"He who does not know Jood, how can he understand the diseases oj man?" - Hippocrates, the father of medicine (460--357 B.C.)
ON A GOLDEN MORNING IN 1946, when summer was all tuckered out and fall wanted to be let in, all you could hear on my family's dairy farm was quiet. There was no growl from cars driving by or airplanes burning trails overhead.Just quiet. There were the songbirds, of course, and the cows, and the roosters who would chime in once in a while, but these noises merely filled out the quiet, the peace. Standing on the second floor of our bam, with the immense brown doors gaping open, allowing the sun to soak through, I was a happy twelve-year-old. I had just finished a big country breakfast of eggs, ba- con, sausage, fried potatoes and ham with a couple of glasses of whole milk. My mom had cooked a fantastic meal. I had been working up my appetite since 4:30 A.M., when I had gotten up to milk the cows with my father Tom and my brother Jack. My father, then forty-five, stood with me in the quiet sun. He opened a fifty-pound sack of alfalfa seed, dumped all the tiny seeds on the wooden barn floor in front of us and then opened a box containing fine black powder. The powder, he explained, was bacteria that would help the alfalfa grow. They would attach themselves to the seeds and become part of the roots of the growing plant throughout its life. Having had only two years of formal education, my father was proud of knowing that the bacteria helped the alfalfa convert nitrogen from the air into protein. The protein, he explained, was good for the cows that would eventually eat it. So our work that morning was to mix the bacteria and the alfalfa seeds before planting. Always curious, 1 asked my dad why it worked and how. He was glad to explain it, and 1was glad to hear it. This was important knowledge for a farm boy. Seventeen years later, in 1963, my father had his first heart attack. He was sixty-one. At age seventy, he died from a second massive coronary. 1was devastated. My father, who had stood with my siblings and me for so many days in the quiet countrySide, teaching us the things that 1still hold dear in life, was gone. Now, after decades of doing experimental research on diet and health, 1 know that the very disease that killed my father, heart disease, can be prevented, even reversed. Vascular (arteries and heart) health is possible without life-threatening surgery and without potentially lethal drugs. 1 have learned that it can be achieved simply by eating the right food. This is the story of how food can change our lives. 1 have spent my career in research and teaching unraveling the complex mystery of why health eludes some and embraces others, and 1 now know that food primarily determines the outcome. This information could not come at a better time. Our health care system costs too much, it excludes far too many people and it does not promote health and prevent disease. Volumes have been written on how the problem might be solved, but progress has been painfully slow. SICKNESS, ANYONE? If you are male in this country, the American Cancer Society says that you have a 47% chance of getting cancer. If you are female, you fare a little better, but you still have a whopping 38% lifetime chance of getting cancer.1 The rates at which we die from cancer are among the highest in the world, and it has been getting worse (Chart 1.1). Despite thirty years of the massively funded War on Cancer, we have made little progress.
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