 Live from my treadmill, which is off. So I don't make anybody motion sick. As I do every month to answer any questions you may have. 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. I think the follow the most interesting, most groundbreaking, most practical findings, new videos and articles I upload every day to my non-profit site nutritionfacts.org. Everything on the website is free. There are no ads, no corporate sponsorship and a kickback strictly non-commercial, not selling anything. Just put it up as a public service as the labor of love as a tribute to my grandmother whose own life was saved with evidence-based nutrition. If you are watching this on Facebook or YouTube, it's this weird vertical format. That's because we're also now streaming to Instagram. So I had to go from kind of landscape to vertical. So sorry if that looks a little weird on your browser. First question up, how can one maximize nutrient absorption on a whole plant-based diet, particularly interested in nutrients and how important for brain health? Well, so nutrients important for brain health, Lutin and Ziaxanthin are fat soluble. And so, and found concentrated in dark green leafy vegetables, most concentrated. And so, but because they're fat soluble, if you eat your greens without some source of fat, they will largely go right through you and you flush them down and not do you any good. Now make it, forget your brain, doesn't even make it into your bloodstream. So that's why we want to mix our greens with some form of fat. What's the best way to get fat? Best way to get all our macronutrients are protein, our carbs, our fat through whole plant foods. So what's a whole plant source of fat? Avocados, nuts, seeds, nut butter, seed butters, right? And so, you know, sprinkle some sesame seeds on your, you know, on your steamed greens or make some kind of, you know, tahini dressing or I don't know why I'm thinking sesame today, but there's all sorts of, you know, some slivered almonds. You can, you know, you can, I like to make pesto with either walnuts or avocado and make it really nice and creamy. So anyway, so you want to have fat in your stomach at the same time we have dark green leafy vegetables to get that Lutin into your brain. Next up, Alexander. If I want to fill capsules at my one with spices I have problems to integrate in my daily diet, which, oh, which capsule material is best? So actually, interestingly, the probably the best way to do it that I found is using edible film. Sounds so weird. One ingredient, potato starch. It's these thin little round discs of, they're so thin, they're transparent, you can't even see them, sheets of potato starch. And so you can put all sorts of nasty powders, anything that tastes gross. A lot of people don't like turmeric, things like that that I recommend. And you make a little pile, you wrap it up like a little wanton or a little dumpling and you dip in water and it kind of congeals together covering all the powders. And then makes this nice little slippery pouch, which is squishy. So you think like, well, I couldn't take a pill that big, but no, the pills are hard. And this is just squishy. And so you put it in your tongue, you don't taste anything because it has this like coating of potato starch. It's really weird. And then you just swallow it down. So that's what I do every day. So my current spice mixture is quarter teaspoon of turmeric, quarter teaspoon of black cumin, quarter teaspoon of ground ginger, quarter teaspoon of papali, which is long pepper. This new thing I discovered in the how not to age. What am I missing? Oh, omelette. And the fifth is omelette. Talking about nasty powders, which is dried Indian gooseberry powder. So rather than capsules, that's probably the easiest way to do it. All right, next up. And then you just swallow once, take a whole handful of capsules and it'll probably a lot cheaper too. Okay, what else we got? Jan, is that Jan or John? Jan, besides, I'm gonna make this bigger so I can actually see what the questions are. Besides B12, are there any supplements I recommend for healthy and vegan 80 years old? So at 80, everyone has to be on B12. You don't have to be vegan. In fact, over 65. That's a recommendation from the National Academy of Medicine, kind of the most prestigious medical institution in the country. Everyone has taken vitamin B12 supplements, B3, vitamin B12, 4 to 5 foods. And if you eat a plant-based diet, you just have to start that recommendation before age 65 and your whole life. So I'm trying to think what came up in the book. So creatine. So I'm adding creatine to a resistance exercise regimen increases lean muscle mass in older individuals. So that's something I would recommend. I believe it's three grams, which is like a teaspoon a day. And I talked about the pros and cons and so you can kind of make up your own mind over it. If you're getting inadequate sun exposure, vitamin D, I would consider a pollutant-free source of DHA, these long chain omega-3 fatty acids. So like an algae-based, 250 milligrams algae-based DHA every day. That's something I do. And then, obviously depends if you're an alcoholic or I mean, there's all sorts of particular situations where you may want to ask your doctor if you were in a particular situation where you'd need a particular supplement. But that's kind of the general ones that come to mind. Okay, they're flooding in. So I gotta go back to the top so I can try to do them in order. So people who got here first will get their questions answered. Next question, is vitamin D from sun more efficient than supplement? Is it better to avoid sun exposure during peak hours? Okay, well, I mean, vitamin C sun exposure is remarkable. You can get like 10,000 international units versus of vitamin D from sun exposure, which is, you know, they typically don't sell. I mean, I think the RDA 400 or 600, I recommend 2,000. But, you know, I talk a lot in the book, particularly preserving your skin chapter, talk about 90% of visible skin aging is from sun exposure. So if you care about your appearance, yeah, avoiding sun, particularly during the peak hours, you know, applying daily sunscreen, wearing a hat, you know, all those various things that you can do will protect your skin from the sun. And so wait a second, where are you gonna get vitamin D from? Well, people who wear sunscreen actually don't have their vitamin D impaired just because most people don't apply sunscreen very well and enough UV rays actually get through. I'm not enough to sunburn you or contribute too much to skin aging, but actually enough to get your vitamin D. So, but that's so you can get the best of both worlds by taking vitamin D supplements and avoiding the sun otherwise, if you can. Okay, next up, Roger. Hempsey's exclamation point. How do they measure up against flaxseeds? Ooh, right, they're actually more nutritious. Well, of course, it depends what criteria are. The reason I'm encouraging people to, the reason they're so important, actually part of my daily dozen. My daily dozen checklist of all the healthiest of healthy foods that encourage people to fit into their daily routine. Available as a free app, Dr. Gregor's Daily Dozen on both Android and iPhone. And so, so important, I include it. So why flaxseeds? Why not any other kind of seeds? Why not hemp seeds? Two reasons. One, they are really the most concentrated source of the short chain omega-3 fatty acids, alpha linoleic acid. And you really want to shoot for 2.2 grams a day, which you can get with your tablespoon of round flaxseeds. You can also get some from Walnut, there's some other foods, but that's a nice, flax are a nice convenient source. And also, flax is the most concentrated source of lignins, which are anti-cancer compounds. It's really remarkable. I'm actually, this is funny. This is, I haven't talked about this before. I just started sitting down to write my proposal for my next book. You'd think I'd let how not to age. I haven't even done my speaking tour yet. You think it'd be, the copies would be cold before I'd started working on the next book, but I'm always thinking about new research. So next is gonna be cancer survival. And all the foods that have been shown, just like how not to diet, I talked about all the specific foods that have been shown randomized control draws to actually accelerate the loss of body fat, right? So every single one, I wanted to make as comprehensive as possible. That's when came up with the 21 tweaks. There's lots of things that can accelerate the loss of body fat regardless of what you eat. And so same thing with how not to age, like what has been shown to actually extend life. And so there's actually specific foods that have been shown to be effective, both cancer prevention, cancer treatment, cancer survival. And one of those is flaxseed. So researchers find that high levels of lignans in the bloodstream, so say with significant lower risk of breast cancer, for example, most concentrated form of lignans are these flaxseeds. So they just randomized women at high risk for breast cancer to, I believe it was a tablespoon a day of ground flaxseeds for, I forget how many weeks or months, maybe six months. And took biopsies, breast biopsies before and after. And saw significant slowing of kind of pre-cancerous changes. That's exciting. But even better would be to take women with breast cancer, randomized them to flaxseeds. And that was done as well and show with biopsies showing significant benefits. And we think it's because of these lignans. And so the only food that comes close, sesame seeds have a significant amount of lignans, but basically everything else doesn't. And so unless you're eating flaxseeds every day or lots of sesame seeds, you're gonna be missing out. So that's why it's so important. You know, there's specific comments like the sulforaphane and the cruciferous vegetables. That's why I recommend specific cruciferous vegetables. There are some nutrients like vitamin C found throughout the plant kingdom, right? So you can get it from bell peppers, you get it from tropical fruit, you can get it from broccoli. So it's not like, you know, you gotta go out of your way to avoid scurvy. But you do have to go out of your way if you're looking for the lignans or the sulforaphane or, you know, these green tea compounds that are found one place in green tea. And there's actually some weird mushroom that has them too. I remember just like there's one plant, the drumstick tree in Africa that has the sulforaphane too. It's cruciferous vegetables and there's weird tree. Anyway, but in general, right? And so that's why there's, you know, I mean, that's why I got books to write. If it was just like eat plants, you know, and it doesn't matter which plants, you know, just sit down to, you know, to iceberg lettuce all day, then, you know, why am I writing books? You know, there could be a sentence long instead of hundreds and hundreds of pages long. Oh my God, have you seen me? This is the, so the US version, they printed on really thin paper. But look, this is the regular version which they printed up in the UK. Look at this monstrosity. That is because there's specific foods for specific things. So anyway, yeah, that's why you should eat flaxseeds. It's probably a longer answer than that you needed. But all right, next up. I understand the soy can inhibit iron absorption. Nothing I'm aware of. There, I mean, so oxalate rich foods. So like the three high oxalate dark green leafies, spinach, beet green, Swiss chard are stingy with their calcium. And so that's like one mineral inhibition example. Probably for iron absorption, tea inhibits the absorption of iron. So that's why I encourage people, even though green tea is a very important beverage, I encourage people to fit into their daily routine, not during meals. Why? Iron absorption. So that's really what I'm most concerned about. And indeed, adding vitamin C rich foods like the ones I mentioned can boost iron absorption if that's your problem. If that's not your problem, or you don't know if it's your problem, you should get tested before you go around and try to boost your iron because you can have, I mean, it's kind of a double-edged sword. You wanna have low iron levels, but not too low that you become anemic because high iron levels access to pro-oxid and increased risk of cancer, some other things. And so you wanna go out of your way to increase your iron unless you are a menstruating woman losing iron every month or for whatever reason found to be anemic for iron deficiency purposes or et cetera, down the list. But shouldn't go out of our way to boost iron unless we know there's a reason to do that. Okay, okay, next up, Carolyn. In the UK, plant meal, oh yeah, organic foods are not fortified. It was a big problem because B12, right? So here in the States, B12 is found, so I talk about you need to take B12 supplements or eat fortified foods. And so here it's super easy. B12's added to everything, soy milk or even some herbal teas have B12 in it, but by kind of organic standards in the UK, in my understanding, you cannot add extra vitamins and stuff that violates their kind of organic principles. And so the soy milk, which is kind of a regular source of fortified B12 fortification for people here in the States, you're missing out. So it's really more important to get it through supplements. Okay, but so this person's asking on a daily basis, so would it be better to get the fortified non-organic or the organic with no fortification? So, well, the most important thing, need to get your B12. And so if you don't wanna take a B12 supplement, which is super cheap, you can do it once a week. If you're under age 65, 2,000 micrograms a week, all the B12 you need, super easy. But if you're just like, I don't like taking pills or I'm not gonna remember whatever. And so I just wanna incorporate a food into my diet, then you'd wanna buy the fortified non-organic to get that B12. But if you're like, look, I take a B12 supplement, I don't need B12, you know, and what's some of the other stuff I don't need? You know, actually vitamin D. So vitamin D is added to plant-based milks. The, is fortified, which may be an issue in the UK during the winter months, no longer, no matter how long you sunbathe naked by the Thames in January, February, you're not gonna make any vitamin D cause the sun's raised at such an angle that during the winter months. And so, you know, so studies have found that the levels of in UK vegans actually drops too low for comfort. Non-vegans can get some vitamin D from dairy milk, from fish, but the vegans, presumably because they're, you know, drinking organic milk, not that you need to drink any milk at all, but if they're drinking some organic plant milk, they weren't getting the vitamin D supplementation, they actually dropped too low. It's fat soluble, I mean, you're not gonna die from vitamin D deficiency during those few months, but it does actually drop too low for comfort in terms of optimal health. So for that, so that's a good reason to either, again, you just take a vitamin D supplement and then be like, just have the, you know, get the non-fortified stuff, but if you don't wanna do the supplement, that would be a kind of cheap easy way to get vitamin D in a country that is so high in latitude. All right, what's next? Carolyn, oh, her skin is yellow. Not quite Marge yellow, but yellow for me and lots of healthy foods. A blood test or normal, that's good. Oh yeah, eating a lot of goodness. How yellow am I? How yellow am I? So that is a sign of health. In fact, I was just at a longevity medical conference in Vegas of all places. I was fantastic talk, 5,000 folks. A book signing line went on for three hours. Even though they sold out of books in 20 minutes. So it was just like, you know, it just juicened me from my 100 city speaking tour, which starts in a week or two. But they had, they had a booth where they had this cool machine. It's this spectrometer where you basically put your palm on it and it reads, you know, how many crontinoids are deposited in your skin, which is an indicator of how many fruits and vegetables, particularly brightly colored fruits and vegetables like dark green leafy vegetables and you know, you know, cantaloupe and sweet potato and all that's good stuff. And as a good indicator of health. So like beta carotene levels in the blood are actually a good predictor of health and longevity, not because the beta carotene it's just a marker of healthy eating. So it's kind of cool that you can get scored on healthy eating. And so, so it's good having crontinoids deposited in your skin. In fact, I talk about my skin capture actually gives you an inside out level of sunscreen like built in sunscreen, not enough to prevent skin aging or skin cancer like you still have to add sunscreen but it's like all the little hard to reach places you don't have to think about it just there already. So there's all sorts of good benefits. Now you can, if you ate too much but this usually happens with people that juice carrots can't eat too many carrots like yaw would get sore. But if you like just put them in a juicer you can get a huge amount like I just had two pounds of carrots or whatever in a juice you can turn orange. It's called crotinoidemia and it's completely harmless but it does cosmetically look a little weird often shows up first in kind of palms and the soles of the feet and it takes a while for it to kind of go away. The only other, so the only, so basically it's a good thing eating lots of healthy foods. So I would stick with it unless you're feeling it's cosmetically weird in which case you can back off a little bit. There is one interesting exception and that's anorexia nervosa. People, largely women who starve themselves can get this crotinoidemia. They can turn bright orange. And so they look, so yeah, so it's interesting I was, I used to have one of these cool spectrometer gadgets. This donor, they're really expensive like $15,000 but this donor least one for me from the company so I could take it around and inspire people to eat fruits and vegetables. And it's funny, I would go at every talk I'd be like a hundred bucks to whoever gets the highest score, right? And so everyone would line up be so fun to like test who could beat Dr. Greger, who score of course is off the charts. And it's interesting, the woman who won at this one particular event I remember, I think it wasn't because she was eating fruits and vegetables it's because she was a victim of anorexia. And so if your orange-ness is a sign of anorexia then obviously you need to get help. Anorexia is a mental illness with one of the highest fatality rates through suicide. I talk about it in how not to diet. And so some to be taken very seriously. So, but that's not your problem. It just means you're eating healthy food and that's fantastic. Okay, next up. Danielson, in a recent blog on a B12 mentioned fortified energy drinks as a source. There some have B12 added to them. So I put a splash of generic five-hour energy drink in my smoothie every morning at 10K RMD, I guess 10,000. Oh, it's probably 10,000% of your kind of daily recommended, whatever a B12 would that work. Okay, so how much is a splash? So let's say a splash is like a hundred or a 100th of a bottle. And is that even reasonable? How many ounces is a typical like, I guess eight ounces of cup. So like 16 ounce bottle. So 16 times 28, 28, 28, 28. So that's about 500 milliliters. And let's say a splash is like half a milliliter. So you just added like 1,000th of the bottle. And if it has 10,000%, that just means it has like a hundred times. And so you'd only be getting one 10th of the RDA of the recommended daily intake if you just put a splash. So I don't think the math works. So I would not use that as a source for your B12. Okay. All right, coffee and a sewing machine asks, let's talk about mushroom coffee. Is it beneficial? Oh, so yeah, I wanna make sure I understand what you're talking about. There are certainly like actual coffee that has mushroom powder added. There is like chaga mushroom powder. I don't know if people, if there's actual pure mushroom products that they just call coffee cause it's like a warm beverage that they drink it as or something. So my concern with chaga mushrooms is they're such high oxalate intake. I think a single teaspoon, you'd have to check the videos, type in C-H-A-G-A into nutrition facts. It'll pop right up. I think one teaspoon is too much like exceeds your oxalate intake for the day. And so it puts you at risk for kidney stones, particularly if you're susceptible. So that would be my one concern. I guess it depends what mushroom we're talking about here. But I'm all in favor of mushrooms, but certain mushrooms have to be cooked. Certain mushrooms have to be not consumed with alcohol. So tell me what mushroom it is and I'll tell you whether you should have it in your coffee. All right. Oh, I gotta scroll back up because we're getting so many. Oh, it won't let me scroll back up. Okay. Sorry for all the questions I skipped. It won't let me go back. There's so many questions. So I'll just start where I have, but I didn't skip you on purpose. GM says, I can only find B12 cyanocobalamin 25 micrograms, 25, 25 micrograms insoluble gummies in New Zealand. How many should I take if I have B12 diff, oh, okay. So if you have B12 deficiency, we don't mess around and you should get, you know, you should be taking 2000 a day. So you should be able to, your doctor should be able to prescribe you 2000 micrograms of chewable B12 a day, even if you can't find it around and worse comes to worse, get B12 injections. Oral B12 is actually superior to B12 injections, but if you can't find high doses, high enough doses to treat deficiency, then you need to absolutely get injected with B12 because it's, B12 deficiency can be absolutely devastating. All right. High prolactin levels question, Mark. What's the cause and how to bring them down to normal? That's a good question. I'm trying to think of any prolactin videos. Nothing that comes to mind. If you type in prolactinnutrisphex.org, let me know if anything pops up. If it doesn't, let me know. And I will add it to my topics list to do the next batch of videos. That's when I'm gonna start in July. So six months speaking tour, January through June, 100 cities and then July, bam, start churning out the new videos. I actually have enough videos queued out until then. So I have to do videos on the road. But then I'm gonna run out of videos. And so I need topic suggestions. If there, particularly if there's something, I mean, of course, I'm gonna do more videos about everything, right? But if there's a topic that's actually not on nutrition facts at all, there's not a single video about it, that really should be my priority. And so if, and so prolactin maybe one, if there are other conditions or foods that aren't, let me know, and I will prioritize those to at least have something on the topic on the site. Okay, next up. Do I need to remove almond skins before making almond milk? You do not need to remove almond skins before making almond milk. Okay. Let's see, what else? Maria, how do you, how do, how, how to do time-restricted eating when you work until 8 a.m., 8 p.m.? Well, you can pack food. So right, so time-restricted eating we want to, what's critical here is early time-restricted feeding. So cutting your eating daily into eating windows 12 hours or less, but critically important to shoved as early as possible. If anything, we skip supper, we don't skip breakfast, try to push as many calories in the morning as possible so you can make your lunch the biggest meal of the day. And then is there something you can pack and eat at work? Depending on your work, there's lots of kind of healthy foods that you can pack with me. I pack them in my suitcase. Can you take a big sweet potato and a Ziploc bag and kind of munch on it, very satiating. It's something I eat on planes. People give me a little weird looks because they're bright purple. I got those Hawaiian sweet potatoes. So it's like, I'm chewing into this like fluorescent purple globe, try to get that through security. I've had lots of questions. Anyway, there's so, rather than starting to eat at 8 30 when you get home, if you can stop eating at least before seven, that'd be best. So maybe you can get away with eating at work. At least that's my suggestion. We are running out of time and trying to think, let me see if there's some really quick question I can answer. Is it better to freeze baked bananas and then use them in a smoothie? Ah, this is such an interesting question. When you come up with this thing, I just gave a webinar relatively recently talking about how adding fresh bananas to a smoothie can interfere with, can interfere with your, the bioavailability of some other nutrients that are in that smoothie. And so ideally you'd use something like, oh, I use frozen sweet potato. It adds a nice creamy sensation and sweetness that the banana has. So you can like microwave them and chop them up and freeze them and just throw in chunks or frozen mango or whatever. But it's all because of this banana enzyme. So if you destroy the enzyme by cooking it, for example, then you go crazy. And so this person is suggesting, okay, we baked the banana. I give how much, you don't have to heat it up too much. And then we freeze it. Does that work? Yeah, that would totally work. So another way to do it is freeze dry. If you really like banana flavor, freeze dried banana, it's not brown. Why is it not brown? Cause the enzyme has been destroyed. Remember it's the browning enzyme. And so you could just add a handful of freeze dried banana chips. I don't know. Anyway, let me announce that it is our end of year fundraiser. If you want to support the work that I do to spread the information about the good news that we have this tremendous power of our health destiny and longevity and that the vast majority of premature death and disability is preventable with a healthy enough plant-based diet and lifestyle if you want to save lives and want to help us get this message out of evidence-based nutrition, please consider nutritionfacts.org, 5-1-2-3-non-profit. So tax deductible here in the United States as part of your kind of end of year philanthropy. We would really appreciate it. And that's it. So the reason I can give away all the sales, all the money from my like speaking on a rare I am all the book sales, all the money I get goes directly to charity is because I get a salary through nutritionfacts.org. And so by donating to Nutrition Facts you are putting kale on my table. So thank you for that. And have a wonderful holiday season and happy new year. And I will see you hopefully on the road. And if not, I will see you.