Podcast conversation (Josh Trent interviewing Shawn Stevenson) about 'food love languages' — how food functions as an expression of love (gift-giving, physical touch, acts of service) and how eating context (who and how we eat) influences health and relationships. Shawn shares childhood context (periods of food insecurity and time living with his grandparents where shared meals/structure were present) and family examples (mother-in-law who cooks with ritual). The discussion cites research (Harvard and other studies) showing families who regularly eat dinner together consume more essential nutrients and that simply eating together four times a week in low-income families dramatically reduced children's obesity and disordered eating. Emphasis: quality/context of meals (who you eat with, intentionality) can affect digestion, parasympathetic activation, epigenetic/health outcomes beyond calories alone.
Chapters
So we might be under delusion that we're making choices about what we eat on our own free will. But if you research, it clearly shows and indicates that what you eat is heavily influenced by how you eat and more interesting with whom you're eating. That right there, the food love languages. Like we all know about our like love language types, right? For me it's like words of affirmation and personal touch. I had never thought about food in that realm from that kind of lens. Can you talk about that? And then also what it was like for you as a kid, you know, with your grandma and your family and just cross those for us, please.
Yeah, thank you so much. That's my grandma's picture back here on the shelf. Like I mentioned, I grew up around very kind of volatile environment. But these were so many good people as well. It's just the conditions that we're in is just so much oppression that you feel like I grew up, we were on food stamps, wic, getting food from food pantries, like charities and things like that.
I remember the Velveeta log, right? We used to get government cheese as.
Well on that block. That government cheese, you know, it was different, but it was tasty, you know. But here's the thing. Coming from that environment, it was very different for me because I was also in a completely different environment. Like almost the opposite for a time. From the age of about, from kindergarten to second grade, I lived with my grandmother in a nice like suburban neighborhood. I walked one block to the school, I played outside and I didn't have to worry about anything happening to me. And we had a routine. We had, I had woke up to certainty. We had routines for in the evening, in the morning. There's so much structure. There was a lot of magic as well. Like seeing my grandmother and grandmother, my grandmother and grandfather every day. And not that I'm sure that they had disagreements, of course they're people, but they, it was so much love and admiration. They were an entity. Like it came together in one sentence. Meemaw and pop. It just came together so with food fitting into these boxes. So words of affirmation when somebody's cooking you a meal. My, my mother in law, one of her big ways she communicates love is through food. She lives for it. She literally lives to make food for other people. It is, she puts so much into it, like literally like met. She's meditating, she puts on meditation music while she's cooking. She puts so much love and life into that food.
She takes it so seriously that's amazing. She listens to meditation music while she cooks.
Yeah.
So it's like heart to hand to dish, for real.
And she's been doing this for decades, you know. And so like she's communicating that through food, which again, that's, that's a gift. Right. Gift giving is one love language. But in return, those words of affirmation for, for how good the food is, man, that really gives her life. That really makes her feel significant. Right. So giving gifts in the form of food, you know, maybe one of the greatest gifts that she gave was when my wife, when she had our son, our youngest son, Braden, and my mother in law brought over food, like food for like several days to take that off of our plate. It was such a wonderful gift to give and to speak in this love language that really mattered. Physical touch, right? Physical touch is another love language. And how we communicate and receive love, nothing fits more into that, that strength, that category than food does. Food is something we take from the external world and put it inside of our bodies.
Yes.
Like, it's so intimate and it be, literally becomes a part of us. It touches us like nothing else can. It is so remarkable because your body is. It's a miracle really, taking this food stuff and turning it into you stuff, you know, it's such a powerful process.
I love this because I think about the way that like we take in water. Our body's like 90% water or something like that. The food and the water that we take, it actually imprints our cells. That's the part that trips me out. And you talk about the science of that in the book too. But when we're absorbing food and water, it is literally like zeros and ones, you know, like superposition on the quantum computers. That's what's happening on a very molecular level when we take in this food. And it's so easy to forget this. The quality versus the quantity. You talk about starving for macronutrients and micronutrients. Somebody could be getting 4,000 calories a day and they're still hungry. And how does that relate to the way that we force our family members to eat? And the food love language is like, well, unless you clean your plate, you don't love me. And meanwhile, what's on the plate? A bunch of calories that don't have any nutrient values.
Yeah. This is so powerful, man. And there's again, because of the nature of this conversation, there's other different dynamics to get into. And of course I go through each of the love languages, but I gotta Touch on what you just brought back up for my spirit right now and what I really was on a mission to provide in this book is that it's not just the food itself, it's also who you're eating with, as you alluded to earlier.
Yes.
And how you're eating when you're eating all of these things. These little dynamics can literally change the entire outcome of our health. We're talking about these epigenetic controllers. And so research. And by the way, it's. Our minds are really run on questions. And so I was asking different questions, and a lot of people are asking about food. And the funny thing is, the data exists, but a lot of people don't hear about these things. So researchers at Harvard, which is, again, one of the most prestigious universities in the world, really, I've heard of them. Researchers at Harvard. Right, Right. So these researchers discovered that families who consistently eat dinner together. Families who consistently eat dinner together had a far higher intake of the most essential nutrients for human health and also protection against diseases. And they also had a far greater consumption of processed food and soda. Just a simple act they identified. After factoring in so many different things. Age, gender, socioeconomic status. The act of eating together made families healthier. And I can, again, from my experience, when I live with my grandmother, we ate together. We ate together at least one meal a day. Living with my mother and my stepfather, I can count on my hands, besides a holiday, how many times we ate together. I'm not kidding. In the. Whatever, 10 years or whatever it might be that I lived in the house 11 years, 12 years, I can count on my hands. We would often eat at the same time. But it's more like a free for all. You know, me and my brother and sister grab some food, we go sit somewhere. A lot of times in front of the tv, playing a video game, just on the go. We didn't have that structure, which entails a little bit more conscientious procedure in creating the meals. This doesn't mean that you can't order out or have takeout or whatever, eat together. But there's also something interesting that happens with humans. We're the only creatures that, like, get together, sit around and. And it's like, quote, breaking bread. We actually do this whole thing. But why do we do it? What it does, it actually helps to activate our parasympathetic nervous system and decrease that fight or flight, sympathetic dominance. Right. It improves digestion, but also by its very nature of the intentionality that goes behind creating food or preparing food for your family. It improves our outcomes of the foods that we're actually eating. And so I shared not just the study from Harvard, but also about three other studies that reiterate this in different forms in the book. And one of the other things that happens when folks simply the act of eating together with your children, this was just four meals a week, and it could have been any meals. And they did this on low income families. All right, Just this act of eating meals together four times a week, any meal could be dramatically protected the kids against obesity, so their rates of obesity plummeted and also disordered eating plummeted. These are protective measures that were stimulated and created simply by eating together as a family. And these are the things that are not talked about in the conversation of food and calorie management and trying to be healthy. These are the things that really make it all special.
I just got to pump the brakes right there because this is so big, like for everyone watching and listening, it's not just about what's on your plate. It's literally whether you call it epigenetically or, you know, Dr. Zach Bush calls it like the redox system, where we're microbiomes talking to each other within six feet. There's a lot of things that our eyes can't see that are actually going on. One of those is love. And that's something that's like peppered across all your content. Everything you do, whether it's a study about mask wearing and digging into the research to educate people about the dangers of mask wearing and maybe the appropriate time to wear a mask. But what's really pivotal, and I want everybody to really feel this, is like when you sit down with people that you love and, and you're creating that connection where there's food, that's an act of service, it's an act of love. There's so much more going on than digestion, protein, carbs and fat. I mean, it's like a big deal.
