They can also understand that it takes time to develop a liking for natural foods, but the more they eat them, the more they will like them. The only way to remove food addiction to junk food is to abstain from eating junk food. Fortunately, your family can have fun together trying the great-tasting, healthful recipes and desserts in this book, and in my cookbooks; making these tasty and healthy alternatives to what the family is eating now is a great family project. Achieving better health, fitness, and intellectual accomplishment via excellent nutrition is exciting, and having this as a family goal is a form of love. I have occasionally asked my children, “What would you do if you were the father and you loved your child as much as I love you?” They get it.
7. IF A PERSON ALREADY IS SUFFERING FROM CHRONIC DIETARY-INDUCED ILLNESS, SUCH AS DEPRESSION, AGITATION, POOR SLEEP, FATIGUE, OBESITY, DIABETES, OR HIGH BLOOD PRESSURE, WHAT CAN HE OR SHE DO TO GET WELL WITHOUT DRUGS?
The most rewarding part of my career as a physician has been enabling the transformation of people’s lives and watching them recover their health. My experience and the experience of many other physicians specializing in lifestyle medicine is that nutritional excellence is far more powerful than drugs. This story is not merely about prevention; it is about the fact that targeted nutrition has amazing therapeutic potential to revolutionize health care, to help people, and to save our economy from the staggering costs of caring for such a sickly society. It not only enables people to normalize their weight, blood pressure, and cholesterol and reverse diabetes, but also enables complete recoveries from asthma, depression, and autoimmune diseases such as psoriasis, lupus, and rheumatoid arthritis. People suffering from severe chronic ailments can return to normal, healthy lives. I have a unique perspective among primary care physicians because I have used nutritional excellence therapeutically for more than twenty-five years and have observed the miraculous healing power of the well-nourished body, which in most cases can heal itself.
In 2016, I published a study in the American Journal of Lifestyle Medicine documenting an average drop in systolic blood pressure of 26 mm/Hg in 443 people following a Nutritarian diet.43 I included numerous cases of advanced obstructive coronary artery disease that resolved. I am not the only physician who has observed, and published studies regarding dramatic reversal of even advanced heart disease as a result of excellent nutrition. This is already well-established in the scientific literature. In 2012, I published a study in the Open Journal of Preventive Medicine which demonstrated that 90 percent of patients with type 2 diabetes following a high-nutrient, low-glycemic diet were able to stop taking all of their medications for diabetes; their mean HbA1c after one year was 5.8 percent, which is within the normal, nondiabetic range.44
Nutrition is powerful medicine, and most conventional physicians in the United States today underuse it. I remember that first pharmacology lecture in medical school when the professor told us to never forget that all drugs are toxic and should be used only as a last resort. The problem was, we never learned about other options, such as changing a person’s diet sufficiently. I am proud to say that my life’s work is a testament to the effectiveness of nutritional and lifestyle medicine for most chronic diseases. Tens of thousands of people have recovered from chronic illnesses for which conventional medicine has no cure. There will always be some advanced and severe illnesses that are beyond the help of nutritional and lifestyle modifications, but even in such cases, excellent nutrition can reduce the need for medications and thereby medication side effects.
8. HOW MUCH SALT IS ACCEPTABLE IN ONE’S DIET?
Salt is sodium chloride, and sodium is an important mineral that is essential for proper functioning of the human body. However, the SAD contains dangerously high amounts of sodium, almost 80 percent of which comes from processed foods and foods we get at restaurants and fast food joints. For millions of years the human diet didn’t contain any added salt—only the sodium present in natural foods, which usually adds up to less than 1,000 milligrams of sodium per day. The dietary intake of sodium in the United States today is about 3,500 milligrams per day.
Numerous observational studies and randomized controlled trials document the fact that high sodium intake increases blood pressure.45 The evidence implicating excess sodium intake as a major cause of high blood pressure levels has been called “overwhelming.”46 A recently published large long-term lifestyle intervention study showed that a 25–35 percent reduction in dietary sodium over ten to fifteen years results in a 25–30 percent lower risk of cardiovascular disease outcomes.47 It is estimated that a 50 percent decrease in sodium consumption in the United States could prevent at least 150,000 deaths annually.48 According to a meta-analysis of sixty-one studies, the lower an individual’s blood pressure, at least down to 1 15/75 mm Hg, the lower the risk of stroke or heart attack.49 There was no “threshold” below which the risk did not decrease; of course, that is assuming the lower blood pressure is “earned” through healthy eating, exercise, and salt avoidance and is not just medicated downward.
But the effects of salt intake are not all about blood pressure. The interesting finding from many different studies is that high salt intake is linked to increases in all-cause mortality and that its death-hastening effects occur in those people who are not “salt sensitive” to its blood pressure effects.50 In other words, significant amounts of sodium in the diet predicts overall mortality and risk of coronary heart disease, independent of other cardiovascular risk factors, including blood pressure.51
The most compelling evidence is from long-term trials following individuals over decades. A 2016 study followed the lives and deaths of participants over many years, clarifying and giving substance to the undeniable reality that higher salt intake kills. The study included multiple twenty-four-hour urine samples collected from adults between the ages of 30 and 54 who were then followed for an average of twenty-four years. The results showed a direct linear association between average sodium intake and total mortality (death from all causes). The more sodium consumed, the higher the death rate. And just the opposite was found as well—fewer deaths occurred in people with the lowest intake of sodium.52
Natural foods such as fruits and vegetables all contain sodium. The amount of sodium humans and other animals need is contained in the natural foods we eat. If we just ate natural foods without added salt, we would most likely consume about 500–750 milligrams of sodium a day. Real food supplies the perfect amount of minerals people need to maximize their health. The human body was designed to function on food, and early humans did not consume extra salt. Our Stone Age ancestors consumed a diet consisting of mainly fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, fish, insects, and wild game and obtained all the sodium they required, as well as the other minerals. This eat-what-you-can-find diet continued for approximately one hundred thousand generations, during which time salt was not added to food.
Today, people in most areas of the world consume ten times as much sodium as is found in a natural “unsalted” diet. Our species developed agriculture around three hundred generations ago, and the Industrial Age again changed our diet over a span of five to ten generations until now. As we have already seen, the “Processed Food Era” started after World War I, two to three generations ago. This means we live with “thrifty genes” that were selected over a long period during which our ancestors had to deal with low salt intake, periods of starvation, and caloric inadequacy.53 These genes were selected to conserve sodium in the body, not get rid of it.
Since almost all Americans and modern industrialized societies consume so much salt, we have to look at isolated or primitive populations to really see the long-term result of low salt intake. It is still possible to find pockets of people living on mostly natural food diets, without added salt. Tribes in New Guinea, the Amazon Basin, the highlands of Malaysia, and rural Uganda all eat very little salt. Hypertension is unheard of in these regions, and blood pressure does not rise steadily with age as it does in the United States and other countrie
s with high salt intakes. The most elderly members of these populations have blood pressure readings like those we see in children. When salt is introduced into these salt-free cultures, however, blood pressure climbs.54 In all human populations studied by medical anthropologists, it is known that people in all salt-free cultures (that is, those cultures not using salt as a condiment) experience almost no increase in blood pressure even into old age. By contrast, blood pressure rises significantly over many years in all human populations in which salt is added to food in significant quantities, resulting in most people sooner or later ending up with high blood pressure.
High-sodium diets ultimately lead to high blood pressure, which causes an estimated two-thirds of strokes and almost half of all heart attacks. According to the NIH, consuming less sodium is one of the single most important ways to prevent cardiovascular disease.55 Certainly, not smoking, maintaining a healthy body weight, eating a nutrient-dense diet rich in vegetables and fruits, and limiting the intake of trans and saturated fats are critical; but too much sodium in our diets ranks right up there as a primary killer in our modern toxic food environment, and most people overlook this until it is too late.
Salt is also the strongest factor related to stomach cancer. Sodium intake data from twenty-four countries were significantly correlated to stomach cancer mortality rates. Additional studies have found positive correlations between salt consumption and the incidence of gastric cancer.56 A high salt diet also increases growth of the ulcer-promoting bacteria H. pylori in the stomach, which is also a risk factor for gastric cancer.57
Reducing dietary salt is not only important for people who already have elevated blood pressure, but limiting added salt is essential for all of us to remain in good health. Since natural foods supply us with 600–800 milligrams of sodium a day, it is wise to limit any additional sodium, over and above what is in natural food, to just a few hundred milligrams. Even the CDC reports that salt kills far more Americans than tobacco (or anything else) and that almost 90 percent of all Americans, including everyone over the age of 40, should cut their salt intake by nearly two-thirds, to 1,500 milligrams per day.58 Medications cannot do nearly what diet improvement and salt reduction can do, and more and more physicians and scientists recognize this. Just cutting out excess salt from the diet can return blood pressure to normal, which can reduce the risk of heart disease by at least 70 percent.
It is also important to note that expensive and exotic sea salts are still just salt. All salt originates from the sea—and sea salts are still more than 98 percent sodium chloride and therefore contribute to your diet the same amount of sodium per teaspoon as regular salt. Sea salts may contain small amounts of trace minerals, but the amounts are insignificant compared with those in natural plant foods, and the excess sodium doesn’t magically become less harmful.
Salt also deadens taste buds, meaning that when you avoid highly salted and processed foods, you will regain your ability to detect and enjoy the subtle flavors in natural foods and experience heightened pleasure from natural, unsalted foods. Your taste buds will get stronger when you stay away from highly salted foods. Of course, this takes time to occur.
9. IF I’VE EATEN ALL THE WRONG FOODS MOST OF MY LIFE, IS IT TOO LATE FOR ME TO CHANGE NOW? HOW MUCH IS MY GOOSE COOKED?
Your goose is never fully cooked. Heart attacks and strokes are the leading cause of death in the modern world, and cardiovascular disease kills more individuals than all cancers added together. But, you can make a decision right now to never have a heart attack or stroke and make the necessary changes in your eating habits to almost guarantee this never happens.
For instance, you can always reduce your risk of developing lung cancer by quitting smoking at any point before cancer begins. Likewise, you can reduce your risk of a variety of cancers with nutritional excellence, even if it is too late to maximally protect yourself against cancer at an advanced age. Even people who have cancer have been shown to live longer eating the healthful, anticancer dietary suggestions discussed in this book. Many studies have already been referenced here on G-BOMBS demonstrating this fact.
Nutritional excellence can do what drugs can’t do; drugs lower risk maybe 10–15 percent, while superior nutrition has the potential to lower risk 100 times that. In my twenty-five years of medical practice offering nutritional advice, I have not heard of anyone who has followed my program strictly for years who has ever had a heart attack or died from heart disease. I have cared for thousands of individuals with heart disease, many of them with very advanced heart disease, and I have seen miraculous healing happen, including improvement of ejection fraction and resolution of atrial fibrillation. It has been exciting and rewarding to see people earn back excellent health and celebrate their health recoveries.
I don’t know about you, but it’s not enough for me to lower my risk of experiencing sudden cardiac death by a mere 30–40 percent. I want that risk to be zero, if possible. With the dietary advice in this book, and my other books on these subjects, I present the medical evidence which shows that you can achieve dramatic reduction in weight, cholesterol levels, triglyceride levels, and cardiac risk that simply cannot be accomplished through medication. In other words, nutrition trumps standard pharmacology.
Cancer is a bit different because the years that you eat an unhealthful diet, including fast food and commercial meats, take their toll on the body and can cumulatively damage DNA. After sixty years of very poor eating habits, the change to an excellent diet cannot reduce risk by 99 percent, like it can with heart disease. My guess is that it will reduce risk of cancer by 50–75 percent. I base that estimate on studies that show reductions in cancer deaths after nutritional interventions. For example, one study followed for ten years women already diagnosed with breast cancer and found the death rate from breast cancer was 71 percent lower over those ten years for women who ate higher amounts of lignans (found particularly in flaxseed and chia seeds).59 But, we are not talking just about flaxseeds here. When we put together a synergistic portfolio of foods, fresh herbs, and spices that have anticancer benefits and avoid unhealthy foods, we can restore immune system functioning and enhance the ability of the body to fight the initiation, development, and spread of cancer. It may not have the extreme benefits we see for heart disease, but the benefits are still remarkable.
Of course, the anticancer benefits are more profound the earlier in life one adopts a healthy diet, and the more advanced the cancer, the less likelihood we will observe such positive effects. Still, one never knows what benefits will accrue and what the body can accomplish when fed right. It is never too late to try to protect your health.
You can slow the aging process now, maintain a healthy weight, lower your blood pressure, prevent or reverse diabetes, protect yourself against a stroke and the so-common mental decline seen with aging, and overall live a better-quality, healthier, and longer life from making these improvements in your eating habits.
Too many people suffer and die needlessly, and I’m sure millions of people of all ages would adopt a healthier diet style if they learned about the profound benefits they would receive. I hope you join me on this quest to inform and motivate others to take better care of their health and to protect all of our children, enabling them to reach their full potentials for health and happiness. Let’s bond together in our mutual desire to spread kindness and goodwill and to value every person’s human potential for health and happiness. I wish you and your family a rewarding and pleasurable experience in your quest for excellent health.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I want to thank and recognize many people who assisted me with this book. First of all, Robert (Bob) Phillips has been and continues to be dedicated to helping me and many others for years; his contribution to this book is invaluable. I want to thank Reggie Thomas, who had a vision years ago, and encouraged this project right from the start. I appreciate his assistance setting up events in urban areas to reach people in need with life-saving nutritional information. I
appreciate my skilled supportive team at DrFuhrman.com, specifically Deana Ferrari, PhD, who assists me with research collection and interpretation; Linda Popescu, RD, who assists with recipes, nutritional analysis, and menus; Lauren Russell and Tim Shay, who assisted with diagrams and graphs; and Doris Walfield, who proofread and made edits. Mimi McGee contributed many fantastic recipes used in this book. Mary Becker also helped with the recipes, preparing, testing, and tweaking them to my liking. Colin Goh’s art brought my cartoon concepts to life. Lisa Fuhrman spent many invaluable hours reading, giving me important feedback and editing. I am also appreciative of the wonderful team at Harper, especially Gideon Weil, who has been a strong supporter of my work and his early vision for my series of books to spearhead nutrition-based healthcare, and Production Editor Lisa Zuniga and Director of Publicity Melinda Mullin.
NOTES
INTRODUCTION: PARTICIPANTS IN OUR OWN DESTRUCTION
1Lane M, Robker RL, Robertson SA. Parenting from before conception. Science. 2014;345:756–60; Dominguez-Salas P, Moore SE, Baker MS, et al. Maternal nutrition at conception modulates DNA methylation of human metastable epialleles. Nat Commun. 2014;5:3746; Lane M, Zander-Fox DL, Robker RL, McPherson NO. Peri-conception parental obesity, reproductive health, and transgenerational impacts. Trends Endocrinol Metab. 2015;26:84–90; Marques AH, Bjorke-Monsen AL, Teixeira AL, Silverman MN. Maternal stress, nutrition and physical activity: impact on immune function, CNS development and psychopathology. Brain Res. 2015;1617:28–46; Prado EL, Dewey KG. Nutrition and brain development in early life. Nutr Rev. 2014;72:267–84.
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