Lifestyle Medicine: Treating the Causes of Disease
If doctors can eliminate some of our leading killers by treating the underlying causes of chronic disease better than nearly any other medical intervention, why don’t more doctors do it?
If doctors can eliminate some of our leading killers by treating the underlying causes of chronic disease better than nearly any other medical intervention, why don’t more doctors do it?
One reason why soy consumption is associated with improved survival and lower recurrence rates in breast cancer patients may be because soy phytonutrients appear to improve the expression of tumor-suppressing BRCA genes.
The intake of legumes—beans, chickpeas, split peas, and lentils—may be the single most important dietary predictor of a long lifespan. But what about concerns about intestinal gas?
Choline may be the reason egg consumption is associated with prostate cancer progression and death.
Too much choline—a compound concentrated in eggs and other animal products—can make bodily secretions smell like rotting fish, and may increase the risk of heart disease, due to conversion in the gut to trimethylamine.
The role white and pink (red) grapefruit may play in weight loss and cholesterol control, as well as the suppression of drug-clearance enzymes within the body.
Plant-based diets tend to be alkaline-forming. This may help protect muscle mass, and reduce the risk of gout and kidney stones. The pH of one’s urine can be estimated with natural pigments, using kitchen chemistry.
Simple changes in diet and lifestyle may quadruple a woman’s survival rate from breast cancer.
Reducing the ratio of animal to plant protein in men’s diets may slow the progression of prostate cancer.
A plant-based diet may not only be the safest treatment for multiple sclerosis; it may also be the most effective.
By age 10, nearly all kids have fatty streaks in their arteries. This is the first sign of atherosclerosis, the leading cause of death in the United States. So the question for most of us is not whether we should eat healthy to prevent heart disease, but whether we want to reverse the heart disease we may already have.
Plant-based diets may prove to be a useful nutrition strategy in both cancer growth control as well as lifespan extension, because these diets are naturally lower in methionine.
A higher rate of cancer deaths among those that handle and process meat is attributed to infection with viruses, and chronic exposure to animal proteins.
Cancer-causing viruses in poultry may explain increased risks of death from liver and pancreatic cancers.
Public health campaigns can use vanity to improve fruit and vegetable consumption, since experiments show carotenoid phytonutrients improve the physical attractiveness of African, Asian, and Caucasian faces.
The artificial butter flavoring diacetyl has been linked not only to deaths of workers handling the chemical, but also to serious lung disease in consumers of microwave popcorn.
Men eating pistachio nuts experienced a significant improvement in blood flow through the penis accompanied by significantly firmer erections in just three weeks—perhaps due to pistachios’ antioxidant, arginine, and phytosterol content.
Because penile arteries are only about half the size of the coronary arteries in the heart, erectile dysfunction can be a powerful predictor of cardiac events—such as sudden death.
Multilevel marketing companies accused of using exaggeration and pseudoscience to promote potentially dangerous products, such as Metabolife and Hydroxycut, by designing studies that appear to purposely mislead consumers.
Chronic red pepper powder ingestion may be an effective treatment for IBS and chronic dyspepsia (indigestion), both of which can arise from food poisoning.
Two kiwi fruit an hour before bedtime may improve sleep quality and duration, without the side effects associated with sleeping pills.
Dr. Greger has scoured the world’s scholarly literature on clinical nutrition, and developed this brand-new live presentation on the latest in cutting-edge research on how a healthy diet can affect some of our most common medical conditions.
The Director-General of the World Health Organization warns that we may be facing an end to modern medicine as we know it—thanks, in part, to the mass feeding of antibiotics to farm animals to accelerate growth.
About half of America’s trans fat intake now comes from animal products.
Pediatric CAT scans are estimated to cause hundreds of cancer deaths every year.
The majority of radioactive fallout from the Fukushima nuclear power plant tragedy was absorbed by the Pacific Ocean. What does that mean for seafood safety?
Black raspberries may cause complete clinical regression of precancerous oral lesions (oral intraepithelial neoplasia).
A randomized phase II clinical trial on the ability of strawberries to reverse the progression to esophageal cancer.
Nearly 5,000 breast cancer deaths a year may be attributable to just light drinking (up to one drink a day).
Expanding on the subject of my upcoming appearance on The Dr. Oz Show, a landmark new article in the New England Journal of Medicine shows that choline in eggs, poultry, dairy, and fish produces the same toxic TMAO as carnitine in red meat—which may help explain plant-based protection from heart disease and prostate cancer.
The story behind the first U.S. dietary recommendations report explains why, to this day, the decades of science supporting a more plant-based diet have yet to fully translate into public policy.
Lignan intake is associated with improved breast cancer survival in three recent population studies following a total of thousands of women after diagnosis.
Hundreds of thousands of Americans are Salmonella-poisoned by poultry every year—yet it remains legal to sell meat proven to be contaminated.
A similar exponential increase in carotid artery plaque buildup was found for smokers and egg eaters.
The early onset of puberty in girls associated with animal protein consumption may be due to endocrine-disrupting chemical pollutants in the meat supply.
Vitamin D3—sourced from sunlight exposure, animal, and plant sources—may be preferable to vitamin D2 sourced from fungi.
Human beings lost the ability to detoxify uric acid millions of years ago. What implications does this have for our health today?
Prolonged daily sitting is associated with a shorter lifespan, even in those who exercise regularly. Standing and treadmill desks are two potential solutions for office workers.
For decades, studies on Gerson therapy for cancer have questioned its safety and efficacy. But, what does the latest head-to-head trial of a Gerson-style regime, versus chemotherapy, show in terms of survival and quality of life for pancreatic cancer ?
Congenital IGF-1 deficiency can lead to Laron Syndrome (a type of dwarfism); but with such low growth hormone levels, those with the condition have dramatically lower cancer rates. This raises the question of whether one can achieve the best of both worlds—by ensuring adequate IGF-1 levels during childhood, while then suppressing excess growth promotion in adulthood.