Revision as of 19:41, 15 May 2021

Dr. (MD) Michael Greger is a popular medical figure in the plant-based healthful-eating community, being one of the biggest influencers for a purely whole foods plant-based diet.
Michael Greger is likely to be the most widely-known advocate for a WFPB (whole foods plant-based) diet.
The main outreach platforms he uses are his Youtube channel and his website Nutritionfacts.org.

Positive impact

Popular outreach videos

While Dr. Greger had posted videos since early 2011, it was not until mid-2012 that a video he posted really put him on the map of Youtube.
After more than a year of series of many short videos talking about specific things directly to the point, he uploaded a speech he had given, titled 'Uprooting the Leading Causes of Death' (currently 1.8M views). In the video, Greger talks for almost an hour in a well-delivering way about how the consumption of animal products significantly worsens the health outlook in almost all the most common causes of death, with a WFPB diet preventing and even, in certain cases, reversing such causes. He goes through each main cause of death systematically providing evidence and multiple studies, showing that eating animal products seriously increase all-cause mortality.
The video made a big impact in changing many minds and is used and shared even today (2021).

He followed this speech with other similar talks, like the one in 2013 'More Than an Apple a Day: Preventing Our Most Common Diseases' (400K views) and the one in 2016 'How Not To Die: The Role of Diet in Preventing, Arresting, and Reversing Our Top 15 Killers' (780K views).

Other popular videos at the beginning of his Youtube work that caused him to gain a significant outreach include 'Eggs and Diabetes' (1.3M views), 'Does Coconut Oil Clog Arteries?' (1.1M views), 'Who Shouldn't Consume Curcumin or Turmeric?' (1.6M views), and other less controversial videos such 'Canned Beans or Cooked Beans?' (1.3M views).

When it comes to videos that did not necessarily put him on the map (posted later on when he had already gained a significant following) but that still gained vast popularity, he has important and impactful work such as 'How Our Gut Bacteria Can Use Eggs to Accelerate Cancer' (1.7M views), 'Egg Industry Response to Choline and TMAO' (700K views) and 'The best diet for diabetes' (1.4M views) - three examples of many of the videos he has that make really strong cases in favor of a WFPB diet.

It can even be argued that, while he isn't focusing on ethics, he does a better job of keeping people vegan by offering strong nutrition advice. A common cause of recidivism is poor nutrition (thanks to quacks such as John McDougall), so keeping people healthy and feeling good strongly reduces the number of people going back to eating meat.

One thing to note about Greger is that his videos are rarely redundant with previously widely-known nutritional evidence, and instead bring to the table some of the latest work and research in the medical world. This is probably one of the factors that set him ahead compared to other health-related Youtube channels.

Other popular videos include 'Chocolate and Stroke Risk' (2.4M views), and 'Eat More Calories in the Morning to Lose Weight' (900K views).

Considering the number of popular videos he made and the fact that his channel has 150M total views (2021), there is little doubt that he reached tens of millions of different people and made an incredible impact in the health-related community by strongly pushing towards a vegan (WFPB) diet with thousands of studies and meta-analysis, and hundreds of thousands of hours of collective work from him and his team of researchers (non-profit and volunteers).

Highly consistent schedule of science-based health-related informative videos

Since Greger started putting videos on Youtube, he has been uploading them very consistently.
He has currently uploaded 2063 videos (mid May 2021), in the span of 10 years and 2 months. That averages to be 203 videos a year, or 0.556 videos per day for over a decade.

The amount of information that can be found on the channel is nothing short of an encyclopedia of nutrition, and his work has been able to provide everyone (that is looking for it) valuable nutritional information that would otherwise be much harder to get to.
The average person cannot be expected to do research and find good scientific studies by itself, so Greger's work is a fundamental one of educating the public, and taking the hard science from thousands of medical studies and translating it in a comprehensive way to the public--while keeping true to the findings of the studies.

Michael Greger's Daily Dozen and other useful work

Greger's Daily Dozen (positives)

Eating whole plants is better for your health on average than a diet with mock meats, and it is certainly better than eating a diet high in animal products. However, it is important to vary up the types of plants (and fungi) you get in your diet.

People eating a plant-based struggle quite a bit at a the beginning in understanding what is best to eat and how much, and some of them fail at staying on the diet because of that. On top of that, even if they keep being on the diet, they might not get what they need and develop eventual deficiencies--or even just nonoptimal levels. Therefore, one of Greger's most useful idea is 'Greger's Daily Dozen'.

Greger's Daily Dozen serves as a handy guide to get an idea of all the best food groups, what to eat, and which ones should be a bigger part of your diet. While a quick rundown of that would be beans, veggies, and nuts, Greger shows us a more granular version of it.

Every day (as shown in the picture on the right):

• 3 servings of beans
• 1 serving of berries
• 3 servings of other fruits
• 1 serving of cruciferous vegetables
• 2 servings of greens
• 2 servings of other vegetables
• 1 serving of flaxseed
• 1 serving of nuts
• 3 servings of grains
• 1 serving of spices
• Exercise
• Beverages

These food groups are necessary to maintain a healthy diet, as they all offer different types of nutrients and benefits.

This offers a very practical solution to the 'what should I eat?' concern that many new vegans have.

That said, there are some caveats to this list, such as the possibility of not getting enough of certain nutrients by blindly relying on this, or the fact that there is no reason to believe 4 servings of fruits would be optimal, and much less reason to believe they are needed (more explained below).

Weight loss videos

Greger has done an in-depth work into weight loss, having series of videos covering everything from fasting, to eating at certain times, to calorie restrictions, to studies on how specific foods affect weight loss, and other.
You can find all his videos on weight loss here.

Books and charity work

Greger has written and made eight books, including two cookbooks:

• Heart Failure: Diary of a Third Year Medical Student (1999)
• Carbophobia: The Scary Truth about America's Low-Carb Craze (2005)
• Bird Flu: A Virus of Our Own Hatching (2006)
• How Not to Die (2015)
• The How Not to Die Cookbook: 100+ Recipes to Help Prevent and Reverse Disease (2017)
• How Not To Diet: The Groundbreaking Science of Healthy, Permanent Weight Loss (2019)
• The How Not to Diet Cookbook: Over 100 Recipes for Healthy, Permanent Weight Loss (2020)
• How to Survive a Pandemic (2020)

All the revenue he gets from ebook revenue is split between Nutritionfacts (him and his team of researchers) and charities--although, the exact split does not seem to be disclosed.

"All proceeds Dr. Greger receives from his book, speaking engagements and DVDs is split between NutritionFacts.org and a donor advised charitable fund from which Dr. Greger distributes to amazing nonprofits that are translating evidence-based nutrition into policy, like Balanced and the Physicians Association for Nutrition." [1]

Even though the exact charity-salary split is not fully disclosed (and prior to 2014, Greger was taking no salary), revenue vs. salary and expenses of Nutritionfacts that you can find here should give you a general idea. One thing important to remember is that there is a team of researchers that has to be paid, and that money spent promoting Nutritionfacts could be just as good as money spent on charity, considering that Nutritionfacts is effectively a platform for free information for people and an important service for public health.

Controversies and unscientific stances

No amount of processed food being acceptable, dogmatically putting whole foods on a pedestal (even when certain processed foods are better than certain whole foods)

Bias towards excessive amounts of fruits being good

Greger has shown throughout the years to have a bias towards any high amounts of fruits being a good thing, like in this video, even though science suggests otherwise.

He fails in three ways when addressing this:

1- Greger does not talk about how there are significant nutritional diminishing returns to eating many fruits, and instead focuses only on the positive aspects, with things such as fiber intake and antioxidants (ORAC value total amount).
He uses data from studies that are at best very weak--like, for example, the study that he cites and uses as evidence that eating large amounts of fruits is beneficial at 2:45 in the video linked above, that looks at a sample of 17 people only, and how they improved eating a lot of fruits from a bad standard diet.
In order to be able to claim that eating a lot of fruits is good, he should instead look at a non-high-fruit WFPB diet, vs. a high-fruit WFPB diet, which would be a fair comparison and a good way to understand whether high amounts of fruits are actually good--this is because pretty much any fiber rich food is a considerable improvement from a bad diet, so such studies offer little insight as to whether, for example, eating 9 apples and 1 broccoli floret is just as good or better than eating 1 apple and 9 broccoli florets. Such studies may not exist yet, but then it cannot be claimed that there are no downsides to eating fruits in large quantities, especially when considering the two points written below that indicate the opposite.
Uses such weak evidence to further an unrelated point is desperate and bias at best, and dishonest at worst.

• Study says/studies say: eating a lot of fruits shows improvements from a standard diet.
• Greger's conclusion: eating a lot of fruits is either not a problem or optimal.
• What the conclusion should actually be: eating a lot of fruits is an improvement from a standard diet, likely because they replace unhealthy foods with better ones, but that does not mean that eating a high-fruit diet is optimal, as eating even better foods is likely better.

2- Greger ignores or omits the fact that fruits are not the best 'bang for the bucks' in terms on nutrients for amount of calories, and as soon as getting what is needed from fruits (micronutrients and ORAC value not too far down the diminishing return scale) is done, it is a waste of calories to spend more of the remaining daily calories in your diet eating fruits rather than something magnitudes more nutritionally dense (such as legumes or greens).
While a certain amount of fruits is optimal to eat, to be able to get certain micronutrients and have a good amount of antioxidant, after a certain point fruits end up replacing more nutritious food that could otherwise be eaten in their stead.

3- Greger does not acknowledge that sugar in fruits causes dental problems, relying on:
1. weak evidence that polyphenolic compounds in fruits may reduce (and not eliminate) in a significant way reduce bacterial growth rate and bacterial adherence to tooth surface (therefore less cavities) [2]--he uses this study to show that sugar in fruits is not something to worry about, even though polyphenolic compounds possibly reducing bacterial growth leading to cavities does not mean that the bacterial growth is eliminated altogether or even in a significant amount
2. the protection that fiber and water found in fruits offer to the teeth, from the sugar in fruits (fiber and water enclosing a part of the sugars, thus those sugars not going into contact with teeth, therefore less cavities) - even though that protection is weak and a part of the sugars still does come in contact with teeth (therefore the more fruits, the more sugar comes into contact with teeth, the more cavities)

He uses those points as assurance that any related worries or potential downsides become negligible regardless of the amount of fruits eaten--when eating fruits in high amounts should clearly be a worry, since there is good reason to believe that the sugars found in fruits increase the risk of cavities and the nutrition on a high-fruit diet is poorer than the nutrition on a non-high fruit diet, and no good reason to believe the contrary.

Endorsing skepticism of the efficacy of chemotherapy for cancer treatment

Salt being categorically bad

Simplistic Dietary Advice

Greger's Daily Dozen (negatives)

We've discussed Greger's dietary outline called his "Daily Dozen" and while it does serve as a good guide to show which foods you ought to get more of than others on a whole-plant diet (strong emphasis on beans and veggies), without taking into account RDA, it will not necessarily fulfill all of your dietary requirements unless you're eating the best of the best in the groups. It should mainly serve as a template for an ideal whole plant-based diet.