 Question is from Riley McFadder, 18. Thoughts on processed versus non-processed foods if the macros are still good in the processed foods? As we go to answer this, Doug, will you look this up? Because I'm gonna make a point that I wanna make sure I'm right on my percentages because it's been a while since I've looked at this. Would you look up what FDA approves labels to be off? And I believe it's- How accurate do they have to be? Yeah, I believe FDA allows like 30%- Oh, yeah, 30%. Yeah, it's 20 to 30% wiggle room on their labels. And you would be a fool to think that- That's a lot. Yeah, you would be a fool to think that a package thing like a lean pocket, which is designed to market and advertise to people that are probably trying to lose weight or count their calories. But they also want it still to taste good. You would be a fool to think that they're not gonna push those boundaries as far as they can so that you feel like, man, this is so good. I can't believe it's only 250 calories. Well, it technically could be about 320 calories based off of how much they allow it to be off. And then also foods that are marketing to, oh, this has 20 grams of protein. Well, again, if you can be off 20 or 30%, I know I'm targeting the group demographic of people that are searching for protein. I'm gonna push those limits. I'm gonna round up to make you think that there's a lot more in there. Before Sal goes on his tangent about process and non-processed foods and the benefits of each or whatever, I'm just gonna tell you straight up that when you're trying, this is also why 99.9% of all competitors don't eat processed foods when you're competing is because when you have to be that diligent and track, can't count on it. No, you can't. You can't count on it. I can't go eat it. It's much more precise to weigh a chicken breast or weigh, yeah. Way, way, way more accurate. And when I'm controlling everything that's in it and being cooked in, and this goes for, when you go to restaurants too, and they now have to like label or list, you know. And to me, it's so funny that this is even a question because do you really think that the 1,000 Chipotle's that have 10,000 different employees that are scooping the black beans and the rice? Well, I know who my heavy-handed guy is. Yeah, right. I'm like, hey man, you give me the meat. Right, do you really think that they're all the same? No, you're talking about, and we're talking about hundreds of calories that could be off based off of just one meal. And if you eat multiple meals out or that are processed, yeah, it's nowhere near as accurate as you think it is. So here's what I'm gonna say about this topic. I can pretty confidently say, and I think that this will age very, very well. So I think in 10, 15 years, I think this is gonna be the consensus. But I can confidently say that it was the processed food revolution that was the single largest contributor to the obesity epidemic in modern Western societies. For a long time, we wanted to blame, we wanted to blame fat. It was too much fat in our diet, that's what's making us fat. Then it was carbs or sugar. The reality is you can gain or lose weight if your calories are too high or too low. And it can be higher in carbs, lower in carbs, higher in fat, lower in fat. We know this. So why the hell ever since I'd say the 50s, but definitely the 60s, 70s, and it really started taking off after the 70s, 80s, 90s and now, why the hell did we all of a sudden become so fat? And why is it that other countries that start to adopt the quote unquote American diet, which really it's the modern developed Western diet? Why is it that other countries, as soon as they adopt this, they all get fat too. You look at Mexico, for example, Mexico a few decades ago, three, four decades ago did not have an obesity problem. You go back 50 years, they had a problem, the opposite. Today, Mexico, I believe rivals America in terms of obesity. How did this happen? It wasn't fat, it wasn't carbs, it was processed food. Now, why does processed food make us gain weight? Well, we now have studies that show this. This is what we've learned as personal trainers, by the way. This is what I knew as a trainer, working with people. This is what Adam and Justin saw themselves as well. Heavily processed foods make you eat more. So now you have, you know, American culture, 60s and 70s, the introduction, or at least the all of a sudden processed food started to become part of our daily lives. Now, at that time, it was still a staple to have, you know, a well-cooked dinner. You know, mom made dinner for you and lunch was probably still made and breakfast still people had eggs and bacon and that kind of stuff. But little by little, these meals were getting replaced by cereal, by, you know, boxed processed foods, by microwave dinners became a thing for a little while. People started eating out more and more. That's considered heavily processed food, all these fast food restaurants started popping up. And as we started to consume more processed food, our wastes started to grow alongside them. Our weight started to go up alongside them. Now we have studies that actually show this. There was a, one of the best studies that I've ever seen when it comes to nutrition. And I consider it one of the best because it was fully controlled. In other words, the people in the study were in a lab the whole time. And one of the problem with studies done on nutrition is that most of them are based off of surveys. So people will go in and then they'll ask them questions like, how often do you eat fruit? How often do you eat vegetables? How often do, and surveys are just notoriously inaccurate. You know, people just, you ask somebody to estimate how many calories they eat. They're always off by 500 calories or more, sometimes thousands. But this study was done in a lab. It was controlled. And what they did is they took two groups of people. One group, they gave them unlimited access to unprocessed natural food. So like chicken and meat and eggs and milk and fruits and vegetables and nuts and that kind of stuff. The other group had unlimited access to heavily processed foods. Believe it or not, this is how good the study was done. They even controlled for macros. The macros of each side were similar. So it wasn't like the heavily processed food side was all sugar and the other side was less sugar. They matched them up pretty damn well. Then here's what they did. That was even more brilliant. They had them stay in their camps for a little while, eat as much as you want, both groups, then they switched them. Then they switched them over just to make sure that it wasn't like these people over here just eat more and whatever. Then they switched them over. Do you know what they found? On average, and other studies have echoed this, on average when people consume a lot of heavily processed foods, they eat around 500 more calories every single day. That's a pound of body fat a week, okay? That's incredible. And that's a lot of food. Now how does this happen? Well, because hunger is not regulated, not just regulated by how many calories in your food or how much it fills up your stomach. It has to do with a lot of different things and processed foods are designed to make you eat more. They do a phenomenal job of doing this. So here's the difference. If you got processed foods and unprocessed foods in the same macros and same calories, you're gonna have a way tougher time eating an appropriate amount if you eat processed foods. You're using an example of a controlled study where they factored in what the calories had to be. My argument is that I would say that a majority of people, and we know this from other studies, under report. And they don't know how to calculate correctly. And it's hard to calculate correctly. Doug pulled up the article for me. It's actually, the FDA allows 20% leeway north or south. So, and they use the example. So a cliff bar legally could say it's 200 calories or 300 calories. It could be literally 100 calorie difference. Now which one do you think they'll put on the label? Right, the one. 250. Yeah, that's a 20% variation up or down. Yeah, so that, and that's on a small bar. The bigger the product is, the more exaggerated that can be. And that's one thing in your diet for that single day. If you've got multiple things in your diet that is processed or packaged like that or eating out, you could be miscalculating by 300 to 700 calories every day, which is typically about how many calories I'm telling a client to restrict or add to their diet based off of their goal. So if you're eating a lot of these foods and you think the quote unquote macros align, they probably don't. So, I mean, now that all being said, that doesn't mean too that I'm also freaking out every time I eat. I mean, I had, you know, Mike Matthews, a good friend of ours, sends us his protein. He's always pushing his products on us all the time, right? So, you know, fuck I eat them. You know, he sends the chocolate chip bars in there all the time. I pick them out and I was eating them yesterday. I don't freak out because I'm eating a bar and going, oh my God, this could be off by 50 calories or whatever. If it's in your diet occasionally, it's not that big of a deal where I think it's going to be, you will or you won't get results, but it's important that you're mindful of these things. You're mindful of the points that Sal's making that when you eat highly processed foods that it's created to hijack your palate and make you want to eat more. That's why it's designed, it's designed to do that. And then also there's a good chance that it's off by a solid 20% north or south and normally the direction that you don't want it to be off. So, keep that in mind when you're eating that stuff. Yeah, and at the end of the day, do you want your, do you want to be able to maintain a good body weight or body fat percentage, but do you want it to be a struggle? Like do you want to have to like use willpower every damn day or do you want it to feel a little bit more natural? Eating heavily processed foods is going to make it a lot harder. So, regardless of what your goal is, eating those types of foods just, and that means I'm counting if everything's equal. As Adam said, it probably not. And we're not even going down the micronutrient path and we're not even talking about the other reasons why whole foods are usually healthier than unprocessed foods. So there just is no comparison. Now again, that being said, here's what processed food is really good at because I'm not going to demonize it. I know it sounds like I'm demonizing it but here's the deal. Processed foods allowed us to feed a lot of fucking people. It's, they don't go bad. I can ship them across the world. There's a reason why in Hawaii spam has become a staple. A lot of people don't realize this but when you go to Hawaii spam in eggs and spam here, they're like, why do they eat spam so much? Because we had soldiers stationed in Hawaii and how do you ship meat without it going bad? They made spam, you know? Processed foods have value and there's a reason why they exist but they make you eat more and I would say if you have the privilege of buying unprocessed foods, it's gonna make it a lot easier for you to stay lean and healthy. Just makes things a lot easier.