The End of Dieting: How to Live for Life (15 page)

To lose weight and improve your health, you need to eat less fat, less carbohydrate, and less protein. Which means you have to reduce your total caloric intake. But the secret is not to count calories to reduce calories—or to worry about where you’re getting the calories from. This process never works. Trying to micromanage the precise amount of each caloric source misses the most critical issue in human nutrition: meeting your macronutrient needs without excess, while getting sufficient micronutrients in the process.

Micronutrients—such as vitamins, minerals, fibers, and phytochemicals—supply critical chemical factors for life and health in small quantities and don’t contain calories. Vitamins are organic compounds required by animals that cannot be synthesized by the body but are nevertheless necessary for normal cell function. Vitamins are classified as either water-soluble or fat-soluble. Of the thirteen currently recognized vitamins, four are fat-soluble (vitamins A, D, E, and K) and nine are water-soluble (eight B vitamins and vitamin C). Water-soluble vitamins dissolve easily in water and in general are readily excreted from the body. Because the body has a hard time storing these vitamins, it requires a more consistent intake of them.

The human body requires at least sixteen minerals. Minerals are tricky, though, because their range of optimal benefit is narrow. Too much or too little iron, selenium, copper, or zinc, for instance, can be unhealthy, even harmful. Too much red meat can introduce into your system a potentially harmful amount of iron and copper,
²
though in general the SAD is severely deficient in most vital micronutrients. Determining the optimal level of mineral intake, then, is crucial.

The safest and surest way to get adequate vitamins and minerals is to eat natural plant foods, including nutrient-rich colorful vegetation such as broccoli, scallions, and tomatoes. When anthropologist Katharine Milton tracked the eating habits of four different species of
monkeys, she found that each species consumed about ten times the recommended daily amount of vitamin C and about four times the recommended daily amount of magnesium and potassium. They also consumed much higher amounts of the essential omega-3 fatty acid ALA.
³
Nonhuman primates eat a diet tremendously rich in disease-fighting micronutrients and phytochemicals from a diversity of plants, which is the primary cause of their longevity and robust health. Our need for nutrients and our digestive systems are no different physiologically from those of the great apes; we too need a diet full of nutrient-rich, colorful vegetation to approach the optimal level of nutrition our bodies need. The amount of colorful vegetation most people in the United States consume is dismally low, and this lack is responsible for the exploding rates of cancer and autoimmune diseases during the past century.

A nutritarian diet is also characterized by the avoidance of sugar and sweeteners, white flour, refined oils, and all kinds of processed foods—foods that are ill-adapted to the design of our species and are linked to cancer. With modern refrigeration and transportation we now have year-round access to the healthiest and most nutrient-rich foods on the planet. We also have the best opportunity, like never before, to achieve and maintain optimal health. Over the past fifty years, more than ten thousand studies have shown the benefits of consuming natural, nutrient-rich plant foods. Here are a few critical points worth considering:

• Plants contain three classes of micronutrients that are critical to our health: vitamins, minerals, and phytochemicals. These nutrients are essential for a highly effective immune system and protection from the common ravages of aging.
  
• Colorful vegetables, beans, and fruits have a low caloric density, allowing us to eat more food. With so many high-nutrient foods permitted in a relatively unlimited quantity, it’s easy to eat to fulfillment and still lose weight and maintain an ideal weight—without the need to count calories or restrict portions.
  
• Increasing micronutrient intake through eating a diet of natural foods reduces appetite and cravings and restores normal hunger signals, allowing you to maintain a lean body mass while simultaneously conferring an assortment of protective health benefits that defy the aging process.
  

Eating foods that are rich in micronutrients is essential to good health. Foods that are naturally rich in micronutrients are also naturally rich in fiber and water. They are also naturally low in calories. By eating more nutrient-rich foods and fewer high-calorie, low-nutrient foods, we naturally lose weight and optimize our health. And the more high-nutrient food we consume, the less low-nutrient food we crave. The less low-nutrient food we crave, the more weight we lose and the healthier we become. It’s that simple.

Phytochemicals: The Secret to Longevity

Essential for normal immune function and disease resistance, phytochemicals are complex chemical compounds that occur naturally in plants (
phyto
comes from the Greek word for “plant”—
phyton
). Phytochemicals support self-reparative mechanisms in cells and enable the body’s defense system to work against waste products, such as free radicals and advanced glycation end products. There are more than ten thousand plant phytochemicals with the potential to prevent various diseases, including cancer. Lycopene in tomatoes, for instance, and lutein and zeaxanthin in green and yellow vegetables inhibit macular degeneration and cataracts in the eyes.
⁴

Some of the most important phytochemicals are
isothiocyanates
(ITCs), which are potent immune-strengthening and vital cancer-fighting agents. ITCs have been found to fight inflammation, inhibit angiogenesis, increase the body’s natural detoxification enzymes, and help kill off cancerous cells, to name just a few health benefits.
⁵
Plus, these antiangiogenic effects do not just block the growth
of tumors and cancers; they also inhibit the accumulation of fat on the body.

The cruciferous vegetables (Table 6) are unique because of their content of the organic compounds called
glucosinolates
. The glucosinolates in cruciferous vegetables are converted into ITCs when the plant cell wall is broken down—by chewing, juicing, chopping, or blending. The myrosinase enzyme is housed in the cell wall, which catalyzes the conversion of glucosinolates to ITCs when cells are broken. The point is, the better you chew the vegetables, the more ITCs are formed.

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McKinley adopted a nutritarian lifestyle, which helped her identify—and overcome—the root of her food-related anxiety. She now feels free to enjoy her life in full
.

BEFORE:
160 pounds

AFTER:
125 pounds

Though I’m only twenty-six years old, I can firmly say that becoming a nutritarian has given me my life back. Before discovering Dr. Fuhrman and his health equation, my life was completely dominated by a fear of food, binge eating, cyclical dieting, weight gain, and poor physical condition. I found myself trying diets one by one, my weight constantly fluctuating, my cravings spiraling totally out of control, my feelings of shame and failure immense and unspeakably devastating. I literally spent years of my life walking around with a notebook recording every single thing I ate.

I came across Dr. Fuhrman’s nutritarian diet style at a very painful period in my life. I had lost two pregnancies in a relatively short period of time and my mother was starting to show signs of kidney damage following several years of a high-protein diet to control diabetes.

At first, I was very skeptical, but as I continued to read, my heart began to race. Here was a plan backed by literally thousands of research papers, and the people who followed it were reversing many types of conditions—from autoimmune disorders to diabetes to heart disease.

For the first time in my life, I haven’t lost hope and I haven’t given up. I no longer suffer from fear, food restriction, and despair. Physically, I’m no longer troubled by the frightening pain around the varicose veins in my right knee and calf, the chronic anemia, the restless leg syndrome, the frequent insomnia, the periods of IBS-like symptoms, the severe mood swings and depression, the migraines, poor complexion, dry mouth, and chapped skin. My life feels normal now, and balanced. I now enjoy a loving relationship with my body that is founded in a thorough understanding that wellness is almost exclusively the result of nutrition and lifestyle.

But my greatest joy is this: After seeing my sustained enthusiasm and conviction for the nutritarian lifestyle, my mom, a fifteen-plus-year diabetic and a Hoosier girl who loved typical Midwest fare, started Dr. Fuhrman’s knowledge-based program early last fall. She’s now very happy living the nutritarian life. Together, we’re learning and working with the goal that she will be off all medications by the end of this year!

Eating cruciferous vegetables produces measurable ITCs in breast tissue, and observational studies have shown that women who eat more cruciferous vegetables are less likely to be diagnosed with breast cancer.
⁶
A recent study of Chinese women, for example, found that those who regularly ate one serving each day of cruciferous vegetables reduced their risk of breast cancer by 50 percent.
⁷
Similarly, a European study found that women who consumed cruciferous vegetables at least once a week decreased their risk of breast cancer by 17 percent.
⁸

Another study tracked the cruciferous vegetable intake of Chinese women with breast cancer for the first three years after their initial diagnosis and then followed them for another five years. The more cruciferous vegetables the women ate, the less likely they were to experience breast cancer recurrence or to die from breast cancer. Women who ate higher amounts of these vegetables exhibited a 62 percent decrease in risk.
⁹

Such data are supported further by the Women’s Healthy Eating and Living (WHEL) study. Breast cancer survivors who reported higher than a median intake of cruciferous vegetables, and were in the top third of total vegetable intake, showed a 52 percent reduced risk of recurrence. This result is especially powerful considering that average intakes were quite low—only 3.1 and 0.5 servings a day of total and cruciferous vegetables, respectively.
¹⁰

Now
is the best time to eat cruciferous vegetables every single day.

Green cruciferous vegetables aren’t alone, though. Plant foods of all colors are rich in various disease-protective phytochemicals.
Carotenoids
are a family of more than six hundred pigmented phytochemicals including alpha-carotene, beta-carotene, lycopene, lutein, zeaxanthin, and astaxanthin. Abundant in green and yellow-orange vegetables and fruits, carotenoids help to defend the body’s tissues against oxidative damage from free radicals, a known contributor to chronic disease and an accepted mechanism of aging.

A well-nourished body houses a high-functioning immune system, and the same immune cells that protect us against bacteria and viruses also protect us against cancer. Vegetables, particularly cruciferous vegetables, are the most nutrient-rich foods available. But, as you’ll see, they aren’t the
only
nutrient-rich foods available. As a nutritarian, you’ll not only eat plenty of green vegetables, but you’ll also eat a ton of other superfoods that work together to make the body cancer proof.

G-BOMBS