4278 The Modern American Diet: The Ultimate Pyramid Scheme
Stefan Molyneux talks with Jack Posobiec about the unhealthy hellscape of the modern Western diet.Note: This conversation contains layperson opinions about nutrition, health and diets. The information is not advice and should not be treated as such.Audio link: https://soundcloud.com/stefan-molyneux/the-modern-american-diet-the-ultimate-pyramid-scheme▶️ Donate Now: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate▶️ Sign Up For Our Newsletter: http://www.fdrurl.com/newsletterYour support is essential to Freedomain Radio, which is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by making a one time donation or signing up for a monthly recurring donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate▶️ 1. Donate: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate▶️ 2. Newsletter Sign-Up: http://www.fdrurl.com/newsletter▶️ 3. On YouTube: Subscribe, Click Notification Bell▶️ 4. Subscribe to the Freedomain Podcast: http://www.fdrpodcasts.com▶️ 5. Follow Freedomain on Alternative Platforms🔴 Bitchute: http://bitchute.com/stefanmolyneux🔴 Minds: http://minds.com/stefanmolyneux🔴 Steemit: http://steemit.com/@stefan.molyneux🔴 Gab: http://gab.ai/stefanmolyneux🔴 Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/stefanmolyneux🔴 Facebook: http://facebook.com/stefan.molyneux🔴 Instagram: http://instagram.com/stefanmolyneux
Now, Jack has been on the show before, but every now and then I'm always delighted to find out when friends have a sort of side piece expertise on something.
And I've always been curious about nutrition and incredibly frustrated by nutrition at the same time, which is not a good combination.
Because I want to eat well and I've gone from, you know, bacon and eggs will kill you to, you know, what you really need is bacon and eggs and everything.
Cholesterol is bad.
Cholesterol is good.
Fat is bad.
Fat is good.
Carbs are bad.
Carbs are good.
And fortunately, Jack has hacked his way through some of the undergrowth.
And while we're neither of us nutritionists, I do value lay expertise in the field.
So thanks for taking the time to set me straight here, Jack.
Yeah, no, I appreciate it.
And it's actually something where I've been sort of posting about this online more recently and not really spurred by anything, but just sort of a side that I've always wanted to start showing forward.
And a lot of this, believe it or not, was taught to me originally by my grandmother going back 15, 16 years ago.
And she would write about these things.
Because she could see how she was born in 1932.
My grandmother could see how in her lifetime, just what you outlined there, the shift that had gone away from sort of this idea that we should eat whole foods, that we should eat natural foods.
This shift towards processed foods, towards fast food, towards the sort of war on breakfast, right?
The war on breakfast.
So eggs are bad.
Bacon is bad.
You've got to eat grains.
You've got to eat more, you know, soy and corn.
And by the way, that's the same stuff that the government is subsidizing.
And so, you know, it's this hand in hand sort of thing between government and industry.
And so she would teach me about all this stuff.
And of course, at first I was like, oh, grandma, you don't know what you're talking about.
That's old school.
Right.
But then as I got older and more and more people started saying it, and it made me go, you know, Jack, wasn't your grandma saying something about this a little while back?
You know, I went and picked up some of the stuff and it turns out a lot of the things that are now being reported in science and reported by new studies of people actually going back, they're realizing
That for decades the science was completely wrong on this, or I should say they propped up science that was wrong and studies that were done incorrectly and started this huge war on meat, this war on cholesterol, and pushed a very high-grain, high-carb, low-fat diet, which actually turned out to be the exact opposite of what people needed.
Well, there's two things that kind of struck me about this before we get into some of the more detailed science about it.
The first is that when women left home to go into the workforce, one of the consequences was good cooking.
And then what you ended up with a whole bunch of TV dinners and fast food, and in particular the frozen food, which kind of tastes like the cardboard wrapping it comes in, unless you add a lot of sugar.
And so, or fat to make up for the loss of nutritional value that comes from freezing and packing it and so on.
So, I was sort of suspicious of the fact that what seemed to be okay was the kind of stuff they were putting in to subsidize women going off to the workforce.
And the second thing is that the food pyramid seems to have been rather unduly influenced by people giving politicians massive bags of money.
I am so glad you mentioned the food pyramid.
So, the food pyramid is was sort of the the height of this the apex of all of this chicanery that was going out and originally believe it or not the very first food pyramid when the FDA or was and the USDA were were approached by nutritionists it didn't actually have the same bottom rung that it had and for those who haven't seen it it's sort of this this idea that we should group our foods into the stuff that we should eat the most the stuff that we should eat a little bit and then the stuff that we should
Yeah, maybe sometimes, but you know, just okay for a treat, right?
So the original bottom rung of that, when it was written by nutritionists, was all fruits and vegetables, right?
Natural foods that hunter-gatherer society would certainly eat more comprehensively than anything else.
That was switched And that's really frustrating, because the fruits and vegetables aren't processed, whereas, you know, bread has to be made out of grain and yeast and stuff like that.
So it's like, well, now what you need to eat the most is the stuff that has actually a whole lot more labor put into it than the other stuff, which seems economically not quite the right answer.
Well, of course, because there isn't a whole industry that's pushing, you know, pickers and growers for vegetables and fruits, right?
There isn't a whole... Well, the immigration lobby, but yeah, I know what you mean.
Well, the immigration, yeah, we can talk about that.
But so the idea is the profit margins aren't there quite as much as there is for this whole gigantic industry.
Uh, behind wheat, behind grains, and obviously also behind sugars.
And a lot of people don't understand how, uh, a lot of white breads, for example, are made up of just various types of simple sugars and the same thing for bagels, the same thing for, you know, other, other parts of that, that family, that food group.
And so the money involved in this had a huge undue influence on the U S government.
This started with the McGovern Commission back in the 70s, which sort of started this war on cholesterol.
Then it turned into the food pyramid.
And a generation, so the food pyramid was introduced in 1988.
So this was hitting right when my generation, I was born in 84.
So when I was going through elementary school, we were all taught this as, you know, there were people who would come in in like a pyramid costume and say, well, this is the food you're supposed to eat.
And I'm Mr. Bread.
I'm Mr. Bagels.
And so my whole generation growing up, that's what we're taught.
Bread, bagels, and cereal is what you should eat for breakfast.
Well, I mean, certainly, I mean, there's some stuff that is not cake, but is cake, right?
So muffins, okay, it's cake.
Like, I get it.
It's cake.
Right.
I was a little surprised to find out that white bread is basically slow motion cake.
And the whole bread thing has been quite an awakening for me because, you know, I grew up in England and there was meat shortages and we just, we had a whole A lot of bread and white bread and like the soft squishy white bread that looks like it should be something used to put bricks together in a wall rather than build human beings from scratch.
So what's the story with bread and digestion and what it does to you?
So this is what's really interesting, right?
Is because people don't physically think about it very much because it looks so much different.
It doesn't look like sugar.
It looks like it's a piece of white bread or it looks like it's a bagel, right?
The way your body breaks down into simple sugars, those various foods that you're eating, is what matters here.
And that's the chemical digestion process.
So when you're actually eating those things, your body doesn't understand, okay, this is a bagel.
It's not really seeing much difference between a bagel and a bag of Skittles.
Right, in terms of the glycemic index that's actually coming up on this, and this is getting a little into... No, no, feel free to break down glycemic index for people, and me too, for that matter.
So what it essentially means is when you eat a piece of food, and this is huge for diabetics, so if there's any diabetics, you know, within sound of my voice in the audience here, this is something that you definitely want to key into, because obviously diabetics, because of their body's response to insulin has changed, whether
Not affected enough or not producing enough, that they need to keep a close monitor on their blood sugar levels, so the amount of glucose that's in their bloodstream at any given time.
So glucose is the most common blood sugar, and that's obviously affected very directly by what you're eating.
So the idea is the glucose then goes into the cell, the glucose powers the cell, and your body moves, right?
Well, people who are tracking that as diabetics were realizing something that When they were eating bread and bagels, suddenly they were having these blood sugar spikes.
And a lot of this has come up because diabetes is going completely insane in the West and certainly in America right now.
We're seeing record numbers of this.
We're seeing record levels of obesity, record levels of heart disease since the introduction of these diets.
And people who are tracking it couldn't realize they said, wait a minute, you know, I haven't had anything with that had any sugar in it, right?
I'm eating my, I'm doing what I'm supposed to do.
I'm eating my whole grains.
haven't touched any candy, and they noticed they were getting the sugar spikes.
And what it really comes down to is that when your body is breaking down the carbohydrates, if they're using simple carbohydrates in something like a bagel, something like white bread, it's going straight into your bloodstream as sugar, the same way a bag of Skittles would or a Snickers the same way a bag of Skittles would or a Snickers
So your body doesn't see it as any different, or in some cases, depending on the level, you're actually getting a higher sugar index in your blood, and this is what they call the glycemic index, you're getting a higher level of sugar in your blood.
Than you would if you were just eating candy.
But there's not a lot of sugar that's added to bread.
And if you ever want to read a horror story, just go to your average Western supermarket, particularly in North America, and just start reading the labels.
It's like, wee, wee, wee, wee!
Everything has sugar added.
But how does it work that the body looks at whole grains?
Because you know, oh, white bread's not that great, I was told.
But boy, if you get some 40-grain bread, you're basically eating like a horse and it's going to be wonderful for you.
So how does multi-grain bread end up being candy in your body?
Well, it's this essential idea that those are, uh, and this comes actually out of the, the McGovern commission, believe it or not, there's a phrase that comes out of there called complex carbohydrates.
Um, and this was, this was first introduced by the U S government in the 1970s.
And it's, it actually is an interesting way of describing it.
So carbohydrates are, uh, you know, already pre-packaged sugars, right?
It's, it's, it's just a sugar that's, that's complex.
So it's a compound sugar when that sugar is broke, then broken down, it's still breaking it down into simple sugars.
So if you know it started as something else, a complex carbohydrate, it's breaking it down into those same simple sugars that you would find in candy bars or chocolates and things like that, that are sugar-added. - Right.
Now, one thing I found that when I started to cut back on carbs is really tough.
You know, that old joke about Chinese food, you know, you're hungry two hours later.
I find it tough to get full without carbs.
And part of me thinks that there's all this bacteria that feeds off carbs that's saying, hey man, enough with the no carbs.
Give me some carbs because otherwise we're all going to die and be replaced by something else and it's genocide of the gut bacteria or something.
Is it kind of like your appetite can get hijacked by the stuff that's inside you that wants the particular food it's gotten used to?
Well, it is too, because when you're eating carbs, right, the Pringles advertisement actually uses this as their marketing slogan, right?
You know, once you pop, you can't stop.
So that's Pringles.
So there's actually chemical evidence behind this that the signals that it's sending to your brain is, I'm eating something, but then also, I'm still hungry.
And so when you're hung, when you're, it's telling you that you've, you've eaten, but I'm also hungry, then you want to eat more.
So as you're eating those car, those carbohydrates and this, you know, Pringles, what, what have you, you want to eat more of them.
Your beat, your body's being sent the signal.
I should eat more of this.
I should have more of these.
I should have more of these.
And so when you start cutting them, your body is still picking up some of those latent signals because your, your own system, right?
Your digestive system is already.
Pre-programmed to be expecting those carbs at regular intervals.
Typically in the mornings, people like to carb load, or if people are eating pasta, spaghettis.
I have a lot of Italian friends, and I'm telling you, you know, those are the ones, they really cannot get them to agree to this.
And there's a lot of, obviously, culture involved with that.
But it's, you're just so pre-programmed and predisposed.
It's not to the level of, I would say, chemical dependence that you find among certain people with like, who have, you know, nicotine addiction or something like that.
But it's definitely, I would say it's along those lines from a scientific perspective.
Right.
But I saw some movie with Dwayne Johnson, The Rock, and as part of his training, he was playing a footballer, and as part of his training, he's like basically mowing down on a bowl of pasta like a combine harvester on a back 40.
And is that not then part of like optimal training?
Because, you know, the guy doesn't have too much of a gut there.
Right.
And it was the same thing with Michael Phelps, you know, the swimmer.
Oh, he's eating two whole pizzas a day and everything else.
Look, when people like Dwayne Johnson or Hugh Jackman, who played Wolverine, are going in for a movie, they bulk up and they're going through intense daily regimens of workout where they might be spending eight, nine, ten hours in the gym and they're doing high intensity lifting.
That's specifically focused on popping their muscles up as big as they can, right before they go on screen.
And what I always find is really interesting.
I call these, I call this the Hollywood diet, the Hollywood workout diet, because when you see them on screen in these films, you know, they look like they look massive.
They look jacked, you know, Hugh Jackman as Wolverine comes out and tears his shirt off and he's got the adamantium claws and everything.
Then go watch them in an interview after the film, right?
Once they've stopped doing the routine.
And suddenly it's like a different person.
It's like they've shrunken into like their younger brother or something.
And it's almost like, wait, where did all your muscles go?
Where did all these gains go?
And you realize that when you have this sort of muscle puffing that you can get through carbs, it's not lasting.
And anyone who works out that does serious bodybuilding, anyone who does lifting from a serious perspective, will tell you that those gains, you can get them quickly, but they are fleeting, they're absolutely fleeting.
And so unless you're working with some regimen where you're, or you have some kind of economic situation where you can work, you know, spend 10 hours a day in the gym, then you can do it, but it's not gonna last.
You need, but if you want sustained growth, that's gonna take years.
That's not gonna be found overnight. - Right, right.
So you're saying that carbs are like the juicing of bodybuilding. - All right. - In a sense, in a sense.
Now, with regards to sugar, so you posted something before Christmas, one of the reasons I want to talk to you about this, because, and Paul Joseph Watson again, not a nutritionist, but he was like, you need sugar man, you need sugar to live, it's healthy, and then you're like, hey man, sugar is not food, and that really struck me, like really struck a chord, because It's tasty and I grew up British, you know, like we're basically sugar addicts.
We basically decided to have an empire because we can't grow sugar at home.
So what is the story with sugar?
A little bit?
Necessary?
Not necessary?
I've tried life without it and it definitely does seem to even out energy.
Like I don't get that sort of mid-afternoon lull and yet at the same time I do kind of crave it so it's a bit of a challenge.
So what I would say is, I mean, Both sides are right in the sense that obviously, yeah, sugar is delicious.
And then secondly, yes, of course we need sugar.
If we don't have the sugar fuels our very cells itself, right, that's the glucose we were just talking about.
So if we don't have sugar, we do quite literally die.
But at the same time, and this goes into the greater diet as well, but humans developed as hunter-gatherers, right?
And so we were predominantly getting our sugar from food that was readily available.
fruits and vegetables.
And that is naturally occurring sugars, which also occur with everything else, all the natural saturated fats that you're going to get from, from those food groups.
And so with that, you will do much, much better eating those, those natural sugars.
And certainly more than any of the, it's, it's when people take it to the next level and they're eating these complex carbohydrates or they're eating, obviously, uh, I think desserts or things that are sugar added that, or any of these even much more, uh, dangerous sugar substitutes like high fructose corn syrup, um, which dangerous sugar substitutes like high fructose corn syrup, um, which is like, you know, delivering a shot straight to your veins of it.
That's where you're getting, you know, these high sugar spikes and then drop-offs.
That's what the whole mid afternoon lull comes from.
It's, it's people, you know, usually drink a coffee in the morning or some kind of energy drink that's loaded with sugar and you're, you're flying right through your morning, you know, red bulls flying off the shelves.
And, and then by the afternoon you crash, you absolutely crash.
So the minute you cut that sugar out, You will go through a level of withdrawal, that added sugar.
You'll go through a period of withdrawal and it's just going to happen.
But you will lose those ups and downs and that rollercoaster of energy throughout your day.
You'll be much more sustained.
And then you can start working out.
If you want to do an exercise regimen, you can figure out where that works best in your day.
And you'll realize that you're actually getting more energy from exercising, more energy from the food you're eating.
When you're not on that sugar cycle.
Right, right.
Now, what about fat?
Because when I was growing up, fat was basically Satan.
And, you know, you saw this solid at room temperature, this is, you know, once on the lips, forever on the hips kind of thing.
And fat seems to have gone through a resurgence, like the counterintuitive fat doesn't make you fat seems to be quite popular these days, which is basically blasphemy to the youthful dietary religion of my childhood.
Right, and that's basically what we're all talking about in terms of all this.
So fats and cholesterols, there's a great book by Larry Schweikart where he wrote a whole chapter about this where it really started to be demonized because of the heart attack of Dwight D. Eisenhower back in the 1950s.
And some people started saying, well, he had a heart attack because of his diet, and his diet is predominantly meats and fats, which led to cholesterol.
And then a lot of this gets laid at the feet of a researcher called Ansel Keys who came out around that time.
And if you go back and look at some of the stuff that he wrote, he would, it wasn't very scientific in the terms of what he was doing.
He was more of an anthropologist where he would sort of go around the world and talk about different places.
He said, well, look at the longevity of these people or look at the lack of heart disease in this area.
And he would just sort of cherry pick parts of the world that had low instances of heart disease or high longevity in terms of age.
And I know this is weird, but this is the story of the war on fat and the war on cholesterol and the cholesterol phobia.
And he would say, well, it must be therefore because of their low fat diet, right?
It must be because of their low fat diet.
And, you know, completely, you know, eschewing any type of actual scientific study.
That's not science.
That's not biology.
That's not chemistry.
That's just anecdotes.
But this was what was pushed and he became a media darling.
Time magazine played a huge role in this all the way up through the 1980s by pushing their You know, sort of two eggs and a frowny piece of bacon, sad face, though, you know, on the cover.
They call that the cover that launched millions of false diets.
And it was with the advent of this war on fat that led to obesity, that led to the epidemic in diabetes that we're experiencing today in the West.
And it's fantastic.
When you look at a supermarket today, you go in there.
And you've never seen more quote unquote health products or low fat products, but at the same time, you've never seen more unhealthy obese people as you are.
And you have to start realizing that, wait a minute, how long is this going to go on before people start waking up and realizing that, wait a minute, perhaps we were wrong.
Perhaps, you know, they call it the standard American diet, sad.
Perhaps it was actually the, the low fat in the first place that led to these issues.
So how would low fat... Is it because you compensate with carbs?
Is it because you compensate with something else?
Because if it's low fat and low sugar and low carbs, it's really tough to be tasty.
And, you know, we are driven a lot by the hedonism of taste.
Is it not so much that it's low fat, but what else you put in to substitute for it?
Well, and that's exactly right, because When things are low fat, and like you said, low sugar, low protein, low everything else, it usually comes out tasting like plastic and nobody would actually buy it, right?
So what they do is they add in sugar, they add in carbohydrates, they add in sugar substitutes, you know, anything with os at the end, like sucrose or dextrose.
And in addition to that, other flavorings and other chemicals To make it more palatable or to make it taste like something that might actually... Sorry.
Sorry.
The drink of water went the wrong way in.
I'm good.
I'm good.
It'd just be weird to choke to death in a dietary conversation.
Hold on.
Alright.
Sorry about that.
Please continue.
I'll edit that near-death experience out.
Did you see heaven?
Well, of course I saw heaven, I'm talking to Jack Posobiec!
So, I'll take it from low-fat.
Yes, what happens in many of these low-fat products, low-fat yogurt is probably the most characteristic of this, where to make something taste more palatable, instead of tasting like plastic, they're adding in
Gobs and gobs of sugar or sugar substitutes like malodextrose, dextrose, high fructose corn syrup, and all sorts of other chemical flavorings to make it taste like something that your body is expecting that would occur in the natural world, that would occur naturally, but you're actually getting this highly over-sweetened, and our taste buds here in the West are raised to be entirely over-sweetened than they are than you'll find anywhere else in the world, these products that are so bad for you
That the amount of chemicals and the amount of sugar that you're eating is so much worse than any benefits that you'd be gaining from eating a lower fat product.
And what's interesting is a lot of the studies that originally came out, if you go back to the 1950s, 60s and 70s, a lot of the studies that originally came out saying, wait a minute, you know, what if it's all this sugar that's causing heart disease?
Or what if it's all this sugar that's causing business executives to have more heart attacks than anyone else?
The same Doctors, the same physicians and physiologists like Ancel Keys were attacking those studies that said that sugar may have been the problem in the first place.
That's very interesting.
As far as meat goes, it's the pendulum seems to be swinging back and now there are people who follow like a meat-based paleo diet and so on.
Where does meat sit in your knowledge of the stuff at the moment?
Meat is definitely something that I consume on a daily basis, if not three times a day.
With meat, you're getting proteins, you're getting a lot of essential vitamins that you simply can't find anywhere else in the natural world.
And, you know, it's interesting for me also looking at it in terms of, you know, I'm a father now, right?
So I have a seven-month-old and I'm raising my son, and so I'm looking at these school lunches and they're like these crypto-vegetarian, you know,
Protein deficient piles of bird seed and I'm thinking my gosh, you know if I'm if I end up sending him to one of these schools I'm just gonna have to you know feed, you know pack his own lunches every time because a lot of this was pushed under Obama Not to make it political, but that was one of their big things and there's plenty of Republicans that are involved in this too in the agriculture business, but you look at this and they're simply not providing children a with the food that they need and enough protein to get through the day.
And they're replacing it with sugar, they're replacing it with carbs.
And so meat is something where I'm very pro-meat.
I'm not shorting meat.
I'm long on meat.
And if anything, I would say the studies are definitely still out in terms of the debate between red meats versus more lean proteins.
But that doesn't mean I won't enjoy a nice steak every once in a while.
Right.
I also wonder, you know, I get kind of jumpy about looking back in time at all the communist propaganda of my childhood.
And I watched Dr. Doolittle the other day, the original one with Rex Harrison, which is, it sounds like a non-sequitur, but it kind of ties in because I'm so jumpy about communist propaganda that I'm like, I immediately jumped to, because it really pushed vegetarianism.
So part of me is like, aha, I'm I bet you it was a communist right or pushing vegetarianism while the Russians are eating meat so that we're tired and distracted and low energy and so on.
And I wonder if the schools are just so bad now, and now that they've cut out recess and so on, if there may not be a tangential benefit to not giving kids the energy they need because it's just a little bit easier to manage.
Well, we've certainly seen Paul Joseph Watson and others work on the effects of overeating soy and soylent, so we could definitely point that out there.
But it's true to an extent where I don't know if it's as nefarious as a communist plot, but you have this weird, I would almost call it a perfect storm of moral hazard in terms of government, business, and people who are just politically active that are lobbying for these completely faulty studies into fats, studies into meats.
And that have just flipped things upside down in terms of how people really should be eating.
Because when it comes down to it, it's not as profitable to talk about things that aren't subsidized in the West already.
So if you're talking about things like corn, which is also subsidized for ethanol, things like soy, which is subsidized, various different types of cattle ranching, which are also subsidized.
Isn't it interesting that we have the same government putting out studies telling us that those foods are healthy, But then whole foods, natural foods or grass fed meats, which is definitely more healthy for you when it's not certainly not hormone injected, protein injected, that we are told that those foods aren't as healthy for you.
Right.
Well, it is something as well, because we're both fathers.
And one of the things I've noticed over the years is sort of when you go to a play center, I literally want to grab some of the parents by the necks and yell at them for the amount of fat they're letting drape on their kids' bodies.
It really is absolutely appalling.
And I see this even with kids in restaurants.
You know that they're just holding out for dessert.
They'll have a couple of bites of pizza.
And I think that their taste buds have always been so corrupted by sugar.
It's like if you take a lot of cocaine, a regular day without cocaine is misery.
And if you tune your taste buds to the most extreme, high-intensity flavors like sugar and so on, everything else just tastes kind of bland.
So when I... Can I actually interject there?
When I first moved years ago, after I graduated college, one of the first places I moved was China.
I lived in Shanghai for two years.
And it's amazing that the cuisine over there does not have the sweetness that we have in the U.S., right?
And when you put something that's like a U.S.
product that has sugar in it, they don't like it.
They don't even want it.
And I was working with the American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai, and one of our companies was Hershey's.
And we were trying to get Hershey bars into the Chinese market.
And we did a couple of taste tests with Chinese focus groups, and they hated it.
They didn't like Hershey bars at all.
Like, you know, regular chocolate Hershey bars.
And we couldn't figure out what it was.
And then eventually one of the people said, look, there's just too much sugar in this stuff.
So they had to make a new special blend.
They called it Hershey's Special Dark.
And they produced that specifically for the Chinese market.
because the people there just aren't used to eating sugar.
It wasn't available during the height of communism that most Chinese people had lived through.
It's starting to become more available now.
But when it hit their taste buds, they didn't want anything to do with it.
It tasted rancid to them.
Hmm.
Fascinating.
And the other thing too with childhood as well is this myth of juice.
You know, the juice is just so good for you and you should just have juice.
And of course, that's subsidized as well and very much pushed on low-income households.
And man, it's pretty corrosive for kids.
No, it absolutely is.
And not only for children, but you see diabetics that are told, you know, drink apple juice, drink cranberry juice, drink orange juice.
I'm not here to try to sell you anything.
I'm not trying to say which alternative diet is better because the jury is still out on a lot of them.
But anything that's focusing more on natural foods is good.
But look at a juice box in your local supermarket next time you go to buy some and look at how much sugar is in a typical carton Or a gallon of orange juice, or a lot of the milk that you'll see has sugar added to it, and it's all done for flavor purposes.
It's all done for taste purposes.
And we realize that we're just giving ourselves so much extra and added sugar, and what is that actually doing?
You know, talk about your coronary health, talking about your cholesterol levels, that's certainly something that people start to worry about more as they get older.
Well, you could be focusing on this when you're younger, so you don't have to worry about it as much when you're older.
Yeah, because people say, well, you know, juice comes from fruits.
Fruits are good for you.
It's like, yes, but fruits have a lot of pulp.
And pulp slows down the absorption of the sugars in the fruit to the point where it's healthier for you.
But juice, even if it has pulp added, is pretty much pulp-free relative to fruit.
And so it's going straight into your system as cane sugar with a bit of apple in it.
Exactly.
So make the juice yourself.
Why not?
If you want your juice, buy a couple of oranges and get a juicer.
We used to have one of those.
We have a juicer now and we love it.
It really doesn't take that much time.
Do you think that that's one of the major issues around childhood obesity?
Because I literally view this as one of the most horrifying things that's going on in the West, which is just the ill health that is occurring to kids.
You know, when I take my daughter to a water park or something, I mean, it's It's wretched to see that you've got these middle-aged dad bods on eight-year-old boys.
Yeah, and a lot of this goes back to, you know, something that you certainly covered a lot in the sense of who is raising our children, right?
And are we raising our children in terms of convenience or are we raising them in terms of creating fully functioning and healthy adults, right?
So if you're subsidizing Uh, your child's your child rearing off to some, uh, daycare center or that's, that's, that's raising children on mass or a government institution.
And in some cases they're looking at how do we take care of 50 kids at once or 30 kids at once, right?
They, you know, whatever the easy button is for them.
If I can get a hundred juice boxes, I'm going to throw a hundred juice boxes at them.
Right.
And so it's, it's easier, it's convenient.
And because we do have more than one, we typically have two parents working.
as they're growing, when kids are growing up now, that these ideas of convenience and these shortcuts are now taken more and more and more.
And that's leading to not only the second and third order effects, and one of them is health.
And it's funny, too, because if you have a good relationship with your children, you can very easily say no to them, and they can say no to you, and you can negotiate about that.
But one of the things that I see in the parenting around me is that the parents seem very, very reluctant to just say no.
Like, so, you see kids with lunchboxes, they've got, like, half-moon cookies, they've got bear claws, they've got, like, just... And my question is, okay, well, why?
Why?
I mean, it's not that hard to figure out that that amount of sugar is not great for kids.
Why is it that parents have such a tough time saying no or explaining why?
Or maybe the parents are modeling as well because now if you've got a lot of overweight parents, they've got bad habits and then it's going to transfer to their kids as it does genetically as well.
Do you have any thoughts as to why parents are having a tougher time saying no to their kids now relative to the past?
So now you're getting into a secondary issue
Uh, which is actually really bigger in a sense of it's, it's part of moral relativism and it's, it's also part of this idea that, uh, and, and, um, arrested development at the same time, where as, as we see this a lot in the millennial community, and I say this as a millennial, that, um, when we start to have kids, well, parents are said, well, my kid, I'm going to treat my kids like an equal.
I'm going to treat my children.
Like, they're one of my friends.
And you wouldn't tell your friends how to eat, or if you did, you'd be very careful about it, right?
You wouldn't necessarily go around lecturing people that are at your workplace about how they should be eating and what they should be doing.
You certainly wouldn't go up to your boss and say that.
And so, we're getting into this area where, because of moral, and then the moral relativism side of it, of, well, you know, people have different choices, and if it's their choice to eat the way they want to eat, if it's, you know, if, Oh, what's the name?
Uh, the, the, the 11 year old drag queen wants to be an 11 year old drag queen.
And you can go ahead and do that because that's your choice.
And so that this idea that all choices are equal, uh, is part of it.
And then the second part of it is this idea that children should be treated the same as adults.
No, they shouldn't.
They are children, you know, by every, every, every standard of childhood development.
I mean, their, their, their mental functioning just simply isn't there.
The development of their mind simply isn't there.
They don't know what they're doing.
They don't know what they're talking about.
And that's not just from experience, but also from the actual physical development of their brain.
The biology isn't quite there yet.
And so you have to teach children what the right thing to do is.
And in some cases, maybe it's because the boomers didn't teach the millennials the right way to do it in the first place.
And now they're just passing on that bad knowledge to a second generation.
But there needs to be enough people.
And I appreciate you doing this podcast with me today because we are explaining that, hey, wait a minute, let's go back a second, dial it back and say, these are children.
This is a new generation.
They need to be instructed.
And if there aren't people doing that instruction, then it's just going to be complete anarchy children at the corn level.
Well, I've had this conversation with my daughter a number of times when she wants to do things that are not good for her.
And I say, listen, my job is to deliver you as an adult in good health.
You know, so when you get to be 18, I'm in charge of your environment until you're 18, and it is my job to deliver You, as an 18 year old, in good health, without an excess of body fat, you know, well knowledgeable, good social skills and so on.
In the same way that you don't want your pizza delivered upside down and half missing, you don't want me to deliver you to adulthood.
You know, think of your 18 year old Isabella.
What kind of body does she want?
What kind of health does she want?
What kind of...
Teeth quality does she want?
Well, we know all of that.
So, you know, we have to negotiate, but it is, you know, the bottom line is it's my job to deliver unto you a healthy body and mind as an adult.
And this seems to have been kind of abandoned in a lot of ways.
They wouldn't choose that.
I said, you know, if I deliver you to adulthood and you're 50 pounds overweight, are you going to be either A, very happy about that, or B, very unhappy about that?
Now you have a lifetime of weight struggles ahead of you.
There was a line actually, so I went back right before we came on today to talk and I was reading some of my grandmother's writings and she passed on a few years ago and one of the things she had written in it was, and it really struck me because she's passed on and now I'm a father, but she wrote, children are a message that we send to a time that we will not see.
Very nice.
So let's close off with this.
Give me your top three or five or whatever number you find the most appropriate of resources or blogs or books or people.
I mean, you've mentioned your grandmother, but I assume she's not on Amazon.
But what have been the most influential people that you've read or books that you've read that have been the most clarifying in these issues for you?
So a lot of this started for me Believe it or not with Mark Sisson and Mark Sisson he writes it's sort of the one of the paleo blog the daily paleo blog and It that's I would say that's the first time that I started seriously asking these questions myself So Mark Sisson was a good resource on that again.
I'm not Endorsing him.
I'm not saying that he's a hundred percent, right?
I don't buy any of these products, but I started reading it and I started I started learning more about it another another person that I went back to believe it or not was a was Atkins and the Atkins diet and looking at some of this, not just necessarily looking at his products, but again, looking at the research that he did.
And then Wheat Belly by William Davis is a fantastic book that talks about a lot of this.
He's the one who talked about the idea between the bagel and the candy bar.
And there's a lot of fitness blogs out there on this.
A really good resource is Eat Fat, Get Fit.
And it's a catchy line.
And I think people can start to learn it from.
And it's interesting because it has a contrarian sort of take on things, but it really does celebrate this idea of taking charge of your diet to to take charge of your lifestyle. - It's a funny thing too, because the one thing that is very true is that bad eating is very efficient in terms of time, in the short term.
You know, like if you just, you're kind of hungry, you get two pieces of bread, you throw some cheese in there and you just eat it and you can eat it while you're working. - Boom, no, it's easy, right?
And the one thing that I was kind of noticing, and this is part of an aging thing as well, Jack, was like, hey, look, I saved 20 minutes by not cooking myself a proper meal, but then I passed out for half an hour on the couch because, you know, like it didn't actually end up saving me any time.
It just felt like it in the moment.
And sort of now that I've slowed down and I'm cooking more, It's better.
I end up with a more even energy level over the course of the day, and it does seem like one of these things that's going to cost you time in the short run, but it really, really pays off.
My wife, Tanya, she comes from Eastern Europe, so for her, a lot of this is just normal.
A lot of this is just how life is, eating healthy.
But she is very health conscious, and one of the things she always says is, she says, You know, you can go buy a new car, you can go buy new clothes, but you can't get a new health.
You only get one of those.
Well, that's a great point to end on.
Thanks very much for your time.
It's been illuminating and I will check out some of the books.
We'll put some links to them below.
Really, really appreciate your time.
I'm glad to hear that your family's doing well.
All my very best to them and to you, of course, as well in this wonderful New Year.
