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Do Meat-Eaters Have More Antibiotic Resistance in Their Guts?

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Those eating plant-based have a reduced load of antibiotic resistance genes in their gut. There are nearly one million Salmonella and Campylobacter infections in children 10 years and younger each year in the United States alone. Some of these infections are severe, causing meningitis and death, and requiring treatment with antibiotics. However, there’s an increasing problem of antibiotic resistance among these bugs that threatens our ability to treat them. Part of the issue is that the same life-saving, miracle-drug antibiotics are being squandered in animals raised for food for things like growth promotion in unhygienic, crowded conditions, which increases the likelihood that pathogens like Salmonella or Campylobacter will become resistant. (I’ve done a bunch of videos on this.) There’s another problem. The resistance determinants, the genes that encode antibiotic resistance, may be transmitted from farm animals to humans through the food supply. Most antibiotic-resistant bacte...
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Are Rare Sugars Like Allulose Actually Healthy?

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Are rare sugars like allulose a healthy alternative to traditional sweeteners? Allulose is a kind of low-calorie sugar that exists naturally in very small quantities but is now industrially produced as a commercial sweetener. It’s said to have advantages that make it comparable to erythritol as a sugar substitute. It’s also said to have anti-diabetic effects, but that study was on obese mice. Allulose decreases LDL cholesterol levels in hamsters fed a high-fat diet and is said to have a substantial impact on obesity in lard-munching mice, but what about men and women? In a petri dish, allulose inhibits fat cell precursors from maturing into fat cells and reduces the amount of fat accumulation within fat cells. Below are before-and-after pictures when regular sugar was replaced with allulose; the fat is stained red. You can also check out the photos at 0:56 in my video Is Allulose a Healthy Sweetener? . The researchers concluded that allulose might be a promising sugar substi...
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Can Allulose Replace Sugar?

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How safe are fourth-generation sweeteners, such as the rare sugar allulose? First, there was sugar and high-fructose corn syrup, the original industrial sweeteners. They were cheap, but they had lots of empty calories and contributed to diseases such as obesity, type 2 diabetes, cavities, and metabolic syndrome. Then came the second-generation sweeteners, the artificial sweeteners in the colored pastel packets: NutraSweet, Splenda, and Sweet’N Low. They have practically zero calories, but there have been reports of adverse effects, prompting caution. For example, artificial sweeteners were found to induce glucose intolerance by altering the gut microbiome, thereby producing “the counterintuitive effect of inducing metabolic derangements.” (They also taste kind of funny.) Enter the third-generation sweeteners: sugar alcohols, such as sorbitol, xylitol, and erythritol. They’re low-calorie sweeteners; however, their laxative effects can create difficulties. That brings us to rare sug...
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A Simple Protein Swap for Healthy Aging

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Swapping just 1% of plant protein in place of animal protein was associated with significantly less age-related deficit accumulation. Based on a study of more than 400,000 people, replacing just 3% of calories of animal protein with plant protein was associated with a 10% reduction in overall mortality risk. That simple swap could translate to about an extra year of life. Egg protein—mostly found in egg whites—appeared to be the biggest offender when it came to mortality risk. Swapping 3% of calories from egg protein for plant protein was associated with more than a 20% reduction in overall mortality—greater than the reduction seen when replacing red meat with plant protein. However, it’s not just about adding years to your life, but life to your years. How do changes in dietary intake of animal versus vegetable protein affect unhealthy aging? Healthy aging is defined as “the process of developing and maintaining the functional ability that enables wellbeing in older age.” No one wan...
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The Best Foods to Protect Against Atrial Fibrillation

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What foods should we eat and avoid to reduce our risk of atrial fibrillation? Atrial fibrillation, or Afib, is the most common clinical arrhythmia, meaning an abnormal heart rhythm, affecting millions of Americans and recognized as a global public health problem due to its “significant burden” of death and disease resulting from stroke, heart attacks, and heart failure. Is there any particular diet that may help prevent or treat it? Recently, we learned what not to eat. Low-carbohydrate diets are associated with increased risk of developing atrial fibrillation for a variety of reasons. First, people on low-carb diets may be eating fewer anti-inflammatory foods like vegetables, fruits, and whole grains. “[R]educing intake of these anti-inflammatory foods may be one of the important mechanisms for the risk” of getting Afib. Second, a low-carb diet means increased protein and fat consumption, which may stimulate oxidative stress (the formation of free radicals), which has been shown to...
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Are Supplements the New Snake Oil?

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There is little guarantee that a dietary supplement will actually contain what is advertised on the packaging and not have undeclared contaminants. In one of my videos a few years ago, I talked about how press releases on the latest science coming out of even top medical centers were filled with overstatements and omissions. Medical journal press releases suffered from similar problems, and press releases from the drug companies were no different, filled with hype and exaggeration. What about press releases issued by the supplement industry? (I’m not even talking about supplement manufacturers, but trade organizations representing the multibillion-dollar dietary supplement industry.) Researchers found that 100% of supplement industry press releases contained “spin,” meaning “strategies to hype or denigrate findings” to distort clinical studies’ results. Here’s the wild part: Industry press releases advocated for supplement use in response to more than 90% of studies reporting no ...
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The Best Foods to Fight H. Pylori

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What food can eradicate H. pylori in the majority of patients? The salting and pickling of fish produce a novel DNA-mutating chemical called CMBA, which is formed from a reaction of salt, nitrite preservatives, and methionine, an amino acid found concentrated in animal proteins. The nitrites can also interact with other protein components to form N -nitroso compounds, a powerful class of carcinogens found in cigarette smoke. This may explain why processed meats such as bacon, ham, hot dogs, lunch meat, and sausage have been tied to increased stomach cancer risk, but this extends to fresh, unprocessed, unsalted meats as well. But isn’t most stomach cancer caused by an infection with a stomach bacteria called H. pylori ? There is a synergistic interaction between H. pylori -induced inflammation gastritis and diet in the formation of stomach cancer. Check this out: Researchers in China discovered that even genetically vulnerable individuals infected with a particularly pathogenic...
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