Top 60 Michael Greger Quotes

You can buy turmeric from any supermarket – or get it raw from Asian shops and grate a quarter of an inch of the root into your food. There’s evidence to suggest raw turmeric may have greater anti-inflammatory effects, while cooked turmeric offers better DNA protection.

You can be in excellent physical shape, with low cholesterol, a healthy body weight and good overall physical fitness – but that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re healthy.

Sometimes it feels like there aren’t enough hours in a day to get everything done.

Anyone who’s promoting the exact diet that they were in previous years probably isn’t keeping up with the latest science, though in general, the balance of evidence has remained remarkably consistent – centering one’s diet around whole plant foods.

Women with a higher intake of berries appeared to have delayed cognitive aging by 2.5 years. So it’s like your brain is 2.5 years younger if you’re eating berries.

Scientists suggest that the link between consuming poultry and cancer spread may be due to carcinogens in cooked meat. For unknown reasons, these carcinogens build up more in the muscles of chickens and turkeys than in those of other animals.

Berries are the healthiest fruit, offering potential protection against cancer and heart disease, boosting the immune system and acting as a guard for the liver and brain.

Up to a thousand milligrams of caffeine is considered safe for most people, which translates into about 10 cups of coffee a day.

Although even light exercise is associated with a lowered risk of some other types of cancer, for breast cancer, it appears that leisurely strolls don’t appear to cut it.

You can actually take people with these precancerous lesions, and basically paint black raspberries on them, and they nearly vanish.

Walking at a moderate pace for an hour a day is considered a moderately intense level of exercise.

Popeye was right about spinach: dark green, leafy vegetables are the healthiest food on the planet. As whole foods go, they offer the most nutrition per calorie.

Among identical twins who have the exact same genes, one may die early of a heart attack and the other may live a long, healthy life – depending on their lifestyle and what they eat.

The USDA is tasked with managing and promoting agriculture – including the well-funded animal agriculture industry – so it’s pulled into a tug-of-war every time the dietary guidelines are re-evaluated.

Good news for orange lovers: citrus fruit intake has been associated with reduced stroke risk.

Many people assume the diseases that kill us are pre-programmed into our genes. High blood pressure by 55, heart attacks at 60, maybe cancer at 70, and so on… But for most of the leading causes of death, our genes usually account for only 10-20 per cent of risk.

The benefits of a healthier diet are far-reaching because they also equate to fewer animals being bred into inhumane factory farm conditions and fewer greenhouse gas emissions.

As you eat more healthily, your palate changes – it’s amazing. Your taste buds constantly adapt: from minute to minute, in fact. If you drank orange juice right now, it would taste sweet. But if you first ate some sweets then drank the same juice, it could taste unpleasantly bitter.

We need to boost our intake of healthy plant foods and reduce our dependence on animal-based foods.

Tart cherries lower the levels of inflammation in the body, which may be particularly useful for those who suffer from gout. They have also been used to improve sleep.

Physical activity is considered a promising preventive measure against breast cancer – not only because it helps with weight control but because exercise tends to lower circulating estrogen levels.

Certain foods, such as meat, appear to harbour toxic bacteria – known as endotoxins – that can trigger inflammation in your arteries, even when food is fully cooked.

The typical Western diet is the number-one cause of premature death and the number-one cause of disability. In other words, a long and healthy life is largely a matter of choice.

A placebo-controlled, double-blind, randomised trial of boys with autism found that two to three servings of cruciferous vegetables a day improves social interaction, abnormal behaviour and verbal communication – within a matter of weeks.

Eating a varied plant-based diet – and avoiding all meat, fish, chicken and dairy products – may have much to recommend it, but it’s certainly not for everyone.

Berries have a lot of soluble fiber. That’s why they gel up when you’re making your Thanksgiving cranberry sauce, with the pectin.

One of the worst things you can do if you’re worried about breast cancer is to cook beef, pork, fish or poultry at a high temperature – which includes frying, grilling and roasting.

Most of us know that the hormone melatonin helps regulate our sleep. But it also seems to play another role – suppressing cancer growth.

Without enough nitric oxide, your arteries can stiffen, raising blood pressure and your risk of heart attack.

A massive stroke may kill you instantly, while a series of mini-strokes may disable and kill you over several years.

The problem with all-or-nothing thinking is that it stops people even taking the first steps. The thought of never having pepperoni pizza again somehow turns into an excuse to keep ordering it every week.

Breast cancer is thought to use cholesterol to help the cancer migrate and invade more tissue.

Five hours a week of vigorous aerobic exercise can lower estrogen and progesterone exposure by about 20 per cent.

In nature, disease-causing strains of avian influenza rarely spread far because the birds sicken and die before they can fly to spread it to others.

Milk contains growth hormones designed by Mother Nature to put a few hundred pounds on a baby calf within a few months.

Oregano is such an antioxidant-rich herb that researchers decided to see if it could reduce the DNA-damaging effects of radiation.

Studies on cherries, raspberries and strawberries suggest that most of their nutrition is retained when they’re frozen, so it’s a good idea to keep some in the freezer.

Sadly, commercially-produced, frozen broccoli lacks the ability to form sulforaphane because the vegetables are flash-cooked before they are frozen.

You have to build up to green smoothies. Everyone loves fruit smoothies: you can add a handful of baby spinach to a fruit smoothie and may hardly even taste it. Next, try two. Slowly, your taste buds can adapt to more greens.

Simply switching to a healthy, plant-based diet can lessen stroke risk by reducing cholesterol and blood pressure, flooding your body with antioxidants and improving blood flow.

Unhealthy meals don’t just cause internal damage decades down the road, but right here and now, within hours of going into your mouth.

A small minority of strokes are hemorrhagic strokes, which are caused by bleeding into the brain when a blood vessel bursts.

Don’t forget that fruit can be cooked – think of baked apples, poached pears and grilled pineapple. But if you like drinking fruit, blending will preserve more nutrition and fibre than juicing.

For women, eating just two handfuls of nuts a week may extend their lives as much as by jogging four hours a week.

Tobacco smoke contains chemicals that weaken the body’s immune system, making it more susceptible to disease and handicapping its ability to destroy cancer cells.

About a quarter of lung cancer cases occur in people who have never smoked. One cause may be another potential carcinogen: fumes from frying.

When any fat is heated to frying temperatures, toxic volatile chemicals that can cause genetic mutations are released into the air.

Sick animals can lead to sick people.

As a physician specializing in nutrition, my priority is to the health of the public.

Nutrition is an exciting, dynamic field – there are more than 10,000 articles published on human nutrition in medical journals every year.

Even if you were to start drinking milk during adolescence in an attempt to bolster peak bone mass, it probably wouldn’t reduce your chances of fracture later in life.

Most Alzheimer’s sufferers aren’t diagnosed until their 70s. However, we now know that their brains began deteriorating long before that.

If you consume too much salt, it can cause water retention. When this happens, your body usually responds by raising your blood pressure to push excess fluid and salt out of your system.

Cholesterol – which you get from eating too much of the wrong kind of fat – doesn’t just help clog arteries in the brain, it may also help to seed the amyloid plaques that riddle the brain tissue of Alzheimer’s victims.

When the FDA announced its intentions to join other countries and ban quinolone use on U.S. chicken farms, the drug manufacturer Bayer initiated legal action that successfully delayed the process for five years.

As you age, your blood pressure tends to get higher.

Harvard University researchers found that women at high risk of heart disease who had a tablespoon of peanut butter five or more days a week appeared to nearly halve their risk of suffering a heart attack compared with women who ate one serving or less per week.