Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Although many people believe that the primary emphasis of my work is about diet, it's not. What we eat is important, of course, but what comes out of our mouth may be more important than what goes into it.
I appreciate the power of a White House bully pulpit - but kids listen and learn primarily from other kids. If your son's friend tells him that the apple is better than the fries, he's more likely to listen.
Concepts such as 'risk factor modification' and 'prevention' are often considered boring and they may not initiate or sustain the levels of motivation needed to make and maintain comprehensive lifestyle changes.
Poor health is not caused by something you don't have; it's caused by disturbing something that you already have. Health is not something you need to get, it's something you have already if you don't disturb it.
Meaningful health reform needs to provide incentives for physicians and other health professionals to teach their patients healthy ways of living rather than reimbursing primarily drugs and surgical interventions.
Eating a vegetarian diet, walking (exercising) everyday, and meditating is considered radical. Allowing someone to slice your chest open and graft your leg veins in your heart is considered normal and conservative.
Educators and school personnel work on the front lines of childhood obesity, but every day they face the challenges of budget cuts, mandated tests, rushed lunch periods, and a decrease in time for physical activity.
I strongly believe that the Founding Fathers of our country got it right: power corrupts, and any time you have too much power concentrated in one place, it tends to get abused, so checks and balances are always needed.
I don't understand why asking people to eat a well-balanced vegetarian diet is considered drastic, while it is medically conservative to cut people open and put them on cholesterol lowering drugs for the rest of their lives.
Think about it: Heart disease and diabetes, which account for more deaths in the U.S. and worldwide than everything else combined, are completely preventable by making comprehensive lifestyle changes. Without drugs or surgery.
Whether you're six or sixty, if you go on a diet and lifestyle program and feel constrained, you're likely to go off it sooner or later. Offering a spectrum of choices is much more effective; then, you feel free and empowered.
In our experience, when people make comprehensive lifestyle changes, they usually can reduce or discontinue medications such as cholesterol-lowering drugs, anti-hypertensives, beta-blockers, ACE inhibitors, nitrates, insulin, and so on.
If we can reach populations in developing countries and help them understand the value of their indigenous diet and lifestyles rather than copying ours, perhaps we can reverse the exponential rise in cardiovascular disease that is plaguing them.
With everything that you can imagine at our fingertips, many of the social interactions that help tie people together in a community have faded away. Are communities traditionally built on relationships, trust and familiarity a thing of the past?
At a time when 20% of people in the US go to bed hungry each night and almost 50% of the world's population is malnourished, choosing to eat more plant-based foods and less red meat is better for all of us-ourselves, our loved ones, and our planet.
A little dark chocolate in small amounts often helps lift me out of those blue moments. When I walk into my favorite store on Union Street in San Francisco that sells high-quality chocolates from around the world, I feel like, well, a kid in a candy store.
Having the BRCA mutation significantly increases the risk of breast cancer, but it is not always the only factor. Lifestyle choices may increase or decrease the risk of breast cancer, but that knowledge is an opportunity to empower ourselves, not to blame.
In a global economy, the Bush doctrine of unilateralism - going it alone - has been disastrous. It's becoming increasingly clear that we're all in this together. Your happiness is my happiness, your suffering is my suffering, your recession is my recession.
Awareness-mindfulness-is the first step in healing. In Counterclockwise, Dr. Ellen Langer eloquently describes how becoming more aware of our beliefs and expectations allows us to powerfully transform our lives for the better. A pioneering, beautifully-written book.
People who are lonely and depressed are three to 10 times more likely to get sick and die prematurely than those who have a strong sense of love and community. I don't know any other single factor that affects our health - for better and for worse - to such a strong degree.
People who are lonely and depressed are three to 10 times more likely to get sick and die prematurely than those who have a strong sense of love and community. I don’t know any other single factor that affects our health - for better and for worse - to such a strong degree.
How you eat is as important as what you eat. If I eat mindlessly while watching television, I get all of the calories and none of the pleasure. Instead, if I eat mindfully, paying attention and savoring what I'm eating, smaller portions of food can be exquisitely satisfying.
In an era in which war and terrorism - at home and abroad - are often based on racial, religious and ethnic differences, rediscovering the wisdom of love and compassion may help us increase our survival at a time when an increasingly divided country and world so badly need it.
When the U.S. claims the right to invade any country unilaterally and then defines a country like Iran or North Korea as 'evil,' then it is a rational response for these countries to develop nuclear weapons as the only military deterrent to invasion. We create what we most fear.
I am as non-accepting of medical quackery and unscientific approaches as anybody else. I've grown up as a card-carrying scientist, and I know the power of science to answer questions, and for many questions I don't know of anything better than scientific approaches to answer them.
I've found that if I tell somebody 'Eat this and don't do that,' it's not only not helpful, it's counterproductive because even more than being healthy, we want to feel free and in control, and as soon as somebody tells us to do something, there's a tendency to do just the opposite.
If I eat mindlessly while watching television, reading, or talking with someone else, I can go through an entire meal without tasting the food, without even noticing that I've been eating. The plate is empty but I didn't enjoy the food - I had all of the calories and little of the pleasure.
One of the reasons my father ... became a dentist was so he could always be home for dinner and spend weekends with his family. At one point he had thought about being a musician, but he said, I'm not going to do that because I'd be on the road all the time and I wouldn't be with my family.
You can meditate on almost anything: a prayer, song, image or word. Close your eyes; sit in a comfortable position. Take a breath, and say the word out loud, emphasizing the humming sound at the end. When you come to the end of the breath, take another one and say the word again. And so on.
When we understand the connection between how we live and how long we live, it's easier to make different choices. Instead of viewing the time we spend with friends and family as luxuries, we can see that these relationships are among the most powerful determinants of our well-being and survival.
When you grow up in an extended family, or in a stable neighborhood with two or three generations of families who live there, you feel seen. Not just the good things you've done, the stuff you put on your resume. You know they've seen you in your dark times, when you've messed up - but they're still there.
When we realize that something as primal as the food that we choose to eat each day makes such an important difference in addressing both global warming and personal health, it empowers us and imbues these choices with meaning. If it's meaningful, then it's sustainable - and a meaningful life is a longer life.
Whether it's by helping us search for health-related information, connecting us with doctors through online portals, or enabling us to store and retrieve our medical records online, the Internet is starting to show the promise it has to transform the way people interact with and improve their own health and wellness.
An Asian way of eating and living may help prevent and even reverse the progression of coronary heart disease, diabetes, hypertension, obesity, prostate cancer and breast cancer. Incorporate more fruits, vegetables, whole grains, legumes, soy products and fish in your diet. Eat at home more with your family and friends.
Because the biological mechanisms that affect our health and well-being are so dynamic, when people change their diet and lifestyle, they usually feel so much better, so quickly; it reframes the reason for changing from fear of dying to joy of living. Also, the support that patients give each other is a powerful motivator.
Not everything that lowers HDL is bad for you. If you change from a high-fat, high-cholesterol diet to a healthy low-fat, low-cholesterol diet, your HDL levels may stay the same or even decrease because there is less need for it. When you have less garbage, you need fewer garbage trucks to remove it, so your body may make less HDL.
In business, when you can meet an unmet need that is this primal, even meeting it in a superficial way can create a multi-billion-dollar business - e.g., the chat rooms in AOL when it first came out, or the lounges in Starbucks, or the billion people who are on Facebook - even though these are hardly the most intimate of life experiences.
If you're at high risk or are trying to reverse heart disease or prevent the recurrence of cancer, you probably need to make bigger changes in diet and lifestyle than someone who just wants to lose a few pounds and is otherwise healthy. If you just want to lower your cholesterol, weight or blood pressure, begin by making moderate changes.
We all have an inner teacher, an inner guide, an inner voice that speaks very clearly but usually not very loudly. That information can be drowned out by the chatter of the mind and the pressure of day-to-day events. But if we quiet down the mind, we can begin to hear what we're not paying attention to. We can find out what's right for us.
The choices you make each day in your diet and lifestyle have a direct influence on how your genetic predisposition is expressed - for better and for worse. You're only as old as your genes, but how your genes are expressed may be modified by exercise, diet and lifestyle choices much more than had previously been believed - and more quickly.
People tend to think of breakthroughs in medicine as a new drug, a laser, or a high-tech surgical procedure. They often have a hard time believing that the simple choices that we make in our lifestyle. What we eat, how we respond to stress, whether or not we smoke cigarettes, how much exercise we get, and the quality of our relationships and support can be as powerful as drugs and surgery. And they often are.
Love and intimacy are at the roots of what makes us sick and what makes us well, what causes sadness and what brings happiness, what makes us suffer and what leads to healing...I am not aware of any other factor in medicine- not diet, not smoking, not exercise, not stress, not genetics, not drugs, not surgery- that has a greater impact on our quality of life, incidence of illness and premature death from all causes.
Over time, years of meditation gave me glimpses of the interconnectedness and interdependence of all life. I experienced that on one level we are alone, separate, apart from everyone and everything; on another level, we are the Self in different disguises, different names and forms, a part of everyone and everything. This experience of interconnectedness is part of spiritual traditions and the perennial wisdom in virtually all religions and cultures.