Food Lies: Why Scientists Are Paid For False Food Studies | Brian Sanders @WellnessAndWisdom

These processed foods, part of the biggest problem is they're sold to you as health foods. And you don't think that they're bad for you, but they are. Some people who have poor health or very overweight, they know it. They're like, yeah, but I love Popeyes and I eat fried chicken all the time. You think you're doing the right thing, and you're not. The changes you can make are actually pretty simple and straightforward.

Brian Sanders, welcome to the show.

Josh, I'm so glad to be here.

This has been a long time coming. I've rescheduled maybe three or four times. So this has been marinating. This conversation's been marinating. So many people know you as the director of a film that's coming out that we're going to go deep into. It's called Food Lies. So today's going to be interesting because what I want to do with your expertise and your knowledge is, yeah, I do want to understand what's truly going on with food packaging and with the lies that, you know, basically big food has been pumping for multiple generations here. Well, not generations, but decades. But I also want to talk about the solutions because I feel like so many people out there, they. They know, quote, quote, what the mainstream media has been telling them about food, whether it's like, low fat is good or high carb is good. But let's talk about how you even got into this world because you were a mechanical engineer. So very logical and linear. How did you even get into filmmaking? Like, what was that journey? Because it's a pretty interesting road from, like, sitting behind a cubicle or a desk or whatever you're doing to being out there and interviewing health experts in the world. So how did that work?

Yeah, well, I grew up with film. I grew up in Hawaii, which we were talking about before, and it was great. And I was just always making film since I was, like, 12. Then I started making films in class, seventh grade through high school. A lot of them were shown to the whole school. And what's interesting is the guy I made these films with, he ended up going to film school. I went to mechanical engineering school. I had my whole journey. I went, I got into tech. I got into some other things, came back around a film. We came back together and started making this film together. So he joined on the project and is now the editor, director, videographer for this film. So that was kind of my full circle back into film. So, yeah, mechanical engineering did not help me prepare me for this film. But, you know, I'm Glad to be back to something that I grew up loving.

You grew up in Hawaii, in Oahu, and did you live off the land? I mean, what was that like when you were growing up as a child? In other words, how did your affinity for organic without the label of organic really start? Like, what was that like for you as a kid?

Well, it wasn't like that. It was kind of learn later that was a problem. Part of my journey is my health journey of myself and my parents. And so we grew up with the food pyramid, so we grew up in Hawaii. I mean, I grew up barefoot, so I, I was always at the beach, hiking, stuff like that. But food wise, we just follow the government guidelines. We're like, okay, we gotta eat pasta, low fat dairy, lean chicken, cereal for breakfast. All the same, the same old stuff that everyone's heard. And that's, that's how I was raised. And I didn't find this until later in life and I didn't find out that I needed to make a change until my parents. Well, I lost both my parents at 30. So yeah, I'm 38 now. So eight years I've been on my journey to, you know, not fall to the same fate.

Did that reach your soul and your heart in a way where it gave you some unique wisdom? How did that affect you? I mean, I can't even believe what that would feel like. I'm sure you still carry it with you today, but how did that shift you?

Well, you know, it happened at the same time when I needed to focus on my health. I think people find they need to focus on their health at 30. It's like that time when you can't eat whatever you want anymore. But yeah, it, well, I mean, I don't want to state the obvious. You know, it's like losing your parents is going to hit anyone hard. But these were the chronic diseases that we shouldn't be getting. So once I started looking into it, I realized, oh, my parents had all the signs of chronic disease and no one told them they were eating the diet that they were told to and, and it wasn't serving them well. And they got basically they both had pre diabetes, which undiagnosed. But now I know looking back and it's just, it was just made me mad and sad all these things because we did the right things. We weren't going to McDonald's. Like it was a big treat to go out to a fast food thing or even out to eat in general. We were making our own food. They were doing what we were supposed to do. And they weren't obese or anything, and they had no overt health problems, but they just had the problems that everyone has. And it's like this dad bod. It's like, you know that you have, like, kind of the belly growing. And this is sort of made fun of as, like, a fun thing these days.

Yeah, dad bod. Yeah.

And it's not fun. It's not fun because that's kind of like a sign of insulin resistance and that your. Your health maybe needs a check. And so we. My parents never got that check. No one ever told them. And so, yeah, I had. I had to wake myself up. And luckily I had some friends around me. Actually, the guy I mentioned, he started reading Mark Sisson's book, Primal Blueprint. People should know Mark Sisson. He's amazing.

Yeah.

And then it just shook me out of that. That funk where you're just thinking that you knew what you were talking about with food or the government knew what they're talking about, and you're like, whoa, it's all kind of backwards.

So I'm confused. Like, what. What were your parents eating that made them pass? And, I mean, I say that with, like, deep reverence and respect, you know, because I'm sure in a way that that fueled your journey for sapien.org and food, lies, film, and a lot of things that you do to pull from that, you know, pain. That pain of loss.

Well, yeah, so they. They were just eating all the processed foods, really. So that's the thing. We weren't eating junk food, you know, like, they were not. My dad, I guess he did go to some fast food restaurants once a week. But my new thesis is that these processed foods, part of the biggest problem is they're sold to you as health foods, and you don't think that they're bad for you, but they are. Right? So it's like some people who have poor health or very overweight, they know it. They're like, yeah, but I love Popeyes, and I eat fried chicken all the time, and that's my thing. Or like, yeah, but I just don't want to stop eating this junk food. It's delicious. But that wasn't the case with them. So that's. That's why. Why I got so passionate about making this film is because I wanted to tell people that you think you're doing the right thing and you're not, and that the changes you can make are actually pretty simple and straightforward. So when I changed my diet eight years ago, it wasn't immediate. I went on this sort of journey myself, but I made very simple changes and my health completely changed. My body composition completely changed. I didn't have allergies anymore. I didn't have joint pain, I didn't have acid reflux. Some of these long term injuries I had, like you said, I was in a cubicle basically doing engineering work. Overuse injuries, those finally went away when I finally changed my diet. And all I really did was just switch from the most. I just took out the most processed parts of my diet, like bread and all these just refined grains and sugars. I just took them out and I just replaced them with something else. You know, it was so simple. It wasn't like I did some crazy thing or it's like I've never, you know, ate a cheeseburger ever again. You know, I still eat a cheeseburger, but it's like I won't go out to like a bad restaurant and eat, you know, something fried in oil very often or I can make it myself, you know. So the changes are pretty simple and they add up to something very powerful where I complete. I feel like a different person. And so, yeah, I just wish I could have known this before. So my dad was from cancer, my mom was Alzheimer's. So it's not like we even know that these are related to diet that much, right? The mainstream. They're like, oh, yeah, that's just genetic. I'm like, I mean, yeah, that's definitely genetic as a component in this, but it is not just genetic. Like I have the same genes and my whole goal is to not express those genes and fall to the same fate, you know?

How old were they?

Not old. I mean, 70, 67. Yeah, yeah. Like they were, they were a bit older for parents because they're both on their second marriage. But yes, they weren't, they weren't like really old.

I mean, to me, like, this is so, I guess you could say impactful because my mom's in her 70s and my dad's close and I can't imagine what it would be like to have not just one loss, but it was the same year. I mean, they left your life in.

The same year, basically. So my mom had Alzheimer's, so it's like, so she was, in a sense, gone, you know what I mean, within that same year. And then from each year, she's basically completely unresponsive, you know, after a certain time. So gone. Yes.

Yeah. And that looking back, was right around the time you said you shifted the way that you Ate. Were you eating in the same way? I mean, were you having, like, the garlic bread and. And the pasta? Like, was that at that time, but.

In a good way. I was making my own foods, too. I remember this. I was going to work at the engineering thing, and I would, like, take a bagel sandwich, and then I'd make all these big pasta and rice dishes and looking back and lean meats, and I was avoiding red meat. It was seriously the same thing that everyone's told to do. And I was always athletic, and I wasn't super obese or anything, but I just wasn't in good shape, you know what I mean? Again, I was doing all the following. All the rules. Just my body completely changed when I just made that switch. So it's hard, though, with health, because some people can eat those foods, and it does sound reasonably healthy, and maybe they can be okay until they're not.

I feel like a lot of the nutrition world, it's so heady, it's so intellectual, where you have, you know, people like Chris Masterjohn and Rob Wolf and you have all these really intelligent people. Diana Rogers, they were just on the Joe Rogan show, actually. And there's a lot of intellectual education when it comes to food. This is what you should do. This is what you should not do. From an intuition standpoint, what does it look like for a human being with natural, intuitive signals to find the right foods to eat the right foods? How do we even begin to teach someone how to do that with all the different distractions, whether it be food additives or flavoring additives? Let's start the conversation there, because I think really the biggest lens we have here is, this is the wrong war. We're fighting the wrong war. The war has been about, oh, my God, are you gonna eat meat or not? Are you a vegan? Are you a vegetarian? It's just like the wrong conversation. The better conversation is, how do we just have a diet that's free from oils, from flour, and from sugar? Because I think if we get rid of those three things, then people's natural intuitive signaling mechanisms are going to come back online.

That's exactly it. And that's kind of the thesis of the film is, well, a couple things. One is, let's not get into dietary camps. And I was in a dietary camp in the beginning. I thought it was like, low carb is like, everything. All we got to do is go low carb. And then. And it. It helped me. But then I realized, oh, no, no, carbs aren't bad. It's the processed carbs that are bad, or like, we need to eat the right kind of carbs in the right context or if you, you know, can handle them if you don't have type 2 diabetes. So all this type of stuff. But so. So part of the film is, yes, let's not get stuck in a camp. I always say camp. No camp. Which is kind of a camp in itself, though. But it's, you know.

Yeah, you're in a camp that's called no camp.

Exactly. But. And another thing of the film, you're right on with fighting the wrong battle. And all we're trying to say is meat has been unfairly demonized for so long. The real enemy is processed foods. It's the sugar, the flour, the oil. These three ingredients make up like 80% of the grocery store, 80% of people eat are basically just different versions of sugar, flour and oil put together with different flavorings and different combinations. And so meat always gets blamed. And if you're talking about instincts and intuitive eating, it's like, well, what did we have for all of history? We didn't have the sugar, flour and the oil, and we had the meat. We were eating meat and eggs and fish and any other fruits and vegetables we could find. And that's it. It's the simplest diet ever. And it's not sexy just to tell, you know, to tell someone, oh, yeah, you just need to eat whole foods and avoid processed foods. Everyone's like, it's either they already know that and they're not going to do it, or it's just a boring message that they're like, yeah, I know, but I like cheeseburgers and pizza and ice cream.

There's that. There's that knowledge and then there's the information war that's happening where no matter what is going on in the media, we're just accosted with, like, low fat, high fat, low carb, keto, Paleo. I mean, it's just nauseating, actually. And I think, really, and I'm curious how you feel about this. We live in a world of media that makes money off of constantly shifting people's opinions back and forth. And actually, it makes the most money by disconnecting people from what they know to be true. Their natural signaling mechanisms, their natural awareness when it comes to food. And I think specifically for the parents out there, like, you know, I'm a dad. As your responsibilities grow without the proper mindset and awareness, you're much more susceptible to being distracted and to being disconnected from yourself and your Own intuition. So what do you think about that?

Yeah, actually just posted about that today. That the whole, the whole world, all the industries, health and systems are geared and I call them tuned out. People like you. It's like people are tuned out for one reason or another. They're busy. No, no one's going to do all the research I've done. That's. No one's going to do that. So they're just like, oh, well, I just saw this commercial and it said it was heart healthy. Or it's like, oh, there's this new superfood. And I'm like, well, why, why is this a superfood? Like, if it's a berry from the Amazon, how humans didn't evolve in the Amazon. Like, we didn't. We lived most of our life in Africa and Europe and all this stuff. Our life, our history.

And so the Fertile Crescent is where we began. Yeah, yeah.

It's like, where were these, where were these acai berries back then? There's nothing wrong with the side bear. I mean, yeah, have some asai bears, but they're not gonna like, save your life. So it's these marketing. Yeah, you're right. The media that they're always playing with us. It's always kind of like dividing people or like you have to have the next like, cool thing or the next scary thing or the next whatever to get you to buy something. And yeah, people don't have enough time to figure it out. And yeah, I mean, I've made mistakes in past. I. And I drank kale and spinach and almond milk shakes for years and years. And I think I had some major problems because of it. But yeah, I don't know. It's hard. People just don't have the time to do it. And then the food that's pitched to them and packaged and it's all delicious and it's all cheap and easy.

Yeah. And it overrides these natural satiety mechanisms that we have where our stomach, the lining in our stomach, and also a few other things produce a hormone called leptin. Leptin means, okay, we're full. Like, that's what tells our brain that we're full. And then when we're under, slept, when we're stressed, there's a lot of different things that factor into this. We produce more ghrelin, which makes us more hungry. So can you share with people that? Because I think that's really the deeper conversation about how the oils, the sugar and the flour affect our natural full versus not full mechanism.

Yeah, we're gonna wrap this all in together. I love this. So, yes, it's basically a discussion of satiety, which maybe people have heard of, maybe not, but it's really a big part of what I believe in, in nutrition. So I think the calorie story is pretty worthless. Like to tell someone to just eat less calories, it's like, well, yeah, everyone wants to eat less calories, but how do they do that? Right? It's also, it's just like, yeah, how do you become rich? Tell someone, you know, spend more money, spend less money.

It's like when people go work, you want to be rich, work harder. Well, that's stupid, actually.

Well, yeah, or spend less money. He make. Oh, yeah. Wow, you're a genius. So you, you, the discussion needs to be how do I eat less, how do I eat less? And how you do that is you eat more satiating foods. Like all calories are not the same. So protein is not the same as energy. Energy is carbs or fat. So we need to be eating more protein. Protein keeps you full, protein does it gives you your, your hormones, those signals of being full. And yeah, the opposite. Like refined carb, especially sugar, you know, refined grains. There's great studies that show they measured this where you can see they had different meals and the two groups ate the one meal with the no carbs, one with the refined carbs. After three hours, the group that ate the refined carbs, the blood sugar went way up, their ghrelin went way up, and their perceived hunger was way up. At that three hour mark, the group that just ate the meal with just protein and fat, none of that happened. No raised ghrelin, no raised appetite, and no raised blood sugar. So this stuff is pretty straightforward. It's just no one thinks about it, no one talks about it. And I'm trying to get the word out there that we need to be talking about satiety. Most people want to lose fat, and also you don't want to lose weight. Losing weight could mean muscle, right? So we need to even go a step further in that discussion is if you're not eating enough protein, you could be losing muscle. So a juice fast, I think is a terrible way to lose weight because you're just getting a bunch of sugar and you're not getting any protein. And so, yeah, you're going to think you lost weight because the scale went down. But there's studies that show you're losing muscle. So there's so much nuance here, right? So you need to know to lose fat you need to know, how am I going to be full so I can eat less energy and still be full. Right? That's a battle.

That is a really good piece to pause on there. So how exactly do we do that? Because there's many compartments in what you just said. But that one specific piece where we're actually eating for satiety, what is that? What does that look like? What does that.

Yeah, absolutely. So I'm thinking about the film. I don't want to give away all the. All the tricks we're using in the film, but you can tease us with the food. Absolutely. No, I'm not trying to keep secrets here, but to. To lose fat and to eat. To eat less but still have that satiety, you need to basically focus on protein and nutrients. We kind of split up food. Food is protein, nutrients, fat, carbs, right? The protein and nutrients, we just call those nutrients, you know, minerals, vitamins, all that stuff. That's your building blocks. The fat and the carbs are your energy. So to lose fat and to be full, if you focus on the protein and the nutrients and you get all that you need, right, you need a daily amount, basically, of protein and nutrients and energy, okay? So that daily amount of protein nutrients is the most important because that's your building blocks. When you say nutrients, you mean vitamins, minerals, everything else. So to get that and then. So the goal of losing weight, if you're trying to get nerdy about it, maybe this is my engineer side. You need to get your targeted amount of protein and nutrients that your body needs to just stay, you know, have muscle and survive and then eat less energy, right? So because if you eat less energy, then your body can burn your own energy, which is your own body fat, right? You have all this energy on your body. So the goal is, how do you lose fat? Burn your own body fat? How do you do that? Eat less fat or carbs so that your body's forced to use your own body fat. But you got to keep that same amount of protein and nutrients eating. You need to eat that every day, right? Because this is what happens if you see vegan deterioration. There's a whole YouTube channel about it. If you're eating a vegan diet, you're not getting all the protein and nutrients you need. Plant foods. If you're solely eating plant foods without supplementing very, very well, you're not going to get all those. And so they look emaciated, they look bad, they lose muscle mass, they lose bone mass, they lose their teeth even, they lose their Hair. This is what's happened. The opposite of what you want to do, obviously. So you want to eat the adequate protein and nutrients, but eat less energy. Right. Fat or carbs. So what foods are those? So I'm getting to it. Right, so what foods are these? These are foods that keep you full, and these are foods that give you the protein and nutrients. And these are basically animal foods and other whole foods. Basically, most whole foods have the correct satiety per calorie. Throwing out a lot of concepts, I know, but I have this concept of satiety per calorie. There's another guy, Dr. Ted Naiman. He's a great doctor.

So this is satiety per calorie, how full you are versus how many numbers of kilojoules you're consuming.

Yes. So basically all whole foods have that. Okay. So if you eat a steak, you are full for the correct time based on how many calories you ate. Okay. If you ate a pack of Doritos, you're going to be probably starving an hour later. It doesn't. Or. You know how you can just keep eating? You can't stop.

It's literally their marketing slogan. You can't eat just one.

One, two pop. You can't stop. You can't just eat one. Yeah.

It's like. It's like. Well, the reason that is is because you paid your food psychologist and food scientists $200 million last year or whatever it is. I mean, it's an atrocious amount.

And a lot of people do great work on talking about hyperpalability and stuff like that. I read the book the Dorito Effect, and Mark Schatzker is great. And there's all these other people talking about hyperpalability. I'm saying it goes beyond that. It's not just that they're so delicious. You keep eating it. It's because there's no protein and nutrients so that your body keeps eating because it's like, when am I going to get my protein and nutrients? That's why. So hyperbole is fine, but it's like, yeah, I don't think that's the biggest problem, that it tastes great, because steak tastes really great. But when I eat a steak, I eat enough and I've stopped and then I'm good.

It's so crazy because I'm thinking about every dinner table in the world and they're like, don't talk about politics. Don't talk about food. Don't talk about religion. It's like, why the fuck not? I have to say Like, I like talking about all of them because I like talking and connecting. And I think we. There's a lot of layers here. But when it comes down to this subject of, well, we have always eaten this way and we've always done things a certain way because that's the way it's always been. And I think when it comes to food specifically, if you look at the Italian culture, like, you know, I'm half Sicilian, so it's all about pizza and pasta and carbs. And, you know, you show your grandmother, you show your mother love by eating your plate and consuming your plate. So there's so much psychological things to be unwound before you even get to the nutrient conversation. Do you see this in your work too?

Absolutely. No one wants to talk about the nutrient part. And it's super hard to do my work quote, because it is cultural and it is. There's so many other reasons why people eat, and none of them really are for nutrients. You know what I mean? Like, no one ever thinks about it. But the thing is, for all of history, it would happen naturally. So we would. Whatever, because we had all whole foods. Basically. If you can make any combination of whole foods and you're gonna get all your nutrients, that's part of the thesis of Dorito effect, is that it's tricking you. These flavors going beyond just the fact that, yes, they're hyper palatable, yes, we get that. But the bigger problem is that they're tricking your body. For all of history, if you ate rich, savory foods, or a delicious strawberry or a delicious steak or whatever, it meant you were getting nutrients and your body knew that. Now, if you eat a Dorito and it tastes super savory or super good, your body's like, oh, I'm getting nutrients, but it's not right. So that's a big problem. So no one is really eating for nutrients. So, yes, that's why food is so complicated too, because everyone has their own ideas, everyone has their preferences. There's culture around food, but no one's getting into the details of the nutrients.

I think we can make it even more simple, and I wonder how you might explain this. So if we look at beliefs around food, nutrient quality of food, and then locality or availability of food, I think those three areas really make it either easy for people or hard for people. How do you describe that type of a lens to somebody that's like, I want to lose weight. You know those three areas well.

So, yeah, there's a lot to talk about when someone's trying to lose weight. You have to. I was a health coach for a bit with Dr. Gary, my business partner. I don't do it that much anymore, but I learn a lot. And a lot about helping someone lose weight is figuring out where they're at, what are what, maybe even what type of eater they are. Can you abstain or do you need to abstain or can you moderate? You know what I mean? I can have a little bit of ice cream once a week and it's great. Some people, if they have that little bit of ice cream, they're just going to go on a binge and go crazy.

But let me pause you right there. Why is that?

I think that's personality types. It's either you can moderate or you can't. You know what I mean?

I remember Gretchen Rubin talking about this two and a half, three years ago on this podcast. And she said, you're either an upholder or I forget the other type. You uphold things easily or you're a moderator. And then there was one more thing. So somebody's gonna like shout it out right now. We're link this in the show notes so you guys can watch it. But she said for her it's easy. She just, she can have crackers and cookies and all these things in her house. And it's like for her, because she identifies as a personality type of upholding, it's not an issue for her. It never even comes into her consciousness. Why do people that know that the food they should not be eating because it doesn't match their body? Like, what's the sabotage thing all about? What is that?

I wish I knew. I don't know why. Because I've had a thing of chocolate in my house for like three, four months. I remember buying it before Christmas because it was some like Christmas day still in my house. Like I have like one every once in a while. I don't. I have no idea why that works for me and why some people would eat the whole thing the first day. I wish I. I'm getting more into this, the psychological side. Like that's my, my next journey, I think. Cause I need to get this film out. And, you know, we really just need to like, look at the basics and figure food out. And then we'll say, okay, you can know all this, but still not do it. That's the second half. That's a. That's a whole nother can of worms. It's. How do you.

I mean, I'll be straight up. I experience this right now to the degree that I'm stressed to the degree that I'm carrying extra added responsibility. And sometimes there's seasons in life, like a lot of parents when they first have children, there's natural weight gain. And I used to look at that and I'd be like, no way, it's not going to happen to me. But it did. And it's because of lack of sleep, sleep deprivation, increased ghrelin, decreased leptin, lots of things from a psychological and also like a physiological perspective or going on. And I think about that first piece where I asked you about the beliefs. How do my beliefs dictate the foods and the quantity of foods that I eat and then also the way that I'm stressed or that I'm carrying my stress dictate the type of foods that I go to as well. Can you expand on that just a little bit?

Yeah. You know, I wish I got more into this, but for me it's like I'm the type of person, like I have this self talk where I'm the type of person who can manage what I eat or like I, I do not binge, I do not snack. I tell myself it's not even. I tell myself I'm the type of person that does not snack and therefore I am.

This is an identity. This is an identity that you have formed for yourself.

Yes. So I haven't snacked. I mean, I'm sure there I was on a vacation, you know, once and I snacked. I haven't snacked in five years. Basically. It's not something I do, but I got there by maybe. Well, I think first I realized that that was bad. I think snacking is a huge problem in society. The more times you eat, the worse you're off you are. And I think that's why some people are doing omad one meal a day and having such success. I do two mad two meals a day. It works amazing. But it turned into my identity and it was so much my identity that I don't like. I have no interest in snacking actually. It's maybe if people could find out a way to make it. It's almost like a negative. Like if I snack, then I'm just hungry and then I'm just like, I just want to eat everything. So by me not snacking, it's not hard for me. Right. It's like if you offered me a snack, I would just say no, I don't want it because I know that if I ate it then I would just get, I would want to eat more. Which it's not the end of the world, but it's just like, I don't want to be hungry. Like, I don't want. I know that if I sn. I know myself, if I snack, it's just going to make me want to eat more and then it defeats the purpose of the snack. It's like, why not just eat a meal, right?

But if you have more, like, let's say that you had 20 pounds more of muscle, that muscle would be craving calories, right? So would you just eat More calories at 2 or 3 squares a day and not snack? Or how do you, how do you unpack that for people that carry a lot of muscle?

Yeah, I mean, eat more times a day. I think that's why you have to look at each person and what their goals are. And if, if someone's coming to me to, to gain weight, then it's like, yes, well, let's increase the amount of meals you eat per day. So. But then I'd still have them eat the same thing, right? I'd still have these nutrient dense protein and nutrient forward foods, but let's just eat them more often.

I love the memes that you create on Instagram. They're so fun. You guys have to go to Food Lies. It's Food Lies on Instagram.

Food Lies.

Yeah, Food Lies. These memes are classic. They're, they're freaking amazing. And one that I really loved is that you were talking about like it was something around the protein myth. Like certain people that eat protein that have this expectation versus people that eat protein and they're just naturally healthy. So the protein myth, Zach Bush, who's sat at this chair, who's been here quite a bit, he's like, we don't need as much protein. You know, protein is actually going to increase uric acid and blah, blah, blah, blah. How do you make sense of that?

I love Zach Bush. I think he's brilliant, amazing thinker, amazing speaker, really. Right on, on, on 99% of the stuff he says, especially with regenerative ag. If I were to talk to him, I'd say, let's talk about protein. I'd say, I think you may have that wrong. And we both know Paul Saldino and guys like this that are doing a lot of work to show the opposite, that even the guy mentioned, Dr. Ted Naiman, these guys, there's a lot of good research, a lot of good doctors out there saying the exact opposite. We need more protein as a Nation. And I 100% believe if we all as a country, say the US we all ate double the protein. I mean, maybe not double is kind of a lot. If we all increase our protein by whatever, 30%, we would be much healthier and everyone would lose weight.

How so? Why is that?

Satiety. It's back to protein and nutrients and satiety. These are all wrapped up. I know if we're kind of jumping around, but it's actually kind of all gonna come together by the end of the. Yeah, there are certain spread of foods, and these are animal foods, plus other good whole foods that have all the protein and nutrients you want and need. And when you start stuffing in why the sugar, flour, oil, why these processed foods are bad, they're basically diluting all the good protein and nutrients. Right. So it's people like, why are people eating so much more? I've always asked people this question. We have this graph of obesity that has this kind of sharp uptick in the 1980s, the U.S. right? It's kind of like this. It's going up and then 1980 goes up. That's when the dietary guidelines were introduced, by the way, in 1980.

In 1980, that's when I was born. That's crazy.

That's right when the big uptick in obesity happened. And that's right when people started eating all the low fat processed foods. And so if you ask a calorie bro, you know, I call them cali bros. They're just like, oh, I lift weights and just count your macros. I'm like, okay, well then why did everyone just gain weight all of a sudden? Did everyone in the entire US decide to not count calories? Or did everyone become a slob that just stuffs their face with food all of a sudden? No, what happened is we changed the foods we ate and our protein has actually been going down since 1980. So people have been eating less red meat and they have been trying, like following the guidelines and it hasn't served them well. Our protein went, I think it used to be about maybe 15% to 12 and a half percent. Something like protein was 15% of our diet. Now it's down to 12.5. 12 and a half percent is basically the worst you can do. Dr. Ted Naiman puts out a bunch of content about this. He also makes great memes. He's also a mechanical engineer. That's why I like him.

Do you make your own memes, by the way?

Oh, yeah, I do it all. Yeah, I love Photoshop and just getting in there. But basically there's studies that show what's I think it's more with rats or mice and they do different chow. Right. They can adjust the macros. What's the way they can gain the most weight? 12 and a half percent protein. Right. And it, it's basically how, yeah, how to make someone eat more. It's like because your body wants protein. So this is another way to think of it. It's called the protein leverage hypothesis, is that your, each organism, any animal will eat to get the certain amount of protein and nutrients. And if you, so if you gave them a food source, say look, and then it had 20% protein, that animal would just eat that and it would, it needs 20% protein, then it would be fine and it would, it would maintain weight. If you give that same animal a food source, right. It's like a rat pellet, like a, there was 12 and a half percent protein they're going to eat to get that 20% protein they need. So guess what? They're going to gain weight because their food Source only has 12 and a half. So they have to eat that much more of it to get that protein. That's what the nation is doing. So that's what changed. What changed is we have all these foods stuffed with sugar, flour, oil in them. All the packaged foods are low in protein and nutrients. And so if you give a whole population a bunch of food with not enough protein, they just have to eat more of it to get that protein. And that's my explanation, that's very simple, of why we had this sharp uptick in obesity in 1980.

It's also a really powerful business model.

The profits in the processing. Yeah, I made a graphic, a video about that. So protein is the most expensive thing. So it's at least shelf stable, most expensive, hardest to deal with. So what are all the packaged foods? They don't have protein. All the packaged foods, it's just like breads and crackers and biscuits and pasta and it's all this stuff that's just a bunch of different combinations of sugar, flour, oil or just carbs or whatever. So yeah, you're right. And then the. I go further with the profits and the processing. It's like, why is our whole system the way it is? Well, if you can make a lot of money off of processing a product with a super high profit margin now. So I sell my company's nose, the tail, right? We sell meat. It's regenerative meat. All the money goes into raising the meat. You can't, I can't tell you how much money it takes to pay the ranch, you know, do the whole thing. There's no profit margin. If I wanted to make money, I'd make some keto process thing, which I don't do. I just always like, I'm not going to do that, because then you'd have a high profit margin. Okay? So all the big food companies, they got the green light once we said, low fat is good. You know, fat's bad. Low fat products are good stuff in a bunch of, you know, cheap grains to fill it up, market them, huge profit margin. And then it just fed the machine, right? So then this machine just keeps. They get so much money, they start funding studies, they do lobbying, they do marketing. You know how many billions, trillions of dollars they've done in marketing, right? Just push it. So that's. It's no wonder we are where we are, right? Because if you look at these studies, it's like, oh, Mediterranean diet filled with whole grains is good. I don't have a big problem with Mediterranean diet, but it's like talking about, oh, whole grains this and that. It's funded by the pasta company Barilla. You know what I mean? All these studies are funded by these processed food industries. They have all the money.

I grew up in San Diego, and I remember walking in the hallway in the nutrition department at San Diego State, and I looked on the wall and it said, funded by General Mills. Literally, General Mills pumped millions of dollars into the curriculum in the nutrition department at San Diego State University. And I was like, something clicked in my mind then. This is when I really first started to take a bigger look at the food industry. Like, I had been a trainer for four or five years. It was 2008, 2009, and in my mind, before anybody even told me anything, when I saw that, I was like, that doesn't seem right. Isn't. Isn't the curriculum supposed to be made by research and by people that are actually doing research? And why is there a food company paying for research anyways? It was a point for me where I started to see the conspiracies that are in plain sight. And, you know, a lot of the big things that we're experiencing now in the news media with this cancel culture is as soon as you label someone a conspiracy theorist or a tinfoil hat or it cancels them. And it goes way back to Project Mockingbird and a lot of things where the FBI actually hired people and the CIA hired people to confuse people, not just about food, but about everything. That's the world that we're in. And that's why I asked you about the beliefs that people have. That's that first starting place of how you see this. Food conversation and food lies. If the beliefs I have are different than what I'm seeing, than what is actually happening in true reality, everybody has to have a choice of are they going to see things for how they actually are or are they just going to keep continuing on in the belief set that they were given by their parents, by society, by other people. So in my opinion, this is a belief situation that allows these companies and all these billions of dollars to keep being pumped into the system. And you've done an amazing job at already describing what happens when that happens. How do you feel about that?

Well, yeah, that's the top level of this all it's controlling narratives is then you control people's beliefs. You could talk about anything. You could talk about the last couple years. You could talk about so many things in society are controlled at the highest level by controlling people's minds. Really it sounds, yeah, I don't know if that sounds tinfoil hat or not because it's really what's happening. What do you think? Like what do you think an advertisement is? What is a marketing campaign? It's change your mind to buy something. It's, it's controlling your narrative. Like that's all we do in society. All nudes is basically just that, that same thing. So I don't know why people don't understand it. I guess that's a problem. It's like people don't recognize it. I don't know, maybe people listening recognize it. There's like a certain crew, I mean everybody. Yeah, people woken up.

This is, this is wellness and wisdom. This is wellness wisdom. So the wisdom that I can see is to make your own choice based on your life experience and your mental faculty and your intuition. But those things can be very complicated for people when they grow up in low income housing and they're on welfare and they're in impoverished environments. When people aren't set up for success at an early age. Those beliefs get installed like a frickin microchip in a computer and the next thing you know, somebody's 30, 40, 50 and they're eating the exact same way as when they were a child. That is to me no coincidence as to why as a country we are exploding. I mean there's something to be said about the way that we believe. You talked about your identity where you're like, I'm not a snacker. We believe who we are. And I think that's fundamental before we start focusing on carbs, proteins and fats and nutrients is really like, you could give somebody the magic blueprint for eating, but they're not going to execute on it unless their beliefs are changed.

That's. So that's a problem. Like comfort foods. Okay, the notion of comfort foods, that's the problem you're talking about? Yes. It's imprinted on you when you're a child. And, and I did have that being from Hawaii. It's rice. You know what I mean?

It's like, it's like spam musubi shoots.

Bra. Shoots, brah. Yeah. If you associate that with some, you know, your childhood or your mom making it for you, I could see how it's going to be hard to change that. And I think that's why there's so much marketing going into changing kids habits and like selling them breakfast cereals and all this type of stuff. So you have to undo that, I guess. We want to talk about solutions, right? Let's not just talk about all the problems. The solution and I told you I want. It was a journey. It was eight years, eight years ago. It wasn't just like, oh man, I'm at the farmer's market. You know, I just came from the farmer's market. That wasn't me eight years ago. Even when I learned the new, you know, information. So it is a journey.

It.

You have to switch. What I like to say is it's not harder, it's just different, you know, I mean like changes, changes. A process changes. Oh, hard. But the new foods that you eat, they're not worse, they're just different. You know what I mean? It's like I eat the most delicious meals ever. They're just different. They're not. It's not Taco Bell. Like Taco Bell does not entice me anymore. It tastes fake and gross. Like I would never eat that anymore. But so it's, it's, it's. You still get to eat delicious food. You just have to go through that change process, if that makes sense. Right. You have to like unwire all that old stuff. And it may be hard because you could have grown up eating whatever, you know, your mom's spaghetti or this lasagna or whatever. We went to pizza every. I love pizza. It's like, yeah, but you can eat something. You can eat pizza once in a while. It doesn't matter. But also you can replace pizza with a delicious salmon with some whatever on the side. If you just make that habit change Rewire takes A little while, yes. And then you. You just find it just as delicious.

So with. With sapien, you own sapien.org and sapien is, I guess you could say, dovetailed into the food lies film. Right. So tell people about Sapien. How did that come through and what does that actually mean? I assume it's more ancestral approach.

Sapien, yeah, to me just means it's like how to live like a human. My pocket is called peak human. It's like, how do we become peak human? And Sapien obviously goes back to our roots as Homo sapiens. And Sapien is kind of the umbrella of all the projects that I do. And yeah, it's kind of. My goal is to be the apple of health. I'll just throw it out there. I've not talked about this publicly, but Apple does a great job. They're worldwide, no brand, and they do hardware and software. Yeah, my goal with Sapien is to do that. It's like not only are we going to give you the information about how to eat, but we'll, you know, we have doctors and health coaches and we have the food too. We have, like, nose to tail. You know, we have the regenerative ranchers. So the. I don't. There is no big name in health right now. Do you know a big name in health like CrossFit, Whole Foods, the grocery store, you know, I mean, there's. They're not big health brands out there and I think there needs to be. And so, yeah, I guess that's what Sapien is to me is. Well, like physically, that's what. Not physically, but, you know, very straightforward. That's what it is. But really what the concept is is going back to our roots and having the diet and lifestyle that humans are made for. And I think people listening probably know that. I'm sure just looking at your bookshelf, I know, I know you're on the same page. Like, I've read most of those books. It's like we just got the diet and lifestyle wrong. We have this modern convenience culture. Everything we talked about, processed foods, all this stuff, all you need to do is kind of undo that. We're not going to go back and live in caves, but we just need to live more like humans in the society that we're in. And it's not hard. I just went to the farmer's market. It's right downtown. Like, it's. It's like six minutes from my house, talking to Sam, who has his ranch out in Bastrop area. He's telling me how his animals are raised, you know, talking about the chickens, what they're eating, I'm getting the orange yolks, you know, delicious foods. That's not hard.

It's not hard because you've made it a identity. And I guess I want to go back to that because that was the belief. And the other one of the other three that I asked you was about like food availability. So for people that choose and this is a choice, you choose to live in New York City, you choose to live in downtown Chicago, you choose to live in Columbus. And I'm sure those places have lots of opportunities and availability for foods that are healthy and more ancestral. But there is this piece too, Brian, about food availability. How do I get food, how do I afford it? This is really a lifestyle choice. You can't change micro unless you change macro lens. You have to change the way that you're looking at your life, change the outcomes that you actually want from an inside heart perspective. And then I think God brings the wisdom. You know, the wisdom is provided. Once we finally choose that we want something different and then we choose we want something different, the wisdom starts showing up. We start making choices that are aligned to that wisdom.

Yeah, well it is, I guess it goes back to the identity. I think it's a lot of self talk. I don't think about this stuff that often. But I realize once you bring it, I'm like, oh yeah, I do have this self talk. Or it's like this is something that I do now. This is my identity. And if you change that, it's so easy to have these new habits. And I don't think that it is that hard or that expensive to do this stuff to get practical here. I think I spend a lot less money on food now. I think people spend way too much money on snacks and coffees and just like, just food wise, like even just going out, I mean I like to go out to eat. I just don't do it that often. It's like yeah, $50 meal, it was great. But it's like, well that could have been a budget for like all my meals for the week. Really? Like I don't, I don't.

50 bucks for a week worth of food.

It's possible. 50. You wouldn't be getting like the like good. You wouldn't get farmer's market meat. Yeah, but I, I was eating for probably like 10, 12. I meant, I kind of meant the work week. I was about to say the five day week.

Sure.

So I was going to say like $10 you could eat for $10 a day if you're just getting like ground beef and eggs and you know, just like a few other. You could just get like a potato, a couple potatoes, ground beef and eggs and maybe like one thing of broccoli. I don't know.

I think this is a deeper layer that we want to go into right now. Because when I, when I look at America, I think the average income is somewhere between 30 and 50k, something like that. And, and obviously a statistician is going to be like, no, it's 43.67, like they're going to know but, but it's somewhere between 30 and 50k. So if you break that down and you look at what Europe spends on food, you look at what Japan spends on food, you look at other countries, they're spending upwards to like 15, 20, sometimes 30% of their income on food. We spend a abysmal amount. I think it's like 10%. It's very, very low. That is a trained behavior. So if we just did this one thing where we just valued food as a chi producing source of energy and of life force energy and we did spend 20 or even 25% of our monthly income of our annual income on food, do you think just that one lever, like pulling that one lever would radically change diabetes, radically change obesity?

You know, we used to do that. We used to spend 20 to 30% of our money on food. And we were healthy back then, you know, before. I think it was more like. Because I was leading this stuff up for the film. Maybe it was, it was back, yeah, back in the early 1900s, we were spending that much money. I don't think it's a panacea. I don't think this is gonna solve all our problems. But I think it's a huge point, and I was gonna try to make a similar point too, is that you have to value health and you have to. That's how, I think how you get that identity is you need to value it first. You need to understand that how valuable what you eat is and that if you do this you will have a long term health, which is hard to do. That's step one. Well is even knowing the information. If you know enough about this, if you study this and believe it enough that I will not die of Alzheimer's or cancer or heart disease and I want to live to as long as I can, I need to eat better. And you know, then you go down this cascade. So then, then you, you value this, then I know that I want to eat these certain whole foods. I want to get rid of anything with sugar, flour, oil in it. Then you will be willing to pay more for those foods. And then you could even know that, well, I'm actually not paying more for general health because I'm not going to the doctor. I haven't been to the doctor in forever. I don't get sick anymore. I haven't been sick since I started doing this. Maybe it's been six years. Maybe when I was still in my transition period, I got sick. But six years, nothing, absolutely nothing. Past two years, nothing. Never felt slightly bad in the past two years. And I haven't done thing differently, by the way, but I spend so much less. I don't see a doctor, I don't pay for snacks, I don't pay for. I mean, how many things can you avoid? Especially those medical bills that could be tens of thousands of dollars. It's just hard for people to associate that when you're at the store and you see one thing's cheap, one thing's expensive, it's hard to get the expensive one because you're thinking about some ten thousand dollar bill that you're theoretically saving. So I get that that's not human.

Nature, but it's a big conversation, man. Yeah, it's a very big one because it stems to a societal choice point where people that are in relationships, people that are in marriages, when one person wants to eat in a more ancestral way and they actually start to do the identity work. And I know for you it's come maybe a little bit easier and there's lots of experts out there that can help you with that. We're actually going to link two different podcasts below. One of them is with Rob Wolf and the other one is with Saladino. And we'll link those below because there's really good gems in there that I remember having with both of these guys. And the bigger question I'd love for you to answer is, so someone's in an identity shift. They've made the decision that they will be healthy, they will be vital, they will eat in a way where there's protein and nutrients and hydration and that's their path. They get pulled off the path, they get distracted from the path because of the environment that they live in. We're in a cosmic soup here and we're all bouncing around and hitting each other and we're absorbing things like how do you recommend to people in the sapien world? You know, the clients that you coach, the work that you do, how do you recommend that they fortify that path of identity that they're claiming for themselves? What does that look like for them to move forward and to push away the distractions?

Well, I think one good tip is to not beat yourself up. So many people have this negative view of even calling it a cheat day. So you're talking about, like, kind of going off track, right?

I hate that word.

Cheat day is like, the worst phrase ever.

I hate it.

It's so bad. Everything about it's negative, so I don't call it that. But I will have meals that go outside my normal food. I don't even have a name for it. It's like, yeah, I might go out to dinner with some people and I might have a piece of pizza. That means nothing to me. The mindset switches. Maybe it is part of the identities. I identify as someone who is an ancestral health eater, who focuses on health, who does the best I can. And so me spending time with my friends and not causing a scene and like, saying, oh, I'm not gonna eat anything, like, this is not good enough for me, or like, I. I don't want to have a cheap. All this. That. That part of my identity is. Is I'm having a great experience and that I know that I'm gonna bounce back tomorrow and be back on the train. And so, yeah, I mean, part of it's back to the self talk too, right? It's like if. If you have this self talk of, man, I'm such an idiot. Like, I ate all this pizza. And then you wake up and you're like, well, screw it. Now I'm gonna, like, get Uber Eats, right?

It's one thing leads to another. Yeah, but it's like a waterfall.

But if you wake up the next day and be like, wow, that was really fun. I got to spend time with my friends. I didn't, like, cause a scene, you know, because I know people in the health world that will cause a scene, and, you know, they go too far, and I'm just like, this is causing you too much.

And that's actually. I'm glad you brought that up, because that's actually what makes people not want to eat healthy, is because they don't want to be identified as somebody who has to be perfect all the time and goes out to the, like, a good dinner place and says, oh, can I just have, like, a piece of steak and, like, some tomatoes on a plate? And it's just awkward. And they're dissecting the menu like the chef.

Oh, but what kind of pan are using.

Right. Like it's just insane. Like, just enjoy it. And what I got from you is the next morning or after you've made food choices that are hedonistic or fun or whatever it is, instead of going into a shame spiral, have it be more of a celebration. Because when there's celebration, you can move on to your normal natural path. I mean, we don't want to literally eat like we're celebrating our birthday every day. That would not be a good health path.

It's not a party if it happens every night. It's a song lyric. I remember. It's not a party if it happens every night. Right. But it's great because once, once in a while you have a party.

Yes.

And it's super fun.

Yes.

But absolutely you celebrate the night. Like, that was amazing. And now I'm back on track. Now I'm gonna, you know, have my good farmers market eggs today and I'm gonna, you know, hit the gym. It's no, it should be no skin off your back. I'd be like, yeah.

We talked about the flour, which the Einkorn wheat and the ancient grains in Sicily and in Italy they have a lot more health giving properties. So I'd love for you to talk about that and then I'd also love for you to touch on oils. Because when people hear the word oils, they're like, whoa, that's a lot. I mean there's many different types of oils. So sugar is self explanatory. If it's added sugar, not good. If it's natural sugar that comes with fiber, like from fruit, certain fruits. But talk about first the Einkorn wheat and just flour in general. And then we can move on to the oils.

Sure. Yes. The flour thing. So completely different food foods. If you think about what you would get in Italy if someone made you a piece of bread, they would be getting and probably an ancestral breed, a heritage breed like an Einkorn. It probably wouldn't be soaked in Roundup, Monsanto's glyphosate. Yeah, they have law, they have different laws over there. It would be probably handmade. It would be probably sprouted. A sourdough would be fermented. You, you know, use a yeast. It doesn't have the extra ingredients and it's slow fermented and it, you have to ferment it overnight and that gets rid of a lot of the antinutrients and it actually gets. Yeah. Gets rid of like the glutens and stuff like that. And yeah, it would be a Completely different thing than a white bread or even a whole wheat bread you get in a store. Get in the store in America, it would be monocropped, you know, glyphosate soaked grain that would, you'd start off with hybridized, you know, for the biggest, best yield, it would be have all these other ingredients in it. Another thing preservatives, different things. We want. It would not be slow fermented. It would not. Even if it was sourdough, they put in, I think it's like acetic acid. They'll put in some kind of acid to make it taste like it's sour. But it actually wasn't taking the time to actually do the fermentation process. It's fake.

It's fake sourdough.

It's fake sourdough. I'm telling you. Dr. Bill Schindler, he's a great guy, interviewed him many times. He talks about this a lot. So you're not. You're getting completely different food products. One, they both seem like bread. They're completely different. And Dr. Bill goes into this in great detail. One is probably completely fine, right? In Italy, you're eating some bread and apparently it's fine because a lot of people in Europe are doing a lot better than us. And the one that you get in the package, yeah, it's completely different. But they're just called the same thing. Same thing with cheese. If you're getting a real cheese compared to a fake processed American slice of cheese that's made from soybean oil, Completely different thing. That's why if food is so confusing, right? Or even carbs, like people think, oh, carbs are bad. Like, no, you have to. They're completely different things. If you're talking about the bread compared to like a sweet potato, those are completely different. And I've even measured it. I had a CGM for a while and I ate a sweet potato. And yeah, my blood sugar went kind of like this and back down. I ate a piece of bread, shot straight up, very high, you know, and then it came down slower. So, I mean, it took us an hour to get here. And not everyone's going to go to this detail, but you have to realize how different these foods are. And I think that's kind of the problem. Why we're in such a mess is because you have to get so into the weeds to figure this stuff out that, yes, you could eat a piece of bread in Italy and be fine. And then you eat something at the store in America and it's not good. And why we have all the problems.

Because it's so, I guess, overwhelming. People feel inundated. They feel it's a lot drowning in information. So give us the wisdom then when it comes. Did you want to show up there?

Well, I wanted to do the oil.

Yeah. I was going to ask you what the oil is next. Okay, so oils, I mean, that's a big topic. So let's talk about oils a little bit. Omega 3, Omega 6, olive oil, avocado oil versus seed oils.

Yes. Again, if you just hear oil's bad, you're not going to know. You have to get into the details. So vegetable oil is pretty much all bad. It's kind of a euphemism. It's good marketing. They're like, ooh, vegetable oil, it's healthy. Really what they are is seed oils. So basically all the vegetable oils are different seeds. I mean, grains are seeds, like wheats are seeds. Like all these things are seeds. Corn oil, soybean oil, all these things are actually seeds. The good oils are fruits. So that's an easy way to think about it. Olives are fruits actually. Right. Because olive has a seed. Coconuts are fruits and avocados are fruits. Right. Avocado is a seed. So you're not eating the seed where you're eating the fruit around it. So the good oils are the fruit oils, not the seed oils. So olive oil, coconut oil, avocado oil, those are the good oils. Everything else is bad. They're highly processed. There's like a 16 step process to even create them. Right. These seed oils, they have like hexane solvents and like, it's insane.

Oh my God. We're gonna link. So you guys click right now. We're gonna link a video that I saw on YouTube. It has millions of views and it shows how they make these seed oils. It is disgusting.

Is it the how it's made? So it's an old show.

It is the most. Watch right here. It is the most disgusting thing you've ever seen.

So I used to watch that show as an engineer growing up. How it's made. It's an engineering show. So the link, I'm, I'm. Because I looked this up for going to squeeze it in the film too. And it's like super old school. It has the 80s 90s music and it's like this sludge, right? It's a sludge.

So disgusting.

Brown, black sludge. Yeah. Don't eat the oil. So just know this is actually kind of the leading hypothesis to what's going wrong in our Society, if you're really talking about what foods are the worst, and a lot of people believe it's acetos. I'm sure Saladino brought it up on his show and some other people. Yes, so, and I, and I agree because if you look at even statistics, I know it's hard. You can't really look at population, you know, epidemiology, it's, it's not very good, but it gives us clues so we can look further. Right. But then if you look at the epidemiology of what we were, like, where we're getting our calories from and our obesity curves and disease curves, it, the, the seed oils is the one that correlates the most. They both rise in the same way. And even, like the people are eating less sugar. So like, we were eating a lot of sugar and then people got the message to eat less and people are eating like kind of less carbs. Like, people kind of got the message. But the seed oil, the calories, it's like all the nationwide, you know, reliance on seed oils or calorie consumption is just obesity disease. And so why that is. Yeah. More nuanced story. Well, I mean, you just think logically, like, why would I want this 60, 15 step process of like some little seed that no one ever got oil from traditionally? And why would that be good for me when you could get, you know, you just step on some olives and you get olive oil.

Yeah, right.

Like that. That or animal fat. Like we would. We always had animal fat. So you don't even have to go into the details of the science to understand that there are healthy fats which are animal fats, and fruit oils, which we always ate, and there are unhealthy versions that are modern and processed. But if you want to go to the next level, I won't go into too much detail, but yeah, you're kind of Talking about the omega 3 to omega 6 ratio or just in our diet in general. And yeah, these seed oils have a very high omega 6 ratio. So this is a polyunsaturated fat. Some people just think we shouldn't be eating as many polyunsaturated fats anyway as a whole. Like, you don't want a ton of those. You'd rather have saturated fat or mono, which is funny because that's what they told us not to eat for so long. But yeah, like, ancestrally, we would never have gotten that much Omega 6 in our diet. And we've studied all kinds of cultures around the world. Dr. Chris Kenobi does Some great research on this, has some great presentations, looks at all these people who are still living, like the Suca Sente or the Tokulawans. There's also the Simone kind of there. These are these populations still super healthy, still kind of on their native diets and actually are high carb, right. So they're eating what they have around them, and they. So they eat fish or animal foods. They eat a whole bunch of potatoes or tubers or taro or something. If you're talking about like the Suca Sente, I think it's them because, you know, they're island. They're getting their Omega 6. They look at their Omega 6. It's like a couple percent, right? So it's like they're eating all these animal foods, which of course are healthy. They're eating all these carbs, but they're super healthy because they don't have the seed oils. They have no access to these oils. And they have a very low omega 6 in their diet. You look at American. Some of these Americans have just wild. I don't want to spit out the wrong numbers, but it is like 30 to 40 times that amount in their diet. And we've never had this before.

What does the high omega 6 do when you're eating too much omega 6? What happens physiologically?

I mean, down to your mitochondrial level? It's just not natural. It throws off your cells. It throws off your mitochondria. Your mitochondria, where you produce energy. I mean, we don't have. It's not super definitive on why it's bad, and I'm sure there is some science that I could look up, but it's basically just your body always needs the correct ratios of certain things. Even water. You mean like, even watered electrolytes. You need to have electrolytes when you drink water. I mean, if you just chug like three gallons of water right now, that would be bad for you.

Yeah.

You would dilute all your electrolytes. And you. I mean, people can die from drinking too much water. So. So the easy way for me to not have to spit out science that I'm not looking at right now and I have not memorized is that it's just not what your body needs. These are. Well, it goes into your cell membranes, too. Like these polyunsaturated fats. They are not stable. So they're highly oxidized, which is part of the problem, and they're not stable. So if your cell membrane, your cell membrane wants to be rigid and saturated fats are that and when you have all these polyens, the high omega 6, basically your cell walls aren't rigid and it causes a lot of problems.

Okay. I mean, there's like lots of information out there. But that is a really important lens that you just gave us. We talked about the sugar, we talked about the oils, we talked about the flour. From a food lies perspective. Like, what did we miss? Because I think. I think this is such a. Literally, this conversation's an onion.

I mean, we could go forever.

You could go forever going back and forth. But. But can you give us the distilled wisdom, like from 30,000ft in the sky? Just speak to someone right now that is taking that first step. They're seeking wisdom. You know, they're drowning in information and knowledge, but they're seeking some wisdom. Okay, speak to them right now.

I'll try to do that. So I like the ancestral lens. We talked a lot about ancestral diets, and that's how we know humans can be healthy. We know we got here, we know we thrived. We used to be taller, we used to have bigger brains, we used to have thicker bones. We used to get less sick. We didn't even have chronic disease until around 1900. I've been looking stuff up for the film. In 1935, there's this one report, there was only 7.5% chronic disease. Now we're up to almost 60% chronic disease. So in 1935, this wasn't that long ago. So the first thing people need to know is we were healthier back then. Even before. I mean, I know sometimes throughout history we didn't have enough food and there were some problems with nutrition or we're trying to live off of bread. All we had was bread. And yes, we were shorter and we weren't as healthy, but if people had adequate access to animal foods and whatever, you know, fruits or vegetables or whatever, they were way healthier than us for all of history. That's the first point you need to know. So then you need to know what to avoid the sugar, flour, oil, basically any of these modern processed foods, and to embrace the whole foods. Basically, you can eat like your great grandmother. I like that one. People throw that one out. You know, it's like, what would your great great great grandmother eat? If she ate it, it's probably fine. And that could even include bread. But what? She made the bread. Yeah, you know, and these. So the pot roast was the center of the meal, and it's homemade food. That's the simple stuff. If you want to zoom out to the Food Lies stuff or the Food Lies film in general, we could go back to the war. Fighting the wrong war. I think that's a big message just to get out there, is that there's been so much demonization of meat. It's been this war on fat forever. I think people finally are kind of warming up to this, that saturated fat's not bad because there have been a lot of good studies that show this. But there's still this incessant push against meat in the media now. So once they try to hit the health side, and maybe that's not working anymore because there's actually other studies that show that meat's completely fine. And there was a really recent study that says worldwide, it increased longevity. People who ate meat actually lived longer. It's a very new study out of Australia. So then they try to move to the climate stuff, right? So they. So they're just attacking meat on all sides.

When you say they, who do you mean?

Well, it's any big industry, anyone. To me, it's all the people that have profit to be made. If you don't eat meat, you have to eat something else. It's like for their stuff to be good, meat has to be bad.

So, like, the investors in Beyond Burger.

Are pushing this hard, but everyone, because all the big food companies, big manufacturer, pharmaceutical, everyone benefits from people eating processed foods. So that's why there's this big push. It's a huge, huge industry that people don't even realize how much it hits. It hits everything, even healthcare. It's like, oh, so there's a reason why it's. It's a scapegoat, you know. You know, Diana and Rob, you know, they made the film Sacred Cow. Like, the whole thing is it's a scapegoat, right? The cow, it's like the scape cow. It's like blame has been put on the cow when it's actually the processed foods that's like the biggest message. That's what I was talking about. The wrong. We have to fight the wrong enemy. Fight the right enemy. We've been finding the wrong enemy the whole time, and look where it's got us. The chronic disease and obesity is rising every single year. That's because we're fighting the wrong enemy. If everyone's saying, oh, we gotta eat less meat every year, it's getting. Trying to get people to eat less meat, eat less fat, and we're just getting sicker and sicker. I'm telling you, if we had a war against sugar, flour, Oil, which is basically all processed foods. I think that would turn around. Like, we would not. We'd be fighting the correct enemy. People we're talking about. It's hard for people to change. Oh, it's fast, it's easy, it's delicious, it's cheap. Right, That's a problem. But if everyone knew how bad it was, if there was a world, okay, how much did people's lives change last years? People, when the powers that be give a message and spend a hundred percent focus on giving that message, they can make worldwide things happen. They can change people's lives, dress. We know that. We've seen that, that. So now we know. So if they, if there was a worldwide campaign, every single news story, everything, it's like, you can't. The processed foods are going to kill you. It's going to be slow, you're not going to know it, but it's going to get you in the end. They're not healthy, it's empty calories, it's low in protein, whatever. We had this insane campaign against processed foods and said, guess what, we're wrong. Meat is a health food. Fat is a health food. Eggs are great for you. Cholesterol doesn't matter. If we, I mean, this is of course never going to happen. If we had this worldwide campaign, it would make change and people would actually make change because they would know that it would help them. Right now it's just, they're just like, oh, I don't know. Well, I'm not eating meat, so that's good. You know what I mean?

It's like, oh, yeah, it can be overwhelming. And I loved how you just took a breath right there because that is exactly. We did some breath work before we started this podcast. And honestly, like, I'm right here with you guys. I'm in the journey. I understand the challenges, the responsibilities. I just want to paint a quick picture. And this picture is what if, Just out of curiosity, because I think real change comes from curiosity, not just from anger, not just from pushing against something. So if I was asking myself a curious question and I said, okay, what would my life look like for me to spend 5 to 10% more of my monthly income on nutritious foods, on whole foods, on animal based foods and fruits that are good for me, what would I have to let go of? And just out of curiosity, I'm not saying you have to do it, I'm not saying this needs to like happen today, but just in your next journal prompt, in what you're doing when you leave Us with this podcast. Just write that down and just marinate, meditate on that. Like, what would it look like for me to spend 10% more of my monthly income on highly nutritious foods? I'm curious what I would have to let go of if I did that. What would I have to let go of? Maybe it's things that I know are hurting me anyways. Maybe it's going to the bar. Maybe it's doing activities with friends that I don't really care about. Whatever it is, the money's there. It's not that the money's there. We can spend billions of dollars on pumping vaccines around the fucking planet. Meanwhile, children can't drink water. I think it's like 3 billion people don't have access to clean water. Some ridiculous number. And also people are starving. This isn't a abundance issue. This is a choice issue. This is an issue of can I pause? Can I self reflect? Can I know myself? Can I know what I want? My values, and can I design a life that's actually in alignment with that? Or not? And I bet you that is the most uncomfortable yet radical, transformational conversation that we could have individually and as a collective. So I just want everyone to sit with that, be curious in your next journaling session as we wrap this conversation. Man, it's been absolutely incredible because a lot of the things you've presented, you've done it from a way where you cut through the clutter. Like you said, we could have done a lot of different layers of the onion here, but I loved this interview so much because you really made things more simple for people to understand, and I really appreciated that and the wisdom that you might share with us about living our life. Well, what is that to you? If you had to define wellness, what does Brian Sanders believe about wellness? How would you define wellness?

Living like a human. And I think there's five pillars to living like a human. And like, I don't think many people do any of these really. And one is the food we eat. So, yes, eating actual real human food, which rarely people do. People want fast, cheap. You know, we. We just mentioned this all movement, right? We. We didn't even talk about that. But of course, everyone knows about that. I think that the outdoors, with the sun, whatever, those. You can combine those. That's what I do. That get in the vitamin D, I'm getting outside. It's the sleep. This is stuff that everyone should know. I'm very focused on sleep. I don't remember the last time I didn't get Eight hours of sleep. It is one of the biggest focuses of my life.

That's because you're not a father.

Well, yeah, yeah, but I used to not get sleep. I used to have my engineering job and I'd stay up till midnight and the alarm was off, you know, going off at 5:30 in the morning.

Yeah.

Now it's the number one priority. And then the fifth pillar is what we're going to talk about next with your podcast when I interview you is the stress, the emotional, everything else. That whole. I don't even know if you might have a better name for it, but that is if you get those five pillars of being human down, you are set. And so little people even think about those things. I mean, people in this community maybe do, but these. And also, I'll say one more thing. These are the five most human things. You cannot hack these five things.

Right.

People are looking for a hack or to cheat nature. You can cheat nature in other ways. I use example of like flying a plane. I mean that's cheating nature. We're like getting, you know, from A to B in like an hour instead of like a 10 day walk. You can't cheat these five things. You can't just like take a pill that's like, oh, I'm gonna sleep for three hours but it's gonna give me eight hours of sleep because I took the pill. You know that it doesn't work like that. The fake beyond meat stuff, that, that stuff's never going to be as good as the real meat. You can't cheat nature in the five most human categories. So you just need to do them is basically, you know what I mean? That's wellness to me is just doing them. It's doing them. There's no shortcut. You just do them. You can't have someone lift for you. You can't have a machine lift for you. It's like, oh, I got this machine that squats for me. It's like, you're not squatting, you're not doing the work.

Yes. There's a lot of decisions that people have to make after this conversation. Where do they go to get guidance from you so they can make better decisions for their health, for their wellness from that ancestral lens? Where do they go?

Well, sapien.org is kind of the main site. I'm on all social media as food lies. So I would just search for food lies.

Yes. You guys can check out his memes too. These memes are amazing because humor is a really great vehicle for education.

It is.

Humor is Great. I mean, I love it. It's one of my favorite things.

I mean, I just threw out this random thing with a cow and, like, some guys and speaking in Spanish and, you know, it's just a stupid meme about a cow. It had nothing to do with health, but people enjoyed it. And it, you know, maybe one more person is going to wake up and, you know, follow some of my advice.

Yes. And when's the actual film coming out? Like, what's the. What's the date?

So we're looking at the end of.

The year, end of 2022.

Yeah, it's been a long journey. We just got some new funding. I have my guy mention Hawaii. He's hard at work. We work on it every single day. It's just, you know, it's kind of like in his hands. I'm not the editor.

Okay.

But, yeah, this year.

All right, well, we look forward to seeing that. And that's@foodlies.org as well, so. Sapient.org and foodlies.org Brian, thank you for coming on the show.

Oh, man. Thanks for being at the pad.

And until we see you again, until Brian gives you more wisdom, until I share that wisdom with you, until we all experience and learn and grow, Brian and I are both wishing you love and wellness. We'll talk to you soon, Sam.