Chris Kresser: This is a controversial area definitely, but if you just think of these things logically, it’s really helpful. The same can be said for TMAO and the hypothesis that TMAO is the reason that red meat causes heart disease—I’ll come back to that in a second—but if it’s true that nitrates and nitrites are high in vegetables. If we’re going to argue that bacon is bad for you because of its nitrate or nitrite content, then we have to account for why we have some way of explaining why vegetables with very high nitrate or nitrite content are bad for you. So far, I haven’t seen any arguments that that answer that question convincingly. That doesn’t mean that there’s not some potential for toxicity there, but it does mean that if we think about it in terms of diet choices that we make, are we going to I supposed to avoid vegetables because they’re really high in nitrate or nitrite? It’s a similar thing with TMAO as I mentioned. For a long time, we were supposed to avoid red meat because of its saturated fat and cholesterol content, and then more recently studies have been suggesting that dietary cholesterol and saturated fat don’t contribute to heart disease, so it’s like this argument has now shifted that we should avoid red meat because of things like Neu5Gc or TMAO. There are studies that show that increased TMAO levels may contribute to heart disease, so it sounds convincing, but then when you look at foods and TMAO, you find that the foods that actually have the highest TMAO levels are seafood by far, way higher than red meat. Then you look at studies on seafood consumption, and you see that people who eat more seafood are dramatically at smaller risk of heart disease. How do we account for that? There must be something else going on, and I’ve written a couple articles about that if you’re if you’re curious. Then we have a similar kind of situation with lectins. A lot of people have argued that in the Paleo world that we shouldn’t consume any legumes at all or any grains at all because of their leptin content. But when you look at the food content of lectins, you see that a lot of vegetables and other plant foods that are considered to be healthy in the Paleo world are as high or higher in lectins than grains and legumes, so what do we make of that? I think you have to step back get away from mechanistic studies, especially when they’re done on animals and doses much higher than we would get in a normal diet or use, or especially if they’re isolating particular compounds and feeding them to an animal that’s on a processed diet without any of the other beneficial compounds that tend to come in those foods that contain that compound. It’s a lot of this research is really reductionistic, and it doesn’t take this full spectrum into account.