Top 35 Marion Nestle Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Eat less, move more, eat lots of fruits and vegetables, go easy on junk foods.”

— Marion Nestle

2. “The problem with nutrient-by-nutrient nutrition science is that it takes the nutrient out the context of the food, the food out of the context of the diet, and the diet out of the context of the lifestyle.”

— Marion Nestle

3. “We don’t have a farm-to-table food safety system. I keep saying this. It came as a big surprise to the FDA that tomatoes were being grown in the United States, sent to Mexico for packing, and then sent back. I mean, they had no idea that our food chain worked like this.”

— Marion Nestle

4. “Many countries have food safety systems from farm to table. Everybody involved in the food supply is required to follow standard food safety procedures. You would think that everyone involved with food would not want people to get sick from it.”

— Marion Nestle

5. “The real reason for health claims is well established: health claims sell food products.”

— Marion Nestle

6. “Fat is mainstream, which is why everyone has become complacent. What used to be considered pudgy before isn’t even worthy of a comment today.”

— Marion Nestle

7. “The trans fat label has been an enormous incentive for food companies to take trans fat out of their products.”

— Marion Nestle

8. “Meat is produced under HACCP plans. Meat and poultry are required to be produced under standard food safety plans and they have been since the mid-’90s, and there are now fewer problems with meat than there used to be. That’s on the USDA’s side.”

— Marion Nestle

9. “At the moment, world hunger and starvation have everything to do with politics. Political conflicts, insufficient responses to natural disasters, corrupt political institutions, and inequalities in income and education constitute what public health practitioners call the ‘root’ causes of hunger and malnutrition.”

— Marion Nestle

10. “Here we have the great irony of modern nutrition: at a time when hundreds of millions of people do not have enough to eat, hundreds of millions more are eating too much and are overweight or obese.”

— Marion Nestle

11. “The real question here is how you – as a reader, eater, and citizen – can recognize and protect yourself against the onslaught of misleading information and advice that results from food-company manipulation of nutrition research and practice. Everyone eats. Food matters. All of us need and deserve sound nutrition advice aimed at promoting public health – not corporate commercial interests.”

— Marion Nestle

12. “Food choices are about your future and that of your children. They are about nothing less than democracy in action.”

— Marion Nestle

13. “The standard four food groups are based on American agricultural lobbies. Why do we have a milk group? Because we have a National Dairy Council. Why do we have a meat group? Because we have an extremely powerful meat lobby.”

— Marion Nestle

14. “One can only be in awe of the creativity of chocolate marketers. My take is that if there is a health benefit, it is small.”

— Marion Nestle

15. “We don’t really have any that protect the food supply from farm to table. We have a food safety system that’s piecemeal, largely divided between two agencies that don’t talk to each other very much. Neither agency can enforce regulations from the farm to the table.”

— Marion Nestle

16. “Unbelievable as it may seem, one-third of all vegetables consumed in the United States come from just three sources: french fries, potato chips, and iceberg lettuce.”

— Marion Nestle

17. “Restaurants that have health-conscious consumers will pay attention to this.”

— Marion Nestle

18. “There’s no question that largely vegetarian diets are as healthy as you can get. The evidence is so strong and overwhelming and produced over such a long period of time that it’s no longer debatable.”

— Marion Nestle

19. “If we have a food supply that we can’t trust, that has enormous implications for the way we view government, for the way we trust business, and for our international trade relations.”

— Marion Nestle

20. “What we know about diets hasn’t changed. It still makes sense to eat lots of fruits and vegetables, balance calories from other foods, and keep calories under control. That, however, does not make front-page news.”

— Marion Nestle

21. “The chef has kids complaining to their parents the food they get in school is better than what they get at home. He’s turned this group of kids into curious, adventurous eaters.”

— Marion Nestle

22. “Consumers have to understand that the purpose of these claims is to get them to buy the product.”

— Marion Nestle

23. “The Centers for Disease Control says that there are 76 million cases of food poisoning in the United States every year, 350,000 hospitalizations, and 5,000 deaths. Is that a lot or a little? Well, it depends on how you look at it.”

— Marion Nestle

24. “It’s a completely reasonable diet – heavy on fruits and vegetables and fresh, seasonal foods. I’m totally for it. It’s common sense in a nice package.”

— Marion Nestle

25. “There are loopholes big enough to drive trucks through. And Congress needs to take a look at those laws and make sure that they’re much more rigorous.”

— Marion Nestle

26. “I live in the United States, and I’m not moving. But from the standpoint of food safety, the countries in Scandinavia do it better than we do. It’s not that they don’t have food-poisoning incidents; it’s that there are many fewer in proportion to the population.”

— Marion Nestle

27. “These days the biggest issue is how many calories you consume. So all of this stuff distracts people from thinking about calories.”

— Marion Nestle

28. “If you would like the FDA to keep a sharper eye on health claims on food products, you need to convey that sentiment to your congressional representatives.”

— Marion Nestle

29. “To summarize the soy-food situation: soy companies produce about 25 billion pounds of meal and oil every year for your use, much of it federally subsidized, that they are eager to get you to buy.”

— Marion Nestle

30. “This book exposes the ways in which food companies use political processes – entirely conventional and nearly always legal – to obtain government and professional support for the sale of their products. Its twofold purpose is to illuminate the extent to which the food industry determines what people eat and to generate much wider discussion of the food industry’s marketing methods and use of the political system.”

— Marion Nestle

31. “It’s a tremendous way of getting people to buy more at lower cost to the producer. There’s no question that that’s an incentive to buy. Everybody loves a bargain.”

— Marion Nestle

32. “If you would like food manufacturers to explain more about the chemical ingredients listed on food labels, take up this matter with your congressional representatives. Congress tells the FDA what to do.”

— Marion Nestle

33. “If a food looks like it should have more calories than is stated on the label, it probably does.”

— Marion Nestle

34. “What it requires is that first of all you identify the hazards: Where in your production chain can contamination occur? This could be a simple matter of cooking a product to kill bacteria and making sure that the product is actually brought to that temperature.”

— Marion Nestle

35. “If you’re sick, first you have to associate your sickness with a food. Then you have to report it to your doctor. Then the doctor reports it to some state authority. The state authority reports it to the federal authority. By the time all that happens, two weeks have gone by.”

— Marion Nestle

36. “You get a lot more calories for the price of hamburgers and french fries than you do for carrots, not least because the government subsidizes the production of corn and soybeans, the basis of cheap corn sweeteners and vegetable oil.”

— Marion Nestle