Eat to Live: The Amazing Nutrient-Rich Program for Fast and Sustained Weight Loss (11 page)

So now you know that it is not merely excess fat that causes disease. It is not merely eating empty-calorie food that causes disease. And it is not merely the high consumption of animal foods such as dairy, meat, chicken, and fish that leads to premature death in America. These factors are important, but what is most crucial is what we are missing in our diets by not eating enough produce. Let’s take a look at some more of the reasons why plant foods are so protective and essential for human health.

To illustrate the powerful nutrient density of green vegetables, let us compare the nutrient density of steak with the nutrient density of broccoli and other greens.

Now, which food has more protein—broccoli or steak? You were wrong if you thought steak.

Keep in mind that most of the calories in meat come from fat; green vegetables are mostly protein. (All calories must come from fat, carbohydrate, or protein.)

The biggest animals—elephants, gorillas, rhinoceroses, hippopotamuses, and giraffes—all eat predominantly green vegetation. How did they get the protein to get so big? Obviously, greens pack a powerful protein punch. In fact, all protein on the planet was formed from the effect of sunlight on green plants. The cow didn’t eat another cow to form the protein in its muscles, which we call steak. The protein wasn’t formed out of thin air—the cow ate grass. Not that protein is such a big deal or some special nutrient to be held in high esteem. I am making this point because most people think animal products are necessary for a diet to include adequate protein. I am merely illustrating how easy it is to consume more than enough protein while at the same time avoiding risky, cancer-promoting effects of too many animal products. Consuming more plant protein is also the key to achieving safe and successful weight loss.

NUTRIENTS PRESENT IN 100-CALORIE PORTIONS OF SELECTED FOODS
²²

Now, which has more vitamin E or vitamin C—broccoli or
steak? I’m sure you are aware that steak has no vitamin C or vitamin E. It is also almost totally lacking in fiber, folate, vitamin A, beta-carotene, lutein, lycopene, vitamin K, flavonoids, and thousands of other protective phytochemicals. Meat does have certain vitamins and minerals, but even when we consider the nutrients that meat does contain, broccoli has lots more of them. For many important nutrients, broccoli has more than ten times as much as steak. The only exception is vitamin B
₁₂
, which is not found in plant fare.

When you consider the fiber, phytochemicals, and other essential nutrients, green vegetables win the award for being the most nutrient-dense of all foods. We will give greens a score of 100 and judge all other foods against this criterion.

Interestingly, there is one food that scientific research has shown has a strong positive association with increased longevity in humans. So which food do you think that is?

The answer is raw, leafy greens, normally referred to as salad.
²³
Leafy greens such as romaine lettuce, kale, collards, Swiss chard, and spinach are the most nutrient-dense of all foods.

Most vegetables contain more nutrients per calorie than any other food and are rich in all necessary amino acids. For example, romaine lettuce, which gets 18 percent of its calories from fat and almost 50 percent of its calories from protein, is a rich powerhouse with hundreds of cancer-fighting phytonutrients that protect us from a variety of threatening illnesses. Being healthy and owning a disease-resistant body is not luck; it is earned.

In a review of 206 human-population studies, raw vegetable consumption showed the strongest protective effect against cancer of any beneficial food.
²⁴
However, fewer than one in a hundred Americans consumes enough calories from vegetation to ensure this defense.

I tell my patients to put a big sign on their refrigerator that says
THE SALAD IS THE MAIN DISH.

The word
salad
here means any
vegetable
eaten raw or uncooked, e.g., a bowl of cold pasta in olive oil with a token vegetable is
not
a salad. I encourage my patients to eat two
huge
salads a day, with the goal of consuming an entire head of romaine or other green lettuce daily. I suggest that you go and make the sign and tape it to your fridge now—and then come back. If you plan on doing it later, you may forget. If you learn but one practical habit from this book, let it be this one.

Did you notice that 100 calories of broccoli is about twelve ounces of food, and 100 calories of ground sirloin is just one ounce of food? With green vegetables you can get filled up, even stuffed, yet you will not be consuming excess calories. Animal products, on the other hand, are calorie-dense and relatively low in nutrients, especially the crucial anti-cancer nutrients.

What would happen if you attempted to eat like a mountain gorilla, which eats about 80 percent of its diet from green leaves and about 15 percent from fruit? Assuming you are a female, who needs about 1,600 calories a day, if you attempted to get 1,200 of those calories from greens, you would need to eat over fifteen pounds of greens. That is quite a big salad! Since your stomach can only hold about one liter of food (or a little over a quart), you would have a problem fitting it all in.

You would surely get lots of protein from this gorilla diet. In fact, with just five pounds of greens you would exceed the recommended daily allowance (RDA) for protein and would get loads of other important nutrients. The problem with this gorilla diet is that you would develop a
calorie deficiency
. You would become too thin. Believe it or not, I do not expect you to eat exactly like a gorilla. However, the message to take home is that the more of
these healthy green vegetables (both raw and cooked) you eat, the healthier you will be and the thinner you will become.

Now let’s contrast this silly and extreme gorilla example with another silly and extreme way of eating, the American diet.

If you attempt to follow the perverted diet that most Americans eat, or even if you follow the precise recommendations of the USDA’s pyramid—eight to eleven servings of bread, cereal, rice, and pasta (consumed as 98 percent refined grains by Americans) with four to six servings of dairy, meat, poultry, or fish—you would be eating a diet rich in calories but extremely low in nutrients, antioxidants, phytochemicals, and vitamins. You would be overfed and malnourished, the precise nutritional profile that causes heart disease and cancer.

Earlier I compared 100 calories of greens with 100 calories of meat. I did not contrast them by weight or by portion size, as is more customary.

I compared equal caloric portions because it is meaningless to compare foods by weight or portion size. Let me provide an example to explain 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 doesn’t matter how much water or weight is added, does 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 explained in chapter one, 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.

Nutrient-weight ratios hide how nutrient-deficient processed food is and make animal-source food look not so fatty. Could this be why the food industry and the USDA chose this method? Could it be a conspiracy to have consumers not realize what they are really eating?

For example, a Burger King bacon double cheeseburger is clearly not a low-fat food. If we calculate its percentage of fat by weight and include the ketchup and the bun, we can accurately state that it is only 18 percent fat (over 80 percent fat-free). However, as a percentage of calories it is 54 percent fat, and the hamburger patty alone is 68 percent fat. McDonald’s McLean Deluxe burger was advertised in the early 1990s as 91 percent fat-free using the same numbers trick, when in fact 49 percent of its calories came from fat.

Likewise, so-called low-fat 2 percent milk is not really 2 percent fat. Thirty-five percent of its calories come from fat. They can call it 98 percent fat-free (by weight) only because of its water content. Low-fat milk is not a low-fat product at all, and neither are low-fat cheeses and other low-fat animal foods when you
recalculate their fat on a per calorie percentage basis. This is just a sad trick played on Americans. Incidentally, 49 percent of the calories in whole milk come from fat.