 But you live from my treadmill as I do every month. Answer any questions you may have. For those of you who I'm familiar with my work every year, I read through every issue. Every English language nutrition, every English language nutrition is all on the planet. So busy folks like you don't have to. I think the most interesting, the most groundbreaking, the most practical findings into new videos and articles to upload every day to my non-profit site, nutritionfacts.org. Everything on the website is free. There are no ads, no corporate sponsorships, no kickbacks, strictly not commercial, not selling anything, just put it 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. All right, let's see what we have here. First question on the list is from Bella. Can I refill my iron stores with diet alone? Or should I take iron pills and give some iron numbers? The most important one is hemoglobin. That determines whether or not you are anemic. Ideally, we want to have a low hemoglobin, but not low iron stores, but not low enough that it would actually take your hemoglobin down to anemic level. Of course, you can restore iron levels with diet. Otherwise, we would not have survived as a species before the invention of iron pills. Of course, it's important to first figure out why. Once anemic, are you indeed not getting enough iron? Are you losing too much iron? So for example, are you particularly heavy periods? Are your blood cells not lasting as long as they should because your spleen is eating up? Do some autoimmune thing? All these various, something wrong with your bone marrow that you're not making enough red blood cells, all sorts of things. So you should, of course, treat the cause. And if indeed the cause is iron deficiency, anemia then, you know, not drinking tea with meals, combining iron-rich foods with vitamin C-rich foods like bell peppers and broccoli and citrus and tropical fruits can improve the absorption of iron. All right, next question is from Stacy, saying, if I'm eating a healthy plant-based diet, is it okay to drink distilled water? I'm assuming this question is coming from the stance of distilled water is missing out on minerals that are found in non-distilled water. And so my look, I can get minerals from eating healthy foods. Yes, you can get all the minerals you need from eating healthy foods. Why not get both? I guess would be my question. Just in particular, there's a lot of energy in the distillation process. I don't know why you drink distilled water, but you do not need to get minerals from water. You can get it from your diet, absolutely indeed. Next up, J.M. says, where do you draw the line between processed food and whole food? For example, I buy chickpeas and tahini to make hummus except for the taste difference. Why is it better, why is it making myself better? Okay, so my definition of processed food is anything that has something bad added or something good taken away. So anything with added salt would make it a processed food and anything that strips away the fiber, for example, would make it a processed food. So the reason why it's healthier to make hummus yourself rather than buying the store is because they're adding salt. I can't imagine a hummus or almost any processed packaged food that doesn't have salt added. And often they're adding oil, which is basically just empty calories. Whereas you're adding tahini, you actually get some nutrition with those calories. And so at home, you cannot add the salt and so you can have much healthier hummus. So would hummus made with just whole foods be processed? See, in my book, it wouldn't be processed. I mean, because nothing bad has been added, nothing good has been taken away. Next up, Stacy says, if I'm eating, oh, okay, we already got that. Thank you, Stacy. Next up is, have I heard anything about the COVID vaccine causing insomnia? I would have to look that up. It's not something that I've done research on. I know certainly from personal experience that COVID can make it hard to sleep. Okay, this is from MVS saying, when's the last time I've eaten meat or animal products? Do you ever not eat 100% plant-based? At home, I try to really eat healthy. There's no junk in the house, I'm not even tempted. But when I'm traveling around, it's much more difficult. So I just do my best. And that's really what anyone can do, what everyone can do. Can I talk? Oh, talk about the renaud syndrome. I think the only video I have talks about the improvement in blood flow when I think people were plunging their hands into ice water after eating citrus because of like asperidin, I think, some of the citrus phytonutrients that improve peripheral blood flow. So that would be my only kind of dietary offering. I mean, this is not something that's actually randomized, renaud sufferers too, but it might be worth a try to eat some citrus. Okay, Ferris says, speaking of iron, I'm on a strictly plant-based diet, but my triglycerides, ooh, that's not good. Oh, LDL is beautiful though. So I'm wondering if this was not a fasting test because triglycerides are very sensitive to the test, it's very sensitive to whether you just ate. So if you just had breakfast and then you got tested, then triglycerides could be up, but it could be up normally. It's the laboratory values are given for fasting levels. So normally, you should have low levels of triglycerides in blood. Same thing with like, taking your blood sugars. Typically we're talking about fasting blood sugars. How much blood sugar you have, not after you've eaten something, but just kind of when you first wake up in the morning, basically, but LDL is gorgeous. I love it. Okay, Milan asks, would be great to have a video on neutrophobic, neutrophic. I've never even heard of that word, but I have in my new book, How Not to Age, coming on December, all proceeds to charity, I have sections on Lyons, Maine, and Rishi, the so-called longevity mushroom, and Ashwagandha. Ashwagandha, I think that's in my sex chapter, preserving your sex life. And so, stay tuned. I'd be happy to give people a sneak peek on any of those if you're interested in, but they're all coming in the book. And of course, everything in the book eventually would be made into videos, but it's a big book. So it may be years down the road. Next up, from Joseph is calcium carbonate safe to consume with part of four or five plant-built. So for example, silks on sweetened organic soy milk or the lead levels, oh, I see. So a concern about calcium carbonate supplements was a lead contamination, but I wonder if there's ever been any testing. Because of, thanks to California, their Prop 65 warning labels, anything that exceeds a certain lead level would have to have a little warning or be fined. And so the fact that there's no warning suggests to me that's been tested for lead and it's not a problem. So that is not something I would worry about. Okay, Danny says ethics aside is low fat fish such as cod healthy. Well, so one of the, I mean, you could argue that if you're gonna eat fish, you should eat the fatty fish because it's the mega threes. I mean, that's the thinking that goes along with the thought that helps with cardiovascular disease. Now that we know that fish oil does not help, these fish fats don't help with cardiovascular disease and really only for more kind of cognitive health, particularly later in life. But in terms of whether fish is healthy regardless of how much fat is in the fish, the question really comes down whenever you ask that question is food ex healthy. The follow up always has to be, well, compared to what? Like what were you gonna eat instead, right? And so it's like our eggs healthy compared to a breakfast sausage. Yes, compared to oatmeal, not even close. So is that cod healthy? Compared to a baloney sandwich, absolutely. Compared to a hummus sandwich, not even close, right? And so it's like, what were you gonna eat instead? And that's what really makes the difference. Okay, Lily dreams 35 lots of little dreams out there. Do I recommend supplementation for vitamin D? Oh, great question. My blood work, ooh, indicated severely low levels and prescribed a high dose. Well, it's severely low enough levels. You may need a sufficiently high dose. So I definitely recommend supplementation for vitamin D for people with severely low levels. The question is, do I recommend it for everybody? And it's funny, I did a series, my last series of videos on vitamin D.