Q&A with Dr. Greger 16

**Michael Greger** (0:00)
I'm often asked my opinion about the cause or treatment of some medical condition, but the question to instead ask is what does the science say? What does the best available balance of evidence published in the peer-reviewed medical literature have to say right now? Welcome to the Nutrition Facts Podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Michael Greger. Today we answer a wide variety of your questions, like the benefits and risks of statins, and whether or not you should get a flu shot. All right, so let us jump right on to questions. OK, question number one. How fast do you get vitamin and seed deficiency if you went on a full carnivore diet? Yeah, so vitamin C is actually found in raw meat, but if you cook meat, you're going to destroy the vitamin C, which I mean you don't want to eat raw meat for food safety reasons. There was, I forget, the scurvy studies. In one of my books, I talk about the scurvy studies. It's just a matter of weeks when you start to get decreased wound healing, which is important. Collagen production requires vitamin C. And they actually, this was before ethics committees, but they actually took people and they sliced them open, study subjects, volunteered, maybe not volunteered, probably got paid. They sliced them to give the exact same wound. And then they put them on vitamin C deficient diets to find out how much vitamin C you needed. You didn't need a lot. Forget what it was like, you know, 10 or 25 milligrams a day. That's not the optimal amount, but it was enough to help with wound healing. If you type in scurvynutritionfacts.org, that's one of the nutrient deficiencies that one may be worried about with the carnivore diet. But, of course, the important thing with the carnivore diet is not, I mean, I don't think people are going to be losing their teeth from scurvy. I'm sure they're going to eat some fruit and vegetables along the way somehow. But it's, you know, the number one killer of men and women is our disease, right? So we got to decrease our saturated fat, diet cholesterol intake, so the last thing we need is more meat in our diets. Alberto asks, Can I take green tea as a powder or supplement in your daily pouch, or do you need to brew it? I don't like the taste of green tea. Okay, that's a great question. So it's actually healthier to have green tea as a powder rather than brewing it, because when you brew it, you get the water-soluble nutrients, and then you throw out the rest. It's like if you boiled some collard greens, and then you threw out the greens, and you just drank the water. Now, that's potluck, or that's… I mean, there's lots of nutrients that leached out of those leaves, and so it's healthy, but you just threw away all the fiber and all the other good stuff. And so if you eat matcha, which is powdered green tea leaves, then you get all the tea compounds found in brewed tea, plus everything else that you would normally throw away with the tea leaves. So, matcha actually tastes different than brewed green tea, so maybe you wouldn't mind the taste. You can put it in a smoothie or something, kind of hide the taste, or yeah, you could do it in little pouches or capsules or whatever, if you'd like. My only reservation is if you're going to actually eat your tea, whether you're opening up a tea bag and dumping the leaves in your smoothie or taking matcha tea, is to use Japanese sourced as opposed to Chinese sourced, just because China was kind of late to the get rid of leaded gasoline game, and so a lot of the soil in tea plantations has a lot of lead in it, which is not a problem with brood tea because the lead does not leach from the leaves into the water. But if you are actually eating the leaves, then yes, you'll actually get that lead. And so Japanese green tea has significantly lower lead levels. It's particularly important for young kids and pregnant women and people that eat a lot of it. So yeah, get some Japanese matcha, try it out, see if you don't mind the taste. And if you do, add it to your pouch or your smoothie or go crazy. All right, what else we got? Okay, Happy Hog says, should green beans be considered a green or a bean? Actually neither. Ha! That's funny. So in my daily, they're considered other vegetable categories. So they're considered just like vegetables. So like zucchini, even though it's green, it's not a green. It doesn't have the same compounds like nitrates and some of the other wonderful things that you'd find. But vegetables are healthy. So green beans are healthy, but don't have the nutritional properties either of legumes, actual dried beans, and don't have the nutrients of dark green leafy vegetables. But yeah, eat some green beans. Just don't dip them in butter or whatever. Okay, are there any negatives? Okay, this is from Barb. Are there any negatives to storing whole flax, pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds, walnuts in the freezer?