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October 20 - October 22, 2022
eggs and poultry may be the worst offenders: Patients may face twice the cancer progression risk from eating less than a single egg per day and up to quadruple the risk from eating less than a single serving of chicken or turkey daily.
The evidence suggests that flaxseed is a safe, low-cost source of nutrition and may reduce tumor-proliferation rates.
Benign prostatic hyperplasia (BPH) is a condition characterized by enlargement of the prostate gland.
Eating garlic and onions has been associated with significantly lower risk of BPH.82 In general, cooked vegetables may work better than raw ones, and legumes—beans, chickpeas, split peas, and lentils—have also been associated with lower risk.
An adult may have around forty trillion cells in his or her body, four times more than a child.
The number-one food source of arsenic was poultry among preschoolers and, for their parents, tuna.15 The top source for lead? Dairy. For mercury? Seafood.
Those concerned about exposing their children to mercury-containing vaccines should know that eating just a single serving of fish each week during pregnancy can lead to more mercury in their infant’s body than injecting them directly with about a dozen mercury-containing vaccines.17 You should strive to minimize mercury exposure, but the benefits of vaccination far exceed the risks. The same cannot be said for tuna.
The oceans are essentially humanity’s sewer; everything eventually flows into the sea.
eating more than half an egg a day was associated with about two to three times higher odds for cancers of the mouth, colon, bladder, prostate, and breast compared to those who didn’t eat eggs at all.
Researchers have estimated that a plant-based diet could wipe out about 98 percent of your dioxin intake.
As it happens, quite unexpectedly, more than five dozen studies over the past half century have collectively shown that smoking tobacco is indeed associated with significantly lower incidence of Parkinson’s disease.
overall dairy consumption was associated with significantly increased risk of Parkinson’s disease.
Millions of tons of slaughterhouse by-products continue to be fed to farm animals in the United States every year.
There have been at least nineteen studies performed on the role coffee may play in Parkinson’s, and overall, coffee consumption is associated with about one-third lower risk.
side effects from medications given in hospitals kill an estimated 106,000 Americans every year.2 That statistic alone effectively makes medical care the sixth-leading cause of death in the United States. And this number reflects only the number of deaths from taking the drugs as prescribed. An additional 7,000 people die every year from receiving the wrong medication by mistake, and 20,000 others die from other hospital errors.
Every year, 12,000 Americans die from complications due to surgeries that weren’t even necessary in the first place. For those keeping score, that’s more than 200,000 people dead from so-called iatrogenic causes (from the Ancient Greek iatrós, meaning “doctor”). And that figure is based only on the data on hospitalized patients. In outpatient settings—for instance, at your doctor’s office—prescription drug side effects alone may result in 199,000 additional deaths.8
Even using more conservative estimates of deaths due to medical errors, health care comes in as the real third-leading cause of death in America.10
Based on a study of more than one hundred thousand Minnesotans, it appears that seven out of ten people may be prescribed at least one prescription drug in any given year. More than half are prescribed two or more drugs, and 20 percent are prescribed five or more medications.46 All told, physicians dispense about four billion prescriptions for drugs every year in the United States.47 That’s about thirteen prescriptions a year for every man, woman, and child.
How ineffectual are some of the most common drugs in America? When it comes to cholesterol, blood pressure, and blood-thinning drugs, the chance of even high-risk patients benefiting from them is typically less than 5 percent over a period of five years.
Take cholesterol-lowering statin drugs, for example. The best they may be able to offer in terms of absolute risk reduction for a subsequent heart attack or death is about 3 percent over six years.
In 2014, Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn Jr. published a case series of about two hundred people with significant heart disease showing that a healthy enough plant-based diet may prevent further major cardiac episodes in 99.4 percent of patients who follow it.56
Eating is essentially a zero-sum game: When you choose to eat one thing, you are generally choosing not to eat another. Sure, you could just go hungry, but eventually your body tends to balance things out by eating more later. So anything we choose to eat has an opportunity cost.
The opportunity costs exacted are not only the nutrients you could otherwise be getting but the unhealthy components you could otherwise be avoiding.
An average serving of vegetables may cost roughly four times more than the average serving of junk food, but those veggies have been calculated to average twenty-four times more nutrition. So on a cost-per-nutrition basis, vegetables offer six times more nutrition per dollar compared to highly processed foods. Meat costs about three times more than vegetables yet yields sixteen times less nutrition based on an aggregate of nutrients.4 Because meat is less nutritious and costs more, vegetables net you forty-eight times more nutrition per dollar than meat.
When the Guidelines tell you to eat less added sugar, calories, cholesterol, saturated fat, sodium, and trans fat, that’s code for eat less junk food, less meat, less dairy, fewer eggs, and fewer processed foods.
three out of four Americans don’t eat a single piece of fruit in a given day, and nearly nine out of ten don’t reach the minimum recommended daily intake of vegetables. On a weekly basis, 96 percent of Americans don’t reach the minimum for greens or beans (three servings a week for adults), 98 percent don’t reach the minimum for orange vegetables (two servings a week), and 99 percent don’t reach the minimum for whole grains (about three to four ounces a day).
I like to think of “unprocessed” as nothing bad added, nothing good taken away.
if the only way I can get patients to eat oatmeal in the morning is if they make it creamy with almond milk, then I tell them to go right ahead. The same could be said for red-light foods. Without hot sauce, my intake of dark-green, leafy vegetables would plummet. Yes, I know there are all sorts of sodium-free, exotically flavored vinegars out there that I could use, and maybe one day I’ll wean myself off Tabasco.
Over the long term, the more you eat healthfully, the better healthy foods taste.
You should try to get three servings a day. A serving is defined as a quarter cup of hummus or bean dip; a half cup of cooked beans, split peas, lentils, tofu, or tempeh; or a full cup of fresh peas or sprouted lentils.
A serving of berries is a half cup of fresh or frozen, or a quarter cup of dried.
For other fruits, a serving is a medium-sized fruit, a cup of cut-up fruit, or a quarter cup of dried fruit.
Common cruciferous vegetables include broccoli, cabbage, collards, and kale. I recommend at least one serving a day (typically a half cup) and at least two additional servings of greens a day, cruciferous or otherwise. Serving sizes for other greens and vegetables are a cup for raw leafy vegetables, a half cup for other raw or cooked vegetables, and a quarter cup for dried mushrooms.
Everyone should try to incorporate one tablespoon of ground flaxseeds into his or her daily diet, in addition to a serving of nuts or other seeds. A quarter cup of nuts is considered a serving, or two tablespoons of nut or seed butters, including peanut butter.
I also recommend one-quarter teaspoon a day of the spice turmeric,
A serving of whole grains can be considered a half cup of hot cereal such as oatmeal, cooked grain such as rice (including the “pseudograins” amaranth, buckwheat, and quinoa), cooked pasta, or corn kernels; a cup of ready-to-eat (cold) cereal; one tortilla or slice of bread; half a bagel or english muffin; or three cups of popped popcorn.
Glancing at my plate, I can imagine one quarter of it filled with grains, one quarter with legumes, and a half plate filled with vegetables, along with maybe a side salad and fruit for dessert. I prefer one-bowl meals where everything’s mixed together, but the checklist still helps me to visualize. Instead of a big bowl of spaghetti with some veggies and lentils on top, I think of a big bowl of vegetables with some pasta and lentils mixed in. Instead of a big plate of brown rice with some stir-fried vegetables on top, I picture a meal that’s mostly veggies—and oh look! There’s some rice and
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Most of your plate should be covered with vegetables and grains, preferably whole grains, with the rest of the plate split between fruits and the protein group. Legumes were given special treatment, straddling both the protein and the vegetable groups.
One of their summary cancer-prevention recommendations is to eat whole grains and/or legumes (beans, split peas, chickpeas, or lentils) with every meal.1 Not every week or every day. Every meal!
When it comes to the nutrients you tend to associate with legumes—fiber, iron, magnesium, potassium, protein, and zinc—about half are lost when soybeans are converted into tofu. However, beans are so healthy that you can throw away half the nutrition and still have a really healthy food. If you do eat tofu, choose varieties made with calcium (you’ll see it in the ingredients list), which can weigh in at a whopping 550 mg of calcium per (3 oz) slice.
plant-based meat alternatives like veggie burgers, which are healthy only insofar as they replace the real thing. Beyond Chicken, for example, has fiber, zero saturated fat, zero cholesterol, and equal protein to and fewer calories than an actual chicken breast (plus presumably less food-poisoning risk). But Beyond Chicken pales in comparison to the nutrition found in the soybeans, yellow peas, and amaranth grain from which it was made. Of course, people choosing these meat alternatives are not standing in the grocery store agonizing between Beyond Chicken Grilled Strips and a bowl of legumes
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Lentils are so rich in prebiotics that they create a feast for your friendly flora, which in turn feed you right back with beneficial compounds, such as propionate, that relax your stomach and slow the rate at which sugars are absorbed into your system.
Canned beans are convenient, but are they as nutritious as home cooked? A recent study discovered that indeed canned beans are as healthy as boiled beans—with one exception: sodium. Salt is often added to canned beans, resulting in sodium levels up to one hundred times more than if you cooked them without any salt.38 Draining and rinsing your canned beans can remove about half the added salt, but then you’d also be rinsing away some of the nutrition. I recommend purchasing the no-salt-added varieties and cooking with the bean liquid in whatever dish you’re whipping up.
Legumes have been found to be “the most important predictor of survival in older people”46 around the globe. Whether it was the Japanese eating soy products, the Swedes eating brown beans and peas, or those in the Mediterranean region eating lentils, chickpeas, and white beans, legume intake was consistently associated with a longer life span.
The buoyancy of floating stools from trapped gases can in fact be seen as a sign of adequate fiber intake.
Legume consumption is associated with a slimmer waist and lower blood pressure, and randomized trials have shown it can match or beat out calorie cutting for slimming tummy fat as well as improving the regulation of blood sugar, insulin levels, and cholesterol. Beans are packed with fiber, folate, and phytates, which may help reduce the risk of stroke, depression, and colon cancer. The phytoestrogens in soy in particular appear to both help prevent breast cancer and improve breast cancer survival.
Berries offer potential protection against cancer (chapters 4 and 11), a boost to the immune system (chapter 5), and a guard for the liver (chapter 8) and brain (chapters 3 and 14). An American Cancer Society study of nearly one hundred thousand men and women found that those who ate the most berries appeared significantly less likely to die of cardiovascular disease.
Shop for the reddest of strawberries, the blackest of blackberries, the most scarlet tomato, the darkest green broccoli you can find. The colors are the antiaging, anticancer antioxidants.
Antioxidant content is one of the reasons I’ve singled out berries for special treatment. They are second only to herbs and spices as the most antioxidant-packed food category. As a group, they average nearly ten times more antioxidants than other fruits and vegetables (and exceed fifty times more than animal-based foods).
There are a few popular diets out there that urge people to stop eating fruits because their natural sugars (fructose) are thought to contribute to weight gain. The truth is, only fructose from added sugars appears to be associated with declining liver function,9 high blood pressure, and weight gain.
