Dynamic Dialogue with Danny Matranga - 397: Seed Oils, Food Dyes + Nutrition Tips for Pre/Post Partum with Dr. Jessica Knurick

Episode Date: January 15, 2025

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Hey everyone, welcome into another episode of the Dynamic Dialogue Podcast. I'm your host Danny Matrenga and today I'm joined by Dr. Jessica Nurick. She's a research dietician, I believe is the correct term. She's a PhD nutrition professional, someone who is extremely scientifically literate and who has a variety of what I would call specializations or areas of really deep and broad expertise, right? So general subject matter expert on nutrition but can really go deep on some super cool topics especially those related to what I would describe as just the general pregnancy period, both pre-pregnancy, post-pregnancy, postpartum, and breastfeeding specifically.

So we talk a lot about those things, which I think are super interesting, especially given that my wife and I have a child now. We also talk a lot about the kind of nutrition slash cultural zeitgeist and what's going on around food dyes and things like seed oils, things like raw milk and more and Jessica's a great person to talk to because you can catch throughout the episode. She kind of filters you know my logical shortcomings and she kind of catches me before I make mistakes or will correct me and and really keeps the conversation going in a nice educational tone. You'll see me

learning quite a bit and I think you guys will really enjoy the episode. So sit back and enjoy my conversation with Dr. Jessica Nurik. This episode is brought to you in part thanks to some of our amazing partners like LMNT. LMNT makes the best electrolyte product on the market. In fact, I've actually started drinking my Alimenti each and every morning before I have coffee so as to optimize my circadian biology, make sure that I'm hydrated and make sure that I'm getting ahead on my water intake throughout the day and not reliant on stimulants, but instead being somebody who's reliant on hydration and the proper balance of minerals and electrolytes.

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Good. Thank you so much for having me. Absolutely. Thanks for coming on. So for those of you who aren't familiar with Dr. Jessica and her work, she's a subject matter expertise. She's an actual doctor in the subjects of nutrition, nutritional sciences, but I found her content pretty recently because my wife and I recently had our first child and we're looking to optimize the experience and many of my clients are women and mothers. So I see the adjacency to the health and the wellness community and motherhood and and I see an awful lot of misinformation. And what I love about Dr. Jessica's content is she cuts right through that. And so we're going to have a great conversation today.

We'll hop around a few different areas, but I'd kind of like to start with for anybody, for any woman or for any family that is planning on getting pregnant or who is planning a family, what are the basic nutritional and lifestyle considerations people should be making? Because I see so much crazy stuff on the internet around like pre-pregnancy nutrition and supplementation and metal testing and there is a lot of noise and I'm not sure where the signal is so I'm wondering what are the things women and families should be focusing on as they prepare for that? Yeah that's a great

question so I mean in general pregnancy is a very energy like just demanding activity right it's a demanding life experience and when I say demanding I really am talking energetically and I'm talking from like a nutrient perspective. It just sucks a lot out of you. And so one of the best things that you can do when you're starting to think about like family planning, having a baby, is to really make sure that you're doing what you can to ensure

that your nutrient stores are where they need to be. And so, you know, most of the time you can do that through your food intake and you can just really prioritize nutrient-dense foods. And also getting on, what I usually recommend is when you start thinking about trying to get pregnant, that's a really good time to start a prenatal vitamin, particularly folate or folic acid because that's when That helps to prevent neural tube defects and a lot of people the neural tube closes at about 28 days So about four weeks pregnant and a lot of people don't even know they're pregnant at four weeks. It's up. This is true Yeah Yeah So just making sure that you're kind of supplementing prior to getting pregnant could be really helpful to just ensure those nutrient stores

Or where they need to be where do we typically get a folate in the diet? Because I think eggs comes to mind. I'm not an expert, but I might be wrong. Well, the biggest one is like green leafy vegetables. Green leafy vegetables, so not eggs. There is a, from a pregnancy perspective, there's one particular nutrient found in eggs. Choline. Choline. Okay, can we talk a little bit about perspective there's one particular nutrient found in eggs. The- Choline. Choline.

Okay. Can we talk a little bit about choline and why choline is important throughout the development and throughout the pregnancy process? Yeah. I mean, and just to be clear, all the nutrients are important for different various reasons, right? We talk about choline because first of all, it's kind of like a baby nutrient. It was recently, recently like recognized in terms of its importance for health and nutrition.

The thing about choline is it's fairly difficult to get from the diet. The reason that you associate it with eggs is because eggs is really the best commonly eaten food in terms of a source of choline. Choline is like a vitamin B-like nutrient and it's really important for neurocognitive development. And so there's been some good research looking at choline supplementation all throughout pregnancy and kind of positive neurodevelopmental outcomes on offspring. And so that's why we really want to focus on that. An egg is, so the RDA for pregnancy but we really wanna focus on that. An egg is, so the RDA for pregnancy is 450 milligrams

per day and then that actually increases when you're breastfeeding to 550 milligrams. But yeah, it's one of the nutrients that increases afterwards when you're breastfeeding or lactating. But so in order to get that, an egg has about 150 milligrams per day, right? So you need a few eggs a day in order to get that. And eggs are, again, really one of the best sources.

I mean, meat also is a source. And so if you have a couple of eggs in a day and then some meat, you usually can meet your needs. But your prenatal vitamin can help too if that contains choline. So just being conscious of like eating nutrient-dense diets because that's really where you're going to get a lot of the bulk of your nutrition and your vitamins and minerals. This, this is all true.

This makes a ton of sense, but it brings me to something more my kind of life crossed over with the piece of content you made. You, I saw a piece of content you made where you said, I believe that the worst pregnancy symptom is nausea. And my wife early in her pregnancy was hitting the eggs hard until for some reason nausea really just kind of flared up and she's like the number one smell and taste that makes me most nauseous now is eggs. So fortunately

we had a good prenatal vitamin. We could get some choline coming in from there. But what should women do if nausea is a challenge during a pregnancy? Because this is our first pregnancy, it was pretty startling to me. I know how important nutrition is and energy availability is, as you said. And I was like, we're having a hard time getting our calorie needs met because my wife just was not enjoying food very much. Yeah. It's very common.

Food aversions during pregnancy are very common. Nausea, morning sickness, that sort of thing. And so, you know, and for most women that happens like most pronounced in the first trimester and then, and then most women do find, like coming into that 12, 13 week range. Um, but some women don't, and some women, it lasts the entire pregnancy. Um, and so some of the strategies that we use, first of all, that's a good reason to make sure that your kind of, um, nutrient stores are optimized coming into pregnancy. Um, you know, when you can eat nutrient dense, um, cause sometimes in that first trimester, it can be very difficult to be able to just like whole foods, things like eggs, things like meat, those sort of things

that give you a ton of nutrition. And so that's when really like supplementation can help. That can be very helpful. Like I said, staying on that prenatal vitamins ensure you're getting enough nutrients. But also, sometimes I'll work with women because they have a huge aversion to protein. So like even using things like Kodiak cakes, which are like protein pancakes, right? And trying to use these like functional foods that can help increase their protein.

Even a protein powder, you know, you wanna make sure that you're using like quality supplements. I always talk about third-party testing with supplements, but yeah, protein powders can be really helpful at that time. Supplementation can be helpful, but overall, for nausea, eating can actually, it's counterintuitive, but eating can sometimes ward off nausea. You feel like you don't want to eat, but just eating a little something, getting something

in your stomach can help with those symptoms too. So there's a lot of things you can do to try to help with symptoms. It's not foolproof, but, um, but sometimes they help. Yeah. We, we dealt with that early in the pregnancy and relied on, on protein shakes to meet the protein needs for at least two months because that the first trimester was very hard. And one thing that we learned a lot about or kind of monitored is just this natural rate of weight gain.

And I think weight in general and culture, especially for women is something they are hyper vigilant and super focused on. For women as they navigate and manage a pregnancy and nutrient availability and eating enough is important. Is there a point at which you can eat too much and like how does one avoid things like gestational diabetes or excessive weight gain if maybe they don't have periods

of nausea and they have what I know a lot of women experience which are like tremendous feelings of sometimes hunger and not feeling quite full at all? Yeah, well I think a couple of things. So, um, weight gain is absolutely essential when, when you're pregnant, right? It's normal. It's, it's going to happen to all of us and we're, we're growing a baby and, um, what we have to do in the kind of public health and the research world is

stratify things. So we have like these like proposed weight gains for women of a certain like height and weight, right? And you'll look. Yeah, and you'll see like what your proposed weight gain is and people really hold onto those super strongly. But at the end of the day, like those are really just like kind of guidelines

that aren't going to apply to every single person. And so, you know, I really am big on kind of listening to your body when you're pregnant and if you're hungry honoring that hunger. And I like to focus more on what are you eating? So like trying to get those nutrients in. So when you're hungry, trying to choose as nutrient dense options as possible,

it's not always gonna be possible. I had ice cream like almost every day of my first pregnancy because it was just a big craving of mine. Yeah. Right. But trying to trying to get those nutrients in, listening to your hunger cues and not worrying too much about about the weight situation. I think that people tend to fixate on weight gain during pregnancy.

And for a lot of us, if we're focusing on kind of the actual energy intake and the actual things that we're doing in the pregnancy, the weight, we will gain what we need to gain. And then as for the, you know, as a general rule, in terms of gestational diabetes, I mean, that's a big area that I, my dissertation work was in the area of diabetes. So I talk about gestational diabetes a lot. And here's, there's a couple of misconceptions about gestational diabetes. You know, anybody with a placenta can get gestational diabetes because it's really a function of every single normal healthy pregnancy. As pregnancy progresses, you have an increase in body fat and an increase in insulin, insulin resistance. And those are just two things that happen to every normal healthy pregnancy.

Now under normal circumstances, your body compensates for that insulin resistance by increasing the amount of insulin that your body's producing. But some women, because of placental hormones and because of maybe potentially unknown factors their body's not regulating blood sugar as well And so what happens is that's why we test all women between 24 to 28 weeks to identify if their body is Processing glucose well, so I mean, you know, there's risk factors for gestational diabetes and weight is one of them But that it's just a risk factor and and anybody can get gestational diabetes and weight is one of them, but it's just a risk factor and anybody can get gestational diabetes, which is why we test, we screen everybody for that because it's really important to identify as early as possible if your body is having trouble

processing blood sugar. That makes a lot of sense. When it comes to foods to avoid, I learned there are a number of foods when a woman is pregnant that she needs to be careful not to ingest. I was making a smoothie once and I put bee pollen on top of it and I posted, hey, I made this smoothie for my wife and somebody said, hey, did you know that bee pollen can stimulate the uterus? And I was like, Oh way. And I looked it up and I was like, Oh my gosh, there's clear. There's some type of connection there. And I started to have like a little micro panic

every time I introduced a new food. And I realized, wow, there's probably so much anxiety around what to avoid, but I know there are some things specifically that are probably important to stay away from. What are some of those foods? Yeah, well, let me just speak to your B-Potland example for a second. Here's the thing about nutrition research. We, nutrition research in pregnancy

is just that like incredibly understudied. Seems like it'd be almost impossible. Yeah, and and so there's just a lot of ingredients in the food supply, like bee pollen for example, where like there's just not research out there to suggest it's safe or otherwise, right? And so a lot of the times it's like out of a precautionary thing, like well we don't know, you know, it really hasn't been studied and this is kind of like a new ingredient in the food supply. So people will just say to avoid it out of like a precautionary principle, which it probably is better to be cautious when you're pregnant.

But I think that some people will think you'll drink a smoothie with a little bee pollen and then go on Google and there'll be like one article that says, you must avoid this in pregnancy and it freaks people out. And it's really not like that. I'll give you a really good example is pineapple. There's a lot of, if you Google, can I have pineapple in pregnancy? You're going to find articles that tell you to avoid it. And, but the reason for that is because there's some, some research where they took a pineapple extract and they put that pineapple extract directly onto the uterine tissue of pregnant rats and it induced contractions and So that they're extrapolating to mean that we shouldn't have pineapple because it's going to induce

Contractions in humans eating a pineapple which is obviously very very different than like putting the Extract onto the uterine tissue and seeing what happens and And so all that to say, pineapple is totally fine. You can have it when you're pregnant, but there's gonna be a Google article telling you you can't have literally any food. So that can make it really difficult to navigate, but I wanna make it clear. Most of the time those are like

out of precautionary measures. Like, oh, we don't really know the research on like something like bee pollen. But then in terms of like things that we probably should be avoiding, you know, things like high mercury fish, which really we all should avoid anyway, but like you want to avoid high mercury fish. That doesn't mean to not eat fish though. There's low mercury fish options. The EPA puts out a good document that shows like the low and moderate mercury fish options. And so kind of choosing some low mercury fish options

like salmon a couple of times a week is great. Yeah, we ate some salmon. Yeah, yeah, good. And then, you know, things like alcohol and vaping and those types of things should probably be avoided when you're pregnant. And then the rest of it is more like from a food safety perspective. Right. And so when we look at foods and we look at their risk of foodborne illness, there tends to be this desire to kind of like just put a list of foods on there and be like, don't eat any of these. And really where that's coming from the most of the time is trying to just reduce risk of foodborne illness. You know, and it's not always the best to do it that way.

Because I prefer to take an approach where I'm kind of Educating on food safety in general for all foods, right? Like so don't leave your food sitting out for multiple hours Probably avoid, you know, like those restaurants like Chipotle those types of restaurants where the food is just sitting out all the time Yeah, that makes so much sense. I cannot tell you how many people I know who have gotten food poisoning from Chipotle. Like, it's like, oh, the chances are at one in 50, which is like absurdly high. Yeah, it's just, it's a good idea to avoid those types of places when you're pregnant, right? Yeah. Because the whole idea is to reduce risk of foodborne illness.

So like, you know, things like sushi, for example, if you want to consume sushi, obviously the safest way to do it is to not consume raw fish. The second safest way to do it is to consume raw fish from a place that you trust, right? That sources their fish, that's close to the sea, that it hasn't been sitting for a long time. They flash freeze in the United States, they flash freeze fish, which tends to kill pathogens. And so that's really helpful to decrease risk. Probably don't eat like gas station sushi.

I'm not sure if it's Hawaii. That's exactly what I was thinking about. Yeah, I do think it's okay in Hawaii. Some of those like 7-elevens, they actually have quality stuff, but not really in the mainland. In Japan as well, you can get like a tremendous assortment of free packaged pathogen free proteins that are poultry or you know fish

Almost any gas station Yeah, and then let's say deli meat is always a big one The safest thing you can do is to not eat deli meat or to heat your deli meat to 160 degrees, which is the safe temperature to kill pathogens in deli meat. But also, for some women who have aversions, deli meat is the only way they can get their protein. Yeah, makes sense. So it's always like a risk benefit analysis, right? So if that's how you're getting your protein and you really want a sandwich, then just make sure you're sourcing your deli meat from somewhere you trust and that's reducing risk

as best as you can. Because really all food can contain risk, right? There is no risk-free food. And we see this in like outbreaks, in Listeria outbreaks that have been in vegetables and produce and salads and cheese and deli meat. So it's all over the board and so just practicing good food safety with all foods is really the best you can do. I want to pivot back to food safety in a second but I want to kind of finish this uh pregnancy specific or post-pregnancy specific

nutritional considerations. When a woman transitions from pre-baby to, you know, breastfeeding, are there food, are there additional considerations? Are there food things? I was shocked to learn that the food, it sounds stupid to say because it makes sense, but the food that you eat can impact your milk. And maybe even how it tastes, which was a shock to me. So I realized very quickly, like there are some serious considerations one might make when it comes to how they eat during lactation, but also you need to have certain nutrients and you mentioned, colon goes up from, I think 450 to 550 milligrams, I think. So what changes might someone make during breastfeeding, which I know can be really challenging and kind of uniquely, it's its own thing to navigate.

Yeah. So I can talk about specific nutrients, but it's important to also realize that we eat foods, not nutrients, right? And so that's what I like to do is I like to focus on really nourish, like the idea of nourishing yourself after you have a baby. Because I think that a lot of times and having done this twice, you can get caught up in just trying to survive in those early days and those early weeks and months, you know, being a new parent and trying to keep this little newborn. I months, you know, being a new parent and trying to keep this little newborn,

I mean, you know, you're just trying to keep a little newborn alive. And then you can forget about yourself because it's kind of like, oh, I'm not building this baby inside of me anymore, so it's okay. But your body really needs to be re-nourished after you go through something like a pregnancy, and especially if you're lactating,

in order to produce milk. So nutritionally, we talk about milk supply a lot. Nutritionally, really the best things you can do for your milk supply are to make sure that you're getting adequate calories, make sure you're getting adequate nutrients, which includes micronutrients, and make sure that you're getting adequate fluids.

And so just hitting those things, and you're gonna do that through eating, I always harp on this, but nutrient dense foods as often as possible. And that's why I also recommend sticking with your prenatal vitamin through lactating years or months or weeks, however long you're going to be lactating. So because that will help to kind of like maintain those nutrients stores because some nutrients do go down, but some like choline, like iodine, they actually increase in breastfeeding

from pregnancy levels. And so just making sure that you're like getting nutrient-intense foods, eating, taking your prenatal vitamins or continuing on with it, you should be in a good spot nutritionally and just not forgetting about yourself. Okay, another question.

There's a sheet that was handed out when we left the hospital of a list of foods and they called these foods galactagogues. Yeah. Is that out in the hospital? Yes. Yeah. I was wondering is that a thing?

Because I was like that. It sounded like a video game. I was like galactagogues. They sound like an alien race, but it was mostly healthy nutrient dense food So I was thinking to myself. Okay, there's a lot of stuff on here that you would want to eat anyway So of course it could help you with healthy lactation, but yeah, it came in our little packet and I had I doing a little Poking around I realized there's some contention there. So is. So is that a thing or is that not a thing? Yeah.

So, black dogs are basically like nutrients that have been that people have been purported to increase your milk supply. Right? So, they can be as like as easy as oats. Yes. This is like the top picture on the graphic. Yeah. And then they can go to like, Fenugreek. Oh yeah.

And, yeah. So, all of those have been purported to be kind of like these galactogs. In the actual scientific research that has studied these things, they found very little evidence for their actual effectiveness in increasing milk supply. And so you have to remember, when we do research, it's generally under a controlled environment so that we, well, as long as it's a controlled experiment, it's under a controlled environment to actually look at, is this one thing causing an increase in milk supply?

And we just don't see it in the research. Now, some things like oats, they're good choices anyway, right? They're nutrient-sense choices, like let's eat them up. That's fine. I had a lot of oats in my early days of breastfeeding. But you know, you could just, in terms of like buying a $15 lactation cookie that has some of these things. We have those, my wife bought those. Yeah. And I would just save your money and make yourself some like oatmeal raisins. They taste, they taste pretty good. I was surprised. I tried them and now they, they are automatically subscribed. So before you knew it, I was like, babe, are you still ordering

these? She's like, oh, they're auto subscription. I canceled, but I need your help getting through them. So I guess that's a great way of kind of refuting the whole Galactog's thing because I ate many lactation cookies and I have not started lactating it. I don't know if that's the best reputation, but yeah, I will say, fenugreek is really the only one that has some evidence. This is mother's milk tea, correct? That's what that is. I think that's what that is.

Yeah. But it's only been shown It's there's mixed results There's studies both ways and the ones that have shown an impact have only shown a really modest impact and only for the first few Weeks of breastfeeding. So after that there's really there's really no impact What's going on guys coach Danny here taking a break from the episode to tell you about my coaching company, core coaching method, and more specifically are a one-on-one fully tailored online coaching program. My online coaching program has kind of been the flagship for core coaching method for a while. Of course we do have PDF programming and we have app based

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It's funny because venue Greek is commonly used in like sports performance and athletic populations to purportedly Increase like male performance. It's often sold as a natural testosterone boosting agent, but I think it really just manipulates luteinizing hormone and does mostly nothing, but there's been like a tiny bit of research that every supplement company has really ran with. So you'll see that in every single, not every single, but many over the counter testosterone formulations, uh, pivoting back a little bit to food safety and just kind of the cultural zeitgeist around nutrition, being a mom. I, I, most of the,

most of the women I train, most of the women I know kind of run the show in their household when it comes to nutrition and what comes in from the store, what gets cooked, all of that. And, uh, nutrition and what comes in from the store, what gets cooked, all of that. And there's tremendous cultural and societal pressure to like, you know, I don't know, health wash our food and like over promote like obsessively, culty, healthy eating. It kind of drives me crazy as a fitness person, what I see on the internet. And I know that a lot of moms feel tremendous pressure. So before we get too into the weeds, like what are some things that if you're in a position

where you have kids who are no longer breastfeeding, they're eating normal food or maybe you're a partner and you are, your partner is not a food person, you're the food person. What can we bring into the home to promote nourishment for the family with before we start sweating the small stuff and stressing about the fucking food dies and all that? Yeah. So I have, um, I have a five year old son and a two year old daughter. So I'm kind of at this stage now where I'm having to feed them and figure out how to feed them. And so what I'll say is what we predominantly do in our house is we eat whole foods predominantly, right? That's the bulk of our diet.

But then I also eat, we have plenty of like processed options in our house, but like 80 plus percent of what we're doing is whole foods. So we have, you know, I'll prep like some proteins, we'll do like chicken and steak So we have, you know, I'll prep like some proteins. We'll do like chicken and steak and whatever it is, fish, whatever the protein is that we're eating. They always have at least one vegetable or two, maybe two if they're like it. I usually make two, sorry. I usually make two vegetables when I'm making like meals. And so they'll get,

have like two options on their plate. I always try to make sure that I'm putting something on their plate that I know they like. So like, let's say I'm making a vegetable that I they've never had or that I don't know that they love. I'll add like some grapes on their plate, right? Or some blueberries also, like to, cause, cause fruits have a ton of nutrients as well. So, um, just kind of like mix it up and make sure that they're, they're getting something that they, that it's like a safe food for them or that they enjoy. Um, and then, and then, you know, like we do a lot of like, in terms of snacks, we do a lot of yogurts, fruits.

Like my daughter is obsessed with hummus, so she eats a lot of hummus and carrots. And then we do like processed foods too. So I have like, I'll use packets sometimes, I'll do Bobos, I don't know if you know what those are. I like Bobos, my wife loves Bobos. Yeah, yeah. I don't know if you know what those are. Oh, I like bobo's. My wife loves bobo's. Yeah. I also love bobo's. And so we'll do like crackers and cheese and stuff.

So even cheese sticks. So even when I'm using, like choosing like kind of processed options, I'm trying to make sure there's some nutrition in there for them. You know, some protein, some, some like micronutrients. So that's what we do often in our house. And then, you know, if they're like a friend's house or school or whatever it is and they have like, what, whatever, I don't sweat it at all. I just, I just, you know, they, the bulk of their diet is kind of these like nutrient-dense foods and then, you know, they're, they're kids too. And so they'll have a little bit of stuff at parties

and stuff like that. That seems like a really balanced way to do it. You have a little bit of stuff at parties and stuff like that. That seems like a really balanced way to do it. You have a little more control over what's eaten at home and you prioritize the most nutrient dense stuff. And then, you know, when they're in social settings or doing their thing, they can have fun. And that's probably the best way to consume the quote unquote unhealthy food anyways, is in those settings where you're doing things with people you care about.

So when it, when it comes to, um, the food avoidance, I think food avoidance culture is like insane and I have had my entire algorithm hijacked by grocery store, uh, Costco. Well, yeah, I made the mistake like so many of us do of adding my two cents to somebody else's dog shit opinion as though that was going to set the fucking world back on track. And all that did was it taught the algorithm that I'm enraged by these grocery store people and now I see some of the most insane takes, but I'm often shocked by how mainstream

a lot of these fears have become. And you know, it's very norm. I don't want to sound judgmental, but you know, these are, and it's a very normal human behavior to hear something scary, be alarmed by it, maybe go out of your way to tell other people about it or to stay away from it.

And I believe that that can actually make nutrition like 50 million times harder and more complicated. Yeah. And anxiety inducing. But very much anxiety inducing and not, not, I understand not everybody's fully equipped. So I kind of want to pick a few of these things apart that are in the cultural zeitgeist right now Starting first with The dyes that are used in many products

To change the color Oftentimes we see these products, you know are marketed for parents to buy for their kids the most recent one This has really been a big culture war thing unsurprisingly, but also surprisingly and like Fruit Loops has been kind of the headliner here, but there are food dyes that are used in American food products that many parents are concerned about. And maybe, maybe you could elucidate the risk profile of some of these things for us on a relative risk profile. Are these things that are maybe safe and not worried about worth avoiding when possible or, uh, yeah, that's actually bad, dude.

Yeah. So, okay. A couple of things with, um, let's just bad, dude. Yeah. So, okay. A couple of things with, let's just talk about food dyes. Because I think we need to talk more holistically as well, just about ultra processed foods. Yes, we can do that. In terms of food dyes, food dyes are primarily used in ultra processed foods, right? And so let me define ultra processed foods.

Ultra processed foods are foods that contain nutrients and processing styles where you could not replicate or make that product at home. So they contain a lot of ingredients that you don't have access to and kind of processing styles that you don't have access to. The best way that I can explain this is let's just use corn as an example, right? So an unprocessed version of corn is just picking an ear of corn out like from the garden.? So an unprocessed version of corn is just picking an ear of corn out like from the garden. That's an unprocessed. A minimally processed would be like a frozen bag of corn. And a processed version would be like creamed corn at the store. And then an ultra processed version would be like Doritos, Dorito chips, Right? And so you can't make Dorito chips

in your kitchen. You just can't. You can make all the other ones, but you can't make Dorito chips. So that's what identifies an ultra processed food. And when we're, when we're talking about these things and that's how we use it in the research. Um, and so who dies are primarily used in these ultra processed foods. So when we look at the actual research that, overall we should be limiting our consumption of ultra processed foods, but we don't as a society of the vast majority of our food supply is ultra processed foods,

which we can talk about as well. But when we are thinking about food dyes, if we're limiting our intake of ultra processed foods, we're limiting our food dye intake, period. We're not going to be consuming them. Food dyes aren't necessary nutritionally. They're not like a preservative that actually is important in some foods. The reason that they're important is purely marketing and psychological, right? Because we like to see color in our foods. And I'm not saying all of us, a lot of us listening probably wouldn't care, but there's

ample evidence that we like that from a psychological perspective. In fact, General Motors, General Mills, back in 2015, they actually got rid of synthetic food dyes out of their cereal. I'm not sure if people are aware of this. And there was a huge backlash to General Mills doing that to the point where they actually had to reinstate some of these synthetic food dyes and come back with their old school lucky charms,

I think it was. So that's, and I reintroduced it to the food supply because of customer demand. Wellness people would be surprised to learn that normal people really care a lot about the way their food looks. Well, and that's the thing, right? Like a lot of the people railing against these ingredients do not eat these foods.

Almost exclusively, for whatever neurotic reason that is. But yeah, you're totally right. Yeah, and I'm not here to like defend food dyes. Like that's not, again, they're not, I'm here to defend like whole nutrient dense nutrition, but there's a nuanced conversation to be had about why food dyes exist in our food supply. And here's the thing, if the goal is to reduce your intake of ultra processed foods overall, swapping one food dye with a different food dye, so let's say you swap out red 40 with a, you know, different natural red 41 is going to do absolutely nothing to improve the nutritional value of

that food. It's still going to be a high sugar nutrient devoid ultra processed food. Right. And so, so that's where we are. But, but, but the conversation that's very easy to remember. It's like food dyes are poisoning us. Let's get rid of them. And it spreads really well on social media. And so that's why these people stick to kind of these really like a clear ingredient, food dye, a clear product, fruit loops, right. And like there's, there's a very clear formula. If, if one wanted to achieve like rapid social media growth in the nutrition space,

there's a clear formula that is to your point, like demonize one particular food component, identify a product that has it and just don't stop. And it works tremendously well. It's very efficient. Grocery store and like a, without your shirt, if you're a man, yes, especially the more shirtless you can be, the better for sure. But I say that all the time. I mean, like if I would, I have a PhD in nutrition science and I'm a registered

dietician, right, if I just literally sold my soul and stopped talking about like nuanced evidence based nutrition and decided to just like, like join that group and just start railing against these ingredients. Oh my gosh, I could have so much success game over. And then just flipping them into my supplement sales. Like I would have so much success. It makes so much money. Yeah. It's almost like, uh, there's an ulterior motive for some of these people. I can't, I can't quite put my finger on it. I want to transition since you brought up General Motors and General Mills and General Motors. I was thinking to

myself, you know, you know what, you know what I hear a lot about is the fact that the seed oils we eat are for industrial products, like maybe motors or whatever else. And that these seed oils are lubricants and they're not fit for human consumption. And there's, I do agree though, that they might be throwing our omega-3, 6 ratios a little out of whack. That's fine. But some of the craziest takes I've seen on the internet are around seed oils, which I will be honest. I consume a lot of seed oils, probably more than I should as a fitness health person. But most of the research I've seen that says that like too much

saturated fat and butter and beef tallow is not a great idea and that seed oils are like, they're not as bad. They're just really fucking high in calories. And this is probably the most singularly railed on food right now that I can think of. Where do we stand on seed oils independent of the fact that like 100% of ultra processed foods probably have a seed oil

Yeah, of some kind Yeah, so here's the thing and we I didn't really we didn't really talk about like what the actual research says about About food dyes, but like if we were is that we could actually have a nuanced conversation about some of these food dyes And what some of the research has said for example, it's there is a little bit of research that shows that red 40 potentially exacerbates symptoms of ADHD in children who already have ADHD. And it's a very small percentage and that research is mixed. So it's not strong, but there's some research that we could talk about there. With seed oils, it just flies in the face of nutrition science research. This railing against seed oils is, as someone who, first of all,

has never called them seed oils, this is really a made up social media wellness term. What do we call them? We've always called them polyunsaturated fatty acids. And then if we're talking about the specific seeds, we talk about the specific seeds. So we'll talk about sunflower oil or safflower oil or rapeseed oil or so on and so forth. And so, but with seed oils and polyunsaturated fatty acids, I mean, there is just a wealth of an abundance of research to show that they, if you substitute them for saturated fatty acids, they can be cardio protective and not inflammatory.

And so as you mentioned the omega-6 to omega-3 kind of imbalance there, and that is a thing, right? So the over consumption of polyunsaturated fatty acids can absolutely be a problem, right? Just like the over consumption of saturated fat could be a problem, the over consumption of sugar is a problem, the over consumption of calories is a problem, the over consumption of saturated fat could be a problem. The over consumption of sugar is a problem. The over consumption of calories is a problem. The over consumption of anything.

And so yes, if you're consuming too much omega-6 fatty acid, which seed oils have in them. Omega-6 fatty acids though are necessary for our health. They're absolutely essential. But if you over consume them, that's going to be a problem. And here's the thing. As you mentioned, seed oils, they're very cheap and they're flavorless for the most part, right? They don't have a strong flavor profile, like something like olive oil.

Olive oil does for sure. And so because of that, they're used in a lot of these ultra processed foods because instead of like olive oil, which would really like take over the flavor in a lot of them. You don't want olive oil in your brownies. Like you just, it will ruin them. Yeah, exactly. And so because our food supply currently is so overwhelmed with these ultra processed foods and we are over consuming these ultra processed foods, many of us are over consuming

polyunsaturated fatty acids. And that's really at the end of the day, what the issue is. If you look at any research that controls for the consumption of these ultra processed foods and the over consumption of seed oils, there just isn't evidence that they are detrimental to our health. That makes a lot of sense to me because I probably should be dead by now if these seed oils were as bad as people say they are because I don't cook with them all the time, but I

definitely eat foods that have seed oil in them on a daily basis. Well, you know what's funny is that a lot of the wellness influencers who rail against seed oils also consume seed oils and sell them on their website. Yeah, they're used in protein powder all the time. Yeah, they'll sell crackers or protein powders with seed oils and you just go to their website, it's just so wild. Like I take one of their videos where they're really got seed oils And I'm like, but you literally sell this product that has safflower and sunflower oil in it

Yeah, and I know when the cameras are off a lot of you guys just eat like normal people so you Definitely definitely that's the one thing that I can say is I just don't drink because I think it tastes icky Which is the most childish and I know it's bad for me, but like you get, you gain a lot of points by avoiding things that are actually dangerous for you, like alcohol, not that many points from gaining, avoiding things that are pretend dangerous. A lot of this is just kind of, I feel like life got really simple, so we needed to make up some fake bad guys.

I don't know. Speaking of things that could actually be dangerous though, I see a huge trend in like this weird like fetishization of saturated fats and like cooking with butter and cooking with beef tallow and like I get these I get content about you know like restaurants explicitly like advertising that we cook all of our shit and beef tallow. And it's like, that to me, I, what would be likely to happen if the average seed oil consumer switched to eating a ton of beef, tallow and butter. I know you already answered this question, but specifically these two things that are becoming very popular to reintroduce

and add to your food unnecessarily. Like what if any health benefits would be attributed to adding beef tallow or butter unnecessarily to your food? Yeah, I mean, so I do think that a lot of the people who do this, you know, if you switch to a diet that is, you know, consuming butter and like a carnivore diet, right, which is where this is like originating from, I think. I mean, the thing that happens is you stop consuming ultra processed foods. You stop consuming, you know, you stop consuming, I'm using the term ultra processed foods and I should mention that within that category, there's like, it's not like a monolith, but if you look at like overall dietary patterns

that consume a lot of them, there tend to be high in calories and low in nutrients. But there are, I mean, the protein powder I had after my workout today is an ultra processed food, right? So there's some nuance within that category. So I just wanna make that clarification. But the vast majority of those people, they're cutting out all of those foods.

But as a public health measure, if we were to do that and just swap out polyunsaturated fatty acids for saturated fats. Yeah, people, this would have been a joke fucking six weeks ago, but this is not a joke actually anymore. There are people who are adjacent to like legitimate levers of Power that would not balk at the suggestion to swap seed oils for beef towel. They'd be like fucking let's do it, bro

So that this could happen. This is no longer a hypothetical Yeah, cardiothoracic surgeons would have a lot more, a lot more work for them. That makes sense. All right. Another high risk food that I just cannot get my risk analysis brain around. Another one that seems almost like a pseudo fetish is raw dairy. And this like, I think it's just the naturalistic fallacy at play, this obsession with raw. But I have been a long time weirdo who drinks kefir, which is like one of the few dairy products nobody's ever heard

of. I also drink kefir. And the reason I drink kefir is because it has a lot of the benefits that we associate with like the family of foods that is quote unquote dairy. It's high in calcium. It's high in protein. It does. I have a dairy fat, heavy yogurt. So it's mine's a little bit higher in calories, but it's also really high in probiotics while being, while being pasteurized. So I feel that I'm getting all of the purported benefits of raw milk, but none of the risk.

And I just, I can't get my head around why people would want to do this. What do we think about raw dairy on a risk basis? Is this a pretty reckless move for people? I mean, every microbiologist I've ever discussed this with says it's a very high risk move to consume raw dairy. Here's the thing at the end of the day, what's interesting is so many of these people who are now proponents of raw dairy five years ago, 10 years ago, were anti-dairy, right? They were like, don't, dairy is inflammatory, don't consume it.

And now they're like like only have raw dairy. I do think I, um, I had my eyes opened a few weeks ago when I was discussing, discussing pasteurization and I had someone comment that they didn't realize the pasteurization was just heating milk. And they thought that it was a chemical process where they were adding chemicals to the milk. And, um, and multiple people thought that I opened up a discussion in my comment section. And so first of all, pasteurization is just heating milk. And one of the traditional ways to do that is just for 15 seconds to heat it,

not even to a boiling temperature. And it's just enough to kill pathogens. And so most of the nutrients remain. I mean, there's a little bit of evidence to suggest like something like vitamin C, which oxidizes in air anyway. Like if you open your, if you open like a, your bottle of orange juice, you're going to oxidize some of that vitamin C because it's an antioxidant. And so there's a little bit of evidence to suggest that that decreases,

but the vast majority of nutrients, there's no nutrient change. There's no evidence to suggest that raw dairy is any more beneficial for health than pasteurized dairy, which again is just heating the milk to kill pathogens. And as you point out, I mean, we already have safe dairy options that contain things like probiotics. Kefir and yogurt are great options for that. So I do think that it's just kind of one of those things. I've seen the sign going around like as for me and my family, whatever the government does, we do the opposite or something like that. Oh yeah. That's one of my favorites, bro. Like you actually, did you read what they said? Cause it's not as bad as it used to be. Like they say lift twice a week. So you're going to do the opposite. You're not going to lift anymore. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. But there's, yes, there is, there is a, a certain counter cultural,

which I respect. I am, I am from the, uh, I grew, I grew, I live in Northern California. I live in between Marin County and Monterey. And you're not going to find two hubs of people that like if you, if just 10 years ago, you told me that all of these things that are popular now, like raw milk and avoiding seed oils and running away from them, that sounds so like the hippie woo woo

left of center area where I'm from. I'm used to all this. In fact, not to get off subject, but like a lot of the anti-vaccine culture emanates from like wealthy white liberal people in California who have the ability to take their kids to the doctor. So I'm surrounded by a lot of that and I'm empathetic to where this comes from and I'm not pinning it on anybody.

You can believe these things no matter where you fall politically, but some of this seems to be a counter cultural and politically adjacent. And I think that's why a lot of people adopt some of these beliefs and project them, I would just say, be careful. Uh, know what you say on the internet for likes and reviews is one thing, but what you eat every day can have consequences. So, so be careful. Um, I mean, it's just, it's a really interesting movement, like a really interesting shift. Cause as you point out, like a lot of this stuff,

really originated with like liberal hippies, right? Like, yeah, that's where, that's the, I got started in nutrition because I was like, I've considered myself old school crunchy like before. Yeah. Oh yeah. I, I have, I have a Jack Lillane power juicer that I've burned the motor out on four times because there is still a part of me that was born of this, you know, community. And there is a degree of, if you are a scientific thinker,

there's a degree of, you know, staying on the tracks and things have gotten a little wild and I find myself a little homeless, homeless, crunchy, I, you know. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, me and you both, we could be in the same home. But yeah, like I, it's just interesting with the current day movement that we're seeing,

where there are all these calls for deregulation for things like milk and allowing milk to be sold, for raw milk to be sold, but at the same time calling for more regulation for our food supply under the guise of these deregulatory policies. So that's an interesting conversation in and of itself, which doesn't really make a lot of sense. Yeah. And maybe a good one for a follow-up episode. I learned a ton today.

Dr. Jessica, thanks for coming on. Where can my audience find you to learn more about how to kind of integrate some, you know, additive, thoughtful, high impact nutrition practices and, and cut through the bullshit that is on the internet right now. Yeah. Thank you. I'm, um, active on Instagram and Tik Tok, although maybe Tik Tok won't be here anymore. So Instagram, find me over there. So it's dr dr Jessica Nurik. It's my name. Um, and that's really only place. All right, Dr. Wol. Thanks for coming on and we'll chat soon. Yeah, thanks so much for having me.