The Ultimate Healthy-Eating Hack, Making Family Dinners Fun, Getting Kids To Cook & Much More With Shawn Stevenson.

My name is Ben Greenfield, and on this episode of the Ben Greenfield Life podcast, we're very cyclical creatures.

You know, our brains are always looking for certainty and automation, and we have these circadian rhythms. I wasn't taught this stuff in my very expensive university education about how the time of day and the sequence of things influences our gene expression. And these circadian clocks, by the way, they are themselves functional genes and proteins that control the expression of other genes and proteins. This is a huge part of our reality.

Fitness, nutrition, biohacking, longevity, life optimization, spirituality, and a whole lot more. Welcome to the Ben Greenfield Life Show. Are you ready to hack your life? Let's do this. Alright. So, my guest on today's show was a guest of mine like 8 years ago. He broke the internets or at least the small sector of the health podcasting internets when he revealed on my show how he healed up some really serious back issues using not surgery, using not some crazy front squat kettlebell method, but instead using nutrition, aloe vera, and stem cell precursors, and all these crazy ingredients I'd never heard of frankly when I'd interviewed him, and I've learned a ton from him since. He has written an excellent book called Eat Smarter. He has the book Sleep Smarter, which is an amazing resource for amplifying your sleep quality. And he also has an extremely popular podcast called the Model Health Show, which you can find wherever fine podcasts are found. But perhaps most importantly and relevant to today's discussion is he has followed up his nutrition book Eat Smarter with his book called Eat Smarter: The Family Cookbook. Now, I'm going to link to everything you guys hear about at BenGreenfieldLife.com/EatSmarter. But, his name is Shawn Stevenson and he's a man after my own heart because this book is all about celebrating food together as a family, which is a staple in the Greenfield house, Shawn. So, this book, when I read through it, I literally read it last night. So, this is all just fresh on my mind. I had roast chicken and carrots and yams and sat there reading your book for a couple couple hours, and it's fantastic, first of all.

Thank you.

It means a lot to me. Read a cookbook while you're eating. So anyways, it's Eat Smarter: The Family Cookbook, and there's not a lot of families, particularly in America, who I think understand the extreme importance of what might seem trite, and that's eating meals together as a family. Do you guys actually do that every day?

Not every day. I'm a big minimum effective dose guy, and I put that into the book as well. But, it's something that is definitely a part of our family culture, and it has been even prior to knowing some of the data just because you could see some of the health outcomes and the psychological benefits as well. And, for us, and this is just according to the data, and let's just go ahead and throw out a few studies on why this matters.

Go straight into the science. Let's do it.

Some researchers at Harvard were gathering data on family eating behaviors for years and looking at what food choices and health outcomes of the family members. And they found that families who eat together on a consistent basis, not denoting what that number was though, and I'll share that in another study, but families that eat together on a consistent basis consume significantly higher amounts of real food. So predominantly what they noted was fruits and vegetables and all of these micronutrients they were tracking. That helped prevent diseases in these family members. And they also noted that they consumed significantly less ultra-processed foods, namely chips and soda. And of course, I'm just like, why don't people know this? This is fascinating. And that was the catalyst to starting this project. But what really did it for me were a couple of other studies. One of them was published in JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association, and one was published in Pediatrics. And so looking at outcomes for our kids, specifically when eating with their family. What the researchers found, and this was that minimum effective dose, 3 meals a week, at least 3 or more, could be more.

Eating 3 meals a week together?

Yes.

Okay.

Eating 3 meals a week together, kids eating with at least one parent 3 meals a week led to significantly less development of obesity in those kids and less development of eating disorders in those kids. And then tie that in with And this was what hit me the hardest. And I was like, "I have to talk about this." Because even with that data, I'm just like, "Okay, does that apply? What if you're in a low-income environment? What if you don't have good food quality? Does all that stuff matter?" And one of the most fascinating studies was tracking minority kids generally in the construct of a low-income environment, which is where I come from. And they found that eating together with the kids, it could be any meal, breakfast, lunch, or dinner, 4 meals a week, these children ate significantly higher amounts of fruits and vegetables. It was 5 servings of fruits and vegetables each day, at least 5 days a week, and significantly less ultra-processed foods, chips and soda specifically they named. But here's what they noted as well. When the TV was never or rarely on, there was some protective mechanism happening.

The TV?

There was some protective mechanism happening when people were eating together with their kids. And we're gonna talk about, of course, today, the behind the scenes, like why is it leading to these beneficial health outcomes? But there's this huge shift that's happening in our culture right now where we're moving away from that. And I would put this on the endangered species list because according to those Harvard researchers, only about 30% of families eat together. On a regular basis. Now, defining what that regular basis is for them and their data, I don't know, but I would imagine it's 4 to 5 meals a week. But the minimum effective doses I noted was 3 meals a week.

3 meals a week is pretty doable. I don't get the TV piece. You mean when you're watching TV during—

During meals, right? So when TV was never or rarely on during family meals. So even during watching TV, there's marketing for processed foods.

Okay.

Right? And so they noted that that had a particular impact on the consumption of processed foods. Foods.

Well, you may have kind of sort of ruined— like, once a month we do family dinner movie theater where we'll choose either a documentary that we've really been wanting to watch or a movie, and we spread like towels on the floor of the living room and we go downstairs to our TV that's rarely ever watched anyways and isn't in the dining room, and we watch TV together and, and eat. But it doesn't have commercials because it's usually a movie, so, so we're safe if we're not seeing processed food commercials.

Just last night My youngest son and my wife and I watched "The Adam Project" together while having dinner. All right. And, shout out to Ryan Reynolds, it's a pretty good family movie. But, it doesn't take away from those moments. That's a part of our culture as well, movie night and watching the game with family and friends and things like that. But, when we're replacing that because that's what's happened is our devices can be divisive really, they can divide us even more so. And so, we've gone from eating together as a species, we evolved doing this. And, I had a recent experience of going to Hawaii for the first time and taking my family with me. And, my wife went to sign us up to do the luau to watch this presentation or whatever, but I'm looking at it through a different lens because I'd just written this book. And, I'm watching this on display. There's, of course, the procurement of the food, which would've happened as a tribe. Everybody has their roles to play, the preparation of the food, the serving of the food.

Mm-hmm. Hunting the pig out in the forest.

Right, and they coming in with the wrap as if they just did that, right? But within that though, there's this element of celebration. Yeah. There's this element of storytelling, and this is how we pass down tradition. Prior to the advent of books, it was through story. And through song and through celebration. And this was a part of our kind of tribal construct. And we kind of evolved or devolved, however you want to look at it, from that to eventually we have communities and neighborhoods. But usually we still had extended family in close proximity, but we moved further and further into neighborhoods. And now a lot of folks don't live near family. And from that, now within our own household with our nuclear family, often people are very divided because everybody's in front of a device.

Yeah, or they're like ships passing in the night because one kid's got basketball practice and somebody's at soccer and mom's gone to yoga or whatever, and you know, you just don't find the time for the dinner.

Exactly. You know, we got so much going on, but my question was, what's going on? All the stuff we have going on, is that preventing or taking away something that's been protecting our health as a species? And so, let's talk a little bit about what was going on. Like, why do you see these beneficial health outcomes? And by the way, another study looked at IBM workers, so people working in tech, and they tracked some of their just kind of objective measurements, but also subjective measurements of stress. All right. So, what they found was that their work stress was, and to put a term on it, kind of metabolized. Better when they were able to make it home consistently to have family dinners. So, regardless of how high stress was at work, having dinners with their family consistently helped them to— their work morale stayed high, productivity, stress stayed negligible.

And this wasn't because all the booze they were having at the family dinner table. Not necessarily.

But what they found was that once work obligations or other things cut into their ability to "make it home for dinner," work morale began to go down, their ability to metabolize stress. So their stress levels, even though prior with stress levels being high at work, they were still okay being able to have dinner with their families. That no longer was the case. They weren't handling stress very well. And so the question is, what is it about eating with friends and family that is protective for our health? First and foremost, well, let's just look, take a meta perspective. When we are in our, in our modern society, as you know, this system is a little bit— it's largely kind of binary, you know. If you think about the sympathetic nervous system and parasympathetic, everybody's talking about the fight or flight, right? We're in fight or flight sympathetic, but we need that. It's an important part of being human.

Yeah, you know, it's part of the excitement of life. It's, it's like, uh, whatever, heart rate variability. People are constantly measuring that and looking at the readiness score. That's not indicative of like a really high level of parasympathetic and low sympathetic. That it gets balanced between the two.

Yes, exactly. That's the key. But some of these things can get villainized, right? Even cortisol becomes this like cortisol's causing me to— I can't lose weight. Cortisol's messing up my—

You'd be dead without cortisol.

Exactly. You need cortisol. You need it. Cortisol, my dog is lost now because of cortisol. But cortisol is like even just to build thyroid hormone, cortisol is involved in so many beneficial things. But, When this is out of balance, it can be problematic for all those things, including losing your dog apparently. But at the end of the day, it's being able to— we would naturally have these ebbs and flows where we shift over to that parasympathetic, which the nickname for that one is rest and digest. Rest and digest. This is key for this family food element because what some of the coolest data is indicating is that When we are in that parasympathetic state and eating food, our bodies, our immune system, our ability to assimilate nutrients, all these things are being influenced when we're with friends and family. Now, to use this intelligently, a lot of us, I happened upon it on accident, but to proactively know, like, I'm going to, my body's better associating with the food that I'm eating when I'm with people that I care about. So we see this shift over from the sympathetic to the parasympathetic, improvements in assimilation, digestion, elimination, but also we see a shift in hormones, right? Humans do, especially women, do oxytocin really well, all right? Oxytocin is being talked about a lot now, as you know, and it's referred to as the cuddle hormone or love hormone. But we produce oxytocin when we're around people that we care about, in particular, close proximity. So hugs are great for releasing oxytocin. But as I said, women tend to produce more oxytocin being around other women, surprisingly, or maybe not so surprisingly. And— but this is something that we all have access to. Our bodies automatically do it because the people that we love and that we care about tends to relax us, tends to make us feel better being around them. Hmm. And so what's so fascinating about oxytocin in this context is that it appears to neutralize the activity of cortisol. Like if it's kind of running rampant and it's just, you're running hot, it tends to kind of neutralize things, bring you back into balance. And it's just very powerful. But are we using it? Because a lot of times we're in that fight or flight all day, And then we're not, as Kelly Starrett would talk about, we're very good at going 0 to 100, but we're not good at downregulating, going 100 to 0.

And so it's kind of like— Working out but not working in.

Exactly. But it's kind of like a hack, a biohack to be able to like, let me proactively get around people that I love because your chemistry changes. And the bottom line piece of this and a big walk away for everybody today is that All of our thoughts create chemistry in our bodies, whether we're conscious or unconscious. It's immediately altering what our body's producing— hormones, neurotransmitters, different enzymes, whatever the case might be. And so even living in that state with these chronically stressful thoughts, there's something that's beyond our conscious awareness when we get around people that care about us and that we care about that helps to nullify those things or better yet, I used the word earlier, of metabolizing those things. And so those are a couple of the reasons behind the scenes of why we see these better health outcomes. But one other one, and we could talk about more if you want to, but one other one is just a psychological piece, all right? Especially today when there's so many things vying for our attention, and in particular with our kids and their exposure to things like social media, and feeling, we were never meant, we're not designed to care about maybe what 100 people think, maybe in our tribe, let alone 1,000 or 10,000 or a million people.

Dunbar's number, something like that, the community that we're equipped from an ancestral standpoint to be able to communicate with on a regular basis and get meaning from.

Isn't it? I think it's like less than—

It's 125, something like that.

Yeah, I was gonna say, something like that. But then after that, things start going haywire. We start having problems.

Saying I can't keep in touch with all 5,000 of my Facebook friends. "Right." "Yeah." "And I accept that friend request 'cause 49999 happened 'cause I pissed somebody off, so I gotta refill the bucket with the extra one." Even with that, just, we don't really even know a lot of these people, but we care so much about, you know?

It's just like our system, we're not really hardwired to be able to deal with that. And so with that being said, also the ability to watch everybody else's highlights basically, because 99% of people are not posting how shitty their life is. Yeah.

All right. How bad their hair looked that morning. All right.

They're showing their highlights. And, we see that and we compare ourselves. It's just something we tend to do as a species because there's always this hierarchy thing that we've evolved with, but we're doing that and What tends to happen, as you know, we see these dramatic increases in anxiety and depression and all manner of mental health struggles, in particular with younger populations, but it's with us as well. But feeling this feeling that you're inadequate, inadequate is really the big thing. And one of our deep psychological human needs is significance, feeling like we matter. Whether that's going back to that tribal construct, we need to feel like we are contributing and we matter and we're seen. And we'll do things to try to get that experience. Giving our children the opportunity to feel seen, getting real face time with them around the construct of a family meal is one of the most valuable things you can give them for their psychology.

Oh yeah, I got teenage boys and it's pretty easy to get them to be a captive audience when there's food on the line. They'll sit down to that for sure. You know, it's interesting because I have a confession actually. It's not embarrassing, but it's vulnerable. I was staying in Santa Monica right now and I was out on a walk last night. I walked past an ice cream store. I sometimes take my sons out for ice cream. We even do one-on-one date nights, mother-son, father-son. We go off. Sometimes we get different tables at the same restaurant and we just have that one-on-one connection time that you don't get necessarily when you're a big group at the family table, but we often meet up for dessert afterwards, and 9 times out of 10, it's gelato or ice cream. So I walked past this ice cream store and I got all nostalgic, right, because I'm traveling with my family. I thought, gosh, you know, I want an ice cream cone. So I went in there and I ordered the cinnamon cookie dough pumpkin ice cream, and, uh, you know, in a waffle cone with brownie bites on top of it. And it was a little bit anticlimactic as I sat there eating my ice cream cone by myself because I wasn't with the people I loved and I wasn't making jokes, you know, and telling stupid dad puns to my kids, and I wasn't, you know, giving my wife a hug as we waited in line for the ice cream. And it's very interesting because you can take these foods that are hedonistic or highly palatable or dopaminergic, the enjoyment of them remarkably decreases. And I don't know what you think about this, or if you've come across any studies in writing this book about this, But I would not be surprised if there's a different biochemical response as well in terms of how high your blood sugar stays up or how well you digest it or even how impactful from a negative standpoint, a so-called junk food like ice cream. You know, this was the good stuff, you know, it was like natural dairy, you know, vegan ice cream, whatever. But I wouldn't be surprised if there were even health risks that you would normally experience from a bad food that you might be at a lower risk of when you're enjoying it with other people.

Yeah. I talked with Kelly about this, Kelly Starrett, and we were talking about this interesting phenomenon of essentially the best time to eat what we would consider a "bad food," but not to give morality to food, but say a fancy pants ice cream cone with all the—

The brownie bites, the chewy ones.

They're really good. All the bells and whistles. And the best time to eat that is when you're happy, is when you're in a positive state, because you have all of this positive chemistry going on in your body that just helps your body to metabolize things and interact with things, not necessarily just better, but more intelligently and efficiently. And it's not on this hyper alert versus this new phenomenon we have in our culture, what we have a name for, stress eating, right? So the worst time just looking from the perspective of your body handling that food in an efficacious way is when you're highly stressed and you don't feel good. But that's when we tend to do it.

Oh yeah, just, just imagine you, you hear about email apnea, right? People holding their breath and being in a stressed-out state for during emails. I'm guilty of this, eating lunch while I'm looking at emails, right? I, I, I know there's a different physiological response to that.

Yeah. And also just you staring into that screen, especially a tiny screen like your phone, that is inherently going to be tuning up the volume on your sympathetic nervous system. Because you being hyperfocused on a small space, you just got back from hunting. That's one of the things that, again, you have to have heightened senses. Your stress is going to be a little bit higher staring into that small space because you've got to be able to make that decision.

Every time you look at that backlit LED, your myopia kicks in, your senses are less tuned. Absolutely. Absolutely.

Yeah. And so, this is putting our nervous system in a place that is not advantageous to interacting with that food. And also, here's something I thought about when you talked about that. Sometimes we have these food experiences like having that ice cream cone with friends and family, and it is nostalgic, it's beautiful. And then, sometimes we seek that behavior when the people aren't around. Whether that's with marijuana, whether that's with alcohol, whether that's with food. We have these experiences and we link it up. Neurons that fire together wire together. And then we'll look for that behavior even though we're not getting that same, we're really looking for connection. And so really important part of this whole food equation is awareness. How do you feel? What are you getting from this experience? And also finding the enjoyment. In particular, when we're with family and friends, it's so much more than just the food, right? And so, one of the cool things is like you talked about this a little bit earlier in our conversation of your game nights, right? Family game nights. And it's just like—

Family game nights during dinner. We play almost, just to clarify, almost every family dinner we have besides the ones that are typically about once a week where we want to have a family discussion, We want to talk about something. We want a chance for our sons to discuss whatever. Most recently, it was to set aside some time to process this recent conflict that's going on in Palestine and Israel and for our sons to ask questions, for us to talk about it because these are conversations that don't organically happen during the day that you need to make space for at some point. But, besides that, about once a week, almost every night, and all of our games are covered in food particles and oils and crumbs and bread and whatever. You can almost eat off of our game cards, but we play games during dinner. 'Cause it's fantastic and it's fun and we talk in between, but we have a giant closet, 100 games, and we bust them out almost every night. My sons often go down, they'll pick 3 out, and then we decide amongst the 3 that we're gonna play. And it's a wonderful way to celebrate food together while you're playing games.

Yeah, what you're doing with that proactively is you're creating different levels or different inputs of reward. It's not just the food, right? And so you're tying this to something. And part of the struggle today is that, especially with the advent of all these ultra-processed foods, which we gotta come back and talk about what does the state actually look like with that, there's a lot of brilliant food scientists who are creating these products to target those pathways and to make us continuously, they're not looking for one-time customers. They're wanting people to be addicted to their foods. And so we can't just pull that food away and say, you know, eat this broccoli or eat this liver. It has to be replaced with something of equal or greater value, ideally, if you want to see long-term change. And so this is where eating with people that you care about, friends and family, comes into play because yes, we can eat, but we tend to eat better when we're with family and friends because of this. And I didn't mention this earlier, When you know that family dinners are Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday, subconsciously you're gonna be planning. Like, okay, what are we gonna eat? We know that I'm eating those days. What are we gonna eat? And we tend to have an idea of what that meal looks like, like a square meal in our culture, right? But when we purposefully implement cultural pieces around that meal, it makes it even more desirable and attractive so our family and friends and our kids look forward to it. That's the key. It's not like, ah, shit, I gotta eat this, you know, Cobb salad or, you know, whatever with my family, right?

And not eat McDonald's raw liver with salt on it. So it's a long story short, I should have called you up to have the ice cream cone with me. Exactly. These issues next time. Tonight I'll ring you. So how's it go down at the Stevenson's house? Like when you're having a family dinner, what's the actual scenario look like? Do you guys all meet up at the kitchen at a specific time? Do you do something special that, that's predictable each night of the week? Do the kids pitch in to cook? Like, describe to me how it actually looks.

All right, we definitely have certain preferences. All right, this is an important part. I talk about this in the book as well, you know, knowing thyself and creating a kitchen culture that you feel good about because there isn't a cookie-cutter way to do this. And so, I'm generally the morning guy. I make a lot of the breakfast stuff, make my wife's coffee for her, those kind of things. I'm in the kitchen playing music.

Don't tell my wife you make your coffee for your wife.

She calls me her barista.

She's very particular. Garçon.

She calls me garçon. And so, yeah. And, but I know the vibe that I like. And so, I'm putting on music and actually Apple just sent me my top 10, whatever I listened to this past year. It's a lot of vibey singing kind of whatever. And my youngest son actually came over to me yesterday. He's 12 and I'm just like, it was one of the coolest compliments. He was like, "Dad, you have a beautiful singing voice." I'm just like, "Oh damn, you noticed? I wasn't really paying attention you was paying attention." But anyways, but I'm in just— how would he know that? It's because I'm in the kitchen singing and dancing around or whatever, getting my vibe going. And sometimes they might not like it if I'm bumping Jodeci or whatever it is, or John Mayer, whatever it is that day. And they might be wanting to do something else, or maybe they want quiet. I don't know. But if you want this food, this the kitchen culture that I like. But towards the end of the day, 9 times out of 10, my wife is the one making dinner. And she doesn't like people being in the kitchen with her. Oh, all right. That's her solace. All right. Usually, interesting, for her, she will either talk to her mom or her sister and prepare food, or she'll put on some, dare I say, trashy show that she normally wouldn't watch, or she knows I'm not going to watch with her, Real Housewives of something. No disrespect if there's any Housewives listening, but she'll put that on and that's just the vibe that she likes. Now, we have purposefully, of course, implemented times where we invite the boys in and my daughter as well who's my oldest to learn some different skills to be included in certain things.

That's what I was wondering when your kids actually learn how to cook if there's a certain time of day when they're helping pitch in.

Yeah. We've just kind of put aside certain days when that happens. Or, she just during this time of year just got a bunch of stuff to make Christmas cookies or whatever. My son will make it with her, my youngest son. And so, all my kids know how to cook.

All right.

So, my youngest son has been preparing. He could whip up some eggs and things like that when he was maybe 6 or 7, and it's just been adding things along the way. And so, also, the thing is when kids are really young, they want to be there. But, what we tend to do, and I made this mistake and I shared this as well, and it's one of those things that if I can go back and change, I would. But, because of our busyness, when the kids ask to help, it's just like, "Not today, bud." Oh, yeah.

It takes 3 times longer to make a steak when a 10-year-old boy wants to help you. Exactly.

Especially, if you're trying to be efficient with the schedule, you got stuff to do. But, eventually, I caught myself and I'm just like I started exercising that yes muscle big time. And, it paid off because my oldest son is a fantastic cook. He can cook so many incredible things. He's one of those people, he's got a sixth sense essentially with ingredients and putting stuff together like this would go good with this, very creative. But, my youngest son is very methodical. He wants to know exactly how to do a thing, follow this, right? It's just being able to pay attention to their personalities, what inputs they need. But, to answer the question fully, my wife is generally preparing whatever the meal is going to be, something probably delicious from the "Eats Mortar" family cookbook. And, me and the boys are usually just hanging out doing something. We might be gaming, we might be playing pool, we might be doing our respective things. I might be reading a book, my son might be talking to his friends, whatever the case might be. But, we come together, we all sit down, and the first thing that we do is we go around the table and everybody shares 3 things that they're grateful for from that day. We've been doing that for years, years and years. And, a couple times we've subbed in different things like, "What did you fail at today?" And, we've shared that kind of stuff too. And, what it does is it's a unifier because sometimes we haven't talked to each other all day and we're in different vibes. And so, it's opening up that proactive communication, get the kids talking, that kind of thing, seeing where their head is at. And, one of the biggest benefits of eating together with your kids is you get to keep your finger on the pulse of their livelihood. So much of our communication is nonverbal, as you know. And so, being able to pick up on those subtle cues to catch things early before it festers into a big monster. And, I've seen it firsthand when we've moved away from having our consistent family dinners and shit happening, things that we weren't able to really pay attention to. And, we might do all this other stuff together, but it's that family dinner and that kind of connection because the dinner table is a unifier that you can miss on certain things.

Ben Greenfield: We are careful when we are looking at sports and activities and excursions and extracurriculars for sons at how many nights of the week are going to be full. Like right now they have a Wednesday night youth group, and then like every couple times a month they've got a Thursday night speech and debate. Most other evenings they are home because we value that family time that bookends the day with our family huddle at the beginning in the morning. We all meet at 7:30 AM in the family living room. We do meditation, we do prayer, we do devotions, we talk about what everybody's doing that day, And then related to my question to you about who's cooking what, we actually do dinnertime assignments in the morning. Like, hey River, you're gonna do carrot fries and dad's gonna go pull the chicken from the freezer, so that's gonna be ready for mom to spice it and put it in the oven at 6:30. And I'm going to take care of setting the table and doing beverages. And then Taryn, you're gonna like slice and toast the sourdough bread. So in the morning Like, everybody knows what they need to have ready at 7 PM. Like, that's usually our actual time. Common thread though, that's interesting that you guys have the gratitude discussions or the what failures did you have type of discussion or a systematic planned predictable conversation opener. We do a very similar thing. So my sons and I, we go through a book about every 2 weeks. I take them through a book and we reserve when we all meet in the kitchen at 7 The first thing we do is we have a 10-minute discussion about the book. What'd you learn from this chapter? I share what I learned, they share what they've learned. Mom just kind of sits in and listens because she doesn't like to read, but she learns as we talk about it. Then I play a song on the guitar, then we sit down to play games. But it's, it's systematic, it's planned. I don't know what you think about this, but I think kids thrive on some element of predictability.

We all do. Yeah, we all do. We're very cyclical creatures. Our brains are always looking for certainty and automation, and we have these circadian rhythms. And one of the most interesting— I wasn't taught this stuff in my university, my very expensive university education about how the time of day and the sequence of things influences our gene expression. And these circadian clocks, by the way, they are themselves functional genes and proteins that control the expression of other genes and proteins. Routines. This is a huge part of our reality, and our bodies are synced up to the 24-hour solar day, you know, and it's constantly— our bodies are trying to find out what time it is and what to do at this time. And so having those routines helps your body to find that balance that, that we talked a little bit about earlier. It's helping to guide our bodies so that they can heal, regenerate, and all these other things when we just tend to be pushing that gas pedal down By the way, to anchor in what we do as well, because with the family game night, we've done that many times. We'll do it after, of course, the meal typically, which I love it of doing it during. That's an awesome thing for us to try out.

It's a time hack too, admittedly. We're old fuddy-duddies. We go to bed at 9:30. So, if we're finishing up dinner around 8:30, we're not going to go have game night afterwards.

I love it. Life hack. Yeah. And so, being able to we'll play a game from time to time. But, what we've done for whatever reason, it wasn't planned, but we started a lot of family dinners, we end up freestyling, freestyle rapping. And, maybe for some reason, there's a lot of videos of us dancing after dinner. And, because we're usually playing music in the background, but that'll just organically happen. And so, The funny thing is I wasn't thinking about all the creative faculties that were taking place. They're finding ways to put words together to communicate, whether it's a story, whether it's targeting the other, like a battle, going at the other person, who's better, or complimenting the other person in more of a complimentary cypher type of thing. It's just like these things organically happened. And, this manifested in this very special moment recently where I went to New York City. I took my family with me when the book came out actually. I went to do Good Morning America. And, even more fun by far was going on this show called Sway in the morning or Sway's Universe. And, Sway was an MTV VJ. That's where a lot of people know him from, but he's got one of the longest-running most popular hip-hop shows in the world. At SiriusXM headquarters, Howard Stern had his domain of the place, and then Sway had his, right? Sway's a pretty big deal. The week before, LL Cool J was there, Missy Elliott sat in that seat, Kanye West, you name it. And I'm sitting there.

There you are with your family dinner book.

Right. But it's because One of his co-hosts listens to my show, and she's been following me for a while, and it's a big part of what he's trying to do as well, give these artists a chance to speak freely but also to empower people. And so, that's what I came there for. And so, it was phenomenal. The room was buzzing. It was amazing. But, when the artists come on there, these different hip-hop artists, they do a freestyle at the end of the show. I didn't come there for that shit, all right?

And he wasn't ready.

And Sway did not— he did not plan on that either. But it was my oldest son, when he met Sway, he literally like whispered in his ear, "My dad can freestyle." And I had no idea. I thought the interview was over. I'm just sitting back like, "Man, that was amazing," right? But the music is coming on and Sway is getting hype and it's just like, "What?" You can see my face on the video as well. I'm like, "What is going on here?" But then he passed it over to me And I did what I had to do. And I just used things from the room, just using creativity. But my family co-created that moment, and the room was just flipping out because I'm not an artist in that construct. And so, to see me perform like that, they couldn't believe it.

Oh, man. You would've put me on the spot, I would've just said something like, "Wiki wiki wiki, next question." It's interesting you talk about that because I feel the same thing about like games, for example, conflict resolution, rhetoric, math, strategic planning, logic. There's a lot that goes into so-called game theory. And, these are lessons that you learn while gathered around food celebrating food. There's obviously the elephant in the room here. I love your title, the devices. What'd you call them?

Are divisive.

Divisive devices. What do you do about that?

All right, this is of high importance today because it's just a part of our culture. It is what it is, especially with kids, teenagers. And first of all, my kids are always the last in their class to get on board with having a cell phone. And I'm a huge advocate of that. No screens until teens, I think is the terminology for it. Because there's kids at my youngest son's elementary school who have cell phones. It's just like— Yeah. But anyways, that's a whole other piece.

Every 8-year-old needs a cell phone.

Right.

You know, they got to stay in touch. All those phone calls.

Yeah. But what we do is, and I shared this really interesting study in the book of like these researchers found that just having the phone in your sightline, in your line of sight, even if it's turned over, Even if it's turned off, creates distraction in your brain. All right. And, what they found was that even having it on your person as well, or if it's in a book bag but it's still in the room, the best effects was if it's not around. Of course, it greatly diminishes when it's in your back pocket or like— not to put it on your body, by the way, but on your person or in your book bag greatly increases your presence and your ability to pay attention. But what we've done, and this has been years ago, we don't bring them to the table. And it's just kind of like this sacred space. We don't need it. We are about to hang out with each other and have a good time.

Start playing Scrabble and somebody's gotta look up whether or not that's a word in the Scrabble dictionary. I have to admit, that's the one time when a phone gets busted out at our table, somebody's like, wait, what's the rules say? And I turn on the phone. That's pretty rare. That's all right.

I would say that that's all right, but just creating a culture where no devices at the table, we're just here with each other hanging out and the device is still there. Sometimes even after dinner as that kind of reward, my son and I might go and play a video game. We might go and maybe we might go watch a show after dinner, but just having that real face time is so important. It doesn't negate all these other cool things we have access to in the world. But truly, we know that those things, when they're replacing this real face time, we're creating a lot of dysfunction and we're creating some huge, huge issues with our health as well. And so whether it's— but I'm finding a way to anchor in some kind of reward with the dinner. So this could be in food form, but you got to be careful about that, using food as a reward. Loving with food. Yeah, you've got to know the context and the personalities of people. But if I know, for example, that my youngest son, like maybe we pivoted and we're having our family dinner because he likes to know. My youngest son likes to know. He's totally down with everything. He'll be the first one there if he knows a Wednesday is family dinner, Friday, whatever it is. But if we say, oh, actually this is going on and it was just like literally an hour before dinner and we're like, we're going to do family dinner right now. And it's on a Tuesday instead, then you could see a little grumbling because he had his other plans mentally. But then, I can come in like, "Hey, do you want the Ben Greenfield specialty carrot cake for dessert or do you want these—" He would be a fool to decline. Or, "Do you want these cherry frozen yogurt pops?

What do you want for dessert?" "Oh, I like dessert." Yeah, the illusion of choice. Exactly. A wise parent.

Yeah, it's just being able to leverage that. And so, now, he's much more inclined to like, "Let me participate in this thing even though it wasn't in my plan per se." My oldest son, he's very fluid, so just flexible. Okay, this is what we're doing, so be it. But, these family dinners have given me the opportunity to pay attention to these character traits of my kids and to see their personalities. Because truly, like, you can come up in the same environment and you have— you have twins, so you have this incredible— you could see the differences in their personality. Yeah. And it's something special. We're all so unique, but being able to, to honor that and to see it, to witness it, it does something special for our kids. We need it as well. And another thing that I've seen is, like, my— in particular, my youngest son, he has his deep sense of compassion for me. He knows when I'm not good, and he'll come over and hug me. And, it's like, "How the hell do you know?" Part of these family dinners has been if we're sharing what we failed at, for example, they realize Dad's not invincible, he's not superhuman because that's what I can sometimes portray thinking from their perspective that I don't get hurt. That I can handle anything. And I do have that, I feel that in my personality. I do feel like I can do whatever needs to be done, but that does not mean that I don't suffer. That does not mean that things aren't hard for me. And so to share that, to share, to be open with them has humanized me and has created a stronger vehicle for not just their compassion for me, but for other people. And just had the parent-teacher conference with my youngest son. And, this was interesting. It's a different type of school. It's definitely more student-focused. And, the 3 teachers he has for middle school, he's in 6th grade, they all sit together and share together. And, each one is going around, they're just echoing. Literally, you get to the next guy, they're just like, "I'm just going to echo what he said." Brayden is a light in our room. He's an anchor. He brings a sense of peace and calmness. I can always count on Brayden. And, it's just like, oh, they're just going around. And also, Brayden is always there to help other people as well, make new students feel welcome. I didn't ask my kid to do none of that stuff. He's just inclined because he wants everybody to feel like they matter. But, here's the cool thing. He wrote an essay on what he feels is his great his greatest character trait. And he shared that, that, you know, he, he makes it intentional to make sure people feel included, but— and so that he wants people to be happy. And that worried me as I was reading at first because just like, is he looking at people pleasing from that lens? But he shared within that, that— but he's like, but I've got to make sure that I'm happy first. Yeah.

And I was like, oh damn, look how you got a young psychologist on your hands, young future psychologist. Look out, Sigmund Freud. You know, it's a— that, that, uh, phone study, by the way, you mentioned, I saw that one. And you don't know how many times I've had a waiter or waitress at a restaurant come up and be like, sir, you dropped your phone, because I always put it underneath my chair when I'm at a restaurant now because I know that. They always pick it up and put on the table. I can just put that back down. That's, that's where I need it to be. Uh, the, the ultra-processed foods that you brought up You know, it's obviously a problem. I don't think that's a secret. But do you have a method of dealing with that at your house when somehow the colorful crinkly package winds up in the pantry and, uh, and, and you need to navigate what you're going to do about that with your kids or at the dinner table or whatever else? Like, how do you deal with that without creating, I don't know, like fear of food or orthorexia or something like that?

Yeah. Oh, such a good question. And by the way, just a quick snapshot of what is the current state of affairs here in the United States. So the BMJ published an analysis looking at adult Americans. British Medical Journal. Yeah, the BMJ, British Medical Journal, one of our top, top 5, dead or alive. That's a rap scenario. I got it, you're freestyling. Okay. So top 5 medical journal. Wiki wiki wiki. And they uncovered that about 60% of the average American adult's diet is now made of ultra-processed. Really fake food, really, if you want to just call it what it is. So what is ultra-processed food? Let's just clarify that. Humans have been processing food for a long time. Processing food isn't the issue. When you cook a food, you're processing the food.

Yeah, mortar and pestle, there's lots of ways you can process. We do that forever.

All right. And also simple processing, right? So what we call minimally processing, pressing the oil out of olives or coconuts, making tomato sauce or spaghetti sauce with tomatoes and spices and things like that, but you could still tell where it came from. There's still proximity to something real. Ultra-processed foods, on the other hand, or when you have a field of wheat that somehow, someway becomes a bowl of Frosted Flakes or Pop-Tarts, or a field of corn becoming the ingredient for, you know, soda, or you— I gotta have my pops cereal, right?

I've never found any corn in my soda.

Yeah, there is actually.

Never mind, I mean kernels. I recently—

I was at my friend's house for his birthday, this, uh, Lewis House, and they had corn ice cream popsicles. So there was some, like, some chefs came in from Hawaii. I don't know if they're doing that in Hawaii for real, but it was like corn-flavored— it was actual corn popsicles. I'd try it. Yeah, yeah. That's the thing about you, Ben, that I respect. You'll do it at least once.

It's as good as carrot cake, but I'd try it.

And so, this is the current state of affairs where most of our food as adults is ultra-processed foods. And so, not to mention all of these newly invented synthetic additives, preservatives, and chemical food dyes. And many of these compounds now, just as each week or day goes by, are being found to have carcinogens, carcinogenic properties, or obesogens is this new kind of category that's being talked about. But these are obesity-causing agents or cancer-causing agents, one of them being glyphosate, for example. The WHO has classified it as a Group 2A carcinogen, which is probable cancer-causing agent in humans, not definitive, but that's concerning. And that's used to treat a lot of the grain products. And another one, the Environmental Working Group did analysis of the most popular grain products on US store shelves and found that 80 to 90% are contaminated with glyphosate. And, you know, again, this is what we see with these ultra-processed foods. With that being said, with our children, and this is the first major book to share this study that was published in JAMA, Journal of the American Medical Association, They tracked ultra-processed food consumption by US children for 20 years from 1999, which at that time the average child was eating 61% ultra-processed food. And up until 2018, that number was almost at 70%. All right, so the majority, vast majority of our children's diet in the United States for the average child is ultra-processed foods. And not to mention, in about a 30, 40-year time span, childhood obesity has tripled.

In our population. Not to mention, obviously, this is, this is, you know, highly debatable, but everything from early onset of cancer to increased prevalence of ADD, ADHD— there's a lot of other potential threads that you could draw there.

Yeah, we can't, we can't definitively say causality here, right? You know, the correlations are strong, right?

Very strong. I'm just saying, if your kid's walking around eating cotton candy and Cheetos, that there might be a psychological effect of that.

Maybe, yeah, just maybe. Call me crazy. So, so with this being said, this is the current state of affairs. So this is what we're dealing with. And what we need to first and foremost is to, to acknowledge and honor what is. Honor what is. Not just, not tolerance, but to, to see it and to accept it because that is the current state of affairs in our, in our society right now. There are all of these newly invented tasty, fun things to eat, whether that's the chocodiles from the Hostess factory that we talked about before, or it's that, you know, bowl of Lucky Charms, or, you know, um, some kind of fancy pants, right, different kind of ice cream equivalent of our giant cocktail sippy cup plastic glitter-filled beverages that we walk down the streets of Vegas drinking as adults.

You can just have way more of that.

Who doesn't want to eat glitter? And so, it's acknowledging what is and honoring that that's what's out here on the streets and that our kids, there's a high probability that they are going to interact with these things. If they're going to have friends, if they're going to have birthday parties, whatever. You can go and create a commune and just be off the whole thing and do everything yourself. That is an incredibly rare situation. In particular here in the United States, the reality is you're gonna be living in the world and your kid's gonna be living in the world. What we need to do is prepare them, give them a great foundation, especially when you are controlling, you know, they're not really online yet and being aware of these things. You're just giving them real food. They have a baseline of real, they're built from real sustainable raw materials. And, what's going to happen when they have those trysts later on with things that are not that good for them for their biology, they're probably not going to feel that good. And, I've seen it, I've allowed it to happen, I've witnessed it. And, it's just being there to be a direct—

So, you mean if you're not getting a bunch of, I don't know, gluten growing up, the first time that you have half a loaf of Wonder Bread, you're probably going Paint the back of the toilet seat and learn a lesson.

Or, for one example that's coming to mind is my youngest son going to a birthday party and the cake and the ice cream. And, prior to that, of course, I would have some input on what those things are, giving them a little bit of an education, but also in a very— this is not in a right or wrong, kind of way. But just letting them know, like, these things tend to do this. Yeah. And let— but letting him experience it, not up here like, you better not do that. Because I, I've— I have had that experience with my older son, for example, of like trying to micromanage things and really changing the food culture in the house. Yeah. Which can lead to rebellion. Like, you're going out here on the streets and you want to go to your friend's house so you can eat all the, the shit.

You know, and it's not just about their bodies too, by the way. I do— I do this with my kids. What's it do to the planet, right? What do CAFO feedlots do to animals? Like, there's, there's a lot more than just your body, right? Like, like, what are we doing as far as soil depletion with monocropping of agriculture? And, you know, how are we actually treating the planet Earth? How are we treating animals and how we're treating our bodies? But sometimes it's not just about what it does to your biology. I mean, there's bigger implications than that, or at least significant implications.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, you can. And it's also knowing your child, what leverage points to utilize. But rather than even with the birthday party thing, which he didn't feel that well afterwards, whatever, but I got an even closer example of this where I was speaking at an event in Mexico and it was awesome. It was like the family got to come along. It was like a week-long thing. But every night, him and his older brother would go and get churros and tacos or whatever it was. It was like— but they do this like 11 PM at night. Yeah, whatever.

Although I would have been along for the ride if they were getting those Mexican coconut popsicles. This is pretty great.

Yeah, yeah. But, you know, so they were doing this for, we'll just say, 5 days. And on the day that we're going back, they had done it the night before. We got up for early flight. My youngest son was on this 5-hour flight, miserable. Sucks on an airplane. I'm talking like I looked at his face, I couldn't even look at him. And he knew, he saw, he looked me in my eyes with his like, you know, with the Bambi eyes like, "Dad." He ended up puking and his brother's the one who helped facilitate this by the way. That little puke bag that I'd never seen anybody use before, my baby boy used it. Used it, but he didn't hit all of it in the bag. And I'm sorry that this has taken this turn in this, but his brother who helped facilitate this—

That's all right. I talked about the toilet seat before you did.

His brother who helped facilitate this had to help facilitate cleaning that up as well. And since that occasion, my youngest son has been much more judicious or cautious about eating too much. Not that he doesn't engage with a donut or a piece of cake or whatever, he's not going hard like he did in Mexico.

Some of the best lessons are learned in the trenches. Well, I mean, when it comes to alternatives, like you mentioned, to some of the so-called bad stuff or the ultra-processed stuff, check this out, folks. Sweet potato pie smoothie. I could get behind that. That sounds like the stuff I make. Buffalo chicken tacos, avocado fries, hazelnut chocolate ice cream, Smarter Snickers Bites. I love that. Quick and easy deviled eggs, pumpkin muffins, all sorts of bowls and burgers and wraps, and, and of course, a giant database of nutrition education that just scratches the surface of what Shawn talked about today. This book is, uh, it, it's really, really good because it's written from what I can tell is practical experience and The intention behind it is really good, getting families together to eat dinner. So I can get behind that.

Shawn, thanks for coming on the show. It's my honor.

Thank you. Thank you. Check out, uh, check out bengreenfieldlife.com/eatsmarter. Grab the book, you'll love it. Want free access to comprehensive show notes, my weekly roundup, cutting-edge research and articles, my top recommendations for everything that you need to hack your life and much more, visit bengreenfieldlife.com.

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