Michael Greger Quotes

The emergence and spread of virulent strains of avian influenza has been attributed by experts to the intensely overcrowded, unsanitary, and stressful conditions that often characterize large-scale factory farming in industrialized agriculture.

- Michael Greger

The typical Western diet is the number-one cause of premature death and the number-one cause of disability. In other words, a long and healthy life is largely a matter of choice.

- Michael Greger

Nitric oxide is a key biological messenger within the body. When released by the cells lining your arteries, it makes the walls of the arteries relax, allowing more blood to flow.

- Michael Greger

Popeye was right about spinach: dark green, leafy vegetables are the healthiest food on the planet. As whole foods go, they offer the most nutrition per calorie.

- Michael Greger

You have to build up to green smoothies. Everyone loves fruit smoothies: you can add a handful of baby spinach to a fruit smoothie and may hardly even taste it. Next, try two. Slowly, your taste buds can adapt to more greens.

- Michael Greger

For women, eating just two handfuls of nuts a week may extend their lives as much as by jogging four hours a week.

- Michael Greger

People tend to eat poorly because it's convenient; it's what's around them. But you can make the switch. I think the way to do that is to just make fruits and vegetables as convenient as possible to eat.

- Michael Greger

Anyone who's promoting the exact diet that they were in previous years probably isn't keeping up with the latest science, though in general, the balance of evidence has remained remarkably consistent - centering one's diet around whole plant foods.

- Michael Greger

One of the worst things you can do if you're worried about breast cancer is to cook beef, pork, fish or poultry at a high temperature - which includes frying, grilling and roasting.

- Michael Greger

While consumers may be more shocked by pink slime or the feeding of Prozac to poultry, the routine feeding of millions of pounds of human antibiotics to chickens presents a much graver threat.

- Michael Greger

Scientists suggest that the link between consuming poultry and cancer spread may be due to carcinogens in cooked meat. For unknown reasons, these carcinogens build up more in the muscles of chickens and turkeys than in those of other animals.

- Michael Greger

High levels of stress can lead to weakened immunity, rendering animals much more susceptible to disease. This makes the average poultry factory farm a hotbed for outbreaks of avian flu.

- Michael Greger

A good way to adjust to a healthier diet is to think of three meals you enjoy that are largely plant-based. Pasta with tomato sauce can be tweaked to whole-grain pasta with added vegetables.

- Michael Greger

While positive mental states may be associated with less stress and more resilience to infection, positive well-being might also be accompanied by a healthy lifestyle.

- Michael Greger

As you eat more healthily, your palate changes - it's amazing. Your taste buds constantly adapt: from minute to minute, in fact. If you drank orange juice right now, it would taste sweet. But if you first ate some sweets then drank the same juice, it could taste unpleasantly bitter.

- Michael Greger

Unhealthy meals don't just cause internal damage decades down the road, but right here and now, within hours of going into your mouth.

- Michael Greger

Tobacco smoke contains chemicals that weaken the body's immune system, making it more susceptible to disease and handicapping its ability to destroy cancer cells.

- Michael Greger

A small minority of strokes are hemorrhagic strokes, which are caused by bleeding into the brain when a blood vessel bursts.

- Michael Greger

When any fat is heated to frying temperatures, toxic volatile chemicals that can cause genetic mutations are released into the air.

- Michael Greger

Broccoli is incredible. It can prevent DNA damage and metastatic cancer spread; activate defences against pathogens and pollutants; help to prevent lymphoma; boost the enzymes that detox your liver; target breast cancer stem cells; and reduce the risk of prostate cancer progression.

- Michael Greger

Ounce for ounce, herbs and spices have more antioxidants than any other food group.

- Michael Greger

About a quarter of lung cancer cases occur in people who have never smoked. One cause may be another potential carcinogen: fumes from frying.

- Michael Greger

The fumes produced by frying bacon contain carcinogens called nitrosamines. Though all meat may release potentially carcinogenic fumes, processed meat such as bacon may be the worst.

- Michael Greger

The benefits of a healthier diet are far-reaching because they also equate to fewer animals being bred into inhumane factory farm conditions and fewer greenhouse gas emissions.

- Michael Greger

We need to boost our intake of healthy plant foods and reduce our dependence on animal-based foods.

- Michael Greger

A plant-based diet is like a one-stop shop against chronic diseases.

- Michael Greger

Don't forget that fruit can be cooked - think of baked apples, poached pears and grilled pineapple. But if you like drinking fruit, blending will preserve more nutrition and fibre than juicing.

- Michael Greger

When the FDA announced its intentions to join other countries and ban quinolone use on U.S. chicken farms, the drug manufacturer Bayer initiated legal action that successfully delayed the process for five years.

- Michael Greger

Simply switching to a healthy, plant-based diet can lessen stroke risk by reducing cholesterol and blood pressure, flooding your body with antioxidants and improving blood flow.

- Michael Greger

The USDA is tasked with managing and promoting agriculture - including the well-funded animal agriculture industry - so it's pulled into a tug-of-war every time the dietary guidelines are re-evaluated.

- Michael Greger

So, what is a stroke? In about 90 per cent of strokes, it's the result of blood flow to part of the brain getting cut off, depriving it of oxygen and killing off the part fed by the clogged artery.

- Michael Greger

In nature, disease-causing strains of avian influenza rarely spread far because the birds sicken and die before they can fly to spread it to others.

- Michael Greger

The Iowa Women's Health Study, which has followed more than 35,000 women for decades, found eating more broccoli, cauliflower, kale and other cruciferous vegetables was associated with a lower risk of getting non-Hodgkin's lymphoma in the first place.

- Michael Greger

Mental health can be just as important as physical health - and major depression is one of the most commonly diagnosed mental illnesses.

- Michael Greger

Most Alzheimer's sufferers aren't diagnosed until their 70s. However, we now know that their brains began deteriorating long before that.

- Michael Greger

When I was a child, doctors sent my grandmother home in a wheelchair to die. Diagnosed with end-stage heart disease, she already had so much scar tissue from bypass operations that the surgeons had essentially run out of plumbing. There was nothing more to do, they said; her life was over at 65.

- Michael Greger

Studies of immigration show that this resistance to heart disease is not just something in African or Chinese genes. When people move from low-risk to high-risk areas, disease rates skyrocket as they adopt Western diets and lifestyles.

- Michael Greger

Certain foods, such as meat, appear to harbour toxic bacteria - known as endotoxins - that can trigger inflammation in your arteries, even when food is fully cooked.

- Michael Greger

Nutrition is an exciting, dynamic field - there are more than 10,000 articles published on human nutrition in medical journals every year.

- Michael Greger

You can be in excellent physical shape, with low cholesterol, a healthy body weight and good overall physical fitness - but that doesn't necessarily mean you're healthy.

- Michael Greger

After following more than 60,000 people for more than a dozen years, University of Oxford researchers found those who consume a plant-based diet were less likely to develop all forms of cancer combined.

- Michael Greger

For many children, it's seeing a beloved relative ill and in pain that leads them to want to become doctors. But, for me, it was watching my grandma get better.

- Michael Greger

Many people assume the diseases that kill us are pre-programmed into our genes. High blood pressure by 55, heart attacks at 60, maybe cancer at 70, and so on... But for most of the leading causes of death, our genes usually account for only 10-20 per cent of risk.

- Michael Greger

In my clinical practice, the one diagnosis I always dreaded giving was Alzheimer's. Billions have been spent on research, but there's still neither a cure nor an effective treatment.

- Michael Greger

You can buy turmeric from any supermarket - or get it raw from Asian shops and grate a quarter of an inch of the root into your food. There's evidence to suggest raw turmeric may have greater anti-inflammatory effects, while cooked turmeric offers better DNA protection.

- Michael Greger

Physical activity is considered a promising preventive measure against breast cancer - not only because it helps with weight control but because exercise tends to lower circulating estrogen levels.

- Michael Greger

Tart cherries lower the levels of inflammation in the body, which may be particularly useful for those who suffer from gout. They have also been used to improve sleep.

- Michael Greger

In a Harvard University study, the diets of nearly 1,000 women were analysed before their morning melatonin levels were measured. Meat consumption was the only food significantly associated with lower melatonin production, for reasons that are as yet unknown.

- Michael Greger

Among identical twins who have the exact same genes, one may die early of a heart attack and the other may live a long, healthy life - depending on their lifestyle and what they eat.

- Michael Greger

Five hours a week of vigorous aerobic exercise can lower estrogen and progesterone exposure by about 20 per cent.

- Michael Greger

One of the reasons it's so difficult to study the relationship between diet and disease is because many dietary behaviors are associated with non-dietary behaviors.

- Michael Greger

Harvard University researchers found that women at high risk of heart disease who had a tablespoon of peanut butter five or more days a week appeared to nearly halve their risk of suffering a heart attack compared with women who ate one serving or less per week.

- Michael Greger

As a physician specializing in nutrition, my priority is to the health of the public.

- Michael Greger

Milk contains growth hormones designed by Mother Nature to put a few hundred pounds on a baby calf within a few months.

- Michael Greger

If you consume too much salt, it can cause water retention. When this happens, your body usually responds by raising your blood pressure to push excess fluid and salt out of your system.

- Michael Greger

Remove all the junk from one's house. Then one doesn't have to deal with the temptation. If you get hungry enough, you will eat that apple.

- Michael Greger

Even if you were to start drinking milk during adolescence in an attempt to bolster peak bone mass, it probably wouldn't reduce your chances of fracture later in life.

- Michael Greger

Studies on cherries, raspberries and strawberries suggest that most of their nutrition is retained when they're frozen, so it's a good idea to keep some in the freezer.

- Michael Greger

Up to a thousand milligrams of caffeine is considered safe for most people, which translates into about 10 cups of coffee a day.

- Michael Greger

Women with a higher intake of berries appeared to have delayed cognitive aging by 2.5 years. So it's like your brain is 2.5 years younger if you're eating berries.

- Michael Greger

As you age, your blood pressure tends to get higher.

- Michael Greger

Good news for orange lovers: citrus fruit intake has been associated with reduced stroke risk.

- Michael Greger

A massive stroke may kill you instantly, while a series of mini-strokes may disable and kill you over several years.

- Michael Greger

Eating a varied plant-based diet - and avoiding all meat, fish, chicken and dairy products - may have much to recommend it, but it's certainly not for everyone.

- Michael Greger

Most of us know that the hormone melatonin helps regulate our sleep. But it also seems to play another role - suppressing cancer growth.

- Michael Greger

Walking at a moderate pace for an hour a day is considered a moderately intense level of exercise.

- Michael Greger

The largest outbreak of bird flu in American history was an H5N2 virus, which led to the deaths of 17 million domestic birds and cost the nation more than $400 million during an outbreak in Pennsylvania that started in 1983.

- Michael Greger

Everyone feels sad occasionally. A full range of emotions is part of what makes us human.

- Michael Greger

A placebo-controlled, double-blind, randomised trial of boys with autism found that two to three servings of cruciferous vegetables a day improves social interaction, abnormal behaviour and verbal communication - within a matter of weeks.

- Michael Greger

Oregano is such an antioxidant-rich herb that researchers decided to see if it could reduce the DNA-damaging effects of radiation.

- Michael Greger

Though pigs have been proven susceptible to a porcine spongiform encephalopathy, the National Pork Producers Council claims that no naturally occurring cases of 'mad pig' disease have ever been discovered.

- Michael Greger

Despite the growing evidence of health benefits associated with coffee consumption, I still don't recommend my patients drink it - not because it's not healthy, but because there are even healthier choices.

- Michael Greger

Cholesterol - which you get from eating too much of the wrong kind of fat - doesn't just help clog arteries in the brain, it may also help to seed the amyloid plaques that riddle the brain tissue of Alzheimer's victims.

- Michael Greger

You can actually take people with these precancerous lesions, and basically paint black raspberries on them, and they nearly vanish.

- Michael Greger

The problem with all-or-nothing thinking is that it stops people even taking the first steps. The thought of never having pepperoni pizza again somehow turns into an excuse to keep ordering it every week.

- Michael Greger

Breast cancer is thought to use cholesterol to help the cancer migrate and invade more tissue.

- Michael Greger

Although even light exercise is associated with a lowered risk of some other types of cancer, for breast cancer, it appears that leisurely strolls don't appear to cut it.

- Michael Greger

Berries are the healthiest fruit, offering potential protection against cancer and heart disease, boosting the immune system and acting as a guard for the liver and brain.

- Michael Greger

Without enough nitric oxide, your arteries can stiffen, raising blood pressure and your risk of heart attack.

- Michael Greger

Sadly, commercially-produced, frozen broccoli lacks the ability to form sulforaphane because the vegetables are flash-cooked before they are frozen.

- Michael Greger

Berries have a lot of soluble fiber. That's why they gel up when you're making your Thanksgiving cranberry sauce, with the pectin.

- Michael Greger

Sick animals can lead to sick people.

- Michael Greger

Sometimes it feels like there aren't enough hours in a day to get everything done.

- Michael Greger