The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos - How Eating Got Complicated

Episode Date: December 4, 2023

For our ancient ancestors food was just another thing they needed to survive - like sleep, shelter or warmth. But in the modern world, food has become a source of anxiety. Do we eat too much, or too little? And are we feeding ourself the "wrong" things? Dr Laurie Santos has plenty of thoughts on our complicated relationship with eating and shared them on a recent episode of the PRX podcast Food, We Need to Talk. The show turned out great, so we thought we'd give you the chance to hear Laurie's chat with the hosts Juna Gjata and Dr. Eddie Phillips.  Just like The Happiness Lab, Food, We Need to Talk relies on the latest science to tackle issues like body image, nutrition, exercise and addiction. You can listen to other episodes of Food, We Need to Talk wherever you get your podcasts.  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Pushkin. lot, but it's not a topic we've tackled a lot on the show. Recently, I was invited to appear on the podcast Food We Need to Talk, and preparing for my interview, it really helped me focus my thoughts on this important subject. Just like the Happiness Lab, Food We Need to Talk relies on the latest science to tackle issues like body image, nutrition, exercise, and addiction. I felt totally at home on the show and really enjoyed my conversation with the hosts, Yuna and Eddie. And so I thought you would too. If afterwards you want to hear more smart thoughts on eating, then you should listen to other episodes of Food We Need to Talk, wherever you get your podcasts.

Just a heads up to our listeners, this episode does involve discussion of eating disorders. If you need more information or need help finding help, go to nationaleatingdisorders.org. I'm Yuna Jata. And I'm Dr. Eddie Phillips, Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School. And you're listening to Food We Need to Talk, the only podcast that has been scientifically proven to help you be happy with your food again. Welcome back to Food We Need to Talk. Thank you so much, Professor Santos, for coming back on to talk about food this time.

Yeah. So the first question we wanted to ask you about is, do you think that we view food differently today than we traditionally have in the past? Because I feel like, to me, food has always seemed very utilitarian. You use food to either be healthy or to manipulate your weight. But I don't think that in the past, people were so preoccupied with their weight and so focused on health, right, because they were just eating food to survive. And so I feel like it's completely started to mean this different thing. Yeah, I think so. I mean, I think it's worth going really way back, right, to how we used to think about food evolutionarily, right?

You know, I think when we were hunter-gatherers, food was just another one of our basic needs, right? You know, we'd get sleepy and we'd sleep. We'd be cold and maybe put on a blanket or a fur or something i think when we were hungry we wanted to eat and i think if you look at the foods that people were eating back then you know like roots and tubers and whatever you know in the back in the evolutionary day very little of it was this sort of highly palatable food and so i think sometimes we think oh today food's so utilitarian you know maybe we need to get back to pleasure but in some ways i think we need to get back to what food really was. It's just like a way to fulfill our needs.

It wasn't necessarily supposed to be this super pleasurable thing that, you know, we got a lot out of. And so I think when you take that big historical approach, you realize, wow, we're thinking about food in a really different way. And it's one of the needs that we've gotten so obsessed about. You know, you talked about regulating your weight or kind of wanting to get fit and things like that. And I think these days we really are super utilitarian when it comes to food. And when you start to realize that it's just an urge, that starts to feel kind of weird. You know, when you think about like, you know, if I have an urge to go to the bathroom, right, I have to urinate. I'm not like making a schedule or having an app or like there's not like influencers who

are telling me I want to go to the bathroom. Like if I'm feeling cold, there's very little infrastructure for like how to get warmer or tips on getting warm. Like you just kind of obey that need. And somehow we've gotten off track with food. So I'm picturing the folks coming back from their hunting and gathering and the food arrives and it might just be some tubers. Maybe it was an exceptional day and you caught an animal of whatever size. If you really went nuts and you were willing to climb up a tree and smoke out the bees, you got a little bit of honey.

But what I'm hearing is that, was everyone clapping and saying, hooray, I'm really happy? Or is it just like, oh my God, I won't be starving for another 24 hours? Yeah. I mean, I think there definitely even were foods back in the evolutionary day that tasted better than others. You know, you mentioned honey, and I think honey has these features of the kind of thing that we are out there looking for, this really high caloric, you know, very sweet sort of food. But my guess is that most of the time it wasn't really the sort of pleasure thing. It wasn't like we were, you know, going on our hunter-gatherer Yelp to try to pick their

best restaurant, you know, with the best cocktails and food. Like, it was just food, right? And I think we've somehow built food up a lot, in part because, you know, it really is a form of pleasure that we can savor in our lives now, done well. But I think it wasn't always that. And I think, you know, some of the kind of difficult, challenging relationships that some of us have with food now, if we could get back to thinking about food just as fuel, like gasoline that we're putting into our big human meat tanks, you know, we might end up developing a healthier relationship with eating. Okay, so that's a great segue into what is a healthy relationship to food. I think it's become a buzzword. Yeah. Everybody loves to say it, especially on Instagram. Everybody's like, yeah,

I'm like really like working on my relationship with food. I'm really good or whatever. It's so vague at this point that I have no idea what they're talking about. So how do you define a good relationship with food? I mean, honestly, I think a good relationship with food is one that you don't think about, right? You know, like I have, you know, historically been part of diet culture, right? Like I picked up these norms. I too have a complicated relationship with, you know, should I be eating healthier? You know, is this going to make me fat?

Like these kinds of things come in, right? Even for me. But when I watch people who have what I would think of as a healthy relationship with food, they just eat when they're hungry and they eat something that seems like it will make their bodies feel decent. And then they don't really think about food very much. So I think kind of just the act of worrying about this

healthy relationship with food and making hashtags about it that go on Instagram already that's signaling like something is amiss, right? Like no one's hashtagging like I have this great relationship with my like, you know, urination or like making my body feel warm, right? Like it's just another urge that we have is just another need that our bodies have. And so already as we start asking this question, I think it means we got off track. But I think, you know, when we think about a healthy relationship with food, it's one that's not taking up a lot of mental bandwidth. I think when you start having it take up mental bandwidth already, this is problematic, you know, even maybe if it's pleasurable, right? Even if you're obsessed

with, oh, what I'm going to eat tonight, I'm really excited about this restaurant and things. I think that already is signaling that you might be kind of getting off track a little bit. So that's, I think, point number one is you shouldn't be obsessed with it. You shouldn't have to talk about it. But the second thing is I think that it's kind of not an emotion that seems to be like very high arousal. Like you're not feeling anxious or sad or stressed. It's kind of much more one of these neutral emotions. Even when it kind of verges on the positive relationship, like you're savoring your food and you're enjoying it. It's not this like extreme thing. It's kind of just like joy.

It's like walking around and seeing the nice flowers. It's like that level of emotion and not one that's taking up a lot of energy and mental bandwidth. taking up a lot of energy and mental bandwidth. Let's add in the texture of food is love. And there's so many cultures where, my God, if you told my wife, if you told my mother-in-law, like not to worry about what they're going to serve when we get together for dinner, that would be sort of like a negative. So I think more I was answering Yuna's question about the influencer version of a healthy relationship with food. I think if you're paying attention to food from the perspective of

sort of diet culture and what you have to eat to be healthy, then you have to kind of worry about these sort of more negative emotions, like things like anxiety and so on, right? But if we stop that, then we can ask, okay, how do we get a more pleasurable relationship with food? And I think that brings us into the healthier versions of cultures that we can have with food, right? Because food is really a super important part of our social connection, right? Again, done well, right? I think, you know, influencer version of orthorexia where you just have your snacks in your bag and you just eat your carrots on the way to the gym, that doesn't work. Jim, that doesn't work.

But these recipes that have been part of your culture for generations, food that's part of rituals that are meaningful both for the social connection and for what they represent in terms of how you're representing the world and sort of life changes. These things can be really essential. But they're often less about the food and more about kind of how we're thinking about the food and what it represents in our lives. Like, my guess is it's not necessarily, you know, if I think back to like, you know, I don't know, my grandmother is cooking. My grandmother used to make these cupcakes and things. It's less about what's in the particular cupcake and more the narrative and the stories that I have going with it, the fact that it's been part of this tradition and so on. And so, that healthy relationship with food is less about the particular food itself.

I don't think anybody cares about the macros that are in the cupcake. It's really about the narrative and the stories and the sort of cultural background that comes with food. How do we reclaim that? I think it's really hard because that healthy relationship comes with being in a culture that thinks about this stuff. And in a lot of ways, we sort of lost those cultures. You all talk a lot about Michael Pollan, who has a lot of discussion about kind of how we can get back to a healthier relationship with food and how we should think about our food decisions. You know, he talks about, you know, making food out of boxes and doing these things. Already the cultural traditions that I think she had grown up with were kind of fading in my, you know, American upbringing. And so I think, you know, we've lost a lot of that and we need to start building that back in. And I think that's important both for our happiness, but also for

our health. You know, I take Michael Pollan's point to be, if you're trying to figure out what a healthy diet is, it's no like one thing or one set of macros. It's often more like the traditional kind of ways that people used to eat, kind of no matter what was in it, right? You take traditional cultures that are much more meat-based or much more plant-based and they have some nuance there, but pretty much all the traditional diets are better than what I was growing up on out of the box in the 1980s. are better than what I was growing up on out of the box in the 1980s. Right. So I feel like the message of like not thinking or stressing too much about food is really important. But then I feel like with the food environment that we live in today,

it's kind of hard to not think about it and still eat, I think, what's good for your body. I have a new roommate that moved in. She loves baking. So now there's just baked goods in the house all the time and it's like if I don't consciously think to myself like I probably shouldn't be having this all the time I just would because they just taste good do you know what I mean so how do you like balance the idea of like these things are everywhere all the time and even all my social gatherings I've been noticing like I've just been going out every other day guys and getting food that I know isn't good for me because I've just been meeting my friends because it's the summer and in the back of my

mind I'm like kind of like like, I feel like it's just like happening a lot right now. I don't really like it. I don't really feel like I feel as good. But then I also don't want to be becoming very stressed about it like I used to. And I haven't been. I haven't not been going to those social gatherings because there's food there the way I used to. Yeah. And I think this is the problem, right? Is that as food becomes something that we get worried about, that we're paying more attention to like that kind of in particular we might even think about it like a diet mentality that kind of diet mentality that comes in whether it's based on health like really i just want my body to feel good or whether it's based on some diet notions like i want to change the size of

my body or i want to become fitter or so on. Both of those have a particular psychological set of features, which is like, it's making us obsessed with stuff, right? Like we kind of, whether it's a sort of diet mentality or a sort of fitness mentality, neither of them are pretty good when they go along with this sort of anxiousness. And so, you know, the kind of anxiousness you're describing about these sort of social events

isn't ideal. But then that of course raises the question like, okay, but how do I do that in the environment where there's this hyper palatable food that I know, even if I don't care about like, even if I'm not in diet head, I still don't want my body to feel super gross right afterwards, right? And so I think part of that is really trying to come to terms with actually paying attention to how these foods make us feel. There's lots of evidence growing that these hyper palatable foods really kind of hijack a certain part of our system. And we often talk about it hijacking our sort of pleasure

system, what we really like. But I think that's sort of incorrect because when you get down to it, these foods don't necessarily feel that great if you're paying attention to them. You know, a lot of people who engage in mindful eating exercises sometimes have the realization that whatever food they've been obsessing over, say like Hershey's Kisses, they finally eat them and they're like, oh, they're kind of waxy. Like in my brain, I had this very delicious thing, but when I mindfully really pay attention to what the taste is, I'm kind of not digging it that much. And that plays into this very dumb feature of the way our brains work. It's like the one feature, like if I could change the way that this part of the human brain work, I would, which is that there seems to be this weird disconnect

in our brains between wanting and liking. And so liking is like, I eat the Hershey Kiss and how it actually tastes. Like what's my actual pleasure response to it? Is it tasty? Is it whatever? But wanting is different. Wanting is how much i start obsessing about it how much i want to go after it how much when i see an ad for it i'm like oh that seems really good you would assume that our brains would be smart that our brains would put those two circuits together that we would want only things that we actually liked but it turns out if you look that is not how brains are organized there's seems to be this interesting disconnect between liking and wanting. And so you can see that most clearly with drugs of addiction. So take somebody who

has a heroin addiction. That person has a really strong wanting for heroin, right? They're going to rob their family, get into all kinds of bad behaviors to go after heroin. But because their bodies are habituated to it, when they actually experience the drug, they don't really even like it anymore, right? They're not getting the same blast that they got maybe the first time they got it. And so that already shows us that there's this disconnect. But I think this is the same kind of thing that's happening with hyperpalatable food, right? Like, you know, your roommate makes the baked goods and you see them on the table and your wanting system is like, go, go, go. Like, take that, you know like but maybe

when you eat it my guess you know i'm like no no like shade to your room i'm sure she makes really delicious how dare you i'm sending this episode over but it might not be as good as your no you're totally right to be right totally right and and what's frustrating about the wanting liking system is i think it runs in reverse too i think there's lots of stuff that we like that the wanting system just hasn't latched onto. Take exercise, right? Yes. We were just talking before we started about, you know, all your deadlifts and going up, right? Like, I have never had my wanting system, like, tell me to go to the gym or tell me to do deadlifts.

But I'm pretty sure most of the time I engage in, like, a hard Pilates class or a hard workout. My liking system fires to that in the end. When I'm leaving the gym, I'm having like, I'm in a sort of euphoria of like, that felt really good, but it doesn't translate into this sort of wanting to go after things. And I think that's true for healthier foods too, right there. You know, we're in the middle of summer when we're having this conversation and right now, like the peaches are just like so good. I had a nectarine the other day that was like on the verge of orgasm, but like I do not still do not have the wanting for those nectarines in the same way I would for the baked goods. And so I think understanding the way this

system works can help us a little bit. First, it just gives us some knowledge about when I'm experiencing this wanting, it might not be an honest signal. I'm probably not going to like this as much as my brain is telling me. My mind's kind of lying to me. But in another way, it can cause us to really start to pay attention more to the things we really do like. And while it is true that the wanting and liking systems are a little bit disconnected, they can sort of update a little bit, like when you actually start to pay attention to your liking. And we know this from work by folks like Hedy Cobert, who's a colleague of mine at Yale, who studies drugs of addiction, where she gets, for example, cigarette smokers to really pay attention when they're smoking to like,

do you like the way this feels? Do you like the way this smells? Do you like the way this feels? And people often, when they start to pay attention, are like, actually, this feels kind of gross. I don't like the smell of this. I don't like what this is doing to my body when I think about that. And what she finds is that that can gradually start to update the wanting system. Not perfectly, but when you really start to pay attention, you're like, hang on, this was not rewarding. I really didn't like this. Then it can kind of do the update. And the same with really mindfully paying attention to the healthy food.

If you really focus on the nectarine and think about it, again, you're not probably going to crave it in the same way your dopamine system goes to these highly palatable foods that are literally engineered by engineers in a laboratory to kind of you know be like the heroin but you can kind of get your wanting system a little bit more on board with going for it so with other drugs of addiction the biggest thing that is always like so annoying to me is that like you the ideal would be to like not have them at all right for the rest of your life but with food like it's impossible to do that because you're never going to be able to like never have hyper palatable food again right unless you like live super super restrictively right and i think and i can't imagine anyone honestly doing that without the anxiety right i mean i think there's you know there's lots of talk these days in the field of

psychology about orthorexia right which for listeners that don't know is this, again, it's not a DSM, like, you know, like categorized official disorder, but it's one that leads to people experiencing a lot of anxiety where you're just really obsessed with eating healthy foods. And so ostensibly, you know, if your dietician or your nutrition looked at your, what you were eating, they might be like, oh, that's's great like you look so healthy but in practice you feel really dysregulated you feel like you're on this kind of like verge of a binge all the time it's taking up all your air time for you it doesn't feel good and so i think that's the problem is that living in this environment of food being so hyper palatable it's so hard to pay attention without it's so hard dipping into the orthorexia i just i'm such

an all-or-nothing person like i would just. I just, I'm such an all or nothing person. Like I would just so much rather have like not care at all or like super care than like kind of care. Do you know what I mean? Totally. I have a friend who says, I wish, you know, the Soylent companies would just like make the thing that was really healthy and we would never, but that's why I think we need to get back to the question that Eddie mentioned, right? Which is to get back to kind of having real true pleasure in food beyond just the hyperpalatability, right? Can we get back to like the way these things were created over time? Like maybe like slowly creating healthy foods, right? Embedding them in our cultures and in our rituals, even if that's sort of starting new cultures and rituals.

What does that look like, right? If you build up that narrative and that history, it can help there be other things that maybe don't necessarily replace the hyperpalatable foods, right? We're not going to like wipe them out of our culture, but it gives us an alternative of things to pay attention to that might be kind of healthier in terms of our bodies too. Is there a kind of like a literacy around food? And what I'm thinking of is I'm sitting here with a concert pianist to my right. I'm effectively musically illiterate. I've never learned how to play an instrument. I will listen to music. I have to remind myself to do it.

Oh, my God. Well, like I'm almost like while I'm exercising. And I would say I'm happier if I'm listening to music, but I'm musically illiterate. I mean, okay. Is the same with food? Like, there are some people for whom that's all they focus on. It can be pathological, as you're pointing out. And then there's others that could be the happiest people I know, and they just go like, food just doesn't resonate with me.

Yeah, I think it's complicated. I mean, I think, you know, a lot of the research really suggests it's about the narrative that we tell ourselves. And again, not really what's in the food. You know, one of my favorite examples of this that shows kind of how funny these narratives can be, looked at individuals who are paying attention to different wines, right? You're tasting wines, right? And you're doing that, for example, like in an fMRI scanner. So we can see what's happening in your brain as you're tasting these things.

And what you find is that the simple label that you're showing people of the price of this wine affects whether or not they taste it. Literally the reward centers in their brain are firing more as they taste it. And so you can give someone exactly the same wine and their brains will fire more for that same wine if it's labeled as they tasted. And so you can give someone exactly the same wine and their brains will fire more for that same wine if it's labeled as more expensive, right? And so that tells us

something interesting, right? It tells us it's not what we're tasting. It's kind of what we're thinking about as we're tasting it. There's a similar paper about tasting Coke and Pepsi. And so a lot of people say that they like Coke better. I also like say that I like Coke better. But if you put people in a scanner and you don't tell them which is which, people's reward centers fire more for Pepsi. I think just because Pepsi actually has more sugar in it than sweet and Coke. But if you tell people it's Pepsi as they're drinking it, then it will fire less. So if they don't know what it is, they like it more than Coke. But if you tell them it's Pepsi, they're like, oh, no, I don't want to drink it. So the story sets the stage.

And I think that's Pepsi, they're like, oh, no, I don't want to drink it. So the story sets the stage. And I think that's powerful, right? I mean, I think it means that we can set our own stories, right? So if your roommate's bringing out the cookies that she bakes and she just says, oh, they're cookies, that might not taste as delicious as if you say, these are my grandmother's secret recipe, decadent chocolate cookies. Like, just labeling something differently actually does make it more delicious to us right and so there's there's kind of funny hacks that we can engage in to make things more delicious well i wonder if part of like the reason i feel that way about food is because like for most of my life really food was just like like i was trying to eat less of it

like that was its only purpose you know what i mean so i don't know if like part of it is that like i think one time i saw a nutritionist who's kind of like kind of nutritionist kind of psychologist. And she was like, you have a lot of fear associated with food and your amygdala is really, the amygdala is the part of the brain guys. That's like the fear kind of anxiety center of the brain. And it's kind of the oldest part of the brain. It's like very, very deep in your brain. Anyways. And she was saying like you just have all these connections between food and your amygdala and like we need to like rewire to have food and like pleasure associated together, not just food and fear. Yeah. I mean, I think there's really something to that, right? I mean, I think if you really have

like a clinically, you know, diagnosed eating disorder, you know, you're building in so many negative emotions that come with food, whether it's about eating too much of it or which kinds of it, right? Like it means that you're not no longer thinking of food as this like fuel that's neutral or like a friend that you could savor that you might like, but as this negative, scary, like potentially harmful, threatening thing. And so I think the process of trying to engage a little bit more with food mindfully, you know, might be pretty helpful, you know, because we do know that both, again, the stories we tell ourselves about food matter. And so if you have a negative story, that's only going to make it worse. But if you have a positive story, that might be better.

But also the rituals that we have around food matter too, right? You know, a wine drunk in a really nice wine glass at a beautiful restaurant is going to taste different than, you know, out of a bag, like, you know, I don't know, in a dorm room somewhere, like some Ivy League dorm room, right? You know, and so I think we can try to develop different rituals to come up with food. And a lot of, you know, therapeutic interventions for eating disorders as people are eating more, you know, that's one of the things, right? It's like, let's try to kind of make this thing not scary. Let's put it in a pretty dish, have a nice ritual about it, really take a deep breath before you eat it, really try to pay attention to what does this

taste like? How would I describe this? That kind of mindful eating can at least make you pay more attention to how things taste. And often when you're doing that, you can notice the pleasure that's associated with that. So I have several thoughts that may be related. Let me give it a try. So once a year, I have this joyous obligation of going out to the Healthy Kitchens, Healthy Kitchens course. It's in Napa Valley. It is at the Culinary Institute of America.

And part of it, you're in the middle of wine country. And part of it, they actually have these tables set up and you can go from table to table and do a wine tasting. And my first reaction when I tasted some of these remarkable wines that cost like $100 plus per bottle was like, oh, it's like velvet. And I remember calling my wife and saying, remember how I said I don't like wine? I don't like cheap wine. But what I'm learning from you, Laurie, is that what sold the wine to me was, again, the setting and the story. Is it the vinter? Yeah. They were actually standing there pouring their creation and setting me up for this experience.

And it was sort of like, of course I was going to. I mean, first off, it really is objectively better. Put me in an fMRI. We can test. We can test. And I'm sure someone has. I'll sign up for that study. But I guess what I'm learning is that it's really the setting, the story.

Can we do that to get ourselves eating better? I think so. And I think, you know, there's some evidence that even, right, the palatability of, you know, not so palatable foods, right, you know, the healthier, like just a bunch of greens or roots or these kinds of things, just the setting can make a lot of difference, right? You know, if you walk into, you know, one of these like bougie New York kind of vegan places where the stuff is plated really well and you know you're paying a lot of money, the kale that's there is different than the kale that I, you know, grab at the supermarket. Like, just to me, it tastes differently, right? So, I think that matters. I think who we are eating with seems to matter,

too. You know, there's lots of evidence. My TikTok account. What's that? My TikTok account. I'm just scrolling. Oh, yeah, yeah. That is part of it, yeah. But you bring up a really important point, right, which is that, you know, we act like these healthier foods don't taste good, but in practice, we're not really giving them the sort of mindfulness benefit of the doubt when we're engaging with them. I was joking about the snacks that you have in your bag kind of thing earlier, but as I've sort of made a foray into trying to eat more healthfully, again, not for weight loss or just to make my body feel good make my body feel good. Sometimes that means eating on the go. Sometimes that means grabbing, you know, a few carrot sticks that are in my bag. And that's not often eating in the prettiest way possible with the best narrative possible. It's just kind of like getting the fuel in to go, right? And so it does feel like we're sometimes, because we're so busy and because we're so easily distracted,

missing out on these opportunities to really enjoy food well. You know, one of the main complaints of people who try to engage in more mindful eating is just like, it's boring. Yeah, it's so boring. Like you're like, I have to just eat and not watch, you know, like not look at my TikTok videos or not watch RuPaul's Drag Race or whatever. It's like, what, you know, like, how am I expected to just eat, right? Like, it just seems so boring, right? And I think that tells us something, right? Even if we're eating a hyperpalatable food, it sometimes seems boring, right? And that really tells us it wasn't about the food. It wasn't about our enjoyment. It was really about the wanting of the food, right? The getting of it and the enjoying doesn't really

matter as much as we thought. Do the advertisements set the wanting? I mean, the double bacon cheeseburger will make it your way? I mean, part of them is that, you know, like most advertisements, they're often very inaccurate. Google how companies make these palatable foods look good. The food styling. Yeah. You know, like ice cream in most food ads is actually just like Crisco or like, because they can't, it would melt under the lights. Right. And so, you know, so a lot of them are kind of faked,

but yeah, I think those things are created to really amp up our wanting system. I mean, it's even like, I have an association with Starbucks. I've loved Starbucks since I was like 15. I've been a gold member since that age anyways. And so I used to go there every day and like, now I don't, cause I can't afford it anymore. But even when I go, it's just like, I'm like, oh, this latte is so good. It's so much better than that. And everybody hates Starbucks coffee. People that actually like coffee are like Starbucks is not good. And it's just like even the brand of Starbucks, like I just love the idea of I'm going to get my Starbucks, if that makes sense, just because it's something I grew up with and it's so comforting to me.

And even branding, right, can matter a lot. You know, I mentioned this Coke and Pepsi. You know, again, when we drink it, the neural activation fires more for Pepsi. But knowing it's Pepsi versus Coke makes us think really differently about it. I think knowing something's Starbucks makes us think differently about it. And I think this gets also back to, you know, we were talking about why are these hyperpalatable foods, you know, so addictive? Why do they kind of trigger this wanting system so much? And I think part of it is that, like, the not-so-hyperpalatable foods, they don't tend to have the marketers or the branding behind them.

Like, my nectarine from the farmer's market doesn't come with, like, you know, a logo that I associate with that nectarine that's bright, that, you know, triggers my memories about eating previous nectarines. It's just a nectarine, right? And so I think that's one of the things that we're pushing against as we try to engage in eating more healthfully is that most of the healthy stuff just doesn't have any of that kind of branding narrative nuance that gets our wanting systems going. And no health claims on the packaging too. So I think we had a figure in our book that was like the amount of money spent on like food marketing by food companies. And it was like billions of dollars. And then the amount of money spent on like agriculture marketing, like marketing vegetables basically. And it was like 200 million and it was like less than 1% of the marketing budget or whatever. Also all the packaging in the supermarket, if you look at the packaging,

you would think the healthiest food is in the middle of the supermarket, right? And then all the vegetables have zero packaging. So it's like, I don't know, it is all very deceptive. We'll be right back. And we're back with Professor Lori Santos of the Happiness Lab, a professor of psychology at Yale University. The other thing I wanted to ask you about was whether restriction makes the wanting part even more mismatched with the liking. Because I remember when I was like, oh, I can't eat this, that, and the other. The only thing I was allowed to eat at the end of the week that wasn't like my treat thing was Halo Top ice cream, which is like the high protein ice cream. If you don't know, Eddie,

it's like ice cream with protein powder. Been there, done that. Yeah, okay. Everybody says it's terrible. Because I was having no other treats, I was like, Halo Top is the best thing on the planet. And I remember I'd wait all week for my,

and I was like, I can have a whole pint because it's only 300 whatever calories. And then I would get it and I'd be like, this is like not good. Why did I wait all week? But I read the whole thing. I was like, I waited all week for this. I have to eat it. You know what I mean? Yeah, I think your liking system was more honest about the Halo top. But yeah, I mean, I think, you know, so so another kind of dumb feature in the brain is that our brain really

doesn't have any way to to kind of tell itself not to do something. So take like, you know, let's get back to sort of drugs of addiction. Like you're walking down the street and you're a smoker and you see a non-smoking sign, right? Ostensibly, the sign is telling you not to smoke. But we don't really have any representation in our brain for not smoke. What our brain sees is smoking. And it tries to shut that down. sees is smoking and it tries to shut that down. So it turns out that if you look at the cravings that smokers experience, they experience more craving in the presence of no smoking signs.

Oh my God. And the reason is like, they're just like walking down the street, maybe not thinking about smoking and they look and they're like, smoking. Oh wait, don't do that. But what's in their brain is like smoking, smoking, smoking, right? I think that insight tells us why restricting often comes with binges. Why, in the words of someone who's been on my podcast a lot, Andrea Wachter, who studies mindful eating, she calls it the diet riot roller coaster. The diets often go with the riots, in part because just the act of telling yourself don't have it usually comes with you thinking about having it, right? So take your Halo Top, right? You're like, I'm not going to have it till the end of the week.

I'm not going to have it till the end of the week. I'm not going to have it until the end of the week. But your brain is just like, Halo Top, Halo Top, Halo Top. And like, there's pressures to like kind of squish it down. But really what it's thinking about is that food. And so a better way to kind of get out of that restriction mindset is actually to find the healthier food that you like. So instead of like, oh, I can't, I just got to wait on the Halo Top, no Halo Top, no Halo Top. If you thought like, ooh, today, like really good blueberries that just came from the supermarket, or like, I got these almonds that are like so fresh and I'm excited about them, right? Thinking about the thing that you actually want to do rather than the thing that you're not supposed to do can be quite helpful. But yeah, I mean, you know,

pretty much every available study of binge eating suggests it doesn't come from nowhere. It comes from having a mindset of restriction, right? That's what's kind of leading people to, people don't necessarily binge unless they also have a, even in their head, if they're not acting on it, this urge that they're not supposed to, or these are the things they're not supposed to eat. I love this list of dumb things our brains do. I know. You should listen to my podcast. My podcast is all about just like things that Lori think is stupidly designed in the brain.

Lori's going to come out with like a human brain 2.0 that we can all transplant at some point. The other thing I want to ask you about binge eating is that, isn't it true that binges also serve some sort of emotion regulation purpose? And we cited a few studies that were interesting in our book that kind of made binge eating analogous to food addiction. And it said that the research wasn't really conclusive on whether or not food addiction is binge eating, whether or not food addiction is actually a real thing. Maybe they're related, maybe they're two separate things. But it did relate food addiction or like not being able to regulate food intake,

I guess, to substances of abuse because a lot of people, when you ask them about it, it's like a behavior they really want to stop and they're unable to stop and they kind of tell themselves to not do it, not do it, not do it, and they end up doing it and they feel really bad. So it kind of had a lot of similarities to the addiction cycle. So I was wondering what you think about that relationship between addiction and food. Yeah, I think, you know, the addiction literature in fields of psychology and psychiatry right now is a little complicated, right? In the sense that, you know, we know that some addictions, kind of more classic addictions, say, you know, like a heroin addiction, for example, those drugs of abuse are literally tapping into chemicals that are kind of part of

the wanting system, right? You know, like heroin is like, you know, these are opiates that are tapping into opiateates that are tapping into opiate systems that exist in our brain. So it's like you're abusing the very chemical that is very, very close to the signal in the brain. There's a more open question about addictions that seem to have all the same features where people binge on these things, they overthink about them, they want to stop, but they can't, right? Like behaviorally and psychologically, these look the same, but the substance that you're feeling addicted to isn't like an opiate, right? It isn't a chemical signaler in a brain, you know? So, things like a shopping addiction or an internet addiction or

TikTok addiction or, you know, maybe in a more nebulous case, a sugar addiction or a food addiction, right? Obviously, foods are, you know, they're not direct opiates, but they're chemicals that are playing a part in this process, right? But there's some debate about whether we want to call that addiction. You know, to a psychologist like me, if it's taking up your thought pattern, if it's like messing with your sense of self, if it's messing with your daily life, it feels addictive, even though we might not want to call it a capital A addiction. And I think binging behaviors, food behaviors for a lot of people feel addictive, you know, whether that's kind of a drug of choice and that you're kind of eating more food than you want to or are comfortable with, whether that's, you know, something like

orthorexia where the thought patterns that you engage in are really, you know, you don't want to keep thinking about healthy food, but you're kind of obsessing with it, like almost like in an OCD way. And so I think even though, again, there's some debate about whether it kind of fits as a kind of capital A addiction that would be in like the psychology journals, it definitely for the people that are experiencing these things is like deeply problematic, you know, beyond just being an eating disorder or something like that. Well, it's also that a lot of people use food to cope with things. Yeah. And I think that's a big thing, right? You know, food really is about pleasure, right? It's a way of getting pleasure. Sometimes it just gives us something to do,

right? You know, like you're feeling bored and it's like a thing that you can turn to. Sometimes it's a way of escaping reality, you know, so kind of it's a behavior akin to something like cutting, which is another sort of behavior like this, where it's like, it just is the only thing you can think about. So you can't think about other things. And so, yeah, I think we're using these foods in functional ways. I think sometimes when we think about disorders of eating, we say like, what's going on? But, you know, minds are smart, you know, despite what I was saying about all these problems with the way brains are organized, like our minds are smart, right? And sometimes the best go-to for pleasure for when you need to stop thinking about something, is something related to your eating.

So as we start to wrap up, absent paying, what does Yale cost now? $70,000. What kind of assignment would you give your students in your happiness course about food? Yeah, well, one is to start paying attention to kind of how and why you're eating, right? I think one of the best early steps in mindful eating is to start when you have the urge to eat something, kind of ask like, why? What's going on? Am I actually hungry? Maybe. Maybe I'm bored. Maybe I just saw the food.

Like when you have that craving, kind of ask what's going on. Not in a judgmental, like I can't have it way, but just in a like curious noticing, like I wonder what caused that urge. And sometimes when you start to engage in that process, you notice it wasn't really about hunger. It was about some emotion. Like you were bored or maybe you were in a good mood or you were excited or you just saw it, right? Like that's the first step I think to noticing whether you're using food in the way that at least evolutionarily our body's intended, which is as fuel, right? And you can eat for other reasons, but like that's the main reason. And then I think the second exercise is to really pay attention to how a food really truly feels, the real liking that you're getting from it when you experience it. Because again, sometimes these hyperpalatable foods that are like in our brain of like, oh,

I'm so obsessed with that. When you finally sit down and notice, you're kind of, it sort of takes some of the magic away. You're like, that actually wasn't as super delicious as I thought. And this is a practice that we use generally beyond just the domain of food in the class, just a practice of mindfulness, trying to notice what things feel like. And I think often that practice shows us this dissociation between wanting and liking where we're like, huh, I really wanted that thing, whatever know, whatever it was, shopping, buying something, watching the TikTok videos, eating, but I didn't actually like it as much as I thought. And sometimes I think in a more important way, it can tell us the opposite, right? Like I didn't really want to go to the gym, but I enjoyed it more than I thought, right? Like I thought the salad was just going to be the boring thing I was

going to eat because I was, you know, trying to eat healthier. But when I paid attention, it was crunchy, it was delicious, it had these flavors that I didn't expect. And so I think that that mindful process can kind of allow us to get our wanting and liking back in sync. And it can also be an important part of the presence that just makes life better and that we can savor it and notice it more. Okay. Do we have our assignments? Yes. I'm going to savor more. I'm going to like more, want less. It sounds like a class in Buddhism here. I mean, I think these ancient traditions were onto something in so many domains, I think for sure when it comes to happiness, but probably when it came to food. I don't think that the ancients had as complicated a relationship with

food. We went all the way back to hunter-gatherers, but I think we don't have to go back that far. I think even if we rewind, honestly, like 75, 100 years, we're already getting back to cultural relationships with food that were a lot healthier. That's what my parents always said when after they read the book and stuff. And my mom said that she was so surprised at how complicated my relationship with food was because she said when she grew up in Albania, like nobody was like dieting or like changing their food choices on purpose. Do you know what I mean? Yeah.

In some ways, it's a funny, weird privilege that we have because we have a lot of food because we have an enormous variety of food. Yeah. But it's not a fun privilege. It's one that causes people a lot of pain and suffering. But do you think part of the reason why we have more of that today than we did before is because the food environment is so different today? I feel like if the food environment is the way it is now, these problems are always going to arise because these aren't foods that necessarily promote the best eating patterns. Totally. And I think that that came hand in hand with a kind of relaxing or maybe a removal of some of the cultural traditions of food that came with it. You know, so two things kind of happened. One is I think we lost kind of culturally specific ways of eating,

right, for the most part, especially in the U.S., where maybe we didn't even grow up with them. But a lot of people came from family backgrounds where they, you know, had kind of these traditions of eating food. So those things were going away at the same time as I think, you know, the food industrial complex was telling us like, oh, these things are so healthy or these things are so delicious. And there were advertisements on TV, you know what I mean? Take an extreme example, take something like breast milk versus formula, right? You know, I was from the generation, my mom, where they were like, oh, breast milk, totally not good. Like we want that, you know, food science energized formula. That was a thing? Yeah, absolutely. In some ways it still is, you know. And I think that, you know, that basic thing was telling you, oh, you're, you know, the wisdom you

thought you had about food, that was wrong. Let's follow what the nutrition science says, you know, like Dr. Kell follow what the nutrition science says you know like dr kellogg who with his you know crackers of like we'll control those urges and make you healthy eat these crackers right and so i think that that really was a moment in time that was happening as again culturally we were kind of abandoning what we used to do and so in some ways it was like a double-edged sword of these more of these hyper palatable foods around in a way there never had been in human history plus a kind of loss of our sort of ancestral wisdom about just how to eat yeah my parents came to america they my mom said that everybody here had like low-fat milk and like low-fat yogurt and stuff and like they could not be converted

because they were like it's so gross like it tastes so bad in comparison and i remember growing up and i was like oh you guys are so unhealthy. Like you're always getting, you know, and my mom would make her own yogurt and with whole milk she would buy, right? I'm like, you guys are so unhealthy, blah, blah, blah. And now the narrative's completely changed where it's like people always say

don't have low fat things because they've been manipulated to take out the fat and blah, blah, blah, blah. And I was like, damn it, they were right. They're always right in the end, damn it. Anyways, thank you so much for coming back on the podcast to talk to us about food. Thanks so much for having me. Thank you. And for telling us all the dumb things that the human brain does. Not all of them. We'll hear more. Yeah, well, I'll come

back the next time and do even more. Thank you so much to Professor Santos for coming on today's episode. Again, it was so much fun. We will link to her podcast as well as all her work on our website. And if you want to hear bonus episodes, you can go to foodweneedtotalk.com slash membership and become part of the Foodie Fam. You can find us on Instagram at foodweneedtotalk.

You can find me on Instagram at the official Yuna and Yuna Jada on YouTube and TikTok. You can find Eddie. Savoring and really learning to like my food. Food We Need to Talk is a production of PRX. Our senior producer is Morgan Flannery, and our producer is Megan Oftermat.

Tommy Bazarian is our mix engineer. Jocelyn Gonzalez is executive producer for PRX Productions. Food We Need to Talk was co-created by Kerry Goldberg, George Hicks, Eddie Phillips, and me. For any personal health questions, please consult your personal health provider. To find out more, go to foodweneedtotalk.com. Thanks for listening! Woo woo!