Table of Contents
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A toast to my close friends and colleagues, whose care and encouragement shine through every page of this book.
First to Ellen, Stan, and Elizabeth Ferris, whose friendship over the past twenty years has sustained and nourished me like no others.
To my coauthor, Carol Colman, and agent, Laurie Bernstein, who have shown unwavering confidence in my vision, and without whom this book would still be only a dream.
To Dr. Oscar Franco, my brilliant colleague, whose unmatched insight into diet and nutrition is the beacon that lights the road to the Bonus Years.
To my colleague and close friend Dr. Kenneth Desser, chief of cardiac training at Good Samaritan Hospital in Phoenix, whose advice and good humor have guided me over the past two years.
To the chef instructors at the Art Institute of Phoenix, without whose patience and help I could never have attempted writing this book. To chefs Bill Sy and Walter Leible, the codirectors of the culinary program, who gave me every opportunity to learn at their side. To Chef Joe Lavilla, who suggested many of the wine pairings outlined in the book. And to Chef Eric Watson, my first instructor at the Institute, whose teaching continues to guide me every time I pick up a knife in the kitchen.
To Shauna Halawith, owner of Kitchen Classics in Phoenix, who has been one of our greatest cheerleaders and who through her classes has allowed us to validate the Bonus Years approach to diet and nutrition.
To Jeanette Egan, whose recipe testing and guidance on menu development made her an integral part of the Bonus Years team, and who has now, along with her husband, John, become a much appreciated friend.
To my grade school colleague and now attorney Charles Taylor, who continues to provide good advice and cheer as he has always done over the past forty years.
To John Duff, my editor and publisher at Putnam, who has given us unparalleled freedom to pursue our vision on the Bonus Years.
PART 1
YOUR FIRST FOOD Rx
CHAPTER 1
The Bonus Years
Your First Food Rx
Would you like to extend your life by six years?
Of course you answered yes. Who wouldnt want to live longer, especially if you could do it in a healthy body? We all want to enjoy some bonus years traveling, playing with grandchildren, pursuing a second or even third career, or just doing all those things that we never had time to do before.
But, you think, this is a trick question, theres a catch. What, youre wondering, do I have to give up to get those bonus years?
Do I have to follow a starvation diet?
Do I have to eat awful health food for the rest of my life?
Do I have to kiss bread and pasta good-bye?
Do I have to forgo dessert forever?
Put your fears to rest, the answer to all these questions is an emphatic No!
True, Im a physician, but I dont expect people to follow a strict and boring diet to gain a few years of life. If that were what I had in mind, I would not be writing this book, and you would not be reading it.
Frankly, I like eating as much as the next guy, probably more. You see, medicine is my profession, but food is my passion. Im not just a physician, Im a trained chef. In fact, in Phoenix, Arizona, where I practice medicine and run Bonus Years cooking classes, Im known locally as Dr. Chef.
And trust me, if eating bland, tasteless food was the only way to earn those bonus years, I might well be the first to say, Its just not worth it.
But thats not the way it is.
The really great news is that living longer has never tasted better.
The Bonus Years Diet features a revolutionary eating plan that I designed in collaboration with Dr. Oscar Franco, M.D., Ph.D., a prominent London-based, Colombian-born epidemiologist, who is renowned for his research on the prevention of cardiovascular disease. His work on the role of nutrition in preventing heart disease, which provided the inspiration for The Bonus Years, has been published in the British Medical Journal, a highly respected, peer-reviewed scientific journal.
And because of the solid science behind the Bonus Years Diet, we are able to make a claim that other diet plans cannot: other diet plans have promised to make you thinner or healthier, but none can also make the claim that you will live longer. We can. If you follow the Bonus Years Diet, odds are you will live a longer and healthier life.
Im not kidding. To be scientifically precise, men who follow the Bonus Years Diet can add on average an extra 6.4 years of life. Women can add an extra 4.6 years.
And theres yet another bonus to the Bonus Years Diet: by following this eating plan, you can decrease your risk of developing heart diseasethe number-one killer of both men and women in the Western worldby a remarkable 76 percent.
Lets be clear, these are extra years you would not otherwise get to enjoy. And enjoy truly is the operative word, because we are talking about adding healthy years, extending the prime of your life!
And you can put your fears to rest. You get to eat great stuff every day, including your favorite treats such as a glass of wine, nuts by the handful, and even a bar of chocolate every day for dessert. This not just an eating plan you can live with. Its an eating plan that you can live it up with.
How is it possible that simply by eating some favorite foods you can actually prolong life and extend your healthy years? The Bonus Years Diet represents a true paradigm shift in how we think about food, and, equally important, how we use food.
Taking Food to a New Level
For years theres been speculation and anecdotal evidence suggesting that longevity may be linked to diet. Of course, everyones grandmother has advised that an apple a day keeps the doctor away. And from time to time the popular press has, for example, touted the health benefits of red wine, or reported that blueberries can make your brain sharper, or most recently, suggested that chocolate might be good for your heart.
These news reports did not just catch your eye. They also made some serious scientists wonder whether what we eat might actually explain why some of us are more robust and live longer than others. Thanks to years of painstaking research, scientists now have a real understanding of how foods work and have precisely identified the life-enhancing properties that give certain foods the power to restore our health and extend our lives.
One of the things scientists have proven is that our grandmothers were right about apples. But unlike Granny, who had a vague sense that some foods were better for you than others, scientists have pinpointed exactly which nutrients, in which foods, and in what doses can deliver these health benefits. Indeed, some of these benefits are the same as those that you might derive from some cutting-edge pharmaceutical treatments.
The idea of dosing food, just like we dose drugs, is an important new concept that is unique to the Bonus Years Diet, and I will explain more about it later, but let me give you a brief overview of what I mean here. In recent years, weve made great strides in treating heart disease with the use of new pharmaceutical therapies. We now have sophisticated statin drugs that can lower cholesterol levels. We have antihypertension drugs that can reduce high blood pressure. We have anticoagulant drugs to prevent blood clots, which can trigger a heart attack. These are great drugs, but they are not without side effects and can be quite costly. The fact is, we now know that by eating certain amounts of certain foods, you can significantly reduce your risk of ever having to take any of these drugs in the first place.
