Realfoodology - You Don’t Have to Be Wealthy to Eat Healthy - Here’s Why | Jason Karp

Episode Date: July 1, 2025

257: Jason Karp is the CEO of Human Co, and, like me, eats, sleeps and breathes clean living. Jason’s company is behind Hu Chocolate, True Food Kitchen (one of my favorite restaurants), and Grove Collaborative, to name a few. He and I spoke together at the nutrition round table last fall in Washington D.C., and I am so excited for you to hear about the work he’s done to bring clean food to the masses and catch up with the rest of the world by banning synthetic food dyes.  Topics Discussed: →  Why Jason has dedicated his life to clean food    → The Hu Chocolate origin story  → What it took to make True Food Kitchen 100% seed oil free     → How Jason got states to ban synthetic food dyes (yay!)  → Why you don’t have to be rich to eat clean  → The future of the clean food movement Timestamps: → 00:00:00 - Introduction  → 00:04:20 - What Inspired Hu Kitchen  → 00:05:57 - Jason’s Health Journey → 00:07:25 - Why He Started Hu Kitchen  → 00:08:58 - How to Pronounce "Hu Kitchen"  → 00:09:36 - The Story Behind Hu Chocolate  → 00:12:02 - Why Hu Kitchen Closed  → 00:13:58 - From Hu Kitchen to True Food Kitchen  → 00:17:07 - When Jason Discovered True Food Kitchen → 00:19:01 - How True Food Kitchen Got Started  → 00:20:07 - Removing Seed Oils from True Food Kitchen  → 00:22:13 - Upgrading vs. Downgrading Ingredients → 00:23:45 - The Grim Truth: Cleaner Food = Lower Profits  → 00:24:46 - How Grocery Stores Prioritize Unhealthy Low-Cost Foods  → 00:27:59 - You Shouldn’t Need to Be Wealthy to Eat Healthy  → 00:30:46 - Changing the System to Favor Clean Ingredients  → 00:34:49 - If You Can Afford a Smartphone, You Can Afford to Eat Healthy  → 00:39:30 - Jason’s Clean Eating Challenge to His Networks  → 00:41:59 - Why the Data on Seed Oils Feels Inconclusive  → 00:43:28 - How ‘The China Study’ Got Debunked  → 00:46:05 - Using Common Sense to Make Decisions on Diet → 00:49:20 - Synthetic Food Dyes in the United States vs. Abroad → 00:56:05 - Jason Role in the National Fight Against Food Dyes  → 00:59:50 - How Clean Food Became Political  → 01:05:28 - The Clean Food Movement Needs Compassion   → 01:11:15 - Controlling the Controllables without Getting Neurotic  → 01:15:45 - Jason Karp and HumanCo Social  Show Links: → HumanCo brands - Cosmic Bliss & Against The Grain Gourmet → Amara: HUMANCO (20% off discount) - Amara   → True Food Kitchen: Mention to your server “JUSTTRUE10” for $10 off of $50 at True Food Kitchen through June 30th - TFK → Grove Collaborative: "HUMANCO" will give new customers 25% off orders $75+. Grove Sponsored By: → Lineage Provisions | Try my favorite Grass-Fed Beef Tallow from Lineage Provisions. Use the code REALFOODOLOGY for 10% off at lineageprovisions.com. → CURED Nutrition | Right now, CURED Nutrition is offering my listeners an exclusive 20% off Serenity Gummies with a monthly subscription. Just head to www.curednutrition.com/REALFOODOLOGY and use the code REALFOODOLOGY at checkout. → Qualia | Check out qualialife.com/REALFOODOLOGY for up to 50% off and use code REALFOODOLOGY at checkout for an additional 15% off. → MASA Chips | Go to MASAChips.com/Realfoodology and use code Realfoodology for 25% off your first order. → Paleovalley | Save at 15% at paleovalley.com/realfoodology and use code REALFOODOLOGY. → Pacha | Head to pachasoap.co and use code REALFOODOLOGY at checkout for 20% off your entire order. Check Out Jason:  → Jason Karp Instagram → HumanCo Instagram Check Out Courtney: → LEAVE US A VOICE MESSAGE → Check Out My new FREE Grocery Guide! → @realfoodology → www.realfoodology.com → My Immune Supplement by 2x4 → Air Dr Air Purifier → AquaTru Water Filter → EWG Tap Water Database Produced By: Drake Peterson

On today's episode of the Real Foodology Podcast. When you downgrade the ingredients, it improves your profit margins. And that's what's happened over the last 40 years with modern business. And part of the reason of why we're here today when everyone's like, how did our food system get so fucking toxic? It's primarily because of capitalism. Hello, friends. Welcome back to another episode of the Real Foodology Podcast.

As always, I'm your host, Courtney Swan, and today's guest is Jason Karp. You may recognize him as one of the many amazing people that I spoke to the Senate with at the Nutrition Roundtable last fall in DC. He's also the CEO and founder of Human Co., which owns a bunch of different companies like True Food Kitchen and Cosmic Bliss, which is one of my favorite ice creams, also Against the Grain, so many amazing companies that we talk about. He's also the co-founder of Hue Kitchen, which you may recognize from those amazing chocolate bars that so many of us love.

And if you wait till the very end, we actually have some amazing codes for you if you want to save a little bit of money on things like True Food Kitchen and Grove Collaborative, which is another company that he's involved with. So please stick around to the very end and you'll get those codes. Thank you so much for listening. If you could take a moment to rate and review the podcast. I know I ask this every week, but if you have not taken a moment to do it yet, it takes about two seconds. A five-star rating review can help this show more than you realize.

So thank you so much. And if you're loving this episode, tag me at Real Foodology and make sure that you tag Jason as well, and he shares his tag at the end. It's also in the show notes, so make sure you share it on social media, and we will hopefully get back to it and repost you guys. So thank you so much for listening. One of my absolute favorite cooking fats is beef tallow. And the one that I trust is from Lineage Provisions.

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Take a moment for yourself. You deserve it. Jason, thank you so much for coming on. Thank you for having me. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. It's going to be having me. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. It's going to be super fun. Yeah.

Let's get into it. So actually, I don't know if we've ever talked about this. I've talked about it a lot with Jordan. I was a Hugh Kitchen super fan when you had the actual restaurant in New York. So I used to work as a nutritionist for a pop star on the road. I was with her for four years and she was based out of New York in the very beginning of when we started working together. Is that right? Yeah. Which pop star? Tovlo. Oh wow. Yeah, I remember. Yeah, sure.

Yeah, so I was with her for four years and in the beginning she was based out of New York and so I would go and you know I'd spend like two three weeks out there and I would be ubering or taking the train every day to Hugh Kitchen. Yeah. Because it was my little mecca. It was one of the only places I found that I could just eat freely and not have to worry about anything on the menu. Yeah, we were crazy. I mean, we were way ahead of, like so far ahead of our time

that people thought we were insane people. Most people don't realize or know that Hugh Kitchen started as a restaurant before it was a chocolate company. I know, which is wild that many people didn't know that. Yeah, a very small percentage know that. I mean, basically the people who lived in New York or the people that were like as crazy as we were Yeah, a very small percentage know that. I mean, basically the people who lived in New York

or the people that were like as crazy as we were 10 years ago, they knew about it. But yeah, Hugh started as a restaurant with my wife, Jessica and her brother, Jordan. The Genesis behind it was several years earlier, I was a hedge fund manager for about 20 years, and in the early part of my career, I got really sick and I was going blind.

I was diagnosed with degenerative eye disease for which there's no cure. And I was supposed to be fully blind by the age of 30. And it was a deeply difficult, depressing, awful time for me. I couldn't understand how I went from what I thought was a pinnacle of health in college, where I was a Division I college athlete, to a few years later I was literally dying and nobody could figure out what was wrong with me and I had all these different diseases.

But the eye disease was the worst because it was literally making me go blind. And it was obviously impacting my daily life significantly. And it's probably too long of a story for this one, but I went down these pretty esoteric areas of research. My background was as a data scientist and as a researcher on indigenous people and how they were significantly healthier than we were even 25 years ago. You know, they generally have zero chronic disease, no obesity, no heart disease, no diabetes.

And it just, it sparked this thought in my mind that definitely was divinely inspired to see if I could cure myself with food at a time, which was 25 years ago now, at a time when that wasn't like a thing. And this was very early Internet, there was not many resources out there, and I wanted to see if I could reverse my diseases through ancestral living. And it worked and that ultimately became there were several kind of inspirations that I was reading along the way Dr. Mark Hyman, Dr. Andrew

Weil who was a founder of True Food Kitchen, yeah and Michael Pollans in defense of food and Omnivore's Dilemma and there were a bunch bunch of these things that I just kept finding and eventually my brother-in-law Jordan started reading them with me. And he wasn't sick like I was, but he started noticing how much better he felt and how much better everything in his life got. And he said to me one day, he was in real estate at the time, I was managing a hedge fund and he said to me, he said, there needs to be the manifestation of all this stuff that we're doing as a restaurant.

Like we need somewhere to eat every day. And I was like, dude, I'm a professional investor. Restaurants are not easy businesses. Like, we don't know the first thing about restaurants. I said, no way. And, you know, if you know Jordan, you know he can be very persuasive. And so we spent a lot of time together on it.

And I'm like, you know what? If I could just break even on this thing and I could have a place to eat every day and we could prove to New York City that you could actually have amazing, delicious food that happens to be super clean and done in a way that no one's ever done before, I just kind of said, okay.

And we had no outside investors. It was incredibly imprudent the way we did it, but we hired a bunch of consultants who knew what we didn't know. We were at least humble enough to know what we didn't know. And Hugh Kitchen, Hugh stands for human. Most people call it who, even though it's Hugh. We went to our absolute best efforts

to try to make people pronounce a HU, even on like the Chalka Bar, it says, get back to human with the HU logo in the word human. And people still call it HU, but fine. But it started as a restaurant. And our entire mission was the fact that we don't live in an optimal way the way humans thrive. And so hence the phrase, get back to human, which is why it's called Hue.

And the chocolate was an accident that came out of the restaurant where we had the, you may recall, we had that baked good section where we had gluten and grain-free scones, muffins, cookies. All the paleo bread that you guys had. Yeah, the pumpkin and the banana bread. But we needed chocolate chips for our stuff. And we wanted, it was right before we opened, we could not find chocolate chips that met our specs.

Because every chocolate chip that we could find had genetically modified white cane sugar in it, it had psilocybin in it, it had preservatives in it, and we could not find chocolate chips. So we just said, you know, we got to make our own chocolate chips for the baked goods. And we hired this consultant to help us do it with two ingredients, which is organic cacao and organic unrefined coconut sugar. And the consultant who was a chocolatier thought we were insane. He's like, you can't make chocolate this way. All chocolate, which we didn't know, but

all chocolate that you could find except for it like farmers markets was made with highly refined white cane sugar. That's like a global thing. And the first few versions that we tried with just those two ingredients, the only two ingredients, those first two versions we tried were disgusting. But we learned the hard way. There's incredible, if not close to infinite variability on how you make chocolate. And what I think made Hugh chocolate so amazing,

and I credit it to Jordan, was the way in which we make our chocolate was highly, highly differentiated and unique. And then we started selling, we liked the chocolate chips so much, Jordan said, hey, let's turn them into chocolate bars and sell them in the restaurant. And they were like handmade

and they didn't have like ingredient labels on them. I remember them. And we were selling them for 10 bucks a bar and people were buying them five at a time. And after a couple months, I said to Jordan, I go, Jordan, like, like, I'm a businessman, we got something with this. Like, people are coming in from out of state to buy our chocolate.

And then we had this lucky break where one of our chefs, his girlfriend was a local forager at the Columbus Circle Whole Foods location. Back pre Amazon, when Whole Foods could have these local foragers, they basically buy local products and just bring them into one store, even though they didn't have like the regulatory framework that you need to sell national products. And she said, she said, this is the best healthy chocolate I've ever had, can we sell it in Whole Foods? And we said, sure.

And that was the beginning of Hugh Chocolate. Wow. I actually have never heard that story before. And then you guys sadly closed during COVID, I think, right? Yeah. You kitchen, I was bummed. Yeah, we were open almost nine years and our lease was up and we had kind of a lucky break

in timing because by that point, the chocolate company or the chocolate part of Hugh had become like what Hugh was. And the restaurant was almost more of this like experience that people like for the first four or five years, like what Hugh was. And the restaurant was almost more of this experience that people, like for the first four or five years, people would know about the restaurant and they'd discover the chocolate. And then in like the second five years,

people knew about the chocolate and they'd come to the restaurant the same way you'd go to like the M&M store in Times Square. And people would be like, this is the Hugh chocolate restaurant. And you know, the restaurant was for a lot for many of us, it was very bittersweet.

It made a little bit of money, but it wasn't. It was a spectacular amount of work. Everything was homemade. Everything was homemade. It was it was basically seven days a week, breakfast, lunch and dinner. We had infinite complexity. Like it was not run as a business. And the amount of work we had to put into the restaurant to like just make it go relative to the chocolate

was so insane that when COVID hit, we could see the writing on the wall very quickly that people just weren't showing up. And we had this huge overhead, we had all these employees and the lease was basically up that year. So we just said, you know what? let's end that chapter, let it go. And I had moved to Austin the year before. So I'd moved to Austin in 2019 and we closed Hue New York in 2020.

And then, you know, and then it just became the chocolate company. Yeah. I remember I ran up to y'all's booth at Expo. It must have been in 2020 and I was like, no, you're closing Hugh Kitchen. I was so bummed. I know, I know. But now, now True Food Kitchen is my like second chapter of the clean restaurant movement. Which is so funny because you didn't even want to open Hugh Kitchen and now here you are opening all these true food kitchens. Yeah. Which true food kitchen is, I mean, Hector and I eat there all the time in Denver.

Yeah. We just love it because it's one of the only places in Denver that we know of that doesn't have seed oils, it has organic ingredients, and it's just really clean, amazing food. We love it. As you all know, I am currently on a fertility journey as I'm hoping to be pregnant by the end of this year. So aging is something that has really been on my mind recently. And I wanted to talk about this supplement that I really love from Qualia called Cynolytic. It's the first of its kind formula designed to help your body naturally eliminate senescent

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Head over to pachasope.co and use code REALFOODOLOGY at checkout for 20% off your entire order. Raise the bar on your next shower or soak because self-care should be as thoughtfully crafted as the food on your plate. Trust me, your skin and your soul will thank you. Go treat yourself. That is p-a-c-h-a-s-o-a-p-P.CO, and use code realfoodology at checkout for 20% off your entire order. Yeah, no, it's, it's, the true food kitchen story is also pretty amusing. And when we had moved to Austin, I have two kids, and we were just looking around for clean places to eat as a family. And I

hadn't heard of True Food Kitchen. I'd certainly heard of Andy Weill and I'd heard he'd started a restaurant, but I didn't know there are two true foods in Austin and there were none on the East Coast. So I'd actually never come across one. And then we heard about it and you know it's basically, it's a more approachable Hugh kitchen. It's obviously, it's bigger, it has servers. It has wine and alcohol. Yeah. Yeah.

It's sort of like hard to describe if you've never been. I kind of describe it as like if you went to Houston's or Hillstones and like you made it healthy or if you had like a healthy or more upscale chilies like that's what true food is yeah and it was far more approachable to me than Hugh was you know Hugh was for the crazy fanatics like we are but like definitely not mass market yeah and we had this investment vehicle that I created under the HumanCo, which is my business called HumanCo, and we buy and build and invest in things that allow people to live healthier lives. That's our mission. And we had this investment vehicle where we were looking to buy a steak of a big business.

And one day we were at lunch, we were going there all the time, and my wife looked at me and she goes, why don't you do it with True Food Kitchen? Because we were looking at all these other companies. And I was like, I don't even know anything about True Food Kitchen. I don't know how big it is, I don't know how many states it's in, like I never looked into it. And then we looked into it, and the more we looked into it, the more I got excited.

And it was started in 2008 by Andy Weil. He partnered with a very famous restaurateur, a guy named Sam Fox, who was the guy behind North Italia and the Henry and a bunch of other brands, the global ambassador in Sam Fox. And Andy was kind of like the North Star Star and Sam Fox was the person who knew how to run a restaurant. And it started in Scottsdale, Arizona. There were about 40 of them when we were looking at buying a steak in it. And today there's 46. And it is the it's the number one full service kind of farm-to-table restaurant in the United States. And right after we made our first investment, they stopped cooking with seed oils, which was over two years ago.

So this was, now it was interesting because I had to, I wanted to say that we were 100% seed oil free. And by the way, Hugh Kitchen was seed oil free back in 2012. I remember. It was insane. And I wanted to say we were seed oil free at True Food Kitchen. But what I realized is that there's still some like ingredients that lurk in like a couple of condiments, you know, one of the gluten-free like hamburger buns had seed oils in it. There were these dried cranberries that were in a couple of the gluten-free like hamburger buns had seed oils in it. There were these

Dried cranberries that were in a couple of the salads that had They're coated in sunflower seed oil and I didn't realize you can't get dried cranberries that aren't coated in sunflower seed oil You can't get them. They don't exist in this country because they don't want this the dried cranberries to stick together And I said to the team I said what would it take for us to go 100% seed oil free? And they're like, well, we got it. Especially with like 46 restaurants, there's a lot of work that goes into that. It's not just like figuring out that this like, oh, get rid of the dried cranberries.

There were recipes that had condiments in it that we didn't technically cook with it, but there was a mayo that had seed oil in it, but there was a mayo that had seed oil in it, and there was a this that had seed oil in it. And it's like, wow, it's like a huge endeavor. And it took the True Food team, kudos to them, almost like a year and a half from when we started to be able to go from 98.5% seed oil free,

and certainly not cooking with it, to 100% seed oil free. And that was as of February of this year that we could say we were the only national restaurant that's 100% C2O-free. That's so amazing. And then we're constantly upgrading the ingredients. That's the other thing that I've done with some of my brands.

We did it when we bought Against the Grain Gourmet, which was our favorite gluten-free, grain-free pizza company in my house. So we bought that company under Human Co. They make amazing, clean labels, simple ingredient gluten and grain-free pizzas out of this like really cute facility in Brattleboro, Vermont. But they were using canola oil. And as soon as we bought it, we substituted out the canola oil for olive oil. But doing that was obviously not good for our margins. It obviously took a while to reformulate and figure it out. But I feel like, I feel like entrepreneurs who have some flexibility

with their investors, which fortunately I do, I feel like we have a duty to upgrade the ingredients, not downgrade the ingredients. And as a lifelong professional investor, I can tell you that I've almost never, like I could count on one hand in 27 years of being a professional investor, the number of companies that have upgraded ingredients over time instead of downgraded. Because when you downgrade the ingredients, it improves your profit margins. And so all these big companies, all these big private equity firms, whenever they buy companies, it's not that they're malicious and they're like, ooh, I want to poison Americans.

It's that it's more profitable. So they look at it and they're like, oh wait, like we could substitute this thing out for something that's cheaper, more reliable, and that's going to improve our profits. Let's do that. And that's what's happened over the last 40 years with modern business. And part of the reason of why we're here today when everyone's like, how did our food system get so fucking toxic? It's primarily because of capitalism and the profitable. And so true food and against the grain and cosmic bliss

and Amara baby foods, which is one of our businesses also, we have like gold standard ingredients and we're constantly looking to upgrade them. And that's something that I rarely see. I know. And how, because I know so many people are asking, okay, first of all, how do we get here? But then how do we fix this?

Like, how do we incentivize these companies to actually make a good profit while also creating healthy, clean products for people? That's the hardest thing, to be honest. You know, what I have done, even though like some of my investment outcomes have been very good and and you know, we ended up selling Hugh, Jordan still works there, but we ended up selling Hugh for a very high valuation. But Hugh never really made money and and the restaurant did, but the Chalk chocolate company didn't. And I view part of what I do as partially philanthropic. Now, I'm fortunate that I can do that

because of all the success that I've been blessed with over the last 30 years. But it's really hard, and it's why you don't see more healthy food companies, because it is inherently lower margin and the problem is that so much of food consumption comes from retail channels like grocery stores places like Walmart and Costco and Target and you know, H-E-B and you name it and

all these grocery stores have a promise of low prices. And some of them, like Walmart, have everyday low price where they're literally competing on price. And when you're competing on price and that's the message you send to your consumer, Doritos will always be cheaper than Sietse because they have much larger production capacity,

it's made with a lot of chemicals, and it's just inherently a higher profit margin item. And it's much harder for the little guy to fight the bigger guys because they have a lot more marketing budget, they have a lot more profits, and then they have this really insidious relationship with the grocers that very few people will tell you about. Most consumers don't know this, but almost all the grocery stores, except for the club ones like Costco, they have two forms of payment that they receive from food companies that are basically bribery, but they have an industry term for the bribery.

One is called slotting and one is called tradesmen. Slotting is when you pay the grocery store for specific positioning and placement and you're like literally paying them to slot your product, which of course you shouldn't have to do because that's the business the grocery store is in. Yeah, that's crazy. But they pay for slotting and trade spend is this catch-all bullshit term for in-store marketing, but they're paying the grocery store to do it. And it turns out in the grocery stores don't disclose this, and they never will publicly disclose this,

that most of the grocery stores make the super majority of their profits off of slotting in tradesmen. They don't make that much money off of selling the food. And so, when you take a mega brand like Frito-Lay, which is owned by Pepsi, which is what makes Doritos, they make so much money from selling bags of chemicals and air, which is what Doritos are, that they then take that money

and they turn back to the grocery store and they keep re-bribing them all the time. So that that's why when you go in the center of a grocery aisle, you see a whole center section of the shittiest food because they pay for that. And then the little guy who uses and procures real ingredients, they can't charge what they need to charge because these grocery stores have hooked all of us on artificially low-priced

food. This food should never have been this cheap in the first place and and then it turns into this whole gaslighting argument of like oh you have to be wealthy to eat healthy and Like it's it's just it's bad for America if these prices are higher that food should never have been that cheap in the first place And and what's happened is Americans have gotten hooked on? on artificially low priced food. And this is not the case in Europe, which again, most Americans don't know this, that 40, 50 years ago, the percentage of the paycheck was comparable in Europe on food as it is here in the US. So the amount as the average person spends is a percentage of their paycheck.

The percentage of that that they spend on food used to be comparable in Europe to what it is here in the US 40 years ago. Today Americans spend half as a percentage of their paycheck on food that Europeans do. I mean, it's crazy. I don't think a lot of people know this, actually. It's a startling statistic. And it's not because we've gotten richer. It's because we've gotten grosser.

And again, like, it's normalized for everyone's paycheck. So this isn't just like for wealthy people. And the reason is is that we have figured out a way to make food artificially too cheap because it's not real. And so then when I go into a grocery store and I try to sell Cosmic Bliss, and Cosmic Bliss is organic, we have a plant-based, we have 100% grass-fed dairy line, we have no refined sugar.

It's so good, by the way. It's so good, by the way So when I go into a grocery store and and I say hey I need to sell a pint of cosmic bliss For about eight dollars to nine dollars for me to not lose money this isn't like I'm making zero profit and They're like well, but we're selling blue bunny for five fifty And then I say yeah But blue bunny is made out of all chemicals and it's genetically modified white cane sugar.

The first ingredient is sugar. All these ice creams have 40% on average more sugar than we do and ours is coconut syrup or coconut sugar. So ours is unrefined. I'm like, ours is organic, theirs is not organic. If it's dairy, they're using conventionally sourced like abused cows. Yeah, factory farm.

And I'm using pastured regenerative cows that are grass-fed, grass-finished. Like they're apples to oranges. And then I say like, I need to charge $8 just to not lose money. And they go, we can't even put your product in our store, because we can't have a $5 pint of ice cream next to an $8 pint of ice cream. And that is the story of so many healthy food products. And if you have the luxury of being able to sell direct to consumer where it's something that's not refrigerated or not frozen, like you can get away with it.

And that's why there have been a lot of big success stories that are DTC. But when it comes to like refrigeration or frozen, it's impossible. And so I think the entire system needs to change. And I think the first step is what we're doing with HHS in terms of banning some of the ingredients completely so that you don't even have the ability to do that. And then I think it's a big education thing. And what gives me some optimism is that in Europe? Because sometimes people are like well that will be impossible and I say well, they're actually doing it in other countries

They do it in France. They do it in Italy. They do in Japan and they're like, well, how does it work in those countries? And the reason is is that they actually have disdain for ultra cheap food in those countries like they won't buy it that they actually have disdain for ultra cheap food in those countries. Like they won't buy it. That's why they spend twice as much per paycheck on food as we do. Because when they see ultra processed fake shit, they just literally look at it

like the way you would look at poison. They just don't buy it. And so those companies don't succeed. And we, unfortunately in America, ultra cheap food, the Sonic Burger, the Chick-fil-A, the Doritos, because of our advertising budgets, we have made ultra-cheap food cool. Yeah, we've glorified it. We've glorified it.

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Again, that's paleovalley.com slash real foodology. That's the thing, and I've said this for so long. I'm so glad that you brought this up because I've said this so much on the podcast that people don't really actually understand what the true cost of food is because we're not seeing it in the grocery store because also too, alternatively, we have a government that's paying subsidies to farmers to grow certain crops, which is why in ultra processed foods you always see in the back of the label, may contain corn, wheat and soy. It's in literally everything because it's so cheap and we have a surplus of it.

And so we don't actually know what the true cost of food is. And we need a whole reframe of society to start waking up and understanding that we're spending more money on luxury cars and, you know, brand new iPhones every year and, you know, designer bags. And we are on the very food that fuels us and keeps us alive. And everybody thinks like, oh, you know, yeah, I'll go, you know, buy a new iPhone every year, but God forbid I buy anything organic because it's so expensive. Yeah, yeah, this is a topic I bring up a lot and it's controversial, but it shouldn't be.

I was on the board at one of the top nutrition schools for four years, and I got to see a lot of the studies and a lot of the research and a lot of the polls, and this comes up all the time. And this misnomer that you need to be wealthy to eat healthy. Yeah. And one of the studies they found,

and this is all common sense too, but is that if you cut off, so if you look at all the different demographics in the US in terms of their socioeconomic status, and you cut off at like the poverty line where people can either afford a smartphone or not afford a smartphone. So that's the delineation. Can either afford a smartphone or not afford a smartphone. So that's the delineation. Can you afford a smartphone or not? If you cannot afford a smartphone,

which is about 94, 95% of the US has a smartphone of some kind. If you can afford a smartphone, then you absolutely, and I'll get into it in a second, then you absolutely can afford to eat much healthier. If you're below the poverty line and you literally need calories and you're on SNAP, it's a different discussion.

And so separate those for a second. And then when you double click into the lowest socioeconomic demographic of the people who can afford a smartphone. So these are people who are basically right on the line. And then you double click and you say, well, what are they spending money on? Because they do have a little bit of discretionary income.

You find that they're spending money on things like beer and cigarettes and even like streaming apps, like everyone has Netflix or Spotify or something, or they have a pair of Nikes that are $180, and you start realizing like, oh wow, like this is totally selective. And then you also discover that once in a while they buy a Frappuccino or a Starbucks for $7. And you're just like, so wait a minute,

you're complaining that you won't pay an extra $3 for a pint of ice cream. That's organic That's four servings by the way. It's four servings. Yeah, right. You're complaining about that But you're buying a hundred and fifty dollar pair of Nikes because they're cool Or you have Netflix or you have spot like you don't need Spotify. You don't need Netflix You don't need like a ever Starbucks. Yeah and and unfortunately then you get into this like freedom of choice debate and people start to get angry. But if you're just talking about true capacity, like is there money for them to reallocate and say,

you know what, maybe you don't buy that frappuccino and maybe like, like what we found, and the data might be a little outdated now, is if you spend $2 to $3 a day extra, and you spend a little bit more time in terms of shopping, you can dramatically upgrade the quality of your food and not be stuck with the way I think everyone thinks we have to be stuck with the ultra cheap food. Well, and this is controversial, but I always bring up the point that, when you start feeding your body with more nutritious foods, your brain gets clear, you can actually get yourself hopefully out of maybe that lower socioeconomic situation

because you're actually thinking clearer and you're able to show up for your job with more energy. And this is just my personal opinion. 100%. But like nobody talks about that. Or for you, you are the perfect example. Think about how many people in those situations are suffering from type two diabetes.

Maybe they have to get a leg chopped off, God forbid. Your eye situation that you had, you were able to actually completely reverse that and now you're not blind anymore. And you can see that greatly impacted your entire trajectory of your life. And we're not talking about that where this could actually greatly change

the entire trajectory and quality and situation of your life if you just simply make a couple upgrades around your diet and lifestyle. Yeah, and look, I've also had a lot of people that I've met over the years since I've been an activist, and I've said, look, don't knock it until you try it. And I will make a recommendation,

and I have in the past to certain people, where I'm like, look, if you just go to the grocery store. So the one thing, so the price thing is a misnomer. What's not a misnomer is time. And the convenience part of it is a big deal. Yeah. Because a lot of people don't have that much time to cook at home.

Yeah. But if you go to a grocery store, you know, you can buy grass-fed beef that can feed your entire family for less than like a family meal at Chipotle. And like a whole meal. And what I say is, look, tell me what your budget is. I'll tell you what to buy. You got to go buy it at a grocery store. Just eat this way for two weeks, not months, not years,

two weeks, just two weeks. And I want you to come back to me in two weeks and tell me how you feel. And I haven't had one of those ever come back to me and say, no difference. And so it's almost like we need to figure out a way to like do a challenge with people. Where you're like, just try it for a couple weeks.

Like, you can knock it all you want. You can make fun of me. You can call me crazy. Just try it for two weeks. You don't need any scientific data. Like, just try it. And that's also where I get, you know, and you've seen this too, where we've had so many, like, opponents that have been claiming pseudoscience with us

and they're claiming that we don't, because we don't have a PhD next to our name that we can't possibly know what we're talking about. In some instances, or they say like, there's just not enough scientific research. And I'll say like- That's on purpose too. Yeah, and I'll just be like, well, I don't need any scientific research,

just try this for two weeks and come back to me. And then like, you can't believe how frequently you'll change people's mind if they just try this for two weeks and come back to me. Yeah. And then like you can't believe how frequently you'll change people's mind if they just try it themselves. Well, there's also that statistic that on average takes about 17 years for the science to catch up to what we already logically know to be true. Yes. Logic is fast, science is slow. That is just a general statistic that we know about this.

So the people that are saying, oh, we need, you know, we don't have the science to back that up. Well, we have plenty of people just changing their lives and seeing the difference in how they feel to know that we're onto something, you know? And another thing is there is plenty of science about it, but a lot of it's getting suppressed by, you know, the companies that stand to make money off of us being sick and eating our ultra-processed,

or eating their ultra-processed foods. There's a lot of science. And it's just in some of the instances, like the battle that I was facing with the food dyes was, and the battle that we faced with some of the seed oils, is that it's not overwhelmingly conclusive, right? There's plenty of science that show that seed oils are bad. There's plenty of science that shows that

all the synthetically derived petroleum-based artificial food dyes are bad. But there's also quote science that shows that it's fine. all the synthetically derived petroleum-based artificial food dyes are bad. But there's also quote science that shows that it's fine. And the first thing I bring up, and again, I used to be a data scientist, so I've like read countless nutritional studies for 20 years, and my background was literally in statistics. And the thing that you have, one of the first things you learn

when you're becoming like a data scientist or you're dealing with statistics is garbage in, garbage out in terms of the data itself. And is the study itself reliable? Is the study itself replicable? And what are the inherent flaws with any of these studies? And what most people don't talk about is that all

human nutritional studies are flawed. Every single one. And now it doesn't mean that you can't rely on it at all, but you have to understand that we have never been able to, and it's both unethical and it's also impossibly impractical, to try to isolate all the variables when you're dealing with humans. And you know, you could try to do a study and say, oh, like, like the example I always bring up was was one of the most famous studies from about 25 years ago, they tried to advocate for veganism was called the China study. Oh, yeah. Yeah, and the China study has now since been thoroughly debunked, but it was a very famous Harvard like legit study

That basically showed that when the standard of living Amongst some of the rural population in China started to improve and they went from eating basically grains and What you would consider basic stuff to being able to afford meat that when they started bringing meat into their diet, modern Western diseases, particularly cancer, started showing up. And so they made this unbelievably robust, thick, you know, peer-reviewed study that basically said when you bring meat into the diet it brings cancer in. But they weren't able to isolate every single variable. And so for example, like they weren't able to isolate that when people standard of living goes up and

they start eating meat, are they eating french fries with that meat? Are they eating like processed food with that meat? Are they smoking more with that meat? Are they living a more stressed lifestyle? Are they living in more industrial places? So did they move from a place that had no pollution to Beijing, where the pollution is like top three in the world? And then the probably the most important variable that's never been tested, that I bring up all the time with concepts around meat consumption, is what is the quality of the meat?

Exactly. They never talk about this in the city. What is the quality of the meat? Exactly, they never talk about this in the city. What is the quality of the meat? So they went from like, were they eating grass-fed, grass-finished, pastured cows? Or were they eating industrial factory-farmed cows that are literally full of antibiotics and hormones and shoved in cages and abused? Like, we have no idea. Like, there should be a study on people who eat just meat and then like you start asking questions like what other variables can you isolate? And you realize that even at its simplest form, if you take identical twins who are literally the exact same DNA and you take one twin and you massively sleep deprive them

and you put them under a ton of stress and you can measure that by their cortisol levels. And you take the other twin and you allow them to live with good sleep, low stress, and you feed them the identical diet. They will metabolize it differently. They will show different markers of inflammation just from sleep deprivation and just from stress. And we most certainly do not control for that variable. No. Yeah, I mean, that's the thing.

And I'm so glad that you brought this up. It is very hard to quantify any of this because of all these different lifestyle factors that you just mentioned. Also, there was this meat study that came out a couple years ago, and all these people were sending it to me being like, see, I told you meat causes cancer. Well, you read into the study and they were labeling the meat all these people were sending it to me being like, see I told you meat causes cancer. Well you read into the study and they were labeling the meat that these people were eating in the study lasagna. Well what's in the lasagna? Pasta, along with the ground beef, hamburgers with the bun on. And that's what they were calling meat and

saying that this causes cancer. And it's just, we're not actually like… That's why I think common sense and intuition are so important and valuable. And like one of the areas of common sense and intuition... So I have a gluten intolerance. And it never... And it kind of came out more and more and more pronounced as I've gotten older. And some of the functional medicine people just completely rule out gluten and say like, gluten's bad, gluten's inflammatory, you can't have any of it.

And like, I wanted to believe that because I'm gluten-free. But then, you know, my common sense, I've developed this, I have a lot of different like common sense rules of thumb. But one of them is if it's a food that's been around for thousands of years and has literally been part of civilization, which bread has been, right? And there's also cultures that like Mediterranean,

you know, I go to Italy and France every year, like they have bread five times a day, right? And they don't have anywhere close to our autoimmune issues that we do. And so when I hear about somebody claiming that there is an ingredient that has been civilizational and been around for thousands of years and to say that it is poison, my red flags in my head go up and go, wait a minute, there's something else going on.

Because there's just no way that there's something that bad that like literally found like civilizations and the foundations of which were built upon. Yes, yes. And so with the gluten as an example, I think glyphosate has a huge role in what's happened, if not like the primary role. And I also know that, and they've shown this, that the ancient wheat varietals that were

used in biblical days and are still used in many of these European countries have significantly less gluten than the wheat crop we use today. And we've hybridized the plant for hundreds of years for robustness. And in doing so, we've massively increased the gluten quantity. And so there's like a lot of those things, like when you hear something's bad, the first thing I would tell like your listeners to ask

is like, is this something that my grandmother cooked with? Or is this something that's been around for hundreds or thousands of years? And if it is, there's something else going on. And it's probably the processing, and it's probably what we've done to it, and it's not the food itself. Exactly, Robin O'Brien, to quote her from her book

years and years ago, it's not the food, it's what we've done to the food. 100%. And you can apply this across the board, dairy, meat, and then our ultra-processed food, which brings me to how you and I first met, which is when we spoke to the Senate roundtable and you very famously were talking about the food dyes that are in Kellogg's Fruit Loops that are not here, that are here in America, but they're not selling that in other countries.

Right. Which this always blows people's minds. And I'm sure most people listening by now already know about all this, but I want to talk about this a little bit because your perspective about all of this is just very important. So in America, we're adding these artificial petroleum-based food dyes, and then you look at other places like Canada, which the companies are making these for other countries in Canada. They use things like watermelon juice, blueberry juice. So what's going on there?

And let's talk about what just happened with the FDA like a week ago. Yeah. No, the last six months have been probably the most consequential in food policy that I've seen in my lifetime. And I've been talking or thinking about this for almost 20 years now. So like first off, it's just awesome that this is now happening. It's so cool. It's so awesome.

And it's so encouraging and I'm so happy and excited that I've had a small part in making it happen. So where this all started was that we have in the US, we have a different regulatory framework called the GRAS policy or the GRAS framework, which stands for Generally Recognized as Safe. It started in 1958. And it was originally done to allow food companies

to take ingredients that everybody knew were fine, things like salt, baking soda, and not have them go through the FDA process for you to add them to formulations of complex ingredients. And because of capitalism and because the FDA has never been well-run, the FDA got kind of overwhelmed, and they allowed or created something

called self-certification, which allowed individual companies to hire their own independent experts who could self-certify, literally, with their own quote research and submit a research report to the FDA that if they came up with a new chemical or a new synthetically derived ingredient that doesn't exist in nature and has never been seen before. And these experts, in some cases, literally it's two months of research. That's it. They basically put together their own report, they send it to the FDA,

the FDA rubber stamps it, and then the ingredient is allowed in our food supply. And in Europe, by complete contrast, Europe takes a much more common sense approach to not subjecting their citizens to random, non-natural things. And it's just, they call it the precautionary principle because it is clearly more precautionary to say like, we don't have enough evidence on whether this works or not, or if it's safe or not. We're not just going to subject our people to this unless it's like Conclusively proven that it's safe and in some cases they require testing of up to 10 years before it's allowed in

whereas in our in our much more capitalistic approach We don't want to stifle innovation And we want more and more companies to be created and more things to come on the market and we want to constantly cheapen food, which again, these seem like noble causes, but we didn't really consider the downstream effects of allowing that.

And there have been dozens of ingredients and dozens, frankly, pharmaceuticals that at one point were deemed safe. At one point had many peer-reviewed studies that said they were fine. So like if you were like a hardcore scientist who's looking at the studies, you'd be like, oh, it says it's safe. And then five years later, 10 years later, 15 years later, we learned the hard way where these things were proven. This just happened with Red 3, right?

Where Red 3 was actually banned in everything but food. It was banned in cosmetics in 1990 because it's carcinogenic. And then enough quote studies were now done as of six months ago where they're like, oh wait, like that shouldn't be in our food either. And then they pulled it out. This happened with elestra, this happened with trans fats, this happened with asbestos, this happened with pharmaceuticals like thalidomide.

And Vioxx. Yeah, and Vioxx, and it's happening now with glyphosate. Yeah. And the point of all this is not to get angry at the regulatory system. The point of this this is not to get angry at the regulatory system. The point of this is to highlight to humanity that science is flawed and that we shouldn't over-rely on science at the expense of common sense. Because that's what it shows you.

It shows you if we could have all of these exhaustive peer-reviewed studies for a decade, say it's fine, and then all of a sudden, it's not fine. That needs to tell you that our, quote, like, system is fragile and it's not perfect. And if you know it's not perfect, then you must allow for common sense and you must allow for intuition into the system. And that's what Europe has done a really good job of. And so the Europeans over time basically started requiring warning labels, cigarette-like warning labels on these food dyes.

And then some of the preservatives like BHT and titanium dioxide, those are outright banned. And the big food companies who are multinational corporations, they want to create a product that complies with the standards of these other countries. So they started making versions of the same exact products we have here, like Fruit Loops, with better cleaner ingredients because those countries won't allow the shittier ingredients in them. Or they require you to put a terrible warning label on the front, which they don't want to do.

And most Americans prior to our Senate roundtable were not aware that we didn't have the option as Americans to get the cleaner version. Like we didn't even have a choice. And a lot of the moms that were awakened by that Senate roundtable were like, can't we just have both choices? And then like, if you put a Froot Loops on the shelf that has artificial food dyes and

BHT, and then the Canadian version right next to it that doesn't have that shit, and you make it the same price, let's see how many American moms are going to choose the toxic one. But we don't have that choice. And that created the outrage and that created the momentum. And that's what started all the state legislature, even before what happened like two weeks ago, which was amazing. And I've testified now in front of the Texas House and the Texas Senate three times.

What was the response like for that? Were they pretty receptive? Oh my God, it was amazing. Like, I was kind of nervous going into it that I was going to get like a bunch of you know, gotcha questions and they were

Texas is a very proud patriotic state that really cares about its people which I didn't appreciate until I moved here. I came from New York. Oh yeah, very different. Yeah, I came from New York, very different.

And they were like, this is insane. It wasn't even like, when I displayed it and explained it and showed it, and they have three bills now that are about to pass that are all, that are going ban these out-of-school foods. There's 26 states right now, half the, like more than half the country has some form of legislation or bill to ban a bunch of these synthetic chemicals either out of the entire state or out of the school food programs. Well and I'm so glad that you brought that up because I've been seeing some you know push back from people online saying oh this isn't actually a ban this is just a we're asking them to but this is what people don't

understand is that these companies are going to be required to comply no matter what because yeah 26 plus states are already working on the legislation to ban them anyway. Yeah those are official bans so the state levels are official and like West Virginia is official now, Utah is official, Arizona is official, California is official, Texas will be official very shortly. Those are complete bans with timelines. And I believe that enough states have already moved that it's already done. Because, again, if you know how corporations work,

they're not gonna wanna produce different products for different states. It's too ridiculous. It's a nightmare. It's a nightmare, it's absurd. And then what happened with the FDA and the HHS a couple of weeks ago, two are being phased out immediately of the eight food dyes that they mentioned.

Two are being phased out immediately of the eight food dyes that they mentioned. Six are going to be phased out over the next 18 months after that. But as of today, right now, the approach they're taking, because again, the federal regulatory process is very difficult. And from what I've heard, and I've spoken to one or two companies directly, from what I have heard, they are voluntarily complying, and they are going to voluntarily comply. And I think this, like, this smoke screen that some of the opponents are trying to make of saying, like, oh, it's not official yet, it's not official yet.

Any of these people, and you know the one woman in particular who's the most vocal, she hasn't spoken to the companies. We have. So like, she doesn't know what she's talking about. So sit down. Yeah, just sit down. Just like, just be patient. Yeah, just be patient.

Because she's creating all this uproar and all these people, you know, confusion. If in two years time, if we get to the end of 2027 and none of this has happened and no formulations have changed, I will concede and say yes you were right. But I can tell your listeners with very high confidence that these changes will be happening over the next 18 to 24 months. That's so exciting. It's so amazing. Yeah. What, because I think you speak to this really well, what do you say?

Because I know a lot of the listeners are on board with all of this, right? But a lot of them are probably getting pushback from friends and family. What do you say to people that are like that woman that are hating and pushing back on every move that we're trying to make? How can we come together and try to get everybody on board with this? Yeah, this has probably been the most upsetting part of this whole process because I, you know, I didn't properly calibrate how politically divided

this could become. And, you know, as you may remember on our Senate panel, which was, I think, 12 or 14 people, probably more than half were historically Democratic. Oh yeah, it was very bipartisan. People. Yeah. And during that entire Senate roundtable on chronic disease, and I remember this because it came up right afterwards, not once was the word Republican or Democratic mentioned. And I think and obviously you know Senator, Secretary Kennedy was historically extremely left and comes from the most Democratic

family of all time. And I think as soon as he joined forces with Trump, who's obviously so polarizing, it turned a lot of people against Kennedy, and it turned a lot of people against Make America Healthy Again, because they viewed it as an implicit endorsement of Trump. And I just think it's so silly, because I think what a lot of us are is the people who have been involved in this movement is we are what I would call truth seekers. We're just looking for truth. We don't care. You know, and I will, and I'm very open minded, but I will negatively judge somebody if they can't separate the message from the messenger. And there's a lot of things that I don't like about Trump,

like a lot. But there's some things he says that I'm like, yes, I completely agree with that. There's things that Bobby Kennedy says that I don't agree with. And I think a proper democratic society allows for free speech and allows for disagreement. And I think to be a productive citizen,

you have to be able to separate the message from the messenger. And there will be people you don't like who happen to have a correct statement. And there will be people that you do like that happen to have an incorrect statement. And you have to be able to be intellectually honest and secure enough in your own convictions

that you can separate those two. And for me, I view the epidemic of mental health, the epidemic of physical health, and the epidemic of planetary health, which I call the meta-crisis, to be a completely existential situation for humanity. And if we do not address the root causes of this meta crisis, we could debate all we want about all of these other silly things. But if we're not here, it doesn't matter.

And so to me, the chronic disease epidemic is at the ground zero epicenter of the problem. And I will put aside my politics, I will put aside my feelings of individual people because I know for the betterment of our children, we have to change this stuff. And I wish that, you know, I've gotten hate mail and hate DMs from my friends.

Me too. I have things froms from my friends. Me too. I have things from people I consider friends. I had to block somebody that I thought was a good friend who had such massive Trump derangement syndrome that they could not see that what I was doing had nothing to do with an endorsement of Trump. That it was simply, I need to stop poisoning my children. And you could just see it.

It is like a mind virus that takes over people. And I think poisoning our children should not be a political or partisan thing. This should be something that we should objectively talk about. And I don't care if it makes Trump look good. I don't care who it makes look good or who it makes look bad. This is something we have to solve. Yeah. And from my perspective, my message has largely stayed the same for the last 14 years, and

it's still the same now. And I'm just grateful that we have somebody on a public political stage actually talking about these issues. Right. However we can get this move forward is, to me, the best way to do this. And if it's going to be be under Trump then so be it But there's so many other amazing people that are involved Bobby Kennedy Marty McCary, you know, there's so many people that are pushing this forward and this really has become this amazing

Grassroots movement that has been largely been moved by the people it has and the moms and the moms and the moms Mom, you know because I think the moms. And the moms. And the moms, you know, because I think the moms, I mean, look, I think there are many concerned dads, and I'm a concerned dad. Of course, yeah. But you know, the moms have really come out in a way that I was so pleasantly surprised by in terms of their grassroots activism. The number of people that showed up with us to the Kellogg's march was unbelievable. We had a thousand people show up for that in Battle Creek, Michigan in like October.

I mean, that was crazy. Amazing. But it's such an interesting time. And the one thing I will say too, that sometimes I have publicly talked about with Callie and Vani, who are two of my partners on like the initial food die momentum, is I think in the beginning of this movement, we had to be more loud, antagonistic, and divisive

to make our point and to be heard. But now in some respects we've won. And now I think it's really important that we drop the anger and we drop the antagonism because all we're doing is we're creating more divisiveness instead of less. And I think compassion and more what I would call feminine energy needs to be brought into the conversation because it's gotten very macho and very like loud, angry, yelling, embarrassment. And that's not my style.

And I also just don't believe you will get as many people on board if you're doing it through anger and antagonism than if you're doing it through compassion. And what I've seen, and I've had a lot of first-hand conversations with people who were on the other side, is that humans in general have a really hard time drastically changing their mind. It's just a natural instinctive thing. And it requires a lot of strength and courage to take something that you held so deeply and be like, wait, I was wrong, oh my God,

I gotta completely change my mind on this. That was a skill I had to develop early on as an investor. Because to be a good investor, you have to change your mind when facts change rapidly. And it's very hard for people to change their mind. And I think to get people to embrace the fact that we have been lied to for so long about a lot of topics, not just food,

whether it's the JFK assassination or it's the UFO phenomenon, like there's a lot of things we've been lied to about that historically everyone used to think we're all conspiracy theory things, but they're not. And I mean, there's obviously plenty of conspiracy theory things that are in course, but, but since I've been really deep in this movement for six months, and I've been involved tangentially with a lot of government officials, it's become clear to me that there was a lot more things we relied to about than I even thought were possible.

And then to be able to handle that, and be able to wake up in the morning and not think like, oh my God, what do I do? My reality was just shattered. It requires some handholding, and it requires some some compassionate Conversation to say hey like everything's gonna be okay, and I think it's important that all of us in this movement Because we know we're right we don't need to yell we don't need to be angry we don't need to embarrass people

We should just stand confirmed firm in our convictions of truth Because the more I think you yell and the more angry you become We should just stand firm in our convictions of truth because the more I think you yell and the more angry you become, the more it looks like you might not be on the right side because you're going out of your way to try to embarrass somebody else. Yeah. And that's not the way that you win people over too.

You win more bees with honey than you do with fire. Yeah. Marty said. Yeah, and I just think it's a hard thing right now. Like, it's really hard. You know, and like, I have two kids. And they hate the fact that I'm right about food dyes. Yeah.

You know, and they want to eat all the shit that their friends are eating. And it's hard for them because their friends are like, your dad's crazy. Like, let's just eat this stuff. You know? And I'll tell you one funny story. This is amazing. This is amazing.

My daughter is 16, and she was... And we're a very, I'd say, like, we're not a micromanagement-style parenting household. And we believe in our kids learning their lessons on their own, but we obviously try to guide them the way we can. And my daughter was going away for this like weekend school trip and she asked my wife to help her pack. And my wife went, you know, and she started grabbing her bags. And you know, like you're always as a parent,

especially when you have a 16 year old daughter, you're expecting to find like weed, you know, or beer, you know, and there was a bunch of red food dye candy in her bag. And that's what she was hiding in her bag, was red food dye candy. That's funny. And ironically, I was hurt more.

I was like, I wish there was drugs in there. I know. It was like a ritual. This was such a blow to me, you know, as like one of the visible leaders of the food die movement. It's funny. But it's funny because like, you know, it's so hard societally. And at some point, I'm sure cigarettes are viewed the same way.

Oh, for sure. And I think when people ask, like, what do I hope things feel like or look like in 15 years, I said I would like that we look at some of this stuff 15 years later, and they're like, I can't believe we ate that shit. Just like we couldn't believe people used to smoke in airplanes, and we look at that, and we're like, those people were nuts.

But like, now, we think they're nuts, but like 40 years ago when I was on airplanes, like people smoked on airplanes. I know, it's crazy. So that's where I think it's going and I think it's just going to be time. Yeah, I think that's absolutely where this is headed and yeah, we just, we're early adopters to all of this and that's why everybody is yelling at us and thinks that we're crazy, but you know, give it 10 or 15 years.

I've been in this movement long enough to see how all of us, you know, in the beginning, everybody thought I was crazy and like, oh, why do you eat that way? You're nuts. And then now, you know, I have people calling me all the time, wait, you were onto something. But it just takes some time to get there. Yeah. The other thing I think that's come up a lot recently

that I do think is an important topic for your listeners is orthorexia. Yes. And, you know, there's been some funny memes from some of our, like, friends where it's like the phases of becoming awakened, you know? And you go through this phase where you think every single thing around you is complete poison. Yeah.

And you're like, oh my God, I can't live. I have to live in a bubble. I can't live. Everything live in a bubble. I can't live everything's voices everything's voices and I think What I because I've been in this for a long time now the first thing to note to your listeners is that the body has natural detoxification methods and There are a lot of things that in small doses And if you just can't avoid it, like microplastics,

or Forever Chemicals, or Red 40, like you're going to be fine. You know, obviously you don't need to have them. But there are sort of acute levels of toxic exposure. And there's degrees of, I think, toxins that are out there, like, I will never eat glyphosate if I can avoid it, ever. Like, not even like a dose. Like, not even a drop. Like, not even a drop if I can avoid it.

But is it possible that I could go a week without having any microplastics? It's literally impossible. It's not possible. I'm not gonna drink out of a plastic bottle, but like, when you go to a restaurant, you have no idea, like like where certain things came from. And what I will say is that the people who go too neurotic, your stress levels will go up so much that you will overpower all of the things that

you're trying to do by living clean. Because if you get to the point where you no longer can eat out, you get to the point where you no longer can eat out, you get to the point where you no longer can eat with friends, you become very isolated, you're constantly hypervigilant and you're on edge, that's going to be more self-destructive than not doing this. And you're still going to get exposed to some of this stuff. And you're still going to get exposed. Because you can't get hold of it. So I would just say, I know this sounds terrifying, and we're going to clean this shit up,

but there are things that you can do that will massively reduce your toxic burden. If you exercise daily, if you sweat daily, certain supplements that are basic supplements, not biohacking supplements, will dramatically help. There's certain things you can do where you're going to be fine. I just wanted to get that out there because these kinds of conversations lead to incredible neurosis. And I just want people to know

you don't need to be that neurotic. Yeah, and if people have been listening to the podcast for a while, they know I have a personal story where I've talked about all this, where I got really neurotic about it. I was avoiding dinners with friends, I would eat before, because I wanted to make sure everything was organic

and meticulous and that I'd meet friends later when they were finishing dinner. And I had my own come to Jesus moment where I was like, this is not healthy. I'm no longer in community with people. I'm keeping myself from the amazing community and the ability just to enjoy a meal with friends and like laugh and be with people.

And yeah, and you can't control it. So I always tell people, control the controllables, control as much as you can of what comes into your home. If you can, you know, encourage your friends to go eat at places like True Food Kitchen. There's things like that. And then it's all about consistency. It's not about perfection.

Yeah. And you have to understand how to handicap risk. Yeah. Right? Like I know these like crazy biohacker types who are so insane with their food consumption, but they like race cars and like- Yeah, all the microplastics from the tires and-

Well, it's just the danger of racing cars. Well, that too. And like, you know, they do these incredibly risky activities that, you know, they'll constantly be breaking bones or they'll like whatever they'll risk their death But they're so insane about like never having like, you know, an non-organic meal Yeah, and you just like when you're just thinking about handicapping risk, like that's just so dumb. Yeah, you know And so you have to also be like logical with what different risks are you taking on in

your life. And we all take risks every day. And you just have to think about like how much relative risk does this add to my life versus all this other shit I'm doing. And if you're isolating yourself and you're not hanging out with other people and you're lonely, you are having way higher health risk situation than any food or chemical you can avoid. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, it's incredibly important for people to hear. So before we go, I just want you to tell everybody where they can find you and then I know

we have a couple discount codes too for your different comments. Oh yeah, yeah. So my... I'm not that active on social media, I probably have to get better at it, is HumanKARP. So Human K-A-R-P, both on X and on Instagram. I'm pretty much non-existent on LinkedIn anymore. I just like, I can't handle all these different channels. My business is called HumanCo, humanco.com. and the various brands that we have invested in, built or bought are True Food Kitchen, which we talked about, Against the Grain Gourmet, Cosmic Bliss Organic Ice Cream, Amara Organic Toddler Snacks and baby food.

And yeah. And there's Grove Collective. Oh Grove Collaborative. I totally forgot about Grove. Yeah. So Grove is not food. We got involved in Grove a couple years ago because it's the number one non-toxic household marketplace in the country.

And so I'm sure a lot of your listeners have heard of Thrive Market. Thrive, so what Grove, what Thrive is for food, Grove is for personal care, household products. And so a lot of people come to me and they're like, hey, I'm just learning about all this stuff. I want to figure out like how do I clean up my kitchen? How do I clean up my bathroom? How do I have, you know, the entire premise of Grove Collaborative is no plastic. So they have, you know, everything from compostable garbage bags to lotions that come in glass bottles and refills that come in metal to pots and pans that now have no forever chemicals, no nonstick. So if you're looking for ways to upgrade your household room by room without the kind of modern toxic living of like toxic synthetic scents that are in everything, Grove is the

place. And it's a pretty well established company. It's been around for eight years And they just have amazing curation and it's like we do all of our household shopping for like our house Like our house products on Grove. That's amazing I've actually ordered from them before and I loved all this stuff that I got. Yeah, actually so your team emailed me There's a couple codes that I can share with people. Yeah, sure So human co will give customers 25% off orders, $75 or more on Grove Collaborative. Also, I love this one at True Food Kitchen.

If you mention to your server, Just True 10, you get $10 off $50 at True Food Kitchen. Wow. All right. Do that one. Yeah, definitely do that one. Make sure you go. That's mine and Hector's favorite restaurant. We go there all the time when we're traveling.

And then Armora, or how do I say that? Amara. Amara. Amara. Okay, HumanCo provides 20%% off discount and that's baby food, right? Yeah, so it's toddler snacks. I eat them There's a little smoothie melt. Yeah. Yeah, there's a number one smoothie melt in Like in the country for on the natural side Much better than once upon a farm. They're all over. So it's a Costco now Walmart target

And they're they're just organic freeze-dried fruit. No added sugar They have a bunch of different things They're meant for toddlers, but you'll find that you'll eat an entire bag in one sitting and it's like a great snack I love that and they're really simple clean ingredients real food ingredients. Yeah, it's all real food. Yeah, awesome. Jason, thank you so much. This has been great. Yeah, thanks for having me. Yeah, I loved this. Thank you so much for listening to the Real Foodology podcast.

This is a Wellness Loud production produced by Drake Peterson and mixed by Mike Fry. Themesong is by Georgie. You can watch the full video version of this podcast inside the Spotify app or on YouTube. As always, you can leave us a voicemail by clicking the link in our bio. And if you like this episode, please rate and review on your podcast app. For more shows by my team, go to WellnessLoud.com. See you next time. 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

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