Michael Greger Quotes
Best 80 Quotes by Michael Greger – Page 1 of 3
“Be a shining role model of the best qualities humane eating embodies: caring, compassion, and empathy.”
“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.”
“I think of veganism humbly and holistically. It's about taking personal responsibility in a world so full of needless suffering.
It's challenging one's self to open one's eyes and question society's assumptions and habits. It's about critical thinking and compassion and how we would like to see the world evolve.”
“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.”
“The most ethical diet just so happens to be the most environmentally sound diet and just so happens to be the healthiest.”
“We should all be eating fruits and vegetables as if our lives depend on it – because they do.”
Flu Season Quotes
“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.”
Heart failure Quotes
“I ask the internist why there aren't more Ornish-like studies.
There aren't any financial interests involved.”
“You know you're grown up when summer is just a season.”
How Not to Die Quotes
“A report by the Institute of Medicine on medical training concluded that the fundamental approach to medical education has not changed since 1910.”
“According to the American Lung Association, smoking tobacco contributes to up to 90 percent of all lung cancer deaths. Men who smoke are twenty-three times more likely and women thirteen times more likely to develop lung cancer than nonsmokers.
And smokers aren’t just harming themselves; thousands of deaths each year have been attributed to secondhand smoke. Nonsmokers have a 20–30 percent higher risk of developing lung cancer if they’re regularly exposed to cigarette smoke.”
“As the Mayo Clinic rather indelicately put it, “Most people are infected with Salmonella by eating foods that have been contaminated by feces.”
How does it get there? In slaughter plants, birds are typically gutted by a metal hook, which too often punctures their intestines and can expel feces onto the flesh itself.
According to the latest national FDA retail-meat survey, about 90 percent of retail chicken showed evidence of contamination with fecal matter.”
“Back in 1903, Thomas Edison predicted that the 'doctor of the future will give no medicine, but will instruct his patient in the care of the human frame in diet and in the cause and prevention of diseases'.”
“Chemopreventive agents can be classified into different subgroups based on which stage of cancer development they help to fight: Carcinogen blockers and antioxidants help prevent the initial triggering DNA mutation, and antiproliferatives work by keeping tumors from growing and spreading.
Curcumin is special in that it appears to belong to all three groups, meaning it may potentially help prevent and/or arrest cancer cell growth.”
“Dr. Margaret Chan, Director-General of the World Health Organization, recently warned that we may be facing a future in which many of our miracle drugs no longer work.
She stated, “A post-antibiotic era means, in effect, an end to modern medicine as we know it. Things as common as strep throat or a child’s scratched knee could once again kill.”
We may soon be past the age of miracles. The director-general’s prescription to avoid this catastrophe included a global call to “restrict the use of antibiotics in food production to therapeutic purposes.”
In other words, only use antibiotics in agriculture to treat sick animals. But that isn’t happening. In the United States, meat producers feed millions of pounds of antibiotics each year to farm animals just to promote growth or prevent disease in the often cramped, stressful, and unhygienic conditions of industrial animal agriculture.
Yes, physicians overprescribe antibiotics as well, but the FDA estimates that 80 percent of the antimicrobial drugs sold in the United States every year now go to the meat industry.”
“Eating a plant-based diet to alkalinize your urine may also help prevent and treat kidney stones — those hard mineral deposits that can form in your kidneys when the concentration of certain stone-forming substances in your urine becomes so high they start to crystallize.
Eventually, these crystals can grow into pebble-sized rocks that block the flow of urine, causing severe pain that tends to radiate from one side of the lower back toward the groin. Kidney stones can pass naturally (and often painfully), but some become so large that they have to be removed surgically.”
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“There cannot be any impediment to science that will ultimately be good to the general public.”
“Enter Dr. Walter Kempner and his rice-and-fruit diet. Without drugs, he brought patients with eye-popping blood pressures like 240/150 down to 105/80 with dietary changes alone.”
“Even just living next to a restaurant may pose a health hazard. Scientists estimated the lifetime cancer risk among those residing near the exhaust outlets at Chinese restaurants, American restaurants, and barbecue joints.
While exposure to fumes from all three types of restaurants resulted in exposure to unsafe levels of PAHs, the Chinese restaurants proved to be the worst. This is thought to be due to the amount of fish being cooked, as the fumes from pan-fried fish have been found to contain high levels of PAHs capable of damaging the DNA of human lung cells.
Given the excess cancer risk, the researchers concluded that it wouldn’t be safe to live near the exhaust of a Chinese restaurant for more than a day or two a month.”
“Excess cholesterol in the blood can lead to excess cholesterol in the brain, which may then help trigger the clumping of amyloid seen in Alzheimer’s brains.
Under an electron microscope, we can see the clustering of amyloid fibers on and around tiny crystals of cholesterol.”
“Fighting the Blues with Greens
Here’s a statistic you probably haven’t heard: Higher consumption of vegetables may cut the odds of developing depression by as much as 62 percent.
A review in the journal Nutritional Neuroscience concluded that, in general, eating lots of fruits and veggies may present 'a non-invasive, natural, and inexpensive therapeutic means to support a healthy brain'.”
“For disease prevention, berries of all colors have 'emerged as champions', according to the head of the Bioactive Botanical Research Laboratory.
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. But it wasn’t known until recently that berries may also boost your levels of natural killer cells.”
“For most of the leading causes of death, the science shows that our genes often account for only 10–20 percent of risk at most.
For instance, as you’ll see in this book, the rates of killers like heart disease and major cancers differ up to a hundredfold among various populations around the globe. But when people move from low- to high-risk countries, their disease rates almost always change to those of the new environment.”
“Given the right conditions, the body heals itself.
If you whack your shin really hard on a coffee table, it can get red, swollen, and painful. But your shin will heal naturally if you just stand back and let your body work its magic.
But what if you kept whacking it in the same place three times a day — say, at breakfast, lunch, and dinner? It would never heal.
You could go to your doctor and complain that your shin hurts. “No problem,” he or she might say, whipping out a pad to write you a prescription for painkillers.
You’d go back home, still whacking your shin three times a day, but the pain pills would make it feel so much better. Thank heavens for modern medicine!”
“How contaminated are U.S. pork products? Consumer Reports magazine tested nearly two hundred samples from cities across the country and found that more than two-thirds of the pork was contaminated with Yersinia.
This may be because of the intensification and overcrowding that characterizes most of today’s industrial pig operations. As noted in an article in National Hog Farmer entitled “Crowding Pigs Pays”, pork producers can maximize their profits by confining each pig to a six-square-foot space.
This basically means cramming a two-hundred-pound animal into an area equivalent to about two feet by three feet. The authors acknowledged that overcrowding presents problems, including inadequate ventilation and increased health risks, but they concluded that sometimes, 'crowding pigs a little tighter will make you more money'.”
“In 2012, the American Dietetic Association changed its name to the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics but didn’t appear to change its policies. It continues to take millions of dollars every year from processed junk food, meat, dairy, soda, and candy bar companies.
In return, the academy lets them offer official educational seminars to teach dietitians what to say to their clients.”
“In a meat industry trade publication, an Alabama poultry science professor explained why we don’t have such a 'heavy-handed' policy: “The American consumer is not going to pay that much. It’s as simple as that.”
If the industry had to pay to make it safer, the price would go up. The fact, he said, is that it’s too expensive not to sell salmonella-positive chicken.”
“In one study, researchers asked athletes to eat about a cup and a half of blueberries every day for six weeks to see if the berries could reduce the oxidative stress caused by long-distance running. The blueberries succeeded, unsurprisingly, but a more important finding was their effect on natural killer cells.
Normally, these cells decrease in number after a bout of prolonged endurance exercise, dropping by half to about one billion. But the athletes consuming blueberries actually doubled their killer cell counts, to more than four billion.”
“Migraines are described as 'one of the most common' pain syndromes, affecting as much as 12 percent of the population. That’s common? How about menstrual cramps, which plague up to 90 percent of younger women?
Can ginger help? Even just one-eighth of a teaspoon of ginger powder three times a day dropped pain from an eight to a six on a scale of one to ten, and down further to a three in the second month.
And these women hadn’t been taking ginger all month; they started the day before their periods began, suggesting that even if it doesn’t seem to help much the first month, women should try sticking with it.
What about the duration of pain? A quarter teaspoon of ginger powder three times a day was found to not only drop the severity of menstrual pain from about seven down to five but decrease the duration from a total of nineteen hours in pain down to about fifteen hours, significantly better than the placebo, which were capsules filled with powdered toast.
But women don’t take bread crumbs for their cramps. How does ginger compare to ibuprofen? Researchers pitted one-eighth of a teaspoon of powdered ginger head-to-head against 400 mg of ibuprofen, and the ginger worked just as effectively as this leading drug.
Unlike the drug, ginger can also reduce the amount of menstrual bleeding, from around a half cup per period down to a quarter cup. What’s more, ginger intake of one-eighth of a teaspoon twice daily started a week before your period can yield a significant drop in premenstrual mood, physical, and behavioral symptoms.
I like sprinkling powdered ginger on sweet potatoes or using it fresh to make lemon-ginger apple chews as an antinausea remedy. (Ever since I was a little kid, I’ve suffered from motion sickness.) There is an array of powerful antinausea.”
“More than two thousand years ago, Hippocrates said: If we could give every individual the right amount of nourishment and exercise, not too little and not too much, we would have found the safest way to health.”
“The American Dietetic Association (ADA), which produces a series of nutrition fact sheets with guidelines on maintaining a healthy diet, also has its own corporate ties.
Who writes these fact sheets? Food industry sources pay the ADA $20,000 per fact sheet to explicitly take part in the drafting process. So we can learn about eggs from the American Egg Board and about the benefits of chewing gum from the Wrigley Science Institute.”
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“When it becomes a revolutionary act to eat real food, we are in trouble.”
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