Transcription
Hey there, Jeff Nelson here. Evette Shores, thanks for tuning in. This is video number three on my series of videos about nuts. If you haven't seen the first two videos, I'm gonna put links down in the description, and I encourage you to check them out when you have a chance.
The first video in this series was about how the nut industry has paid for many, and even most, of the research about nuts, and how it's low-quality research. It's biased, it's very misleading. In my second video, I named the names of some of the top nut researchers who get a lot of money from the nut industry, and I showed that the idea that nuts protect against heart attacks is false. I showed that the idea that you'll live longer because of nuts is nonsense, and it's based on weak associations. And the only researchers that are saying this are the ones that have been paid a lot of money by the nut industry.
Now, why am I making these videos? Well, because I've seen in recent years a few vegan advocates who promote a lot of commercial science that is very low-quality science, that's biased. What I call science for profit. And they read this, and they come up with all kinds of rules and recommendations and things you should eat, and that you need to eat this every day. And they leave people thinking, you know, you have to do this, you have to do that. Are you sure you're getting enough of this? And, you know, take these supplements. And so they make the vegan diet seem very complicated, and it causes worry and anxiety in some people. You can ignore people that are using crappy commercial science that comes from an advertising agency, basically.
I'm gonna talk about nuts right now, but toward the end of this video, I'm going to talk about a few other superfoods to show how the same concepts apply when evaluating, you know, whether research is good or commercial. But at this point, I'm gonna talk about this idea that some vegan advocates push that you need to eat some fat in order to better absorb certain nutrients. So the thinking goes like this: carotenoids are substances in fruits and veggies, and carotenoids contain antioxidants. Now, carotenoids are fat-soluble, and when you eat your veggies raw, you need to eat them along with a little fat, or else you won't absorb them and you'll be deficient.
Now, as you're about to see, this is just a marketing trick. This is advertising science. It was dreamed up by an ad agency working for Proctor & Gamble in order to try to increase sales of a salad dressing of one of their brands, which is Kraft Foods. And then the California Avocado Commission decided to jump on the same bandwagon, and soon after, they did their own study, this time with avocados. Now, both of these studies were set up to try to increase sales, either of salad dressing or avocados, but they're all baloney.
Why are they baloney? Well, the first reason is because if you're eating a healthy plant-based diet, you are eating and absorbing plenty of carotenoids. You don't have to give it a second thought. If you eat even the small amount of fruits and veggies that the government recommends, you are gonna be fine. You don't have to worry about this at all. Because when you chop up any raw veggies, or when you cook them, you dramatically increase absorption. The issue is gone.
The research around this idea of being able to absorb carotenoids using some oil or fat only appears to work when people have been depleted of carotenoids for anywhere from four days to two weeks. That's how these studies are designed. I call this a rigged study because it's structured in order to achieve a predetermined result. They were testing to get a result that you wouldn't get in a normal person. This is a special diet that they're testing, but if you just took normal people off the street, this would not work.
The second reason you don't need to worry about having fat when you eat raw veggies is that if you happen to have a meal where you don't have any fat in it, and you just have these raw veggies, your body stores their carotenoids in your cells, and the next time you have a meal that day, or the next day, with a little fat in it, not very much, it releases those carotenoids, and they are absorbed. So this idea that you need to eat some fat at the same meal, it's salad dressing science. It's not a real thing.
Finally, there is absolutely no research published that I could find anywhere that shows that adding nuts to raw veggies or to a salad will help increase absorption in any way. So if anybody has told you, "Hey, you should add some nuts in order to increase, you know, absorption or something like that," they're just making that up. Ask them to show you a study, to give you a cite to a study that shows that that actually works.
So here's the story. In the late 1990s, there was some research showing that carotenoids were better absorbed from cooked tomatoes than raw ones, and tomato paste allowed for more absorption. Vegetables were heated up, some fat was included. This is the study here. So in 2004, Procter & Gamble came up with this idea to test their salad dressing so they could potentially make some advertising claims, just like the nut industry. That I discussed in our last video, where the nut industry had to overcome the low-fat, you know, recommendations of the 1980s and 1990s. The salad dressing, you know, business was in the same position. So they were looking for ways to kind of, you know, promote fat and full-fat dressings. And this was, this was what they decided.
Here's the study. It's called "Carotenoid bioavailability is higher from salads ingested with full-fat than with fat-reduced salad dressings as measured with electromechanical detection." The study was paid for by Procter & Gamble, as I say, and it was actually conducted by two employees of the company, Dale Cooper and Allison Eldridge. They took ten people between the ages of 19 and 28. And they told them not to eat any foods containing carotenoids for four days leading up to the test. They kicked three people out of this group. And on the morning of the test, they tested the blood. And one of the guys had too high of a carotenoid level in his blood. So, you know, that was not what they wanted. They thought, "Well, maybe he cheated. You know, maybe he had an orange, or maybe he had something with some carotenoids in it." So they kicked him out of this study. The study was done on only seven people.
Then they fed the study participants three different raw salads on different days, with a four-day fast of any carotenoid foods before that. And the main salad contained Kraft Good Seasons Italian dressing mix along with water, vinegar, and canola oil. The salads had either no fat, or six grams of fat, or 28 grams of fat from the oil. And they found that adding the fat increased the absorption of the carotenoids. And when they ate salad containing more fat, they had more carotenoids in their blood in the hours shortly after eating compared to the one with very little or no fat.
Now, this is sort of a whoop-de-doo study. I mean, big deal. You can increase people's absorption of carotenoids over a few hours using fat, and if you start people off all their carotenoids to begin with, so they don't have any. If you let these people eat their normal diet and come in, then the test fails because people would have fine levels of carotenoids from eating a normal diet. It only works if you get people's blood carotenoid level artificially low by stopping them from eating things like potatoes and pizza and oranges and veggies and all the many foods that plant-based eaters are always eating. So I don't know any healthy plant-based eater that would need to give this silly commercial research a second thought.
We know that you get plenty of carotenoids just by chopping up and cooking foods. For example, from this textbook, it says, "Normal cooking and food processing procedures can enhance the bioavailability of carotenoids relative to raw vegetables. These treatments disrupt cell walls and may cleave carotenoids from proteins, facilitating the liberation and thus the absorption of carotenoids. Heat processing converts some of the naturally occurring trans isomers of beta-carotene to the cis configuration." And further down, it says, "In the practical situation of changing diet to improve health, fat intake is lowered and fruit and vegetable intake is increased. For women making these dietary changes, the resulting decrease in calories from fat and increase in fiber did not negate an elevation in plasma carotenoid concentrations." And they named a study.
So this study they're talking about looked at women who were eating a low-fat diet, at 15% of fat calories, and in order to get protection from a recurrence of breast cancer. And they found they had plenty of carotenoids in their blood. Quoting the study, it says, "Circulating carotenoid concentrations are responsive to a high vegetable diet intervention which also included reduced dietary fat and increased fiber intakes to reduce risk for breast cancer recurrence." And we know that carotenoids include starchy potatoes. So if you're eating sweet potatoes, winter squash, you know, if you're eating a normal starch-based diet, you've got no worries about carotenoid absorption.
And we see that people who switch from the standard American diet to Dean Ornish's diet, which is 10% of calories from fat, they were followed very carefully over years and was all documented, and they had a dramatic increase in carotenoids simply because they ate more fruits and veggies. The study says that "intake of all the major dietary carotenoids were substantially, in some by four times, in just the first year of eating the Ornish diet." And this Table One shows the increase in the intervention group eating the Ornish diet between baseline to start and year one, where they all, as you can see, they all shot up the amount of carotenoids. So they had much more carotenoids in their blood when they ate a low-fat, very low-fat diet compared to the control group eating the standard American diet.
Now we can look at this textbook, and it's titled "Dietary Reference Intakes for Vitamin C, Vitamin E, Selenium, and Carotenoids." This chart shows bioavailability, which means absorption, from low to high. And the right column is the type of food, the left column is an example of that food. Here we see raw leafy green vegetables like spinach, that's the lowest absorption. Raw yellow-orange veggies like carrots, peppers, those are higher absorption. Absorption, then mildly cooked yellow-orange veggies, then processed with fat, then tubers like sweet potatoes, yams, and squash, then fruits, which have very high absorption, then supplements.
And the truth is, people increase their carotenoid blood levels just by eating more fruits and veggies. The big thing missing from the recommendations made by this Kraft salad dressing research, or from anybody who might be telling people they should add fat to increase absorption, is this: Where is the evidence that anybody is deficient in carotenoids? Where is even one vegan, or even one raw vegan, shown to be deficient? And there's no evidence whatsoever. It's a fake problem. This is a problem, quote-unquote, created by the salad dressing industry to make people falsely believe that they need to buy salad dressing in order to be healthier. It's a theoretical, you know, scaremongering deficiency based on nonsense.
The people going into these studies are deprived and depleted of carotenoids, so that when they eat some with some fat, you see a reaction. But if they were eating a normal diet, it's moot. Nobody would even be thinking about this. So not only is there no evidence that anyone eating a healthy plant-based diet has a carotenoid deficiency, but there's no evidence that having more and more carotenoids has any benefit. Okay, we know too much carotenoids when isolated out actually promote cancer. They promote lung cancer, and they promote cancer from asbestos. That's been shown in studies.
So making this study, as I said, the California Avocado Commission one year later, in 2005, decided they wanted to try and sell more avocados using the same trick, this game scheme. And here's the study. And as you can see, it was paid for by the California Avocado Commission. And under experimental design, it says, "All subjects were instructed to avoid carotenoid-rich foods for two weeks as a washout period before each clinical visit." A list of foods to avoid based on USDA nutrition counseling center was provided. So that meant for two weeks, these participants had to avoid foods like carrots, yams, no white potatoes, no sweet potatoes, no french fries, no pizza, no spaghetti, no sauce, tomato sauce, no papaya, no watermelon, no cantaloupe, no mangos, no spinach, no kale, no tomatoes, no bell peppers, no oranges. I mean, it's a really long list of foods that contain carotenoids. They had to deplete their carotenoid stores as low as possible, down to zero, ideally if possible, so that they could, you know, maybe show some meaningful or slightly impressive benefit. But it's what I consider stacking the deck, trying to show an effect and make it look like, "Wow, on a chart," when you realize what you're really looking at, it's like a big deal.
So they started off this avocado study with 11 people in it, but only eight participants finished. So it was a very small study, just like the Kraft salad dressing study. And in 2014, the avocado industry paid for another similar study where they had 12 participants, and they had to avoid these carotenoids they were studying for two weeks, fat, and then fast all day the day before the test. So, so once again, it's a study that doesn't apply to people eating a normal diet. The study results were predetermined by the avocado board for their own purposes. The results don't really tell us anything about a benefit to people eating a normal diet, or especially to people eating a healthy vegan diet.
Now, there have been some studies that on this absorption issue that were not paid for by a food company with a marketing agenda. Here are two studies on carotenoid absorption that were not paid for by the food industry. These were both done by a researcher named Shell and Goltz. And what was the purpose? Why was Dr. Goltz investigating this? Whether salad dressing oil would help absorb more nutrients? Well, she says right here at the beginning of the study, "Carotenoids are the most widely dispersed group of natural pigments with approximately 700 different species identified to date. Well known for their antioxidant activity, epidemiological studies have also indicated that increased intake of carotenoid-rich vegetables is associated with reduced risk of several chronic diseases, including cancer, macular degeneration, and coronary heart disease." Okay, so fruits and veggies are good, is what they're saying. We got that.
"Despite these associations, Americans consume only 1.6 cups of the 2.5 cups of vegetables recommended by the 2010 Dietary Guidelines for Americans each day. Yet increases in the consumption of several salad vegetables, including leafy greens, carrots, bell peppers, and fresh tomatoes, are becoming apparent. Strategies to optimize absorption of carotenoids from these commonly consumed vegetables are needed." Okay, so Dr. Galatz and the researchers here are saying people don't eat enough fruits and veggies. But according to the USDA, people are eating more salads, and so they're still not eating enough. So we need a strategy. Since they're not eating enough, to increase the absorption of carotenoids from the veggies that they are eating. So, you know, we should look at adding oil to get that increase. But that's silly. If people aren't eating enough fruits and veggies, why not focus on strategies to get them to eat more fruits and veggies?
Okay, we know that only one in 10 Americans get the recommended intake of fruit and veggies. The researchers admit that "it's not really clear whether it's the carotenoids or the fiber or some other aspect of these foods, of these fruits and veggies, that are beneficial." Since that's the case, why not focus on just getting people to eat more fruits and vegetables rather than adding a bunch of calories from oil to absorb a little more?
All right, here's Table Three from the study. And as you can see, look over here on the left, how much oil they added: three grams, eight grams, or 20 grams. And you can see they tested different types of fats, oil, and butter. And absorption over here went from 66 to a high of 106. So that's close to about an 80% increase with the top amount of oil. Now, here you have different absorptions for different carotenoids, but basically, here's the conclusion of this absorption study. It says, "In conclusion, the results of the current study suggest that amount of co-consumed lipid (meaning fat) is a primary potentiator of carotenoid absorption from common salad vegetables. Overall, 20 grams of lipid promotes greater absorption of carotenoids from a raw vegetable salad than three and eight grams for the three different types of lipid tested in this study. However, source of lipid may have distinct impact on carotenoid absorption that merits further study."
And they go on to talk about the different types of oil and the amount, which was 20 grams to maximize absorption. 20 grams of oil. So the gimmick is to have people who don't eat enough fruits and vegetables, they should eat 180 calories of oil in order to increase their carotenoid absorption during a meal of salad or raw veggies. But you're gonna end up absorbing those carotenoids anyway, whether you end up adding any fat to this meal or not. Here's why, from the conclusion: "Additionally, the present study focused specifically on the impact of co-consumed lipid on carotenoid bioavailability. It has been documented that when co-consumed lipid fats amounts or sources do not facilitate their incorporation into chylomicrons, carotenoids can be stored in epithelial cells until lipids from a subsequent meal are available to promote their absorption. Therefore, it will be important for future research to evaluate not only the impact of co-consumed lipids but also intestinal lipid loading and meal patterns on the bioavailability of carotenoids from common dietary sources."
You will still absorb the carotenoids you eat in your raw salad because they're stored in your cells, and the next time you have some fat, even the next day, you have a few meals, several meals from now, those will be released, and they will be absorbed into your system. What's this all about, anyways? And this is the study that they cite that documents this. And the bottom line is, your body stores carotenoids, and when you eat fat at another meal, and it doesn't take much, then the carotenoids are absorbed into your body. You know, let's say you have a raw salad for lunch, a raw something for dinner, and then, you know, you have some oatmeal the next morning. Boom. All those carotenoids are absorbed the next morning with the fat in the oatmeal.
Okay, who knows what the RDA, the recommended daily allowances for carotenoids? Does anybody know what? Yeah, that's right. There isn't any. Here's a review that states, "After reviewing the published scientific research in 2000, the Food and Nutrition Board of the Institute of Medicine concluded that the existing evidence was insufficient to establish a recommended dietary allowance or adequate intake for carotenoids." Now, some vegan advocates are saying, "Geez, you know, you need to eat more and more carotenoids." But no one has even established how much. You know, what the baseline is that we need. So this is pure scaremongering, really.
It turns out that carotenoids are simply a marker for how much fruit and vegetables you're eating. The Centers for Disease Control state, "Carotenoids are considered among the best biological markers for fruit and vegetable intake. The strongest dietary predictors of serum carotenoid concentration are fruits, carrots, and root vegetables, and tomato products." So again, carotenoids are just a marker for how much fruit and veggies you're eating. It's just another way of expressing that. In the actual amount, nobody's really focused or concerned because it's irrelevant. Are you eating a lot of fruits and veggies? You're good. You're not? Then you should eat more.
Remember these studies by Dr. Cults where they used oil to increase coronary absorption? They were set up to increase absorption in people who don't eat enough fruits and vegetables. They weren't set up for somebody who eats only fruits and vegetables, like a plant-based eater. And again, it says, "Factors other than the food vehicle are thought to be important in the bioavailability of beta-carotene. These include cooking, chopping, and the presence of dietary fat, all of which improve the bioavailability."
So now, for further reference on how much carotenoids you need, the existing recommendation for consumption of five or more servings of fruits and vegetables per day is supported because this would provide three to six milligrams per day of beta-carotene. Have you heard of any studies of vegans who add fat to their salad or the raw veggies versus vegans who didn't do better? The ones adding fat? No. Who would do such a study? This is a fake issue. This is not a problem. It's totally made up by the Kraft salad dressing corporation, and it's something, you know, that's like a con. People are trying to con you. It's advertised propaganda. It's not real science.
You know, humans are a complex system that is undergoing dynamic equilibrium adjustments all the time. Some guy on YouTube reading some studies from the salad dressing industry and then telling vegans, "Hey, you have to do this. Hey, add some fat. Put this in your salad." This is not how the body works. Last time I checked, I didn't see the ER rooms at the hospital overflowing with people with carotenoid deficiency. Have you?
So dense absorption studies with oil and with avocados, what about nuts? No. There are no studies of nuts and carotenoid absorption. So anybody that's telling you, "Hey, add some nuts," they're just assuming. They're just thinking, "Well, maybe." And in fact, some of the people that promote nuts love to say that, you know, you don't absorb a lot of the fat in nuts. That's why they don't add more weight like you think they would. You just poop it out. You poop out, you never absorb that fat. So if that's the case, it may be that nuts are like butter, which have very low absorption rate for carotenoids. So this whole idea of, you know, "you add some nuts," that is pseudoscience. Near the subsonic notes and all this sort of thing. It's all part of the superfood mentality. It's all part of, you know, looking at numbers, looking at kind of irrelevant things that corporations and advertising agencies try to focus on and make you focus on, so you'll think, "Oh, wow, I need this. This is healthy." No, it's not. It's just advertising.
One of the foremost experts I'm going to be interviewing on my channel, her name is Marion Nestle. And here's a little clip where she's talking about this subject. "I love blueberries, but are blueberries really a superfood? The Maine Blueberry Association was very concerned that the ground-level blueberries that are grown in Maine, which have to be picked by hand and are really expensive and difficult to get, and that they were going out of business because nobody was buying them. They measured their antioxidant level. All fruits have antioxidants. They found antioxidants in blueberries and they found some that were higher in blueberries than other fruits, and they were in marketing heaven. Do we need more antioxidants? Not if you eat fruits and vegetables generally. All fruits and vegetables have antioxidants, and they're sort of to keep off bad insects and things like that. There's not much evidence that eating more antioxidants on top of an already reasonable diet does any good for you at all. And certainly the supplements have been shown in some cases possibly to cause harm. I love blueberries, but do they have to be marketed because of their antioxidant? When people go on and on about antioxidants in a particular food, you know, you're listening to corporate research."
My advice is to stop listening to people trying to convince you that there's this magical food or supplement or pill that's going to save or extend your life. Here's another example just to show you how this kind of commercial research works. There's a website called nutritionfacts.org, and it's run by a medical doctor, Michael Greger. And Dr. Greger has come up with a list of 12 foods or supplements that he says are crucial and that you should eat them every day. He calls them the Daily Dozen. One of Dr. Greger's Daily Dozen is the food called the spice turmeric. Okay, turmeric is a healthy spice, but I've come across people who tell me they're adding turmeric like every food. They want to have it every day. And I think, "Wow, you must really love that stuff." And what they say is, "Well, no, Dr. Greger says it fights cancer, so, you know, it's good to try and eat it at every meal."
And so if you go over to nutritionfacts.org and you read the argument in favor of turmeric, it goes like this: Okay, cancer rates in India are way lower than other countries, especially Western India. Turmeric consumption in India is high. This is an association study, so we can't show cause and effect. But when we look at studies of putting turmeric on cancer cells in petri dishes, the cancer cells die. So turmeric must be an incredible cancer fighter, right? There's some obvious weaknesses with this argument beyond the fact that it's mostly speculation. The first is that cancer rates in India are not low like has has been thought. There's been a lot of research about this recently, and the problem is that reporting accurate cause of death and cancer cases, that's the huge problem. The Indian medical system is very, very bad at reporting accurate causes of death.
So here's an article from a few months ago: "No, India's Rate of Cancer Incidence Isn't the Lowest in the World." And if we scroll down, it says, "These findings beg the question: For a country with such a large population, how are India's rates of cancer so low? Is it an issue of genetics, or is there something intrinsic to the Indian diet, like turmeric, that makes us less prone to cancer? It's an issue of data reporting." Interestingly, the list of countries with the lowest rate of cancer was topped by Syria, which had only 85 cases per 100,000 members of its population. Well, when you're faced with the threat of being bombed on a regular basis, going to the doctor or reporting your cancer diagnosis seems like less of an urgency, doesn't it?
And down further, they're talking about the specifics and the doctors who did this research. "The data isn't collected properly, and as a result, a lot of India's cancer cases aren't reported." Sharma says, Dr. Sarika Gupta, a woman's cancer specialist at Apollo Hospital in New Delhi, also disagreed with the IHME's assessment of India. "We have the third highest rate of female cancer cases in the world after China and the U.S." Gupta says she also added that the symptoms in more than half of India's cancer patients go undetected due to a shortage of adequate screening technology in rural or underdeveloped areas, or worse, a lack of awareness about the disease itself.
So Dr. Greger's whole premise about India having lower cancer rates, that's false. And so is the association between turmeric and cancer. It's actually an association between turmeric and poor reporting of health data. The petri dish studies are often paid for by the supplement companies trying to sell, you know, turmeric pills, and they're lousy commercial science.
Researchers did an extensive review of all the published studies on turmeric, and what did they find? Well, here it was written about in Time magazine: "Once something enters the popular press, it can be blown out of proportion," says co-author Michael Walters, research associate, University of Minnesota's Institute for Therapeutics Discovery Development. "These studies have become part of folklore, and their actual results don't really measure up to what they're quoted as." One big problem, the new report notes, is that the curcumin is not easily absorbed by the body. And despite the thousands of research papers published on turmeric, the reviewers were unable to find any double-blind, placebo-controlled clinical trials, the gold standard in medical research, to support its myriad health claims. Many studies also involved conflicts of interest, Walter says, like researchers who own supplement companies and could benefit from sales of curcumin extract. Overall, the research casts doubt on the curcumin's usefulness as a standalone supplement and as potential for future drug discoveries. Turmeric is certainly not going to hurt you, and there may be something else in there that's biologically active, he says. All we know right now is that curcumin itself is not the panacea that people think it is.
So much for the actual research around turmeric versus speculation or weak or commercial, non-existent associations. If you base your diet on actual research, we know that Dr. Esselstyn, Dr. Ornish, Pritikin, McDougall, and those approaches, they're proven. Even the, the supposed turmeric dementia or Alzheimer's link, which is another way to turmeric supplement companies have tested, turns out to be totally unproven. Here from the Alzheimer Society website: "Turmeric is not easily absorbed, and there's no real evidence that supports turmeric being used as a treatment for Alzheimer's disease. But the specific effects of curcumin on amyloid beta plaques could be a useful target for future investigations into potential treatments." And then it goes on to look at the claims of curcumin, says, "Though research has shown that curcumin could prevent the formation and even break up the amyloid beta plaques associated with Alzheimer's disease, similar results have not been found in clinical studies, and the way that curcumin could work within the brain is unclear."
Here's a simplification of what we've learned so far in this video series: Nuts won't save or extend your life. The research supporting the nut claims is corrupted or misleading. You don't need to eat extra fat to absorb nutrients. Turmeric is not a miracle spice. Why do people promote these unsupported claims? The scaremongering around nuts, I view this myself as a power play. Whenever someone, whenever someone's agenda is whether it's to scare you into eating animals, "Hey, you'll be deficient if you don't eat some chicken," or they want to scaremonger you into, "You know, you need nuts, you need turmeric, you need, you know, omega-3 supplements, you'll be deficient without it," or whatever. The scaremongers always have the solution. That's the thing. Whatever they're telling you, that's the solution. And when you're scared, and someone says, "I have the answers," and you feel like, "Okay, I can turn to this person, they can fix the problem, it can make me feel less fearful," then then the person becomes comforting to you. And, "Hey, I can trust this person." So scaremongering is an age-old manipulation.
And people are built to be healthy and live a long time. The idea that you need some kind of secret superfoods from the supermarkets, you know, that you have to eat this food or that food every day. Next time someone tells you that, ask them, you know, "Where is the evidence that this kind of excellent nutrition will make me live longer? Where are the cultures that get this amazing nutrition and have lived a long time because they really aren't out there?" Though we know that the cultures that live the longest have been on a pretty low-fat, largely plant-centered diet. It's simple.
Thanks for tuning in. I hope you enjoyed the video. Give it a thumbs up if you did. Subscribe if you're not subscribed. We're not done with this subject. We got more videos coming. Thanks. I'll see you on the next one.