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

by Michael Greger

that appear to have the same effect ...

dripping green tea on colon, esophageal, or prostate cancer cells has been shown to reactivate gen...

Three hours after eating a cup of broccoli sprouts, the enzyme that cancers use to help silence our defenses is suppressed in your bloodstream110 to an extent equal to or greater than the chemotherapy agent specifically desi...

In the Gene Expression Modulation by Intervention with Nutrition and Lifestyle (GEMINAL) study, Dr. Ornish and colleagues took biopsies from men with prostate cancer before and after three months of intensive lifestyle changes that included a whole-food, plant-based diet.

Without any chemotherapy or radiation, beneficial changes in gene expression for five hundred different genes were noted. Within just a few months, the expression of disease-preventing genes was boosted, and oncogenes that promote breast and prostate cancer were suppressed.113 Whatever genes we may have inherited from our parents, what we eat can affect how those genes affect our health.

We’ll see in part 1 why it’s important to eat at least nine servings of fruits and vegetables daily, and then part 2 will help you decide whether to buy organic or conventional produce. I’ll try to answer all the common questions I receive daily and

atherosclerosis, from the Greek words athere (gruel) and sklerosis (hardening),

heart disease may be a choice.

To drastically reduce LDL cholesterol levels, you need to drastically reduce your intake of three things: trans fat, which comes from processed foods and naturally from meat and dairy; saturated fat, found mainly in animal products and junk foods; and to a lesser extent dietary cholesterol, found exclusively in animal-derived foods, especially eggs.26

there is only one true risk factor for coronary heart disease: cholesterol.

The optimal LDL cholesterol level is probably 50 or 70 mg/dL, and apparently, the lower, the better.

The population target should therefore be a total cholesterol level under 150 mg/dL.

To become virtually heart-attack proof, you need to get your LDL cholesterol at least under 70 mg/dL.

there are only two ways to achieve this for our population: to put more than a hundred million Americans on a lifetime of medications or to recommend they all eat a diet centered around whole plant foods.31

As soon as they stopped eating an artery-clogging diet, their bodies were able to start dissolving away some of the plaque that had built up. Arteries opened up without drugs or surgery, even in some cases of patients with severe triple-vessel heart disease. This suggests their bodies wanted to heal all along but were just never given the chance.40

Given the right conditions, the body heals itself.

Your arteries are not merely inert pipes through which blood flows. They are dynamic, living organs.

We’ve known for nearly two decades that a single fast-food meal—Sausage and Egg McMuffins were used in the original study—can stiffen your arteries within hours, cutting in half their ability to relax normally.43

And just as this inflammatory state starts to calm down five or six h...

leaving many Americans stuck in a danger zone of chronic, low...

recently shifted to bacterial toxins known as “endotoxins.”

Certain foods, such as meats, appear to harbor bacteria that can trigger inflammation dead or alive, even when the food is fully cooked.

Endotoxins are not destroyed by cooking temperatures, stomach acid, or digestive enzymes, so after a meal of animal products, these end...

They are then thought to be ferried by saturated fat across the gut wall into your bloodstream, where they can trigger the inf...

plant-based diets don’t just help clean out arteries but also improve their day-to-day function.

Can a single serving of Brazil nuts bring down your cholesterol levels faster than statin drugs and keep them down even a month after that single meal?

a single meal containing between one and eight Brazil nuts. Amazingly, compared to the control group who ate no nuts at all, just a single serving of four Brazil nuts almost immediately improved cholesterol levels.

LDL—the “bad”—cholesterol levels were a staggering twenty points lower just nine hours after eating the Brazil nuts.51 Even drugs don’t work nearly that fast.52 Here’s the truly insane part: The researchers went back and measured the study participants’ cholesterol thirty days later. Even a month after ingesting a single serving of Brazil nuts, their cholesterol levels stayed down.

Brazil nuts are so high in the mineral selenium that eating four every day may actually bump you up against the tolerable daily limit for selenium. Nevertheless, this is not something you have to worry about if you’re only eating four Brazil nuts a month.

McGovern

Committee, they released Dietary Goals for the United States, a report advising Americans to cut down on animal-based foods and increase their consumption of plant-based foods.

upset.”

FoodPolitics.com

Under industry pressure, not only was the goal to “decrease meat consumption” removed from the report but the entire Senate nutrition committee was disbanded.

Several prominent senators reputedly lost their election bids as a result of supporting the report.54

The Low Carb Fraud

it was uncovered that many members of the U.S. Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee had financial ties to everything from candy bar companies to entities like McDonald’s Council on Healthy Lifestyles and Coca-Cola’s Beverage Institute for Health and Wellness. One committee member even served as “brand girl” for cake-mix maker Duncan Hines and then as the official Cr...

“Tomato Effect.”

The term was coined in the Journal of the American Medical Association in reference to the fact that tomatoes were once considered poisonous and were shunned for centuries in North America, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

It’s bad enough that most medical schools don’t even require a single course on nutrition,58 but it’s even worse when mainstream medical organizations actively lobby against increased nutrition education for physicians.

clients.

Eat Drink Politics web site

a healthy diet may help mitigate the DNA-damaging effects of tobacco smoke, as well as perhaps help prevent lung cancer from spreading.

Although there is no cure for the permanent lung scarring that COPD causes, a diet rich in fruits and vegetables may help slow the progression of the disease and improve lung function for its thirteen million sufferers.

Finally, asthma, which claims 3,000 lives each year, is one of the most common chronic diseases among children, yet it may be largely preventable with a healthier diet.

Research suggests a few extra daily servings of fruits and vegetables can reduce both the number of cases of asthma during childhood and the number of as...

Researchers rounded up a group of longtime smokers and asked them to consume twenty-five times more broccoli than the average American—in other words, a single stalk a day. Compared to broccoli-avoiding smokers, the broccoli-eating smokers suffered 41 percent fewer DNA mutations in their bloodstream over ten days. Is that just because the broccoli boosted the activity of the detoxifying enzymes in their livers, which helped clear carcinogens before they even made it to the smokers’ cells? No, even when DNA was extracted from the subjects’ bodies and exposed to a known DNA-damaging chemical, the genetic material from the broccoli eaters showed significantly less damage, suggesting that eating vegetables like broccoli may make you more resilient at a subcellular level.

broccoli, cabbage, and cauliflower may help prevent further damage.

Certain compounds in broccoli may have the potential to suppress this metastatic spread.

What the kale did do was substantially lower their bad (LDL) cholesterol and boost their good (HDL) cholesterol10 as much as running three hundred miles.

turmeric, which gives curry powder its characteristic golden color, may also help prevent some of the DNA damage caused by smoking.

Curcumin

may potentially help prevent and/or arrest cancer cell growth.