Realfoodology - The Perfect Oil: Tallow + Why Seed Oils Should Not Be Consumed | Steven Arena of Masa Chips

Episode Date: June 9, 2023

149: Today's guest is Steven Arena, Co-founder of Masa Chips. If you are not familiar with Masa Chips, they are tortilla chips made with a few simple ingredients; organic corn, grass fed beef tallow and salt. Steven joins me to talk about tallow, PUFA's, the food industry, avocado oil and so much more. If you want to try Masa Chips, you can use code REALFOODOLOGY for a discount here. Topics Covered: Avocado oil and how it's mostly fake + can you find a REAL avocado oil? Why beef tallow is the best oil to fry in Cassava and blood glucose levels Saturated fat Processed foods Lactose intolerance How corn has been bred to be more digestible The ultimate chip! How your body processes seed oils Seed oil + carb combo Why are seed oils so bad? Types of seed oils Canola oil PUFA's Sunscreen and how to tan properly Red light therapy Best clothing to wear to avoid micropastics Check Out Steven and Masa Chips: https://www.masachips.com/ Code REALFOODOLOGY gets you a discount! Sponsored By: Seed's DS-01® Daily Synbiotic seed.com/realfoodology Use code REALFOODOLOGY for 30% off your first month's supply of Seed's DS-01® Daily Synbiotic Organifi www.organifi.com/realfoodology Code REALFOODOLOGY gets you 20% Off Check Out Courtney: Courtney's Instagram: @realfoodology www.realfoodology.com My Immune Supplement by 2x4 Air Dr Air Purifier AquaTru Water Filter EWG Tap Water Database

On today's episode of The Real Foodology Podcast. What you have to do to an almond to make a cookie that even resembles half of an actual cookie made with real flour. So you just swapped out one version of processed foods for another version of processed foods that taste way worse. When we could have just fixed the quality of the original foods, got them back to how they were before the sort of green revolution, all the agriculture chemicals, and then it would be delicious and it'll be healthy. And that's what traditional food is. That's why it's so amazing. Hi friends. Welcome back to another episode of the Real Foodology Podcast. I'm your host, Courtney Swan. Today's episode is a really, really fascinating one. It was really fun for

me to record because my guest Steven and I, we have very similar philosophies when it comes to our diets. And he also explains a lot of these modern issues that we're dealing with right now with health in a very relatable way. He really makes it make sense. He is the founder of Masa Chips, which you guys will learn more about in the episode. But basically, he created these tortilla chips just out of organic corn, grass fed beef tallow and salt. And let me tell you guys, these chips are incredible. I'm going to eat one. I'm going to give you guys a little chip ASMR, just so you can hear the crunch. Oh my God. This is how chips are supposed to be. They're crunchy.

They don't disintegrate when you dip them into guac or whatever dips you want to be eating them with. And they actually really taste good, unlike a lot of these other alternative foods. And we talk about that. So we get into swapping out more traditional foods for these like quote unquote healthier, more processed foods. And we talk about that. So we get into swapping out more traditional foods for these like quote unquote, healthier, more processed foods. We dive into that. We talk about seed oils and why he uses beef tallow instead of seed oils, like most other tortilla chips, like pretty much every tortilla chip on the shelf besides his are made with canola oil or soybean oil or corn oil. So we dive into that.

We really get into why PUFAs, which are polyunsaturated fatty acids, why those are not good for you, what the deal is with avocado oil. Is it actually healthy for us? What we should be eating? We also talk about sunlight and what he feels about sunscreen. And do we actually burn if we eat more seed oils? Is that what's causing sunburns? This is a super informative episode. It was really fun for us to record. I had a great time talking with Steven and I hope you guys enjoy it. Before we get into the episode, please stay tuned to the very, very end because we are going to give you a discount code. If you guys want to try masa chips, you can go to their website and find out where they sell them near you, or you can definitely, of course, order them online,

use the code. You're going to save a little bit of money. And of course, as always, if you guys are loving and enjoying the podcast, if you could just take a moment to rate and review, it would mean so much to me. It really helps the show. With that, let's get in with Steven. Did you know that you may not be getting all the beneficial probiotic bacteria from some of your favorite fermented foods? For example, kombucha, kimchi, sauerkraut. Unfortunately, a lot of these probiotics and the good bacteria in these foods don't always survive the trip to your gut. This is why in addition to eating those very healthy and nutritious foods, I also like to take a probiotic like seed. And the reason I really like seed is because unfortunately not all probiotics are created equal. A lot of probiotics

on the shelf also do not actually make it to your gut. So it's incredibly important that you're getting a good high quality probiotic. Otherwise those probiotics are going to be burnt up in your stomach acid and never actually repopulate your colon. That bacteria has a lot of stuff it has to get through. Digestive acids, bile salts, and enzymes. This is why I really like Seed's DS01 Daily Symbiotic. It's nested in a capsule delivery technology that ensures precision entry through the small intestine to your colon. So that's the main reason that I love Seed. And then of course, also because it is a highly effective probiotic. It's a broad spectrum, two-in-one plant-based prebiotic and 24-strain probiotic. They have a proprietary formulation of 24 distinct probiotic strains in scientifically studied dosages. And the systemic benefits go so above

and beyond the gut. I talk about this quite often on the podcast, but our gut health determines pretty much everything. Everything starts in the gut. Things from psoriasis to eczema to constipation, anxiety, depression, mood disorders. All of this stuff is linked to you guys. Even probiotics can help with constipation, diarrhea. When I was in college, I used to struggle with yeast infections. And guess what got rid of the yeast infections? Taking your probiotic. So this is serious stuff for your health guys. And I love Seed. It is well-backed, scientifically studied. I also have a podcast with the founder. If you

guys want to go back and listen to that and hear about what makes Seed truly stand out above the rest. Some of the other benefits according to Seed themselves, it helps with GI function, skin health, heart health, gut immune function, gut barrier integrity, and micronutrient synthesis of vitamins B9 and B12, meaning it's going to give you more energy too. And you may see improvements in digestion within 24 to 48 hours, which can include bowel movement regularity and eased bloating. And let me tell you guys, as someone who's been struggling with bloating a lot recently, I'm so excited to get back on my seed regimen because I really think this is going to help a lot. Also, can we just talk about their packaging for a second? As someone who is really concerned about all the plastic in our landfill,

I am so obsessed with their sustainable monthly refill system. They give you a glass jar and a little mini travel jar as well. And then every month you keep that jar and they send your new refillable supplements in a compostable bio-based pouch that you pour into that jar. And this paper is made from algae that would otherwise damage fragile marine ecosystems. So all around, you can feel really good about purchasing seed probiotics because you are also helping to offset all the plastic and all the waste that we have in our landfills. So if you guys want to try seed probiotics today, please go to seed.com slash realfoodology and use code realfoodology to redeem 30% off your first month of seeds, DSN01 Daily Symbiotic. Again, that's seed, S-E-E-D.com slash realfoodology.

And make sure to use code realfoodology. Steven, let's just like dive into this. I'm so excited to have you on. Great. Yeah. It's going to be fun. I know. So before we started recording,

Steven and I were talking about, well, his chips. I initially found them in Erewhon. It's a spring called Masa and I'll let you tell people more about them, but basically they're organic corn, sea salt, and they're fried in beef tallow. And I want to know why beef tallow? Tell my audience why. Okay. Why beef tallow? So if you want to deep fry something, you have a few options. You got coconut oil, you got avocado oil, you obviously have seed oils, and then you have a few options. You got coconut oil, you got avocado oil, you obviously have seed oils, and then you have olive oil. That's like all the oils there are. So seed oils are out because they're seed oils, obviously.

Coconut oil, we tried. Avocado oil, we tried. When you fry stuff in plant oils, usually it comes out way too greasy. And so it's ironic you think, oh, the animal fat is like greasier. But no, the plant oils are greasier, crazily enough. Wow, and I feel like with the plant oils, though,

chips break so easily. Yeah, it's just not meant for it. People are not out there in Polynesia deep-frying stuff in coconut oil. That's not a thing. And then avocado oil, too, it's an option, but most avocado oil on the market is fake. It's because avocados are all grown by drug cartel-owned farms in Mexico.

And so they have very little supply chain transparency. They have zero incentive to make an authentic product. So yeah, there's a study done by USC, San Diego, I think. 82% of the avocado oil they could buy on the supermarket shelves. 82% of the brands were fake. Either laced with seed oils or already rancid. And then this is... It's so distressing.

And it's even worse. Last fun fact. Because where does avocado oil come from? It comes from rotten avocados. Avocados are expensive. Millennials will pay a lot of money for avocados if they're fresh. But a lot of avocados go bad in the supply chain. So what do you do with bad avocados? Well, you turn into avocado oil. So yeah, it's super sus.

Oh my God. Okay. So I'd never heard that before. I heard about the cutting and that's what I was going to ask you about because assuming that most of my listeners have heard this before, but I want to drop this just in case that they haven't, this is a really huge problem with olive oil too. And it's the same kind of thing. 60 Minutes did a whole segment on this. So it's definitely not a conspiracy. What's happening is a lot of these companies are cutting with seed oils, like canola, soybean, whatever you have it, and then marketing it as olive oil. And I more recently have found this out about avocado oil. So for people listening that are like, oh my God, what do I do?

How do you find, do you know how to find like a good clean avocado oil if that's what you want? I personally don't know how to find a good clean avocado oil. I think the study that did this investigation, they published the brands that were like, okay. So you could look at that. And remember, this is like the brands on the shelves.

Imagine like what you're getting when you're buying in industrial quantities. That's never the highest quality item, right? Because the highest quality always goes to retail. But yeah, so you got the drug cartels in Mexico lacing avocado oil. You got the mafia in Italy lacing olive oil. So those are out. And then also, yeah, you shouldn't really fry and plant oils

for the reasons I already described, so that leaves tallow. And guess what? Tallow is like the OG frying oil. If you've ever been to Belgium and eaten the Belgian fries, they invented french fries. They're the most famous french fries in the world. And they're fried in tallow. That's why they're so good. McDonald's used to fry in tallow up until the 90s.

So yeah, and figuring all this stuff out, when I wanted to make the chips, I was like, we have to do tallow. That's the right way to do it. The other benefit to tallow is that a lot of it goes, it's wasted in the current supply chain. So people talk about nose to tail eating and whatever. Well, there's a lot of beef fat that farmers many times pay to get rid of.

It's a trash product. They can't do anything with it. And so you have farmers who are trying to do pasture-raised, they're trying to get the most money per animal, and so now we have a use for tallow, which is great. So there's a whole host of benefits to it. I mean, they also taste amazing. And the last thing is, the plant oils are also not nutrient-dense.

So yeah, some of them are more saturated, some of them are better than others, but only the animal fats have vitamin A, vitamin K, vitamin D, conjugated linoleic acid, CLA, all these things. So Tala is really the good choice, but it was definitely a pain making that decision because of production. How did you even come up with this in the first place? I want people to hear your founding story.

Oh, nice. I've been involved and obsessed with health for almost 10 years at this point. And so seed oils were one of the more recent things that I really stumbled upon as like, okay, this is super terrible. That must have been over two and a half years ago at this point. And so the last food that I willingly ate that had seed holes in it

was tortilla chips because they're just so good. Obviously it's like a snack food, it's like chips are snacks, but the way that you can use tortilla chips, that's part of a healthy diet because I'm busy, whenever I need lunch, I'll put cheese and meat, like some salsa on tortilla chips. And that's a good meal right there. It's gluten-free. It's pretty digestible. And nothing will ever replace what you dip in a guacamole. I'm sorry. You can try to do cucumbers. Yeah, it doesn't work. Crackers even, get the hell out of here.

No, it needs to be a tortilla chip. It's just like they were too good. And I was getting the organic tortilla chips made with organic canola oil, which is like a joke. And so at one point I was like, this is enough is enough. I can't be in good conscience eating seed oils anymore. So I stopped eating the tortilla chips. And then about six months later or so, I was in Miami with a few of my friends for a New Year's trip.

And one of them was eating takeout seed oil taco, nacho, whatever the hell. And he's just sitting across the room. He's not into health. And I was glaring at him like, dude, what are you doing? Eating your engine lubricant over there? And he's like, what?

Come on. It's just chips. They're delicious. And I was like, yeah, okay, fine. They taste good. But you're poisoning yourself. And then the classic retort, I'm sure you've heard this a million times. Well, I'd rather enjoy my life than be healthy and miserable like you.

Classic, classic. And I'm sitting here like, no, you don't get it. Dude, I eat food on a daily basis that's better than anything you've ever tasted. I eat raw milk, raw milk ice cream, my grass-fed ribeyes, my potatoes and butter, honey, organic seasonal berries, organic citrus fruits, cheese. How is that an unpleasurable life?

And so most people don't know this, that's the thing. And he didn't know this, because our culture has this idea that it's either or. It's health or taste, you can't have both. And so I started explaining to him the same thing about tortilla chips. Like, no, you can have a good tortilla chip. And I'd make organic corn, I'd fry it in tallow, I'd explain all the hypotheticals, and then he was like,

well, why don't you go make them yourself? And then I'm like, boom, okay, maybe I will. And then that was it. That's my co-founder actually today. That's amazing. Yeah, we left Miami and it was like a sort of fun little, friends are going to start a startup kind of side project in the back of our heads. And then over the next few months,

we just gathered more and more intel, got more serious about it. We found someone to do the brand art, which you've seen the bag. It's fire. Yeah, it's so good. I mean, this is how I first found it at Erewhon. It's because I just saw rows and rows.

I mean, we were talking about this. There was a wall of them at Erewhon. And I was like, not only was there a wall of them, but it's such beautiful branding. And I'm a sucker. I'm a sucker for branding. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, don't judge a book by its cover, but no, like do, you know,

it's, it means something. So, um, so that branding, when I first saw the packaging design, I was like, okay, there's no way we can't do this now. Cause up until that point it was like, ah, you know, maybe it'll happen. But once we saw it, I was like, this must enter reality. And so then, then we, you know, tried to find a manufacturer to make it for us, which is, if people aren't familiar, this is exactly what every CPG brand does. You have a brand, you have an idea, and you go try to find a co-manufacturer, is what they're called, to go make it for you. Basically, all the food in the country is produced by maybe a few hundred factories.

That's how it works. No one wanted to touch it because of the tallow. And so people were like, well, what if you used coconut oil? What if you used avocado oil? And I was like, no, we're not doing that. Because I had made a prototype with tallow and they were just amazing. I'm like, I'm not compromising on this. So we then had to figure out how to make it ourselves. And we started in a rinky-dink little commissary kitchen with a restaurant deep fryer and our tallow and our tortillas and just grew from there. And we're still making it

ourselves today, actually. Little known facts. I was at the factory this morning. So are you still, do you have a co-manufacturer? No, we're still doing it. We've upgraded. We have an entire very big, nice kitchen. It's really cool. It's in this old office building. I find it very ironic. The office building was formerly occupied by Merck, the pharmaceutical company.

Oh, wow. That's incredible. So we have an old Merck office building. We have the cafeteria where they used to have lunch for the people in the office before. Remote work was a thing. It was loaded with seed oils, I'm sure. Yeah, it's all our new equipment. We brought in bigger fryers.

But yeah, no, it's still a basket and a bunch of guys with baskets and a salt shaker putting it in bags with a sealing machine by hand. And we ship it out. It's all done by hand. And so when people are like, oh, Masa's expensive. And I'm like, well, yeah, because I have like 12 employees that I have to pay living wages to who have to make these chips. Yeah. Well, and I also tell people too that, yeah, I mean, that's expensive, but you know what's even more expensive? Surgery, medication for the rest of your life, constant doctor

bills. Doctors. Yeah. Like people, like the amount of money people spend constant doctor bills. Doctors. Yeah. The amount of money people spend on medical bills blows my mind. I would be bankrupt if I had the average Americans medical bills. I think the average American spends 12K. 12 to 13K on medical bills in a year. That's average.

My medical bills are zero. When I had health insurance at my last job, I would go for my annual checkup, but I don't do that anymore, so it's zero. Yeah, seriously. But that's what I always tell people. You can either pay for it now or you pay for it later,

not only in your health and your energy and your mental health, but way more, astronomically more in your wallet too. Yeah, and people only seem to care about money, but what about you enjoying and having a good life for the 80 years that you're going to be around? Okay, we can get an Excel spreadsheet and do the budget all we want, but if you're going to be miserable and overweight

and unhappy and bad skin or whatever your health problem is, is that worth money? And for some people I guess it is, but that seems crazy to me. I know, I agree. And do you not want to have energy to go about your day? I also have this mentality too of when you feel better in your body, you obviously have more energy, so you're going to make more money because you're going to show up better for your job.

For real. Yeah, you can't perform at a high level. I imagine most people listening to this probably make money because of their brain. Whether it's marketing or finance or whatever, their brain is what allows them to make money. And if your brain is jammed up with seed oils and arsenic, like we were just talking about, cassava is high in arsenic,

if your brain is full of these toxins, how are you going to perform at a level where you can actually provide for yourself? Exactly. That's why it pays off to put more money into your food now. And okay, so I want to go into that a little bit because that actually blew my mind. So before we were recording, we were talking about cassava. I was telling Steven that I have more recently discovered that for a lot of people, apparently cassava causes your glucose to really spike like crazy high. I have a girlfriend that was wearing a glucose monitor and she shared her results yesterday and her blood glucose levels went up to 196 after eating cassava. That's insane. That's insane.

Yeah. That's like crazy. Yeah. That's wild. Like I, okay. So if anyone's listening to this and has a CGM like, and wants to,

you know, dedicate their body to science, please, please do this. I've, I've heard a few reports and I've seen some screenshots, but it'd be great to like see more. Someone ate masa.

This was like two weeks after we launched and someone was eating masa. They had a CGM and they posted a screenshot of their levels after they ate a bag, a whole bag, and it was flat. It wasn't a noticeable thing. So obviously you have the carbs from corn, but you also have a lot of saturated fat, which as we know, prevents the spiking of blood sugar that would be due to the sugar carbs. So that combination, it works. And yeah, I mean, cassava, I've never felt good eating it personally. I tried the whole cassava pasta that there's that one brand that has cassava pasta.

It tastes good. It's like, all right. It's jovial. Yeah, it's good enough. But I made mac and cheese and I was like, oh, I'm going to eat my cassava pasta, the cassava chips, the cassava strips fried in avocado oil, that's a thing too. But it always made my digestive

worse. And I'm like, this is... And then you look into cassava, it's like ground up, powderized flour from this plant in Southeast Asia that I'm just guessing that most of the people listening to this, their ancestors have never even seen a cassava.

They're the first person in 10,000 generations to ever encounter that food. Okay, so you're telling me that's paleo and that's healthy? It's like ancestral eating? What about your ancestors? So it's just like, I think what happened is people, for the 20th century, food just became so junk. The potato chips, the corn chips, the french fries,

the candy, the bread, whatever it was. The foods that are recognizable became such junk that people were like, okay, everything about those foods is bad. Everything. So don't eat bread, don't eat gluten, don't eat saturated fats was the thing back then. Pesticides are bad, don't eat pesticides.

Corn's bad, don't eat corn. Don't eat any of this. But then what they ended up doing was they just swapped out one version of processed foods or another version of processed foods. Although this version of processed foods comes from Latin America and has exotic names or comes from Southeast Asia and it's like, oh, it's coconut oil. It must be good. Oh, it's chia seeds. Oh, so it must be good. And it's like, dude, what you have to do to these foods to even attempt to recreate the effect that you had, like for bread, for example, what you have to do to an almond,

like ungodly things to an almond to make a cookie that even resembles half of an actual cookie made with real flour. So you just swapped out one version of processed foods for another version of processed foods that taste way worse. When we could have just fixed the quality of the original foods, got them back to how they were before the sort of green revolution, all the agriculture chemicals and the additives and stuff. And then it would be delicious and it'll be healthy. And that's what traditional food is. That's why it's so amazing. People kept traditional recipes alive over generations because they had value. Just like you think about all the old books. It's like a common thing. Why are all the old books so good?

Well, because monks in monasteries for thousands of years manually had to copy books, so they would only spend their time copying the books that were good. It's the same thing with recipes. Only the recipes that are good get passed down generation after generation, and they're good because they satisfy us on a psychological, dopamine sense,

because they taste good, but they're nutritionally supportive. So that's why traditional recipes are so good. We have the best recipes available to us, and then we just threw them all out in the trash, and we're eating ungodly cassava abominations. So that's the whole food philosophy that Masa is just the tip of the iceberg with for our company,

but also just in general. Eat sourdough bread, eat raw milk, eat ice cream, you know, all these things with real ingredients. I love that so much. You and I are on the exact same page. We have very similar philosophies. I always tell people, anyone that feels confused about what to eat,

I'm like, look back to all the foods that we've been eating forever. You know, like what did our ancestors really eat? What are the foods that have been, um, most, most people have had, um, you know, access to for the majority of our time on this planet. And what would that be? Milk, cheese, eggs, beef, you know, animal foods, animal fats, corn. A lot of people had access to corn. Yeah. Thousands of years. So, I mean, and some people had access to corn. Yeah, thousands of years. Exactly. And some people will make the argument,

and sure, it's somewhat valid that corn and grains in general have been cultivated for less time than animal foods. And they're certainly correct. But a saying that we shouldn't eat that is to say that humans have not evolved in the past 10, 15,000 years. And we clearly have. The very ability for certain people to digest lactose and other people to not shows that evolution has happened in the past so many thousands of years. Well, actually, sorry to interrupt you, but the argument with the lactose, again, comes back to

also another thing that I say often is it's what has been done to the food. So we were drinking raw milk. And if you're not pasteurizing and homogenizing it and taking out all those amazing enzymes that allow our body to actually digest the lactose, then of course you can digest it. But what we're doing is we're completely processing it. We're heating it up so high that it has no nutrients, no vitamins and no enzymes left in there.

And so then it's affecting our bodies in different ways. When we mess with nature and what we're given, it's not going to have the same effect on our body. Yeah. Yeah. Like the milk thing is very interesting because like, because of the probiotics and the bacteria in milk, they'll digest it for you if you build up those probiotics over time. So there are people who do have genetically produce like a genetic mutation that allows them produce lactase. So it's like double lactose tolerance. But there are plenty of people, like the Mongols are a great example. East Asians don't have that gene,

but the Mongols drink a ton of raw milk. That's been their thing for centuries. And so they're still able to digest it even without that gene because their gut microbiome has the proper bacteria to be able to do it. So lactose for sure. Anyone can become lactose tolerant provided you're eating the right milk. So yeah, milk is a great food.

But the grains too, it's a fun one. People like to rail on seeds a lot, seeds and grains, myself included. Of all the foods that are seeds, which there are many, nuts, legumes, beans, pumpkin seeds, actual seeds like grains, the seeds being the strains and the species of seeds

that were cultivated for human consumption, they became more digestible over the generations of cultivation. So if you think back 5,000 years ago, the Aztecs eating corn, corn was bred to be more digestible. And there's a lot of these modern seeds that people are obsessed with that humans didn't really ever eat. But because it's not a grain, and grain is like a dirty word, we eat them. And they're way more inflammatory. They have way more anti-nutrients. They have much higher PUFA content. So they're much more inflammatory because I guess there was a big grain scare

like 10 to 15 years ago. People don't like them. People don't like grains and they eat the seeds instead. But it's like, if you're going to eat a food, why would you not want to eat the food that's the version of it that's been most bred to be digestible and prepared to be digestible? Why would you want to eat the one

that's growing out in the wilds because 99% of plant matter is indigestible? You're going to want to eat the 1% that is. And it is that way because humans cultivated it. So it's like, that's why you'd want to eat those things. Wow, that's such a great point. But you know what I was also thinking about too? There's such a fine line, right? Of like creating these foods that are more digestible and we can evolve with them. And then I was thinking alternatively of what we've done to corn specifically here in the United States where over 90% of it is genetically modified

and Roundup ready, meaning it has Roundup in the seed. So you have to be careful. You have to be really educated as a consumer. You don't want to, so the operating principle here is that it occurs over time consistent with an evolutionary process. Corn being what it is,

the amount of change that corn underwent from 5,000 years ago to 1950 is nothing in comparison to what it's gone through since 1950 with genetic engineering to the present day. So it's like, that's crazy. That type of process is crazy because it's definitionally is not fit for us. How many generations have there been of humans

since the genetic engineering of corn? Not enough time for any sort of evolution to have occurred. Maybe two, one and a half? Yeah, exactly. But over the 5,000 years, like bread for example, over the 5,000 years, no, it's like 8,000 years of bread in the Middle East and then into Europe, that's a lot of generations.

So yeah, there's this balance that you want to strike between modern hybridization and weird fiddling that's bad, but also a thousand year long process of good. The animals too, people, it's very funny, people will say, oh, eat wild foods. And then you'll see those things, like those memes on Instagram where it's like, this is what a banana looks like. This is what a strawberry looks like. And it's like, they look terrible and completely unappetizing.

And it's like, yeah, okay. Those are domesticated foods. Congratulations. What about the animals you eat? How many of you people are eating wild hunted deer or elk that you caught yourself? You know, like what are you talking about? How many people who are drinking raw milk

are going out and trying to capture capture a gazelle and milk it? Cows are fake animals in the same way that corn or the strawberries are fake. We bred them for the purpose of nourishing us. It just so happens that humans in the past did that process more wisely than the humans do today. And thus the modern, the very contemporary creations, like say any of the food that's been modified after like 1950,

or maybe just the 20th century, keep it easy. That's very questionable. But before that, it's great. More nutrients, more quantity. Great, that's awesome. Let's do that. I've been consuming collagen for about six years now. I like to put it in my morning drink, whether that's coffee or matcha. I usually prefer coffee, but lately I've actually been doing coffee

and then having a matcha a little bit later. I love to mix the collagen in with my nut milk that I put in my coffee. It's usually almond milk or coconut milk. And I'm so excited to announce that Organifi has their own collagen now. As with all Organifi products, it's glyphosate residue free, really high quality. It has hydrolyzed bovine hide collagen peptides that are derived from pasture raised cows. It also has eggshell membrane collagen. It's taken from the thin layer between the egg and the shell. And this is collagen rich, and it may be beneficial for strong joint health. It also has hydrolyzed fish collagen peptides derived from wild caught fish. Because this collagen source is of a small particle size, it makes it easier to digest

and more absorbable. And then there's also chicken bone broth protein concentrate in there. This collagen type is actually found in your gut joints and cartilage, and it helps support more absorbable. And then there's also chicken bone broth protein concentrate in there. This collagen type is actually found in your gut joints and cartilage, and it helps support greater health both inside and out. Collagen is really good for lubricating the joints. It's also great for healing and sealing the gut. Often now because of our diets, people are dealing with leaky gut syndrome and collagen actually goes in there and helps to seal the gut. So if you're having any sort of leaky gut syndrome symptoms, collagen may be your best bet. It's also great for just

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It's something else. Maybe it's a cracker or whatever, but it's not a tortilla chip. There is no substitute for corn in that recipe that could ever be as satisfying and fit as well with the recipes and the ways in which you consume it. As anyone who's tried alternative quote-unquote tortilla chips brands who I will not name will know, it's just inherently unsatisfying.

The other thing about corn is that there's a very historical process for preparing it in a way that makes it more digestible. So the other, the other thing about like digestibility of like grains in particular in history is that not only do we have the cultivation of them for this purpose, we also have, uh, traditional methods that like rose up in order to address this digestibility problem. So prepare them in a way that's like fit for humans to eat. Sourdough bread is probably the most famous example of this.

You ferment it with bacteria and yeast that literally reduce the gluten, they reduce the phytates and the phytic acid, and they make it more digestible. And then everyone who, I'm sure you have many friends who will tell you, I went to Italy and I just ate the bread and I felt great. I lost weight. That's happening because bread is made the right way. So corn has a similar process. It doesn't involve bacteria, but it involves boiling it with basically limestone. This is called nixtamalization. It's on the back of the bag. It's like that big word that everyone always asks me what it means. And so the Aztecs invented

this like thousands of years ago. And by boiling with limestone, it gets rid of the very indigestible outer shell. When you eat corn on the cob and you poop and there's corn shells in the toilet, nixtamalization gets rid of that. And it also makes certain nutrients more bioavailable. It's like vitamin B3 is more bioavailable. And there's this other thing with magnesium where if you eat raw corn, you eat too much of it, your body's ability to absorb magnesium will diminish. So there's also mycotoxins that end up in raw corn that are eliminated through the process of nixtamalization. So yeah, doing that makes it very digestible and it also makes it taste good. And so we have this traditional process, this traditional ingredient in a traditional recipe and there's no substitute for it.

Their potato chips are great, crackers are great, but when you need a corn chip, you need a corn chip. Let me tell you, as someone who grew up in San Antonio, Texas, which I think there's more Mexican food restaurants than there are any other food. And so I grew up on pretty traditional Tex-Mex and traditional Mexican food. And I told you this when I met you. These chips taste like those legit...

I would go to these hole-in-the-wall Mexican food restaurants where you know that they're using lard and like legit real old recipes this is exactly what they taste like not only that not only are they like uncompromised in taste out of anything else i've ever tried they don't break when you dip them in stuff some of these other chip alternatives that we were you know we're not gonna name you can't even dip them in anything because they just like disintegrate and in the. I usually end up getting like a spoon with the chip and I'm like, this is ridiculous. These don't break. They're incredible. You did such a good job. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. That's anyone from San Antonio or anyone who like, so for example, one of the, for a few weeks after I started,

I got a similar remark from someone who's like grandma's like from a small town in Mexico. And he's like, Hey, my grandma, when she makes tortilla chips, she makes them with lard and these taste like that. And I'm like, that's an amazing compliment right there. So it's like, if you think about the perfect version of something, there's the actual thing and then there's the perfect version that it could be. This is the perfect version of a tortilla chip. I would agree.

That's like, every box was checked. Very deliberately deliberately of course, because I'm not going to spend my effort making things that are not as good as they could possibly be. And I think that's also something that a lot of quote unquote health food suffer from. They'll do one or two things right. They're like, oh, our cheese is regenerative or this ingredient is organic. And it's like, bro, what about all these other five things that you're not doing right? I'm not paying for this.

I'm either getting perfect or I'm not going to eat it at all. If I don't have moss chips, I'm not eating tortilla chips. I'll do something else. I'll figure it out. So yeah, you really have to make sure that every single box is checked. And I think we did a good job doing that with this product. Yeah, you really did.

You know what else is really cool about these chips? And we've also talked about this. They really fill you up. So one of the issues that I've had, like when I go to like a Mexican food restaurant, I mean, everyone knows this. You go and you sit and you eat all the chips and salsa and you just feel like you can eat like two full baskets of them.

Yeah, like a chili's and they're very thin. So you could just eat a million. You just like house them, you know? And these, like I can't even, like I couldn't even eat them all. Like I couldn't even eat a whole bag if I tried because they really fill you up and satisfy you, which is something like from a nutritionist standpoint, I'm like, this is what you want from your food. You want something that's really satisfying and filling that will keep you

full for a longer period of time. Cause that's how you, you manage your blood glucose levels. You mentioned earlier that this doesn't make your glucose spike. So you're not going to crash and like crave more sugar later. It's really, I mean, an ideal situation. Yeah. I think people look at the, our nutrition label and be like, oh, it's the same calories as any other tortilla chip, and that's true. But other tortilla chips, you'll eat 20 of them and want 20 more, but these, you'll eat 20 of them

and that's good, that's it. Exactly. And so people who are like, I'm sure many of your listeners are mindful of their caloric intake, right? You want to minimize, if you want to reduce your calories, you want to do it in a way that doesn't leave you feeling starving and then like prone to binging, you know, late at night when your willpower is weak and you know, whatever. So you want to be full on fewer calories. This is the way to do it. And there's a very simple

explanation for this, which is one of the things that really blew my mind when I was initially doing all my research on seed oils a few years ago. Polyunsaturated fats, like in seed oils, don't trigger your cells' fullness receptors. Your cells will not emit the fullness hormones when you eat polyunsaturated fats. There's a great lecture on YouTube about this if people are interested by Michael Eads, but I'll try to summarize as best as I can. Basically, your cells can eat an infinite amount of glucose because you can convert it very easily to ATP, energy, whatever. But it's not that energy dense. So this is why you can drink an entire sweet tea

or half a bottle of Coke or something. You can just down calories of sugar. It's very easy to do that. But fats are more calorie dense per gram than sugar, like almost twice, twice as calorie dense. So if you eat fat, your cells will see fat coming in and they'll be like, oh, this is a lot of energy. We don't need all this much. Like once we get enough, we're good. So they send out, you send out the fullness hormones. Seed oils are a fat, so they're just as calorie-dense as all fats are. But they have the same way of triggering fullness hormones that glucose has,

which is to say they don't. So your body looks at it as if it's sugar, but it's twice the calories that it thinks it is. Because they're inherently unnatural. Our body is not designed to recognize that. And so you end up eating more. And one of the cool study on this was they fed a bunch of kids a carb plus a fat combination. And they were like, hey, just eat as much as you want until you're full. Just do it up. And then they measured the amount of calories they ended up eating. And so when the carb plus fat, when the fat was a saturated fat, there was like 300 or 400 fewer calories that they ate than the seed oil plus carb combination.

So it's like, this is real. You eat it, you're full, we're not making this up here. Wow, that's fascinating. I've never even heard that before. I just assumed because it was a higher quality, more nutrient dense fat. That's so interesting. Little known facts about saturated fats. Yeah, the lecture by, yeah, this is one of the greatest things I've ever seen about this because most people know about seed oils. It's inflammation, oxidation, right? It's bad for your skin, IBS, blah, blah, blah, which is all very true. But there's this additional fact about it in the way that it affects your metabolism.

And so this is why you have all the insulin wackiness going on with seed oils, because you're eating all these calories, but your body thinks it's sugar. So like it messes up that natural calorie regulation system so that affects your insulin and then your insulin resistance. And so this is why people will still have diabetes

or whatever the symptoms when they don't eat sugar, because it's not the sugar that's messing with you, it's the seed oils messing with you. Can we talk about that more? So I've done a couple of episodes on it, but just in case, I want to give people a little bit of a refresher because I also really like your viewpoint on this. Why are seed oils so bad and can we name them for people so they know what is the deal with the PUFAs, with the polyunsaturated fatty acids?

100% we can name them. I actually wrote a sub stack on this because people kept asking me. Now I can pull it up so I don't do it from memory. Yeah, because I get so many DMs from people. A lot of people are still really confused on seed oils. And so I think repetition, people need to keep hearing it. Because seed oils aren't, they don't call themselves seed oils. That's the think repetition, people need to keep hearing it. Because seed oils aren't, they don't call themselves seed oils.

That's the sort of tricky thing about them. They either are called vegetable oil or they have the name of the actual seed. So the seed oils, the industrial seed oils, there's nine of them that you'll find in common places. So soybean oil, canola oil, corn oil. Also canola oil, for the record record is also called rapeseed oil. Especially, yeah. Delicious. Let's have some of that. They call it that in like

Europe a lot of the time. But so canola oil, a lot of it comes from Canada. And so canola is not a plant. Canola is a portmanteau of Canada and oil. So can oil. Yeah. Do you know it's Canada low acid oil? I didn't know it was that. Because they messed with it because it was really high in, I'm going to mess this up. Arucic acid. Arucic acid. And so they modified it to bring it down and that's why it's called Canadian low acid

oil. Interesting. That's crazy. Yeah. So canola sounds a lot better than like, you know, rapeseed. But if you think about it, it's like canola, this sounds like something you'd find in an automotive shop, right? Like can oil, you know, anyway, soybean oil, canola oil, corn oil, which is going to sound interesting because we're talking about corn. I'll get to that in a minute. Cotton seed oil. Well, guess what? Cotton's not food. Sunflower oil.

Safflower oil. Grapeseed oil. So grapes. And that was often considered higher end. If you go to Williams-Sonoma, they'll have grapeseed oil in a fancy bottle. And it's like, ooh, grapeseed oil. So true. Anyway, peanut oil, which is arguably the quote unquote best of the seed oils because

it's the lowest in PUFA. So peanut oil, sorry, it's still from seed. Peanuts are seeds. And then a rice bran oil, which I've seen on sort of like high end homemade, like house made tortilla chips before. And yeah, so those are the oils. So once again, for the record, soybean, canola, corn, cottonseed, sunflower, safflower,

grapeseed, peanut, and rice bran oil. And the reason why they're bad is there's two things. All these come from an industrial process, meaning if I sent you back in a time machine 200 years ago, no one on earth could possibly make it for you

because you need big machinery and chemical solvents and stuff and the fact that's related to that is that they're all concentrated so every individual seed that is in a seed oil has a tiny bit of oil and so you have to squeeze a tiny bit of oil out of a large number large, large number of seeds to get an appreciable quantity of seed oil.

So for example, corn oil, like one tablespoon of corn oil is like 20 ears of corn worth of oil. That's insane. Yeah, maybe it's a dozen, I don't know. But it's more than you'd ever consider eating. So this is kind of the issue. When we talk about natural foods, whole foods, I'm sure people are familiar with the whole idea

eat fruit instead of plain sugar because you get the fiber along with the sugar actual foods have all the things that you need in the right combinations for you to process them wow, magic, what a coincidence so when you do this sort of concentration BS then you're able to extract more of the bad stuff all at once and hyper-concentrate it. And you would never be able to expose yourself to that in a natural setting.

A similar thing happens when people start putting kale in juices. Kale and other cruciferous vegetables are high in oxalates, and oxalates are toxic in large quantities. They can cause kidney stones and inflammatory. They're inflammatory in general. It's very bad. However, if you were to eat kale, you would maybe eat a few leaves or something and then you'd be tapped out.

That's enough kale. But if you were to juice it without the fiber filling you up, you're going to eat pounds of kale worth of kale in this juice without the fiber. And so anything that's bad in the kale is going to get concentrated and then you're going to eat a lot of it and that's a problem. So it's the same thing with seed oils. This bad thing that's present in small quantities

that would not be worth worrying about in normal situations becomes very potent because you eat a lot of it. So that's the general what seed oils are. Why they're bad, simply they are inherently inflammatory and so oils, like fats in general when you eat fats, they go everywhere in your body because your body is run on and built with fat

your cell membranes are made of fat your hormones are made of fat cholesterol is made of fat you have body fat so fat gets everywhere and so wherever this inflammatory fat molecule ends up, it causes inflammation. And then wherever that is, it looks slightly different, but it causes a problem. So if it happens in your eyes, you get macular degeneration. If it happens in your brain,

you get Alzheimer's. If it happens in your skin, you get skin cancer and sunburn. If it happens in the fat, especially in women, like around the middle part of their body, then you get cellulite because estrogen combined with like PUFAs basically causes cellulite and those tissues are higher in estrogen. If it happens in your gut, you get IBS. If it happens in your liver, you get fatty liver disease. So the point is like they're, think about it, they're literal, like they're just terrorist molecules that go all over your body and just tear apart your living tissues. And so whatever that looks like in whatever part of your body it is,

it's going to have some noticeable effect. Yeah, wow, that's fascinating. I've actually never heard someone describe it in that way. So I'm glad I asked you. So you brought up a really great point that I think will help people understand this. It is very hard to extract oil out of a sunflower seed. But then you think alternatively, olive oil,

one of the reasons why it's so healthy for you, I mean, you just squish an olive and you get oil. And olive oil comes out. It just leaks out. So olive oil is like a fruit oil. And similarly, avocados is a fruit oil. It comes from the fleshy fruit part of that thing, not the seed on the inside.

Although there's another clever one, olive pomace oil. Oh, I haven't heard of that. P-O-M-A-C-E. It's on cheaper foods. It's used in industrial settings, so people can call it olive oil. But they just crush the whole olives up, and after they extract the extra virgin olive oil, they crush this mashup. I think it's called pomace.

That's why it's hence the name. And they crush the seeds. So now you have olive seeds there and all the good oil has been extracted and then whatever's left, that's olive pomace oil. So yeah, big difference between fruit. The only places where you can get oils from are seeds, fruits, and animals. So the only fruit oil that I would personally consider worth eating is olive oil. I mean, if I were a Polynesian, I would consider eating coconut oil, but I'm not. And when I eat it, it makes me feel terrible. And my excrement appears in ways that are too graphic to describe, but it's not pleasant. So I don't eat it. My ancestry comes from the Mediterranean, so I will eat my olive oil and I'll be fine.

But yeah, so that's the only fruit oil I would eat. And then the other oils, of course, the animal fats. So you got butter and ghee, which are the same thing, which are amazing. Tallow. And then lard is questionable. It's based on the source of the pig. If the pig's good, the lard's going to be good.

If the pig's bad, the lard's going to be bad. And same thing with chicken fat or something. So yeah, personally, I would stick to real olive oil, butter, tallow, and honestly, that's pretty much it. Yeah, ghee. That's pretty much what I do too. Exactly. I do too. Yeah, I mean, what do you need anything else for? Exactly. Yeah, no, I totally agree.

So I know this is something you're really passionate about and I'm excited to talk to you about this. Kind of piggybacking off the seed oils. So we hear a lot about this online now that if you don't eat seed oils, you won't burn. And everyone is so scared of the sun. Everyone's so scared of getting burned. Everyone's using this crazy chemical sunscreen that they're lathering on their skin. And then it's reacting with the chemicals in

that sunscreen are reacting with the UV rays. And that is actually what is causing cancer. Yeah. Like it's very funny. Cancer rates increase as time goes on and people spend less time in the sun, in particular, less time in the sun unprotected. I like to say this little thought experiment. If the sun were toxic to human biology, we would never have come out of the trees. We'd be still swinging from branches in the shade as monkeys. That's a great point. How does that make sense?

How is that even remotely possible? There's a few things to consider. Some people will be like, the ozone layer is depletedeted. So it's like the sun's too strong. Well, the ozone layer has recovered to like within, I think, 6% of what it historically was after we banned like the chemical that caused the hole in the ozone layer in the 1980s. So that's not it. I mean, yeah, you could argue latitude for sure. Like if you're from Northern Europe and you spend your time in Costa Rica, there's going to be, you know, a little bit of adaptation

there that maybe you're not a hundred percent well suited to. But at the same time, your ancestors were out in the sun, like farming and hunting and doing all their stuff like for hours a day. And what do you do? Like 30 minutes of tanning? Like, what are we talking about here? You know? So you can't even compare compare the amount of sun exposure. But the real thing comes down to what it comes down to is that your skin is ill-prepared to handle the sun, which is, yes, very intense radiation. You just are not built to handle it.

Just like if you started barefoot running, your feet would get torn up if you go on the pavement the first day. But if you build up your foot calluses over however many miles of barefoot running, your feet would get torn up if you go on the pavement the first day. But if you build up your foot calluses over however many miles of barefoot running, then you'll be able to barefoot run just fine. It's the same thing. Think about your sun calluses. You have to build that up. And people will be like, oh, but then I'll get wrinkly and I'll look terrible and whatever else. But the reason for the inadequate ability of your skin to handle the sun has to do with well, seed oils, two things, seed oils and then a lack of cholesterol.

So those two points I'll take separately, but they're related. I mentioned before that seed oil molecules are inflammatory. Wherever they go, they cause inflammation. Well, the reaction that actually happens is called oxidation. And oxidation is accelerated by the presence of light, heat, and oxygen. If you have subcutaneous fat right under your skin, and your cell membranes in your skin have PUFAs in them, so PUFAs are the name for the oils that are in seed oils,

then when you go out in the bright sun, which is UV, it's very intense, the seed oils in your body are being exposed to the UV. So that rate of oxidation is going to accelerate, which means the rate of inflammation is going to accelerate. So you go out there and you go in the sun, you get red and you're like, oh, my skin, oh, you know, the sun's bad. Well, no, your skin has like, basically, if you want to think about it, like little inflammation magnifying glasses that are receiving the sunlight and multiplying its negative effects. So if your skin is free of seed oils, then your ability to handle sunlight without the inflammation from sunburn, that improves. And then the other thing about seed oils, why they're so insidious, it's not directly related, but if you eat a lot of

your fat from seed oils, that means you're not eating a lot of cholesterol because cholesterol is in saturated fats. And so cholesterol is necessary to turn sunlight, like UV light from the sun into vitamin D. So like the literal chemical reaction is like UV light plus like this form of cholesterol, 7-dehydroxycholesterol. I think I said that right. That reaction then produces vitamin D. So if you don't have cholesterol, it's like you're trying to collect solar energy without solar panels on your house. It's just going to heat up the roof of your house. So you need to have your little solar panels there to collect the sunlight, and so you eat your saturated fats. So that's another issue. And then perhaps the last thing also is that vitamin A is necessary

for skin health. And so if you eat a lot of seed oils, well, guess what? Seed oils don't have vitamin A, but all the fats that you should be eating like butter and tallow do have vitamin A. So if you're replacing good fat calories with bad fat calories, not only are you adding the presence of this inflammatory thing, you're detracting from the actual nourishing vitamins that would be in the thing that you're not eating. So you need vitamin A as well. But yeah, that's sort of like double, triple whammy of combinations combined with people don't adequately build up their sun tolerance results in their negative experiences with the sun. And that's why they resort to like crazy concoctions and chemicals like sunscreen. Yeah. Wow. That was fascinating. So for people listening that are like, okay, if I went

and tanned right now, I would burn. What is your advice on how to start building that up over time? So it's important to start, if you're going to tan in a given day, it's important to start in the morning. Sun exposure, both in your eyes and on your skin in the early morning, or use a red light panel. So people have red light therapy. Because if you think about it, the red light, which is naturally higher intensity in the morning time from the sun, that's signaling your body, hey, in four hours, it's going to be strong sunlight out here,

so get ready to be able to build your melanin or whatever. So red light primes your skin to accept the sort of UV light that happens at midday. So yeah, red light therapy. I tell people to do this if they're going to go on a tanning bed, like if it's the winter and they live in London, do red light therapy before you'll do a tanning bed. Tanning bed? Are we recommending tanning beds? Well, I mean, if you live in London and it's the winter,

then it's better than nothing. It would be my preference to fly to a place that's warmer with sun, which is what I try to do. But if that's not feasible for you, then yeah, I think it's better than nothing. People with SAD, Seasonal Affective Disorder, what's the cure? You get a UV lamp. That's a tanning bed just on your desk. So yeah, if you're going to tan in a given day, you should start with red light. I mean,

ideally you would just go out in the morning for 10 minutes and then you pick the medium intensity light. If you're just starting out, say 11 a.m. or like 10.30, and then you do five, 10 minutes, five minutes on each side. Do it like roast yourself, like a little rotisserie chicken. And then you do five minutes on each side, and then that's it. Then you do the same thing the next day.

Same thing the next day. And then you do 10 minutes on each side. And then you do 15 minutes on each side. And then you maybe go out at noon or 1 p.m. And then you just build it up slowly that way. Whilst, of course, doing all the food-related stuff that we mentioned. Stop eating seed oils and eat more vitamin A and cholesterol.

And that's all you really need. Yeah, I mean, I live in Southern California and I feel like my diet is so healthy that I don't burn anyways. But I also feel like I think my body was just so used to being in the sun all the time. I hike every day. I walk the beach a lot.

I'm in the sun a lot. I never put sunscreen on. I will say though, I do put sunscreen on my face. How do you feel about that? Like a non-toxic zinc face. I would prefer wearing a hat personally. That's what I would do. And I do wear a hat.

There is an extent to which yes, you want to tan and get the health benefits from the sun, but we don't need to be spending six hours a day at equatorial sun exposure during the summer. That's not, two extremes again. Get some sunlight, don't sit in your fluorescent lit office building all day, but there's not really a need for you to be out there for six hours. So hat, that's totally fine. I would prefer, so the other thing too is that if your eyes are blocked from UV light, then your skin doesn't know what the hell is going on and so you'll be more prone to burning

because your eyes will not be giving your skin the signal that it needs to produce the melanin or whatever to absorb the sunlight. So I would prefer to avoid, whenever I go out and tan and stuff, I'll take my glasses off. Even regular clear glasses, they block UV light, and especially sunglasses.

Interesting. So I would do that too. But yeah, hats are great. I would not prefer to put sunscreen, but I think Van Man just came out with a tallow balm and zinc, basically sunscreen, which is what I would use if I wanted to. But I think the clothing is generally the best. Like get in the shade and put on clothing is the best way to avoid super intense sun

if you're not ready for it or you don't want it. Yeah, like if you're going to be in a boat all day, put clothing on. Put a linen shirt on. This is why God invented white linen. Exactly. That's so funny. Not only will you protect yourself, you won't be putting this cancer scoop

and you look better. It's true. You look cool. Don't kill the fish also. That's another thing too. That's a big one. If you're going to go out in the water and you got this crap all over your body and then you're going to go out in the water and you got this crap on all of your body,

and then you're going to sit around and be like, why are all the fish dying? Why are the coral reefs dying? Well, because you literally go swimming and put your cancerous crap right in their home. Exactly, and it's killing them all off. Yeah. Yeah, no, that's a really big one too.

Do you think there are, outside of, what did you say was Van Man? I wrote it down. Van Man, yeah. Are there any other ones? What do you think about the zinc oxides, what did you say was Van Man? I wrote it down. Van Man, yeah. Are there any other ones? What do you think about the zinc oxides? Because if I'm in the sun all day, like when I went to Mexico recently, we were in the sun for a long time. Sure. And I was putting a zinc oxide, like a non-toxic sunscreen. How do you feel about that?

I mean, if it's, so zinc oxide, I think there's two forms. One is like the particles are much smaller than the other. It's like micro zinc. I forget what it is. One of those is better than the other. And I forget which one. I would have to ask because I don't use this stuff. One of those is better than the other. And if it's just that plus like your tallow or coconut oil

or whatever the carrier oil is, and if it's a good fat, then sure, go for it. But yeah, me personally, once again, still prefer to just wear the linen. And also, if it's very hot, that actually keeps you cool. Long-sleeve linen and stuff, people don't realize this. But this is why people in the Middle East wear the white, you've seen the white, I forget what they're called, robes for lack of a better term, because it's so hot outside. So it's like, say a hundred degrees, your body temperature is 98.6, right? So sweating and like being outside, like sweating works when like the outside air is like cooler than you. But when the outside air is cooler than you.

But when the outside air is 100 degrees, it's literally better to be 98.6. So what the thick robes do is they create this insulating layer where the air in between your skin and the robe is 98.6. And the air on the outside of the robe is 100 or whatever it is. And so it protects you from the heat in this way where if you were like bare skin, you would die, which is why they don't do it and why they have white robes. So it actually helps keep you cool. So would highly,

highly recommend. Well, I'm feeling really good about my recent linen purchases for my Mexico trip coming up. Nice, nice, nice. Yes, very important. That's great. What's your favorite brand of linen? Oh, actually I got this white linen shirt from this brand called Vitamin C, but it's like S-E-A. S-E-A, sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I really, I love that one a lot.

Yeah, it's cute and I like the name too. There's also another brand that I'm totally blanking on right now. Dish makes good stuff too, D-I-S-S-H. If there's any males listening, I don't know if this company makes women's clothing, but I like Alex Crane a lot. Alex C-R-A-N-E, Alex Crane.

They make very nice looking things. Also, Dandy Del Mar is also cool. I don't know if they have as much linen, but they definitely have nice beachy things. That's actually what I'm wearing right now. I saw it and it was like the Masa shirt. I have to get this. I turned myself into a Masa chip. I mean, it's perfect. I wish people that are listening to the podcast right now could see this. I was actually going to point that out before we got off. I was like, your shirt literally looks like the bag. It's so cool. It is a white, it's like, look at that. It's like orange and white stripe, like knit cotton shirt. It's so good. It's so good. Alex, Alex Crane is great. Big fan of his.

He also has great shorts. That's what I wear is my swim shorts. They're like linen short shorts and like linen dries relatively quickly when you get it wet. So I just literally, my shorts, and then I just go in the water and then they dry and it's great. I love that. I'm going to tell my boyfriend that. Yeah, because most bathing suits for men and women are plastic. And so of course you want to avoid plastic if at all possible.

It's heating up in the sun too. Yeah, and it's clinging to your skin. You're just direct injecting microplastics into your body. There's a good brand that makes women's swim stuff called Akoya Swim. A-K-O-I-A, Akoya Swim. I think most of their stuff is natural fabrics. They are knit, most of them, but I don't think all of them.

But yeah, they look pretty good. So they're very Bali style. I love. Awesome. Okay, I'm writing all these down. Yeah, this is great. Well, is there anything else that we haven't gone over that you think is really important for people to know in terms of what we talked about today?

Or really anything? Sure, yeah. I think, okay, it's very important to understand that healthy foods taste good. I think we already talked about this. Yeah, but it's important to reiterate it. It's important to reiterate it because not only, okay, you, the listener, you have your willpower, you can eat your cardboard and be fine with it. Even though the cardboard's you have your willpower. You can eat your cardboard and be fine with it.

Even though the cardboard's not healthy, but whatever. You can apply the strength of will to make yourself be healthy when your impulses would otherwise tell you not to do that. Most people can't do that, and most people don't do that, hence why everyone's fat and sick. The problem is not that they have some lack of willpower here. They're not bad people or whatever. Those very same people who lived in the 1950s

would have been perfectly healthy and fit and whatever. Because they would just go to the food store, buy the food, and eat the food. And it was fine. Nowadays, if you're a normal person, you go to the food store, buy the food, eat the food, you're going to have problems. And it's very sad because people get so frustrated about this because they try really hard to lose weight or be healthy or

whatever. And then, well, whatever, I'll get back to that. So the issue here is that if you're going to try to be a normal person, you're not going to put in all the effort that they think that we as health people go crazy about. Like my friend, for example, he's like, oh, you're not going to put in all the effort that they think that we as health people go crazy about. Like my friend, for example. He's like, oh, you're insane. I work 80 hours a week. I work in finance. I don't have time for this.

Congratulations, you work 10 hours a week because you have a software engineering job at a big tech company. Good job. You can do all this stuff. He's not going to do it. So for those people, and those are the people that I'm really trying to reach,

and I think we should reach if we care about the health of our fellow humans. Those are the people we really need to get through to. We need to make them understand that the good food is not a sacrifice. It makes their lives better. It tastes better. It's more enjoyable. It's more filling. And it can be convenient, which is like, you know, there's not many brands like Masa, to be fair, we're working on it. We're going to have more products than this kind of thing. But I think the very existence of this kind of thing will be game changing for people because, yeah.

And then to the healthy people, there's this point where like, I'm sure people are familiar with this. You want to be healthy. You finally are like frustrated. You're like, I give up. You know, I'm sure, I'm sure people are familiar with this. You want to be healthy. You finally are like frustrated. You're like, I give up. You know, I'm tired of being this way. I'm going to go be healthy. So then you restrict yourself. You hear about a vegan diet. You hear about a keto diet. You hear about a carnivore diet. And you're like, I'm going to, I'm going to intermittent fast. I'm going to like eat 200 calories a day or whatever, a thousand calories a day. I'm going to run 20 miles, all these things. Your body's not built for that and you'll fail.

I'm sorry, it's not a willpower issue, it's a physiological issue. And so what happens is then they fail and then they end up binge eating something bad for them, like really bad, like a tub of Ben and Jerry's or In-N-Out French fries or something. And then now they physically feel good because they ate, but then they psychologically feel terrible.

They have this guilt spiral that they go in. And they're like, oh, I'm so bad, I have to punish myself even more by eating 800 calories a day and running 20 miles a day. And then they'll fail, and then they'll binge again. And so it's like this restrict, binge, guilt cycle. Restrict, binge, guilt, punish. On and on and on. And that is no way to become healthy.

Not only are you going to mess your psychology up, but you're going to kill your metabolism in the process because that's not how the body works. Your body will adapt to eat a lower amount of calories and you'll still get fat. That's just how it works. So in order for the health people to break free of this and for the unhealthy people to break free of the fact

that they eat junk all day they have to know that healthy food tastes good is more enjoyable and you can eat unrestricted you'll be full, you'll be satisfied you can do all that and still be optimally healthy and in fact that is how to be optimally healthy all the healthiest people I know eat this way. I know plenty of people that do all this restrictive stuff,

they're not as healthy. All the healthiest people I know eat what we talk about. So I think that's the important thing. And the only way to really show people this is through demonstration. You go to a party, you bring your good food, you bring your moss chips, of course, or whatever. You show your friends that, hey, I'm a healthy person, this is how I eat, my life's enjoyable, of course. Or whatever, you show your friends that like, hey, I'm a healthy person.

This is how I eat. My life's enjoyable. So can you. And I think that's how we really fix this whole issue. So that's what I'll end with. That was awesome. What a way to end. I mean, more people need to hear this

because I would say out of all the comments and DMs I get, that's probably the most prevalent that I get is a variation of people saying, oh, come on, live a little, life is too short. Or how can you do this to yourself? And also I'm sitting here being like, you're feeling pity for me and I'm over here living my best life.

Like literally eating- Yeah, you're doing fine. Like I see your Instagram stories. You're doing fine. I'm thriving. I'm like, I'm thriving over here. And also don't ever feel restricted. I'm thriving. I'm thriving over here. And also, don't ever feel restricted. I eat all the

foods I want to eat. I have a rule that my food needs to not only be good for me, but also taste good. I don't choke back disgusting foods because I think, oh, I have to eat this because it's healthy for me. No. I don't

do that. And that's so counterproductive because like, and this is the real, like the final quote unquote red pill here is that like doing that is actually how to be healthy. Because some people, oh, you're coping. You just want to eat tasty things. Like, no, human taste as all animal taste did evolved to find the best foods for us through taste.

That's why we have taste buds. But if you eat artificial foods, the chemical engineers hijacked your natural taste mechanism. So you'll find tasty things that aren't healthy for you. But if you're only eating things that are natural, as in you could take a time machine 200 years ago and find actual humans eating this. If you eat only those things, eat whatever you want,

and you'll be fine. I love it. Okay, I want to ask you one more question before we go. Cause I ask all of my guests this, what are your personal health non-negotiables? So these are things that you do either daily or weekly non-negotiable. Oh, wow. How long you got? Or you can give us like a skim, but like your favorite, maybe you're your top couple that you're just like, I have to do this every day for my health. I do not drink tap water. It's a big one. I do not wear plastic clothing.

And I do not eat food that is invented in the past hundred years. And I don't eat anything that is invented in the past hundred years. And I don't eat anything that's not organic. And then the last sort of minor thing is I think about 90% of everything that I eat comes from a local farm, within an hour from here, which is great. Not everyone can do that because they don't necessarily live in a place where there's good farms. In New Jersey, ironically enough, we have the ability to do this,

the Garden State, for a reason. But yeah, 90% of what I eat comes from a local farm. That's incredible. All right, please tell people where they can find you online. Where can they find Masa Chips? Really Tan Man, spelled as you would imagine, Really Tan Man, on every social platform and then you can find Masa Chips

on Instagram and Twitter and you can find Masa Chips themselves on MasaChips.com Awesome, thank you so much I don't know if you have a code Do you have a code? Oh, I don't Okay, let's do it. Can we make it real foodology?

Absolutely. All right. Great. Also, if you're going to buy Masta chips, real foodology for your discount. Great. I love it. You guys definitely check them out.

Masta chips are the best tortilla chip you will ever have. So try them now. Thank me later. DM me and be like, these chips changed my life. Also DM ReallyTanMan. Let him know. Awesome. Yeah. Thank you guys so much for listening

and thanks for coming on, Steven. This was really fun. That's been fun. Yeah, thanks Courtney. Thank you. Thank you so much for listening to this week's episode of The Real Foodology Podcast. If you liked the episode,

please leave a review in your podcast app to let me know. This is a Resonant Media production produced by Drake Peterson and edited by Mike Fry. The theme song is called Heaven by the amazing singer Georgie. Georgie is spelled with a J. For more amazing podcasts produced by my team, go to resonantmediagroup.com. I 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.