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Tag: PCBs

  • Fungal Toxins for Breakfast? | NutritionFacts.org

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    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.

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    Michael Greger M.D. FACLM

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

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    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.

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    Michael Greger M.D. FACLM

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  • What’s the Best Weight-Loss and Disease-Prevention Diet?  | NutritionFacts.org

    What’s the Best Weight-Loss and Disease-Prevention Diet?  | NutritionFacts.org

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    The most effective diet for weight loss may also be the most healthful.

    Why are vegetarian diets so effective in preventing and treating diabetes? Maybe it is because of the weight loss. As I discuss in my video The Best Diet for Weight Loss and Disease Prevention, those eating more plant-based tend to be significantly slimmer. That isn’t based on looking at a cross-section of the population either. You can perform an interventional trial and put it to the test in a randomized, controlled community-based trial of a whole food, plant-based diet.

    “The key difference between this trial [of plant-based nutrition] and other approaches to weight loss was that participants were informed to eat the WFPB [whole food, plant-based] diet ad libitum and to focus efforts on diet, rather than increasing exercise.” Ad libitum means they could eat as much as they want; there was no calorie counting or portion control. They just ate. It was about improving the quality of the food rather than restricting the quantity of food. In the study, the researchers had participants focus just on a diet rather than exercising more exercise because they wanted to isolate the effects of eating more healthfully.

    So, what happened? At the start of the study, the participants were, on average, obese at nearly 210 pounds (95 kg) with an average height of about 5’5” (165 cm). Three months into the trial, they were down about 18 pounds (8 kg)—without portion restrictions and eating all the healthy foods they wanted. At six months in, they were closer to 26 pounds (12 kg) lighter. You know how these weight-loss trials usually go, though. However, this wasn’t an institutional study where the participants were locked up and fed. In this trial, no meals were provided. The researchers just informed them about the benefits of plant-based eating and encouraged them to eat that way on their own, with their own families, and in their own homes, in their own communities. What you typically see in these “free-living” studies is weight loss at six months, with the weight creeping back or even getting worse by the end of a year. But, in this study, the participants were able to maintain that weight loss all year, as you can see below and at 1:57 in my video.

    What’s more, their cholesterol got better, too, but the claim to fame is that they “achieved greater weight loss at 6 and 12 months than any other trial that does not limit energy [caloric] intake or mandate regular exercise.” That’s worth repeating. A whole food, plant-based diet achieved the greatest weight loss ever recorded at 6 and 12 months compared to any other such intervention published in the medical literature. Now, obviously, with very low-calorie starvation diets, you can drop down to any weight. “However, medically supervised liquid ‘meal replacements’ are not intended for ongoing use”—obviously, they’re just short-term fixes—“and are associated with ‘high costs, high attrition rates, and a high probability of regaining 50% or more of lost weight in 1 to 2 years.’” In contrast, the whole point of whole food, plant-based nutrition is to maximize long-term health and longevity.

    What about low-carb diets? “Studies on the effects of low-carbohydrate diets have shown higher rates of all-cause mortality”—meaning a shorter lifespan—“decreased peripheral flow-mediated dilation [artery function], worsening of coronary artery disease, and increased rates of constipation, headache, halitosis [bad breath], muscle cramps, general weakness, and rash.”

    The point of weight loss is not to fit into a smaller casket. A whole food, plant-based diet is more effective than low-carb diets for weight loss and has the bonus of having all good side effects, such as decreasing the risk of diabetes beyond just weight loss.

    “The lower risk of type 2 diabetes among vegetarians may be explained in part by improved weight status (i.e., lower BMI). However, the lower risk also may be explained by higher amounts of ingested dietary fiber and plant protein, the absence of meat- and egg-derived protein and heme iron, and a lower intake of saturated fat. Most studies report the lowest risk of type 2 diabetes among individuals who adhere to vegan diets. This may be explained by the fact that vegans, in contrast to ovo- and lacto-ovo-vegetarians, do not ingest eggs. Two separate meta-analyses linked egg consumption with a higher risk of type 2 diabetes.”

    Maybe it’s eating lower on the food chain, thereby avoiding the highest levels of persistent organic pollutants, like dioxins, PCBs, and DDT in animal products. Those have been implicated as a diabetes risk factor. Or maybe it has to do with the gut microbiome. With all that fiber in a plant-based diet, it’s no surprise there would be fewer disease-causing bugs and more protective gut flora, which can lead to less inflammation throughout the body that “may be the key feature linking the vegan gut microbiota with protective health effects”—including the metabolic dysfunction you can see in type 2 diabetes.

    The multiplicity of benefits from eating plant-based can help with compliance and family buy-in. “Whereas a household that includes people who do not have diabetes may be unlikely to enthusiastically follow a ‘diabetic diet,’ a low-fat plant-based approach is not disease-specific and has been shown to improve other chronic conditions. While the patient [with diabetes] will likely see improvement in A1C [blood sugar control], a spouse suffering from constipation or high blood pressure may also see improvements, as may children with weight issues,” if you make healthy eating a family affair.

    This is just a taste of my New York Times best-selling book, How Not to Diet. (As with all of my books, all proceeds I received went to charity.) Watch the book trailer. You may also be interested in its companion, The How Not to Diet Cookbook.

    Check out my hour-long Evidence-Based Weight Loss lecture for more. 

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    Michael Greger M.D. FACLM

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  • What About Omega-3s and Vegetarians’ Stroke Risk?  | NutritionFacts.org

    What About Omega-3s and Vegetarians’ Stroke Risk?  | NutritionFacts.org

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    Does eating fish or taking fish oil supplements reduce stroke risk? 

    In my last video, we started to explore what might explain the higher stroke risk in vegetarians found in the EPIC-Oxford study. As you can see below and at 0:25 in my video Vegetarians and Stroke Risk Factors: Omega-3s?, vegetarians have a lower risk of heart disease and cardiovascular disease overall, but a higher risk of stroke. We looked into vitamin D levels as a potential mechanism, but that didn’t seem to be the reason. What about long-chain omega-3s, the fish fats like EPA and DHA? 

    Not surprisingly, their levels are found to be “markedly lower in vegetarians and particularly in vegans than in meat-eaters.” They’re about 30 percent lower in vegetarians and more than half as low in vegans, as you can see below and at 0:45 in my video. 

    According to “the most extensive systematic assessment of effects of omega-3 fats on cardiovascular health to date,” combining 28 randomized controlled trials, stroke has no benefit. There is evidence that taking fish oil “does not reduce heart disease, stroke or death,” or overall mortality, either. This may be because, on the one hand, the omega-3s may be helping, but the mercury in fish may be making things worse. “Balancing the benefits with the contaminant risks of fish consumption has represented a challenge for regulatory agencies and public health professionals.”  

    For example, dietary exposure to polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) may be associated with an increased risk of stroke. In one study, for instance, “neither fish nor intake of PCBs was related to stroke risk. However, with adjustment for fish intake,” that is, at the same fish intake, “dietary PCBs were associated with an increased risk of total stroke,” so the PCB pollutants may be masking the fish benefit. If we had a time machine and could go back before the Industrial Revolution and find fish in an unpolluted state, we might find that it is protective against stroke. Still, looking at the EPIC-Oxford study data, if fish were protective, then we might expect that the pescatarians (those who eat fish but no other meat) would have lower numbers of strokes since they would have the fish benefit without the risk from other meat. But, no. That isn’t the reality. So, it doesn’t seem to be the omega-3s either.

    Let’s take a closer look at what the vegetarians are eating.

    When it comes to plant-based diets for cardiovascular disease prevention, all plant foods are not created equal. There are two types of vegetarians—those who do it for their health, and those who do it for ethical reasons, like global warming or animals—and the latter tend to eat different diets. Health vegans tend to eat more fruits and fewer sweets, for instance, and you don’t tend to see them chomping down on vegan donuts, as shown below and at 2:41 in my video. 

    “Concerns about health and costs were primary motivations for [meat] reduction” in the United States. A middle-class American family is four times more likely to reduce meat for health reasons compared to environmental or animal welfare concerns, as you can see in the graph below and at 2:55 in my video. 

    But in the United Kingdom, where the EPIC-Oxford stroke study was done, ethics was the number one reason given for becoming vegetarian or vegan, as you can see in below and at 3:05 in my video.

    We know that “plant-based diets, diets that emphasize higher intakes of plant foods and lower intakes of animal foods, are associated with a lower risk of incident cardiovascular disease, cardiovascular disease mortality, and all-cause mortality”—a lower risk of dying from all causes put together—“in a general US adult population.” But, that’s only for healthy plant foods. Eating a lot of Wonder Bread, soda, and apple pie isn’t going to do you any favors. “For all types of plant-based diets, however, it is crucial that the choice of plant foods is given careful consideration.” We should choose whole fruits and whole grains over refined grains and avoid trans fats and added sugars. Could it be that the veggie Brits were just eating more chips? We’ll find out next. 

    Another strikeout trying to explain the increased risk. Could it be that the vegetarians were eating particularly unhealthy diets? Labels like vegetarian or vegan just tell me what is not being eaten. You can be vegetarian and consume a lot of unhealthy fare, like french fries, potato chips, and soda. That’s why, as a physician, I prefer the term whole food, plant-based nutrition. That tells me what you do eat. You eat vegetables and follow a diet centered around the healthiest foods out there.

    If you missed the first four videos in this series, see:

     Surprised about the fishy oil findings? Learn more: Is Fish Oil Just Snake Oil? and Omega-3s and the Eskimo Fish Tale. 

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    Michael Greger M.D. FACLM

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  • Say No to Fish for Five Years Before Pregnancy  | NutritionFacts.org

    Say No to Fish for Five Years Before Pregnancy  | NutritionFacts.org

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    Advisories telling pregnant women to cut down on fish consumption may be too late for certain persistent pollutants. 

    If you intentionally expose people to mercury by feeding them fish (like tuna) for 14 weeks, the level of mercury in their bloodstream goes up, as you can see in the graph below and at 0:14 in my video Avoiding Fish for Five Years Before Pregnancy. As soon as they stop eating fish, it drops back down such that they can detox by half in about 100 days. (So, the half-life of total mercury in our blood is approximately 100 days.) Even if you eat a lot of fish, within a few months of stopping, you can clear much of the mercury out of your blood. But what about your brain? 

    The results from modeling studies are all over the place, providing “some extreme estimates (69 days vs. 22 years).” When put to the test, though, autopsy findings suggest the half-life may be even longer still at 27.4 years. Once mercury gets in our brains, it can be decades before our body can get rid of even half of it. So, better than detoxing is not “toxing” in the first place. 

    That’s the problem with advisories that tell pregnant women to cut down on fish intake. For pollutants with long half-lives, such as PCBs and dioxins, “temporary fish advisory-related decreases in daily contaminant intake will not necessarily translate to appreciable decreases in maternal POP [persistent organic pollutant] body burdens,” which help determine the dose the baby gets. 

    Consider this: As you can see in the graph below and at 1:32 in my video, an infant may be exposed to a tumor-promoting pollutant called PCB 153 if their mom ate fish. But if mom ate only half the fish or no fish at all for one year, levels wouldn’t budge much. A substantial drop in infant exposure levels may only be seen if the mom had cut out all fish for five years before getting pregnant. That is the “fish consumption caveat.” “[T]he only scenarios that produced a significant impact on children’s exposures required mothers to eliminate fish from their diets for 5 years before their children were conceived. The model predicted that substituting produce for fish would reduce prenatal and breastfeeding exposures by 37% each and subsequent childhood exposures by 23%.” So, “a complete ban on fish consumption may be preferable to targeted, life stage–based fish consumption advisories…” 

    If you are going to eat fish, though, which is less polluted—wild-caught or farmed fish? In a recent study, researchers measured the levels of pesticides, such as DDT, PCBs, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, and toxic elements, such as mercury and lead, in a large sample of farmed and wild-caught seafood. In general, they found that farmed fish were worse. Think of the suspect as farmed and dangerous. The measured levels of most organic and many inorganic pollutants were higher in the farmed seafood products and, consequently, so were the intake levels for the consumer if such products were consumed. For example, as you can see in the graphs below and at 3:09 in my video, there was significantly more contamination by polycyclic hydrocarbons, persistent pesticides, and PCBs in all of the farmed fish samples, including the salmon and seabass (though it didn’t seem to matter for crayfish), and the wild-caught mussels were actually worse. If you split adult and child consumers into those only eating farmed seafood or only eating wild-caught seafood, the level of pollutant exposure was significantly worse with the farmed seafood.  

    Overall, the researchers, who were Spanish, investigated a total of 59 pollutants and toxic elements. They concluded: “Taking all these data as a whole, and based on the rates of consumption of fish and seafood of the Spanish population, our results indicate that a theoretical consumer who chose to consume only aquaculture [farmed] products would be exposed to levels of pollutants investigated about twice higher than if this theoretical consumer had chosen only products from extractive fisheries [wild-caught fish].” So, when it comes to pollutants, you could eat twice the amount of fish if you stuck to wild-caught. That’s easier said than done, though. Mislabeling rates for fish and other seafood in the United States are between 30 and 38 percent, so the average fraud rate is around one in three.  

    In my previous video on this topic, How Long to Detox from Fish Before Pregnancy, I mentioned a study that suggests detoxing from fish for one year to lower mercury levels, but other pollutants take longer to leave our system. 

    For optimum brain development, consider a pollutant-free source of omega-3 fatty acids. Check out Should Vegan Women Supplement with DHA during Pregnancy?. 

    Aside from pollutants, there are other reasons we may want to avoid excessive amounts of animal protein. See Flashback Friday: The Effect of Animal Protein on Stress Hormones, Testosterone, and Pregnancy.

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    Michael Greger M.D. FACLM

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