Food for Life: How the New Four Food Groups Can Save Your Life (17 page)

There were no double-blind studies, no control patients, or anything else that would suggest that what happened to Dr. Sattilaro will happen for anyone else, although there is a large cadre of people who report similar results.

I became interested in Sattilaro’s story, so I went in search of him. He had resigned his job as head of Methodist Hospital and had moved to Florida. I met him in 1986. He was not only alive ten years after his anticipated death but youthful and vigorous. He had adhered to the macrobiotic diet and adopted a specific exercise program. He went swimming every day. His cancer seemed to be gone, and he kept X-ray films in a file for when he needed to remind himself of his remission. Sattilaro had been deluged with letters from other cancer patients, but always answered that he did not know if what had happened to him could also happen for them. He was not even sure that his dietary program should get the credit.

Eventually, he began to deviate from the diet, adding fish and chicken, as if to test whether he was cured or simply in remission. If it was a test, he failed. In July 1989, I called Dr. Sattilaro and found him to be gravely ill. His cancer had recurred—“viciously,” he said. He was in good spirits, but harbored no illusions about the grim situation he was in. He knew that the
end was very near. He had resumed the use of painkillers, which at times made him quite groggy.

Can the regimen he followed be given credit for his decade-long reprieve from cancer? Did his deviation from the diet compromise his defenses against cancer? These are questions that, while intriguing, are not answerable.

A group of patients with Kaposi’s sarcoma, an AIDS-related cancer, tried the same macrobiotic diet, on the theory that a diet which boosts the immune system might help with AIDS. And it apparently helped.
⁷⁸
Although AIDS patients generally lose certain types of immune cells (lymphocytes), these patients kept better lymphocyte counts. They were not cured, but their survival was improved.

Unfortunately, most AIDS patients get just the opposite. Their doctors prescribe a high-fat regimen sometimes called the “Häagen-Dazs diet” in order to counter the wasted appearance that comes with AIDS. Yet a high-fat diet would be expected to impair immunity. Obviously, no diet is a substitute for other intervention in a condition as severe as AIDS. On the other hand, it is a mistake to discount the benefits that a healthful diet might bring.

Researchers at the University of Arizona have found that people who have been treated for colon or rectal cancer have less risk of recurrence when their diets are rich in fiber. They found benefits from daily supplements of 13.5 g of wheat bran fiber (the amount in ½ cup of All Bran cereal) per day, but they speculate that other forms of fiber, such as oat bran, might have the same effect.
⁷⁹
If you have bran cereal, I suggest topping it with soymilk rather than cow’s milk to avoid animal fat, cholesterol, lactose, and animal proteins (see
Chapter 6
).

In addition, because colon cancer is encouraged by diets containing animal fat and discouraged by diets rich in vegetables, a low-fat, plant-based diet is important both for those seeking to prevent cancer and those who have already been treated for it. Vegetarian diets can easily boost fiber intake by 10 to 20 g per day.

Unfortunately, there is virtually no scientific information available on
specific dietary steps to improve survival for those with other cancers of the digestive tract.

It is clear that much more needs to be learned about the power of foods to prevent cancer or to improve cancer survival. The good news is that the diet that helps protect against cancer is the same one that keeps cholesterol low and waistlines slim. Keeping animal products out of the diet, keeping oils to a minimum, and including generous amounts of vegetables, grains, beans, and fruits is a powerful prescription.

This chapter presents a new approach to losing weight. It is dramatically more effective than commercial diet plans. If the directions in this chapter are followed, weight control is usually permanent, without any calorie restriction.

Most diet plans are not very successful, and there are good reasons why. Many are simply too weak to get results. Others are geared only to the short term, with formulas that cause a temporary weight loss, often followed by a larger weight gain.

There is a much better way. Take Mark, for example. He was a successful businessman who traveled frequently and tended to circulate in upper-crust social circles. He was bright, well-dressed, and witty. But his weight had bothered him for years. He had been on every imaginable diet. He could lose some weight, and had many times, but could never maintain the weight loss. Like many other people, he was tempted to believe that his problem was a lack of willpower or that he had just been dealt a bad hand genetically. He had come to feel that diets were futile.

I first met Mark in July 1991. I was filming a series of medical instruction videotapes, and Mark had helped make the arrangements. At one point, we got to talking about the weight-control program in this chapter. He was skeptical at first, but decided to give it a try.

Mark’s size 56 suit became a 54 suit. Then 52, 48, and on down. He called me a few months later. He had lost seventy pounds. By Christmas, he had lost more than a hundred. His suit size dropped to 44. In less than a year, his waist was sixteen inches slimmer. But what was most remarkable was that Mark was easily able to retain his progress. He bought a new set of clothes, and he can still wear them today.

Although I have changed his name, Mark is a real person. In this chapter, we first look at how old-fashioned diets failed him, and maybe let you down, too. And then we look at how to achieve permanent weight control.

More than one-third of American women and one-quarter of American men are trying to lose weight. They spend $30 billion a year on diet programs and products. Often they do lose some weight. But if you check with the same people five years later, you will find that nearly all have regained most or all of whatever weight they lost. A National Institutes of Health panel sought data to show if any commercial diet program has long-term success. Not a single one could provide any. Meanwhile, frustration has spawned antidiet groups, carrying the message that people should accept being heavier than fashion might dictate.

While extreme thinness may be a twentieth-century fashion perversion, overweight is not just a cosmetic issue. It is clearly linked to cancer, diabetes, heart disease, and other health problems. It is not “natural” to be overweight. The fatty diet consumed in Western countries is not natural, the physical inactivity that is routine in America is not natural, and low-calorie dieting is neither natural nor a useful solution to the problem of overweight. The epidemic of obesity in America is the predictable result of these factors.

As we will see in detail, overweight is due primarily to the high fat content of our foods. People who consume grains, vegetables, fruits, and legumes tend to stay slim. Vegetarians are significantly slimmer than meat-eaters.
^1–
3
The typical meat-eating American gets nearly 40 percent of his or her calories from fat. Some federal programs call for a reduction to 30 percent. But both of these percentages are astronomical compared to the traditional diets of people in Asia or Latin America. A menu of grains, vegetables, fruits, and beans is easily under 10 percent fat. This is the key factor for the vast majority of overweight people. While there is gradually increasing recognition of this fact, most diet products and programs have still not quite put it to use. They still prescribe foods with a higher fat content than is advisable, and they get predictably poor results.

Commercial diet centers have sprung up all across America. To their credit, most diet franchises offer more than just dietary information and food products. They also offer counseling, exercise, and other programs. Their dietary guidelines make a modest attempt at boosting complex carbohydrates by including pasta and vegetables in their meals. They also have come to appreciate the need to avoid overly restrictive calorie levels. But their food guidelines are extremely weak, and include about twice as much fat as they should.

I contacted representatives from Diet Center, Nutri/System, Jenny Craig, and Weight Watchers. For comparison, the plan I recommend, and which you will read in this book, derives about 10 percent of its calories from fat, but look at the fat content prescribed by these diet programs:

All have one serious flaw: they include substantial amounts of animal products and oil. The result is at least two times more fat than is optimal for weight control. The fat content of these meal plans is below that which is typical in America, but it is still too high to get good—and lasting—results.

If you patronize a franchise for its exercise or stress-reduction classes, be sure that it will allow you the flexibility to reduce the fat content of the diet and increase the carbohydrate content. The recipes in this book will help you do that. Unfortunately, some programs are extremely rigid because they are combating even worse diets in their customers.

Most frozen dietetic meals are high in fat too, but the manufacturers know that most consumers are not looking at the fat content. They are looking at the number of calories in each dinner. So they plan to put no
more than 300 calories in the box, and make however small a serving is required to stay under that limit. This is a useless approach. As we shall see, it does not take advantage of what we now know about weight control.

Table 7
lists the average fat and calorie content of 25 Lean Cuisine and 23 Weight Watchers frozen entrees. Weight Watchers has a “regular” dinner line that is near 300 calories per dinner and an “Ultimate 200” line of smaller dinners that are 200 calories or less. As you can see, none of these product lines is low in fat.

Table 7     
Frozen Dinners: Small Portions, Lots of Fat

Medifast, Optifast, and other high-protein formulas are designed for what their literature calls “supplemented starvation.” They use a very low calorie, high-protein liquid formula instead of real food. The formulas are intended to remove all temptation to stray from the diet. Such diets can result in rapid and profound water loss, and can cause various metabolic disturbances. Older supplemented-starvation programs caused several deaths, so newer programs are designed to be used under a physician’s supervision.

The maker of one program sends doctors a package of materials encouraging them to prescribe the program to patients. Prominently included is a detailed income prospectus stating that doctors could expect to pocket $15,700
per month
in profits from selling the supplements, lab fees, and patient appointments. Also included is a newspaper article about a man who had lost ninety-two pounds on the program, with a picture in which he proudly displayed his old huge trousers. I telephoned the man. He said that while he had lost the weight at first, he had now gained about half of it back. Oprah Winfrey demonstrated the same Achilles’ heel of the supplemented-starvation
diets. She lost a phenomenal amount of weight, put it all back on, and became completely discouraged about any possibility of lasting weight control.

High-protein supplemented-starvation programs are impressive in the short run and disappointing in the long run. I do not recommend them. As you will see, there is a much more effective strategy. If, for whatever reason, you do begin a protein-supplemented fast, by all means do so only under a doctor’s supervision.

Ultra Slim-Fast powders are made from various sugars and milk components, with added flavorings, vitamins, minerals, and fiber. They are to be mixed with low-fat milk, juice, or water, and consumed for breakfast, lunch, and as an afternoon snack, followed by a “sensible low-fat, well-balanced dinner.” The three daily servings with milk supply fewer than 700 calories. The powders are fairly low in fat (16 percent), but their major nutrients are simple sugars, particularly sucrose (table sugar) and lactose. The overall program is basically an old-fashioned low-calorie diet, with supplements designed to avoid vitamin deficiencies. But as we will see, low-calorie diets don’t take into account how the body works, and therefore cannot enjoy long-term success.