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Pringles and Food Is A Drug


Jonathan: Hey everyone, Jonathan Bailor back with Carrie Brown. We are living the Smarter Science of Slim and we are podcasting. Carrie, how are you doing today?

Carrie: Awesome. I/m excited.

Jonathan: We have had a pretty ethic past two podcasts with some Q&A and I don’t even think we are done because you were telling me you had some more questions.

Carrie: Yes, always.

Jonathan: Let’s [crosstalk 00:44]

Carrie: I am always trying to find a hole in your theories Bailor. So far, I have come up with big fat zero.

Jonathan: Good news is because they are not my theories, I am just a mouthpiece for the most brilliant researchers that have been doing this for 40+ years. If we were relying on me, we would have been off track a long time ago. Fortunately, we are not bu Carrie before you get into your new questions, can you recap what we covered in the past two episodes because I think they are related.

Carrie: It was awesome.

Jonathan: Okay, awesome, so what else?

Carrie: Did you want more than that?

Jonathan: Little more, little more.

Carrie: It’s all about quality, not quantity.

Jonathan: Okay, you’re fired. The short version is…

Carrie: You can always trust me to distill anything down to six words.

Jonathan: She is a professional sound baker.

Carrie: That was actually six words, “It’s all about quality, not quantity,” six words – there you go.

Jonathan: All about quality, not quantity. It is – good job.

Carrie: See?

Jonathan: Two podcasts ago when we talked about protein, fat, carbohydrate, what they do when you eat them, how they are processed differently by the body and how that definitively proves that a calorie is not a calorie, it’s fact, it’s not even debatable, it’s just – the earth isn’t flat like there is no controversy there. Then next week after that Carrie asked a great question where we mentioned fat is very easy for your body to storage fat as it is already fat whereas protein for example – I am oversimplifying, but you need to take protein and then you need to turn it into sugar and you need to convert sugar into fat and that burns much calories. Why can we eat fat or how do we eat fat as part of a fat burning health boosting lifestyle and then we explained how again, even that question is rooted in the calorie myth of when you eat 500 calories and let’s say you store 300 of those as body fat, you just got 300 calories of body fat and you have to go exercise them off, that’s a myth.

If a healthy body stores 300 more calories worth of body fat than it needs, it will do everything in its power to help you burn those 300 calories off either through giving you more energy or just making you move in voluntarily or even metabolizing food less efficiently or just suppressing your appetite later, the body is brilliant and smart and tries to balance you out, it’s called homeostasis and it is awesome and it is why quality is so important because it is through the quality of our diet that we maintain our body’s ability to keep us slim automatically like it did for every generation of people that ever lived up until the last two.

Carrie: It’s awesome and fascinating.

Jonathan: There are questions that that brings up because it is so counter to what we have been taught.

Carrie: Yes.

Jonathan: You have some examples of such questions, do you not?

Carrie: Pringles. I would like to know about Pringles.

Jonathan: Okay.

Carrie: Because one of the things you said last week or maybe the week before, it was all so exciting, I can’t quite remember. One of the things you said was that when we eat food, our brain, because it’s so brilliant switches on a full indicator.

Jonathan: Our satiety signals.

Carrie: Then we don’t eat food for a while because we don’t need to and the body is trying to automatically balance that what we eat, verus what we need. Which is all good, except that I have noticed that what happens when you eat Pringles is that you actually want to eat more and more and more and more and more, the whole satiety signals doesn’t work. Talk to me about that.

Jonathan: Carrie, it is very important point. I am so happy you brought it up. I am getting riled up, I got to reel myself in. I will start with an example. We live in the state of Washington; in the state of Washington marijuana is legal. I am not going to talk about something that is illegal right now. In the state of Washington where marijuana is legal, when people smoke marijuana, they consistently find that it gives them – it increases appetite. It is an appetite stimulant. This is why you will hear people Carrie like “Where are you going with this, don’t worry it all makes sense Carrie, why did you bring up marijuana?”

Carrie: Washington is beautiful, I should just say that while we’re on the subject of Washington, the great state of Washington is a very, very beautiful place, I love living here.

Jonathan: Yes, it is amazing, anyway.

Carrie: Back to the drugs.

Jonathan: Back to the drugs. Marijuana has substances in it which stimulate appetite just like there are appetite suppressants like there are things for example that suppress appetite, there are appetite stimulants. What makes something an appetite suppressant or appetite stimulant, right? Everything in our body, it has to do with our brain. Folks who are familiar with the original book or the upcoming book know that your hypothalamus has a huge – basically what in your brain is controlling, whether or not you are hungry or full. When you eat food, it is either helping your brain to send satiety signals or doing nothing or it can send signals that even make you hungrier. Now, Pringles as you rightly identified Carrie…

Carrie: Do you even know what a Pringles is?

Jonathan: I ate Pringles, I ate tubes of Pringles back in the day.

Carrie: I am shocked.

Jonathan: I wasn’t born this way Carrie.

Carrie: Jonathan Bailor ate Pringles.

Jonathan: It’s TMZ, get TMZ on the phone, huge controversy. That was actually a joke, quick aside, my brother-in-law came to the town, Brandon, he is a great guy and he, my wife, and I, he is an endurance athlete and he is not – he doesn’t practice the SANE lifestyle, which is fine, to each their own. He insisted on making a quick side stop at local grocery store because he was going to go on a major bike ride – 100-mile bike ride the next day and he wanted to get bagels and other kinds of things what I am not going to – to each their own and so we were in the bakery section of the grocery store and I am like “Angela, we got to make sure that no one takes a picture,” it’s going to be like TMZ, Jonathan Bailor breaks down and goes on starch binge. Okay, where were we, Pringles?

Carrie: Pringles.

Jonathan: Once you pop, you can’t stop. Pringles markets that. Same thing you will think about light beer. Light beer is saying look, look, look beer which is caloric and therefore causes your body to become full, we’ve invented a way to make that not happen. You can continue to drink beer indefinitely while you eat a bunch of garbage and yay, now the beer doesn’t prevent you from eating garbage which is sad, but that’s what this beer does or even Jell-O, there’s always room for Jell-O, right, or you drink a soda and that soda contains 600 calories in it, but you can still eat a Big Mac.

Carrie: That doesn’t stop you eating more.

Jonathan: Exactly. Again, folks it’s not about calories, it’s about so much more than calories because for example, appetite suppressants are non-caloric, they are chemicals, but they act like calories would normally act in the sense that they make your brain demand fewer calories, right? The best appetite suppressant in the world is SANE food in the sense that it causes so many satiety signals to be triggered that you will and this we might go on a couple tangents in this podcast folks, this is – strap yourself in this is going to be a wild ride and no we didn’t smoke marijuana before this episode.

Carrie: I will have you know I have never smoked marijuana.

Jonathan: I have never actually smoked any form of any substance, but…

Carrie: Me neither.

Jonathan: Anyway, it just never appealed to me not that – anyway tangent, the – where was I going? Most appetite suppressant foods are…

Carrie: SANE foods.

Jonathan: SANE foods, but then what it is after that, we’ve gone on too many tangents. Okay, where were we, rewind, read the transcript, which probably doesn’t exist yet. Okay, so we were talking about stimulating signals in the brain when you eat calories, your body generally will demand fewer calories – why it is not about calories? Okay, why is it not about calories? When you eat food and you get calories, that triggers satiety signals in your brain, that’s all good. A lot of what we eat today is not just food, right? It’s a bunch of chemicals and garbage. Look on the label of any – like diet soda for example. There are no calories in it, but it’s got a bunch of other stuffs in it. When you think about edible products, edible products are everything in the center of your grocery store essentially. Anything that you can’t find directly in nature isn’t edible product.

Carrie: You mean like Pringles?

Jonathan: Like Pringles, like Jell-O, like the beer we talked about, those are – they may or may not have calories in them, but they certainly do have a lot of chemicals in them and what those chemicals do, just so – again remember your brain doesn’t care whether it’s food or whether it’s a pill or whether it’s a liquid like if an appetite stimulant goes into your mouth, it will make your brain make you want more food even if you take an appetite stimulant in the form of Pringles like it has the chemical compositions and the cues that are analogous to an appetite stimulant pharmaceutical, it’s just that one is sold to you on the food aisle and we give to kids in the schools whereas the other one is highly regulated, you need a prescription for it, but they both do similar things in the brain, take sugar for example. Sugar has definitely been shown in clinical studies to trigger a similar response in opioid receptors in your brain; these are the receptors that for example heroin and morphine act on, sugar activates those same receptor sites, so there is a reason sugar makes you feel real good. It’s the same reason heroin makes you feel really good, it’s an opioid, it is acting like a drug.

I think many podcasts back Carrie, we talked about how everything you put it – like try if at all possible to just say it’s not like food and pills and drinks, they are not separate categories, if it goes in my mouth, if you put something into your body, it is going to affect your body, I don’t care if it’s Pringles, I don’t care if it’s Pop-Tarts, I don’t care if it’s broccoli, I don’t care if it’s Prozac, you put it in your body, your body is going to do something. Some of those things stimulate an appetite, some of them reduce appetite, the more inSANE it is the more it’s going to drive your appetite up, the more SANE it is, the more it’s going to drive your appetite down and the more it’s going to help re-regulate your hormones all because of it’s interaction with your brain, your satiety signals and even Carrie, we just recorded a bonus podcast with a brilliant researcher named Dr. Elizabeth Brondolo over at St. John’s University in New York. She was talking about why antidepressant and antipsychotic medications often result in weight gain and part of the reason for that…

Carrie: Pick me.

Jonathan: Part of the reason for that is studies have shown that these medications act on the satiety signals in your brain and they just cause people to just be hungrier and again, an individual might overeat, but they are not overeating because they are weak or they are not overeating because they are lazy and the answer is not to – they just need to exercise more, the answer is there is a change that has happened in their brain and just like any human being on the planet, we will eat until it is no longer hungry. These individuals are eating until they are no longer hungry, it’s just that those hunger signals happen too late and that then results in weight gain.

Carrie: So that the natural brain function to control things is just wonky.

Jonathan: Yes, and that’s even only once side, that’s the calorie’s inside, on the calorie’s outside then the brain would be sending less, like we said satiety, but also just calorically burning signals like have higher energy levels. Often times, people that go on antidepressants for example notice that they feel like they just have less energy that’s because they’re burning fewer – I mean they have – they are running slower. You get one-two punch of the satiety signal, it’s broken down, so people end up eating more than they need to eat and then their energy levels drop, so they are burning more than they would normally burn.

Carrie: This is good news for anyone who is taking medication.

Jonathan: Yes, you are not weak or the problem – it’s also good news for anyone who is overweight because again, you are not weak. What we are sold in our grocery stores today – this is the bottom line, what we are sold in our grocery stores today is a lot more like pills and pharmaceuticals designed by food manufacturers to make us take more of them than they are foods that you find directly in nature that are beautiful and healing and healthy. Pringles are more like pharmaceuticals and they are – Pringles are designed in a laboratory by scientists to…

Carrie: Disrupt your society button.

Jonathan: Satiety.

Carrie: That’s what I meant; it didn’t come out that way.

Jonathan: This is why it is so – people are like “Jonathan you are so passionate” – once you have this information – like how did Prozac get came up with? They were like okay, there are these receptors in the brain and if we create these chemicals, we can negate them or manipulate them in this way. That is what food scientists do. They say how could we take these non-regulated substances, high fructose corn syrup, non-regulated substance. How can we take that and use it and combine it with these other stuffs to make it act like a drug as known as, to override your satiety signals to change your baseline levels of satiety and to trigger an opiate response that causes you to want more and more and more and more and that’s why I am not going to sleep on a normal schedule until we do something about this as a society because it is irresponsible to allow this to continue especially to our children because if you went into a school and they were just handing pills out to kids…

Carrie: You’d go nuts.

Jonathan: You’d go nuts, but it is a fact that it’s not like “Oh pills those are totally different than Pringles,” they are not, they are not totally different, they are very much more similar than they are distinct.

Carrie: Breathe Jonathan, breathe.

Jonathan: That’s why Pringles say, “Once you pop, you can’t stop.” Did I answer your question?

Carrie: It absolutely did. The synopsis for me the last three podcasts is that it’s a lot more complex than the rest of the world would have us believe and the key is quality.

Jonathan: There is a brilliance in what you just said Carrie because it is like yes it is complex and in fact this might be dumb – so, it’s complex, but it’s also extremely simple. The problem – once we are told myths, it’s complicated.

Carrie: By complicated I mean there is a lot more going on than we have been lead – we have been lead to believe that it’s simple, you eat more, you exercise less, you gain weight, that is not actually true and we know that now because we understand that there is way more going on – that’s what I meant by complicated.

Jonathan: Exactly right and when any – I do not mean this in a derogatory sense but if anyone comes to a person – one of our brilliant listeners who is listening to this podcast is just like “It’s just calories in and calories out.” That’s like saying so “How do you make a baby?” Here is how you make a baby – a man and a woman have sexual intercourse, that’s how you make a baby. There is a lot more that actually goes in to making the baby, right? Like there are kindergarten explanations like “Here’s how you make a baby – a man and a woman have sex.” “How do you gain weight?” You gain weight when you take in more calories and your body burns off.

That’s true, that’s absolutely true, but there is a lot – like there is a system in your body that controls how many calories you take in and how many calories you burn off and there’s a bunch more going on there and the body is brilliant and to trivialize it and then to blame people’s moral fortitude because they have been given chemical garbage that breaks their body’s ability to do that which it is designed to do naturally is dare I say a crime against humanity, it makes me very upset.

Carrie: Before we go, I do just want to reiterate because as you know, it’s very close to my heart that for me right now, the whole medication thing is key because there is something else going on that I have no control over and I can do whatever to regulate my food and all that kind of stuff but if there is anyone else and I am sure there is millions of people out there that are taking medication for other things, just bear in mind that that is likely doing something to your brain that is messing up all your systems that keep your body in homeostasis.

Jonathan: That is why again, this calorie myth is a crime because similar there’s medication like medication and calorie, there is no calorie conversation, medication sleep – sleep if you get sleep deprived, your hormones go bonkers even if you change nothing, even if you eat a really high quality diet, really high quality SANE diet and you go two weeks getting three hours of sleep every night, you will gain fat, you will absolutely gain fat because it’s not primarily about calories – telling someone that weight, your long-term weight is a function of calories is like saying that your intelligence is determined by your eye color, like it’s just that’s not – it really the more you understand – here is actually a quick story to wind this up – to wind us down – wind me down.

Okay, I may have told this story before on the podcast, but it’s helpful. There is a woman out for a jog and she is jogging, it’s nighttime, it’s dark and it’s dusk, let’s say streetlights are on, she is jogging in a park and there is a woman sitting on a bench reading a magazine and the woman who is jogging runs by, she stops and she starts just searching around on the ground underneath a streetlight close by and she is holding one of her eyes, so the woman on the bench looks over and says “All right, you must have lost your contact lens, is there anything I can do to help?” and the female jogger is like “Oh, yes thank you, thank you, please come over here under the streetlight and help me to find it.”

The woman leaves the bench, walks over about 10 feet towards the streetlight to the female jogger and starts helping her look for it, they can’t find it, they can’t find it, they can’t find it, the woman who had left the bench 10 feet back says “We can’t find your contact, where did it fall out?” and the female jogger says “Oh back there by the bench” and the woman who was on the bench, which is again 10 feet behind them says, “Well, why are we looking over here underneath the streetlight?” The female jogger says “Well, because the lights better over here.” Of course, that makes no sense just because it’s easier to see underneath a streetlight doesn’t mean that’s where you should be looking. Where you should be looking where the contact actually fell out and yes, it’s easy to understand calories and it’s – we are led to believe that it’s easy to count them in and easy to count them out and we have dispelled that in previous podcasts and we can dispel it even more in the next podcast, but just because something is simple, doesn’t mean it’s true, right? Saying that the sum of any two numbers is 43 is simple, but it’s wrong.

Carrie: Right.

Jonathan: Saying that weight gain is just a function of calories is easy, it’s easy to measure and it’s easy to look under the streetlight because the light’s better than it is to look 10 feet back where your contacts fell out.

Carrie: There’s millions of people out there who know for sure thing that calories in, calories out doesn’t work because they have spent years and years eating less and exercising more and not losing weight.

Jonathan: Again, there is so much nuance here because it’s not that calories don’t exist, it’s not like calories are unicorns, it’s that our calories are automatically regulated by our body, so yes it is, you will not gain weight unless you store more calories than you burn, that’s true, but the quantity of foods you are eating and the quantity of exercise you get, is not what most influences that equation, what most influences that equation is the quality of the food you are eating, the quality of the movement you are undertaking with your body, how much stress you have in your life, your age, and if you are taking any medications and none of those are calories.

Carrie: Done.

Jonathan: Done, completed. I love it. Carrie, that was a great question, thank you. This week and every week after folks, remember; eat smarter, exercise smarter, and live better. We will chat with you soon.

Carrie: See you.

This week we cover how surprisingly similar today’s “foods”/edible products are to drugs of abuse.