Transcript for:
Understanding Brain Responses to Food Cravings

when the brain doesn't get what it thought it was going to get how does it respond it's almost like it gets a little ticked off it says I really want that thing I didn't get because I thought I was gonna get it and this time I really want to get it so it's going to work extra hard to get it so this is what evolution has given us Evolution did not design us to want to stuff our faces but it did design us to respond to uncertainty with excess motivation why because when something important like food becomes uncertain well that Whispers there's a possibility you might not get it and if that keeps happening you'll starve you'll die so we've created this environment where there's a lot of uncertainty in our food and I use artificial sweeteners as an example people say okay well it's like Diet Coke and I said a few things but that's just one example uncertainty is baked into so much of the food we eat [Music] so excited to dig into these questions I was just truly Blown Away by the book and I told you before we started recording that you know this book was so impactful to me for a couple reasons one because it really made me think about things differently and I will I some Concepts that I'd never ever thought about or heard before uh like nutritive mismatch which we'll talk about during this episode and what that means for our health and our obesity and chronologies epidemic um but also because it's just filled with so many Amazing Stories uh some of which I'm sure we'll go into uh in this episode but I think the book is called end of cravings and so I think we should just start by defining what uh Cravings actually are and really breaking down that concept I think a lot of people have had that feeling of like I'm craving you know fill in the blank uh for me sometimes it's dark chocolate and almond butter um but what's actually happening when we feel a craving and what's sort of the physical a lot physiologic response happening in the brain so craving is very simply desire it is I guess you could say desire at its most intense and it has a negative connotation we think um we're victims of craving this interview that's true but it's important to understand this is a natural thing it's there for a reason and if you look at um humans or animals in a natural context it performs a very important task if you think of starving uh starvation what do people do when they starve they crave food they become absolutely fixated with food the same is true if you've ever gone a long run on a really hot day and you become really thirsty you start to Crave water you can almost feel it you it just completely seizes your mind we see when we look at um the journals of British Sailors who are suffering from scurvy you know we hear in high school when we talk when they teach that that they have these swollen gums and that's true they did have swollen gums but the first symptom was a craving for fruits and vegetables so the craving is the brain saying I need you to get something that's really really important for survival so craving um it comes from a good place but that doesn't mean in our modern world that is always a good thing and and that it became one of the focal points of this book because one of the most interesting things about obesity is that we tend to think the stigma is that it's a disease of pleasure that people with obesity lose themselves and the pleasure of the moment they just don't know when to say enough is enough and that's not what the Neuroscience tells us the Neuroscience tells us that obesity is is much like Starving in the sense that it is a disease of craving so so let's just talk about two brains if you think of a trim brain and an obese brain and they both you know it's a milk it's time for a milkshake everyone thinks it's when the obese brain takes a sip of that milkshake and it just loses itself it lights up like a Christmas tree that's not what the Neuroscience tells us what the Neuroscience tells us it's when it's upon seeing the milkshake it is upon receipt of the queue as the psychologist would say the trim brain says that looks like a nice Milkshake the obese brain says I gotta have that milkshake that milkshake looks like the best thing ever and here's what's even more interesting when it comes time to actually sipping and tasting that Milkshake the obese brain if anything be pleasure response is blunted so they have this massive craving for a milkshake and yet the milkshake isn't actually all that fulfilling whereas the trim brain says that looks like a nice milkshake and they take a sip they go wow that's a great milkshake so it really is a miserable condition it is such a distorted and and terrible relationship with food because people are tortured by a craving for for a an expectation of pleasure that is never really fulfilled you know I I thought something so interesting about the book was this idea that up until about 50 years ago we were able to resist over consuming food we may have had in abundance of food we had to store food for winter at times and we didn't just go and eat all of it and now we're in this situation where we literally can't resist the food there's an insatiable craving and you talk about how obesity is actually a disease of craving so what has changed over the past 50 to 100 years where we are no longer able to resist the food that is in front of us I think I mean that is the nub of the question right there and and it's interesting you say we're no longer able to resist but maybe maybe we weren't resisting 50 years ago it's it you know maybe it we weren't tempted in the same way um there's this idea that we are wired to be obese that that um um that you know we evolved in this environment where calories were unreliable Foods could be food could be scarce so it just always made sense to eat a little bit more and now in this modern food environment we're surrounded by all these calorie rich foods we're sort of sitting ducks I don't think that makes sense and I think it's really important to truly understand the nature of the brain and its relationship with food because it's the only way we can understand this problem so here's the reason I don't think that makes sense um for one thing in an um an evolutionary environment if you're carrying extra weight it makes acceleration less efficient more slowly more slow it makes coming to a stop or turning quickly much less efficient you're much less Nimble so it's gonna be much harder to catch prey and you're more liable to become prey but I think this is the best argument as to why this doesn't make sense if you are carrying around extra weight let's say 20 pounds of of fat as energy Insurance in case famine comes knocking in the door that is a really inefficient way to go about your life it's like driving a very big car what is a big car need it needs more gasoline will a big body is the same way so if you're trying to navigate around a calorie scarce food environment if you're carrying extra calories you have to eat lots more calories just to maintain those calories so it's a really bad strategy to use in a calorie scarce environment this whole idea that we are kind of forged by the Stone Age to be sort of hungry ogres that were that the appetite is dumb permanently hungry always turned on is just wrong um the the brain and we know this because of dieting that the brain controls our body weight when people go on diets the diets work only for about six or eight months and and this is part of the problem because people think the diet is working then around the six to eight month Mark um the pounds start to come back on and people blame themselves to say the diet was working I failed that's not what what is happening what is happening is the brain is intervening and the Brain says I know you're losing weight and I want you to gain it back and what happens is people snap back to their old weight so that might sound on the surface like well what are you saying that sounds like we're you know wired to eat but it also works the other way when scientists do over feeding studies they've been doing these since the 1950s it turns out that getting people to eat too much food is nearly as miserable as starving the first scientist who did this his name was Ethan Sims he tried to do to college everyone thinks college students are permanently hungry you know always want to eat he couldn't get them to eat too much food they just didn't want to he had to go to a state prison and even there prisoners were dropping out of the study it was so miserable to just literally you know eat yourself to just stuff your face and here's what is so interesting is when that experiment came to an end the pounds melted away they snapped back to their old way just the same way dieters do so there's this um this evidence that the brain has a pretty good idea of how much it wants you to weigh here's the other thing that's important to understand we think of the sensation of eating of flavor and taste is this sort of frivolous thing you know sweetness and flavor this is it just sort of gets in the way of nutrition it takes me to a bad place that could not be more wrong it is your brain's way of measuring the nutrients that come into your body and the brain is is obsessed with measuring I talk about one of the studies in the book um uh scientists of the national Institutes of Health named Kevin Hall he studied people taking a drug called canagliflausen This is a drug that diverts sugar into the urine it's for it's used for diabetics and this drug was diverting about 360 calories a day of sugar into their urine and he noticed for every pound they lost there was a commensurate uptick in their appetite until they were making up for this loss of 360 calories by consuming an extra 350 calories that is such I mean like talk about accuracy that is unbelievable but these people had no idea I mean they didn't they they were you know they didn't know if they were taking a placebo they were just taking this pill this all happened unconsciously so this really reframes the idea of of overeating and obesity because this isn't just us uh you know falling into our natural inclinations as um given to us by Evolution there's something wrong where a brain that manages body weight and a brain that is obsessed with measuring um with the nutrients that come in the body has basically made a kind of decision to say I need to eat more food and that is the question we need to ask what could cause a smart brain to say I need to eat more food that really feels like the the Crux of the the book and what you really answer in this in this book which is that this may actually be caused by something that is very different than what we conventionally think about as part of the Obesity conversation which is actually maybe that the there's this um with the Advent of of processed food and this totally new food environment that we're that we're living in um that our brain is really confused this amazing measurer that is so finely tuned is not really sure what's going on and and so I'd love for you to like dive into this concept and and touch on um you know how odd this time we're living in is for our brain in the sense that we use it used to have these Visual and sensory cues that gave it a good sense of actually what was coming in from the mouth to the stomach and now it's completely completely lost what's what's going on there and um what is happening physiologically with with our brain and with our uh sort of uh motivation mechanisms that are causing us to overeat through this way let's just first talk about how important um this this measuring of nutrients coming in is um we do that with our nose and mouth um you know we experience it as taste and flavor but to your brain this is information and this is so important that if you think of your um your DNA as your uh instruction manual to make you the thickest chapter is on making the nose and the mouth so that is how important nutrient detection is to the brain and it's it's only really recently that we've started to mess around with those signals um they were always very stable so I want to talk about an experiment that was done at Yale University by a woman named Dana small because I think this really sort of once you understand this experiment the pieces start to fall into place so she she began the experiment by asking a simple but important question which is is it possible to create drinks that are just as rewarding as a sugary drink but pack for your calories this is kind of the dream of things like artificial sweeteners can I sort of scratch this itch I have for sweet things but not get that big wall of calories in the gut and if it and if it turns out that's possible isn't that great we can go around drinking all the sweet delicious things we want but not pay for it in terms of all these calories that accumulate as body fat well it's a really interesting question um but how do you answer it and this is what makes Dana small such an interesting scientist what she did is she devised five novel drinks they all had a distinct flavor in color and she gave them um they were all made equally sweet with an artificial sweetener called sucralose so they all tasted equally sweet like they had about 75 calories worth of sugar then she used a tasteless starch called maltodextrin to give each of these drinks a different calorie payload one had no calories one had about 37 one had 75 one had 112 and one had 150. she gave these drinks to subjects and they went home and they would drink these drinks in their brain I told you obsessed with measuring so their brains you know drank sipped tasted learned and the and the Brain you know doesn't just measure what's in the mouth also measures what's in the gut it's called post ingestive learning so the brain gets kind of a case report on each of these drinks and then she invites the subjects back to the lab and she sticks them in the brain scanner and they sip each of these drinks so let's you know let's ask ourselves how how do we think all these brains are going to respond to these drinks are they going to like them all equally the same because they were all equally sweet and the Brain just it we like sweetness so you know if it tastes sweet that's all we care about or is the brain smart and it's going to measure these drinks and it's going to say I like the 150 calorie drink because I'm a calorie hog well it was one of these two outcomes that Dana small was expecting and it turns out there was only one drink that really generated a big brain response and that was the 75 calorie drink it just didn't seem to make a lot of sense like the one right in the middle um not 150 calories not the zero calorie drink right down the middle it it didn't really make sense so she did the experiment again and it happened again so now she she sort of you know kick things up a notch and she put um her subjects in something called an indirect calorimeter this is a device that measures What's called the thermic effect of food when you consume calories the body starts to expend energy and we can measure that in in terms of the heat that's given off to process those calories so the more calories you consume the bigger the thermic effect so one day a female subject in early 20s comes in and she drinks that 75 calorie drink and there's this beautiful little pluma feet just exactly like you'd expect that's what the physiology textbook say is going to happen everything's going great a few days later she comes in and she drinks that 150 calorie drink well what do we know from what we know about physiology and how the body burns calories there should be a bigger plume of heat right there's no plume of heat the metabolic response is flat this woman has consumed 150 calories and it's like she drank a cup full of air like what on Earth could be going on and Dana small is flummoxed and then it hits her it's the number 75 because all the drinks tasted as though they had 75 calories worth of sugar but only one drink actually had 75 calories worth of energy in it and that's the drink that was metabolized properly and that's the drink that got the brain excited this tells us something very important that sweetness isn't just this sort of frivolous Sensation from the Stone Age that's meant to pleasure us for no good reason it is information and that the accuracy of that information is crucial because when everything lines up when the sweetness matches the calories the beverages metabolized properly and the Brain responds to it properly but when it's mismatched when the taste does not match the calories everything kind of goes kaplooey it doesn't get metabolized properly the brain doesn't respond to it what happens to these calories they're floating around in the blood and the Brain almost isn't even aware of them so this is kind of frightening because you're you're dump nutrients into your body and they're not getting processed properly she did more experiments and she found that this brings about um symptoms of the body that are like metabolic disease she did a study with adolescence and this is really important because adolescents are in a period of bodily growth right so that's why a lot of teenagers drink juice they drink pop they eat chips they eat pizza they can really pack it away because they're in a period of growth the body does need energy and she found that when she gave these adolescents mismatched strengths they actually had to bring the study to a screeching halt because they drew blood from three subjects early on and they were already looking pre-diabetic so this is like okay this isn't good okay so now let's pan out a second and say this is disturbing because we see when you start to mess around with the sensory signals in food doesn't get metabolized properly but let's ask a deeper question let's talk about the fundamental nature of the brain itself I told you how the brain loves to measure why does it love to measure because the brain loves to predict a lot of neuroscientists are talking about the brain as a prediction engine the reason we have you know the senses the sense of sight the sense of hearing the sense of taste the sense of touch is so we can draw a kind of a map of the external world and so we can thrive in that external world we drop a representation of it that lets us predict what's going to happen well we've created a situation where a signal that for millions of years was stable sweetness sweetness meant calories the more sweet something was the more calories it had well now we have this funny situation where maybe that's not true you could have a sweet drink on a Monday and you get a bunch of calories so you could have a similarly sweet drink on a Tuesday and get no calories or get a bit of calories and then on Wednesday you have the same sweetness and you get lots of calories so this signal that was stable all throughout Evolution very recently has become unstable what what is this well psychologists call this very simply uncertainty there's an even sort of more technical word for uh phrase reward prediction error basically means the brain had a predictive reward in mind that reward didn't happen how does a brain respond and this is where things get really interesting the brain responds with increased motivation when the brain doesn't get what it thought it was going to get how does it respond it's almost like it gets a little ticked off it says I really want that thing I didn't get because I thought I was gonna get it and this time I really want to get it so it's going to work extra hard to get it so this is what evolution has given us Evolution did not design us to want to stuff our faces but it did design us to respond to uncertainty with excess motivation why because when something important like food becomes uncertain well that Whispers there's a possibility you might not get it and if that keeps happening you'll starve you'll die so we've created this environment where there's a lot of uncertainty in our food and I use artificial sweeteners as an example people say okay well it's like Diet Coke and is it a few things but that's just one example uncertainty is baked into so much of the food we eat there's not just artificial sweeteners there's fat replacers now um what's so amazing everybody knows what artificial sweeteners nobody knows about the fat replacer industry multi-billion dollar if you've ever scratched your head and wondered well just what the heck is light mayonnaise anyway what is a light salad dressing it is technology that companies have created to create the illusion of of Rich fatty calories in the mouth and deliver just a dribbling of calories in the gut this is a great idea if your brain's just a hungry from the Stone Age fool that brain if your brain is smart obsessed with measuring this is a terrible idea because you're fooling your brain and your brain will have the last laugh it will have the last word and it's going to say don't do that to me I'm going to get what you tried to take away and this is what we see in Neuroscience is we see excess motivation people with obesity crave food too much we have incited this kind of artificial state of excess hunger by tampering with the sensory qualities of food that is just such a mind-blowing explanation and it was so beautifully stated and I think two of the main points that I'm hearing is that the first is that when there is a mismatch between what the brain sort of thinks the stomach's going to be getting based on taste and other sensory cues and what it actually receives leaves it first of all actually changes the way we metabolize the food which is really interesting and that that experiment with the Mala Direction and The the sweet drink uh 75 calories versus 105 calories 150 calories with the same sweetness is so so interesting I think I remember from the book that and that you said that with when the sweetness essentially equated to what 75 calories would be the body metabolizes it properly and it is you know all the sort of cellular processes that break down carbohydrates and glucose and process this and form ATP and all this stuff kind of were working but then when it was the same sweetness so we expected 75 calories but it was actually 150 calories literally the metabolic processes inside the body like post-digestion the cellular physiology actually changed is that is that actually yeah it just stops it just comes to a screeching halt it's like it's like um it's like if you invited 20 people over to a party and and you open the door and 50 people are there and you just like oh my God I don't know what to do like you just freeze you freak out call off the party exactly gotta get away I'm calling the cops like um it's something like that it really seems to throw things into disarray and we don't actually know why that is I mean that's an area of further study that might have to do with um the rate of like gastric emptying there's so much more to learn here but what we do know is that we see that um when the signal doesn't match the nutrition things don't work one of the things I find so interesting about this is how surprising we find this because it's we've been so conditioned to think that taste and flavor is frivolous and unrelated to this important business of nutrition like like nutrition is always from the neck down we always think of nutrients entering the body entering the stomach carbs protein fat and it's as though this whole experiential part that happens in the mouth is just like frivolous and silly and it's like well of course it isn't of course there's a reason we have this experience and of course it must mean something important for the way the body metabolizes and processes food but I think we've been so conditioned to ignore it that when we actually you know have really good evidence saying hey guys look at what's going on it becomes such a surprise to us which I think is in itself is so interesting it's almost like because we think of flavor as driving pleasure we think we can really have our cake it eat it too by just getting as much flavor as we want and then you know totally not like whatever the actual uh nutrients that are going in like it's sort of almost like an after that we've decoupled these things and and I think what you present is this model of how it's really an integrated system of flavor and taste and all of the stuff that's happening with the sensory cues of food is actually setting up a top-down um series of Downstream effects that are going to be related to how we actually process them up metabolize that food which is one of those this is why the book was I think so impactful was it's like well duh like but and yet we have really so so decoupled those things in culture to our detriment one of the second big things I I was hearing from what you were saying is is I think just it's just so fascinating which is that when you essentially have the taste and what your body is predicting uh that you're gonna get from a food uh when that is sort of mismatched with what the food actually provides which is essentially the definition of processed food it's like changed and altered and very much um modified to be something that it's not essentially um that that is actually going to drive us inherently to eat more and this is not necessarily about craving more of that flavor it's the the fact that the brain is confused there's inconsistency between different iterations of like what it's getting like you might have a Diet Coke on Tuesday and then a Coke on Wednesday and a Diet Coke on Thursday and a coke on Friday and so it's getting the same flavor but different amounts of nutrients and it's throwing the brain for a loop saying like there's inconsistent nutrition coming in this is a time of scarcity and inconsistency and therefore I need to be driven to essentially consume more and eat more and that that is just so so fascinating to me and this I I you called I think reward prediction error could really be really a link between the Obesity epidemic the chronic's epidemic and the processed food culture that we've been living in just for the last few few decades um I wonder if you could share one of my favorite parts of the book If which was the gerbil experiment with the seeds because I think yes because this really um yeah yeah no it's a great one and this really uh brings to light how uncertainty works so this is an experiment done with gerbils and they they were put in two um a food environment one was a very certain food environment so there in this food environment um there was like this big bowl just filled with seeds and next to it there was like a bowl filled with Sands there were seeds buried in the sand and in this um it was just like paradise for gerbils they had all the seeds they could eat and finally if they didn't really overeat all that much and it was kind of funny because even though they could go to this big bowl um and just you know pig out on seeds they seem to enjoy digging around and pulling out these seeds from the sand and you know eating them at their Ledger and so forth and then one day they go from a certain condition into the uncertain condition and now okay the big Bull's gone there's just a bowl of seeds and there's actually not that many seeds in it and then the next day well the big Bowl's there there's a few seeds and the bowl with the sand there's like hardly any seeds and then it was moved to the left side of the cage and just things keep changing and and the stability is gone and what do those gerbils do they start now they really start to pig out and guess what they don't seem to enjoy pulling the seeds out of the sand if they can if they can get a free seed of that big bowl they will go for what is called the most profitable Bowl the bowl the that gives them the most for the least amount of energy so we've seen this uncertain food environment this this Whisper of a loss the war the world is Whispering to the gerbil you might not get enough to eat what do they do they freak out and start stuffing their cute little dribble faces here's the most interesting thing about that experiment they always had too much food to eat even in the uncertain condition there was more food than they could have eaten but it was because of this change in the way their expectation of food was framed that it sort of instilled this panic in them and um this might seem odd and unusual but but it happens to us um you know you can if I told you you've got to catch a flight at five o'clock it takes an hour to get to the airport your watch says it's two o'clock or your watch says it's three o'clock it's either an hour fast or an hour slow what are you gonna do 50 50 chance that it's early so it's you know it's fine it's no good deal airport yeah exactly that's right okay so here's another example if your fuel gauge in your car was uncertain it says it's full it says but you actually don't know it's just not working what's your response to get more gas you're you're gonna yeah you're gonna be you're just gonna be I gotta you know you're gonna go to the gas station more often because you're like I don't know how much gas is there and running out of gas sucks right you got to call a tow truck it's a disaster so you can you can suddenly feel like you just feel it's like yeah if I don't know how much gas is my car of course I'm gonna fill it up because running out would be a disaster so this is um an emotional response that we all have and this is a signal as an unconscious signal that our food is sending us now and it's and here's the thing it's not just artificial sweeteners and fat replacers those are the two big ones which is industry really trying to muck around with our sensory system but there's all sorts of other things like emulsifiers um there's you know there's things they add to ice cream so that it doesn't form ice crystals well that's good if you want to get a longer shelf life out of ice cream but also adds a creaminess to it and this was noticed decades ago so of course they're going to use more of that if it makes it taste more creamy they put things in chocolate milk for example so that it doesn't um it doesn't separate into the chocolate in the milk because that's unsightly nobody wants to buy that so there's all sorts of things they add into food they put stuff in microwave pizzas so it doesn't you don't get this like puddle forming when you microwave it these are called modified starches there's a massive industry in modified starches I call them stealth cars because they are carbohydrates that have no flavor they're just there to kind of perform a functional role in a processed food so you're you're putting these calories in your body and you can't really sense them as they go in um we've been so divorced from the importance of the sensory aspects of food that everyone thinks it's no big deal because nutrition starts with nutrients in the gut being diffused in the body that's not how it works the mouth is in the nose that is the Gateway that is where it all starts and we've ignored it we think it doesn't matter and I'm saying it's actually the most important part of nutrition yeah I think it can be perplexing because we think like oh we live in this environment now of such crazy food abundance it's everywhere you go to the grocery store is you're just surrounded there's you know in most grocery stores like the shelves are full and shiny and all this stuff and so it's like okay that's the problem um but to really start seeing your perspective of that this is that that's not actually that's not the problem there's too much food around it's what's happening to our brains in that the way that food is processed is actually signaling to our brain when we eat it that there's actually uncertainty and there's potentially a survival risk because and that is just such a different Paradigm that makes so much sense um and and also kind of I think gets at this like this this insatiable sort of Desire that we have it's it's it it makes sense that this is getting out of this deep visceral sort of dopamine survival like neuroscircuitry because like you said when you look at the brain scan that it's not actually generating maybe that much pleasure and yet we are literally killing ourselves by eating so much of it and so to unlock this new way of looking things of like this is actually the survival brain being hijacked in a sense and then utilizing the dopamine reward Pathways essentially you know to to co-opt us like it's it's a it puts a lot of the puzzle pieces together I think in a really new um new and interesting way and I think also um so so much of what I think about and focus on as like a physician and and with what we're you know doing with our audience and members at levels is like fundamentally trying to move people towards eating a more you know thoughtfully grown Whole Foods unprocessed diet and have a better relationship with this incredible miraculous substance that you know creates our body and also dictates the functioning of our body and um but motivating people to eat Whole Foods like it's it can be challenging but I think understanding truly like why Whole Foods actually um or unprocessed Foods um are actually what it's physiologically doing to our brain I think is a new level of motivation and understanding of why it's important that could really have a huge impact If people could really um adopt and incorporate this message uh that you're talking about um so I just I'm very grateful for you putting this this out there um you know I just think it's all about we think a lot about empowerment at levels and how do we Empower people to live their healthiest lives and I definitely believe that empowerment comes starts with understanding like the real the reality of what's going on and this is a whole I think broader reality why do you think that this this perspective hasn't really made it to the mainstream conversation you know so much like you're you're bringing it to the Forefront but why do you think we've been lacking in in having this understanding of our brains and what's happening to our brains with processed food um it's a really good question um because it seems clear to me and it's been something that's sort of it's like it was calling out to me and certainly I talked to a lot of scientists about this and I think slowly the consensus will start to move in this direction but I think it's because part of the problem is that as North Americans we are suspicious of pleasure we think pleasure is a bad thing and there's a big mistake we're making is that we're conflating addiction with pleasure and we we think that things that taste good are actually addictive this is wrong um maybe the most important uh aspect of addiction is that pleasure is gone when when heroin addicts talk about using heroin or alcoholics talk about alcohol using alcohol they are seized by cravings for it as when they're in the grip of the craving they're convinced that it will bring them pleasure but the it no longer delivers pleasure and and I think that's important because um we talk about Whole Foods and I agree I mean I I I think Whole Foods the way to go but but there's almost this idea that oh that's you know boring it's like going to church community service eating food I mean the food that nature creates is the most delicious of all like like Frito-Lay and Pepsi and Coke they don't have anything on Mother Nature if you're going to talk with like strawberry or grape peach or an amazing steak or or mushrooms or something like that um but we've been so conditioned to think of healthy eating as boring like it's gonna suck it's gonna taste terrible and I think that's part of the problem if what's so interesting to me is that when you look at the food cultures that have the highest standards for food the three I think of are Italy South Korea and Japan these are countries that where the food is I mean incredibly of an incredibly high quality and they're very picky about what they eat they are in far better shape in terms of obesity and metabolic Health than we are so I think that's telling us something really important that we're getting wrong that food needs to taste good food tasting good naturally is not a bad thing it's a very good thing um yeah I'd love to chat a little bit more about the Italians because you get into the Italians quite a bit in the book and you know when you look at the rates of global obesity of course the US is like right at the top you know like by like a huge huge gap in between the other charts and then you've got like Italy much lower down with only about 10 obesity and then South Korea is like way way way at the bottom near Japan um with like three percent or so obesity so these are also modernized industrialized countries you know with tons of access to any any particular any product they they want so what is going on where did the trajectories go awry between the US and these other countries that love food are super modernized and yet have a fraction of the Obesity that we do yeah so I I focus on Italy because Italy is a western culture there's many Italian immigrants in North America and um I love South Korea and Japan but but they're I think they're culturally more more different um so I've really focused on Italy and I the most interesting thing about Italy is um is I think it really explodes one of the myths about food which is that delicious food takes us to a bad place um northern Italians Italians I mean Italian cuisine is famous um northern Italians in particular the city of Bologna is where I really focused um bologna sounds like bologna or bologna well that's where we get that that kind of famous um maybe Infamous luncheon made comes from bologna there they call it Mortadella it's I would say it's a it's a finer creation there's a little more of a a crafted artisanal product but one of the biggest differences between the mortadell you get in bologna and the bologna you find in Supermarket shelves here is in Italy you see these cubes of white fat they are not afraid of eating fat in Bologna um they are obsessed with food they have a repository in their Chamber of Commerce where they keep an official list of recipes that if you want to make something like lasagna this is how you make lasagna if you want to make tortellini which is that wonderful little dumpling that's filled with with pork and and prosciutto and parmesan cheese this is how you make it and it must be served in a broth made with a farmyard chicken I mean they are really fastidious about it um they have these two religious orders one is the the Brotherhood of the teletella this is their favorite noodle it's made with the two um two nutrients we've been living in fear of carbs and fat it's made with eggs and flour and they make this this just fantastic noodle which they use with their famous Ragu ala Bolognese um it's it's this is not the Mediterranean diet this is not fish this is not olive oil this is pork cream pasta butter um it's really rich food well you'd think if Rich delicious food is what makes us fat that the northern Italian should be the absolute plumpest in the western world what is so stunning is that not only are Italians thinner by a long shot than North Americans Northern Italians are skinnier than Southern Italians the rate of obesity in Northern Italy is less than eight percent the um the nhane survey has been measuring obesity in in the United States uh since the early 60s it's never been that low we've we as far as we've been measuring we haven't been as skinniest Northern Italians and they're eating this absolutely fantastic Rich delicious amazing diet it's so good that people travel by plane lows just to eat what they're eating so on the one hand I think this is actually really hopeful it's like okay so it actually is possible to literally not have your cake have an amazing cake have the world's best cake and eat it too that's really exciting but then I want to understand like okay so what's going on it's like what is it that makes Northern Italy different from us so I started to you know turn back the pages of history and what I found is at one time Northern Italy wasn't so much different as it was similar similar specifically to the American South this is going back a little over a century ago and in Northern Italy there was a disease a an epidemic region called pellagra that word we get from a DOT an Italian dialect it literally means rough skin and the disease of rough skin started usually with Farmers farmers let's start with like a skin scale on their hand I start in the spring it would kind of go away later in the summer but then it would return the next year and eventually kind of overtake their whole body their their hands would become these these hideous appendages um they would they would get diarrhea they would become kind of demented and confused and eventually they would die and they had no idea what was causing this they thought oh maybe it had to do with if you lived too close to a river some people said there's these spores that get into your blood and they ignite or it has to do with eating rotten food they had I mean there's it's hilarious some of these old-time medical explanations from centuries past well in 1904 pelager suddenly pops up in Georgia and just like in Italy it's a it's an epidemic it starts to spread from state to state and the American scientists it's very much reminiscent of our obesity debate because it's all these experts and they're just pounding their fists on the table saying that they have the answer some say it's a it's clearly a disease of infection um it's it's it's um it's like a virus or a bacteria some say it's spread by flies there was a Sandfly contingent there was a mosquito contingent they would argue with each other and then one one day um this epidemiologist named goldberger uh Joseph Goldberg gets sent to a sanatorium Tennessee and everyone thinks this guy's nuts because he's like don't clean up the puke on the floor don't change the bed sheets keep everything as it is I just want these people to eat different food and and they start eating like beans and cheese and milk and everyone's like this guy is the total lunatic and it works by the spring like you get in the fall by the spring there's one case of pellagra left he then but nobody believes him No One Believes him so then he goes to a prison in Mississippi and he creates pellagra he gets permission from the um from the governor he says if I if I can do this experiment on these prisoners will they let them go free he's like yeah okay so he gives them what's called a pellagra diet they're eating a diet of of grits which is cornmeal which is like the Italians were eating polenta um pork fat and molasses and he induces pellagra So eventually people start to realize that this guy knows what's going on and this led to a very important discovery which is that of vitamins um gold not not Goldberg was the only one but this research helped us understand that food isn't just food that there are vital elements within food that are necessary for the continuation of life and if you don't get these elements you die well early on they were called vital amines We Now call them vitamins and where things get really interesting is if you look at how the American government responded to palagra and how the Italian government did the American government said um they did what you'd think you do they put on their lab coat and they said if people need niacin well let's just give them niacin let's put niacin in in white bread Everybody Eats white bread let's put niacin and white bread it and let's just not Denise and let's also do thiamine and riboflate and those are also two important B vitamins let's also do iron so that's called enrichment and I started with white bread and then it it just it spread to like pasta now it's in everything some donuts it's in basically all our processed carbs also in breakfast cereals and it worked beautifully pellagra it's just like poof gone just fell off a cliff um over in Italy the response was almost like medieval they they didn't I mean they could have added um niacin to polenta but they didn't they said uh we should bake bread and communal ovens and you know what poor people should do they should raise rabbits because rabbits are are really economical form of meat and some people say well if you have palagra you know what you should do is you should have a glass of red wine which is like so Italian it's so funny like you're gonna tell this person they have a nutritional deficiency and you're saying have a glass of Vena it actually wasn't bad advice though and not that anybody knew it but the wines back then weren't well filtered they had lots of yeast and yeast is just like super loaded with niacin so actually if you got pellagra go get yourself a glass of red wine 100 years ago really good idea here's what's also interesting and also the Italian method also worked didn't work as quick but it's Italy literally ate its way out of a nutritional epidemic well now let's just fast forward the clock to the present because these two regions could not be more different Northern Italy um I mean it's the seat of of Italian culture fashion Ferrari Maserati in Northern Italy is this amazing place and the food is incredible southern Italy or excuse me the American South it graduated from one nutritional disaster to another what was Once Upon a Time the poloker belt is now the Obesity belt it's also called The Diabetes belt so if you look at the southern U.S it really sort of confirms our deepest fear about food which is that you're either going to starve or you're going to eat yourself to death but Northern Italy says no actually you can have this great relationship with food so then I asked this question could enrichment have had something to do with this could putting vitamins in in processed carbs or something to do with this it's I'll be the first to say this sounds totally wacky I mean we've had every um theory of obesity in the world except now so this idiots coming on saying it's vitamins I mean how how dumb is this there's no calories and vitamins right there's not a single calorie you can have like one ton of vitamin C like there's no calories so what could the connection be well here's here's where things get interesting remember that diet that that Joseph goldberger created in that prison what were they eating they were eating grits which is to say you know corn cornmeal pork fat and molasses carbs fat and sugar it's really hard to imagine a more calorie dense diet yet these people were literally starving how is that possible well it what that tells us is that our concept of calories equaling energy is wrong we think of calories it's like putting gas in your car or plugging your your phone into the wall socket to get energy calories don't equal energy because for the energy and calories to be released they have to be metabolized and to be metabolized you need certain vitamins certain B vitamins like niacin like Simon like riboflava where things get really interesting and where where um where I really became convinced is when I looked at Pig farming in the 1950s because this this is where this is where things really um start to come together the goal of the pig farmer is to get pigs big and fat as quick as possible the faster they can turn over their pigs the more money they can make well back in the early 1950s Pig Farmers knew if you want to get your pig big and fat really quickly what do you do you give them a diet of corn with some soy that just packs in the pounds but if that's all you give them they die they they their hair starts to fall out they get diarrhea they crater they lose weight and they're basically getting something like a pig version of pellagra they knew that the diet was unbalanced they didn't really know why but they said it's really important to send your pigs out to pasture where they would munch on Alfalfa so back then all pigs were pastured pork that's you know trendy and more expensive now but that's the way all pork was once upon a time they knew that Alfalfa was essential to balance the diet well the discovery of vitamins changed everything I mean we talk about kfos and confinement for farming vitamins made that possible because now you could take your pigs you could stick them crowd them all together in a barn and give them that Rocket Fuel feed of corn and soy and then Dust In These B vitamins they didn't need to eat Alfalfa anymore and now their rate of gain just took off um I found pamphlets from the University of Iowa from the late 1950s that would say the pig has a reasonable ability to balance its own diet but there's now a better way there was now optimal weight gain what was that it was giving pigs corn and soy with the B vitamins dusted in well this is great if you want to get your pigs big and fat quickly that's the way to go but the problem we have as humans is that we get big and fat too quickly and what did we do to our diet we did something that resembles a whole lot about what we did to the pig diet and the chicken diet and the cow died the confinement diet which is to say give them processed carbs and dump in the B vitamins and they will get big and fat super quick oh my gosh it's so interesting like I think um it I mean so many fascinating elements and elements of it one is that it's like uh good intentions gone awry you know like it's like okay this was seemed I could totally see at the time and we're fighting palagra that like oh let's enrich our flower and these staples and maybe it'll help um and to think that we're now I don't know 50 hundred years later whatever it is and we are essentially like potentially paying the price for this and it's so hard to dig our way out it's just really really fascinating to hear the full story um one thing that definitely got me like head scratching um during this part of the book was just reflecting on something I talk about a lot with the metabolic health you know our community which is which is the importance of micronutrients for optimal metabolism and how I I something I said on you know many podcasts is that like when I go to the grocery store I'm on a micronutrient hunt you know micronutrients being vitamins minerals antioxidants Etc like these that serve multiple functions you know they they can be locking key cofactors for enzymatic practices in the body they can act as antioxidants they can be incorporated into proteins like soleno proteins um things like that and how all these things are really important for ourselves to function properly and and so just how important it is to get those and then try still trying to work through how to balance that with and essentially saying like you know for our metabolic Machinery to function properly we need proper micronutrients we're also living in this funny time right now where while we are fortifying food with some vitamins our our whole foods are becoming less micronutrient dense as our soil becomes depleted in our farming practices become worse in our monocropping Agriculture and and the average American is deficient in at least one key micronutrient um and so that seems to me in my mind to be a big problem related to the fact that we're not eating diverse omnivorous nutrient dense Whole Foods and we're stripping a lot of our foods of different things so I'm kind of trying to like put this together in my head of like how enriching foods with B vitamins or with with these vitamins is actually helping our body much more quickly store it as fat versus this other reality that's happening where people are becoming in some way vitamin or micronutrient depleted because of our processed food diet and our poor soil how do you think through those different things going on I was tortured by the same thought and I've thought and I've thought a lot about it so so let's talk about a first on a philosophical level because what is so interesting is if you look at the American approach the Italian approach the American approach is to say we're dumb we don't know what what's good for us and food is by its very nature incomplete because it doesn't always have what we need so we will take the the god-like hand of science to intervene and we're going to put in food what dog Garnet needs to be in there um and the Italians they took a very different approach they didn't see food as the problem they saw food as the Cure they said that the problem with these poor Farmers is they can't afford good food that's what they said grow rabbits it's like you need to eat meat you need to drink wine you need to eat all these good things it seems kind of uh it has this folksy kind of you know old world quality but they were right um and here's what the difference is it comes down to complexity and simplicity nature is complex Whole Foods are there are so many compounds and Whole Foods you know we talk about ingredientless being long if you look at the ingredient list of strawberries or all the composite of the strawberry be from here to the Moon there's tens of thousands of compounds the the idea that we could enrich food to make it healthier it's well intended the problem is we are simplifiers we just do a a handful of things that we think are important we can't come anywhere close to achieving the complexity and the ones that nature does this is why I'm such a Critic of things like plant-based meat because there may come a time when we can equal the complexity of Nature and create food that is that um communicates with our body the same way actual food does but we are so far away from that and part of that is because of our reduction of simplistic thinking so when we do things like enrich and fortify food we're not really trying to mimic the complexity of nature people say that we enrich food to replace what's lost in processing that's not true the nutrient profile that's lost in processing is nothing like what we add in enrichment when we think of all the vitamins and minerals we need not to mention all the phytochemicals the antioxidants all that stuff the stuff that companies are dumping into Rice Krispies or multi-grain Cheerios is nothing like what you actually see in a plant it's it's it's not even a vague resemblance and one of the reasons companies do this is because unfortunately um they have the advantage that most of us just don't know a great deal about nutrition so a parent looks at the side of the cereal box and says look at all those vitamins this must be healthy so what what we're getting wrong is um it's it's just not in the right amount not the right diversity not the right uh Nuance uh and it's tilted a certain way I think an interesting thing is is a lot of people say that um there's too many empty calories in our food if you think of something like like sodas well that is empty calories right that's just sugar but what's really interesting if we were really eating this this empty calorie diet we'd be just like those Southerners we'd have pellagra so clearly we're getting the vitamins we need to process those calories into fat but I agree that I don't think we're getting a truly nourishing diet I think it's it's um lacking in all sorts of ways so we've just sort of torqued it in you know this way in this way but the diet we've created by by doing that in no way fills in or can in any way equal what nature does when Nature creates food maybe one day we'll do that but but we're not doing it now I don't even think we're trying to be honest I think it's just um it's a quick fix that's meant to uh make people think food is healthy than it is so I'd love to kind of shift gears and talk about potential Solutions here and some actionable things that that people can do because it can seem pretty overwhelming um you know our motivation circuitry at the most fundamental level is being hijacked by our food environment and whatnot and so I I would love to talk about a vision that you see for for moving forward and what we can learn from other cultures and how what is your personal framework for how we should be approaching our diet and our food um let's maybe start with talking on like the individual level and then and then maybe we can also secondarily touch on a systems level well I think the important thing is everybody's after a quick fix and there is no quick fix um uh we've gotten ourselves into a bad place with food it's taken time it's going to take us time to get out of that that bad place I think on an individual level I'm one of those very lucky people um I eat what I want and um I I maintain a healthy body weight I don't diet I kind of weigh myself and I kind of like you know one day it's a couple pounds up one day it's a couple pounds down but I realize how lucky I am but I the the relationship I have with food should be the normal relationship everybody has with food so the question is how do you get back to that um I think one of the things to do when people say eat Whole Foods eat real food eat foods that your grandmother would recognize that's true that's not wrong but what I would add to that is eat like an Italian eating food isn't doing community service nourishing the body isn't like um meant to be boring or painful it's meant to be joyful um food tastes good for a reason because it's providing nourishment so every meal should be an opportunity to indulge and enjoy what nature gives us but eating like an Italian that means valuing food the way Italians do which is honoring the goodness that that is we get from the land and the Sea at times of all these funny food rules that if you want to call us San Marzano tomato a sandwich tomato it must be a certain type of tomato grown in a certain place the reason they're saying that is because that's their guarantee equality because we know when we grow this tomato it tastes this variety here it tastes really good they have all sorts of rules all over the place um we we're nothing like that um I think things are improving like you can look at things that you know we're developing a more sophisticated wine palette or you look at like the growth of artisanal cheeses or craft beers things are getting better but we have to really make a big deal over flavor and celebrate it and be willing to spend a little bit more money on food that really does taste good you know the right way not not by cheating um what I often tell people to do this will sound weird eat food that tastes like what it is um if you actually start to look at what's in the ingredient list you see things like artificial flavors and natural flavors and you see artificial sweeteners and fat replacers these are foods that are engineered to create a flavor image that deviates from what they're sending to your stomach so eat food that tastes like what it actually is and I think that is doing your brain a big favor and you're just going to find by doing that you're just eating foods that are automatically healthier but I think also we have to develop a more sophisticated language about pleasure I visited um a clinic in Germany I spent some time with a with a scientist there named Anya Hilbert and she does what's called hedonic therapy that just means pleasure therapy hedonics means pleasure in in sciences and she let me take part in this in this therapy and it was so interesting because it really made me realize how our brain can respond in two different ways to Foods so one of the first things she does this was an exercise in in making the experience this wanting circuit this craving circuit that can take us to a bad place and you started with a bag of potato chips it was um cheese and onion flavored and and she said open the she said look at the bag look at the picture and she's like open and it makes this pop and there's this worship around she's like just smell how you know smell it like like just inhale it deeply and then she said take out two chips and she said you can nibble them but you can't you can't Munch them she said you can sniff them and then she said rub them together and I thought that's weird but I rubbed the chips together and it was really really odd I was absolutely seized by like an almost angry desire like I really wanted to eat those chips and then she said throw them out throw them in the garbage like crazy these two beautiful potato chips I threw them and I took these two new beautiful pristine potatoes I did it again and this creamy just washed over me like I really wanted to eat this so badly I'm someone who has a good relationship with the food but I was brought to this place of like total craving I was angry I really wanted these chips well then now we did a different um experiment and this was opening my my experience at my inner Mind's Eye to the pleasure circuit which is different than dopamine dopamine dopamine is craving dopamine's desire pleasure is mediated by the opioid neurochemicals this is true pleasure and she gave me this little square of dark chocolate she said just put it in your mouth and just let it start to mouth and nothing really happened at first I was like yeah whatever and then there's just this little there's this warmth in this little this like cocoa Aroma just starts to fill my mouth and then and then it starts to mouth and then and then it the droplets turn into a pool and then I crunched through this biscuit Center and this was such a different experience because a few minutes earlier I was like hopped up I was aggressive everything was going quickly and all of a sudden like everything's going slowly and I'm like the passenger in a boat and this chocolate's taking me on a journey and that is what true pleasure is and I think we know that because there's a reason we call junk food junk food because we know an intuitive level this is crap this is this is taking me to a bad place when you know I think potato chips everyone eats potato chips right it's no one ever talks about this like legendary bag of potato chips they had on their like their honeymoon or their first trip to France we talk about other things we talk about mushrooms or great steak or great soup or a great glass of wine um and that is how food is meant to pleasure us and when food Pleasures Us in that way I think it communicates to our body in a different way but here's what is so interesting about Anya Hilbert's research she has patients with binge eating disorder and these people are absolutely consumed by Cravings they they eat themselves to the point where they they they you know it's painful in the stomach there's so much food well when they get these Cravings to stuff their faces she says just take a really fine chocolate and let it melt in your mouth and what she's found is that the pleasure that chocolate can deliver can extinguish the craving so I think that's telling us something that when you choose to eat food that delivers true pleasure you start to develop a different relationship with food would you say that food that delivers true pleasure is going to be uh more like beautifully grown Natural Foods filled with all the phytochemicals that are supposed to be in there and like is that exactly what would be defined as food that generates pleasure yeah I would say in my experience if um if I had to think of an example I would I think dark chocolate's a really good example I talked to one of any Hilbert's patients actually and she she said dark chocolate was like a transformative food for her because she didn't like it at first she found it bitter but then she start to eat and she started to kind of develop develop a taste for and then one day she put a square of milk Chalk in her mouth she's like I can't believe I was ever eating this it's just so sickly sweet and she said the other thing about dark chocolate is you just can't eat it too quickly like you would never stuff your face with dark chocolate it's just it's something that is meant to be slow and slowly savored and and you talk about things being beautifully grown I would agree with that not because out of some kind of snobbish sort of you know talk about terroir and rare this and where that it's just that um that when food is beautifully grown there's a complexity that our brains can perceive in food and that's what we're perceiving and that's why the Italians care about the way their tomatoes taste and they care about the varieties of grapes because they know that's that's where the real Joy is so yes I would agree with that yeah I mean it really resonates with my own personal food Journey over the years I was very very overweight in my early teenage years and and I ultimately was able to to lose a lot of weight and and really keep it off through [Music] um so learning how to cook and learning about food and and moving away from the standard American diet towards really more of a I would say unprocessed diet but also appreciating food more I think it's it's you know with my what I when I was in college what really got me fascinated with the biosciences was the study of neutrogenomics so like how food compounds change gene expression and I think it it kind of fed into what you're talking about which is a sense of awe and reverence for what food can do so is this journey that was a combination of you know wanting to lose weight and then for me that was learning how to cook and learning how to actually prepare foods and engaging with food so much more than I had as a child where you're just wolfing down food you know and and it was slower and took more time and I appreciated the food more because I was actually cooking it coupled with this more science-based sense of awe over the power of food and what it can actually do and that together really set me personally up for a long-term sustainably positive relationship with food where what has been what struck me so much and I think it's so easy to say when you're at this place and it's harder to because I've been on both sides of this I know how how create how much how severe craving can be I mean I've been there I've I've been I've I've hid as a child I literally hid Nutella containers of my chocolate in my in my uh closet so I like I get it very much but now I just would never I have no risk for that right now and I think it's I think it is really what you talk about which is that pleasure has overcome that in a lot of ways to the extent where now I really like think about and dream about more healthy foods like like a cauliflower rice like stir fry I'm like oh God that sounds so good like I love to eat that and you know or something that I've really taken like an hour to cook or something like that and it's like I used to think before reading your book actually that like I changed somehow the dopamine reward circuitry in my brain to like want healthy food now so I have a reward pathway or a motivation pathway towards healthy food but what I kind of hear you saying is that it might actually be more that the pleasure associated with that stuff which maybe is more opioid driven or something like that is actually stifling some of the other Cravings that could be there and less so that I've replaced one craving with another is that like how do you think through that I think it's both I I think you do kind of overwrite those Cravings because it looks like you do get hungry right like you do want to eat and I'm similar to you like I remember as a teen like I would crave like crappy pizza or McDonald's or something that's insatiable for me now it's just it's foreign to me I don't and if I'm stuck in an airport and I eat that like like rarely when that happens I'm just like wow there's like this is just like hot grease like there's just nothing there um I was actually really proud today my daughter got braces and she said she said Daddy can you make chicken soup and I was like I'm really busy I got a podcast I gotta prepare and that's how I found like a can of Campbell Soup she's like no no I don't want that I want you to make chicken soup and I'm like you know you're right so I made her chicken soup and and she followed along with me and and we got herbs in the garden um and we got like a shiitake mushroom because that has this beautiful kind of umami and I thought this is great I'm not trying to congratulate myself or anything like that this is how you do it and I I'm glad she caught me she didn't let me take the easy way out and I think but I think what's also really interesting is that people don't realize the degree of processing when you start to when you start to know what to look for you know some of these fat replacers they have names like carrageenan um that that's actually I think it's like an algae or something um I can't remember I get them confused people don't realize how much is going on they're actually putting these things in cream now if you look at like the whipped cream topping you get in in um on coffees and things like that everyone thinks it's whipped cream it's not it's it's well most of the time it's not it's these confected fake whipped creams that have fewer calories in them so it's really everywhere in the food environment I don't want to be one of these weirdos that it's like you know if it didn't come out of your garden don't eat it but it does frighten me when I when I see my kids are up against my my other daughter brought home an energy drink from Starbucks it was mismatched it had um it had sugar and it also I think it had sucralose in it so it was like a Danish ball experiment it also had 200 of I think it was vitamin B6 and I'm sitting there going why would anybody need 200 nobody does but in our silly way we think well if 100 is good 200 I mean this is an energy drink this must be really good it's packed with nutrients and this is just the way we're designing foods that really screw things up so I think it's more important than ever um to just like it's simple as it is eat real food oh my gosh the part of your book around all the stuff that's put in our food was mind-blowing you've touched on it a bit in this episode like the to make something taste like fat we're actually using like micro particles of protein Globs like you talk about yeah that's a good one oh it's it's revolting but like yeah no it is no but here's the best part so that that's a that's a product called simplex and that and I'm Canadian that was discovered here in Canada it was a scientist working for a brewery he tried to turn this is I think it's 1978. he tried to turn whey that's that liquid that's left over when you make cheese you got your curd that becomes the cheese and you got this liquid he tried to turn the way into a gelatin and he got this styrofoam-like thing that sort of tasted like cheesecake or um cream cheese that was eventually sold to NutraSweet and they marketed I think in 1988 as a product called simplex and what it was is a micro particulated protein tiny little balls of protein that were just tickling the tongue which created this experience of fat even though it wasn't fat um here's what's interesting when they put uh this stuff in a product if you look at the ingredient label you don't see micro particulated protein you don't see the word simplest you'll see whey protein or milk protein that doesn't sound bad right yeah it's like oh this is like a concentrated milk that sounds great um so that's just one of the ways that I mean here's the other thing scientists aren't studying that they don't even I talk to all these sensory scientists who are studying um artificial sweeteners they don't know about fat Replacements because they've also been fooled because the fat replacement industry has been really smart they just lurk in the shadows they put the stuff in your food but they give it all these kind of nice sounding names so people don't realize that this stuff is getting put now in everything because it brings the calorie count down and you know it's odd but one of the reasons this is happening is because the nutritional info panels everyone turns over the package they see calories they're always picking the one that has fewer calories so the companies are saying well we've got a lot of calories let's use artificial sweeteners let's use fat replaces they bring that calorie count down every time we do this we're putting we're just baking in uncertainty into our food so it's really it's spreading which which I think is the scariest thing for me I love that just by baking in uncertainty into our food with these replacers and Ultra processing we're literally driving our motivation to eat more I just think that's so fascinating um okay couple wrap-up questions for you um the first is still one of these other things I'm still working through um which is this concept with the Italians like they eat a lot of pasta and you talk about pasta a lot in the book and ravioli and um pasta you know is like not found in nature it's a you know ground grain and water and maybe egg and stuff like that it's it's a combination food the brain I would assume doesn't really know or is able to predict what that's going to do to the body so how do you look at like something like that like a technically a somewhat processed food that seems Italians seem to be doing fine with like how does that how does that fit as not causing some sort of mismatched situation because how does the brain even know what something like pasta or bread actually is or is supposed to be in terms of nutrients yeah it's a great question and the answer is it doesn't initially when you're born it doesn't well actually you're subject to Flavors and amniotic fluids so maybe it does a little bit it's very complex but the truth is uh we're not born with a hardwired kind of menu of things we have a brain that's capable of learning so the brain learns what pasta is and it learns that it contains carbohydrate and it learns that it contains if you're eating Italian pasta that might contain some fat um and it's really smart that way the Italian pasta doesn't it isn't enriched or fortified so that's also a big difference um but here's the difference pasta tastes like what it is um so it's not trying to fool you um and it's and like I said the Italian version isn't torqued with um B vitamins the way ours is so um you could say the same thing about rice noodles in in Japan or or I mean you know cavemen didn't eat rice um cavemen certainly didn't eat sushi but I think Sushi's I like sushi and and I think it's I don't think it's driving people into a bad relationship with with food the way processed foods are the distinction between processing and Ultra processing all foods are to some degree processed raisins are processed right uh wine is a processed food um when you cook food you're processing it I think people say the the where things are a problem is when sensed nutrition deviates from actual nutrition and you don't see that in something like pasta what you taste is what you get if you know if you're eating real pasta and that's what the pasta you grew up with as a child and stuff like that it's when you start to Tinker with things and start to fool try to fool the brain I think that's where we get into trouble it's when we try to fool the brain yeah so it's like if you took a pasta and added some flavorings or cut out some element you know to to deep carve it or say you know who knows like just like basically yeah yeah exactly if you if you created like some pasta that yeah had the flavor and sensory experience of pasta but like oh but half the calories I think that would be a bad idea yeah that makes a lot of sense very interesting it's and I guess the same would be true of bread because there's so many different varieties of bread at this point we've got what bread used to be which is like flour and water and salt and then we've got what bread is now which you mentioned in the book there's a lot of breads now that literally have sugar and Sucralose in them we've got all these modifying things in there and it's just oh it's you know 15 ingredients so it's actually quite a liberating point I think because I think some people are like oh gosh can I never eat pasta again can I never eat bread again and I think what I'm hearing is to really focus on Simplicity of ingredients and and quality and and nothing that's fake or fooling in in the product is a really good start in terms of how you shape your diet um absolutely yeah very interesting so in terms of I think practical I mean tips I think one thing that I'm hearing is for people because I think people in a lot of what we hear from our communities like where do I start you know where what what's what's the first step I I am eating a lot of this stuff and I do have a huge craving for it so what am I supposed to do I'm not just going to become like a you know Whole Foods regeneratively grown meat person tomorrow so like where do you start and what I'm hearing one tip I heard you say was that take maybe take something like dark chocolate or some like really gorgeous strawberry or beautiful heirloom tomato from the farmer's market and sit with it and just as like almost an experience like put it in your mouth and let it just like chew it let it melt whatever and just start to engage with some of those Pathways like is that like a a technique that people should do yeah I would say it is I think I think the palette can change you know I used to drink soft drinks like Most teens did I used to drink Coke I drink it now and I'm like it's just like bubbly syrup and I'm like I can't believe I ever drank this um so I think the palette can change it takes time the thing I'll say the funny thing with me is this all started for me with wanting to eat good food this is not like a nutrition thing for me I mean I guess it is but the way this started for me was I wrote a book about steak that's where it started I'd love to eat steak I love to eat good food I mean right now that uh the plums are in season the nectarines are in season I'm in heaven I just it's so delicious nature can pleasure us in a way that the food companies I mean they're centuries away from doing what nature can do yeah yeah I think the baby steps to get there um are so helpful and you give some of those in the book which I think is really really helpful um you know for me slowing down you talk about in the book really experiencing meals I think trying to build in cooking into our lives can help with that because you start to have a bit of a more complete sensory experience with food so even if it's cooking something really simple yeah I think it can be well the other thing too is um people are afraid of cooking so the one thing I'll say I love to cook you're gonna screw up don't beat yourself up if you screw up every you know no dishes ever perfect my wife's always like oh you're so critical it's like I'm not critical I'm it's just every time you cook something you learn something new about that dish so I'm always kind of making notes and all that people shouldn't be afraid of cook because you're probably going to screw it up your first time um and if you have a dinner party don't cook something you've never cooked before the dinner party good life lesson right there safe people always make okay lightning round last three um three things I would love to hear a yay or nay of what you think about them I think I know the answer to uh to a couple of them but um so people taking vitamins yay or nay I would I would say unless your doctor has told you like like some people for example aren't very good as they get older they they don't absorb vitamin B12 efficiently so they go to they get a blood test it's like your B12 levels are low if your doctors told you to take B12 take B12 but just to go and like buy vitamins and take them nay no get your vitamins from food that's where they should come from okay and what if people are eating a very Ultra processed diet where really they're just getting like the B vitamins and the Fortified vitamins but they might not be getting any zinc selenium manganese chromium choline what about that situation I think they should if they realize that that the solution is to change their diet and I don't think they're gonna I don't I don't think taking vitamins is a wise course very interesting okay I also don't think there's any evidence that shows that vitamin supplements there's some evidence I talk about in the book that especially with pregnant women um that vitamin supplements could actually be contributing to um the fact that so many pregnant women have difficulty losing the weight that they gain in pregnancy that was super awesome so yeah yeah no it's it's it's really here's the thing vitamins are like the forest elves of nutrition they're just these like they they always do good they're they're pure and wonderful nothing is that simple um anything that can you know water you can poison yourself with water um we have antioxidants because oxygen which is necessary for respiration is also can cause cellular damage like so you know biochemistry is all very complex it is yeah I think there's very specific type of supplementation that that there is some clinical backing for but I think again it's like in conversation with the doctor for instance for hypothyroidism like 200 micrograms of supplemented selenium has been shown for certain patients with autoimmune hypothyroid to be I have no issue with that it's just like what you're talking about it's like that's a clinically indicated sort of like discussion you're kind of using a potentially therapeutic or super therapeutic level to drive a particular outcome um so uh yeah so that's very but that's that's interesting okay um two is alternative uh Meats so things like Beyond Burger impossible Burger uh Ard no hard no I mean that to me is the absolute apotheosis of this kind of North American approach that we can do better than nature and I mean these are foods their their entire purpose is is to fool you we're taking something and trying to make you think it tastes like something that it isn't so on some level I think it's well intended but I don't think it's the way to go the other thing is I don't like people calling them plant-based because it makes it sound as though they have all the things in plants that make plants good the fiber the the micronutrients the phytochemicals they have none of that if plant-based meat is plant-based Coca-Cola is plant-based Doritos or plant-based potato chips are plant-based like it's it's I think it's misleading people there's a there's a company that's trying to fight back against us called actual veggies which is a it's it's in the exact same container as like the impossible and Beyond like very similar packaging down to like the shape of the plastic insert but it's literally just organic vegetables that have been like basically Blended together and like nothing else I think the binder is like flax seed or something so anyways not still not uh you know a whole food but but certainly trying to do something a little different than this idea of like Beyond Burger as if it's something better than what nature could do Beyond exactly yeah um okay last one um the entire category of non-nutritive sweeteners so just like non-intuitive sweeteners as an umbrella term yay or nay yeah so this is one that I know our listeners are going to be really interested in so I'd love I would love your take on this a lot of people will talk about that aspartame sucralose sugar alcohols um what else so some of them are essentially worse offenders than others and then when we like you often hear monk fruit Stevia and allulos being put in a category of like these are actually better and okay because they don't seem to cause an insulin response they don't seem to perturb the microbiome they don't seem to change uh digestive or satiety hormones but after reading your book I'm like I can't imagine Mark's gonna say that these make sense because they're a total nutritive mismatch situation so do you see a difference within the category or from your perspective is it they're they're all a problem because of the way they fool the body well I think I think anytime you're trying to you know you know pull kind of pull a fast one in your brain it's probably not going to work out um yes these things are different there was just a study that came out a couple days ago and sell that looked at the microbiome and I I think they looked at aspartame sucralose uh stevia and maybe there was one other and they all I mean they they had different effects but they all had an effect um but I guess the other thing is you know if you look at the rcts um they don't like a lot of the rcts they don't look that bad but here's the thing they never look that good either they they seem to show that people lose like a half a pound or a pound you're like come on I mean it's it's nothing I I think I think it's the wrong direction to go I think the direction to go is in real food and that um and if you have a tortured relationship with sweet Foods maybe just get away from them for a while and reintroduce yourself to um to Sweet fruit and things that are kind of sweet the old-fashioned way and repair your palate rather than to further deceive it that would be my Approach okay well any last final words of wisdom or anything else you'd like to share that we did not cover on this this podcast that no we wow we covered a lot so um I guess I would say we've gone to this point where food is almost like a poison and I think food can be so wonderful it nourishes us and it Pleasures us and I think we can get back to that so I think there's reason to be hopeful and I think um I think we can get back together I love that where can people find you I'm on Twitter uh I'm on Instagram I'm not I'm not all that active on social media I think you know the reason I wrote books is because if you have an important you know message there's a lot to it a book is the best way to express it so I would encourage people to read the books and if they ever want to reach out to me on any social media platform they're welcome to [Music]