#2942: Michael Greger

Michael Greger is a vegan activist, author, MD, and general purveyor of medical misinformation. As laid out in various videos and in his bestselling book How Not to Die, Greger basically claims that eating animal-based foods is the cause of all disease and that, conversely, a vegan diet is the cure for everything. This is, needless to say, incorrect.

 

Greger rose to (some) fame in the early 2000s for his wild alarmism about mad cow disease, which he claimed was “much more serious than AIDS”; according to Greger, “thousands of Americans may already be dying because of Mad Cow disease every year”; that last claim was, in fairness, posed as a question and should be treated accordingly.

 

His current advocacy for a vegan, whole-foods diet is fairly typical for activist perusal of science: Although many of Greger’s statements constitute good and sound advice, and some of it is based on genuinely scientific findings, his claims are also characterized by judicious cherry-picking, omissions (e.g. this), misrepresenting real research (a plethora of examples are mentioned here) and overstating the benefits of his recommendations (and the dangers of animal-based foods). His book How Not to Diet, for instance, is reviewed here: as his other stuff, it mixes good and sound advice with omissions and unsupported speculation, and no: it has not been shown in a randomized controlled trial that a whole food plant-based diet can reverse heart disease. His video on how Death in America is largely a foodborne illness, which purports to offer “practical advice on how best to feed ourselves and our families to prevent, treat, and even reverse many of the top 15 killers in the United States”, is discussed here: In the video, it is for instance claimed that “a plant-based diet of primarily whole grains, fruits, vegetables, and legumes can completely prevent heart attacks” based on some small-scale and flawed research by Caldwell Esselstyn that only purported to show that patients (merely a few) who had already had a heart attack did not have a second one while on cholesterol-lowering medications and a largely plant-based diet that also included animal-based foods; that “those who eat meat are 2-3 times as likely to become demented as vegetarians”, which is demonstrably false; and that diabetes can be cured by a plant-based diet, which is insane nonsense. His best-seller How Not to Die provided data for this study.

 

Greger is a co-founder and fellow of the American College of Lifestyle Medicine and founder of the website NutritionFacts.org. His list of books is long but his stylistic characteristics seem to found in most of them, for instance in Bird Flu: A Virus of Our Own Hatching, which, as public health expert David Sencer tactfully put it, “a professional audience would quickly put aside for more factually correct sources of information”.

 

Diagnosis: No, he is not always wrong. But he is always untrustworthy, and you have no good reason to listen to anything he has to say (if it is correct, you’ll find it in better sources; if you can’t find it in better sources …). His popularity is depressing.