8 — Plant Foods; Friend or Foe

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Episode Transcript

This is the Eat Ancestral Podcast, number eight. "Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better."  – Albert Einstein A lot of people, these days, seems like a majority, depending on where you live, seem to think or at least sympathetic with this idea that we all need to significantly reduce our meat and animal food consumption. And that we should basically replace all of that with more plants. And fungi too, but they don't usually get a mention. They are normally lumped in with the vegetables of the world. But anyway, the less animal foods you eat, and the more plants and mushroom vegetables that you eat, the better off you'll be. Better for you, better for me, better for the planet, better for your karma. Sounds like a win-win for everyone, and everything involved. Well, as we talked about in Episode Two, we know that the nutritional claim has no basis. In fact, humans have been eating animal foods, animal meat, fat, organs, and blood, for well over 2 million years. We evolved into humans because of them. That's not going to end well for the koala, because it has a dependency on that food source. It's a biological imperative that it gets that food. And in humans, we see that if we take animal foods out of the diet, our health tends to decline. We develop nutrient deficiencies, which leads to big problems; gut issues, fertility issues, the most common. And this should be a big red flag, especially reproduction. Making babies is one of our primary functions. And if we can't do that, or if we don't care about that, and we don't care about the quality of our offspring, then we've completely lost the plot. But anyway, not only is this plant based agenda being painted as a more nutritious way to eat, it's also apparently the only sustainable and ethical way to feed yourself. We'll be unpacking the sustainability topic soon. I have a lot to share on that. But for today, let's just put it aside. Today I wanted to talk mainly about something that is quite relevant in a nutritional sense, but also has a lot to teach us on the ethical front. And all of this seems to be stuck in the, in the minds of the collective. First there was said that meat encouraged masturbation, which is obviously a bad thing. Then it was said to cause violence. Then it became all about health and longevity. Then it became about how cows and meat eaters have almost single handedly created a climate disaster. And now apparently people think that we've evolved past this kind of beastial behaviour anyway. So oat milk, kale and fake soy meat burgers are apparently your future. What people don't know is that these ideas that have percolated through society in the last few decades, are not actually grounded in science. They're built on a foundation of religious ideals, and an overreliance on epidemiology. Both of which are obviously problematic when you're trying to be objective. ideology is not science and association does not equal causation. The history of our nutrition guidelines is actually a pretty interesting tale. And I will be putting something together on that in the future. But anyway, not only do animal foods have this bad reputation to deal with, plant foods are supposedly all good. Nothing but nutrients. They make the oxygen we breathe, they feed us, they keep us healthy. And they obviously don't mind that we use them as medicine. Or that we rely on them as food. They're our friends. They're on our side, right? Well, is this true? Again. It's funny, I never even considered this until I was in my mid 20s. I always considered vegetables, and other plant foods as de facto healthy. But the things I've learned in the last few years have really made me reconsider these beliefs that society had given me, programmed into me. And it's completely changed the way that I structure my diet, and completely change the way I feel and how healthy I am. And when I sat down to think about this topic, and how to approach it, I think that the thing that made me shift my perspective on this, most of all, was stepping outside of my human centric worldview, and considering all of this from the perspective of a plant. Considering a plant's eye view of the world. And I know that might sound a bit odd. But please bear with me, I have something of a thought experiment to share. And I think it's a part of the story that is ultimately really important to our understanding of the nutritional and ethical ramifications of our food choices. And it can also help us understand our place as humans as animals within our ecosystem, something that is, especially in the urban environments, lacking. Anyway, enough of a preamble, let's jump in and talk about this thought experiment. So we're going to try and empathise with a plant. So do what you need to do to get comfy, maybe close your eyes. And just try and visualise this or put yourself in in the position of a plant. So pretend as though you're a plant, whatever that means. You're sitting there or standing, whatever the right verb is for what they do, you're in a forest or a garden, you can pick the landscape. And let's say that you've been a plant for a few years by now, so you're pretty good at it. And anyway, so imagine you're there just minding your own plant business. You've got your roots deep in the ground, looking for water and nutrients. Your leaves are capturing the sunlight, which with the help of C02, you can turn into plant food. And you've got some pretty flowers blooming from the ends of your green branches that you're hoping some bee might be attracted to. If you're a fruit tree, you might have some fruit just starting to ripen. This fruit contains seeds, your plant babies. Obviously, you also as a plant, want a nice big family of plants. And so that's what the seeds are therefore to further your species lineage. As is the goal with all organisms. Anyway, all is well in plant world, until one day, some loud, lumbering herbivore comes along and they start eating you; pretty flowers, your green leaves, your fruit, everything it can. Well, let's run through some options. You can't scream, or pull your roots up and run away like some and from Lord of the Rings. You can clobber the animal over the head with a good combination, like that tree from Harry Potter. So what can you do? Are you simply defenceless, doomed to be eaten without consequence? Again, I realise this might sound a bit silly but hang in there. For me this was a bit of a revelation. Maybe you've thought about this before, I don't know. But this is definitely not something that's usually considered in the world of nutrition or in these edgy, progressive conversations about the ethical and moral complications of our food choices. I think it'd be helpful to actually take a step back for a second and look at some history. Look at the co-evolution between plants and animals on planet Earth. And just FYI, some of these ideas relevant to fungi as well, which predate both plants and animals. But today, we're just going to speak to co-evolution of plants and animals specifically. So animals and plants have been coexisting on our planet Earth for hundreds of millions of years. About 800 million years in total, or about 500 million years since we came out of the oceans onto dry land. Obviously, the size of those numbers are too large for us to even contemplate. But it's obviously an extremely lengthy period of time. Anyway, at some point, long ago, animals started treating plants as food. And at first the plants were relatively defenceless, but it did not stay that way. So let's take a look at what happened. I have a paper here called Animal-Plant Warfare and Secondary Metabolite Evolution. And I thought reading an abstract, or some of the abstract and some of the conclusion could be quite helpful. So it says quote; "In recent years, the concept of an animal-plant warfare emerged, which focused on the co-evolution between plants and herbivores. As a reaction to herbivory, plants developed mechanical defences, such as thorns and hard shells, which paved the way for adaptive animal physiques. Plants evolved further defence systems by producing chemicals that exert toxic effects on the animals that ingest them. As a result of this selective pressure, animals developed special enzymes, eg. Cytochrome P450 monooxygenases (CYP 450), that metabolise xenobiotic phytochemicals. As a next step in the evolutionary competition between plants and animals, plants evolved to produce non toxic pro drugs, which become toxic only after ingestion by animals through metabolization by enzymes such as CYP450. Because these sequestered evolutionary developments call to mind an arms race, the term animal-plant warfare has been coined. The co-evolutionary adaptation process among higher organisms, termed animal-plant warfare has resulted in a huge array of bioactive chemical compounds in plants. Because the primary function of these phytochemicals is defence against predators, it comes as no surprise that many of them are toxic to humans.". Plants then evolved further defence systems. They gained the ability to defend themselves by producing chemicals that they embedded in their tissues; in their roots, in their leaves, in their stems, and especially in their seeds, their plant babies. Just to make this more relevant to us humans, a small handful of red, or dry kidney beans, sorry, will put you in the hospital, or potentially even kill you. So that's how serious this is. So where animals have immune systems and can defend themselves with their physicality–with their horns or teeth, or by running away–plants don't have immune systems, and they have limited mobility. Remember, you're rooted to the spot. So they had to figure out something else. And they evolved several ways of defending themselves chemically, by manufacturing toxic compounds and embedding these in their tissues.This is something like their immune system. And so this is where it gets really interesting. Once the plants realised that animals have evolved ways of detoxifying their defence chemicals, the plants mounted yet another attack. They produced chemicals that would only become toxic after passing through an animal's detoxification systems. That is mind-blowing. That is a Trojan horse. So all these plants, they might not scream or cry when we eat them, they don't make pottery, they don't write poetry, but clearly, they're not as stupid as they have been made out to be. It seems like plants, not humans, the true masters of biochemistry. Because tens of thousands of these plant defence chemicals have been discovered at this point, and they clearly help plants defend themselves against fungi, insects and animal predators. And here's the thing. Apparently, we modern humans, with our predilection for plant based diets, consume a lot of these plant pesticides in our vegetables, grains, seeds, nuts, beans, legumes... all of these foods contain plant pesticides. Now some of these plant pesticides might be relatively harmless to humans. Like herbs in small amounts, which contain chemicals that for an insect might mean acute neurotoxicity or death. But for us, the risk is much lower, again, depending on how much we eat, and perhaps with the trade off, because it makes our food taste better. And you know, what's funny is that for years, I thought that by buying the expensive organic produce, that I was avoiding pesticides. But apparently pound-for- pound when compared to the consumption of synthetic pesticide residues, which are sprayed on and found on all conventional crops, natural plant pesticides actually account for 99% of all of the pesticides that we modern humans ingest. 99%. That's saying something because there's a hell of a lot of synthetic pesticides on our food, and in in our food. And I imagine the synthetic pesticides are much worse for humans. more potent pound for pound, but still, the point is that all of the plant foods in the supermarket, all of the plant foods at the farmers market, it's packed with plant defence chemicals. It's packed with pesticides that the plant itself made. So we've established that plants contain toxic chemicals that are designed to ward off animal predation. These chemicals are potent and can exert seriously harmful effects in humans. And if we choose to eat plants, it is a choice, we will rely on our detoxification systems and organs like the liver and the kidney and these CYP450 enzymes, to detoxify these compounds to neutralise them, and to escort them from the body as soon as possible. Just like how when we drink alcohol, or when we walk down a busy street and inhale a load of secondhand cigarette smoke or car engine fumes, a similar set of these detoxification processes are turned on. Our bodies really want to get rid of all of that as soon as possible. So plant foods thus exist on a toxicity spectrum. And most plants are inedible, completely inedible to humans, because they are very, very high on this toxicity spectrum. Just think about going for a walk in the park or the forest. We don't look at the grass or any old tree, or mushroom for that matter that we come across as food. We know deep down, it's not human food. Other animals might be able to eat it, but we do not. Our anatomy is not specialised towards plant eating. And while the plants that humans have cultivated, domesticated, these, these plant foods at the supermarket, while they tend to be a bit lower on this toxicity spectrum, they still contain lots of these defence chemicals. Again, we see the nutrition does not boil down to calories and macros. It goes much deeper than that. And when it comes to eating plants, there's clearly a risk- reward calculation to make. More plant foods is definitely not better, it doesn't mean you're going to be healthier. Actually, this point seems pretty clear that the opposite is more true. And if you're eating plants seeds, beans, legumes, you're literally eating a plant's baby. Besides, if we all exclusively ate plants, we would quickly develop nutrient deficiencies that have serious consequences. It poses a massive risk to our own health. It burdens our public health care systems and risks the health of our future generations. Just like taking those leaves away from the koala, it's inviting our own extinction. So this brings us to a discussion around tolerance. Humans are omnivores, we can theoretically tolerate a certain amount of these defence chemicals. But again, we're not specialist plant eaters. So we need to be careful. Humans have a physiological limitation at the species level. And then we need to consider our individual tolerance, which has a lot to do with our current state of health, and our ancestry. So in particular; gut health and immune function, and effectively the total amount of stress or stress load, allostatic load, that we are placing on our organs, like our liver and kidney, to clean up all of these environmental toxins. Things like coffee, chocolate, alcohol, environmental pollutants, like plastics and heavy metals, and all sorts of other chemicals. This all burdens our detoxification systems. And just like a kitchen sink, that is filling up with water faster than it can drain away, a backlog of problems in the body is going to create a compounding series of future problems. And I can't count the amount of people I've met in the last few years who are dealing with some kind of issue, usually gut-related, who reach out for help. But then, upon hearing the proposed solution, basically refuse to stop eating their favourite plant foods, even just temporarily. They just can't let go of the idea that the plants could ever be the problem and that they aren't as healthy as they've always been told, or that you might possibly eat them in excess. And it's sad because I'm trying to help and their chronic issues will never be resolved. They'll only get worse. Until it hurts so much, that you're actually willing to shelve your beliefs, to be a bit more open-minded and engage in some scientific thinking, it's not going to go away. Being told to avoid your vegetables literally makes no sense if you've been diligently following the mainstream nutrition advice for the last several decades. But there it is, waiting for those who are desperate enough to try. I think it was Carl Jung who once said, "What you most want to find, will be found in the place you least want to look". I don't know if that rings true for you, but for me, it certainly does. And it's not just the peanut allergy sufferers and the coeliacs who need to care about this. This certainly affects all of us. And I wanted to go into a few details about what some of these plant chemicals are called and what they can do in humans. So let's get into that now. Basically, a high level introduction here is that these defence chemicals, these plant pesticides, can cause gastrointestinal distress, they can impair our digestion, and compromise our ability to absorb nutrients from our foods. So let's start with inhibiting digestion. Not to get too deep into biochemistry, but basically humans break down food with the help of enzymes. So we have an amylase enzyme for carbohydrates, a lipase enzyme for fats, proteases, for proteins, etc. And so, just like it sounds, these enzyme inhibitors inhibit normal digestive processes. If the food can't be broken down, the nutrients won't be absorbed. And you're not going to be getting the nutrition from your food. It will just be sent out the other end. Moving on, some of these compounds can prevent absorption of nutrients. So even when they are broken down, we struggled to absorb them. Why is that? Well, some plant compounds bind to minerals or chelate to minerals, which inhibits their absorption. These are things like phytic acid in grains, like oats. Oxalates, in spinach, tumeric, and almonds. And both of these, phytic acid and oxalates, can bind to minerals like zinc, and magnesium and phosphorus and selenium and calcium, which ultimately significantly decreases the amount of these nutrients that your body will be able to absorb. So we call this rickets, or osteopenia, osteoporosis. So something to consider; what we pair our foods with. Oxalates also problematic in other ways. They seem to be able to lodge themselves in our tissues like our joints, bones, our skin, and our thyroid and breast tissues. Excess oxalates are also implicated in the formation of kidney stones and kidney disease, especially in people who have a condition called  oxalosis, or hyperoxaluria, which is characterised by having an excess of oxalates in your urine. So humans, unlike plants ,have no physiological use for oxalates. They're a waste product. And the body can only get rid of so much of this stuff every day. So a green kale smoothie like I used to drink back in the day thinking I was being healthy, might contain 10 times the amount of this ,these oxalates ,that my body can feasibly excrete in any given day. Remember, whether it's alcohol, heavy metals, or oxalates, a backlog of these problems to deal with, for your kidneys and your liver and other organ systems to detoxify and get rid of, this is not a good thing. Anyway, enough about oxalates. Moving along, some compounds can cause leaky gut, otherwise known as intestinal permeability. This is a big, big problem. Some compounds like lectins and gluten, you might have heard of, trick our gut lining into opening up. And this is not supposed to happen. This allows undigested food particles, bacteria, potentially viruses, through the gut wall and into the body. Again, this is not supposed to happen, it creates an inflammatory response, and effectively an overactive immune system. And if you don't stop supplying the problem, then you could have a chronic, chronically overactive immune system. The good news is that when we remove these foods, things tend to settle down, the body can actually repair itself in a lot of ways. We just need to stop supplying the problem. And conversely, supply the nutrients that we need; the building blocks of our tissues and hormones and growth factors and endogenous antioxidants, which means animal foods. Last section here, these plant defence chemicals can contribute to endocrine issues. So there are compounds in legumes, for example, and the brassica family of vegetables, which interfere with thyroid function. Compounds from beans, like soybeans, contain xenoestrogens, which interfere with reproductive hormone balance. Maybe this is why babies don't like eating broccoli. They haven't yet been brainwashed into believing the hype. They're just following their instincts. Anyway, the point is the plants have a lot of ways to discourage us from eating them and to cause us issues, yet we persist, we continue to think that great. Well, not me not anymore, and hopefully not you either, after hearing all of that. Just to recap, these plant pesticides can inhibit normal digestion, impair nutrient absorption cause gastrointestinal distress, cause leaky gut, creating inflammation and dysregulating our immune system, can overload our detoxification capacity and accumulate in our tissues and contribute to the formation of kidney stones and other issues. And they can even interfere with thyroid function and reproductive hormone function. I do think that some plant foods must have, do have, redeeming qualities. And let me tell you that in my experience, a carnivore diet can get a little boring. Especially with all the options we have these days, especially if you want to be social And life is too short to miss out on all plant foods. Plus, I've played around with long term low carb/keto diets and at the end of the day, while they are very beneficial and even therapeutic in a lot of ways, I think there is some benefit in eating some whole food carbohydrates, like maybe some seasonal fruit, or honey. And this is why, as I tried to outline in Episode Two, First Principles of Human Nutrition, I think that we should consider eating plants and fungi for variety and pleasure. Not because they're especially nutritious, or because it's more ethical or sustainable, just because we want to indulge our senses. And the good news is that I think we can actually eliminate a lot of the risk if we are smart about it. So this means choosing our plant foods carefully, not over indulging in them, and learning about traditional methods of food preparation that help to render these foods safer to eat, and more nutritious. Fruit being the only, the only part of the plant that the plant actually wants an animal to eat, as long as it's properly ripe. And we're careful not to eat the seeds, and perhaps even the skin. Basically, what tools do we have to mitigate these plant toxins? And as it turns out, food preparation has a significant impact here. And if people are interested, I might put together a deeper look into all of that in the future. But effectively, this means learning about cooking and soaking and fermentation. It means removing the skin and the seeds. These are some of the basic things we can do. Even though we take things like cooking totally for granted these days, it was at one point in time, a major technological invention. And it can really help us out in a lot of ways when it comes to plant foods. The problem is that all of these methods combined don't completely eliminate the risks. There's no free lunch. And this is especially true for those of us who are actually dealing with gut and autoimmune conditions. And again, just like a lot of people are nutrient deficient without knowing it, it would be safer to assume that you have some degree of gut dysfunction, gut dysbiosis, going on. You might not have an autoimmune disease. But don't assume that you're so robust, and healthy that you can ignore all of this. If you want a visual representation of how I think about all of this, how I structure my diet, and that of my clients, you can download my version of the food pyramid. In its current form, there will probably be some future changes. But overall, I don't think much will change. And I've tried to rank foods by tolerance, digestibility and preparation time, or the amount of preparation methods you would need to employ to make it worth, to make the juice worth the squeeze. Okay, so that's it for me today. I hope you've found some value in that. Please let me know if you have any advice or feedback or you need coaching or support. There will be a link in the show notes that will take you to my website, you can get in touch with me there. If you'd like to support the show, I don't have any sponsors. I don't have any social media. I think there's too much censorship going on on those platforms these days. And that ultimately, it's just as poisonous as some of these plant chemicals. And alternatively, you can buy me a coffee. There'll be a link in the show notes. Please don't buy too many–coffee has plant chemicals too. Anyway, that's enough for me today. Thank you very much for listening. And thank you to all farmers and food producers out there, doing things the hard way, the right way. Looking after the animals, looking after the environment, putting nutrients back into the soil, and ultimately feeding the rest of us, giving us the freedom to live our lives without going hungry or needing to go hunting or foraging ourselves. I think we take that for granted. But just want to say thanks. Anyway, that's enough for me today. My name is Ben. This has been the Eat Ancestral podcast and we have been talking about whether plants are our friends or our foes. But I do think this gives us a deeper understanding. And as it turns out, plants do have ways of defending themselves, and they're more capable than we give them credit for. Plants don't seem like they want to be eaten. So we need to be careful not to exceed our current capacity to deal with these things. We need to figure out our tolerance. Otherwise, regardless of how good our intentions are, this might ultimately cause a lot of harm. And I think this is highly relevant given how common nutrient deficiencies are in the modern world. I think at this point, it's a good assumption to make that you yourself are deficient in a variety of things. You're not bulletproof. You need micronutrients. And apparently, in the modern world, we're definitely not getting enough of them. So what's interesting here as well, is that while the nutritional label that comes along with some foods might indicate, you know, X amount of whatever mineral is in this food, if it comes from a plant, or you're pairing animal foods with plant foods, you're probably not absorbing all of that. And so if you're counting on getting those micronutrients, and you're adding them up, and you're thinking, wow, I got so much of this mineral, that's great. Well, again, you're probably not absorbing all of it. And just to point out, we don't have these problems with animal foods. And I'm not trying to bash plants or tell you to never eat them again. It just seems like most people aren't aware of this. We're too busy counting calories, macros and talking about all its supposed health benefits of our favourite plant superfoods. So I'm just trying to balance out the scale here. You can find that in the show notes. I'll put a link in there. Take care. I'll talk with you soon. 

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