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November 2, 2022 - January 19, 2023
At the start, their liver enzyme levels were normal, but after just one week of this diet, more than 75 percent of the volunteers’ liver function test results became pathological.21 If an unhealthy diet can cause liver damage within just seven days, it should be no surprise that NAFLD has quietly become the most common cause of chronic liver disease in the United States, afflicting an estimated seventy million people.22 That’s about one in three adults. Nearly 100 percent of those with severe obesity may be affected.
Drinking just one can of soda a day appears to raise the odds of getting fatty liver disease by 45 percent.
NAFLD has been characterized as a “tale of fat and sugar,”
This may explain why adherence to a Mediterranean-style diet with plenty of fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and beans has been associated with less severe fatty liver disease even though it is not typically a low-fat diet.
To explore the relationship between diet and serious liver disease, about nine thousand American adults were studied for thirteen years. The researchers noted that their most important finding may be that cholesterol consumption was a strong predictor of cirrhosis and liver cancer. Those consuming the amount of cholesterol found in two Egg McMuffins34 or more each day appeared to double their risk of hospitalization or death.
Unfortunately, pork may harbor HEV as well. Experts suspect that much of the American population has been exposed to this virus, as there is known to be a relatively high prevalence of HEV antibodies among U.S. blood donors. This exposure may be a result of individuals consuming HEV-contaminated pork.
Some of the plant-based protection might have been due to the antioxidant properties of fruits and vegetables. Higher dietary intake of antioxidants is associated with significantly lower lymphoma risk. Note I said dietary intake, not supplementary intake. Antioxidant supplements don’t appear to work.
Supplements contain only a select few antioxidants, whereas your body relies on hundreds of them, all working synergistically to create a network to help the body dispose of free radicals. High doses of a single antioxidant may upset this delicate balance and may actually diminish your body’s ability to fight cancer.
Why is there so much lymphoma and leukemia risk associated with eating such relatively small amounts of poultry? The researchers suggested this result could be a fluke, or it could be due to the drugs, such as antibiotics, that are often fed to chickens and turkeys to promote their growth. Or it might be the dioxins found in some poultry meat, which have been linked to lymphoma.
If, in the case of blood cancers, one cause is a poultry virus, then the more the meat was cooked, the more likely it is that the virus was destroyed. Cancer-causing poultry viruses—including the avian herpesvirus that causes Marek’s disease, several retroviruses like reticuloendotheliosis virus, the avian leukosis virus found in chickens, and the lymphoproliferative disease virus found in turkeys—may explain the higher rates of blood cancers among farmers,
Well, I went home that night and we cleaned house. Got rid of everything that didn’t grow out of the ground, everything processed. And guess what, over the next year, I lost my beer belly and the high blood pressure. Life is so much better without those medications—they made me feel so tired all the time. And my kidney function is back to normal. It makes me mad that no one told me this sooner and that I had to feel so bad before I felt better.
better to keep your kidneys healthy in the first place. Although your kidneys can fail suddenly in response to certain toxins, infections, or urinary blockage, most kidney disease is characterized by a gradual loss of function over time. A national survey found that only 41 percent of Americans tested had normal kidney function, a drop from 52 percent about a decade earlier.
We’ve already seen that the standard American diet can be toxic to blood vessels in the heart and the brain—so what might it be doing to the kidneys? Putting that question to the test, researchers at Harvard University followed thousands of healthy women, their diets, and their kidney function for more than a decade8
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.
Dietary acid load is determined by the balance of acid-inducing foods (such as meats, eggs, and cheese) and base-inducing foods (such as fruits and vegetables). A 2014 analysis of the diets and kidney function of more than twelve thousand Americans across the country found that a higher dietary acid load was associated with significantly higher risk of protein leakage into the urine, an indicator of kidney damage.
people are unwilling to reduce their meat consumption, they should be encouraged to eat more fruits and vegetables to balance out that acid load.
Unfortunately, this type of Band-Aid approach is all too typical of today’s medical model. Cholesterol too high from eating a diet unnaturally high in saturated fat and cholesterol? Take a statin drug to cripple your cholesterol-making enzyme. Diet unnaturally high in acid-forming foods? Swallow some baking soda pills to balance that right out. These same researchers also tried giving people fruits and vegetables instead of baking soda and found that they offered similar protections, with the additional advantage of lowering the subjects’ blood pressure.
Eating a plant-based diet to alkalinize your urine may also help prevent and treat kidney stones—those hard mineral deposits that can form in your kidneys when the concentration of certain stone-forming substances in your urine becomes so high they start to crystallize. Eventually, these crystals can grow into pebble-sized rocks that block the flow of urine, causing severe pain that tends to radiate from one side of the lower back toward the groin. Kidney stones can pass naturally (and often painfully), but some become so large that they have to be removed surgically. The incidence of kidney
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experimental “high” animal protein diet was designed to re-create the animal protein intake of the average American,
Phosphate additives play an especially important role in the meat industry.
weight (and thus to increase profitability since chicken can be sold by the pound), and to reduce “purge,” the term used to describe the liquid that seeps from meat as it ages.
In meat, there’s an additional food safety concern, as adding phosphate may increase the growth of leading food poisoning bacteria Campylobacter in poultry purge up to a millionfold.
Meat already contains highly absorbable phosphates; adding more may just add insult to kidney injury. Chicken appears to be the worst offender:
90 percent of chicken products
Why were these killer fats deemed safe in the first place?
safe” determination? It’s not the government or a scientific body. It’s the manufacturer.
FDA refers to as “GRAS self-determination.” What’s more, these manufacturers can legally add things to our food supply without informing the FDA.
1997 and 2012, 22.4 percent were made by someone directly employed by the manufacturer itself, 13.3
For example, PepsiCo alone spent more than $9 million in a single year to lobby Congress.
what about the other 96 percent? Historically, the only accepted risk factor for kidney cancer has been tobacco use.
This may help explain the rising rates of kidney cancer over the last few decades despite the falling rates of smoking. Clearing the Confusion: Nitrates, Nitrites, and Nitrosamines Although fresh meat also contains nitrosamines, processed or cured meat like deli slices may be particularly harmful. In Europe, the world’s second-largest prospective study on diet and cancer calculated that a reduction in processed meat consumption to less than twenty grams a day—less than a small matchbook-sized portion—would prevent more than 3 percent of all deaths.
can hear, and for a good reason. Besides skin cancer, breast cancer is the most common cancer among American women. Every year, about 230,000 are diagnosed with breast cancer, and 40,000 die from
What kind of blood do you want in your body—what kind of immune system? The kind of blood that just rolls over when new cancer cells pop up, or blood that circulates to every nook and cranny in your body with the power to slow down and stop cancer cells in their tracks?
Besides helping to regulate your sleep, melatonin is thought to play another role—suppressing cancer growth. Think of melatonin as helping to put cancer cells to sleep at night.
Melatonin production can be gauged by measuring the amount of melatonin excreted in our first pee in the morning. And, indeed, women with higher melatonin secretion have been found to have lower rates of breast cancer.
And certain plant foods may be particularly protective. PREVENTING (AND TREATING) BREAST CANCER BY EATING PLANTS Not long ago, I received a very moving note from Bettina, a woman who had been following my work on NutritionFacts.org. Bettina had been diagnosed with stage two “triple-negative” breast cancer—the hardest type to treat. She underwent eight months of treatment, including surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation. A breast cancer diagnosis is stressful enough, but the anxiety and depression can be compounded by this type of rigorous cancer regimen. Bettina, however, used the experience to
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Inadequate fiber consumption may also be a risk factor for breast cancer.
This effect is presumed to be due to lignans’ further estrogen-dampening effects. But since lignans are found in healthy foods like berries, whole grains, and dark, leafy greens, could they just be an indicator of a healthy diet?
What about women who already have breast cancer?
the muffins with flaxseed, on average, witnessed their tumor-cell proliferation decrease, cancer-cell death rates increase, and their c-erB2
While intake of green tea and soy might account for a twofold reduction in Asian women’s breast cancer risk, it doesn’t fully account for the disparity between Eastern and Western breast cancer rates.
In 1946, the World Health Organization defined health as “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.”
FOIA documents revealed that the FDA knew that these drugs—
seven months, her bowel movements were effortless, her once-crippling migraines had stopped altogether, her periods were more regular, less painful, and shorter—and her depression was gone. Just months earlier, Shay had felt so bad that she couldn’t get out of bed in the morning. But by improving her diet, she is now much healthier, both physically and mentally.
self-described fitness nut, he always tried to make good choices out of respect for his body and was lucky to have descended from long-lived, healthy ancestors. Tony was a runner who had always been at a healthy weight. He stayed
What about “Milk: It Does a Body Good”? All foods of animal origin contain sex steroid hormones, such as estrogen, but today’s genetically “improved” dairy cows are milked throughout their pregnancies when their reproductive hormones are particularly high.
Concerns about milk and other dairy products first arose from population-scale data, such as the twenty-five-fold increase in prostate cancer in Japanese men since World War II, which coincided with a sevenfold increase in egg consumption, a ninefold increase in meat consumption, and a twentyfold increase in dairy consumption.
The researchers found that cow’s milk stimulated the growth of human prostate cancer cells in each of fourteen separate experiments, producing an average increase in cancer growth rate of more than 30 percent. In contrast, almond milk suppressed the growth of the cancer cells by more than 30 percent.16 What happens in a petri dish, though, doesn’t necessarily happen in people. Nevertheless, a compilation of case-control studies did conclude that cow’s milk consumption is a risk factor for prostate cancer,
Some babies are born with a rare birth defect called galactosemia, in which they lack the enzymes needed to detoxify galactose, a type of sugar found in milk. This means they end up with elevated levels of galactose in their blood, which can cause bone
Eggs, Choline, and Cancer
