Kevin Klatt, PhD, RD

I've seen a meme shared on social media multiple times this week, asserting that our foods contain paint thinners in the form of Trisodium Phosphate (TSP). The image below was shared on a FaceBook page called "Organic Health" with the caption "It's right in our faces... Just mocking us. Can you believe there is paint thinner in cereal?"   : from Organic Health, link here The meme links to an article over at naturalcuresnotmedicine ( here ). The article contains very little scientific material and quite obviously is written to scare people out of buying foods with TSP, not present an objective viewpoint on it. The article states that TSP is something that developers and construction workers should be familiar with, not people buying food (a pretty pointless comparison). The authors of the natural cures article go so far to even say that inorganic phosphate can be detrimental to our health: there is no citation for this claim, which is a rather ludicrou...

A recent study looking at saturated fat intake in the context of a low-carbohydrate diet came out in PLoSOne the other day (1), and the headlines are covering the topic in their typical misleading fashion - see medicalnewstoday's article here titled "Rise of Saturated Fat in Diet does not Raise Fats in Blood". Even Greg Miller, PhD tweeted the study to me saying: At face value, seeing that headline and Greg's comment, I would think...hmm okay, researchers got together, set up a tracer study using some kind of labeled fatty acids in individuals consuming typical diets and showed that lipid fractions in the blood weren't enriched in these labeled fats, in any individual, obese or not, and that there was some functional outcome. Having read the study, I can tell you that's not even close to what was done - so let's investigate further: The study was entitled "Effects of Step-Wise Increases in Dietary Carbohydrate on Circulating Saturated Fatty Ac...

Fats are all the rage lately, as people who become interested in nutrition start to realize that the field's methods are far from perfect and leave the science pretty soft . I find the conversation to be a bit nauseating at times, as we try to isolate one nutrient while ignoring the whole food complex, and the food's place in the context of the diet**. Lately, the conversation seems to be about butter - is butter back? Bittman proudly declared it so . Time Magazine had a cover with the headline "Eat Butter". Harvard School of Public Health responded with an article, " Is Butter Really Back?" . What's the deal - is the nutritional sciences community really that split on whether you should be using butter or oil? My take on the issue is much more simplistic than opinions on fatty acid profiles that can't be backed up by the current data (unless someone can find me some data where humans replaced only palmitic acid with only linoleic acid and saw be...

I've been meaning to start a series on food additives and why they're in foods. Often, food ingredients list a lot of words that people don't understand and.or know their purpose/safety - despite what one might hear, not being able to pronounce a word on a food label is not a reason to not consume that food. Words on the food label like Pantothenic Acid and Pyridoxine might sound frightening, but they're actually just vitamins B5 and B6. There's unfortunately much fearmongering that surrounds food additives that often strays far from science or even precautionary principles, so I figured i'd do a little mini-series on the topic. What better way to segue into this  than with the recent talk of propylene glycol  in Fireball, a popular cinnamon flavored whiskey.The story was reported on here . Fireball was recalled in Europe, after an American shipment was sent overseas. The amount of propylene glycol allowed in American Fireball is different than Europe, so it w...

Raw for Beauty.com When I hear people talk about things being 'toxic', I cringe a bit. Merriam dictionary defines toxic as "containing or being poisonous material especially when capable of causing death or serious debilitation" . It's colloquial usage has deviated far from the true definition, with every food and substance being subject to the term. Recent concerns regarding the toxicity of food products, like ones made by Food-Babe minded folks discussing  chemicals in pumpkin spice lattes , often fail to mention the dose of the questionable compound, and when this is pointed out, they retort that there is a lack of long-term data on the topic in humans and invoke the precautionary principle. mercola.com In determining the toxicity of chemicals (be they vitamins, hormones, or environmental chemicals), there are always gaps in the data. Nothing in science is so certain that more data couldn't refine our understanding- indeed, we have no huma...

Vani Hari, AKA the FoodBabe, shared on her Facebook page today a post about 'toxic' glucose solutions used in OGTTs for pregnant women. You can find her post  here . The article focuses on the brominated vegetable oil (BVO) content of this drink, after expressing delight that Coke/Pepsi are removing BVO from their products, which I'm sure she'll now consume copious amounts of.. Before we get into the toxicity data on BVO, why is BVO added to drinks? Well, it's not to a government-conspiracy to poison consumers. Citrus oils are added to beverages, usually soft drinks, as a clouding/flavor agent. However, these oils are less dense than the water-sugar mixture, so small amounts of brominated vegetable oil are dissolved in the citrus oil to increase their density and keep them in suspension. Alternative weighting agents do exist in the forms of damar gums, ester gums, and sucrose diacetate hexaisobutyrate (Fennema's Food Chemistry,4th Edition, 2008). Regarding...

A new paper (1) in the Journal of Animal Science was published recently, that analyzed the health of animals fed GMO feed since it was introduced in 1996, until 2011. The study finds that " These field data sets representing over 100 billion animals following the introduction of GE crops did not reveal unfavorable or perturbed trends in livestock health and productivity. No study has revealed any differences in the nutritional profile of animal products derived from GE-fed animals".  This represents billions of meals eaten by billions of animals, of multiple species that show no detrimental health impacts. If you read the whole paper, it moves beyond just the health impacts on animals, and calls for the international scientific and regulatory communities to find common ground on the issue of GMOs: " There is a pressing need for international harmonization of both regulatory frameworks for GE crops and governance of advanced breeding techniques to prevent widespread dis...

The blog-o-sphere is certainly replete with interesting theories, regardless of whether they're backed by data. One that I hear constantly is that the dietary guidelines make us sick/fat/diabetic/obese/etc etc. With the recent Annals of Internal Medicine low carb publication , I saw a particularly substantial number of people making claims that recommendations to choose a low-fat diet made us fat. I have a lot of issues with taking a reductionist viewpoint with regard to dietary recommendations, because they were never to 'just' reduce fat intake. But let's play along. Google Images The line of thinking that backs this can be found in this chart: The first dietary guidelines came out in 1980 and advocated reducing fat consumption. If you look at this chart, it appears that this coincides with the obesity epidemic. Does correlation equal causation?  I hope not, or else Nick Cage has some explaining to do: Spurious Correlations: http://www.tylervigen.com/ ...