The Omega Diet: The Lifesaving Nutritional Program Based on the Diet of the Island of Crete

420 Pages·1999·2.04 MB·English

by  Artemis P. Simopoulos

The Omega Diet
The Lifesaving Nutritional Program Based on the Best of the
Mediterranean Diets
Artemis P. Simopoulos, M.D., and Jo Robinson
To my husband, Alan Lee Pinkerson, M.D., and my daughters, Daphne, Lee, and
Alexandra Pinkerson, M.D., whose enthusiasm and support encouraged me to
translate the latest nutrition knowledge and concepts into a book for the benefit
of the general public
A.P.S.
Contents
Introduction
Part 1
Your Health Is in the Balance
1. Found: The Missing Ingredients for Optimal Health
2. The Skinny on Fat
3. Why We Eat the Wrong Fats
4. A Fatty Acid Primer
Part 2
Fighting Disease with The Omega Plan
5. The Genesis of a Heart Attack
6. Taming the Savage Cell
7. Defeating SyndromeX, Obesity, and Diabetes
8. Food for Thought
9. How The Omega Plan Fine-tunes Your Immune System
Part 3
Putting The Omega Plan into Action
10. Your Health Is in the Balance
11. The Omega Shopper
12. The 3-Week Omega Plan
13. The Omega Weight-Loss Plan
14. In the Omega Kitchen
15. Shortcuts to Healthy Eating
Comments and Endnotes
Appendix
Grams of Fatty Acids per 100 Grams
Resource Section
Recommended Reading
Searchable Terms
Acknowledgments
Copyright
About the Publisher
Introduction
In this book, I have the privilege of presenting some lifesaving new discoveries
about diet and health. Careful research conducted over the past fifteen years has
shown that fat is more than fuel—it is an essential nutrient that influences every
aspect of your being from your ability to learn to the beating of your heart.
Whether fat enhances or undermines your health depends on its unique blend of
“fatty acids,” the molecular building blocks of fats and oils. Eating a healthy
balance of fatty acids will reduce your risk of a host of diseases, including
cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes, obesity, arthritis, and asthma. It might
even save your life.
In an ideal world, we should not have to know anything about fatty acids in
order to eat a healthy diet; we should be able to shop at the local store, buy
products that are readily available, and be confident that we are bringing home
nutritionally balanced food. But we do not have this luxury. Unwittingly, we
have allowed the food industry to make technological changes to our food
supply without understanding the biological consequences. The net result is that
our diet is so different from the natural human diet, the diet on which our species
evolved, that it is at odds with our genetic makeup, increasing our risk of heart
disease, cancer, diabetes, obesity, and immune disorders. The Omega Diet, the
landmark medically proven program featured in this book, restores a healthy
balance of essential nutrients to your diet. This simple and delicious program
will help every cell and every system in your body function as nature intended.
As fortune would have it, I grew up eating a diet very similar to The Omega
Diet. I was born in Greece, a country with a 5,000-year tradition of good
nutrition. My mother made a great effort to give us fresh, wholesome food, a
task made easier by the fact that we had a large estate that had been in her family
for generations. Within the stone walls of the estate were chickens, goats, sheep,
and hundreds of trees that gave us olives, pears, figs, plums, and pomegranates.
The mild climate allowed fruits and vegetables to grow year round. Given this
bounty, everything we ate was impeccably fresh. The eggs that went into the
spinach pie had been laid by our hens that very morning. The milk was from the
day’s first milking. The whole-wheat bread was freshly made, and the olive oil
that anointed the bread had been pressed from our own olives. For lunch, we had
charcoal-broiled fish that had been swimming in the Mediterranean Sea only the
day before. One of my childhood delights was waking up in the morning and
hurrying down to breakfast, knowing that I would be greeted by a bowl of ripe
fruit. The fruit would be chilled—not because it had come from the refrigerator
but because it had been picked before dawn.
Although the food was delicious and bountiful, it was eaten with restraint.
As is true in most Greek households, a period of fasting preceded our holidays
and feast days. During Lent, for example, we would go for several weeks
without eating meat or dairy products. During Easter week, we would even forgo
olive oil. It wasn’t unusual for adults to lose ten pounds before Easter, a reversal
of the American tradition of feasting during the holidays and then going on a
punishing diet. Exercise was an integral part of our lives. We would walk to
market, to school, and to church. In church, everyone would stand except the old
people. In school, we had a full hour of physical activity every day. People from
the wealthiest families even had personal exercise trainers—decades before the
practice became fashionable in the United States.
I was in for a rude shock when I came to the United States in 1949 to study
chemistry at Barnard College. To put it bluntly, I found much of the food
inedible. I can still remember the first breakfast I ate in the dorm. The only bread
available was white bread, which, to me, tasted like cotton. There was one kind
of cheese, an intensely orange, bland, and rubbery cheese. The fruit looked
appetizing, but it had so little flavor that it was hard to believe it was the same
kind of fruit that grew in Greece. There were three other Greek students at
Barnard, and they viewed the American diet with equal dismay. Eventually, we
discovered that white bread tastes better when it’s toasted, and that rye crackers
are a reasonable standin for whole-grain bread.
The stark contrast between the American diet of the 1950s and the traditional
Greek diet made such an impression on me that it helped shape my entire
medical career. When I went to medical school, I specialized in pediatrics and
focused much of my attention on infant and maternal nutrition. I began to realize
that many of the children with serious diseases had been malnourished in the
womb. This unfortunate start was made worse by the types of food eaten in the
home—refined foods, lots of saturated fat and sugar, very few fruits and
vegetables, and margarine with its hidden cargo of trans-fatty acids. My first job
following my training was directing the newborn nursery at George Washington
University, and I saw once again that diet and lifestyle can have dramatic effects
on the health of the child. This observation made me interested in the interplay
between genetics and nutrition as well. Which types of food were ideally suited
for a child’s genetic background? How could diet help compensate for genetic
defects? I found the answers to many of my questions when I went to study
endocrinology and metabolism at the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
In the late 1970s and 1980s, I added another interest—food politics. Medical
research alone cannot change what Americans eat. Vital research paid for with
taxpayers’ money remains locked in the medical journals unless it is
communicated to the public and implemented by government policy. To help
shape that policy, I chaired the Nutrition Coordinating Committee at the NIH for
nine consecutive years and co-chaired the Interagency Committee for Human
Nutrition Research at the Office of Science and Technology Policy at the White
House for five years. These committees influenced nutrition and food policy
throughout the federal government.
While chairing the committees, I became aware of a number of new findings
about essential fatty acids and, in 1985, helped organize the first international
conference devoted exclusively to this topic. Following the conference, my
colleagues and I wrote a comprehensive research program focusing on essential
fatty acids that was adopted by ten separate institutes of the NIH.
One of the most important findings to come out of the research program is
that our bodies function most efficiently when we eat fats that contain a balanced
ratio of the two families of essential fatty acids—omega-6 and omega-3 fatty
acids. The ratio in the typical American diet has been estimated to be as high as
20 to 1. One of the few diets in the world to have a balanced ratio of essential
fatty acids is the traditional Greek diet. Ironically, I had spent much of my
medical career gaining scientific insight into the very diet on which I was raised.
When you follow The Seven Dietary Guidelines of The Omega Diet, you
will be fueling your body with a ratio of essential fatty acids ideally suited for
your metabolism. You will also be enriching your diet with fresh fruit,
vegetables, legumes, and oils high in omega-3 fatty acids. A study conducted in
the 1990s (the Lyon Diet Heart Study) demonstrated convincingly that this type
of diet protects your cardiovascular system more effectively than any other heart
diet or drug.
Although this book is focused primarily on diet, I will also be stressing the
importance of physical exercise. Regular physical activity enhances your health
in many of the same ways as eating the right balance of nutrients. When you
combine exercise with a healthy diet, you have what Hippocrates defined as
“Positive Health”:
Positive health requires a knowledge of man’s primary constitution
[what we now call genetics] and of the powers of various foods, both
those natural to them and those resulting from human skill [today’s
processed foods]. But eating alone is not enough for health. There must
also be exercise, of which the effects must likewise be known. The
combination of these two things makes regimen, when proper attention
is given to the season of the year, the changes of the winds, the age of
the individual, and the situation of his home. If there is any deficiency in
food or exercise, the body will fall sick.
I have written this book with the hope that it will empower you to make
healthier food choices, greatly increasing your chances of enjoying lifelong
“positive health.”
PART 1
Your Health Is in the Balance