Quotes from Michael Greger

You can actually take people with these precancerous lesions, and basically paint black raspberries on them, and they nearly vanish.

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.

People tend to eat poorly because it's convenient; it's what's around them. But you can make the switch. I think the way to do that is to just make fruits and vegetables as convenient as possible to eat.

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

A small minority of strokes are hemorrhagic strokes, which are caused by bleeding into the brain when a blood vessel bursts.

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.

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

The largest outbreak of bird flu in American history was an H5N2 virus, which led to the deaths of 17 million domestic birds and cost the nation more than $400 million during an outbreak in Pennsylvania that started in 1983.

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

With no serious downsides, a one-in-three potential benefit for end-stage cancer seems like it would spark further research, right? But who's going to pay for a study of something that can't be patented?

For disease prevention, berries of all colors have "emerged as champions," according to the head of the Bioactive Botanical Research Laboratory.39 The purported anticancer properties of berry compounds have been attributed to their apparent ability to counteract, reduce, and repair damage resulting from oxidative stress and inflammation.40 But it wasn't known until recently that berries may also boost your levels of natural killer cells.

The best way to minimize your exposure to industrial toxins may be to eat as low as possible on the food chain, a plant-based diet.

the top reason doctors give for not counseling patients with high cholesterol to eat healthier is that they think patients may "fear privations related to dietary advice."65 In other words, doctors perceive that patients would feel deprived of all the junk they're eating. Can you imagine a doctor saying, "Yeah, I'd like to tell my patients to stop smoking, but I know how much they love it"?

Back in 1903, Thomas Edison predicted that the "doctor of the future will give no medicine, but will instruct his patient in the care of [the] human frame in diet and in the cause and prevention of diseases.

To become virtually heart-attack proof, you need to get your LDL cholesterol at least under 70 mg/dL.

Excess cholesterol in the blood can lead to excess cholesterol in the brain, which may then help trigger the clumping of amyloid seen in Alzheimer's brains. Under an electron microscope, we can see the clustering of amyloid fibers on and around tiny crystals of cholesterol.

Fighting the Blues with Greens Here's a statistic you probably haven't heard: Higher consumption of vegetables may cut the odds of developing depression by as much as 62 percent.26 A review in the journal Nutritional Neuroscience concluded that, in general, eating lots of fruits and veggies may present "a non-invasive, natural, and inexpensive therapeutic means to support a healthy brain.

The poultry industry commonly injects chicken carcasses with salt water to artificially inflate their weight, yet they can still be labelled "100 percent natural." Consumer Reports found that some supermarket chickens were pumped so full of salt that they registered a whopping 840 mg of sodium per serving—that could mean more than a full day's worth of sodium in just one chicken breast.

In a meat industry trade publication, an Alabama poultry science professor explained why we don't have such a "heavy-handed" policy: "The American consumer is not going to pay that much. It's as simple as that." If the industry had to pay to make it safer, the price would go up. "The fact," he said, "is that it's too expensive not to sell salmonella-positive chicken."99

The American Dietetic Association (ADA), which produces a series of nutrition fact sheets with guidelines on maintaining a healthy diet, also has its own corporate ties. Who writes these fact sheets? Food industry sources pay the ADA $20,000 per fact sheet to explicitly take part in the drafting process. So we can learn about eggs from the American Egg Board and about the benefits of chewing gum from the Wrigley Science Institute.63

But for most of the leading causes of death, the science shows that our genes often account for only 10–20 percent of risk at most.15 For instance, as you'll see in this book, the rates of killers like heart disease and major cancers differ up to a hundredfold among various populations around the globe. But when people move from low- to high-risk countries, their disease rates almost always change to those of the new environment.

profession? A report by the Institute of Medicine on medical training concluded that the fundamental approach to medical education has not changed since 1910.127

While the pathology of stroke and Alzheimer's are different, one key factor unites them: Mounting evidence suggests that a healthy diet may help prevent them both.

With diets Westernizing globally, Alzheimer's rates are expected to continue to increase, writes one researcher in the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease, "unless dietary patterns change to those with less reliance on animal products.…