The relative paralysis of our arteries for hours after eating fast food and cheesecake may also occur after consuming olive oil. Olive oil was found to have the same impairment to endothelial function as high-fat foods like sausage and......

Botanically speaking, seeds are small embryonic plants--the whole plant stuffed into a tiny seed and surrounded by an outer layer packed with vitamins, minerals, and phytochemicals to protect the seedling plant's DNA from free radicals. No wonder they're so......

For the first 90% of our evolution, humans ate diets containing less than a quarter teaspoon of salt a day. Why? Because we ate mostly plants. Since we went millions of years without salt shakers, our bodies evolved into......

Depression is a serious and common mental disorder responsible for the majority of suicides. As I've covered in Antioxidants & Depression, intake of fruits, vegetables, and naturally occurring antioxidants have been found to be protectively associated with depression. Therefore,......

The endothelium is the inner lining of our blood vessels. Laid end-to-end, endothelial cells from a single human would wrap more than four times around the world. And it's not just an inert layer; it's highly metabolically active. I've......

A study out of the University of North Carolina found no association between dietary fiber intake and diverticulosis. They compared those who ate the highest amount of fiber, 25 grams, to those who ate the smallest amount, which was......

Though many reported feeling better on Dr. Walter Kempner's rice and fruit diet, he refused to accept such anecdotal evidence as proof of success. He wanted objective measurements. The most famous were his "eyegrounds photographs," taken with a special......

The World Health Organization (WHO) recommends we reduce our consumption of salt, trans fats, saturated fats, and added sugars. Why? Because consumption of such foods is the cause of at least 14 million deaths every year from chronic diseases.......

High blood pressure ranks as the number-one risk factor for death and disability in the world. In my video, How to Prevent High Blood Pressure with Diet, I showed how a plant-based diet may prevent high blood pressure. But......

Studies suggest that excessive consumption of animal protein poses a risk of kidney stone formation, likely due to the acid load contributed by the high content of sulfur-containing amino acids in animal protein, a topic I explore in my......

Back in the 1960s, a patient isolator unit was developed for cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy. Because our immune system cells were often caught in the friendly fire, up to 50% of cancer patients died of infections before they could......

More than 2000 years ago Hippocrates (460-377 BCE) said, "If we could give every individual the right amount of nourishment and exercise, not too little and not too much, we would have found the safest way to health." What......

Gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD) is one of the most common disorders of the digestive tract. The two most typical symptoms are heartburn and regurgitation of stomach contents into the back of the throat, but GERD is not just burning......

During his career at Duke, Dr. Walter Kempner treated more than 18,000 patients with his rice diet. The diet was originally designed as a treatment for kidney failure and out-of-control high blood pressure at a time when these diagnoses......

In my video How to Prevent Kidney Stones With Diet you can see what the jagged surface of a kidney stone looks like under a microscope. Imagine one of those scraping down your urinary canal! Kidney stones affect approximately......

Pesticides have been classified as probable carcinogens for 25 years. Different pesticides have been associated with different cancers through a variety of mechanisms, including genetic damage--direct hits to our DNA or chromosomes--and epigenetic modification, changes in the way our......

How might we reduce our exposure to pesticide residues on fruits and vegetables? What about staying away from imported produce? Well, it turns out domestic produce may be even worse, dispelling the notion that imported fruits and vegetables pose......

Are organic foods safer and healthier than conventional alternatives? Those are two separate questions. Some consumers are interested in getting more nutrients; others are more concerned about getting fewer pesticides. Let's do nutrition first. As seen in my video,......

There's a take-off of the industry slogan, "Beef: It's What's For Dinner" - "Beef: It's What's Rotting in Your Colon." I saw this on a shirt once with some friends and I was such the party pooper--no pun intended--explaining......

The most comprehensive and systematic analysis of causes of death ever undertaken allows us to answer questions like, how many lives could we save if people cut back on soda? The answer is 299,521. Soft drinks aren't just bad......

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the rates of all of our top 10 killers have fallen or stabilized except for one, suicide. As shown in my video, Antioxidants & Depression, accumulating evidence indicates that free......

Generally, adherence to healthy lifestyle patterns has decreased during the last 18 years. Obesity is up, exercise is down, and the number of people eating just five servings of fruits and veggies a day dropped like a rock. And......

In my video If Fructose is Bad, What About Fruit?, I explored how adding berries to our meals can actually blunt the detrimental effects of high glycemic foods, but how many berries? The purpose of one study out of......

If oatmeal is so powerful that it can clear up some of the ravages of chemotherapy just applied to the skin (see my video Oatmeal Lotion for Chemotherapy-Induced Rash), what might it do if we actually ate it? Oats......

Rice currently feeds almost half the human population, making it the single most important staple food in the world, but a meta-analysis of seven cohort studies following 350,000 people for up to 20 years found that higher consumption of......