Posts

What Is “Pine Mouth Syndrome”? 

Image
Why do some pine nuts cause a bad taste in your mouth that can last for weeks? The reason I make pesto with walnuts instead of the more traditional pine nuts isn’t only because walnuts are probably healthier with 20 times more polyphenols, but also because of a mysterious phenomenon known as PMS. Not that PMS. Pine mouth syndrome is characterized by what has become my favorite word of the week: cacogeusia, meaning a bad taste in your mouth. You can get cacogeusia from heavy metal toxicity, seafood toxins, certain nutritional and neurologic disorders, or the wrong kind of pine nuts. “Termed ‘Pine Mouth’ by the public, cases present in a roughly similar fashion: a persistent metallic or bitter taste beginning 1–3 days following ingestion of pine nuts lasting for up to 2 weeks.” As I discuss in my video Pine Mouth Syndrome: Prolonged Bitter Taste from Certain Pine Nuts , thousands of cases have been reported , and it doesn’t seem to matter if the pine nuts are raw or cooked. Could the...
Post a Comment
Read more

Are Raw Mushrooms Safe to Eat? 

Image
Microwaving is probably the most efficient way to reduce agaritine levels in fresh mushrooms. There is a toxin in plain white button mushrooms called agaritine, which may be carcinogenic. Plain white button mushrooms grow to be cremini (brown) mushrooms, and cremini mushrooms grow to be portobello mushrooms. They’re all the very same mushroom, similar to how green bell peppers are just unripe red bell peppers. The amount of agaritine in these mushrooms can be reduced through cooking: Frying, microwaving, boiling, and even just freezing and thawing lower the levels. “It is therefore recommended to process/cook Button Mushroom before consumption,” something I noted in a video that’s now more than a decade old. However, as shown below and at 0:51 in my video Is It Safe to Eat Raw Mushrooms? , if you look at the various cooking methods, the agaritine in these mushrooms isn’t completely destroyed. Take dry baking, for example: Baking for ten minutes at about 400° Fahrenheit (“a process ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Why I Don’t Recommend Moringa Leaf Powder 

Image
“Clearly, in spite of the widely held ‘belief’ in the health benefits of M. oleifera [moringa], the interest of the international biomedical community in the medicinal potential of this plant has been rather tepid.” In fact, it has been “spectacularly hesitant in exploring its nutritional and medicinal potential. This lukewarm attitude is curious, as other ‘superfoods’ such as garlic and green tea have enjoyed better reception,” but those have more scientific support. There are thousands of human studies on garlic and more than ten thousand on green tea, but only a few hundred on moringa. The most promising appears to be moringa’s effects on blood sugar control. Below and at 0:55 in my video The Efficacy and Side Effects of Moringa Leaf Powder , you can see the blood sugar spikes after study participants ate about five control cookies each (top line labeled “a”), compared with cookies containing about two teaspoons of moringa leaf powder into the batter (bottom line labeled “b”). Ev...
Post a Comment
Read more

Is Moringa the Most Nutritious Food? 

Image
Does the so-called miracle tree live up to the hype? Moringa (Moringa oleifera) is a plant commonly known as the “miracle” tree due to its purported healing powers across a spectrum of diseases. If “miracle” isn’t hyperbolic enough for you, “on the Internet,” it’s also known as “God’s Gift to Man.” Is moringa a miracle or just a mirage? “The enthusiasm for the health benefits of M. oleifera is in dire contrast with the scarcity of strong experimental and clinical evidence supporting them. Fortunately, the chasm is slowly being filled.” There has been a surge in scientific publications on moringa. In just the last ten years, the number of articles is closer to a thousand, as shown here and at 1:02 in my video The Benefits of Moringa: Is It the Most Nutritious Food? . What got my attention was the presence of glucosinolates, compounds that boost our liver’s detoxifying enzymes. I thought they were only found in cruciferous vegetables, such as cabbage, broccoli, kale, collards, and caul...
Post a Comment
Read more

Are Carboxymethylcellulose, Polysorbate 80, and Other Emulsifiers Safe? 

Image
Emulsifiers are the most widely used food additives. What are they doing to our gut microbiome? When grocery shopping these days, unless you’re sticking to the produce aisle, “it is nearly impossible to avoid processed foods, particularly in the consumption of a typical Western diet,” which is characterized by insufficient plant foods, too much meat, dairy, and eggs, and a lot of processed junk, “along with increased exposure to additives due to their use in processed foods.” The artificial sweetener sucralose, for example, which is sold as Splenda, “irrefutably disrupts the gut microbiome at doses relevant to human use” and “ induces glucose intolerance.” In other words, it can make our blood sugars worse instead of better. It’s relatively easy to avoid artificial sweeteners, but “it may be much more difficult to avoid ingestion of emulsifiers…because they are commonly added to a wide variety of foods within the modern Western diet.” In fact, “emulsifiers are the most widely used ...
Post a Comment
Read more

True Health Intiative: Scientific Consensus on a Healthy Diet 

Image
The leading risk factor for death in the United States is the American diet. About a decade ago, the American Heart Association (AHA) expressed concern that its “2020 target of improving cardiovascular health by 20% by 2020 will not be reached if current trends continue.” By 2006, most people were already not smoking and had nearly achieved their goal for exercise. But when it came to healthy diet score, only about 1 percent got a 4 or 5 out of its diet quality score of 0 to 5, as you can see below and at 0:35 in my video, Friday Favorites: The Scientific Consensus on a Healthy Diet . And that’s with such “ideal” criteria as drinking less than four and a half cups of soda a week. In the last decade, the AHA saw a bump in the prevalence of the ideal healthy diet score to about 1 percent of Americans reaching those kinds of basic criteria, but, given its “aggressive” goal of reaching a “20% target” by 2020, it hoped to turn that 1 percent into about 1.2 percent. (Really, as you can ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Cleaning Products, Air Fresheners, and Lung Function 

There is a reason the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention prohibits not only smoking but also scented or fragranced products in its buildings. In a recent review entitled “Damaging Effects of Household Cleaning Products on the Lungs,” researchers noted : “Adverse respiratory effects of cleaning products were first observed in populations experiencing high levels of exposure at the workplace, such as cleaners and health-care workers, with a primary focus on asthma.” Occupational use of disinfectants has also been linked to a higher risk of developing chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, such as emphysema. As I discuss in my video Friday Favorites: The Effects of Cleaning Products and Air Fresheners on Lung Function , we now know that, in addition to workplace exposures, “exposure to household cleaning products has also emerged as a risk factor for respiratory disorders in childhood,” as well potentially being “an important risk factor for adult asthma.” Common househo...
Post a Comment
Read more