Eat to Live is a diet developed by Joel Fuhrman, a doctor whose specialty is reversing disease through nutrition. The concept behind it is very simple and intuitive:
Health = Nutrients/Calories
In other words, the more nutrient-rich your food, the healthier you will be. This means minimizing or eliminating processed foods with "empty" calories as well as meat and dairy, which are not only nutrient-poor as judged by the formula above, but also raise the risk of heart disease, cancer, and other illnesses.
I know from personal experience and my friends' experiences that this diet really works. When I started it, my weight dropped rapidly and kept dropping until it stabilized right at the number Dr. Fuhrman's weight tables recommended for my height -- and has stayed right there for months. My BMI went from 22.4 (within the normal range) to 18.6 (on the low end of the healthy range). And it was really easy. You can eat as much as you want, so long as you eat a variety of whole vegan foods.
This diet seems weird and fringey to most people now, but I'm convinced it will eventually become very popular. I hope it will even change the majority of Americans' diets for good. It works too well not to be a success; it just has to reach its "tipping point." It seems like the momentum is gathering. A book called The China Study, which urges an almost-identical diet, was published in 2004, the year after Dr. Fuhrman's book. And Michael Pollan's book that just came out, In Defense of Food, has this message: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."
I encourage everyone to read Dr. Fuhrman's book, Eat to Live, and to try the diet! Even if you're a healthy weight, it's nice to see, written down, a guide to exactly how to eat in order to be as healthy as you can be. Then, you can decide whether to eat that way or not -- but at least you'll have good information about the optimal human diet.
1 comment:
Yeah, the beauty part of the Fuhrman diet is that it's a diet only in the sense of "the kind of food a person eats," not in the sense of "a special course of food to which one restricts oneself in order to lose weight." The combined facts that you can eat as much as you want and that you're eating food that's better for you than what you'd be eating otherwise—well, that's enough to convince me. I've only been doing the diet partway, still eating meat and cheese and cookies a few times a week, and I lost 30 lbs. and have kept it off for months! I sound like an advertisement, but it's true.
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