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Scot: Can spinach cause kidney stones? Is there an upper limit to protein intake? Is cinnamon the key to weight loss? And if we have time, are oysters the perfect breakfast food? We're going to go ahead and answer that one right now: No. Well, we'll find out what the claim is. This is another addition of "TikTok Nutrition: Fact or Cap." Mitch is back from the depths of TikTok yet again, and we're going to find out which of these is true, which of them are cap, which means false.

This is "Who Cares About Men's Health," with information, inspiration, and a different interpretation of men's health. I'm Scot. I bring the BS. Producer Mitch is on the show.

Mitch: Hey there.

Scot: And the PhD, he is technically a doctor, the MD . . . Well, he's not the MD, but he's a PhD to my BS,

Thunder: Jalili. He is a Professor in the Department of Nutrition and Integrated Physiology. How are you doing, Thunder?

Thunder: I'm doing great. Thanks for having me today.

Scot: Are you particularly interested in any of these off the bat before we get to all of them? Is there any that kind of piqued your interest?

Thunder: All of them except the oyster one, because I hate oysters.

Mitch: Good. I'm glad that's universal.

Scot: Yeah, seems pretty unanimous there. All right. Mitch, you went back to TikTok to find out what they're talking about there. TikTok and social media can be a useful research resource for health and nutrition information, but you have to go in with a pretty, I think, big dose of skepticism. What did you find out this time? What was going on this time?

Mitch: I don't know. You get a little deep into it, and all of a sudden, I'm not sure of reality anymore. And so Thunder, you're a nutritionist. I want to ask a couple of questions just to see what the day-to-day with a nutritionist is like. How much in a week raw ground beef do you eat from the container?

Thunder: Usually about 30 to 35 pounds.

Mitch: Okay, perfect.

Scot: When you say the container, do you mean actually from the cow, just gnawing it right off the bone, or what?

Mitch: No, just the little saran wrap, they rip right through it.

Scot: That happens on TikTok?

Mitch: Yeah, saw a lot of that. How often do you come across nutrition secrets that the government doesn't want you to know?

Thunder: Virtually a daily basis.

Mitch: That's why I assumed. Every article, it seems like that. And then my final question is how much time as a nutritionist do you feel that you spend in a grocery store shirtless?

Thunder: Probably a good six and a half to seven hours a day.

Mitch: All right. It's one "nutritionist" after another doing these weird things that I do not understand, and I just needed to check in really quick.

Thunder: Well, in graduate school there's a whole course we have to take on shirtless nutrition.

Scot: That's outstanding. It seems like being shirtless is kind of a prerequisite to being a health and wellness and fitness influencer on social media.

Mitch: It really does.

Thunder: Yeah, you've got to represent.

Scot: I'm glad you had some training in that. All right. Well, let's go ahead and get to the first one. Can spinach cause kidney stones? I mean, spinach is supposed to be so healthy for you and so good. This is actually a claim that's out there, Mitch? Why don't you go ahead and set this one up for us?

Mitch: So this is a trend. It came out a couple years ago. Apparently, Liam Hemsworth, the younger Hemsworth brother, in a TMZ-type article had talked about how he had constantly struggled with kidney stones because of his vegan diet. And a lot of the kind of meat-forward dude bro nutritionists really latched onto that study.

One of the things that's kicking around right now . . . I found this particular story has 11.4 million likes, and 669,000 followers on this account only, and the claim is if you eat as much as a cup of spinach in a day, it's going to form kidney stones.

 

Spinach has a lot of oxalates, and the oxalates in spinach actually cause kidney stones for a lot of people. Some people can eat spinach, but a lot of people think this is a great health food, and it causes issues for a lot of people.

If you're thriving, don't change anything about your diet. But if you have kidney stones or autoimmune issues, understand that a low-oxalate diet is around 40 to 50 milligrams of oxalates per day. One cup of raw spinach has 700 milligrams of oxalates per day. So if you want the nutrients that are in spinach, whether it's vitamin K or iron, just eat a steak, eat some hamburger, eat some liver, and then you will get the nutrients without all of the oxalates in here.

Spinach is in fact a vegetable. It's a leaf. The plant doesn't want you to eat this, and humans are not very good at clearing this oxalate. There's an example famously with Liam Hemsworth. He got a kidney stone and a lot of people have attributed their kidney stones to things like spinach, which has a lot of oxalates in it. So be careful with this one, guys.

 

Thunder: Believe it or not, there is actually an element of accuracy and truth to this. I know, big surprise. Hang on a second. Let me take off my shirt so I can finish.

Mitch: That'll help me a lot. Thank you.

Scot: Yeah, I wasn't quite believing you until you did that. Now I'm totally in.

Thunder: So let me start off by saying the risk of kidney stones is pretty complex. There is definitely an age component to it. There's kind of a metabolic component to it. In other words, the way some people's metabolism operates, particularly their immune system, that can be a player. There are obviously other dietary factors. There are even microbiota factors, gut microbiota.

There's a lot going on, so it's not a one size fits all that if someone has kidney stones, if they stop eating spinach, everything will be solved. But there's a chance that it would help, so I'm definitely not discounting it.

But I think some people that would watch this video and they struggle with kidney stones and they stop eating spinach, they may not get the result they think because of all the other factors that may be at play at the same time.

Scot: But it sounds like it is possible.

Thunder: Oh, absolutely. Yeah.

Scot: It might work, like it did for Liam Hemsworth. That's Thor's younger brother, right, Mitch?

Mitch: Yes.

Scot: It could work for them.

Thunder: Yeah, absolutely. And the fact that Liam Hemsworth is a vegan, he's not eating red meat, which is a risk factor in some people. He's not overweight, which is another risk factor, right? So he has some other things that are not in play.

Maybe he's one of those people that just can't handle oxalates. Maybe his immune system is not quite working the way it should. Some people need their immune system to clear oxalates, which is the thing that's found in spinach, so it doesn't accumulate in the kidney. So maybe he's susceptible to that. I'm just guessing here.

But in those circumstances, it seems like it definitely works for him and I wouldn't take away that possibility for other people. And it's a pretty low-risk thing to try. If you do have history of kidney stones, if you want try to not eat spinach, go for it. Try it and see what happens.

Scot: All right. So spinach causes kidney stones, fact or cap?

Thunder: I wouldn't say it causes kidney stones. I would say spinach may exacerbate the risk of kidney stones.

Scot: All right. So there's a bit of truth in that. The part of me that has been doing this podcast and working in healthcare for a while now would say if you do try that, Thunder said it's a pretty low-risk thing. I mean, there are some people who have never eaten spinach in their lives, and they're doing fine. So eliminating it is fine.

But you probably should have that conversation with your doctor, because who knows? That information might help inform them on some . . . It might provide information that could inform them that would be able to help you even more.

Thunder: Yeah. And I should add one other thing to the spinach story. There's a difference between cooked spinach and raw spinach. Cooked spinach does have less oxalate than raw spinach, so there's that to consider as well. The raw spinach is probably going to be like the huge spinach salad, if you can imagine that. That probably carries a bit more of the risk in some cases than having some spinach that's cooked.

Scot: Number two in "TikTok Nutrition: Fact or Cap?" is there an upper limit to protein intake? Mitch, go ahead and set this up. Explain what you mean by that.

Mitch: So this one is a very popular one that was first started to be seen kicking around TikTok a couple of months ago. Just this one post that we're about to listen to reached 1.6 million people, but this claim has been made on Joe Rogan and a bunch of different sources that basically argues whether or not men really need more protein over a certain limit.

And the thing that makes this one feel kind of strange is that it was a single female nutritionist who posted an item explaining what the research shows, and as we'll hear in an example here, it's a lot of dude bro nutritionists basically stitching, or adding their stuff onto hers, and telling her that she doesn't know what she's talking about, that more protein is always better.

 

Person 1: . . . over again, that 0.82 is the upper limit of the benefits of protein.

Person 2: Sure, if you want to ignore the increased metabolic rate, the higher satiety levels, the ability to preserve muscle mass in a deficit, all of the things that matter to an obesity crisis, which we are most certainly facing in America. But go ahead and keep your low-protein diet. Time for my BUILT bar.

 

Scot: All right, Thunder, is there some truth to this? Here's how I've heard that, because I've heard this too, that there's an upper limit to protein, and I've heard it in a lot of different contexts. But an upper limit to what? That would be my question. Is that your first question?

Thunder: Yeah, that is a good question. An upper limit to what? Now, the assumption we're making is the limit to the amount of protein you can use for protein synthesis in the body before it gets diverted to do other things. That's my assumption of what they're talking about.

Scot: Okay. So is there a fact or cap to this?

Thunder: Well, don't you just love talking about protein, by the way?

Mitch: It's what most of us talk about.

Scot: You feel that there's too much protein talk in the world, Thunder? Is that what you're getting at?

Thunder: Yeah. I mean, everyone loves to debate it. All right. So the way I see it, this is one of those topics where everybody is a little bit correct. In certain activity conditions, yeah, 0.8 grams per kilogram of body weight of protein is all you need, and anything you have beyond that is not really used for protein synthesis. In other activity conditions, you would need more. So the lady is correct in some cases, and the guy is correct in some cases. So you've got to look at it in an individual standpoint.

So let me just give an example. If you take someone middle-aged or not even middle-aged, a 30-year-old guy who's fairly sedentary, has an office job, doesn't get a ton of activity beyond what you do in just daily life, for them 0.8 grams per kilogram of protein is really all they need that meets their daily protein synthesis requirements.

But if you take that same guy and now you have them training for a triathlon, for example, or they like to go to the gym three or four times a week and lift weights, now their protein intake is going to be different because they're putting strain on their muscles. They're inducing their muscles to hypertrophy. In other words, add more contractile machinery. They have increased daily protein turnover in the muscles that are involved in repair and replacement, all those things, so you're going to need a little bit more protein.

Scot: So is there a point where you're getting negligible health benefits from eating protein? Because the thought is more is better, right? The more I eat, the more muscle I'll get. Do we reach a point where that really falls off?

Thunder: Oh, 100%. First of all, just eating protein by itself is not going to make your muscles bigger. You have to have the exercise and the physiological overlay.

Scot: Oh, rats.

Mitch: I know. I get that fancy yogurt in the black label because I know it's going to get me shredded.

Thunder: Yeah. Take off your shirt and eat the yogurt and it all falls into place.

Scot: But if you are exercising to the point where you are causing hypertrophy . . . What is that word?

Thunder: Hypertrophy.

Scot: Where you're making your muscles grow, you would want to eat more protein, but there comes a point where for that purpose, more protein is not going to really benefit you anymore.

Thunder: Right. So everyone has a limit. It's just going to be determined by the activity level.

Scot: Hey, Mitch, what were some of the other health benefits that that particular influencer mentioned? We're talking about building muscle, how much protein you need. But I remember satiety was one of them, this feeling of feeling full, that eating more protein, he is implying, would help you feel more satisfied so you wouldn't be eating the other stuff. What else was in there?

Mitch: So he also talked about mood regulation, he also talked about energy levels through the day, and he also talked about the increased metabolism.

Scot: All right. So, Thunder, this 0.86 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight, the claim that this influencer is making is that is not enough though for these other health benefits as well. What are your thoughts on that?

Thunder: Yeah, I don't agree with that, because the thing he said about better for your metabolism, I don't even know what that means. That's so broad and vague. I don't even understand what he's talking about, so let's just put that one aside.

The satiety point, yeah, protein makes you feel full. So if you have a meal and you have some protein in it, you will feel more full and maybe not eat again for a while. But you know what? You can accomplish the same thing with eating fat in that meal. You can accomplish the same thing by having more fiber in that meal. Protein isn't the only game in town when it comes to satiety.

And then energy, sometimes I think people mistake in having more energy levels with not feeling sleepy, right? You eat a meal and you feel sleepy an hour or two later. They confuse that with having low energy.

I think if you have a meal and it has kind of a low sugar content and more complex carbs as opposed to refined carbohydrates, that goes a long way to kind of "give you more energy," because you usually don't feel sleepy if you have meals that are lower in sugar and lower in refined carbs. Meals that have more protein and fat and fiber tend to not leave you in that food coma state.

So I wonder if some of that is just kind of confusion. It's not necessarily an effect of just protein. It's kind of more the diet and the meal in general.

Scot: Sure. Or thinking that if somebody eats more protein, that means they're going to be eating less of that other stuff which can cause some of these negative things maybe.

Thunder: I mean, it's possible, but I wouldn't say for sure, because there are a lot of people that love their protein bars and are having a high protein intake, but they're eating a lot of other crap in the diet too. They're on a refined carbohydrate diet.

Scot: Yeah. In a protein bar, there's a ton of simple carbohydrates, right? A ton of sugars.

Thunder: I mean, depending on the bar, yeah, there can be.

Scot: As much as a candy bar.

Mitch: I do want to use that as a segue, though, because one of the things I do want to draw attention to is with this particular clip, there are quite a few influencers that name specific bars. And when you go a little deeper into their account, they have sponsored posts. They get a kickback from the brands.

Scot: Huh. Wonder what their motivation is. What do you think?

So what about the other side of this? We talked about spinach and that it's kind of low risk if you want to remove spinach from your diet and see what happens as far as kidney stones. What about, "Hey, I just want to eat more protein"? Is there a downside to that?

Thunder: There can be. We talked about briefly how in some people red meat increases the risk for kidney stones, so there's a downside. There's some literature out there that suggests protein intake could be related to increased cancer risk kind of depending on where you get the protein, so that's a potential downside.

Just kind of shooting for normal amounts of protein is really the way to go. And again, if you're in any kind of athletics, and that doesn't mean you have to be a 25-year-old Olympic athlete, but anything that kind of goes beyond the normal baseline level of activity, yeah, eat more protein.

And you should get it from food. You can get plant-based protein. That includes grains and beans. And you can get protein from animal products too. There's nothing wrong with that. Just temper that with some of the other possible issues that may come from eating too much red meat, for example.

Scot: I feel that a potential downside would be if you're so focused on protein, that means you're not focused on maybe some other healthy stuff that should be in your diet.

Thunder: I mean, that definitely could be. I guess I just kind of assumed that people that are trying to be into health and eating more protein, they should be paying attention to that too, but maybe that's a bad assumption on my part.

Scot: All right. One-sentence summary. Upper limits of protein responses, can you get too much? How would you put that into a sentence or two to help people with a takeaway?

Thunder: I would say yes, you can get too much protein. And by that, I mean protein you're not using for protein synthesis, but it's being diverted to energy use or even promoting fat storage.

Scot: All right. "Nutrition: Fact or Cap?" number three. How about this one? We're calling this the cinnamon effect. Go ahead and set this up for us, Mitch.

Mitch: This one is wild. So it came out of nowhere. We're already up to 1.5 million plays over 20 accounts in the last month, and it's this claim that says if you put more cinnamon in your diet, you'll lose weight. And they talk about the importance of having cinnamon to get shredded. They put cinnamon on every little thing that they eat throughout the day.

The thing that is kind of interesting on this one is I couldn't find any specific journals referenced. I was looking at one after another of a person trying to claim that there has been research on, there have been studies on, but not a single citation. And so this one, with how quickly it's been spreading and the amount of people sharing it, it seems strange that there isn't even a scientific claim.

 

Person 1: Yo, why are you putting cinnamon on your fruit?

Person 2: Bro, you realize the reason you're not shredded is because you're not putting cinnamon on your fruit. You put cinnamon on your fruit, your blood sugar doesn't spike. When your blood sugar doesn't spike, you burn more body fat. So if you want to get shredded and stop being a fat [bleep], starting eating cinnamon with any sugar you eat.

 

Scot: Oh, are you kidding me?

Mitch: No, and it's the Taco bell noise. They do it whenever they point at their abs. I don't know when that started. It's odd.

Thunder: That's fantastic.

Mitch: Right? There's a lot of these. They're slurping their fruit, and they have their big giant thing of Kroger brand cinnamon, and yeah, they point to their abs and the Taco Bell sound plays. It's pretty magical.

So the one that I did want to share is the one that has been the most stitched, and this is actually from a Russian nutritionist. Again, recognize that he never cites a specific article.

 

This is how cinnamon will help you get rid of your belly fat. First way/benefit, now the benefit is it satiates hunger. It makes you less hungry, keeps you full and satiated.

Now, let's go over to the next way, which is with metabolic boost. Now cinnamon, believe it or not, boosts metabolism, and it's actually been studied. And I'm not just pulling stuff out of my butt. Now, studies have shown that cinnamon helps with metabolizing fat, and more specifically stubborn fat.

Another way that cinnamon helps you get rid of the belly fat is through reducing blood sugar levels. You wake up, you have a glass of water, and what you do is you drink this fat-burning drink, which also helps lower the blood sugar levels.

Another way cinnamon works is on an empty stomach. This is the best way to consume cinnamon. So what you do is you take one glass of water, you put a little bit of cinnamon, a little bit of salt, and four drops of lemon, and you mix that, you stir it, and you just drink it.

Now, another way that cinnamon can help you is it is also an antioxidant and an anti-inflammatory.

Now, when you have your cinnamon with it, so same day you had your fat-burning drink and then you had the snack with cinnamon and then you go eat the burger, it works on as an anti-inflammatory and it reduces many of the negatives. It negates many of the negatives of the burger.

 

Scot: First of all, that was the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard. People listen to this guy and watch this guy? Are you serious?

Thunder: I know. He sounds like he's just bat-[bleep] crazy.

Scot: He does, doesn't he?

Mitch: I know, right? One hundred and twenty thousand followers and growing.

Scot: Oh my gosh. Really, people? This is what we're fighting out there, Thunder.

Thunder: I know.

Scot: Thank you for not being that kind of nutritionist, Thunder. I appreciate that, first of all.

Thunder: Yeah, I think my colleagues would hang me if I was like that.

Scot: All right. It's really hard to sort through all of the stuff that he said, so we're going to do it for you here. There were four primary claims that were made about cinnamon. It satiates hunger and keeps you full. Number two, boosts metabolism. Number three, reduces insulin response. Four, it's an antioxidant for anti-inflammation. So what do you think about any of those?

Thunder: This kind of reminds me of politics, because the guy takes the smallest kernel of potential truth, and twists and expands and distorts it in a way that it's completely nuts.

So let's start with his blood sugar/insulin thing. First of all, what he was saying is just 100% wrong. When you wake up in the morning after sleeping, you are already in a fasted state. Your blood sugar is already low. Why would you pound some cinnamon to lower it even further? Because if it actually does work, now you're hypoglycemic. You'll pass out and bash your head on the counter or something. So that's just dumb.

Something to lower blood sugar should be taken with a meal or after a meal to enhance insulin sensitivity, if it works. Not when you're fasting.

Mitch: That was the Taco Bell boy. A bunch of them are taking big pieces of fruit, covering it in cinnamon, and just chowing down saying that it's not going to spike their insulin. Is that closer to what would happen if it was true?

Thunder: If it worked, yes, that's the approach you want to take. But why would you do it with fruit? Fruit has a lot of fiber in it. It takes a while to digest. It doesn't spike your glucose that quickly. Maybe you should have a cinnamon bun with a pound of cinnamon on it, because that'll spike your glucose levels, and so the cinnamon can counteract it.

Scot: Yeah. And really that makes no sense either, does it?

Thunder: Right.

Scot: So the other assumption they're making is that spiking your insulin, the amount of spike you would get with fruit is a bad thing. And it's not, is it?

Thunder: No, it's not. So right away there those guys are missing the mark. Now, if you have an individual who is pre-diabetic, for example, or someone who's type 2 diabetic, and they have problems with insulin resistance, can cinnamon be used to kind of potentiate/increase the insulin effect in those people and keep their blood sugar lower? That's a legit question.

Now, there have been studies done in animals and there have been some studies done in people, and the studies done in people are kind of all over the place. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.

The other important factor is the amount of cinnamon you have to do this. This is beyond sprinkling some on an apple slice, right? This is like a tablespoon of cinnamon or two teaspoons of cinnamon. The dose is pretty high. So now you have to turn to putting that cinnamon in a capsule as a supplement and pounding a few of those every time you eat.

And I think that's probably the most important message I would say about cinnamon. I like cinnamon, but everything you hear about the effects of cinnamon assumes a pretty big dose, and it's more than what you get from sprinkling it in yogurt or oatmeal or fruit. It requires a supplemental dose. It has to be in a pill, and a number of pills.

Mitch: Do you guys remember the cinnamon challenge from YouTube yesteryear where people were trying to eat a giant spoonful of cinnamon, and you'd just watch one person or another get really sick really fast? That's all I can think about. That's a lot of cinnamon. That is a whole lot of cinnamon.

Thunder: Yeah. And it's tough to have straight up. That's why we put it in a capsule and we swallow it, so we don't have to choke it down through our mouth. But again, you need at least a couple grams. The studies that have looked at it in people have given anywhere from 500 milligrams, which is not that much, up to 6 grams, which is at least a teaspoon and a half. So we've just got to keep that in mind.

And then the other point is most of this work has been done in cell studies, cell culture studies, and animal studies. It has not been done necessarily in humans.

The whole thing about cinnamon will help you get shredded and lose weight? Where does that idea come from? Well, people have done studies using adipocytes, which are fat cells, grown in a culture dish and have treated it with extracts of cinnamon. Not just sprinkling cinnamon on the cells, but taking the phytochemical extract, the active component, if you will, and treating the cells with that and found that the cells increased expression of genes that are involved in breaking down triglycerides/fat. Awesome.

But that's cells in a dish, and that's an extract of cinnamon. How do you apply that to people? And that's where the knowledge kind of breaks down.

Scot: Is cinnamon the key to weight loss, Thunder? What's your final verdict?

Thunder: Cap.

Scot: That was a good one. That was a quick one. All right, gentlemen. Well, we're not going to have time for the oyster one today. We will try to tackle that in a future episode. Are oysters the perfect breakfast food? But for this episode, any takeaways? Mitch, takeaway?

Mitch: Skepticism. Just assume everyone on the internet is trolls until proven otherwise, is all I can say. It's things like the spinach discussion, right? Can it cause kidney stones for people that have that predisposition and can't deal with oxalates? Yes. But this idea that normal immune system responses, people out there that have never had a kidney stone, don't toss away spinach from your diet. And so that's kind of where I'm at. It's just like, "Does it seem too good to be true? Maybe it is."

Scot: My takeaway is more recent of what you just said, Thunder. One of the things that these influencers love to do is they love to say, "The research shows." And there are a lot of questions you have to ask yourself. Just because there's research doesn't mean it's good research. Was it a good study? Was it a reliable study? Who did the study? And in this last example of the cinnamon effect, is it in a cell or is it in a human? Because those are two very different things.

So that is really my takeaway. Just because somebody says, "The research shows," doesn't necessarily mean it's based on good research, or research that's applicable to the claim. Thunder, thoughts?

Thunder: My takeaway, and you guys may be surprised, is I kind of like that all this stuff is on TikTok, because it gives people ideas and makes people think about stuff. So as long as they can somehow do their own homework and find out, "Is any of this legit?"

So I think it's actually positive to have these ideas out there. But hopefully people are, like I said, doing homework, maybe asking a nutritionist or a doctor or something, "Is there any truth to this?" and looking into it for themselves.

Scot: All right. Well, if you have something you would like

Thunder: to address in "Fact or Cap: TikTok Nutrition," be sure to reach out to us, or if you have any thoughts on any of the three that we talked about today. Maybe you're one of those people that spinach actually . . . you stopped eating spinach and it reduced your incidences of kidney stones. Would love to hear that story. You can reach out to us at hello@thescoperadio.com.

Thanks for listening, and thanks for caring about men's health.