The book "Do not Die! Food in the fight for life "

Research shows that nutrition and lifestyle are more important than surgeon’s tablets and scalpel.

Premature death can be avoided by slightly adjusting your eating habits and lifestyle. Doctors heroically struggle with serious and chronic diseases, but can do nothing to prevent them. Millions of people die each year from 15 major diseases.

Follow Dr. Greger's advice and find out what foods you should eat and how to change your lifestyle to live longer. Eat right, says Dr. Greger, and you will not need any surgery or pills!

Chapter 1. How not to die from coronary heart disease

Imagine that terrorists used biological weapons that ruthlessly spread around the world, threatening the lives of approximately five hundred thousand people each year. In other words, from him every 83 seconds - year after year - one person dies. Pandemic news would be on the front pages of all newspapers and magazines all day, every day. We would mobilize troops, attract the best scientists in order to resist the epidemic. In short, would not stop at nothing.
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Fortunately, we do not lose every year hundreds of thousands of people because of the threat, the spread of which could have been prevented ... Isn’t it?

In fact, we lose. This biological weapon is not a virus released by terrorists, but it kills more Americans every year than we lost in all past wars .. And the fight against them is not in the laboratory, but in grocery stores, in the kitchen and at the dinner table. And to win, we do not need a vaccine or an antibiotic. Enough ordinary fork. Then what happens? If the epidemic has grown to catastrophic proportions, but it is so easy to warn, why aren't we doing more than now?

The killer I mean is coronary heart disease that affects almost everyone who sticks to a standard diet.

Most common cause of death

The main cause of death in the world is fat deposits on the walls of the arteries, called atherosclerotic plaques. For most people who feed on a standard, plaques form in the coronary arteries - blood vessels that supply the heart with oxygen-rich blood. The formation of plaques called atherosclerosis (Greek athere - gruel, sklerosis - hardening) is a hardening of the arteries, in which cholesterol plaques are deposited on the walls. This process takes decades. Vessels gradually narrowed - and reduced access to blood to the organs. Limited coronary circulation causes pain and constriction in the chest - angina. When plaque ruptures, a thrombus is often formed, which can block blood flow, causing myocardial infarction, damaging or even destroying part of the heart.

Perhaps the words “myocardial infarction” evoke images of friends or relatives who have suffered from chest pain and shortness of breath for years before they died. However, for most people who are suddenly dying of myocardial infarction, the first symptom is the last symptom. This is called sudden cardiac death (death occurs one hour after the first manifestation of the disease). In other words, you may not even know that you are walking on the edge until it is too late. You feel great, and an hour later you are leaving the world of the living forever. That is why prevention of coronary disease is so important! It is important to do it before you even know what ischemia you have.

Patients often ask me: “Is ischemia not an age-related disease?” I know where this delusion came from. In the end, the heart makes billions of strokes for a person’s life. Can't the motor go berserk after a while? Not.

The colossal amount of data collected shows that there are vast areas in the world where epidemics of coronary insufficiency simply do not exist. For example, in the famous "Chinese study", scientists studied the relationship between eating habits and chronic diseases in rural districts of China. In Guizhou Province, for example, with a population of about half a million people over three years, not a single death from coronary heart disease was recorded among men younger than 65 years old.

In the 1930–1940s, Western doctors, who worked in numerous missionary hospitals in sub-Saharan Africa, found that many of the chronic illnesses that plagued the so-called developed world are simply absent here. In Uganda (located in East Africa) with a population of several million people, coronary insufficiency “was almost never seen.”

But maybe the inhabitants of these countries simply died earlier from other diseases and did not live long enough to get ischemia? Not. This is proved by the results of autopsies conducted by Ugandans and Americans of the same age. The researchers found that out of 632 people from St. Louis, Missouri, 136 suffered a heart attack. And what about 632 Ugandans of the same age? Myocardial infarction was found only in one. Myocardial infarction occurs in Ugandans a hundred times less than in Americans. The doctors were so amazed that they examined another 800 deaths in Uganda. Of the 1,400 autopsies performed, only one person was found to have a slight prolonged damage to the heart, that is, a heart attack did not lead to a fatal outcome. Both then and now in industrialized countries, coronary heart disease is the main cause of mortality. In central Africa, she kills less than one in a thousand.

Immigration studies show that good heredity has nothing to do with it. When people move from a low-risk country to a high-risk country, their incidence of rocket soars upward after they adopt the eating habits and lifestyle of a new locality. Extremely low rates of coronary heart disease in rural China and in Africa are explained by extremely low levels of cholesterol in these populations. Although the diet varies greatly between Chinese and Africans, it is basically the same - preference is given to products of plant origin, such as cereals and vegetables. Since they consumed a lot of dietary fiber (fiber) and few animal fats, their cholesterol level was on average below 150 mg / dl6, 7 - the same level is observed in people of our decade who follow a plant-based diet.

What does all of this mean? This means that coronary heart disease is not an inevitable evil.

If you look at the teeth of people who lived ten thousand years ago, long before the invention of the toothbrush, you will notice that there is almost no caries. They had never used flossing in their entire life, but their teeth were healthy. Because the candies have not been invented yet. Modern people are ready for the pleasure that they get from sweets, to endure unpleasant and expensive treatment at the dentist .. Of course, I sometimes indulge in sweets - I have good insurance! But we are not discussing plaque here, but atherosclerotic plaques forming in our arteries. It is a matter of life and death.

Ischemic heart disease - it is from her, most likely, we and our loved ones will die. Of course, each of us independently decides how to live and what he has, but we should be aware of the predictable consequences of our actions in order to make the choice more consciously. We could avoid sweets that spoiled our teeth, and just as well we can avoid trans fats, saturated fats, and high cholesterol foods that clog our arteries.

Let's take a look at how coronary heart disease progresses with age, and learn about simple products that at any stage can help prevent, stop and even reverse the development of heart disease before it is too late.

Coronary heart disease begins in childhood

A study published in 1953 in the Journal of the American Medical Association radically changed our understanding of the development of heart disease. The researchers conducted about three hundred autopsies killed during the war in Korea, whose average age was 22 years. Amazingly, in 77% of the soldiers, clear signs of coronary atherosclerosis were found. Some arteries were clogged by 90% or more. The study "clearly showed that atherosclerotic changes begin in the coronary arteries years and decades before the age period when coronary heart disease (CHD) becomes a clinically expressed problem."

Further studies of people who died as a result of an accident between the ages of 3 and 26 years, found that lipid strips — the initial stage of atherosclerosis — are present in almost all children under the age of ten. By the time we turn 20 and 30, these lipid strips will already grow into full-fledged plaques, like those found in American soldiers who died in Korea .. And by the time they turn 40 or 50 years old, they can start us kill.

If you are reading this book and you are over 10 years old, then the question is not whether you need to start eating more correctly to prevent coronary heart disease, but whether you want or not the heart disease that you have, in all likelihood, already there, regressed.

When do these lipid strips begin to appear? Atherosclerosis may begin before birth. Italian researchers studied the arteries of a human fetus, undeveloped as a result of miscarriage, and deeply premature babies who died shortly after birth. It turned out that the arteries of unborn babies, whose mothers had high levels of LDL cholesterol, were damaged. Thus, the researchers suggest that atherosclerosis does not occur as a result of malnutrition in childhood, but also in the womb.

We know that it is harmful for pregnant women to smoke and drink alcohol. It is never too late to start eating right for the sake of future generations.

According to William K. Roberts, editor-in-chief of the American Journal of Cardiology (American Journal of Cardiology), the only significant risk factor for the formation of atherosclerotic plaques is cholesterol, in particular, elevated levels of LDL-cholesterol in the blood24. Indeed, LDL cholesterol is called “bad” cholesterol, since it is the source of the accumulation of cholesterol in the blood vessels. The results of autopsies of thousands of young people - victims of an accident - revealed that the level of cholesterol in the blood closely correlated with the severity of atherosclerosis of the arteries25. To drastically lower the level of LDL cholesterol, it is necessary to sharply limit the intake of the following substances: trans fats contained in processed foods, meat and dairy products; saturated fats found in animal products and fast food; to a lesser extent - dietary cholesterol, which is contained exclusively in animal products, especially in eggs.

See the pattern? All three concentrated sources of bad cholesterol - the main risk factor for the development of the main "killer" - are found in animal products and semi-finished products. This explains why the epidemic of coronary heart disease almost did not affect the people who adhere to the traditional diet, which includes mainly plant foods.

»More information about the book can be found on the publisher's website.
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