Quotes from Michael Greger

Plant-based meals tend to be rich in antioxidants on their own, but taking a moment to spice up your life may make your meal even healthier.

So adding vinegar to potato salad or to rice (like the Japanese do to make sushi rice) or dipping bread in balsamic vinegar may blunt the effects of these high-glycemic foods.

Ninety-six percent of Americans don't eat the minimum recommended daily amount of beans, 96 percent don't eat the measly minimum for greens, and 99 percent don't get enough whole grains.1285 Nearly the entire U.S. population fails to eat enough whole plant foods—the only place fiber is naturally found in abundance.

7 Just as you don't have to wait for your physician to tell you to stop smoking, you don't have to wait to start eating healthier

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.42 The blueberries succeeded,

people who had had pets for twenty years or longer. The researchers suspect the reason is connected to the fact that having pets may have beneficial effects on the immune system.58

something in the peels of organic apples (presumably present in conventional ones as well) that appears to reactivate a tumor-suppressor gene called maspin (an acronym for mammary serine protease inhibitor). Maspin is one of the tools your body appears to use to keep breast cancer at bay. Breast cancer cells find a way to turn off this gene, but apple peels appear to be able to turn it back on.

Plant-based diets are the nutritional equivalent of quitting smoking."66

Dear Doc, You won't believe this. My diabetes is GONE. I beat it, doc! How Not to Die really did save my life! Guess what else? My wife has had problems with her weight since she was a teenager. We went on a plant-based diet together, and she has, for the first time in years, gotten to a normal weight! We are both so happy, we feel like teenagers again. (Did I tell you we were high school sweethearts? That was a very long time ago, but it doesn't feel so long ago anymore!)

In terms of antioxidant bang for your buck, açai berries get honorable mention, beating out other superstars, such as walnuts, apples, and cranberries. The bronze for best bargain, though, goes to cloves, the silver to cinnamon, and the gold for most antioxidants per dollar—according to a USDA database of common foods—goes to purple cabbage.24 Açai

Yes, fiber supplements can help with constipation, but all the other purported benefits didn't seem to materialize. Studies associating high fiber intake with lower risk of disease and death relate only to fiber from food intake rather than from fiber isolates or supplements.

Take Off Pounds Sensibly (TOPS) is a nonprofit, peer-led weight-loss program that has been publishing its results for more than fifty years.923 Not having to siphon off money for shareholders, TOPS is five times cheaper than Weight Watchers and may be fifty times less expensive than other leading programs such as Nutrisystem or Jenny

Most deaths in the United States are preventable, and they are related to what we eat.4 Our diet is the number-one cause of premature death and the number-one cause of disability.

Four Rules of Sleep Conditioning:4658 Go to bed only when you're sleepy. Only use the bed for sleep (and sex). No reading, eating, or screen time. If you can't fall asleep within fifteen to twenty minutes or so, get up, leave the bedroom, and don't go back until you're sleepy again. Repeat as necessary. Get up at the same time every morning no matter how little sleep you have had.

As Kaiser Permanente's guide The Plant-Based Diet: A Healthier Way to Eat puts it: "If you find you cannot do a plant-based diet 100 percent of the time, then aim for 80 percent. Any movement toward more plants and fewer animal products [and processed foods] can improve your health!"3

you could have rotating trays of microgreens that you snip off with scissors for probably the healthiest salad out there.

So even home-sprouted alfalfa seeds should not be considered safe.

Now that we have highly sensitive C-reactive protein blood tests that can measure levels to a fraction of a point, the medical community has realized that walking around with baseline levels of even just 2 or 3 mg/L appears to set us up for increased risk of catastrophes like heart attacks and strokes.933 Having a C-reactive protein level under 1 mg/L denotes low risk, yet the levels of most middle-aged Americans exceed this,934 suggesting most suffer from chronic inflammation. This

Four Rules of Sleep Hygiene:4660 Exercise regularly. Avoid caffeine, nicotine, and alcohol before bedtime. Make the bedroom dark, cool, comfortable, and quiet. Establish a relaxing bedtime routine.

There may be no such thing as dying from old age. From a study of more than forty-two thousand consecutive autopsies, centenarians—those who live past one hundred—were found to have succumbed to diseases in 100 percent of the cases examined. Though most were perceived, even by their physicians, to have been healthy just prior to death, not one "died of old age."1

treatments aimed not just at reducing tumor bulk but at targeting what has been called the "beating heart of the tumor":112 cancer stem cells. That's where broccoli may come in. Sulforaphane, a dietary component of cruciferous vegetables like broccoli, has been shown to suppress the ability of breast cancer stem cells to form tumors.113 This means that if you're currently in remission, eating lots of broccoli could theoretically help keep your cancer from returning.

People were given soup, but half were given small spoons and told to eat slowly, and the other half were given big spoons and told to eat quickly, and an amazing thing happened: The slow-eating group not only ended up feeling more satiated, but they did so after eating less soup.2977 They felt fuller eating less food.

Those who start out more plant-based but then add meat to their diets at least once a week not only appear to double or triple their odds of diabetes, stroke, heart diseases, and weight gain but suffer an associated 3.6-year drop in life expectancy.

of significant sulforaphane buildup.114 In other words, we now know that the cancer-fighting nutrients in broccoli do find their way to the right place when we swallow them. To reach the concentration of sulforaphane in the breast found to suppress breast cancer stem cells, however, you would have to eat at least a quarter-cup of broccoli sprouts a day.115 You can buy broccoli sprouts in the produce aisle, but they are cheap and easy to grow at home.