Joel Fuhrman

Health is normal. The human body is a self-repairing, self-defending, self-healing marvel. Disease is relatively difficult to induce, considering the body's powerful immune system. However, this complicated and delicate machinery can be damaged if fed the wrong fuel during the formative years. ... Healthy living with nutritional excellence throughout life can slow the decline of aging. It can prevent the years and years of suffering in ill health that is so common today as people get older and become dependent on medical treatments, drugs, and surgery. Nutritional excellence is the only real fountain of youth.

We know that childhood and adolescence are the most crucial times for environmental stimuli to affect breast cancer risk, but changes made during adulthood and even after diagnosis still have the potential to create positive changes in the body.

There is simply not enough money available to support a system in which the lion's share of expenditures is devoted to acute care, with virtually nothing being spent on preventive medicine, i.e. health care.

Seeds and nuts are indispensable for cardiovascular health. The protective properties of nuts against coronary heart disease were first recognized in the early 1990s, and a strong body of literature has followed, confirming these original findings.

Cutting back on calories is not the answer to successful weight loss and successful health... you have to increase the quality of what you eat, not just reduce the quantity.

In the future, it's going to become more and more impossible for the economy to support how expensive medical care is and the number of sick people we have. Why don't we just get our population healthier so we don't need medical care?

We must always remember that all medical interventions have risk, and very little can be asserted with 100 percent certainty.

Out of one pocket we pay billions of our tax dollars to support the production of expensive, disease-causing foods. Out of the other pocket, we pay medical bills that are too high because our overweight population consumes too much of these rich, disease-causing foods.

Excess dietary salt is most notorious for increasing blood pressure. Americans have a 90 percent lifetime probability of developing high blood pressure - so even if your blood pressure is normal now, if you continue to eat the typical American diet, you will be at risk.

If you eat the standard Western diet that most people eat in the modern world, it's quite likely you will develop heart disease.

A high nutrient density diet was associated with more feelings of hunger in the mouth and throat and less in the head and stomach.

The modern diet is grossly deficient in hundreds of important plant-derived immunity-building compounds which makes us highly vulnerable to viruses, infections and disease.

The problem with the standard American diet, a primary cause of our current obesity epidemic, is the fact that the majority of foods consumed are high in calories and low in micronutrients.

A significant number of research studies have documented that heart disease is easily and almost completely preventable through a diet rich in plant produce and lower in processed foods and animal products.

The human diet, for millions of years, did not contain any added salt - only the sodium present in natural foods, adding up to only about 1000 mg sodium per day.

Instead of trying to increase your metabolism with the goal of losing weight, try to slow your metabolism with a low-calorie, high-nutrient diet for a longer, healthier life.

The American diet causes disease. It is composed of 25 percent animal products and 62 percent processed foods and only 5 percent of calories from fruits and vegetables.

To provide optimal levels of protective micronutrients, a diet must be vegetable-based, not grain-based.