Super Immunity (4 page)

Any person studying the subject of nutrition in depth and following the latest research would find it hard to ignore the fact that certain natural foods—those that I call “super foods” because they lead to Super Immunity—contain micronutrients that have profound protective effects. The evidence has become overwhelming that devising dietary patterns rich in these high-micronutrient super foods is your secret to excellent health and your access to the fountain of youth.

In the 1930s scientists identified the first known micronutrients: vitamins and minerals. They also isolated the portions of plants that supply us with fuel in the form of calories, labeling those “macronutrients.” Macronutrients encompass fat, carbohydrate, and protein. These all contain calories, and we need them to survive. Water is also considered a macronutrient, even though it does not contain calories.

In that same era scientists discovered that a deficiency of certain micronutrients could cause various acute diseases with exotic names like scurvy, pellagra, and beriberi. Deficiency diseases were common in the United States until the 1940s, when the FDA mandated “fortification” (the adding of micronutrients) of common foods like bread and milk. These diseases are still common in many poorer countries, however.

Deficiency of vitamin A—xerophthalmia (an eye disease)

Deficiency of vitamin C—scurvy

Deficiency of vitamin D—rickets and osteoporosis

Deficiency of iodine—goiter and cretinism

Deficiency of iron—anemia and mental retardation

Deficiency of thiamine (B
₁
)—beriberi

Deficiency of niacin (B
₃
)—pellagra

By 1940 the vitamin supplement business was a billion-dollar industry: people were advised to drink orange juice and take vitamin C capsules, and our food manufacturers began adding supplemental A, D, and B vitamins to processed foods. In the 1950s and 1960s there was a further increase in fortified processed foods. Eventually processed foods replaced fresh foods as the major source of calories in developed countries.

In the 1960s fast-food restaurants also began to spread throughout America, and by the 1970s they were a six-billion-dollar industry. Within twenty more years they were
everywhere:
in 2005 the fast-food industry broke $120 billion in sales in the United States alone.
⁵
Fortification of foods became a strategy to prevent deficiency in processed foods that were naturally deficient in micronutrients. Calorie-dense food was everywhere, but the micronutrients were missing. The result? Today, too many of us live on processed foods, convenience foods, and fast foods; we have almost no vegetation, mushrooms, beans, or seeds in our diet.

The fortification of processed foods grew out of an earlier, compartmentalized view of nutritional science: scientists and public authorities thought that we could prevent health complications from poor nutrition, poor food choices, or an inadequate food supply simply by supplying individual micronutrients that were inadequate in the diet. Even though the replacement of these missing nutrients
did
cure and prevent various deficiency diseases (like the ones previously listed), this approach launched a processed-food and junk-food revolution that took our diet and health in the wrong direction.

The mindset that created a shift in our general diet still exists today, and it is still causing damage. These dietary changes not only degraded our immune systems; in the process they exposed us to hundreds of potential illnesses. The oversimplification of human nutrition led to the development of medical foods such as baby formula, hospital liquid feeds, nutritional fortified drinks, and food supplements, further contributing to our health care crisis and ultimately to the explosion of cancer.

The Cancer Explosion in the Modern World

Between 1935 and 2005, cancer rates rose every single year for seventy years straight! As processed foods and fast foods expanded into the underdeveloped world (both nationally and abroad), we saw rural areas starting to develop higher rates of cancer and obesity. The result today is a nation (and other nations) with exploding numbers of people with immune system disorders, allergies, autoimmune diseases, and cancers.

In the 1960s and 1970s most nutritionists focused their attention on the study of macronutrients and looked to determine the best ratio of fat, protein, and carbohydrate for optimal health. Doctors and nutritionists thought that our micronutrient needs could be met via a multivitamin or other supplement solution, and saw no necessity to meet our vitamin and mineral needs through micronutrient-rich food. In fact, the micronutrient density of food was generally ignored: science had not yet isolated and understood the critical function and dependence of the immune system on foods that contained hundreds of not-yet-identified organic compounds.

AVERAGED CANCER MORTALITY TREND IN THIRTEEN MODERN COUNTRIES

O. Hallberg and O. Johansson, “Cancer Trends During the 20th Century,
Journal of Australian College of Nutritional and Environmental Medicine
2002, 21(1): 3–8.

Even today many still believe proper nutrition to be some ideal ratio of macronutrients, with proponents falling into different camps—high-protein advocates, low-fat advocates, high-carb advocates, low-carb advocates, and so on. Unfortunately, this focus on macronutrients over micronutrients diverts attention away from understanding optimal nutrition in a complete and effective manner. Many people worry about their weight, but almost everybody—even the person who carefully monitors caloric intake—neglects their health.

We now know that a diet can be “healthy”—in other words, health-promoting—with a broad range of acceptable macronutrients: it can, for example, contain more fat and less carbohydrate, or more carb and less fat. The problem is that the health-enhancing qualities of a diet are not accurately determined by the level of either fat or carbohydrate. They are determined by the amount and the diversity of micronutrients. For example, a diet with 15 percent fat could be micronutrient-adequate or micronutrient deficient, as could a diet of 40 percent fat. This is a critical point, so I'll restate it: it's not the ratio of fat to carbs in your diet that matters for your health. Many people see fat as the villain and mistakenly ignore the impact of protective micronutrients. They might be surprised to discover that nutritionists have recently learned that when there is fat present in the meal, the most powerful micronutrients found in vegetables are absorbed more readily into the body. In other words, fat itself is not the villain.

The point here is that when our body is deficient in plant-derived micronutrients, we weaken our immune system and leave ourselves exposed to infections and cancer. The way we're going—eating more processed and packaged convenience foods and routinely giving fast food to children—I worry especially about the potential spike in breast cancer rates in younger women in the next twenty to thirty years (or sooner).

I hope that together we can make known the broad array of powerful immune-supporting micronutrients found in vegetables and the incredible opportunity they provide to protect ourselves and our families. The answer is simple—we just need to feed our bodies with super-charged fuel, and that means foods that are richest in micronutrients.

Greens: The King of Vegetables

As we have seen, micronutrients are those nutritional factors essential for our survival and longevity that do not contain calories. Because they are not calorie-contributors, they do not give us fuel or energy; we rely on
macro
nutrients for that function. The key to superior nutrition, then, is to get adequate amount of micronutrients, while at the same time not consuming excess calories. To get optimal amounts of immune-protective micronutrients, we have to eat lots of vegetables. Fortunately, vegetables are relatively low in calories, so large amounts can be consumed without overeating on calories.

Nutrition scientists have shown over and over that people who eat more natural plant foods—vegetables, fruits, legumes—are less likely to get sick. But are all vegetables equally protective? If we wanted to design a Super Immunity diet, we would want to know which foods had the most powerful effects. Then we could eat plenty of these foods each day, flooding our bodies with the protective substances contained within them.

So … which foods have the most powerful effects? Let's add up the immune-supporting micronutrients in a broad array of common foods and see how various food types compare. Later, in chapter 5, I'll give you a similar list for the Top 30 Super Foods.

As you can see from these nutrient scores, when it comes to immune system–building micronutrients, green vegetables win the race. No wonder those are the foods most closely linked with protection against heart disease and cancer. A review of more than 206 epidemiological studies shows that the consumption of raw green vegetables has the most consistent and powerful association with reduction of cancer of all types, including stomach, pancreas, colon, and breast.
⁶
How many green vegetables do
you
eat a day?

A Matter of
Emphasis

Most health authorities today are in agreement that we should add more servings of healthy fruits and vegetables to our diet. I disagree.

Thinking about our diet in this fashion doesn't adequately address the problem. Instead of considering adding protective fruits, vegetables, beans, seeds, and nuts to our disease-causing diet,
we must make these foods the main focus of the diet itself
.