Speaker 1: I don't want to be an American idiot. Flow me
Speaker 1: here on seven hundred Wlwe are at that time of
Speaker 1: year now, probably started with Halloween, but with Thanksgiving looming
Speaker 1: here literally on the horizon. We can see it, we
Speaker 1: can smell it, we can teach it, we can almost
Speaker 1: touch it. And that is the amount of food we're
Speaker 1: going to eat. A lot of food, and a lot
Speaker 1: of it not good for us, a lot of ultra
Speaker 1: processed foods. And there's something called the bliss point. You
Speaker 1: wonder why you don't stop beating when you're full. You
Speaker 1: only stop beating when you hate yourself, and that is
Speaker 1: because of the confluence of fat, salt, and sugar. Food
Speaker 1: scientists are a long time have been developing that they've
Speaker 1: cracked the code years ago, and when those three things
Speaker 1: are together in the right balance and the right harmony,
Speaker 1: you literally unlock the code to get people to gorge themselves,
Speaker 1: stuff themselves silly. And that's what we face, the science
Speaker 1: behind that. Doctor David Bissonette is here, is a nutritional
Speaker 1: scientist and joins the show on seven hundred Why doctor,
Speaker 1: how are you?
Speaker 2: I'm very well, God, very good good.
Speaker 1: Hopefully I just had that correctly between fat, salt, and sugar.
Speaker 2: Yeah, job, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: But it's interesting because this is this is literally decades
Speaker 1: and decades and decades of research to come up with
Speaker 1: what they call the bliss point.
Speaker 2: Yep. Yeah, they're they're developed in sensory evaluation labs in
Speaker 2: these corporate headquarters and labs, and they determine where it is,
Speaker 2: like you said, where the high excitation points are for
Speaker 2: different foods combinations of assault, sugar, and fat. And they
Speaker 2: indeed it dick people and it causes what they call
Speaker 2: repeat acquisition behavior going back to it because you love it,
Speaker 2: but like you said, it's really bad for you. So
Speaker 2: I described this, I investigate this in the book Insatiable Nations,
Speaker 2: Unpeasable Hunger.
Speaker 1: And that's it right as we have Yeah, for the
Speaker 1: longest time, I mean, food was okay, I eat to live,
Speaker 1: to work, and then I eat some more to fuel.
Speaker 1: So because I'm working physically, and in the modern era
Speaker 1: in America, in the modernized world, that's changed, right, we
Speaker 1: are largely sedentary, and yet food has now become entertainment.
Speaker 1: It's also become delicious, which we didn't have. Is probably
Speaker 1: as recently as a couple generations ago.
Speaker 2: I guess, oh yeah, you got that right. We were
Speaker 2: very complex and we eat for emotional reasons, and the
Speaker 2: research is now showing that this is actually caused by
Speaker 2: depression and anxiety. We see that prevalence still high depression,
Speaker 2: high anxiety emotional eating. We have stress eating, and we
Speaker 2: have we call mindless habit driven eating. And this is
Speaker 2: where it becomes potentially disastrous for kids to be introduced
Speaker 2: to these foods early on, because they carry them forward
Speaker 2: and that's exactly what they do. It's mindless eating. It's
Speaker 2: a default and it's terrible.
Speaker 1: How did we get to that point? I mean, if
Speaker 1: you think about how absurd it is that I would
Speaker 1: get home after a long day of work and have
Speaker 1: dinner and hour whatever it is. Okay, I'm going to
Speaker 1: open a box of cheese Doritos and sit there and
Speaker 1: watch TV and shovel them in my face unconsciously, just
Speaker 1: loading myself with calories. And it's you know what, I
Speaker 1: don't know about you. It's awesome, but.
Speaker 2: You're doing it. It's often for the time you're doing it,
Speaker 2: but remember you feel lousy after. So we have two
Speaker 2: basic mechanisms to control appetite. One's called the homeostatic mechanism.
Speaker 2: It's balanced in the body. It's based on energy reserves,
Speaker 2: and that normally should suffice right to say, Okay, you've
Speaker 2: got enough fat reserves, and it has all kinds of
Speaker 2: you know, hormones to sort of stop the eating. And
Speaker 2: it's a pretty good mechanism. But we also have what
Speaker 2: they call the hidonic eating, right, the pleasure centered eating,
Speaker 2: which you know really is in the frontal lobe of
Speaker 2: the brain. And that explains why it is a Thanksgiving
Speaker 2: that we fill ourselves with turkey and really say we
Speaker 2: couldn't eat another bite, yet when the pumpkin pie comes out,
Speaker 2: we have one and two pieces. So that is basically
Speaker 2: what's happening, is that our hedonic center, the pleasure center,
Speaker 2: is causing us to overeat beyond what we need. And
Speaker 2: like you said, we enjoy it, but only for a
Speaker 2: short time.
Speaker 1: Yeah, because the misery lasts longer. You're miserable for days
Speaker 1: after you stuff yourself with thanks Kim. And it's the
Speaker 1: best when you're eating, and then after you feel like hell,
Speaker 1: and you know you don't eat, you don't you don't
Speaker 1: eat till you're full, You'll eat till you hate yourself.
Speaker 2: Yep. Yeah, and we do that consistently, even though we say,
Speaker 2: all right, next time, I'm not going to do this.
Speaker 2: But you know, it's very enticing and it's part of
Speaker 2: you know, it should be part of a you know,
Speaker 2: sort of a almost like a moral base behavior fixed
Speaker 2: on temperance. Right, It's kind of like a discipline that
Speaker 2: we need to sort of exercise more in our lives.
Speaker 2: But this is really difficult to do because the food
Speaker 2: industry promotes right with very sophisticated ads. Give you an example,
Speaker 2: nineteen ninety seven, Madison, Madison Street and Madison Avenue advertisers
Speaker 2: are spending seven billion dollars in advertising foods of all sorts.
Speaker 2: The USDA's budget was three hundred and thirty three millions,
Speaker 2: and so the co and that was to promote healthy food.
Speaker 2: And when you have this kind of dichotomy, right, you
Speaker 2: can't overcome it easily. And that's why my book Insatiable
Speaker 2: I talk about radical shifts in the you know, in
Speaker 2: our lifestyle and in our diet that we need to
Speaker 2: sort of promote. One is, you know, stop the soda pop. Right,
Speaker 2: It's not a negotiable because it's too addictance.
Speaker 1: You can vilify certainly the fast food industry, the quick
Speaker 1: food industry, the premie food industry, you know. But but
Speaker 1: I guess I don't know. I was almost said, this
Speaker 1: is kind of like a negative to capitalism. But you know,
Speaker 1: they've got to increase their margin, they've got to make money.
Speaker 1: They got to find ways for people to buy more food.
Speaker 1: And for people to buy more food, they have to
Speaker 1: consume the food that they're eating. And so you want
Speaker 1: to sell more pop and chips and candy and things
Speaker 1: that are processed. I get that all point. It's up
Speaker 1: to us to show some restraint, but it's difficult the
Speaker 1: way is formulated. I get that whole model. I guess.
Speaker 1: The other side before someone takes away is, you know,
Speaker 1: this is bashing big food and everything. You know, look
Speaker 1: that we have done for for example, you don't see
Speaker 1: people starving to death anymore. You look at all of
Speaker 1: the you know, you look at all of the maladies
Speaker 1: that our generations before us suffered from malnutrition wise, and
Speaker 1: brain development and bone density and all those things. And
Speaker 1: you know that's in the rear view mirror in the
Speaker 1: modern world. Now, that downside is we're killing ourselves with
Speaker 1: that same knife and fork, we've gone to the other extreme.
Speaker 1: But you know, because of the ready available of food,
Speaker 1: because the prices have dropped because of that technology, it's
Speaker 1: eliminated starvation, which was a scourge for the world for
Speaker 1: most of the time humans have been on this planet.
Speaker 2: Well, it's an interesting point you're making, but what we
Speaker 2: don't really realize is that back in the nineteen thirty
Speaker 2: America is teppered with malnutrician and that was within the
Speaker 2: era of the industrial revolution and mass production. So we
Speaker 2: actually did not solve the problem back then. It took
Speaker 2: a while to get onto the concept of fortification. But
Speaker 2: we're really fortifying food and that's what they were doing
Speaker 2: that were ultimately so highly processed that they were workless.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, and you see that a lot today too,
Speaker 1: I guess is this setting up to be By the way,
Speaker 1: doctor David Bissonett, he's a professor of nutrition, a doctorate
Speaker 1: nutritional science, writes about insatiable, about what's called the bliss point,
Speaker 1: and that is food manufacturer's process with manufacturers have developed
Speaker 1: and it depends obviously on the product. Because this has
Speaker 1: been researched and focused group to death that they have
Speaker 1: found the exact correct proportions when the salt and sugar
Speaker 1: and fat in a product to get you to eat
Speaker 1: as much as possible so they can sell more and
Speaker 1: make more money. And that is capitalist dynamic right there,
Speaker 1: for good or for bad. But this is starting to
Speaker 1: sound like it's setting up to be maybe a lawsuit
Speaker 1: developed like we saw with big tobacco, right is, hey,
Speaker 1: we made a product that's highly addictive and dangerous. You
Speaker 1: can make that case with these types of processed foods,
Speaker 1: can't you?
Speaker 2: Oh you can? Then. In fact, it's very interestingly, these
Speaker 2: very tobacco companies that got their hands slapped are the
Speaker 2: very ones that bought Nubisco General Foods, and they mastered
Speaker 2: obviously the advertising, and they're applying the same concept to
Speaker 2: food as they did to tobacco. They own the food company.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, sure, and it's like, okay, we can do
Speaker 1: that only with food. Now. I think it's a more
Speaker 1: i don't know, improving in course. So, for example, we
Speaker 1: know that tobacco, you know, by itself, is less now
Speaker 1: I'm gonna say safe, but it's less dangerous until you
Speaker 1: start adding chemicals and all sorts of things to make
Speaker 1: it more didictive and consumable and preserve it. And that's
Speaker 1: what happens when you come buys tobacco, because now you've
Speaker 1: got tire and nicotine, and nicotine gets you. But there's
Speaker 1: no nicotine in food. How do you make the connection
Speaker 1: between national physical addiction to something like tobacco and then
Speaker 1: try and translate that to potato chips. It's that element's
Speaker 1: not there, you know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's very It's just I mean, truly, the food
Speaker 2: that we eat is very high in sugar, and we
Speaker 2: have the food industry has vehicles to get that in.
Speaker 2: Just to give you an example, two thousand and eight,
Speaker 2: the soda pomp industry flooded, you know, the American landscape
Speaker 2: really with about the equivalent of fifty four gallons of
Speaker 2: available soda pomp for person per year. And that's incredible,
Speaker 2: and we were big consumers and that brought in extra calories,
Speaker 2: and these calories aren't good. I remember teaching down in
Speaker 2: Kentucky and there was a student team to me and said, listen,
Speaker 2: I drink fourteen twelve ounce doctor pepper the day and
Speaker 2: that feeling good? Yeah? Do you have recommendations? And so.
Speaker 1: The band stupid, there's your recommendations. You're fatally stupid.
Speaker 2: He he was addicted. It was sugar highs and this
Speaker 2: is you know, has a certain part of the population
Speaker 2: affected by this. You'd be very surprised how many people
Speaker 2: actually consume so of pop. But also you know, sweetened
Speaker 2: sweetened beverages as well, and you know also chips, which
Speaker 2: are very high in fat, and our society mechanism doesn't
Speaker 2: really kick in the same way for liquids and for
Speaker 2: high density things like chips, so they you know, they
Speaker 2: don't give us the signal okay, you've had enough, even
Speaker 2: though we may have you know, consumed twelve hundred calories
Speaker 2: and chips.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and it doesn't seem like it when you're eating it.
Speaker 1: That's the thing. It's calorically that it's dense, but it's
Speaker 1: not filling, it is correct.
Speaker 2: I've seen students down a full twelve ounce bag of
Speaker 2: potato chips and top that off with a pizza. Yep.
Speaker 1: Yeah. But it's great to have that younger person's metabolism.
Speaker 1: That's the thing, right, because when I was younger, you know,
Speaker 1: you're playing sports or whatever. Yeah, you sit down, you
Speaker 1: could kill a two liter of pepsi in needle, half
Speaker 1: a loaf of bread and an entire package of balgoney
Speaker 1: and be hungry an hour later.
Speaker 2: Well, this is true, but what we don't realize is
Speaker 2: these foods that are you know, high and fat actually
Speaker 2: cause damage to the body. We have a new phenomena, right,
Speaker 2: it's a non alcoholic fabby liver disease. And this is leading.
Speaker 2: This is going to lead in the next decades to
Speaker 2: higher needs for liver transplants. We are sickening our people
Speaker 2: because of that. We think, oh, we have a high metabolism.
Speaker 2: Not so. That level of intake actually causes accelerated synthesis
Speaker 2: of fat in the liver, coming primarily from hyper corn
Speaker 2: syrups some theory, but certainly it's from the sugar, the
Speaker 2: hygherger loads that we're eating. So no, this is not
Speaker 2: about an issue of high metabolism and how lucky we are.
Speaker 2: You're setting up those young people for a chronic life
Speaker 2: of you know, chronic disease.
Speaker 1: Well there lies the problem, doctor, right is it? You
Speaker 1: know you can you need more calories when you're growing, obviously,
Speaker 1: and that's why you know you look at a teenage
Speaker 1: boy and it's my god, how much money and food
Speaker 1: am I? This is great? I got to work a
Speaker 1: third job in order to afford just the food. But
Speaker 1: the problem is you continue those eating patterns, and many
Speaker 1: people when they get to their late twenties orly thirties,
Speaker 1: maybe forties, continue to eat like they're a teenager. That's
Speaker 1: when the weight gets packed on.
Speaker 2: Well, yeah, absolutely. But the thing that you're not mentioning
Speaker 2: here that's in the equation, yeah, is this high coloric
Speaker 2: load that's required is usually tied to the youth, absolutely,
Speaker 2: and to the high activity traditionally tagged to youth. This
Speaker 2: is not the case anymore. We actually have a condition
Speaker 2: called secentism. It's a new disease that's being investigated by
Speaker 2: physiologists because it's the high degree of inactivity in the youth.
Speaker 2: They're actually developing old people's disease.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean we have one something, yeah, something like
Speaker 1: one and four. I think I just read a stat
Speaker 1: on one and four young people between twelve and nineteen
Speaker 1: are pre diabetic.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, yeah, it's it's an epidemic absolutely. And the
Speaker 2: thing about diabetes is that you know, type two diabetes
Speaker 2: is that it's you know, ninety five percent associated with
Speaker 2: waking right though, with obesity. So the only way to
Speaker 2: solve it, of course, is to eat leaner. And again,
Speaker 2: you know the book. If you go to insatiablewe dot com,
Speaker 2: which is the website, you'll get more information about the book,
Speaker 2: but also certain other ideas. I've got videos up there
Speaker 2: and stuff that tackle different subjects.
Speaker 1: Yeah, gotcha. There's the thing though, because it sounds like
Speaker 1: one may listen to you, doctor and Gold. So what
Speaker 1: you're saying is make food less delicious.
Speaker 2: No food is supposed to be delicious. Using spices and herbs,
Speaker 2: it can be incredible. What happens is we've overstimulated our
Speaker 2: taste buds. And if you're going to make that radical
Speaker 2: shift to normal food, it takes a little while, but
Speaker 2: not that long. It takes a week or two getting
Speaker 2: off those highs and really realizing. You know, you know
Speaker 2: people say to me, oh, I can't get off soda pop. Well,
Speaker 2: you know these were patients of mine previously, and you know,
Speaker 2: within a week they say, oh my god, I feel.
Speaker 1: So much better.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I don't have craving for sugar like I
Speaker 2: used to. So it's actually not that difficult, and it's
Speaker 2: really the stress of disengaging from that high level of sugar.
Speaker 2: It's really short lived. And the same thing goes for
Speaker 2: the food. Our evolutionary genes were not meant to be
Speaker 2: adapted to this high level of tape sensation.
Speaker 1: If we keep eating this way, though, doctor Bissonette, want
Speaker 1: our genetics change. I mean we all adapt to the environment.
Speaker 1: So if we continue to eat like we eat, don't
Speaker 1: dount our bodies just simply change. And it may take centuries,
Speaker 1: but don't we have.
Speaker 2: All look more at it in terms of thousands of years. Okay,
Speaker 2: but really what we know in terms of epide genetic
Speaker 2: changes that take place in uteral For example, a mother
Speaker 2: that an expected mother that eats poorly, that's overweight, she
Speaker 2: passes on epigenetic changes to the baby, who then becomes
Speaker 2: prone to obesity and a variety of chronic diseases. So
Speaker 2: this genetic story really doesn't pan out correctly, right, It
Speaker 2: does appear that we can have a formula like a
Speaker 2: code for help, and we can't really deviate from it
Speaker 2: unless we don't become chronically ill. And the United States
Speaker 2: is very chronically ill. You know, we have a healthcare
Speaker 2: expenditure of about three point seven billion dollars and seventy
Speaker 2: five percent of that is tied to chronic disease. Just
Speaker 2: think about it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, I mean you believe it. You see it
Speaker 1: all over right. We are literally the diseases we used
Speaker 1: to die. If you look back one hundred years, even
Speaker 1: as fascinated by as stuff you don't you forgot existed
Speaker 1: in this country, you have to look up the definition
Speaker 1: of what it means hundre years ago. It's the exactly
Speaker 1: apple to day everything is. Largely everything is based on
Speaker 1: what we consume. Whether it's a cancer, uh, some forms
Speaker 1: of lymphoma, but most certainly heart disease and things. It's
Speaker 1: because of what we're putting in our bodies as opposed
Speaker 1: to what we're not putting in our bodies.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's high correlations to that, you know, quantic disease,
Speaker 2: colding cancer, very high association with you know, low fiber
Speaker 2: and poor dietary habits and lack of exercise as well.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well that's all the hard stuff, right. I mean,
Speaker 1: you know, eating whole grains and it doesn't taste as
Speaker 1: good as a bag of doritos. I mean, you know
Speaker 1: you admit that, would you? I mean if you had
Speaker 1: a bag of doritos and I had a bag of
Speaker 1: kale chips, what would you ride now, you know, you'd
Speaker 1: eat the kale chips, But you can't tell me that
Speaker 1: the doritos are. The doritos are one hundred times more
Speaker 1: delicious than any cal chips.
Speaker 2: Well, listen, I go into the pub. But but but
Speaker 2: ultimately you shouldn't be eating chips. That's one of the
Speaker 2: radical changes. Chips have invaded our food supply in such
Speaker 2: a way that we have really caused a massive obedience
Speaker 2: in food behavior. Chips have virtually no nutritional value, yet,
Speaker 2: like you say, they're various good and again a radical
Speaker 2: shift roup you know, stop, you know, to stop eating
Speaker 2: these will open up your case buds actually to appreciate
Speaker 2: the more subtle cases of fruit and vegetables. We see
Speaker 2: this problem in children who are brought up on chips
Speaker 2: and things of that nature. They will not eat fruits
Speaker 2: and vegetables. We hear mothers complain about it all the time. Well,
Speaker 2: what happened is they introduced it too early, right, and
Speaker 2: they for you know, they forever captured their trillren so
Speaker 2: to speak into you know what it ends up to being, uh,
Speaker 2: you know, a weight management problem. They can never get
Speaker 2: out of the Now, all.
Speaker 1: Right, I gotta get gone, but I appreciate the time.
Speaker 1: Doctor David Bissonette, he's an Associate Professor Nutrition uh doctor
Speaker 1: in nutritional science and writes about this and insatiable the
Speaker 1: nation's unappeased hunger. It certainly is the scourge of well,
Speaker 1: not just our generation, I think the past one, in
Speaker 1: future ones as well. Doctor, all the best, thanks.
Speaker 2: Again, well, thank you very much.
Speaker 1: Also, I hope that none of this, whether the conversation,
Speaker 1: would dissuade you from eating like you're on death row,
Speaker 1: because I plan on doing that on Thursday myself. It's
Speaker 1: just interesting information and it's marketing and it's so American
Speaker 1: that we have developed food to make us eat, us
Speaker 1: eat past the point of being full, so we buy more,
Speaker 1: we eat more. If you know that, do with that
Speaker 1: information what you wish? I'm with you. I look, gluttony
Speaker 1: is it really should be?
Speaker 2: There?
Speaker 1: Should just be the sixths, especially this time of the year.
Speaker 1: Can we just table the gluttony for hey, we're just
Speaker 1: pumped the brakes on that, shall we? Slooney seven hundred
Speaker 1: WLW