Let's say you're trying to lose 20 pounds or boost your immunity or increase your ability to fight covid or even cancer. Well, the amazing thing is with the right diet. You are well on your way to achieving these vital health goals. Welcome to the nutrition facts podcast. I'm your host. Dr. Michael Greger. It's time for the nutrition facts grab-bag where we look at the latest science on a whole variety of Topics. In our first story will look at the dangerous effects.
of heavy metal
music. If you search for heavy metal in the National Library of Medicine, database, most of what you find is on, heavy metal contamination. In this, for example, making it so hard to clearly establish the role of fish and a healthy diet. Perhaps helping to explain that quintuplet of odds, of autoimmune diseases, like juvenile arthritis, for instance, but searching the hazards of heavy metal also pops up, entries on the risks from heavy metal music.
Here they were talking about traumatic injuries from slamming around, but you're more likely to get injured and alternative rock concert. It's the Goo Goo Dolls. You got to worry about, not Nine Inch Nails. Okay, sure. Music induced hearing loss is a serious problem, but that can be from any loud music. It's interesting clinical recommendations include the 80 to 90, rule no more than 80% of the maximum volume on personal listening devices for no more than
90 minutes a day, but that's not what the science shows. Do not exceed 60% of the maximum volume, maybe more evidence-based, but they figure teens would just ignore that. So they came up with a more acceptable advice. I assumed, I'd see a lot of satanic Panic nonsense from the 80s where parents bereaved by Suicide started suing heavy metal musicians. What kind of evidence did the parents present? There's been little scholarly research.
On till this study that proceeded to try to correlate the number of Statewide Heavy Metal magazine subscriptions to youth suicide rates. Oh, you got to be kidding when researchers called psychiatric institutions pretending to be parents worried because their son started listening to that heavy metal music even though they made it clear that their son didn't exhibit. Any symptoms of mental illness. No drugs. No alcohol and was doing fine at school, 10 of the 12 facilities believe.
Sun, required psychiatric hospitalization. Imagine what that would do to a kid turns out? If you actually come back, a few decades later, metalheads were, significantly happier in their youth and a better psychologically adjusted than their peers. Some studies. We're just strange to Parkinson's, patients, walk better. Listening to Yellow Submarine or Master of Puppets. Other studies were just like duh, heavy metal, musicians exhibit, a higher heart rate than those.
Arming contemporary Christian, much of a shocker. Some studies were kind of cute the Influence of Music on promoting patient safety during surgery. Veterinary patients. Kitty's getting spayed with little earphones on their head. Turns out that Adagio for Strings may be more relaxing than a CDC, our view on music therapy for human patients, warned that caution should be exercised when guiding patients in selecting their music as chaotic.
Music. Such as hip hop, and metal is not healing to human cells with three citations. No less. The two of them. Don't say anything. And the third is a nursing newsletter, merely quoting someone's opinion, but I did some digging and it turns out stomach, cancer cells like metal. If you play them, Cannibal Corpse versus Beethoven 12 hours of Death, Metal increased their growth in a Petri dish. That's so metal, but who puts headphones on their stomach?
Oh, or their chests for that matter. Well, in one study, Mozart killed off. One type of breast cancer cell line and not another in another study. Only Beethoven's Fifth seem to work in Mozart flopped when the Petri dishes were surrounded by speakers and little platform of the even get this stuff published. Anyway, the true Danger from heavy metal is head-banging, head-banging is a contemporary dance form. Consisting of abrupt flexion extension movements of the
Commonly seen in heavy metal. The number of avid aficionados is unknown, but some fans might be endangered by indulging excessively. Although generally considered harmless Health complications attributed to this practice include ripping your carotid artery or rupturing your long whiplash, injury and neck fracture or in this case a subdermal hematoma. This guy reported head-banging at a Motorhead concert and all that brisk forward and backward acceleration might have
Ruptured, his bridging veins and caused him to bleed, into his skull, bridging veins bridge, the gap between the brain and the covering that lines, the inside of your skull. And if the veins tear blood can build up under your skull and compress your brain. This bridging vein rupture has been demonstrated on head-banging cadavers again, A Very Metal study. It's been likened to a kind of shaken baby syndrome in adults. The researchers conclude that there are
Serves as evidence in support of motorhead's rock-and-roll reputation, but I think the real takeaway is that a potentially dangerous complication, like that can result from a seemingly, benign activity. And some of the brain bleeds can be massive. Hmm. See, you can tear more than just veins. There are two sets of arteries that tunnel into the skull. The carotid arteries in the front and their vertebral arteries in the back and you can't are both sets a fifteen-year-old indulged.
In head-banging, ripping his carotid artery, which led to a massive stroke, and he presented half paralyzed and unable to speak and died in a coma within a week. What about the vertebral arteries in the back there? Wedge into your skull, rendering them susceptible to shearing forces from extremes of neck motion. And that's exactly what appeared to happen. A heavy-metal, drummer tearing the wall of the artery. Now, obviously, all this is really rare. Probably afflicting.
Less than 1 in 1,000 or so what can metalheads do to reduce their risk to prevent injury due to such head-banging. The range of head and neck, motion should be reduced, slower Tempo, Music should replace metal. Good luck with that. The frequency of head-banging, could be only on every second beat. It's actually not a bad idea or personal. Protective equipment, should be used, what? Like a neck brace little formal injury. Research has been conducted.
In the worldwide phenomenon of head-banging. So researchers constructed the theoretical head-banging model with enough physics. Terms to make any nerd, happy angular displacement, sinusoidal Motion in the sagittal plane. Amplitude of the displacement. Curve study, participants Headbangers, but you do need a control group easy, listening music, head injury curves, neck injury curves, based on head-banging Tempo and angular sweep at an average headband.
Temple. We're trying to keep the range of motion under 75 degrees. So to minimize the risk of head and neck injury Headbangers should decrease the range of head and neck motion. Unfortunately, it is difficult. If not impossible to change the habits of heavy metal aficionados. Maybe what we need are metal studded, neck, braces,
and our next story, we look at what the gut has to do with developing Parkinson's, disease.
Parkinson's disease is a never worsening neurodegenerative.
Disorder that results in death and affects about one in 50 of us, when we get older a small minority of cases are genetic and run in families, but 85 to 90 percent of cases are sporadic. Meaning they just seemingly pop up out of nowhere. It's caused by the death of a certain kind of nerve cell in the brain. Once about 70% of them are gone the symptoms start. Okay. So what kills off those cells, it's still not completely clear, but the abnormal clumping of a protein called
Alpha-synuclein is thought to be involved. Why? Because if you inject Blended Parkinson's brains into the heads of rats are monkeys, you can induce Parkinson's, pathology and symptoms or even just injecting the pure clumped, alpha-synuclein strands themselves. Okay, but how do these clumps naturally end up in the brain? It all seems to start in the gut. The part of the brain where the pathology often First shows up is directly connected to the gut and we have
Direct evidence of the spread of Parkinson's pathology from the gastrointestinal, tract to the brain alpha-synuclein from brains of Parkinson's, patients taken up in the gut wall and creeping up the vagal nerves from the gut into the brain. But this was in rats. If only, we had a way to go back and look at people's corns before they got Parkinson's and indeed, we can old: biopsies were dredged up from people who would later, develop, Parkinson's and years.
For symptoms arose. You could see the alpha-synuclein in their gut research supported by the Michael J. Fox Foundation has found that you can reliably distinguish. The colons of patients from controls by the presence of the Parkinson's, protein lodged in the gut wall, but had to get there in the first place. Perhaps vertebrate food products as a potential source of prion like alpha-synuclein, see nearly all the animals with backbones.
That we eat cows chickens pigs and Fish Express the protein alpha-synuclein. And so when we eat common meat products, when we skeletal muscle were eating nerves, blood cells and the muscle cells themselves, every pound of meat has like a teaspoon to a tablespoon of blood in it. And that alone could be an alpha synuclein Source. Potentially trigger clumping, Cascade of Our Own alpha-synuclein in the gut though may seem intuitive that dietary alpha-synuclein could see
This kind of build up in our gut. What evidence do we have? That, it's actually happening. There's a surgical procedure called vagotomy, which the big nerve that goes from your gut. To your brain is cut as an old-timey treatment for stomach ulcers, woodcutting communication between the gut and the Brain, reduce Parkinson's risk, apparently, so suggesting that the gut to brain vagal nerve may be critically involved in the development of Parkinson's disease. Now, of course, many people,
Regularly consume meat and dairy products, but only a small fraction of the general, population will develop Parkinson's. So, there must be other factors at play, that may somehow provide an opportunity for unwanted dietary alpha-synuclein to enter the host and initiate disease. For example, your gut becomes leakier as you age. So might that play a role. Well, what else makes your gut leaky dietary. Fiber. Deprivation has also been shown to degrade the intestinal barrier and hands pathogen and
So this all Races possibilities for a food based therapies. Parkinson's, patients, have significantly less private tell in their Gutta friendly fiber eating floor, that bolsters your intestinal barrier function. So, low levels of cravat. Ella is linked to a leaky gut which has been linked to intestinal alpha-synuclein deposition. But fiber, rich foods may bring private all levels back up. Therefore by adopting a plant-based diet in addition to getting the beneficial effects of Fire.
No nutrients. It's possible that increasing overall fiber intake, May modify the gut microbiome and gut, leakiness and beneficial ways. So does a vegan diet, one with lots of fiber, no meat reduce risk for Parkinson's Disease and Parkinson's, does appear to be rare in quasi vegan. Cultures, rates are about five times lower. In rural sub-Saharan Africa, for instance. And now all this time, we were thinking the benefit seem for Parkinson's from plant-based diets was due to the antioxidants and
Inflammatory nature of the animal free diets but maybe it's also due to the increased intestinal exposure to fiber and decrease the intestinal exposure to ingested nerves and muscles and blood.
Finally today. We look at what randomized controlled human trials. Tell us about the ways we may or may not benefit from eating onions.
Onions are potentially a good source of antioxidants, though. Interestingly. The antioxidants are concentrated in the outer layers immediately, under the papery peel. Unfortunately, most consumers discard these most nutrient, Rich outermost layers. Thus losing a valuable part. Here are some numbers more than 10 times more antioxidants in the outer layer of white onions. Compared to the core. You'll also note that yellow onions in general, have more antioxidants than white and a red onions. Beat them both.
Based on three different antioxidant testing methods. That's why I always try to buy red. The red onions are indeed slightly better yellow or white onions are no slouches containing considerable levels of antioxidant activity so nutritious, sure, but are there any particular clinical benefits to onion consumption? For example, here's a review. Purporting to have evidence that testosterone in males are enhanced by onion, but the researchers were talking about studies on the effects of onions.
Juice on testicular. Torsion in rats, who cares. What happens after a rat? Testicle is rotated, 720 degrees counterclockwise, except. Of course the rat you don't know what happens in people until you put human testes to the tests and onion extracts. Don't appear to work. Okay, what about bone health? Evidently older white women who consumed onions at least once a day had overall bone.
And
there was five percent greater than individuals, who consume the onions. No more than once a month, 5%, might not sound like a lot. But that Improvement in bone density, could potentially translate into decreasing, the risk of hip fracture by more than 20%. If indeed it was cause and effect daily. Administration of onion did cause a big bump in bone density. This opens the possibility for a low-cost safe and effective nutritional approach to osteoporosis. You guessed it in the
A rat. Another rodent study rats, but finally, here we go. Tremendous strides have been made in treating osteoporosis with drugs, but they have the potential for serious adverse side effects. So scientists have drawn their attention to natural remedy. So let's randomize people to drink onion juice or Placebo, onion juice. I don't know. What sounds worse. Sugary onion juice or fake. Sugary onion use and as
Drinking onion, juice wasn't bad enough. It was all for nothing. It didn't even work. What about the anti-allergy? Activities of shallots and any therapeutic effects on helping allergic runny noses, 16, such patients were randomized equally into an antihistamine group or a group that got antihistamines, plus some capsules, containing dried shallot powder, and it looked like the shell, it group did better, but there was actually
We know statistically significant difference in total symptoms between the two groups. So another hashtag on Yin fail. There has to be something onions. Can do what about testing the effects of fresh? Yellow onion consumption on breast cancer. Patients to try to decrease the toxic effects of a chemotherapy drug called doxorubicin. Unfortunately, no, significant benefit was found on decreasing damage to the liver or heart. But here we go. Finally, a clinical
The onions, the consumption of fresh yellow onion ameliorates, the high blood sugars and insulin resistance in breast cancer patients during doxorubicin. Based chemotherapy doxorubicin isn't just toxic to the liver and heart may also contribute to insulin resistance. So, let's do a randomized. Triple blind controlled clinical trial. Randomizing patients to, like a whole onion a day or a third. I'm an onion. Add a what happened? The high onion group experienced a significant decrease in.
In blood sugars and insulin resistance compared to the low on in Group. They went up in the law and group but down in the high onion group. So make onions your friend. What's the worst that can happen? A little onion breath and Bo probably the least of your worries if you have cancer on
chemotherapy.
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