The physician behind NutritionFacts.org and How Not to Die — his methodology and where his philosophy connects to THE FAD, in depth.
This page describes Dr. Greger's publicly known work in detail. It is not a personal endorsement of THE FAD, and none of this is medical advice.
Michael Greger is a physician and founder of NutritionFacts.org, a nonprofit that has produced thousands of short videos reviewing nutrition science research, each typically built around a specific published study or body of research. He's the author of the bestselling book How Not to Die, which examines diet's relationship to the leading causes of death in developed countries.
What distinguishes Greger's approach is volume and sourcing — his videos and books cite primary peer-reviewed research directly rather than secondary summaries, and NutritionFacts.org has published thousands of pieces of content this way, making his catalogue a genuinely useful (if consistently plant-forward-angled) index into the nutrition literature.
Greger has extensively covered the anti-inflammatory research behind fibre and plant diversity (see our fibre types page and plant diversity page), the case against processed and red meat (see our nitrates and processed meat page), and spices like turmeric and ginger (see our anti-inflammatory foods list).
Greger is generally skeptical of relying on supplements as substitutes for whole foods, with one notable, consistently stated exception: he recommends vitamin B12 supplementation specifically for anyone eating a fully plant-based diet, since B12 is found almost exclusively in animal products — a nuance covered in our own micronutrients page.
Greger's plant-forward emphasis is a stronger, more prescriptive position than some nutrition researchers take — he's explicitly an advocate for a specific dietary pattern, not a neutral synthesiser of the field. His work overlaps with, and is sometimes discussed alongside, more contested territory like The China Study controversy — worth reading his conclusions alongside the other perspectives in our research library rather than as the final word.