17 Dec 2025 · 1 min
Brian Johnson argues that foods with long shelf lives are less healthy than fresh foods. The faster a food rots, the better it is for you. Shop the outer aisles for fresh produce, not the processed items in tubes and jars.
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You're listening to Optymyze with Brian Johnson. More wisdom in less time.
Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to another micro class. This one's on Shelf Life plus yous Life. It's inspired by clean gut and the wisdom is echoed in Michael Pollan's Food Rules. Here's the basic deal. When you are in the grocery store, right, and you veer away from these outside aisles, this is where all the fresh stuff tends to be. That's where you want to hang out the majority of your time. Let's just say you go to one of those center aisles, cruising down it, looking at something right there. And he wants you to know that the longer the shelf life of the food that you're thinking about eating, that is in a tube or a jar or a bottle or whatever, the longer the shelf life, the lower and the shorter your life is. Keep that in mind. Michael Pollan says real food rots. Real food is alive, which means it can die. If you've killed something already. Yeah, it will last forever on the shelf. It's immortal because you've used preservatives, what Alejandro Junger calls antibiotics. You might as well just be honest. They're killing life, right? They're already dead, so they're going to last forever. When you eat them, you're going to decrease your lifespan. So this isn't going to rot. The food on the shelf isn't going to rot, but you are faster if you consume it. Keep that in mind and look at what you're eating. Are you eating real food or are you eating food that never rots with weird ingredients that's baked up by some food scientist? Buy fresh foods. The faster it rots, the better it is for you. Typically remember the correlation between shelf life and your life. Have another awesome day. See ya.
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