Raw garlic is compared to roasted, stir-fried, simmered, and jarred garlic. Garlic lowers blood pressure, regulates cholesterol, and stimulates immunity. I’ve talked before about its effect on heart disease risk factors, but what about immunity? Eating garlic appears to offer the best of both worlds, dampening the overreactive face of the immune system by suppressing inflammation while boosting protective immunity—for example, the activity of our natural killer cells, which our body uses to purge cells that have been stricken by viruses or cancer. “In World War II garlic was called ‘Russian Pe ..read more

A calorie is not a calorie. It isn’t only what you eat, but when you eat. Mice are nocturnal creatures. They eat during the night and sleep during the day. However, if you only feed mice during the day, they gain more weight than if they were fed a similar amount of calories at night. Same food and about the same amount of food, but different weight outcomes, as you can see in the graph below and at 0:18 in my video Eat More Calories in the Morning to Lose Weight, suggesting that eating at the “wrong” time may lead to disproportionate weight gain. In humans, the wrong time would presumably mea ..read more

Given the power of chronotherapy—how the same dose of the same drugs taken at a different time of day can have such different effects—it’s no surprise that chronoprevention approaches, like meal timing, can also make a difference. The 2017 Nobel Prize in Medicine was awarded for “elucidating molecular mechanisms of the circadian clock,” our internal clock. For billions of years, life on Earth evolved to a 24-hour cycle of light and dark, so it’s no surprise our bodies are finely tuned to that pattern. But, even when we’re in total darkness without any external time cues, our body to cycle in a ..read more

Dairy consumption is associated with years of advanced ovarian aging, thought to be due to the steroid hormones or endocrine-disrupting chemicals in cow’s milk.   When it comes to the amount of steroid hormones we are exposed to in the food supply, dairy “milk products supply about 60–80% of ingested female sex steroids.” I’ve talked about the effects of these estrogens and progesterone in men and prepubescent children, and how milk intake can spike estrogen levels within hours of consumption. You can see graphs illustrating these points from 0:25 in my video The Effects of Hormones in Mi ..read more

Breakthroughs in the field of chronobiology—the study of our circadian rhythms—help solve the mystery of the missing morning calories in breakfast studies. Where did this whole “breakfast is the most important meal of the day” concept come from? “The Father of Public Relations,” Edward Bernays, infamous for his “Torches of Freedom” campaign to get women to start smoking back in the 1920s, was paid by a bacon company to popularize the emblematic bacon-and-eggs breakfast. The role of public relations, he wrote in his book Propaganda, is the “conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organize ..read more

Dr. Greger developed the Daily Dozen using the best available balance of evidence from scientific nutrition research. Rather than being a meal plan or diet in itself, the Daily Dozen is a checklist to inspire you to include some of the healthiest of healthy foods in your everyday routine and encourage you to design more balanced meals. The Daily Dozen is meant to serve as an aspirational minimum, so feel free to add even more whole, plant-based foods throughout your day.  Here are some recipes to help you check off some Daily Dozen boxes. Brownie Sandwich Cookies Check out our Brownie ..read more

I discuss why we may not want to exceed the recommended intake of protein. Diabetes isn’t just about the amount of body fat, but also the distribution of body fat. At 0:26 in my video Are BCAA (Branched-Chain Amino Acids) Healthy?, you can view cross-sections of thighs from two different patients using MRI. In the images, the fat shows up as white and the thigh muscle is black. At first glance, you might think the bottom cross-section has more fat since it’s ringed with more white. That is the subcutaneous fat, the fat under the skin. But, if you look at the top cross-section, you’ll see how t ..read more

Are there any safe and effective dietary supplements for weight loss? In a previous discussion, I noted that an investigation found that four out of five bottles of commercial herbal supplements bought at major U.S. retailers—GNC, Walgreens, Target, and Walmart—didn’t contain any of the herbs listed on their labels, instead “often containing little more than cheap fillers like powdered rice, asparagus and houseplants…” You might hope your supplement just contains houseplants. Weight-loss supplements are infamous for being “adulterated with prescription and over-the-counter” drugs. In a samplin ..read more

Only 2 out of 12 supplement companies were found to have weight-loss products that were even accurately labeled. According to a national survey, one-third of adults who have made serious attempts at weight loss have tried using dietary supplements, for which Americans spend billions of dollars every year. Most people mistakenly thought that over-the-counter appetite suppressants, herbal products, and weight-loss supplements had to be approved for safety by a governmental agency, like the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), before being sold to the public or at least include some kind of w ..read more

See what a penny a day’s worth of garlic powder can do. In ancient Greece, “the Art of Medicine was divided into three parts”: cures through diet, cures through drugs, and cures through surgery. Garlic, Hippocrates wrote, was one such medicinal food, but that was to treat a nonexistent entity called “displacement of the womb,” so ancient wisdom can only go so far. Those who eat more than a clove of garlic a day do seem to have better artery function than those who eat less than that, but you don’t know if it’s cause-and-effect until you put it to the test.  As I discuss in my video Benefi ..read more