NutritionFacts.org Video Podcast
Michael Greger, M.D. FACLM, founder of NutritionFacts.org and New York Times best-selling author, presents the latest evidence-based nutrition research in easy-to-understand video segments. The podcast covers virtually every aspect of healthy eating, with new videos and blogs uploaded daily. NutritionFacts.org is a non-profit public health organization that operates without sponsors, ads, or paid subscriptions.
Episodes
Friday Favorites: Comparing Vegetarian and Vegan Athletic Performance, Endurance, and Strength
Long-term plant-based eating may improve exercise capacity and endurance.
Dietary Supplements for Treating Tinnitus
Most over-the-counter tinnitus supplements promise relief but lack solid evidence and may even carry risks.
Alternative and Lifestyle Treatments for Tinnitus Relief
What everyday strategies can make tinnitus easier to live with?
Friday Favorites: Do Vitamin D Supplements Help Prevent Diabetes, Cancer Mortality, and Overall Mortality?
Randomized interventional trials are necessary to establish cause and effect.
Conventional Treatments for Tinnitus Relief
Cognitive behavioral therapy may reduce tinnitus distress, while most drugs fall short.
What Causes Tinnitus and How to Prevent It
Why do hundreds of millions of people hear sounds others can’t?
Friday Favorites: Any Benefits to Ear Candling? What’s the Best Way to Remove Ear Wax?
Photographs are taken inside the ear canal before and after ear candling to put it to the test. And irrigation? Also called ear syringing, it involves flushing out ear wax with a low-pressure jet of warm (body temperature) water and works up to 70% to 90% of the time.
How to Form Good Habits
Learn how to use implementation intentions.
How to Break Bad Habits
There are two ways to break a bad habit: change the cue or change the action.
Friday Favorites: Why Do Milk Drinkers Live Shorter Lives on Average?
How might we reduce the risk of premature death from dairy consumption?
How Long Does It Take to Form Healthy Habits?
The idea that habits form in 21 days is a myth.
The Effects of Glyphosate on Children and How to Reduce Exposure
Could low-level glyphosate exposure affect pregnancy or metabolic health in children?
Friday Favorites: Does Aluminum Cause Alzheimer’s Disease?
Although aluminum isn’t necessarily benign, what convinced me that it does not play a role in Alzheimer’s disease?
Are Consumers of GMO Crops Exposed to Enough Glyphosate to Increase Cancer Risk?
If most glyphosate exposure comes from food, how much do we actually absorb?
What Explains the Different Glyphosate Safety Conclusions?
If glyphosate was deemed “probably carcinogenic,” why did regulators still approve its use?
Friday Favorites: Acid Reflux Medicine May Cause Osteoporosis
Stomach acid–blocking proton pump inhibitor drugs—PPIs with brand names like Prilosec, Prevacid, Nexium, Protonix, and AcipHex—appear to significantly increase the risk of bone fractures.
Should You Supplement with Vitamin K2?
Vitamin K supplements are touted for bone, brain, and heart health, but have they actually been shown to help?
Glyphosate Declared a Probable Human Carcinogen
What does the glyphosate controversy show us about conflicts of interest in science?
Friday Favorites: Exercise Before or After Meals for More Weight Loss and Better Blood Sugar Control?
If people burn more fat on the days they exercise before (rather than after) eating, why doesn’t this translate into more weight loss?
How to Maximize the Cephalic Phase of Digestion to Lose Weight
Why might taking smaller bites and drinking thicker smoothies through narrower straws help us feel fuller faster?
Does Eating Too Fast Affect Weight Loss?
Extending meal duration by even four minutes may facilitate weight loss.
Friday Favorites: Does Sunscreen Cause or Prevent Skin Cancer? Which Type Is Best to Use?
Sunscreen is put to the test in a randomized controlled trial to see if it can actually prevent skin cancer. According to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, only two sunscreen ingredients can be considered safe: zinc oxide and titanium dioxide.
How to Lower Cholesterol with Dr. Greger’s Portfolio Plus Powder Recipes
There’s a simple way to try to fit all the cholesterol-lowering foods into your daily diet.
How to Lower Cholesterol with Herbs and Spices
Can small daily doses of herbs and spices really drop LDL cholesterol by double digits?
Friday Favorites: How Hot Peppers May Extend Your Life
Spice can hack your brain by making foods taste saltier.
Foods That Lower Cholesterol
Adding specific nuts, beans, and fruits to our diet can drive LDL cholesterol even lower—often with drug-like effects.
Statin Drugs vs. Cholesterol-Lowering Dietary Supplements
What happened when rosuvastatin was pitted against six common dietary supplements?
Friday Favorites: Fecal Transplants for Ulcerative Colitis, MS, Depression, Bipolar, and Alcoholism
I go over randomized, controlled trials and case reports of stool transplants for various clinical conditions.
Barberries Rather Than Berberine to Lower Cholesterol
How many dried barberries do you need to eat to get the cholesterol-lowering dose of berberine?
How to Lower Cholesterol with Supplements That Actually Work
What are the whole-food equivalents of some of the most powerful cholesterol-lowering supplements?
Friday Favorites: Dietary Cholesterol and Inflammation from Abdominal Obesity
The optimal intake of dietary cholesterol may be zero.
Why I Don’t Recommend Red Yeast Rice Cholesterol-Lowering Supplements
Red yeast rice contains the drug lovastatin and may also contain kidney toxins.
Why I Don’t Recommend Policosanol Cholesterol-Lowering Supplements
Sometimes, looking at the latest meta-analysis can lead you astray.
Friday Favorites: The Return on Investment (ROI) for Employee Health and Wellness Programs Put to the Test
Workplace wellness programs report an average ROI of 3, returning $3 for every $1 invested. Why do so many workplace wellness programs fail to deliver?
The Latest Clinical Trial of Turmeric Curcumin for Alzheimer’s Disease Treatment
Can turmeric really sharpen memory within hours?
How Ultra-Processed Foods Could Cause Disease: Changes in Structure
Why does preserving the food matrix make a difference?
Friday Favorites: Vitamin D Supplements Tested for COPD, Heart Disease, Depression, Obesity, and Cancer Survival
Before watching the video, can you guess which conditions vitamin D has actually been proven to work for in randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trials?
How Ultra-Processed Foods Could Cause Disease: Calorie Density
The biological mechanisms our bodies use to regulate our weight likely evolved in the context of eating at least four or five pounds of food a day.
How Ultra-Processed Foods Could Cause Disease: Changes in Texture
The average rate of caloric intake of ultra-processed foods is about double that of unprocessed foods.
Friday Favorites: Is Spicy Food Good for You?
Those who regularly eat spicy foods tend to live longer, but is it cause and effect?
Mercury Exposure from Tuna Fish vs. Silver Dental Amalgam Fillings
The mercury exposure from amalgam fillings is like eating one can of tuna every two months.
Diets and Foods Shown to Improve Depression in Randomized Controlled Trials
Dietary interventions were put to the test for major mental illness.
Friday Favorites: Does Coffee Inhibit Iron Absorption? What Are the Effects of Having Too Much Iron?
Coffee and common herbal teas impair iron absorption, which may help explain some of their benefits.
Why Might Vegetarians Develop Less Depression
The largest study to date found that vegetarians have a 30% lower chance of developing depression over time.
SIBO and Leaky Gut: What the Science Says
Is small intestinal bacterial overgrowth (SIBO) a real disorder?
Friday Favorites: Dietary Sources of the “Longevity Vitamin” Ergothioneine
As we age, it may be even more important to include mushrooms (or tempeh) in our diet.
Do Vegetarians Have More or Less Depression and Anxiety?
Snapshot-in-time cross-sectional studies are mixed when it comes to vegetarian diets and mental health outcomes.
Getting Kids to Eat Their Vegetables
Can offering kale purée to babies shape their future taste for greens?
Friday Favorites: Are Menopausal Hot Flashes Inevitable? How Can Soy Foods Help?
Why do 85% of menopausal women suffer hot flashes in some countries but only 15% in others? Soy can be considered a first-line treatment for menopausal hot flash and night sweat symptoms.
How Ultra-Processed Foods Could Cause Disease: Loss of Phytonutrients
The 150 key nutritional components that are tracked in nutritional databases are only a tiny fraction of the more than 26,000 compounds present in our food.
How Ultra-Processed Foods Could Cause Disease: Packaging Chemicals
What are the human health effects of the mineral oils, phthalates, and bisphenols leaching from packaging materials into processed foods?
Friday Favorites: Improving VO2 Max: A Look at Vegetarian and Vegan Athletes
Plant-based diets improve the performance of athletes and nonathletes alike
How Ultra-Processed Foods Could Cause Disease: Industrial Contaminants
There are contaminants of processed foods that don’t show up on the ingredients label.
Friday Favorites: How to Get a Good Night’s Sleep Without Sleeping Pills
Taking even less than 18 Ambien-class sleeping pills in an entire year may triple the risk of dying prematurely.
Cold Water Immersion for Gout Flares
Cold water immersion is put to the test for burns, priapism, gout, and muscle aches.
Is Shrimp Good for You? Antibiotic Resistance
The FDA finds 1 in 10 imports of shrimp have unsafe levels of drug residues yet only tests about 1 in 1,000 shipments.
Friday Favorites: The Best Diet for COVID and Long-COVID
Healthy plant-based diets appear to help reduce the risks of severe COVID-19 and getting infected in the first place, even independent of comorbidities.
Is Shrimp Good for You? Pollutants and Food Safety
Eating just a single shrimp could exceed the safety limit for banned pesticides and chemicals.
Use Fiber to Burn Calories in Your Sleep with an Intestinal Workout
Our gut can be sedentary too—unless we feed it fiber.
Friday Favorites: The Effect of Sleep on Weight Loss
Those randomized to 8.5 hours of sleep a night lost significantly more body fat than those who got 5.5 hours. Getting even one more hour of sleep a night may help with weight control.
Flushing Calories with Fiber for Weight Loss
Could eating more fiber mean absorbing fewer calories from everything else we eat?
Mercury Exposure from Tuna vs. Thimerosal in Vaccines
A single can of tuna causes as much mercury exposure as how many mercury-containing vaccines?
Friday Favorites: Why Vegans Should Eat More Plant-Based
One cannot assume that simply avoiding animal foods will necessarily produce a healthy diet.
Can Cold Showers Improve Immune Function?
Does cold stress impair or boost our immunity?
What Is Titanium Dioxide, and Is It Safe?
Banned in Europe for concerns regarding DNA damage, titanium dioxide remains legal in U.S. foods.
Friday Favorites: Fecal Transplants for Aging and Weight Loss
Does poop from centenarians have anti-aging properties?
Iron-Deficiency Anemia: The Best Treatment and Are Vegetarians at Higher Risk?
What is the optimal dosing regiment for iron supplements?
How to Get the Ideal Ferritin Level and Avoid Symptoms of Iron Deficiency
Donating blood can bring down iron levels down to the sweet spot between 15 to 50.
Friday Favorites: The Benefits of Fenugreek for Preventing and Treating Diabetes
The spice fenugreek contains 4-hydroxyisoleucine, a peculiar amino acid that may explain its benefits for controlling blood sugar.
Are the Lower Iron Stores in Vegetarians a Risk or a Benefit?
Having high iron stores can increase cancer risk such that those randomized to donate blood experience a dramatic reduction in cancer death rates.
The Best Milk Alternative: Oat vs. Soy Milk
Can oat milk’s nutritional profile compete with soy milk’s?
Friday Favorites: Do Garlic, Beer, Bananas, and B Vitamins Really Repel Mosquitoes?
Garlic, beer, bananas, and B vitamins are put to the test as repellents for mosquitoes and ticks.
The Best Source and Dose of Plant Sterols for Lowering Cholesterol
Lower LDL cholesterol with 2 to 3 grams a day of phytosterols taken with meals from healthy, fortified foods or safe supplements.
Are Plant Sterols Safe for Lowering Cholesterol?
Safety concerns regarding phytosterolemia, red blood cell fragility, oxysterols, and the absorption of fat-soluble nutrients are addressed.
Friday Favorites: Dietary Approach to Naturally Treating Menopause Symptoms
Specific foods have been shown in randomized controlled trials to improve symptoms like hot flashes.
Are Plant Sterols Effective for Lowering Cholesterol?
Even if we eat little or no cholesterol, phytosterols can block the reabsorption of the excess cholesterol our liver dumps into our intestines.
How to Lower Cholesterol with the Portfolio Diet
Can a plant-based Portfolio Diet lower LDL cholesterol as effectively as statin drugs?
Friday Favorites: The Role of Endotoxins in Alzheimer’s and Dementia
Why can a single meal high in saturated fat impair cognition?
How Not to Die Documentary
In celebration of the 10th anniversary of the publication of How Not to Die, a documentary about my life and work.
The Benefits of Turmeric Curcumin for Arthritis, Blood Sugar, Cholesterol, and Body Weight
Dozens of human trials reveal where turmeric delivers—and where it doesn’t.
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