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July 13 - September 26, 2023
Greens are the healthiest vegetables, and berries are the healthiest fruits—in part due to their respective plant pigments.
Consuming sugar in fruit form is not only harmless but actually helpful. Eating berries can blunt the insulin spike from high-glycemic foods like white bread, for example.15 This may be because the fiber in fruit has a gelling effect
in your stomach and small intestine that slows the release of sugars16 or because of certain phytonutrients in fruit that appear to block the absorption of sugar through the gut wall and into your bloodstream.
Eating a piece of fruit with each meal could be expected to lower, rather than raise, the blood sugar response.
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.
Participants were asked to eat forty-three servings of vegetables a day in addition to the fruit, the result of which was that the researchers recorded the largest-ever bowel movements documented in a dietary intervention.23
most of their nutrition is retained even when frozen.
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 ...
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mix the cherries in a bowl of cooked oatmeal along with cocoa
powder and pumpkin seeds. If you sweeten it with date sugar or erythritol (see here), it’s like eating chocolate-covered cherries for breakfast.
Gojis have the third-highest antioxidant capacity of any common dried fruit
second only to dried pomegranate seeds and barberries
Gojis also have a specific antioxidant pigment that makes corn yellow—zeaxanthin. When eaten, zeaxanthin is shuttled into your
retinas (the back of your eyes) and appears to protect against macular degeneration, a leading cause of vision loss.37
gojis may even help people already suffering from macular degeneration.
goji trail mix!
in Asian supermarkets, you can buy them as “Lycium” berries,
crossover trial of black currants found they can improve the symptoms of computer eye strain (known in doctor-speak as “video display terminal work-induced transient
refractive alteration”).40
other berries like bilberries, blueberries, or blackberries may help as well.
aronia berries and elderberries, followed by black raspberries, blueberries (especially the smaller “wild” varieties), and blackberries.
The cheapest source, though, is probably red cabbage.
1 medium-sized fruit 1 cup cut-up fruit ¼ cup dried fruit Daily Recommendation: 3 servings per day
the 2010 Global Burden of Disease Study.
Funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation,
In the United States, the massive study determined that the leading cause of both death and
disability was the American diet, followed by smoking.
green-light sources of fat like nuts).
Watermelon seeds, on the other hand, have pretty respectable antioxidant levels, so I try to avoid seedless varieties.
Seedless or not, watermelon contains a compound called citrulline that can boost the activity of the enzyme responsible for dilating the blood vessels in the penis that result in erections.
Yellow
watermelon has four times more citrulline,14 though,
Just as poultry processors inject salt water into chickens to add water weight, processed food companies often use sugar as a cheap way to bulk up products sold by the pound.
Eating a dozen dried apple rings a day may drop LDL cholesterol levels 16 percent within three months and 24 percent within six months.17 If you buy dried fruit, I recommend choosing unsulfured varieties.
Sulfur-containing preservatives, such as sulfur dioxide in dried fruit and sulfites in wine, can form hydrogen sulfide in your gut—this is the rotten egg gas implicated in the development of the inflammatory bowel disease ulcerative colitis.
The sulfur naturally contained in cruciferous vegetables does not appear to elevate colitis risk,19 so feel free to add kale chips to your healthy snacking menu. Prescribing Kiwifruit There appear to be a disproportionate
Kiwi is one of the fruits I’ve prescribed to my patients with insomnia (two an hour before bedtime appears to significantly improve sleep onset, duration, and efficiency)
and also to help with constipation-type irritable bowel syndrome (two kiwifruit a day seem to significantly improve bowel function).
Kiwifruit also appear to benefit immune function.
Citrus zest lives up to its name in terms of enlivening dishes, and it may do the same to your DNA-repair capabilities.
Within two hours of consuming citrus, your DNA becomes significantly more resistant to damage,29 which may help explain why citrus consumption is associated with lower risk of breast cancer.30 Some of the citrus compounds thought responsible
which concentrate in the breast31 and enhance DNA repair32—are found in the peel, though.
½ cup chopped ¼ cup brussels or broccoli sprouts 1 tablespoon horseradish Daily Recommendation: 1 serving per day
sulforaphane’s role as a “detoxicant.”
The formation of sulforaphane in cruciferous vegetables is like a chemical flare reaction. It requires the mixing of a precursor compound with an enzyme called myrosinase, which is inactivated by cooking8 (though microwaved broccoli appears to retain some cancer-fighting capacity).
If you chop the broccoli (or brussels sprouts, kale, collards, cauliflower, or any other cruciferous vegetable) and then wait forty minutes, you can cook it as much as you want.
At that point, the sulforaphane has already been made, so the enzyme is no longer needed to achieve maximum benefit.
