Joel Fuhrman

Out of one pocket we pay billions of our tax dollars to support the production of expensive, disease-causing foods. Out of the other pocket, we pay medical bills that are too high because our overweight population consumes too much of these rich, disease-causing foods.

We must always remember that all medical interventions have risk, and very little can be asserted with 100 percent certainty.

In the future, it's going to become more and more impossible for the economy to support how expensive medical care is and the number of sick people we have. Why don't we just get our population healthier so we don't need medical care?

Seeds and nuts are indispensable for cardiovascular health. The protective properties of nuts against coronary heart disease were first recognized in the early 1990s, and a strong body of literature has followed, confirming these original findings.

We know that childhood and adolescence are the most crucial times for environmental stimuli to affect breast cancer risk, but changes made during adulthood and even after diagnosis still have the potential to create positive changes in the body.

The diet, to be healthy, has to be mostly fruits, vegetables, beans, nuts and seeds.

We have these weapons of mass destruction on every street corner, and they're called donuts, cheeseburgers, French fries, potato chips, junk food. Our kids are living on a junk food diet.

Your future health can be predicted by the nutrient density of your diet.

The American diet causes disease. It is composed of 25 percent animal products and 62 percent processed foods and only 5 percent of calories from fruits and vegetables.

A high nutrient density diet was associated with more feelings of hunger in the mouth and throat and less in the head and stomach.

Sodium is an important mineral that is essential for proper functioning of the human body - however, the American diet contains dangerously high amounts of sodium, almost 80 percent of which comes from processed and restaurant foods.

We need radical dietary improvement, and the earlier in life that change is made, the better. Just following a vegan diet or eating a few more vegetables is not enough.

One can be a vegan and eating a health-promoting, high-nutrient diet, but one can also eat a small amount of animal products while following a Nutritarian diet and still live a long, healthy life.

The problem with the standard American diet, a primary cause of our current obesity epidemic, is the fact that the majority of foods consumed are high in calories and low in micronutrients.

If you want ideal health, you need to overcompensate and eat an excellent diet.

Eating a high-nutrient diet actually makes you more satisfied with less food, and actually gives the ability to enjoy food more without overeating.

Excess dietary salt is most notorious for increasing blood pressure. Americans have a 90 percent lifetime probability of developing high blood pressure - so even if your blood pressure is normal now, if you continue to eat the typical American diet, you will be at risk.

The human diet, for millions of years, did not contain any added salt - only the sodium present in natural foods, adding up to only about 1000 mg sodium per day.

If you eat the standard Western diet that most people eat in the modern world, it's quite likely you will develop heart disease.

The modern diet is grossly deficient in hundreds of important plant-derived immunity-building compounds which makes us highly vulnerable to viruses, infections and disease.