Michael Greger - How not to diet cookbook 100+ recipes for healthy, permanent weight loss

Surely, if there was a safe, simple, side-effect-free solution to the obesity epidemic, we would know about it by now, right? Im not so sure. It may take an average of seventeen years before research evidence makes it into day-to-day clinical practice.

Take one example that was particularly poignant for my family: heart disease. Decades ago, Dr Dean Ornish and his colleagues published evidence in one of the most prestigious medical journals in the world that our leading cause of death could be reversed with diet and lifestyle changes alone Even now, hundreds of thousands of Americans continue to needlessly die each year from what we learned decades ago was a reversible condition.

I had seen it with my own eyes. My grandmother was cured of her end-stage heart disease by one of Dr Ornishs contemporaries, Nathan Pritikin, using similar methods. She had been given her medical death sentence at age sixty-five after one too many open-heart surgeries, but thanks to a healthy diet was able to live another thirty-one years until she was ninety-six to enjoy her six grandkids, including me.

So, if effectively the cure to our number one killer of men and women could get lost down a rabbit hole and ignored, what else might there be buried in the medical literature that could help my patients but just didnt have a corporate budget driving its promotion?

I made it my lifes mission to find out.

Thats why I became a doctor in the first place and why I started my nonprofit site, NutritionFacts.org. Everything on the website is free. There are no ads, no corporate sponsorships. Its strictly noncommercial; nothing is for sale. I launched it as a public service, as a labour of love, as a tribute to my grandmother. New videos and articles are uploaded almost every day on the latest in evidence-based nutrition.

So, what does the science show is the best way to lose weight?

Im so sick and tired of the nutritional nonsense that comes out of the diet industry, feeding us an endless parade of quick-fix fads that always sell because they always fail. Repeat customers are their whole business model, yet people just line right back up to be fooled again.

The weight-loss industry is so corrupted by financial and ideological conflicts of interest that you can never know who to trust. Too often in diet books, the rule is to obfuscate rather than illuminate, cherry-picking facts to push some pet theory and ignoring the rest to promote their own agenda. Its the opposite of science. In true scholarship, your conclusions follow from the evidence, not the other way around.

Im not interested in offering duelling anecdotes, and the last thing we need is more dietary dogma. What I am interested in is the science. When it comes to making life-and-death decisions as important as what to feed yourself and your family, as far as Im concerned, theres only one question: What does the best available balance of evidence say right now?

My goal was to create the oxymoron: an evidence-based diet book.

The problem is that even just sticking to peer-reviewed medical literature is not enough as, concluded a commentary in the New England Journal of Medicine, False and scientifically unsupported beliefs about obesity are pervasive even in scientific journals. The only way to get at the truth, then, is to dive deep into the primary literature and read all the original studies. Whos got time for that, though? There are more than half a million scientific papers on the subject with a hundred new ones published every day. Even researchers in the field might not be able to keep track of whats going on beyond their narrow domain. But thats what we do at NutritionFacts.org. We comb through tens of thousands of studies a year, so you and your doctors dont have to.

Diets dont work by definition. Going on a diet implies that, at some point, you will go off the diet. Short-term fixes are no match for long-term problems. Lifelong weight control requires lifelong lifestyle changes.

First, a diet has to be sustainable. Consider water-only fasting. No diet works better. Its 100 per cent effective, but also 100 per cent fatal if you manage to stick with it. This is why an optimal diet needs additional building blocks to ensure long-term viability.

Along with being efficacious and sustainable, it needs to be safe. Books touting liquid protein diets in the 1970s sold millions of copies, but the diets started killing people. Safety is about losing weight without losing your health.

Any long-term eating pattern must also be nutritionally complete, containing all essential vitamins and minerals, and finally, our chosen diet should be life-extending. In the very least, what we eat shouldnt cut our life short and ideally should be healthy enough to improve our life spans. Theres no point in losing weight if it causes you to lose it all.

After diving deep into the medical literature, I identified seventeen key ingredients to the ideal weight-loss diet and dedicated a chapter in my book How Not to Diet to each. The foods we eat and, in fact, our meals and entire dietary patterns should be anti-inflammatory; free from industrial pollutants; high in fibre and water; and low in high-glycemic and addictive foods, added fat and sugar, calorie density, meat, refined grains, and salt. They should also be low insulin index, friendly to our friendly gut flora, particularly satiating, and rich in fruits and vegetables as well as legumes.

We should eat real food that grows out of the ground; natural foods that come from fields, not factories; from gardens, not garbage; a diet centred on whole plant foods.

It turns out the healthiest diet also appears to be the most effective diet for weight loss. Indeed, we have experimental confirmation: a whole food, plant-based diet was found to be the single most effective weight-loss intervention ever published in the medical literature, proven in a randomized controlled trial with no portion control, no calorie counting, no exercise component the most effective ever.

I didnt stop there, though. I spent the second half of How Not to Diet on all the tools I had unearthed in my research to drive further weight loss for any stubborn pounds that remain.

In the first half of the book, we learned that a calorie is not necessarily a calorie. One hundred calories of chickpeas have a different impact than one hundred calories of chicken or chocolate, based on their different effects on such factors as absorption, appetite or our microbiome. In the second half, I went a step further and explained how even the exact same foods eaten differently can have different effects. Its not only what we eat, but how and when.

The one piece of advice that probably best sums up my recommended weight-loss boosters would be to wall off your calories. Animal cells are encased only in easily digestible membranes, which allow the enzymes in our gut to effortlessly liberate the calories within a steak, for example. Plant cells, on the other hand, have cell walls that are made out of fibre which acts as an indigestible physical barrier, so many of the calories remain trapped. Processed plant foods, however, such as fruit juice, sugar, refined grains, and even whole grains if theyve been powdered into flour, have had their cellular structure destroyed and their cell walls cracked open, so their calories are free for the taking. When you eat structurally intact plant foods, though, you can chew all you want, but youll still end up with calories completely encapsulated by fibre, which then blunts the glycemic impact, activates whats called the ileal brake that dials down appetite, and delivers sustenance to your friendly flora.