The School of Greatness - Why Your "Healthy" Foods Are Making You Sick | Michael Pollan

Episode Date: April 17, 2026

Michael Pollan cuts through nutrition confusion and exposes the uncomfortable truth: ultra processed foods now make up more than 60% of the American diet, and they're engineered to manipulate your body and brain. Most foods you think are healthy, like plant-based burgers with 21 synthetic ingredients and diet sodas that trick your metabolism, are actually sabotaging your health and creating cravings that trap you in a cycle of poor eating. Your gut microbiome holds the key to everything from your weight to your mental health, and it's starving without the 30 different plants per week it needs to thrive. By understanding how food companies exploit your evolutionary instincts for sweetness and fat, you can reclaim control and use Pollan's seven-word mantra to make choices that honor both pleasure and nutrition. The transformation begins when you stop lying to your body about what you're eating and start thinking of food as medicine rather than entertainment. Michael’s books: This Is Your Mind on Plants How to Change Your Mind Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation Food Rules: An Eater's Manual In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto The Omnivore's Dilemma The Botany of Desire In this episode you will: Identify the hidden ingredients in "healthy" foods that are actually toxic to your body Learn why diet sodas sabotage weight loss faster than regular soda Discover the 10 trillion organisms in your gut that control your mood and metabolism Master Michael Pollan's seven-word mantra for eating real food Understand how to retrain your appetite signals to stop overeating at every meal For more information go to https://lewishowes.com/1916 For more Greatness text PODCAST to [phone] Follow The Daily Motivation for essential highlights from The School of Greatness More SOG episodes we think you’ll love: Dr. David Perlmutter Glucose Goddess Dr. Jessica Knurick Get more from Lewis! Get my New York Times Bestselling book, Make Money Easy!Get The Greatness Mindset audiobook on SpotifyText Lewis AIYouTubeInstagramWebsiteTiktokFacebookX Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

I think nutrition and this idea of wanting to extend our life, our lifespan, living a healthier life, living longer is something that people are taking note of, specifically in recent times after just all the different physical ailments, stresses, diseases that people are accumulating in life. And I want to start with a question that I think anyone could resonate with, which is the worst foods that you think, so many people are consuming that they think are healthy, which are actually really, really unhealthy for us physically,

mentally, emotionally, spiritually. If you had a list of three to five foods that you think people think are healthy, but actually the research, the studies are showing, it's actually hurting you. Well, yeah, I mean, I think the least healthy category of foods are what are called ultra-processed foods, sometimes UPFs. these are foods that are heavily processed. The reason they use the word ultra

is because lots of healthy foods are processed. Cheese is processed, yogurt is processed, white flour has been processed. So there's a degree of processing that's just kind of fine. But when you get into ultra-processed foods, which often carry health claims. I mean, I'll give you an example, the Impossible Burger or the Beyond Burger, right?

A super processed, though, right? Yeah, like 21 and... ingredients, some of them never before in the human diet. Really? And they're, you know, they're sold as plant-based. And I would always watch out for that phrase because it can, it sounds really good. It has an aura of health around it, but how about just plant? Right.

Why plant-based? One ingredient. One ingredient. Carrot. Exactly. One ingredient food. Lettuce. Yeah, that's a plant-based root.

And so, you. So, but in fact, it's got these 21 ingredients and lots of novel things and emulsifiers. And bonding. Yeah, methyl cellulose is the glue that holds it together. It's, I mean, I like them. I have to say, they're tasty. They're a pretty good synthesis of meat-like experience. But it's an ultra-processed food.

And we do know that ultra-processed foods as a category, which now represent more than 60% of the American diet, which is astonishing, are bad for us in many ways. And we have really good research suggesting that. And I'm not speaking any specific one. There's no research that the Beyond Burger or Impossible Burger is bad for you, but the class that it is a part of is. And so you've got people eating great amounts of this. And not even knowing the difference.

You know, a frozen pizza versus a real pizza, it looks the same. But to make it last as long as it lasts, in your grocer's freezer, you have to add all sorts of chemicals to it. Interesting. And products. Now, the best definition of ultra-processed food is it's made with ingredient.

It's something you couldn't make at home. You don't own methyl cellulote. It's not in your pantry. You don't have amulsifiers. You don't have... And you need a factory to make these foods. So if you look at the label and you see stuff you don't have in your pantry

or a normal person wouldn't have in their pantry, that's an ultra-process food. Stay away. So I would say that's the big category, the plant-based ultra-process food, because plant-based has this aura about it. Is there, you know, meat-based processed foods that are worse than plant-based processed,

or is it really not matter? I don't know that it matters. I don't think it's an important distinction. Gotcha. You know, a lot of the ingredients in processed food, if you look at the label on a Twinkie, you know, they're like, I don't know, there are a lot of ingredients.

a very high number of them are derived from a plant, specifically from corn. A lot of the American food system consists of growing huge amounts of corn, and this is commodity corn, this is not corn on the cob, and then using those kernels, breaking them down into its chemical constituents and then putting them back together as processed food. So all that crap is plant-based technically. That's where it starts. But it's so far removed from a plant as to... not be healthy. So ultra-processed foods is the number one category. What would be the next

category of unhealthy foods that seem to be healthy? Sugar. I mean, I think, you know, one of the things people should pay attention to is how sugar has infiltrated foods that never used to have sugar in them. Like which types of foods? Oh, ketchup, tomato sauce. Bread. Bread, you know, historically, no, it's flour, water, and yeast. or a sourdough starter. That's all you need to make bread. What is sugar doing there? The industry has discovered that if you add sugar to anything,

you will sell more of it. It's magic in the marketplace. And we are, you know, hardwired by evolution to like sweetness. Sweetness in nature is a sign of nutritious food, of energy. You know, it's ripe fruit. And so the problem with a lot of the modern food industry is that it takes these... you know, inborn qualities we have.

Like we like sweetness. We like fat, the sensation of fat, because these are, you know, flavor is the brain system for making, you know, evaluating nutrition in nature. And it works really well until you learn how to fool it. And that's essentially what food science does. We can make you think you're eating a strawberry when you're eating cardboard.

bar or something. Yeah. And we can think you're eating sugar, drinking sugar when you're drinking a diet soda. One of the really interesting facts about diet sodas of zero-calorie soda is that people don't lose weight. Why is that? Well, one of the theories is that your body, experiencing sweetness, prepares for sugar, releases insulin and gets all ready and then doesn't get the sugar.

So you crave it. and you will get it somewhere else. You'll get it in a piece of white bread or you'll reach for a pastry or something like that. So you end up consuming just as much sugar, just not in that diet soda. So what's worse, a diet soda or the regular soda? I would, if you're going to drink soda,

and soda, you know, you probably shouldn't drink or make a very special occasion food. I really don't like saying don't eat anything. I think the key distinction is, is this a daily routine food that you should eat whenever? Or is this a special occasion food? I would put soda in the special occasion.

Sure. And if you're going to do it then, would you do the diet soda or the regular soda? I would do the regular soda. Why screw around? No, I mean, there's a recent study out about erythrotrol, which is an alcohol that's very sweet. And that's going into a lot of processed foods. And they've just recently found that there are various health problems associated with it. I mean, you know, our body understands sugar, our species understand sugar.

Let's stick with what we have a long history with and not go with these novelties. So why does our body think we're having something nutritious when we have something sweet, even though it's high fructose corn syrup as opposed to a fruit or a strawberry or, you know, a blueberry? Why does it think this is nutritious just because it tastes good? Well, because we have this, I mean, we inherited this, it's not one gene, but a liking for sweetness, just because if, let's say you're in nature and there's a lot of berries out there and you taste some and one is like really sour or bitter. That's a sign of an alkaloid, which can be a poison, whereas sweet is usually a sign that it's something safe to eat and will give you some energy. So in the state of nature, our senses are very well tuned to the environment and our bodies and can negotiate between the two.

But once you start creating synthetic flavor, we're lost. Our bodies don't know. Now, it's interesting, we're fooling our bodies into thinking they're eating meat with some of these plant-based burgers. And what are the implications of that? What are those? I don't know. We haven't studied that yet.

So we've studied with diets that are, you know. We study with diets that are, you know, artificial sweeteners, I guess, right? Well, there's a very interesting study that was done at Yale where a scientist looked at the relationship of expected sweetness and actual sweetness in any, and in when the amount of sugar in a drink matched the expectation that we had, you were better off. and when it was off, either the soda, they did it with a drink. I don't know if it was a soda. If the sweetness was greater than it would be if it were sugar or less than it would be with sugar, things went wrong. In the body.

In the body, yeah. So it's almost like match the amount of sugar to the sensation that you have. Make sure it's pretty close. Yeah. If you want your metabolism to work correctly. Because we have this very, you know, highly attuned insulin. metabolism and and that's what goes awry when people get overweight it's just not working right so you know we shouldn't lie to our bodies we shouldn't let our food lie to our

bodies don't trick it and say this is really healthy even though it tastes really sweet yeah yeah maybe it's not the right thing yeah so how do we I mean we're so addicted to pleasure sensations it seems like physically as human beings how do we learn to intentionally eat for pleasure and also for nutritional value, but not get caught up in eating so much sugar or processed foods that give us this heightened sense of pleasure quickly and easily. Well, you know, I came up with my seven-word mantra

when I was trying to figure out how I should eat. Eat food, by which I mean real food, food that isn't synthetic, that isn't lying to your body, that people have been eating for a long time, that your grandmother would recognize as food, that contains ingredients that a third grader can pronounce. I mean, I have all these food rules. And then the second part of the mantra is not too much.

And that's the hard part for people. And mostly plants. And not all plants. I don't think meat is bad for you. I think it's perfectly nutritious food. But the more plants in your diet, the healthier you will be. And why? Well, plants have, first of all, we've been eating plants for, you know, 300,000 years.

As long as we've been around as a species, it's the main thing we eat. We get, we would get lucky when we hunted and, you know, or caught animals to eat meat. But the mainstay for most diets has been plants. Plants are full of nutrients that we need, phytochemicals of various kinds. Antioxidants, the most famous. And they're really important. and you get those, all plants produce antioxidants. They have to survive.

It's how they deal with all the solar radiation they're getting. And that is cancer preventative, does all sorts of things. But the other thing that we're now understanding is so important about plants is that there are cell walls we know as fiber. And fiber is essential. We're learning the biggest, the two biggest discoveries, I think, in food, is that, this research around ultra-processed foods. And the other is this research around the microbiome. Yes.

And that there are 10 trillion organisms you share your body with. They have the majority, actually. Right. They're more of them than there are cells of you. And that microbiome turns out to be critical to our health. 10 trillion. 10 trillion microbes in your gut. Microbes in the gut.

Yeah. And they have such a powerful effect on our health. And they be healthy and diverse, because you want a diverse number of species of these microbiomes. What they eat is fiber. They eat plants. They're not interested in other things. They don't deal with sugar. They don't deal.

All the kind of immediate gratification processed foods are absorbed in the small intestine very quickly. They're designed for that purpose. Ultra-processed food has little or no fiber. But fiber is what these microbes need to be healthy. And when they're healthy, they're producing lots of chemicals, byproducts, some of which, you know, are important to mental health, too. I don't think, you know, the link between the microbiome and your mind has only recently been established, but it has been established. And for example, most of the serotonin in your body is produced in your gut. And we need that for a whole lot of different reasons.

So that's the best argument for eating lots of plants. a variety of plants because there are many different types of fiber and many different types of antioxidants. So the recommendation is you eat 30 different plants a week. 30 different. It's not as hard as it sounds. Really? Coffee is one of them.

Okay. Yeah. That's one, you got one plan there. But I mean, there are lots of plants that you're eating without thinking about it. Sure. But if you think about varying your diet, you know, you had some strawberries or blueberries this morning. You're going to have, there's lettuce on your sandwich at lunch.

at lunch, there's plants in the bread of your sandwich. I mean, it's not that hard to hit 30, I think. Sure. Unless you're eating a lot of processed food. Right. Now, in terms of the story of longevity, living a healthy, longer life, how important is it to have meat in your diet in order to maintain muscle mass and strength as we continue to age? how important is meat for building muscle?

Well, I think protein is important for building muscle and protein is important for healing. You know, the reason that athletes consume a lot of protein after they've had a big performance is that they're rebuilding muscles that have been torn down. Torn down, yeah. But you can get protein from plants and people overlook the importance of that.

You can get it from legumes or beans and tofu and things like that. It's just harder. You have to put more of thought into it. I don't know that meat is necessary for longevity. I don't know that I haven't seen research to that effect. It's a very convenient way of getting a lot of protein. But other things come with it.

I guess not for longevity, but building muscle for longevity so that you have the strength to, you know, get back off the ground if you fall over when you're older or you have stronger. But we have, you know, we've been reading about and hearing from vegan athletes. I mean, there are some very high-performing vegan athletes, which kind of gives the lie that you need meat to do this. I just think you have to be, I mean, I've had periods where I've only eaten plants, and I

did crave protein sometimes, and so I, you know, added back in fish. Sure, sure. And so I think it depends on you and your metabolism. Some people thrive on an all-plant diet, and some people simply don't. They don't feel they have enough energy. Sure. I felt I had enough energy. I just something in me needed more protein.

Right. And I was eating lots of tofu and tempe and things like that. Apparently not, or my mind didn't think it was enough. Right. So, you know, you have to listen to those signals when you get them. But, you know, I think if you're interested in, if longevity is your focus, and that's never been my focus. My focus has always been, be as healthy as you can for as long as possible, and then have a, what is the term? compress morbidity or something, the shortest possible period of illness before death.

That's the key. That's what Dr. Sinclair talks about. Oh, yeah? Yeah. I don't know if you're familiar with his work, David Sinclair, but he's, he talked about how his mom suffered like a, I can't remember, something like a 10-year unhealthy death. Yeah, and that's typical in America. And he was like, I want it to be, you know, I'm sick and I die within a couple of days,

stuff of the thing. And I live a healthy life until it's over, as opposed to. to how do I keep myself alive in an unhealthy way for as long as possible. That's not a good life. And we have a medical system that's pretty good at that too. But so, you know, my focus is chronic disease. I mean, just the kinds of things where people have 40 years of diabetes or something, which is not a great way to live the second half of your life.

No. Is there a way to reverse diabetes? Type 2 diabetes can be reversed with diet. and exercise. People really can put themselves on a regime and their numbers will go down and their blood glucose will improve. So in the case of type two,

type one is genetic, and I don't know that, I think diet's very important to maintaining yourself, but I don't know that you can reverse it. How do you navigate the pleasure signals in your gut or your brain telling you,

or that might tell you, that tells a lot of people, here's a candy bar, here's a cookie, here's a milkshake, I want to eat this now. How have you trained your mind and your gut microbiome to not be tempted and want it and crave it consistently? Or is the craving there, but you've just created standards and food rules to support yourself in minimizing those temptations? Yeah, well, I don't know that I've worked it out completely.

I mean, I have my cravings. If you ask my wife, who, you know, if there's a bag of potato chips, she'll finish it if it's open. I am fairly disciplined. And some of it is just being mindful. You know, I've thought a lot about food and nutrition, and I have researched it and great. You know, so asking yourself a set of questions, you know, am I still hungry or am I just enjoying eating? That's a big one. You know, Americans are social.

I mean, think about what your mom said to you. She said, are you full when she fed you, right? She didn't say, are you satisfied? That's the right question. Or are you no longer hungry? Because the moment you're no longer hungry is many bites before you're full. Right. Just stop eating. Exactly. And so I often will ask myself, so am I still hungry or am I just eating because there's more on the plate? And then I enjoy the process. And, you know, in other countries, I talk about this in my master class. There are sayings. In Japan, they say Harahachi boo, which means eat until you're 80% full. That's interesting. And in the Arab world, they say you should eat till you're three quarters full.

In France, they don't say, parents don't say to kids, are you full? They say, do you still have hunger? And so it's a different way of socializing appetite. In America, it's like, eat until you cannot eat any more. Way past hunger. Way past hunger. And there's two more courses to come, so we've got to finish them.

So the goal is satisfaction. It's not making yourself full. How do we get to satisfaction when people have been training and conditioning themselves for decades to eat to past? We are up a powerful industry. I mean, I can't. overestimate how important food marketing is. I mean, the industry spends like $40 billion getting us to eat more. It's in every commercial, it seems like. It's either drugs or food. Yeah. In every candy commercial. Yeah. I bet you can't eat just one, you know, the old

lays potato chip commercial. And in fact, food scientists talk about craveability as a, as a something they're designing into the food. And they can do that. They know how to do that. And they're, you know, we're being manipulated by the food science and the marketing. So it's a struggle because in other countries, America's somewhat unique in food because we don't have a single old traditional food culture. You know, in most cultures, you would eat the way your parents ate growing up, the way their parents ate growing up. And people knew what food was, what wasn't food. This is what we traditionally eat. In America, since we're, you know, a mongrel nation, you know, drawn from so many different cultures, immigrant nation, we don't have a single dominant food culture.

And I think that has left us vulnerable to marketing and to fats. And so America will change the way it eats overnight. You know, I remember the low fat craze, you know, that was like when I was growing up, you know, fat was the evil nutrient. you shouldn't eat fat. And then suddenly in 2002, I know exactly when it happened. It was like it's not fat that makes you fat. It's sugar that makes you fat carbs. So then we had the campaign against carbs.

And overnight in 2002, and it was one article published in the New York Times. Well, Atkins was that out. Well, Atkins was behind it, but it was a writer named Gary Taubes. And it was like, what if it's all a big fat lie? That was a cover story in the Times. Good time. Good headline. And suddenly, like, donut companies were going out of business,

and bread companies were going out of business because everybody was demonizing carbohydrates. Wow. And we're still kind of in that world and celebrating protein. Protein now is the good nutrient. Carbs are the evil nutrient. Fat is depending on what world you're in. If you're in the keto world, fat's fine. If you're in the...

Right. So, you know, we're crazy about it. food. We really are confused, fashion conscious, fashion driven, and it's no wonder because we're getting these messages. You know, the grocery store is full of foods being sold on the basis of health that aren't healthy. So no wonder we're confused. You know, the food in the supermarket that screams loudest about its virtues is all in the middle aisles. It's all processed food with packages. The healthiest food is the produce section where the food is like sitting there. quietly because it doesn't have packages.

Yeah, by the corner, yeah, there's no packages. It's intimidated. You're starting to see some, like, I don't know, Apple companies putting a plastic, you know, wrapping in bags, and here's some marketing behind this. Yeah, but, I mean, the real health claims should go on that stuff. Yes. But, of course, you know, farmers don't have money to research the health claims.

I'm curious. It's, you know, I don't know the statistics, but you mentioned about marketing, would you say 40 billion a years? Have you said in the food industry in terms of, marketing and ad spend. And compare that to how much the government spends informing us about health in food, the food pyramid or whatever, my plate. And it's the equivalent of a single SKU, a single product from Frito-Lay. Oh my gosh. And so the message, any kind of health message about food is drowned out by the marketing market. That's crazy. So 40 billion a year on the food

industry to market you products that probably 99% aren't actually healthy. Yeah. and that are formulated to scientifically get you hooked. Get you to eat more. And play on your dopamine system and, you know, give you those kind of satisfaction. I want this now. And people might say, well, you know, your parents cooking for you, they're also trying to get you to eat. But they're not trying to get you to overeat. Yes.

Your parents are trying to satisfy you with food. And the food industry is trying to addict you with food. That's a very different approach. Where do you think, do you know how much the medical world, the drug industry spends a year in advertising? I don't know that number. I'm curious what that is. But I'm curious your thoughts if there was a law that banned all food marketing and all drug marketing. Because I believe these food marketing and the drug marketing is making us sicker.

It's not helping us get to the root of healing intuitively and organically. It's masking. It's putting over layers. Confusing. It's telling you you're going to get healthier, but it's not the case. If there was a ban against all food marketing and all drug marketing on everywhere, TV, podcast, everywhere, do you think the country would get healthier? Or what do you think would happen if there was no marketing for food or drugs? It's a great question. I think we'd be a lot healthier.

I think we would. I think culture would step into that gap. and culture has a lot of wisdom about food and we don't listen to it nearly enough. Or science would step into the gap too. And we'd get our scientific information not from pharmaceutical companies as we do now. The other interesting phenomenon, though, is how much of those pharmaceutical products

you see advertised on TV are expressly designed to undo the effects of a diet. Right. Yeah. And it's a lot of them. Everything for diabetes is about dealing with. Type 2 diabetes is a product of the food system, right? I mean, rates have gone up with obesity and that we are spending.

So we spend about three quarters of all spending in health care goes to treat chronic diseases. Of that, some of it is smoking. Some of it's smoking in alcohol. If you take out alcohol and smoking, how much is related to food? It's something like $500 billion out of $750 billion. Oh, my gosh. It's a huge number. How much of chronic disease is related to food and nutrition?

Most of it. Most of it. Versus smoking or drugs or alcohol. Yeah, most of it. 80%? Food. No, the American diet, the standard American diet, is what is killing most of us. That is what most people die of. And I'm talking about several types of cancer that are linked to it.

Heart disease, obviously linked to diet. and diabetes, which has become a really big killer. It is the way we're eating that is doing this to us and that we could save a fortune by changing the way we eat in health care spending and no doubt we could improve longevity as well. It's the elephant in the room is the American food system and we all take it to be as like normal. And the food still looks the same.

Pizza looks like pizza and these convenient frozen. and dishes in the in the grocer's freezer, but it's not the same. That, you know, that packaged ravioli or tomato sauce is not what those things were or should be. Right. So, um, in a way, it's an easy fix and it's a hard fix. I remember I was speaking, I was giving a speech to a group of health insurance executives. Um, and I was trying to enlist their support for reform of the food system, which is one of my causes. I don't want that, though. Well, the reason it was very interesting.

And I was saying, you know, you guys should be allies of the food reform movement because every case of type 2 diabetes you prevent is $400,000 to your bottom line. That's how much it costs to treat each case over the life of that person. $400,000. $400,000 for something that can be completely prevented. And one of the presidents of these organizations came up to me after and says, you don't understand. we don't have a long-term interest in your health because the churn because the churn

because medical contracts for medical insurance are only one year and people are constantly switching plans and companies are constantly switching plans so we don't you know you're talking about something that is going to benefit you over years and we don't care about that and I realize there there's a simple fix how about five-year contract for health insurance. That would completely change the incentives for the insurance company, and they would start talking to us about prevention. Interesting. Because they don't, they benefit when we are sick. Well, I don't know that they benefit, but they don't benefit when we prevent when we're super healthy. Yeah. Yeah. So they're not invested in preventive medicine. And that.

Wow. And the drug companies aren't. Oh, they benefit enormously when we're sick. disease, sure. That's the only way they make money. Yeah, OZempaq. I mean, right? Everybody's on taking OZempaq for diabetes and weight loss now. How much money are these drug companies making? I don't have any figures. It's a huge industry. Huge. And, you know, their business model, too, is some drug you have to take every day the rest of your life. And... But that doesn't cure the illness. No, they're not cures for the illness. They're just dealing with the symptoms. And that's true for mental health drugs, too. Yeah.

SRIs don't cure depression. I mean, they, you know, tamped down symptoms when they work. What is the greatest cure for depression without any drugs? I would say exercise. It's huge. And eating real food. I think you do those two things. Now, it's not going to work for everybody.

Some people have depression caused by trauma and, you know, all sorts of different factors. But those two things can make a huge difference. I don't think we fully recognize the mental health impacts of the way we're eating. When you're eating a diet that is, for example, has lots of sugar in it, you're going to be on an emotional roller coaster. I mean, watch kids with sugar, you know. And they think that chocolate or this kind of sweeten cereal makes them happy. And it does for a little while, but they crash.

And that's true for us, too. We have these ups and downs during the day that have a lot to do with our sugar intake. and then when we get this spike and it has to do with glucose release and things like that and then we crash and the solution of that is more more sugar so snacking is another thing too we're you know meals meals are like a really good human institution snacking you know we're eating you know all day long how bad is snacking for our our gut microbiome for our brain and for our overall just metabolism. If we're eating meals and then snacking a little bit here and there in between.

I mean, I don't think snacking is like evil or anything, and I think a lot depends on what you have. I snack. I'm a writer, so, you know, I'm at my desk. I'm supposed to get up. That's the other, that's the competing value, right? You should stand every half hour. Move a little bit.

Where do you go? You go to the kitchen. And you heat up your coffee or pour a cup of tea, and then you have, you know. You'll have some nuts or some of us. I'll have a handful of nuts or dried fruit. Yeah, definitely. And I'm not like Obama.

I don't count my almonds as he allegedly did. So I think snacking, you kind of lose sight of how much you're eating. It just becomes kind of invisible. So, I mean, I think it's something that people have to be careful about. But I don't believe in being punitive about it. But I think eating meals with other people, you know, we're talking about food as if it's this transaction between us and this stuff, but meals, eating with other people affects how you eat. You know, when you're eating with other people,

you put down the fork and talk and then you pick it up and there's more time. And the more time you spend eating, the more likely you are to know when you're full. It takes 20 minutes for the body to send you the news like, enough. We're full. 20 minutes. So if you're eating really fast, you're defeating that signal. And so you're eating too much. But if you have a leisurely meal, you're much more likely to realize, you know, I think I've had to know.

It's interesting because I was just having a breakfast meeting this morning. And I probably went for about an hour and a half, right? It was a great meeting and meal because I noticed that I did not finish my plate. Because you were engaged. I was engaged. I was talking and then I eat a little bit when they were talking, you know, and have a few bites, and then I would have my fork here with food and be like

talking to them and just like, okay, let me listen, engage. And it got to the point, and I didn't have a lot. I had two eggs, scrambled eggs. I had a couple pieces of bacon and I had some, you know, potatoes, kind of the standard breakfast. Yeah, exactly, right? And I was eating the potatoes and I was like,

huh, okay, I'm getting pretty full. And I just left the last potato. And I was like, let me just experiment. I left it on the table. And I could have eaten it, easily. But I left it because I was like, I actually feel pretty satisfied. Well, that clean plate ethic is really bad. I mean, why? I mean, when you're done eating, it's okay if you leave something on the plate. And in fact, it's a good practice. Just make a point. I'm not going to

eat the last thing on my plate. Just as an exercise. Now what do you feel like? Well, I don't want to waste food. Well, yeah, I know. And that's what we were brought up. People are starving in Korea or whatever. Yeah. The thing you heard from your parents. It's not going to help them if you leave. a potato. Maybe you should take less at the beginning or maybe the, you know, portion size is a huge problem. Huge. Don't get the appetizers. Don't get the desserts. You know, have... We tend to think that the amount of food put in front of us is the proper amount to eat. It's usually probably double what we're supposed to eat. And for food, for restaurants, they've learned that, um, we appreciate ampleness and the cost of the food is one of their lowest costs. And so they give us portions that are too big. And we,

we complement a restaurant for having big portions. You feel like you're getting more for your value? Yeah, you feel you're getting good value. And the economics definitely work for the restaurants, but it doesn't work for us. So we end up, big portions are definitely part of our problem. So you mentioned before, you know, two great ways to minimize or decrease depression for a human being

is healthy nutrition and exercise, those two things. If someone is... Getting some sunlight is really good too. Sunlight, probably quality sleep as well. Oh, yeah. I mean, people are depressed off and have trouble sleeping. But one of the ways to fix your circadian rhythms is make sure every morning you look at the sun,

you go outside. Even if it's cloudy, just look at where it should be. And that information comes through your eyes to your brain and kind of sets your clock, and it will improve your sleep. Yeah, Dr. Andrew Huberman has done a lot of research on that and preaches it almost every day about the research and breathing. Yeah. He says that's the number, his number one health tip is get outside and look at the sun.

First in the morning, right? Yeah. Not when it's already up and you can't look at it. And it's okay if you didn't get up at dawn, but, you know, before midday. Yeah. Get up for 10, 15 minutes and look towards the sun, right? Just allow your eyes to gaze towards it. And you'll be getting outside and you'll be getting some vitamin D.

Some nature. You spend way too much time inside. Yeah. Being outside is, you know, I mean, But exercising outside, I think, is better for us than inside. What do you think is the root cause of depression? Why someone could get depressed or chronic depression? Because we all go through sadness and grief and loss and heartache and, you know, relationships

and deaths and, you know, career ending, things like that, where there might be a season of sadness. But the chronic depression, what is the root cause of that? I don't think we know. You know, there are people looking for genes implicated in depression. They have not had success finding them. there is depression caused by events people with a cancer diagnosis get depressed we understand exactly why

and if they're healed or cured their depression might lift but then you have other people and I've interviewed them in my research on psychedelics who've been depressed for 30 years without a break and I don't think we really understand that it's exhausting on the nervous system on the brain on the heart

every system every system but I don't think we have a real understanding of what's going on. I mean, one of the things I've learned about mental health is that there's a lot we don't understand. We don't even know if depression, anxiety, addiction, and say, OCD are separate diseases? Or are they four different symptoms of the same underlying disease, which is to say a mind that is too rigidly, you know, bound up and stuck in patterns or rumination. They're all characterized by rigidity and strong habits. A controlling nature almost, right? It doesn't have a flexible.

An attempt to control nature by... And they're also characterized by these destructive narratives that people tell about themselves. So, you know, they're in the DSM, you know, the Bible of diagnoses, they're listed as separate things, but I've talked to psychiatrists who say, no, they may all be the same thing. Susan David talks about emotional agility, having the ability to be flexible with our emotions and not be so rigid. Habits, yeah, habits get us into trouble with food, certainly, and with our mental health. And habits are really valuable.

I mean, they can organize your life. They can save you from having to run, you know, run the algorithm. Every time a new situation comes up, it's like, okay, this is a conversation with my boss, this is the kind of thing that works. You know, you have a habit. But they also are straitjackets. Yes. And the older we get, the harder it is to break habits. And that's one of the really interesting things about psychedelic medicine. I'm not talking about psychedelics used recreationally, but when they're used in a therapeutic context, people seem to be able to break habits and behavior. Interesting. And that's really powerful. And that allows you to start taking different

consistent actions, which get you different emotional results. Exactly. And you can basically lay down the pathways of new habits, which, you know, becomes more and more important as we age. Have you ever felt extreme depression in your life? I have had periods. I don't know that they were extreme, but I've definitely had periods that I can remember where I was depressed or anxious.

I had periods when, as a teenager, I was a very anxious teenager. and then experience some depression in my, I would say, in my 20s. And not so much since then. Why do you think you have a pretty, you know, harmonious emotional environment internally? Well, you're, you know, you're assuming that's the case, but thank you. Well, if you're not in depressed states, then you have to be at least neutral. I'm definitely not in depressed states, and I'm definitely not in an anxious state. And I think a lot of it owes to the fact that I'm mindful about my health, which means exercise.

And, I mean, I do a couple things. I have a whole regime. So I eat real food, not too much, mostly plants. I struggle with the not too much because I love to eat. But if you're eating real food, it's less of an issue. You know, overeating, you know, a vegetable stir fry is not going to get you in trouble the way overeating a pizza is. Yeah, or a whole cake or something. Yeah.

And I don't have a big sweet tooth, luckily. That's not, I wish I had that disease. So I don't crave dessert, and I rarely do have dessert. That's a gift. Okay, so eat real food? Eating real food, exercising at least 30 minutes a day. And I do aerobic exercise, and I do, you know, floor and weight work. I mean, it's amazing the benefits of moving 30 minutes a day on how much more joy,

excited you can be, how much more peaceful, how much more gratifying. It just makes you feel better. So if you don't feel good, move. Yeah. It's so important. There was a study that came out

just a couple weeks ago that said 11 minutes of walking will improve your longevity and improve your health in general. 11 minutes. So it doesn't have to be a lot It doesn't have to be, you don't have to be running. Intense.

You can be walking. So exercise. Eat real food. And the last thing is I meditate. And I meditate about 25 minutes a day, preceded by some breathing exercises. And, you know, that's stress reduction. You know, the other thing people don't talk about

and it's very hard to quantify is social connection. Huge. And loneliness, the surgeon general, Vivek Murphy has really made this his cause. You wrote a really good book on loneliness and that people without social connection or who are mediating their social connection through social media, which isn't the same thing.

You're not connected. You're not really connected. You have faux friends. You have faux connection. But that's really important. And having some sort of social group that supports you in some ways And so those four things, I think, are so important.

So cultivating your friendships is huge. How many people have you studied or worked with who have been in emotionally depressed states that started doing these four things, essentially, the three things plus deepening their intimate relationships saw improvement? Oh, many, many people. I mean, I've seen this over and over again. I'm not a scientist, so I haven't researched it and obviously haven't done a control. But I've seen it in my friends.

I've seen it in relatives. It can do a lot for people. And by the way, we have evidence that the regime I'm just describing has very positive effects on people's cardiovascular health. Dean Ornish has done a lot of research using that, pretty much that regime, those four things, although he insists on a totally plant-based diet.

And I think it should be substantially plant-based. And he has also done that with men with prostate cancer and has found prostate cancer is a very interesting case because many people are not treated for it since, you know, it doesn't, it's often doesn't advance. So it's one of the rare cancers that people live with for years and can, be studied while they're being surveilled for it. So we can look at lifestyle interventions and see if they make a difference. So UCSF put several thousand men on this regime with a control to see if it would have

an effect and indeed it slowed the progression of their disease and lowered their PSA scores, which is a marker of prostate cancer. Wow. So, and Dean Ornish is now trialing this with a group of people just diagnosed with Alzheimer's. to see if it has an effect on the progression of their disease. With eating real food, exercise and meditation? Yeah, some kind of, it doesn't have to be meditation, some kind of stress reduction.

It could be yoga. Yeah, breath work. Breath work. It's all those techniques we have to essentially lower stress. Wow. I think I love this prescription, you know, this organic, intuitive prescription that you have. It's too bad doctors don't talk about it more, too.

Yeah. And I think the other elephant, in the room that we, you know, kind of hit on a little bit is the trauma, you know, because I think you can eat well, you can exercise, you can meditate, you can have social connections, but if there's still trauma stored in our memories or in our body, it can take us farther, but it can still, we can still be pulled back into the trauma. And I think, because I did all these things for many years, but I still hadn't faced certain traumatic memories.

I hadn't created new meaning from those memories. I didn't process them. I hadn't fully address them. I didn't fully unpack and talk about them and have catharsis and emote in those feelings and grieve and go through the wide range of emotions of traumatic moments in my life. How did you end up doing that? I did that in the last couple of years. It's been on a 10-year journey of healing traumatic experiences.

Ten years ago, I opened up about being sexually abused as a kid. when I was five. It's one of my first memories, actually. And for most of my life, that emotional and psychological wound was a memory playing in my mind almost daily. You know, it was just kind of come up and I would just push it away and work really hard.

So I used... So it was present. It wasn't a suppressor. It was constantly present, but I would try to run away from it. I'd try to outwork it. I would try to, you know, be a workaholic in sports and achieve and succeed to validate

I'm worthy, lovable, and enough. Yeah. But it wasn't until I hit 30 when I had lots of breakdowns in my life that I realized I had never addressed it or told anyone. So I went down a process, and I've talked about this many times in my show and publicly, but I went down a process of facing the trauma, you know. With the help of therapists? I did it in an emotional intelligence workshop initially,

so kind of a safer environment in a group setting, and then worked with therapists to unpack it more and process that healing. And then I ended up writing about it in a previous book on The Mask of masculinity I talked about where I feel like a lot of men suffer from trauma that they never expressed. They never talk about it in a healthy way.

And so I was able to unpack that, but then there were more things over the last 10 years that I needed the face that I was unwilling to, or I thought maybe I'd done all the work. In the last couple of years, it was really kind of healing the pain in my heart, heart in other ways through emotional coaching sessions, but very intense, you know, three to five hour sessions on every Saturday for months because I wanted peace and freedom

in my heart. Again, I ate well, I exercise well, I'm healthy, but emotionally, psychologically, spiritually, there was wounds that I hadn't yet mended. I hadn't yet healed and created a new meaning, as Victor Frankel talks about, is creating that meaning behind these traumatic events. And I think the healing of the trauma for me has brought me so much peace, psychologically, emotionally, and spiritually. And physically, there was physical pain in my chest, in my throat that would come and go.

That now I haven't felt in almost two years. How great. And for most of my life, you know, 38 years, I felt pain, palpitations, off and on, depending on life's circumstances. And now with some of the most chaotic events, in life, a book launch, moving into a new home, buying a home, you know, I just turned 40, like all these kind of like events, life events, I feel peaceful. And the only way that I could attribute the peak, now it doesn't mean I don't have moments of stress and overwhelm, but the way

I feel peaceful is because I've been doing so much of the healing trauma work, but been willing to say, I'll do anything. I'll try, I'll say anything, I'll try things, whatever type of emotional experiences you want me to go through, healing the inner child wound, you know, having spiritual experiences with my five-year-old self, my 12-year-old self, 60, whatever it is, having those conversations, I've been doing that. And that has given me a sense of peace and freedom that I've never felt in my life. And that's why I was interested about, you know, psychedelics and the topic of psychedelics, because I have lots of friends, but I swear by it.

I've been in ceremonies, I've sat in ceremonies and watched people, I've seen everything been passed around. I've seen people like go, you know, hallucinate. I've seen people throwing up. I've seen people crying. I've seen people releasing. I've seen these things. And I've been curious about them, but I've always been weary of recommending or suggesting these things because I've, one, never done it. And I don't want to recommend something. But I'm also curious about the long-term potential side effects of an out and external drug putting into the body and how that affects the brain, the heart, the emotions, and all these different things.

And I love your example of having these breakthrough moments for people to change their habits, which I think is necessary for healing and shifting our behavior. And my thought is, is there a way to do that emotionally, spiritually, and psychologically and try everything else first before doing psychedelics? Or should people go right into therapeutic psychedelics? without trying all the other types of therapeutic experiences first. Well, I don't think it's one-size-fits-all. I mean, it takes a lot of courage to do what you did.

It was painful and scary and you feel like you're going to die emotionally. And so some people are not going to be able to do that. They're not going to have a commitment or fear is going to get in the way of doing it. I've been researching psychedelic therapy since 2014. I, too, had never used psychedelics and was really afraid of them. I had a series of experiences for my books on psychedelics, How to Change Your Mind, and then this is your mind on plants. The night before every one of those experiences, I was...

Terrified. I was up all night. I was, you know, because, you know, the self, the inner self is a really scary place to go. Yes. Terrifying. Yeah. And you're opening a door and you don't know what's going to be on the other side of that door.

It's terrifying. I found in the event that they were powerful and really interesting experiences and I have not yet on psychedelics had the experience of, I've had some dark experiences and kind of wrestling matches with certain things. But I haven't had the experience. some people do, which is a trauma that they were not aware of comes up. Yeah. And that can be really destabilizing if you're not being held in a therapeutic relationship. In other words, if you're not with a facilitator or guide who can help you, it can be incredibly productive when it comes up,

because now you know, oh, there's the problem. Aware of it. Yeah, you're aware. But if you don't have an ongoing integrative therapeutic process afterwards, you could downward spiral. You could. And it's really important, I think to, if people are going to explore psychedelics to deal with their mental difficulties, that they do it with somebody who is well trained. Yes. And in the specific case of trauma, which I think is much more widespread in our society than we realize. Because there's big teas and little tea trauma. Oh, yeah.

You know, there's traumatic events and then there's just the feeling of abandonment by your parents. Yeah, or you had an alcoholic parent. And, you know, that's, you can't point to one event, but it's not one. They weren't abusing you, but it was an abusive experience. Yeah, yeah. So what has proven most effective is MDMA in the treatment of trauma. What does that stand for again? I don't know.

I'm sorry. It's a short? I should know that. But it's also known as Ecstasy or Molly. That's the street name. But it's MDMA. It's a drug that's been around since the 30s. People don't realize it was used in psychotherapy in the 70s and early.

early 80s until it was banned in 1985. And that's when it became a very popular rave drug. And the DEA just cracked down on it and said, we're not going to. But it was, you know, it was being used effectively in therapy. There are now two phase three studies. That's the last phase before approval showing that about two-thirds of the people who have been diagnosed with PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder, who have got. guided MDMA trips, usually two, lose that diagnosis.

In other words, they don't qualify for a diagnosis of PTSD anymore. That's an astonishing result, two-thirds. Right. So that, I think, is going to be a powerful tool. And it is going to be approved by the FDA in the next couple years. Some people say next year. Wow. Because the data is in, and the data is very strong.

So that's an encouraging thing. because the kind of, you know, we have soldiers who have been traumatized. We have women who have been traumatized by sexual abuse. We have racial trauma in this country. And we may have a powerful new tool to treat it. On the risk of taking in these foreign substances. Right. And how it affects the brain chemistry and, you know, long-term effects.

I don't think people realize this. But most drugs have what's called an LD-50. the amount of the drug you take where 50% of the rats or whatever it is die. The lethal dose, okay? LD stands for lethal dose. Wow. There is no lethal dose of psilocybin or

LSD or DMT. That's astonishing. You can't. You can't overdose. You can't overdose. You can't get crazy. You can't die. Well, maybe you could, I mean, who knows? Maybe there's a certain amount you just take your brain just... There is one reported case of

and this is a horrible story of shooting up an elephant with LSD with huge amounts of LSD and it died. But it also had received huge amounts of a tranquilizer. So it's not really useful information. But there's a lot of safety data on these drugs. And I don't think people know or realize that there are over-the-counter drugs that can be lethal. that it's only about 17 or 20 pills of Tylenol and you can kill yourself.

Wow. Okay? The equivalent amount of LSD is not going to do that. So brain toxicity, you know, unless we're missing something and it's going to take, you know, but people have been using LSD for a long time. They've been using ayahuasca, which has DMT in it, and they've been using psilocybin for thousands of years.

But just because they've been doing for thousands of years does that mean it's good for the brain? and your emotional stay long term. Yeah. Well, no. But I think that if it were, you know, having consistent patterns of damage of some kind, we would have picked it up.

Sure. MDMA is a little more toxic. But the thing to understand about psychedelic therapy is like, I mean, we should be asking the same questions of SSRIs and all the antipsychotic drugs. 100%. All drugs. Which people take every day.

Now, I have friends who have been, you know, doing shrooms and ayahuasca and all these different things for years. And some of them swear by. They say, like, this is the answer. This is helpful. This is, like, giving me clarity. It's showing me visions. It's helping me, like, face traumas, things like that. Which I'm all for those things.

But my curiosity comes in when someone needs to do these things over and over and over again, as opposed to, okay, I've got the awareness, which is what I need. It's pulling out the stuff from the past that I wasn't even aware of or the things that I needed to face. Now I've had these moments of clarity, darkness, visioning, all these different things that allowed me to open my heart, express these things, release. I'm all for that. It's when people need to do it over and over again every month or every six months and go back to like some, you know, psychedelic retreat, which gets me wondering why. Yeah. Why do you need to continue to do it every six months, every year? consistently, when you've started to face it,

is there other emotional or psychological therapies they can do to process and integrate healing without external chemicals entering the body and the brain? Right, right. That's my thoughts. Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, there are people who, I mean, it depends on why people are using it.

You talk about healing, and that should be have an arc, right? Yes. And, you know, you get the message and you hang up the phone, as Nandos or somebody like that said when you stopped using psychedelics. And then there are other people who get into, I mean, you could call it a habit. They don't use them every day.

They don't use them every week. The experience is you don't feel like using it again. I mean, when you have a big psychedelic experience, your first thought, this isn't like using a drug like cocaine or something. Your first thought is not where can I get some more? Your first thought is, do I ever have to do this again? Because it's really hard work. It's intense.

But there are people who have a regular journey. And sometimes there are people who are using psychedelics, not for healing, but for, say, spiritual development and spiritual exploration. And I think that's legit, too. I really do. You know, I would be nervous about somebody who is using psychedelics every month and wondering why. Is there something missing from their lives that they should be attending to? Is that becoming its own problem? But they're, you know, they're very strange substances.

They can have many different identities depending on the context in which they're used. So, you know, there is a powerful religious context for most of history. That's how they were used. There were sacraments. They were used to be in touch with the divine. And that's very different than the healing context. And then there are people who take them just for thrills. And, you know, that seems to me, you know, the least interesting.

Interesting. But we use this word recreational use of a drug. What's wrong with recreation? Right, right. Why did that get such a negative connotation? So... I still don't think it's, you know, I'm trying not to judge, because I'm trying to see what is most beneficial to our health.

And so if there's massive benefits to our immediate and long-term health, then I'm all open to exploring that. And I think it's too soon to say. And that's the thing. I grew up rarely taking any drugs. You know, and the belief was the mind, we have the power to heal ourselves with our thoughts, our mind, and the body's pharmacy has so many healing components. And I'm sure as a meditator, you've gone through some beautiful visioning and some beautiful spiritual experiences by closing your eyes, meditating and breathing intently as well.

And so my thought is, are there ways to do this without recreational drugs, therapeutic drugs, you know, drugs in general to heal versus doing it from inside out? Yeah. So there are. I mean, you know, I mean, there's an interesting question whether a drug produced by the body, like endorphins after you exercise, is, you know, superior. to a drug that comes from outside. Aldous Huxley wrote about this and doors a perception. They're all chemical events, right? Whatever's happening.

So endogenous versus exogenous chemicals, how significant is that? But there are other ways to get there. I mean, meditators, really experienced meditators, get into a psychedelic state. There are breathing exercises. There's something called holotropic breathwork,

which is a form of breathing based on yoga techniques that I've done it. will give you a psychedelic experience. Not everybody, but a high percentage of people. It's kind of uncanny how this works. You are doing something to your blood chemistry, though, when you hyperventilate. That's what's happening.

I think either the acidity or alkalinity is increasing as you reduce the carbon dioxide. I don't know the physiology of it. Fasting can get you there. Isolation tanks for some people can get you. dark spaces like caves. Yeah, yeah, if you remove all sensory input, people who go on vision quests and, you know, they're alone in nature for a long time and they're not eating, they will have psychedelic experiences. So, you know, we're wired for these experiences and there are other ways to get there. And psychedelics is one way. But I would, you know, I would press against this idea

of, you know, toxicity, though, because there's not a lot of evidence or addictive potential. They've been shown not to be addictive. There are absolute risks. People at any risk for schizophrenia or personality disorders are not allowed in the current drug trials. And people can have terrifying experiences. And what happens if you have a, you know, maybe you're not, maybe you haven't been clinically diagnosed as bipolar, but you might have some bipolar tendencies. Or maybe you're not diagnosed as narcissistic, but you're not diagnosed as narcissistic. do you have narcissistic tendencies or, you know, extreme mood swings or depressive states,

people like that, could it get them off the track, so I say? It could. People have had psychotic breaks on LSD trips. I mean, we saw that in the 60s. There were, you know, admissions to psychiatric, you know, hospitals and things. And it's really hard to come back from that, right? Yeah. Although there's some debate over whether these are people who would have eventually had a break.

And that, you know, it's not like incidents of schizophrenia went up when people started using LSD. Any kind of mental shock can put people over. And LSD is a big shock to the system. Sure. That can definitely happen. And, you know, look, people should approach this with great care. It's very consequential. It's momentous to decide, I'm going to have a high-dose psychedelic experience.

You should be with someone who knows the territory who can prepare you properly. Scary things can happen. but if you know how to deal with it, you can navigate those things. And often the results at the end are make it worth it. So, you know, I'm loathe to recommend anybody do anything, but I also think that people should know how many people are being healed by this. And that the thing we have to keep in mind is that mental health treatment is just not very good in this country, you know.

I mean, even with, I mean, the access issues and insurance and all that, there's that problem. But the problem is, and I've heard this from psychiatrists who I've interviewed, it's like, they'll tell you, we don't have very good tools. If you compare mental health treatment to any other branch of medicine, oncology, cardiology, infectious disease, they have all prolonged human life and relieved lots of suffering in the last 50 years. You can't say that about mental health treatment. We're kind of where we were. We have SSRIs, which we throw out everything. What are those? There's selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors.

Antidepressants. Yeah. Paxil. But those antidepressants, do they have any benefit? Because I feel like people who are on antirepressants don't have, like, it doesn't actually work. Or maybe it's like they feel for a few weeks or a month like some benefit, but then it's like you're still depressed.

Well, it gets people out of crises very often. if someone's having a suicidal crisis. But the evidence on, they don't work very well. I mean, there's some people they help. When they were approved in the early 80s, late 70s, they did two percentage points better than placebo. I mean, trivial benefit. But we didn't have anything else.

So is something. And they got hyped by the industry. But it's not healing. It's not healing. It doesn't affect the root cause. So it's minimizing some of the effect. It's lowering symptoms for some people, not for everybody, But over time, the effect goes down.

And then you need more and more. You need some of the drive. Or you switch to another one. The other problems with it is that it decreases your libido. You put on weight, and they're very hard to get off. They're addictive, in effect. So if you want to talk about toxicity to the body, I mean, that's a bigger issue than LSD or psilocybin. Sure.

What would you recommend or suggest before people get on some type of antidepressant? that they try on, that they experiment with, that they apply for, you know, a 30-day window before, say, okay, I'm just going to jump into. Well, that regime we talked about, you know, eat real food, get half hour of exercise a day, some sort of stress reduction technique, sunlight, and social connection. And the problem with people who are depressed is they tend to lose their social connections. They don't have the connections. Yeah, they're often lonely.

Yeah. But I would, I think that's the first line of defense. And, you know, right now it's important to understand, too, that even though psilocybin is being trialed, doing drug trials for depression, it hasn't been approved yet. So it's still illegal. Right. And that's something you have to take into account. Gotcha.

You have to work with someone underground. And that has its own set of risks. Sure. You know, speaking of people feeling lonely, people, it seems like there's more social anxiety and loneliness than ever, even though they're more. connected or seemingly false connected with social media. What would you suggest for people to overcome the feeling of loneliness? Well, it takes us back to food. Meals.

The institution of meals. Eat with other people. Don't eat alone. Find somebody. Invite someone out to have a meal with or cook and invite people into your home. So much happens at the table that isn't about fueling your body. And that there is a kind of connection that happens when we eat together that's really wonderful. It's deeper than a lot of other connections we have. You know, and when we share something,

when we share food out of the same common, you know, dish, we're connecting. That's a connection. Sharing food is a very powerful bond between people. It has been for like thousands of years. And we, you know, we learn things about other people. You know, why do world leaders always have banquets, right? It's because going back a thousand years, it's a time where, you know, you don't shoot someone over a banquet table. You know, you put down your arms and you pick up your fork and knife. You connect. And I just think the meal is one of the great institutions. And it helps us deal not only with healthier eating because you're not going to eat junk food. You're not going to eat a microwaveable food in front of someone else. You're going to cook something

or order in and eat the same thing. And that sharing puts us on the same mental wavelength. It's almost like in training ourselves to someone else that we're eating the same thing together. And so I think putting yourself, you know, way too many of us eat alone now. And I think it's really destructive to eat alone. When you eat alone, you eat mindlessly.

You're in front of the TV or you're reading something and you're just don't know what you're doing. I mean, think about, you know, you're in front of the TV with a bag of potato chips. Like, you don't even realize you've eaten a bag. It's just so mindless. Also, manners automatically helps people control their appetites. People don't want to act like pigs at a table.

Yeah. Whereas when you eat alone, you do act like a pig. So getting away from solitary eating. You have crumbs all over your belly. You're just like, ah, just eating in it, yeah. Exactly. You know, in this class I did from, masterclass. We're looking at not just the health effects of food, although those are very important,

but there are all these other effects, and that there are ways to align your eating with your values. And we all have different values, and some people, food is just going to be about health. But for other people, it's about their relationship to nature, for example. You know, are they eating organically or sustainably? Is that what matters to them? And for others, it's about about ethics, is this a way, do I feel comfortable eating animals or these animals? So there's a moral and ethical questions that come. So much happens at the table. And my, and so where I came out thinking about this and preparing the class is there's no one right way to eat.

There's probably a right way to eat if health is your only concern. But if you're thinking about these other things and eating for pleasures, perfectly legitimate reason. It argues for slightly different kinds of food. Sure. How does someone come up with their eating values? Well, that's a process of kind of self-inquiry. I mean, and we go through that in the class about like,

so what really matters to you when you think about food? You know, are you someone who thinks a lot about nature and climate change? There's a way to eat if you really want to, you know, make your contribution to reduce climate change. They're foods that have a big. climate footprint and foods that don't. Beef is, of course, the worst offender and milk. That's a huge part of your climate footprint if you're a beef eater. But maybe you're concerned about the health of the soil.

And what about social justice? The health of the workers in the food system. That argues for slightly different choices, too. What's great about food, though, is that we're not stuck with one choice. we now, we're very lucky because there are now, you know, there's organic food, there's conventional food, there's what's called regenerative food grown on very healthy soils, that we can, we have an opportunity to express our values by our food choices. That's a great vote to have. You know, we're really lucky to have that vote because in many parts of life, we don't have that

vote to make. Right. What are your food values? Well, I think a lot about the environment. I started out as a writer writing about nature and gardening. And so I'm very concerned about climate change. And I don't know how you cannot be, but a lot of us are not. And so that I think a lot about the environmental impact of what I eat. So I don't eat beef. I eat very little meat. I mostly eat fish. And I'm careful about that, too, because some fish is, you know, really unsustainably produced. You know, Some farm salmon is just horrible the way it's produced, not just for the fish, but for the environment with lots of antibiotics. And I will choose organic when I'm buying plant foods. Organic is not a perfect label, but it's one of the only labels that's monitored by the government.

And so you know that if you buy organic food, it has not been grown with synthetic pesticides. I'm particularly insistent on buying organic wheat products, whether that's pasta or bread. The reason being that it's become common practice in America to spray wheat fields with glyphosate, which is an herbicide that has been linked to lymphoma. The farmers do, it's not allowed in Europe. Farmers do it for the express purpose. They spray it on the wheat fields right before harvest to kill the wheat. because the wheat has to be dry before you can harvest it.

So it speeds up that process. It's a really irresponsible use of a pesticide. Why are there so many things in the American food system that don't happen in Europe, that are legal in other countries? Yeah. Hormones in beef, for example. I mean, every non-organic beef animal gets a hormone implant in its neck. And then we wonder why girls are going through puberty early.

I mean, we are exposing ourselves to lots of hormones through our meat. And that's not allowed in Europe either. Europe has tougher environmental rules, especially around food and cosmetics. Believe it or not, there are chemicals in our cosmetics that you can't put in European cosmetics. It's the power of the American food industry. It is dominant. They control Congress. They control the agricultural committees in...

So there have been efforts to ban glyphosate, there have been efforts to, you know, get hormones out of beef, and the industry has stopped it. Wow. And the reason for that is we've allowed these industries to get so powerful and monopolistic that we had a great example during the pandemic. When there were outbreaks of COVID in the meat plants, in the high plains, Tyson's meat plants, the local public health authorities, so many people were dying on those lines and they were bringing COVID into their communities. The local health authorities wanted to close down the lines for two weeks and just quiet.

This is right at the beginning of the pandemic. John Tyson, the president of Tyson, takes out an ad in the full-page ad in the New York Times. Dear Mr. President, you need to invoke the Defense Production Act, which is designed to get companies to do things they don't want to do to help the war effort. We want you to invoke the Defense Production Act to force our workers back on the line. Come on. And within days, President Trump signed an executive order opening up the Tyson production lines. So when a company can force a president to do its bidding, you know an industry has gotten too powerful. Wow.

Yeah. This is crazy. What is the things that you've seen 10 years ago in the nutritional food world that people thought was the way? Science, you know, society thought this was the way, that we now have new evidence and new science showing that that's not the way and there's something different that is the way. Is there anything that's changed in the last 10 or 20 years? The biggest thing is something we talked about right at the beginning is ultra-processed food. And we didn't, you know, we'd heard for years that junk food was bad for us, and we thought the reason was there was too many, too much sugar, too much fat, too much salt. It turns out it's not about the nutrients. It's about the processing itself and all the chemicals that are used.

And this was, and that this is what's making us fat. The processing itself, not the actual sugar. So there was a really cool experiment done at the National Institute of Health. bioscientist who was very skeptical of this theory that processed food was uniquely bad. And he was a great believer that, no, if you get the nutrients right, you'll be healthy. He got a group together. They lived in a facility, so he fed them for 30 days and divided them into two groups, control and not, and created two meals for every meal.

One was substantially whole foods. the other was substantially ultra-processed food, like 80% ultra-processed food, matched for calories, matched for protein, salt, sugar, everything. And people in each group said, eat as much as you want, or as little as you want. Up to you. No control on caloric intake. Consumption, yeah. The people in the group with the ultra-processed food ate 500 more calories a day.

So the way you prepare the food dictates how much you're going to eat and that blew his mind and he came around to the thesis that there is we don't know exactly what it is but there's something uniquely bad about that kind of food Does it not make you feel full or does it make you still hungry or craving that?

It could be that because it has so little fiber it doesn't fill you up in the same way it could be the fact that it's absorbed really quickly in the body and not going through this long you know, microbiome processing in your body. I mean, when you process food, you're essentially externalizing digestion. In other words, instead of eating things like plants or even, you know, real meat that hasn't

been overly processed or turned into hamburger, your body has to work hard to break it down. You burn calories. Digesting is burning calories. Yeah. But as soon as you start doing this high-level processing and removing the fiber, You're creating food that your body can be very lazy about digesting. And so it's absorbed through the small intestine rather than the large intestine. And that may explain it.

It could also just be the science, this idea of lying to the body about what you're getting, fooling the body. And it could be other effects in the microbiome. There's some evidence that emulsifiers, which we use to keep food, basically keep the oils and the waters from separating in processed food. food would look even uglier than it does, if not for these chemicals. Amulsifiers have damaged the lining of the gut and allow for large particles to get into the bloodstream, which leads to an immune reaction. So it may be that processed food inflames our

bodies in ways that are destructive. So the science is still out on the cause, but we know the effect. The effect is you will eat a lot more food if you're eating ultra-processed food and you will increase your risk of all sorts of chronic diseases. That's really clear. Where do you feel like in 10, 15 years will be the new science that comes out? Because it seems like there's always something new being, you know, discovered or revealed. Where do you see the nutritional health world moving into in the next 10, 15 years of these other discoveries? I think we will continue to accumulate evidence that it's really simple. Eat food. not too much, mostly plants.

I think that's going to hold up. I'll put money down on that. Mostly means, doesn't mean no meat, means some meat. That word, that adverb pissed off everybody because the vegetarians are like, why don't you go all the way and just say, eat plants? And the meat eaters were like,

why don't you talk about meat? No, mostly, let's be reasonable about that. I don't, I think we are going to learn that a traditional diet of real food is the best way to eat. And it's going to be really simple. And I think we have overcomplicated food. And there's so many reasons to do it, right? I mean, you know, scientists want funding.

Companies want to have a health claim. They need to churn. You know, there are 14,000 new food products every year, and a lot of them carry health claims. Isn't it amazing? 14,000 new food products. 14,000 new food products every year. Oh, my gosh.

or like ridiculous extensions of something we have. You know, it's like an Oreo in the shape of a straw. You know, that's innovation. And there's always an investor who wants to make money a return on creating this product or this business or this company. And the other economic incentive is that it's not profitable selling simple food that comes off the farm. You make more money processing the food.

The more value added. It's the package. It's the health claim, but it's also the tricking it up and, you know, giving it new flavors and new colors and, you know, think about how many different, check out next time I mean in the supermarket, how many pop tarts there are and pop tart like products. It's just brand extension. So this is capitalism. Capitalism, you know, depends on novelty. The idea that you're going to eat simple foods that you prepare yourself. Who makes money on that? I don't know. You got to be, the egg business has got to be making money, right? I don't know, like eggs and, you know, like eggs and, you know. Apples are making business, but it's not as much, though. To give you an example, I think it's 14 cents of your food dollar goes back to the farmer. It's all the people in the middle who make the money. And farmers will tell you this.

Or people in the food industry, I'm sorry, not farmers will tell you. If you want to make money in food, it's not from growing it. It's from processing it. So we have a strong incentive to process food as much as possible. Plus you get something you can put a brand name. on, right? You get you have IP, you know, you have all this value added and the farmers get screwed. Crazy. Now, what is the main, the masterclass that you have, what is the main benefit within the master class that people will get out of that when they go through it? Well, my hope is, I mean, the reason I did it, I had a couple of reasons I wanted to do it. One was the, the, one of the great things about master class is you get a lot of time.

It's like a, I forget how long it is, but it's a two and a half or three hour class. So you can really go deep. Yes. And you don't always get to do that writing articles. So I really appreciated that. And the production values are amazing. I mean, it's seen some of the clips looks amazing. Well, they send a crew of like 60 people.

I know, it's crazy, right? It's like a full movie production. Yeah, it is. And it looks like it. They make you look great. But I just, I'm hyper aware because I get asked questions. I do a lot of public speaking of how confused people are about food. And they'll say to me, so should I buy the organic or the conventional or the regenerative

or the humane? And there are all these labels in the store. And we're tying ourselves up to knots about what should be a very simple transaction. And, you know, for most of human history, people have, like, known what to eat. They learn from their parents and they learn from what was available. They didn't have to run all these complex algorithms to figure out what a product to buy. So I saw this as an effort to cut through a lot of nonsense about food, whether it's coming from the nutritionists or the marketers, and just like, let's look at this, let's take a fresh look, let's figure out what you care about, because I'm not going to tell you how to eat. It's not, it doesn't have that kind of message. My message really is,

tell me what you care about and I'll tell you what to eat. And so we go through the various, you know, different motives. Getting clearing your food values, getting them, you know. Yeah, figure out what your food values are and then here's how you might align them with what you're actually eating. Right. And so I'm hoping it'll relax people about food. I want people to come out of it like with their stress level around when they go to the supermarket down. I don't want them to have to read labels.

do this all the time. So, yeah, you talk a lot about intentional eating. You know, it's not just about mindless eating, but being very intentional about these food roles, these values that we create together. And I really love the idea of getting back to the dinner table or getting back to the commune table with at least one person. So that we can connect, we can slow it down.

We can have more fulfilling conversations, feel more fulfilled spiritually and emotionally, but also nutritionally fulfilled. in that process. Yeah. And I think that, you know, we've reduced food to this transaction

between us and this stuff. But in fact, food is not a thing. It's a set of relationships. Food connects you to other people, as it has for all of human history. It's a communal act. But it also connects you to nature, right? It's your most important connection

to the natural world. You affect nature more through your eating than anything else you do. If you think about what agriculture does to nature, right? It's the way we change the landscape more than anything else. It's the way we change the composition of species on the planet. The reason there are, you know, 50 million head of cattle in the U.S. and only 5,000 wolves.

It's because we like one and we don't like the other or the other's a threat to the one we like. And we affect the atmosphere. You know, greenhouse gas production from the food system is about 33%. Really? Yeah. So there's a lot at stake when you sit down to eat. And I don't, but I want that to feel empowering that you can actually vote. It's not a burden.

Right. It's an opportunity. Right. So that's what I want to inspire people with to take their food choices as an opportunity to express their values. Wow. They can go to masterclass.com and check that out. If they search your name, they can get that at masterclass.com. You've also got a number of, what do you have, seven, eight New York time bestsellers now?

What are you at? Something like that. Something like that. Something crazy. How to change your mind has been a, you know, a. phenomenon that's gone all over the world talking about the psychedelics and the studies that you've done there. But the recent book is more about your mind on plants. This is your mind on plants where I look at three different psychoactive, one of which we're all involved with, caffeine, almost all of us.

And people don't think about that as a drug, but it is a drug. And I think it's a very good drug in many ways. It's had a lot of positive effects for people. Although people, like all drugs, people can get in trouble on that. You talk about bringing chemicals into our body. We're doing it all the time. All the time. And so I look at caffeine. I look at opium. You know, we have such a big problem around opiates now. And I look at mescalin, which is a psychedelic that you don't hear as much about. But it's a really interesting substance that Native Americans have been using to heal themselves for a very long time. What is the pros and cons of coffee that you talk about that you've research that can truly benefit current health, lifespan, cognitive health, and also what are the

cons of caffeine or coffee? Yeah. So caffeine is a powerful drug. I don't think people realize it, but most of us have an addiction to it. And I got off caffeine for three months. It was one of the hardest things I've ever done. No caffeine, no chocolate, no tea, no coffee. And I didn't feel myself for that whole time. You know, I got through the withdrawal, which only took a couple days. You didn't feel grounded or you didn't feel connected to yourself.

I felt like I was someone else. Really? And it made me realize that being caffeinated was my default state. It's like that was my normal. And I'd been drinking coffee since I was 10. I started early. So about like 10 years, right?

10, 20 years now. A lot more than that. Like 50 years. 50 years drinking coffee. Yeah, every day. Since you were 10, how did you start at 10? I think I started like 35, you know. Yeah, I know.

I started early. Everybody said it would stunt my growth. It apparently didn't. At all. Maybe I would have been seven foot without it. So I felt, you know, it was hard to do. I felt like I had acquired attention deficit disorder. I normally have very good focus.

I can concentrate and, like, block things out. You need to to write. I couldn't write. Without the coffee. Without the coffee. I just was, I, I, I found things came in from the periphery. You know, I got easily distracted.

And, you know, that's why we take amphetamines, you know, to deal with that. They give us, like caffeine, stimulants give us a focus. And I needed it. So it was really hard. And the first cup after three months. I was amazing. So it was incredible. It was delicious, right?

It was the best, it may have been the best drug experience I've ever had. Wow. Yeah, I was euphoric. So. So, now you're a cat. of benefits. Yeah, yeah. So I looked into this.

There are a lot of health benefits to caffeine. Caffeine or coffee? Yes, it's coffee and tea have the health benefits. It may not be the caffeine. And the reason is that coffee and tea, believe it or not, are the biggest source of antioxidants in the American diet. That's pathetic, actually, but it's true. And so we don't know.

Caffeine, we do know improves performance. athletes will tell you that on test taking, it improves performance. If you study for a test and drink caffeine after that, after you've studied, you will remember the material and do better on the test. Wow. So it really does enhance mental function. It has some physical benefits, too. It reduces risk of certain kinds of cancers.

it reduces risk of cardiovascular disease, Parkinson's disease, and reduces risk of dementia. So it has a lot of benefits. The negatives are, if it makes you really jumpy, you know, some people react badly to it or drink too much. It reduces risk of suicide and depression up to seven or eight cups. If you're drinking seven or eight cups a day, your risk of suicide and depression go way up. Seven cups a day is a lot. Yeah.

But people do. I know people who, like, are sipping it all day long. That's too much, though, right? Seven cups a day. Come on. The big negative on caffeine is it does interfere with good sleep. Even if you stop drinking it at noon, which is my practice, a quarter of the caffeine in your body is still circulating at midnight. It lasts in your body a long time.

So when should you stop coffee by? Well, at least by noon, but hopefully at earlier. 10 a.m. maybe, yeah. Yeah, if you can. I mean, I go to noon because I sip it while I'm writing in the morning. What happens with even people who can fall asleep, and there are people who can have an espresso at night and fall asleep, it's changing the quality of their sleep.

They're losing what's called slow-wave sleep. You know, there's REM sleep, which is when you dream. But there's a kind of very deep sleep called slow-wave sleep, which is very important for your health, and caffeine reduces the amount of it you have. So I interviewed a bunch of sleep experts for the chapter on caffeine, and none of them use caffeine. Was it Michael Walker?

Matthew Walker, yeah. I don't know if he does now, but he, yeah, and he did a master class, actually, about sleep. That's definitely worth checking out. And he's had no caffeine. Yeah, and he's like against caffeine. But he's softened a little bit. Yeah.

Huberman talks about, he has a cup of coffee, I think early in the morning, but he's like, try to finish it as soon as you can. Yeah. Earlier in the day. Every day when you wake up, you are undergoing withdrawal. That's why you crave coffee. You know, the people who say, I can't talk to you

until I have a cup of coffee. The reason is that for most of us, we're drinking coffee to head off those withdrawal effects. The caffeine just lasts long enough during the night that you don't wake up to drink coffee. But as soon as you get up in the morning, you want it. So, you know, we are addicted. But addiction, you know, if you have a steady legal supply, is not a terrible thing.

Sure, sure. Yeah. Not too much of it. This is amazing. You've got a, you know, your website has so much research and articles and information. Well, I've posted every article I've ever written there. Yeah. And it's available for free to anybody who wants.

And that's Michaelpollon.com. Michaelpollon.com. So make sure, and, you know, make sure you go sign up for your newsletter and be subscribed to everything you have there. what's the social media place you spend time on the most? Is there a platform of choice? I use Twitter. Okay. I use Instagram, but just in a kind of personal way.

I just post pictures I like that I've taken. Twitter's more of the research and the information that you have. Twitter's very useful for journalists. I mean, and so I'll, if I read something interesting and it could be about health, it could be about food, it could be about psychedelics. I'll post it, you know, sometimes without comment, just, hey, you should read this. Check it out, yeah. Yeah, so I use it that way. I don't hold forth.

I don't offer a lot of opinions, but I just find it's a great way to share information. Wow. What are you most excited about in your life right now? What am I most excited? Well, it's spring,

and we're about to start gardening. I'm a passionate gardener, and we've had so much rain in California. So much. Today it's radio, you know? It's insane. And the earth has been saturated, and you don't want to mess with the earth when it's that wet.

It's bad for it. So I'm really looking forward to starting to plant and get my garden going. I grow vegetables and flowers and various psychoactive. That's cool. That's exciting. Well, Michaelpollin.com, the masterclass.com, check you out there. The books, they can get it all at your website as well for the books. And again, you've got a number of New York Times bestsellers.

So get multiple books if you want to dive in more. This is a couple of questions that I have. left. This is a question I ask everyone at the end called the three truths. So imagine a hypothetical scenario. You've written a lot. You've researched a lot. You've had a ton of experiences. And imagine you get to live as long as you want, but eventually it's your last day. It's not that long, drawn-out death. It's a quick, healthy, you know, quick, painless death. And imagine you continue to live your life the way you want, in achieving your dreams and connected to people you care about and healthy.

But it's the last day. For whatever reason, you've got to take all of your work with you. Every article, every book, every message, you know, the masterclass is gone. You know, everything has to go to some other place when you pass on. So for whatever reason, we don't have access to your content, your information, your wisdom. But you get to leave behind three final truths, three lessons from all of your experiences that you've learned that you would leave behind as kind of like, here are these wisdom,

this wisdom. What would be those three truths for you to leave behind? Yikes. I told you, I didn't like to hear questions in advance. I know. Put you on the spot. Well, the first one would be to honor the plants. My whole career, I have been learning from plants

about how to eat, about the mind. It's amazing what they have to teach us. And, you know, they don't speak loudly, but if you listen and you're curious. So honor the plants. That could mean growing them. It certainly mean eating them. This is a cliche.

People often say that. No one goes to their deathbeds thinking, God, I wish I'd spend more time at work. So honor your family. That's good. Your loved ones. Your sisters. I don't have brothers. although I have brothers-in-law, your partner, your child, I think that we get caught up in things.

And those are the relationships that matter at the end. And the other stuff doesn't. Third truth, I think one of the biggest problems we have is fear. I think we are closed off because we're afraid. We're afraid of trying new things. We're afraid of saying things. We're afraid of exposing our weakness. And overcoming fear.

I would say that's so important. My father, who was a very wise person, or he got wise. He wasn't always. He was a lawyer, but he hated the law. But he liked helping people, and he had a clientele of people your age, who he would help with their money issues. but their money issues were always really family issues or self-worth issues and all these kind of questions and he would always say you know your biggest problem is between your ears he would

say and it's your fear and he was very good at getting people to like have faith in themselves make the big move change your career quit that job buy that house marry that person and he was a kind of just do it person and it usually worked out and people spend a long time procrastination because they're afraid of change. And so embracing change and overcoming fear, I would put number three. I love those. I don't know about the order.

I haven't thought about the order, but those are the three that came to me. Honor plants, honor your family, overcome your fears. I love it. I'm a big believer that self-doubt is the killer of all dreams. We can have all the talent, but if we doubt ourselves, we're not going to act courageously, we're not going to take the risks.

We're not going to say what we need to say, like you said. So we've got to learn what are those fears that cause us to not ourselves. Self-doubt is very much the root. fear. Before I ask the final question, I would acknowledge you, Michael, for your continuous journey to seeking wisdom, truth, knowledge, lessons to help people. You know, you've been on this journey for a long time, and you keep showing up. You keep showing up in service to the process, to the journey of discovery, and to sharing the process with us so that we can try to understand this world in a more harmonious, integrous way. So I really acknowledge you for your

humility, your service, your commitment to being of service with your mission. It's really inspiring. My final question for you is what's your definition of greatness? Oh, I should have seen that coming. I think you've just given it. I think it is your willingness to give it away to help other people, to help people transform their lives. I think transformation is like so key and we get so stuck.

So for me, you know, my work, I didn't set out with a mission to, like, heal people or to change their minds. I set out with a mission to follow my curiosity. And then I found stuff that, oh, people need to know about this. This is not what they thought. And that's exciting to me when I find that out. When I, you know, spent a year of studying nutrition and realized, oh, I can, all you need are these seven words. And I just wanted to give them to everybody. So I think that idea of putting your work in the service of other people is very powerful to me.

It makes me feel like I'm not being self-indulgent when I'm sitting there alone writing all day long. Then maybe it will have an effect on the world. I feel very lucky that I've had two phases in my writing life where I produced books that changed the conversation. conversation. If you do that once in a lifetime, you feel pretty good. But this happened with food, and it's happening now with psychedelics. And I don't know what the next one will be, but, and I don't know why that is, because I'm saying things that other people know and that in some ways are pretty obvious when it comes to food. But sometimes the obvious is very powerful. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and it inspired you on your journey towards greatness.

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