The End of Dieting: How to Live for Life (20 page)

Beans, however, head the list of preferred carbohydrate-rich foods. Beans have a low GL and are also high in micronutrients and fiber. I rank beans among the world’s most perfect foods. They stabilize blood sugar, blunt your desire for sweets, and help you feel full. Beans contain both insoluble fiber and soluble fiber and are very high in resistant starch—more than any other high-carbohydrate food. Though
technically a starch, resistant starch acts more like a fiber by “resisting digestion.” Since resistant starch passes through the small intestine undigested, a significant number of the calories derived from a bean’s carbohydrate load is not fully absorbed.

So consider beans your preferred high-carbohydrate food. Among your more common choices (and there are lots of uncommon varieties as well) are chickpeas, black-eyed peas, black beans, split peas, lima beans, pinto beans, lentils, red kidney beans, soybeans, cannellini beans, and white beans. You can almost never go wrong with beans.

More Than Calories

Not only does counting calories and eating less not work for long-term weight loss, but it isn’t supported by advances in nutritional science or clinical evidence. A nutritionally unsound low-calorie diet is doomed to fail because it increases your cravings and hunger signals. With so few nutrients for your brain, you become more emotional and less able to handle stress. Which means you’re more likely to binge on junk food.

Some people have proposed focusing on the caloric density of foods. This, too, is unsustainable, largely because it’s too narrow a criterion for evaluating relative food value. Caloric density alone doesn’t consider a food’s protective anticancer potential or other health benefits. Nor does it account for the
quality
of its carbohydrate content, which includes its fiber content and the proportion of slowly digestible, resistant starch. A diet style with a favorable caloric density needs to consider micronutrient density and overall health benefits. A diet with a high amount of micronutrients per calorie, and with a low hormonal index (meaning insulin and IGF-1), is more descriptive of what is healthful. Such a diet also has a favorable low caloric density overall.

At the same time, if you overemphasize calorie density, you might be encouraged to exclude from your diet seeds and nuts, which have
a high caloric density. Nuts and seeds have a very high count of calories per gram, almost five times higher than that of meat, yet as discussed in the last chapter, they have been shown to promote weight loss and dramatically enhance health and longevity. Meat has the opposite effect.
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It may promote general cell growth, but it also stimulates fat storage hormones. Plus, when your diet contains more nuts and seeds instead of foods high in refined carbohydrates or animal products, the disease-promoting and cancer-promoting hormones insulin and IGF-1 are reduced. Substituting seeds and nuts, calorie for calorie, for carbohydrates or animal products results in lower body fat storage, which makes it easier for you to maintain a favorable weight. This makes the emphasis on calorie density in opposition to the preponderance of scientific evidence.

It is common in the diet industry to structure a new diet book or plan around one factor that makes a diet look favorable and inflate the importance of that factor, while almost ignoring all the other factors that are important. For example, besides caloric density being too narrow a criteria to structure a diet plan around, the low-glycemic diet, the alkaline diet, the high-fiber diet, the low-sugar diet, the high-starch diet, the low-fat diet, and many more are also simply incorrect in their emphasis and simplicity. When you give up on diet plans, you recognize that eating healthfully cannot be summed up with a narrow focus—it must be comprehensively inclusive of all healthful parameters.

Lower Levels of IGF-I Lead to a Longer Life

IGF-1 is one of the body’s most important growth promoters during fetal and childhood development. Later in life, however, it accelerates the aging process and promotes the growth and replication of cells, which often leads to cancer.

An elevated IGF-1 level is linked to an increased risk of all major cancers, including cancers of the colon, breast, and prostate.
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It stimulates mitosis (cell division) and inhibits apoptosis (a process leading to cell death). This means that IGF-1 not only promotes the spread of cancerous cells, it also inhibits the immune system’s ability to identify and kill abnormal cells before they become cancerous (apoptosis). Furthermore, as we age, high circulating IGF-1 levels promote the replication of injured cells that otherwise would not become malignant.

Heightened IGF-1 levels also promote the growth and proliferation of tumor cells and enhance tumor cell survival, adhesion, migration, invasion, angiogenesis, and metastatic growth.
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Reduced IGF-1 levels in adulthood are also associated with reduced oxidative stress, decreased inflammation, enhanced insulin sensitivity, and longer lifespan.
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But the big story here is IGF-1 and cancer. So many dieters have jumped on the high-protein bandwagon, eating egg whites, fish, and lean meats under the false assumption that they’re eating healthfully. In truth, however, this kind of diet is fueling an explosion of cancer. The nutritarian diet is specifically designed to maximize cancer-protective nutrients from foods and minimize or negate cancer-promoting dietary practices.

Unquestionably, IGF-1 is a major player in the causation of breast and prostate cancer. The European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition (EPIC) found that elevated IGF-1 levels were associated with a 40 percent increased risk of developing breast cancer for women older than fifty.
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In the Nurses’ Health Study, high IGF-1 levels were associated with a doubled risk of breast cancer in premenopausal women.
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Additional human studies, reviews of the literature, and five meta-analyses have also found an association between elevated IGF-1 levels and the development of breast cancer.
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The most recent of these showed a strong correlation with the most common estrogen-positive breast cancers in both premenopausal and postmenopausal women.
Higher levels of IGF-1 were observed in overweight women, consumers of alcohol, and those who ate a diet higher in animal products.

In other words, higher IGF-1 levels promote common cancers. End of controversy. Not only that, but excess IGF-1 also promotes dementia in humans, while lower IGF-1 levels enhance brain function in later years. Elevated circulating IGF-1 levels have been found in patients with Alzheimer’s disease, and reduced IGF-1 signaling reduces symptoms of neurodegeneration.
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In muscle tissues that require IGF-1 for proper functioning or repair in adulthood, local production of IGF-1 from muscular exertion compensates for the lower circulating IGF-1 levels. So lower levels are longevity-promoting and have no apparent drawbacks.

Which Foods Raise IGF-1 Levels?

Since the principle dietary factor that determines IGF-1 levels is animal protein, the excessive meat, fowl, seafood, and dairy intake common in our society is responsible for high circulating IGF-1 levels. When many of us were children, we were taught that animal products were good for us because they were a biologically complete protein that was essential for good health. Research in the past ten years, however, has shown conclusively that high biological protein is the most damaging feature of animal products.
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Milk products raise IGF-1 levels the most, though this is most likely the result of other bioactive growth-promoting compounds in addition to their high protein content. Ten different observational studies and several interventional studies have confirmed a positive correlation between milk and heightened levels of IGF-1.
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Take prostate cancer for instance, which seems to be particularly sensitive to IGF-1 levels. The risk of developing this cancer increases in direct proportion to an increased consumption of dairy and meat.
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Researchers tracked more
than twenty-one thousand men in the Physicians’ Health Study for twenty-eight years and found that those who had one serving of milk a day had double the risk of dying from prostate cancer compared with men who rarely drank milk.
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Meat consumption was also shown to raise IGF-1 levels in this study. Several other studies have confirmed that meat, poultry, and fish raise IGF-1 levels.
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“Free IGF-1,” rather than the IGF-1 that is bound to proteins, has the growth-promoting biological activity that promotes cancer; so if the IGF-1 binding proteins are reduced, more free IGF-1 is available to perform its nefarious duties. Therefore, it is important to note, the higher consumption of saturated fat from meat and cheese in conjunction with the high level of animal protein makes things worse by decreasing levels of the IGF-1 binding proteins, thus increasing free IGF-1 levels in the circulation.

But it’s not only animal products that raise IGF-1 levels. Refined carbohydrates do too, because they cause rapid increases in insulin levels, which lead to an increase in IGF-1 signaling, a major factor in the connection between diabetes and cancer.
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And heightened levels of insulin raise IGF-1, which is another reason why a high-glycemic diet promotes cancer. At the same time, by adhering to a cell’s insulin receptor, IGF-1 can also act like insulin to promote fat storage. When both are elevated, you have a cancer-promoting sandwich—like a ham and cheese sandwich on white bread. Regularly consuming high-glycemic foods with animal protein, a common staple of the SAD, promotes cancer. Everyday dishes like pizza, spaghetti and meatballs, a hamburger on a bun, fish and chips, and steak and fries are responsible for promoting a cancer epidemic in this country.

Isolated soy protein, found in protein powders and meat substitutes, may also be problematic because the protein is unnaturally concentrated and its amino acid profile is very similar to that of animal protein. Dietary interventions using isolated soy protein confirmed
that it raised IGF-1 levels more than soybeans.
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Such excessive IGF-1–promoting effects were not seen with tofu or unprocessed soybeans alone.
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A variety of beans in the diet is most healthful, rather than an excessive dependence on just soy foods, especially processed soy foods, as they may raise IGF-1 levels too much.

If you want to live to be one hundred years old, the road to getting there is clear. Centenarians have low levels of IGF-1 and high levels of anti-inflammatory molecules from nutrient-dense plant foods. A diet high in phytochemicals, resulting in lower levels of oxidative stress, coupled with a reduction in IGF-1 is the secret to longevity and protection against cancer.
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The amount of animal products that can safely be added to a diet is not clearly defined; however, averaging more than 1 ounce a day for women and 1.5 ounces a day for men is likely risky. The IGF-1 curve starts to increase considerably above these levels.
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Since this is an area of evolving science, this is just an estimated guideline based on the information available today.

When I wrote
Fasting and Eating for Health
in 1995, I noted that the only scientifically documented way to slow aging and prolong life was through restricting calories in a nutritional environment of micronutrient adequacy. The advancements in science over the past twenty years have shown that protein restriction is even more lifespan-promoting than episodic calorie restriction, and the benefits of calorie restriction can be negated if the intake of animal protein is too high—potentially even at levels just above 10 percent of total dietary calories.

Restricting calories and reducing IGF-1 signaling are the only two well-established means of increasing lifespan. Both are characterized by slimness and decreased insulin levels; however, most scientists in this field believe that the mechanism that extends lifespan so dramatically is the effect that calorie restriction has on keeping IGF-1 levels low.

The pivotal investigation that changed the playing field was a six-year study published in 2008 with members of the Calorie Restriction Society. Unlike the lower IGF-1 levels seen in calorie-restricted animals, the study found that the IGF-1 levels in calorie-restricted humans were
not
significantly different from those of a control group eating the SAD.
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Scientists were surprised and first thought that caloric restriction does not extend human life like it does in animals. The researchers then noted that the study group eating fewer calories was consuming more animal protein as a percentage of total calories than the SAD. Apparently, the animal protein was inhibiting the drop in IGF-1 they had expected.

When they compared those unfavorable IGF-1 levels in the study participants with the IGF-1 levels found in vegans, they saw dramatically lowered IGF-1 levels in the vegans even though the vegans weren’t restricting calories. This explained the lack of the expected benefits in the calorie-restricted subjects. Further investigations continued in this field, eventually quantifying the differences in IGF-1 levels and the IGF-1–raising potential for various diet styles and foods utilizing forty-seven hundred participants, further confirming that animal protein intake was primarily responsible for maintaining the elevations in IGF-1 levels.
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