38 Quotes by Neal D. Barnard

I’m thinking of people in rural Japan and China, where McDonald’s hasn’t yet arrived. These are the thinnest, healthiest, longest-lived people with the least risk of cardiovascular disease and diabetes.

The dangers of eating animal products occur after the age of reproduction. If people developed cardiovascular disease that was fatal by the age of twelve or thirteen, eating animals would have died out long ago. You get it after you’ve already reproduced.

The thinnest people on the planet are those who eat the most carbohydrates.

In China, because China is gaining wealth, rice consumption is way down. Rice is a poor person’s food, and they’re eating less of it. To wait in line at a fast food chain is cool. And they haven’t historically had weight problems. So they don’t have this culture of, “I need to lose weight.”

A vegan diet takes care of most of what we need to do.

It’s much better to say, “If the herd is running, I’m running with those guys.” And humans have herd mentality.

In my own life, I decided to leave meat off my plate in medical school, but was a bit slow to realise that dairy products and eggs are not health foods either.

Dogs have a sense of smell much greater than ours and they’re much faster than we are. We have fairly dull senses, fairly slow locomotion. In our Olympic trials, we celebrate speeds that would be an embarrassment to a bird or a dog or another animal.

Not only are the studies themselves often lacking even face value, but they also drain badly needed funds away from patient care needs.