Quotes About Diet

The optimal LDL cholesterol level is probably 50 or 70 mg/dL,

In other words, it wasn't the weight loss and it wasn't the exercise that reversed cell aging—it was the food.

There are also components in certain foods that may increase the risk of depression, such as arachidonic acid, an inflammation-promoting compound found mostly in chicken and eggs in the diet that is blamed for potentially impairing mood by inflaming the brain.

China is perhaps the best-studied example. There, a transition away from the country's traditional, plant-based diet was accompanied by a sharp rise in diet-related chronic diseases, such as obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, and cancer.38

But feed people four servings a week of beans, split peas, chickpeas, and lentils, and you can get a whopping 40 percent drop in C-reactive protein,2368 a leading indicator of systemic inflammation. More beans equals less inflammation. Greater consumption

I think the only medical professional who ever asked me about a family member's diet was our veterinarian.

My grandma was given her medical death sentence at age sixty-five. Thanks to a healthy diet and lifestyle, she was able to enjoy another thirty-one years on this earth with her six grandchildren. The woman who was once told by doctors she only had weeks to live didn't die until she was ninety-six years old.

The Mediterranean diet, for example, which is higher in vegetables, beans, fruits, and nuts, and lower in meats and dairy products, has been associated with slower cognitive decline and lower risk of Alzheimer's.

What's more, not only may eating healthier to prevent cancer help to prevent heart disease but eating to prevent heart disease may also help to prevent cancer. One of the reasons? Cholesterol may play a role in the development and progression of breast cancer.75 Cancer appears to feed on cholesterol.

Anyone can lose weight eating less food. Anyone can be starved thin. Starvation diets are rarely sustainable, though, since hunger pangs drive us to eat. We feel unsatisfied on low-calorie diets. Unsatiated. We do have some level of voluntary control, but our deep-seated instinctual drives may win out in the end. For

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. Knowing this, scientists set out to find the most

Ground flax is a light, nutty powder that can be sprinkled on oatmeal, salads, soups—frankly, just about anything you're eating.

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.

Whatever genes we may have inherited from our parents, what we eat can affect how those genes affect our health. The power is mainly in our hands and on our plates.

the dividing line between health-promoting and disease-promoting foods may be less plant- versus animal-sourced foods and more whole plant foods versus most everything else.

That one unifying diet found to best prevent and treat many of these chronic diseases is a whole-food, plant-based diet, defined as an eating pattern that encourages the consumption of unrefined plant foods and discourages meats, dairy products, eggs, and processed foods.

Toss a tablespoon of ground flax into a blender with some frozen berries, unsweetened soy milk, and half a ripe banana or mango or a few dates for sweetness, and you have a delicious drink containing both classes of protective phytoestrogens—lignans in flax and isoflavones in soy. (See chapter 11.) Blend in some cocoa powder for a chocolate milkshake that could help improve your chances of both preventing and surviving breast and prostate cancers.

decided upon a more timeless, proactive approach: build an optimal weight-loss diet from the ground up. Based on the most compelling evidence my research team and I could find, I sought to generate a list of dietary attributes and components most effectual for weight loss. The best ingredients, if you will.

Amazingly, compared to the control group who ate no nuts at all, just a single serving of four Brazil nuts almost immediately improved cholesterol levels. LDL—the "bad"—cholesterol levels were a staggering twenty points lower just nine hours after eating the Brazil nuts.51 Even drugs don't work nearly that fast.52

you had two people eating the same number of calories, it appears the person eating more meat would, on average, gain significantly more weight.

Bottom line: Putting together all the randomized controlled trials of ginger powder, two to twelve weeks of a quarter teaspoon to one and a half teaspoons a day of ground ginger significantly decreased body weight for just pennies a day.

Every time you put something in your mouth, it's a lost opportunity to put something even healthier in there

Legumes have been found to be perhaps "the most important dietary predictor of survival in older people" around the world.

So for the first 90 percent of our hominoid existence, our bodies evolved on mostly plants.