Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy Quotes

“What’s good for American farmers isn’t necessarily good for Americans’ health.”
― Walter C. Willett, Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy: The Harvard Medical School Guide to Healthy Eating

“The blocks of the Healthy Eating Pyramid include: • vegetable oils such as olive and canola oil as the primary sources of fat • an abundance of vegetables and fruits, not including potatoes or corn • whole-grain foods at most meals • healthy sources of protein such as beans, nuts, seeds, fish, poultry, and eggs • a daily calcium supplement or dairy foods one to two times a day • a daily multivitamin • for those who choose to drink, alcohol in moderation • red meat, white bread, potatoes, soda, and sweets only occasionally if at all.”
― Walter C. Willett, Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy: The Harvard Medical School Guide to Healthy Eating

“Celebrate vegetables and fruits: Cover half of your plate with them. Aim for color and variety.”
― Walter C. Willett, Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy: The Harvard Medical School Guide to Healthy Eating

“Choose foods rich in polyunsaturated and monounsaturated fats, like nuts, salmon, and avocado, over those rich in saturated fats, like red meat. And don’t eat those that contain artificial trans fats.”
― Walter C. Willett, Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy: The Harvard Medical School Guide to Healthy Eating

“In fact, Mark Twain’s cynical, laconic view of health information is as good today as it was one hundred years ago: “Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint.”
― Walter C. Willett, Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy: The Harvard Medical School Guide to Healthy Eating

“Using a Mendelian randomization approach, a genetic variant involved in metabolizing alcohol was shown to be associated with heart attack risk, and only in those consuming alcohol.10”
― Walter C. Willett, Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy: The Harvard Medical School Guide to Healthy Eating

“These findings were profoundly important because they clearly showed that the high heart disease rates of the U.S. were not due to genetic factors and were not inevitable.”
― Walter C. Willett, Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy: The Harvard Medical School Guide to Healthy Eating

“Praise for Nurses and Health Professionals Back in 1976, Dr. Frank Speizer at the Channing Laboratory of Brigham and Women’s Hospital and the Harvard School of Public Health started the Nurses’ Health Study. Its initial aim was to investigate the potential long-term consequences of oral contraceptives, which were then being taken by millions of women. Nurses were chosen as the study population because of their knowledge about health and their ability to provide complete and accurate information about various diseases, thanks to their nursing education. The research team signed up 121,700 female registered nurses between the ages of thirty and fifty-five. Since then, the aims of the Nurses’ Health Study have broadened to look at the effects of diet and other lifestyle factors on cancer, cardiovascular disease, osteoporosis, mental health, and other conditions.”
― Walter C. Willett, Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy: The Harvard Medical School Guide to Healthy Eating

“Unfortunately, randomized trials are often impossible to do when it comes to nutrition. Getting people to prepare and eat special meals for a long time is difficult. So is getting people to take a vitamin pill or placebo for maybe a decade or more. Given the large number of volunteers needed, the cost of running a randomized trial can be astronomical. The Women’s Health Initiative—which tested”
― Walter C. Willett, Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy: The Harvard Medical School Guide to Healthy Eating

“The thinking behind these early recommendations was that, since people were going to eat no matter what, guidelines based on intelligent guesses were better than no guidelines at all. That’s actually a reasonable approach when there isn’t much evidence. Unfortunately, these recommendations never carried warning labels like “Educated Guess, Subject to Change.” Those educated guesses tend to be repeated thousands of times until they acquire the ring of truth.”
― Walter C. Willett, Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy: The Harvard Medical School Guide to Healthy Eating

“In the pages that follow, I will describe how to boost your score to be at or near the top of the scale, where the payoffs can be huge.”
― Walter C. Willett, Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy: The Harvard Medical School Guide to Healthy Eating

“When we compared the two indexes using diet data from the Nurses’ Health Study and the Health Professionals Follow-Up Study, the Alternative Healthy Eating Index was far better at predicting the development of cardiovascular disease and other chronic conditions”
― Walter C. Willett, Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy: The Harvard Medical School Guide to Healthy Eating

“down.”
― Walter C. Willett, Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy: The Harvard Medical School Guide to Healthy Eating

“congratulate the advisory committee for correctly concluding that there was no evidence to support a specific upper limit. This is an important step, because the caps on total fat in the past led to promoting foods high in carbohydrates that were mostly refined starch and sugar.”
― Walter C. Willett, Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy: The Harvard Medical School Guide to Healthy Eating

“the USDA consistently ignored the extensive body of evidence linking certain eating patterns with long-term health.”
― Walter C. Willett, Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy: The Harvard Medical School Guide to Healthy Eating

“Some recommendations on diet and nutrition are misguided because they are based on inadequate or incomplete information. That wasn’t the case for the USDA’s pyramid. Its recommendations were wrong because they ignored solid evidence on healthful eating and aimed to please various food lobbies.”
― Walter C. Willett, Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy: The Harvard Medical School Guide to Healthy Eating

“But what the Food Guide Pyramid really offered was wishy-washy, scientifically unfounded advice on an absolutely vital topic—what to eat. Some”
― Walter C. Willett, Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy: The Harvard Medical School Guide to Healthy Eating

“(This oversight of competing interests isn’t unique to the USDA. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission, for example, is charged with the often contradictory tasks of promoting nuclear power and regulating its use.)”
― Walter C. Willett, Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy: The Harvard Medical School Guide to Healthy Eating

“What should be a scholarly and scientific process is often a free-for-all among lobbyists for agribusinesses, food companies, and special interest groups.”
― Walter C. Willett, Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy: The Harvard Medical School Guide to Healthy Eating

“websites, Facebook pages, and blogs. Much of the advice they offer is misleading or erroneous.”
― Walter C. Willett, Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy: The Harvard Medical School Guide to Healthy Eating

“Not long ago my cholesterol began creeping up. Much to my dismay, my doctor recommended that I start a low-fat diet—a recommendation from the 1980s that we now know doesn’t work for lowering cholesterol.”
― Walter C. Willett, Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy: The Harvard Medical School Guide to Healthy Eating

“in mind that low-fat does not mean healthy (see chapter five).”
― Walter C. Willett, Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy: The Harvard Medical School Guide to Healthy Eating

“Eat plenty of vegetables and fruits, but limit fruit juices and corn, and hold the potatoes. • Eat more good fats (these mostly come from plants) and fewer bad fats (these mostly come from meat and dairy foods). • Eat more whole-grain carbohydrates and fewer refined-grain carbohydrates. • Choose healthy sources of protein, limit your consumption of red meat, and don’t eat processed meat. • Drink more water. Coffee and tea are okay; sugar-sweetened soda and other beverages aren’t. • Drink alcohol in moderation, if at all. • Take a multivitamin for insurance, just in case you aren’t getting the vitamins and minerals you need from the foods you eat. Make sure it delivers at least 1,000 international units of vitamin D.”
― Walter C. Willett, Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy: The Harvard Medical School Guide to Healthy Eating

“I can’t quite rival the brevity of food writer Michael Pollan’s seven-word dietary credo, “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”4 That’s a decent general overview, but it doesn’t offer much real guidance. That’s exactly what this book provides.”
― Walter C. Willett, Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy: The Harvard Medical School Guide to Healthy Eating

“Because the urgency of addressing climate change has become more apparent since 2001, I have devoted a chapter to the information censored by Congress.”
― Walter C. Willett, Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy: The Harvard Medical School Guide to Healthy Eating

“In this update of Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy, I examine the USDA’s pyramids and plate and show where they have misled the public.”
― Walter C. Willett, Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy: The Harvard Medical School Guide to Healthy Eating

“In its passage of the final national budget for 2015, Congress took the highly unusual step of saying that the USDA could not consider the chapter on diet and climate change that had been written by the USDA’s Dietary Guidelines Scientific Advisory Committee.”
― Walter C. Willett, Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy: The Harvard Medical School Guide to Healthy Eating

“Toss out your old diet books, forget the government’s famous but flawed food pyramid, and get your hands on Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy, by Walter Willett.”
― Walter C. Willett, Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy: The Harvard Medical School Guide to Healthy Eating

“Celebrate vegetables and fruits: Cover half of your plate with them. Aim for color and variety. Keep in mind that potatoes don’t count (see “The Spud Is a Dud” on page 167). THE HARVARD HEALTHY EATING PLATE Figure 1. The Harvard Healthy Eating Plate was created to address deficiencies in the USDA’s MyPlate. It provides simple but detailed guidance to help people make the best eating choices. • Go for whole grains—about one-quarter of your plate. Intact and whole grains, such as whole wheat, barley, wheat berries, quinoa, oats, brown rice, and foods made with them, have a milder effect on blood sugar and insulin than white bread, white rice, and other refined grains (see chapter six). • Choose healthy protein packages—about one-quarter of your plate. Fish, chicken, beans, soybeans, and nuts are all healthy, versatile protein sources. Limit red meat, and try to stay away from processed meats such as bacon and sausage (see chapter seven). • Use healthy plant oils, such as olive, canola, soy, corn, sunflower, and peanut, in moderation. Stay away from foods containing partially hydrogenated oils, which contain unhealthy artificial trans fats (see “Trans fats,” page 83). If you like the taste of butter or coconut oil, use them when their flavor is important but not as primary dietary fats. Keep in mind that low-fat does not mean healthy (see chapter five).”
― Walter C. Willett, Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy: The Harvard Medical School Guide to Healthy Eating

“Here is the outline of my simple, actionable advice for healthy eating, which I describe in detail later in the book: • Eat plenty of vegetables and fruits, but limit fruit juices and corn, and hold the potatoes. • Eat more good fats (these mostly come from plants) and fewer bad fats (these mostly come from meat and dairy foods). • Eat more whole-grain carbohydrates and fewer refined-grain carbohydrates. • Choose healthy sources of protein, limit your consumption of red meat, and don’t eat processed meat. • Drink more water. Coffee and tea are okay; sugar-sweetened soda and other beverages aren’t. • Drink alcohol in moderation, if at all. • Take a multivitamin for insurance, just in case you aren’t getting the vitamins and minerals you need from the foods you eat. Make sure it delivers at least 1,000 international units of vitamin D.”
― Walter C. Willett, Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy: The Harvard Medical School Guide to Healthy Eating