 Trying to stay healthy can seem like a full-time job sometimes, especially during a pandemic. But I'm here to make that goal a little easier. Welcome to the Nutrition Facts Podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Michael Greger. It's time for the Nutrition Facts Grab Bag where we look at the latest science and a whole variety of topics starting today with pine nuts. But you know that some pine nuts can cause a bad taste in your mouth that can last for weeks. The reason I make my pesto with walnuts, instead of the more traditional pine nuts, is not only because walnuts are probably healthier. We're talking 20 times more polyphenols, but also because of a mysterious phenomenon known as PMS. No, not that PMS, Pine Mouth Syndrome. Characterized by what has become my favorite word of the week, caca-ju-ja, meaning a bad taste in your mouth. You can get it from heavy metal toxicity, seafood toxins, certain nutritional and neurological disorders, or from eating the wrong kind of pine nuts, termed pine mouth by the public. A few days after eating pine nuts, you get this persistent metallic or bitter taste in your mouth that can last for weeks. Thousands of cases have been reported. Raw versus cooked pine nuts doesn't seem to matter. Could the cause be some unidentified toxin present in some varieties of non-edible pine nuts out of more than 100 different kinds of pine trees? The nuts of only about 30 are considered to be edible. So, pine nut samples from stricken consumers were analyzed, and indeed, they all contain nuts from Chinese white pine, which is not reported to be edible. That tree is typically only used for lumber. You don't know it's the Chinese white pine nuts, though, until you put it to the test. Researchers had a few folks consume 6 to 8 Chinese white pine nuts. Most of the subjects hadn't ever heard of pine mouth syndrome, and boom, they all developed symptoms. And we still don't know exactly what it is in those nuts that causes such a weird reaction. We just know to stay away from those kind of pine nuts. So, what kinds of pine nuts do we have on our shelves here? All kinds, apparently, including those associated with pine mouth. So, unsurprisingly, hundreds of cases have been reported in the US as well. Most of the implicated nuts were reportedly labeled as originating from Asia, and in most cases, China. Europe actually did something about it, and demanded China stop sending them toxic nuts, which they did in 2011. And this export restriction likely resulted in less being imported into the US as well, given the decline in cases going to 2012. Rare cases still happen, though, as evidenced by an active Facebook group entitled Damn You Pine Nuts. Although there are no proven therapies, pine mouth syndrome appears to be benign and just goes away on its own. In our next story, we look at how emulsifiers are the most widely used food additives. What are they doing to our gut microbiome? Today, when grocery shopping, unless you're sticking to the produce aisle, it's nearly impossible to avoid processed foods, particularly feeding the standard American diet, characterized not only by insufficient plant foods and too much meat, dairy, and eggs, but also lots of processed junk, and along with that, an increased exposure to food additives. For example, the artificial sweetener sucralose, sold as Splenda, can disrupt the human gut microbiome and induce glucose intolerance. In other words, it can make your blood sugars worse instead of better. It's relatively easy to avoid artificial sweeteners, but it may be more difficult to avoid ingestion of emulsifiers, because they're commonly added to so many foods. In fact, emulsifiers are the most widely used food additives, and most processed foods contain one or more of them. We now consume emulsifiers by the megaton every year, thanks to a multi-billion dollar industry. You commonly find emulsifiers in fatty dressings, fatty spreads, baked goods, mayonnaise, salad dressings, candy, and beverages. Why do we care? Like all authorized food additives, emulsifiers have been evaluated by risk assessors who consider them as safe. However, there are growing concerns among scientists about their potentially harmful effects on our intestinal barrier, in terms of causing a leaky gut, as well as their effects on our microbiome. Moreover, they could possibly increase the absorption of environmental toxins present in the food. We know that the consumption of ultra-processed foods may be a contributor to weight gain, for example. Healthier, longer-lived populations don't just have low meat intake and high plant intake, but they're eating minimally processed foods. Maybe the emulsifiers found in processed foods could be playing a role based on a number of pre-clinical studies, but who cares if emulsifiers make rats gain weight? When you read emulsifiers can cause striking changes in the microbiota they're not talking about within human beings. Mice are often used to study diet's impact on the microbiome, but we only share a few percent of bacterial genes in common. Even the gut flora of different mouse strains can be considerably different from each other. So if you can't even extrapolate from one type of mouse to another, how are you supposed to translate results from mice to human beings? Remarkably, there's been little study of the potential harmful effects of ingested emulsifiers in us. For example, lecithin, perhaps best known as a key component of egg yolks, was found to be worse than polysorbate 80 in terms of allowing bacteria to leak through the gut wall into the bloodstream. But whether lecithin consumption in humans causes the same problem is yet to be determined. There's certainly a paucity of human trials on the effects of emulsifiers in processed foods, but we at least have data on human tissue, cells, and gut flora. Dietary emulsifiers directly alter the composition of the human microbiome ex vivo, potentiating intestinal inflammation. Ex vivo means outside the body. Researchers inoculated an artificial gut with fresh human feces until they had a nice stable culture going, and then added carboxymethylcellulose, or polysorbate 80, and got a boost in pro-inflammatory potential, starting within one day with the carboxymethylcellulose and within the first week with polysorbate 80. This approach revealed that both emulsifiers acted directly upon human gut bugs to increase their pro-inflammatory potential. If you then test the effect of these emulsifiers on the protective mucus layer and petri dish cultures of human gut lining cells, you'll find that they can partially disrupt the protecting layer. But both this study and the last used emulsifier concentrations that weren't far in excess of what people might typically get day to day. This is probably the study that raised the greatest potential concern. The researchers surgically obtained not just cells, but actual intestinal wall tissue and found that polysorbate 80 could double the invasion of E. coli through the intestinal lining tissue, whereas adding fiber, in this case fiber from plantains, could seal up the gut wall tissue twice as tight. In our final story today, we look at how the spice cumin can work, as well as whorlostat, the anal leakage obesity drug. In my video Benefits of Black Cumin for Weight Loss, a total of 17 randomized controlled trials showed that the simple spice could reduce cholesterol and triglycerides. And the side effects? A weight loss effect. Saffron is another spice found to be effective for treating a major cause of suffering, depression in this case, with a side effect of decreased appetite. When put to the test in a randomized double-blind placebo-controlled trial, saffron, indeed, was found to lead to a significant weight loss of 5 pounds more than placebo and an extra inch off the waist in 8 weeks. The dose of saffron used in the study was the equivalent of drinking a cup of tea made from a large pinch of saffron threads. Suspecting the active ingredient, might be crocin, the pigment in saffron that accounts for its crimson color, researchers also tried giving people just the purified pigment. That led to weight loss too, but it didn't do as well as the full saffron extract, being the placebo by only 2 pounds and half an inch. The mechanism appeared to be appetite suppression, as the crocin group ended up averaging about 80 fewer calories a day, whereas the full saffron group consumed 170 calories less a day, on average. A similar study looks specifically at snacking frequency. The researchers stopped perhaps the mood-boosting effects of saffron might cut down on stress-related eating. Indeed, 8 weeks of a saffron extract did cut snack intake in half compared to placebo, accompanied by a slight but statistically significant weight loss about 2 pounds. Even a loss of a few pounds is pretty remarkable, given that tiny doses utilized about 100 milligrams, which is equivalent to about an eighth of a teaspoon of the spice. The problem is that saffron is the most expensive spice in the world. It's composed of delicate threads sticking up out of the saffron crocus flower. Each flower produces only a few threads, so you need 50,000 flowers to make a single pound of spice. Enough flowers to cover a football field, so that pinch of saffron could cost a dollar a day. That's why I make 21 tweaks to accelerate weight loss and how not to diet. Instead of saffron, I include black cumin, which at a quarter teaspoon a day would only cost 3 cents a day. What about just regular cumin? Used in cuisines around the world, from Tex-Mex to South Asian, cumin is the second most popular spice on earth after black pepper. It's one of the oldest cultivated plants with a range of purported medicinal uses, but only recently has it been put to the test for weight loss. Those randomized to a half teaspoon of both lunch and dinner over three months lost about four more pounds, and an extra inch off their waist, the spice was found comparable to the obesity drug known as orlostat. For those of you who don't remember, that's the anal leakage drug you may have heard about, sold under the brand names Alla and Zeneca, though the drug company apparently prefers to term fecal spotting to describe the rectal discharge it causes. The drug company's website offered some helpful tips, though. It's probably a smart idea to wear dark pants and bring a change of clothes with you to work. You know, just in case a drug causes you to crap your pants at work. I think I'll stick with the cumin. Thank you very much. We would love it if you could share with us your stories about reinventing your health through evidence-based nutrition. Go to nutritionfacts.org slash testimonials, and we may share it on social media to help inspire others. To see any graphs, charts, graphics, images, or studies mentioned here, please go to the nutritionfacts.org podcast landing page. There you'll find all the detailed information you need, plus links to all the sources we cite for each of these topics. For a vital timely text and the pathogens that cause pandemics, order the e-book, audio book, or hard copy of my latest book, How to Survive a Pandemic. For recipes, check out my even newer book, the How Not to Diet Cookbook, is beautifully designed with more than 100 recipes for delicious and nutritious meals. All the proceeds I receive from the sales of all my books goes to charity. NutritionFacts.org is a non-profit science-based public service where you can sign up for free daily updates on the latest in nutrition research via bite-sized videos and articles. Everything on the website is free. There's no ads, no corporate sponsorship. It's strictly non-commercial, not selling anything. I 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.