Popeye was right about spinach: dark green, leafy vegetables are the healthiest food on the planet. As whole foods go, they offer the most nutrition per calorie.
Michael Greger
While positive mental states may be associated with less stress and more resilience to infection, positive well-being might also be accompanied by a healthy lifestyle.
Mental health can be just as important as physical health - and major depression is one of the most commonly diagnosed mental illnesses.
Ounce for ounce, herbs and spices have more antioxidants than any other food group.
Berries are the healthiest fruit, offering potential protection against cancer and heart disease, boosting the immune system and acting as a guard for the liver and brain.
Women with a higher intake of berries appeared to have delayed cognitive aging by 2.5 years. So it's like your brain is 2.5 years younger if you're eating berries.
Broccoli is incredible. It can prevent DNA damage and metastatic cancer spread; activate defences against pathogens and pollutants; help to prevent lymphoma; boost the enzymes that detox your liver; target breast cancer stem cells; and reduce the risk of prostate cancer progression.
A plant-based diet is like a one-stop shop against chronic diseases.
You have to build up to green smoothies. Everyone loves fruit smoothies: you can add a handful of baby spinach to a fruit smoothie and may hardly even taste it. Next, try two. Slowly, your taste buds can adapt to more greens.
Tobacco smoke contains chemicals that weaken the body's immune system, making it more susceptible to disease and handicapping its ability to destroy cancer cells.
After following more than 60,000 people for more than a dozen years, University of Oxford researchers found those who consume a plant-based diet were less likely to develop all forms of cancer combined.
Simply switching to a healthy, plant-based diet can lessen stroke risk by reducing cholesterol and blood pressure, flooding your body with antioxidants and improving blood flow.
As you eat more healthily, your palate changes - it's amazing. Your taste buds constantly adapt: from minute to minute, in fact. If you drank orange juice right now, it would taste sweet. But if you first ate some sweets then drank the same juice, it could taste unpleasantly bitter.
If you consume too much salt, it can cause water retention. When this happens, your body usually responds by raising your blood pressure to push excess fluid and salt out of your system.
Good news for orange lovers: citrus fruit intake has been associated with reduced stroke risk.
You can buy turmeric from any supermarket - or get it raw from Asian shops and grate a quarter of an inch of the root into your food. There's evidence to suggest raw turmeric may have greater anti-inflammatory effects, while cooked turmeric offers better DNA protection.
You can be in excellent physical shape, with low cholesterol, a healthy body weight and good overall physical fitness - but that doesn't necessarily mean you're healthy.
People tend to eat poorly because it's convenient; it's what's around them. But you can make the switch. I think the way to do that is to just make fruits and vegetables as convenient as possible to eat.
The emergence and spread of virulent strains of avian influenza has been attributed by experts to the intensely overcrowded, unsanitary, and stressful conditions that often characterize large-scale factory farming in industrialized agriculture.
The typical Western diet is the number-one cause of premature death and the number-one cause of disability. In other words, a long and healthy life is largely a matter of choice.
Scientists suggest that the link between consuming poultry and cancer spread may be due to carcinogens in cooked meat. For unknown reasons, these carcinogens build up more in the muscles of chickens and turkeys than in those of other animals.
Milk contains growth hormones designed by Mother Nature to put a few hundred pounds on a baby calf within a few months.
Tart cherries lower the levels of inflammation in the body, which may be particularly useful for those who suffer from gout. They have also been used to improve sleep.
Studies on cherries, raspberries and strawberries suggest that most of their nutrition is retained when they're frozen, so it's a good idea to keep some in the freezer.
The Iowa Women's Health Study, which has followed more than 35,000 women for decades, found eating more broccoli, cauliflower, kale and other cruciferous vegetables was associated with a lower risk of getting non-Hodgkin's lymphoma in the first place.
Nitric oxide is a key biological messenger within the body. When released by the cells lining your arteries, it makes the walls of the arteries relax, allowing more blood to flow.
Walking at a moderate pace for an hour a day is considered a moderately intense level of exercise.
Although even light exercise is associated with a lowered risk of some other types of cancer, for breast cancer, it appears that leisurely strolls don't appear to cut it.
Don't forget that fruit can be cooked - think of baked apples, poached pears and grilled pineapple. But if you like drinking fruit, blending will preserve more nutrition and fibre than juicing.
Oregano is such an antioxidant-rich herb that researchers decided to see if it could reduce the DNA-damaging effects of radiation.
The problem with all-or-nothing thinking is that it stops people even taking the first steps. The thought of never having pepperoni pizza again somehow turns into an excuse to keep ordering it every week.
Physical activity is considered a promising preventive measure against breast cancer - not only because it helps with weight control but because exercise tends to lower circulating estrogen levels.
The benefits of a healthier diet are far-reaching because they also equate to fewer animals being bred into inhumane factory farm conditions and fewer greenhouse gas emissions.
When any fat is heated to frying temperatures, toxic volatile chemicals that can cause genetic mutations are released into the air.
Without enough nitric oxide, your arteries can stiffen, raising blood pressure and your risk of heart attack.
When I was a child, doctors sent my grandmother home in a wheelchair to die. Diagnosed with end-stage heart disease, she already had so much scar tissue from bypass operations that the surgeons had essentially run out of plumbing. There was nothing more to do, they said; her life was over at 65.
Nutrition is an exciting, dynamic field - there are more than 10,000 articles published on human nutrition in medical journals every year.
Five hours a week of vigorous aerobic exercise can lower estrogen and progesterone exposure by about 20 per cent.
As you age, your blood pressure tends to get higher.
A good way to adjust to a healthier diet is to think of three meals you enjoy that are largely plant-based. Pasta with tomato sauce can be tweaked to whole-grain pasta with added vegetables.
For women, eating just two handfuls of nuts a week may extend their lives as much as by jogging four hours a week.
Remove all the junk from one's house. Then one doesn't have to deal with the temptation. If you get hungry enough, you will eat that apple.
A small minority of strokes are hemorrhagic strokes, which are caused by bleeding into the brain when a blood vessel bursts.
The fumes produced by frying bacon contain carcinogens called nitrosamines. Though all meat may release potentially carcinogenic fumes, processed meat such as bacon may be the worst.
While consumers may be more shocked by pink slime or the feeding of Prozac to poultry, the routine feeding of millions of pounds of human antibiotics to chickens presents a much graver threat.
Certain foods, such as meat, appear to harbour toxic bacteria - known as endotoxins - that can trigger inflammation in your arteries, even when food is fully cooked.
Eating a varied plant-based diet - and avoiding all meat, fish, chicken and dairy products - may have much to recommend it, but it's certainly not for everyone.
We need to boost our intake of healthy plant foods and reduce our dependence on animal-based foods.
Berries have a lot of soluble fiber. That's why they gel up when you're making your Thanksgiving cranberry sauce, with the pectin.
Most of us know that the hormone melatonin helps regulate our sleep. But it also seems to play another role - suppressing cancer growth.
