Quotes from Michael Greger

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

In a study refreshingly not funded by a vinegar company, two daily tablespoons of apple cider vinegar mixed into a drink reduced fasting blood sugars in prediabetics an average of sixteen points within one week, which is better than what you'd tend to see with antidiabetic drugs like Glucophage or Avandia.2650 The vinegar was found to be safer, cheaper, and more effective. No wonder vinegar has been used medicinally since antiquity.

This may help explain why sugary drinks have been blamed as perhaps the single largest driver of the obesity epidemic,4856 accounting for at least one-fifth of the weight gained between 1977 and 2007 in the United States.4857 By the year 2000, Americans were drinking an estimated 190 calories a day of sweetened beverages.4858

Comparing the absorption of fat from peanuts to the exact same number of peanuts ground into peanut butter, you flush more than twice the amount of fat down the toilet when you eat the peanuts themselves.

In the Harvard cohorts, the categories of berries and apples/pears appeared to stand out on the fruit side in terms of foods associated with the most weight loss, and cauliflower and tofu/soy did so on the vegetable side.

Obese individuals randomized to just about four teaspoons of yacon syrup a day for 120 days lost nearly four inches off their waists and more than thirty pounds, whereas those on the placebo syrup gained weight.2674

Inform your physician if you eat grapefruit. This fruit can suppress the enzymes that help clear more than half of commonly prescribed drugs, and less drug clearance means higher drug levels in the body.

To amp AMPK, I recommend trying two teaspoons of vinegar with each meal. You might be thinking, Wait—vinegar for breakfast? Those aghast at the thought of drizzling vinegar on their oatmeal may have never heard of chocolate vinegar, strawberry vinegar, or any of the dozens of other exotic flavors out there.

Interventional studies putting around three to six cups' worth of daily green or oolong tea to the test showed an average metabolic boost of about one hundred calories a day, shaving off three butter pats' worth of extra fat every day.

Under stress, we tend not only to eat more food but worse food, and we seem to deposit more fat in the worst place, in and around our abdominal organs.

Studies find that if you let kids run around for just six minutes, the levels of immune cells circulating in their blood increases by nearly 50 percent.

That is one reason most of the spotlight has been on green, white, and oolong teas, as they have about five times more EGCG than black tea.

One such study tried giving people with metabolic syndrome placebo or actual garlic tablets adding up to a half teaspoon of garlic powder a day. And it worked, resulting in a drop in both weight and waistlines within six weeks.2285 A half teaspoon of garlic powder costs less than four cents. What about trying garlic supplements, like the fancy aged garlic extract ones you may have seen advertised. No weight-loss benefits were found.2286

appear to help turn BRCA protection back on, removing the methyl straitjacket the tumor tried to place on it.144 The dose breast cancer researchers used to achieve this result in vitro was pretty hefty, though—the equivalent to eating about a cup of soybeans. Soy may also help women with variations of other breast cancer susceptibility genes known as MDM2 and CYP1B1.

When you eat spaghetti, you get a gentle rise in blood sugars.4898 If you eat the same amount of wheat baked into bread form, however, you get a big spike in blood sugars.

While regular physical activity improves immune function and lowers respiratory infection risk, sustained and intense exertion may have the opposite effect. As you go from inactive to active, infection risk declines, but at a certain point, overtraining and excessive stress can increase the risk of infection by impairing immune function.57 In the weeks following marathons or ultramarathons, runners report a two- to sixfold increase in upper-respiratory-tract infections.

From a nutrition standpoint, the reason I don't like the terms vegetarian and vegan is that they are only defined by what you don't eat. When I used to speak on college campuses, I would meet vegans who appeared to be living off french fries and beer. Vegan, technically, but not exactly health promoting. That's why I prefer the term whole-food, plant-based nutrition.

one teaspoon of ground cumin may be about the equivalent of a baby aspirin.

People sometimes ask me why I don't go on vacations or even take a day off. I have to explain that I feel as though my entire life is a holiday. I feel so blessed to be able to dedicate my time to helping people while doing what I love: learning and sharing. I can't imagine doing anything else.

Your family history does not have to become your personal destiny. Just

Asian populations also eat more mushrooms.149 As noted in the box on red wine here, white mushrooms have also been shown to block the estrogen synthase enzyme, at least in a petri dish. So researchers decided to investigate if there was a link between mushroom intake and breast cancer. They compared the mushroom consumption of one thousand breast cancer patients to one thousand healthy subjects of similar age, weight, and smoking and exercise status.

The women whose mushroom consumption averaged just about one-half a mushroom or more per day had 64 percent lower odds of breast cancer compared with women who didn't eat mushrooms at all. Eating mushrooms and sipping at least half a tea bag's worth of green tea each day was associated with nearly 90 percent lower breast cancer odds.150

frontloading one's calories earlier in the day with a prolonged nightly fast has been associated with significant weight loss over time, leading the researchers to conclude: "Eating breakfast and lunch 5–6 h[ours] apart and making the overnight fast last 18–19 h[ours] may be a useful practical [weight control] strategy.

Of all the nuts studied in PREDIMED, the researchers found the greatest benefits associated with walnuts, particularly for preventing cancer deaths.15 People who ate more than three servings of walnuts per week appeared to cut their risk of dying from cancer in half.