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Tag: organic foods

  • Fungal Toxins for Breakfast? | NutritionFacts.org

    One of the few food contaminants found at higher levels in those eating plant-based diets are mycotoxins, fungal toxins in moldy food ingredients, such as oats.

    In France, exposure to dietary contaminants was compared between vegetarians and meat-eaters, and the results showed that exposures to persistent organic pollutants like PCBs and dioxins were dramatically lower among those eating more plant-based foods. This was due to their avoidance of foods of animal origin, though they did have higher estimated exposure to some mycotoxins, fungal toxins present in moldy food.

    There are many types of mold on the planet, possibly millions, and the vast majority are harmless. However, over the last several years, certain mold toxins, such as aflatoxin and ochratoxin, have been popping up in breakfast cereals. Hundreds of samples were taken off store shelves, and about half were found to be contaminated with ochratoxin, but those store shelves were in Pakistan, which has a sub-tropical climate with monsoons and flash floods, leading to fungal propagation. Similar results have since popped up in Europe, in Serbia, for instance. They’ve also been found in Spain and seen in Portugal. Then, mycotoxins were discovered in breakfast cereals in Canada. What about breakfast cereals sold in the United States?

    Researchers collected 144 samples and, similar to other countries, found that about half contained ochratoxin, but only about 7% exceeded the maximum limit established by the European Commission. What is the significance of finding ochratoxin in U.S. breakfast cereals? In the largest study to date, which included nearly 500 samples of cereal off store shelves across the United States, overall detection rates were about 40%, though only 16 of the samples violated the European standards. All the cereals with ochratoxin were oat-based; however, about 1 in 13 of the oat-based cereal samples tested were contaminated.

    Ochratoxin has become increasingly regulated by many countries to minimize chronic exposure. Shown below and at 2:23 in my video Ochratoxin in Breakfast Cereals are the current regulations for mycotoxins in cereal-based baby foods, for example, worldwide.

    Some countries are very strict, like in the European Union; other countries are less so, and one country in particular has no standards at all. Ochratoxin is not currently regulated at all in the United States.

    What about sticking to organic products? One might expect them to be worse due to the fact that fungicides are not allowed in organic production. However, “mycotoxin concentrations are usually similar or reduced in organic compared with conventional products.” For example, in one of the breakfast cereal studies, researchers found similar contamination, and the same was found for infant foods. It cannot be concluded that organic is better than conventional from a mycotoxin perspective. “Despite no use of fungicides, an organic system appears generally able to maintain mycotoxin contamination at low levels.” But how much is that saying, given how widespread it is? How concerned should we be about the public health effects from “long-term exposure to this potent mycotoxin”?

    If you look at blood samples taken from populations going back decades, sometimes 100% of people turn up positive for ochratoxin circulating in their bloodstream. In some sense, mycotoxins “are unavoidable contaminants of food,” since they are not easy to detect and many of them can remain hidden. And, once foods have become contaminated, mycotoxins aren’t destroyed by cooking. So, are there some foods we should simply try to avoid due to a higher risk of contamination? That’s exactly the question I’m going to address next.

    Doctor’s Note

    This is the first video in a four-part series on mold toxins. Check related posts below for the other three.

    Michael Greger M.D. FACLM

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  • Chemical Safety, Cultivated Meat, and Our Health  | NutritionFacts.org

    More than 95 percent of human exposure to industrial pollutants like dioxins and PCBs comes from fish, other meat, and dairy.

    By cultivating muscle meat directly, without associated organs like intestines, the incidence of foodborne diseases “could be significantly reduced,” as could exposure to antibiotics, “pesticides, arsenic, dioxins, and hormones associated with conventional meat.” Currently, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved seven hormone drugs to bulk up the production of milk and meat. “In the European Union, there exists a total ban on such use,” however. Even without injected hormones, though, animal products naturally have hormones because they come from animals. “Eggs, example given, contribute more to the dietary intake of estradiol [estrogens] than beef, whether the animal is legally treated with hormones or not.” After all, eggs come straight from a hen’s ovaries, so, of course, they’re swimming with hormones. But if you’re directly growing just muscle meat or egg white protein, you don’t need to include reproductive organs, adrenal glands, or any of the associated hormones.

    “Chemical safety is another concern for meat produced under current production systems.” There are chemical toxicants and industrial pollutants that build up in the food chain, such as pesticides, PCBs, heavy metals, and flame retardants, but there is no food chain with cultivated meat. We could produce all the tuna we wanted, with zero mercury.

    When the World Health Organization determined that processed meat was a known human carcinogen and unprocessed meat a probable human carcinogen, it wasn’t even talking about the carcinogenic environmental pollutants. When researchers tested retail meat for the presence of “33 chemicals with calculated carcinogenic potential,” like polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), organochlorine pesticides like DDT, and dioxin-like PCBs, they concluded that, in order to reduce the risk of cancer, we should limit beef, pork, or chicken consumption to a maximum of five servings a month.

    Why cultivate meat at all when you can just buy organic? Surprisingly, “consumption of organic meat does not diminish the carcinogenic potential associated with the intake of persistent organic pollutants (POPs).” A number of studies have recently compared the presence of environmental contaminants in organic meat versus conventional meat, and the researchers found, surprisingly, that organic meat was sometimes more contaminated. Not only organic beef either. Higher levels were also found in pork and poultry.

    If you look at the micropollutants and chemical residues in both organic and conventional meat, several environmental contaminants, including dioxins, PCBs, lead, and arsenic, were measured at significantly higher levels in the organic samples. As you can see below and at 2:56 in my video, The Human Health Effects of Cultivated Meat: Chemical Safety, the green is organic meat, and the blue is conventional. 

    Cooking helps to draw off some of the fat where the PCBs are concentrated, as shown here and at 3:01.

    Seafood seems to be an exception. Steaming, for example, generally increases contaminant levels, increasing contaminant exposure and concentrating mercury levels as much as 47 percent, as you can see here and at 3:15 in my video. Better not to have toxic buildup in the first place.

    More than 95 percent of human exposure to industrial pollutants like dioxins and PCBs comes from foods like meat, including fatty fish, and dairy, but the pollutants don’t appear magically. The only way the chicken, fish, and other meat lead to human exposure is because the animals themselves built up a lifetime of exposure in our polluted world, from incinerators, power plants, sewer sludge, and on and on, as you can see here and at 3:40 in my video.

    Unlike conventional meat production, a slaughter-free harvest would not only mean no more infected animals, but no more contaminated animals either. In terms of pollutants, it would be like taking a time machine back before the Industrial Revolution.

    Doctor’s Note:

    Cultivated meat means less contamination with fecal residues, toxic pollutants, antibiotics, and hormones; up to 99 percent less environmental impact; and zero pandemic risk. Cultivated meat allows people to have their meat and eat it, too, without affecting the rest of us.

    This is the final video in this cultivated meat series. If you missed the first two, check out the videos on Food Safety and Antibiotic Resistance.

    I previously did a video series on plant-based meats; see the related posts below.

    All videos in the plant-based meat series are also available in a digital download from a webinar I did. SeeThe Human Health Implications of Plant-Based and Cultivated Meat for Pandemic Prevention and Climate Mitigation.

    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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