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October 20 - October 22, 2022
Subjects who drank more than two cups of coffee a day appeared to have less than half the risk of developing chronic liver problems as those who drank less than one cup.82
people who drank the most coffee had half the risk of liver cancer compared to those who drank the least.
University of Oxford researchers found that those who consume a plant-based diet are less likely to develop all forms of cancer combined. The greatest protection appeared to be against blood cancers. The incidence of leukemia, lymphoma, and multiple myeloma among those eating vegetarian diets is nearly half that of those eating meat.
pills do not have the same cancer-fighting effects as produce.
poultry tended to be associated with the greatest increased risk of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, all grades of follicular lymphoma, and B-cell lymphomas, such as B-cell chronic lymphatic leukemia (including small lymphocytic leukemia and prolymphocytic lymphocytic leukemia).34 The EPIC study found that risk increased between 56 percent and 280 percent for every 50 grams of poultry consumed daily. For comparison, a cooked, boneless chicken breast may weigh as much as 384 grams.
Workers in poultry slaughterhouses have been found to have higher rates of cancers of the mouth, nasal cavities, throat, esophagus, rectum, liver, and blood. On a public health level, the concern here is that the cancer-causing viruses present in poultry and poultry products may then be transmitted to those in the general population who handle or eat inadequately cooked chicken.
Approximately one in three Americans over the age of sixty-four may suffer from chronic kidney disease (CKD),3 though three-quarters of the millions affected may not even know they have it.
The researchers found three specific dietary components associated with this sign of declining kidney function: animal protein, animal fat, and cholesterol. Each of these is found in only one place: animal products. The researchers found no association between kidney function decline and the intake of protein or fat from plant sources.
The reason those who eat a plant-based diet appear to have better kidney function was originally thought to be due to their lower overall protein intake.19 However, we now know that it’s more likely due to the fact that the kidneys appear to handle plant protein very differently from animal protein.20 Within hours of consuming meat, your kidneys rev up into hyperfiltration mode. This is true of a variety of animal proteins—beef, chicken, and fish appear to have similar effects.21 But an equivalent amount of plant protein causes virtually no noticeable stress on the kidneys.
Within two days of eating the extra tuna, the levels of stone-forming compounds—calcium, oxalate, and uric acid—shot up such that the subjects’ kidney-stone risk increased 250 percent.
Oxford University researchers found that subjects who didn’t eat meat at all had a significantly lower risk of being hospitalized for kidney stones, and for those who did eat meat, the more they ate, the higher their associated risk.
Uric acid stones can apparently be dissolved away completely with a combination of eating more fruits and vegetables, restricting animal protein and salt intake, and drinking at least ten glasses of fluid a day.
In the United States, eleven different types of phosphate salts are allowed to be injected into raw meat and poultry,82 a practice that’s long been banned in Europe.
Did you know that one hot dog has as many nitrosamines (and nitrosamides, which are similar tobacco carcinogens103) as four cigarettes and that these carcinogens are also found in fresh meat, including beef, chicken, and pork?104 This may help explain the rising rates of kidney cancer over the last few decades despite the falling rates of smoking.
In short, you can die with your tumors rather than from them. This is how dietary cancer prevention and treatment can end up being the same thing. One or two cancer cells never hurt anyone. But how about a billion cancer cells? That’s how many may be in a tumor5 by the time it’s picked up by a mammogram.6 Like most tumors, breast cancer starts with just one cell, which divides to become two, four, and then eight.
But I’ve been eating much healthier for the last twenty-five years. My hope is that even if I did initiate a cancerous growth, if I don’t promote it, I may be able to slow down its growth. I don’t care if I get diagnosed with cancer a hundred years from now. I don’t expect to be around at that point to worry about it.
as many as 39 percent of women in their forties already have breast cancers growing within their bodies that may be simply too small to be detected by mammograms.
Physical activity is considered a promising preventive measure against breast cancer43 not only because it helps with weight control but because exercise tends to lower circulating estrogen levels.44 Five hours a week of vigorous aerobic exercise can lower estrogen and progesterone exposure by about 20 percent.
This process may explain why eating well-done meat is associated with increased risk of cancers of the breast, colon, esophagus, lung, pancreas, prostate, and stomach.56 The situation creates what the Harvard Health Letter called a meat preparation “paradox”57: Cooking meat thoroughly reduces the risk of contracting foodborne infections (see chapter 5), but cooking meat too thoroughly may increase the risk of foodborne carcinogens.
the Iowa Women’s Health Study found that women who ate their bacon, beefsteak, and burgers “very well done” had nearly five times the odds of getting breast cancer compared with women who preferred these meats served rare or medium.
Cancer develops in three major stages: 1) initiation, the irreversible DNA damage that starts the process; 2) promotion, the growth and division of the initiated cell into a tumor; and 3) progression, which can involve the invasion of the tumor into surrounding tissue and metastasis (spread) to other areas of the body.
Cancer appears to feed on cholesterol.
The number-one killer of women is heart disease, not breast cancer, so women still need to bring down their cholesterol.
Unfortunately, the average American woman appears to eat less than fifteen grams of fiber per day—only about half the minimum daily recommendation.92 Even the average vegetarian in the United States may only get about twenty grams daily.93 Healthier vegetarians, though, may average thirty-seven grams a day, and vegans forty-six grams daily.94 Meanwhile, the whole-food, plant-based diets used therapeutically to reverse chronic disease contain upward of sixty grams of fiber.
Flaxseeds are one of the first items ever considered to be health foods, treasured for their purported healing properties since at least the times of ancient Greece, when the renowned physician Hippocrates wrote about using them to treat patients.116 Better known as one of the richest plant sources of essential omega-3 fatty acids, flaxseeds are really set apart by their lignan content.
In terms of breast cancer risk, eating about a daily tablespoonful of ground flaxseeds can extend a woman’s menstrual cycle by about a day.119 This means she’ll have fewer periods over the course of a lifetime and, therefore, presumably less estrogen exposure and reduced breast cancer risk.
In other words, the flaxseeds appeared to make the subjects’ cancer less aggressive.
A National Breast Cancer Coalition survey found that the majority of women believe that most breast cancers occur among women with a family history or a genetic predisposition to the disease.141 The reality is that as few as 2.5 percent of breast cancer cases are attributable to breast cancer running in the family.
Eating mushrooms and sipping at least half a tea bag’s worth of green tea each day was associated with nearly 90 percent lower breast cancer odds.
There are twenty times more studies published on health and depression than there are on health and happiness.
Are people healthier because they’re happy, or are people just happier because they’re healthy? Prospective studies that follow individuals over time have found that people starting out happier do indeed end up healthier. An analysis of seventy such studies on mortality concluded that “positive psychological well-being has a favorable effect on survival in both healthy and diseased populations.”6 Those who are happier appear to live longer.
Happier people, it seems, are less likely to get sick.
There are also components in certain foods that may increase the risk of depression, such as arachidonic acid, an inflammation-promoting compound found mostly in chicken and eggs in the diet that is blamed for potentially impairing mood by inflaming the brain.
Those eating plant-based diets don’t just have lower rates of many of the leading killer diseases but also appear to have lower rates of such annoying ills as hemorrhoids, varicose veins, and ulcers; fewer surgeries; fewer hospitalizations; and only about half the odds of being on drugs, including tranquilizers, aspirin, insulin, blood pressure pills, pain medications, antacids, laxatives, or sleeping pills.
There are data suggesting that people with higher levels of arachidonic acid in their blood may end up at significantly higher risk of suicide and episodes of major depression.16 The top-five sources of arachidonic acid in the American diet are chicken, eggs, beef, pork, and fish, although chicken and eggs alone contribute more than the other top sources combined.
Higher consumption of vegetables may cut the odds of developing depression by as much as 62 percent.26 A review in the journal Nutritional Neuroscience concluded that, in general, eating lots of fruits and veggies may present “a non-invasive, natural, and inexpensive therapeutic means to support a healthy brain.”27
studies have shown that the more fruits and vegetables you eat, the happier, calmer, and more energetic you may feel that day—and this positivity can spill over into the next day. For your diet to have a meaningful psychological impact, though, you may need to consume approximately seven servings of fruits or eight servings of vegetables each day.
Consumption of even a single carb-rich, protein-poor meal has been shown to improve depression, tension, anger, confusion, sadness, fatigue, alertness, and calmness scores among women with PMS.
In a yearlong study, about one hundred men and women were randomly assigned to eat either a low-carb or high-carb diet. By the end of the year, the subjects eating the high-carb diets experienced significantly less depression, hostility, and mood disturbance than those in the low-carb group. This result is consistent with studies finding better moods and less anxiety among populations eating diets higher in carbohydrates and lower in fats and protein.
people who drank two or more cups of coffee daily appeared to have about only half the suicide risk compared to non-coffee drinkers.
adding sugar to coffee may negate many of its positive effects on mood, and adding the artificial sweetener aspartame (found in Equal and NutraSweet) or saccharine (in Sweet’n Low) was associated with an increased risk of depression.50
They randomly assigned depressed men and women aged fifty or older to either begin an aerobic exercise program or take the antidepressant drug sertraline (Zoloft). Within four months, the mood of those in the drug group improved so much that they were, on average, no longer depressed. But the same powerful effect was found in the exercise group—that is, the group of people who weren’t taking any drugs. Exercise, it seemed, works about as well as medication.
exercise appeared to work about as well as drugs at bringing depression into remission.
A study of nearly three hundred thousand Canadians found that greater fruit and vegetable consumption was associated with lower risk of depression, psychological distress, mood and anxiety disorders, and poor perceived mental health.
Among the carotenoids, lycopene (the red pigment in tomatoes) has the highest antioxidant activity. Indeed, a study of nearly one thousand elderly men and women found that people who ate tomatoes or tomato products daily had just half the odds of depression compared with those who ate them once a week or less.
According to the published literature, the results of nearly all antidepressant trials were positive. In contrast, FDA analysis of trial data—including the unpublished studies—demonstrated that roughly half of the trials showed the drugs didn’t work after all. When all the data—published and unpublished—were combined, antidepressants failed to show a clinically significant advantage over placebo sugar pills.73 This finding suggests that the placebo effect explains the apparent clinical effectiveness of antidepressants. In other words, improvements in mood may be a result of the patient’s
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Just because antidepressant drugs may not work better than fake pills doesn’t mean they don’t work at all. Antidepressants offer substantial benefits to millions of people suffering from depression. And although the placebo effect is real and powerful, antidepressants do seem to beat out sugar pills in reducing symptoms in the most severely depressed—perhaps about 10 percent of patients (although admittedly, this statistic also means that about 90 percent of depressed patients may be prescribed medication with negligible benefit).
antidepressants cause sexual dysfunction in up to three-quarters of users. Other problems may include long-term weight gain and insomnia. And about one in five people have withdrawal symptoms when they try to quit.80
The only thing potentially worse for prostate cancer than eggs was poultry: Men with more aggressive cancer who regularly ate chicken and turkey had up to four times the risk of prostate cancer progression.33
Men who consume two and a half or more eggs per week—basically an egg every three days—may have an 81 percent increased risk of dying from prostate cancer.
