Michael Greger 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.”

“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.”

“The best way to minimize your exposure to industrial toxins may be to eat as low as possible on the food chain, a plant-based diet.”

“The egg industry itself funded research on Salmonella and the various ways to cook eggs. What did they find? Salmonella in eggs can survive scrambled, over-easy, and sunny-side-up cooking methods.

Sunny side up was found to be the riskiest. The industry-funded researchers bluntly concluded: “The sunny-side-up method should be considered unsafe.”

In other words, even the egg industry itself knows that its product, prepared in a manner that millions of Americans eat on any given day all across the country, is unsafe.”

“The population with the highest rate of the “Alzheimer’s gene” has one of the lowest rates of Alzheimer’s disease?

This contradiction may be explained by Nigerians’ extremely low blood-cholesterol levels, thanks to a diet low in animal fat104 and consisting mainly of grains and vegetables.”

“The poultry industry commonly injects chicken carcasses with salt water to artificially inflate their weight, yet they can still be labelled '100 percent natural'.

Consumer Reports found that some supermarket chickens were pumped so full of salt that they registered a whopping 840 mg of sodium per serving—that could mean more than a full day’s worth of sodium in just one chicken breast.”

“The primary reason diseases tend to run in families may be that diets tend to run in families.”

“The researchers tried a clever tactic to overcome this problem. They created a number of recipes for common foods including muffins and pasta in which they could disguise placebo ingredients like bran and molasses to match the texture and color of the flax-laden foods.

This way, they could randomize people into two groups and secretly introduce tablespoons of daily ground flaxseeds into the diets of half the participants to see if it made any difference.

After six months, those who ate the placebo foods started out hypertensive and stayed hypertensive, despite the fact that many of them were on a variety of blood pressure pills. On average, they started the study at 155/81 and ended it at 158/81.

What about the hypertensives who were unknowingly eating flaxseeds every day? Their blood pressure dropped from 158/82 down to 143/75. A seven-point drop in diastolic blood pressure may not sound like a lot, but that would be expected to result in 46 percent fewer strokes and 29 percent less heart disease over time.

How does that result compare with taking drugs? The flaxseeds managed to drop subjects’ systolic and diastolic blood pressure by up to fifteen and seven points, respectively.

Compare that result to the effect of powerful antihypertensive drugs, such as calcium-channel blockers (for example, Norvasc, Cardizem, Procardia), which have been found to reduce blood pressure by only eight and three points, respectively, or to ACE inhibitors (such as Vasotec, Lotensin, Zestril, Altace), which drop patients’ blood pressure by only five and two points, respectively.

Ground flaxseeds may work two to three times better than these medicines, and they have only good side effects. In addition to their anticancer properties, flaxseeds have been demonstrated in clinical studies to help control cholesterol, triglyceride, and blood sugar levels; reduce inflammation, and successfully treat constipation.

Hibiscus Tea for Hypertension Hibiscus tea, derived from the flower of the same name, is also known as roselle, sorrel, jamaica, or sour tea.”

“The salicylic acid content in plants may help explain why traditional, plant-based diets were so protective. For instance, before their diets were Westernized, animal products made up only about 5 percent of the average Japanese diet.

During this period in the 1950s, age-adjusted death rates from colon, prostate, breast, and ovarian cancers were five to ten times lower in Japan than in the United States, while incidences of pancreatic cancer, leukemia, and lymphoma were three to four times lower.

This phenomenon was not unique to the Japanese. As we’ve seen throughout this book, Western rates of cancers and heart disease have been found to be dramatically lower among populations whose diets are centered around plant foods.”

“The top reason doctors give for not counseling patients with high cholesterol to eat healthier is that they think patients may 'fear privations related to dietary advice'.

In other words, doctors perceive that patients would feel deprived of all the junk they’re eating.

Can you imagine a doctor saying, Yeah, I’d like to tell my patients to stop smoking, but I know how much they love it?”

“This was my wake-up call. I opened my eyes to the depressing fact that there are other forces at work in medicine besides science.

The U.S. health care system runs on a fee-for-service model in which doctors get paid for the pills and procedures they prescribe, rewarding quantity over quality. We don’t get reimbursed for time spent counseling our patients about the benefits of healthy eating.

If doctors were instead paid for performance, there would be a financial incentive to treat the lifestyle causes of disease. Until the model of reimbursement changes, I don’t expect great changes in medical care or medical education.”