Quotes About Nutrition

Try eating with chopsticks. Even in experienced hands, they tend to slow eating rate.

You can buy amla online or at any Indian spice store.

The optimal LDL cholesterol level is probably 50 or 70 mg/dL, and apparently, the lower, the better.

not smoking, not being obese, getting a half hour of exercise a day, and eating healthier—defined as consuming more fruits, veggies, and whole grains and less meat. Those four factors alone were found to account for 78 percent of chronic disease risk.

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

Unless it's specifically labeled Ceylon cinnamon, a quarter teaspoon of cinnamon even a few times a week may be too much for small children, and a daily teaspoon would exceed the tolerable upper safety limit for adults.111

The elevated stomach cancer risk associated with salt intake appears on par with that of smoking or heavy alcohol use but may only be half as bad as opium use

The optimal dose appears to be one-half cup,147 but beet juice is perishable, processed, and hard to find.

Serving Sizes: ½ cup fresh or frozen ¼ cup dried Daily Recommendation: 1 serving per day

I don't recommend fish oil, since even purified ("distilled") fish oil has been found to be contaminated with considerable amounts of PCBs and other pollutants, so much so that taken as directed, salmon, herring, and tuna oils would exceed the tolerable daily intake of toxicity.

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.

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

While there is no proven way to halt the progression of Alzheimer's, if you do know anyone suffering from the disease, regularly cooking him or her saffron-spiced paella may help.

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

Of course making berry ice cream or at least a berry-banana mix is even healthier. My favorite is chocolate. To make it, blend dark, sweet cherries or strawberries mixed with a tablespoon of cocoa power, a splash of a milk of your choice (more if you want a milkshake), a capful of vanilla extract, and some pitted dates. If you didn't yet get your nuts for the day, you can add some almond butter.

Those concerned about exposing their children to mercury-containing vaccines should know that eating just a single serving of fish each week during pregnancy can lead to more mercury in their infant's body than injecting them directly with about a dozen mercury-containing vaccines.

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

The battle of the bulge is a battle against biology, so obesity is not some moral failing. I can't stress enough that becoming overweight is a normal, natural response to the abnormal, unnatural ubiquity of calorie-dense, sugary, and fatty foods.

Aren't goji berries expensive, though? In natural foods stores, they can go for twenty dollars a pound, but in Asian supermarkets, you can buy them as "Lycium" berries, and they're even cheaper than raisins. So, however you used to eat raisins—as a snack, in baked goods, in your breakfast cereal or oatmeal, whatever—I recommend you make the switch to gojis.

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.