The Ultimate Healthy-Eating Hack, Making Family Dinners Fun, Getting Kids To Cook & Much More

We're very cyclical creatures. You know, our brains are always looking for certainty and automation, and we have these circadian rhythms. I wasn't taught this stuff in my very expensive university education about how the time of day and the sequence of things influences our gene expression. And these circadian clocks, by the way, they are themselves functional genes and proteins that control the expression of other genes and proteins. This is a huge part of our reality.

All right, so my guest on today's show was a guest of mine, like, eight years ago. He broke the Internet, or at least the small sector of the health podcasting Internet, when he revealed on my show how he healed up some really serious back issues using, not surgery, using, not some crazy front squat kettlebell method, but instead using nutrition, aloe vera, and stem cell precursors and all these crazy ingredients I'd never heard of, frankly, when I interviewed him. And I've learned a ton from him since. He has written an excellent book called Eat Smarter. He has the book Sleep Smarter, which is an amazing resource for amplifying your sleep quality. And he also has an extremely popular podcast called the Model Health show, which you can find wherever fine podcasts are found. But perhaps most importantly and relevant to today's discussion, he has followed up his nutrition book, Eat Smarter, with his book called Eat the Family Cookbook. Now I'm going to link to everything you guys hear about@bengreenfieldlife.com eatsmarter but his name is Sean Stephenson, and he's a man after my own heart, because this book is all about celebrating food together as a family, which is like a staple in the Greenfield house. Sean. So this book, when I read through it, I literally read it last night. So this is all just fresh on my mind. I had roast chicken and carrots and yams and sat there reading your book for a couple of hours, and it's fantastic.

First of all, thank you.

It's always fun to read a cookbook while you're eating.

So anyways, it's Eat Smart of the Family Cookbook, and there's not a lot of families, particularly in America, who I think understand the extreme importance of what might seem trite, and that's eating meals together as a family. Do you guys actually do that every day?

Not every day. I'm a big minimum effective dose guy, and I put that into the book as well. But it's something that is definitely a part of our family culture, and it has been, even prior to knowing some of the data, just because you could see some of the health outcomes and the psychological benefits as well. And for us, and this is just according to the data. And let's just go ahead and throw out a few studies on why this matters.

Go, go straight into the science. Let's do it.

Some researchers at Harvard were gathering data on family eating behaviors for years and looking at what food choices and health outcomes of the family members. And they found that families who eat together on a consistent basis, not denoting what that number was though, and I'll share that in another study. But families that eat together on a consistent basis consume significantly higher amounts of real food. Right. So it predominantly what they noted was fruits and vegetables and all of these micronutrients they were tracking and that helped prevent diseases in these family members. And they also noted that they consumed significantly less ultra processed foods, namely chips and soda. And of course, I'm just like, why don't people know this? This is fascinating. And that was the catalyst to starting this project. But what really did it for me were a couple of other studies. One of them was published in jama, the Journal of the American Medical association, and one was published in Pediatrics. And so looking at outcomes for our kids, specifically when eating with their family, what the researchers found, and this was that minimum effective dose, three meals a week, at least three or more could be more.

Eating three meals a week together.

Yes. Okay. Eating three meals a week together. Kids eating with at least one parent three meals a week led to significantly less development of obesity in those kids and less development of eating disorders in those kids. And then tie that in with. And this was what hit me the hardest. And I was like, I have to talk about this, because even with, with that data, I'm just like, okay, does that apply? What if, you know you're in a low income environment? What if you don't have good food quality? Like, does all that stuff matter? And one of the most fascinating studies was tracking minority kids generally in the construct of a low income environment, which is where I come from. And they found that eating together with the kids, it could be any meal, breakfast, lunch or dinner, four meals a week. These children ate significantly higher amounts of fruits and vegetables. It was five servings of fruits and vegetables each day, at least five days a week. And significantly less ultra processed foods, chips and soda specifically they named. But here's what they noted as well. When the TV was never or rarely on, there was some protective mechanism happening. The tv.

There was some protective mechanism happening when people were eating together with their kids. And we're going to talk about, of course today, the behind the scenes like, why is it leading to these beneficial health outcomes? But there's this huge shift that's happening in our culture right now where we're moving away from that, you know, and. And I. I would put this on the endangered species list because according to those Harvard researchers, only about 30% of families eat together on a regular basis. Now, defining what that regular basis is for them and their data, I don't know, but I would imagine it's four to five meals a week. But the minimum effective doses I noted was. Was three meals a week.

Three meals a week is pretty doable. I don't get the TV piece. You mean, like when you're watching TV during.

During meals? Right. So TV was never or rarely on during family meals. So even during watching tv, there's marketing for processed foods. Okay, right. Yeah. And so they noted that that had a particular impact on the consumption of foods.

Well, you may have kind of sort of ruined, like once a month we do family dinner, movie theater, where we'll choose either a documentary that we've really been wanting to watch or a movie. And we spread, like, towels on the floor of the living room and we go downstairs to our TV that's rarely ever watched anyways and isn't in the dining room. And we watch TV together and eat. But it doesn't have commercials because it's usually. So we're safe if we're not seeing processed food commercials.

Just last night, my youngest son and my wife and I watched the Adam Project together while having dinner. All right. And shout out to Ryan Reynolds. It's pretty good family movie.

Yeah.

But it doesn't take away from those moments. Like, that's a part of our culture as well. Movie, movie night and watching the game with family and friends and things like that. But when we're replacing that, because that's what's happened is our devices can be device divisive. Really. They can divide us even more. So. And so we've gone from eating together as a species. Like, we evolved doing this. And I had a recent experience of going to Hawaii for the first time and taking my family with me. And, you know, my wife went to, like, sign us up to do like, the. The luau. Right. To. To watch this presentation or whatever. But I'm sit. I'm looking at it through a different lens because I'd just written this book and I'm watching this on display. There's, of course, the procurement of the food. Right. Which would have happened as a tribe. Everybody has their roles to play. The preparation of the food, the serving.

Of the food, hunting the pig out in the forest. Right.

And they're coming in with the rap as if they just did that. Right. But within that though, there's this element of celebration.

Yeah.

There's this element of storytelling. And this is how we pass down tradition. Prior to the advent of books, it was through story and through song and through celebration. And this was a part of our kind of tribal construct and we kind of evolved or devolved, however you want to look at it, from that to eventually we have communities and neighborhoods, but usually we still had extended family in close proximity, but we moved further and further into neighborhoods. And now a lot of folks don't live near family. And from that now within our own household, with our nuclear family, often people are very divided because everybody's in front of a device.

Yeah. Or they're like ships passing in the night. Cuz one kid's got basketball practice and somebody's a soccer and mom's gone yoga or whatever and you know, you just don't find the time for the dinner.

Exactly. You know, we got so much going on. But my question was, what's going on? All the stuff we have going on, is that preventing or taking away something that's been protecting our health as a species? And so let's talk a little bit about what was going on. Like why do you see these beneficial health outcomes? And by the way, another study looked at IBM workers, so people working in tech, and they tracked some of their just kind of objective measurements, but also subjective measurements of stress. All right, so what they found was that their work stress was, and to put a term on it, kind of metabolized better when they were able to make it home consistently to have family dinners. Right. So regardless of how high stress was at work, having dinners with their family consistently helped them to. Their work morale stayed high. Productivity stress stayed negligible.

And this wasn't because all the booze they were having with the family dinner table.

Not necessarily.

But what they found was that once work obligations or other things cut into their ability to, quote, make it home for dinner.

Mm.

Work morale began to go down. Their ability to metabolize stress. So their stress levels, even though prior with stress levels being high at work, they were still okay being able to have dinner with their families. That no longer was the case. They weren't handling stress very well. And so the question is, what is it about eating with friends and family that is protective for our health first and foremost? Well, let's just take a meta perspective, like when we are in our modern society, as you know, this system is a little bit. It's largely kind of binary. You know, if you think about the sympathetic nervous system and parasympathetic. Everybody's talking about the fight or flight. Right. We're fight or flight sympathetic. But we need that. It's an important part of being human.

Yeah. You know, it's part of the excitement of life. It's like whatever heart rate variability. People are constantly measuring that. And looking at the readiness score, that's not indicative of like, a really high level of parasympathetic and low sympathetic. It gets balanced between the two.

Yes, exactly. That's the key, you know, but some of these things can get villainized. Right. You know, even cortisol becomes this. Like, cortisol's causing me to, you know, I can't lose weight. Cortisol's like, you know, mess it up. My.

You'd be dead without cortisol. Exactly. You need cortisol.

You need it. Cortisol. You know, my. My dog is lost now because of cortisol.

Yeah.

And. But cortisol is, like, even just to build thyroid hormone. Like, cortisol is involved in so many beneficial things. But when this is out of balance, it can be problematic for all those things, including losing your dog, apparently. But, you know, at the end of the day, it's being able to. We would. We would naturally have these ebbs and flows where we shift over to that parasympathetic, which the nickname for that one is rest and digest. Rest and digest. This is key for this family food element. Because what some of the coolest data is indicating is that when we are in that parasympathetic state and eating food, we are our bodies, our immune system, our ability to assimilate nutrients, all these things are being influenced when we're with friends and family. Now, to use this intelligently, a lot of us, I happened upon it on accident. But to proactively know, like, I'm going to. My body's better associating with the food that I'm eating when I'm with people that I care about. So we see this shift over from the sympathetic to the parasympathetic. Improvements in assimilation, digestion, elimination. But also we see a shift in hormones. Right. Humans do, especially women, do oxytocin really well. All right. Oxytocin is being talked about a lot now, as you know, and it's referred to as the cuddle hormone or love hormone. But we produce oxytocin when we're around People that we care about in particular, close proximity. Right. So hugs are great for releasing oxytocin, but as I said, women tend to produce more oxytocin being around other women. Surprisingly, or maybe not so surprisingly.

But this is something that we all have access to. Our bodies automatically do it because the people that we love and that we care about tends to relax us, tends to make us feel better being around them. And so what's so fascinating about oxytocin in this context is that it appears to neutralize the activity of cortisol. Like, if it's kind of running rampant and it's just you're running hot, it tends to kind of neutralize things, bring you back into balance, and it's just very powerful. But are we using it? Because a lot of times we're in that fight or flight all day, and then we're not. As Kelly Starrett would talk about, we're very good at going 0 to 100, but we're not good at down regulating.

Yeah.

Going 100 to 0.

Yeah. And so it's working out, but not working in.

Exactly. But it's kind of like a hack, you know, a biohack, to be able to, like, let me proactively get around people that I love. Because your chemistry changes.

Yeah.

And the bottom line piece of this and a big walk away for everybody today is that all of our thoughts create chemistry in our bodies. Whether we're conscious or unconscious, it's immediately altering what our body's producing. Hormones, neurotransmitters, different enzymes, whatever the case might be. And so even living in that state with these chronically stressful thoughts, there's something that's beyond our conscious awareness. When we get around people that care about us and that we care about, that helps to nullify those things. Or better yet, I used the word earlier of metabolizing those things. And so those are a couple of the reasons behind the scenes of why we see these better health outcomes. But one other one we could talk about more if you want to, but one other one is just a psychological piece. All right. Especially today when there's so many things vying for our attention, and in particular with our kids and their exposure to things like social media and feeling. We were never meant. We're not designed to care about maybe what a hundred people think, maybe in our tribe, let alone a thousand or.

Ten thousand or a million, Dunbar's number, something like that. The community that we're equipped from an ancestral standpoint, to be able to communicate with on a regular basis. And get meaning from.

Isn't it? I think it's like less than.

It's 125.

Yeah. I was going to say something like that. But then after that things start going haywire. We start having problems saying, I can't.

Keep in touch with all 5,000 of my Facebook friends. Yeah, I accept that friend request because 49999 happened because I pissed somebody off. So I gotta refill the bucket with the extra one.

Even. Even with that. Just. We don't really even know a lot of these people. But we care so much about. You know, it's just like our. Our system. We're not really hardwired to be able to. To deal with that. And so with that being said, also the ability to watch everybody else's highlights, basically. Because 99% of people are not posting how shitty their life is.

Yeah.

All right.

How bad their hair looked that morning.

They're showing their highlights and we see that and we compare ourselves. It's just something we tend to do as a species because there's always this hierarchy thing that we've evolved with. But we're doing that. And what tends to happen as you know, we see these dramatic increases in anxiety and depression and all manner of mental health struggles, in particular with younger populations. But it's with us as well. But feeling this feeling that you're inadequate. Inadequate is really the big thing. And one of our deep psychological human needs is significance. Feeling like we matter. Right. Whether that's going back to that tribal construct. We need to feel like we are contributing and we are matter and we're seen and we'll do things to try to get that experience. Giving our children the opportunity to feel seen. Getting real FaceTime with them around. The construct of a family meal is one of the most valuable things you can give them for their psychology.

Yeah, I got teenage boys and it's pretty easy to get them to be a captive audience when there's food on the line. You know, they'll sit down to that for sure. You know, it's interesting because I have a confession, actually. It's not embarrassing, but it's vulnerable. I was staying in Santa Monica right now, and I was out on a walk last night and I walked past an ice cream store. I sometimes take my sons out for ice cream. We even do one on one date nights. Mother, son, father, son. We go off. Sometimes we get different tables at the same restaurant and we just have that one on one connection time that you don't get necessarily when you're a big group at the family table. But we often meet up for dessert afterwards. And nine times out of ten it's gelato or ice cream. So I walked past this ice cream store and I got all nostalgic cause I'm traveling to my family. I thought, gosh, I want an ice cream cone. So I went in there and I ordered the cinnamon cookie dough pumpkin ice cream and in a waffle cone with brownie bites on top of it. And it was a little bit anticlimactic as I sat there eating my ice cream cone by myself because I wasn't with the people I loved and I wasn't making jokes and telling stupid dad puns to my kids. And I wasn't giving my wife a hug as we waited in line for the ice cream. And it's very interesting because you can take these foods that are hedonistic or highly palatable or dopaminergic, the enjoyment of them remarkably decreases. And I don't know what you think about this or if you've come across any studies in writing this book about this, but I would not be surprised if there's a different biochemical response as well in terms of how high your blood sugar stays up or how well you digest it, or even how impactful from a negative standpoint. A so called junk food like ice cream, you know, this was the good stuff. You know, it was like natural dairy, you know, vegan ice cream, whatever. But I wouldn't be surprised if there were even health risks that you would normally experience from a bad food that you might be at a lower risk of when you're enjoying it with other people.

Yeah, I talked with Kelly about this, Kelly Starrett, and we were talking about this interesting phenomenon of essentially the best time to eat what we would consider a, a quote, bad food, but not to give morality to food, but say a fancy pants ice cream cone with all the, the, the, the brownie bites.

The chewy ones, they're really good, all.

The bells and whistles. And the best time to eat that is when you're happy, is when you're in a positive state because you have all of this positive chemistry going on in your body that just helps your body to metabolize things and interact with things, not necessarily just better, but more intelligently and efficiently. And it's not on this hyper alert versus this new phenomenon we have in our culture, what we have a name for stress eating, right? So the worst time, just looking from the perspective of your body handling that food in a, in an efficacious way is when you're highly stressed and you don't feel good, but that's when we tend to do it.

Oh yeah, just, just imagine you, you hear about email apnea, right. People holding their breaths and being a stressed out state for during emails. I'm gu of this, eating lunch while I'm looking at emails. Right. I, I, I know there's a different physiological response to that.

Yeah. And also just you staring into that screen, especially a tiny screen like your phone that is inherently going to be tuning up the volume on your sympathetic nervous system. Because like you being hyper focused on a small space, you just got back from hunting. That's one of the things that again, you have to have heightened senses. You're going, your stress is going to be a little bit higher staring into that small space because you've got to be able to make that decision.

Every time you look at that backlit led, your myopia kicks in, your senses are less tuned. Absolutely.

And so this is like putting our nervous system in a place that is not advantageous to interacting with that food. And also, here's something I thought about when you talked about that sometimes we have these food experiences, like having that ice cream cone with friends and family, and it is nostalgic, it's beautiful. And then sometimes we seek that behavior when the people aren't around, whether that's with marijuana, whether that's with alcohol, whether that's with, you know, food. Like, we have these experiences and we link it up, you know, neurons that fire together, wire together, and then we'll look for that behavior even though we're not getting that same. We're really looking for connection. Yeah. Right. And so really important part of this whole food equation is awareness. Like, how do you feel? Like, what is, what are you getting from this experience? And also finding the enjoyment, you know, in particular, you know, when we're with family and friends, it's so much more than just the food. Right. And so what, you know, one of the cool things is like, you talked about this a little bit earlier in our conversation of your game nights. Right? Family game nights. And it's just like family game nights.

During dinner we play almost, just to clarify, almost every family dinner we have, besides the ones that are typically about once a week where we want to have a family discussion, we want to talk about something. We want a chance for our sons to discuss whatever. Most recently it was to set aside some time to process this recent conflict that's going on in Palestine and Israel and for our sons to ask questions for us to talk about it because these are conversations that don't organically happen during the day that you need to make space for at some point. But besides that, about once a week, almost every night. And all of our games are covered in food particles and oils and crumbs and bread and whatever you can almost eat off of our game cards. But we play games during dinner because it's fantastic and it's fun and we talk in between. But we have a giant closet. Hundred games, and we bust them out almost every night. My sons often go down, they'll pick three out and then we decide amongst the three that we're gonna play. And. And it's a wonderful way to celebrate food together while you're playing games.

Yeah. What you're doing with that proactively is you're creating different levels or different inputs of reward. It's not just the food. Right. And so you're tying. This is something. And part of the struggle today is that especially with the advent of all these ultra processed foods which we got to come back and talk about, what does the state actually look like with that? There's a lot of brilliant food scientists who are creating these products to, to target those pathways and to make us continuously. They're not looking for one time customers. You know, they're wanting people to be addicted to their foods. And so we can't just pull that food away and say, you know, eat this broccoli or eat this liver. It has to be replaced with something of equal or greater value, ideally, if you want to see long term change. And so this is where eating with people that you care about, friends and family comes into play. Because yes, we can eat better. We tend to eat better when we're with family and friends because of this. And I didn't mention this earlier. When you know that family dinners are Monday, Wednesday and Thursday, subconsciously you're going to be planning like, okay, what are we going to eat? We know that I'm eating those days. What are we going to eat? And we tend to have an idea of what that meal looks like. Like a square meal in our culture. Right. But when we purposefully implement cultural pieces around that meal, it makes it even more desirable and attractive. So our family and friends and our kids look forward to it. That's the key. It's not like, oh shit, I gotta eat this, you know, Cobb salad or you know, whatever with my family.

Right.

And not eat McDonald's raw liver with salt on it.

So it's a long story, Charles. I should have called you up to have the ice cream cone with me. And I'm gonna solve these issues next time. Tonight I'll ring you. So how's it go down at the Stevenson's house? Like, when you're having a family dinner, what's the actual scenario look like? Do you guys all meet up at the kitchen at a specific time? Do you do something special that. That's predictable each night of the week? Do the kids pitch in to cook? Like, describe to me how it actually looks.

All right. We definitely have certain preferences. All right. This is an important partner. I talk about this in the book as well, you know, knowing thyself and creating a kitchen culture that you feel good about, because there isn't a cookie cutter way to do this. And so I'm generally like the morning guy. I make a lot of, like, the breakfast stuff, make my wife's coffee for her, those kind of things. I'm in. I'm in the kitchen playing music.

Don't tell my wife. You make your coffee for your wife?

She calls me a barista.

She's very particular.

Garcon. You know, she calls me garcon. And so, yeah, but I know the vibe that I like, and so I'm putting on music. And actually, Apple just sent me my top 10. Whatever I listened to this past year. You know, it's like a lot of, like, vibey singing, kind of whatever. And my youngest son actually came over to me yesterday. He's 12. And I'm just like. It was one of the coolest compliments. He was like, dad, you have a beautiful singing voice. I'm just like, oh, damn. You noticed. I wasn't really paying attention. He was paying attention. But anyways. But I'm in. Just. How would he know that? It's because I'm in the kitchen singing and dancing around or whatever, getting my vibe going. And sometimes they might not like it if I'm, you know, bumping Jodeci or whatever it is or John Mayer or whatever it is that day, and they might be wanting to do something else, or maybe they want quiet, I don't know. But if you want this food, this the kitchen culture that I like, and. But towards the end of the day, nine times out of ten, my wife is the one making dinner, and she doesn't like people being in the kitchen with her. Oh, all right. That's her. That's her solace. All right? Usually interesting. She. For her, she will either talk to her mom or her sister, right, and prepare food, or she'll put on some.

Dare I say, trashy show that she normally wouldn't watch or she knows I'm not gonna watch with her. You know, Real Housewives is something. No disrespect if there's any housewives listening, but she'll put, put that on and like that's just the vibe that she likes. Now we have purposefully, of course, implemented times where we invite the boys in and we've. And my, and my daughter as well, who's my oldest, to learn some different skills to be included in certain things.

But that's what I was wondering like when your kids actually learn how to cook, if there's a certain time of day when they're helping pitch in.

Yeah, we, we've just kind of like put aside like certain days when that happens. Right. Or like she just, you know, during this time of year just got a bunch of stuff to like make Christmas cookies or whatever. Like my son will make it with her. Right. My youngest son. And so my old. All my kids know how to cook. All right. So my youngest son has been preparing. You know, he could whip up some eggs and things like that when he was maybe like six or seven. And it's just been adding things along the way. And so also the thing is when kids are really young, they, they want to be there, but what we tend to do. And I made this mistake and I shared this as well. And it's one of my, one of those things that if I can go back and change, I would. But because of our busyness, when the kids ask to help, it's just like, you know, not today, bud. You know, I said it takes three.

Times longer to make a steak when like a 10 year old boy wants to help you.

Exactly. Especially if you're trying to be efficient with the schedule. You got stuff to do. But I eventually I caught myself and I'm just like, I started exercising that. Yes. Muscle big time. And it paid off, you know, because like my oldest son is a fantastic cook. He can cook so many incredible things. He's just, he's one of those people, he's got like a.

Sixth sense essentially, like with ingredients and putting stuff together like this will go good with this. Very creative. And my young. But my youngest son is very methodical. He wants to know exactly how to do the thing. Follow this. Right. It's just like being able to pay attention to their personalities, what inputs they need. And so. But to, to answer the question fully, my wife is, is generally preparing whatever the meal is going to be something probably delicious from the East Martyr Family Cookbook. And you know, me and the boys are usually just hanging out, doing something. You know, we might be gaming, we might be playing pool, we might be doing our respective things. You know, I might be reading a book, my son might be talking to his friends, whatever the case might be. But we come together, we all sit down and the first thing that we do is we go around the table and everybody shares three things that they're grateful for from that day. And we've been doing that for years, years and years. And a couple times we've subbed in different things like, you know, what did you fail at today? And we've shared that kind of, that kind of stuff too. And what it does is it's, it's a unifier because sometimes we haven't talked to each other all day and we're in different vibes. And so it's like opening up that proactive communication, get the kids talking, that kind of thing, seeing where their head is at. And one of the biggest benefits of eating together with your kids is you get to keep your finger on the pulse of their livelihood. So much of our communication is non verbal, as you know, and so being able to pick up on those subtle cues, you know, to catch things early before it festers into a big monster. And you know, I've seen it firsthand when, when we've moved away from having our consistent family dinners and shit happening, like things that we weren't able to really pay attention to. And we might do all this other stuff together, but it's that family dinner and that kind of connection because the dinner table is a unifier that you can miss on certain things.

Yeah. Such a unifier in fact, that we are careful when we are looking at sports and activities and excursions and extracurriculars for our sons at how many nights of the week are going to be full. Like right now they have a Wednesday night youth group and then like every couple times a month they've got a Thursday night speech and debate. Most other evenings they are home because we value that family time that bookends the day with our family huddle at the beginning. In the morning we all meet at 7:30am in the family living room. We do meditation, we do prayer, we devotions, we talk about what everybody's doing that day and, and then related to my question to you about who's cooking what, we actually do dinner time assignments in the morning, like hey river, you're gonna do carrot fries and dad's gonna go pull the chicken from the freezer. So that's Gonna be ready for mom to spice it and put it in the oven at 6:30 and I'm going to take care of setting the table and doing beverages and then Taryn you're gonna like slice and toast the sourdough bread. So in the morning like everybody knows what they need to have ready at 7pm like that's usually our actual time. Common thread though. It's interesting that you guys have the gratitude discussions or the what failures did you have? Type of discussion or a systematic, planned, predictable conversation opener. We do a very similar thing. So my sons and I, we go through a book about every two weeks I take them through a book and we reserve. When we all meet in the kitchen at 7 the first thing we do is we have a 10 minute discussion about the book. What'd you learn from this chapter? I share what I learned, they share what they've learned. Mom just kind of sits in and listens because she doesn't like to read but she learns as we talk about it. Then I play a song on the guitar, then we sit down to play games. But it's, it's systematic, it's planned. I don't know what you think about this but I think kids thrive on some element of predictability.

We all do. Yeah, we all do. We're very cyclical creatures. You know our brains are always looking for certainty and automation and we have these circadian rhythms, you know and one of the most interesting. I wasn't taught this stuff in my university, my very expensive university education about how the time of day and the sequence of things influences our gene expression. And these circadian clocks by the way they are themselves functional genes and proteins that control the expression of other genes and proteins. This is a huge part of our reality. And our bodies are synced up to the 24 hour solar day, you know and it's constantly try. Our bodies are trying to find out what time it is and what to do at this time. And so having those routines helps your body to find that balance that, that we talked a little bit about earlier. It's helping our to guide our bodies so that they can heal, regenerate and all these other things when we just tend to be pushing that gas pedal down and, and by the way to anchor in what we do as well because you know with the family game night we've done that many times. We'll do it after of course the meal typically which I love it of doing it during. That's an awesome thing for us to try out.

It's a time hack Too. Admittedly, we're old fuddy duddies. We go to bed at like 9:30, so if we're finished up dinner around 8:30, we're not gonna go have game night afterwards.

I love it. Life hack.

Yeah.

And so, you know, being able to, you know, we'll play a game from time to time. But what we've done, for whatever reason, it wasn't planned. But we started a lot of family dinners. We end up like freestyling, freestyle rapping. And you know, maybe like, for some reason we. There's a lot of videos of us dancing after dinner, you know, and because we're usually playing music in the background, but that'll just organically happen, you know. And so the funny thing is I wasn't thinking about all the creative faculties that were taking place. Like they're finding ways to, you know, put words together to communicate, whether it's a story, whether it's, you know, you know, targeting the other, you know, like a battle, you know, going at the other person who's better or complimenting the other person in like a, you know, more of a complimentary cipher type of thing. It's just like these things organically happened. And this manifested in this very special moment recently where I went to New York City. I took my family with me. When the book came out, actually, I went to do Good Morning America. And even more fun by far was going on this show called Sway in the Morning, or Sway's Universe. And Sway was an MTV vj. That's where a lot of people know him from. But he's got one of the longest running, most popular hip hop shows in the world. At Sirius XM headquarters, Howard Stern had his domain of the place and then Sway had his. Right. Sway's is a pretty big deal. Like the week before LL Cool J was there, you know, Missy Elliott sat in that seat, Kanye west, you name it. And I'm sitting there.

There you are with your family dinner book.

Right. But it's because, you know, one of his co hosts listens to my show and, you know, she's been following me for a while. And it's a big part of what he's trying to do as well. Give these artists a chance to speak freely, but also to empower people. And so that's what I came there for, you know, and so it was phenomenal. Like, the room was buzzing. It was amazing. But when the artists come on there, you know, these different hip hop artists, they do a freestyle at the end of the show. I didn't come there for that shit, all right?

And he wasn't ready.

Did not, he did not plan on that either. But it was my oldest son. When he met Sway, he, he literally like whispered in his ear, my dad can freestyle. And I had no idea. I thought the interview was over. I'm just sitting back like, man, that was, that was amazing. Right? And then. But the music is coming on and Sway is getting hype and it's just like, what. You can see my face on the video as well. I'm like, what is going on here? But then he, he passed it over to me and I did what I had to do, you know, and I just used things from the room, you know, just using creativity and. But my, my family co created that moment, right? And the room was just flipping out because I'm not, I'm not an artist with, in that construct. And so to see me perform like that, they, they couldn't believe it, right?

Oh, man, you would put me on the spot. I would have just said something like, wiki, wiki, wiki. Next question. You know, it's, it's, it's interesting you talk about that because I feel the same thing about like games, for example, conflict resolution, rhetoric, math, strategic planning, logic. Like, there's a lot that goes into so called game theory. And these are lessons that you learn while gathered around food, celebrating food. There's obviously the elephant in the room here. I love your title. The devices. What'd you call them?

Divisive.

Divisive. Divisive devices. What do you do about that?

All right, this is of high importance today because it's just a part of our culture. You know, it is what it is, especially with, with kids, teenagers. And you know, first of all, my kids are always the last in their class to get on board with, you know, having a cell phone. And I'm a huge advocate of that. You know, no, no screens until teens, I think is like the terminology for it. Because there's kids at my youngest son's elementary school who have cell phones. It's just like, yeah, but anyways, that's.

A whole other 8 year old needs a cell phone, right? You know, they got those phone calls.

But what we do is. And I shared this really interesting study in the book of like, these researchers found that just having the phone in your sightline, in your line of sight, even if it's turned over, even if it's turned off, creates distraction in your brain, all right? And what they found was that even having it on your person as well, or if it's like in a book bag, but it's still in the room. The best effects was if it's not around. Of course, like, greatly diminishes when it's, like, in your back pocket or, like, not to put it on your body, by the way, but on your person or like, in your book bag, greatly increases your presence and your ability to pay attention. But, you know, what we've done, and this has been years ago, we don't bring them to the table, you know, and it's just kind of like this sacred space. We don't need it. We are about to hang out with each other and have a good time.

Start playing Scrabble, and somebody's gotta look up whether or not that's a word in the Scrabble dictionary. I have to admit, like, that's the one time when a phone gets busted out at our table. Somebody's like, wait, what's the rules say? And I turn on the phone. But that's pretty rare. That's all right.

I would say that that's all right. But, you know, just creating a culture where, you know, no devices at the table, you know, like, we're just here with each other hanging out, and the device is still there. Sometimes even after dinner, you know, as that kind of reward, my son and I might go and play a video game, right? We might go in, like, you know, maybe we might go watch a show after dinner. But just having that real FaceTime is so important. It doesn't negate all these other cool things we have access to in the world. But truly, we know that those things, when they're replacing this real facetime, we're creating a lot of dysfunction, and we're creating some huge, huge issues with our health as well. And so whether it's. But I'm finding a way to anchor in some kind of reward with the dinner. So this could be in food form, but you got to be careful about that. Using food as a reward.

Loving with food.

Yeah, you've got to know the context and the personalities of people. But if I know, for example, that my youngest son, like, maybe we pivoted and we're having our family dinner because he likes to. No, my youngest son likes to know. He's totally down with everything. He'll be the first one there if he knows a Wednesday's family dinner, you know, Friday, whatever it is. But if we say, oh, actually, this is going on. And it was just like, literally an hour before dinner, and we're like, we're going to do family dinner, right? Now, and it's on a Tuesday instead, then you could see a little grumbling, you know, because he had his other plans, like, mentally and. But then I can come in like, hey, do you want the Ben Greenfield specialty carrot cake for dessert? Or do you want.

He would be a fool to decline.

Or do you want these cherry frozen yogurt pops like you. You. What do you want for this? Oh, yeah, I like dessert.

Yeah. The illusion of choice. Exactly. A wise parent.

Yeah. It's just being able to leverage that, you know, and so he's. Now, he's much more inclined to, like, let me participate in this thing, even though it wasn't in my plan per se. My oldest son, he. He didn't. He's very fluid. Right. So just like flexible. Okay, this is what we're doing. So be it. Right? But this also, these family dinners have given me the opportunity to pay attention to these character traits of my kids and to see their personalities, because truly, like, you can come up in the same environment and you have. You have twins, so you have this incredible. You could see the differences in their personalities.

Yeah.

And it's something special. We're all so unique. But being able to, to honor that and to see it, to witness it, it does something special for our kids. We need it as well. And another thing that I've seen is like, my. In particular with my youngest son, he has his deep sense of compassion for me. Like, he know. He, like, he knows when I'm not. I'm not good, you know, and he'll come over and hug me and just like, it's like, how the hell do you know? Like, part of these family dinners has been if I'm. If we're sharing what we failed at. For example, they realize, like, dad's not invincible. He's not superhuman. Because that's what I can sometimes portray. Thinking from their perspective, you know, that I don't get hurt. You know, that I can handle anything. And I do have that. Like, I feel that in my. In my. My per. My personality. Like, I do feel like I can. I can do whatever needs to be done, but that does not mean that I don't suffer. That does not mean that things aren't hard for me. And so to. To share that, to share, to be open with them, has humanized me and has created a stronger vehicle for not just their compassion for me, but for other people. And just had, you know, the parent teacher conference with my youngest son and his three. This was interesting. It's a different type of school. You Know, it's definitely more student focused. And the three teachers he has for middle school, he's in sixth grade, they all sit together and share together. And they. Each one is going around just echoing. Literally, you get to the next guy, they're just like, I'm just going to echo what he said. Braden is a light in our room. He is an anchor. He brings a sense of peace and calmness. I can always count on Braden. Right? And it's just like, oh, they're just going around. And also, Braden is always there to help other people as well, make new students feel welcome. Like, I didn't ask my kid to do none of that stuff.

Yeah.

He's just inclined because he wants everybody to feel like they matter. But here's the cool thing. He wrote an essay on, like, one of what he feels is his great. His greatest character trait. And he shared that, that, you know, he. He makes it intentional to make sure people feel included. But. And so that he wants people to be happy. And that worried me as I was reading at first, because it's like, is he looking at people pleasing from that lens? But he shared within that that he's like, but I've got to make sure that I'm happy first.

Yeah.

And I was like, oh, damn, look.

How you got a young psychologist on your hands. Young future psychologist. Look out, Sigmund Freud. You know, it's that.

Phone study, by the way you mentioned. I saw that one. And you don't know how many times I've had a waiter or waitress at a restaurant come up and be like, sir, you dropped your phone. Because I always put it underneath my chair when I'm at a restaurant now, because I know that they always pick it up and put on the table. I can put that back down. That's where I need it to be. The ultra processed foods that you brought up, you know, it's obviously a problem. I don't think that's a secret. But do you have a method of dealing with that at your house when somehow the colorful crinkly package winds up in the pantry and.

You need to navigate what you're going to do about that with your kids or at the dinner table or whatever else. How do you deal with that without creating, I don't know, fear of food or orthorexia or something like that?

Yeah. Such a good question. And by the way, just a quick snapshot of what is the current state of affairs here in the United States? So the BMJ published an analysis looking at adult American British Medical journal yeah, the bmj, British Medical Journal. One of our top top five dead or alive. That's a rap.

Scenario.

Freestyling.

Okay, so top five medical journal.

Wiki wiki wiki.

And they uncovered that about 60% of the average American adult's diet is now made of ultra processed. Really fake food. Really. You know, if you want to just call it what it is. So what is ultra processed food? Let's just clarify that. Humans have been processing food for a long time. Processing food isn't the issue. When you cook a food, you're processing the food.

Yeah, Mortar and pestle, you know, there's lots, lots of ways you can process. Yeah, Forever.

All right. And also, you know, simple processing. Right. So what we call minimally processing, pressing the oil out of olives or coconuts, making tomato sauce or spaghetti sauce with tomatoes and spices and things like that. But you could still tell where it came from. There's still proximity to something real. Ultra processed foods, on the other hand. Or when you have a field of wheat that somehow some way becomes a bowl of Frosted Flakes or pop Tarts or you know, a field of corn becoming, you know, the ingredient for, you know, soda or you. I gotta have my pops cereal.

Never found any corn in my soda.

There is actually.

Never mind, I mean, kernels.

I recently, I was at my friend's house for his birthday is Lewis Howes. And they had corn ice cream popsicles. So there was some like, some chefs came in from Hawaii. I don't know if they're doing that in Hawaii for real. But it was like corn flavored. It was actual corn popsicles.

I'd try it.

Yeah, yeah, that's, that's the thing about you, Ben, that I respect. You know, you'll do it at least once.

Good as carrot cake.

And so, you know, this is the, this is the current state of affairs where most of our food as adults is ultra processed foods. And so not to mention all of these newly invented synthetic additives, you know, preservatives and chemical food dyes and you know, many of these compounds now, just as each week or day goes by, or being found to have carcinogens, carcinogenic properties or obesogens is this new kind of category that's being talked about. But these are obesity causing agents or cancer causing agents, one of them being glyphosate, for example. The WHO is classified it as a Group 2, a carcinogen, which is probable cancer causing agent in humans. Not definitive, but that's concerning. And that's used to treat a Lot of the grain products. And another one, the Environmental Working Group did an analysis of the most popular grain products on US store shelves and found that 80 to 90% are contaminated with glyphosate. And you know, again, this is what we see with these ultra processed foods, with that being said with our children. And this is the first major book to share this study that was published in JAMA Journal, the American Medical Association. They tracked ultra processed food consumption by US children for 20 years from 1999, which at that time the average child was eating 61% ultra processed food. And up until 2018 that number was almost at 70%. All right, so the majority, vast majority of our children's die in the United States for the average child is ultra processed foods. And not to mention in about a 30, 40 year time span, childhood obesity has tripled in our population.

Not to mention, obviously this is, this is, you know, highly debatable, but everything from early onset of cancer to increased prevalence of add, adhd, there's a lot of other potential threads that you could draw there.

Yeah, we can't, we can't definitively say causality here.

Right.

You know, the correlations are strong.

Right?

Very strong.

Just saying if your kid's walking around eating cotton candy and Cheetos that there might be a psychological effect of that.

Maybe, just maybe.

Call me crazy.

So, so with this being said, this is the current state of affairs, so this is what we're dealing with and what we need to first and foremost is to, to acknowledge and honor what is honor, what is not just.

Not tolerance, but to, to see it and to accept it. Because that is the current state of affairs in our, in our society right now. There are all of these newly invented, tasty, fun things to eat. Whether that's the chocolate from the Hostess factory that we talked about before or it's that you know, bowl of lucky charms or you know, some kind of fancy pants, different kind of ice cream.

Children equivalent of our giant cocktail sippy cup, plastic glitter filled beverages that we walk down the streets of Vegas drinking as adults can just have way more of that.

Who doesn't want to eat glitter? You know, and so it's just, it's acknowledging what is, and honoring that that's what's out here on the streets and that our kids, there's a high probability that they are going to interact with these things if they're going to have friends, if they're going to have birthday parties, whatever. You can go and create a commune and just be off the, all the whole thing and do everything yourself. That is a incredibly rare situation, in particular here in the United States. The reality is you're going to be living in the world and your kids are going to be living in the world. What we need to do is prepare them, give them a great foundation. Especially when you are controlling, you know, they're not really online yet and being aware of these things, you're just giving them real food. They're. They have a baseline of real. They're built from real sustainable raw materials. And what's going to happen when they have those trysts later on with things that are not that good for them, for their biology? They're probably not going to feel that good. And I've seen it. I've allowed it to happen. I've witnessed it. And it's just being there to be a direction.

You mean, like, if you're not getting a bunch of, I don't know, like gluten growing up, the first time that you have half a loaf of Wonder Bread, you're probably going to paint the back of the toilet seat and learn a lesson.

Or for one example that's coming to mind is, you know, my, my youngest son going to a birthday party and the cake and the ice cream. And prior to that, you know, of course, like, you know, I would have some input on what those things are. Giving them a little bit of education, but also in a very, like, this is not in a right or wrong kind of way, but just letting them know, like, these things tend to do this.

Yeah.

And let it, but letting him experience it. Not up here. Like, you better not do that. Because I, I have had that experience with my older son, for example, of like trying to micromanage things and really changing the food culture in the house. Yeah. Which can lead to rebellion. Like, you're going out here on the streets and you want to go to your friend's house so you can eat all the, the, you know, and it's.

Not just about their bodies too, by the way. I do, I do this with my kids. What's to do with the planet. Right. What a CAFO feedlots do to animals. Like, there's, there's a lot more than just your body.

Right.

Like, like what are we doing as far as soil depletion with monocropping of agriculture and you know, how are we actually treating the planet Earth? How are we treating animals and how we're treating our bodies? But sometimes it's not just about what it does to your biology. I mean, there's bigger implications than that or at least significant implications.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, you can. And this also knowing your child, you know, what, what leverage points to utilize. But rather than even with the birthday, the birthday party thing, which, you know, he didn't feel that well afterwards. Whatever. But I got an even closer example of this where I was speaking at an event in Mexico and it was like, it was awesome. You know, it was like the family got to come along. It was like a week long thing. But every night him and his older brother would go and get churros and tacos or whatever it was. It was like. But they do this like 11pm at night. Yeah.

Although I would have been along for the ride if they're getting those Mexican coconut popsicles.

Right? Yeah. But, you know, so they were doing this for, we'll just say five days. And on the day that we're going back, they had done it the night before and we got up for early flight. My youngest son was on this five hour flight, miserable. I'm talking like I looked at his face. I couldn't even look at him. Yeah, but he, and he knew. He saw. He looked me in my eyes with his, like, you know, with the Bambi eyes, like, dad. He ended up puking. And his brother's the one who helped facilitate this, by the way. That little puke bag that I'd never seen anybody use before. My baby boy used it and. But he didn't hit all of it in the back. And I'm sorry that this has taken this turn in this. But his brother who helped facilitate.

I talked about the toilet seat before you did.

His brother who helped facilitate this had to help facilitate cleaning that up as well. And since that occasion, my youngest son has been much more judicious or cautious about eating too much. Not that he doesn't engage with, you know, a donut or a piece of cake or whatever, but he's not going hard like he did in Mexico.

Some of the best lessons are learned in the trenches. Well, I mean, when it comes to alternatives, like you mentioned to some of the so called bad stuff or the ultra processed stuff. Check this out, folks. Sweet potato pie smoothie. I could get behind that. That sounds like the stuff I make. Buffalo chicken tacos, avocado fries, hazelnut chocolate ice cream. Smarter Snickers bites. I love that. Quick and easy. Deviled eggs, pumpkin muffins, all sorts of bowls and burgers and wraps and. And of course, a giant database of nutrition education that just scratches the surface of what Sean talked about today. This book is it. It's really, really good because it's written from what I can tell is practical experience and the intention behind it is really good. Getting families together to eat dinner so I can get behind that. Sean, thanks for coming on the show.

It's my honor. Thank you. Thank you.

Check out, check out BenGreenfieldLife.com eatsmarter Grab the book. You'll love it. Hey, quick thing, most of you who listen don't subscribe like or rate this show. If you're one of those people who do, then huge thank you. But here's why it's important, important to subscribe like and or rate this show. If you do that, that means we get more eyeballs, we get higher rankings. And the bigger the Ben Greenfield Live show gets, the bigger and better the guests get and the better the content I'm able to deliver to you. So hit subscribe anywhere you listen. It means way more than you might think. Thanks for listening.