So I’ve been trying to eat healthier overall and thought I was doing pretty good until I keep seeing all these videos popping up on YouTube talking about how we shouldn’t eat vegetables and that most of them like kale, spinach, broccoli ect all contain toxins harmful to our digestive systems (see carnivore md paul saladino channel) but then there are channels like AthleanX that say half your plate SHOULD contain green vegetables…which is it?
a lot of people in the western world have had a heavily processed diet which messes up the immune system and the microbiome. this leads to allergies and intolerances. basically people start reacting to a lot of common food. some people react to a very very wide range of food, including a lot of different plant foods and even green vegetables. they go on a carnivore diet and feel better. if youre not reacting to green vegetables, eat them.
I love meat! But the anti vegetable rhetoric is a bunch of crap. Sure would be cool if it were true though…all meat all the time!!! Sadly, it is not the case. If it were, vegans would never have made it 😉
Vegetables by themselves would not be toxic unless it’s something you’re allergic to. I’d suggest not watching YouTube videos and actually following science. Maybe they’re talking about chemicals that are used to harvest but Kale, spinach and broccoli are not toxic in their natural form.
Both…..it’s a balancing act between the two. Plants ARE full of chemicals, some of them healthy, some of them toxins. Life has been playing a game of one-upmanship forever. With plants and animals adapting to each other. Humans have been adapting plants by various means for a long time. Lots of foods have to be prepared in special ways to have them be edible or maintain nutrients. Unfortunately some people for various reasons lack certain adaptations and may have food intolerances or allergies. These can often not be super aware of what actual food is giving them issues so elimination diets can give them some relief. In some cases after a rest, their system might be able to tolerate the food and others might have to avoid the food from then on. It’s clear that world wide there are different healthy ways to live but those different lifestyles also have differing health complications. Carnivore diet can help some people like Saladino but he has moved away from pure carnivore to include fruit and honey for example. Others have maintained carnivore for many years. Just because one person does well on a particular food it doesn’t mean that all people can tolerate equal diets as genetics and microbiomes and cultural eating practices as well as many other health factors all play a part. If you look at world wide consumption of foods it’s clear that green leafy vegetables play a part but they are only accounting for 10-15% ish of calories.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7352906/
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/vegetable-consumption-per-capita
Notice how this graph/map tops out at 280 kilos per year. But some of the longest lived countries in the world not being top consumers.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/what-the-world-eats/
So despite people opinions on what is the perfect diet is the world isn’t there yet.
Working my way through this, that popped up while I was writing your reply.
There does seem imho to be a bit of a bell curve in diets and that being why a balanced diet seems to be best. If you eat only a particular source then it’s more likely to hit nutrient deficiency or toxic buildup.
The dose makes the poison. You wouldn’t want to go eating pure oxalate, but the amount in vegetables is only an issue if you eat a massive amount (like kilos of veggies each meal) and even then probably isn’t an issue unless you have kidney disease. Other phytochemicals that get targeted by these people are phytates and lectins. Yet most of the plants that contain all of these are associated with better health outcomes, not worse. A lot of the so-called antinutrients also have other properties that are helpful to human health.
Nutritionfacts.org is an excellent resource for this and many other questions. I’ve been going there for a decade. Provides deep dive meta analyses, generally supporting whole food plant based diets as the best.
The content is super accessible, videos, and now a podcast.