| Over the past 100-150 years, there has been an enormous increase in the consumption of n-6 fatty acids as a result of the increased intake of vegetable oils. In western diets today, the ratio of n-6 to n-3 fatty acids ranges from approximately 20:1 to 30:1 instead of the traditional range of 1:1 to 2:1. It is thought that a high intake of n-6 fatty acids shifts the physiologic state to one that is primarily inflammatory by producing inflammatory hormone-like molecules known as prostaglandin E2 series. |
J. Robert Hatherill
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 In contrast, western diets are prepared with extensive, often high-temperature cooking methods. Americans eat relatively few fresh foods while overconsuming highly processed ones. A typical American family may visit the market once a week and consume meat and dairy products daily.
Western-style cooking generates more cancer-causing agents than were present in the food before it was cooked. And fresh foods like vegetables and fruits, which protect from cancer, have been replaced in western diets with prepackaged, processed foods with long shelf lives. |
Dianne Onstad
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 Among their most effective therapeutic applications are as a cure for constipation, gastritis, and chronic acidosis, common complaints for those who live on western diets. The black variety of grapes are by far the most potent, being excellent detoxifiers of the whole body but especially good for the digestive tract, liver, kidneys, and blood. Those following a diet solely of grapes for several days or weeks (known as the grape cure or ampelotherapy) will feel their powerful detoxifying and alkalinizing properties. |
Bruce Fife and Jon J. Kabara
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 What is this mysterious food that has been used throughout the tropical island cultures in the Pacific, yet is relatively uncommon in western diets?
A survey of the types of foods common among these people would include bananas, mangos, papayas, kiwi, taro, sego palm root, and coconut. While all of these are common in the tropics, only a few are widely dispersed and used as staple food sources by millions of island inhabitants. Mangos, for example, are found only in limited locations and are not an important food source in most island populations. |
Brenda Davis and Tom Barnard
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 Animal products are the greatest sources of saturated fats in western diets. Saturated fat is hard at room temperature. The harder the fat, the more saturated fat it contains. Milk fat is more than 60 percent saturated, beef fat about 40 percent, chicken fat about 30 percent, and fish fat 20 to 33 percent. That compares with plant fats that are about 6 to 25 percent saturated, most being in the 10 to 15 percent range.
The important exceptions are the tropical oils. Coconut fat is more than 85 percent saturated, palm kernel oil more than 80 percent, and palm oil about 50 percent. |
Tanya Harter Pierce
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 Unfortunately, the amount of manmade, partially hydrogenated oils known as "trans-fatty acids" is extremely high in modern western diets. These trans-fats are so similar to cholesterol that our bodies cannot tell the difference. They are mistakenly used in place of good cholesterol to build cell membranes. This then causes these cell membranes to lack a vital electrical charge that would normally attract oxygen. Without sufficient oxygen, the cellular environment becomes more and more anaerobic. |
Arthur Agatston, M.D.
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 Omega-3 fat appears to be a major missing ingredient in western diets.
Finally, a number of studies have documented that several forms of nuts that are rich in mono- and polyunsaturated fats help prevent heart attacks and strokes. This gives us a great variety of foods, oils, and spreads that can make our meals taste great while actually improving our health. So including the right fats in the South Beach Diet was an easy call, and it's looking better and better as more good fat studies are reported.
Once we fine-tuned the diet, it seemed ready for a real test drive. |
Steven G. Pratt, M.D. and Kathy Matthews
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 Indeed, most of us are eating ourselves to death: only about 10 percent of Americans eat the foods that would enable them to be free of chronic disease and premature death.
Our western diets are literally killing us. While man evolved on a plant-based diet more than fifty thousand years ago, our modern diet—the one our parents ate and the one we're eating—developed only during the past fifty to eighty years. It is not serving us well. We humans are genetically "wired" for starvation, not an overabundance of food. |
Neal Barnard, M.D.
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 Women on western diets have unusually high levels of estrogens during their reproductive years and a dramatic change at menopause. They have a much worse time with menopausal symptoms, including much more aggressive bone loss, than do women on plant-based diets. They also have much more breast cancer and other hormone-related cancers. More on all of these in chapter 5.
Men on western diets have a far higher risk of prostate problems. It is hard to imagine that the prostate gland in the lower abdomen could be affected by your dinner. |
Bruce Fife and Jon J. Kabara
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| Most Americans and others who eat typical western diets get 32-38 percent of their calories from fat, most of which is in the form of unsaturated vegetable oils. Yet they still suffer from numerous degenerative conditions and weight problems. The islanders in this study consumed as much or more total fat and a far greater amount of saturated fat, yet they are relatively free from degenerative disease and are generally lean and healthy.
Considering the amount of saturated fat in their diet, Dr. Ian A. Prior and colleagues calculated their cholesterol levels. |
Jack Challem
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 Over the past several decades, however, the quantity of trans fatty acids in western diets has skyrocketed.
Partially Hydrogenated Hazards
Beginning in the 1960s and 1970s, public health officials began urging people to consume more polyunsaturated fats, particularly the omega-6 variety, and fewer saturated fats as a step toward reducing the incidence of coronary heart disease. To expand the use of omega-6 oils, food makers began hydrogenating them. Hydrogenation adds many of the qualities of saturated fat, such as butter, and also increases the amount of trans fatty acids. |
Schuyler W. Lininger, Jr. DC
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 As with amino acids in general, ornithine is predominantly found in meat, fish, dairy, and eggs. western diets typically provide 5 grams per day. The body also produces ornithine.
Ornithine Has Been Used in
Connection with the Following Condition*
Ranking
Health Concerns
Other
Athletic performance (p. 20) (for body composition and strength)
*Refer to the Individual Health Concern for Complete Information
Who Is Likely to Be Deficient? |
| Since most western diets are high in protein, the majority of diets probably supply enough sulfur.
Are There Any Side Effects or Interactions? No side effects have been reported with the use of sulfur.
Connection with the Following Conditions*
Ranking
Health Concerns
Primary
Congestive heart failure (p. 43)
Other
Diabetes (p. 53)
High blood pressure (p. 89)
Epilepsy
*Referto the Individual Health Concern for Complete Information formulas. Diabetics (p. 53) have been reported to have lower blood levels of taurine.1
How Much Is Usually Taken? |
Barrie R Cassileth, Ph.D.
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 Colon therapy, for example, is based on the idea that high-fat, western diets lead to an accumulation of a thick, gluelike substance in the colon, which in turn produces disease-causing toxins. The belief in disease-causing toxic material in the body is common in alternative medicine. The idea is not supported by mainstream science.
Biological therapies are often promoted for many different illnesses. This is possible because most proponents of biological alternatives believe that a single underlying problem causes all diseases. |
Jean Carper
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 This elicited an extraordinarily strong comment from the authoritative Nutrition Reviews: "We have the development of a new rationale for these milks, namely, protection from colon cancer for populations on western diets. More studies of the potential ... are clearly warranted. The yogurt connection cannot be overlooked."
Certainly not. After all, yogurt has had a successful 5000-year field test as a health food. Science is now merely giving millions of souls a multitude of new reasons to go on believing what they—and folk medicine—have long suspected to be true. |
Neal Barnard, M.D.
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 Second, protein tends to use up vitamin B6, and western diets are far too high in protein, due to the common use of meat, poultry, and fish. Part of the vitamin's job is to convert proteins from one form to another, and high-protein diets demand more of the vitamin than is needed on a lower-protein diet.20
HEALTHFUL SOURCES OF
VITAMIN
B6 (MG)
Avocado (1)
0.85
Navy beans (1 cup, boiled)
0.30
Banana (1)
0.66
Pinto beans (1 cup, boiled)
0.27
Broccoli (1 cup, boiled)
0.22
Potato (1, baked)
0.70
Brussels sprouts (1 cup, boiled)
0.46
Soybean flour (1 cup)
0. |
Neal Barnard, M.D.
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| There is no vitamin C in meats, and beta-carotene is scarce as well. western diets are also often low in vitamin E, vitamin B6, folate, magnesium, and zinc.30 The combination of the Western diet, reduced absorption, physical inactivity, and medications can starve your white blood cells for the vitamins and minerals they need.31
Scientists have tested various nutrients to see if a little more zinc, vitamin E, or beta-carotene will affect immune function. To an extent, they do. But a team of researchers in New Jersey stumbled on an interesting lesson. They wanted to test the effects of zinc. |
Elizabeth Somer, M.A., R.D.
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 Obesity rates doubled in the past thirty years as Japanese children switched from vegetables, rice, and fish to more western diets containing animal fat, vegetable oils, and sugar.
• Obesity trends in other countries parallel increased fat and calorie intakes and decreased activity and intake of plants.
• When people return to eating styles more in tune with their evolutionary roots, they lose weight.
THRIFTY GENES
Granted, obesity begets obesity. |
Schuyler W. Lininger, Jr. DC
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| Amino acid requirements vary according to body weight; however, average-size adults require approximately 800-1,000 mg of methionine per day—an amount exceeded by most western diets. Therefore, most people would not benefit from methionine supplementation.
Are There Any Side Effects or Interactions? Animal studies suggest that diets high in methionine, in the presence of B vitamin deficiencies, may increase the risk for atherosclerosis (p. 17) (hardening of the arteries) by increasing blood levels of cholesterol (p. 79) and a compound called homocysteine (p. 84). |
Linda B. White, M.D.
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 Eat better. western diets, with high animal fat and low vegetable fiber content, are predisposing factors in the development of heart disease. Many good books and classes are available on heart-healthy diets. of factors. They include whether high blood pressure, heart rhythm irregularities, or congestive heart failure are present and whether other disease, such as asthma, is present. Many patients require more than one drug.
Herbs that have an effect on the health of the circulatory system take time—weeks to months—to do their work. Be patient. |
Stephen T., M.D. Sinatra
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 Therefore, it makes sense to increase the fiber in our diet. western diets are too high in fat, sugar, and salt, and too low in fiber and starch. To put it simply, Americans need to eat more like the inhabitants of some of the less developed countries of the world.
The benefits of fiber are even greater than once thought. A recent article in the Journal of the American Medical Association in the spring of 1996 revealed that an increased dietary fiber intake, independent of fat intake, was extremely important in preventing coronary artery disease. |
J. Robert Hatherill
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| They breastfeed less, and they eat rich, western diets. But why are lifestyle factors so crucial to breast cancer rates? It appears that the longer a woman's fertile lifespan is (in other words, the greater the number of menstrual cycles she goes through during her life), the more prone she is to breast cancer.
Until 1960 the death rate for breast cancer in Japan was only one-sixth that of the Western world. |
Neal Barnard, M.D.
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| Men on western diets have a far higher risk of prostate problems. It is hard to imagine that the prostate gland in the lower abdomen could be affected by your dinner. But foods do influence hormones very strongly, and hormones have powerful influences on all reproductive organs, including the prostate. There is even evidence that whatever genetic tendency men may have toward baldness will be expressed earlier in those on high-fat diets. As we will see in chapter 11, the dietary hormone boost may increase testosterone's damaging effect on the hair follicle.
But the problems don't start there. |
| People on western diets tend to lose calcium from their bones surprisingly fast. For women the situation gets even worse after menopause: The more calcium they lose, the weaker their bones get.
The solution to the problem has been obscured by commercial pressures. It is hard to turn on the television without hearing commercials suggesting that milk promotes strong bones. The commercials do not point out that only 30 percent of milk's calcium is absorbed by the body or that osteoporosis is common among milk drinkers. Nor do they help you correct the real causes of bone loss. |
Neal Barnard, M.D.
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| Typical western diets include twenty times as much linoleic acid as ALA, or even more, in addition to a hefty dose of artery-clogging saturated fats. These diets program every cell in our bodies toward inflammation. An optimal diet omits meats, dairy products, and added oils and is based entirely on plant foods. know is that, if you take a supplement of borage oil, evening primrose oil, or black currant oil, the GLA in them turns into prostaglandin Ei and cools down your joints. |
Elson M. Haas, M.D.
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 I will briefly discuss some of the main categories and some specific fish that are common to our western diets.
Shellfish consist of a variety of small meaty and mineral-rich fish from two families, the mollusks and the crustaceans. The mollusks animals that are the sea filterers, or "garbage eaters," as I call them. These include clams, oysters, mussels, and scallops. I usually suggest that people avoid eating much of these foods. Since these shellfish eat by pumping water through their bodies, they can easily concentrate pollutants from the ocean. |
Bradley J. Willcox, D. Craig Willcox, and Makoto Suzuki
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 As the amount of trans fat has increased in western diets, so has heart disease. In fact, some scientists feel that trans fats are the most heavily implicated of all fats in the worldwide heart disease epidemic.
Since manufacturers, as of this writing, are under no obligation to list trans fatty acids on their food labels, products can be labeled fat-free when in reality they are loaded with trans fat. One popular margarine even goes so far as to advertise that it has o grams of trans fat when it actually has 0.5 gram per serving—not a lot, but certainly more than advertised. |
Andrew L. Stoll
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 These Eskimos succumbed to circulatory disease at only one-third the rate of those on modern western diets in the United States. However, an important caveat is that these studies did not look at other factors, such as exercise levels, which are known to have an impact on heart disease.
The Eskimo diet is extremely limited due to a lack of food diversity (particularly plants) in the harsh arctic environment, especially compared to the one around the East African lakes. |
Sandra Steingraber
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 Finally, the adage that high-fat western diets are the cause of breast cancer has not yet been supported by data. Dietary fat has long been a centerpiece of study in the investigation of breast cancer risk.
And yet, several long-term, heavily funded studies have indicated that dietary fat is unlikely to play a major role by itself. Rather than continuing to focus singlemindedly on the absolute quantity of fat consumed, several researchers have called for a more refined, ecological approach to diet. |
Committee on Diet, Nutrition, and Cancer, Assembly of Life Sciences National Research Council
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 However, since dietary fat is highly correlated with the consumption of other nutrients that are present in the same foods, especially protein in western diets, it is not always possible to attribute these associations to fat intake per se with absolute certainty.
Breast Cancer. Several international correlation studies have shown direct associations between per capita fat intake and breast cancer incidence or mortality (Armstrong and Doll, 1975; Carroll, 1975; Drasar and Irving, 1973; Gray et al., 1979; Hems, 1978; Knox, 1977). |
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