Quotes About Nutrition

Remarkably, even with all the improvements in care, you are 70 percent more likely to die from heart disease today than you were in 1900. That's partly because other things used to kill people first, and partly because a hundred years ago people didn't spend five or six hours an evening in front of a television with a big spoon and a tub of ice cream. Heart disease is far and away the Western world's number one killer.

The largest source of foodborne illness is not meat or eggs or mayonnaise, as commonly supposed, but green leafy vegetables. They account for one in five of all food illnesses.

Americans today consume about twenty five percent more calories than they did in 1970. And let's face it, they weren't exactly going without in 1970.

COMPLICATED molecules. About a fifth of our body weight is made up of them. In simplest terms, a protein is a chain of amino acids. About a million different proteins have been identified so far, and nobody knows how many more are to be found. They are all made from just twenty amino acids

By one estimate, about half the sugar we consume is lurking in foods where we are not even aware of it—in breads, salad dressings, spaghetti sauces, ketchup, and other processed foods that don't normally strike us as sugary. Altogether about 80 percent of the processed foods we eat contain added sugars. Heinz ketchup is almost one-quarter sugar. It has more sugar per unit of volume than Coca-Cola.

The main thing to bear in mind is that carbohydrate, upon being digested, is just more sugar – often quite a lot more. That means that a 150g serving of white rice or a small bowl of cornflakes will have the same effect on your blood glucose levels as nine teaspoons of sugar.14

even with all the improvements in care, you are 70 percent more likely to die from heart disease today than you were in 1900. That's partly because other things used to kill people first, and partly because a hundred years ago people didn't spend five or six hours an evening in front of a television with a big spoon and a tub of ice cream.

We all know that if we consume too much beer and cake and pizza and cheeseburgers and all the other things that make life frankly worth living, we will add pounds to our bodies because we have taken in too many calories. But what exactly are these little numerical oddments that are so keen to make us round and wobbly?

That means that a 150-gram serving of white rice or a small bowl of cornflakes will have the same effect on your blood glucose levels as nine teaspoons of sugar.

Over a lifetime, we eat about sixty tons of food, which is equivalent, notes Carl Zimmer in Microcosm, to eating sixty small cars. In 1915, the average American spent half his weekly income on food. Today it's just 6 percent

In consequence, some 50 percent of people globally are estimated to be vitamin D deficient for at least part of the year. In northern climes, it may be as much as 90 percent.

A striking marker of just how confused nutrition advice can be was a finding by an advisory committee for the American Heart Association that 37 percent of American nutritionists rate coconut oil—which is essentially nothing but saturated fat in liquid form—as a "healthy food." Coconut oil may be tasty, but it is no better for you than a big scoop of deep-fried butter.

Happiness is a good bank account, a good cook and a good digestion. —jean-jacques rousseau

The stomach holds about one and a half quarts, which is not very much compared with other animals. The stomach of a big dog will hold up to twice as much food as yours does.

A person's lifetime risk of colorectal cancer is about 5 percent, and eating processed meat every day appears to boost a person's absolute risk of cancer by 1 percentage point, to 6 percent (that's 18 percent of the 5 percent lifetime risk).

A heart attack, as one doctor has put it, is "50 percent genetic and 50 percent cheeseburger.

Within the animal kingdom only humans and guinea pigs are unable to synthesize vitamin C in their own bodies.

New Rule: Food companies must face the facts: One container equals one serving. Look, we're Americans, and that means once we open the bag, there's no stopping us until we're licking stray bits of powdered cheese off the carpet. So stop trying to give us nutritional information based on a fraction of the package. It assumes a talent for two things that we're really not capable of: restraint and math.

For health, more of your protein should be derived from plant sources so as to reduce fat intake. While we are not necessarily advocating a totally vegetarian diet, we are suggesting that endurance athletes and runners adopt a primarily plant-based diet.

You've got to have something to eat

Drinking more water, eating lots of fruits and vegetables, avoiding processed salty foods, going to bed earlier, and exercising regularly will do more to give you beautiful, bright eyes than any cream or makeup can.

No one is ever going to die from broccoli flu or spinach flu, and tofu will never become to-flu.

The only real nourishment you boys ever get comes from my cooking. - Florence Zimmermann

Avocados are my favourite fruit.