The Truth About 5 Health Food Trends | Compilation

[Music] some days it can feel like every time you open Twitter or check the news there's some new health food trend like just add this ingredient to your morning coffee and you'll be cured of all inflammation whatever that means sometimes though it's not always clear what trends are garbage and what ones are actually rooted in science so over the years we've hit up the peer-reviewed research and gotten to the bottom of it here are some of the trends we have debunked first speaking of things you might put in your coffee there's tumeric - lovely yellow color and coffee shops love to put it in fancy lattes sometimes they even claim that this magic ingredient can do so many different good things for your body but take their advice with a grain of salt here is Olivia with more if you've spent any time on foodie instagrams lately you're probably familiar with the vibrant yellow of golden lattes these lattes are usually made with some kind of nut milk and cinnamon but they get their color from turmeric a spice that's been used in Indian cuisine and ira vedic medicine for millennia touted as the next miracle superfood turmeric has some bold health claims behind it like that it can prevent and even cure cancer and while there have been a surprisingly large number of studies conducted on the spice there isn't a lot of evidence to support its superfood status the dozens of supposed health benefits of turmeric certainly seemed too good to be true people and even scientists claim it makes your skin glow improves brain function can prevent cancer diabetes and heart disease and can even cure the uncurable x' from cancer to arthritis alzheimer's and more but the studies underlying these claims haven't really looked at the effects of turmeric heavy diets on health when researchers study the quote medicinal effects of turmeric most of the time they're actually using concentrated curcumin an active ingredient in turmeric or a mix of it and similar molecules collectively called curcumin oits these are polyphenols compounds with multiple carbon rings so there's somewhat similar in structure to the healthy stuff in red wines and they also happen to be highly reactive molecules so in lab tests they might seem like they can do a lot but there's a lot of contradictory science too for example it's often said that curcumin has health benefits because it's an antioxidant a compound that binds to electron hungry molecules called oxidants which can damage cells but some studies have found it acts as an anti antioxidant as it can worsen the damage of these compounds or even caused damage all by itself such conflicting findings tend to happen with highly reactive compounds because they don't actually solve a specific biological problem they interfere with the lab tests being run biochemists have even come up with a special name for such annoying molecules they're classified as pan a se interference compounds or pains and curcumin earned that cheeky description because despite over 10,000 studies on the stuff and more than a hundred and twenty trials testing it for different medical conditions there isn't really conclusive evidence that adding turmeric to your diet does anything special that's partially because the vast majority of those trials were conducted in rats and you know it can't be said enough that rats aren't people well they can be useful to see if something has potential many Iraq cures completely fail in us and to the trials that have been conducted in people have had mixed results at best and very widely in methodology those that do suggest benefits often have critical design flaws like that they aren't double blinded clinical trials those are the gold standard studies where neither the experimenter nor the participant knows whether they're getting the drug or a placebo to minimize the error that comes from bias and most don't use dietary turmeric like in a latte instead they stick purified curcumin or curcumin oits in a capsule the dose in that pill varies from study to study from as low as thirty six milligrams to as high as eight thousand milligrams per day her Q monoids make up anywhere from one to four percent of turmeric powder so to get the same amount from lattes well let's assume you use a generous teaspoon of ground turmeric to make your drink that weighs a little over two grams and contains anywhere from 20 to 90 milligrams of curcumin oits so two down eight thousand milligrams you'd have to drink between 88 and 400 lattes a day every day that's a lot of cashew milk and it's not clear how much of the curcumin you eat actually gets into your bloodstream so that it can travel around and do the things people claim it does that's because curcumin basically goes right through you in animal studies ingested her cumin quickly ends up excreted in feces which is why you might notice your poops become nice and yellow after you eat curry and in people researchers often fail to detect any curcumin in a person's blood even after they've consumed as much as 12 grams of the stuff so while there are a few things you can do to increase how much curcumin your body absorbs like eating pepper or fat at the same time even then it's really unclear if basically any curcumin you eat stays around long enough to actually do anything all that said curcumin isn't the only component of turmeric so it's possible that other things in the spice either combined with curcumin or aloe could be good for you if eaten regularly as part of a healthy diet probably not like cure your cancer good for you but maybe a little better than the same meals without the spice and the good news is that turmeric as a food and even curcumin as a supplement are thought to be pretty harmless so you can sprinkle a large pinch of turmeric on your latte and you probably won't experience any negative side effects other than maybe some yellow tinted feces and whether you're boosting your health or not at least you'll get a pretty yellow Instagram out of it excellent yellow tinted feces that's what I've always wanted so long as we're talking about stuff you put into coffee we might as well mention chocolate every now and then you'll here's some food blog claim that you should put dark chocolate powder in your coffee or eat a square of chocolate candy bar every day but while there is some truth to this you can probably guess what's up here's Michael with more chocolate as if we needed any more excuses to indulge in the sweet stuff there are constantly claims floating around that hey chocolate might actually be good for you there is some science to back that up but you guessed it the Devils in the details most of these claims involve flavonoids a class of compounds found in lots of plants including cacao the plant whose seeds are used to make cocoa and chocolate and some studies have linked flavonoids to a decreased risk of heart disease some experimental studies which are considered the best type of study for establishing cause and effect have shown decreases in blood pressure when healthy adults were given specially developed high flavonoid cocoa drinks or chocolate for example one 2015 study found that 100 adults who drank a high cocoa chocolate drink twice a day for one month had a drop in blood pressure of around 4 millimeters of mercury which is a measure of pressure and a drop of blood pressure of just 2 millimeters has been associated with a decreased risk of stroke or heart problems at least on average within a population there are also a few experiments that hint that flavonoids could improve blood flow to the brain which in turn might mean better brain function for example a 2014 study in Nature Neuroscience found that older adults did better on a memory task and had increased blood flow to particular memory centers in the brain if they had a high flavonoid cocoa drink for 3 months but there are a bunch of other studies that only show changes in brain blood flow and not improvements in cognition and there are a few key points in these experiments that mean that a candy bar now and then isn't going to give you any benefit for one and most of these trials it took weeks or months to see any health benefits and most of the cocoa drinks in the experiments were specially made to have high levels of flavonoids between 400 and 1,000 milligrams using cocoa that's processed differently than regular supermarket chocolate even 400 milligrams is more flavonoids than chocolate normally has and you'd need to eat at least two large bars of regular dark chocolate every day to get that much even if you did the way cocoa is processed to make it less bitter as well as adding milk or sugar has been shown to reduce the levels of flavonoids or the body's ability to absorb them plus the flavonoid and rich chocolate used in these types of experiments isn't particularly tasty some participants were even put off from eating it yeah these studies managed to make chocolate taste bad so you won't be finding these flavonoid rich drinks and bars at the supermarket so overall there is evidence that flavonoids in chocolate and other food have a small beneficial effect on heart and maybe brain health but how that works isn't fully understood yet and more importantly these compounds occur in small enough quantities in your average bonbon or candy bar that to get an effective dose you'd have to eat quite a bit more chocolate than you should I mean all the sugar and fat that comes with that chocolate is going to outweigh any benefits so enjoy chocolate as a treat but don't expect to be living longer because of it well if there was some truth to that one also chocolate is very good and I love it now we couldn't make a video about health food trends without asking about a big one antioxidants the obsession with them probably got started because of some seemingly convincing evidence but the longer studies go on the less straightforward things seem it seems like every week there's a news article claiming you should consume more antioxidants be it through fancy smoothies or sciency sounding supplements this antioxidant craze goes back a long time to the 80s and early 90s when some early research suggested antioxidants could maybe protect against certain diseases food and supplement companies jumped on that research and have been touting the benefits of antioxidants ever since but the follow-up research investigating those benefits has actually been pretty inconsistent and scientists aren't totally sure why yet health food commercials will give you the impression that an antioxidant is a thing a healthy thing you should be eating and drinking but chemically the word antioxidant is actually more of an adjective than a noun it describes a range of chemicals and enzymes that can neutralize free radicals compounds with single unpaired electrons free radicals can cause real havoc in our cells altering DNA damaging the proteins our cells need to function and messing with the sophisticated membranes holding everything together and these free radicals can come from practically anywhere from the food we eat to the air we breathe even sunlight can produce free radicals in our bodies now our cells try to contain them by employing a large network of antioxidant chemicals and enzymes to deactivate the different types of free radicals our bodies encounter but when the amount of free radicals being produced outpaces the rate at which our bodies can quench them our cells enter a state known as oxidative stress unfortunately slipping into a bubble bath and decompressing with an episode of queer eye is not a viable way for our cells to de-stress though that does work for my mind and if our cells stay oxidatively stressed for long periods of time there can be serious health consequences in the 80s and 90s scientists started gathering evidence that cancer heart and neurodegenerative diseases the negative side effects from aging could all be linked to damage from oxidative stress at least in part research during that time also found that a Mediterranean diet which is rich in antioxidants was associated with a lower incidence of those diseases scientists put two and two together and developed the hypothesis that supplementing people's diets with antioxidants might prevent or even reverse the problems associated with these diseases it's an elegant idea but unfortunately it's been difficult to find support for researchers began by looking at how supplementing single antioxidant chemicals would affect cells grown in test tubes and saw some promising results for example studies showed that chemicals like vitamin E could successfully act as antioxidants to reduce damage from oxidative stress and cell membranes so when they tried to extend the benefits that they saw and cell cultures to randomized clinical trials with real humans taking those same antioxidants they found inconsistent effects for instance and a study called the woman's health study published in 2005 a group of almost 40,000 women took either a vitamin E supplement or a placebo every other day for ten years that is a big study population which should enable you to see robust results the rates of cancer and heart disease were unchanged compared to control but researchers did observe a 24% reduction in heart related deaths in the group who took the vitamin except another study published in 2005 which tracked nearly 4,000 people over seven years found that vitamin E supplements increased the risk of heart failure which would indicate an increased risk of heart related mortality the opposite of what the first study showed and such contradictory claims about antioxidant supplements are so common in the field that's virtually impossible to take the findings of any individual study at face value in fact a meta-analysis of 78 randomly controlled trials with a combined sample size of almost 300,000 people of various health backgrounds found antioxidant supplements to have no net beneficial effect the one exception for supplements is that a combination of three antioxidants moderately reduced the risk of age-related eye disease which yeh it's something we guess despite the lack of reliable evidence for antioxidant supplements though many studies have found that people who follow diets containing fruits and vegetables rich in antioxidants have lower incidence of diseases related to oxidative stress so we can see benefits from Antioch and supplements in a petri dish and we can see benefits from antioxidant rich diets and people but we can't seem to demonstrate any benefit from antioxidant supplements in people it could be a simple problem of dosage we may be over or under administering these antioxidants so they're not doing the job we want it could also be that ourselves compensate for the elevated antioxidant levels from supplements by slowing down their own antioxidant production so overall in our bodies the levels don't change or maybe it's just that individual antioxidants are not effective at protecting against a disease in large organisms instead we main in a wide variety of antioxidants rather than just woman at a time you know how we said that our bodies use a variety of antioxidants naturally that's true of fruits and veggies - and that variety might help our bodies deal with the wide variety of free radicals we naturally encounter each antioxidant compound acts a little differently so if someone has an excess of a particular free radical giving a high dose of the wrong antioxidant could be like giving a band-aid to someone with the flu it's just not the right treatment it might also be that studying nutrition is just plain hard and we have a whole video on why that is which we'll put a link to at the end of the video whatever the reason antioxidant supplements don't have much evidence to recommend them that's even though we know the chemistry and even though we know having them in your diet is linked to beneficial effects our bodies are complicated and science is weird about connecting dots sometimes but that's why we do it to really know what we know and right now we just don't know about those antioxidant pills that's the thing about a health research sometimes things aren't as clear as you want them to be and other times the research is actually pretty straightforward like in this next example if you've ever browsed the drink section at your local grocery store you've probably come across something called alkaline water that claims to mess with your body's chemistry if that sounds like a terrible idea it is but it's all right here's Olivia with more about why you shouldn't worry you may have heard of alkaline water it's the newest health trend hitting grocery store shelves these products are essentially just water treated to have a more basic pH between eight and ten instead of water as usual neutral seven and supposedly they take your internal chemistry from acidic to alkaline leaving you more hydrated and healthy drinking alkaline water can even prevent bone loss and cure cancer if the health gurus are to be believed but science doesn't back it up as any kind of miracle drink the claim is based on an old idea often called the acid ash hypothesis that a more acidic body leads to health problems like cancer and osteoporosis and if an acidic body creates bad health then making things a little more alkaline could prevent all kinds of diseases so for decades folks have been coming up with special diets and now beverages like alkaline water that are supposed to raise your bodily pH and thereby cure cancer but there isn't one bodily pH human blood has a pH of around 7.4 for example while muscles are a bit more acidic at a pH of around 6.1 and it's not easy to change those numbers with what you eat or drink for example a study published in 2001 is often touted as showing that special diets can tweak internal PHS but even it didn't actually find much of an effect the researchers prepared to meal plans for 8 volunteers an acidifying one where the foods had higher amounts of phosphates in them and participants drank a low pH water and an alkaline one with loads of calcium in a high ph water but after four days on the alkaline diet while the subjects pee was noticeably less acidic the average blood pH only went up 0.01 four units on average that's less than the participants daily variation and likely within the level of error for the instrument used to detect it it's actually a good thing they didn't find any big changes in blood pH based on diet the range of pH where your cells work well is really narrow so big swings in either direction can damage your organs and even be fatal that's why your body has several systems in place for keeping acid-base levels balanced for example it can respond to decreasing PHS by getting rid of one of the most common acid forming molecules carbon dioxide by well breathing a little more but usually it's your kidneys that jump into action they take whatever you have too much of in your blood and put it into your pee and that's why urine pH does change based on what you eat and drink in that 2001 study for example the alkaline diet raised the subjects year in PH by an average of one point zero two units so if you wanted to alter your blood pH by drinking an alkaline beverage you'd have to interfere with your kidneys which just to be clear is a really bad idea and other parts of the body also regulate their local acidity either by making acidic or basic compounds or by throwing whatever they don't want into the blood and letting the kidneys take care of everything that means that your urine is pretty much the only bodily fluid you can alter by chugging alkaline water with one other exception you do have some external control over the pH of your stomach at least temporarily because you can directly neutralize some of the acid there with what you put in it and that's why alkaline water might be effective against one particular health issue acid reflux acid reflux is thought to occur because acidic stomach juices activated digestive enzyme called pepsin if there's too much pepsin or it sloshes up into your esophagus or other places it doesn't belong it binds to tissues and causes symptoms like burping and heartburn and an article published in 2012 did find that alkaline water can deactivate pepsin but that was done in dishes in a lab not in an actual human body and we already have lots of cheap readily available meds for neutralizing stomach acids that's the whole idea behind antacids when you look closer at the purported health benefits of drinking alkaline water the evidence just isn't there fake cancer for example some scientists noticed that tumorous tissues are often more acidic than healthy tissues which is likely where people got the idea that reducing acidity could cure or prevent cancer and if that were the case you'd think that bladder cancers would be especially susceptible to alkaline diets because urine pH can actually be influenced by what we eat but a study of over 27,000 men from Finland in 2005 found that a lower year in pH didn't significantly increase the risk of developing bladder cancer similarly many have claimed that alkaline water can prevent or help treat osteoporosis a disease where bones become less dense and more likely to breathe that's because if your kidneys slack on the job another way your body can buffer too much acid is to pull calcium and bicarbonate from bone and less calcium means less bone mass however a study from 2010 found no association between urine pH and a subjects bone mass density or how many bones they broke and meta-analyses have failed to find any connection between excreted acids and bone health so for all the conditions drinking alkaline water might prevent so far we haven't seen a real case for any of them and despite the acid ash hypothesis existing for half a century there hasn't been any direct research showing that an alkaline diet or alkaline water can improve a person's health luckily there don't seem to be any side effects either so if you want to drink alkaline water because you like the taste more power to you you'll just have some slightly more expensive pee finally for our last example let's switch things up a little bit because this last food myth is not about something that's supposedly good for you it's about something that many people claim is bad msg people love to rage against the monosodium glutamate but turns out it's fine here's Stefan with the details foodies can't stop talking about umami the savory taste that's taking over the culinary scene and which along with sweet sour bitter and salty is one of the five basic tastes that our tongues precede but if you're a fan of Chinese takeout you've been team umami from the get-go that's because msg the flavoring often associated with American Chinese food is umami in its purest form and while you might have been told it's bad for you or causes the so called Chinese restaurant syndrome science disagrees as much as we associate msg with Chinese food there isn't anything inherently Chinese or even Asian about the compound MSG stands for monosodium glutamate the sodium salt of glutamate it's an amino acid that the human body can synthesize but that we also get from our food like other amino acids glutamate is an important building block for proteins and it also helps nerve cells send signals to other cells in the body it's the most abundant excitatory neurotransmitter in vertebrates since it's so important for our bodies it's not surprising we've evolved a taste for it we have the mommy specific receptors on our tongues and in our stomachs and these drive our love for foods that contain glutamate like tomatoes mushrooms and aged cheese's and umami rich foods have been staples in human diets for forever for example historians called the concoction known as guru an umami filled sauce made from fermented fish guts the ketchup of ancient Rome and we've been concentrating available naturally-occurring glutamate by sun drying tomatoes and curing meats for centuries long before we knew what amino acids were even babies seem to like MSG which makes sense because human milk is naturally rich in glutamate but purified msg wasn't a thing until 1908 when a Japanese chemist realized that the base made from kombu seaweed in his soup imparted a delicious flavor that wasn't one of the four previously established tastes he soon isolated the crystalline salt of glutamate from the kelp striking culinary gold he called the crystals ajinomoto which means essence of taste and it wasn't long before MSG became commercialized in Asia it was branded a staple for any modern cook and quickly became ubiquitous in kitchens across Japan and China by the early 1930s it had gone global with companies like Heinz and Campbell's adding MSG to their products and even the US military hopped on the MSG train during World War 2 the army used the best available food science to develop nutritionally dense rations with law shelf lives called k-rations but soldiers hated them because they were super bland so in the late 1940s they started adding msg to them and suddenly they weren't so reviled our universal love for msg isn't just from its savory goodness studies have shown that new mommy functions as a flavor enhancer creating a harmony between various flavors and aromas and adding a sort of dimension to both a phenomenon known as umami synergy that sounds kind of nebulous but consider a 2007 study published in the European Journal of Neuroscience researchers at Oxford University had 12 volunteers sip an umami drink made of water msg and the nucleotide inosine monophosphate while significant aroma on their own both the umami drink and the vegetable aroma were considered unpleasant and bland but when combined they were rated higher and they just seemed to go together better than a salty drink paired with the same smell what was really telling though was that brain activity maps showed that way more neurons associated with flavor and pleasure were lit up from the combo than would have been estimated by adding up the isolated effects of each given all this you might be wondering why companies now proudly proclaim their food doesn't contain MSG or people say it makes them sick well while our love of msg comes from biology a lot of people's aversion to it seems to have roots in something else entirely racism it all started with a 1968 letter to the editor of the New England Journal of Medicine describing the authors and his friends so-called Chinese restaurant syndrome following the consumption of Chinese food it included symptoms like heart palpitations generalized weakness and radiating numbness the idea took hold spurring years of bias science based on the flawed assumption that Chinese restaurant syndrome was a real thing and that MSG caused it subsequent animal studies seemingly confirmed the idea but these often consisted of injecting super concentrated doses of MSG directly into creatures abdomens which isn't exactly a scientific approach to determining the effects of MSG sprinkled into saucepans more recent research on msg aversion has taken into account the xenophobia and racism that fueled it and over the last three decades a number of double-blinded placebo-controlled studies including studies of subjects with reported sensitivity to MSG have failed to find a reproducible response to ingesting foods with msg a much more likely explanation for feeling crummy after Chinese takeout is the SIBO effect where you feel sick simply because of the belief that something will make you ill fortunately scientists are one step ahead of the haters investigation into the potential health benefits of msg is ongoing with research suggesting it can help increase salivation and appetite in the elderly increase satiety and therefore reduce caloric intake in those trying to lose weight and help impart flavor while reducing overall dietary sodium so yeah msg doesn't deserve its toxic reputation and you don't need to avoid your favorite restaurant just because they use a little so there you have it from tumeric to MSG there's a lot of misleading claims out there but usually if you just give those headlines a critical look and find out where they got their information things get at least a little bit clearer and I'll tell you one thing the best nutritional supplement is a grain of salt thanks for watching this episode and thank you to all the patrons who have helped make this content possible we've done a lot of episodes over the years and we've been able to do that and we are able to keep going and trying new things because of you if you want to learn more about supporting this show you can head on over to patreon.com/scishow [Music] you [Music]

Channel: SciShow

Views: 423,585

Rating: 4.8695889 out of 5

Keywords: SciShow, science, Hank, Green, education, learn, food trends, turmeric, golden latte, chocolate, health, antioxidants, alkaline water, msg

Id: 5OJLtSawqKg

Length: 27min 10sec (1630 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 02 2020