 to you live from my treadmill, 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, every English language nutrition journal in the world, so busy folks like you don't have to. I then compile all the most interesting, the most groundbreaking, the most interesting, groundbreaking, practical advice into new videos and articles that I upload every day to my nonprofit 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 that as a public service, as a labor of love, as a tribute to my grandmother, whose own life was saved with evidence-based nutrition. Let us get to your questions. All right, is raw Nori seaweed equal to roasted? I didn't even know you could get raw Nori seaweed. I guess that makes sense. I've never seen it. Trying to think of the research, I know there's been some, the only randomized control trial of Nori I can think of was the immune boosting study. I think, if I remember correctly, let's not just have me remember correctly, let me actually find it. So I don't misquote anything. Hold on one second. Raw Nori. All right, Nori, that's funny. There's a lot of words with the letters N-O-R-I in it. Okay, hold on. We're gonna find Nori. Okay, those randomized to, oh, okay. Those randomized to Nori had a significant boost in natural killaxle activity, which is our kind of a first line defense against virus infected and the cancerous cells. Though they used a Nori extract equivalent to about seven sheets of Nori Day. And so we know word yet on whether or not Nori is effective, but in that study, they used dried. So we don't know if raw is better, just as good, or less good. That's the only study that I know of that actually pitted Nori against placebo. All right, next on the list, how much potassium, oh, how much potassium is too much on a daily basis? Oh, oh my God, you are awesome. 6,000 milligrams of potassium from food alone. I do enjoy adding potassium chloride that's all substitute to meals. So the recommended daily minimum is 4,700 milligrams a day and you are absolutely rocking it. 98% of Americans don't reach the recommended minimum daily intake of potassium. 98% of Americans are potassium deficient diets. You are in that 2%. We evolved getting 10, 15,000 milligrams a day massive amounts of potassium. And so no need to worry at where you are. The only people in need to worry about excess potassium intake are those with impaired kidney function because excess potassium is just excreted to the kidneys but if you have kidney problems, potassium levels can build up in your blood. So if you have a kidney problem or just have diabetes because diabetes can so damage the kidneys, you may have kidney problems even though if you don't know it. So if you have diabetes or if you're older than age 70 because we have declining kidney function as we age, get your kidney function tested. Diabetics in the elderly to make sure you have good kidney function before adding something like a potassium chloride to your diet. Okay, fantastic. Good job though. Eat those sweet potatoes and greens. Two of the most concentrated sources. All right, what else do we have here? Nona says, or Nana, you said it was a good idea to bulk up kids with nut butter because they're small stomachs. What about the problem of getting too much omega-6s to omega-3 ratios? So you can bulk up there. I was talking about chlorically dense foods which are critically important for small children. They need lots of calories to grow and they have really small stomachs so they can't just feed them salads. So something like nuts, seeds, nut butters, avocado, smoothies, lots of calories packed in a little dose. The big problem with the omega-6 to omega-3 ratio is really these artificial oils like cottonseed oil. So these highly processed oils. So sunflower, sunflower, cottonseed, corn has a lot too. These have abnormally high omega-6 levels and so that could interfere with your ability to elongate the short chain omega-3 fatty acids in foods like walnuts and flaxseeds into the long chain omega-3s like DHA and EPA which may be important for cognition. Next up, oh, Nona again, what is the optimal hemoglobin levels for men and women? And I guess the recommended levels are higher than the optimal, no. So I'm glad, so hemoglobin is a measure of how my red blood cells you have in your blood and which is not as sensitive as something like hematocrit to different hydration levels. And so hemoglobin is indeed what you wanna see if you are anemic or not. And the normal values differ from lab to lab and different men and women, but no, those are actually the levels that we wanna have in your blood. And if you're lower, you're anemic and what does anemia come from? It could come from dietary insufficiency. For example, iron, your body needs iron to create red blood cells or your body may be retiring them too soon. Your red blood cells should live about 120 days, but if you have autoimmune disease that eats them up or your spleen is hoarding them or who knows, then you could become anemic no matter how much iron you have or you're making enough because there's something happening in your bone marrow that's crowding out, your red blood producing cells, there's all sorts of things going on. So bottom line, if you have low hemoglobin then you need to follow up with further testing. See what is the cause of that anemia? And then of course, ta-ta-ta, treat the cause. All right, Zen Pool says, oh, that's very sweet of you, happy to help anytime. Zen, Steven asks, I recommend taking B12 supplement. I recommend taking B12 supplement on an empty stomach, but you also say get it in fortified foods, which would not be on an empty stomach. Do I recommend taking B12 supplements on an empty stomach? I mean, the important thing is this mixing with your saliva. So that's why something chew, like some sublingual supplements, something that they can just chew or any kind of chewable supplement or liquid supplement or spray. That's really more important. It shouldn't matter whether empty stomach or not. Let me just check really quickly to make sure I'm not even forgetting my own recommendations. Oh, take that back, ha, empty stomach. It's on my list. I'll have to go back and see what the, what led me to make that recommendation. I presume it's in my latest B12 series of B12 videos. And so the recommended doses that I give, presumably are based on that. You know, I should go check. But no, it's a good question. Typically the doses one gets in supplements, for example, are so much more than you would ever need that it probably doesn't matter very much. But if you're doing fortified foods because we're talking about much more doses, then it would indeed make a difference. So let me look that up and get back to y'all. I don't know how I do that. How about come back, ask a question next month and I'll have an answer for you. In fact, I'll write myself a note, B12, empty stomach. And I'll find out, you can also email me and happy to get back to you directly. But of course, other people might be curious. Okay, next up, Ammo says, I have medication that has side effect of weight gain. Ah, is that part C? Yes. We're going to have a loose weight gain 50 pounds. Well, if there, so ideally if there are other things you can do to treat the cause of whatever you're treating the zeparxia with, that would be ideal through non-pharmacologic methods. If that is not possible and you need to be on it, then yes, it's even more important for you to eat a healthy diet to drop the weight. I forget the mechanism for zeparxia whether it's increased appetite or, I forget if I covered that and how not to diet. But whatever the cause, all the components of a whole-food pump-based diet that make weight loss more effortless like low and cloric density and what I had like 16 criteria in the first part of how not to diet, all those will help regardless of what's making you put on excess weight. Next up, Bernadine says 78-year-old female, TSS, primary doc, the thyroid stimulant hormone 6.1, wanted to lower it and so started Black Human and we'll follow up. Oh, do I have a, that's funny. I might remember my own videos. I would not be surprised if Black Human helps practically anything, right? They're in there like a thousand studies, clinical trials. I've done a bunch of videos about human, but I forget if one is on thyroid function. Let me look up real quick. Black human, human, thyroid. Oh, there we go. So yeah, so I have a video about, let me see, Black Human, do a random, oh, here we go, randomized, double blind, simple control trial, eight weeks, half teaspoon of powder, Black Human a day, this is for Hashimoto's patients, significant reduction in body weight. Well, that's a separate thing, but also a reduction in thyroid stimulating hormone, which is a sign that thyroid function was improving and even lowered my level of autoimmune anti-thyroid antibodies, which is kind of the cause of the hypothyroidism. And significant drop in interleukin-23, which is a pro-inflammatory signal that you also often see in autoimmune inflammation of things like thyroid. So fantastic. And what are the side effects? 70% drop in LDL, bad cholesterol. So I'm all in favor, half teaspoon a day. And if you don't like the taste, you can use that edible film trick to, if you, just not a big fan of the Black Human. Okay, next up, Bill says, give me the poor tracker, oh, Stence, you can tell me that again. What is the alternative treatment you've been, oh, in the acute case of emergency heart attack, then Stence are absolutely life-saving. It stents for stable heart disease that are useless in terms of actually pro-logging someone's life, in which case, because it's not the narrowed arteries that are more likely to kill you, but the invisible ones that you can't see on angiography, that you can't stent, that are eventually lead to most deaths which explains why Stence don't work. So what do you have to do? You have to reverse that atherosclerosis, heal your arteries up, how do you do that? Ornish proved it in the Lancet in 1990, you go on a whole food plant-based diet and lifestyle program. Okay, so, but in emergency setting, they may, Stence can be life-saving. Okay, Nick says, co-worker keep, oh, keeps getting kidney stones, ouch. Used to a lot of animal products, but the vegetarian, that's fantastic. Okay, oh, so keeps getting kidney stones, even though they are cutting out animal products, which for a variety of reasons, they're like, maybe there's increased risk of kidney stones. Okay, so what else can do it, still gotta drop sodium, still gotta increase hydration. Some people, most typical kind of kidney stones, cut some oxalate. Some people are just oxalate super absorbers. And so if that's the case, then it needs to reduce high oxalate foods. So, you know, there's, so all in favor of dark green leafy vegetables, but choose other ones, then beet grains, spinach and Swiss chard, which are fantastic foods, but a little high on oxalates for people have oxalate super absorption. Same thing with nutting to make nuts, nuts can be high on oxalates. And I talk about some other foods in my oxalate videos. So I checked those out, that could certainly be a reason why. Also, vitamin C supplements. Vitamin C supplements are very common and a double one's risk of getting kidney stones. So that's something that may, that is a possibility you'd have to ask them if they're on it, they should stop. Next up, max. What if anything is lost when foods are transformed? Oh, okay. So I'm gonna take lentils, chickpeas to like pasta or sprouted grains to sprouted grain breads. There was that really cool study that looked at food form. So they gave people the same foods, the same amount of foods, but in different forms. So they gave randomized people to chickpeas or hummus. Then there was like muesli versus like ground up, muesli ground up into like powder. And so it was like legumes. I forget if there's a nut and seed in there, but basically same foods, ground up versus intact. And doubled the stool size of those eating intact foods. Say, wait a second, they ate the same amount of foods that they have twice the stool size because most of stool isn't undigested food. It's pure bacteria, literally trillions and trillions per teaspoon. And intact whole grains and legumes are so much better for your gut microbiome. Boy, were your gut microbes happy when you ate those intact grains and legumes because no matter how well you chew there's still these, you know, multi-millimeter size chunks that go down through your intestine and are attacked on all sides by digestive enzymes but they can only get so far. And so you end up delivering these little chunks of starch to your good gut bugs and your colon and that acts as prebiotics. So there's resistant starch, which resists digestion but basically you're taking normal starch when you eat intact foods and turning it into resistant starch just because you're eating it naturally as opposed to powdering it, which our body doesn't know what to do with and we absorb most of the nutrients high up in our small intestine and we starve our microbial self. The fiber still makes it all the way down but all that starch that's left when you take, you know, steel cut oatmeal or even better, oat groats and you powder it into like instant oat flour or tiny flakes and the instant oats. The exact same food, different effect on the body and it's because the microbiome. That's one of the reasons. And so I talk a lot about food form in how not to diet in the wall off your calories chapter. That was certainly illuminating to me. And so, yeah, so I definitely checked that out. Big difference. Okay, Rachel says, is it okay to cook big run-outs within the recipe or will that produce AGEs, acrylamides, you ever roast tofu? Okay, so what this person is, what Rachel is referring to are these so-called gerontotoxins or advanced glycation end products. I talk a lot about them because they're aging toxins, pro-aging toxins, talk a lot about them. My upcoming book, How Not to Age Out This December. And so, I think in How Not to Die, gave us the top 20 AGE most concentrated foods, every single one not only. And I'm a part of what typically, was mostly like chicken, hot dogs, boiled. So it's like high fat, high protein foods exposed to high dry temperatures. And so, but I know that, and so, but you know, it's like, oh, if I remember correctly, like boiled chicken has like 1,000 units and broiled, BR, broiled has like 6,000 units. But then like a sweet potato that's steamed, forget it has like five versus a roasted sweet potato has like 10 or whatever, or 20. So it's like, wow, it's a lot more, but I mean, nowhere close to what was in the animal products. And so, nuts and seeds, even roasted toasted nuts and seeds don't make it anywhere near the top list, which is like McDonald's nuggets and things. And so, I mean, I still encourage people to eat their nuts and seeds and nut butters and seed butters raw versus roasted toasted AGEs, but it's important to kind of get that, take a step back and get that context. In terms of what would happen in a recipe, you wouldn't, because these are, it's all about moisture, not all about moisture, but moisture is a significant part. It's a high dry heat. So if you just roast a walnut sitting out there on a baking tray, it forms these AGEs. But in a cookie, it's surrounded by dough, which is wet, and the moisture prevents the heat rising beyond a certain temperature. And so, I'm sure if like a little walnut is sticking, it's a little elbow out of a cookie, that little elbow get some AGE formation, but if it's actually in the dough, you would not get that kind of reaction. Mark, any herbs and spices interfere with each other? Well, so, we hear about kind of the classic, our herbs and spices interaction is turmeric and black pepper, right? Take out just a few grains of black pepper, dramatically increases, 2,000% increase of bioville, but in fact, I was just looking at this, I think it's like 2,800 actually, I don't know why the, well, I guess it's, there's two different measurements you can use, but yeah, it's a huge increase. Why, as I talk about in the video, you are actually suppressing your body's detoxifying enzymes. So black pepper has like the opposite effect of something like broccoli, which boosts your detoxifying enzymes. So, but by tamping down your ability of your body to rapidly detoxify foreign substances, the curcumin in turmeric kind of sneaks past the liver, which is being suppressed by the black pepper and some more shows up in your bloodstream, a lot more. But is that necessary, so is it necessarily a good thing to be kind of suppressing your detoxifying enzymes with black pepper? So you can imagine taking black pepper with something that you actually don't want to increase your bioville body of, might not be a good thing. You know, there's lots of, speaking of detox enzymes, grapefruit is kind of classic for slowing down the metabolism of certain drugs. And so increases one's risk of priapism, for example, in taking Viagra, it increases, can increase your level so much that you do have the problems described in those commercials. But hey, if you have an expensive cancer drug, you can take it less frequently, if you take it with the grapefruit juice or something. But let me see, herbs and spices interacting with each other. Nothing else really comes to mind. If something occurs to me, I'll come back to it. That's a neat question. Andrew says, how little salt is too little salt? You don't need to add any salt, obviously, because we evolved, right? We exist. We exist. And for millions of years, we and our ancestors had no access to salt shakers, no access to the ocean for many folks, no access to KFC. So the sodium naturally found in the whole healthy plants is all the sodium we need. You don't have to add any salt to your diet. Known as BAC, are all cancers affected by diet? Well, I was gonna say no, but that's just because they haven't been tested. So we don't know. Are there are cancers that won't be affected no matter how healthy we eat? I mean, it's hard to imagine anyone with any cancer that you would not recommend they eat as healthy as possible. It's like saying, does tobacco cause every, contribute to every cancer? The answer is no, I mean, presumably, but we wouldn't tell anyone with any cancer to smoke or not get enough sleep or not take care of themselves. And so in that way, even if it doesn't help that particular cancer, eating healthy could help you deal with the treatment as I described in a bunch of videos. And so whether or not the cancer itself is affected by your diet, we should still try to take good care of ourselves, particularly if we're fighting off a major disease. Okay, Professor D, class, class. Do plants have things in them that resist being eaten, AKA inhibiting bioavailability plants? Like nutrients, fat, vitamins. Or anti, yeah, so there's this concept of anti-nutrients. And, oh, I have a video, I don't know if it's up yet. So I do, I have a whole video addressing anti-nutrients, which in most cases, really kind of myth. You know, I have videos about the phytates, how people used to like soak their nuts to get rid of phytates, but actually because we have studies on puppies done a half a century ago that shows may interfere with calcium, but absorption, but actually phytates actually really good for you. And so, you know, we've kind of co-evolved with plants such that, you know, they come up with something that tries to make us not nibble them and we come up with something to get around that so we can still nibble them. And so, I mean, certainly there's things made by poisonous plants that we don't want to have anything to do with. You know, poison ivy, we have yet to, some animals can eat poison ivy, like goats can totally eat poison ivy. We're not goats, don't eat poison ivy. But in terms of bioavailability, I mean, there's all sorts of things that affect bioavailability. You know, you drink tea, interferes with iron absorption, things like that. But in general, and you'll see in the video, this whole concept of kind of mineral inhibitors or anti-nutrients is really overblown. Okay, oh, there we go. David's saying that Cyprexa causes AMPK levels in the brain increasing hunger. Oh, so it's a hunger increase. Okay, well, so then it's really important that you have a healthy diet. So if you have a hunger increase and you're eating really chlorically dense foods, you're eating French fries all day, boy, you can get a lot of weight. But I mean, you know, some foods are so chlorically dilute that there's no matter, you couldn't eat that much. You can eat your stomach to bursting all day long, right? You know, 2,000 calories of strawberries. Then I had that in a video once, which was like, I don't know how many cups of strawberries, but an inedible amount of strawberries. So then, you know, you're really hungry, you'll eat more, but you eat such healthy food that you wouldn't get the same kind of weight gain. All right, oh my God, we're out of time already. Okay, I did want to mention one thing. We have a Valentine's Day fundraiser. We just announced today. If you, for the first, I forget how many people, make a donation, I will make a personalized video for whoever wanna wish a happy Valentine's Day. So partner, friend, family, whoever, you give me the script and I'll say that as kind of a Valentine's Day present. We've done in this previous years, they've been a lot of fun. I'm gonna be recording them first week of February, so you gotta get them in soon. And there's the link. It's c.see.nf slash vday. It's like a little URL shortener that'll take you to the full link. And you can check it out. Hope everybody has a fantastic month. Hope your New Year's resolutions are going strong, unless of course, they're bad New Year's resolutions. But if you wanted to eat healthier, then I'm all in favor.