This sounds like a Chubbyemu video premise. (It's an excellent YouTube channel that posts semi-dramatised medical educational videos, usually following a fictionalised patient presenting to ER after ingestion of some substance, with an explanation of how that substance causes problems in the body and how a medical team might try to address it.)
I've definitely seen a video where he says the actor is a YouTuber friend and links to their channel, so it'd make sense if other videos are also friends?
im finally doing it. there is this thing where people recommend a youtube channel and laboriously explain what its about and 99.99% of the time its a channel that is insanely famous and known by everyone, requiring no recommendation or explanation. doing this has a negative association because it indicates everyone is oblivious to the world, to the fact that what you watch on youtube is not special.
I've been arguing for years with vegans who drink copious amounts for thyroid-damaging kale and kidney-stone-forming spinach juices. Many of the plants are rich in anti-nutrients and natural toxins to weed off predators. Having a normal-size salad is one thing, drinking 2 pounds of kale is something else. People should learn more abou Hormesis and why too much of the bad thing is bad and too little of it is a good thing. Every nutrient and intervention has an optimal range - below and over it turns detrimental to health. Drink too much water and you die from brain swelling; drink too little and you dry from dehydration - everything works around this example although ranges may dynamically vary from day to day. Things are not as simple as we want them to be (for our convenience).
The thing to me that is so ironic about juicing is that most people who are super into things like juicing and "juice cleanses" (whatever the hell that means) are totally against "processed" foods.
I'm like "What do you think a juicer is??" You just took that natural plant that's loaded with healthy fiber, removed all the fiber and concentrated it so it's mostly sugar and water.
This is arguing semantics really. When people say "processed" they don't mean run through a blender, or mashed in a bowl, etc. They mean food that is processed industrially with a bunch of (usually unnecessary) chemicals added to stabilize or enrich the food. Oreos are a processed food. Cake you make at home from whole ingredients is not processed. You are correct technically (the best kind of correct) but in every day speech they are different.
Your greater point I agree with though. People who drink vegetable smoothies don't realize all that delicious sugar those vegetables have is now streamlined because they destroyed the fiber. But hey! It's healthy!
Like the flour you use to make a cake has been altered from its whole state more than a little bit. So has the sugar. And of course, both ingredients are used in Oreos, for roughly the same reasons you'd use them at home.
I suppose most people don't cook with palm oil and soy lecithin.
<<
Vanillin – natural or synthetic? – secrets of science
99 % of vanillin flavor is produced synthetically (petrochemical origin) or biotechnologically (e.g. from ferulic acid, eugenol).>>
I mostly do cookies, quick breads, and cakes, but I don't think I've ever used corn syrup in my baking (not even for frosting) and definitely not high fructose corn syrup!
Your other points seem sound, and are things that I would not be surprised to find in homemade cake (except maybe the lecithin; what use does a cake have for an emulsifier?)
Regarding cakes and emulsifiers, could it be part of the industrial process to ensure the large volume of liquid ingredients are properly mixed before adding to the dry ingredients? In a small bowl it isn't hard to get the oil and eggs distributed but I can see it getting more difficult at scale.
Corn syrup is made by converting starches to glucose. HFCS is made by converting some of that glucose to fructose.
There might be some significant nutritional impact from that, but it's more or less a similar process to make it (with an additional reaction to convert some of the glucose to fructose).
> They mean food that is processed industrially with a bunch of (usually unnecessary) chemicals added to stabilize or enrich the food. Oreos are a processed food. Cake you make at home from whole ingredients is not processed.
The ingredients I listed aren't whole ingredients - which I would take to be e.g. flour, eggs, milk, butter, etc. If you're cooking with high-fructose corn syrup then you're not cooking with whole ingredients.
This is "flour is a whole ingredient because I say so".
The properties of flour are in fact quite different than the properties of whole wheat. And of course there is then a continuum, from whole wheat flour to white flour to bleached white flour.
I grew up with a countertop electric flour mill...I'm fully aware there's a continuum. And whole wheat flour is a far cry from heavily processed high fructose corn syrup.
> People who drink vegetable smoothies … destroyed the fiber
Do you have a source on this? Because I did a quick check, and at a glance it seems this is not true (and in fact blending can actually release fibers for some fruits) [1].
My understanding has always been that blending doesn’t make fruits/vegetables less healthy than their whole counterparts.
Blending and juicing are different things. Juicers typically remove the fiber which is then discarded as a waste product.
It's very possible that blending is still worse than eating whole though because the juice is now immediately available in the gut without the whole food needing to be slowly broken down even if you also still consume the fiber. Rate of absorption makes a huge difference in nutrition. Obviously the real secret is chewing as little as possible and instead swallowing large chunks.
> Blending and juicing are different things. Juicers typically remove the fiber which is then discarded as a waste product.
Yeah, I get that. And makes sense. But I keep seeing (even in this thread) that blending is almost/just as bad.
> It's very possible that blending is still worse than eating whole though because the juice is now immediately available in the gut without the whole food needing to be slowly broken down even if you also still consume the fiber. Rate of absorption makes a huge difference in nutrition. Obviously the real secret is chewing as little as possible and instead swallowing large chunks.
In theory, but is there anything to back this up? Because it seems like there isn’t much in the way of science or studies. But yet I see plenty of claims of it.
This is one of the many reasons why scientific literature differentiates between “processed” and “ultra processed”.
There’s something about the whole topic that draws pedantry out of people who think it’s a binary motion. It’s not. Blending some vegetables before you drink them isn’t the same as eating an ultra processed packaged food from the store.
Nobody who thinks about it beyond looking for “gotcha” opportunities would actually believe that.
In my opinion, people focus too much on vague science they don't understand. All we have as far as I know, are a few fairly weak studies showing a weak correlation between ultra-processed foods consumption and certain diseases like colon cancer.
They look at multiple diseases which drastically increases the odds of false positives, they use a broad definition of ultra processed food, they base their study on people's own answers and their end result only shows a marginal increase in certain diseases like for the control group they observe a tiny effect like a 20% increase in colon cancer for the processed food consumers.
This means if 5/1000 people in the control group get this disease, it's 6/1000 for processed food consumers. It's basically nothing. It is highly likely to be caused by random variance.
This type of research is not mature enough to base life decisions on. It is a hint that there might be something worth looking into but that's all there is to it.
Most people don't know nearly enough to have any sort of informed opinion on this topic. We as a society don't know whether processed food is bad, nor how bad it might be, we just think it might be so it's frustrating when people cite shitty popsci articles as if they're facts.
The one thing we can say for sure is that we haven't observed any significant effect in the studies we have done.
For all intents and purposes, eating processed food is as far as we know completely safe. Certainly much safer than consuming alcohol.
Maybe it's because processing implies adding extra/artificial things to the food but there isn't as much of a stigma from taking a natural food and only removing things from it. It allows the food to remain "unadulterated" in one's mind while still becoming unhealthier.
and with regards to water. I believe, it's when you sip on water all day that the danger of brain swelling occurs because your body looses the ability to gauge how much water is in it's system and doesn't quite know how much to excrete.
too much of anything isn't good. it's time to start embracing less.
it's okay to drink a bit too much water at once because your body can excrete it without problems.
They highlighted spinach for the kidney stones (i.e. oxalates). Per your chart, they are at 970 mg/100g, so two pounds of spinach would be roughly 9000mg of oxalates.
One of the reason I eat raw spinach only in moderation. It’s a completely different story however if you cook it. You could blanch spinach and then crush it into your soothie and all the oxalates would be broken down.
As this disagreed with recommendation I had from a doctor, I just looked it up. Cooking spinach certainly reduces oxalates, maybe about 50%. It does not eliminate them.
We evolved to thrive on a varied diet and we do best when we have access to many different sources of nutrition from plants to animals. Trying to simplify things for the sake of some worldview or another will damage your health.
Reminds me of 'fruit-only-diet influencer dead at 39'. However 'healthy' an extreme diet seems, in extreme it almost certainly isn't. Yes most people should probably eat more fruit; no they should not eat exclusively fruit.
RIP Steve Jobs. It was likely his Apple-only diet that did him in. He would go to these orchards in NorCal and disappear for weeks on end, eating only apples the whole time. He tried eating apples aggressively to cure his colon cancer and it appears to have exacerbated it.
I don’t think that’s a fair judgement. Sure, from the outside the decision to ignore medical advice seems crazy, but in the end it was his decision and he paid for it. Would a billion rounds of chemo have saved him? Maybe, but it’s also likely he would have ended up in the same spot anyways. We are all human, and doctors are just humans that are more well informed about the subject than others but are still human, and in the end it’s all just an experiment to see if this works better than that or that.
So I think the lesson should be, if you get cancer then you should be able to finish your days, in your own way if you decide.
He had a pancreatic neuroendocrine tumor which is potentially curable. But instead of getting treated immediately he dicked around trying to cure it with woo woo.
Jobs had an islet cell neuroendocrine tumor, a rare type of pancreatic cancer.
He decided to delay surgical treatment in favor of dietary treatment presumably because at the time there was little evidence for the effectiveness of surgical treatment (and obviously plenty of risk connected to it).
> a policy prohibiting employees from talking to one another about any topic about which both parties have not yet been officially "disclosed"--Distortionspeak for "cleared to discuss"--by a higher authority.
The most modern of which I've seen so far is Conjecture's infohazard policy:
It's mostly true AFAIK, according to Walter Isaacson's biography.
I don't think he disappeared for weeks in orchards, but he would reportedly eat only apples for weeks at a time, or carrots. He was a "fruitarian" for a period of time. [1]
And he didn't eat only apples to cure his cancer, but he did choose things like "dietary supplements and juices" specifically to cure his cancer, instead of modern medical recommentations. Which he then regretted when the cancer progressed. [2]
It's not a random coincidence that he named the company Apple. He was really into apples, like more than anybody you've probably ever met.
On a more general note, a human eating a vegetable is a predatorial relationship, and like any prey, the vegetable will evolve defenses against such predation. Obviously the vegetable can't run away, so it produces compounds that are harmful against its human predators. Artificial selection through farming may reduce the harmful compounds, but constitutes a small fraction of their relevant evolutionary history.
On the other hand, we have the opposite relationship with fruits. When our ancestors ate fruits, they played a pivotal role in facilitating the plant's reproductive fitness by dispersing the seeds, at times with the excellent complimentary fertilizer that is human excrement. In this case, the plant has an evolutionary incentive to produce more nutritious fruits to encourage such human consumption.
There are a lot of "vegetables" that are actually botanical fruits such cucumbers, zucchini, tomato, etc. (note they all contain seeds). They are much better alternatives than true vegetables (spinach/kale) for juicing if you are trying to avoid sugar or somehow don't like sweet juice.
It also doesn't sound right to me to refer to liquified vegetables as "juice", when I've long thought the term refers to the liquid produced from squeezing a fruit (not to mention liquified spinach/kale sounds a bit nasty)
Used to go to this restaurant after my Saturday morning movie, just to have lunch. This wee gal working there on that shift, usually, noted that I would pull my ticket stub out (along with other things I was planning on pitching) and began to regularly ask me what I thought of whatever movie I had seen.
One Saturday I came in and was instantly struck with a kind of floating anxiety, that something was wrong. Well, it smelled like someone who was very, very ill. I see her and her color is all off: pale but for two spots of color. Her respiration is fast, shallow, and her rib cage looks lifted. As in there is a lot of pain on one or both sides above the hips. When I get to the counter, I ask if she's alright trying to play cool about it (inside I am freaking out a bit). She says she's going home in a few hours. And what can I do?
I can't finish my lunch, I'm so keyed up because everything is telling me that this is a very sick person. As I leave, I am trying to be casual but again ask if she has someone to come pick her up. She says she'll be fine.
She's not there for the next four or five weeks.
When she returns, she tells me that she collapsed a couple of hours later and spent a week in the hospital with septicemia from her kidney infection from some obstruction. Apparently kidney stuff runs in her family when they get older. But she's young. I look at her nails, something in the corners. I use my nose again. Because this is kind of a healthy place. Again, trying to be casual, "Hey, do you like spinach?" She proceeds to tell me how she loves spinach and just "grazes" on it constantly at work. "Handfuls," according to her. Because this place throws uncooked spinach leaves on everything.
I scribble down on the back of a receipt a note for her to bring to her doctor during followup, because my guess is she just grazed herself into some oxalate stones. Been very wary of spinach since.
What were the nail orners indicative of? How were you able to identify spinach consumption from smell and nails? Was it because there were bits of spinach in her nails and it smelled like raw spinach?
They had a greenish tinge along the, I don't know the technical term for it, the line between the nail proper and the bed. But she smelled, uh, "leafy?"
I have a particularly keen sense of smell and, well ... like fresh green leaves, in a vegetable kind of way. But it was enough for me to make the connection.
>Given the increasing popularity of juice cleanses, it is important that both patients and physicians have greater awareness of the potential for acute oxalate nephropathy in susceptible individuals with risk factors such as chronic kidney disease, gastric bypass, and antibiotic use.
These people seem to have a profound misunderstanding about how and what cleans up toxins in the body and that there's something you can "take/drink/eat" that will somehow supercede your liver and kidneys to make them pure or something. Its bizarre. In their quest to become "less full of shit" they have become maximally full of shit
People who talk about "toxins in the body" generally don't even know what "toxins in the body" means. It's like people talking about "chemicals" in food. Newsflash, literally all matter is chemicals. Food is 100% chemicals.
"But they mean artificial chemicals!"
Sure. Except people don't know which ones are "artificial", nor do they know whether these artificial chemicals are more dangerous than their natural counterparts.
They're just full of shit. They don't have a clue, they're just parroting shit they read on Instagram or whatever.
You want to prove "chemicals" are bad? Pick one specific chemical, do some studies and conclusively prove it's harmful, then say "chemical x is bad". "Chemicals are bad" is just incorrect.
Almost none of this shit is based on reality. For the things we know are bad like lead, asbestos, PFAS etc we have solid science and we act on that knowledge by writing legislation to prevent unsafe use.
Popular science is like 99% total bullshit. That's why people complain that "scientists change their mind every year". Because the scientists just published some results showing a weak link between chocolate and cancer, then a bunch of bullshit articles popped up saying chocolate cures cancer and then people wonder why they still have cancer after they ate chocolate.
What really drives me insane is the complete crockshittery of the US food pyramid/guide and the obsession with "lite" products. People should realize fat is really good for you as a source of nourishment and satiety and if you suck all of it away, you gotta replace it with even worse garbage to compensate.
Yeah, throwing a bunch of greens into a blender is not a great way to consume them. Boiling/steaming is the way to go. The vast majority of vegetables I personally eat are well cooked and mushy.
I used to make green smoothies all the time, even went as far to by an expensive Blentec blender. If you are following Weight Watchers you actually get penalized for blending/juicing vegetables, so I stopped. Normally these are zero point foods. Their justification makes a lot of sense to me:
Man, I wish that chewing and food volume would reduce my hunger.
The only thing that makes me stop feeling hungry is my blood sugar going back up to a normal level.
I'm truly envious if there's actually anybody out there who can eat low-calorie bulky foods and actually feel satisfied by the meal. I just feel bloated but still just as hungry as before eating.
I don't think that only caloric content matters. How satiating do you find a 150-calorie small bag of Doritos compared to three or four grapefruits, with a similar caloric content? For me the answer is "not very."
Grapefruits aren't a good comparison, since Google says a grapefruit has 104 calories.
But if we compare a 150 calorie bag of doritos with 5 large tomatoes (each one being 33 calories), that feels about comparable in terms of satiating me in terms of giving me a break from hunger for maybe 45 minutes.
On the other hand, just large tomatoes does absolutely nothing for hunger. Which is the indication for me that volume is entirely irrelevant. (And why would volume matter? Your body can't turn volume into calories.)
Only problem with 5 large tomatoes is that it leaves me feeling kind of gross/bloated with that much volume. My stomach will literally feel like it protrudes, which is uncomfortable.
My mistake. I got misled by the “serving size” of half a grapefruit (who just eats half?). But volume mattering is pretty well attested and most people have experience with it. Why wouldn’t it? You physically can only fit so much food inside your stomach before it is uncomfortable to continue, no matter the caloric content.
Yeah I guess that's what mystifies me about it so much. Volume does nothing for me.
Like if I'm on a diet of 1,200 cal/day to lose weight, eating bulky foods does nothing to make me any less miserable, compared to if I stick to dense protein/fats/carbs. The sensation (and distraction) of hunger remains identical.
1,200 calories per day is an exceptionally restrictive diet in any case. I think it might be more obvious the difference if you were just eating till you felt full and tried swapping around different foods (though there is plenty of historical record of people resorting to nonfood items of no nutritional value just to fill their stomachs if hungry enough).
i know exactly what you mean. I can eat like 4 LBS of cucumbers in one sitting and still feel like I could eat a pizza afterwards. when you consume super low calorie foods like cucs and tomatoes, zuchinni, the body actually keeps on counting the calories with incredible accuracy and adjusts your hunger/appetite accordingly. But, I'll say, it does help a little bit and you do get a bit of discount by going with low calorie veggies, it's just not a silver bullet. at the end of the day you'll still consume less calories than you would have: just don't expect one large salad to fill you up. at the end of the day, you still need to go hungry to loose weight or keep it off.
fats don't all do that well on satiety studies. just look at the holz studies. most of the satieting things didn't have much fats in them: potatoes, apples and oranges.
The fiber factor probably plays a big role too. Sometimes juicers take that out. Fiber can make you feel full and it may also play a role in rate of sugar absorption.
Steaming retains more nutrients. Not only does boiling leach nutrients into water that is often discarded, it's easy and common to boil for longer than is necessary to make the item digestible.
Note that some things must be boiled to become safe; pokeweed greens can be boiled (and the water discarded) to reduce alkalinity. The berries, however, are never safe for human consumption.
I really hate this kind of micro-analysis when it comes to health. The human body is really really complicated and getting fixated on things like oxalates is in direct contradiction to longer term studies on overall health that show that eating mostly plants is a good thing.
Depends on the meat. If it’s western raised pork or chicken, they bioaccumulate omega-6 from their feed that the percentage of their fat that’s omega-6 can rivals or exceed that of “vegetable” oils. Ruminants seem to resist this bioaccumulation.
So the wrong meat give you all the same lovely effects of systemic inflammation, paradoxical immune suppression, metabolism suppression, and the pile of strange effects from the metabolites and free radicals. Which normally don’t matter much, but start to do when modern consumption of omega-6’s end up significantly more than historical exposure, all year long.
This is one thing to watch out for in rodent studies involving “fat”. In addition to having a very different relationship to fat than humans, the fat they are given is generally very high in omega-6, often being lard (from western raised pigs) mixed with some amount of vegetable oil. Thus because “animal fat” was used, the generally negative outcome then gets wrongly associated with saturated fats. If the study doesn’t give a breakdown of the fatty acid profile, then it’s basically worthless. Unless someone feels like trying to track down the researchers and find the chow product they used. Which is sometimes viable.
The key part of those studies is that they were comparing omega-6 fats to saturated fats like butter. They are healthier than saturated fats all else being equal, but that doesn't mean you should have that much of it.
I don't think either are great in the quantities most people consume, but the current evidence suggests saturated fats are worse if you are to simply replace one with the other.
So before I start, I just want to say that I have no intention of trying to properly argue some kind of complete and rigorous position and have this turn into yet another discussion where people throw sources around and nothing gets accomplished. Sometimes that's fun, but that takes a lot of time and effort, neither of which I have the luxury or desire of burning right now. Basically this is ultimately a drive by comment written on a break (now breaks, fuck). I can't commit to anything else, and I am just assuming you genuinely are interested in something you've not been exposed to.
I offer my strong encouragement to reevaluate and look on with suspicion about the standard "health advice" that has ultimately been provided and supported by an industry that has been dependent on products with high omega-6s in order to achieve low costs and strong preservative effects. And when I say industry I don't mean some "the man" boogeyman cackling in the shadows, I mean I work in agriculture and the very boring humans up and down the supply chain have a lot of incentives for certain thoughts and behaviors, and are strongly disincentivized to ever stop and say "hey is this a problem?".
Ask yourself this, if it is true that eating more omega-6 fats than humans have historically been exposed to is healthy, then why has turning away from the high saturated fats found in "traditional" european and american foods (piles of butter and carbs) only resulted in a population level increase in cardiovascular disease, obesity, and diabetes? While you can't make a rigorous conclusion from just that correlation, Chesterton’s Fence definitely seems relevant here. To be clear, I consider there to be multiple causes for all three of those issues and no one single fix, but I do consider the omega-6 called linoleic acid to be a particularly strong one. Unfortunately there seems to be different "metabolic gears" people can be in, so just taking a metabolically compromised person and only feeding them butter and carbs may not help and could even hurt their situation.
The food oil industry is well aware of the problems that omega-6s have, but obviously aren't keen on announcing something they are at fault for. What you will see is a quiet move to new varieties of plants bred/modified to produce higher monounsaturated fats in place of polyunsaturated fats. As a side note, this may actually not be the best move. Linoleic acid can induce a lower metabolism (in fact animals that enter torpor seem to require it) however once that happens it appears that the monounsaturated fats found in body fat stores seem to maintain the cycle. So it's unlikely to help those with compromised metobolisms. Another side note, I've heard that consuming very large amounts of linoleic acid can sometimes do the opposite and raise metabolism though I've not explored that much. Frankly it's a bad idea to try and achieve it that way, but it's another example of a surprising reverse of what you'd normally expect. If you ever wonder why there's so many seemingly contradictory relationships, it's because your metabolic pathways are an impossible clusterfuck of nested feedback loops, like if a hydra fucked an ouroboros. Look at this map and despair of ever trying to make a 100% always correct statement even with well done science: http://biochemical-pathways.com/#/map/1
But shortly put, the only thing (probably) correct in that article is that linolenic acid intake does not seem to correlate with arachidonic acid levels (I'm presuming this is in rats). I can say this because I'm reasonably convinced that linoleic (not to be confused with linolenic) also doesn't seem to correlate with arachidonic acid (in rats). So I find it definitely reasonable to take on it's face. The conclusion that omega-6s are somehow then good, is absolute bullshit though. Arachidonic acid is not the only omega-6 with issues. The most well researched one with a laundry list of negative effects is linoleic acid.
>American Heart Association (AHA)
AHA is a highly biased organization that puts out bad science. They are the Autism Speaks of the health world. If their stamp is on it, be extremely wary.
>"Omega-6 fats are not only safe but they are also beneficial for the heart and circulation," says advisory coauthor Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian, an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women's Hospital.
Jesus titty fucking christ, she couldn't be more irresponsibly and dangerously wrong. Now, there a load of resources one can explore that counter this idea of "heart healthy" omega-6s, but instead of a gish gallop that not even I'm interested in, here's my personal favorites, because it so perfectly illustrates how easily one can walk away with the exact wrong conclusion if the trial isn't thorough enough.
See Figure 2.
Basically Both Normal and diabetic rats were fed a "normal" diet vs one with very high omega-6.
Apoptosis is controlled cell death, in this case measured by caspase-3 activity. The Diabetic rats had their heart cell caspase-3 activity reduced by about half.
So this means, omega6 resulted in less heard cells dying, right? Heart healthy and great for diabetics!
But they also measured something else. Necrosis is uncontrolled cell death (resulting in inflammation and other negative side effects), in this case measured by serum LDH. In Figure 3, they show that serum LDH more than triples.
Basically feeding diabetic rats omega-6 enriched food traded heart cells dying in a controlled manner, with dying in an uncontrolled manner.
P.S. Epidemiology in health research (which the pro-omega-6 crowd is heavily reliant on) is a giant pile of dogshit that can be made to say whatever the author wants, and severely suffers from the replicability crisis that plagues other areas of science where it's hard to actually control and measure everything involved. Beware both the conclusions, as well as the time spent digging through shit to find out that yes, it really was shit.
It's been hard to tease out and more to come but sat fat appears to have a knee curve where small amounts don't cause harm. See Plant Chompers yt for some of the research.
Is there a good overview of anti-nutrients? I feel like this is an elephant in the room among all the even basically nutritionally/biochemically literate in any forum discussing health foods and diet. People act like because plants have seeds that they want you to eat and propogate them that they forget they might have other defenses to deter from consuming them that might be overlooked.
I can't speak for that speaker but the typical answer: meat consumption is associated with affluence, which also is associated with sugar and processed food consumption.
Hmm? Oxalates causing less severe damage (kidney stones) is more common than just one woman. If you are a vegan you know you need to go easy on things like raw spinach and almonds.
Almonds are one of the highest-oxalate foods but I think generally it's fine unless you're prone to calcium oxalate kidney stones. But most people find out they're prone when they get their first stone.
I've gotten two and don't recommend. Things that help, short of the sort of restrictions I'm stuck with: drink lots of water with high-oxalate foods, and eat foods high in calcium with them. The calcium binds with the oxalate in your guts instead of your kidneys and passes right out. Some people dissolve a calcium pill in the water they boil spinach in.
They can see tiny stones in your kidneys with a scan so it's possible to check before you get a real problem, though I don't know if they would without any symptoms.
> Despite significantly more dietary oxalates (254 mg/day) and oxalate-containing foods such as nuts, vegetables, and whole grains, participants with higher DASH scores have a 40–50% decreased risk of kidney stones [68]. This is perhaps attributed to the protective and synergistic effects of phytate, potassium, calcium, and other phytochemicals all abundant in the DASH dietary pattern. Similar findings regarding the protective role of vegetables on urolithiasis risk were reported by Zhuo et al. [69]. While animal protein consumption was associated with higher kidney stone risk, vegetable and tea consumption were associated with a decreased risk of stone formation.
It's possible to eat a DASH diet while leaving out the foods with the highest oxalates. It's what I do myself.
Avoiding high-oxalate foods if you're prone to oxalate stones isn't a meme, it was the advice of my urologist and the printed pamphlets he gave me. Along with drinking plenty of water, especially with meals as I mentioned above. As for calcium, it's mentioned as protective in your quote.
A̶r̶s̶e̶n̶i̶c̶ Cyanide is the thing to watch for I believe. Stay away from bitter almonds, roasted should be fine. You'd have to eat a 25 Kg bag of sweet almonds to get into trouble. Not sure about the cumulative effects though, that might be worth checking into.
Could you bring some empirics to the table for normal people having a common problem with oxalates at normal doses without predisposing issues like kidney disease or the ones the woman had in the case study?
Does "going easy on oxalates" just mean you have fewer than six spinach smoothies per day?
I'm used to these dietary memes cashing out into either trivial claims or nothing burgers.
> Oxalic acid has an oral LDLo (lowest published lethal dose) of 600 mg/kg.[62] It has been reported that the lethal oral dose is 15 to 30 grams.
and
> Frozen commercially available spinach in New Zealand contains 736.6 ± 20.4 mg/100g wet matter (WM) soluble oxalate
while the USDA says about 900 mg per 100 g for American spinach on average.
So roughly 1% of the wet spinach by weight. 1 kilo of high-oxalate spinach probably has 10 - 20 grams of oxalic acid. That's a lot of spinach, but probably chuggable in one day in smoothie format. Far too close to the LD50 estimate for my comfort!
For one large salad, it's unlikely to exceed a couple grams. I'm unsure about the effects of chronic lower dose exposure.
This is what I mean, though. How many people regurgitating "Be sure to watch out for oxalates!" know that we're talking about thousands of grams of spinach?
Looking it up, people generally eat 50-200mg of oxalates per day with 1000mg being the outlier high end.
Eat your spinach. If you're worried, then cook it.
The article says this may only be an issue for those: "susceptible individuals with risk factors such as chronic kidney disease, gastric bypass, and antibiotic use."
I'm gonna go ahead and say that if something is bad enough to kill someone who is somewhat weakened, that doesn't make it fine for folks who aren't weakened. This is an extreme diet and even if it doesn't kill you, it's ridiculous to think it will do you no harm. If you're at risk of death from taking antibiotics because you only eat fruit, the problem isn't the antibiotics.
Sugar especially fructose in high amounts isn't great for the body.
Modern fruit has been genetically engineered (via selective breeding or other means) to be much more sweet than their wild counterparts, and hence contains much more sugar.
Surviving on wild fruit is probably not really that pleasant since most of them don't really taste that great.
PS: generally fruit have little protein, so you might also want to find some extra sources of protein too.
As a gastroenterologist I see so many gastrointestinal issues caused by smoothies. They also cause a lot of weight gain as they are usually high in calories. Just eat your fruits and vegetables.
Another problem with smoothies is that they are blended, which speeds up absorption and causes blood sugar to spike. That forces your body to increase production of insulin, and spiky insulin increases the risk of blood sugar issues.
If you just eat the fruits and veggies normally, the digestive system has a couple more hours to slowly absorb the calories and nutrients, helps smoothen things out a bit.
And if you have to chew and eat the food, you probably end up consuming less of it.
I'm sure it makes a lot of people feel better, but almost certainly because of the cessation of whatever dietary behavior was causing them to feel bad in the first place, as opposed to eliminating some undefined "toxin."
From what I am reading, this is true for a lot of diets, what you stop eating during your diet often has a bigger impact that what the diet prescribe you to eat.
And as we can see in this case, most of the toxins that you secrete after a "cleanse" are from the "cleanse" liquid itself! Though to play debil's[0] advocate for a second, the body can retain toxins from the environment, e.g. heavy metals, chemicals from plastics, etc. So there is some basis in the idea of trying to purge toxins, but if you find a way to do that with a smoothie from store bought vegetables, you would be up for at least some kind of prize for advancing our understanding of human biology.
Words like toxin, detox, cleanse, and rejuvenation are red-flag words that almost always indicate quackery[1]. It's like this generation's "crystal healing".
It's like the idea that getting a massage releases all the toxins in your body and you need to drink water after to flush them out. That's what they always tell me after I get one. I have to restrain laughter.
Even though the toxins myth is incorrect, drinking lots of water after is a good idea.
A deep tissue massage can cause mild rhabdomyolysis, which is where broken down cells (from the massage) get dumped into the blood. Water will help dilute urine while this occurs. Many massage therapists probably do think that there are harmful toxins get released, though.
It came about as a marketing gimmick due to the scientific reality of widespread contamination of food, water and air with persistent chemicals that accumulate in human bodies, e.g. PCBs in breast milk and so on. It's also a reality that many 'natural' substance accumulate and persist in the body and are only slowly excreted particularly if they have a nonpolar oily affinity (this is why THC testing, i.e. marijuana urine tests, work).
The reason it's batty is that nobody who markets these products ever does a scientific study to see if their 'cleanse' program has any measureable effect on the rate your body excretes various pollutants and contaminants, relative to the normal background turnover. Generally, removing the source of the contamination is more important than anything else, e.g. lead poisoning from contaminated water supplies and so on.
Exactly. So when people take"essential oils" or whatever to "detox" - yeah sure, you may feel a difference.
But that's probably because that substance you ingested wasn't healthy in the first place and what you're witnessing is your body trying to get rid of it fast.
A constrained diet can be a useful tool in identifying which foods cause inflammation and other issues. I now live on a subset of the food groups based on a few dozen such N=1 cleanse experiments, with much improved health.
For my idiosyncratic combination of diabetes and gastroparesis the removal of carbs and fiber have been life savers. I fought hard against recognizing that though and had to prove it to myself with cleanses. But the difference was too dramatic for me to ignore.
Almost every study on that page links a separate case of gastric bypass with later oxalate dietary issues. There are other reasons to be aware of oxalate intake but it’s like that one woman who almost overdosed on raw bok choi (iirc 1-1.5 kg per day https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc0911005) a little moderation in all things.
My system is a 12oz green smoothie every other day. Forcing it into a daily, ritualistic cult is where beneficial health ventures turn to NIH articles.
One of the factors in figuring out how safe a particular substance is that there may be gut bacteria, genetic, or other dietary confounders that make something fine for one person but poison for another. A spinach smoothy a day may be good for you but bad for me.
A friends father recently had some issues with gout that were requiring some rather obnoxious dietary measures to tame. He found evidence in the literature about some bacteria strains that were found to be effective, found a source for the identified strains, and swears by the result.
Even if you're going heavy on juicing or what not, it's important to diversify instead of drinking the same thing for days or weeks at a time. Generally people who run into these problems are the ones taking shortcuts --the same type that'd be doing steroids instead of spending 6-7 years in the gym on a regular basis.
With oxalate nephropathy, I have an oxalate budget of 100/day - 2 oz of dark chocolate covers that.
But then, if one is concerned, citrates provide a first-line defense,e.g. 4 oz of lemmon juice, or,say, calcium or potassium citrate. That doesn't stop things, but it helps.
In your microbiome, oxalobacter formigenes is the primary defense. Lose that from, say, antibiotics or IBS, and you've got problems.
Let me build on that visit https://elicit.org/ and type in a research question like "what causes oxalate nephropathy" and look at the results (elicit is free). That happens to be where I found the paper linked at the top.
During COVID lockdown, working from home, I dramatically reduced my coffee intake while not replacing it with other liquid intake. I was literally drinking about 500 mL per day during lockdown. I also snacked on lots of almonds. When my son was born (still during lockdown), I literally did lots of running (jogging) around for various paperwork. 7 days after my son was born, I woke up, mentioned to my wife it felt a bit like I had been punched in the kidney the night before, and promptly found blood in my urine.
Luckily, it turned out that I had a kidney stone, and apparently the jogging for paperwork shook it loose. (Cancer, kidney infection, kidney stones, and physical injury are the main causes of blood in urine.)
Magnesium citrate is now my citrate of choice. It turns out I should drink at least 2 L of water per day.
too much raw spinach, in combination with gastric bypass and prolonged antibiotic use.
The bypass probably doesn't help because you are reducing the time exposed to acid/alkali. The antibiotic also kills off any bacteria that would absorb oxalates.
I would agree with that. A lot of research does talk about both antibiotics and gastric bypass surgery. But, that's only a part of the story. My research continues to uncover ways in which oxalates can cause mayhem. Just consider ordinary kidney stones. Calcium Oxalate. Oxalate damage is not limited to that,or to kidney failure through nephropathy. There is a medium.com piece by a fellow who had calcium oxalate crystals in his hearing canal. To get his hearing back, he had to go on a low oxalate diet. There's a pubmed on such situations [1]
No they can't, as this study shows. The problem is that calcium is bonding to the oxalates. Normally your body will pass them through excretion, but it appears that oxalates in high quantities should be avoided altogether, as they just seem to collect in the kidney. Skip the oxalates and just take the calcium. One is essential and the other is the opposite.
Agree about avoiding high quantities of oxalate, but the point of taking calcium is so that the binding occurs in the gut where it can be excreted, rather than the kidneys.
Serious green eaters know that oxolates are there to make eaters move on from taking out the whole bush. In the same way, if you consume a high amount of greens you have to rotate them.
It could have been the diet, the fluoroquinolone, or both. YC News has a good bit of discussion on the damage fluoroquinolones can do, and it’s worth reading.
Actually, there has been more than one video about oxalate nephropathy already, but from more obviously potentially harmful sources (https://youtube.com/watch?v=QJs431FsC_k&t=6m40s, https://youtube.com/watch?v=UrbylXMU8Mw&t=7m45s).