Shaun Newman Podcast - #343 - Stephan Guyenet

Episode Date: November 18, 2022

Has his Ph.D. in neuroscience, spent over a decade studying neurodegenerative disease & the neuroscience of body fatness, wrote the book "The Hungry Brain" and is the founder of Red Pen Reviews which publishes the most informative, consistent, and unbiased popular health and nutrition book reviews available. Let me know what you think Text me 587-217-8500

Hey everybody, this is Paul Brandt. This is Wayne Peters. This is Sean Baker. I'm Megan Murphy. This is Jess Moskaloop. I'm Rupa Supermonea. This is Sheila Gunn-Reed, and you're listening to the Sean Newman podcast. Welcome to the podcast, folks.

Happy Friday. Man, another week gone by. You know, a couple things before we get on to the sponsors. One, I've decided not to continue on with the Western Standard. I feel like, you know, there were some people wondering about that. And I just didn't work out. I appreciate everything the Western Standard did for me at the time and allowing me to have a show on everything else.

And I really hope that our paths cross again at some point in the future. I'm certain that something will happen. But for the time being, we're going to go back to Monday, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and the odd Thursday when the mood strikes or, you know, you have some audio that people want to get out and have. And so that's going to leave Thursdays open for the time being. So I'm going to be working on a few different ideas, but right now four shows a week,

just to give everybody a quick update on where we're at and what you can expect moving into the next month, December. Man, December, like Christmas, holy dinah coming fast. And then December 3rd, speaking of December, I'm putting on a Christmas party. I've got a comedian hired. We're going to have supper, supper entertainment, and then obviously at the casino,

you're two feet away from going and enjoying that part of it. I had put it out to a bunch of businesses, podcast supporters, that type of thing. And out of all the possible tables that we had, we only have one left. So it's a table of 10. So if you're a business, and you're looking, you know,

you've got a small thing, and you're looking for something to do for a Christmas party for your employees. Hit me up, shoot me a text. Obviously, in the show notes is my number. Yeah, we're one table away from selling the entire evening out. So it should be a fun evening that's to, December 3rd, doors open at 6 for supper, followed by comedian Sean Lachomber, and then the evening's yours.

So it should be a nice little night, December 3rd once again. Jeez, I'll stop saying that over and over again. Let's get on to today's episode sponsors. Upstream Data, Stephen Barber. I was with Vance Crow here this past week, and we were having a little discussion, and he thinks awfully high, highly, awfully high, awfully highly of Mr. Barber. And I would say if you go back to episodes 163 and episode 318, you can get a feel for him. He obviously owns and operates upstream data, which has taken, you know, a creative solution

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methanol and chemicals delivering to your farm commercial or oil field locations. For more information, visit them at Hancock Petroleum. dot c a he has his phd in neuroscience he spent over a decade studying neurodegenerative diseases and the neuroscience of body fatness he wrote the book the hungry brain and is the founder and director of red pen reviews which publishes the most informative consistent and unbiased popular health and nutrition book reviews available i'm talking about stephen gineh so buckle up here we go This is Stefan Giena and you are listening to the Sean Newman podcast. Welcome to the Sean Newman podcast today. I'm joined by Stefan Giena.

So I hope I pronounce that right because I keep looking at it. You keep telling me DNA and I, for some reason, I want to say something completely different. Either way, welcome aboard and thanks for giving me some of your time. You pronounced it right and thanks for having me on, Sean. Now, I stumbled upon you via Twitter of all places. someone had recommended your book. Normally I don't take recommendations off Twitter for some reason. This one stuck out. I read it and I was like, wow, that was like really useful, I guess, is the way my brain, someone who's wrestled with, sorry, the book is the hungry brain.

And then someone who's wrestled with, you know, weight his entire life as an athlete and everything else eating lights. I just found it really, really good. That being said, Stefan, maybe you could give the listener a little bit of a background on you. You know, maybe they've picked up your book. Maybe they've stumbled on you, you know, on different podcasts, that type of thing. You're certainly not a stranger to them. But wherever you want to take it and we'll hop off from there. Yeah, I'm a former researcher in the areas of neuroscience and obesity.

I'm no longer doing academic research, but now I've transitioned to other activities, including science communication. And really my main area of interest in terms of the science is obesity, understanding the neuroscience of obesity that explains why, basically why our eating behavior causes us to gain weight even though we don't want it to. And so that path led me to write my book, The Hungry Brain, which is a very, essentially a general audience book about the neuroscience of obesity that explains why the brain is so central to both eating behavior and body fatness, why it's, you know, instead of us making

poor conscious decisions, there are all these non-conscious brain regions that evolve for a totally different context that are basically pushing us in the wrong direction. And, um, In addition to that, I've been doing some other science communication, particularly around information quality. So I think a lot of people recognize that there's a lot of misinformation out there. Some of it's on the internet. Some of it's in other places. You know, there's good information and there's misinformation. There's both, right? But the quality of information that we're exposed to every day is really variable. And so with some nutrition scientists and myself, we, developed an organization called Red Pen Reviews.

It's a nonprofit organization that publishes the most informative, consistent, and unbiased reviews of popular nutrition books available. So as a guy who's picked up several books, some I've gotten through, some I've kind of just read, I don't know, the first opening couple chapters and went, that, this isn't for me and throwing it on the side. Essentially with this red pen review, I could essentially go there and go, oh, these guys think very highly of X, Y, Z, and not so highly of a couple others, essentially, is what you're doing? Yeah, absolutely. And the key thing about what we're doing is that we have a structured review method that is the same for every book that we reviewed. So we have this

review method that we specifically designed to be very informative and to eliminate as much of our bias as possible. So the exact same method that we apply to every book, we try to be as objective as possible, and it's administered by experts. And so, you know, when's the last time you read a review where the person writing the review actually checked citations to make sure that the author was using citations appropriately? I mean, it's actually pretty rare that you read a review of a popular nutrition book where someone is going through and checking citations. So that's just something that's built into our method. So what's one of your, what's a popular book then that you're like, this is bang on?

And what's a popular book maybe on the flip side where you're like, man, this is popular, but the deeper we dug on it, this is like horrendous. Yeah. So a good recent example of a book that scored well is a book called The Proof is in the Plants by Simon Hill. That got an overall score of 84% and a scientific accuracy score of 95%. And basically he's arguing for a whole food diet that's mostly based on plants. We are not here to tell people what diet to be on or even what diet is the optimal diet. But mostly we're concerned with how well is the author using evidence,

how evidence-based are the statements they make in the book and their dietary recommendations. And so in this book, he recommends that the evidence that he is using is very close to what the scientific literature is saying. It's not exaggerating things a lot. And so the scientific accuracy score is 95%. If we go to another plant-based book that is very popular, the China study that was published in 2016, at least the latest edition was, that one got an overall score of 64% and a scientific accuracy score of 48%. So even though the diet it's recommending is similar in a lot of ways, the China study is not, and by the way, the China study is published by an actual nutrition researcher.

Like someone who has a PhD who was, you know, employed doing research at one of the nation's top academic institutions, the nation, I'm talking about the United States. He was a researcher at Cornell. And despite that, the way that he uses evidence is not really true to the scientific literature. it's not really true to the rules of logic. And so that's an example of a book that has kind of similar recommendations and even has, you know, really high-level credentials for the author, but is not getting the same kind of scientific accuracy score. What drew you to this?

You know, like obesity, like, you know, I've joked on the podcast lots. you know if i could go back in a time machine i would uh stifle the the beginning of uh the kernel going around with kFC and basically what i'm arguing is that i would snuff out the fast food industry because i'm like it is it is bad but then i read the book your book and i'm like it goes a lot further than just fast food this is like this is just across the board on what we've done to food in general. When it comes to obesity, you don't need to go much further than probably every street corner to see the problem playing out. But I'm curious, what drew you to trying to solve or help or I don't even know, understand maybe the problem of obesity and how, you know, in your book,

especially, you know, like how hard it is, how hardwired it is into the brain. Like, what brought you there? Yeah, there are a few reasons. One is that I have always been fascinated by neuroscience. The brain is one of the most complex structures in the known universe, the human brain, and it's really at the frontier of what many people are doing in science. Like, we know, we know basically how the liver works. We still have things to learn about the liver, but we know basically how it works. We still have a ton of basic things to learn about the brain and how it works and how it makes

us who we are. And so I've always been very interested in the brain. And once I learned that obesity has a lot to do with the brain, both in terms of determining our behavior, because the brain is the organ that generates behavior, and also in terms of containing an actual body fat regulatory system, once I learned that it was kind of a way, you know, to apply my neuroscience. knowledge to a problem that was really affecting a lot of people. So that's part of it. The other part of it is that I was already kind of in the health and nutrition space to some degree. I was dipping my toes into it. And I could see that there were a lot of kind of hairbrained theories floating around about what causes obesity. And basically, as I was doing research on,

obesity, on the neuroscience of obesity at the University of Washington, I, you know, I was reading through the literature. I was doing research myself. I was seeing it unfold in other people's hands. And I was seeing all this really important information that people were uncovering in the field that was not making it to the public. And because it wasn't making it to the public. It was allowing all kinds of hairbrained theories to flourish. And so that really got me interested in obesity from a science communication perspective because I felt like I was a person with, you know, I'm not the greatest researcher in the world. I'm not the greatest writer in the world, but I'm the guy who had the right background and enough writing skills to put the pieces

together to bring this to the public. And so that's kind of the landscape of what got me interested in this, including the public communication aspect of it. You mentioned hairbrained ideas multiple times. What are some hairbrained ideas that you're just like, that is complete farce or that is complete shit or whatever that are sitting out there in the public today, I can just imagine. Yeah. I think one of them that is kind of, I think, baked into a lot of people, the way that people think

without them even realizing it is, okay, so calorie intake has a lot to do with, with our body fat and it's that much is true. But when people kind of internalize that, they, most people just kind of assume, and I think, I think this isn't just people assuming. I think this is also for a long time kind of come from the medical community and to some extent the research community in the past, they assume that because calorie intake and expenditure controls your body fatness, that your brain just kind of works like an Excel spreadsheet. And all you have to do is decide how many calories you want to eat and how much you're going to jog. And that, you know, therefore determining your body fatness is easy because it's just these numbers. You have to,

you have to hit. And so it kind of turns, it kind of turns body fatness into this like conscious choice and it kind of frames it as a conscious choice, right? And if you're not making that conscious choice, if you're a person with obesity, obviously you're making the wrong choice, right? And so it's your fault. And that's kind of like this logic that has, I think, a lot of people kind of intuitively carry with them. And I think partly the reason they do that is because most people don't know that both your calorie intake and your body fatness are regulated in a really potent and complex way by non-conscious brain regions.

And so, you know, there's all these brain regions that control your heart rate and your blood pressure, your body temperature, all this stuff that's just humming around in the background, you have zero control over it, right? Body fatness is one of the things that's regulated. So, and, you know, of course, you do have some control over your body fatness. I'm not saying you have zero control. But what I'm saying is that there are these regulatory systems that are pushing things in one direction or another, and they're really powerful.

They're really hard to resist if those. regulatory systems are telling you to eat more or to be heavier. So I can hear certain people going, well, then I got no, I got no choice in this. I just, you know, it's in the back of the brain. I can't do anything. I'll carry on. And when I read your book, that is not what I took out of it. I took a lot of different things, just that not to maybe beat yourself up so much about

how complex these systems really are. And on top of that, where we're at. in today's world with how like manipulated food is to really your body or your brain or your body or both. You can correct me. Or it's just like, oh, yeah, that's good. Right? And that's been in the old system for a long awful time.

Yeah, absolutely. And I don't want to give people the impression they have no control. But, you know, I can speak to some statistics in the United States. two-thirds of people with obesity go on some kind of diet each year to lose weight. And yet 43% of U.S. adults have obesity. And so obviously these diets are not causing them to not have obesity anymore because, you know, we have this very elevated obesity rate. So I think, I think I don't want to paint a hopeless picture, but I just want people to

understand realistically what the situation. is because it's not as simple as just saying, I want to lose 50 pounds and then it flies off. You know, and also because now today we have a spectrum of options for dealing with elevated body fatness. So it used to be that diet and lifestyle and a few like not very effective drugs were our only real options and bariatric surgery too. But now we have, we have, first of all, more effective diet and lifestyle programs than we used to. Second of all, we have bariatric surgery has gotten better. And we have this new class of drugs, the GLP1 receptor agonists, that are really effective for weight loss.

So I'm talking about somaglotide and now terseptide. and so for people who, you know, have actual obesity and, you know, have tried diets and have failed to lose weight, I think, you know, going to your doctor and speaking with them about medical management of body fatness now is a better time than it ever has been for that. Now, on the other side, if you're somebody who just wants to lose a few pounds or if you want to prevent yourself from, gaining weight over time, which I think is important, then I think you're, you're going to be more in the diet and lifestyle bucket. And that's, that's the appropriate bucket for that kind of person right now. Yeah, I guess the second part is kind of, I guess, where I fit in, right? Like I'm, I listen to that. I'm like, I'm like, yeah. And I feel like, and I don't know what your thoughts on this, a lot of people, well, no, not a lot of people. I'll do myself. I've had to try a bunch of different

things just to see if I like it, not like it. You know, I forget what part of the book it is. Forgive me. But it's talking about like, you know, basically starving yourself and your brain being, you're fighting with your brain all the time. And you're just hungry. And it's, you know, and so you eventually relent or, you know, even if you, you can handle it for a long time. And sitting on this side, Stefan, I've tried a lot of different things. I actually just finished coming off 10 days of the carnivore diet listeners. Well, I just wanted to try. I was just curious.

You know, it's like meat. Well, I can handle that. You know, eggs. Ooh, I like that too, right? And minus the first two days, which were kind of these wild two days where I'm sure, I don't know what the neuroscience on it is. I'm assuming I was addicted to sugar and a bunch of different things. But once I got through that, like, I felt really good on that.

And one of the things I think people, maybe even myself struggle with is you assume that, oh, wow, this is the whatever it is, the new hot thing. And you try it and it doesn't work for you. You're like, oh, well, I just suck. And you take it all yourself, except people are really diverse and complex, even in one's family. And you can try five different things and four of them can work for the other. however many people. And maybe you just need the fifth. And to kind of be a little more experimental in your diets, because I mean like certain people can eat ice cream and never have an issue. Other people have a teaspoon of it and they're on the can. You know,

it's like there's some genetic makeup there that is different. And I, and probably people need to understand that and do a little more fine tuning of their own personal diet kind of thing. Yeah. Yeah, I agree with that. I think personal experimentation. in health is good. I think, you know, you want to start with a kind of palette of options that are evidence-based and then test them out and see how they work in you. I agree that different things are going to work with different people, genetics, and just, you know, your life experiences are all going to impact that. You know, I've been telling this story. I'll butcher it, but I would appreciate if you would talk about it a little bit.

In your book, you talk about a bunch of different studies with rats, which you can probably give me why they choose rats and everything else. But it was talking about how you addict, how you create an obese rat, and that you couldn't just do it by essentially putting pellets in there. I'll let you tell the story because I really want my listeners to hear that story. I would prefer that they go read about it themselves. But if they don't do that, I would love for them to hear the story from the guy I heard from and maybe give it a little more context because I'll probably butcher it every time I talk about it again. Yeah, sure. So there, so back in the 1970s, researchers were trying to develop animal models of obesity. So there was, the obesity rate was

already rising at that time and it was not nearly as prevalent as it is today, but there were already something like 12 to 15% of the population of adults had obesity at that time. So it was already a problem, not as big of a problem as today. And they were trying to create animal models so they could study it because there's a lot you can do in animal models that you can't do in humans. And in a lot of ways, the first choice is rodents, rats and mice, because they're very cheap to keep. They have short lifespan.

so you can do experiments that cover most or their entire lifespan and see how they react to different things over long periods of their time. And then today we have all these genetic tools and mice as well that support research. But there was, yeah, so they had tried different techniques. They had tried adding fat to pellets. They had tried adding sugar to pellets. They had tried mixing in different kinds of foods. You can get rats and mice to gain fat by adding fat to their food pellets.

But it was kind of slow. You know, researchers, like, you have a grad student that's there for a few years in the lab. Like, you can't wait a long time for things to get fat. You want things to get fat quick, and you want them to get really fat, so you can study really obesity. And so this researcher named Anthony Scalphani decided to do. try something different. What he did was he went to the grocery store and he bought a variety of calorie dense, tasty human supermarket foods. And so in the rats cage, because he was doing these studies in rats, he put a variety of calorie dense, tasty foods, things like cookies and peanut

butter and salami and chocolate and that sort of thing. And it made the rats. very fat, very fast. It made them way fatter than any kind of nutrient you could put in pelleted diets. And that's held to this day. You can you can feed rats or mice, high fat pellets. You can feed them high sugar pellets. You can feed them high fat, high sugar pellets. And they will get fatter, especially with the ones that are higher in fat. But nothing makes them get as fat, as fast, or eat as many calories as tasty, calorie-dense human foods. And specifically, a variety of foods. So if you just put cookies in their cage, that's not as fattening as if you put cookies

in salami, for example. Like, if you just put cookies or just put salami, not as fattening as both. And by the way, another thing to add here that I think is important is these rats and mice, typically they still have access to their healthy, unrefined rodent pellets, but they just choose not to eat it when you give them this variety of palatable human foods. So basically, they have healthy food that will support their health and keep them relatively lean for their lifetime. They specifically choose not to eat it because they prefer eating these less healthy fattening human foods. And so basically, you know, I think I don't need to go through all

the evidence in detail, but I think the human evidence supports this as well. I think these foods do the same thing to us that they do in rodents. Well, that's what's so like when you, when you just talk out the story of how do you addict rats to food, it's like, oh, now that I got to understand like you're not talking about a simple just don't eat the the junk food. It's it's all built into this sucker and you got to, you know, you got to wrestle with a very complex issue, you know, certain people and lots of people have talked about this can eat whatever they want, whenever they want and not have any issues. Other people, I joke, look at a treat and they've already gained some weight, right? Like it's, it's, it's, you know, a little bit facetious,

but you get the point. So, The cured of obesity then is get rid of all the supermarket foods and go back to a very bland diet. I mean, I think that would, I do think that would help. I don't think it would be very popular. Definitely wouldn't be popular. But you think, you know, if you're sitting around, okay, we just had COVID and who did COVID kill? A lot of obese people. Elderly obese.

you know like the statistics show you know even it was like 80 some percent here in where I'm from had four or more comorbidities right won't and I mean that gets you know your body ain't in good shape um so like it's like you want to protect the public you want to do what's right you want to help the health care system all these different things and yet you know we also want access to food and everything else so it's like like this really really obvious problem that at some point you've got to do something about it,

don't you? Otherwise, you know, I think of the the Wally movie where they're all living up in space and like giant and just kind of roaming around on their little carts, you know, and never use anything. It's like if we don't start attacking this problem, where do we eventually get to? Yeah, I don't know. I mean, honestly, if we went back 10 years and

and you asked me, would the prevalence of obesity in U.S. adults be 43% today? I would say, no way. Like, there's a, there's got to be some kind of biological limit on, you know, how many people, like what percentage of the population can actually even develop, you know, can actually gain that much fat. But at this point, I don't know where the ceiling is. I mean, if you look at the increase in obesity rates, it's been going up and up and up, and there's not really any sign that it's significantly slowing down in the United States. I'm talking about based on U.S. figures, but I think it's similar around the world in most places. So, yeah, where is it going to end?

I really don't know. And, you know, I think it's a very difficult problem because we have this food system that in many ways is amazing, right? It produces food that it's very cheap, that is safe in terms of like microbiologically safe and in terms of like contamination with, you know, lead and whatever. It's safe in those kinds of ways. And it's very convenient.

It's very tasty. Those are all good things, right? But the problem is that it has this. externality of not being good for our health and increasing the risk of obesity. And so, you know, what do you do about that? I think that's a very difficult question because, I mean, I think there are absolutely are things that we could do on a societal level to improve our food environment and improve our physical activity environment that would reduce obesity.

but I think that it would be just on a practical level, getting the support of the public, getting the support of lawmakers, I think it would be very difficult because we're talking about a really big problem. If you look at the best evidence we have on calorie intake over time, the average American is eating more than 220 calories extra, relative to 1970 or so.

And so we're eating like 10% more calories than we used to on average. And how do you reverse that? Like that's, you know, that requires a major shift in dietary habits to accomplish. And for the government or, you know, other organizations to roll, that back on a societal level is is really a huge task maybe an impossible task because you you think about it um like what is think we popularized um i don't know if it's obesity but certainly having more weight on than than you know is desirable at least in my my books right and i'm looking at sports illustrated i'm looking at these different things

things that have, you know, and instead of addressing it, because when you think of 43% of, and I'm using the United States, you think about that, and you go, man, the population's going to be really susceptible to a lot of things over the next extrapolate how long. Because if it isn't showing signs of weakening, that means it's only going up, which means like it's going to get worse, right? Because overweight people, have health problems, which means it's going to, like, I don't know where that ends. I just know it's a big problem. And certainly people are talking about it. It's just, it's not like you flick the easy switch, you know, because I think food preparation, you know, one of the cool things, love or hate the carnivore diet. I thought it was one of the things it forced me to do was I had to cook again. Like I literally, you know, you couldn't just, you know, and I'm you know once again I don't eat a pizza pop but you know like we've gotten so easy you just throw something in the microwave or you you know everything's instant and with the carnivore diet

I I had to cook every meal and that um was both enjoyable I forgot how much I enjoyed cooking uh especially day after day after day but the food preparation you know if you forget to unthaw something now you're like oh god now I got you know you got to go through all these different steps. And I don't know. But I, in saying all that stuff, and I also think of, I've had different guys on here talking about blue color workers because, you know, the world of plumbers and carpenters and all these different things for what make our world what it is, farmers, right? I mean, it come from oil and gas and agriculture. And yet we've not popularized that. So there's becoming less and less of them. And you go from a societal Western culture standpoint, what happens there?

as well. And you see all these problems growing, not lessening. And as a society, I don't have the answers. And I'm not saying you do. But I look at it and I go, you're starting to understand how complex this is. And I don't know where it goes. Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, there's a lot to chew on there. So there have been over time major changes in the way that we interact with food. in the United States is where I'm the most familiar, but it's, it's happened everywhere that has become industrialized and affluent. And what you see basically is that people have outsourced food preparation. That's really the biggest trend. So if you go back to the late 1800s in the U.S., 93% of food expenditures were on ingredients that were brought home and cooked, prepared in the home.

whereas today it's less than 50% of food expenditures are on food to be eaten at home. And actually that I think even conceals how big of a change it's been because a lot of the food that we buy now and eat at home is actually pre-prepared food. So if you're buying frozen pizzas or ice cream or something like that or even, you know, yeah. Yeah, you don't have to do anything. I mean, frozen pizza certainly you got to wait 20 minutes or whatever. But yeah. But it's a pre you're still outsourcing your food prep is is the point from that I'm trying to make. And so, so we have, you know, seen this profound reshaping of our diets.

And some of that is that like our food system has gotten so efficient that, you know, from farming to food processing to, to retail that it's a lot cheaper. food expenditures are way less as a percentage of income than they used to be if you go back 100 years in the United States. And, you know, it fluctuates, it goes up and down. But over the long run, it's gone way, way down. In the 1930s in the U.S., people were spending almost a third of their income on food. And today it's more like 10%. So, and then you have, you know, these societal and demographics.

demographic changes where you have now, you know, used to be households, you would typically have have one person working. Now you have two people working. And so you don't have someone at home who's preparing, you know, who's like job basically is preparing food and doing other things and taking care of children. And, you know, that's not a bad thing necessarily overall. You know, I think a lot of people want to work. But it, you know, has the, effect of taking away time that used to be dedicated to cooking food in the home. And so, you know, that and playing along with the fact that processed food and restaurant food is a lot cheaper and is more convenient than it used to be, you kind of have this two-way street of

encouraging this shift toward outsourcing food preparation. And I think that's a lot of what got us to where we are today in terms of our current food environment. Yeah. You know, one of the, everything has like, um, every step forward has like a,

a weird or, uh, you know, kind of like a side step to it kind of thing. Um, because when you, when you talk about, uh,

couples now both working, I mean, that's exactly where I'm at. You know, uh, my wife is a very career driven woman. But that means we both come home at, uh,

four or five. or whatever time we walk in. And then you got this, you know, and I was asking you before we started about kids because I got three of them, right? So, you know, if supper ain't on the table of five or five, ten, you're dealing with a bunch of orangutans hanging from the wall and screaming and crying and everything else.

So to be fast and quick and whatever else, certainly there was a part in there. But in saying all that, you know, kids, how are you, you have, you have a child. What are the things you were trying, you know, obviously young still, but one of the things you're looking at as a father trying to instill in them. And I didn't ask, boy or girl, Stefan? Boy. A little boy. With your boy, what are you going to try and instilling him so that, you know, he doesn't fall into, you know, that he understands that eating 15 bags of chips,

although tasty, probably isn't the best choice. Yeah, you know, I, I try to, there are a couple different angles on this. So one of them is that I try to instill what I think of as basic food hygiene or basic eating hygiene. And what I mean by that is there's a tendency, especially in the U.S., for people to just kind of have food laying around and graze on it throughout the day. And so I try to create more structure around eating. So there's specific. times of day at which we eat and, you know, particularly breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Right now, he's also having snacks. But for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, those are times that we sit down. We have specific meals that include specific foods, and those are the foods available for him to

eat. He can't just run and grab something else. And there aren't, there isn't food outside of those times. So there's very like there's the structure around eating. And so that's one part of it is what I call meal hygiene. And then there's the other part of trying to develop his, his tastes in a direction that will support his nutrition for life. And so giving him healthy foods to eat and, you know, presenting them in a way that a young child is more likely to eat and just kind of, you know, exposing him to things over and over again, even if he doesn't like it, he's got to take a little taste. But we're not going to make a big deal out of it. It's not going to be like a big throwdown, but he still has to eat at least a little bit of everything and, you know, keep getting

exposed to it over and over again. And such that he develops his tastes in a way where, he grew up eating healthy foods. And so that's what he's accustomed to as he gets older. And also he's accustomed to eating the flavors of a wide variety of different kinds of food. So he's not going to be super, super picky as he gets older. And let me acknowledge, too, that a lot of it depends on the kid, too. Like, I understand that some kids are naturally just a lot harder than others to get to eat

stuff. And I wouldn't say, I would say my son is probably on the easier side, not to say that it's always easy by any means, but probably on the easier side when it comes to getting him to try different kinds of foods. But, you know, the other thing is that I don't control everything that he eats. So he goes to daycare and eats what they feed him and it's not always healthy food. And in fact, I've been trying to work with them to improve the foods that they give him because a lot of times I'll see what it is and it kind of is not what I want him to be eating. So, so yeah, it's not perfect for sure. And I'm sure a lot of parents can can sympathize. with that how how hard it is to you know feed your kid consistently healthy food um and honestly

I'm not worried about him eating some unhealthy food like you know we he had a birthday recently and we got pizza and we ate cake like I'm not worried about that every now and then it's not like you just don't want it you just don't want it to take over a lifestyle I don't want it to be the predominant thing that he is yeah yeah but I think you can extrapolate that with kids, you know, I think of, uh, take pop. I'm just like, it serves no purpose for a young kid to, to drink pop. And saying that, do my kids get pop from time to time? As, there's no way that I'm, you know, at some point they're going to get it anyways, you know, like, uh, I don't know about your life story, but eventually you, you, you come out from underneath your parents wing. And then

you're going to try some things. And so to act like that's going to be, um, uh, any different with your children is is almost well it is laughable uh and saying that you're trying to give them the best fighting chance at not having something just dictate to their life and uh when it comes to uh food food in general i just i just point to uh all the sugary drinks man like the the the amount of the amount of uh when you go to a store now and see the variety of different drinks that you can put in your body, even if they are zero sugar. I'm like, I don't think you want any of that. And I'm, you know, if there's one thing that my body doesn't seem to crave, it is pop or

juice or, or, you know, a whole bunch of different things. I mean, energy drinks, geez, there's a lot of energy drink lovers out there that just, like, love it. And it's like, that can't be good. Like, none of that can be good. No, I agree. I mean, sugar, sweeten, beverages, calorie dense beverages. And, you know, I'm including like the fancy coffees that have, you know, it's not just...

Well, you're not, now you're offending all the Starbucks crowd. Yeah. Those things are probably even worse because they're higher in calories. I mean, you can have a drink that's hundreds of calories. And, you know, in your mind, you categorize it as a coffee, but it's really like practically a meal. Yeah. So, yeah, I think cutting out high calorie beverages or at least great. greatly limiting them is a great idea. And actually, alcohol falls into that category.

Now we've just offended everyone. I know. I'm going for, I'm going for everybody here. But yeah, alcohol actually, so pure alcohol, ethanol is one of the most calorie-dense substances there is. So the only thing that's more calorie-dense than ethanol is fat. So fat's nine calories per gram. Ethanol is seven calories per gram. Carbohydrate and protein are four calories per gram. So it's very calorie dense. And, you know, especially when you drink something like a beer that also has carbohydrate in it, you know, you're looking at 150 to 200 calories just in that one beer. So, you know, it's, it's, I'm not saying no one should ever drink a beer. But I think the, the liquid calories are particularly problematic when it comes to calorie intake and body fatness.

So do you think then, like, certainly I can't speak for the United States school system, like what they're teaching there. But when you look at it, you go like, man, kids at a certain point should just get taught all of this and there should be a huge curriculum on it. And maybe there's teachers swearing at the radio right now. But like coming through school, certainly we had health and wellness and a few different things. But I just, none of it stuck whatsoever. You're in your, your throes of your teenage years, and I was, I was an athlete. So I was playing tons.

I just got to eat whatever the fuck I wanted to. And I ate a lot of shit. And, you know, that's probably one of the hardest things to curb as you get older, and especially as you don't exercise near as much as what I used to. You know, I certainly trying to do a lot more. but as with kids and work and everything, you know, sitting here full time, like doing this, podcasting, I sit now more than I probably ever did because I got to, you know, I got to read and research and blah, blah, blah, blah. And I'm editing blah, blah, blah. But back 20 years ago,

when I was playing hockey probably six days a week, you kind of almost could in your brain eat whatever you wanted to and never see any negative impact, at least no physical body weight side of that. Yeah, I think people who are highly physically active are more resistant to fat gain in the face of a fattening diet. I think that's true. And actually, you can go back and see that in the evidence from the very earliest days. So when I was telling you about Anthony Scalphani and the diet, he put those rats on, the

so-called cafeteria diet, which includes a variety of human supermarkets, market foods. He had one group that he gave running wheels. And rats, if you give him a running wheel, they will use it quite a bit spontaneously. And that group still gained fat, did not gain as much fat. So it gained significantly less fat than the group that was just given the food and wasn't given the running wheel. And that's something you see pretty consistently in the animal research literature. And then in the human lit, too, people who exercise more tend to be leaner, and it probably goes both weights. It probably is the case that as you gain weight, you're less likely to exercise because exercise doesn't feel as good, but also people who exercise a lot are

less likely to gain weight. So it's kind of a vicious, it can be kind of a vicious cycle. Would you also say that people who exercise, mentally think more clear. And I can't think of a better way to articulate that. But they just, they literally more exercise. Don't, well,

I just think about it. When you exercise, suddenly if you're having, you have a meal, suddenly maybe you're not eating, six snacks afterwards or whatever. But I found at my lowest stages where I wasn't moving. near as much. And maybe, you know, you just kind of get into a depressed sense of being.

You overeat. You emotionally eat and they, I know they, they whatever on that side. But just that by moving your body and breaking out of it, you actually start to get some positive thoughts rolling. And I'm sure there's more scientific ways to break that down. But to me, like just moving, obviously you're expending more calories. So that's going to help you. But there's a something that happens in the brain, which I mean, geez, you've done all the work on it. You can maybe make sense but better than I'm mumbling my way through. Well, yeah, I mean, exercise does have an effect on mood. How much that relates to its impact on weight? I don't know. Here's the interesting thing, though, exercise does not affect your calorie, your daily calories burned as much as you might

think. So it used to be that we thought it had a huge effect. So basically, if you do 300 calories a day of exercise every day for the next year, you're basically just adding 300 calories of burn on top of your regular metabolism. But actually, that's not quite what happens. The body adapts. And it only will increase your energy expenditure a little bit over the long run. So that specific day, like the first day you start to exercise, yes, it will add just on top. But over time, your body adapts over months. And it ends up increasing your energy expenditure less than you would think your total energy expenditure. So you'll still burn the calories while you're doing the activity, but your body over time will kind of subtract calories from other things to make

way for that so that your overall calorie expenditure doesn't increase as much as you would think. So that's work that's been done by Herman Ponsor, and he basically, over time, convinced me that that was probably mostly correct. But it seems to impact your appetite. And it seems like you were alluding to this to some extent. So even though, so I think it does impact your body weight, and it's probably better for preventing weight gain than it is for losing weight once a person has gained weight. but it seems to affect people's appetite. So not only does it increase your calorie burn a little bit, but it seems to decrease your intake a little bit relative to what you would otherwise have eaten.

That is, I don't know, my brain got stuck on if you, you worked out every single day and your uptake was 300 calories, you know, every calorie burn, sorry, every single day over year. the fact of body will essentially figure out a way to, you know, I don't know, is it, does it figure that by you doing what you're doing eventually you're going to starve yourself or you're going to fall apart? And so it just starts to like manage it different. That's a wild thought.

Like I mean, it's super cool. But as a guy sitting here going, that's a, can you imagine how pissed you'd be if you did that? that your body's just like, nah, now we're not going to make it that easy. Well, yeah. And I think that explains why exercise doesn't cause as much weight loss in the average person as people expect it to. So it does cause some weight loss. You know, I think there's a lot of, there have been a lot of like news stories and things.

Exercise doesn't, doesn't work to lose weight. It does cause weight loss. It's just not as much as you would expect based on if you're just measuring how many excess calories are being burned while this person is exercising. that's you're not going to get the same amount by just adding that up you're not going to get the expected amount by just adding that up because the body adapts um and it's it's really counterintuitive and this is part of the reason why it took me a while to come around because like you know you have a big day of exercise it makes you really hungry right like you can tell you can tell

you can tell your body burned more calories than usual you get hungry you get tired like it's obvious, right? And it did. But the thing is, so over a short period of time, it does bump up, but over a long period of time, your body adapts. And so if you did that same workout for months, then your body, that's when your body would adapt and your calorie intake would not remain as high as it was initially. Okay. That, A, that's a thought to think on for a while. but if you're listening to this and you're going okay so what's one thing stephen would say is a good move to make i'm i would say in my journey i've i've come to a place where i'm like you know you have to implement things that can be long term there's no point in losing i don't know pick it pick

whatever number you want 30 pounds and 30 days or 100 pounds in a year or whatever it is for you um You have to find something that you can balance with lifestyle, one, because you've got to enjoy these things. Otherwise, it's doomed to fail, in my opinion. And then, you know, you want something that over the course of time you can continue to do because it's, it fits once again your lifestyle. I know you got a bunch of recommendations at the end of the book. I was just curious, you know, after writing the book, after, you know, probably discussing this way too much, you know, and I appreciate you coming in doing the book. I'm doing the book. the same thing here. You know, when people want to take one step in the right direction, what is your thoughts on that when it comes to all the research and discussions you've had? Yeah, there's really two big things, if you'll allow me to say too, that I like to throw at people that I think are helpful and kind of on the easy side. One of them is controlling your food environment because if you have food that is in your immediate environment that is easy for you to access and it's tempting, you're more likely to eat it, right? And so controlling your food

environment, so you're not giving your brain food cues. We didn't talk, we didn't talk about this in this podcast, but those food cues, the sight and the smell of food, trigger eating drive. They trigger cravings. Those are the environmental trigger. that turn on your brain's motivational systems to eat food even when you don't need it. And so controlling those food cues, not having food in your environment, not having food that's really easy to grab, putting up small barriers so that you'd have to like go into a jar and unscrew a lid or like peel a piece of fruit if you wanted to eat something or crack nuts. Like if you're really hungry, you can still eat it, but there's a barrier there.

so you're not just going to idly stick it in your mouth. So controlling your food environment is number one, what I would say. Number two is eating foods that have a higher fullness value per calorie. So basically when you sit down to eat, the way most people eat is they start eating and then they keep eating until they feel full and then they stop, right? So that signal of fullness is the thing that tells them to stop eating. And so however many calories it takes to hit that point is the number of calories you're going to eat at a typical meal.

And it turns out that depending on the type of food you're eating, that number of calories can be very different. So you could push away from the table with the same level of satisfaction, but have eaten very different number of calories depending on what kind of food you have. in front of you. And so food that is very calorie dense, that is to say a lot of calories per gram or per volume, meaning that it's not a lot of volume in your stomach for a lot of calories. It's not filling your stomach up very much. That food is less is less filling. Food that is lower in protein is less filling. Food that's lower in fiber is less filling.

and food that is highly palatable. So really, really tasty is less filling per calorie. And so, you know, I've just described what we intuitively recognize as junk food, pizza, French fries, candy, those all fall into that category, pastries. On the other hand, food that is lower in calorie density, so it has a lot of water and fiber, food that's higher in protein, food that's lower in palatibility. It doesn't have to taste like crap, just not be like super, super amazing. Those are the kinds of foods that are going to help you feel full with the smaller

number of calories without even noticing. Like you won't even, you don't even, you're not even trying to eat fewer calories. That's, you're just eating to appetite until you're full and you've consumed fewer calories just by virtue of the foods that you've chosen. And so those are more unrefined foods, more similar to what our ancestors would have eaten, like fresh meats, fresh fruits, vegetables, eggs, things like that. So those are two things that I would say are helpful to get started.

And, you know, a thing that both of those have in common that I think is, important is you're not consciously trying to regulate your calorie intake. You're not counting your calories. You're not restricting anything. You're just making, you're setting up your choices in advance so that you can, so you don't need to restrict. You don't need to deprive yourself in order to eat a lower number of calories. Is there, can I tag one thing on to your last point? I forget where I read this, but when you eat something that's very protein dense or rich, and I'm specifically talking about meat, does your body not take longer to digest it, which means you feel fuller for longer, something along that lines?

Well, I mean, protein is the most filling macronutrient. So the macronutrients are protein fat carbohydrate. Of those three per unit calorie, protein is the most filling, both over the short term and in the long term. Whether that relates to the speed of digestion, I don't know. I don't think so. But I don't actually know the answer to that. But I will say that fat takes longer to be digested than carbohydrate, but it is about

the same in terms of its satiating value. As long as it's, as long as the calorie density is equated is the same. Fat and carbohydrate are about the same protein is more, more satiating than either of those. But I think if there is a relationship with speed of digestion and how satiating protein is, if there is a relationship there, I'm not aware of it. Hmm. Okay. Well, once again, that's interesting. I'm just curious if that's scientific or if I'm just making that up. Maybe I'm just making it up. I mean, it makes you feel fuller for longer, for sure. But, you know, that sensation is that feeling of fullness is generated by the brain. That's your brain deciding that you have eaten a combination of nutrients that you don't need to have a high eating drive again right now. Hmm. You could probably, when it comes to the brain and food and everything else, one forgets how much power is sitting between our ears. It's everything.

I mean, you know, in the context of what we're talking about right now, the brain, you know, when people, when you eat a meal and you feel full, we intuitively think, oh, my stomach's full. Like in your brain, you're thinking like, oh, there's no more room in my stomach. That's why I stopped eating. But in fact, our stomachs are huge. I mean, most people could probably fit twice as much food as they habitually eat at a meal inside their stomach. It's not that your stomach is physically full. It's that your brain is integrating all of these signals that are coming up from your stomach and your small intestine and your mouth.

Like tons and tons of information is going up to your brain stem and other parts of your brain. your brain is integrating that and saying based on the current circumstances of what's happening in your body, your energy needs and some other things, and based on the signals that are coming up from your digestive tract about how much food is in there and what type of food, we're going to decide that you've had enough right now. And that is the feeling of fullness. That's how that gets generated and propagated throughout the brain, which then shuts down your eating drive and makes you not enjoy eating food anymore. And yet that can be overridden with walking by and seeing a bag of whatever you want.

And all of a sudden you're like, well, maybe I got a little bit of room. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's, you know, that and that's other parts of your brain that have different priorities. Like we have these evolved food preferences that are deeply stamped into our brains. So to your brain, the food properties that are in a bag of chips or a donut or ice cream or whatever it is, to your brain, that's a survival food. That's a food that is going to keep you alive and fertile and, you know, maxing out your gene copies in a wild environment of our ancestors because they were always struggling to find

food. Struggling is not the right word. No, but they were working hard. to find food. That was their their main activity, right? I mean, obviously safety and the things like that. But I mean, before, take where I'm at. It wasn't that long ago, you know, in probably the last 150 years, right? We didn't have power hanging out in every farm and every place, right, which has allowed us to have these things called, you know, freezers, deep freezes, ice boxes, whatever you want to call it, which allows you to store food for a long period of time.

That's why we had sellers and different things like that that allowed us to store things in the coal. That's why they brought ice from the rivers and, you know, so that they could, but think of how much time and effort went into making sure you had food and didn't starve through the Canadian winter. I'm speaking specifically where I'm sitting at, right? Like there was a ton of effort went into making sure you didn't go hungry. Yeah, absolutely. you know if you had to walk five miles and climb a tree to get a hamburger and milkshake i wouldn't be well i mean you'd be a phenomenal shape most people probably wouldn't do it yeah most people probably

wouldn't and they're probably you know if that's what you had to do to get processed food probably there would be a lot less obesity right and that's you know like you said the primary occupation of our ancestors hunter gatherers particularly was getting food And, you know, farmers as well, like back before farming, you know, advanced farming technology that we have today when you had to physically plant and, and, and, and, hoe the, the rose and everything. I even, even take, even take milk cows, right? Like, before you had all the technology we have now, you know, farmers, you melt by hand. Like, I mean, these are my ancestors, right? Like they literally did all this. And now you have, you know, I've met a man this weekend who used to have milk trucks that were filling up the, we're delivering to Costco every single day of the week. And I was like, in the amount of milk doing that, I was like, oh my God.

Right. Like you don't got that. That isn't human beings doing that anymore. That's industrialization that can milk that many cows to then put it in, you know, super bees and truck it all over the United States. right like yeah uh we've gone you know we've really uh changed the way food is prepared like that one to me is is just like so glaringly obvious we just don't think or talk about it and to understand it is one thing and then to try and put a little more food preparation because that's when i come back to the carnivore diet and people can love or hate that it's whatever to put more

food preparation so that you're actually investing in your meals, right there is is a commitment. And by doing that, chances are you're not eating, you know, the quick pizza or the quick whatever that, you know, anyways. And there are probably multiple reasons why the carnivore diet tends to be slimming. And by the way, I'm not advocating it just stating what I believe to be true. But yeah, simplifying the diet to just one thing, I think is certainly part of it. it. Well, I really appreciate, I'm watching the clock. I should have had us out here a few minutes ago. I was enjoying the conversation so much. The Crude Master final question here before I let you out is if you're going to stand behind a cause, then stand behind it absolutely. What's one thing Stefan stands behind? A cause.

Hmm. Well, I would say that I really believe in what we're doing at Red Pen reviews. You know, I think a lot of people recognize that there's a lot of misinformation out there and there's some good information as well, but they have a hard time telling those things apart. and, you know, same way I do when I'm reading about things that aren't in my area of expertise. And so I think, I think Red Pen Reviews is a little piece of a broader movement to try to help people sort misinformation from good information. Well, that's one way to bring it all the way back around, isn't it? Red Pen reviews, I'm going to have to go check it out.

And I, uh, if, if you're interested in, uh, in it, I suggest people go look at it as well. I know, um, when it comes to my body and what works and what doesn't work, so I'm always looking for different ideas and different thoughts to, to try and, um, you know, round it out because I, I feel like I got a lot of life left to live. And, and I want to do that with a, with a healthy body and a healthy mind and everything else. Uh, I appreciate you giving me some time today, Seth. And, uh, uh, who knows, I never know where the future leads and whether our paths cross again or not. But it's been an enjoy. hour of getting to know you and I do appreciate you giving me some of your hard-earned time

and I would really recommend your book because it was I thought it was a fantastic read and it certainly led to me reaching out and everything else so thanks again for hopping on okay my pleasure Sean thanks for having me