Quotes About Wellness

Plant-based meals tend to be rich in antioxidants on their own, but taking a moment to spice up your life may make your meal even healthier.

7 Just as you don't have to wait for your physician to tell you to stop smoking, you don't have to wait to start eating healthier

Plant-based diets are the nutritional equivalent of quitting smoking."66

Dear Doc, You won't believe this. My diabetes is GONE. I beat it, doc! How Not to Die really did save my life! Guess what else? My wife has had problems with her weight since she was a teenager. We went on a plant-based diet together, and she has, for the first time in years, gotten to a normal weight! We are both so happy, we feel like teenagers again. (Did I tell you we were high school sweethearts? That was a very long time ago, but it doesn't feel so long ago anymore!)

Most deaths in the United States are preventable, and they are related to what we eat.4 Our diet is the number-one cause of premature death and the number-one cause of disability.

Four Rules of Sleep Conditioning:4658 Go to bed only when you're sleepy. Only use the bed for sleep (and sex). No reading, eating, or screen time. If you can't fall asleep within fifteen to twenty minutes or so, get up, leave the bedroom, and don't go back until you're sleepy again. Repeat as necessary. Get up at the same time every morning no matter how little sleep you have had.

As Kaiser Permanente's guide The Plant-Based Diet: A Healthier Way to Eat puts it: "If you find you cannot do a plant-based diet 100 percent of the time, then aim for 80 percent. Any movement toward more plants and fewer animal products [and processed foods] can improve your health!"3

you could have rotating trays of microgreens that you snip off with scissors for probably the healthiest salad out there.

Four Rules of Sleep Hygiene:4660 Exercise regularly. Avoid caffeine, nicotine, and alcohol before bedtime. Make the bedroom dark, cool, comfortable, and quiet. Establish a relaxing bedtime routine.

There may be no such thing as dying from old age. From a study of more than forty-two thousand consecutive autopsies, centenarians—those who live past one hundred—were found to have succumbed to diseases in 100 percent of the cases examined. Though most were perceived, even by their physicians, to have been healthy just prior to death, not one "died of old age."1

People were given soup, but half were given small spoons and told to eat slowly, and the other half were given big spoons and told to eat quickly, and an amazing thing happened: The slow-eating group not only ended up feeling more satiated, but they did so after eating less soup.2977 They felt fuller eating less food.

CHIP doesn't provide meals—just advice and encouragement, empowering people with knowledge.2505 Within a month on the program, blood sugars, cholesterol, and blood pressures dropped enough for many participants to drop their antidiabetic, cholesterol-lowering, and blood pressure–lowering medications. Better numbers on fewer drugs, along with an average six-pound weight loss.

That's why the glycemic index of intact wheat kernels (wheatberries) or even cracked wheat (like bulgur found in tabbouleh) is down around 45, but whole-wheat bread is nearly as bad as white bread with both up about 70.

Serving Sizes: 1 cup raw leafy vegetables ½ cup raw or cooked nonleafy vegetables ½ cup vegetable juice ¼ cup dried mushrooms Daily Recommendation: 2 servings per day

In smoothie form, you can drink fruits and vegetables at about two cups a minute—ten times faster than it might take to eat fruits and vegetables in solid form.

Back in 1903, Thomas Edison predicted that the "doctor of the future will give no medicine, but will instruct his patient in the care of [the] human frame in diet and in the cause and prevention of diseases."12

and the leading sources in the U.S. diet are parsley, bell peppers, celery, apples, and oranges.1024 The most flavone-filled beverage is chamomile tea.

On average, those who eat low-energy-density diets consume hundreds of fewer calories, yet they eat significantly more food, about three-quarters of a pound more a day.

Vegetarians and vegans are recommended to take supplements containing at least 50 mcg of cyanocobalamin (the most stable form2452) a day or at least 2,000 mcg once a week2453 (or brush twice daily with a B12-fortified toothpaste

Note that none of these recommendations to cut down on added sugars applies to fruit. As you'll read in the Rich in Fruits and Vegetables section, fruit can actually facilitate weight loss. If you randomize people to a diet low in all sugars, even the naturally occurring sugars in fruit, they do worse than those randomized to just cut down added sugars. Those who retained fruit in their diets lost nearly 50 percent more weight.

About twenty sprigs of cilantro daily for two months reduced inflammation levels in arthritis sufferers and cut uric-acid levels in half, suggesting that lots of cilantro may be useful for people suffering from gout.

As I explored in How Not to Die, these are the very same foods that in some cases may help prevent each of our top fifteen killers: (1) heart disease, (2) lung diseases, (3) iatrogenic ("death by doctor") causes, (4) brain diseases, (5) digestive cancers, (6) infections, (7) diabetes, (8) high blood pressure, (9) liver diseases, (10) blood cancers, (11) kidney disease, (12) breast cancer, (13) suicidal depression, (14) prostate cancer, and (15) Parkinson's disease.

and we know who shouldn't be fasting in the first place4109 (such as those with advanced liver or kidney failure, porphyria, or uncontrolled hyperthyroidism, and women who are pregnant or breastfeeding).

The good news is that no matter what your mom ate or how you lived as a child, by eating and living healthfully, you may be able to slow the growth rate of any hidden cancers. In short, you can die with your tumors rather than from them. This is how dietary cancer prevention and treatment can end up being the same thing.