Food for Life: How the New Four Food Groups Can Save Your Life (2 page)

There are other emerging findings. Arthritis has long been an enigma for doctors, but new dietary measures have helped many people and are included here. Many multiple sclerosis patients have benefited dramatically from dietary changes. And scientists are now asking whether foods can delay the signs of aging or even help men to keep their hair. The answer to that question is “We don’t know yet,” but what we do know is detailed here. Even such unlikely problems as varicose veins and hemorrhoids are being linked to foods.

There are other peculiar twists to the new dietary findings. For example, it turns out that foods influence not only our health and longevity but can also affect a man’s ability to function sexually. The same sort of diet that allows the blood supply to nourish the heart also allows blood to flow unimpeded on its way to the sexual organs.

Women are dramatically affected as well. The high fat content of the customary diets of Western countries causes an artificial elevation of estrogen, the female sex hormone. Reducing the fat content of the diet not only reduces cancer risk but also makes menstrual periods much more comfortable.

There is one benefit to changing your diet that you may not have expected: You can save a substantial amount of money. A research nutritionist at the George Washington University calculated that a menu based on grains, vegetables, fruits, and beans can save a family of four about $40 per week. That adds up to $2,100 per year, or a new car every six or seven years.

This book will give you the details you need. As I drafted this guide, I aimed to do two things: give you the latest and best knowledge on using foods intelligently, and make the process of change as easy and clear-cut as possible.

Included is detailed information on how to plan meals, how to make changes in eating habits easy, and how to make them stick, plus menus and recipes—both for people who like to cook and for those who do not want to spend much time in the kitchen.

Special considerations for pregnancy and nursing, and for children, are included in
Chapter 6
.

Now, food is not everything. Your health is also affected by tobacco, alcohol, physical activity, and the stress of modern life. And some people will have medical problems in spite of taking very good care of themselves. No program is foolproof, including this one.

On the other hand, foods can be more powerful than I had ever imagined. When I arrived at medical school, I knew little about nutrition. I knew that red meat was not exactly a health food, but on the other hand, my family includes several cattle-raisers. In fact, they outnumbered the doctors 4 to 3. As a youngster, I even worked at McDonald’s.

In my medical studies, I learned about what happens to people when they get a little older. In lectures, I saw slides of hearts damaged by heart attacks, the dead and discolored portions carefully outlined by the instructor’s pointer. I assisted at autopsies of patients who had died of strokes caused by the loss of blood supply to the brain. As the pathologist took samples, he showed me holes as big as golf balls in parts of the brain that were supposed to allow a person to speak and move. I met patients whose legs had been amputated when diabetes destroyed their circulation.

I began to learn about the causes of these conditions. Scientists were pointing fingers at the foods on which these people were raised—and on which I was raised, too.

During medical school, certain patients took a permanent place in my memory. On the ward to which I was assigned, there was a room on the left in which a woman of about thirty-five years of age lay in bed. Her eyes were hollow and black. She was very thin and always wore a scarf on her head to hide the fact that her hair had fallen out from chemotherapy. She had breast cancer. Her husband and two small children frequently came to visit, and their faces were often glistening with tears.

Our job was to push chemotherapy. We also pushed morphine and Demerol, narcotic painkillers that lessened the pain of the cancer that had spread to her bones and now grew within them. We also pushed lies: “I think we’ve turned a corner. There are some positive signs. We’re seeing a good effect from the medicine.” Eventually the pretense failed. One day, we pulled the sheet over her lifeless face and went into the next room, where there was another woman of about the same age. She also had a scarf on her head, and her eyes had the same wasted look.

Breast cancer is an epidemic. It devastates families. But for us it became
routine. There was nothing that could prevent it. The best that could be done was to discover it on a mammogram or physical exam, and begin treatment as early as possible. But research has started to emerge, showing that in countries with low cancer rates people ate differently from people in countries where cancer is at epidemic proportions. Investigators learned of the effect of foods on sex hormones, of the protective natural chemicals that are in vegetables and fruits, and of many other factors. A mountain of research has shown that food plays an important role in cancer of the breast, colon, prostate, and other organs, and can increase or decrease the likelihood of survival of cancer patients.

This stunned me. It suggested that the women who had died in that hospital might not have developed cancer in the first place. The painful battle need never have occurred. It was not their fault—or our fault. We could not have been sure that a different diet would have worked. But none of us had even known to try.

Over the past few decades, the science of nutrition has raced ahead, giving us a good understanding of cholesterol, fat, fiber, and vitamins. But there has been almost no change in what schoolchildren are taught to eat since the four food groups were introduced in 1956—two years before the Hula-Hoop craze.

The Department of Agriculture’s promotional posters used to list milk as the first group and meat as the second. Grains got a group, and fruits and vegetables had to share a group. Because livestock products were assigned two of the four groups, menus developed under this plan were often loaded with fat and cholesterol. That is how an entire generation learned to eat, and how they, in turn, raised their children.

The results are tragic. There are 4,000 heart attacks
every single day
in this country. The traditional four food groups and the eating patterns they prescribed have led to cancer and heart disease in epidemic numbers, and have killed more people than any other factor in America. More than automobile accidents, more than tobacco, more than all the wars of this century combined.

As our children grow up, heart disease awaits most of them, taking more
victims than any other cause of death. The second leading cause of death will be cancer, and third will be stroke. All are strongly linked to food decisions. At this point, we know which foods are dangerous and which are safe. We can easily spot which children have eating habits that will put them at risk. But we do nothing. Often, we actually encourage bad diets. The same father who would run in front of a speeding car to push a child out of danger nods approvingly as his daughters or sons learn eating habits that will later take their lives.

A child born today has a one-in-three risk of eventually developing cancer. It might occur around age thirty or maybe forty, or maybe later. But as high as the risk of cancer is, the risk of heart disease is even higher. Children grow into adulthood with a one-in-two risk of heart disease. Americans die years earlier than their counterparts in Japan, for instance, where very different dietary habits are preferred. We send our children to the best schools we can afford, and try to equip them with moral values that will last a lifetime, but we give them food habits that, when they grow up, will cut short two lives out of every three.

The issues are not all life-threatening. Millions of Americans wrestle with expanding waistlines, frustrated by diet schemes that promise results but prove useless. Most are unaware of the new science of weight control.

If old eating habits are so destructive, why haven’t we changed? One reason is force of habit, first demonstrated in the worried scowl that comes over a child’s face when confronted with any new food. The other reason is politics. Livestock producers have put enormous pressure on the federal government to keep their products listed as daily requirements. Tobacco companies, with their legendary political clout, are amateurs compared to the livestock promoters. The dairy industry has managed to receive a half-billion to a billion dollars in federal support
every year
. Meat and dairy products got food groups number 1 and number 2 on the old four-food-groups posters. In classroom lessons and after-school television advertising, images of high-fat, no-fiber foods are drummed into children’s heads, while cholesterol is pounded into their hearts.

This book aims to change things. It is based on a completely new nutritional plan, first proposed on April 8, 1991, by the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM), along with some of the world’s most respected scientists. Dr. Denis Burkitt is the medical pioneer who discovered the value of fiber. His name and work are studied by every medical student in the world. Dr. Burkitt traveled to Washington, D.C., to
speak at the 1991 PCRM press conference and to ask reporters to spread the lifesaving message far and wide. Dr. T. Colin Campbell, the Cornell University biochemist who heads the prestigious China Health Study, which revealed in stark detail how differences in diet lead to dramatic differences in health, also joined our press conference announcing the New Four Food Groups. We were also honored to be joined by Dr. Oliver Alabaster, a cancer researcher and author at the George Washington University School of Medicine. To him, a change in eating habits had a personal meaning. His mother was diagnosed with breast cancer when she was only forty-one, and died a few years later. As Dr. Alabaster knows only too well, if we can change the way people eat, we can let some children know their parents a bit longer.

The plan in this book is a simple one, but it has the power to bring health and vigor to a new level, and add years to life.

The New Four Food Groups program recommends that your diet be based on grains, legumes, vegetables, and fruits. The latter two are no longer forced to share a single group, and meat and dairy lose their food-group status. Centering your diet on the New Four Food Groups will lead to a huge reduction in fat intake and an increase in fiber, complex carbohydrates, beta-carotene, and other important nutrients. This plan is not just low in cholesterol; it has
no cholesterol at all
. Evidence shows that the cumulative effect of these food choices, made three times a day, 365 times a year, is dramatic. As will be described in the following chapters, this evidence comes from scientific studies of the dietary habits of people who have stayed well and people who have become ill; comparisons of health statistics of populations following different diets; and experiments in which both patients and healthy people have tested various diets.

This book was written both for people who are healthy and want to stay that way, and for people who are struggling with health problems. It is specific in its recommendations, and includes references both to other books for the layperson and to scientific literature.

Of course, people change their diets for lots of different reasons. One advantage of a diet based on grains, vegetables, and other plant foods is that the animals that might otherwise have been eaten can all breathe a sigh of relief. About six billion chickens are fattened up yearly in the U.S. From the de-beaking process on the factory farm to the miseries of the slaughter line, their eight-week life is no treat. The same could be said for pigs, cattle, veal calves, turkeys, and other animals raised on modern farms.

A plant-based diet lets the earth breathe easier, too. The cultivation of
crops for direct human consumption is much more efficient than using grains or legumes to fatten up livestock. Only a fraction of the nutrients that cattle or other animals take in are left in their muscles at the time of slaughter. The rest have been used up to power their movements, metabolism, body warmth, and other life functions. Nearly twenty years ago,
Scientific American
reported that producing a pound of bacon requires ten times as much crop land (in the form of feed grains) as is used to make the same quantity of bacon analog from soybeans. The cultivation of those feed crops requires land, water, and pesticides and other chemicals that add to our environmental problems.

Meanwhile, the U.S. imports 78 million pounds of beef from Brazil annually, according to the USDA Economic Research Service, and the destruction of the Latin American rain forest to provide grazing land is an ever-growing nightmare. You can help the environment and the animals at the same time that you are doing tremendous favors for your waistline, your coronary arteries, and your general health.

Food choices give us enormous power. The change in our eating habits has already begun. Oatmeal and whole-grain toast are pushing bacon and eggs off the American breakfast plate, and at lunch and dinner we are starting to think about what fiber and fat mean. But that is just the beginning. The program described in this book uses the full power of healthful eating. First, we explore the new facts you need to know about healthful eating. Then, in a three-week program which you can tailor to your individual needs, you begin a new menu that is delicious, easy to prepare, and designed for maximum weight control, cholesterol reduction, cancer prevention, and all-around good health. You will find delightful menus and recipes; tips for entertaining, travel, and dealing with reluctant family members; and ways to adapt favorite traditional recipes.

This book goes beyond old-fashioned “diets,” calorie counts, and other shortsighted ideas; the program you find here is easier and much more powerful. The changes described in this book will give you and your children eating habits you can live with, so that you all can enjoy a long life free of heart disease, cancer, stroke, and many other serious illnesses. For many, it can mean a level of health we had not thought we could attain.