Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy

ldquo;In this updated edition of Eat, Drink and Be Healthy, Dr. Willett, one of the world’s pre-eminent nutrition researchers, explains the latest evidence to help us all thrive, and live longer lives. And for home cooks, professional chefs, and food lovers everywhere, this must-read elegantly bridges nutrition and culinary strategies in ways that honor the cause of deliciousness and the pleasures of sharing food with family and friends."

Auteur

Walter C. Willet, M.D. with Patrick J. Skerrett, co-developed with the Harvard School of Public Health

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In this national bestseller based on Harvard Medical School and Harvard School of Public Health research, Dr. Willett explains why the USDA guidelines--the famous food pyramid--are not only wrong but also dangerous.

Résumé
In this revised and updated edition of the bestselling Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy, Dr. Walter Willett, for twenty-five years chair of the renowned Department of Nutrition at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, draws on cutting-edge research to explain what the USDA guidelines have gotten wrong—and how you can eat right.

There’s an ever-growing body of evidence supporting the relatively simple principles behind healthy eating. Yet the public seems to be more confused than ever about what to eat. The never-ending promotion of celebrity and other fad diets gets in the way of choosing a diet that is healthy for both you and the planet that we all share.

So forget popular diets and food trends. Based on information gleaned from the acclaimed Nurses’ Health Study and Health Professionals Study, which have tracked the health and eating habits of thousands of women and men for more than thirty years, as well as other groundbreaking nutrition research, this revised and updated edition of Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy provides solid recommendations for eating healthfully and living better and longer.

Dr. Willett offers eye-opening new research on choosing foods with the best types of carbohydrates, fats, and proteins, and the relative importance of various food groups and supplements. He clearly explains why controlling weight, after not smoking, is the single most important factor for a long, healthy life; why eating some types of fat is beneficial, and even necessary, for good health; how to choose wisely between different types carbohydrates; how to pick the right protein “packages”; and what fruits and vegetables—not juices!—fight disease. Dr. Willett also translates this essential information into simple, easy-to-follow menu plans and tasty recipes. Revised and updated, this new edition of Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy is an important resource for every family.

Échantillon de lecture
Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy

CHAPTER ONE

Healthy Eating Matters

YOU EAT TO LIVE.

It’s a simple, obvious truth. You need food for the basics of everyday life—to pump blood, move muscles, think thoughts. But what you eat and drink can also help you live well and live longer. By making the right choices, you can avoid some of the things we think of as inevitable penalties of getting older. Eating well—teamed with keeping your weight in the healthy range, exercising regularly, and not smoking—can prevent 80 percent of heart attacks, 90 percent of type 2 diabetes, and 70 percent of colorectal cancer.1 It can also help you avoid stroke, osteoporosis, constipation and other digestive woes, cataracts, and aging-related memory loss or dementia. And the benefits aren’t just for the future. A healthy diet can give you more energy and help you feel good today. Making poor dietary choices—eating too much of the wrong kinds of food and too little of the right kinds, or too much food altogether—can send you in the other direction, increasing your chances of developing one or more chronic conditions or dying early. An unhealthy diet during pregnancy can cause some birth defects and may even influence a baby’s health into adulthood and old age.

When it comes to diet, knowing what’s good and what’s bad isn’t always easy. The food industry spends billions of dollars a year to influence your choices, mostly in the wrong direction. Diet gurus promote the latest fads, most of which are less than healthy, while the media serves up near daily helpings of flip-flopping nutrition news. Supermarkets and fast-food restaurants also offer conflicting advice, as do cereal boxes and thousands of websites, blogs, Facebook pages, and tweets. The federal government, through its Food Guide Pyramid, MyPyramid, and MyPlate images, aimed to cut through the confusion but ended up giving misleading and often unhealthy recommendations (see chapter two) that benefit American agriculture and food companies more than Americans’ health.

While the average American diet still has a long way to go before it can be called healthy, it has improved over the past decade or so in spite of the babel of nutrition information. Several of my colleagues and I looked at the diets of almost 34,000 Americans who took part in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey between 1999 and 2012. This survey, conducted every year, gauges the diet, health, and nutritional status of a sample of adults and children in the United States. We rated the diet of each participant using a tool we developed that assigns higher points to healthy components of the diet, like eating whole grains and unsaturated fats, and lower points to unhealthy components, like eating red meat and drinking sugar-sweetened beverages. The highest score, 110, indicates the healthiest diet possible. We were delighted to report that the quality of the American diet improved between 1999 and 2012.2 Consumption of artery-damaging trans fats declined by 80 or 90 percent, and Americans drank about 25 percent fewer sugar-sweetened beverages. On average, people ate slightly more fruit, whole grains, and healthy unsaturated fats. Our study showed that the average American diet still wasn’t very healthy—rating 48 points out of 110—and that poorer individuals and those with less education have poorer diets than wealthier and better-educated individuals. And this gap looks like it is increasing over time.

Yet, these modest improvements in diet quality had an astounding impact on the health of the nation. Between 1999 and 2012, we estimated that these changes prevented 1.1 million premature deaths from heart attacks, strokes, cancer, and other causes, and 3 million cases of type 2 diabetes. But there’s more work to be done, since the “average American diet” in this study wasn’t that great. The eating strategies described in this book will help you make a great diet and reap not only the benefits described in this study but many more as well.

SIMPLE STEPS

I wrote Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy in 2001 to cut through the confusion about diet. Basing the book on the most reliable scientific evidence available then, I offered recommendations for eating and drinking healthfully. Sixteen years and thousands of scientific papers later, the recommendations in this edition of the book are fundamentally the same, though supported with more extensive evidence and enhanced with important new details. That’s encouraging, because it means that, with careful attention to the types and strength of studies, we can make conclusions about healthy eating that withstand the test of time and deep scientific scrutiny. However, the book needed to be updated, because far too many Americans are still confused about what constitutes a healthy diet and are looking for the best available information.

Even more encouraging is that nat…