Michael Greger Details

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.