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The root cause of chronic diseases is eating too delicately
A few decades ago, most of the healthy life expectancy around the world was affected by inadequate nutrition. Now, the biggest cause of trouble is high blood pressure, which is a disease caused by excess nutrition.
The prevalence of this chronic disease is largely due to the introduction of a diet dominated by animal sources and processed foods.
That is, as our living conditions improve, we eat more and more delicately, eating too much milk, eggs, meat, oil, soda, sugar and highly processed grains.
As a result of a shift away from traditional plant-based diets, the incidence of diet-related chronic diseases, such as obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease and cancer, is skyrocketing.
Researchers have tracked diet and disease progression in specific populations. In the case of meat, they studied people who switched from a vegetarian to a regular diet.
After eating meat at least once a week, they were 146 percent more likely to have a heart attack, 152 percent more likely to have a stroke, 166 percent more likely to have diabetes, and 23 times more likely to gain weight.
In the 12 years after switching from vegetarian to omnivorous, eating meat reduced their life expectancy by an average of 3.6 years.
However, even vegetarians who eat too many processed foods are at high risk of chronic diseases.
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Do 4 things to reduce the risk of chronic disease
In nutrition, there is a term called the Diet Quality Index, which reflects the percentage of calories obtained from nutrient-rich, unprocessed plant foods on a scale of 0 to 100, with higher scores indicating higher diet quality.
At the same time, the more fat you can lose over time, the lower your risk of abdominal obesity, high blood pressure, high cholesterol and high triglycerides.
They compared the diets of 100 women with breast cancer with those of 175 healthy women and concluded that those who scored higher on the diet quality index of whole-vegetable diets reduced their risk of breast cancer by more than 90 percent.
If you do just four things, you can reduce your risk of chronic disease by 78% :
- Don't smoke,
- Not obese,
- Exercise for half an hour every day,
- And eating healthier (more fruits, vegetables and whole grains, less meat).
If we try to do these four things from now on, we can reduce the risk of diabetes by more than 90%, the risk of heart disease by more than 80%, the risk of stroke by 50%, and the risk of cancer by at least one-third.
In particular, some cancers, such as colorectal cancer, the second biggest cancer killer, are more than 71 percent preventable with simple diet and lifestyle changes.
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Eating healthy will keep you younger than exercising
Eating more fruits, vegetables, and other antioxidant-rich foods is more healthy than eating highly processed grains, soda, fish, meat, and dairy products.
Studies have shown that if you eat only whole vegetables and avoid processed and animal foods, it may slow down the aging of cells and make people younger.
On the contrary, if you only work on the "quantity" of the diet rather than the "quality", you still maintain the wrong eating habits, no matter how hard you exercise, no matter how much weight you lose, it is not useful for the long-term maintenance of physical health.
What really reverses cellular aging is not weight loss or exercise, but diet.