Eat Plants, Live Long

BY MICHAEL GREGER

Adhering to just four simple healthy lifestyle factors can have a strong impact on the prevention of chronic diseases: not smoking, not being obese, getting a half hour of exercise a day and eating healthier—defined as consuming more fruits, veggies, and whole grains and less meat.

Those four factors alone were found to account for 78% of chronic disease risk. If you start from scratch and manage to tick off all four, you may be able to wipe out more than 90% of your risk of developing diabetes, more than 80% of your risk of having a heart attack, cut by half your risk of having a No. 2 cancer killer, colon cancer, up to 71% of cases appear to be preventable through a similar portfolio of simple diet and lifestyle changes.

Maybe it’s time we stop blaming genetics and focus on the more than 70% that is directly under our control. We have the power.

You can take statin drugs for your cholesterol to lower risk of heart attacks, pop different pills and inject insulin for diabetes, and take a slew of diuretics and other blood pressure medications for hypertension. But only one unifying diet helps prevent, arrest or even reverse each of these (leading causes of death) killers.

Unlike with medications, there isn’t one kind of diet for optimal liver function and a different diet to improve our kidneys. A hearthealthy diet is a brain-healthy diet is a lung-healthy diet. The diet that helps prevent cancer just so happens to be the same diet that may help prevent type 2 diabetes and every other cause of death on the Top 15 list.

Unlike drugs—which target only specific functions, can have dangerous side effects and may only treat the symptoms of disease—a healthy diet can benefit all organ systems at once, has good side effects and may treat the underlying cause of illness.

That one unifying diet found to best prevent and treat many of these chronic diseases is a wholefood, plant-based diet, defined as an eating pattern that encourages the consumption of unrefined plant foods and discourages meats, dairy products, eggs and processed foods.

I don’t advocate for a vegetarian diet or a vegan diet. I advocate for an evidence-based diet, and the best available balance of science suggests that the more whole plant foods we eat, the better—both to reap their nutritional benefits and to displace less healthful options.

For most of our leading killers, nongenetic factors like diet can account for at least 80-90% of cases. As I noted before, this is based on the fact that the rates of cardiovascular disease and major cancers differ fivefold to a hundred-fold around the world. Migration studies show this is not just genetics. When people move from low- to high-risk areas, their disease risk nearly always shoots up to match the new setting.

As well, dramatic changes in disease rates within a single generation highlight the primacy of external factors. Colon cancer mortality in Japan in the 1950s was less than one-fifth that of the United States (including Americans of Japanese ancestry). But now colon cancer rates in Japan are as bad as they are in the United States, a rise that has been attributed in part to the fivefold increase in meat consumption.

Research has shown that identical twins separated at birth get different diseases based on how they live their lives. A recent American Heart Association–funded study compared the lifestyles and arteries of nearly five hundred twins. It found that diet and lifestyle factors clearly trumped genes. You share 50% of your genes with each of your parents, so if one parent dies of a heart attack, you know you’ve inherited some of that susceptibility.

But even among identical twins who have the exact same genes, one could die early of a heart attack and the other could live a long, healthy life with clean arteries, depending on what she ate and how she lived. Even if both your parents died with heart disease, you should be able to eat your way to a healthy heart. Your family history does not have to become your personal destiny.

In a study of more than 600 centenarians, fewer than 2% of the women and not a single one of the men were obese.

What does it really mean to be overweight? Obese? In simple terms, being overweight means you have too much body fat, whereas being obese means you have way too much body fat.

In technical terms, obesity is operationally defined as a body mass index (BMI) of 30 or more, while being overweight means you have a BMI of 25 to 29.9. A BMI between 18.5 and 24.9 is considered “ideal weight.”

Calculating your BMI is relatively easy … grab a calculator and calculate it on your own. To do so, multiply your weight in pounds by 703. Then divide that twice by your height in inches. For example, if you weigh 200 pounds and are 71 inches tall (5 foot 11), that would be (200 × 703) ÷ 71 ÷ 71 = 27.9, a BMI indicating that you would be, unfortunately, significantly overweight.

In the medical profession, we used to call a BMI of under 25 “normal weight.” Sadly, that’s no longer normal. Being overweight became the norm by the late 1980s in the United States and appears to have steadily worsened ever since.

The largest studies in the United States and around the world found that having a normal body mass index, a BMI of 20–25, is associated with the longest life span. Putting together all the best available studies with the longest followup, that can be narrowed down even further to a BMI of 20–22.

Unlike waist circumference, body mass index has the advantage of taking height into account. Waist-to-height ratio may offer the best of both worlds, and the cutoff value is the simplest to remember: Keep your waist less than half your height. The goal is to get a waistto-height ratio under 0.5.

Whole-food, plant-based nutrition—pretty self-explanatory, right? But aren’t some whole foods better than others? For example, you can apparently live for extended periods eating practically nothing but potatoes. That would, by definition, be a whole-food, plantbased diet—but not a very healthy one. All plant foods are not created equal.

Looking over the checklist, you’ll see there are three servings each of beans, fruits, and whole grains, and about twice as many veggies in total than any other food component.

Instead of a big bowl of spaghetti with some veggies and lentils on top, I think of a big bowl of vegetables with some pasta and lentils mixed in. Instead of a big plate of brown rice with some stir-fried vegetables on top, I picture a meal that’s mostly veggies—and oh look!

There’s some rice and beans in there too. But there’s no need to be obsessive about the Daily Dozen. On hectic travel days when I’ve burned through my snacks and I’m trying to piece together some semblance of a healthy meal at the airport food court, sometimes I’m lucky if I even hit a quarter of my goals. If you eat poorly on one day, just try to eat better the next.

My hope is that the checklist will serve as a helpful reminder to try to eat a variety of the healthiest foods every day.