From The Heart #12: Chia Seeds, Yuka Scores, And The Dose That Makes The Poison

Shaky hands and loud headlines don’t make good health decisions, you do. 

This episode dives into the messy middle where wellness advice often gets flattened into yes/no rules and scary scores. We start with chia seeds and the internet’s favorite twist: a rare, easily preventable issue turned into a sweeping indictment. The fix is simple, soak briefly or drink water, yet those details get buried by fear-driven content that thrives on clicks, not context.

From there we unpack how apps like Yuka can mislead. A natural peanut butter may get dinged for fat or sodium while an ultra-processed, low-calorie snack earns gold stars. That’s not a win for your health; it’s a win for reductionist scoring. We talk about pattern over points, how foods behave in your real life, not just on a label. 

Then we go deeper into EWG lists and pesticide anxiety, clarifying the crucial difference between detecting many compounds and consuming harmful doses. Dose matters more than counts, and risk lives in context, not headlines.

Processing isn’t the villain either. It’s a spectrum, from harmless physical changes to beneficial fortification and, yes, some less healthy outcomes. Skim milk, fortified plant milks, and protein powders can be smart choices, depending on needs and goals. The bigger threat is fear itself: anxiety that pushes people toward orthorexia, rigid rules, and social stress. We trade absolutism for a practical framework, eat mostly whole foods, use processed options strategically, hydrate, move, sleep, and question any tool that spikes your fear instead of sharpening your judgment.

If you’re ready to replace panic with perspective, this conversation gives you sturdy questions to ask and calmer ways to choose. Subscribe, share with a friend who’s app-obsessed, and leave a review telling us the biggest wellness myth you’re ready to retire.

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Peace, love, plants!
Dr. Jules 

Transcript

Section A

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Yo playbies buddies, welcome to a new segment that I'm calling from Earth. These are bonus episodes, there's no script, no plan, just honest conversations and lessons that come straight from real patients and real life. And most of the time I just hit record and I speak. So what you're hearing is raw, it's unscripted, and it's intentional. But if you're ready for something a little bit more spontaneous, this is from the heart. Over the last week, I've actually gotten a few questions that raise some concerns for me. I know that a lot of people rely on apps or on online content to kind of manage or track their help journey. And I want to talk about some of these tools that are probably causing more or more harm than good, or that could potentially, for some of you, cause more harm than good. Now, the internet tends to see things in a very black or white way, and while it's impossible to fit nuance and context in a 30-second video, and that's why I am here with this platform. Now, I've just recently learned that there's actually an acronym called TLDR, which means too long didn't read. People tend to complain because my content is long, my videos can be 10-15 minutes long, my posts can take five, six minutes to read. The fun part about the internet is that there are about a million other people that do what I do uh in short form. So it's really easy to find someone else that would summarize in a 10-second sound bite what I take 30 minutes sometimes to decipher. So yeah, this video is not going to be short. It's going to be 10-15 minutes. It's going to talk about things to be aware of and how the internet uses fear to motivate change, which is not great for people's mental health. Now, over the last year, I've gotten a dozen people talking to me or asking me about the dangers of chia seeds. And I've actually had people recently ask me that question. They ask me, is it true that I absolutely need to soak my chia seeds in water before I eat them? Or that they could possibly harmful, be harmful for me? So, number one, chia seeds can absorb anywhere from five to twelve times their weight in water. And that's the gel that forms around it is soluble fiber that gets dissolved in water and that puffs up, it absorbs water. That's literally one of the great benefits of chia seeds, where they promote gut health, they feed the prebiotic fiber is fermented and then feeds good gut bugs. But if you take two tablespoons of dry chia seeds and you put them in your mouth and you swallow them, what's gonna happen is gonna combine with mucus and with fluids in your body and with and with saliva and it's gonna puff up super quick. And there has been cases of people where they have blockages in their esophagus because they've ingested large amounts of dried chia seeds. That doesn't make chia seeds toxic, just means drink water with them, wash them down, or either soak them before. Now you don't need to soak them for hours. I put chia seeds in my oatmeal every single morning, and by the time I wash my berries, the chia's have already started to form a gel. And then I just make sure to drink water with my meal, right? So the internet has this way of demonizing ultra rare things that almost never happen and that can be easily mitigated. Now, people describe chia seas as being toxic and dangerous, and you should be scared to eat them when they're a great source of ALA omega-3s, prebiotic fibers. Chia Cs are super healthy. That's the point I'm getting at. But people tend to fear things that are ultra rare, and that's I've all I've talked about that in the past. It's called the risk perception gap. The example I gave, I think, in a video, is probably something about the risk of hormone replacement therapy and breast cancer. I'm pretty sure I talked about your relative risk increase in breast cancer in people who take in women who take hormone replacement therapy is something like 15 to 20 percent, and the relative risk increased risk of breast cancer in people who are obese or is anything from 30 to 50. So we tend to fear the wrong things, right? And yesterday I got a message from someone, and it's the second time in a few months that I've gotten this same inquiry. I'll talk about the first time because it's quite interesting. Um, my wife owns Studio di Mada with her best friend Milani. I was literally, my daughters wanted to cut my hair and shave my beard, so I led them. And what happened is that my wife, I think she just kind of had a bottle of gel or mousse or whatever product she puts in my hair when she does my hair, when she cuts my hair. And someone and literally people researched that product and put it in what they in something called the Yucca app. Now, a lot of people here I'm sure know what the Yucca app is, and then I got a bunch of messages by from people saying that they couldn't believe that a wellness educator like me would put such harmful products in my hair. Oh my goodness. So I wanted to talk about the Yucca app because I've recently gotten a message, I think a few days ago or yesterday, from someone saying, I've just put certain foods in the Yucca app and it labels it as a super dangerous toxic food that I shouldn't be eating. I'm well aware of the wellness apps and apps like Yucca, which basically give a score to food. You can scan the barcode and it gives us food a score. Now, I really dislike these apps because they miss a lot of context. I'll give you an example. Now, if you take a super healthy food like peanut butter and you scan it, because some peanut butters have added sodium or have high levels of fat content, they tend to score very poorly on apps like the Yuca app. Whereas ultra-processed foods that are low in calories that are filled with artificial colors and preservatives get a high score because they're considered diet-friendly or or or weight loss supporting. Now, I get that these apps have use, they get a lot of things right, they can help people get more educated about what's in their foods, they help people read labels, they educate people on how to care for what they put in their body or on their body. But a lot of these apps are fear-mongering against perfectly healthy products. And if certain people are avoiding a certain hair gel because of the Yuca app scoring it poorly, then I think we're focusing on the wrong issues, right? And I'll give you an example where I'll give you an example from the EWG. The EWG is the environmental working group. Every year it publishes their dirty dozen or clean 15, and the dirty dozen is basically the most pesticide-laden foods that we have. Now, typically, strawberries come out on top because the wide number of pesticides that are used to grow strawberries. Now, I'd rather not have worms in my strawberry, and I'd rather have as less chemical pesticides as possible. All right, so let's get that out of the way. But the way the EWG measures pesticide residue on their fruits is that they measure the number of detectable pesticides, not their concentrations. Now, any toxicologist or anyone here with a basic scientific education background will understand that it's the dose that makes the poison. If there are a hundred pesticides on my strawberry, but the dose of these are super, super, super low, they're not going to be harmful for you. If there are less pesticides, I'm happy. But if there's less pesticides, but their doses are higher, they're likely going to be more dangerous for your health. Now, some something like the Yucca app would score the strawberry with least pesticides in terms of numbers is better than the strawberry that has no pest that have a lot of pesticides but at low dose. Now, if I'm mixing people up, I want to give you an example, right? Using the EWG classification for organic food, like the dirty dozen and the clean 15 to determine whether or not a food is good or bad would be the equivalent of me saying that tolanol is toxic. People will be like, well, Jules, come on, it depends on the dose. Yes, it depends on the dose. If I give you one milligram of tolanol, it will do nothing. And if you take a milligram of tolanol with a milligram of Advil with a milligram of muscle relaxer and a milligram of whatever else you want, it will likely do nothing. You'll feel nothing. Your body will degrade it, metabolize it, get rid of it, excrete it, and you will still be healthy after taking that one milligram of tolanol. Now, if I give you 500 milligrams of tolanol, you might have a little bit of better pain and management, you have a little bit less fever. But if I give you 5,000 milligrams of tolanol, you're likely to console the ER with fulminate hepatitis and maybe even die from acute liver injury. The dose makes the poison, right? Not the number of compounds, but the dose. So what happens with something like the EWG is they measure good or bad depending on the number of ingredients and not their dose. When polanol is super useful when used at appropriate doses. So I just want people to be careful when they're reading about certain organizations like the EWG or apps like the Yuca app, right? Because there's a lot of context missing, and what people don't know is that the EWG is a marketing and lobbying organization for the organic farming industry. I'm all for organic farming. That's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is that people pay and the EWG gets money from companies that then get their label EWG approved, slapped on it. Just even in the same manner as certain organizations, associations, or apps get payback and cash back from organizations from products that pay to have their label slapped on it, right? So, for example, let's say I want to become rich and I determine I'm gonna call it the jewels approved label. Well, and people pay me money for me to slap my jewels approved label on it. Well, I might bend the rules and loosen the criteria, right? So I'm not saying these things are good or bad. That's not what I'm saying, because I know a lot of people will kind of respond negative negatively to this. I just want you to have a little bit more critical thinking, right? So super healthy foods that then have added sodium score very poorly on the app, where super processed, unhealthy foods that have low saturated fat and low sodium and low added sugar, but are still ultra-processed, will score better. Now it all comes back to that example where I got people responding to hair gel that my wife put on my head that is literally not absorbed in my body, and people saying, I can't believe that you would use something like that in your hair because the Yucca app rates it poorly. Now, the Yucca app used the number of ingredients as a marker of health. I've spoken about this a lot. Something being processed doesn't automatically make it bad. Processing exists on a spectrum from physical modification to chemical modification, and you can modify something physically and still not change the nutritional content, much in the same way as you can modify something chemically and make it healthier or make it less healthy. It depends. You can add things and call it chemically processed, and you can remove things and call it chemically processed, and if you add good things, aka fortification, no one argues that adding iodine to sodium is good, that adding B12, calcium, and vitamin D to soy milk is good, but it's still a processed food. That doesn't make it inherently bad. That being said, you can take 3.25% milk and process it by creating skim milk, and this actually reduces the amount of saturated fat in the milk and therefore makes it healthier and less calorie-dense. So chemically altering something is processing it, but it doesn't automatically make it good or bad. It depends, right? But as soon as something is processed, a lot of these apps, like the Yucca app, will automatically demonize it. And you need to be careful when you are not well versed in the type of processing, the amount of processing, whether it's physical or chemical. A lot of processed foods can be super healthy for you and are associated with positive health outcomes. Not just because it's caused is is called process doesn't mean that it's bad, right? I prefer you eating 80% of your foods from whole foods that grow in the ground in a plant from a plant from a tree, in their status close to the way Mother Nature created them. I think that's reasonable, but never would I think that just because it's processed this bad, I consume protein powders, an ultra-processed food. But protein powders are regularly associated with positive health outcomes in terms of lean body mass and metabolic parameters. So even that would be a great example of an ultra-processed food that is associated with positive health outcomes. So what I'm saying here is just be careful because a lot of the information you see online is fueled on fear. There's no need to fear chia seeds. But if you take a heap of chia seeds in a dry mouth, it might absorb water in your throat or in your esophagus and it will puff up. It will blow up or expand, and that might cause issues. And if you go on the Yuca app and you scan the barcode of a natural peanut butter that contains a little bit of added oils or added sodium, it'll score very poorly. While you may scan that Low-fat granola bar that may score great. So the Yuka app is good in terms of it helping people or encouraging people to get educated about what they put in their mouth. And I'm all for that. But the issue we're seeing is that people are scared, right? They're scared of eating produce that's not organic because of the pesticides, or they're scared of eating peanut butter because the Yuka app says it was here. Goes Fluffy gagging on the couch again. You you good Fluffy? Anyways, where I'm going with this is that I don't know where I'm going with this. It's difficult. I mean, what I'm trying to do here is educate people on the nuances and on the pros and cons, and then trying to help you make your own decision. But I do understand how influencers nowadays are extremely convincing, right? And people that speak with authority and don't wear a shirt and have a six-pack and speak loudly and are standing like that instead of slouch like me, they will gain more traction according to the algorithms online. So I get that, and I get that a 22-minute video about nuances of food tracking is not gonna go viral, right? Nuance. So there are pros and there are cons to things like the EWG or Yucca apps or wellness apps. There are pros and cons of tracking calories or tracking macros. And the pros for me may be cons for other people. Some people even suffer from orthorexia, which is basically an obsession with being healthy and adopting help promoting behavior to a point where people forget to live their lives and people are avoiding going at the restaurant because of fear of ingredients that would be unhealthy there. So it's all about balance. Everyone has a different balance. My balance is different than yours, may not work for everyone, but I do hope that people here by watching my videos continue understanding that my goal is to help you reflect, to help you develop critical thinking skills, not to believe everything you see online, including the content that I post, and understand that it's almost impossible to have a balanced and nuanced view of any subject, even in a 23-minute video, right? Anyways, that's my story, and I'm sticking to it. Thanks so much for listening. We'll see you at the next video or audio or podcast or wherever you find this content. Have an awesome day. Peace everyone, go check out my website, livebasedoctortools.com to find free downloadable resources. And remember that you can find me on Facebook and Instagram at Doctor Tools Corvier, and on YouTube at LiveBaseDoctor Tools.