Mark Bell's Power Project - Beyond The Food: How Family Dinners Are Shaping The Future of Families - Shawn Stevenson || MBPP Ep. 995

Episode Date: October 11, 2023

In Episode 995, Shawn Stevenson, Mark Bell, Nsima Inyang, and Andrew Zaragoza talk about some alarming statistics regarding the health of Americans, how eating at the dinner table can help relieve some of those health issues, and how families can still do this while on a budget. Order Shawn's Book: https://eatsmartercookbook.com Follow Shawn on IG: https://www.instagram.com/shawnmodel/   Official Power Project Website: https://powerproject.live Join The Power Project Discord: https://discord.gg/yYzthQX5qN Subscribe to the Power Project Clips Channel: https://youtube.com/channel/UC5Df31rlDXm0EJAcKsq1SUw   Special perks for our listeners below! ➢ https://Peluva.com/PowerProject Code POWERPROJECT15 to save 15% off Peluva Shoes!   ➢https://drinkag1.com/powerproject Receive a year supply of Vitamin D3+K2 & 5 Travel Packs!   ➢ https://withinyoubrand.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save 15% off supplements!   ➢ https://markbellslingshot.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save 15% off all gear and apparel!   ➢ https://mindbullet.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save 15% off Mind Bullet!   ➢ https://goodlifeproteins.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save up to 25% off your Build a Box   ➢ https://hostagetape.com/powerproject to receive a year supply of Hostage Tape and Nose Strips for less than $1 a night!   ➢ https://thecoldplunge.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save $150!!   ➢ Enlarging Pumps (This really works): https://bit.ly/powerproject1 Pumps explained: https://youtu.be/qPG9JXjlhpM   ➢ https://www.vivobarefoot.com/us/powerproject to save 15% off Vivo Barefoot shoes!   ➢ https://vuori.com/powerproject to automatically save 20% off your first order at Vuori!   ➢ https://www.eightsleep.com/powerproject to automatically save $150 off the Pod Pro at 8 Sleep!   ➢ https://marekhealth.com/PowerProject to receive 10% off our Panel, Check Up Panel or any custom panel!   ➢ Piedmontese Beef: https://www.CPBeef.com/ Use Code POWER at checkout for 25% off your order plus FREE 2-Day Shipping on orders of $150   Follow Mark Bell's Power Project Podcast ➢ https://www.PowerProject.live ➢ https://lnk.to/PowerProjectPodcast ➢ Insta: https://www.instagram.com/markbellspowerproject ➢ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/markbellspowerproject   FOLLOW Mark Bell ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marksmellybell ➢https://www.tiktok.com/@marksmellybell ➢ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkBellSuperTraining ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/marksmellybell   Follow Nsima Inyang ➢ https://www.breakthebar.com/learn-more ➢YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/NsimaInyang ➢Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nsimainyang/?hl=en ➢TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@nsimayinyang?lang=en   Follow Andrew Zaragoza on all platforms ➢ https://direct.me/iamandrewz   #PowerProject #Podcast #MarkBell #FitnessPodcast #markbellspowerproject

We have the most chronically diseased culture in the history of humanity, in the documented history of humanity. Six out of ten Americans have at least one chronic disease, so 60% of Americans have at least one chronic disease now. We have higher rates of heart disease, diabetes, cancer, obesity, every manner of mental health condition, the list goes on and on. So if you're healthy in this culture, you're not normal. That's the thing. You're not normal. The norm is to be unwell. We are tribal creatures. This is how we survived. And the process of eating together with your tribe has happened forever. Americans created, we invented TV dinners. Okay. And then we start to have the ads where, okay, we don't sit down and eat together. We eat in front of the TV,

but are we missing something protective for our family and our children by not eating together on a regular basis without that stuff being integrated? And so here's what I found. Sean Stevenson, what's going on, man? Oh, man, just happy to be here. Yeah, glad to have you here today. Every time I come here, I learn something immediately. Yeah. You know, you guys got all the funnest, newest toys. We're always doing something different.

We like to move around a lot. Yeah, that part, that part. If anybody, if they've never been here, truly, like you guys are really about that life. You're always doing something creative, always experimenting, and everybody here has right there's no fake there's no calf implants over here they're all real yeah you never know true we were just talking about that yeah uh what's uh what's kind of new well you know you're deep into uh nutrition you have like the number one show not like the number one show you have the number one show on nutrition. What's new in nutrition and health? Is there anything new out there? Any new under the sun? Well, here's the thing, you know, there's always going to be new

conversations, but you know, when it really, what it really boils down to is for me, I'm always asking what have humans been doing the longest? Like what really helped us to develop this incredible brain that we have and this really remarkable prefrontal cortex. I'm thinking alcohol. People have been drinking alcohol for a really long time. Listen, we... Helped us survive, right? Here's the thing. So we developed the capacity to utilize... So when I was in college, I was taught that we had three macronutrients, right? Fats, carbohydrates, and proteins. But alcohol is also a macronutrient. It can beats, carbohydrates, and proteins. But alcohol is also a macronutrient.

It can be used by the body as fuel. But what's different about it is that alcohol can't be stored like the other macronutrients. So your body has to use it immediately. So you need it all the time. You got to re-up it. When you bring it into your body, your body shuts off basically other forms of energy because it can't store this alcohol and something called fat sparing. It's a phenomenon called fat sparing happens where you might be utilizing fat for fuel. And as soon as alcohol comes in, you, it shuts down that process because your body has to use it. Now we developed the capacity to utilize alcohol and some of the best kind of

looking at evolutionary biology was, you know, fruit would fall off the trees and would start to degrade after a point, but still wanting to stock up on energy, our ancestors being able to eat those fruits that are then fermented, creating ethanol, basically. And we developed the kind of bacterial integration, our cells, our mitochondria to be able to use that as fuel. integration, our cells, our mitochondria to be able to use that as fuel. Now cut to, you know, thousands upon thousands of years later, humans were like, well, ethanol is not enough. And so we invented distillation. Right. And so it's just like, we can use it as fuel, but it is a very highly combustible, like potentially dangerous fuel. It's poisonous to the body. Yeah, essentially. But we did use it like there was in small percentages of our water, right?

Like a 1% alcohol or something like that to help with how shitty our water was, I guess, millions or thousands of years ago. Yeah, absolutely. It was a form of cleaning, basically, you know, antibacterial. It's a very strong antibacterial, which is the point of what is it doing to your microbiome? And some of the latest research is indicating that it's one of the primary place of disruption is consuming alcohol. And, you know, even small amounts for some people can really create dysbiosis. And that can lead to upstream problems as well, you know, and start to kind of break down that barrier. And now there's this new phenomenon being talked about called leaky brain, right? So not just leaky gut, but leaky brain, things being

able to basically infiltrate the brain and get into the brain that shouldn't be there. And also an inability for the brain to really clean itself properly, right? This autophagy process, we have these, they're called glial cells in the brain, and they're 10 times more active when you're sleeping, right? And so that's when a lot of the housekeeping happens for your brain to clean out a lot of metabolic waste. What does alcohol do? One of the primary things it does is it disrupts your sleep quality. And so this is where the phenomenon of a hangover really happens, is the body's inability to really process all of this kind of metabolic buildup, this metabolic waste.

And there's also another phenomenon that takes place when we drink alcohol close to bedtime. It's called a REM rebound effect. And so I don't, this probably never happened to anybody here, anybody listening, but somebody could drink so much they don't really remember what happened the night before.

And well, what happens is one of the primary things that takes place during sleep is something called memory processing so this is where our experiences right now get converted to our short-term memory and so that primarily is happening during REM sleep rapid eye movement sleep and this is something cool getting into like the topic of dreaming and like how we're processing things. We're just now starting to understand a little bit about dreams, but that's all taking place where we're processing events and memories and problem solving basically while we're unconscious. And so when your REM sleep is disrupted, basically what happens, you can pass out, you can be unconscious, you know, drinking alcohol, but you're not going

through your REM sleep cycle. It's delayed. And so a lot of stuff that happened with recency, recently before you went to sleep, you have the potential to not remember. All right. So that's kind of, and also the hangover effect happens there as well because you're not getting that kind of rejuvenative sleep being disrupted. And I don't know how we got onto this track. The latest nutrition. uh, being disrupted. And I don't know how we got onto this track. What got you excited? Um, what got you excited to kind of dive into this topic of, you know, the way that things used to be? Yeah. You know, just looking at the environment around

us right now, man, you know, um, the CDC's latest report, uh, last year was just shocking. I just, I just sat there and just looked at it for a while. They put it on this little cute little infographic to like soften the blow. It's so inappropriate. But basically their latest numbers indicate that six out of 10 Americans have at least one chronic disease. So 60% of Americans have at least one chronic disease now. It's including children. No, no. American adults. We'll get to children because this is really the catalyst for me doing this work that I'm doing right now. And 40% of American adults have two or more chronic diseases. That's the current state according to the CDC. Now, obviously, again, a lot of things have been pointed back to the CDC the last couple of years.

But, like, I'm one of the few people that actually go and analyze their data. And, you know, so for them to put something, we probably need them in some sense, right? Yeah. Yeah. Like, do you think it's a good thing to have, right? It's a good thing to have somebody giving us this information, right? Absolutely. You know, we've got different organizations that are partially dedicated to that, but unfortunately it's the narrative around those things that can be inappropriate, right? So instead of them addressing, like we have this epidemic of chronic diseases, we need access to more healthcare, right?

And then understanding we have a $4.2 trillion healthcare industry that's just getting, it's just sucking money out of everybody, out of every orifice of every person in the United States. And it's so lucrative, but yet we're getting sicker and sicker and sicker and sicker. So the solution here is not access to more healthcare. The solution here is something totally different. And that's what we're going to talk about. And so that was

one of the kind of inspiring moments, but to point it back to what really did this and why I'm focused so much on this right now, which is family wellness and culture change is the impact that's happening on American children. And so a lot of people have been hearing about this study recently. So this was published in the BMJ, British Medical Journal, one of the top medical journals in the world by far for a long time. And they recently published a study reporting that almost 60% of the average American adult's diet is made of ultra processed food now. Okay. So ultra processed food. 60%? Yeah. Wow. Okay. So now this is not far-fetched because I'll share a little bit about what I was eating. My son is over here. He knows, you know, I ate fast food every day, right? Every day. When we were living in Ferguson, Missouri, every day, unless I didn't

have $2, you know, then I'd eat like a box of Velveeta shells and cheese, right? Like that's really the way that I grew up is just like kind of inundated with ultra processed foods. And so, by the way, just to clarify what is ultra processed food versus what have humans been doing the longest humans have been processing foods forever. All right. Finding creative ways to extract nutrients and also to make things palatable. We have certain flavors, sensations or flavor drivers to make us eat certain things because they taste good. And we also have this new class just in the last couple of decades of like,

you know, eat to live, don't live to eat, you know, and kind of ignoring the fact that humans have always craved tasty things, but we've created ways of processing things. Like for example, the cooking of certain foods, right? Cooking a sweet potato or cooking a piece of meat to be able to, that increases the

caloric density that you can extract from the food by cooking it, makes more calories available, and also starts to unlock some things that, again, there's a lot of great scientific evidence pointing to this is part of the way that we were able to develop this really sophisticated brain was the advent of cooking now with that being said taking something like olives olives right and making olive oil right humans have been doing that for a long time thousands of years and when you take an olive which has all of these remarkable compounds and you press the oil out, extra virgin olive oil, it's a cold press process. You just take the olive oil and you take the olives and you press the oil out.

That's it. That's it. Stone press usually. And it's bottled in dark glass. So that's processing. But now we have something that is very health affirmative. And I'm just going to throw this study out here. Now we have something that is very health affirmative.

And I'm just going to throw this study out here. So researchers at Auburn University found that oleocanthal rich extra virgin olive oil is one of the primary antioxidants. It's one of the few things ever discovered that can help to repair potentially the blood brain barrier. Like I talked about leaky brain phenomenon earlier and also being able to reduce inflammation in the brain, which we can circle back and talk about what an epidemic that is as well. So it has this really great affinity towards cognitive function and brain protection. And certain researchers have been talking about this for a long time. But that's processing. Now, when we take corn, you know, all of these, you know, fields and fields of corn, and somehow or another, through different things corn this corn eventually becomes

a bowl of fucking lucky charms like how did that happen that's ultra processing so now we take this substrate and now we have all of these different methods of processing high heat temperature adding all these different solvents and food dyes and sweeteners and additives and preservatives and now you have something that doesn't remotely resemble where it came from. That's ultra processed. And so again, when we say that 60% of the average American diet is made of that food now, I'm telling you, mine was more than 60%. Mine was closer to 80 to 90%. And that is no joke, but that's also why I experienced a disease state and advanced arthritic condition of my spine and my bones when I was just a kid.

I was 20 years old. I got the diagnosis. But that was years in the making, right? Track practice, 15 years old. I broke my hip running a 200-meter sprint. And I was fast. Like I had so much going for me, you know, and just like because I was made out of those compounds. And so now here's my point.

And just like, because I was made out of those compounds. And so now here's my point. My new book is the first published book that has this new study in it. And this was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, JAMA. And they analyzed the ultra processed food consumption of American children, age two to 19, from 1999 to 2018. In 1999, the average American child was eating 61% ultra processed foods already. By 2018, it's almost 70% of the average American child

is eating ultra processed food is making up their diet. All right. Now this should not again, be far fetched. I was just at my son, my youngest son, his AAU basketball tournament. And over at the place where they can get their food on breaks, it's everything, everything was ultra processed food. There's Pop-Tarts, there's chips, there's cookies, there's Gatorade. That's all that they have. And there's so much of it.

There's so much seeming variety, but it's all made of the same shit. It's all made of corn. It's all made of wheat. It's all made of sugar. That's it. And different food colors. It's food like how much energy do we need man and what does this get excited they want to show that they care and that they love their kids so they bring a giant tray of muffins of course but then they're all eating it when the kids are playing that too that part

that part and uh but you see the long tail effect of that. You see the parents outcomes a lot of times, again, that are at these tournaments and where this is going to lead them, you know? And this is another important point is that we share our love through food. The reason I was eating so much ultra processed food is I was introduced to it by people who loved me and they were showing their love through that. The first time I had, and I'll never forget this moment, F pebbles all right i was a cereal guy all right shout out to the cereal guys out there i see you andrew yeah no i see you shaking your head the fruity pebbles and cocoa pebbles because they had more surface area so you had more flavor in each bite come on and that's i know my cereal dude astrophysics

but it was my great grandmothergrandmother my great-grandmother who I got to spend some time with I was like maybe four years old and I got to ride the senior there's like a senior citizen bus that would take her like from the home to like the grocery store and we went to the grocery store we came back and she poured me this bowl of this cereal I'd never seen before and again four years old I still have that memory I know what it tastes like in that moment. You're starting to worry him. I can feel it because he's like,

oh, if anyone introduces my son, right? Oh, yeah, yeah. No, I'll be, mm-mm. It's a bad day for them. And so, you know, having that experience is such a, it's a joyful memory, right? And it was also setting the stage for dysfunction because it wasn't real food and it wasn't her intention to hurt me. It was her intention to show her love

for me. And so this is why we can't get into this blaming game with, even with society at large, but especially with our family members for our state of health that we're in. It's like, what are we going to do now? You know, a lot of times our parents are doing the best they can with what they know. And, um, and so I even tied that in together in the Eat Smarter Family Cookbook, how it's basically, you know, people know about the love languages, the five love languages and how, you know, it could be words of affirmation. It could be acts of service. It could be physical touch. All of those things relate deeply to food and our relationship with food. You know, my mother-in-law is a phenomenal cook.

And part of how she shows her love is cooking for other people. And you extending those words of affirmation to her, she lives for that. Right? She lives for it. And even with physical touch, nothing touches us closer than food. Like we're taking something from the outside world and making it a part of our body. Like that's crazy, crazy powerful. And so just seeing this data and looking at what's happening with us kids. And last part I'll share, share here is we've got epidemics of diabetes happening in children. We've got just within the last couple of years, there was a report done by the CDC, coincidentally, and they were looking at about a year time span when everything shut down with childhood obesity, which was already skyrocketing.

And they found that over the course of that year study approximate, children who are moderately obese, their annual rate of weight gain doubled in that time span for children who are a healthy weight their annual rate of weight gain went up by about three pounds and so kids were gaining weight faster during that time period what happened we were indoors eating more processed food we were moving less all the things you might be well that's a spot instance that's okay we fixed it later no no that's not how it works. And you know, this intimately as well. Like when we struggle with our weight as a, as a child, it is so much harder to deal with that when we get older. And it's something it's called recidivism, right? So when, when it's basically set in a thermostat internally and you battle with that, and we know that also, as we get to be an adult, like it's not as easy to maintain

whatever level of health for most people, but also most people are doing what most people are doing in our culture, which is eating ultra processed foods and living a largely sedentary lifestyle. And so this mission right now is to change this because we can, we have to right now because our children are really suffering the most.

You know, it's not just the obesity. It's not just the diabetes. It's the mental health epidemics in our children. It's the epidemics of disordered eating. And we have solutions. We have solutions based on science and they're really, really simple. Pat Project family, we love beef on this podcast.

We talk about it a lot. All right, we love our meat, but sometimes eating the same meat all the time can get a little bit boring. That's why we partner with Good Life Proteins, which also has certified Piedmontese on their website. But sometimes you might just want to eat some chicken or fish or duck. Duck. Who eats duck? But you can eat duck. That's why if you go to goodlifeproteins.com, you can select their build-a-box options and input all the proteins you want. Then you'll select subscribe and save to save money on all of your meat. If you enter code POWERPROJECT at checkout, you can save up to 25% on your subscription. That means you're going to be saving 25% on all of that different meat

that's going to be heading to your door. Once again, head to goodlifeproteins.com. You can enter code POWERPROJECT and save up to 25%. Links are in the description box below as well as the podcast show notes. Let me ask you this, because like in your book, actually, I saw that there was a good segment on having, like making sure that if you economically can't buy

a lot of certain types of foods, you think they're too expensive. There are ways that you can save on that. Because I feel like there's one of the reasons, and it's an excuse that many people have, is they think that eating healthy is an expensive process. It's like going to Sprouts or Whole Foods. But how about for people who necessarily they have multiple kids and it's hard for them? So they go for the processed food that can help feed all their kids. So they go for the processed food that can help feed all their kids. How can they navigate that so that everyone in the household can be healthy and move in the right direction?

You know, I'm so grateful to be able to answer this question. I would not want to go back. But I'm somebody who actually knows what it's like. I grew up in poverty. In the United States, though, poverty is different. Most of the world is living on like a couple dollars a day. Poverty in the United States is like you've still probably got a TV. I got a video game system maybe a year later, but I got I got the PS2. You know, I go to my friend's house. He play it for a year. Then we get it. We had a you know, we would have cars. My mom literally bought her cars from this car lot. It was called OK Junk Cars. I'm not lying. I should get a Ford escort and we ride, you know. So that's poverty in the United States. You probably have these assets still. And, you know, getting certain things like, you know, food stamps. And we were getting food from charities. All right. So like there's a place called the Hosea House. They would provide us

with food, even Christmas gifts like we were that poor. And so when I was able to make this change with my health, I was again, living in Ferguson, Missouri. I'm surrounded, I'm inundated, completely saturated by fast food restaurants. There's, there should be zoning laws against this, but because of the nature of where it is and the exploitation of the environment that is low income, that is uneducated about food and nutrition. This is just what we ate. And you can name a fast food place, and it was within two miles of my house, all of it.

As soon as I go out in my apartment complex, there's a liquor store right there. As soon as I go out, check cash in places, the list goes on and on. And so I was struggling, man. I'm also trying to do something that never been done by anybody that I knew. And especially in my family, I was in college at the university that was just outside of Ferguson. It was 15 minutes away from my

apartment complex, but it was a completely different reality walking on that campus. Right. And it's like that for a lot of hoods around the country, like just blocks away, it could be, you know, a completely different environment. And so one of the things that I had access to at the university was university gym. Right. So even though I neglected that when I was diagnosed with that so-called incurable spinal condition, degenerative bone disease, degenerative disc disease, and I had two herniated discs, I grew up as an athlete and that was my like low hanging fruit was training. And now, but now I can't train. So supposedly, because that's what they told me,

I can't do anything. But what I was missing was what am I making my tissues out of? Right. And that's the, that's probably the biggest missing piece in medicine today is the unfortunate unawareness, unfortunately, again, by our well-meaning physicians, not realizing that if they're a cardiologist, for example, and they're analyzing the data on their patient's heart function and what's happening in their blood and the health of their blood vessels

and capillaries and arteries, all of those things they're looking at in their patient is made from the food that their patient ate. All right. They're looking at food. All right. And if you don't understand that, we're literally just missing, we're missing the foundational part of all this.

And so it's not just the tissues themselves, but the energy used to make all those things for the cells to communicate. It's all based on food. used to make all those things for the cells to communicate. It's all based on food. And so when I had that revelation, because of exposure, this is the key, because being in poverty, because I'm literally, I'm in a situation where I find out, oh, like I get to make my tissues out of better things because I came across them. Being in college, I had a proclivity towards research. And initially when I went to school, I was like, you know, because of TV, I was like, I should be a doctor and get into a pre-med program. But I hated science, ironically. Like, I have a problem today. Like, my wife even said, she did a post for my birthday last week. And she said, you know, this guy in his free time, he's researching and studying science. And so it's a deep love affair, but it came in a different way than I thought. And, you know, so fate kind of had other plans for me

to fall in love with it later. And I had a friend who I was kicking it with for a couple of years, and she was in chiropractic school. And I just, I really thought she was super weird. Like, I didn't want to hear any about what you're doing with your whatever, these, your friends with the, you know, with the adjustments. Like, one time she invited me to a get-together.

They're all like, I walk in, there's people adjusting each other. Kind of like here, by the way. Kind of like here. And, you know, but she had taken me to, and I had known her for, again, a couple of years. And she, one day we were hanging out. After I made this decision to get well, which this, even if we're talking about what if we say we can't, you got to switch that shit over first and foremost. Like, I can. I can do something.

And so that decision part is like, that's really the launching pad for everything else. So regardless of what I went through, regardless of the pain I was in, I was like, I can do something to feel better. And just by starting to see the world through a different lens, really, there was stuff that was there. I drove past this place hundreds of times, and it was a Wild Oats. I don't know if you guys— Never heard of Wild Oats. So it was kind of—Whole Foods bought them up a couple years ago. Oh, okay.

So they were kind of like more of a mom-and-pop type of health food store. There was one in St. Louis, one Whole Foods in them up a couple years ago. Okay. So they're like more like, they were kind of like more of like a mom and pop type of health food store. There was one in St. Louis, one Whole Foods in St. Louis. And St. Louis is a big city. Yeah. And when I say it's a big city, even this year, murder capital, all right, of the United States. You know, people might think it's here or there.

St. Louis, yeah. So it's a big city. A lot of stuff going on. That's not our claim to fame, by the way. You know, we got an arch, it's baseball heaven all the days. But it's a big city. Yeah lot of stuff going on. That's not our claim to fame, by the way. We got an arch, it's baseball heaven, all the things. But it's a big city. Why we have one Whole Foods? One.

When I moved three-ish years ago, there were three Whole Foods. And so she took me to Wild Oats, and I'm just like, again, what is she on? This is so weird. There's grass inside the place. There was wheatgrass. And I'm just like, this is so weird. There's like grass inside the place. There was wheatgrass. And I'm just like, this is so weird. And then I saw there was a nutrition prescription. It's like a reference book in the supplement section. And I went over and I started, I looked for my condition,

right? Degenerative disc disease. And it had a couple of studies. And I went to the references and I looked at what the studies had to say. And it was just like, if you're deficient in, you know, omega-3s, calcium, yada, yada, your body's going to leach in particular for calcium was found to get leached from your hips and your spine first in order to clot your blood. Right. And I'm just like, I broke my hip and my spine. How do they know this? I'm like, I'm drinking milk all the time. What's the problem? But there was other, you know, like a dozen of other key nutrients that aid in assimilation. And also another fallacy I was taught in school in my nutritional science class was you need to tell your patients or tell your clients they need to get like a multivitamin, get all your, you know, your essential vitamins and minerals. But there's so many different forms of these things. There's multiple forms of vitamin C.

There's multiple forms of calcium. There's multiple forms of B12. The list goes on and on. Which version am I getting in this synthetic one trick pony supplement, right? And so anyways, I find this out. I start flooding my tissues with all this really high quality food, but I did it. Let me not jump that far. I did supplements first. So it was natural pill popping and that was hella expensive. And eventually within, honestly, within a couple of weeks time span, not only did that cost expenditure being somebody who didn't have money, like I'm now I'm like paid a light bill by the supplement, like that kind of decision. And I realized like, okay, I can get all this stuff in food some other

resources that come along and so now i'm making calculated decisions to just add in a couple of new things right when i could and from there what really changed the game for me and this is what i want to get to for everybody who's in that position of being in a in a state where the expense of health seems to be so large. What I did was, number one, if I went to a Whole Foods, for example, I would just get what was on sale. If there's a sale, that's what I'm going to be eating this week. And I would stock up on it, right? So I make like a calculated decision to buy, like, if it was grass-fed ground beef,

if it was grapes, if it was, you was grapes if it was you know whatever it is i would like this is what i'm going to eat based on sales so i was coming in looking for sales and also funny enough ferguson has a farmer's market it'd been going on forever and i didn't know it this was like five minutes from my house in the quote good part of ferguson right but it was right there and that became a big part of our family outings. Eventually, like we would go there on Saturdays to the farmer's market. My kids would get some treats and stuff like that. I talked to the farmers. A lot of stuff was sometimes half the price that I was paying at Whole Foods. Right. And so, and I got closer to my food and building these relationships. CSAs as well. You know,

there's like food delivery. There's so many options today. It's like, there's so many. But you can invest in CSAs where they're going to send you, you're not going to get to necessarily pick what kind of fruits and vegetables they send you, but you're going to save money. You know, maybe again, upwards of 50% or more

than what you would pay at the grocery store. But you got to have some creativity as well to be able to use, like maybe they might give you some radishes or some, you know, um, some beets and some, you know, mulberries, like you just got to find out creative ways to use them. And so those are just a couple of things that because I was seeing things differently, I found ways to save money. Now here's the most important part By me investing in myself and me feeling better, I didn't know that my mind would start working differently. I didn't know that I would become more creative and have more energy and a better ability to problem solve. I didn't know that was

going to happen. And so once I started feeling better, I started to make more income. Number one. Number two, and this is a true story. You know this too. You guys know this. Some of the things I was investing in, right, to maybe buy, this is literally like 20 years ago when I found out about goji berries, for example. Yeah. Which are hot on the streets now. At the time, I had to go to this like, just this like acupuncturist on University City

or I'm like buying from the Tibetan School of Medicine. It wasn't like out here like that. I'm making this calculated risk because I found about this thing and I'm like, wow, it has this and this. And, but eventually within about, maybe two year time span, I was getting goji berries sent to me for free

because of the relationships that I had built and the education that I was getting goji berries sent to me for free because of the relationships that I built and the education that I was sharing. And so, so much of my food today, I don't pay for. That's crazy. That's crazy. You guys know this. It's amazing. It's such a blessing. Absolutely. But it's just a story that we tell ourselves that we can't. And the big problem with that is that we tend to have this tunnel vision, right? And there's this really cool thing, and this is something that all of us, especially under the spirit of fitness, Stanford University researchers found that just simply going for a walk, 10, 15-minute walk, it increases something called divergent thinking by upwards of 60% in problem solving. So we tend to hammer away like trying to solve a problem and we have this one track mind.

And I'm gonna mess this up, but Einstein had said something along the lines of, you cannot solve a problem from the same level of thinking that created a problem. And that's why we spend so much time trying to hammer away at an issue. But there's usually 10 other ways to fix this thing or solve this problem, sometimes more, 100.

And so my mantra recently has been where there's a will, there's 10,000 ways, right? But we can't see that if we're not making that investment in ourselves. And the last part is truly, and you guys know this, everybody listening, when we don't feel well, we can absolutely accomplish great things. We can be compassionate. We can be great things we can be compassionate we can be creative we can be helpful yes but it's harder and it's harder to sustain it when you when you feel good suddenly those higher order character traits become easier to access and more consistent because all that stuff takes energy people have heard this before if you don't feel well you don't do well traits become easier to access and more consistent because all that stuff takes energy.

People have heard this before. If you don't feel well, you don't do well. People don't feel well because they don't do well. Truly. This is a state of affairs that we have today where we become in this essentially just kind of outsourcing our potential to other people. And that's what I had done at the time. I outsourced my potential to my well-meaning physician who told me that I can't get better. He told me there's nothing you could do about this. This is incurable. I don't have that condition. And I've accomplished so much since then. And not just that being able to help so many other people. And so, you know, that's, you know, regardless of the circumstances we're in, there is a way. Yeah. It's kind of expensive to, to like eat out. I mean, I guess if you're like rolling through fast food all the time, maybe there's some, you can buy a 70 cent taco or something from Taco Bell or something like that. But, um, even just thinking of like going to Chipotle or something and trying to get like a burrito, I mean, it's way cheaper to actually start to cook for yourself. Um, and even if it's not necessarily cheaper, even if it's the same or if it's slightly a little bit more expensive, it's just a better move in general.

And then once you start to eat a certain way, then other family members start to get into it. Friends get into it. Not that I know of. maybe I have done this before, but I don't remember like forcing my children to eat a particular way. I never forced them into fitness. I showed them stuff. I said, this is what I know how to do. I'm not a mechanic. I know how to lift weights. So I'm going to show you this. And if you ever want to do it, this is how you do it. And then same thing with the eating habits and stuff. My wife and I have good eating habits, and the kids are like, what are we having for dinner? They're not asking.

Every once in a while they want pizza and stuff like that, but they're usually like, where's our protein? Where's our source of protein? What you're talking about, that's culture. It's a culture. What you're talking about, that's culture, right? It's a culture. And this is really addressing root issues because all of us have tried to help people by advising them to make certain behavior changes. But if they're making that behavior change within a culture that is very contrary to

that behavior change, it's going to be very, very difficult to make that behavior change. And oftentimes it takes superhuman will to be able to do that. If the, if the culture you're surrounded by is pushing you towards something else. And so what I really, at this point in my career, I've been in this field for 20 years. And so I'm so grateful for this, but I finally pinned down what is the place we need? What is the highest leverage place, the button for us to push to get the greatest results? And it's addressing culture. And so what is culture? Let's talk about what culture is. Culture is defined as the shared values, beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors of a group that is then passed on to future generations. All right. Values, attitudes, beliefs, behaviors,

then passed on to future generations. Your kids have no choice but to be affected by the culture that they grew up in. Right. My son is sitting over here. You see those shoulders? He can't help it. He can't help it. He's in it. All right. Now, of course, now, with that being said, what really matters here is, number one, and this is very important, the American culture, which is now, of course, this isn't just an American issue. This is a worldwide issue growing. But in the United States, we're the best at it. We have the most chronically diseased culture in the history of humanity, in the documented history of humanity. We have higher rates of heart disease, diabetes, cancer, obesity, every manner of mental health condition. The list goes on and on. Alzheimer's disease is

skyrocketing. I could talk about these issues all day. There's a report published in the New England Journal of Medicine not too long ago, and it effectually was titled 200 Years of Diabetes. And essentially diabetes was pretty stagnant, pretty much at the same place until about 40 years ago. Then it exploded, it quadrupled in the span of about 40 to 50 years, quadrupled. Something happened, right? And so this is the culture that we're existing in. And so if you're healthy in this culture, you're not normal. That's the thing.

You're not normal. The norm is to be unwell. There's a great quote from Krishnamurti that says, it is no manner of health to be well adjusted to a severely sick society. All right. We're trying, we want to fit in. We can't help it because like other creatures, humans are products of our environment. But what makes us different is that we're conscious creators of our environment too. If we become aware of our ability to do it. And so with that being said, I spent a lot of years trying to address the

macroculture, right? Trying to get people to not be at the drive-thru. And I might've saved a couple of people, all right? But my work really changed and my effectiveness changed when I started teaching people how to create a microculture in their own household, right? A place that makes health easy to access. Right now, disease and dysfunction is easy to access. We're surrounded by it. And so in Ferguson, Missouri, in my little apartment where I had my mattress on the floor, this shitty little love seat, which the other day, my wife was talking to Bedros and um she was like when she first came over to my house uh to my apartment and i was like you know i'll cook you something you know whatever and so um but she came over and she saw my little love seat which was made of i'm not

bullshitting this carpet here that's what the that's what it was made of and because i was overweight prior to her meeting me, and she met me when I was a trainer, strength and conditioning coach, finishing up my degree. But one half of the love seat was cool. Like the cushion was there. The other half was caved in. And there was pillows underneath the cushion to hold it up.

And she saw this and she's just like, how does he get girls over here? Then she realized she was over there. Right? I never heard that story before. She just said it like a couple weeks ago. I'm like, damn. Yeah, gotcha. But anyways, man, again, being in those conditions,

I created a microculture in my household that started to infect essentially my children, right? My son, because now he's, he has no choice. You're eating what I can afford to make now. And this is going to be high quality food and food. Isn't just food is information. And so it's changing the way that his cells are being in school. We're taught DNA to RNA to protein, right? DNA to RNA to protein. So we've got this blueprint on how to make you, but it's going to be, it's going to be influenced or controlled by what ingredients you're giving for the process, right? So this is nutrigenomics, nutrigenetics, huge fields, again, of science, looking at how our food impacts our genetic expression. But what kind of proteins

are you going to be making? What are the fuels you're giving your body to do the process? Because when you look in the mirror and you see yourself, you're seeing the proteins that you've eaten and minerals as well. That's largely what you're seeing. And so there's a blueprint to make you, but there's blueprints to also essentially create what we would call disease symptoms. But we label it as such,

but a lot of times our chronic conditions, which according to JAMA, published in 2018, the number one cause of our epidemics of chronic disease is poor diet. And we know this. But with that understanding, when we take back control of what we're actually making our tissues out of, what's the program?

Because we have this blueprint and something that would be manifested as a disease is really your body trying to make an adaptation. It's an adaptation to function under unideal circumstances. All right. And a lot of those adaptations can be changed. Right. But unfortunately, that's not what we're taught. You have that adaptation take place and then you're prescribed a drug

to try to mute the symptom. And that's not, again, addressing the root cause. And so last point here with this is that, you know, creating that microculture started with me. So the culture starts from you. You create a culture within yourself, right? So I'm starting to make these certain decisions and then create an environment to where now my son over there, you know, as soon as he was old enough to get into the Gold's Gym in Ferguson, Florissant, they had just built a new. I brought him. Yeah. So now he's getting he's getting acclimated to the iron and he's just a kid. It's in his blood. It's in his DNA. made it to the iron and he's just a kid is he it's in it's in his blood it's in his dna and he fell in love with it and just giving him these exposures and we all always had like little pieces of equipment at the house and things like that and we do fitness type of things together as a culture

so saturdays we go to the track at the local high school and we train together we do sprints together right and my youngest son has been doing that since he could barely even walk all right and um so that's the thing is like proactively, and that's what I'm teaching people in this new project. How do we create a microculture of wellness within your household? And here's the last part, truly last part. What I just found out, my son and I and my wife and my youngest son, we just went on a trip and went to Hawaii for the first time.

And I'm sitting there and I'm looking at the cultural norms. And I'm also, I'm very inquisitive, very curious. So I'm asking questions of people like who born and raised there truly, like it's in lineage. Yeah. And I'm asking what they think about certain things, what they eat, what their grandmother ate, that kind of thing. And I see this culture that has so much robust health when they're abiding by that culture. But when they start to abide by the new culture of disease and dysfunction, they have those outcomes as well. But what I realized was, even though I'm now implanted

into their culture temporarily, we brought our culture with us wherever you go you take your culture with you and so and my son knows this as well people were coming up to us asking us questions you know just like interacting with us that just it would not be normal for other families you know asking like what do you guys do like you guys even when we're on the plane like somebody walked by us you remember and she was like your family is so beautiful. Right. And I'm just like, you know, thank you. And I'm not, I'm not thinking about this, but our culture is with us and it's infectious. And so that's another way that we can really make change rather than trying to beat people over the head, trying to get them to change, be the example. And it seems logical. We talk about this, but real talk, be the model. Be the example. And do that with your family. Create a microculture to where your family becomes an example. And that is so infectious. That starts to bleed its way out to your neighborhood, to your community. And that's how we really make change is addressing the culture to make health more accessible.

I hate to sound like a broken record, but your sleep quality most likely sucks. It's one of the biggest things that we talk about on the podcast. So many guests have come on and talked about how sleep can help you stick to your diet, stick to your workout plan, lose body fat, gain muscle, all the good things that you're trying to do. But it's hard to do because you might be snoring. And if you're snoring, that's why we've partnered with hostage tape, which is mouth tape that you can put over your nose, mouth, when you're asleep to help you stop snoring and breathe through your nose. But if you haven't been breathing through your nose this whole time while you've been sleeping, it's going to be a little bit difficult to get air through there. That's also why Hostage Tape has nose strips to help open up your nasal airways and make it easier to breathe through your nose when you're asleep. Now your partner

won't be having a f*** with you when you're asleep because you'll be actually breathing through your nose andrew how can they get it yes that's over at hostage tape.com slash power project where you guys will receive an entire year supply of nasal strips and mouth tape all for less than a dollar a night again that's at hostage tape.com slash power project links in the description as well as the podcast show notes what you got going on over there andrew so much um so much but i didn't want to back to the cereal yes literally not um actually well because you had said like you know once you start cleaning up your diet and you start thinking a little bit better um can you point to certain foods that are going to cloud someone's thought process versus other foods that are going to help you actually start to have a clear mind

and that sort of thing? Absolutely. So in the book, in the eSmarter Family Cookbook, I talk about the three cultural contagions, right? So these are parts of our culture, dietarily speaking, that have created, and this is the thing about this project. There's over 250 scientific references, right? So I'm not just saying shit. Like this is the most about this project. There's over 250 scientific references.

So I'm not just saying shit. This is the most valid science that we have. But it's also very simple. And so one of the damaging things potentially, and I mentioned olive oil earlier. So there's something about these oils being able to impact the human brain. What about shitty oils? I wonder what's going to happen. How would you define shitty oils, by the way?

Because some people listen to like, there's nothing wrong with canola oil. Well, olive oil sometimes too is also a little bit of a rabbit hole, isn't it? Like at restaurants, I believe they use like 50% olive oil, 50% some other shit.

And then from what I hear, I don't really know if I have good sources, but I've heard that a lot of olive oil is rancid. So there's. All right. So just to unpack that super quick, if it's low temperature processed, quote, extra virgin, they're supposed to abide by that. And they're storing it in dark glass. This has been done for centuries because our ancestors, before all of this modern technology, knew that this was going to oxidize and the oils would be damaged. They're even sensitive to light.

All right. So but again, I can go study after study after study on benefits of olive oil. A lot of the potential downsides, it's not proven, unfortunately. It's a lot of hearsay. However, we do know that if your olive oil is bottled in plastic or in a clear bottle or you're heating it to excessively high temperatures, you're just making free radicals. You're just going to be guzzling free radicals. Now, is that product still better than the alternative, which I'm going to talk about? Yes, probably.

Now, the alternative that I'm talking about, and there's been, unfortunately, so crazy that there's still debates about this stuff. Yeah. But vegetable oil, right? Vegetable oil, canola oil, corn oil. And again, I'm just going off of the science here. world in this subject dr kate shanahan she's good friend former family physician she's been the nutrition nutritionist and physician for the lakers you know helped kobe extend his career got him on bone broth and stuff like that got dwight howard to stop eating so much candy all right he's still playing he's over you know overseas but you know um but anyways she's got i'm talking, if somebody's not just reading an abstract and spending time, like,

it takes thousands of hours in research. And she's got hundreds upon hundreds upon hundreds of published peer-reviewed papers looking at these oils. There's so much. There are scientists all over the world asking these questions. You know, quote, good and bad oils.

So one of the ones I want to share with you guys, and this was published in BMJ Open Heart. So this is a journal dedicated to heart health. And the researchers cited essentially that, quote, vegetable oils can be a major culprit behind organ failure, cardiac arrest, and even sudden death. All right. That sounds crazy. Like I'm going to have a little bit of vegetable oil and die. Like that's, it sounds extreme. But they have documented occasions on when these things have happened. All right. Now, with that being said, we don't want to go to extremes in any of these things because there might be some nutritive benefit here.

But what I want people who are just like, you know, that's rubbish. I've never said rubbish before. That's my first time saying, I don't know. It was pretty clean. That's just rubbish. Vegetable oils are totally fine. Yeah. What I would invite you to do is when I talked about extra virgin olive oil, you take olives, you crush them. When you make canola oil, this canola, this genetically engineered plant, first of all, all right, this is a new plant, all right? And to be able to extract oil from that, the amount of high heat processing that needs to take place, the chemical solvents that have to be added, the chemical deodorizers that have to be added.

The list goes on and on. Like literally, if you see canola oil being made, and there's some videos out on YouTube about canola oil being made, but actually you got to find the right one and to actually get to see what's happening and all the chemicals get added to it. That is by definition an ultra processed food.

It is an ultra processed food that humans have not consumed in our food. It is an ultra processed food that humans have not consumed in our evolution. It's recent. We're talking about a few decades ago, literally versus thousands of years with something like olive oil. All right. It was something like coconut oil, centuries upon centuries. Humans have had, our genes have interacted with these things. This is newly invented ultra-processed food. Can we at least be a little bit more cautious? Now, with that said, in the book I share another study,

and this was published in Inhalation Toxicology. So the top journal looking at smelling shit and how toxic is it. And they found that smelling vegetable oil while cooking, canola oil, can damage your DNA. Just the smell, inhaling the fumes of it. Okay. And by the way, all of these studies, they're documented. You can go and double check.

And for me, again, I read that. I'm just like, this is crazy. Really? Damage your DNA? Yeah. Yeah. It's a newly invented ultra-processed food that we're inhaling the fumes of. We were just talking about. Makes sense. There's fumes that come from cars that, you know, that are toxic to us. It makes sense.

Yeah. Yeah. And so, again, we want to we want to be mindful. Yep. There it is right there. Yeah. There it is. This shit gets crazy. It looks almost like you can recognize what it is right now, but in a minute, it's weird. I think that people maybe don't realize how much of these oils are in their foods. You know, people are like, well, I don't really use oil at home. Yeah. But it's like, no, this is in almost every packaged food you could possibly think of. And then on top of that, unfortunately, it's used at restaurants all over the United States.

So it's kind of hard to avoid sometimes. Yeah. Some of these oils earlier on, like forms of margarine, things like that, they were banned in major cities. Like New York City was one of the first major cities to ban partially hydrogenated vegetable oil, which was super popular. It's still out there, but this is what creates, quote, margarine, right? And it was banned. Like, margarine, right? And it was banned. Like, why would they do that?

And this is true. Like, this was, like, maybe 15 years ago. Why would they ban this oil from being used in restaurants in New York City? Look at that. Again. And so, yeah. What is that? Wow.

Doodle bricks. Yeah. Looks like some poo coming off the assembly line. So, again, man, like, again, it's by its very nature, it's an ultra, extremely ultra processed food and it's the main oil found in ultra processed foods. And so, you know, that's one of the foods that, again, understanding that the human brain, by the way, this is where it all links back to the brain, is that why was olive oil affecting the human brain, the brain itself, the solid weight of the human brain, the brain is mostly water, you know, upwards of depending on where you are in your life cycle, upwards of 80%, but maybe 70 to 80% water. But the physical solid weight of the brain is mostly fat followed by protein. And there's a little bit of carbs that are in the mix there, minerals, but it's mostly made of fat and your body needs these building blocks to make these fats and here's another cool thing for years unfortunately we were we demonized fat for a

long time and there's this infighting stupid for years just infighting about carbs and fats and the thing is everybody's right and everybody's wrong all right it just depends on you it depends on you where you are right now what what's going in your life, what diet is going to work best. It might be a little bit higher protein, might be a little bit higher carbohydrate, higher fat, depends on you. Now there's, there's a difference between the fat that we use for fuel that can fuel processes in the body. Like I mentioned, like alcohol can do, and structural fats, okay? So fat can be used as a fuel to run processes, or they can be used to build things,

in particular, your brain cells. So those are called structural fats. So these enable signal transduction, basically for your brain to be able to talk, your brain cells to be able to talk. These fats are critically important. What are they made from? Primarily, omega-3s, DHA and EPA in particular. These are so important to literally building your brain cells. And I shared a study in the book. This

was published in the journal Neurology and they did MRIs. They actually looked at people's brains and analyzed their diets. And they found that people who had the lowest intake of DHA and EPA had the highest rate of brain shrinkage. All right. So, and what they found was the number was under four grams a day where people who had the highest rate of brain shrinkage versus the six grams was like optimal for that kind of brain protective aspect. And it's because again, these are the oils that are being used or kind of recycling out other oils, other structural fats to make your brain cells and keep them healthy. We've got to protect our brain cells. They're not like other cells in our bodies.

Some of these cells have to last for years and years and years. And if we damage them by bringing in all these kind of inflammatory, low quality fats integrating into your tissue matrix, you're going to have a problem. And it's not an accident that Alzheimer's and most people don't know this. It's the sixth leading cause of death in the United States right now. Whoa, really? Yeah. Yeah. It's almost in the top five, sixth leading cause of death. It is a terrible way to die. And people that have family members that have experienced this, they know this. It isn isn't just like we think about it like a notebook type of thing like you know they all you forget right no no you forget how to swallow right you forget how to

breathe all right this is a very very powerful degradation of the the human body uh in particular with the human brain. This leads to the second thing. So number one being those oils. And the number two thing, which is why a lot of scientists call Alzheimer's type three diabetes, is the fact that your brain cells can become insulin resistant as well. There's a lot of insulin activity happening in the human brain. We know our brain cells run primarily off of glucose. There's been a huge movement with ketones, ketone bodies, and that kind of thing your brain can use as an alternative fuel, but still many processes exclusively run on glucose.

Now, what happens when we evolved a brain that has these sugar gates? They're like express pass, like that fast dash pass, whatever that is, to go through the tolls. We have more sugar gates than anything else for what's getting into the brain. All right? Your brain is sopping up sugar. And according to researchers at Harvard, your brain will gladly confiscate up to 50% of the glucose that you just consumed. Because it evolved to like, I need the glucose for brain functions. And it'll just sop it up. And your brain is only about 2% of your body's mass, but it consumes somewhere around 25% of the

calories you consume. All right. It is a very, very hungry organ and it's doing a lot of processes. And so with that being said, what if we have a brain that evolved to have very low exposure to sugar and suddenly we have Mountain Dew, right? Suddenly we have Fruity Pebbles. Suddenly we have, again, the list goes on and on and on. I was a big time honey bun boy as well. Hostess honey buns is two for 99 cents too. Oh yeah.

You know, pop it in a microwave. Dude, come on now. This is dirty. This is dirty talk. And that was breakfast right oh man i mean on a you know on a bad day yeah that's a good breakfast yeah so yeah man it's just again so now what's happening is we get all this glucose shuttling its way to the brain and we're creating insulin resistance in the brain and also just it's a really inflammatory event

that takes place due to all these metabolic waste products. And so I'm going to share a piece of evidence with gain. So what the researchers found was that insulin resistance and excessive body fat is causing inflammation in the brain and inflammation in the brain is causing excessive body fat buildup and insulin resistance because there's a specific place in the brain. And this was in the title of the study, hypothalamic inflammation in particular in the brain. So the hypothalamus is basically our internal thermostat for your metabolic rate. It's in close proximity, working with your thyroid to determine how much energy you're using.

And in addition to that, it's like regulating your body temperature, sleep cycles, all this stuff. Your hypothalamus is, it can be considered the master gland, for sure. And now we're getting all this inflammation. It's inflammation of this gland. And it's causing massive downstream problems. Primary culprit here is the excessive amounts of sugar that we're consuming.

And all of that reactivity is taking place in our brain. Because again, our brain is getting hit the hardest by all of that abnormal sugar consumption. Do you guys want to piss off all of fitness YouTube space right now? Sure, sure. Go for it. Okay. So, Mr. Stevenson, I've heard you say. I don't like this already.

That, like, we'll just say if somebody's eating 2,000 calories a day, they're maintaining there. Maybe they might be gaining a little bit. They're maintaining there. Maybe they might be gaining a little bit. If somebody is eating 2000 calories of ultra processed food versus whole foods, you're saying that the person that's eating the whole foods will actually start to drop weight versus the other person, regardless of the amount of calories. All right. We're not here to be controversial. We're here to be good people, good men having a good conversation. Yes, sir. All right. So just to give you an example, there was a study that was conducted by researchers in St. Louis from my hometown. So St. Louis University. And they wanted to see what would happen, taking people, putting on them on the same calorie controlled diet. But they changed one thing. that was just what they were having

for breakfast. All right. So one group of study participants had eggs while the other group of participants had bagels, same amount of calories at the end of the study. This was a multi-month study. The people who were consuming the eggs for breakfast, even though they were eating the same amount of calories, they lost more weight, more body fat. They had a higher increase in their hormones related to satiety and reduction in their hunger related hormones. All right. Dropping their BMI was lower and all they changed was just what they were eating for breakfast. One of them, and here's the thing, one is eating a whole food, eggs, and the other is eating an ultra-processed food in the form of that bagel. And everything else in the day was the same, other than that breakfast.

Exactly. And same amount of calories, again. Now, does this say that people are going to lose more weight when they eat real food versus ultra processed foods no not not not at all because there have been examples done studies done and a lot of these are though these are anecdotal these are not like peer-reviewed studies by the way so it would be like a professor at a university right it was one of the popular ones like he just ate fast food he just ate mcdonald's he's like see calories, calories out. But again, let's take a look at his long-term health from doing something like that. Again, making his tissues out of these fake ingredients.

What's going to happen to his testosterone? What's going to happen to the tissues that are making his vision, his eyes? I can go on and on and on. And we got to look at the bigger picture here. can go on and on and on. And we got to look at the bigger picture here. And so what I'm really bringing into the fold the last couple of years is this term called epichloric controller, right? So this is something above caloric control that is determining what the calories do in your body. I went to a conventional university. I was taught about calories. I respect that. But nobody asked, where did this come from? The calories, they didn't

just manifest in the field of nutrition. They started off, this was in physics. And it kind of parlayed its way over like, let's find out how much energy is in this food. And we use something called a bomb calorimeter and basically incinerate a food and the kind of energy that it's giving off. Now, unfortunately, your metabolism as a human is not like a bomb calorimeter. It's not incinerating everything. Our bodies only process certain things from certain things. So already the calorie confusion,

the calorie equation with the foods is missing out on the fact that our digestion is very different. Now we get into the different macronutrients. We know that proteins, for example, has this kind of higher thermogenic effect. It costs more calories to process protein than it does fats and carbohydrates. So what is your net gain in what you're eating, right? There's so many different ways. So that's one epicolor controller is the macronutrient

construct of the meal. Another one is your microbiome, huge epicluric controller. And this was highlighted by some other researchers. There's a huge database, studies on identical twins at Washington University. Fascinating stuff. There's no better way to see the difference that can happen between certain inputs than seeing with identical twins. All right. We're talking about they're from the same egg all right so truly like and what they were seeing was one twin same diet same household same environment but one twin would become overweight while the other would have a healthy weight and so they analyzed their microbiomes and tracked this data for a long time and what they found was that

there's a certain ratio or spectrum of bacteria called from acutes they just looked at these two primary ones from acutes and and bacterial deities and what they found was that people who had a higher ratio of from acutes tended to be less firm and cute all right I'm sorry I'm thinking like that is kind of funny. I shouldn't have did that. But anyways, they would have a higher ratio or a higher proclivity towards having a higher BMI, more weight gain. And so what they found was that there's this really interesting thing happening with our microbiome and our proclivity towards gaining and losing weight. Now, what this relates back to is another epicolor controller, which is your brain. So this is from researchers at Yale.

And they determined that the vagus nerve is really having a moment right now. A lot of people have heard of this nerve connecting the brain and the gut. they uncover was that based on your body's assessment of what you just ate and what you have stored in your tissues, your brain can inform your gut to decrease or increase the assimilation of calories that you just consumed. Your brain could tell your gut to assimilate less of those calories. We're talking about a magnitude of hundreds. It could be hundreds of calories more or less based on your brain's assessment of what you have. Now, what if you have a lot of energy stored in your body, but like many Americans are, where we're in the state where we're overweight or obese, but we're starving for nutrients,

critical nutrients that your genes are going to drive you to keep eating in order to get that selenium in, in order to get that vitamin C in, in order to get that, you know, copper, whatever it is for it to run a process that you're not getting because your palate has been manipulated. We evolved having, and this is something that's called post-ingestive feedback. We evolved, when we ate a food, your cells would basically take little notes on like, okay, I got some magnesium from this, vitamin C, I got these amino acids, and a flavor sensation would be connected to a certain food, right? This is what animals do in nature.

Have you ever thought about why certain animals eat certain things? Have you ever thought about that? animals eat certain things? Have you ever thought about that? Like certain animals, nobody told them. All right? The mama cat didn't like, you know, smack the baby cat. Like, no, you go eat that. Go for the liver first. You know what I'm saying?

Like they're just, they're going to try to eat other animals that they can eat. Yeah. Okay. And so, but there's a flavor orientation towards eating certain things again it's posting just the feedback now we have food scientists brilliant uh an invention one of them is a gas chromatograph where now we could take this food and we can identify what chemicals are making those flavors. And so now we can take those flavors and add them to things that are not those things. Okay.

So now we have fruity pebbles, right? Now we have strawberry soda, strawberry candy, strawberry ice cream. It might not be exactly like a strawberry, but it's just enough to like give you some orientation and muddy up the metabolic waters. And so now our ability to be, have that information of like, oh, I need to eat this food has been dramatically dumbed down. Right. And this again, speaks to the, the, the phenomenon with ultra processed foods. And so the last point here with the epicolor controllers, there are several of them, them that I've identified. But going back to the microbiome, you know, it's so crazy that something that is invisible would have such an impact, right? So the microbiome is having a moment right now as well.

And we're having an epidemic of something called dysbiosis, where we have what we would refer to as more opportunistic bacteria that can kind of take over. And I say opportunistic rather than bad bacteria because everything has its role. Even what we would label, a lot of people have E. coli. It's just like, is it in check? Because that particular strain of bacteria might be doing something for you it might be converting i don't know some kind of compound or protecting you somehow yeah through our evolution and now it's just like oh that's bad we need to kill it that's the problem again is coming in with a blunt instrument trying to destroy this

immaculately intelligent thing that would run really well if you were just feeding it real food. How do we make the gut microbiome, I guess, like better or more robust? Is it as simple as maybe eliminating processed foods? Also, one cool thing about your book is that you do have, you've managed to educate a lot, right? But you do have sections where there are foods that you talk about good for the gut, good sleep good for your brain you you you make it easy for people to digest but also to understand it's very you put it very simply in the book easy to digest you got that yeah i wasn't even let's go so what was your your question mark uh just on the gut microbiome i mean there's oh yeah seems like there's still it's kind of i guess the research is still uh fairly new but um how does someone like work on that make it more robust so

that we the calories that we consume we uh are just more efficient with them our microbes are like we are in a way and by the way uh one of the fastest growing fields in science is analyzing the genetics involved with our microbes. And so if we go gene for gene with our microbes, which we have upwards of maybe four times as many bacteria cells in our body and on our bodies than we have human cells. If we go gene for gene, their genes compared to ours, 99% of our genes that we're carrying in our system are bacterial genes. And they're interacting. Now what's being studied is the interface between our bacterial genes and our human genes. Because human genome project, okay, we got 20,000, 25,000 genes we share collectively, why are we all so different? We thought there are, there are certain species of corn that have more genetic spectrum than we have. All right. This is

true story. So we thought we were going to have a billion, like some gene. No, there's something else that's guiding and modulating what those genes are doing. Again, these epi caloric or epi genetic controllers. Right. And so, yeah, if we're coming in again with ultra-processed food, what we're going to be doing is feeding certain, just like I was going to say, just like us, if we're not getting fed what we want to eat, or matter of fact, we're not getting fed food that we can eat, we're going to die. We're going to die off and, or we're going to leave this property. Okay. And so certain certain certain strains of bacteria eat certain things. And if it's not available, they're just going to disappear.

They're going to become endangered species and or they're going to be eliminated. Extinction. And if you compare today, which we fortunately, again, we have modern technology to do this. A hunter gatherer, their microbiome cascade versus the average person in america they have four times more species of bacteria than we do okay at minimum so would you say if we have 10 000 they've got 40 000 all right that's a huge difference and also again all the information inputs and how that's influencing what our bodies are doing could that be another reason why we're so unwell, right? And so if we're not feeding bacteria, right, we get into this, another cookie cutter diet comes along and says, okay, you can't eat this, right? You can't eat, I don't want to again, cause no problems, but

one of them says, you know, you can't eat beef, right? What if there are bacteria, which there are, that that is their primary substrate? Now I've eliminated that because of an idea that I was given. And maybe again, you evolved or your ancestors evolved eating this food. Those bacteria are going to leave the property, right? It could be bread, right? So maybe again, we've developed certain bacteria that can interact with those molecules that now we pull it out because it's bad for you, according to whatever this particular diet says. And again, we're not getting into debate about this. It's just like we haphazardly start pulling out foods, trying to find health instead of paying attention to ourselves, shifting over.

So many people get well by doing any of these diet frameworks simply because they're not eating as many ultra-processed foods. They're eating more whole, real foods. And their intelligence, their cellular intelligence, their microbiome intelligence starts to come online, really. And they start to feel better because they're avoiding things rather than what they're, you know, kind of prescribed to do with the diet framework. And so last part here, when it comes to like, what can we do to improve the health of the microbiome? One of the most remarkable things seen in the data in order to increase that number one for, for, for health is diversity.

All right. As many species as possible this does not mean you go get a probiotic and that it doesn't work like that and if you look at the science on probiotics it's not very robust it's not it doesn't really work that well for most people not to say that in some instances because some people again they've had good results taking certain probiotics but we have to also provide that substrate we have to provide the prebiotic in order for those probiotics to populate in the first place. And you might be just buying a bunch of dead bacteria in a capsule. You don't know, right?

What did our ancestors do? They weren't taking probiotics. They were eating fermented foods, cultured foods. Again, going back to culture. Eating food that's about to go bad. Pretty much. Right? You know, my mom was eating sauerkraut.

I just thought she was so weird. I thought she was just gross. But come to find out, you know. But so how do we increase the diversity? This is the number one way. And again, this is several of the studies that I cite in the book. The number one way to increase the diversity of your microbiome is to increase the diversity of foods you're eating.

To provide, and this is just so Captain Obvious, provide different substrates. This is great. So this means we get to eat pizza every once in a while, right? Hey, pepperoni pizza? A get. Hey, it's up to you. It's up to you.

But, you know, with that being said, you know, this is not about, this is far from being about perfection and ignoring the fact that we live in a reality where we have Fruity Pebbles, we have Honey Buns, we have all these things. You might have an entanglement. You might have an entanglement with some of these things from time to time. But what does your primary diet look like? Are you eating primarily foods that your genes have evolved with some exposure to? That's the thing. And then dabbling in some of that stuff, that's not the problem, right? And so what I mean is a diversity of real foods, right? So this would speak to our ancestors eating things more seasonally, you know, because we can get in our kick. And I know all of us, everybody here has done this before.

When we're training, when we're, you know, maybe working towards a fitness goal or the fitness competition, chicken, rice, vegetable, chicken, rice, vegetable, chicken, rice, vegetable. And even in our venture towards health, which we could find some health there, of course, and fitness, but the diversity of those foods. And also it's like psychologically daunting as well, you course, and fitness, but the diversity of those foods. And also it's like psychologically daunting as well, you know, for many people because they got to eat the same thing over and over again. And it depends on your personality type. I could be fine with that,

but we can get caught into a box. Even if we're eating like, maybe it's not chicken, rice, vegetable, maybe it's like pork, rice, vegetable, right? Maybe you change it up, but we still, we tend to get, do the same foods over and over again. Once we found it, find a level of health and ease. And so simply by adding in, I would challenge people to add in one to two new foods just throughout the week, you know, just add in one to two new foods. Maybe, you know, you haven't eaten plums. All right. Plums are in season and you, you know, eat a couple of plums during the week, you know, fill it down in your plums. Shout out to Will Ferrell. But just adding in a couple of foods that you that you don't normally eat a couple of times a week, add in some diversity. It can really do your gut a lot of good.

some diversity, it can really do your gut a lot of good. While we were in the gym, you're kind of alluding to the difference that eating food with people can have for like with how they, whether it's digest that food or intake that food, what was it that you were talking about? Man, this is what I'm most excited about. And this is going back to culture. And my question was, well, first of all, I came across some data from some researchers at Harvard who were compiling research for years on family eating behaviors and health outcomes for the family. And when I came across it, I couldn't believe

that people didn't know about this. And so what they uncovered was essentially that people who eat together with their family on a consistent basis, eat significantly more micronutrients, vitamins, and minerals from whole food sources that many of these are required to prevent chronic diseases. And they eat significantly less processed food like chips and soda and i was just like could the process of eating together have some kind of like unknown protective health aspect to it and so i was thinking i always if people want to just peer into like how i always think about where did this come from that's just one of the things that just pops into my mind like where did this come from how long have humans been of the things that just pops into my mind. Like, where did this come from? How long have humans been doing this?

And I just started to think back, like, we know this, we are tribal creatures. This is how we survived. And the process of eating together with your tribe has happened forever. Yeah. When we talked earlier about culture, there are cultures that exist today. There's still hunter-gatherer tribes that exist today. And built into the – it's an unconscious belief. But remember, culture being attitudes, values, beliefs, behaviors. There's a belief that if I don't move, I will die.

Because in order for you to get your food, you have to move. That's the culture. We have to hunt. We have to procure our food. We, you have to move. That's the culture. We have to hunt. We have to procure our food. We have to process our food. That's baked in in our, in our culture today, you don't have to do anything and you can get food put in your hand. Okay. So movement is optional in our culture.

More and more and more. So many of our conveniences have become causes of degradation. And so with this being the understanding, I was like, so humans have been doing this a long time. We had a culture where, and just again, going back to the culture in Hawaii and seeing the luau phenomenon, right? So it's procuring the food, hunting, gathering, preparing the food together, eating together in celebration. It's all part of the process.

And this was what was normal, okay? Versus, especially in the last few decades, families eating together has become more and more on the endangered species list. So much so that those researchers at Harvard denoted that only 30% of families eat together on a regular basis now. Something that was baked in to our culture. This is something that we just did. Even when we became more kind of isolated and we start to have our houses that might not be in the proximity of our other loved ones, there still this culture it was kind of impressed upon our culture for family dinners americans created we invented tv dinners okay and then we start to have

the ads where okay we don't sit down and eat together we eat in front of the tv right and tv is fun what is the shows back in the day i don't know like uh dick van dyke or something you know like whatever it was. There's a lot of dicks. A lot of people named Dick back in the day. But you're right, man. I'm good. I'm good.

But, you know, we started to have this other entity being invited into Family Meals, which was technology. Right. And now we're losing touch with each other. And by the way, this is not my family knows we have a movie night. We'll watch the show together, watch the game, that kind of thing. But are we missing something protective for our family and our children by not eating together on a regular basis without that stuff being integrated? And so here's what I found. So this study was looking at families from low income what would what would primarily be low income environment minority children minority families and they analyzed the eating behaviors

and the health outcomes of the kids and so what they found was that children who eat together with their family four days a week whatever meal ate five servings of fruits and vegetables five days a week on average. Okay. Yeah. So they were eating significantly more fruits and vegetables and significantly less ultra processed foods, chips and soda in particular when the TV was never or rarely on. That's what they noted in this study. And by the way, this study is in the Eat Smart Family Cookbook as well.

And to top it off, and I can share 10 more studies like this, but this is one of the most fascinating because it looks specifically at a health outcome. This was two studies. One was published in JAMA, Journal of the American Medical Association. One was published in Journal of Pediatrics. And they found that families who eat together just three times a week, the children in those families had significantly lower incidence of developing obesity and eating disorders. Just three meals a week created some kind of disease buffer, like an invisible shield around the family that reduced their risk of chronic disease in those children. There's something remarkable about that. And of course, I'm like, what?

Why? Why is this? What comes to my mind is like neglect, you know, like, hey, there's macaroni and cheese on the stove if you're hungry and the kid just goes over, scoops it. You don't see them. They go to the room. They play the video game. You're not like not interacting enough.

I don't think. Yeah. You just said it. That's that's one of the like super Captain Ob obvious eating together, initiate something in our brain of planning. Like we know that we're eating together, whatever, by the way, those three, I encourage everybody to do this. It's one of the big takeaways today, schedule it. And this is friends and family, by the way. So friends can be involved in this and I'll share why in a moment, but pick those three days, whatever it is for you. So this could be Monday, Wednesday, and maybe brunch on Sunday.

This is something we tend to do. Like last week, Jordan, it was actually the week before, but he, he messaged my wife and I said, Hey, family dinner on Tuesday, because we had missed a few. Right. And then Tuesday came around. He's making you guys responsible. Culture, man. And then that Tuesday came around. This was just last week, but my wife was having a day. All right.

It was, it was the day. So she wasn't about to cook anything. I wasn't prepared to cook anything at the time because it just was like last minute. She was out somewhere and it's like getting close to seven o'clock. So I hit the door dash. All right. But we still ate together. Yeah. Him and my youngest son we sat down and we ate it was tuesday that was the that was the plan and so we we just had that little pivot that

little adjustment but making those times sacred to the best of your ability and this is also effective for parents as well and i shared a study study, this was done on workers at IBM. And what they found was that their work morale stayed high, you know, job satisfaction, as long as they can get home and have dinner with their family. But as soon as work started to cut into these family mealtimes,

work morale went down, job satisfaction went down, stress went up. Why is that? Why does that matter? Another study published in JAMA found that 80 upwards of 80% of all physician visits today for stress related conditions, stress related illnesses, stress is a huge component. Going back even to that hypothalamus

issue, stress can mess up that whole system. And so there is something remarkable about eating together with people that you care about. We evolved doing this. And it can be so rewarding for our kids, absolutely protective for our children. But you mentioned it too. There's kind of this unfortunate, and this is what I grew up with because I'm not exaggerating. I can count on my two hands how many times I sat down and ate a meal with my family. I'm not kidding. These were holidays. All right. Nine or 10 of those. And it's not that we didn't love each other or anything like that. It's just like, we didn't know. A lot of times

my little brother and sister and I, we might sit down and eat together, but my parents are doing something. They're somewhere else. And eventually it got to like, we would eat at the same time but disperse video game tv uh homework outside whatever friends just like we would disperse grab whatever mom had and then we would not eat together had we known had my mom had the education that there's something protective and all of every all of our All of the people in our family having some chronic condition, again, my little brother was in the hospital every, I'd say at least every season,

hospitalized for asthma. My little sister, eczema. I had asthma and also I had the degenerative bone condition. My mother, obesity, diabetes. Stepfather, alcohol know, I had the degenerative bone condition, my mother, obesity, diabetes, all right. Stepfather, alcoholism, drug abuse. He just passed away. You know, he's in a group home for almost 15 years because of the damage to his brain

from, you know, we grew up in the crack epidemic. You know, again, it's just, that's the culture. And so I didn't see any examples outside of that. And so for me to try to figure out a way to, to make it, and for me to stand here today and tell you that it's possible, I'm not, I'm not just one of those people, like, if I could do it, you can do it. No, like seriously, I had every car stacked against me. All right. Violence just every day. I'm just exposed to this. There's gunshots. There's PTSD that I didn't know I had for years. All right. I promise you where there's a will, there's 10,000 ways. And so I had to take responsibility and understand, like, honestly, like the pen is in my hand to write a different story for my family. pen is in my hand to write a different story for my family. And so I started to put these little pieces in place. Part of it was just automatic because I was focused on my health. I changed

the culture within, and so they're automatically exposed to it. But over time, I started to develop and create conditions where eating good food was easy. Fitness was easy to access, right? Easy. Fitness was easy to access. Right. And so that's what it's really about. Again, understanding that we have the power to really shift our culture within our households. Please, if there's one action step for everybody today, put it on the calendar, schedule it three meals a week. Just pick them. I'm telling you, it's going to be so rewarding. And invite some friends because maybe they don't have the same setup or access to the same family situation that you have. Yeah. And also, another study that I shared, I know I've shared probably, I don't know, dozens of studies today. But one of them was looking at what happens when we eat in isolation. Especially, consistently, significantly lower quality food intake all right more consumption of ultra processed food and less consumption of essential nutrients when we're eating alone all the time you know and it just makes sense because why would i prepare a meal for just one person

that's what what also happens to a lot of elderly people as well. So also this is for our young ones and our elder ones as well. Eat together more often. Build that into the culture. Schedule it because we got a lot of stuff going on. And sometimes if it's not on the schedule, it's not real. So schedule that. Have you seen any differences in the research that you're looking at in terms of the way that people even digest stuff or the way they utilize calories based off of eating together? That's a great question, man. Great question. So the first thing that jumps out is the switch. Remember when I talked about the increase in stress from not having family dinner?

That has to do with the sympathetic nervous system, right? So this kind of fight or flight, that's just going to be ramped up. And for us in our culture today, it's not like a lot of like really intense fight or flight moments it's like a low-grade fever it's just like always kind of running hot right um our friend kelly starrett talks about how we're very good at going zero to 100 but not good at down regulating going 100 to zero but what my point is that we're usually still just operating at like 85 right and so that is part of it so when we sit down with people that we love we're able to de-stress because the dinner table like this podcast table is a unifier it's a unifier of minds

and if we get into even some you know just like literally being in the same space and electromagnetic field coming from the body heart math institute has a lot of good information on this but we have a tube torus like an electromagnetic magnetic field that extends from our bodies and so this we're interacting with each other our microbiomes are sharing as well we're sharing data that's another thing that just being in proximity with people, you're sharing microbial data as well. And usually it's going to be adding to your repertoire, right? And so there's all these unseen things, but also that deactivation of the sympathetic fight or flight and turning on the parasympathetic and its nickname is the rest and digest nervous system right and so now here's the thing though let me be clear this is not all sunshine and rainbows all right because especially if you have a culture where this is not normalized it might not be an easy transition right if you have a culture where everybody's just been in front of a device all this time, our devices divide us. They do. And I share some data on this. Just even having the phone in proximity distracts our attention. They're running cognitive skills tests on people and just even you seeing it in your vision. And just imagine all these people sitting down and eating with their phone right next to them and constantly checking.

constantly checking, right? And so kind of creating this sacred space is going to take some, some, some energy. Now here's the cool part that we don't really realize. And I know this intimately because I just experienced this. This is for all of us right now. We suffer most of the time because people are not doing what we want them to do. If people would just do what we want them to do, everything is cool. That's it. If your wife just did what you want her to do, no problems. All right. If you just did what she wanted you to do, beautiful every day. But that's not how it works.

We're different. We have different goals. We have different aspirations, different intentions, different moods. different goals. We have different aspirations, different intentions, different moods. And so my point being that knowing this, that we're all different, we create suffering for ourselves because just like, why won't the kids just do what I want them to do? All right. They're their own being. They're their own entity, right? We could force people to do things for so long and we will rebel. And so here's the gift that we have is that being a parent who has some level of intention, you know, your kid better than anybody. You know, what excites them, you

know, what D excites them, you know, what motivates them and inspires them. You know, what depresses them, use it to your advantage. This is, this is, um, being the way of the peaceful warrior. All right. So this is like benevolent psychological interaction. All right. But we don't do that because we just want them to do what we want them to do. Same thing with our significant other. running my office working as a nutritionist doing all this one-on-one work and consulting with all these businesses the number one thing people would say why they can't achieve their goals is they would blame other people that was the number one thing i'm just like so why you know what's going on now why would this you know and there's like well if my wife you don't understand my wife my husband won't you know this is cool but i don't want to make two dinners my kids there you know i'm just i'm just sean i'm just gonna make the the hot dogs and mac and cheese you know because my kids won't eat it and it's all of these beliefs these programmed cultural beliefs that it's got to be

hard and also that it can't be joyful yeah and i promise you i'm, my son, we are big time foodies. All right. We love food. And this is really the secret, which shouldn't be a secret, which is like, people don't like things that they love taken away from them and replaced with some bullshit. Like we have to replace that habit with something of equal or greater value. Every time you're hungry, eat some carrots. Right, right. You're like, what?

That's not a solution. Drink water. Chicken breast. And just drink water. Yeah. Just drink, just drink, drink your urine. time you're hungry eat some carrots right right like what that's a solution chicken breast and just drink water yeah just drink just drink drink your urine it doesn't trick every time i don't know um somebody said it somewhere for sure yeah i'll make the medicine and i drink the medicine uh but you know it's it's just understanding that you know we have the ability we understand the motivations of our of our family members and we need to address that and understand and this also is going to require us to grow and change another thing is that we want change without changing

and so this process that's going to be so unifying and healing for your family is going to require you to grow, to develop more traits of patience and creativity. But I promise you also, here's the thing, it can be so joyful. It could be so fun. And I've been, I've been testing these things. I've also been kind of running these trials on these things because I have my family culture that was kind of built unconsciously, but we build in joy at the table, right? So this is one of the things where there's a reward built in psychologically for my kids. Like my 11-year-old, like he wants to game with his boys. I want to play with my boys. I want to game with my boys.

But to pull him away from the screen, like, of course, it would be like pushback, whatever. No, no, no. He knows that this is – like he's oftentimes leading the charge a lot of times in us having these like we've got these questions, creative questions that we go around. Like we'll pitch a question out and everybody goes around the table and answer. It might be something fun. It might be something deep to think about. Like, you know, if you could have one superpower, what would it be and why? And everybody go around and just answer the question.

Or we have a unifying piece of, like, gratitude practice, right? So before our meals, we each say three things that we're grateful for from the day. So if we have family dinner tonight, I'm going to be like, you know, I'm grateful to hang out with my guys and see them and Mark and do this incredible show. And see this incredible guy over here, who's about to be three year old. Yes, sir. Little boy, uh, Andrew, and just being able to hang out and, um, you know, that's going to be one of the things I'm grateful for, but we just share these things. It just like, you see that energy, like they, they don't know what's going on if my son wasn't here. So I'm sharing this and they're like, Oh, well, like, well, okay, what's going on with

that? You know? And so it's just like inviting in and also it's a spirit of gratitude that is laid down uh another thing could be you know i'm doing basically like a love fest where you know we put somebody in the hot seat and we all just go around and share what we admire about you you know like there's so many creative ideas. And another thing too, we just, I just shared a video with this. Uh, we, we freestyle a lot. All right. It's another one of those things of like a fostered creativity, engagement, incredible for the brain, all the things, but we're just having a good time. Oftentimes our meals will end with some freestyles. Sometimes it'll be battles. Sometimes we're collabing together. But also, you know, it wouldn't be a surprise

to see dancing and singing and different creative things that we evolve doing those things. And then we go and watch other people do them. Like, we go to a luau and we watch the show. Like, you're supposed to dance! You know? So, like, finding things that fit your culture that bring joy like it's a this is like a door of the explorer type of thing like you're gonna find do some exploration

and unearth secrets like hidden things for your own personal family culture that can then your kids are gonna pass that on you think my son's not gonna be free freestyling with his kids he absolutely is you know and this is what's so beautiful. Again, culture, values, attitudes, beliefs, behaviors passed on from one generation to the next. We talked to countless professionals on the podcast about the importance of having strong feet. And chances are that wearing narrow toe box shoes has weakened your feet and your toes don't function the way they should. Sucks, bro. Yeah.

That's why we partnered with Paloova. your feet and your toes don't function the way they should. Sucks, bro. Yeah. That's why we've partnered with Paloova, and they're the first casual, wide-toe box, five-finger shoe that you can wear running, in the gym, literally anywhere. But the benefit of these shoes is that as you stick your feet in and your little toesy-woesy start to get a little bit of spacey-waseys, your feet will start to function the way they should because your toes will slowly start to widen out and your feet will no longer be

this blubby little cast that they probably are right now andrew how can we get them yeah time to spread them cheeks i mean toes uh head over to paluva.com slash power project that's p-e-l-u-v-a dot com slash power project now check out enter promo code power project 15 to save 15 off again that's at paluva.com slash power projectject. Links in the description as well as the podcast show notes. They got tons of them. Check them out. A lot of people are probably already doing some stuff, you know, like they probably have,

you know, people that are parents, they probably have convenient foods around the house. It's just a matter of kind of swapping those out. Like, you know, work on getting rid of some, not all all but some of the processed foods and uh some fresh fruit some vegetables some yogurt some just better options i mean everybody kind of already knows in their head what's better options talked about whole foods right it's a whole food type of uh diet and um for me with my family it's been

And, um, uh, for me with my family, it's been great to kind of watch, you know, they, they, they know like where these, uh, where some of this food is. We have stuff in our pantry, but we also have, um, just healthier options. You know, they're not, they're not, maybe not as, uh, offensive. We don't have like Doritos and we don't have Oreos in the house, but we have, you know, legendary tasty pastry or, uh, just these other foods that are, you know, maybe more like protein bars. There's still like pretzels. There's still chips. We still have ice cream in the freezer because I think that's important too.

Like you should learn how to have it near you without like smashing it all the time. Because your kids are going to be exposed to this stuff as well, you know. And so there's a time. I'm not all crazy about like them eating bread and like like that like go make a sandwich like that's a great that's a great little snack some turkey and cheese sounds reasonable do you want your kid to be the one that has to bring their own snack to the birthday party you know i mean are we going to go that far and it's okay if we are but we've got to understand that your kid is not always going to be under your wing and they're going

to be exposed to skittles they're going to be exposed to you know mountain dew and all these things do they have a basis of health because what's happened with my family and my my son over there as well because he has a foundation and some, some foundational understanding about these things. He, I've allowed him to know how it feels to have shitty food. He knows experientially what it's like when he goes too far and he knows that it's food. I didn't know that this is the thing.

Like you would think, okay, anybody would know. No, no. When I was, when I was a kid, one of my favorite things was to get the seven-eleven nacho with chili and cheese okay i go to 7-eleven and not only would i pump by the way the meat is

in a pump probably that should be a red flag and the cheese is in a pump you pump it onto the nacho and nacho chips but i got to a point where i would take the chips out of the nacho tray put chili and cheese at the bottom put chips on then put chili and cheese on top i love this better move right there all right keep your pants on everybody and so and i would experience what i now know to be deadly in indigestion all right like i don't know if i'm gonna make it okay and so one day i caught while i was living in ferguson i called my mom i was like mom i don't feel good i just you know it's just a my you know my nacho and chili cheese she's like you just need a white soda you just need a white soda baby a ginger ale sprite oh okay seven up so my body was giving me this feedback this shit that

i just ate is hurting me her solution is that i'm deficient in soda okay that's again very different my son knows that oh this food hurts you so to to say that people just know that no they don't i didn't know that yeah all right i got good grades in school you're pretty don't i didn't know that all right i got good grades in school i'm pretty smart but i didn't know because i was not existing in a culture that informed me that this food is created it's just food it's just food it doesn't do all this other stuff no food is foundational to to life and so you know um yeah it's it's crazy it's amazing yeah growing up in a mexican household seven up was what you drank when your stomach hurt. Let me ask you, where did this thing come from?

I don't know. Because the ginger ale thing. I think ginger might be real. Ginger might actually help. Ginger? My grandmother said it, maybe. Ginger. Ginger, yeah.

Ginger. I think ginger is in ginger ale, though. A little bit. Is ginger actually in ginger ale? Probably not. It's the favorite thing he was talking about. I did a master class on soda on my show a couple years ago it was one of the most fascinating fun shows ever done and uh yeah it started off being ginger you know it's one of the primary ingredients but then just over time more sugars added root beer same thing it was

you know actually using different roots dr pepper was all these different herbs and spices and just like you know food manufacturers kind of integrated their way in and then based and then with sparkling water i think dr pepper is the first soda right or mr pibb like one of those is like the first one to market i think if i remember correctly i think it was root beer oh okay yeah that sounds right and then uh dr pepper was like definitely definitely in the top three coming down the pipeline. And Coca-Cola had that Coke in it. Again, this was something you get at a pharmacy. The pharmacist had the Coca-Cola dispenser.

Let me ask you this. The way that you grew up, was it not masculine to take care of your body and to be healthy? Oh, man. That's different. There's a difference between fitness and health. Right? So it was definitely masculine to be fit. You know, my stepfather.

Like if you're worried about your weight, you know, especially back, I don't know, 30 years ago. We're just athletic. You know, it's just like you want to have the big muscles. I think you're weird, though, if you're worried about your weight and wanting to be like healthy probably right but we also grew up at a time where there wasn't you know there'd be like one kid who's overweight in in my school yeah right or in my class all right that's changed so we were all just kind of just fit by nature in a sense but also you see the superheroes you same as you you see you know the ultimate warrior see, you know, the Ultimate Warrior. You see, you know, Arnold. You see all that. You want to be that superhero as well. So, and my stepfather, he's a boxer, toughest guy, you know.

He had that, it was like a spring in the middle in the bar. You know the handles, right? Just an expander thing. Yeah, and he would do that. And then I couldn't do it at all. I couldn't move it an inch, you know. I'm just like, this guy's the strongest. Oh, my, I want to be like him.

And he had the Pink Panther tattoo on his bicep. Of all things, this is a brother. I'm just thinking some of that stuff's not cool, though. If you were to get burgers at a barbecue to not eat the bun. You know what I mean? Especially when you're growing up. Other people on the block might think you're weird or strange you know it's kind of hard to might be hard to navigate some of that when you're young yeah that's such a good question you know

but i think i don't know i experienced this um when i and i shared this with andrew as well after i'd really transformed my health and you know, not only reversing the degenerative disc disease, my bone density was just incredible, better than normal, all the things. I still had like seasonal allergies and things like that. But my mother-in-law came into my life, you know, kind of like a package deal, you know. So she was my then girlfriend, but my wife later. And I met my mother-in-law and my wife well my girlfriend at the time she had just taken me for my seasonal trip to the ER this is when I'm in Ferguson health is great but I just had this one lingering thing because I would have this I would have hay fever

and so I got when got my prescription which of course going to be an antibiotic did they look did they actually run any do they know it no but I got my prescription, which of course is going to be an antibiotic. Did they look? Did they actually run any? Did they know it? No. But I got something to leave there with. And we stopped by her mom's place. And she came over to see me. She was like, this is my mother-in-law talking to me.

She was like, yeah, my daughter tells me that you're having this hay fever. You can't breathe. I was like, yeah, you know, it's the weather changing. You know, it's the weather. She was like, is the problem out there or is the problem in you? And I was like, wait a minute. I shouldn't be allergic to the world. Right? Like, I'm just like, the problem is in here. Everybody else is okay. And so I started making some changes there with my nutrition. And, you know, I haven't had that issue since. But when I went to see my brother a couple years after this, and again, just a whole different level of health.

And just like I didn't know it was possible. I felt so good. Like a lot of times you don't know how good you can feel. It's just like you're just living in this fog. And I went to see my brother. We stand outside his place and, you know, we're standing kind of like arm to arm, kind of looking out of the street.

And he was like, so I heard you was eating organic. And I'm just like, yeah, you know, just like food isn't sprayed with pesticides and herbicides or denticides you know side means to kill by the way i'm just like dropping these little things on them whatever but he's just like so skeptical because i'm eating organic and it's just like this isn't gangster you know and it's just like i'm eating the same food you are it's just like my food doesn't have all of these things that's making your estrogen go higher. All right. And making you act like a baby. But, um, but shout out to my brother. And, uh, but also again,

by me changing the culture and standing firm on that, my brother's picked up so many things over the years and really focused more on his fitness and training and all that cool stuff. So, um, but I had to like withstand the environment being like, you forgot where you came from. You forgot, you know, hostess is in your heart. All right. You know what I mean?

It's just like, nah, like that's, that's silly. Like we got to put that stuff behind us. So thank you for that. And by the way, also with the, with the upgrades, this is what it's really about. So this is the bottom line. How do we make this attainable for everybody? It has to be about joy. So many of these silly diets

unknowingly promote deprivation, restriction, not enough, all these rules that we just cognitively, we rebel against these things. And it might not be outward, but internally, we want to have freedom. And we can get into this place where we have all this weird fear around food as well. And so what I, what my mission was is to upgrade many of the foods that we love. Like my family, we love brunch. We're big brunch family. Shout out to all the brunch lovers out there and so pancakes being on the menu and as

mentioned earlier what i did was i took it was over 40 foods but i went and grabbed the latest peer-reviewed data on these foods and so one of them was sweet potatoes and so i shared a study affirming how these anthocyanins and sweet potatoes are really remarkable in helping to improve your cognitive function, including potentially helping to improve your memory. And I'm like, okay, so in the book, in that section where you learn about these foods, there's going to be little emojis there that denote what part of your anatomy it's going to be good for. So we've got a brain emoji on that one. And there might be another one for metabolic health, a little muscle emoji, right? And so then you can go back to the recipes and see what these recipes are

going to target when you have them. And so, but also, so now you know about this sweet potato, we don't got to just do a run of the mill sweet potato. Let's take the sweet potato and make some protein pancakes. And so that's what we're doing and having these incredible flavor experiences while getting in all this real food, right? In the form of the sweet potato, getting delivered in this pancake form. Come on now. This is not to mention another, another one too, just on the brunch tip. My favorite thing. Well, I can't say favorite thing, but very close was McDonald's breakfast. Oh yeah. Come on. Oh. How many did you buy that one time?

Nine. I think it was nine and ten. I thought it was like 12. No, no, no. It was nine. I know you didn't get through them all, but okay. Yeah, so maybe I purchased 12, but I ate nine. It was the sausage, egg, and the biscuit, the crumbly biscuit with cheese. I can go through multiple of those.

There's a great scene in Big Daddy. I don't know. Have you guys seen Big Daddy? We haven't seen it in a long time. A long time. Long time. Well, he's trying to get the kid to McDonald's breakfast by 11. And he's just like, come on. We're going to get to.

And he gets there. And it's like 11.01 or whatever. He's like, I just missed one minute because they won't give him the breakfast. She was like, sir, breakfast was over at 10.30. And so he's just like, the kid is crying now. He's flipping out. But that's how I felt, too. A lot of times I wouldn't get up in time for the McDonald's breakfast,, the kid is crying now. He's flipping out. But that's how I felt too. Like a lot of times I wouldn't get up in time for the McDonald's breakfast, even though it was my favorite.

But anyways, point being, I created this upgraded breakfast sandwich. And it is, I mean, it's amazing. Like we just had it yesterday, actually. And it's just like being able to have these things that we love using high quality ingredients, incredible flavor experiences. Because my youngest son came in while I was eating and he was like, what do you got there? You know, he's just like, where's mine? You know, because he knows what we're about that life. You know what I mean?

And so being able to have incredible things like that, but also new ways to use foods that you might be accustomed to, like eggs and a Southwest chorizo scramble. Something so simple, but all of this is just kind of like putting in this other angle of flavor, but also being able to deliver a food so dense in micronutrients. Not just the eggs, but turmeric is in that as well. And it fits really nicely into the dish. And researchers at UCLA found that turmeric is really remarkable at helping to, we know about it for being an anti-inflammatory.

It's kind of one of the popular things that a lot of people know about now. But it's also able to help to break down amyloid beta plaque build up in the brain. This could be, again, there's some debate about this, causative or contributing to Alzheimer's disease. So turmeric is really special and it has this kind of affinity for the human brain.

But what are the ways we're getting it in? So we also share our slow cooker curry recipe that I think we might be having tonight. My favorite, honey sriracha salmon. The list goes on and on. Don't even get me started on the snacks, by the way. But just being able to have these things on. We got Snicker Bites. Just being able to upgrade, things like that.

But also, here's the last part of that is because I've been in this field so long, we're not doing this with complication. We're not doing something that's got 27 ingredients. It's just very simple, easy recipes, high quality ingredients, and a lot of deliciousness. That's really the, yes, the information is remarkable. It is life changing. But at the end of the day, what do I get to eat?

And I'm saying, I'm opening up this door to a whole new reality of like, let's have a good time. Let's enjoy amazing food with each other, have these amazing, like memorable food experiences that we can then pass on as a culture to our children. This is how we change this. It's not going to be through deprivation and restriction and infighting, debating about minutia. It's going to be changing the culture within our household. I know it's a cookbook, but do you talk about exercise a bit too? There is one little part in there where I mentioned that. And it's in the context of family, family culture.

And the act of exercise, if you even think about it, it's so crazy. Exercise wasn't really a concept for much of human evolution. No one would ever exercise. Right. It would be ridiculous to go exercise. But the question is, why then would we move? Number one, of course, it's to procure food and shelter and all the things.

So it's functional. and shelter and all the things. So it's functional. But there's something that is activated when we move, which is our lymphatic system is able to get some motility, mobility. Because our lymphatic system, we have four times more lymph than we have blood. And if, unlike our cardiovascular system,

having a heart being a pump, the lymphatic system doesn't have one. And so if you're not moving your body, your lymph is stagnant and it's extracellular waste management really. And so this debris, this nastiness, really this toxicity is going to start to build up in your tissues. You have to move in order to move this out of your system. That's number one. Exercise, what we call exercise movement is designed for assimilation of nutrients. That's one of the things that I want everybody to know. And that's what I came across when I was trying to get my health together.

I came across a study on racehorses and they were giving them supplements to increase their bone density because I was trying to increase my bone density. And then it did increase their bone density. But there was another study group of these racehorses, which is a billion dollar industry. And they gave them supplements and walk them and increase their bone density more. And I was like, it's the movement is driving the nutrients into the tissues.

So it's about assimilation. It's about digestion as well. Elimination as well. So when we're moving our bodies, as I mentioned, being able to process and move our lymphatic system, but also through exercise, our skin is a large detoxification organ as well, helping to get some of this stuff out of our system. So it goes together, you know, the nutrition, the movement, sleep, all these things. These are basic ingredients to make really robust humans. But unfortunately, we have a culture today that none of these things are really respected. They're all just kind of like we're thrust into these really strange conditions where doing those things at a high level is abnormal.

And so what I'm working to do is make everybody weird, right? Until being healthy becomes the norm. And I know we can do it. I know we can do it. That's why we have platforms like this, that we can reach more people than the conventional authorities, right? And we can really talk to people's hearts and we can move the needle very quickly. Like we've seen how quickly we can galvanize that our society can be galvanized to do certain things. The same thing can be done for health, but we have to do it ourselves. We have to start with us.

We can't keep hoping that people outside of us are going to change the condition so that our kids can be protected. We've got to do it. Have you actually seen your own bone density over the years go up like have you did you get like dexascan or some sort of testing yeah it's been it's been a long time it's been maybe 10 years because i did i would go the thing is like after a while it's just like i it was kind of holding me back in a sense because i'm just still doing this thing out of fear

essentially like let me see or let me not even say that there was a speckle of that but more so affirmation for what i already knew to be true right so i would go in for these different scans even you know x-rays of my spine all that stuff and um you know it's just kind of like affirmation that i know i'm good i know that i'm healthy and um you know the after going back to the physician nine months later after inputting the mriting the MRI up and seeing two herniated discs, L4, L5, S1, and they were like, they looked like, I don't know, some Canadian bacon, like black, burnt Canadian bacon. And then going back nine months later after making the decision to get well and seeing my discs are now thicker, you can see the light shining through them. Like it was, it's kind of like, I already knew I was good. I felt good. I was out of pain.

I was doing all this amazing stuff, but I needed their permission. And you guys just had my friend on, Tom, and he shared with me how, and just again, one of the things that speaks to me about him too, is just like validating things through science and research and how we can get trapped in imaging because we're looking at something in a static way and not in a functional living human being. And he shared the study with me that they did these MRIs of all these people that were asymptomatic and they found all these problems that they should be having loss of function pain with. And just like, they just didn't know that they were supposed to be hurt. Yeah. You know what I mean? And it's cool. Like also you might

want to know if there's something off, but what if that just the awareness of that thing creates dysfunction and fear and all the things. So there's a place for imaging of course, but, um, the most important thing I'm trying to advocate for everybody, especially like me, I didn't have access even to imaging early on, is paying attention to how you look, how you feel, and how you perform. And how do we do that? We've got to tune back into our bodies. It's hard to do that when we're inundated with all this shit, distracted, all the stuff going on out there, eating low quality food. It becomes harder to listen to what our bodies and our minds really need. But again, that intelligence gets turned on.

We start giving ourselves better ingredients. Where can people buy your book? People can pick it up anywhere that books are sold, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, all that good stuff. sold, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, all that good stuff. And if you go to eatsmartercookbook.com, we're also doing a 25K health and fitness giveaway. So you instantly get registered for that. We're doing like, people are going to get $500 in fitness equipment from Onnit. They're going to get $500 in groceries from Thrive Market. Pl plunge, giving away a plunge as well. So all these great companies, again, are chipping in to be a part of this movement. Cool.

And many other gifts. And also we're doing the Family Health and Wellness Summit this year as well. And people get free access to that virtually. You can attend from anywhere. It's a $297 ticket for the event. You get it for free when you get the book. ticket for the event you get it for free when you when you get the book so after grabbing your copy from Amazon or whatever the case might be pop over to eat smarter cookbook comm for those bonuses strength is never weakness

weakness never strength catch you guys later bye