The End of Dieting: How to Live for Life (7 page)

Well, not only is this the wrong message, it’s not even a new message! The high-protein diet continues to take different names and forms, gaining new legions of meat-loving devotees every generation. First it was known as the Atkins diet, then Sugar Busters. Then it came
back as the South Beach diet, and, most recently, the Dukan diet. Now it’s the Paleo diet. Regardless of its name or specific iteration, however, it’s always the same diet—high protein, low carb, enormous risk.

Our modern diet, the SAD, causes diseases. Eating refined sugar, white flour, processed oils, and commercially processed meats is harmful to our health. But instead of replacing those unhealthy choices with seeds, nuts, vegetables, fruits, and other foods packed with vital nutrients, the Paleo crowd continues to advocate for more meat. They also tell you to stay away from beans and whole grains entirely. This is despite irrefutable evidence that eating beans reduces the risk of cancer and enhances longevity.
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The Paleo position is diametrically opposed to the overwhelming scientific evidence that confirms that consuming large quantities of meat is a health risk.

For a normally sized male, a meat-based Paleo diet contains between 150 and 200 grams of protein a day, or roughly three to four times the daily amount recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). This is foolishly and dangerously excessive.

All animal products, including meat, fish, and dairy, are rich in substances associated with cancer and heart disease: saturated fat, cholesterol, and arachidonic acid. However, it isn’t merely the fat content that makes excessive animal products disease promoting. Animal protein stimulates the rise of cancer-promoting hormones within the body, especially insulin-like growth factor-1 (IGF-1). When we consume animal protein, the body increases its production of IGF-1. Though IGF-1 is one of the body’s most important growth promoters during infancy and childhood, it accelerates the aging process, promoting the growth, proliferation, and spread of cancer cells later in life. Elevated IGF-1 levels are linked to an increased risk of several types of cancers, including colon, breast, and prostate cancer.
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Reduced IGF-1 signaling in adulthood, on the other hand, is associated with reduced oxidative stress, decreased inflammation, enhanced insulin sensitivity, and longer lifespan.
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Marcie realized that rapid weight loss is possible and sustainable, without deprivation, because, to her pleasant surprise, eating vegetables is far more enjoyable than she ever imagined
.

AFTER:
Lost 90 pounds in less than a year

It was the beginning of another year and I was (reluctantly) determined to lose weight. I felt terrible and had very little energy. I prayed to God to help me. By the third day of my diet, my husband reconnected with an old employer, who handed him a copy of
Eat to Live
. He said it helped him beat colon cancer. I took this as an answer to my prayers. I read the book and started the nutritarian diet style.

After following the program for about six weeks, I had my lightbulb moment—exactly how Dr. Fuhrman describes it. I began to look forward to eating vegetables. The best part about the nutritarian diet style is that you don’t have to weigh your food, and you can actually eat however much you want—all while losing weight! The fact that these foods are found in nature and aren’t processed was a huge selling point for me. All of the foods on this diet are what God intended for us to eat.

This plan worked for me when other diets failed, not only because other diets (like Atkins) were hard to maintain, but because depriving and counting calories was just too hard. Of course, the weight coming off rapidly made it easy to continue. Besides the weight loss, I started to think more clearly and focus better. I stopped getting headaches, and I started to enjoy working out. My bouts with depression went away completely. That alone makes it worth staying with this program.

By the fall, I had lost 90 pounds. I can’t tell you how wonderful I feel today. Dr. Fuhrman’s books are a gift and contain all the research that explains why these foods are so good for us. This knowledge made it easier for me to stick with the plan. Now, I eat for health.

Protein-rich plant foods, such as seeds, beans, and greens, don’t raise IGF-1 levels, don’t contain pro-inflammatory substances, and are rich in anti-inflammatory and life-extending phytochemicals. The secret to long life and successful weight loss is to get more protein from natural plant sources and less from animal products.

Clearly, at this point in nutritional science we have enough studies which show that diets higher in the amount of meat shorten lifespan and promote cancer. And these studies have been consistent in various regions of the world and with various types of meat, implicating many different aspects of meat, including grass-fed meats and the more contaminated commercial corn-fed or grain-fed meats.

But you’d never hear this if you’re talking to a Paleo diet advocate. Recently, I attended a medical conference in Denver, Colorado, where I heard Loren Cordain, an exercise physiologist and leader of the Paleo movement, give a talk. In his presentation, he advocated a diet in which 80 percent of calories come from meat. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. That is more than double the high meat intake that Americans already consume! How could he advocate such a cancer-promoting diet? When an astute conference attendee asked Cordain about IGF-1, he replied, irritably and incorrectly, “Only sugar raises IGF-1 levels, not meat.” Never mind science; Cordain was staying on message, though he didn’t deny the cancer-promoting effects of elevating IGF-1. That animal protein is the primary driver of higher IGF-1 levels is a fly in the ointment that all Paleo advocates must acknowledge. The clarity of the scientific studies on this issue shows that their favored diet promotes cancer.

A recent scientific study compared the amount of animal products consumed in 157 different countries with high-quality food consumption and disease-occurrence data and noted that cancer rates were highest (with a fifteen- to twenty-five-year lag time) in populations consuming the most animal products and lowest in those consuming the least. Fewer than 10 percent of calories from animal products correlated with lowest cancer risks (standardized for age).
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Though some people may experience moderate, short-term weight loss by reducing refined carbohydrates and increasing calories from animal products, such as poultry and other meats, the dramatically dangerous health results are clear over the long term. A number of recent studies confirm this. The Nurses’ Health Study and Health Professionals Follow-up Study, for instance, found a positive association between a diet high in animal protein and cardiovascular mortality.
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A diet consisting mostly of vegetable sources of protein shared no such link with cardiovascular mortality. Similarly, the Health Professionals Follow-up Study also showed a causal relationship between strokes and ischemic, or coronary, heart disease and a high-protein, low-carb diet.
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A huge Swedish prospective study also gathered data from more than forty thousand women between the ages of thirty and forty-nine.
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Researchers followed them for an average of 15.7 years. Women with a diet low in carbohydrates and high in animal protein significantly increased their risk of cardiovascular disease, ischemic heart disease, and ischemic stroke in a dose-dependent manner (that is, these diseases rose in proportion to the increased consumption of animal protein).

Researchers also found that for every increase of 5 grams of animal protein and decrease of 20 grams of carbohydrates a day, the risk of cardiovascular disease was increased by 5 percent. The increased consumption of meat has consistently been associated with an increased incidence in type 2 diabetes as well. Even half a serving more of meat a day increased the risk of diabetes by 48 percent in a large study of almost 150,000 individuals.
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The EPIC-PANACEA study, one of the largest weight evaluation studies in history, found that meat and poultry intake, after adjustment for calories, was responsible for the highest amount of body fat.
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What this means is a person who eats meat will weigh more and have more body fat than someone whose source of calories is
predominantly from plants, even though the number of calories is
exactly
the same.

The data are overwhelming. Clearly, we need to eat much less animal products.

The only real controversial or unclear issue here is what amount of animal products is safe and which types are best. Many people believe that seafood is the most favorable animal product to consume, but given the high concentration of pollutants in most seafood, this is not so clear. Wild-caught animal products are definitely cleaner sources and are therefore preferred. Still, less is almost always more. The less animal products we consume, the lower the risk of disease. This is seen even when we consider the cleanest, most natural animal products, because the concentration of animal protein is the main feature that promotes abnormal cell growth and disease.

The Adventist Health Study had the best-controlled data for shedding some light on this subject. It compared vegans with flexitarians, that is, people who eat meat only a few times a week. It showed the vegans had an average increased lifespan of 1.5 years compared to the flexitarians eating one or two servings of animal products a week, which is less than 5 percent of total calories.
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Recently, I have been advocating either a vegan diet or a diet with less than 5 percent of calories from animal products. I think the evidence is now compelling enough to show that even 10 percent, which I had suggested as the upper limit in the past, may be too much animal products to optimally protect against cancer, largely because it could add roughly 200 calories from animal products and more than 30 grams of animal protein to your diet a day. Such a level could elevate IGF-1 levels beyond what is optimal in most people.

Regardless of this debatable point of interest, and the difficulty in establishing a precise percentage of safety, it is irresponsible and negligent to advise people to increase their consumption of animal products
from 30 percent up to 60 to 80 percent, as Paleo and other high-protein advocates do. No reasonable scientist familiar with the body of literature on this subject would consider this amount safe. I think nutritional scientists the world over would agree that we have to reduce the level of 30 percent by at least half, not increase it.

Even the dangerous Paleo diet may look acceptable when compared with the SAD. However, only a diet style rich in colorful vegetables, both raw and cooked, can ward off disease, reduce fat storage, protect against cardiovascular disease and cancer, and simultaneously stabilize your weight. The Paleo diet is a passing fad that caters to the like-minded meat-obsessed crowd, helping them justify how they want to eat. Every new iteration of high-protein mania succeeds despite the cumulative evidence of thousands of studies that consistently shows that the relative healthfulness of any diet is generally proportional to its higher vegetable content and the variety of its vegetable content. Paleo and high-protein diets are only for people who still believe the earth is flat.

It is also worth noting that some Paleo advocates will tell the story that they experienced a “failure to thrive” on a vegan or vegetarian diet. They may report that their body was falling apart and they were dying until they started eating more animal products again. Of course, they didn’t try eating higher-protein plant food and more whole-plant fats from high-protein seeds and nuts or even some limited amount of animal products in conjunction with more beans. To feel well, they just had to go back to eating lots and lots of meat. These stories merely indicate bias and nutritional ignorance of how to structure a healthy diet and how to achieve nutritional adequacy for a wide range of human needs and requirements. Even those people who require a diet with more protein and fat can achieve that without resorting to a diet loaded with meat. As you can see in Tables 1 and 2 on the following page, beans, seeds, nuts, and greens are all high in protein.