Quotes About Health

Two of the most nutritious plants in the world —lamb's quarters and purslane—are weeds, and some of the healthiest traditional diets, like the Mediterranean, make frequent use of wild greens.

it would be a big mistake if medicalization is all that happens." Why a mistake? Because Bob Jesse was ultimately less interested in people's mental problems than with their spiritual well-being—in using entheogens for the betterment of well people.

researchers found that a dollar could buy 1,200 calories of potato chips and cookies; spent on a whole food like carrots, the same dollar buys only 250 calories. On the beverage aisle, you can buy 875 calories of soda for a dollar, or 170 calories of fruit juice from concentrate.

Four of the top ten causes of death today are chronic diseases with well-established links to diet: coronary heart disease, diabetes, stroke, and cancer.

Today these four crops account for two thirds of the calories we eat. When you consider that humankind has historically consumed some eighty thousand edible species, and that three thousand of these have been in widespread use, this represents a radical simplification of the human diet. Why should this concern us? Because humans are omnivores, requiring somewhere between fifty and a hundred different chemical compounds and elements in order to be healthy.

You're better off eating the real thing in moderation than bingeing on "lite" food products packed with sugars and salt.

Thirty years of nutritional advice have left us fatter, sicker, and more poorly nourished. Which is why we find ourselves in the predicament we do: in need of a whole new way to think about eating.

This might not matter to much of anyone but a confirmed Slow Foodie, eager to save and sample endangered food traditions, except for one notable fact: Medical researchers are coming around to the startling conclusion that, in order to be healthy, people need more exposure to microbes, not less; and that one of the problems with the so-called Western diet—besides all the refined carbohydrates and fats and novel chemicals in it—is the absence from it of live-culture foods.

When we eat mindlessly and alone, we eat more.

A diet based on quantity rather than quality has ushered a new creature onto the world stage: the human being who manages to be both overfed and undernourished, two characteristics seldom found in the same body in the long natural history of our species.

Be the kind of person who takes supplements—then skip the supplements.

Stamets had recommended that I "cook" the mushrooms to destroy the compounds that can upset the stomach.

Watch out for those health claims.

the whole problem of health in soil, plant, animal and man as one great subject.

Traditional diets are more than the sum of their food parts.

Nutritionism prefers to tinker with the Western diet, adjusting the various nutrients (lowering the fat, boosting the protein) and fortifying processed foods rather than questioning their value in the first place.

Apparently it is easier, or at least a lot more profitable, to change a disease of civilization into a lifestyle than it is to change the way that civilization eats.

There may or may not be a correlation between the beautiful and the good, but there probably is one between beauty and health. (Which, I suppose, in Darwinian terms, is the good.)

At every level, from the soil to the plate, the industrialization of the food chain has involved a process of chemical and biological simplification

pensar no alimento como puro e simples combustível é interpretá-lo mal.

Cancer? Stamets's extract of turkey tail mushrooms (Trametes versicolor) has been shown to help cancer patients by stimulating their immune systems. (Stamets claims to have used it to help cure his mother's stage 4 breast cancer.)

Since 1985 our [American's] consumption of all added sugars- cane, beet, HFCS, glucose, honey, maple syrup, whatever- has climbed from 128 pounds to 159 pounds per person.

DON'T EAT ANYTHING YOUR GREAT GRANDMOTHER WOULDN'T RECOGNIZE AS FOOD.

From a typical McDonald's meal] this is how the laboratory measured our meal: soda (100%), milk shake (78%), salad dressing (65%), chicken nuggets (56%), cheeseburger (52%), and French fries (23%).