Dhru Purohit Show - The Biggest Diet & Lifestyle Mistakes People Make After Turning 40 with Shawn Stevenson

Episode Date: September 25, 2023

This episode is brought to you by BiOptimizers Magnesium Breakthrough, and Lifeforce.  There are many misconceptions about what it takes to lead a healthy lifestyle. But the truth is, you don’t need fancy supplements, an expensive gym membership, or a niche diet to be healthy. In fact, the biggest returns on health are often simple, free, or low-cost—we just need guidance getting started on the journey.  Today on The Dhru Purohit Podcast, Dhru sits down with Shawn Stevenson to discuss the top mistakes, misconceptions, and confusion people face when setting out on their health journeys. Shawn Stevenson is the author of the international bestselling book Sleep Smarter and his latest book, Eat Smarter, and the creator of The Model Health Show, one of the top health podcasts in the world. He is the founder of Advanced Integrative Health Alliance, a company that provides wellness services for individuals and organizations worldwide. In this episode, Dhru and Shawn dive into (audio version / Apple Subscriber version): -Top mistakes that people over 40 make (2:13 / 2:13) -The power of walking, movement, and muscle as we get older (4:21 / 4:21) -Areas in health and wellness that cause the most confusion (23:25 / 18:05) -Protein for satiety and weight loss (26:58 / 24:04) -The habits that have caused our nation to be sick (41:15 / 37:03 ) -The role of the family unit in creating health (41:24 / 39:54) -Shawn’s stance on pharmaceutical interventions for obesity and heart disease (1:04:14 / 1:01:44) -Creating a tipping point where we normalize wellness (1:18:13 / 1:16:33) -Why focusing on your microenvironment is critical for creating change on a larger scale (1:28:00 / 1:26:25) -Recipes from Shawn’s new cookbook, Eat Smarter Family Cookbook (1:37:40 / 1:34:12) -What to eat (and not to eat) for breakfast (1:49:08 / 1:46:24) -The benefits of raw honey (1:52:56 / 1:50:00) -Where to order Shawn’s cookbook and special features (2:03:50 / 2:00:30) Also mentioned in this episode: -Preorder Eat Smarter Family Cookbook: 100 Delicious Recipes to Transform Your Health, Happiness, and Connection, here -eatsmartercookbook.com (plus bonuses and free access to the Family Health & Fitness Summit!) -Ultra-Processed Diets Cause Excess Calorie Intake and Weight Gain -Trends in Consumption of Ultra-processed Foods Among US Youths Aged 2-19 Years, 1999-2018 -Glyphosate Use, Toxicity, and Occurrence in Food -Maternal nutrition and the programming of obesity BiOptimizers is offering 10% off and a special gift with your purchase, so just head over to magbreakthrough.com/dhru with code DHRU10. Right now, get 15% off your first purchase of Lifeforce at mylifeforce.com with code DHRU. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Walking is one of the few things where your body will directly use fat for energy to fuel what you're doing. Versus high intensity interval training is very glycolytic. So it's utilizing your stored glycogen, the glucose that you might have had recently, breaking down glycogen from your liver, your muscles, and then eventually it'll start burning fat. If you're curious about the top fitness, health, and wellness mistakes that people make after turning 40 and beyond, Today's episode is absolutely for you. Welcome to the Drew Proet podcast. Each week we explore the inner workings of the brain and the body with one of the brightest minds in wellness, medicine, and mindset.

This week's guest is a dear friend of mine, Sean Stevenson, and he's here to talk about the biggest fitness and lifestyle mistakes that people make after they turn 40. Even in our mid-30s, and I turned 40, by the way, last year, we start to notice that our body shifts. We don't respond to food the same way. It might be harder to lose weight. might be tougher to put on muscle, where we're talking about all of those things on today's episode and the power of food and lifestyle habits to turn it all around. Let me tell you a little bit more about my friend Sean Stevenson. Sean is the author of the international bestselling books, plural, sleep smarter, eat smarter, and his latest soon-to-be bestseller, knock on wood,

Eat Smarter Family Cookbook. In addition to all the authoring, Sean is the creator of the famous the Model Health Show, which is one of the top podcasts in the world. Sean, a little background about his academics. He's a graduate of the University of Missouri, St. Louis, where he studied business, biology, and nutritional science. He is the founder of Advanced Integrative Health Alliance, a company that provides wellness services for individuals and organizations worldwide. Sean has been featured in pretty much every media outlet out there, Forbes, Fast Company, New York Times, Muscle and Fitness, ESPN, and many, many others. He's also an in-demand keynote speaker for numerous organizations, universities, and conferences,

because he explains and breaks things down so well, which he's going to do today. I love having Sean on. Today was a fascinating discussion. Stay tuned. Sean, welcome back to the podcast. Pleasure to have you here. Let's jump right in.

People turn 40 and all of a sudden they start noticing things in their body, things that weren't happening before. It's easier to put on weight. It's harder to lose it. What do you feel are some of the top, mistakes that people make when they hit 40 and beyond when it comes to health and nutrition. Absolutely. Great question.

Obviously, a lot of people go through this. And it really has to do with our hormones changing. You know, there's a shift that takes place, whether it's perimenopause or men going through andropause. And so the biggest mistake is really not understanding that our hormones are changing based on where we are in our life cycle. And for a lot of people, even going from high school when that diet and then moving into their 20s and 30s and just seeing like, I.

I can't, quote, get away with certain things anymore because our hormones are changing. And also just even comparing ourselves to maybe our peers and being able to do certain things that they can do, for example, and quote, get away with that we can't. And so our hormones are really unique to us. And so one of the most important things as we age is really paying attention to the quality versus the quantity. All right. And so what I mean by that is it's about getting more efficient.

Whereas a lot of times we try to add things onto our plate, my advocation is to take some things off of your plate. I was just with a friend of mine yesterday, Shaline Johnson. She's been in the fitness industry. She actually has the Guinness World Record for like the most fitness DVD sold ever. Oh, wow. She's been in the game for a long time. But she shared as she's in her mid-50s now that she's completely transformed and done things

that she wouldn't expect that are leading to better health outcomes when it comes to her body composition. Oh, wow. Like what? Like, for instance, she used to work out on average like three hours a day, which is just like, it's crazy. Of course, that's her business too, to be fit. But she found that it was starting to lead to basically a lack of returns. Right. So diminishing returns were happening with all that investment in fitness. She called me while she was out on her morning walk, which is something she would have never thought that she would do this, quote, zone two cardio. where you're, you know, you're walking at a brisk pace, but you're still able to maintain a conversation. And versus her doing high intensity interval training basically every day. And now she's found that her body composition is actually improved, but more importantly, her mood and her happiness and her perception of herself is improved. And so there's two things I want to talk about here. Number one is using this, which is, it should be captain obvious, but utilizing,

more walking as we're getting older. Our genes expect us to walk. We're bipedal. There's other animals out here run around on all fours. We have these two feet and we're really hardwired throughout our evolution

to be able to walk. And this is one of things we're going to talk about today. We have certain cultures that exist on planet Earth still, hunter-gatherer tribes, where it's built into their culture. It's a deep kind of unconscious awareness

that if I don't move, I will die. If I don't move, I'm not going to be able to procure my food, to be able to find shelter, to take care of myself and my tribe. And our culture, walking is optional. Movement is optional. And it's great we got door dashed on our phones, but at the same time, our innovations are taking more and more movement out of them. And so understanding that our genes expect us to walk, and the question is, what are we getting when we're walking more? and what this is is versus high intensity interval training, which is great. By the way, it has this place. It's not that she doesn't do that occasionally. But when we're doing that, we're evoking this kind of sympathetic nervous system and adrenaline

is getting released and it's going and cleaving off our fatty acids and using them for fuel. But a lot of it's getting reabsorbed, by the way. But it's kind of like a quick hit, literally high intensity interval training, hit H-I-T-T-T. and but then the kind of residual benefits are not as much as when we do something like walking because when we're walking we can actually be closer to not necessarily a sympathetic state but because we're in more of a calm space and we're not pushing our body too much walking and this is one of the big takeaways from today for everybody walking is one of the few things where your body will directly use fat for energy to fuel what you're doing all right

versus high-intensity interval training is very glycolytic. So it's utilizing your stored glycogen, the glucose that you might have had recently, breaking down glycogen from your liver, your muscles, and then eventually it'll start burning fat. All right? It's not necessarily as efficient. All right. Now, as far as just getting directly to the fat. And so when we're walking, and again, just walking at a brisk pace, and this is something that you can stack as well.

When you're walking, we can have a meeting. we could listen to a podcast, we could catch up with our kids, we can just kind of take this time to be more meditative. It's not a meditation per se, but it is meditative to walk. For me, I find that I have a lot of great ideas when I'm walking. And even researchers at Stanford found that when people were dealing with a problem and they would go for a 10 to 15 minute walk, they would have a 60% increase in something called divergent thinking, which is basically increased creativity and being able to look at our problems and solve. them from a different perspective. Right?

So there's all these different things we can stack when we're walking. And not to mention, again, that quote, zone two area, we're going to be able to just pull off and utilize our stored fat for energy. And so one other little piece here that we can add is when to do it. Ideally, if we can get a little bit of walking in in the early part of the morning in a fasted state, it's going to be nice if we can. This isn't a time necessarily, again, you've got to go for an hour walk if you don't feel like that. But being able to just, and this is something I actually do every day, you know, even if it's

five minutes, but I tend to do like a 10 to 15 minute walk in the morning. And also you can get the sun exposure, right, the fresh air, all the things are stacking and getting that circadian rhythm lined up outside. I can go on and on, but also post meal. And the glucose goddess, I think you talk with her recently as well, but this is one of the things that she's affirmed in her data. And Shaline actually just got back from Italy and she saw, you know, You know, one of these towns that have been around for centuries, she was shocked that pretty much, it seemed like the whole town would go for a walk after dinner, right? And it's just like, what is going on?

It's a cultural implement that they're doing. It's just like, how do they know this? Like, were they studying their cells to be able to do this? It's just built into the process. And, you know, so post-walk, that's going to help to shuttle all of that glucose into ourselves more efficiently. And so the last piece I want to share is our muscle sensitivity. So when we talk about insulin resistance, which is what we see as we age, tends to in this culture, what we're really talking about is not just our fat cells. The primary site of insulin absorption and utilization is our muscles.

Right. And so that's another thing that we see as we age is a loss of muscle. Does it have to be that way is the question? And the data indicates absolutely not. And so here's the rub. Our muscles work on a use it or lose it basis. And so it becomes even more important. Again, quantity over quality that we utilize our muscles,

dedicate some strength training each week to ensure that we're not just maintaining our muscles, but even have the potential to grow some more of that kind of depot. And the last part is that our muscles are also, it's in essence a storage container or a reservoir. for anti-aging hormones. And so people that are physically fit, physically active, that have more muscle on their frame when they age, and should an injury occur, they recover faster.

Not to mention, we see a significant reduction in injury in the first place. So when we're carrying more muscle on our frame and we are injured, so we see about a 25% faster recovery. And for many people, especially as they age, sometimes when they're injured, that's the end of the show. A broken hip could just put you completely into a sedentary lifestyle and just all downhill from there. Another thing that she shared that, again, I've seen, I worked at a university for many years, so I got to talk and work with people from all over the world.

But being able to see people in certain parts of Asia where they literally sit on the floor, right? That's where they sit. They sit on the floor. They don't have furniture. When they eat, when they have tea, they're sitting on the floor. They don't have broken hips in that culture for some strange reason. That's just they're not having all these fractures. Well, guess what?

They're doing all of these squats, you know, dozens, 100 squats a day just getting up and down off the floor. And so this is something else where we can find more quality over quantity. We don't have to do 100 squats. What if we just spend some time sitting on the floor more often? And this is something, again, I've implemented into my lifestyle. This episode is brought to you by bioptimizers. You know, I've had a bunch of experts on my podcast talk about the insane benefits of

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10% off and a special bonus gift with your purchase. Just head over to mag breakthrough.com slash drew and use the code drew 10 at checkout. That's mag, M-A-G, breakthrough, B-R-E-A-K-T-R-O-U-G-H-R-G-H-com slash D-H-R-U with the code Drew 10. D-R-U-10. This episode is brought you by Lifeforce. Are you ready to unlock? the secrets to a vibrant life? Well, listen up, because I'm super excited to tell you about Lifeforce, the groundbreaking health

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M-Y-L-I-F-E-F-O-R-C-E dot com, my-lifference.com, and enter the code Drew, D-H-R-U, that's me, to optimize your health span today. That's Drew, D-H-R-U at my-lifeforce.com for 15% off your first life force purchase. What's an example of how you have, you're a family man, right? You've got two kids. Yeah. You're happily married, and I've been happily married for now. How many years? We've been together for 19 years.

We just celebrated our 16 year anniversary. That's right. I think I saw it on Instagram. Happy anniversary, by the way. How have you guys weave this into your life, especially within the family? Awesome. Well, I have three kids. One of them's out the house.

Oh, yes. That's right. We've got two more to go. I love my family. I love my kids so much. And you already know this, man. You see the culture that we've built. My son, my oldest son, is working at fitness right now.

I never told him to do it. He's just around it. ever since he was old enough to get a gym membership, I was taking it with me, you know, to the gold's gym and our, like, when we lived in Ferguson, Florissant, in Missouri. And, you know, now he's teaching this to other people. And, like, literally thousands of people are following him now. And he's extending this gift through his unique life experience. And the same thing holds true with my youngest son.

Our dedication to fitness isn't about fitness. It's about family. Because for me, the number one reason that I'm training each day is so that I can be more resilient and show up for them so that I can endure any challenges that are ahead and leave my family. That's the number one reason I'm doing it. I'm not trying to get the abs and all the things. That can be a side effect, by the way, you know. But the main objective is like something of a higher order and something that really creates another level of accountability. And so my kids see that.

This isn't just about looking good. this is about performance and being your best self. And so some of the ways that we've integrated this into our culture, like even my youngest son just started back to school today, but I knew that he had the day off yesterday, and I was going into studio late. So instead of me running off to the gym, I was like, I grabbed him and I said, you know, also I know his mind, my youngest son's mind, he likes to have his schedule, right?

My oldest son is whatever, right? Anytime, anywhere, anywhere, like if I say, hey, let's go. run to the gym, let's go, you know, on a hike. Let's go. My youngest son is like, you're interrupting his plans, all right? And so it's also understanding the psychology of your family members, which takes patience. It takes energy, basically, at the core of this, to be able to assess, like, what is the way to get through to this individual? One of the big secrets that should not be a secret, when I was working as a clinician for many years, the number one,

thing that people would complain about as to why they couldn't achieve their goals. Like I've given these science-backed behavior changes to do to get what they wanted, whether it's getting off the metformin, their licentipril, they had hypertension, whatever, lose weight, whatever, this is the way to go. But whenever I would dig and find out, what's the reason that you're not able to implement this, people would do this? Well, you know, it's just my kids, you know, they wouldn't want to eat this stuff or, you know, my husband, he's always making this. you know, really bad food, you know, my parents, people would start blaming the people closest to them as to why they couldn't get the results that they wanted, right? And it took some time for me

to help them to kind of redirect towards their inner power and stop blaming, which is not to say that our family members don't complicate our lives because they absolutely do. But for us to understand that we get to create the culture that we want, but it starts with us, right? And so, By working with a lot of different people and then being able to implement this stuff in my life and test this stuff, I've seen it hold true. We have to have the energy, which again, that comes from taking better care of myself. Now I have more patience and I have more understanding because here's what I was going to say was what all of them are struggling with and what you and I struggle with as well from time to time is that we just want our family members to do what we want them to do. Everything's cool, all right? Just don't kill my vibe, all right?

Everything's good. I know what I'm doing here. I'm talking about just fall in line, all right, act right. And people are not going to act right. People that you love, they're their own person, and they're going to do things that don't necessarily fit with what you want them to do. And so there's this wonderful quote from St. Francis of Assisi that says, seek first to understand and then to under, I'm sorry, seek first to understand and then to be understood.

Whereas we most often, we just want people to understand us, to understand what we're trying to communicate, to listen to us. You need to listen first. That's really the secret. But it's harder. It's not that it's impossible when we don't feel good and we don't have energy. It's a lot harder. And so pouring into our cup, we've all heard this before, put your mask on first, all the things.

No, for real. And so last point here was with my youngest son, knowing his mindset, I gave him a heads up. It was like two hours prior. I was like, A, B at 9 o'clock, we're going to do some training, all right? And I could see a little bit of, but he's just,

it's also like, well, dad got to me with enough cushion on my day off. I'm kind of chilling out. And so I trained with him, right? I could have again, skated off to the gym, but this was an opportunity for us to do something together,

for him to see what I'm doing, to model, and also for him to have that physical experience. And one of my mantras, I should put a TM on this, is that families that train together remain together. Yeah. All right. People have heard this, you know, families that play together, stay together.

Families that train together remain together. There's something really remarkable when humans come together under the spirit of challenge that bonds you. And again, this is like a subconscious thing. But, you know, after we completed the workout, you know, it's so cool. you know, he just came up to me and he's like, Dad, thank you so much for training with me today. That's beautiful. And so that's a couple of the things we've done just in the context of family fitness.

But of course, we're going to talk more about the food piece here in a moment, which is really, which is really, it can be the most complex, but also the highest leverage thing that we can address in our family culture. Well, let's pivot to food. And we'll start with the individual. And actually, we're working to the concepts, the family as well. well, what are on that same theme, what are some of the mistakes that you see people doing, especially in particular, you know, I turned 40 last year.

And so I've been taking my audience on a little bit of a journey through even my own navigation. You know, I'm not an expert in this field like you are, but I get to interview a lot of people and even sometimes I'm confused. And last year, one of the things that I saw, especially having come from the world of being vegetarian and then a raw foodist, which we both were at one point in time and a vegan, is that I realized like, wow, like I, unlike you, I hadn't caught the fitness bug in particular. I was good at walking. I was good at meeting up with friends and being active and hiking, which is good.

I had the zone too, but I didn't have the strength training piece, right? And partly the reason that I didn't have the strength training piece is that I always felt like I never made progress in the gym, even when I have like six months of really focusing on it. And I was missing the other side, which I was under eating on protein. which goes back to one of your core things earlier that you were talking about is that as we age, and I think the stats are once you have 40, you lose on average 8% of muscle mass every decade for those that are not eating adequate protein and also those that are not stimulating their body through training, right? And we need the walking and we need the training, as you mentioned earlier.

So I got serious and said, I need to find a support team around. me and make this a priority. And I've shared a little bit about things with my audience. And I started to notice the results because I was putting the right pieces of the puzzle together. So even somebody like me was so confused about some of the most basic things that were there. What else do you see people confused about, which is a, you know, part of the reason that

you do the work that you do? We're so eye to eye. This was the other part that I was going to go to when we talk about food. And especially getting over 40 is the importance of protein. Now, one of the studies that I mentioned in the East Mortar Family Cookbook was done by researchers at St. Louis University, which is my hometown. Shout out to everybody there. Yeah, exactly. And what they did was they took test subjects who were otherwise healthy but overweight or obese.

Their metabolic factors, their numbers were, again, what they considered to be healthy still. and in an effort to lose weight and or reduce body fat they put them on two different types of breakfast all right now these two breakfast items were the same amount of calories but they had very different effects at the end of this eight week study so one group was told to consume eggs for breakfast okay high protein high fat or a bagel all right same amount of calories keep in mind mind. Okay. And of course, during this process, they do put them on a calorie restricted diet, a thousand calories less. So let me just put that out there. And they tracked their biometrics over the course of this eight-week study. Now, here's what happened at the end of eight weeks. And by the way,

this was just for breakfast, right? They just had them eat the eggs for breakfast or the, you know, what can be considered an ultra-processed food for breakfast. And here's what happened. At the end of the eight-week study, actually I'll pull the numbers up for you. This is crazy. At the end of the egg week study, the people who consume the eggs lost 61% more of their body mass index. All right. Again, same calorie diet, by the way, a 65% greater weight loss, a 34% greater reduction in waist circumference, and 16% greater loss of body fat. Wow.

All right. Same calories they're consuming. But by eating the eggs, something changed with their metabolic health. And the question is what is going on here? When we're talking about more of a protein-dense implement, why does this work? Why is protein so important, especially as we age? One of the things you just mentioned, our muscles are literally built from proteins. And if we're not providing that raw material, you can get stronger, you can burn calories,

but you're not going to be able to actually build more muscle tissue unless you're providing that essential building block. But it goes further than that. when we have these conversations about hormones, which is what I started off with, your hormones are made from proteins. If you're not providing these essential building blocks, you can't even make testosterone and progesterone and the list goes on adrenaline. These are all made from proteins. So your body can do a patchwork job. But if you provide the raw materials, it can do so much better. And so just to give like a really visceral understanding of this, when we look at each other or when we look at ourselves in the mirror, what we're seeing predominantly is the proteins that we've eaten

or the lack thereof. And also minerals. That's a big part of what we see when we look in the mirror. It is such an important part of this macronutrient conversation, but it's been left out. It's kind of been like pushed to the side in essence in all this battle about carbs and fat the past couple of years. And it's so strange because protein is arguably the most important of these macronutrients because of it is literally the building blocks for so much. Can I chime in with something? Absolutely. Are you familiar with a lot of the conversations around satiety and people talking about how also protein it seems to fill you up more and make you less hungry throughout the day? Thoughts on that? I was literally, but we're right here. I feel bad because I feel like I'm still

your punchline out of this. That was exactly what I was about to mention next. So within that study and a couple of other studies that I mentioned in the cookbook, look at the satiety implications because the really cool thing about protein, protein-dense foods is that they do, in fact, trigger higher levels of satiety. And they also have this stronger thermic effect, right? So it takes more energy to digest proteins than it does fats or carbohydrates. and my belief is that it's because your body takes it very, very seriously when it gets its hands

on some high-quality proteins because it can be used for so much. Whereas fats and carbohydrates tend to be used a lot as energy substrates, whereas protein is used to build things, all right? Not to say that fats aren't used to build things as well. One of those things is, you know, building our brain, for example. There are certain fats that get shuttled across the blood-brain barrier. to help to build our brain cells or regenerate them, to enable signal transduction, stability, those kind of things. But predominantly, our tissues are built with proteins.

And so some of the studies indicate an increased production of versus a carbohydrate diet. I shared a couple of studies like this. A carbohydrate food versus a high protein food, higher production of GLP1, which is getting a lot of news right now. Right. Higher production of peptide Y-Y-Y. Leptin, the list goes on. There's many different satiety hormones. We cover a lot of them in the book as well.

Because for years it's just like leptin and garrulent. But we know that protein is going to kick on all of these satiety factors. This is why what we see is it's very difficult in general for us to eat a lot of high-protein food in a meal because of the satiety implications. Whereas if we have a lot of carbohydrates, we can tend to eat those. a little bit easier. Let me lay all this out. So this is going to get wrapped in this bow. And this study is new.

It's just done recently. This was conducted. It's a ward study that's done at the NIH. All right. So this is where people are locked in. You can't sneak out and go to Subway or to Whole Foods. It's a 28-day study. Ward meaning like a prison ward?

It's not a prison per se, but if you're at the NIH, I get images of like the Hawkins lab in Strangers. things. Like these are all volunteers that are part of this ward study. Yeah, yeah. They're not just like snatching people up in a van off. Okay. Or like that they were, I think, which is unethical now, but like back in the day, they used to take prisoners and say, okay, you guys are all eating vegetable oil and you guys are going to have saturated fat and let's see what ends up happening. That's not even back of the day. It still happens. It still happens. Really? I thought those studies were like unethical now. I mean, you know, there are unethical aspects to it. Okay, got

But we could even circle back and talk about a recent study done on prisoners. With multivitamins? Yeah, we talked about that before. Yeah, we talked about that before. So that was pretty recent. Okay, okay, got it, got it. So, so award study. Yes, so this is award study.

Again, this was conducted at the NIH. And they took 20 healthy test subjects, 10 men, 10 women. And they also was a crossover study. So they did both different kind of, quote, treatment groups. One group is given, and this is a randomized trial, also, you know, you didn't know where he was going to go first. Ultra-processed foods made up their diet. There's meals of ultra-processed foods.

But the same energy makeup as the people who are eating the minimally processed slash whole-food-based diet. All right. Same calories, same macronutrient ratios. Also comparable sugar as well. But one is coming from ultra-process and the other is coming from whole foods or whole-food-based meals. All right. And so again, the test subjects, what's so cool is they experienced both parts of the study, right? So after two weeks, they would switch to the other diet. Now here's what's crazy. So after compiling the data, when people were eating the ultra-processed meals, again, although that they had the same, and this was, they got to eat as much as they wanted or as little as they wanted. But when eating the ultra-processed food, test subjects ate about 500 more calories a day on average. Something wouldn't kick up. on with their appetite, just kind of like the suppression, their cravings were stronger, and their

appetite. So we got cravings and appetite. They're slightly different. Appetite is how much you eat. It wouldn't get shut off. And also, for some strange reasons, it's unconscious, they ate less of the protein in their ultra-processed meals and ate more of the carbs and fat. They were just kind of driven to do that. All right. So those satiety factors weren't kicking on and protein. That's what can get overlooked in the study, is that they weren't eating as much of the protein that they had offered to them. And of course, just as a result, people gained about two pounds in that study group, in that study period. The people that are eating the ultra-processed foods.

Older processed foods. Versus when they were eating the minimally processed less whole food-based meals, they lost two pounds on average over the course of those two weeks. And again, ate about 500 calories less. They were just more satisfied. And so this speaks to the real part of this conversation. And I just want to end this today in all the infighting that our colleagues, our friends, battling about which diet is best, speaking, you know, preaching to the choir and debating over minutia when the majority of our citizens here in the United States and also this is a worldwide

issue now, most of our citizens are eating mostly ultra-processed foods. We're debating about whether keto is better or, you know, whatever, you know what I mean? Like your ratios of fats and carbohydrates and what you. but not. Most people are eating fake food. And living sedentary lifestyles. Yeah. And not strain training, right? So you add all those things together. And it's like most people just need help with the basics and to make them simplified so they can live a long healthy life and minimize their risk of chronic disease. Precisely. And that chronic disease were beyond epidemic of proportions. Last year, the CDC's numbers came out and they stated that 60% of American

adults now have at least one chronic disease. Crazy. 60% and 40% have two or more chronic diseases. And they put this out in this little infographic to, I guess maybe soften the blow. It looks nice, like happy little cartoon characters. But everybody's sick, but that's not what the images look like, right? And also in that infographic, by the way, they noted that there's, we have a $4.2 trillion health care system here.

And they're talking about where money's going to help to reduce these things. No, everything's getting worse. And a big part of this is the fact that we're fueling, not just fueling our body on this low-quality stuff. We're building our tissues out of fake things. And what does the problem really look like? A lot of people have talked about this. I think we talked about this in our last conversation.

According to the BMJ, 60% of American adults diet is made of ultra-processed food today. The average American. I was far worse, by the way. For me, it was up close to 80 to 90%. This is not an exaggeration. Absolutely, yes. And this also led to the disease onset that I experienced when I was 20 with an advanced arthritic condition of my spine and my bones. I broke my hip, which is usually reserved for people much older, just while I was out running at track practice because I was made out of garbage, really. And so, but here's the thing. And this is the first book that's sharing this data. I'm very grateful for that. But it's also, this is a call to action. A recent study came out looking at ultra-processing. food consumption of our children in the United States. This was a big reason that I wrote this book, is centered around this. This was published in JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association.

They looked at food consumption of our children, age two to 19, for about 20 years. In 1999, the average American child's diet was 61% ultra-processed food, already beating out American adults. but by 2018, the average American child's diet is now close to 70% ultra-processed foods. Wow. And what are the outcomes that we're seeing? Skyrocketing rates of obesity in our children. Skyrocketing rates of diabetes, lifestyle-induced type 2 diabetes in our children, significant degrees of early onset of heart disease in our children, mental health epidemics. The list goes on and on and on. this is not without repercussions. And this is really the mission is to understand, like, again,

we have an opportunity to make some shifts here. But if people aren't aware of how bad it is, and I know this, like, I grew up in this in the 80s, it was revolutionary when Pop-Tars came out, all right? I was there popping out of the toaster and I got this, like, rectangular breakfast ready for me. And I'm going to school and just to fit in with my friends, you know, all the kids, we've got our little, you know,

I was also there when luncheables came out, you know, but we've got all these ultra-processed foods. It was a game-changer when my grandmother gave me Capri's sons, all right, that little straw with the pouch and that was in my lunchbox. I had like a Knight Rider lunchbox or something like that. But this was just how it was. We didn't realize that our culture was now programming us to eat ultra-process fake foods. And just really quickly, if you can, let's make this distinction. I've been on a mission talking about this, but also a lot of my colleagues are now speaking out about it.

Humans have been processing foods forever, all right? Whether we're talking about, you know, cooking something, right, cooking meat or cooking a potato, or taking an olive and pressing the oil out, that's been done for centuries. That's processing, and that's not what we're talking about. Ultra-processed foods are when we take, there's a field of corn, or a field of wheat. And somehow, through an immense amount of processing, that field of wheat becomes fruity pebbles. All right? It is so denatured that you can no longer recognize where this thing comes from, not to mention all of the added, you know, the preservatives, food dyes,

all these different chemicals. And one of the things I'm also bringing forward in this project is the WHO has denoted that glyphosate is a Class 2A carcinogen. That means it probably causes cancer. There's been a lot of talk about glyphosates and it's dangerous, but I just want to get right to the point. This very likely causes cancer in humans. And the environmental working group did an analysis and found that almost 90% upwards of 90% of grain products on our store shelves are contaminated with glyphosate at amounts that are far exceeding what's tolerable or considered safe. Right. And so when I was trying to get healthy in college, when I was. was experiencing this condition and I was like you know what I need to I need to grow up I need to put

the honeynut Cheerios and cap and crunch to the side and I'm going to eat an adult cereal so I got the quaker oatmeal squares all right it's so wholesome you know look at this guy on the box he's a quaker right and come to find out that was like number one on their list of the most contaminated with glyphosate cereals wow this quaker oatmeal squares and I was doing that because of the marketing it's high fiber whole grains, all of these, this is called health washing, using these healthy catch words to attract unaware buyers to buy an ultra-processed food. Because at the end of the day, that quicker oatmeal squares is the true essence of an ultra-processed food. And so I'm trying to improve my health with that. And this is why they're kept being these blockades. Of course,

we can get better. If we're just stepping away or reducing the amount of ultra-processed foods, that we're consuming, we're going to see improvements in our health. And that's what we tend to see with a lot of these diets, whether it's a vegan protocol, whether it's a paleo protocol, keto protocol. When we switch over and start eating more real foods, our health improves, but we put it all into that particular diet framework. And not to say that any of them are not valuable because they all are valuable. But the question is, what's best for you and what's at the heart of why people get better when they're doing these things? It tends to be because they're eating more real food.

It's so important. You know, we were chit-chatting a little bit before the episode, and it's kind of a dark thought, but it's like if another country, if a crazy, radicalized group was really trying to get at the heart of destroying, you know, we're recording this in the U.S. You and I are U.S. citizens.

Obviously, we have a global following that's out there, but really trying to destroy a nation in this particular case, the U.S., they would be encouraging more. more the behaviors that are so pervasive that are destroying our health and our family. I'd love you to just tick off a few of those, right? They're so obvious, but it's like these are the habits. These are the lack of priorities.

These are the things that are genuinely eating and eroding at our foundation as a country. Yeah. What are some examples of those things, right? So number one, you just mentioned it. They would have us focus on convenience at all cost and prioritize. a diet of ultra-processed foods. That'd be number one, right? Number two, you mentioned earlier.

They would have us live a more sedentary lifestyle to the degree that most people, the most amount of walking that they get in their house, besides shuffling around a little bit between the kitchen and that sort of thing, would be to maybe walk out to their car and then walk back in, right? What are some of the few other habits that you think a group, a nefarious group, might implement

to try to destroy the foundation of a country. Another thing would be to fracture the family unit. Because, you know, the longest running human study, longitudinal study, looking at like what really is protective of our health long term. And this was Dr. Waldinger and his associates at Harvard. They found that the number one thing impacting our health long term is our relationships. And to top it all off and then to dig in like, why does this really matter, there's a meta-analysis of 148 studies over 300,000 people. And this was conducted by researchers at Brigham Young University.

And they found that having high-quality relationships or healthy relationships led to a 50% decrease in all-cause mortality. That's a 50% reduction in death from all causes. by having warm, healthy relationships. Now, the question is, how do we do that? How do we ensure that we have healthy relationships? We're not taught that in our culture. As a matter of fact, we're more fractured than we've ever been. We're more divided from each other.

Even our nuclear families are so divided. We can be all in the same household, and I've seen it time and time again, and everybody's on their respective screen. We're disconnected. Our devices can be divisive. And so, and by the way, This isn't to villainize these things because all of these things also have value.

They tend to have value as well. Even with ultra-processed food, it might keep you alive in a zombie apocalypse situation. You know what I mean? I think about like the Walking Dead if you happen upon, you know, some honeybonds in a, you know, a convenience store that's been bombed out and depleted. That might keep you going. You know what I mean? That stuff's going to last for 100 years, you know.

Are you going to thrive? Probably not, you know. So everything has its place. And it's not to demonize any of these things, but is to take back our power. And here in the United States, and this has been spreading worldwide as well, but we're really the king of this, we don't understand the power of culture.

Because both you and I and many of our colleagues have been trying to get people to change behaviors, to not go to that ultra-processed food establishment, or to go out and get their exercise in that their bodies is starving for. It's very difficult to make those behavior changes in a culture that is unwaresolved. well in a culture that is driving you to do the opposite. And that's really the issue that was being missed. It took me many years to figure this out. I've been in this field for 21 years as of this month. It took me years to figure this out. We have to address the culture. We talked a little bit earlier. Their culture is still in existence on planet Earth that their cultural belief is if I don't

move, I die. In order for me to eat, I am required to move, to gather, to hunt, to prepare food, And also, historically, we ate together as a species. This was all a tribal construct. Everybody was involved in the process of food, in the process of eating. We just got back from Hawaii recently. And this is a dramatized... It's a dramatization of something real, which is, you know, this luau phenomenon, which is cool. You see the dancing and the food and all the things.

But this is about we're hunting and gathering. We're preparing the food. and we're eating together and we're celebrating together, right? We see this as like, oh, that's from this time that's forgotten. Like, look at this. This is really interesting. This is how we evolved. And so my question was, has something happened, a protective force field, really,

for that terrorist situation, a protective force against that, has that been destroyed with the fracturing of our family units? in particular surrounding food and eating together. And that question sparked this journey, which led me first. The first domino was this vast database that some researchers at Harvard were compiling,

looking at family eating behaviors and their food intake. Like what were they eating when they were eating together versus when they were eating separately in isolation? And what they found was that, in particular, when children were eating along with their parents on a consistent basis, they had a significant increase intake of vital nutrients that helped to prevent chronic diseases, that lower our resilience, that make us more

susceptible to disease and dysfunction, and also make us easier to manipulate if, again, we don't have that energy to stand up against whatever the force may be, right? And also, they had a significant reduction in intake of ultra-processed foods, chips and soda, namely in the study. And, And I was just like, this is crazy. This should be everywhere. Everybody should know this. Why don't people know this? And so, but I was just like, okay, this is an isolated data set.

Although these are people at Harvard. They're pretty smart. But I was like, there's got to be some other research on this. And I found it. Two studies. One was published in the journal Pediatrics. Another one was published in JAMA, Journal of the American Medical Association. The researchers found that when families ate together with their children,

just three times a week was that kind of minimum effective dose, three meals a week with their children. These children who ate consistently with their family, again, just three times a week, had a significantly decreased incidence of developing obesity and a significant decrease incidence of developing eating disorders by eating with their family more often. Now, is this going to be perfect across the board? No. But this is something that really stood out for these researchers, that there's something protective about eating together as a family unit.

Last study, I'll share this one. This one hit me the hardest because a lot of people theorize about access and people not having an opportunity to be well, to eat healthy, to exercise and things like that. But they don't come from where I come from. I come from that environment where my family's on food stamps, where we're getting food from charities. Literally, there's this place called the Hosea House that we would get food from charities. Even my Christmas gifts for several years came from charities. One time we actually went on this basically a poor kid's trip. We didn't know what it was, you know.

And we got to ride in the Wiener Mobile, the Oscar Meyer Wiener. Yeah. It's out here rolling around on the streets. And we went to this, you know, this place that they took us to and we got these Christmas gifts. And, you know, but the thing was I got the same Christmas gifts every year, which sucked. Like I kept getting YATI. which is still to this day I don't know how to play Yatzee but those are the conditions that we were in

and I can tell you and I'm being 1,000% with you here I can count on my two hands how often I ate together with my family. Wow. All right and usually most of these times was a holiday of some sort and a lot of times in low-income environments one of the parents are gone

and or we only have one parent And so this was the situation I was growing up in. My mother worked overnight at convenience store, and she's, again, trying to put food on the table. She would literally, she sold her blood many times to get money for us to get food. Wow. And but working at the convenience store, one of these evenings, somebody tried to rob the store, do something to her. And she was stabbed eight times. And she ended up, my mom's different, though.

I mean, just from where we're from, she ended up subduing the guy. And police came all the things. When she went to the hospital, you know, got stitches and, you know, the, her physician told her that if you weren't overweight, you would have died. Wow. This, this body fat that you're carrying, you being a, quote, heavyset woman, saved your life. What's it going to do to her psychologically? Wow.

That's her protection, right? And so, again, this isn't, because sometimes it would be like, well, why don't you guys just work harder, you know, pull yourself up by your bootstraps, you know, like, I'm sharing what my mom was doing to try to make it. Of course. There's a reason why she's not able to have dinner with you. She's working. Yeah, that part. And my stepfather was involved as well.

He worked that late shift, 11, I'm sorry, three to 11 shift as a cook. But also we're growing up in an environment during the crack epidemic where, you know, many of my family members are getting addicted to drugs and alcohol. And so that's happening in my household as well, right? It's the culture. It's just like you're inundated with this stuff. And so with this being the case, regardless of the quality of food that we're able to purchase, this particular study, and I shared this, all of the studies that we're covering, by the way,

most of them are in the East Martyr Family Cookbook. But researchers looked at low-income households of minority children. And it was so incredible because what they found was that families that ate with their children just four times a week, whatever meal it was, the kids ended up eating five servings of fruits and vegetables five days a week at least. And significantly less processed food, chips and soda. And the researchers noted in particular when the TV was never or rarely on during family meals. Now, regardless of our circumstances, had my family known that we can have better health outcomes. and protect our children just by eating together. Even if it's fast food, that's all you're getting at that time, that's all you can afford.

There's still a difference with eating together. There's something that's unlocked. There's some shifts. We're talking about epigenetic influences. We could talk about why this is, by the way. Part of that is, if we know, for example, we're having family dinner on Wednesdays, for example, there's going to be a subconscious, like, okay, the planning of it, like, okay, we're going to eat this, what we deem to be like a square meal, right? So that's going to be there. But sometimes life's going to happen. You're going to end up maybe ordering something and that's okay. But still, there's something protective about eating together. One of those things is we see a significant reduction in that kind of sympathetic fight or flight nervous system activity and that switching over to the parasympathetic, quote, rest and digest nervous system, significantly less stress when people are able to make it home. And we'll just talk about the adult side, which is another study that I cited as well.

This was done on workers at IBM. If they were able to make it home for family dinners at a reasonable time and to have time with their family to eat together, their work morale stayed high. Their stress levels stayed low. And stress is a huge killer. JAMA published this data years ago. Upwards of 80% of all physician visits are for stress-related diseases.

Stress is a huge component of this. We can think ourselves into disease because our thoughts create chemistry in our bodies instantaneously. And so if we're having habitual thoughts of worry, of fear, of anger, we're just altering our chemistry. And this isn't bioidentical. This is made for us, in us, by us. Fubu, for us, by us. All right?

And so we have to understand the power of our minds. And also the fact that being around people that we love, that we care for, there is this really innate activation of more. health affirming hormones and neurotransmitters like oxytocin. Just being with our family, with people that we love and care about, we're very good. Humans start producing more oxytocin, which oxytocin, this hormone, has this counter-effect to cortisol. And we know this very clearly now. The question is, are we getting a healthy dose of it on a daily basis like we evolved doing?

Because there's also a difference between being with your family and on a device than being with your family, right? So that's another reason why there's these better health outcomes. And one other thing, there's several other ones as well, but another part of this is the innate connection that happens and the health outcomes for the children because now we can actually see them and we could allow them to feel seen.

And so this is so important, we have a deep need to feel significant and to feel like we matter. And so for our children to get that, but also we could see their speech pattern, what excites them, what makes them kind of closed off, right? What conversation pieces? We get to really, the dinner table is a unifier.

It's a connective entity, right? We know this outside of, even outside of just our family circle, we talk about breaking bread, right? But just like even a lot of business is done over meals, right? a lot of connection, but truly for our family, that dinner table is acting as a unifier in a place of learning leverage for your children that are different personalities. I talked a little bit about my two kids' personalities. I've learned much of this by eating together with them, including yesterday. We're all sitting around eating. And because some of the things that I dealt with over the years and also working with a lot of people is, quote, picky eaters, right? We're trying to get healthier,

but we're struggling to get our kid to eat certain things or, you know, another family member. So what I started to do in toward the end of my clinical work was I would find ways to talk to the family, right? Because I was very good at pointing out certain character traits and finding leverage points for, especially for the kids, you know, whether it's like they're wanting to be a better athlete or a better mathlet, right? And I'd use that as leverage for them fueling their body differently, right? but here's the key. And this should be, this should not be a secret at this point. It's using joy instead of using, instead of using restriction. Me coming in and taking away things from this family.

If I'm coming in, I'm like, sorry, kid, you can't have fruity pebbles anymore. That kid's going to be pissed off at me and or rebel. He's going to find a way to get those fruity pebbles. Versus let me find a way to get him something that he really enjoys equally or more. that's made from real food, which it should not be a secret anymore that that is not just possible, but probable. Or even starting with that first, and then you want to have a little bit of whatever afterwards, it's all good. And you've been mentioning kids, but there's so many people, you know, that listen to the podcast that maybe they don't have kids or their kids are grown up. Right. And they're like, hey, I'm done with all that parenting stuff.

My kids are, you know, adults on their own. But still, even if you have a husband, you have a wife, you have a boyfriend, you have a girlfriend, these are the same dynamics that show up there. How often do I hear from people, and I'm sure you do as well. It's like, I'm trying to make these healthy changes. And my husband doesn't want to eat this thing or my boyfriend doesn't want to eat that or my girlfriend is not into this component. So it's like, how do we end up? Or I'm divorced and I live alone and I don't have a significant other. My kids are off living their life.

You know, I don't want to bother them. They don't live nearby me. So I don't have somebody to eat with on a regular basis. And just that loneliness epidemic that's there for individuals that are in that position. especially as they get older. So all these same principles, they apply to everyone. You know, it may not be the examples with your kids. It may be with somebody else like your husband, your spouse, whatever it might be.

Or it might be that you have so much lack of being able to share and break bread with other people that it's easier for you to fall into some version of being in despair. You know, maybe you're not full-blown depressed, but you're just not as excited about things in your life. because you don't have anybody to share it with. And that's no judgment on that situation. It's just to say, hey, we might want to prioritize this aspect of how at least even a couple times a week can we break bread with somebody else?

Absolutely. And another thing was, like, is there data on the health outcome when we're eating more so in isolation? And absolutely there is. And so I cited a study that found that when we're eating alone more frequently, our diet quality tends to be significantly lower. so the more intake of ultra-processed foods, and also far less intake of essential nutrients. Our diet is just worse when we tend to eat alone more often.

Now, this doesn't hold true for everybody who's really just about that health life, but could you be missing out on another powerful ingredient by not eating more frequently with people you care about? And by the way, this extends to friends too. This isn't just family. This is friends is included in this as well. And so one of the things that I admire about you so much is that if this doesn't exist, you build it. You make it happen. If that friend group isn't there and you just like,

I really want to, be the person that makes it. You know, you said that to me several times. It's just like, we have so much power and agency in this, but we get attached to our story of what we're lacking. I come from lack. That's where I come from. And there is a way. Matter of fact, there's 10,000 ways. It's just changing our perception of these things. Because also, and also seeing the advantages that you have. Because even in that environment, not having much at all, like real talk, not having much, it incites such a level of creativity that is kind of mirrored in society now, you know, whether it's creativity towards music expression, towards athletics, you know, we literally had the crate on the phone pole in the alley. Like, we did that. And, you know, also, you know,

there's some aspects of even creativity with food. One of my most, prized memories of food. There's two. I'll share the first one really quickly because I've said fruity pebbles multiple times. It was my great-grandmother who she's lived at a senior home and she took me there's like a little senior bus. They'd go to the grocery store and I went back with her and I was probably four at the time and she poured me a bowl of fruity pebbles which I'd never had. That I could taste it to this day. That food experience was like it stuck with me forever. Right. And it wasn't she was trying to mess me up. She was just a great grandma. showing love to her great grandbaby that she is fortunate enough to spend some time with, right?

And she knows that kids like this stuff because it's a kid's quote, kid cereal, which is part of the problem. It's the cultural thing driving us to eat that food. Kids food versus adult food. The marketing towards us to eat that ultra-processed food. But another one is my stepfather, man, so many times, man, we just be like, you know, we're hungry, you know, and just like there's not food. There's not anything to, you know, really put it. together. And this was one of the days where he was there and my mother was at work.

And we didn't have anything to eat from my perspective, which is like we're hungry. And there was some government cheese, which is like this block. It's actually really tasty. It doesn't melt very good. But it's government cheese. There was some frozen deer sausage in the freezer that my grandfather had hunted and sent, right? Which I didn't want anything to do with it. eating Bambi. That was my mindset. I'm not eating that. And we had some Texas toast, which is like some thicker bread that came along with like the WIC program or whatever it was. And there happened to be some tomato sauce in the cabinet. And my stepfather made pizza out of those ingredients. He's a chef and that creativity. And he made pizza out of that. And it was, I still

remember this. I was like eight years old. I'll never forget that. experience and being able to eat it with him is just so powerful man and it's not that it tasted like dominoes you know it didn't taste like a typical pizza but the fact that a kid loves pizza right i'm checking that box and also this food experience with somebody that cares about me and also making something out of nothing that's the power that we have man you know and so i want us to embrace that power and to and to utilize that moving forward that's the protective force against the terrorist organizations that might be, you know, trying to dumb us down and the various groups hurt our health, you know, make us less capable of performing.

But, you know, when it really boils down to it, man, there's something really special about eating together with the people that you care about. Yeah, I want to ask you a question, sort of like a bigger picture question, which is that in the world of health, one of the questions that naturally comes up is that, okay, seeing every year that the populations are getting unhealthy. Not just here in America, we're exporting this all around the world, right? We're trending in the wrong direction, and it looks like it's starting to become an exponential trend.

We're getting more overweight as a society. We're less likely to share meals together and all other stats that we talked about earlier. And unless if we have, you know, a sort of a... a figurehead like a president who like literally this is their like main sort of thing right or congress gets on you know bored you know is there enough momentum just between books podcasts other stuff that we yeah you know the people that are healthy they're getting healthier right people often ask me like are people getting healthier or are they getting worse off and it's actually both yeah the healthiest people the people that are tuning in

here. They're actually getting super healthy and they're becoming more aware and they're getting fitter and they're doing things, right? You see a lot of the people that write you and many of my friends listen to your podcasts. I see it within their own families. They're getting healthier. And the folks that are working two, three jobs might only have one parent in the household. They're trending in this other direction. I think I read some statistics of the day that like five percent of patients and often these are patients that are in like, dealing with like dialysis and other sort of extreme things. In many health systems, they can amount to almost 70, 80% of the total cost of health care

is taking care of 5% of patients that are there, right? These are the people that are just very sick and very unhealthy, often from chronic disease. So you have one side that's going in one way, and you have another side that's going in another way. And for the side that's going in the wrong direction, at least from health outcome-wise, is the advice that we're sharing on the podcast, walking more, making food at home, is that enough? Or do we need a major intervention? And one of the major interventions that's having a lot of topics and discussions these days,

even hinted towards earlier when it comes to obesity, is these GLP-1 inhibitors, right? We've had multiple clinicians come on this podcast talking about, and I want to ask them because I see a lot of people here. We live in L.A. you see people are taking OZempic, Wagovi, whatever, you know, the drugs that are that are out there. And I've heard a lot of nuanced thoughts about it, right? I've heard a lot of nuanced thoughts from people who come on, clinicians that say,

hey, you know what, this is kicking people in the right direction, but there's a right way and a wrong way to do it, you know? And other people saying that, you know, what is really the long-term impact of these and is there really ever a free lunch with things? do you have a perspective in the midst, especially in the context of your nutritional background, but then also your ability to empathize with the most disenfranchised, enfranchised societies because you shared earlier that you have actually lived in a part of town that's like that, right? So what do we need on a national level and is there a role for these pharmaceutical interventions

or are they taking us off track? It's a lot there. Of course. Well, you already know my, I tend to bring a balanced perspective because I'm not afraid to look at the things that I disagree with and see their value. I even mentioned honey buns having a value. Again, fruity pebbles. Ideally in the context of a zombie apocalypse, you know, like, but on a daily basis,

like would that be something to eat if you're trying to perform at a high level and have good metabolic health? Probably not. And the same thing really holds true with this pharmaceutical model, but the problem is that we now exist in a pharmaceutical model of health. It's the domineering force that's dictating how people are being cared for. And this is a multi-trillion dollar industry. You know, there's so much money being made from the farming of sick people and not getting them well, not helping them to remove the cause. None of these things are bringing a cure. These are

oftentimes creating lifetime customers of a thing. And again, not seeing the health outcomes that we are promised. There was a recent analysis that was done, huge meta-analysis, looking at the health outcomes from statins, all right? And statins, there was a time when it was like near number one as far as drug classes that were getting prescribed. Multi, multi, multi, multi-billion dollar drug class. It still is. But there was a time when it was just, but something is chipping away at the statin industry right now and some of the science is getting out. They were looking at actual increase or potential decrease. The scientists were just looking at the data on lifespan when having access to a statin or being prescribed a statin. And the researchers found this vast

difference in what was believed. Essentially, we were seeing minus 15 days of life and upwards of maybe 30 days when being on a statin for years at a time. So we're not really seeing an increase in lifespan. And the question is, well, what about quality of life? You mentioned a certain group of people taking up a lot of the resources as far as health care. What we're really good at is keeping people alive, but not necessarily living. It's not that we're necessarily living longer, we're dying longer. We can kind of extend the suffering and keep people around, but what about quality of life? Well, being on a statin, another one of these studies, I did a huge master class on this on my show. And there's several studies on this, by the way. We see about a 30,

percent increased incidence of developing diabetes for people who take statins. It's creating another. This isn't a side effect. It's just other effects. It might be effects that you don't want to happen, but we call them side effects, but it's an effect of taking this particular drug class. It's going to not just alter how your body's processing cholesterol, but what is cholesterol responsible for, what it's interacting with? What's the effect that's going to have on a pancreas or the liver health or your brain? Because that's another thing that has, there's even noted warnings on products about potential memory loss when taking a statin. You know, the FDA after years will come out and add a label.

In the context of OZMPIC, Wagovi, and the like, there's a black box warning by the FDA on OZMPIC warning that, hey, this was in laboratory animals, but we do see a significant incidence of developing thyroid tumors. Just letting you know. It also says it's unsure that this would happen in humans. That unsure should make you unsure. Can I ask you one question on that?

Finish your point. Then I'll jump in. But this brings into the question, would somebody losing 100 pounds and all the metabolic benefit that that can bring and reducing other risk factors, would that cost with an increased potential of developing cancer, could somebody justify taking O-Zimpe. And I believe that there are cases when, yes, absolutely. And are we actually addressing the root cause of the obesity in the first place? Because you said it earlier, something along the lines of there's no free lunch. Every action has a reaction.

We live in a universe where there's causality. There's cause and effect. It's just, it's a principle in physics. Stuff isn't just going to happen. You don't get this weight loss without every cell in your body is being influenced. It isn't just targeting GLP1 because that's communicating with every single cell in your body is being affected. And what are the long-term outcomes? That's the last part I'm going to share here in this and I'll pass it back to you. We don't have long-term data on this. But we do know that this is one of those things where it is being advocated to be on for extended an amount of time, potentially forever, if you want to maintain these benefits.

And in that black box warning, it says treatment, duration, dependent tumors, and the amount. So how much you're taking and how long you're taking, every one of those steps increases your risk, potentially of developing thyroid cancer. In animals, we're not animals, though. All right? So again, I would just bring on, encourage a higher degree of skepticism, but also being open to this being a potential. Not solution, but supplement to cracking the code of severe obesity in our society.

But the other problem is that this isn't often used for people that are struggling with severe obesity. This is more so, in some instances, vanity metrics and also not directing people and supporting them in what is the thing that's really going to help their bodies long term to sustain these results. Yeah, that's well said. The question I was going to ask you is that we know at least correlation-wise. one of the biggest things that's correlated with cancer is obesity. And so obviously there's going to be risk, but in the case of severe obese people,

we know the data. We've had an obese population now for decades. What is it now in America? It's like 63% or something like that. So overweight and obese, it's nearing 80%. It's about 75% of our population. And clinically obese, the last published robust numbers were prior to the pandemic,

and that was at 42.5%. Got it. And it was produced. objected to hit 50% by 2030, but we've seen obesity take a nice jump. During the pandemic. Yeah. So we know the long-term outcomes of people being severely obese, and you bring up a great point, which is that, again, are these things, especially in a public health level, when

you have members of, you know, top public health going on 60 minutes and saying obesity is genetic, right? And we need to get kids started on these things. That's obviously when it gets really scary when there's no other nutritional backing or emphasis. In fact, there'd be a lot more credibility because essentially from my understanding, you know, these GLP1 inhibitors, they're peptides, right? Right? They're peptides inside the body.

And so they are pharmaceuticals, right? But they're, I think there's been a little bit more openness to even people in the health world about the potential role that peptides can play. potential, right, potential. But you get really nervous when people say, okay, we just need to get young people short on this. And then it's just that that's it forever. And then you can eat whatever else you want to eat. So then what ends up happening, right?

And obviously these are all different buckets, right? There's going to be people that do things for vanity, right? We've had people like some of our colleagues, JJ Virgin, Dr. Gabriel Lyon say, like, look, I have patients where, yeah, yeah, there is a little, they're 20 pounds overweight. They're 30 pounds overweight. But I'm going to make sure that they don't forget about the basics. Strain training, eating correctly, doing some auditing of your calories because even in the

wellness world now, we can overeat on calories because there's so much healthy junk food that's out there today. And at least let me teach them how to do it right. And then the other side of it, people like Robert Lustig, Callie Means, who are very, very worried about there's no emphasis on nutrition. There's no emphasis on paying attention to the basics and the fundamental of health. There's no emphasis on working out. And this is going to be a hijacking of the pharmaceutical industry to just say like this is how it's going to be for the rest of our lives. And this becomes a new normal. Chances are, again, we have to be honest also about

the industry itself. You know, there are all these documentaries and docu-series out there now. You know, Painkillers is the latest one on Netflix about. the opioid epidemic. And so, but the thing is, it's just like, we might see that as an isolated incident. But that was just when it was getting started. Because many of the most robust, successful pharmaceutical companies today, yeah, the Slackler family might be, you know, out of the business. But Johnson & Johnson was one of the biggest players in our recent opioid epidemic.

They were really a primary source of opium, you know, this kind of, quote, genetically modified poppy that was being used to make a lot of these opioid drugs, and they just recently paid out part of a multi-billion dollar settlement for their participation in this. And not to mention, fentanyl came later, all right? And fentanyl is the leading killer, well, overdose overall, but fentanyl is the biggest one, of people in their, quote, prime of life years. All right? Literally, it's killing more people in our country than anything else are something that,

things that have come from this pharmaceutical industry that knew the dangers. All right. So again, oh, suddenly, oh, this industry, they're bringing about something to help everybody who's struggling with their weight. The good folks at fill in the blank. No, no, no, no. We got to be honest here about the industry itself. Not to say that something good can't come from it, but we need to acknowledge the track record. Now, with that being said, it's, listen, this is probably going to end badly. Just looking at history. I don't want it to, but one of the things that's happening right now, you mentioned that 60 Minutes segment. And other nationally televised shows, one of the things that just recently is going on is all the lawsuits that are coming out for the makers of OZempic.

In particular, causing one of the kind of leading stories with one of the biggest lawsuits was a woman who lost 150 pounds. Wow. Which is remarkable. But now she has severe digestive paralysis. She can't digest her food. She's suffering. Can you imagine putting something in your body and it doesn't move? Wow.

You know? And so all these lawsuits are coming forward due to digestive diseases and disruption taking place. Sepsis, you know, people can, so many bad things can happen if your digestion. Part of it was like to slow down the movement of food through your system so you feel full or longer. Is that something to really tinker with or tamper with based on how we evolved and just the natural, like, you've got to look at what are the long-term ramifications? This isn't just some little cute thing like we just tweak this little thing in the system. But also with that being said, we still have to be mindful of the place. We have to acknowledge how valuable it is in feeling good from potential problems,

but also from people losing the weight that they've been struggling with sometimes for decades. We have to acknowledge that that matters too. If you feel good and feel good about yourself, like what kind of health benefits can that do? you know so we got to keep all this stuff in context but i would just again come into this very very skeptical because there everything has a price to it and if we're not addressing the root cause and that's really what our what our society has been terrible at so going back to that specific point this is one of the most important parts of this conversation there are two tracks there are two trains right now it's two bullet trains sans brad pit all right we've got two bullet trains one is people

are getting healthier than ever. We're talking about extending lifespan substantially and quality of life, not just lifespan, but health span. And then we've got multiple epidemics of chronic disease, the likes of have never been seen in human history. We are the most chronically diseased society in the history of humanity. And the question is, where's the bridge? For people that, because here, this is another thing people don't understand. I've never met one person who didn't want to be healthy. Never. Everyone wants it. Everybody wants it. But we might have stories about what it costs and things that we tell ourselves, even sometimes not even feeling worthy of being healthy. And so we tell

ourselves, we can tell ourselves and tell us, tell other people we don't care. But that's not true. Everybody wants to be healthy. It's just a matter again, the conditions that we're existing in. And what this really has to do with is these kind of battles of culture. we can get into our little bubbles of health and think that everything is a lot better than it is. But most of our citizens and our families are struggling and it's getting worse. So how do we change this?

Because for me, for years, I was trying to target social behavior change, target the macroculture. You can make some changes. My first book, Sleep Smarter, it's an international bestseller. It's getting close to 30 different languages, is translated in, and it shifted the culture. It made the conversation of sleep wellness something that was popular.

Many books have come since, but it was a trigger. It was the first domino for something really big and really special. So I know my power in that. And that's still not the fastest way to get to that tipping point. I'm actually rereading Malcolm Gladwell's book Tipping Point right now. And he did this really cool shout out for me for my show not too long ago. and he's just one of those people that it's just a great thinker. And this is how epidemics are started.

There's a tipping point. And we tend to frame epidemics as things that are negative. But we can also have epidemics of wellness. We can have a culture where it's normal to be healthy. Right now, it's normal to be unhealthy, right? And so if you're a healthy person who doesn't have a metabolic disease in this culture today, you're weird. you're not normal. And we want to embrace the weirdness, yes.

But at the same time, how do we create that tipping point where we normalize wellness, where we make it easy for people to make healthy choices, where we make it easy for people to access ways to express their bodies and to move their bodies and to access healthy food? It doesn't start by targeting the macroculture, which is what a lot of people think, who don't come from where I come from, which is like, we need access. We need more access to health care. We're getting access to a system that is keeping us sick and disempowered. All right.

We need more. People don't have access to healthy food. That's what the problem is. There was still healthy food in my environment. I just didn't know that it existed. Right. I didn't know the difference. You know, living in Ferguson, Missouri, coming out of my apartment complex,

the first thing I see is a liquor store with shelves and shelves of ultra-processed food. That's just one of the liquor stores I'm surrounded by. Not to mention, which shouldn't be legal with different zoning laws. It's not allowed in many other parts of the country, like quote, nice neighborhoods. But every fast food you can name within a two mile radius, I'm surrounded by it, all of it. All of it. So that's what I see and is cheap. And so the culture is programming me like, this is food.

This is what you eat. I don't realize that that's not even food. It's fake food. And so how do we change this? We change this by shifting the microculture first. And so what do I mean by this? The macro culture is the culture that we exist in. Our culture just to define what culture is.

A culture is the attitudes, values, beliefs, and behaviors of a group of people that is then passed on from one generation to the next. That's what culture is. That's what it's defined as. We have no choice but to be affected by the culture that we grow up in. We say this. We're a product of our environment. Absolutely.

We are. But what's different about us as humans, we're also creators of our environment. We can consciously make alterations in our environment that alter our outcomes. And so the microculture is a culture in your household. But also, your culture is something you carry with you. When we just went to Hawaii recently, I realized, like, I'm planted now into this other culture. But my culture, people were literally coming up to me and my family multiple times. there, they were just attracted to us for some reason. And I know what it is now. I thought on the

surface like, okay, maybe it's like the kind of healthy exuberance maybe, right? My son's out here with all these muscles, you know, whatever. Like, what do you do? What do you guys do? How do you, what is your workout, that kind of stuff? But it's because of our connection. That's what was attractive, you know? And this true story, just even we got on the plane, you know, twice on that trip, people walk by us and said, your family's so beautiful. Right? One lady who was probably in her 60s or 70, she was like, can you guys adopt me? All right?

These are true. This has really happened. And in the moment, I don't think about it. I'm like, just, oh, that's so sweet. But then I'm just like, after, you know, having these conversations, I'm just like, why? What would trigger somebody to acknowledge us like that? And so I realize that you take your culture with you, wherever you go.

You influence the world around you. and we don't really get it. All right? So, for example, I can now, because of the culture that is built within me, I can go into what you would deem to be the most unhealthy circumstances and still make choices that are advantageous to me and what I'm about and what I believe in. Many people, myself included, there was a time when we go into a certain environment

and we might tell ourselves, I'm not eating that shit or I'm not drinking with these people, but you get into the environment and other things happen. You know, the environment dictates. And so it's creating the culture within yourself and your family. And so that microculture is the most powerful, effective force. Because my family, not just me, there's an energy that gets created when there's more people involved, is such a powerful model or influence to other families.

Right? And so when they see us, they see what's possible. But I had to consciously create that culture in my household. A lot of things were unconscious, though. Let me be clear. But eventually got to a place where I'm making choices and here's the rub. No one said this was going to be easy. No one said this was going to be easy. But you've got to choose your heart. You've got to choose. It's hard having your children have chronic diseases. I had asthma, my little brother, chronic asthma. Of course, I had an arthritic condition, by the way, in high school. My little sister had severe eczema.

My mother, obese, diabetes, stepfather, addiction, eventual obesity. This is all we knew was disease, right? That's hard. That's hard. Oh, but we got to eat all kinds of stuff. Right? We were eating, I mean, I get the food. This was back when the food stamps came in a little booklet. So you had paper, you know, little pieces. My mom would give me like a $10 food stamp. I go to the corner store. It's on. All right. I'm getting all kinds of, you know, old Vienna hot chips and not orange juice, orange drink was one of my favorite things, right? Because just being in the hood, be growing up where I grow up. And also, you know, penny candy. Literally one penny get you a piece of candy. You come in with a dollar? We're. We're going in. We're going in with a dollar. We're not. We're going. literally all of us are walking around the hood with a bag a paper bag full of like starts off with 100 pieces of candy and it's just getting ran through by the end of the day all right it's crazy

and so that's hard as well okay so we we feel that we get to do whatever we want eat whatever we want but we're also all struggling with diseases and struggling with our connection with each other and struggling with an ability to make it out of this volatile environment because that's what the data shows, there's already clear data on this. When we venture into obesity, being in a low income environment, it is substantially harder to reach a place of financial security. Because it's, it's not that we can't. It's not that it's impossible. It's just harder because we have to have the energy to be able to do different things. And so we get to choose our heart. The other hard is we start to proactively find ways to bring more healthy assets or exposures into our family environment.

Knowing that there might be some resistance. If, for example, we've got kids who we've spent years putting a device in front of them and they would eat while, you know, watching a show or playing video games and we don't eat together, often at all, if or at all, it's going to take a shift in the culture. but what I did was I dug into the science absolutely and just also being very practical like what are some of the things that you can do to help to make that transition more smooth because the solution at its core is connecting this is with adults and children we're just a big adult babies really you know to be honest we still have a lot of the same wiring we don't think that we're affected

by peer pressure for example we tell our kids don't be used to subject to peer pressure we do the same thing now. We're probably more subject to peer pressure when we get older. But being able to understand the psychology of our loved ones, what motivates them, what de-excites them, it's all got to be driven by creating something. We can't just take something away that people enjoy. We have to replace it with something of equal or greater value. That's the key. That's the key. So if I'm coming in saying, okay, I know that you love Denny's pancakes. You know, you're a Denny's boy. Every week you're at Denny's.

Moon's over my hammy, all the things, but you got to get your pancakes. We can't just take the pancakes away. Yes, you said this earlier. You can have the pancakes and we add in these other things. And or we can even make some delicious pancakes that rival your Denny's pancakes over here. But now we're adding in all these real pancakes. food elements. And, you know, our friend Mark Hyman says that food isn't just food, it's information. What if we can slide in some of these protein sweet potato pancakes and all of those,

all of that new information into your body that starts to alter those kind of epigenetic influences? We have nutrigenomics, neutrogenetics. And now your brain starts working differently. Now your metabolism starts working differently. You just ate a pancake, though. That's all you might be even concerned about. I'm eating a delicious pancake, right? And so that was the part of the mission as well. Let's talk about some tactics for the family to create this environment around the table,

also the kitchen culture, to get people more to a place of celebration and joy versus like pulling everybody along and also the food because that's at the end of the day, what am I going to eat? And so even those pancakes that I mentioned, that's one of the most popular recipes

that's in the book, these protein potato pancakes. Do you have a photo in the book? Of course. Yeah, we can pull it up. Tessa, let's see if we can find it. While she's pulling that up, shout out to Tessa. Thanks for pulling that up. You know, you were making this connection between a lot of people want to start on the macro. They want to focus on access. They want to do that. But it's really the micro. So as part of that is like, hey, take care of you and your family home environment first. You have no idea that once you get right, how you can influence everybody around you.

But if you go too quickly to try to influence other people without having your own culture right, your own family unit, right? And even if you're single, that's your own personal culture that's there, you're going to end up spinning your wheels because people are going to look at you and say, well, if it's that easy, you're not doing it in your own home. Right. So when you get it there, and we have literally seen that, even though the statistics are crazy right now. And we've mentioned them all before, how we're headed more to chronic disease, how we're headed more to obesity. I will say one thing for the people that are truly the least, the least, the least, you know, the least. of culture, the thought leaders that are there in pretty much every category, music,

intellectuals like Malcolm Gladwell, right, and authors, obviously in this space of personal development, health, fitness people, I have never across the board seen so many people talking about health, true wellness is their driving priority in life. And that is exciting. I've also, even though we have a lot of work to do, I've never seen more people talking in my life that I've been here for 40 years or so and living in America for probably about 37 of those years. I've never seen on a political side, even though I'm not waiting for some politician to solve the issue, right? You talked about our friend Mark Hyman.

He says, you know, revolutions don't start in Congress. They can end in it, but it's the people that get it started. So this revolution of health, I am quite hopeful because I've never seen so many people talking about how health is truly their main driving value. in life. Are you noticing this too? Absolutely. Absolutely. It's not, again, we can get into these bubbles, but I'm seeing this across the board and people in different, you know, levels of entrepreneurship, for example. And also, I've, this, even I can see the requests that I get coming in from all these different, you know, corporate entities asking me to come and speak to their teams. I just did a talk for ESPN. Shout to all the people at ESPN. At the Falcons football

stadium in Atlanta, which was crazy. I'm speaking at this, my green room was like the visiting coaches locker room. It's just these kind of crazy experiences. But what they wanted to do was not just looking at execution at a high level in their job performance, but being corporate wellness warriors or corporate athletes, right? That's the new framing that's getting put into a lot of these different entities because not only does it really help with the bottom line, which for a lot of companies, it's the bottom line, all the sick days, all the expenses in dealing with folks that are struggling with their health, which it is, it can be a weight on a business. But improving that, but also seeing these other really remarkable side effects that don't

get quantified enough, which is employee morale and connection, right? Relationships and creativity, right? Because we're living at a time really of the extreme need for innovation and creativity. That's really our superpower right now in the information age. And especially AI is like, you know, it's just knocking on the door. What is going to be your linchpin, right? How are you going to make yourself a linchpin in whatever it is that you're trying to do? What's going to set you apart? We need the energy and capacity to be able to do that.

And so much of our energy is siphoned. Even, you know, you mentioned earlier the significant increase in cancer, for example, when we venture into obesity, one of those cancers, we see about a dog. doubling in risk of of ovarian cancer, testicular cancer when we venture into obesity, but endometrial cancer in particular is about a seven to ten times increase incidence when we venture into obesity. Crazy. And so it's just like, what can we do to help to something that might seem on the surface

about, you know, vanity and body positivity and self-love, but also helping. to reduce the risk of things that are really destroying families and taking people out, we have a pharmaceutical model that we're existing in right now, but there's a lot of dense getting hit into it. A lot of holes are getting poked into it right now. There's a, there's a, there are minor shifts. Even the fact that there are all these documentaries out, kind of calling out this behavior, it's like art imitating life, life imitating art kind of thing, but also like these messages are getting out there and people are thinking different, right? And I believe that, that nature finds a way.

We're at this place where we're talking about the destruction of our species. You know, Casey Means has talked about this as well. But some of the, and I don't even like to talk about this because it's so dark. But we're seeing a significant drop in the ability for humans to reproduce. In about a 50-year time span, there's about a 50% reduction in sperm in the average male's semen. about a 50% reduction in full term. No matter of fact, a 50% increase in miscarriages as well in the same time span. And I go on and on and on.

And the question is like, what is it? Why is this happening with humanity? It's not just one thing. Everything affects our ability to reproduce. Even going back to what we're making our cells out of, those sex cells even, our womb, you know, if we're talking about our mothers out there, is made from the food that that person has eaten. And a recent study was just published in the FASA journal, and they found that there's an appetite regulating network in the brain that's well established. This is a part of the

hypothalamus. But mothers who are exposed to excessive amounts of food, in particular, is going to be coming through ultra-processed food, created what they deemed to be permanent change. to the appetite-regulating network in their children. And in particular, they noted significant insulin, not insulin, leptin resistance in the brain as well. So the inability to feel satisfied from the foods that we're eating. And so literally, even in the womb, we're making these changes. And so we've got to understand the power of food, absolutely, that we're making our tissues out of these things.

And we get to choose what we're making ourselves out of. but it's not just food. It's also that movement. It's also our relationships is a huge, it might be the biggest thing according to, again, the longest running human study, not to mention that huge meta-analysis I mentioned earlier. Our relationships play such a powerful role.

Part of your exercise has been your men's group that you get together and you guys go hiking or whatever the case might be, like doing things under the spirit of, Like if you have that social connection and accountability, it just makes all that stuff easier. It's the positive peer pressure. Yeah. Right?

That you mentioned earlier. It makes a difference in our life and it helps us spiral upwards instead of spiraling downwards. Let's talk about food and recipes. We brought up the recipe. This looks beautiful for those that are just listening on audio. This is a gorgeous pancake recipe. What's the name of this? This is sweet potato protein pancakes.

Talk about a big picture. Like, is there a story behind this? Is it literally like you're one of your sons? Like, how did this recipe come to be and get included in the cookbook? Awesome. So, number one, what I did was, you see those little emojis right there? Yes. The little brain emoji.

Walk us through. So those watching on YouTube, you could see it. And, but yes, there's a brain emoji, a muscle. There's a brain with a lightning sort of like brain power. Yeah, cognitive function. Cognitive function. And then there's digestive. And yeah, exactly.

And so we've got the cognitive function with the brain emoji. We've got the muscle emoji is like metabolic health. And then the one with the kind of lightning bolt through the human mind is our state of mental wellness. You know, so mental health aspects. And so what I did was I targeted some of the most nutrient dense science-backed foods. And whatever particular part of the body that had the most data that they kind of target helping to improve, the function of, I created a correlating emoji because we have an emoji culture. You know, sometimes like a couple emojis says more than a paragraph, you know.

And so I wanted to leverage that. And so with those foods, one of them was sweet potatoes. And there was some remarkable data on its influence on potentially even improving our state of mental wellness. Because these really remarkable anthocyanins, well, let's just talk about that really quickly. Yeah. So the anthocyanins and sweet potatoes apparently can help to improve our memory. All right. So there's some data on that.

And also it's providing this little serotonin hit that can help. Serotonin is kind of glorified as this feel good neurotransmitter slash hormone. A little sweet potato can actually increase your body's production of serotonin and also utilization of serotonin. So what I did was I was just like, okay, my family, we love brunch. You know, brunch foods, pancakes is a big thing. Literally my favorite meal the day. Yes. I mean, it's for a lot of people.

And so I was just like, what can we do to bring in some real food nutrients, nutrition that also taste delicious into a pancake recipe? And also the biggest kind of downside with a pancake is the fact that it's just this very carbohydrate dominant thing. And so bringing in a really high quality protein source, you know, this could be a high quality, you know, grass-fed way or whatever the case might be, to up-level the protein ratio in the meal as well. And so I worked, man, I made so many pancakes trying to figure this out of the recipe

because we're big foodies. Like my family, all of us are, like I mentioned, my stepfather's a chef, executive chef actually at Morton's of Chicago for many years. And so we're just really big foodies. We all like to cook and make amazing food. But we also tell you if something doesn't taste good, you know, so we're not shy about that because, you know, for me, I've never, I've never really bought into this idea of eating to live and not living to eat. Yeah.

Because humans, we, just like any animal in nature, have you ever thought about why certain animals eat certain things? Like, why are they driven to eat that thing? We are designed. We have a certain flavor palette that drives us to eat certain foods. We just evolve that way. And if we were living in natural normal circumstances, there's something called post-ingestive feedback. We talked about this before, but we would eat a food, and our cells would basically take notes that, okay, I just ate these cherries, and I got, you know, this vitamin C, I got this melatonin.

Wow, there's melatonin. I got this selenium, right? It's just like taking notes. And so if we become deficient in those things or start to run low, our stock and our cells, we would create a craving to go and seek out that flavor, all right, that cherry flavor. And so that's called post-intensive feedback. The problem is today food scientists have really manipulated those pathways. And now it's like the waters are so muddied because we could take that cherry flavor and isolate it using a gas chromatograph and be able to identify the chemistry that makes that cherry flavor.

And now we can add that flavor to candy. We can add that flavor to popsicles and the list goes on and on. No cherries required. Right. And so what we're doing with this is taking back control of our of our palate, of our biology, and starting to retrain our palate with real food. And so that flavor intelligence starts to come back online. And we start to ironically crave healthy things.

That's the crazy thing that is possible because we know it. And some people have experienced this with exercise. Like they don't feel right if they don't exercise. Like they crave it. Something hard? What? this is what's possible and you get to choose your heart but we can become create basically a positive addiction essentially and but also an addiction where you don't overdo it because that appetite

regulating network gets proper inputs you feel fulfilled and complete but you're still drawn to these things and literally like the cells in your body are changing and they start to be attracted to more of those healthier components i've felt this for so much of my life where once I started shifting how I ate, you literally crave healthy food. And again, a big part of that is that people don't know always what to make. Like, what do we eat? What do we make? When you learn a few things, when you have some guidance from a cookbook like yours,

it's out now, it shows you that really you only need to make like four to six meals. And then you have your variations of them, right? Most of us are not making something new every single night. And definitely not moms who are often leading a lot of the cooking inside of the household. Right. You have your family staples of the recipes that you enjoy that everybody loves. Some things that you might make on a special occasion. And the variation that happens inside of it, I've found that just learning, you know,

three to four to five recipes for somebody and picking your favorites from a book like this is enough for people to completely shift how they eat. Yeah. And it goes back also to simplicity with that too. because a lot of my friends and colleagues have put out recipe books before. And I'm definitely, a red flag goes up if there's too many ingredients. Yeah. You know, and so really making this very simple where most of the ingredients have, I'm sorry,

most of the recipes have 10 ingredients or less, somewhere around that. And also getting those flavor sensations and food experiences that we love so much. One of my favorite food experiences as a kid was when the bomb pop man would drive down the street. Now, I don't know if you know about this. Bomb pop, like, is that like a popsicle? Yeah. So it's an ice cream truck, right? And so it's got like music or the bells.

Yeah. No matter what we're doing, we hear it. It's like the Avengers call or something, you know, like Avengers assemble. We're all running outside to stop the bomb pop man. He pulls up and they've got the pictures of all the different types of ice cream and popsicles on the side. And, you know, sometimes, basically you need a dollar, you know, sometimes some the cheapest bomb pops for like 20. $0.25. And wow, like, what an experience on a hot summer day for a bunch of kids in the hood, you know. And so, but knowing that experience of having a really delicious popsicle, for example, it's just like, oh, no, I have to honor that.

And so we created these cherry frozen yogurt pops. And these are all really simple things to do and also simple things and fun things to do with your kids. And, but even with that, there are different, like, little trays and things you can make bomb pops and and popsicles in the freezer but what are those made of as well because we don't want to possibly especially all the data is coming out with certain plastics which is one of the kind of go-toes and so we use a silicone model for that our mold and there's so many cool things so that's another big thing that we talk about in the book is like good better best options for doing some of these things you mentioned even just even something along the lines of of the food preparation and what that energy that it can require.

So there's strategies on, you know, making food for leftovers. There's strategies on. It's another thing that Mark really sparked in my mind to dig into the research on how much food waste we have is crazy. We have enough food that we waste that we can feed everybody on earth two, three times over. It's like 40% of our food goes to waste. Exactly. So what are some strategies that we can,

actually keep a hold on our food. And so another one of those foods, by the way, and, you know, I'll just share this study really quickly, is avocados. Avocados are definitely having its moment right now. It's even, like, there's even McDonald's got, you know, some avocado on their burger. Really? I've not seen that. Yeah. McDonald's is putting avocado on the burger? Something. They're putting avocado on different stuff. Okay. All right. So this is a randomized controlled trial. This was cited in the journal, current developments in nutrition, and I found that adding avocado to test subjects diet over the course of the three-month study led to a significant reduction in belly fat.

Wow. Again, all things considered calorie-wise, there's something really remarkable about metabolic health regarding avocados. Number one, there's a bridge there. Some people don't even like, I didn't even eat an avocado until I was about 25 my entire life because it just look weird. All right. Now it's one of my favorite foods.

But with that, an avocado can be a risky purchase. Also, if you don't have a lot of money, I can get two for 99 cent tacos at Jack in a Box because of government subsidies, by the way, enable that. And an avocado might cost you $3. All right? So we want to make it count. And avocados can go from good to, like, disrespectful very quickly, right?

It's like unripe and then, like, you can get disrelipped. respectful. So how do you really extend the lifespan of that avocado? Right. So because we tend to, I know I tend to buy multiple and before I know it, I can end up possibly losing all of these. And it happened too many times where I just look into a little bit of the science. And so right before it gets to that perfect ripeness, or even when it's ripe, put in the refrigerator. That can extend the viability of it for another three days. All right? Just right there off the bat. Another thing is once it's ripe and you know you're not going to use it right now, you can cut it it into chunks and put in the freezer to use to make smoothies. You're welcome. You're welcome.

And we have a great smoothie recipe in the book. One of my favorite ones is the heart health smoothie smoothie. And so it has all of these really science-backed ingredients for improving your cardiovascular health. And cherries are one of the highlights as well. But that cherry and avocado combination with some chocolate, ooh, it's not only is it delicious, but, you know, it's really, really good for your metabolic health. A little protein powder so you can hit your protein goals and boom you're done uh how do you you know one of the biggest questions that people have is often that start of the day how do i start the day that not only that i'm leaning towards whole foods you know and different people want to eat at different times right but that i'm also

getting in that protein going back to that study that you said shared that ward study where people were starting with eggs in the morning and it wasn't necessarily something special about eggs alone, even though eggs are very special, it was the fact that they're having, you know, some protein, a little bit of healthy fat inside of there that seems to play a role as we were chatting about being satiated and feeling full and also having that protein to sustain you and, you know, hit some of your goals, especially if you're working out. What are some ways that you start your morning off that play on some of those themes? Because again, I see so many people confused about what they should be eating.

in the morning. Yeah. So again, just looking at the science on this. And this isn't true for everybody, by the way. Some people can do well on a higher carbohydrate-based intake for their first thing. Some people. But for most folks, you're going to want to keep the carbs a little bit lower, not saying necessarily low-carb, but ensure that you're getting in that, you know, really substantial amount, whack of protein and some healthy fats. It's really going to help to improve satiety throughout the day. What the data indicates is that eating a higher ratio of carbohydrates for that first meal in the morning keeps your appetite higher throughout the rest of the day. And I know that I've experienced this firsthand as well. But what are the things that are most

promoted to us for breakfast in our culture? These are all carbohydrate dominant things outside of things like eggs, for example. For most folks, and I know for me, the thing that I was eating when I would get to school, you know, I was in a school-free lunch program, they're giving the kids these single serving bowls of cereal, you know, frosted flakes and, and, you know, fruit loops and things like that. And then a little cup of like orange juice, maybe the, you know, the milk to pour on your cereal. It's just like, or donuts, you know, like this is so nefarious in a sense what we're feeding our kids to start the day. But that's what we're marketed to. They're called breakfast cereals for a reason, although, you know, for me, it didn't matter what time,

you know, especially. I was a serial guy. A serious. killer. All right? So definitely, you know, I've eaten many bowls of cereal late in the evening. But like one of those big serving dishes as well, like I take this cereal seriously, you know. But they're so addictive. It's a very addictive thing. This is why I have such a strong memory, like flavor, like my brain, I know what that tastes like those fruity pebbles. And, you know, just even understanding that part of it, what our kids are getting. One of the industry tenants is get them while they're young. You can create a lifetime customer

that way. I know that that was the case for me and many other people. Like, we have these food experiences as a child that we carry with us into adulthood. We just tend to never break them for many of us in our culture today, unfortunately. And so for me, I'm not going, I'm going to celebrate that. Funny enough, I'm going to

celebrate that. And I'm going to find a way how can we do this with real food? Right? And not, we've got to stop. The pivot, unfortunately, recently has been lesser of evils, right? Even in a political context, you know, who's the least bad, you know? Like, what if we have the choose from the greater of goods?

What if we do that? And so doing that with food. And so one of those would be, let's be honest about our, in the health space, our recent obsession with, quote, low glycemic sweeteners, all right? where we get this bag of xylitol or stevia or whatever it looks like sugar it looks the same it's a bag of that white powder okay that you look you can get this on the streets as well like it does it looks suspicious but they're telling you okay let's bake all these different recipes use this instead that is by its very nature and deeply ultra processed food and so what i'm bringing forward is like

hey wait a minute what if there was a sweetener that is far beyond a sweetener? And what if there's a sweetener that our genes have the closest resonance with? Like we've been eating as a species longer than any of this stuff. And that sweetener is honey. This is a food that's been utilized for thousands of years. And there's a recent study that I cited in the book. Again, this is one of the foods that we go through. And they found that not only does honey not create that initial derangement spike and crash in blood glucose when upon consumption, over time utilizing honey actually improved people's fasting glucose.

Wow. That's crazy. How a sweetener? No. That's because it's disrespectful to even call honey just a sweetener. It's something different. And by the way, in that study, they also found improvement in blood lipids and overall reduction in cardiovascular disease risk when test subjects were eating honey.

Raw honey. Just be clear. not the pasteurized stuff that, you know. A lot of fake honey out there. Oh, man. Yeah. There's a lot of fake Jessica Alba's out there. All right.

So people, some people are going to get that. Some people are not going to get it. There's a movie. It's a dance flick called Honey. Jessica Alba shout to her. But, yeah, you're absolutely right. And there's the enzymatic kind of been, it's so loaded with all of these different polyphenols and enzymes.

This is why honey is so stable. Like, they've literally dug up honey, you know, in Egypt. That is like centuries old that it's not necessarily if you want to eat it, but you can. Right. As long as it doesn't interact with water, honey is very stable. It's going to stick around forever. Special. It's a special food.

And so I'm being very, right now, very, very bullish on honey. You know, just really advocating for like, let's give ourselves permission to enjoy some sweetness, but let's do it with the good stuff. Because humans, we're driven. We've evolved to seek out tasty sweet things, but we villainized our desire for sweet things, and also food manufacturers have manipulated it as well, absolutely. There's nothing wrong with liking something sweet.

Through our evolution, we knew it's tied to, this sweet flavor is a great source of energy that I can use to run processes, in particular for our brain that runs on glucose primarily. Regardless of a ketogenic protocol, which keto's shout out to ketones. Absolutely. But there are many processes that exclusively run on glucose. And this is why, and this is one of the interesting things, our brain is only about 2% of our body's mass, but it uses about 25% of the calories we eat. And research said Harvard found that in any given meal,

your brain will gladly confiscate about 50% of the glucose that you just took in. All right. So if you just drank a Mountain Dew cold red, about half of that sugar is going to be stopped up by your brain cells. Is it an accident that we're seeing this epidemic of insulin resistance in the brain, i.e. onset of degenerative brain diseases, i.e. Alzheimer's is now the sixth leading cause of death in the United States, aka type 3 diabetes. Your brain is just funneling that stuff up. Right. So it's not our desire for sweet things. That's the problem. It's how we've been manipulated recently in our culture. So let's create a cultural shift, honor our desires, use higher quality foods, and ultimately by us making these changes in our microculture, and I did this living in Ferguson, Missouri, with barely two nickels to rub together, I found a way to get this done and figured out. There happened to be a farmer's market. In Ferguson, the good part, by the way, I didn't live in the good part. It was just 10 minutes away. There's a farmer's market for years.

I just wasn't attuned to it because I was telling myself that I don't have access. Nobody's going to help me. It was right there and it ended up being one of those things eventually was integrated into my family culture where we go to farmers market every weekend and my kids would, you know, We get to talk to the farmers and we get some little treats there. But now I'm paying half the price I was paying at Whole Foods to get the same foods. And I'm closer to where it comes from. Right. There is a way.

There's absolutely a way. And the thing, last part is, as soon as we start feeling better, the interesting thing that happens is, again, we activate this capacity for creativity. And we tend to find a way to be able to invest in ourselves and invest in our foods at a higher level. It's just taking one step at a time. When we feel better, we start to do better. That's really at the heart of all of this. Whether it's our interaction with our family, when we feel better, we start to do better. We're better able to manage and our tolerance, our empathy and compassion goes up.

It's not that we can't have it when we don't feel well. It's just harder. And it pulls away a lot of that mental energy. Literally, I'm talking about tangible glucose drainage from the brain. There's something called decision fatigue. But as we take better care of ourselves and build up that capacity, that microculture in ourselves, branch that out to our family, now we have a superpower in influencing our community.

And that's really what this is all about. Well said. When you feel good, you have all the energy you need to give love and attention to the goals that matter to you. Whatever that might be. Somebody wants to start a creative project. Somebody wants to have the energy to run around for their grandkids. somebody wants to build a new business somebody wants to whatever it is whatever your goals are

you need energy if you need sustained energy and not fake energy that's really built on a house of whole foods and of course a non not having a sedentary lifestyle getting in your walking and then especially a little bit of strength training inside the mix too you combine those together with some friendships, turn off the media. You know, I had a, I don't know if you've interviewed her before, but Dr. Tara Swart, she's a neuroscientist, Oxford train neuroscientist and also psychiatrist. She's an MD neuroscientist, incredible human being.

She said, when I talk to my friends and colleagues that are neuroscientist, I don't know one of them. This is from her. I don't know one of them. that regularly watches the news because they know how susceptible our brain is to information. About, wow, an Oxford trained psychiatrist and neuroscientist telling people she doesn't know one neuroscientist in her network, right? Her network that regularly watches, you know, traditional news. because of knowing how susceptible our brain is

to all this negativity that we're surrounded by. So key. Two follow-up questions on what you share. Breakfast idea, right? Just one. What's one thing you had for breakfast this week? That was a great way to hit your protein goals, but have that sustained energy,

just like we were talking about eggs. And then besides dessert recipes, is there a way that you incorporate honey in your routine? in a week. Absolutely, of course. So, you know, of course, it's easy psychologically for us to see something, quote, sweet, right? So adding to a smoothie or the like or a dessert.

But also we can integrate this into, I've got a spicy protein bowl as well that's got, you know, notes of things like, you know, siracha, things like that. But all these high quality protein foods. And then you add a little drizzle the honey. Oh, it gets serious, you know. And also one of my favorite recipes is the honey serracha salmon as well in the book. We have that, you know, at least every couple of weeks we'll have that. It's one of our family favorites. And some of these things are very simple to make as well.

And you can modulate, you know, bring a little bit more honey or a little bit more serracha for your sweetness and spicy desires. But those are just a couple. Yeah, there's tons of different ways that we can add in honey even into kind of classically lower glycemic recipes. And also not to mention even with something. something with, you know, a recipe with salmon. Everybody knows this at this point, the value of these fatty fish. But we, I dig in. You know how I do it. I'm just like bringing it to another

level, but also making it more tangible and practical. But one of the most recent studies found that folks in particular that aren't consuming enough DHA and EPA have the highest rate of brain shrinkage. And so they were actually, they were using MRIs and looking at people's brains. And they found that under four grams a day, that was kind of like the minimum effective dose for protecting your brain from shrinking over time and losing mass, in particular your gray matter. Your gray matter matters, you know. And so being able to protect our brain, how do we hit these marks? Depending on the type of salmon, by the way, there's a variety.

And we're not even talking about farm versus wild caught. But, you know, from Coho to King Salmon, potentially with one serving, you can hit that mark and beyond, just depending on which type of salmon you're eating. So it's just like it's a really great food to get those compounds that are so important for sustaining our brain, right? But we can deliver that in a tasty way. We don't just got to buy a supplement, which, again, I'm not a good supplements at all. But it should be supplementing an already great nutrition protocol to fuel your human excellence. you know and so let's get this from food first and then add in supplements accordingly but our cells

have evolved to interact with food i love it sean it's always such a pleasure to have you on the show you are the food hype man you're also the sleep hype man too right anything that is undervalued that we could be giving a little bit more attention to that could radically transform our lives you are the hype man for and this new book falls perfectly into that category. Eat Smarter, family cookbook. It's in pre-order right now. People can pick it up. Any kind of fun pre-order stuff that's going on or any mentions or the URL of where people can get it from? Yes. I mean, this has to go beyond just our immediate family. But to again, create this movement and that tipping point, we have to work together. And so this isn't just me

with this cookbook. I put together a family celebration. The 2020 Family Health and Fitness Summit is coming up here soon. And to attend the event, it's a virtual event you can attend from anywhere. And not just hearing from me how I constructed this culture of wellness within my own household, but some of the other leading people in fitness, nutrition, psychology. Dr. Daniel Aiman is one of the speakers you're going to hear from, double board certified psychiatrist, Layla Ali, undefeated boxing champion, but she also won the cooking show Chopped Twice.

She's a phenomenal cook. We've got Dr. Amy Shaw. We've got Shaline Johnson. All these incredible superstars in their respective fields. But they have kids. And so I'm digging in and asking them, grilling them, like, how did you deal with picky eaters? How did you afford groceries for your family of, you know, sometimes they have five kids or whatever the case might be? And finding out from more people who figure some things out, how do we create a culture of wellness?

Because it can't just be through my lens. Although the way that I do it, of course, I'm taking it multiple. perspectives and consolidating it into this one masterpiece. And this is something this book is something that I know for certain is going to impact your life for many years to come, be a resource for many years to come. It's the only cookbook. This is the first time this has been done. There's over 250 scientific references in a cookbook. This has never been done before.

But in a way that's beautiful, colorful. You see the layout of the book. And my family is all in this book too, you know. And so just again, there's an energy that jumps off the page. And I'm so proud of this. And so people get access to the summit. The ticket for the summit is $297. You get that for free when you pre-order the book.

And also we're doing a 25K health and fitness giveaway. So some of the companies, you know, friends and colleagues, they're chipping in for this as well. And so like On It is giving away $500 in fitness equipment. And we have a ton of on it equipment. That's what we used yesterday. My son and I working out was on a fitness equipment. And so they're giving away multiple people are going to get $500 in fitness equipment.

$500 in groceries from Thrive Market is going to go to a bunch of people. So you get access to that for free as well. And a bunch of other free stuff that we're doing, like real things, tangible things that you can eat and or utilize for your family fitness. You're going to get some access to by pre-ordering the book. And by the way, all of that, you go to Amazon, Barnes & Noble, your favorite local bookstore to get the book. And depending on when people are listening to this, it comes out 10-10 is the big celebration.

10 out of 10, 10, 10. 10, 10, 23. And then go to eatsmarter cookbook.com. Eat smarter cookbook.com to get access to all those bonuses that you were going to love and you deserve. I love it, brother. Well, we'll link to that in the YouTube captions, in the show notes on audio. And I really hope everybody picks up a copy. And if you can, if there is a family that you know that wants to,

be growth-minded, but maybe they're not listening to podcasts. Maybe that's not something they've been exposed to. Maybe they don't have time to it. Maybe they don't know about you. They don't know about me. But one book, one book picking up an extra copy, could literally change somebody's family tree. So think about that family.

I can think of one. I'm going to get an extra book for them. And it makes a great gift, especially with the holidays and everything coming up. So I would encourage that. those that can afford to do that to do it. Sean, this has been fantastic. Thank you again for being on the show.

Congratulations. Thank you. I appreciate you, man. Appreciate you. Hi, everyone. Drew here. Two quick things. Number one, thank you so much for listening to this podcast.

If you haven't already, subscribe, just hit the subscribe button on your favorite podcast app. And by the way, if you love this episode, it would mean the world to me. And it's the number one thing that you can do to support this podcast is share with a friend. share with a friend who would benefit from listening. Number two, before I go, I just had to tell you about something that I've been working on that I'm super excited about. It's my weekly newsletter, and it's called Try This. Every Friday, yes, every Friday, 52 weeks a year, I send out an easy-to-digest protocol of simple steps that you or anyone you love can follow to optimize your own health. We cover everything from nutrition to mindset, to metabolic health, sleep, community, longevity, and so much.

more. If you want to get on this email list, which is, by the way, free and get my weekly step-by-step protocols for whole body health and optimization, click the link in the show notes that's called Try This or just go to Drew Perot.com. That's D-H-R-U-P-U-R-O-H-I-T.com and click on the tab that says try this.