This has been blamed on the decreasing “whole plant food content of their diet,” including a shift from brown rice to white and the substitution of other refined carbohydrates, packaged snacks, and fast-food products for India’s traditional staples of lentils, fruits, vegetables, whole grains, nuts, and

“As a result of these conflicts [of interest],” concluded an analysis in the Food and Drug Law Journal, “the Guidelines sometimes favor the interests of the food and drug industries over the public’s interest in accurate and impartial dietary advice.”19

In general, the dividing line between health-promoting and disease-promoting foods may be less plant- versus animal-sourced foods and more whole plant foods versus most everything else.

On the other hand, a twin pair of studies from Columbia and Harvard Universities found that consumption of cured meat—like bacon, bologna, ham, hot dogs, sausage, and salami—may increase the risk of COPD.38,39 It’s thought to be due to the nitrite preservatives in meat, which may mimic the lung-damaging properties of the nitrite by-products of

So why didn’t I learn about any of this in medical school? There’s little money to be made from prescribing plants instead of pills. The neuropathy pain reversal study was published more than twenty years ago, and the blindness reversal studies more than fifty years ago.

But when the smokers were given turmeric, the DNA-mutation rate dropped by up to 38 percent.15 They weren’t given curcumin pills; they merely got less than a teaspoon a day of just the regular turmeric spice you’d find at the grocery store. Of course, turmeric can’t completely mitigate the effects of smoking. Even after the participants ate

Researchers rounded up a group of longtime smokers and asked them to consume twenty-five times more broccoli than the average American—in other words, a single stalk a day. Compared to broccoli-avoiding smokers, the broccoli-eating smokers suffered 41 percent fewer DNA mutations in their bloodstream over ten days. Is that just because the broccoli

There’s an enzyme in the roots of bristlecone pines that appears to peak a few thousand years into their life span, and it actually rebuilds telomeres.68 Scientists named it telomerase. Once they knew what to look for, researchers discovered the enzyme was present in human cells too.

Even vegetarians can suffer high rates of chronic disease, though, if they eat a lot of processed foods.