How to live longer!

Starting today, a ground-breaking series that could change your life. Based on a Nobel Prize-winning discovery, the ultimate guide to what to eat to beat heart disease, strokes, cancer and Alzheimer’s

WHEN I was a child, doctors sent my grandmother home in a wheelchair to die. Diagnosed with end-stage heart disease, she already had so much scar tissue from bypass operations that the surgeons had essentially run out of plumbing. There was nothing more to do, they said; her life was over at 65. For many children, it’s seeing a beloved relative ill and in pain that leads them to want to become doctors. But, for me, it was watching my grandma get better. Soon after she came home, she saw a report on TV about Nathan Pritikin, an early lifestyle-medicine pioneer who’d been gaining a reputation for reversing terminal heart disease.

He’d just opened a new clinic — and, in desperation, my grandmother booked in for a supervised plant-based diet and exercise programme. They wheeled my grandmother in — and she walked out on her own.

I’ll never forget that. Within three weeks, she was actually walking ten miles a day. When I was a child that was all that mattered: I got to play with Grandma again. But over the years, I grew up to understand the significance of what had happened.

At that time, the medical profession didn’t even think it was possible to reverse heart disease.

Drugs were given to try to slow the progression, and surgery was performed to circumvent clogged arteries, but the disease was expected to get worse and worse until you died.

Now, however, we know that as soon as we stop eating an arteryclogging diet, our bodies can start healing themselves.

My grandma was given her medical death sentence at 65. Thanks to a healthy diet and lifestyle, she enjoyed another 31 years on this earth.

The woman once told that she had only weeks to live didn’t die until she was 96 years old.

Her near-miraculous recovery not only inspired one of her six grandchildren to pursue a career in medicine, but granted her enough healthy years to see him graduate from medical school. And I’ve since made it my life’s mission to study the evidence-based links between disease and nutrition.

I now have a team of researchers and volunteers who last year alone helped me dig through 24,000 papers published on the subject.

The result of all this research has been quite astounding. It’s now clear, for example, that the vast majority of premature deaths in the UK and U.S. could be prevented.

MANy people assume the diseases that kill us are pre- programmed into our genes. High blood pressure by 55, heart attacks at 60, maybe cancer at 70, and so on . . . But for most of the leading causes of death, our genes usually account for only 10–20 per cent of risk.

The other 80-90 per cent of risk? It’s our diet and lifestyle. The typical Western diet is the numberone cause of premature death and the number-one cause of disability. In other words, a long and healthy life is largely a matter of choice.

So what choice have we made? Well, for many of us, the answer is not a very good one.

An analysis of the diet and lifestyle of 35,000 adults scored their diets from zero to five to see if they met a bare minimum of healthy- eating targets — which included fruit, vegetables and whole grains. How many do you think scored even four out of five on their ‘healthy eating score’? About one per cent.

But adhering to just four simple healthy lifestyle factors can have a strong impact on the prevention of chronic diseases: not smoking, not being obese, getting half an hour of exercise a day, and eating more healthily (defined as consuming more fruits, vegetables and whole grains and less meat).

Those four factors alone were found to account for more than three quarters of your risk of chronic disease.

If you manage to tick off all four, you may be able to wipe out more than 90 per cent of your risk of developing diabetes, more than 80 per cent of your risk of having a heart attack, cut by half your risk of having a stroke, and reduce your overall cancer risk by more than a third.

Indeed, one study has shown that the drop in mortality risk among those with healthier habits is equivalent to being 14 years younger.

Let’s talk a little more about ageing. In each of your cells, you have 46 strands of DNA coiled into chromosomes.

At the tip of each chromosome, there’s a tiny cap called a telomere, which keeps your DNA from unravelling and fraying. Think of it as the plastic tips on the end of your shoelaces. Every time your cells divide, however, a bit of that cap is lost. And when the telomere is completely gone, your cells can die.

Telomeres have been thought of as your life ‘fuse’: they can start shortening as soon as you’re born — and when they’re gone, you’re gone.

In fact, forensic scientists can take DNA from a bloodstain and roughly estimate the person’s age, based on how long their telomeres are. So what would you have to do if you wanted to prevent this telomere cap from burning away?

Well, smoking cigarettes is associated with triple the rate of telomere loss, so the first step is simple: stop smoking. But the food you eat every day may also have an impact on how fast you lose your telomeres. Consuming fruits, vegetables and other antioxidant-rich foods has been associated with longer, protective telomeres. In contrast, consuming refined grains, fizzy drinks, meat (and fish) and dairy has been linked to shortened telomeres.

What if you ate a diet composed of whole plant foods and avoided processed foods and animal foods

— could cellular ageing be slowed?

The answer lies in an enzyme found in a tree — a bristlecone pine — that grows in the White Mountains of California and is nearly 4,800 years old. It was hundreds of years old before construction of Egypt’s pyramids began.

There’s an enzyme in the pines’ roots that appears to peak a few thousand years into their life span, and it actually rebuilds telomeres. Scientists named it telomerase.

But here’s the amazing thing: once they knew what to look for, researchers found that telomerase was present in human cells, too.

The question then became: how can we boost the activity of this age-defying enzyme?

Seeking answers, the pioneering researcher Dr Dean Ornish teamed up with Dr Elizabeth Blackburn, who was awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in Medicine for her discovery of telomerase.

They found that just three months on a whole-food, plant-based diet, coupled with exercise, could significantly boost telomerase activity — the only intervention that had been shown to do so.

What’s more, a five-year followup study found that while the telomeres of those in a control group, who did not change their lifestyles, predictably shrank with age, the telomeres of those who had changed their lifestyles had actually grown.

Five years later, their telomeres were even longer on average than when they started — suggesting not only that a healthy lifestyle can boost telomerase enzyme activity, but that it can reverse cellular ageing.

This astonishing result wasn’t just because the healthy-living group was exercising more or losing weight, research showed.

Weight loss through calorie restriction and an even more vigorous exercise programme failed to improve telomere length. So it appears that the active ingredient is what you eat.

Nor is it to do with how much you eat. As long as people were eating a typical Western diet, it didn’t appear to matter how small the portions were, how much weight they lost, or how hard they exercised; after a year, they saw no benefit in terms of their telomeres.

In contrast, individuals on the plant-based diet exercised only half as much, enjoyed the same amount of weight loss after just three months, and achieved significant telomere protection.

In other words, it wasn’t weight loss or the exercise that reversed cell ageing — it was the food.

AND as I’ll explain in this series next week, Dr Ornish and his colleagues have used the same diet and lifestyle changes to halt and apparently reverse the progression of cancer in certain circumstances. We will also see how the same diet can reverse heart disease, too.

What about our other big killers? The four leading causes of death in the UK are: 1) heart disease; 2) dementia and Alzheimer’s; 3) stroke; 4) lung cancer.

And it turns out a more plantbased diet may help prevent, treat, or reverse every single one of those causes of death.

Of course, there are prescription medications that can help with some of these conditions.

But there is only one unifying diet that may help prevent, arrest, or even reverse each of them. And that is a whole-food, plant-based diet, defined as an eating pattern that encourages the consumption of unrefined plant foods and discourages meats, dairy products, eggs and processed foods.

By the way, I’m not telling you to adopt a vegetarian or vegan diet. I’m arguing for an evidence-based diet, and the best available balance of science suggests that the more whole plant foods we eat, the better — both to reap their nutritional benefits and to displace less healthy options.

That doesn’t mean you can never eat steak again. But if you do have steak, make sure you have it with a large portion of broccoli — because broccoli lessens the carcinogenic effect of cooked meat.

Bear in mind that even small changes in your diet, such as eating less meat or more vegetables, can produce significant results.

Studies have shown, for example, that when men with prostate

cancer went on a half-vegan diet, it appeared to slow down the growth of their cancer.

One study found that women who ate more whole plant foods seemed to reduce their chances of getting breast cancer by more than 90 per cent.

And the largest study ever performed on diet and bladder cancer found that an increase in plant protein of only 2 per cent was associated with a 23 per cent decrease in cancer risk.

In fact, the list of how what we eat can change our lives for the better goes on and on.

For example, if you are one of the four in ten men over the age of 40 who experiences erectile dysfunction, help can be found simply by eating three handfuls of pistachio nuts every day ( see box on previous pages).

As for walnuts, eating just four, three times a week, seems to cut your risk of dying from cancer in half. I’ll be explaining all this, and more, in the Mail next week.

Most doctor visits are for lifestyle-based diseases — so they’re preventable.

As physicians, my colleagues and I were trained not to treat the root cause but rather the consequences — by giving a lifetime’s worth of medications to treat risk factors such as high blood pressure, blood sugar and cholesterol.

It has been compared to mopping up the floor around an overflowing sink instead of simply turning off the tap.

What I hope to help you understand is that most of our leading causes of death and disability are not inevitable and can be prevented.

The primary reason diseases tend to run in families may be that diets tend to run in families. Research has shown us that identical twins separated at birth will get different diseases based on how they live their lives.

A recent American Heart Association-funded study compared the lifestyles and arteries of nearly 500 twins.

It found that diet and lifestyle factors clearly trumped genes. You share 50 per cent of your genes with each of your parents, so if one parent dies of a heart attack, you know you’ve inherited some of that susceptibility.

But even among identical twins who have the exact same genes, one could die early of a heart attack and the other could live a long, healthy life with clean arteries, depending on what she ate and how she lived.

Even if both your parents died with heart disease, you should be able to eat your way to a healthy heart. Your family history does not have to become your personal destiny.

Even if you’re born with high-risk genes, you have tremendous control over your medical destiny.

Whatever genes we may have inherited from our parents, what we eat can affect how those genes impact on our health. The power is mainly in our hands — and on our plates.

Today, I’ve given you some remarkable scientific findings on the effects of different foods. And from Monday, I’ll tell you specifically what to eat if you want to avoid contracting some of our major diseases — and, if necessary, help reverse them.

Adapted from How Not to die: discover the Foods Scientifically proven to prevent And Reverse disease by dr Michael Greger and Gene Stone, published by Macmillan at £14.99. to buy a copy for £11.24 visit mailbookshop.co.uk or call 0808 272 0808. Offer until March 5, free p&p on orders over £12.