I don't approve of the use of animals for any purpose that involves touching them - caging them.

I thought - being a musician doesn't help your medical credibility really. Although I started to rethink that when I learned that Albert Einstein was quite a violinist and in fact would perform a lot with symphonies. So if it's good enough for Albert, it's good enough for me.

Overall, our population is in the worst shape it's ever been. Children are in terrible shape. We have absolutely unprecedented numbers of obese and overweight children - one in three now. A generation ago it was something like one in ten.

In my own life, I decided to leave meat off my plate in medical school, but was a bit slow to realise that dairy products and eggs are not health foods either.

Music is the exact opposite of anxiety. It's there to relieve anxiety, to calm you down. And to just get the noise out of your biological system. So that, it's not going to make your immune system stronger than normal. What it does, in my view, is allow your immune system to work with the full force of normality.

The Stone Age gave us arrow heads and eventually knives, and that allowed us to kill animals in ways you couldn't before, and once you had them you were able to remove the skin and bones.

I am always struck by how difficult it is for people to see how much cruelty they are bringing not only upon animals but upon themselves and their loved ones and other people, how much we are screwing up the planet, how much we are hurting our own health, how hard it is to change all that, how eager people are to make a buck at everybody else's expense - all those things are discouraging.