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October 20 - October 22, 2022
feeding subjects a fruit-, vegetable-, and nut-based diet that included about twenty servings of fruit per day for a couple of weeks had no adverse effects on weight, blood pressure, or triglycerides—all while lowering LDL (“bad”) cholesterol by an astounding thirty-eight points.
Of course making berry ice cream or at least a berry-banana mix is even healthier. My favorite is chocolate. To make it, blend dark, sweet cherries or strawberries mixed with a tablespoon of cocoa power, a splash of a milk of your choice (more if you want a milkshake), a capful of vanilla extract, and some pitted dates. If you didn’t yet get your nuts for the day, you can add some almond butter. Either way, you get an instant, decadent, chocolate dessert so nutritious that the more you eat, the healthier you are. Let me repeat that: The more you eat, the healthier you are.
cruciferous vegetables like broccoli can potentially prevent DNA damage and metastatic cancer spread in chapter 2, activate defenses against pathogens and pollutants in chapter 5, help to prevent lymphoma in chapter 9, boost your liver detox enzymes and target breast cancer stem cells in chapter 11, and reduce the risk of prostate cancer progression in chapter 13. The component responsible for these benefits is thought to be sulforaphane, which is formed almost exclusively in cruciferous vegetables.
Beyond being a promising anticancer agent,1 sulforaphane may also help protect your brain2 and your eyesight,3 reduce nasal allergy inflammation,4 manage type 2 diabetes,5 and was recently found to successfully help treat autism.
BroccoMax boasts the equivalent of a half pound of broccoli in every capsule. Study subjects were given either six capsules a day or a single cup of broccoli sprouts. The supplement hardly worked at all, whereas the sprouts boosted blood levels about eight times higher for eight times less cost.
Dark-green, leafy vegetables are the healthiest foods on the planet. As whole foods go, they offer the most nutrition per calorie.
Today, only about one in twenty-five even reach a dozen servings throughout the course of an entire month.3 I advise getting more than a dozen servings per week.
greens turned out to be associated with the strongest protection against major chronic diseases,6 including up to about a 20 percent reduction in risk for both heart attacks7 and strokes8 for every additional daily serving.
Imagine if there were a pill that could prolong your life and only had good side effects. Everyone would be taking it! It would be making billions of dollars for the lucky drug company that created it. All health plans by law would have to cover it. People from every walk of life and every corner of the globe would be clamoring for it. But when that “pill” is just eat-your-greens, people lose interest.
you step outside on a sunny day, there’s enough light reaching your brain that you could actually read this page inside your skull.
When you’re thinking about ways to pair your greens with something you already love to make the greens more palatable, consider mixing them with a green-light source of fat: nuts, seeds, nut or seed butters, or avocados. Many of the nutrients greens are famous for are fat soluble, including beta-carotene, lutein, vitamin K, and zeaxanthin. So pairing your greens with a green-light source of fat may not only make them taste better but will maximize nutrient absorption.
Vinegar may be one condiment that’s good for you.
Type 2 diabetics consuming two tablespoons of apple cider vinegar at bedtime, for example, were found to wake up with better blood sugars in the morning.
Perhaps the least controversial advice in all of nutrition is to eat more fruits and vegetables, which is to say eat more plants, since the term vegetable basically just means all parts of the plant that aren’t fruit.
The researchers found that “a higher intake of green and yellow vegetables was associated with decreased facial wrinkling.”
Ergothioneine appears to function as a potent intramitochondrial antioxidant, meaning it can get inside the mitochondria—the microscopic power plants within your cells. The DNA inside the mitochondria is especially vulnerable to free-radical damage, since many other antioxidants are unable to penetrate the mitochondrial membrane. This is one reason ergothioneine may be so important.
What are the best dietary sources of ergothioneine? The highest levels by far have been reported in mushrooms.
The peel of the sweet potato has nearly ten times the antioxidant power as the inner flesh (on a per-weight basis), giving them an antioxidant capacity approaching that of blueberries.
Sweet potatoes themselves can be considered a superfood.35 They are ranked as one of the healthiest foods on the planet
The single most effective vegetable was garlic, which came in first against breast cancer, both child and adult brain cancer, lung cancer, pancreatic cancer, prostate cancer, and stomach cancer, and second after leeks against kidney cancer.
Raw-food diets automatically eliminate most red- and yellow-light foods, which is not only an improvement over the standard American diet but also over many plant-based diets. There is no evidence to suggest, however, that eating raw foods largely or exclusively is healthier than eating a combination of cooked and raw whole plant foods.
Of the six cooking methods studied, griddling and microwaving were actually the gentlest. Nuking your veggies appears to preserve, on average, more than 95 percent of antioxidant capacity.78
Rinsing produce under running water generally removes less than half of the pesticide residue.
organic produce does not seem to have significantly more vitamins and minerals. Organic fruits and vegetables do, however, appear to have more nontraditional nutrients like polyphenol antioxidants,
Based on its elevated antioxidant levels, organic produce may be considered 20–40 percent healthier, the equivalent of adding one or two servings’ worth to a five-a-day regimen.
People not only tend to overestimate the nutritional benefit of organic food, they also overestimate the risks of pesticides.
At least half your plate should be filled with vegetables. Here’s a simple rule: Include vegetables in everything, and the more the better. Bean burritos are better than carnitas, but better still is a bean burrito with lots of veggies wrapped inside. Instead of spaghetti with marinara sauce, make it spaghetti with marinara sauce … and loads of veggies.
Ground flax is a light, nutty powder that can be sprinkled on oatmeal, salads, soups—frankly, just about anything you’re eating.
All the participants ate their normal diet, but half were told to add two fruit-and-nut bars daily. After two months, despite the extra 340 calories a day from the bars, the fruit-and-nut bar group did not gain any weight.4 Dried fruits and nuts appear to be so satiating that people feel full and unintentionally offset the calories elsewhere throughout the day.
So instead of trying to make your day longer, why not make your life longer by an extra two years? That’s about how long your life span may be increased by eating nuts regularly—one handful (or about a quarter of a cup) five or more days a week.
walnuts really do seem to take the lead. They have among the highest antioxidant3 and omega-34 levels, and they beat out other nuts in vitro in suppressing cancer cell growth.
those eating more nuts each day had a significantly lower risk of dying prematurely overall.
People who ate more than three servings of walnuts per week appeared to cut their risk of dying from cancer in half.
All the studies showed less weight gain than predicted, no weight gain at all, or weight loss—even after study subjects added a handful or two of nuts to their daily diets.
Perhaps prolonged nut consumption leads to weight gain? That question has been examined six different ways in studies lasting up to eight years. One found no significant change, and the other five measures found significantly less weight gain and reduced risk of abdominal obesity in those who ate more nuts.20
When you eat nuts, you burn more of your own fat.
Male sexual function is like a penile stress test, a “window into the hearts of men.”
40 percent of men over age forty have erectile dysfunction. Men with erection difficulties in their forties have a fiftyfold increased risk of having a cardiac event (like sudden death).
The reason even young men should care about their cholesterol levels is because they predict erectile dysfunction later in life,38 which in turn predicts heart attacks, strokes, and a shortened life span.
Intense colors and intense flavors can be signs of intense benefit. For optimum health, you should try to eat both colorful and flavorful foods.
We have seen how curcumin may play a role in preventing or treating lung disease, brain disease, and a variety of cancers, including multiple myeloma, colon cancer, and pancreatic cancer. But curcumin has also been shown to help speed recovery after surgery6 and effectively treat rheumatoid arthritis better than the leading drug of choice.
Over the last twenty-five years, about half of new drug discoveries have come from natural products.
If there were ever such thing as a magic pill, single-ingredient, ground turmeric root would probably come closest.
Fenugreek appears to significantly improve muscle strength and weight-lifting power output, allowing men in training, for example, to leg press an extra eighty pounds compared to those ingesting a placebo.
Amla is arguably the most important plant in Ayurvedic medicine, used traditionally as everything from a neutralizer of snake venom to a hair tonic.83 I eat it because it’s apparently the single most antioxidant-packed green-light food on Earth.
A 2015 analysis found that people who eat more whole grains tend to live significantly longer lives independent of other dietary and lifestyle factors.3 No surprise, given that whole grains appear to reduce the risk of heart disease,4 type 2 diabetes,5 obesity, and stroke.
The next question, then, is what percentage of the population should avoid wheat and other gluten-containing grains? About one in one thousand may have an allergy to wheat,34 and nearly one in one hundred have celiac disease,35 which appears to be on the rise.
Beyond just comparing antioxidant content, there’s experimental evidence to suggest that pigmented rice—red, purple, or black—has benefits over brown. For example, in addition to having about five times more antioxidants,48 colored rice varieties have shown greater antiallergy activity in vitro,49 as well as superior anticancer effects against breast cancer50 and leukemia cells.
Tea and coffee—preferably without creamer or sweetener—tied as the number-two healthiest beverages, second only to water, the top-ranked drink.
It turns out the oft-quoted “drink at least eight glasses of water a day” recommendation actually has little underpinning scientific evidence.5 The eight-a-day recommendation can be traced back to a 1921 paper in which the author measured his own urine and sweat output and determined he lost about 3 percent of his body weight in water a day, which comes out to about eight cups.6 Consequently, for the longest time, water requirement guidelines for humanity were based on just one person’s urine and sweat measurements.
