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1 " Even just living next to a restaurant may pose a health hazard. Scientists estimated the lifetime cancer risk among those residing near the exhaust outlets at Chinese restaurants, American restaurants, and barbecue joints. While exposure to fumes from all three types of restaurants resulted in exposure to unsafe levels of PAHs, the Chinese restaurants proved to be the worst. This is thought to be due to the amount of fish being cooked,28 as the fumes from pan-fried fish have been found to contain high levels of PAHs capable of damaging the DNA of human lung cells.29 Given the excess cancer risk, the researchers concluded that it wouldn’t be safe to live near the exhaust of a Chinese restaurant for more than a day or two a month. "
― Michael Greger , How Not to Die: Discover the Foods Scientifically Proven to Prevent and Reverse Disease
2 " The egg industry itself funded research on Salmonella and the various ways to cook eggs. What did they find? Salmonella in eggs can survive scrambled, over-easy, and sunny-side-up cooking methods. Sunny side up was found to be the riskiest. The industry-funded researchers bluntly concluded: “The sunny-side-up method should be considered unsafe.”84 In other words, even the egg industry itself knows that its product, prepared in a manner that millions of Americans eat on any given day all across the country, is unsafe. "
3 " In a meat industry trade publication, an Alabama poultry science professor explained why we don’t have such a “heavy-handed” policy: “The American consumer is not going to pay that much. It’s as simple as that.” If the industry had to pay to make it safer, the price would go up. “The fact,” he said, “is that it’s too expensive not to sell salmonella-positive chicken.”99 "
4 " Just because you’re born with bad genes doesn’t mean you can’t effectively turn them off. "
― Michael Greger , How not to die in a pandemic: Wie man eine Pandemie überlebt
5 " In the References section, I’ve included a website address and a QR code for the full list of the nearly five thousand citations referenced throughout this book. "
― Michael Greger , How not to diet
6 " I’m not interested in offering dueling anecdotes, nor am I interested in dietary dogma, beliefs, or opinions. What I am interested in is the science. When it comes to making life-and-death decisions that concern something as important as your own health and that of your family, as far as I’m concerned, there’s only one question: What does the best available balance of evidence say right now? That’s what I’ve tried to encapsulate in this book. "
7 " I’m such a stickler for veracity that I hired nine fact-checkers to go through every citation of the How Not to Die manuscript, and I committed to the same rigor with this book. "
8 " Calculating your BMI is relatively easy: You can visit one of the scores of online BMI calculators, or you can grab a calculator and calculate it on your own. To do so, multiply your weight in pounds by 703. Then divide that twice by your height in inches. For example, if you weigh 200 pounds and are 71 inches tall (five foot eleven), that would be (200 × 703) ÷ 71 ÷ 71 = 27.9, a BMI indicating that you would be, unfortunately, significantly overweight. "
9 " When your smoking habit erases the antioxidant-boosting effects of eight hundred cups of kale, you know it's time to quit. "
10 " The eight-a-day recommendation can be traced back to a 1921 paper in which the author measured his own urine and sweat output and determined he lost about 3 percent of his body weight in water a day, which comes out to about eight cups. Consequently, for the longest time, water requirement guidelines for humanity were based on just one person’s urine and sweat measurements. "
11 " The primary reason diseases tend to run in families may be that diets tend to run in families. "
12 " With no serious downsides, a one-in-three potential benefit for end-stage cancer seems like it would spark further research, right? But who’s going to pay for a study of something that can’t be patented? "
13 " This was my wake-up call. I opened my eyes to the depressing fact that there are other forces at work in medicine besides science. The U.S. health care system runs on a fee-for-service model in which doctors get paid for the pills and procedures they prescribe, rewarding quantity over quality. We don’t get reimbursed for time spent counseling our patients about the benefits of healthy eating. If doctors were instead paid for performance, there would be a financial incentive to treat the lifestyle causes of disease. Until the model of reimbursement changes, I don’t expect great changes in medical care or medical education.5 "
14 " For disease prevention, berries of all colors have “emerged as champions,” according to the head of the Bioactive Botanical Research Laboratory.39 The purported anticancer properties of berry compounds have been attributed to their apparent ability to counteract, reduce, and repair damage resulting from oxidative stress and inflammation.40 But it wasn’t known until recently that berries may also boost your levels of natural killer cells. "
15 " the top reason doctors give for not counseling patients with high cholesterol to eat healthier is that they think patients may “fear privations related to dietary advice.”65 In other words, doctors perceive that patients would feel deprived of all the junk they’re eating. Can you imagine a doctor saying, “Yeah, I’d like to tell my patients to stop smoking, but I know how much they love it”? "
16 " The best way to minimize your exposure to industrial toxins may be to eat as low as possible on the food chain, a plant-based diet. "
17 " Fighting the Blues with Greens Here’s a statistic you probably haven’t heard: Higher consumption of vegetables may cut the odds of developing depression by as much as 62 percent.26 A review in the journal Nutritional Neuroscience concluded that, in general, eating lots of fruits and veggies may present “a non-invasive, natural, and inexpensive therapeutic means to support a healthy brain. "
18 " 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. "
19 " Excess cholesterol in the blood can lead to excess cholesterol in the brain, which may then help trigger the clumping of amyloid seen in Alzheimer’s brains. Under an electron microscope, we can see the clustering of amyloid fibers on and around tiny crystals of cholesterol. "
20 " To become virtually heart-attack proof, you need to get your LDL cholesterol at least under 70 mg/dL. "
