 Hello, this is Dr Michael Greger coming to you live from my treadmill as I do every month to answer your questions. Just spent some time on Facebook doing a live thing there and now here for the next half hour and then we'll do it again next month. Before it starts taking questions, let me just say that we are but one day from the end of our end of year donation drive to help the 501c3 non-profit organization that runs nutritionfacts.org. If you would like to support my work, please consider making a tax deductible donation. We are currently at, we are at 89.94%, let me refresh though, hold on, hold on, 90.19%. We are but 9.81% to go to hit our goal by the end of the year so we are down to the wire. You will help us out if you value what we do in nutritionfacts.org. Everything's free, obviously no ads, no core sponsorship strictly not conversion to selling anything just put it up as a public service, it's a labor of love as a tribute to my grandmother who's the reason that I do what I do. All right, let us get to questions here. All right, where are we? Here we go. All right, questions are pouring in, I'll start by the top. Oliver Hawk, I asked what's the function of the appendix? A biology teacher told me it used to be for heavy plant digestion but due to switch to an omnivore kind of lost its function. That is a good question, we are not actually sure what the appendix is for but it is packed with immune tissue, lymphoid tissue and so we think it may have something to do with immune function but certainly Birket, one of our most famous medical figures of the last century for which Birket's lymphoma is named after. He's also well known for his fiber theory where he talked about the role fiber may play in preventing some of the chronic diseases that plaguing the western world but we're missing from the missionary hospitals that he spent a lot of time from in sub-Saharan Africa where he didn't find these epidemics of heart disease and obesity and diabetes and colon cancer and on down the list and appendicitis was actually one on those lists and thinks that that little if in cases of appendicitis you often find a what's called a fecalif, a little stone of compacted feces blocking the entrance or the exit to the appendix and that's thought to cause the inflammation and so if we so maybe that's the reason why people eat high fiber diets who have more who have a softer larger stool less constipation have lower rates of appendicitis oh yeah who knows I actually have a video coming up in on on fasting as a treatment for appendicitis for people that don't want to go into surgery not something I would recommend but interesting case report as part of my long extended fasting series but that's enough on appendix thank you for your question um oh it's probably not Oliver probably Olivier sorry about that um osse gears oh just says thanks um oh Olivier also says nearsightedness is less sun to blame for our nearsightedness um is our foods that may help with myopia it's a good question never looked into it um maybe because I couldn't see no um uh why is nearsightedness increasing I don't know good question if you go to pubmed.gov the database the largest medical library in the world and type in uh the myopia which is the kind of technical name for nearsightedness and diet um maybe you'll find something and I'll do a video about it all right Olivier was ready to go with all those questions as soon as the thing started smart person um and the next question was kissing girl kissing girlfriend causes irritation dry skin pimples oh due to due to his stubbles idea of a treatment or prevention it's called shaving maybe um and uh two more questions from Olivier uh do you have a database showing which paper oh oh which patient with papers you evaluated and um tag them with various uh tags I mean I do have a database of all the let's see how big I mean um these are just the um papers um uh collected for 2017 um which let's see um and there are the database is 61.61 gigs 75177 PDFs um but uh they are tagged but they're categorized uh not by um by industry bias but by subject matter and finally Olivier says can't find much on whole food plant-based diet and cystic fibrosis in the literature um uh what do you think um uh uh I I only think what the literature says testing literature that I then I've got no opinion um in fact I have no opinion about stuff in literature it's just in the literature it's not um and uh though I haven't done specifically a search for cystic fibrosis and diet if anyone does find anything I would love to offer um uh my advice on that not my advice just presenting the data in hopes that it might help somebody Chloe says maybe you can get me to talk about intermittent fasting other interesting third person there um uh I'd love to talk about intermittent fasting I just haven't finished all my research on it so that's why I hesitate to talk but there is a huge boatload of data and looking forward to uh doing lots of videos about it China asks ooh isn't China like Indian for um chickpea I don't know maybe that's just I don't know well what a great name can you get all the amegas you need just with plant foods such as flaxetia right there are two essential fats omega-3s omega-6s omega-6s is basically found everywhere um uh so that's not a problem but omega-3s in fact people get a lot too too many omega-6s from the junky um oils and processed foods like cottonseed oil um but uh but we need our omega-3s um I mean that's something you could be relatively fishing in and the most concentrated source of omega-3s are flax seeds in fact I'm just working on some flax seed videos right now that's what I was doing this morning um flax seeds um cheese seeds um walnuts hemp seeds um dark green leafy vegetables have some even though they don't a lot of fat in them at all um but um so but and so that is the short chain omega-3 called ethyl linolemic acid which our bodies can elongate into the long chain omega-3s like EPA and DHA the question is can it elongate it enough for optimum health it's an unanswered research question we've got a bunch of videos about it um but basically bottom line is you may want to supplement you die with long preform long chain omega-3s and not rely um particularly as we get older on our body making enough for optimal cognitive health so I would recommend 250 milligrams of EPA and our DHA a day from pollutant free sources meaning algae based sources all right ossegears raw vegan recovery asks what is my new book oh um so um uh how not to die cookbook just came out and hit the number three in New York Times best sellers very very excited thanks to all your pre-orders um and so hopefully expose lots of new people um to uh eating healthy or eating evidence-based um and uh so but my next book which I'm going to start writing in March and currently buffering out enough videos to be able to take off a year to write it um is going to be on obesity called how not to diet um and looking very much forward to sitting down and working on that but it's just a massive project there's just I think there's 80 000 articles a year on obesity alone and so that's like that's a lot and so every day that goes by I get farther and farther behind so looking forward to jumping on that but I've got to do all the videos first how can we come up with this new compelling content all the time new videos and articles every day it's because we have hundreds literally hundreds of volunteers but we also have over a dozen paid staff that costs a lot of money um and it's all just donation based kind of like Wikipedia everything's free um but we count on the donations of people that just want to support our work feel it's useful for them valuable so even if one in a thousand people kicks in a few bucks we'd be all set since we reached so many millions of people even a dollar can help um please go to nutritionfacts.org click on the donate button um we'd love your donations anytime of the year this is just our final end of year push um uh to get us set up for next year anyway all right next um we did Chloe we okay oh China's back saying mother worried about siblings missing nutrients from animal products um uh um can I give her a clear mind um and uh so uh there are only two uh vitamins um not made by animals well not made by plants um ones vitamin D made by animals such as yourself when you walk outside and get enough sun at this time of the year though and uh high enough in the northern hemisphere the sun's razor at such an angle that I may not be making enough vitamin D so I'd encourage 2000 international vitamin D a day regardless of what we eat and the other bother vitamin not made by plants is vitamin B12 not made by animals either made by little microbes that blanket the earth uh we may have been able to get all the B12 we need to drink out of mountain stream of well water or something but no we chlorinate our water supply kill off any bacteria so we don't get a lot of B12 in our water anymore don't get a lot of color either that's a good thing we live in such a nice sanitary world um uh but uh but it's critically important anyone eating a plant-based diet to get a regular reliable source of vitamin B12 our fellow great apes get all the B12 they need eating bugs dirt and feces I prefer supplements so 2500 micrograms of uh cyanicobalamin cheapest form of vitamin B12 once a week costs less than five bucks a year get all the B12 you need um and uh there you go all right um Julia asks what foods are best for the brain how can I best keep my brain healthy berries berries for the berries for the wind and so uh there was you know this famous Harvard nurses study I found that berry eaters it's just a few servings a week of blueberries or strawberries um though women eating um berries compared to uh non berry eaters or infrequent berry eaters um had a delay had um they're basically their their cognitive function um was two and a half years younger so they kind of delayed brain aging by two and a half years that was an observational study though and so it's possible maybe berry eaters were just healthier in other ways it weren't controlled for um that's why we'd like interventional studies and indeed berries have been put to the test the original studies well there's all these studies done on rats um but uh the first human study was done I believe it was like five six cups of wild blueberries a day it was a pilot studies just wanted to see look can any amount of blueberries actually improve cognitive health um and it did um uh and it was a randomized control study you can give people powdered blueberries versus fake blueberry powder that looks like blueberries that's when they send numbers calories and everything but actually doesn't have anything blueberry in it that's how you can do randomized specific control trials with berries um and so but then finally and that's I have a new video coming out about the uh until now video of what about kind of doable levels of blueberries so they did um uh one cup of blueberries a day um and got significant improvements in various dimensions of cognitive function among older adults and works for kids too um a really remarkable study how much was it I forget how many blueberries it was but they gave kids not like you know eight weeks of a couple day of blueberries but one meal single meal blueberries got significant boost in cognitive function so like that's what you feed your kids on the morning they have their exams um but literally within hours of consumption um we think it's the polyphenol phytonutrients actually go through the blood band barrier and get into our brain have all sorts of wonderful things so eat berries for your brain all right and lots of other stuff I've got a whole chapter on brain disease in how not to die all proceeds from all the sales in my books go to charity of course all right Linda Linda got my new cookbook yes let me know what you think Linda Channa is back how much vitamin D oh talked about that she is a day Oscar gears is back is me so healthy um uh me so healthy yes um uh yes me so is a whole soy food and despite its high setting content is not associated with stomach cancer or high blood pressure as normally high setting foods would be so yes it's healthy and that's actually what we use in the cookbook to make things salty and savory use me so use the whole food every single ingredient of every single recipe and how not to cookbook is health promoting it's a whole plant food a green light food all right Deborah what diet do I recommend for cats you need to ask a veterinarian I am a veterinarian but a very restricted one knowing only one species um and that's homo sapiens so can help you there Olivier is back what's the function oh we talked about the appendix all right Julia are there any foods that can help me establish a better sleeping pattern oh 10 that problem is falling asleep um yeah I actually do have I have videos on tart cherries which can buy canned you can also buy in concentrate but you buy a whole can cherries and water um and uh video on kiwi fruit I don't know if that was the yellow kiwi fruit or green kiwi fruit in terms of sleep and I just did um just scripted a video that's coming up um uh that on uh on these melatonin um and the problem with maltone supplements is that if you actually go so the study looked at 31 brands off the shelves and the purity and the strength was completely off what's under label unfortunately our supplement industry so poorly regulated you just cannot know what's in the bottle it says it has like there were some chewables that said had 1.5 milligrams of melatonin so chewables that's what kids might take actually had nine milligrams that's like a hundred times physiological normal levels um and so and not just um uh uh uh strength of purity found that they use contaminants um these unidentified contaminants some of which look surprisingly like that horrible tryptophan contaminant back in the 80s that um killed dozens of people and second thousands um again that's that's the problem with the supplement industry but um but so wouldn't it be nice to get but so but the these studies show that melatonin does actually um um help with sleep um uh in high enough doses and so that's like five plateaus of five milligrams um but you don't want to take the supplements um because pureties and potency issues so what do you do if only there was a best of both worlds way to do it um if only melatonin was found in a safe simple side of our free solution food we've known since 1995 that plants have melatonin um and which plants though i mean in enough that actually affects melatonin levels in the blood absolutely inside there was i do have one study where it talks about how you randomize people to eat more vegetables less vegetables you actually show they have more melatonin eating vegetables but um and um but uh but the updated video talks about how they did these fruit studies they had people eat pineapples oranges well i forget what the third one was anyway so you can you i mean you can show you can get these levels but um the problem is uh so i was talking about jet lag and it's like you can't take it's harder to pack a pineapple in your suitcase um is there anything like small you can do and so i talk about each food category um how much melatonin is in each food so actually like um look we make melatonin so animals do too so you can find melatonin and meat but with the highest melatonin meat is salmon i think and you have to eat like 200 pounds of salmon and a single meal to get the melatonin effect so that's that's that's off the table whole grains there was a corn strain a yellow corn strain now highest level has been 16 years i'm in a single meal way too much scratch that the highest fruit oh highest vegetable um was white mushrooms and you only have to eat like forget it was like two pounds but two pounds of mushrooms like 10 cups of mushrooms because it's so light so all right scratch that so mushrooms have 100 100 times more than meat but still doesn't help you um and then fruit cranberries to the rescue a single ounce single ounce of cranberries can give you a physiological dose of melatonin um uh and uh but uh so you could actually do that you can do a smoothie um uh so any in the evening you can have a strawberry excuse me cranberry smoothie and out the cranberries is like a um that's the cranberries um and and look you could actually travel with cranberries right they wouldn't smush through but then what do you do when you get there right it's not like you can pack your blender with you too so thankfully ta-da long story short pistachios the most nutrient excuse me melatonin rich nut pistachios melt highest melatonin rich um food anywhere like off the charts high levels of melatonin um to get a physical physiological dose so i need is two two what you ask no two like two pistachios um actually gives you physiological dose melatonin extraordinary so like a handful of pistachios would be like a high dose melatonin supplement but without uh the contaminants etc anyway try that try the kiwi fruits tart cherries and pistachios um and see and report back and tell me if you're sleeping better of course there's all sorts of sleep hygiene things i assume you're already doing dark and cold and you know all the things that help you sleep better anyway all right moving right along only got 10 minutes left i was just excited about this melatonin videos okay um lauren asks you can get all the omega three oh yeah what lauren says uh you can get all your mega threes you need from roman lettuce that's so not true but if you need more search youtube anyway um you know i mean as a percentage of fat i'm sure there's a lot of mega threes in roman lettuce like there are in all greens but there you know how much fat is in roman lettuce it's not a lot of fat so it could be 100 of mega threes you i mean you'd have to get a wheel barrel presumably worth of of romaine to get you know like two grams of ala day so um i disagree respectively respectfully um michelle asks oh uh michelle is talking to julia um roton as high um is it risky what causes it um um i assume uh roton is meaning mcb on blood test for vegans that's a mean carpester volume um yeah that could be a sign of vitamin b12 deficiency also be a sign of folio deficiency but if you're vegan you're probably getting a lot of foli because that's found in beans and greens um michelle asks what's my opinion of a law diet encourage people to eat both a combination of raw and cooked foods cooking actually improves nutrition of some um vegetables because it's not what you eat it's what you absorb and so you can you know quadruple the amount of beta character in your bloodstream eating cooked carrots compared to raw carrots um uh and improves uh lycopene and bioavailability and the red pigment tomato so processed tomato products actually healthier than raw tomato products and on down the list but uh but the raw food is have it right that we should all sit down to big salads every day but you know i'd put you know legumes and uh you know uh some you know beans canned beans and and and nuts and seeds and um uh delicious okay uh and if anyone for whatever reason really does want to eat 100% raw which i wouldn't recommend but if you do um you need to get a book called becoming raw by brenda davis of santa melina um uh you could do it healthy it just takes a lot of work um julie asks if i eat something salty but i have it with kale um with the harmful effects that suddenly be countered by the healthier components of the meal um well in certain i mean so eat something salty i'll be back for your blood pressure but eating that kale and broccoli that you mentioned in your question um these are nitrate containing vegetables which actually improve my nitric oxide production can actually improve blood pressure because you lower blood pressure um so yeah it would actually counteract that negative effect but guess what but um but then it you kind of cancel things out i mean don't you want to eat stuff that actually improves your health not just as neutral for your health that's why um i would encourage you to eat the kale without the salt um if you want something salty uh i mean ideally we you know look we don't want to add salt in the kitchen or the dining room table we don't want to eat processed foods which is where most of the salt comes from um and so um ideally we want to get our taste buds away from the hyper salty palate everything tastes like cardboard for a few days but eventually all of a sudden natural foods just taste super like you need some celery you're like oh my god it's so salty um uh and so that's ideally but um uh if you don't want to try changing your palate which would be the ideal message just like you know with like non-toxic sweeteners like erythritol um non-toxic yeah but maintains that high sweet palate and so if you're out and about vacationing or something without erythritol you'll be tempted to eat sweets uh same thing with salt yeah at home um uh you could use um healthy salty things like miso um but it would maintain that high salt palate and then you're out running around without miso you might be tempted by high by those airline pretzels or something um but um if uh if if you don't care about your palate then uh yeah so miso would be the only kind of um high sodium uh whole food source that does not is not associated with the gastric cancer hypertension two things that we worry about with high sodium consumption um and uh you could also use um potassium salt you know there's a potassium chloride kind of salt substitute um not the one that's like half and half sodium potassium but the one that's pure um a potassium chloride um would be a healthier option there's also all sorts of wonderful kind of spice blends um that are actually healthy um health promoting because i have herbs and spices and stuff that are sodium free um um i talk about uh one called table tasty and how not to die um but uh you can you can try try and and search around find one you like there's a savory um uh spice blend um that we use and how not to die which you can make that um may give you the flavors you're missing by cutting out salt from your diet all right anyway where are we anastia asks for that food cooked in a microwave oven uh suffer some molecular damage when eating it causing my abnormal changes in our blood and our immune system um so why do i recommend you cook in it well but i actually did what you said i wouldn't but i just reviewed a microwave in fact it's just coming up the next few weeks there'll be um my microwave videos um part of the current volume in fact you can get them now streaming live well in real time a live stream of uh all my microwave videos because it's part of the current volume um so that's at drgregor.org you click on downloads and you can watch streams them right now or you can just wait a few weeks and they'll all be online for free or you can make donation to get the dvd download but um and basically so i review all the literature on microwave safety um and foods and so you see what the sign says okay marie um asks what are the best low low fiber foods to eat oh when preparing for a colonoscopy a best thing to eat when preparing for a colonoscopy do you remember peppermint oil right peppermint leaves um so i check out my peppermint colonoscopy video and uh but in terms of uh i mean in terms of prepping that's that's the most important things i mean if you're gonna um eat low fiber foods and you need to least healthy um then the least unhealthy low fiber foods out there um uh or you can eat nothing at all that's has the lowest fiber um at all rather than um using it as an excuse to eat junk um are you going to make any oh interesting so tea give her an S i'm gonna make any views about DNA testing and health issues well you know i just did a video well when i say did a video um this video may not come up for months because it means i scripted a video um and that's what i'm doing right now before the next book scripting up months of videos so when i say oh i just did a video and you're like waiting for it the next day it's actually gonna be a while but so i just did a video about a polymorphism on caffeine metabolism there's some people that are high metabolizers um versus uh lower kind of middling metabolizers caffeine and there may actually be a differential effect of coffee consumption in terms of overall mortality and some other things that is actually something you can get tested for but i feel that and there's the you know lactose uh lact taste persistence so the mutation allows people to digest milk after weaning um this so there are a few kind of genetic conditions that actually do have kind of real uh had term impacts on your health but most of what you see in the kind of DNA testing personalized nutrition personalized medicine space um is a lot of unfortunately um which was uh what i uh came to the conclusion of um that there's actually very other than um these very few clear examples um we don't have a good data suggesting that um there are kind of particular dietary needs for particular people um but uh but i'll continue looking that area because i know it's uh it's it's something of high interest all right and finally one minute left Marie asked are there any disadvantages of eating wheat germ yes it's a processed food you're just getting the germ not the rest um but uh the high um uh the the i mean the phytates and wheat germ great but may actually at that concentrated dose um interfere with some mineral absorption um i know i think that's uh i'd i'd have to look at that data but i remember looking at something um on wheat germ and was saying oh that's why you shouldn't eat wheat germ but anyway it's processed we'd like to eat it in whole food form um ideally um and uh let me see there let me too if i take one more um uh hey um ossegears asked cut out dates and grains to heal my teeth okay um can i eat grains without detriment to my teeth um you um eat whole grains and and you know floss and brush your teeth and uh practice good dental hygiene and you should be fine in fact there was a study um done on you know because if you look at um you know a teeth from schools thousands years ago they have these like perfect teeth no cavities often um and you say well wait a second they didn't have any dentists whatsoever no flossing no two but before two parts were invented you say well yeah it was four candy bars were invented too right um well yeah that makes sense but you don't know until you put it to the test say okay where you gotta find somebody who doesn't eat processed foods you do it on a tv show there's a tv show in sweden where they put people on uh like uh i don't know if it was an island but they they had people eat stone age for a month um uh and so they had like security guards making sure no one eats a twinkie um and they put them on this so they wanted a replicated diet like from five thousand years ago so it was mostly whole grains um so lots of intact whole grains like barley and stuff so it was a grain-based diet um and even had some honey in it which would be kind of refined sugar right um and um of course and so that they didn't have any toothbrush or anything um and uh they so they had a plaque build up over that month as you can imagine but no increase in gingivitis which is just crazy um because you do all these studies um where you that's how you that's how you show gingivitis you take people you stop them from flossing and brushing and the plaque builds up and that causes gum inflammation and then eventually if you don't treat the gum inflammation the gingivitis then you get something called periodontal disease where the tooth structures the structures that hold the teeth like ligaments and bones dissolve away then you lose your teeth okay so that's the sequence plaque gingivitis periodontitis um but here plaque build up without gingivitis why well they actually measured the bacteria they didn't have the bad bacteria the the bad bacteria that eats away your teeth and causes the inflammation right um why well they weren't eating you know refined sugars and they were eating all this fiber all these anti-inflammatory plant foods and so for all these reasons they think that uh that they actually didn't get the gum inflammation um and so that supports your adding grains to your diet um but not in the form of candy bars thank you very much everyone until next month and again if you um value nutrition facts.org please consider making an end of your donation one day left