Top 44 Michael Greger Quotes

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.

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

Despite the growing evidence of health benefits associated with coffee consumption, I still don’t recommend my patients drink it – not because it’s not healthy, but because there are even healthier choices.

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.

Sick animals can lead to sick people.

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.

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

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

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

The fumes produced by frying bacon contain carcinogens called nitrosamines. Though all meat may release potentially carcinogenic fumes, processed meat such as bacon may be the worst.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

One of the reasons it’s so difficult to study the relationship between diet and disease is because many dietary behaviors are associated with non-dietary behaviors.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

While positive mental states may be associated with less stress and more resilience to infection, positive well-being might also be accompanied by a healthy lifestyle.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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