21-Day Weight Loss Kickstart Quotes

“Americans now eat more than one million chickens per hour.”
― Neal D. Barnard, 21-Day Weight Loss Kickstart: Boost Metabolism, Lower Cholesterol, and Dramatically Improve Your Health

“Between 1909 and 2007, meat intake rose from 124 pounds to more than 200 pounds per person per year. That’s more than seventy-five pounds of extra meat for every person every year.”
― Neal D. Barnard, 21-Day Weight Loss Kickstart: Boost Metabolism, Lower Cholesterol, and Dramatically Improve Your Health

“What I have found over and over is that, once we have made short-term changes, they tend to change our long-term habits.”
― Neal D. Barnard, 21-Day Weight Loss Kickstart: Boost Metabolism, Lower Cholesterol, and Dramatically Improve Your Health

“What about protein? Egg white is essentially solid animal protein. That is not an advantage; that is part of the problem. As I mentioned above, animal protein—including that from eggs—is hard on the kidneys and encourages calcium loss. Instead of building you up, it is gradually tearing you down. You are much better off getting protein from plant sources.”
― Neal D. Barnard, 21-Day Weight Loss Kickstart: Boost Metabolism, Lower Cholesterol, and Dramatically Improve Your Health

“There is more cholesterol in a single egg than in an entire eight-ounce steak.”
― Neal D. Barnard, 21-Day Weight Loss Kickstart: Boost Metabolism, Lower Cholesterol, and Dramatically Improve Your Health

“Plant proteins are not only free of animal fat and cholesterol; they are also free of two problems caused by animal proteins. First, animal protein is linked to osteoporosis, apparently because it causes the kidneys to lose calcium in the urine. If you were to check urine samples from people following meaty diets—especially high-protein Atkins-style diets—you would find that they lose calcium rapidly.3 Sodium does the same thing, as we’ll see below. Second, animal protein is also linked to gradual loss of kidney function. Harvard researchers studied a group of women who had already lost some kidney function, as many people do, due to high blood pressure, diabetes, urinary infections, or other factors. As the years went by, the researchers found that those women who tended to get their protein from animal products were much more likely to experience continued loss of kidney function.4 Protein from plants did not have this effect. So if you get your protein from beans, grains, vegetables, and other foods from plant sources, your kidneys will breathe a sigh of relief.”
― Neal D. Barnard, 21-Day Weight Loss Kickstart: Boost Metabolism, Lower Cholesterol, and Dramatically Improve Your Health

“To state the obvious, a cow’s muscles were designed by nature to move the cow’s legs. A chicken’s muscles allow the bird to walk and fly (although current breeding and rearing practices are such that these obese birds do not get around very well). A fish’s muscles move the fish’s tail. A muscle is not designed to be a nutritional supplement. It is a biological ratchet system designed for pulling. For that purpose, it is beautifully designed. Strings of protein serve as the ratchet mechanism, with fat in between them. If meat were designed to provide good nutrition, it would have fiber to tame your appetite, complex carbohydrate for energy, and vitamin C to protect your body, among other vital nutrients. But meat has none of these things. It is mainly a mixture of fat and protein (along with the occasional parasite, perhaps). Meat’s fat packs in calories, and it adds to the fat that is collecting inside your cells—the intramyocellular lipid that slows down your metabolism, as we saw in chapter 3.”
― Neal D. Barnard, 21-Day Weight Loss Kickstart: Boost Metabolism, Lower Cholesterol, and Dramatically Improve Your Health