PNTV: It Starts with Food by Dallas Hartwig & Melissa Hartwig (#331)

Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to Philosopher's Notes tv. Today we've got another great book. It starts with food by Dallas Hartwig and Melissa Hartwig. It starts with food, subtitled discover the Whole 30 and Change youe Life in Unexpected Ways. I recently interviewed Dallas Hartwig with my dear friend Pilar Gerasimo about their new podcast called the Living Experiment. Check it out. Living Experiment. Awesome stuff. In that chat I shared the fact that this book changed my life. Read it almost exactly four years ago, right before Emerson was born and literally changed my life and changed my nutritional approach. We'll talk about that a little bit more in a moment. Philosopher's Note, Bunch of big ideas. The book covers the whole 30 plan. If you haven't checked that out yet, check it out. We'll have a link below. Fascinating stuff. This is one of the premier books in the Paleo movement. Bunch of big ideas. Let's look at five of my favorites. Now we'll start with plus one or minus one. Chapter one. First words are basically their health and food philosophy is you're making a choice. With every bite you take, you're either getting more healthy or less healthy. There's nothing neutral, right? The food you're eating is either a plus one for you or it's a minus one, period. Now, when we talk about plus one or minus one in terms of Maslow, right, Who said you either step forward into growth or back into safety? Plus one or minus one, plus one or minus one. When we talk about that in general, it's pretty straightforward whether what you're going to do in this moment is a step forward or not. Now, some things are obvious. Nutrition. We all know that eating excessive amounts of hyper processed foods and sugars isn't healthy, right? So when we're faced with that glazed donut or that can of coke or whatever, most of us are pretty aware that taking that is a step back, that's not improving our health. But there are some things that are more ambiguous. There's so many different competing nutritional theories that it's not always clear whether this is a plus one or or a minus one. This book is all about helping us make that more clear. But keep that in mind. Plus one or minus one is what you're going to do in this moment. Plus or minus. Then they say, of course, sometimes even when you know what's best for you, what you believe to be best for you, you're going to choose to deliberately special occasion do something that you know isn't health giving in a nutritional sense. That's fine, celebrate the moment, experience that. But let that be the exception to the solid meal. And than the rule. Do it consciously rather than compulsively. That's our first big idea. The second big idea is what led me to experiment with the whole 30. They do a great job of sharing the fact that, look, they have their ideas and they have their science. And the reality is anything in science that says one thing, you can pretty much find another article that will say the opposite of it. But they have a lot of science that shows what makes sense. Then they have a lot of clinical results from their individuals. Tens of thousands of people now who have participated in their program. They say, okay, that's powerful science plus clinical experience and testimonials, etc. But the only thing that ultimately matters is you and your experience with what you're eating. There's bio, individuality. We all experience food differently. I have certain sensitivities that are different than yours. I have a different health background than you do. You might have been super healthy young and maybe you were born naturally breastfed and just ate a wonderful diet. You never got sick. That wasn't my story. Right. I had a totally different biographical background. We all have different genetic dispositions. We all have a different experience with the world and with food. And they say we need to run an experiment of one to figure out what truly works for you. And as I was reading this book, frankly, reluctantly, four years ago, I was vegan at the time, for nearly a decade, most of which I was very dogmatically vegangelical about it, not open at all. But Alexandra had a lot of skin issues that were unresolved. And we thought we were approaching our nutrition from a healthy perspective. At the time it was a low fat vegan diet with a lot of grains, which I no longer think is optimal. Whole other conversation. But anyway, I was very into that mode and I was very unopened. But she read this book, convinced me to read it. We read it. And what got me to make the. To even read it and then to make the switch and to jump in and do the experiment was the fact that we were naming our son Emerson after Ralph Waldo Emerson. And one of my favorite quotes from Emerson is that he says that all life is an experiment. All life is an experiment. Ralph Waldo Emerson said, the more experiments the better. And I said, well, we can't name our kid Emerson and not be willing to experiment with our lives. And there's enough data showing that what we were doing wasn't quite working. Alexander had her skin issues. I was always hungry. My mood would go up and down or my energy levels and my mood at times, my energy levels really would go up and down. And I'd get migraines once in a while. I knew there was some work that I could do on it, so I jumped in the experiment of one. And for us, we found that when we eliminated grains, I'd already eliminated dairy, so that was a non issue. But eliminating grains and then some vegetable oils, I used to worry about getting migraines. It happened like once or twice, once every month or two. Now I'm not worried about that at all. I haven't worried about that in years. And I attribute that to removing some stuff that proved to be toxic for me. That's a long winded way to say if your health is perfect and you can't optimize it at all, everyone in your family's health is just absolutely dialed in. Perfect. Keep on doing what you're doing. If not, be open to experimenting. And then don't trust anything we're talking about. Go test it in your own life. And they provide a really cool program to do that also. This is what all the great teachers do. When you look at David Ludwig in Always Hungry or Mark Hyman in Eat Fat, Get Thin or the Clean Gut guys, Alejandro Junger, they all have a phase where you eliminate all of what they call the toxic triggers is how Junger puts it, right? The things that might be triggering you, you eliminate them for a period of time. Then you systematically reintroduce them and test it and see how you feel without them and then how you feel when you add them back. It's a really, really powerful way to approach things and get clarity on what works for you. Not everybody else or whatever all the scientists or diet authors say, but what works for you. Experiment of 1/3 big idea. They talk about their good food standards. So they eliminate a lot of things on the whole food whole 30 plan, right? And they keep the foods that pass four tests. They have four things that it needs to pass. One, food needs to be good for you psychologically. We'll talk about that in a little more detail. Needs to be good for you hormonally, needs to be good for your gut and it needs to be good from an inflammation perspective. If it's not, it's eliminated, you don't do it. 1, 2, 3, 4. Psychologically, they start there because there's a lot of psychological triggers in our foods that we're not even aware of. It's kind of Subtle and sneaky. We talked about this in David Ludwig's great book, Always Hungry. David Ludwig's the MD PhD Harvard Medical School and School of Nutrition who's done research to show that fast acting carbs literally light up your brain. They put people in an FMRI after consuming fast acting carbs. In that case it was corn sugar, right? Fast acting carbs and their brain lit up their nucleus accumbens, the same center, the reward center then lights up for an alcoholic or a cocaine addict lights up after having fast acting carbs, well, guess what? That is not. Whereas it doesn't with slower acting carbs. That is not a positive psychological response from that food. Don't eat that food. You want to conquer your cravings, which is the first phase of David Ludwig's plan. You eliminate all those fast acting carbs, anything that might trigger that, and that includes stuff like pizza. That flour is fast acting. It is not healthy for you. You need to eliminate it. The bread, the pastas, all the things made with refined flour is not helping. Fast acting, negative psychological response. And then we also talk a lot about lately the fact that some foods, well, all foods affect you hormonally differently, right? A nutrient is not a nutrient. Certain metabolic switches are pulled with one food that are pulled in a different way with other foods. They talk about the fact we need to look at how the foods we're eating affect our insulin, cortisol and other hormones. Different foods affect us differently. We need to eliminate the foods that don't work. And then of course, our gut. As Alejandra Junger says, in clean gut, it all starts with the gut. 70 to 80% of your immune system is in your gut. You need to ask the question, is the food that I'm consuming making my gut healthier or not? And then finally, inflammation. All diseases can be traced back to inflammation. So are the foods you're consuming positive, anti inflammatory or inflammatory? The primary foods that are eliminated in this program that fail to pass these tests are obviously the refined flours and sugars, et cetera, but also grains, which we're going to talk more about in a moment. Dairy and vegetable and seed oils. We talked a lot about veggie and seed oils, but those are brand new in the food supply. Soybean oil was not consumed 100 years ago. The now it's 20% of our calories. You don't need to think very hard about that to say that's probably not a good idea. We evolved over thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of years without something and now it's 20% of our diet. Not a good idea, it is inflammatory, it does not help our gut, et cetera. That is a quick look at their four principles or aspects of good food. And then our fourth thing is grains. I used to eat a ton of grains, right? So you know, refined flours, everyone knows is not good for us. But whole grains, those are good for us, right? They talk about it in the book, obviously within the Paleo movement. They talk about it in depth, but they make a really good distinction, which is, and obviously they're proposing that it's toxic, it isn't a smart thing to eat. And you can look at this evolutionarily and see it was only 10,000 years ago that we introduced grains in any quantity, right? You go back pre agricultural revolution, we had a miniscule amount of grains. Now we eat 150 pounds of wheat per year alone. Again, scratch your head on that one. That doesn't make a lot of sense. But again, longer conversation on the details of that. But the point that they make, which is awesome, is, look, these grains have toxic triggers and it's going to affect different people to a different degree. Some people are really gluten sensitive, celiac disease style. Other people may not be as sensitive. And there's a spectrum of how people will be effective. But they say, look, you need to ignore all the marketing from cereal manufacturers who tell you that you need grains in order to have a healthy diet. And they say that you do not need grains. There's not one positive nutrient in grains that you can't find in vegetables and fruits. Not one. And there are a lot of potentially anti nutrients in grains. Therefore it doesn't make sense to eat grains, period. And certainly not in the quantity that we eat them. When you can get all those nutrients in vegetables and fruits. And they say, look, when you put grains on your plate, there's an opportunity cost to the other foods you could have been putting on your plate. There's no more room for some other important whole foods like vegetables and fruits. So that's a really, really compelling reason from my perspective, to significantly reduce, eliminate grains and eat vegetables. Get all of your phytonutrients, all the other nutrients you need from a ton of grains, I'm sorry, a ton of greens and veggies. Michael Pollan echoes this wisdom. He says, look, you look at the industrialization of our food production system and one of the five key things that shifted is we used to eat a ton of leaves, now we eat a ton of seeds. Grains are Seeds. They're grasses. And the seeds of grasses, that's what wheat is, that's what corn is, that's what rice is. They are the seeds of grasses. We used to eat a ton of leaves, now we eat a ton of seeds. That's not a good switch. Go back to eating leaves. My big fun goal right now these days is a pound of raw greens per day, plus a bunch of veggies. All the nutrients are there without all the potential toxic triggers. Fifth big idea is the health equation. The name of the book is it starts with Food. They say your health equation starts with food. You need to sleep, you need to exercise, but you can't out exercise a bad diet, period. You can't out train or out exercise a bad diet. And a lot of people who are working out really, really hard, trying hard to lose a certain amount of weight or whatever to optimize their their energy levels and their vitality, etc. Are training hard. But the reality is it starts with food. You can find an effortless way to reach your ideal weight without going through all the exercise at the intense levels without a lot of gains. Exercise is obviously awesome for a number of reasons, but you can't out exercise a bad diet. It starts with food. And then of course, you also need to look at the other factors. The movement that we talk about in Movement 101, which is coming out soon, the relationships, sleep, 101, etc. Etc. Etc. So remember your personal health equation. It's multifaceted, but it starts with food grains. Check in on how you're showing up, how many grains you're consuming. That's a long conversation. Check out David Perlmutter's Grain brain as well for more on that and the effects on your psychology and the inflammation created from grains from his perspective. We had our four pillars of good food, right? Our food needs to affect us positively, psychologically. It needs to, that is not trigger addictive responses and cravings, hormonally pull the right metabolic switches. Our gut health is extraordinarily important. And of course we don't want inflammation from the food we're eating. And then run the experiment, the experiment of 1. Open your life up to testing certain things and see what truly works. Move it out of the abstract theoretical into the practical to see what works for you and your family. And remember, plus one or minus one. Moment to moment to moment, we're making choices. Let's make wise ones. That's a quick look. I'm looking forward to interviewing Dallas as well. I appreciate Dallas and Melissa for their wisdom and I hope you enjoyed. Look forward to sharing more. Nutrition 101 is coming soon by the way. Very excited about that for now. Have another awesome day. See you. Isn't it a bit odd that we went from math to science to history, but somehow missed the class on how to live? For some wacky reason, optimal living 101 never made the schedule. Of course, it's too late to go back and change that and you're too busy to read full time to catch up yet. If you're like us, you're all about optimizing your life and actualizing your potential. So imagine this. Imagine having someone read the best books on optimal living and pulling out the big ideas that can truly change your life. You know those sections you asterisk and underline and mark all up. Then imagine that guy me connecting those ideas to other great books in helping you apply them to your life today. Well, that's what I do with something we call Philosopher's Notes where I break down each great book into a simple 6 page PDF, 20 minute MP3 and 10 minute Philosopher's Notes TV episode. Then imagine me taking the absolute best big ideas from those great books and sharing them with you in fun, inspiring, super practical optimal living 101 classes on stuff like purpose 101, confidence 101, business 101, meditation 101, that sort of thing. You've got a personal trainer? I'm kind of like your personal philosopher. Ancient wisdom plus Modern Science plus Common Sense plus Virtue plus Mastery plus Fun. That's what our optimized membership program is all about. We'd love to have you join us. Check us out at BrianJohnson. Me join.