Eat to Live: The Amazing Nutrient-Rich Program for Fast and Sustained Weight Loss (8 page)

The Mediterranean diet looked better than ours because of the increased consumption of vegetation, not because of the oil. People who use olive oil generally put it on vegetables such as salads and tomatoes, so its use is correlated with higher consumption of produce. Their diets were better in spite of the oil consumption, not because of it.

If you are thin and exercise a lot, one tablespoon of olive oil a day is no big deal, but the best choice for most overweight Americans is no oil at all.

I have only a few bones to pick with those advocating the Mediterranean diet style. First, they claim that cooking food in olive oil increases phytochemical absorption and that eating vegetables without a high-fat topping is not as nutritious since the phytochemicals are not absorbed. When vegetables are cooked, or eaten with fat, some nutrients are more efficiently absorbed and other heat-sensitive nutrients are lost or rendered less absorbable. Many studies show that raw fruits and vegetables offer the highest blood levels of cancer-protective nutrients and the most protection against cancer of any other foods, including cooked vegetation.
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Any advice not recognizing that raw vegetables and fresh fruits are the two most powerful anti-cancer categories of foods is off the mark. Plus, when you use raw seeds and nuts instead of oil, you receive dramatic health benefits without all the empty colories because of the high micronutrient content.

Paul Talalay, M.D., of the Brassica Chemoprotection Laboratory at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine is involved with researching the effects of cooking on phytochemicals. He reports “widely different effects on the compounds in vegetables that protect against cancer.”
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These compounds are both activated and destroyed by various cooking methods.

I recognize that raw, uncooked vegetables and fruits offer the most powerful protection against disease, and I encourage my patients to eat huge salads and at least four fresh fruits per day. Diets with little raw foods are not ideal. As the amount of raw fruits and vegetables are increased in a person’s diet, weight loss and blood pressure are lowered effortlessly.
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Additionally, raw foods contain enzymes, some of which can survive the digestive process in the stomach and pass into the small intestines. These heat-sensitive elements may offer significant nutritional advantages to protect against disease, according to investigators from the Department of Biochemistry at Wright State University School of Medicine.
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These researchers concluded that “most foods undergo a decrease in nutritive value in addition to the well-known loss of vitamins when cooked and/or processed.” Most vitamins are heat-sensitive, for example 20 to 60 percent of vitamin C is lost, depending on the cooking method.
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Thirty to 40 percent of minerals are lost in cooking vegetables as well.
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Consuming a significant quantity of raw foods is essential for superior health.

For the best results, your diet should contain a huge amount of raw foods, a large amount of the less calorically dense cooked vegetation, and a lesser amount of the more calorically rich cooked starchy vegetables and grains. Cooking your food in oil will make your diet less effective and you will not lose weight as easily. You may not even lose any weight at all.

Keep in mind, weight loss slows down over time. Most people starting almost any diet after eating haphazardly lose some weight initially. It is easy to drop a few pounds by merely counting calories, but many overweight individuals with a strong genetic tendency to obesity and slow metabolism who need to lose lots of weight may lose very little or none at all. Some may lose an initial five to fifteen pounds, but then when further weight loss becomes even more difficult, they give up.

Another problem with the Mediterranean diet is the preponderance of pasta and Italian bread, which not only causes difficulty with weight control but is also an important factor
in increasing colon cancer risk in populations with this eating style.
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For the very overweight individual, the Mediterranean diet, like other conventional weight-loss programs, is neither restrictive enough nor filling enough to achieve the results desired. Because olive oil adds so many extra calories to their diet, the dieters still have to carefully count calories and eat tiny portions. All those calories supplied by olive oil, almost one-third of the total caloric intake, make the diet significantly lower in nutrients and fiber.

You can always lose weight by exercising more, and I am all for it. However, many very overweight patients are too ill and too heavy to exercise much. As a former athlete, and today as a physician, I am an exercise nut and a fanatic about recommending exercise to my patients, but many people cannot comply with a substantial exercise program until they are in better health or lose some more weight first. They need a diet that will drop weight effectively,
even if they can’t do lots of exercise
.

I have tested my recommendation on more than two thousand patients. The average patient loses the most weight in the first four to six weeks, with the average being about twenty pounds. The weight loss continues nicely—those following this program continue to lose about ten pounds the second month and about a pound and a half per week thereafter. The weight loss continues at this comparatively quick rate until they reach their ideal weight.

The bottom line about healthy fats is that raw nuts, seeds, and avocados contain healthy fats. However, you should consume a limited amount of these foods, especially if you wish to lose weight. Also remember that oil, including olive oil, does not contain the nutrients and phytonutrients that were in the original olive. The oil has little nutrients (except a little vitamin E) and a negligible amount of phytochemical compounds. If you eat the quantities of oil permitted on the typical Mediterranean diet, where all the vegetables are cooked in oil, you will have difficulty taking off the weight you need to lose.

You can add a little bit of olive oil to your diet if you are thin and exercise a lot. However, using a small amount of raw seeds and nuts in salad dressings and dips is a better, more healthful option. Plus, the more oil you add, the more you are lowering the nutrient-per-calorie density of your diet—and that is not your objective, as it does not promote health.

When we think of fiber, we usually think of bran or Metamucil, something that we take to prevent constipation and that tastes like cardboard. Change that thinking. Fiber is a vital nutrient, essential to human health. Unfortunately, the American diet is dangerously deficient in fiber, a deficiency that leads to many health problems (for example, hemorrhoids, constipation, varicose veins, and diabetes) and is a major cause of cancer. As you can see, if you get fiber naturally in your diet from great-tasting food, you get much more than just constipation relief.

HOW YOUR BODY BENEFITS FROM THE FIBER FOUND IN PLANT FOODS

When you eat mostly natural plant foods, such as fruits, vegetables, and beans, you get large amounts of various types of fiber. These foods are rich in complex carbohydrates and both insoluble and water-soluble fibers. The fibers slow down glucose absorption and control the rate of digestion. Plant fibers have complex physiological effects in the digestive tract that offer a variety of benefits, such as lowering cholesterol.
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Because of fiber, and because precious food components haven’t been lost through processing, natural plant foods fill you up and do not cause abnormal physiological cravings or hormonal imbalances.

Some people are so confused that they do not know what to believe anymore. For example, two studies about fiber received sensational coverage by the media after appearing in the
New England Journal of Medicine.
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Newspapers proclaimed the bold headlines
HIGH-FIBER DIET DOES NOT PROTECT AGAINST COLON CANCER
. No wonder our population is so confused by conflicting messages about nutrition. Some people have actually given up trying to eat healthfully because one day they hear one claim and the next week they hear the opposite. There’s a lesson to be learned here: Don’t get your health advice from the media.

I am bringing up this issue so you realize not to jump to conclusions on the basis of one study or one news report. You can see how research information is often (mis)reported in the news. I have reviewed more than two thousand nutritional research papers in preparation for this book and many more in prior years, and there is not much conflicting evidence. As in a trial, the evidence has become overwhelming and irrefutable—high-fiber foods offer significant protection against both cancer (including colon cancer) and heart disease. I didn’t say
fiber;
I said high-fiber
foods
. We can’t just add a high-fiber candy bar or sprinkle a little Metamucil on our doughnut and french fries and expect to reap
the benefits of eating high-fiber foods, yet this is practically what the first study did.

The studies mentioned above did not show that a diet high in fresh fruits, vegetables, beans, whole grains, and raw nuts and seeds does not protect against colon cancer. It has already been adequately demonstrated in hundreds of observational studies that such a diet does offer such protection from cancer at multiple sites, including the colon.

The first study merely added a fiber supplement to the diet. I wouldn’t expect adding a 13.5-gram fiber supplement to the disease-causing American diet to do anything. It is surprising that this study was actually conducted. Obviously, adding supplemental fiber does not capture the essence of a diet rich in these protective plant foods.

The second study compared controls against a group of people who were counseled on improving their diet. The participants continued to follow their usual (disease-causing) diet and made only a moderate dietary change—a slight reduction in fat intake, with a modest increase in fruits and vegetables for four years. The number of colorectal adenomas four years later was similar. Colorectal adenomas are not colon cancer; they are benign polyps. Only a very small percentage of these polyps ever advance to become colon cancer, and the clinical significance of small benign adenomas is not clear. In any case, it is a huge leap to claim that a diet high in fruits and vegetables does not protect against cancer. This study did not even attempt to address colon cancer, just benign polyps that rarely progress to cancer.

In both studies, even the groups supposedly consuming a high-fiber intake were on a low-fiber diet by my standards. The group consuming the most fiber only ate 25 grams of fiber a day. A high-fiber intake is a marker of many anti-cancer properties of natural foods, especially phytochemicals. The diet plan I recommend is not based on any one study, but on more than two thousand studies and the results I’ve seen with thousands of my own patients. Following this plan, you will consume between 50 and 100 grams of fiber (from real food, not supplements) per day.

In an editorial, published in the same issue of the
New England Journal of Medicine,
Tim Byers, M.D., M.P.H., basically agreed, stating, “Observational studies around the world continue to find that the risk of colorectal cancer is lower among populations with high intakes of fruits and vegetables and that the risk changes on adoption of a different diet.”
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He further explained that the three-or four-year period assessed by these trials is too brief and cannot assess the effects of long-term dietary patterns that have already been shown to protect against colorectal cancer.

The reality is that healthy, nutritious foods are also very rich in fiber and that those foods associated with disease risk are generally fiber-deficient. Meat and dairy products do not contain any fiber, and foods made from refined grains (such as white bread, white rice, and pasta) have had their fiber removed. Clearly, we must substantially reduce our consumption of these fiber-deficient foods if we expect to lose weight and live a long, healthy life.

Fiber intake from food is a good marker of disease risk. The amount of fiber consumed may better predict weight gain, insulin levels, and other cardiovascular risk factors than does the amount of total fat consumed, according to studies reported in the
Journal of the American Medical Association.
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Again, data show that removing the fiber from food is extremely dangerous.