Jane Harris

Millet isn’t the name of a specific grain, but a generic term that applies to a number of totally different plants. Which is the most healthful “Millets are highly nutritious but vastly ignored as a main source of food primarily due to lack of awareness.” Have you heard of ancient grains? Millets aren’t messing around. Arguably, they are the first grains cultivated by humankind— dating back not only 5,000 years, but maybe 10,000. Why millets and not just millet? I had no idea that “millet” wasn’t the name of a specific grain. In fact, millet is a generic term that doesn’t just apply to different species but to a number of totally different plants. There are “major and minor millets,” pearl millet, which is what most people think of as millet, and also proso, foxtail, and finger millets, which are all completely different grains. Although they look similar, they aren’t the same, as you can see below and at 1:05 in my video Studies on Millet Nutrition: Is It a Healthy Grain?...

If the nitrites in foods like ham and bacon cause lung damage, what about “uncured” meat with “no nitrites added”? “Recently, the World Health Organization (WHO) classified processed meat as carcinogenic to humans.” Also known as cured meat , such as bacon, ham, hot dogs, lunch meat, and sausage, processed meat is definitively cancer-causing. What’s more, “high processed meat consumption has also been associated with increased risk of all-cause mortality”—that is, dying prematurely from all causes put together—“and is a risk factor for several major chronic diseases, such as type 2 diabetes, coronary heart disease, and stroke.” What about lung issues like asthma? As I discuss in my video Does Processed Meat Affect Our Lung Function? , nitrites are added to processed meats as preservatives to preserve their pink hue (so the meat products don’t turn gray), keep them less rancid-tasting, and prevent the growth of diseases like botulism. But, if that same sodium nitrite is put into th...

There is a toxin in lychee fruit that can be harmful, but is it harmful only under certain circumstances? Lychee fruits have been widely used in many cultures for the folk medicine treatment of everything from farting to testicular swelling. (Arsenic, mercury, and lead are also included in many “traditional” remedies.) Lychees have also apparently “been shown to exhibit numerous health benefits,” but the studies cited include ones like this: “Protective Effect of a Litchi [Lychee]…-Flower-Water-Extract on Cardiovascular Health in a High-Fat/Cholesterol-Dietary Hamsters.” What are we supposed to get from that? We don’t eat lychee flowers…and we aren’t hamsters. Hard to argue with this, though: “Flavor is sweet, fragrant, and delicious,” which is why I love them so much. I then saw this: “A child-killing toxin emerges from shadows. Scientists link mystery deaths…to the consumption of lychees.” In Vietnam, it’s called “nightmare” encephalitis. There were unexplained outbreaks in ch...

Laboratory models suggest that extreme doses of heme iron may be detrimental, but what about the effects of nutritional doses in humans? In muscle meat, there is a heme protein that contributes to, well, the meaty taste of meat. There’s also a heme protein in the roots of soybean plants that can be churned out to provide a similar flavor and aroma in plant-based meat, which is used to make the Impossible Burger possible. The question is: Are there any downsides? When the European Food Safety Authority was considering the safety of adding heme iron to foods, its main concern was a potential increased risk of colon cancer. As you can see below and at 1:00 in my video Does Heme Iron Cause Cancer? , we know meat causes cancer. Processed meat—bacon, ham, hot dogs, sausages, and lunch meat—is considered a Group 1 carcinogen, meaning we know it causes cancer in people with the same level of certainty that something like smoking causes cancer, whereas something like a burger probably caus...

Is heme just an innocent bystander in the link between meat intake and breast cancer, diabetes, heart disease, stroke, and high blood pressure? In an editorial in the Journal of the American Medical Association , the chair of nutrition at Harvard pointed out that many plant-based meats, such as burgers made by Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods, can be high in sodium. An issue specific to the Impossible burger is the “heme (an iron-containing molecule) from soy plants added to the burger patty to enhance the product’s meaty flavor and appearance.” Safety analyses have failed to find any toxicity risk specific to the soy heme churned out by yeast, and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has agreed that it is safe, both for use as a flavor and color enhancer. In other words, it’s just as safe as the heme found in blood and muscle in meat—but how much is that really saying? The concern raised in the JAMA editorial, for example, was that “higher intake of heme iron has been associa...

The influenza virus has existed for millions of years as an innocuous intestinal virus of wild ducks. What turned a harmless waterborne duck virus into a killer? In his classic book Bird Flu: A Virus of Our Own Hatching , Michael Greger, M.D. FACLM, founder of NutritionFacts.org and New York Times Best-Selling author, traces the human role in the evolution of this virus, whose humble beginnings belie its transformation into a potentially deadly strain with the potential to become the next pandemic. Visit h5n1book.org to read the full text of Dr. Greger’s Bird Flu for free. Given the latest bird flu cases and outbreaks in 2025, the urgency in understanding animal-to-human diseases, their history and causes, and how we may prevent their emergence is once again paramount. In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, 14 years after his now-classic Bird Flu: A Virus of Our Own Hatching was published, Dr. Greger dove once again into the research and released How to Survive a Pandemic , an u...