Kevin Klatt, PhD, RD

If there's one thing social media has taught me, it's to be skeptical of anything that goes viral. One of the most recent articles i've seen going around the facebook/tumblr world is an article, seemingly reposted on a number of different sites, that discusses how strange America is for having to refrigerate their eggs. If you haven't read these articles, see one version here . To summarize them, eggs can become infected with Salmonella on the outside or the inside. Eggs contain a protective covering, called the cuticle, that can prevent Salmonella penetration into the egg. America washes eggs throughout industrial processing, effectively removing the cuticle, and henceforth, the egg's protection. To avoid proliferation of dangerous amounts of Salmonella, we have to refrigerate eggs. This is all weird because other countries, the article claims, don't wash the eggs, so they retain the cuticle and therefore, don't have place eggs in the fridge. The article ...

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...

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...

I just got back from the American Society for Nutrition's Advances and Controversies in Clinical Nutrition conference and came back with a lot of ideas for blogging.  I was happy to see a number of things i've blogged about and my thoughts on clinical nutrition were covered at the conference, with similar conclusions - I identify more as a scientist and less as a future clinician so it's good to see i'm not totally off base with reality. One very interesting talk was given by the chair of the Food and Nutrition Board (FNB) of the Institute of Medicine (IoM). Before I go on to discuss some relevant points from her talk, there's a few definition you'll need to be sure of (1): Dietary Reference Intake (DRI's ): reference values that are quantitative estimates of nutrient intakes to be used for planning and assessing diets for healthy people (Recommended intakes and Upper Limits) Recommended Dietary Allowance (RDA) (newly called AMDR): the average daily ...

I really applaud anyone who is trying to make positive changes to their lifestyle, especially by improving their nutrition but, few things annoy me more than massively disseminated misinformation. The most virulent case of this is linoleic acid, an omega 6 (n-6) fatty acid. Do one google search of "Omega 6's and Inflammation" and you'll find articles on every internet health site, written by MDs/RDs/etc etc, telling you that Omega 6's, like those found in vegetable oils, are virtually the cause of every modern day ailment, from heart disease, to acne and arthritis. They'll cite you information stating that the n-6:n-3 fatty acid ratio is all out of whack. There seem to be 2 reasons that people claim linoleic acid is pro-inflammatory. 1, because it is a precursor to inflammatory molecules in the body. 2, because it is subject to oxidation, and these oxidative endproducts (reactive carbonyl compounds, ketones, aldehydes) incite an immune response . 1. Lino...

That title is half a fiber joke and half pointing to the need for a Nutrition Fact Check website (similar to the politics version ). Fiber also happens to be a great way to slow down digestion, to reduce the surge of blood sugar following a higher carbohydrate meal and maintain satiety for longer (1). I see/hear a lot of things about Glycemic Index and many of them are not factual, misguided or simply untrue. The most common myth I've heard lately is that all whole grains have the same Glycemic Index value as processed grains (it varies a lot, some do , some don't - see below). Besides the fact that one should be using the Glycemic Load and ditching the Glycemic Index, it's hard to substantiate those rumors - I don't like to call out web sites, simply type into google "whole wheat same GI as white wheat" if you want to see the numerous websites passing around this myth. If you would like a reliable source regarding general Glycemic Indices, try this Ha...

Alkaline diets have blown up in popularity. The theory is that over a long time, eating more foods that act acidic in the body (not necessarily having to be acidic in its food form outside the body) will lead to a leaching of calcium from the bones to neutralize blood pH. Some foods claimed to acidify the blood are simple starches, sodas (rich in phosphoric acid) and animal products (higher in cysteine/methionine, sulphuric amino acid). The blood sits at a pH of 7.34-7.45 - this is very tightly regulated, because too high or too low a pH can alter the rates of enzymatic reactions, protein structures, etc. You wouldn't make it too long if your pH dropped out of this homeostatic range. This all sounds fine and dandy right? More acid-acting foods, more calcium removed from bone to neutralize this. I've said this before - there isn't always a simplistic logic that allows you to infer anything about health.I've always been very apprehensive to accept this theory, because...

If you haven't heard the comments made by David Attenborough regarding humans having stopped evolving, see this ( http://tinyurl.com/khdapmd ). This post only seeks to further support comments made by prominent evolutionary biologists and anthropologists who have already pointed out the flaws in Attenborough's thinking ( http://tinyurl.com/msy24eh ).  As I've pointed out on this blog before, there's a gap in the understanding of human evolution - a lot of people think that only selection is acting as a force of evolution. Attenborough's comments state that humans have stopped selective forces, with the advent of medicine and birth control, etc etc. This is why I wrote the second blog topic on understanding evolutionary and what we can infer about health - there are more forces of evolution than just selection. Evolution is, simply, the change in allele frequencies over time. Alleles are constantly under the effects of genetic drift, with an allele having the p...

Besides Nutrition is Toxicology (dosage/concentration), my other mantra is becoming "No Nutrient Works in Isolation". Metabolism is an amazingly interactive system - one dietary change isn't going to have one effect. Anytime anyone says one aspect of nutrition is bad for you, you must think "in what context?" This is similar to thinking about evolution and natural selection - saying one variant is bad for you is misleading - in what environment does that gene have a detrimental outcome? Obviously, there are genetic defects that are not viable - but for gene variants that we associate with long-term health, good/bad are based on context. As I mentioned before in the folic acid post, the most widespread TT variant of MTHFR seems to be detrimental for maintaining methylation - but probably only in an environment where folic acid and riboflavin intake is low. A quick google search on Fructose and Health effects will take you to websites explaining tha...

The moderate viewpoint always seems to be most truthful, from my experiences. This is especially true in nutrition. I have read articles by MDs stating that nutrition isn't a big issue and there's no evidence showing that fruits and vegetables lead to long life. I have also read alternative health providers stating that eating a raw vegan diet will stave away every ailment known to man. I find this polarized view to be quite vexing - and part of the reason that I'm interested in the intersection of genetics and nutrition. There is definitely no questioning that people benefit from increasing their consumption of nutrient dense foods - getting back to nature is definitely a good thing in a secure food environment; choosing minimally processed foods increases the amounts of vitamins, mineral, antioxidants and phytonutrients that you'll get. It's not all about genetics; people don't become obese due to some genetic defect alone - there needs to be a calorically r...

The term anti-nutrients seems to come up a lot when considering ancestral diets, and for those trying to eat a diet more in line with this concept. For one, I don't think antinutrients is truly the best of describing these plants compounds - calling phytic acid or lectins 'antinutrients' automatically assumes that they are bad in all forms and all concentrations. You'll hear me say this a lot - Nutrition is Toxicology. There is nothing that is inherently bad for you, in and of itself. It depends on the quality, quantity, and form. Don't get me wrong, phytic acid may be something you want to consider, especially if you're a vegetarian with low iron, but it's also been looked at as having anti carinogenic effects (1) - there is definitely not enough of a body of research to draw any overwhelming clinical significance out of this, but there's at least a hint that it's not all bad (phytic acid will probably get its own post later). Anywho, let's ...