Ep.18 – Big People, Big Business – How Health is Bad for Business

Jonathan: Welcome to the Smarter Science of Slim, the scientifically-proven program where you eat more and exercise less to burn fat and boost health.

Carrie: Eat smarter, exercise smarter, live better. I am so ready for that!

Carrie: This is Carrie Brown with Jonathan Bailor.

Jonathan: Carrie and I just had a fun Smarter Science of Slim–related experience, which I think you guys will have seen by the time this podcast airs.

Carrie: It was very fun!

Jonathan: Carrie, why don’t you tell them what we did?

Carrie: We had a friend of ours come over and do a photo shoot.

Jonathan: A little photo shoot. Carrie was not as thrilled as she could’ve been with the current photo we’re using for our podcast.

Carrie: I hate that photo! Every time you publish a podcast, I’m cringing.

Jonathan: So we’ve got some new photos. Hopefully, they’re fun. Carrie, I’m glad we had some fun then because today we have not as fun of things to cover. Today, I wanted to jump into a bit of big business’ role in the inSANEity that we’ve been talking about recently, in terms of just dietary nonsense, and to get us started, I wanted to give you an idea of just how backwards a lot of what we eat today is.

Carrie: Okay.

Jonathan: Dr. Loren Cordain who, if people are not familiar with him, he’s a great individual to look up in many ways, one of the core founders of the Paleo movement. He’s a professor and famous researcher at Colorado State University, and he did an analysis of the traditional American dietary habits and found that, Carrie get this, 72% of what we eat today was not eaten for about 99.8% of our evolutionary history! Is it any surprise that about 70% of us are overweight when 72% of what we eat; and when I say that, I mean 24% of our calories are coming from starches, 19% of our calories coming from added sweeteners, 18% coming from refined oils – just these inSANE things making up the vast majority of our calories. It’s really kind of no surprise! It’s actually kind of a surprise we’re not all obese and diabetic with these kinds of dietary habits.

Carrie: It is.

Jonathan: And the sad thing is is that we saw on previous podcasts that we’ve basically been told that much of what I just referred to was healthy because it’s low in fat, but then we get that message compounded when big business gets into the picture. Dr. Friedman over at Rockefeller University, has a beautiful quote along these lines of how the pursuit of big profits really generates big people. Dr. Friedman puts it like this, Carrie – “Why has the scientific evidence from longstanding obesity research not found its way into the minds of the public? Perhaps it’s because these views are shaped by a constant barrage of advertisements from the diet industry which has a multibillion dollar interest in promoting the view that weight can be controlled through a volition of willpower alone.” We’re going to see, Carrie, that there’s a whole lot of money to be made in feeding us inSANE… I don’t even like to call it ‘food’; I like to call it ‘edible products’ because that’s really what they are.

Carrie: I’ve always had a theory that the medical profession and big food and big farmer keep us at a certain level of unhealth because if they fix us, they won’t be able to pay their bills.

Jonathan: Yeah, well, I think it’s pretty fair to say it’s not really a health care business. It’s more of a sick care business. If everyone is healthy, you go out of business. I mean, if staying slim and healthy is simple, a lot of people stand to lose a lot of money. Like Dr. Weis in the Academy of Healthcare Management Journal tells us, “There is a lot of money being made feeding both oversized stomachs and feeding those enterprises selling fixes for oversized stomachs and both industries – those selling junk food and those selling fat cures – depend for their future on the prevalence of obesity.” Carrie, think about when was the last time we cured a disease? We don’t cure diseases anymore. We create treatments which you take for the rest of your life to treat the symptoms of the disease because obviously there’s no money in curing the disease.

Carrie: There’s a whole lot of Band-Aids going on in this world.

Jonathan: A whole lot of Band-Aids. So, let’s talk a bit about how basically health is bad for business. Backing up, we already know that Washington D.C. is the home of lobbyists. That’s a lot of how what gets done in our country gets done. That’s no different for the food industry, Carrie, and that’s something we have to keep in mind. I mean, the USDA is the United States Department of Agriculture; not the United States Department of Health. When we talk about farming and food, the days, for most of us, of getting our food from nice family farms is completely gone. Our food is grown by huge agribusiness, and it’s really a business. In fact, according to a 2007 report by Dr. Hendricks and Heffernan, over at the University of Missouri, Carrie, 83.5% of beef, 70% of soy beans, and 55% of flour are produced by the top four firms in those industries. For corn alone, for genetically-modified corn and soy beans, which supply many, many of our calories, 90% of those are provided to us by a single company.

Carrie: I find that very scary.

Jonathan: It is scary. This is kind of a silly example, Carrie, but consider the dairy industry. Why is dairy a food group? We all know there are SANE dairy products – Greek yogurt, cottage cheese – but when did dairy become a required part of a balanced diet? Who said that besides maybe the 1.4-billion dollar agribusiness lobbying effort that went into that? What makes a food a required food group? Like, how’d it get its own food group? I want the Jonathan Bailor food group.

Carrie: You probably might want to gag me after I say this, but I’m all for cheese being part of a balanced diet.

Jonathan: A required part of your balanced diet is the cheese. It’s actually kind of funny. Just to give us some insight into what’s actually going on here, and to make sure that we get our nutrition information from science and not from marketing, we want to ask ourselves – Is where I’m getting my information from driven by profit or driven by science? Because, if we look towards resources that are driven by profits, we hear things like this – this is an actual quote, Carrie, from the Grocery Manufacturers of America; these are the people responsible for ensuring that grocery stores are as profitable as possible – “Policies that declare foods good or bad are counterproductive.” Counterproductive at what? God forbid we have any policies that call foods good or bad! What is that? It doesn’t make any sense.

Carrie: That makes no sense at all.

Jonathan: It’s actually funny, Carrie, because if you look back at some of the earlier myths we talked about, ‘a calorie is a calorie’ is actually critical to this marketing information of policies that declare food good or bad are counterproductive or this similar quote from the Sugar Association – yes, there’s actually a sugar association – that says, “All foods have a place in a balanced diet.” Now, Carrie, if a calorie is a calorie, in some ways, that’s kind of true. Whether it’s soda, whether it’s potato chips, whether it’s Wonder Bread – if a calorie is a calorie, then we don’t need policies that declare food good or bad, and all foods do have a place in a balanced diet. But a calorie isn’t a calorie.

Carrie: Right.

Jonathan: That’s an extremely profitable position to lead us to believe because if it is, then every food… we can enjoy everything in moderation because a calorie is a calorie and the total quantity of calories is all that matters. But everything isn’t okay in moderation, and we know this. There are certain things we don’t want to eat any of, and of course, it depends on our goals, but they’re certainly not good for us in any dosage.

Carrie: Is now a good time to tell you that I don’t like cupcakes anymore and it’s all your fault?

Jonathan: Oh, no. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? It sounds good to me, but I….

Carrie: Well, my body thinks it’s a good thing; my mouth is not so sure about that!

Jonathan: But you just had a protein bar which you found quite delicious, ironically!

Carrie: It was. I must say that it was like eating candy.

Jonathan: Good. I am happy to hear that your palate’s changing. I actually saw that happen, too. I hated vegetables my entire life and then, you spend a few weeks doing more and more vegetables and you start to like it. It’s also cool because when your palate changes, foods that may not have been as delicious before will just become more delicious and it makes SANE eating a lot easier – at least that’s what it sounds like, is happening for you.

Carrie: I swear, though, that there’s something in all these genetically-modified products that is addictive or that it just makes you want to eat more because the less I eat, the less I want it. It’s just it’s cool, but weird at the same time.

Jonathan: Oh, absolutely! Sugar and starch addiction is a proven phenomenon. In fact, we may get to it this week but I think it’s going to spill over into next week when we dig into sweeteners specifically, and we will talk about studies showing their addictive properties. There’s no question about that. So, just one more fun science vs. profits quote here – this one from the National Soft Drink Association, who tells us, “As refreshing sources of needed liquids and energy, soft drinks represent a positive addition to a well balanced diet.” Why are you laughing?

Carrie: Whoever wrote that was clearly smoking dope!

Jonathan: Again, the point here, folks, is it’s not that we’re going to become hormonally clogged and immediately obese and diabetic if we occasionally treat ourselves to starch and soda, but that’s obviously not the case. But what is the case is starch and sweets should not be recommended as part of a balanced diet. They should be thought of as treats and as long as we think of them as treats and enjoy them as treats, that’s fine. Actually, what we’ll find is, as Carrie talked about here, the SANEr we get, the less potentially we’ll even want them even as treats, which is interesting.

Carrie: I mean I really do not have any desire to eat cupcakes anymore, which is just for anyone that knows me is going to find that quite strange, but I just don’t have the desire for it anymore.

Jonathan: Yeah, so for folks who didn’t potentially listen to our earliest podcasts, you may have forgotten Carrie – she can tell you more about this – but she is actually a world-renowned pastry chef!

Carrie: Yes, it’s kind of ironic that I’ve dealt with this, and I don’t even like cupcakes anymore and I’m a pastry chef and I’m doing this.

Jonathan: There’s a book right there from pastry chef to something… I don’t know. Folks, again, I always want to make sure we’re not coming off as conspiracy theorists here and I always want to try to present the facts and be science-based. So when we talk about science being crowded out by money, again, this isn’t just a theory. For example, let’s look at some data here: nearly two-thirds or 64% of members of national committees on nutrition and food receive compensation from food companies. In fact, David William at the Los Angeles Times reported, “At least 530 government scientists at the National Institutes of Health, the nation’s preeminent agency for medical research, have taken fees, stock, or stock options from biomedical companies in the past five years.” The bottom line, Carrie, is that both the food industry and our government are paid to keep profits high – not to teach us about nutritional science. A famous quote puts this plainly, “It’s hard to get someone to believe one thing when they’re paid to believe another.”

Carrie: Right.

Jonathan: And again, it’s very easy for this to come off as we say, “Government, big business!” That’s not what I’m saying. What I’m trying to say here is that we have to look at what people’s motivation is. The motivation of the USDA is a profitable agriculture industry. The motivation of food corporations is to make as much money selling food as possible. Nothing wrong with that; we just need to be aware of that so we don’t say, “Hey, government and big food, what should I eat?” from a nutritional perspective.

Carrie: So they have an agenda.

Jonathan: Exactly.

Carrie: They have an agenda which is not necessarily the same as mine or yours.

Jonathan: Exactly. So, that’s key right there. Just look at the agenda. For example, this is kind of a silly anecdote, but my first exposure to nutrition as a child was on the back of a cereal box. Of course, the food guide pyramid was there with starch, the cereal I’m eating at the bottom. Well, reading a cereal box for nutritional information – I know that sounds stupid. Even reading these magazines for fitness information – a lot of these… For example, these things like Muscle and Fitness and Men’s Health and Women’s Health – at least Muscle and Fitness, these are owned by a corporation which sells nutritional supplements and sells exercise equipment. So, making it seem like it’s complicated and promoting that you exercise all the time so that you need to take a bunch of supplements because otherwise you get sick…. You just going to have to look at the motivation where you’re getting your information from.

Carrie: There’s a lot of snake oil out there.

Jonathan: There’s a lot of snake oil. The thing to keep in mind again, Carrie, is that – this is a new catch phrase I’m throwing around – it’s ‘Slim is simple’ because when you think about it….

Carrie: Not necessarily easy.

Jonathan: No. Exactly.

Carrie: But simple.

Jonathan: The key distinction – it is simple. Here’s proof. Up until about 50 years ago, if you look at the actual obesity data, about 90+% of us avoided obesity. This was before gyms. This was before anyone counted calories. This was really before anyone dieted or thought about these things. 90+% of us accidentally avoided these maladies! The reason for that is, well, we just ate food.

Carrie: Right.

Jonathan: And we didn’t eat these ‘edible products’. So, slim is simple. It becomes complicated when we try to make it work in a broken system. So if we continue to eat starches and sweets, and we try to be slim and healthy, that’s really complicated because we’re eating starches and sweets.

Carrie: But it’s also complicated because when we go to the grocery store anymore, we can’t tell what is food and what’s an edible product. It’s just the packaging has become very complicated. The label leads us to believe it’s healthy, but if we kind of dig in the details, we find it’s not. It shouldn’t be that complicated.

Jonathan: Well, let me give you some tips, Carrie, that I think might simplify it. First thing is, if the label is complicated, it’s not healthy. The vast majority of SANE foods, think about them – non-starchy vegetables, nutritious sources of protein, whole food natural fats, low-sugar fruits – they’re not in packages. They don’t even have labels on them. One, stay out of the middle aisles. Two, if it doesn’t need to be refrigerated or frozen, chances are it’s not SANE. Of course, there are exceptions, but generally food is alive or was recently alive and because of that, it needs to be refrigerated or frozen or it goes bad. If there’s a lot of packaging, if it’s advertised on TV, and if it makes health claims on the package, that’s generally a big red flag that it’s actually not healthy for you. So like, ‘enriched’ or ‘a good source of x’. Spinach doesn’t say ‘it’s a good source of x’; it’s just spinach. It’s just sitting there. Just eat the spinach.

Carrie: So, here’s a really good example of how complicated it is these days. You know I went on my road trip around Georgia a few weeks back.

Jonathan: Yes.

Carrie: Normally when I’m home, I don’t drink bottled water; but I’m in Georgia – and it’s 106 degrees and even I know I have to drink water, right? I stop at the gas station, and I go in and there would be 20 fridges lined up and I’d go there and I go, “I just want some water.” How simple is that? Fifteen minutes later, having read the labels of 40 different brands of water and discovered that there was probably only two that were water, and the rest, I may as well have drunk a can of soda.

Jonathan: Absolutely.

Carrie: That, to me, is how much more complicated can we get when we’re just trying to buy water and we have to spend 15 minutes reading labels to determine what is water and what really isn’t water because it’s got so much sugar or corn syrup or whatever the hell in it. It’s just like when did this become so complicated?

Jonathan: It’s very true. Actually, while we talk about drinking things, beverage companies are some of the worst perpetrators of this confusion. I want to give one story and, folks, if this is a subject that’s interesting to you, I am not the best source for information by far. Marion Nestle over at NYU, Michele Simon is an attorney who writes about this, and Michael Pollan: all awesome resources. I really recommend their work. One story, to really drive home, this is about your health. This is about your family’s health. This is really important. I mean, we worry all kinds, like seatbelts and getting too much sun and yada yada yada. What you put into your body has more of an impact than anything. I mean, you are putting this into your body. It’s really important. So, just to drive home how careful we need to be. This is kind of a tough story to tell, because it’s sad.

So, Carrie, science, a million years of evolution, and common sense tell us that mother’s milk beats out formula as the best food for babies. There’s no question that just, given the free choice between those two things, mother’s milk is going to be optimal. Then, basic human decency tells us that it would be wrong to persuade mothers who cannot afford sufficient quantities of formula for their babies to buy it anyway. Two kind of self-evident points there. Neither of these facts stop the food industry from marketing infant formula to mothers in developing countries. In fact, this led to formula being deluded and contaminated and tragically, it increased rate of infant mortality. This was well known. This information was passed along to the food corporations. It didn’t matter. They continued their promotional campaign. In fact, they issued an advertisement, distributed in Africa, that depicted an African baby holding a container of formula with the caption, The very best milk for your baby. I’ll post this ad up on the show notes, and Dr. Cecille Williams, who is a pediatrician who spent years working with African infants reported, “Statistics have been collected that show the death rate among artificially-fed babies is greater than that among breast-fed babies. This is a death rate that shows a very marked class prejudice. Misguided propaganda on infant feeding should be punished as the most criminal form of sedition. These deaths should be regarded as murder.” I mean, I don’t want to get too dark, but in a world, Carrie, where we had more socially responsible corporations, and if we can help vote with our dollars to drive corporations in this direction, we would have a more SANE-looking Food Guide Pyramid, something with non-starchy vegetables and seafood at the base and nutritious sources of protein and low-sugar fruits and eggs in the middle; and then whole food natural sources of fat at the top. Or if we wanted to redesign the MyPlate to be a SANE plate, we’d have half the plate full of non-starchy vegetables and a third of the plate full of nutritious protein and maybe some low-sugar fruit and some whole food natural fat on the side and maybe a cup of water and green tea. I’ll post those graphics up. It’s really not that complicated. We’ve just got to take the power back, Carrie! We’ve got to!

Carrie: We do. Actually, I might take the power back right now because it’s hard for me to concentrate sitting next to you today.

Jonathan: All right, Carrie! Carrie cannot focus. Carrie, what is the problem?

Carrie: You’re wearing a muscle shirt, and when you start waving your arms around, I’m just like ‘ahhh.’ There’s nowhere I can look.

Jonathan: So here’s the problem, folks. Carrie and I are in the studio. The ventilation is horrible. It is at least 85 degrees in the studio. So I am in my very, very conservative undershirt here, and Carrie… It’s just getting out of hand, folks. That was a good way to liven the mood. Please forgive Carrie. She’s getting a little flushed.

Carrie: I can’t decide whether I should sit opposite, across the table, but then I’d have to look at you, or whether to sit next to you and kind of just get the side view.

Jonathan: Oh my goodness! Well, Carrie…

Carrie: At least stop waving your arms now.

Jonathan: Okay, I will keep my hands down and I will talk back to one of the people I referred us to earlier. Dr. Nestle, the author of an awesome book called Food Politics, tells us… again, folks, I’m not trying to point blame here. I’m just trying to get us to see we’ve got to be careful about where we get our information from. Quoting Dr. Nestle, “The USDA is in the position of being responsible to the agriculture business. That is their job. Nutrition is not their job.” If you were the CEO of a food corporation and your job rests, paying for your kids’ college rests on you bringing in more profits next quarter, that is your job. Our job, as consumers, is to make sure that we’re educated and that we’re keeping ourselves as healthy and fit as we want to and that’s what we’ve got to do. We’ve got to make sure we have access to that information because, frankly, I believe that’s the challenge. There are things we know are bad for us – that’s cool – but there’s a whole slew of things that many of us eat and many of us do that we’ve been told is good for us and frankly is counterproductive.

Cathy: I think that’s the real problem, is that people genuinely don’t know what they’re doing wrong. They don’t know that they have to read all 40 labels of water to find one that’s actually water. People are very trusting. Well, it’s another big food company. They wouldn’t trick us surely. People are very trusting and I think that’s where it all kind of goes sideways – that people just don’t know what they don’t know.

Jonathan: I really think it’s a sacred thing. Sometimes in American culture, especially, we’ve lost some of the sacredness of food. I don’t mean to be mystical here, but when we think about it, you’re going to put anything else in your body, before you would put a pill in your body, it has to go through the FDA, it’s got to get approved, you’re careful about the side effects… I mean, if you’re going to give your kids medication, you’re even more, “Oh my God, what can I take this with?” Those are pills that you may take once a day, you may only take when you’re sick. We ingest food constantly.

Carrie: And it’s completely unregulated.

Jonathan: Well, it’s regulated to some extent, but pink slime is legal.

Carrie: Sugar is legal.

Jonathan: Hopefully, we can change that, but there’s a reason for this, folks. I mean, if you look at it, there’s really an inverse relationship between the SANEity of food and the profitability. Think about non-starchy vegetables. Think about seafood and lean meats and just these basic foods. There is very little profit in selling that. You don’t really make too much of a profit margin selling spinach and organic grass-fed beef. Where you make your profit is taking sugar and taking cheap bulk-produced corn or wheat or soy and industrial oils and mashing them together into some edible product that then you can put some mascot on and charge $5 for it because no one knows what it is, so they don’t know if it’s expensive or not, and that’s where they make their money. The more sugar and the more starch you can… Those are cheap raw materials and they don’t go bad, so you can make 100,000 widgets, edible widgets, and just ship them all across the country and they’re good for 20 years; and you’re in the business of selling an edible product, instead of having to do…. I mean, if you ask any farmer who works at a farmer’s market, it’s kind of a hassle. The food goes bad; things like that, but we’ve just to take power back.

Carrie: But at least you’re not killing people.

Jonathan: Well, it is true. I mean, I’m not sure I could ever work at Philip Morris, considering what they do. That’s just my two cents, folks. It’s really just about taking the power back and ensuring that we know where we’re getting our information from and empowering ourselves to say, “Hey, does this person or does this corporation, does this organization have my best interest in mind?” Carrie, one other thing that I want to look out for is… For example, there are organizations that do have our best interests in mind, but they’ve gone on record as saying one thing, and once you go on record saying one thing, it’s very difficult for some, especially large organizations, to say they’re wrong. This has a lot to do with the low-fat thing. If the National Institutes of Health just comes out and says, “Oops, sorry, that whole low-fat thing – yeah, not only was that wrong, but that probably killed your uncle. Sorry.” That’s a pretty hard thing to just come out and do, so not only do you need to look out for the motivation from a profit perspective, but also ‘has this organization gone on record with one thing, and are they just sticking to that; or are they open to new research or are they willing to say, “Hey, you know what? I was wrong about this.” Have they ever done that before? I don’t know. The most egregious perpetrator of this profit at the expense of health is, far and away, sweeteners. So, Dr. Yudkin, over at the University of London, who was a pioneer in this area back in the day, was known for saying, “If only a small fraction of what is already known about the effects of sugar were to be revealed in relation to any other material used as a food additive, that material would promptly be banned.”

Carrie: I’ve heard that more and more phrased in various different ways by various different people over the past year. And it’s always out there and still nothing’s happening; still nobody’s doing anything.

Jonathan: No. We just have to keep beating on this drum, Carrie. This, to me, is like smoking or is like the green environmental issue where the societal changes can happen, but it has to come from the bottom up. You’re right. A lot of people are saying this. For example, the Center for Science in the Public Interest informs us that carbonated soft drinks are now the single most consumed food in the American diet. In fact, the problem has gotten so bad, Carrie, that at the turn of the millennium, the average American ate over 150 lbs. of sweeteners. That’s not total sugar; that’s just sweeteners added to food, because they’re in everything. Basically, Carrie, these are generalizations. If it’s baked or processed, it’s probably got sweeteners in it. If it doesn’t require refrigeration, it probably has some sweetener in it. These low-calorie snacks we see –this is the one I love! – 100-calorie snack pack, but it’s 80% sugar, but it’s only 100 calories! Carrie, in fact, weight loss products… go to your grocery store. The next time you’re there, go to the health aisle, pick up a weight loss bar or a weight loss shake. I guarantee you, one of the first three ingredients will be sugar or high-fructose corn syrup and that’s in a weight loss product. Even protein bars, things like low-fat salad dressings, the vast majority of dairy products, even cough syrups – I mean, it’s just everywhere!

Carrie: That’s because we’ve been completely brainwashed into believing that fat is the “baddy.”

Jonathan: Absolutely. If you take fat out of everything, then…

Carrie: Then it’s all good and so nobody’s worrying about how much sugar there is in there because it just hasn’t got any fat, so it’s healthy!

Jonathan: Obviously, Skittles are a fat-free snack to give to your kids! Exactly. In fact, Carrie, just to break that data down on to a more day-to-day basis, thanks to the sweet saturation, the average American is eating a little under a half a pound of added sweeteners per day. Per day of added sweeteners. Folks, when I say added sweeteners, I’m not talking about the sugar in fruit, I’m not even talking about the sugar in milk.

Carrie: Half a pound?

Jonathan: Half a pound!

Carrie: 8 ounces?

Jonathan: Per day!

Carrie: Holy cow!

Jonathan: Again, you know how I feel about starch. You know how I feel about some fruits that have a lot of sugar in them. This is none of that. This is just – you take a food and you stick sugar in it.

Carrie: Half a pound?

Jonathan: Half a pound. Two centuries ago, Carrie, people ate about one-tenth of that! In fact, during the previous 99.8% of our evolution, our ancestors ate none. There was no such thing as added sweeteners.

Carrie: I’m sorry. I’m stuck on that half a pound. Because I admit, lovely people, that I made twelve batches of chocolate ice cream yesterday, but it’s not for me. I have 160 friends coming into town in a couple of weeks and I….

Jonathan: Yes, she’s a dealer on one hand and the therapist on the other.

Carrie: And I promised them I’d make them ice cream, and I’m not going to eat it; but it is wonderful!

Jonathan: Keep digging that hole, Carrie! Keep digging the hole.

Carrie: So I made twelve batches of chocolate ice cream, and so I’m looking at that half a pound a day and I’m thinking about the amount of sugar I put in that ice cream and I could eat two batches of that ice cream and still not consume the amount of sugar that Joe Average is eating in added sweeteners a day.

Jonathan: Well, think about it in terms of beverages, Carrie. If you were to drink three non-diet Colas in a day, you’re already at, I don’t know, what is that? Thirty something teaspoons of sugar? I mean, there’s a lot of sugar especially in drinks. If you just give up sweetened drinks, if that’s step 1, you’re going to see fat melt off your body if you just gave up sweetened drinks.

Carrie: And that sounds simple, but you’ve got to read the label.

Jonathan: You’ve got to read the label. Absolutely!

Carrie: You’ve got to read the label because those 40 branded waters are as bad as pop!

Jonathan: And you’ve got to watch out for this other little trick they play. It’s not always going to say ‘sugar,’ it’s not always going to say ‘high-fructose corn syrup.’ I’ll actually post in the show. I’m not going to go through the whole list I have a list of about 50 names for added sweeteners like ‘dextrin’ and these things like organic cane juice, your body doesn’t care. It can be organic sugar, it is still sugar. In fact, this is actually a challenge for some of us because a weight loss bar with 30 grams of sweeteners in it is the same as a candy bar with 30 grams of sugar in it from our metabolism’s perspective. It does not care where the sweetener is coming from. Whether it’s organic brown rice syrup or high-fructose corn syrup; it doesn’t really matter. Some are worse than others, but Heart Smart cereal that has 20 grams of sugar in it is just as bad as breakfast pastries which have 20 grams of sugar in it, because they’re full of sweeteners. If it’s got sweeteners in it, no good. It doesn’t matter what the type of sweetener is, – I’ve got a list for you here – we’ve got to get rid of those added sweeteners. Carrie, the thing that breaks my heart is, it doesn’t mean we can never eat sweet things again; there’s all sorts of natural non-caloric sweeteners such as Stevia or luo han guo, I think I’m pronouncing that correctly, which is a herb from China. These things are sweet, they’re delicious, and they do not cause this hormonal chaos. So it’s not as if we need to go without sweet for the rest of our life, we just need to avoid caloric sweeteners.

Carrie: I actually had some girlfriends over for lunch on Saturday and I made dessert and it was a chia seed thing that I made up. I’m going to be posting the recipe soon. I made it, and they didn’t know what it was. I dished it up and they could not believe that there was no sweetener in it. There was no Stevia, no nothing; there were just some strawberries in it and that was where the sweetness was coming from. They couldn’t believe it wasn’t sweet and they were just like, “This is more delicious than most desserts, puddings, that we’ve ever eaten!”

Jonathan: Well, the good news, Carrie, and your friends probably didn’t experience this, but I know you are and I have and those listeners that have gone SANE are experiencing this without a doubt and that’s as you go SANE, your sweet tolerance changes. So, just like caffeine or alcohol, if you drink one coffee a day, you might need to move to two and then you might need to move to three. Even with alcohol, you develop a tolerance. The same thing happens with sweet. Hypothetically, if you went 21 days without eating any form of added sweetener, on day 22, if you ate some blueberries, you’d be like, “Holy God!” There would just be this party in your mouth, that everyone’s invited.

Carrie: One day last week, I made my kind of porridge – no oats or starches, but I make this porridge.

Jonathan: Your SANE porridge.

Carrie: My SANE porridge. And I made it with pineapple chunks instead of another fruit, and it was so sweet! It was almost like I couldn’t believe that it hadn’t been in syrup or whatever. It was frozen pieces, and it was so sweet, and I think that’s because I have lowered my….

Jonathan: Your tolerance.

Carrie: I’m that much more sensitive to sweet now, so it doesn’t take as much to get the sweet here.

Jonathan: And the other thing that’s beautiful, Carrie, is as we move away from these edible products and more towards food, there’s two things that I think are just wonderful about that. One, our palate changes. We start to taste things we’ve never tasted before; but I think even more importantly, Carrie, this is where we hear so much about diets, and diets are temporary. What we need to do is to have something that we can do for the rest of our life because of course, if we want to keep up our health and fitness, we need to keep up whatever we’re doing. Having a way to make our tastes change… It’s actually funny, Carrie, because one of the more effective newer forms of medication people are using to quit smoking, I think it’s called Chantix. It’s a medication you take which makes cigarettes taste terrible. So you take it and then you don’t want to smoke anymore because every time you smoke, it tastes terrible. So how cool would it be if for 21 days, it’s not going to be fun because we have to break our addiction, we have to put ourselves in this state; but if for 21 days, we could set ourselves up for the next 21+ years, recalibrate our taste buds, and have these inSANE foods just really not taste that good anymore, or they still taste good, but it’s not like we crave them and we can’t stop once we start. That’s something we can do for the rest of our lives.

Carrie: I actually found when I first started eating this way, I found that very quickly, in a matter of days, because I was eating so much more protein, a lot of those cravings were gone within a matter of days! I was no longer craving the sugar or the starches that I had been before because of that increase in protein.

Jonathan: Carrie, from a biological perspective, what you’re experiencing is cool for two reasons. One, those cravings are going away – that’s awesome! But another one of those reasons those cravings are going away is when we “clear” this hormonal clog that I talk about, you’re not going to get these cravings as much because instead of… So if we eat a traditional Western diet, we eat a bunch of starch and sugar and our body just runs on that. It burns that up and then it’s hormonally clogged, so when it runs out of energy from the sugar and starch we just ate, it can’t burn our fat effectively, so it tells you, “Eat more sugar and starch. Eat more sugar and starch, because that’s how it’s fuelling itself. But once we clear this hormonal clog, we won’t get these ravenous cravings because when we’re out of energy from what we just ate, our body says, “Well, I’m going to eat a 500-calorie saturated fat meal off your hips. I’m going to eat another 500-calorie saturated fat meal off your tummy.” And you’re not getting these cravings because your body is satisfying itself with its own fat tissue. When we run on sugar perpetually, we’ve just got to keep kind of stoking that fire; but when we allow our body to basically fuel itself, that’s another reason you’re experiencing that lack of cravings, which is great!

Carrie: But I think the great thing about it, for anyone listening who hasn’t gone over to the other side yet and started eating SANE, it really truly is not as hard as you think it’s going to be; and it’s not as hard as all those other diets you’ve tried. It really isn’t. When you start to eat a SANE balanced meal, a lot of those cravings and all of that just literally magically disappear, which makes the whole thing a lot easier. It’s not hard to stay on this lifestyle because those kind of crazy-making feelings aren’t there like they are in a normal diet.

Jonathan: Yeah, it’s like chronically being too full for dessert. We’ve all that experience. We’re just like, “Oh my God! I don’t want to eat dessert.” Same kind of thing. Carrie, the other thing I like to keep in mind when you say, “It’s not that hard,” is what we’re talking about here. One, hunger is hard. I don’t know too many people that can be hungry for their entire life, but when you think about it, there are millions and millions and millions of people who have this sort of macro, “I don’t eat this. I do eat this.” Some examples are vegetarians, people who have certain religious beliefs, pregnant women, diabetics – all of these. This isn’t some small fraction of the population. If you add all those people up, you get over two billion people that, at any given point in time, are eating intentionally. Those two billion people don’t have anything on us. We can do it, too, but we just need to… I feel like the reason those people – vegetarians, pregnant mothers, things like this, it’s not just about, “I want to diet, and I want to lose weight.” It’s about something deeper. It’s about their health, or it’s about something meaningful to them. That’s why I want to drive home this message of health and your family’s health and your wellbeing being so important, because if you can attach that meaning to this, you can just live a lifestyle where you don’t crave these things, and you’re like the two billion people in the world who are just conscious about what they eat. So, I think that’s a good place to start.

Carrie: That got a bit deep there.

Jonathan: It did. It got a bit deep.

Carrie: But it’s all true, people!

Jonathan: We had some other stuff I wanted to cover today, but we’ll pick that up on the next podcast because we’re already over for time. Folks, just to wrap up, we talked a bunch about sugar this week. We’re actually going to talk more about sugar next week and sweeteners; we’re going to talk about high-fructose corn syrup; we’re going to talk about sugar addiction; we’re going to talk about all kinds of fun stuff, but just to wrap up – I want to wrap up with one more quote and this is from Dr. Popkin, over at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who pointed out that as early as the 1950s, “Research showed that a link between sugar consumption and coronary heart disease was stronger than the link between heart disease and the consumption of saturated fats from animal foods.” Carrie, this work was ignored, though. The reason I want to leave with that quote is at some point in time this week, there may be the temptation for you or for your kids or something to consume sugar flagrantly, and if your child or if you went over to a neighbor’s house – this is kind of a silly example, Carrie – but if they melted a stick of butter into a cup and gave it to you, you would not eat that. You would be kind of disgusted by that, and you’d say, “Even if it tastes good, I’m not going to eat that because I know it’s going to destroy my health.” Start to think of sweetened beverages in that way. That is just concentrated diabetes. You’re drinking diabetes.

Carrie: It’s poison is what it is.

Jonathan: It’s poison. In moderation and if it’s intentional, it’s fine; but make sure it’s a treat. Sugar is no joke. It’s been shown more than saturated fat, more than anything else we’ve been talking about or heard about, to be the cause of these obesity, cardiovascular disease, diabetes. Folks, please, for your health, for the health of the country, for the health of your family, just cut down on the added sweeteners, enjoy as much as you want of SANE, non-starchy vegetables, nutritious sources of protein, low-sugar fruits, and whole food natural fats, nuts, seeds, cocoa, coconut, all kinds of wonderful foods, and with that, Carrie, I’m going to put my shirt back on because that was….

Carrie: Hallelujah! Thank God!

Jonathan: To be clear, I still have an undershirt on, folks. This is a family show. Anyway, Jonathan Bailor and Carrie Brown, we’re living the Smarter Science of Slim. See you next week.

Jonathan: Wait, wait! Don’t stop listening yet.

Carrie: You can get fabulous free SANE recipes over at CarrieBrown.com.

Jonathan: And don’t forget, your 100% free Eating and Exercise Quick Start Program as well as free fun daily tips delivered right into your inbox at BailorGroup.com.