Transcription
[Music] and eating beans save your life. Hi, I'm Nick Urban, host of the MindBody Peak Performance podcast. And in this episode, we are delving into exactly that. We're talking about the science of soluble and insoluble fibers, and specifically around legumes and beans.
Our guest this week will share a story I found pretty surprising about how legumes literally saved the life of her daughter. We talk about the different properties of fibers, why they are so important, the biochemistry of it, the practical uses, how much you should consume every day for optimal health, what it means, and what to do if you get gas from consuming beans. The validity and importance, or lack thereof, of the so-called antinutrients, the lectins, the phytates, the trypsin inhibitors, and all that stuff inside legumes, and what to do about them. And why the Blue Zones, the longevity hotspots around the world where people often live beyond age 100 in healthy condition, often consume lentils.
Since this recording, I've been consuming a lot more lentil and legumes in my diet. I now have a small portion at just about every meal. I like to meal prep them and dish just a little bit out. And I hope after this conversation, you'll consider doing the same.
Our guest this week is Karen Hurd. Karen holds a Master of Science in Biochemistry and is currently enrolled at the George Washington University in the Master of Public Health Program. Her philosophy in approaching health is that food has the power to kill and food has the power to heal. It's your choice. Karen applies her knowledge at the biomolecular level to understand the cause of health problems we face and what dietary and lifestyle changes are needed to correct that cause and unlock our best health. She's been practicing for 30 years now, and dare I say, she's one of the few voices advocating legumes. We also make it practical so you can implement this without having a bachelor's or master's in biochemistry yourself.
If you want to check out Karen's work, you can find it at KarenHurd.com. K-A-R-N H-U-R-D. And she does have a lot of information around particular health topics, dietary protocols for them, and even offers one-on-one email support. If you want to check that out, a link to that will be in the show notes.
Speaking of show notes, you can find everything we discuss at MindBodyPeak.com/138. And if you find this podcast episode interesting or useful, go ahead and share it with a friend, a carnivore, or someone on keto that perhaps has completely removed all sources of fiber from their diet. They may just thank you down the line.
All right, ladies and gentlemen, sit back, relax, and enjoy this conversation with Karen Hurd. Karen, welcome to MindBody Peak Performance.
Thank you. I'm pleased to be on this.
Yeah, well, today we're going to dig into a topic that I think needs a lot more discussion on, and that is all things fiber and legumes. And I know that you specialize in those, and so I'm looking forward to discussing with you.
Okay, I look forward to educating everybody on it. Let's start off today with a warm-up, and that is the unusual non-negotiables you've done for your health, your performance, and your bioharmony.
Um, first of all, I don't need any sweets at all, period. Exclamation point. No exception. So you won't find me eating a cookie or having a piece of candy or anything like that. It's absolutely destructive to my health, to everybody's health. Um, it's very necessary to also not let yourself become stressed out. You know, there are major things that occur in our life and we can't change, and then our attitudes towards those. We have to be careful because stress is a major component of our physical well-being. And so I make sure that I don't allow myself to become stressed out and take time for myself, take time for my family. Don't do caffeine at all. Caffeine is a destructive force. Don't do supplements at all. They are also stimulants and cause destruction. It can cause more harm than good. And I eat a good diet that includes proteins and legumes and vegetables, and I live a good life, and I'm very happy and healthy.
I love it. Lots of controversial things in there. Seemingly basic, but also like, one of the big things you mentioned is you consume legumes. And this day, it seems like those are public nutrition enemy number one. They're a subset of carbohydrates that is fiber. I'm sure people are going to be curious, how did you get so involved in fiber and legumes?
Um, it was to save my little girl's life. So, my, I had an 18-month-old, and then I had two other children just slightly older. I had three children five and under. And we moved into a home where they had just put down a new to the home carpet. Although this carpet had been stored in a man's garage for several years. Well, it was infested with carpet beetles, which we didn't know because they have to be in the warm to be able to hatch out. Anyway, they hatched out all the larvae hatchings, the little adult, they, they go through these more stages. Anyway, they came out as carpet beetles. We had carpet beetles, not 10, not 100, not a thousand. We had hundreds of thousands, millions of carpet beetles everywhere because they put the carpet throughout the entire house. You open the sock door, they're running out of the sock. Where you open the kitchen drawer, the where the silver were, everywhere. There we were, everywhere. We could not vacuum them up quick enough. You couldn't smash them, hit them. It, there were just, they were, we were overwhelmed. And so, um, we called the exterminator, and he came out and sprayed for them. It killed them all, and it also caused us all to be very sick. And my 18-month-old went into grand mal seizures. And so we, of course, rushed her into the hospital. And it was, they said, no, this had nothing. I said, they just sprayed our house for bugs. They sprayed every square inch of the carpet. I think it has something to do with that. And I had some military training. I was in the United States Army. I knew that this was a nerve agent, and it, you know, and that this could be a biological response to this particular nerve agent that they put on the carpet. And they said, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. She'd have to drink the, you know, that it was Durband 2E. She'd have to drink it. They sprayed it on the carpet. This couldn't happen. I said, we're all sick. I was carrying a baby at that time. I began to miscarry that baby, and I did end up miscarrying that baby. It was a very horrific time. So they sent us back home. Said, look, she has double pneumonia. I said, but if she was poisoned with a nerve agent, that's how they die with double pneumonia. Their lungs filled with fluid. They said, no, no, you're wrong. And they sent us back home. And I went back home. Now she's on loading dose of phenobarbital. And then she started with the same symptoms, which I trained all my troops on. This is what you need to look for for a nerve agent poisoning: pinpoint eyeballs, slight cough, diarrhea. Anyway, I said, she had all those. But this time, she's on phenobarbital. And I thought, she is going to die. She's going to die if I keep her. So I walked out of that house and said, I will not return till I get to the bottom of it. You have to understand, we were in St. Louis Children's Hospital to where they were treating us, and they said that I was wrong. I was barking up the wrong tree. I had nine neurologists in the same room with me sat down and said, Mrs. Hurd, you were barking up the wrong tree. It was exactly their words. Mrs. Hurd, you were barking up the wrong tree. Your little girl was not poisoned. She has double pneumonia. She'll have to be on phenobarbital loading doses and on it the rest of her life. And so I said, just do a cholinesterase level. I begged them because I knew enough. I said, because of all my army training, just do a cholinesterase level because then you can check her liver to see what the liver enzymes, the cholinesterase, and you can tell me she's poisoned. There is no need to do that. It's a simple blood draw. It is a simple blood draw. It's a simple test. They refused to do it. Anyway, so I went home, and I came out of that house and I said, I will never go back in that house again until we get to the bottom of it. So I called every poison control. I mean, you got a mad mama, okay? When you get a mama trying to protect her young, I was on the trail. And so I finally got a hold of Poison Control Center in Dallas. They said, well, you could talk to Dr. Sheldon Wagger out in Corallis at the university there. He knows child toxicology. I told him the whole story. He said, it's absolutely probable that your daughter was poisoned. Have you had the carpet tested? I said, I want to do that, but the lab said they have to recall their instruments and it's thousands of dollars. My husband is a pastor of a church. We had no money. You know, I said, he said, send it to me for free. Put it on dry ice because it breaks down at this rate. I sent it to him. His lab out in Corallis at the university, he tested it. It was 100 times the normal strength that it should have been. And he said, why hasn't she had a cholinesterase level test? I said, because the doctors wouldn't do it. Give me your doctor's name. Within 30 minutes, the doctor was calling you and saying, would you bring Ruth in for a col? That's right. Yes. Cholinesterase level was positive. She had been poisoned. It was 100 times as strong as it should be. Actually, the Illinois EPA had to come out and take all of the carpet out and everything because it was so highly toxic. They had to haul it to a special waste facility, hazardous waste facility. It was so bad, but now, so high, I have a little girl. And so now they're all aware of the problem. They're testing her liver. She's dying, and she was dying. It was apparent to me. It was apparent to all of us. We were very sick by this time. I miscarried this baby, and we were all very sick. My husband and my two other little older children, but my 18-month-old, she was not recovering. And they tested her liver, and off the church, they said, she's going to die, and there's nothing we can do. It's just a few more weeks, Mrs. Hurd. And I said, somebody somewhere, help me. And they all, I took her to specialists in Chicago. We conferred with specialists, of course, in St. Louis. We conferred on phone with specialists in Dallas. And they all had the same prognosis: she is not going to live. There is no way her liver can detoxify from this poison. There's no way. And so I left Ruth, she's just 18 months old, with my husband and the other two kids. I said, I'm going to the Washington University Medical Library, and I'm going to read. Nobody has an answer, but I'm going to see if there's any answer. And so I read and I read about this thing called the enterohepatic recirculation, and that we could pull toxins out if we had soluble fibers. So then I made a concoction of psyllium, basically, in beans. And then she wasn't eating at that time. I mean, she was languishing. It was a really, she was almost gone. And I would shoot it with an oral syringe and make her swallow it, you know. And she began to recover. And she was covered with warts. She was covered with everything because every virus took a hold too. I mean, everything was shot. I mean, she was, it was really bad. And she began to recover. And in six weeks, she was completely well. And all the doctors, I mean, they were like, what happened? How could this be? And then it was in the newspapers. And then people started calling me, saying, what did you do? You saved your little girl. Save my, you know. It's like, I'm not a doctor. I'm not a nurse. You know, hey, you know, not anything, just trying to save my little girl. And she, by the way, is saved. She's 35 years old today, and she's married and has two little children. And so God saved her, but it was through soluble fiber. It was through these beans that people won't eat because they're afraid of gas and they don't understand. And so that's how I got into it all.
Yeah, wow. What a story. What is the role? Why does fiber matter in the human diet?
Fiber is absolutely essential. If we don't have fiber, then you can expect to have a myriad of different health issues as you continue through your life, and even starting when you're a child or even as a baby. I want to, there's two different types of fiber, and so we have to understand there's differences in fiber. The two main categories, there are only two categories, they are insoluble fiber and soluble fiber. Soluble fiber actually comes from insoluble fiber as insoluble fiber is broken down by cooking, the, uh, plant weathering in the, you know, like a pea on a pea plant as it stays out and is not harvested when it's young and tender, and it stays there all summer long and it's harvested in the fall. Then it's lost some of its insoluble fibers converted to soluble fiber by the sun, the wind, the rain, time. And then likewise, soluble fiber can be converted back into insoluble fibers. So if you have a, let's take a mung bean that's a hard little dry bean, and you soak it and you can sprout it. Then that sprout has become insoluble fiber coming from the soluble fiber. Fiber is a very complex matrix of polysaccharide. Um, so if you look at the structure of it in a chemical sense, that you'll see it's a mini branched carbohydrate. Carbohydrate is carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. And so it's, it's not just a straight chain like when we look at a fat. We just have a straight chain of carbons. It's a very branched, many, it looks like a, a complicated tree shape. And so the more complicated that is, the better it is for the human body.
Now, let's go back into the two types of fiber, insoluble and soluble fiber. The one that is the most critical to our health is soluble fiber because soluble fiber has an incredible ability to bind with our digestive fluid, bile. And now I'm going to stop there at that because we have to understand what bile is and the incredible impact that it has upon our life. Bile is a fatty acid fluid that is produced in our liver. And our liver is just underneath the right rib cage, and it is one of the largest organs besides skin. We count skin as an organ that we have in the human body. The liver is responsible for pulling out of the bloodstream all your blood. Everybody's blood goes through the liver at about a gallon a minute. So I mean, it's, it's working all the time, 24/7. And the liver is a filter that is pulling out of the bloodstream all fat-soluble waste, just fat-soluble waste, not water. Water-soluble waste, water-soluble waste is the kidneys' job. To give you an idea of how important it is to be able to pull the fat-soluble waste out, let's look at the other filtration systems in the human body. We have the lymph tissue. The lymph tissue is constantly filtering also the bloodstream, and it pulls out, um, antigens. Antigens are things that are foreign to the human body that could create a reaction. So it's bacteria and virus. It also pulls out other things that are antigens that are dead, that don't have, that can't reproduce, perfumes, fragrances, allergens. So the lymph system is definitely involved. But if you lose major parts of your lymph system, say you had breast cancer and you had one of your breasts removed, they will oftentimes remove many of the lymph nodes underneath your arm. Or if you have been a football player and you got a damaged spleen, which is a fairly common occurrence, you know, you get hit in your spleen. Your spleen is part of your lymphatic system. It can be gone. You will live because we have hundreds and hundreds of lymph nodes and tissue throughout the human body. You might have some swelling where they removed some, or, but you're going to live. It's not a life-threatening thing to have lost that filtering system of the lymph.
Then you have the kidneys, which are filtering your water-soluble waste. If your kidneys completely fail, they just stop. They're not going to function at all anymore. They are no longer cleaning your bloodstream, and you don't have dialysis to help you. Will you die tomorrow? Nope. What about the next day? Nope. What about the next day? It'll take you two weeks before the toxin, water waste, the water-soluble waste toxins build up in your bloodstream to a point that it will kill you. So you got two weeks if your kidneys conk out. However, let's look at our third filtration system, and that's the liver filtering out fat-soluble waste. If your liver fails, you, you will be dead in 24 hours because that is how nasty and toxic the waste is that the liver is filtering out of your bloodstream. Your liver cannot fail. I mean, we've all heard stories about, you know, a person that, you know, got overdosed on drugs or overdosed on alcohol or something happened, and, and they're dead in 24 hours.
Let's focus on the liver and its important role in clearing out the fat-soluble waste. The blood flows through the liver. The liver pulls all of these toxins, and most of those toxins, people need to understand, are your own metabolic waste. It's not a drug you took. It's not the alcohol you drink. It's not the pollutants that you're breathing in from the air. It's not the BHT. It's not the, the, the glycosides that they're using in the fertilizer, all the things that we get all wrapped around the axle about. The vast majority, the liver is pulling those things, yes, but the vast majority of waste that is being pulled out of your bloodstream is your own metabolic waste from just being alive, your own hormones that you produce. All of that is being pulled out of the liver. And if you leave in extra hormones that shouldn't be there, you're going to have some major health problems. So the liver is vital. It pulls all of this stuff out of the bloodstream. Okay, so now what are we going to do with it? Okay, it has been removed from the bloodstream. Now it's in the liver tissue. What, what does the liver do with it? It's like, okay, well, maybe we can send it on down to the kidneys, because the kidneys, you urinate, and then you could pee it out, right? Oh, no, no, no, no. You got to understand, fat-soluble waste has nothing to do with water. In chemistry, we call it hydrophobic. Phobic means afraid of. We're afraid of water. These molecules in chemistry will not combine with anything water. It's just, it's impossible. So we're not going to be able to get rid of this waste through the kidney system.
Okay, what can we do? Well, maybe we could put it in the skin. But to get it to the skin, you got to dump it back into the bloodstream, which will poison the bloodstream again, and then it will come out through the skin somehow, you know, or leak out through your eyeballs, or, you know, no, none of that is going to work. It's all, it will not work at all. Chemically, the biological makeup of a human being, it will not work. Haha. But there is one thing that could work. The liver has to get rid of things that it clears from the bloodstream called bilirubin, which is dead red blood cells. Our blood cells only live for 120 days. That's right. That's all they're supposed to live. Then they have, they've lived their, they've done their job, and they're exhausted, and they die off. Well, the liver is constantly clearing out bilirubin, the dead red blood cells. And so they have to be placed and gotten rid of someplace. Also, well, the liver is making this digestive fluid, bile, that it puts bilirubin in. Why couldn't we also put in this fat-soluble waste that we're clearing out of the bloodstream? We can, and we do. Because bile is made out of a fat. And see, fat-soluble waste has to be put into a fat carrier. That's the only way chemically these things will be able to associate with one another. And so your fat-soluble bile becomes a trash truck. It is now getting rid of your bilirubin, red blood cells, dead red blood cells, and all this trash. And in addition to that, because when you're talking about a fatty acid, bile is a fatty acid. It is of a pH that is lower. The lower the pH, the more acidic something is. And we want a pH of some type of digestive something coming down into your gut so that when you eat foods that you can break them apart and digest them, you eat them, and then they're digested. And so this bile has got a dual purpose. It's the trash truck for the liver, which is keeping us from dying. And two, it becomes a digestive enzyme. It's helping you digest very specifically what? Carbohydrates? No. Think about fats. Fats only like to deal with fats. Fats are very particular about whom they associate with, and that is only fats. So your bile fluids are your waste stream, but they're also the digestive enzyme that's breaking down every single fat that you eat. So when you eat a fat, you will have a release of bile. Where's the bile released from? From the gallbladder. You'll say, wait a minute, gallbladder. How does this come in? What type of organ is this? It's actually just a little storage facility. Bladder is actually an old term that means storage. A bladder. We have water bladders. We have a bladder that stores urine. We call it a bladder. It's just a storage facility for some type of liquid. And so the liver is producing the bile. It travels down what are called biliary ducts into the gallbladder, where the gallbladder just stores it until you eat. Eat a meal, and when you eat a meal that has fat in it, it will go through a peristalsis, that means a smooth muscle contraction, and it will literally shoot. It's like you can hear it when we ever sat next to somebody. It's really quiet, and you hear this and there's noise, and you, oh yeah, that's it. It's not a stomach growl. It's just this little, that's bile being released. It's literally shooting out of the gallbladder into the duodenum. The duodenum is the top part of your small intestine. So it's right here under your sternum. And the bile is carrying the trash.
Now, you also need to know because some people don't have a gallbladder. They're going to say, I don't have a gallbladder. I don't have that storage facility anymore. You still are releasing bile into the duodenum. We have a common, we have a couple different ducts, biliary ducts. And so we have a duct that is dripping bile constantly into the duodenum 24/7. But you're not getting this, sometimes we get a quarter cup of bile released at once. I mean, we're shooting a large amount of liquid into the duodenum when you eat fats. We are just getting a drip, and it's about this fast, drip, drip, drip. It's very slow. So the amount of bile that you're putting in the duodenum is nothing compared to the bile that you're getting when you eat a meal. When you get this, and it depends on the person, how much fat you ate, but you could easily get a quarter cup of bile released. That's a, that's a whole lot more than the slow drip, but it's a steady drip from the other biliary duct. So our bile is making it into the duodenum. Okay, yay, we made it. It's out of the bloodstream. All this nasty toxin waste, gone from the bloodstream. Now it has entered into the liver. The liver put in the bile. The bile is now either in the gallbladder or it is in the duodenum. Hooray, gone out of danger.
Okay, so now what happens to it? Well, this is a fat-soluble substance. Bile is a fat. And so it's going to travel through the duodenum where all of our proteins are absorbed. That we have little villi that stick out from the, the wall, the, it's called the lumen. The lumen is the opening of our gastrointestinal tract, of that colon. And there's these little hairlike projections which are villi that that are sort of waving out in that open space. And then they catch a hold of the particles as they go by in the duodenum. They're grabbing proteins, and your proteins are being digested, and your carbohydrates, some of those are being digested too, but most of those were digested in your stomach, which is one step before you get to the duodenum. Okay, so we're not absorbing fats. We don't absorb fats in the stomach. We do not absorb fats in the duodenum. So all your bile is just trekking through this, and it's twisty-turning. Your small intestine does little, little hairpin turns back and forth. And so it's twisting and turning and going through the entire duodenum and it reaches the jejunum, which is the second part of your small colon or small intestine. Jejunum, do we absorb fats there? No. No, we don't absorb fats there either. We're absorbing the rest of the proteins in the jejunum. But then we reach the ileum. And the ileum is the last part of the small intestine. Well, at the right side, right where the terminal part of the ileum is, the last part of the small colon, which is called the ileum, it's connected to the large colon by a valve that opens and closes. It's called the ileocecal valve. In the small colon, it is in the ileum that our fats are absorbed. And very specifically, at the terminal part of the ileum, we're absorbing, that's where all those little villi are reaching out and say, oh, I, I am targeted to absorb fats now because it, it takes a certain type of, these are all chemical reactions, and you have to have certain pull from electrons. I mean, it gets very complicated into what is attracted. But at that point, in the terminal part of the ileum, we're going to absorb all of these fats. So all the butter you ate, any of the good oils that you ate, your olive oil, you know, whatever is a fat, that is where it's going to be coming through the intestinal tract and entering the bloodstream.
So here's the question for the day. If bile is made out of a fat, which we already have identified that it is, and we absorb fats, the ones that you're eating, and then the bile is breaking down and helping digest, if we absorb fats from the terminal part of the ileum, do we also absorb our own bile as that's carrying all that nasty trash? Yes, we do. And it used to be believed that we'd absorb 90 to 95% of that bile. However, in recent years, we have confirmed that it's not 90 to 95%. It is a full 95%. 95% of your toxic bile that's carrying all this stuff that'll kill you in 24 hours flat if you don't get it out of the bloodstream, has just been dumped back into the bloodstream. Oh no. And it goes right back through a portal vein to the liver. And the liver goes, oh my goodness, what are you doing back here, bile? Now, you have to understand that when it's being absorbed, it's being, it's coming in, and it's back down into all its little hormone shapes, all the little drug shapes, you know, I say shapes because all of these molecules have a very particular shape. Okay, so all of these individual things are going back in, and they're loose. They were all gathered up and placed in the bile for excretion, and all they got dumped back into the bloodstream, 95% of them. They're recycled into the bloodstream. They go, they hit the liver because remember, the liver is filtering a gallon of blood a minute, and you only have so many gallons in you. Okay, so we're talking in a very short time, in a very few minutes, all your blood has been filtered through the liver. The liver is going, oh, what are you doing back here? All this trash, all this stuff that I filtered out, I have to filter out a second time. And it filters it all out a second time. But bear in mind that while this bile was down in your gastrointestinal tract, and it can be down there, it depends, you recycle your bile. So your bile is recycling anywhere, average 21 to 70 times a day, you're recycling your bile. So while your bile is fooling around down here, having lazy man's, you know, going through that little squiggly small intestine, just, you know, going along its path before it gets reabsorbed, what was your liver doing in that time? Taking a rest break? No, it was continuing to filter your bloodstream. It filters your bloodstream 24/7. So now it's got the old bile that's coming back, and I'm just calling it bile, but remember, it's coming back in all the little constituent parts that made up all the toxic waste. And so it's got the old bile coming back, and bile itself is made out of triglycerides, which is a fat. And so the old bile comes back with all its trash, 95% of it, plus now it's got new trash. So what does it do? Okay, it downshakes it together, makes more room. We're going to put more trash into the bile that already has 95% recycled trash. So now we have more concentrated bile, more concentrated with what? With more fat? No. The fats can carry a lot. It's more concentrated with this toxic waste. So that gets dumped back down at the gallbladder, or it's dripping, drip, drip, drip down into the duodenum, and around she goes again for a second time. So we're talking 21, 70 something times a day, it's recycling. And every time it comes through the liver, it's picking up more garbage. And when you pick up more garbage, you have to understand because these things are fat-soluble, you were changing the pH. Because the pH is the negative log of hydrogen ion concentration. Well, that's a whole bunch of chemical gobbledygook. What does that mean? It is the hydrogen ions that tell you what the acidity of the bile is. The more hydrogen ions that you have in a substance, that is the lower the pH, which the lower the pH means it's more acidic. So then you have even more acidic bile, besides all of its toxic components, getting dumped into your tender little duodenum until a point that it recycles so much, it's an acid burn. And it backwashes through the pyloric sphincter into the stomach, comes all the way up, up in the esophagus, and we call that acid reflux. And we blame it on hydrochloric acid. It has nothing to do with the hydrochloric acid that is made by these cells that will only produce enough hydrochloric acid for the moment to digest things in the, in the stomach. Anyway, so we get the blame all misplaced. But we are, we have acidic bile because we've been recycling it over and over and over again. Then this acidic bile causes problems. It begins to cause problems in the gallbladder because it causes the gallbladder, because this is so acidic, it causes inflammation on the interior wall of the gallbladder. This is a problem. You have inflammation. Oh, and I didn't tell you, this is a really neat piece of chemistry that everybody has to understand. The more hydrogen ions that you add to a substance, you actually change the physical state. We have physical states. We have gas, so it's, we have liquid, we have solid. And the more hydrogens that you put into something, you turn it into a solid. So now we have bile that's coming down that is so thick that it starts to be a sludge, and it's hard to push through the biliary ducts. And so you have to work really hard through the peristalsis to get it to come, come out when you eat something, which creates pain. Even worse pain. What if this bile gets so solid? Because remember, as you lower the pH, the more hydrogen particles you have, you're going to turn this liquid into a solid. It rolls into little stones. What if these stones are big enough that they block the biliary duct altogether? Oh, you want to talk about pain? I know that you're male and you've never had a child, but I'm a female and I have children. A gallbladder attack is more painful than having a child. It is excruciating pain. You will go to the ER. You'll say, do anything, knock me out, top the pain, because you have a stone that has blocked the duct. So you have this, this smooth duct, this is a smooth muscle trying to push the bile into the, to the duodenum, but it can't push. It's blocked by a stone. And so it backs up. It creates a tremendous pain. It goes all the way and wraps around your back. I mean, it's a horrific experience. So we have bile turning into solids, making sludge, inflaming the inside of the gallbladder. Then it hits, when the bile, you know, okay, well, let's assume you don't get the stones, you just get the acidic bile and duodenum, and now it's coming back up because it always backwashes because the way the sphincter closes, and we have a closed system. If you look at a P-trap in plumbing, I mean, this is just simple plumbing. When you open it and you close it, then you have a backwashing. You force things back up to the throat, we call throat esophagus, and then you have all this problem. And then you have Barret's esophagus, and the esophagus is all inflamed and swollen, and it, you can't swallow well. Well, that's because you got burning bile that is in constant contact with, if I had bile burning in my hands, they, they would become inflamed and hurt. I'm not able to use them very well. I mean, it's just common sense, but we just have to understand the whole cycle and what's happening with the chemistry of it all.
Okay, so now it hits the duodenum and now it's causing inflammation in the duodenum. Oh, and now it goes down further and further. And the 5% that does go into the large colon, because remember, we're recycling 95%, but what happened to the 5% of this burning bile? It's now in your large colon. As it goes through the colon, it causes it to be inflamed and have soreness. Now we have Crohn's disease. And now we have ulcerative colitis. Crohn's disease, small, the colon. And now we have ulcerative colitis. And now we have proctitis. The inflammation, the proct, that's the right there at the end, right where it connects to the anal canal and goes out the rectum. Now we have, well, yes, you have burning bile. It just, let's not have the burning bile.
Okay, so how do we get rid of it? 95% is being absorbed because it's a fat. We have to find a substance that has two qualities. Two qualities. One, it has to be able to bind with fat so the fat cannot come unbound. So we're talking about, we're talking about a bonding in chemistry, which gets really complicated. Okay? And then two, it cannot be absorbed at the ileum or any other place. It has to be excreted into the toilet in the form of a bowel movement. Nick, there's only one food that we, only one thing that we can eat that has both those qualities, and that is soluble fiber. Remember, we started this discussion talking about insoluble fiber and soluble fiber. Insoluble fiber, that's the wheat, that's the, the, the husky stuff, you know, on the wheat bran. We call wheat bran, or, you know, it's the peel on a corn kernel, you know, it's the stuff that you chew up and it comes out the same way you swallowed it, you know, it's, if you eat a carrot and you didn't chew it up to little bits, so you're looking at insoluble fiber that's coming through in the toilet. Insoluble fiber cannot do this. Only soluble fiber can do this. And so the soluble fiber is found where? Because we need the soluble fiber. Before I tell you where it's found, I'm going to tell you how it works. So soluble fiber is consumed. You eat it, you swallow it, it goes down your esophagus, it moves into the stomach. The stomach, then there's a pyloric sphincter between the stomach and the duodenum, and it enters into the duodenum. And guess what it meets? It meets the bile, this fat that's carrying all this toxic waste. And the soluble fiber looks across a crowded duodenum at the bile, and they rush into each other's arms. There is a physical chemical attraction. It has to do with electron charges and valence electrons, and they rush into each other's arms, and they bind, and they do not come unbound. They are forever captured together. And it has to do with the polysaccharide, very complex structure that I mentioned at the very beginning of this, that it, it captures it in a net that it can't get uncaptured. And so now they are married. The bile is married to the soluble fiber. There is no such word as divorce. And the soluble fiber in the bile, this married couple, travels through the small colon, through those zigzags, and they make it down to the terminal part of the ileum. And when they reach there, the bile, the fatty acid says to its marriage partner, I have got to be absorbed now, and I'm going to go back into the bloodstream because I'm a fat, and fatty acids absorb here. And the soluble fiber says, honey, honey, wait just a minute. I forgot to tell you something before we got married up there in the duodenum. I can't cross the intestinal barrier. And we're married, and there is no such word as divorce. And so I'm going into the large colon, and out into the toilet in the form of a bowel movement. And baby, you're coming with me. And that's exactly what happens. That's exactly how we carry the bile out.
So Karen, I'm curious, you said that only the soluble fiber, or in this case, legumes, are able to do that and actually bind to the waste to help us eliminate it. What about something like the binders, such as activated charcoal or chlorella, or even like the more strong, like pharmaceutical binders?
They can still be separated out. They're not as efficient as your soluble fiber, which is found in legumes. And so I should say right now that legumes, so people know what legumes are, they're your beans, like pinto beans, navy beans, red beans, kidney beans, lentils, black-eyed peas. They are not peanuts because a lot of people are concerned that peanuts are biologically classified as legumes. It's because of the way they grow. They're little short bushy things, and so it's got to do with its foliage and the type of growth. It's, it's got oil in it. Your legumes don't have oil in it. You're not going to find any oil in black-eyed peas or black beans or kidney beans. There's no oil. And so in any of the nuts, a peanut is truly a type of nut. It's a ground nut instead of growing on a tree like an almond. So these legumes are absolutely critical that we should be eating them three times a day so that we can stop, stop this recycling of bile. If you think about it, if you're one of the 21, or maybe you're, you know, in the 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, depends on your motility, how fast things are moving through your gut, but you can do this up to 70 times a day. And you're only eating beans three times a day. You're only throwing away bile three times. So, and you're, but you're throwing away with your meals where you're having the greatest release of bile because remember, in between your meals, you have that slow drip that's coming from the liver. It's not nearly as much as what you're releasing when you're eating a meal. You get a large amount of bile that is released at that time. So three times a day is for a healthy person, is what everybody should be doing. However, if you have some problems that have been caused by these toxins, and remember, I'm calling them all toxins, but some of them are your own endogenous hormones, your own testosterone, your own estrogen, your own progesterone, your own adrenaline, which is epinephrine or norepinephrine. It's all your growth hormones. It's every hormone that you make. All of those are cleared by the liver and being recycled. And for those who don't understand about hormones, our body will make as many hormones that are necessary. That is a very tightly controlled. This works with the pituitary gland, and there has to be stimulating hormones to be able to produce the hormones. That's another subject for another day, but this really cool subject. But you have could be excreting a certain amount of hormones because if you don't, you will have too much estrogen in your bloodstream. What happens if you have too much estrogen? Well, in a male, you're going to have prostate problems, period. You're going to have an enlarged prostate. That's what that excess estrogen is going to do to you. What happens in a female? You're going to have premenstrual problems. You're going to have cystic ovarian cysts. You're going to have all kinds of fibroids. You're going to have fibrocystic breast disease. You can end up with breast cancer, with breast cancer or cancers of the, the female anatomy. They're always testing to see if it's, you know, receptive to certain hormones. The vast majority are estrogen. They're these hormone-receptive cancers. Well, why do you have so many hormones? It's because you're recycling them constantly. People think, well, hormones are all broken down. They are not. I, the liver is able to break a hormone down, but it rarely does because there's no need to get to those constituent parts that make up hormones. Hormones have, have fatty acids in them. And so those fatty acids are long carbon chains with hydrogens attached. We, we very rarely need those because we have enough fats in our diet. And so you're recycling hormones. They don't get broken down. People think, oh, if you use a hormone to stimulate a chemical reaction, because that's what hormones do, they're actually attaching onto a molecule, to a cell, and it triggers the cell into some sort of action, usually into a growth. And so, and, and when we trigger those, you think, well, then you used up the hormone. It got used up in the triggering. No, not at all. Hormones are, don't, do not function chemically like that. They go from a relaxed state into a taut state, and they will be, they will trigger the reaction. Then they release from the receptor site where they're triggering, and they go to another receptor site and trigger that reaction. It's, they can go and trigger tens of thousands of reactions, and they're never used up, and they're cleared out of the bloodstream, and they are in their complete, full molecular form, and they can go down into the gut. And by the way, you have receptor sites in the gut that they can trigger, and so you'll have re-capture sites in the gut that are sending all kinds of, so you feel nauseous and sick at your stomach, and all kinds of, you know, we call a vagus nerve reactions, and on and on and on. These are hormones that are triggering that reaction because they are still active, and they're still potent. And when you have large amounts of these hormones that are coming through your gut and going back into the bloodstream, you are going to have problems. You'll have problems with anxiety. What's anxiety? It's an overproduction of norepinephrine and epinephrine. Those are two hormones made by the adrenal glands that that enable you to think quickly, to deal with situations. But if you have too much of it, everything's going to bother you. It's too much noise in the room. I feel like I'm going nuts. There's too much stimulus, you know, that's too much epinephrine and norepinephrine. That's a panic attack. Well, you're recycling all these hormones over and over, and then you eat things to stimulate the production of those very hormones. You eat a bunch of sweets. You heard me say at the beginning, I don't eat sweets at all. Why? Because sweets increase your adrenaline production. Well, I'm already an on-the-go, very passionate person that it's already moving. I naturally produce a lot of adrenaline. Adrenaline is norepinephrine and epinephrine. And so I produce a lot of that. I am not going to eat things or drink coffee, which also increases the production of epinephrine and norepinephrine, the adrenal hormones, until I'm bouncing off the walls. Is that ridiculous? No, I make plenty of hormone for exactly what I need at the moment, and I can remain calm when I need to be calm, and I don't have panic attacks or any of.
The rest of it, and this is so connected. The legumes in your diet are absolutely essential, and if you're not eating them, you should not be wondering why you're having the reactions that you have. And you blame it on all kinds of other stuff because you don't know. And it's because you're not stupid, it's just no one's ever taught you this before. Everyone needs to hear this information so that they can begin to include legumes as part of your diet.
Can you break down the different types of soluble fiber? There are five different types of soluble fiber, and some of them are more effective than other ones. Like we have pectins. Pectins are fairly good. We have mucilages, we have hemicellulose, cellulose, and we have some of the mucilages. And all of these together, whether the hemi or they're not, they are making up the five types of soluble fibers. Some are more effective than others.
There are only, there's only one type of supplement because we see, oh, let's just name some of the supplements that are out there. Um, dextrin is one of them, and people will go buy dextrin. But, but it is a very weak soluble fiber with very little binding capacity. The one that has all five and the most effective are your beans. If you want to do something to substitute in case you don't have beans or you're traveling and you can't, you only carry cans of, you know, pinto beans with your, whatever, you can take psyllium. Psyllium is the, is the husk to the plantago seed. And so it is, it has got comparable of those five soluble fibers as, as a bean does. And so if you're going to have to take a supplement, psyllium is the only one that will do. You can't do the dextrin or, you know, I mean, you can just bring up examples. I have people write me all the time say, well, this work? No, it has to be psyllium or it has to be beans because otherwise you're not going to get much effect. Their dextrin don't work. It's wheat dextrin is one of the most common that people will use, or they will just use apple pectin. Well, apple pectin, that's nice. Pectin is a soluble fiber, but it is only one of the five that we really need to be effective, and it's not very strong on its own. So that's obviously one of the big reasons to consume legumes and soluble fiber in general.
What about other things that they do for the body, such as like the fibers increasing the production of post, uh, postbiotics like butyrate and that kind of thing? We have prebiotics and probiotics. Those are the, are good gut flora. And so the legume, when you eat that, is a carbohydrate, and it's the carbohydrates that are providing the fuel for these are live bacteria. I say ate fuel, it's a, it's a source of food for them. They have to have something to eat. And so the carbohydrate in the bean is also, is feeding those good bacteria. So it's a prebiotic is what it's called.
A fiber is classified as a carbohydrate. Well, a carbohydrate is going to give you four calories per gram, but a fiber gives you zero calories per gram. Insoluble and soluble give you zero. Fiber has zero calories in it, but it's classified as a carbohydrate. So when you're reading a label, it's label, it's going to say, oh, look here, it's got this many carbohydrates, and I'm a diabetic, and I can only have so many carbohydrates. Take the number of grams of fiber and subtract. And then you have to multiply that by four because there's four calories per one gram of carbohydrates. And then you say, well, now subtract that many calories from there because this, the soluble fiber and the insoluble fiber give you zero calories. But you can't get that from a label. It's all just rolled in there. And they say, look, we have this many grams, and you take that many grams because you can just look at it and do the math yourself. They'll say it has 20 grams of carbohydrate, and they multiply that by four, and they say, see, you have 80 calories. It's four calories per gram, so you have 80 calories. It's like, well, no, because 10 of those grams were fiber. So what's 10 times 4? 40. We take 80 and subtract 40, you really only have 40 calories there. So diabetics, you're okay. You know, so but nobody knows that because unless you study this like, like you do or like I do. And so then it's like, no. And so they should have a separate category. You know, they have protein, you know, you've seen the labels, they have protein, they have fats, they have carbohydrates, and then the fiber is a little indentation, it's a sub to the carbohydrates. It's like, no, no, no, no, you just need a whole separate category. Bring it out all the way to the left side of the margin here and give it its own category, fiber, because fiber carries nothing. It doesn't carry any nutrients, it doesn't carry any fats, it doesn't carry any proteins, it doesn't carry anything.
I have people call me all the time and email me all the time. I'm seeing undigested food in my stool. This is terrible. I'm not digesting my food. And it's like, you're seeing insoluble fiber. And fiber because it goes out the same way it you swallowed it. If you don't chew up that carrot stick in your mouth or all those peas or all those bean skins, because beans, that skin on a bean, that's insoluble fiber. If you don't masticate it, that means chew it up to its ground to a pulp, when it comes through, you're going to see the little bean skin floating. You're going to see little pieces of carrots because you didn't chew it up. And then, and you say, oh, I have to do a better job chewing. Well, sure, you can. But it doesn't matter. All it's doing is providing bulk to your stool. It's not a problem.
What are other great sources of fiber, soluble and insoluble, that people should consider adding to their diet? I mean, obviously legumes and beans are a huge one. If you eat a half a cup of beans, you are going to get five grams of soluble fiber. Let's make it a cup because then we can compare it and make it reasonable to other things. So if you ate a cup of cooked, okay, cooked lentils, cooked black beans, the kidney beans, whatever you're eating, you're going to get 10 grams of soluble fiber. And I'm, I'm, this is a generality that you're getting 10 grams because you need to understand the longer that bean was on the vine or the more wind or the more sun that it was exposed to, it's going to have more soluble fiber. So if it's on the north side of the hill, it's going to have more soluble fiber than necessarily being on the west side of the hill. You know, it just all depends. And so, you know, they'll say, well, this one says that it has this many grams. And well, you can go to, I have done this, I've done all this research, I've gone to a hundred different sources, and they all vary by slight amounts. Well, it depends because when you test it, it's like, well, what crop was that? And was it a good growing season or was it a horrible growing season? And how much sun did it get and wind and rain? And, you know, it all changes because remember, the soluble fiber is coming from the breaking down, a chemical breakdown of insoluble fiber. Okay. So a cup of cooked beans, you're going to get 10 grams of soluble fiber. The next closest source that we have in nature that has a large amount of soluble fiber is oatmeal. In a cup of oatmeal, you're going to get two and a half grams. Cooked, a cooked oatmeal, you're getting two and a half grams. Compare that to 10, it's like, oh, four times, it's only a fourth of what you're going to get in eating your beans. Then if you go after that and say, well, you know, I know vegetables are great for me, you know, I'm going to eat my carrots, I'm going to eat my broccoli, I'm going to eat, you know, my asparagus or whatever vegetable you're eating. A cup of cooked vegetables has only a half of one gram of soluble fiber. The rest of it's insoluble fiber, which is great for adding bulk to your stool. It'll absorb a bunch of water too. And, you know, it's all, that's all fine and dandy. And it comes with all kinds of nutrients that not in the soluble, insoluble fiber, that's separate in the rest of the vegetable.
Every person should be getting five grams of soluble fiber every meal. Eat three meals a day, that's 15 grams of soluble fiber a day. So let's do some math. If you're going to eat 15 grams of soluble fiber and you're getting a half of one gram in a cup of vegetables, how many cups of vegetables do you have to eat to get to 15? 30. Okay, let's go to the oatmeal. We're getting two and a half grams in one cup. Well, we need 15 for the day. But if you did beans, it's a half a cup each meal. Can a person eat a half a cup of cooked, not, not, you know, the dry, cooked, completely done, a half a cup at breakfast, a half a cup at lunch, a half a cup at dinner? You can do that. I can do that. Anybody can do that. We can easily do that. That's what we have to do. So there's, unless you're going to take psyllium, like I said, if you're on the road, then you would, to get a half a cup, two level teaspoons, two level, not heaping teaspoons of psyllium will give you the same amount of fiber. But then you don't get any of the prebiotic. You don't get any of the carbohydrate calories. So true carbohydrate calories, and you don't get any of the minerals. I mean, you're talking about calcium, you're talking about potassium, you're talking about, they're, they're like gold. What's coming with nutrients? Yeah.
Do you have a favorite of the legumes, like say black beans or pinto or lentils or anything in particular? I love them all, and I love them all. It doesn't matter what they are. I eat and I eat all of them. And then, and hummus works too, by the way. You can do, you know, because that's just ground up beans. Refried beans, that works too. You know, they're.
So what if they're more cooked and more mashed up? Remember that the more cooked something is, the more processed, when you're talking soluble fiber, the more soluble fiber it has because you're breaking down that insoluble fiber into soluble fibers. So this is the one time the more you cook it, beat it up, you know, process it, the more soluble fiber you get.
And I have a feeling that people listening to this may avoid beans for several reasons. The classic is that the age-old adage of beans causing bloating and gas. And then also, what's the impact on people who are in ketosis or trying to burn their own stored body fat? It is not the bean that is creating the gas. It's your hormones that create gas. You have to understand there's two ways to digest food in the gastrointestinal tract. The first is through digestive enzymes, and that is the preferred method, and that is what the body will always default to. We, we make a large amount of digestive enzymes, mostly made in the pancreas, although some are made in the stomach also. But those digestive enzymes break down the food so they can cross the little hairlike projections of the ileum and enter the bloodstream. There is another process of digestion. And so the digestive enzymes are actually the catalyst to cause a breaking down of these molecules so they come to pieces. There is another way that we can make these molecules come to pieces, and that is through fermentation. We're all familiar with fermentation. You make, you take cabbage and you ferment it, you get sauerkraut. You take grapes, you ferment them, you get wine. You know, you can see fermentation happening all around us. Things get fermented. However, to trigger the fermentation pathway, it's a chemical pathway. Okay, these are chemical pathways. You have to have something that is going to trigger that receptor site to cause fermentation to happen. And the only thing that will trigger that receptor site is a hormone. Hormones do the triggering of the receptor sites. And so if your bile is full of these hormonal waste products, if they're fully, fully alive and functional hormones, they're coming down into your gut and they are triggering the fermentation process. And then whatever is in your gut will be fermented, and fermentation always creates gas. We know this. If you've ever fermented cabbage, you take that lid off that crock, you can smell it. I mean, you know, or you can smell a winery. You know, if you could, you can smell a winery within five miles because they're fermenting these grapes. It's like, I smell that, I smell that. Yes, because they, the fermentation causes a release of gas. And so a bean has something that can be fermented because everything can be fermented. And carbohydrates are the most easily fermented thing. That's why we use hops, it's a grain to make beer. It's what, guess what a bean is? It's a carbohydrate. It's not just, it's not just the fiber. A bean has actual carbohydrates in it too that we count with the four calories per gram. And so you're going to ferment the bean. But I will tell you, you will ferment whatever you're eating that's a carbohydrate anyway. You will ferment whatever it is if you've kicked in that fermentation cycle, which is this recycling bile.
I just have to tell you a quick story about a client. He called from Canada and he said, Karen, I have a really bad gas problem. It is so bad and is so painful that I can't even go to work. And if I'm at work, I clear the room, you know, because I cannot eat beans because beans cause gas. And I said, I need to ask you a question. He said, what's the question? How many beans are you currently eating? Now, none, because they cause gas. I said, okay, so now help me go through the logic here. You have a horrible gas problem? Yes, I do. That's why I'm calling you. And you're going to tell me to eat beans? And I said, but you're not eating beans now, but you have a horrible gas problem. So what's causing your gas if you're not eating beans? And he went, ah, never thought of that. I said, it's the hormones in your bile. And the reason you're recycling your hormones is because you don't eat beans. You start eating beans, and it will just be a matter of time, and you have no more gas at all.
So I'm guessing you told him to start eating beans very slowly and gradually? In slowly and then to work up. By the way, he called back in a few weeks, he had no more gas. He's eating beans at half a cup, three times a day. So if someone has these exact issues, then your recommendation would be to start really small, like, I don't even know, a tablespoon? Start with a tablespoon, a tablespoon at lunch or breakfast, lunch, and dinner. You say that didn't bother me? Fine. Go to two tablespoons, go to three. And there are times we need to understand too that we're going to be producing large amounts of hormones. And that even if you've been doing your beans and you say, I've been doing beans for years and I haven't had gas, now all of a sudden I have gas and I'm doing the same amount of beans. It's because you're under stress. I don't know what happened in your life, you lost your job, you're going through a divorce, you don't have any money to pay your bills. I mean, something is really stressful in your life, and you're making huge amounts of hormones to deal with the stress. With women, usually once a month, this is happening because they're making large amounts of hormones as they come up on a menstrual cycle. And it's like, always when I come up on my menstrual cycle, I have so much more gas. Yes, because you have that many more hormones that you're producing, and you have to excrete those hormones, and you're not getting rid of them as much. So you'd have to eat the beans more frequently. And for some people, if they say, I just can't do it, well, then do the psyllium. There are no carbohydrates in psyllium. It's all fiber. I know they're classified as carbohydrate, but they have no calories. You cannot get any, any sugar out of them. Any, that's what carbohydrate converts to a blood glucose sugar. And so you can have psyllium. They will not cause gas. You say, well, I still have gas even if I did psyllium. It's because you also ate a piece of bread with it. You're going to ferment the bread. It's the hormones that cause fermentation. And the body would love to go back to the default state and just use digestive enzymes. But if you've got all those hormones there, believe me, it's going to kick into play the fermentation pathway.
I do not recommend a ketogenic diet for anyone because you do not have adequate carbohydrates in the bloodstream to be able. You have to have carbohydrates. They are a very essential fuel the mitochondria have to burn, and especially in your brain, because the brain has to make neurotransmitters for you to signals back and forth. And you're going to force this into burning fat as a fuel, which the body is very loath to do. And there's all kinds of downsides to this. And let me tell you, the biggest downside right now is that when you don't have enough carbohydrates in the bloodstream, then your body is going to say, we're going to die because you will die. You will eventually die. And so it's going to say, we're going to have to come up with a source of carbohydrates. Well, you can't come up with a source from fats because a ketogenic diet is high in fat. A carbohydrate is made out of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. Fats are made out of carbons and hydrogens. They do have a carboxy head, which has one atom of oxygen. It is not even suspicious for some of these are 20 carbons long. We're not, we, we can't even make it happen. You will not be able to turn a fat into a carbohydrate. However, we can turn a protein into a carbohydrate. And when you're in a ketogenic diet, you will go into ketosis. That's where they get the name ketogenic. You will go into ketosis. What is ketosis? That is when you are taking a protein molecule and you convert it into the carbohydrate, you convert it into that blood sugar. And you have to do this, otherwise you will die. And so, uh, you need to understand a protein molecule is made out of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and a nitrogen. That's the only difference between a carbohydrate and a protein molecule is that nitrogen. If we could just strip off that nitrogen off that molecule, get rid of it, we can guess where it's done in the liver. Oh boy, your liver is already dealing with toxic waste out the kazoo. So the liver now's got a new job. You don't have enough carbohydrates. And whether you say, oh, I'm sure my liver is not doing that. I'm on a ketogenic diet and I'm eating enough fat, my liver's not doing that. You are burying your head in the sand. Your liver is doing this. You are in ketosis. You are going through the deamination process. The liver can take a protein molecule. So this is your muscle mass. And muscle is heavy, by the way. A lot of people say, look at all I'm losing. Do you understand what you're losing? You're losing muscle. And it will begin to work on your muscle. And it'll take it from your gluteus maximus, which is one of your biggest muscles. It will pull from every muscle in your body. The liver will start taking protein molecules and it will strip off the nitrogen atom. It's called deamination. Amine is the Latin for nitrogen. And so all proteins have a nitrogen. It will strip off the nitrogen. And then what do you have left? You have a CH molecule, which is a carbohydrate. It's a sugar. Hooray, save the day. We can think, we can function because you, if you don't have carbohydrates, if you don't have that blood sugar, you are going to die. So we've saved the day. Okay, so that's fine. You got your sugar. You say, okay, but you have to look at what happened. What, where did that nitrogen go? There's a, you got, you got a free floating nitrogen atom hanging around. I am telling you, they do not just state pure little nitrogen atom. They are going to immediately, because of the valence electrons in a nitrogen atom, you're, you're going to immediately have hydrogens attached to it. Hydrogens are prolific throughout the entire bloodstream. You're going to have three hydrogens immediately slam into that nitrogen and make an NH3. Anybody that's a chemist out there, what is NH3? Ammonia. Is ammonia poison? Oh, yes. Don't drink ammonia, people. Ammonia will kill you dead. And ammonia is water soluble. So the liver has just made, it's, it's stripped off the nitrogen. And now we've got the hydrogen attached. Now it's got to run down, down to the kidneys. This is in the bloodstream. You have ammonia in your bloodstream. It's got to run down to the kidneys. You got to filter out this water soluble waste, which is ammonia. And how it's going to do that, it's immediately going to say, you're going to die of ammonia poisoning really fast. So we're going to slap a hydroxy particle, which is an O, another, it's an oxygen and another hydrogen. We're going to slap that onto the NH3, which will turn it into what's called urea. Well, urea then has to be cleared by the kidneys. So now you, you put your liver under massive strain. Now you just put your kidneys under massive strain. And it's got all this urea that it has got to excrete. And it will be excreting at great rates. And at the same time, it's excreting the urea, guess what else it excretes? All your water soluble minerals. Highest number one most prolific is calcium. I will tell you, when you stay on a ketogenic diet, you're going to end up with kidney stones, and you will regret it the rest of your life. It's just like, you want, oh man, kidney stones. You, I talked to you about gallbladder. Okay, let's talk about kidney stone pain. Oh, this is bad. And it's like, this is really stupid. This is so stupid. Why would you stress and put your liver at risk? Why would you stress and put your kidneys at risk? Why would you do this? And what you're losing, what are you losing? Muscle is dense. Fat, by the way, is very fluffy. Okay, it doesn't weigh a lot. You're losing muscle mass. Muscle mass is so heavy. It's like you're destroying your health. Do not do these ketogenic diets.
Is it pulling from the muscle tissue itself, or is it preferentially stripping the aminos off of your last meal that you consumed? It will strip it off the last meal that you just consumed because that's still in the bloodstream, then it hasn't been added to the muscle mass. But there will be a time that there's not enough of that too, and then you will strip it off of your existing muscle.
Yeah, Karen, whenever I scroll through social media, my algorithm shows me the posts on the carnivore and going super low carb and all like the miraculous health transformations. And when I look at the comments, everyone's talking about, oh yeah, there's essential amino acids, which is true, and you need to get those from your diet or you will die. And there's no such thing as essential carbohydrates, so therefore you don't need them and they're a waste. It's like, well, sure, you can live if you're not consuming those, but it's not like just because you're not consuming those, your body's going to function at its best. You're like, what about the impact of legumes and soluble fiber on the neurotransmitters? I know you've mentioned, uh, epinephrine and norepinephrine a little bit. Anything else that, what other effects does it have on the brain chemistry?
It does have an effect on the brain chemistry in the context that you're affecting the amount of norepinephrine, epinephrine that the adrenal glands produce because that we make epinephrine and norepinephrine in the brain itself. It is one of the neurotransmitters. We have over 100 different neurotransmitters. Epinephrine or norepinephrine is one of the most common. Those two, and then we also have dopamine, serotonin, those are common also. Acetylcholine too. All of those are very common. And the, what we produce in the adrenal glands is where the vast majority of epinephrine and norepinephrine is made. That will actually go, it goes through, there's a pituitary hypothalamus axis, and it will travel through that and it will arrive in your brain. It will act as a neurotransmitter so that you can think faster. It causes you to think faster. It's, it's allows messages to cross from one neuron to the other. But if you get too much of it, then you will have anxiety. And you will, you know, people who are really nervous, they say, I'm so nervous, I can't even do my, you know, like stage fright, you know, they, they can't speak, you know. You can get so much of it, it actually hinders you. And you get so much of it, it causes anxiety and it hinders you and you can't think clearly. You want just enough so you can be able to write on, you know, you've got all those thoughts right there. So the consumption of soluble fiber, if you have an excess of epinephrine or norepinephrine, will bring it down. So there's not as much in the brain. But if you say, well, I don't want to eat it because then I won't have as much brain power. No, no, no, no. You have to understand that that is controlled by the pituitary. There is actually another stimulating hormone that says create this much or don't create this much. You're not going to change that at all. So we will only excrete what we have to excrete, what's considered in excess. It's creating a detrimental effect on you.
Yeah, I have a couple more questions about your approach to legumes in general. And that is like, first of all, do you recommend combining them with anything or like having them separately, like before the meal, like having pre-loading before the meal with just the legumes or combining them with fat? I'm not sure from a bile perspective what you'd want to do. You usually can combine them, but there are a few cases where I'll ask you to separate from your fats, your beans, because when you eat beans with a fat, you're going to bind with the bile fats. Yes, but you're also going to combine with the fats that you just consumed in that meal. And so you will bind with less bile fat because you're going to immediately combine with what is in that, what you just ate. So if you had beans and cheese together, okay, that soluble fiber is going to be binding with that saturated fat in that cheese. And so you're not going to be getting rid of as much bile. But you're still going to be getting rid of a nice amount. Now, there's an advantage of eating beans and fats together because when they combine together, you're not going to have problems with constipation. If you have constipation, you need to be eating fat at every meal and beans with that fat because that all that fat is going to be carried out and will be landing in the large colon, which makes your stools easy to pass. There are times we need a large amount of fats to enter the bloodstream, and we don't want the beans capturing all that good fat and putting it into the toilet. We want that in the bloodstream. For instance, if you have psoriasis or you have, you know, different skin issues that are calling for an increased amount of fat, and so then you would want to eat your beans an hour and a half away from your fats. And so then you'll have the maximum absorption of fats, and you can eat your beans later, and you'll still carry out bile.
I was also thinking like a little hack if you're traveling would be to eat beans if you're not sure about the quality of like the oil they're using in a restaurant, it might be rancid or something, and then perhaps you're gonna bind that oil and get less damage from it. Yes, yes, and that will work. Yes, it will work. Yeah, that's cool. It's pretty easy to do. A lot of restaurants, you can just get a side of beans or something, and you don't have to have any fancy expensive binders with you. Yeah, exactly. And most restaurants, they do serve beans. Even if they say, well, we don't have, you know, like whatever restaurant, we don't have a side of beans. You say, well, don't you put them on top of salads? Don't you put garbanzo beans or black beans on top of salads? Well, yeah, we do have them in the kitchen. Well, then give me some, you know, yeah, we do. I mean, everywhere I go, they do.
So Karen, do you have any preferred ways of preparing your beans? Does it matter? Like, how worried are you about the quote anti-nutrients that are contained within beans, and do you take any special precautions around those? Whenever you cook a bean, you cook the anti-nutrients out. So all the oxalates, the phytic acid, you know, whatever you're going to pick on those are whenever I mean, we have so many scientific good scientific studies that start with the bean not cooked, and we can test for the phytic acid or the oxalates, and then you cook them, and then you see, wow, they're gone by 70, 80, 90%. Of course, because, and you're not going to eat a raw bean. I mean, they're so hard, they break your tooth, you know, you can't do that. So you're going to cook them. And so all you have to do is just know you're cooking them, they'll be fine. And then you throw throw the water away. So you know, when you cooked a bean, whether you cook them in an open kettle or you put them in an Insta Pot, you know, that's a pressure cooker basically, then you drain off the water, rinse them. And the same thing in the can, you got them in a can, rinse them, and then you're throwing away any of those anti-nutrients. You throw them away. You just take them off. And then you can add whatever you want to it, you know, oh, I want salsa on them, or I want to make a little gravy, or put them in a soup, or, you know, then you can do all that.
Well, Karen, I am eternally grateful for your work and for convincing me to open my mind enough to have this conversation about beans, about legumes, about fiber in general, because this is exactly what the world needs right now. Thank you for joining me on the MindBody Peak Performance podcast and sharing your wisdom and your time. Thank you. Thank you very much, Nick. Until next time, I'm Nick Urban here with Karen Hurd, signing out from MindBodyPeak.com. Have a great week and be an outlier. I hope that this has been helpful for you. If you enjoyed it, subscribe and hit the thumbs up. I love knowing who's in the 1% committed to reaching their full potential. Comment 1% below so that I know who you are. For all the resources and links, meet me on my website at MindBodyPeak.com. I appreciate you and look forward to connecting with you. As a reminder, the information in this video is for informational purposes only. Please consult your primary healthcare professional before making changes.