Top 35 Neal D. Barnard Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I think herd mentality is a good thing overall. Because if every sheep had to figure out the velocity of the wolf and their personal risk, that would take forever.”

— Neal D. Barnard

2. “To give a child animal products is a form of child abuse.”

— Neal D. Barnard

3. “Overall, our population is in the worst shape it’s ever been. Children are in terrible shape. We have absolutely unprecedented numbers of obese and overweight children – one in three now. A generation ago it was something like one in ten.”

— Neal D. Barnard

4. “You will find that your taste buds have a memory of about 3 weeks.”

— Neal D. Barnard

5. “The most powerful bond we know of is the bond between mother and child, and we break it in order to make “comfort foods” for ourselves” Michael Schwarz.”

— Neal D. Barnard

6. “The beef industry has contributed to more American deaths than all the wars of this century, all natural disasters, and all automobile accidents combined.”

— Neal D. Barnard

7. “The Stone Age gave us arrow heads and eventually knives, and that allowed us to kill animals in ways you couldn’t before, and once you had them you were able to remove the skin and bones.”

— Neal D. Barnard

8. “A vegan diet takes care of most of what we need to do. But you’ll also want to minimize the use of oils generally, because while olive oil and other vegetable oils are better for your heart than chicken fat, they are as fattening as animal fats.”

— Neal D. Barnard

9. “If a dog happens to catch a rabbit or another animal, it can very easily remove the hide. If a cat catches a squirrel, they have no trouble with that. But if a person does that, they will work all day and all night to get the skin off of an animal, because they don’t have long canine teeth anymore.”

— Neal D. Barnard

10. “In my own life, I decided to leave meat off my plate in medical school, but was a bit slow to realise that dairy products and eggs are not health foods either.”

— Neal D. Barnard

11. “If some people think, “Why am I eating a dead bird soaked in poop?” I think if some people get disgusted by that, it’s all to the good. Their coronary arteries will be healthier.”

— Neal D. Barnard

12. “A vegan diet takes care of most of what we need to do.”

— Neal D. Barnard

13. “The thinnest people on the planet are those who eat the most carbohydrates.”

— Neal D. Barnard

14. “It doesn’t do a lot of good for your health to move from red meat to white meat, but it gets you further down the road towards making more substantial changes later.”

— Neal D. Barnard

15. “The dangers of eating animal products occur after the age of reproduction. If people developed cardiovascular disease that was fatal by the age of twelve or thirteen, eating animals would have died out long ago. You get it after you’ve already reproduced.”

— Neal D. Barnard

16. “It’s much better to say, “If the herd is running, I’m running with those guys.” And humans have herd mentality.”

— Neal D. Barnard

17. “Chicken fat, beef fat, fish fat, fried foods – these are the foods that fuel our fat genes by giving them raw materials for building body fat.”

— Neal D. Barnard

18. “Another advantage of avoiding sodas is that you will avoid the caffeine that is in many of them. Caffeine is a weak diuretic that causes calcium loss via the kidneys.”

— Neal D. Barnard

19. “I have been following a vegan diet now since the 1980s, and find it not only healthier, but also much more attractive than the chunks of meat that were on my plate as a child.”

— Neal D. Barnard

20. “In China, because China is gaining wealth, rice consumption is way down. Rice is a poor person’s food, and they’re eating less of it. To wait in line at a fast food chain is cool. And they haven’t historically had weight problems. So they don’t have this culture of, “I need to lose weight.””

— Neal D. Barnard

21. “Chimpanzees will eat a little bit of meat. But, they never eat dairy products, and no other animal would do that.”

— Neal D. Barnard

22. “Dogs have a sense of smell much greater than ours and they’re much faster than we are. We have fairly dull senses, fairly slow locomotion. In our Olympic trials, we celebrate speeds that would be an embarrassment to a bird or a dog or another animal.”

— Neal D. Barnard

23. “Since I first went to India twenty some years ago, there’s been a palpable change. There’s now pizza everywhere, meat is much more popular than it’s ever been. Vegetarianism is “that quaint thing our parents did.””

— Neal D. Barnard

24. “People do lose weight on an Atkins diet. The reason they lose weight is because of calorie reduction. If a person’s caloric intake has not fallen, if they are really shoveling in the steak, they don’t lose weight.”

— Neal D. Barnard

25. “I’m thinking of people in rural Japan and China, where McDonald’s hasn’t yet arrived. These are the thinnest, healthiest, longest-lived people with the least risk of cardiovascular disease and diabetes.”

— Neal D. Barnard

26. “If we studied human beings which can include human genes, human blood samples, and human behavior, then you can leave the animals out of the labs and you can leave them off your plate.”

— Neal D. Barnard

27. “Exercise is beneficial, and I strongly recommend it. But a lack of exercise is not the primary reason for weight problems, and exercise can never take the place of a healthful diet.”

— Neal D. Barnard

28. “Between 1909 and 2007, meat intake rose from 124 pounds to more than 200 pounds per person per year. That’s more than seventy-five pounds of extra meat for every person every year.”

— Neal D. Barnard

29. “I don’t approve of the use of animals for any purpose that involves touching them – caging them.”

— Neal D. Barnard

30. “While it’s certainly true that many people think that dairy doesn’t have a cost to the animal, it’s because they never went to a dairy farm.”

— Neal D. Barnard

31. “Not only are the studies themselves often lacking even face value, but they also drain badly needed funds away from patient care needs.”

— Neal D. Barnard

32. “I think we have to do everything that’s useful. We’re doctors. Our job is to tell the truth. And it doesn’t have to be embellished in any way.”

— Neal D. Barnard

33. “I was aware of what animals go through because I had driven animals to slaughter and I’d killed animals. And I was aware that there were certain ethical issues, but they weren’t preying on my mind very heavily.”

— Neal D. Barnard

34. “So, if people in Asia or Africa who eat lots of carbohydrates have very little diabetes, and if the disease becomes more and more common as carbohydrates are excluded from the diet, researchers have had to conclude that a high-carbohydrate diet is not the cause of the disease. In fact, the culprit seems to be lurking in our Western diets.”

— Neal D. Barnard

35. “People have to know that if they’ve wanted to lose weight, if they’ve wanted to get their diabetes better and get their cholesterol down, here is how it works. Beyond that point, you can’t force people into changes, you have to guide them.”

— Neal D. Barnard

36. “Here is the most important thing to understand about cravings: They are not caused by weak will or gluttony. Cravings are triggered by biological properties of the foods themselves. That is, certain foods have chemical makeups that cause us to crave them in very much the same way that drugs, alcohol, and tobacco have addictive components.”

— Neal D. Barnard