What the Health

"I realized there was so much more about diet and disease that I hadn't ever learned. It felt as if this information had been practically withheld. Processed meat causes cancer. Sugar doesn't cause diabetes. I had doubt about the claims these doctors were making, so I did some searching on my own. Harvard researchers looked at nine prospective studies finding that just one serving of processed meat per day increased risk of developing diabetes by 51%. The link between eating meat and developing diabetes became undeniable. But, when I went on a leading diabetes organization's website, the American Diabetes Association, not only did they not have this information front and center, they were featuring recipes for red and processed meat. And on their recipes for healthy living, they had bacon-wrapped shrimp. What the health?"

"When people are eating meat, I think of it as a bit like smoking. It's sort of Russian roulette. You may not get diabetes, but your chances of getting diabetes, about 1 in 3. You may not get cancer, but, your chances, if you're a man, about 1 in 2. A woman, 1 in 3. Your chances of gaining weight, 2 out of 3. It's not all diet, but, most of it is. The best thing that you can do to make sure that you empty all those bullets out of the chamber and not taking a risk with your health is to get the animal products out of your diet and eat healthy foods."

"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."

"If I could deliver one message to the researchers who are looking for the cause of diabetes, and the cause of clogged arteries, and the cause of high blood pressure, and the cause of obesity, I would tell them the answer is in three words. It's the food!"

"If people adopted a plant-based diet, the changes we would see in our individual health, in our national health situation and in this physical, environmental world we live in, would be so profound!"

"What's really sad is that we cannot trust information from these leading health organizations like the American Heart Association and the American Diabetes Association because they are taking money from the very industries who are causing the problems that they are supposed to be helping to prevent."

"If you look at the incidence of hypertension and diabetes and mortality in men, they actually get reduced when you get higher and higher in how much you restrict animal products."