Joel Fuhrman - Eat To Live

Eat to Live 53

There is no longer any question about the importance of fruits

and vegetables in our diet. The greater the quantity and assortment

of fruits and vegetables consumed, the lower the incidence of heart

attacks, strokes, and cancer.^5 There is still some controversy about

which foods cause which cancers and whether certain types of fat are

the culprits with certain cancers, but there's one thing we know for

sure: raw vegetables and fresh fruits have powerful anti-cancer agents.

Studies have repeatedly shown the correlation between consump-

tion of these foods and a lower incidence of various cancers, includ-

ing those of the breast, colon, rectum, lung, stomach, prostate, and

pancreas.^6 This means that your risk of cancer decreases with an in-

creased intake of fruits and vegetables, and the earlier in life you start

eating large amounts of these foods, the more protection you get.

Humans are genetically adapted to expect a high intake of natu-

ral and unprocessed plant-derived substances. Cancer is a disease of

maladaptation. It results primarily from a body's lacking critical sub-

stances found in different types of vegetation, many of which are still

undiscovered, that are metabolically necessary for normal protective

function. Natural foods unadulterated by man are highly complex —

so complex that the exact structure and the majority of compounds

they contain are not precisely known. A tomato, for example, con-

tains more than ten thousand different phytochemicals.

It may never be possible to extract the precise symphony of nutri-

ents found in vegetation and place it in a pill. Isolated nutrients ex-

tracted from food may never offer the same level of disease-protective

effects of whole natural foods, as nature "designed" them. Fruits and

vegetables contain a variety of nutrients, which work in subtle syn-

ergies, and many of these nutrients cannot be isolated or extracted.

Phytochemicals from a variety of plant foods work together to be-

come much more potent at detoxifying carcinogens and protecting

against cancer than when taken individually as isolated compounds.

Authorities Join the Unrefined Plant Pood Bandwagon

After years of examining the accumulating evidence, eight top health

organizations joined forces and agreed to encourage Americans to

eat more unrefined plant food and less food from animal sources, as

revealed in the new dietary guidelines published in the July 27,

1999, Journal of the American Heart Association. These authorities are

the Nutrition Committee of the American Heart Association, the Amer-