Do you eat more for pleasure or to sustain your body? If you’re not cautious about what you feed yourself and your family now, there is potential for future health problems that can result from poor eating habits. It’s easy to preach about nutrition, but it’s another challenge to walk the walk.
Board-certified family physician and nutritional specialist Joel Fuhrman, M.D. has written several books including bestseller Eat to Live and a two-book set called Eat for Health. Whether you want to lose weight, reverse disease or both, Dr. Fuhrman has developed scientifically backed nutritional methods to help. He recently took time to discuss America’s bad eating habits with Vegan Mainstream – as well as the key to unlocking the door to a better quality of life.
Vegan Mainstream: Tell me about yourself and why you became interested in the nutritarian diet style.
Joel Fuhrman: I’ve been in practice [for] 20 years, and I decided to become a physician because of my interest in natural health and nutrition through my teenage and young adult life.
I was on the World Team in figure skating. I was second in the United States National Pairs Championships in 1973. Through my competitive ice skating career, I always had superior nutrition…I just found nutrition to be fascinating, because people thought they could put any kind of harmful substance in their bodies and go to doctors and expect doctors to give them a drug, which we know is toxic, to try to remedy what was their self abuse. It never made sense to me — [that] whole idea of the medical profession never made sense to me…so I did become a physician and decided to utilize nutrition as the main focus of my practice. I actually went to medical school with the purpose of becoming a doctor whose focus was on human nutrition.
VM: With the media and celebrities dictating the image of the “perfect body,” where do people usually go wrong in their diets?
JF: In the American diet, 62 percent of calories are processed foods — by processed foods we’re talking about white flour, sugar, oil - things like bagels, donuts, cookies and rice cakes, pretzels, breakfast cereals and sodas…those are all foods that have an insignificant amount of micronutrients per calorie. [When you eat things like that] you’re just taking in calories without any nutrient load. The average wild monkey in the woods consumes 15 times more micronutrients than the average American consumes.
VM: Eat to Live is a book that contains your revolutionary formula for weight loss…can you briefly discuss your equation: health = nutrients / calories?
JF: In the early 1990s, I started to promote the health equation, which is Health = N / C [Health = Nutrients / Calories]. I’m the originator of that equation, which is now used by nutritional scientists all over the world to describe how to achieve a healthy life expectancy. [This] means not just how long you live, but [it also refers to] the quality of your life in your later years, [which] is traumatically affected by the micronutrient-per-calorie density of your diet through life. In other words, we’re advocating that people’s diets are richer in micronutrients per calorie — more foods that are high in micronutrients and less foods that are low in micronutrients.
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VM: In your opinion, when it comes to food and eating, what is the worst behavior our society is engaging in?
JF: Simplistically, I’m lumping together processed foods and animal products in the same category…a piece of chicken is like a bagel. Why am I saying a piece of chicken is like a bagel? Because they’re both good sources of calories called macronutrients, but neither one has a significant micronutrient load. Both the bagel and the chicken do not contain antioxidants like E and C and K and folate and bioflavonoids and lignins. Since they’re both lacking what our bodies are starving for, as we eat those foods, they’re contributing to the overall causation mode of cancer and heart disease. We have to reduce animal products and processed foods simultaneously so we can occupy the major portion of our plate with unrefined plants if [we want] to have any kind of success at winning the war on cancer or heart disease in America.
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Check out this video of Dr. Fuhrman talking about micronutrients with Mehmet Oz, M.D.:
VM: I see you’re a parent of four children…what is the most challenging part of raising healthy kids? Any advice for families who want to make a healthy change?
JF: Well, I did write a book on that, Disease-Proof Your Child. It’s probably my favorite book, and I think it has a lot of great information in it…it’s a must read for all Americans. It essentially explains how we can win the war on cancer by changing the way kids eat and that cancer - adult cancer - is predominantly caused by what kids eat in their first ten years of life.
…The main thing people need to do is get all the unhealthy food choices out of their house and model the behavior they want their child to [emulate]. In other words, the first thing parents have to do to get their kids to eat healthy is to eat healthy themselves. If they don’t do that first, nothing’s going to ever work — you can’t be a hypocrite. The first step is…to make your house a healthy island of superior health foods, and no options to eat foods that are unhealthy because they’re not in the house. Then the whole family as a whole has to give each other love by making sure everyone takes good care of their health — even the kids are responsible for helping the parents take care of their health.
Dr. Fuhrman has incredible patient success stories to share. Check out more health news, recipes and parenting tips by visiting Fuhrman’s blog at DiseaseProof.com.
