Joel Fuhrman - Eat To Live

Eat to Live 235

and grain dishes can be flavored with sauces and dressings made

with nuts and seeds.

If you want to gain weight, eating more — or eating differently

to bulk up — will add mostly fat to your body. It is exceptionally rare

for a person to gain more muscle just from eating more food. Forcing

yourself to consume more food than your body wants is not in your

best interest. If you want to gain weight, lift weights to add muscle;

then the exercise will increase your appetite accordingly. When you

eat a healthful diet, nature has you carry only that mass you need;

your muscles will enlarge only if additional stress is placed on them.

Of course, this book is designed for those who are overweight and

desirous of losing weight. Those who are truly excessively thin, and

need to gain weight, may have to modify this eating plan somewhat

to meet their individual needs.

Is it dangerous to eat more fruits and vegetables because of the

increased consumption of pesticides? Do I have to buy organic?

The effects of ingesting pesticides in the very small amounts present

in vegetation are unknown. Bruce Ames, Ph.D., director of the Na-

tional Institute of Environmental Health Sciences Center at the Uni-

versity of California at Berkeley, who has devoted his career to

examining this question, believes these minute amounts pose no risk

at all.

He and other scientists support this view because humans and

other animals are exposed to small amounts of naturally occurring

toxins with every mouthful of organically grown, natural food. The

body normally breaks down self-produced metabolic wastes and nat-

urally occurring carcinogens in foods, as well as pesticides, and ex-

cretes these harmful substances every minute. Since 99.99 percent of

the potential carcinogenic chemicals consumed are naturally present

in all food, reducing our exposure to the 0.01 percent that are syn-

thetic will not reduce cancer rates.

These scientists argue that humans ingest thousands of natural

chemicals that typically have a greater toxicity and are present at

higher doses than the very minute amount of pesticide residue that

remains on food. Furthermore, animal studies on the carcinogenic

potential in synthetic chemicals are done at doses a thousandfold

higher than what is ingested in food. Ames argues that a high per-

centage of all chemicals, natural or not, are potentially toxic in high