Kevin Klatt, PhD, RD

I teach an introduction to Nutrition and Food Science lab, and one of the most consistent things I see people doing/saying is that red meat is 'bad' for you. I know that this is a pretty heated area of debate amongst nutrition professionals, especially alternative health. That discussion aside for the time being, it doesn't change the fact that Americans are eating less red meat (1). I'm not against reducing your consumption of red meat, but with that, comes the reduction of major sources of iron in the diet. The DRIs for iron are 8mg for adult males, 18mg for adult, premenopausal females, and 27mg for pregnant women (2). Besides beef, chicken liver, oyster, and clams top the list for being high in heme iron (3). These are not generally foods we consume a lot of - and no health professional would recommend consistently getting your iron from chicken liver due to risk of hypervitaminosis A, and retinal's detrimental effect on bone mineral density and osteoclast ac

Today, I had a friend ask me whether protein powders were bad. I have students ask me on a daily basis whether something is bad to eat or not. These are extremely difficult questions to answer, if you're trying to remain scientific. While it's the job of public health nutrition to reduce foods and nutrients to 'bad' or 'good', it's the job of nutritional scientists and dietitians to look at dosage, and the context of a food within an individual's diet - it's wholly unscientific to say whether something is bad for someone. Not only is it unscientific, I think this is the wrong mindset to get into, regarding food. The focus on "is it unhealthy" fixates individuals on avoiding specific foods (which one could argue isn't the healthiest relationship to have with food) . I can give you a list of a million things not to eat, but what would you know about eating? In reality, we should focus on what to eat . If you're focusing on a diet

If you haven't seen the little girl's video that shows how 'alive' organic food is and how 'dead' conventionally grown food is, check it out: http://www.spiritscienceandmetaphysics.com/a-little-girls-experiment-will-change-the-way-you-think-about-food/ This situation is the perfect example of why dosage matters, and furthermore, why scientific education matters. As the little girl rightly points out ( i'd like to know what adults used their child to push their unscientific agenda?? ), Chlorpropham, the chemical sprayed on conventional plants to prevent sprouting and extend shelf life, has been shown to be carcinogenic in animal models. But only in extreme doses never even close to being consumed by humans .  I talk a lot about dosage on this blog and how it's been removed from nutritional sciences ("eat as much as you want of these, never eat that"), but these same misunderstandings also apply to toxicology - this isn't to say ther

There are a lot of different thought processes in nutrition. When it comes to employing nutrition research at a population level, there seems to be 2 lines of thought: good enough and perfection. I title this Chocolate Milk and Juice because these are two areas where the debate gets quite heated and you can see these polarized perspectives: Chocolate Milk - Milk is a great source of nutrients, like protein, riboflavin, calcium and (fortified) Vitamins A&D. In America, we have food policy that's made milk production super cheap (when compared to other nations, like India) and milk widely available - it's our society's chosen source of readily available calcium. We all know calcium is extremely important for bone health, and its particularly critical to absorb enough calcium throughout growth and development, to achieve peak bone mass and delay the onset of osteoporosis later in life. However, alongside all of the nutrients in milk, chocolate milk contains a significa

It's really hard to talk nutrition with someone, especially when you stick to the science and they can throw out sentiment after sentiment - sentiment always sounds better than science! Here's a few common sentiments I get all the time that are so far from scientific: 1. "But so and so did it and lost a ton of weight!" - This one's from the people who never took a statistics course. 'Miley Cyrus went gluten-free and look how healthy she is!!' is known as an n=1 situation - one person's experiences don't say much, and nothing controls for confounding factors. If we took every anecdote of healthy people, whether they were olympic athletes or individuals who lost 400lbs, we'd get about 100+ diets out of it (go look at the diet section of your local book store - I'd say about a 100) . What one person did to stay healthy only shows the dietary plasticity of the human body - we can eat a variety of things, or not eat a variety of things, and b

Seeing the words 'healthy' and 'carbohydrates' can be rare these days - depending on where you're getting your nutrition info. I see a lot of critiques of the Acceptable Macronutrient Distribution Ranges (AMDRs), set by the Institute of Medicine. So let's take a look at those: AMDRs (1) : Carbohydrates , males/females, 9-70: 45-65% of total calories Fat, males/females, 19-70: 25-35% of total calories Protein , males/female, 19-70: 10-35% My challenge, to myself, is to incorporate a variety of carbohydrate sources. It's very easy to get stuck in a carbohydrate rut... one might say a carbohydrut (okay i'll stop). But seriously, it seems like you say carbohydrate and people automatically think, "grains"! There's so much more to carbohydrates and the reasons behind the AMDR values. Carbohydrates are pretty unique to plants - besides muscle glycogen and dairy sugars - and with plants come an array of vitamins, minerals, antioxidants and

I'm pretty passionate about good scientific education - I'd argue nothing is more valuable than the ability to ask questions to understand the world around you, and model a system to answer them, as best and objectively, as possible. Humans are such inquisitive creatures since birth, and good scientific education, in my opinion, can only foster that further. Unfortunately, America doesn't have the best scientific education - not to say some isn't great! But I don't think I really appreciated science until very late into my undergraduate career. **bias - I went to 13 years of catholic school** But after working in labs with individuals from foreign countries (Netherlands, Australia, England, etc), it seems science edu in America is generally pretty piss poor in the elementary-high school range. I could rant about that for a while, but I'd like to specifically talk about nutritional sciences. What is the study of nutrition? You can look at nutrition from so

A number of avenues have been taken to study the treatment of age-related cognitive decline/impairment (think diseases like Alzheimer's Disease). Nutrition has gotten a lot of focus, with studies looking at Omega 3 fatty acid intake and fruit and vegetable consumption (even in the form of juices) potentially lowering the risk of Alzheimer's Disease (AD) and protecting against cognitive decline (1,2,3). Another major area for nutrition in the prevention of cognitive decline (and seemingly most age-related diseases) has looked into mitigating oxidative stress - a major factor in the pathogenesis of Alzheimer's Disease is the oxidative up-regulation of beta and gamma secretase, required for the generation of beta-amyloid plaques (4). There are other components of the disease including the ApoE4 genotype (6), as well as advanced glycated end products and blood brain barrier permeability but I won't discuss that at the moment - though it's good to know that the latter

Throughout evolution there was a sort of trade dental health off - or so it's been accepted. As hominids started consuming more soft starches (like grains, especially cooked), we accepted the detrimental effects of cavities over tooth wear/enamel erosion. ( for a great read on the evolution of dentition, check out John Hawk's blog ) Before domesticated food and modern technologies, the teeth were subject to a lot more stresses that could wear away the enamel. When you start eating starchy crops, much softer after heat treatment and processing, this issue goes away - but another arises. Starchy crops are easily fermented by bacteria and also stick to teeth - the perfect formula for dental caries (cavities). It's been generally shown across hominid fossils from the Paleolithic and Mesolithic that dental caries were a rarity - there is one famous Pleistocene skull found in Zambia that was replete with cavities. Even Neanderthal samples don't show much evidence of regul

It seems like everyone has a bit of a cough or sore throat today. That common cold is a bit annoying but luckily, there's a million claims about any number of vitamin/mineral/herb supplements that can help your immune system out!  What holds up to the science? What can you tell your patients/friends/family? Here's a quick breakdown of the evidence for/against the popular ones: 1. Vitamin C - Go into any drug store in the winter and you're bombarded by Emergen- C and Airborne as soon as you enter. Their box covers usually advertise that they've got 1000mg of vitamin C - yay!! right? The clinical trials are actually pretty dim regarding Vitamin C's ability to prevent or treat the common cold . The latest Cochrane review (1) on vitamin C supplementation showed a very small benefit for regular supplementation with Vitamin C (generally over 1g/day), and no effect for therapeutic use (started at beginning of onset). The only individuals that Vitamin C may be beneficial