Nutritional Yeast and Other Reasons to Avoid Health Tabloids

We really do live in a beautiful age. We have so much at our disposal. We are, at least in the English speaking world, the wealthiest culture to ever live of which we have any historical record. Even the impoverished can check their cell phone from their own car to check their bank account to see how poor they are! Then they can watch a movie nearly for free and call or text or social media their friends at no additional charge...

Among the amazing benefits of our age is the availability of information. We are rapidly approaching a time when education will be affordable because of the high percentage on-line and as it is you can, if you have some aptitude and background to start with, learn to do just about anything, obtain just about anything on the internet, from your phone.

We do have some new precautions we must learn as part of this whole process. One of them is that the phone or computer itself is damaging to our health in prolonged dosages and much about what is available there is highly addictive. Another is that anyone can say anything on the internet. I want to take just a minute to tell you about my sojourn as an author for a large, world-wide health publication.

I had the occasion to write, see what was getting people's attention and read other authors' materials. This was mildly interesting at the start but I began to see some things which made me want to warn my clients and later all my readers. Below are a few things I saw:

1. Other writers would read published literature which they thought would get the attention of their readers and would write articles about it like it was the gospel truth or like they understood it, even though they had no actual clinical experience with it.

2. Most of my contemporary writers were not actually in practice. Some did consulting, but the problem there is that you don't get to objectively assess patient after patient, use Outcome Assessment Tools (OATs) or otherwise follow up to see if they were actually getting better--if the approach, supplement, diet, etc...was working at all!

3. Information which got people's attention just got passed around by other writers and other "consultants" all over the world, using multiple references to other such articles, all of which were referencing each other. This information was passed off like it was gospel truth and the person writing knew all about it, etc.

4. Precious few of those other authors have enough education to read a study and understand what it does and does not say. Among those who have the education, clearly sometimes they were going with an excerpt or the abstract to determine what the study said. One study, involving several thousand peer-reviewed articles from every discipline related to health in the english-speaking world, determined that 1/3 abstracts claimed conclusions which were NOT SUPPORTED BY THE ACTUAL STUDIES! In other words, unless you have enough education to read the study and pull it apart, you do not really know what it actually said. Those with enough education are often so pressed for time that they have to quote and hope!

So the conclusion is that really bad ideas would get sold effectively and suddenly everyone was talking about it like they knew all about it and preaching it like it was scripture and then dogmatically defending it when it was questioned--all this without EVER ACTUALLY USING IT IN PRACTICE AND CHECKING TO SEE IF IT WAS TRUE OR WORKED AT ALL!

I will admit, I wrote about popular subjects too...but I wrote what I knew about them, improving as best I could on ideas which were good and debunking ones which were bad ideas.

Now, lets look at nutritional yeast.

To begin with, professionals who had their sleeves rolled up--working in busy, real practices where they see the results of their work and have to deal with them--have used nutritional yeast in practice since at least the 1920's! That alone tends to make me refuse to take tabloid criticism of nutritional yeast at face value. In fact, I have long urged those who are serious about learning natural healing to start with professionals from that era: Royal Lee, Dr. John R. Christopher, Bernard Jensen, Dr. William Kelley and Jethro Kloss--and some of their more modern counterparts have carried forward the work well enough, like Richard Schulze, David Pesek, David Christopher, Nicholas Gonzales and Dr. D. A. Versendaal. I am not trying to name drop, I am simply hoping that serious students who are reading this blog will start seeking out those experts to study with so that they can get the foundation needed to keep them from believing every ridiculous idea that comes around which happens to sound compelling, but which it totally untested!

The world is rapidly changing. New toxins and stressors never encountered or never in such quantity, are upon us in a tidal wave. Still, these guys didn't do anything stupid and you can count on it. It doesn't mean they were never wrong, but if it was harmful, they certainly never used it as a platform. They did not agree really with each other on many points, but all of them were among the smartest in their fields.

So, just at this point, I find Nutritional Yeast to probably be quite useful and never harmful. However, lets examine some additional data to try to put the current issues to bed.

1. Nutritional Yeast contains Monosodium Glutamate (MSG) and is therefore the devil! First of all, what we know about MSG is not nearly so much as we think we know. Yes, it causes inflammatory response in many people...but not, interestingly, in every setting. In other words, some people will have no reaction if they eat it in certain contexts. Having said that, let me be clear: On principle, I am very cautious (not dogmatic) about any isolated chemical. So, for example, an isolated vitamin will deplete the other nutrients needed for its action by stimulating that action over and over in the absence of sufficient quantities of the other nutrients needed. Whole food sources normally will not do this. Salicylic acid exists in literally EVERY plant on the entire planet! And yet, I am definitely against using aspirin very much or casually, even though it is just another variation of salicylic acid (specifically acetylsalicylic acid). In other words, the chemically isolated form of many chemicals is an entirely different discussion from that of the whole food. Oranges, for example, contain numerous lethal chemicals! I am going to go on eating them though and recommending that others do. The issue just isn't there unless you isolate the chemical and give it in concentrated form like that. In the case of Nutritional Yeast, I have used it in my practice for nearly 20 years and I have yet to see any evidence of MSG toxicity even a single time. In fact, the only issue I have witnessed with nutritional yeast is that it is loaded with amino acids and B vitamins and can be stimulating, which can make people use too much and then not sleep as well for a couple days after.

2. Synthetic vitamins are added to Nutritional Yeast and so we should avoid it. This has become a common practice and I am sure it sells well to the uninformed. You can buy nutritional yeast which has been "formulated" for the vegan, who has been lied to and told that he or she cannot possibly be nutritionally sound on a plant based diet. While some genuine help is offered clinically by some animal products, it is just incorrect and totally unsupported by the facts to assert that you are always going to be deficient on a plant based diet. If the plant based diet is wise and healthy (treated elsewhere in my blog posts) there is no danger of deficiency. B12 deficiencies, for example, are unaffected by plant based eating and are just as common among flesh eating people. There is literally no need at all for supplementing in a healthy person on a healthy plant based diet. Additionally, Nutritional Yeast NATURALLY contains all the B vitamins in abundance. "Fortifying" nutritional yeast is very odd indeed, except that perhaps it will sell better to the ignorant vegan who only looks to tabloid literature to divine his collected wisdom.

To my knowledge, none of those experts who used nutritional yeast for the last 100 years used fortified nutritional yeast. I certainly don't. I buy organic nutritional yeast with no fortifications grown on organic or non-GMO molasses. It is certainly available, we order it in large bags for things we make and for our own use as a healthy seasoning.

3. Nutritional Yeast is grown on genetically modified molasses, oh no! While the advent of GMOs is alarming and those plants/foods will certainly be revealed in time for the disease-causing fake-foods that they are, they are not as wide-spread as some would make us feel. If the discussion is soybean oil (which I hope none of you eat at all) then the GMO fear is probably warranted. But genetically modified sugar cane is new and has not taken the world by storm yet. GMO sugar beets are somewhat more common. Fortunately, the majority of Europe has outlawed GMOs and resistance has mounted at the grass roots level in the USA to the point that the tide of them has been slowed. Certainly organic, non-GMO molasses is in no short supply and our nutritional yeast is not grown on it. The transfer of chemicals and abnormal proteins from any GMO is a real concern and I hope my readers will utterly refuse to buy any GMOs. You can learn more about GMO's by visiting. www.nongmoproject.org

My conclusion is that Nutritional Yeast is no problem if you buy the good stuff. I advise against the use of tabloid health literature as your main source of health information. My opinion is that somewhere around 95-98% of it is junk. Robust confusion emerges from such literature proffered by those who have no actual clinical experience in practice, but who have an ax to grind or who want your attention or your money. Build your foundation on good material and then learn how to assess how you are really doing beyond the sudden slight improvement of a change which might be as much stimulation as healing. These are patterns which lead to the outcomes you want.

Its Healing Time!

Kal Sellers DC