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Why We Limit Salt, Sugar, and Fat
Salt, sugar, fat. All three are essential to our health. All three can also be thoroughly destructive to our health. The difference lies in the amount we take in. A little bit of each is healthy, but Americans are overdosing on them like it’s our job. Every day we shovel truckloads of the stuff into our bellies, often without even realizing it.
Why? Because food companies inundate even the most innocent-looking products, including staples like bread, with appetite-stimulating salt, sugar, and fat to make us addicted—so we buy more, and still more, and even more.
Most Americans don’t have a clue that they’re being led around grocery stores with a ring in their noses and a sign on their foreheads that screams “Sucker!” We haven’t learned how to outwit, outsmart, and outplay the food companies at their own game. When you play by their rules, you become victim to the megadoses of salt, sugar, and fat these companies add to their products to make them taste better, to extend shelf life, and to get you hooked on their products.
Think I’m joking? Take a look at the best-selling book The End of Overeating by Dr. David Kessler, FDA commissioner under Presidents Clinton and Bush. In his book, Dr. Kessler describes in gory detail how food companies put salt on top of sugar on top of fat and then put more salt, sugar, and fat on top of the existing salt, sugar, and fat, all to get you addicted to their food—just as an alcoholic becomes addicted to alcohol or a heroin addict becomes addicted to heroin.
Likewise, read Pulitzer Prize–winning author Michael Moss’s book Salt Sugar Fat, in which he describes how the “food giants have hooked us; hook, line and sinker.” The stakes are high and these companies are playing for keeps. Their concern is their bottom line. They have little concern if you flatline.
But, you ask, what’s the big deal? After all, salt, sugar, and fat make food taste great, right? They make everything sweet and juicy and sumptuous and…
Stop right there!
My goal during the Seven-Day Rescue is to throw you off your salt, sugar, and fat habit. Your eyes will open and your palate will awaken to the glorious and sublime flavors that naturally exist in whole, strong, plant-based foods. This means I am going to show you everything you need to know about how salt, sugar, and fat wreck your diets, your taste buds, and your health.
SALT
Table salt. An American tradition. What home in America doesn’t have a salt shaker on the dinner table? Surely it can’t be bad for us. It’s not even an animal product. Salt, or sodium chloride, is a chemical compound containing a metal (sodium) and a halogen (chlorine). By weight, 3.5 percent of our planet’s oceans are pure salt. How bad can it be? Well, according to a 2012 review in the Lancet, consuming too much salt may be killing up to 9 million people worldwide every year. That’s roughly the population of Sweden.
The Institute of Medicine and the American Heart Association recommend that people not consume more than 1,500 mg of sodium a day. To put that in perspective, 1 teaspoon of salt is 2,300 mg of sodium. Believe it or not, most people are inhaling between 3,500 and 5,000 mg of sodium each and every day.
Of course the food industry can’t get enough of salt. As Michael Moss points out in Salt Sugar Fat, Cargill, the number one supplier of salt, boasts in its sales literature that “people love salt. Among the basic tastes—sweet, sour, bitter, and salty—salt is one of the hardest ones to live without. And it’s no wonder. Salt helps give foods their taste appeal—in everything from bacon, pizza, cheese and French fries to pickles, salad dressing, snack foods and baked goods.”
So, yes, salt is great… for selling food. Not for selling health. Notice that the Cargill folks loved touting the sales benefits of salt, yet they fail to mention any health benefits from dumping mountains of addictive salt into food products. That’s because there aren’t any benefits to eating that much salt! Now, a bit of sodium is essential to optimal human health: Among many other benefits, sodium helps to maintain electrical currents among our muscles and nerves, regulate blood pressure, and sustain a healthy blood pH level. But in this case, too much of a good thing spells Trouble with a capital T.
Let’s put our sodium consumption in historical context. We wolf it down now, but for 90 percent of human evolution our diets contained the equivalent of about a quarter-teaspoon of salt per day. That’s because we ate plants, which contain only trace amounts of sodium. It wasn’t until we learned how to preserve unhealthy animal meat using unhealthy amounts of salt that our sodium consumption really skyrocketed.
So if our bodies are meant to consume ten times less sodium than we consume now, what kind of bad stuff is going on under the hood?
Ingesting less sodium takes a lot of pressure off your body—blood pressure, that is. When you get your blood pressure taken at the doctor’s office, you’ll get two numbers back. Let’s take mine, for instance, which is around 116/66 mm/Hg. The first number is my systolic blood pressure, meaning the pressure in my arteries when my heart is actively pumping blood. The second number, diastolic blood pressure, is the pressure in my arteries when my heart is resting between beats. Ideally, according to the American Heart Association, we should have a blood pressure below 120/80. Someone is considered to have high blood pressure if his or her reading is more than 140/90.
High blood pressure, also called hypertension, is known as a “silent killer” because in most cases it has no symptoms. People with elevated blood pressure are straining their hearts by making them work harder to move blood around. Their hearts sweat and pound and gasp away, but they’re none the wiser. For this reason, the Global Burden of Disease Study, which involved more than 300 institutions in 50 countries, concluded that high blood pressure is the number one worldwide risk factor for death, resulting in fatal heart attacks, strokes, and other catastrophic organ failures.
The basic problem with salt is that it encourages fluid retention in the body. Normally, your kidneys deploy a precise balance of potassium and sodium to remove extra water from the blood. But when you consume too much salt, this fragile sodium–potassium balance is shot to smithereens. As a result, your kidneys remove less water from your system. This puts damaging pressure on blood vessels in your kidneys, and your arteries bulge to accommodate the extra fluid. Tiny muscles in your arteries beef up in an attempt to support the extra pressure, but this only makes the blood passageways smaller—which both increases blood pressure and contributes to plaque buildup. Like a water main bursting under too much pressure, your arteries can burst suddenly without warning.
There are all sorts of little white pills out there that supposedly reduce your blood pressure, but you can reduce it much further, and much better, by cutting out those little white rocks—salt. An analysis in the BMJ calculated that if we could reduce our salt intake by a measly ½ teaspoon per day, we could prevent 22 percent of fatal strokes and 16 percent of fatal heart attacks. And when a study in the New England Journal of Medicine proclaims that “a reduction in salt intake of 3 [grams] per day”—that’s a little bit less than 1 teaspoon—“would save 194,000 to 392,000 quality-adjusted life-years and $10 billion to $24 billion in health care costs annually,” we should probably listen.
The evidence is clear. Don’t let any salt sellers tell you otherwise! For example, the Lancet published a double-blind, randomized trial—the gold standard of clinical research—proving that if you ask people with high blood pressure to cut out their sodium, their blood pressure plummets. But if you give them more sodium, their blood pressure skyrockets. A study published in Kidney International demonstrated how just a single salty meal can massively increase blood pressure. The subjects were given a bowl of soup with a typical amount of salt, and within three hours their blood pressures surged. The folks who got soup with no added salt, however, did not suffer any such spike. And this is not new news: Way back in the 1940s, Duke University’s famed diet researcher Dr. Walter Kempner was able to bring patients with horrendous blood pressures—as high as 240/150—down to 105/80 just by shifting them to a rice-and-fruit diet.
The science is clear: Too much sodium leads to high blood pressure, which leads to an early death. So, cut out the table salt. That’s that, right?
Well, it’s not that easy. Back in 1991, a groundbreaking study in the Journal of the American College of Nutrition revealed that saltshakers supply only about 6 percent of our overall sodium intake. Instead, the biggest source of sodium is right at the grocery store. The study found that a whopping 75 percent of Americans’ sodium comes from processed foods like mac and cheese, canned soups, salad dressings, tomato sauce, and pizza.
One surprisingly large contributor to America’s sodium intake is humble bread. Here’s a fun fact for you: Did you know that there is more sodium in one measly slice of Wonder Whole Grain White Bread (150 mg) than in one eighteen-chip serving of Lay’s Oven Baked Potato Crisps (135 mg)? In fact, bread can contain as much as three times more sodium than potato chips.
How can this be? You can taste the salt from chips marinating on your tongue’s ten thousand taste buds—that’s what makes chips so deliciously addictive—but who’s ever tasted the salt in bread? You don’t, and that’s the whole point. The salt in bread is baked into the flour and yeast, where you seldom notice it. But it’s still there, trashing your health. This is one of the reasons I eat open-faced sandwiches with one slice of bread—an open-faced sandwich limits the sodium (as well as concentrated calories). I encourage you to do the same thing during the course of the Seven-Day Rescue. Check out the “Building Your Rescue Flats” section here–here.
Another huge source of sodium: restaurant food. The latest data from the trade publication Restaurants and Institutions reveals that millennials eat out an average of 3.4 times per week, Generation Xers 2.5 times per week, boomers 2.3 times per week, and as soon as Generation Zers begin earning money, their average will likely exceed millennials’.
Successful restaurants require repeat customers, so they dump as much salt as they can into their food to make it addictively tasty. For example, stop by Burger King for a bacon-and-cheese Whopper, and you’ll take in 1,390 mg of sodium! Add a serving of large fries to that Whopper, and you’re at 2,070 mg! Take a stroll into a TGI Fridays and gobble down the “healthy” Chipotle Yucatan Chicken Salad, and you’ve earned yourself 1,420 mg of sodium. Add the avocado vinaigrette dressing, and you’ve now topped the salt scales at 1,990 mg. Meanwhile, step inside the Macaroni Grill and have their Classic Italian Bake and get ready to pull out your blood pressure medication on the spot: You’ve just knocked back 4,890 mg of sodium. Hey, the Dead Sea called, they want their salt back!
So how do you best avoid the salt trap? Try to eat whole, plant-based foods that don’t come in a package or a box. However, when you do eat packaged or boxed foods, you’ll want to follow these label-reading rules and guidelines. I was taught these from the brilliant dietician Jeff Novick, whom we met in chapter 2.
The first guideline when looking at any package, box, or canned product? Never, ever believe any of the health claims. It’s all just marketing mumbo jumbo.
Instead, look at the nutrition facts panel on the back. Here is Jeff’s simple rule: If the milligrams of sodium are more than the calories per serving, leave it on the shelf. In other words, the ratio of sodium to calories should be no more than 1:1. Most soups, pasta sauces, and canned goods have anywhere from three to ten times more milligrams of sodium than calories per serving. Classic all-American Campbell’s Tomato Soup, for example, has 90 calories and 480 mg of sodium.
How about we leave the Campbell’s for Andy Warhol and we’ll eat some healthy soup like the Miso Barley here.
Next up, a box of P. Terry’s veggie burgers: They may be a svelte 220 calories per patty, but don’t let your eyes bulge out of your head when you see the 580 mg of sodium! A bottle of Newman’s Own marinara pasta sauce has a scant 70 calories per serving, but also an artery-scorching 460 mg of sodium! Pick up a can of Bush’s Black Beans at 100 calories per serving, and you’ll find nothing less than 490 mg of heart-stopping sodium!
Dumping in salt is the cheapest way to give these products maximum shelf life, to give them flavor without putting in more expensive spices and herbs, and, most important, to make you a regular customer. If you follow Jeff’s 1:1 rule, within ten seconds you can determine if a product belongs in your grocery cart or the Dumpster.
Meanwhile, as long as you eat whole-food, plant-based meals, you’ll never take in too much sodium. If your diet follows the Engine 2 guidelines, during the course of the Seven-Day Rescue Diet you should be getting no more than 500 mg of naturally occurring sodium per day from your plant-strong food, and another 500 to 1,000 mg from condiments, sauces, and packaged and canned foods.
For example, a cup of spinach has 24 mg of natural sodium. A medium apple has 2 mg of sodium. A large potato has 42 mg, a half cup of brown rice has 5 mg, and a cup of grilled portabella mushrooms has 13 mg of sodium. With delicious plant-strong foods, the Seven-Day Rescue program has been able to bring people’s blood pressure down by an average of 10/5 mm/Hg, and some by as much as 60/40.
Read labels following Jeff’s 1:1 guideline; don’t cook with salt; lightly salt your food; eat whole, strong, plant-based foods; and watch as your blood pressure drops and your taste buds come to life.
Once you dump the salt, instead of tasting nothing but sodium you’ll savor the natural scrumptiousness of sweet brown rice, a fresh bunch of steamed broccoli with lemon juice, or a Cara Cara orange.
SUGAR
Our country suffers from a major, intense, powerful sweet tooth. The latest data indicate that on average Americans consume nearly 30 teaspoons of added sugar a day. In case you were wondering, according to the American Heart Association, the suggested upper limit is 9 teaspoons of added sugar for men and 6 teaspoons for women.
During the Seven-Day Rescue, we will keep added teaspoons of sugar closer to 1 or, better yet, 0. And don’t worry, your food will be juicy, succulent, flavorsome, and scrumptious!
White sugar, brown sugar, corn syrup, molasses, sucrose, fructose, sorbitol: The issue isn’t what kind of added sweetener is the best or the worst. The issue is that people are completely overdosing on sweetness, no matter what it is. In fact, most people are now consuming nearly 160 pounds of added sugars per person, per year! (At the dawn of the American Revolution in 1776, we consumed just 4 pounds.) Frankly, I’m not interested in what type of sugar you’re using. They all contain roughly 50 calories per tablespoon and they are metabolized in the same unpleasant way.
The bottom line is that Americans are pouring on added sugars like there is no tomorrow, and, consequently, many of us have a lot fewer tomorrows. Indeed, a study from the School of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, published in the American Journal of Public Health, concluded that added sugars have been linked to telomere shortening. Telomeres are the caps at the end of each strand of DNA. Picture the cap on the end of a shoelace. These little items have many tasks, including protecting our genetic data and regulating our aging process. When in good shape, telomeres keep chromosome ends from fraying, preventing DNA damage. Think of telomeres like a bomb fuse: The shorter your telomeres get, the less time you have to live. It turns out that people who drink 20 ounces a day of sugar-sweetened beverages have shorter telomeres than those who don’t. In fact, they are so much shorter, researchers have predicted that these sugar-guzzlers will ultimately lose five years of life.
Interestingly, the only scientific data supporting the lengthening of telomeres was done by Dr. Dean Ornish at the University of California, San Francisco, in conjunction with Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn, who won the Nobel Prize for her work on the telomere. Dr. Ornish performed this feat with a group of men following a whole food, plant-based diet over a three-month period, during which Dr. Ornish successfully showed the ability of plants to stop and reverse prostate cancer.
In addition, added sugars hit your digestive system like a freight train. In response, your body immediately pumps out insulin to deal with all that excess blood sugar. In the hours following, you actually become hypoglycemic, which means all that insulin has actually made your blood sugar too low. The only option remaining for your body is to dump fat into your bloodstream to get things under control. This added fat creates a constant level of inflammation and contributes to many of the chronic Western diseases including heart disease, diabetes, cancer, obesity, metabolic syndrome, and autoimmune disorders.
Naturally occurring sugars, however, like those found in berries, kiwi, eggplant, quinoa, butternut squash, and pinto beans, do not cause these blood sugar and insulin spikes. This is largely due to the high fiber content of whole-plant foods. Fiber—which is found only in plants—has a wonderful gelling effect that not only makes you feel nice and full, but also binds to sugar and slows down the rate at which it is absorbed into your blood.
There is almost no limit to how much naturally occurring sugar you can eat! These sugars represent your body’s primary fuel source, and you do not want to shy away from them. For example, even though a large banana contains more than 15 grams of natural sugar, we let it slip because fructose in a banana is attached to nearly 4 grams of fiber. But remember, when you remove sugar from its fiber—which happens when you juice—you lose most of the health benefits. (For more information, see chapter 3.)
I recently came across a fantastic article in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition that broke down how fiber works its magic. In a study that took place at the University of Eastern Finland’s Institute of Public Health and Clinical Nutrition, one group of participants drank both a glass of sugar water and a glass of berry juice. A second group drank the sugar water and then ate a bunch of actual berries. Predictably, within fifteen minutes the juice group experienced a massive blood sugar spike. But among the berry group, despite consuming the same amount of sugar overall, there was no such spike. The soluble fiber in the berries was even able to neutralize the additional sugar water, and the result was no insulin shock and no inflammation-promoting fat dumped into the blood.
Unfortunately, too many people think that added sugars are just empty calories, that they provide no nutrition but aren’t overtly bad for us as long as we consume them in moderation. Here we go again, folks: that dreaded M-word. Remember, moderation is not your friend. Moderation is the enemy. Moderation is saying: “Hey, I’ll eat only a moderate amount of poison that is making me sick and stealing away years of good health.” To that I say: “Not during the Seven-Day Rescue!”
Added sugars are added poison. Simple as that. Apart from piling on weight, added sugars can lead to chronic disease. Let’s start with liver toxicity. Added sugars in the form of fructose—from sodas, pastries, and juices, to name a few—overload your liver’s ability to process them into energy. As a result, much of the sugar is converted into pure fat, which finds its way into your bloodstream as LDL—“the bad”—cholesterol. As we know, this leads to inflammation in your arteries. But globs of fat also pile up in the liver, leading to an increasingly common condition known as nonalcoholic fatty liver disease. Just like with alcoholics, sugarholics also damage their livers, too often fatally. Meanwhile, as a 2013 study in the Journal of Hepatology concluded, “Industrial, not fruit fructose intake is associated with the severity of liver fibrosis.” In other words, natural sugars found in whole fruits are perfectly healthy, while added sugars promote liver scarring.
Meanwhile, salt isn’t the only little white crystal that promotes high blood pressure. A 2014 analysis published in the journal Open Heart determined that added sugars play “a major role in the development of hypertension.” Among studies lasting eight weeks or more, high sugar intake was found to boost systolic blood pressure by 6.9 mm/Hg and diastolic blood pressure by 5.6 mm/Hg. Meanwhile, people who consume 25 percent or more of their calories from added sugars have triple the risk of death from cardiovascular disease. And good old fruit? As a review in the journal Diabetes points out, “Whereas fructose from added sugars is associated with hypertension, fructose from natural fruits is not.”
Whether you’re chugging a soda, lapping up a Greek yogurt, or spooning cereal, I’ll bet you dollars to donuts that you’re consuming sugar beyond your wildest dreams. For example, that 12-ounce can of Coke you’re downing as an afternoon pick-me-up boasts 10 teaspoons of sugar. Your daily Greek yogurt with fruit, which claims to have zero fat and enough protein to get you sprinting out the door in the morning, has between 4 and 5 teaspoons of added sugar. That box of Honey Nut Cheerios your kids scream for before running out to catch the school bus has 2 added teaspoons of sugar per serving. Meanwhile, that postworkout Snickers bar boasts 7 teaspoons, and you’ll find 15 teaspoons of sugar in that innocent Jamba Juice Banana Berry Smoothie!
We have to outfox the food manufacturers by beating them at their own game. To do this, it’s crucial to differentiate between naturally occurring sugars, which are healthy, and added sugars, which are not. Again, let’s use Jeff Novick’s label-reading guidelines, but this time for sugar. The easiest way is to look at the ingredients list and see how many types of sugars are listed and where they fall in the list. First of all, we don’t want to eat a product that has sugar listed as one of the first three ingredients. (Remember, ingredients have to be listed in descending order by the weight.) If sugar is listed as one of the first three ingredients, leave that cavity bomb on the shelf.
Second, we don’t want to eat a product that has more than three kinds of added sugars. You’ll be dumbfounded when you discover that some of your favorite products have five to ten different types of sugar! It’s super simple and fun when you can shop the aisles and see right through manufacturers’ attempts to sweeten you up. Sometimes they try to use sophisticated names to conceal what that impostor sugar really is, so be sure to look out for anything that says “evaporated cane juice syrup,” “evaporated cane juice,” “agave nectar,” “molasses,” “beet sugar,” “malt,” “barley malt,” “cane juice crystals,” “corn sweetener,” “corn syrup,” “ethyl maltol,” and the evil granddaddy of them all, “high-fructose corn syrup.”
So in this box of Fiber One cereal there are twelve different kinds of sugar listed all over the ingredients panel! Do not go anywhere near this abomination! If you want fiber, get it straight from the source: fruits, vegetables, legumes, and whole grains.
FAT
Fat. We are fat. Very fat. According to the CDC, 75 percent of Americans are now considered either overweight or obese. One big reason: We eat too much fat itself, most of which comes from animals and refined oils. For many people, unnecessary and unhealthy fats represent more than 33 percent of their total calorie intake. This overconsumption of weak fats is a major contributing factor to the pool of diseases that are fattening up our bottoms along with our annual health-care bills.
There are three types of fat: trans fats, saturated fats, and unsaturated fats. Trans fats are the meanest, ugliest, artery-clogging, heart-stopping villains of them all. They occur in all meat and dairy products, and they appear in packaged and boxed foods as partially hydrogenated oils. Hydrogenation is a chemical process whereby hydrogen is added to liquid oils to turn them solid, which increases a product’s shelf life and decreases your shelf life. These fats are Bad news with a capital B: Research from the Harvard School of Public Health concludes that trans fats are horrendous for your health even in tiny doses: for every 2 percent of your daily calories that come from trans fat, your risk of heart disease skyrockets by 23 percent!
These are the fats that were banned in all New York City restaurants in 2006, and more recently from all packaged foods since they no longer meet the FDA’s distinction of being “generally recognized as safe” for human consumption. The food industry has until 2018 to remove artificial trans fats from all processed food products, but you can get a jump start and avoid these products even before they’re pulled from the shelves by understanding how to read labels. Be careful, though. Food manufacturers are very clever. Their products can still contain trans fat even if the ingredients panel says “zero trans fat.” If you spot any ingredients that say “partially hydrogenated oil,” or if it includes margarine, or if you see the term “shortening,” there are trans fats. Toss them out of your shopping cart and onto the Trans-Siberian Railway!
Next up, fats that are solid at room temperature are known as saturated fats, and they are found almost exclusively in meat and dairy products. The only exceptions are nuts and seeds (5 to 10 percent saturated fat) and coconuts (91 percent). During the next seven days, I want you to steer clear of saturated fats because of their association with promoting heart disease, type 2 diabetes, major cancers, and obesity. If people tell you they are a fan of saturated fats, what they’re essentially saying is they’re a fan of meat and dairy products. This is why the Atkins people, the South Beach people, and most recently the Paleo people are trying to bring back saturated fat. It’s the lifeblood of their programs. Of course, if everyone had time to read the medical literature, all these gimmicky diets would be dead in the water. But people love to hear good news about their bad habits (remember those old ads from the 1950s claiming most doctors choose Camel cigarettes?) and will hang on until the bitter end.
Here’s a Finnish study that really blew my mind. Right after World War II, Finland decided to jump on the meat-and-dairy bandwagon like the rest of the Western world. Sure enough, that wagon brought Finland to the same health wasteland it brought America. The Finnish diet was high in saturated-fat-laden meat and dairy products, heavy in salt, low in fruits and vegetables, and by the 1970s the mortality rate due to heart disease among Finnish men was the highest in the world. But a group of intrepid researchers decided to help convert Finnish dairy farmers into berry farmers, and eventually the project expanded into educating the entire country about the dangers of a diet based around saturated fat. It paid off. For instance, in 1972, 60 percent of Finns reported using butter on their bread. Nowadays, barely 5 percent do. Over the ensuing decades there was as much as an 80 percent drop in heart disease mortality and a seven-year boost in life expectancy for men and a six-year boost for women. Not surprisingly, that coincided with a big drop in saturated fat intake, from 21 percent of total calories to 14 percent.
But the problems with saturated fat don’t end with heart disease. The Harvard Women’s Health Study, which followed thousands of women for ten years, concluded that high saturated-fat intake, mainly from the likes of processed foods, meat, and dairy, is associated with cognitive decline. Women who consumed the most saturated fat had 60 to 70 percent increased odds of experiencing deteriorated brain function, while those who took in the least saturated fat had the same brain function on average as women six years younger!
In addition, saturated fat can build up in muscle cells, which can lead to insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes. Moreover, saturated fat can also kill off the delicate beta cells in your pancreas that produce insulin. As a study from the University of Minnesota, reported in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, concluded, “The proportional saturated fatty acid composition of plasma is positively associated with the development of diabetes. Our findings… suggest indirectly that the dietary fat profile, particularly that of saturated fat, may contribute to the etiology of diabetes.”
And listen up, fellas: When it comes to saturated fat, you need to worry about your johnson along with your ticker. A recent Harvard University study suggested that just a small increase in saturated-fat intake was associated with a significant drop in sperm count. Another study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition found that consuming lots of saturated fat can reduce sperm counts by as much as 65 percent!
Let’s keep this simple: If that fat comes from an animal, it should stay in the animal. Animal fats have fault lines the size of San Andreas. The fat from beef is nearly 40 percent saturated. Chicken fat is more than 30 percent saturated. Egg fat is more than 30 percent saturated. But the number one source of saturated fat isn’t meat or eggs—it’s dairy, specifically cheese. Yes, your beloved cheese! That concentrated source of cow milk is more than 80 percent fat (and 70 percent saturated). Did you know that whole milk is 51 percent fat? One 8-ounce glass has the same amount of saturated fat as 4 strips of bacon. Two percent milk is 35 percent fat, and one glass has the same amount of saturated fat as 2½ strips of bacon. And 1 percent milk is actually 25 percent fat and has the same amount of saturated fat as 1½ strips of bacon. (The percentages in milk refer to the amount of fat by weight, not by calories. For example, if you have 100 pounds of 2 percent milk, 2 pounds of the milk is pure fat.)
In addition to all the health problems associated with trans and saturated fats, there are also toxic heavy metals, pesticides, and pollutants that migrate to, and are stored in, the fat of animals. Dioxins, for example, are environmental pollutants that can cause reproductive and developmental disorders, destroy the immune system, and cause cancer. You don’t get them from asbestos or insecticides, though: More than 90 percent of human exposure comes through eating saturated fats from meat, dairy, and fish.
Finally, there are two types of unsaturated fat: monounsaturated and polyunsaturated. Monounsaturated oils are liquid at room temperature, but when refrigerated they begin to solidify. The biggest source of monounsaturated fats is cooking oils, especially canola, olive, and peanut; nuts such as macadamias and hazelnuts; and fatty vegetables such as olives and avocados. Monounsaturated fats are unnecessary, and research by Dr. Lawrence Rudel from the Wake Forest School of Medicine suggests that monounsaturated fats promote atherosclerosis at the same rate as saturated fats, much to the dismay of everyone who thinks a Mediterranean-style diet based on olive oil, olives, and avocados is healthy. (For more information about the dangers of cooking oil, see chapter 2.)
But don’t despair! We’ve read all about bad fats, but there are good-guy fats out there as well! I’m talking about polyunsaturated fats. Not only are they healthy, they are essential. Your body cannot live without polyunsaturated fats, and that’s why you need to be eating more of them! Like many other vital nutrients, your body cannot produce its own polyunsaturated fats—they must come from your food. More specifically, they must come from plant food. Once you realize there is an abundance of naturally occurring healthy fats in plant-based foods, you will never look at oats or kale the same way!
During the course of the Seven-Day Rescue, we’ll be focusing on polyunsaturated fats, specifically omega-3 fatty acids. These fats help your body do pretty much every darn thing possible: fight infections, regulate blood clotting, build muscle, burn fat, preserve brain function, destroy cancer cells, and prevent heart disease and stroke by reducing inflammation and lowering blood pressure. The best sources of omega-3s are whole, plant-based foods such as green leafy vegetables, beans, ground flaxseed meal, walnuts, chia seeds, and hemp seeds.
The other type of polyunsaturated fats are omega-6 fatty acids, but these aren’t nearly as healthy as omega-3s. In fact, most of us are getting more omega-6s than we should, mainly because these days omega-6s are overwhelmingly found in processed foods and vegetable oils. Throughout most of human evolution, our ratio of omega-3s to omega-6s was about 1:1. That’s because we mainly ate plants, not Pringles. Nowadays, however, most Americans have anywhere from a 10:1 to a whopping 25:1 ratio of omega-6s to omega-3s. The science is complicated, but in short form, too many omega-6s in your diet can cancel out the health benefits of omega-3s. The result is chronic-disease-promoting inflammation.
You have to be careful with omega-6 fats because excessive amounts are found in certain plant foods. For example, almonds have a horrendous 2,500:1 ratio of omega-6s to omega-3s. That ain’t going to cut the mustard during the Seven-Day Rescue. Instead, we’re going to limit our nut intake to walnuts. They have the lowest ratio of omega-3s to omega-6s at 1:3, which will help alleviate the chronic inflammation that has built up in your body after years of eating the wrong foods.
During the Rescue Diet, your total calories from plant fats will top off at 15 percent—with 0 percent coming from animal fats. This will allow you to get plenty of nurturing and healthy essential omega fats while your body starts to heal itself at a cellular level and a macro level. In fact, my father insists that his patients who are reversing their heart disease derive no more than 10 percent of their calories from fat, and he has achieved some of the most dramatic before-and-after results in medical history.
In addition to limiting your intake of nuts, seeds, and avocados, you need to learn how to read a food label to determine how much fat resides in any given product. I’m a little more lenient than my father is, but we still want to make sure that no more than 25 percent of any packaged food’s calories come from fat, just as I recommended in my first book, The Engine 2 Diet.
The nutrition facts label does most of the math for us—there’s a handy “calories from fat” panel that helps us figure it out. Let’s take Lay’s Classic Potato Chips, for example. The total calories per serving are 160, but the calories from fat are a massive 90. The easiest way to figure out 25 percent, using simple division, is to look for the total calories per serving. Next, divide those calories by four—that will give your magical 25 percent. For example, in our Lay’s potato chips, the total calories are 160. If we divide by 4, we get 40. Therefore, we don’t want our calories from fat to be over 40. With the Lay’s, the number of calories coming from fat is 90, which is definitely greater than 40. So give those chips the ol’ heave-ho!
If you do the math and divide 90 by 160, you’ll discover the amount of fat in these potato chips is actually 56 percent, unlike, say, a delicious baked sweet potato, which has 60 calories but only 1 lonely calorie from fat—good for an artery-soothing 1.6 percent.
Another task I want you to undertake when you are buying packaged, canned, and boxed goods: Read the list of ingredients and be on the lookout for added fats we want to avoid over the next seven days. These include saturated animal fats such as butter, eggs, lard, cheese, chicken fat, and beef fat; trans fats in the form of partially hydrogenated and hydrogenated vegetable oils; and all extracted vegetable oils such as olive oil, canola oil, sunflower oil, safflower oil, grape-seed oil, coconut oil, palm oil, corn oil, flaxseed oil, and walnut oil.
Plants are the mother lode of healthy fats. Did you know that all plant-based foods contain essential fats? Strawberries, apples, potatoes, corn, and even grapes all have fat just like they have protein and carbohydrates—and without any of the disease-promoting garbage you get with animal-based food. Simple oats? Sixteen percent fat. Kale? Eleven percent fat. Grapes? Nine percent fat.
When you load up on healthy fats, your body will thank you. Your cells will become liberated, your mind will become clear, your heart will sing, and your libido will reach new heights!
We are drowning in seas of salt, lakes of sugar, and oceans of fat. Instead of sending us life vests, the food companies are sending us lead weights. When you hear about conglomerates like Unilever investing $30 million in a twenty-person team to study the sensory power of high-fat food—or when soda companies use regression analysis and sophisticated math to find the “bliss point,” that ideal amount of salt, sugar, and fat to add to their product for peak addiction—you realize that multibillion-dollar corporations don’t always have our best interests in mind.
Your body wants to fight back against salt, sugar, and fat. As a study in the Journal of Food Science points out, we can actually taste fat like we taste salt and sugar, and eating too much of all three blunts our taste buds. Like a drug addict, we need more and more to be satisfied.
The Seven-Day Rescue stops your addiction in its tracks. Once you lay off the added poisons, your taste buds actually become more sensitive again. I’ve had people come up to me after the seven days astounded by how much less salt they’re pouring onto their food. This helps explain why a study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition found that participants who switched to a low-salt diet for only a few weeks refused to return to heavily salted food. It tasted terrible!
Healthy, plant-based food tastes wonderful. If you’ve grown up on the typical American diet, you just need to give your poor taste buds some time to wake up. They’ve been beaten unconscious by the onslaught of salt, sugar, and fat. But don’t worry, after seven days they will wake up with a vengeance, craving strong, healing plants!