Nobody will disagree that Twinkies are just not good for you. Skittles are not good for you. No one's going to be like, I kind of think they're okay, right?
How can we start to make better choices around certain things is what I wanted to dig into and then go through like three categories of food and say like eat or pass. So like, should you eat this thing or should you pass? Like, what's the net benefit?
So pumpkin seeds, right? Seeds, nuts in general. We know that seeds and nuts, especially something like pumpkin seeds, are high in magnesium. We know they're good for you. But then you get into this scenario of, well, what happens if you eat roasted?
And I'm not talking about flavored and barbecue flavor. That's just like, yeah, don't eat that. But you get into roasted pumpkin seeds that are salted. And you look on the back, and it's like, hmm, roasted in a seed oil. Is it eat or pass?
Is it the net benefit of eating pumpkin seeds? higher or is it like, no, avoid them. They're in roasted in seed oil.
What's your hot take? Okay. Hot take is that we really rarely want to ever eat seed oils that have been cooked at high temperatures or really ever.
We know they have omega-6 fats. We know that high heat during roasting can actually make those fats more damaging, create more oxidative stress in the body. So as you said, raw, unroasted, always better. If you are...
on a road trip in an airport in a gas station and there are literally no options of what to eat and it's the option between like chips or cookies or roasted salted pumpkin seeds i'd say go for the pumpkin seeds you know you're gonna get more nutrients uh with um something like pumpkin seeds because you're gonna get the magnesium and all the other minerals that are in those those seeds um Whereas in the cookies or the chips, you're still going to get those refined seed oils that have been heated, but you're not going to get nearly as many nutrients. So it's probably a better option, but definitely unroasted is the way to go. And if you only like them roasted, something you can do at home is actually roast them at a much lower heat for a little bit of a longer time.
And so that's one option. Pass if you have the option of raw versus roasted in a seed oil. Eat if.
the alternative is grabbing a bag of chips. So salmon, next one, this idea of avoid farmed salmon at all costs. We know there are a ton of challenges with that, but I would assume, I would assume that if somebody is on a journey to health and wellness and they're introducing new types of foods into their diet. The alternative being a hungry man freezer dinner is not as good an option as farmed salmon. We know wild caught's better.
We know all these things. But what's the hot take on that as far as like how bad is farmed salmon when you start to talk about like optimal being wild caught, farmed being an option? Where does it lie? Like what's your hot take on that? I think if the decision is between eating an ultra processed.
like microwave meal, like, which is, I'm assuming what the hungry man type of meals are, you know, that's like, you know, refined grains, ultra processed, you know, oils and cheeses and meats and all of these things, then I think there's no question that farmed salmon is an upgrade from an ultra processed, you know, microwave type dinner meal. Again, it all comes back to nutrients. While it's not the best choice compared to wild salmon, there still are going to be useful nutrients in that food.
There's going to be vitamins and minerals. There's of course going to be omega-3 fatty acids. There's even been research showing that people can improve their omega-3 fatty acid levels by eating farmed salmon. It is not the optimal choice. If you can do it, I think the best possible option is...
If you are going to eat salmon, get a very small amount, a couple ounces of the highest quality salmon, and then fill the rest of your plate with whatever the cheapest organic vegetable you can find is. And, you know, so shift the quantities around a little bit. Organic beans are 99 cents a can.
So, you know, supplement where you are going to get some of that protein and from the salmon with... beans that are very inexpensive and try some beans, a very small amount of wild caught salmon, and then whatever the most on sale organic vegetable is. And so there are other ways to, I think, be economical about these things, you know, other than just going with the lower quality product.
So it's not a full pass. It's a... understand that there are some benefits to things like Pharm7, but there are also some challenges, things like higher omega-6, higher environmental toxins, all these things that could go into eating that.
And it's, again, how often are you eating it? And there are all these other factors. If you've heard me talk on other podcasts before, you know that I believe that tracking your glucose and optimizing your metabolic health is really the ultimate life hack. We know that cravings and mood instability and energy levels and weight are all tied to our blood sugar levels.
And of course, all the downstream chronic diseases that are related to blood sugar are things that we can really greatly improve our chances of avoiding if we keep our blood sugar in a healthy and stable level throughout our lifetime. So I've been using CGM now on and off for the past... four years since we started Levels and I have learned so much about my diet and my health. I've learned the simple swaps that keep my blood sugar stable, like flax crackers instead of wheat based crackers.
I've learned which fruits work best for my blood sugar. Like I do really well with pears and apples and oranges and berries, but grapes seem to spike my blood sugar off the chart. I'm also a notorious night owl and I've really learned with using Levels. how if I get to bed at a reasonable hour and get good quality sleep, my blood sugar levels are so much better. And that has been so motivating for me on my health journey.
It's also been helpful for me in terms of keeping my weight at a stable level, much more effortlessly than it has been in the past. So you can sign up for Levels at levels.link slash health, get access to a continuous glucose monitor and the Levels software that helps you really dial into a lot of these strategies for your life and your body. All right, so let's go into the last one. This gets thrown around and floated around very often, the dirty dozen versus the clean 15. And again, this is where information can be challenging to consume because if you're starting out and you're trying to learn, things get talked about in these absolutes. Avoid the dirty dozen at all costs.
Only eat the clean 15, right? But if you look and you start to break down certain things, well, kale and spinach are in the dirty dozen, right? But as far as like having a high glycemic index, they actually don't at all, right?
Like they're totally fine in that respect. And then you look at the clean 15 and you get something like corn. Well, sure, corn doesn't have as many pesticides and toxins in it.
The glucose response from corn, and we're benchmarking vegetable against vegetable. As opposed to saying something like pineapples in the clean 15. Well, that's also rocket fuel for your glucose levels. So what's the hot take on this dirty dozen versus clean 15 when you're thinking about things like kale, where people talk about, oh, it's got a high level of arsenic.
And then you talk about things like corn, where it's like, well, there aren't as many pesticides. What's your thought on those two things? So our ultimate goal.
is to get as many nutrients as we possibly can into the body to help with our cellular functioning and our optimal health while minimizing the toxic burden in the body. So that's table space. That's what we want to achieve.
And toxic burden can certainly come from pesticides. So that's why these lists are really helpful. To make things more complex, we also want to minimize the collateral damage of certain healthy foods.
Most unprocessed plant foods are healthy, but some carry with them some collateral, like a really high glucose spike, like with the example that you talked about with corn. So this creates some complexity, but that's just a framing for what we ultimately want to achieve. Most nutrients, least cattle damage, least environmental toxic burden. So with that, we can start to really go food by food in these lists. Spinach and kale are...
incredibly nutrient dense foods with almost no glucose spike. So it's like check, check, but they're on the dirty dozen. So they have a higher pesticide load.
Ultimately, we're trying to minimize our total, our body's total body burden to environmental chemicals that are problematic. So it's kind of about dose and like the dose makes the poison. If we could eat all organic all the time, that's great. But if you're eating non-organic every once in a while, you know, you're at a restaurant, it's not organic and you, you know, then I think eating the salad with a ton of spinach and a ton of kale, um, you know, that that's not gonna, uh, that's not going to cause permanent long-term damage. We have to think about things cumulatively, uh, over time.
If I had the choice personally between eating a huge salad of non-organic spinach and kale versus eating two cobs of corn, actually at this point in my life, I would eat the salad, the non-organic salad and get all those nutrients from spinach and kale, even though there may be some pesticide burden. And I do what I can to minimize that, like wash the food really well and make sure I'm getting as many other like antioxidants and healthful things on that salad. The best possible scenario, I think, for people is to figure out how to eat organically, essentially for the same price as conventional, which I think is totally possible if you're sort of smart and scrappy about it.
The way that I approach it is that when I go to the grocery store, I am looking for whatever organic foods are on sale. And often when they're on sale, they are the same or lower price than the conventional food. And so I'm looking for highly nutrient dense plant foods with low glycemic impact that are on sale. And what that does for you is that it ends up having you buy things that you might not normally buy, which actually is going to increase the diversity of the food that you're eating.
That's just one sort of like fun tip that I like to give. Another is looking for frozen organic food, which is often cheaper than the fresh version and has just as many nutrients. So you can buy a large bag of frozen organic. spinach, often for $2, $2.50 for like a pound of this.
And so that's another way to get those nutrients organically without such a high price tag of the fresh food. So it's definitely important to remember that frozen produce has just as much generally nutritional value as the fresh counterpoint. One other thing to realize on these lists is that There's some trends you'll see. The dirty dozen is all things without peels. It's things where the pesticides are going to be sprayed directly on the plant.
And many of the things on the Clean 15 have peels like melons or onions, papaya, pineapple, avocados, things where like the outer layer basically has to be taken off to eat it. So also use that as a general rule. Like lemon is not on the... clean 15, but I'm assuming given how big the rind is, you know, that's one where you might be able to do, um, non-organic and kind of get away with it. And I don't know that for sure, but that's kind of a gestalt that I use.
If it's, if there's an outer coating that I can take off, um, it's probably safer to eat from the, uh, non-organic perspective.