Greens Pack a Powerful Punch
It is not merely excess fat that causes disease. It is not merely eating empty-calorie food that causes disease.
And it is not merely the high consumption of animal foods such as dairy, meat, chicken, and fish that leads to premature death in America. These factors are important, but most crucial is what we are missing in our diets by not eating enough produce. Let’s have a look at some more of the reasons why plant foods are so protective and essential for human health.
To illustrate the powerful nutrient density of green vegetables, let us compare the nutrient density of steak with the nutrient density of broccoli and other greens.
Now, which food has more protein — broccoli or steak? You were wrong if you thought steak!
Steak only has 5.4 grams of protein per 100 calories and broccoli has 11.2 grams, almost twice as much.
Keep in mind that most of the calories in meat come from fat; green vegetables are mostly protein (all calories must come from fat, carbohydrate, or protein).
The biggest animals — elephants, gorillas, rhinoceroses, hippopotamuses, and giraffes — all eat predominantly green vegetation. How did they get the protein to get so big? Obviously, greens pack a powerful protein punch. In fact, all protein on the planet was formed from the effect of sunlight on green plants. The cow didn’t eat another cow to form the protein in its muscles, which we call steak. The protein wasn’t formed out of thin air — the cow ate grass! Not that protein is such a big deal or some special nutrient to be held in high esteem. I am making this point because most people think animal products are necessary for a diet to include adequate protein. I am merely illustrating how easy it is to consume more than enough protein while at the same time avoiding risky, cancer-promoting substances such as saturated fat. Consuming more plant protein is the key to achieving safe and successful weight loss.
Now, which has more vitamin E or vitamin C — broccoli or steak? I’m sure you are aware that steak has no vitamin C or vitamin E. It is also almost totally lacking in fibre, folate, vitamin A, beta-carotene, lutein, lycopene, vitamin K, flavonoids, and thousands of other protective phytochemicals. Meat does have certain vitamins and minerals, but even when we consider the nutrients that meat does contain, broccoli has lots more of them . For many important nutrients, broccoli has more than ten times as much as steak. The only exception is vitamin B 1 2, which is not found in plant fare.
When you consider the fibre, phytochemicals, and other essential nutrients, green vegetables win the award for being the most nutrient-dense of all foods. We will give greens a score of 100 and judge all other foods against this criterion.
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. 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. However, less than one in a hundred Americans consumes enough calories from vegetation to ensure this defence.
100 calories of broccoli is about ten ounces of food, and 100 calories of ground sirloin is less than 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 1,500 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 litre 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 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. No one would seriously expect you to eat like a gorilla. However, the message to take home is that the more of these 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 to 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 — six to eleven servings of bread, 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
