Quotes About Diet

Serving Sizes: ¼ cup of hummus or bean dip ½ cup cooked beans, split peas, lentils, tofu, or tempeh 1 cup of fresh peas or sprouted lentils Daily Recommendation: 3 servings per day

in pill form? Sure enough, the pills didn't seem to help at all. Improvements in lung function and asthma control were evident only after subjects increased their actual fruit and vegetable intake, strongly suggesting that consuming whole foods is paramount.59 If adding a few daily servings of fruits and vegetables can have such a significant effect, what if asthma sufferers were put on a diet composed entirely

The good news: Type 2 diabetes is almost always preventable, often treatable, and sometimes even reversible through diet and lifestyle changes. Like other leading killers—especially heart disease and high blood pressure—type 2 diabetes is an unfortunate consequence of your dietary choices.

For some cancers, like our number-two cancer killer, colon cancer, up to 71 percent of cases appear to be preventable through a similar portfolio of simple diet and lifestyle changes.52

One of the diseases antioxidant-rich foods may help prevent is stroke. Swedish researchers followed more than thirty thousand older women over a period of a dozen years and found that those who ate the most antioxidant-rich foods had the lowest stroke risk.42 Similar findings were reported in a younger cohort of men and women in Italy.43 As with lung disease,44 antioxidant supplements don't appear to help.45 Mother Nature's powers cannot be stuffed into a pill.

Dozens of similar studies demonstrate that if you reduce your salt intake, you reduce your blood pressure. And the greater the reduction, the greater the benefit. But if you don't cut down, chronic high salt intake can lead to a gradual increase in blood pressure throughout life.34

Biopsies taken before and after the diet and lifestyle intervention showed that the expression of more than five hundred genes was affected. This was one of the first demonstrations that changing what you eat and how you live can affect you at a genetic level, in terms of which genes are switched on and off.

As a dark-green, leafy vegetable, kale is not only one of the most nutrient-dense foods on the planet—it may also help fight off infection. Japanese researchers tried dripping

The number-one source of sodium for American kids and teens is pizza.61 A single slice of Pizza Hut pepperoni pizza can contain half your recommended sodium intake limit for the entire day.62 For adults over fifty, it's bread, but between the ages of twenty and fifty, the greatest contributor of sodium to the diet is chicken—not the canned soups, pretzels

I remember the interviewer emphatically stating, "Nutrition is superfluous to human health." And he was a pediatrician! I knew I was in for a long road ahead. Come to think of it, I think the only medical professional who ever asked me about a family member's diet was our veterinarian.

Serving Sizes: 1 medium-sized fruit 1 cup cut-up fruit ¼ cup dried fruit Daily Recommendation: 3 servings per day

I recommend that people unable to get sufficient sun take one 2,000 IU vitamin D3 supplement each day,18 ideally with the largest meal of the day.

Specific plant foods have been found to be protective of the liver. For instance, starting out the day with a bowl of oatmeal and (surprisingly) coffee may help safeguard our liver function.

Fiber is naturally concentrated in only one place: whole plant foods. Processed foods have less, and animal-derived foods have no fiber at all. Animals have bones to hold them up; plants have fiber.

It turns out that sodium intake appears to suppress the activity of a key antioxidant enzyme in the body called superoxide dismutase,49 which has the ability to detoxify a million free radicals per second.50 With the action of this workhorse of an enzyme stifled by sodium, artery-crippling levels of oxidative stress can build up.

minimize stroke risk by eating a minimum of 25 grams a day of soluble fiber (fiber that dissolves in water, typically found in beans, oats, nuts, and berries) and 47 daily grams of insoluble fiber (fiber that does not dissolve in water, found primarily in whole grains, such as brown rice and whole wheat).

The trillion-dollar processed food industry uses dirt-cheap added salt and sugar to sell us their junk.57 That's why it's not easy avoiding sodium on the typical American diet, since three-quarters of salt comes from processed foods rather than a saltshaker.58

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.

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.

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.

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.