Top 92 Quotes & Sayings by Michael Greger

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

Everyone feels sad occasionally. A full range of emotions is part of what makes us human.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

In a Harvard University study, the diets of nearly 1,000 women were analysed before their morning melatonin levels were measured. Meat consumption was the only food significantly associated with lower melatonin production, for reasons that are as yet unknown.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.