Dr Paul Taylor: Why “Healthy” Foods Are Making You Fat

I'd like to ship you a free copy of my book, Habits of High Performers. If you come and join the 2026 goal setting workshop, I will ship you one of these today. The link is in the notes. Please come and join me to set up the very best 2026 you could imagine. If you've set up goals in the past or New Year's resolutions and they haven't substantiated, I'm here to help you across all the key pillars of your life, nail your goals. I'll see you there. Welcome to the Lead On Purpose podcast. I'm James Laughlin, former seven time world champion and now coach to entrepreneurs, CEOs, professional athletes all over the world. This show is for people who refuse to settle, people who are driven, people who want to grow, who know that there's so much more to learn and want to learn from the world's best. Each week I bring you insights from a special guest who's at the top of their game with whether they're in Formula one, whether they're a billionaire, whether they've started a company from scratch and take it to the top. I bring them to you so that you can rewire your mindset, take action and lead a life of purpose. Let's get started. You're in for an absolute treat. Today's special guest is Paul Taylor. Enjoy the show. Dr. Paul Taylor, a huge welcome to the Lead On Purpose podcast.

Thank you very much, James. This is going to be most confusing for your listeners, particularly when we start to speak as quickly as Norn Irish people speak when they're together.

Yeah. This is very unfortunate for some listeners, or maybe fortunate if they like our accent.

I'm talking to a fellow podcaster who's based out of Melbourne. So down the southern hemisphere here recently became Dr. Paul Taylor is just finished his second book, which we won't talk about it this time. We'll have another episode. We'll go deep on that. We're going to talk about about death by comfort today. And that got me sitting up, pausing. What on earth is this? So we're going to talk a little bit about death by comfort, but what's this? If we go into tactics right away, what's the single most damaging habit that most of us don't realize is damaging our health?

Probably eating food that we think is healthy that is actually destroying our gut microbiome, as in ultra processed foods. Upf, maybe upfs. Yeah. No, I think probably a lot of your listeners will have heard of this. You know, in research circles there's been a heap of research over the last decade and the evidence coming out about how damaging these foods are is just ridiculous.

Can we talk about for a moment for the listener, what. What kind of foods are we talking about here? Yeah.

So look, the definition of an ultra processed food, this came out of a university in Brazil.

And it's called the NOVA classification of foods. And they classify foods into four different categories. One is raw or minimally processed foods. I call them low H I low human interference foods.

I love that.

The second one, they talk about processed culinary ingredients. So things you used to cook with oils and salt and things like that. And then they have processed foods which have been around for a long period of time, but that goes through minimal processing. The sort of stuff, James, that we used to eat when we were growing up, right? Things like canned fish, canned vegetables, sourdough bread, artisan, proper artisan breads, these sorts of things that have minimal processing, fermented foods, all of those sorts of things. But the last category is ultra processed foods and drinks. So typically they are made in large steel industrial complexes. So they're made in factories, right. And they have food components in them. They typically have five or more ingredients and then have things like flavor enhancers, preservatives and emulsifiers that extend their shelf life and actually make them feel amazing in your mouth and are actually.

Start to become tap into reward pathways in the brain similar to addictive drugs. You think of Pringles. Once you pop. Once you pop, that's it. That should be the tagline for ultra processed foods and drinks. Right? Now there are subcategories of these things or there's a continuum of these things. Right. So if I was to say just with that description and ask your listeners, you know, what would some ultra processed foods be? Do you think most listeners would come up with things like all biscuits, cakes, pastries, ice cream, chocolate, all of this sort of stuff. But it also includes things like a lot of sauces that you will get in the supermarkets. Actually, the vast majority of it is in the middle aisles of the supermarkets.

Interesting.

The reasonable stuff is around the outside. That's your veg meat. Exactly. Fruit, veg meat, yogurt, milk, all of that stuff. And all this shit's in the middle, Right?

Just stay out the middle. Just avoid it. If you can stay out of the.

Middle, I'll just shop around the outside of the supermarket. Right? That's that. You know what nutrition education. Done, done and dusted next. Yes, but so, so, you know, we talked about some of those Things, but also a lot of these pre prepared meals are actually ultra processed foods and drinks. And the thing that shocks most people is the vast majority of breakfast cereals and supermarket breads are actually ultra processed foods and drinks and are, you know, they are the things that we are consuming the most of. And a supermarket loaf is a different species to an artisan sourdough loaf. It is completely different in its, its constitution and in terms of the impact that it actually has on your metabol. And a brilliant exercise on this, especially for people who have kids, is going to a supermarket, buy a standard white loaf, even a brown loaf, right. Just a standard one, and go to an artisan baker and get a proper sourdough bread that's being fermented for at least 24 hours. You cut a square, the identical size and pop them one by one in the roof of your mouth and just leave them there. That supermarket bread will be dissolved within 30 seconds to a minute. And three or four or five minutes later, that sourdough, there'll still be stuff of bits of it stuck to the roof of your mouth. Wow. Because what happens is they actually now supermarket breads, they're made in less than four hours, whereas an artisan sourdough loaf is, is fermented first and it takes at least 24, probably 36, sometimes 48 hours to make that huge. But the, the sourdough, what actually happens, the mother that they use, the fermentation process actually changes the structure of it and, and actually acts as a natural preservative. So a good sourdough loaf will, will last you at least a week. Right. Remember when we were kids and, and you bought a loaf and after four or five days it would go moldy?

Yep.

Now you can buy a supermarket loaf and 10 days later it won't be moldy.

Yeah. Well, like my little boy's gluten free, dairy free. And we get these like, I think it's Vogels or something like that. But it said gluten free, dairy free and it will never go off. I mean, we went away to South Africa for two and a half weeks and we had left some in the fridge and it was, there was not one bit of mold on it. And that's. It would have been three, three weeks since we bought it. Not one bit of mold. Unbelievable.

And that's just wrong, right? That. No, it's not, it's not food. This is the thing. And so breakfast cereals as well, Like a lot of people think that they're eating stuff that is healthy. So I'm not sure if you have it in New Zealand. Over here we have the star system on, on products. Right. And it's the biggest. Lot of bullshit. I often just reverse it. Right. And if it's got four or five stars, go, that's probably shit.

So different parameters to get those stars. And it means nothing about gut health or human health.

Absolutely. So. So. And what a lot of people don't understand about these star products is, is that they're comparing all the products within a food category. Right. So when they take breakfast cereals, they're comparing breakfast cereals against breakfast cereals. Right.

Not against apples, bananas and whole foods.

Exactly, exactly. And nutrigrain. Right. Which is the biggest selling breakfast drill in Australia. And I think it's probably right up there in New Zealand.

It is.

You look at the front of the packet and I don't know if you remember the adverts about little triathletes.

Yes, I do.

And it's all about triathlon. And on the front of the packet, high in protein, high in calcium. And I think it has four and a half stars. And they got there because they reduced their sugar content from 33 grams per 100 or 32 grams per 100 grams down to 29 grams per hundred.

That's ridiculous.

And this shit still has four or four and a half stars.

And giving this to their kids, thinking they're doing them a good turn.

Correct. And look, part of the problem here, admit I am as far away from a conspiracy theorist as you would meet. Right? Because I'm a proper hardcore scientist. But big food is more powerful than big pharma or big tobacco. You know who bought the world's biggest food companies in the 70s and 80s? Tobacco companies.

Wow.

Because they realized that their game was up and they thought, where can we go and make money? So they started buying some of the world's biggest food producers and they moved all executives and a whole heap of IP into that and started creating lobby groups. And what they did then is they pay a lot of universities to do funding that they can influence. Right. And then they lobby governments around things like the star thing. And I'll give you an example of how far this stuff goes. There's a. An investigative journalist over here called Marianne Dempesai and she exposed Dietitians Australia for taking 30 grand a year from Australian breakfast cereal manufacturers to promote their products. These are supposed to be the independent governing body around nutrition. And they are in bed with the big food producers. Terrific whole grains, like the best breakfast cereal on the Planet is the cheapest oats. Yeah, it's natural. That's what you're after, right? There's one friggin ingredient in that and it's not. So a lot of these breakfast shows they're cooked at hundreds of degrees. That breaks down the chemical structure and means that in the body even though it says it's a complex carbohydrate or it's a whole grain, the body essentially treats it like sugar. It breaks it down super super quick and it spikes your blood sugar. And you know, if I was the czar of the universe, the one thing I would change is to make sure that every kid change their breakfast composition. The vast majority, the ones who are eating and the adults who are eating breakfast cereals. A piece of toast, a glass of orange juice.

This is so good. Like so we, we've got a little nine year old boy, we haven't had breakfast cereal in our house for maybe four years. He got gluten free, we had some tummy problems, realized he was gluten free, got off all that stuff. So in the mornings now he would be having eggs, he would have some toast sometimes but more often than not it's a berry smoothie with a bit of raw butter but peanut butter. What should kids be having? Is that good or bad or.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But that, that, that is ideal. You know we tend to cycle through a few different breakfasts in our house from lots of eggs and, and I, I eat probably a slice of bread a day. But it's an artisan sourdough. Right. So we'll have eggs with sourdough with nitrate free bacon to roast tomatoes, mushrooms, you know this, it's time. But it's proper food and it's the food that we used to eat when we were kids.

Yep.

And it take but it takes time. This is the thing, right.

It's not just pouring into a bowl. Milk.

Exactly. That's the thing. Or we will have. We used to call it gym boys and gym girls breakfast when our, our kids were little. And so it's a big handful of oats, different types of nuts, different seeds, berries and full fat yogurt. And now I actually to bring up a lot of these high protein yogurts which I think are great. What you don't want is low fat. Low fat generally means high sugar.

Yes.

And just so people understand what's going on. So the typical breakfast that a lot of people are eating, especially kids, is very high in carbohydrate, relatively low fat, but really low in protein. And that is just bad juju. We need to get significant amount of protein in at breakfast. Everybody. Kids need it because they're growing, adults need it. Especially if you're post 30 because you're losing muscle mass. And once you get the my, it's north of 50 something Muscle protein synthesis reduces so you tend to really lose a lot of muscle and that is really bad. The second biggest predictor of how long you're going to live is your muscle strength.

That makes total sense. Caroline, my partner, has been for the last six months going deep on understanding muscle, what it does, brain, cognitive, long term balance, lifespan, health span. So her protein intake has went from I think something like 40 grams a day to now she's getting something like 100. And yesterday 140, 850 grams. Like yeah, way more. And I need to be doing the same thing.

Hey, James here. I wanted to take a quick moment to let you know about something. Look, I get asked to deliver keynotes and workshops for teams and companies all over the world, from London to Antarctica, from America to Australasia, from armies to small businesses to large corporates to sports teams. But I go in and deliver keynotes around the mindset of high performers, around the habits of high performers, about how we navigate change. If you would like me to come and speak to your team or speak at your conference or deliver a bespoke workshop, please get in touch with my team. Carolinejlochlan.com will be able to help. I'll also make sure that we put that in the show notes.

Yeah, yeah, especially you know, once you go past 40 and especially past 50 and, and you need to be eating more and more protein. You know, the recommended daily intakes which were set 50 or 60 years ago are just way, way, way too low. They're not 0.8 grams per kilogram of body weight. And that is, it really is not enough, especially as you get older and your ability to rebuild muscle is key. So I think something for people to understand here. You have an infinite storage capability for fat, right? You can store ridiculous amounts of fat. You just need to look around these days and you can see that you can store a shitload of carbohydrate in your body, in your liver and your muscles, right? So there's a big sink for that. We have almost no storage facility for protein. So protein is like you have a sink and the tap is turned on but there's no plug in it. So there's stuff going in there, but it's running out all the time. Here's the thing that for, for people to understand. If you don't eat any fat for a month or two, you're really going to start to struggle. Right. If you could.

With protein.

After a few days without protein, your body starts to really break down big time. You could go for 50 years without any carbohydrate whatsoever and be perfectly healthy.

Wow.

Because our body has a process called gluconeogenesis. Gluconeogenesis, where it creates glucose as much as it needs from some parts of protein and a little bit of the fat molecule. Right. And our brains actually run really well on ketone bodies. Right. If you're not having any carbohydrate at all, you shift across completely to burning fat for energy and then you'll break down a bit of fat and a chunk of protein to get enough glucose to keep you alive. Right. You know, you know when you look at glucose and you go to the doctor, you get your glucose done and it says like it's 5.1 or whatever, that's millimoles per liter. We have about a teaspoon full of glucose in our entire blood.

Wow. So really next to nothing.

And most of these, to bring the conversation back, circular. The vast majority of these ultra processed foods are based on carbohydrates because they're very, very cheap to produce, which means they're highly profitable for both the manufacturers and the supermarkets. The supermarkets get more on it. So then they position them at the place where you actually buy stuff.

Right. It makes sense. You know, I go around, see supermarkets when people are obese or maybe low socioeconomic and you look in the, in their trolleys and it's like white bread, it's like big two liters of lemonade. And it's just all the rubbish. And it's so sad to see.

It is so sad to see. And then, you know, if they start to go health conscious, they might think, well, let's not have lemonade or let's have diet Coke instead. And the recent research is saying that may actually be worse for you in terms of weight gain and your health than actually having the real thing. That's not to say the real thing is good, it's just, it's, it's just, it's a continuum of, of evil for your body.

Yeah. And this whole idea, like what we put in does have a direct impact on our gut or microbiome, but we're in control of what we put in. Most of us have a choice.

Absolutely, Absolutely. But I mean, there is a massive problem with education Particularly with lower socioeconomic people and you know just getting them to understand and it's, it's, it's more difficult to eat healthy than it is to just have these convenience foods and, and you know people even think like protein bars and things like that they're ultra processed foods. Right. You're better off with grab a handful of nuts or you know, snack on a can of tuna or whatever.

I've been boiling eggs recently just you know bring boiled eggs with me.

We do the same thing. Lots of boiled eggs in our, in our house I probably eat 20 to 30 eggs a week.

Amazing.

It's just this is as I say to people, I just like to simplify nutrition. Low hi diet, low human interference. Basically you look at a piece of food and you ask yourself has this been alive recently? Can I see that? This food has grown out of the ground, come off a bush or a tree, it's run around on two or four legs or it's swam recently and it's been minimally interfered with by humans. If the answer to that is yes, eat it, it's fine. If you're looking at a piece of food though and you're going to Mr. Krispy Kreme donut, I don't remember seeing you running around on two legs. Then it's in your treat food. Right. So I'm not saying never eat this stuff. 8020 rule is the one that we use in our house, right.

Is that 80% little zag every now and then.

Exactly. Because you know we all, we've all got to live and you know I'm a, I'm a big fan of chocolate. I have dark chocolate 85% every friggin day in life. But I like and you know all the other stuff as much as other people but I just don't eat it or I rarely eat it. Yeah. You know occasionally I'll treat myself to a carrot cake, a bit of carrot cake or a good baked cheesecake, you know those sorts of things. But the vast majority of in and our house and you know we got a 15 year old boy and a 19 year old girl who self regulate around the 8020 room.

Incredible.

And who understand that. And this is what I like to get people to understand. We have co evolved for 2 million years eating food that has been alive and it interacts with our bodies and our brains and our metabolisms in ways that we do not fully understand even yet. Right. Everybody knows about vitamins and minerals and have these because they're high in vitamins, high in minerals or high antioxidants. But what most people don't understand is, is that the average piece of fruit or vegetable has between 10 and 15,000 polyphenols and flavonoids. And what these little microchemicals do is they, they act as enzymes and cofactors for chemical reactions that are going on, thousands of them, every single second inside your body. Right. We are just a chemical factory and we actually depend on a lot of these, these foods, these polyphenols and flavonoids for our metabolism to run well. Right. And this is why, when you're not eating them, that we start to fall apart metabolically. But it doesn't happen overnight. You know, it takes, it takes years and sometimes decades for the effects to be seen. But once you see the effects, often the horse is bolted.

Yeah, it's hard to reverse that. Right?

It becomes really hard to reverse it. And the longer you wait, the harder it becomes.

Well, hopefully people listening right now are going, okay, I'm more aware right now. And I can develop habits and discipline that will help reverse it. But let's go back to the book. So death by comfort, what does it mean? Why did you write that book? What do people really need to know?

Yeah, look, it's just for me, you know, being on this earth for 50 odd years and just seeing over time the slow and steady decline in our physical and mental health and realizing that it's the comforts of modern world that are really driving it. Right.

We're an animal. We need to remember that when you take an animal out of its natural habitat, it starts to struggle. And we are out of our natural habitat right now. What do you mean by that? So we're living in thermal neutral environments, right. Where very rarely are we cold, very rarely are we over hot, because we've got heating and cooling and all of these things. And we can dig into why that's bad thing, but we also, we are an active species. I'll give you probably my favorite quote from any research journal I've read. The Journal of Applied Physiology 2012. Professor Frank Booth, legendary exercise physiologist, he was talking in this research paper about the human genome. Here's what he said. The human genome has not changed in over 45,000 years. The current human genome requires and expects us to be highly physically active for normal functioning. Dwayne didn't say optimal, he said normal. So let me give you a bit of color on that. So we have guidelines around physical activity. Right. Which are evidence based and they're pretty good. Right. And See, it pretty much the same in New Zealand, Australia, UK, United States, 150 to 300 minutes of moderate physical activity a week, or 75 to 150 minutes of vigorous or a combination of them spread over at least five sessions and incorporating at least two strength training sessions. Right. So they are minimum guidelines. But people say, well, how much did humans used to move? Well, we actually know this from a study by a bunch of Harvard researchers on the Hadza. So the Hadza are a hunter gatherer tribe who live in Tanzania in East Africa. And at the time of the study, I think it was 2016, about 90% of the food they got, they got from hunting and gathering. So they live a very traditional hunter gatherer lifestyle. Right. What they found, they put on pedometers to see how much they walked, and they put on heart rate monitors to see about the intensity of their physical activity. Right. And what they found, and then they compared it to data from smartphones and watches from 111 nations. So across 111 nations, people move on average about 5,000 steps a day.

And it varied country to country. I think it was the Chinese moved the most at about 7,000. Americans, Australians, Kiwis, Brits, all around the 5,000 mark. Right. Typically, men move a little bit more than women, males and females. But with the Hadza, they found Hadza women take on average 10 and a half thousand steps a day, had a man and boys 18 and a half thousand steps a day. But it's when they looked at the intensity of their physical activity that it got blown away. And bearing in mind that around half of Australian adults and Kiwi adults don't hit the bare minimum of 150 minutes of moderate a week. The Hadza were doing 945 minutes of combined moderate to vigorous physical activity. And every week, in terms of intensity, they were moving seven to 10 times the amount of the average Brit, Kiwi, Aussie or Yank.

That's what we need to be doing and that's why we look the way we do as a nation.

Exactly. Because now it's two things. It's the diet, it's the exercise, and then there's a few other ancillary things that play into it. And they all mix with each other. So.

The exercise thing doesn't explain the weight. Right. I want to make this very, very clear. And exercise alone is not an effective weight loss strategy. Most of weight comes from overfeeding. But when you mix overfeeding with being sedentary and lack of sleep, then you just get metabolic disaster. Then, right. But the physical activity is important in ways that surprises people. And I write extensively about this in my book. Every time you're contracting your muscles, you're releasing chemicals called myokines. These are molecules. They're signaling molecules. And 30 years ago, when I did my master's in exercise science, they taught us about Myokines. And what we knew about Myokines then was that they helped to break down fat and glucose and provide energy for muscular contraction. And then other Myokines would help the muscle, rebuild the muscle after exercise and make the muscle bigger, faster, stronger. And we know that that's true. But what we now know about Myokines is they get outside of your muscle, into your bloodstream, they go all around the body, and then they latch on to our different organs and organ systems, and they communicate. So what we now know is that myokines improve the health of your entire immune system. They improve the function of your stress response system, they improve the health of your ent gastrointestinal tract, even changing your gut microbiome into a more positive microbiome. We know that other Myokines trigger your pancreas to secrete insulin, your liver to dispose of blood glucose, which, working together, help prevent type 2 diabetes, Alzheimer's, and other forms of dementia. Myokines help to remodel your bone and your blood vessels throughout your life. Other Myokines keep your skin looking young, and in Myokines actually cross the blood brain barrier and in the brain, trigger the release of bdnf. That helps you to grow new brain cells and protects the brain cells that you have against damage. So bdnf, Brain derived neutropic, neurotropic, Neurotropic factor. Neurotropic means nerve growth, right?

Okay.

You put BDNF on cells in a petri dish, particularly neurons, they grow like crazy. It's been called miracle growth for the brain.

Wow.

We know from a combination of animal and human studies and the mechanisms that. That bdnf, the best source of it is physical activity, and it massively spikes around lactate threshold. So for the listeners, that's when you're starting to accumulate lactic acid. Okay. And people will understand this. This is that when you're working hard, exercising hard, it's that heavy feeling you get in your muscles, and it starts to make you sick. And your brain says to you, why are we doing this shit, James, we can just stop right here, right now. Right.

Without feeling. Yes.

And we all know that feeling. That is when BDNF massively spikes Right. And I think there's a good evolutionary reason for this, because when would you be running fast as a hunter gatherer?

Either when you're chasing something to get it to eat, or when you're running away from something.

Bingo. So doesn't it make sense that your brain would go, james, remember where this is? Yes, because this is where the prey is or this is where the lions are. So remember not spatial awareness. So when they do studies on rats, they throw them in water in a water maze, they show them how to get out, and then they throw them in again. And this is a test of memory. Young rats do much better than old rats because the old rats are losing their cognitive function.

Right.

Then they take the old rats and they put half of them on a running wheel, and then they throw them into the water and they do as well as the young rats after they've been on a running wheel. And then these rats have signed a form to donate their brains to science, and. And they open up their brains and boom. BDNF has spiked in the hippocampus.

Interesting. That's fascinating. So, I mean, it's a damning.

I think there's just a very strong evolutionary reason why lots of stuff would get upregulated with lactate and lactate, right? Which is what us physiologists call lactic acid lactate. We used to think lactic acid was a bad thing because that was the stuff that made your muscles not be able to work. We actually know now it's the hydrogen ion that's doing that. Lactate is a fuel source for your heart and your brain, and it's actually one of the preferred fuel sources for your heart. So it actually gets recycled and used as a fuel source. So we are very well designed for both doing and responding to physical activity, both long and slow and short, intense stuff. And it changes our metabolism. And when we don't move, we destroy our metabolism in many, many unseen ways. Right. I have to take you through the biochemistry of exercise, make your freaking head spin. Right? But that's just one thing. And then understanding then what nutrition does as well. And here's the thing that people need to understand. It's like when you diet. So what we know from the data, right, from big population studies, the worst country in the world for ultra processed food consumption is the United States. In the last study, I think it was 2016, but somebody will correct me.

57 or 58.9% of all calories consumed were ultra processed foods. American teenagers, 66% of all calories consumed by ultra processed foods in the uk. And again the data is quite old from the last survey. Almost 55% of all calories consumed by everybody whose ultra processed foods and drinks. Teenagers again 66%. Now in Australia it was 42%. But that was back in 2008. We know the world's worst consumers as in sales, United States, United Kingdom, New Zealand, Australia, Canada and Mexico. Right. So I think we could safely say over 50% of all calories consumed in those countries are ultra processed foods and drinks. Now that's a problem one because of all the shit that's in them. Right. The, the high, they are basically carbohydrate rich and a lot of that carbohydrate has been heated and broken down. The chemical structure starts to break down, which means that we turn it into sugar. Much, much quicker does that make sense than if it's something that's natural. So that's one thing. The other thing is the emulsifiers, the flavor enhancers, all of these things are damaging directly. The second thing is if half your calories are from this stuff, it is crowding out of your diet healthy foods that help your metabolism to run well and support good health. So it's actually a double whammy of you're introducing bad shit and the bad shit is crowding out good shit as well.

So it's that it's a whole cluster. Right?

It's a clusterfuck as we used to say, 100%.

It really is. Now we need to sort it out and there's listeners going now, oh my God, Paul, like I'm going to be dying any minute now. So what can people do to not die too young and actually have good health span and lifespan? You know, if it was down to movement, you know, the sedentary life, what would you recommend there? Down to just diet A good, you know, Rule 80:20. What it might be some, some helping tips for us to kind of.

Yeah, so, so, so I'll give you some tips. So try to do the 8020 run.

Yeah.

And, and shop around the outside of the supermarket. Not the inner good advice. Right. Minimal time spent in the.

A big thing is keep shit food out of the house, you know, the treat foods. And as a parent you go I'll get that for the kids. And the parents snack on it as well. It's not good for you and it's not good for your kids. It's killing your freaking kids. Right. So firstly understand that yes, this is going to be more difficult, but I'm A big fan of this as a parent and knowing what I knew as I grew up, it almost scared the shit out of me. Because you have a massive responsibility as a parent because your kids do what you do rather than what you say.

Oh, I know what, my nine year old shows that every day.

Yeah, absolutely. So they are watching you all the time. They're watching your feeding behaviors and they get a lot of those feeding behaviors from you and the movement from you they mimic, particularly when they're younger, right? All of this stuff, they're little sponges and their brain is being shaped. There's amazing amounts of neuroplasticity. So it is tough being a parent. It is a huge responsibility being a parent, right? Which means you need to step up, right? And so that means just keep less of this stuff in the house because if it's in our house, I'll eat more of it. It's so tempting.

Noodles.

Because what it does is it hijacks your brain, right? So just give a bit more depth than this and then I'll get back to recommendations. What we know there are scientists all around the world working out the bliss point of these foods. So the bliss point is a combination of fat, salt, sugar, any two of those three that in specific balances actually hijacks your brain's reward systems, right? And the chemical dopamine, that is about goal directed behavior. So when you eat at Tim Tam or Pringles or anything like that, your breeds reward pathways are going, oh my fucking God, this is amazing. Right? And some chemicals are going, this tastes lovely. Dopamine's going, where's the rest of the packet? Yeah, right? It's this more, more, more. This Moorishness that comes from, from these is because of the bliss points, right? And if you think of the foods that you overeat, they will have fat, salt, sugar, any two of those three, and sometimes all three of them, right? And when they get the combinations, right, it is like drugs for the brain, right? So I think that's really important for people to understand. And if you have a meth addict in your house, you wouldn't fucking leave meth in all the cupboards in the fridge.

Common sense, right?

Yes, exactly. So it's, it's about having the discipline when you're shopping, which means around the outside of the supermarket and don't shop hungry and don't bring your kids with you because Pastor Parr is massive, right?

It's huge. It's absolutely huge. And then it's about you need to be organized and it's about cooking your own foods. Because when you're eating out, you don't know what oils they're using.

Particularly vegetable or seed oils that have been cooked over and over again are very, very dangerous for our health. Right. And so in a lot of these fast food places or restaurants that use the cheaper oils and when they're using them over and over again, they're releasing toxic aldehydes into those oils, right? So home cooking is best. Cook extra. And then you can have that as a lunch or even as a breakfast, right? You go to Asia, they don't eat frigging breakfast cereals in Asia. They eat another meal, right? It's just breaking the fast. It's just another meal. Get away. Do you know where this comes from? You'll, you'll love the story. Breakfast cereals. The first breakfast cereal invented Kellogg's cornflakes. Right. Do you know why they invented them?

No.

They were Seven day Adventists and they thought that protein encouraged masturbation.

So they designed a low protein diet so that people are. Low protein breakfast so that people would masturbate less.

Oh, that is outstanding.

That is absolutely true.

Oh, Jesus. Wired to the moon. God, that brilliant.

Is that crazy? So, so, and then I would say for, for people try to get a significant amount of protein at breakfast, at least 30 grams.

And how do we do that? What's a quick easy way to do that?

Yeah, so quick easy ways to do that. See the high protein yogurts that are out these days. Brilliant, right. Just have, have some of that. A big chunk of high protein yogurt, whole heap of oats, nuts and seeds if you can afford them, they can be quite expensive. But nuts and go, go and buy them in bulk, right? Nuts and seeds and, and berries are a little bit of fruit in there you'll get. With a decent bowl of that, you'll easily get 25, 30 grams of protein or an omelet on a piece of sort of with avocado, right? But three or four eggs into, into there, right? Or you can even have bacon and eggs. But if you can afford it by nitrate free bacon, right. That's the sort of stuff you'd be looking for. Scrambled eggs, whack a heap of cheese in there, right?

Our grandparents would have been making us.

You know, it is eat it like your grandparents, right? A bowl of oatmeal, right. Or porridge with full fat milk in it. If you, if you're okay with dairy, then crack on with that stuff, right? That will give you a good chunk of Protein. You might need to have a little bit of extra protein on the side, but try get 30 grams of protein. So here's what happens when you eat a high carbohydrate diet. What happens is insulin spikes really quickly because the blood sugar goes up and the body has to regulate blood sugar because if it goes above certain limits, it's toxic. So it's got this very tight homeostatic mechanism around things like blood sugar, the amount of sodium in your blood, your blood pressure, all of this is tightly controlled. So it releases insulin after you get that glucose spike. Insulin opens the doors to the cells so that the glucose comes in. But when you get that big spike of blood sugar, you get the big spike of insulin and then it all rushes into the cells and your blood sugar drops below normal. Then your brain goes, james, we're starving. We've got low blood sugar. Go and get some food. So what happened when we moved away and when this whole war on fat came out? It was about carbohydrate. And the food companies loved it because the breakfast cereal seals went through the roof. Then people were having these high carbohydrate breakfasts and they were saying to nutritionists or dietitians, I'm starving by half past ten. And they would say, well, then have some snacks, right? And then you get this just bouncing around of your blood sugar all day. The best way to not have that is to have low carbohydrate and high protein and a chunk of fat in there as well. And you'll find that you're not hungry and you don't need the mid morning snack, you don't need the mid afternoon snack if you're having enough protein and fat, right? And some people are more susceptible to others in terms of their genes. If there's been a lot of diabetes and obesity in your family, you're likely reasonably carbohydrate intolerant, and you probably do a shitload better on a low carb diet, right? That's always the first thing. When I see people who are overweight, especially with a lot of weight around the middle, I go bang. That's insulin. That's a carbohydrate problem. You go low carb and eat natural foods and you'll see the weight fall off like there's no tomorrow.

How easy is that?

But it's, it's simple. But it can be hard to do because it's those carbohydrates and particularly the, the ultra processed ones that are high in the bliss point. It's just Saying to your brain, more, more, more, more, more. And if you have it in the house, you're more likely to. So the first thing is discipline around your shopping. The second one is, is time to cook foods and, and, you know, cook batches of food so you have it there. Little tips. When your kids come home from school, cut up little carrot sticks and cherry tomatoes, whatever, bit of hummus dip or whatever, and just leave that out. And, you know, the research shows you will eat the first thing that you see when you open your fridge or your cupboard. Yeah. So put the good stuff at the front. Right. And the unhealthy stuff, hide it away at the back.

And if possible, don't be stocking up on crisps and chips.

Absolutely. That's the shopping discipline that I mentioned earlier on. Right. So just, just clean your house. It's like, it's like alcohol. When I was trying to reduce my alcohol, I realized you got to have it out of the house.

We stopped drinking five and a half years ago and the only way we could do it was just don't have things in the house. Like if it's, there's a beer in the fridge, if there's a Guinness there, I'm drinking it, you know.

Yeah, that's right. Because you open the fridge to look for something else and you might not even be consciously aware of it, but your peripheral vision has seen that Guinness and that Guinness is singing to your brain.

Oh, it is.

Come and get me. To the reward pathways. And then dopamine's going, hey, dude, look over there, there's a Guinness. You know you want it and then.

You have one and then the alcohol kicks in with the. And you want another one. And it's like.

That's right.

Good.

Exactly.

The sedentary side of things just, I see that most of us are doing not nearly enough steps or movement throughout the day. What would be a good way to structure a day? If you're a busy parent, you do have a eight hour, you know, day of sitting at a desk. How can we rack those babies up?

So movement snacks are critical. Right. Is just doing movement snacks where you're getting off your arse. Set a little alarm clock every half hour. Ideally, worst case scenario, every hour. Just get off your arse and move. Do a 30 second sprint on the spot as hard as you possibly can. What do you say? You'll be blowing out your arse.

Yeah. 100% sweating.

That completely changes your metabolism. So if you sit for 30 minutes or more, there are changes in gene expression and your Blood sugar goes up, your blood pressure goes up, cerebral blood flow goes down, your cognitive function drops. So getting up every half an hour and moving, I've got kettlebells and club bells lying around my desk as a trigger way to do it. We got exercise shit all over the house, so. Good. So think about those little movement snacks of 30 seconds to 2 minutes every half an hour or worst case scenario, every hour. Just so you're firing up your metabolism again and you can accumulate a huge amount of physical activity through this, right? There's actually been research on them now and this is frigging academics, right? I've called these things movement snacks for years. Academics call it vilpa, vigorous intensity lifestyle physical activity. I'm like, for fuck sake, could you be a bit more creative?

I love that. Yeah, I'm going to remember to do my vilpas. Yeah, I love it.

So I think movement snacks are one thing, getting your kids involved in it, right? If you've got little kids, let's do a 30 second sprint and get the sillies out, right? Run around doing all of that stuff. One thing that's absolutely critical. After dinner, go out for a 20 minute walk, huh? It will completely change how your body stores glucose and, and, and how your metabolism actually runs. Try to get in the habit and ideally after every meal. You're moving after every meal, right? Or even if you do a workout and then eat a meal. When you do a workout, what happens is your cells are wide open to taking all of that stuff, right? So if you're going to have your treat stuff, do it just before or just after a workout, Right?

Right.

And marry the two. Marry the two in order to. If then if I want a treat, then I have to exercise beforehand. I have to earn the right.

I love that.

If, then, if, then stuff, right? So make this stuff contingent and it's your 8020 route and enjoy your 20%. Like really enjoy your 20. If it's chocolate, if it's ice cream, buy the best damn quality that you can afford and savor that shit, right? So this is not about, this is not about being one of these freaks. I'm certainly not like that. There are people out there with orthorexia, which is this new condition of obsessive exercising and obsessive clean eating. And it's a mental health condition, right? So the 8020 rule is the way to go and then around exercise. I did a podcast last week around really interesting study around your personality type and preference for exercise using the big five personality. So the Big five. This is the most rigorous, well researched personality or set of personality descriptors. Right. It's called the ocean, the big five. O for openness to new experience, C for conscientiousness, E for extroversion.

A for agreeableness, and N for neuroticism. Right. So it turns out conscientious people, they tend to be well organized, well structured, they tend to want to do the right thing. Turns out they exercise more. No surprise there. Right? Right. It turns out that people who are high in extroversion, like high intensity interval training, they like group stuff, they like the high energy stuff. And that's pretty obvious.

Yeah.

Neurotic people, neuroticism. A lot of people go, oh, they're neurotic. And it's like a swear word. Neuroticism is just that you are more prone to emotional responses. Right. So people who are higher in neuroticism tend to get a lot more anxiety and depression. Neurotic people do not like high intensity exercise and actually didn't even really like the lower intensity, the sort of Zone 2 stuff, which is steady state. However, in this study, this was beautifully designed. They actually benefited the most from exercise per day, particularly in reductions of stress. They use something called the Perceived Stress Scale, which I've used in my research, and it found that neurotic people, when they exercise, they were the people who had the biggest drop in their perceived stress. So they're the people who benefit the most. But the people who tend to not like exercise because it gives them uncomfortable emotions, they don't like the discomfort. So there's a very strong link between.

Discomfort tolerance and distress tolerance. So distress tolerance is how well can you handle negative emotions and discomfort is how well can you handle physical discomfort. Right. And there's a very strong relationship between.

The two of them.

Yeah. And I've always said, anxious people, the best thing that you can do to conquer your anxiety, one is breath work and the other is exercise and of increasing intensity over time. Because it's those same hormones, adrenaline and noradrenaline, that are released when you're exercising, that are released when people are anxious. They have a reduced ability to tolerate high levels of those chemicals, those stress chemicals, but they're the same chemicals that are involved with excitement. A lot of it is about your perception and it's just about getting used to it.

So we talk about desensitizing our systems and desensitizing psychologically from that.

So. And you'll probably know the best treatment for anxiety is exposure therapy. It is not Avoidance. And for me, the best thing that you can do to build that up is exposure therapy to graded exercise program. Now, the key for anybody with exercise is to try and find something that you enjoy. So if you're an extrovert, you will probably enjoy group stuff. Right? And higher intensity stuff. Like I love going to CrossFit. Right. There's a great group dynamic there and we're all working out hard and I love that. Right. Neurotic people may not like that. They might like just going and doing the cardio machines or whatever. Our smaller group stuff, rather than these big loud environments.

Yes, of course.

You know, whether it's sport, whether it's bike riding is just try and find something that you actually enjoy doing. Because consistency is key when it comes to exercise. And what they find is that people will build their tolerance over time. They will slowly increase their intensity over time. And I would say to people, if you're doing any sort of exercise program is, is just measure. Because what gets, what gets measured gets managed.

100 we got to see where the starting point is and am I progressing or am I not? Because otherwise we convince ourselves were Arnold Schwarzenegger and Linford Christie, when actually we're not measuring anything. So, Dr. Paul, I want to say a huge thanks and I'm going to say a couple of things here. One, we need to get you back on the show very soon because this should be a three hour deep dive.

You haven't even scratched the surface.

I know, I know. I can sense that. So I want to get you back on the show another couple of times before your next book comes out. But a couple of big call outs. One, everyone that's listening now that would like to live a better life, that would like a longer life, that would like to care for people around them, including if you've got kids, please go and order the book Death by Comfort. It's in the show notes. Go click it. Dr. Paul, where can people come find you if they want to follow along, listen to your work, listen to your podcast?

Yeah, so the podcast is probably the best because there's a heap of stuff like this that I talk about in the podcast and interview people. It's currently the Paul Taylor Podcast and in a couple of weeks it's going to change his name to the Hardiness Podcast.

I love it. By the time this comes out, it'll be the Hardiness Podcast.

It'll be the Hardiness Podcast then, which is gonna be my new book called the Hardiness Effect, which will probably be available for pre order the other way is Instagram, I think I'm paultaylor Biz on Instagram on my website, which is paultaylor Biz. And my website will really have, you know, it has the book, my talks, the podcast and different links and stuff like that on the website that in.

There for everyone to make it super easy. Dr. Paul, I want to say a huge thanks and to say we're stopping for now, but we need to continue this. So I'm going to get the team to be in touch because I want to go deeper on this stuff. I'm really passionate about it, as is my partner, Caroline. We're doing a lot of research over the last couple of years on what we're eating, how we're moving, getting experts on the show like yourself. So we're very, very lucky to have you here as part of the Lead On Purpose family. So you're welcome back here any day of the week.

I'd be more than happy to come back and do a deep dive into some of the other stuff we haven't even touched on yet.

No, 100%. Well, bring it on. But for now, mate, go well getting that book finished. Congrats on becoming Dr. Paul. That's a recent achievement, so it's just huge.

Cheers, mucker. Stick it out.

Thanks, my man. All the best.

Cheers.

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