Eat to Live: The Amazing Nutrient-Rich Program for Fast and Sustained Weight Loss (21 page)

Epidemiologic studies indicate an inverse association between frequency of nut and seed consumption and body mass index.
Interestingly, their consumption may actually suppress appetite and help people get rid of diabetes and lose weight.
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In other words, populations consuming more nuts and seeds are likely to be slim, and people consuming less seeds and nuts are more likely to be heavier. Well-controlled nut-feeding trials, designed to see whether eating nuts and seeds resulted in weight gain, showed the opposite: eating raw nuts and seeds promoted weight loss, not weight gain. Several studies have also shown that eating a small amount of nuts or seeds actually helps dieters feel satiated, stay with the program, and have more success achieving long-term weight loss.
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By contrast, refined oil, which contains 120 calories per tablespoon, is fattening and can sabotage weight loss. Plus, it does not have any protective effects on the heart. The secret here is to forgo the oil and instead make salad dressings, dips, and sauces by blending in seeds and nuts.

The healthiest diet for all ages is one that includes some healthy fatty foods. This same diet will also prevent and reverse disease. Even for people who are overweight, I recommend one ounce of raw, unsalted seeds or nuts per day, such as sesame seeds, sunflower seed, flaxseeds, pumpkin seeds, walnuts, pistachio nuts, or almonds.

Trans fats do not exist in nature. They are laboratory-designed and have adverse health consequences. They interfere with the body’s production of beneficial fatty acids and promote heart disease.
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As trans fatty acids offer no benefits and only clear adverse metabolic consequences, when you see the words
partially hydrogenated
on the side of a box, consider what’s inside poisonous and throw it in the trash.

Trans fats are surely cancer-promoting and raise your cholesterol as much as saturated fat.
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Considering that they also reduce HDL (good) cholesterol, trans fats may be even more atherogenic
than saturated fatty acids.
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Convincing evidence from the Nurses’ Health Study and others indicates that trans fats are as closely associated with heart attacks as the fats in animal products.
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The amount of trans fats used in foods has significantly decreased in recent years. Many food manufacturers have reformulated their products to reduce or eliminate trans fats. Food manufacturers now must indicate trans fat content on their products’ nutritional labels. Beware that levels of less than 0.5 gram per serving can be listed as 0 grams trans fat, making it possible for a person eating multiple servings of a food labeled free of trans fat to still consume a significant amount.

There is no question that a high-fat diet increases the risk of many cancers. This has been demonstrated in hundreds of animal and human studies. It’s not only the amount of fat but also the type of fat that is linked to increased risk (just like the type of protein). It gets complicated, so here are the main points:

1. Any extracted oil (fat) can promote cancer because consuming even the healthier fats, such as olive oil, in excess adds too many empty calories. Excess calories have toxic effects, contributing to obesity, premature aging, and cancer.
   

2. Excess omega-6 fatty acids promote cancer risk, while omega-3 fats, which are harder to come by, tend to lower risk. Omega-6 fats are found in polyunsaturated oils such as corn oil and safflower oil, whereas omega-3 fatty acids are abundant in seeds, greens, and some fish.
   

3. The most dangerous fats for both heart disease and cancer are saturated fats and trans fatty acids, listed as “partially hydrogenated” on food labels. You would be foolish not to avoid these fats. Trans fats may raise breast cancer risk by more than 45 percent.
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4. Whole natural plant foods (whole grains, greens, nuts, and seeds) supply adequate fat. Eating an assortment of natural foods will ensure that you are not deficient in fat. For those who require more DHA fats, flaxseeds, hemp seeds, chia seeds, walnuts, and plant-derived DHA supplements are the healthiest and cleanest sources.
   

Remember, a low-fat diet can be worse than a higher-fat diet if it has more saturated fat or trans fat and if it contains an excessive amount of refined carbohydrates.

Note that lean meat or fowl, which contains 2 to 5 grams of fat per ounce, contains less fat, less saturated fat, and fewer calories per ounce than cheese, which has 8 to 9 grams of fat per ounce. Cheese has much more saturated fat (the most dangerous fat), about ten times as much saturated fat as chicken breast. Cheese is the food that contributes the most saturated fat to the American diet. Most cheeses are more than 50 percent of calories from fat, and even low-fat cheeses are very high-fat foods.

Americans have this fetish with watching fat and forgetting everything else we know about nutrition. Fat is not everything. If the fats you consume are healthy fats found in raw seeds, nuts, and avocados, and if your diet is rich in unrefined foods,
you needn’t worry so much about the fat—unless you are overweight.

The take-home message regarding fat is this: Avoid saturated fats and trans fats (hydrogenated fats) and try to include some foods that contain omega-3 fat in your diet.

Remember those “Basic Four” food group charts we all saw in every classroom in elementary school? Protein had its own box, designated by a thick steak, a whole fish, and an entire chicken. Dairy foods had their own special box as well. A healthy diet, we were taught, supposedly centered on meat and milk. Protein was thought to be the most favorable of all nutrients, and lots of protein was thought to be the key to strength, health, and vigor. Unfortunately, cancer rates soared. As a result of scientific investigations into the causes of disease, we have had to rethink what we were taught. Old habits die hard; most Americans still cling to what they were taught as children. There are very few subjects that are more distorted in modern culture than that of protein.

Keep in mind that we do need protein. We can’t be healthy without protein in our diet. Plant foods have plenty of protein. You do not have to be a nutritional scientist or dietitian to figure out what to eat, and you don’t need to mix and match foods to achieve protein completeness. Any combination of natural foods will supply you with adequate protein, including all eight essential amino acids as well as nonessential amino acids.

It is unnecessary to combine foods to achieve protein completeness at each meal. The body stores and releases the amino acids needed over a twenty-four-hour period. About one-sixth of our daily protein utilization comes from recycling our own body tissue. This recycling, or digesting our own cells lining the digestive tract, evens out any variation from meal to meal in amino acid “incompleteness.” It requires no level of nutritional
sophistication to get sufficient protein, even if you eat only plant foods.

It is only when a vegetarian diet revolves around white bread and other processed foods that the protein content falls to low levels. However, the minute you include unprocessed foods such as vegetables, whole grains, beans, or nuts, the diet becomes protein-rich.

Which has more protein—oatmeal, ham, or a tomato? The answer is that they all have about the same amount of protein per calorie. The difference is, the tomato and the oatmeal are packaged with fiber and other disease-fighting nutrients, and the ham is packaged with cholesterol and saturated fat.

Some people believe that only animal products contain all the essential amino acids and that plant proteins are incomplete. False. They were taught that animal protein is superior to plant protein. False. They accept the outdated notion that plant protein must be mixed and matched in some complicated way that takes the planning of a nuclear physicist for a vegetarian diet to be adequate. False.

I guess they never thought too hard about how a rhinoceros, hippopotamus, gorilla, giraffe, or elephant became so big eating only vegetables. Animals do not make amino acids from thin air; all the amino acids originally came from plants. Even the nonessential amino acids that are fabricated by the body are just the basic amino acids that are modified slightly in some way by the body. So the lion’s muscles can be composed of only the protein precursors and amino acids that the zebra and the gazelle ate. Green grass made the lion.

I see twenty to thirty new patients per week, and I always ask them, “Which has more protein—one hundred calories of sirloin steak or one hundred calories of broccoli?” When I tell them it’s broccoli, the most frequent response I get is, “I didn’t know broccoli had protein in it.” I then ask, “So where did you think the calories in broccoli come from? Did you think it was mostly fat, like an avocado, or mostly carbohydrate, like a potato?”

PROTEIN CONTENT OF COMMON FOODS IN INCREASING ORDER OF PROTEIN PER CALORIE

Note
: Green vegetables have the most protein per calorie of all the above.

People know less about nutrition than any other subject. Even the physicians and dietitians who attend my lectures quickly answer, “Steak!” They are surprised to learn that broccoli has about twice as much protein as steak.

When you eat large quantities of green vegetables, you receive a considerable amount of protein. Remember, one ten-ounce box of frozen broccoli contains more than 10 grams of protein.