Food for Life: How the New Four Food Groups Can Save Your Life (22 page)

Second, when you are physically active, your body readjusts your metabolism to burn calories more quickly. This effect persists for a time even beyond the period of activity.

Third, when you stay active, your muscles keep their strength. If you do not, your muscles waste away from inactivity. This is important because your muscles are real calorie burners. Muscle tissue has a rapid metabolism and is much better than fat tissue at burning off the calories we ingest.

Fourth, physical activity helps keep the appetite under control. After a tennis game or an hour on the dance floor, people are actually less likely to overeat, even though they have just burned off a lot of calories. This mechanism helps you stay slim after you have shed unwanted pounds, but unfortunately will not help as you are losing weight. While you are overweight, your appetite is not likely to be affected by your physical activity.
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Fifth, people who use their bodies are better able to relax, and more likely to get a good night’s sleep. This is important, because when you are chronically tired or stressed, you are much more likely to use unhealthful foods or other indulgences to prop yourself up.

Just as there are foods that naturally work to keep you slim, there are physical activities that do the same. The most important ingredient in any physical activity is enjoyment. If it is not fun, you won’t stick with it. Physical activities do not need to be particularly strenuous, and they certainly do not have to be unpleasant. Remember, you can burn up all the gas in your tank in either a high-speed chase or a leisurely drive. The same is true of the fat your body has been storing. The simple program in Appendix I will help you get going. It is very easy, and it really works.

If a low-calorie diet has slowed your metabolism, change your dietary habits before you dramatically increase your physical activity. Even though physical activity increases the metabolic rate for most people, it can actually have the opposite effect on people who have been on severe diets.

For better or for worse, genetics does play a role in our size and shape. If your parents were tall, you are likely to be tall. If they were heavy-set, particularly early in life, you may well have the same tendency. The role of genetics has been clearly demonstrated in studies of identical twins who were raised apart. Their ultimate weights tend to be rather similar, in spite of differences in the diets of the families who raised them.
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Genetics is not everything-they don’t have identical weights-but there is clearly a tendency toward a similar body size.

We tend to inherit not just our size but our shape, too. If your parents and grandparents were apple-shaped, carrying their weight in their chests and abdomens, you are likely to be apple-shaped. If they were pears, carrying their weight in their hips and thighs, you are likely to have the same tendency.

Apples are more likely to have health problems, including heart problems, high blood pressure, and diabetes, as a result of their weight. To check whether weight problems will affect your health, take a tape measure and measure your waist and then the widest point of your hips. For women, if your waist is more than 80 percent of your hip measurement, your weight will add to your risk of heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and other problems. For men, health risks begin when your waist is bigger than your hips. Hip fat is less likely to contribute to health problems compared to abdominal fat, but unfortunately it is harder to get rid of.

As you lose weight, your size will change, but your basic shape may not; you may become a skinny pear, but you’ll still be a pear.

Although genetics does affect size and shape, it is certainly not the last word. We give our children a lot more than just DNA. We give them recipes. We give them preferences for food that take hold at a very young age. We pass along our attitudes about the importance of food and its meaning. In my family, food was not a particularly important part of our family life, and was never used as a cure for depression or a reward for accomplishment. But for other families, food plays a central role in family matters, and love, nurturance, and rebellion can all take place between the spoon and the mouth. So when something “runs in the family,” that does not necessarily mean it is coded on your chromosomes.

What makes us grow heavy are diets centered on meats, dairy products, fried foods, and oils. Fat in foods adds all too easily to our own fat stores, and does not boost our calorie-burning mechanisms. Refined sugars and alcohol conspire against us, too. These foods give us lots of calories, without the complex carbohydrates and fiber that can help us stay slim.

Low-calorie dieting is no solution because it slows your metabolism and makes binges more likely. The answer for permanent weight control is, first, to build your diet from grains, vegetables, fruits, and beans. These foods are more powerful than any weight-loss diet. Most people can eat all they want, any time they want, and stay slim. If you really are overeating, you can help yourself overcome this, as many others have.

And don’t forget to take your body for a walk, a game of tennis, or a night on the dance floor. You’ll love the new you.

So far we have seen a powerful menu for lowering cholesterol, staying slim, preventing cancer, and maybe even slowing the effects of aging. But that is really only the beginning. Many other conditions never well addressed by previous diets are improved, prevented, or reversed by the low-fat New Four Food Groups program. Adult-onset diabetes can often go away, appendicitis and varicose veins can usually be prevented, and the course of multiple sclerosis can be changed substantially. Arthritis can, in many cases, be improved. And if you have been consuming milk and antacids for an ulcer, here’s a new two-week treatment that cures ulcers in most patients. In this chapter we look at these and other surprising facts.

Arthritis means painful and swollen joints for millions of people. Arthritis is actually a group of very different diseases. Osteoarthritis is a gradual loss of cartilage and overgrowth of bone in the joints, especially the knees, hips, spine, and fingertips, apparently caused by accumulated wear and tear. At least 85 percent of the population above the age of seventy has osteoarthritis. Unlike rheumatoid arthritis, osteoarthritis causes only transient stiffness and usually does not cause major interference with the use of the hands, although it can cause painful episodes.

Rheumatoid arthritis is a more aggressive form of the disease, affecting over 2 million people. It causes painful, inflamed joints, and sometimes leads to severe joint damage. Rheumatoid arthritis is one of medicine’s mysteries.
For one thing, the disease seems to be relatively new. There were no medical reports of the disease until the early 1800s; skeletons unearthed from medieval cemeteries have shown no signs of it. Some have suspected that a virus or bacterium may play a role, perhaps by setting off an autoimmune reaction. There may also be a role for genetics, perhaps in causing a susceptibility to the disease.

For years, people have suspected that foods play a role in causing rheumatoid arthritis. Many have noticed that their joints feel better when they steer clear of dairy products, citrus fruits, tomatoes, eggplant, or certain other foods.

Not long ago, I was giving a series of lectures and interviews in the Midwest. A woman who was driving me from one appearance to another told me that she had had painful arthritis. Now she was a picture of health, thin and athletic looking, and her arthritis was totally gone. What had made the difference? Dairy products were the culprit. When she left them out of her diet, her arthritis went away completely.

Shortly thereafter, my schedule brought me through Wisconsin. There I met another woman who also told me that her arthritis was clearly linked to dairy products. It pained her to say so, because she had been raised on a Wisconsin dairy farm. But she learned that staying away from dairy products was the key to getting rid of her symptoms.

Other foods have been blamed as well. A 1989 survey of over a thousand arthritis patients revealed foods they felt were most associated with their symptoms: red meat, sugar, fats, salt, caffeine, and nightshade plants (e.g., tomatoes, eggplant).
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At first, scientific studies did not find that eliminating such foods helped substantial numbers of people. So doctors stuck to using anti-inflammatory medications and painkillers in what is usually a losing battle against joint damage. However, an increasing number of research reports show that certain dietary changes are, in fact, helpful.

For instance, diets that boost polyunsaturated oils and add omega-3 supplements have a mild beneficial effect, and researchers have found benefits from vegan diets.
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Diets that include dairy products are not helpful,
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and diets that boost saturated animal fat cause arthritis to get worse.
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Several studies have shown that supervised fasting can be helpful.
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A team of Scandinavian researchers hit upon a regimen that produced significant improvements in rheumatoid arthritis. The number of tender or swollen joints diminished, morning stiffness decreased, grip strength improved,
and blood tests used in the assessment of arthritis also improved, although X-rays of the joints did not. The program was carefully tested in a comparison with standard medical treatment.
The Lancet
, a prominent British medical journal, published the report as its lead article on October 12, 1991.
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Here is the treatment program the research team used.

The patients first began a modified fast for seven to ten days. During this period, they consumed herbal teas, garlic, vegetable broths, and juice extracts from carrots, beets, and celery. No fruit juices were allowed.

After the fast, the patients reintroduced a “new” food item to their diet every other day. If they had any worsening of symptoms during the following two days, this item was eliminated for at least seven days. If the item was introduced again, and again caused worsening of symptoms, it was omitted permanently.

For the first three to five months, they eliminated meat, fish, eggs, dairy products, gluten (a wheat product), refined sugar, and citrus fruits. In addition, salt, strong spices, preservatives, alcoholic beverages, tea, and coffee were to be avoided. After this period, gluten and dairy products could be reintroduced, but would be again eliminated if they produced symptoms.

Why does such a regimen work? The researchers felt that food allergy or intolerance may be a more frequent contributor to arthritis than is commonly recognized. Their dietary regimen excluded common problematic foods. It had other advantages, too: vegan diets dramatically change the amount and type of fats in the diet, which, in turn, can affect the immune processes that play a part in arthritis. The omega-3 fatty acids in vegetables may be a key factor, along with the near absence of saturated fat. And patients lose weight on a vegan diet, which contributes to the improvement.

In addition, vegetables are loaded with antioxidants which can neutralize free radicals. As we saw in
Chapter 1
, oxygen-free radicals attack many parts of the body and contribute to heart disease and cancer, and intensify the aging processes generally. Joints are not spared. Imagine that a runner’s knee is injured slightly, perhaps owing to strain or exercising a bit too hard. A little fluid accumulates in the joint. If the exercise is continued, the joint movement causes the pressure in the joint to increase momentarily, which in turn causes the blood supply to the joint to be cut off for an instant. With every pounding step, the blood supply stops, then returns, over and over again.

The joint is set up for free-radical injury. As blood rushes back in and oxygen is restored to the joint tissues, free radicals are produced. Iron acts
as a catalyst, encouraging the production of these dangerous molecules, which in turn attack the cells lining the joint, inflaming and damaging the tissues.
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The cells in the joint try to defend themselves. Vitamin C and vitamin E, which are plentiful in a menu drawn from vegetables and grains, help neutralize these free radicals. The body also tries to keep iron sequestered from the tissues. Iron is transported and stored in special protein packages, rather like the way explosives-and cholesterol-are packaged and transported with great care. Meat-based diets supply an overload of iron. And meat has no vitamin C and very little vitamin E. On the other hand, vegetables supply more controlled amounts of iron, with generous quantities of antioxidant vitamins. Antioxidants may have a role, not just in prevention but also in reducing symptoms of arthritis. Some treatments of arthritis, including nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, work at least in part by neutralizing free radicals. For the most part, however, vitamins and other antioxidants will prevent damage before it occurs, rather than treat an inflamed joint.
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