Mehmet Oz quotes:

True health care reform cannot happen in Washington. It has to happen in our kitchens, in our homes, in our communities. All health care is personal.

What happens when you have great grief in your life is the arteries of that heart begins to spasms down, just literally squeezes down like this because you're feeling the tension of your life and then the heart muscle itself will also begin - to get stressed out.

As a surgeon you have to have a controlled arrogance. If it's uncontrolled, you kill people, but you have to be pretty arrogant to saw through a person's chest, take out their heart and believe you can fix it. Then, when you succeed and the patient survives, you pray, because it's only by the grace of God that you get there.

If you don't know your blood pressure, it's like not knowing the value of your company.

It's difficult to love someone you don't respect, which is hard to remember when you're having an argument.

Medications almost always do it better if they're used in conjunction with other supports.

I've always felt that, when I looked at my tombstone, it shouldn't say, 'Mehmet Oz banged out 10,000 open-heart operations.' I've probably done 5,000. Am I any better at it than 10,000? He shook his head. It's just a different number on the tombstone.

At the end of the day, sleep is a barometer of your emotional health. And so if you're not in the right place where you need to be, then you're going to have voices keeping you up at night because you have to work through those issues.

In Turkey, you're not allowed to be left alone in the hospital. The nurse teaches the family how to do things, and somebody is always there with the patient.

I saw many people who had advanced heart disease and I was so frustrated because I knew if they just knew how to do the right thing, simple lifestyle and diet steps, that the entire trajectory of their life and health would have been different.

You need to be proactive, carve out time in your schedule, and take responsibility for being the healthiest person you can be - no one else is going to do it for you.

I get up at the same time every morning.

If I make your workplace conducive to walking at lunch, or working out at some time during the day, or I get people to use the stairs more by creating incentives to do such, then people will start doing it naturally.

Unfortunately, several companies are attempting to deceive consumers through the unauthorized use of my image or my name, and my attorneys are pursuing those making these false claims.

You cannot drive a system that's going to be aiming at preventing illness if everyone is not in it. The whole gaming of health insurance and health care in America is based on that fundamental principle: insure people who aren't sick and you don't have to pay more money on them.

Most food you drop is still perfectly edible. If it was in your eyesight the whole time, you can pick it up and eat it.

What we have now is doctors who are actually better technically at what they're doing in their specialty than 30 or 40 years ago, but we lost the relationship, when the doctor would look people in the eye and say, 'I care about you. We can do this together.'

I think that we're beginning to globalize medicine now. You have to take Eastern approaches and bring them to the West, and share West with the East.

We are spending most of our time in American health care fixing the mistakes that either we in the profession are causing or our patients are, without recognizing it, causing to themselves.

I think I'm a better doctor than I am a husband. I give myself a good grade as a doctor, then the next best grade as a father, and the worst grade as a husband.

Not enough families eat together. We eat in front of the TV while we're absorbed in a program.

My mother was all about unconditional love, and I don't think we give that to our patients a lot. At the end of the day, what they really need you to do is to look at them in the eye and say, 'I'm here for you. I'm going to make sure this works out.'

Most allopathic doctors think practitioners of alternative medicine are all quacks. They're not. Often they're sharp people who think differently about disease.

No matter how old you are, no matter how much you weigh, you can still control the health of your body.

The biggest mistake people make is to try to lose too much weight too fast.

Your waist size should not be more than half your height.

In my business, if I get too close to you and you die, it hurts me. And so you develop a natural inclination not to be close to the patient, so that if things don't work out ideally, you can still get up the next day and care for the next patient.

When there is a psyche-disrupting event in your life, it can prevent you from getting the long blocks of sleep at night that are so important to healthy aging.

I get up in the morning and do a seven-minute yoga workout. I know the most likely time I'm going to do something is when I first get up, and I make it short because, like you, I don't really want to do that first thing in the morning.

Food is no longer sacred to us: in becoming too efficient we've changed its nature.

The rule I use is, If it doesn't come out of the ground looking the way it looks when you eat it, be careful.

Medicine has always been my calling.

You learn how to take care of people from the women in your life.

What happens when you have great grief in your life is the arteries of that heart begins to spasms down, just literally squeezes down like this because you're feeling the tension of your life and then the heart muscle itself will also begin - to get stressed out."

You get the health benefits of coffee up through about the first twenty-four ounces. It's the biggest source of antioxidants for Americans, and we think it helps prevent Alzheimer's and Parkinson's as well.

It's like, imagine the ripples on top of an ocean. And I'm in a rowboat, reactively dealing with the waves and water coming into my boat. What I need to do is dive into the deeper solace, the calmness beneath the surface.

The opposite of anger is not calmness, its empathy.

Your genetics load the gun. Your lifestyle pulls the trigger.

Hostility comes from loneliness, from not seeing yourself like a drop falling into the ocean of humanity like everyone else.

People say their weight is genetic. But it turns out that people who are overweight don't just have overweight kids. They also have overweight pets. That's not genetic.

If you want to be healthy and live to one hundred, do qigong.

I don't operate on smokers. I tell cigarette smokers that I can operate on you, I get paid the same. And you might even do well. But it's the wrong thing to do. So I refuse to operate on you until you stop smoking.

I feel differently immediately when I start to put weight on. I don't like that sluggish, blunted disposition that I have when that happens.

We don't walk. We overeat because we've made it easy to overeat. We have fast-food joints on every corner. By the way, the 'we' is all of us. It's not the government. It's all of us doing this together.

I'm sure people think that I'm out in left field you know, playing by myself.

I do practice what I preach when it comes to nutrition.

We're all human beings, but some of us are more sophisticated at covering our flaws. We're just smart enough to lie to ourselves that everything is OK.

Food - I love nuts. I eat them all the time, they're easy to carry around, and I am never hungry all day long.

"A hundred years ago, in this country, we were more comfortable with these discussions [of past lives, touching the spiritual world, collective unconsciousl] than we are today. I think part of that is that we have gotten addicted to the same serum that I'm taking, which is the belief that the answers are always going to be right there in front of us. And sometimes ya gotta take that leap."

A lot of folks believe their best years are behind them. But I want Americans to recognize that's not true.

Any food products made from flour, especially whole-wheat flour, form gas when broken down in the large intestine. Beware of eating these types of food before bedtime to avoid feeling inflated in the morning.

As we get better at understanding how little we know about the body, we begin to realize that the next big frontier in medicine, is energy medicine. It's not the mechanistic part of the joints moving. It's not the chemistry of our body. It's understanding for the first time how energy influences how we feel.

Avoid buying frozen dinners and processed foods, as they are often overloaded with salt.

Before you reach for the saltshaker, consider swapping your snacks for a healthier option.

Biology always beats will power.

Blend all ingredients. Drink with probiotic straws to maximize the benefits of a healthy diet and support normal absorption and assimilation of nutrients in the gut.

Energy Medicine is the last great frontier in medicine.

Every hour you sit at work increases your mortality 11 percent. Think about that.

Every person has the right to look and feel like a million bucks.

Here's the number one reason Americans are heavy: The brain, very smartly, wants nutrition. But the average American is not eating nutrients; he or she is eating empty calories. So you finish that 2,000 calories and your brain says, Keep going until you get nutrients.

I believe science has a wonderful ability, in an unbiased way, to offer hope to many people who are confused, but it's not the only way to find hope.

I have become convinced that the most overlooked tool in our medical arsenal is harnessing the body's own ability to heal through nutritional excellence.

I like shows that have some level of intelligence to them. When it's not as predictable, when you don't know what's coming at you.

I meditate and I'm passionate about it.

I really think it would be cowardly to pull back and not challenge the status quo, when the status quo may not be the right way for the field to go,

I used to bicycle to work across the George Washington Bridge, but my wife told me it wasn't professional.

I was lucky enough to marry a wonderful chef.

If you can laugh your way through life, you can have a good time as you're going through the sometimes troubling time that we have in our lives.

If you change your lifestyle, remember it's not a wind sprint, but it's a marathon you're embarked on, and you'll be able to stay there.

I'm sure people think that I'm out in left field you know, playing by myself,

It takes around 30 minutes for your body to realize you're full, so if you're hungry when you sit down to eat, and you eat as quickly as most Americans do, you're just going to keep throwing down food before that feeling kicks in.

It's a big issue for me - feeling like I should be helping every person who asks for something or who has a problem.

I've got so many weaknesses.

Make the driving force in your life love.

Medicine grounds me, it centers me, that's why I continue to do it.

Medicine is a jealous mistress. It demands all your time.

Much of eating is about customs and habits, and we've developed some unfortunate ones. Not enough families eat together. We eat in front of the TV while we're absorbed in a program. You know, the average person will eat up to 50 percent more food when distracted.

One way to fuel the brain to make more decisions is to feed it carbs. So as the day goes on, you start to crave more carbs - especially women, because women tend to make more of the day-to-day decisions in our lives than men.

Our ancestors had to eat whenever food was around. And we're actually still hardwired the same way. The big difference is we don't have to hunt for our food. For us, "hunting" comes down to sliding the milk carton out of the way.

Packaged foods, partially hydrogenated oils and enriched flours are not your friends. Above all, remember this one word: transfats. Avoid it at all costs.

People change based on what they feel, not what they know. Which means that understanding all that advice doesn't matter if there's no deep, profound, visceral awareness of why it's important.

Rather than munching on a bag of potato chips, stick to fresh fruit and veggies.

Reiki has become a sought-after healing art among patients and mainstream medical professionals.

Surgery has trained me better than anything else to connect with people.

Sweeteners, which can be up to 300 times sweeter than natural sugar, are known to increase appetite and result in overeating. Be on the lookout for artificial sweeteners, and when possible, steer clear of them.

That's how most men connect - in bed. The physical connection is important because it reinforces the emotional one.

The more decisions we make in a day, the more likely we are to make bad decisions - because deciding wears us down. You start making decisions in the morning, and by the middle of the afternoon, you're running on fumes.

The next big frontier in medicine is Energy Medicine.

The transfats found in margarine, packaged cookies, crackers and pasta increase fat in your midsection, and can actually redistribute fat from other parts of the body to the belly.

There are a lot of food Nazis in the U.S., but I believe if you can show people what's really important, they'll judge the rest for themselves.

There are really two things that drive New Year's resolution success. Number one is telling somebody about your goal. Chances are, they'll either join you in pursuing it or at least support you. Number two is to be concrete and specific. You don't want a goal like "becoming a better person," because there's no objective way to judge that. It's got to be something like "I'm going to call my mother once a week." Or "I'm going to cut my body mass index to 25." It can't be fudgeable.

There were certain elements of the healing process I could not capture. And even if I was right in the science, I could be wrong in the spirit.

We don't need sugar to live, and we don't need it as a society.

We know what we should and shouldn't put in our mouths, but in those times that pull on our souls, we revert to what's emotionally comfortable.

We need a wholesale reevaluation of what health feels like. Most Americans don't even know what that is anymore. I want to tell people, "Listen, there are places where you can focus on your health, and it can actually be simple."

Whatever you choose, do it fully-with passion and childlike enthusiasm.

Women are much more sensitive. We know that emotionally but their organs respond to the same degree.

You don't have a family doctor anymore like you did when you were a kid, who treated you throughout your life.

You have to be going somewhere to have the energy you need to get there.