The Hidden Toxins in These Common Plant Foods — And How They Damage Your Body

[Music] You famously say that plants are trying to kill us. Um, so, uh, yeah, why is that? It's being slightly facitious. I mean it's it's really a quote that I took from my own professor of cancer biology when I was doing my undergraduate degree and he was trying to relay upon us that plants are living organisms and they like to stay living organisms and so they have a a series of defenses that are chemical in nature. So all living things have a defense otherwise they they would have gone extinct by now and if there weren't as robust a defense as they needed. So while animals can run away and fight back, plants can't. And so they have chemical deterrence as their as their main weapon. So we have catalog, counted and named um nearly 1 million defense chemicals that plants make that can be directly toxic. They can be disruptive to our physiology. They can disrupt our hormones. They can cause other sorts of impairments. They can disrupt the digestion and absorption of other nutrients and and so on and so on and so on. So there there are quite a lot of of robust defenses that that plants have. Now a plant is trying to kill you in the same regard as as a moose or a bison is trying to kill you. It's not that it's hunting you and it and it wants you dead. It's just that you get too close to a bison or a moose and it feels threatened, it will take you out because it's kill or be killed in the wild for plants as well as animals. And so if you threaten that plant, it is more than happy for you to die if it gets to live. And people say, well, they don't necessarily have a conscious choice in this matter. Not necessarily the case. You know, more and more botnists are coming out now saying that plants are actually quite sentient and they have a nervous system that relays in response to injuries and attacks and different sorts of stimuli very similar to our central nervous system. So they don't have a centralized nervous system or a brain, but their entire body acts like a central nervous system. So they don't have a brain, they act like a brain. They have receptors on their on the surface of their bodies that are the same protein photo receptors that we have on the back of our retina that recognize different frequencies of light. So that while they don't have eyes, they are eyes and they can actually see around them. They speak to each other. They communicate through their roots, through vibrations, through chemical signals sent through the air. And um they're actually quite sophisticated in a lot of ways. In fact, some botnists are saying that they display features that denote personhood and individuality, which is pretty Yeah. Which is pretty remarkable. So these these plants are like every other living thing. And and they they have to defend themselves and they have to defend themselves in robust nature. You think about this way. Latex, we use latex gloves in in medicine all the time. latex is and a lot of things we use in in medicine are from plants. A lot of them are toxins that we find, you know, is helpful in certain cases. You know, penicellin, that's a that's a toxin that's made from mold that kills bacteras, right? So, the there's there's there's this constant war in nature and we use that to our advantage in certain circumstances. So latex is actually a sap that's that's secreted from certain plants. And it's when they're sort of crushed and chewed that they start releasing this really thick, sticky sap with latex in it. And what happens is when the animals eating that plant and it releases all this latex, it actually glues their mouth shut. And so, you know, it's a pretty elegant way to stop something from eating you is gluing its mouth shut. But the reality is is that that animal typically can't get his mouth unglued and so they die and they starve slowly to death over the course of the next couple weeks or they get taken out by something else. So the plant really has no problem with you dying if it gets to live. And there are in fact the majority of plants on Earth will kill you if you eat them even in small quantities. And there are some plants that if you just get too close to them and breathe in the chemicals that they're exuding in a defensive nature around them, you can die just from inhaling the chemicals that they that they exude. There's a there's a garden in England and um you know on the gates it says you know beware you know these plants can kill and um there are plants you know of that nature that you get too close to them and and disturb them and they can actually kill you. And in fact there I think one of their heads grounds keepers actually did die. Maybe a couple other people who work there have died as well by getting too close to these plants and and breathing in their fumes. So, you know, it's it's not that they're actively hunting us and and trying to kill us, but they are just defi they're trying to defend themselves just like everything else. And if that means that you have to die so they get to live, so be it. They're more than happy to do it. Just like if you get too close to a moose, it will stomp you out because it's not trying to eat you, but it's trying to make sure that you don't eat it. That's inc. Yeah, it's quite incredible actually because I think that's not uh what the majority of people think when they they think of plants as a I mean it it is living but they don't really think of it the same way they would think of an animal, you know. Hey guys, just want to take a second to thank our sponsor at Carnivore Bar. I don't promote many products because honestly all you need to be healthy is to just eat meat. 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You know, they just because they can't scream out in English, hey, that hurts. You can still see them yelling and screaming. So, plants yell and scream in a different way. But they do yell. And in fact, there there are papers that have been published that are just called, you know, plants scream, you know, and they so it's uh they can send out scream out chemical signals screaming to other plants that they're being attacked, that they're being killed, and to defend themselves like, "Hey, we're being attacked. Defend your cells." They send signals to their roots to other plants. They send vibrational signals to other plants and those other plants around them start responding and start upregulating more and more toxins. So this is this is a good reason why people will tend to well it's the folk wisdom you may have been taught by you know your mother parent or something like that that when you're looking for produce if it has like signs of like an insect biting it or burrowing in you even if that insect is gone I mean it you oh you don't eat that one that one's bad why is it bad is there bacteria on it is it infected no what it is is that insect started eating that and the plant started defending itself, started making more and more toxins to drive that away. And that's why it didn't get completely eaten, just had a chunk of it bitten out and then it got too toxic and it started tasting horrible and so the the bug took off and went somewhere else. But that means that that's upregulated a lot of those toxins and so that can be more harmful if you eat something that has a blemish or has, you know, like fungus started attacking it or something like that as well. So, it's not, you know, the information is out there. It's just, you know, how how we're gathering this information is is generally through hearsay and propaganda. It's plants are great for you. Meat's going to kill you. Saturated fat's going to give you a heart attack. And so, you have to eat anything else by definition is therefore good for you as long as it doesn't have saturated fat and it's not from an animal. And that's sort of what's been going on for the last 40 years. And it's just complete rubbish, you I mean, just because something is, you know, is is something different. If you're if you're calling one, you know, one thing bad for you, just being something else doesn't necessarily make it good for you, it just means it's not that one thing. So, even if something didn't contain saturated fat, if saturated fat were bad for you, which it is not, just because something didn't have saturated fat doesn't mean it's deacto good for you. But that is exactly the argument that was made. And so these plants didn't fruits and vegetables didn't have saturated fat. And so then they said, "Okay, yeah, they're all good for you." The only thing people started avoiding was was saturated fat. So, you know, it's it's not an education. Like that's not what botany teaches us. That's not what biology teaches us. That's not what the hard sciences show. The hard sciences show that plants and animals are in an evolutionary arms race. Plants becoming more and more toxic so less and less animals can eat them so they can survive and thrive. and animals becoming more and more adapted to specific po toxins and specific plants they can eat that plant and survive and thrive. And this is why out of the 400,000 plants in the world, most of them will kill you. And in fact, most plants will kill most animals, even herbivores, because herbivores have to be specially adapted to the plants that they eat as well. And so while a koala eats eucalyptus and almost nothing else eats eucalyptus because they're so toxic, koalas don't eat anything else because those other things would be toxic to a koala. And so we eat avocados and grapes, but avocados and grapes will kill cats and dogs because they have less defenses towards the toxins in grapes and avocados. And obviously they grapes and avocados do have toxins or else it wouldn't kill dogs and cats. Chocolate, same thing. You know that that can be toxic to to dogs at certain levels. You know there and there's reasons for that. It disrupts our physiology in certain ways that that will result in death. And we forget this fact and we forget the fact that these things have toxins and that we have not been exposed to these toxins for really more than 10,000 years in any meaningful way. and that more um you know native populations that have more recently turned to a post-aggricultural way of eating in the last 150 years like Native Americans, the indigenous a indigenous Australians um several populations of subsaharan Africa um etc. you know the Inuit that these these peoples were largely hunter gatherers mostly hunters they gathered if the hunt wasn't successful and if they could get meat they ate meat. is plants were a backup sort of a a starvation to food. Um and if they had to by and large and now they're you know as in a post-aggricultural society they get far more sick than people of of western descent who have been exposed to agriculture for 10,000 years or so. And that's really telling. You know, we've had, you know, Europeans and others have had about 10,000 years to be exposed to these plant toxins and start to try to get a bit of a defense against them. But these other native populations that came more recently to a post-aggricultural way of eating, a western society, a western diet, which in aggro in anthropology, they talk about specifically when you come from a pre-aggricultural society, hunter gather population, basically you're dealing with injuries and infectious disease, and they live just as long if not longer than the rest of us. It's just that infant mortality rates high. So the average life expectancy is lower. But how long people live before they die of old age is as long or longer than people in the west. And they don't get these chronic diseases. But when they move to civilized so-called societies, these post-aggricultural societies, western societies, all of a sudden there's a massive shift in what they they get afflicted with. And it's now not predominantly infectious disease and injuries like it would have mostly been in the 17 and 1800s for us. But it's chronic disease. That's the major burden of disease. And that's the major burden of disease around the world. 90% of deaths in the western world are from chronic diseases. 74% of deaths around the world are from chronic diseases.