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

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

After all, 2 + 2 = 4 regardless of what your favorite mathematician thinks. This is because there isn’t a trillion-dollar industry that profits from confusing people about arithmetic. If you were getting conflicting messages from all sides about basic math, in desperation, you might have to choose one authority to stick with, hoping that person

When meat is grilled, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) are also produced, one of the probable carcinogens in cigarette smoke. The researchers discovered that not only was the ingestion of grilled meat in the third trimester associated with smaller birth weights, mothers merely exposed to the fumes tended to give birth to babies with a birth

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

Some people have expressed concern that boosting telomerase activity could theoretically increase cancer risk, since tumors have been known to hijack the telomerase enzyme and use it to ensure their own immortality.75 But as we’ll see in chapter 13, Dr. Ornish and his colleagues have used the same diet and lifestyle changes to halt and apparently

curcumin, the bright-yellow pigment in turmeric.12

Curcumin is special in that it appears to belong to all three groups, meaning it may potentially help prevent and/or arrest cancer cell growth.13

For reasons not fully understood, curcumin seems to leave noncancerous cells alone.