Living Healthy: couple

Wednesday, October 10, 2012

Animal Protein and IGF-1

At first we didn’t know why eating a plant-based diet for just a couple weeks appeared to so dramatically improve cancer defenses. Then, last year, researchers figured it out: eating healthy lowers the level of the cancer promoting growth hormone IGF-1. This saga was detailed in my last four Care2 articles:

What is the mechanism by which a simple dietary change can alter the levels of this cancer promoter? Imagine you’re a kid with some tinker toys. Then for your next birthday you get one of those huge tinker toy sets dumped down in front of you. All excited with this new load of raw building materials, you may really start scaling up. Basically it’s the same with your liver and insulin-like growth factor 1.

When you dump a load of protein in your body, your liver’s like, “Whoa, look at all this! What are we going to do with it all? We can’t just waste it, we’ve got to do something with it.” Thus, your liver starts pumping out IGF-1 to tell all the cells in the body, “it’s growin’ time! Be fruitful and multiply. Spare no expense, go crazy—look how much excess protein we got to work with!”

The problem is that some of the new additions spurred by this growth hormone may be tumors. When you’re a fully-grown adult, cell growth is something we want to slow down—not accelerate. The goal, therefore, would be to maintain adequate, but not excessive, overall protein intake.

Wait a second, though. As I show in my 3-min. video Protein Intake and IGF-1 Production, studies have found no association between total protein intake and IGF-1 levels, but that’s because they didn’t take into account animal versus plant protein. It took a study comparing meat-eaters to vegans to show that higher IGF-1 levels were only associated with animal protein intake. In fact, plant protein seemed to decrease IGF-1 levels. Animal protein appears to send a much different signal to our livers than most plant proteins. Even vegans eating the same amount of protein as meateaters still had lower levels of the IGF-1, so it’s apparently not about excessive protein in general, but about animal protein in particular. To understand why, see the above NutritionFacts.org video pick.

For those who haven’t been following along, see IGF-1 as One-Stop Cancer Shop for the reason we’re so concerned about IGF-1 levels and my videos The Answer to the Pritikin Puzzle and How Plant-Based to Lower IGF-1? to learn about the role diet plays in cancer development. If the reason animal proteins raise IGF-1 levels is because they resemble our own proteins, what about the few plant proteins that just coincidently happen to have amino acid ratios similar to proteins such as soy? Great question! That will be the subject of my Care2 article on Friday.

In health,
Michael Greger, M.D.

PS: If you haven’t yet, you can subscribe to my videos for free by clicking here and watch my full 2012 presentation Uprooting the Leading Causes of Death.

Image credit: StuartWebster / Flickr

Source : care2[dot]com

Friday, September 28, 2012

Tomato Sauce With Butter & Onion

I finally jumped on the foodie bandwagon and made this tomato sauce everyone has been raving about for the past couple years. First Deb, then Jaden, then Francis, then Elise — I figured there had to be something to it…

Our new addition does not make cooking easy but this recipe looked just simple enough to attempt between dealing with the two kids in the fuzzy haze of sleep deprivation.

The only change I made was to substitute the last tomatoes from our garden and the ones we received in our CSA pick-up this week for the canned San Marzano tomatoes that Marcella Hazan’s recipe calls for. I figure this can only help though I’m sure the San Marzanos are tasty, too.

Since I was using fresh tomatoes, I blanched them, cooled them in ice water and peeled them.

Then peeled and halved the onion, sliced the butter and combined it all in the pot. Simmered for 45 minutes, stirring regularly and crushing the tomatoes against the side of the pot.

Removed the onion, gave it a few licks with the old immersion blender and salted it to taste. I admit it went against the grain to use butter instead of olive oil but it makes the sauce so rich and smooth and, well, buttery, that I have no regrets at all. And I also questioned the removal of the onion but decided just to follow the recipe and was pleased with the end result – a delicate, rich, fresh tasting sauce.

Simple, delicious, comfort food. And a perfect way to use up some end-of-the-season tomatoes, too. Directions on the next page are for the canned tomatoes – but just blanch and peel if you’re using fresh ones.

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Source : care2[dot]com