PNTV: The Happiness Diet by Tyler Graham and Drew Ramsey, MD (#328)

Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to Philosopher's Notes tv. Today we have another great book, the Happiness Diet by Tyler Graham and Drew Ramsey, M.D. the happiness diet Subtitle A nutritional prescription for a sharp brain, balanced mood and lean, energized body. Tyler Graham is the former health editor for Oprah's Magazine and now runs the health section for Details magazine. And Drew Ramsey, M.D. is a professor of psychiatry at Columbia University. He's a practicing psychiatrist who specializes in mood disorders and anxiety. The two came together. This is a great book, really well written, all about how food can affect the core aspects of our happiness. Which is our third big idea, our focus or thoughts? Ability to focus our energy and thoughts and then our mood, whether we're stable or kind of going all over the place and our energy. The book is basically broken out on those three sections packed with big ideas. A really fun look at the historical analysis of how we got to where we are. I'm excited to share some of my favorite big ideas from the Philosopher's Note. You'll notice number two is something I never thought I'd write on my chalkboard. We'll get to that in a moment. The first big idea is MAD is what they call the modern American diet. Mad. Others call it the standard American diet. But whatever you want to call it, if you're on it, you are going to be mad, as in slightly crazy, and sad, as in likely depressed. The research shows this unequivocally. If you eat a more modern American diet, you are much more likely to be depressed and have all the other issues that you don't want to have health wise and mentally than if you eat a more optimized diet. The happiness diet. In this case, there are three key aspects to the MAD diet, the modern American diet that we want to address that the book walks us through. The first is sugar. And to put it in perspective, well, I'll give you the first, give you the three, then we'll go into the detail. So. So the first is sugar and refined carbohydrates. The second, vegetable oils, veggie and seed oils. And the third, factory farmed animals. None of this stuff exists in any quantity. 100 years ago, 200, 300 years ago. Sugar, for example. 300 years ago we consumed five pounds of sugar. Thousand years ago, we didn't consume any sugar. Right. It's an incredibly recent addition to our diet. Today we consume 150 pounds of sugar on average each, every year. The guys say that this is the most significant change in the human diet since fire since fire. Right. Agricultural revolution. Nothing compared to this adding sugar to our diet and the quantity we have. Our body simply did not evolve to handle that level of sugar. We literally do not have the mechanisms to tell our brains to quit eating sugar or refined carbs, which acts very much like sugar. So we got to address that. If you want to get off the mad approach. Vegetable oils did not exist 100 years ago. It took the Industrial revolution to figure out that we could squeeze oil out of vegetable products. Right. We had olive oil for a long time, but vegetable oils in the form of soybeans and corn and safflower and sunflower and all these things and did not exist before we learned how to press them out. Very, very recently. Now, as I mentioned in Eat fat, get thin, 20% of our total calories in America on average come from soybean oil. Just soybean oil. That is literally crazy. You don't need to think very hard about that to say that's probably not a good idea. Something that did not exist in our diet 100 years ago now consists. Comprises 20% of our diet. That's truly crazy. And go through the grocery store. I was at Whole Foods the other day, picked up salad dressing, first ingredient soybean oil. Picked up another one, first ingredient soybean oil. Eats in a ton of stuff. We want to get rid of that. And we especially want to make sure we get rid of all the trans fats. The trans fats are just absolutely toxic. Look for things that say partially hydrogenated oil and quit eating them. Inflames your brain too much. The ratio of omega 3, omega 6 is off. Way too much omega 6, which we need, but not in the quantities we have now. It's inflammatory, not doing good things for your overall mood, focus and energy. And then third, factory farmed animals. These guys basically say animal fat that isn't from a factory farm is actually a really important nutrient for us. We've evolved on that and subsisted on that for a very, very long time. To demonize, that doesn't make sense. But factory farmed fat and animal products is an entirely different story. For not only the ethical and moral reasons, but they're fed a horrible, unnatural diet of grains which changes their flesh. So we're eating more Omega 6s. Again, these three primary things are what we want to deal with as we move away from the MAD to a happiness diet. Second big idea is a phrase I never thought I would write on my chalkboard here. Beaver anal gland juice. Yes, I just said beaver anal gland Juice. Ridiculous to even say that out loud. But get this. In the book, the authors have a hundred reasons why you should not eat processed food, right? So like every other page, you've got a different reason why you should not eat processed foods. The number one reason is this. They say, hey, the next time you have some processed pudding or some candies or, I don't know, some dairy products or ice cream type of products, look at the ingredients. And there's an ingredient that you'd never know was kind of gross. It's some whatever name. I don't even know what it was. But you read it and you're like, okay, whatever. They say, well, you should know that that's from beavers. Then you should probably know that it's actually beaver anal gland product. So I just added the juice to it to make sure the image comes through strongly. Beaver anal gland juice. Who thought that was a good idea to add to our diet? Is a question worth asking. And then it's actually not a rhetorical question. Because if you dig a little bit deeper into that, you'll see that the people who thought that was cool are the food scientists who are working at the super jumbo huge fake food factories. Then dig a little deeper than we learn in this book that tobacco companies own a lot of the most popular fake food companies out there. Did you know that? And I'm going to write this all down. So you've got tobacco, right? And then we want to see that tobacco company owns Kraft and Nabisco. And now it starts making sense. Now you can look at it and go, oh, well, what type of person would think that beaver anal gland juice was awesome for the diet? I'm not that surprised, actually, if I had to pick, tobacco companies would kind of show up as some organization that's not that concerned about our health and overall well being, right? And they also spend, by the way, these companies and others, $10 billion targeting kids to consume their junk food. Then we look at it and see that obesity rates have just skyrocketed since 1980, and we start to see connections here. So keep that in mind. I'm gonna write a couple other things. Apparently the FDA has actually had to think this through. And for processed foods, another reason not to eat processed foods, know that they actually have acceptable standards for rat hair that's allowed into certain processed foods. And just to make sure everyone's cool, we got to allow a certain amount of maggots into certain processed foods. Now I find all that as disgusting as you do. And the whole intention Here is quit eating the processed foods. Make the connection. This stuff is not meant for consumption. As Michael Pollan says, it's not food, it's edible food, like substances. If you want to get off of the MAD diet, we need to reduce and eliminate the processed foods. Last time I'm going to say it. Beaver anal gland juice. Not meant for human consumption, I'm pretty sure. Certainly not without you knowing that that's what you're eating. Where's the big label that says, hey, here's what it is? Third big idea, food for thought, mood and energy. So as I said, the book is structured on these three ideas. That food can be used to boost your thought ability to focus your mood, your ability to stabilize your mood and deal with life's frustrations and not go up and down and get all anxious. And then energy, you need energy if you want to meet life's challenges and optimize and actualize your pot. They give a ton of research that's been done in all the credible peer reviewed journals that demonstrate clearly this never shows increased rates of optimal living and all that good stuff. What it does consistently show is an increased risk to depression, to anxiety, to dementia, to all the other things that we do not want to experience in our lives. We want to make that connection. And they say, look, a lot of times when people want to boost their cognitive capacity, right, they go get an app and they go play puzzles or whatever, or if they're feeling a mood challenge, they go to a therapist or take medication. All of which has benefits. But they say the underlying core here is we need to see that our happiness starts at the end of our fork with the food that we eat. And as long as we're subsisting on the MAD approach, we're going to struggle. Fourth big idea is carbage. The stuff, this processed stuff is carbage, carbohydrate, garbage, carbage. In a note on Eat Fat, Get Thin, we talked about how to identify a quality carbohydrate. So there's complex carbohydrates in plants. Awesome. Then there's carbage, which is the sugar hyper processed carbohydrates that constitute most of our caloric intake these days. So you've got the 20% for soybean oil, then all the other oils, then you've got all the carbage. You have very little percentage of calories from actual food. So Mark Hyman gave us a list of things to think about in terms of finding a quality carbohydrate. Check out that for more. But now know that pizza dough, flour and bread, pasta, these things are not what we used to eat. Before the industrial revolution, all those things were stone ground. When you stone grind certain grains and all those different products, you have a refined or processed food. But it's still got its essential components that have a lot of nutrients we need. But as the industrial revolution came along and we learned how to press these grains with a iron roller, right, you squeeze out and separate all this stuff and you basically create this beautiful. They thought it was beautiful at the time. White flour, which was completely devoid of all nutrients, it became carbage. And our body did not evolve to digest that. It says, as bad for us, as the sugar is spikes, our blood sugar drops, our blood sugar switches, all the weird metabolic switches we've been talking about and leads to that madness. So eliminate the carbage. Find quality carbs. Eat food. As Michael Pollan says, not too much, mostly plants. Another one of his favorite, my favorite rules from his food rules was if it's a plant, eat it. If it was made in a plant, don't. Your great great grandmother wouldn't recognize it as food. Don't eat it. And then our fifth big idea is smiling is a result of trying. And they talk about the fact that a lot of people who attempt to change their health behaviors, their diets fail at that. There are a lot of reasons for that. But one of the main things we don't want to do is make this all or nothing. You've got to do it perfectly or you give up catastrophizing. When you fall short, they say, look, if you're still going to fast food, drive throughs a few times a week and really eating a lot of refined and processed and sugar laden foods. Take it easy. Get yourself into a new rhythm and build your habits. Don't make it all or nothing. And catastrophize. One bad meal, it doesn't matter. As we talked about in Daniel Amen's change your brain, change your life. No growth occurs in a straight line. It never goes like that. You don't just say you want to change your life and then boom, here you go. You're awesome. A rock star. It's a zigzag, right? You're on fire. Oops, you slip, then you come back and you stabilize eventually at a new level, right? But you got to be willing to embrace the zigs and the zags. Don't catastrophize. Don't make it all or nothing. As long as you're Trying. You'll be smiling. All progress is good. Honor the progress, celebrate the small wins. Keep on going. 1%. We talked about this in Conquering Perfectionism 101, the incremental optimizer. Incrementally optimizing, aggregated and compounded over time is where the magic occurs. But you got to be willing to embrace the oopses as you eliminate the carbage. Take it out, carbage out, nutrients in. Keep the food for thought in mind that food, not apps and not therapy and the medication as the primary vehicle to change our lives and change our well being. We want to start with food and then we've got, I'll say one more time, beaver, anal gland juice, rat hairs, maggots, and tobacco companies that own Kraft and Nabisco. Let's just keep that in mind as we shop in our grocery store. Let's also remember the final idea in the note is we vote with every dollar we spend. And we're not only, you know, voting and consuming food that will optimize our mood and our happiness and hopefully our families and our children, but our countries and our next generation. We needed to take responsibility for our choices and play a role in creating the life and the world that we want to create as we see what we can do to eliminate MAD in our lives and in our culture. Sugar and refined carbs, not so much. Veggie oils, not so much. And factory farmed animal products need to be eliminated. That's a quick look at the Happiness Diet. Awesome book. Highly recommend it. Look forward to the interviews and I hope you enjoyed what was your favorite big idea and how can you make that a bigger, more integrated part of your life? Get on that. Have another awesome and happy day. See you. Isn't it a bit odd 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 and 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.