How Not to Die

  Miso, however, was not associated with increased cancer risk.27 The carcinogenic effects of the salt may be counteracted by the anticarcinogenic effects of the soya. For example, tofu intake has been associated with about 50 percent less stomach cancer risk28 and salt with about 50 percent more risk,29 which explains how they may effectively cancel each other out. Further protection apparently offered by allium (onion) family vegetables30 may tip the cancer-fighting scale in favor of miso soup that’s garlicky or has some scallions thrown in.

  Cancer isn’t the primary reason people are told to avoid salt, though. What about miso soup and high blood pressure? There may be a similar relationship. The salt in miso may push up your blood pressure while the soya protein in miso may lower it back down.31 For example, if you compare the effects of soya milk to skimmed milk (to make a fairer comparison by removing the saturated butterfat factor), soya milk lowers blood pressure about nine times more effectively than skimmed dairy milk.32 Would the benefits of soya be enough to counter the effects of the salt in miso, though? Japanese researchers decided to find out.

  Over a four-year period, they tracked men and women in their sixties who started out with normal blood pressures to see who was more likely to be diagnosed with high blood pressure: those who had two or more bowls of miso soup a day or those who had one or less. Two bowls a day would be like adding half a teaspoon of salt to your daily diet, yet those who consumed at least that much miso were found to have five times lower risk of becoming hypertensive. The researchers concluded: “Our results on miso-soup have shown that [the] anti-hypertensive effect of miso is possibly above [the] hypertensive effect of salt.”33 So miso soup may actually be protective overall.

  Edamame is about as whole a soya food as you can get. After all, these are soyabeans still in their pods. You can buy them frozen and just throw a handful into some boiling water anytime you want a healthy snack. They cook in about five minutes. All you need to do is strain them and, if you’re like me, crack lots of fresh pepper onto the pods and nibble the beans right out. (You can also buy them preshelled, but then they’re not as fun to eat.)

  On the opposite end of the processing spectrum are plant-based meat alternatives like veggie burgers, which are healthy only insofar as they replace the real thing. Beyond Chicken, for example, has fibre, zero saturated fat, zero cholesterol, and equal protein to and fewer calories than an actual chicken breast (plus presumably less food-poisoning risk). But Beyond Chicken pales in comparison to the nutrition found in the soyabeans, yellow peas, and amaranth grain from which it was made. Of course, people choosing these meat alternatives are not standing in the supermarket agonizing between Beyond Chicken Grilled Strips and a bowl of legumes and whole grains. So if fajitas are the foregone conclusion, then it would certainly be healthier to choose the plant-based mock meat to the meat itself. I see the value of these meat-alternative products as healthier transition foods to wean people off the standard American diet. Even if you just stopped there, you’d be better off, but the more you can move toward whole-food nutrition, the better. You don’t want to get stuck at the yellow light.

  Peas

  Like edamame, raw english peas (also known as shelled or garden peas) can be a great au naturel snack. I fell in love with peas in the pod when I first picked them off the vine at a farm my brother and I spent time on one summer as kids. They were like sweets. Every year, I look forward to the few weeks I can find them fresh.

  Lentils

  Lentils are little lens-shaped legumes. (Lenses were actually named after lentils; lens is lentil in Latin.) They gained fame in 1982 upon the discovery of the “lentil effect,” or the ability of lentil consumption to blunt the sugar spike of foods consumed hours later at a subsequent meal.34 Lentils are so rich in prebiotics that they create a feast for your friendly flora, which in turn feed you right back with beneficial compounds, such as propionate, that relax your stomach and slow the rate at which sugars are absorbed into your system.35 Chickpeas and other legumes were found to have a similar influence, and so this phenomenon was later renamed the “second-meal effect.”36

  Lentils are already one of the most nutrient-dense legumes. But when sprouted, their antioxidant power doubles (and even quintuples for chickpeas).37 Lentils can be easily sprouted into one of the healthiest possible snacks. I was amazed when I first tried making them. What start out looking like hard little pebbles transform into tender morsels in just a couple of days. Why add protein powder to your smoothies when you can add sprouted lentils? In a sprouting jar, or simply a mason jar covered with cheesecloth secured with a rubber band, soak lentils overnight in water, drain, and then rinse and drain twice daily for another couple of days. Sprouting to me is like gardening on steroids—I can create fresh produce in three days right on my kitchen counter. (Of course, if you open a tin of lentils, you can enjoy them in about three seconds.)

  Are Tinned Beans as Healthy as Home Cooked?

  Tinned beans are convenient, but are they as nutritious as home cooked? A recent study discovered that indeed tinned beans are as healthy as boiled beans—with one exception: sodium. Salt is often added to tinned beans, resulting in sodium levels up to one hundred times more than if you cooked them without any salt.38 Draining and rinsing your tinned beans can remove about half the added salt, but then you’d also be rinsing away some of the nutrition. I recommend purchasing the no-salt-added varieties and cooking with the bean liquid in whatever dish you’re whipping up.

  Home-cooked beans may come out tastier, particularly texture-wise. Tinned beans can sometimes be a bit mushy, whereas when properly soaked and cooked, beans can come out nice and firm yet tender. Using dried beans is also cheaper. Some bean-counting researchers found that tinned beans can be about three times as expensive as home cooked, but the difference only came out to about twenty cents (fifteen pence) per serving.39 My family chooses to spend that extra twenty cents to save the hours beans can take to cook.

  The only legumes I have the patience to cook from scratch are lentils. They cook quickly and don’t need to be presoaked. You can just simmer them as you would pasta, in a pot with an abundance of water, for about half an hour. In fact, if you’re mak-ing pasta and have the time, why not let some lentils boil in the water for twenty minutes before adding in the pasta? Lentils are great in spaghetti sauce. That’s what I do when I make rice or quinoa: I throw a handful of dried lentils into the rice cooker, and they’re done when the grain is cooked. Mashed and seasoned cooked lentils also make a great veggie dip. Double check marks!

  Dipping veggies in hummus is a double-check-box snack. And don’t forget other bean blending, from garlicky white bean spreads and pinto pâtés to spicy black bean dip. Another fantastic snack (can you tell I love snacking?) is roasted chickpeas. Google it. My favorite, not surprisingly, is the buffalo ranch flavor (from the Kid Tested Firefighter Approved blog40), using a silicone baking mat.

  Mealtime options can include dishes like bean burritos; chili; pasta e fagioli; red beans and rice; minestrone; Tuscan white bean stew; and black bean, lentil, or split pea soup. My mum turned me on to dehydrated precooked pea soup mixes. (The lowest sodium brand I’ve been able to find is from Dr. John McDougall’s food line.) You simply add the mix to boiling water with some frozen greens and stir. (Whole Foods Market sells inexpensive one-pound frozen bags of a prechopped blend of kale, collard, and mustard greens. Couldn’t be easier!) I pack pea soup mix when I travel. It’s lightweight, and I can prepare it in the hotel room coffeemaker.

  Big Bucks on Beans’ Benefits

  For more than a decade, soya foods have enjoyed the rare privilege of an “FDA-approved” food-label health claim about soya’s ability to protect against heart disease. A billion-dollar industry, Big Soya has a lot of money to fund research touting the benefits of their bean. But is soya really the top bean, or are other legumes just as powerful? It turns out that non-soya beans, including lentils, lima beans, navy beans, and pinto beans, drop bad cholesterol levels41 as
effectively as soya protein.42 One study, for example, found that eating 130 grams a day of cooked pinto beans for two months may drop your cholesterol by nineteen points.43

  One of my favorite go-to quickie meals starts with toasting some corn tortillas. (Food for Life, the same company that makes Ezekiel bread, makes a sprouted yellow corn tortilla usually sold in the frozen section.) Then I mash some tinned beans on them with a fork and add a spoonful or two of jarred salsa. All the better if I have fresh coriander, salad greens, or avocado to top it all off. If I’m lucky enough to have fresh collard greens, I’ll steam a few leaves and use them as burrito wraps to replace the tortillas. We call them collard-ritos in our house. Greens and beans—can’t get healthier than that!

  Any leguminous dessert options? Three words: black-bean brownies. I don’t have a recipe of my own, but if you poke around online, you’ll find many good ones, including the one Dr. Joel Fuhrman shared on The Dr. Oz Show, which uses almond butter as the green-light source of fat and dates as the green-light source of sugar.44

  Mostly, I just add beans to whatever I happen to be making. I try to always keep an open tin at the front of the fridge as a reminder. We buy black beans by the case. (Black beans appear to have more phenolic phytonutrients than other common legumes,45 but the best bean is probably whichever one you’ll eat the most of!)

  Clearing the Air About Beans and Gas

  Beans, beans. Good for your heart. The more you eat, the . . . longer you live? Legumes have been found to be “the most important predictor of survival in older people”46 around the globe. Whether it was the Japanese eating soya products, the Swedes eating brown beans and peas, or those in the Mediterranean region eating lentils, chickpeas, and white beans, legume intake was consistently associated with a longer life span. Researchers found an 8 percent reduction in risk of premature death for every twenty-gram increase in daily legume intake—that’s barely two tablespoons’ worth!47

  So why aren’t more people taking advantage of this dietary “fountain of youth”? Fear of flatulence.48 Is that really the choice you’re left with, then? Breaking wind or breaking down? Passing gas or passing on?

  Are the concerns about the gassiness of beans just a bunch of hot air?

  When researchers tried adding 130 grams of beans to people’s diets, the majority experienced no symptoms at all. Even among people who did get gassy, 70 percent or more reported that it diminished by the second or third week of the study. The researchers concluded: “People’s concerns about excessive flatulence from eating beans may be exaggerated.”49

  Flatulence may be more common than you think. Americans report passing gas an average of fourteen times a day,50 with the normal range extending up to twenty-three times daily.51 Flatulence comes from two places: swallowed air and fermentation in the bowel. Factors that might cause you to swallow extra air include chewing gum, wearing ill-fitting dentures, sucking on boiled sweets, drinking through a straw, eating too fast, talking while you eat, and smoking cigarettes. So, if the fear of lung cancer doesn’t get you to quit smoking, maybe fear of flatulence will.

  The main source of gas, though, is the normal bacterial fermentation in the colon of undigested sugars. Dairy products are a leading cause of excessive flatulence,52 which is due to poor digestion of the milk sugar lactose.53 One of the most flatulent patients ever reported in the medical literature was effectively cured once all dairy products were removed from his diet. The case, reported in the New England Journal of Medicine and submitted to the Guinness Book of World Records, involved a man who, after consuming dairy, experienced “70 passages in one four-hour period.”54 Cutting the cheese, indeed.

  Long term, most people bulking up on high-fibre plant foods do not appear to have significantly increased problems with gas.55 The buoyancy of floating stools from trapped gases can in fact be seen as a sign of adequate fibre intake.56 The indigestible sugars in beans that make it down to your colon may even function as prebiotics to feed your good bacteria and make for a healthier colon.

  Even if at first they make you gassy, beans are so health promoting that you should experiment with ways to keep them in your diet at all costs. Lentils, split peas, and tinned beans tend to produce less gas, and tofu isn’t usually an offender. Repeated soakings of dried beans in water containing quarter of a teaspoon of bicarbonate of soda per gallon57 and tossing out the cooking water may help if you boil your own beans. Of the spices that have been tested, cloves, cinnamon, and garlic seem to be the most gas reducing, followed by turmeric (but only if uncooked), pepper, and ginger.58 If worse comes to worst, there are cheap supplements that contain alpha-galactosidase, an enzyme shown to break up the bean sugars and take the sail out of your wind.59

  Odor is a separate issue. The smell appears to come primarily from the digestion of sulfur-rich foods. So to cut down on the stench, experts have recommended cutting back on such foods as meat and eggs.60 (Hydrogen sulfide is called “rotten egg gas” for a reason.) This may be why people who eat meat regularly were found to generate as much as fifteen times the sulfides as those eating plant-based diets.61

  There are healthy sulfur-rich foods, such as garlic and cauliflower. If you’re about to embark on a long trip in a confined space after a big meal of aloo gobi, Pepto-Bismol and generic equivalents can act as a windbreaker by binding up the sulfur in your gut to eliminate odors. But this should be used only as a short-term solution due to the potential for bismuth toxicity with chronic use.62

  Then there are the high-tech solutions, such as carbon-fibre, odor-eating underwear (cost: £42), which were put to the test in a series of studies that included such gems as “Utilizing gas-tight Mylar pantaloons, the ability of a charcoal-lined cushion to absorb sulfur-containing gases instilled at the anus of eight subjects was assessed.”63 The name of the charcoal-lined cushion? The “Toot Trapper.”

  The bottom line: Intestinal gas is normal and healthy. No less an expert than Hippocrates himself was attributed as saying, “Passing gas is necessary to well-being.”64 In a review of degassing drugs and devices, Dr. John Fardy, a chair of gastroenterology, wrote: “Perhaps increased tolerance of flatus would be a better solution, for we tamper with harmless natural phenomena at our peril.”65 And, yes, Dr. Fardy is his real name.

  Legume consumption is associated with a slimmer waist and lower blood pressure, and randomized trials have shown it can match or beat out calorie cutting for slimming tummy fat as well as improving the regulation of blood sugar, insulin levels, and cholesterol. Beans are packed with fibre, folate, and phytates, which may help reduce the risk of stroke, depression, and colon cancer. The phytoestrogens in soya in particular appear to both help prevent breast cancer and improve breast cancer survival. No wonder the cancer guidelines suggest you should try to fit beans into your meals—and it’s so easy! They can be added to nearly any meal, easily incorporated into snack times, or served as the star attraction. The possibilities are endless.

  Berries

  Dr. Greger’s Favorite Berries

  Açai berries, barberries, blackberries, blueberries, cherries (sweet or tart), concord grapes, cranberries, goji berries, kumquats, mulberries, raspberries (black or red), and strawberries

  Serving Sizes:

  60 g fresh or frozen

  40 g dried

  Daily Recommendation:

  1 serving per day

  The case for berries has been made throughout this book. Berries offer potential protection against cancer (chapters 4 and 11), a boost to the immune system (chapter 5), and a guard for the liver (chapter 8) and brain (chapters 3 and 14). An American Cancer Society study of nearly one hundred thousand men and women found that those who ate the most berries appeared significantly less likely to die of cardiovascular disease.1

  Wait a second—tastes great and may help you live longer? Yes. That’s what plant-based eating is all about.

  Greens are the healthiest vegetables, and berries are the healthiest fruits—in part due to their respective plant p
igments. Leaves contain the green pigment chlorophyll, which sets off the firestorm of photosynthesis, so greens have to be packed with antioxidants to deal with the charged high-energy electrons that are formed. (Remember superoxide from chapter 3?) Meanwhile, berries evolved to have bright, contrasting colors to attract fruit-eating critters to help disperse their seeds. And the same molecular characteristics that give berries such vibrant colors may account for some of their antioxidant abilities.2

  Americans eat a lot of pale and beige foods: white bread, white pasta, white potatoes, white rice. Colorful foods are often healthier because they contain antioxidant pigments, whether it’s the beta-carotene that makes carrots and sweet potatoes orange, the lycopene antioxidant pigment that makes tomatoes red, or the anthocyanin pigments that make blueberries blue. The colors are the antioxidants. That knowledge alone should revolutionize your stroll down the produce aisle.

  Guess which have more antioxidants—red onions or white onions? You don’t need to look up the answer. You can see the difference with your own eyes. (Indeed, red onions have 76 percent more antioxidant capacity than white, with yellow onions in between.3) So, given the choice, why buy another white onion ever again?

  Red cabbage may contain eight times more antioxidants than green cabbage,4 which is why you’ll never find a green cabbage in my house.

  Pop quiz: Which wipes out more free radicals—pink grapefruit or regular grapefruit? Granny Smith or Red Delicious? Iceberg lettuce or romaine? Red grapes or green? Yellow or white sweetcorn? See, you don’t need me to go to the supermarket with you. You can make all these calls yourself.

  What about a purple-skinned aubergine or a white-skinned aubergine? Trick question! Remember, the pigment is the antioxidant, so the color of the skin doesn’t matter if you peel it off. As we learned in chapter 11, that’s why you never want to peel apples. It’s for this same reason kumquats may be the healthiest citrus fruit, since you can eat them rind and all.