Dynamic Dialogue with Danny Matranga - 319: These Are the 10 Foods Making *Most People* Fat

Episode Date: September 12, 2023

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Hey, everybody, welcome in to episode 319 of the Dynamic Dialogue podcast. In this episode, we are going to discuss the notion that, quote unquote, there's no such thing as bad food. And we'll discuss the morality and general decision making that goes into deciding what is and isn't worth eating. We'll discuss the 10 foods that I think are the most closely associated with obesity, the stuff that I would stay as far away from as possible if I were somebody looking to lose weight or live healthier, the stuff I would look for alternatives for. We'll discuss organic,

clean eating, gluten-free, keto, protein, fiber, nutrient timing. We will discuss a lot about nutrition. So you will learn a ton in this episode about making good food choices. This would be one to send to somebody who's looking to lose weight, but maybe not super stoked about tracking everything they eat. That's something that we want for our clients because that is the most reliable approach. But for people who are just getting started, they sometimes just need to be told not necessarily what to eat, but what to stay away from.

And we'll talk about all those culprits and more in episode 319. This episode is brought to you in special part thanks to our awesome partners over at Ice Barrel. If you're like me, you want to get the absolute most you can out of your fitness and out of what it is that you're doing in life. I like to make sure that I'm recovering well and prepped for hard workouts. I like to make sure that my cognition is sharp and I like to make sure that I'm doing what I can to maintain my long-term health. And cold water immersion is a phenomenal tool I use and have used for a while to help me do this. Cold water immersion or taking ice baths is a great way to improve your recovery and performance. Just a few short sessions a week can really make a difference in how you recover. It can increase

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And again, if you want to improve your cognition and performance, and you have those midday lulls, or you want to be more present for your family or for your friends when you get off of work and you don't want to caffeinate, temperature modulation like ice baths or cold exposure or sauna heat exposure can be really valuable for increasing that subjective sense of well-being and bringing you back to a place of alertness in a really chaotic world. in a really chaotic world. It's also great for just cultivating resilience. I find I'm much tougher. Again, this is a more anecdotal thing, but I find that I am much tougher, ready to face the day's tasks when I am consistently exposing myself to the elements. Call it bromeopathy, call it anecdote, but I will tell you one thing is for sure, cold water immersion has made a huge difference for my health and wellbeing in just a few short sessions a week. An ice barrel is the sleekest, best looking, cleanest, and most affordable way to do it reliably. You can head over to icebarrel.com slash Danny to take advantage of their

100% satisfaction guaranteed with again, a 30 day money back guarantee and save 125 bucks on your Ice Barrel using the promo code Danny. So again, icebarrel.com slash DANNY, and check out using the promo code DANNY to save $125. Okay, so starting off the episode, I'd like to unpack the notion that there's no such thing as bad foods. This is something that I've heard communicated by a ton of influencers and nutrition experts. And I think it comes from the right place. I think it comes from detaching morality from certain decisions, which is to say, you know,

like, does it make you a bad person to eat a cinnamon roll? I don't think so. I certainly don't think so. I certainly don't think so. I actually don't think any of your food choices really have a damn thing to do with who you are as a person. If you really wanted to be hardcore personal responsibility and reading in more than you probably ought to to people's decision making, I think you could say that, yeah, anybody who says, I need to lose weight, I want to lose weight, I'm desperate to lose weight, but then makes terrible food decisions, does that make them a bad person? I don't think so. I just think it shows a lack of commitment and discipline. So

I don't think there's a single food choice you can make that makes you good or bad. But the choice you can make that makes you good or bad. But the phrase, there's no such thing as good or bad foods. Like this is the argument I would make. And I think vegans would have something to say about this too, because people who eat a vegan diet typically do so because they have a philosophical reason for doing so. They believe that it is in the best interest of the planet. And it's certainly the least cruel way to eat if you care about animal wellbeing, which, you know, this is something I grapple with all the time when we discuss, you know, where nutrition might go and with lab meat. And I know a lot of people are off put by it, but I don't hate the idea long-term of having, you know, genetically identical meat

that maybe has better macros, a lower cholesterol, a better long-term health implications tied to it, and no animals have to suffer. Like I have a dog. Every time I eat pig and steak, I have to square the circle of like, yeah, this doesn't bother me, but I'd never eat my dog. And I know the intellectual gymnastics are there. But I don't think, morally speaking, there's such thing as a bad food, even animal food. People would disagree with me there. But the phrase is, there is no such thing as bad food. And I question that.

I question whether there are foods that, like if all you do as a food is contribute calories and pleasure. I don't think that makes you a not bad food. Like I look at something that is completely devoid of nutrition that has a massive tendency to be over consumed. We're going to talk about 10 of those foods today. Soda comes to mind immediately. That's the number one thing that comes to mind for me right now is soda. It's also number one on the list, but I look at a food like soda and I go, yeah, it tastes good. And yes, it has calories and technically it has water. So it's hydrating. It tastes good, but it yields zero nutrition. And I'm not going to say that there's, that it makes it a bad food, but it makes it bad for pretty much everybody. Like it's not giving you something. And one of the things, one of the

frameworks, one of the mental models that I like to operate with in life is, you know, not everything can add value, but there's an opportunity cost, right? Whatever I'm spending on soda calorically and monetarily are calories I'm not consuming and fluids I'm not drinking from other places. So if I drink 300 calories of soda a day and it yields all of the calories and all of the energy from sugar, that's 300 calories I could have allocated to more nutrient dense foods with higher food volumes that make me actually feel full. Maybe these are even beverages. They might just be beverages that are lower in calories. Like you could make the argument that 300 calories of fruit juice is substantially better than 300 calories of soda, because at least you're getting

whatever vitamins and minerals were present in that fruit. So I think that this discussion about there's no good things in bad or good foods and bad foods is important before we dive into these 10 foods because I think that if you removed these foods, we'd miss them culturally. We like them. We enjoy them. We love them, but we do have a tendency to overeat them. And I don't agree with framing anybody who eats them as bad. And I don't agree with framing the foods themselves as bad. I would just encourage you as we go through this list, ask yourself the question for the small amount I have or the small amount of these foods that I eat or am I, I'm inclined to eat, or maybe it's mediums and large amounts, how many calories is that costing me? And where could I allocate those

elsewhere? And if I'm trying to lose fat, could I just go without them? That would improve my health, my wellbeing, my cognition, the way I feel, the way I look, the way I age. I'm not saying don't eat these. I'm just saying you should probably eat less of these, a lot less of these if you want to be healthy compared to the way the average American eats. So the first food on the list, the number one thing that I think makes the most Americans fat is calorically rich beverages. And I really whittled this down to two primary things, soda and coffee. Soda water has zero calories. Black coffee has zero calories. And those two things are at the base of the sodas and coffees that we enjoy so much. But it's August 29th, so of course

that means we're in the middle of summer, right? Psych, it's pumpkin spice season. And it's been pumpkin spice season by the time you'll hear this podcast for like three and a half weeks, which means Starbucks is serving up a 390 calorie pumpkin spice latte. And a lot of people start their day with a calorie rich coffee. That's somewhere between 200 to 400 calories. My fiance has a vanilla oat milk latte. That's probably between a hundred and 250 calories on the weekend, Saturday and Sunday. And typically during the week, she'll have a Starbucks brown shaken oat milk espresso. And that's like, I think between 80 and a hundred. So those drinks I think are a

little more reasonable. If you can keep it South of 200 calories and maybe do it a couple times a week, or if you're going to have this every morning, cause you really enjoy it, keep it South of a hundred calories. That's going to help a lot. But if you're drinking a coffee every morning, that's, you know, 390 calories. I use the pumpkin spice latte as an example. And people are like, nobody, nobody gets that. The fuck they don't. Nobody actually orders that. Oh, nobody orders that. I love that. I love the confidence that people have in saying that. Like Starbucks, like I get people in my replies, people on social media telling me that you can go to Starbucks and order the pumpkin spice latte with less calories.

Like I don't fucking know that. Like Starbucks doesn't fucking know that. Why don't you think Starbucks just promotes the 70 calorie version that you can get from the macro barista? Maybe it's because one of the best and most profitable businesses of all time knows a little bit more about what people are going to fucking choose than you do. Like, yes, you can tell somebody, oh, just go there, get it with one pump of this, one pump of that, one packet of this, and it tastes the same. They won't do it. They will go order the 390 calorie pumpkin spice latte 40 times in the next four months, and they will aggregate 16,000 additional calories into their diet, which if you do the math is about five

pounds of body fat. And not technically speaking, I think it's probably closer to two. It really just depends on the thermic effect of the human's diet, but you could quite literally slap two to four pounds of body fat, depending on your activity level, just from increasing 16 to 20,000 calories, getting a pumpkin spice latte like every three days between now and the end of the year. And people act like, oh, nobody's actually doing that. And it baffles me because of course they are. Or Starbucks wouldn't do this every year and it wouldn't be a meme and a cultural phenomenon. People love it. And if you start your day or every other day or even every three days with a 400

calorie coffee, you can run into some trouble because those calories stack and they add up and they compound. And people do the same thing with sodas and energy drinks every morning with a monster or every lunch or dinner with a soda. And so in the spirit of being practical, I wouldn't recommend that you avoid these things altogether. But in fact, I might recommend that you find alternatives. For sodas, I like diet soda. I'm not saying to drink 20 diet sodas a day and expose yourself to cancerous amounts of aspartame. I get it. You can see a carcinogenic effect when you feed rodents the equivalent amount of aspartame that in humans would be about 20 sodas. So one to two diet sodas a day, I think that's going to be fine if it helps you drink less soda. You know, doing a coffee in the morning with, you know, low fat almond milk and a couple different

pumps of sugar-free this or that, I think that's probably better than slamming a 400-calorie latte. In a perfect world, you drink black coffee and water, but we know that people want to enjoy food. So I would just really encourage you, look at all of the beverages you drink and be sure to ask yourself, how many calories am I drinking every day? And aim to cut that number in at least half. Taking a break from this episode to tell you a little bit about my coaching company, Core Coaching Method. More specifically, our app-based training. We partnered with Train Heroic to bring app-based training to you using the best technology and best user interface possible. You can join either my Home Heroes team, or you can train from home with bands and dumbbells or elite physique

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You can chat, ask questions, upload form for form review, ask for substitutions. It's a really cool training community and you can try it completely free for seven days. Just click the link in the podcast description below. Can't wait to see you in the core coaching collective, my app-based training community. Back to the show. Moving to the number two food, making everybody fat, staying with calorie-laden rich beverages, we're talking alcohol, baby. That's right, alcohol. Not only does it destroy your sleep, not only does it make it harder to recover from your training, not only does it make you more likely to overeat, not only does it affect important hormones, it also has a lot of calories. And most people drink, you know, one to two servings of a beverage when they drink.

So maybe they drink one to two glasses of wine every night or one to two beers every night or, you know, a couple days a week, they'll have three or four beers. I'm not going to tell you anything you don't already know about alcohol. Okay. You know, it's bad. You know, it's linked to many different forms of cancer. You know, that it's linked to many different forms of neurodegenerative disease. You know, that it has calories. You know, that it's bad for the gut. Alcohol is simply not healthy, even in small amounts. But just like we've talked about on the podcast so many times before, social components of health are vital for human health. So if alcohol is involved in social settings, eliminating it entirely might

not be practical for you, and it might not be what you want to do. And I respect that. That doesn't make you a bad person. Alcohol is an objectively bad for you food and that it is linked to all this disease, but it's an objectively like cultural fixation. It's not going anywhere. And you know, if you can reduce your alcohol intake, cut it down by half or, or switch to lower calorie options, it will make a huge, huge difference. Okay, the third one I've got on here, kind of an interesting one, fatty dairy. So think of really soft cheeses, really fatty, creamy dairy. Dairy is amazing for you. It's actually quite nutritious. A lot of people shit on it unnecessarily. They just don't understand how nutrient dense a lot of dairy is. Vitamin C, calcium, a bunch of different minerals, tons of protein. And a lot of times if it's fermented dairy like yogurt or kefir, which is kind of more what I'd prefer, you're going to get some probiotics too.

But a lot of the fatty, creamy cheeses, butters, the creamier, fattier forms of dairy, they don't yield the same nutrient density on a calorie per calorie basis, in large part due to the fact that they're composed more of fat than protein and the food matrices of everything are different. Like cheese is actually a very nutrient dense food matrix, but it's a very calorie heavy nutrient dense food matrix, but it's a very calorie-heavy nutrient-dense food matrix. And if you're eating a bunch of melted cheese versus a hard cheese that has some mouthfeel, you'd be shocked at how much more cheese you can eat. So you've got to be mindful

of fatty dairy additives to food. So if you're eating foods with tons of cheese, tons of butter, it's not necessarily that those foods are bad. It's just that they're very energy dense. They mix into things easily and it's easy to over consume them. The fourth food item is chips. Now, uh, this can be potato chips, corn chips, and crackers, but chips are really, really appealing. They have a very, very good mouthfeel, feel that crunchy, crispy, cracking texture. We tend to like that, especially when it's paired with savory and salty. It lights a lot of receptors up in our brain. I just want you to think, how many crunchy, salty foods are there? Popcorn, chips, crackers. We love these things. We like tortilla

chips. We like potato chips. We like crispy fries. We like the crispy outsides. There's something nice about these combinations. They're very rewarding. But these foods, the way that they're prepared, typically they're fried in oil. So we're going to take that kind of nutrient-dense potato or nutrient-dense corn, and then we're going to slice it thin of nutrient dense potato or nutrient dense corn, and then we're going to slice it thin and fry it. And we create surface area by keeping the chip flat. And then when we fry it, it accepts all the oils. And therefore it accepts all the calories. And a lot of people will tell you like, oh, you got to watch out for the seed oil, seed oil, this seed oil, that I'm not here to be that guy. I'm actually here to be a different guy. I'm here to say, look, seed oils, long-term way less harmful than a shitload of calories coming

from chips and being obese or being overweight or, you know, being in a calorie surplus chronically, which is inflammatory and could lead to disease. You gotta bring the calories down, uh, from, from foods that don't bring with them a lot of nutrient. Um, and I think that's really important. The fifth one, we mentioned it earlier as a good alternative, but again, it can be problematic are juices and juices are usually things that people are selecting instead of soda. They want a sweet beverage that does have some micronutrients. Um, and you know, I, I think that's, I think that's important. Um, uh, but I don't think getting it from like us, a juice is important. And so like, I, I'm encouraged that people want fruit flavored

things. I would just say, eat more fruit. That's something we can say is a great swap. But the juice itself, it goes down so easy. It's very sweet. Most of the time there's added sugar, which means added calories without necessarily having to change the size of the product. Sugar is going to be accepted into a liquid product very easily. It's going to become homogenous quite quickly. How much sugar can you pour into water, right? A good amount because it will just accept it. And I think that's really, really important. So we got to remember food volume at all times. We got to think about food volume at all times, which is how many calories are in the space of food. And in the long run, the more food I get for less calories, the better.

And a lot of those foods are really, really good. Like I'll be straight, like really, really nutrient dense. Um, think about a bowl of watermelon or a bowl of strawberry yields tons of amazing vitamins. The food volume is very high, but if you turn that strawberry into jam, you can get the same calorie equivalent in like a tablespoon because of how much a small amount of strawberry puree can accept in syrup and sugar. It's really remarkable how that changes

and how cooking changes food volume. So gotta be aware of juices, and I think we should add jams to that. And the alternative is whole food fruit. And I know that people hate that alternative, like, hey, eat more of the whole foods. But I think in the longterm, that'll be better for your health.

Number six is pastries. This one goes with number one, coffee and soda. Typically, I see a lot of sodas and cookies, sodas and chips, and I see tons of coffees and pastries. And a lot of pastries kind of fall into that third category too, in that they're cooked with a lot of fatty dairy. We see cheesy pastries, we see creamy, buttery pastries, a lot pastries with icing, pastries with chocolate. And there's just a lot of nutrient density and it's very hard to eat a pastry and feel full. I know I could eat multiple, multiple donuts, which are in theory like the same thing as

a bagel. I could only eat so many plain whole wheat bagels. I could eat a lot more of them if they had cream cheese. I could eat a lot more of them if they had butter, and I could eat more donuts than all of them, even though ostensibly these are just sugary grain holes, like our wholist grain discs, be it fried or covered in whatever. I think pastries are more often than not, they have incredible mouthfeel, very palatable, very fatty, they go down easy and they're not satiating. So it's something that you need to be aware of if you're consuming a lot of these foods. The seventh item on the list is salad dressing. So a lot of people miss the mark with salad purely because of the dressing. Like salad

is amazing. It's nutrient dense. This is salad mix. You can add a variety of different vegetables, but salad dressings can impede fat loss due to the high calorie content and they don't make you satiated. Two tablespoons of creamy Caesar dressing has like 180 calories. That's a ton. Two tablespoons. Most people are putting a quarter of a cup of dressing on their salad. And typically salads generally are going to be health promoting, right? You're getting a ton of fiber and protein that great for appetite regulation. And again, not a lot of added sugars or crap. You can make a salad taste good by just adding more vegetables or fruits or nuts, seeds,

a little bit of cheese. Even people go crazy with the salads for chicken, shrimp, eggs, you name it. The salads can be popping. They can be really good, but the dressings can throw them downhill quickly. So you've got to be mindful there. Also in that department is condiments. So condiments, creamy, sugary, sweet, those things can be problematic as well. You want to be mindful of your condiments. Opt for salsas, hot sauces, and lower calorie condiments when you can. You can also just really season your food well. Seasonings, spices, and stuff typically have very good nutrition profiles, lots of unique

polyphenols, great micronutrient exposure, and they're almost always low to no calorie. Herbs, spices, salts are all going to be better than condiments. The ninth one is sugary cereal. And this is the ultimate serving size depression-inducing moment. When you pour a bowl of cereal on your food scale and you go like, holy shit, it never ceases to amaze me how small 28 grams of cereal really is. You pour a bowl of cereal, it's three servings. And typically people are like, well, a bowl of cereal is 180 calories. It's like, dude, you eat three bowls, technically three servings a bowl. Um, and that's just such a mind fuck the first time you see it. So that's one I'd probably stay away from and opt for things like oatmeal, which is still a grain in most instances, like cereal is

a category of grain product, right? So oats have fiber. Even quick oats are probably better as long as you don't drown them in cereal and add a bunch of calories to them. That way you can use cinnamon, you can use stevia, you can use whatever, but you can get a much better satiety response from a grain-based breakfast. And the last one is just fast food, folks. Like most fast food restaurants are in the business of competing for your taste buds and delivering cheap, affordable food. Um, so, you know, it's gotta be convenient. It's gotta be cheap. It's gotta be tasty. Um, so it's, it's, and it's gotta be fast, as fast as it can be. So how do you make all that happen at once? Tons of additives,

that happen at once. Tons of additives, tons of oils, tons of cheeses, tons of frying, tons of fatty, low cost, because typically they're fatty cuts of beef. This stuff long-term, fatty cuts of chicken, low quality stuff like that, just try to stay away from the fast food. I feel like that's very obvious. But those are 10 foods that I believe are not morally morally bad and you're not bad for enjoying them, but they're not going to promote many health, um, you know, health benefits outside of when you do them socially. So I would recommend trying to try to use them, but use them more socially and tie them to positive things like that. Maybe don't necessarily use them as a reward, but think long-term how you want to use them. Thanks so much for tuning into the episode and I'll catch you on the next one.