The Dr. Hyman Show - How To Eat Well On A Tight Budget

Episode Date: November 13, 2023

This episode is brought to you by Rupa University, AG1, and Beekeepers.  Processed foods and takeout have become staples in our modern diets, despite these foods often driving inflammation and degrading our health. The good news is that cooking real food and meal planning can actually be easier and cheaper in the long run. In today’s episode, I talk with Dr. Rangan Chatterjee, Jill Shah, Vani Hari, and Shawn Stevenson about rethinking and reframing our food choices. Dr. Rangan Chatterjee is regarded as one of the most influential doctors in the UK and wants to change how medicine will be practiced for years to come. He hosts the biggest health podcast in Europe, Feel Better, Live More, which Apple has announced as one of the most downloaded new podcasts of the past year. His first book, How to Make Disease Disappear, is an international bestseller. Jill Shah is the president of the Shah Family Foundation, which supports innovative and transformative work where education, healthcare, and community intersect in the city of Boston. The foundation’s primary work and support is centered on Boston’s schools and community organizations, with the goal of broadly sharing the programs and solutions that prove successful. Vani Hari is the revolutionary food activist behind foodbabe.com, cofounder of organic food brand Truvani, and New York Times bestselling author of The Food Babe Way and Feeding You Lies. She has led campaigns against food giants like Kraft, Starbucks, Chick-fil-A, Subway, and General Mills that attracted more than 500,000 signatures and led to the removal of several controversial ingredients used by these companies. Shawn Stevenson is the author of the international bestselling book Sleep Smarter and creator of The Model Health Show, featured as the number one health podcast in the US with millions of listener downloads each year. A graduate of the University of Missouri-St. Louis, Shawn studied business, biology, and nutritional science and went on to found Advanced Integrative Health Alliance, a company that provides wellness services for individuals and organizations worldwide. This episode is brought to you by Rupa University, AG1, and Beekeeper’s. If you’re a healthcare provider who wants to learn more about Functional Medicine testing, go to rupauniversity.com to sign up for a free live class or a boot camp! Head to drinkAG1.com/HYMAN to receive 10 FREE travel packs of AG1 with your first purchase. Go to beekeepersnaturals.com/HYMAN and enter code “HYMAN” to get Beekeeper’s Naturals’ exclusive offer of 20% off sitewide. Full-length episodes of these interviews can be found here: Dr. Rangan Chatterjee Jill Shah Vani Hari Shawn Stevenson

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Pharmacy. Hi, this is Lauren Feehan, one of the producers of The Doctor's Pharmacy podcast. Contrary to popular belief, cooking real food is often cheaper than buying fast food and comes with so many benefits, including providing nutrition to our bodies and bringing us closer to family and friends. So why do so many of us get takeout so often? In today's episode, we feature four conversations from the Doctors Pharmacy about the misconception that fast food is cheaper and faster than cooking at home. Dr. Hyman speaks with Dr. Rangan Chatterjee about his favorite ways to make cooking at home easy and affordable, with Jill Shaw about school lunches, with Vani Hari about

how to read an ingredients label, and with Shawn Stevenson about upleveling our health and relationships by cooking at home. Let's jump in. People have been, I think, taught that cooking is difficult, that eating healthy is expensive. Is this true? And how do you address the issues of, you know, cooking and cost and feel great, lose weight? Yeah, so there is a section on cooking and explaining just how important it is. It's that basic life skill that until recently, I'm pretty sure all families, all humans, all tribes would have had that ability. And it's something that is now optional. It can only have been optional because we have the ability to buy all these food products so quickly, so cheaply, and our lives are so busy,

they're stressed out. A lot of us feel we don't have time to cook. And certainly in certain socioeconomic groups, I think we have to accept that actually it's not about money so much. It's about having the luxury of time to cook, which a lot of people will say, you know, if I'm working two jobs, I don't have time to cook, right? So I think cost and time poverty is something we should be absolutely aware of. Now, I don't think, I think, you know, the research, and I think what we spoke about this when you came on my podcast recently, it's simply not true that eating well has to be really, really expensive. Of course, there are certain things that are more expensive. There's no question. Like wild salmon, for example, is probably more expensive. But, you know, a can

of sardines is dirt cheap here in the UK. Do you know what I mean? There are ways that actually we can eat in a way that actually is whole food, but isn't super, super expensive. And I think where you live can really influence what's available, what you consider normal. You know, we mentioned environment before, but our friend circle, our own sort of network of tribes that's important as well you know the research by nicholas christakis has shown that you know someone in your social circle is a beast you're 45 more likely to be a beast if a friend of a friend is a beast you're 25 more likely to be a beast and if it's a friend off a friend off a friend you're 10 percent more likely to be obese which just shows just how powerful these social connections are and the

environment even our friends and family environment is at influencing us but it really isn't Mark as expensive as we think or some people think it might be to eat well, but you have to be able to cook, right? That is a basic, basic skill. And if you cannot cook, that's okay, right? Recognize it and go. Learning to cook may be one of the most important things that you can learn to do, whether it's in one of your cookbooks, Mark, whether it's to go on YouTube.

There is so many free and cheap resources now to teach people how to cook some basic meals. And you know, the truth is, is that the pandemic for some people, not for everyone, but for some people, Mark, there's been a lot more time at home, a lot more time with family. And I know many people who have got into cooking during lockdowns, during these restrictions, suddenly they're not commuting for two and a half hours a day. And they're actually buying cookbooks and they're learning how to cook recipes.

I've got to say, Mark, you know, my new routine on a Sunday afternoon, which really has come in in the last year, I love nothing more than this. On a Sunday afternoon after lunch, right, I clear out the kitchen. I'm a bit old school. I put on a CD and I've got a CD player in the kitchen. I put on one of my favorite CDs and I cook a big batch of butternut squash soup to last us for the week, right? I've got lentils in it, butternut squash, it's got leeks, onions, ginger. I'm trying to think about the price of it, but you know, lentils are dirt cheap, right? Two or three butternut squash is not that expensive. And apart from that, it's stock leeks, onions,

and ginger. It's kind of like that, not only is it not expensive, but those one and a half, two hours are some of the most enjoyable times I spend in the week. I've got some great tunes on. I'm chilling. My daughter may be there drawing on the kitchen counter. We may be chatting at the same time. And at the end of it, there's the smell, there's the feeling that you're really connected with the food. And then, you know, oh, that's going to go in the fridge. So in the week, if we ever need something for a meal, we can just go and heat that up. And so I'd really encourage people to find what works for them. Where is that moment in your week where you can actually find a bit of time to batch cook? If you are trying to cook something from scratch, three meals a day, seven days a week, that's where it can become really challenging. Not only is that a huge cognitive load, 21 times now I need to think about what I'm going to eat in just one week,

right? So batch cook, cook more. And one of the tips in the what we eat section is eat dinner for breakfast, right? It's such a simple thing that people haven't thought of before. It's like eating, you know what it's like eating you know you know what it's like mark the breakfast foods that we often start our days with are literally setting ourselves up for hunger for mood swings and and if you cook a bit extra at night heat it up in the morning have some salmon sweet potatoes and broccoli in the morning sometimes if that's what you have the night before and often people find that they're just not hungry until lunchtime. There was this case, I had this exactly, someone who was having what

he thought was healthy granola every morning, you know, sugar-filled granola. He thought it was healthy and he didn't really need to lose that much weight, but he found that his concentration was going, his focus was going, he'd get a bit shaky by 12 o'clock. And he started having, and this guy was vegetarian, right? And I remember it so well. He said, well, what should I have? I said, well, what do you have in the evening? He goes, well, I love roast vegetables. I said, okay, what do you have with it? He says, goat's cheese. I said, okay, why don't you start there? So the next morning, he has goat's cheese with roast vegetable. And he said it got to 2 p.m. before he was even hungry. And he said, I didn't realize before that my concentration wasn't good and my energy wasn't good. It's only when I had a real food breakfast that I realized, oh, wow, I've been functioning

sub-optimally for years. And so, you know, you know this as well as I do, Mark. I mean, there's plenty of tips on how people can do this inside the book. But, you know, I really want to encourage people to take this rounded approach. If you have tried already and focused on one area and it's not been sustainable for you, let me help you figure out why that is. Maybe there's something else that you've not tackled that's actually the underlying root cause yeah it's so important because we don't we just sort of stay on the surface and don't really figure it out i just love your story of cooking i think most of us feel so disenfranchised from it but with covid now it's an opportunity for us to really dig in and and try new things and to be with family and to be with the people you love and

we have more time and and i think if people can reclaim their kitchens it's really the key to weight loss is i mean i i always tell the story of this family i you know i work with in south carolina who was living in on food stamps and disability in a trailer with a family of five and were massively overweight you know the father was diabetic on dialysis the mother was 100 plus pounds overweight the son was like probably 100 pounds overweight almost diabetic at 16 years old. All I did was cook a simple meal with them, show it how fun it was to do it together. We, you know, they didn't even have cutting boards and knives.

I had to get them that afterwards and they ended up losing, you know, 200 pounds together as a family in the first year. And the son actually went back and gained weight because he had to go work at Bojangles, which is the only places kids could get work, which is a junk food, fast food restaurant in the South. But then he went on to lose 138 pounds, went to medical school. And it was really all through the simple act of cooking one meal. And I think if you can imagine if we could go into everybody's home and show them how

to shop and cook one simple meal, the basic cooking techniques, how to cut things, how to peel. I mean, they know how to peel an onion. They know how to peel garlic. They know how not make a salad dressing from simple olive oil and vinegar they don't have to stir fry they're not i mean it was just it was stunning everything they'd had was from a box of package or can that was either heated in a microwave in the oven or you know like it was just it was terrible um and it made me really realize how powerful it is just to empower people with a simple act of cooking real food at home and it's

much much cheaper and i gave them a guide on good food on a tight budget which is how to eat well for less and they were able to do it in within the budget that they had for five people on disability and food stamps yeah i mean that's so powerful mark when you stories like that and you know when i when i filmed the first series of bbc Doctor in the House, where I'd go and live alongside families for four to six weeks, it was a common theme. I'm going to say in at least half of the families that I went and stayed with, they didn't know how to cook or it was something they used to do and they've lost the habit.

And I remember in the first season, the lady with type 2 diabetes, I remember just, again, cooking them a meal, a basic meal, chopping things together. You know, these guys were used to getting McDonald's several times a week. And I remember so, you know, you mentioned cost. I can remember that so well. In 2015, my first day filming Evermark, right? So, I go to this family's house in Shrewsbury in the UK first day I meet them and we start off because I'm going to stay at their house that night for the first night which they didn't know I didn't realize that and the father said to me he said hey I said to them hey guys I'd love to find out a little bit about what you guys eat normally and the dad said to me, look, why don't you come along

and I'll show you. So he points to his car seat. So I get into his car. We drive for 15 minutes out of town, right? One five, 15 minutes out of town. We go into a McDonald's drive-thru and this is a family of four. So husband and wife, I think the daughter, you know, the daughter and the son were like teenagers, 15, 16, 17, something like that. He ordered four double meals from McDonald's, right? And the cost was 48 pounds. So let's put that in perspective. 48 pounds, I don't know what the exchange rate is at the moment, must be at least 65 to $70, dollars, right? And he said, we do this. And what was interesting, Mark, is as we were driving there, he said to me, hey, Doc, this is actually really embarrassing that you're coming with me, but this is what we do four to five times a week. So what's interesting

is several things. He's spending 65, $70 on four double meals from McDonald's, right? Which when they ate, they were hungry 30 minutes later and they were moody afterwards, right? But the second thing is, and this speaks to what we were talking about before, is that when he's driving there with me sitting next to him, he suddenly says, hey, Dot, you know what? This is really embarrassing, right? But he only realized that with me sitting in the car next to him because if it's just him and his family, he can do it. No one's questioning him. I wasn't judging him. I wasn't questioning him. But the simple act of me being there was like a mirror to him. And he goes, man, we do this four or five times a week you know and that's that's really interesting from an emotional viewpoint isn't it what's really going on there yeah it's so powerful i think we don't realize how much we get into habits unconsciously and just do those

things without thinking and then it leads over the course of our life to just dramatic changes in our health and our well-being. And it's, you know, what kills me, and I think you experience the same thing, is how close people are to feeling good, right? If the feel great part, I mean, the lose weight part, you know, is slow. You can do a pound a week maybe, but when there's more, depending on what you're doing, you know, initially you might lose more. But the feel great part can happen pretty quick and i i think you know most people when they start to shift their diet and they start to change their habits and they start to understand how to sort of reprogram their biology for well-being and health

that they were they were like well wow i didn't know how quickly i could feel better i didn't know i was feeling so bad till i started feeling so good and it's so rewarding for me to see that the that the the simple act of eating real food and regulating your life in a way that supports health has such dramatic downstream benefits on mental health, on mood, on relationships, on work, on productivity, on just parenting, on everything that you care about in your life. You don't have your biology well-regulated. You're a victim to the whims of all these influences that are outside of us, which is the food we're eating is information, as we learned from our mentor, Jeff Bland. And it is an instruction manual that is telling everything in our body what to do. And we often think that our emotional states or psychological states or our relationships are not triggered by food. But it can be really dramatic.

You know, and just to sort of recap a little bit about what our friend David Promutter wrote about in his book Brainwash, where he was on the podcast, he talked about how people are eating the processed food that we're all eating now, 60% of our diet. It disconnects the frontal lobe from the limbic brain, which means the limbic brain is the reptile brain that is reacting, responding, is angry, you know, fight or flight, all that. It disconnects that from the frontal lobe, which is the adult in the brain. It's sort of the higher self. And so all of a sudden you've got this dysregulated reptile in your brain that's not being supervised by an adult. and it leads to all this disordered behavior and i i part of me wonders if our society has become so devices divisive so

conflicted and there's so much rancor because of of our diet in part because it how it affects our brains and our and our functioning yeah i mean so powerful to hear that it wouldn't it wouldn't surprise me at all i think it's it's not just gonna be one thing is it's all these multiple inputs coming from all the way around and that's the whole thing about food isn't it we it's so reductive to talk about it just in terms of calories and you know energy into the body and energy out you know as you say food is information that's so much more than just those calories. And actually, we're doing food a disservice by just talking about it in terms of energy. It is more than that. You know, genetic expression, hormones, as you say, with the brain, what it might be doing. Absolutely incredible. And, you know,

we mentioned emotions before, but again, it goes both ways doesn't it you can feel stressed and want to eat more but actually eating the wrong kinds of food consistently can make you more hungry and cause you to overeat and can cause you to to crave more of those foods so it kind of it feeds it on both ways and I sort of feel that the right approach for each person is going to be slightly different. But I think, you know, we can absolutely agree that I don't know anybody who won't benefit from eating more real food in their diets. You know, I can't see the downside of doing that. Hey, everyone, it's Dr. Mark. Now's the time of year when sniffles and colds start to set in. Being inside all the time puts us in direct contact with tons of germs,

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but it was there last year. There's a huge trade show. And if you're a food nutrition services worker, you are more than invited. If you're you or me, you are absolutely not invited. And, um, you just go and you walk the aisles. We sent two folks there and, um, undercover and, uh, but that that's, it's just rows and rows and rows and rows of prepackaged food. There's not, you know, anything fresh, whole or real to be seen anywhere. And lots of brands that, you know, well, Domino's and Pepsi and all these other guys marketing school food to these programs. And so these programs buy into it super easy, right? You can menu it, you can make the menu sound delicious.

And, and it's, it's really easy to kind of take stuff out of plastic and put it in warming oven. So we thought, you know, and I, and I actually thought, okay, it's probably because there's just not enough money in the subsidy, right? And so that must be what it is. This is all we can afford. Well, you know, we get into the story and we, you know, we started to do the analysis on it. It ends up, you absolutely can pay kids all whole real food. You can employ more people locally in doing it. And the prepackaged stuff actually costs more than the real food. Wait, wait. So you're saying that the junk food and the processed food and the food is more expensive than real food cooked from scratch

by real humans locally in the kitchens. That's exactly right. And, you know, when we were going through this process, we brought in chefs to just help us understand it. And so Ken Oranger, who is a celebrity chef in Boston, pointed this out to us. He said, you know, the prepackaged roast beef that they're slicing up has been processed, right? So a whole bunch of people have touched it, manipulated it, and, you know, injected it with preservatives and salt and all kinds of other things. And sugar. And sugar, lots of sugar. That's right.

Why do you put sugar in turkey? I have no idea. No, well, probably to hide whatever other things you're trying to hide because you cooked it so long ago. But the, and so he said, you know, that costs way more than if we just order some roast beef and have it shipped to the schools. And so as we started to do the analysis, it was true in every case.

If you buy prepackaged stuff, because it's been processed, there's so much more cost in it. And then you've got margin on it as well. So, you know, there's profit on it. Wow. So you basically decided you were going to take this on and you created something called My Way Cafe. Yeah. And, you know, in the discovery of the challenges, you found a whole set of solutions, right? Because the basic mantra is, look, there's only a small amount of money that kids get for school lunch. What is it? $2 or something per lunch? Yeah. It's a little more than that. $3.45. $3.45. But 20 cents of it is milk. Okay. Which by the way, we can talk about it. But skim, skim or flavored. Okay. Another topic we'll get to it

because I could go on for hours about that. But you hear the mantra, look, this is the best we can do. We can't serve kids delicious, real whole food because it's too expensive. It's too difficult. It's not possible. And you actually figured out that not only possible, but it's not that hard and it's totally scalable. So tell us about that process. Yeah. Well, it was fun to do it on paper, right? So if you pull out spreadsheets and you start to put in all the food costs and all the labor costs and all the transportation costs, you can show very easily in a model that you can take the same subsidy from the USDA, employ three times as many people, serve all real whole food. And the only single time investment you need to make, we did it philanthropically and then the city has now taken it over, is to build these micro kitchens.

And they're not even, I mean, they have a combination oven and they have the right number of sinks, they have prep tables and they have a freezer and fridge in them. And they're not even, I mean, they have a combination oven and they have the right number of sinks. They have prep tables and they have a freezer and fridge in them. So they're not, nothing out of this world, but it's exactly the amount of equipment. We have rice cookers as well for people to prepare a full buffet of hot and cold food every day for kids. Looks like a rainbow. Kids love it. It smells good. It doesn't smell like heated plastic in schools anymore. It smells like real food. And so, but that process took a long time. That process took about nine months of us pushing really hard.

You know, we tripped over, it was like one thing at a time, every hurdle. And you can imagine why government alone can't do this, because there are so many no's that get in the way. And so we just kind of, every time someone said no, we said, why not? And we would just solve the problem. And then we'd get to the next thing. You know, like one of the earliest problems we solved was everything was coming in wrapped. So apples were wrapped in plastic, oranges were wrapped in plastic. It just made it look so unappetizing and um so the why the answer to the why why do we have to do it this way was well you don't have fruit washing

sinks in the in the kitchens so we said if we put a fruit washing thing in the kitchen do we have to wrap the fruit anymore and they said no you just got to wash the fruit so like it was just you know super simple like not expensive solution to a really big problem. Kids weren't eating the fruit because it took five minutes to unwrap the bloody thing, and it didn't look appetizing anyway. So we just had to do that with everything. And we got rid of it. Instead of people saying, this is why not, and just stopping there,

you were like, well, how do we fix this? Yeah, exactly. And you found it wasn't that hard, right? It's a sink. It's, it's other simple things. And I think, you know, uh, what was interesting, you shared with me once, it was a little subversive because you sort of started this program in the school. You did it in one school, you showed it could be done. You got them to not ship in the food from out of state, all wrapped in plastic. And you didn't really tell anybody what you were doing. And by the time people caught on, it was sort of too late. And, you know, these big food service providers that were, you know, cashing in all the government

supports and making crappy food were out of business. Right. That's right. You know, so it was interesting because the one thing that we caught wind of is that the food provider, so the, the vendor that provided all the plastic wrapped food, that, that opportunity was up for bid. And so, and we happened to just walk in the door as that bidding process was being set up. And so the only recommendation we made, because we didn't want to have anything to do with plastic wrapped food, is we said, make sure that you have the right to pull out any school. If for any reason you would want to shift the way you were feeding kids. So they wrote that into the bid and the deal was done with that in

mind. And we knew already, like, if this thing works, then we're just going to be able to, you know, pull off. So, and that's what's happened. 30 schools a year have come off of that contract and have gone on to this, you know, fully managed by the Boston Public Schools, real whole food. So, who made those decisions about the contracts? Was it the school superintendents? Was it? The head of food services. Who's terrific. Yeah. Who came from LA. She had, you know, she was trying to do a lot of things in LA in terms of shifting the food also in what they were serving there. And so she was, she was, you know, this all seemed very risky to her. And we kept saying to her, we're here to carry the risk on this. We'll make sure that like we don't break anything.

And, but you know, it was her decision to put the language into the contract and she really kind of made sure that we could keep pushing forward. It was because it was complicated. Yeah, it is. You know, I think right now we're hearing a lot of mantras about school lunch. Oh, you know, we put in these nutrition guidelines that are better under the Hunger-Free Kids Act that Obama passed in 2010, which improved the guide on what to eat more whole foods, more vegetables, et cetera, et cetera. Although they still passed potatoes, I mean, quote, French fries as a vegetable and

ketchup and pizza as vegetables, which, you know, just still is hard to imagine. But now what's happening is these guidelines are being rolled back because they're saying the kids won't eat the healthy food. They throw it in the garbage. It tastes bad. It costs too much. And so they're rolling back these guidelines. And yet your model shows that that's just a bunch of nonsense. Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting. I think the one thing we did in terms of a service model, which I think changes the way kids behave around food, it's all child driven. So the protein is separate from the grains, is separate from the warm vegetables, is separate from all the cold fruits and vegetables, is separate from the beans, et cetera. And so nothing has to touch anything else, which is a big reason that kids don't like

certain things. So if I walk down the line, right, I might take protein, I may take chicken, and I might forego the rice because I don't like it, but maybe there's a roll that I want and I like the roasted broccoli, or I don't like any of the hot vegetables, but I do want an apple and I want some celery and I want a carrot, but I definitely don't want a salad and I do not want dressing, but I do want the hot sauce.

So kids make their own meals. And this is not slow. This happens. There are servers on the other side. This is all within the $3.45 who are talking with kids. Kids are saying, please and thank you. There's a whole conversation that's going on that wasn't happening before. And they're getting exactly what they want. They walk up the line pretty gleefully, actually. And they eat it. They eat it all because they asked for it. That's what they wanted. There's no food waste. There's no food waste. And then, you know, and then we really insert opportunities for kids to try things, right? So while they're sitting around, they're sitting at the table eating, we might say, these are chickpeas. Would you like to try chickpeas? Right. So that we introduce new foods,

tofu. Tofu is like, kids love tofu now. Love it. You know, and so it's just so hard to hear the argument that kids won't eat the food. I think the adults don't know how to present the food to the kids. So just to recap, the economics work, you can create better food, more locally sourced, made from scratch. All you need is a little bit of an improvement in the kitchens. Yep. You hire more people. Yep. Which still was, is within the cost structure. Totally. Who are happier with their jobs because they're actually cooking and making kids happy. Yeah. And the kids are happy. They're not throwing out the food. Yeah. And, and how's their health and academic performance?

Have you tracked that? It's interesting. So we are doing, there's a study being done right now on the behavioral health because we were hearing from so many principals and teachers that negative behavioral events had gone way down in the schools. And so kids were just being disciplined less and teachers and principals thought it was because of the school food, the new school food. We don't have data yet. We are going to start doing some research on their

physical health as well. But I can tell you one story that I tell all the time. There was a child who was diagnosed with failure to thrive. And part of the school's responsibility was to try to get a half a can of a protein drink into this child every day. His name was George. And I walked in about three days after the My Way Cafe program had started in his school. And the principal was kind of teary eyed. And she said, I got to tell you, she said, this boy, George told me his situation. She said, he's eating every meal. Wow. And so I ended up meeting George a week later. And he said, do you know the people who make the food? And I said, oh, I do. Yeah. And he said,

how does someone make a recipe? I said, well, it's kind of like coloring. If you take a red crayon and a blue crayon and you put them together, it's kind of like coloring. If you take a red crayon and a blue crayon and you put them together, it's purple. So that's what they do. And he's like, I'm pretty sure that I want to be a chef. This is a kid who a couple of weeks ago, his pediatrician came in to see what was happening. His mom wanted to be able to bring the food home so he would eat at night. I mean, this is like a game changer. And as far as I can tell,

it was his relationship with one of these newly hired cafeteria service workers who just changed his mind about eating. It was mind blowing. It still is. So yeah, no, and he's such a cute kid. Yeah. And then, you know, the, the, maybe you haven't collected the data yet, but I think it's going to show remarkable things.

You know, when you look at kids in schools and violent, disruptive behavior, it's a big issue. I mean, one in ten kids are on ADD medication. You know, we have to have special ed. It's an enormous problem in schools. School nurses are dishing out medications left and right. And we know from the studies that these are difficult kids. There's a 3,000 kids study, which were incarcerated youth. And they basically replaced junk food with healthier

options and got rid of sugar and refined foods. And in 12 months, there was a 21% reduction in antisocial behavior, a 25% reduction in assaults, a 75% reduction in use of restraints. And get this, Jill, there was 100% reduction in suicides, which is basically, when you think about it, suicide is the third leading cause of death in children's age 10 to 19. And when you look at the CDC study, there was an incredible study by the CDC looking at nutrition in kids and found that those kids perform far better when they're well nourished. If they're not, they're basically having poor academic performance. They're having more absenteeism. They're having more disruptive behavior. They're less likely to problem solve, less likely to pay attention. And I think this is something we just don't

understand that we're doing to our kids. And it's something that's completely solvable with real food. I mean, the CDC published this in a report in 2014 called Health and Academic Achievement. And it was just such a clear link between poor nutrition and poor academic performance with lower test scores, lower grades, poor cognitive function, less alertness, less attention, poor memory. And it was just amazing. And so we have the ability to change this. We just don't do it. And I think the science is there. And now what you've shown is that the end of Feeding You Lies. And this is kind of how you start the process of really training your mind to eat real food. You start with the question, the first question, what are the ingredients? So you have to know kind of everything that you're eating. And so if you sit down for a meal and you don't know the ingredients, stop eating that meal and find out. And once you read the ingredients

and look at them, do you understand them all? Are they real food? Are they, you know, is it an apple, cinnamon, and sea salt? Or is it TBHQ and, you know, blue number one? TBHQ, by the way, is a very popular synthetic preservative that they use in very popular products. And, you know, Reese's peanut butter cups comes to mind. Oh, no, I used to love those. Oh, yeah. And, you know, this is actually an ingredient that negatively affects your T cells in your bodies and promotes allergies. So like if you have an allergic, just an allergy to anything, it can just increase your immune

response to that allergy. And you can have a very adverse reaction. And if you eat a lot of foods with this, it's been linked to vision disturbances, stomach cancer, behavioral problems in children, all sorts of things. And this is a preservative that's in a lot of things. But, you know, when you read that on a label, TBHQ, you have to ask yourself, what is that, right? And so that leads you to the second question, which is, are these ingredients nutritious? Is TBHQ nutritious? Hell no. Hell no, right? And so then you start to realize like, why am I eating these non-nutritious ingredients? And maybe I

need to choose something different. And then the third question you ask yourself is, where do these ingredients come from? Are they made in a laboratory, in a chemical factory? And in the case of natural flavors that you mentioned, yes, they are. People see the word natural and think it's coming from nature. Yeah, it starts in nature, but the way they manipulate, for example, a strawberry in a laboratory, or they can manipulate some other substance that comes from nature and make it act like a strawberry or taste like a strawberry or create the one millionth best part taste of something so that they can put it in a product that normally would not taste good on the shelf that lasts there for you know that's nine to twelve months

um they could put it in a product and it would taste like a real strawberry even though it has no real strawberries in it. And that's what natural flavoring is. And so it tricks your brain into thinking you're eating real food when you're not, but your body is still wondering where the nutrition from that strawberry is coming from. So you start to crave more than you should. And so natural flavors are one of the most evil ingredients, I believe, in our food supply because they trick your brain and they hijack your taste buds and they continue that craving so you eat more than you should. And with obesity, heart disease, and diabetes as

our biggest issue in this country and cancer, we have to take control of our taste buds. And the only way to do that is not to allow the food industry to control them. And so removing natural flavors from your diet is like the number one thing, I think. And it's so, you know, even though there's many more chemicals that are many more, much more harmful to you, almost 99% of the products on product shelves at the grocery store have natural flavors. So if you avoid natural flavor, you avoid many of those. And it's actually one of the reasons I started my company, Truvani. I just want to mention because there are so many supplement companies out there, protein powder companies and supplement companies that use these

natural flavors. And I wanted to create a line of products that were made from real food and non-synthetic substances. It didn't trick your brain into craving a flavor more than it should. I want people to be able to turn off their normal mechanism to crave food. And it's one of the reasons why we're doing what we're doing at TruePot. I mean, that's just so important what you're saying is because these chemicals and some of these things are not put in there necessarily as a preservative,

but they're put in there deliberately to hijack our brain to make us eat more, crave more, want more. And one of those is MSG, which has got 50 different names or more. So it's hidden and it doesn't say necessarily MSG or monosodium glutamate because people are hip to that. They change the name like hydrolyzed yeast protein or extract. And that actually is what's used in research to fatten up rats or mice to study obesity. So they give them MSG as a way to increase their appetite, make them eat more and get fat. And I remember once I was talking to a nutritionist who lived in Samoa, which has the most obese population in the entire world, and most of them are diabetic. And she said for

breakfast, they had ramen noodles, sugar. They had MSG. They put Kool-Aid powder on it, which has all these artificial colors, and they put MSG powder on it. So it's extraordinary. That's their breakfast, basically Kool-Aid, MSG, and ramen noodles. The most powerful form of transformation is addressing the microculture, the microculture in your own household. And so regardless of the fact that I was living in Ferguson, Missouri, I can step outside of my close environment, close proximity environment and go and start to procure my food. Because as soon as I became aware that food mattered, that food could change

the ingredients I was making my tissues out of. Suddenly, this farmer's market in Ferguson, the nicer part of Ferguson, by the way, for years, there'd been a farmer's market. And I was oblivious to the fact that it existed. And now I'm going there each week with my family. I'm saving, sometimes paying 50% less of what I'm paying at Whole Foods to try to get these same foods. Saving money, getting closer to where my food is coming from. And now again, just because of my awareness and my dedication to changing the microculture in my household, because as I mentioned, it wasn't just me going to the farmer's market. I was taking my kids with me. I was taking my then girlfriend, now wife with me.

And we made this into a family event and it became a part of our culture. But how did you, Sean, how did you like go, God, here's what kind of knife I need. Here's a pot I need. Here's how to chop an onion. Here's how to like, how do I mince garlic? Like, how do I, how do I bake? How do I, I mean, just basic things. How did you go from like basically eating in, you know, factory made food to making

homemade food? And that, that bridge that bridge that you had to cross was like a big expanse for most people to think about who don't know the way around the kitchen. Okay. I'm going to share two things. Number one, that wasn't my particular story because I grew up in a household where the skill of cooking was apparent. It was there. We were oftentimes eating ultra-processed food, but my mom was a great cook. My stepfather got paid to cook at high-end places. We just didn't have a lot of money. Same thing, my little brother to this day is a fantastic cook. And so, I'm going to share with you one of my core memories. But that's unusual, right? That's unusual.

It is. And so, I'm going to share that second thing in just a moment. But one of my core memories, and it's so interesting that this book is coming out, having just lost my stepfather. But one of my core memories was, it's one of those days we open up the cabinet, there's nothing there. We open up the refrigerator, we don't have anything to eat. And this is a time when he's at the house and we're just like, we're hungry, you know? And so I go to him like, hey, we're hungry. There's no food. He goes into the kitchen and there was a loaf of Texas toast that we got on the WIC program. There was government cheese, which is this block of cheese. And there was some tomato sauce in the cabinet. And there was some frozen deer sausage in the freezer that my grandfather has sent to us.

And at the time, of course, I wasn't trying to eat Bambi. I was not into that deer sausage. But what he did was he took those ingredients and he made pizza out of them. He made pizza with those ingredients. And I will never forget that. I was like eight years old and it stayed with me forever because number one, and by the way, it didn't taste like Domino's, all right? It didn't taste exactly like pizza I was used to, but the fact that kids like pizza and I was

eating pizza, that elicited some motivation and some joy in that moment. And the fact that I got to eat with him because we rarely ate together. And sharing that moment with him, eating pizza, eliciting, and this is a huge part. This is the point I was trying to make. In that environment, it really can incite such a high level of creativity. When people hear about my story and where I come from, there can be a lot of, you know, empathy and even sympathy about that. But you don't understand the beauty that's there as well and the capacity for creativity. And so that stuck with me my entire life to this moment. And so this is bringing back to, okay, so where do have this, it's never been easier to be unhealthy. It's never been easier to be healthy.

We have access to every manner of training with this with a simple YouTube video. But what we need to do is- My mother always said, if you could read, you can cook. Meaning, just follow the recipe. And it's like, if you can watch a YouTube video, you can cook, right? That part. I was like, I don't know how to make duck breasts. I'm going to like watch Gordon Ramsay make duck breasts on YouTube.

He could yell at me virtually, you know, and we could make this happen. Yeah, I was like, wow, wow, wow. That's like not so hard. So I think, you know, even if you don't know how to make everything, you can learn so easily by just the tools we have available. You're right. It's never been easier to be sick or healthy. And we've also got to take the complexity out of it because it's unnecessary.

And so even a lot of great recipe books, they can tend to be a little bit complex. And so what I focused on was simplicity, high quality ingredients, real food ingredients, but also tying in some of the most joyful food experiences in our culture. Like for example, one of my favorite things growing up and in particular, when I was trying to get my health together and having this revelation prior to that, I love McDonald's breakfast. All right. And I'm not alone. All right. The sausage McMuffin. But the thing was, I oftentimes didn't get up in time to make it to breakfast because of staying up late,

playing video games, being unhealthy, all the things. But it's one of my favorite things. So my thought was, I know that these breakfast sandwiches are incredibly popular. How can I upgrade this and create a delicious breakfast sandwich using real food ingredients that's going to knock people's socks off. And that's one of my youngest son's favorite foods, by the way, favorite meals is this breakfast sandwich that we put into the Eat Smarter Family Cookbook. Love that. Love that. And the same thing with pancakes. If we're talking about, I would get the hotcakes and sausage. And so I took a foundational food that has these powerful anthocyanins that have been found to

improve the health of our memory, metabolic health in the form of sweet potato, a foundational food that has these powerful anthocyanins that have been found to improve the health of our memory, metabolic health in the form of sweet potatoes and make these delicious sweet potato protein pancakes. And again, it's based on a real food, deliciousness, and now we're getting all, as you said, and I remember it changed my life when you said it, Mark, that food isn't just food, it's information, right? So now we're getting all these higher order, more intelligent compounds into our bodies and it starts to change us from the inside out. And so those are the two things, taking away the complexity, making simple recipes, number one, easy on-ramp and also things that we're familiar with. I agree. I mean, I, I, you know, I was a single father. I had two kids, you know,

worked hard as a doctor and, and I, you know, figured out how to make simple things. And the weekend might make a big pot of stew or soup. I, I learned how to make simple, quick meals. And, you know, like last night, I, as a great example, people think it's like, I don't take the onerous and take a long time and be difficult but it really doesn't like i had a couple of friends over last night and uh we didn't really have much time and i was busy working all day and essentially just made like in like i don't know it was 15 minutes maybe less uh an incredible meal i had sweet potatoes that i put in the oven before so i planned ahead a little bit just put them in an hour ahead which is you just throw them wash them throw them in the oven it's like a toaster oven, it's pretty easy.

I whipped together a salad. I buy like pre-washed arugula and I chopped up some tomatoes, chopped up some cucumbers. I didn't bother even mixing the olive oil and vinegar. I just pour the olive oil on, pour the vinegar on, salt and pepper, toss it up. Like literally salad took three minutes. Um, I, I, I cooked a steak on the grill five minutes and, uh, certified some mushrooms and garlic. And the whole thing was like a very simple meal, but it was delicious, full of medicinal compounds and, and everybody loved it. And it was, it didn't, it didn't take a lot of stress or a lot of time or a lot of effort. And I think

people have to understand that, that, that the yourself that is hard or it takes too much time or it's too expensive is just a myth. And we need to reclaim our kitchens. Exactly. And part of that myth, again, it's that cultural influence. And I was just going to share this really quickly was that one of the other things on the other side is when we're eating in isolation and we're not preparing food for us, even ourselves, let alone our families. And this was published in Nutrition Journal in 2018. And I was just finding like, is there some data showing that if we're not doing this, what's going to happen? And they found that eating alone, we tend to have significantly lower diet quality and lower intake of essential nutrients that help to prevent chronic diseases.

And so it's protective on so many different levels, eating together with people we care about, having higher quality ingredients, and taking the complexity out. Taking back really control. Because America, we invented the TV dinner. We invented it. And that marketing and that culture has taken control. I used to eat that Salisbury steak. Oh, the mushy steak, yes. Swanson's Salisbury.

I remember that. And we had those TV dinner trays. It was like a special tray that you'd open up to put your TV tinfoil dinner on. And then you could watch TV. And this was like in the 60s. It was like so bad. It was so bad. Wow. You know, the title of your book is so important. It's like the Eat Smarter Family Cookbook, right? This is food you can cook with your family, with your kids, 100 delicious recipes to transform your health, happiness, and connection. And, you know,

health, happiness, and connection is not, they're all not separate, right? Your health is actually determined by your social relationships and connections, as we started off talking in the beginning. And so whether it's inviting friends over, whether it's family members, whether it's your spouse, whatever it is, if it's two people, that's, that's a family dinner, right? So make sure you prioritize this. It's gotta be something that's, it's built into a value system that you have for yourself. Otherwise it's going to be very hard for people to sort of reclaim their health and resting it out of this disaster of chronic disease and obesity that we're seeing today in America. I hope you enjoyed today's episode. One of the best ways you can support this podcast is by leaving us a rating and review below. Until next time, thanks for tuning in.

I hope you enjoyed this week's episode. Just a reminder that this podcast is for educational purposes only. This podcast is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical professional. This podcast is provided on the understanding that it does not constitute medical or professional advice or services. If you're looking for help in your journey, seek out a qualified medical practitioner. If you're looking for a functional medicine practitioner, you can visit ifm.org and search their find a practitioner database. It's important you have someone in your corner who's trained, who's a licensed healthcare practitioner, and can help you make changes, especially when it comes to your health.