On January 16, 2024, TC Luoma announced that, as for a few months back, he no longer was employed by any supplement company, as in Biotest/T-Nation, and that he now is on Substack only. However, T-Nation are still publishing what seems to be a backlog of his articles, and the latest article, as of January 17, was yet another push for the extremely toxic and dangerous polyphenols.
On January 5, 2024, I covered the juvenile misunderstandings of the highly toxic and totally worthless Resveratrol – and well, here we go again.
As I mentioned in that article, “phytonutrients” are chemical compounds produced by plants that help to protect them from germs, fungi, bugs, and other environmental threats. It’s not clear who first coined the term “phytonutrients,” but they used to be called “phytochemicals.” Likely, some evil genius changed the name to deceive people into believing that these defense chemicals are “nutrition,” which they absolutely are not! These chemicals are not present in animals, they are unique to plants as a part of their self-defense mechanism.
Phytonutrients like polyphenols are simply plant toxins, chemicals produced to protect the plants from being eaten and destroyed. These chemicals are produced to hurt and even kill those trying to consume the plant. Polyphenols are thus a potent poison. But as always, the inverted “science” does not understand the first thing about human physiology or how our bodies actually work. So, with these basic facts established, let’s see what TC got completely wrong this time.
TC begins his article with some extremely false propaganda often touted in the very bastardized and pseudo-scientific field of “nutrition,” claiming that vegetables and fruits might make people live longer, when the truth is the complete opposite. And from there he herds the gullible ‘T-Nation’ readers into a laughable study on mice and what he believes is some secret “muscle building” properties of ‘polyphenols.’
Well, mice are not humans, and vice versa. The differences in the physiology and ability to neutralize toxins and poisons are like night and day. But for laughs, let’s see what these low-IQ researchers thought they found and what conclusion TC used to push Biotest supplements onto their readers.
The so-called “study”
Scientists divided young male mice into three different groups:
- The control group received standard mouse chow for 20 weeks.
- A second group received a slightly modified version of the chow – same basic stuff, but with a small (2%) amount of a powdered blend of fruit and vegetables.
- The third group received the same chow but with a slightly larger amount (3%) of a powdered fruit blend.
The veggie and/or fruit powder they used is commercially available and sold to people to augment their nutrition. The product is similar to Biotest’s Superfood albeit “weaker,” with only a third of the number of different fruits and vegetables found in Biotest’s product.
In other words, Biotest’s blend of crap is three times as toxic as the mice-slop they used in the so-called study. Also notice that they did not use plants, as in fruits and vegetables, they used a chemically filtered and dehydrated powder blend. In other words, these powders are a concentrated blend of defense chemicals, antinutrients, and other very harmful toxins. It’s thus hundreds of times more toxic than anything you could gather in nature and consume in one sitting.
What Happened to the mice?
After 20 weeks, the two groups of mice that were fed the fruit and vegetable powder were physically superior to the control mice:
The mice in the powdered fruit and vegetable groups had muscles that were around 1.4 and 1.45 times larger, respectively, than the control group. When forced to run to exhaustion, they ran 1.7 and 1.8 times longer, too. They also ran about 50% farther. Finally, they exhibited greater grip strength than mice in the control group.
When the scientists dove into the biochemistry of what the supplemented mice had done, they found some wild stuff. The fruit and vegetable extracts increased the number of mitochondria in the muscle cells of the mice. Mitochondria are responsible for churning out ATP, the energy currency of cells, in addition to pumping out enzymes that convert food into cellular energy.
Well, all this sounds good and fantastic if you believe that these changes are good, especially in the long run. Would the same thing happen in humans? Perhaps.
While there might be some chemicals, as in polyphenols that could have an acute stimulus on signal pathways that upregulate mitochondria, it could also be an emergency survival mechanism, or both.
In nature, if you for some reason were starving and had to rely on some plants to sustain you until you could get real animal-based food, you would get very little in each sitting, and very few naturally occurring plants in nature are actually edible. It would be a few pickings here and there. A far cry from a concentrated powder.
Same thing if you would have some plants with your meat and animal fat to make the meal bulkier. The animal-foods providing real nutrition would mitigate some of the damage done by the plants.
However, when you flood your system within a minute with such a concentrated poison as a powdered vegetable and fruit blend with possibly thousands of different toxins from more plants that you could ever find in nature in the span of weeks searching, your body will be overwhelmed. Introducing so many different toxins in one sitting is completely impossible in nature. It’s completely unnatural and something your body is not built for, or accustomed to handle.
If you’re healthy, you can normally deal with a few toxins every day, as in a small sitting of plants, but such an onslaught, especially if continued every day for weeks on weeks, will overtax your detoxification ability and your body will try to find other ways to mitigate the extremely large and unnatural toxic load, like upregulating cells and their mitochondria, which as a “side-effect” also means increased body mass.
Now, this might seem like a “cool” effect to those obsessed with body composition. Your cells are temporarily “working better” to clear out toxins and you gained some body mass. It’s almost like you had been taking some exogenous testosterone and perhaps a SARM like Cardarine. But instead, you gulped down a shitstorm of poisonous plant chemicals and can claim to be ‘natty.’ Vegans wouldn’t even mind shitting their pants five times a day when getting such results, even if they’re very temporary.
However, that raises the question of what actually happens to all the thousands of toxins you gulped down – toxins that your body can’t break down and eliminate. Yes, they get stored in your body fat and in other soft tissues. And what happens years down the line when these tissues get saturated and cell function begins to get threatened? Yes, your body form tumors to encapsulate the toxins to shield them off from becoming life threatening.
So, in short, you traded a sudden increase in cell functionality and body mass over the span of a few weeks, for cancer and tumors a bit later in your life – something that might end up cutting off quite a bit of your lifespan, not to mention life quality.
So, what can we learn from this? Well, it’s absolutely not to use toxins for a temporarily and short-lived boost in endurance and muscle mass as TC Luoma suggested in his conclusion.
What you should take away from retarded studies like this is that it doesn’t really matter how these cellular changes occurred. It doesn’t matter if they can be seen as positive. What matters is the fact that these ‘polyphenols’ are defense chemicals; they are toxins, and they poison you. That is an undebatable fact.
What matters is what will happen years from now as these toxins, and all other toxins you get exposed to and you no longer can eliminate as your body is overtaxed, accumulates in your body.
You always need to ask follow-up questions and think one step further, not blindly stare at the immediate and acute results, as they do not paint the whole picture.
While plants are contraindicated to the natural human diet of animal-based foods and will try to kill you, just imagine what these man-made concentrated and processed powders will do. Please, stay as far away from them as you can.