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

by Michael Greger

(You can also buy bags of fresh greens and other crucifers that are prechopped or shredded, which can pre...

If you sprinkled some mustard powder on frozen broccoli that’s been cooked, would it start churning out sulforaphane? Yes! Boiling

Daikon radishes, regular radishes, horseradish, and wasabi are all cruciferous vegetables and may have the same effect. All it appears to take is a pinch to revitalize sulforaphane production.15 You can also add a small amount of fresh greens to your cooked greens.

I slice raw cauliflower into “steaks,” roast at 400°F for about a half hour, and then smother it in a lemon-tahini sauce. Sometimes I go minimalist and just sprinkle on lemon juice, zest, capers, and garlic. (This chapter

Lay out the torn leaves in a single layer on a cookie tray lined with parchment paper or a silicone mat to prevent sticking, and bake at a low temperature (about 250°F) and check often to make sure they don’t burn. Within about twenty minutes,

they transform into light, crispy snacks. Preseason the leaves before you roast them, or add your spices after they’re done.

Ann Esselstyn’s recipe on her son Rip’s website, E...

four or more cups of broccoli sprouts may indeed be detrimental.23 They concluded, however, that no harm was found at “nutritionally attainable concentrations.

Serving Sizes: 1 cup raw ½ cup cooked Daily Recommendation: 2 servings per day

Dark-green, leafy vegetables are the healthiest foods on the planet. As whole foods go, they offer the most nutrition per calorie.

I advise getting more than a dozen servings per week.

If you are on the drug warfarin (also known as Coumadin), talk with your physician before you increase your greens intake.

The drug works (both as a rat poison and a human blood-thinner) by crippling the enzyme that recycles vitamin K, which is involved in clotting your blood. If your system gets an influx of fresh vitamin K, which is concentrated in

greens, you can thereby undermine the effectiveness of the drug. You should still be able to eat your greens, but your physician will have to titrate the dose of ...

Eating greens nearly every day may be one of the most powerful steps you can take to prolong your life.

greens turned out to be associated with the strongest protection against major chronic diseases,6 including up to about a 20 percent reduction in risk for both heart attacks7 and strokes8 for every

additional daily serving.

if we could find something that could tightly bind to carcinogens and prevent them from slipping into our DNA, we might be able to prevent some of the mutations that lead to cancer.

an interceptor was found: chlorophyll, the

Six cups of spinach

worth of chlorophyll appeared to block about 40 percent of the carcinogen.13 Amazing!

you do have chlorophyll in your body—temporarily, at least—after you eat greens. But it would seem there’s no way the chlorophyll that enters your bloodstream after that salad could react with sunlight. After all, light can’t penetrate through your skin, right? Wrong. Any kid who’s ever shined a flashlight through her or his fingers could have told you that.

The red wavelengths of sunlight do penetrate into your body.14 In fact, if you step outside on a sunny day, there’s enough light reaching your brain that you could actually read this page inside your skull.

Your internal organs are bathed in sunlight, along with any chlorophyll circulating in your bloodstream. Although any energy produced by the chlorophyll would be negligible,16 it turns out that light-activated chlorophyll in your body may help regenerate a critical molecule called coenzyme Q10.17 CoQ10, also known as ubiquinol, is an antioxidant.

When ubiquinol extinguishes a free radical, it is oxidized to ubiquinone. To act as an effective antioxidant again, the body must regenerate

ubiquinol from ubiquinone. Think of it like an electrical fuse: Ubiquinol can only be used onc...

All along, we’ve been thinking that the main benefit of sunlight was only the formation of vitamin D and that the main benefit of greens was the antioxidants

they contain. But now we suspect the combination of the two may actually help the body create and maintain its own internal stock of antioxidants.

Eating a plant-based, chlorophyll-rich diet may be especially important for those on cholesterol-lowering statin drugs, as these medicatio...

liquid, ripe fruit, and fresh greens. I’d start with a two-to-one ratio of fruits to greens to start with before tipping heavier toward greens on the scale.

I like to add fresh mint leaves as well for a boost of flavor (and even more greens).

cooked oatmeal, chopped mint leaves, cocoa powder, and a healthy sweetener

to make the greens more palatable, consider mixing them with a green-light source of fat: nuts, seeds, nut

or seed butters, or avocados.

Many of the nutrients greens are famous for are fat soluble, including beta-carotene, lutein,...

This can mean enjoying a creamy tahini-based dressing on your salad, putting walnuts in your pesto, or sprinkling some toasted sesame seeds on your sautéed kale.

The jump in nutrient absorption is no small effect. When researchers tried feeding people a healthy salad of spinach, romaine, carrots, and tomatoes along with a source of fat, there was an impressive spike in carotenoid phytonutrients in their bloodstream over the next eight hours. With a fat-free dressing, carotenoid absorption flatlined down to negligible amounts; it was as if they’d never eaten the salad at all.

adding some avocado to your salsa may triple the amount of fat-soluble nutrients that make it into your bloodstream (in this case, the lycopene in the tomatoes).

a single walnut or a spoonful of avocado or shredded coconut.

adding two teaspoons of vinegar to a meal may improve blood sugar control, effectively blunting the blood sugar spike after a meal by about 20 percent.

Consuming pickles or vinegar pills does not seem to have the same effect.

Vinegar may also help with polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), improve arterial function, and help reduce body fat.

Having a big salad every day is a great way to burn through the Daily Dozen. To a base of mesclun greens and arugula, I add tomato, red bell pepper, beans, and barberries, along with toasted nuts if I’m using a fat-free dressing.

My

current favorite dressing recipe is a Caesar spin-off shared by Dr. Michael Klaper from the TrueNorth Health Center: 2 tablespoons almond meal 3 cloves crushed garlic 3 tablespoons di...

2 tablespoons white miso 3 tablespoons lemon juice 1/3 cup water Blend and enjoy! (If you have a high-speed blender, you could probab...

red cabbage microgreens have a sixfold higher vitamin C concentration than mature red cabbage and nearly seventy times the vitamin K.39 But

Microgreens are the perfect plants for the impatient gardener—fully grown in just one to two weeks.

there’s one green I caution against eating: alfalfa sprouts. Over a dozen years, twenty-eight outbreaks of Salmonella food poisoning linked to sprouts have been documented