“Green smoothie cleanse” causing acute oxalate nephropathy
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
Actually, there has been more than one video about oxalate nephropathy already, but from more obviously potentially harmful sources (https://youtube.com/watch?v=QJs431FsC_k&t=6m40s, https://youtube.com/watch?v=UrbylXMU8Mw&t=7m45s).
The channel is curious in that Dr Bernard seems to hire actors to produce what looks like stock footage to illustrate the story.
180mg of oxalates isn't that much.
Most people consume 200 to 300 mg of oxalates per day: https://www.webmd.com/diet/foods-high-in-oxalates
and with regards to water. I believe, it's when you sip on water all day that the danger of brain swelling occurs because your body looses the ability to gauge how much water is in it's system and doesn't quite know how much to excrete.
too much of anything isn't good. it's time to start embracing less. it's okay to drink a bit too much water at once because your body can excrete it without problems.
am I right?
I'm like "What do you think a juicer is??" You just took that natural plant that's loaded with healthy fiber, removed all the fiber and concentrated it so it's mostly sugar and water.
If you process it at home it's still processed.
Your greater point I agree with though. People who drink vegetable smoothies don't realize all that delicious sugar those vegetables have is now streamlined because they destroyed the fiber. But hey! It's healthy!
https://www.mondelezinternationalfoodservice.com/Product/Pro...
Like the flour you use to make a cake has been altered from its whole state more than a little bit. So has the sugar. And of course, both ingredients are used in Oreos, for roughly the same reasons you'd use them at home.
I suppose most people don't cook with palm oil and soy lecithin.
PALM OIL, SOYBEAN AND/OR CANOLA OIL…HIGH FRUCTOSE CORN SYRUP…SOY LECITHIN…ARTIFICIAL FLAVOR
Soy lecithin isn't, but it isn't a significant nutritional component or particularly questionable (it's a vegetable extract used as an emulsifier).
Your other points seem sound, and are things that I would not be surprised to find in homemade cake (except maybe the lecithin; what use does a cake have for an emulsifier?)
> They mean food that is processed industrially with a bunch of (usually unnecessary) chemicals added to stabilize or enrich the food. Oreos are a processed food. Cake you make at home from whole ingredients is not processed.
The ingredients I listed aren't whole ingredients - which I would take to be e.g. flour, eggs, milk, butter, etc. If you're cooking with high-fructose corn syrup then you're not cooking with whole ingredients.
The properties of flour are in fact quite different than the properties of whole wheat. And of course there is then a continuum, from whole wheat flour to white flour to bleached white flour.
There might be some significant nutritional impact from that, but it's more or less a similar process to make it (with an additional reaction to convert some of the glucose to fructose).
high fructose corn syrup, palm oil, vanillin
<< Vanillin – natural or synthetic? – secrets of science 99 % of vanillin flavor is produced synthetically (petrochemical origin) or biotechnologically (e.g. from ferulic acid, eugenol).>>
Do you have a source on this? Because I did a quick check, and at a glance it seems this is not true (and in fact blending can actually release fibers for some fruits) [1].
My understanding has always been that blending doesn’t make fruits/vegetables less healthy than their whole counterparts.
[1] https://nutritiondaily.com/does-blending-destroy-fiber-nutri...
It's very possible that blending is still worse than eating whole though because the juice is now immediately available in the gut without the whole food needing to be slowly broken down even if you also still consume the fiber. Rate of absorption makes a huge difference in nutrition. Obviously the real secret is chewing as little as possible and instead swallowing large chunks.
Yeah, I get that. And makes sense. But I keep seeing (even in this thread) that blending is almost/just as bad.
> It's very possible that blending is still worse than eating whole though because the juice is now immediately available in the gut without the whole food needing to be slowly broken down even if you also still consume the fiber. Rate of absorption makes a huge difference in nutrition. Obviously the real secret is chewing as little as possible and instead swallowing large chunks.
In theory, but is there anything to back this up? Because it seems like there isn’t much in the way of science or studies. But yet I see plenty of claims of it.
There’s something about the whole topic that draws pedantry out of people who think it’s a binary motion. It’s not. Blending some vegetables before you drink them isn’t the same as eating an ultra processed packaged food from the store.
Nobody who thinks about it beyond looking for “gotcha” opportunities would actually believe that.
They look at multiple diseases which drastically increases the odds of false positives, they use a broad definition of ultra processed food, they base their study on people's own answers and their end result only shows a marginal increase in certain diseases like for the control group they observe a tiny effect like a 20% increase in colon cancer for the processed food consumers.
This means if 5/1000 people in the control group get this disease, it's 6/1000 for processed food consumers. It's basically nothing. It is highly likely to be caused by random variance.
This type of research is not mature enough to base life decisions on. It is a hint that there might be something worth looking into but that's all there is to it.
Most people don't know nearly enough to have any sort of informed opinion on this topic. We as a society don't know whether processed food is bad, nor how bad it might be, we just think it might be so it's frustrating when people cite shitty popsci articles as if they're facts.
The one thing we can say for sure is that we haven't observed any significant effect in the studies we have done.
For all intents and purposes, eating processed food is as far as we know completely safe. Certainly much safer than consuming alcohol.
(random source: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2023/08/01/zhanna-sam...)
"Founder of Apple only eats... apples! Omg lol"
I don't think he disappeared for weeks in orchards, but he would reportedly eat only apples for weeks at a time, or carrots. He was a "fruitarian" for a period of time. [1]
And he didn't eat only apples to cure his cancer, but he did choose things like "dietary supplements and juices" specifically to cure his cancer, instead of modern medical recommentations. Which he then regretted when the cancer progressed. [2]
It's not a random coincidence that he named the company Apple. He was really into apples, like more than anybody you've probably ever met.
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/healthmain/strange-eating-habits-ste...
[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/alicegwalton/2011/10/24/steve-j...
He decided to delay surgical treatment in favor of dietary treatment presumably because at the time there was little evidence for the effectiveness of surgical treatment (and obviously plenty of risk connected to it).
https://www.reuters.com/article/idUK144083343120120222
(the biopsy line was originally after the quote from the wife abut not opening his body yet)
> a policy prohibiting employees from talking to one another about any topic about which both parties have not yet been officially "disclosed"--Distortionspeak for "cleared to discuss"--by a higher authority.
The most modern of which I've seen so far is Conjecture's infohazard policy:
https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/Gs29k3beHiqWFZqnn/conje...
I can't find the HN submission anymore.
On the other hand, we have the opposite relationship with fruits. When our ancestors ate fruits, they played a pivotal role in facilitating the plant's reproductive fitness by dispersing the seeds, at times with the excellent complimentary fertilizer that is human excrement. In this case, the plant has an evolutionary incentive to produce more nutritious fruits to encourage such human consumption.
There are a lot of "vegetables" that are actually botanical fruits such cucumbers, zucchini, tomato, etc. (note they all contain seeds). They are much better alternatives than true vegetables (spinach/kale) for juicing if you are trying to avoid sugar or somehow don't like sweet juice.
It also doesn't sound right to me to refer to liquified vegetables as "juice", when I've long thought the term refers to the liquid produced from squeezing a fruit (not to mention liquified spinach/kale sounds a bit nasty)
Used to go to this restaurant after my Saturday morning movie, just to have lunch. This wee gal working there on that shift, usually, noted that I would pull my ticket stub out (along with other things I was planning on pitching) and began to regularly ask me what I thought of whatever movie I had seen.
One Saturday I came in and was instantly struck with a kind of floating anxiety, that something was wrong. Well, it smelled like someone who was very, very ill. I see her and her color is all off: pale but for two spots of color. Her respiration is fast, shallow, and her rib cage looks lifted. As in there is a lot of pain on one or both sides above the hips. When I get to the counter, I ask if she's alright trying to play cool about it (inside I am freaking out a bit). She says she's going home in a few hours. And what can I do?
I can't finish my lunch, I'm so keyed up because everything is telling me that this is a very sick person. As I leave, I am trying to be casual but again ask if she has someone to come pick her up. She says she'll be fine.
She's not there for the next four or five weeks.
When she returns, she tells me that she collapsed a couple of hours later and spent a week in the hospital with septicemia from her kidney infection from some obstruction. Apparently kidney stuff runs in her family when they get older. But she's young. I look at her nails, something in the corners. I use my nose again. Because this is kind of a healthy place. Again, trying to be casual, "Hey, do you like spinach?" She proceeds to tell me how she loves spinach and just "grazes" on it constantly at work. "Handfuls," according to her. Because this place throws uncooked spinach leaves on everything.
I scribble down on the back of a receipt a note for her to bring to her doctor during followup, because my guess is she just grazed herself into some oxalate stones. Been very wary of spinach since.
I have a particularly keen sense of smell and, well ... like fresh green leaves, in a vegetable kind of way. But it was enough for me to make the connection.
"But they mean artificial chemicals!"
Sure. Except people don't know which ones are "artificial", nor do they know whether these artificial chemicals are more dangerous than their natural counterparts.
They're just full of shit. They don't have a clue, they're just parroting shit they read on Instagram or whatever.
You want to prove "chemicals" are bad? Pick one specific chemical, do some studies and conclusively prove it's harmful, then say "chemical x is bad". "Chemicals are bad" is just incorrect.
Almost none of this shit is based on reality. For the things we know are bad like lead, asbestos, PFAS etc we have solid science and we act on that knowledge by writing legislation to prevent unsafe use.
Popular science is like 99% total bullshit. That's why people complain that "scientists change their mind every year". Because the scientists just published some results showing a weak link between chocolate and cancer, then a bunch of bullshit articles popped up saying chocolate cures cancer and then people wonder why they still have cancer after they ate chocolate.
https://www.weightwatchers.com/au/blog/food/why-fruit-counts...
The only thing that makes me stop feeling hungry is my blood sugar going back up to a normal level.
I'm truly envious if there's actually anybody out there who can eat low-calorie bulky foods and actually feel satisfied by the meal. I just feel bloated but still just as hungry as before eating.
But if we compare a 150 calorie bag of doritos with 5 large tomatoes (each one being 33 calories), that feels about comparable in terms of satiating me in terms of giving me a break from hunger for maybe 45 minutes.
On the other hand, just large tomatoes does absolutely nothing for hunger. Which is the indication for me that volume is entirely irrelevant. (And why would volume matter? Your body can't turn volume into calories.)
Only problem with 5 large tomatoes is that it leaves me feeling kind of gross/bloated with that much volume. My stomach will literally feel like it protrudes, which is uncomfortable.
Like if I'm on a diet of 1,200 cal/day to lose weight, eating bulky foods does nothing to make me any less miserable, compared to if I stick to dense protein/fats/carbs. The sensation (and distraction) of hunger remains identical.
Note that some things must be boiled to become safe; pokeweed greens can be boiled (and the water discarded) to reduce alkalinity. The berries, however, are never safe for human consumption.
Does "going easy on oxalates" just mean you have fewer than six spinach smoothies per day?
I'm used to these dietary memes cashing out into either trivial claims or nothing burgers.
and
> Frozen commercially available spinach in New Zealand contains 736.6 ± 20.4 mg/100g wet matter (WM) soluble oxalate
while the USDA says about 900 mg per 100 g for American spinach on average.
So roughly 1% of the wet spinach by weight. 1 kilo of high-oxalate spinach probably has 10 - 20 grams of oxalic acid. That's a lot of spinach, but probably chuggable in one day in smoothie format. Far too close to the LD50 estimate for my comfort!
For one large salad, it's unlikely to exceed a couple grams. I'm unsure about the effects of chronic lower dose exposure.
Looking it up, people generally eat 50-200mg of oxalates per day with 1000mg being the outlier high end.
Eat your spinach. If you're worried, then cook it.
Despite your statement I don’t think this knowledge is automatically distributed amongst vegans.
I've gotten two and don't recommend. Things that help, short of the sort of restrictions I'm stuck with: drink lots of water with high-oxalate foods, and eat foods high in calcium with them. The calcium binds with the oxalate in your guts instead of your kidneys and passes right out. Some people dissolve a calcium pill in the water they boil spinach in.
They can see tiny stones in your kidneys with a scan so it's possible to check before you get a real problem, though I don't know if they would without any symptoms.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7600777/
A lot of the "common sense" about oxalates just sound like social media memes.
Avoiding high-oxalate foods if you're prone to oxalate stones isn't a meme, it was the advice of my urologist and the printed pamphlets he gave me. Along with drinking plenty of water, especially with meals as I mentioned above. As for calcium, it's mentioned as protective in your quote.
Don't eat plants; they're trying to kill you! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1cqNDDG4aA
I usually forward it to friends that rant about meat being bad for your health.
So the wrong meat give you all the same lovely effects of systemic inflammation, paradoxical immune suppression, metabolism suppression, and the pile of strange effects from the metabolites and free radicals. Which normally don’t matter much, but start to do when modern consumption of omega-6’s end up significantly more than historical exposure, all year long.
This is one thing to watch out for in rodent studies involving “fat”. In addition to having a very different relationship to fat than humans, the fat they are given is generally very high in omega-6, often being lard (from western raised pigs) mixed with some amount of vegetable oil. Thus because “animal fat” was used, the generally negative outcome then gets wrongly associated with saturated fats. If the study doesn’t give a breakdown of the fatty acid profile, then it’s basically worthless. Unless someone feels like trying to track down the researchers and find the chow product they used. Which is sometimes viable.
https://www.health.harvard.edu/newsletter_article/no-need-to...
I offer my strong encouragement to reevaluate and look on with suspicion about the standard "health advice" that has ultimately been provided and supported by an industry that has been dependent on products with high omega-6s in order to achieve low costs and strong preservative effects. And when I say industry I don't mean some "the man" boogeyman cackling in the shadows, I mean I work in agriculture and the very boring humans up and down the supply chain have a lot of incentives for certain thoughts and behaviors, and are strongly disincentivized to ever stop and say "hey is this a problem?".
Ask yourself this, if it is true that eating more omega-6 fats than humans have historically been exposed to is healthy, then why has turning away from the high saturated fats found in "traditional" european and american foods (piles of butter and carbs) only resulted in a population level increase in cardiovascular disease, obesity, and diabetes? While you can't make a rigorous conclusion from just that correlation, Chesterton’s Fence definitely seems relevant here. To be clear, I consider there to be multiple causes for all three of those issues and no one single fix, but I do consider the omega-6 called linoleic acid to be a particularly strong one. Unfortunately there seems to be different "metabolic gears" people can be in, so just taking a metabolically compromised person and only feeding them butter and carbs may not help and could even hurt their situation.
The food oil industry is well aware of the problems that omega-6s have, but obviously aren't keen on announcing something they are at fault for. What you will see is a quiet move to new varieties of plants bred/modified to produce higher monounsaturated fats in place of polyunsaturated fats. As a side note, this may actually not be the best move. Linoleic acid can induce a lower metabolism (in fact animals that enter torpor seem to require it) however once that happens it appears that the monounsaturated fats found in body fat stores seem to maintain the cycle. So it's unlikely to help those with compromised metobolisms. Another side note, I've heard that consuming very large amounts of linoleic acid can sometimes do the opposite and raise metabolism though I've not explored that much. Frankly it's a bad idea to try and achieve it that way, but it's another example of a surprising reverse of what you'd normally expect. If you ever wonder why there's so many seemingly contradictory relationships, it's because your metabolic pathways are an impossible clusterfuck of nested feedback loops, like if a hydra fucked an ouroboros. Look at this map and despair of ever trying to make a 100% always correct statement even with well done science: http://biochemical-pathways.com/#/map/1
But shortly put, the only thing (probably) correct in that article is that linolenic acid intake does not seem to correlate with arachidonic acid levels (I'm presuming this is in rats). I can say this because I'm reasonably convinced that linoleic (not to be confused with linolenic) also doesn't seem to correlate with arachidonic acid (in rats). So I find it definitely reasonable to take on it's face. The conclusion that omega-6s are somehow then good, is absolute bullshit though. Arachidonic acid is not the only omega-6 with issues. The most well researched one with a laundry list of negative effects is linoleic acid.
>American Heart Association (AHA)
AHA is a highly biased organization that puts out bad science. They are the Autism Speaks of the health world. If their stamp is on it, be extremely wary.
>"Omega-6 fats are not only safe but they are also beneficial for the heart and circulation," says advisory coauthor Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian, an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women's Hospital.
Jesus titty fucking christ, she couldn't be more irresponsibly and dangerously wrong. Now, there a load of resources one can explore that counter this idea of "heart healthy" omega-6s, but instead of a gish gallop that not even I'm interested in, here's my personal favorites, because it so perfectly illustrates how easily one can walk away with the exact wrong conclusion if the trial isn't thorough enough.
https://journals.physiology.org/doi/pdf/10.1152/ajpheart.004...
See Figure 2. Basically Both Normal and diabetic rats were fed a "normal" diet vs one with very high omega-6. Apoptosis is controlled cell death, in this case measured by caspase-3 activity. The Diabetic rats had their heart cell caspase-3 activity reduced by about half.
So this means, omega6 resulted in less heard cells dying, right? Heart healthy and great for diabetics!
But they also measured something else. Necrosis is uncontrolled cell death (resulting in inflammation and other negative side effects), in this case measured by serum LDH. In Figure 3, they show that serum LDH more than triples.
Basically feeding diabetic rats omega-6 enriched food traded heart cells dying in a controlled manner, with dying in an uncontrolled manner.
P.S. Epidemiology in health research (which the pro-omega-6 crowd is heavily reliant on) is a giant pile of dogshit that can be made to say whatever the author wants, and severely suffers from the replicability crisis that plagues other areas of science where it's hard to actually control and measure everything involved. Beware both the conclusions, as well as the time spent digging through shit to find out that yes, it really was shit.
Also curing processed meats creates NOCs, NAAs, and PAHs: https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/2015/11/03/repo...
Modern fruit has been genetically engineered (via selective breeding or other means) to be much more sweet than their wild counterparts, and hence contains much more sugar.
Surviving on wild fruit is probably not really that pleasant since most of them don't really taste that great.
PS: generally fruit have little protein, so you might also want to find some extra sources of protein too.
Other than the calories, what's the problem with smoothies?
Another problem with smoothies is that they are blended, which speeds up absorption and causes blood sugar to spike. That forces your body to increase production of insulin, and spiky insulin increases the risk of blood sugar issues.
If you just eat the fruits and veggies normally, the digestive system has a couple more hours to slowly absorb the calories and nutrients, helps smoothen things out a bit.
And if you have to chew and eat the food, you probably end up consuming less of it.
1: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/dec/05/detox-m...
But that's probably because that substance you ingested wasn't healthy in the first place and what you're witnessing is your body trying to get rid of it fast.
Diet alone is never enough to get you out of the flare-up, but it makes a big difference in how deeply you suffer.
A deep tissue massage can cause mild rhabdomyolysis, which is where broken down cells (from the massage) get dumped into the blood. Water will help dilute urine while this occurs. Many massage therapists probably do think that there are harmful toxins get released, though.
I first learned about this when I got fairly sick a few hours after a deep tissue massage. I felt pretty horrible for a few days.
The reason it's batty is that nobody who markets these products ever does a scientific study to see if their 'cleanse' program has any measureable effect on the rate your body excretes various pollutants and contaminants, relative to the normal background turnover. Generally, removing the source of the contamination is more important than anything else, e.g. lead poisoning from contaminated water supplies and so on.
Asking in earnest; I don't want to read this and then repeat it to people if it's not really true.
12 oz green smoothie every other day: clever system.
6 oz green smoothie every day: daily ritualistic cult; slow painful death.
A friends father recently had some issues with gout that were requiring some rather obnoxious dietary measures to tame. He found evidence in the literature about some bacteria strains that were found to be effective, found a source for the identified strains, and swears by the result.
It's probably still better than knocking down several diet sodies per day (e.g.: https://www.tiktok.com/@tlctv/video/7023764315417120006?lang...).
Even if you're going heavy on juicing or what not, it's important to diversify instead of drinking the same thing for days or weeks at a time. Generally people who run into these problems are the ones taking shortcuts --the same type that'd be doing steroids instead of spending 6-7 years in the gym on a regular basis.
Is this issue caused by consuming too much spinach or by consuming spinach in combination with specific foods found in green smoothies?
The bypass probably doesn't help because you are reducing the time exposed to acid/alkali. The antibiotic also kills off any bacteria that would absorb oxalates.
But then, if one is concerned, citrates provide a first-line defense,e.g. 4 oz of lemmon juice, or,say, calcium or potassium citrate. That doesn't stop things, but it helps.
In your microbiome, oxalobacter formigenes is the primary defense. Lose that from, say, antibiotics or IBS, and you've got problems.
Luckily, it turned out that I had a kidney stone, and apparently the jogging for paperwork shook it loose. (Cancer, kidney infection, kidney stones, and physical injury are the main causes of blood in urine.)
Magnesium citrate is now my citrate of choice. It turns out I should drink at least 2 L of water per day.
Don't overdo any one thing, no matter how healthy. As Paracelsus said; Dosage makes the poison.
> Predisposing factors included a remote history of gastric bypass and recent prolonged antibiotic therapy
I knew as soon as I saw it, and the keyword confirms it: a fluoroquinolone, moxifloxacin was used.
FQs like cipro and levaquin are well documented to cause permanent full body damage through all sorts of mechanisms. Including acute kidney injury https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3708027/
And the effects are worse for older populations.
The diet was likely unrelated to the kidney injury.