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Tag: factory farming practices

  • How Healthy Are Baruka Nuts? | NutritionFacts.org

    How do barukas, also known as baru almonds, compare with other nuts?

    There is a new nut on the market called baru almonds, branded as “barukas” or baru nuts. Technically, it isn’t a nut but a seed native to the Brazilian Savannah, known as the Cerrado, which is now among the most threatened ecosystems on the planet. Over the last 30 years, much of the Cerrado’s ecosystem has been destroyed by extensive cattle ranching and feed crop production to fatten said cattle. If it were profitable not to cut down the native trees and instead sell baru nuts, for example, that could be good for the ecosystem’s health. But what about our health?

    “Although baru nuts are popular and widely consumed, few studies report on their biological properties.” They do have a lot of polyphenol phytonutrients, presumably accounting for their high antioxidant activity. (About 90% of their phytonutrients are present in the peel.) Are they nutritious? Yes, but do they have any special health benefits—beyond treating chubby mice?

    Researchers found that individuals fed baru nuts showed lower cholesterol, supposedly indicating the nuts “have great potential for dietary use” in preventing and controlling cholesterol problems. But the individuals were rats, not humans, and the baru nuts were compared to lard. Pretty much everything lowers cholesterol compared to lard. Nevertheless, there haven’t been any reports about the effect of baru nut consumption on human health, until this: A randomized, controlled study of humans found that eating less than an ounce a day for six weeks led to a 9% drop in LDL cholesterol. Twenty grams would be about 15 nuts or a palmful.

    Like many other nut studies, even though the research subjects were told to add nuts to their regular diets, there was no weight gain, presumably because nuts are so filling that we inadvertently cut down on other foods throughout the day. How good is a 9.4% drop in LDL? It’s the kind of drop we can get from regular almonds, though macadamias and pistachios may work even better, but those were at much higher doses. It appears that 20 grams of baru nuts work as well as 73 grams of almonds. So, on a per-serving basis or a per-calorie basis, baru nuts really did seem to be special.

    There are lower-dose nut studies that show similar or even better results. In this one, for instance, people were given 25 grams of almonds for just four weeks and got about a 6% drop in their LDL cholesterol. In another study, after consuming just 10 grams of almonds a day, or just seven individual almonds a day, study participants got more like a 30% drop in LDL during the same time frame as the baru nuts. Three times better LDL at half the dose with regular almonds, as you can see below and at 2:47 in my video Are Baruka Nuts the Healthiest Nut?.

    The biggest reason we are more confident in regular almonds than baru almonds is that studies have been done over and over in more than a dozen randomized controlled trials, whereas in the only other cholesterol trial of baru nuts, researchers found no significant benefit for LDL cholesterol, even at the same 20-gram dose given for even longer—a period of eight weeks.

    That’s disappointing, but it isn’t the primary reason I would suggest choosing other nuts instead of baru nuts. I would do so because we can’t get raw baru nuts. They contain certain compounds that must be inactivated by heat before we can eat them. The reason raw nuts are preferable is because of advanced glycation end-products (AGEs), so-called glycotoxins, which are known to contribute to increased oxidative stress and inflammation.

    Glycotoxins are naturally present in uncooked animal-derived foods, and dry-heat cooking like grilling can make things worse. The three highest recorded levels have been in bacon, broiled hot dogs, and roasted barbecued chicken skin—nothing even comes close to that, not even Chicken McNuggets, as you can see below and at 3:50 in my video.

    However, any foods high in fat and protein can create AGEs at high enough temperatures. So, although plant foods tend to “contain relatively few AGEs, even after cooking,” there are some high-fat, high-protein plant foods. But, again, AGEs aren’t a problem at all with most plant foods. See the AGE content in boiled tofu (in a soup, for instance), broiled tofu, a raw apple, a baked apple, a veggie burger—I was surprised that veggie burgers are so low in AGEs, even when baked or fried—and nuts and seeds, which are up in tofu territory, especially when roasted, which is why I would recommend raw nuts and seeds and nut and seed butters whenever you have a choice. See below and at 4:33 in my video.

    Doctor’s Note

    In my Daily Dozen checklist, I recommend eating a quarter cup of nuts or seeds or two tablespoons of nut or seed butter each day. Why? See related posts below. 

    For those unfamiliar with advanced glycation end-products (AGEs), check out the first two videos I did on them way back when: Glycotoxins and Avoiding Glycotoxins in Food.

    Michael Greger M.D. FACLM

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  • Eating with Hypothyroidism and Hyperthyroidism  | NutritionFacts.org

    Is the apparent protection of plant-based diets for thyroid health due to the exclusion of animal foods, the benefits of plant foods, or both?

    Several autoimmune diseases affect the thyroid gland, and Graves’ disease and Hashimoto’s thyroiditis are the most common. Graves’ disease results in hyperthyroidism, an overactive thyroid gland. Though slaughter plants are supposed to remove animals’ thyroid glands as they “shall not be used for human food,” should some neck meat slip in, you can suffer a similar syndrome called Hamburger thyrotoxicosis. That isn’t from your body making too much thyroid hormone, though. Rather, it’s from your body eating too much thyroid hormone. Graves’ disease is much more common, and meat-free diets may be able to help with both diseases, as plant-based diets may be associated with a low prevalence of autoimmune disease in general, as observed, for example, in rural sub-Saharan Africa. Maybe it’s because plants are packed with “high amounts of antioxidants, possible protective factors against autoimmune disease,” or because they’re packed with anti-inflammatory compounds. After all, “consuming whole, plant-based foods is synonymous with an anti-inflammatory diet.” But you don’t know until you put it to the test.

    It turns out that the “exclusion of all animal foods was associated with half the prevalence of hyperthyroidism compared with omnivorous diets. Lacto-ovo [dairy-and-egg] and pesco [fish] vegetarian diets were associated with intermediate protection.” But, for those eating strictly plant-based, there is a 52 percent lower odds of hyperthyroidism.

    As I discuss in my video The Best Diet for Hypothyroidism and Hyperthyroidism, this apparent protection “may be due to the exclusion of animal foods, the [beneficial] effects of plant foods, or both. Animal foods like meat, eggs, and dairy products may contain high oestrogen concentrations, which have been linked to autoimmunity in cell and animal studies.” Or it could be because the decrease in animal protein by excluding animal foods may downregulate IGF-1, which is not just a cancer-promoting growth hormone, but may play a role in autoimmune diseases. The protection could also come from the goodness in plants that may “protect cells against autoimmune processes,” like the polyphenol phytochemicals, such as flavonoids found in plant foods. Maybe it’s because environmental toxins build up in the food chain. For example, fish contaminated with industrial pollutants, like PCBs, are associated with an increased frequency of thyroid disorders.

    But what about the other autoimmune thyroid disease, Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, which, assuming you’re getting enough iodine, is the primary cause of hypothyroidism, an underactive thyroid gland? Graves’ disease wasn’t the only autoimmune disorder that was rare or virtually unknown among those living in rural sub-Saharan Africa, eating near-vegan diets. They also appeared to have less Hashimoto’s.

    There is evidence that those with Hashimoto’s have compromised antioxidant status, but we don’t know if it’s cause or effect. But if you look at the dietary factors associated with blood levels of autoimmune anti-thyroid antibodies, animal fats seem to be associated with higher levels, whereas vegetables and other plant foods are associated with lower levels. So, again, anti-inflammatory diets may be useful. It’s no surprise, as Hashimoto’s is an inflammatory disease—that’s what thyroiditis means: inflammation of the thyroid gland.

    Another possibility is the reduction in intake of methionine, an amino acid concentrated in animal protein, thought to be one reason why “regular consumption of whole-food vegan diets is likely to have a favourable influence on longevity through decreasing the risk of cancer, coronary [heart] disease, and diabetes.” Methionine restriction improves thyroid function in mice, but it has yet to be put to the test for Hashimoto’s in humans.

    If you compare the poop of patients with Hashimoto’s to controls, the condition appears to be related to a clear reduction in the concentration of Prevotella species. Prevotella are good fiber-eating bugs known to enhance anti-inflammatory activities. Decreased Prevotella levels are also something you see in other autoimmune conditions, such as multiple sclerosis and type 1 diabetes. How do you get more Prevotella? Eat more plants. If a vegetarian goes on a diet of meat, eggs, and dairy, within as few as four days, their levels can drop. So, one would expect those eating plant-based diets to have less Hashimoto’s, but in a previous video, I expressed concern about insufficient iodine intake, which could also lead to hypothyroidism. So, which is it? Let’s find out.

    “In conclusion, a vegan diet tended to be associated with lower, not higher, risk of hypothyroid disease.” Why “tended”? The associated protection against hypothyroidism incidence and prevalence studies did not reach statistical significance. It wasn’t just because they were slimmer either. The lower risk existed even after controlling for body weight. So, researchers think it might be because animal products may induce inflammation. The question I have is: If someone who already has Hashimoto’s, what happens if they change their diet? That’s exactly what I’ll explore next.

    This is the third in a four-video series on thyroid function. The first two were Are Vegans at Risk for Iodine Deficiency? and Friday Favorites: The Healthiest Natural Source of Iodine.

    Stay tuned for the final video: Diet for Hypothyroidism: A Natural Treatment for Hashimoto’s Disease. 

    Michael Greger M.D. FACLM

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  • Vegans and Iodine Deficiency Risk  | NutritionFacts.org

    Most plant-based milks are not fortified with iodine.

    “Adequate dietary iodine is required for normal thyroid function.” In fact, the two thyroid hormones are named after how many iodine atoms they contain: T3 and T4. “Given that iodine is extensively stored in the thyroid gland itself, it can safely be consumed intermittently,” so we don’t need to consume it every day. However, our overall diet does need a good source of it. Unfortunately, the common sources aren’t particularly health-promoting: iodized salt and dairy foods. (Iodine-based cleansers like betadine are used on cows “to sanitize the udders, resulting in leaching of iodine in the milk.”) Iodine may also be added to cattle feed, and some commercially produced breads contain food additives with iodine.

    If you put people on a paleo-type diet and cut out their dairy and table salt, they can develop an iodine deficiency, even though they double their intake of seafood, which can also be a source of iodine. What about those switching to diets centered around whole plant foods? They also cut down on ice cream and Wonder Bread, and if they aren’t eating anything from the sea, like seaweed or other sea vegetables, they can run into the same problem.

    A three-year-old’s parents reported striving to feed her only the healthiest foods, and her diet included only plant-based, unsalted, and unseasoned foods. She got no unprocessed foods, but she also got no vitamin supplementation, which could be deadly. Without vitamin B12, those on strictly plant-based diets can develop irreversible nerve damage, but in this case, a goiter arose first, due to inadequate iodine intake.

    In another case of “veganism as a cause of iodine-deficient hypothyroidism,” a toddler became ill after weaning. Before weaning, he was fine because his mother kept taking her prenatal vitamins, which fortunately contained iodine.

    Most vegetarians and vegans are apparently unaware of the importance of iodine intake during pregnancy, “for the neurodevelopment of the unborn child, similar to their omnivorous counterparts.” The American Thyroid Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics have recommended that women, even just planning on getting pregnant, should take a daily supplement containing 150 micrograms (mcg) of iodine, yet only 60 percent of prenatal vitamins marketed in the United States contain this essential mineral. So, despite the recommendations, about 40 percent of prenatal vitamins don’t contain it. “Therefore, it is extremely important that women, especially when pregnant, breastfeeding, or planning a pregnancy, read the labels of their multivitamin supplements to ensure that they are receiving an adequate amount of iodine.”

    Women of reproductive age have an average iodine level of 110 mcg/liter, which is fine for nonpregnant individuals, but we’d really like women to get at least 150 mcg/liter during pregnancy. (It’s basically a 24-hour urine test, in which iodine sufficiency is defined as 100 mcg/liter of urine in nonpregnant adults; the average vegan failed to reach this in the largest study done to date, one out of Boston.)

    The recommended average daily intake is 150 mcg per day for most people, which we can get in about a cup and a half of cow’s milk. Regrettably, plant-based milks aren’t typically fortified with iodine and average only about 3 mcg per cup. Although many plant-based milks are fortified with calcium, researchers found in the largest systematic study to date that only 3 out of 47 were fortified with iodine. Those that were fortified had as much as cow’s milk, but those that weren’t fell short, as you can see at 3:30 in my video Are Vegans at Risk for Iodine Deficiency?. 

    Plant-based milk companies brag about enriching their milks with calcium and often vitamins B12, D, and A, but only rarely are attempts made to match iodine content. The only reason cow’s milk has so much is that producers enrich the animals’ feed or it comes dripping off their udders. So, why don’t plant-milk companies add iodine, too? I was told by a food scientist at Silk that my carrageenan video played a role in the company switching to another thickener. Hopefully, Silk will see this video, too, and consider adding iodine, or maybe another company will snatch the opportunity for a market advantage.  

    The researchers conclude that individuals who consume plant-based milks not fortified with iodine may be at risk for iodine deficiency, unless they consume alternative dietary iodine sources, the healthiest of which are sea vegetables, which we’ll cover next.

    Doctor’s Note:

    This is the first in a four-video series on thyroid function. The next three are: 

    For more on iodine, see the related posts below.

    Michael Greger M.D. FACLM

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  • Antibiotic Resistance, Cultivated Meat, and Our Health  | NutritionFacts.org

    Medically important antibiotics are being squandered by animal agriculture to compensate for typical factory farming practices.

    Cultivating muscle meat directly from cells instead of raising and slaughtering animals would reduce the risk of foodborne illnesses “due to fecal contamination during slaughtering and evisceration of carcasses” because there would be no feces, no slaughter, and no carcasses to eviscerate. In addition, cultivating meat would also reduce the threat from antibiotic resistance.

    To compensate for overcrowded, stressful, and unhygienic conditions on factory farms, animals are typically dosed en masse with antibiotics. A lot of antibiotics. About 20 million pounds of medically important antibiotics a year, as you can see here and at 0:57 in my video, The Human Health Effects of Cultivated Meat: Antibiotic Resistance. 

    In the United States, for example, farm animals are given about 2 million pounds of penicillin drugs and 15 million pounds of tetracyclines annually. This is madness. 

    Antibiotic drugs important to human medicine go right into the feed and water of animals like cows, pigs, and chickens, by the ton and by the thousands of tons, as shown below and at 1:02 in my video. And that is all without a prescription.

    Ninety-seven percent of the tens of millions of pounds of antibiotics given to farm animals in the United States are bought over the counter—without a prescription or even an order from a veterinarian, as seen here and a 1:24. To get even a few milligrams of penicillin, we need a doctor’s prescription, because these are miracle wonder drugs that can’t be squandered. Meanwhile, farmers can just back their trucks up to the feedstore. 

    Now, half the Salmonella in retail meat—chicken, turkey, beef, and pork—is resistant to tetracycline, as shown below and at 1:50 in my video. About a quarter of the bugs are now resistant to three or more entire classes of antibiotics, including some resistant to “cephalosporins such as ceftriaxone [which] are critically important drugs we use to treat severe Salmonella infections, especially in children.” 

    Such agricultural applications for antimicrobials are now considered an “urgent threat to human health.” “The link between antibiotic use in animals and antibiotic resistance in humans is unequivocal.”

    As shown here and at 2:20 in my video, it all starts with the poop. 

    Antibiotic-resistant bugs are selected for and then can spread via meat or produce contaminated by poop or they can spread through the wind, the air, or the water, or be carried by insects. There are many pathways by which resistant superbugs can escape. So, even if you don’t eat meat, you can be “put at risk by the pathogens released from stressed, immunocompromised, contaminant-filled livestock” dosed with antibiotics. That’s one of the reasons the American Public Health Association called for a moratorium on factory farms, due in part to all the pollution from concentrated animal feed operations (CAFOs) to the surrounding communities. 

    Every year, more than five tons of animal manure are produced for every man, woman, and child in the United States. Again, it all starts with the poop. But cultivated meat means no guts, no poop, no fecal infections, and no antibiotics necessary. It also means no fecal or antibiotic residues left in “foodstuffs such as milk, egg, and meat” that can potentially cause a variety of side effects beyond just the transfer of antibiotic-resistant bacteria to humans.

    And, as you can see here and at 3:30 in my video, things are getting worse, not better. U.S. animal agriculture is using more antibiotics now than ever.

    This isn’t only because more animals are being raised for food, either. Antibiotic sales in the United States are outpacing meat production. Yes, meat production is going up, but there is a serious rise in antibiotic sales for meat production, as shown below and at 3:46.

    With the combined might of Big Ag and Big Pharma (who profit from selling all the drugs), it’s hard to imagine anything changing on the political side. The only hope may be a change in the production side.

    “The unstoppable rise of super-resistant strains of bacteria is a serious worldwide problem, resulting in 700 000 deaths every year,” and the projections for global antibiotic use in the production of farm animals are “ominous,” estimated to exceed 100,000 tons of antibiotics pumped into animals raised for food by 2030. Quite simply, we may be “on the path to untreatable infections” by using even some of our “last resort antibiotics,” like carbapenems, just to shave a few cents off a pound of meat.

    And it’s not just foodborne bacteria. Mad cow disease, swine flu, and bird flu have the potential to kill millions of people. Skeptical? I’ve got a book for you to read, whose author’s “superb storytelling ability makes every page of the book interesting and fascinating for both specialist and layperson.” (Thanks, Virology Journal, for the wonderful book review and calling my book “a must read.”)

    Given the threat of the chickens coming home to roost, an editorial in the American Journal of Public Health thought that “it is curious, therefore, that changing the way humans treat animals—most basically, ceasing to eat them or, at the very least, radically limiting the quantity of them that are eaten—is largely off the radar as a significant preventative measure. Such a change, if sufficiently adopted or imposed, could still reduce the chances of the much-feared influenza epidemic…Yet humanity does not consider this option.”

    That may be moot, though, because we could cultivate all the chicken we want, without guts or lungs.

    It’s hard to stress the importance of that American Journal of Public Health editorial. As devastating as COVID-19 has been, it may just be a dress rehearsal for an even greater threat waiting in the wings—the wings of chickens.

    According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the leading candidate for the next pandemic is a bird flu virus known as H7N9, which is a hundred times deadlier than COVID-19. Instead of 1 in 250 patients dying, H7N9 has killed 40 percent of the people it infects.

    The last time a bird flu virus jumped directly to humans and caused a pandemic, it triggered the deadliest plague in human history—the 1918 pandemic that killed 50 million people. That had a 2 percent death rate. What if we had a pandemic infecting billions where death was closer to a flip of a coin?

    The good news is that there is something we can do about it. Just as eliminating the exotic animal trade and live animal markets may go a long way toward preventing the next coronavirus pandemic, reforming the way we raise domestic animals for food may help forestall the next killer flu. The bottom line is that it’s not worth risking the lives of millions of people for the sake of cheaper chicken.

    If you missed the previous video, see The Human Health Effects of Cultivated Meat: Food Safety. Up next is The Human Health Effects of Cultivated Meat: Chemical Safety. 

    Michael Greger M.D. FACLM

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  • Food Safety and Cultivated Meat  | NutritionFacts.org

    What are the direct health implications of making clean meat—that is, meat without animals?

    In a 1932 article in Popular Mechanics entitled “Fifty Years Hence,” Winston Churchill predicted that we would one day “escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing, by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium.” Indeed, growing meat straight from muscle cells could reduce greenhouse gas emissions by as much as 96 percent, lower water usage by as much as 96 percent, and lower land usage by 99 percent.

    If we are to avoid dangerous climate change by the middle of the century, global meat consumption simply cannot continue to rise at the current rate. And there have certainly been initiatives like Meatless Mondays to try to get people to cut down, but so far, “they do not appear to be contributing in any significant way to the translation of the idea of eating less meat into the mainstream.” So, “in the light of people’s continued desire to eat meat, it seems the problems associated with consumption are unlikely to be fully resolved by attitude change. Instead, they must be addressed from an alternate perspective: changing the product.”

    From an environmental standpoint, it seems like a slam dunk. From an animal welfare standpoint, it could get rid of factory farms and slaughter plants for good, and I wouldn’t have to stumble across articles like this in the scientific literature: “Discerning Pig Screams in Production Environments.” I mean, what more do we need to know about modern animal agriculture than the fact that, “in recent years, a number of so-called…‘ag-gag’ laws have been proposed and passed…across the USA,” banning undercover photographing or videotaping inside such operations to keep us all in the dark.

    What about the human health implications of cultivated meat? I get the animal welfare, environment, and food security benefits, but what about “the potential for cultured meat to have health/safety benefits to individual consumers”? Nutritionally, the most important advantage is being able to swap out the type the fat. Right now, producers are growing straight muscle tissue, so it could be marbled with something less harmful than animal fat, though, of course, there’s still animal protein.

    When it comes to health, the biggest, clearest advantage is food safety, reducing the risk of foodborne pathogens. There has been a sixfold increase in food poisoning over the last few decades, with tens of millions “sickened annually by infected food in the United States alone,” including hundreds of thousands of hospitalizations and thousands of annual deaths. Contaminated meats and other animal products are the most common cause.

    When the cultivated meat industry calls its products clean meat, that’s not just a nod to clean energy. Food-poisoning pathogens like E. coli, Campylobacter, and Salmonella are fecal bacteria. They are a result of fecal contamination. They’re intestinal bugs, so we don’t have to worry about them if we’re making meat without the intestines.

    Yes, there are all sorts of “methods to remove visible fecal contamination” in slaughter plants these days and even experimental imaging technologies designed to detect more “diluted fecal contaminations,” but we are still left at the retail level with about 10 percent of chicken contaminated with Salmonella and 40 percent of retail chicken contaminated with Campylobacter. What’s more, most poultry and about half of retail ground beef and pork chops are contaminated with E. coli, an indicator of fecal residue, as shown here and at 3:47 in my video The Human Health Effects of Cultivated Meat: Food Safety. We don’t have to cook the crap out of cultivated meat, though, because there isn’t any crap to begin with.

    Doctor’s Note:

    This is the first in a three-video series on cultivated meat. Stay tuned for The Human Health Effects of Cultivated Meat: Antibiotic Resistance and The Human Health Effects of Cultivated Meat: Chemical Safety.

    I previously did a video series on plant-based meats. Check them in the related posts below.

    The videos are also all available in a digital download from a webinar I did: The Human Health Implications of Plant-Based and Cultivated Meat for Pandemic Prevention and Climate Mitigation.

    Michael Greger M.D. FACLM

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  • Do Taxpayer Subsidies Play a Role in the Obesity Epidemic?  | NutritionFacts.org

    Do Taxpayer Subsidies Play a Role in the Obesity Epidemic?  | NutritionFacts.org

    Why are U.S. taxpayers giving billions of dollars to support the likes of the sugar and meat industries?

    The rise in calorie surplus sufficient to explain the obesity epidemic was less a change in food quantity than in food quality. Access to cheap, high-calorie, low-quality convenience foods exploded, and the federal government very much played a role in making this happen. U.S. taxpayers give billions of dollars in subsidies to prop up the likes of the sugar industry, the corn industry and its high-fructose syrup, and the production of soybeans, about half of which is processed into vegetable oil and the other half is used as cheap feed to help make dollar-menu meat. You can see a table of subsidy recipients below and at 0:49 in my video The Role of Taxpayer Subsidies in the Obesity Epidemic. Why do taxpayers give nearly a quarter of a billion dollars a year to the sorghum industry? When was the last time you sat down to some sorghum? It’s almost all fed to cattle and other livestock. “We have created a food price structure that favors relatively animal source foods, sweets, and fats”—animal products, sugars, and oils.

    The Farm Bill started out as an emergency measure during the Great Depression of the 1930s to protect small farmers but was weaponized by Big Ag into a cash cow with pork barrel politics—including said producers of beef and pork. From 1970 to 1994, global beef prices dropped by more than 60 percent. And, if it weren’t for taxpayers “sweetening the pot” with billions of dollars a year, high-fructose corn syrup would cost the soda industry about 12 percent more. Then we hand Big Soda billions more through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly known as the Food Stamps Program, to give sugary drinks to low-income individuals. Why is chicken so cheap? After one Farm Bill, corn and soy were subsidized below the cost of production for cheap animal fodder. We effectively handed the poultry and pork industries about $10 billion each. That’s not chicken feed—or rather, it is! 

    This is changing what we eat. 

    As you can see below and at 2:03 in my video, thanks in part to subsidies, dairy, meats, sweets, eggs, oils, and soda were all getting relatively cheaper compared to the overall consumer food price index as the obesity epidemic took off, whereas the relative cost of fresh fruits and vegetables doubled. This may help explain why, during about the same period, the percentage of Americans getting five servings of fruits and vegetables a day dropped from 42 percent to 26 percent. Why not just subsidize produce instead? Because that’s not where the money is. 

    “To understand what is shaping our foodscape today, it is important to understand the significance of differential profit.” Whole foods or minimally processed foods, such as canned beans or tomato paste, are what the food business refers to as “commodities.” They have such slim profit margins that “some are typically sold at or below cost, as ‘loss leaders,’ to attract customers to the store” in the hopes that they’ll also buy the “value-added” products. Some of the most profitable products for producers and vendors alike are the ultra-processed, fatty, sugary, and salty concoctions of artificially flavored, artificially colored, and artificially cheap ingredients—thanks to taxpayer subsidies. 

    Different foods reap different returns. Measured in “profit per square foot of selling space” in the supermarket, confectionaries like candy bars consistently rank among the most lucrative. The markups are the only healthy thing about them. Fried snacks like potato chips and corn chips are also highly profitable. PepsiCo’s subsidiary Frito-Lay brags that while its products represented only about 1 percent of total supermarket sales, they may account for more than 10 percent of operating profits for supermarkets and 40 percent of profit growth. 

    It’s no surprise, then, that the entire system is geared towards garbage. The rise in the calorie supply wasn’t just more food but a different kind of food. There’s a dumb dichotomy about the drivers of the obesity epidemic: Is it the sugar or the fat? They’re both highly subsidized, and they both took off. As you can see below and at 4:29 and 4:35 in my video, along with a significant rise in refined grain products that is difficult to quantify, the rise in obesity was accompanied by about a 20 percent increase in per capita pounds of added sugars and a 38 percent increase in added fats. 

     

    More than half of all calories consumed by most adults in the United States were found to originate from these subsidized foods, and they appear to be worse off for it. Those eating the most had significantly higher levels of chronic disease risk factors, including elevated cholesterol, inflammation, and body weight. 

    If it really were a government of, by, and for the people, we’d be subsidizing healthy foods, if anything, to make fruits and vegetables cheap or even free. Instead, our tax dollars are shoveled to the likes of the sugar industry or to livestock feed to make cheap, fast-food meat. 

    Speaking of sorghum, I had never had it before and it’s delicious! In fact, I wish I had discovered it before How Not to Diet was published. I now add sorghum and finger millet to my BROL bowl which used to just include purple barley groats, rye groats, oat groats, and black lentils, so the acronym has become an unpronounceable BROLMS. Anyway, sorghum is a great rice substitute for those who saw my rice and arsenic video series and were as convinced as I am that we need to diversify our grains. 

    We now turn to marketing. After all of the taxpayer-subsidized glut of calories in the market, the food industry had to find a way to get it into people’s mouths. So, next: The Role of Marketing in the Obesity Epidemic. 

    We’re about halfway through this series on the obesity epidemic. If you missed any so far, check out the related videos below.

    Michael Greger M.D. FACLM

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  • Pre-Cut Vegetables and Endotoxins  | NutritionFacts.org

    Pre-Cut Vegetables and Endotoxins  | NutritionFacts.org

    Endotoxins can build up on pre-cut vegetables and undermine some of their benefits.

    You may remember when I introduced the endotoxin theory literature in my video The Exogenous Endotoxin Theory, which sought to explain how a single Sausage and Egg McMuffin meal could cripple artery function within hours of consumption. Maybe it’s because such a meal causes inflammation within hours of consumption by inducing low-grade endotoxemia, endotoxins in the bloodstream, as I previously discussed in my video Dead Meat Bacteria Endotoxemia. Endotoxins are structural components of gram-negative bacteria like E. coli, as you can see below and at 0:35 in my video Are Pre-Cut Vegetables Just as Healthy?. Certain foods, like ground meat, have high bacterial loads, so the thought was that the endotoxins in the food were triggering the inflammation.

    Critics of the theory argued that because we already have so many bacteria living in our colon, so many endotoxins just sitting down in our large intestine, a few more endotoxins in our food wouldn’t matter much in terms of causing systemic inflammation. After all, we have about two pounds of pure bacteria down there where the sun don’t shine, so there could be about a whole ounce of endotoxin. The lethal dose of intravenously injected endotoxin can be just a few millionths of a gram, so we could have a million lethal doses down there. However, the apparent paradox is explained by compartmentalization. It’s location, location, location.

    Poop is harmless when it’s in your colon, but it shouldn’t be injected into your bloodstream or eaten for that matter, particularly with fat, as that can promote the absorption of endotoxins in the small intestine. That goes for well-cooked poop, too.

    As you can see in the graph below and at 1:44 in my video, you can boil endotoxins for two hours straight with no detriment in their ability to induce inflammation. You could easily kill off any bacteria if you boiled your poop soup long enough, but you can’t kill off the endotoxins they make, just like you can’t cook the crap out of the meat. The consumption of meat contaminated with feces doesn’t just cause food poisoning. It can spill out onto the animal’s skin during the evisceration process when the digestive tract is ruptured. 

    Even when slaughterhouse workers trim off “visible fecal contamination,” the trimming itself can, ironically, sometimes lead to an increase in certain fecal bacteria, thought to be caused by “cross-contamination resulting from the handling to removal fecal contamination” from one carcass to the next. Then, even when properly stored in the fridge, endotoxins start accumulating along with the bacterial growth, as you can see in the graph below and at 2:30 in my video. 

    What about other foods? The highest levels of endotoxins were found in meat and dairy, and the lowest levels in fresh fruits and vegetables. That was testing whole fruits and vegetables, though. “Most spoilage organisms cannot penetrate the plant’s surface barrier and spoil the inner tissues.” That’s why fruits and veggies can sit out in the fields all day in the sun. But, once you cut them open, bacteria can gain access to the inner tissues, and, within a matter of days, your veggies can start to spoil. So, what does that mean for all those convenient pre-cut veggies these days?

    While endotoxins were not detectable in the majority of unprocessed vegetables, once you damage the protective outer layers of vegetables, you diminish their resistance to microbial growth. So, while freshly cut carrots and onions start with undetectable levels, day after day after they’ve been chopped, you start to get the growth of bacteria and, along with them, endotoxin buildup—even if they’ve been kept chilled in the fridge. Not as much as meat, but not insignificant either, as you can see in the graph below and at 3:27 in my video. Enough to make a difference, though? You don’t know until you put it to the test.

    What would happen if you switched people between foods expected to have a lower endotoxin load to foods containing more endotoxins? For instance, going from intact meat, such as a steak, and whole fruits and vegetables, to more like ground beef, pre-cut veggies, and more ready-made meals, as shown below and at 3:39 in my video. After just one week on the lower-endotoxin diet, people’s white blood cell count, which is an indicator of total body inflammation, dropped by 12 percent, then bumped back up by 14 percent after just four days on the higher-endotoxin diet. They also lost a pound and a half on the lower-endotoxin diet and slimmed their waists a bit. 

    They weren’t eating otherwise identical diets, though. It looks like they were eating more meat and cheese on the higher-endotoxin diet and perhaps getting more food additives in the ready-made meals. So, how do we know endotoxins had anything to do with it? That’s where the onion study comes in. Another study was designed based on two meals that differed in their content of bacterial products but were otherwise nutritionally identical. So, researchers compared freshly chopped onion to prechopped onion that had been refrigerated for a few days. The pre-chopped onion wasn’t spoiled; it was still before the “best before” date. So, would it make any difference?

    Within three hours of consumption, the fresh onion meal caused significant reductions in several markers of inflammation. That’s what fruits and vegetables do—they reduce inflammation—but these effects were not observed after eating the pre-chopped onions. For example, three hours after eating freshly chopped onions, researchers saw a significant drop in inflammatory status, but there was no significant change three hours after eating the same amount of pre-chopped onions, as you can see in the graph below and at 5:06 in my video. So, it’s not like the pre-chopped onions caused more inflammation, like in the meat, eggs, and dairy studies, but it did appear that some of the onion’s anti-inflammatory effects were extinguished. “In conclusion, the modern trend towards eating minimally processed vegetables”—pre-cut vegetables—“rather than whole [intact] foods is likely to be associated with increased oral endotoxin exposure.” It’s still better to eat pre-cut veggies than no veggies, but cutting your own might be the healthiest.

     For some other practical veggie videos and blogs check out the related posts below. 

    Michael Greger M.D. FACLM

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  • Dairy Milk Hormones’ Effects on Cancer  | NutritionFacts.org

    Dairy Milk Hormones’ Effects on Cancer  | NutritionFacts.org

    What are the effects of the female sex hormones in cow’s milk on men, women, and children? 
     
    All foods of animal origin contain hormones, but most of our dietary exposure to hormones comes from dairy products. By quantity, as you can see below and at 0:16 in my video The Effects of Hormones in Dairy Milk on Cancer, it is mostly prolactin, corticosteroids, and progesterone, but there are also a bunch of estrogens, which concentrate even further when other dairy products are made. For instance, hormones are five times more concentrated in cream and cheese, and ten times more in butter. 

    When it comes to steroid hormones in the food supply, about three-quarters of our exposure to ingested female sex steroids come from dairy, and the rest is split evenly between eggs and meat (including fish). Indeed, eggs contribute about as much as all meat combined, which makes a certain amount of sense since an egg comes straight from a hen’s ovary. Among the various types of meat, you get as much from white meat (fish and poultry) as you do from pork and beef, and this is just from natural hormones—not added hormone injections, like bovine growth hormone. So, it doesn’t matter if the meat is organic. Animals produce hormones because they’re animals, and their hormones understandably end up in animal products. 
     
    About half of the people surveyed “did not know that milk naturally contains hormones,” and many “lacked basic knowledge (22% did not know that cows only give milk after calving)”—that is, they didn’t realize what milk is for—feeding baby calves. Researchers suggested we ought to inform the public about dairy production practices. In response, one Journal of Dairy Science respondent wrote that telling the public about the industry’s new technologies, like transgenic animals (meaning genetically engineered farm animals), “or contentious husbandry practices” (such as taking away that newly born calf so we can have more of the milk or “zero-grazing for dairy cows”—i.e., not letting cows out on grass), “does not result in high rates of public approval,” so ixnay on the educationay. 
     
    The public may not know the extent to which they are exposed to estrogen through the intake of commercial milk produced from pregnant cows, which has potential public health implications. “Modern genetically improved dairy cows, such as the Holstein,” the stereotypical black and white cow, can get reimpregnated after giving birth and lactate throughout almost their entire next pregnancy, which means that, these days, commercial cow’s milk contains large amounts of pregnancy hormones, like estrogens and progesterone. 
     
    As you can see in the graph below and at 2:42 in my video, during the first eight months of a pregnant cow’s nine-month gestation, hormone levels in her milk shoot up more than 20-fold. Even so, we’re only talking about a millionth of a gram per quart, easily 10 to 20 times less estrogen hormones than you’d find in a birth control pill. In that case, would drinking it really have an effect on human hormone levels? 


    Researchers analyzed three different estrogens and one progesterone metabolite flowing through the bodies of seven men before and after they drank about a liter of milk. Within hours of drinking the milk, their hormone levels shot up, as you can see in the graph below and at 3:08 in my video. 


    The researchers also looked at the average levels of female sex steroids flowing through the bodies of six schoolchildren (with an average age of eight) before and after they drank about two cups of milk. Within hours of drinking the milk, their levels shot up, tripling or quadrupling their baseline hormone levels, as you can see in the graph below and at 3:23 in my video. So, one can imagine the effects milk might have on men or prepubescent children, but what about women? Presumably, women would have high levels of estrogen in their body in the first place, wouldn’t they? Well, not all women. 

    What about postmenopausal women and endometrial cancer, for example? Estrogens have “a central role” in the development of endometrial cancer, cancer of the lining of the uterus. “Milk and dairy products are a source of steroid hormones and growth factors that might have physiological effects in humans.” So, Harvard researchers followed tens of thousands of women and their dairy consumption for decades and found a significantly higher risk of endometrial cancer among postmenopausal women who consumed more dairy, as shown below and at 4:19 in my video. 
    What about dietary exposure to hormones and breast cancer? Unfortunately, “understanding the role of dietary hormone exposure in the population burden of breast cancer is not possible at this time.” 

    For more on the relationship between cancer and dairy, see related videos below. 

    I talk about the effect of dairy estrogen on men in Dairy Estrogen and Male Fertility.

    What about the phytoestrogens in soy? See here.

    Michael Greger M.D. FACLM

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