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

Hooray! The week’s finally over, time to eat. And this week Eating to Live on the Outside is heads to Carmelita Vegetarian Restaurant in Seattle, Washington. It looks good, lots of unique creations.

Okay, I’m staring at the online menu right now. Well, there’s not a ton of food to choose from, but definitely some interesting and creative options. Here’s what caught my eye:

Roasted pear salad, arugula, candied pistachios, Point Reyes bleu cheese and lemon-pistachio vinaigrette; I’m ditching the cheese.

Baby lettuces, Trampetti extra virgin olive oil, lemon and sea salt; I’m nixing the salt. The olive isn’t great. But I can deal with it.

White bean-quinoa cakes, Tagglasca olive tapenade, tomato relish, tomato gastrique and fried basil; the fried basil is a little iffy.

Grilled baby potato salad, green beans, smoked paprika vinaigrette and oil poached egg; no egg for me.

Butternut squash puree, Gruyere, candied pumpkin seeds, arugula and sage pesto; I’ll pass on the Gruyere, i.e. cheese.

Artisanal polenta cake, apple/sweet potato hash, foraged mushroom sauce and fried parsnip; the fried parsnip isn’t great. But I love mushrooms.

Farro Tagine, spicy walnut pesto, braised squash, Swiss chard and pomegranate molasses; greens and pomegranate, fantastic!

Wow, lots of exotic-sounding food at Carmelita’s! But if I had to pick, I’d go for the baby lettuce, olive oil, lemon salad or the butternut squash puree with arugula. Both look cool!

Carmelita’s might be slim-picking, but it still works! I dig it, but what about you? Check out Carmelita’s menu and tell me what you’d order. Until then, eat wisely. Peace.

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A New York foreign-currency trader was fired after his boss learned he was vegetarian. Ryan Pacifico was mocked and endured remarks like, "You don't even eat steak, dude. At what point in time did you realize you were gay?" And his former boss would go out of his way to make him feel uncomfortable, by ordering hamburgers and sausage pizza for weekly team meetings. Mr. Pacifico, a married tri-athlete, called the situation bizarre; The New York Post reports.

How silly. Being veggie is totally badass! Batman is a vegetarian. And Iron Man drinks green shakes. Actually, sometimes guys bust my chops about not eating meat, and doing Yoga, but they back off when I punch them in the face. Just kidding, I could care less.

In related news, earlier this month a group of flight attendants were fired for being too fat.

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Editor’s Note: This is a guest post from Steven Acocella, MS, DC, DACBN and does NOT necessarily represent the opinions of DiseaseProof or Dr. Fuhrman.

At the Beltsville Human Nutrition Research Center in Maryland and published in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association researchers evaluated the short to medium term weight loss results of popular diets. Popular diets: correlation to health, nutrition, and obesity grouped the most popular diets into categories based upon the prescribed ratios of energy for each macronutrient. If you remember from Nutrition 101, caloric energy comes from only 3 sources, fat, carbohydrate and protein. For example, diets such as The South Beach Diet and The Atkins Diet derive 50% or more calories from fat while Dr. Fuhrman’s Eat to Live derives the majority of energy from natural, unrefined carbohydrate.

The study looked at food intake over a 2 year period and included several hundred participants who followed the various diet styles compliantly. They then analyzed the relationship between a reduction of Body Mass Index (BMI), the diet style and the Healthy Eating Index (HEI).

The Healthy Eating Index scores were highest for the vegetarian or near vegetarian diet style and lowest for the low carbohydrate, high fat diets. Conversely, energy intake was highest for the Low Carbohydrate group, often exceeding the average accepted recommendations of 2000 Kcal/day or men and 1500 Kcal/day for women. This is strange considering these were weight loss eating plans that were followed intently.

The weight loss results were no surprise. The healthiest body mass was seen in the vegetarian group. A direct, proportional relationship was seen with a rise in the percentage of calories derived from fat and BMI. As the percentage of fat calories increased so did those subject’s BMI. Total calories were also directly related to the percentage of dietary fat with the average daily energy intake for the vegetarian or nearly vegetarian group consuming 1450 Kcal/day and the high fat diet group consuming 2200 Kcal/day. Researchers noted the relationship between the Healthy Eating Index verses calorie and fat percentages were inversely related.

Putting all this together, this important study using an excellent group of subjects has made the following observations: diets low in fat have the highest Healthy Eating Index scores and are generally the lowest in total calories. Those subjects on these diets enjoyed the most favorable BMI measurements and other biomarkers of health. Conversely, the high fat, low carbohydrate diet styles have the lowest Healthy Eating Index scores and those that consumed this diet style had poor BMI measurements and other indicators of health.

It is worth mentioning that the authors of this study discuss a review of the literature suggests that weight loss is independent of dietary composition and is solely a result of total calories consumed. They suggest that their findings, although supportive of this confers that successful, healthy weight loss over time is a function of quality as well as quantity.

UPDATE: Dr. Fuhrman had some thoughts on Steven’s post:

My health equation, Health = Nutrition / Calories is almost entirely ignored by the scientific community. If the micronutrient density index of a particular diet was published along with the other characteristics researchers would place less emphasis on the relative macronutrient composition and more on the micronutrient composition. Nevertheless, the long-term health potential of a given diet is based so much more on its micronutrient profile rather than its macronutrient profile.

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Wow, it’s finally Friday! Good, I’m pooped. But before I pack it in, we’ve got to knock out Eating to Live on the Outside and this week we’re taking an internet trip to Maine and checking out Green Elephant Vegetarian Bistro.

Okay, I just finished reading Green Elephant’s menu. It’s not perfect. I wouldn’t eat everything on it. But here’s what I might order:

Steamed Yellow & Green Beans

• Spicy peanut sauce, yellow beans and green beans; very simple, very good!

Asian Vegetable Stew

• Chinese broccoli, green mustard, cabbage, Napa cabbage, cauliflower, turnip, carrot and tofu; hopefully it’s low or no salt, because all those veggies are great.

Vegetable Clear Spicy Soup

• Mushroom, butternut squash, onion, tofu and hot basil; same worry about the salt, but lots of cool vegetables.

Spicy Green Leaves Salad

• Greens and spicy bean curd dressing; hard to beat greens.

Steam Assorted Vegetables with Peanut Sauce

• Broccoli, mushrooms, zucchini, sweet corn, snow peas, carrot, green beans, peanut sauce, 5-grain tempeh and brown rice; I’d ditch the tempeh and the rice isn’t the most nutrient-dense thing in the world, but I can deal with it and look at all those veggies!

Tofu Delight

• Stir-fried tofu, snow peas, carrots, zucchini, corn, bell pepper, onion, organic egg, celery, scallions, yellow curry sauce and served with buttercup squash and brown rice; I’m nixing the eggs and same thing with rice.

Peanut Curry

• Coconut milk, soy meat, chickpeas, sweet potato, carrots, onion, peanut curry, mashed buttercup squash and brown rice; no soy meat for me.

Tofu Tikka Masala

• Tofu, spinach, edamame, chickpeas, Masala curry sauce, served with brown rice seasoned with curry powder, peas, carrots and shallots; the edamame beans make this a lock for me. I love them!

Green Leaves Wrap with Mango & Herbs

• Mango, herbs, greens and tamarind dipping sauce; well, if the greens are the wraps, this sounds very intriguing. Mango is awesome.

Pineapple Brown Rice

• Brown rice, pineapple, sunflower seeds, soy meat, sweet corn, peas, carrots, scallions and organic egg; again with the rice and no egg for me.

Green Elephant works! Plenty of good stuff to satisfy your veggie desires. But if I had to pick, I’d order either the Steam Assorted Vegetables with Peanut Sauce or the Tofu Tikka Masala.

Now, I think Green Elephant is cool. But I’m a big dummy. So, what do you think? Flip through Green Elephant’s menu and let me know what you’d order. Until then, eat wisely! Peace.

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Two new studies, one in the American Journal of Roentgenology and the other in the British Medical Journal, cast doubt on the long-established Framingham Risk Score for evaluating cardiovascular disease. The Framingham score assesses risk based on age, gender, total blood cholesterol, HDL, smoking, blood pressure and taking blood pressure medication. The first study did not accurately predict risk for a group of 1,653 people with no history of heart disease and the second revealed the Framingham score did no better than chance in predicting the 108 deaths; HealthDay News reports.

Okay, I admit, this report made me woozy, way over my head! So I asked Dr. Fuhrman about it. Here’s what he had to say:

Medical studies are clouded when they only look at the symptoms of unhealthy behavior such as high cholesterol and high blood pressure. These easily measurable numbers correlate with unhealthful lifestyle and diet-style, but they could reflect past habits, not present ones, plus they are not the sole cause of heart attacks.

These numbers do not incorporate other more critical factors such as diet-style and exercise tolerance and body weight. So if one person had higher cholesterol but was eating significantly healthier and exercising more, they might be at significantly lower risk than a person with a lower cholesterol and blood pressure, but with more intravascular and cellular oxidative stress from their low nutrient diet.

Hopefully that clears it up for you. Now, in other heart-related news, a recent report showed even a little extra belly fat can increase cardiovascular risk. And, in attempt to curb his own heart troubles and those of his city, Chicago’s health commissioner is encouraging everyone to go vegetarian!

Like Dr. Fuhrman says, a vegetable-based diet is the best way to aggressively reverse heart disease!

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The windy city is well known for big beefy “Da Bears” fans, but Chicago Health Commissioner, Dr. Terry Mason, wants all Chicagoans to kick the deep dish pizza and go vegetarian. This January, Dr. Mason, a practicing urologist, won’t eat any meat. Dr. Mason, who has high cholesterol and had a coronary stent implanted in 2005, hopes his example will encourage others, especially African-Americans, who have a high rate of hypertension and high cholesterol, to cut harmful fatty foods; The Chicago Tribune reports.

Kudos to Dr. Mason! Lots of cool people have gone veggie. And who’s cooler than Batman! That’s right, the dark knight himself, Christian Bale, is a vegetarian. Even Batman knows fruits and vegetables offer excellent protection against cancer and heart disease reversal.

And switching to a vegetable-based diet is good for the planet too. Meat and other animal products strain the environment and require vast amounts of natural resources to produce, unlike fruits and vegetables which are far less taxing. So eat your veggies, lots of them!

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You shouldn’t eat a lot of meat. It’ll boost your risk of heart attack, cancer and other diseases. But the rearing of livestock also beats up the environment, polluting water supplies and generating huge amounts of greenhouse gases. That’s why many scientists are scrambling to repurpose cattle emissions, i.e. cow farts, burps and poop, into sources of energy, specifically methane fuel.

Now, those systems cost money and might not always be practical. So here’s a simpler solution, don’t eat as much meat! It doesn’t mean you have to go vegetarian, vegan or even flexitarian, but some experts insist if Americans cut meat consumption from 12 ounces per capita to only 3.1 ounces per day, roughly the size of a deck of cards, we’ll slow global climate change; Fresh Greens explains.

Not a bad idea. Especially when you consider Dr. Fuhrman’s food pyramid, he recommends eating foods like meat and dairy very infrequently.

Via Serious Eats.

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A funny thing happened yesterday. A couple months ago I switched Yoga studios. I like a vigorous practice and my old studio cut back on classes. Now, as luck would have it. My new studio is two doors down from a farmers market.

I’ve been shopping there for a while now. Here’s the stuff I bought yesterday: chicory, Bartlett pears, Bosc pears, broccoli, blueberries, red grapes, apricots and pineapple chunks. A smaller than average purchase for me, it only cost about 18 bucks.

Now, when it was my turn in line, the cashier, who I see every week and never makes small talk, asked me, “Hey, do you work in a restaurant? Because you always buy lots of stuff.” I smiled. I guess a short Italian guy buying bunches of produce every week does look like a restaurant owner, especially in New Jersey, the land of pizzerias and delis.

I laughed and told her no. To be brief, I explained I eat a vegetable-based diet and that I don’t eat meat. She wanted to know if I was a vegetarian. I said, “Sort of.” Telling her I eat fish once a week, but most of my diet is fruits and vegetables. She seemed to get it and thanked me for my repeat business.

So, has something like this ever happened to you? It wasn’t a first for me, but it was still pretty funny. Maybe I should open a restaurant. Apparently I look the part!
 

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