Top 40 Quotes & Sayings by Neal Barnard

In my own life, I decided to leave meat off my plate in medical school, but was a bit slow to realise that dairy products and eggs are not health foods either.

The beef industry has contributed to more American deaths than all the wars of this century, all natural disasters, and all automobile accidents combined.

If beef is your idea of 'real food for real people', you'd better live real close to a real good hospital.

We help people to begin truly healthful diets, and it is absolutely wonderful to see, not only their success, but also their delight at their ability to break old habits and feel really healthy for a change.

I have been following a vegan diet now since the 1980s, and find it not only healthier, but also much more attractive than the chunks of meat that were on my plate as a child.

Meat consumption is just as dangerous to public health as tobacco use... It's time we looked into holding the meat producers and fast-food outlets legally accountable.

A vegan diet takes care of most of what we need to do. But you'll also want to minimize the use of oils generally, because while olive oil and other vegetable oils are better for your heart than chicken fat, they are as fattening as animal fats.

To give a child animal products is a form of child abuse.

Chicken fat, beef fat, fish fat, fried foods - these are the foods that fuel our fat genes by giving them raw materials for building body fat.

I think we have to do everything that's useful. We're doctors. Our job is to tell the truth. And it doesn't have to be embellished in any way.

I don't approve of the use of animals for any purpose that involves touching them - caging them.

Music is the exact opposite of anxiety. It's there to relieve anxiety, to calm you down. And to just get the noise out of your biological system. So that, it's not going to make your immune system stronger than normal. What it does, in my view, is allow your immune system to work with the full force of normality.

Overall, our population is in the worst shape it's ever been. Children are in terrible shape. We have absolutely unprecedented numbers of obese and overweight children - one in three now. A generation ago it was something like one in ten.

It's much better to say, "If the herd is running, I'm running with those guys." And humans have herd mentality.

It doesn't do a lot of good for your health to move from red meat to white meat, but it gets you further down the road towards making more substantial changes later.

Dogs have a sense of smell much greater than ours and they're much faster than we are. We have fairly dull senses, fairly slow locomotion. In our Olympic trials, we celebrate speeds that would be an embarrassment to a bird or a dog or another animal.

Medicine is often conservative and slow to incorporate something that wasn't there before and that we're afraid people are going to laugh at us for. But, the beauty of music is - well, a couple things. There are no side effects that are harmful. Music doesn't do that. It doesn't have any negative effects whatsoever. So I do think it's going to come, but I think it's a new idea for people.

In China, because China is gaining wealth, rice consumption is way down. Rice is a poor person's food, and they're eating less of it. To wait in line at a fast food chain is cool. And they haven't historically had weight problems. So they don't have this culture of, "I need to lose weight."

Another advantage of avoiding sodas is that you will avoid the caffeine that is in many of them. Caffeine is a weak diuretic that causes calcium loss via the kidneys.

The thinnest people on the planet are those who eat the most carbohydrates.

Since I first went to India twenty some years ago, there's been a palpable change. There's now pizza everywhere, meat is much more popular than it's ever been. Vegetarianism is "that quaint thing our parents did."

People have to know that if they've wanted to lose weight, if they've wanted to get their diabetes better and get their cholesterol down, here is how it works. Beyond that point, you can't force people into changes, you have to guide them.

The dangers of eating animal products occur after the age of reproduction. If people developed cardiovascular disease that was fatal by the age of twelve or thirteen, eating animals would have died out long ago. You get it after you've already reproduced.

I was aware of what animals go through because I had driven animals to slaughter and I'd killed animals. And I was aware that there were certain ethical issues, but they weren't preying on my mind very heavily.

I thought - being a musician doesn't help your medical credibility really. Although I started to rethink that when I learned that Albert Einstein was quite a violinist and in fact would perform a lot with symphonies. So if it's good enough for Albert, it's good enough for me.

I am always struck by how difficult it is for people to see how much cruelty they are bringing not only upon animals but upon themselves and their loved ones and other people, how much we are screwing up the planet, how much we are hurting our own health, how hard it is to change all that, how eager people are to make a buck at everybody else's expense - all those things are discouraging.

I'm thinking of people in rural Japan and China, where McDonald's hasn't yet arrived. These are the thinnest, healthiest, longest-lived people with the least risk of cardiovascular disease and diabetes.

If beef is your idea of 'real food for real people,' you'd better live real close to a real good hospital.

I think herd mentality is a good thing overall. Because if every sheep had to figure out the velocity of the wolf and their personal risk, that would take forever.

If we studied human beings which can include human genes, human blood samples, and human behavior, then you can leave the animals out of the labs and you can leave them off your plate.

Not only are the studies themselves often lacking even face value, but they also drain badly needed funds away from patient care needs.

If some people think, "Why am I eating a dead bird soaked in poop?" I think if some people get disgusted by that, it's all to the good. Their coronary arteries will be healthier.

While it's certainly true that many people think that dairy doesn't have a cost to the animal, it's because they never went to a dairy farm.

Chimpanzees will eat a little bit of meat. But, they never eat dairy products, and no other animal would do that.

People do lose weight on an Atkins diet. The reason they lose weight is because of calorie reduction. If a person's caloric intake has not fallen, if they are really shoveling in the steak, they don't lose weight.

A vegan diet takes care of most of what we need to do.

If a dog happens to catch a rabbit or another animal, it can very easily remove the hide. If a cat catches a squirrel, they have no trouble with that. But if a person does that, they will work all day and all night to get the skin off of an animal, because they don't have long canine teeth anymore.

The Stone Age gave us arrow heads and eventually knives, and that allowed us to kill animals in ways you couldn't before, and once you had them you were able to remove the skin and bones.

The important thing is that while heroin and cocaine and tobacco and every drug and junk food cause dopamine release, there are healthier ways that you can put this into your life. And the three big ones are intimacy ... physical activity ... and the third thing is music.

You will find that your taste buds have a memory of about 3 weeks.