18 quotes
A plant-based diet is like a one-stop shop against chronic diseases.
Consuming too much salt kills an estimated 1.9 million people a year.
In the United States alone, up to ninety-two thousand lives could be saved each year simply by eating less salt.
Artificially sweetened beverage consumption [of fizzy drinks ] is associated with leukemia, so we should eliminate fizzy drinks from our diets for this reason—and many others.
How Not to Die: Discover the Foods Scientifically Proven to Prevent and Reverse Disease (2025)
The turmeric spice component curcumin, a simple spice found in the supermarket, might have the ability to slow or stop multiple myeloma in a percentage of patients. It couldn't hurt to spice up our diet.
How Not to Die: Discover the Foods Scientifically Proven to Prevent and Reverse Disease (2025)
We've known for decades that even a single workout can elevate mood and that physical activity is associated with decreased symptoms of depression. For example, one study of nearly five thousand people across the United States found that people who exercised regularly had 25 percent lower odds of a major depression diagnosis.
How Not to Die: Discover the Foods Scientifically Proven to Prevent and Reverse Disease (2025)
That one unifying diet that's been found to best prevent and treat many of these chronic diseases is a whole-food, plant-based diet, defined as an eating pattern that encourages the consumption of unrefined plant foods and discourages meats, dairy products, eggs, and processed foods.
How Not to Die: Discover the Foods Scientifically Proven to Prevent and Reverse Disease (2025)
Higher intake of meat in general—whether red meat, white meat, processed, or unprocessed—is also associated with an increased risk of death from all causes put together. If the whole world cut out meat, we'd save an estimated seven million lives a year. If humanity cut out all animal-sourced foods, we might save eight million lives annually.
How Not to Die: Discover the Foods Scientifically Proven to Prevent and Reverse Disease (2025)
A blood pressure checkup is easy to ignore or postpone. The insidious consequences of hypertension may not be apparent until we're lifted into an ambulance or lowered into a grave. Go to your local pharmacy, or doctor's office, and get your blood pressure checked.
How Not to Die: Discover the Foods Scientifically Proven to Prevent and Reverse Disease (2025)
[Compared to cow's milk] soy milk is only deficient in blood pus, antibiotics, artery-clogging fat, and cholesterol.
We can actually change the expression of genes—tumor suppressing genes, tumor activating genes—by what we eat, what we put into our bodies. So, even if you've been dealt a bad genetic deck, you can still reshuffle it with diet.
Interview in the documentary-film What the Health by Kip Andersen (2017)
A healthy diet can reduce stroke risk by reducing cholesterol and blood pressure while improving blood flow and antioxidant capacity.
High fiber intake may also help ward off stroke. High-fiber diets may also lower blood pressure, which reduces the risk of brain bleeds.
How Not to Die: Discover the Foods Scientifically Proven to Prevent and Reverse Disease (2025)
The Global Burden of Disease Study noted which foods, if added to the diet, might save lives. More nuts and seeds? 600,000 lives. How about vegetables? 860,000 lives. More whole grains. An incredible 1.6 million lives a year. Fruits. Worldwide, if humanity ate more fruits, we might save an estimated 1.7 million lives.
How Not to Die: Discover the Foods Scientifically Proven to Prevent and Reverse Disease (2025)
The pandemic of chronic disease has been ascribed in part to the near-universal shift toward a diet dominated by animal-sourced and processed foods—in other words, more meat, dairy, eggs, oils, fizzy drinks, sugar, and refined grains.
How Not to Die: Discover the Foods Scientifically Proven to Prevent and Reverse Disease (2025)
The blood of men on the standard American diet slowed down the rate of prostate cancer cell growth by 9 percent. Place men on a plant-based diet for a year, though, and the blood circulating within their bodies can suppress cancer cell growth by 70 percent—that's nearly eight times the stopping power compared to a meat-centered menu.
How Not to Die: Discover the Foods Scientifically Proven to Prevent and Reverse Disease (2025)
When you're treating diseases with drugs, you know there's one drug you take for cholesterol, a different class of drugs you take for high blood pressure, different class of drugs you take for diabetes, but, with diet, a plant-based diet affects all these diseases. One diet to kinda rule them all.
Interview in the documentary-film What the Health by Kip Andersen (2017)
The evidence suggests that flaxseeds are a safe, low cost source of nutrition and may reduce tumor-proliferation rates. Why not give them a try? Just make sure to grind the flaxseeds first if you don't buy them preground—otherwise, the seeds may pass right through your body undigested.
How Not to Die: Discover the Foods Scientifically Proven to Prevent and Reverse Disease (2025)
By age 10, nearly all kids have fatty streaks in their arteries. This is the first sign of atherosclerosis, the leading cause of death in the United States. So the question for most of us is not whether we should eat healthy to prevent heart disease, but whether we want to reverse the heart disease we may already have.
The idea of preventive health is that we do something now so that nothing bad happens later.
You eat a healthier diet now to avoid disease later.
You have tremendous power over your health destiny. The vast majority of premature deaths can be prevented with simple changes in what you eat and how you live.
In other words, a long and healthy life is largely a matter of choice.
How Not to Die: Discover the Foods Scientifically Proven to Prevent and Reverse Disease (2025)