Consumption Disease Quotes

Elsewhere the paper notes that vegetarians and vegans (including athletes) 'meet and exceed requirements' for protein. And, to render the whole we-should-worry-about-getting-enough-protein-and-therefore-eat-meat idea even more useless, other data suggests that excess animal protein intake is linked with osteoporosis, kidney disease, calcium stones in the urinary tract, and some cancers. Despite some persistent confusion, it is clear that vegetarians and vegans tend to have more optimal protein consumption than omnivores.

The laboratory evidence that carbohydrate-rich diets can cause the body to reain water and so raise blood pressure, just as salt consumption is supposed to do, dates back well over a century

If seeing her an hour before her last Weak cough into all blackness I could yet Be held by chalk-white walls - The Consumptive. Belsen 1945

Our entire system, in an economic sense, is based on restriction. Scarcity and inefficiency are the movers of money; the more there is of any resource the less you can charge for it. The more problems there are, the more opportunities there are to make money. This reality is a social disease, for people can actually gain off the misery of others and the destruction of the environment. Efficiency, abundance and sustainability are enemies of our economic structure, for they are inverse to the mechanics required to perpetuate consumption. This is profoundly critical to understand, for once you put this together you begin to see that the one billion people currently starving on this planet, the endless slums of the poor and all the horrors of a culture due to poverty and pravity are not natural phenomenon due to some natural human order or lack of earthly resources. They are products of the creation, perpetuation and preservation of artificial scarcity and inefficiency.

Connection is health. And what our society does its best to disguise from us is how ordinary, how commonly attainable, health is. We lose our health - and create profitable diseases and dependences - by failing to see the direct connections between living and eating, eating and working, working and loving. In gardening, for instance, one works with the body to feed the body. The work, if it is knowledgeable, makes for excellent food. And it makes one hungry. The work thus makes eating both nourishing and joyful, not consumptive, and keeps the eater from getting fat and weak. This is health, wholeness, a source of delight. (pg.132, The Body and the Earth)

If you walked into your local convenience store and bought a package of cigars, you would notice that it carries a label warning of the potential dangers of cigar smoke. Yet research suggests that cigar smoking poses a hazard only to moderate to heavy cigar smokers, who comprise less than 1 percent of the adult population. More than 97 percent of American adults, however, eat animal foods, and despite much research demonstrating the connection between the consumption of animal products and disease, we are not warned of these dangers.

Fighting the Blues with Greens Here’s a statistic you probably haven’t heard: Higher consumption of vegetables may cut the odds of developing depression by as much as 62 percent.26 A review in the journal Nutritional Neuroscience concluded that, in general, eating lots of fruits and veggies may present “a non-invasive, natural, and inexpensive therapeutic means to support a healthy brain.

and Grenouille’s mother, who was still a young woman, barely in her mid-twenties, and who still was quite pretty and had almost all her teeth in her mouth and some hair on her head and – except for gout and syphilis and a touch of consumption – suffered from no serious disease, who still hoped to live a while yet, perhaps a good five or ten years, and perhaps even to marry one day and as the honorable wife of a widower with a trade or some such to bear real children... Grenouille’s mother wished that it were already over.

Excessive consumption of the high amounts of sodium in processed, salty foods can lead to high blood pressure and heart disease, stroke, kidney damage, cancer, weight gain, osteoporosis, and overeating—this list is equally long and alarming.2

The consumption of “sweets” in the Seven Countries study, as you might remember, correlated more closely with heart disease rates than did any other kind of food:

To this day, the notion of treating diabetes by increasing consumption of the foods that caused the disease in the first place, then managing the blood sugar mess with medications, persists.

But today, the AHA is saying something quite different. In their massive 2015 report Heart Disease and Stroke Statistics, they buried a bombshell in the text.8 It says that five huge randomized controlled trials have demonstrated that total fat consumption does not affect rates of coronary heart disease or stroke.

Overstimulation of IGF-1-signaling pathways in the brain due to milk consumption could thus accelerate the onset of neurodegenerative disease. IGF-1 passes the blood-brain barrier and reaches the neurons in the brain.

Consumerism sees the consumption of ever more products and services as a positive thing. It encourages people to treat themselves, spoil themselves, and even kill themselves slowly by overconsumption. Frugality is a disease to be cured.

Fear is an insidious little monster. It's a train of thoughts that doesn't announce itself as fear. It pretends to be rational and cautious, but in excess, it's a cancer that diminishes our life's potential. It won't scream "I'm fear," but it will weigh on your shoulders as doubt, insecurity, excess consumption, stress and dis-ease. So, instead of running away from fear, let's turn, look and face fear so that we can recognize it for what it is and let it go.

The ceremonial differentiation of the dietary is best seen in the use of intoxicating beverages and narcotics. If these articles of consumption are costly, they are felt to be noble and honorific. Therefore the base classes, primarily the women, practice an enforced continence with respect to these stimulants, except in countries where they are obtainable at a very low cost. From archaic times down through all the length of the patriarchal regime it has been the office of the women to prepare and administer these luxuries, and it has been the perquisite of the men of gentle birth and breeding to consume them. Drunkenness and the other pathological consequences of the free use of stimulants therefore tend in their turn to become honorific, as being a mark, at the second remove, of the superior status of those who are able to afford the indulgence. Infirmities induced by over-indulgence are among some peoples freely recognised as manly attributes. It has even happened that the name for certain diseased conditions of the body arising from such an origin has passed into everyday speech as a synonym for "noble" or "gentle". It is only at a relatively early stage of culture that the symptoms of expensive vice are conventionally accepted as marks of a superior status, and so tend to become virtues and command the deference of the community; but the reputability that attaches to certain expensive vices long retains so much of its force as to appreciably lesson the disapprobation visited upon the men of the wealthy or noble class for any excessive indulgence. The same invidious distinction adds force to the current disapproval of any indulgence of this kind on the part of women, minors, and inferiors. This invidious traditional distinction has not lost its force even among the more advanced peoples of today. Where the example set by the leisure class retains its imperative force in the regulation of the conventionalities, it is observable that the women still in great measure practise the same traditional continence with regard to stimulants.

On January 1, 2004, Denmark introduced legislation to restrict trans fats to no more than 2 percent of the total fat in any food. Consumption of trans fats fell from 4.5 grams a day per person in 1975 to 2.2 grams in 1993 to 1.5 grams in 1995 to almost 0 grams by 2005. By 2010, the incidence of heart disease and related deaths in Denmark had dropped 60 percent.

Fatty liver is a completely reversible process. Emptying the liver of its surplus glucose and dropping insulin levels returns the liver to normal. Hyperinsulinemia drives DNL, which is the primary determinant of fatty liver disease. Normalizing insulin levels reverses the fatty liver. Refined carbohydrates, which cause large increases in insulin, are far more sinister than dietary fat. High carbohydrate intake can increase DNL tenfold, whereas high fat consumption, with correspondingly low carbohydrate intake, does not change hepatic fat production

omega-3 consumption “lowers plasma triglycerides, resting heart rate, and blood pressure and might also improve myocardial filling and efficiency, lower inflammation, and improve vascular function.

In Georgian England, sweeps and climbing-boys were regarded as general cesspools of disease—dirty, consumptive, syphilitic, pox-ridden—and a “ragged, ill-looking sore,” easily attributed to some sexually transmitted illness, was usually treated with a toxic mercury-based chemical and otherwise shrugged off. (“Syphilis,” as the saying ran, “was one night with Venus, followed by a thousand nights with mercury.”)

high-glycemic carbs can affect the progression of heart disease.” During the consumption of foods high in sugar, there appears to be a temporary and sudden dysfunction in the endothelial walls of the arteries

All bodies are, in some sense; engines driven by the health or disease of their owners, jackets of flesh that are the physical sum of their wearers. But to become your disease? To become the consumption itself?

The irony of our existence is this: We are infinitesimal in the grand scheme of evolution, a tiny organism on Earth. And yet, personally, collectively, we are changing the planet through our voracity, the velocity of our reach, our desires, our ambitions, and our appetites. We multiply, our hunger multiplies, and our insatiable craving accelerates. Consumption is a progressive disease. We believe in more, more possessions, more power, more war. Anywhere, everywhere our advance of aggression continues. My aggression toward myself is the first war. Wilderness is an antidote to the war within ourselves.

Milk consumption has already been identified as an aggravating factor in the acne “epidemic” among adolescents, and preliminary successes have been reported with reduced milk consumption. It is even more important that excessive milk consumption can promote diseases commonly associated with a Western lifestyle

Roughly one-third of the planet already lived in chronic poverty, according to United Nations statistics. Farmer pointed out that through the spread of disease, illiteracy, and consumption of resources by the poor, prosperous first-world countries would increasingly be affected—unless they scaled back on their own use of resources and brought education and health care to the poor. In his speeches, Farmer liked to talk about “the nation of humanity,” as opposed to developed or undeveloped nations. He wanted everyone to see the interconnectedness of it all, and that the responsibility of the WLs was more than just giving money. Three

More than thirty studies have shown the protective effect of tomato consumption on prostate cancer.17 The Harvard Health Professionals Follow-Up Study examined 46,719 men for lycopene intake and found that consuming two to three cups of tomato sauce per week is associated with a 30 percent decreased risk of prostate cancer, which is consistent with the antiangiogenic effect of lycopene on cancer.18 In the men who did develop prostate cancer, those who ate more tomato sauce were found to have less angiogenic and less aggressive cancers.19 More than one thousand cultivars of tomatoes exist, and the amount of lycopene in each varies greatly.

Regular consumption of fish has been shown to exert a strong anti-inflammatory effect, reduce risk for heart disease, help protect against asthma in children, moderate chronic lung disease, reduce the risk of breast and other cancers by stunting tumor growth, and ease the symptoms of rheumatoid arthritis and certain bone and joint diseases.

Work is hazardous to your health, to borrow a book title. In fact, work is mass murder or genocide. Directly or indirectly, work will kill most of the people who read these words... Even if you aren't killed or crippled while actually working, you very well might be while going to work, coming from work, looking for work, or trying to forget about work. The vast majority of victims of the automobile are either doing one of these work-obligatory activities or else fall afoul of those who do them. To this augmented body-count must be added the victims of auto-industrial pollution and work-induced alcoholism and drug addiction. Both cancer and heart disease are modern afflictions normally traceable, directly, or indirectly, to work. Work, then, institutionalizes homicide as a way of life... We kill people in the six-figure range (at least) in order to sell Big Macs and Cadillacs to the survivors. Our forty or fifty thousand annual highway fatalities are victims, not martyrs. They died for nothing -- or rather, they died for work.

The most fertile districts of the habitable globe are now actually cultivated by men for animals, at a delay and waste of aliment absolutely incapable of calculation. It is only the wealthy that can, to any great degree, even now, indulge the unnatural craving for dead flesh, and they pay for the greater licence of privilege, by subjection to supernumerary diseases.

Our deeply-rooted beliefs about the wholesomeness of milk and dairy products should be re-considered under careful, scientific evaluation. Given the tumor promotor effect of IGF-1, patients with tumorous disease should restrict consumption of milk and milk protein. The same applies to patients with coronary heart disease and with a family history of neurodegenerative disease.

She was now precisely in that state when, if her constitution had contained the seeds of consumption, decline, or slow fever, those diseases would have been rapidly developed, and would soon have carried her quietly from the world. People never die of love or grief alone, though some die of inherent maladies which the tortures of those passions prematurely force into destructive action.

The change which would be produced by simpler habits on political economy is sufficiently remarkable. The monopolising eater of animal flesh would no longer destroy his constitution by devouring an acre at a meal … The quantity of nutritious vegetable matter consumed in fattening the carcase of an ox, would afford ten times the sustenance, undepraving indeed, and incapable of generating disease, if gathered immediately from the bosom of the earth.

meat sales in the United States to fall by half in 1906, and they did not revive for another twenty years. In other words, meat eating went down just before coronary disease took off. Fat intake did rise during those years, from 1909 to 1961, when heart attacks surged, but this 12 percent increase in fat consumption was not due to a rise in animal fat. It was instead owing to an increase in the supply of vegetable oils, which had recently been invented.

While we were forming mobs to drive an Autherine Lucy [the black woman who integrated the University of Alabama in 1956] from an Alabama campus, the Russians were compelling ALL children to attend the best possible schools,” opined the Chicago Defender. Until the United States cured its “Mississippiitis”—that disease of segregation, violence, and oppression that plagued America like a chronic bout of consumption—the paper declared, it would never merit the position of world leadership.

The ADA takes a conservative stand, leaving out many well-documented health benefits attributable to reducing the consumption of animal products. Here are the three key sentences from the summary of their summary of the relevant scientific literature. One: Well-planned vegetarian diets are appropriate for all individuals during all stages of the life cycle, including pregnancy, lactation, infancy, childhood, and adolescence, and for athletes. TWO: Vegetarian diets tend to be lower in saturated fat and cholesterol, and have higher levels of dietary fiber, magnesium and potassium, vitamins C and E, folate, carotenoids, flavonoids, and other phytochemicals. Elsewhere the paper notes that vegetarians and vegans (including athletes) “meet and exceed requirements” for protein. And, to render the whole we-should-worry-about-getting-enough-protein-and-therefore-eat-meat idea even more useless, other data suggests that excess animal protein intake is linked with osteoporosis, kidney disease, calcium stones in the urinary tract, and some cancers.

Elsewhere the paper notes that vegetarians and vegans (including athletes) “meet and exceed requirements” for protein. And, to render the whole we-should-worry-about-getting-enough-protein-and-therefore-eat-meat idea even more useless, other data suggests that excess animal protein intake is linked with osteoporosis, kidney disease, calcium stones in the urinary tract, and some cancers. Despite some persistent confusion, it is clear that vegetarians and vegans tend to have more optimal protein consumption than omnivores.

Hegel was paradoxically not idealist enough to imagine the reign of abstraction in art. That is to say, in the same way that, in the domain of economy, he wasn’t able to discern the self-mediating Notion which structures the economic reality of production, distribution, exchange, and consumption, he wasn’t able to discern the Notional content of a painting which mediates and regulates its form (shapes, colours) at a level which is more basic than the content represented (pictured) by a painting—“abstract painting” mediates/reflects sensuality at a non-representational level.

The percentage of civilized men who breathe correctly is quite small, and the result is shown in contracted chests and stooping shoulders, and the terrible increase in diseases of the respiratory organs, including that dread monster, Consumption, “the white scourge.” Eminent authorities have stated that one generation of correct breathers would regenerate the race, and disease would be so rare as to be looked upon as a curiosity. Whether looked at from the standpoint of the Oriental or Occidental, the connection between correct breathing and health is readily seen and explained.

Dr. Mark Burhenne had been studying the links between mouthbreathing and sleep for decades, and had written a book on the subject. He told me that mouthbreathing contributed to periodontal disease and bad breath, and was the number one cause of cavities, even more damaging than sugar consumption, bad diet, or poor hygiene. (This belief had been echoed by other dentists for a hundred years, and was endorsed by Catlin too.) Burhenne also found that mouthbreathing was both a cause of and a contributor to snoring and sleep apnea. He recommended his patients tape their mouths shut at night.

Our deeply-rooted beliefs about the wholesomeness of milk and dairy products should be re-considered under careful, scientific evaluation. Given the tumor promotor effect of IGF-1, patients with tumorous disease should restrict consumption of milk and milk protein. The same applies to patients with coronary heart disease and with a family history of neurodegenerative disease. Milk consumption has already been identified as an aggravating factor in the acne “epidemic” among adolescents, and preliminary successes have been reported with reduced milk consumption. It is even more important that excessive milk consumption can promote diseases commonly associated with a Western lifestyle

The 1890s were apprentice years for Yeats. Though he played with Indian and Irish mythology, his symbolism really developed later. The decade was for him, as a poet, the years of lyric, of the Rhymers’ Club, of those contemporaries whom he dubbed the ‘tragic generation’. ‘I have known twelve men who killed themselves,’ Arthur Symons looked back from his middle-aged madness, reflecting on the decade of which he was the doyen. The writers and artists of the period lived hectically and recklessly. Ernest Dowson (1867–1900) (one of the best lyricists of them all – ‘I cried for madder music and for stronger wine’) died from consumption at thirty-two; Lionel Johnson (1867–1902), a dipsomaniac, died aged thirty-five from a stroke. John Davidson committed suicide at fifty-two; Oscar Wilde, disgraced and broken by prison and exile, died at forty-six; Aubrey Beardsley died at twenty-six. This is not to mention the minor figures of the Nineties literary scene: William Theodore Peters, actor and poet, who starved to death in Paris; Hubert Crankanthorpe, who threw himself in the Thames; Henry Harland, editor of The Yellow Book, who died of consumption aged forty-three, or Francis Thompson, who fled the Hound of Heaven ‘down the nights and down the days’ and who died of the same disease aged forty-eight. Charles Conder (1868–1909), water-colourist and rococo fan-painter, died in an asylum aged forty-one.

Black newspapers and their readers wasted no time in making the link between America’s inadequacy in space and the dreadful conditions facing many black students in the South. “While we were forming mobs to drive an Autherine Lucy [the black woman who integrated the University of Alabama in 1956] from an Alabama campus, the Russians were compelling ALL children to attend the best possible schools,” opined the Chicago Defender. Until the United States cured its “Mississippiitis”—that disease of segregation, violence, and oppression that plagued America like a chronic bout of consumption—the paper declared, it would never merit the position of world leadership. An editorial in the Cleveland Call and Post

Nuts, in moderation, are another good choice for an after-dinner indulgence. Most nuts are full of healthful monounsaturated fats, have little or no carbohydrates, and are also high in fiber, which increases their potential benefit. Macadamia nuts, cashews and walnuts can all be enjoyed. Many studies show an association between increased nut consumption and better health, including reducing heart disease8 and diabetes.9 Pistachio nuts, high in the antioxidant gamma-tocopherol and vitamins such as manganese, calcium, magnesium and selenium, are widely eaten in the Mediterranean diet. A recent Spanish study found that adding 100 pistachios to one’s daily diet improved fasting glucose, insulin and insulin resistance.

Some diseases, such as HIV/AIDS, have slid down the list, but among the diseases whose incidence has increased the most over the past generation is chronic kidney disease. The number of deaths has doubled.14 This has been blamed on our “meat-sweet” diet.15 Excess table sugar and high-fructose corn syrup consumption is associated with increased blood pressure and uric acid levels, both of which can damage the kidney. The saturated fat, trans fat, and cholesterol found in animal products and junk food are also associated with impaired kidney function, and meat protein increases the acid load to the kidneys, boosting ammonia production and potentially damaging our sensitive kidney cells.16 This is why a restriction of protein intake is often recommended to chronic kidney disease patients to

Never will the world be conscious of how much it owes to them, nor above all of what they have suffered in order to bestow their gifts on it. We enjoy fine music, beautiful pictures, a thousand exquisite things, but we do not know what they cost those who wrought them in sleeplessness, tears, spasmodic laughter, rashes, asthma, epilepsy a terror of death which is worse than any of these, and which you perhaps have felt... Heaven only knows what the disease was of which you thought you had detected the symptoms. And you were not mistaken; they were there. Neurosis has an absolute genius for malingering. There is no illness which it cannot counterfeit perfectly. It will produce life-like imitations of the dilatations of dyspepsia, the sicknesses of pregnancy, the broken rhythm of the cardiac, the feverishness of the consumptive. If it is capable of deceiving the doctor how should it fail to deceive the patient? No, no; you mustn’t think I’m making fun of your sufferings. I should not undertake to heal them unless I understood them thoroughly. And, well, they say there’s no good confession unless it’s mutual. I have told you that without nervous trouble there can be no great artist. What is more,"..."there can be no great scientist either. I will go further, and say that, unless he himself is subject to nervous trouble, he is not, I won’t say a good doctor, but I do say the right doctor to treat nervous troubles. In nervous pathology a doctor who doesn’t say too many foolish things is a patient half-cured, just as a critic is a poet who has stopped writing verse and a policeman a burglar who has retired from practice.

The modern capitalist economy must constantly increase production if it is to survive, like a shark that must swim or suffocate. Yet it’s not enough just to produce. Somebody must also buy the products, or industrialists and investors alike will go bust. To prevent this catastrophe and to make sure that people will always buy whatever new stuff industry produces, a new kind of ethic appeared: consumerism. Consumerism sees the consumption of ever more products and services as a positive thing. It encourages people to treat themselves, spoil themselves, and even kill themselves slowly by overconsumption. Frugality is a disease to be cured. Consumerism has worked very hard, with the help of popular psychology (‘Just do it!’) to convince people that indulgence is good for you, whereas frugality is self-oppression.

Our historical overview has focused on northern Europe and the U.S., where consumption was considered inherited for most of the nineteenth century, but that certainly wasn’t the case everywhere. Rates of phthisis appear to have been lower, for example, in China, where Daoist physicians argued the disease was infectious beginning in the twelfth century CE. Consumption was rarer in southern Europe as well, where the illness was also understood to be infectious. As the writer George Sand tried to find a place for consumptive Frédéric Chopin to stay in Spain, Sand wrote a friend, “Phthisis is scarce in these climates and is regarded as contagious.” But of course phthisis was scarce in those climates precisely because it was regarded as contagious. “We went to take residence in the disaffected monastery of Valdemosa,” Sand goes on, “…but could not secure any servants, as no one wants to work for a phthisie…. We begged of our acquaintances that they give us some help…a carriage to take us to Palma from where we wanted to take a ship back home. But even this was refused us, although our friends all had carriages and wealth.

IN THE PAST, when dying was typically a more precipitous process, we did not have to think about a question like this. Though some diseases and conditions had a drawn-out natural history—tuberculosis is the classic example—without the intervention of modern medicine, with its scans to diagnose problems early and its treatments to extend life, the interval between recognizing that you had a life-threatening ailment and dying was commonly a matter of days or weeks. Consider how our presidents died before the modern era. George Washington developed a throat infection at home on December 13, 1799, that killed him by the next evening. John Quincy Adams, Millard Fillmore, and Andrew Johnson all succumbed to strokes and died within two days. Rutherford Hayes had a heart attack and died three days later. Others did have a longer course: James Monroe and Andrew Jackson died from progressive and far longer-lasting (and highly dreaded) tubercular consumption. Ulysses Grant’s oral cancer took a year to kill him. But, as end-of-life researcher Joanne Lynn has observed, people generally experienced life-threatening illness the way they experienced bad weather—as something that struck with little warning. And you either got through it or you didn’t.

Suppose we humans are, as a species, exhibiting disease behavior: we’re multiplying with no regard for limits, consuming natural resources as if there will be no future generations, and producing waste products that are distressing the planet upon which our very survival depends. There are two factors which we, as a species, are not taking into consideration. First is the survival tactic of pathogens, which requires additional hosts to infect. We do not have the luxury of that option, at least not yet. If we are successful at continuing our dangerous behavior, then we will also succeed in marching straight toward our own demise. In the process, we can also drag many other species down with us, a dreadful syndrome that is already underway. This is evident by the threat of extinction that hangs, like the sword of Damocles, over an alarming number of the Earth’s species. There is a second consideration: infected host organisms fight back. As humans become an increasing menace, can the Earth try to defend itself? When a disease organism infects a human, the human body elevates its own temperature in order to defend itself. This rise in temperature not only inhibits the growth of the infecting pathogen, but also greatly enhances the disease fighting capability within the body. Global warming may be the Earth’s way of inducing a global “fever” as a reaction to human pollution of the atmosphere and human over-consumption of fossil fuels.

There are kinds of food we’re hard wired to love. Salt, sugars, and fats. Food that, over the course of the history of our species, has helped us get through some long winters, and plow through some extreme migrations. There are also certain kinds of information we’re hard wired to love: affirmation is something we all enjoy receiving, and the confirmation of our beliefs helps us form stronger communities. The spread of fear and its companion, hate, are clearly survival instincts, but more benign acts like gossip also help us spread the word about things that could be a danger to us. In the world of food, we’ve seen massive efficiencies leveraged by massive corporations that have driven the cost of a calorie down so low that now obesity is more of a threat than famine. Those same kinds of efficiencies are now transforming our information supply: we’ve learned how to produce and distribute information in a nearly free manner. The parallels between what’s happened to our food and what’s happened to our information are striking. Driven by a desire for more profits, and a desire to feed more people, manufacturers figured out how to make food really cheap; and the stuff that’s the worst for us tends to be the cheapest to make. As a result, a healthy diet — knowing what to consume and what to avoid — has gone from being a luxury to mandatory for our longevity. Just as food companies learned that if they want to sell a lot of cheap calories, they should pack them with salt, fat, and sugar — the stuff that people crave — media companies learned that affirmation sells a lot better than information. Who wants to hear the truth when they can hear that they’re right? Because of the inherent social nature of information, the consequences of these new efficiencies are far more dramatic than even the consequence of physical obesity. Our information habits go beyond affecting the individual. They have serious social consequences. Much as a poor diet gives us a variety of diseases, poor information diets give us new forms of ignorance — ignorance that comes not from a lack of information, but from overconsumption of it, and sicknesses and delusions that don’t affect the underinformed but the hyperinformed and the well educated.

Vitamin D3 boasts a strong safety profile, along with broad and deep evidence that links it to brain, metabolic, cardiovascular, muscle, bone, lung, and immune health. New and emerging research suggests that vitamin D supplements may also slow down our epigenetic/biological aging.29, 30 2. Omega-3 fish oil: Over the last thirty years or so, the typical Western diet has added more and more pro-inflammatory omega-6 polyunsaturated fatty acids versus anti-inflammatory omega-3 PUFAs. Over the same period, we’ve seen an associated rise in chronic inflammatory diseases, including obesity, cardiovascular disease, rheumatoid arthritis, and Alzheimer’s disease. 31 Rich in omega-3s, fish oil is another incredibly versatile nutraceutical tool with multi-pronged benefits from head to toe. By restoring a healthier PUFA ratio, it especially helps your brain and heart. Regular consumption of fatty fish like salmon has been linked to a lower risk of congestive heart failure, coronary heart disease, sudden cardiac death, and stroke.32 In an observational study, omega-3 fish oil supplementation was also associated with a slower biological clock.33 3. Magnesium deficiency affects more than 45 percent of the U.S. population. Supplements can help us maintain brain and cardiovascular health, normal blood pressure, and healthy blood sugar metabolism. They may also reduce inflammation and help activate our vitamin D. 4. Vitamin K1/K2 supports blood clotting, heart/ blood vessel health, and bone health.34 5. Choline supplements with brain bioavailability, such as CDP-Choline, citicoline, or alpha-GPC, can boost your body’s storehouse of the neurotransmitter acetylcholine and possibly support liver and brain function, while protecting it from age-related insults.35 6. Creatine: This one may surprise you, since it’s often associated with serious athletes and fitness buffs. But according to Dr. Lopez, it’s “a bona fide arrow in my longevity nutraceutical quiver for most individuals, and especially older adults.” As a coauthor of a 2017 paper by the International Society for Sports Nutrition, Dr. Lopez, along with contributors, stated that creatine not only enhances recovery, muscle mass, and strength in connection with exercise, but also protects against age-related muscle loss and various forms of brain injury.36 There’s even some evidence that creatine may boost our immune function and fat and carbohydrate metabolism. Generally well tolerated, creatine has a strong safety profile at a daily dose of three to five grams.37 7.

Although there are certainly a number Hair Loss regarding treatments offering great results, experts say that normal thinning hair treatment can easily yield some of the best rewards for anybody concerned with the fitness of their head of hair. Most people choose to handle their hair loss along with medications or even surgical treatment, for example Minoxidil or even head of hair hair transplant. Nevertheless many individuals fail to realize that treatment as well as surgical procedure are costly and may have several dangerous unwanted effects and also risks. The particular safest and a lot cost efficient form of thinning hair treatment therapy is natural hair loss remedy, which includes healthful going on a diet, herbal solutions, exercise as well as good hair care strategies. Natural thinning hair therapy is just about the "Lost Art" associated with locks restore and is frequently ignored as a type of treatment among the extremely expensive options. A simple main within normal hair loss treatment methods are that the identical food items which are great for your health, are good for your hair. Although hair loss may be caused by many other factors, not enough correct diet will cause thinning hair in most people. Foods which are loaded with protein, lower in carbohydrates, and have decreased excess fat articles can help in maintaining healthful hair as well as preventing hair loss. For instance, efa's, seen in spinach, walnuts, soy products, seafood, sardines, sunflower seed products and also canola acrylic, are important eating essentials valuable in maintaining hair wholesome. The omega-3 and also rr Half a dozen efas contain anti-inflammatory properties that are valuable in maintaining healthier hair. Insufficient amounts of these types of efa's may lead to more rapidly hair loss. A deficiency in nutritional B6 and also vitamin B12 can also result in excessive hair thinning. Food items containing B vitamins, like liver organ, poultry, seafood and soybean are important to healthier hair growth and normal thinning hair treatment. Both vitamin B6 and also vitamin B12 are simply within protein rich foods, which are needed to preserve natural hair growth. Vitamin b are incredibly essential to your diet plan to avoid extreme hair thinning. Certain nutritional vitamins as well as supplements are often essential to recover protein amounts which in turn, are helpful in stopping thinning hair. Growing b vitamin consumption in your diet is an effective method to avoid or perhaps treat hair damage naturally. Alongside the thought of eating healthily regarding vitamins, nutrients and also vitamins and minerals are also the utilization of herbal treatments which are good at preventing hair thinning as a organic thinning hair therapy. One of the herbal remedies producing healthcare head lines will be Saw Palmetto. Although most studies regarding Saw palmetto extract happen to be for your management of prostatic disease, more modern numerous studies have been carried out about its effectiveness for hair thinning. The actual plant has been seen as to operate in eliminating benign prostatic disease by lowering degrees of Dihydrotestosterone, the industry known cause of androgenic alopecia, the medical phrase regarding man or woman routine hair loss. While there isn't any clinical trials supporting this herb's usefulness being a normal hair thinning treatment, there is certainly some dependable investigation proving that it could decrease androgen exercise within

Men are not content with a simple life: they are acquisitive, ambitious, competitive, and jealous; they soon tire of what they have, and pine for what they have not; and they seldom desire anything unless it belongs to others. The result is the encroachment of one group upon the territory of another, the rivalry of groups for the resources of the soil, and then war. Trade and finance develop, and bring new class-divisions. "Any ordinary city is in fact two cities, one the city of the poor, the other of the rich, each at war with the other; and in either division there are smaller ones - you would make a great mistake if you treated them as single states". A mercantile bourgeoisie arises, whose members seek social position through wealth and conspicuous consumption: "they will spend large sums of money on their wives". These changes in the distribution of wealth produce political changes: as the wealth of the merchant over-reaches that of the land-owner, aristocracy gives way to a plutocratic oligarchy - wealthy traders and bankers rule the state. Then statesmanship, which is the coordination of social forces and the adjustment of policy to growth, is replaced by politics, which is the strategy of parts and the lust of the spoils of office. Every form of government tends to perish by excess of its basic principle. Aristocracy ruins itself by limiting too narrowly the circle within which power is confined; oligarchy ruins itself by the incautious scramble for immediate wealth. In rather case the end is revolution. When revolution comes it may seem to arise from little causes and petty whims, but though it may spring from slight occasions it is the precipitate result of grave and accumulated wrongs; when a body is weakened by neglected ills, the merest exposure may bring serious disease. Then democracy comes: the poor overcome their opponents, slaughtering some and banishing the rest; and give to the people an equal share of freedom and power. But even democracy ruins itself by excess – of democracy. Its basic principle is the equal right of all to hold office and determine public policy. This is at first glance a delightful arrangement; it becomes disastrous because the people are not properly equipped by education to select the best rulers and the wisest courses. As to the people they have no understanding, and only repeat what their rulers are pleased to tell them; to get a doctrine accepted or rejected it is only necessary to have it praised or ridiculed in a popular play (a hit, no doubt, at Aristophanes, whose comedies attacked almost every new idea). Mob-rule is a rough sea for the ship of state to ride; every wind of oratory stirs up the waters and deflects the course. The upshot of such a democracy is tyranny or autocracy; the crowd so loves flattery, it is so “hungry for honey” that at last the wiliest and most unscrupulous flatterer, calling himself the “protected of the people” rises to supreme power. (Consider the history of Rome). The more Plato thinks of it, the more astounded he is at the folly of leaving to mob caprice and gullibility the selection of political officials – not to speak of leaving it to those shady and wealth-serving strategists who pull the oligarchic wires behind the democratic stage. Plato complains that whereas in simpler matters – like shoe-making – we think only a specially-trained person will server our purpose, in politics we presume that every one who knows how to get votes knows how to administer a city or a state.

Islamic philosophy of life prioritizes equitable distribution over efficiency. Overreliance on efficiency paralyses the equity and ethical concerns of development policy change. While Islamic principles allow freedom and liberty in lawful consumption within the moral boundaries, they induce affirmative action to promote well-being when people possess the means. In contrast, according to consumer sovereignty, as long as people can put up dollar votes for their preferences, resources will be allocated on producing, marketing and distributing inessential goods even if a quarter of the world population lives in poverty and suffers from hunger, malnourishment and curable diseases.

The modern urban-industrial society is based on a series of radical disconnections between body and soul, husband and wife, marriage and community, community and the earth. At each of these points of disconnection the collaboration of corporation, government, and expert sets up a profit-making enterprise that results in the further dismemberment and impoverishment of the Creation. Together, these disconnections add up to a condition of critical ill health, which we suffer in common -- not just with each other, but with all other creatures. Our economy is based upon this disease. Its aim is to separate us as far as possible from the sources of life (material, social, and spiritual), to put these sources under the control of corporations and specialized professionals, and to see them to us at the highest profit. It fragments the Creation and sets the fragments into conflict with one another. For the relief of the suffering that comes of this fragmentation and conflict, our economy proposes, not health, but vast "cures" that further centralize power and increase profits... Only by restoring the broken connections can we be healed. Connection is health. And what our society does its best to disguise from us is how ordinary, how commonly attainable, health is. We lose our health -- and create profitable diseases and dependencies -- by failing to see the direction connections between living and eating, eating and working, working and loving. In gardening, for instance, one works with the body to feed the body. The work, if it is knowledgeable, makes for excellent food. And it makes one hungry. The work thus makes eating both nourishing and joyful, not consumptive, and keeps the eater from getting fat and weak. This is health, wholeness, a source of delight. And such a solution, unlike the typical industrial solution, does not cause new problems.

To look at human energy consumption in another way, in a developed society today, every individual consumer is the rough ecological equivalent to a herd of gazelles.

My life as a patient changed the day I reread a letter by the nineteenth-century poet John Keats in which he offers a theory of what makes an artist great. At the the time of its writing, Keats had witnessed his mother die from tuberculosis, then a poorly understood disease with an unclear cause. Soon his brother Tom and later himself would die of the infection. In the letter, Keats - in his early twenties - tried to e plain to his brothers the special quality that differentiated a great artist form a merely good one. “Negative Capability,” as he terms it, is the quality “of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.” I couldn’t escape the sense that Keats’s words about the necessity of “being in uncertainties” derived form his own experience of living with consumption’s impact on his family. In fact, his formulation of negative capability seemed to be a key to living well in the face of pain. It was a profound insight of the sort that comes from witnessing loss and suffering up close. (As the chronically ill know, to the alive *is* to be in uncertainty.) I was grateful for his words, because they reminded me that I wasn’t living off the known map of human experience. Rather, I had felt invisible in my illness, I realized, because American culture - and American medicine within it - largely strived to downplay the fact that we still know so little about illness. A doctor friend told me that in med school he was explicitly taught never to say “I don’t know” to a patient. Uncertainty was thought to open the door to lawsuits. In the place of uncertainty, Americans have catchphrases: *Just do it. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.* no wonder that as a patient I was bent on an “irritable reaching after fact & reason.” The shadowland I lived in, forced against my will into what Keats called the great “Penetralium of mystery,” was an uncomfortable and unsatisfying place, especially since I lived in a culture that Donita’s the importance of triumph over adversity - a culture that insists on recovery.

I understood, too, what was upsetting my supposed benefactors. This wasn't about my work or my Instagram feed, or whatever uncomfortable email or phone call. Ryan and Seth had received this morning from whichever of their corporate partners was currently on edge. This was about the extent to which I would seem to be playing my role. Just as I had come to understand that in the world of Pict it wasn't enough simply to go to work and go home - that there was, in addition, and expectation of some deeper, human contribution - so too, in the context of this programme, this opportunity, it would never be enough simply to point to the material gains I had made. They needed me to be not only successful, but happy, evolved, gratefully aglow. It was my job to make them feel good about themselves and to help them package up that satisfaction for the consumption of others. In my mind, I saw their vision: me, on a podium or stage, perhaps giving a TED talk, gushing about the life in the change in my life they'd occasioned. (p.165)

Once you cross a certain threshold, money doesn’t get you more happiness. Our main concern is that if you have growth which is blind, fed by people’s growing consumption, it’s not really sustainable. What we are trying to do in our own little context is see what pattern of growth will be sustainable and desirable.” Fellow Traveler The secretary introduces me to another government minister, a fortyish gentleman who has been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease.

you should be very cautious about taking broad-spectrum antibiotics for anything other than a life-threatening infection. And our consumption of antibiotics doesn’t just come from filling a doctor’s prescription. Almost all American chicken or beef contains enough antibiotics to kill bacteria in a petri dish!

with duckweed, looking like green confetti. Early settlers had found Concord damp, poor, low, and mean; it was, they complained, unusually subject to storms and full of swamps and impenetrable undergrowth. All that had changed by 1837. There were still extensive lowlands and swamps, but Concord on the whole was a healthy place. Surrounded by open land, it was drier than it is now, and it seems to have been relatively free of insects. Life expectancy was around forty, but almost one person in four lived until seventy. One out of every five died from fevers of various sorts, while one out of every seven deaths was from “consumption.” The disease was endemic in many families, including Thoreau’s.5

Liposome-encapsulated magnesium (as threonate) has only recently become available (early 2019), and undoubtedly many other companies will start selling fraudulent “liposome-encapsulated” versions of this product as they have with vitamin C and other nutrients. Currently, LivOn Laboratories is the only company producing this form of magnesium encapsulated in liposomes. Early anecdotal feedback is indicating that a quality liposome-encapsulated form of magnesium appears to have a high degree of intracellular bioavailability, capable of getting significant amounts of magnesium into the cytoplasm without the consumption of energy, as would be seen when utilizing active transport mechanisms into the cell.

To this day, a central argument of the alcohol industry is that the most significant harms of alcohol are confined to a minority of excessive drinkers. This is specious—superficially correct, perhaps intuitively appealing to those with a personal experience of addiction, but in fact deeply wrong. Alcohol problems exist on a continuum, and numerous studies have found that most of the harmful effects of alcohol can be seen not among the most severe cases but in the much larger population of drinkers at the middle of the consumption bell curve—a group defined as “hazardous” or “at-risk” drinkers. People don’t need to be stereotypical alcoholics to drive drunk, get into fights, commit domestic violence, or develop alcohol-related diseases. Hazardous drinkers have fewer of these problems at an individual level, but they make up so much more of the population that they account for the most problems overall.

Dr. Mark Burhenne had been studying the links between mouthbreathing and sleep for decades, and had written a book on the subject. He told me that mouthbreathing contributed to periodontal disease and bad breath, and was the number one cause of cavities, even more damaging than sugar consumption, bad diet, or poor hygiene.

Furthermore, consumption of refined sugar increases inflammation. People with Parkinson’s are in a state of chronic inflammation, and we need to reduce or eliminate any food or activity that exacerbates that state.

Even years later traumatized people often have enormous difficulty telling other people what has happened to them. Their bodies reexperiences terror, rage, and helplessness, as well as the impulse to fight or flee, but these feelings are almost impossible to articulate. Trauma by nature drives us to the edge of comprehension, cutting us off from language based on common experience or an imaginable past... Sooner or later most survivors... come up with what many of them call their "cover story" that offers some explanation for their symptoms and behavior for public consumption. These stories, however, rarely capture the inner truth of the experience. It is enormously difficult to organize one's traumatic experiences into a coherent account - a narrative with a beginning, middle, and an end.

You might assume that livestock with cancer or obvious infection would be rejected for all consumption. Not so. The part considered diseased (such as the abscess or tumor) is cut out, but the rest of the sick animal goes right on into human food. Guess where the abscess or tumor goes? Into pet food.

The humble egg, in particular, was singled out in a 1968 proclamation by the American Heart Association, accused of causing heart disease because of its high cholesterol content. It has remained in nutritional purgatory for decades, even after reams of research papers showing that dietary cholesterol (and particularly egg consumption) may not have much to do with heart disease at all. Eating lots of saturated fat can increase levels of atherosclerosis-causing lipoproteins in blood, but most of the actual cholesterol that we consume in our food ends up being excreted out our backsides. The vast majority of the cholesterol in our circulation is actually produced by our own cells. Nevertheless, US dietary guidelines warned Americans away from consuming foods high in cholesterol for decades, and nutrition labels still inform American consumers about how much cholesterol is contained in each serving of packaged foods.

Between the purported sex appeal of tuberculosis and its special deadliness in young people, being afflicted with the disease—or at least, looking like you were—became associated with a certain status. This was a moment at which a woman’s value was strongly tied to femininity, fragility, and purity alike. The consumptive girl lived at the tantalizing nexus of all three: being made at once sexually desirable by sickness yet also too sick to consummate that desire. And her death, heartbreaking as it was, only cemented her status as a sort of archetype of female purity, unsullied by the usual forces that conspired to slowly rob a woman of her value. It was possible, in this moment, to imagine that tuberculosis patients were destined for something greater, something more meaningful, than the ordinary vagaries of a mortal life: when the consumptive girl passed, it would be in a state of unpolluted grace

Got Milk? For the record, you shouldn’t. I am not advocating for training your gut to handle lactose. We learned about the effect of animal protein and saturated fat on the gut in Chapter 2—less SCFA-producing bacteria, more inflammatory bacteria, increased TMAO production, increased intestinal permeability, and increases in bacterial endotoxin. As we’ve done in the past, when we examine the whole food rather than a sum of its parts, we find that dairy products have been associated with prostate cancer and Parkinson’s disease. Also the link to bone health turns out to be a myth—a prospective study of ninety-six thousand people over twenty-two years showed that milk consumption during teenage years did not protect against hip fracture later in life. In fact, men who drank more milk as a teenager actually had increased risk of hip fracture in the study. In a study of women in Sweden, high milk intake was associated with increased risk of bone fracture, heart disease, cancer, and premature death. One of the first things I do with my patients who have gas, bloating, or diarrhea is to eliminate dairy. You would not believe how many of them are cured just by doing this. Sorry, but milk doesn’t do a body good. The irony is that lactose, which has been vilified through the years as evil, is probably the most redeeming thing about dairy because lactose is actually a prebiotic and can have a beneficial effect on the gut microbiota.

A closer look at inflammatory foods in the gut Studies keep showing that the complex carbohydrates you’ll find in whole fruits, veggies, legumes, and whole grains are anything but inflammatory. They’re actually anti-inflammatory. But we rely on our gut microbiome to process them, and if there’s damage to the gut then it’s also impaired in carbohydrate processing, which leads to digestive distress. That’s not inflammation, that’s just sloppy processing. It doesn’t hurt you beyond the acute symptoms. But what does hurt you is the effect that you see from animal product consumption—less SCFA-producing good bacteria, more inflammatory bacteria, increased intestinal permeability, release of bacterial endotoxin, creation of carcinogenic secondary bile salts/polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons/N-nitroso compounds/heterocyclic aromatic amines, and vascular disease-fueling TMAO. Yes, it is easier for our body to digest and process meat. We don’t rely on our microbiome as much for that. So you may not feel any discomfort, but keep in mind what’s happening inside you. Silent but deadly.

Saad Jalal -Healthy eating refers to the practice of consuming a balanced and nutritious diet that provides the body with the essential nutrients it needs to function optimally. It involves making food choices that promote overall health and well-being while reducing the risk of chronic diseases. Here are some key principles and aspects of healthy eating: Balanced Diet: A healthy diet should include a variety of foods from all food groups. This typically includes fruits, vegetables, whole grains, lean proteins (such as poultry, fish, beans, and tofu), and dairy or dairy alternatives. Balance is essential to ensure that your body receives a wide range of nutrients. Portion Control: Eating the right portion sizes is crucial for maintaining a healthy weight. Overeating, even healthy foods, can lead to weight gain. Learning to recognize appropriate portion sizes can help control calorie intake. Saad Jalal Toronto Canada - Limit Processed Foods: Processed and ultra-processed foods often contain high levels of added sugars, unhealthy fats, and sodium. Reducing the consumption of these foods can improve overall health. Opt for fresh, whole foods whenever possible.

Again, the #1 risk factor for heart disease isn’t LDL-C; it’s the insulin resistance of metabolic syndrome, of which triglyceride is a much better biomarker than LDL-C. In fact, the largest study of heart attacks in the US revealed that 66 percent of the victims had metabolic syndrome. And the primary driver? Insulin resistance. And its primary driver? Our out-of-control sugar consumption.

Should you be eating soy? There’s been some debate about soy due to the perception of its carrying estrogen, but I want you to understand that phytoestrogens aren’t estrogen, nor do they act like human estrogen. Instead, phytoestrogens are isoflavones, one of the unique phytochemicals in soy beans. There are actually three soy isoflavones: genistein, daidzein, and glycitein. They have a number of health benefits, including: lowering cholesterol, strengthening bones, treating menopausal symptoms, lowering risk of coronary heart disease, and reducing risk of prostate/colon/breast/ovarian cancers. Want even more good news about soy? There are certain gut bacteria that can convert soy isoflavones into an even more beneficial compound called equol. This is like a supercharged isoflavone, giving you even more cardiovascular, bone, and menopausal health benefits. Unfortunately, you need to have the bacteria in order to do this. Equol can be produced by 50 to 60 percent of Asian people but just 30 percent of Westerners. For what it’s worth, diets high in carbohydrates (really meaning fiber) and low in saturated fat are associated with equol production, while antibiotics appear to hinder it. I recommend consuming only non-GMO and organic soy in its whole-foods forms: edamame, tofu, miso, tempeh, tamari, and unsweetened soy milk. Model your soy consumption after the way they do it in Asia. For some delicious ways to consume soy, check out the recipes in Chapter 10.

Blocking inositol triphosphate stops the wave. Inositol triphosphate receptor activation by calcium can desensitize the receptors. Inositol triphosphate is more sensitive to their receptors, but it is also less reactive than calcium and can act over many areas of the cell. Calcium and inositol triphosphate act like a hand on a faucet when they bind their receptors on the endoplasmic reticulum. After turning on the faucet, calcium flows out. The release of calcium from internal endoplasmic reticulum through these receptors results in sparks or puffs before it is sequestered back into the endoplasmic reticulum. These sparks or puffs can be amplified by neighboring endoplasmic reticulum as calcium itself releases more calcium stores. To get calcium back into the endoplasmic reticulum, energy must be used. ATP (Adenosine-5-triphosphate) is produced by the mitochondria, the power plants of the cell, by using energy from the blood. ATP consumption in the cell is similar to world oil consumption. It is the voracious creation of energy and power. Believe it or not, the ion that stimulates ATP production in the mitochondria is none other than calcium. When we eat and drink, our body breaks down our foods into energy. This energy is required for the mitochondria to produce ATP. Fats and sugars are broken down into units that are eventually utilized by the mitochondria transport system. When there is not enough energy available, calcium is unable to pump back into the endoplasmic reticulum and calcium diffusion can

In 1992, Willett published the results from eight years of observation of the Nurses cohort. Fifteen hundred nurses had developed breast cancer, and, once again, those who ate less fat seemed to have more breast cancer. In 1999, the Harvard researchers published fourteen years of observations. By then almost three thousand nurses had contracted breast cancer, and the data still suggested that eating fatty foods (even those with copious saturated fat) might protect against cancer. For every 5 percent of saturated-fat calories that replaced carbohydrates in the diet, the risk of breast cancer decreased by 9 percent. This certainly argued against the hypothesis that excessive fat consumption caused breast cancer. Despite

Wolever and Jenkins tested sixty-two foods and recorded the blood-sugar response in the two hours after consumption. Different individuals responded differently, and the variation from day to day was “tremendous,” as Wolever says, but the response to a specific food was still reasonably consistent. They also tested a solution of glucose alone to provide a benchmark, which they assigned a numerical value of 100. Thus the glycemic index became a comparison of the blood-sugar response induced by a particular carbohydrate food to the response resulting from drinking a solution of glucose alone. The higher the glycemic index, the faster the digestion of the carbohydrates and the greater the resulting blood sugar and insulin. White bread, they reported, had a glycemic index of 69; white rice, 72; corn flakes, 80; apples, 39; ice cream, 36. The presence of fat and protein in a food decreased the blood-sugar response, and so decreased the glycemic index. One

consumption of grains is probably responsible for most, if not all, of the noncommunicable diseases we face as a civilization today, we

Known as the McGovern Committee, they released Dietary Goals for the United States, a report advising Americans to cut down on animal-based foods and increase their consumption of plant-based foods. As a founding member of Harvard University’s nutrition department recalls, “The meat, milk and egg producers were very upset.”53 That’s an understatement. Under industry pressure, not only was the goal to “decrease meat consumption” removed from the report but the entire Senate nutrition committee was disbanded. Several

I can safely say that the origin of every single disease is genetic. Our genes are the code to everything in our bodies, good and bad. Without genes, there would be no cancer. Without genes, there would be no obesity, diabetes or heart disease. And without genes, there would be no life. This might explain why we are spending hundreds of millions of dollars trying to figure out which gene causes which disease and how we can silence the dangerous genes. This also explains why some perfectly healthy young women have had their breasts removed simply because they were found to carry genes that are linked to breast cancer. Much of this focus on genes, however, misses a simple but crucial point: not all genes are fully expressed all the time. If they aren't activated, or expressed, they remain biochemically dormant. Dormant genes do not have any effect on our health. This is obvious to most scientists, and many laypeople, but the significance of this idea is seldom understood. What happens to cause some genes to remain dormant, and others to express themselves? The answer: environment, especially diet. As we saw in chapter three, the genes that cause cancer were profoundly impacted by the consumption of protein. So while we can say that genes are crucial to every biological process, we have some very convincing evidence that gene expression is far more important, and gene expression is controlled by environment, especially nutrition.

The high level of meat and saturated fat consumption in the USA and other high-income countries exceeds nutritional needs and contributes to high rates of chronic diseases such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes mellitus and some cancers.

The researchers noted that their most important finding may be that cholesterol consumption was a strong predictor of cirrhosis and liver cancer. Those consuming the amount of cholesterol found in two Egg McMuffins34 or more each day appeared to double their risk of hospitalization or death.35

She showed how consumption of animal fat was already dropping in the US in the 1960s when the AHA made their pronouncements. At the same time, and since the early 1900s, the consumption of polyunsaturated vegetable oils had dramatically increased. This rise ‘perfectly paralleled’ the rising heart-disease rates, she said.

The consequences for public health have been nothing short of tragic, Teicholz said. It’s quite likely, she argued, that by shifting towards a greater consumption of grains and other carbohydrates, the US guidelines have been a major contributor to the pandemics of obesity, diabetes and heart disease.

Accordingly, the authors concluded: ‘Irrespective of the possible limitations of the ecological study design, the undisputed finding of our paper is the fact that the highest CVD [cardiovascular disease] prevalence can be found in countries with the highest carbohydrate consumption whereas the lowest CVD prevalence is typical of countries with the highest intake of fat and protein.

Obesity is associated with, but does not cause T2DM. Both diseases are the consequence of prolonged over-consumption of the same drug – carbohydrates. T2DM manifests as damage to end-organs that result from a series of progressive microvascular injuries due to the toxic effects of chronically elevated blood sugar.

the association between heart disease, obesity, and diabetes. If heart disease is caused by high-fat diets, as is commonly believed, then so are obesity and diabetes, since these diseases appear together in both individuals and populations. But there is no evidence linking obesity to dietary-fat consumption, neither between populations nor in the same populations.*91 And, of course, if dietary fat is not responsible for heart disease, then it’s unlikely that it plays a role in obesity and diabetes.

all of whom had questioned their fat patients extensively about their diets. Their common finding was an excessive consumption of starches and sweets. Rony reported that the craving for sweets and starches among his patients was so common that it suggested an underlying physiological mechanism at work, possibly related to a greater need for or reduced availability of glucose.

Soy consumption has been clearly linked to a higher risk of vascular dementia, or Alzheimer’s disease, in men (White et al. 1996). The isoflavones of soy inhibit the enzyme conversion of testosterone to estradiol via the aromatase enzyme, which is necessary for male brain function and maintenance (Irvine et al. 1998).

For every 5 percent of saturated-fat calories that replaced carbohydrates in the diet, the risk of breast cancer decreased by 9 percent. This certainly argued against the hypothesis that excessive fat consumption caused breast cancer.

This led investigators to propose that all these diseases had a single common cause—the consumption of easily digestible, refined carbohydrates.

The consumption of sugar is undoubtedly increasing. It is generally recognized that diabetes is increasing, and to a considerable extent, its incidence is greatest among the races and the classes of society that consume most sugar.

Sugar and white flour were also obvious suspects in the etiology of diabetes, because the dramatic increase in consumption of these foodstuffs in the latter decades of the nineteenth century in the United States and Europe coincided with dramatic increases in diabetes incidence and mortality.

It is apparent,” wrote Emerson in 1924, “that rises and falls in the sugar consumption are followed with fair regularity within a few months by similar rises and falls in the death rates from diabetes.

of the thirteen countries highest in consumption of sugar, eleven are found among the thirteen highest in death rate from diabetes.”)

When researchers looked at trends between diet and disease, as Himsworth and Joslin had done with diabetes and Keys and a later generation of researchers would do with heart disease and even cancer, they would measure only fat, protein, and total carbohydrate consumption and fail to account for any potential effect of refined carbohydrates.

these investigators, too, concluded that differences in cancer rates could be explained by differences in fat consumption and animal-fat consumption, particularly between Japan and the United States. They did not serve science well by ignoring sugar consumption and the difference between refined and unrefined carbohydrates.

This brings us back to the questions we asked earlier: If people eat less on carbohydrate-restricted diets, why aren’t they hungry. And if they don’t eat less, why do they lose weight? If the restriction of carbohydrates works to ameliorate this defect in fat metabolism, as Pennington speculated, then weight will be lost, hunger will be absent, and calorie consumption may decrease, while energy expenditure will increase. This is no more than the consequences of the law of energy conservation applied to a biological system that works to conserve body composition and maintain a healthy flow of fuel to the cells and tissues.

Excessive consumption of fructose contributes to the development of fatty liver disease, kidney stones, and gout.

Administered daily, Gleevec can “contain” cancer growth, which then ceases to be dangerous. We have reached the stage of “cancer without disease,” in the language of Judah Folkman, who discovered angiogenesis.59 It so happens that many herbs and spices act along some of the same lines as Gleevec. This is true of the labiate family, for example, which includes mint, thyme, marjoram, oregano, basil, and rosemary. They are rich in fatty acids of the terpene family, which makes them particularly fragrant. Terpenes have been shown to act on a wide variety of tumors by reducing the spread of cancer cells or by provoking their death. One of these terpenes—carnosol in rosemary—affects the capacity of cancer cells to invade neighboring tissues. When it is incapable of spreading, cancer loses its virulence. Moreover, researchers at the National Cancer Institute have demonstrated that rosemary extracts help chemotherapy penetrate cancer cells. In tissue cultures, they lower the resistance of breast cancer cells to chemotherapy.60 In Richard Béliveau’s experiments, apigenine—plentiful in parsley and celery—has demonstrated powerful inhibition of the creation of blood vessels, which tumors need to grow, and to a degree comparable to Gleevec. This effect occurs even with very small concentrations, similar to those observed in the blood after consumption of parsley.