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Recipe from The Starch Solution.

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In my nearly defenseless condition, they would have wanted to know the condition of my heart before anything else would be done. This decision for them would be easy to justify: after all, I was an elderly male (67) and I had a past history of serious atherosclerosis, having suffered a major stroke at age 18. I have no doubt that there are old blockages (scars) in my arteries that developed as a young man eating the Western diet (my highest cholesterol had once been 338 mg/dL). Twenty years ago I had a CT heart scan (performed out of curiosity) showing significant amounts of calcification in my coronary arteries demonstrating that I had atherosclerotic plaque disease. These blockages were, however, old fibrous scars. Since I changed my diet at age 27 my cholesterol has dropped to below 150 mg/dL and I am confident that no new disease has formed. But the scars (with calcium in them) remain for a lifetime.

The plaques found on my heart scan are healed, stable, non-lethal, and of no risk to me—unless they were to be discovered and treated by a cardiologist or a bypass surgeon. If I would have gone to the hospital after my fall in March of 2015, I would have been facing the standard practice of prophylactic revascularization: angioplasties with stents placed before any other treatment to my bones would be provided. Remember, I refused to go to the hospital so I avoided this common scenario. I healed at home.

Before continuing, I would like to tell you my outcome. My hearing has completely returned to normal and my balance is pretty good. It took about three months for my fractures to heal and after six months I was almost pain free. I can say I am back to 100% a year after this near tragedy. But, how do I protect myself in the future from unnecessary investigations of my heart if I have an accident that leaves me unable to defend myself?  Have a tattoo written on my chest?

Prophylactic Revascularization Has Long Been Known to Be Unnecessary

One of my friends was not as fortunate as me. At age 90, fully active, traveling around the world and working everyday, he was found to have colon cancer in April of 2015. I recommended he have conservative surgical treatment. His physicians requested that his heart arteries be studied before the cancer surgery. During his prophylactic revascularization two stents were placed, he suffered two heart attacks, and four cardiac arrests. He survived but has spent the past year in a convalescence home. He has made recovery, but my guess is he will never be the same. In retrospect all would agree that prophylactic revascularization should not have been done and conservative surgery (even as simple as a diversion colostomy) would have avoided much unnecessary suffering. (Hindsight is wonderful, but his physicians knew better at the time.)

Logically, it seems like the right thing to do, to open any blocked arteries before a required surgery, such as hip replacement or a cancer removal, is performed. Cardiovascular complications are the leading cause of death following non-cardiac operations. Prophylactic revascularization has been promoted as a potential solution. However, in 2004 The Coronary Artery Revascularization Prophylaxis (CARP) trial showed no benefit from this strategy. A study published in the March 2016 issue of JAMA Internal Medicine of 194,444 patients undergoing non-cardiac procedures found that half of them with evidence of commonly present, obstructive disease had received a recommendation to have this useless, costly, and harmful heart surgery performed before their necessary surgery. The majority of people have these chronic blockages. Therefore, if the cardiologist looks into your heart then you will likely be found to be in need of their services.

Heart Surgery Does Not Save Lives for Chronic Coronary Artery Disease

As a physician well studied in the cause and treatment of coronary artery disease, I can defend myself, my family, and many of my patients, from most unnecessary medical treatments (if I am fully conscious). However, most people are unaware of the real benefits and harms of common treatments, and are at the mercy of their doctors. According to a letter in the 1992 issue of the Annals of Internal Medicine titled, Money, Fun, and Angioplasty “…the combination of three factors, never so closely associated before in the history of medicine, has been synergistic in promoting coronary angioplasty: It is very lucrative; patients are mostly self-referred; and it is fun to perform.” This procedure was introduced in 1979 and now more than 800,000 angioplasty procedures are performed annually in the U.S. Angioplasty is an artery-clearing procedure usually involving the placement of a stent, a metal mesh tube used to prop open a diseased section of a heart artery.

Angioplasty can be lifesaving if done within minutes of a heart attack. At this stage, this condition is called “acute coronary artery disease.” The event is a result of the rupture of a volatile plaque inside an artery wall, similar to a pimple rupturing on a teenager’s face. In the process of healing the rupture, a blood clot forms, causing a partial or complete blockage of the flow of blood to the heart muscle. If the blockage is large enough then the heart muscle lying distal dies. The goal of angioplasty is to open the blood clot within 90 minutes of the onset of chest pain. Unfortunately, if the procedure is attempted after six hours, it is too late; the heart muscle is dead and no survival benefits are found with surgery.

The Formation of Chronic Disease (Old Blockages)

After the rupture of a volatile plaque and the formation of a blood clot, the healing continues with the conversion of the affected area into scar tissue over the next several weeks. This process of plaque rupture, clot formation and, finally, a scar, occurs many times in many places throughout the 44,000 miles of arteries in the human body. Eventually multilayer scars may result in a closure of an artery by 50%, 70%, 90%, or 100%. These multilayer scars are the blockages that are seen on an angiogram or CT heart scan in chronic coronary artery disease. They should be considered history!

Only after obstructing 70% or more of the lumen of the artery do these blockages produce symptoms such as chest pain (angina). Most angioplasties, as well as coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG), are performed on patients with chronic coronary artery disease. You must understand that these surgeries are directed at hard, fibrous, stable, non-lethal scars, medically referred to as “blockages” or “plaques,” in order to understand why these treatments do not save lives. To repeat for emphasis, these blockages, seen as shadows on an angiogram, are non-lethal scars: old healed disease. The killing part of the disease is the initial rupture of a volatile plaque and the clot that quickly forms, days to decades before their discovery by the cardiologist.

Failure of Heart Surgery Unquestionable, but Doctors Won’t Stop

Studies consistently demonstrate, beyond any informed person’s doubt, that angioplasty offers no benefit in terms of reducing death or other cardiovascular events over optimal medical therapy in the setting of chronic coronary artery disease. This knowledge is universally accepted in the medical business. Research showing the failure of angioplasty to save lives has been extended to15 years after treatment. Even successfully treating completely blocked coronary arteries does not save lives.

Following these consistent research findings of the failure of angioplasty to save lives, cardiologists were advised in 2007 by the American College of Cardiology and the American Heart Association to change their practice behaviors. In 2011 studies published in the Archives of Internal Medicine and the Journal of the American medical Association, however, showed that cardiologists were still doing business as usual, with no reduction in unnecessary angioplasties. In an editorial accompanying the Archives of Internal Medicine article, an expert wrote about these ghastly findings: “In addition, in a fee-for-service health system and in an environment in which more and more physicians are being compensated on the basis of relative value unit productivity, it remains to be determined whether personal financial gain might play a role in continuing old practices and in performing procedures shown to be of no benefit.”

Save Yourself

Your goal is to keep yourself and your loved ones away from the medical businesses. However, sometimes that is not possible (for example, following a serious accident). Services provided by the medical businesses could also be life-saving in other acute events, such as an angioplasty performed within 90 minutes of a heart attack. However most medical problems are due to chronic illnesses caused by the way we eat and our bad habits. It’s the Food! Fix that which is fixable and avoid future tragedy.

Originally published in a McDougall Newsletter and republished with permission. Click here to sign-up for the McDougall Newsletter for free.

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The Healthiest Diet on the Planet offers a scientifically based alternative that immediately helps you lose weight, feel better, protects you against life-threatening disease, and even reverses most common chronic diseases. This is a simple and proven formula that I have been sharing with my patients for four decades, one that always yields life-changing results. These are the very foods that we as humans are designed to eat, these are the foods we crave, these are the foods that unbiased studies have proved to be the most health promoting.

Although human beings can survive on many different varieties of food, in order to function, feel, and look our best, we must lean heavily on our biological design as herbivores, plant eaters. But not just any plants. We are starch eaters, also referred to as starchivores or starchitarians. Starches are plant parts that store an abundance of energy, otherwise known as carbohydrates, to power our rocket-building brains and to sustain muscles that can run for days without stopping. That special fuel is sugar, which is stored as long chains in starchy plant parts often referred to as complex carbohydrates.

Starches that grow underground, such as potatoes and sweet potatoes, are so nutritionally complete that a person can live in excellent health on these foods alone. Starches provide an abundance of protein, vitamins, minerals, and dietary fiber, with just enough essential fat to meet all of our dietary needs. Grains and legumes, however, need a little help from fruits, like oranges, and green or yellow vegetables, like broccoli, in order to provide adequate vitamin A and C.

The most important evidence supporting my claim that the natural human diet is based on starches is a simple observation that you can easily validate for yourself: all large populations of trim, healthy, athletic, war-fighting people, throughout verifiable human history, have obtained the bulk of their calories from starch. Examples of once-thriving people include Japanese, Chinese, and other Asians, who ate sweet potatoes, buckwheat, and/or rice; Incas, in South America, who ate potatoes; Mayans and Aztecs, in Central America, who ate corn; and Egyptians, in the Middle East, who ate wheat.

There have been only a few small isolated populations of people, such as the Arctic Inuit Eskimos, living at the extremes of the environment who have eaten otherwise. Therefore, scientific written documentation of what people have eaten over the past thirteen thousand years convincingly supports my claim. Archaeological evidence shows we have been starch eaters for more than a hundred thousand years. Evidence of pre−Homo sapiens dates plant eating to 2.6 million years ago for humanoids.

Ready to get started? Check out Forks Meal Planner, FOK’s easy weekly meal-planning tool to keep you on a healthy plant-based path. To learn more about a whole-food, plant-based diet, visit our Plant-Based Primer.

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For more than 6,000 years, natives of the frozen North have lived with almost no contact with the rest of the world. Not until the mid-1800s were reliable records made of their daily lives, their diets, and their health. Early reports describe these people as looking beautiful and athletic when they were young, but then they aged quickly, and “men and women who appeared to be 60 or over were rare.”

Rumors have since circulated that traditional Eskimos have lived free of heart disease, cancer, and most other chronic diseases affecting western civilizations these days. Research published in the mid-1970s tried to explain this “Eskimo paradox” of living healthy with very few plant foods, on a high-fat, high-cholesterol, no-dietary-fiber diet. The omega-3 fish fats were noted as the miracle ingredient providing protection. Dietetic and medical experts have uncritically accepted this theory in the face of libraries filled with incriminating evidence to the contrary. They tell patients to eat more fish, poultry, and even red meat—like the Eskimos – and plenty of fish oil – in order to stay healthy.

Pushing the Nutritional Envelope

Hunted animals, including birds, caribou, seals, walrus, polar bears, whales, and fish provided all the nutrition for the Eskimos for at least 10 months of the year. And in the summer season people gathered a few plant foods such as berries, grasses, tubers, roots, stems, and seaweeds. Frozen snow-covered lands were unfit for the cultivation of plants. Animal flesh was, by necessity, the only food available most of the time.

The fat, not the protein, from animal foods provided most of the 3,100 calories required daily for these active people. Plants are the primary source of all carbohydrates, including digestible sugars and non-digestible dietary fibers. Eating raw meat indirectly provided Eskimos with enough carbohydrates in the form of glycogen (found in the muscles and liver of animals) to meet their necessary nutrient requirements and keep them out of a starvation condition called ketosis. Muscle tissue contains almost no calcium, and as a result the daily intake was about 120 mg/day versus the 800 mg and more commonly recommended for good health. Plants (not people) synthesize Vitamin C, yet the Eskimo was able to avoid scurvy with the 30 mg of vitamin C consumed daily found in land and sea animals. Recommendations for vitamin C are 60 mg/day and higher daily. Low levels of sunlight, and preformed vitamin D from fish, met the “sunshine D vitamin” requirement for Eskimo health. By the grace of environmental design, Nature made sure there was just enough nutrition for the Eskimo to survive.

There Is No Eskimo Paradox

The human being is designed to thrive on a diet of starches, vegetables and fruits. The Eskimo experience serves as a testament to the miraculous strengths and adaptability of our bodies. We can survive on raw and cooked meat, but we thrive on starches, vegetables and fruits. These hardy people survived living at the edge of the nutritional envelope, but not in good health. Here are some of the health costs they paid:

Claims that Eskimos were free of heart (artery) disease are untrue. A thorough review of the evidence concludes that “Eskimos have a similar prevalence of CAD (coronary artery disease) as non-Eskimo populations, they have excessive mortality due to cerebrovascular strokes, their overall mortality is twice as high as that of non-Eskimo populations, and their life expectancy is approximately 10 years shorter than the Danish population.”

Mummified remains of Eskimos dating back 2,000 years have shown extensive hardening of the arteries throughout their brains, hearts and limbs; as a direct consequence of following a carnivorous diet of birds, caribou, seals, walrus, polar bears, whales, and fish. The June 1987 issue of National Geographic magazine carried an article about two Eskimo women, one in her twenties and the other in her forties, frozen for five centuries in a tomb of ice. When discovered and medically examined they both showed signs of severe osteoporosis and also suffered extensive atherosclerosis, “probably the result of a heavy diet of whale and seal blubber.”

Their low-calcium diet and lack of sunshine (vitamin D) are only minor factors contributing to the extensive osteoporosis found in recent and ancient Eskimos. Alaskan Eskimos older than age 40 have been found to have a 10% to 15% greater deficit in bone mineral density compared to Caucasians in the US. This research published in 1974 on 107 elderly people concluded, “Aging bone loss, which occurs in many populations, has an earlier onset and greater intensity in the Eskimos. Nutritional factors of high protein, high nitrogen, high phosphorus, and low calcium intakes maybe implicated.”

Protein, and especially animal protein, consumed in excess of our needs places serious burdens on the body. The liver and kidneys work hard to process the excess protein and excrete its byproducts along with the urine. As a result of this extra work, Eskimos have been reported to have an enlarged liver while living on meat, and to produce larger than average volumes of urine in order to excrete the byproducts of protein metabolism. The bones also play a role in managing excess animal protein (acidic by nature) by neutralizing large amounts of dietary acids. In this process bone structure and bone mineral content are lost through the kidney system, depleting the bones into a condition called osteoporosis.

Diseases of animals are readily transmitted to humans when eaten. One example is trichinosis (an infection with the roundworm Trichinella spiralis), which is found in about 12% of older Eskimos; a result of eating raw and infected walrus, seal, and polar bear meat. In most cases this parasite infestation causes no symptoms, but illness and death can result.

Since the 1970s the diet of the Eskimo has contained high levels of toxic, organic pollutants and heavy metals. These lipophilic chemicals are attracted to and concentrated in the fatty-tissues of land and sea animals. As a direct result of the traditional Eskimo diet (now contaminated by industry wastes), the bodies of these Arctic people contain the highest human concentrations of environmental chemicals found anywhere on Earth: “levels so extreme that the breast milk and tissues of some Greenlanders could be classified as hazardous waste.” Eskimo women have been found to have levels of PCBs in their breast milk five to ten times higher than women in southern Canada. These chemicals cause and promote many forms of cancer and cause brain diseases, including Parkinson’s disease.

Nutrition Has Gone Downhill for the Eskimo

The notion that consuming meat, fish, and fish oil will promote health and healing has captured the attention of the scientific community in large part because of the misinterpretation** of the Eskimo experience. But life has gotten worse for the Eskimo. Over the past 50 years their traditional diet has been further modified with the addition of western foods. Rather than using a hook, spear, or club to catch their meal, as in the past, people living in this part of the world use the “green lure” (the dollar bill) and catch their meals through an open car window at the local fast-food restaurant. Obesity, type-2 diabetes, tooth decay, and cancers of the breast, prostate, and colon have been added to the Eskimo’s traditional health problems of artery disease, bone loss, and infectious diseases.

People living in the frozen north these days have heated homes and drive around in comfortable SUVs. The challenging environment their ancestors barely survived through required a carnivorous diet. Those days of needing 3100 calories a day to counter the freezing cold and hunt for dinner are gone. The idea that current epidemics of obesity and sickness in these Northern people would be best fixed by returning to the old ways of carnivorous diet would not work unless they also returned to living in igloo homes and hunted their lands for every meal. Physicians and dietitians now caring for these people suffering from the western diet with the addition of too much traditional food (ancestral meat) should be prescribing a starch-based diet to help them lose excess weight and cure common dietary diseases.

*The term “Eskimo” comes from a Native American word that may have meant “eater of raw meat.” The word “Eskimo” has come to be considered offensive, especially in Canada. Many prefer the name “Inuit,” which means “the people” or “real people.” However, “Eskimo” is the term used in the scientific and historical literature and will be used here.

**Misinterpretation is easy to spread because:

1) People love to hear good news about their bad habits.

2) Nutritional “facts,” even when false and harmful, are used to sell meat, fish, and other foods.

3) The media loves headlines that sell their products, like “The Eskimo Diet proves Meat’s Good.”

Originally published in a McDougall Newsletter and republished with permission. Click here to sign-up for the McDougall Newsletter for free.

_{Feature photo source: My Life with the Eskimo by Vilhjalmur Stefansson.}

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Vitamin D supplements are so powerless that the benefits of supplements can only be seen at the extremes of need, such as with institutionalized elderly women (and even then the benefits are with a combination of vitamin D and calcium, not vitamin D alone). In other words, if grandma can soak up some sunshine on the outdoor patio several times a week, she will reduce her risk of fractures far beyond any benefits hoped for by adding pills or injections of vitamin D.

Vitamin D Supplements Increase Broken Bones

Two large randomized controlled trials have shown an increased risk of fractures with annual high-dose vitamin D supplementation.

1) In the British ”Wessex” study, 9,440 community-dwelling participants, aged 75–100 years, were randomly allocated to receive an annual injection of 300,000 IU vitamin D2 or matching placebo every autumn over three years. The vitamin D group showed an almost 50% increased risk of hip and leg (femur) fractures.

2) In the Australian study 2,256 community-dwelling women aged 70–92 years were randomly allocated to receive an annual oral dose of 500,000 IU vitamin D3 or placebo. Those on the supplement had a 15% increased rate of falls and a 26% increased rate of fractures.

The mechanism for these adverse turns of event is unknown, but supplementation may cause muscle weakness and nervous system imbalances that result in more falls and fractures. Scientific research has shown that vitamin D supplements can also increase “bad” LDL-cholesterol (heart disease), prostate cancer, immune system suppression, autoimmune diseases, gastrointestinal symptoms, kidney disease, and calcium kidney stones.

The Vitamin D Disease Myth

The medical and pharmaceutical industries’ infatuation with vitamin D began when researchers correctly observed that the incidence of common chronic diseases, such as obesity, heart disease, type-2 diabetes, and multiple sclerosis was more common in populations of people living further from the equator and closer to the North and South Poles. Since even a school-aged child knows that the sun is hotter near the equator, the investigative spotlight looking for the cause of epidemic diseases became exposure to sunshine. Well, not exactly sunshine, but rather a metabolic product of sunshine: serum 25-hydroxyvitamin D in the blood. Rather than recommend the obvious—more sunshine—the remedy of traditional medicine was manufactured pharmaceuticals in the forms of oral and injectable vitamin D. In the US between 2002 and 2011, the sales of vitamin D supplements increased by more than 10 times, from $42 million to $605 million.

The Dietary Connection Is Missed

More than 100 years of laboratory and clinical research has established the causal relationship between the rich Western diet (heavy in animal foods and vegetable oils) and common chronic diseases. The geographic changes seen with vitamin D and, more accurately, the amount of sunshine, also conform to this incriminating research. The real reason for this correlation is that as populations migrate from the equator to more temperate climates, their food supply naturally changes.

The seasons of fall, winter, and spring are times of low food productivity by plants: Fruits from trees and bushes have ripened by summer’s end; the wheat and corn crops have all been harvested by fall. To survive, people living farther from the equator have relied more on meat, poultry, fish, and dairy foods for calories. Concentration of human financial wealth in the northern and southern latitudes today has perpetuated this inequality in food distribution. Rich people consume richer foods. Poorer countries have traditionally been equatorial, and their foods have been beans, corn, potatoes, rice, and other starches.

The amount of sunshine is incidental and the blood levels of vitamin D are irrelevant. The food is the cause of the most common chronic diseases: obesity, heart disease, diabetes, multiple sclerosis, and cancer.

Chronic Disease Causes Low Vitamin D

Eating the Western diet causes serious common chronic diseases. In an effort to heal, the body responds with repair processes that include inflammation. One of the responses to this inflammation is the lowering of the serum 25-hydroxyvitamin D in the blood. Thus, low vitamin D in the blood is a result of being ill, not the cause of sickness. This is the main the reason studies using vitamin D supplements have consistently shown no benefits to patients with common chronic diseases. The metabolic imbalances created by administering this unnatural substance may actually be responsible for the increase in falls, fractures, and other damage. (Vitamin D is a hormone synthesized with the help of sunlight; it is not intended for oral intake or injection.)

Studies show, in addition to the healing processes, that even our basic food choices lead to inflammation. Consuming meat and other animal foods increase inflammation while grains and vegetables decrease inflammation. Thus, low vitamin D levels do not cause obesity, heart disease, diabetes, multiple sclerosis, and cancer, but rather result from the illnesses (and the very foods that caused these chronic conditions).

The epidemic of obesity has added to the epidemic of vitamin D deficiency. Because vitamin D is fat-soluble, excess body fat will pull vitamin D out of circulation, thus contributing to lower levels.

There Is Sunshine in Seattle

For excellent health, people must get sunshine; there is no substitute. The amount of sun required depends on one’s skin pigmentation. For a light-skinned person, exposing the face, arms, and hands to five minutes of sun at noon two to three times a week at a latitude of Boston, MA in the spring, summer, or fall will cause the body to produce sufficient vitamin D to meet all of its needs. Asian-Indians may require three times as much exposure, and dark-skinned people may require 10 times as much exposure under the same sunlight conditions. During wintertime, this fat-soluble vitamin is stored for long periods of time, mainly in the liver and the fatty tissues.

Commonly people claim that they live in a part of the world where the sun does not shine. This is, of course, not true; there has always been enough sunshine to promote good health. Consider that people have lived in high northern and southern latitudes from Canada to New Zealand for more than 15,000 years, without taking any vitamin D supplements. And many of these people have had darker skin pigmentation than the typical very-white-skinned northern European Caucasian.

High-tech environmental studies on the penetration of sunlight all over the globe confirm the abundance of ultraviolet radiation available to produce vitamin D in people, even for those living in higher latitudes. Stop for a minute and consider that there is sufficient energy from the sun to grow huge rainforests, such as the Great Bear Rainforest, which extends from Vancouver, Canada to the border of Alaska. The energy is available, but people must take advantage of it.

Responding to a Low Vitamin D Level

I encourage people to avoid routine examinations of their blood for vitamin D levels (25-hydroxy vitamin D). There is nothing to be gained; adequate sunshine and eating well are “givens,” regardless of blood test results. Various experts consider wide ranges of test values, between 12 and 100 ng/ml, sufficient. People with and without adequate sunshine exposure are commonly found to be deficient based on these blood results. Finally, and most importantly, treating abnormal blood tests with vitamin D supplements hurts people, at least by causing more fractures. Thus, there is no level of vitamin D discovered by a blood test that would cause me as a medical doctor to prescribe vitamin D supplements to one of my patients.

I recommend people expose themselves to as much sun as tolerated. That may mean to let their skin become slightly reddish at times. Skin damage, however, must be avoided because serious precancerous conditions (actinic keratosis), skin cancers, and accelerated aging come from over exposure.

Refocused physicians, dietitians, and other healthcare providers will resolve their clients’ health problems by feeding them a starch-based diet. Inflammatory foods will thus be avoided and chronic diseases will be improved or cured. And, as a side benefit, 25-hydroxyvitamin D may naturally rise to numbers considered to be “normal” by meddling medical and pharmaceutical businesses.

Originally published in a McDougall Newsletter and republished with permission. Click here to sign-up for the McDougall Newsletter for free.

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Research at that time (before the 1980s) had shown that overweight women with high levels of cholesterol, estrogen, and prolactin in their blood died sooner from their breast cancer than women with lower values. This study demonstrated that the McDougall Diet improves all of these prognostic factors without costs or side effects. The ultimate benefits are predicted to be a reduced risk for recurrence of the cancer and a longer life. “Cure” is the proper word to use for patients who live out their normal life expectancy.

The McDougall Diet is based on common starches, like beans, corn, potatoes, sweet potatoes, and rice with some green and yellow vegetables and fruits. No vegetable oils. No supplements.

On February 13, 2015, the American Cancer Society published their recommendations that cancer survivors should follow “prudent diets,” plant-based diets that are high in fruits, vegetables and unrefined grains while at the same time being low in red and processed meats, refined grains, and sugars. Its report states, “These diets are contrasted to ‘Western’ diets,’ which have the opposite pattern and are heavy in meats, sweets, other processed foods, and dietary fat.” They also recommend weight loss and exercise in order to prolong survival for people with cancer.

This turn in thinking about the importance of food is especially important because the latest statistics (2015) from the American Cancer Society show little improvement in survival rates over the past 40 years for cancer patients; regardless of the good intentions of their practitioners, aggressively attacking their tumors with surgery, radiation, and/or chemotherapy. (Improvements from standard medical treatments have been limited mostly to childhood, blood, and lymphoid cancers, representing fewer than 10% of all cancers.)

Improved Survival From a Healthy Diet

A low-fat, plant-based diet* has been shown to positively affect survival in cancers of the:

Breast
Colon
Prostate
Skin: Melanoma

*This research has been based on diets that are still too high in fat (30% or higher), loaded with animal foods, and deficient in plant-derived foods (especially starches). A truly low-fat, starch-based diet like the one once followed in Japan (rice and vegetables with fewer than 10% of the calories as fat) would provide far greater benefits for prevention and survival than the “Mediterranean-type” diets that have been recommended lately. A truly therapeutic diet, like the McDougall Diet, is 7% fat with no meat, poultry, fish, eggs, dairy, or vegetable oils. Meaningful research in the future should use the best treatments available rather than compromise the patients’ health with “prudent diets.”

This enlightened dietary approach focuses on strengthening the human body and its magnificent abilities to heal and stay healthy; while, at the same time, removing cancer-causing and -promoting elements from the patients’ diets. Even diseases, which seem as far removed from food as pre-cancerous actinic keratosis of the skin and lung (smoking) cancer are benefited with a healthy low-fat diet. The McDougall Diet supports phenomenal recoveries in many ways.

Ten Diet-Induced Changes That Slow and Reverse Cancer

1. Losing weight: Obesity increases not only the risk of getting cancer, but overweight people die sooner from their cancers.*
2. Cutting out meat: This removes substances known to cause cancer progression.
3. Stopping cow’s milk:  This removes substances known to cause cancer progression.
4. Reducing intake of growth stimulants: Animal foods of all kinds increase growth factors (IGF-1, etc.) for cancer progression.
5. Giving up vegetable oils: Isolated corn, safflower, olive, etc. oils will encourage tumors to grow faster (than do animal fats).
6. Avoiding consumption of cancer-promoting chemicals (environmental carcinogens and persistent organic pollutants).
7. Increasing immune system enhancing plant components called phytonutrients.
8. Growing healthy intestinal bacteria to enhance the body’s defenses against cancer.
9. Increasing intake of anti-cancer plant sterols.
10. Raising the consumption of cancer-fighting folates. As the root word “foliage” implies, these substances are from plants.

Independent of diet, physical activity (exercise) has also been shown to significantly improve survival of women with breast cancer. Sunshine is also vital for health and could cut the risk of dying from breast cancer in half. (I do not recommend vitamin D supplements.)

* People treated with a low-fat, starch-based diet become healthier, and one sign of this better health is they become trim. Unfortunately, physicians misinterpret the meaning of this weight loss as a sign of sickness because of their past experiences which have taught them that “slim” means the end of life; because their patients lose their appetites and become malnourished with illness and treatments. Patients must not let themselves suffer from their doctors’ biases and ignorance. (React when you hear, “You can go on a vegetarian diet, just don’t lose weight.”)

Is Hope Ever Lost?

I often see women with breast cancer, men with prostate cancer, and both genders with many other forms of late-stage cancers. Their doctors have given them no hope; in fact, in most cases, well-intentioned medical treatments (surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy) have added to their miseries. Hopelessness compounds the suffering. Patients need to be told that even with advanced cancer, there is sometimes recovery, called “spontaneous regression.” The standard definition of spontaneous regression is “the partial or complete disappearance of a malignant tumor in the absence of treatment or in the presence of therapy considered inadequate to exert a significant influence on the disease.” Spontaneous regression of cancer is not as rare an occurrence as once thought. In a study based on mammograms, 22% of the invasive breast cancers in women spontaneously regressed (disappeared on their own) over a six-year interval (with no treatment).

People with a body full of disease have also recovered. One recent report identified 32 cases of spontaneous regression of clinical breast cancer. There are certainly many more unreported cases. Advanced melanoma, brain cancer (neuroblastoma), and kidney cancer are also known to disappear without treatment. Precancerous changes in the female uterine cervix and colon polyps also regress naturally.

Simple logic would lead to the conclusion that “such a miracle” is more likely to happen for someone in good health, rather than in poor health. The only way I know to consistently improve health is by replacing destructive habits with supportive ones. The most powerful of these necessary changes is the kind of food (not the quantity).

I have seen what I believe to be spontaneous regressions in my patients. Ruth Heidrich is one remarkable example of metastatic breast cancer, spread to the bones and lungs, diagnosed over 33 years ago, and she lives cancer-free today. Ruth was with us in January of 2015 on the Hawaii McDougall Adventure trip.

Never give up! It’s the food.

Diet and Cancer Success Story

At age 29, on April 11, 2011, Jessica Bowen was diagnosed with aggressive Stage 3 invasive ductal carcinoma of the breast cancer. (Stage 3 means the cancer is large and has spread to multiple lymph nodes, and maybe to the skin and muscles of the chest.) She underwent standard therapies and changed her diet. I heard from Jessica on February 22, 2015. “Hello! I am doing good, thank you for asking! I’d be honored if you use my story any way you see fit! If it can help anyone, that makes me happy. Here is an updated picture. I was a ‘survivor model’ for Rock the Runway & Runway for a Cause last year…I was able to share my story with other survivors while participating.”

Originally published in a McDougall Newsletter and republished with permission. Click here to sign-up for the McDougall Newsletter for free.

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Robert Atkins, MD, creator of the Atkins Diet, was upfront with his recommendations to eat a diet almost exclusively made up of meat, poultry, cheese, butter, fish, and eggs, with very little plant-foods. The first Atkins Diet book was published in 1972; since then well-informed people have come to understand (through their own readings and personal experiences) that eating an animal-based, high-fat, low-carbohydrate diet is wrong. They have learned that following this eating pattern causes epidemic diseases, including type-2 diabetes, coronary heart disease, and common cancers; and that the livestock industry is at the root of climate change. Many people are also wrestling with their conscience as they deal with the moral issues of animals being killed unnecessarily for food, supporting the horrors of factory farming, and depleting our oceans. Therefore, a diet book titled Eat More Animals to Lose Weight would meet a mostly unfriendly audience.

Wheat Belly and Grain Brain take a backdoor approach to the Atkins low-carbohydrate method. As the titles of these books suggest, wheat causes a big belly and grains damage the brain. Within their pages you learn that all starchy foods, including rice, corn, and potatoes—the traditional foods consumed by billions of people throughout human history—are now unhealthy and must be minimized or, better yet, avoided altogether. If you believe these authors, then what is left to eat in order to meet your energy requirements? Meat, dairy, fish, and eggs (the original Atkins Diet).*

In order for the authors of these two books to pull off the monumental task of luring otherwise intelligent people into inherently dangerous diet plans, they have had to (1) ignore the bulk of the science, (2) exaggerate the truth, and (3) make false associations.

Ignoring the Science: Low-Carbohydrate Diets Contribute to a Higher Risk of Death and Disease
Low-carbohydrate diets can cause weight loss, but weight loss should not be the primary goal of individuals, medical doctors, dietitians, insurance companies, or governments. The goal is to live longer and stay healthy. Three major scientific reviews show that low-carbohydrate diets increase the risk of sickness and death.

Exaggerating the Truth about Inflammation
Promoters of low-carbohydrate diets, those high in meat, dairy, fish, and eggs, claim dietary carbohydrates are packed with inflammatory ingredients, and that inflammation is at the heart of virtually every disorder and disease. The evidence linking carbohydrates to inflammation is convoluted, theoretical, and largely limited to an uncommon condition, Celiac disease.

Inflammation is the consequence of injury, such as from a cut, burn, or infection. The pain, redness, swelling, and heat that follow are natural, necessary processes for healing. These symptoms and signs of inflammation resolve after the single event. However, with repetitive injury, inflammation can become long-standing, referred to as “chronic inflammation.” One common example of chronic inflammation is bronchitis from inhaling cigarette smoke 20 times a day. Stop smoking and the inflammation stops, and the lungs heal (scar tissues and other residuals of the damage can be left behind).

For dietary diseases, including atherosclerosis, primary sources of repetitive injury are meat, cheese, and eggs. Once the injury is stopped, then healing occurs and the inflammation resolves. Reversal of coronary heart disease is seen on follow up examinations.

Research does not support the theory that carbohydrates from wheat, other grains, or starchy vegetables are the source of injury that leads to chronic inflammation. In contrast, scientific research does solidly support that the source of injury leading to chronic inflammation is animal foods.

Several mechanisms have been proposed to explain how animal foods injure our bodies. For example, atherosclerosis (chronic inflammatory artery disease) has been explained by the “cholesterol hypothesis” and by the “TMAO hypothesis.” Another sound mechanism identifies cow’s milk as the culprit. Most important for the consumer to understand is that these mechanisms consistently blame meat, dairy, and/or eggs as the source of the repeated injury and chronic inflammation. No debate here.

Relevant to the argument that inflammation is not the underlying cause of obesity and disease is the fact that treating inflammation with powerful anti-inflammatory medications does not favorably change the course and progression of the disease. To quote respected researchers, “In fact, to our knowledge, no anti-inflammatory therapy cures the majority of patients with a disease in which inflammation plays a major contributory role…” To repeat, inflammation is the result of injury, not the cause of disease.

Making False Associations: Using Celiac Disease to Demonize All Carbohydrates for All People

The main take-away that readers will get from Wheat Belly is that wheat is the major cause of obesity, heart disease, diabetes, and almost all other major health problems that people suffer from. Wheat can be very troublesome for a small percentage of the population. Celiac disease is a condition that affects fewer than one in one hundred people following the Western diet. These people must avoid gluten, found in high concentrations in wheat, barley, and rye. However, to put this real concern into a global, historical perspective, consider the importance of these three grains: they have served to fuel the development of civilizations throughout human history and still are a major source of calories, protein, vitamins, and minerals for billions of people. People without celiac disease, or the few other conditions that warrant elimination of these three specific grains, will find them an excellent source of nutrition.

Even those few people intolerant of gluten (wheat, barley, and rye) can healthfully consume non-gluten rice, corn, oats, and other grains. Low-carbohydrate promoters enthusiastically demonize these grains too.

Making False Associations about Diabetes and Carbohydrates
The main take-away that readers will get from Grain Brain is that grains and other starchy foods are the cause of type-2 diabetes, Alzheimer’s disease, obesity, and most of the other chronic health problems suffered in the Western world. The truth is that people with type-2 diabetes are ill with many disorders of the body and brain. But grains and other starchy vegetables do not cause type-2 diabetes. The Western diet, loaded with meat, fat, and empty calories, makes people overweight and diabetic.

Type-2 diabetes is cured by a starch-based, high-carbohydrate diet. To take this point to the extreme, the Rice Diet, consisting of white rice, fruit, fruit juice, and table sugar (more than 90% of the calories are from carbohydrate) has been shown to cause profound weight losses in the severely obese, cure type-2 diabetes, and reverse heart disease. Dietary fat increases blood sugar levels and causes people with type-1 diabetes to require more insulin.

Regardless of the effects on blood sugar, the underlying animal-based, low-grain, low-starchy-vegetable diet consisting of those very foods recommended in the books Wheat Belly and Grain Brain, is the major reason people with type-2 diabetes are so sick with heart and other diseases.

Looking Beyond the Smoke and Mirrors
The truth is that the rich Western diet makes people fat and sick. Steering people away from the few healthy components of our diet (grains and other starchy vegetables) and toward the unhealthy foods (meat, dairy, fish, and eggs) makes matters worse. People are desperate for a solution to their weight and health problems, and many of them are easily deceived. Especially when told that prime rib and cheddar cheese are good for them—people love to hear good news about their bad habits. Just as important for the rising popularity of low-carbohydrate diets, books like Wheat Belly and Grain Brain enhance the profits of the meat, dairy, egg, and fish industries.

Although these industries spend hundreds of millions of US dollars advertising “their science” and influencing national nutrition and health policies, the truth is simple and easy to understand: All large successful trim healthy populations of people throughout human history have obtained the bulk of their calories from grains and other starchy vegetables. Consumption of meats along with other rich foods in any significant quantity has been limited to the diets of fat, sick aristocrats (kings and queens)—until recently. To regain our lost health and save planet Earth, the smoke and mirrors behind popular diet books must be exposed.

*In an effort to partially compensate for important nutritional deficiencies, like dietary fiber, vitamin C, and thousands of other phytochemicals found only in plants, non-starchy green, red, and yellow vegetables (for example, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, celery, kale, lettuce, parsley, peppers, and zucchini), and a few fruits are commonly added to these low-carbohydrate diets, including newer versions of the Atkins Diet. Only plants make carbohydrates, thus “low-carbohydrate” is in practical terms synonymous with meat, poultry, cheese, butter, fish, and eggs.

**Simple sugars, like glucose and fructose, are refined ingredients found in sodas, cakes, cookies, and table sugar. Starches (sometimes referred to as complex carbohydrates) are foods with “natural sugars,” such as, barley, corn, millet, oats, potatoes, sweet potatoes, rice, and wheat.

Originally published in a McDougall Newsletter and republished with permission. Click here to sign-up for the McDougall Newsletter for free.

The post The Smoke and Mirrors Behind Wheat Belly and Grain Brain appeared first on Forks Over Knives.

Statins Lower Cholesterol but Do Little for Better Health
In my practice over the past decade I have limited my prescriptions for cholesterol-lowering medications to people who are at high risk for future troubles. Unless there is a contraindication, I have recommended statins to patients with a history of heart surgery, heart disease, TIAs, or strokes, with a goal to take a dosage sufficient to lower their blood cholesterol levels to 150 mg/dL (4 mmol/L) or less. Furthermore, based on the recommendations of the highly respected Cochrane Collaboration and others, I have adviced that otherwise healthy people, even those with high cholesterol, not take cholesterol-lowering statins. Of course, I have strongly recommended that everyone eat a healthy diet.

Statins effectively lower blood cholesterol by inhibiting an enzyme (HMG-CoA reductase) involved in the production of cholesterol in the liver. The cholesterol numbers, revealed by simple blood tests, are dramatically reduced with this commonly prescribed treatment. Unfortunately, the reduction in blood cholesterol translates into only very small improvements in the health of the arteries, as seen by tiny (but statistically significant) reductions in heart disease. These weak benefits can be appreciated in very sick people who are at high risk for future health problems. This strategy is called secondary prevention. They have already had a serious problem.

However, the benefits from statins are very difficult to demonstrate in healthy people because their risk of future troubles is very low, and remember I wrote, the real-life benefits from statins are very small. This strategy is called primary  prevention. Nothing serious has happened, yet. Intervention is being recommended in hopes of preventing a serious event in the future.

There is an ongoing controversy as to whether or not statins should be more widely prescribed. The doctors and scientists working for pharmaceutical companies think they should be. But, consider the influence of money on their findings and opinions. Annually, $37 billion is spent on cholesterol-lowering medications worldwide.

My Recommendations for Statins Are Changing*
The most recent review (January 2013) by the Cochrane Collaboration has concluded that there is, “…strong evidence to support their use in people at low risk of cardiovascular disease.” This is a reversal from their previous conclusions, which recommended against such treatment for people without a history of heart disease (for primary prevention). As a result, I am changing the way I present information to people on the use of statins. For practical purposes, choosing whether or not to take these kinds of medication should be based on an understanding of the actual benefits and risks as assessed by various experts. Currently, the data is based on the study of people who eat the Western diet. I believe the benefits will be found to be far less in people who consume a starch-based McDougall-type diet.

A recent analysis, published in the medical journal, the Lancet, by John Abramson, MD, a guest speaker at two previous McDougall Advanced Study weekends, summarizes the effects of statin therapy: “Our analysis suggests that lipid-lowering statins should not be prescribed for true primary prevention in women of any age or for men older than 69 years. High-risk men aged 30–69 years should be advised that about 50 patients need to be treated for 5 years to prevent one event. In our experience, many men presented with this evidence do not choose to take a statin, especially when informed of the potential benefits of lifestyle modification on cardiovascular risk and overall health.”

John Abramson, MD, Author of Overdo$ed America
Recorded at the March 2013 McDougall Advanced Study Weekend

Cholesterol-lowering statin therapy is based on the observation that high cholesterol levels in a person’s blood are associated with more heart attacks and stroke. The organic substance cholesterol is found in large amounts in all animal foods. When people eat meat, poultry, fish, eggs, and dairy products their blood cholesterol levels rise. The rationale is that lowering these levels with medication will fix the problem. As discussed above, the real-life benefits have been minimal. Not surprisingly, this failure has led researchers to look into other mechanisms to explain how eating animal products and other unhealthy foods cause artery damage.

Antibiotics May Be the Next Blockbuster Drugs to Treat Heart Disease

In April of 2013, an article in Nature Medicine and one in the New England Journal of Medicine found that a diet of meat, dairy products, and eggs caused damage to the arteries by increasing the production of trimethylamine-N-oxide (TMAO). Carnitine and choline, found in these animal foods in high concentrations, are metabolized by gut microbes (bacteria) into trimethylamine (TMA), which in turn is absorbed into the bloodstream and then metabolized by the liver into TMAO. This organic compound has been shown to cause artery damage in animal experiments and is strongly associated with heart disease in people.

Meat, dairy products, eggs, and other animal foods favor the growth of bacteria that readily convert carnitine and choline to TMA. Vegans and vegetarians grow few of these kinds of bacteria and as a result produce very little artery-damaging TMAO. This research may lead to medical treatments, including the use of probiotics (bacteria supplied in pills and fermented foods), medications to limit the synthesis of trimethylamine from carnitine and choline, and/or antibiotics to suppress specific TMA-producing bacteria in the intestine. In all three pharmacologic approaches the medications would need to be taken for a lifetime. Great profits will be generated as a result, just like with statins.

Who Should Take Statins? A Starch-based Diet Is the Non-profit Solution

Starches, vegetables, and fruits are essentially cholesterol-free and discourage the growth of intestinal bacteria that lead to the synthesis of artery-damaging TMAO; and these foods contain very little carnitine and choline (the precursors of TMAO). Unarguably,—whether blaming cholesterol, carnitine, choline, or bad-bowel-bacteria—diseases of atherosclerosis (heart attacks, strokes, kidney failure, etc.) are due to consuming meat, dairy products, and eggs. Therefore I recommend the McDougall Diet to prevent and treat heart and other artery diseases.  In other words, fix the problem.

Lack of profit is the primary reason for lack of acceptance of this simple, safe approach. Consider that the most popular brand name statin, Crestor, purchased at a discount pharmacy like Costco or CVS, costs about $6 a day. Comparatively, a starch-based diet costs $3 a day for all of the food (2500 calories). The rivers of profits from a drug-over-diet approach extend to the food and medical industries. (Generic statins are much less expensive.)

Our research shows that the cholesterol-lowering benefits of the McDougall Diet are comparable to statins. We have analyzed the results of 1700 people who have been through the McDougall residential program in Santa Rosa. In seven days people starting with total cholesterol of 200 mg/dL or more experience a reduction of 34.2 mg/dL on average. If the starting number is 240 mg/dL or more, the average reduction is 42.1 mg/dL. (If LDL is initially 100 mg/dL or greater, the average reduction is 21.1 mg/dL; if 160 mg/dL or greater, the average reduction is 31.5 mg/dL.)

To answer the question, “Who Should Take Cholesterol-lowering Statins? Everyone or No One?” My response is slightly more complex than all or none. The decisions made primarily depend upon what a person chooses to eat. Eat meat, dairy products, eggs, and other unhealthy foods and you may benefit from taking statins (a little). Eat a starch-based McDougall Diet and any benefits from statins for an otherwise healthy person vanish, and all that is left are side effects and costs. However, as a medical doctor trained in traditional drug therapy, I want to take advantage of both worlds: diet and drugs. For most patients with serious existing disease, such as those with a history of heart surgery, heart disease, TIAs, or stroke, in addition to my diet I recommend sufficient cholesterol-lowering statin medications to lower their blood cholesterol to 150 mg/dL or less.

*I reserve my right to change my opinion on medications and surgeries because the foundations—the scientific research—for my recommendations are incomplete, inaccurate, and constantly changing. However, in case you are wondering, my advice on what you should eat (a starch-based diet) will not waiver because the scientific underpinnings are rock solid.

Originally published in the McDougall Newsletter and republished with permission. Click here to sign-up for the McDougall Newsletter for free.

The post Who Should Take Cholesterol-lowering Statins? Everyone or No One? appeared first on Forks Over Knives.

Her radical treatment may have helped her; time will possibly tell.* All we know for sure is that Ms. Jolie has made a great sacrifice today for a theoretical benefit in the very distant future—say one to five decades henceforth.

*If she develops breast cancer then we can assume this prophylactic treatment failed. If the cancer never appears there are two possibilities: one, she may never have been destined to grow, or die of, breast cancer—in this case a double mastectomy would not have been necessary. The other possibility is that the treatment saved her life. Neither disease-free outcome can be proven for her as an individual.

Some important lessons can be learned from her story:

1) Women (and men) are willing to make almost any sacrifice to avoid premature death and suffering. This tells me that the effort required to eat a better diet is no real obstacle. Switching from braised beefsteak to Mary’s Tunisian Stew (found in The Starch Solution) is no sacrifice at all—especially when compared to a double mastectomy. Breast, prostate, and colon cancer are due to an unhealthy diet—and so are type-2 diabetes, obesity, and coronary heart disease. Unfortunately, few people are given the information needed to take advantage of a simple, cost-free, dietary solution.

2) Profit drives health messages. One woman’s double mastectomy generates more than $50,000 in medical business. Dietary change cuts the food bill in half. People do not save themselves with a healthy diet because no doctors are prescribing it, no hospitals are serving it, and no Fortune 500 companies are selling it.

3) Left unchecked by a few honest doctors, scientists, and politicians, profiteering would lead to medical recommendations to cut a smoker’s risk of lung cancer in half by having one lung prophylactically removed (rather than cost-free smoking cessation). Prostate cancer occurs in nearly 100 percent of men by age 80 years. So why not recommend total prostate removal on every man’s thirtieth birthday?

4) Sexism is rampant in the medical businesses. Conservative treatment (including a “doing nothing approach” called “watchful waiting”) has been a standard recommendation for men with prostate cancer for more than 20 years. Mutilation, has been, and still is, universally recommended for women, even with the slightest hint of pre-cancer of the breast (DCIS). Even those women fortunate enough to avoid breast amputation (a mastectomy), are universally harmed. They are all persuaded into receiving breast, lung, and heart damaging radiation, when a simple (in most cases non-deforming) lumpectomy alone would suffice (even for women with invasive breast cancer).

5) Celebrities have great influence. Ms. Jolie’s experience may cause many women to choose radical surgical treatments, but President Bill Clinton’s experience with reversing his poor health (and heart disease) by changing his diet sent millions more people towards a very conservative course. We need more positive examples.

6) Shining light on a subject will reveal the truth. With mastectomy back in the headlines, stories should again be told about how more than sixty years of medical research has unarguably shown no survival benefits of mastectomy or lumpectomy with radiation, over a simple removal of the lump. As a result of this science more than 18 states in the US have “informed consent laws” that force physicians to tell women facing breast cancer tests and treatments the facts about the failure (and benefits) of breast cancer treatments. In the state of Hawaii where I helped get the 3rd informed consent law passed in the US, women have also been told by state law since 1982 that they need to change their diet.

I applaud Ms. Jolie for making her story public. I do hope her life has been prolonged by this radical surgery. I would, however, discourage this approach for my patients, because I believe the harms far outweigh the benefits. Irrespective of any decisions about mastectomy, or any other medically prescribed treatments, all women and men need to have the opportunity to benefit from a starch-based diet. In 1984, I performed the first study ever published in a medical journal showing the benefits of a healthy diet for women with breast cancer (the McDougall Diet). Since then, dozens of other scientific papers have come to similar conclusions. Yet, doctors rarely mention the importance of food, as they send their patients off to therapies that they (in fact) know will have disastrous consequences.

For better understanding and scientific support read The McDougall Program for Women and McDougall’s Medicine – A Challenging Second Opinion (found in libraries and downloadable from my web store. Also see my Hot Topics on breast, prostate, and colon cancer.

Originally published in a McDougall Newsletter and republished with permission. Click here to sign-up for the McDougall Newsletter for free.

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