Joel Fuhrman - Eat To Live

62 Joel Fuhrman, M.D.

daily. 1 suggest that you go and make the sign and tape it to your

fridge now — and then come back. If you plan on doing it later, you

may forget. If you learn but one practical habit from this book, let it

be this one.

Green Salad Is Less than 100 Calories per Pound

Did you notice that 100 calories of broccoli is about ten ounces of

food, and 100 calories of ground sirloin is less than one ounce of

food? With green vegetables you can get filled up, even stuffed, yet

you will not be consuming excess calories. Animal products, on the

other hand, are calorie-dense and relatively low in nutrients, espe-

cially the crucial anti-cancer nutrients.

What would happen if you attempted to eat like a mountain go-

rilla, which eats about 80 percent of its diet from green leaves and

about 15 percent from fruit? Assuming you are a female, who needs

about 1,500 calories a day, if you attempted to get 1,200 of those

calories from greens, you would need to eat over fifteen pounds of

greens. That is quite a big salad! Since your stomach can only hold

about one liter of food (or a little over a quart), you would have a

problem fitting it all in.

You would surely get lots of protein from this gorilla diet. In fact,

with just five pounds of greens you would exceed the RDA for pro-

tein and would get loads of other important nutrients. The problem

with this gorilla diet is that you would develop a calorie deficiency. You

would become too thin. Believe it or not, I do not expect you to eat

exactly like a gorilla. However, the message to take home is that the

more of these healthy green vegetables (both raw and cooked) you

eat, the healthier you will be and the thinner you will become.

Now let's contrast this silly and extreme gorilla example to an-

other silly and extreme way of eating, the American diet.

If you attempt to follow the perverted diet that most Americans

eat, or even if you follow the precise recommendations of the USDA's

pyramid — six to eleven servings of bread, rice, and pasta (con-

sumed as 98 percent refined grains by Americans) with four to six

servings of dairy, meat, poultry, or fish — you would be eating a

diet rich in calories but extremely low in nutrients, antioxidants,

phytochemicals, and vitamins. You would be overfed and malnour-

ished, the precise nutritional profile that causes heart disease and

cancer.