The New Optimum Nutrition Bible

by Patrick Holford

  Health care—the fastest-growing failing business

  Nothing in Western culture really teaches us to be healthy. Apart from a little wisdom imparted by our parents, most of whom spend their later years in increasing pain, we are not taught how to be healthy at school, in college, or by the media. Government campaigns may advise against smoking and drinking, but there is little real guidance and few results. In the United States 2.3 billion alcoholic drinks are consumed each week, and an estimated 26 million men and 23 million women are smoking cigarettes.

  What we call “health care” is really “disease care.” Described by Dr. Emanuel Cheraskin, professor emeritus at the University of Alabama Medical School, as “the fastest-growing failing business,” modern medicine is failing to provide true health care and making a lot of money out of it. It is, says Cheraskin, “primary prevention of health deterioration.”

  Take heart disease as an example. Currently, you have a 50 percent chance of acquiring heart disease during your life. It accounts for a quarter of all deaths before the age of sixty-five, and one in four men has a heart attack before retiring from work—half of these men don’t have high cholesterol levels! It is well accepted that high blood pressure is the leading warning of serious cardiovascular problems. Conventional medicine recommends weight loss and drugs to lower high blood pressure and cholesterol, but little heed is paid to the many dietary factors also known to achieve this end. Even 1,000 mg of vitamin C daily can significantly lower blood pressure, yet this is rarely recommended. A mere 750 IU of vitamin E daily reduces the risk of a heart attack in those with cardiovascular disease by 75 percent, according to a large-scale placebo-controlled trial undertaken at Cambridge University Medical School.1 Supplementing B vitamins, which lower homocysteine, an often ignored risk factor greater than cholesterol, can also halve the risks of both heart attacks and strokes.2

  Contrary to popular belief, the risk of death from many common types of cancer is increasing, not declining. Consider breast cancer, which accounts for one-third of all cancers diagnosed in women and around forty thousand deaths each year in the U.S. If treatments were working, women with breast cancer would live longer and be at less risk of dying. We are told that, in the last thirty years, the survival rate has increased from 60 to 75 percent. However, the death rate from cancer over the same period has steadily increased. What has happened is that people are being diagnosed earlier and so appear to survive longer. We are losing the cancer war, not winning it.

  According to medical expert Dr. John Lee, breast cancer is occurring more frequently and earlier in women’s lives than in the mid-1980s. Mammograms show microcalcifications in the breasts that could never have been picked up before. These are not the invasive tumors we need worry about, but they skew the statistics to show better survival rates. The usual treatment is surgery followed by the drug tamoxifen, yet medicated and nonmedicated patients do just as well. Dr. Lee believes the major cause of breast cancer is “unopposed estrogen” (normally balanced in the body with progesterone), and there are many factors that would lead to this situation. Stress, for example, raises levels of the hormone Cortisol, which competes with progesterone. So does insulin resistance, which is the consequence of eating too much sugar and refined carbohydrates. Xenoestrogens from the environment, found in pesticides and plastics among other common sources, can damage tissue and lead to increased cancer risk later in life. Milk, too, is a known promoter of breast and prostate cancer growth.

  Clearly, there are also nutritional elements to consider. Yet doctors have continued to prescribe unopposed estrogen for women on hormone replacement therapy (HRT) for decades, despite clear evidence of risk back in 1989, when Dr. Bergfist’s study in Scandinavia showed that if a woman is on HRT for longer than five years she doubles her risk of breast cancer.3 This was followed by a study by the Rollins School of Public Health at Emery University in Atlanta, Georgia, which followed 240,000 women for eight years and found that the risk of fatal ovarian cancer was 72 percent higher in women given estrogen.4 However, it was only when the Million Women Study was published in The Lancet that HRT started to be phased out. The authors, whose research showed that use of combined estrogen-progestin HRT increases risk of breast cancer by 66 percent and risk of death by 22 percent, estimated that twenty thousand women had contracted breast cancer because of HRT in the last decade.5

  Taking another example, by the age of sixty, nine in every ten people have arthritis. Once the level of pain is unbearable, sufferers are recommended steroidal or nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs. While both classes of drugs reduce the pain and swelling, they also speed up the progression of the disease. In the United States, nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs are a $30 billion industry—$17 billion for the drugs and $13 billion for treating the side effects. Thousands of people die from the side effects of these drugs alone. Yet there are proven, safe nutritional alternatives that have as great an anti-inflammatory effect without the harmful side effects.

  Put all these and other risks into the health equation and it is easy to understand why the average person today is destined to live a measly seventy-five years and spend the last twenty in poor health, when it is an established fact that a healthy human life span should be at least a hundred years. And the sad truth is that the statistics are not getting any better. For all our advances in drugs, surgical procedures, and medical technology, a man aged forty-five today can expect to live for only two more years than the same man in 1920, until seventy-four, instead of seventy-two. Conventional approaches to health care are clearly barking up the wrong tree. Perhaps what is needed is a new tree.

  The new idea of health

  Instead of thinking of the body as a machine, and disease as a monkey wrench in the works that must be removed or destroyed with drugs or surgery, medical scientists are now beginning to look at human beings as complex adaptive systems, more like a self-organizing jungle than a complicated computer. Rather than trying to “control” a person’s health by playing God with high-tech medicine, a new way of looking at health has emerged that considers a human being as a whole, with an interconnected mind and body designed to adapt to health if the circumstances are right.

  Of course, this adaptive capacity is not the same for everyone. We are each born with different strengths and weaknesses and different levels of resilience—some of us have what is popularly called “good genes” or come from “good stock,” and some of us do not. So, according to this new concept, our health is a result of the interaction between our inherited adaptive capacity and our circumstances. On a physical/chemical level, for example, that interaction would be between our genes and our environment. If our environment is sufficiently hostile (bad diet, pollution, exposure to viruses, allergens, and so on), we exceed our ability to adapt and we get sick.

  Going back to cancer, we know that the risk is increased if we smoke, regularly drink alcohol, eat beef and dairy products, take certain drugs and hormones, and are exposed to exhaust fumes and other pollutants—to name a few. The risk, on the other hand, is lower if we have a high intake of certain vegetables, fibers, and antioxidants, such as beta-carotene and vitamins C and E, and live in an unpolluted environment. Evidence shows that, when the pluses significantly outweigh the minuses, health can be improved.

  Genes and the environment are like the chicken and the egg. Science is proving that our genes are influenced by the environment in which we have evolved. Similarly, how we interact with our environment—for example, our ability to digest certain nutrients—depends on our genetics. I believe that the future of medicine will focus primarily on genetics and on environmental medicine, of which nutrition plays a major part, as the means to influence health. Genes, however, are harder to change than diet, so it is likely that nutrition will form the major part of the new approach to health care, along with strategies to reduce “antinutrients”—substances such as environmental pollutants, pesticides, and chemical food additives, which all interfere with the action of
nutrients.

  The new model of health. Your genes interact with your environment (everything you eat, drink, and breathe) to create you. If you have good nutrition, the result is that you have the capacity to adapt to the stresses of life. That’s health. If your total environmental load exceeds your genetic capacity to adapt, you may develop disease.

  Remember, we are always being challenged—be it as the result of the neighbor’s cold or unavoidable exhaust fumes. What we take into our bodies—be it healthy food, drink, drugs, or junk—can dramatically affect our ability to stay healthy.

  2

  Defining Optimum Nutrition

  Most of us are unwitting students of the Breakfast Cereal School of Nutrition. Morning after morning we stare at the cereal package, reading, “… RDAs … one serving provides thiamine, riboflavin, niacin,” and, together with other clever advertising, this assures us that our reasonably well-balanced diet will give us everything we need. This is, however, the greatest lie in health care today—a belief based on wrong information and a complete misconception of the nature of the human body.

  Human as machine

  The concept of the body as a machine is a product of the thinking of philosophers such as Newton and Descartes and of the industrial revolution, which envisioned a clockwork universe and man as a thinking machine. Until a couple of hundred years ago, our ancestors had spent millions of years being hunter-gatherers and ten thousand years being peasant farmers, only to be propelled, as many country people were, into the new towns and cities to fuel the need for labor during the industrial revolution.

  The diet that the new industrial workers were fed consisted of fat, sugar, and refined flour. A cookie or cake is a good example. Flour was refined so it would not support weevils and, like refined sugar and saturated fat, did not spoil. These cheap, energy-providing foods were considered “fuel” in the same way that a car needs gas. Not surprisingly, health declined. By about 1900, people had started to be smaller than in earlier generations. This led to the discovery of protein—the factor in food needed for growth. Sugar for energy, protein for muscle. With this concept, the Western diet of high sugar, fat, and protein was born.

  Yet people were still sick and, one by one, the classic vitamin-deficiency diseases such as scurvy and rickets were solved as new vitamins were discovered. The importance of minerals was also established, but all these vital nutrients were still dealt with in a very mechanical way. All each person needed was the recommended daily allowance (RDA) of each nutrient, a level considered to be sufficient to protect the body against deficiency diseases. Yet, according to Dr. Jeffrey Bland, world-renowned nutritional biochemist, former professor of chemistry, and founder of the Institute of Functional Medicine, “the RDAs have absolutely no relevance to individual nutritional assessment. They are standards of identity to meet the needs of practically all healthy people to prevent the known nutrition disorders beriberi, pellagra, scurvy, kwashiorkor, rickets, and marasmus. They have nothing to do with the common disorders of Western society.”

  Food, genes, environment, and disease

  Your body is composed entirely of molecules derived from food. In a lifetime, you will eat one hundred tons of food, which is broken down by enzyme-rich secretions in the digestive tract produced at a rate of about ten quarts per day. Macronutrients (fat, protein, carbohydrate) and micronutrients (vitamins, minerals) are absorbed through the digestive tract, whose health and integrity depends fundamentally on what you eat. Your nutritional status determines, to a substantial extent, your capacity to adapt and maintain health. Biochemical imbalances resulting from suboptimum nutrition experienced over generations are recorded and expressed genetically as strengths and weaknesses of specific body processes. Your genes express themselves in your environment (food, air, water, and so on). If your environment is too hostile for them, you cannot adapt and disease results. If your environment is nourishing, you have a greater resistance to disease and are more likely to experience health and vitality.

  What does optimum nutrition mean?

  Optimum nutrition is, very simply, giving yourself the best possible intake of nutrients to allow your body to be as healthy as possible and to work as well as it can. It is not a set of rules. For example, you do not have to be vegetarian or take supplements or avoid eating any particular food, although for some people such advice would be appropriate. Your needs are completely unique and depend on a whole host of factors, from the strengths and weaknesses that you were born with right up to the effects that your current environment has on you. You only have to look at the tremendous variation in the way we look, and in our talents and personalities, to realize that our nutritional needs are also not likely to be identical. No one diet is perfect for everyone, although there are general guidelines that apply to us all.

  Your optimum nutrition is the intake of nutrients that:

  Promotes your optimal mental performance and emotional balance

  Promotes your optimal physical performance

  Is associated with the lowest incidence of ill health

  Is associated with the longest healthy life span

  To date, fifty nutrients have been identified as essential for health. Your health can be promoted and maintained at the highest level if you are able to achieve your optimal intake of each nutrient every single day. Gradually, your entire body, including your skeleton, is rebuilt and rejuvenated. Through optimum nutrition you can:

  Improve mental clarity, mood, and concentration

  Increase IQ

  Increase physical performance

  Improve quality of sleep

  Improve resistance to infections

  Protect yourself from disease

  Extend your healthy life span

  These might sound like bold claims, yet each has been proven by proper scientific research. Recently, I rang up two doctors who had been in general practice for many years before discovering the optimum nutrition approach. One told me, “I’m convinced that nutrition will be a major part of medicine in the foreseeable future. I’m getting substantially better results with diet and supplements than I used to with drugs.” The other, a general practitioner in Dublin, Ireland, said, “The evidence for nutritional therapy is becoming so strong that if the doctors of today don’t become nutritionists, the nutritionists will become the doctors of tomorrow.”

  Discover your optimum nutrition

  Old-fashioned concepts of nutrition assess your needs by analyzing what you eat and comparing it with the RDA for each nutrient. This method is very basic, since RDAs do not exist for a number of key nutrients, have little relevance to what is needed for optimal health, and do not take into account individual variations in need or lifestyle factors that alter your needs, such as exposure to pollution, level of stress, or exercise.

  Minerals preceded by a question mark are thought to be essential although studies have not yet confirmed this.

  This book introduces you to the much more useful optimum daily allowances (ODAs) and enables you to assess your optimum nutrition using three proven methods, each of which represents a piece of the jigsaw for calculating your needs. The more methods that can be used, the more effective will be the resultant nutritional plan. In addition, nutritional therapists have access to biochemical tests to find out more precisely what a person’s nutritional needs are. The three methods listed below also take into account four key principles—evolutionary dynamics, biochemical individuality, synergy, and environmental load—that are fundamental to the optimum nutrition approach and are explained in the following chapters.

  Symptom analysis

  This enables you to see, from clusters of signs and symptoms (such as lack of energy, mouth ulcers, muscle cramps, easy bruising, poor dream recall, and so on) which nutrients you may be lacking.

  Lifestyle analysis

  This helps you identify the factors in your life that change your nutritional needs (such as your level of exercise, stress, pollution, and so on).

 
Dietary analysis

  This compares your diet not with RDAs but with optimal levels of nutrients and takes into account your consumption of “antinutrients”—substances that rob the body of nutrients.

  3

  From Monkeys to Man—Nutrition and Evolution

  You are much older than you think. The human body you walk around in is the result of millions of years of evolution, the vast majority of which was spent living in an environment and eating a diet very different from those of today. Understanding the dynamics of our evolution can provide essential clues for promoting health.

  To C or not to C?

  Take the case of vitamin C. Practically all animals make it in their bodies, so they do not have to eat it. The exceptions are guinea pigs, fruit-eating bats, the red-vented bulbul bird, and primates, including humans. Most animals produce the equivalent of 3,000 to 16,000 mg per day—a little different from the recommended daily allowance (RDA) of 60 mg and more consistent with the levels known to boost immunity and minimize the risk of cancer. In fact, vitamin C-producing animals are immune to most cancers and viral diseases.