Dr. Greger: The Most Potent Anti-Death Food

the food is 50% fat marbled beef could you imagine like someone like Dr Gregor coming out and saying that ah that would be the day that gravity doesn't exist anyway that's not the answer as anyone who follows Dr Michael Gregor's work knows full well if you aren't familiar with Dr Gregor he's a medical doctor that favors a plant-based lifestyle which is why my bad joke is especially laughable or not anyway I ran across a short video Dr Gregor released on the most potent foods for reducing all cause mortality the outcome of death from any cause

essentially heart disease cancer dementia Etc let's listen in and then let's crack open a few studies to confirm or deny the claims welcome to episode one of my series on the anti-aging 8 let's get nutty compared to any other food group consumption of nuts associated with the lowest risk of premature death a palm full of nuts each day may be enough to offer maximal benefit now too many nuts more than a cup a day may increase the risk of kidney stones and peanut butter consumption does not appear to have the same salutory effects okay let's

stop it there for a moment because just in 25 seconds he says a lot so the food is nuts and the claim is that it's the most potent food for reducing all cause mortality which is that outcome that I briefly described earlier he also mentions that too many nuts might raise the risk of kidney stones and peanut butter is exempt from this all cause mortality benefit we'll get to each but let's discuss the primary one nuts do they reduce all cause mortality for that we can lean on this analysis in this study researchers compiled 18

studies looking at nut consumption and all cause mortality they compared people's data across all 18 studies between those who consumed to no to almost no nuts per week versus those that ate nuts each week from there they Quantified the number of people who died in each group from cardiovascular disease or cancer and established a risk of death mortality based on nut consumption here is that data we have the studies on the left side the relative risk of all cause mortality consuming low amounts of nuts to consuming high amounts of nuts on the right side and

the numbers are transformed into dots and lines called confidence intervals in the middle if the dots and lines move to the left there's a reduced risk when consuming more nuts that diamond at the bottom is the average of all the studies together so clearly this analysis indicates Dr Gregor is correct yet keep in mind that we're discussing associative studies here and we just went over what is known as an unadjusted result that means that the researchers are not controlling for other factors other variables that might explain the results other than nut consumption so for example

do people who eat nuts also exercise more or do they weigh less or do they eat less in general so the researchers broke up the studies based on the level of adjustment here up top are the minimally adjusted indicating studies only controlling for sex and age the bottom grouping of studies is the fully adjusted analysis also adjusting for smoking alcohol body weight fruit and vegetable consumption physical activity diabetes cardiovascular disease vitamin supplementation total calorie intake fish intake red meat intake and a few studies also adjusted for whole grain consumption but regardless of the analysis that

you look at both indicate reduced all cause mortality from greater nut consumption again indicating that Dr Gregor is still correct but he also mentions that overc consumption can raise the risk of kidney stones and he mentions that more than a handful of nuts per day may not offer additional benefit while we'll address that second point Point later but let's address the kidney stone risk there are a few case reports of people consuming large amounts of nuts and developing kidney stones and kidney pathology but these types of reports are among the lowest tier of evidence in

science considering that they involve a single person and don't control for any other factors that said there is some evidence that high oxalate foods like some nuts almonds in particular can contribute to kidney Stone formation this isn't specific to nuts but some fall in that camp so he may have a point there too he also mentions that peanut butter does not provide these anti- mortality benefits that we just went over there's a little more here than he gets into in the video peanut butter in small amounts seems associated with slightly reduced all cause mortality as

we see in column C2 here with a loss of an effect with greater concern assumtion however if we uh return to this analysis the researchers are including more data and indicate as seen here with a relative risk reduction of about 11% and one row down looking at peanuts specifically a slightly better result with greater certainty so it seems to me that peanuts at least provide some benefit if these associations hold true which across great data sets they do this was also further corroborated in more recent studies indicating the same result all right Dr Gregor has

one more thing to say and then we need to discuss how much of these nuts that we need to consume for maximum benefit and of all nuts walnuts may be the healthiest stay tuned for episode two of our anti-aging 8 series it's brief but he mentions walnuts being the best of them all you could say it is the nut to rule them all and in the darkness bind them Galadriel with the Almond nut elron with the Hazelnut and Sauron with the Walnut which can never be destroyed unless it is cast into the fires of Mount

Doom or I guess you could use a nutcracker if only Frodo had thought of that anyway I'm sure there are a few blank stairs looking at me right now a little confused is the Walnut Superior this is a tough one because we need comparative analyses and although I did find some narrative reviews Indica that walnuts might be among the best for cardiovascular disease I couldn't find anything directly comparing in relation to all cause mortality so I'll just keep myself firmly planted on the I don't know but it probably doesn't matter so long as we know

that the association indicates overall health Improvement movent speaking to that I discovered a fascinating study that aims to quantify the life extension benefit of Walnut consumption and how much is optimal per day I'll be covering that for the physionic Insiders if you're interested in having access to all my analyses including that one hop on over and join the physionic Insiders Linked In the description the final question is what is the optimal amount of nuts in general a according to the research that we've been over well look at this data the vertical axis is mortality risk

so the lower the lines go the better anything under 1.0 there is a reduced risk horizontal axis is the amount of nut consumption of all kinds so about three servings per week is associated with the greatest reduction in all cause mortality without much change going higher on a daily basis that equates to about 12 G per day not a lot needed so overall I think Dr Gregor did a great job I mean keep in mind that he didn't site any studies so he may have looked at some other studies that I didn't but even with

that in mind it seems most of his points do hold true except you know maybe the peanut butter and peanut perspective but he's made other claims in the past as well and you can find those right here thanks for watching [Applause] o [Music]