 Hello, this is Dr. Michael Greger coming to you live from my treadmill as I do every month on both Facebook Live and YouTube Live to answer any questions you may have. Oh, before I let me introduce myself for those of you who are familiar with my work, every year I read the reviews of every language, language, and nutrition journal in the world, so busy folks like you, don't have to. I think Paul's most interesting, most groundbreaking, most practical, most new videos and articles I upload every day to my non-profit site, nutritionvox.org. Everything on the website is free. There are no ads, no corporate sponsorship, but no strictly non-commercial, not selling anything, just putting it up as a public service as the labor of love as a tribute to my grandmother who was cured with a healthy diet and lifestyle, which is why I became a doctor to then pass along the good news to everybody else. All right, a bunch of questions have already come up. First question is from Marco, who says, been eating healthy and feeling less energetic and waking up tired. What could be the cause? Could be a million different things, some of which are completely non-diarrheated. Maybe it's a sleeping problem, maybe it's a good thing, things that could be going on. You should see your physician and find out what's going on. Maple flavor asks, what's the optimal protein intake? Is student medicine recommendation for 0.8 grams per ounce of kilogram body weight more than enough protein? Maple flavor is back asking, there's all these protein powders, should I be eating soy protein or pea protein or rice protein? And the answer is, there's no reason to eat any kind of protein powder at all. We should get all of our nutrients with few exceptions from whole plant foods. And we can do that by legumes. Why eat pea protein isolate when you can eat peas? Meaning split peas or any of the legumes, beans, split peas, tripe peas and lentils. These are the plant protein superstars. So look, along with your protein, you get the fiber and the folate and the phytonutrients and potassium, all these other wonderful things that you're missing when you get isolated. It's like a protein powder is like a vegetable oil of the fat kingdom or the lard of the fat kingdom or the sugar of the carbohydrate kingdom, table sugar. You take a sugar beet filled with nutrition, remove all the nutrition you left with sugar. You take split peas, remove all the nutrition you left with just the protein. Why would you do that? There's no reason you can eat. Get all the protein you need from whole plant foods. Marco is back saying, I'm skinnier than I would like to be, what can I do? You can eat more food. You can eat more if you want to gain weight. You can eat more calorically dense foods like nuts, seeds, nut butters, avocados, smoothies. You can do weight training. There's all sorts of ways that you can bulk up. All right, Martin asks, Martin's wife eats healthy yet only tends to have one bowel movement a day. There's a lot of people that would dream of having a bowel movement every day. Why is this, why does she have such a low frequency? You call that a low frequency, certainly not compared to the standard American diet but it sounds like he's asking, why not more? Basically, normal, whoa, normal. Sorry, things are falling over over here. All right, we will let that fall. So long as it doesn't hurt my microphone. One bowel movement day can be considered normal depending on what's going on with her. I would look at her fiber intake if she eating lots of whole plant foods and getting her fiber intake, 50, 60, 70 grams a day. I mean, if she's eating that kind of fiber intake and still just having one bowel movement a day, I wouldn't worry about it. Even though probably ideal is three as I talk about in my videos on bowel movement frequency. All right, maple flavor is back asking more protein powder, we already answered that. Lack of solidarity asks, oh, is just a remarking on a question. All right, what's next? Yavor asks, cyanocobalamin and algae-based DHA how much of each? Cyanocobalamin 2,500 micrograms once a week. So all you need, you can do 100 micrograms a day but it's cheaper, easier to 2,500 micrograms once a week. How much algae-based DHA if you choose to take DHA about 250 milligrams a day should be more than enough. Rake922 asks, is it ridiculous to never buy food contained in plastic containers as well as cans? A concern both about BPA and similar compounds as well as phthalates. Well, dry food should presumably not, BPA, for example, in food lining of cans, particularly a problem with acidic foods like tomatoes, the concern is that it would erode some of that to plastic and chemicals into itself. But dry containers, presumably the plastic should stick in the plastic unless of course you put it in the microwave or something. That's something I would not necessarily be concerned about. Is Ed Clark, 37, asked, is fasting health-promoting or not? And there's all sorts of fasting. There's water-only fasting, intermittent fasting, alternate day fasting. I have over a gig of PDFs. In fact, I was just checking this morning, someone had asked on fasting, going to do a whole long series of videos in fact. And I said it here first, everybody, are you ready? I'm doing a webinar, a fasting webinar. It'll be hours long, just talking about fasting. I know it's a common question, so I'm going to put all my fasting, my new fasting videos together, instead of just putting them out over the next couple of years to do it all in one, really excited about that. And so stay tuned on that. Rake922 is back asking, do vegan athletes have adequate amounts of creatine in the body? Is there a third-party testing to avoid toxic heavy metals and supplements? The way you avoid toxic heavy metals and supplements is not taking creatine supplements. Your body can make all that you need. Holisticale asks, can pregnant women, can pregnant vegans become choline deficient? They can't, they don't need enough choline. The concern is that people may get too much choline by eating choline, foods that are too choline rich, such as eggs, but as long as you're eating nice, variety of whole plant foods, you need not worry. In fact, I have a video about, if you look at my TMAO videos, I talk about the data on this mirage of choline deficiency, which is just egg industry propaganda. Green and cruciferous, I should know how to pronounce cruciferous. As slow as I can die, the same effect as, oh, I'm just replying to somebody else. Okay, oh, it, it tend to, it tane to nothing. It ain't nothing, I get it. It ain't nothing asks, is nutritional yeast healthy? Nutritional yeast is healthy for most people with the exception of those who have Crohn's disease or a disease called hydratinitis separativa. And perhaps other autoimmune diseases, stay tuned, I have a couple videos coming up. In fact, videos on nutritional yeast, on those who should avoid nutritional yeast, in the DVD I just released today, which is now available streaming and download. It'll all eventually be free online. But if you want to support nutrition facts by making a donation to get the DVD right now and watch it right now, you can certainly do that. All right. Assyl JJ, Assyl JJ asked, please, what about PCOS? Ooh, hold on, I think I have PCOS video on the DVD today too. I tell you, you're asking all the right questions. Hold on, let me look. PCOS, PCOS, PCOS. Oh, is that a later? Maybe that's in born 38. Hold on, let me look. Two, two, two, two. I know, maybe I just released a PCOS video. Yeah, it's the five board videos that have coming up. I just did, I think I just released two videos from PCOS, just a search for PCOS in nutritionfacts.org and they will pop right up. And it's questions like yours that got me to do those videos. So thank you so much for asking. Alayna the vegan asks, hello again, hello again. I've come off of contraception. What can I do to regulate my hormones again? That should happen naturally. Your body will get back in sync and so just do all the regular things you normally do, like get enough sleep and exercise and eat healthy and your body will come back to homeostasis, meaning come back into balance, isn't your body amazing? Mike asks, is there any evidence eating apricot kernels as a source of vitamin B17 will prevent cancer? I actually have some videos about B17. There is no such thing as B17. There was something made up by pushers of some crazy, fraudulent, nutty cancer cure, quote unquote cure, that actually hurt lots of people and there's a really interesting history about it and I will put a bunch of videos together about it but basically do not eat apricot kernels and ignore and anyone who says you have to get B12, B17, excuse me, B17, that should be a red flag that they don't know what they're talking about. You shouldn't listen to a word that they say. In fact, we should come up with a list of those kind of things. I know I have kind of an internal list when I'm looking at somebody's work but maybe I shouldn't write a blog or something. If you see these words and anyone's work, just click away, click away. Marina, vegan, asks, pregnancy and plant-based diets is it safe to lose fat while pregnant? It's safe to lose fat. You don't want to lose weight. You want to be gaining weight while you're pregnant. I wouldn't go out of my way to lose fat while pregnant but yeah, no, it's safe but I mean, you should be gaining weight, of course, as the baby grows inside you. Steve Streeter asks, many vegan DHS supplements contain sunflower oil, should we concern about that or are there DHA supplements that do not contain oil? The amount of sunflower oil found, so the reason we want to, in general, stay away from using sunflower oil is because it's omega-6 rich oil. So sunflower oil, sunflower oil, cottonseed oil, corn oil, lots of omega-6's may kind of throw off our omega-3 to omega-6 ratio which makes the difference in terms of how many, our elongation of our short chain, plant-based omega-3's, but it's all about quantity. So the small amount found in some supplement I would not worry about. It's just these are not oils I would cook with or use, not that I would cook with any oil but certainly would stay away from omega-6 rich oils in large quantities but it's certainly not a large quantity taking a supplement every other day or so. Green and cruciferous is back. Just responding to somebody else. April, whole-cut asks, how do I reduce inflammation? When one has degenerative disc disease, custard conditis hurts to move. How do you reduce inflammation? Well, one way is to eat an anti-inflammatory diet. And if you type in degenerative disc disease or disc disc into nutrition factors, you'll pull up a video showing it, talking about the evidence that degenerative disc disease is actually maybe a disease of atherosclerosis, a clogging of the vertebral arteries that feed those discs and so you can do MRI studies and you can correlate people's diets and cholesterol levels with how much their discs are degenerating. And so discs are particularly sensitive to clogging off of blood supply because it's an avascular tissue. There isn't a blood supply actually inside your discs. It's the largest avascular tissue in the world so it relies on just diffusion to get waste products out and to get nutrients in. So you need a good strong blood supply. You don't have that if your whole body is clogged up because you've been eating a standard American diet. And so that would be, so I'd recommend starting to eat healthier and eat a hopeful plant-based diet should reduce inflammation throughout your body and should help with both those conditions. Let me know how you do. All right, maple flavor says I eat a lot of sucralose. Could that be a problem? Check out my, just type in Splendor, sucraloseinternutrusfacts.org and a video will come up talking about the concerns about one's gut flora. The sucralose, the company that makes Splendor talks about how you don't have to worry about the safety of sucralose because it's not absorbed into your body. It stays in the intestine and is excreted out of the body. Well, it does stay in your intestine but then it exposes your good gut bacteria in your colon, sucralosein has adverse effects as I detail in the video, so check it out. Okay, maple flavor is backed. If I get my fat intake from canola oil, is there any harm? Well, the harm is that all those empty calories you got from eating oil, you could have been getting some nutrition from instead. So it's the opportunity cost of eating empty calorie foods like vegetable oil, including canola oil. Although it's not completely empty, there's some mega threes being here, mega threes eating whole food sources like ground flax seeds. The two tablespoons I recommend every day is part of my, oh, do I recommend one? I think it's one tablespoon. I don't even know my own daily dozen. I should get the app. Free on my phone and Android. A tablespoon of ground flax seeds today and we'll get the ephelon and anionic acid that's found in canola oil, but with a bunch of other nutrients as well. Okay, Serrano asks, are there any health risks? Does that say with eating a tablespoon of raw organic cacao every day? I assume you mean cocoa powder. If you do, then there's health benefits unless there's some heavy metal contamination or something, but cacao, like actual like little like nibs, cacao nibs has cocoa butter in it, which if you are concerned about your cholesterol levels would not necessarily be the best thing to eat. Okay, XX asks, Glucose, Serrano shows us vegetarian friend revealed high blood sugars and insulin resistance, that's not good. Avoid saturated fat or is it okay to at least reduce? And eating vegan is unfortunately not an accepted option. So I mean the number one source of saturated fat in the United States is vegetarian. It's dairy, it's dairy products. And so you can have, I mean, so you can eat a lot of cheese, butter and ice cream, have terrible saturated fat intake, get insulin resistance, high blood sugar, pre-diabetes, diabetes, and suffer from blindness, amputations, kidney failure and death. And so you see the whole food plant-based diet or move as much as possible in that direction and hopefully prevent those horrible outcomes. And it's like saying, I don't know, I mean, you can only do what you can do, but that's what I would recommend for optimal health. All right, it ain't nothing as, I eat lots of nutrition, is that a problem? Answer that already, it could be, if you have Crohn's disease or a Hidratinine, the Separativa, Serrano, Asterine, GI risk consuming oatmeal every morning, GI risk, how about GI benefit? Open meal every morning, fantastic idea. Leon, Liam, sorry. Oh, he's just replying to somebody else. Mohammed asks, are there upcoming videos about acne? I've got a bunch of videos about acne. Is the barberries one up yet? If it's not, maybe it's just coming up? No, I think it's up already. There's a really cool video about eating barberries, which you can buy in Middle Eastern stores. It's used to make a Persian rice dish. Highest antioxidant dried fruit you can get, typically on the market. Delicious, and this double-blind placebo-controlled study found remarkable, and if I remember correctly, I got 40 to 45% drop in acne compared to placebo, eating this wonderful yummy, in fact, you could put it on Serrano's oatmeal, and that'd be a great idea. All right, Polly says that Polly's sister refused to eat flax seeds because of cyanide. She says it is in the research. Is it true, or what can I show her? So cyanide, there's actually little bits of cyanide in all sorts of healthy foods. That's why our bodies developed the ability to detoxify cyanide, so that's why we can eat healthy foods like apples, and peaches, and things, and not have to worry about it all, or eat ground flax seeds, and not have to worry about it all. There are these cytogenic glycosides found in a bunch of healthy foods, including soy, and flax, and cruciferous vegetables, but your body can take care of any cyanide that's in them. In fact, the Swedish edition of the book, so the Swedish government says don't eat flax seeds for that very reason-based, and so I actually, in the Swedish edition of the book, they wouldn't publish it unless I put in something special about it, so I forget. If you email me, I can show you exactly what I wrote in the Swedish edition, but I basically went back through all that. So it was based on this one letter reporting in the lance of like 30 years ago, which it was just kind of this theoretical concern, it's actually been put to the test, and there's some ungodly amount of flax you'd have to eat to actually run through a problem. I wouldn't, so eat ground flax seeds, and don't worry about the cyanide concerns. Kathy, congrats, congratulates me on my PBS gig. How cool is that? My first TV special is going to be premiering in Detroit August 8th, and then in either October or December nationwide, I'm so excited about it, and so check it out. I just got back from Detroit yesterday. I hope it'll come to a stationery you soon. Okay, Ashley says she's having a hard time finding good blueberries, fresh or frozen, frozen, really? What about blueberry powder as a backup? You know, I'm trying to think. There actually are some studies on powdered berries. I forget what they showed. So I'm surprised you can't find good frozen blueberries, but if you actually can't get any berries the berry powder is would I guess be the next best thing. So yeah, I would do it, but probably frozen would be best, but I know it's in a video coming up. I just forget what it said. So stay tuned and hopefully it'll pop right up. Raul asks Christopher's vegetables impact on thyroid hormones. Raul's doctor says to limit them because his TSH is elevated. So there are again, this goes back to the side, genetic icosides. There are these compounds in healthy foods like broccoli, soy and flax seeds that interfere with your thyroid, Goyan's uptake of iodine. And so can actually impair thyroid function if you have marginal iodine intake. The answer is not to avoid really healthy foods. The answer is to get enough iodine. We should eat anyways, critical nutrient, particularly for pregnant women. And so what's the best source of iodine? Probably the healthiest source is sea vegetables. So eat norwee seaweed as a snack, find ways to incorporate sea vegetables in your diet, get all the iodine you need, then you can eat all the broccoli you want and not worry about it. And so yeah, your doctor is wrong to tell you to limit your broccoli intake. Virus asks, how do you make sure you get them? Oh, there we go, iodine. So if you wanna, you can check out my videos on iodine and talks about how much you'd have to eat it. So it's like two norwees sheets a day, get all the iodine you need. I might talk how much seaweed's out, all that stuff. It's all in there. Just don't use hijiki, it says too much arsenic. And I have a bunch of new videos about arsenic and rice in the new DVD launched this morning, which I think will be really useful for folks. Muhammad asks, is it true that the body cannot store carbs as fat and just burns excess carbs as body heat? It depends if you're eating, so that's true and false. So it's true that most carbs are just burned off, but if you need excess carbs, your liver can indeed turn them into fat and you can get fatty liver because of it. So if you have people drink one of those big 7-Eleven, whatever, what are those? What's the, I forget their names. Anyway, like big sodas or whatever, you can definitely overload your poor liver with carbs and it'll turn into fat. And that's not where you want fat in your liver, seeing a fatty liver disease. And if you eat carbs with fat, your body will store the fat and burn the carbs. And so yeah, the carbs will burn, but you just store it all that fat because your body, so all the carbs come in and the preference for your body is to burn carbs, not fat. And so there's ways in which eating carbs can lead to excess body weight, but it's because you're eating it with fat or you're drinking soda and eating lots of added sugars and getting huge amounts in your diet. We're not talking about healthy whole food sources of carbohydrates, like whole grains and legumes and fruits and vegetables. All right, maple flavor asks about heavy metal contamination of rice protein powder. The biggest concern with rice protein powder would be the arsenic content. So I'd stay away from that, but there's no reason you need it anyway. And a side berry powder, I don't know of any study showing a side berry powder, heavy metal contamination, although the study showing that the side berry powders have no side, some of them have absolutely no side berries at all. So why not just get frozen the side pulp which you can buy in the frozen food section in your local grocery store. And then you can actually get a side berry and you know that it's actually side berries and not just purple powder of unknown origin. Leanne asks, says that they use a pinch of dukes on my oatmeal every morning for I then, must be Dulse. Yes, okay, yeah, Dulse, that sounds delicious. Go for it. All right, Sonia asks, seeing recipes for smoothies with frozen cauliflower, how cool is that? I've never seen a smoothie recipe with frozen cauliflower. That's a great idea. Is the safety, can consume frozen vegetables from a bag? Absolutely. In fact, frozen vegetables can even be healthier than fresh sometimes cause so-called fresh vegetables may have been sitting on a ship from the other side of the world for weeks, days or weeks, losing nutrition every day. Whereas frozen vegetables may be frozen on the day they're picked and actually retain more nutrition. Local, fresh, obviously best, but if you can't get that, absolutely frozen vegetables, fantastic way to get lots of veggies in your diet. You look at my freezer, half frozen greens, half frozen berries so I can make sure to get, regardless of whether I go to the supermarket or not recently, I can get berries and greens into my daily diet to fulfill my daily dozen. Okay, list of all the healthy foods I wanna get into my daily diet. Okay, Sonia has developed a avocado allergy. Is there any way to overcome that? She misses avocados, though not allergic to mangoes or latex, that's interesting. Do not eat avocados if you have an avocado allergy. Will it go away as you get older? Probably not if it started as an adult. Usually people that get the food allergies and that'll kind of sticks with them. I'm sorry, miss avocados. Look up all sorts of recipes for like green pea guacamole or something, although it's just not the same. Can I, all right, and finally, oh yes, we got one minute, what can I do? Um, Marie says they consume...