How Not to Die: Discover the Foods Scientifically Proven to Prevent and Reverse Disease QUOTES

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. "

― Michael Greger , How Not to Die: Discover the Foods Scientifically Proven to Prevent and Reverse Disease

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 "

― Michael Greger , How Not to Die: Discover the Foods Scientifically Proven to Prevent and Reverse Disease

4 " When your smoking habit erases the antioxidant-boosting effects of eight hundred cups of kale, you know it's time to quit. "

― Michael Greger , How Not to Die: Discover the Foods Scientifically Proven to Prevent and Reverse Disease

5 " 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. "

― Michael Greger , How Not to Die: Discover the Foods Scientifically Proven to Prevent and Reverse Disease

6 " The primary reason diseases tend to run in families may be that diets tend to run in families. "

― Michael Greger , How Not to Die: Discover the Foods Scientifically Proven to Prevent and Reverse Disease

7 " 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? "

― Michael Greger , How Not to Die: Discover the Foods Scientifically Proven to Prevent and Reverse Disease

8 " 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 "

― Michael Greger , How Not to Die: Discover the Foods Scientifically Proven to Prevent and Reverse Disease

9 " 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. "

― Michael Greger , How Not to Die: Discover the Foods Scientifically Proven to Prevent and Reverse Disease

10 " 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”? "

― Michael Greger , How Not to Die: Discover the Foods Scientifically Proven to Prevent and Reverse Disease

11 " 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. "

― Michael Greger , How Not to Die: Discover the Foods Scientifically Proven to Prevent and Reverse Disease

12 " 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. "

― Michael Greger , How Not to Die: Discover the Foods Scientifically Proven to Prevent and Reverse Disease

13 " 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. "

― Michael Greger , How Not to Die: Discover the Foods Scientifically Proven to Prevent and Reverse Disease

14 " 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. "

― Michael Greger , How Not to Die: Discover the Foods Scientifically Proven to Prevent and Reverse Disease

15 " To become virtually heart-attack proof, you need to get your LDL cholesterol at least under 70 mg/dL. "

― Michael Greger , How Not to Die: Discover the Foods Scientifically Proven to Prevent and Reverse Disease

16 " Dr. Margaret Chan, Director-General of the World Health Organization, recently warned that we may be facing a future in which many of our miracle drugs no longer work. She stated, “A post-antibiotic era means, in effect, an end to modern medicine as we know it. Things as common as strep throat or a child’s scratched knee could once again kill.”147 We may soon be past the age of miracles. The director-general’s prescription to avoid this catastrophe included a global call to “restrict the use of antibiotics in food production to therapeutic purposes.” In other words, only use antibiotics in agriculture to treat sick animals. But that isn’t happening. In the United States, meat producers feed millions of pounds of antibiotics each year to farm animals just to promote growth or prevent disease in the often cramped, stressful, and unhygienic conditions of industrial animal agriculture. Yes, physicians overprescribe antibiotics as well, but the FDA estimates that 80 percent of the antimicrobial drugs sold in the United States every year now go to the meat industry. "

― Michael Greger , How Not to Die: Discover the Foods Scientifically Proven to Prevent and Reverse Disease

17 " Migraines are described as “one of the most common” pain syndromes, affecting as much as 12 percent of the population.63 That’s common? How about menstrual cramps, which plague up to 90 percent of younger women?64 Can ginger help? Even just one-eighth of a teaspoon of ginger powder three times a day dropped pain from an eight to a six on a scale of one to ten, and down further to a three in the second month.65 And these women hadn’t been taking ginger all month; they started the day before their periods began, suggesting that even if it doesn’t seem to help much the first month, women should try sticking with it. What about the duration of pain? A quarter teaspoon of ginger powder three times a day was found to not only drop the severity of menstrual pain from about seven down to five but decrease the duration from a total of nineteen hours in pain down to about fifteen hours,66 significantly better than the placebo, which were capsules filled with powdered toast. But women don’t take bread crumbs for their cramps. How does ginger compare to ibuprofen? Researchers pitted one-eighth of a teaspoon of powdered ginger head-to-head against 400 mg of ibuprofen, and the ginger worked just as effectively as this leading drug.67 Unlike the drug, ginger can also reduce the amount of menstrual bleeding, from around a half cup per period down to a quarter cup.68 What’s more, ginger intake of one-eighth of a teaspoon twice daily started a week before your period can yield a significant drop in premenstrual mood, physical, and behavioral symptoms.69 I like sprinkling powdered ginger on sweet potatoes or using it fresh to make lemon-ginger apple chews as an antinausea remedy. (Ever since I was a little kid, I’ve suffered from motion sickness.) There is an array of powerful antinausea "

― Michael Greger , How Not to Die: Discover the Foods Scientifically Proven to Prevent and Reverse Disease

18 " The American Dietetic Association (ADA), which produces a series of nutrition fact sheets with guidelines on maintaining a healthy diet, also has its own corporate ties. Who writes these fact sheets? Food industry sources pay the ADA $20,000 per fact sheet to explicitly take part in the drafting process. So we can learn about eggs from the American Egg Board and about the benefits of chewing gum from the Wrigley Science Institute.63 "

― Michael Greger , How Not to Die: Discover the Foods Scientifically Proven to Prevent and Reverse Disease

19 " In one study, researchers asked athletes to eat about a cup and a half of blueberries every day for six weeks to see if the berries could reduce the oxidative stress caused by long-distance running.42 The blueberries succeeded, unsurprisingly, but a more important finding was their effect on natural killer cells. Normally, these cells decrease in number after a bout of prolonged endurance exercise, dropping by half to about one billion. But the athletes consuming blueberries actually doubled their killer cell counts, to more than four billion. "

― Michael Greger , How Not to Die: Discover the Foods Scientifically Proven to Prevent and Reverse Disease

20 " The poultry industry commonly injects chicken carcasses with salt water to artificially inflate their weight, yet they can still be labelled “100 percent natural.” Consumer Reports found that some supermarket chickens were pumped so full of salt that they registered a whopping 840 mg of sodium per serving—that could mean more than a full day’s worth of sodium in just one chicken breast. "

― Michael Greger , How Not to Die: Discover the Foods Scientifically Proven to Prevent and Reverse Disease