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Specific Steps to Excellent Health

Joel Fuhrman, M.D., is a family physician and researcher who specializes in reversing disease through nutrition. Millions of people were inspired by his work through the PBS special, 3 Steps to Incredible Health, which was the network's highest grossing pledge drive program of 2011. Dr. Fuhrman is the number one New York Times bestselling author of Eat to Live, and research director for the Nutritional Research Foundation. He coined the term “nutritarian,” which means someone who strives for nutritional adequacy for improved health and whose food choices are high in nutrients per calorie.

What is a diet that won't just be a little better than the norm, but that will maximize your potential for optimal health? Which vitamins are healthy for you, and which are so hazardous that they should come with warning labels? What about food allergies, and whole grains? The doc is in, and he's here to give you the latest breakthroughs in nutrition for optimal health.

JOHN ROBBINS: I find you somewhat unique among medical doctors. Very few even study nutrition, much less help their patients apply it. It has occurred to me that a doctor who doesn't know about nutrition is something like a fireman who doesn't know about water.

DR. JOEL FUHRMAN: The medical profession developed with a primary focus on developing and prescribing medications to reduce people's symptoms, rather than on dealing with the causes of disease. Thousands of years ago, a doctor was someone who taught people how to live a healthy life. But I think it has evolved to now being a person who is an expert in giving medications. The trouble is that taking toxic remedies to resolve bad lifestyle choices is largely ineffective and allows for peoples' underlying disease process to continue advancing. I think there are a lot of doctors re-evaluating their careers right now. Fortunately I had the opportunity to learn about nutrition at a young age and to pursue a career where nutrition became the centerpiece of my medical practice. It's afforded so much personal reward to help many thousands of people reverse their conditions and get well, without medications.

JOHN ROBBINS: What are the rewards that our readers could look forward to if they were to heed your suggestions?

DR. JOEL FUHRMAN: Proper nutrition is the foundation for protecting yourself from cancer, obesity, diabetes, heart attacks, and strokes. Most people who learn about my Nutritarian approach are in poor health, after living thirty to fifty years on a diet that breeds disease. Now they can lose weight and they can get in better health, lower their blood pressure, or get rid of their diabetes. But the question is: Is that enough? After forty to fifty years of eating a cancer-causing diet, will a change now be sufficient to prevent you from having your life cut short with a tragic cancer at a later stage from what you ate in the first half of your life?

My answer is that eating decently or making moderate beneficial changes is not adequate enough to repair the broken DNA cross-link—the methylation of DNA. In other words, whatever damage occurred to your cells over those years even before you were born, even when your eggs were in your mother's body before you were conceived, has an impact still. Your health can be affected long-term by your exposure to toxins, and by a lack of nutrients.

So we maximize the body's ability to repair dysfunctional DNA, to remove toxins from the cells, and to restore itself and its immune system. We have to undo the damage that, if left unchecked, would lead to cancer. My niche in the nutritional world is to help people who don't just want a little better health, but who want to know what would be optimal. To maximally repair cellular damage, we are going to push the envelope of human longevity and really see if we can win the war on cancer.

My approach is not just about losing weight and not having heart attacks. It's also about maximizing healthy life expectancy. A hundred years ago people lived about as long as they are living now. Life expectancy was lower because we had much higher infant and child mortality rates, and many women died during childbirth. But in the real comparison of health issues, we found that people who lived fifty or a hundred years ago actually didn't have as much disability, discomfort, and pain in the last ten years of their lives as people do today. They mostly had a bad time in the last three to six months of their lives. Now people are over-medicated and sickly, and have a very poor healthy life expectancy. This is because the American diet has degenerated with so much fast food, processed food, and refined food.

We are literally seeing an epidemic of disease that's weighing down our health-care system, weighing down our economy, and creating huge amounts of personal human tragedy. Excellent nutrition is tremendously powerful in giving us personal choice and control of our health destiny. It can also be tasty, fun, and exciting to actually be in great health and continue to have a healthy life as we age.

JOHN ROBBINS: You coined the term “nutritarian.” Would it be correct to say that refers to someone whose food choices provide an optimal amount of nutrients per calorie?

DR. JOEL FUHRMAN: Sure, but also a person who strives for better nutrition. A “nutritarian” is someone who chooses to have excellent nutrition, in order to have better health. A lot of people are “nutritarians” and have never heard of the word before. Micro-nutrients are the noncaloric portion of food—the vitamins, minerals, phytochemicals, and other newly discovered factors that are so important for human health. I use the formula H=n/c (health equals nutrients divided by calories). If you want to live a long time, repair cellular damage, and protect against late-life diseases like dementia, you want a large amount of micro-nutrients per caloric buck. That means a high n/c ratio. You need a broad spectrum of micro-nutrient diversity. You need to eat a lot of green vegetables and other colorful foods that supply you with high levels of the phytochemicals that prevent cancer.

JOHN ROBBINS: Which micronutrients are the most important to consume to make sure we have superior immune function?

DR. JOEL FUHRMAN: The most important nutrient for you to consume is the one that you're missing. You have to make sure that you have comprehensive micronutrient adequacy. If your body is an orchestra, you can't have a few extra drum sets pounding on while there are no flutes present. You have to make sure everything's present to create the music.

It's not just about eating more broccoli. It's also about, for example, eating some mushrooms, because mushrooms supply some particular nutrients that are not present in many other foods and that are important to achieve comprehensive micronutrient adequacy. Micronutrient adequacy is not about numbers, but about the complexity and the diversity that is necessary for superior immune function.

JOHN ROBBINS: What are the micronutrients that most Americans are deficient in, and what are good sources to provide them?

DR. JOEL FUHRMAN: The American diet couldn't be better designed to create cancer and heart attacks had we designed it for that purpose. Right now it's degenerated to the point that 62 percent of calories are from refined foods and about 26 percent come from animal products. Of the 10 percent of calories that remains from unrefined plant food, half of that comes from white potato products, which are not exactly nutrient-rich. Americans are just not consuming fruits, vegetables, beans, nuts, and seeds. They're not consuming sufficient quantity of natural plant foods with a broad assortment of protective micronutrients.

I coined another acronym called G-BOMBS, to help people remember the foods that they are supposed to be consuming on a regular daily basis.

The “G” stands for greens, which includes both raw and cooked green vegetables. Most of all we're focusing on leafy greens and cruciferous vegetables like broccoli, cabbage, and Brussels sprouts. A mixture of raw vegetables and cooked green vegetables in your diet has been documented to have an association with longer life and protection against cancer.

The first “B” stands for beans, which are associated with longer life and are a rich source of phytonutrients that link to longevity in humans.

The “O” stands for onions. I've been shocked and pleasantly surprised at the studies that show how protective onions are against cancer. I have changed my diet dramatically in the past five to ten years, trying to shred raw onion on my salad, and to eat more onions and mushrooms.

The third one is “M” for mushrooms, which is a very exciting part of research. It appears that mushrooms have the ability to actually enhance human immune function. They help to label cells that are becoming abnormal for your immune recognition to remove them. Mushrooms also have weight-loss benefits outside of being low in calories, because they actually have angiogenesis inhibition effects, which prevent the blood vessels from fueling fat expansion. So they have fat-inhibiting effects as well as cancer- and tumor-inhibiting effects.

The second “B” stands for Berries. Berries have Polyphenols and Anthocyanidins, which are very beneficial for the brain and the body's immune system.

The “S” stands for Seeds, like flax seeds, Chia seeds, hemp seeds, pumpkin seeds, and sesame seeds. Having some seeds on a regular basis can be beneficial for numerous reasons. The lignins have cancer-protective effects, and the fatty acids are beneficial for health, the stabilization of inflammation, and heart regularity.

We can construct dietary recommendations to maximize human immune function, and to repair and resist the process of aging. We have an opportunity to live longer and in better health than in any other time or place in human history.

JOHN ROBBINS: Is there a role for whole grains in your diet?

DR. JOEL FUHRMAN