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Ten Reasons to Keep Eating Healthy Foods Despite Today’s Headlines

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Today's newspapers are blaring with crazy headlines. The New York Times, for

instance, says that a " Low-Fat Diet Does Not Cut Health Risks, Study Finds. "

 

Dr. Fuhrman draws no such conclusions. “This study compared to groups that

both ate unhealthy diets, " he says. " Look closely and you will see that the

researchers compared a typical, disease-causing American diet, with one that was

just marginally better, but still terribly unhealthy.â€

 

According to the study’s authors, the “low fat diet†they told the women

in the study to eat is as follows:

 

…postmenopausal women in the intervention group were advised to reduce total

fat intake to 20% of energy and to consume at least 5 servings of fruits and

vegetables and 6 servings of grains daily; women in the control group continued

their usual eating pattern.

As it turned out, the women in the low fat group actually ate just about one

more serving of fruit or vegetable per day, fell far short of the even the

modest 20%-of-energy-from-fat goal, and consumed the same number of calories as

the women who did not modify their diets. As Gina Kolata reports in The New York

Times:

In the first year, the women on the low-fat diets reduced the percentage of fat

in their diet to 24 percent of daily calories, and by the end of the study their

diets had 29 percent of their calories as fat. In the first year, the women in

the control group were eating 35 percent of their calories as fat, and by the

end of the study their dietary fat content was 37 percent. The two groups

consumed about the same number of calories.

Preventing tough diseases like heart disease and cancer with diet requires an

approach that is aggressive, multi-faceted, and nuanced. Dr. Fuhrman says

research has already shown that simple interventions like those studied here are

not effective:

The studies published this week in JAMA are nothing new. Those who conducted

those studies should already be aware of hundreds of others studies that

demonstrate “low fat†is not the key factor in disease causation. High

phytochemical intake, including critical antioxidants in (high-fat) nuts, seeds

and avocados contain heart disease and cancer fighting compounds. Eating more

low-fat foods such as egg whites, chicken, and pasta does not expose us to the

disease-fighting compounds in berries, seeds, nuts, cruciferous vegetables,

tomatoes and carrots.

Here are ten reasons why it still makes sense to eat a diet rich in vegetables,

fruits, beans, legumes, nuts, and seeds:

 

1. Fruits and vegetables are the right things to eat, and among the best things

they could have studied. But an increase of roughly one serving of vegetables

and fruits per day—which is what was found in the study—does little to ward

off cancer or heart disease. As described on DiseaseProof yesterday, I advocate

a diet in which vegetables are 30-70% of calories, and fruit is 20-50% of

calories.

 

2. A fixation on fat content is misleading. I do advocate little to no animal

fats or oils (including olive oil). The fat from nuts and avocados is healthy

and necessary, and for most of my patients I do not restrict it.

 

3. In this study, participants were encouraged to eat more grains, when in my

diet—largely to achieve the potent anti-cancer and anti-heart disease

benefits—I advocate replacing grains with vegetables as the basis of the diet.

 

4. Children were not included in this study. As we have discussed in greater

detail previously, the best way to see the effects of diet on cancer is to

examine the diets of children.

 

5. Even with this non-optimal diet, this study did find a correlation between

diet and breast cancer. As The New York Times reports: “The women on low-fat

diets had a 9 percent lower rate of breast cancer; the incidence was 42 per

thousand per year in women in the low-fat diet group, compared with 45 per

thousand per year in women consuming their regular diet.â€

 

6. The most important factor in preventing heart disease is LDL cholesterol. In

this study, minor dietary changes were studied—and were found to make minor

reductions in this all-important statistic. Imagine if they had studied serious

dietary improvements.

 

7. Eating a diet heavy in bread, pasta, white meat, and processed foods can be

low in fat, but is a very poor source of the micronutrition, especially

phytonutrients, that contribute mightily to overall health. Many of the most

important dietary interventions that we recommend were simply not studied.

 

8. The study was of post-menopausal women. The later in life they are started,

the smaller effects dietary interventions can have.

 

9. Every time very healthy diets have been studied, they yield tremendous

results. Consider the references below, as well as this evidence about diet and

cancer, and diet and heart disease. In addition, the anecdotal evidence of my

15-year medical practice shows that not one of my active patients has had a

heart attack.

 

10. For you hardened skeptics: there is no downside whatsoever to eating healthy

food like fruits, vegetables, beans, legumes, nuts, and seeds. Try it for six

weeks. (The details are in Eat to Live.) You’ll feel great.

 

 

Dr. Fuhrman has day-to-day experience helping people prevent cancer and heart

disease with diet. He sees it working every day in his practice, and says this

study fails to focus on some of the most important findings in nutrition

research.

 

To win the war on cancer; these positive diet change must occur when we are

young.

 

When our cells are growing they expose their DNA to the damaging effects of low

nutrient and low phytochemical intake. The low consumption of fruits,

vegetables, beans, and nuts (only 5 percent of calories consumed by children)

results in our unstoppable and growing cancer epidemic. Research scientists have

been forced to accept the idea that the causes of cancer are usually set into

motion more than 50 years before diagnosis. Our big artillery in the war on

cancer is truly our in our kitchen; but we must start feeding our kids right to

unleash the big guns.

 

Even though the factors initiating cancer causation cannot be eliminated with

late-life dietary changes, nutritional excellence even later in life can have

dramatic effects at lowering cholesterol and preventing heart disease. But a

much more aggressive change in diet is required to achieve that degree of

protection than what was looked at in these recent studies. It has already been

established that a diet-style which contains a much larger percent of calories

from unrefined plant foods (ninety percent) has dramatic effects on the

occurrence of heart disease.

 

My vegetable-based diet was studied in the medical journal Metabolism in 2001

and was found to lower LDL cholesterol 33 percent and have dramatic effects on

cardiac disease markers. Similar plant-based dietary approaches, either

vegetarian or near-vegetarian containing mostly vegetables, bean, fruits, and

nuts, have also been shown to offer dramatic protection against heart disease,

even when adopted later in life.

 

 

And finally, some relevant studies to consider:

 

Jenkins DJ, Kendall CW, Popovich DG, et al. Effect of a very-high-fiber

vegetable, fruit, and nut diet on serum lipids and colonic function. Metabolism

2001 Apr;50(4):494-503.

 

Hu FB, Willett WC. Optimal diets for prevention of coronary heart disease. JAMA

2002 Nov 27;288(20):2569-2578.

 

Campbell TC, Parpia B, Chen J. Diet, lifestyle, and the etiology of coronary

artery disease: the Cornell China study. Am J Cardiol 1998 Nov

26;82(10B):18T-21T

 

Esselstyn CB. Resolving the Coronary Artery Disease Epidemic Through Plant-Based

Nutrition. 2001 Autumn;4(4):171-177

 

 

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