And we're back with another edition of Federalist Radio Hour. I'm Tristan Justice.
As always, you can email the show at radio at the Federalists dot com,
follow us on Twitter at fdr LST. Make sure to subscribe wherever you
download your podcast and the premium version of our website. Today, I'm joined
by doctor Georgia Eed, an author in psychiatrist who specializes in nutrition, brain
metabolism, and mental health. Georgia, thank you for joining me. Thank
you very much for inviting me, Tristin. So let's dive right into your
recent roundbreaking book just released, Change Your Diet, Change Your Mind. My
takeaway from this book was really similar to what I came away with from doctor
Christopher Palmer's book which came out about a year and a half ago, call
it Brain Energy, which is that most of our problems are really foutable,
not druggable, and that all this, all these mental health issues, it's
all one disease, metabolgic dysfunction. My subtect readers know that I'm writing another
whole book on this, related to the OBESID epidemic and kind of tying it
all back to you know, this one crisis, not necessarily a mental health
crisis or disease crisis. It's a lifestyle crisis considering how we eat and live
and work today. But of course we've kind of fallen into this track where
we don't really ask ourselves what we could be doing about our own situations.
We want doctors to fix them for us with a cheat, well expensive but
cheap in terms of effort, pharmaceutical fix. Your book was really tailored into
what kinds of foods we should be eating and why and how we should be
eating. So I want to start off by just having you tell us about
your book. Sure, So thanks for asking about it and thanks for reading
it. Yeah. So I wrote the book because I want people with mental
health conditions of all kinds, anybody who's worried about their mental health, which
is now the vast maturity of us. I mean, if you don't have
a mental health condition yourself, then someone very close to you certainly does that.
You know, dietary changes can be really powerful therapeutic interventions. They can
change your improve your mental health in ways that no medicine can, sometimes even
within a matter of just a few weeks. But you have to know which
dietary changes are the ones to make and they're not the ones that we're used
to hearing about. So I really this book I wrote to empower people,
give people hope, even people with longstanding serious mental illnesses, who've tried lots
of medications, been out of the hospital. For people who think that they've
tried everything, I want them to know that there's so much more they can
do if they have the right information. And she seems like there's so much
misinformation about there about what kinds of foods we should eating. When people talk
about changing or fixing their diet, they think will more fruits and vegetables,
you know, an aggressive food and vegetable load. But you talked a lot
about your book about the different kinds of foods we should be eating and how
the vegan diet, for example, has so many pitfalls in terms of you
talk about anti nutrients found in a lot of these different popular food items.
Can talk about a little bit about what kinds of foods we should be eating
and debunk some of the most popular myths surrounding a healthy diet today. Yes,
you know, we've been told and we've really fed the wrong information about
nutrition for decades, really for fifty seventy five years now. So we've been
feeding our brains and the rest of our bodies improperly for our entire lives,
for generations, and that's really catching up to us because almost none of us
are healthy anymore. Depending on which study you look at, it's about ninety
percent of us have at least one marker of metabolic dysfunction, and this affects
every cell in the body. And so we're eating improperly because the information that
we've been given is not based on science or biology or experiments. It's based
on guesswork and untested theory about what certain groups of nutrition scientists think we should
be eating, and so those untested theories are published as high blot, as
headlines and as dietary guidelines. I mean, most of our dietary guidelines actually
rest upon this guesswork as opposed to human biology and food ingredients and what we've
known about nutrition to be true for so long, about the very basic facts
about human biology and what every cell requires to be healthy. So, for
example, we are told that the foundation of our diet not only that should
it be high carbohydrate, but the types of carbohydrates that should form the foundation
of the diet are things like old grains and lagoons, and so not only
are these very starchy and so therefore you know they're not going to be safe
for you if you have a significant degree of metabolic you know, damage pre
diabetes, type two diabetes, something called insulin resistance. We can talk about
all those of you want, but the majority of us now have unfortunately damaged
carbohydrate metabolism, and so, uh, you know, the more of those
carbohydrates who eat, the higher endslaline levels going to go up, and the
more damage is going to be doing over time. So not only are they
just too high in carbohydrate for the majority of us now, but they're also
extremely low in nutrients. Uh so low in nutrients that products made with grains
are routinely fortified with lots of vitamins and minerals because they don't possess very many
of them themselves. So and then they're also full of naturally full of anti
nutrients that you know that plants naturally produce to guard their nutrients for themselves.
And then on top of that, you know, we have the issue that
a lot of these foods are are really hard to digest and and can irritate
the gut lining cant can aggravate the immune system. Uh and and so there
are lots of these There is no good reason to base your diet on these
foods. They really don't deserve to be the foundation of our diet. But
yet we're told that that should be something like forty to sixty percent of our
diet, should be complex starches and refined starches, pastas and breads and cereals
and things like that. And in the meantime, oh, go ahead,
no, please, please. In the meantime, there's so much anxiety about
people eating meat. There's this whole industry now to even dissuade people from eating
meat, as if meat is bad for you. There are a group of
scientists a couple of months ago who even proposed putting warning labels on meat products
like we do with cigarettes. And you talk a lot about in your book
about how meat is really a super food containing all the right minerals and nutrients
that we actually need to function optimally. And so I wonder if you can
talk about kind of some of the different myths surrounding meat itself. Yeah,
so there's a whole chapter in the book. So one of the things about
the book is that the about a quarter of it is a series of chapters
on different whole foods to help people understand what are the pros and cons of
eating meat, what are the pros and cons of eating grains, What are
the pros and consivating dairy and fruits and vegetables, et cetera. Right,
so it kind of really dive into it. And the meat chapter, you
know, really, it could have been one sentence. It could have just
been your meat is good for you, full stop. But the reason why
I had to write a whole chapter about it is because it's the opposite of
what we've been told. There are lots and lots and lots of scary headlines
about meat causing colon cancer, causing heart disease, causing obesity, just you
know, you name the disease and meat has been blamed for it. And
when you but you actually look at the science behind those claims, there there
is no evidence. There's no evidence for any of any of those claims.
In fact, when you actually look at reliable sources of science where scientists have
actually done experiments or they've actually looked inside meat to see what's inside and and
how good it is for what you see, is every nutrient you need in
its proper form without any anti nutrients, easy to digest, is incapable of
creating unhealthy levels of blood sugar and insulin, metabolically healthy, nutritionally healthy,
uh gastrointestinely safe, and so they're just it's the most perfect source of food
that you that you can imagine, and yet it is the most vilified.
And you know the reasons for that are really complex, but when you look
at the simple facts about it, there's just there's absolutely no question that these
foods are essential for human health, for physical health, for mental health,
and there's it's almost difficult to to what's sort I'm looking for. It's almost
difficult to prove that we needed to eat anything more than that. The evidence
behind grains and vegetables and fruits. It's not that you can't get nutrients from
those foods. It's not as though most people need to avoid those foods.
It's just that they get a lot more credit than they deserve, and meat
gets blamed for all of these diseases, which really most of these diseases have
to do with high glucose and insulin levels, which are coming from refined carbohydrates
largely. So a lot of these studies when they look at meat and they
try to blame problems on meat, it's meat in combination with refined carbohydrates like
breads and sugars and flowers and so forth, and so one of the things
that might be helpful for people to members it's not the meat, it's the
sweet So if you put a piece of meat on the barbecue that's perfectly healthy
for you, douse it in sugary barbecue sauce, now you have a problem.
So there's a lot of confusing messages about food out there, and that's
I think one of the biggest ones is that meat is the most dangerous food
you can eat, when actually the opposite is what's true. Are you concerned
at all about the level of processing of our meat supply, because one of
the arguments about meat is that meat today is so much different than the meat
we were consuming even just one hundred years ago. And so, I mean,
meat's been such an important part of human diet throughout our entire species.
We're talked about forty thousand years of evolution. But on the other hand,
our food supply today is radically different from even how it was even just seventy
years ago. And so are you concerned about how you know meat? It's
so general, such a general term. Are you concerned about the level of
processing and the meat supply. I'm concerned about the quality of our food supply
in general, so meat as well as plant, so animal foods as well
as plant foods. You know, all of these have been many of these
suits have been co opted by the food industry processed, you know, appearing
to add value, but really are just anything you do to a food,
anything you do to meat, including cooking, it can reduce its nutritional value.
So the less process the better as far as I'm concerned for meat.
But I would still say despite the many, many, very real problems which
I do try to address in the book regarding our food production system both a
plant and animal foods. The way we grow food, the way we treat
animals, the way we treat people who who produce our food, the way
the way we damage the environment and the production of the food, all of
these things, the way we feed the animals, and the way and the
way we the way we try to nourish the soil of the plants, all
of these systems are have tremendously, tremendously complicated negative effects on the health of
the planet, on the health of people, on the health of animals and
plants, and so many many problems. However, if you are concerned about
your health, you have to eat, and you have to make the best
choices you can. And if you had a choice, say, for example,
between a processed meat, I always, you know, I advocate for
fresh and frozen, minimally processed animal foods in my book and my life and
with my patients. But if you had a choice between a processed piece of
meat, like say, a piece of salami or a hot dog or uh
you know, uh name name a slice of bacan versus a cupcake or a
bowl of cereal or yogurt with sugar in it, that piece of processed meat
is going to be infinitely healthier for you, infinitely more nutritious, infinitely safer
for your metabolism than the processed plant food option would be. And I think
a lot of people don't realize that. You know, I'm not a fan
of process foods of any kind, but when you process carbohydrates, what you
end up with is a really metabolically dangerous product of naked carbohydrates that a tsunami
of glucose molecules and insulin in your system. Even process needs, unless they've
had sugar added to them, are incapable of that kind of metabolic damage,
and they're far more nutritious. So I'm not a fan of process foods,
but again, you need to I think people need to understand what they're actually
deciding between and have the right information so that they can make better choices for
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com. The processing was really a key takeaway from a book I read from
doctor Robert Lustig called Metabolical, which you cite in your book, and his
monitor aout the entire book was it's not what's in the feud, it's what's
been done to the food. And that was so eye opening to see.
I mean, walking through the grocery store, I feel like I'm wearing the
tinfoil hat on sometimes because I feel like there's almost nothing walking down the aisle
that I want to purchase that I feel safe purchasing. You have to really
look for the unprocessed items that have been barely industrialized. And so meanwhile,
as our food supply changes and as the American diet changes, we're just deteriorating
into the best with product disease and mental health crisis. And it's not just
that we're not eating correctly, we're not sleeping right, we're not in sync
with our circadian rhythms. There just seems to be a lack of awareness as
to how we're going about our lifestyles, and of course diet is I would
argue, probably the most fundamental part of that. And I don't want to
necessarily write off medication for sake psychiatric issues, but I think it's such an
interesting contradiction to note that when we're looking at the record number of prescription drugs
that we're pushing out to the country, particularly antidepressants, and then you look
at the World Happiness Survey and how the United States just fell eight spots to
a record low. We're not even in the top twenty now, and where
prescribe, we're prescribing all these antidepressants at record numbers. And I thought Bill
Maher made a really excellent plan on this the other day when he talked about
our mental health crisis. He talked about how maybe you don't have social anxiety
disorder and that you're just shry, and maybe you don't have OCD. You
just like things in order. Maybe you're not clinical leader, you're depressed,
you're just sat But maybe we have all these issues because we're not eating properly.
And really, the brain is no different from any other organ in the
body that when you don't nourish it correctly, it's not going to operate optimally.
And so, considering that seventy three percent of US adults prescribed antidepressants haven't
even been diagnosed with depression, I want to know how much of our mental
health crisis do you believe, as a psychiatrist could be relieved if we just
refocused our attention on fixing our diet and our food supply. Yeah, there's
no way for me to prove that this is the case. Of course,
it's not a question I can answer scientifically, but I can tell you.
You ask me what I think, and based on my knowledge with fifteen years
of studying nutrition and twenty five years of practicing psychiatry, I can tell you
that I think the vast majority of our mental health crisis is directly due to
our lifestyle, mostly our diet, but also, as you said, circadian
rhythms. We don't spend enough time outside exercise. We don't spend enough time
using our bodies, you know, and we spend too much time in front
of screens, and those things are all true. But you could arrange the
outside of your life as perfectly as you can imagine. You could have a
wonderful relationship, you could love your work, you could have enough money,
you could spend your time outside, you know, you could get to bed
at the right time. You could do all of these things. But if
you don't eat properly, no matter how good your life looks on the outside,
you are going to be unstable on the inside. Because the foods you
eat determine the balance of the neurotransmitters in the brain, the health of the
cells in your brain, your hormone levels and how they you know, how
they are regulated. And we're not talking just about reproductive hormones. We're talking
about stress hormones and appetite hormones UH and and and and also reproductive hormones and
blood pressure regulating hormones. Everything will be destabilized from within because food is information,
and so when you take that food in, it's telling you, it's
telling your hormones what to do. And a lot of people think they overeat
or they emotionally eat because their hormones are kind of in control because they're stressed,
and and and really a lot of that is the other way around that
what you're eating is telling your hormones to make you eat that way. What
you're eating is making you stressed because it's raising your stress hormone levels. And
if you know which foods are going to be metabolically safe, hormonally friendly,
and brain healthy, then you can add actually stabilize yourself from within. Again,
often within a matter of days, just a few weeks, people can
notice tremendous, like really meaningful improvements in their anxiety levels, in their mood,
in their outlook on life, in their energy levels, in their sleep
quality, in their ability to tolerate stress, in their ability to recover from
stressful events. I mean, my gosh. I worked I specialized in college
mental health for thirteen years. I worked at Harvard University Health Service for seven
years and then Smith College more than five years. And what I saw on
college campuses was just people becoming the mental health are young people becoming increasingly brittle.
I mean students, so many students, some who had every advantage,
not all, but unable to manage a day, unable to get through the
day without specialized support, coming into the crisis, coming into our mental health
service in crisis, meeting leaves of absence, you know, needing you know,
UH hospitalization, sometimes having to go to the emergency room, meeting crisis
appointments. We're not well, and and that's not normal. We shouldn't.
We should expect much more from ourselves than that. I'm so glad you brought
up the tech part of this, because I think addiction is such a fundamental
pillar of why we have all these issues. Food is so addictive as it
is with screens and illicit substances. I mean, it's it's all capitalizing on
the reward centers of our brains to make us create these products. Even more
so, it's not just food. It's not just the screens. It's it's
it's our day to day where everything is preying on our on our on our
dopamine UH neurotransmitters. Oprah Winfrey just held this special on obesity, which really
was just an hour long time time in commercial for these drug companies with new
weight loss drugs. Now, I don't want to discount anyone who might have
taken ozampi ormandua and found really great successful results on a condition it's so hard
to treat. But I'm worried that these weight loss drugs are really just another
example going down this road of needing a pharmaceutical intervention to fix our every problem
that can already really be solved by just implementing different lifestyle changes. This specialist
even sponsored by weight Watchers, which ran ads. During it. You had
representatives from Noble Ortisks and Eli Lilly participate on air. But look, obesity
is really just has as much to do with the brain as it does with
the rest of our organs. We're all food addicts, and you can be
a food act and not even be OBEs. In fact, I would argue
most of us are, and we all have a sweet tooth, right.
But as a psychiatrist, do you think we've gone so far down the rabbit
hole of addiction that mere lifestyle changes are no longer enough to curb the epidemic
of obese c Because I just finished this book called The Least of Us and
about the opioid epidemic by I might picture the name Sam Ken your Days.
I might have said that wrong, but talked about how the the dopamine mechanisms
in our brain are so powerful they will absolutely overwhelm any sort of willpower that
draws us to elicit substances or social media or food. So, as a
practicing practicing psychiatrists, what do you make of this kind of rabbit hole of
addiction? Yeah, food, So I think terminology matters, that words matter
when we're having this kind of a discussion, because when I hear the term
food addiction, I want to make a tweak to it, because you can't
really become addicted to whole foods. Whole foods, generally speaking on non addictive,
and they're very satisfying and they're very difficult to overeat, so and that
that's true for plant as well as animal foods. So you know, even
if you're even if you consider yourself a sugar addict or love sweet foods,
there are only so many bananas you will be able to swallow. And that's
because of all the fiber in the water, and there's some natural stop signs
built into whole foods. And this actually brings us to back to this question
about these weight loss drugs, because there are appetite regulation centers in the brain,
but there are also appetite regulation systems in the gut as well. There
are hormones in the brain and gut that help us understand, okay, when
should we eating and when should we stop? And processed foods that have had
their cellular integrity destroyed, So if they've been liquefied or crystallized or powdered,
those foods bypass a lot of those hormonal stop signs. You literally cannot stop
eating them because they don't satisfy your appetite. There's no stop sign. And
so people, you know, imagine yourself trying to eat, you know,
ten servings of steak, that's very different cult to imagine imagine yourself eating trying
to eat ten servings of pie. You could probably do it. And so
it's just very different. And you know the way that foods are processed in
our bodies. Our bodies are designed to take in whole plant and animal foods
and to see them. With some we're designed to chew our food, swallow
it, and then when it arrives in the stomach and in the intestines,
you know it's it, expects to see it, expects to see whole foods
coming through. If you eat liquids or powders or crystals, your hormonal response
will be very different. And so when people say food addiction, I really
want to use a different term, And I think the most addictive ingreed,
what is the addictive ingredient within food, right, is what is causing that
dopamine loop that you that you feel cannot be surmounted and it's really very very
difficult to resist. It's the refined carbohydrates. It's not the fat. I
mean, I don't know anybody who's a vegetable oil. I don't know anybody
you know. It's not the fat. It's the refined carbohydrate. That's what's
causing that dopamine spike. And most processed foods contain some form of refined carbohydrate.
Sugar, flour, cereals, fruit, juices, you know, all
those kinds of things that are either sweet or powdered starches. So when people
stop eating those, they feel like they have a lot more control over what
they're and they give them more willpower, so to speak. And then when
people switch to a ketogenic diet, which is one of the dietary patterns I
suggest in the book for people who are looking for bettermental health, there are
other patterns as well. Don't worry. If you're afraid of a ketogenic diet,
don't worry. There are other options. When people switch to a ketogenic
diet where most of their cells are being fed by fat, fueled by fat
rather than carbohydrate, by a greater ratio of fat to carbohydrate, they naturally
feel satisfied for long periods of time between meals. Many people, this is
what I do in my practice every day. Many people, even severe food
addiction histories food addiction histories, can sit in a room with cookies or cake,
or in the break room at work, whatever, and feel as though
they're not drawn to them, and it's a completely foreign experience to them.
So there are ways. There are ways to change your diet that will reset
your brain chemistry, reset your appetite hormones, and give you a real fighting
chance in this world where we're surrounded by these ultra processed, refined carbohydrate foods
that are so compelling and so addictive, and so inexpensive and so convenient we've
been raised on since we were little kids. Unfortunately, there is hope even
for those situations where people feel like their jopamine system has been shot. You
know that there's nothing they can do. It's just going to be a slog
for the rest of their lives. I can tell you from working with people
who've had decades of so called food addiction, that when they eat the right
foods, they no longer feel addicted, and that I think is a really
important message for people. I don't want people to give up and feel like
it is just going to be, you know, a slog every day for
the rest of their lives. There are things you can do to get control
over your appetite and help you feel really happy with your relationship with food.
Again. This is Molly Hemingway of The Federalist, Join me my husband,
Mark of Real Clear Investigations, twelve time All American swimmer, Riley Gaines,
Aaron Wren of The American Conservative, and others for the twenty twenty four Making
the Case Conference Friday July twelfth and Saturday July thirteenth at Concordia University, Chicago.
Learn more at Issues Etc. Dot org. Making the Case July twelfth
and thirteenth in Chicago, Issues Etc. On the oprah Winfree Special, there
was a woman who had been taking vinduro for a number of months and ultimately
lost more than half her weight and she got down to a metabolically healthy way
of about one hundred and fifty pounds. She was about three hundred pounds,
and she spoke about taking Manduro as if it was this magic diet pill that
immediately solved her food cravings, and she talked about how she no longer had
that constant voice in her head that she wanted. I think the example they
used on the show was the bagel and so, but if I'm understanding correctly,
you can actually turn those cravings off naturally after switching to say a ketogenic
diet or a diet with whole foods. And of course, I think this
is where Americans get so frustrated, because I think most people don't really know
what those whole foods are, because there's people afraid of eating meat, and
they want to eat all these different fruits and vegetables that like we talked about
earlier, of these anti nutrients that can sometimes become problematic. And so I
look at a ziantic and I see a permanent treatment for if you're ventable problem
that already has the cure. Am I right or not? I do agree
with you on that. So the way these medicines work they've gut effects and
they have brain effects, right, do they work in this kind of dual
way to curb your appetite. Essentially, they slow the stomach emptying, so
food stays in the stomach longer, and that's one signal. There are actually
stretch receptors in the stomach that acts as a sort of stop sign, one
hormonal stop sign for overeating. And then they also tell the brain to reduce
your appetite, and they lower your blood sugar by reducing the amount of sugar
that the liver releases into the circulation. Right, So they lower your appetite
and they lower your blood sugar. Well, where is all that blood sugar
coming from in the first place. The easiest, most effectstive way, and
the safest way, and the best way to lower that bloacher, without copays,
without injections, without doctor's visits, without side effects, is to remove
those external sources of sugar from your diet so that your blood sugar can't spike
to unhealthy levels. And that you can do that's something that's safe for you
to do for the rest of your life. And not only will it help
you lose weight. If you're trying to lose weight, but it will also
it will be healthy for all of your cells because you'll be protecting yourself against
those glucose and insulin spikes. Now the medication for the people, some people
find very good results with these medications. And I'm you know, I'm not
anti medication. I still use medications in my own practice. I'm definitely,
you know, somebody who wants to find the right solution for each person that
comes to me. And not everybody can change their diet. Not everybody will
change their diet. Some people are in situations, in living situations where they
can't change their diet, or their have cognitive impairment where they can't change their
diet, for example. So no everybody can do that. And so I
like that people have choices and that people you know, can choose a medication
if they can access it and afford it and tolerate it. Those are three
big gifts. But I don't view those medications as a solution to our metabolic
health crisis. We're going to give children these injections, I mean children now
have obesity and insulin resistance and can't stop eating. Is this really the answer
for all of us, that all of us should be on an injectable medication
so that we can just continue to eat the wrong foods for the rest of
our lives. And remember, you know, folks who are listening that you
know health is not just about weight. So yes, you can lose weight
on these medicines. There are lots of weights to lose weight, so we're
much harder than others. But what about your health? So it's important that
even if you are eating less, whether you're dieting to eat less or whether
you're or whether you're taking medication eat less, the foods that you're eating,
the quality of the foods that you're eating, continues to matter because your cells
don't just need to don't just care about how what size you are. They
care about what nutrients are coming in. Are you getting enough protein, are
you getting the right kinds of fat, are you getting enough vitamins, are
you getting enough minerals? And are you not eating the foods that are going
to be damaging your cells, the foods that cause inflammation, foods that cause
oxidative stress, which is why I'm always told to eat so many antioxidants,
food foods that are damaging your system over time. Even if you're at a
healthy weight, you're still going to be continuing on the road to poor health.
So one of my concerns about these medicines, and this has happened to
a number of my own patients, One of my concerns about these medicines is
that, yes, it can curb your appetite. Again, if you can
tolerate and afford it, it can curb your appetite. But what are you
going to be eating? What foods are you going to be eating. So
for some of my patients who have food addiction, when they start a medicine
like this, it almost gives them permission to eat the wrong foods because they're
not going to overeat those foods, and so you know, they kind of
feel like they don't have to be careful about their food choices anymore because they're
not going to gain weight, so then they make less healthy choices. So
weight is not just health is not just about weight. So there are so
many reasons why I agree with you that this is not the solution. This
is a this is a this is really a pipe dream. I mean,
I think these medicines can be useful in bridging, helping people get field some
control and make some progress, curb that appetite and then learn and practice healthier
dietary strategies. And though just a study published by Vertic Health showing that they
put people on one of these weight loss medications, one of these GLP one
medications, which which help them lose weight, and then they gradually transition them
over to a low carbohydrate diet and they were able to come off the medication
and maintain that weight loss using a low carbohydrate diet. So they both work,
and I would suggest that if people are using these medicines, to use
them short term as a way to help them practice healthier eating strategies and make
some progress, gain some ground, and then gradually transition to a diet that's
going to allow you to stay at that healthy weight and improve your overall health.
At the same time, I'm so glad that you brought up the children,
because last year the American Academy of Pediatrics just came out your guidelines and
treating Childhood ob city, and they were, to put it plainly, to
meet bonkers. They are recommending children as young as twelve and thirteen be recommended
these weight loss injections on top of bariatric surgery. For adolescents who have an
e and matured into adulthood yet and so you have these really these remedies are
a loss of a glass resort being deployed on children who are then destined to
become lifelong patients. You had one of the doctors who was a consultant for
one of the drug companies on over one Free special to talk about she acknowledged
that, yes, the data shows that to maintain that weight loss on these
weight loss drugs, patients usually have to remain on the drugs, and of
course it just enables this behavior that got them to where they are in the
first place. When that patient on the program talked about she still wanted to
eat the vegel and she still would eat the begel. Well, the begel
god is to where we are in the first place, being refined carbohydrates and
spiking an insulin response. And so I get really concerned when we talk about
deploying these remedies of last resort on children, because you're just creating lifelong medical
patients who are then going to remain, you know, sending no more more
disks and lightly paychecks best for the wealth of their lives on top of remaining
in their lifestyles as consumers of big food for the next generation. Yeah,
I think we're really in denial as a species about being able to continue to
eat this way. It's destroying us. I mean, it's destroying our bodies
and our brains from the inside out. And each successive generation is becoming less
healthy, less robust, less capable. And this is really really concerning to
me. So, you know, I why aren't we asking why why are
so many more people overweight than than we used to be. Why what is
driving this overeating instinct in the first place? What's causing us to overeat like
this? Get to the root cause of it, or else we will we
will be completely at the mercy of pharmaceutical companies, you know, who are
trying to medicate. You can't medicate your way out of this problem. I
mean think we're all in denial about that, and so we need to actually
get the root of the problem. And the problem with the root of the
problem is it involves a very difficult behavior change, and behavior change is harder
than taking a medication. I know it is, but I'm also one of
the one of the things I explained in the book is it doesn't take very
long to see results if you know which change is to make. Because people
have been given not just the wrong information about what to eat and what's healthiest
for us, they've also been given the wrong information about how to lose weight.
So all of the diets that most of the diets that you see most
people think about calories and exercise and those sorts of things as ways to lose
weight, that information is outdated and incorrect. And what's actually true about weight
loss is again it's all about managing your glucose and insulin levels. Insulin is
not just a blood sugar regulator. Insulin is a master hormone, a master
metabol hormone. One of the things it does is regulate blood sugar. But
one of the other things it does is it turns off fat burning. So
if your insulin level is too high because you've got too much carbohydrate or too
much food in your diet more than you need, the insult level is going
to be too high, that's going to turn off your fat burning enzymes.
And you could literally have five hundred pounds of excess body fat. That's just
lots of energy stored and stored in your body, sitting there waiting to be
used. You can't burn it because your fat burning hormones are turned off by
insulin. So any diet that lowers insulin levels will help you burn fat.
And it doesn't have to be a keutogenic diet, but that's the most comfortable
and most sustainable way to do it. You could also you could calorie restrict.
You could eat a high carbohydrate diet. That's you seven hundred and twenty
five calories a day, but that's going to turn your metabal great down.
Over time. Metabolism is going to slow down, and you're going to be
really hungry. And you know, you could also fast, and fasting is
a really effective way to lose weight, but you can't. You have to
eat at some point, and when you eat, it's really important to make
healthy choices when you're eating. And so you can exercise, but you can't
exercise all day long. So there are lots of ways to lower your insulin
levels. And if people understand how to lower the insulin levels that it's mostly
about. It's mostly about the quality and quantity of carbohydrate in your diet that's
driving you to overeat, that's making you store fat, that's making it impossible
for you to burn fat. That's making you hungry, then I think people
will feel empowered to do something that Actually, when something works, people will
stick with it. But the other dietary strategies hear about, such as calorie
restriction, exercising more, that sort of thing, it doesn't work for long
because it doesn't satisfy your body's energy needs in the same way, and it
makes you hungry and it turns down your metabolic rate. So all of this
information, so it's making people feel hopeless. But if you understand the biology,
you can fix this problem fairly easily. So having the right information,
knowledge is power, so you can choose to take the medication. But I
would also encourage you to learn about what got you into this problem. I
mean, I've had a lifelong history of weight problems. I was overweight when
I was six years old. I was one of only two overweight girls in
my elementary school class. It used to be very uncommon back then to be
overweight, and it was humiliating, and I struggled for decades with my weight
until I discovered, you know what the truth is about weight management, and
so you know, I want to give people out their hope that there is
another way and it's a much healthier, much more sustainable, and much more
affordable way. And that hopelessness that you just talked about, I think is
really that is what's manifested into this body positivity movement, which came sixty years
ago as Okay, let's all feel comfortable in our own skin and not shame
anyone probably look into its healthy do bobs. That's really what it's become the
last ten years. And I started reading all these books I could find from
influencers for the body positivity movement, and it came away with, well,
no wonder everyone's frustrated because everyone's been following the wrong diet advice for three consecutive
generations while living on an industrialized diet. So not only is this high carblow
leading everybody stressed and sick, but it's leaving them resentful and frustrated over the
fact that the diet advice they were following to lose weight wasn't working. Low
fat diet was such a failed government experiment, and so it's no wonder that
we have so many people, rightly, I would argue, frustrated, frustrated
about their inability to lose weight, and so I just kind of want to
end with what are some of the most important lifestyle changes that you believe that
people could start making to day to change their life and change their mind.
Yeah so, and really the core message of the book is that you want
the core of your diet, if you're willing to do this, you want
the core of your diet to be animal foods, non dairy animal foods perfectly.
We could talk about that another time, but so you meat, seafood,
poultry, and eggs or any combination of those. This means that you
can be healthy even as a vegetarian if you're willing to include some eggs in
your diet. Right, So, the core of your diet needs to be
for optimal health animal foods. You can try to supplement your way around it,
but that's not going to be as good. And then the next layer
of your diet beyond that is whole plant foods, So whole fruits and vegetables.
Not the grains or the beans, or the flowers or the sugars,
none of those. But fruits and vegetables, the ones that you tolerate best
and the ones that you enjoy the most. That's the next layer. And
then and you can even include you know, some some nuts and seeds and
that if you wish, I'd put those just on the next level on the
outside. But in any case, if you've got these whole foods, really
what it is is a paleo so called paleo style dietary pattern. You know,
it's a hunter gatherers style pattern. It's it's the pattern that we evolved
as a species over two million years to consume just the animal and plant foods
that were in our natural environment minimally processed. Yes, they may have been
cooked, they may have been chopped into small pieces. Sometimes they may have
been fermented, but they were not put through a factory and industrially processed.
We didn't have factories back then. That was impossible. That is the dietary
pattern that our brains and our bodies evolved to be healthy on. And so
the first step in my book, the first plan that I suggest in my
book is to I mean, you could start even smaller, you could start
but just removing all the ultra processed foods, all the packages and the cans
and the bottles and so forth, and just eat foods that don't have an
ingredient label. If you enter your store, a whole food does not need
and usually does not have an ingredient label. If it has an ingredient label,
stop and ask yourself what is this? Is this a food? Is
this a processed food? Because what you'll see on processed foods ingredients, you'll
see what they don't have. Oh it's fat free, or oh it's gluten
free, or oh it's cholesterol free. I don't really care what's not in
it. I want to know what is in it. Turn the food over
read that ingredient label. If you see more than one ingredient, I would
leave it alone. So you really want meat, fruits, vegetables, nuts,
seeds, those kinds of foods as the core of your diet. Everything
else beyond that, the flowers, the grains, the sugars, the vegetable
oils, everything else outside of that of that core is really dangerous territory.
And that's almost upside down from what we're told. We're told the core of
our diet should be carbohydrates, including refined carbohydrates, and that meat should be
at the very outer limit of what you know it's going to should be avoided
or minimized at all costs. And so that's upside down and backward. So
any one of those changes that you make to your diet is going to be
a step in the right direction. Well, on that note, Georgia,
thank you for joining me. Thanks very much for having me, Tristan.
I really enjoyed the conversations.