Quotes from Michael Greger

To drastically reduce LDL cholesterol levels, you need to drastically reduce your intake of three things: trans fat, which comes from processed foods and naturally from meat and dairy; saturated fat, found mainly in animal products and junk foods; and to a lesser extent dietary cholesterol, found exclusively in animal-derived foods, especially eggs.

This is why I prefer the term whole-food, plant-based nutrition.

Men in the United States appear to have eleven times more colorectal cancer than men in India, twenty-three times more prostate cancer, fourteen times more melanoma, nine times more kidney cancer, and seven times more lung and bladder cancer.

The two most prominent dietary risks for death and disability in the world may be not eating enough fruit and eating too much salt. Nearly five million people appear to die every year as a result of not eating enough fruit,16 while eating too much salt may kill up to four million.

Mangos can be a messy pain to peel, but once that's done, I slice them about a centimeter thick and sprinkle them with chia seeds before putting them in the dehydrator. If I'm taking them on a plane or a hike, I'll dry them completely. Otherwise, I only wait until just the outside is dry. The outer layer, encrusted with chia, gets a crispy texture while the core remains moist and ready to burst.

An LDL around 70 mg/dL corresponds to a total cholesterol reading of about 150, the level below which no deaths from coronary heart disease were reported in the famous Framingham Heart Study, a generations-long project to identify risk factors for heart disease.29

healthiest diet is one that minimizes the intake of meat, eggs, dairy, and processed junk, and maximizes the intake of fruits, vegetables, legumes (beans, split peas, chickpeas, and lentils), whole grains, nuts and seeds, mushrooms, and herbs and spices—basically, real food that grows out of the ground. Those are our healthiest choices.

Think about it. Patients walk in with one of the most painful, frustrating, and hard-to-treat conditions in all of medicine, and three-quarters of them were cured in a handful of days using a natural, nontoxic treatment—namely, a diet composed of whole plant foods. This should have been front-page news.

Hospitals are terrible places to be and terrible places to die.

I also like drying thin apple slices. I either sprinkle them with cinnamon or rub them with freshly grated ginger. They can be just dried until chewy or completely dehydrated into crunchy apple chips. Eating a dozen dried apple rings a day may drop LDL cholesterol levels 16 percent within three months and 24 percent within six months.17

For those who don't like seaweed, Eden brand's canned beans have a tiny amount of kelp added such that iodine levels average between 36.3 mcg per half-cup serving (great northern beans) to 71.2 mcg (navy beans).35 Not only are those levels safe—you'd have to eat about twenty cans a day to get too much—but checkmarking my three legume servings a day with Eden's beans would fulfill your daily iodine requirement.

Three hours after eating a cup of broccoli sprouts, the enzyme that cancers use to help silence our defenses is suppressed in your bloodstream110 to an extent equal to or greater than the chemotherapy agent specifically designed for that purpose,111 without the toxic side effects.

a metaphor for modern medicine. A doctor a day may keep the apples away.

Kiwi is one of the fruits I've prescribed to my patients with insomnia (two an hour before bedtime appears to significantly improve sleep onset, duration, and efficiency)

Consider Taking 250 mg of Pollutant-Free (Yeast- or Algae-Derived) Long-Chain Omega-3s Daily

In 2010, the chair of the nutrition department at Loma Linda University published a paper suggesting that giving up meat entirely is an effective way to combat childhood obesity, pointing to population studies demonstrating that people eating plant-based diets are consistently thinner than those who eat meat.28

The problem with all-or-nothing thinking is that it keeps people from even taking the first steps. The thought of never having pepperoni pizza again somehow turns into an excuse to keep ordering it every week. Why not scale it down to once a month or reserve it for special occasions? We can not let "perfect" be the enemy of the good. It's really the day-to-day stuff that matters most. What you eat on special occasions is insignificant compared to what you eat day in and day out.

give me just three weeks. I find that if my patients think of it simply as an experiment, they're more likely to go whole hog (whole grain?) and realize the maximum benefits.

overnutrition.

Thankfully, you can get the benefits without the risks by getting long-chain omega-3s from algae instead,

There's no magnesium aisle in the supermarket.

This is good news, because it's best not to eat mushrooms raw; there's a toxin in edible mushrooms called agaritine to which you should minimize your exposure.

Take cholesterol-lowering statin drugs, for example. The best they may be able to offer in terms of absolute risk reduction for a subsequent heart attack or death is about 3 percent over six years.54 Meanwhile, a whole-food, plant-based diet may work twenty times better, potentially offering an absolute risk reduction of 60 percent after fewer than four years.55

Liver dysfunction can run in families, like the iron-overload disease hemochromatosis. It can be caused by infections that can lead to liver cancer, or it can stem from drugs—most often inadvertent or intentional overdoses of Tylenol.4 The most common causes, however, are drink and food: alcoholic liver disease and fatty liver disease.