#adventuresinnutrition

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Adventures in Nutrition: The Unexpected Problems and Dangers of Plant Foods

We are surprisingly ineffective at digesting many plant-based foods, causing their nutritional value to be overstated and if we could fully digest them, our definition of what is edible may have to change.  

Breaking a Biological Barrier Better than Evolution

The quest to break down cellulose in foods in a controlled way has fascinated me for over a decade now. My early attempts in this area had limited success and resulted in a early morning raid of my home by a narcotics task force. (No narcotics were found nor were there any charges pressed, but that is a story for another blog post.) Suffice to say, cellulose is an incredibly robust molecule and the techniques involved in breaking it down are pretty extreme.

Even with billions of years of evolution, nature hasn’t been able to find a way to readily break down cellulose, and I wanted to solve the problem in what is comparatively the blink of an eye. And being the compulsive experimenter that I was, I soon would find a way to break down cellulose, and this time without attracting the attention of the police! Unfortunately, it would end up making a number of people rather sick in totally unexpected ways.

My focus turned to physical approaches to attack cellulose, as enzymes required a relatively narrow and low pH range to be efficient, often low enough to damage other organic compounds in the food. Acid based approaches destroyed all the other organic compounds. So physical was definitely the best route, and it seemed like a blender would be the way. My target model was trying to make a perfectly smooth wild blueberry smoothie, because most blenders didn’t come close and it was obvious in the restroom there was a lot of antioxidants going unabsorbed from typical blenders.

After extensive testing and side by side (and a lot of product returns) I settled on the Cleanblend as the most powerful blender available for general purpose smoothie-type blending applications. Honestly, I feel this blender is really only on the edge of unlocking the world of plants for our digestion. Starting with deeply frozen berries, I would usually have to run it to the point of them being fully melted and even slightly warm from the mere friction of the very sharp stainless steel Japanese blades. Sometimes, even that was not enough, and I would freeze the smoothie into ice cubes and repeat, or I would let it keep going, even as the friction would heat the slurry to a rolling boil with steam gushing out.

Although it was a struggle, I was able to cross a barrier that had been pretty much out of reach previously. I was able to actually rip apart celluose and lignans to a useful degree, breaking down plant structures so that we could fully absorb their constituents. Moreover, because I did this through physical action, and in many cases without significant heat, it would largely leave all the other complex organic compounds intact and fully available to the human body. And the end result would be totally smooth, so one could consume even things goats might not like very much, such as blackberry vines.

Basically, I succeeded in augmenting the human digestive system so that it could access pretty much everything in plant based foods.

The Good

Fully unlocking berries for digestion has been an almost universal win. Combined with non-glycemic sweeteners, a powerful blender makes wild blueberries and cranberries a truly delicious smoothie drink. The blender would reduce the seeds and skins down completely, yielding a smoothie that has a texture more like a peach or mango smoothie. The high levels of mostly water soluble antioxidants were quickly and easily absorbed, and the smoothie would provide a distinct energizing effect almost like a cup of coffee.

Overall, experiments using berries came out universally favorably. Generally speaking, the more you would blend, the better it would taste, the better you would absorb it, and the better you would feel. The distinctively stimulating levels of antioxidants was really unexpected and visual fecal monitoring verified that virtually all of the anthocyanin antioxidants were being absorbed. I also loved the effects on acai puree, paired with wild blueberries I could actually create a smoothie that could keep me awake at night if consumed too close to dinner, simply from so many antioxidants.

Many vegetables also responded well to blending. Most antioxidant rich solanaceae “vegetables” (tomatoes, peppers, etc.) were extremely delicious blended down and definitely seemed to be a bit more energizing when eaten. Squash were pleasant tasting, but did not exhibit any apparent digestive or nutrition absorption alterations. Onions were very nice too. Celery was unremarkable but added a pleasant mild taste. Typically, I woulds make a hot soup with vegetables, although cold V8 style drinks were quite nice too.

Some unexpected greens turned out to be very nice in savory soup applications, such as onion greens and blackberry vines. Blackberry vines, if pre-blended, actually had a slight berry note and mild flavor and made a nice addition to cold fruit smoothies. They seemed to have something beneficial as the smoothies seemed more satisfying, complete and energizing.

The Weird and Bad

Using a blender to extend the digestive tract demonstrated that we are not very effective at absorbing a lot of nutrients. For example, I can eat dried goji berries until my stomach is physically full without any upset. It’s clear that I’m missing a lot of the lycopene by the effect on fecal coloration. But in a smoothie form, there is much less fecal color effect, yet I can only handle a few ounces dried goji in a sitting - any more and I get a characteristic “mineral upset stomach” effect. This suggests that despite the high levels of minerals and antioxidants in gojis are, we can only absorb a relatively small fraction of them without the assistance of a blender.

The whole brassica family is rich in indigestible sugars, encased in plant cellulose. Also encased in the plant cellulose is their purportedly beneficial compounds. Blending definitely did an incredible job at releasing the indigestible sugars, causing gas to a degree I had never experienced before from modest servings of said vegetables. This suggests that typical ways of eating brassicas fail to give us access to most of their beneficial compounds.

Now, most of this stuff - we suck at absorbing nutrition from a lot of the best “superfoods” out there - won’t come as a surprise to people who have studied our evolution and physiology. What may come to a surprise is just that some food we eat can be downright dangerous if we fully digest it. The best example is the common mango.

I started making these amazing mango smoothies. Everyone loved them. They were buttery smooth, made with fully peeled frozen organic mango pieces. Then people started breaking out in rashes. I even developed mild rashes. One person got severe rashes and itching, to the point it made it nearly impossible for him to sleep and he sought extensive medical evaluation at Stanford. It took over 4 months to fully clear up. Nobody would believe me it was my smoothies, as many had eaten huge amounts of mangos at various times in their lives, but I’m absolutely convinced it was in fact my smoothies.

Mangos are related to poison oak and poison ivy and contain urushiol. Generally, the levels in the fruit are considered negligible, but I’ve never seen an analysis. All I know is that once I began blending the fruit down like crazy, people started getting rashes. And the rashes went away after I eliminated my mango smoothies, even though they protested. The rashes also responded to treatment protocols for urushiol-related autoimmune skin reactions.

I also had some interesting experiences blending citrus - I had a severe bloating and gained over 20 pounds of water weight temporarily, when I had never exhibited a significant allergy prior. What was different? I blended the peeled fruit whole super extensively.

After the mango and citrus incidents, I pretty much decided it was time to stop blending new plant-based foods, especially fruit. Even seemingly common foods seem to hide harmful compounds. I shudder to think what might have happened if I started blending grains…

Where To Go From Here

Most of our nutritional assumptions about the nutritional value of plants are probably significantly overstated, as they rely on absolute chemical analysis and do not factor in absorption which is clearly relatively poor. I also believe that many plant-based foods harbor allergenic / inflammatory compounds that are not sufficiently recognized but probably contribute to health harms over the long term similar to gluten’s inflammatory effects.

More research is clearly required here, but I have no idea who would fund this kind of thing. There is no “anti-fruit” lobby. There is no specific industry that stands to benefit from reduced fruit consumption. These are hard questions with uncomfortable answers for the status quo.

Direct comments and discussion to my Twitter.

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Adventures In Nutrition: Intentionally Overdosing Myself on Omega-3s

I have a unique quality of taking things to a whole new level when I’m trying to answer a question or solve a problem, and people seem to always underestimate what I’m willing and able to do. It’s had some pretty fascinating results that I’ll be writing about over the coming months in my Adventures in Nutrition series of blog posts. Today, by popular Twitter request, I’m going to be exploring the experience of overdosing on omega-3s.

Biofeedback Basics

I’ve always had a unique ability to extract patterns from my own personal biological experiences. For example, when I was younger, what got me interested in dietary supplements was when I noticed an interesting effect where my skin quality (particularly pimples) seemed to be improved when I had increased sunlight exposure, particularly in the summer (very pronounced in the Northwestern United States where I grew up) and I noticed that this effect occurred even on parts of my body that were never exposed to the sunlight. I quickly realized this must have been from vitamin D synthesis occurring. I began taking vitamin D3 supplements at a healthy dose and found I got most of the benefit year around without sunlight exposure.

From there, my desire to closely at my own body and its responses to refine my understanding of diet, nutrition and biochemistry has exploded. Over the years, I developed a wide range of different techniques to be able to see ever finer biochemical details. I’m not immune to placebo effect, but I definitely am pretty good at canceling out noise like that over time through a variety of techniques. I’ll be be covering these concepts in more depth soon.

A Deep Curiosity in Omega-3s

I attended The Evergreen State College, an extremely progressive liberal arts school that had a huge focus on interdisciplinary study. The school is architected in such a way that everyone is pretty much forced to take full time programs each quarter - a single interdisciplinary program co-taught by approximately 3 faculty in rather different areas of focus with a single theme. Students are then encouraged to take a deep dive into a subset of the larger program theme, culminating in an end-of-quarter project or paper much like a mini-thesis. When I was in the program “The Science of Fat” my focus was omega-3s.

My work familiarized me with some pretty shocking realities - how our omega-3/6 ratios have radically skewed over the past few hundred years, primarily due to the wide scale cultivation of “vegetable” oils in northern climates. I quickly began to think about the n-3/n-6 ratio as being far more important than the exact amount of n-3 in the diet. I learned about the hugely therapeutic potential of omega-3s, especially for autoimmune and inflammatory issues, such as rheumatoid arthritis. I learned about the difficulties mammals have in synthesizing long chain n-3s from short chain ALA, and the issues in getting plants to synthesize long chain n-3s.

Since then, I’ve applied this learning extensively and seen remarkable benefits to human health by deploying high doses of omega-3s in people’s diets. One of the most remarkable examples was the complete reversal of rheumatoid arthritis in my mom, when she began consuming hot flax meal for 2 of her 3 meals per day. Her experienced chiropractor had never seen anything like this in over 20 years of practice. I also tested high doses of chia and flax oils* in myself and found there wasn’t really any discernable way to significantly overdose on omega-3s simply because they have a top ratio around 4:1 n-3/n-6. (I would say there are slight negative effects after a while from that, but they aren’t significant.)

*At the time I had access to drums of flavorless, odorless flax and chia oils, making it relatively easy to replace virtually all the fat in my diet with those oils.

Overdosing on Long Chain Omega-3s

Naturally, being hypercurious, I decided that I needed to embark on a new test to explore the limits of omega-3. I decided to use fish-based oils this time, as it provides exclusively long chain omega-3s, and has almost incredibly low levels of n-6. (I hesitate to state the ratios because variance in methods and source seafood, but they are something in the range of 10:1 to 20:1 n-3/n-6 - roughly a complete inversion of the typical American diet.)

Because I absolutely love seafood*, I decided I would simply eat as much low-mercury, high-fat** seafood as possible until I achieved an overdose. This took roughly a month of eating mostly the highest fat canned fish as my primary caloric source, red salmon (49 g fish oil per ~15 oz can) and chub mackerel, including drinking all the fish oil in the water broth in the can. (I did eat a variety of other seafood, especially shrimp, for variety. The key was all wild whole seafood.) Canned seafood includes the skin and does not lose any of the oil during processing, making canned red salmon significantly higher in omega-3s than skinned fillets. (It also retains the bones, providing other valuable minerals in much higher quantities.)

* If you would like to kill me, just give me an endless supply of highly marbled swordfish steaks. I would probably eat that for every single meal until I died of mercury poisoning or went completely insane. (This assumes I’m not already completely insane!)

** When it comes to seafood, except for marine mammals, it is very hard to find anything with the majority of calories from fat. If anybody could provide me with a safe source of high-fat marine mammal meat, I would gladly repeat this experiment. Unfortunately, I am not a Native American and thus the US Marine Mammal Protection act largely makes this impossible.

It took roughly a month to achieve a clear overdose. I generally felt very good, improving health overall, for the first two weeks. It leveled off after that. Around 3 weeks, I noticed that foods seemed to taste more bitter, especially potassium rich foods and I felt a little bit off from my peak, but not too much. In some ways, it felt a little like when you take a high dose NSAID for a long time, you don’t feel bad necessarily, but you can kind of feel that your body is just a little bit off from its normal homeostasis with maybe a touch of dysphoria. I also began to have this bizarre intense craving for foods rich in oleic acid, which is something I’ve had never experienced prior or since.

Around the 1 month mark, I was out for an extended mountain bike ride and had a big fish lunch packed. I stopped to eat it, and kept riding for another hour or two, then stopped and had a drink of a beverage sweetened using high intensity sweeteners including acesulfame potassium. It was so potently bitter. Given that I’ve filed a patent in the arena of sugar replacement, I’ve tasted this ingredient and blend a hell of a lot of different times and it never tasted like this to me. It was like a light began flashing in my head - what in the world caused this? The effect was so pronounced, even years later, I can see the exact spot deep in the hills of southwest Washington where I was when I had this experience.

I went home and decided to experiment around. I tried different beverages and foods and it was clear that somehow I had massively amplified my sensitivity to potassium bitterness. I surmised it was the first clear and overt sign of serious omega-3 overdose. Over the next week I experimented around, and I found I was on some sort of nonlinear biological line, and I could inch myself one way or the other with a relatively small dose of omega-3 or omega-6. I consumed soybean oil rich mayonnaise to back off my ratios, and used molecularly distilled fish oil to push myself back across the line. (Using molecularly distilled fish oil allowed me to be sure it wasn’t some other nutrient or impurity in the fish oil responsible for the effect.) It took maybe 10-15 g of either and 12-24 hours to go back and forth across this discrete nonlinear line to potassium sensitivity.

I later conducted a fair amount of research into this subject and found a lot of studies that linked omega-3 long chain fatty acids to various potassium ion channel systems in the body and it makes a good amount of sense what I experienced. I really would need to invest some serious time to fully understand all the mechanisms inside the body here and am hesitant to cite research that I really do not fully understand. However, for the curious, searching on Google Scholar and using Sci-Hub to get any papers not readily available as free fulltext will yield a lot of interesting and very dense reading. If anybody wants to provide further understanding on this front, I will gladly update this post.

Conclusions

It is exceptionally hard to overdose on omega-3 fatty acids and basically saying “as much as possible” is probably not an unreasonable suggestion for most people in the real world, especially given the huge bodies of research showing benefits for heart, brain, autoimmune, triglycerides, some forms of cancer and much more.

The narrower range of biological effects of ALA and lack of sources extremely high in ALA but with negligible n-6 makes it largely impossible for most people to overdose on plant source omega-3s, even on extreme diets as followed by my mom to reverse RA. Interestingly, because of the slightly lower molecular weight of ALA compared to long chain forms, the lower cost of plant based sources, and the ability to produce completely odorless, flavorless forms of flax and chia oils at affordable prices makes it an interesting therapeutic target for autoimmune and inflammatory issues, but it largely lacks the heart and brain health benefits as these organs appear to use long chain n-3s functionally and structurally.

The ability to overdose on long chain n-3s from whole seafood sources is interesting and actually surprised me. I did not expect dramatic effects like the altered taste. I was mostly expecting something like an upset stomach or overall feeling of being unwell, but any dysphoric sensation was incredibly limited. I would like to study this further in the context of native Alaskan/Inuit diets. It seems that some of their diets might sometimes get enough long chain n-3s to induce the potassium ion issue I experienced, but my best guess is that their marine mammal fat sources may have saved them.

That said, it is exceptionally hard to imagine one overdosing on fish oil from supplements - I consumed around 100 g a day of fish oil on this regimen, and even if we distilled pure n-3 and gave people 1000 mg per softgel, that would be around 30 soft gels per day, which is pretty hard to imagine. Additionally, that would be additive to a normal diet, whereas I replaced virtually all oils with fish oil, so it would take even more soft gels to overdose on fish oil. I strongly feel that a whole diet approach needs to be taken to get enough n-3.

Further Discussion

I was surprised when a number of people expressed interest in reading about my experiences with omega-3 overdosing, so I’m not really sure how much depth is of interest here. I can sketch approximated curves of experiences, do more calculations of my intake, and provide more detailed accounts of the experiential component if people are interested. Reach out to me on Twitter with questions or further discussion of this subject!