Michael Greger, MD

The 7 Original Heroes of the Movement

Featured Hero:   Dr. Michael Greger

Dr. Michael Greger is a US-based physician, New York Times bestselling author and professional speaker on a range of nutrition, safety and public health issues. He is also one of the experts who’ll be sharing his voice within the Hippocrates Docs and the Just 1 Thing 4 Health (J1T4H) program. A founding member and Fellow of the American College of Lifestyle Medicine, Dr. Greger is a licensed general practitioner specializing in clinical nutrition. He is also the creator of NutritionFacts.org, a non-commercial, science-based public service designed to provide free updates on the latest in nutrition research using easy-to-digest videos.

In his lectures, videos and writings about nutrition, Dr. Greger works to persuade people to change their eating habits from a Western pattern diet to a whole foods, plant-based diet. It is this shift, he says, that can help prevent and reverse a host of chronic diseases. It is because of this that he is critical of other doctors for not encouraging their patients to adopt plant-based diets and avoid animal-based products, and the US government for giving watered down advice about healthy eating in a bid to protect the economic interests of nutritionally unhealthy food producers.

As a child, Dr. Greger watched his heart-diseased grandmother heal from certain death as a result of the low-fat Pritikin diet. In the decades since, he has built a career from promoting the healing power of a whole-food, plant-based diet. Dr. Greger’s most recent books, How Not to Die and the How Not to Die Cookbook, are user’s guides for thwarting America’s biggest and most preventable killers using this approach; both books became overnight New York Times Best Sellers.

Dr. Greger is a graduate of the Cornell University School of Agriculture and Tufts University School of Medicine. Hired to work on mad cow issues for Farm Sanctuary, near Cornell, in 1994, he later appeared as an expert witness testifying about the disease when cattle producers unsuccessfully sued Oprah Winfrey for libel over statements she has made about the safety of meat. Following this, he joined Organic Consumers Association to work on mad cow disease issues, a disease he later called “The Plague of the 21st Century”.

Dr. Greger has served the farm animal welfare division of the Humane Society as director of public health and animal agriculture. During his term with the Humane Society, he testified before Congress following the release of an undercover video of Westland Meat Packing Company which showed downer animals entering the meat supply. The fall-out from the exposure saw the USDA force the recall of 143 million pounds of beef, some of which had been a part of America’s national school lunch program.

Sparked in his youth and reinforced over the course of his career, Dr. Greger is dedicated to bypassing health middlemen and delivering important, and often lifesaving, information straight to the public. “With the democratization of information, doctors no longer hold a monopoly as gatekeepers of knowledge about health,” Dr. Greger writes in his book, “I’m realizing it may be more effective to empower individuals directly.”

We acknowledge and express our gratitude to Dr. Greger for being one of our trusted authorities in the Hippocrates Docs’ Just 1 Thing 4 Health movement.

 

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