Eat to Live: The Amazing Nutrient-Rich Program for Fast and Sustained Weight Loss (24 page)

Although diet books are everywhere, it is estimated that more than 75 percent of all Americans are overweight.
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Investigations report such a sweeping and rapid increase of obesity globally that it is considered a serious medical epidemic, affecting a significant portion of the world’s population.
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The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that the spread of processed food and American fast food worldwide has made obesity and the diseases of low-nutrient, high-calorie eating bigger contributors to premature death worldwide than starvation. WHO has stated:

Because being overweight or obese dramatically increases the risk of all the major causes of death, the spread of America’s toxic
food industry may be the most serious health issue facing the modern world. Ideal body weight and overall health are inseparable. A weight-loss program can be considered successful only if the weight loss is permanent and safe and it promotes overall health. Temporary weight loss is of little or no benefit, especially if it compromises your health. The confusing diet wars and opposing opinions among diet authors are paralyzing the potential to improve the health of millions of suffering individuals.

In the classic portion-controlled (calorie-counting) diet, it is likely that the body will not get adequate fiber or nutrients. The body will have a compounded sensation of hunger, cravings, and addictive withdrawal, which for most is simply overwhelming. This dieting philosophy invariably results in people losing weight then gaining it back. Calorie counting simply doesn’t work in the long run. A diet based on portion control and calorie counting generally permits the eating of highly toxic, low-nutrient foods and then requires us to fight our addictive drives in the attempt to eat less. This combination undernourishes the body, resulting in uncontrollable and frequent food cravings, along with a heightened desire for concentrated calories. This low micronutrient intake in conjunction with withdrawal symptoms can lead to perverted cravings, such as the desire to eat junk food, drink alcohol, or take drugs. Cravings are not the result of hunger; they are the result of toxic habits. Anyone seeking to adopt a healthy diet must accept that there will be a period (generally six weeks or less) during which the body will attempt to detoxify. You may feel ill during this time, and true hunger may be absent the entire time. Without an adequate education in superior nutrition and solid principles to stick to, dieters flounder and fail, bouncing from one diet to another, always losing a little and regaining, frequently regaining more than they lost.

Misinformation works hand in hand with self-deception. Countless diets advertise that you can eat all the foods you love and still lose weight. Consequently, why would anyone want to completely revamp his or her diet? It seems as though it would be
far easier to eat less of something that you love than it would be to switch to eating something that you may not currently like. The problem is that in practice, eating less of the same things has been proven not to work. Studies have shown that portion-control diets result in significant weight loss that is maintained over five years for fewer than three people out of one hundred.
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It is merely a matter of time before those trying to keep their portions small increase the amount of food they are eating. The amount of fiber in these diets is insufficient, and the nutrient density is poor. These diets restrict calories, but because the food choices and meal plans are so calorie-dense, dieters must eat tiny portions in order to lose weight. These choices don’t satisfy their desire to eat, and they wind up craving food and becoming frustrated. When dieters can’t stand eating thimble-size portions anymore and finally eat until satisfied, they put weight on with a vengeance. These diets are founded on weak science and perpetuate nutritional myths. To become healthy, disease-resistant, and permanently thin, you can’t escape the necessity of eating large amounts of nutrient-rich, healthy food.

Many of the most heavily promoted and bestselling diet books are also among the most dangerous. Some of the more popular books and websites promote high-protein, low-carbohydrate dietary patterns, emphasizing how dangerous it is to ingest white flour, sugar, and corn syrup. Of course I agree with the dangers of consuming high-glycemic junk, but I think it is time to put these high-protein diets to bed. There should be no controversy here. High-protein diets are not life span favorable, they do not offer the anti-cancer protection inherent in a diet much richer in plant-derived micronutrients, and they are not cardioprotective. In fact, even when they result in some weight loss, they can still raise LDL cholesterol and cause or permit the advancement of
heart disease.
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The mild degree of weight-loss success they offer a minority of people, from the removal or reduction of dangerous, low-nutrient carbohydrates, is simply not good enough.

The popularity of these books is evidence that people are looking for a way to lose weight without having to curtail their dangerous love affair with rich, unhealthful foods. They preach what people want to hear: you can eat lots of fat, cholesterol, and saturated fat and still lose weight. This illicit romance can lead to tragic consequences.

High-protein-diet gurus typically promote the idea that their recommended diet is the healthiest. They would have their devotees believe there is a worldwide conspiracy of more than 3,500 scientific studies involving more than 15,000 research scientists reporting a relationship between the consumption of meats, poultry, eggs, and dairy products and the incidence of heart disease, cancer, kidney failure, constipation, gallstones, diverticulosis, and hemorrhoids, just to name a few health problems. The point here is not to be confused about nutrition and health by misinformation; we need to strive to eat far fewer animal products and more high-nutrient plant foods. Many of these diets have people afraid to eat healthful fresh fruits because they contain carbohydrates. Fruit consumption, however, shows a powerful dose-response association with a reduction in heart disease, cancer, and all-cause mortality.
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Due to its emphasis on eating more animal products and fewer carbohydrates, the popular Atkins diet is a prototype of dietary misinformation. Tragically, an otherwise healthy sixteen-year-old girl died after following the Atkins diet for three weeks. More recent popular diets are also dangerous. I consider the South Beach diet one of the most dangerous diets because the three phases encourage people to go on and off a ketogenic diet, which can cause electrolyte shifts leading to life-threatening cardiac arrhythmias.
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There was a tremendous explosion in sudden cardiac deaths in young and middle-aged women that occurred in parallel with the period of popular enthusiasm for these carbohydrate-restricted, high-protein, ketogenic diets. This was
first reported at the American Heart Association’s forty-first annual conference in 2001 after a national surveillance study was performed by Dr. Zheng and his colleagues at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC).
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Similar deaths were seen in the past related to liquid high-protein diets.
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A coincidence? I doubt it; this should not be taken lightly.

The medical literature has shown that ketogenic diets can cause a pathological enlargement of the heart called cardiomyopathy, which is reversible, but only if the diet is stopped in time.
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In
The South Beach Diet
, written by a cardiologist, the reader is led through a series of dietary phases that cycle back and forth between weight regain and carbohydrate restriction. Allowing one’s weight to fluctuate up and down is risky. It can lead to heart problems and increase the presence of the most dangerous type of vulnerable atherosclerotic plaque, increasing heart attack risk. When you have a cardiologist recommending weight cycling and recurrent ketogenic carbohydrate restriction to vulnerable heart patients, it is not just irresponsible but illustrative that incorrect dietary advice can become deadly.

As discussed in chapter four, high levels of animal protein show a strong correlation with higher cancer incidence. Hundreds of scientific studies have documented the link between animal products and certain cancers:

• Increased risk of epithelial and lung cancer
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• Increased risk of pancreatic cancer
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• Increased risk of colon cancer
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• Increased risk of stomach and esophageal cancer
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• Increased risk of bladder and prostate cancer
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• Increased growth of mammary tumors
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Although it would be wrong to say that animal foods are the sole cause of cancer, it is now clear that increased consumption of animal products combined with decreased consumption of fresh products has the most powerful effect on increasing one’s risk for various kinds of cancer. Most medical researchers agree that meat
consumption is an important factor in the etiology of human cancer.
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In fact, reducing animal protein in the diet may be the most important dietary intervention one can take to reduce cancer risk.
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High-protein weight-loss diets promoting high-animal-product and low-plant-product (carbohydrate) consumption are not only unhealthy; they could be fatal.

Besides all the dangers reviewed here, it should be clear that eating meat actually correlates with weight gain, not weight loss, unless you radically cut carbs from your diet to maintain a chronic ketosis.
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Researchers from the American Cancer Society followed 79,236 individuals over ten years and found that those who ate meat more than three times per week were much more likely to gain weight as the years went by than those who tended to avoid meat.
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The more vegetables the participants ate, the more resistant they were to weight gain.

If increasing one’s risk of heart attack and cancer isn’t enough of an argument against high-protein diets, the science is conclusive that they also cause kidney damage, kidney stones, and gout.
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Many people develop kidney problems at a young age under the high-protein stress. Due to the accumulated research, the American Kidney Fund’s medical advisory panel issued a press release stating that high-protein weight-loss diets can result in irreversible scarring in the kidneys. This is also observed in bodybuilders who consume excess protein in an attempt to pack on more muscle. The only treatments are dialysis and kidney transplantation. This research shows that kidney function is impacted even in healthy athletes. That should send a message to anyone who is on a high-protein weight-loss diet.
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Overweight individuals are likely to have some kidney damage already, since almost 25 percent of people over age forty-five, especially those with diabetes or high blood pressure, have a degree of kidney impairment. Researchers have concluded, “The
potential impact of protein consumption on renal function has important public health implications given the prevalence of high protein diets and use of protein supplements.”
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Diabetics are at increased risk of kidney disease and are extremely sensitive to the stress a high-protein diet places on the kidney.
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In a large, multicentered study involving 1,521 patients, most of the diabetics who ate too much animal protein had lost over half of their kidney function, and almost all the damage was irreversible.
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Blood tests that monitor kidney function typically do not begin to detect problems until more than 90 percent of the kidneys have been destroyed.

There is an important take-home message here—and that is to understand how critical a life-or-death issue nutrition is. We must get this right. Humans are primates, and all other primates eat a diet of predominantly natural vegetation. If primates eat some animal products, it is a very small percentage of their total caloric intake. Modern science shows that most common ailments in today’s world are the result of nutritional ignorance. However, we can eat a diet rich in phytochemicals from a variety of natural plant foods that will afford us the ability to live a long and healthy life.

I always try to emphasize the benefits of nutritional excellence. With a truly healthy diet, you can not only expect a drop in blood pressure and cholesterol and a reversal of heart disease, but your headaches, constipation, indigestion, and bad breath should all resolve. Eating for nutritional excellence enables people to reverse diabetes and to gradually lose their dependence on drugs. You can expect to reach a normal weight without counting calories and dieting, as well as achieve robust health and live a long life free of the fear of heart attacks and strokes.

Nutritional excellence, which involves eating plenty of vegetables, fruits, and beans, does not have to exclude all animal
products, but it has to be very rich in high-nutrient plant foods (which should make up well over 80 percent of your caloric intake). No more than 10 percent of your total calories should come from animal foods. There is insufficient data at this point to suggest that there is a clear longevity advantage to adhering to a vegan diet (one that is entirely free of animal foods). However, the scientific literature suggests that there is a longevity advantage to dropping your animal-food consumption to as little as one or two servings per week. The most consistent finding in the nutritional literature based on every epidemiological study is that as fruit and vegetable consumption increases, chronic diseases and premature deaths decrease.