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So can switching fats help with weight loss? Amazingly, Australian researchers found that even if you feed people about the same number of calories and the same amount of fat, but switch out meat and butterfat for olive oil, nuts, and avocados, you lose nearly six more pounds of fat in a single month.1954 You can certainly overdo plant fats, though. On high-fat diets, the type of fat appears to matter less.1955 Have people drink nearly a half cup of oil, and you can temporarily triple their insulin resistance in a matter of hours.1956
If you lose enough weight by any means, whether by exercise, stomach stapling, chemotherapy, or a hearty cocaine habit, you can temporarily drop your cholesterol levels no matter what you eat.
With all this new knowledge, what we learned is that each one of us can be thought of as a superorganism, a kind of human-microbe hybrid.2042 The human colon has been considered the most biodense ecosystem in the world, meaning there’s more life concentrated in our colons than anywhere else on Earth.2043 Many probably think that stool is composed primarily of undigested food, but most of it—about 75 percent—is pure bacteria.2044
if these drugs can cause weight gain in farm animals, might exposure to antibiotic residues left in meat contribute to the human obesity epidemic? Public health scientists have raised this as a theoretical possibility,2057 especially given the rise in fish farming.2058 It can take as much as a half pound of antibiotics to produce just one pound of salmon,
Breast milk naturally contains special compounds that can nourish the infant’s microbiome, which may help explain why breastfed infants are less likely to become obese as children.2077 This benefit appears to be limited to those who didn’t receive antibiotics during the breastfeeding period, however, underscoring the importance of our gut flora for weight control.2078 Breast is best, but after weaning, what should we eat, and what should we avoid to promote a healthy, slimming microbiome?
We know that Big Pharma is infamous for this; industry-funded studies that yield negative results are quietly shelved and buried, so all your doctors get to read are the glowing reports. In making evidence-based decisions for our patients, the peer-reviewed medical literature is the gold standard, but all too often, those with the gold make the standards.2173
The road to health is paved with good intestines!
a phenomenon called sensory-specific satiety.2392 Within minutes, the pleasantness of the taste, smell, texture, and appearance of an eaten food drops off compared to the uneaten foods.2393 It’s like how the first bite of chocolate tastes better than the tenth bite. Our bodies tire of the same sensations and seek out novelty by rekindling our appetites every time we’re presented with new foods. This helps explain the “dessert effect,” where we can be stuffed to the gills but get a second wind when dessert arrives.2394 What was adaptive for our ancient ancestors to maintain nutritional
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Diets don’t work almost by definition. Going on a diet implies that, at some point, you will go off the diet. Short-term fixes are no match for long-term problems.2421 Lifelong weight control requires lifelong lifestyle changes.
And finally, our chosen diets should be life-extending. At the very least, what we eat shouldn’t cut our lives short and ideally should be healthy enough to improve our life spans. There’s no point in losing weight if it causes you to lose it all.
vacuous
The goal of weight loss is not to lighten the load for your pallbearers.
Many weight-loss programs restrict caloric intake by limiting portion sizes or using meal replacements, which can result in hunger and dissatisfaction, thereby contributing to poor compliance and weight regain.2509 The satiety-promoting, all-you-care-to-eat, plant-based, whole-food dietary approach may therefore be a potent tool for sustainable weight loss.
A whole food, plant-based diet achieved the greatest weight loss ever recorded at six and twelve months compared to any other such intervention published in the medical literature.2527 The record-breaking study can be read in full for free at www.nature.com/articles/nutd20173.
Recent breakthroughs in the field of chronobiology—the study of our bodies’ natural rhythms—have upended another key piece of nutrition dogma: the concept that a calorie is a calorie. As it turns out, it’s not just what we eat but when we eat. Because of our circadian rhythms—circadian coming from the Latin words for about and day—morning calories don’t appear to count as much as evening calories.2798
Does skipping breakfast lead to higher cholesterol, for example? Yes, within just two weeks, there was a significant rise in bad LDL cholesterol in those randomized to skip breakfast.2866 The Israeli 700/500/200 study found that the triglycerides of the king-prince-pauper group got significantly better, dropping 60 points, while those of the pauper-prince-king group got significantly worse, rising 26 points.2867
slaking
Also known as the Great Masticator, Fletcher was a health reformer who popularized the idea of chewing each mouthful more than thirty-two times, a chew for every tooth.2989
Most people suffer gas and bloating at ten grams of sorbitol a day, which is about eight sticks of sorbitol-sweetened gum, and at twenty grams, most get cramps and diarrhea.3051 So be careful how much sorbitol you eat.
The notion that eating quickly may lead to weight gain used to be considered an old wives’ tale.3079 As anyone married to one can attest, though, wives—young or old—are most often right in the end.
Hippocrates evidently called walking “man’s best medicine”3245 (and it works for women too!).
(I personally try to eat at least a pound of greens a day, which is about three cups cooked or a dozen raw.)
To be clear, I encourage everyone to eat huge amounts of dark leafy greens every day, the healthiest food on the planet. Greens answer the question: What if the food with the lowest calorie content also had the highest nutrient content?
Just make sure to choose real cinnamon (also known as Ceylon cinnamon), not cassia cinnamon (also known as Chinese cinnamon). In the United States, if it doesn’t specify Ceylon on the label, it’s probably cassia, which, as I described in How Not to Die, has too much coumarin for comfort. A single daily teaspoon of cassia cinnamon could exceed the safety limit for liver toxicity risk in an adult, and even a quarter teaspoon may be too much for a small child.3581 So make sure it says Ceylon on the label, and then sprinkle to your heart’s desire.
Change the cue, or change the action. We can block either a habit’s initiation or its fluid implementation. The researchers went as far as to suggest that dieters “actively disrupt the execution of the activated eating sequence by simple manipulations such as eating with the nondominant hand and, in so doing, bring their eating under their personal control.”
Even when lying at rest, sound asleep, there’s simply less of our bodies to maintain as we lose weight. Every pound of fat tissue lost may mean one less mile of blood vessels our bodies have to pump blood through every minute.
www.bit.ly/NIHcalculator
In a separate experiment, Dr. Hall showed that if you cut about eight hundred calories of carbohydrates a day from your diet for six days, you lose fifty-three daily grams of body fat, but, if you cut eight hundred calories of fat, you lose eighty-nine daily grams of body fat. That’s nine pats of butter worth of extra fat melting off their bodies every day.
Instead of prescribing a set number of calories on “fasting” days, which many people find difficult to calculate outside of a study setting, a pair of Iranian researchers came upon the idea of unlimited above-ground vegetables. Starchy root vegetables are relatively calorie-dense compared to veggies that grow above the ground, including stem vegetables like celery and rhubarb, flowering vegetables like cauliflower, leafy vegetables like, well, leafy vegetables, and all the fruits we tend to think of as vegetables, such as tomatoes, peppers, okra, eggplants, string beans, summer squash, and
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The healthiest snacks are fresh fruits and vegetables, of course, but I also enjoy snacking on nori sheets, lentil sprouts, “air-fried” purple sweet potato fries, edamame, and seasoned air-popped popcorn.
Rock drummers, however, can burn more than six hundred calories an hour.4414 One study concluded, “The metabolic demands required during heavy metal drumming meet the American College of Sports Medicine guidelines for the development of health related fitness.”4415
This may help explain why sugary drinks have been blamed as perhaps the single largest driver of the obesity epidemic,4856 accounting for at least one-fifth of the weight gained between 1977 and 2007 in the United States.
Dietary fiber alone has certain benefits, but its primary role may be to encapsulate nutrients for special delivery to our gut microbiomes. If there’s one recurring theme in this book, it’s wall off your calories. Make sure as many of your calories as possible—your protein, your carbs, your fat—are encased in cell walls. Cell walls are made out of fiber, which acts as an indigestible physical barrier, so when you eat structurally intact plant foods, many of the calories remain trapped. Chew all you want—you’re still going to end up with calories completely surrounded by fiber, which then
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I like to start my mornings with what I call my BROL bowl. BROL stands for barley, rye, oats, and lentils. Most people are only familiar with pearled barley, which is partially refined by having some of its bran polished off. You can buy barley groats, sold as hulled or hull-less barley. If your budget allows, go for purple barley, which naturally contains some of the antioxidant pigments found in berries as a bonus. Rye groats are typically sold as rye berries. Oat groats are just oat groats, though I’ve also seen the terms hull-less and hulled oats. And since I know I should probably check
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