Michael Greger Quotes

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

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.

Remove all the junk from one's house. Then one doesn't have to deal with the temptation. If you get hungry enough, you will eat that apple.

The largest outbreak of bird flu in American history was an H5N2 virus, which led to the deaths of 17 million domestic birds and cost the nation more than $400 million during an outbreak in Pennsylvania that started in 1983.

High levels of stress can lead to weakened immunity, rendering animals much more susceptible to disease. This makes the average poultry factory farm a hotbed for outbreaks of avian flu.

For disease prevention, berries of all colors have "emerged as champions," according to the head of the Bioactive Botanical Research Laboratory.39 The purported anticancer properties of berry compounds have been attributed to their apparent ability to counteract, reduce, and repair damage resulting from oxidative stress and inflammation.40 But it wasn't known until recently that berries may also boost your levels of natural killer cells.

Nitric oxide is a key biological messenger within the body. When released by the cells lining your arteries, it makes the walls of the arteries relax, allowing more blood to flow.

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.

This argument didn't seem to placate the critics, so the AAFP executive

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.

The emergence and spread of virulent strains of avian influenza has been attributed by experts to the intensely overcrowded, unsanitary, and stressful conditions that often characterize large-scale factory farming in industrialized agriculture.

When I was a child, doctors sent my grandmother home in a wheelchair to die. Diagnosed with end-stage heart disease, she already had so much scar tissue from bypass operations that the surgeons had essentially run out of plumbing. There was nothing more to do, they said; her life was over at 65.

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

Those who consume animals not only harm those animals and endanger themselves, but they also threaten the well-being of other humans who currently or will later inhabit the planet ... It is time for humans to remove their heads from the sand and recognize the risk to themselves that can arise from their maltreatment of other species.

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.

In my clinical practice, the one diagnosis I always dreaded giving was Alzheimer's. Billions have been spent on research, but there's still neither a cure nor an effective treatment.

If [you are] over the age of 10, the question isn't whether or not to eat healthy to prevent heart disease, it's whether or not you want to reverse the heart disease you already have.

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

An LDL around 70 mg/dL corresponds to a total cholesterol reading of about 150, the level below which no deaths from coronary heart disease were reported in the famous Framingham Heart Study, a generations-long project to identify risk factors for heart disease.29

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.

The most ethical diet just so happens to be the most environmentally sound diet and just so happens to be the healthiest.

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

Broccoli is incredible. It can prevent DNA damage and metastatic cancer spread; activate defences against pathogens and pollutants; help to prevent lymphoma; boost the enzymes that detox your liver; target breast cancer stem cells; and reduce the risk of prostate cancer progression.

I ask the internist why there aren't more Ornish-like studies. 'There aren't any financial interests involved.'

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

After following more than 60,000 people for more than a dozen years, University of Oxford researchers found those who consume a plant-based diet were less likely to develop all forms of cancer combined.

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

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

While consumers may be more shocked by pink slime or the feeding of Prozac to poultry, the routine feeding of millions of pounds of human antibiotics to chickens presents a much graver threat.

A plant-based diet is like a one-stop shop against chronic diseases.

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.

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.

Ounce for ounce, herbs and spices have more antioxidants than any other food group.

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.

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

Though pigs have been proven susceptible to a porcine spongiform encephalopathy, the National Pork Producers Council claims that no naturally occurring cases of 'mad pig' disease have ever been discovered.

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.

Mental health can be just as important as physical health - and major depression is one of the most commonly diagnosed mental illnesses.

The study found that after two hours of intense cycling, the number of monocytes (another type of immune system white blood cell) in subjects' bloodstreams took a dip. But those who were given the equivalent of about three-quarters of a teaspoon of nutritional yeast before they exercised ended up with even higher levels of monocytes than when they started working out.

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.

For many children, it's seeing a beloved relative ill and in pain that leads them to want to become doctors. But, for me, it was watching my grandma get better.

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.

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.

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.

A good way to adjust to a healthier diet is to think of three meals you enjoy that are largely plant-based. Pasta with tomato sauce can be tweaked to whole-grain pasta with added vegetables.

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.

People tend to eat poorly because it's convenient; it's what's around them. But you can make the switch. I think the way to do that is to just make fruits and vegetables as convenient as possible to eat.

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.

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.

I continue to be amazed by our bodies' ability for self-repair ... Our bodies want to be healthy, if we would just let them. That's what these new research articles are showing: Even after years of beating yourself up with a horrible diet, your body can reverse the damage, open back up the arteries-even reverse the progression of some cancers. Amazing! So it's never too late to start exercising, never too late to stop smoking and never too late to start eating healthier.

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

Studies of immigration show that this resistance to heart disease is not just something in African or Chinese genes. When people move from low-risk to high-risk areas, disease rates skyrocket as they adopt Western diets and lifestyles.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

The Iowa Women's Health Study, which has followed more than 35,000 women for decades, found eating more broccoli, cauliflower, kale and other cruciferous vegetables was associated with a lower risk of getting non-Hodgkin's lymphoma in the first place.

So, what is a stroke? In about 90 per cent of strokes, it's the result of blood flow to part of the brain getting cut off, depriving it of oxygen and killing off the part fed by the clogged artery.

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.

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.

Be a shining role model of the best qualities humane eating embodies: caring, compassion, and empathy.

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.

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