A plant-based diet is like a one-stop shop against chronic diseases.
— Michael Greger
You can actually take people with these precancerous lesions, and basically paint black raspberries on them, and they nearly vanish.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Breast cancer is thought to use cholesterol to help the cancer migrate and invade more tissue.
Most of us know that the hormone melatonin helps regulate our sleep. But it also seems to play another role - suppressing cancer growth.
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.
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.
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.
Berries have a lot of soluble fiber. That's why they gel up when you're making your Thanksgiving cranberry sauce, with the pectin.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Unhealthy meals don't just cause internal damage decades down the road, but right here and now, within hours of going into your mouth.
A massive stroke may kill you instantly, while a series of mini-strokes may disable and kill you over several years.
Good news for orange lovers: citrus fruit intake has been associated with reduced stroke risk.
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.
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.
Ounce for ounce, herbs and spices have more antioxidants than any other food group.
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.
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.
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.
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.
As you age, your blood pressure tends to get higher.
For women, eating just two handfuls of nuts a week may extend their lives as much as by jogging four hours a week.
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.
We need to boost our intake of healthy plant foods and reduce our dependence on animal-based foods.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A small minority of strokes are hemorrhagic strokes, which are caused by bleeding into the brain when a blood vessel bursts.
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.
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.
Oregano is such an antioxidant-rich herb that researchers decided to see if it could reduce the DNA-damaging effects of radiation.
Walking at a moderate pace for an hour a day is considered a moderately intense level of exercise.
Five hours a week of vigorous aerobic exercise can lower estrogen and progesterone exposure by about 20 per cent.
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.
Most Alzheimer's sufferers aren't diagnosed until their 70s. However, we now know that their brains began deteriorating long before that.
Without enough nitric oxide, your arteries can stiffen, raising blood pressure and your risk of heart attack.
Sometimes it feels like there aren't enough hours in a day to get everything done.
