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

by Michael Greger

canned sardines were found to be the most heavily tainted with hexachlorobenzene, though salmon was found to be the most contaminated food overall.

Farmed salmon may be the worst, containing ten times more of a class of toxic chemicals called PCBs than wild-caught salmon.

your own fat stores are acting as reservoirs for these pollutants.72 Overweight individuals may be effectively carrying around a personal toxic waste dump on their hips.

Without significant weight loss, people whose bodies contain salmon pollutants may take between fifty to seventy-five years to clear the chemicals from their bodies.73

those eating vegetarian diets were getting higher intakes of nearly every nutrient: more fiber, more vitamin A, more vitamin C, more vitamin E, more of the B vitamins thiamin, riboflavin, and folate, as well as more calcium, magnesium, iron, and potassium.

many of the nutrients that are so rich in plant-based diets are among the very ones that most Americans normally don’t get enough of—namely, vitamins A, C, E, not to mention fiber, calcium, magnesium, and potassium.

people who avoided meat also ingested fewer harmful substances, such as sodium, saturat...

those eating meat-free diets consumed an average of 364 fe...

Those who eat plant-based diets may even have an 11 percent higher resting metabolic rate.76

This could be because vegetarians have a higher gene expression of a fat-burning enzyme called carnitine

palmitoyltransferase, which effectively shovels fat into the mitochondrial furnaces in your cells.

meat consumption was associated with significant weight gain even after adjusting for calories.

Insulin treatments themselves may accelerate aging, worsen diabetic vision loss, and promote cancer, obesity, and atherosclerosis.

Insulin can promote inflammation in the arteries,

Blood sugar levels can normalize within a week of eating six hundred calories daily, because fat is pulled out of the muscles, liver, and pancreas, allowing them to function normally again.

Instead of changing the quantity of food you eat, it’s possible to reverse diabetes by changing the quality of that food.

what if diabetics just ate better food, as in a 90 percent or more plant-based diet of all-you-can-eat greens, lots of other vegetables and beans, whole grains, fruits, nuts, and seeds?

We’ve known diabetes can be reversed with an extremely low-calorie diet.97 Now we know that it can also be reversed with an extremely healthy diet, but is that because it was also low in calories?

even participants who temporarily didn’t lose weight

on the plant-based diet, or who actually gained weight, still appeared to improve their diabetes.

the beneficial effects of plant-based diets may extend be...

after eating a plant-based diet for an average of only sixteen days. Some of the subjects had been diabetic for two decades and had been injecting twenty units of insulin a day. Yet within two weeks of eating a plant-based diet, they were off insulin altogether.

Even at approximately the same body weight, he had lower blood sugars on a plant-based diet using no insulin than when he had been on a regular diet using thirty-two units of insulin daily.101 That’s the power of plants.

“Regression of Diabetic Neuropathy with Total Vegetarian (Vegan) Diet.”

After years and years of suffering, seventeen out of the twenty-one patients reported that they felt complete relief from their pain—within days. Their numbness noticeably improved too.

The diabetics lost an average of ten pounds, their blood sugar levels dropped, their insulin needs dropped in half, and, in five of the patients, not only was their painful neuropathy cured, so was, apparently, their diabetes.

they were off all blood sugar drugs in les...

the diabetics’ triglyceride and cholesterol levels improved on average as well. High blood pressures dropped by so much that half of the subjects also appeared cured of their hypertension.

trans fats naturally found in meat and dairy could be causing an inflammatory response in the patients’ bodies.

people who had been on a whole-food, plant-based diet for nine months or more appeared to have removed all the trans fat from their bodies (or at least from their butts!).

But their

neuropathy pain didn’t take nine months to get better. It improved in closer to nine days.

Within

an

average of two years of eating a plant-based diet composed mostly of rice and fruits, even diabetic vision loss can be reversed in ...

“Uprooting the Leading Causes of Death” video on NutritionFacts.org,

Eating more whole grains could potentially save 1.7 million lives a year. More vegetables? 1.8 million lives. How about nuts and seeds? 2.5 million lives. The researchers didn’t look at beans, but of the foods they considered, which does the world need most? Fruit. Worldwide, if humanity ate more fruit, we might save 4.9 million lives. That’s nearly 5 million lives hanging in the balance, and their salvation isn’t medication or a new vaccine—it may be just more fruit.5

The number-one risk factor for death in the world they identified is high blood pressure.6

even people who start out with a so-called normal blood pressure of 120/80 appear to benefit from going down to 110/70.14 But is it possible to do that? Look at the Kenyans—not only is it possible, it appears typical for people who live healthy, plant-based lifestyles.

You can continue eating the artery-bursting Western diet, or you can choose to take off the pressure.

The two most prominent dietary risks for death and disability in the world may be not eating enough fruit and eating too much salt.

American Heart Association recommends everyone consume less than 1,500 mg of sodium daily24

if you reduce your salt intake, you reduce your blood pressure.

salt itself can injure our arteries independent of its impact on blood pressure. And that harm begins within thirty minutes.

vitamin C is

appears to reverse much of the sodium-induced suppression of blood vessel function.

The Yellow Emperor’s Classic of Internal Medicine,

high blood pressure medications reduce the risk of heart attack by 15 percent

and the risk of stroke by 25 percent.78 But in a randomized, controlled trial, three portions of whole grains a day were able to help people achieve this blood-pressure-lowering benefit too.

Whole-grain intake is associated with lower risks of type 2 diabetes, coronary heart disease, weight gain,85 and colon cancer.86