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

by Michael Greger

nutritional yeast may improve a wide range of emotional states, reducing feelings of tenseness, fatigue, confusion, and anger, while at the same time increasing perceived “vigor.”

One group ate its regular diet, while the other ate its regular diet plus a cup of cooked white button mushrooms every day. After just a week, the mushroom eaters showed a 50 percent boost in the IgA levels in their saliva. These antibody levels remained elevated for about a week before dropping.

mushrooms may have an anti-inflammatory effect.

potentially offering a boost in immune and anticancer function without aggravating diseases of inflammation.

Consumption amounts of beef, pork, chicken, and dairy products could explain the daily excretion amount of several antibiotics in urine.”149 These antibiotic levels can be lowered, however, after merely five days of removing meat from the diet.150

Carbophobia: The Scary Truth About America’s Low-Carb Craze.

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pathological agents in obesity and type 2 diabetes are identified as “high-fat and high-calorie diets,”

9 If insulin is the key that unlocks the doors to your cells, saturated fat is what appears to gum up the locks.

by switching to a healthy diet, you can start improving your health within a matter of hours.

Blood sugar, though, is a little like a vampire: It needs an invitation to come into your cells. And that invitation is insulin, the key that unlocks the front door of your muscle cells

so glucose can enter.

what’s jamming up the door locks on your muscle cells, preventing insulin from letting glucose enter? Fat—more specifically, intramyocellular lipid, the fat inside your muscle cells.

Fat in your bloodstream,

can build up inside your muscle cells, where it can create toxic breakdown products and free radicals that block ...

No matter how much insulin you produce, your fat-compromised muscle cells ca...

One hit of fat, and within 160 minutes, the absorption of glucose into your cells becomes compromised.

you can lower your insulin resistance by lowering your fat intake.

as the amount of fat in your diet becomes increasingly lower, insulin works increasingly better.

Prediabetes is defined by elevated blood sugar levels that are not yet high enough to reach the official diabetes threshold. Commonly found among those who are overweight and obese,

Prediabetics may already have sugar damage to their kidneys, eyes,

blood vessels, and nerves even before diabetes is diagnosed.19

overweight as a teen could be an even more powerful predictor of disease risk than being overweight as an adult.27

giving up meat entirely is an effective way to combat childhood obesity, pointing to population studies demonstrating that people eating plant-based diets are consistently thinner than those who eat meat.28

when your belly gets bigger, you’re not necessarily creating new fat cells; rather, you’re just cramming more fat into existing ones.

In overweight and obese people, these cells can get so bloated that they actually spill fat back into the bloodstream, potentially causing the same clogging of insulin signaling one would experience from eating a fatty meal.

as fat levels rise, your ability to clear sugar from the blood drops due to insulin resistance—the cause of type 2 diabetes.

as diets become increasingly plant based, there appears to be a stepwise drop in diabetes rates.

flexitarians appear to cut their rate of diabetes by 28 percent, good news for those who eat meat maybe once a week rather than every day. Those who cut out all meat except fish appear to cut their rates in half. What about those eliminating all meat, including fish? They appear to eliminate 61 percent of their risk. And those who go a step farther and drop eggs and dairy foods too? They may drop their diabetes rates 78 percent compared with people who eat meat on a daily basis.

Even at the same weight as regular omnivores, vegans appear to have less than half the risk of diabetes.37 The explanation may lie in the difference between plant fats and animal fats.

If we take muscle biopsies from people, saturated fat buildup in the membranes of their muscle cells correlates with insulin resistance.42 Monounsaturated fats, however, are more likely to be detoxified by the body or safely stored away.43

Those eating plant-based diets have been found to have better insulin sensitivity, better blood sugar levels, better insulin levels,45 and even significantly improved function of their beta cells—the cells in the pancreas that produce insulin in the first place.

people eating plant-based diets appear to be better at both producing and using insulin.

Reducing belly fat may be the best way to prevent prediabetes from turning into

asked to eat five cups a week of lentils, chickpeas, split peas, or navy beans—but not to change their diets in any other way.

Guess who got healthier? The group directed to eat more food. Eating legumes was shown to be just as effective at slimming waistlines and improving blood sugar control as calorie cutting.

The legume group also gained additional benefits in the form of improved cholestero...

When you eat saturated fat, both insulin action and insulin secretion are impaired within hours.54 The more saturated fat you have in your blood, the higher your risk may be for developing type 2 diabetes.55

whole-food, plant-based diets are great for people who like to eat, since you can basically eat as much as you want without worrying about counting calories.

plant-based diet beat out the American Diabetes Association’s recommended diet for weight loss. This occurred without restricting portions the subjects ate and without requiring calorie or carb counting.

in addition to weight loss, individuals consuming plant-based meals experienced improved blood sugar control as well as reduced risk of cardiovascular disease compared with people who followed diets that included more animal products.59

In addition to improving insulin sensitivity better than conventional diabetic diets, the plant-based approach can also lead to a significant drop in LDL cholesterol, thereby reducing risk of the number-one killer of diabetics, heart disease.62

patients eating vegetarian food were less likely to binge, and the plant-based folks tended to feel less hungry as well

not only do plant-based diets appear to work better but they may be easier to adopt long term.

And with the improvement in mood they seem to bring, there may be benefits for both physical and mental health.

the vegetarian men had only half the odds of diabetes as the occasional meat eaters. The vegetarian women had 75 percent lower odds of diabetes. Those who avoided meat altogether appeared to have significantly lower risk of both prediabetes and diabetes than those who ate plant-based diets with an occasional serving of meat, including fish.

the prevalence of diabetes among those eating strictly plant-based was zero.

“obesogenic” chemical pollutants released into the environment that may disrupt your metabolism and predispose you to obesity.

95 percent of that exposure may come through the consumption of animal fat.67 What’s the big deal?

one chemical in particular, hexachlorobenzene, as a potent risk factor for the disease.