so today we're going to do something a little different we're going to take a
look under the hood somebody asked a really
good question in last week's video: mr or mrs (not sure)
vegan for the animals says, "do chia seeds have to be ground up?
google says yes and no, not sure what's the truth." so this is a really good
question, if we chia seeds whole or really any
seeds, are we getting any of that nutrition in
there or are the seeds just going for a ride in our gut? but even more broadly,
this happens all the time. we hear some claim, we try
to fact check on the internet and we see conflicting information and
we don't know what to believe. so let's go over
how to find solid information, the actual MO
so that you can do it yourself and you don't need me anymore. so there's lots of
different databases of scientific work, let's go with Google
Scholar, it's more intuitive, the look, we're used to it for obvious reasons
so if i search chia seed i already know what's gonna happen but just to show you
we get almost 70 000 results. the nerds have been busy
and we're gonna go over every single one of these in detail in this video so
stick around, get a drink... no, just kidding. everybody's like "going
back to cat videos"... okay so this is just like google except
instead of websites each hit is a research study. and we started with
a very general search in this case so of course predictably the results are
a little all over the place. structure of chia seeds, chia seeds
oil blah blah so we do exactly what we would do in
google, we narrow the search, we go more specific. so
let's try "chia seed whole". okay, we're looking for whole versus
ground. okay, that's more interesting. so each hit
shows the title here in big letters. look, chia fed as ground or whole, that's
what we're looking for, bingo. except it's in rats... alright, i'm
assuming most of you are not primarily interested in rat nutrition, correct me
if i'm wrong. but look at the second one. in women.
that's humans last i checked. and this little excerpt, this little
blurb over here talks about milled chia, that's ground
that's a synonym, right? and whole chia. this could be interesting
so let's take a look. click the title right here. ok, chia
seed supplementation and disease risk, a metabolomics investigation. what a page
turner! this sounds like, this is like the da
vinci code for nerds. don't ever get intimidated by
sciency terms, this stuff is not as complicated as it seems, anybody can
do this with a little bit of time and inclination
okay so below the title we always find the abstract
that's nerd for summary. okay, so this is going to give us the juice
of the paper. so right here, objective: the study assessed the effectiveness of
milled and whole chia seed. that's what we're looking for. and look
right here in the results: ALA increased 58%. so ALA is an
essential fat that chia has a lot of and it's actually
an omega-3 fatty acid and we talked a lot about it in last
week's video. so ALA increased 58% and EPA, that's another omega-3,
increased 39% in the milled chia seed group
compared to non-significant changes in the whole chia seed
and placebo groups. so that's exactly what we're looking for. comparing
whole seeds and ground seeds and seeing how nutrient absorption differs. so let's
see if we can take a look at the actual whole paper.
if we click 'view paper' right here, we hit a paywall but
don't panic, we got some tricks up our sleeve
so navigate back to google scholar and right here
is that reference for that paper and if instead of clicking the title
we click this link to the right, it takes us straight to the full text
so here we are. we already covered the title and the abstract
the actual body of the paper usually has four sections
first is the introduction, pretty self-explanatory, they cover kind of the
the broad picture of the field and how these experiments they're about to do
fit in, the logic, second is the methods, basically the MO, the technicalities of
how the experiments were done. third is results, that's the gist of the,
you know, the outcome of the experiments they did
and last is discussion, again pretty self-explanatory, just kind of how their
results fit into the general broad picture of
the field. now obviously we could spend an hour here
going through every section but let's zoom straight through to the results
and right in figure 1 it shows us what we want. here's ALA,
that omega-3 fatty acid we talked about, and this is plasma levels so levels
in the bloodstream, and you can see that with whole chia,
right here these bars, before and after the study there's no real difference
whereas with milled seeds, with ground seeds, you see a significant increase
in the blood levels of ALA. the little asterisk over here,
this is normal code in the literature, it means it's statistically significant
so we could go over how much chia they were fed and how long the study lasted,
it's all in there, but right off the top this study is
telling us that at least in those conditions
we need to grind the chia seeds to get those omega-3 fats, whereas the whole
seeds don't seem to do much. so that's what i
replied to that viewer in the comments but then i wondered,
what about soaked chia seeds? because when we make those delicious
chia puddings we don't grind and they look really different,
mushy, almost like a gel, so is that all wasted nutrition?
so let's investigate some more. if we search for example chia seed
ALA water, let's say. and right the first hit is talking about
chia seed and placebo mixed with water and then consumed after sitting for 10
minutes. okay, that's what we're looking for. and
it says something about ALA here. this could be interesting, let's take a
look. click right there, the title... actually not the title, click right there,
take us straight to the full text. we got our abstract,
and we see over here ALA increased 24% in chia seed and in this
paper they're soaking the chia seeds before
consumption as we saw so soaking also seems to work at least to
some extent. so even with this really quick search we've already learned a lot
both grinding and soaking seem to improve the absorption of omega-3 fatty
acids from chia. the effects seemed a little stronger in the first paper
with the grinding but we've got to bear in mind it's really tricky to compare
results across studies. so in actionable terms what are we going to do?
one option is to just mix it up, sometimes have it ground on your cereal
in the morning for example and some other times when you feel like
it have it soaked in a chia pudding. that's what i do
that gives you a little bit more variety, you don't have to be chained
down to one way of eating it, it's more interesting anyway. so that's just a
really quick illustration but you can see how powerful this can be
as a method to look for information when you're confused
and to protect yourself because knowledge is power, right?
here's last week's video on omega-3s if you want to get a little deeper into
that and here's more on the different types
of fat and how to make sense of studies that seem to contradict each other