Free Eat to Live: The Amazing Nutrient-Rich Program for Fast and Sustained Weight Loss by Joel Fuhrman

against this criterion.

The Secret of Extreme Longevity
     
    Interestingly, there is one food that scientific research has shown has a strong positive association with increased longevity in humans. So which food do you think that is?
    The answer is raw, leafy greens, normally referred to as salad. 23 Leafy greens such as romaine lettuce, kale, collards, Swiss chard, and spinach are the most nutrient-dense of all foods.
    Most vegetables contain more nutrients per calorie than any other food and are rich in all necessary amino acids. For example, romaine lettuce, which gets 18 percent of its calories from fat and almost 50 percent of its calories from protein, is a rich powerhouse with hundreds of cancer-fighting phytonutrients that protect us from a variety of threatening illnesses. Being healthy and owning a disease-resistant body is not luck; it is earned.
    In a review of 206 human-population studies, raw vegetable consumption showed the strongest protective effect against cancer of any beneficial food. 24 However, fewer than one in a hundred Americans consumes enough calories from vegetation to ensure this defense.
    I tell my patients to put a big sign on their refrigerator that says THE SALAD IS THE MAIN DISH.
    The word
salad
here means any
vegetable
eaten raw or uncooked, e.g., a bowl of cold pasta in olive oil with a token vegetable is
not
a salad. I encourage my patients to eat two
huge
salads a day, with the goal of consuming an entire head of romaine or other green lettuce daily. I suggest that you go and make the sign and tape it to your fridge now—and then come back. If you plan on doing it later, you may forget. If you learn but one practical habit from this book, let it be this one.

Green Salad Is Less Than 100 Calories per Pound
     
    Did you notice that 100 calories of broccoli is about twelve ounces of food, and 100 calories of ground sirloin is just one ounce of food? With green vegetables you can get filled up, even stuffed, yet you will not be consuming excess calories. Animal products, on the other hand, are calorie-dense and relatively low in nutrients, especially the crucial anti-cancer nutrients.
    What would happen if you attempted to eat like a mountain gorilla, which eats about 80 percent of its diet from green leaves and about 15 percent from fruit? Assuming you are a female, who needs about 1,600 calories a day, if you attempted to get 1,200 of those calories from greens, you would need to eat over fifteen pounds of greens. That is quite a big salad! Since your stomach can only hold about one liter of food (or a little over a quart), you would have a problem fitting it all in.
    You would surely get lots of protein from this gorilla diet. In fact, with just five pounds of greens you would exceed the recommended daily allowance (RDA) for protein and would get loads of other important nutrients. The problem with this gorilla diet is that you would develop a
calorie deficiency
. You would become too thin. Believe it or not, I do not expect you to eat exactly like a gorilla. However, the message to take home is that the more ofthese healthy green vegetables (both raw and cooked) you eat, the healthier you will be and the thinner you will become.
    Now let’s contrast this silly and extreme gorilla example with another silly and extreme way of eating, the American diet.
    If you attempt to follow the perverted diet that most Americans eat, or even if you follow the precise recommendations of the USDA’s pyramid—eight to eleven servings of bread, cereal, rice, and pasta (consumed as 98 percent refined grains by Americans) with four to six servings of dairy, meat, poultry, or fish—you would be eating a diet rich in calories but extremely low in nutrients, antioxidants, phytochemicals, and vitamins. You would be overfed and malnourished, the precise nutritional profile that causes heart disease and cancer.

Weighing Food and Trying to Eat Smaller Portions Is Futile
     
    Earlier I compared 100 calories