Disease Proof : Disease Proof : Health & Nutrition News & Commentary : Dr. Joel Fuhrman

It seems like commonsense to me: You want to lose weight? Eat lots of healthy nutrient-dense plant matter, exercise, and strictly limit health-destroying foods like saturated fats, refined grains, sodium, etc. This approach is too mystifying for some, though, and some are blaming the plate their food comes on. It has given rise to the smaller plate diet. MSNBC reports:

Want to lose weight? Try eating off smaller plates. A new study shows that using smaller bowls and spoons may curb the amount of food eaten.

"People could try using the size of their bowls and possibly serving spoons to help them better control how much they consume," write researchers in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.

"Those interested in losing weight should use smaller bowls and spoons, while those needing to gain weight — such as the undernourished or aged — could be encouraged to use larger ones," add Dr. Brian Wansink, of Cornell University, and colleagues.

In a previous post Dr. Fuhrman says worrying about portion sizes is misleading:

It is meaningless to compare foods by weight or portion size. Let me provide and example why this is the case. Take one teaspoon of melted butter, which gets 100 percent of its calories from fat. If I take that teaspoon of butter and mix it in a glass of hot water, I can now say that it is 98 percent-fat-free, by weight. One hundred percent of its calories are still from fat. It didn’t matter how much water or weight was added, did it?

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Next time you grab that novelty salt shaker, you might want to think twice before you rattle the contents of Mickey Mouse’s head all over your meal. Salt is far more insidious than most people realize. From Disease-Proof Your Child, here’s what Dr. Fuhrman has to say about it:

A large body of data illustrates that populations with low salt consumption have lower levels of blood pressure compared to populations with higher salt intake. In Japan and China, salt intakes are often as high as eighteen grams or more per day. Hypertension (high blood pressure) and stroke are the major causes of premature death in these nations. The National Center for Health Statistics reports that in the United States, the man salt intake is eight grams per day. This high intake of sodium assures that we have an elderly population with high blood pressure.

High salt intake, and resultant high blood pressure later in life, does not merely increase the risk and incidence of stroke. It also can lead to kidney failure, congestive heart failure, and heart attack.

Last week J.M. Hirsch of The Washington Post took a look at America’s fiend-like salt addiction. He offered up some stern words for the state of salt consumption in this country:

When it comes to health, it doesn't matter if it was mined in Kansas, solar-evaporated from the Mediterranean Sea or hand-harvested in French marshes. Salt is salt, the experts say, and it's bad for your health. Chances are you're eating way too much of it.

If you think setting down the shaker will make a difference, take that advice with a grain of salt. Most salt comes from processed foods and restaurants.

Someone should send this to “health guru” Dr. Joseph Mercola who, on his website, sells and touts the benefits of Himalayan Salt:

When you use pure Himalayan Crystal Salt, you receive 250,000,000 years of accumulated sunlight and energy, plus all the natural minerals your body needs for restoring balance and life force.

Although, dramatic claims like this aren’t the primary pushers of our salt addiction. In his article Hirsch points out processed and restaurant foods are the main culprits (not really a new concept for this blog):

For perspective, a McDonald's Quarter Pounder with Cheese contains nearly half a teaspoon of salt, while two slices of Pizza Hut Meat Lover's Stuffed Crust pizza has more than a teaspoon. Even most low-sodium canned soups contain nearly a quarter teaspoon.

And taste isn't always a good indicator. A serving of Cheerios has more salt than a serving of Ruffles potato chips.

Because processed and restaurant foods dominate the American diet, it can be hard to cut back—unless you eat out less and buy fewer processed foods.

Believe it or not, there can be life without salt, even the Himalayan variety. In Eat to Live Dr. Fuhrman offers up some suggestions for those trying to cut back or remove salt from their diets:

If you desire to salt your food, do so only after it is on the table and you are ready to eat it. It will taste saltier if the salt is right on the surface of the food. You can add lots of salt yet hardly taste it if the salt is added to the vegetables or soup while they are cooking. VegiZest instant soup mix has a nice salty flavor and can be added to salads or sprinkled on food. Use herbs, spices, lemon, vinegar, or other non-salt seasonings to flavor food. Condiments such as ketchup, mustard soy sauce, teriyaki sauce, and relish are very high in sodium, so if you can resist them, use the low sodium varieties sparingly.

And for those totally committed to eliminating salt or together, a salt free life can actually make eating more enjoyable. As discussed in a previous post: Warning Labels for Salt

If you don’t use salt, your taste buds adjust with time and your sensitivity to taste salt improves. When you are using lots of salt in your diet, it weakens your taste for salt and makes you fell that food tastes bland unless it is heavily seasoned or spiced. The DASH study observed the same phenomenon that I have noted for years—it took sometime for one’s salt-saturated taste buds to get used to a low sodium level. If you follow my nutritional recommendations, without compromise, avoiding all processed foods or highly salted foods, your ability to detect and enjoy the subtle flavors in fruits and vegetables will improve as well.

According to Dr. Fuhrman if you’re a vegan or vegetarian you’ve got even more reasons to avoid salt. Check out this post: Salt: Potentially More Dangerous For Vegans and Vegetarians

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From Dr. Fuhrman's book Eat to Live:

It is meaningless to compare foods by weight or portion size. Let me provide and example why this is the case. Take one teaspoon of melted butter, which gets 100 percent of its calories from fat. If I take that teaspoon of butter and mix it in a glass of hot water, I can now say that it is 98 percent-fat-free, by weight. One hundred percent of its calories are still from fat. It didn’t matter how much water or weight was added, did it?

In fact, if a food’s weight were important, it would be easy to lose weight, we would just have to drink more water. The water would trigger the weight receptors in the digestive tract and our appetite would diminish. Unfortunately, this is not the way our body’s appestat—the brain center in the hypothalamus that controls food intake—is controlled. As I’ve explained in the past, bulk calories and nutrient fulfillment, not the weight of the food, turn off our appestat. Since the foods Americans consume are so calorie-rich, we have all been trying to diet by eating small portions of low-nutrient foods. We not only have to suffer hunger but also wind up with perverted cravings because we are nutrient-deficient to boot.

We must consume a certain level of calories daily to feel satisfied. So now I ask you to completely rethink what you consider a typical portion size. To achieve superior health and a permanently thin physique, you should eat large portions of green foods. When considering any green plant food, remember to make the portion size huge by conventional standards. Eating large portions of these super-healthy foods is the key to your success.

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The Weston A. Price web site states that “people with high cholesterol live the longest,” and that it is a myth that “for good health, serum cholesterol should be less 180 mg/dl,” adding, “There is no greater risk for heart disease, even at levels as high as 1,000 mg/dl.” This doesn’t jive with every respected scientific authority in the world and is utterly ridiculous in light of thousands of respectable studies.

WAPF correctly points out that processed foods, sugar, corn syrup, and white flour are harmful, but nutritional deficiencies caused by “junk foods” are not remedied by a diet high in meat and butter, animal products that are devoid of plant-derived phytonutrients, which promote health and slow the “aging” process. By contrast, the saturated fat in meat and butter raises cholesterol and is one of the significant causes of heart disease.

Nourishing Traditions, by Sally Fallon and Mary Enig, is a smorgasbord of woefully outdated and potentially dangerous advice. For example, “If you cannot get your family to eat organ meats when served as such, there are plenty of ways to add them to their food without their knowledge…Poached brains can be chopped up and added to any ground meat dish, as can grated raw liver.” Even if it were not so clearly known that animal products in general need to be strictly limited in the diet, common sense should tell us not to eat the brains of animals in light of what is know about Mad Cow disease and its human equivalent, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.

Nourishing Traditions is full of bad science and illogical reasoning and its appeal is dependent on people’s ignorance about nutrition. Fallon and Enig perpetuate long-held nutritional myths by referencing the same people who started the myths in the first place.

Nutrition is a complicated subject, and it takes familiarity with a comprehensive body of scientific studies and articles to devise recommendations to prevent disease and promote longevity. Science is not perfect, but evidence builds on prior studies, and ongoing research attempts to test each hypothesis and check validity in an unbiased manner. Today, we have a comprehensive body of knowledge with over 15,000 articles written since the 1950s documenting the link between a diet high in saturated fat and low in fresh fruits, nuts, seeds, vegetables, and beans and the increased risk of cancer and heart disease.

While Nourishing Traditions has over 200 references, many are antiquated, with poor observations. For the most part, the authors reference their own articles and those of other Weston A. Price Foundation authors. Only fourteen of the references are from peer-reviewed journals published in the last ten years, and for most of those fourteen, the authors misrepresented what was stated in the articles. By contrast, my book Eat to Live contains over 1,000 medical references to peer-reviewed medical journals.

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No. For example, Inuit Greenlanders, who historically have had limited access to fruits and vegetables, have the worst longevity statistics in North America. Research from the past and present shows that they die on the average about 10 years younger and have a higher rate of cancer than the overall Canadian population.1

Similar statistics are available for the high meat-consuming Maasai in Kenya. They eat a diet high in wild hunted meats and have the worst life expectancy in the modern world. Life expectancy is 45 years for women and 42 years for men. African researchers report that, historically, Maasai rarely lived beyond age 60. Adult mortality figures on the Kenyan Maasai show that they have a 50% chance of dying before the age of 59.2

We now know that greatly increasing the consumption of vegetables, legumes, fruits, and raw nuts and seeds (and greatly decreasing the consumption of animal products) offers profound increased longevity potential, due in large part to broad symphony of life-extending phytochemical nutrients that a vegetable-based diet contains. By taking advantage of the year-round availability of high-quality plant foods, we have a unique opportunity to live both healthier and longer than ever before in human history.

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