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November 2, 2022 - January 19, 2023
those eliminating all meat, including fish? They appear to eliminate 61 percent of their risk.
They may drop their diabetes rates 78 percent compared with people who eat...
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On the other hand, oleate, the monounsaturated fat found mostly in nuts, olives, and avocados,
In other words, people eating plant-based diets appear to be better at both producing and using insulin.
Reducing belly fat may be the best way to prevent prediabetes from turning into full-blown diabetes.
Saturated fats may also be toxic to the cells in the pancreas that produce insulin.
As noted earlier, even if you don’t eat extra fat, the extra fat you wear may cause the spillover effect—the tendency for overstretched fat cells to spill fat into the bloodstream.
Both the vegetarian and traditional Asian diet groups were following healthy diets, avoiding soda, for example. Despite the similarities in diet among the four thousand study subjects and after accounting for weight, family history, exercise, and smoking, the researchers found that the vegetarian men had only half the odds of diabetes as the occasional meat eaters. The vegetarian women had 75 percent lower odds of diabetes. Those who avoided meat altogether appeared to have significantly lower risk of both prediabetes and diabetes than those who ate plant-based diets with an occasional serving
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The dramatic rise in obesity has been blamed squarely on overeating and inactivity. But could there be something else about the food we’re eating that’s plumping us up?
because vegetarians have a higher gene expression of a fat-burning enzyme called carnitine palmitoyltransferase, which effectively
massive name, the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer–Physical Activity, Nutrition, Alcohol, Cessation of Smoking, Eating Out of Home, and Obesity—commonly known as EPIC-PANACEA—was comprised of hundreds of thousands
followed for years. It’s the largest study ever to investigate eating meat and body weight, and it found that meat consumption was associated with significant weight gain even after adjusting for calories. This means that if you had two people eating the same number of calories, it appears the person eating more meat would, on average, gain significantly more weight.
Instead of starving by eating less food, though, what if diabetics just ate better food, as in a 90 percent or more plant-based diet of all-you-can-eat greens, lots of other vegetables and beans, whole grains, fruits, nuts, and seeds? In a pilot study, thirteen diabetic men and women were told to eat at least one big salad every day, as well as veggie-bean soup, a handful of nuts and seeds, fruit at every meal, a pound of cooked greens, and some whole grains; to restrict their animal product consumption; and to eliminate refined grains, junk food, and oil. Then, the researchers measured their
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After about seven months of eating a diet centered on whole plant foods, the subjects’ A1c levels dropped to a nondiabetic 5.8—and this was after they were able to stop taking most of their medications.
Now we know that it can also be reversed with an extremely healthy diet, but is that because it was also low in calories? The study subjects lost about as much weight on the vegetable-packed, plant-based diet as people who went on semistarvation diets based on liquid meal replacements.
Subsisting on mostly diet shakes made out of sugar, powdered milk, corn syrup, and oil, or eating a plant-based diet where you can enjoy real food and lots of it?
Just such a study was published more than thirty-five years ago. Type 2 diabetics were placed on a plant-based diet and weighed every day. If they started losing any weight, they were made to eat more food—so much that some of the participants actually had trouble eating it all! The result: Even with no weight loss, subjects on the plant-based diet saw their insulin requirements cut by about 60 percent, meaning the amount of insulin these diabetics had to inject dropped by more than half. Furthermore, half of the diabetics were able to get off insulin altogether, despite no change in body
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a remarkable study was published, entitled “Regression of Diabetic Neuropathy with Total Vegetarian (Vegan) Diet.”
Their numbness noticeably improved too. And the side effects were all good: The diabetics lost an average of ten pounds, their blood sugar levels dropped, their insulin needs dropped in half, and, in five of the patients, not only was their painful neuropathy cured, so was, apparently, their diabetes.
On top of that, the diabetics’ triglyceride and cholesterol levels improved on average as well. High blood pressures dropped by so much that half of the subjects also appeared cured of their hypertension.
other words: Because plant-based diets work. Think about it. Patients walk in with one of the most painful, frustrating, and hard-to-treat conditions in all of medicine, and three-quarters of them were cured in a handful of days using a natural, nontoxic treatment—namely, a diet composed of whole plant foods. This should have been front-page news.
The most interesting speculation was that trans fats naturally found in meat and dairy could be causing an inflammatory response in the patients’ bodies. The researchers found that a significant percentage of the fat under the skin of those who ate meat, or even just dairy and eggs, was composed of trans fats, whereas those who had been on a strictly whole-food, plant-based diet had no detectable trans fat in their tissues.
Fortunately, there may be an even better tool than BMI that we can use to gauge the health risks of body fat. It’s called Waist-to-Height Ratio, or WHtR.
How far behind the times is the medical profession?
“Uprooting the Leading Causes of Death”
“How many lives could we save if people around the world cut back on soda?” The best answer? 299,521.3 So soft drinks and their empty calories don’t just fail to promote health—they actually seem to promote death. But apparently soda isn’t nearly as deadly as bacon, bologna, ham, and hot dogs. Processed meat is blamed for the deaths of more than eight hundred thousand people every year.
The number-one risk factor for death in the world they identified is high blood pressure.6 Also known as hypertension, high blood pressure lays waste to nine million people worldwide every year.7 It kills so many people because it contributes to deaths from a variety of causes, including aneurysms, heart attacks, heart failure, kidney failure, and stroke.
You’ve probably had your blood pressure taken at the doctor’s office. The nurse reads off two numbers, say, for example, “115 over 75.” The first number (“systolic”) represents the pressure in your arteries as your blood pumps from the heart; the second number (“diastolic”) is the pressure in your arteries while the heart is resting between beats. The American Heart Association defines “normal” blood pressure as a systolic pressure under 120 and a diastolic pressure under 80—or 120/80. Anything above 140/90 is considered hypertensive. Values in between are considered prehypertensive.
In the United States, nearly seventy-eight million people have high blood pressure—that’s about one in three American adults.
High blood pressure, then, appears to be a choice. You can continue eating the artery-bursting Western diet, or you can choose to take off the pressure. The truth is that eliminating humanity’s primary risk factor for death may be simple. No drugs, no scalpels. Just forks.
What would happen if, instead of consuming ten times more sodium than what your bodies were designed to handle, you just ate the natural amount found in whole foods? Is it possible your blood pressure would stay low your whole life? To test that theory, we’d have to find a population in modern times that doesn’t use salt, eat processed food, or go out to eat. To find a no-salt culture, scientists had to go deep into the Amazon rainforest.
In other words, they start out with an average blood pressure of about 100/60 and stay that way for life. The researchers couldn’t find a single case of high blood pressure.
But the real villains aren’t necessarily the salt-mine barons—it’s the processed food industry. The trillion-dollar processed food industry uses dirt-cheap added salt and sugar to sell us their junk.
But there are two other major reasons the food industry adds salt to foods. If you add salt to meat, it draws in water. This way, a company can increase the weight of its product by nearly 20 percent.
Pop quiz! Which has been reported to contain the most sodium: a serving of beef, a serving of baked all-natural chicken, a large McDonald’s french fries, or a serving of salted pretzels? The answer? Chicken. The poultry industry commonly injects chicken carcasses with salt water to artificially inflate their weight, yet they can still be labelled “100 percent natural.” Consumer Reports found that some supermarket chickens were pumped so full of salt that they registered a whopping 840 mg of sodium per serving—that could mean more than a full day’s worth of sodium in just one chicken breast.
How can you overcome your built-in craving for salt, sugar, and fat? Just give it a few weeks, and your taste buds will start to change. When researchers put people on a low-salt diet, over time, the research subjects increasingly enjoyed the taste of salt-free soup and became turned off by the salt-heavy soup they had previously craved. As the study progressed, when the participants were allowed to salt their own soup to taste, they preferred less and less salt as their taste buds became acclimated to healthier levels.
The cause of high blood pressure isn’t medication deficiency. The underlying cause is what you eat and how you live. As we discussed earlier, the ideal blood pressure, defined as the level at which lowering it further yields no additional benefit, is probably around 110/70.96 Can you really get it that low without medication? Remember, this was the average blood pressure of men more than sixty years old in rural Africa on no treatment other than their traditional, plant-based diets and lifestyles.97 In rural China, we find similar results: 110/70 throughout life without any
Why not recommend an even more plant-based diet? We’ve known for decades that “food of animal origin was highly significantly associated with systolic and diastolic B[lood] P[ressure] after the age and weight effects were removed.”103 That’s a quote from a series of studies performed by renowned physician Frank Sacks and colleagues back in the 1970s, but there are studies going all the way back to the 1920s demonstrating that adding meat to a plant-based diet can significantly elevate blood pressure in a matter of days.
The reason that the DASH diet was modeled explicitly after vegetarian diets but was not meat-free itself might surprise you. The primary design goal of the DASH diet was to explicitly create eating patterns “that would have the blood pressure lowering benefits of a vegetarian diet yet contain enough animal products to make them palatable to nonvegetarians.…”107 Dr. Sacks had even shown that the more dairy vegetarians consumed, the higher their blood pressure appeared to rise.108 But he figured there was no point in calling for a diet he believed few would follow. This is a recurring theme in
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There appears to be a stepwise drop in hypertension rates the more plant-based foods you eat.
Those who cut out all meat except for fish had a 38 percent lower risk of high blood pressure, and those who cut out all meat had a 55 percent lower rate.
How did the numbers come out? Not surprisingly, the endurance runners on a standard American diet had a better blood pressure average than their sedentary, meat-eating counterparts: 122/72 compared with 132/79, which fits the definition of prehypertensive. But the sedentary vegans? They averaged an extraordinary 104/62.115
Ground flaxseeds alone “induced one of the most potent blood-pressure-lowering effects ever achieved by a dietary intervention.”
After six months, those who ate the placebo foods started out hypertensive and stayed hypertensive, despite the fact that many of them were on a variety of blood pressure pills. On average, they started the study at 155/81 and ended it at 158/81.
What exactly does the liver do? Up to five hundred different functions have been attributed to this vital organ.
According to a famous series of papers in the Journal of the American Medical Association called the “Actual Causes of Death in the United States” [emphasis added], the leading killer of Americans in the year 2000 was tobacco, followed by diet and inactivity. The third-leading killer? Alcohol.
accidents; the other half were slower, and the leading cause was alcoholic liver disease.
disease. Because heart disease is the leading cause of death, it explains why people who drink moderately may live longer lives than those who abstain. But this advantage may be restricted only to those who fail to practice a bare modicum of healthy behaviors.
“Who Benefits Most from the Cardioprotective Properties of Alcohol Consumption—Health Freaks or Couch Potatoes?” What constituted a “health freak”? According to the researchers’ definition, anyone who exercises thirty minutes a day, doesn’t smoke, and eats at least one serving of fruits or vegetables daily.
The most common cause of a fatty liver is not alcohol but nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD).
