I often get the question about why fruits and vegetables are good for you and the short answer is that they are good for you because they are what you are supposed to be eating. That sweet tooth you have is not meant to lead you to white sugar or refined carbohydrates it is meant to lead you to the natural sweetness found in fruits and vegetables. Let’s take a look at exactly why fruits and vegetables are good for you.

High Nutrition, Low Calories

Anyone who reads this blog regularly knows I’m not a big fan of the calorie concept (see: When it Comes to Weight Loss, Forget Calories), but calories can be useful when talking about certain food concepts and understanding the goodness of vegetables and fruits is one of those times.

There are many ways to measure the value of the food you are eating. Measuring food by weight and nutrients is called a Nutrient Adequacy Score and is a common way to measure the quality of food, but it is very inaccurate. You can also measure the quality of food by calorie (how many nutrients does a food supply per calorie) and this is much more accurate. When you compare the nutritional value of foods by calories (called a Nutrient Density Score) you see that nothing stacks up to fruits and vegetables.

When you calculate the Nutrient Density of Foods then foods such as Kale, spinach, Brussels sprouts score really high (you get a lot of nutrients per calorie) and foods like grains, beans and meats are much lower (not many nutrient per calorie).

There are many different nutrient density scoring charts, but the most user-friendly is Dr. Joel Furhman’s (see ANDI Scoring System). Using this system show you that there is nothing as good for you to eat as fruits and vegetables.

You might be shunning fruits and vegetables for their cost, but take a closer look. When Turns out vegetables may seem expensive, but they provide the best nutrient per calorie of any food[i]

Anti-Everything

Fruits are vegetables are the anit-everthing foods (anti-cancer, anti-heart disease…) There are no better fighters of disease to put in your mouth than fruits and vegetables. Let’s take a look.

Anticancer

• Fruit consumption seems to be protective against cancers of the esophagus, oral cavity, and larynx.[ii]
• Eating more fruits and veggies protects against cancer of the stomach and pancreas as well as colorectal, prostate,^[iii] and bladder cancers. Even lung cancer risk is lower for smokers who eat their veggies.^[iv]
• For women, cancers of the cervix, ovary, and breast,^[v] and endometrium are all lower when they consume more fruits and vegetables.
• Women who consume a large amount of fiber are at lower risk for breast cancer in women (fiber “sweeps” cholesterol and bad estrogens out of the body).^[vi]
• Clinical trials are ongoing with many individual fruits and vegetables:
  • Cruciferous vegetables (such as cabbage and broccoli).[vii]
  • Allium vegetables (such as garlic and onion).[viii]
  • Tomatoes.[ix]
  • Berries.[x]

• Compounds found in fruits and vegetables are also being tested:  lycopene (from tomatoes), sulforaphane (from asparagus), brassinin, (from cruciferous vegetables), indole-3-carbinol (from broccoli), and resveratrol (from grapes and peanuts). [xi]

• John Hopkins School Of Medicine has been studying the benefits of Brassica vegetables for over 20 years.
  • High fruits and vegetable consumption reduces your risk of high blood pressure.^[xii]
  • A high-fiber diet lowers cholesterol,^[xiii]
  • You also reduce your overall risk of heart disease when you eat fruits and veggies.^[xiv]
  • Consumption of fruits and vegetables—particularly leafy green vegetables and vitamin C-rich fruits—appears to have a protective effect against coronary heart disease.^[xv]
  • Eating more fruits and vegetables helps you to lose weight; scientific research has shown that eating more fiber does help to lower your weight.^[xvi]

  Heart Disease

  • High fruits and vegetable consumption reduces your risk of high blood pressure.^[i]
  • A high-fiber diet lowers cholesterol,^[ii]
  • You also reduce your overall risk of heart disease when you eat fruits and veggies.^[iii]
  • Consumption of fruits and vegetables—particularly leafy green vegetables and vitamin C-rich fruits—appears to have a protective effect against coronary heart disease.^[iv]

Weight Loss

• Eating more fruits and vegetables helps you to lose weight; scientific research has shown that eating more fiber does help to lower your weight.^[v]

Other Diseases

• The risk for Alzheimer’s, ^[xvii] diabetes, ^[xviii] and many other diseases is lower with higher fruit and vegetable consumption.

Vegetables and Fruits are Good For You

There is no doubt that vegetables and fruits are good for you, the research above is only a tiny bit of what is out there. You should try to make fruits and vegetables as much of your diet as possible. You can feed your body what it needs by making sure every meal has some sort of fruit and vegetable in it.

[ii] Riboli E, Norat T. Epidemiologic evidence of the protective effect of fruit and vegetables on cancer risk. Am J Clin Nutr. 2003 Sep;78(3 Suppl):559S-569S.

[iii] Freedland SJ, Aronson WJ. Dietary intervention strategies to modulate prostate cancer risk and prognosis. Curr Opin Urol. 2009 May;19(3):263-7.

[iv] Block G, Patterson B, Subar A. Fruit, vegetables, and cancer prevention: a review of the epidemiological evidence. Nutr Cancer. 1992;18(1):1-29.

[v] Patterson RE, Cadmus LA, Emond JA, Pierce JP. Physical activity, diet, adiposity and female breast cancer prognosis: A review of the epidemiologic literature. Maturitas. 2010 Jan 22

[vi] Suzuki R, Rylander-Rudqvist T, Ye W, Saji S, Adlercreutz H, Wolk A. Dietary fiber intake and risk of postmenopausal breast cancer defined by estrogen and progesterone receptor status–a prospective cohort study among Swedish women. Int J Cancer. 2008 Jan 15;122(2):403-12.

[vii] Herr I, Büchler MW. Dietary constituents of broccoli and other cruciferous vegetables: implications for prevention and therapy of cancer. Cancer Treat Rev. 2010 Aug;36(5):377-83. Epub 2010 Feb 20.

[viii] Bianchini F, Vainio H. Allium vegetables and organosulfur compounds: do they help prevent cancer? Environ Health Perspect. 2001 Sep;109(9):893-902

[ix] Ansari MS, Ansari S. Lycopene and prostate cancer. Future Oncol. 2005 Jun;1(3):425-30.

[x] Gullett NP, Ruhul Amin AR, Bayraktar S, Pezzuto JM, et al. Cancer prevention with natural compounds. Semin Oncol. 2010 Jun;37(3):258-81.

[xi] Gullett NP, Ruhul Amin AR, Bayraktar S, Pezzuto JM, et al. Cancer prevention with natural compounds. Semin Oncol. 2010 Jun;37(3):258-81.

[xii] Alonso A, de la Fuente C, Martín-Arnau AM, et al. Fruit and vegetable consumption is inversely associated with blood pressure in a Mediterranean population with a high vegetable-fat intake: the Seguimiento Universidad de Navarra (SUN) Study. Br J Nutr. 2004 Aug;92(2):311-9.

[xiii] Brown L, Rosner B, Willett WW, Sacks FM. Cholesterol-lowering effects of dietary fiber: a meta-analysis. Am J Clin Nutr. 1999 Jan;69(1):30-42.

[xiv] Slavícek J, Kittnar O, Fraser GE, et al. Lifestyle decreases risk factors for cardiovascular diseases. Cent Eur J Public Health. 2008 Dec;16(4):161-4.

[xv] Joshipura KJ, Hu FB, Manson JE, et al.  The effect of fruit and vegetable intake on risk for coronary heart disease. Ann Intern Med. 2001 Jun 19;134(12):1106-14.

[xvi] Liu S, Willett WC, Manson JE, et al. Relation between changes in intakes of dietary fiber and grain products and changes in weight and development of obesity among middle-aged women. Am J Clin Nutr. 2003 Nov;78(5):920-7.

[xvii] Giem P, Beeson WL, Fraser GE. The incidence of dementia and intake of animal products: preliminary findings from the Adventist Health Study. Neuroepidemiology. 1993;12(1):28-36.

[xviii] Barnard ND, Cohen J, Jenkins DJ, et al. A low-fat vegan diet and a conventional diabetes diet in the treatment of type 2 diabetes: a randomized, controlled, 74-wk clinical trial. Am J Clin Nutr. 2009 May;89(5):1588S-1596S. Epub 2009 Apr 1.

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Health News:

HORMONE REPLACEMENT THERAPY (HRT): HRT and the risks of breast cancer were reviewed in a recent symposium. It appears that even using HRT for a short time increased the risk of breast cancer. Which begs the question: why use HRT? The risks are not a small increase, but for some women constitute a doubling of their risk for breast cancer.

Dr. Scott’s Comments: Hormones are powerful and can create huge problems in our bodies. Estrogen, in particular, is a problem for women because of the risk of breast, endometrial, and ovarian cancers. Part of the problem lies in the fact that most HRT are synthetic hormones that are not natural to humans. Other problems have to do with the fact that many chemicals in our environment act like estrogens (including plastics, pesticides, and a host of other chemicals). The final question has to be should we be putting hormones in an aging person at all?

HRT is a travesty because there are many natural substitutes that work just as well, without the side effects.

original article

CANCER MUCH WORSE FOR DIABETICS: Cancer is currently the number two killer worldwide and is rapidly approaching number one. People with diabetes are more than 40 percent likely to die in the years right after a cancer diagnosis than people who are not diabetic.

Dr Scott’s Comments: There are no well-established links between sugar consumption and cancer — at least not yet. This new study sheds light on another horrible aspect of diabetes: it makes surviving a cancer diagnosis harder. For me, this adds to the destruction wrought by sugar. Not only is sugar toxic to our blood vessels (witness the kidney, eye and heart damage in diabetics), but it also leads to obesity, heart disease and diabetes. Clearly we have to start avoiding the sugar and foods that act like sugar in our diets.

original article

LOW GLYCEMIC DIET FOR DIABETICS: The prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association has published an article showing that diabetics eating foods that are low on the glycemic index had better sugar control than those that didn’t.

Dr Scott’s Comments: I’m going to borrow a word from my 10 year-old-daughter to describe the finding of this study: DUH! Medical science has come a long way, but they have yet to make any connection between what we eat and the diseases that we get. Maybe this study will change their minds. Yes, diabetes has something to do with the sugar and foods that act like sugar that we eat every day. I think that people eating Eating Below the Glycemic Index would fare even better… maybe even reverse their diabetes.

original article

STRESS INCREASES HEART DAMAGE: People who reported a high amount of stress in their lives increased the risk of a cardiovascular event by as much as 50 percent when compared to people who have a low amount of stress. The increase in disease was evident by the number of heart attacks, bypass surgeries, and strokes that high-stress people suffered from.

Dr. Scott’s Comments: This study shows the strong connection between our minds and our bodies. Stress is a big killer, but is often hard to define or understand. I personally feel the best treatment for stress is exercise. Whenever the world starts weighing too much on my shoulders, I know I have to get out for a run, or hop on my bike, or even just take a walk outside. It also helps to listen to other people’s worries: When you hear someone describe what they are worried about, you realize that many of their fears are ungrounded, maybe yours are too?

original article

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A new study out today brings to question the thought that some cancers may go away on their own without any treatment. The findings are remarkable because in this study, the took a look at one of the more common cancers: breast cancer.

Here is what happened:

The study, in the journal Archives of Internal Medicine took a look at two groups of women.

• The first group were women from age 50 to 69 who were invited to participate in breast cancer screening for five years. These women had mammography three times during the years 1996 and 2001.

• The other group were women were of the same age (50 to 69), but who didn’t have mammography screening during the five years between 1992 and 1997. This group of women, though, did have mammography at the end of the five-year period.

What the researchers found out was that the women who were regularly screened (the first group)had a 22 percent higher chance of having cancer than the group that weren’t screened.

The first thought to pop into your head when you read that is to assume that it was the screening (mammography) that might have caused the cancers, but the researchers say that the much more likely cause for the difference in the groups is that some of the women in the non-screening group had cancer and it simply disappeared.

What to Make of the Findings

The first thing you need to understand about these findings is that it was a population study and the researchers were looking back over what happened in the past. The best way to study if cancers actually go away is to have a group of people who have been diagnosed with cancer and then split them into two groups: one that gets treatments and the other that doesn’t. This kind of study, however, will probably never happen and is considered unethical.

This new study, however, does raise some questions:

• We often rush to treat breast and many other cancers. Is the best approach may be to wait and see?
• Does treating cancers with chemotherapy, surgery and radiation actually help spread the cancer and lead to death quicker than if they were just left alone? This has been shown to be true for prostate cancer, where survival rates are unaffected by treatment or no treatment.¹
• Is it better to be screened for cancers or not?

All these questions leave us wondering what we should do with a cancer diagnosis. Certainly, cancer is a horrible disease and many people die from it every day. The question we need to start asking ourselves is this: what is better, to be treated or not to be treated?

My guess is that time will tell us which cancers will fall under the “watchful waiting” class and which will not; which need to be treated aggressively and which do not. Certainly those people who choose to go the “watchful waiting” route have all manner of natural medicines to support them during this time that have been shown to not only to be safe, but effective in the treatment and prevention of cancer, but that is topic for another day.

For now, we can hope that researchers take this new study as an opportunity to take a look at conventional screening and treatment and start to assess the effectiveness of treatments in a scientific manner: deciding which work and which do not.

1. Prostate cancer. Damber JE, Aus G. Lancet. 2008 May 17;371(9625):1710-21

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If you get in a car wreck, break your arm, or if you are having a heart attack, you know what to do: Head straight for your local medical doctor or hospital. That makes sense.

The problem arises when you have a chronic illness such as asthma, arthritis, chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, diabetes or even cancer. If you have one of these conditions, you now begin to wonder where you should go. You have a wide variety of practitioners to choose from medical doctors, naturopathic doctors, acupuncturists, and an equal variety of approaches both medical and natural.

Worse still is if you know you don’t feel right, but no tests any doctor runs find anything wrong with you. While the choices seem overwhelming, they are really a choice between two competing medical ideas.

Two Roads Diverge in the Woods

When you have a chronic illness or you are just feeling sick and tired, you are standing at a crossroads, but this crossroads is maybe not what you think. You are not standing at a crossroads between natural medicine and conventional medicine, but at the choice between choosing symptom relief or supporting the natural healing mechanisms of your body.

What most people don’t realize is that a path to health, especially when they have a chronic disease or simply don’t feel right, is a choice between these two competing thoughts. Let’s take a look at both of them.

Symptom Relief

Symptom relief is a great idea. You are feeling bad and you want to feel better, so you reach for something that is going to make you feel better. Everybody does this. The question you want to ask yourself, though, is how long do you want to go for just symptom relief?

Imagine for a moment that you have a problem with anxiety. A great solution for that anxiety is alcohol; it has the ability to remove the symptom of anxiety from your body and if it were considered a medicine, we would say that it is fairly effective – it works pretty well. But you can see the folly in thinking that drinking a beer is a good solution for anxiety. Along with the “medicine” comes a whole host of side-effects that are undesirable, the same holds true of many medicines. It may work for a while, but it is not a long-term solution.

Symptom relief is a good approach for the short-term, but you want to employ other strategies when you are dealing with a longer term illness.

Supporting Your Natural Healing Mechanism

Here is the thing that you need to understand about your body: it wants to be healthy. There is a natural healing mechanism inside your body that only needs to be supported to help you heal from almost any illness. You know and trust this natural healing mechanism when you get a minor injury such as a cut on your finger.

Think about it, you are cutting vegetables for dinner and the knife accidentally nicks your finger. If you are typical, you don’t run out of your house and to the Emergency Room for a minor cut. You support the natural healing mechanism of your body by washing off the cut and then putting a band aid over it. You then forget about it because you trust that your body will heal the cut. In a few days your take off the band aid and your body has already repaired much of the damage. In a few weeks, you won’t remember the cut or see any evidence that it ever happened.

Think about what a miracle that is! Wound to perfect skin… all in a few weeks.

You could also do the opposite: not support your body’s healing mechanism. Imagine if you had that same cut, only this time you didn’t clean it, rubbed it in filth and allowed it to become infected. That same cut might blossom into a larger infection, the wound might not close, and you could end up being very sick or having a scar from all the damage.

When you Feel Sick and Tired

Wouldn’t it be nice to trust that same natural healing mechanism that heals your minor cut also can heal your chronic disease? Choose symptom relief if you must, but also choose to support your body in the exact way you supported it when you got that cut: create the conditions for your body to heal itself. Just like the cut, your body needs your help to create the right conditions for health.

Here are the best ways to create the conditions for health, no matter the disease you might have:

• Food: Eat food as close as you can to the way it is found in nature. This means food that is minimally cooked and is free from preservatives, additives, and colorings. Fill your plate with as many vegetables and fruits as you can. Avoid sugars and foods that act like sugars in your body, such as many grain-based foods. Eat foods that are organically grown if possible.
• Exercise: Get out of the house and move your buns around. Walking is enough, but think about riding a bike, running, playing tennis, swimming – whatever you can do.
• Laugh: Take clues from kids and find the humor in everything you can and be ready to play at any moment.
• Sleep: Consider sleep to be a medicine. Take whatever means necessary to get enough sleep. Many people with chronic illnesses need more sleep than the rest of the population. Take a nap if you need it.
• Supplement: You are probably not getting enough nutrients and should consider a good multivitamin and a good essential fatty acid supplement. Don’t go overboard with supplements, though, I have had patients bring me large bags full of every conceivable supplement. It should be simple; most people need only a few supplements.
• Take time off: you need to relax as much as you need food and exercise. Relaxing means that you choose any activity that breaks you out of your routine and gives you a chance to be alone with your thoughts and your desires and not be run by your schedule.

While this might seem like a simply list, it is actually hard for most people to follow and that is why so many of us are sick. Know that the investment in yourself takes time, effort, and sometimes money, but that the investment is well worth it.

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