Hello and welcome to On Books.
This week, I want to inspire you to read How
Not to Die by Michael Greger M.D. he's a doctor.
This is one of my favorite books from the
past year, I have read I think over 20 or
25 nutrition and health books over the past
few years.
I've been really deep and interested in the
subject and I've done some speaking around
it and writing, I'm very passionate about
this subject.
Of all the books I feel like this one is really
just the one to read, like the monolith, the
beautiful composition aggregate of a lot of
this stuff that's out there.
: A few things to come, jumping into this,
I want to talk about why this book?
Who is Michael Greger?
Why is he writing it?
At the end I want to give you two takeaways
from the book where I'm going to read a little
bit.
Two takeaways that after reading the book
caused me to change something in my day every
single day, in my habits every single day.
I'm going to bring those to you as well.
: At the front of this episode, you heard
Dr. Greger talking about his site nutritionfact.org.
I want to just tell you a little bit about
why I think he's doing a wonderful job with
his site nutritionfacts.org and how it relates
to the book.
The site nutritionfacts.org, basically, I'm
just going to read from the about page here
because it sums it up.
He says, "Whenever there's a new drug or surgical
procedure, you can be assured that your doctor
will probably hear about it because there'll
be a corporate budget driving its promotion.
But, what about advances in the field of nutrition?
The reason we don't see ads on TV for broccoli
is the same reason groundbreaking research
on the power of foods and eating patterns
to affect our health and longevity gets lost
and buried in medical literature.
There's no profit motive.
It may not make anyone money, but would it
profit our lives?"
He says actually, "But, what if it could profit
our lives?"
: I'm sharing with you the site because the
site NutritionFacts, the amount of time over
the years that he's put reading through different
journal studies and working with this research
team, this nonprofit team put this together.
He's put together, just think about like a
thousand videos at this point that are all
free.
This book is the aggregate of the best of
those videos more or less, so it's a gem.
I'm just going to play it for you now.
Just some excerpts from one video in particular
that I think has some really beneficial takeaways
that you could get away.
I'm going to play it for you now.
I'll stop in the middle to tell you a little
bit to speed you up.
Let's do it.
All right, ready?
When I used to teach medical students at Tufts,
I gave a lecture about this amazing new therapeutic
called iloccorB.
I talked about all the new signs, all of the
things you can do, excellent safety profile
and just as they were all scrambling to buy
stock in the company and prescribing to their
patients, I did the big reveal, apologizing
for my dyslexia.
I had gotten it backwards, all this time I
had been talking broccoli.
Sulforaphane, is thought to be the active
ingredient in broccoli, which may protect
our brain, protect our eyesight, protect us
from free radicals, induce our detoxification
enzymes, help prevent cancer as well as help
treat it.
For example, I've talked about how Sulforaphane
can target breast cancer stem cells.
Then I talked about how the formation of this
compound is like a chemical flare reaction
requiring the mixing of a precursor compound
with an enzyme and broccoli, which is destroyed
by cooking.
This may explain why we get dramatic suppression
of cancer cell growth from raw broccoli, cauliflower,
Brussels sprouts, but hardly anything from
boiled microwave or steamed except from microwave
broccoli that actually retained some cancer
fighting abilities.
: I'm going to pause right there.
As this video is going on, what you can't
see is that he is highlighting on the screen
the different reports that are hideously citing
himself by using different medical journal
reports.
You have to watch it for yourself as he's
talking.
Everything he is saying is backed up by reports.
He's not just kind of preaching from some
philosophy or some things that he heard or
just speaking off cuff, everything is very
well documented and cited and that's really
profound.
I'm going to move a little bit further through
the video now just to give you one of the
big takeaways.
: If you're following along, he's saying that
Sulforaphane has this really potential healing
property in broccoli, that's very healthy
for you.
One of those situations where the problems
is that when we cook broccoli, what happens?
We cook it and it loses the Sulforaphane,
right?
It loses that potential.
He gives this method called Hack and Hold.
I'm going to play it for you now, which is
a way that you can still cook your broccoli
and not lose all the nutrition that comes
along with it.
That's why I described the hack and hold technique.
If you chopped the broccoli, Brussels sprouts
or kale, collards, cauliflower.
First, and then wait 40 minutes, then you
can call cook them all you want, the Sulforaphane
is already made, the enzyme has already done
its job, so you don't need it anymore.
When most people make broccoli soup, for example,
they're doing it wrong.
Most people cook the broccoli first, then
blend it, but now we know what should be done
in the exact opposite, blend it first, wait,
then cook it.
: Now, that you have a taste for just one
of the videos of the thousands that are on
the site, now you have a sense of just a little
sliver of what's in this book.
Because, while each of the videos is just
built on a few dozen research articles, peer
reviewed science that he's compiling for one
video.
Now this book is, he's taking the best of
all that research, the best of all his videos
and the stories, and all that kind of stuff.
He's putting it into more or less just this
big magazine, this encyclopedia that you can
read through and find what you're looking
for.
: How is the book arranged?
Where do you start with a big book like this?
Well, the book is divided into two parts,
the first part is the why?
The second part is the how?
He writes, "This book is divided into two
parts.
The why and the how.
Part one, the why, to eat healthy section?"
He explores the role of food in prevention,
treatment and reversal of the 15 leading causes
of death in the United States.
I'm going to pause there.
As he's saying, the first half of the book
is then subdivided into the top 15 ways basically
that Americans die, which is interesting in,
and of itself.
Do you know the top number one reason that
Americans die?
The number one disease?
Most people think it's cancer, but it's heart
disease it's the number one.
Then the list goes down from there, we have
heart disease, lung disease, brain disease,
goes, digestive cancers, infections, diabetes,
so each one of the chapters is backed.
: I'm going to read the chapter titles, How
Not to Die from Heart Disease Page 17, How
Not to Die from Lung Disease, Page 30, How
Not to Die from Brain Disease, and it just
goes down there, the top 15.
Within that, he looks at how you know based
on all of this research, like I said, he looks
at the role that diet plays in preventing
these diseases.
I'm going to read from the introduction at
the beginning of the book, he writes, "There
may be no such thing as dying from old age
until recently, advanced age had been considered
to be a disease itself.
But, people don't die as a consequence of
maturing, they die from disease most commonly
heart attacks.
Most deaths in the United States are preventable
and they're related to what we eat.
Our diet is the number one cause of premature
death and the number one cause of disability.
Surely, diet must also be the number one thing
taught in medical school.
Right?
Sadly, it's not.
According, to the most recent national survey,
only a quarter of medical schools offer a
single course in nutrition down from 37%,
30 years ago."
: So, I'll just to repeat what he said because
this is crazy, but if you're a doctor, you
don't have to take that many nutrition courses,
actually, maybe only one.
Yet a lot of us go to our doctor and ask them
for nutrition advice, "Hey doctor, what should
I eat?
Should I eat this?
Should I eat this?"
But, they're not necessarily trained in that.
This is something I've read about a lot and
a few other books such as the China Study
and a variety of other books that people have
argued that doctors should have more nutrition
training.
: He goes on, "While most of the public evidently
considers doctors to be very credible sources
of nutritional information.
Six out of seven graduating dr surveyed, physicians
were inadequately trained to counsel patients
about their diets.
Exactly that, one study found that people
of the street sometimes knew more about the
basic nutrition than their doctor's, concluding
physicians should be more knowledgeable about
nutrition than their patients, but these results
suggest that this is not necessarily true."
: I really like the way that the first half
of this book is broken down, how he's broken
it down to the 15 diseases that Americans
most die from because I don't know, I think
of life is a game in some ways, whereas like
you want, I want to have good health, and
I want to live as long as I can, but I want
to live those years without prescriptions
and drugs or all the side effects of all that.
You want to just live healthy and personally
then I just want to not live anymore.
Right?
I want to live in good health as long as I
can, more or less.
It makes sense, logically if I was playing
this game, so to speak, that to know the top
15 things that are going to come up and potentially
destroy me, so to speak, that I could become
educated, trained, strong and take care of
those because if you were thinking of this
as a pie graph, that's a big chunk of the
pie graph of things against you.
: What he does is for each of the 15 diseases
he offers why, why certain foods, why or why
not, they may contribute to this disease.
I'm just going to look at the first one, the
number one, which is heart disease, How Not
to Die from Heart Disease.
Chapter 1, I'm going to read a little bit
and just give you some of his thinking on
this.
He starts writing, "Imagine if terrorists
created a bio agent that spread mercilessly
claiming the lives of nearly 400,000 Americans
every year.
That is the equivalent of one person every
83 seconds, every hour around the clock, year
after year.
The pandemic would be front page news, all
day, every day with Marshall the army and
march our finest medical minds into a room
to figure out how to find a cure for this
bio terror plague.
: In short, we'd stop at nothing until the
terrorists were stopped.
Fortunately, we're not actually losing hundreds
of thousands of people each year to preventable
threat.
Are we?
Actually, yes we are.
This particular biological weapon may not
be given, may not be a germ released by terrorists,
but it kills more Americans annually than
have all past wars combined.
It can be stopped not in a laboratory, but
right in our grocery stores, kitchens and
dining rooms.
As far as weapons go, we don't need vaccines
or antibiotics, a simple fork will do."
: What's going on here?
If this epidemic is presence on such a massive
scale, yet so preventable, why aren't we doing
more about it?
The killer I'm talking about is coronary heart
disease and it's affecting nearly everyone
raised on the standard American diet.
Our top killer, America's number one killer
is a different kind of terrorists, fatty deposits
in the walls of your arteries caused by I'm
going to not say this right, but as arteriosclerosis
plague, maybe that's how you say it.
For most Americans raised on conventional
diet.
Plague accumulates inside the coronary arteries,
the blood vessels that crown the heart hence
the coronary and supply it with oxygen rich
blood.
The buildup of plaque known as arteriosclerosis
from the Greek word athere, gruel and sclerosis,
hardening is the hardening of the arteries
by pockets of cholesterol, rich gunk that
builds up within the inner linings of blood
vessels.
: I want to move ahead a little bit here because
he goes on telling the story and he looks
at, there's a page here is fish oil, just
snake oil is talking about how fish oil may
relate to heart disease, talks about Lipitor
a little bit and moving on.
There's a part here called Heart Disease is
Reversible, where he looks at research from
Dean Ornish, Caldwell Esselstyn, and Nathan
Pritikin.
Nathan Pritikin is one of the doctors that
helped cure his grandmother, which he talks
about just being a using ... I'll tell you
the story, but basically, his grandmother
was sentenced to die at 65 from heart disease.
It was like, "There's nothing we can do."
Nathan Pritikin came in using ... not using
all these pharmaceuticals that were, the kind
of standard diet that she needed to consume,
but rather changing her nutrition and thus
she went on to live, I think for at least
like another into her '80s at least.
: He puts this chapter, which I'm sure he's
really proud of together, this Heart Disease
is Reversible and man, there's a lot in here
that I could kind of start breaking down,
but I'll just read a little bit more and then
leave it to you.
He writes about heart disease, he says, "Originally
researchers blamed the animal fat or animal
protein, but attention has recently shifted
to bacterial toxins known as Endotoxins.
Certain foods such as meats appear to harbor
bacteria that can trigger inflammation dead
or alive even when the food is fully cooked.
Endotoxins are not destroyed by cooking temperatures,
stomach acids, or digestive enzymes.
After a meal of animal products, these Endotoxins
may end up in your intestines.
They are then, "I'm sorry."
They are then thought to be ferried by saturated
fats across the gut wall into your bloodstream
where they can trigger the inflammatory reaction
in your arteries."
: I think this book is a little bit easier
to read, than for me to read to you because
if you see the words, I just think it's more
readable than listening to.
One of the main points here, the building
on Ornish's Study is that Dr. Ornish reported
91% reduction in angio attacks within just
a few weeks in patients place on a plant based
diet, both with or without exercise.
This is talking about the role that meat has
in basically causing or exacerbating heart
disease, and the reversibility of it, which
is I'll just repeat that here, 91% reduction
in attacks was in just a few weeks of removing
meat and eating healthy plants as a substitute.
: I'm going to move to the second half of
the book and it's going to be short.
As you can tell from me reading the first
half of the book, it's a little bit in depth
that parts, there's some science, there's
storytelling and it breaks down.
Like I said, there's 15 diseases, one, two,
three, four, five, all the way to 15.
That's all the why, right?
The second half of the book is a little bit
more of like a how to guide and maybe I guess
if you trusted enough you came to this book,
you just wanted to know how do I just start
living healthier?
If you just were like, "I'm with your doctor,
I've seen your videos, I've read the introduction,
I'm with you."
Then you could probably just get to the second
half and just gobble up some of these tips
that he has in here."
: I'm going to share with you two, that are
just frameworks that I use now for informing
my own health.
I think, one thing that's important to point
out as well, when we look at different diets,
there're so many different diets out there,
right?
There's like paleo, there's Atkins, I don't
know there's vegan, plant based, there's always
different dIetary that you can do.
I think, the question that's worth asking
is what are you trying to optimize for is
important?
Because, I do believe that there are certain.
Again, I should say that I'm not a doctor,
take these for what you're worth, do your
own research, don't just follow me.
I'm not a doctor at all.
I believe I will say based on what I've read,
that there are certain diets that will optimize
you gaining muscle.
There are certain diets that will optimize
you for losing weight.
Right?
If those are your goals, you may lose weight
on the Atkins diet, you may gain muscle doing
Crossfit and eating paleo.
: My goal in this game, so to speak, is good
health.
I want to live a healthy life and I want my
mind to be functioning at high level of cognitive
ability.
I want to have friends and family and treat
them well and be alert for that and live right,
good health, all that stuff that comes to
good health.
There's going to be trade offs when you decide
what you're optimizing for.
If you're optimizing for losing weight, you
may slightly be giving up some of your good
health and they don't talk about that.
I think, that's a pretty profound realization,
right?
Is that, okay, yeah, you may be losing the
weight, but what are you giving up?
The trade offs are rarely talked about.
: In this book, the main optimization is good
health.
How not to die, not dying.
You may disagree with some of this and say,
"Well, paleo says I need to eat, so-and-so
lean chicken protein, X amount of days so
that I can gain body mass."
Okay, that may also be true, right?
But this is about health.
Within that context, he gives for living a
healthy life and not dying.
He gives what he calls Dr. Greger's daily
dozen.
Dr. Greger's daily dozen, it's 12 different
types of food that you should have and the
amount of servings that you should have of
them every day.
: Right now I'm just going to read down the
list of 12 that you should have every single
day and if you would like when you get the
book, each of the chapters at the end, more
or less goes through these 12 foods and why
you should have them or how they can affect
you or how you can use them to your benefit
more or less.
They'll talk about things like the effects
of hibiscus tea or green tea versus white
tea, coffee, like all this is just in the
beverage category.
There's 12 different types of food that you
should have every single day and the list
goes.
Barry's beans, other fruits, cruciferous vegetables
which are like broccoli, Swiss chard, there's
a few other things, greens, other vegetables,
flaxseed, nuts, spices, whole grains, beverages
and exercise.
: Like I said, each one of the chapters goes
through why?
A little bit about the science, how often
to have it?
If you're this type of person and you may
want to have more or less of this, all that
kind of stuff.
There's not recipes like actual, there's a
whole another book about recipes if you want
that, but it's more or less just broken down
by each of the foods, broccoli, hibiscus tea,
and the health benefits of each one.
Which is, like I said, it's that kind of encyclopedic
read where you can come to it when you have
questions and thumb through and get your answers.
: I'm going to read from the exercise portion
here, this is one of them.
He says, you need to do exercise every day
because that's my number two takeaway.
My number one takeaway was just having this
list and reading through the benefits.
I have begun to incorporate flaxseed into
my diet every day as well as spices.
I make a drink of turmeric and cinnamon, I'll
put together, it takes a second.
You put it together, but after reading the
benefits of and how easy this is to get this
nutrition every day, just made some quick
changes in my life that I've really felt good
about, that's the nutrition part.
: One of them here exercise I also found really
interesting because I thought that I exercised.
All right, I thought that I exercised enough
three times, four times a week.
I thought that that was pretty good, but I
love, I love this part here where the question
is how much should you exercise?
This is looking, like I said, a research and
so he writes and you might not want to hear
this if you don't like to exercise.
He says, "The current official physical activity
guidelines recommend adults get at least 150
minutes a week of moderate aerobic exercise,
which comes out to a little more than 20 minutes
a day.
That's actually down for previous recommendations
from The Surgeon General, The CDC, and The
American College of Sports Medicine, which
recommend 30 minutes a day, at least 30 minutes
a day.
The exercise authority seemed to have fallen
into the same trap as the nutrition authorities
recommending what they think might be achievable
rather than simply informing you what the
science says and letting you make the decision
for yourself."
: I think that, that's a pretty profound way
for us to end here because that's what this
book is doing.
I really believe that he's bringing us the
science in its raw form saying, this is what
the science is about food, about disease,
about exercise.
There's a lot of other books out there which
you can read about the politics of food, about
how, I don't know how to go into it, but the
food triangle, the politics of the fact that
the people who put meat and eggs and dairy
on the food pyramid are lobbyists from those
organizations, and there just happens to not
be a broccoli lobbying group for reasons we
could go into, but so because of money more
or less.
This is really interesting, I think that's
what this book really is doing and I love
that.
That sentence there the way he says, it is
just that, "They should be just showing you
the science and letting you make up your mind."
I think that, that's what this book is doing.
: In case, you didn't get the takeaway, his
serving size here for exercise is 40 minutes
of vigorous activity every day.
That's what you should be doing.
What is vigorous activity?
Something like basketball, bicycling, tennis,
scuba diving, swimming laps, jogging, hockey,
football.
I don't know, there's a whole list here or
90 minutes a day of moderate activity.
That would be, I don't know what he has here,
dancing, dodgeball, yoga yard work, etc, etc.
There's a whole list, you could read through
it when you get the book.
: Yeah, 40 minutes a day, and so I don't know,
as soon as I read that and I read this chapter,
it sounds crazy, but I got in the habit of
doing about 40 minutes.
Let's say 35, almost 40 minutes of exercise
every single day and it's just become a habit
since the past year of reading this book.
I've just pushed myself every day to get out
there and yeah, I've been feeling really good
and it's when we can talk about habit, the
way you make habits in a different time.
But, once I just decided I was going to do
it every day, it became a lot easier.
As crazy as that might sound for some people
out there who don't like to exercise perhaps.
: This book was really inspirational to me.
I have it, I keep it by my bedside.
It's something as I explore new foods, as
I hear about new diets, it's always there.
It's such a really well researched.
Yeah, it's such a well put together book and
there's so much in here that I want to share
with you.
I'm going to leave it to you now to check
out How Not to Die, please pick it up and
check it out.
As well as Michael Greger's site nutritionfacts.org,
where he has a lot of free videos and education
on there without any advertisements, totally
non-profit up there for you to enjoy public
service announcement basically that he put
together to share his decades of research
with the world.
Please take it, take a second and check that
out.
