you mentioned and then certainly in this
clip they talked about the carnivore
lifestyle
i actually made notes of a number of
things i'd like to
rebut or or comment on in terms of that
part of the little clip i watched
if if we have time for me to say a few
things about it like
well let's let's talk a little bit about
the
the the the effects that were that have
been said by saladino and others um
about sulforaphane being goitrogenic in
other words having a negative effect on
the thyroid
um i have some comments there but can
you go ahead and speak to that
is sulforaphane
no it's not yeah maybe not the verb in
itself but yeah i said
a certain isothiocyanate if you wanted
yeah
so so it's it's not and and nor are
broccoli sprouts when eaten in
moderation nor are glucoraph and rich
supplements
um mature broccoli i mean this is a
this is this is a long story but mature
broccoli
broccoli produces different
glucosinolates in different phases of
its lifestyle and market stage broccoli
or heads of broccoli florets
do have things called indole
glucosinolates
when they are acted on by myrosinase
they can
form
they form unstable intermediates and
they can form compounds which
can be toxic or goitrogenic and maybe
even promote certain cancers
depending upon if they're administered
before or after a person gets exposed to
the carcinogen
there's a lot of literature on cancer on
based on animal studies on that and i
think the jury is still
out on the beneficial effects of eating
of those compounds
but the byproducts of indole
glucosinolate metabolism
are among others are things called
indole-3-carbinol and diendolyl
it's really the subject i think for
another uh
another discussion um but in
but i want to bring it back to broccoli
sprouts and sulforaphane
and so we did this 12-week study in
china that i told you about
um well collaborators i i'm not an
author of this
co-author of this most recent study but
they took some of the they took the
blood samples from this
12-week study where we gave them
sulforaphane from broccoli sprouts and
looked at indicators of thyroid thyroid
status hormone status and autoimmune
status
and found absolutely no negative effects
on
thyroid function so that's three months
of continuous ingestion of sulforaphane
that's definitely the longest effect
that's a study that's looked at
thyroid specific potential side effects
but this is the first author's name is
chartoon pakis and
it was 2019 and um
you know this is this is someone whose
specialty is thyroid uh
thyroid function he's published uh quite
quietly on it
and there was no effect so um
yeah yeah that was a great study i mean
three months is a long time and you
certainly would think that
after three months of taking continuous
broccoli sprout extract
every day if there was going to be a
negative effect on the thyroid you would
see it after three months
um moreover that in 2018 there was a
very long-term animal study in rats
where there were two groups of rats
there were some rats that were
that had hypothyroidism drug induced
hypothyroidism
um and then there was a an iodine
deficient group
of rats and they were they were given
broccoli sprouts
uh freeze dried or whatever you know
broccoli sprout extract
and not only was there no harmful effect
on the thyroid
even in iodine deficient animals um
in terms of their high thyroid
homeostasis so their th
their their thyroid stimulating hormone
their t34 were all
the same in the animals they're in the
rats that had hypothyroidism
there was a beneficial effect from the
broccoli sprouts in the thyroid gland an
antioxidant effect that was beneficial
so to say that it's a goitrogen and
gonna have negative effects on the
on the on the thyroid it's it's it's
quite funny because
you see this sort of echo chamber uh
meme going around uh particularly in
groups that are
anti-plant um and they just have it all
wrong
a complete lack of understanding and and
not even looking at
actual good data so yeah well
you know it interestingly um this
persists in the medical community too
so in in one of our studies the the
autism study that we published in 2014
the there were questions from the irb
which is made up of
among other things physicians about
the potential for thyroid thyroid issues
and were we going to monitor thyroid
chemistry
and and we did and we had went through
the same explanation
sort of that i just did with you um and
so in that study
after the 12-week 12-week study with a
follow-up um
or 16-week i guess i have to review my
own
papers but um daily consumption
this was with autistic kids not
perfectly uh
nor healthy subjects but um there were
there were we followed thyroid chemistry
and as i recall there were a couple of
times when thyroid
function was flagged uh and they wound
up being in
in placebos uh those that are getting
placebo
so um yeah i mean it's a concern that
keeps on coming up but
with market stage broccoli it's it's a
valid question to ask can you get too
much market sage broccoli
perhaps yeah yeah but um and there are
areas where
um goiter is endemic and those people
eat a hell of a lot of cabbage
um right there also are certain things
like arsenic in the soils there so
the cabbage right exactly i mean there's
a lot of confounding factors and cabbage
is not broccoli sprouts
like i mentioned there's hardly any
glucoraphanin in cabbage
the other question also was related to
saladino and the question
was how do you respond to paul
saladino's claims on
joe rogan's podcast that the risks of
sulforaphane outweigh the benefits
okay are we do we have from now till
close
until 11 30 yeah we've got we've got 14
minutes
okay so i have i made just a short
little list of nine points um i don't
want to go through them
in detail but let me let me just sort of
tick them off i guess
so um i think on multiple levels it's
bad advice
uh to the the carnivore lifestyle
uh is bad advice human beings didn't
evolve as kind of as carnivores we're
omnivores that means
we eat a variety um vegetable
and and meat um and
you know this is this is a product of
evolution you can look at tooth and
mouth
and jaw structure and all sorts of other
anatomical things it's clear we didn't
evolve to be carnivores
and i think a self-anointed fitness and
or nutrition guru is not going to change
the course of human evolution
in a generation and you know
i call them sensationalist claims or not
but the bottom line is there is there's
certain dogma scientific dogma and
evolution
our evolution as human beings
is something that they're not going to
be able to rewrite and certainly
for you know varieties the spice of life
certainly eating broccoli sprouts
only to the exclusion of everything else
would be terrible for you
so but that's not what anybody's
advocating
um uh point four
uh studies of phytochemicals in
isolation
and in fight in food matrices
and in limited combinations with other
phytochemicals vitamins minerals etc
show almost without exception that
yes some things are frank toxins think
about nicotine
um they're toxic at pretty much any
level and the toxicity goes up
most most many phytochemicals not most
but many phytochemicals have
a u-shaped uh effects curve a hormesis
or a hormetic effect
so spanning from no effect at very low
concentrations to
perhaps benefit or satisfying a
requirement
to harm or toxicity at the highest level
um you know everything's toxic at some
level water is
sugar is salt is and sulforaphane is
um so i think the evidence is
overwhelming though that that eating
a lot of broccoli or broccoli sprouts is
not is
is not harmful for you um
there's we talked about the the
extensive evidence of all sorts of
pathways that are upregulated
protective pathways um it's thoroughly
documented in the literature
and the subject of many clinical studies
now good clinical studies and some bad
ones
you