Full transcript: Ben Pratt on London Real
0:15 Welcome back to London Real. My name is Brian Rose. With me is Mr. Nick Gabriel, and joining us today is nutritionist Ben Pratt, who’s the author of Nutrition’s Playgrounds. Welcome. Thank you. It’s good to be here. Thank you for coming. So I’m just going to put a copy of your book up here on the camera. You know, Nick and I, we talk about nutrition all the time. You know, I think Nick knows more about nutrition than I have. You’re our first nutritionist on the show. You know, we got so many questions to ask you. And I was just just thinking before today, I read the New York Times all the time and there’s always a new article once every couple days about how you should eat this or eat that and they did a study of, they would do a study of like 50 people in eight weeks and then they could do a conclusion and I was like there’s six billion people in this world and then next week they have another conclusion. I was just wondering, how do we know what to listen to and what not to?
1:04 I think that’s a really good question but I also think in your introduction there you’ve raised some great points in that you’ve raised the point that very often a study is run, maybe even if it is with a larger cohort than just 50 people, you know, let’s say the study is run with 800 people over five years, which would be deemed to be quite a good sized study, a randomized control trial, something like that. But just because a study’s been run, if the study’s run well, they’re usually looking at one single variable, I mean, amidst all the variables, which then may show some change or result that they deem to be significant, which is that there’s less than a 5% chance it was by accident, all right? And as soon as they’ve identified that, then, unfortunately, what tends to happen is the media get hold of this, and then they make all of these assumptions that, oh, that means if we live this way or eat this way or do this or do that, therefore, these things must be right.
1:52 And I generally think that’s probably just because we’re jumping on something that’s new that’s just been published. The people who’ve published it want to see that their information’s getting out there, But the reality is, is has it really been tested or trialed? Not on a large scale, not on a population-wide, here’s some nutrition advice that will benefit the population. It’s a very small group of people. We’ve done a fairly rigorous trial, but even still, it’s only over one single change.
2:17 And that doesn’t necessarily mean that if you then say, just eat this food, that’s going to cancel out all the issues when you’re not just changing that one thing. Because if you say to somebody today, eat a better diet, do you think they’re just going to make one change? And they go, oh, I’m going to just drink more water. else is going to change. You know, that’s not going to happen, is it? As soon as they think about eating healthy or living better, loads of things will change. And so then it’s, well, which of those many things made the difference to their health if their health did improve?
2:43 But also, like, you can’t just base everything on what a scientific study said. I mean, I have a friend who’s a, she’s a doctor of pharmacology and she’s just finished a PhD and she said to me, I could have made my data say anything I wanted it to. And it can be so easily influenced. Plus the study is funded by someone. Right. And so there they have their own motives, even if it’s a double blind study, they still have their own motives to bury it if it’s not good or publish it if it is good.
3:07 Well, yeah, this, you know, I would agree with you and I’ve been in various conversations or interviews in the past where people have said, you know, well, you know, I don’t want to get bogged down in how reliable statistics or analysis is. And I completely understand that. But at the same time, we have to be able to get our data from somewhere to then justify some, you know, guidance or advice to whoever. You know, an area that I’ve done a fair bit of study and is in the area of obesity and an interesting when you look at obesity people are very willing to say oh but these changes you’re suggesting that was a very unreliable study or that was a population-wide you know study therefore it’s not very reliable because it was self-reported you get those kind of things and I’m very much you know would acknowledge that and say yes it was a population study that noticed that the trends in fact didn’t follow what we normally think when we look at people’s diet but at the same time we also then never question is there actually an obesity epidemic and how do we know that there is because we have a population wide survey and that happens every 18 months and from that we then say we have an obesity issue and so you know on one side you find people will not weigh up one group of evidence with the same fairness as they do with something else you know if you’re gonna pick holes in that kind of evidence from nutrition
4:18 Saying oh that’s too generalist it should be more specific then we’re gonna also have to apply that same little thumb elsewhere we all have our own biases. So what do we do? That’s the question. With all this information out there, is you have to go on anecdotal evidence or do you have to look at the constant case study which is the whole world. Like you said the world is getting more obese so we’re obviously doing something to make that happen. Well for me I think that there’s a good way that I find to get not just past all of the science but to start to measure it according to what evidence there is of our cultural history as well. You know it’s It’s really fascinating when you begin to get back and you start to study some of the less westernized, civilized populations, and you begin to look at how they live and eat.
5:00 And actually, a lot of their health in the long term was very, very good. If they did suffer from early death, quite often it was because of a random infectious disease that got into the population, not because of chronic breakdown of health like we see in the western world. And when you begin to look at some of these more isolated populations, somehow or other, Now that we have an understanding of how to analyze their foods, we see that they ate in a way that maximized their nutrition, that then optimized their health, but yet nobody was analyzing any of that scientifically.
5:29 They kind of began to work those things out sort of inherently through the generation. It was reverse engineering. Yeah. Yeah, that’s interesting. And that wisdom was passed down for years and years and years.
5:39 Now when we look at how we eat today, whilst we can throw all the science in the world at it, which for most people I think will completely confuse them because they don’t get it, we can also strip that away and say, well, hang on a minute, is what we’re eating now and the things we’re saying we should eat now, was that eaten 300 years ago? Did that optimize health in the past or is it only something that we’re saying today, you should eat that? You know, the paleo diet is really popular. I know it’s popular in LA, which is the diet we were eating, what, 5,000 years ago before even agriculture, right? Is that something you’re talking about there?
6:11 Well, I think whilst all diets are going to have their weaknesses, all diets will have their strengths, and I think the basic principle of paleo is interesting. This concept of modernized foods might not be so great for us, so let’s go back to how I used to eat. I do still think there’s some flaws. When you look at people like Rob Wolf or Lauren Cordain, guys who actually wrote books about the paleo diet, whilst their books are very interesting and there’s still some good information in those books, I still think there’s some tenants that you’ve got to question of how reliable are those tenants. Which specific tenants would you? Like for example the whole concept that the agricultural era began 9,000 years ago so somewhere around 7-8,000 BC is when we began to cultivate grains and since that point onwards human health has taken a gradual downturn and so therefore we should only eat foods that existed prior to that. That’s one of their strong tenants but you know if we could begin to look at other evidence and you know for let me just back step there if we look at grains and then we We also look at dairy to being two of the biggest areas that the paleo says to avoid.
7:12 If we look at grains, there is archaeological evidence that suggests that some grains, like ancient grains like einkorn, may have been cultivated as long as 16,000 years ago. So that potentially doubles the time period that they’re talking about. And we sort of think, well, does that mean that the diet potentially should change? There’s also some cave paintings that have been found in the Middle East that potentially date back to 29,000 BC. So does that mean, and those cave paintings showed sort of deer herders herding deer and keeping them, you know, in closed pens and the assumption maybe that maybe they were doing that for their milk.
7:48 And you sort of think, well, you know, that’s kind of interesting to me as well. Could there have been evidence to suggest that that existed 30,000 years ago? Now, even just this week, something came out about the size of dinosaurs and then you said it was maybe the week before and they said that they think dinosaurs might actually when they’ve been half the size we’re saying that they have been. And you sort of think, well, and that came out of a new archaeological discovery. Now, for me, that kind of evidence is always a little bit guesswork, isn’t it? And if we’re going to base a whole dietary system on our best guess of the archaeological evidence, then I think that that’s, you know, there’s always the room that suddenly things get thrown out because new evidence suggests it was completely different. So I don’t necessarily see archaeology as being any more reliable factor than modern day science.
8:32 I think we have to work within the scope of what we really have good enough records and experience and understanding to know. So do we need to go back 10,000 years or can we learn enough from even just the last two or three hundred years? That’s a very good point. You know, I just wanted to, one of the things, Brian and I, we didn’t argue about it, but I kind of, I think we have different viewpoints and I’d love to hear your viewpoint on it is saturated fat.
8:57 You know, when I was like 15 or 16 and I started working with weights and becoming interested in nutrition, the paradigm of the era was fat is bad, full stop, all fat is bad. And I remember eating a super low fat diet, you know, and then it changed and they said, well, not all fat is bad, you know, polyunsaturated fat is good, but the rest are bad. And then it changed again. They said, okay, well, only this one is only saturated fat is bad. And you know, it’s been my experience from what I’ve been studying lately, apparently saturated fat is one of the most important components in your diet.
9:29 Do you think that’s true? What is your opinion on that? I think I’ve kind of gone through some of the similar processes that you’ve mentioned there Nick, that it did used to be that you shouldn’t eat any fats. When you get into the history of that and where it all came from, you may have looked into some of the work back in the 50s by a man called Ansel Keys. Keys was one of the key proponents of the lipid hypothesis, this concept that fat intake on its own was responsible for the rise in heart disease that was prevalent.
9:59 He was the perfect example of someone who was getting the data to say what he wanted it to say. I mean, he was looking for evidence to support his hypothesis. He wasn’t very open-minded from what I’ve read. Sure, I mean, there was two different studies he did. The original one was a six-country study where he looked at the data and he was able to show a very clear correlation between total fat intake in various countries versus the actual rate of heart disease that was present.
10:22 And it was almost a perfect line. So people were like, well, it’s obvious. But when that was actually published, he got a lot of criticism for that. It really got kind of berated in the scientific community because they felt that there were things that were unreliable about it. It looked like the data was cherry-picked.
10:36 And interesting, three years after that, some other scientists went back to his data and looked at what data he could have selected. And there was up to 22 countries he could have used, which he didn’t. And they went, well, when you look at the 22 countries on the same graph together, it’s clearly not an obvious correlation. So now that being the kind of guy that he was, Keyes was a very determined individual. He was a very well-known individual in the scientific community.
10:57 He had two post-doctors. He wasn’t a stupid man. He was primarily a marine biologist who went on into human physiology. And he was determined to say, I think there’s something to this and he wanted to go further. And so a few years later, he published another seven country study that showed a similar correlation.
11:15 And he kind of made it his life’s work get out there and to prove that there was something to this. But really interestingly is between those two studies, Keyes also did some other work on vegetable oils. So he didn’t just look at total intake, he looked at the rise in vegetable oil consumption, and that was published in 1956. So that was between the two studies. And he hypothesized in that that the rise in vegetable oil consumption might also be one of the reasons we’re seeing a rise in heart disease. But at that time, the vegetable oil industry, particularly in the U.S. was becoming very, very powerful and they very quickly kind of pushed him off that one because they wanted to take over the butter and cream industry that was huge in the U.S.
11:53 If you think of the wild, wild west, those boys, they made America in a lot of ways. That was the dairy industry and the beef industry that really helped the western frontier move onwards and people lived on that. Beef was very big, yeah. Yeah, but for the vegetable guys to get in there and to take some of that pie was important. So what do you tell your clients these days?
12:14 I mean, when they say, should I stay away from saturated fats or should I go to them? What do you tell them? Well, the interesting thing about that is that if nutrition is very good at separating the components and saying you have to eat this, but not that. Now when you talk about fat in general, the first thing I would say to most people is well, first of all, do you understand what foods have saturated fat in them? And what do you think the most common answer is going to be?
12:35 Animal products, right? Animal products, okay? Which straight away I’m like, no, you’re wrong. It isn’t just animal products. Oil has the highest saturated fat content of any any food on earth at 92 percent But most people don’t know that is avocado have saturated fat it will have some but quite low Okay, but then again people will say well beef’s got to be a bad one You go you beef has about 50 to 55 percent saturated fat But it also has 30 percent monouns saturated fat that we normally don’t talk about If we look at lard which a lot of people think well, that’s bound to be high in saturated fat Well, actually it’s slightly higher in monos than it is saturates. It’s interesting So we make this assumption that we know what foods are high in saturated fat therefore bin those The other thing that is never discussed is the type of saturated fat.
13:14 We’re always just thrown out there to go saturated fat is saturated fat. It’s all the same, it’s all bad. But the length of the fatty acid chain, and I know this is getting a bit technical, but the length of the fatty acid chain could vary from 2 carbons in length up to, you know, 20 carbons in length. And they don’t all act in the body the same, they don’t all have the same impact. And we can’t just go saturated fat is the problem.
13:35 Okay, so to rephrase the question, do you think eating a big plate of bacon, like greasy bacon, is that about, would you say that’s a bad nutrition choice or not? Again, I wish it was a simple just to go, it’s bad, because I think essentially, you know, foods, apart from modern manmade foods, which we have put the fat and all the sugar and all those things in together, we’ve created something that didn’t exist. That’s different to saying, well, what about bacon?
14:04 I mean, but again, bacon today, if I was to go and buy a bacon that’s had water added to it, it’s come from a European pig that’s been raised in stressful conditions in a sow stole that’s… But nitrates are injected into it. Well, water’s injected, nitrates are used to cure it. You know, that’s not the same as a pig that’s actually been lived and reared outdoors in a happy sort of stress-free lifestyle. They’ve had sunlight on them all the time.
14:28 They’ve had access to good food. You know, it’s like saying, well, if you take a sick person and you would feed that to somebody, would that person help that person be healthy? And most people are like, well, of course not, because they’re ill, their tissues are not great. So, unfortunately, with something like bacon, it isn’t just is the bacon greasy, therefore is that the problem? Bacon obviously has lard in it.
14:48 But at the same time, you could fry a good piece of bacon, constantly fried in some really cheap vegetable oil that’s rancid and has a high antioxidant, or sorry, a high level of free radicals, and those free radicals of the oil you’re frying it in are the thing that becomes problematic for you and leads over time to mutation in cancerous cells. You know, I have a principle which I mean, because like Brian said, his opening question pretty much sums it up where there’s so much information that it causes confusion. And what I do in my life is the filter I run through whenever I make a food purchase is how close is this food to how it would be in its natural state?
15:27 Like the more of a process it’s been through the less nutritional value I personally believe it to have. So, for example, I’d rather eat an orange than drink a glass of orange juice, et cetera. I mean, what would you say to that? Is that a? I’d say that’s a pretty good way to think of it.
15:43 And I think for it, but at the same time, you know, it takes time for people to understand what do you mean by processed? Because for some people, unprocessed is that they’ve gone out and they’ve bought some what is even on the packet, we’ll say, you know, unrefined sugar. That’s unprocessed to them. And you’re like, well, it’s not. That’s heavily processed.
16:01 It’s like the brown sugar you see in Starbucks. Oh, it’s natural sugar. Really? Yeah, it’s hysterical. Okay, the natural sugar.
16:08 Exactly. Or the same with flour. I make all my own cakes. Okay? Very good.
16:13 But they’re still filling in full of sugar and flour. Actually, to someone who’s not, like, on the inside joke here, what are we not telling them as far as sugar and flour? How is that not natural? Well, I mean, sugar is a compound that is present in all plants, okay? And I find it kind of interesting because I often find people go, well, you know, this is better.
16:30 Syrup is much better because it came from a cactus instead of from a sugarcane. Agave syrup. The bottom line is it is sugar that’s being extracted from a plant then heavily refined and in that refining process they generally concentrate it. The sugars are not present in those levels of concentration in the plant. You know a classic example would be if you look at an orange as you mentioned and you look at a glass of orange same size as the orange you will get twice the sugar in the glass versus the actual orange.
16:57 So just the process of squeezing concentrates the sugars. fibers as well. True. Now if you think I’ve had to use, you know, I don’t know how many beets to be able to get down to just a bag of sugar, you’ve had to take all of those sugars across lots of plants, concentrate them down, remove the minerals, remove the fiber and get down to pure white sugar. You’ve changed, you know, there’s just no way you could eat that much sugar with a normal natural food and that’s going to play havoc with your blood chemistry and flowers it’s a similar sort of process. There’s no way you could eat the same level of of whole grains to deliver the same amount of white starchy flour if you were to do that.
17:32 So are you against both of those white devils? The white devils. I personally, Nick talks about diet choices he makes. When I see any kind of processed sugar, I stay away or any kind of lately white flour or any actually gluten we’ve been staying away from lately. Are those two that are like big red things on your radar?
17:48 Or again? Yeah, I would say sugar is definitely a big one. I think manufacturers know that sugar has a big impact upon us, but also the change in modern sugar consumption has varied a lot and that sugar’s found in so many foods, even things like meat products, you’ll find sugar added to make them taste better. So it takes some time as well to make that change because people are used to a certain level of sweetness and you suddenly say, let’s cut it out and people really find that hard.
18:14 It takes a couple of weeks to readjust sort of your appostat to get down to that level of sweet. Brian would say that’s because they’re weak. Well, when we started eating spices and salts for the ayahuasca diet, I found that after a few days, I didn’t need as much salt as I needed and the spices up. I find it did adapt. So, you know, maybe that’s true about sugar, but it is everywhere.
18:33 It’s in ketchup. I mean, years ago, when I really started to get onto sort of an improved diet, one of the things I did, and I got really strict for a while, over about four months, I really went right. I’m not having any added sugar in anything. Anything that’s got added sugar, I’m not having. I did that for about four months.
18:48 And I remember just out of nowhere, somebody offered me a sugar-coated gum sweet made by Round Trees. And they gave it to me and said, here, have that. And I just thought, you know what? I don’t think for four months. And I put it in my mouth and the taste sensation was like nothing I’d ever experienced.
19:06 And I was thinking, why is that like, it’s almost blowing my head off for sweetness because I’d become accustomed to not having that much. Now, when you consider that, you know, years ago from what our data can show us, people would probably eat, you know, four kilos of sugar in a whole year. Whereas today in the UK, the average is 42 kilos of sugar in a year. You’re thinking, wow, you know, we, 10 times as much sugar now as we did even just a hundred years ago.
19:30 You know, that is a huge increase. Do you think, um, sugar is toxic? Do you think it’s a toxic substance? Well, say that the primary effect that sugar has on the, on the body is it’s, it’s, it’s actually a depressant. So most people think, Oh, you give someone sugar, they get jacked up and they’re gonna, you know, like with children, they’re going to go off the walls and watch them.
19:48 But it’s not the, it’s not the jackup that, that really makes them irritable or a crotchie or an, or frustrating. It’s the 15, 20 minutes later when they start to come down. And that’s when you start to find the children become fractious on sugar. And with humans, we probably don’t have that with adults, sorry, the same physical output where things go wrong, we suddenly just start going nuts off the wall. We tend to find that our mental focus goes.
20:12 We tend to find that our emotions, we become a bit irritable and just we react to things we wouldn’t react to. You’re not necessarily going mad and angry, but we suddenly find ourselves getting a bit short with people, or we find it hard to stay focused in work, or we find ourselves getting a bit down. So we still respond, but the signs and symptoms are different to what you might see in a child, which who, you know, a child will very clearly show this is a problem for me. This is why I’m responding this way. So it’s the depressing effect that follows 15 to 20 minutes later. That’s the real negative impact on sugar.
20:40 You know what? I was speaking to Brian earlier in the week, and what just absolutely blows my mind is how the Olympics are taking place in London and the two main sponsors are McDonald’s and Coca-Cola. You know, the Olympics are like the pinnacle of health and performance and what it means to be like a healthy human being. And it’s just, it’s so diametrically opposed to what sugar is and to what these foods represent. And just for me, and with my like weird conspiracy theories, it’s another sign of how fucked up society is today.
21:13 You know, I just can’t reconcile it in my own mind. What do you think, Brian? Do you go on to the corporate greed thing as well on top of that? Yeah. Big time.
21:22 Yeah? Big time. I think that’s a separate issue. That’s because you have shares in Coca-Cola. Yeah, maybe.
21:27 But I mean, I think he raises an interesting point though, you know, that we immediately assume that because we’re looking at elite performance and we’re looking at athletes who can show us amazing physical traits, that that means that their nutritional approach should be absolutely spot on. But, you know, in my experience and with other, you know, nutritional experts I spoke A lot of the time, those kind of athletes have a whole host of issues, nutritionally and digestively. Because whilst they’re physically asking themselves to perform at a very high level, it’s also very difficult to eat the sorts of foods that you should eat in the demand that the body is requiring when you’re training six days a week, twice a day.
22:03 A lot of those guys, out of almost necessity to perform to the level that modern society says you have to, to be a good athlete, their nutritional demands are higher than perhaps ever in history. Do you remember Michael Phelps diet four years ago? It was ridiculous. I mean it was just and it wasn’t necessarily the highest qualities of food or the lowest saturated fats but it was a lot was like 7,000 calories a day. It worked for him which confuses me. I guess maybe he could have been even better if he had been eating some super high quality whole food. He had such a high caloric output that he needed but it didn’t matter. I don’t know what he would you… It’s an interesting thing. I think again if we go back to maybe like traditional populations and in places like in Africa where they’ve studied pygmy tribes and people who were hunter-gatherers, you know, if we go back to that paleo idea.
22:46 What they’ve actually found is we sometimes have this concept that these hunter-gatherers were just on the go all the time. But actually when they studied the way that they live, they, the guys go out and hunt, they find some food and we’re done for the day. We go back and we sit around and do nothing whilst the woman prepare the food and we just spend family time. You know, these weren’t, you know, athletes that were just kept on going, kept on going, kept on going.
23:06 They were lean and they were strong, but it was more of a short, sharp, If they could find food that was sufficient in an hour, we’re not going to waste energy. In times when food was scarce, yeah, they’d have to be out there longer. But that, you think of the energy spent versus the energy coming in. Now, today, we’re obviously in a food-free world where there’s enough food to go around, and therefore- Of course, at least. For us to be able to perform like an athlete to have a much, much higher level than you could if food wasn’t so prevalent.
23:34 So they are eating huge amounts of calories to sustain what really is actually a non-human level of physical activity. Humans really don’t train for 20 hours a week. That’s not really what human physiology is about. Whilst you can do that, if you have the ability to rest and recover, it’s a full-time job, isn’t it? For these guys to be able to keep doing that, it’s their whole life.
23:57 Do you support the calories in, calories out hypothesis or theory? Yeah, that’s a really interesting one, it’s kind of the basis of all weight loss and weight management sort of theory, isn’t it? Could you just break that down for our listeners who don’t know what that means? Sure, that’s basically the concept of if I eat fewer calories and do a bit more activity to burn off anything that’s excess, then I’m going to be able to draw my fat stores and lose weight or vice versa.
24:27 If I eat too much and sit around too much, then I’m going to get lazy and I’m going to put on weight and that’s why I’ve gained weight. And down to the last calories. So if you run the treadmill and you burn 400 calories and you can see it on the meter and you eat a chocolate that has 400 calories, you should be maintaining weight. That’s that theory, right? That’s the theory.
24:44 Which already sounds creepy. Go ahead. Go ahead. What are your thoughts on that? It’s also based around the three and a half thousand calorie formula, isn’t it?
24:50 You know, when people get in there, they come to the gym, they start for the first time and they learn, well, if I cut back 500 a day, if I can either maybe cut back 300 calories of food and do 200 calories of exercise, that’s 500 a day in a week, three and a half thousand how convenient that’s a pound of fat and you heard that yeah and the body isn’t a mathematician the body doesn’t sit and work at all like the math and the reality is is that there’s a lot of inaccuracies to that there’s a lot of failings to that that’s a real oversimplification and I challenge anybody to go out there and actually try and find the root of where that came from and they like they would literally a calorie means unit of heat energy so that literally burn the food using like whatever it’s a bomb calorimeter and I mean the human body isn’t a bomb color what is that word bomb calorimeter yeah it’s not one of those it’s a complex organism with a bunch of intricate chemical processes taking place so with insulin spikes and all sorts of other stuff it is it but I mean scientists haven’t been that dull when they try to work out the calories per gram of food they they appreciated that you know digestively there were certain that you know like for example a protein does carry more than four calories per gram. It’s a little over five, but they appreciate that not all of that protein will be used for energy. Some of it goes into structural
25:58 Processes. So when they estimated the calorie levels, they sort of said, yeah, these are the ones that are probably much reliable. So it wasn’t just them making a foolish mistake. You know, inherently there are some very small variations in carbohydrates. It’s not all four. Some of them can be up as high as four and a half. When we look at fats, they can vary anywhere from the low or the low sevens, high sixes, all the way up to nine and a half calories per gram. So there are inherently some errors in that if you really get down to brass tacks.
26:24 However, the majority of fats will be nine calories per gram or there or there about. So I can see why they’ve simplified some of those things when you kind of get down to it and looking at it like that. The thing that gets me, and I did some research a little while back when I drew information from World Health Organization data across Europe, and it’s good to see it on a much larger scale, you know, half a million people in Europe, or sorry, half a billion people in Europe, and you know, what’s the fat intakes, what’s the calorie intakes, and therefore what’s the weight gain.
26:51 And when you track the total calorie intake versus obesity, there is an increase in calories, but it’s not that big. It’s about 130, 140 calories difference between the leanest nation and the largest nation on average when you follow the trend. And, but for me, I sort of look at that and go, right, well, the leanest nation was 6% obesity. The most obese nations, 30% obesity almost in those years. And that’s UK, right?
27:14 No, no, that was Malta in 2002 where that data came from. And when you actually look at that difference and you say, does 140 calories, the cost of a finger, a fudge of chocolate, that little fudge bar, that’s about 140 calories. Is that the difference between 25% obesity of the whole population because they ate that much different every single day? I’m convinced that it’s total bullshit. I reckon it’s the quality of the food that we’re eating that’s changing our physiques.
27:41 And you know what absolutely gets my back up more than anything else is I watched this show that I think you watched as well. It was called The Men Who Made Us Fat. Yes, I saw that. You’ve got to watch the line and they were interviewing this woman from the American sugar foundational American sugar industry or I remember that and She was literally lying through her teeth. She was saying our calories a calorie like sugar doesn’t make you fat It’s how many calories you take in and it’s just a blatant lie. That’s not true Yeah, well and the interesting thing was they also interviewed the the other gentleman on that show who’s the endocrinologist So he’s the guy who you you know He spent his lifetime studying hormones and how foods affect your hormones and he’s there saying well No sugar drastically affects your insulin levels And if your insulin levels are skyrocketing all the time you have no choice your body will be shunting You know glucose and triglyceride so fats into your fat cells So blood sugar has a massive impact on your capacity to fat store and she’s there saying oh, but nobody’s actually ever you know Published data to suggest that that actually is true that if you drink our product Coca-Cola, the VAT will lead to weight gain and you know for me that’s kind of a that’s a really interesting one especially when you begin to look at how much Coca-Cola pay towards us or donate to certain you know nutritional journals
28:57 Any sort of thing well why are they donating to various journals like the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition or something like that and you know they have an interest in what gets published as well for various reasons. Let me ask you a question what do you eat? I know that you’re I read about your wife and she She does a lot of natural cooking, I think she has a cookbook out, and she changed all the way she cooked many years ago when you guys met. What do you eat on a regular basis?
29:21 I think my wife, I’ll just correct you, she loved to have a cookbook out, but she doesn’t have a cookbook. Oh, she doesn’t? Okay. But she is very keen to cook a lot. Me too, I love to get in the kitchen, I love to get in the kitchen.
29:32 I think the battle that we’ve had, and this is kind of interesting because we have a young family, is how do you eat in a way that helps your children to be healthy but doesn’t, you know, estrange them from the rest of their peers who are eating absolute junk, you know. And it gets them to eat at the dinner table as well, right? Yeah. I mean, we had that same battle as adults when we were doing the ayahuasca diet, you know what I mean? We were just total weirdos when it came to food.
29:52 I couldn’t be social at all. Yeah. I would say that one of the things that definitely affects us is it is a lot more difficult to eat out and we don’t do that a lot. And if we do do that, we try to be choosy where we go, places that we, you know, have a good reputation or things like that. Because I think that makes a difference when you’ve got a young family, too It also makes it more expensive to eat out But so we don’t eat out a lot we generally you know our main meals are usually at home because then we can cook them Ourselves and I think that makes a difference because immediately, you know what you’re eating is anything you want with your kids?
30:23 And yeah, I mean generally sugary stuff fizzy drinks aren’t obsolete. We just don’t buy them. Yeah Jelly and hard sweets those kind of things, you know, those kind of things are absolute out our kids That’s because of the sugar. Yeah, primarily our kids do eat chocolate That’s but with a bit of moderation in that one and they know that that’s the sweet that they’re allowed That’s fine You know again trying to allow them to integrate a bit with normal life to some extent, you know We do their pack lunches all the time except once a week We let them have a school dinner so they can feel like they’re part of the class But we choose the day that’s a roast home cooked dinner rather than to what’s with chips. What’s with the school dinners I mean like, you know I mean, my girlfriend’s daughter comes home and she’d tell me what she had and I’m just like, are you are you like?
31:04 Yeah, it’ll be like pizza and this dessert with this chocolate cake I’ll be like, are you kidding me? Seriously? Yeah, but if you look, you know Some years back on Jimmy Oliver did all of his stuff on Italian that what was he managed to get the boost the average Price per school dinner to 44 P per child. It’s like how can you feed someone nutritionally good food on 44 pH out? That’s very very difficult. So could you give us an example? I mean, I think Brian and I both got lucky for specifics Could you have us an example of what you would consider a healthy breakfast and an example of what you would consider an unhealthy breakfast?
31:36 Unhealthy breakfast skim milk cold cereal Glass of concentrated orange juice unhealthy unhealthy breast skim milk. Wow. Okay. All right Healthy breakfast might be whole natural yogurt with some organic raspberries, you know, something like that That’s a nice one low in sugar. This is some good protein content in there some good natural fats in there Yeah, that would be you can maybe even add in some a bit of coconut cream or something like that.
32:01 What’s wrong with skim milk, man? I was raised on skim milk. What’s right with skim milk? I don’t know. Because I mean, Brian, it’s my understanding that you came from the era in which fat was demonized.
32:12 That’s why I was raised on it, because I was in California in the 70s and mom was like, yeah, fat makes you fat. So we had skim milk, which is zero fat. And growing up on that, you get used to it, but I mean, you’d think that’s necessary those fats in there. Sure. Like a low fat milk?
32:26 We’ll go for the full four percent in your opinion. Well, that’s kind of an interesting argument right there Let’s just step back a second because for me to understand what skim milk is you need to understand what’s happened to it You know just like we said sugar is present sugar is present in all plants, isn’t it? So sugar itself isn’t inherently bad But when you know because if I sit down and I eat some raspberries I’m gonna get some sugar in there But very low amounts and it comes with a whole host of antioxidants, vitamins, minerals, all right When I look at milk in its natural form milk comes with a lot of nutrition But by the time it’s skim milk and you buy it from the shop a huge amount has happened to it I mean if you read the label, it will say that it’s pasteurized homogenized Standardized milk so and I would say to any of the listeners if you don’t know what those three things are Then you don’t know what you’re drinking because you’ve never looked into what they do to your milk But by the time it leaves the cow to the point that you’re sitting with it on your table So pasteurization means they boil it. It means they heat it to 72 degrees for between 20 and 30 seconds to kill the bacteria That’s well, that’s what that’s the only thing they want you to know Okay, all right, but pasteurization will also destroy the enzymes and enzymes are compounds that help you to Digest and assimilate the nutrients into your body
33:31 So it’s the nature of the proteins, right? It will also damage some of the more fragile proteins particularly the case ins are a bit more that if you think you know We’re a little miss muffin curds in way Yeah The way was the thin water liquid so that if you left let milk sit and it started to go off You’ll see that you get a liquid bit in a thick bit The curds are kind of the heavier case in proteins the case ins tend to be a little bit more resistant But the way are particularly fragile, they’ll definitely become damaged. Not only will bad bacteria be destroyed, but good bacteria will be destroyed.
34:00 Now milk isn’t particularly on its own, a massive source of good bacteria, but there’s some there. That’s why you suggested yogurt. Yeah. Yogurt allows those bacteria to proliferate and grow and that’s why you end up born. But any yogurt you get in the UK store has been pasteurized anyway, right?
34:14 Yeah, pretty much. I mean, you know what I find interesting? Anything you buy in a bottle in a UK store has been, a bottle or a box, any liquid it has been pasteurized. So when everyone’s like, oh, I’m getting my own Jesus, got vitamins in it, you’re getting nothing. You’re just getting sugar water.
34:27 Well, your vitamins are still there. It’s just been pasteurized. And also because for good reason, you could dive wasn’t in the wrong process, right? Sure. And originally pasteurization was made because people were dying from brucellosis and stuff like that.
34:38 All right. I mean, pasteurization came from, predominantly started in the U.A. It was Louis Pasteur who did the first pasteurization. But Louis Pasteur never, ever intended for pasteurization to be applied to milk. Okay.
34:50 A cleansing process to get rid of bacteria but it was never like oh this should be something that’s done across the milk. The dairy industry who were seeing very poor quality milk be produced in swill dairy just outside the cities decided that that would help them clean up their milk so that people could stop blaming their milk for causing illness. You’ve got to appreciate as we began to urbanize how you get to get your milk from the country into the cities we became a bigger and bigger problem so they began to move the dairies closer and closer to the cities and unfortunately the The intensification of dairies occurred where more and more cows were crammed together in poor conditions.
35:23 The poor conditions led to illness and therefore they needed to find a way to clean up the milk to make it valuable again. That’s why pasteurization was introduced. That meant the milk was now drinkable and sellable because it had been pasteurized and cleaned. Yeah, you know what? I’m going to change that thing about my filter being how many processes it’s been through and I’m going to change that to how close is this food related to the profit motive of a large corporation.
35:47 You say how close, I thought you were going to go into local, and that’s another thing a lot of people say that if you buy something that’s within 5-10 miles of you, by definition it’s going to potentially be organic or potentially have a lot more nutrients for you. Well, that depends where you live, doesn’t it? Yeah, it does. For me, I live currently in what would be kind of considered the sort of the green belt of the UK. I’m over in the east side of the country where there’s just lots of rapes and lots of wheat.
36:12 Now, if I was to buy food that was immediately 5-10 miles from me, guess what I’m eating? I’m eating wheat and rape, and you know, does that mean it’s organic? No, because I watch them spray the fields all the time. So I think you’ve got to get away. Local food is good to support the local economy, but that doesn’t naturally mean it’s better quality. Someone came and spoke to me the other day and said, well, I really want to get into this local food thing. I went down to my local farm shop, couldn’t believe how much fruit and veg was for overseas. And I said, well, yeah, it’s going to happen because they’re trying to compete with the supermarkets to make people come because they need to run on their business.
36:42 So they will not have all of the seasonal projects, the out of season projects that the supermarkets have and people complain. So they bring in stuff that’s out of season and therefore comes from abroad. Or you have bigger, maybe like box game deliveries like River Food Organic or somewhere like that or Able and Cole, some of these big companies who deliver organic produce, their demand’s so big that their local suppliers can’t produce enough. So they bring stuff in from overseas.
37:05 So you can’t just assume because it’s local, it’s better, and you can’t just assume it’s organic it’s better. You know I could go and buy some organic apples for example that have come from New Zealand. Now for them to be in ripe good condition at the time I buy them they were not picked ripe. They were picked unripe and as soon as that plant is now separated from the the tree it’s beginning its slow degradation and nutrient value. So if it’s got a longer transportation process you’re slowly going to lose nutritive value. A great way to test something like that with an apple is they very simply cut it in half and watch how quick it goes brown because the antioxidants in the apple will prevent oxidation and prevent the apple going brown.
37:42 And I’ve done this with local apples that go brown instantly. I’ve done it with local apples that, you know, don’t go brown for ages. And the same with overseas. A lot of it’s to do with how good was the soil in the first place, how good did the plant grow, and how far is it, how long has it been since it was picked. This organic buzzword does get me wind up sometimes and I was like, it’s organic, which means it must be magical.
38:05 Yeah, like an organic fudge brownie is not going to be bad. But I mean, sometimes some pesticides can do the right thing. They can make food cheaper. They’re not going to kill you, blah, blah, blah. It’s not like this is going to kill you or make it worse.
38:15 And some places don’t get the organic label because they don’t do all of these processes, but they still produce good food. Is that true? For me, organic has a place, and I am a proponent of organic food. But I guess I’m a proponent of the organic ideal. Because really, most people’s understanding of organic is that, oh, that means it can’t spray pesticides.
38:37 And I’m like, and? There’s so much more that the organic ideal is about. Ultimately, what Eve bowled for in the 40s, what she was trying to get out of all of this was that food should retain the integrity for which it had in the beginning. So if you bought some fruit and veg, it should still ultimately kind of be fruit and veg, rather than, because you can take fruit process to heck and you end up with a fruit winder that’s just jelly sugar that tastes like fruit.
38:59 So we’ve got to be very careful in what form it comes. Now, for me, if you’re buying food in a large supermarket chain where most of the staff, bless them, they’re doing a good job for whatever it is that they do, but they’re not going to be able to tell you much about that produce beyond what’s on the packet label. So if I say, can you tell me about the condition we went to this apple was grown that came from Argentina, they’re going to go, it’s organic.
39:23 That’s all linked. So it gives me some assurance that some standards have been met if I’m in that setup. However, if I go to the local producer, I don’t need to have an organic certification on there because I can just ask him straight and say. And he says it was picked from that tree that you crossed the river. Yeah, he can tell you, this is the way I do it, these are the things I do, and you can intimately get to know these people and therefore you know exactly how your food is produced.
39:44 I mean, I buy some stuff that is not organic, but because I can speak directly to the farmer, I know a lot about it, he show me around what he does, and therefore I feel confident that it’s good food. But with the separation of the large supermarket chains, people are not in touch any longer with the people who produce their food, and so organic as a certifier helps provide some level of assurance. Okay. Brian, we haven’t spoken about Alpha Brain for a while.
40:10 We should. Yeah, okay. That’s a good point. I completely forgot about that. We are sponsored by Alpha Brain, which is produced by Onit Labs.
40:16 This is onit.com, and it’s a nootropic, which means it has got GPC colon and all sorts of other things to make your brain work a little bit better. And the other thing, which I like about, and I don’t know if this is going to be something that you’ve looked into, but which is a shroom tech sport, which has a cordyceps mushrooms, which I know you’ve been taking a lot of it always, and I take it before a big anaerobic work. I like kettlebells and I just feel it really kicks in, but that’s probably more like my trip.
40:40 Micro nutrients. You guys can get 10% off if you go to on it.com and use the code London Real. Yeah. So just check that out. You know, I’ve been making this kale shake every day since the last three months and and I just put a picture up on our website and I wanted to ask you about it.
40:55 And it’s basically raw vegetables and fruit that I stick in my Vitamix, which is I think an American made product, which is just a really powerful blender. And I put in there a beetroot, cucumber, celery, ginger, apple, pear, carrots, and some ginger. And I just blend the fuck out of it. And I eat like 1.25 liters of that. I just drink it down.
41:18 Nick had some on Monday. Yeah, I love his stuff. And I’ve been doing it. I feel good. digestion everything I try to make sure I wash everything obviously since it’s raw I try to like a look a little bit out where it’s coming from organic wise and stuff sure is there anything is it should I be eating that should I not well my question would immediately be to use why are you eating it cuz Joe Rogan does it if Joe Rogan told you to jump in the fire which fire but you know I think a lot of people will do exactly that they see something that someone else is doing. They admire that person for some reason or other, therefore they do it. And you know how many people live or eat a particularly nutritional style because they saw somebody that they admired it. Everyone.
42:03 And whilst, you know, there’s, compared to what you could eat, you know, and the garbage that is available, that’s a big step forward. And I’m sure it does your digestive system a lot of good. But I mean even a lot of the plants you’ve identified have a lot of variable nutrients, they have a lot of variable herbal properties that can have different effects. know, you identified in that massive cocktail of things that you you take ginger, ginger on its own can have a digestive benefit. And so you sort of go well, do you need all of it for digestion? Do you have a history of bad digestion problems and therefore that’s why you need it? And I just think today in our efforts to try and do things that are good we sometimes just go bosh, do everything. When actually you may already be high in some of the nutrients that you’re taking. So say for example you already naturally had a very high level level of iron for example and as guys sometimes tend to do and you then go in there and have this massive shake that just dumps tons of iron into your system we could also query is that a good thing necessarily that you’re now driving your iron cans even higher when potentially that could be problematic there’s a good range for a lot of nutrients rather than just saying more is better you know the way I never get a supplement I just whatever it says on the bottle I just double it yeah like straight away we’re gonna talk about your supplement
43:11 Sure and you know for if you understand a bit about supplementation usually you know if they’re identifying RDA levels or something like that Quite often they are very very low. So there’s probably but I take the idea I give the idea as much seriousness as I give the food pyramid. There’s total bullshit, right? What do you what do you take every day? Do you really want to know come on play it up?
43:30 I take epigaly catechins a green tea extract. I take one gram of vitamin C. I take a vitamin B complex called B100. I have two tablespoons of coconut oil. I have six capsules of allicin which is aged garlic extract. I have four magnesium tablets. I have four fish old tablets. I have a selenium tablet. I have a vitamin A. I take two different types of vitamin E. Fuck, that’s all I can remember right now. There’s a few more.
44:10 Every day. Every day, yeah. Well, now I’m doing two on one off. I just feel better when I do that. Well, I’m sure you do. There’s a lot of nutrition in those things. How much do you think that cost you a month?
44:19 Probably cost me about a hundred quid. I mean, I have a deal with the supplement company. I get referral income. So I don’t really pay that much for it. But, you know.
44:29 If you had to pay full price, how much would that cost? It’d be more than 100. Yeah, it’d be more than 100. But at the end of the day, how much money does my average peer spend on alcohol each week or each month? Do you know what I mean?
44:40 I’m with you on that one. But the interesting thing for me would be, what if you invested that into better food? That’s a very good question. For me, supplements have their place. There is a time and a place where your supplementation will be beneficial, particularly when we get into illness.
44:52 If someone has an illness that means that their ability to digest certain nutrients is poor, then supplementation is good because you can super dose the system and still some of it gets through and then there’s some benefit and however if you have someone who’s generally a healthy individual and most things are okay you’ve got to start asking the question well you know we’re not just looking at normal healthy we’re trying to get to like optimal health and this is why a lot of people get drawn into the supplement world to go whoa and for me I’m just thinking well you know supplements in that case if you’re generally not ill and there isn’t a problem could we not invest more food in or money into your food because actually that might be quite an enjoyable process I mean how much fun is it to take a cod liver oil tablet or how much fun is it to down some garlic extra?
45:30 I kind of get off on it now, to be honest. Like, just downing all the way over. You are. It’s performance art. It does it at tables and restaurants and people all look at them.
45:37 But I mean, in terms of taste enjoyment, is it nice? I’m not going to lie to you, sometimes I’ll have an awesome meal, because I take them with meals and I’ll look at these 10 tablets or 12 tablets, whatever it is next to, and I’ll be like 20. Yeah. I’ll have, between every couple of miles, I’ll reach a day couple of tablets and dude, sometimes that gets boring. It’s arduous.
45:54 Yeah. Sometimes it’s arduous. But at the end of the day, like, man, I’m healthy. I’m guessing this is gonna be preventative for a lot of degenerative illnesses. And I don’t know, I mean, it seems to be working for me, knock on wood.
46:07 But that’s an interesting one, because you’re somebody, and this is what’s really interesting when you get into the world of supplementation is that generally the people who take supplements are already the health-conscious people, all right? So they’re already trying to eat well, and then they go, yeah, but I’m healthy and I’m good, and it’s like, right? If that was a proper clinical trial, which of those things could we identify as, we couldn’t identify any of it as being the things making a difference because there’s too many changes.
46:27 Yeah, that’s true and bottom line is would you still be as healthy with just the diet because you’re already eating a better diet It’s a very good question. I don’t know the answer and you know And I don’t have a problem with you know having supplements per se But I just think that there’s a lot you can do with a diet before you need to go down that route necessarily and the food When you eat a good diet, it usually tastes great and brings so much pleasure Sociality enjoyment, you know for me cooking and preparing when I have the time to do that is such a a therapeutic process in itself, and then to sit and eat it, you know. Speaking of that, what is your lunch and dinner, just so we can get through a good, you know, or an average lunch and dinner?
47:05 It varies. I would say, start with dinner, that’s probably the easiest place to start, because lunch with work and all that gets mixed around. For me, dinner is always a home-cooked meal, and when I say home-cooked, I don’t mean I heated some beef and I stuck a sauce on it. I mean, right from scratch, I like to do everything from scratch. That’s cool.
47:20 Kill the chicken in the backyard. That’s it, yeah, go ahead. How close do you go? Do you get an organic chicken? Yeah, I mean, if I can.
47:28 When time permits and life is right, the minute my life has been a bit hectic, but in the past year or so, I got to the point where I had my key areas where I went locally. All my dairy and milk comes from a specific farm that I go to. All my meat comes from a specific place. I’ll buy in a month supply into my freezer and then I don’t have to go again. And that makes your trip to the supermarket a lot less.
47:47 Is all your milk unpasteurized and your cheese unpasteurized? And that’s okay with your kids? Yeah, yeah. They’re all good. They’ve been doing that for six years, no bother.
47:53 Women they have to be a little careful. What was that? I don’t want to get off topic here. Let’s see, shall we come back to the unpasteurized meal thing? I’m happy to go into it but it’s a completely, it’s a big area. Go back to dinner, dinner. And so for me you know some of those things, there’s some planning in advance and that I have the raw ingredients there that I can start with. I mean even you mentioned chicken, usually once a week, twice a week, once every two weeks, I will prepare and make a big chicken stock and I keep that in my refrigerator. So I always have things like I don’t need to use a stock cube, I can use herbs, spices, some salt, and chicken stock and that adds the basis of a sauce or anything that I’m making and you know some of those things you do need to plan in advance and have them and so that you can cook and but I you know I would sit down and I’d have chilli con carne like anybody else but I’m gonna make it from better quality beef from whole grain rice from beans all those kind of things that some of the preparation methods might be a bit different if I had the time I’d soak the rice from the morning before I cook it at night. Do you soak rice to remove phytic acid? That’s one of the benefits of soaking rice yeah it’s just but it also so it softens the the fibrous husk a little bit, it allows the cooking time to speed up, but by reducing phytic acid, as you say, it then allows the minerals to be released and be absorbed a
49:00 Bit more. Is that white rice or brown rice, or do you have a- Brown rice. Always? Yeah. Okay.
49:06 I just want to get back onto the supplementation thing. Just so, just for the listeners, um, I take a lot of supplements, but Brian is the guy who hides little caches of fish oil capsules around his apartment, so he remembers to take them, right? I was taking 10 a day for a while of fish oil. That’s a lot. Yeah.
49:21 I would say, well, I don’t know. If there is a need to supplement, probably one of the best and common ones to do today is a fish oil, apparently because you’re getting, if it’s a good fish oil, you’ll get your omega-3s, vitamin A and D in one go. And, you know, omega-3s we know is generally lacking in the population. Vitamin D is generally lacking in the population. So those are quite reliable places to go.
49:41 Another place you’d sort of go with is very common deficiencies with things like zinc and magnesium, all right? Now, you can take those, if you wish, as a supplemental form, but you can improve your foods. You know, I personally would much rather be taking unprocessed sea salts that are high in magnesium anyway and using those as part of my food preparation. So it’s just taking the time, really. You have to take a little extra time each week to try to plan your diet out a bit more and buy those things and prepare.
50:04 I mean, I find with my veggie shake, I got to go and buy like a whole bunch of vegetables. I got to get them every four days. It’s just takes, it is a mission, but. But this is the interesting thing, isn’t it? Cause you’ve probably hit the key word there that I think puts most people off wanting to change.
50:17 You’ve gone, it takes more time. and they go, oh, I don’t have time. Time is the one commodity modern life doesn’t give us lots of, unless food becomes such a high priority to you that you will make the time. Unfortunately, for a lot of people that I’ve worked with, food is not that high a priority that they’re willing to take that extra time because other things like family and work and life in a way. I just don’t understand that.
50:35 I just don’t understand like how someone could not prioritize. You know, we all heard that expression, you are what you eat. But you’re an athlete. No, but like, I’m a human being, right? And at the end of the day, this is how I think about it.
50:44 Like you’ve been given this vehicle to get through this experience, like the human experience, right? So like if I had a car, I wouldn’t put sand in the gasoline tank. I’d put like the premium best quality gasoline I could find. And it’s the same with your body. Like why the fuck would you treat it like a garbage can?
50:59 Do you know what I mean? That’s you though. I mean, some people eat fish and chips because it tastes good. But I understand what you’re saying. And the difference with your analogy is if you put sand in the gasoline tank or in your petrol tank, should we come back to the bridge?
51:08 Okay, petrol. Your engine would immediately go wrong. When you put bad food in, people don’t recognize the symptoms of the engine going wrong. Like, I’m good, I enjoyed the food, I feel great, let’s get on with life. Because they haven’t tuned into the symptoms that the body tells you, because you will get symptoms within 15, 20 minutes, that what you’ve eaten isn’t great, but people, well it could be that, it could be something as simple as sneezing, could be something as simple as a slight itch in the back of your mouth, it could be that, you know, half an hour to an hour later, you’re just not focused on your task, or you’re just feeling a bit moody, or you’re feeling, suddenly you’re thinking, oh, you know, I just cannot be bothered to know what’s coming over me.
51:42 But they don’t relate that all those things could actually be related to the very meal that they’ve just eaten. A sneeze could indicate an allergen in the food you was going to see. It could indicate, yeah, any number of things. An increase in your heart rate could indicate that that food’s not great for you. You know, it might just have gone up by 10 beats per minute since you’ve eaten the meal and they don’t realize that.
51:58 I want to send people to your website, which is naturalfoodfinder.co.uk. If someone’s watching this and we only have a few minutes left, guys, and if you want to tell them something, you know, if it’s three things they should look out, or you say a lot of people, they don’t have the time to make these changes in their diet, what can they learn from you or what would you say to someone that are like, okay, I do want to change my diet. I don’t know what to do. You know, obviously people try diets and they, they fall off on really quickly.
52:22 What’s your advice to people when, when they do want to make a change? For me, I think to make a change, I think people need to hark back to something that’s familiar, right? Now, some people may have been raised in a way that the way they eat is familiar, but I’ve generally found that if most people go back and think of what they ate at their grandparents’ house or looked at the way their grandparents might have prepared food. There’s something there different to what they do today and you know I spoke to numerous people who said oh I remember telling my parents that what they’re doing was wrong and telling the chain and then today they’re eating completely different with their kids how they their parents would have fed them and usually you know if you look back one of the things you will find is because supermarkets didn’t dominate back then people were in touch with their local suppliers they knew their local baker they knew their local you know green grocer they knew their local butcher their fishmonger all those kind of things because they went to the same place all the time. Those people were the food experts who knew what happened to the food. So if you look at and go well can I live my food life a little bit more like how my grandparents did you’re probably going to make a number of very positive changes that will have an impact upon your life and help you get back to real food that really has always been around you know it swims in
53:31 The sea it runs on the ground it was grown in the dirt or on a tree you know something like that you know those things have been time tested we don’t need scientific trials to go that’s a good food because you know people ate it for generations and it led to vibrant health you know and you very rarely find a study going oh fruit and veg you know that’s garbage you just don’t find that all right we find that industrialized production of fruit and veg there may be some negative consequences but fruit and veg as a whole meat as a whole has never really been said to be oh that’s bad most of the studies today they say oh red meat is bad they’re looking at processed red meat you go into the study and go, well, what meat are they talking about? They’re talking about, you know, cured this, cured that, you know, processed meat here, processed meat there.
54:14 We’re not talking about, you know, organic, reared, grass-fed meat the way it should always have been, you know. Do you think we inherently know what a good meal is? Like, I was just thinking, if you go to the north of the UK, we see fish and chips. If we go to Italy, we see like, you know, vegetables and pasta and polyunsaturated fat. You go to Japan, they’re eating sashimi. I mean, don’t we all know as a human that, like, this is what you should be eating and this What you shouldn’t are you kind of saying that well, I mean fish and chips if we go back a hundred years ago How did they eat fish and chips?
54:42 It was probably a pretty good meal because they would have caught the fish that day The fish and chip guy would have been down there bought it from the local fish mongers Probably using local potatoes from somewhere and it was cooked most likely in something like a beef tallow back then All natural whereas today. It’s nothing like that. You’ve got probably cheap potatoes from overseas somewhere You’ve got fish that might have been in ice for months You know, it really isn’t the same as what it used to be. It’s cooked in vegetable oils today, you know, full of processed salt You know, it isn’t quite the same as how it used to be Yeah, I quite I quite enjoy making fish and chips, you know, I do it for my kids I’ll you know, make my own fish bread the fish, you know I’ll even fry it if I can get hold of some good larders and beef tallow or you know There it is very prat says eat fish and chips chips. But the quality matters. You know, we got to wrap this thing up, guys. They can follow, people can follow you on Twitter, which is Ben underscore Pratt. I’ve just followed him. We’re going to be following him here. Before we go, I had to ask you one question.
55:41 I get a lot of flack for my cook zeros and my sugar from Red Bulls. Set the record straight. When it comes to artificial sweeteners, how do you feel about them? I say that if it’s instead of sugar, it’s okay, but that’s just me. What do you say?
55:54 And I’m listening. That’s a really interesting one. Cause the sugar in coke is high fructose corn syrup or what is normally called in the UK, glucose fructose syrup. And you know, probably it would be a bit better than having, you know, the 12 teaspoons of glucose fructose syrup that’s in a typical kind of coke cause that’s really gonna mess you up. However, in the longterm, you know, the high levels of aspartame that are in there have been linked to other problems, you know, particularly weight gain, excited toxicity in the brain, messing up with your appetite centers.
56:24 I’d suggest if anyone wants to look a bit deeper into the effects of aspartame, they might want to look up a guy called Russell Blalock, who’s an MD in the US. He’s done a lot of work on aspartame, monosodium glutamate and the way they play with our brain and all the issues that are- So you stay away from this stuff? I wouldn’t go near them. Really, you wouldn’t touch them at all and your kids don’t touch them. So no artificial sweeteners at home, just either an occasional chocolate, but you do that within moderation and any sweeteners I do use tend to be something that’s natural maple syrup, a little bit of honey.
56:54 So I say that’s bullshit. And I’m going to keep drinking this. You’re going to get a new prop, dude. A new sponsor. Ben, that was lots of fun.
57:02 I mean, I feel like we could probably talk for another hour. Fantastic. Um, and so I hope people come and look at your website and check you out and we’d love to have you back on some time. Thank you so much. Thank you.
57:11 Thanks for coming, man. Um, until then it’s about the journey. All right. Thanks. Cheers.
57:16 Thanks.
