Blogs: Health

Go Nuts for Breast Cancer Prevention

2013-06-18T12:00:00Z

The Black Women’s Health Study I profiled in my last blog Prevent Breast Cancer by Any Greens Necessary was out of Boston University. Across the Charles River, the Harvard Nurse’s Health Study also tried to determine which plants may be particularly protective in reducing breast cancer risk.

They looked at intake of fiber and nuts during adolescence and the incidence of fibrocystic breast disease. Fibroadenomas are noncancerous breast lumps, but are considered a marker for increased breast cancer risk. Depending on what lumpectomy biopsies show, benign lumps can indicate anywhere from 30% to 1,300% greater risk of women with fibrocystic breasts going on to develop cancer later in life. Breast cancer can take decades to develop, so the researchers wanted to start early, asking women what their diets were like in high school.

We’ve known in adulthood that consuming more fiber is associated with a lower risk of breast cancer, and this new research suggests the same when you’re younger. Women who had the most fiber intake during adolescence have a 25% lower risk of developing potentially precancerous breast disease.

But there’s fiber in all whole plant foods—fruits, vegetables, beans, whole grains, nuts, and seeds. Did any class of plant foods stick out?

Nut consumption was found to be particularly protective. Just two servings a week was associated with a 36% lower risk. That raises the question, though. Which type of nuts? Do peanut butter and jelly sandwiches count or do you have to eat true nuts, like almonds or pecans? See my 3-min video Tree Nuts or Peanuts for Breast Cancer Prevention? to find out.

Harvard researchers also found that fiber and nut consumption was associated with a significantly longer lifespan in women. See my 2-min. video What Women Should Eat to Live Longer, one of my top ten most popular videos of 2012.

Soy food consumption during adolescence also seems particularly protective. See my 3-min. video Why Do Asian Women Have Less Breast Cancer?.

What effect might even just a few days on a diet full of plants have on breast cancer cell growth? See my 4-min. video Answer to the Pritikin Puzzle.

Don’t nuts make you fat, though? You’d be surprised—check out Nuts and Obesity: The Weight of Evidence.

-Michael Greger, M.D.

PS: If you haven’t yet, you can subscribe to my videos for free by clicking here and watch 2012-2013 year-in-review presentation Uprooting the Leading Causes of Death.

Image credit: Steve Parker/Flickr

Meet the Forks Over Knives Doctor In Person on June 23rd!!!

2013-06-15T17:34:55Z

One of the most delightful segments of the blockbuster documentary was Dr. Terry Mason, the Cook County Medical Commission. In a rare Southern California appearance he will be speaking with Dr. Baxter Montgomery (the Vegan Cardiologist from Houston Texas) and founder of the CHIP program Dr. Hans Diehl at Healthy Taste of The South Bay.

There will be a catered lunch by Chef Babette Davis of Stuff I Eat restaurant and culinary presentations by Chef Eric LeChasseur of Seed Kitchen, Sanae Suzuki and Chef AJ. Tickets are available at www.HealthyTasteOnLine.com. All food is whold food plant based and OIL-FREE!!! Recipes of the chef's presesntation will be given out.

The event takes place at Torrance Memeorial Hosptial from 9am-4pm on Sunday, June 23rd and will not be live streamed. Tickets are only $99. Whether you want to improve your health, lose weight or just feel great, this event is not to be missed.

Prevent Breast Cancer by Any Greens Necessary

2013-06-13T12:00:00Z

Recently a study of 50,000 African-American women was published, a sadly neglected demographic when it comes to nutritional science and, in fact, medical research generally. Certain African populations were among the healthiest on earth, inspiring one of America’s lifestyle medicine pioneers Nathan Pritikin (see my 2-min. video Engineering a Cure). Sadly, African-Americans currently suffer disproportionately from chronic diseases. The good news is that many of the diseases—such as high blood pressure and diabetes—can be prevented, stopped, and even reversed with a healthy plant-based diet.

The Black Women’s Health Study investigated fruit and vegetable intake in relation to risk of breast cancer. Those who listened to mom and ate their veggies had a significantly lower risk of the most difficult type of breast cancer to treat (estrogen-receptor negative). Were any plants found particularly protective?

Which was associated with lowest breast cancer risk in African-American women? Apples, bananas, broccoli, cabbage, cantaloupe, carrots, collard greens, grapefruit, oranges, spinach, tomatoes, or sweet potatoes? Check out my 3-min. video Preventing Breast Cancer By Any Greens Necessary to find out the answer.

For more on breast cancer prevention and diet, see my posts from last week Mushrooms For Breast Cancer Prevention and Why Less Breast Cancer in Asia?

Why Less Breast Cancer in Asia?

2013-06-11T12:00:00Z

Though breast cancer is the most common cancer among women around the world, the rate in some areas of the world, such as Asia, is up to six-fold lower than in North America. Maybe it’s the green tea and soy?

As I show in my 3-min. video Why Do Asian Women Have Less Breast Cancer?, if anything, green tea may only drop risk by about a third. Soy works better, but only, it appears, if you start young. Soy intake throughout the lifecycle is associated with decreased breast cancer risk, but the strongest, most consistent effect is for childhood intake, cutting the risk of later breast cancer by as much as half. If you don’t start consuming soy until your teens or adulthood, though, then soy is only associated with about a 25% drop in breast cancer risk. I have another video on Breast Cancer Survival and Soy, though it may be possible to overdo it.

Combined, green tea and soy consumption would only account for maybe for a two-fold difference in breast cancer risk—not 6-fold, so researchers looked into what else Asian women were eating. In my last post Mushrooms For Breast Cancer Prevention I presented evidence that plain, cheap, widely available white mushrooms appear able to outsmart breast cancer cells that try to make their own estrogen. That was based on placental tissue samples, though. Check out my 2-min video Breast Cancer vs. Mushrooms to see mushrooms stacked up against the real thing.

Given the intriguing mushroom experiments, researchers asked a thousand breast cancer patients how many mushrooms they ate. Then they asked the same question to a thousand healthy women who they tried to match to the cancer patients as closely as possible—same age, height, weight, exercise, smoking status, etc. Based on those answers they calculated that women who averaged at least a certain daily serving size of mushrooms appeared to drop their odds of getting breast cancer 64%! What was that average serving size? Half of a mushroom a day.

Who eats half a mushroom? Well, that was averaged over a month. So compared to women who didn’t regularly eat any mushrooms, those who ate just 15 a month appeared to dramatically lower their risk of breast cancer. Similar protection was found for dried mushrooms.

Combining mushroom consumption with green tea—sipping a half teabag’s worth of green tea every day along with eating that half a mushroom—was associated with nearly a 90% drop in breast cancer odds.

Green tea may also help account for the Asian Paradox. Which type is best? See Antimutagenic Activity of Green Versus White Tea. And what may be the best way to prepare it? See Cold Steeping Green Tea.

-Michael Greger, M.D.

PS: If you haven’t yet, you can subscribe to my videos for free by clicking here and watch my 2012-2013 year-in-review presentation Uprooting the Leading Causes of Death.

Mushrooms For Breast Cancer Prevention

2013-06-06T12:00:00Z

Breast cancer can take decades to develop, so "early" detection via mammogram may be too late. The breast cancer you may feel one day as a lump in the shower, may have started 20 years ago. We now suspect that all the epithelial cancers: breast, colon, lung, pancreas, prostate, ovarian—the ones that cause the vast majority of cancer deaths—take up to 20 years or more to manifest. By the time it’s picked up it may have already been growing, maturing, scheming for years, acquiring hundreds of new survival-of-the-fittest mutations to grow even quicker and better undermine our immune system. Early detection may in effect be really, really late detection.

People are considered “healthy” until they show symptoms, so if we’ve been harboring a malignancy for 20 years we may feel all right, but we haven’t been. Thus, many people who do the right thing and improve their diet in hopes of preventing cancer may, at that very moment, be treating it as well. In this way, cancer prevention and treatment may sometimes be the same thing.

What new developments are there are in the battle against breast cancer? Well, most breast tumors are estrogen receptor positive, meaning they respond to estrogen; estrogen makes them grow. The problem for tumors in postmenopausal women is that there isn’t much estrogen around—unless of course you take it in a drug like Premarin (so-named because it’s made from pregnant mare urine). Premarin appears to increase the risk of breast cancer (as well as strokes, heart attacks, and blood clots). Unfortunately, the plant-based bioidentical hormone replacement therapies don’t appear any safer (see my 4-min. video Plant-Based Bioidentical Hormones).

Thankfully millions of women stopped taking Premarin in 2002, and we saw a nice dip in breast cancer rates. Unfortunately, those rates have since stagnated. Hundreds of thousands of American women continue to get the dreaded diagnosis every year. So what next?

Well, with no estrogen around, many breast tumors devise a nefarious plan—they’ll just make their own! Seventy percent of breast cancer cells synthesize estrogen themselves using an enzyme called aromatase. In response, drug companies have produced a number of aromatase inhibitor drugs that are used as chemotherapy agents. Of course by the time you’re on chemo it can be too late, so researchers started screening hundreds of natural dietary components in hopes of finding something that targets this enzyme.

To do this you need a lot of human tissue. Where are you going to get it from? To study skin, for example, researchers use discarded human foreskins from circumcision. They’re just being thrown away–might as well use them! Where are you going to get discarded female tissue? Placentas. They got a bunch of women to donate their placentas after giving birth to further this critical line of research.

After years of searching, they found seven vegetables with significant anti-aromatase activity. You can see the graph in my video Vegetables Versus Breast Cancer. Bell peppers, broccoli, carrots, celery, green onions, and spinach dropped aromatase activity by about 20%, but mushrooms forced down the estrogen-producing enzyme more than 60%.

Which mushroom worked best? Woodear, crimini, oyster, Italian brown, enoki, button, stuffing, shiitake, chanterelle, or Portobello mushrooms? Don’t even try to guess—you won’t get it! Check out my 2-min video Breast Cancer Prevention: Which Mushroom Is Best? for the answer.

More on the magic of mushrooms in Making Our Arteries Less Sticky and Constructing a Cognitive Portfolio. Probably a good idea to cook them, though: Toxins in Raw Mushrooms.

I also have videos on breast cancer risk in relation to apples, broccoli, exercise, flax seeds, green tea, greens, meat, melatonin, saturated fat, soy, and trans fat.

-Michael Greger, M.D.

PS: If you haven’t yet, you can subscribe to my videos for free by clicking here and watch my 2012 year-in-review presentation Uprooting the Leading Causes of Death.

Plant-Based Diets for Metabolic Syndrome

2013-06-04T12:00:00Z

Metabolic syndrome, also known as syndrome X, is a medical disorder characterized by the so-called “deadly quartet”: abdominal obesity, high fasting blood sugars, high triglycerides, and high blood pressure. Metabolic syndrome can set people up for liver disease, stroke, diabetes, cancer, and heart disease. It’s been estimated to afflict about a quarter of the American population. How do we stop it and how can we prevent it?

Well, if it has to do with obesity, the level of fat in the blood, and high blood pressure then that would seem like a job for plant-based nutrition. In my 2012-2013 year-in-review presentation Uprooting the Leading Causes of Death I address the role diet may play in preventing, arresting, and reversing our top 15 killers, including many related conditions. We didn't have data on metabolic syndrome specifically, though, until now.

The results can be seen in my 2-min. video Metabolic Syndrome and Plant-Based Diets. Even after controlling for lifestyle factors such as smoking and exercise, risk was highest in those eating non-vegetarian, intermediate for those eating semi-vegetarian, and lowest in those eating vegetarian, cutting the odds of having metabolic syndrome by more than half.

We see that same step-wise progression towards lower disease risk the more plant-based one’s diet gets with high blood pressure, cataracts, diabetes, and obesity.

To maximize benefits it appears we have to move towards maximizing the proportion of plants in our diet, but it’s not all or nothing. Just adding more healthy plant foods to crowd out some of the animal and junk foods in the diet may offer significant protection. For example, consumption of three portions of whole grains a day appears as powerful as high blood pressure medications in alleviating hypertension. An analysis of a bunch of randomized drug trials suggests that taking blood pressure lowering drugs may reduce the risk of getting a heart attack by 15% and the risk of getting a stroke by about 25%, the same benefits attributed to three daily servings of whole grains. Some grains appear to be more protective than others, though. Watch my 2-min. video Whole Grains May Work As Well As Drugs to find out which may work better.

More on refined versus whole grains can be found in Great Grain Robbery and Is White Bread Good For You? Whole grains may in fact extend our lifespan (What Women Should Eat to Live Longer), but what about the phytates in whole grains? See New Mineral Absorption Enhancers Found. And see Antioxidants in a Pinch for how to make your morning oatmeal even healthier.

-Michael Greger, M.D.

PS: If you haven’t yet, you can subscribe to my videos for free by clicking here.

Image credit: Tunstall Telehealthcare / Flickr

Plant-Based Diets for Psoriasis

2013-05-30T12:00:00Z

Plant-based diets appear to decrease inflammation via a variety of mechanisms, including boosting our adrenal gland function. Glucocorticoids are circulating steroid hormones produced by our adrenal glands that suppress inflammation and also help our kidneys excrete potassium. When we eat a lot of potassium-rich foods our adrenal glands secrete more glucocorticoids to keep our potassium levels in check, which may have the side effect of decreasing the level of inflammation in the body. See my 3-min video Potassium and Autoimmune Disease for the effect this may have on autoimmune diseases such as psoriasis.

Where is potassium found? See my post last week, 98% of American Diets Potassium Deficient. Hint: bananas don’t even make the top 50 sources!

What about autoimmune arthritis? See my previous post Plant-Based Diets for Rheumatoid Arthritis and my videos Preventing Arthritis and Diet & Rheumatoid Arthritis. Eating healthier doesn’t improve everyone’s joint pain, but as with all nontoxic treatment modalities, they should always be tried first.

Plant-based diets may help with other pain syndromes:

as well as other hypersensitivity diseases:

-Michael Greger, M.D.

PS: If you haven’t yet, you can subscribe to my videos for free by clicking here and watch my 2012 year-in-review presentation Uprooting the Leading Causes of Death. My 2013 review should be out in July.

Image credit: HoskingIndustries / Flickr

Rheumatoid Arthritis - What Is It & How To Treat It

2013-05-29T07:47:14Z

Arthritis is a growing and leading public health concern in many developed countries. In the United States, it's the number one cause of disability, and its prevalence is rising due to the increase in obesity and age amongst the population [1]. In fact, data from the CDC found that 22.2% (49.9 million) adults age ≥ 18 had self-reported doctor-diagnosed arthritis. 42.4% of these arthritis sufferers reported limitations in their daily activity level because of the disease.

Arthritis is also an expensive disease, costing a total of $128 billion annually in the United States [1]. Clearly, this chronic condition warrants serious attention in our efforts to prevent, limit, or even reverse the debilitating effects it has on individuals.

Read rest of article here.

Dr. Greger's Natural Nausea Remedy Recipe

2013-05-28T12:00:00Z

I travel a lot. When I was on the road full time, there were months I'd give over 40 presentations in 30 days across dozens of cities. My speaking schedule is still fuller than I'd like (especially now that I can save lives online in my jammies!), but I do love meeting folks face to face. One problem I've always had, though, is motion sickness. Whether in planes, trains, or automobiles I've struggled my whole life getting nauseated in moving vehicles

As a physician I can prescribe myself an array of powerful anti-nausea drugs, but I've always strived to find natural remedies for myself and my patients to avert the risks of side-effects (which take the lives of more than 100,000 Americans every year).

As I noted in my video Dangerous Advice From Health Food Store Employees, ginger has been found to be an effective remedy for nausea. Though used for thousands of years in traditional healing systems (in India it's known as maha aushadhi, meaning "the great medicine"), ginger wasn't proven to reduce nausea until 1982 when it beat out Dramamine in a head-to-head test in volunteers spun blindfolded in a tilted rotating chair. Ginger is now considered a nontoxic broad-spectrum antiemetic (anti-vomiting agent) effective in countering nausea during motion sickness, pregnancy, chemo, radiation, and after surgery.

I've tried nearly every ginger candy, chew, syrup, tea, ale and gum on the market and found them to be uniformly wimpy. At the other end of spectrum I've cringed on an eye-watering variety of fresh ginger extracts and glycerites. I needed to find something that packed a punch without actually burning my mouth. That's how this recipe was born:

Lemon-Ginger Apple Chews

1 whole peeled lemon

1 hand of ginger

1 finger of turmeric root (omit for use during pregnancy)

4 apples, thinly sliced

Liquify the lemon, ginger, and turmeric in a high speed blender. Coat the apple slices with the blended mixture and place in a dehydrater until desired chewiness. I like them a little moist, but they can be also be dehydrated further into crispy apple chips for longer storage. For me, a few pieces eaten about 20 minutes before travel works wonders.

I imagine mangoes would work well too. Please let me know in the comment section below if you come up with any yummy variations.

Ginger is generally considered safe during pregnancy, but the maximum recommended daily dose of fresh ginger during pregnancy is 20 grams (about 4 teaspoons of freshly grated). More than that may have uterine-stimulating effects. So those using these to combat morning sickness should spread this recipe out over several days. There is insufficient safety data regarding the use of turmeric during pregnancy, and so the turmeric should be omitted from the recipe for use for morning sickness. And because of the soluble oxalates in turmeric, even if not pregnant I wouldn't recommend eating more than a half a batch a day.

Ginger also has all sorts of other wonderful properties. See for example Plants vs. Pesticides and Amyloid and Apple Juice. Reducing Radiation Damage With Ginger And Lemon Balm from my volume 13 DVD should be up on NutritionFacts.org in a month or so.

Dried apples are pretty amazing in their own right. See Dried Apples Versus Cholesterol. Make sure to cut off brown spots (Fungal Toxins in Apples) and leave them unpeeled (Apple Skin: Peeling Back Cancer). Which apple may be best? I just use whatever I can find at my local farmer's market, but feel free to check out my video The Healthiest Apple. And if you're wondering why the lemon? You probably missed Which Fruit Fights Cancer Better?

-Michael Greger, M.D.

PS: If you haven’t yet, you can subscribe to my videos for free by clicking here and watch my 2012 year-in-review presentation Uprooting the Leading Causes of Death.

98% of American Diets Potassium Deficient

2013-05-23T12:00:00Z

Less than 2% of Americans achieve even the recommended minimum adequate intake of potassium due, primarily, to inadequate plant food intake.

If you take any plant, burn it to ash, throw the ash in a pot of water, stir it around, skim it off and then let the water evaporate, you’ll be left with a white residue at the bottom known as pot ash. It has been used since the dawn of history for everything from making soap, glass, fertilizers, and bleach. It was not until 1807, though, when a new element was discovered in this so-called vegetable alkali. They called it pot ashium—potassium. True story, which I bring up only to emphasize the most concentrated source in our diet, plants.

Every cell in the body requires the element potassium to function. As I detail in my 2-min. video 98% of American Diets Potassium Deficient, for much of the last 3 million years or so, we ate so many plants that we probably got 10,000 mg of potassium in our daily diet. Today, we’d be lucky to get 3,000.

Less than 2% of Americans even get the recommended minimum adequate intake of 4,700 a day. To get even the adequate intake, the average American would have to eat like 5 more bananas worth of potassium a day. 98% of Americans eat potassium deficient diets, primarily because they don’t eat enough plants.

Why do we care? A review of all the best studies ever done on potassium intake and it’s relationship to two of our top killers, stroke and heart disease, was recently published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology. A 1600 mg per day higher potassium intake was associated with a 21% lower risk of stroke. That still wouldn’t get the average American up to the minimum adequate intake, but it might be able to wipe out a fifth of their stroke risk. The paper concludes: “These results support recommendations for higher consumption of potassium-rich foods to prevent vascular diseases.”

What does “potassium-rich foods” mean? Find out in my 2-min. video 98% of American Diets Potassium Deficient. Hint: bananas don’t even make it into the top 50 sources!

People eating plant-based diets are often asked where they get their protein (and have to explain that plants are the preferred source). Maybe they should then ask where people eating conventional diets get their potassium–or their fiber for that matter, see Relieving Yourself of Excess Estrogen. For more on what we evolved to eat, see Paleolithic Lessons.

The banana listing reminds me of a similarly humorous finding about the levels of eyesight-saving nutrients in eggs versus greens. See Egg Industry Blind Spot. Bananas are also kind of pitiful antioxidant-wise (see Best Berries). Is it worth going out of our way to eat plants with the most antioxidants? See Anti-Inflammatory Antioxidants to find out.

-Michael Greger, M.D.

PS: If you haven’t yet, you can subscribe to my videos for free by clicking here and watch my 2012 year-in-review presentation Uprooting the Leading Causes of Death.

Image credit: 24oranges.nl / Flickr

Plant-Based for ALL Patients! Says Kaiser Permanente.

2013-05-22T11:35:42Z

Finally some much needed CLARITY from the "system"

In their Spring 2013 Journal, America's largest managed care company and hospital system has taken a bold stand on the superiority of plant-based nutrition to promote health. This is big news and deserves widespread distribution. Please share this blog with your doctor.

"Physicians should consider recommending a plant-based diet to all their patients...encouraging whole, plant-based foods and discouraging meats, dairy products, and eggs as well as all refined and processed foods."

Background. Although our medical doctors receive little if any nutritional training in med school, they are the primary gatekeepers when it comes to advising patients about what they should be eating. And since most of the doctors eat the Standard American Diet (the S.A.D.) themselves, naturally that is what they advise their patients to eat. That practice has resulted in the sickest nation on Earth with by far the highest cost of healthcare. But things are finally beginning to change.

From the Spring 2013 Kaiser Permanente Journal

The objective of this article is to present to physicians an update on plant-based diets. Concerns about the rising cost of health care are being voiced nationwide, even as unhealthy lifestyles are contributing to the spread of obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease. For these reasons, physicians looking for cost-effective interventions to improve health outcomes are becoming more involved in helping their patients adopt healthier lifestyles.

Healthy eating may be best achieved with a plant-based diet, which we define as a regimen that encourages whole, plant-based foods and discourages meats, dairy products, and eggs as well as all refined and processed foods.

Research shows that plant-based diets are cost-effective, low-risk interventions that may lower body mass index, blood pressure, HbA1C, and cholesterol levels. They may also reduce the number of medications needed to treat chronic diseases and lower ischemic heart disease mortality rates. Physicians should consider recommending a plant-based diet to all their patients, especially those with high blood pressure, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, or obesity.

Of all the diets recommended over the last few decades to turn the tide of these chronic illnesses, the best but perhaps least common may be those that are plant based...Despite the strong body of evidence favoring plant-based diets, including studies showing a willingness of the general public to embrace them, many physicians are not stressing the importance of plant- based diets as a first-line treatment for chronic illnesses. This could be because of a lack of awareness of these diets or a lack of patient education resources. (See link below to view the complete Kaiser Pemanente Journal source document.)

Click here to continue reading this article.

—J. Morris Hicks, board member, T. Colin Campbell Foundation

Three Reasons To Read Whole Now

2013-05-22T06:59:34Z

Why Whole Is the Must-Read Nutrition Book of Our Century

If you read only one book for the entire rest of your life, Whole: Rethinking the Science of Nutrition, should be it. T Colin Campbell, PhD, the book's pioneering author, shatters the current ways of thinking about nutrition with a compelling blueprint for a revolutionary alternative.

Here are three reasons to put aside whatever else you are working on, go out or online and get hold of Whole now, and read this groundbreaking work.

WHOLE WILL TRANSFORM YOUR UNDERSTANDING OF NUTRITION

At its core, Whole aims to revolutionize your understanding of food and nutrition. You may be wondering about questions such as:

Which foods are magic bullets for vibrant health?
What are the most essential nutrients?
If I have a specific illness or risk factor, which foods are most effective for healing?
How can I make sure I absorb all the nutrients in the foods I eat?

Guess what. These are the wrong questions to be asking!

Dr. Campbell shows you these are reductionist questions that spring from a paradigm (way of seeing the world) that breaks food down into its individual components, studying each in isolation in a simplistic one-cause-one-effect model.

Your body does not work that way. For example, the amount of a food nutrient that is absorbed depends very much on the amount your body needs. Once in your body, that nutrient interacts in intricate ways we don't even begin to understand with thousands of other components of your biochemistry, which changes from second to second. All foods are webs of tens of thousands of interlinked substances, and it's a mistake to focus on one or a few of these since they all interact.

Just as destructively to understanding how to achieve health, science gives high prestige and lots of funding to genetic research. The accepted belief is that tinkering with genes that have evolved over billions of years is a high-tech way to cure disease.

Such reductionist approaches are profoundly disempowering. You must rely on medical specialists. No one, not even a PhD researcher, can keep up with more than a tiny fraction of research in specialties that grow increasingly narrow. You may believe DNA is destiny, and you have no good way to rescue your health from a "bad" genetic inheritance.

The message of Whole is enormously hopeful. Your body is a complex, self-governing system that has a mind of its own on how to absorb and use the thousands of nutrients in food. Every part of your anatomy and biochemistry is intricately connected to other parts and to the whole system that is you.

Tinkering with your body to treat each individual organ or illness with its own compartmentalized strategy has to backfire, causing more problems than it solves. However, a wholistic approach centered on a whole foods, plant-based diet can prevent your less desirable genetic potential from ever getting expressed and is the basis for achieving and maintaining balanced functioning. By feeding your body the food it was designed to thrive on, you address the root causes of illness, not just the symptoms.

Discover more reasons to read Whole now by clicking here

Plant-Based Diets for Multiple Sclerosis

2013-05-21T12:00:00Z

The distinguished neurologist Roy Swank‘s low saturated fat diet remains the “most effective treatment of multiple sclerosis ever reported in the peer review literature.” In patients with early stage MS, 95% were without progression of their disease 34 years after adopting his meat and dairy-restricted diet. Even patients with initially advanced disease showed significant benefit. To date, no medication or invasive procedure has ever come close to demonstrating such success.

To understand one reason why a plant-based diet may be so successful in treating the disabling auto-immune disease, one has to first understand how the immune system works. This was one of the greatest mysteries in all of biology—solved by a brilliant scientist who won the Nobel in 1960 for figuring it out.

As I illustrate in my 3-min. video Clonal Selection Theory of Immunity, each one of our antibody-producing immune cells, called B-cells, produces only one type of antibody. Antibodies are one of the main weapons our immune system uses to attack foreign invaders. And they’re specific. It’s not just like we have one B-cell that covers grass pollen and another that covers bacteria, we have a B-cell in our body whose only job is to make antibodies against the pollen of purple Siberian oniongrass! (whether or not we ever come in contact with it). Another whose only job is to make antibodies against the tail proteins of bacteria that live only in the thermal vents at the bottom of the ocean…

Wait a second. There must be a billion different things in the world. If each of our B cells produces only one type of antibody, then we’d need to have a billion different types of B cells. And we do!

So, let’s suppose one day you’re walking along and get attacked by a platypus (they have poison spurs on their heels you know). And so for your whole life up until that point the B-cell in your body that produces antibodies against duck-billed platypus venom was just hanging around, twiddling its thumbs, until that very moment. As soon as the venom is detected that specific B-cell starts dividing like crazy, making copies of itself, and soon you have a whole swarm of clones specialized for platypus poison protection. Fending off the toxin, you live happily ever after. That is how the immune system works. Aren’t our bodies spectacular?

If we have a billion different types of antibody-producing B cells, each capable of recognizing a different molecular signature, why then do we tend not to attack ourselves? And how can what we eat sometimes undermine this inherent protection from autoimmune disease?

As I describe in my 3-min video Clonal Deletion Theory of Immunity, the reason that we don't often fall prey to friendly fire is because before we’re even born we kill off each and every B cell that recognizes us. That’s what our thymus gland is for. When we’re still a fetus, our body lines up all our immune cells, holds up a picture of our self and asks them one by one: "do you recognize this person?" And if any of our immune cells says yes, they’re killed on the spot, death by apopotosis (programmed cell death) and good riddance.

Turns out this process of ridding our bodies of self-recognizing immune cells happens throughout our lives, mostly in our bone marrow. If you remember, though, in my video series on IGF-1 (starting with The Answer to the Pritikin Puzzle) animal protein consumption increases the level of a cancer-promoting growth hormone that prevents apoptosis, prevents our body’s killing of cells it wants to get rid—that’s why IGF-1 levels are linked to cancer. So IGF-1 might contribute to the inappropriate survival of self-reactive white blood cells in autoimmune or inflammatory conditions. Maybe that’s why people who eat plant-based diets appear protected from autoimmune diseases, explaining, for example, the extraordinary rarity of most autoimmune diseases among sub-Saharan rural blacks following a traditional plant-based diet. Before they changed their diets, evidently not a single case of MS had been diagnosed among a population of 15 million.

-Michael Greger, M.D.

PS: If you haven’t yet, you can subscribe to my videos for free by clicking here and watch my 2012 year-in-review presentation Uprooting the Leading Causes of Death.

Image credit: GerryShaw / Wikimedia Commons

Plant-Based Diets for Rheumatoid Arthritis

2013-05-16T12:00:00Z

Plant-based diets may help rheumatoid arthritis by decreasing exposure to an inflammatory “Trojan horse” compound found in animal products called Neu5Gc. On Tuesday in my post How Tumors Use Meat to Grow I talked about the role Neu5Gc may play in stimulating breast cancer growth, but what about inflammation in our joints?

For those of you who have been following my work since the beginning, you’ll remember back in 2003 I covered a landmark paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences entitled “Human intake and incorporation of an immunogenic nonhuman dietary sialic acid.” They took autopsy samples and discovered proof of Neu5Gc in human tumors. In my video The Inflammatory Meat Molecule Neu5Gc you can see it stained brown in human breast cancer, melanoma, brain tumors, and ovarian cancer.

The presence of Neu5Gc in human tumors mystified researchers, because human beings are genetically unable to produce this substance. But other animals can. Maybe, the researchers proposed, human beings absorbed it from eating these other animals? So they put it to the test.

Because Neu5Gc is found in animals and animal products, the researchers had to first eat vegan for a few days to clear their system (including no animal-derived ingredients in foods or drugs or shampoo), and then they basically drank a glass of diluted pig mucous. Within days this invading meat molecule could be found oozing from their bodies, in their saliva, urine—even their hair clippings. They concluded: “Because NeuGc-type compounds are not found in plants, and Neu5Gc is not synthesized by microbes, the dietary source of Neu5Gc must be foods of animal origin.” They proposed that the metabolic incorporation of this molecular “Trojan horse” from animal products may be contributing to the higher rates of cancer and heart disease in those that eat meat and dairy.

Why heart disease too? If you check out my 3-min video Nonhuman Molecules Lining Our Arteries, you’ll see that this foreign meat molecule tends to accumulate not only in the lining of hollow organs (where carcinomas like breast cancer develop inside your glands), but also in the lining of blood vessels. This may be contributing to the hardening of our arteries, the #1 killer of men and women in the United States.

Inflammation is one of the three steps en route to fatal heart disease. See Arterial Acne, Blocking the First Step of Heart Disease, and Making Our Arteries Less Sticky. Antioxidants found predominantly in plants may also decrease inflammation within the body. Nuts may be particularly useful in this regard.

The absorption of the inflammatory molecule Neu5Gc from animal foods may explain why vegetarian diets seem to improve rheumatoid arthritis. Maybe that’s why rheumatoid arthritis is not present in most other great apes. Maybe the incorporation of this reactive alien molecule into inflamed tissue such as arthritic joints could be aggravating arthritis. What we do know is that if you take animal products away, rheumatoid sufferers can feel better within weeks–see Diet & Rheumatoid Arthritis and Preventing Arthritis.

Bacterial endotoxins are another reason animal products may trigger an inflammatory immune reaction. See The Leaky Gut Theory of Why Animal Products Cause Inflammation, The Exogenous Endotoxin Theory, and Dead Meat Bacteria Endotoxemia.

Beyond the putative role of nonhuman Neu5GC as a potential molecular link between diet, autoreactive antibodies, and the progression of human cancer and heart disease, I close out the Neu5Gc story with a 3-min. video entitled Meat May Exceed Daily Allowance of Irony. It turns out that consuming Neu5GC may set children up for life-threatening reactions to E. coli toxins originating in the same animal products. The researchers ask if this is “poetic justice” for meat eaters. Not when it’s a major cause of acute life-threatening kidney failure in children. For more on E. coli, see Fecal Bacteria Survey and Chicken Out of UTIs.

My exploration into Neu5GC spanned a seven video series (starting with Cancer as an Autoimmune Disease). If you’d rather these more extensive probes than my one-off videos, I’ve done similar in-depth series on reversing cancer cell growth, why animal products cause inflammation, changing vitamin D recommendations, arugula athleticism, why nuts don’t appear to cause expected weight gain, as well as the latest dietary guidelines.

-Michael Greger, M.D.

PS: If you haven’t yet, you can subscribe to my videos for free by clicking here and watch my 2012 year-in-review presentation Uprooting the Leading Causes of Death.

How Tumors Use Meat to Grow

2013-05-14T12:00:00Z

Certain cancers—like breast cancer—can be thought of in part as an autoimmune disease.

When people get heart or kidney transplants, they must be given immunosuppressive drugs to prevent rejection of the new organ. What do you suppose happens to cancer rates in those individuals who have their immune systems suppressed? Well, for some types of cancer, like skin cancer, the risk goes up. This supports the so-called immune surveillance theory—the idea that our immune system acts as a natural defense system for keeping cancer under control (see a cool video of immune cells taking on a cancer cell here). This could explain why, as we age and our immune function declines, our risk of cancer goes up.

The problem with the immune surveillance concept is that for some cancers, suppressing immune function decreases risk. After a kidney transplant, though your skin cancer risk may go up, your breast cancer and rectal cancer risk goes down. Why would people with depressed immune systems have less cancer? This led to a new theory of cancer I explore in my 4-min. video Cancer as an Autoimmune Disease.

The only reason the immune system is even able to pick out cancerous cells from noncancerous cells is because tumors express foreign looking molecules that stimulate our immune system. Why would tumors do that? Why would cancer cells go out of their way to wave a red flag around saying, “Hey, come get me!”? We think it’s because cancer tends to thrive in a setting of low level inflammation. In the video I show a number of examples of chronic inflammation leading to cancer–ulcerative colitis to colon cancer, chronic pancreatitis to pancreatic cancer, chronic hepatitis to liver cancer, and stomach inflammation to stomach cancer. Oftentimes the body’s inflammatory immune response can further cancer’s agenda.

By inciting an immune response, cancer creates its own inflammation, which may stimulate angiogenesis, the formation of new blood vessels to bring blood to the tumor and help it grow. This may explain the mystery surrounding Kaposi’s sarcoma, a cancer affecting those with AIDS. When you start treating AIDS and the immune system starts to recover you can actually see a flare in the cancer.

So what are the dietary implications of this new autoimmune theory of cancer? See my 3-min. video How Tumors Use Meat to Grow: Xeno-Autoantibodies. In short, there’s a molecule called Neu5Gc found in nonhuman animals but not made by the human species. Cancerous breast tumors appear to incorporate this molecule that women consume in meat and dairy to trick their immune systems into creating the environment of low-grade inflammation that breast cancer thrives in. Our own cancer may use what we feed on to get what it feeds on.

For more on Neu5Gc, one of the most fascinating topics of modern day nutrition, see my 4-min. video The Inflammatory Meat Molecule Neu5Gc.

Why else might those eating plant-based diets have lower risk of all cancers combined? Kathy Freston wrote a good summary. It could be due to diminished exposure to IGF-1, heme iron, inflammation, viruses, antibiotics, saturated fat, nitrosamines, and arachidonic acid associated with animal product consumption. Or it could be the DNA repair,cellular stress defenses, anti-inflammatory properties, soy, lignans, phytonutrients, and fiber associated with healthy plant food consumption. It’s probably both, so it may not be enough to just eat vegan—we need to eat our veggies too.

-Michael Greger, M.D.

PS: If you haven’t yet, you can subscribe to my videos for free by clicking here and watch my 2012 year-in-review presentation Uprooting the Leading Causes of Death.

Image credit: Pulmonary Pathology / Flickr

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