Think and Eat Yourself Smart Quotes

“Many animals are also given growth hormones to further speed up the fattening process.18 These hormones are associated with a number of health risks in both animals and humans, including a possible correlation with cancer, which is why many countries no longer permit the use of hormones in industrial meat production.”
― Caroline Leaf, Think and Eat Yourself Smart: A Neuroscientific Approach to a Sharper Mind and Healthier Life

“Excessive consumption of the high amounts of sodium in processed, salty foods can lead to high blood pressure and heart disease, stroke, kidney damage, cancer, weight gain, osteoporosis, and overeating—this list is equally long and alarming.2”
― Caroline Leaf, Think and Eat Yourself Smart: A Neuroscientific Approach to a Sharper Mind and Healthier Life

“Processed, heated, and refined fats, as well as “trans fats” (hydrogenated fats), are the bad fats commonly found in foods such as margarine, shortening, your average American pizza, and the processed cheese so widely available in grocery stores. These bad fats have been linked to a higher risk of heart disease, macular degeneration, multiple sclerosis, certain cancers, diabetes, obesity, osteoporosis, infertility and endometriosis, and depression.3 (For more on fats, see chapter 16.)”
― Caroline Leaf, Think and Eat Yourself Smart: A Neuroscientific Approach to a Sharper Mind and Healthier Life

“Yet the animals are not just fed corn and soy. Expired cookies, candy, and even other animals are often turned into feed, including feed for large-scale dairy operations. We have turned herbivores like cattle into carnivores, often with fatal side effects.”
― Caroline Leaf, Think and Eat Yourself Smart: A Neuroscientific Approach to a Sharper Mind and Healthier Life

“What do corn and soy have to do with meat and dairy? Today, animal feed is made up largely of corn and soy.”
― Caroline Leaf, Think and Eat Yourself Smart: A Neuroscientific Approach to a Sharper Mind and Healthier Life

“Likewise, healthier products are often put close to the bottom on the shelves, while processed, sugary foods with bright packaging are put at eye level, socially conditioning us to buy more of them.48”
― Caroline Leaf, Think and Eat Yourself Smart: A Neuroscientific Approach to a Sharper Mind and Healthier Life

“Grocery stores, for example, deliberately place candy and chocolate bars by the checkout counter in order to promote “impulse buying.”
― Caroline Leaf, Think and Eat Yourself Smart: A Neuroscientific Approach to a Sharper Mind and Healthier Life

“How real, then, is the food in our supermarkets? Real food, again, is fresh and nutritious, predominantly local, seasonal, grass fed, as wild as possible, free of synthetic chemicals, whole or minimally processed, and ecologically diverse. We have seen that in our supermarkets, even the fresh produce isn’t very fresh. Foods are no longer whole, but processed to extend shelf life.”
― Caroline Leaf, Think and Eat Yourself Smart: A Neuroscientific Approach to a Sharper Mind and Healthier Life

“Healthy thoughts can enhance the effects of good nutrition and mitigate the effects of bad nutrition—to a degree. In fact, healthy thoughts lead to better food choices. Eating and thinking are so intertwined that what you are thinking about before, during, and after eating will impact every single one of the 75–100 trillion cells in your body, including the cells of your digestive system. Your state of mind will have a negative or positive influence on your digestive health, and your digestive health will also have a negative or positive influence on your state of mind.”
― Caroline Leaf, Think and Eat Yourself Smart: A Neuroscientific Approach to a Sharper Mind and Healthier Life

“The mind is a key factor throughout this book. Thinking, as you will see, plays a dominant role in eating. Toxic thoughts can negate the positive effects of good nutrition.”
― Caroline Leaf, Think and Eat Yourself Smart: A Neuroscientific Approach to a Sharper Mind and Healthier Life

“Thinking, as you will see, plays a dominant role in eating. Toxic thoughts can negate the positive effects of good nutrition. Healthy”
― Caroline Leaf, Think and Eat Yourself Smart: A Neuroscientific Approach to a Sharper Mind and Healthier Life

“The nonconscious mind is responsible for somewhere between 90–99 percent of your mind’s activity.13 For example, out of the 10 million bits per second processed through the eye, only a maximum of 50 bits per second are processed consciously.14 The nonconscious mind operates twenty-four hours a day, at fantastic speeds, about a quintillion (1018) bits per second at a synaptic level and an octillion (1027) bits per second at a microtubular level, for the whole brain.15 Indeed, the mind is truly magnificent. It is the orchestra conductor,”
― Caroline Leaf, Think and Eat Yourself Smart: A Neuroscientific Approach to a Sharper Mind and Healthier Life

“Perhaps one of the most well-known, and indeed controversial, examples of the global impact of food production is the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). NAFTA opened the trade borders between the United States and Mexico, making American corn, subsidized by the US government, cheaper to purchase. Subsequently, many Mexican farmers lost their farms (since they could not compete with the low price of corn grown in the United States), compelling these individuals to find work elsewhere and contributing to the rise of illegal immigrants in the United States.19 Likewise, labels such as “Fair Trade” or “Whole Trade” on many foods today highlight the fact that what we choose to eat can and does impact the people and communities that produce our foods.”
― Caroline Leaf, Think and Eat Yourself Smart: A Neuroscientific Approach to a Sharper Mind and Healthier Life

“Although this major incident shows the dangers of feeding animals to other animals, it is often still considered an economically viable practice for industrial operations. Many feedlots in the United States, for instance, feed their cows chicken meat, while some companies even consider it “sustainable” to feed chicken to farmed fish.21”
― Caroline Leaf, Think and Eat Yourself Smart: A Neuroscientific Approach to a Sharper Mind and Healthier Life

“Perhaps the most infamous example of this is the recent epidemic of mad cow disease, a variant of bovine spongiform encephalopathy that leads to Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD) in humans.20 In the United Kingdom, cows that were fed the remains of other cows in meat and bone meal contracted this disease, killing over a hundred people in 1996.”
― Caroline Leaf, Think and Eat Yourself Smart: A Neuroscientific Approach to a Sharper Mind and Healthier Life

“In the feces-covered facilities of many industrial operations, these grain-based diets necessitate the large-scale use of antibiotics (80 percent of all antibiotics in the United States alone) to simply prevent the animals from dying. This has significantly contributed to the global antibiotic-resistance crisis.”
― Caroline Leaf, Think and Eat Yourself Smart: A Neuroscientific Approach to a Sharper Mind and Healthier Life

“God designed cattle as animals that graze over stretches of grass, but these industrial operations work on economies of time and scale: confined cattle eat all day, getting fatter in a much shorter space of time, while a single operation can hold far more cattle in a smaller space.17”
― Caroline Leaf, Think and Eat Yourself Smart: A Neuroscientific Approach to a Sharper Mind and Healthier Life

“Within these operations, it is both cheaper and less time-consuming to feed the animals corn and soy in confined spaces, even though these grain-based, immobile diets are not well adapted to the way God created these animals. For example, cattle have rumens, which are designed to digest various grasses and plants, not massive amounts of grain, and as a result these cattle are more prone to disease and general ill health, such as stomach ulcers, while they are less nutritious to consume.”
― Caroline Leaf, Think and Eat Yourself Smart: A Neuroscientific Approach to a Sharper Mind and Healthier Life

“They travel long distances. And synthetic chemicals are used freely.”
― Caroline Leaf, Think and Eat Yourself Smart: A Neuroscientific Approach to a Sharper Mind and Healthier Life

“Instead of taking the wheat germ out of the bread for our convenience, we should ask ourselves why God created wheat like that in the first place.”
― Caroline Leaf, Think and Eat Yourself Smart: A Neuroscientific Approach to a Sharper Mind and Healthier Life

“These preservatives and additives have serious side effects.43 For instance, azodicarbonamide, a synthetic chemical used to manufacture rubber and plastic, is used in the United States as the food additive E927 to bleach flour and condition dough in industrial bread production.”
― Caroline Leaf, Think and Eat Yourself Smart: A Neuroscientific Approach to a Sharper Mind and Healthier Life

“The snare of “long-life” foods can directly affect our health. Take the average loaf of bread available today. To adapt the production of bread to the food industry’s goal of a large market for cheaply and efficiently produced foodstuffs, the wheat germ, which contains the natural oils that give bread its true, wholesome flavor and make it nutritious, has to be removed, since it causes bread to rot within a day. To make up for this loss of flavor and texture, the wheat, after it is heavily processed into white flour, is made into a bread-like product that contains preservatives and additives such as the infamous high fructose corn syrup (HFCS).42 Or, in the case of many organic packaged breads that last for days, organic sugars and other strange-sounding ingredients are added.”
― Caroline Leaf, Think and Eat Yourself Smart: A Neuroscientific Approach to a Sharper Mind and Healthier Life