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November 2, 2022 - January 19, 2023
“Nutrition is superfluous to human health.”
The question that haunted me during training was this: If the cure to our number-one killer could get lost down the rabbit hole, what else might be buried in the medical literature? I made it my life’s mission to find out.
But with the democratization of information, doctors no longer hold a monopoly as gatekeepers of knowledge about health.
Most deaths in the United States are preventable, and they are related to what we eat.
While most of the public evidently considers doctors to be “very credible” sources of nutrition information,7 six out of seven graduating doctors surveyed felt physicians were inadequately trained to counsel patients about their diets.8 One study found that people off the street sometimes know more about basic nutrition than their doctors, concluding “physicians should be more knowledgeable about nutrition than their patients, but these results suggest that this is not necessarily true.”
In public health school, students learn that there are three levels of preventive medicine. The first is primary prevention, as in trying to prevent people at risk for heart disease from suffering their first heart attack.
Secondary prevention takes
place when you already have the disease and are trying to prevent it from becoming worse, like having a second heart attack.
At the third level of preventive medicine, the focus is on helping people manage long-term health problems, so your doctor, for example, might prescribe a cardiac rehabilitation program that aim...
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With this in mind, the American Heart Association came up with “The Simple 7” factors that can lead to a healthier life: not smoking, not being overweight, being “very active” (defined as the equivalent of walking at least twenty-two minutes a day), eating healthier (for example, lots of fruits and vegetables), having below-average cholesterol, having normal blood pressure, and having normal blood sugar levels.
Medical anthropologists have identified several major eras of human disease, starting with the Age of Pestilence and Famine, which largely ended with the Industrial Revolution, or the stage we’re in now, the Age of Degenerative and Man-Made Diseases.
In 1990 around the world, most years of healthy life were lost to undernutrition, such as diarrheal diseases in malnourished children, but now the greatest disease burden is attributed to high blood pressure, a disease of overnutrition.
The pandemic of chronic disease has been ascribed in part to the near-universal shift toward a diet dominated by animal-sourced and processed foods—in other words, more meat, dairy, eggs, oils, soda, sugar, and refined grains.
China is perhaps the best-studied example. There, a transition away from the country’s traditional, plant-based diet was accompanied by a sharp rise in diet-related chronic diseases, such as obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, and cancer.
Take meat, for example. To see what effect an increase in meat consumption might have on disease rates, researchers studied lapsed vegetarians. People who once ate vegetarian diets but then started to eat meat at least once a week experienced a 146 percent increase in odds of heart disease, a 152 percent increase in stroke, a 166 percent increase in diabetes, and a 231 percent increase in odds for weight gain. During the twelve years after the transition from vegetarian to omnivore, meat-eating was associated with a 3.6 year decrease in life expectancy.
Even vegetarians can suffer high rates of chronic disease, though, if they eat a lot of processed foods.
In general, the dividing line between health-promoting and disease-promoting foods may be less plant- versus animal-sourced foods and more whole plant foods versus most everything else.
A study entitled “Death Row Nutrition: Curious Conclusions of Last Meals” analyzed the last meal requests of hundreds of individuals executed in the United States during a five-year period. It turns out that the nutritional content didn’t differ much from what Americans normally eat.
The truth is that adhering to just four simple healthy lifestyle factors can have a strong impact on the prevention of chronic diseases: not smoking, not being obese, getting a half hour of exercise a day, and eating healthier—defined as consuming more fruits, veggies, and whole grains and less meat. Those four factors alone were found to account for 78 percent of chronic disease risk.
Maybe it’s time we stop blaming genetics and focus on the more than 70 percent that is directly under our control.53 We have the power.
The level of vitamin C in the blood was considered a “good biomarker of plant food intake” and hence was used as a proxy for a healthy diet. The conclusions held up. The drop in mortality risk among those with healthier habits was equivalent to being fourteen years younger.55 It’s like turning back the clock fourteen years—not with a drug or a DeLorean but just by eating and living healthier. Let’s talk a little more about aging. In each of your cells, you have forty-six strands of DNA coiled into chromosomes.
Scientists named it telomerase. Once they knew what to look for, researchers discovered the enzyme was present in human cells too. The question then became, how can we boost the activity of this age-defying enzyme? Seeking answers, the pioneering researcher Dr. Dean Ornish teamed up with Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn, who was awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in Medicine for her discovery of telomerase. In a study funded in part by the U.S. Department of Defense, they found that three months of whole-food, plant-based nutrition and other healthy changes could significantly boost telomerase activity, the
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Weight loss through calorie restriction and an even more vigorous exercise program failed to improve telomere length, so it appears that the active ingredient is the quality, not quantity, of the food eaten.
In contrast, individuals on the plant-based diet exercised only half as much, enjoyed the same amount of weight loss after just three months,73 and achieved significant telomere protection.74 In other words, it wasn’t the weight loss and it wasn’t the exercise that reversed cell aging—it was the food.
The same diet that helps prevent cancer just so happens to be the same diet that may help prevent type 2 diabetes and every other cause of death on the top-fifteen list.
That one unifying diet found to best prevent and treat many of these chronic diseases is a whole-food, plant-based diet, defined as an eating pattern that encourages the consumption of unrefined plant foods and discourages meats, dairy products, eggs, and processed foods.
Most doctor visits are for lifestyle-based diseases, which means they’re preventable diseases.
We’re a long way off from Thomas Edison’s 1903 prediction, but it is my hope that this book can help you understand that most of our leading causes of death and disability are more preventable than inevitable. The primary reason diseases tend to run in families may be that diets tend to run in families.
Research has shown us that identical twins separated at birth will get different diseases based on how they live their lives.
the Journal of the American Medical Association
Overall, the researchers found no protective benefit for overall mortality, heart disease mortality, sudden cardiac death, heart attack, or stroke.
If there’s anyone reading this over the age of ten, the question isn’t whether or not you want to eat healthier to prevent heart disease but whether or not you want to reverse the heart disease you very likely already have.
To drastically reduce LDL cholesterol levels, you need to drastically reduce your intake of three things: trans fat, which comes from processed foods and naturally from meat and dairy; saturated fat, found mainly in animal products and junk foods; and to a lesser extent dietary cholesterol, found exclusively in animal-derived foods, especially eggs.26
The optimal LDL cholesterol level is probably 50 or 70 mg/dL, and apparently, the lower, the better.
The average cholesterol for people living in the United States is much higher than 150 mg/dL; it hovers around 200 mg/dL. If your blood test results came back with a total cholesterol of 200 mg/dL, your physician might reassure you that your cholesterol is normal.
To become virtually heart-attack proof, you need to get your LDL cholesterol at least under 70 mg/dL.
Given the right conditions, the body heals itself.
Your body wants to regain its health if you let it.
Your body wants to be healthy.
Unhealthy diets don’t just affect the structure of your arteries; an unhealthy diet can also affect their functioning.
They are dynamic, living organs.
Vegan diets are exclusively plant based, avoiding meat, dairy, and eggs.
Can a single serving of Brazil nuts bring down your cholesterol levels faster than statin drugs and keep them down even a month after that single meal?
What about individual doctors, though? Why aren’t all my colleagues telling their patients to lay off the Chick-fil-A? Insufficient time during office visits is a common excuse physicians cite, but the top reason doctors give for not counseling patients with high cholesterol to eat healthier is that they think patients may “fear privations related to dietary advice.”65 In other words, doctors perceive that patients would feel deprived of all the junk they’re eating. Can you imagine a doctor saying, “Yeah, I’d like to tell my patients to stop smoking, but I know how much they love it”?
The worst death I ever witnessed was that of a man dying of lung cancer.
Lung cancer is our number-one cancer killer.
First, it’s important to understand the toxic effects of cigarettes on the lungs. Tobacco smoke contains chemicals that weaken the body’s immune system, making it more susceptible to disease and handicapping its ability to destroy cancer cells. At the same time, tobacco smoke can damage cell DNA, increasing the chance for cancer cells to form and flourish in the first place.
The two most serious brain diseases are stroke, which kills nearly 130,000 Americans each year,1 and Alzheimer’s disease, which kills nearly 85,000.2 Most strokes can be thought of as “brain attacks”—like heart attacks, but the rupturing plaques in your arteries cut off blood flow to parts of the brain rather than to parts of the heart. Alzheimer’s is more like a mind attack.
Bananas, although they’ve been marketed for their potassium content, aren’t actually particularly rich in the mineral.
What are some of the truly potassium-rich foods? The healthiest common whole-food sources are probably greens, beans, and sweet potatoes.
