 Dr. Michael Greger coming to you live from my treadmill as I do every month to answer any questions you may have, though this may be the last for a few months as I am facing the deadline for my new book, How Not To Age, which should be out December 2022 unless I don't make my deadline in which case it may be pushed back as much as a year. But for those of you unfamiliar with my work every year, I read through every issue of every English language, nutrition journal in the world, so busy folks like you don't have to. Then I compile the most interesting, most groundbreaking, most practical findings and new videos and articles that upload nearly every day to my non-profit site nutritionfacts.org. Everything on the website is free. There are no ads, no corporate sponsorship, strictly non-commercial, not selling anything, just put up as a public service, as a labor of love, as a tribute to my grandmother, whose own life was saved with evidence-based nutrition. Let us go to the questions and see what you have for me today. All right, Fernanda says, what is the ideal LDL? Ideal LDL depends on whether or not you have been diagnosed with heart disease. If you have not a lifetime LDL, well actually, a lifetime LDL under 100 should protect you from heart disease. However, if you didn't figure this out until middle age and your LDL is too high and you're trying to get it down to prevent heart disease, then 70 would be the target. If you already have heart disease, then the target draw in terms of secondary prevention, prevent the second heart attack, drops down to like 30 to 50, or basically as low as possible. So way to say, could there be a harm of having cholesterol too low? We didn't know until PCSK9 inhibitors came out. We have these new biologic injectable drugs which can drop people's LDL cholesterol into these single digits. And still not seeing any problems with hormone manufacture like testosterone, estrogen, or any other issues that have piled on. So only benefit as you go lower and lower, but most people should not need drugs to get their LDL down. They just need to cut out or cut down on the three things that increase one's cholesterol. And that is saturated fat found mostly in animal fats and junk trans fats found almost exclusively now in animal fat. Now that's been removed from the food supply from partially addressing the oils. And third is dietary cholesterol found predominantly in eggs, but throughout the animal kingdom. Just do all that. Your cholesterol should drop right down. Add in a whole bunch of high fiber plant foods, which is say whole plant foods, and you can push your cholesterol down even further. I have an LP little A video up. Trying to think if I have another one coming up. I was just looking at that for the book. But I go through exactly where we should have a target LP little A and what we can do about it. Yes, in addition to eating healthy, there are a few foods particularly that may lower LP little A further. I think those are black coon seed and flax seeds, but check the video to find out. Okay, I will randomly click another question and it says this is from Leslie Geraldine. What do you think about eating insects like chimpanzees do? In Mexico, people eat crickets with lime and chili. Lime and chili sounds good. I actually do have two videos on entomophagy, which is the consumption of insects. I talk about which insects are the healthiest insects to eat, etc., etc. Check it out, but have a really, but only if you have an iron stomach because there's some really gross, at least to my sensibilities, pictures, and images in those two videos. Okay, this is from Heidi Neu, the plant-based, mostly fruit diet. Okay, if I need to take vitamin B12 supplement, absolutely. Or even vitamin B12 fortified foods. One of those too, critically important for anyone eating a plant-centered diet, even if you're not, even if it's not strictly plant-based, critically important to do. Okay, next up, Jacqueline says, what is the, oh, that's a good question. What is the difference between vegan and whole food plant-based diet? So a vegan diet is defined as not eating animal products and oftentimes also has other stipulations like not wearing animal products, but from a strictly dietary point of view, no animal products. But that means you could live off of french fries and beer and cotton candy and have a strictly vegan diet and have a horrible diet. Whereas whole food plant-based diet doesn't just say what you don't eat, but actually says what you do eat. Oh, you actually eat vegetables. That's nice. So whole food plant-based diet, one is trying to minimize the intake of meat, eggs, dairy, and junk and maximize the intake of fruits, vegetables, whole grains, legumes, your beans, puppies, chickpeas, and lentils, nuts and seeds, herbs and spices, mushrooms, basically real food that grows out of the ground. These are our healthiest choices. Next up, we have Mike. What a good name. What do I think of Kate, Dr. Kate Shanahan, fat-burned-fix, specifically grass-fed beef, Pasteur. That's when you raise them germ-free. Pasteur-raised meat and dairy. I've never heard of Dr. Shanahan or the fat-burned-fix. What do I think of grass-fed beef or a pasture-raised meat and dairy? Still has such a fat, trans-fed cluster, all things I just talked about that actually increased your LDL cluster. The number one cause of, I mean, the leading risk factor for the number one cause of death in men and women. Now, is that better than eating bacon? It is better than processed meat. Yes, indeed. Unprocessed red meat is healthier than processed red meat. So better than bacon ham, baloney, sausage, but certainly not as good as eating some hummus. Okay, next up, next up. There we go. Oz asks, how do I motivate myself to reduce my meat intake? Went to very small amounts to back to previous amounts. Oh, okay. Well, one can, depending on your personality, things may work differently. One can educate yourself, continue to educate yourself. One can control one's environment. And so if you just don't have meat in the house, it's easier to, you know, it's just like not having junk in the house. I mean, it's easier not to eat cookies when there aren't cookies in the cupboard kind of thing. And, and yeah, and educating yourself is about the various, whether you care about your health, you educate about health, you care about the environment, you can educate yourself about environmental impacts, care about pandemic risk, care about, you know, animal issues, you know, you can kind of constantly, you know, barrage yourself with information so you can live a life that is aligned with your values of, you know, wanting to have a healthy family and all that kind of stuff. Hopefully, that helps. And, you know, figure out like, what are you getting out of that, out of the meat? Do you like the taste? Is it the texture? Is it, you know, there are other things you could explore that are healthier with the same text, taste, texture, whatever is just like one recipe you really love it in. Well, maybe we can swap that out. There's all sorts of wonderful resources online for people to do that. Worst comes to worst, there are, you know, plant-based meats on the market now, certainly better than animal-based meats, not as good as, you know, eating beans or something, but certainly zero cholesterol, usually less saturated fat, no trans fats. So, and it actually has a little fiber, so certainly healthier and can give you those the same kind of tasting textures that you grew up with on your transition towards eating a diet centered around whole plant foods, which would really be ideal. Next question, Maria says, I have, oh, constant post-nasal drip. Oh, I had it for years. I've been hopeful plant-based still, since May, still have it. What am I doing wrong? Every, oh, sorry, I can't read the rest. It cuts off. I got to keep your question short, I guess. Well, so post-nasal drip can be an allergic, have an allergic component, could be dust, could be dander, could be, you know, pollen, that kind of thing. And so, you can, for example, try an air filter, like a happen filter at night in your, in the room that you sleep, and that can kind of take some allergens out of the air, and that may help. Give that a try. Okay, next up, Jason says, what do I think about Dave Asprey? This is a lot of stuff about MCT oil. Recommends eating fats. I've never heard of Dave Asprey, but I do have videos about MCTs using my coconut oil videos. And like eating fats isn't like just drinking oil or spoonfuls of lard or something. I mean, I encourage people to eat fats in whole plant foods like avocados and nuts and seeds and things. But yeah, I wouldn't recommend eating isolated fats if indeed that's what Dave is saying. John Moore says, can I comment on the significance of trypsin inhibitors contained within some plant-based foods? Should we as hopeful plant-based officials be concerned? No, we should not be concerned. And so, and these are the so-called anti-nutrients. I know I covered it in a video. I don't know if the video is that yet. I think it is. It was on plant-based milks. Maybe it's coming up if it's not already there, where I talk about where it was this interesting, this nice review at the table, had this long list of all the advantages of plant-based milks over animal-based milk. And then in the con column was this anti-nutrients. So it's like all these lists of good things, plus anti-nutrients. What do we say? What are anti-nutrients? And so then I go into the long to do all the research. And basically, spoiler alert, may not even be such a thing, you know, like, so we used to think, for example, you know, phytates or mineral absorption inhibitors, but this is based on like puppies and rats. It's a half a century ago. It actually has beneficial effects in people. So, and so I go through each one of them and talk about them. But so it definitely has something to worry about. If the video is not already up, it will be coming up. And if you have any follow-up questions, let me know. Okay, next up, pelican. Not pelican one through six, but pelican seven says, this is a typical question that I'm having a lot of trouble finding proper clarity for, okay. Disrupting nuts and seeds and legumes and water was a little salt. Oh, I just talked about this. Cheers, Andy. Okay, so phytogaster, those are the phytates I was just talking about. So we don't want to soak our nuts and seeds because we want those phytates, which may have anti-cancer properties. And I do have videos up on that. You have to not just soak legumes, but you don't have to soak legumes, but you do have to cook legumes. But you wouldn't want to add salt. It has nothing to do with phytic acid. But yeah, and you don't want to add salt period. That's, we get way too much salt. And indeed, hypertension is the leading cause of death on planet earth. So don't worry about soaking nuts and seeds. Don't add salt to anything if you can help it. And you don't need to soak your legumes, but you do need to cook them. Oh, unless you want to sprout them, like you can sprout lentils. Some legumes you can sprout. Sprout lentils are a wonderful, healthy snack and super easy. Any advice on asthma? Yes, I got videos on both preventing and treating asthma. Typically they have to do with increasing food and vegetable consumption. This actually studies where they took people reduce their food and vegetable consumption and increase their food and vegetable consumption randomized to each group. And those increase food and vegetable consumption, if I remember correctly, significantly lower asthma exacerbation rates. But what's interesting about this study is the group randomized to low food and vegetable consumption was like the average food and vegetable consumption of the American public. So it was like putting people in the low food and vegetable group that did so poorly in the study. That was just like the average food and vegetable group. So definitely one increase of fruits and vegetables, whether that's because of an anti-inflammatory effect or an antioxidant effect. Who knows, who cares, eat more fruits and vegetables to decrease one's risk. Also high fiber foods, they butyrate the short chain fatty acid produced from all prebiotics like fibers, just in starch. When we eat things like whole grains and legumes converted by our good gut flour into the short chain fatty acids like butyrate, which are absorbed through our system, circulate through our body, have anti-inflammatory effects, including within the airways. We should help with asthma. Okay, Krishna says, two baby aspirin okay to take, had a stroke in January, no blockages. I have a video on whether low dose aspirin is a good thing for both cardiovascular disease prevention and for cancer prevention. Check it out. Although there's new recommendations that have just come out, which I have not reviewed yet, so maybe out of date. But I will certainly update those videos as soon as I finish the book. Fingers crossed. Okay, Matt says, what do I think about supplementing with EPA only, not DHA for cardiovascular risk reducing effects, seen in the reducet trial? Long, well, I could go through the whole long story, but basically, so, but the bottom line is that, you know, randomized controlled trials, the randomized people, the fish well have found no benefit, little or no benefit for cardiovascular disease until, and all of a sudden this new reducet trial came out and which tried just the EPA instead of the EPA and DHA was a typical mix in fish well and found a significant reduction. Now, if you of course, if you throw it in with all the other failed trials, it washes out and there's actually no benefit. But they're saying, well, no, but this is kind of a special formulation or at least the pharmaceutical company that produces the stuff says this is a special formulation. It turns out it may have been the placebo control that they chose, they of course funded the study, they chose mineral oil as the placebo control as opposed to another trial that recently came out, used corn oil as a control, which is better control because it's neutral whereas mineral oil actually increased CRP, C-reactive protein, increased inflammation, increased LDL cholesterol. And so this is a classic big pharma drug industry trick where they choose as the comparator something they know is to be inferior so their new fancy drug looks better. And so they choose mineral oil to make, so we don't exactly know how much just the pure EPA is actually helping people. There are more studies on the way, but no, I would not take EPA or DHA for cardiovascular disease prevention. However, EPA may indeed help with cognitive function later in life, which is why I recommend people consider it. Okay, what is the best way to get sufficient zinc? I've run into a chronic deficiency and had to supplement. I'm curious how you got to diagnose chronic deficiency. It's really hard to actually measure zinc status. But if that were the case, then you don't need to supplement with zinc, you need zinc rich foods. Zinc, there's a lot of zinc. The reason why men, for example, have lower zinc levels in women is for the opposite reason that women tend to have lower iron levels because they lose iron every month and men use zinc, lose zinc in every seminal emission. Zinc is found in semen to protect the sperm and found in all seeds, not just semen. And so it can found in not just nuts and seeds, which are seeds, but also beans, which are botanically seeds as well. Whole grains, what are whole grains? They're seeds. Anything you put in the ground turns into a plant, that's a seed, botanically. So these are the foods packed with lots of zinc because zinc has this quality that helps with kind of reproduction growth. So that's where you should get your zinc problem. Shouldn't need to supplement. All right, my best past says K-Tow. Oh, Jesus. Bebida vegetal de semillas de hemp, so es allergica a los frutos secos. Okay, so I'm gonna transfer, transfer, oh, I get, oh, uh, oh, see, I can't, I was gonna copy, paste, it's like Google Translate, but unfortunately I can't copy, paste off the screen. So it looks like I drink maybe hemp milk because I'm allergic to fruit sugar. I, I, sorry, I apologize for my only knowing one language. I actually took a couple years of Spanish in junior high school, but learned un poquito solamente. Okay, Peter Rabbit. No, not just any Peter Rabbit, but Peter Rabbit, the nurse, pianist and composer, although maybe RDN is not actually a nurse. Anyway, RD is. Arb plastics, plastics in chewing gum, certain for human's health. I didn't know there was plastic in chewing gum. I don't think there's plastic in chewing gum. If there was, be concerned. You don't want to eat plastic, but I guess it's just a question, is the gum base in chewing gum bad? I actually do have videos on chewing gum, either up or not, but basically it was on chewing gum benefits for, for weight loss. And if I remember correctly, there weren't any, but yeah, I would not worry about the gum base and I'm not sure what you're talking about, about plastics. Okay, next up. Miyazaki Fan 100 says healthy sodium intake for endurance athletes with about treating hypotension with salt intake. You do not have to go out of your way to add salt to your diet, or you shouldn't have to. And we should not treat anything but symptomatic hypotension. So people, if you're like, oh my God, my blood pressure is low, well, that's actually good. We want basically lower the better without becoming symptomatic. We're just kind of like iron stores. We want to have our, you know, iron as low as possible, but without causing symptoms or dropping hemoglobin. Okay, Tom Dunnick says, dangers of glyphosates in organically gums of which have been reported. Well, so organically gums by definition by the 2002 USDA are gays and shouldn't have any glyphosates in them, but if there's some kind of cross contamination, we don't even know if there's adverse effects of glyphosates in, you know, you know, conventional soybeans or something. For example, which is where you find presumably the highest levels, that's the roundup pest side. And we just simply don't have any human data. But I've got videos, I go through all the data and talk about the, you know, laboratory animal stuff. But if you're interested in glyphosates, check out, it's like a three video series. Just type GMO into nutritionfects.org, and it should pop right up. Okay, what do we got next? We got Karen, spelled interestingly, the sanical balm and reduced potassium levels in the blood, not that I know of, and cannot imagine a mechanism by which that would happen. That is my preferred form of vitamin B12 for supplementation. Doc, be gone. Hope you're not talking about me. What do you think about a teaspoon of organic flaxseed oil on organic popcorn? So the herbs and spices stick to it. I also spray apple cider vinegar on it. Doesn't that do it? Works for me. I think I use malt vinegar, same thing. What do I think about teaspoon of flaxseed oil? Unnecessary. If you want your stuff to stick to it, you can use it just kind of water based stuff. You can spritz anything you want on it. Yeah, unnecessary is what I would say to that. Lewis says, does the high content omega-6 in walnuts, there's really not a high content omega-6 in walnuts, interfere with the absorption of omega-3. There's also present in walnuts. I'm not an impression they share the same pathway of absorption. Not exactly, non-absorption, but same pathway in terms of elongation with an enzyme called delta-6 desaturates. The ratio of omega-3 to omega-6 walnuts is actually excellent. Certainly the highest 3 to 6 ratio of any nuts, although something like flaxseed would be even better. The only thing about omega-6, we're not exactly sure how impactful this is, we should probably stay away from omega-6 rich oils, which are like the junky stuff you find in junk food, which is content seed oil, corn oil, sunflower oil, sunflower oil. Just stay away from country sources that you probably don't have to worry about your omega-6 ratio in whole healthy foods. 24 Swiffer says, 8 grams of my protein a day comes from soy, is that going to be a problem? Well, the 80 grams of protein may be a problem, unless you are absolutely humongous. We really only need 20 grams for a healthy ground kilogram of body weight, although look your way, 100 kilograms, right? What is that, 240 pounds, something like that, 220 pounds? That should be ideal body weight, not measured body weight. Presumably the only way you're doing that is by taking soy protein supplements, which I would not recommend. I wouldn't recommend any protein supplements. In fact, I think what's going to come out of my how not to age book on longevity is a protein restriction may actually be one of the secrets, although I'm still working on it. Don't take my word for it until all the research is done. Okay, do I, I maybe fly shacker is responding to somebody else asking, they brush your teeth? I certainly brush my teeth. Man of constant sorrow, that sounds depressing. How do I treat IBS? Oh, I think vomiting, when eating under stress, I wouldn't consider that a irritable bowel syndrome issue. But, well, I would not eat under stress. Huh. Yeah, and I would, yeah, and I would, you know, make sure you don't have like some kind of esophageal stricture or something. That is not a normal symptom people should have. Someone's replying to somebody else. That's awesome. Kavi says, hello. Oh, thank you. Any opinion on the salt fix by this James person never heard of it. But unless the salt fix is don't add any salt to your food, well, then I am skeptical. Next up, Shev Weas says in the video, you said two nourish sheets a day provides fish and iodine. Is that two palm size snacking sheets? No, those are actually full size nourish sheets like to roll sushi. Indeed, not the little snacking sheets. Okay, next up, Maria says, how come my husband got COVID and I didn't. He's a carnivore diet and I eat a plant-based diet, but sometimes I eat seafood. There's only one study that on on plant-based diets and COVID, which did not find any difference in prevalence rates, but just the difference in severity. So people in the plant-based may have less severe courses of COVID, but did not have, but it was not measuring the chance of getting COVID in the first place. The reason that your husband got COVID and you didn't is because either they got you got the exposure to a large dose or he didn't have the whatever immune capacity that you had. Hopefully those are that was a breakthrough infection that and hopefully you are both vaccinated to reduce particularly to reduce your risk of getting infected in the first place, but most importantly, boost your risk of a severe course. I'm a Moderna recipient and very soon maybe able to get a booster shot. Any opinion? Oh, I got to go. All right, sorry about that. I've got an interview starting in 60 seconds. Thanks so much, everybody. Have a safe, happy, healthy holiday season.