How Not to Die: Discover the Foods Scientifically Proven to Prevent and Reverse Disease

by Michael Greger

Diet Versus Exercise

Similar studies have shown that women eating plant-based diets appear to strengthen their bodies’ defenses against breast cancer in just fourteen days (as detailed in chapter 11).

To find out, blood from each of the three groups was dripped onto human prostate cancer cells growing in a petri dish to see whose blood kicked more cancer butt.

Prostate Cancer Reversal Through Diet?

If a healthy diet can turn your bloodstream into a cancer-fighting machine, what about using it not just to prevent cancer but also to treat it? Other leading killers, including heart disease, type 2 diabetes, and hypertension, can be prevented, arrested, and even reversed, so why not cancer?

Prostate cancer can be so slow growing and the side effects of treatment so onerous that men diagnosed with it often choose to be placed in a medical holding pattern called “watchful waiting” or “expectant management.”

Those on the half-vegan diet did appear to slow down the growth of their cancer.

Prostate cancer rates vary tremendously around the world. African Americans, for example, may have an incidence of clinically apparent prostate cancer that is some 30 times greater than that of Japanese men and 120 times greater than that of Chinese men. This discrepancy has been attributed in part to the higher amounts of animal protein and fat in Western diets.

This idea was studied by the same Pritikin Foundation researchers who pitted the blood of individuals before and after a plant-based diet against the growth of prostate cancer cells. This time, they performed the same experiment on the type of normal prostate cells that grow to obstruct urine flow. Within just two weeks, those eating plant-based diets saw their blood acquire the ability to suppress the abnormal growth of noncancerous prostate cells too—and the effect didn’t seem to dissipate with time. The blood of those eating plant-based diets over the long term had the same beneficial effect for up to twenty-eight years straight.

Why do people who live to be one hundred or older seem to escape cancer?

Each year, you are reborn. You create and destroy nearly your entire body weight in new cells every year. Every day, about fifty billion of your cells die, and about fifty billion new cells are born to keep you in balance.

Once you’ve gotten through puberty, you no longer need to produce many more cells than you retire.

This may explain why you can so dramatically bolster the cancer-fighting power of your bloodstream within weeks of eating a plant-based diet. Remember the experiments in which dripping the blood from people eating healthy diets onto cancer cells wiped more of them out? Well, if you add back to the cancer cells the amount of IGF-1 that left the plant eaters’ systems, guess what happens?

After just eleven days of cutting back on animal protein, your IGF-1 levels can drop by 20 percent, and your levels of IGF-1 binding protein can jump by 50 percent.

I once gave a speech in Bellport, New York, about preventing chronic disease through diet. Afterward, an audience member named John was inspired to e-mail me and recount his battle with prostate cancer.

Instead of going under the knife, John decided to switch to a plant-based diet.

John was diagnosed in 1996. After changing his diet, his cancer went away and has stayed away.

His most famous work—one of Esquire’s 1963

It appears that blood levels of some pollutants in women may drop by nearly half during pregnancy,

So to get that same 99 percent drop, it could take more than a century—a long time to delay having your first child. By now you are probably wondering how these chemicals get into your food in the first place. One reason is that we’ve so thoroughly polluted our planet that the chemicals can just come down in the rain. For example, scientists have reported eight different pesticides contaminating the snow-packed peaks of Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado.

Parkinson’s patients have been found to have elevated levels of an organochlorine pesticide in their bloodstreams, the class of largely banned pesticides that includes DDT.

As noted earlier, though many of these chemicals were banned decades ago, they may persist in the environment. You can continue to be exposed to them through the consumption of contaminated animal products in your diet, including dairy.

They estimated that Parkinson’s risk may increase 17 percent for every daily cup of milk consumed.

This may help explain the link between milk intake and Parkinson’s, as well as the link between milk and another neurodegenerative disease called Huntington’s disease. Indeed, higher consumption of dairy products appears to double the risk of earlier-onset Huntington’s.

As we’ve discussed, organochlorines are a group of chemicals that includes dioxins, PCBs, and such insecticides as DDT. Although most were banned decades ago, they persist in the environment and creep up the food chain into the fat of the animals people eat.

Coffee for Preventing and Treating Parkinson’s Disease

Of course, there’s only so much you can charge for a cup of coffee, so drug companies have tried to tweak caffeine into new experimental drugs, such as preladenant and istradefylline. But it turns out they don’t appear to work any better than plain coffee, which is far cheaper and has a better safety record.

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.

a lot of drugs are being doled out in an attempt to prevent disease. But how well are these billions of pills working? An overconfidence in the power of pills and procedures for disease prevention may be one of the reasons doctors and patients alike may undervalue diet and lifestyle interventions.

However, as doctors, we know that if we divulged this information, few of our patients would agree to take these drugs every day for the rest of their lives, which would be detrimental for the small percentage of people who do truly benefit from them. That’s why doctors in the know and drug companies oversell the benefits by conveniently not mentioning how tiny these benefits actually are. When it comes to chronic disease management, practicing conventional medicine can be thought of as practicing deceptive medicine.

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

(Note that aspirin should never actually be given to infants or children.)

one health care quality advisor noted, the widespread disregard of Dr. Starfield’s evidence “recalls the dark dystopia of George Orwell’s 1984,

In part 1 of this book, I explored the science that demonstrates the role a plant-based diet rich in certain foods may play in helping to prevent, treat, and even reverse the fifteen leading causes of death. For those who may have already been diagnosed with one or more of these diseases, the information in part 1 can be lifesaving.

“What do you eat every day, Dr. Greger?”

without angioplasty. No surgery. No miracle drug. Just a plant-based diet and other healthy lifestyle changes.

For example, are eggs healthy? Compared to oatmeal, definitely not. But compared to the sausage links next to them on the breakfast platter? Yes.

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.

They concluded: “The purchase of plant-based foods may offer the best investment for dietary health.”

Meat costs about three times more than vegetables yet yields sixteen times less nutrition based on an aggregate of nutrients.

The U.S. government’s official Dietary Guidelines for Americans has (as of this writing) a chapter “Food Components to Reduce,” which specifically lists added sugars, calories, cholesterol, saturated fat, sodium, and trans fat.

At the same time, there are nine so-called shortfall nutrients, of which at least a quarter of the American population isn’t reaching an adequate intake. These are fiber; the minerals calcium, magnesium, and potassium; and vitamins A, C, D, E, and K.

public health authorities to say what’s best and let people make up their own minds. Figure 5 That’s why I appreciate the American Institute for Cancer Research (AICR) recommendations. Not beholden to the USDA, the AICR simply lays out the science. When it comes to the worst of the worst, the institute doesn’t pull any punches. Instead of the Dietary Guidelines for Americans’ advice to “Consume fewer … sodas,”10 the AICR cancer prevention guidelines advise: “Avoid sugary drinks.” Similarly, the AICR doesn’t just say to cut back on bacon, ham, hot dogs, sausage, and lunch meats. The cancer guidelines tell you to “avoid processed meat.” Period. Why? Because “data do not show any level of intake that can confidently be shown not to be associated with risk.”11 The healthiest diet is one that maximizes the intake of whole plant foods and minimizes the intake of animal-based foods and processed junk.

No wonder the eating habit apparently best able to control our epidemics of dietary disease is a whole-food, plant-based diet.

Dairy is the number-one source of calcium in the United States, but it’s also the number-one source of saturated fat.

The green-light message shines brightly in pronouncements telling you to “eat more fruits and vegetables,” but the yellow and red lights can be dim and cloudy thanks to politics. In other words, the guidelines are clear when there is eat-more messaging (“Eat more fresh produce”), but eat-less messaging is obscured into biochemical components

“Reduce intake of solid fats (major sources of saturated and trans fatty acids).” What’s the average consumer supposed to do with that obscure little nugget? 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.

So if trans fats are found in meat and dairy and the only safe intake of trans fats is zero, that means the Institute of Medicine went on to encourage everyone to start eating a plant-based diet, right? No, they did not. The director of Harvard’s Cardiovascular Epidemiology Program famously explained why: “We can’t tell people to stop eating all meat and all dairy products,” he said. “Well, we could tell people to become vegetarians,” he added. “If we were truly basing this only on science, we would, but it is a bit extreme.”

For example, 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.

Then there was the junk food. The federal guidelines were so lax that up to 25 percent of your diet could be made up of “discretionary calories,” meaning junk. A quarter of your calories could come from cotton candy washed down with Mountain Dew, and you’d still be within the guidelines. Yet we failed. Astoundingly, 95 percent of Americans exceeded their discretionary calorie allowance. Only one in a thousand American children between the ages of two and eight made the cutoff, consuming less than the equivalent of about a dozen spoonfuls of sugar a day.