So many excellent quotes in this podcast… Here’s just a few (timestamp links to the spot in the vid).

• 4:18 - “Folic acid does the same thing as radiation.” - Bruce Ames
• 10:35 - “When you get a little low on any vitamin or mineral, it’s to nature’s benefit to ration it. Where would you expect it to ration it if you don’t have enough selenium, or Vitamin K, or magnesium? Well, it’s going to put it into those proteins that are essential for survival, because what nature wants you to do: survive and reproduce. Thats strong selection. Living to ninety? Nature doesn’t really care about about that, because you’re past your reproductive age.” - Bruce Ames (on insidious micronutrient deficiency causing aging or “The Triage Theory”)
• 14:37 - “For example, in Vitamin K, the clotting proteins get it first… and only after they’re satisfied do you prevent calcification of the arteries, or prevent cancer, or prevent bone fractures. It’s all insidious damage that you get that’s a long term consequence. In fact, we call these the diseases of aging.” - Bruce Ames (on The Triage Theory in selenium and vitamin k dependent proteins)
• 22:13 - “Over the years we’ve discovered these 15 vitamins, and 15 essential minerals… but it’s all based on some disease that shows up or people dying.” - Bruce Ames (on longevity vitamins and the trouble with using only acute symptoms for defining essential nutrients)
• 23:20 - “I have an italian wife who feeds me a wonderful diet. She kept on nagging me that I should get more exercise. One day I said: when I feel like exercise I run my experiments, I skip controls, and I jumps to conclusions! I liked that joke so much I must have told her it fifty times and one day she said, "I’ve heard enough of that joke, I’m getting you a personal trainer!” So now I go and work out twice a week.“ - Bruce Ames (on his exercise habits)
• 24:24 - “The EAR (estimated average requirement) is actually set two standard deviations lower than the RDA and people still aren’t even meeting that.” - Rhonda
• 25:25 - “What you want to know is… does it shorten your life? You can do those kinds of questions in mice, but those are expensive to do and no one’s been really doing them.” - Bruce Ames (on studying deviations from optimal micronutrient intake)
• 31:05 - “The obese are eating the worst diet in the country if you define worse as ratio of calories to essential micronutrients. They’re just eating empty calories.” - Bruce Ames
• 36:46 - “The docs are all used to randomized double-blind clinical trials, which makes a lot of sense because if you test a drug in people, no one has it to start with! But… applying it mindlessly to nutrition is stupid, because if 90% of the population has enough of Vitamin X and 10% are really deficient, you want to test it on that 10% otherwise you’ll never see anything because you’re diluting [your results] with the 90% that have enough.” - Bruce Ames (on the problem of randomized double-blind clinical trials in nutrition)
• 38:12 - “Medicine has sort of abdicated [their responsibility]: most physicians know nothing about nutrition. They don’t get any training in medical school… maybe an hour or two lecture. […] I think prevention is going to involve different people. It’s going to involve people who know some nutrition and can figure out mechanism. The analytical methods are coming fast so that you’ll be able to put your finger in a machine and it will send the results to your iPhone.” - Bruce Ames
• 42:05 - “If I don’t eat veggies with a meal, I feel deprived.” - Bruce Ames
• 42:15 - “I think we all should try and eat a good diet. It’s actually a wonderful to eat a good diet, because you’re eating all of these different kinds of foods… and they all taste good, and when you get used to it, you feel better!” - Bruce Ames

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