Joel Fuhrman - Eat to Live Cookbook: 200 Delicious Nutrient-Rich Recipes for Fast and Sustained Weight Loss, Reversing Disease, and Lifelong Health

CONTENTS

DEAR READER,

C ongratulations on being part of the Eat to Live family, a rapidly growing army of individuals who embrace a nutritarian lifestyle. This ideal diet-style can both maintain our ideal weight and push the envelope of human longevity. Consuming the healthiest foods on the planet gives the best results: most effective disease reversal, disease protection, longevity enhancement, and the end of dieting.

Eating healthfully also allows us to derive the maximum pleasure and enjoyment out of life. When we eat right, over time, our tastes are modified and we truly enjoy and prefer natural foods. Plus, when we know we are eating for health, we feel emotionally and intellectually secure in our health destiny, which further enhances our appreciation of the food we eat.

I have written this cookbook with the intent of taking the worlds healthiest foods and making them even more delicious. These recipes come from my home to yours.

From my family to yours, I wish you the best of health, and a long and pleasurable life.

Joel Fuhrman, M.D.

EAT TO LIVE IN A NUTSHELL

E at to Live is a mind-set, a lifestyle, and the title of my New York Times #1 bestselling book, Eat to Live . When you eat to live, you seek foods, recipes, and menus that are nutrient-rich, so the body is supplied with its nutritional needs for optimum health, disease prevention, and maximum lifespan.

If you want to maintain your good health and enjoy life to the fullest as you age, the secret lies in what you feed your body. Following a plant-based, nutrient-dense diet also enables you to lose weight and keep it off permanentlywithout hunger or deprivation.

If you want to throw away your medications and recover from chronic illnesses, such as heart disease, high blood pressure, and diabetes (all examples of common illnesses that are more effectively treated with nutritional intervention than drugs or surgery), then the Eat to Live lifestyle is the most effective approach.

Uncovering the cause of a disease, when possible, rather than covering up symptoms with medications, always results in a more favorable outcome. When you maximize nutrients and minimize calories, you become disease-resistant. Countless studies have shown a relationship between nutrition and calories and your longevity and health potential. The majority of Americans ultimately die from their destructive nutritional extravagances.

The most important building block of health is nutrition. Without superior nutrition, your ability to live life to the fullest is limited. Scientific studies reveal that high-nutrient foods such as vegetables, fruits, beans, nuts, and seeds contain vitamins, minerals, and phytochemicals that work in synergy to allow us to achieve the best possible health and immunity from disease. Some of these nutrients are well known while others have yet to be identified. Unfortunately, most of modern society lives on a low-nutrient diet of empty-calorie, processed, refined foods and high-fat, fiberless animal products. It is no wonder we have an overweight, disease-ridden population dying prematurely due to nutritional ignorance.

All of my dietary advice is based on eating larger quantities of nutrient-rich foods and fewer foods with minimal nutritional value. An optimum diet supplies fourteen different vitamins, twenty-five different minerals, and more than one thousand phytochemicals. These plant-based chemicals have profound effects on human cell function and the immune system. The foods that are naturally rich in these nutrients are also high in fiber and water and are naturally low in calories. They provide what your body needs to maximize its self-healing and self-repairing mechanisms.

Nutrient-rich foods are almost always low-calorie foods.

I use a simple formula to express my eating style:

H = N/C

H ealth = N utrients/ C alories

Your health is predicted by your nutrient intake divided by your intake of calories.

H=N/C is a concept I call my health equation. It stresses the importance of focusing on the nutrient density of your diet. If your nutrient intake is low and your calories are high, your health will be only a fraction of what it could be if you were consuming a high level of nutrients in each calorie.

Food supplies both nutrients and calories (energy). All calories come from only three elements: carbohydrates, fats, and proteins. Nutrients, on the other hand, come from noncaloric food factors, including vitamins, minerals, fiber, and phytochemicals. These noncaloric nutrients are vitally important for your well-being. The key to good health and achieving your ideal body weight is to eat predominantly those foods that have a high proportion of nutrients (noncaloric food factors) to calories (carbohydrates, fats, and proteins).

Our society has evolved to a level of economic sophistication that allows us to eat ourselves to death. A diet centered on milk, cheese, pasta, bread, fried foods, and sugar-filled snacks and drinks lays the groundwork for obesity, cancer, heart disease, diabetes, and autoimmune disease. Although these foods are certainly harmful, that is not the whole problem. The other important issue is what we are not eating.

When we evaluate the standard American diet, we find the calories coming from phytochemical-rich foods, such as fresh fruits, vegetables, beans, intact whole grains, raw nuts, and seeds, are less than 13 percent of the total caloric intake. This dangerously low intake of unrefined plant foods guarantees weakened immunity to disease, frequent illnesses, and a shorter lifespan. Until we address this deficiency, we will never win the war on cancer, heart disease, diabetes, and other degenerative diseases.

As I explain in my book Super Immunity:

Super Immunity can be best defined as the bodys immune system working to its fullest potential. Modern science has advanced to the point where we have evidence that the right raw materials and nutritional factors can double or triple the protective power of the immune system. Superior nutrition is the secret to super immunity. We are dependent on the quality of whole foods grown from the earth to sustain us: the health of the food we eat ultimately determines our own health.

Many accept that disease is the result of genetics or luck. The reality is that the vast majority of us bear the responsibility for our health through our dietary choices. Nutrition, exercise, and environment simply overwhelm genetics. Poor food choices are the largest cause of disease and premature death.

Vegetables and fruits protect against all types of cancers when consumed in large enough quantities. This is documented by hundreds of scientific studies. The most prevalent cancers in our country are mostly plant-food-deficiency diseases.

Numerous diet plans call for counting calories, eliminating some foods, and adding others, but only this one asks you to strive for more micronutrients in your diet. This diet-style does not require deprivation. There is no calorie counting, portion-size measuring, or weighing involved. You eat as much as you want and, over time, you will be satisfied with fewer calories. As you consume larger and larger portions of nutrient-dense unprocessed foods, your appetite for empty-calorie foods decreases and you gradually lose your addiction to them. At the same time, as the micronutrient quality of your diet increases, your desire to overeat is curtailed.

DON AND HIS WIFE

After fighting a losing battle with diabetes on Glucophage, Actos, and Glyburide, and not wanting to start insulin injections, I wanted to learn about better nutrition, which led me and my wife, who also has diabetes, to Dr. Fuhrman. Together, we learned about his life-changing and life-saving nutritarian plan. I am now off medication. My energy level is better than I can remember, and my A1C is running six. Thats down from elevenall without medication. My wife has lost 34 pounds, and, like me, shes now medication-free. Thank you, Dr. Fuhrman, for giving us back a quality of life!