Quotes About Nutrition

American farmers produced 600 more calories per person per day in 2000 than they did in 1980. But some calories got cheaper than others: Since 1980, the price of sweeteners and added fats (most of them derived, respectively, from subsidized corn and subsidized soybeans), dropped 20 percent, while the price of fresh fruits and vegetables increased by 40 percent.

There are scores of studies demonstrating that a diet rich in vegetables and fruits reduces the risk of dying from all the Western diseases; in countries where people eat a pound or more of vegetables and fruits a day, the rate of cancer is half what is in the United States.

Okinawa, one of the longest-lived and healthiest populations in the world, practice a principle they call hara hachi bu: Eat until you are 80 percent full.

But don't take the silence of the yams as a sign that they have nothing valuable to say about health.

There is every reason to believe that corn has succeeded in domesticating us.

You may not think you eat a lot of corn and soybeans, but you do: 75 percent of the vegetable oils in your diet come from soy (representing 20 percent of your daily calories) and more than half of the sweeteners you consume come from corn (representing around 10 perecent of daily calories).

A growing body of research suggests that many of the health problems associated with eating beef are really problems with corn-fed beef.

You are what you eat is a truism hard to argue with, and yet it is, as a visit to a feedlot suggests, incomplete, for you are what what you eat eats, too. And what we are, or have become, is not just meat but number 2 corn and oil.

Real food is alive and there for it should eventually die.

You are what you eat eats.

Rule No. 12: shop the peripheries of the supermarket and stay out of the middle.

Huxley suggests that the reason there aren't nearly as many mystics and visionaries walking around today, as compared to the Middle Ages, is the improvement in nutrition. Vitamin deficiencies wreak havoc on brain function and probably explain a large portion of visionary experiences in the past.

Eating what stands on one leg [mushrooms and plant foods] is better than eating what stands on two legs [fowl], which is better than eating what stands on four legs [cows, pigs, and other mammals].

A collective spasm of carbophobia seized the country,...

As grandmothers used to say, 'Better to pay the grocer than the doctor

Part of the appeal of hamburgers and nuggets is that their boneless abstractions allow us to forget we're eating animals.

The blessing of the omnivore is that he can eat a great many different things in nature. The curse of the omnivore is that when it comes to figuring out which of those things are safe to eat, he's pretty much on his own.

Yet as a general rule it's a whole lot easier to slap a health claim on a box of sugary cereal than on a raw potato or a carrot, with the perverse result that the most healthful foods in the supermarket sit there quietly in the produce section, silent as stroke victims, while a few aisles over in Cereal the Cocoa Puffs and Lucky Charms are screaming their newfound whole-grain goodness to the rafters.

In borrowing from a food culture, pay attention to how a culture eats as well as to what it eats.

Easy. You want Americans to eat less? I have the diet for you. Cook it yourself. Eat anything you want—just as long as you're willing to cook it yourself.

Leave something on your plate... 'Better to go to waste than to waist

The cook in the kitchen preparing a meal from plants and animals at the end of this shortest of food chains has a great many things to worry about, but "health" is simply not one of them, because it is given.

Human beings ate well and kept themselves healthy for millennia before nutritional science came along to tell us how to do it; it is entirely possible to eat healthily without knowing what an anti-oxidant is.

One USDA scientist went so far as to claim that there has never been a documented case of food-borne illness from eating fermented vegetables.