Life at Its Best.
I thought I would start off by showing you a slide of the
university where I work.
This is University of the Western Cape, this is
the student hall and that's the square that the students
affectionately call Red Square for some reason or other.
And that's where we did quite a fair amount of our research on health.
Now here's an interesting statistic.
When you compare the UK with Japan, you will see that in
the '60s Japan didn't know colorectal cancer as we know it in the West,
and as time progressed, so colorectal cancer increased in Japan.
Now this is amongst men where as in the '60s, colorectal cancer was quite
prevalent in Western society.
Now in the '60s they would teach that the Japanese must be genetically
different to everyone else and that's why they didn't get
these diseases as readily.
But as we went into the mid '80s, the Japanese had caught up.
So obviously the genes changed within those few years, right?
Or maybe something else changed.
When we look at the women, it's the same sort of
scenario, also a catching up.
The women lagging a little bit behind the men; the men seemed to change more
rapidly than the women but it's the same basic trend.
So what we have is a change in disease occurrence within a nation in
a period stretching over just 15 years.
Now what has changed?
Obviously it's not only genes that run in a family but diets
run in a family as well.
Now what had happened is that Japanese society was adopting
western lifestyles, imported mainly from the United States of America,
like many things, and so they brought the
same sort of diseases.
If we look at the 10 leading affiliations that caused death in
the United States, in 1995, the number one killer was heart
and blood vascular diseases, the second one was cancer
and then came chronic lung diseases, accidents, pneumonia, diabetes,
HIV, suicide, liver sclerosis, kidney failure, and all
the other possibilities in between from infectious diseases to you name it.
But the two top killers obviously were heart and blood vessel diseases.
And if you look at the causes, of what caused them, then it
gets even more interesting.
So, almost a million people died in that one year from heart
and vascular diseases and over half a million on cancer and then there was
a reduction as we go down the list.
So AIDS not very prevalent, those two were the top diseases.
And looking at the reasons, so the underlying factors,
poor diet and inadequate exercise is the number one cause of
those diseases in the world.
Tobacco was the number two cause, alcohol the number three
and then come the infectious diseases, and these infectious diseases are
largely transmitted by what we eat as well.
So the first four causes have to do with lifestyle.
That's quite incredible.
Then come toxic agents, firearms, sexual behavior,
motor vehicles and illicit drugs.
So obviously, if we could change our lifestyles, that would make
a very, very big difference.
Obviously, from what we saw, seven factors to longevity,
no smoking must be quite high up on the list.
Number two, we need enough rest.
Sleep seven to eight hours-few people actually do that,
and eat breakfast regularly.
We will be talking about that some more as we go along what
the benefits are of eating breakfast.
People in a busy lifestyle tend to skip breakfast because
they haven't got time.
They are rushed in the mornings and they make lunch and
dinner their main meals.
No eating between meals-that is a very important criteria.
If you don't eat between meals, you don't have to start
the process all over again, leads to much fermentation.
We will deal with that issue as we go along.
Maintaining a proper weight is important.
Exercising regularly, and moderate or preferably no
alcohol-those would be the factors that science has lifted up
as the main ones leading to longevity.
Here's an interesting statistic.
How many patients are killed by their cures?
This is a study that's being done all over the world.
This particular article comes from a scientific magazine
and it deals with the United Kingdom.
If you are going to see over here, 70,000 deaths and cases of serious
disability in England each year, from what, prescribed medication.
That makes prescribed medication the number three killer in
the industrialized world.
So number one killer is heart/vascular disease, number two killer is cancer
and the number three killer in the world, in industrialized
countries-prescribed medication.
That's not drug use,-prescribed-what the doctors prescribe.
So, incompatibility and medication can lead to death.
So it would be a wise idea if one lived healthily
and didn't have to consume all this stuff.
Sometimes medication is absolutely essential in order to survive.
Like an antibiotic, when you are seriously ill, can save your life.
A wrong one can kill you.
So, sometimes one doesn't have much choice.
But if you were healthy and you could avoid many of these
things, that would be the best of all.
A very important factor in modern research is free radical research.
Free radicals are charged particles or charged chemicals which
create oxidative damage.
And we can mop them up by having the right components in our diets.
Vitamin pill fails to fend off cancer.
This was an article in New Scientist Magazine.
Taking a supplement of beta-carotene for example, is not equivalent to
eating a diet that is rich in fruit and vegetables.
Now what does this actually mean?
You see, people today live fast lifestyles and they know
that their vegetables are good for them.
We always tell the kids now eat your broccoli and the kids says ugh,
I don't want to eat my broccoli; eat your carrots, and the kids says,
ugh, I don't want to eat my carrots, and so we have this problem.
And in a fast food lifestyle, where you don't have the healthy foods,
the obvious thing is to say, give me a supplement,
just give me a tablet, and then I can eat whatever junk I like
and I will take it as a supplement.
And so the cancer societies of the world realized that what was
preventing disease let's say in a healthy society was their regular
intake of foods, particularly yellow foods that are rich in beta-carotene.
And so they thought, well obviously beta-carotene is the agent
that prevents cancer, and so they made a tablet with
beta-carotene and decided to sell it to people as a preventative for cancer.
Now the first test they did was to give it to people that smoke.
Then they sold these things as anticancer foods.
Fortunately, you still have some laws in this country and other countries,
where they say, you cannot make a claim that something will prevent
cancer without scientific proof that it actually will do so.
That makes sense, doesn't it?
So what they did is they told the companies that they cannot state on
their product this will prevent cancer.
You first have to prove that it prevents cancer.
So two studies were done in the world, Finnish studies and
the CARET study, where they gave extracted beta-carotene to patients,
to smokers, to prevent lung cancer.
And the study was to run for a 10 year period and they were
convinced that those who took the beta-carotene would be
protected against cancer.
Well they stopped the Finnish study after some eight years
because they started realizing something very strange.
After a period of time it became evident that those patients,
so those people, those smokers who received the beta-carotene actually
had more cancer than those who got a placebo.
That was interesting.
So quickly they stopped the CARET Study which was supposed to
run for a number of years, 10 years, they stopped it after four years.
And they did the statistical analysis and lo and behold the same thing.
After just four years, it was very evident that those who
received the beta-carotene had a higher incidence of cancer
than those who didn't.
Oops, so the tablet didn't do the trick.
And this was a serious issue.
So the magazines and the medical articles came up.
There is one in a German news magazine, Gefährliches Beta-Karotin-dangerous
beta-carotene, and it will cause major problems and actually lead to
an increased incidence of cancer.
Well why does this happen?
Obviously beta-carotene is good for you because everybody knows
that people with diets rich in beta-carotene are less
likely to get cancer.
See, the problem lies in the enhancement of activity through
a combination of natural foods.
In normal foods, you have combinations of Es and Cs and other compounds.
If you bite into a carrot, you get lots of beta-carotene,
but you also get lots of flavonoids-another group of compounds
that can increase the reducing capacity of a vitamin twentyfold to fiftyfold.
That means that if you have a positive side effect of these
nutrients that they act as antioxidants themselves
and also boost the activity of whatever you are taking.
So basically, if you want to have Vitamin E, the best way to take it is
in a food that is rich in Vitamin E.
So for example, wheat germ oil is very
rich in this product, one tea spoon 83% of your recommended
daily allowance, sunflower seed oils.
All the seed ones are rich in Vitamin E, and they even list margarine,
we will come to these later.
Blueberries are quite rich, mustard greens, soybeans
and wheat germs.
And a list of the top 10 antioxidant fruits and vegetables are strawberry,
plum, orange, red grapes, kiwi, grapefruit, white grapes, banana,
apple, tomato, those are the ones.
But this doesn't mean that the others are not important,
all of them are important, but these are very rich in antioxidants.
And the vegetables are garlic, kale, spinach, Brussels sprouts,
alfalfa sprouts, broccoli, beets, bell peppers, onions, and corns,
although I wouldn't put corn as a vegetable-I would put it
as grain, nevertheless.
Those are sort of recognized as the top ones.
So if you want to have a vitamin supplement, there it is.
That's the best vitamin supplement in the world.
It gives you a balanced combination of all these components and
is what we really need.
Phytochemical research on health is booming in the world today.
And there is a lot of argument about this issue.
But I thought it would be perhaps a good idea if we went through this
little exercise together.
What is a phytochemical?
Phyto is plant, chemical is a chemical so phytochemical
are chemicals in plant.
So that's basically what it means.
And in plants, besides the nutrients like the carbohydrates,
the fats and the proteins, you have a lot of these phytochemicals.
And some of these phytochemicals are anticarcinogenic-they fight cancer,
and they prevent diseases.
So phytoestrogen, for example, is a very important phytochemical
and many plant foods contains phytoestrogens.
Now don't get confused.
A phytoestrogen is not the same as a normal estrogenic
hormone in the female.
Women produce estrogen, the female hormone, and men
that consume phytoestrogen won't suddenly become feminine,
definitely not.
These chemicals are similar to estrogens but they are not the same.
Now a woman, for example, in menopause, will have all kinds of
symptoms that are debilitating.
And so she will go to the doctor and the doctor will
prescribe hormone replacement therapies.
Isn't that right?
And he will prescribe estrogens to replace the natural estrogens
that have been taken out of the system.
What happens then is that you are supplying
a synthetic or extracted estrogen to take the place of what you have lost,
and it has been found that that estrogen is carcinogenic.
And so your risk of breast cancer is greatly increased when you
take those type of estrogens.
Now plants contain natural estrogens which are not like mammalian estrogens,
but they compete for the binding site and strangely enough,
these are anticarcinogenic.
And so women and men need these phytoestrogens in their diets.
Health benefits of diets rich in phytoestrogens would Include,
for example, prevention of breast cancer.
Gentleman, in case you thought that that only applied to women,
prostate cancer and other cancers are prevented by phytoestrogens.
Heart disease and stroke, osteoporosis, menopausal symptoms,
brain diseases linked to aging, Alzheimer's, and all of these can be
retarded greatly by phytoestrogens.
Alcoholism, if you were an alcoholic and you have to overcome
the negative effects, then phytoestrogens can help.
And inflammatory diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis,
all of these are benefited by diets rich in phytoestrogens.
So you really want to get those into your diet.
They are what we call nature's designer estrogens.
Imbalances in estrogen are strongly linked to many major western diseases
including heart disease, cancer, prostate and breast cancer.
And excess estrogen-that's normal estrogen-that you would get in hormone
replacement therapy for example, can promote the growth of cancers.
We want to prevent that.
So what can women do for example if they want to have
a normal, relatively normal healthy lifestyle when they get into their
menopausal years without taking all these medications that
can be so problematic?
So what are phytoestrogens?
Here is a little definition.
Phytoestrogens are natural plant molecules similar in shape
and size to human body estrogen, but not identical.
And this slight difference means they don't have all the same effects of
estrogen and luckily, since some of the effects
of estrogen can be nasty.
So what do they do?
They help to control dementia-that's people who do not remember things and
develop age, loss of memory, and Alzheimer's disease, cognition,
alcoholism, immune system.
And then also the symptoms of menopause-hot flashes,
menopausal symptoms, endometriosis, osteoporosis-all of those can
be limited by phytoestrogens.
Cancers-prostate, colon, breast, leukemia, all general cancers,
skin cancer, inflammatory diseases, kidney diseases,
cardiovascular improvements.
So you can see that this is very, very widespread.
Likely because the name is phytoestrogen, there have been some
articles which would suggest that plants rich in phytoestrogen can
be a problem and cause disease, like for example, the soybean.
Of course, none of this is true and reputable scientists over
the world have recognized that there is some skullduggery there
trying to undercut natural foods for the sake of some other industries.
So don't believe everything that you read.
If you want to know exactly what it is that has been isolated as
the key component in some foods, for example, Brussels sprouts,
has a compound which is known as Sinigrin, and Broccoli sulforaphane
and also dithiolthiones, etc.
So there they all are--citrus food contains limonene and
so we have certain foods phytic acid in grains, for example,
these are some of the compounds that occur in these products.
And they can work at different levels.
They can either prevent carcinogens from actually doing their thing
or once they have actually initiated the cancer process, they can prevent it
by preventing tumor promotion through oxidative damage or prostate gland
or steroids or any one of those.
Here is a little list for you.
Garlic, for example, is rich in sulfides, mono-terpenes
tri-terpenes, phenolic acids.
The herb teas in general are rich in flavenoids, glucarates,
coumarins, phenolic acids.
Soybeans, you can see a very good spread.
Grains have a very good spread.
Cruciferous vegetables-that's all your cabbage family-cabbage and broccoli
and Brussels sprouts and all of those, are one of your best anti-cancer foods.
In fact, if it wasn't for the cabbage, the Germans wouldn't exist anymore.
And your umbelliferous vegetables-that's your carrots
and your celery, your parsley and all of those, are also
very, very rich in these foods.
So yes, garlic is, for example, number one on the list
in terms of power.
But if you have a date, for example, you could go for the cruciferous
and you would find everything there in the cabbage family that you will find
in the garlic, every single one of those components, perhaps not so
much but at least you don't blow your partner away.
And yes, some more of them, citrus is quite good,
Solanaceae, that's your potato and your tomato and all of those.
By the way, gentlemen, the tomato is very good
because it contains compounds which are anti-prostate cancer.
So start including lots of tomatoes in your life.
And cucurbitaceae, I like these names, that's the pumpkin family,
anything from squashes through whatever; they are pretty good.
Licorice, you can make teas from licorice.
And flaxseed, we will come to that in a moment.
So, this is your anti-cancer diet.
Have a look at it.
There it is.
Anything that's a legume, particularly try and include soy which
is one of the richest.
The African diet typically consists of grains and legumes, that's it,
and some greens, and they had none of the western lifestyle diseases
and still they became urbanized.
So, here are your grains and your legumes in a typical African
market and none of those diseases.
Today, one of the worst cases of sudden increase in disease in
the world is found in urbanized Africa.
Nuts and seeds, sprouts, these are anti-cancer foods.
There is your anti-cancer garlic, this is potent anti-cancer food.
Anything that you see on that list, and that list, and that list,
all of it is anti-cancer food.
Can you see none of it looks like a tablet?
That means you actually have to start doing things with food rather
than substituting with a tablet and learn to start
living life with these foods.
So the high anti-cancer foods are garlic, cabbage, licorice, soybeans,
ginger and carrot, celery and parsnips.
The medium ones are onions, herb teas, turmeric, citrus, whole wheat, flax,
brown rice, tomatoes, eggplants, peppers, and all of the rest of
the cabbage families beside cabbage itself.
And then you can add there some of your grains and your condiments.
So here is a summary of findings.
Phytoestrogens and breast cancer, there is a wealth of evidence that
phytoestrogens are protective against breast cancer.
And here is a little graph for you in terms of prostate cancer
and breast cancer is very similar.
This is the incidence of prostate cancer in China, South Korea and
Japan as opposed to the UK, Australia and the USA.
It's pretty bad.
So wow, would one like to get prostate cancer?
It's not a very nice cancer to have.
So what's the difference?
Why does China have such a low incidence, South Korea and
Japan, and the western countries look like that?
Bowel cancer, high intakes of soybeans and tofu give an 80% reduced risk
of cancer of the rectum and the lower bowels, 80%.
Phytoestrogens can reduce the number of crypts,
those are little places that become inflamed
and eventually form little tumors.
Phytoestrogens may be effective only in blocking the early rather
than the late stages.
So, you want to start having a lifestyle as soon as possible
and kids must learn to like these things.
This is an interesting study that was done on skin cancer.
Today, they are telling you the sun is getting worse and worse,
time to wear wide brimmed hats, don't they?
In Australia, it became a law that you had to
wear a wide brimmed hat.
They have taken that law away again now, I hear.
Now why is that?
Because people are getting more and more cancer.
Here is what happens.
Phytoestrogens can protect against the harmful effects of UV from the sun.
In a study performed by the US army, it was found that rats exposed to
lethal doses of X-rays all survived if they were fed phytoestrogens in
their diet, whereas those eating regular food all died.
So the phytoestrogen genistein blocks the growth of skin cancer cells called
B16 melanoma cells in mice.
So here is a substance in the food that prevents skin cancer.
And you can get it from soy foods.
Remember this one, we will talk more about genistein.
Genistein is a very important compound, and it is as good in many cases
as hormone replacement therapy that you get from the doctor.
Estrogens have a protective effect on the brain.
Alzheimer's disease, there are two main types of Alzheimer's;
early onset, which strikes anywhere from the age of 30 to 70.
I know someone who is just 40 years old who has got Alzheimer's disease
and you have to pen him in, he is like a child.
He will get undressed and he will start walking down
the street naked, it's pretty bad, and he is only 40 years old,
and he was a head master of a school.
And it appears to be genetic, often runs in family,
more commonly Alzheimer's occurs late in life, it's more sporadic,
and it is about 1.5 times more common in women than in men.
And it seems to be more common in people living in urban
rather than rural areas.
Why?
It's a diet question.
Now why is it more common in women than in men?
You see, women have high estrogen levels and then when they got older,
when they start going into menopause, their estrogen levels drop,
they crash and then they get the menopause symptoms
and then they get hormone replacement therapy from the doctors,
which are carcinogenic, and the whole idea is
actually very detrimental.
Now because their hormone levels drop so low, the protection that
the brain needs, estrogens, is removed and they are more
prone to Alzheimer's disease.
Men also have estrogen.
We have everything a woman has.
We just don't have the high levels that a woman has but
the man's estrogen level doesn't drop throughout his lifetime.
It stays relatively constant.
So we don't have that time period when we get old when estrogen levels
suddenly drop, and that's why men have a protection
against Alzheimer's disease.
Cancer of the uterus-there is a 54% reduction if you have
foods high in phytochemicals.
Stomach cancer, regions in Japan that have high tofu intake,
for example, have the lowest rates of stomach cancer.
If they eat a lot of salted fish, for example, they have high incidence
of cancer; if they eat a lot of tofu, they don't have the cancer.
It also boosts antioxidants.
For example, Vitamin C and Vitamin E, phytoestrogens also work
as antioxidants and they prevent us from making the bad kind of
cholesterol known as LDL cholesterol, so very, very good.
It also improves the flexibility of the blood vessels.
In your blood vessels, there are muscles and all kinds of
layers, and the blood vessel has to remain flexible.
As you get older, it gets impregnated with fats and it gets less flexible.
Well if you have phytoestrogens in your diet, you can even get back to
your normal responsiveness.
So normally, as you get older because the blood vessel gets less
and less flexible, your blood pressure starts rising.
If you have lots of phytoestrogens in your diet, your blood pressure can stay
low and that's very, very nice to have a low blood pressure.
Low blood pressure that is detrimental is one when you get up, you are dizzy,
you don't know what's going on.
But a low blood pressure where you don't get dizzy means
your blood vessels are still flexible, that's good.
Phytoestrogens also help bone.
Like estrogens, they make bone dissolving osteoclasts less active.
You have two types of cells in your bone working-one is osteoblast
that builds calcium into the bone; the other one is osteoclast
that takes calcium out of the bone.
So, if you have phytoestrogens in your diet, the ones that break down
the bone become less active and so you don't lose as much
calcium from the bone.
Menopause, reduced hot flashes, dryness of the reproductive tract,
cholesterol levels, bones, skin condition, brain function,
all of these are helped by phytoestrogens.
70% drop in estrogen levels when a woman goes into menopause.
And so they get hormone replacement therapy, as I said, which
has many side effects.
And I would like to do a little quiz with you now to see
how well you fare in terms of your phytoestrogen diet.
I do this with my students at the university when I run through
this course with them.
And you will be surprised at how they fare.
I will tell you afterwards.
So if you have a piece of paper, has anybody got a piece of paper
or pen or something, just make a note, and let's see how you fare.
Make a little home test.
Alright, we have to do this test fairly.
That means it's either all or nothing.
Do you use soymilk in place of dairy milk each day or almost daily
on cereals and in cooking?
If the answer is yes, you get five points.
If the answer is no, you get naught.
Okay?
And be honest.
Do you eat soybeans or foods made from soybeans such as tofu, soy burgers,
soy hotdogs, anything made from soy, on average three or more times a week?
If you do, you get five points; if you don't, you get naught.
Okay?
Three.
Do you eat other legumes such as chickpeas, lentils,
red kidney beans, navy beans or food prepared from these such
as hummus, dhal, any one of these on average three or more times a week?
If you do, you get two points; if you don't, you get naught.
Now here is an interesting one.
Do you eat linseeds or use linseed meal-that is ground linseeds-on your
cereals, mixed into yogurt or bread, at least three times each week?
If so, you get five points; if you don't, you get naught.
Linseed is flaxseed.
I will show you a slide of it just now.
I will tell you why you get five points for that.
(Audience)
If you take a capsule, it's not quite the same
but it's better than a kick in the pants.
But I wouldn't give you five points, no.
Do you add sprouts such as alfalfa or soy sprouts to your salads
or sandwiches once or more per week?
Then give yourself three points.
Then, do you on average eat two servings of fruits fresh daily
or pieces of apricot or whatever, even dried fruit?
Do you regularly, daily eat fruits?
If you do, you get three points.
And then, do you on average eat at least five servings of vegetables of
a variety of colors each day?
Very few people get that far.
Then you get three points.
That's different vegetables.
Then, if you use whole meal grains, in other words, no refined flours, no.
But if you use whole meal three or more servings each day,
everything whole grain, so that could be whole grain,
it could be rye, it could be brown rice, or whole meal pasta,
any one of those, do you use them regularly?
Three points.
If you eat nuts and seeds, nut butters, even including peanut butter at least
three times a week, you get two points.
Then, do you mostly choose fresh juices such as tomato or vegetable juices in
preference to soft drinks?
If you do, you get a magnanimous one point.
This is just a phytoestrogen test, okay.
Do you drink herbal teas most days?
If you do, you get another magnificent one point; if you don't, you get naught.
If you use only virgin olive oil in your cooking in place of margarines
and things, or sunflower seeds or any one of them, you get one point.
Do you eat at least 30 types of food per day?
Now remember, this sounds impossible.
But let's make this simple.
If you read the list of ingredients on any can of anything, it's long,
even if it means just the herb.
Like if you add some celery or you add some parsley
or you add this or that, all these little things,
a little bit of garlic, little bit of onion, potato,
dah-dah-dah, it's not too difficult to get there.
If you do all of that, you only get one point in any case.
So I will be nice to you, give yourself that point.
Now let's add up the score.
Let's add it up and let's see where we get.
Alright, let's see what happens.
Who in this audience gets between 26 and 35 points?
Alright so one, two, three, four, five, about six or seven.
Who fall into the second category, 16 to 25 points?
There are quite a few that go up there.
That's pretty good protection.
If you fall into those categories, you are pretty good.
If you fall between six and 15, are there some here?
Don't be shy.
Yes.
That's not so hot.
Anybody between naught and six?
Yes.
Guess what the average is for a typical secular university
class like I have?
I had about 450 students in my class.
Guess what the average was for all of them?
Under three, they all fall into this category, every single one
in the world out there.
That's pretty bad.
Now I am talking here to a society that should be health
conscious and so we had some in there, we had some in there
and we had quite a lot in there and we even had quite
a few in there, right.
So there is a lot of room for improvement here,
a lot of room for improvement.
Proteins-how much protein do you actually need?
But let's just backtrack.
Number one, if you want to be healthy, you have to have a variety of foods in
your diet of plant origin and that will supply
phytochemicals, right?
That was the one point.
Second point, now we are going to deal with a bulk dietary
foods in what we are eating.
Number one, proteins.
How much protein do I need?
Well, the World Health Organization, the United Nations University and
the FAO say that adults need 0.75 grams per kilogram per day.
Now that's very little.
I know that you work in pounds.
So it's about 2.4 pounds to the kilogram if I am correct there,
and you can work it out how much you actually need.
You need very, very little protein.
But mankind actually consumes vast quantities of protein.
And anything that you consume more than you need becomes a problem.
I will tell you why because protein contains nitrogen, and
when you break down a protein, you build it into your body
as your own protein, that's fine.
But if you eat more protein than your body needs,
you cannot store it.
We cannot store protein; we can only store fats
and carbohydrates.
So we would have to change the protein we eat into
a fat or a carbohydrate.
That means we have to split out the nitrogen and it gets split out
as ammonia which is toxic and we convert it to urea
and we have to get rid of that through the kidneys.
But it's a toxic substance.
And if we have too much protein in the diet that means we put
a toxic load on our system.
So, better not to eat too much protein and rather eat more carbohydrate.
Now what does the world teach you, that if you have a lot of carbohydrate
you are going to get what, fats.
Is that true or is it not true?
In actual fact, it's not true.
If you eat refined carbohydrate, you are going to get fats.
But if you eat whole food carbohydrate, you will not get fat.
Alright, let me make an analogy.
A car is built of iron-is that right?
The engine block is built of iron and the chasse is built of iron,
the whole car is built of iron.
So the obvious fuel for the car to run would be iron.
So that's why you fill up your tank with iron filings.
Is that correct?
No.
What do you fill up your tank with?
With gasoline, with gasoline because you are going to burn that.
Now, the same applies to the human body.
The human body, the structural component is protein.
So you are built up largely of protein.
Now you don't want to run on protein, you want to run on carbohydrate.
That's the fuel of the body.
And when you burn the fuel in the body, you produce carbon dioxide and water.
The water is useful to you, the carbon dioxide you
go, and it's gone, right?
Whereas if you burn protein, you get all these accumulated toxins in
your body, these harmful compounds.
Your ammonia has to be converted to urea.
That may not get too high a concentration or else you will die.
The sulfur in the protein has to be built out-that creates sulfate,
sulfuric acid so you are creating an acid system.
You have to neutralize that by releasing calcium from the bone.
You are creating problem after problem by eating
too much protein.
Whereas if you eat carbohydrates as fuel, you don't have that problem.
If you eat refined carbohydrates you have a problem as we
will see in a moment.
So which proteins are better-plant proteins or animal proteins?
Which one do you think?
Now you see when I first started doing research on this, I applied for
a research grant to show that there was a difference between
plant and animal proteins in terms of their effectiveness.
And guess what, they turned down my request because they said
a protein is a protein is a protein, doesn't matter what you eat,
it won't have an effect.
When you digest it, you will get amino acids and you make
whatever you want out of that.
And I argued no, it's not like that because the ratio of amino acids
in a plant is going to be different to the ratio of amino acids in an animal,
but they didn't buy that.
And so by some chance, we managed to get into
a research project where we could actually test this and prove it
and go back to the research committees and say pooh, and then
they started funding it.
That was fun.
And today, this is common knowledge.
Here is an article in American Journal of Clinical Nutrition,
a high ratio of dietary animal to vegetable protein increases
the rate of bone loss and the risk of fracture in
post-menopausal women.
Women in the highest quintile of ratio of animal to vegetable protein had
nearly fourfold greater risk of fracture compared with women with low
ratios, independent of other risk factors including age, calcium intake,
weight, estrogen use, smoking, alcohol use and total protein intake.
So if you were to consume animal proteins, you were at least four times
as bad off as when you were consuming plant proteins.
Now this publication came out in 2001; we actually started this a lot earlier.
Why?
Because certain amino acids for example are rich in sulfur
like this one over here, cysteine and methionine.
And if you have lots of those, and animal proteins have
a lot of those, you place a tremendous acid load on the system.
You see, plant proteins contain more branched-chain amino acids
than do animal proteins and they are easier to digest
than animal proteins.
If you have branched-chains on your amino acids then your protein is nice
and loose, it's globular.
If you have non branched-chains, you have a very compact protein,
and in order to digest that compact protein,
you have to punch it up.
So you have to create a far more acid system in your stomach,
for example, in order to that to unwind that protein
so that your enzyme can start cutting it up.
So, for example, if you had to have a diet high in protein
but plant proteins, the pH in your stomach would never go lower than 4.5.
If you put an egg in your stomach, it drops to 1.5-that's battery acid.
Do you know that American society and western society in general,
their favorite product to buy and the number one product
to buy is an antacid.
Isn't that right?
Don't they advertise antacids on your TV from morning till night?
Absolutely. Why?
Show me the animal out there in the world, an elephant or
a gazelle or any one of them with a bottle of antacid tied to its bag.
There is only one creature that does that and that's us.
Maybe we are putting the wrong thing inside
so that we produce all that acid.
Maybe we should never do it.
So plant proteins have very high levels of amino acid called arginine
and glycine in the blood than do animal proteins,
and these levels are associated with protecting against clogging
of arteries, for example.
So we did a little test.
We fed rabbits on diets which contain equal amounts of protein.
The one group contained an 18% protein ration derived from soya
and the other one from casein.
Now what is casein?
Casein is the protein you find in dairy products.
So you will have it in cheese and in milk and in all of those.
And look, when they were fed soya, they had higher levels of arginine.
When they were fed casein, they had low levels of arginine.
Now arginine is your detox amino acid.
It helps you to get rid of the excess nitrogen.
You want lots of arginine in your diet and you only get it from plant foods.
Glycine is the other one you want high.
Soya gave a high glycine and milk solids gave
a low glycine at the same protein level.
In fact, rabbits that were fed animal proteins developed arteriosclerosis
and they have elevated cholesterol even if their diet doesn't
contain any cholesterol.
And by just giving them a little bit of plant proteins
you improve this situation.
So, vegetable protein lowers cholesterol and raises it if
you have animal proteins.
There is the difference.
Plant-based proteins, animal-based proteins and you see
a vast difference in cholesterol levels between the two groups.
So overall, the healthier protein to take is plant protein.
I will just run through this quickly before we go to the next category.
The 10 animal proteins that cause high cholesterol in rabbits
as plant protein doesn't cause high cholesterol, egg white, pork, chicken,
beef, fish, whole egg, casein, turkey, skim milk and egg yolk.
So obviously, the animal proteins were the problem, and plant proteins
were much, much lower.
When we look at the 10 plant proteins that cause low cholesterol,
you will see something interesting.
None of them are really very high as the average animal protein.
But look at this.
Beans, fiber beans and peas are very cholesterol reducing.
So if you have a high cholesterol level, what is the best thing
you can do to lower it?
Eat some beans.
It's in fact better even than some prescription drugs
with none of the side effects.
It really is worth your while to do that from.
What does the world teach us?
What is the best source of calcium in the world?
Milk; you have to get your milk.
Now I am not going to deal with that in detail; we will
be doing that tomorrow.
There is an interesting lecture coming.
Don't miss that for anything in the world.
It's fun.
It's called Udderly Amazing.
But low absorption of calcium is what you get from milk.
In milk, only 25% of the calcium in cow's milk is
actually absorbed by the body.
75% goes in and straight up.
Human milk, although it contains less than half the calcium of cow's milk,
is a better source of calcium because of its high absorption.
So here is a difference already.
And then kale, that's that green cabbage leaf,
turnip greens or sesame seeds are better sources for the same reason.
So, those are your good sources of calcium.
Anything that's dark green is a good source of calcium.
Have a look at the acid loads in food.
Fish will give you an acid load of 7.9 milliequivalents per 100 grams.
That's quite high.
Bread will give you 3.5, flour 7, pasta 6.7, that's lower
but still reasonably high.
If you come to meat, it goes to 9.5.
Now when you go to cheeses, low protein cheeses, 8,
and high protein cheeses-that's mature cheeses-generally speaking, 23.6.
That's a catastrophe, that's a catastrophe.
How are you going to neutralize that acid load?
The answer is fruits and vegetable give a negative acid load
so that is positivizing.
But unfortunately, the body reacts to acid in one way only.
When you get it into your diet, there is a hormonal response
that kicks in and you get calcium stress.
So, here is average urine pH when you fed rabbits soy versus
caseins, it is an experiment that we did, and you will see that
soy gave you a far more alkaline urine than casein.
Actually I had my students go up and do a test.
I made them test the acidity of saliva and of urine, of vegetarians,
non-vegetarians in the society, and I made them also test Rastafarians.
Rastafarians are vegetarians who believe in their religious ritual
that they must use a lot of marijuana and drugs, but they are vegetarian.
And we found something very fascinating.
All the vegetarians had an alkaline urine and
the non-vegetarians had an acid urine.
And the vegetarians had an alkaline saliva but not
the Rastafarians, they had an acid saliva from the drug
that they were taking, and the meat eaters had an acid saliva.
So they were acidic from the word go.
Total fecal calcium.
When you fed these rabbits foods, the ones that were on casein,
that is the protein in dairy, that went straight through
so they didn't absorb it if there was casein in the diet.
If they had soy, they had a much better rate of absorption,
in fact twice as high.
Urinary calcium, so even that which they did absorb
when they were on casein, they urinated it out.
You see the body has to protect itself against the acid releases
a lot of antacid which it gets from the bone and that's calcium carbonate
deposits being put into the blood stream to neutralize
the acid and then you have to urinate it out.
Sometimes we release so much of it from the bone to
neutralize the acid in our system that the kidneys cannot cope
and they cannot release it.
Then you have to precipitate it.
Where do you precipitate it?
In your joints and all over these places, and then what you get is you
get stiff joints and you get gout and pains and arthritic diseases
and all of those, all products of the type of food we are eating.
So this is the type of food where you will get a good plant protein
source that will not be osteoporotic calcium releasing.
There's the soybean, you can soak it and freeze it and use it
whenever you want to; green such as kale, broccoli, bok choy,
as good as milk in terms of calcium absorbability; there are all
the journals that confirm these experiments.
What you see on the screen there is your calcium source.
Have you ever seen a horse run after a cow and say, excuse me,
could you satisfy my calcium needs for me today, yes or no?
No.
There is only one creature in the world that does that and that's man.
You think cats do it or do we induce cats to do it?
Did you know that the veterinary societies in the world have issued
warnings, do not feed your cats milk because they get kidney failure from
the high acid load that it produces and then they start urinating
blood and then your cat dies.
So take away the blunt proteins from your cat and it will not get it.
So, not even a cat should have it.
But humans, well who cares, they can have it, right.
So these are your calcium sources.
Now let's have a look how phytoestrogens help bone.
Like estrogens, as we said, the osteoclasts become less active.
So a woman is not likely to get osteoporosis while she is
in the flower of her life.
But when she goes through menopause, that's when the trouble
starts, isn't that right?
And later on when they fall, they break their hips.
Now there is a compound that you would like to get
and that is the compound Genistein.
You find it in soybeans but somewhere else also.
That suppresses the activity of the bone dissolving itself.
So you want to have that in your diet.
Ladies, you want to have Genistein in your diet.
Where do you get it from?
Soybeans amongst others.
Several studies have confirmed that Phytoestrogen Genistein is almost
as effective in preventing bone loss in animals as Premarin, which is one of
the most commonly prescribed hormone replacement therapies.
So Genistein is almost as good as that.
But this one causes cancer and Genistein doesn't.
Which one would you prefer?
Just asking, just asking.
So how do you get enough of that?
Do you know that seed?
That's flaxseed.
Flaxseed is the highest source of Genistein in the world.
So if you eat flaxseed just like that, it goes in there and out
the other side and goodbye.
So what do you think would be a good thing to do to flaxseed?
Grind it.
Put it in a liquidizer and go, then you have ground flaxseed,
put it in a bottle, put it in your refrigerator.
When you have breakfast, when you have muesli or granola
or one of those in the morning, take flaxseed a teaspoon or
two and pour it over it.
If you have porridge, put it over there.
Put it in your bread, bake it in there.
How many points did you get for flaxseed?
Five.
Now you know why.
And men, it will help you be more cognitive, help your brain function,
prevent prostate cancer.
So it's good for men too.
Improve mineral content and density in the bone.
A Danish study which found that soy milk containing naturally high
levels of phytoestrogen actually stops bone loss that would otherwise occur in
women after menopause.
Women who consume two glasses of soy milk daily delivering 50 milligrams of
isoflavones over the two years did not lose bone from their spine.
So it's advantageous to take soy milk rather than cow's milk.
Cow's milk will cause bone loss.
I will prove that to you as we go on.
We did a lot of research on osteoporosis.
In an Australian study conducted at the Royal Women's Hospital in Melbourne,
post-menopausal women experienced a 5% increase in bone mineral content
when they ate 45 grams of soy grits everyday for three months.
Just including soy in the diet solves the problem.
Estrogen impersonates blockers.
So phytoestrogens are able to impersonate estrogen
because of their similar molecular shape and these phytoestrogens are very
selective where they dock, in other words the
receptors that they go on.
We have receptors in the bone; women have receptors in the breast;
men have receptors in the prostate; we have receptors in our blood vessels;
we have receptors in the brain and you want
these compounds in there.
There are two types of estrogen receptors, the one we call alpha
and the other one we call beta and estrogens normally dock
to both of these equally.
So estrogens will dock to any one of them.
But given a choice, phytoestrogens prefer beta.
This is interesting.
This is very desirable since beta receptors are found in bone,
brain and blood vessels.
So if you have a diet rich in phytoestrogens, if you put soy milk on
your cereal in the morning or on your granola, that will help your
brain, your bone and the breast.
Women, you cannot afford to go without this stuff.
And that's where you want it to work.
By the way, Korean women, Korean women are known for
the fact that they don't experience the typical western menopause symptoms.
While the western women are hot flashing and exhausted,
the Korean women are after retirement off
overseas on holidays.
And people say that all this soy will cause mental debility.
Have you heard of that one?
Have you ever read that soy products cause brain problems?
The contrary is true.
They say your kids will become stupid.
My question is why do the Koreans win the Mathematics
Olympiad every year, because they are quite sharp up
there and their diet definitely contributes to that.
Now carbohydrates, what to avoid and not to avoid.
These are two groups of rates, and they are equally old.
These rates over here on the left are alive and well,
and they are being held by the tail there; you see
pulling at the tail.
Then investigating these that look like moth-eaten mothballs,
the tails are limp, they are at the point of death.
Now what's the difference between these two groups?
They are equally old and they ate exactly the same food.
But this group over here lived only half as long as this group on the left.
What was the difference?
One difference alone.
The group on the left got as much food as it needed;
the group on the right could eat as much as it wanted
and they lived half as long.
Not a good idea to eat continuously.
Western society eats continuously.
They have one meal a day all day.
Refined foods are what they normally eat.
So if you have a company called BcBlonalds.
When you go there, you get a burger and that has
a refined bun on it and then it has some meat patty inside of that
and that's basically refined food.
It's a devitalized food; it impedes the immune system,
its diabetic, carcinogenic.
Rats that are fed carcinogens, those are compounds that cause cancer,
and a complex carbohydrate, show lower index of breast cancer
than rats fed carcinogens and simple sugars.
And then it also leads to obesity.
The whole world today is geared on refined foods.
There are very few countries in the world where you can buy
decent bread for example.
Germany is one of them.
Germany has excellent bread and excellent laws in terms of bread.
But you go anywhere else, go to the Middle East, go to Africa,
come to the United States, you name it.
I always say you need two loaves of bread to make a sandwich
in the United States.
You put whatever you put on the one and on the other
and you take the two loaves and you squeeze them together,
you have one sandwich.
It's just air and no fiber.
In a typical grain, you have the white flour, then you have
the bran layers on the outside and then you have the germ.
Now in the old days, they used to put this in a stone mill
and they used to grind it.
And everything was ground together and inseparable.
These days, they don't do that anymore.
Firstly, it's very labor-intensive.
Secondly, you only get a little at a time.
So you need something that's a lot faster to feed all
the people that we have.
So what do they do?
They have roller mills where they don't work with stones
but they work with rollers.
So as the grain comes shooting in through the first roller,
the rollers are set so far apart that the grain is cracked
and it cracks the other layers off.
And they fall down on the one side in piles
and piles and piles of bread.
The white flour then as the rollers come tighter
and tighter together comes sifting down and forms the white flour.
And the germ which contains the oils and the vitamins like Vitamin
E for example and all of those, and the vitamins that are required in
both of these layers to actually digest what's in the middle like
the Vitamin B5 for example in the bran helps to digest
the endosperm, those fatty germ layers, they stick to the rollers
because they are full of fat.
And then they have scrapers on the rollers which scrape that off
and it comes off later as a big club and that's
called the wheat germs.
So now they have three packages which you never had in the old days.
You had one flour stone ground with all of those components
in, now you have three.
That's pretty good for industry.
Number one, it goes very fast; number two, you can now make
three packages instead of one.
So they sell you the white flour which makes you constipated number one;
number two, it gives you a glucose surge, the glucose levels
rise very quickly, gives you all kinds of problems.
So when you put it in the system over here,
it has to pass all the way down, there is no roughage to take it down.
So when you go to the toilet, you have a veritable squeezing
experience and you have room for those magazines so
that you have something to read while you are having this
eye-popping adventure.
Not a good idea.
So they realize they have a problem.
So what do they sell you?
They sell you bran and they say, here, have a high bran breakfast.
And they give you all the bran for breakfast, pathetic.
It helps to get the food down but it doesn't help the next meal
or the next meal; you need to have all these things together.
Now what do they do with the germ?
They put it into the creams and into the shampoos
and they say put it on your head and on your skin and
when you erupt in all kinds of pimples and boils and carbuncles and furuncles,
you put it on the outside.
Why are you erupting in the first place?
From the toxin that's on the inside.
So we have all kinds of solutions for this terrible problem.
And junk food is bad news.
A Gut Feeling.
If you thought junk food would really make you fat, think again,
you could also be fattening a hungry mass of alien gut bacteria
that may repay you with bowel disease or even cancer.
So the study shows that meat consumption rises from 60
to 600 grams per day.
Sulphates, that's what we spoke about in the urine, double,
that goes as calcium loss, and sulphites in the
feces increases tenfold.
Now what does that mean?
In your intestine, you have certain bacteria and you want to
have healthy bacteria.
Remember they always tell you that if you run low on
bacteria what should you eat?
Yogurt.
Now what type of bacterium do you have in yogurt?
Lacto bacteria.
Now after you are weaned, you don't need lacto bacteria,
you are not supposed to have lactose.
Which animal still consumes lactose after being weaned?
None.
But lacto bacteria are better than no bacteria.
So they say that's how you augment it.
But that's not what you really want.
The type of bacteria you want is known as a methanogen.
Those are the healthiest ones, a big study done at the Dunn Nutrition
Center at Cambridge University.
So let's say you are eating your proteins and your carbohydrates and
then you have bacteria that help ferment these things
and they produce various compounds.
Now the most common compound that you would find is
the carbon dioxide production and the hydrogen production.
That's if you have lot of carbohydrates in your diet.
If you however have animal proteins in your diet, you get a lot of sulfurs
forming, like I have explained.
Now that changes the bacteria.
Bacteria that can handle the sulfur are called
sulphate-producing bacteria.
So if you have a high meat diet, you will have a lot of those bacteria
in your gut; if you have a high plant diet, you will have a
lot of methanogens in your diet, in your intestines.
Now when they break down the products, they produce a gas which is methane.
So if you have these, they will produce sulphites,
which are toxic and cause cancer.
Now there is one way of telling which one of those you actually have.
Methane is explosive but it's generally odorless, right,
whereas the sulfur ones contain, well this noxious sulfur compounds.
Has anybody ever dropped a stink bomb?
That's hydrogen sulfide, it's pretty smelly.
So if you are feeling airy one day, notice the aromatic experience
and that will tell you what type of bacteria you largely
have in your intestines.
You can be explosive and odorless, that's fine.
Sometimes if you eat abnormally or in between meals, you will also have
acid production and you will also have a shift in bacteria.
To have a healthy gut, get methanogens in there.
And if you explode, so what, nobody will notice if it's silent.
Here is colon cancer and mortality.
This is roughage in the diet.
And notice the more roughage you have in the diet, the lower
the incidence of cancer.
So you want that roughage to be in your diet.
If you don't, you get what we call diverticulosis.
This is what happens when you sit on the toilet and
the eyes come out during the process.
The same happens in your gut = you make balloons as you put the pressure on,
and it forms little sacs.
And eventually those sacs fill up with debris and it can't get back
so it just hangs there and then it gets inflamed
and infected and you get colon cancer and you get sick and
you are in a big problem.
Here's something else that's interesting.
This is the response to a glucose meal.
In other words, if you had to go and eat refined food, or kids,
if you had to go and drink a glass of Coca Cola or drink
a glass of any bubbly cool drink out there, the average Coca Cola will
contain 12 teaspoons of sugar per can, 12 teaspoons of sugar per can.
Imagine the sugar load you give a little kid with a small body
by knocking 12 teaspoons of sugar back in one go.
What happens?
Here is a glucose meal.
Here's plasma glucose level.
So here is a glass of sugar water and you are drinking it
and immediately up goes the glucose level in the blood.
And then it has to be brought down because if it doesn't get brought down,
you will go into a coma.
So the body responds by an enormous insulin release.
So that's the response of insulin immediately after that glucose meal.
And because the insulin level is so high, the glucose level drops like
a rocket and it drops to lower than normal resting level.
Normally you are there but because you have had too much
insulin released, it now drops to that.
We call that hypoglycemia, low blood sugar.
And there is hardly an individual in the United States of America
that doesn't suffer from hypoglycemia because they have refined diets.
Here's the same amount of sugar when you give a diet with fiber in it.
So if you take that same amount of sugar and you added some oatmeal gum
to that, or if you take a fruit juice which contains pectin
for example, which is a fiber, that fiber holds on to the sugar.
So what happens is it never gets that high and your insulin levels never
get that high because that sugar doesn't go into the blood.
The fiber holds it in the gut, and as the food goes down
the gut, so it releases it slowly little by little by little.
And the end result is insulin doesn't go so high, it stabilizes,
and at the end of the process, you have about the same level
as you had in the beginning-see, no hypoglycemia.
Now what happens when you are hypoglycemic?
Firstly, you get nervous and then you crave something to eat
because you also get a sugar craving, and that's
why you keep on noshing between meals.
Now I always tell my students, you will not come to my class
after you have had a glass of Coke, you might as well stay outside.
And you are not going to write exams for me if you ever drink
a glass of Coke because I will not take an excuse I went blank,
I couldn't remember anything.
They always do that, right.
Why they go blank?
This is what happens.
And they wouldn't believe me so I said, well let's test
it, let's get some rabbits.
And we took some rabbits and we gave some of them Coca Cola,
the equivalent of what a human would drink by mass.
Now the rabbits love it.
And you know what, some people say that's animal cruelty.
And what we do to ourselves is much worse, we do the exact same thing.
That's what, human cruelty?
So is Coca Cola human cruelty?
So we give them a little coke and the rabbits drink it straight off
the syringe, it's all gone.
And some of them get water and some of them get
the same amount of sugar with pectin in for example, that's the fiber in apple.
And this is what happens.
If they get Coke, we only have, the practicum only lasted 3 1/2 hours,
I couldn't complete the experiment but it nevertheless was interesting.
The high surge of blood glucose when they went on a diet here of plain
glucose, up it went, and then it came down slowly.
After 3 1/2 hours, it still hadn't normalized.
So that's okay, you have glucose levels in the blood.
Glucose plus pectin, this one over here, started coming
down nicely and regularly.
Coca Cola, I even missed the peak there, must have been up like
that, insulin surge and down.
After 1.5 hours, they start going hypoglycemic, and that's when
the student strikes a blank, brain stops, everything stops.
So they start sweating, they start getting nervous,
they shake, they have this warmness, pounding heart, increased heart rate,
anxiety, shivering, freak, and then they say that
they remembered nothing.
They also get confusion, drowsiness, weakness, difficulty in speaking,
concentration, visual disturbances and all of these symptoms,
not a good idea to have refined food.
So Coca Cola is really bad news, very bad news.
If you should ever have to take something like that, make sure you do
it with a meal but Coke never.
So, effect of food processing on blood glucose levels.
The apple is the best way to consume the apple juice.
Apple sauce is the next; apple juice will give you
the lowest levels of glucose in the end.
Then blood-sugar peaks.
Here is a medical journal.
It's also dangerous for your blood vessels.
You see, the blood vessel itself when that sugar surges into
the blood gets damaged and the little endothelial,
that inner layer gets damaged.
Alright.
Let's have a look at another issue, a fat issue.
Dietary fat and breast cancer.
It's pretty prevalent and obvious in the world that
the more fat one consumes, the higher the rate of cancer.
General cancer rates increase with more fat consumption.
Look at the United States and Canada, they are way up there.
In fact, the United States is always a good example to use
because it will 9 out of 10 times be your worst example.
There are only two countries that beat you on one disease
and that is osteoporosis.
Norway will beat you 2 to 1 and so will Holland and
Switzerland also beats you.
But for the rest, you are right up there, you are winning
everything these days.
Here are UK figures from the 1940s.
Notice, since 1940, since the war, carbohydrate consumption has been
coming down and fat consumption has been going up and the same in
the United States, fatty foods, fatty foods.
That of course leads to obesity.
So if you want to know how well you are faring, then you just work out this
little equation for yourself.
Your Body Mass Index.
What is your weight in kilograms?
Kilogram is what, about 2.2 pounds, alright.
Divide it by your height times your height in meters, that will
give you your Body Mass Index.
And if you look at it, a Body Mass Index which is lower
than 20, in other words, if you are thin as a rake,
that is problematic.
This is fathers who did not work due to illness in India; the thinner they
were, the worse off they were.
So you don't want a Body Mass Index of 16 or 16 to 17.
Once you start getting to 20, you are getting okay.
Then you stay okay till about 26, 27, 28, then it starts getting problematic.
30 is still okay.
Once you have a Body Mass Index of 32 or higher, then you have a problem.
So you should be able to just work it out for yourself.
Just take your weight and your height and divide.
So that is bad news.
Obesity and the risk of death from cancer.
For example, average body weight, and the percentage increase of death
rate, if you are above average weight, just 20 to 30 just, it's not
the end of the world but once you start getting to 40%
overweight, then you have a big problem.
And women are always worse off than men.
And now the woman must also decide where she is overweight.
There is a very simple way of doing this.
Go and stand in front of a mirror.
That's what you do.
And you look at yourself and you say, where is my weight distributed,
is it in the top half of my body, in other words, am I well-endowed
around here, or am I well-endowed around here?
If the main fat sits on the buttocks, then you are three times
less likely to get breast cancer than if the main fat sits up there.
That's just the luck of the draw, nothing you can do about it.
So whole food energy is the way to go to prevent these diseases.
Bananas, potatoes, legumes, grains, all of these foods, partially processed
foods like tofu for example, are also very good still, breads,
whole grain breads, nuts, seeds, fruits.
If you have a lots of those in your diet then you will have number one high
phytoestrogens, number two the right ratio of protein,
the right type of protein, you will have whole carbohydrates,
no surges, none of these things that make you obese, it would prevent
obesity, would prevent cravings between meals, and these are
the very best tablets that you could consume in your life.
Start getting variety, variety, variety into your life.
And if you find a shop that looks like this,
go ballistic, visit it, enjoy it.
And food actually is fun when you are shopping in a
shop like that, isn't it?
It is fun.
Is this enough energy to actually get things done in the world?
Here are two groups of people; they are both athletes.
And the one group over here is getting one type of diet and this
one another type of diet.
The top group over here is getting a high carbohydrate diet
and the bottom group is getting a low carbohydrate diet.
That means they are eating more meat products for example.
Now they start training.
So they go for a jog in the morning for their training.
They are training for a marathon.
Notice that when they run, their glucose or their glycogen
levels in the muscles drop.
Well they are burning the energy in your
muscles, you are running.
Down they come.
And now you go home and you start eating and you are relaxed.
The one on the high carbohydrate diet recovers to there by the next day.
The other one only recovers to there.
The second day they go jogging, they meet for training in the morning,
down comes this level, down comes that level,
now they recover during the day.
That one goes to there, that one to there.
Third day, can you notice that the gap between the two is getting
bigger and bigger and bigger?
Now this one is staying just below those levels.
Now if this one were to stop training for one day, prior to the big match,
where would he recover to?
Easily back to his normal level, isn't that right?
In fact, he might even recover if he rests two days before
the event higher than his normal level, whereas this one would go
that much and that much and the gap would always be tremendous.
Now the two sets of athletes start getting ready for the run.
Which one is likely to have the greatest stamina?
The top one no doubt.
So that is why athletes today have to go on high carbohydrate diets or
else they cannot compete in a competitive world.
So glycogen is essential for prolonged exercise
and exhaustion is due to a reduction in muscle glycogen,
and we need to make sure that glycogen stays high.
Work of course uses it up and fat cannot produce
the same amount of energy, speed energy as glycogen.
It's not as readily available.
Over long term, yes, but not readily available.
So 625 grams of carbohydrate per day leads to maximum replenishment
of glycogen in athletes.
Now, let us say you are overweight and you want to lose
weight; what do you do?
Tell me what you do.
What is the best training they say; what should you go and do?
Go jogging, right, or go and do heavy training.
Today, we know that that is no longer true.
I have worked with these sports training institutes.
We have done research projects that are amazing in this field.
I want to tell you something very, very simple.
If you want to lose weight, if you want to lose weight,
if you want to burn fat, then never do strenuous exercise,
you will not burn fat during strenuous exercise, you will only burn glycogen
because that's the fast burner.
Are you with me?
If you are going to go for a heavy run to lose weight,
you will lose glycogen which you will recuperate with your food,
you will not lose one ounce of fat.
If you want to lose weight what must you do?
You must walk.
Go for walks and walk so fast that you never have to pant.
That's how fast you must walk.
Walk on a steady incline and that you work up
a nice sweat after a long walk but that you don't have to go (panting).
That's the way you lose fat.
If you are going to train hard, you are not going to lose fat,
you are going to lose glycogen.
So, even 10 minutes of walking per day is better than hard exercise.
And science has found out that short exercises-20 minutes,
10 minutes per day, is just as good as people that train
themselves half silly.
Isn't that amazing?
So if you want to lose weight, go for walks, and try
and walk on steady inclines if you can, which is difficult in your country.
If you want to have endurance, how do old tennis stars,
how did Steffi Graf manage to stay there so long?
She had to change her diet.
How did Boris Becker manage to stay there so long?
How did Carl Lewis manage to stay there so long?
They all changed their diets.
They all went on to vegetarian diets with plant power to animal power.
Plant foods give you more endurance, more energy, more power
than any other food.
If I didn't have the diet that I have, I would not have
the stamina to do what I do.
I can walk, I can do all these things and I am so grateful.
Before I changed my diet, I was fit and I did sport
and I did all those things but I would come out
and I would say I am finished, I am exhausted, my brain is dead.
And I used to have that dull feeling from the diet that I had.
I never have that feeling anymore and that's because I concentrate on
whole foods and I suggest you do the same.
So, in our next lecture, we will look at some additional things
that we can look at for example, foods that we eat that are not really
foods that we on a regular basis consume and what the effect is on us.