By now, you know that tuning up your menu has a tremendous payoff. In this chapter, we’ll get practical. I’ll show you which foods are in, which are out, and how to be sure you’re starting off on the right foot. We will also take a look at complete nutrition—making sure you’re getting all the nutrients you need. It’s very easy, as you’ll see.
The three overall principles are (1) set animal products aside, (2) keep oils to a minimum, and (3) go low-glycemic-index. Okay, so when we look at our plates, what’s in and what’s out?
The foods that you’ll want to have front-and-center on your plate are whole grains, legumes (beans, peas, and lentils), vegetables, and fruits. These four food groups are all free of animal products, needless to say. In their natural state, most are also very low in oil and low-GI.
Let’s take a closer look at these healthy staples, and then we’ll see how to turn them into delicious meals. By creating delicious meals, your focus will quickly shift from what you are leaving off your plate to what you are now newly experiencing and enjoying.
The Whole-Grain Group. Bread, rice, pasta, tortillas, cereals—foods made from grains—are staples the world over. Where these foods remain a staple, people are much healthier than in places where meaty, cheesy diets have invaded.
Whole grains bring you protein, healthful complex carbohydrate, and fiber, with no cholesterol, animal fat, or other undesirables.
The Legume Group. Legumes is a nutritionist’s word for beans, peas, and lentils—foods that grow in a pod. This group includes not only navy beans, pinto beans, black beans, chickpeas, lentils, and all their cousins, but also all the foods they can be turned into: hummus, chili, bean soups, veggie burgers, veggie hot dogs, tofu, tempeh, meatless deli slices, and many others.
The bean group brings you abundant protein, calcium, iron, soluble fiber, and even traces of omega-3 fatty acids (“good fats”). The entire legume group boasts an enviably low glycemic index, meaning these foods are powerful for keeping your blood sugar steady.
People who include beans in their routine have lower levels of LDL (“bad”) cholesterol and higher levels of HDL (“good”) cholesterol.1 They are also about seven pounds thinner than their bean-neglecting friends, according to the US government’s National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, conducted from 1999 through 2002.2
The Vegetable Group. You know that vegetables are loaded with vitamins, and many are also rich in highly absorbable calcium, as well as iron and fiber. And although broccoli doesn’t like to brag, more than 30 percent of its calories come from protein.
But what really has researchers talking is vegetables’ antioxidant power. The orange color in a carrot or yam, for example, comes from beta-carotene. Beta-carotene and other antioxidants neutralize free radicals—that is, compounds in the blood that contribute to aging, DNA damage, and cancer. You’ll see beta-carotene’s cousin, lycopene, as the red color in tomatoes and watermelons; it is also a powerful antioxidant.
As you plan meals, go for color, and include more than one in a meal: green vegetables, orange vegetables, yellow vegetables, or whatever your tastes call for. They will help you get slim or stay that way, and are wonderful for health.
The Fruit Group. Fruits are not just vitamin-rich. They also have plenty of fiber to slim you down, with essentially no fat or cholesterol. And many fruits are loaded with antioxidants, just as vegetables are. So, when it comes to desserts or snacking, you can’t beat fresh fruit.
Although fruits are sweet, they have surprisingly little effect on blood sugar—nearly all fruits are low-glycemic-index foods.
These four healthful food groups give you the ingredients for a slim, healthy body. So what do they look like on your plate? The possibilities are endless:
A Mediterranean dinner might start with pasta e fagioli, followed by broccoli rabe with garlic, roasted eggplant, and a medley of strawberries and melon. Fagioli (beans) are legumes, pasta is a grain, broccoli and eggplant are vegetables, and strawberries and melon are fruits—bringing you each of the four healthful food groups.
A Latin American choice might be a corn tortilla stuffed with beans, lettuce, tomatoes, caramelized onions, and summer squash, along with Spanish rice, plenty of vegetables, and sliced papaya or pineapple for dessert.
The Southern United States might bring us black-eyed peas, corn bread, kale or collard greens, and peaches for dessert. A Boston kitchen would follow a similar menu but change the players: Black-eyed peas would become baked beans, corn bread be changed to a baked potato, and kale to Swiss chard or cabbage.
An Asian dinner might start with a savory vegetable soup, followed by tofu and bok choy in a savory sauce on brown rice. And you can read your fortune while munching on sweet orange slices.
At an Indian restaurant, delicately spiced lentils or chickpeas could be complemented by spinach and basmati rice with currants and cashew slivers, a papadum or two, along with mango slices.
You will think of countless other possibilities, and take a look at the menus and recipes later in this book. The idea is simply to let the four healthy building blocks—whole grains, legumes, vegetables, and fruits—turn into tasty meals.
So much for the foods we want to focus on. It’s just as important to set aside the foods that can cause trouble. Let’s go through them. As we do, you’ll probably see some that have been mainstays for you for a long time, and you might wonder what life will be like without them. For now, don’t be too burdened by that thought. The whole idea of the Kickstart is to test-drive a remarkably healthy way of eating and to experience the surprising benefits it can bring. Once you’ve done that, you can start to think about how to approach this over the longer term. I’ll help you.
So here are the foods that you’ll want to skip during your 21 days.
As I was growing up in North Dakota, we put roast beef or pork chops at the center of the plate more or less every day. At the time, we did not make the connection between those foods and the weight problems, heart disease, and cancer that were much more common in the United States than in many other countries, and still are. But eventually researchers implicated the fat, cholesterol, and other undesirables in these foods for the health problems we have been struggling with. It is now abundantly clear that people who skip animal products are slimmer and healthier than those who eat them.
Let’s take a look at a cut of meat. To state the obvious, a cow’s muscles were designed by nature to move the cow’s legs. A chicken’s muscles allow the bird to walk and fly (although current breeding and rearing practices are such that these obese birds do not get around very well). A fish’s muscles move the fish’s tail. A muscle is not designed to be a nutritional supplement. It is a biological ratchet system designed for pulling. For that purpose, it is beautifully designed. Strings of protein serve as the ratchet mechanism, with fat in between them.
If meat were designed to provide good nutrition, it would have fiber to tame your appetite, complex carbohydrate for energy, and vitamin C to protect your body, among other vital nutrients. But meat has none of these things. It is mainly a mixture of fat and protein (along with the occasional parasite, perhaps).
Meat’s fat packs in calories, and it adds to the fat that is collecting inside your cells—the intramyocellular lipid that slows down your metabolism, as we saw in chapter 3.
Meat’s protein is a problem, too. In years past, nutrition researchers praised animal protein because it provides the amino acids (protein building blocks) our bodies need. However, it soon became clear that plants provide all the protein we need, too. Any normal variety of plant foods provides all the essential amino acids. I’ll explain more about this later in this chapter.
Plant proteins are not only free of animal fat and cholesterol; they are also free of two problems caused by animal proteins.
First, animal protein is linked to osteoporosis, apparently because it causes the kidneys to lose calcium in the urine. If you were to check urine samples from people following meaty diets—especially high-protein Atkins-style diets—you would find that they lose calcium rapidly.3 Sodium does the same thing, as we’ll see below.
Second, animal protein is also linked to gradual loss of kidney function. Harvard researchers studied a group of women who had already lost some kidney function, as many people do, due to high blood pressure, diabetes, urinary infections, or other factors. As the years went by, the researchers found that those women who tended to get their protein from animal products were much more likely to experience continued loss of kidney function.4 Protein from plants did not have this effect. So if you get your protein from beans, grains, vegetables, and other foods from plant sources, your kidneys will breathe a sigh of relief.
Of course, people who grew up with meaty diets, as I did, are sometimes reluctant to let them go, despite the problems they cause. Whenever someone says to me, “You know, I really love meat, and I’m not sure I could give it up,” I remember the words of my friend Baxter Montgomery, MD, a cardiologist in Houston. A patient had asked Dr. Montgomery for some words of encouragement to help her give up unhealthy foods. He said, “Think of it this way. What you’re ‘giving up’ is diabetes. You’re giving up high blood pressure. You’re giving up the weight that you’d like to be rid of, and all those medicines you’ve been taking. There are delicious foods waiting for you. And when you’re in a healthy body, the new foods you’re eating will taste so good.”
And I would go a step further. Although meat is one food that protests loudly when it is about to be fired, it puts up remarkably little fight once you’ve replaced it with other foods, especially the delicious ones you’ll see in the recipe section of this book. Within a short time, you’ll find you don’t miss it at all.
Don’t take this on faith; you’ll soon see for yourself. The idea of the Kickstart is not to make any long-term diet resolutions. The idea is to try out a new and exciting approach to food and see how it goes. A focus on the short term takes the pressure off any menu change.
Let me say a word or two about chicken. In recent years, Americans have grown particularly fond of it, as I mentioned in chapter 1. But it is hardly health food. You already know that fried chicken is loaded with grease, and that grease means calories. What you may not know is that grilled chicken presents problems of its own.
When meats are heated at high temperatures, cancer-causing chemicals called heterocyclic amines form within the meat tissue. They occur as heat alters amino acids, creatine, and other compounds in animal muscle. The US government and leading cancer authorities list them as carcinogens, and there is no amount that is deemed safe to ingest. They can occur in any grilled meat, but the biggest source is chicken.
Some jurisdictions, including the State of California, require restaurants to warn their customers of the presence of cancer-causing chemicals in the foods they serve. So my research team gathered one hundred samples of grilled chicken salads and sandwiches from restaurants in California. We visited a variety of McDonald’s, Burger King, Applebee’s, Chick-fil-A, Outback, Chili’s, and T.G.I. Friday’s restaurants. And we found heterocyclic amines not only in every restaurant, but in every single grilled chicken sample. As a result of our action, Burger King now posts a warning about heterocyclic amines in every California store, and by the time you read this the other restaurants are likely to have followed suit.
Shortly thereafter, KFC released its new grilled chicken, trying to appeal to customers who know that fried chicken is not healthy. So we tested KFC’s grilled chicken, too. And once again, we found carcinogenic heterocyclic amines. These cancer-causing chemicals commonly arise when muscle tissue is cooked at high temperatures, such as grilling.
If you were to do an experiment, grilling a hamburger, a chicken breast, and a veggie burger, what do you think would happen? Well, the hamburger is made of muscle tissue, so heterocyclic amines are likely to form. Ditto for the chicken. Chicken is muscle from a bird, so grilling it will produce carcinogens. But what happens if you grill a veggie burger? The answer is, it gets hot. Period. It is not muscle tissue, so it is much safer on the grill than any sort of meat.
It makes sense to skip dairy products, too. If you were to send a cup of milk to a laboratory, you would soon discover that its nutrition is perfect for calves and terrible for humans. First, milk is loaded with fat to help a calf grow rapidly. Most of that fat is “bad” fat—that is, saturated fat.
Cheesemakers take advantage of all that fat. In making their product, they remove the water and concentrate the remaining fat and protein. The result is a cake composed mainly of animal fat (about 70 percent of its calories), with as much cholesterol, ounce for ounce, as a steak.
Of course, health officials are concerned about dairy fat. So dairy manufacturers offer reduced-fat products. Getting rid of the fat is certainly a good idea. But what are you left with? The most abundant nutrient in nonfat milk, believe it or not, is sugar. Lactose sugar makes up the majority of the calories in nonfat milk.
The protein in dairy products is a problem, too. Dairy products are common triggers for arthritis pain, migraines, and other conditions, as we will see on here. Because the problem in this case is the dairy protein, not the fat, nonfat versions are just as problematic as whole milk.
When you drink milk, it does in your body just what it does in a calf’s body, which is something that has caught the attention of cancer researchers. That is, milk causes the amount of insulin-like growth factor, or IGF-I, in your bloodstream to rise. As its name implies, IGF-I makes things grow. That’s great if you are a calf too small to eat grass. But it’s not so good if you are an adult human. In your body, rapid growth can mean the growth of cancer cells.
Indeed, men with higher amounts of IGF-I in their blood have higher risk of prostate cancer. Women with more IGF-I have a higher risk of breast cancer. In two Harvard studies, men who had two or more dairy servings per day had a 30 to 60 percent higher prostate cancer risk that did men who generally avoided milk.5–6 Studies in other locations have found a similar association. The links between milk and other forms of cancer—particularly breast and ovarian cancer—are inconclusive and still under study.
This does not mean you can’t splash milk on your breakfast cereal; just make it soy milk, rice milk, almond milk, oat milk, hemp milk, or one of the other plant-based milks that are on the market these days. The variety is endless, and they are far healthier than the animal-derived kind.
Eggs are a special case. There is more cholesterol in a single egg than in an entire eight-ounce steak. There is also a surprising load of “bad” (saturated) fat along with it. What are they doing in that egg, you might ask? The answer, of course, is that they are building a chicken.
A developing chick cannot call out for room service. Everything that is going to turn into feathers, bones, claws, a beak, an intestinal tract, and all the internal organs has to be in the egg when it is laid. Before the egg hatches, these ingredients rearrange from an amorphous mass into a complete bird body. Because cholesterol is used to build animal cell membranes, the mother hen packs an enormous amount of it into every egg she lays.
What are the numbers?
If you cracked two eggs into your skillet, you’ve just laid nine grams of fat. About one-third of that fat is in the “bad” (saturated) form.
And to understand the cholesterol numbers, let me give you a comparison. A Burger King Whopper has 75 milligrams of cholesterol. A McDonald’s Quarter Pounder with Cheese has 90 milligrams. A Double Quarter Pounder with Cheese has 155 milligrams. But one large egg has 212 milligrams of cholesterol. And if you had two eggs for breakfast—well, you get the idea. Eggs are designed to build chickens, and that’s it.
What about protein? Egg white is essentially solid animal protein. That is not an advantage; that is part of the problem. As I mentioned above, animal protein—including that from eggs—is hard on the kidneys and encourages calcium loss. Instead of building you up, it is gradually tearing you down. You are much better off getting protein from plant sources.
So it pays to think of bird’s eggs as a wonder of nature, but not as food. When you skip animal-derived products, you skip fat, cholesterol, unnecessary calories, and a lot of health problems.
Skipping animal fat is a good idea. But we want to be careful about vegetable fats, too. As you have learned, fats and oils are packed with calories. Gram for gram, they have more than twice the calories, compared with carbohydrate or protein (nine for fat, only four for carbohydrate or protein, as you know by now). Although vegetable oils are healthier than animal fats—they are much lower in saturated (“bad”) fat and do not contain cholesterol—they still pack a load of calories that can get you in trouble. So it pays to learn some nonfat cooking techniques, and it turns out to be remarkably easy. In the next chapter, I’ll show you how.
If you have frequent cravings, if your energy seems to come and go, or if you have diabetes or high triglycerides, there is one more group of foods to be careful with. Foods that cause a precipitous rise in blood sugar can aggravate all these problems.
Happily, there are only a few that you’ll want to be concerned about. As we saw in chapter 2, the main offenders are sugar, white and wheat breads, white potatoes, and some cold cereals. We also saw that there are good replacements for each of these products.
So that’s it. You’ll want to emphasize whole grains, vegetables, fruits, and legumes, and all the wonderful foods made from them, and to skip animal products, oily foods, and high-glycemic-index foods. And as a quick peek at the recipe section will show, there is a huge array of delicious foods waiting for you.
Let me tackle a few questions that come up very commonly.
Q: Can I drink alcohol during the Kickstart?
A: Alcohol is not restricted in the Kickstart program. In our research studies, we generally limit alcohol to two drinks per day for men and one per day for women. But there are, of course, other considerations about alcohol, particularly for women: Women who drink daily—even one glass of wine or other alcohol—have a higher risk of breast cancer, compared with women who do not drink. So if you drink, it pays to keep it modest and intermittent.
A: We have not restricted coffee or other caffeinated beverages, either. This does not mean they are good for you. You may well sleep better without them, and many people find that they have better overall energy without caffeine.
Q: Is it okay to have a little meat or cheese every now and then?
A: Give yourself a complete break. That way, you’ll be able to see what a really perfect diet can do for you. Also, by not teasing yourself with occasional bits of unhealthful products, you’ll give your taste buds a chance to forget about them.
Q: I have a sweet tooth. Are there any treats I can have other than fruit?
A: If the usual fruits like blueberries, apples, bananas, and oranges are not doing it for you, try varieties that are a bit more special, like mangoes, papayas, bing cherries, or lychees. Or cut up chunks of cantaloupe and melon, drizzle them with lemon, and add a leaf or two of mint. Or dip strawberries in melted dark chocolate or cocoa powder. Make fresh juices. Try frozen grapes.
Or try these:
Q: Can I have store-bought snacks like crackers, pretzels, and so on?
A: Yes. Just check the labels to be sure there are no animal products and that they are low in oil—no more than about two or three grams of fat per serving.
Q: If I do need to use oil, which one do you recommend?
A: Our goal is not to choose a different kind of oil, but to keep all oils to a minimum. There are, of course, traces of natural oils even in foods that you would not think had any at all. Vegetables, fruits, and beans, for example, all contain tiny amounts of natural oils. It’s the added oils that get us into trouble with extra calories. And if you look at the recipe section, you’ll see abundant techniques for cooking without oil.
When people set aside meat, dairy products, eggs, and greasy foods, their nutrition improves dramatically.7–8 That’s important to emphasize, because some people imagine that a plant-based diet might lack the nutrition they need. The fact is, it’s just the opposite.
Partly that’s because of what you’re not getting: animal fat and cholesterol. But it’s more than that. When you replace meat with beans, vegetables, or other healthful foods, you’re getting fiber to keep you slim and lower your cholesterol, antioxidants and vitamins to protect against cancer, and potassium to lower blood pressure. A plant-based diet is nutrient-rich.
In a recent study, we looked at what happens when people throw out animal products and replace them with whole grains, legumes, vegetables, and fruits. The answer is that they don’t just get less fat and cholesterol. They also get more fiber, beta-carotene, vitamins C and K, folate, magnesium, and potassium.8
In order to measure the overall healthfulness of a diet, Harvard researchers developed the Alternate Healthy Eating Index, which rates intake of healthful and unhealthful foods. When people cut calories or count carbs, their scores don’t get better at all. But when you switch to a low-fat, plant-based diet, your score improves dramatically. In other words, you are not only throwing unhealthful foods off the menu, you’re bringing in the nutrients your body needs.8
Even so, you may be wondering if you will get adequate protein, calcium, or other nutrients. So let’s walk through the common nutritional issues and see how easy it is to be sure you’re getting everything you need.
Protein. Think of protein as the girders and beams that build your body. You need a certain amount of protein in your diet to repair daily wear and tear. Your body also uses it to build tiny structures: enzymes that help you digest food, for example, and antibodies that protect you from infections. The important thing to know is that a plant-based diet easily gives you all the amino acids your body needs, as I mentioned above.
Twenty years ago, when I was writing my first nutrition book, I interviewed Dr. Denis Burkitt, who became famous for identifying and then curing a form of blood cancer, now known as Burkitt’s lymphoma, and then went on to establish the value of fiber in the diet, which made him a well-recognized pioneer in the world of nutrition. Burkitt argued strongly for returning whole grains, beans, vegetables, and fruits to our diets.
I asked Dr. Burkitt about protein. I knew that getting protein was not a problem, but I wanted to get his comment for my book. The more I pressed him for his thoughts about protein, the more impatient he got. He finally said, “Neal! Forget protein!” As he pointed out, if you have any normal variety of grains, legumes, vegetables, and fruits, you’ll easily get all the protein you need. If you are keen on boosting your protein intake for whatever reason, you’ll find plenty of it in beans and bean products, such as tofu, tempeh, soy milk, and vegan deli slices.
Fat. As you know by now, most people’s meals deliver much more fat than they need. It’s dripping out of burgers, oozing out of chicken salads and cheese pizza, and hidden in cupcakes and lattes. So while we are now embarking on a search-and-destroy mission to eliminate unnecessary fat from our diets, we need to remember that the body does need some fat. In fact, there are two kinds of fats that are critical for health. Their names are alpha-linolenic acid and linoleic acid. They are very different from the saturated fat that is common in animal products and that increases cholesterol levels.
Traces of alpha-linolenic acid are found in vegetables, fruits, and beans. They can supply the fat you need, even if you add no oils at all to the foods you eat. Sometimes people aim to increase their linolenic acid intake with walnuts, soy products, or flaxseeds. It is also found in flax oil, linseed oil, canola oil, and walnut oil.
Linoleic acid is widely available in foods, and there is no need to go looking for it.
Calcium. The most healthful sources of calcium are green leafy vegetables and legumes, or “beans and greens” for short. Broccoli, Brussels sprouts, kale, collards, and many other greens are loaded with calcium, and their absorption fraction—the percentage that your body can use—is actually higher than that of milk. One notable exception: Spinach is loaded with calcium, too, but spinach is a selfish vegetable; its absorption fraction is very poor.
There is also plenty of calcium in beans, as well as in fortified juices and soy milk.
Many people tend to think of milk as a source of calcium, and it certainly has been aggressively marketed in that way. But there are a couple of problems with relying on milk for calcium.
First, milk-drinking children do not have stronger bones than children who get their calcium from other foods.9 And older women who drink milk have no protection at all against bone breaks. The Nurses’ Health Study, conducted by Harvard University, which followed 72,337 women over an eighteen-year period, found that women who drank the most milk had just as many hip fractures as women who drank little or no milk.10 The reason could be that only about one-third of milk’s calcium is absorbed; the remaining calcium remains unabsorbed and passes out with the wastes. In addition, the animal protein and sodium in milk tend to increase the loss of calcium through the kidneys.
Second, milk tends to skew nutrition in the wrong direction. If you get your calcium from milk, you miss the beta-carotene, iron, and fiber that vegetables would bring you. And you would get fat, cholesterol, and animal protein, none of which the body needs.
One last point about calcium. Just as important as getting adequate calcium is keeping the calcium you have. It turns out that your body eliminates calcium minute by minute through the kidneys. Calcium losses are accelerated by animal protein and by sodium. So avoiding animal protein and keeping sodium low will help your bones. Exercise will, too, both in children whose bones are developing and in adults who hope to keep their bones intact.
Iron. Your blood cells use iron to build hemoglobin, which gives them their bright red color. Hemoglobin carries oxygen from your lungs to your body tissues. So where do you get iron? The most healthful sources are the same “beans and greens” that bring you calcium. Some people think of red meat as a source of iron, of course. But there is real value in getting iron from plants. Here’s why:
Plants carry iron in a special form, called non-heme iron, which is more absorbable when your body is low in iron and less absorbable when your body has plenty of iron already. That allows your body to regulate how much iron it takes in. Meats carry iron in a different form, called heme iron, which tends to be highly absorbed whether you need it or not. That is not good, because iron can be harmful, if you get too much of it.
In your body, iron encourages the production of free radicals. High iron levels are also linked to heart disease, cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, and aging.
So plant sources of iron are preferable. Absorption is increased when vitamin-C-rich foods (fruits and vegetables) are consumed at the same meal. Dairy products tend to interfere with iron absorption.
Zinc is involved in wound healing, immunity, and other biological functions. Hopefully, you are not lying awake at night worrying about where zinc comes from. But if so, rest easy: You’ll find it in legumes, nuts, and fortified cereals (such as Grape-Nuts and bran flakes).
Vitamin B12 is essential for healthy nerves and healthy blood cells. Deficiencies are uncommon. They are usually due to poor absorption and take years to develop. But you definitely don’t want to be deficient, because the first signs can be irreversible nerve symptoms. It’s really easy to avoid. Here’s what you need to know:
Vitamin B12 is not made by plants or animals. It is made by bacteria. Presumably, before the advent of modern hygiene, there were traces of bacteria in the soil and on vegetables and fruits that provided traces of vitamin B12. Those days are long gone, of course. Animals have bacteria in their digestive tracts that produce vitamin B12, and traces of it end up in meat, dairy products, and eggs. But there are two problems with animal sources. First, they also contain cholesterol, fat, and animal proteins. Second, their absorption is not always sufficient, which is why the US government recommends that everyone over age fifty take a B12 supplement.
The easiest and safest thing to do is to take a supplement, such as any common daily multiple vitamin. You can also get B12 from fortified foods (such as fortified breakfast cereals and fortified soy milk). The amount you need is extremely small—just 2.4 micrograms per day for an adult (slightly more if you are pregnant or breast-feeding). Taking more than the required amount carries no risks.
Don’t neglect this, and don’t assume that the bits of garden dirt left on your vegetables contain B12. They don’t.
Vitamin D helps your body absorb calcium from the foods you eat, and also helps protect you against some forms of cancer, as I mentioned above.
Normally, vitamin D is made when sunlight touches your skin. Getting fifteen to twenty minutes of direct sunlight on your face and arms each day will do the job. But if you do not get regular sun exposure or live at a latitude where sun exposure is not sufficient, you’ll want to take a supplement. The US government’s recommended intake is 200 IU per day for people up to age fifty, 400 IU per day for those fifty-one through seventy years of age, and 600 IU per day for older people. However, because of vitamin D’s possible anticancer effects, some authorities now recommend daily doses as high as 2,000 IU per day. The safety of doses above 2,000 IU per day is not clear.
The Kickstart program gives you a chance to be on as perfect a diet as is humanly possible. And that means focusing on what’s in, avoiding what’s out, and letting your body do the rest. In the next section, we’ll put these guidelines to work.