Whole (4 page)

How healthy is the WFPB diet? It’s hard to imagine anything healthier— or anything more effective at addressing our biggest health issues. Not only is WFPB the healthiest way of eating that has ever been studied, but it’s far more effective in promoting health and preventing disease than prescription drugs, surgery, vitamin and herbal supplementation, and genetic manipulation.

If the WFPB diet were a pill, its inventor would be the wealthiest person on earth. Since it isn’t a pill, no market forces conspire to advocate for it. No mass media campaign promotes it. No insurance coverage pays
for it. Since it isn’t a pill, and nobody has figured out how to get hugely wealthy by showing people how to eat it, the truth has been buried by half-truths, unverified claims, and downright lies. The concerted effort of many powerful interests to ignore, discredit, and hide the truth has worked so far.

I have spent the last few decades studying the effects of the WFPB diet; for me, the diet’s results are convincing based solely on the data. But it’s still helpful to explore the question of why. Why is the WFPB diet the healthiest way for humans to eat? Based on my training in biochemistry, I have a few conjectures that can be boiled down to one concept: oxidation gone awry.

Oxidation is the process by which atoms and molecules lose electrons as they come into contact with other atoms and molecules; it’s one of the most basic chemical reactions in the universe. When you cut an apple and it turns brown in contact with air or when your car fender rusts, you’re witnessing oxidation at work. Oxidation happens within our bodies as well. Some of it is natural and good; oxidation facilitates the transfer of energy within the body. Oxidation also gets rid of potentially harmful foreign substances in the body by making them water soluble (and therefore able to be excreted in urine). Excessive uncontrolled oxidation, however, is the enemy of health and longevity in humans, just as excessive oxidation turns your new car into a junker and your apple slice into compost. Oxidation produces something called free radicals, which we know are responsible for encouraging aging, promoting cancer, and rupturing plaques that lead to strokes and heart attacks, among other adverse effects impacting a host of autoimmune and neurologic diseases.

So how might a plant-based diet protect us from the disease-causing effects of free radicals? For one thing, there is some evidence that high-protein diets enhance free radical production, thus encouraging unwanted tissue damage. But it’s virtually impossible to eat a high-protein diet if you’re consuming mostly whole, plant-based foods. Even if you munched on legumes, beans, and nuts all day, you’d be hard pressed to get more than 12-15 percent or so of your calories from protein.

But there’s much more to whole, plant-based foods than the high-protein animal foods they replace. It turns out that plants also produce harmful free radicals—in their case, during photosynthesis. To counteract that free radical production, plants have evolved a defense mechanism: a whole battery of compounds capable of preventing damage by binding to and neutralizing the free radicals. These compounds are known, not particularly poetically, as antioxidants.

When we and other mammals consume plants, we also consume the antioxidants in those plants. And they serve us just as faithfully and effectively as they serve the plants, protecting us from free radicals and slowing down the aging process in our cells. Remarkably, they have no effect on the useful oxidative processes I talked about earlier. They only neutralize the harmful products of excessive oxidation.

It seems reasonable to assume that our bodies never went to the trouble of making antioxidants because they were so readily available in what, for most of our history, was our primary food source: plants. It’s only when we shifted to a diet rich in animal-based food and processed food fragments that we tilted the game in favor of oxidation. The excess protein in our diet has promoted excess oxidation, and we no longer consume enough plant-produced antioxidants to contain and neutralize the damage.

It’s important to remember, however, that this is just a theory. The most important thing is not
why
the WFPB diet works so much as the fact that it
does
work. The evidence is clear about the WFPB diet’s effectiveness— whatever specific reasons there may be.

When I lecture publicly, I’m often asked about the numbers. Many people want precise formulas and rules. How many ounces of leafy greens should I eat daily? What proportion of my diet should be fat, protein, or carbohydrate? How much vitamin C and magnesium do I need? Should certain foods be matched with other foods and, if so, in what proportion? And the number one question I’m asked is, “Do I need to eat 100 percent plant-based to obtain the health benefits you talk about?”

If you’re asking those questions right now, here’s my answer: relax. When it comes to numbers, I am reluctant to be too precise, mostly because (1) we don’t yet have scientific evidence that fully answers these questions; (2) virtually nothing in biology is as precise as we try to make it seem; and (3) as far as the evidence suggests at this point, eating the WFPB way eliminates the need to worry about the details. Just eat lots of different plant foods; your body will do all the math for you!

As far as whether one should strive to eat 100 percent plant-based instead of something less—say, 95-98 percent—my answer is that I am not aware of reliable scientific evidence showing that such purity is absolutely necessary, at least in most situations. (Exceptions would include patients with cancer, heart disease, and other potentially fatal ailments, for whom any deviation can lead to worsening or relapse.) I do believe, however, that the closer we get to a WFPB diet, the healthier we will be. I say this not because we have foolproof scientific evidence of this, but because of the effect on our taste buds. When we go the whole way, our taste buds change and remain changed, as we begin to acquire new tastes that are much more compatible with our health. You wouldn’t advise a heavy smoker who wants to quit to continue smoking one cigarette per day. It’s much easier to go 100 percent than 99 percent, and you’re much more likely to succeed in the long run.

I’m also often asked whether I consider the WFPB diet to be vegetarian or vegan. When describing the WFPB diet, I prefer not to use the “V” words. Most vegetarians still consume dairy, eggs, too much added oil, refined carbohydrates, and processed foods. Although vegans eliminate all animal-based foods, they also often continue to consume added fat (including all cooking oils), refined carbohydrates (sugar and refined flour), salt, and processed foods. The phrase
whole food, plant-based
is one I introduced to my colleagues as a member of a National Institutes of Health (NIH) cancer-research grant review panel from 1978 to 1980. Like me, they were reluctant to use the words
vegetarian
and
vegan
, or assign a particular value to the ideology that lies behind much vegetarian and vegan practice. I was interested in describing the remarkable health effects of this diet in reference to the scientific evidence, rather than in reference to personal and philosophical ideologies—however noble they may be.

Later in this book, I’ll share a more personal life and career trajectory, but I do want to recap my research career briefly so you can decide right away whether I have credibility on the subjects I cover here.

For more than fifty years, I have lectured and done experimental research on the complex effects of food and nutrition on health. For approximately forty of those years, I did laboratory experiments with my many students and colleagues. For twenty of those same years, I was a member of expert committees that evaluated and formulated national and international policies on food and health and determined which research ideas should be funded. (Often, my views were in the minority and did not end up having the impact on policy I would have liked—one reason, in fact, that I left academia and started writing “popular” books.) I have published more than 350 research papers, most of which were peer-reviewed, in the very best scientific journals. I have served on the editorial review boards of several top-flight scientific journals. In short, for the last half century I have been deeply immersed in the development of scientific evidence all the way from its experimental origin to the presentation of results in the classroom, food and health policy boardrooms, and the public arena.

In my previous book,
The China Study,
which I coauthored with my son Tom, I shared the research (my own and that of others) that led me to champion the WFPB diet as the optimal human diet. I must admit to some naïveté when that book hit the shelves in early 2005. I was hopeful that the incontrovertible evidence reported in that volume would shake up the American way of eating. I innocently thought that the truth, by itself, could inform government policy, shape business decisions, and change the public debate on food.

To a limited extent, all those things have happened. Some very powerful ex-government officials (including former President Bill Clinton) have touted
The China Study
and plant-based nutrition in general. Progressive and influential companies like Google and Facebook offer many WFPB
dishes in their cafeterias. It’s much easier to buy WFPB ingredients, meals, and snacks at grocery stores, restaurants, and online outlets than ever before. And the recent “gluten-free” craze (about which the scientific debate is still raging) has pushed many people away from highly processed breads, cookies, and pastas and toward less refined and more natural alternatives.

But the mainstream culture has not embraced plant-based eating. The government still teaches and subsidizes the wrong things. Businesses still cater to the Standard American Diet (aptly abbreviated the “SAD” diet), composed largely of white flour, white sugar, hormone-injected and antibiotic-doused meat and dairy, and artificial colors, flavors, and preservatives. And “low-carb” supporters typically advocate a diet consisting of an unconscionable amount of animal protein and fat. This book is partly my attempt to answer a very troubling question: Why? If the evidence for a WFPB diet is so convincing, why has so little been done? Why do so few people know about it?

Before I share what I believe, based on my decades of work in the nutrition field, are the answers—answers that have implications not only for our food choices and health-care system, but for the vibrancy of our democracy and our future as a species—I want to make sure you are aware of the evidence for the WFPB lifestyle. In the next chapter I’ll share that evidence and explain how to evaluate the efficacy of proposed health interventions.

History is a race between education and catastrophe.

—
H. G. WELLS

I
n the previous chapter I inferred that what we eat can have a bigger impact on our health than just about anything else. The evidence that I and others have amassed over the years points to WFPB as the optimal human diet. I refer you to my last book,
The China Study,
for an in-depth look at the evidence supporting these assertions.

Of course, not everyone in the world believes that a plant-based diet is the best way to eat for our health and for the planet, despite all the evidence. The media is awash with pundits who contradict what I say, often in quite articulate and entertaining ways. The fact is, it’s pathetically easy for critics to take individual data points out of context and misapply them to support opposite conclusions from mine. The question is, how can they evaluate the evidence without becoming experts in biochemistry, cardiology, epidemiology, and the dozen other disciplines that would provide the necessary context?

Before we discuss the barriers to more widespread adoption of the WFPB diet, I want to address those critics and those criticisms by sharing
with you my model for evaluating diet and health research. My hope is that it will help you make sense of the barrage of nonsense and half-truths that passes not just for legitimate criticism of the WFPB diet, but also for health coverage in the media. Once you’re inoculated against “fad of the week” reporting, you’ll navigate health claims in general with much more savvy and confidence—and be even better equipped to judge the evidence in favor of the WFPB diet, and criticisms of it, for yourself.

If you watch TV news, you’ll see lots of stories each week about promising new drugs, new gene therapies, new high-tech machines, and new health claims about foods, vitamins, enzymes, and other micronutrients. None of these “breakthrough discoveries” come close to the benefits of the WFPB diet, although you wouldn’t know it from the hyped-up and ill-informed reporting of the studies upon which these claims are based.

Before I stack up my evidence against theirs, let’s talk about how to evaluate research in general. Otherwise we’ll be trapped in a “he said, she said” shouting match in which the loudest (or in this case, best-funded) voice wins. When you hear a health claim, ask yourself three questions: Is it true? Is it the whole truth, or just a part of it? Does it matter?