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the right dietary pattern. Just stay attuned to the principles of the diet. The only way you’re going to mess it up is if you start treating yourself all the time, or the oils start creeping into the diet and you start eating those items at the top of the pyramid with a great deal of liberalism. But if you stick with the basic food groups that we’re talking about, you’ll get full, you won’t develop a weight problem, and you’ll lose weight if you need to. You just can’t overeat. I couldn’t have possibly eaten another plate of food today; it would have been too much bulk.
    THE WELLNESS FORUM’S
    Eating Plan
    GM: We’ve discussed fat. How about protein? I find that when people talk about nutrition, their concerns tend to be their weight and their protein intake. Do you find that’s what people are most concerned about?
    PP: Those are two major anxieties, but people have lots of misdirected concerns. I have people coming into my office with serious health and weight problems, and they’re worried about the plastic in water bottles and about all kinds of things that may be concerning but they’re hardly the main issue. Americans are very distracted by information that isn’t pertinent at the expense of getting to the information that is pertinent.
    People are concerned about their weight, but not enough of them, in my opinion. There’s an interesting phenomenon going on in our country and it’s the way that we’ve simply accepted our increasing weight. When I was in high school, there were more than seven hundred kids in our graduating class and only a handful of them were overweight. Now most of the students in graduating classes are overweight. People who are overweight look around and everyone looks like them; they don’t feel particularly bad about it or feel compelled to do something about it right away. And that’s an insidious trend because being overweight puts you at additional risk for every disease you don’t want to get and for dying from those diseases.
    Regarding protein: it’s all but impossible to design a diet that has enough calories every day that doesn’t contain enough protein because protein needs are so low. Excretion studies have shown that protein needs for normal adults may be as low as 2.5 percent of calories. 2 Human breast milk, which fuels most rapid growth of humans during our entire time on the planet, contains only 6 percent protein. 3 So there’s not much chance of protein deficiency in any diet of caloric sufficiency. I’ve told people, just go to the USDA food database and start entering any combination of foods that add up to 1,500 or 2,000 calories a day; you’re going to see that it’s impossible to become protein deficient eating any combination of food. Our problem, by contrast, is that we eat way too much protein.
    GM: What’s the risk there?
    PP: We now know that animal protein consumed in excess of what humans need becomes a powerful cancer promoter, based on Dr. Campbell’s studies as reported in
The China Study
. 4 Even if you consumed a really high-protein, plant-based diet, the fact remains that the body’s need for protein is actually very low. So if you consume too much protein, even plant protein, you simply have to get rid of the excess; we can’t store much protein. What the body will do is convert some of the surplus protein to carbohydrate because that’s readily usable for energy. In the process of doing this, the body has to get rid of nitrogen from the amino acid chains, as carbohydrate does not include nitrogen. 5 As the body releases nitrogen from the amino acid chains, the nitrogen throws off a lot of toxic by-products like urea and ammonia, which are detoxified by the kidneys and liver, causing a lot of stress on those organs.
    GM: So we basically have this word—protein—that enjoys a great reputation. We have whole industries that are set up to provide us with an abundance of protein, whether it’s in the form of a snack bar or a