Realfoodology - 74: The End of Craving with Mark Schatzker

Episode Date: December 29, 2021

Mark Schatzker is the author of The Dorito Effect, Steak and his newest book, The End of Craving. He is a writer in residence at the Modern Diet and Physiology Research Center, which is affiliated with Yale University. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Best American Travel Writing and Annual Review of Psychology.  Mark joins me to talk about the nations eating disorder and how our pallets have been hijacked with flavors and chemicals that we are using in unnatural ways. Also the set point where your body wants to stay at, how your brain decides how much you weigh, the real reason we can’t stop eating, what we can do about it and so much more. This conversation was fascinating! Check Out Mark: https://www.markschatzker.com/

On today's episode of the just disappears inside you. The brain continually analyzes food as it makes its way into your stomach, but also as it's metabolized in the body. So it keeps score. What do I think I'm getting? What am I getting? And this, I argue, is how food has changed the most, which is to say it doesn't taste the way it used to. Hi, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of The Real Foodology Podcast. I am your host, Courtney Swan. Today's guest is absolutely fascinating. I interviewed the author Mark Schatzker. He is probably most well known for his book, The Dorito Effect. He also wrote Steak and his newest book, The End of Craving. He is a writer in residence at the Modern Diet and Physiology Research Center,

which is affiliated with Yale University. And his writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Best American Travel Writing, and Annual Review of Psychology. I was so excited to talk to Mark. I am such a big fan of his work. And I can't say this enough. I mean, his research that he has done is just absolutely fascinating. I love it. He has so many studies that he references and he's just really knowledgeable in what is happening right now with our food. You know, it's only been in the last couple of decades that we started flavoring our foods. Think about the way that our ancestors ate. Even our grandparents weren't eating the foods that they would not recognize the foods that we are eating today, the Doritos and the flavored cookies and flavored

milks and just all of the stuff that sits on our food shelves now that we know are not natural. Our palates have been hijacked with flavors and chemicals that we are now using in unnatural ways. So we really dive into this. We dive into the research, which is so fascinating. Like I said, we also talk about our bodies have this set point that they want to stay at with our weight and it's, you know, tied in with our homeostasis. So we talk about that. We also talk about how your brain decides how much you weigh, the real reason why we can't stop eating and what we can do about it. And so much more. I really just want to get into this episode because

I'm really excited for you guys to hear it. So make sure you check out his books, the Dorito effect and the end of craving is out now by the time we have recorded this, it's his brand new book. So definitely check it out. It is fascinating. And with that, let's get to the episode. Do you want to hear the biggest discovery of our time for promoting healthy aging? Of course you do, because all of us are concerned about aging. There is a class of ingredients called senolytics that were discovered less than 10 years ago, and they are being called the biggest discovery of our time for promoting healthy aging and enhancing your physical prime. Now, when I'm talking about aging here, I'm not just talking about on a superficial level, wrinkles and saggy skin. I'm talking about energy,

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that's Organifi. It's O-R-G-A-N-I-F-I.com slash realfoodology. Let's dive right into it. So we obviously have a massive health problem in this country. And I would love to hear your perspective on what is happening. Like, are we eating too much? Have our food palates been hijacked? What's going on? Yeah, all of the above. We are definitely eating too much. And, you know, what's so interesting is we've been trying so hard for so long not to eat, to push back on this. If you think about the, you know, the health problems we face, it's just about the worst. We've made significant improvements in things like cardiovascular health and cancer. Alzheimer's, we've gone essentially nowhere with. All our big hypotheses for

Alzheimer's are failing. But with obesity, we've gone backwards. We've been trying to limit weight gain to reverse this scourge of, you know, BMIs increasing since the 1980s. And it's like we're fighting a fire with a hose filled with gasoline. It seems to be having the reverse effect somehow. What we're doing clearly isn't working. It's a huge public health threat. We've been focused on the pandemic for very good reasons for the past two years. But what we've forgotten about is that this is also a very pressing health problem, which causes billions of dollars in unnecessary medical costs and also suffering, unnecessary, you know, preventable death and also suffering. So what is the real reason that we can't stop eating? Well, it's not what we think. We've fought a war on

fat and then we fought a war on carbs. And I argue that those are symptoms of a disorder. We tend to eat too much of both of those macronutrients. What's happening is that our brains literally want to eat more food. We're in a situation where the brain wants to eat more than it physiologically needs to. And this is a new problem. This is not how we are supposed to be. We do not emerge from the womb on the kind of lifelong mission to stuff ourselves. This is something we've done to ourselves. And it's important to understand that because by understanding that it opens the door to the possibility that we can reverse it, that it doesn't have to be this way. Yeah, it is. It's really interesting when you think about like, if we were eating as nature designed and intended where we were, you know, foraging and obviously that's not, like, if we were eating as nature designed and intended,

where we were, you know, foraging, and obviously, that's not what we do nowadays. But we wouldn't have this problem of like overeating. It's similar when I think about like, how someone can't, they just can't stop eating Doritos. But you don't really hear about people binging on salmon. So no, or fruit. Yeah, fruits are really interesting example. Because when I think of some of my most favorite eating experiences will be something like a peach at the absolute peak of ripeness. And you would never sit there mindlessly eating 12 peaches as you watch TV. But that happens with some of the foods that we eat. But the other thing that's important is, is there's this idea that we are somehow tilted towards eating too much. There's this idea that,

you know, our evolutionary ancestors, the ones that could carry a bit of extra fat to withstand a famine, you know, were better off. So, you know, thousands and thousands of years later, here we are in the modern food environment tilted towards weight gain. And I don't think that's true for a couple of really important reasons. The first is just to talk about how we evolved from our ancestors. But three million years ago, we were more like our chimpanzee

brethren. We had a much smaller brain and a much larger digestive tract. So we could eat fibrous plant foods. And it took a long time to digest, but the brain was small, not particularly energy hungry, so it worked well. A very interesting trade-off took place over the course of evolution. Our brains got really, really big. And brains are metabolically really hungry. It takes a lot of energy to fuel a big brain. So to do that, to fuel that big brain, we had to upgrade our diet to a more calorically rich diet. We started eating fat. We started eating more nuts. We started eating ripe fruit. We wanted food that packed a big caloric punch because we had that big brain to power. So people have often used that as evidence that we kind of are born with this

lust for calories because that's what made us human. But I think it misses a really important point about that because what made us human was upgrading to this calorically potent diet. And what that did is it gave us time. Chimpanzees spent about 80% of their waking life just searching for food and eating food. It's obviously much, much less for humans. And because we were able to eat this calorically dense food, it gave us the luxury of time, which meant we could build structures. We could craft weapons. We could tell myths, we could do all the things that make us different from animals because we

had the luxury of time. And that means there's something very important because when you're doing all those other things, you're not eating food. So that means inbuilt in this evolutionary leap that we made to eat more calorically dense food, that came with it, the ability to stop eating and do other things. So this idea that food has this kind of in this trance that we can't break out from, I think is wrong. I think that's something that's very new. Yeah. And so what is it about our food now that's causing this trance that's happening essentially? Well, the other interesting thing is that we tend to think that the brain is unintelligent, that what goes hand in hand with this idea of the brain being primitive is that it doesn't,

it's kind of dumb. It sort of has this ogre-like appetite for calories. And it really, you know, this appetite is totally out of sync with the body's actual needs. And that the stomach is like some kind of unfillable pit and you know the food just goes in and in and in and never really fills up and that's also totally wrong um the brain um when it comes to eating is like a paranoid forensic accountant it is absolutely obsessed with what it's getting that's why we have taste buds that's why we can smell food because the brain wants to have some idea of what it's getting. But then what most people don't know is that after we eat, it's not like food just disappears inside you.

The brain continually analyzes food as it makes its way into your stomach, but also as it's metabolized in the body. So it keeps score. What do I think I'm getting? What am I getting? And this, I argue, is how food has changed the most, which is to say it doesn't taste the way it used to. And this is making the brain adjust. So one of the most important findings that we see from neuroscience is how people with obesity respond to food. The stigma is that people with obesity lose themselves in the pleasure of food, that they don't know moderation, and they just kind of overindulge, and if they just had the good sense to say enough is enough, they'd be fine.

That's not at all what the brain science tells us. What the brain science tells us is that if anything, they receive less pleasure from food, not more, but less. So where do we see the difference? It's when they see food, when they get that Pavlovian cue, when they see the milkshake, they see the pizza, they smell the spaghetti, they get this huge drive of desire. They get a craving for food. That is what we see as being the difference, is that they want food too much. That's why the book is called The End of Craving, because it's really a problem of craving, of wanting.

And what's so depressing, it's about wanting and not really getting what you ever wanted. It's this ongoing desire for food that is never truly quenched by the pleasure of eating. That's so fascinating. And there are so many different things going on in my brain as you were saying all that. And first of all, what I was thinking about is just how much our modern food environment has changed so much as you think about in the last maybe 100 years or so. I love this example of you used to go to a gas station, like when my parents were kids, and they would maybe have a soda machine. And that was it. And you basically just went there to get gas. Now you go and there's, you know, photos of pizza while you're pumping gas. And you walk in and there's just food everywhere. We have ads, we have Instagram, you go on Instagram, you're scrolling, there's just food everywhere on TV. We are now like just being inundated with all this food everywhere.

And then also I was thinking about this too, like we are, we have this epidemic of where we are overfed, but undernourished. So what I believe is happening and correct me if I'm wrong, is that we are, we're eating all this this food that's not actually providing any sort of nutrients for us. And so was a little over a hundred years ago when there was an epidemic called Pallagra that was sweeping the American South. And the diet at the time was incredibly, incredibly calorically potent. People were eating corn flour, like grits. They were eating pork fat and they're getting molasses. So you got carbs, fat, and sugar. So that's kind of, as we tend to think of it, sort of like the essence of junk food. But they were literally starving to death. And the reason they were starving to death is because that diet was missing an essential nutrient called niacin, vitamin B3.

So without niacin, all that food was unmetabolizable. So if we were really eating a nutrient-poor diet, we would be starving because that is the definition of starving. It's not getting one of the essential nutrients, whether it's, you know, calories or vitamins. So what we've created is a kind of a bizarre food system where it seems to be tilted really towards caloric potency. We figured out what was wrong with that diet and we started putting vitamins in food. So we're in a funny situation where we do, you know, I guess levels of some nutrients aren't where they should be, but others are probably in excess because we are consuming such a calorically potent diet that it does take some basic level of certain kinds of vitamins to enable that. Yeah. And so let's talk about some of the ways that we have tinkered with our food that is causing this.

It's messing with this. So like artificial flavorings. I know you wrote an entire book about it, the Dorito effect, which is so interesting. So what is that doing to us and our brains? Yeah, so let's talk about two things. I mentioned the example of vitamins, and we should talk about that because that's sort of one thing we're doing that's different. And then there's also this idea of how we've changed the sensory properties of food. So that's another, so what I'll pick up with that. And then we can return to the vitamins later. Um, I mentioned about this, the intelligence

of the brain and how it's, it's so, um, sort of hell bent on prediction. So that's why we have this, this nutrient sensing system, which is the nose and the mouth. And it's a really important system. If you think of, um, if you think of your DNA as your manual to make you that takes up, that's the biggest chapter is how to make your nose and mouth. So it's there for a really important reason. And what it does is it gives your brain an early reading as to what it's getting, because we're not like, um, we're not like a car where you can just sort of pump gas into it. It goes into a tank and everything's fine.

When we eat, food is like a disruption. The brain needs to know what it's getting. It starts to secrete different hormones, things like insulin or ghrelin, depending on what we're eating. Just seeing food actually begins this metabolic process. So that's why we taste food, because the brain wants to predict. And we've only recently learned what the consequences are when we start to disrupt that. So I talk in the book about an experiment that was conducted at Yale University by a professor named Dana Small. And what she was trying to do at the time was she wanted to see if it was possible to create

beverages that had the same sort of delicious, rewarding taste, but delivered fewer calories. Because if we could do that, that would kind of be a win. We can sort of have the drink we want, but we don't get this influx of unwanted calories. So it's a really tricky thing to test. How do you do that? And what she did was she created five drinks that all had the same level of sweetness. They were all created to taste as though they had 75 calories of sugar, but she did that with the artificial sweetener called sucralose. So it created sweetness with no calories. Then she was able to give each drink a particular amount of calories using a tasteless starch called maltodextrin. So one drink had no calories, then it was like 37, 75, 120, 140. So she created five drinks. They all taste, the sweetness is the same,

calories are different. And she got her subjects to drink each drink, their brains could get to know them. And then she would perform brain scans as they sampled each drink, and she would measure their brain response to see what does the brain think of each of these drinks. Like I measured, the brain, it wants to know what it's getting. It analyzes the drink. It analyzes it once it's swallowed it. It forms opinions. And what she predicted was that the brain, the drink that will get the biggest brain response will be the 140 calorie drink because we like calories. Calories are important. That's our kind of fuel. And the results really surprised her. For some reason, it was the 75 calorie drink. She thought, that's weird. It's not the most. It's not the least. It's sort of right in the middle. She thought, okay, I guess I did something wrong.

I'll do it again. The same thing happened. And then she realized something. The drink that got the biggest brain response was the drink where the calories and the level of sweetness were matched. It tasted like it had 75 calories and it actually had 75 calories, whereas the others tasted like 75 calories, but either had too much or too little. So this was interesting. So the next thing that Dana Small did was she took her subjects and put them in something called an indirect calorimeter, which is this fancy device that essentially measures what's called the thermic effect of food, which is basically when you eat food, you give off heat because your body's metabolizing it. So it's kind of like how your car gets warm, you know, when you turn the engine on. And this tells us that it measures the

degree to which food is being metabolized. And usually what the textbooks say is the more you eat, the bigger the effect. So she had her subjects come in and they drank that 75 calorie drink that tasted like it had 75 calories. And she got this nice little plume of heat, just what you would expect. A few days later, a subject comes in and tries the 140 calorie drink that tastes like it has 75 calories. Nothing happens. The drink is swallowed. There is no metabolic response at all. It is totally flat. It's as though this subject didn't drink a thing, which is really alarming. You're like, okay, there's 140 calories going into this body and nothing happens. It's as though, as Dana Small describes it, when the sweetness and the calories are out of sync,

the brain just sort of throws up its hands and says, I don't know what to do here. And it's actually quite alarming that she's done more studies with these mismatched beverages and found that you get essentially like the symptoms of diabetes, which is to say that the brain doesn't know how to metabolize these carbohydrate calories coming in. She did a study with adolescents because adolescents, you know,

they're in a period of growth. Their brains are getting bigger. That's one of the reasons they drink a lot of sodas that they shouldn't drink because they have this need for calories. And they had to stop the experiment at the very early stage because three of the subjects quickly became pre-diabetic. So that's how alarming this sort of sensory

tinkering would appear to be. So this is interesting because this is what I argue is how food has changed. We argue about carbs. We argue about fat. We argue about sugar. There's no question we're consuming more of these things, but they haven't changed. They're the same as they've always been. Sugar is no different today than it was 200 million years ago. What has changed are the sensory properties of food. We have literally changed the way food tastes.

We do that with the fake flavors that I talked about in the Dorito effect. We also do that with artificial sweeteners. We do that with things like modified starches. These are tasteless starches that we use because they have all sorts of, you know, they do all sorts of things you want for food processors. Like if you don't want to, if you want to microwave a pizza and you don't want it to form like a puddle, you can use a modified starch. But what we don't ask ourselves are, well, what's the effect of putting a tasteless starch in food that you don't really sense, but winds up in your stomach. That's, that's another way. And then there's something called fat replacers, which is, um, this is a huge sort of family of additives that are put

in all sorts of foods to create the, the simulation of fat food tastes creamy and rich and mouth filling while delivering just a handful of calories. Well, if you subscribe to the theory that your brain is kind of this sort of stonage moron, then yeah, this is a really good idea. Fool that moron. Make it think it's getting what it wants and fool it and give it these low-calorie alternatives. That all changes if the brain is smart. If the brain is not only taking a measurement as the food comes in, but taking a measurement once the food gets in there. So that forces us to ask a really interesting question, which is to say, what does a brain do when it thinks it's getting something and doesn't get what it wants? And this is something that psychologists have been studying for decades. It provokes an uncertainty response.

It's called reward prediction error. And that's basically fancy for saying you didn't get what you thought you're going to get. Every time this happens, it responds by saying, I need to get more because in evolution, if the brain, you know, experiences a loss, it didn't get what it wanted. That could mean the difference between life and death. So it's sort of baked into our genes that when this uncertainty experience provokes motivation, that's what we see in the brain scans. It's not that the food is too delicious, it's that people want it more. So that really is how I see so much of the change in the food that we eat, is that we've created this incredible gulf between how food tastes and

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than it is to drink the diet soda. Because when you drink the diet soda, your body is preparing, you know, when it hits your tongue, your body prepares for it to get sugar. And then when it doesn't get that sugar, then they found that people then are just craving more sugar and they end up eating more and eating more sugar in particular because your body has prepped and thinks it's getting sugar, but it didn't get it. And this is where we're tricking our brains. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And it all comes down to the idea of whether your brain is smart or stupid. And if it turns out it's really smart, this isn't a wise thing to do because it's going to key onto it. So people often say

that these things fool your brain, but the truth is they don't fool your brain. Your brain's smart. You said, you didn't fool me. I'm onto you. So I'm going to adjust. And next time you try that, I'm going to make sure I get more. You know, when you said something earlier that I think is so interesting is that we haven't really, like, nothing has changed, for example, about sugar. Sugar has always been what it is. It's, you know, addictive in its own ways. But when you think about, like, a soda, for example, it's all just like sugar, like carbonated sugar water. What the difference is is the flavoring that we're adding to it that's making it this whole new addictive component.

Yeah, exactly. And that's what's so interesting about things like potato chips and carbonated beverages. If you take all the sodas that are there in the soda aisle, fundamentally, they're just carbonated water with a lot of sugar. If that's all they were, though, because everyone talks about, oh, it's the sugary drinks. We are wired to love calories. If that's all that was there, who would drink it? It's these amazing recipes of flavors that these flavor companies come up with that make Dr. Pepper taste different from Coca-Cola, that make it taste different from 7-Up, that just light our brains up in such a way that we end up drinking more. I would argue that I don't think these are truly pleasurable beverages. They don't delight me the way like a really good glass of wine would or like that peach I described. But there's something about it. You take a sip and for some reason your hand is going back to take yet another sip. And there's something insidious

about that because, I mean, it's just not good for us. But I also mean, that's not the way food is supposed to work. We have a very sophisticated system. It's very smart, but it wasn't built for this kind of thing. Well, and I heard you talk about this on another podcast that was very profound to me, we haven't necessarily made food more delicious, we've just made it more craveable, which like you said, is very insidious. It's kind of like, you know, what we were saying earlier is that you can down a whole bag of Doritos and not even think about it kind of like, you know, what we were saying earlier is that you can down a whole bag of Doritos and not even think about it, but like, you're not going to binge on, you know, a piece of salmon or fruit or whatever it is. And it's because of something that's happening in our

brain with these artificial chemicals that we're adding to our food. Yeah. And I think this is important because even a lot of the scientists who studied to say that we live in a, um, in this food environment where foods are hyperpalatable. I don't think these foods, I don't think the KFC double down is hyperpalatable. I've tasted it. It's just really salty and really greasy. It's not what I would call a great chicken sandwich. It's not a great chicken experience. It's not anywhere close to that. I think a lot of these foods, we eat them because they have that ability to keep us going. But because... My dog, sorry. Your dog agrees with me, clearly.

Yeah, clearly. It's because we're on this quest for calories. So one of the reasons that we consume these foods is because they're delivering the calories that our brain wants. So we've essentially made this demand of the food environment. I guess there's this interesting question, are these foods being pushed on us or are we asking for them? And I think a big part of it is that when they put where, you know, people are fearful of main food groups? Like, let's think about like, there's this push now to not really eat red meat and everyone's scared to eat red meat now. But then we're going to all these, well, what I would call highly palatable, but you just explained why you don't call it that. But these like junk processed foods and how, like, why have we gotten so far from nature? It's almost like we have this like

God complex about our food industry, where we don't believe nature has made the perfect food, we can make it better. So I think that is the question. And this is something I trace in the book back when I mentioned earlier, pellagra, the epidemic of pellagra, this took place in the American South, it was a deficiency of niacin. It also took place simultaneously in Northern Italy. Northern Italy at the time was like the American South, very poor, and it was kind of a corn-based agricultural economy. We call it grits, they call it polenta, but that's just sort of when you make a porridge out of cornmeal. And they suffered from pellagra as we did in the American South. Interestingly, both cultures took a very different approach to it. We cured pellagra by enacting laws

to encourage the enrichment of flour. So the government made it such that the millers of grain were essentially forced to start adding B vitamins to the flour, niacin, thiamine, riboflavin, and the mineral iron. Well, it started with that. It's just taken off since we also have voluntary fortification. Companies are allowed to put vitamins in things, and we put them in breakfast cereals. We put them in energy drinks. We're dumping a ton of vitamins into so much of the foods that we create, that we process. Italy took a totally different approach and one that's almost baffling because it's just seems so smart. If you're vitamin deficient, just give people vitamins. It seems like it makes such common sense and it

worked. I mean, Pellagra disappeared overnight when we started doing that. Italy didn't do that. Italy said, um, we should bake bread in communal ovens. They said poor people should learn to raise rabbits because rabbits are a cheap, you know, a cheap meat to raise. They said this is a real winner. They said people should drink wine, which just seems like could there be anything more idiotic than saying something like that? But there was kind of a wisdom to what they were saying, because not that they knew it, but the wines of the day were unfiltered. They had much more yeast floating around than wines do today. And that yeast has niacin. So they didn't know why wine was good. They just knew that wine was good. They had this kind of faith in food. So what's interesting is in in North America, we saw food as being there's something wrong with it.

We discovered that there are these things called vitamins and not all foods has the right vitamins. Something's wrong with food. We need to fix food. And something's wrong with us. We don't know what we need. Italians had a totally different view of it. They said the problem isn't food. The problem is these people are poor and they can't afford good food. So they created the conditions in which people could get better food.

It took longer for them to cure pellagra, but they literally ate their way out of a nutritional epidemic, a deficiency. What's so interesting is to look at these two chunks of geography more than a century later. The American South graduated from one nutritional disaster to another. It used to be called the Pallagra Belt. Now we call it the Diabetes Belt or the Obesity Belt. Not so in Northern Italy. It was its own little Pallagra Belt. Now it is a Shangri-La of eating. This was probably the most interesting experience writing this book was traveling to Northern Italy because it tells us everything we're thinking about food and nutrients and obesity is flat out wrong. They worship food. Northern Italy does not eat a Mediterranean diet. It is not the land of grilled fish and olive oil. They love pork. They love

salamis. They love cheese. They love pasta. They love butter. They make an art of combining the two nutrients we've spent 50 years vilifying, which is carbs and fat. If you go to Bologna, which is a city revered for its culinary traditions, they have an official repository at the city hall, at the chamber of commerce, where they keep official recipes. So if you want to make their famous ragu alla bolognese, they say, this is how you make it. They have a whole list of these recipes. They so revere their fresh pasta that their favorite noodle is called the tagliatella. They have one cast in gold. These people, I mean, it almost sounds like they're sick. What is wrong with them? They are so obsessed with food that they've almost made it part of their laws.

So you would think if it was deliciousness that drove us to be big, you'd think the fattest people in the world are going to be right there in northern Italy where they keep golden noodles at their chamber of commerce. Not so. Obesity rate here is 42%. The last time the CDC released figures. This is before the pandemic, by the way. It's gotten worse since. What is the rate of obesity in northern Italy?

8%. 8%. 8%. 42 versus 8, and they are eating incredible food. The food they eat is so good that we fly to Italy just so we can sit next to them and say, I'm going to have what that guy's having because the food that they eat is so good. So that tells us we're really getting something profoundly wrong. It's also very exciting because it also shows us you can have a wonderful, fulfilling, enriching, delicious relationship with food and you do not have to pay that heavy price for it. Yeah. So, so what do we, what do we make of this then when we look at that

difference in how we did it versus Italy? Um, I do find it interesting that in Italy, it reminds me of like, think of an animal in the wild or like way, way back in the day before, um, we had our industrialized food system. We were very much driven by our innate need for specific vitamins and minerals. And that's how we would forage for food, you know, and some of it too was dependent on like what we could find, but we, we have it built in biologically in us to seek out certain foods to get certain nutrients. And it seems like that's kind of what Italy really leaned into. Whereas we tried to override that and say, we know better, we need x, y, and z. And we just

fortified all our food with it. But so what do we make of that? And then how do we maybe shift that in America to get more like Italy? Well, I think there's a bunch of ways it went wrong. The fact that we thought there was something not only wrong with food, but the fact that we thought that the appetite was kind of dumb meant that we never really paused to think, are all these kind of processes that we invented to tinker with food a good idea? We just sort of assumed that the appetite's kind of moronic. We can do whatever we want. We never really thought twice about inventing things like flavors.

We never paused to think, is this a good idea? We just thought, of course, artificial sweeteners are a great idea. Of course, fat replacers are a good idea. Low fat is clearly better than full fat. Of course it is. It's obvious. Italy always saw something. They revered the purity of eating real food. They revere the products of the land and the sea. I don't finally know what makes them tick differently than us, but they do think differently about food. But it also, I think, has specific metabolic consequences. If you look particularly at the history of livestock farming. What we don't realize,

we're very critical of how we raise livestock. We don't like confinement farming. We don't like this idea of absolutely cramming them full of corn so they can get big and fat really quickly. But what few people realize is that that innovation, that leap, whatever you want to call it in farming, would not have been possible without the discovery of vitamins. So if we wind the clock back to around the 1950s, the way we raised pigs in North America was that we gave them pig feed, but we also put them on pasture. So farmers at the time knew if you want to get a pig big and fat quickly, you fed it corn with some soy. So it's getting this big punch of carbs with some protein. But they also knew you can't just feed them that because they're going to get sick and die. They're going to get like the pig version

of pellagra is not a nutritionally balanced diet. It's just too heavy on the calories. So they sent them up to pasture where they would typically eat alfalfa, but that's not the only thing they ate. And they knew you would even see at the time written in, you know, they're the things that the animal scientists wrote that the pig had a reasonable ability to balance its diet. It kind of knew what it was doing. You sent it out there in pasture. It ate the alfalfa. Then it came in and ate some of the corn.

And that's how things worked. The invention of vitamins utterly changed this. Now you could keep a pig in what they called dry lot, but it was essentially just fenced in. It's what we call confinement now. You didn't need to give it green feed. It didn't need alfalfa. It didn't need to go into pasture. You didn't need to actually bring in cuttings of green feed, which they also did. You could just dust in this magic formula of B vitamins and their growth rate just took off. These pigs got big and fat faster than pigs ever had before. And almost overnight, pig farming changed forever.

Pastured pig raising was a thing of the past. We brought them into what we now call barns, but are more like flesh factories, where we just pack them in and give them corn, give them soy, give them their vitamins, and they put on fat and they put it on really quickly. Well, if you're kind of like a commodity farmer and your mission is to get pigs big and fat really quickly, I guess that's a good thing. I'd argue that's not the best way to raise good quality pork, but we're humans. And the thing we don't want to do is get big and fat really quickly.

And yet we're doing the same thing that we did with pig feed, which is to say, we're eating a lot of refined carbs and we're adding these B vitamins. Now, we tend to think like, aren't vitamins good? They contain the word vital. Like, I mean, it sounds like a crazy conspiracy theory. But the B vitamins are interesting because they enable energy metabolism. They are what allows us to convert calories into energy. So if you're going to have a really high calorie diet, by definition, you need a really high B vitamin diet. Probably the most

interesting one is that one that caused pellagra, niacin. We've known for almost a century that there's something really interesting about the sugar called fructose, which many of us have been suspicious of because we have things like high fructose corn syrup. We know the body doesn't metabolize fructose the way it does glucose. Well, a scientist discovered many decades ago that fructose is kind of interesting. When you compare it to other sugars, for some reason, fructose needs a lot of niacin. If you're low on niacin, you can't really metabolize it properly. Well, we consume an awful lot of fructose because fructose is part of sucrose. It's half of the sucrose molecule. But there's also a ton of fructose, obviously, in high fructose corn syrup.

Well, if you're going to be consuming a lot of fructose, what do you need a lot of? Niacin. And that's what we're adding so much of to so much of the food that we eat. Wow, that's fascinating. I've never heard that before. And you know, there is something interesting to note too, is that we're starting to realize that there is a big difference between the vitamins that we extract, and then we, you know, use them to fortify these cereals or whatever, versus the vitamins that are naturally occurring in food. And we have, we've now basically like boiled it down to, okay, well, we know that, like, let's say, for example, like oranges, we have now decided oranges are most

important because they're high in vitamin C. But I think what we are forgetting is that it may not necessarily just be the vitamin C alone, but the way that vitamin C is made up in oranges with everything else in there. And so there is this school of thought that if we are just taking that vitamin C, or let's say with a vitamin B, for example, if we're just taking that vitamin B out and not leaving it in the food that provides everything that it needs for our body, then we're messing with nature essentially. And we're not giving ourselves what our body like truly needs. Yeah. I think it's

wrong on a whole bunch of levels. One of them is when you find a vitamin source in an actual food, you're going to get a whole bunch of other things too, including things like fiber and water, which take up space in your stomach, which means automatically you can eat less. But I think what it fundamentally gets wrong, and this is the mistake we made, is we think nutrients are more important than eating. That we kind of imagine like the space age future, and we're all going to run around in silver unitards, and we're going to take nutrient pills because eating is like primitive and dumb. And we're so smart, we're just going to like inject the nutrients right in our system. And that is what we got so wrong. The way we were designed by evolution to acquire nutrients was through the act of eating. So this whole, you know, idiotic thing we've been doing

for decades about having shouting matches about nutrition, carbs, fat, ketosis, paleo, blah, blah, blah. That's not what we were designed to do. We were designed to eat food. And the experience, this immersive, rich, wonderful experience of eating is actually how your brain nourishes itself. We shouldn't be afraid of it. We should be embracing that. Yeah. You know, I just thought of that. Do you remember that drink Soylent? I think it's still around, but it reminds me of that where they were like, we're going to change the future of eating. You don't even have to leave your desk. You can just drink this thing all day and you'll be totally fine. And it, I mean, it's absolute garbage. It's like canola oil, soy, and just

a bunch of fortified vitamins. It actually, it's funny. They think it's a solution to nutrition and there's a number of compounds that are human creations that didn't really exist in nature. Now, that's not to say they're necessarily poisonous. But I just can't think of a better example of this sort of this hubris we have that we think we know better. What makes us think we know better? The more we alter food, clearly the worse it gets. Everybody who looks at this says we need to be eating more wholesome foods, more whole foods. And yet yet there's this other side of us that thinks like the more we can mess with it, the better. It's I mean, it's just so obvious that that's not working. Yeah. So what's the solution? I mean, I know that there's a lot of talk, a lot of talk on,

you know, soda taxes or whatever. But then there's also a lot of conversation that we can't really legislate this. So what do we do? So it's funny because people say, you know, are you in favor of legislation? I guess I'm not against it in the sense that I would say we should, you know, legislate against legislating. But I don't think this is a problem that you can solve by passing one or two or 20 laws for a whole bunch of reasons. I think like dieting, the idea that there's a kind of a simple fix to this is a wish that probably will not be fulfilled. I think we have to recognize that what are we going to ban? I have my idea of what I think is the problem, but we don't always agree on these things. So how could we as a society come up with the definitive list of what's good and what is bad? Like I just said, I don't think fat, for example, is an inherent evil. A lot of people do. There's a lot of fat taxes all over the world. I think if our brains tend to obey them, but they don't have a big effect. And when the taxes start to get big, people find ways around

them. But then there's also kind of unintended consequences. We found, for example, we put calorie numbers next to menu items at fast food restaurants, at big restaurants. And it's not to say I'm against that. I honestly don't know how I feel, but I do know that sometimes it has an unforeseen consequence. What they find in studies is that when people see the number, they will consume less food, but then they unconsciously go up and make up for it. They might have a snack later that night. This gets back to the idea that your brain is in charge. Your brain is the one making these decisions about what we eat. So that doesn't necessarily work. But the other problem is that we've become so calorie obsessed that we have these nutritional info panels in the back of

every package and people look at them and they say, look, this one's got 300 calories versus that one's got 400. When we make decisions like that, we're sending, we're telegraphing signals to companies to say, we want there to be fewer calories. So what do they do? They start employing these technological solutions, bat replacers, artificial sweeteners to bring the calorie count down. Well, that may be making the problem actually worse. So you look at that when you go like, oh my God, like, what do we do? And I would argue the change we have to make is within ourselves. We have to change the way we regard food. We have to stop being these kind of, you know, brilliant nutritionists running around thinking we know about protein and calories. We don't. We just don't understand

that the people who professionally do this for a living, PhD people who run laboratories, they can't predict how many calories they're going to consume in a day. How could we possibly do it? I think we need to approach eating the way Italians do, which is to say it's not just to eat real food. It's to eat real food, the very best real food. It's to look at every meal as an opportunity to extract a delicious, wonderful experience from food, a communal experience. Eating is meant, food is meant to be enjoyed. And it provides us with a great deal of pleasure. And it tells our body something important about what we're eating. It's a much better way to live. And in terms of like food

tastes great, but I also think it's a much healthier way to live. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting that you brought up calories, because it's funny. Now, when we're looking at these calories, we're making food choices based on these numbers. And it's like, we're overriding our body's innate desire for certain foods, right? Like if you were to look at a menu and say like, Oh, you know, I'm really like, let's just say like, I'm really craving the steak or whatever. And then I look at a menu and it's like the steak is, you know, 1000 calories, and then I could get this like chicken dish for like 500 calories or whatever. But it goes back to then, okay, so now am I going to decide that I'm going to do this chicken instead, but what if my body was really needing iron? And there is something

to be said about the foods that we crave. And there's a reason why certain foods taste really good. And I'm talking about real foods. I'm not talking about like Doritos here, you know? And so it's interesting that now we're overriding these innate biological needs with these like numbers that we now see. And it's not, it's not normal. It's not natural. And I think we're also degrading the experience of eating. Even if you think about chicken, I mean, we we've gotten sort of fixated on boneless skinless chicken. We've now bred chickens to have these enormous breasts. We, they get these myopathies like woody breasts. So like the quality is going down. We don't eat the skin. The skin is the tastiest part. The skin is where there's a lot of the, there's some, you know,

there's people like, oh my God, there's fat in it. There's also a lot of nutrients. We've just made it like this, this weird protein absorption experience. I'm just going to eat these cubes of tasteless protein. Whereas a really good chicken is a wonderful experience, but we don't raise chickens to be tasty. We raise them just to produce really cheap protein. It's, I mean, it's insane. It is insane. Well, and you think about like our ancestors weren't running around being like, Oh, I probably shouldn't have that steak. It's like a lot of calories. And you know, it's like, it is pretty insane when you think about it. It really has changed the way that we eat and we approach food entirely. And the other thing is, if you recognize, I mean, the brain, it knows so much more about

the calories that we're consuming, but also our own weight. We think that we can control our body weight, that I'm going to decide to go on a diet. It doesn't work that way at all. The brain controls what you weigh. We actually know this firsthand. Anybody who's ever tried to go on a diet knows this because this is how all diets work. They work at first. You start to, you know, the pounds kind of melt away. You fit into your old pants. People say you look great. You feel better. And then you hit this wall. It happens around the six to eight month mark where it just stops working. And what you've

run into, that brick wall you ran into is your brain. It's this very old part of your brain that said, enough is enough. Stop this silliness. I want you to wait, get back to your previous weight because for whatever reason, that's the weight it wants you to be at. But it also works the other way. When scientists do overfeeding studies where they put people in labs and they, and they make them, they force them to eat a lot of food. People can't stand it. It's an awful experience. And when the study's over, they lose the weight. So the brain is in control here. And this whole idea that you can just like glance at a package and go, ah, I'll take this one. It's got fewer calories. Like you're somehow in control. Like you have any clue what you actually ate that day

and you're going to meet some goal and you have any idea what you're going to expend. I mean, it's a farce, but we sort of go along as though like we're all wearing lab coats and have little calculators and stuff. I mean, it's a great point. You know, that's one of the first things I learned when I was getting my master's in nutrition is that all of our bodies have a set point that they want to kind of be in and stay at. And so it's like, when we are trying to mess with that, our body is like, no, like, good luck. You know, like, we don't really have a lot of control over it. Like you said. Yeah. And it's making so many of the things we think are helping are making it worse. It's,

it's, I mean, you kind of see it from 30,000 feet, you have to shake your head. So can we reprogram our cravings? Like what? So now that we know all of this, what is kind of the solution? Like, let's say someone's listening right now. And they're just like, Oh, my God, well, where do I even start? How do I get back to a place where I feel like, like, how can people get healthier now that we know that we are kind of being hijacked with these artificial flavorings, et cetera. Yeah, and it's not easy. And that's the important thing to understand. This is a complex problem, but I think we can do something. The first thing is, if we know that a lot of these additives that we've come up with are perhaps doing the wrong thing, well, let's avoid them. So I would say the first thing to do is just stop trying to fool your brain, avoid artificial sweeteners, avoid things that say low fat and light, but also look at the ingredient panel

because a lot of these things are making it used to be like going back a decade or two that a lot of these fat replacers would just appear in things that were diet or low fat light. Now they're making their way into all sorts of things. I see, I see regular looking yogurts that have a really weirdly long ingredient list. So try to eat things that are as unprocessed as possible. But I would also say the pleasure of eating, I think, can be a solution to this. One of the interesting things is that when we look at how the brain responds to food, we tend to think of pleasure as being a single thing, but there's actually two neural circuits. There's two parts of your brain at work here. One of them is, it's sort of fueled by this neurotransmitter called dopamine, which a lot of people have heard of. Dopamine has the reputation

of being the pleasure chemical, but it's not. It's the motivation chemical. And there's the other brain circuit that is fueled by neurotransmitters, transmitters that trigger the opioid receptors. These are two related systems that talk to each other, but they're not the same thing. One of them is desire. One of them is pleasure impact. And I think we are too wrapped up in the desire of eating. That's what we see, like I said, in the brain scans. But I visited a lab in Germany where a leading researcher in this area made me intimately acquainted with the nature of these two different neural circuits and foods that trigger them. So the first thing that she made me do is she gave me two potato chips, cheese and onion flavor.

I wasn't allowed to eat them. She made me open the bag. There was this pop. She said, inhale the aroma. She said, you can feel the chips. You can just take the tiniest little nibble. And she said, you can rub them together. And I was absolutely swept by this wave of craving that came over me. I mean, I wanted to eat those chips so badly, it hurt. She made me do, she said, throw those out and start it again. And two fresher chips somehow, they were even more powerful. And it made me realize that there are foods out there that induce this kind of, this kind of reinforced kind of eating where you just, your hand keeps going back in the bag or you keep on reaching out to take another sip.

They never really delivered that much pleasure. I've never heard anyone say the best meal I ever had was a bag of potato chips, you know, in France or something like that's just not what people say. But somehow they just make had was a bag of potato chips, you know, in France or something. Like that's just not what people say. But somehow they just make us eat a lot of these things, these foods. Then she, I did something completely different. We start to focus on this other part of the brain. She gave me a tiny little dark chocolate that was covering a very crunchy biscuit center, a fine, fine, dark chocolate. And she said, just let the heat of your body melt this. And instead of being consumed by this desire to eat this, this tiny little chocolate,

like took me on this journey and I just let it melt and taste it. And I was amazed at this tiny, tiny chocolate gave me such an amazing experience, deep pleasure. What is so interesting is that this woman uses fine chocolate as a therapy for people with binge eating disorder. When they are overcome by this desire to eat and to really eat, eat a lot, they will have a fine chocolate. And this plume of pleasure from a fine chocolate can extinguish this volcanic burst of craving. That's fascinating. I mean, I will say I've found that personally, just anecdotally in my own life, when I started on this journey of really seeking out more, you know, organic and high quality meats,

like grass fed meat and pasture raised and all this stuff, I have found myself just innately like when I really enjoy these amazing, delicious tasting, like really high quality foods that I eat, I don't, I don't feel like I'm chasing all of these unnatural cravings anymore. Whereas like, for example, when I was in my 20s, and I had gained weight from college and you know, whatever, and I was like trying to get back to my weight. And it was like, I was doing it in all these unnatural ways, like eating slim fast bars and all this stuff that were not satisfying. And then I felt like I was just chasing food all day. Whereas now, similar to how you just described, I'll have this like amazing meal with grass fed

meat and, you know, organic vegetables, and I feel satisfied or like, I'll have this really nice piece of organic dark chocolate that yeah, it's more expensive. But like, honestly, I end up spending less money on food now too, because I'm not eating as much as I once was. That's so interesting that you say that. And I think that's exciting because it tells us that our palates can change. It's not going to change overnight though. It will take time. But I think what you said is also interesting. You said grass fed beef. I'm a huge fan of grass fed beef. My first book actually was about steak. I traveled the world searching for steak and eating steak. And I learned a great deal about it, but let's just talk about calories because this is what we do. So let's compare. I don't eat a lot of fast

food, but let's say you have one of those fast food meals. It's like a thousand calories. You have the big burger with the large portion of fries and the soft drink. What always amazes me about those food experiences is how quickly you eat them. Like, like it's down the hash in about four minutes and I'm often still hungry after. It's like, I could do that again. I will at home on a Saturday night with my wife, have a great grass fed steak, maybe with some sauteed potatoes and a Caesar salad and a glass of red wine. Well, that's not, you know, that's a, that's a big calorie bill if you're in the calorie counting business. But the experience of those two, you know, so-called, you know, equal calorie meals could

not be more different. And we just think that should be avoided. What really matters is the calories. That's not true. What we were, what we evolved to do was eat food and the experience of eating is an intimate part of that. Yeah, that's fascinating. And if you think about it, you, like you said, you enjoyed that meal so much more than just

this like cheap processed food. And again, like I compare that to the meals that I'm eating now to, um, I don't know, like the lean cuisines or even just like a gross nasty pizza or whatever it was compared to this, like higher quality food. It it's a much better experience. It is. It's so much better. It's a, it's a much better way to, it's so much better it's it's a much better way to it's it's a much better relationship to have with food yeah and it's very freeing because I found for me like when now that I have this healthier relationship with food um it's freeing like I don't know how else to say it it's now my mental I have more mental capacity for other things in my life than thinking about like oh

what's the calories in this or like you know if I eat this how long do I have, you know, exercise to burn this off? Like we're wasting so much mental capacity on things that don't really matter. Well, also, I think one of the big problems we have is the fear of food. And I think this is a huge problem, especially for young girls, eating disorders. There's so many negative messages about food. You often see them on cover of diet books, or even if you look like the health unit for a high school curriculum, the cover will have something like a half a grapefruit, some grapes, an avocado, and a pear, and some celery, like as though these are the only clean and pure foods and everything else is bad. Humans cannot survive on that kind of a diet. We would die. We would simply die on a diet like that.

But we've conditioned ourselves to literally live in fear of foods that actually nourish us. Yeah, yeah, that's a great point. So before we go, is there anything else that we haven't covered on this topic that is important to note? Oh, I think we covered a lot. No, I think we covered all the main points. What will inevitably happen is that I'll remember at 2 in the morning and say, oh, we should have lot. No, I think we covered all the main points. What will inevitably happen is that I'll remember at two in the morning. We should have talked about that. Well, I would always be happy to have you come back on. This is such a fascinating conversation.

I learned so much, which is my favorite part about doing these interviews. It's really cool. Thank you so much. I had a great time. It's a very interesting subject and it's a real pleasure to chat about it. Yeah. So before we go, I want to ask you one question that I ask all my guests. For you, what are some of your health non-negotiables? So that means no matter how busy your day is, no matter how crazy everything gets, what are some things that you do for your own health? And that doesn't necessarily have to be diet related. It can be mental, whatever it is, things that you do to show up to be your best self. But it's interesting because I probably think more about my kids' health than I do my own. Um, so one of the non-negotiable things are things like, um,

are things like the, you know, low fat foods and artificial sweeteners. Those are things I don't let in the house. It's just, that's, we can't talk about that. That's not coming in here. That's awesome. I love it. So for everyone listening, where can they find you and where can they find your books? So the book is on sale at bookstores. It's at Amazon. I have a website, markschatzer.com. Awesome. I wrote The Dorito Effect as well. And if you like steak, I wrote a book about steak. Great. Well, thank you so much for coming on today. This was fascinating. Thanks for having me. I had a great time. Thanks for listening to today's episode of the Real Foodology Podcast. If you liked this episode,

please leave a review in your podcast app to let me know. This is a resident media production produced by Drake Peterson and edited by Chris McCone. The theme song is called Heaven by the amazing singer Georgie, spelled with a J. Love you guys so much. See you next week. The content of this show is for educational and informational purposes only. It is not a substitute for individual medical and mental health advice and doesn't constitute a provider patient relationship. I am a nutritionist, but I am not your nutritionist. As always, talk to your doctor or your health team first. Thank you.