Crazy Sexy Diet: Eat Your Veggies, Ignite Your Spark, and Live Like You Mean It! (21 page)

The lesson we draw from these studies is that avoiding fatty foods and bringing in the vegetables and fruits, along with physical activity, can make a huge difference. If these healthy changes can help women who have already had cancer, they are likely to be even more powerful before cancer strikes.

Diabetes is getting to be so common, we would call it a fad if it weren’t so dangerous. In simple terms, diabetes means there is too much sugar in the blood. The sugar we are thinking of here is glucose, which is supposed to provide energy for your body. It powers your brain, your muscles, and other organs. But in diabetes, glucose is having trouble getting into the cells where it belongs. Instead it builds up in the bloodstream, where it can damage the delicate blood vessels of your eyes, kidneys, heart, and legs. Needless to say, you don’t want that to happen.

Why is glucose having trouble getting into the cells? Why is it building up in the bloodstream? Let me draw an analogy: To get through the front door of your house, you use a key. What if you were to arrive home one day to find that your key does not turn in your lock? You look carefully at the key, and it is clear that there is nothing wrong with it. But looking into the lock, you discover that, while you were away, someone stuck gum in it. You could spend the rest of your life crawling in and out of the window. But it would make more sense to clean out the lock.

When glucose enters your cells, it uses a “key,” too. Glucose’s key is insulin, a hormone that opens tiny channels in the cell’s outer membrane, allowing glucose to pass through. But in Type 2 diabetes, the common form of diabetes that affects so many people nowadays, the insulin key isn’t working properly. Researchers have looked into why insulin is not able to open up the cell, and what they have found has dramatically changed our view of diabetes.

It turns out that your cells can get gummed up, too. Just as gum in a lock interferes with a key, fat particles from the foods you eat can enter the cells and interfere with insulin’s ability to open the cell membrane to glucose. The answer to diabetes is to clean out your cells. When you avoid fatty foods, it is like cleaning gum out of a lock. Fat leaves your cells, and insulin starts to work better.

In our research, we have found that simple dietary changes can do the trick, dramatically improving diabetes. In some cases people improve so much that no one would know they had ever had the condition.

There are three keys to preventing diabetes (or reversing it if you have it now):

1.
Avoid all animal products.

2.
Keep vegetable oils to a minimum.

3.
Avoid sugar and refined flour products.

These simple steps can help your cells to clean themselves out, reversing the process that leads to diabetes. We do not limit how many calories or carbohydrate grams you choose, so you’ll never go hungry. And the foods you eat are all good for you. As you’ll notice, they are similar to the ones that reversed heart disease and caused dramatic weight loss in Dr. Ornish’s study.

So although heart problems, cancer, and diabetes are serious problems, they have nothing to do with how old we are. They relate to how long and how badly we have been abusing our bodies. If we give ourselves healthful foods, exercise, and the healthful environment we need, we can prevent these problems to a great extent. And if you already have encountered one of these health challenges, foods can help you heal.

“But wait!” you say.
“We’ve been eating body parts for ages, what’s the problem?” True. While our ancestors have been eating meat since they came down from the trees, they consumed it infrequently and in smaller portions. Also, the meat was very different. It was wild and fresh, not from diseaseridden factory farms that dose already sick animals with drugs and chemicals. Though we were huntergatherers, we gathered a heck of a lot more than we hunted. Woolly mammoth was a luxury saved for special occasions, like bar mitzvahs and weddings.

Many nutrition experts believe that humans are ill equipped to fully digest and absorb meat. Though we’re practicing omnivores, we appear to be more like herbivores physiologically. The true question: What’s optimal? The true answer: Plants.

Consider a carnivore, the lovely lioness. She has claws, fangs, and an abundance of hydrochloric acid to do the tough job of digesting flesh. I don’t know about you, but I’m not gonna chip my manicure attacking and gutting Bessie the cow. Humans have molars and masticating jaws, perfect for grinding and chewing high-fiber goodies. Our stomachs contain hydrochloric acid in smaller amounts better designed to digest plant proteins.

In addition, the lioness dines on fresh kill, preferably organs high in minerals. Because she doesn’t haul around a camping stove, Madame Lioness eats her food raw and therefore receives all the enzymatic benefits. Her short digestive tract ensures that zebra goes in, zebra comes out. Now think of the length of our intestines, about 26 twisting, curving feet. Pig goes in; pig stays in for days and weeks at a time. Pig makes us bloated and bitchy. Our personal thermostat hovers around 98.6. What happens to pig at that temperature? Stink city! If our digestive fires aren’t strong, the former Being rots and corrupts our internal environment. Bad bacteria go wild; it’s like their version of a coke whore bender.

The belief that we need
enormous amounts of protein to be healthy and strong is one of the most pervasive myths in America. In fact, overdosing on protein is one of the key reasons why we’ve become so unhealthy. Studies show that as protein consumption goes up, so do the rates of chronic disease. In truth, protein deficiency is virtually nonexistent in industrialized countries. Walk around any Uncle Sam strip mall and you’ll see that our problem is quite different: a full-blown obesity epidemic. Obesity is just one of many casualties of a country suffocating under the burden of diseases of affluence. What do I mean by diseases of affluence? This term commonly describes the maladies that are killing our friends, families, neighbors, and coworkers. Historically, the rich could afford meat, cream, saturated fat, rich sweets, and spirits. Yet, the more they consumed the more health problems they experienced. Now thanks to the availability of fast cheap food (which you’ll learn about it in a hot second), we can all afford to break down and fall apart. Underdeveloped nations have their problems, too. But they tend to concentrate around sanitation, safe drinking water, and basic medicines. Cultures that rely on traditional plant-based diets have far fewer cases of the big diseases that we all fear.

As gardens are being replaced by test tubes, the American public has become one big science experiment. The Standard American Diet is tap dancing on the last nerve of our health. And in the age of rapid globalization, SAD has spread like an aggressive cancer. As a result, the major health issues that are soaring in our country are now plaguing the entire planet. Thank you, Uncle Sam, for the globalization of illness. Bravo!

We’re digging our graves with our forks and steak knives. And check this out: Many average to overweight people are actually malnourished! Whoa, how is that possible? Excess animal protein and fat clog your cells, bloodstream, and colon. As a result, you absorb less nutrition from your food. In addition, poor-quality grub leaves us still feeling hungry. So what do we do? Eat more, get less, and gain weight.

Is protein important? Absolutely, but in large quantities it’s deadly. In his book
Eat Right America
, Joel Fuhrman, a renowned MD and nutrition expert, likens our extreme emphasis on protein to dietary suicide. He suggests that unless you’re anorexic, you don’t have to worry about consuming enough protein. The trick is to upgrade the proteins we consume and to make safer choices on a regular basis.

The USDA’s recommended daily allowance is about 0.36 gram of protein for every pound of body weight. So let’s say you’re that mythical 130-pound woman nutritionists always use as an example. In that case, you need about 47 grams of protein (130 × 0.36) every day. But many experts believe this recommendation is too high. Dr. Furhman suggests that we only need about 20 to 35 grams of protein per day.

How does that compare with reality? The average American adult consumes between 100 and 120 grams of protein every day. Not only is that nearly five times what we need, it comes mostly from high-fat animal products. But just for the sake of argument, let’s go with the government’s standards. What do 47 grams of protein look like? It doesn’t
take much: ¼ cup almonds contains 7.4 grams, ½ cup quinoa contains 3 grams, ½ cup tempeh contains 15.8 grams, 1 cup lentils contains 17.9 grams, 1 cup broccoli contains 2.6 grams.

So clearly, if you’re eating a well-balanced vegetarian diet—meaning you’re consuming a wide variety of high-quality foods, like vegetables, greens, sprouts, legumes, tempeh, beans, nuts, grains, and so on—then you will certainly meet your protein needs. Pregnant or breast-feeding women need more protein, as do athletes. But even these needs can easily be met just by eating more of the good stuff. Talk with a holistic-minded doctor or naturopath to make sure you’re getting what you need.

Proteins are long strings of amino acids. There are twenty different amino acids you need for good health, but our bodies can only make eleven of them. The remaining nine are referred to as essential amino acids. Because we can’t make them, it is essential for us to get them from our diet. Foods that contain all nine essential aminos are known as complete proteins. However, labeling foods as having either “complete” or “incomplete” proteins plays into the idea that some proteins are better for you than others.

While animal flesh is a complete protein, it’s also “complete” with saturated fat, cholesterol, hormones, antibiotics, and other unsavory party poopers like
E. coli
. Human flesh is actually the most complete source of protein for us because the amino
acids are already in the ideal proportions, but that doesn’t mean I should eat the FedEx guy. Unlike their vegetarian counterparts, animal proteins are high in saturated fat, are very acidic, and lack phytonutrients, water, antioxidants, enzymes, and fiber.

Newsflash: Many plants have complete proteins, too! Can you say quinoa, soy products, buckwheat, and hemp seeds? Other plant proteins are only slightly incomplete, so as long as you’re eating a variety of them you’ve got a complete protein powerhouse. You don’t even have to eat them all at the same meal or even on the same day. The great Goddess would have shot you out of your mom’s Vjay with a calculator and food chart if nature intended you to worry about grams of protein and combining grains and legumes at every meal.