#403: What's REALLY In Your Food? | Dark Secrets of Ultra-Pasteurized Milk, Natural Flavors & Microplastics EXPOSED With Ben Katz

Welcome to Longevity. I'm your host, Natalie Knidham. I'm a nutritionist, a human potential and epigenetic coach, and I created this podcast to bring you the latest ways to take control of your health and longevity. We cover it all, from new technology and ancestral health practices to personalized interventions and a very special interest of mine, peptides and bioregulators. Enjoy the show. Hi, I'm Natalie Knidham, your host, and we are back with a brand new guest. My guest today is Ben Katz, also known as Mr. Mass Speck, an academic and a little chemist at UC Irvine who reverse-engineers everything from Taco Bell meat to popcorn to Doritos, and sometimes entire industries. His mission? Figure out what's actually in our stuff. We talk about why synthetic nicotine may actually be cleaner than plant-arrived, how natural flavors can hide everything from modified peppermolecules to sweeteners, and why your ultrapastorized milk has to be reflavored just to taste like milk again. 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Like I said, I have to give credit to my producer on this one. She's like, Nat, you need to meet this guy and you need to interview him. And I was like, all right. And then I started looking into you and I was like, Oh my God, this is so cool. So I think this is so super cool for the audience. I know that you're going to be right with me. Ben, why don't you tell us a little bit? You're the mass spectrometry. I've gone by the name Mr. Mass spec and then the channel on everything is mass spec everything now. So it's kind of I didn't limit myself in my mass specing. I'm not noticed and I may have bitten off more than I can chew here. So yes, from boost to plastic bags and everything in between. You think of and then people are I put a voicemail line, which is kind of fun. So I started trying to do like a little voicemail line Twitch show and then so people call in and leave suggestions and I get lots of email suggestions and then I am an academic. I met I met UC Irvine. So I have all my academic projects as well. So it's a good guy. But it's a fun it's a fun side project here, this mass spec everything brand. I love it. So why don't we tell people what a mass spec is? Mass spectrometer is a way to measure the mass of molecules and masses typically correspond for small molecules to their chemical formula. And then you can even fragment these molecules inside the mass spec to give you like conclusive fragmentation ions to tell you what something is. And so mass specs are great for figuring out we're like the reverse engineers of stuff. We can figure out what's in stuff. And so that's a lot of what mass spec is being used for when you have complex products. Then we're also doing all the boring things like if a synthetic chemist is just trying to make a chemical and make sure they have made the chemical. We're doing that. We're also doing all the CSI stuff that you see on TV like we're forensics. So I do some forensics work. And then we're also doing a lot of the kind of boring quality control work that should be done like is this product or for this you know ingredient you receive the same as the last batch. And so there's mass spec people that are running you know quality control at a bunch of companies. And then a huge portion of my academic work is all pharmaceutical. So the pharmaceutical industry is probably the biggest in making both small and large molecule drugs and biologics. And so mass spec plays a role in all of that in part of the quality control and confirming that we've made things properly. And then yeah educating students to do it and have jobs to do a little chemistry. So all the things. Yeah. So how did you get started though on what you do. So clearly you have a job and in your job. People bring you things. But how did you get started being Mr. Mass spec. So I definitely didn't like seek out to be Mr. Mass spec. I was originally making YouTube videos. Maybe like three or four years ago. And they were just instructional how to use mass spec videos. And they're very unpopular super unpopular just for my needs. People how to use this piece of equipment. And then I think I went through like a long period of I thought it was interesting to for like people that don't know a mass spec lab to like see just like a piece of robotics move for 15 seconds. So I went through like a silent phase where I was just showing equipment moving. And then I think I just like randomly one day decided to start talking in a video and it did better. People wanted to hear my voice. And I was like OK. So people actually want to hear my voice. And then I think what did it all was I made a video on TikTok about what's in the Taco Bell meat. So I was in the Taco Bell taco. And I did a video what's in the meat. And I think my wife woke me up the next morning. She's like you know that video you just made has like 30,000 views. And then throughout the day it went up to like a million plus views. And then I became the what's in it guy. And for a while it was just meat and burgers. And then I was like I don't want to get pigeonholed and meat and burgers. And so I started doing like some candy and sodas. I did a lot of chocolate. I'm really interested in how much caffeine is in chocolate especially like my kids candy bars that have really caffeinated sometimes. And then I got into checking nicotine pouches for people really interested in these nicotine pouches and vapes and seeing if the nicotine's clean. And so I had already done a lot of that stuff for the FDA. So I was like oh we can just go ahead and like just just open the box out there and explain things to people. So that the nicotine thing is interesting because my understanding is your work with the nicotine products led to some changes in the industry or some products being pulled off the shelf. You want to talk about that what is it about? Generally like I do work with like some of the FDA and DEA enforcement groups which which are like high level enforcement. So when they're making regulations about importing usually it comes down to taxes to tell you the truth is the reason why people like in the government care. Okay well we don't care about that. What we want to know is like in the nicotine world is there variations we need to know about. Yes there's two main differences. There's synthetic nicotine which is taxed one way and there is naturally derived nicotine which is taxed a different way. And so I've been a strong proponent of trying to convince people that synthetic nicotine is better. Because when you extract things out of a plant all these other similar compounds that are related to other xanthan alkaloids for caffeine and then other nicotine alkaloids. So like anabasting and coating are much more they're much more cancerous than nicotine itself is is I guess I mean considered a cancerous drug as well but there's other analogues of it specifically anabasting which would be only in the nicotine plant that can when you're extracting out the nicotine and purifying it it still tags along. Yeah it's a very similar structure and it's far more toxic. And so the idea that sometimes plant produced compounds are more toxic because of tag along molecules is something that people should think about more. I also think it's a problem with caffeine as well. There's this huge push for natural caffeine. I'm actually a proponent of caffeine anhydrous which is no way because caffeine anhydrous you know is 100% caffeine. If you extract it from like green tea or coffee or green coffee you get a lot of other xanthan alkaloids and so you get all these other molecules that have other effects and when you're purifying things and concentrating it from plants you sometimes get way more than you'd actually want. And so my early work in nicotine was checking the validity of importer's claims on whether or not it was synthetic or plant derived. So for the synthetic nicotine basically it's a cleaner product you know what you're getting but is nicotine carcinogenic whether you no matter what way you're ingesting it? I don't know that's the thing I try to like walk that thin line on is I'm not a medical doctor so I'm just gonna go for the medical side of it but as an analytical chemist when people are adding ingredients and they say this product contains nicotine I want the cleanest product possible. I want it to be nicotine purified. There was a bunch of research back on whether or not the diastereomers like if it's all R versus all S or if it's the the racemic mixture. There was some medical research based on that I believe as well as far as addiction I don't know if that's true or not and probably not the right person but there's a lot of stuff on diastereomers as well like when when drug companies make drugs they usually patent the racemic mixture and the purified R and S isomers differently because they have different effects in the body. Yeah so these are mirror images of the molecule right? They have different effects on how they affect your body and so there's usually one isomer that's stronger and so I don't know the research point on nicotine but that's the way that we would check it analytically. The synthetic is going to be a racemic mixture of both and then plants make all one isomer and so if you have somebody's line it's really easy to tell and so we found all sorts of different things from importers where importers were completely line where they were blending they were like an off mixture and so you know in my opinion the same thing you know caffeine is not not chiral but it's the same thing where I like I prefer to for these ingredients for it to be one thing you know and and that's kind of what I've gotten at a lot with the channel is that there are ingredient labels on food and products that are multiple things yeah and they really need to be flushed out and be more specific. Yeah no I guess I was asking and I guess this isn't your work is really like if you light it on fire does it change in a way that makes it more or less toxic versus you know you get like nicotine gum and nicotine chews like you get all these different such a good question I mean absolutely combustion is going to cause differences in the molecule and so yeah I don't know I'm sure there's there's people that research that for sure yeah and then the same thing with vaporizers right vaporizing on a nebulizer on the molecule is different skin absorption of the molecule is going to be different but yeah as far as the known impurities that come from the nicotine plant itself specifically this molecule called anabasthen yeah it's far more toxic than nicotine yeah I'll bet all right so so what was in the Taco Bell meat is there any meat in the taco bell meat? The thing that I think was the hook that people cared about was there was putresine which I see in all but that's but that's part of the spermedine putresine yeah and so it's supposed to kind of be there right but it's funny because that's what people look up and is like rotting meat and then people are like oh it's rotting meat but like really like all dead you know animals are going to be producing this and even plants there's they're producing this and so but it was the hook that got the general population to care about what I said and then I like put out putresine hats and t-shirts a little bit funny and I wore I was probably the number one person that wore them and then uh it was people thought they were pretty I don't know people thought they were funny yeah if you know if you're in the know if you if you know you know yeah well putresine's interesting right because it's part of that triad with the spermedine spermin and putresine that actually has pretty significant beneficial effect on the human body I brought up another one actually when I did the popcorn but most my most recent video is the popcorn video and I dropped the Dye Ferule Putresine which is a metabolite from corn yeah it's kind of an interesting corn metabolite that everyone like criminalizes corn I guess but I think these putresines are supposed to have like you know positive effects you know well and I mean the interesting thing and I think you know it's interesting about corn I mean we live in a society where people really like to they like a sound bite they like a short little hit and the problem with corn is not that it's corn it's that it's been genetically modified and nobody's really bothered to take the time to figure out is this a good thing or a bad thing yeah there's aspects of the corn manufacturing process that could be problematic but you know at the heart of it a little Dye Ferule Putresine is probably not so bad from corn brand yeah well do we know I don't know actually I don't know nobody studied it the literature that I said it was looked like is pretty good I guess when you're doing your work when you're when you're investigating whether it's a food or a drink or whatever it is you're gonna find different peaks on the report and then it's gonna come down to what are you gonna chase down are you gonna look at all the peaks yeah um well for you know for the social media channel it's usually like it is kind of the sound bite or trying to get people interested in what I'm saying I do also try to like have a general theme of things that I'm working on it's not kind of in the background um but yeah you're right it's it's um the the things I haven't focused on in the channel that I get a lot of questions on is quantitation so I've not it's a lot more work and mass spec to be quantitative and to be absolutely quantitative you have to use a different type of equipment and there's a lot more like you know validation stuff I'm doing more discovery so what I call it is a discovery untargeted analysis right and so it's kind of the early stage if you're gonna do like a real research project with the lab like ours you would start where my channel is and you first want to discover things that are in it so because you can't quantify what's in it until you know the things you're looking for and then when you're going to quantify things you need to buy standards and you need to set up standard curves and you need to do everything all proper and that's more boring um and so that's time for that really we're gonna not deal with that don't got time too many things I chose everything right so it's so recently there was a big to-do about a a supplement in the biohacking space for college and there was an ingredient in that in that product that had not been disclosed okay and I've spoken to people in the industry since then who believed that that that ingredient was added by the manufacturer without the company actually even knowing about it and then somebody found it and I don't know how and it was maltodextrin okay maltodextrin seems like something that you may not have to disclose yeah and so the the the brand themselves I think were caught off guard it was a big big deal you know because people started accusing the brand of of being unethical and dishonest when all of them are maltodextrin which is a lot of stuff well right but but I think because because sometimes and particularly in this space people get really really sticky about what is and isn't in a product yeah absolutely right hey I appreciate that I'm like the first advocate of everything being labeled like I want cast numbers for every single ingredient with the molecule name I feel like you know knowledge is power and so a lot of times when I'm talking about stuff it's mainly because I found it and I want people to just be able to do their own research and so I do think that hiding ingredients there's no reason to do it you're not giving people the exact formulation and so I think the more transparency the better because people are empowered now to do their own research and come up with their own answers and so why why hide anything these days and so yeah the questions so did you have you ever looked into I mean I'm just so full of questions right now because you know in I started off as a holistic nutritionist and now I've been in this this space that's slightly more expanded for the last 10 years or so and there's a big narrative around oh yeah cereal companies line the bags of the cereal like the cereal bags in the box with chemicals to keep the cereal crunchy oh well yeah they're probably using tbhq or one of these like approved anti you know antioxidant drying agent type things but yeah for sure which are which is not particularly helpful for human health no I mean that well you know it doesn't need to be disclosed on the box like sometimes they need to be disclosed on the box sometimes they don't so yeah so again on my my general theme my biggest and most general theme is what so who do you come after right how are all these things sneaking into food uh and they aren't allowed to they don't have to put them on the label right there there's rules um so the the way to sneak things in is in the flavors category yeah so I want to talk about that for sure and so there's no um the organization is called FEMA not not the man emergency management issue but the flavors and extractives manufacturing association okay that list has gotten out of control the the extractives manufacturing association which is exactly what it sounds like it's in a manufacturing association it is not a regulated agency they they they recommend directly to the FDA what is considered generally recognized as safe gross I mean if your users probably know the word gross this is a big term how do you get things gross status in the United States because once it's gross you can put it in food and you don't have to really even tell anybody you can kind of like you know you can put it in there and hide it in an ingredient label and so there is what seems like to me a side path into gross which doesn't require testing that's being currently run by a manufacturing organization and it's coming in through flavors and extractives and so that's where they're hiding it yeah and if you say it's in flavoring ingredient or something in this category you don't have to tell people what it is like there's no requirement to that's wild and so this is where so this is where when I mean this is where people like me will tell clients just don't eat anything out of a box or a bag well this is where multidextrin would come in right because multidextrin even though it's a big chemical and it's this big polymer series and stuff like that it's still considered a food additive and so you would still have it in a classification where if you wanted to put it in that category you could it's a great it's crazy what you can put in there and there's almost there's almost no limitations to what you can put in there and the power is it's at your fingertips here like these CFR regulations that are submitted into the the federal government repository these are so accessible now with AI digging like you can read these documents yeah and that's how I get a lot of my subject matter is that if I'm gonna be uh talking about something I'm gonna try to find it specifically where it's approved in the Codifegra regulations wow and so so so flavors and so could that be natural flavors when you see that on on a bag oh yeah well I mean like multidextrin anything it could be essentially found as a natural flavor and so there's so many natural flavors naturally you don't want to think of as natural flavors it's it's naturally inspired flavors yeah it's been found in literature yeah to come from an organism that's alive yeah and you don't have to tell anyone what organism it was alive from right just that it existed once and then you found it and then it's naturally inspired right so I don't think there's really that many uh distinction fully synthetic is artificial so like completely inconceivable that to your point earlier it could almost be better than the natural leaves well in flavors I don't know but yeah I don't know about flavors yeah like if you're gonna go the best my best comparison is in sweeteners right so uh you know stevia is starting to get really far from being a natural flavor they're doing a lot of work on stevia but since it is a natural flavor you could technically not disclose stevia and then you find a didn't you what was it called oh it was a quervo that's what I don't want the big tequila companies coming after me because that's a scary that's a scary family you just went after the little guy and they're gonna watch it out for these tequila empire um but yeah and so they don't but let's say sucralose yeah sucralose is a chlorinated sugar right that's not gonna exist in nature like you stuck I think five or six chlorines all over sugar um wow that's not going to be your thyroid any so that's artificial and so you do have to label sucralose that well for sure yeah and by the way for the record you probably don't want to be consuming a whole lot of sucralose just to be clear um well we do put it into a lot of beverages these days well they do a lot of beverages and a lot of the supplements that you'll find generally speaking the a lot of the like I think a lot of the the kind of the healthier brands or the more professional brands either because they know or because they know that the consumer is more savvy will now avoid sucralose because because the consumer has gotten hold of the fact that sucralose might not be my friend right I know but like the prime is like basically straight sucralose and like what is that prime that prime drink that is like viral amongst the kids it's like all sucralose essentially wow okay so you heard it here guys I mean a lot of the people listening to this podcast would know that sucralose is a negative but yeah the fact that it has a whole bunch of chlorine molecules attached to it is that's pretty scary yeah I mean it definitely makes it so it's no calorie because your body definitely can't process it so um yeah but it has the desired effect yeah well in that aspect but what other effects would it have is the yeah I don't I don't yeah of course so I think I'm sure there's tons of research out there uh both both pro and con for it for sure I think there's more more con if you I would agree I I try to avoid it personally um but when I look at it it's not even like um it's a lot of times not even a well manufactured product it's like a couple different chlorinated versions of the same sugar it's very interesting to look at yeah but yeah it's got a really good signature you see it all the time and it's cheap probably because it's cheap right it's incredibly cheap to chlorinate things yes yeah and so and it makes it sweeter so you don't have to use as much oh my god it's cheap and you don't you need much well yeah that's how you know you put a you put a halogen onto a drug right and that's how they make drugs in industry more potent as well so like that's the that's the strategies like diodenate or something a drug and that's how you make it stronger um and so they're just following classic drug strategy uh making sweetness stronger by putting chlorines on there okay wait did you tell me what was in the taco bell talk about me was the putresine oh right it was the putresine okay and beef surprisingly beef and beef and beef yeah so all in all it wasn't pepper yeah we can go down another wormhole too I've been I've been investigating pepper peppers are very interesting I see pipperin molecules and everything and it seems like they're modifying pipperin let's go down that rapid hole because pipperin is synthetic it's what the category in between the two which is pipperin's the best way to talk about is semi synthetic you take a naturally derived molecule and then you mess with it so sucralose you can't put chlorines on it that's artificial now you took a natural sucrose and then you put a bunch of chlorines on it too far you've gone too far however if you put a bunch of hydroxyls on it that could maybe still could be considered natural and so they're doing that with pipperin I found something called like um the called like cosmo pipperin or something like that or hydroxy pipperin was not the one that you found in the dorito ranch flavored chips yeah and it's in it's like a skin penetration delivery agent yeah in your chips in your chips talk about poking holes in your gut they don't have to say anything because it's pepper it's derived from pepper it was once pepper it was once pepper and now we've done a few things to the pepper but it's not enough to make it like we have to talk about it why would they do that like why wouldn't they just use pepper I don't know the food there's a lot especially if you go down like the the side of PepsiCo right there's a lot of food science engineers so so do you think it has to do with the whole palatability kind of you gotta read yeah you just would have to like start dig the funny thing is is the vast majority of this stuff is publicly published food science journals and a lot of it's not even that current it's like they figured this stuff out in the 80s and 90s you know um and so a lot of times it's really old literature uh but yeah they figured out food processing a long time ago yeah there's all sorts of reasons to do food processing one to make it tastes better right yeah um but also to get more bang for your buck less starting using more you know you use less material so the same thing that happened like ice cream right the reason all these guar gums yeah and all these thickening gums are in your ice cream is because you know cream's too expensive so you lose you use less food but you know it's much same we can get the same texture we can thicken it you know and so there's that's the reason behind a lot of this are like for bread the reason there's bread additives is because they're trying to get that nice poofy bread but not use as much flour because flour is expensive and so yeah well and and extend the shelf life extend the shelf life I mean you know using using sweeteners so you don't have to have as much sugar sugar is expensive um you know so it's really you know it's a lot of times it's cost of the production of product as well that's amazing because in those doritos you found all kinds of kind of food derived food related yeah it's interesting I thought that's kind of like a subtle nuance from my channel is it like these are almost food ingredients but they're not but they're not like there was a milk one yeah there's a milk one that's a big series I've been working on I've done one or two videos on it but I have so much more content I just haven't had time to like actually make videos but coming soon uh what's the difference between pasteurization and ultra high temperature pasteurization I saw that the Costco milk Costco milk and so if you read all the literature behind ultra high so ultra high temperature pasteurization is at a considerably higher temperature it's like 280c or something that's crazy high and so nobody likes the milk if you ultra pasteurize milk it does last for six months on the shelf however it tastes terrible and nobody likes it yeah and so um and then you start looking at the ultra pasteurized brands or you like buy them and you have your your your like five year old who really likes milk taste them all and they're like this one tastes weird this one tastes good and they can they're all different and you're like okay what's going on and they're artificially flavoring the milk back to the right flavor using yeah naturally inspired probably synthetically produced lactones so dodeca lactone and tetralactone are typically the milk flavors yeah but I'm coming across more I'm trying to find all the milk flavors that you add and then you can run pasteurized milk which has no problem because they just pasteurized it and they didn't ultra pat it's not as high temperature and so you can see what the natural levels are supposed to be of the lactones yeah so the lactones are there okay so it's a naturally occurring compound in milk it just it gets new by the ultra the high heat is ruined by the ultrapasturization process and so it'll like break the lactone or it will get rid of it because it just kind of like has too too much of a partial pressure I'll just like remove it yeah so they add it back in but you know you can only see so much with mass spec like you can't like the big difference between a natural product is there's just this depth there's this like nuanced depth like if you look at it like a plant derived extract there's tons of molecules life produces things with enzymes all these different variations the same reason why I was saying hey if I'm if I'm getting caffeine like I'd rather have said that is the other thing for when you're having flavors it's better to have it naturally derived because it's all these little nuanced flavors that you can't really right but then as soon as you go to a synthetic they can't put all those back in so they'll pick two of them and they'll try to get the ratio right and so it does taste different you're really good at tasting things so yeah that's pretty wild yeah so that's flavors and then with so with the milk so with the ultrapasturized milk you can almost guarantee that there's some kind of flavoring going on some sort of artificial flavoring going on yeah some some sort of lactone and then typically I've been just looking into these like esters are the other kind of flavors that people like to add to things and they're really easy to produce they're very much naturally inspired because they're just basically lawn chain fatty acids and alcohols that have a stirrified together and heat yeah easy to produce and they have all these very strange nuanced fruity kind of flavors and so fruity to milky to waxy hard to describe a lot of them so so you're basically like you're in the world of saying look this is what's in this food or this drink or in the case of the target plastic bag in this plastic bag you're holding with your hands and but you're not really like you're not in the world of necessarily saying this is bad or this is good I'm an analytical chemist hey this is what's in it do your own research I don't want to get caught up in what would be just basically my personal beliefs because I'm not well vested in the medical side of things what do you do with your family what do you do with your family I I've definitely a lot of the early things I explored were things that I was running for my family health so yeah so personally I watch chocolate I think a lot of the reason why children are crazy sometimes after eating sugar is not because of the sugar but because of the caffeine interesting yeah and so there's and even in candy and chocolate that's being made for children marketed to children there should there's really shouldn't be caffeine or there should be a proper caffeine ratio so I've always been very suspicious of the cocoa industry it's like a lot happens either there's a couple of American there's there's one company that I know of or a couple companies in Hawaii that are American chocolate from cocoa bean from the actual plant producers the rest of it is very it's very difficult to get a handle on very sketchy so isn't there a rotation process there's a roasting process it's very similar to coffee and during all those different processes there's all these different ways to label cocoa on ingredient labels that are produced from cocoa liqueur to cocoa powder to cocoa you know mass there's all sorts of weird the the the cocoa processing stream gets broken out in a bunch of different ways and sadden like that needs some transparency so people know if they're buying chocolate has it been a you know it's been altered in a way that it would elevate the caffeine over the theobromine which is kind of the molecule you're after in chocolate so I was going to ask about theobromine because in one of your in some of your work you mentioned about the ratio of theobromine to caffeine to caffeine in chocolate have you also which is one so should there be is there a specific ratio that there's a public ratio yeah so there's a public ratio for for there's supposed to be more theobromine than caffeine like I think it's a two to one ratio and then you'll see chocolate products where the caffeine is 90 caffeine 10% theobromine and so there's some various there's something going on in the cocoa processing industry and typically it's bigger chocolate companies like like a Hershey's kiss that would have more of a problem for sure and do have you investigated much in the world of heavy metals and and chocolate I have it so that's one of the areas that I haven't focused on so metals are a mass spec called an ICPMS it's a it's a plasma instrument and we got out of that industry we are I don't have that instrument anymore due to oh my god it uses too much argon so it's a it's a engineering scientist thing yeah I can't be dealing with that much argon that's hilarious so uh yeah I haven't gotten into the mat the metals game I thought about getting into anions and cations because a lot of people talked about that but um and then I have a gas instrument but I haven't done a lot of focus on on small gases just GC for like things like containing carbon like terpenes and stuff like that what's the deal with argon what's is it just expensive oh it's expensive so you just don't want to be yeah helium's expensive I need helium from a lot of my insurance but I don't go through nearly as much um but uh ICPMS they run their plasma on argon plasma and so the argon plasma is expensive so so so heavy metal testing is not your not your jam not me yeah the there's a lot of people to actually do it though and I've uh I've referred to others uh I thought about getting into it but then yeah the chocolate industries come under heavy fire oh or like massively for for having for being laden with heavy metals absolutely I've wanted to get into metals I feel like it would just give me way more to do and so I've kind of again tried to stay in my lane where I'm like I'm in a very odd uh I'm in an unpopulated space nobody's over here uh hanging out in the moderately sized molecule space um so if I was going to go anywhere further I was probably going to go more into the protein side of things um so I have I've had sitting on my desk as inspiration uh both Vienna sausages in a can and span in a can oh um and so I have eventually decided to try to go do a proteomics project on uh heavily processed meat yeah um I thought that'd be interesting it would be interesting what about things like have you so then maybe you haven't done this yet like I was going to ask you about the fake meats like lap grown meat like beyond I wanted to do something on those yeah so that's a really interesting um yeah ligno he would be really cool to do something on ligno he yeah sure it's funny I see I see all these companies differently than most people I see them like what what was the waste stream that they decided to use and so yeah the fake meat companies are soybean root repurposing companies is the way I would they're like using uh ligno heme uh which I think is a byproduct of rhizobium and uh and like you know probably soybean and all bean roots but probably soybeans where you're getting the most of it well it just feels like when you're talking about these molecules like we've gotten so far away from the original food oh so you can't you can't even say that it's soy I mean you shouldn't be able to say that it's soy there so I yeah a little my history I come from I by original my university before I'm here used to here by now but eight years before I was at Kansas State University so I do come from the food space and so I have this um it's this like back and forth right so I don't like to like criminalize the food industry um which is a lot of a lot of people in this space do um it's because the problem is hard uh we are food insecure yeah and so I've been to a lot of these uh food food security conferences uh and the world is food insecure yeah we do not have enough food uh there is not and and it's a it's a yearly problem like we can't miss a harvest and have food saved up for the planet you would lose a billion people so it's um it's a crazy food insecure world anyone who thinks that we're in a food surplus uh doesn't know the numbers like it's we do need to and the United States um does the best job in the world of getting food out of the fields and into the mills so we can do stuff with it the vast majority of agriculture uh gets lost due to field waste field field rot really probably I don't know I don't know the exact numbers but like out of India they're probably only getting 10 percent that's wild out of the field that's wild considering the billions of people that are that are starving they're starving so the big problem is we can grow it you just can't get it in we can't even harvest it can't even get it out of the field really and so then you're like oh you want to criminalize the food industry they're doing a lot of tricks here and you're like well we're really good at getting it out of the field and so a lot of the GMOs people criminalize GMOs and you're like if you come from the food sector you're like well some of the early GMOs weren't even really GMOs they were crosses and the main thing that we were trying to do was get rid of something called shattering which is a problem everywhere in the world so when you're going to harvest grain and you're going to pick it a lot of the seeds just break off when you pick the stock and they fall under the ground and they're on the ground and you can't eat them and that's called shattering and so to come up with grain heads that didn't shatter imagine how much more food you get like you could go from having a 10 percent harvest to having a 90 percent harvest if you get rid of shattering right so there's there's a lot of things that have been done with classic breeding with food that are positive shattering removing tannins from certain crops so they're more palatable I mean this is the kind of thing that farmers have been doing since the beginning of time selective breeding and then everything is crossed back to what would be like kind of your robust species so all the GMOs are done usually on B-stacked chromosomes across a really weak variety of wheat because it's easier to get your genes in right and then they'll cross that back naturally to a robust variety of like winter wheat or something like that right and so that that's there there always there always a combination between genetic markers and classical breeding if you're a regular listener of this podcast bioregulators are not news to you if you're new to the podcast this may be a new concept and I'm telling you now this is one of the craziest most cutting-edge concepts that's been around for decades that's so few people know about and that concept are bioregulators think of bioregulators as seasonal upgrades for your body not a fix not a hack just foundational support as the weather cools and routines change your internal systems have to adapt and we know that when they don't adapt smoothly which they often don't do as we age we end up feeling sluggish foggy or just a little off even if you're doing all the right things now this is why I love nature's marvels natural bioregulators these are organ specific peptide complexes that support your body's own regulatory systems in a rejuvenated way and there's decades of research behind these now this time of year I'm especially fond of the liver bioregulator a gentle way to support the liver's detox pathways and metabolic flow at a time when the liver is working overtime from the holiday goodies delicious drinks and stresses of the season bioregulators as a whole improve communication at the organ level helping the body to do what it knows how to do just like when you were younger and more efficiently now pro tip you'll want to stack that liver bioregulator with the pancreas bioregulator and the stomach bioregulator for a full digestive support and renewal stack I would do two capsules a day of each for 30 days now head on over to profound-health.com use code not 15 for 15% off your first order do it for a month let me know how you feel GMO tends to be used as a bad word but but there's a difference between breeding the ability into a plant to resist herbicide so you can spray the absolutely the daylights out of the crop and then people just end up eating a whole lot of pesticides and herbicides versus selectively finding the strains so yeah there's definitely needs to be a distinguishing there's no distinguishing characteristic between that right now yeah and that's kind of put you know as the US and Canada being the leader in this space we've definitely put a lot of mistrust in the rest of the world because of a lack of transparency and what's being done in a lot of these things and so there has been a damaged reputation due to a lot of different tech that's been out there well you know it's funny I was I was just staying with a couple of women at a retreat I was hosting and one woman took an apple and she she cut a piece off of it and she left it on the counter yeah and we came home at the end of the day and one of us I think one of the women I was with looked at and goes that apple didn't turn brown how weird is that like when you used to eat an apple when you when I was a kid if you ate an apple yeah you go brown you barely got to finish the apple before it would start turning brown yeah I did I did something on that I it was I made a t-shirt and again it was funny and people didn't nobody bought the t-shirt nobody thought it was funny so what so what did you do on that it was it was um it was maybe a shot at vegetarians that was the thing I was doing it was um your your fruits and veggies are covered in tallow that's where the tallow's going so I know a lot of people in this space love tallow there's something called polyethosylated tallow amide P E A O or something like that and what is that is your fruit coating so it's going to fruit coating that's why it doesn't rot yeah but even when it's cut isn't the cut isn't the the apple not browning when it's cut a genetic modification they did yeah for sure that could be a genetic modification um but they're they're putting these uh non-ionics or factants uh animal fats on the outside of fruits and that's what keeps them uh from uh going back rotting yeah oh my god so there's but but is it but can can we say that it's tallow or is it another one of these things you don't have to far away but is it so far removed from actual tallow that we don't know physiologically what the effects are on the body anymore yeah I mean people could do their own research on it it's called polyethosylated tallow amide P O E A's and they are um it's all tied in with your glyphosate everybody's all talking about glyphosate that's the same yeah so the reason I brought it up is because of the glyphosate conversation you know glyphosate uh is um like water soluble right yeah yeah yeah so it gets into everything it doesn't work if it's on the ground it's foliar yeah foliar herbicide and pesticide has to stay on the leaf but it's water soluble and it rains and so how do you get it to stick polyethosylated tallow amide so it's all getting sprayed with P O E A everything you're hilarious you think this is hilarious it's really hilarious it's not good for fish though it's definitely probably not good for the fish but yeah are we talking about glyphosate or glyphos phosphate is that it yeah that broad spectrum systematic herbicide everybody yeah but doesn't it get then taken up by the plant if it's water soluble like won't it get taken up by the plant the goal is not to have it go uh to not to have it wash off right yeah the goal is to have it on the surface of the plant but people end up consuming it like we are riddled with we're eating the stuff that's on the surface of the plant yeah we know the glyphosate from from a human health perspective is not a positive from a plant perspective I see what's happening but I'm hoping someday we find a better way um but can we talk also about another so there's a couple of other things I wanted to touch on with you there's microplastics yeah it's gales receipts and what the heck did you find in that target bag I don't know that's that's really interesting you don't even know okay that stinks I don't know I found the compound yeah I don't know why that plasticizer's there but I have an idea tell us um California kind of messed up I feel like California sometimes has really good intentions right but then they don't think them through so then the regulation they said that the plastic bag in order to be considered a non-reusable plastic bag which is banned non-reusable plastic bags are banned yet if you're from California plastic bags everywhere right yeah so they basically regulated that you couldn't have bags that were below a certain certain thickness so if the plastic is thick enough it qualifies the plastic bag as being a reusable plastic bag oh my gosh and so since companies had to make thicker plastic bags as everybody knows if you make thicker plastic the plastic isn't as plasticky you can't it doesn't work like a bag it's like a box yeah you know it's too strong and so this compound that stinks you can smell it this is a plastic softening agent it interdigitizes itself in between the long thick plastic chains and makes it a little wimpier and so it's a flexibility agent and it stinks the high heavens and I can't stand it and somebody needs to do something about it um and I'm sure it's bad for you it just smells like it's bad for you yeah so basically so we don't know we don't know and so this was a California oopsie they said oh nobody's gonna spend 10 cents on plastic bags if we make them thicker turns out people don't care yeah they will they're still using them if anything's probably increased the amount of plastic bags out there because then you can reuse them and you're using them a lot more well yeah and then they and then they they stick around longer right and then they didn't they didn't uh criminalize um the bags you put your fruits and veggies in which are still in plastic bags you know well thank god I mean in a way but but that brings us to our next little topic which is microplastics microplastics which are which are now everywhere including in people including in the water in the soil in pretty much in the air pretty much everywhere what are your thoughts on microplastics have you have you gone looking for them in places and I've I've um I'm coming up with something for microplastics that's I've been working on it uh I brought it up in a couple different things I have to like when I get data um I have some clients that own their data and that were microplastic um looking for microplastics so I have to make sure that I don't step on anyone's toes as I go around these different microplastics because I have some like real client projects that are working on plastics as well um but the question I always ask to the general public is what is a plastic and what is this term micro and so for me I don't do so well with micro I am a mass spectrometrist we work in really small sorted plastics but and then even when you look at like if you're like a engineer a material science engineer you're going to use uh the only way to look at large plastics is using what's called light scattering dynamic light scattering and that basically will tell you a general population size of all the plastics but that doesn't really tell you exactly what the polymer repeat is and what the plastic is made out of and so to look at that you actually you have to look at small plastics so the way I think about it is if I look for really small plastics that are in my mass range super small just a couple of the monomers together like uh like a hundred monomers put together 30 monomers in that range where they're in my mass range and I can actually measure the monomer spacing subunit between the groups so I can figure out the exact plastic that's a representation of what's in the hole so if you find small there's most likely going to be big and there's going to be medium there's going to be stuff all through the whole range so if I focus on just the small what I'm going to refer to as the 1000 molecular weight subunit series so polymers always show up as like a distribution they'll look like a big Gaussian blob yeah and so if we say we're looking at the center of mass at a thousand and that's kind of how I look for it then you start saying okay are people good question for you and you know your your audience are people more worried about hydrophobic non-water soluble plastics are they more worried about water soluble plastics I think people are worried about plastics that are found in their bodies because those are typically more soluble right yeah yeah yeah because the the and I don't think anybody really knows but the what people would imagine is these plastics could end up stuck in places they could clog up capillaries they could do all sorts of stuff they could change the way that you respond to hormones and other things like they could act if you go even earlier than that you could say they could act inside your gut yeah and modify digestion nutrient uptake gut behavior bio behavior and so the one that I focused on so if I have I have to always think is the mass spec side of things right what's something that we can measure so is there one that we can just single out and be like hey this is the we'll use this as an analog and the thing that's come to mind for me is polyethylene glycol yeah polyethylene glycol is a polymer peg um yeah of ethylene glycol it's very easy for me to measure with mass spec there's also polypropylene glycol which would have an extra carbon um and so the spacing mass uh on the ethylene glycol is 44 Dalton spacing and polymers look very characteristic they're just even 44 Dalton spacing all the way across because it's a polymer and nobody when they manufacture them sorts them they're just kind of broad range right yeah um so what I've been trying to tell people is that peg I can look up the code of regulations but peg I think 100 to 10 000 that molecular weight range of that polymer is generally recognized as safe and allowed to be added directly to food so that so if I was going to say hey we're gonna research microplastics and I'm worried about environmental microplastics the most I'd say hey let's worry let's first worry about plastic that's being added to your food intentionally and it's not even against the rules so what so I did a whole piece on where I was like let's go and research when when was peg polymers and other polymers put onto the gross list uh and and allowed for the there's different areas of the gross list there's contact food agents and then there's things that are allowed directly in your food added directly to the food so you mean they can touch the food during manufacturing so what happened is back in like the 70s peg I think was as it was considered a food contact agent so it could be on like a wrapper yeah touch your food and then I think I could look up the registration I think was in the late 70s they finally put it with a bunch of other plastics onto the direct addition to food list and since then you've been allowed to add it to food and there's no changing that rule right now and so you can think like miralax the the anti-constipation basically homeopathic bite over the counter that's peg 3500 that's just straight microplastic that's polyethylene glycol polyethylene glycol 3500 the only uh the only like FDA approved medical study that's ever done on polyethylene glycol and human health was done from the clinical study of them using 3500 is miralax and if you look at the publications around miralax it's actually pretty bad you're like if you take too much of it people get really sick wow and if you've ever taken miralax you can you can tell right away that you're like I could get pretty sick from this product I mean it's definitely gonna do its job but it's almost like you're like you know too much of a good thing the body doesn't want it there yeah and so that's kind of where I've had my distinction I'm like hey we could spend all this time focused on environmental contamination which is definitely important you're gonna get microplastics from water bottles and things like that but maybe we should first fix or at least talk about the fact that there's polymers being added directly to food yeah and cosmetics that you're putting onto your skin and it and the shorter the chain and the more hydrophilic the more likely it's gonna end up in your body so as a general rule yeah people should look for or be more concerned about the hydrophilic molecules do you think because they're they just they just travel more easily yeah and so there are definitely going to be a hydrophilic I mean I think it's kind of still a good medical question that people would have to investigate because hydrophilic it could almost like pass through you easier yeah yes you could excrete it maybe yeah but then it also has this but then if it can pass through you easier it may not get excreted it may get actually up taken up by cells and so that's the way they actually deliver some drugs making drug conjugates to peg so peg will water soluble pull drugs into the skin or into cells for delivery and so peggillating small molecules is a big big industry in the pharmaceutical space as well does anybody know if they stay or if they get cleared they've all sorts of different effects I think that's all probably being studied on that's a whole different that's another animal but so so something I've actually I try not to promote too much stuff but I have been working coming soon potentially there was a nutraceutical company that reached out about making a supplement that removes polymer microplastics so you could take it and it just will hang out as like a sponge I think it's kind of probably just based on like activated carbon or something like that yeah and it will bind up microplastics either that you eat in your gut and then eventually will allow them to be all tangled up in removes they don't make it further than your stomach so it's something you could take um you know you kind of find up microplastic exposure yeah and they send me some of it it hasn't hit the market yet and I tested it on peg so that was my idea is like let's do the mass spec technique is called malty it's a it's a laser desorption is the best way we can look at polymers and so I basically just took peg 1000 and I made a concentrated solution of it and I mixed it with their product and then spun it out and the water didn't have any peg in it afterwards so you're like okay we can remove it so there is the potential uh to produce a product that could remove it from both the environment and from your gut and you know it should be all tested to make sure that it's beneficial but again it's pulling off the gross list they're going to try to pull things they're accepted as safe to try to combat another problem so I do think there's people working in this space when when's the supplement going to be available do you think it sounds like it sounds like they're like going to put it out soon so I think you're going to have to connect me to those guys I'd love to talk about it yeah I definitely I'll keep you posted once they give me uh any type of uh link to where it's being solved yeah I notice I get a lot of stuff pre pre market here now no but that's awesome right I mean I think I think that you know the biggest problem for me with the microplastics conversation is that until you just said this about the supplement to date we don't have a solution right so if there's no solution it's almost like you know it's it's hard to you don't want to talk about it too much not because you don't want people to know but why am I going to stress people out about something you can't do anything about it yeah so that's kind of where I've partnered I've come in and partnered with companies where I feel like I can get behind a solution that doesn't currently exist yeah I also and then I encourage people that listen to your show to reach out if they have good ideas yeah and and I like to you know I like to help brands that are trying to focus on clean products yeah transparency on labeling and then transparency on manufacturing and so I do I do think that there needs to be almost like a stamp of approval these days on a product that that you're like hey you know there's been a little bit more effort than than just focusing on profits in this product and they're trying to do something good here well I think it needs to be your I think you need to get at your own stamp of approval and then we can get that's what I'm thinking yeah I don't know if it'll be my logo or or something but just to have my hands and stuff and to see a product come to me and then have have founders that are interested enough in a product being high quality to reach out and have me look at some of their ingredients and make some decisions along the way you know I think it just starts with small changes yeah and and founders having good ideas and so yeah do you think that making cleaner products is by it's very nature just more expensive like people are just gonna have to like what are you saying like because I wonder about that I think there's a lot of stuff going on right now you know there's a lot of onboarding in American manufacturing there's a lot of this resistance to foreign manufacturing a lot of the transparency issues do come from I don't know if anyone's ever tried to design a product that's being manufactured abroad there's a lot of black box things you have to just choose yeah there's a lot of manufacturers that that they won't tell you even the ingredients that are going in your product and then it's incredibly difficult as you get stuff state-bound here to get anyone to check products for you I have so many people reach out to me saying hey can you analyze my product and that's just not really what I I do I'm not doing as much fee-for-service work just because of how busy we are academically here and so the way I've been partnering with people is if I really like the founders and I like the product and I want to get involved early and it looks like something where I could really help then then we'll try to do something but there really should be some there should be more labs out there I think as consumers want it more there needs to be a way to check products as you make it and then I also think just having more locally produced ingredients that are sourced carefully and then and the more control of your manufacturing process is going to help so I think in the short term yes more expensive but why do you want to buy like low quality garbage like wow well I think what's difficult in the food world is that not everybody can afford expensive food right and so security and food you know exactly it comes back to food security and you know there's there's an education piece but I would I would venture to say that there's plenty of people who are aware that packaged foods are not good for them but don't have the option they either live in a food desert or they just absolutely have money but and so I totally understand this idea of food desert and that but for for innovation it typically starts at the high end yeah unfortunately but that's just how it is yeah so you're not going to innovate if nobody's going to want to buy I'm doing an olive oil right now too with with this great company Durant Olive Oil I don't worry again and and they get a lost in the shuffle right there's tons of olive oil companies out there but this is a genuine American made olive oil is being milled it's a great product I've checked in a bunch of their different olive tree you know orchards and and checking all these different things and it looks like a great product right and so how do you how do you convince people to buy a brand that's let's say twice as expensive as the Costco olive oil there's not a lot of value there right they're like uh come on I'll just buy the Costco one well but but I mean I think have you looked at olive oil as a category like are you able to it's crazy adulterated it's like it's the additives and then is it even olive oil it's even yeah I yes I've been doing a lot of pieces on the fact that olive oil is clearly adulterated specifically I mean Costco olive oil any blended olive oil um so anyways I'm like okay I'll find an alternative source for people yeah this is good olive oil but it's too expensive so then how do you like so then I think to myself I'm like okay it's too expensive I'm not going to get it into the food deserts it's not going to happen there's not even enough of this olive oil even being produced so how do we correct the behavior so I say okay what's partner with what's draw attention to it and the best way to draw attention to it is the high end market first so you say okay are people willing to spend a thousand dollars on a bottle of olive oil not that many people but maybe a couple people right and that would be a huge publicity so then you're saying okay well this bottle this limited release that this company Durant put out is a thousand dollars I definitely cannot afford that but a couple rich billionaires can but they also sell a bottle that's 40 dollars it's not the same level of it's not that from the exact same trees but it's not adulterated but it's actual olive oil not adulterated it comes from a good company we know that it's that it's just it's just not as nuanced it's like you go from limited edition to larger edition to then making that the norm and so you you almost have to change the price I've been seeing the same thing with like maple syrup yeah people were for the long time I'm very emotionally invested in maple syrup but I mean people for the longest time we're just willing to buy maple flavored corn syrup well which is horrifying horrifying if you're gonna avoid anything for your kids just do that just don't just don't yeah just don't put syrup on it but then they're like okay well that stuff's incredibly cheap you can get like a gallon for like three dollars but the consumers now are educated enough from lots probably 20 years of work people saying hey this stuff is really poisonous to buying low quality maple syrup right yeah you're like okay well it's better than I'll buy Trader Joe's maple syrup it's five dollars it's definitely pure maple syrup but then you can start doing maple syrup analysis you can be like okay maybe they're adulterating a little bit maple syrup but it's not as bad what are they doing to the maple syrup I still trying to figure it out come on so you're trying to you you need more I need more high quality maple syrup that's the problem I can send you some of that yeah I got like four I need to get in my basement I like to go to the stores right I need a I need a family run maple syrup business that can show me video proof that they're tapping the trees and this is the orchard and they tapped them and then they evaporated it and then it's like so it's like I try to go at least I like as a scientist you're like I need standards yeah what is like for when I was doing honey right honey is another one that's we could terrible like don't buy Brazilian honey that's my my my just don't do it that's the story um Brazilian I've never even heard of Brazilian honey yeah so Brazilian organic don't buy organic honey and that hilarious thing to say to people don't buy organic honey um because the US doesn't give organic honey stamps and because think about it like you can't guarantee that you're you don't know where the bees are going where the bee goes yeah so we don't know where the bees go but Brazil can put organic honey on theirs because what what are they doing be warehouse right be warehouse oh and then they feed and don't they feed them like corn syrup or something yeah yeah yeah I was feed a sugar that's I mean I have heard that I mean I did a dive on honey recently and it is it's tragic I mean it's clearly honey and being made from bees but then you look for plant biomarkers and they're not there they're not there and so you're like okay so it's not bees that are feeding on flowers it's just bees uh inside of a warehouse and of course it's organic because there's nothing else in the warehouse wow that's just crazy well and I mean I think it goes back I remember having a conversation with the Greek olive oil manufacturer at a at a health food show and um and he said to me at the time and this is going back a few years he said if you're seeing olive oil extra virgin olive oil for less than 25 bucks a liter it's not olive oil it's something else like it's just he's like first of all there's not enough olive oil on the planet to stock the shells that are coming from if there's more than one country on the label that too suspicious yeah yeah but I think they're pretty smart I mean there's lots of olive oil that says one country on the bottle and yeah and and so I'm trying to come up with a way I don't know just like what do you what do you look for to confirm that it's good olive oil so I'm fine like a published oil adulteration method I'm trying to figure it out and I think I can see in your future I can see in your future a commercial testing lab that just that runs through stuff with with other people not just you yeah I need to run lab corp situation yeah and then and then being able to issue certificates of analysis yeah that then manufacturers can you know have a QR code on their labels that shows that they got they went through the testing I think it I think there's great potential for something like that and then even yeah QR codes that go to the data itself it's just such a big project you really have to think about it it's just so many things like you can go all day thinking about all the different things that are affected and so yeah I do think that's kind of the moral of the story that everybody's always asking about is is there any product that's really safe from this type of old adulteration and then why is there so little being listed on labels and and so like you know the last one for the kids that I did a piece on is on apple juice I noticed the kids that drink apple juice get more cavities right interesting and and there has be ever seen an apple juice that says sugar added none right doesn't exist on the planet they all say 100 apple juice mm-hmm no sugar added you could buy the lowest quality apple juice that exists and it would say 100 juice no and so what's going on in apple juice and if there's a whole category of enzymes we talked about this briefly about food enzymes there's enzymes called pectinases yeah right pectinases will break down the pectin sugar into short chain sugars typically not sucrose because they don't produce sucrose some fructose but also some other shorter chain and and these pectinases are not derived from humans or from plants they're derived from fungus and bacteria and so you're basically processing a sugary drink with enzymes that signal to fungus and bacteria to produce a bunch of short chain sugars that taste sweet to humans so you don't have to say that you've added sugar because you just broken down polysaccharides into sugar and then that basically feeds the wrong bacteria in your mouth and then you get a bunch of cavities and so that's my like theory about the whole process and so I would love it if they just they know how much pectinase they added right it's a they don't have to tell you because they're not saying that they're using it to increase the sweetness they're saying they're using it to reduce the cloudiness because pectin if you make apple cider yeah it's easy standard apple cider is cloudy yeah that's pectin well natural apple juice generally is cloudy it's not pectin and it's cloudy yeah and it would gel if you gel all the pectin and you could make jam with it if you like you know heated it but apple juice you can't because it's been digested with pectinases and all the pectin's basically eaten up so what to look for in your apple juice is it should be cloudy cloudy yeah cloudy and not as sweet and and not be happy though they'll be drinking the cider and they'll be like this is cloudy and it's not as sweet well but I think you but but I think that brings us to you know we're gonna have to draw this to a close because you're gonna have to go but I think that brings us to this place where where the food industry has created these hyper palatable foods so that people find them irresistible and they can't stop eating them and it's what's driving so many of the metabolic issues in our society absolutely but it's a it's it's a call to parents to try at least with small children to if they've already exposed them to these foods to help their kids to recalibrate their taste buds by just not buying those foods yeah and to to realize that there's a lack of transparency on purpose like if it says 100 juice 100 apple juice use your you know use your intuition like does it look like I mean well people don't know what orange like if you smush an orange juice and taste it does it taste like simply orange juice you know like it doesn't no something must be happening if the label just says 100 orange juice and you make 100 orange juice at home and they taste different then you're not the one doing anything different you just squeezed an orange so you know you're right you you're truthful and so you're like okay something is happening here and there's a whole categories of things that they do not have to report on labels um specifically uh post harvest regulators uh anything that has to do with texture uh clarity um flavor there there's literally an enzyme for processing grains called flavor's I'm like this has been used since like the 70s so it's like flavor's I'm yeah so you know like it makes it makes grains taste better yeah these enzymes don't even have to have release uh they're not trying to hide anything in theory flavor or zybe but yeah realize that that um that there's a whole category of food enzymes uh and a lot of processing being done the food that you don't have to report on the label and so just kind of use common sense sometimes when you look at a food product okay so let's close with your best advice for people and then we're going to close with telling people where to find you to learn more about all this stuff yeah yeah that's it best advice is to trust your instincts and do your own research these days guys so like if you have a food product like apple juice and it doesn't look like or orange juice and it doesn't look like what you would expect uh there could be more to the label than meets the eye and so um yeah just just realize that uh you know food uh if it doesn't taste as you would predict from taking the natural raw food then then there's probably things happening uh and then just you know you're in a great age where knowledge is at your fingertips and you can search research things and so just transparency uh and doing your own research is just super powerful these days and are there three substances or chemicals in particular you would tell people to watch out for on product labels uh art i i strongly advise staying away from artificial sugars and sweeteners i i i i think that's a category that has to be labeled on food and um just minimizing the amount of sugar and having low sugar beverages uh is definitely or diluting juice yeah a lot with water or with seltzer water or something like that it could be a better alternative uh than and consuming huge amounts of artificial sweetener uh and then uh you know i still am a strong advocate of avoiding things like bpa and bps yeah which are starting to get pushed out a little bit more as plasticizers so that's what i was talking about with receipts and things like that yeah and then um there's still a lot of products that use uh and they'll label it they'll be on the label uh for antioxidants bht which is just very well known it should be a vote should have been eliminated for a long time now uh the tbhq or whatever the other antioxidants should be on the label uh would avoid those antioxidants and then everyone's favorite one to avoid if it's brightly colored and synthetic you do not need oil petroleum drive sulfo dyes you do not need these artificial dyes 100 and then the word flavor from our previous yeah and then i don't want to go down the wormhole but the the category that's most interesting that has the word flavor on it and hides the most ingredients uh if you want to start looking at labels uh it would be anything that goes into your mouth oral care so mouthwash toothpaste uh and and then uh shampoo and things like that they'll be they'll be a category called fragrance yes they have a lot of stuff in yeah so you gotta be careful when you see these kind of uh you know um so those are the pockets they hide things in yeah like native shampoo and conditioner 10 ingredients but one of the ingredients is fragrance so you're like yeah i don't think so all right okay then thank you so much this has been incredibly interesting can you tell people where to find you yeah so it's mass spec everything uh on youtube and instagram and i still put it up on tiktok too so and then mr mass spec on the twitch channel if you ever want to see one of the live streams and yeah we'll have more stuff out soon just keep keep going here so thank you so much yeah it's great been a pleasure hey folks just a quick reminder that all of the information presented in this podcast is for information purposes only no medical advice no diagnosing no treatments suggested here before you try anything that you hear about or learn about here make sure that you check with your medical provider