Food As Medicine

December 16, 2009

Interview with Joel Fuhrman, M.D. author of the book Eat to Live: The Revolutionary Formula for Fast and Sustained Weight Loss

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Mike Carruthers:
You should eat healthy; you’ve heard that advice a million times.

Joel Fuhrman M.D.:
Because everybody’s saying eat more fruits and vegetables, everybody’s saying berries prevent dementia, mushrooms prevent breast cancer. Everybody’s reporting the science that food is our most powerful medicine.
 

Joel Fuhrman M.D.

Dr. Joel Fuhrman, author of the book Eat to Live, says a lot of the science behind why healthy eating is so good for you is still coming out and it’s fascinating.

It wasn’t until about fifteen years ago we finally realized that a strawberry has 700 nutrients in it. A piece of broccoli has 1,000 nutrients. The point is there are more undiscovered nutrients than there are even discovered nutrients. And you have to actually eat real food to get those things.

Specifically Dr. Fuhrman says we need to understand that…

Natural plant foods are rich in phytochemicals and antioxidants. We’re talking about anything the color green, red, orange, black in other words things that nature put color in the food. Like sweet potatoes have more nutrients than white potato. Berries are particularly rich foods. There’s studies that have come out in the last five years showing that just by people eating an ounce of nuts and seeds a day you can reduce cardiac death by at least 60%.

It’s not that you have to give up all the foods you love.

We call it the 90% rule; you don’t have to be perfect all the time to be healthy. But the problem is Americans are eating 90% junk and only 5% healthy stuff.  We have to get up to eating 90% healthy stuff and less than 5% of the stuff that isn’t so good – do you follow me?

For Part 2 click here.

To hear the complete unedited interview, click here