How Not to Diet

by Michael Greger

If we took a page from Big Pharma’s playbook and listened to those exercise-promoting influencers, we would appeal to emotions, rather than “logical benefits such as better health” to promote exercise and instead prescribe “pleasure and meaning.” We would need to “shift from a medical to a marketing paradigm.”3305

I bristle at the marketing talk, but the nice thing about exercise is that it really can deliver on all those fronts—fostering elixir-of-life feelings of joy and vitality while helping people physically fulfill their goals in life.

Frame a walk as exercise, and people report feeling more fatigued and in a worse mood than after going the same d...

And it really can be fun. When sedentary individuals are started on an exercise regimen, they report enjoying it significantly more than they had expected.3307

The bottom line with exercise is that any amount is good3308 and the more the better.

The anti-inflammatory effects of exercise can also alleviate headaches and more diffuse, chronic, musculoskeletal aches and pains that disproportionately affect overweight individuals.3311

overall, exercise is win-win: adding years to your life and life to your years.

Extracts of spinach were used in these studies so the researchers could create convincing placebos, but you can get just as many thylakoids eating about a half cup of cooked greens.

Which greens have the most? You can tell just by looking at them.3325 Because thylakoids are where the chlorophyll is, the greener the leaves, the more potent the effect.3326 So go for the darkest-green greens you can find. In the store where I shop, that’s the Lacinato (or dinosaur) kale.

What happens when you cook greens? Blanched for fifteen seconds or so in steaming or boiling water, they actually get even brighter green, but if you cook them too long, they eventually turn a drab olive brown. When greens are overcooked, the thylakoids physically degrade, along with their ability to inhibit lipase. Within that first minute whe...

personally try to eat at least a pound of greens a day, which is about three cups cooked or a dozen raw.) This is especially important for those who juice or blend their greens, as oxalates appear to be absorbed more rapidly in liquid than solid form.3355

The best sources of calcium are Green Light foods like leafy greens. In How Not to Die, I defined my Green Light category as foods of plant origin to which nothing bad has been added and from which nothing good has been taken away. Green Light whole plant foods, unlike dairy, package calcium with lots of fiber, folate, iron, antioxidants, and thylakoids, instead of the baggage that too often accompanies milk products, such as sodium, cholesterol, and saturated butterfat.

the American Heart Association is explicit about our need to cut down on dairy fat (and coconut oil and meat) to reduce the risk of our number one killer.3402,3403

Drink Hibiscus Tea

Hibiscus tea, also known as roselle or Jamaica, is enjoyed around the world, hot or cold, for its bright red color and tart cranberry-like flavor. It’s the “zing” in Red Zinger tea. I talk about its benefits in the chapter on high blood pressure in How Not to Die, working as well as,3405 or even beating out, some antihypertensive medications in head-to-head tests.3406

Within three hours of drinking hibiscus tea, one hundred different metabolites can be detected in the human bloodstream.3407

Alterations in gene expression at the three-hour mark suggest an improvement in metabolism and a downregulation of cholesterol synthesis, but randomized controlled trials have failed to consistently find cholesterol-lowering benefits.3408...

In Mexico, hibiscus tea has been used traditionally for the treatment of obesity, sparking lots of research interest.3410 Computer modeling studies have suggested that certain hibiscus compounds might bind ...

hibiscus inhibited lipase more than the others,3413 and hibiscus has been found to reduce body fat in hamsters,3414 mice,3415 and rats, increasing fecal fat excretion.

the dose they used was the equivalent of nine cups of hibiscus tea a day.3418 I recommend people stick to no more than a quart a day on a regular basis due to the high manganese content. (Manganese is an essential trace mineral, but nine cups a day might result in too much of a good thing.3419)

Finally, in 2018, a study was published using a reasonable dose—the equivalent of about a single twelve-ounce glass of tea a day.

The complicating factor is that the researchers also added lemon verbena to the mix. That’s another herbal tea, better known for improving recovery after intense bouts of strength training,3420 but there were some promising in vitro data on effects of lemon verbena on fat cells in a petri dish,3421 so they tried a combination. The dose came out to be about a cup and a h...

those randomized to the tea group lost significantly more weight—eight pounds compared to five. That’s only an extra pound a month, but an extra pound a month on a same-calorie diet.3425 That’s the advantage of fat-blocking interventions that actually cause you to lose more calories: Beyond reducing hunger, they can make you feel fuller for longer in hopes that you’ll subsequently eat fewer calories.

continue to enjoy spinach, beet greens, and chard all the time. It’s just that you can overdo those three.

To make sure I don’t end up consuming more than a serving or two a day of the high-oxalate ones when I’m trying to hit my pound-a-day green leafy quota, I personally do mostly kale, collards, and arugula, which also happen to have the added benefit of being cruciferocious. And you can enjoy it with a cup of hibiscus tea for added zing.

Exposure to cold (or lack thereof) might even help explain the rise in obesity rates. Wintertime bedroom temperatures have been slowly creeping up over the last few decades.3472 The U.S. standard for winter comfort evidently increased from 64°F in 1923 to 76°F by 1986.

All other things equal, spending just 10 percent of one’s life at 72°F instead of 82°F could theoretically result in an eighteen-pound weight loss over a decade.3473

You burn 164 more calories a day living at 62°F instead of 72°F, about sixteen calories per degree.

A climate of 62°F is pretty chilly, but simply moving within the range of climate-controlled buildings from 75°F down to 66°F has been proven to boost BAT activation.

This resulted in a 5 percent boost in metabolic rate, so about one hundred more calories burned every day or an annual calorie-deficit equivalent of approximately twenty days of fasting.

So just a slight thermostat shift to a cool-but-not-too-cold ambient temperature may have a significant effect.3478

Human trials with grains of paradise, an African plant in the ginger family, demonstrate that the boost in metabolism is indeed through brown fat activation,3565 which can then lead to a drop in visceral body fat.3566 We don’t have to search for grains of paradise, though, because plain old ginger spice will do.

Putting together all the randomized controlled trials of ginger powder, two to twelve weeks of a quarter teaspoon to one and a half teaspoons a day of ground ginger significantly decreased body weight for just pennies a day.

A longer study—sixteen weeks with subjects getting about a teaspoon of cinnamon a day—resulted in about seven pounds of weight loss and a two-inch-slimmer waist, with improvements in blood sugars and pressures, cholesterol, and triglycerides.

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.

Today, THC, the main psychoactive component of cannabis, is FDA-approved as an appetite stimulant and has been shown to help slow the wasting syndrome associated with AIDS.3604

If cannabis is so good at stoking our appetites, why do regular users tend to be skinnier on average? It does not appear to be due just to concurrent tobacco use.3610 The boost in appetite may be outweighed by the boost in metabolism.3611 We’ve known for more than forty years that our metabolic rates shoot up by about 25 percent within fifteen minutes of lighting up a joint and stay there for at least an hour.

while there is little evidence to support an association between cannabis use and the two main concerns linked to smoking tobacco—lung cancer and emphysema3614—using cannabis can result in addiction, chronic bronchitis, and altered brain development, and may increase the risk of schizophrenia.3615

Marijuana liberalization has also led to an increase in the incidence of a rare condition known as cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome,3616 which is believed to be caused by long-term heavy use of high-potency cannabis.

Simply drink a cup of tea, and, within an hour, you may be burning up to 10 percent more calories.3619 Drink four cups of tea in the twenty-four hours before a thirty-minute walk, and you burn an extra gram of fat during your half-hour stroll.

tea without anything added has practically zero calories, so based on these findings, tea may be thought to have “negative” calories. In effect, each cup of tea swept away about 25 calories.

Researchers reported in the abstract that the green tea preparation they used “resulted in significant weight loss” and “reduced waist circumference.”3652 The abstract of a scientific paper is a concise summary listing all the important findings, and it’s often the only part of a study people read since the rest of the paper can be concealed behind a paywall, as it was in this case.

green tea can lower cholesterol3660 and prevent colon polyps.3661 You can even gargle with it to help prevent the flu.

a meta-analysis of observational studies where tea-drinking populations were followed over time shows consumption of green or black tea is associated with living a significantly longer life.

there’s a fourth category: nutrition without calories. That’s where tea comes in, along with many spices. So imagine making a spicy chai with green tea, ginger, and cinnamon. You’d be nailing three fat burners in just one cup.

Once you do something long enough, your brain commits the actions to memory and can whip them out at will to automate away some of your cognitive workload—and the automation happens automatically. The mere repetition of a simple action in a consistent context ultimately leads to the action being activated upon exposure to that same situation.

Habits are defined as “learned behavioral responses to situational cues,”3763 so there are two parts—the cue and the action. The cue can be in any context—for example, an event (such as arriving at work), a time (after breakfast), a location (in the car), or even a mood (anxious).3764

It just has to be something salient that is frequently and consistently encountered in daily life.3765 Do something over and over again in the same context—whether intentionally or unintentionally—and a habit can form.3766

it does get progressively easier with time, and you only have to maintain your motivation until the habit forms. After that, you’re golden. It’s like uploading a new piece of software into your brain for a built-in, lifelong body hack.

The magic of habits lies in their persistence even after losing conscious motivation or interest. They just become second nature. You don’t have to worry about them anymore. Health can happen effortlessly.