Eat to Live: The Amazing Nutrient-Rich Program for Fast and Sustained Weight Loss (14 page)

Fruits and vegetables are the two foods with the best correlation with longevity in humans. Not whole wheat bread, not bran, not even a vegetarian diet shows as powerful a correlation as a high level of fresh fruit and raw green salad consumption.
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The National
Cancer Institute recently reported on 337 different studies that all showed the same basic information:
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1. Vegetables and fruits protect against all types of cancers if consumed in large enough quantities. Hundreds of scientific studies document this. The most prevalent cancers in our country are mostly plant-food-deficiency diseases.
   

2. Raw vegetables have the most powerful anti-cancer properties of all foods.
   

3. Studies on the cancer-reducing effects of vitamin pills containing various nutrients (such as folate, vitamin C, and vitamin E) give mixed reviews; sometimes they show a slight benefit, but most show no benefit. Occasionally studies show that taking isolated nutrients is harmful, as was discussed in chapter three regarding beta-carotene.
   

4. Beans in general, not just soy, have additional anti-cancer benefits against reproductive cancers, such as breast and prostate cancer.
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Most Americans would prefer to take a pill so they could continue eating what they are accustomed to. Can you imagine a pill made by a pharmaceutical company that could reduce cancer rates by 80 percent or more? Wouldn’t that be the most financially successful pharmaceutical product of all time? You would be crazy not to take this life-extending gift.

The anti-cancer and disease-protective qualities of food demonstrate the crux of the failure of modern medicine. After billions and billions of dollars allocated and donated to cancer research, we have nothing to show for it. We are losing the war on cancer because we are on an incessant search for the impossible-to-find cure, when in fact removing the causes is the only way to win.

You can close this book and put it away right now as long as you can incorporate this crucial dietary change into your life: consume high levels of fruits, green vegetables, and beans. This is the key to both weight loss and better health. Exactly how much
veggies and beans you need to eat and how to incorporate them into your diet and make them taste great are covered in chapter eight.

People who omit meat, fowl, and dairy but fill up on bread, pasta, pretzels, bagels, rice cakes, and crackers may be on a low-fat diet, but because their diet is also low in vitamins, minerals, phytochemicals, important essential fatty acids, and fiber, it is conspicuously inadequate and should not be expected to protect against cancer. Additionally, because these refined grains are low in fiber, they do not make you feel full until after you have taken in too many calories from them. In other words, both their nutrient-to-calorie and nutrient-to-fiber ratios are extremely low.

Let me repeat this again to be clear: Following a strict vegetarian diet is not as important as eating a diet rich in fruits and vegetables. A vegetarian whose diet is mainly refined grains, cold breakfast cereals, processed health-food-store products, vegetarian fast foods, white rice, and pasta will be worse off than a person who eats a little chicken or eggs, for example, but consumes a large amount of fruits, vegetables, and beans.

Studies have confirmed this. Multiple studies have shown that vegetarians live quite a bit longer than nonvegetarians do.
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But when we take a close look at the data, it appears that those who weren’t as strict had longevity statistics that were equally impressive as long as they consumed a high volume of a variety of unrefined plant foods.

Remember, long-term vegans (strict vegetarians who consume no dairy or other foods of animal origin) almost never get heart attacks. If you have heart disease or a strong family history of heart disease, you should consider avoiding all animal-based products. To quote a respected authority, William Castelli, M.D., director of the famed Framingham Heart Study in Massachusetts:

We tend to scoff at vegetarians, but they’re doing much better than we are. Vegans have cholesterol levels so low, they almost never get heart attacks. Their average blood cholesterol is about 125 and we’ve never seen anyone in the Framingham study have a heart attack with a level below 150.

The research shows that those who avoid meat and dairy have lower rates of heart disease, cancer, high blood pressure, diabetes, and obesity.
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The data is conclusive: vegetarians live longer in America, probably a lot longer.

This is a difficult question to answer accurately, as there are few studies on lifelong vegetarians in countries with electricity, refrigeration, good sanitation, and adequate nutrition. American studies conducted in 1984 on Seventh-Day Adventists, a religious group that provides dietary and lifestyle advice to its members, sheds some light on this issue. Adventist leadership discourages the consumption of meat, fowl, and eggs; pork is prohibited. Because eating animal products is only discouraged and not necessarily prohibited, there is a large range in animal-product consumption. Some Adventists never eat meat and eggs, whereas others consume them daily. When we take a careful look at the Seventh-Day Adventist data, those who lived the longest were those following the vegetarian diet the longest, and when we look at the subset who had followed a vegetarian diet for at least half their life, it appears they lived about thirteen years longer than their average, nonsmoking Californian counterparts.
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Most of the participants in this study were converted to the religion, not born into it. There was no data on those following such a diet since childhood. However, the data from this carefully constructed study was compelling; and what is of considerable interest to me is the association of green salad consumption and longer life.
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Leafy greens, the most nutrient-rich foods on the planet, were the best predictor of extreme longevity.

Some nutritional experts would argue that a strict vegetarian who follows a diet rich in natural vegetation, not refined grains, has the longest longevity potential, as indicated by evaluating the China Project data together with hundreds of the smaller food-consumption studies—but, of course, this is still educated speculation. Let’s not argue whether it is all right to eat a little bit of animal foods or not, and thereby miss the point that cannot be contradicted or disagreed with:

So much has been written about the causes of breast cancer (there are entire books devoted to the subject), yet women are still confused. This section should not be skipped over by men. Men have mothers, daughters, sisters, and wives they must help protect, and the same factors that cause breast cancer cause prostate cancer. Men with a family history of breast cancer have an increased risk of prostate cancer, and women with a family history of prostate cancer have an increased risk of breast cancer.
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So there is a strong link between these two hormonally sensitive cancers.

American women are now twice as likely to develop breast cancer as they were a century ago, and most of this increase has occurred in the past fifty years. In spite of all the fear and publicity, American women are still in the dark about what they can do to protect themselves, and researchers looking for a simple cause have met with frustration. The reason is that breast cancer, like most cancers, is multicausal. Considering a number of contributing factors simultaneously is essential to understand the rapid
climb in the incidence of breast cancer in recent decades. We know much today about the causes of breast cancer, and the good news is that genetics plays a minor role and the disease does not strike at random. The war against breast cancer can be won.

Carcinogenesis, the process that leads to cancer, is believed to occur in a series of steps. It is a multistage process that begins with precancerous cellular damage that gradually proceeds to more malignant changes. The first step is the development of cellular abnormalities, which eventually leads to cancer. This usually occurs during adolescence, and soon after puberty.
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Remember that unhealthy childhood nutritional practices cause excessive sex hormone production and early pathologic changes in the breast tissue that set the stage for cancer many years later.

We know that puberty at an earlier age is a significant marker of increased risk, and we know that there is overwhelming evidence that ovarian hormones play a crucial role, at all stages, in the development of breast cancer.
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It is common knowledge among physicians that the earlier a woman matures, as measured by the age of her first menstrual period, the higher her risk for breast cancer.
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Both early menarche (the onset of menstruation) and greater body weight are markers of increased risk of breast cancer.
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Women are not the only sex affected; the same increased risk as a result of early maturation is seen with both prostate cancer and testicular cancer.
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If we grow and mature more rapidly, we increase our cancer risk and age faster. We see the same thing in lab animals; if we feed them so they grow faster, they die younger.
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Ominously, the onset of menstruation has been occurring at a younger and younger age in Western societies during the past century.
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The average age in the United States is now about twelve years. According to the World Health Organization, the average age at which puberty began in 1840 was seventeen.
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During the time period that the age of menarche has decreased from seventeen to about twelve in western Europe and the United States, there has been a concomitant change in Western eating habits. There has been an increased consumption of fat, refined carbohydrates, cheese, and meat and a huge decrease in the consumption of complex carbohydrates such as starchy plants. Modern studies of girls on vegetarian diets characterized by more complex carbohydrates and no meat show a later age of menarche and, as one would expect, a significant reduction of acne as well.
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A greater consumption of animal foods leads to a higher level of hormones related to early reproductive function and growth.
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These hormonal abnormalities persist into adulthood.
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Uterine fibroids also develop from a diet deficient in fruits and vegetables and heavy in meat. As the consumption of meat increases and vegetation decreases, one’s risk of fibroids increases proportionately.
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In other words, the stage is set by our poor dietary habits early in life. Breast and prostate cancer are strongly affected by our dietary practices when we are young.

AGE OF PUBERTY OVER TIME

Source: Tanner, J. M. 1973. Trend toward earlier menarche in London, Oslo, Copenhagen, the Netherlands and Hungary.
Nature
243: 75–76.

First European and then American studies have indicated that the protein richness of one’s diet is a more sensitive marker of early menarche than increased body weight.
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This conclusion is consistent with the data relating earlier menarche with increased animal protein use in South African girls.
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Then in the 1990s, when the data from the massive China-Cornell-Oxford Project was dissected, we again saw the high correlation between breast cancer incidence and the consumption of animal products.
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In China, animal-food consumption correlated well with early menarche and increasing levels of sex hormones. Serum testosterone levels had the best correlation with breast cancer, even better than estrogen. Of note is that increasing levels of testosterone significantly increases the risk of both breast cancer and prostate cancer. Testosterone rises as well with increasing levels of obesity, and being overweight is another consistent risk factor.
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