How Not to Die: Discover the Foods Scientifically Proven to Prevent and Reverse Disease
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
Michael Greger MD • How Not to Die: Discover the Foods Scientifically Proven to Prevent and Reverse Disease
they found that three months of whole-food, plant-based nutrition and other healthy changes could significantly boost telomerase activity, the only intervention ever shown to do
Michael Greger MD • How Not to Die: Discover the Foods Scientifically Proven to Prevent and Reverse Disease
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 turmeri
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Part of the USDA’s mission is “expanding markets for agricultural products.”14 At the same time, the federal agency is tasked with protecting public health by helping to develop the Dietary Guidelines for Americans. That’s why, when those two directives are in sync, their eat-more language is clear: “Increase fruit intake.” “Increase vegetable inta
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Five years later, their telomeres were even longer on average than when they started, suggesting a healthy lifestyle can boost telomerase enzyme activity and reverse cellular
Michael Greger MD • How Not to Die: Discover the Foods Scientifically Proven to Prevent and Reverse Disease
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.
Michael Greger MD • How Not to Die: Discover the Foods Scientifically Proven to Prevent and Reverse Disease
So how does curcumin affect this process? It appears to have the ability to reprogram the self-destruct mechanism back into cancer cells. All cells contain so-called death receptors that trigger the self-destruction sequence, but cancer cells can disable their own death receptors. Curcumin, however, appears able to reactivate them.17 Curcumin can a
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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
Michael Greger MD • How Not to Die: Discover the Foods Scientifically Proven to Prevent and Reverse Disease
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 ciga
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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
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