Top 80 Michael Greger Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Highly pathogenic bird flu viruses are primarily the products of factory farming.”

— Michael Greger

52. “While the pathology of stroke and Alzheimer’s are different, one key factor unites them: Mounting evidence suggests that a healthy diet may help prevent them both.”

— Michael Greger

53. “The fumes produced by frying bacon contain a class of carcinogens called nitrosamines.31 Although all meat may release potentially carcinogenic fumes, processed meat like bacon may be the worst: A UC-Davis study found that bacon fumes cause about four times more DNA mutations than the fumes from beef patties fried at similar temperatures.32.”

— Michael Greger

54. “USDA’s chief flu researcher David Swayne recommended producers try to recoup the costs of culling by selling sick birds for human consumption.”

— Michael Greger

55. “Traditional societies tend to have more diverse gut flora in general, and the key is thought to be their extraordinary fiber intakes, which can reach 120 grams a day,2104 nearly eight times the American average.”

— Michael Greger

56. “People seem to be better able to deal with coming up short on positive goals than negative ones. So framing your subgoals as things you want to accomplish, rather than avoid, can help you escape the fatalistic, black-and-white thinking that can subvert your longer-term goals.”

— Michael Greger

57. “If you ask people to double their baseline number of chews per bite, they end up eating about 15 percent less pizza, feeling just as full eating more than one hundred fewer calories.2996 Even just asking them to chew 50 percent more times than normal may cut their consumption by nearly 10 percent.2997.”

— Michael Greger

58. “As a high-calorie-density food, the admonition to “eat sparingly” still applies, but that’s all one may need. While the optimum benefits of fruits and vegetables may require cups a day, nuts appear so potent that the mortality benefits may be had for mere ounces a week. FOOD.”

— Michael Greger

59. “Viruses are measured in millionths of a millimeter.301 As one writer described them, “Like tiny terrorists, viruses travel light, switch identity easily and pursue their goals with deadly determination.”

— Michael Greger

60. “To facilitate its spread, toxoplasma worms its way into the rodent’s brain and actually alters the rodent’s behavior, amazingly turning the animal’s natural anti-predator aversion to cats into an imprudent attraction.305.”

— Michael Greger

61. “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

62. “A recent study of 150,000 Americans was able to examine the issue more thoroughly. Higher stroke rates were found among individuals sleeping six hours or less, or nine hours or more. Those at lowest risk got around seven or eight hours of sleep a night.”

— Michael Greger

63. “To walk off the calories found in a single pat of butter, we’d have to add an extra seven hundred yards to our stroll that evening. What about a Snickers bar? We’d need to jog a quarter mile for every single bite.”

— Michael Greger

64. “Scientists suspect that by eating chicken and other meat, women infect their lower intestinal tract with these antibiotic-resistant bacteria, which can then creep up into their bladder.1182 Commonsense hygiene measures to prevent UTIs have included wiping from front to back after bowel movements and urinating after intercourse to flush out any infiltrators. Commenting on this body of research, Science News suggested meat avoidance as an option to “chicken out” of urinary tract infections.”

— Michael Greger

65. “The flesh of some wild game, like moose and elk, is less than 2 percent fat by weight and less than 15 percent calories from fat.”

— Michael Greger

66. “A BMI between 18.5 and 24.9 is considered “ideal weight.”

— Michael Greger

67. “What if you give young adults two cups of water immediately before a meal? Do they then eat less? Indeed, they eat about 20 percent less, taking in more than one hundred fewer calories.”

— Michael Greger

68. “Any diabetic can maintain normal blood sugars eating a stick of butter; only a cured diabetic can maintain the same feat eating a banana. As I detailed in How Not to Die, diabetes truly can be reversed this way with a healthy enough diet, sometimes in a matter of weeks and even without weight loss.4205.”

— Michael Greger

69. “I am extremely concerned that the ability of our nation to prepare for and respond to disasters has been sharply eroded. I hear from emergency managers, local and state leaders, and first responders nearly every day that the FEMA they knew and worked well with has now disappeared. In fact one state emergency manager told me, “It is like a stake has been driven into the heart of emergency management.”827.”

— Michael Greger

70. “It’s been argued that for about 99.8 percent of our time on Earth, it was virtually impossible for us to regularly consume more than 15 percent of calories as fat.”

— Michael Greger

71. “Lessons can be learned from past pandemics. In 1918, as Boston hospitals filled beyond capacity, a tent hospital was set up in nearby Brookline. Though exposing ailing patients to the chilly Boston autumn was condemned by Bostonians as “barbarous and cruel,” it turned out that the fresh breeze and sunshine seemed to afford the overflow patients far better odds of survival than those inside the overcrowded, poorly ventilated hospitals.2039.”

— Michael Greger

72. “COVID-19 is the third deadly human coronavirus to emerge since the turn of the century. Emerge from where? Where do new infectious diseases come from? All human viral infections are believed to originate in animals.9.”

— Michael Greger

73. “The reason the Amish have some of the lowest rates of obesity is not a high prevalence of gym memberships. They walk an average of eighteen thousand steps a day just living their lives.”

— Michael Greger

74. “Weight loss through calorie restriction and an even more vigorous exercise program failed to improve telomere length, so it appears that the active ingredient is the quality, not quantity, of the food eaten.”

— Michael Greger

75. “Influenza transmission is legendary. The dying cells in the respiratory tract trigger an inflammatory response, which triggers the cough reflex. The virus thus uses the body’s own defenses to infect other potential hosts.”

— Michael Greger

76. “The only way to truly stop a pandemic, it has been suggested, is to stamp it out at its source.2380 Once it starts, as noted the editorial board of the journal of the Canadian Medical Association, “School closure, quarantine, travel restrictions and so on are unlikely to be more effective than a garden hose in a forest fire.”

— Michael Greger

77. “The longer-term trials performed even worse. In a meta-analysis of eighteen randomized controlled studies lasting a minimum of six months, the diet-plus-exercise group failed to beat out the diet-only group at all.”

— Michael Greger

78. “If most urban meat-eaters were to visit an industrial broiler house, to see how the birds are raised, and could see the birds being “harvested” and then being “processed” in a poultry processing plant, some, perhaps many of them, would swear off eating chicken and perhaps all meat. For modern animal agriculture, the less the consumer knows about what’s happening before the meat hits the plate, the better.3513.”

— Michael Greger

79. “For millions of years, we may have evolved getting approximately 10 percent of our calories from fat.”

— Michael Greger

80. “The National Academy of Sciences once estimated that a total ban on the widespread feeding of antibiotics to farm animals would raise the price of poultry anywhere from one to two cents per pound and the price of pork or beef around three to six cents a pound, costing the average meat-eating American consumer up to $9.72 a year.1357 Meanwhile, antibiotic-resistant infections in the United States cost an estimated $30 billion every year1358 and kill ninety thousand people.”

— Michael Greger

81. “Preload studies, where people are fed a first course one, five, fifteen, twenty, thirty, or sixty minutes before the main meal, show that this fullness feedback loop may take about twenty minutes to fully tamp down our appetites.”

— Michael Greger

82. “What are the odds that a killer flu virus will spread around the world like a tidal wave, killing millions? “The burning question is, will there be a human influenza pandemic,” Secretary Leavitt told reporters. “On behalf of the WHO, I can tell you that there will be. The only question is the virulence and rapidity of transmission from human to human.”

— Michael Greger

83. “Both were given identical instructions to follow a healthier diet, but one group was also given fourteen grams of dried goji berries a day, which is about two tablespoons.3923 Forty-five days later, the goji group appeared to cut two and a half inches off their waistlines.”

— Michael Greger

84. “Was the weight loss simply statistically significant or actually significant? That’s for you to decide. During the three-month trial, compared to the placebo group, the group taking one daily tablespoon of vinegar steadily lost about a pound a month and the group taking two daily tablespoons were down a total of about five pounds. Five pounds may not sound like a lot, but that weight loss was achieved for just pennies a day without removing anything from their diets.”

— Michael Greger

85. “The population with the highest rate of the “Alzheimer’s gene” has one of the lowest rates of Alzheimer’s disease? This contradiction may be explained by Nigerians’ extremely low blood-cholesterol levels, thanks to a diet low in animal fat104 and consisting mainly of grains and vegetables.105 So, it.”

— Michael Greger

86. “A doctor a day may keep the apples away.”

— Michael Greger

87. “More than two thousand years ago, Hippocrates said, “If we could give every individual the right amount of nourishment and exercise, not too little and not too much, we would have found the safest way to health.”

— Michael Greger