Forks Over Knives (3 page)

Today, if you Google the word
health
you’ll see about 2 billion results—interest in health has probably never been greater than it is today. Health information is endemic in our culture: It’s plastered on everything from cereal boxes to billboards, featured in magazine and newspaper articles, discussed on daytime talk shows and on prime-time news programs, and disseminated in costly newsletters and private seminars. Health-related books dominate the best-seller lists. Health-related products are sold everywhere, from drugstores to late-night infomercials.

You might think all this interest would result in good health for most people. It hasn’t. Most Americans are sick. In the United States, one person is killed by heart disease every minute. Every day, 1,500 people die from cancer. Combined, these two diseases kill over one million people per year. The Centers for Disease Control estimate that seven out of ten deaths are from chronic diseases.

For Americans between the ages of 45 and 64, the rate of suffering from three or more chronic diseases jumped from 13 percent in 1996 to 22 percent in 2005. Overall, between 1996 and 2005, the number of Americans of all ages who suffer from three or more chronic diseases increased by 86 percent. And in the past decade alone, the incidence of diabetes has grown 90 percent.

On top of that, two thirds of adults are either overweight or obese, and obesity rates for children have doubled over the past thirty years. More than 24 million Americans suffer from diabetes, most cases of which are a result of the same poor diet that led to their obesity. And this number will only increase: An estimated 57 million Americans are experiencing “pre-diabetic” symptoms.

A growing number of people are becoming aware that lifestyle choices can have a powerful effect on their health, and paramount among those choices is nutrition. However, in spite of this knowledge, most people are still eating a health-destroying diet rich in fatty, salty, sugary junk and animal-based foods. Unfortunately, the link between diet and health is still not well understood by many doctors, who are not required to take courses on nutrition in school, and who therefore rely on pills and procedures to treat patients.

Furthermore, vested interests in the food and agriculture industries have spent millions of dollars each year on marketing that discourages people from associating bad health with bad food. The pharmaceutical industry, which promotes the use of drugs over food for maintaining health, retains 1,585 lobbyists, on whom it spends over $241 million per year.

But could the answer to our health problems be a relatively straightforward one? Could it be that the best way to promote health and to avoid disease isn’t to take large quantities of medicines, or to rely on complicated medical procedures?

The answer is
yes
. The formula for good health may be as simple as this: Eating a whole-foods, plant-based diet. That’s what the world of
Forks Over Knives
is all about, and it’s a message that is resonating with audiences nationwide.

A plant-based diet is a very simple one. It consists of avoiding anything that came from a source that ever had a face or a mother. In other words, avoiding all meat (including fish), dairy, and eggs.

What you do eat are the very best foods that Mother Nature offers: grains, fruits, vegetables, and legumes. Often relegated to side dishes by a meat-devouring American public, these foods actually create the best-tasting and most nutritious meals possible.

A healthy, plant-based diet is also composed of whole foods. That means avoiding refined foods, such as olive oil and white bread, and staying away from artificial foods with chemical additives. In other words, a plant-based diet is centered on foods that come from whole, unrefined plants. As Dr. John McDougall (
page 52
) says, “There is a right diet for humans,” and it is based on one key principle: Eat plants. (It isn’t just Dr. McDougall who believes this. Another famous thinker, Charles Darwin, said, “The normal food of man is vegetable.”)

Here are the key principles of the plant-based, whole-foods,
Forks Over Knives
diet:

EAT PLANTS—THE MORE INTACT, THE BETTER.
And not just any plants—eat whole, minimally refined fruit, vegetables, grains, and legumes. The closer you can get to the plant as it exists in nature, the better. Natural, plant-based foods provide all the essential nutrients needed for a well-balanced and healthy diet, as there are no nutrients found in animal-based foods that are not abundantly available in plant foods (with the exception of vitamin B
₁₂
; see below).

This means that a diet of potato chips, pretzels, dairy-free pastries, and low-calorie soda may technically be a plant-based diet, but it is not a healthy plant-based diet.

A well-structured, plant-based diet will meet all your nutritional needs—for calories, protein, vitamins, and minerals—without calorie counting, portion control, or measuring. It’s the easiest way to eat!

AVOID OVERLY PROCESSED FOODS.
These are foods that include, among other items, bleached flour, refined sugars, and extracted oils. White flours, sugars, and most oils do come from plants, but they have been stripped of most of the nutritional properties they once had. And
although some nutritionists recommend olive oil, why cook with the most concentrated form of fat on the planet when you can choose from many other liquids? Olives are a wonderful food, but olive oil can be problematic.

The reason? Oil is 100 percent pure fat. This means that, in the case of olive oil for instance, the manufacturers have taken whole olives, squeezed out and chemically extracted the good parts (the healthy fiber, vitamins, and minerals), and left you with little more than a concentrated dose of calories. Olive oil contains close to 4,100 calories per 16 ounces!

AVOID PRESERVATIVES AND ADDITIVES.
This is a no-brainer. Why load up your diet with anything artificial when you can be eating whole foods that don’t need additives to make them taste so great?

ELIMINATE DAIRY.
Casein, the primary protein in cow’s milk, may well be one of the most potent chemical carcinogens ever identified (to learn more, read Colin Campbell’s
The China Study
; see
page 20
). Dairy products increase the risk for chronic diseases, and cow’s milk in particular has been linked to an increased risk for cancer, juvenile diabetes, multiple sclerosis, and many other conditions.

Humans have no nutritional need for cow’s milk. Cow’s milk is designed to provide a baby calf with adequate nutrients to grow from 70 pounds to about 1,000 pounds in one year. And, it contains casomorphins, addictive compounds similar to morphine, to ensure that the calf will stay near its mother, safely nursing and growing. Casomorphins are addictive for humans as well, which can make giving up dairy a challenge.

DON’T WORRY ABOUT CARBOHYDRATES.
Nearly everyone has heard about low-carbohydrate diets—they have been fashionable for years. But they are not necessarily healthy. In fact, carbohydrates are the body’s preferred energy source, so it’s important to eat carbohydrate-rich foods.

It’s also important to choose the right
types
of carbohydrate-rich foods. Mangoes, broccoli, and pastries are all high-carbohydrate foods, but mangoes and broccoli are obviously much better for you. If you eat cakes and cookies made with white flour and sugar, you’ll experience rapid rises in blood-sugar levels, increased insulin response, and weight gain. If you eat whole-plant foods like fruits, whole grains, and vegetables, you’ll thrive on a high-carbohydrate diet. As an added bonus, these foods are high in fiber, which provides a feeling of fullness. Eating high-fiber foods almost always reduces the overall number of calories consumed, which assists with weight loss.

Figure 2a

Figure 2a:
To test his theory about dairy, Dr. Colin Campbell fed two groups of rats diets with different amounts of casein, the main protein in dairy products. After 12 weeks, all of the rats eating a diet of 20 percent casein had a greatly increased level of early cancer tumor growth, while rats eating a 5 percent diet showed no evidence of cancer whatsoever.