How To Eat Well On A Tight Budget

Coming up on this episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy.

It's simply not true that eating well has to be really, really expensive. We live in such an exciting time.

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Hi, this is Lauren F. One of the producers of the Doctors Pharmacy podcast. Contrary to popular belief, cooking real food is often cheaper than buying fast food and comes with so many benefits, including providing nutrition to our bodies and bringing us closer to family and friends. So why do so many of us get takeout so often? In today's episode, we feature four conversations from the Doctors Pharmacy about the misconception that fast food is cheaper and faster than cooking at home. Dr. Hyman speaks with Dr. Rangan Chatterjee about his favorite ways to make cooking at home easy and affordable, with Jill Shaw about school lunches, with Vani Hari about how to read an ingredients label, and with Shawn Stevenson about up-leveling our health and relationships by cooking at home.

Let's jump in. People have been, I think, taught that cooking is difficult, that eating healthy is expensive, Is this true? And how do you address the issues of cooking and cost and feel great, lose weight?

Yeah, so there is a section on cooking and explaining just how important it is. It's that basic life skill that until recently, I'm pretty sure all families, all humans, all tribes would have had that ability. And it's something that is now optional. It can only have been optional because we have the ability to buy all these food products so quickly, so cheaply, and our lives are so busy, they're stressed out. A lot of us feel we don't have time to cook. And certainly in certain socioeconomic groups, I think we have to accept that actually it's not only it's not about money so much, it's about having the luxury of time to cook, which a lot of people will say, if I'm working two jobs, I don't have time to cook, right? So I think cost and time poverty is something we should be absolutely aware of. Now, I don't think, I think the research, and I think what we spoke about this when you came on my podcast recently, is that it's simply not true that eating well has to be really, really expensive. Of course, there are certain things that are more expensive? There's no question. Like wild salmon, for example, is probably more expensive. But, you know, a can of sardines is dirt cheap here in the UK. Do you know what I mean? There are ways that actually we can eat in a way that actually is whole food but isn't super, super expensive. And I think where you live can really influence what's available, what you consider Normal, you know, we mentioned environment before, but our friend circle, our own sort of network of tribes, that's important as well. You know, the research by Nicholas Christakis has shown that, you know, someone in your social circle is obese, you're 45% more likely to be obese. If a friend of a friend is obese, you're 25% more likely to be obese. And if it's a friend off a friend off a friend, you're 10% more likely to be obese, which just shows just how powerful these social connections are and the environment even our friends and family environment is at influencing us. But it really isn't Mark as expensive as we think or some people think it might be to eat well, but you have to be able to cook, right? That is a basic, basic skill. And if you cannot cook, that's okay, right? Recognize it and go, Learning to cook may be one of the most important things that you can learn to do, whether it's from one of your cookbooks, Mark, whether it's to go on YouTube. There is so many free and cheap resources now to teach people how to cook some basic meals. And, you know, the truth is, is that the pandemic for some people, not for everyone, but for some people, Mark, there's been a lot more time at home, a lot more time with family, and I know many people who have got into cooking during lockdowns, during these restrictions, suddenly they're not commuting for two and a half hours a day and they're actually buying cookbooks and they're learning how to cook recipes. I've got to say, Mark, you know, my new routine on a Sunday afternoon, which really has been has come in in the last year, I love nothing more than this. On a Sunday afternoon after lunch, Right? I clear out the kitchen. I'm a bit old school, I put on a CD and I've got a CD player in the kitchen. I put on one of my favorite CDs and I cook a big batch of butternut squash soup to last us for the week, right? I've got lentils in it, butternut squash, it's got leeks, onions, ginger. I'm trying to think about the price of it, but you know, lentils are dirt cheap, right? Two or three butternut squash is not that expensive. And apart from that, it's stock, leaks, onions and ginger. It's kind of like that. Not only is it not expensive, but those one and a half, two hours are some of the most enjoyable times I spend in the week. I've got some great tunes on. I'm chilling. My daughter may be there drawing on the kitchen counter. We may be chatting at the same time. And at the end of it, there's the smell, there's the feeling that you really connected with the food and then you know, oh, that's gonna go in the fridge. So in the week, if we ever need something for a meal, we can just go and heat that up. And so I'd really encourage people to find what works for them. Where is that moment in your week where you can actually find a bit of time to batch cook? If you are trying to cook something from scratch three meals a day, seven days a week, that's where it can become really challenging. Not only is that a huge cognitive load, 21 times now I need to think about what I'm going to eat in just one week, right? So batch cook, cook more. And one of the tips in the what we eat section is eat dinner for breakfast, right? It's such a simple thing that people haven't thought of before. It's like eating, you know what it's like, Mark, the breakfast foods that we often start our days with are literally setting ourselves up for hunger. Oh, it's terrible. For mood swings and if you cook a bit extra at night, heat it up in the morning, have some salmon, sweet potatoes and broccoli in the morning sometimes if that's what you have the night before. And often people find that they're just not hungry until lunchtime. There was this case I had this exactly, someone who was having what he thought was healthy granola every morning. You know, sugar-filled granola.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

He thought it was healthy. and he didn't really need to lose that much weight, but he found that his concentration was going, his focus was going, he'd get a bit shaky by 12 o'clock. And he started having, and this guy was vegetarian, right? And I remember it so well. He said, well, what shall I have? I said, well, what do you have in the evening? He says, I love roast vegetables. I said, okay, what do you have with it? He says, goat's cheese. I said, okay, why don't you start there? So the next morning he has goat's cheese with roast vegetable. and he said it got to 2:00 PM before he was even hungry. And he said, I didn't realize before that my concentration wasn't good and my energy wasn't good. It's only when I had a real food breakfast that I realized, oh wow, I've been functioning suboptimally for years. And so, you know, you know this as well as I do, Mark. I mean, there's plenty of tips on how people can do this inside the book. But, you know, I really want to encourage people to take this rounded approach. If you have tried already and focused on one area, and it's not been sustainable for you. Let me help you figure out why that is. Maybe there's something else that you've not tackled that's actually the underlying root cause.

Yeah, it's so important because we don't we just sort of stay on the surface and don't really figure it out. I just love your story of cooking. I think most of us feel so disenfranchised from it. But with COVID now it's an opportunity for us to really dig in and and try new things and to be with family and to be with the people you love and we have more time. And I think if people can reclaim their kitchens, it's really the key to weight loss. I mean, I always tell the story of this family. I worked with in South Carolina who was living on food stamps and disability in a trailer with a family of five and were massively overweight. The father was diabetic on dialysis. The mother was 100 plus pounds overweight. The son was probably 100 pounds overweight, almost diabetic at 16 years old. All I did was cook a simple meal with them, show it how fun it was to do it together. They didn't even have cutting boards and knives. I had to get them that afterwards. and they ended up losing, you know, 200 pounds together as a family in the first year. And the son actually went back and gained weight because he had to go work at Bojangles, which is the only place his kids could get work, which is a junk food or fast food restaurant in the South. And, but then he went on to lose 138 pounds, went to medical school, and it was really all through the simple Act of cooking one meal. And, you know, I think if you can imagine if we could go into everybody's home and show them how to shop and cook one simple meal, the basic cooking techniques, how to cut things, how to, I mean, they know how to peel an onion. They know how to peel garlic. They're not making salad dressing from simple olive oil and vinegar. They don't know how to stir fry. They don't know how to, I mean, it was just, it was stunning. Everything they'd had was from a box of packaged can that was either heated in a microwave in the oven or, you know, it was just, it was terrible. And I made me really realize how powerful it is just to empower people for the simple act of cooking real food at home. And it's much, much cheaper. And I gave them a guide on good food on a tight budget, which is how to eat well for less.

And they were able to do it. And within the budget that they had for five people on disability and food stamps. yeah, I mean, that's so powerful, Mark, when you stories like that. And, you know, when I, when I filmed the first series of BBC One's Doctor in the House, where I'd go and live alongside families for four to six weeks, it was a common theme. I'm gonna say in at least half of the families that I went and stayed, stayed with, they didn't know how to cook or it was something they used to do and they've lost the habits and. I remember in the first season, the lady with type 2 diabetes, I remember just again cooking them a meal, a basic meal, chopping things together. You know, these guys were used to getting McDonald's several times a week. And I remember so, you know, you mentioned cost. I can remember that so well in 2015, my first day filming ever, Mark, right? So I go to this family's house in Shrewsbury in the UK. First day I meet them and we start off because I'm going to stay at their house that night for the first night, which they didn't know. I didn't realize that. and the father said to me, he said, hey, I said to them, hey guys, I'd love to find out a little bit about what you guys eat normally. And the dad said to me, okay, well look, why don't you come along and I'll show you. So he points to his car seat. So I get into his car. We drive for 15 minutes out of town, right? One five, 15 minutes out of town. We go into a McDonald's drive-thru and this is a family of four. So husband and wife, I think the daughter, you know, the daughter and the son were like teenagers, 15, 16, 17, something like that. He ordered four double meals from McDonald's, right? And the cost was £48. So let's put that in perspective. £48. I don't know what the exchange rate is at the moment. Must be at least $65 to $70. Dollars, right? and he said we do this. And what was interesting, Marcus, as we were driving there, he said to me, hey, Doc, this is actually really embarrassing. Now, you coming with me, but this is what we do four to five times a week. So what's interesting is several things. He's spending 65, 70 on four double meals from McDonald's, right? Which, when they ate, they were hungry 30 minutes later and they were Moody afterwards. Right. But the second thing is and this speaks to what we were talking about before. It's that when he's driving there with me sitting next to him, he suddenly says, Hey doc, you know what? This is really embarrassing, right? But he only realized that with me sitting in the car next to him because if it's just him and his family, he can do it. No one's questioning him. I wasn't judging him. I wasn't questioning him. But the simple act of me being there was like a mirror to him. And he goes, Man, we do this four or five times a week, you know? And that's that's really interesting from an emotional viewpoint, isn't it? What's really going on there?

Yeah, it's so powerful. I think we don't realize how much we get into habits unconsciously and just do those things without thinking. And then it leads over the course of our life to just dramatic changes in our health and our well-being and it's, you know, what kills me, and I think you, you experience the same thing is, how close people are to feeling good. If the feel great part, I mean, the lose weight part is slow. You can do a pound a week maybe, but when it's more, depending on what you're doing, initially you might lose more. But the feel great part can happen pretty quick. And I think most people, when they start to shift their diet and they start to change their habits and they start to understand how to sort of reprogram their biology for well-being and health, that they were like, wow, I didn't know how quickly I could feel better. I didn't know I was feeling so bad till I started feeling so good. And it's so rewarding for me to see that the simple act of eating real food and regulating your life in a way that supports health has such dramatic downstream benefits on mental health, on mood, on relationships, on work, on productivity, on just parenting, on everything that you care about in your life. If you don't have your biology well regulated, your a victim to the whims of all these influences that are outside of us, which is, you know, the food we're eating is information, as we learned from our mentor, Jeff Bland. And it is a instruction manual that is telling everything in our body what to do. And, you know, we often think that our emotional states, our psychological states, or our relationship are not triggered by food, but it can be really dramatic, you know, and just to sort recap a little bit about what our friend David Promoter wrote about in his book, brainwash, where he was on the podcast. He talked about how people are eating the processed food that we're all eating now, 60 of our diet. It disconnects the frontal lobe from the limbic brain, which means the limbic brain is the reptile brain that is reacting, responding, is angry, you know, fight or flight, all that. It disconnects that from the frontal lobe, which is the adult in the brain. It's sort of the higher self.

And.

And so all of a sudden, you've got this dysregulated reptile in your brain. It's not being supervised by an adult, and it leads to all this disordered behavior. And I, I, part of me wonders if our society has become so divisive, divisive, so conflicted, and there's so much rancor because of, of our diet in part, because it, how it affects our brains and our, and our functioning.

Yeah.

I mean, it's so powerful to hear that it wouldn't, it wouldn't surprise me at all. I think it's. It's not just gonna be one thing, is it? It's all these multiple inputs coming from all the way around. And that's the whole thing about food, isn't it? It's so reductive to talk about it just in terms of calories and, you know, energy into the body and energy out, you know, as you say, food is information that's so much more than just those calories. And actually, we're doing food a disservice by just talking about it in terms of energy. It is more than that. you know, genetic expression, hormones, as you say with the brain, what it might be doing, absolutely incredible. And, you know, we mentioned emotions before, but again, it goes both ways, doesn't it? You can feel stressed and want to eat more, but actually eating the wrong kinds of food consistently can make you more hungry and cause you to overeat and can cause you to crave more of those foods. So, It kind of it feeds it on both ways. And I sort of feel that the right approach for each person is going to be slightly different. But I think, you know, we can we can absolutely agree that I don't know anybody who won't benefit from eating more real food in their diets. You know, I don't I can't see the downside of doing that.

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And enter the code Hymen. And now, let's get back to this week's episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy. We're just taking tons of pre-wrapped packaged food and feeding it to kids across America. And there's a huge, you know, in Vegas, I don't know, maybe it's not there every year, but it was there last year. There's a huge trade show. And if you're a food nutrition services worker, you are more than invited. If you're you or me, you are absolutely not invited. And you just go and you walk the aisles. We sent two folks there. Undercover. undercover. But it's just rows and rows and rows and rows of prepackaged food. There's not anything fresh, whole or real to be seen anywhere. And lots of brands that you know well, Domino's and Pepsi and all these other guys marketing school food to these programs. And so these programs buy into it super easy, right? You can make the menus sound delicious. And it's really easy to kind of take stuff out of plastic and put it in warming ovens. So, We thought, you know, and I actually thought, okay, it's probably because there's just not enough money in the subsidy, right? And so that must be what it is. This is all we can afford. Well, you know, we get into the story and we, you know, we started to do the analysis on it. It ends up you absolutely can pay kids all whole real food. You can employ more people locally in doing it. And the prepackaged stuff actually costs more than the real.

Wait, wait, so you're saying that the junk food and the processed food and the food is more expensive.

More expensive.

Real food cooked from scratch by real humans locally in the kitchens.

That's exactly right. And when we were going through this process, we brought in chefs to just help us understand it. And so Ken Oringer, who is a celebrity chef in Boston, pointed this out to us. He said, the prepackaged roast beef that they're slicing up has been processed, right? So the whole bunch of people have touched it, manipulated it, and injected it with preservatives. and salt and all kinds of other things. Sugar. And sugar, lots of sugar. That's right.

Why do you put sugar in turkey? I have no idea.

No, well, probably to hide whatever other things you're trying to hide because you cooked it so long ago. And so he said that costs way more than if we just order some roast beef and have it shipped to the schools. And so as we started to do the analysis, it was true in every case. If you buy prepackaged stuff, because It's been processed. There's so much more cost in it. And then you've got margin on it as well. So, you know, there's profit on it.

Wow. So you basically decided you were going to take this on and you created something called My Way Cafe.

Yeah.

And, you know, in the discovery of the challenges, you found a whole set of solutions, right? Because the basic mantra is, look, there's only a small amount of money that kids get for school lunch. What is it? $2 or something per lunch?

Yeah, it's a little more than that. $3.45.

$3.45.

But 20 cents of it is milk.

Okay, which by the way, we can talk about it.

Skim or flavored?

Okay, another topic we'll get to it. Because I could go on for hours about that. But you hear the mantra, look, this is the best we can do. We can't serve kids delicious real whole food because it's too expensive, it's too difficult. it's not possible. And you actually figured out that not only possible, but it's not that hard and it's totally scalable. So tell us about that process.

Yeah, well, it was fun to do it on paper, right? So if you pull out spreadsheets and you start to, you know, put in all the food costs and all the labor costs and all the transportation costs, you can show very easily in a model that you can take the same subsidy from the USDA, employ three times as many people, serve all real whole food, and the only single time investment you need to make, we it philanthropically and then the city has now taken it over, is to build these micro kitchens. They're not even, I mean, they have a combination oven and they have the right number of sinks, they have prep tables and they have a freezer and fridge in them. So they're not, nothing out of this world, but it's exactly the amount of equipment, we have rice cookers as well, for people to prepare a full buffet of hot and cold food every day for kids. looks like a rainbow. Kids love it. It smells good. It doesn't smell like heated plastic in schools anymore. It smells like real food. And so, but that process took a long time. That process took about nine months of us pushing really hard. You know, we tripped over, it was like one thing at a time, every hurdle. And you can imagine why government alone can't do this because there are so many nos that get in the way. And so we just kind of, every time someone said no, We said, why not? And we would just solve the problem. And then we'd get to the next thing. One of the earliest problems we solved was everything was coming in wrapped. So apples were wrapped in plastic, oranges were wrapped in plastic. It just made it look so unappetizing. And so the answer to the why do we have to do it this way was, well, you don't have fruit washing sinks in the kitchens. So we said, if we put a fruit washing thing in the kitchen, do we have to wrap the fruit anymore? And they said, no, you just got to wash the fruit. So it was just super simple, not expensive solution to a really big problem. Your kids weren't eating the fruit because it took five minutes to unwrap the bloody thing and it didn't look appetizing anyway. So we just had to do that with everything. And we got it done.

Instead of people saying, this is why not, and just stopping there, you were like, well, how do we fix this?

Yeah. Exactly.

And it just wasn't that hard, right? It's a sink. It's other simple things. And I think, you know, what was interesting, you shared with me once, it was a little subversive because you sort of started this program in the school. You did it in one school. You showed it could be done. You got them to not ship in the food from out of state all wrapped in plastic. And you didn't really tell anybody what you were doing. And by the time people caught on, it was sort of too late. And, these big food service providers that were cashing in on the government supports and making crappy food were out of business.

Right, that's right. It was interesting because the one thing that we caught wind of is that the food provider, so the vendor that provided all the plastic wrap food, that opportunity was up for bid. And we happened to just walk in the door as that bidding process was being set up. And so the only recommendation we made because we didn't want to have anything to do with plastic wrap food, as we said, make sure that you have the right to pull out any school. If for any reason you would want to shift the way you were feeding kids, so they wrote that into the bid. And the deal was done with that in mind. And we knew already, like if this thing works, then we're just going to be able to, you know, pull off. So, and that's what's happened, 30 schools a year. have come off of that contract and have gone on to this, you know, fully managed by the Boston Public Schools, real whole food.

So who made those decisions about the contracts? Was it the school superintendents?

Was it- the head of food services.

Who's terrific.

Yeah.

Who came from LA. She had, you know, she was trying to do a lot of things in LA in terms of shifting the food also in what they were serving there. And so she was, she was, you know, this all seemed very risky to her. And we kept saying to her, we're here to carry the risk on this. We'll make sure that we don't break anything. But it was her decision to put the language into the contract. And she really kind of made sure that we could keep pushing forward. It was because it was complicated.

Yeah, it is. I think right now we're hearing a lot of mantras about school lunch Oh, you know, we put in these nutrition guidelines that are better under the Hunger Free Kids Act that Obama passed in 2010, which improved the guidelines on what to eat more whole foods, more vegetables, et cetera, et cetera. Although they still passed potatoes, I mean, quote, french fries as a vegetable and ketchup and pizza as vegetables, which, you know, just still is hard to imagine. But now what's happening is these guidelines are being rolled back because they're saying the kids won't eat the healthy food. They throw it in the garbage. It tastes bad. It costs too much. And so they're rolling back these guidelines. And yet your model shows that that's just a bunch of nonsense.

Yeah. It's interesting. I think the one thing we did in terms of a service model, which I think changes the way kids behave around food is we, we, it's all child driven. So we, the protein is separate from the grains, is separate from the warm vegetables, is separate from all the cold fruits and vegetables, separate from the beans, Etc. And so nothing has to touch anything else, which is a big reason that kids don't like certain things. So if I, if I walk down the line, right, I might pay protein, I may take chicken and I might forego the rice because I don't like it, but maybe there's a roll that I want and I like the roasted broccoli or I don't like any of the hot vegetables, so maybe, but I do want an apple and I want some celery and I want a carrot, but I definitely don't want a salad and I do not want dressing, but I do want the hot sauce. So kids make their own meals and this is not slow. This happens, there are servers on the other side, this is all within the $3.45 who are talking with kids, kids are saying please and thank you, there's a whole conversation that's going on that wasn't happening before and they're getting exactly what they want, they walk up the line pretty gleefully, actually. And they eat it. They eat it all, 'cause they asked for it. That's what they wanted. They asked for food waste. There's no food waste. There's no food waste. And then we insert opportunities for kids to try things, right? So while they're sitting around, they're sitting at the tables eating, we might say, these are chickpeas. Would you like to try chickpeas? So we introduce new foods, tofu. Tofu's like, kids love tofu now. Love it. It's just so hard to hear. the argument that kids won't eat the food. I think the adults don't know how to present the food to the kids.

So just to recap, the economics work. You can create better food, more locally sourced, made from scratch. All you need is a little bit of an improvement in the kitchens. You hire more people, which still is within the cost structure.

Totally.

Who are happier with their jobs because they're actually cooking and making kids happy. And the kids are happy, they're not throwing out the food. And how's their health and academic performance? Have you tracked that?

It's interesting. There's a study being done right now on the behavioral health because we were hearing from so many principals and teachers that negative behavioral events had gone way down. in the schools. And so kids were just being disciplined less and teachers and principals thought it was because of the school food, the new school food. We don't have data yet. We are going to start doing some research on their physical health as well, but I can tell you one story that I tell all the time. There was a child who was diagnosed with failure to thrive and part of the school's responsibility was to try to get a half a can of a protein drink into this child every day. His name was George. And I walked in about three days after the My Way Cafe program had started in his school. And the principal was kind of teary-eyed and she said, I gotta tell you. She said, this boy, George, told me his situation. She said, he's eating every meal.

Wow.

And so I ended up meeting George a week later. And he said, do you know the people who make the food? And I said, oh, I do, yeah. And he said, how do you, how does someone make a recipe? I said, oh, it's kind of like coloring. You know, if you take a red crayon and a blue crayon and you put them together, it's purple. So that's what they do, you know? And he's like, oh, and he's like, you know, I'm pretty sure that I want to be a chef. Like, this is a kid who, a couple of weeks ago, his pediatrician came in to see what was happening. His mom wanted to be able to bring the food home so he would eat at night. I mean, this is like a game changer and. As far as I can tell, it was his relationship with one of these newly hired cafeteria service workers who just changed his mind about eating. It was mind-blowing. It still is. He's such a cute kid.

Yeah. And then maybe you haven't collected the data yet, but I think it's going to show remarkable things. When you look at kids in schools and violent disruptive behavior, it's a big issue. One in 10 kids are on ADHD medication. you know, we have to have special ed. It's an enormous problem in schools. School nurses are dishing out medications left and right. And, you know, we know from the studies that, you know, these are difficult kids. There's a 3,000 kids study which were incarcerated youth, and they basically replaced junk food with healthier options and got rid of sugar and refined foods. And in 12 months, there was a 20 1% reduction in antisocial behavior, a 25% reduction in assaults, a 75% reduction in use of restraints. And get this, Jill, there was a 100% reduction in suicides, which is basically, when you think about it, suicide is the third leading cause of death in children's age 10 to 19. And when you look at the CDC study, there was incredible study by the CDC looking at nutrition in kids and found that those kids perform far better when they're well nourished. And if they're not, they're basically having poor academic performance. They're having more absenteeism. They're having more disruptive behavior. They're less likely to problem solve, less likely to pay attention. And I think this is something we just don't understand that we're we're doing to our kids. And it's something that's completely solvable with real food. I mean, the CDC published this in a report in 2014 called Health and Academic Achievement. And it was just such a clear link between poor nutrition and poor academic performance with lower test scores, lower grades, poor cognitive function, less alertness, less attention, poor memory. And it was just amazing. And so we have the ability to change this. We just don't do it. And I think the science is there. And now what you've shown is that the possibility of scaling this is there.

I think what's really important about reading labels is that, you know, there's this kind of three question detox that I talk about at the end of Feeding youg Lies. And this is kind of how you start the process of really training your mind to eat real food. You start with the question, The first question, what are the ingredients? So you have to know kind of everything that you're eating. And so if you sit down for a meal and you don't know the ingredients, stop eating that meal and find out. And once you read the ingredients and look at them, do you understand them all? Are they real food? Are they, you know, is it an apple, cinnamon, and sea salt, or is it TBHQ, and blue number one. TBHQ, by the way, is a very popular synthetic preservative that they use in very popular products. Reese's Peanut Butter Cups comes to mind.

Oh, no, I used to love those.

Oh, yeah.

And this is actually an ingredient that negatively affects your T-cells in your bodies and promotes allergies. So, if you have an allergic just an allergy to anything. It can just increase your immune response to that allergy. And you can have a very adverse reaction. And if you eat a lot of foods with this, it's been linked to vision disturbances, stomach cancer, behavioral problems in children, all sorts of things. And this is a preservative that's in.

A lot of things.

But when you read that on a label, TBHQ, you have to ask yourself, what is that? Right? And so that comes That leads you to the second question, which is, are these ingredients nutritious? Is TBHQ nutritious?

Hell no.

Hell no, right? And so then you start to realize, why am I eating these non-nutritious ingredients and maybe I need to choose something different? And then the third question you ask yourself is, where do these ingredients come from? Are they made in a laboratory, in a chemical factory? And in the case of natural flavors that you mentioned, yes, they are. People see the word natural and think it's coming from nature. Yeah, it starts in nature, but the way they manipulate, for example, a strawberry in a laboratory, or they can manipulate some other substance that comes from nature and make it act like a strawberry or taste like a strawberry or create the 1,000,000th best part taste of something so that they can put it in a product that normally would not taste good on the shelf that lasts there for, you know, that's nine to 12 months, they could put it in a product and it would taste like a real strawberry even though it has no real strawberries in it. And that's what natural flavoring is. And so it tricks your brain into thinking you're eating real food when you're not, but your body is still wondering where the nutrition from that strawberry is coming from. So you start to crave more than you should. And so, natural flavors are one of the most evil ingredients, I believe, in our food supply because they trick your brain and they hijack your taste buds and they continue that craving so you eat more than you should. And with obesity, heart disease, and diabetes as our biggest issue in this country and cancer, we have to take control of our taste buds. And the only way to do that is not to allow the food industry to control them. And so removing natural flavors from your diet is the number one thing, I think. And it's so, even though there's many more chemicals that are much more harmful to you, almost 99% of the products on product shelves at the grocery store have natural flavors. So if you avoid natural flavor, you avoid many of those. And it's actually one of the reasons I started my company, Truvani. I just want to mention because There are so many supplement companies out there, protein powder companies and supplement companies that use these natural flavors. And I wanted to create a line of products that were made from real food and non-synthetic substances. It didn't trick your brain into craving a flavor more than it should. I want people to be able to turn off their normal mechanism to crave food. And it's one of the reasons why we're doing what we're doing.

I mean, that's so important what you're saying is because these chemicals and some of these things are not not put in there, as far as a preservative, but they're put in there deliberately to hijack our brain to make us eat more, crave more, want more. And one of those is MSG, which is got 50 different names or more. So it's hidden. And it doesn't say necessarily MSG or monosodium glutamate because people are, are hip to that. They change the name like hydrolyzed yeast protein or extract. And, and that actually is what's used in research to fatten up. rats or mice to study obesity. So they give them MSG as a way to increase their appetite, make them eat more and get fat. And I, I remember once I was talking to a nutritionist who lived in Samoa, which has the most obese population in the entire world, and most of them are diabetic. And she said, for breakfast, they had ramen noodles, sugar. They had MSG.

MSG.

Yeah, and they put Kool-Aid powder on it, which has all these artificial colors, and they put MSG powder on it. So, it's extraordinary. That's their breakfast, basically Kool-Aid, MSG, and ramen noodles.

The most powerful form of transformation is addressing the microculture, the microculture in your own household. And so, regardless of the fact that I was living in Ferguson, Missouri, I can step outside of my close environment, close proximity environment, and go and start to procure my food. Because as soon as I became aware that food mattered, that food could change the ingredients I was making my tissues out of, suddenly this farmer's market in Ferguson, the nicer part of Ferguson, by the way, for years there had been a farmer's market. and I was oblivious to the fact that it existed. And now I'm going there each week with my family. I'm saving, sometimes paying 50 less of what I'm paying at Whole Foods to try to get these same Foods, saving money, getting closer to where my food is coming from. And now again, just because of my awareness and my dedication to changing the micro culture in my household. Because as I mentioned, it wasn't just me going to the farmers market. I was taking my kids with me. I was taking my then girlfriend now wife with me. And we made this into a family event and it became a part of our culture.

But how did you, Sean, how did you like go, God, here's what kind of knife I need. Here's a pot I need. Here's how to chop an onion. Here's how to like, how do I mince garlic? Like how do I bake? How do I, I mean, just basic things. How did you go from like basically eating in, you know, factory-made food to making homemade food? And that bridge that you had to cross was like a big expanse for most people to think about who don't know the way around the kitchen.

Okay, I'm gonna share two things. Number one, that wasn't my particular story because I grew up in a household where the skill of cooking was apparent. It was there. We were oftentimes eating ultra processed food, but my mom was a great cook. My stepfather got paid to cook at high-end places. We just didn't have a lot of money. Same thing, my little brother to this day is an fantastic cook. And so I'm going to share with you one of my core memories.

That's unusual, right? That's unusual.

It is. And so I'm going to share that second thing in just a moment. But one of my core memories, and it's so interesting that this book is coming out having just lost my stepfather. But one of my core memories was, it's one of those days we open up the cabinet, there's nothing there. We open up the refrigerator, we don't have anything to eat. and this is a time when he's at the house and we're just like, we're hungry, you know? And so I go to him like, hey, you know, we're hungry. There's no food. He goes into the kitchen and there was a loaf of Texas toast that we got on the WIC program. There was government cheese, which is this block of cheese, and there was some tomato sauce in the cabinet, and there was some frozen deer sausage in the freezer that my grandfather has sent to us. and at the time, of course, I wasn't trying to eat Bambi. I didn't. I was not into that deer sausage. But what he did was he took those ingredients and he made pizza out of them. He made pizza with those ingredients. And I will never forget that I was, like, eight years old, and it stayed with me forever because, number one, and by the way, it didn't taste like Domino's. All right? It didn't taste exactly like pizza I was used to, but the fact that kids like pizza and I was eating pizza. that elicited some motivation and some joy in that moment. And the fact that I got to eat with him because we rarely ate together. And sharing that moment with him, eating pizza, eliciting, and this is a huge part, this is what the point I was trying to make in that environment, it really can incite such a high level of creativity. When people hear about my story and where I come from, there can be a lot of you know, empathy and even sympathy about that. But you don't understand the beauty that's there as well, and the capacity for creativity. And so that stuck with me my entire life to this moment. And so this is bringing back to, okay, so where do we pick up these skill sets if we don't grow up with this? And, you know, today it's really ironically, even though we have this, it's never been easier to be unhealthy. It's never been easier to be healthy. We have access to every manner of training with this with a simple YouTube video.

But what we need to do is- My mother always said, if you could read, you can cook. Meaning just follow the recipe. And, you know, it's like, if you can watch a YouTube video, you can cook, right? That part- I was like, I don't know how to make duck breast. I'm gonna like watch Gordon Ramsay make duck breast on YouTube.

And I'm like, that's okay.

Yeah, I was like, wow, wow, wow. That's like, not so hard. So I think, you know, even if you don't know how to make everything, you can learn so easily by just the tools we have available. You're right, it's never been easier to be sick or healthy.

And we've also got to take this, take the complexity out of it because it's unnecessary. And so even a lot of great recipe books, they can tend to be a little bit complex. And so what I focus on was simplicity, high quality ingredients, real food ingredients, but also tying in some of the most joyful food experiences in our culture. Like, for example, one of my favorite things growing up, and in particular when I was trying to get my health together and having this revelation prior to that, I love McDonald's breakfast, all right? And I'm not alone, all right? The sausage McMuffin. But the thing was, I oftentimes didn't get up in time to make it to breakfast. because of, you know, staying up late, playing video games, being unhealthy, all the things. But it's one of my favorite things. So my thought was, I know that these breakfast sandwiches are incredibly popular. How can I upgrade this and create a delicious breakfast sandwich using real food ingredients that's going to knock people's socks off? And that's one of my youngest son's favorite foods, by the way, favorite meals, is this breakfast sandwich that we put into the Eat Smarter Family Cookbook. I love that. and the same thing with pancakes, you know, if we're talking about, I would get the hot cakes and sausage. And so I took a foundational food that has these powerful anthocyanins that have been found to improve our, the health of our memory, you know, metabolic health in the form of sweet potatoes and make these delicious sweet potato protein pancakes.

Wow.

And, like, again, it's based on a real food deliciousness. And now we're getting all, as you said, and I remember it changed my life when you said it, Mark, that food isn't just food is information.

Right?

So now we're getting all these higher order, more intelligent compounds into our bodies and it starts to change us from the inside out. And so those are the two things, taking away the complexity, making simple recipes, number one, easy on ramp and also things that we're familiar with.

I agree. I mean, I, you know, I was a single father. I had two kids, you know, worked hard as a doctor and, and I, you know, figured out how to make simple things and the weekend might make a big pot of stew or soup. I, I learned how to make simple, quick meals. and, you know, like last night, I, as a great example, people think it's, like, gotta take the onerous and take a long time and be difficult, but it really doesn't. Like, I had a couple of friends over last night, and we didn't really have much time. And now I was busy working all day and essentially just made, like, in, like, I don't know, it was 15 minutes, maybe less. An incredible meal. I had sweet potatoes that I put in the oven before, so I planned ahead a little bit. Just put them in an hour ahead. which is you just throw them, wash them, throw them in the oven. It's like a toaster oven. It's pretty easy. I whipped together a salad. I buy like pre-washed arugula and I chopped up some tomatoes, chopped up some cucumbers. You know, I didn't bother even mixing the olive oil and vinegar. I just pour the olive oil on, pour the vinegar on, salt and pepper, toss it up. Like literally salad took three minutes. I cooked a steak on the grill five minutes and sir fried some mushrooms with garlic. And the whole thing was like a very simple meal, but it was delicious, full of medicinal compounds and, and everybody loved it. And it was, it didn't, it didn't take a lot of stress or a lot of time or a lot of effort. And I think people have to understand that, that, that the myth of, you know, cooking for yourself, that it's hard or it takes too much time or it's too expensive, is just a myth. And, and we need to reclaim our kitchens.

Exactly. And, you know, part of that myth, again, it's that cultural influence. And I was just going to share this really quickly was that one of the other things on the other side is when we're eating in isolation and we're not preparing food for, for us, even ourselves, let alone our families. And this was published in nutrition journal in 2018. And I, I was just finding, like, is there some data showing that if we're not doing this, what's going to happen? And they found that eating alone, we tend to have significantly lower diet, diet quality and lower intake of essential nutrients that help to prevent chronic diseases. you know? And so it's protective on so many different levels, eating together with people we care about, having higher quality ingredients, and taking the complexity out, taking back really control. Because America, we invented the TV dinner. We invented it. And that marketing, that culture.

I used to eat that. Salisbury steak.

Oh, the mushy steak, yes.

Swanson's. Yes, Salisbury.

I remember that.

And we had like that, we had those like TV dinner trays. It was like a special like tray that you'd open up to put on your TV tinfoil dinner on, and then you could watch TV. And this was like in the sixties, which was like so bad. It was so bad. Wow. You know, the title of your book is so important. It's like the Eat Smarter Family Cookbook, right? This is food you can cook with your family, with your kids, a hundred delicious recipes to transform your health, happiness and connection. and, you know, health, happiness and connection is not they're all not separate, right? Your health is actually determined by your social relationships and connections as we started off talking in the beginning. And so, you know, whether it's inviting friends over, whether it's, you know, family members, whether it's, you know, your spouse, whatever it is, if it's two people, that's a family dinner, right? So make sure you prioritize this. It's got to be something that's built into a value system that you have for yourself. Otherwise, it's going to be very hard for people to sort of reclaim their health and for us to get out of this, you know, disaster of chronic disease and obesity that we're seeing today in America.

I hope you enjoyed today's episode. One of the best ways you can support this podcast is by leaving us a rating and review below. Until next time, thanks for tuning in.

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