How Not to Die Book Summary, by Michael Greger

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1-Page Summary of How Not to Die

Overview

If you’ve ever tried to diet, then you know how confusing it can be. There are a lot of different diets out there and they all have different rules. Some require eating lots of meat while others say that’s not healthy. You may find one that works for a few days but then stop losing weight. It’s hard to know who to trust when making such an important decision about your health because some diets contradict each other. What any serious dieter really needs is a purely evidence-based approach which shows them what the best dieting choices are so they can lose weight fast and effectively without sacrificing their health or happiness in the process. This article will help readers understand why we should eat like our ancestors did before processed foods became popular just 50 years ago by providing key points on why this is the right way to go if we want to live healthier lives.

Fiber helps you feel full and, in turn, eat less. The reason for this is because fiber makes you feel fuller faster. Fiber also slows down the absorption of food into the bloodstream so that your body doesn’t get a sudden influx of calories or sugar (which can cause insulin spikes). Beans help stop overeating by making you feel more satiated after meals.

Big Idea #1: Obesity is a normal bodily response to an abnormal situation – the abundance of highly calorific and processed foods.

Obesity is becoming more and more common. In the past 100 years, it has gone up from one in 30 people to one in three. In fact, 71% of adults are overweight today, and 40% are obese. This is a new normal for Americans.

Obesity is a problem because of the abundance of processed foods in today’s society. This issue has been going on for centuries, but it only recently became an epidemic. The reason why this happened was because people are eating too much food that isn’t good for them.

Humans have always needed food to survive. For most of our history, it was scarce and hard to find. If you found some food, you ate it. And if a certain type of food had more calories than others, then that’s what people would focus on eating because they wanted the most calories per hour spent gathering them. After all, if someone could get 250 calories an hour foraging for ten hours straight without any breaks to sleep or rest, that’s 2,500 total calories in a day; but if they could get 500 calories an hour from one source alone instead of needing two sources with 250 each to reach the same amount of total daily intake—that would mean getting half done in just five hours! That means five extra hours every day is available to do other things like art or cave paintings rather than spending time looking for food!

Thus, humans developed a preference for calorie-dense foods because of their evolutionary history.

We still have this instinct today. For example, what foods do you crave? Do you lust for vegetables or fatty, starchy foods with a lot of sugar and calories? Studies show that children prefer fruits over vegetables because they’re sweeter. They’ll even pick potatoes over peaches because they’re more calorie-dense.

Our biology was built for scarcity, but today we have plenty of food. Processed foods are more calorie-dense than natural foods. It’s hard to tell the difference between a lettuce and a chocolate chip cookie because our ancestors didn’t eat those types of processed foods.

The reality is that weight gain isn’t unusual. When people have too many calories, their bodies respond in a natural way by storing them as fat. Today, we’re surrounded by more excess calories than ever before.

How Not to Die Book Summary, by Michael Greger