More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
October 20 - October 22, 2022
The Alzheimer’s Foundation estimates that fifteen million friends and family members supply more than fifteen billion unpaid hours annually caring for loved ones who may not even recognize them.
In the United States, those who don’t eat meat (including poultry and fish) appear to cut their risk of developing dementia in half. And the longer meat is avoided, the lower dementia risk may fall.
A study that followed nearly two thousand people for about eight years found that people who drank fruit and vegetable juices regularly appeared to have a 76 percent lower risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease.
saffron appears just as effective at treating Alzheimer’s symptoms as the leading drug.
Subsequent studies using MRI scans found that aerobic exercise can actually reverse age-related shrinkage in the memory centers of the brain.156 No such effect was found in the stretching and toning control groups or a nonaerobic strength-training group.157 Aerobic exercise can help improve cerebral blood flow, improve memory performance, and help preserve brain tissue.
Only a small percentage of all human cancers are attributable to purely genetic factors. The rest involve external factors, particularly our diet.2
Food goes through men eating plant-based diets in just a day or two, but this transit time takes as long as five or more days among those eating more conventional diets. Women eating plant-based diets also average a day or two, but the average intestinal transit time in most women eating conventional diets may be four days.
The scientists came to the same conclusion as the Harvard researchers: Meat consumption was associated with increased risk of dying from cancer, dying from heart disease, and dying prematurely in general. Again, this was after controlling for other diet and lifestyle factors, effectively excluding the possibility that people who ate meat also smoked more, exercised less, or failed to eat their fruits and veggies.
The healthiest sources of iron are whole grains, legumes, nuts, seeds, dried fruits, and green, leafy vegetables. Avoid drinking tea with meals, as that can inhibit iron absorption. Consuming vitamin C–rich foods can improve iron absorption. The amount of vitamin C in a single orange can enhance iron absorption as much as three- to sixfold, so those trying to boost their iron absorption should reach for some fruit instead of a cup of tea.
The study found that those who slaughter chickens have about nine times the odds of both pancreatic cancer and liver cancer.88 To put this result in context, the most carefully studied risk factor for pancreatic cancer is cigarette smoking. But even if you smoked for fifty years, you’d have “only” doubled your odds of getting pancreatic cancer.
Humans evolved eating huge amounts of fiber, likely in excess of one hundred grams daily.128 That’s up to about ten times what the average person eats today.
Only 3 percent of Americans may even reach the recommended minimum daily intake of fiber, making it one of the most widespread nutrient deficiencies in the United States.
Most modern human infectious diseases were unknown before domestication led to a mass spillover of animal disease into human populations.6 For example, tuberculosis appears to have been originally acquired through the domestication of goats7 but now infects nearly one-third of humanity.8 Meanwhile, measles9 and smallpox10 may have arisen from mutant cattle viruses. We domesticated pigs and got whooping cough, we domesticated chickens and got typhoid fever, and we domesticated ducks and got influenza.11 Leprosy may have come from water buffalo and the cold virus from horses.
it may be best to focus on feeding the good bacteria already living in your gut.49 What do your friendly flora eat? Fiber and a certain type of starch concentrated in beans. These substances are called prebiotics. Probiotics are the good bacteria themselves, whereas prebiotics are what your good bacteria eat. So the best way to keep your good bacteria happy and well fed is to eat lots of whole plant foods.
One of the reasons animal foods are the leading culprits is that most foodborne pathogens are fecal pathogens. Because plants don’t poop, the E. coli you may get from spinach didn’t actually originate in the spinach; E. coli is an intestinal pathogen, and spinach doesn’t have intestines. The application of manure to crops has been found to increase the odds of E. coli contamination by more than fiftyfold.
In 2010, for instance, more than half a billion eggs were recalled due to Salmonella outbreaks.
Salmonella in eggs can survive scrambled, over-easy, and sunny-side-up cooking methods.
Eating chickens, not their eggs, is actually the most common source of Salmonella poisoning.
Studies have shown that up to 80 percent of the time, placing fresh chicken on a cutting board for a few minutes can transfer disease-causing bacteria.95 Then, if you put cooked chicken back on the same cutting board, there’s about a 30 percent chance that the meat will become recontaminated.
According to the latest national FDA retail-meat survey, about 90 percent of retail chicken showed evidence of contamination with fecal matter.103 Using the presence of bugs like E. faecalis and E. faecium as markers of fecal contamination, 90 percent of chicken parts, 91 percent of ground turkey, 88 percent of ground beef, and 80 percent of pork chops are tainted on the retail level nationally.104
The reason most people have more fecal bacteria in their kitchen sinks than their toilet seats118 is likely because they prepare their chickens in the kitchen, not the bathroom.
the FDA estimates that 80 percent of the antimicrobial drugs sold in the United States every year now go to the meat industry.
More than twenty million Americans are currently diagnosed with diabetes, a tripling of cases since 1990.2 At this rate, the CDC predicts that one in three Americans will be diabetic by midcentury.
Type 1 diabetes, previously called juvenile-onset diabetes, represents approximately 5 percent of all diagnosed diabetes cases.
Type 2 diabetes is almost always preventable, often treatable, and sometimes even reversible through diet and lifestyle changes. Like other leading killers—especially heart disease and high blood pressure—type 2 diabetes is an unfortunate consequence of your dietary choices. But even if you already have diabetes and its complications, there is hope. Through lifestyle changes, you may be able to achieve a complete remission of type 2 diabetes, even if you’ve been suffering with the disease for decades.
The only dietary group found to be of ideal weight were the vegans, whose BMI averaged 23.6.29
Interestingly, the number of individual fat cells in your body doesn’t change much in adulthood, no matter how much weight you gain or lose. They just swell up with fat as the body gains weight, so when your belly gets bigger, you’re not necessarily creating new fat cells; rather, you’re just cramming more fat into existing ones.
People who eat a plant-based diet, on the other hand, have just a small fraction of the rate of diabetes seen in those who regularly eat meat.
Even at the same weight as regular omnivores, vegans appear to have less than half the risk of diabetes.
There was significantly less fat trapped in the deep calf muscles of vegans than in those of comparably slim omnivores.
The advantage of a whole-food, plant-based approach to weight loss is that there may be no need for portion control, skipping meals, or counting calories, because most plant foods are naturally nutrient dense and low in calories.
Experiments have shown that people tend to eat the same amount of food at a meal, regardless of calorie count—probably because stretch receptors in the stomach send signals to the brain after a certain volume of food has been ingested. When much of that volume is a zero-calorie component like fiber or water, that means you can eat more food but gain less weight.57
The study found that, calorie for calorie, those eating vegetarian diets were getting higher intakes of nearly every nutrient: more fiber, more vitamin A, more vitamin C, more vitamin E, more of the B vitamins thiamin, riboflavin, and folate, as well as more calcium, magnesium, iron, and potassium. Furthermore, many of the nutrients that are so rich in plant-based diets are among the very ones that most Americans normally don’t get enough of—namely, vitamins A, C, E, not to mention fiber, calcium, magnesium, and potassium. At the same time, people who avoided meat also ingested fewer harmful
...more
identified poultry as potentially the most fattening meat,89 a finding that has since been confirmed in another study. Men and women eating even a single ounce of chicken a day (think two chicken nuggets) had a significantly greater gain in body mass index over the fourteen-year follow-up period than those who consumed no chicken at all.
The CDC estimates that 37 percent of U.S. adults—and 51 percent of adults over sixty-five—have prediabetes.
Processed meat is blamed for the deaths of more than eight hundred thousand people every year. Worldwide, that’s four times more people than who die from illicit drug use.
In the United States, nearly seventy-eight million people have high blood pressure—that’s about one in three American adults.
Nearly five million people appear to die every year as a result of not eating enough fruit,16 while eating too much salt may kill up to four million.
The American Heart Association recommends everyone consume less than 1,500 mg of sodium daily24—that’s about three-quarters of a teaspoon of salt. The average American adult consumes more than double that amount, about 3,500 mg daily.
if you reduce your salt intake, you reduce your blood pressure. And the greater the reduction, the greater the benefit.
Cheese, it turns out, ranks as a leading contributor of sodium in the American diet,
The trillion-dollar processed food industry uses dirt-cheap added salt and sugar to sell us their junk.57 That’s why it’s not easy avoiding sodium on the typical American diet, since three-quarters of salt comes from processed foods rather than a saltshaker.
The number-one source of sodium for American kids and teens is pizza.61 A single slice of Pizza Hut pepperoni pizza can contain half your recommended sodium intake limit for the entire day.62 For adults over fifty, it’s bread, but between the ages of twenty and fifty, the greatest contributor of sodium to the diet is chicken—not the canned soups, pretzels, or potato chips one might expect.
the drugs still haven’t gotten to the root cause of the problem. The cause of high blood pressure isn’t medication deficiency. The underlying cause is what you eat and how you live.
vegetarian diets may be particularly good at lowering blood pressure.
On average, those who eat completely plant-based foods are about thirty pounds lighter than those eating conventional diets.
Tested head-to-head against a leading blood pressure drug, two cups of strong hibiscus tea every morning (using a total of five tea bags) was as effective in lowering subjects’ blood pressure as a starting dose of the drug Captopril taken twice a
Drug companies rake in more than $10 billion a year from blood pressure medications.145 You can’t make billions on beets.
one little shot of beet juice has been found to allow free divers to hold their breath for a half minute longer than usual.
The CDC defines excessive drinking as the regular consumption of more than one drink a day for women and more than two a day for men.
