This content was created by Lewis Howes. This content was uploaded by Lewis Howes. This is a YouTube video titled "Convenience Is Costing Your Health - Dr. Jessica Knurick" created on November 2, 2025. It features a conversation between Dr. Jessica Knurick and Lewis Howes discussing the impact of systems on personal health choices, the importance of nutrition and physical activity, and the challenges of behavior change in adopting healthier lifestyles. The discussion also touches on the historical context of convenience foods and the need for systemic changes to promote health.
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Individual choice is important, but the systems that surround them, I would argue, are more important. And data would support me on that in that if you build a system for the most people to succeed, more people will succeed. Right. And if you build a system for the most people to fail, more people will fail. And so if we want to think about how do we improve the health of Americans, how do we improve, you know, the, the most Americans, not just, not just the select few.
Yeah.
You have to think from a systems perspective. So I'll give you an example. Individually, we might be working together, right. And we're going to talk about like, what are the best things nutritionally that we can do to optimize our own health, our personal health. Okay. And that's going to be things like increasing your, the amount of vegetables you're eating and fiber and decreasing low nutrient ultra processed foods. Right. Making sure you're waking up and getting, you know, hydrated every day and limiting alcohol and, you know, other drugs and things like that. Right. Those are all going to be recommendations on a personal level. Making sure you're meeting all of your nutrient requirements. Physical activity, you're gonna, you know, make sure you're moving your body every day, make sure you're lifting weights a couple times a day, make sure you're getting cardio in so, you know, stress your heart a little bit. And so all of those things on a personal level are very important. You need to motivate somebody to be able to do that. Well, you also can design systems to help people to be able to do that. So if I'm building a food environment and it's 70% ultra processed food, mostly low nutrient ultra processed food, and then I'm telling you to make half your plate fruits and vegetable and meet your fiber intake guidelines. It's not that you can't do it, it's just that it makes it way more difficult. And so if you can build a system to make it less difficult, you're going to have more people succeed.
100%. I'm a fan of that. I mean, when you have the ability to order any food you want at a finger on a fingertip now and have something delivered to you, it's also hard because that system just makes it more convenient and easy. One of the things that I try to do in my home with my wife is like, we just don't have sugary stuff because I know that's my advice. I know it's harder for me to say no if I just see it. So I just don't Buy it. I don't have it in the fridge or in the home to try to set up my environment to have more restrictions because otherwise I can get weak and I can be like, ah, let me go have some more of this and eat sugary things. It's definitely hard, but at the end of the day it's also my choice and decision. And so I try to set up the systems for myself personally and try to just make sure I'm not clicking a button on a phone to get quick calories. Yeah, but it's so convenient. So how do we override convenience and this kind of, I guess, habits that we have built over years because the system has made it so easy for us to access ultra processed foods. How do we override that?
Yeah, I mean, I think that we have to understand why the system is built for convenience first. So I always try to like, look at like these root cause analyses. Right. So our system, I mean, and you can go all the way back to like World War II. So after World War II is when like this idea of convenience really started growing and we started creating these like, convenience foods and people, you know, you started having like two working parents and so time was shorter and so you needed quicker things. Like you didn't have all of this time to prepare food from scratch. And you know, that's only gotten worse in our society in the sense that like a lot of people are working multiple jobs and they don't have, you know, the, the time and resources to be able to make food even if they can go buy, you know, even if a bag of beans is cheaper than, you know, like canned beans. Right. Canned beans are far more convenient than what it would take. I don't even know how long it would take to make beans.
I think, I think 30, 60 minutes or something. Yeah, yeah, it took a while. Yeah.
And so, you know, and so you can't, it's almost like you can't fault people. Not that canned beans are a bad choice. They're, they're a wonderful choice. That's kind of a bad example. But it's, it's just the convenient option. Right. And so I think we have to understand like, why this convenience happens and then also like work in ways like, okay, so we have these systems built up for people to be reliant on these like, convenience foods or this more convenient, like, choices. How can we maybe like switch it up to make that a bit more of a healthful choice? Right. And those types of things and kind of like do with what we're Working with. Because right now, I mean, yeah, the system is really set up and I keep going back to the system, but like it really just is, it's, it's set up for profitability, not necessarily for what's going to keep the people healthy.
I'm curious then, what are the science backed research that you've seen that can help people heal from the inside out?
Yeah, I mean we have great data on this. Like we have very consistent data on what is on nutrition science data on physical activity data. Right. Like we, if we just need to get people to adopt the behaviors. So the thing is, is that when I first started my PhD research it was really in chronic disease prevention. And I wanted to see like what, what could we do? I wanted to answer the question you just asked, like what could we really do to optimize someone's health and be able to like get them, you know, to heal from the inside out. And what I found was we have very good data and it's been consistent over decades on, on the best way to do that and reduce risk of chronic disease. The problem is behavior change. The problem is getting people to adopt the those behaviors. And that's actually what got me kind of interested in. So my research was really on these things we termed easily adoptable strategies to reduce risk of disease. Right. Like what's the minimum viable thing we can get somebody to do that can like significantly reduce their risk of disease? And so those were things like walking after a meal or taking fiber. We used like a fiber supplement, but it was just like trying to increase your fiber intake and that. But when you start to do that, you start to see, okay, it's the problem with like getting people to adopt the behaviors more than anything. It becomes impossible to not look at kind of like the systems that, that are, that are intruding and making people or making it difficult for people to adopt the behavior.
But even if we had the perfect systems, yeah. Say there was no cars and people had to bike or walk right everywhere. And they've got 10,000 steps a day minimum. And they're hanging out with friends and family all day and their relationships are rich because their friends and family live next to them and they see neighbors and their activities and the only thing they could eat is they have 80% options of healthy food choices. Right. When you go to the store and you have to make your meals and all these different things, would there still have to be a behavioral change around quick, easy convenience? I don't know. Sugar. Like we're just still need to change your behavior even if the environment and the system was set up perfectly to succeed for optimal health?
Yeah, probably. I mean, I mean we're hardwired to love sugar, for example, right? Like that's just like a biological thing. We love sugar. So like if you have, if you have like sugar available, right? Like we're kind of like, oh, we want some more sugar.
Sweet, sweet, sweet.
Yeah. And again, not that a little bit of sugar is not bad. It's the over consumption of anything that that's the issue. But to your point, if we did have a system like that, there would be far more people who were adopting the behaviors that are recommended versus people versus what we see now. Right. And so we still would like all of the like personal, personal like recommendations and personal development and all of that would still be important, but you would have more people able to succeed within those Systems.
They took 50 year olds that were sedentary. They went from not exercising to five to six hours a week. After two years, their hearts looked 20 years younger.
