What is up you guys? Welcome to another edition of Controversial Thoughts. This is my monologue podcast that comes out every Friday. It's on my podcast, which is called Fundamental Health.

And I'm going to put it on Instagram and YouTube and everywhere else. But wanted to talk this week about almond milk.

People who are interested in plant-based diets in general love almond. This has become the darling of the industry recently with all sorts of companies jumping on the bandwagon to make all sorts of alternatives to dairy milk.

We're going to talk about soy milk at the end of this mini podcast as well. But I want to start by focusing on almond milk. And specifically, an ingredient that is often present in both almond milks and soy milks called carajena.

But before we get to carajena and an interesting paper that I found and why you should probably be avoiding carajena in your diet in general, I wanted to tell you guys about the concept of an animal-based diet.

And when I'm talking to people about this, they don't always understand nuts. Can I eat nuts? Aren't they good for me? Paleolithic diets include nuts, paleo diets, and aren't almonds good for me.

So this video is about all the reasons you don't want to eat almonds and you don't want to eat almond milk. Now, obviously carajena isn't additive to almond milk, but it's still a reason not to consume many almond milks. But there are other problems with almonds like oxalates. But in general, when you think about things from the perspective of a plant-based, a plant-based organism, a plant, these plants want to defend their seeds.

As I talk about many times, plants put so many different defense chemicals into their seeds. They put oxalates and lectins and digestive enzymes into their.

Plant babies are what seeds are. And whether seeds are seeds, nuts, like almonds, grains, like wheat, or barley, or oats, or legumes, like soy, or kidney beans, these are all plant seeds. These are all some of the most highly-dependent foods out there, which is why I recommend against consuming them at all.

So when an animal-based diet is different than a paleolithic diet, because it doesn't have any seeds of any kind, no nuts, no grains, no legumes, no beans, because these are highly-dependent.

So pause on that thought. We're going to talk about how harmful the oxalates in almonds can be, specifically in kids and in adults, causing genital urinary problems, so bladder problems and kidney problems.

And before we get to that, I wanted to talk about this really cool paper looking at Caragenein, a long-shane, sulfated polysaccharide found in algae that's extracted from algae and into a lot of foods as a thickener.

So yet another reason not to eat almond milk. So check this paper out. This is really interesting.

It came across this one recently. The title is, a Caragenein free diet shows improved glucose tolerance and insulin signaling in free diabetes, a randomized pilot, clinical trial.

So as I talk about a lot, this is an interventional trial. This is not epidemiology. This is observational trial. This was published on the 21st of April, 2020. So it's a pretty recent trial.

So they say in the abstract, Caragenein is well known to cause inflammation. So this is a long-shane, sulfated polysaccharide found in seaweeds and algae, well known to cause inflammation, using laboratory laboratory experiments to study mediators and treatments of inflammation.

However, Caragenein is added to hundreds of processed foods to improve the texture. Previous work indicated that low concentrations of Caragenein in drinking water caused marked glucose intolerance and insulin resistance in a mouse model.

Why would that be the case? So we have to imagine that if Caragenein is bad for humans, it's bad for us because it's damaging the gut.

But something about this long-chain, sulfated polysaccharide that we probably never saw much of evolutionarily. And perhaps is some sort of a plant defense molecule and these aquatic plants is actually herming our gut and causing some degree of leaky gut.

And what an interesting connection that is between leaky gut and insulin resistance overall inflammation. This is certainly something that I talked about in the past, but not something that Western medicine really wraps its own much that there could be connections between GI inflammation, specifically damage to the gut epithelium causing quote unquote leaky gut as we know what clothe really and overall activation of the immune system, inflammation insulin resistance.

How fascinating is that? But in this paper, this is exactly what the researchers are suggesting that when they removed Caragenein from the diets of 13 patients with prediabetes. So not a very big study, but interesting.

Interesting is a 12 week randomized parallel arm feeding trial. One group was provided with all meals and snacks with no Caragenein. A second group received a similar diet with an equivalent content of all the macronutrients protein fat and carbohydrates with Caragenein. That was the only difference. What a cool control trial.

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