Adventures in Nutrition: The Unexpected Problems and Dangers of Plant Foods
We are surprisingly ineffective at digesting many plant-based foods, causing their nutritional value to be overstated and if we could fully digest them, our definition of what is edible may have to change.
Breaking a Biological Barrier Better than Evolution
The quest to break down cellulose in foods in a controlled way has fascinated me for over a decade now. My early attempts in this area had limited success and resulted in a early morning raid of my home by a narcotics task force. (No narcotics were found nor were there any charges pressed, but that is a story for another blog post.) Suffice to say, cellulose is an incredibly robust molecule and the techniques involved in breaking it down are pretty extreme.
Even with billions of years of evolution, nature hasn’t been able to find a way to readily break down cellulose, and I wanted to solve the problem in what is comparatively the blink of an eye. And being the compulsive experimenter that I was, I soon would find a way to break down cellulose, and this time without attracting the attention of the police! Unfortunately, it would end up making a number of people rather sick in totally unexpected ways.
My focus turned to physical approaches to attack cellulose, as enzymes required a relatively narrow and low pH range to be efficient, often low enough to damage other organic compounds in the food. Acid based approaches destroyed all the other organic compounds. So physical was definitely the best route, and it seemed like a blender would be the way. My target model was trying to make a perfectly smooth wild blueberry smoothie, because most blenders didn’t come close and it was obvious in the restroom there was a lot of antioxidants going unabsorbed from typical blenders.
After extensive testing and side by side (and a lot of product returns) I settled on the Cleanblend as the most powerful blender available for general purpose smoothie-type blending applications. Honestly, I feel this blender is really only on the edge of unlocking the world of plants for our digestion. Starting with deeply frozen berries, I would usually have to run it to the point of them being fully melted and even slightly warm from the mere friction of the very sharp stainless steel Japanese blades. Sometimes, even that was not enough, and I would freeze the smoothie into ice cubes and repeat, or I would let it keep going, even as the friction would heat the slurry to a rolling boil with steam gushing out.
Although it was a struggle, I was able to cross a barrier that had been pretty much out of reach previously. I was able to actually rip apart celluose and lignans to a useful degree, breaking down plant structures so that we could fully absorb their constituents. Moreover, because I did this through physical action, and in many cases without significant heat, it would largely leave all the other complex organic compounds intact and fully available to the human body. And the end result would be totally smooth, so one could consume even things goats might not like very much, such as blackberry vines.
Basically, I succeeded in augmenting the human digestive system so that it could access pretty much everything in plant based foods.
Fully unlocking berries for digestion has been an almost universal win. Combined with non-glycemic sweeteners, a powerful blender makes wild blueberries and cranberries a truly delicious smoothie drink. The blender would reduce the seeds and skins down completely, yielding a smoothie that has a texture more like a peach or mango smoothie. The high levels of mostly water soluble antioxidants were quickly and easily absorbed, and the smoothie would provide a distinct energizing effect almost like a cup of coffee.
Overall, experiments using berries came out universally favorably. Generally speaking, the more you would blend, the better it would taste, the better you would absorb it, and the better you would feel. The distinctively stimulating levels of antioxidants was really unexpected and visual fecal monitoring verified that virtually all of the anthocyanin antioxidants were being absorbed. I also loved the effects on acai puree, paired with wild blueberries I could actually create a smoothie that could keep me awake at night if consumed too close to dinner, simply from so many antioxidants.
Many vegetables also responded well to blending. Most antioxidant rich solanaceae “vegetables” (tomatoes, peppers, etc.) were extremely delicious blended down and definitely seemed to be a bit more energizing when eaten. Squash were pleasant tasting, but did not exhibit any apparent digestive or nutrition absorption alterations. Onions were very nice too. Celery was unremarkable but added a pleasant mild taste. Typically, I woulds make a hot soup with vegetables, although cold V8 style drinks were quite nice too.
Some unexpected greens turned out to be very nice in savory soup applications, such as onion greens and blackberry vines. Blackberry vines, if pre-blended, actually had a slight berry note and mild flavor and made a nice addition to cold fruit smoothies. They seemed to have something beneficial as the smoothies seemed more satisfying, complete and energizing.
Using a blender to extend the digestive tract demonstrated that we are not very effective at absorbing a lot of nutrients. For example, I can eat dried goji berries until my stomach is physically full without any upset. It’s clear that I’m missing a lot of the lycopene by the effect on fecal coloration. But in a smoothie form, there is much less fecal color effect, yet I can only handle a few ounces dried goji in a sitting - any more and I get a characteristic “mineral upset stomach” effect. This suggests that despite the high levels of minerals and antioxidants in gojis are, we can only absorb a relatively small fraction of them without the assistance of a blender.
The whole brassica family is rich in indigestible sugars, encased in plant cellulose. Also encased in the plant cellulose is their purportedly beneficial compounds. Blending definitely did an incredible job at releasing the indigestible sugars, causing gas to a degree I had never experienced before from modest servings of said vegetables. This suggests that typical ways of eating brassicas fail to give us access to most of their beneficial compounds.
Now, most of this stuff - we suck at absorbing nutrition from a lot of the best “superfoods” out there - won’t come as a surprise to people who have studied our evolution and physiology. What may come to a surprise is just that some food we eat can be downright dangerous if we fully digest it. The best example is the common mango.
I started making these amazing mango smoothies. Everyone loved them. They were buttery smooth, made with fully peeled frozen organic mango pieces. Then people started breaking out in rashes. I even developed mild rashes. One person got severe rashes and itching, to the point it made it nearly impossible for him to sleep and he sought extensive medical evaluation at Stanford. It took over 4 months to fully clear up. Nobody would believe me it was my smoothies, as many had eaten huge amounts of mangos at various times in their lives, but I’m absolutely convinced it was in fact my smoothies.
Mangos are related to poison oak and poison ivy and contain urushiol. Generally, the levels in the fruit are considered negligible, but I’ve never seen an analysis. All I know is that once I began blending the fruit down like crazy, people started getting rashes. And the rashes went away after I eliminated my mango smoothies, even though they protested. The rashes also responded to treatment protocols for urushiol-related autoimmune skin reactions.
I also had some interesting experiences blending citrus - I had a severe bloating and gained over 20 pounds of water weight temporarily, when I had never exhibited a significant allergy prior. What was different? I blended the peeled fruit whole super extensively.
After the mango and citrus incidents, I pretty much decided it was time to stop blending new plant-based foods, especially fruit. Even seemingly common foods seem to hide harmful compounds. I shudder to think what might have happened if I started blending grains…
Most of our nutritional assumptions about the nutritional value of plants are probably significantly overstated, as they rely on absolute chemical analysis and do not factor in absorption which is clearly relatively poor. I also believe that many plant-based foods harbor allergenic / inflammatory compounds that are not sufficiently recognized but probably contribute to health harms over the long term similar to gluten’s inflammatory effects.
More research is clearly required here, but I have no idea who would fund this kind of thing. There is no “anti-fruit” lobby. There is no specific industry that stands to benefit from reduced fruit consumption. These are hard questions with uncomfortable answers for the status quo.
Direct comments and discussion to my Twitter.
