CHAPTER 1

COOK OR BE COOKED

How many times have you had, or heard, these conversations?

“I know I’m carrying extra weight, but I just can’t lose it.”

Or:

“I lost twenty pounds last year, but I’ve gained it all back and then some.”

Or:

“My doctor just told me that if I don’t watch my diet and start exercising, I’m on my way to developing diabetes.”

This cookbook has been written to end those conversations. It will teach you to reorient your food life and your life in general. It will help you feel better, live healthier, be more productive, and—believe it or not—lose weight without dieting. You will be able to do this by taking advantage of the hormones that control energy balance and “satiety,” the feeling of being full.

Drafted with my dear friend, chef Cindy Gershen, these dishes are down-to-earth, decidedly easy, and delicious. The recipes either minimize or eliminate the ingredients that do damage to our bodies and our health: fructose (the sweet molecule that makes up refined sugar); refined carbohydrates; and processed (fiberless) foods of all kinds. They emphasize ingredients that will help your body recalibrate how it uses energy and stores fat: whole grains, whole vegetables (peels and all!), fiber, omega-3 fatty acids, and high-quality protein. And here is a huge plus: most of them can be made in less than thirty minutes of active cooking time.

These recipes have not been pulled out of thin air. They are based on the science I outlined in my first book about the obesity and diabetes pandemics, Fat Chance: Beating the Odds Against Sugar, Processed Food, Obesity, and Disease. They have been drawn from the more than thirty years of experience that Cindy has had as a successful restaurateur and caterer in the San Francisco Bay Area, where we both live.

WHY THIS COOKBOOK?

Frankly, you need this cookbook, no matter what your weight. It’s not just because the way most of us are eating today is making us fat. Even more alarming, the Industrial Global Diet is making us seriously ill. As I explain more fully in Fat Chance, 40 percent of normal-weight Americans suffer from the same diseases as the obese: type 2 diabetes, lipid disorders, hypertension, heart disease, cancer, and dementia. Being thin or normal weight is not a Get Out of Jail Free card.

This affects all of us, doctors included. For instance, my friend, colleague, and noted surgeon turned nutrition scientist Dr. Peter Attia discovered that he was prediabetic, even though he is young, slender, and exercises three or four hours a day. Dr. Attia recounted his personal experience with prediabetes in a TEDMED talk: http://www.ted.com/talks/peter_attia_what_if_we_re_wrong_about_diabetes.html. He lost forty pounds and reversed his prediabetes with improvements in his diet.

The bottom line is that the Industrial Global Diet is killing people while bankrupting the American medical enterprise. If we do nothing in America, Medicare will be broke by 2026 due to the enormous burden of such chronic metabolic diseases as diabetes. And America exports its diet around the world to the detriment of both developed, and developing, countries. It has to stop. But it won’t stop until you make it stop.

Change will not come from the food and diet companies. It will not come from restaurants or supermarkets. You and your family will drive this change, cooking together in your own kitchens. Spatulas and spoons are the first line of defense in the war against bad food. Change starts at home. The food industry, like any industry, must be responsive to its customers. If you don’t buy it, they won’t sell it.

We’ve lost an entire generation of cooks to our fast food culture. Cooking is a skill passed down from parent to child. If your mother doesn’t teach you, where are you supposed to learn to chop onions, or cream butter, or make salad dressing? American high schools used to teach home economics, and that’s gone too, in the name of education cutbacks and No Child Left Behind (which is really No Child Moving Forward and No Teacher Left Standing). The majority of kids growing up today have never boiled water, not even in a microwave. Kids create a dish from scratch? As they say in Brooklyn, my hometown, “Fuggedaboutit!”

If you don’t know how to cook—and a 2011 survey found that nearly one-third of Americans don’t—fear not. These recipes do not require exotic spices or pricey equipment or hours of prep time. All of them can be made with basic kitchen tools, with nothing more exotic than a blender, in less than half an hour of active cooking time. They have to be: They were tested by Cindy and her high school students at Mount Diablo High School in Concord, California, where she teaches healthy cooking and responsible eating. If kids can make these recipes in less time than a school period, you can too! And if high school students, who are notorious for not eating anything healthier than Flamin’ Hot Cheetos and a corn dog or drinking anything healthier than a Starbucks Frappuccino, can enthusiastically consume their own creations made by their own hands, you can too! In all honesty, your lives may depend upon it.

WE’RE ALL GETTING FATTER AND SICKER

If you doubt the seriousness of this epidemic, consider these signs of the Dietary Apocalypse: Nearly 70 percent of Americans are overweight; 30 percent are obese. In 1980, only 5 percent of children scored above the 95th percentile in body mass index (BMI), the standard way of gauging healthy body weight. Today, a whopping 20 percent of kids score above the 95th percentile. In 1980, there were almost no adolescent type 2 diabetics. Today, there are 40,000. More than 8 percent, or approximately 25 million, Americans have diabetes today. By 2050, it is predicted that one-third of Americans will be diabetic.

This problem is not limited to rich, overprivileged countries like America. The World Health Organization has found that the percentage of obese humans worldwide has doubled in the last twenty-eight years. Globally, the obese now outnumber the undernourished by 30 percent. Fifteen years ago it was the other way around. Every country, even developing ones, has seen an uptick in obesity rates over the last decade. World authorities now consider obesity and its associated diseases to be a greater threat to human health than are smoking or infectious diseases.

Consider the magnitude of this change. And you know the really amazing thing? This massive, and I mean massive, upending of our food life has happened in just three decades.

IT’S NOT YOUR FAULT

Why do I care so much about getting people into their kitchens to cook healthy food? I’m a pediatrician. It’s my job to care. Specifically, I am a pediatric endocrinologist, which means that I care for children who have hormonal imbalances. Every day I see the misery that results when the body’s systems for maintaining and storing energy go haywire. It’s my job to take care of kids who have become obese because of brain tumors, hormone excesses or deficiencies, muscle weakness, or other problems. They are tragically overweight and develop chronic metabolic diseases at frighteningly early ages.

But it’s not their fault. And it’s not your fault. Everyone thinks that obesity is a matter of personal responsibility. That explanation just does not cut it. Here are six reasons why your fat is not your fault.

1. Obesity Is Not a Choice. The quality of life for obese children is the same as for children on cancer chemotherapy. Obesity is not something to which people, especially children, aspire.

2. Diet and Exercise Don’t Work. Everyone can name a celebrity who has lost weight, but the overwhelming majority of us ordinary folk fail in our weight loss efforts. Even if we are successful for a while, we gain it back in short order.

3. The Obesity Epidemic Is Now a Pandemic. This is not an American problem, an Australian problem, a British problem, or a Japanese problem. This is a global problem. Around the world, we are all eating the Industrial Global Diet.

4. Even Animals Raised in Captivity Are Getting Fat. Livestock animals drink the same water and breathe the same air that we do. We don’t yet know why this is happening to these animals, but it argues in favor of some sort of environmental insult to which all life on the planet is now exposed.

5. The Poor Pay More. The poor often don’t even have supermarkets, let alone access to healthy food. Can a person exercise personal responsibility if there’s no healthy choice available?

6. The Greatest Rate of Increase in Obesity Is in the Youngest Patients. Children between the ages of two and five have experienced the greatest rate of weight increase in the last decade. It is impossible to assign personal responsibility, or free choice, to this age group. We even have an epidemic of obese six-month-olds. Infants don’t diet or exercise.

For various reasons, the complicated system that regulates energy in our bodies—the nerves, hormones, and brain structures that determine what we eat, how much we eat, and whether our body stores that energy as fat or uses it for the business of living—has gone haywire.

IF WE’RE ALL DIETING, WHY ARE WE STILL FAT AND SICK?

You might say, “I don’t have a disease. What does all this have to do with me?”

Well, people around the world are putting on the pounds almost as quickly as the kids in my clinic. They’re gaining for similar reasons: The energy regulation systems in their bodies have been thrown out of balance. But in the case of the general public the cause is not brain tumors or other medical issues. The cause is bad food. It’s a matter of what’s in the processed food of the typical modern diet, and what isn’t in that processed food.

Every item in the supermarket screams that it’s “low fat” or “low carb” or “low calorie.” Everyone has a new, magic solution: Eat low carb! Don’t eat fat! Eat lots of protein! Drink this powder! Fast every other day! Count food points! Buy prepared diet food! Eat wild food! Eat raw food! Juice your food! Eat only greens! Take this pill! Take that shot! Have your stomach stapled!

You might ask yourself why we think we have it right. Because we are not saying any of those things. We’re not proposing a magical solution. We’re proposing a sensible solution.

I ask you: Have you seen anyone suddenly shed pounds and keep them off for more than a year or two with any of these miracle weight loss systems? Aside from bariatric surgery (which only works in about two-thirds of patients), everyone else loses for the first six months, and then the weight slowly returns over the next six months.

BIG FOOD’S NOT SO SMALL SECRETS

Here are some other things that the food and diet industries don’t want you to know:

This is just not true.

The fact is that different calories are metabolized differently, and how those calories are metabolized and where they go have everything to do with what diseases you might develop. You cannot eat 1,500 calories of jelly beans each day, lose weight, and be healthy. Your body uses and stores fuel—calories—very differently depending on the quality of those calories.

Because: A calorie is not a calorie.

But guess what? Thin does not necessarily mean healthy. Someone who looks quite thin might have a lousy diet and have “visceral fat,” that is, fat around the internal organs, putting him as much at risk for disease as someone who’s obese. That’s the case for as many as 40 percent of the normal-weight population. Sure, we should all strive to maintain a healthy weight. But focusing only on weight loss is the wrong approach to our problems.

Today highly sweetened foods are immediately available everywhere you go. Plus sugar is addictive—weakly so, like alcohol, but addictive nonetheless. The food industry has hijacked these two phenomena for their own use. That’s why more than 80 percent of the 600,000 food items in the American food supply are spiked with added sugar.

WHAT IT’S REALLY ABOUT: “METABOLIC SYNDROME”

Though it sounds pretty grim, it’s not hopeless. We just need to understand what we’re doing to ourselves and what the food industry is doing to us. And to understand that it’s necessary to outline just a bit of science. This is a cookbook, not a textbook. If you want to understand the science in detail, the complete picture is sketched out in Fat Chance.

This is what you need to know: Obesity is not a character flaw; obesity is not a behavior; obesity is not a disease (despite the American Medical Association declaring it one). Obesity is not a defect in energy balance (calories in/calories out). Rather, obesity is a defect in energy deposition—where excess energy is stored—that occurs because of changes in biochemistry and hormones that are caused by bad food.

Other downstream effects of obesity include sleep apnea, gallstones, and problems with your joints and feet. If you carry a lot of extra pounds, you put yourself at higher risk for all of these conditions. And, not surprisingly given the obesity rates, all of these medical problems have become more common in the last thirty years. They all increase the risk of early death.

This is not just a personal crisis for the people unlucky enough to carry lots of extra pounds. It’s a financial and political crisis as well. All the diseases caused by excess body fat result in at least $192 billion in medical bills in the United States alone. The 2012 bills for diabetes and dementia in the United States were $245 billion and $200 billion respectively. The global cost runs into the trillions. That doesn’t even take into account the lost productivity and the sheer human misery generated by these diseases. There’s simply not enough money to pay for it all.

Those extra pounds may take a toll on our vanity, but even more serious are the medical conditions that “travel” with obesity. These diseases are known as “metabolic syndrome.” They include, but are not limited to: type 2 diabetes, fatty liver disease, high blood pressure, lipid problems, heart disease, polycystic ovarian disease, cancer, and dementia. All of these are “chronic metabolic diseases” that occur due to ineffective energy processing, and can happen in normal weight people as well. Obesity is not the “cause” of these diseases; rather, obesity is a “marker” for these diseases. When we tackle the cause, toxic food, both the diseases and the obesity will get better, no matter what your weight.

SCIENCE FOR THE COOKBOOK CROWD

ENERGY STORAGE AND INSULIN

Lloyd Blankfein, the president of Goldman Sachs, recently stated, “The only job of business is to make money.” Not the primary job, the only job. Explains a lot, right?

The physiologic counterpart of this concept is “The only job of the pancreas is to store energy.” The pancreas makes enzymes that break down food into smaller nutrient molecules. The pancreas also makes hormones like insulin, which escorts the energy from food into fat cells for storage.

It makes sense that the quest for, the regulation of, and the storage of energy—that is, calories—is one of the most important things that the body does. After all, if you don’t store energy, none of the other processes of life can happen: no digestion, no breathing, no movement, no thought. None of it happens without calories. And insulin is the way the calories get where they need to go. Insulin shunts glucose and fatty acids to fat cells. It stores amino acids in muscle. It tops off the liver’s glucose stores as “glycogen,” or liver starch. Insulin shunts energy from the blood into fat cells.

Here’s the key takeaway fact: Insulin makes fat. More insulin, more fat.

Calories come from various kinds of foodstuffs, from carrots to cheesecake to Coca-Cola. The calories arrive at the stomach and then the small intestine, where foodstuffs are broken down into smaller components. The liver has first dibs on all of these nutrients. Whatever the liver can’t take up goes into general circulation in your bloodstream. When bloodstream glucose levels rise quickly, the pancreas releases the insulin to store the excess.

ENERGY BALANCE AND LEPTIN

On top of the energy storage system is another complex system that’s supposed to signal when you’re hungry and when you’re full. A structure at the base of your brain, the hypothalamus, acts like a traffic cop, monitoring what’s going on and directing the various hormonal systems of your body.

The hypothalamus reads what’s happening through the blood signals it gets: the hormones insulin and leptin. Insulin tells the hypothalamus when there are excess nutrients that need to be stored. Fat cells produce a different hormone, leptin, that tells the hypothalamus whether there are enough energy stores on board in the first place. In response to these signals, the hypothalamus tells your body whether you need more or less energy, whether you need to eat, or whether you need to push your chair from the table.

When these systems operate as they should, you feel hungry when your brain senses that you’re running low on calories, and you feel full when you have had enough calories. When you need to expend energy, you have it on board. Things stay mostly in balance; you feel good and you maintain a stable weight.

TOO MUCH, TOO FAST

But what happens when you eat a meal of processed food, say, a Big Mac, super-size fries, and a full-sugar Coke? Or, what happens when you eat what may seem a “healthier” option, such as pasta with packaged tomato sauce, salad and croutons with bottled dressing, and ice cream for dessert? That’s when your finely balanced energy system starts to run off the rails.

That fast food meal (or the home-cooked meal made with processed ingredients) delivers a huge burst of nutrients into your upper gut: boatloads of glucose, fructose, fats, and proteins. Because they’ve already been partly processed and because there is no fiber to slow down its absorption, these nutrients race through the stomach and small intestine. These organs absorb the nutrients very quickly, bringing everything to your liver all at once. There, your liver cells get overwhelmed, and turn the excess into liver fat. The pancreas gets the signal that the liver is sick and chugs out more insulin to make the liver do its job. This drives energy into fat cells for storage, making your body weight go up.

So what do you think happens if you eat processed or fast food regularly, day after day, year after year? Excess insulin means excess fat. Excess insulin also means that your brain can’t tell if your leptin is working. If your brain can’t see your leptin, your brain thinks it’s starving, and that makes you feel hungrier. Now you are in a vicious cycle: The more you eat, the higher your insulin goes, and the more your brain thinks it’s starving.

HOW YOUR CELLS GET SICK

At the cellular level, the avalanche of energy and nutrients overwhelms your body’s cellular power generators, called “mitochondria.” When the mitochondria get overloaded they have no choice but to turn the extra energy into liver fat, making your liver even sicker. That makes you fatter, lazier, sicker, and you don’t even know where all these problems came from. How can all this be happening when you’re dieting, buying “low fat,” and all the rest? Now you have “metabolic syndrome.” Now you are losing years of your life as your cells and your body age more quickly.

What the science shows is that obesity is not the result of aberrant behaviors. Rather, obesity is the result of the nutritional alterations that drive our insulin levels higher. Gluttony and sloth are not the cause of the rapid global rise in obesity. Rather, they are the symptoms.

With a few rare individual exceptions, that’s the biochemical and hormone situation for the 1.5 billion overweight and obese people on the planet. And it’s a problem for a sizeable proportion of normal weight people too. The majority of people today, regardless of weight, produce twice as much insulin for the same dose of glucose as people produced thirty years ago. Even if they’re eating about the same amount as the generation before them, they’re making more fat in response. That means things are getting worse just by doing nothing. And that’s what we’re seeing on the streets, in our homes, and in my clinic.

THE NOT-SO-USUAL SUSPECTS

Stress, environmental factors, lack of sleep, and many other things feed into the obesity pandemic by changing various biochemical pathways. And each person’s insulin and leptin situation is slightly different. But really, the major cause of our ballooning waistlines worldwide boils down to two words: “toxic food.”

The modern diet is larded with things that upset our energy balance and our health. Here are just a few:

FRUCTOSE

Fructose is the Voldemort of the metabolic syndrome pandemic: stealthy, ever-present, and bad for the common good. The refined, white sugar that you put in your coffee or sprinkle on your cereal consists of molecules that have two halves: One half is “glucose,” a minimally sweet substance (think molasses) that all your cells need for energy. The other half is “fructose.”

Fructose is the sweet stuff. We like it. A lot. But the truth is that our bodies don’t need fructose. There is not one biochemical reaction in the body that requires fructose. A technical way to say this is: Fructose is an energy source, but it is not a nutrition source. You can get along perfectly fine without fructose. Aside from its effects on the pleasure center of the brain, fructose has lost whatever value it might once have had to humankind. It’s “vestigial” (a holdover, unnecessary). We don’t need it. But boy, do we want it.

Does sugar cause weight gain? The data say yes, but not all that much. Is sugar a cause of obesity? In some people, probably so. Is sugar the cause of obesity? Not even close. What fructose does is cause metabolic syndrome, and that’s what makes you sick, because your liver has a harder time metabolizing it. So, instead, the liver turns fructose into liver fat, and that leads to metabolic syndrome. This drives your insulin even higher, causing more weight gain. The reverse is also true: when metabolic syndrome improves, your weight will improve of its own accord.

Americans now consume an average of 22 teaspoons of sugar each day, up nearly 50 percent from a generation ago, according to the American Heart Association (AHA). We need to cut that in half, according to the AHA.

But just cutting out “high-fructose corn syrup” (HFCS) will not save you. HFCS, honey, molasses, agave syrup, brown sugar, organic demerara sugar, beet sugar—to your body, these are all the same thing, chemically.

Today, sugar is everywhere: A 2012 report by the magazine Mother Jones found that a generation ago, Americans spent 11.6 percent of their food dollars on processed foods and sweets; now, Americans spend 22.9 percent of food dollars on them. And sugar (the sweet stuff) is in all kinds of places you might not expect: yogurt, spaghetti sauce, crackers (check out Wheat Thins), ramen noodles, even hamburger meat!

TRANS FATS

Patented in 1902 and introduced to our food supply as Crisco in 1911, trans fats are the single most dangerous item in our diet. They increase the shelf life of every item to which they are added. Bacteria don’t have the machinery to digest trans fats, so foods with trans fats keep longer. And guess what? Your mitochondria, those cellular power plants, are just repurposed bacteria. They can’t digest trans fats either. Rather than being converted into energy by the mitochondria, trans fats just stick around, literally: They line our arteries and our livers, causing disease.

OMEGA-6 FATTY ACIDS

These lead to the production of inflammatory compounds, the ones targeted by aspirin. We need some omega-6s to help our immune system function, but they’re supposed to exist in balance with the omega-3 fatty acids that fight inflammation. We’re supposed to have a 1:1 ratio between omega-6s and omega-3s. Today, most of us have twenty-five times more omega-6s on board than omega-3s. That leads to a pro-inflammatory state that drives heart disease, diabetes, and cancer.

Omega-6s are found in canola and corn oils, and in the meat from animals that are fed corn and soy. It makes a difference where you get your protein: Corn-fed beef, chickens fed commercial pellets, and corn-fed, farmed fish—all these feed into chronic inflammation in your body.

ALCOHOL

In small amounts, alcohol can be protective against disease, keeping your system on “alert,” keeping your liver’s detoxifying enzymes “ready to go,” ready to process the toxic parts of your food. But in large amounts (more than two drinks per day for a man, one for a woman), alcohol overwhelms your mitochondria, gets turned into liver fat, and drives the development of metabolic syndrome. Just look at the “beer belly” of many adults today.

BRANCHED-CHAIN AMINO ACIDS

These compounds—leucine, isoleucine, valine—are the essential building blocks of protein. When you are building muscle, these compounds are good. That’s why body builders take “protein powder.” But when you’re not building muscle, these amino acids go to the liver mitochondria to get turned into energy. And when the mitochondria get overwhelmed, they turn these branched-chain amino acids to liver fat. And liver fat, well, you get the punch line by now: Liver fat leads to metabolic syndrome. Branched-chain amino acids occur in many foods, but you find their highest levels in corn-fed beef, chicken, and farmed (corn-fed) fish.

WHAT’S GOOD FOR BIG FOOD IS BAD FOR YOU

The packaged, processed foods that make up 80 percent of what’s for sale at your local Kroger’s, Piggly Wiggly, Walmart, or Safeway are great for the food companies: They’re cheap. They’re highly profitable. Even better, they keep forever, thus, the ten-year-old Twinkie, the Oreo that never spoils.

These processed foods have been engineered to make you crave them. They’re full of sugar, fat, salt, and caffeine. Even worse, the ingredients in processed food make you overindulge once you get your mouth around them. Though there’s still a robust academic debate about whether fast food can be addictive, doctors no longer dismiss the idea out of hand.

Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute of Drug Abuse, has gone on record supporting the concept of food addiction. Let me tell you this: After treating obese children for the last fifteen years, I can categorically say there are loads of kids who can’t fend off a Big Mac Attack. The science says that sugar is addictive, though not in everyone, like alcohol. But it’s addictive nonetheless. Combine sugar with another addictive substance, like caffeine, and now you’ve a truly addictive, toxic brew: It’s called soda.

The food that’s cheapest and most available may be good for the food companies. For us mere mortals, that food is a health disaster. It’s toxic at high dose, and we’re overdosed. Most of the food that surrounds you—in the coffee break room, at the meeting, in the supermarket, at the convenience store check-out, in the movie theater, at street-side stands, at sports events, and in your own cupboards—is processed and will make you fat or sick, or both.

TARGET THE BIOCHEMISTRY TO IMPROVE YOUR HEALTH

So far, medical research has yet to find a pill or a shot that will really fix obesity, or metabolic syndrome for that matter. We can treat all the different diseases that travel with metabolic syndrome, but we can’t stop the cellular damage. Based on how metabolic syndrome occurs (mitochondrial energy overload), there is no obvious drug target, so I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for the “magic bullet.” But don’t despair. There really is hope.

In order to reverse obesity and metabolic syndrome, we have to reverse the damaging biochemistry. That means we need to give the cellular power plants, the mitochondria, a break. We need to stop the liver overload in order to fix the insulin resistance. We need to get the insulin down in order to fix the leptin resistance, the reason we think we’re hungry even though we’re fat.

Calories are not the target. INSULIN IS THE TARGET.

As long as insulin stays high, the drive to eat and the drive to store energy cannot get better. Get the insulin down. That’s what my clinic at UCSF does. That’s what the recipes in this cookbook do. That’s why this cookbook is different. And that’s why this cookbook is necessary.

Until the food industry reformulates its fare to provide quality, not quantity, and until the U.S. government stops subsidizing the very foodstuffs that drive disease (corn, soy), the American foodscape is unlikely to change. In the meantime, how do we lower our insulin? We must start eating differently, more like our parents and grandparents did. We should be cooking food that has these things:

EAT “REAL” FOOD

Food writer Michael Pollan has said, “Don’t eat food that your grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.” We don’t need to go that far. After all, would Grandma recognize tempeh, tofu, or edamame? Pollan also has said, “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” But when you eat “real” food, the not-too-much takes care of itself. And there are plenty of plants—corn, soy, refined wheat—that aren’t all that good for you.

No, the science says that we need to get back to basics. We need real, whole food that we cook at home: whole grains, grass-fed meats, meat and eggs from free-range chickens, wild fish, whole vegetables and fruits, peels and all.

Sounds utopian to most. Indeed, the problem is that “real” food is expensive and considered “specialty” food. This cookbook takes that into account. These recipes are designed for everyone, including parents in low-income neighborhoods. You should be able to afford and find the ingredients in these recipes at most local supermarkets. If you can’t, demand these ingredients. More on that later.

You aren’t going to find these healthier ingredients in “diet” frozen dinners. You’re not going to find them in packaged sauces, packaged cereals, packaged desserts, packaged snacks, or condiments, even those labeled “healthy.” In fact, if products are labeled “low fat” that often means that the fat has been replaced with sugar instead.

You’re not going to find this kind of real food at McDonald’s, or at any other fast food chain. Witness what happened to the “McLean Deluxe,” hamburger meat infused with seaweed. Even though it tasted pretty good, people would not purchase it. When people go to McDonald’s, they are not going to be diet-conscious. Even if you eat a salad from the drive-thru, that salad is going to come with croutons and salad dressing dripping in sugars, trans fats, and omega-6s. In fact, a McDonald’s salad (plus the dressing) may have more calories and sodium than does a Big Mac. The “healthy” chicken topping the salad will have been fed corn or soy, because that’s cheaper. So the chicken will be full of branched-chain amino acids and omega-6s, which leads to—you’ve got it now—metabolic syndrome.

Dessert should be special, a once-a-week affair. Refined sugar should be a treat, something to look forward to. It should not be an everyday, every meal centerpiece. And if you’re going to have dessert, make it fantastic, something to remember. If you can buy it at a supermarket, I promise you, it’s not fantastic.

Yes, avoiding the sugar and other problem nutrients in processed food is a little more trouble. Cooking things from scratch may take a little more time. Some items—fresh berries or high-quality meats or fish—may cost a little more. Would you rather pay a couple extra bucks for good produce and spend a little more time cooking whole grains? Or would you rather end up with a lifelong, chronic condition that costs tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars, and may even cost you your life? Think of it this way: it’s your time or your health. Short-term gain for long-term pain.

THE INSPIRATION FOR THIS COOKBOOK

I started synthesizing the science into these conclusions more than a decade ago. Long before I gave a lecture that turned into a four-million-plus-hit YouTube video explaining the science and the policy implications of sugar (youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM), long before I wrote Fat Chance, long before I appeared on 60 Minutes, NPR Science Friday, and The Colbert Report, I started speaking to the medical community about the obesity pandemic and the science behind it.

While giving a talk at John Muir Medical Center in 2006, I met Cindy Gershen. Cindy’s husband, Lance, is a pediatrician, and he had let her know about the subject of the talk. She came armed for bear. At first, I thought she was a stalker. Then I realized, no, she was way worse! She practically held me down kicking and screaming while she extracted every scientific point I had made to date. Then she said, “Thank you. You have just scientifically validated everything I’ve learned through experience.” We’ve been best friends ever since.

CINDY’S STORY

In 1981, when Cindy was in her mid-twenties and pregnant with her third child, she opened her first food business, Sunrise Bakery and Café in Walnut Creek, California, twenty miles east of San Francisco. After her son was born, his sleep patterns didn’t let her rest much. So she stayed up with him through the night and baked pastries, quiches, and breads for her café. People lined up outside for a taste of that home cooking.

She soon outgrew the café’s space and opened Sunrise Bistro, a block away from the café. She continued the homemade tradition there, and expanded it beyond breakfast and snacks to include lunch and dinner entrées.

Two decades later, the Bistro was still going strong and had added a catering department. Yet Cindy rarely made it out of the kitchen. Over the years, she had loaded 210 pounds onto her petite, 5-foot-3-inch frame. She had thought she was eating healthy food, but still, she had become obese.

Cindy felt tired, depressed, and ashamed. She told me that, during her fat years, she had a constant negative feedback loop going in the back of her mind: “How could she have let her body get so out of whack? What was wrong with her?” She told me that she would have done anything—anything—to get rid of the weight.

Cindy had tried a million diets: Weight Watchers, fasting, diet shakes, you name it.

Although she had a wealth of knowledge, she realized she lacked commitment. One day, Cindy decided not to diet. Instead, she fundamentally changed her approach to food. She kept her portions to reasonable levels. She eliminated snacks. She cut refined flour and refined sugar out of her diet. She avoided sodas, alcohol, and juice. She ate small amounts of whole grains, added lean proteins and dairy, doubled her fruits and tripled her vegetables.

Over six months, Cindy lost one hundred pounds. She felt healthier, more clear-headed, and more energetic than she had in years. As of this writing, she has kept that weight off for fifteen years.

“Until I heard you talk, I didn’t understand why what I did worked,” she told me. “And it is so liberating to learn that my problem with weight did not have its roots in some character flaw.”

In very simple terms, when Cindy cut out added sugar, she broke an addictive cycle with food and stopped a whole grab-bag of unhealthy processes in her body: insulin and leptin resistance, misfiring biochemical signals that meant she never felt full, overloaded mitochondria, liver fat; in other words, “metabolic syndrome.”

When Cindy ate real food rather than processed food, she felt less hungry because it took her body longer to process the fuel she was putting into it. That has helped her to stick with her new, healthier habits. By reducing her insulin, Cindy’s positive feedback loop (leptin resistance) regained its servo-mechanism (leptin sensitivity), and became a negative feedback loop once again, allowing her to lose the weight and keep it off.

Cindy still gets choked up when she talks about that day when we met. She understands better than most how painful it is to be severely overweight: the cycle of self-blame and shame and diet failure and hopelessness. She often says she can’t believe how good she feels now. She brims with energy. Let me tell you, this grandmother gets more done before 9 A.M. than most people do in an entire day. I’m an overachiever, and yet she puts me to shame. She says she still marvels at the revelation of feeling so good about her body after decades of hating it.

Cindy finally reversed her obesity by reversing her biochemistry. She did it by cooking and eating “real food”—indeed, with many of the recipes you’ll find in this book.

ROB AND CINDY GO ON THE ROAD

Not long after our first meeting, Cindy and I started working together. We called our events “Eat and Learns.” You can’t just talk to people about the benefits of “real” food; you have to show them. That means feeding them.

We spoke at retirement communities and political gatherings and schools and conferences. I’d explain the science, Cindy would tell her story and the method behind the madness. Then we’d cook a healthy meal with the audience to show them that it’s not difficult.

We do the same thing in my clinic: We hold a “teaching breakfast” with the patients and the parents. We’ve learned that you can’t get kids to change until the parents change, and they won’t change until you show them four things: 1) Their kid will eat the food; 2) Other people’s kids will eat the food; 3) They themselves like the food; and 4) They can afford the food.

Providing all that information offers the best chance of turning a family around; anything less than that is doomed to failure. And that’s what we continue to see from all these healthy-eating programs nationwide. Most health and diet regimes don’t work long-term. It’s time for a change.

CHANGING COMMUNITIES

Emboldened by her scientific understanding of her own story, Cindy revamped the menus of her restaurant and catering business, cutting down on sugar and refined flours, adding lots more beans, grains, vegetables, and fruits to her menus.

Gradually, Cindy became a public advocate for healthier food and healthier lifestyles. She sponsored a “Mayor-A-Thon” to get politicians involved, walking a mile a week with elders at a large retirement community to promote healthier lifestyles. She organized health festivals. She challenged other restaurants to serve healthier food to their customers. She started a nonprofit, Wellness City Challenge (wellnesscitychallenge .org), to promote healthier lifestyles. I agreed to serve on the board of Wellness City Challenge, and still do. I have also started my own non-profit, The Institute for Responsible Nutrition (responsiblefoods.org), to provide the medical, nutrition, and legal know-how to take on the processed food industry. We work together to change communities. Today, the San Francisco Bay Area. Tomorrow, we’re coming to your town.

As Cindy got more and more involved with promoting healthy lifestyles in local communities, she started to work more and more with schools. She saw kids like those who populate my medical practice at UCSF: preteens with diabetes, grossly obese teenagers, kids who have trouble focusing, kids who are hyperactive, kids with constant fatigue. Cindy felt that many of these problems could be solved if only kids had the knowledge and the power to change how they eat. Eventually, she decided that she needed to start teaching these kids about nutrition and how to cook healthy food.

Cindy got a part-time job as a teacher at Mount Diablo High School, an underserved, struggling school in the suburban town of Concord, about ten miles from affluent Walnut Creek, where she lives and operates her businesses. Cindy says she is blessed with the people who staff her businesses, so she could run the restaurant and catering operations while only checking in for a few hours each day. She was free to become a part-time high school teacher.

Think about this: Cindy gave up a lucrative day job that she loves to take on the biggest challenge in America: toxic food. Talk about being an overachiever!

KIDS WILL EAT THIS FOOD AND LIKE IT

During the 2011 to 2012 school year, Cindy taught one class of about twenty high school juniors how to cook healthy food. Together, they fed their entire class and offered free breakfast and lunch to all the teachers who wanted to participate. The kids ate food that everyone else says teenagers won’t eat: whole foods low in sugar and high in fiber and nutrients. Dessert was fruit, not cakes and cookies. She has continued these efforts, adding more classes through the 2012 to 2013 calendar and into the current school year.

I have visited Cindy’s classes many times, and what I’ve seen there gives me so much hope for the future. Some of Cindy’s students have lost fifty, even a hundred pounds, eating the dishes you’ll find in this cookbook. Teens who once had trouble focusing, who were once behavior problems, who once had no direction have become energized and ambitious. Cindy has changed their food and empowered her charges for the rest of their lives. The mantra of the class: “Change the Food, Change the Future.”

When we were choosing the recipes for this book, Cindy enlisted students from her classes to help test the recipes at a scale more appropriate for a home kitchen, rather than for a restaurant or a school cafeteria. After they cook, the kids eat their creations: servings of shaved, roasted Brussels sprouts; kale chips; and quinoa. When I’ve visited Cindy’s classes, I have witnessed it again and again.

Look, I’m a pediatrician. I get to see other people’s kids all day. And I’m telling you this: You have never met a more positive, friendly, alert, and engaged group of young people. No attitudes or obsessing over smart phones or gang colors here. These kids are armed with survival skills, and they’re not just surviving—they’re thriving.

YOU CAN DO IT TOO

When they see my videos on YouTube or read Fat Chance, people frequently e-mail me. The most common question, is, “So what do we do now?” Cutting out sugar and the bulk of refined flours, making things from scratch—all that sounds so difficult. It sounds so complicated. It sounds so bland. It sounds so un-fun.

Both the food and the diet industries would like you to believe just that. The reason Cindy and I decided to write this book together is that it’s just not true. It’s another misleading, corporate dogma to be debunked.

With new knowledge, a new approach to food, and a few basic cooking techniques and recipes, you can change your life based on the science I outlined in Fat Chance. The food you make can be delicious, it can be fast, and it can be fun.

The steps you need to take are not all that complicated, and it’s our hope that this book will show you that’s so. You don’t need to diet. In fact, if you ever go on a diet again, I will have failed. You can lose weight and keep it off. Even more important, you can reverse the damage of metabolic syndrome. You can live a longer, happier, and healthier life. And ultimately, it’s cheaper too. Let’s get cooking!