Frequently Asked Questions

Everything on NutritionFacts.org is free. There is no members-only area where additional life-saving information is available—for a price. There are no advertisements of any kind allowed. We don’t accept corporate sponsorships. NutritionFacts.org is strictly non-commercial. There’s no line of Dr. Greger’s Brand Snakeoilwondersupplements. We are not selling anything. Dr. Greger simply produces these videos as a public service for those hungry for evidence-based nutrition.

Then how do the bills get paid? The Jesse and Julie Rasch Foundation provided the critical start-up seed money and expertise to get us off the ground, but now NutritionFacts.org runs strictly on the Wikipedia model of accepting donations from users who appreciate the content. We reach so many millions of people that if even 1 in 1,000 make a small contribution we will be able to continue to thrive. If you feel like NutritionFacts.org has enriched your life, please consider supporting us by making a tax-deductible one-time or monthly donation.

None whatsoever.

Dr. Greger now draws a salary from NutritionFacts.org as Research Director. So when you support NutritionFacts.org, part of your donation goes to putting kale on his table. 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.

Our second favorite question! You can make a tax-deductible donation to NutritionFacts.org using a credit card, debit card, PayPal, or ACH, or by sending a check to “NutritionFacts.org” c/o Michael Greger, P.O. Box 11400., Takoma Park, MD 20913.

Some companies “match” their employees’ charitable contributions. For example, if you donate $50 to NutritionFacts.org, your employer may donate an additional amount—some even double the amount of a personal contribution. Your $50 becomes $100 to support educating millions about eradicating dietary diseases. Some companies provide the guidelines and forms to fill out online, or you can check with your Human Resources office. Some companies even match the contributions of retirees and employees’ spouses. It’s worth checking out! Federal Employees can donate using our CFC Code: 26461

There are other ways you can support the site. You can use GoodSearch.com to search the web, which will donate to NutritionFacts.org if you set us up as your charity of choice.

Our favorite question! NutritionFacts.org used to be run entirely by volunteers. Thanks to the support of many kind and generous souls, we now have fourteen full-time staff, but continue to rely heavily on volunteers. If you’d like to help out, please take a look at our current volunteer opportunities and sign-up for our volunteer newsletter.

Yes! Just click on the View Transcript button below each video.

Yes! Click on the cog wheel button below the playbar of any video and select Subtitles/CC to view our caption and translation options. More instructions are available here.

Yes! Just click on the Sources Cited button below each video.

Each of our videos offer a variety of translated subtitles and are accessible via the cogwheel button on each video. We also have a full Spanish-language version of the website which you can access by clicking the Spanish flag in the top right corner. We also share our content through Chinese social media platforms such as Weibo.

To order Dr. Greger’s books in other countries and languages, please see this page for more information.

Please view our Community Guidelines for more details. Our comment etiquette is also available above the comments section of each video for easy reference.

The intention of the comment section under each video and blog post is to allow all members to share their stories, questions, and feedback with others in a welcoming, engaging, and respectful environment. Off-topic questions are permitted, in hopes more experienced users may be able to point them to more relevant videos that may answer their questions. Off-topic comments are not permitted. Vigorous debate is welcome so long as participants can disagree respectfully. Advertising products or services is not permitted.

To make NutritionFacts.org a place where people feel comfortable posting without feeling attacked, we have no tolerance for ad hominem attacks or comments that are racist, misogynist, homophobic, vulgar, or otherwise inappropriate. We’ve gotten more sensitive to this after a physician who graciously donated his time to answer people’s questions stopped contributing because of negative comments. So please, for everyone’s benefit, help us foster a community of mutual respect. Enforcement of these rules is done to the best of our ability on a case-by-case basis.

If you notice a post that might break these guidelines, please contact us. Thanks for your help keeping the comments section on NutritionFacts.org an engaging, respectful forum for all.

You may notice that next to some of the commenters’ names there is a “Health Support Volunteer” designation. These are folks who have graciously volunteered to assist in answering questions and being generally helpful on the site. Their opinions may not reflect the views of Dr. Greger or the best available science and should not be taken as medical advice.

The best available balance of evidence strongly suggests that a diet centered around whole plant foods is the healthiest. For specifics, please see Dr. Greger’s blog post Optimum Nutrition Recommendations.

Leave a comment under any of the videos or blog posts or post on our Facebook page or tweet us. Our (largely volunteer) social media team keeps an eye out for such requests and passes them along. You may also try to get your question answered on Dr. Greger’s monthly live Q&As, when he answers dozens of questions on YouTube and Facebook. Be sure to subscribe to our newsletter to find out about upcoming Q&As. To see all of his previous live chats, go here.

We’d be honored! We only ask that you please check out and adhere to our Copyright Guidelines.

As you can see on his speaking schedule, he used to do up to 40 talks a month (!) but has since significantly cut back so he can focus on research. With NutritionFacts.org he can now reach more people in his jammies than traveling around the world, but he misses the one-on-one interactions, so make sure to try to catch him if he comes to a city near you!

We do have a store you can purchase swag on DrGreger.org such as our “Plants are the Best Medicine” hoodie or a printed copy of our Evidence-based Eating Guide. You can also purchase copies of all past webinars here. It is not a recording of the webinar itself, but a compilation of the videos featured in the webinar. All of these videos are also available for free on NutritionFacts.org.

More than 10,000 articles are published in English-language medical journals every year on the subject of human nutrition. To choose which ones to make videos about, he uses three main principles: novelty, practicality, and engagement. The first question he asks: Is it groundbreaking? If it’s just yet another study showing broccoli is good for you, unless there’s some new unique insight it probably won’t make the cut. The second question: Is it practical? Can the information be used to make real-world kitchen or grocery store decisions? Who cares if there’s some new whortleberry with medicinal properties if it can only be foraged wild in the tundra somewhere. Finally, is there a way to make it interesting? That’s probably the greatest limiting factor. There’s lots of trailblazing new science with hands-on implications, but unless Dr. Greger can find a way to make it captivating, to add humor or intrigue, or solve some mystery, the paper may sadly end up in the recycling bin.

For the same reason that the website of the American Lung Association probably seems biased against tobacco. The Philip Morris Corporation has come up with more than a hundred studies showing the health benefits of smoking. For example, the nicotine may help schizophrenics with psychotic symptoms and smoking may affect immune function sufficient to benefit ulcerative colitis. The tobacco industry used these studies to accuse former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop of “selective reporting” when he argued that smoking caused cancer.

The reason Dr. Koop chose to focus on anti-tobacco studies is presumably because he was trying to accurately reflect what was in the scientific literature. The best available balance of evidence strongly suggests smoking is bad for most people’s health, and the same could be said for many foods. So when the tobacco industry dismisses public health professionals as being biased against tobacco–of course they’re biased against tobacco. To be biased against smoking is to be biased against death and disease. That’s their job.

No one has to smoke, but everyone has to eat. So there’s an additional opportunity cost to eating unhealthy foods beyond just how bad they themselves may be for our health. Every Twinkie we put in our mouth is a missed opportunity to eat something healthier.

Dr. Greger only started his comprehensive annual reviews of the nutrition literature in 2007, so though he does do limited iterative citation searches and explores older works to provide background and put new studies in historical context, in the last 50 years alone more than a quarter million papers have been published on nutrition in English-language medical journals. So he may have never come across study Y. If you think Dr. Greger may have missed an important study, please contact us — he would be very appreciative. And if you find an error, even better! Dr. Greger has already re-recorded dozens of videos because astute readers found egregious mistakes (like the chlorella debacle). Please help us make the site as robust as possible by leaving comments or sending us a note if you have any questions anytime about anything.

You may have noticed we often use words like “may” instead of “can,” “does,” or “is,” or include qualifiers like “appears to” or “seems to.” Why? Because that’s how science works. As one of Dr. Greger’s heroes Bertrand Russell famously said, “The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.”

In terms of inclusivity, our intention is to avoid exclusion, particularly of communities often marginalized. At the same time, given our commitment to accuracy, we use the terminology that researchers themselves use in their own studies. For example, if we use the words men or women when referring to biological sex, that may be because that is how the researchers identified the study participants.