Anti-Free Radical, Pro-Longevity Diet

By Elmer M. Cranton, M.D.
Copyright © 2005Elmer M. Cranton, M.D.

     The diet you'll be eating to avoid cardiovascular ill health will—for almost every one of you—be the same diet that you would design to insure yourself a long and healthy life. That's because most good diets have general principles in common. And they have certain long-term results in common, too. Most of you will find that eating right keeps you looking trim and vigorous, with healthy skin and hair. Over the long haul of life, it will provide you with one good day after another, days full of energy, not days that are sluggish, sleepy and suffused with brain fog.

We each have our own particular balance of meat and fish, fruits and vegetables, potatoes, whole grains, pasta, and rice that suits us. But that individualized and satisfying food profile, that I hope you'll construct for yourself, won't contradict—if it's healthy—this paper full of basic do's and don'ts. It will only benefit from them.

 Food transforms our bodies. Let's consider two aspects of how and what effect it has on you.

 First, food provides the building blocks for this extraordinary, high-energy, mobile body that you live within. Clearly, a healthy spectrum of nutrients is necessary if your body is to function at its optimum level. Simply put, if you want to maximize the operation of all your metabolic systems, you need to ingest a powerful regimen of vitamins and minerals, proteins, fats and carbohydrates, packaged in the highest quality foods.

 Such foods will also provide you with a wide-ranging panoply of antioxidants—a molecular defense team no one can do without. That certainly exemplifies the positive aspect of eating: the right foods strengthen and protect you from a myriad of glitches in your machinery, while providing the fuel for function. But keep in mind that you can in no way receive all the nutrients that are essential for optimal health from food alone. Supplements are also very important. Recent research now provides good, scientific evidence for that statement—one I have been making to my patients for decades.

 Second, of course, it's important not to eat the wrong things, at least not frequently. There are foods—refined sugar, white flour, margarine, rancid or hydrogenated oils—that aren't much good for anyone at any time. They do provide a source of calories, but they are not utilized by the body healthful way. To eat such things in significant quantity is self-destructive. In addition, there are other foods—often sternly criticized—that are fine. I'm referring to meat, fish, fowl, eggs and butter in moderation. How much of these animal sources of food you should be eating is very much a matter of individual metabolism, preference and personal philosophy.

 Some people do best on a high protein, low carbohydrate diet. More fat and cholesterol inevitably accompany more protein, but if supplemental antioxidants are taken, I have not seen a problem with that so-called Atkins approach. Dr. Robert Atkins of New York City, author of many popular weight-loss and diet books, has advocated this approach for decades. For many people, that approach seems to work best. Weight control can be easier, energy levels increase, and sense of well-being improves. Despite what you may hear from other sources, I have not seen an increase in risk factors in my practice for atherosclerosis on that type of dietary regimen—as proven in recent scientific research.

 Increased release of insulin by the pancreas with age is probably as much a risk factor for heart disease as dietary fat. Fat and cholesterol have only been shown to cause problems if they become oxidized. Supplemental antioxidants help to prevent that.

 Many people, especially those who have gained weight, develop resistance to insulin, as they grow older. The pancreas releases insulin into the blood in response to dietary starches, sugars, and other carbohydrates. Carbohydrates cannot be taken into cells and utilized without insulin. As cells become resistant to insulin, the pancreas must increase insulin production. This leads to persistent high blood levels of insulin, which block the breakdown of fat, leading to weight gain and obesity. Excess insulin also contributes to high blood pressure, abnormal cholesterol and triglyceride ratios, and increases the risk for heart disease and stroke. The new buzz word for that set of conditions is "Syndrome X," also called the metabolic syndrome.

 As cells become increasingly resistant to insulin, the pancreas may not be able to produce enough to control blood sugar. If sugar levels in the blood, called glucose, become too high as a result, it's diagnosed as diabetes—type II, adult onset diabetes. If the pancreas becomes totally exhausted and loses its ability to produce insulin, type I, insulin-dependent diabetes can result. It's not uncommon for adults to be somewhere between those two extremes, producing more insulin than normal, but still keeping their blood sugar within limits. Those are the people who often do better with less carbohydrate and more protein in their diet.

 Conversely, some people feel better on a low-protein, low-fat, and high complex carbohydrate diet. This is the approach originally proposed by Nathan Pritikin as the Pritikin Diet, and more recently popularized by Dr. Dean Ornish, called the Ornish Diet.

 Dr. Barry Sears proposes a diet intermediate between these, with attention to the types of carbohydrates that require less insulin to utilize. He calls this the "Zone Diet," and stresses carbohydrates with a lower glycemic index, which trigger less insulin release by the pancreas.

 Others may prefer a strict vegetarian diet, and do very well on that regimen.

 Any of those dietary regimens can be acceptable and can be healthy if the general guidelines in this paper are followed.

 A word of caution: you can't have it both ways! Those who follow a high protein, low carbohydrate approach, as advocated by Dr. Atkins, must be truly conscientious about carbohydrate restriction, or they'll gain weight. Carbohydrates can be very addicting and difficult to give up.

 Not all calories are equal in their ability to cause obesity. Some people remain obese while eating less than 1,000 calories daily. Others stay slim eating fives times that amount. Familial, genetic inheritance varies widely, but an important difference is also blood insulin levels and insulin resistance at the cell membranes. The way to reduce insulin is to eat less of those carbohydrate foods that promote insulin release by the pancreas. The average American gains one pound per year between age 20 and age 70. Insulin resistance is largely the cause. From age 70 on, average weight tends to decline as essential hormone levels decline and cell replacement slows.

 I'm going to propose an eating plan that seems to work well for the vast majority of my patients and which has substantial scientific evidence to back it up. If you follow this plan and then modify it in the direction of what makes you feel most energetic and healthy day in and day out, you should have no difficulty creating a truly formidable pro-longevity diet. And my name for that diet is:

 THE ANTI-FREE-RADICAL, PRO-LONGEVITY DIET

 That's exactly what this paper will introduce you to. Electron-hungry free radicals are byproducts of merely living. The reason that the mammals on this planet—including humans—are capable of leading such incredibly active lives is because they use an extraordinary high-activity fuel, oxygen. Watch the way a wood fire burns: It's consuming oxygen, as well as logs, for fuel. In a similar way we also consume oxygen, but in a more controlled fashion; and we pay the price in potential oxidative damage to our cells, enzymes, genes, and chromosomes.

 Fortunately, our bodies have constructed a formidable network of defense against the almost explosively reactive substance that fuels it. Our bodies make every effort to stay saturated with antioxidants—substances that inhibit oxygen free radical formation and neutralize free radicals already formed, many of which are necessary in controlled amounts for life and health. Nevertheless, it has been estimated that there are enough free radicals released in our bodies during every 24-hour period to subject each and every one of our cells to a thousand hits by unbalanced electron-stripping molecular fragments. This is war!

 It turns out that many of the prime sources of pathologically active, potentially disease-causing free radicals can be avoided with dietary manipulation. For example, we can avoid consuming processed fats and oils (particularly the more rancid ones I'll tell you about later) and stop eating highly processed and refined foods, which have been stripped of essential protective antioxidants and other micronutrients.

 This is a decided departure from the widely practiced but outmoded "no eggs, less animal fat" dietary approach to minimizing the risk of cardiovascular disease.

 The anti-free radical diet establishes a five-pronged approach to this internal war against free radicals:

1. It reduces consumption of foods that metabolize most readily into excess free radicals.

2. It supplies optimal amounts of free radical-scavenging nutrients.

3. It provides ample quantities of trace and ultratrace nutrients necessary for healthy metabolism—for healing, immunity, and manufacture of antioxidant enzymes.

4. It utilizes less-oxidizing food preparation methods to minimize lipid peroxidation before consumption.

5. It reduces intake of calorie-dense fatty foods, helping to avoid obesity, and reducing dietary sources of lipid peroxide free radicals. Lipid is a medical word meaning fat, and lipid peroxidation is a process whereby free radicals disrupt fats and fatty membranes within and surrounding cells in the body, a process, therefore, of cell destruction—just what you don't want your food to be doing to you. I'll frequently be mentioning peroxidation as a bad feature of those foods you don't want to eat too much of.

 Unlike some rigidly restrictive nutritional regimens, this anti-free radical, pro-longevity diet doesn't take all the fun out of eating. You needn't swear off prudent amounts of properly  eggs, butter, shrimp, steak, and other foods high in cholesterol that have long and mistakenly been maligned as lethal.

 This is not really a diet in the traditional sense, inasmuch as there are no meal plans to follow. It's more of an eating, cooking, and food-selection program, designed to help you eat wisely, to take in the maximum possible protection from free-radical-induced illness and nutritional deficiencies.

 Here are the pro-longevity guidelines that my patients and I attempt to live by:

 Moderate consumption of dietary fats and oils—especially the processed or hydrogenated varieties—to a level equaling 30 to 35 percent or less of total calories consumed. Although essential fatty acids are necessary for healthy skin, arteries, blood, glands, nerves, and, indeed, all cells, most health experts agree on the wisdom of lowering total fat intake from the average American intake of 45 to 50 percent of calories. They disagree, however, on how low is low enough. Some maintain no more than ten percent—a truly Spartan requirement—of total calories is optimal. My recommendation is to stay in the more easily managed 30 to 35 percent range, paying careful attention to the sources, the processing and the quality of your fats and oils. I've encountered very few patients willing or self-disciplined enough to remain on a diet of only ten percent fat calories for an extended time.

 Let me digress somewhat and discuss the rationale for dietary fat moderation. It's a scientifically accepted fact that cholesterol (itself a fat-soluble, lipid-like sterol) and other dietary fats and oils only become harmful after they are damaged by oxygen and oxygen radicals. The resulting oxidized and peroxidized lipids are not only toxic in their own right, but are also precursors for further chain reactions of free radical propagation.

 This potential for disease-causing effects can be avoided in two ways:

      1. fats and body tissues can be protected by antioxidants, or

      2. fats and are consumed in moderation, thus starving the oxidative process of fuel.

 The latter is the conventional approach recommended by most dietitians because it has been proven to protect some protection against age-associated diseases. Unfortunately, it also has the potential to deprive the body of essential fatty acid nutrients and cholesterol, which are necessary for many vital functions of the body's antioxidant defenses. And it takes much of the joy out of eating. Lipids and cholesterol are also the raw material from which a large number of hormones and vitamin D are produced within the body.

 In recent years, a sizeable body of scientific evidence has accumulated to show that antioxidant deficiency is much more important than an excess of fat and cholesterol as a cause of disease.

 Low blood levels of vitamin E were shown in a World Health Organization study to be 100 times more significant relative to atherosclerosis and cardiovascular disease than high blood levels of cholesterol.

The daily intake of a broad spectrum multivitamin preparation, similar to that which I prescribe for my patients, was shown in a study by the University of California to increase life expectancy by as much as six years.

 To use a metaphor, if the fire in a furnace is breaking through the walls and threatening to burn the house down, it can be combated in two ways:

1. dampen the fire by depriving it of fuel, which is analogous to the low-fat, low-cholesterol approach to nutrition, including the use of cholesterol-lowering drugs; or
   
   

2. fireproof the house and make the furnace walls more resistant, protecting the structure from damage while continuing to benefit from a steady supply of fuel.

The latter is a more commonsense approach and is in accordance with my recommendations.

 Except for a very few people who have inherited a potentially lethal gene for exceptionally high cholesterol (sometimes 400 mg/dL or higher), it makes more sense to me to increase the intake of antioxidant nutrients, both in food and with other nutritional supplements, rather than deprive the body of enjoyable foods that contain vital fats and cholesterol. Many recent scientific studies support that approach.

 The pharmaceutical industry sells billions of dollars of cholesterol-lowering drugs each year and advertises aggressively against the nutritional supplement approach. Drug company salespeople routinely call on doctors to tout the benefits of a variety of expensive prescription drugs to lower cholesterol. They rarely, if ever, inform doctors that cholesterol-lowering pharmaceuticals also have antioxidant activity and anti-platelet activity, similar to antioxidant vitamins, and that it's quite possible that reported benefits stem from those properties, rather that from reduction in blood cholesterol. But, there are no patents to protect large profits that might otherwise subsidize a physician-education program on the benefits of vitamins, minerals, and supplemental antioxidants.

 The untold part of the story is that reducing the quantity of fat is not nearly as crucial as eliminating the wrong kinds of fat. Contrary to popular myth, it's not the saturated (animal) fats that are the "bad guys" and the polyunsaturated fats (liquid oils of vegetable or seed origin) that are the "good guys." It's sometimes exactly the reverse—especially if the unsaturated oils have been exposed to light, heat, and air in the extraction, bottling, and food preparation process. And they almost always have been.

 Saturated fats, such as we find in butter, eggs, beef, lamb, and pork, can be eaten more safely when prepared properly. The saturated fatty acids that they contain are not—under normal conditions—easily subject to the cell-damaging lipid peroxidation that I told you about a moment ago.

 In sharp contrast, the polyunsaturated fats that are commercially sold (vegetable and seed oils) often undergo extensive lipid peroxidation that damages their molecular structure. This can begin the very moment those oils are extracted from the foods in which they naturally occur. Consumption of such chemically altered oils disrupts our normal metabolism, impairs cell membrane integrity, and helps to initiate a mutation process that contributes to cancer and plaque formation in the arteries.

 The richer the oil in polyunsaturated fatty acids (which contain trace amounts of unbound metallic elements) and the longer it is exposed to heat, light, atmospheric oxygen, the greater the health threat. The poorest quality oils are customarily used in the manufacture of salad dressings and mayonnaise, since their rancidity can be so easily masked by heavy seasoning.

 Even the so-called cold-processed oils, premium priced in health food stores, may also, in excess, cause damage to the arteries. Just as soon as the oil is extracted from its source—the soybean, peanut, corn kernel, walnut, sesame seed, etc.—it begins to oxidize. It stores best if refrigerated and protected from bright light.

 Heating vegetable oils to fry foods greatly compounds the problem. When an oil is heated, the rate of oxidation increases rapidly, doubling with every ten degrees centigrade rise in temperature.

 Hydrogenation, such as takes place during the commercial preparation of margarine, vegetable shortenings, and products like nondairy creamers and nondairy whipped toppings, converts polyunsaturated fats and oils into dangerous trans-fatty acids. Trans-fatty acids have been twisted out of shape and cause cell walls to be weakened. Most of the baked goods and so-called junk food in your local supermarket contain large quantities of hydrogenated oils, which have the commercially pleasing property of extending shelf life.

 Do you protect your health by substituting margarine for butter? Hardly!

 Margarine is clearly more toxic. Contrary to the image of the attractive Indian maiden on the package, by the time corn oil margarine reaches your table, it is almost completely unnatural. Not only have its original ingredients been drastically altered, but its free fatty acids have been combined with harsh chemicals and treated by petroleum-based solvents. The last defenders of this extraordinarily unattractive food began to lose their confidence in 1993 when Dr. Walter Willett and his team of researchers published another chapter in the findings of the Harvard Nurses Study, a many-decades-long project following the health fortunes of 85,000 nurses. It turned out that the women who were eating the equivalent of four or more teaspoons of margarine daily had a 66 percent greater risk of developing heart disease than women whose consumption was very low or who didn't consume the synthetic butter substitute at all. As for butter itself, there was no indication of increased cardiovascular risk among the women who ate it.

 There's no need to be fanatic about it. It's what you do most of the time, not what you do occasionally that really matters. No one likes a fanatic! Here are some suggestions that will help you optimize intake of dietary fats to maximize both the length and the quality of your life:

• When eating beef, lamb, pork, or veal, always select the freshest, leanest meat available. Aged meats owe their enhanced flavor to rancid fat. Trim excessive visible fat before preparation. To satisfy your beef hunger, choose dishes such as casseroles or stews that provide smaller individual portions of meat than a roast or a steak. When a recipe calls for hamburger, buy the leaner variety, precook it, and drain off the fat before adding it to the dish. You may also wrap cooked hamburger in several layers of paper towels and squeeze out residual fat. Pressure-cooking leaner and less expensive cuts of beef will make them quite tender.
  
  

• Substitute fish and lean poultry for other meat. Even the leanest beef you can buy has more than twice as much total fat as skinless white chicken or turkey meat, and fish. Remove the skin and visible fat before cooking or eating poultry.
  
  

• Eliminate fried foods from your diet when practical.  Slow roast meats, fish, and poultry.
  

• Use dairy products with a lower fat content, such as one-percent-fat cottage cheese and low-fat or nonfat skim milk. Cottage cheese and milk labeled as containing one percent fat by weight actually contain ten percent of total calories as fat.
  
  Whole milk contains 40 percent of calories as fat. Be wary of imitation dairy products. Pseudo-sour cream, for example, is often made with hydrogenated oils. But nonfat and low-fat cream cheese, yogurt, and sour cream are now easily available. Read the labels carefully, however. Non-fat products often compensate for flavor loss by adding lots of sugar.
  

• Use more vinegar, lemon juice, garlic, onion, or herbs for salad oils and dressings, and use tomato and other fruit juices for rich sauces and gravies. One of my personal favorites for seasoning is Mrs. Dash Original Formula^®. Garlic and onion have the additional benefit of being rich sources of dietary antioxidants.
  

• Limit your intake of hidden fats, which are often hydrogenated or otherwise altered. Read labels. Be wary of pies, cakes, puddings, ice cream, and similar desserts. Nonfat ice cream is now available, but it remains very high in sugar.

In addition to the above tips on ways to moderate fat intake, select foods to maximize nutritional value. Avoid the "white plague" foods—white flour, white rice, and refined white sugar—whenever practical. It's not necessary to be extreme about it, but the less the better.

 Much of the American public now suffers from a form of "over-consumption malnutrition." Their diet contains too many calories that have been stripped by the food industry of most of the trace nutrients necessary for proper assimilation, and for protection from external and internal degradation. The high-speed milling of grains such as wheat, rice, and corn results in the reduction or removal of more than twenty nutrients, including essential fatty acids and the majority of minerals and essential trace elements. Ideally, your refined carbohydrate intake should be carefully limited whenever you have a convenient choice—use little white-flour breads, or crackers, cereals, pastas, or snacks made from highly processed, nutrient-depleted starches. If the label says "enriched" be especially cautious. Very little of what has been removed is added back in the so-called enrichment process.

 In comparison with the nutrients that naturally exist in the grain of wheat as it's growing in the field, the approximate percentage of each removed during the production of white bread is listed below:

•  90 percent of the vitamin A,

• 77 percent of the vitamin B1,

• 80 percent of the vitamin B2,

• 81 percent of vitamin B3,

• 72 percent of vitamin B6,

• 77 percent of vitamin B12,

• 50 percent of pantothenic acid (B5),

• 86 percent of vitamin E,

• 67 percent of folic acid,

• 60 percent of calcium,

• 40 percent of chromium,

• 89 percent of cobalt,

• 76 percent of iron,

• 85 percent of magnesium,

• 86 percent of manganese,

• 71 percent of phosphorus,

• 77 percent of potassium,

• 16 percent of selenium,

• 30 percent of choline, and

• 78 percent of zinc and copper!

At most, only five of these vitamins—B1, B2, B3, folate, and iron—are put back during the so-called enrichment process. And, if a deficiency does not exist, iron supplementation has the potential to accelerate age-related free radical damage in your body.

 Refined white sugar likewise lacks many vital nutrients, including those ingredients, such as chromium, needed for its metabolism. Each spoonful you consume depletes those very nutrients from body reserves needed for its utilization. Insulin cannot metabolize sugar in the absence of adequate chromium. The average American's annual intake of sugar and high fructose corn syrup is now 137 pounds. That almost equals consumption of ones total body weight in sugar yearly.

 Many of the enzymes involved in free radical protection—your body's own internally-produced antioxidant team, including catalase, superoxide dismutase, and glutathione peroxidase—require the trace nutrients listed above that are lost in the refining process. Without these control enzymes, free radicals are generated at an ever-increasing rate.

 Other molecules that neutralize unwanted free radicals include beta-carotene, vitamin E, vitamin C, the trace elements selenium, zinc, copper, manganese, and the amino acids methionine and cysteine. Without these substances—that are virtually zapped out of your foods during processing—the body cannot protect itself. The best way to cut down on your consumption of refined carbohydrates is to up your intake of natural, unrefined foods, particularly whole grain products and green and yellow vegetables, which should ideally make up about 50 percent or more of your total daily calories. Here are some tips for an unrefined, healthy diet.

• Read labels carefully. Choose sugar-free whole grain cereals and whole grain breads. Eat brown rice and whole wheat, buckwheat, or soy pasta products. Steer clear of products with the telltale "enriched" notation. When you translate "enriched" into honest English, what you get is "almost totally impoverished."
  

• Cook from scratch more often. There are hidden additives and refined sugars in hundreds of processed and ready-to-eat foods that we don't normally think of as sweetened, such as canned vegetables, salad dressings, catsup, biscuit mix, TV dinners, mayonnaise, and steak sauce. Hydrogenated fats and oils are also more likely to be found in factory-made, convenience, and processed foods.
  

• Avoid foods that contain refined sugars. These are often disguised with names like sucrose, dextrose, corn sweeteners, corn syrup, maltose, invert sugar, raw sugar, brown sugar, and turbinado, and fructose. Most so-called raw and brown sugar is nothing more than refined white sugar, colored with a little molasses or caramel to darken it. The same is true of much so-called whole wheat bread, in the form of colored white flour.
  

• Be wary of sugar-free soft drinks or so-called diet drinks, especially those that are cola-flavored. They often contain phosphates, which, in excess, can disrupt calcium metabolism. Evidence is also accumulating to incriminate the artificial sweetener aspartame as a cause of many adverse affects on the body.
  

• Eat mainly whole foods that have not been fractionated—such as fresh fruits and vegetables, whole grains, peas, and beans—whenever possible. Eat the food whole (the fruit instead of the juice) and the entire vegetable (potatoes with skins). Train yourself to shop more around the fringes of your supermarket, the outer aisles where fresh produce, dairy products, meat, and fish are sold. Avoid the brightly colored packages of highly processed foods. It's been said, with some truth, that the cardboard boxes often contain more nutrition than the contents.
  

• Increase dietary fiber. Dietary fiber binds bile acids and promotes speedier movement through the digestive tract. This reduces the time they're subjected to putrefaction, oxidation, and reabsorption—which can otherwise increase production of oxidized LDL cholesterol by the liver. Increasing your consumption of dietary fiber is easily accomplished as follows:
  

1. Eat more root vegetables such as potatoes, parsnips, yams, beets, carrots, turnips, etc. Other high-fiber vegetables are spinach, cabbage, sprouts, cauliflower, broccoli, and eggplant.
   

2. Eat whole-grain bread and pasta. There is very little fiber value to bread made of milled white flour.
   

3. Start the day with a high-fiber breakfast cereal. Examples include oatmeal, brown rice, whole grain cereals and rolled wheat.
   

4. Add miller's bran or oat bran to your favorite recipes. It has an innocuous texture and flavor.

• Reduce salt consumption—no matter how often you've heard it, it bears repeating. Many foods, even with a prudent diet, will already have salt added, and deficiency is highly unlikely. Cut back on excessive salt. Not simply because of the link between sodium intake and high blood pressure, but also because cell walls damaged by free radicals lose some of their ability to maintain a proper sodium gradient. Excessive sodium can leak into cells that are already compromised, causing further metabolic impairment. Small capillary walls, damaged by free radicals, may leak plasma into soft tissues, causing swelling and edema. A free-radical-weakened sodium pump is less able to remove excess sodium from within cells. (A word of caution here, a few people feel weak on salt restriction. It can be an individual thing.)

1. Lowering your salt intake is easier said than done. Food manufacturers add it to foods that rarely taste salty. For example, would you suspect it to be an ingredient in Kellogg's Corn Fflakes? Jell-O pudding? Low-fat cottage cheese? All three have salt added, but the real surprise is how much. One serving of pudding may contain 404 mg of sale (sodium chloride)—one-third the amount in a steeped-in-brine dill pickle.
   

2. Since salt is a likely ingredient in any processed food not specifically labeled "No Salt Added," here are the most practical ways to cut back:

1. Reduce voluntary salting. Use a saltshaker sparingly at the table. When cooking, substitute garlic, onion powder, kelp powder, herbs, and natural spices in recipes that specify salt.
   

2. Avoid excessive high-salt condiments, soy sauce, for example, and prepared steak sauces, gravies, and relishes.
   

3. Moderate your intake of salt-laden foods, including smoked fish, delicatessen-style meats, canned soups, pickles, pretzels, potato chips, and similar snacks.

Learn to cook the anti-free-radical way. More often than you might realize, it's not what you cook but how you cook that adds to health problems. As a general rule, the faster the food is cooked and the higher the heat it's exposed to, the more health-depleting the changes that occur. Heat speeds up the chemical reactions of peroxidation. Heat also destroys many vitamins.

 Here are four rules for anti-free-radical cooking. Again, there is no need to be fanatic about it, but make wiser choices when practical.

1. Do not overdo broiling over hot coals. If you're one of millions of suburban homeowners who relish backyard patio cooking, you won't welcome this news: Your cherished charcoal broiler is a free-radical generator. Charring food oxidizes it, producing free radical precursors, and this is also the reason that excessive charbroiled and smoked foods may cause cancer. That sizzling steak (hamburger, hot dog, and chicken breast), salted, seasoned, and grilled to tasty perfection, becomes coated with compounds—similar to those found in tobacco tars—called aromatic polynuclear hydrocarbons. They potentially generate excessive free radicals, including singlet oxygen, against which the body has little inherent defense. In fact, the smoke from a single steak's fat drippings contains as much of the carcinogen benzopyrene as the smoke from approximately three cartons of cigarettes, i.e., six hundred coffin nails. Fortunately, optimum intake of nutritional supplements can go can long way toward protecting against this.  
   
   Grilled hamburger presents a special problem. Because of its high fat content and the large surface area exposed to air and heat, it is the most easily oxidized of all meats. In addition, iron and copper (potent free radical catalysts) are crushed out of the meat's cells and into the fat and juices during the grinding process, accelerating oxidation, making it  potentially more dangerous, especially if the ground beef is a few days old. Also, hamburger is a rapid breeding ground for bacterial contamination that may have occurred in processing—a cause of the recent E. coli scares.  
   
   The solution is to have your hamburger fresh ground from lean meat lean and use it at soon. Keep it well refrigerated or frozen until cooked. Steer clear of fast-food burgers. Or at least, insure that they are well done. And, if you can't give up your backyard grill, trim all visible fat from steaks, chops, and ribs, and take both skin and fat off the chicken. Above all, take your vitamins as antioxidant protection.
   

2. Fry foods less often. The oxidation of fat and oil used in frying added to the oxidation of the fat found in the food itself add up to a double whammy. Even animal fats—chicken, pork chops, fish, or eggs, normally thought of as saturated—also contain some unsaturated fatty acids and cholesterol, both of which oxidize easily.  Olive oil used in cooking is less subject to oxidation.
   
   Animal experiments have shown oxidized cholesterol to be so damaging that if as little as one percent of the cholesterol in your diet is consumed in its oxidized form, atherosclerosis may be triggered.  
   
   Here's what that means in practical terms:
   
   Eggs are okay unless you fry them in hot fat.  In its natural state or when a fresh egg is either soft-boiled or poached with intact yolk unexposed to air, its cholesterol content remains unoxidized and is itself an excellent free radical scavenger and nutrient. The situation is reversed when the egg is scrambled, powdered, or cooked into a recipe. Then the cholesterol is heated and exposed to oxygen and becomes partially oxidized into a number of potentially cell-damaging, toxic by-products. The same holds true for animal meat foods, which contain preformed cholesterol—including most meats and many types of shellfish, poultry, and seafood. When fresh baked, poached, or steamed, with excessive  fat removed, these are high quality foods. Fried, they become less wholesome.
   
   Be doubly wary of restaurant-fried foods, where highly oxidized (rancid) fat is often used over and over again in deep fat fryers, with infrequent changes.
   

3. Learn to cook without overcooking. Easy advice to follow. Invest in a crock-pot or a wok. Both methods rarely allow foods to exceed 212 degrees, the boiling point of water—below that, lipid peroxidation takes place much more slowly. When using a wok, add a little water (and a minimum of oil) to prevent food from getting overly hot. Extra-virgin olive oil is recommended.
   

4. Avoid using aluminum cookware. Ordinarily, aluminum cookware should not be a problem because the human body does not absorb much aluminum. However, studies indicate that aluminum does build up in the tissues of some disease victims. Aluminum deposition has been proven to occur in the arteries of atherosclerosis patients, and in the brains of Alzheimer's victims and some types of Parkinson's sufferers. Therefore, although not a proven cause, it makes sense to limit your exposure as much as possible, especially since aluminum is already widely used as a food additive, is in our drinking water, our medicines, and is used in cosmetics and toiletries. Some acid based foods, such as tomatoe paste, can dissolve large amounts of aluminum from cookware.

Eat an abundance of fresh whole grains and vegetables—and do so as soon as possible after purchase while they are still fresh. Fresh frozen is also much more nutritious than canned veggies.

 While all methods of food storage result in gradual loss of nutrients, some are decidedly worse than others. Freezing delays deterioration, but major nutrient losses can still occur if the food is blanched prior to freezing. Prolonged storage results in vitamin loss and progressive oxidation, even while frozen for many months.

 For instance, asparagus left unrefrigerated for three days before use has lost most of its B-complex vitamins, perhaps before you even get it home. The same holds true, in varying degrees, for other veggies. The fresher the better. When possible, buy farm-fresh produce at farm stores and markets and only as much as you can serve and eat shortly after purchase. Or better yet, grow your own—not very practical for most people these days.

 I emphasize fresh, whole foods, close to their natural state, because a wide spectrum of vitamins and micronutrients remain at healthy levels, and nothing artificial has been added. Organically grown is preferable, although more expensive and less widely available.

 You can get a high concentration of vitamin C from green peppers, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, strawberries, spinach, oranges, cabbage, grapefruit, and cauliflower. To beef up the beta-carotene content of your diet, select carrots, sweet potatoes, cantaloupe, apricots, peaches, cherries, tomatoes, and asparagus. Other fruits and vegetables rich in B-complex vitamins are peas, corn, potatoes, lima beans, and artichokes.

 Here are some general rules that apply to choosing and eating fresh foods:

1. When shopping for food, give top priority to freshness. Of the alternatives after fresh, frozen should be second choice, preferably if not blanched or thawed and refrozen. Third place goes to dried foods. They deteriorate quite slowly, but lose most vitamin C and vitamin A content because of heat involved in the drying process. In last place comes canned foods. Canning of fruits and vegetables causes the most nutrient loss—as much as 50 percent or more. Also, excessive sugar and salt is usually added in the canning process.
   

2. Eat your vegetables raw whenever possible. Concoct your own low-fat salad dressings by combining whatever spices, herbs, and condiments you like with nonfat yogurt, nonfat buttermilk, or one percent low-fat cottage cheese. Most modern cookbooks have a variety of recipes for delicious oil-free salad dressings. When you must cook vegetables, undercook them. They should retain their crispness. Steaming is much preferred to boiling. Microwave cooking preserves nutrients better than high-heat methods, but I'm not sure how much it disrupts molecular structure and energy. I microwave when I'm in a rush, but not routinely.
   

3. Eat fresh foods as soon as practical after purchase. Return frozen foods that reveal telltale refrozen signs when opened (food covered with ice crystals or a sheet of ice). Keep close track of food stored in your freezer. Check "use by" dates on containers (yes, they're often there, but you have to hunt for them).

Avoid excess caffeine, soda, and alcohol—as well as chlorinated drinking water containing chemicals. Simply put, people fare better without excess caffeine. Drinking more than a few cups of coffee per day may increase your risk of ill health. Tea has antioxidant benefits, in addition to caffeine.

 Soft drinks, especially cola-flavored varieties (sugar-free or not) skew the body's delicate calcium/phosphorus balance, already a problem, since the typical American diet contains twice as much phosphorus as calcium instead of the optimal one-to-one ratio. Where does all the extra phosphorus come from? Red meats have many times more phosphorus than calcium, another good reason to rely more on poultry and fish for high-quality protein. Many carbonated beverages have phosphate buffers to prevent the carbon dioxide from forming carbonic acid. Thirdly, extra phosphorus comes from processed foods laced with preservatives, many of which are phosphate-based.

 Why is the calcium/phosphorus ratio so important? When it is out of balance, excessive calcium tends to leak into cells, deposit in soft tissues, and accelerate aging. When cells are overwhelmed by calcium, they die.

 One or two moderate-sized alcoholic beverages a day is a safe limit for most persons, except for pregnant women, people with seriously compromised health, and those with a predisposition for alcoholism. Alcohol metabolizes to become acetaldehyde, a potent free radical precursor and cross-linker.

Inspect your water supply. Water is no less important to our bodies than food, yet we have good reason to fear for the quality and safety of our water supply. Public water supplies often contain numerous added chemicals that are potentially harmful. Artificially-softened water can also be dangerous because of its excess salt and its occasional abundance of lead and cadmium, two of the more potent toxins.

I advise that you drink well water only when you are certain the well is far away from any source of commercial toxic waste and that, if you are suspicious, you have it tested. Otherwise drink bottled, spring or distilled water or equip your tap with a tested and effective water purifier. Reverse-osmosis water purifiers are quite good, especially in conjunction with activated charcoal. Activated charcoal filters are almost as effective by themselves, and simpler to install. Be wary of bottled water and investigate the supplier carefully. Some marketers simply bottle tap water and plastic bottles can release potentially toxic chemicals into the water.

When planning meals to suit this anti-free-radical pro-longevity diet, here are the foods I recommend you eat each day:

• Vegetables - At least two generous servings of a variety of fresh vegetables, especially those green and yellow varieties known to be the chief food sources of the important antioxidants beta-carotene, vitamin C, and vitamin B complex. There are many vital nutrients in vegetables that we have not yet identified and are not obtainable in supplements. A list of nutritious veggies includes: artichokes, asparagus, beet greens, snap beans, lima beans, navy beans, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, carrots, cauliflower, collards, chard, yellow corn, kale, kohlrabi, lentil, mushrooms, green peas, pumpkin, sauerkraut, snow pea pods, spinach, squash, succotash, winter squash, sweet potatoes, yams, tomatoes, turnip greens, turnips, water chestnuts, and zucchini. There are many more.
  

•  Salads - Eat  daily from a combination of raw vegetables. You can add extra anti-free-radical potency by the liberal use of chicory, Chinese cabbage, cucumber, endives, escarole, lettuce, parsley, pimento, chives, red and green peppers, dandelion greens, watercress, radishes, scallions, garlic, onions, and leeks. Season salads with lemon juice, herbs, or oil-free or low-fat dressings. Olive oil on salads is less likely to be oxidized because it is a monounsaturate. Extra-virgin olive oil is excellent in salad dressings. Choose a brand that does not smell or taste rancid.
  

• Fruits - Two to three small to moderately sized fresh servings a day, not canned, cooked or juiced, with choice depending on individual taste and what is seasonally available. Good fruit sources of antioxidants are apricots, bananas, cantaloupe, all melons, oranges, tangerines, papayas, peaches, plums, prunes, lemons, limes, pineapples, tomatoes, black currants, raspberries, rhubarb, and strawberries. If canned, use fruit packed in its own juice, without sugar or syrup.
  

•  Protein Foods - Two servings a day consisting of the following: four- to six-ounce portions of lean beef, pork, veal, or lamb. Intersperse red meat with chicken, turkey, or fish. Use water-packed canned tuna. Canned chunk tuna is much less likely to contain mercury, compared with solid white varieties.
  
  Eggs - One or two a day, preferably fresh-boiled or poached, with yolks intact, not scrambled, fried, or cooked into other dishes.
  

• Cereals and breadstuffs - Eat two to four servings a day of unrefined whole-grain products. These include such breakfast cereals as oatmeal, all bran, and shredded wheat, pasta, breads, muffins, or crackers made from stone-ground whole grain flours, and brown rice. Sparingly spread breads with butter, if desired, never margarine, not even the newer soft varieties.
  
  Dairy products - Drink mainly low-fat or nonfat skim milk. Use low-fat or nonfat cheeses and other dairy products. Soymilk is a nutritious substitute, although some brands have lots of sugar added.
  

• Beverages - Decaffeinated coffee is fine (no more than three or four cups a day of nondecaffeinated coffee). Drink no more than three cups of milk per day. Limit to a maximum of two ounces of alcoholic liquor, eight ounces of wine, or two 12-ounce cans of beer. Limit most soft drinks. There is no limit on naturally carbonated spring water.
  

• Eating the anti-free-radical pro-longevity way is not difficult and can easily be made very pleasurable. Learn to shop, cook, and eat so that your food intake prepares you for a hearty old age. It can be an exciting adventure. You have much to gain—a longer, healthier, happier life. much to gain—a longer, healthier, happier life.

  If you choose the low-carbohydrate Atkins approach, which can be very effective for weight and blood sugar control, Dr. Cranton's AntioxPackets become even more essential, two packets daily with meals. Many recent research studies show that it's simply not possible to receive fully effective amounts of vitamins, minerals, trace elements and antioxidants from diet alone. The regular use of nutritional supplements can do much to minimize potential free radical problems.