More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
September 20 - September 23, 2023
Dr. Ornish and his colleagues’ studies were published in some of the most prestigious medical journals in the world. Yet medical practice hardly changed. Why? Why were doctors still prescribing drugs and using Roto-Rooter-type procedures to just treat the symptoms of heart disease and to try to forestall what they chose to believe was the inevitable—an early death?
In general, the dividing line between health-promoting and disease-promoting foods may be less plant- versus animal-sourced foods and more whole plant foods versus most everything else.
We eat almost as if the future doesn’t matter.
Weight loss through calorie restriction and an even more vigorous exercise program failed to improve telomere length, so it appears that the active ingredient is the quality, not quantity, of the food eaten.
In other words, it wasn’t the weight loss and it wasn’t the exercise that reversed cell aging—it was the food.
That one unifying diet found to best prevent and treat many of these chronic diseases is a whole-food, plant-based diet, defined as an eating pattern that encourages the consumption of unrefined plant foods and discourages meats, dairy products, eggs, and processed foods.
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.
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.
To become virtually heart-attack proof, you need to get your LDL cholesterol at least under 70 mg/dL. Dr. Roberts noted that 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.
Sadly, the history of medicine holds many examples of the medical establishment rejecting sound science when it goes against the prevailing conventional wisdom. There’s even a name for it: the “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.57
“Plant-based diets are the nutritional equivalent of quitting smoking.”66
The reason is simple: Supplements don’t appear to work.
In 1901, a woman named Auguste was taken to an insane asylum in Frankfurt, Germany, by her husband. She was described as a delusional, forgetful, disoriented woman who “could not carry out her homemaking duties.”66 She was seen by a Dr. Alzheimer and was to become the subject of the case that made Alzheimer a household name.
Wait a second. The population with the highest rate of the “Alzheimer’s gene” has one of the lowest rates of Alzheimer’s disease? This contradiction may be explained by Nigerians’ extremely low blood-cholesterol levels, thanks to a diet low in animal fat104 and consisting mainly of grains and vegetables.105 So, it seems, diet can trump genetics.
The regular use of the spice turmeric in Indian cooking has been proposed as one possible explanation.14
The bigger and more frequent your bowel movements are, the healthier you may be.
Food goes through men eating plant-based diets in just a day or two, but this transit time takes as long as five or more days among those eating more conventional diets. Women eating plant-based diets also average a day or two, but the average intestinal transit time in most women eating conventional diets may be four days.22 So you can be regular but four days late. You can measure your own oral-anal transit time by eating some beets and noting when your stools turn pink. If that takes less than twenty-four to thirty-six hours, you’re probably meeting the healthy half-pound target.23
Until we know more, your best bet is to avoid tobacco, excess alcohol intake, and obesity and to eat a diet low in animal products, refined grains, and added sugars97 and rich in beans, lentils, split peas, and dried fruit.98
Because plants don’t tend to run as fast as animals, the bulk of our diet used to be made up of a lot of bulk.
Given the scandalously ill-regulated supplement market, it’s hard to know what you’re getting when you try to buy “food” in supplement bottles.
Runners who were given the daily equivalent of about a spoonful of nutritional yeast in the four weeks after the race appeared to have just half the rates of upper-respiratory infection compared to runners consuming a placebo.
Rather than let them shut me up, I posted their legal threat online with a point-by-point rebuttal.154 Thankfully, under the law, the truth is considered an absolute defense against defamation.
The advantage of a whole-food, plant-based approach to weight loss is that there may be no need for portion control, skipping meals, or counting calories, because most plant foods are naturally nutrient dense and low in calories.
We’ve known since the siege of Paris in 1870 that type 2 diabetes can be reversed by an extreme reduction in food intake. Parisian doctors documented how glucose disappeared from their patients’ urine after people went weeks without food.93
Fortunately, there may be an even better tool than BMI that we can use to gauge the health risks of body fat. It’s called Waist-to-Height Ratio, or WHtR.
Ground flaxseeds may work two to three times better than these medicines, and they have only good side effects. In addition to their anticancer properties, flaxseeds have been demonstrated in clinical studies to help control cholesterol, triglyceride, and blood sugar levels; reduce inflammation, and successfully treat constipation.127
According to a famous series of papers in the Journal of the American Medical Association called the “Actual Causes of Death in the United States” [emphasis added], the leading killer of Americans in the year 2000 was tobacco, followed by diet and inactivity. The third-leading killer? Alcohol.5
There actually appears to be a beneficial effect on overall mortality by drinking some alcohol—but only, it seems, for those who are not taking good care of themselves already.17
One to two drinks a day did lower the risk of heart disease for the “couch potatoes,” those living unhealthy lifestyles. But people who practiced even the bare minimum of healthy behaviors showed no benefit from alcohol. The lesson: Grapes, barley, and potatoes are best eaten in their nondistilled form, and Johnnie Walker is no substitute for actual walking.
1 handful fresh or frozen cranberries 2 cups water 8 teaspoons erythritol (a naturally derived low-calorie sweetener; read more about erythritol and other sweeteners in part 2) Place all the ingredients in a blender and blend at high speed. Pour over ice and serve.
Just as on the road, green means go, yellow means caution, and red means stop. (In this case, stop and think before you put it into your mouth.) Ideally, green-light foods should be maximized, yellow-light ones minimized, and red-light foods avoided.
Using my definition of nothing bad added, nothing good taken away, steel-cut oats, rolled oats, and even (plain) instant oatmeal can all be considered unprocessed. Almonds are obviously a whole plant food. I would also consider no-salt-added almond butter to be a green-light food, but even unsweetened almond milk is a processed food, a food from which nutrition has been stolen.
That’s why I prefer the term whole-food, plant-based nutrition.
Ironically, healthy eating can be so effective that it undermines its own studies of effectiveness!
NutritionFacts.org
I also recommend one-quarter teaspoon a day of the spice turmeric,
Even better than tofu, though, would be a whole soy food like tempeh, which is a type of fermented soybean patty.
roasted chickpeas.
The favored dessert in our home is soft-serve “ice cream” made by blending frozen fruit. You whip up frozen fruit in a blender, food processor, or juicer, and voilà! Instant all-fruit ice cream. You have to taste it to believe it. The simplest recipe has one ingredient: frozen bananas. Peel and freeze some ripe bananas (the riper, the better—I’m talking brown). Once frozen, throw them in a food processor and blend. They transform into a smooth, light, fluffy dessert cheaper, healthier, and tastier than anything you might get in a trendy frozen yogurt shop.
Of course making berry ice cream or at least a berry-banana mix is even healthier. My favorite is chocolate. To make it, 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 eat, the healthier you are. Let me repeat that: The more you eat, the healthier you are. That’s my kind of
...more
Cherries can reduce the level of inflammation among healthy people too (as measured by a drop in C-reactive protein levels),32 so I was excited to find a green-light source available year-round—a canned product with only two ingredients: cherries and water. I drain off the liquid (which then goes into my hibiscus punch recipe here) and 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.
Aren’t goji berries expensive, though? In natural foods stores, they can go for twenty dollars a pound, but in Asian supermarkets, you can buy them as “Lycium” berries, and they’re even cheaper than raisins. So, however you used to eat raisins—as a snack, in baked goods, in your breakfast cereal or oatmeal, whatever—I recommend you make the switch to gojis.
Date People’s annual harvest comes in around my birthday in October, and I always splurge as a present to myself and get a big box to put in our freezer.
I also like drying thin apple slices. I either sprinkle them with cinnamon or rub them with freshly grated ginger. They can be just dried until chewy or completely dehydrated into crunchy apple chips. 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
Eating greens nearly every day may be one of the most powerful steps you can take to prolong your life.
Frozen greens are cheaper, last longer, and come prewashed and prechopped.
The healthier you eat, the healthier you look.
What are the best dietary sources of ergothioneine? The highest levels by far have been reported in mushrooms. For example, oyster mushrooms, which you can grow yourself in only two weeks from a just-add-water kit, have more than one thousand units (μg/dag) of ergothioneine, about nine times more than their closest competitor, black beans.
