 All right, today's episode, Sean Stevenson, he's the best selling author, he's author of the books, Sleep Smarter and also the book Eat Smarter. He's also a top podcaster, he's a fitness, health and wellness expert, brilliant gentleman. We had a great conversation with him about his new book, Eat Smarter Family Cookbook. So this is a cookbook with recipes that you can make with your family, but also this is one of the only cookbooks I know that will cite actual scientific studies for the things that you put in the food in this book. Over 150 studies are cited in this book. He also has an exceptional story, you won't believe how he grew up and his life circumstances and what got him to where he's at now. We talk about that in this episode. Now we do have a giveaway, the RGB bundle. If you want to win that bundle of programs, you have to enter, here's how you enter. Leave a comment below this video in the first 24 hours that we drop it. Subscribe to this channel and turn on notifications. Do all those things and if you win, we'll let you know in the comments section. We also have a sale going on right now. Maps, Bands is half off and the Hard Gainer Bundle is half off. Both can be found by clicking on the link at the top of the description below. All right, here we are talking to Sean Stevenson. This is actually a direction I wanted to go with you today since we're all fathers and I think it's just a fun conversation, especially considering that I'm in the thick of it right now is I think that's one of the mistakes that parents make is they put their insecurities or they put their wants and desires on their kid so bad that even if the kid does it, it's they end up resenting them for that. So I'm very cautious of that, right? Like I want so damn bad for him to play basketball, not at the risk of him resenting me later in life. So it's like, I'm there if you want to play, but then I want to encourage whatever it is that he gets excited about. And now did you know that going into fatherhood or did you learn that through being a dad? Just the fact that you're even asking that question and that aware of conscious as a parent, you're already winning. You're already providing an environment where he's going to thrive. I definitely learned along the way. I have two older kids who are adults. My youngest son though still is in the house. He just turned 23. Hopefully this is last semester, by the way. But I had a lot of practice and I came, I come from a very volatile environment. And so it was more, you know, even sports was just kind of like an outlet and a possibility of getting out of the environment. So it was like more serious in a sense. And so, but you take that upon yourself, you know, and by putting my kids into stuff, like I definitely had that like wanting them to be able to, you need to go pro. You know what I mean? So you can make it out of the, you know, conditions, but we weren't living in that reality anymore. And so over time, like I allowed my kids to make choices, but then even when they did make the choice, I would kind of go a little bit hard and like put them in all this other stuff and, you know, training them all the things. And that kind of it backfired a little bit, I think, my oldest son. He was a baseball kid. He asked me to play baseball when he was like in third grade. And he actually, he got in the car, picked him up. He said, I want to play baseball at my school, but you could say no. I was like, damn, like you're scaring me. I'm not going to say no, but I got you, you know. So we started playing and played all the way up into high school. And in St. Louis, we got some legends as far as baseball, you know, it's quote baseball heaven. Yeah. No disrespect to any other teams. But, you know, the school that he went to and also that I graduated from has been known for like turning out MLB players like Sirius, like MVP. Ryan Howard, for example, he played for the Phillies. David Fries, World Series MVP went there. And so this is a team where you got to make the team. And it's a big deal if you do any made the team is a freshman. And, you know, he just, he didn't like it. He didn't like it. And all his friends are running track. And so I'm just like, please don't let this boy quit baseball. But he did. And I had to really just kind of bite my tongue. And now how old are you at that point in your life when he's, when he's in freshman high school? I think I was, let's see, if he was. What's that, 13? If he was like 14, 15. So I was like 34. So you were pretty young when you had him then. Yeah, I was 20. Okay. So, and this is, I actually, I'm really curious because this, some of the stuff I don't know about you, like as far as your, your childhood, did you, did you have a lot of childhood trauma? What was your, what was your home like? And then did you watch that manifest into now becoming a father? Like how much of that had you learned from? How much of it was still carried with you into becoming a dad? Yeah, I grew up in two very different environments. So I'm, I'm biracial, half black, half white. And so when I was a kid, and if you even see my birth certificate now, my mother was 18 when she had me. And there's no father there. And this wasn't like immaculate conception kind of thing, you know what I'm saying? There was a father, but I never met him. You know what I mean? And, but my stepfather came into the picture when I was like one. And so he was, I thought he was my father until I was like eight. And, but being that they were young and also living in a kind of um, volatile environment, a lot of violence, a lot of drug use. Sometimes they wouldn't have a place to stay. And so I stayed at my grandmother's house. And this was like the white part of my, my white family. Okay. And it was a nice neighborhood. I walked one block to go to school because I ended up living with her for a couple of years. And I think it was my mom trying to give me an advantage. And so I live with my grandmother from kindergarten, first and second grade. And it walked one block to school. It was magical, man. It was absolutely magical. You know, there was a lot of certainty, a lot of safety, routine. You know, she would tuck me in at night, read stories, say our prayers together. We always had these amazing meals. I had my own little table and chair and, you know, she let me eat whatever I wanted kind of thing and made a big deal out of me. She made me feel really important and like holidays would be magical, man. Yeah. And um, but then I would go to stay with my mom sometimes on the weekend and it's just literally I'm sleeping on the floor. There's mouse traps, you know, we're like on government assistance, you know, and of course there's violence in the household, violence outside the household. It's just like I couldn't wait to get back to my grandma's house just for safety, you know, being a little kid. And you know, I had some different things kind of laid down there and just seeing what a, what a healthy relationship could be with my grandmother and grandfather. And then my grandfather started having some heart issues. And this is some stuff we could talk about today as well. So he had like high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and this was in the 80s. And so his doctor told him to stop eating butter and the meat that he was hunting. Of course. And eat a low fat diet. Margarine. Yeah. Country crock. Wow. Was like, you know, in the refrigerator. And um, that's when he ended up having a heart attack after those changes. Did that drive you into nutrition? As part of it. Oh. As part of it. Because life again, life doesn't call the qualified. Life qualifies the called. Right. So my life was like qualifying me for what I'm doing today. And so anyways, after he had a couple of heart attacks and he ended up having open heart surgery. So he's a, he was like, good old boy grew up in the country in Missouri, like the boot heels. And um, so he went back to, you know, where he grew up and there was a decision with, you know, my grandmother. I know she wanted to take me with her. But I would literally be the only brown person in the environment, like for real, real. And um, so I ended up moving back with my mother in the inner city for third grade. And so I'm going from an all white school where, you know, I'm sticking out like a sore thumb to now an all black school where I'm also sticking out like a sore thumb. And in this environment, now I'm on the school lunch program suddenly. I went from carrying my little lunchbox night writer and had the, you know, Capri sons had just come out and all that stuff. To now I'm getting this little red ticket to get food, to get breakfast and lunch. If I'm going to eat. And, you know, we've got this kind of like, you know, I'm walking further to go to the bus stops, a ton of kids and a lot of like unknowns. And, but in this environment though, man, this is what people don't understand. When you don't have a lot, like we would get food from charities. There's this place called the Hosea house. We would get food and even Christmas presents because, you know, we didn't have a lot of money for that as well. And every year we get Yahtzee over and over again and like some other random stuff. Like the same gifts and shit. Yeah. And going like poor kid trips, you know, one of them was like, we got the rod and the wiener mobile, the Oscar Meyer mobile was pretty lit. But, you know, but living in that environment, you, you cultivate unknowingly like a high degree of creativity. Yeah. All right. So it's just like literally making something out of nothing and also finding ways to be strong and very resilient. And so in this environment, now again, it's just like a total culture shock. And I'm trying to find my footing because all of us, it's like a deeply ingrained thing for humans to want to fit in. Totally. Right. And so now I'm adapting to this environment, but I'm also, I'm picking up this diverse skill set of being in different places and being able to connect with different people. And this is so crazy because I'm just now making this connection, talking with you guys, like when the book comes out, I'll be on Good Morning America and then going over to Sway in the morning. You know what I'm saying? Yeah, yeah. That's cool. Like who can do that? Right, right, right. How often do you even see that cross over? I got chills, man. That's, that's powerful, man. So again, life was qualifying me to do this and to be able to speak to a wide spectrum of people. Now, what are you? Okay, tell me, this is such an interesting part of your story. Going back and forth between the two. What are you seeing at that time in your life? And then what did you see when you got older and reflect? Right? So are you going through stuff? Like, are you dealing with, you know, racism at one school? And then the other one you're not fitting in? Are you like, what are you feeling between as a kid? And then when you unpack that as an adult now, what it did for you? Yeah, man. Thank you for asking that. Yeah. When I was living with my grandmother, you know, I didn't know that I was different until some kids let me know. Yeah. And so I remember a very specific incident. I was walking home and they were calling me, you know, different slurs as it may. And I'm just like, they're in there cussing at me. And we walked by my house and my grandfather was coming around the back and these kids were like telling them that I was cussing, like I was saying stuff. And so he had me go get a switch off the tree and whoop my ass. And I, you know, and it's just like, I didn't do anything, but he's trying to make sure that I'm an upstanding citizen and all the things. And also because he knew that I had to abide by the rules or I would face more severe consequences in this environment. And so, but going to the other environment, now I'm like, quote, pretty, you know, like a pretty boy and, you know, green eyes and all this stuff. And I don't really look like anybody. This isn't an early 80s. So I'm still a little bit of anomaly. Like mixed kids are out here heavy now. You know what I mean? But at the time, you know, it wasn't anybody else like me at the school, except maybe one other kid. And so, but in this environment, man, and this is what I wanted to say and what I kind of picked up from that, was there was the most like memorable time of my childhood. We lived like in this two family flat, right? So there's one upstairs, one downstairs we lived upstairs. And then there's like a walkway and then there's a four family flat. And the one closest to us is where a crack was being cooked and sold. And so like this is the crack spot. And this is like again, like during this epidemic. And we had already, he didn't die yet, but he was incredibly disabled. My oldest uncle from my stepfather's side. And my, his younger brother, my uncle Larry, everybody has uncle Larry is just like off the chain, you know? You know, the alcohol, the drugs, or whatever the case might be, wild. My uncle Larry's been shot, stabbed, multiple stents in prison, rehabs. One of the funnest times in my life was going to the rehab. They had a bowling alley, video games. I'm like, you should do this more often, you know what I'm saying? But anyways, my stepfather was kind of the youngest brother of these three in their kind of age bracket. My grandmother had another son later on, which they had a pretty big age gap. And so my stepfather, you know, he's a boxer, very, very tough guy. Like, you know, he had that bar you've been with the spring, right? And he could do that. I couldn't even budget, man. And you know, he had the tattoo and just like, he's just so strong. And it's kind of like a stoic figure to me. And, you know, he definitely was a very, very strong alcoholic. But I thought we had collectively agreed that he wouldn't end up like his brothers. And one of those days, he ended up over there at the crack spot and got high. Oh, wow. I don't know. And that's his first time. Yeah. Oh, wow. To my knowledge. But that was to this day, man. Like that really fucked me up because like that was my little bit of certainty that we had this family structure. You saw him? That's how it happened? So I heard my mother outside yelling at him and like pushing him over back into our house. And I'm like 12 at the time. I'm 13. And I've never shared this before, man. So he was coming up the stairs and I had this very deep feeling that the way to get to the top of stairs and kick him in the chest, kick him down the fucking stairs. Oh, wow. And because, you know, again, in our environment, we solve problems with violence. That's how it was raised. And the same thing, you know, from inside of my house and also externally, man. I've been in so many fights and just like, it's just what it was. Which is crazy. And so this is leading to how I do things differently today. Yeah, yeah. But instead, man, it's crazy. I can't believe I'm telling you guys this. I just, I ran by him. I was just so hurt. I was so angry. I was crying and I ran up to the door of the crack house and I punched the window in. All right. So now glass is shattered. My hand is bleeding and I'm just screaming like, why, why did you do this to my family? Then 12 years, 12 years old when you run and you do that. Unfortunately, somebody else who stayed in that four family flat was a friend of my mom's. They hid me because they couldn't kill me. So I hid out and I could hear them looking for me outside. Kind of died down. My mother talked to them later, just like, you know, he's a little kid. You know, he didn't mean to disrespect all this stuff. But our relationship was never the same after that. And he actually just died. It's probably why it's fucking me up. Yeah, he just died three months ago. But he was in assisted living for like 15 years because of the brain damage. Not from that moment, but it happened again. You know, I don't know how many times afterwards. What was your relationship or what is your relationship like with substances through that? Because I know that can push people in either direction. Either they reach for substances like what they saw or they're like, I don't even want to touch them. That's a great question. And this is a reflection of also the environment because our environment, we are a product of our environment absolutely, but we're also creators of our environment if we become aware of it. And I have two siblings, my younger brother and sister. You know, they're very different. And we were in the same environment, but also I had these different exposures, in particular living with my grandmother for that really impressionable period. Oh, you saw the contrast. And so like, you know, my brother has definitely dealt with substance abuse. And you know, my sister's same. They're still in the midst in the grips of it now. And you're the oldest? I'm the oldest, yeah. And I never, nothing. Drugs, alcohol, I like sip some of my wife's wine before I just don't like it, man. But I told myself that I'm never going to be that, right? And so it's just like a lot of times we end up being just like our parents or a complete opposite. And you know, that's one of the things that I did pick up was kind of that contrast, what I didn't want. And so I took that with me into my life as a parent and creating an environment. I already knew that I would never, you know, inflict violence upon my kids in the same manner that I, I mean, it was regular basis, you know. And but also I wanted my kids to know that I love them. I knew my parents love me, but like my stepfather told me like one time, you know what I mean? They love me. He was drunk, of course. Like, I love you. And my mom, like, I can't really remember her hugging me as a child, you know, like again, but she is because she wanted me to be tough. And in this environment, I had to, you know, because I could die, you know. And, you know, I lost friends. We, you know, I had a guy who was like my, quote, big brother who, you know, he just was a part of our family kind of be around. We, my mom watched his kid and he was murdered, you know what I'm saying? I was what maybe somewhere around 10 when that happened. And, you know, so she didn't want me to be soft. And what that did was that made me very hesitant to let people in, you know, as I grew into adulthood and I really didn't trust people. And fortunately, you know, I went to, I always excelled academically, which is a reflection I feel for my grandmother because she was just on that, you know. She made me, she made me love it, you know. And I remember she bought me this little Garfield, like writing book and I could, it's like, I can make whatever I want. I can write stories and, you know. And, you know, so I get academic scholarship because I was going to, my whole thing was again, it was sports, just like, this is going to be my way out. And, but this is where I really kind of, the transition and the health started because there's a big difference, as you guys know, between fitness and health. And I was the fast kid. Like in the hood, I'm that guy on the football field, the track, same thing. I'm returning kicks and punts to different speed. Like if you see the game films, I'm at a different speed. It was at track practice when I was 15, sophomore doing a 200 meter time trial. And as I'm coming off the curve of the track and to the straightaway, my hip broke. So like my iliac crest, like the tip of my hip just broke. And I didn't know what it was, you know what I'm saying? I was just like limping and, you know, I came to practice like the next day or two. And then the coach was like, you need to go get looked at. And, you know, but I didn't fall. There wasn't any trauma. How does a kid break his hip from running? Like that doesn't make any sense. Right, yeah. And fast forward, it was like half a dozen more injuries. Like I couldn't, I've got game films where literally, it's like a 39 sweep or a 38 sweep. And I get past the safety. I'm like five yards from anybody headed to the end zone. And I just fall, I collapse because I like tore muscle in my leg, you know. Interesting. And so you're deficient in something. What is it? That's the thing. Nobody stopped to ask. Why is this kid breaking his hip and like- That's classic deficiency symptoms. At the time, of course, like what happened is, especially when you're young, it's just you go through standard of care. Right. So they gave me some insides, some crutches. I got to use the school elevator for a while. You'll get better. And that was that. Nobody asked why is this happening. And it wasn't until I was 20. And my next level aspirations are vanquished. You know, I'm walking on red shirt at this private university trying to like re-regarner my football promise. And I just can't keep it together. And I get this diagnosis of degenerative disc disease at 20. And degenerative bone disease, basically. Advanced arthritic condition. Now here's what people don't understand. For that to manifest to get that diagnosis, where I have an MRI and my disc or like my L4, L5, 1 are like black. Right. Right. You can't see the light shining like the other disc. That's years. Years and years and years. By that point, it's already been happening. That's what you mean. Because I'm thinking it's a trauma. Like something happened. Right. And I asked the physician at the time. Like what do I do? Because I'm used to working with coaches. And you know, coaches, staff, physical therapists. Like, okay, so what do we do to fix it? You know, he's just like, whoa, I'm sorry, son. You have the spine of an 80 year old. This isn't something that you're going to be able to fix. This is something we're going to help you to manage. I'm sorry that it happened to you. But this is something you're going to have to live with. Now, for whatever reason, I didn't really, it didn't register that he said that. And I'm just like, I had no really grounds for saying this, but I asked, does this have anything to do with what I'm eating though? Like, should I change the way I'm exercising? And he put his hand on my shoulder. He was like, this has nothing to do with what you're eating. This is something that just happens. Right. And mind you, he was about 300 pounds himself. And, you know, maybe five, 10, for some context. And it's not again, this isn't to say that he wasn't good at his job, but whatever he was trying to do for himself to maintain the state of health was obviously not working for him. And little did I know what was impacted on my mind was something called a no-cebo effect. Right. So it's the opposite of placebo. And you guys know this like, placebos are on average like 33% effective in clinical trials on average. All right. So the power of your mind, a fake drug, sham surgery, creating a therapeutic effect based on our thoughts. A no-cebo effect is the opposite. This is when you get a negative injunction, like something bad is going to happen essentially, like you're never going to walk again. You have six weeks to live. This is incurable. And so I went in because I was having a nuisance of sciatic pain, like, but I didn't know what sciatic pain was just like my, my hamstring was always tight. And then within two weeks, chronic debilitating pain and on a slew of medications. Because of that. You think because they told you, you're like, oh, that's it. Yeah. And he gave me permission. He gave me permission to stop fighting because all that time, even getting into college, I was always fighting because that's the environment I come from. I just to jump back just a little bit, I got kicked out my entire junior year. I graduated in three years of high school. My entire junior year was kicked out for fight, big, big fight that happened at school in kind of same scenario, you know, guy, like, you know, pretty much, you know, talking shit. Yeah. And it's just like, you have no idea where I come from. I was going to ask, because you kind of skipped over, you know, from 12, that very traumatic situation, having that type of childhood. I would imagine your teenage years were, I mean, sounds like sports probably kept you above water. Yeah. But then the rest of it, you were probably fighting your way through life. Yes, exactly. Yeah. The only, and it happened after football season, which was only like a month and a half into the school year is when the fight happened. I waited until football season was over. I never said that to you. Get you later, motherfucker. Just goes to show you how much, you know, when a kid values something, how they're going to make their choices based off of that. You're like, I'm not going to fight until football's over. Yeah. Yeah. So you stop fighting, you got much worse. Obviously, you're a lot better now. You're very mobile, you look healthy, fit. So you must have started fighting again or figured something out. What happened? Yeah. At that time, you know, just sometimes, you know, especially when you go through a lot, when somebody tells you you can stop fighting or give you a pass, you take it. And you guys know this, by the way, I'm a very analytical person. I'm a, I've been in this field for 21 years now, research scientist, nutritionist, written multiple mega hit books. I'm a very analytical, skeptical person. But in that moment, I listened to what he said, which is not like me. And the only thing I can attribute that to is again, I just. You're a break. Yeah. I was, I just felt like I was done. You know, I'm just done with fighting. And over the course of that, it was, I was 20 when I got the diagnosis. And now, by the way, he's not only is my spine and my bones atrophying, but everything else is. Of course, you're going to lose so much muscle. You know, now I'm gaining a lot of weight. I was the quote skinny kid in my family. All right. Probably 80% of my family members were obese. And you know, but now that quote fat gene or whatever, you know, the FTO gene is one of them. But that whatever was dormant in me, now it's kicking on. And so I became significantly overweight. When I see pictures of myself, man, I just look like, I look like a chubby ghost. You know, that's what I look like. I look dead. You know, I look kind of like that guy. So at 20, how long, how long did this really knock you down and keep you in this phase? You get that at 20 years old, basically gives you the excuse to give up on yourself, right? Start to put on the weight, unhealthy. How long did you get stuck in that? It was two years, two years, about two and a half years. And I'll share this with you guys. At the time, the first prescription that my physician gave me was for Celebrex and a couple of other things. You know, Celebrex is an inset non-steroidal anti-inflammatory just to help with pain. But Vioxx was hitting the market at the time. And Vioxx, by the way, is killed, confirmed at least 40,000 Americans. Upwards of 60,000, probably a couple hundred thousand cardiac events happened in U.S. citizens from Vioxx. Another non-steroidal anti-inflammatory. Massive failure of the... I was a prescription pad away from being put on Vioxx and possibly dying. A lot of young people died, you know. So it's just like I'm already kind of in this space. And there's just like really shifty things happening and kind of like rolling on the dice and lucky moves. But Celebrex had this really weird side effect that hadn't really gotten its own drug yet, so it wasn't really talked about, which was restless leg syndrome. And so that was my biggest struggle for those two years was sleeping. Like I would go to... lay down to go to bed and it felt like my legs were trying to fucking go for a jog. They're trying to leave me. It'd be awful. Can you imagine that, bro? Yeah, it's torture. And I'm just thinking it's me. But it's the Celebrex that I'm on. And so I'm... But now I'm gonna put on a medication to sleep and taking over the counter, like Tylenol PM to boot. I'm just like... I'm doing what people are telling me to do. And... But here's where everything changed. So that two years goes by, now definitely my mental health is suffering mightily. I'm in so much pain, man. I was in... I was afraid to get up. I was in so much pain, I would just sit as much as I possibly can. And I actually mentioned this in this new book in the E Smarter Cookbook. My wife... I met my wife at college, but this was after everything changed, which I'm gonna get to. But she came over to my apartment and I have this quote, Love Seat, which is like a little short couch, basically two booties can fit in it. And one side where I sat was caved in and there was a bunch of pillows because my big ass had broken, like I broke through the wood on this Love Seat. And the Love Seat was so terrible. It was made of like this, whatever this carpet is made out of is what the Love Seat was made out of. It was pretty terrible. But anyways, and she... And by the way, she just said this story. Do you guys know Badros? Yeah. She just told this story to Badros and his wife, we were having dinner, that when she came over and saw that shitty Love Seat, she was like, how does he get girls over here? Then she realized she was over there. I was like, that's right, yeah. And so anyways, those two years go by and I always advocate for people to get a second or third opinion. But if you're getting a second opinion for somebody who thinks the same way... Doesn't count. Exactly. And so I would leave the next doctor with a new prescription and a new signature, you know, a card so that I can get out of work. Bed rest. They would... I can walk. I walked into the place, but they're all putting me on bed rest. And so this is going by, and now here's where everything changes. I see the last physician that I saw and I'm sitting at home. I'm literally sitting on the edge of my bed, looking at this pill bottle, and all of this stuff came rushing into my mind. First of all, I was angry because I thought about the physician who just told me that he can't help me, that he's having dinner with his family and sitting by the fire. I conjured up this very romantic story. And they're like, ha ha ha, passing mashed potatoes and having his good life. And what really that was about was he's not thinking about me. I'm thinking about him and I'm sitting here in misery. And he told me that I can't get better. And in that moment, this kind of ties all the way back to my grandmother. She just came rushing into my mind because she called me earlier that day when she was still alive. And she would call me frequently throughout this two year period and it was annoying. I'm just like, I'm fine. Grandma, I'm fine. But I was not fine and she knew it. And all that investment she put into me, all those times she made me feel like I was going to do something incredible with my life. Here I was giving it all away. And that combined with that anger made me decide to change it all. And for the first time in those years, I asked a different question. All that time when I was suffering, I was asking true story all day, every day. Why me? Why me? Why me? Why will somebody help me? Why this have to happen to me? And there's this interesting thing about the human brain. It's called instinctive elaboration. Like we always, we all have a dominant question that we ask because it's kind of like a GPS. It's like guiding our attention. Like for some people, it could be like, how can I have a good day? Or how can I get people to like me? But mine was why me. And so you're going to find external internal feedback on why you like, You're going to find reasons. I was getting all this affirmation on why my life is fucked up. Because I'm isolated. I don't trust people. I'm unhelpable. I'm unlovable, like all these things. And I was getting data to affirm those things. And for the first time in those two years, I asked, what can I do to feel better? What can I do to feel better? And eventually a short time later, that question evolved to, how can I be the healthiest person in the world? Now, when I asked that question, it led to, and this isn't just like, you see what you filter for. Your filter for reality determines your focus. And so I changed my filter and I'm asking how I can feel better. So now things that were already there, I start to see that shit. And one of those things, I've been dating this girl off and on for like three years. And she was grown. Like I was, I was like 22. She was grown, you know, she was like probably 30 at the time. And she had just graduated from chiropractic school. And I just thought she was super weird, you know. But you know, she was, she was like that. So I just would, you know, would hang out with her. But I never went anywhere with her. Right? I just come over to her house. I went to one of her get-togethers with her weird chiropractic friends. It was just, it wasn't for me. But now that I asked this question, she takes me to Wild Oats. I just, I'm in the car with her. I don't know where she's going. And we end up at Wild Oats, which has since been bought by Whole Foods. It's kind of like more of like a mom-and-pop type of Whole Foods. And by the way, St. Louis is a big city. It's a big city. There's one Whole Foods in the entire city. And when I moved to LA four years ago, there were three. All right. So, but back, you know, around 2020, 2002, sorry, 2002, when this transformation happened, went to Wild Oats. And now I'm still in college at the time. And just a very avid researcher, like I want to execute on my papers and all the things. And I go over to, there's a thick ass book called like nutrition prescriptions or something like that. And you can look up a certain health condition. I looked up degenerative disc disease. And there were like these peer-reviewed studies on different supplements and nutrients that can help to reverse this condition and also to build bone density. And I never heard any of this shit before. It's crazy. One of those things was Omega-3s. We need Omega-3s for bone density? Like, I had no idea. And I knew that, and this is also crazy, but I ate fast food pretty much every day. And if I didn't have like two dollars to go to Jack in the Box or whatever, I would eat like a can of SpaghettiOs or like, you know, a box of macaroni and cheese. Like ultra processed food was like 90% of my diet, true story. And so I was made of that. I was just made of really low quality materials. And, you know, finding out about these nutrients, I first started becoming like a natural pill popper and like buying all these supplements which I couldn't afford. I could barely even pay my rent while I'm in school. And eventually though, because I'm asking these questions, I started to identify the foods that I could find them in viable sources. And last point I want to share really quickly was those three things that I did to transform my health. And I got a scan done on my spine nine months after that decision moment. And my two, and even to this day, like I just got a scan done maybe like eight months ago, my discs are robust. They're thick. Normal. Normal. Yeah. Just fucking wild. Yeah. It's both amazing, obviously, I'm sure you feel this way, but happen for a reason, put you where you're at. But also infuriating that you're a kid, you're in this pain, and nobody thought to be like, okay, this is not normal. There could be a nutrient deficiency likely or something that's causing this. It's terrible to think that that happened. And that happens all the time. Yeah. And I felt so isolated, man. I was living in Ferguson, Missouri at the time and in this kind of glorified food desert. And so this is what another thing that folks don't understand is like, I wasn't aware that food mattered. Like it just didn't occur to me or anybody in my family that there was a difference between like wild caught salmon and fish sticks. There's no, it's just like, it's just food. Yeah. And I'm just surrounded. There's supposed to be like some kind of zoning laws or something, but in this environment, every fast food that you can name within like a two mile radius of an apartment, everything, like you can just name something. I'm like, yeah, I could walk there. And it's cheap. It's accessible. Obviously it tastes good. It is designed to by food scientists. But here's the thing. So my three things that I did to kind of take control of my health. The first one was very low hanging fruit and it just really speaks to you guys as well was the gym. I'd stopped doing anything because that's what they told me to do. And so I just went to the university gym and just like, I wasn't a lot of pain, but I just like got on the elliptical and like the stationary bike first and just kind of start pedaling. It didn't feel good. Eventually I started walking a little bit, picked up a couple of weights. Some stuff started happening, started feeling better, but the real change happened when I combined that with the nutrition. Of course. And I came across this, one of this particular studies was on race forces, which this is like a, I don't know if you guys ever watch any of like the Triple Crown and all that stuff. It's super weird, but it's like a billion dollar industry. Oh yeah. And those horses, like if they break a bone, you could stand to lose millions of dollars. And so they did this study where they were giving the horses supplements to build their bone density. So they had a control group, supplement group, but then they had another group. And then by the way, the ones receiving the supplements, the horses, they did improve their bone density by giving them supplements. But they had another group where they walked the horses and gave them supplements and their bone density went significantly. So they combined it while taking the supplements. Yes. Wow. And they had the most outstanding bone density increase. And that's what exercise is really about. It's about assimilation of nutrients and elimination, like exercise, exercise, they're very, very close. And it's just like getting rid of metabolic waste as well. Because our ancestors didn't quote exercise. They just did shit. Yeah. Like we, we have to replicate because our life has become so sedentary, you know. And so now I'm going to the university gym. I'm consciously putting in my body real food. That's the only thing I did. Instead of going to McDonald's to get a burger, now I'm going to Whole Foods. Kind of very risky as far as like my being able to pay my bills, but like getting grass-fed beef, like, you know, a sprouted bun or whatever, broccoli instead of whatever those french fries are. And just like putting real food into my body. And like you guys know about this as well, like nutrigenomics, epigenetics. And so now we know that food can alter what proteins are getting built, right? So in my university class, we were taught DNA to RNA to protein, right? DNA to RNA to protein, right? So our genes, we've got a blueprint, right? But that blueprint can be altered in a way that different proteins are getting printed or different copies are getting printed of you. That's what makes us so unique as a species. Because, you know, like the Human Genome Project, they thought because like a banana has like certain types of bananas, by the way, have like tens of thousands, maybe like 50,000 genes. They were like, we're going to have millions as a species. But it was like 20,000, 25,000 genes. But what makes us so different is that we can have so many different combinations of how our genes are getting expressed through epigenetics. And my passion has been nutrigenetics, nutrigenomics, and how every bite of food we eat alters our gene expression. And one of my colleagues, mentors is Bruce Lipton. I don't know if you guys have ever talked to him before. He's a cell biologist. He really impressed epigenetics into popular culture. And he shared with me in one of our conversations, and this is out there, he shared this before, that depending on the exposure, environmental input, you can have 3,000 different proteins that are getting created from a single gene. So there's that much variety that can happen. And so now I'm putting these real foods into my body and building my tissues out of real things, right? Real sustainable materials. But it just, I didn't just lose weight though. I looked completely different. If you saw myself then, I don't even look like the same person. Like my body, like a higher quality version of myself started getting printed out. And the last part was so changing my nutrition movement. And when I started doing things better during the day for myself, I started sleeping better. And I didn't need the, you know, the ambient, the celibrex and all that stuff. They've been long gone. And now I'm sleeping through the night. And if you're not sleeping, you're not healing. When I started sleeping good, man, I got better so fast, you know. At what point did you start taking the medication out of the equation once you started to go through all this? You know what? Nobody's ever asked me that before. It was actually like, I can't buy this and these supplements. Kind of necessity. Yeah. Oh wow. That's just monetary only though. Interesting. Wow, that's amazing. So like otherwise you might have stayed on both. And not really felt the true benefit. Now at the time, are you studying the path that you ended up going or did you switch because of this experience? Man, I love you guys, man. All right. So I went to school initially. Again, it's just private university in St. Charles, Missouri, expensive. And but I did get an academic scholarship. And I went pre-med. They had a great pre-med program. And I didn't, I did it because of television. I didn't know any fucking doctors, except the ones that I went to. I didn't know, like I didn't have any peers who were doctors or let alone successful or actually I was the first person in my family to even go to college. And so I did it because of the Cosby show. And like he was, you know, doctor or lawyer or whatever. I was like, they're happy. That's what I should do. Wow. But I mean, I'm not exaggerating at all. I hated science. I hated it. I would have this recurring. That's funny considering how much you talk about science and how much you read studies and you like research. Exactly. But this is the crazy part. Again, life qualifying you because my hate for it, my reoccurring nightmare in biology class and not having my homework and all this stuff and that teacher, I got out of it when I was there at this university. And I switched over because of television to business and marketing because of the movie Boomerang. And I was like, I want to do that. So then I started, you know, in that space. But then I lost my health. And then that had me circle back to that thing that I hated, but now with a new perspective. And I realized I didn't hate science. It was the way that I was being taught because it was so, it was so abstract in a way and it was so external. It was not brought to life. And in particular, even my professors, as we're in biology and we're studying the cell, we don't get taught. And there's not even an awareness that when you're looking at that mitochondria, that mitochondria is made from your menu. The nucleus is made from the nutrients that you're eating and the membranes of those cells are made from your meals. We're looking at food. Food is what's making everything about us. So as we're seeing each other, we're seeing what each other is eating in particular proteins, but also minerals are thrown in the mix here. And so there's this disconnect between food. We kind of just think the cell just happens. It's just a cell, but now it's like illuminated. And I actually, now I'm shifting my coursework back to, I still have two years of school left, and I shifted it back to biology. And I had taken nutritional science as well, which was, it was so crazy, bro. I mean, I was wildly miseducated. All right, same thing. My nutritional science teacher was overweight, you know, and this is the... Now, you didn't know any different. You were just taking it like, this is how it, this is good nutrition. This is how it works. And I thought it was about fitness still. That's why I took it. And, but there was a disconnect like, he's going to teach me to be fit. You know, it just didn't make sense. But, you know, we're taught the food pyramid, you know, seven to 11 servings of whole grains every day that we should recommend for ourselves and also for patients if we ever get into clinical work. And also, here's another huge gap in the education. By the way, a lot of our programs were funded by General Mills at the university, of course. But we were not taught that, because another thing we're told is, you know, to get your vitamins and minerals, right? So everybody should take a multivitamin. And we weren't taught that there are multiple forms of magnesium. There's multiple forms of vitamin C. There's multiple forms of B12, right? There's also cofactors and other nutrients present in food that delay or accelerate release. It's all, I mean, we co-evolve with food. So it's very different than just taking a pill. That synthetic isolated version of it. And here's a little not-so-fun fact for everybody. The majority of vitamin C supplements on the market are made from GMO cornstarch or GMO corn syrup. So those little, like, packets by the register is crazy. Like, we're trying to do something to support our health and improve our main system. One of the studies I actually shared in the book was looking at the impact of vitamin C supplementation from a whole food concentrate. And this was in the form of Camu Camu Berry, which is like the most vitamin C-dense food ever discovered, really. And a synthetic vitamin C supplement. And they had, they took folks, this was a one-week study, that had like a really intrusive kind of inflammatory behavior, which was smoking for the researchers. And so they took smokers and they had them too. And this was a randomized trial, placebo-controlled, but the placebo was the synthetic vitamin C, right? So they're doing that or this. And what they found after this week's study was that people taking the whole food concentrate of the Camu Camu Berry had a significant reduction in inflammatory biomarkers, like C-reactive protein. And they found no change in the people who were taking the synthetic vitamin C, nothing. There was no benefit at all. But there was a notable increase in inflammation and increase in antioxidant blood levels for people taking the real food version of vitamin C. Again, like you said, it has all these cofactors and all this other stuff we don't even understand. Sean, let me interrupt you for a second, because I know you'll have scientists, this annoys the hell out of us. These are the science people in the health and fitness space. And there's not, I love science, but it doesn't have all the answers. And I hate it when they say, no, no, no, it's the same molecule. Exactly. This vitamin C, that vitamin C, this one comes from an orange, this one comes from the lab. It's identical. So it can't be, it's not possible that it would act any different. Like, what do you say to that? I used to think that, you know? And because of my conventional education, but also thank goodness, and this is what I love about you guys, it's like you question things, you know? And so I had to like tap back into my kind of natural tendency, which is to be skeptical. And so, yeah, this is, even with them, I'll give you a good example. So when I was doing clinical work, working as a nutritionist and, you know, getting all these referrals from my physician colleagues and, you know, chiropractic friends and all this stuff, and just like one person after the other, day after day after day. And I found out about the importance of Omega-3s from my own health, from my bone density earlier on, but then I started to come across some data on its importance with cognition. And so I was having everybody take Omega-3s, but I would just be like, you know, make sure to get your chia seeds, hemp seeds, borage oil, hemp seed oil, flax seed oil. It's in the refrigerated section. It's very delicate. And I was missing the point because there isn't just one form of Omega-3s. And the plant version, because for me, it's just like, oh, these are Omega-3s. Same thing. Same chemistry. But if you dig deeper, there's converted. Exactly. And ALA is the plant form. And you can convert some of it to DHA and EPA, but you can lose upwards of like 75, 80 percent. Depending on your microbiome, your genes, the list goes on and on. It's not efficient to get the Omega. By the way, how much do we need? One of the coolest studies that I've ever seen, they were using fMRIs and looking at people's brains and monitoring their intake of Omega-3s. And they found that people who had the lowest intake of DHA and EPA, these are the animal forms. And also there's some in basically algae. I was just going to say algae, right? But the concentrated forms that we evolved with are animal forms. That's right. The people who had the lowest intake of DHA and EPA had the highest rate of brain shrinkage, like their brains literally losing volume and accelerating their aging process of their brain. And that minimum amount was four grams a day. All right. So people who had eight, four grams or more had the most robust, shrink-proof brains. And now how do you get four grams in? Immediately again, I would just be like fish oil. You know, for people doing like a vegetarian approach, maybe krill oil, which is like a microscopic shrimp. Key word, when people would just hear shrimp, but microscopic, bro, microscopic. So wherever people's ethics lie, but then there's algae oil. But we have like no randomized trials or any kind of really peer-reviewed data on algae oil. We know that the Omega's are there, but it's not really backed by trials. And so, but if somebody is a vegan, taking a vegan approach, I would highly recommend at least doing that. But, oh, by the way, The Journal of Neurology published a cool study and they found that people who eat one seafood meal per week do in fact perform better on cognitive skills tests. You know, but that's what we've been doing forever. Yeah, well, so this brings me to a current argument and debate I'm seeing also. In fact, I just commented under my friend Lane Norton's page on Twitter. I love him because he's very science. Let me see the data. But he's also lots of integrity. And he'll always change his mind if the data changes. So I love the guy for that. But there's this whole debate going on over seed oils, right? Seed oils are bad. No, no, no, no, no data that shows that seed oils are bad at all. They're perfectly fine. And my argument is, first of all, we don't know everything. And so far, when we consume things that we did not co-evolve with, so seed oils require industrial processing to consume in the amounts that we're getting. You're not going to get seed oils in nature the way that we, it just doesn't work that way. You can't eat, you can't possibly crush enough of these seeds and extract enough oil to get what we're getting and a lot of food we're getting. So I always say, look, we don't have the data. That doesn't mean it doesn't exist in the future or that you know conclusively. But so far, if we consume things in amounts that we didn't co-evolve with, it typically doesn't turn out well for us. So we may think we have the answers, but that typically, because you just said evolved, that's what brought me there. If we co-evolve with our food, we co-evolve with bacteria, we co-evolved in this environment, the more we change those things, probably worse for us. At least our physical bodies, right? Yeah, here in the United States, this is from the CDC just last year. 60% of Americans now have at least one chronic disease. Majority. 40% have two or more. So that means if you're healthy, you're not normal. You're no longer in the norm, all right? That's the state that we're in. So something is seriously awry. Couple that with, this was published in the BMJ. Everybody's heard this by now, or most people have. And the BMJ is one of the highest-tier peer-view journals. They even did a great job the last couple of years of being more kind of balanced. They published data indicating that 60% of the average American adults died is now ultra-processed foods. 60%. And this new cookbook that I'm sharing, I'm grateful to say this, but I'm also like, this is a call to arms. This is the first time that this new study on children's consumption in the United States of ultra-processed food has been published in a major book. This was published in JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association. They looked at U.S. kids' diet for about 20 years. In 1999, the average American child's diet was 61% ultra-processed foods. By 2018, it was almost 70% of our children's diet is ultra-processed foods. And so I'm saying all this to say, to tie it back to seed oils, because I'm just going to give a very logical, and by the way, what is an ultra-processed food? Yeah. All right. Several of my colleagues, like, I've been having this conversation and it's like getting out there, because humans have been processing food forever. Yeah, I hate this, by the way. They're all foods processed. Okay, yeah. I know that the steak in the package was processed, but that's not the same thing. The same fuels. Yeah, cooking is a process. Right, right, right. All right, cooking meat, baking a sweet potato, mashing the sweet potato, taking the olive and pressing the oil out. But that is minimally processed. That is a very minor process. You could still identify where it came from. Right. Different than having 40 different things inside of it. That's ultra-processed food. That's when we get to a place where we see a field of corn and somehow that becomes Lucky Charms. Yeah. Or we see a field of wheat and it becomes Pop-Tarts. Like it's so far removed from anything natural not to mention all of these synthetic ingredients, the additives and food dyes and preservatives. 90% of which are there to make it more palatable and enjoyable anyway. Yeah. This goes to food scientists, brilliant food scientists. And this goes back to chemistry, right? So one of the most recent inventions was a gas chromatograph where they can identify the chemistry that makes certain flavors, right? And this start to fuck everything up because we evolved eating foods and ourselves is a really cool thing that our bodies do is called post-ingestive feedback. And so we would eat a food traditionally. So maybe our ancestors came across some mulberries and we eat those mulberries. And as they're consuming those and getting that certain flavor, it's coming along with copper, selenium, vitamin C, certain amino acids. So we're associating flavors with nutrients that would occur in nature. Exactly. And then we've become deficient or low in stock and those nutrients needed to keep us healthy. And you crave that flavor. We would develop a crave. Exactly. But now you're going to go get gummy bears. Exactly. Because now we could take that flavor of mulberry, right? Isolate it, and now we can add it to soda. We can add it to pop tarts. We can add it to ice cream. No mulberries necessary. You know what's crazy about that is now you have that nutrient deficiency. You have this natural, primitive, hundreds of thousands of year old drive to crave this flavor. You go get this soda that quenches that flavor, still don't get the nutrient. I want more of that soda. I want more of that soda. I want more of that flavor. And by the way, I love that example because my favorite soda growing up in inner city was strawberry soda. It's just a hood classic. It doesn't have to taste exactly like strawberry, but it's just enough to muddy up the metabolic waters. That's right. Right. Just enough to confuse and throw off your system. And it's expecting certain things to come along with certain flavors. And now we have again, it's just this tapestry. And so I'm bringing this to this point with these seed oils. I'm just going to throw a couple. These are peer-reviewed prestigious medical journals. One of them is BMJ Open Heart. So British Medical Journal. Top, we're talking top five that are alive. All right. Top tier peer-reviewed journal. These researchers found that the consumption of quote vegetable oil was indicative of significant cardiovascular damage, increased incidence of stroke, heart attack. And on top of that, and this is really, this is crazy. I'm actually talking tomorrow with this really prestigious toxicologist. All right. Because again, like rather than me guessing or people debating about, like, I'll go to the person. Yeah. Who's the best in this? Right. Right. And so. Oh, that's smart toxicologist. Yeah. So this was published in the journal Inhalation Toxicology. So this is like the premier journal looking at how different, you know, environmental fumes and things like that are affecting health. And these researchers found that even smelling the fumes of vegetable oil while cooking can damage your DNA. Wow. Wow. All right. Now again, I'm not just saying that. I don't care. I don't care if it makes you, I don't know, grow bigger boobs. I don't care what the outcome is. That was so random. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. I love that switch of the edit for that. Yeah. Just switch of the edit for that. I just care about like, what does a science say? Like, what is it actually doing to us? So we can make informed decisions. And so all this ties together to say, okay, extra virgin olive oil. That process, that means it's cold press. Traditionally, it's stone pressing. It's bottled in dark glass. It's cared for. If you see how canola oil is made, it is a nightmare. It's like. Industrial processing. Like industrial is the word I like to use. Yeah. It's like watching a scary movie. Yeah. It's like sludge. Yeah. And the high heat temperatures. The oils are already like, you're just guzzling free radicals. Yeah. Not to mention the deodorizers. Yep. The bleaching agents. They're making it flavorless. They have to basically add all this shit and take stuff out. It's no way you could make this naturally. It'd be impossible. Here's the question. Is that or is that not an ultra process food? Yeah. It is the very definition. So for my colleagues that we wanted to debate whether or not this is beneficial for human health, is it an ultra process food? Yes, it is. We need to be highly skeptical of this newly invented junk that the human human genome has not associated with. I like that because I like the word skeptical because on the one end they're like, no, it's bad for you. The other one's like, I think it's very wise to just say what you just said. Like, yeah, I'm skeptical. Hasn't been around for very long. We didn't co-evolve with this. Very different from the foods that we evolved eating. So I think it's fair to remain skeptical. Do you ever look at alternative forms of medicine? Obviously, they're not based in the scientific method they were on before the scientific method existed, but many of these alternative forms of medicine existed for thousands of years. So anecdote doesn't mean much, but you combine thousands of anecdotes over hundreds of years. Well, it starts to mean things. So if the Chinese say, genesing may stimulate energy, well, there might be something there, Ashwagandha. Before we had all the studies, they said it was great to improve fertility and man, well, the data now supports that. Do you ever look at alternative forms of medicine for clues or hints of where to look where maybe science hasn't looked yet? That's such a great question. So when I started doing my own clinical work and working with people in the real world, I had already gone through so much with my own health and I'd also was working at the university gym for so long and just kind of giving basic nutrition advice until I graduated and opened my own office. And fortunately, I had an influence, which was my mother-in-law. And she's an occupational therapist and she was a professor as well, but she's from Kenya. And so she had all of this kind of tradition and I could see the health of her family members and just the country in general was better than ours. And I'm just like, is it the food? And I started to see some of the things that she was eating. And also, of course, you start to see the invasion of kind of modern Western food in their culture as well. And how their health starts to go down real quick with that. Yeah. And by meeting her and getting kind of her input on food, I started to ask questions of the people I was working with at the university. And I had a great opportunity because I'm working with people from all over the world. And so now I'm starting to see like, and this is interesting, every person I talk to from a different country, every culture has cultured foods. And I'm like, that's interesting. Every one of these cultures eats some kind of fermented food. Mm-hmm. What's up with that? Like, and I start to put these patterns together, these pieces. And then I could see like, again, there's, I have a day I work with many, many different students from India. One of them, matter of fact, I'll share this with you guys. It was a kid that worked at the front desk when you come into the gym. And he had, I mean, like you could, all you could see is his eyes. He had such bad acne. And he could see, like he saw me, you know, every day, we'll just say for, you know, three months, like the semester. And he was like, you could see, he was like interested. Like he kind of like, want to ask me questions. And he could see all these people getting these results that were coming in and they're leaving happier. And also like, you could see their transformations. And one day he asked me, he's like, hey, and he was very embarrassed. He was like, do you have anything to help? Like, you know, skin. And at the time, you know, knowing that dairy is a big part of the Indian culture, well, certain, it depends. There's many different, you know, just like with Kenya, there's different tribes, you know, but it's sacred. Like there's a sacred relationship in some instances. And this is where it kind of, you're getting like your animal protein in a sense, but the shit here is way different from what his ancestors were having. And so I just was just like, just test this, give it a, give it a test, cut out dairy. I didn't give him, I didn't give him the reasons why I didn't really get into it. I was actually trying to go somewhere. I was, I was in a hurry. So quick answer, cut dairy. Yep, cut, test it out, cut dairy. I think I gave him like one like leverage point. I don't know what it was. I don't know. Maybe it's like some histamine reaction or something. But I saw him because the semester was over. And then I saw him after summer break. And man, this was just a couple of months later, his skin looked like new. There were a couple of blemishes here or there, but like, man, he was like almost in tears. And he was like, dude, all I did was just like cut out dairy and you know, it healed my skin. And I was just like, it was never the, the dairy itself is the problem. It's the shit that you're eating here right now. It's very different. And so I'm saying all this to say that I started to question what people evolve with in different cultures. Because what if instead of me telling people, and you guys know this too, like we know all the guys who are like the face of, you know, the vegan diet or the carnivore diet or paleo diet or keto diet. These are our friends and they all mean well. And they're all right and they're all wrong as well. Yeah, we always talking about that. They're doing what they're doing. Whatever you believe about them, I know them. They're doing what they're doing because they really want to help people. That's right. And they've seen success for some people. But the people who didn't receive that success aren't the ones in their ads. All right. And that's the majority of people most of the time getting caught into some kind of religious framework. And so I was doing that at first. Like whatever I was into, you're going to be into it. Right. If I'm into big time in the Ayurveda, we're going to find out your dosha. And you're going to eat according to that. And I'm just like building all these tools, integrating them into my practice. And then it hits me thankfully. And I've been in this field, like I said, it's 21 years. This was about 11 years ago. And it just hit me like a ton of bricks. I have the basis on the person, not on what I think. And so I started to ask people about their heritage. Like where are your ancestors from? What is your life like at home? Work stress? How's your sleep quality? And starting to get like, what are the things that you tend to crave? Like what are your favorite foods? And you know what, I would start to base everything around them rather than my thing or what this diet framework is. And of course I could take principles from different things and help them to experiment. But most importantly, it's like where the future is. We're really there as personalized nutrition. And so to answer your question, even Hippocrates, like our physicians today, they take the Hippocratic oath. He's considered to be the father of modern medicine, but nobody gives a shit about what he said or what he was doing in his practice. One of them, one of his famous quotes is, all disease begins in the gut. What goes in the gut, bro? Like what goes in there? The irony of that, right? Never trip out over the wisdom that they had back then. How did they know? That's so weird. You know, one of his favorite treatments was whey protein. I don't know about that. Not like you think, it was called serum at the time. And you could like bathe in it basically. So you take a bath in that shit, you know? Wow, I don't know that. Yeah, it's true story. Now, was it any of the first one to use fasting as a way to cure seizures? Was that him? I'm not sure. Yeah, but I know that fasting was in his toolkit. Yeah, that was one of the things I did. Walking, sunlight, fresh air. You know what's funny about what's not funny to me? It seems obvious now. I learned this as a personal trainer through fitness because, and I like fitness or exercise because in my opinion, it's a faster path to get to the conclusion that you came to because nutrition is very complex. Not to say exercise is complex, but I think as a personal trainer, you very easily, you start very quickly see like, Oh, this exercise is not working well for that person. I got to do, and you start to realize everything. Okay, I have to individualize everything. Everything has to be individualized. You learn that very, very quick. But our microbiome was like a fingerprint. The way we grew up and then our perception of how we grew up is very, very unique. Our DNA is very unique. What makes us think that, it's interesting to me how some people can't consider that there's going to be an individual approach or that an individual approach isn't the best. Of course it is. Of course it is. Yo, you're talking about even any kind of blanket treatment. We should all throw up a serious red flag. There have been many recently, where it's just like a one size fits all. You take this medication, you do this thing, and that's just the way it is. And not looking at the individual need, first and foremost, and also paying attention to potential damaging ramifications when you do a certain thing. That might be good for one person. Might be deadly to another person. That's just facts. It's just the way it is. Well, I mean, look, I use the carnivore diet as an example. My theory is that people who do well on carnivore diets have hyper-reactive immune systems. And so eliminating everything, except for meat, makes them significantly healthier. Healthier. The average person without those issues would not do well on a carnivore diet in comparison to it, maybe more individualized kind of balanced diet for that person. That's just one example. Yeah. And again, I love when we have practitioners and teachers who evolve their thinking. You mentioned Lane earlier, like I know Paul Saladino. He's super passionate, obviously, great communicator, all the things. But I met Paul when he was just like, it's all about the meat. Yeah, nothing. It's all about it. Meat and organs. That's it. Now, he's a honey guy. Like he's Mariah Carey, all right? He's a honey guy. Fruit. He even now he's posting about fruit juice. Yeah. All right? Yeah. He's evolved a bit. But here's what he did though. He had to challenge himself and it took time because he was living by theory and he actually went and spent some time with the hunter-gatherer tribe. And so they're eating like some plants. They're eating honey. And he's just like, fuck, I got to eat honey. And the next thing you know, like he's paying attention. He stayed with the hot stuff, right? Yeah. Like what are the health outcomes for these folks? And of course, the thing is we're going to bring our bias into it and we're going to have a process of elimination, basically what tears we can accept. And so he still shares that like, you know, if they could, they're going to eat meat only. You know, some folks, they're over here eating some berries and nuts and shit like that. But the thing is, it's just him getting to a place of honesty like, are they eating berries or not? Yes. So maybe it matters. Maybe this is something that their genes have expected them to eat for thousands of years. Yeah. Unless you're the world's greatest hunter. I'm sure it was super confirmed from two after he followed that up with a workout too. You know, I'm sure you've been missing honey and berries for a long time also. You give that up, but you had one of the best workouts. Right, right. Oh yeah, they got a pump. His pump is different. I'm a superhero man. So, so how do we, I mean, this is a larger question, but how do you think we reverse this? Because you mentioned children. Children eat more processed foods than adults do. And that's probably because the convenience and also kids, you know, you got to eat. I don't want to eat that. I eat this thing that you want to eat that you like because it's designed to make it hyper palatable. How do we, how do we reverse out of this? It seems almost impossible with the convenience, the marketing, the availability, the palatability. And now we have generations that have grown up this way. Like any strategies or ideas? Yeah. So first and foremost, since we're talking about what we evolved doing, humans, our children evolved eating what the adults were eating. Right. Okay. Our children are not broken today. The environment is different. All right. So the fact that our kid won't eat this or that, this is us. This is the culture. Kids just did that through our evolution. Yeah. Or they would die. That's right. You know, so now we have, you know, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of different choices for foods and flavor experiences and textures and things like that. And this is, by the way, before we get into this, this is not ignoring the fact that like a Cinnabon might be dope sometimes. You know what I mean? Like, sure. Process foods are just a thing. And they even have value. I'll even go so far to say that, you know, there's a bunch of like walking dead spinoffs. I've never seen it. Personally. But obviously it's popping if he's getting spinoffs. You want processed food if the shit hits the fan. If the shit hits the fan and you come across a honey bun, it can keep you going. Well, I mean, I made this comment the other day when we were kind of bashing this, you know, this lab grown meat that's happening now too. And I'm like, listen, there's still people starving in this world. And if we can, if we can grow that in a lab and get the cost down extremely low and ship it to these people and save people's eyes, well, that's better than. Better than death. Yeah. You know what I mean? That should be the marketing. Yeah. Better than lab grown meat. There's a difference. Just the step above death. At least you're not starving. So, all right, to solve this issue, it's actually most complex problems have very simple solutions. We over complicate things. For sure. And so for years working as a clinician and as an educator, and you guys do the same thing, we advocate for behavior change. Right? Do this thing and you're going to get this result. And as right as that might be, if we're advocating for a behavior change with our client and then we send them to an environment where that environment is counter that behavior and even belittling that behavior and making that behavior exponentially more difficult to do, chances are they're going to fail. Yeah. That's why all the biggest loser contestants put on the way back. Like 89% of them put the way back on. Is there in this bubble? And then they go into a whole other environment that's nothing like that bubble that got to this extreme. No support, nothing, yeah, for sure. This is exactly what changed. When I started to see truly widespread results is when I made this shift mentally, which was, instead of me targeting behavior change, which again, it still matters, I started targeting culture and environment for the people that I was working with. And so what I mean by that is, your culture is controlling your choices. What we even crave is cultural. We crave things in our environment that we've been exposed to. Of course. Right? So like there's people in Iceland that might have a craving for fermented shark. Yeah, yeah. We don't know what that is. Probably don't want to know. It's awful. A lot of people there don't want to know. There are people in Cambodia that eat deep fried tarantula. True story. My wife and my mother-in-law being from Kenya, Nyama Choma, barbecue goat meat is like the thing. For us, a lot of people here, they can't do the goat. Their baby goats are kids. Yeah. You know what I'm saying? It's like it's to the proximity. You know what I mean? So we crave what is in our culture. And in our culture here, it's predominantly ultra-processed foods, right? And so understanding culture is controlled. It's kind of like an invisible hand that's guiding our decisions. Like it's creating the illusion of freedom for us here in this free country. But it's just based on what we're aware of. The choices are still given to us. We're told what you're supposed to eat and what you're supposed to do by the culture. And then we make choices within that. And so I'm saying all this to say, let's define what culture is. Culture is the shared attitudes, beliefs, values, and behaviors shared by a group of people then passed on from one generation to the next. That's what culture is, all right? Our culture, as I already outlined, we are the sickest, most chronically diseased society in the history of humanity. Right now, and I already mentioned the CDC stats, but they also shared that somewhere about 75% of American adults are now overweight obese. We're at 42.5% obesity. And this is based on BMI, which of course it could be controversial. But we're not talking about a 510, 220-pound NFL right back. You know what I'm talking about, all right? And right now, 130 million Americans, and this is like, I'm sharing NIH and like CDC data, 128 million, 130 million Americans are type 2 diabetic or pre-diabetic now. This was published in the New England Journal of Medicine about 10 years ago, and the paper was essentially titled 200 Years of Diabetes. And diabetes was consistent throughout the last century plus. And then about 40 years ago, something changed. Exploded. And it quadrupled in that time span. All right? And diabetes at its core, it's an adaptation. Do you remember when we first started learning, because we're almost the same age right around, do you remember when they used to call type 2 diabetes adult onset? Because kids didn't get it? Yeah, yeah, that's nice change. They changed the name because kids get it now. Yeah, and it's happening more and more, like a significant amount of our children are developing type 2 diabetes. Childhood obesity has tripled in about the last 40 years. You know, it's crazy. We talk about, I bet I know you, I'm sure you agree with me. We talk about all these looming crises. Oh my God, the world's gonna end because of this and because of that. Because literally, literally, if we don't fix this, we'll at the very least bankrupt our country. At the very least, at the worst, we're gonna lose our fertility within two generations. That's what the data is showing. This is the biggest looming crisis. Because we're talking about people here. We're not talking about the environment that we can adapt to. We're not talking about wars that we may be able to prevent. This is humans. This is what's happening to us. This is the greatest looming crisis that we, and nobody talks about it. Yeah. They're talking about from a cosmetic standpoint. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it's so strange. We're very strange. We're very strange creatures, man. And even within that, the Lancet did a massive, like this was multi-country. It was like 170 countries were included. And they determined it was like 11 million people die annually from poor nutrition. And we're not talking about starving. We're talking about overconsumption. Ironically, we're in an age now where more people are dying from overconsumption of fake food than from lack of food. So this is, as you just mentioned, this is the biggest crisis that we're facing. And just to kind of put a cherry on top of this and tying it back to, again, behavior change in a sick culture, it was, Krishna Murthy said that it is no manner, and I'm paraphrasing, no manner of good health to be well-adjusted to a severely sick society. Right? So we want to be a part of society. We want to be well-adjusted. But what if the culture is sick? And so knowing that the culture is unwell right now, and we're telling people to change their behavior, now we get into willpower. Right? So you have to have this superhuman, which every guy in this room has it, you know? But if you've got to rely on your willpower at some point, it's going to fail, you know? And especially just in our life with all this shit, we have decision fatigue, you know, we know it's a real thing. And just like your ability to keep fighting against all this sickness is very challenging, especially for the average person, especially if you're in it. And so rather than trying to, which I spent years doing, trying to get people to not go to McDonald's or, you know, advocating for like larger cultural change. And I've made a crazy dent, man. And thank you for asking me this stuff in the beginning. It was hard to talk about, man. But coming from where I come from, man, you know, I transformed my health living in Ferguson. I was sleeping on the floor, you know? And man, my first book, Sleep Smarter, which is the last time that we did this and had this conversation, it changed everything. There had never been a sleep wellness related book that had done well. And now I just got a message from my agent for the Danish translation renewal. I have 23 different foreign contracts for this book. Awesome. It's crazy. And since then, many sleep wellness related books have come out, but it changed culture. It wasn't something that was being talked about at that level when it comes to health. And I'm a nutritionist, but I brought it into the fold because I saw that it was missing with the people that I was working with. That's why I did it. And so I know that we can change the larger culture scape, but that shit is hard as hell. And sometimes it takes lightning in a bottle. It's hard as hell. And part of it is I feel responsible that our space has done such a shitty job at it. You know, you just highlighted two things that you've written books on that not once have we talked about macro breakdowns and comparing studies of which is better than that. It's as simple as how often does anybody put effort into their sleep routine and how many people are willing to say, hey, you know what? I'm not going to overcomplicate this. I'm just going to cut out processed food and eat whole foods. Like those two things, this is exactly what we would teach our client. I mean, it took me 10, 15 years to get here of, you know, when you're a young trainer and you're going through all the schooling and certifications, you get excited about all the knowledge. You want to teach all these people all this new stuff that you've learned. But then when you distill it down to the things that really fucking move the needle, it's like, get your clients to get good sleep and get them to get rid of all this processed shit out of their diet. And those two things will radically shift. Like 90% of the people were trying to help. It's so simple, like I said. Why do we make it so hard? Now, because of the culture, and now how do we change the culture in a real way, which is putting the power back into people's hands and helping them to change their microculture in their household so that they can make, so that they can control the controllables and make healthy decisions automatic. What if healthy decisions were the only option? That's what we can do within our households. But even when I talk about culture, I just took my family to Hawaii for the first time and it really struck me. And I already turned in the manuscript for this book that we take our culture with us. You are a reflection of your culture. Wherever you go and you plant yourself in Iceland, in Kenya, in, you know, another state, you are a representation of your culture, where you come from. And so being that you're a representation of that, you're also infectious. Because we, unfortunately in our society today, we talk about infectious things or things getting transferred is just negative. Right. But health can be contagious as well, right? And so being that you're a reflection, I saw this when people just ran this, which I just, I never really thought about it before, but now it's like making sense. And also talking some of this stuff out. People are just coming up to my family just randomly or like we're sitting on the plane and people come up to us just like, we love, we're just over there talking with my sister, we love your family. We don't know them at all. They don't know me from like social media or from the show or anything like that. They're just coming over because there's something contagious about our connection. That's what it really is. It's our connection. And so here's where we can make this change and create a healthier microculture in our household. Number one, in the context of food and eating real food, we evolved in tribes. And so we would hunt together, gather together, food preparation together, eat together, celebrate together. And I'm saying this because I just saw them kind of doing a dramatization of a luau in Hawaii. We're watching like, oh, this is a great show. That's how life was, right? That's how that's how we evolved. And this was a great time for people to connect to storytell, which was passing on tradition and sharing valuable information about their success as a people, right? And then of course the evolution of books came along eventually, but that's how knowledge was passed down, was through stories. But we don't do none of that shit anymore. We devolved recently in just the last couple of centuries from tribes to now, just even a few decades ago, having neighborhoods. But even within that context, you were still in the proximity of other family, not just your nuclear family. But then we moved even further apart to now we just have our nuclear family. Then we moved even further apart to even within the nuclear family, parents, children, now they're all divided because they're on devices. All right, so now we're completely isolated. And my question was, was there something protective in encouraging us to eat quality foods when we were eating together? And I came across all of this amazing data and that was the reason that I decided to do this project. It started with some research from some folks at Harvard who were gathering data on family eating behaviors and food choices. All right, they found that families who eat together on a consistent basis consume significantly higher amounts of whole foods, real foods, fruits and vegetables, and significantly higher amounts of micronutrients that are protective against chronic diseases. And those family members consume significantly less ultra-processed foods. Interesting. I'm just like, okay, my next question was, what's the minimum effective dose? Because that's another thing I picked up all those years of working with people is that people want change, but they don't want to change that much. Right? And so that's even how I wrote Sleep Smarter. I was just like, what are clinically proven strategies that people can do to improve their sleep quality without changing much? Right. And that's why it was part of the reason it was successful. And so knowing that people don't want to change that much, but they want this change, I was like, what is the minimum effective dose? And I came across a couple studies. One of them was published in Pediatrics. So looking at outcomes for kids and families and another one was published in JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association. They found that three meals a week or more, but three minimum, three meals per week, the children and those families eating together with their parents, three meals a week or parent. These kids had a plummeting risk of developing obesity and significantly reduced risk of developing eating disorders. Well, just with three meals, huh? Three meals, three meals per week. And by the way, there's 250, there's over 250 scientific references in this cookbook, which has never been done before. You know, the saddest part about that research just shows you how far we've gotten away from that. That just three meals alone can make that radical difference. You know, I want to piggyback off of you sharing that because I've watched this unfold raising my four-year-old. And there's of course been times where we're busy or on different eating schedules because I got home from work at a different time or whatever. And getting him to eat what we're eating is exponentially more difficult when we're not all eating together. Of course. We all sit down at the dinner table together and the food that is on the table is what we eat it's not even a discussion. It's literally that easy. But if he's by himself doing something and I'm eating over here doing something or we're missing each other by time, then all of a sudden there's this debate on what he should eat. So I've watched how easy it is to get him to eat the foods we want him to eat when we're all eating together a family and how challenging it is just simply by disrupting that. And so it starts with just making that effort of we're going to eat together. Like that's we have to make this important our family because it'll make all the other things that much easier. Yeah. And it's basic modeling, basic modeling. And also, but what about parents? Let me throw this in here too. So another one of the studies that I shared was done on office workers in tech. They were working at IBM. And they found that as long as they were able to make it home and have dinner with their family on a consistent basis, their work morale stayed high, productivity, stress level stayed negligible. Even if stress was high at work, there was some balancing when they ate dinner with their family consistently. But as soon as obligations cut into their time spending with their family, specifically eating dinner together, something that was a tradition in recent, in our recent evolution, quote, making it home for dinner. As soon as family dinner start to be pulled away, stress levels went up exceedingly high, productivity went down and work morale, their happiness in doing the work that they're doing went down as well. There's something protective about being with people that you care about under the guise of food. And I'll tell you what they are really quickly. One of them is when we're around people that we care about, we switch over our chemistry changes because our thoughts create chemistry in our bodies. We start producing more things like oxytocin, for example, which is one of the few compounds that's found to have like a neutralizing effect on cortisol. So we do oxytocin when we're around people that we care about. In person, by the way. In person. You don't get that when you're talking on the phone or texting. It's got to be in person. We're Zoom, yeah. It's often called the cuddle hormone. Mm-hmm, yeah. Right? So it's like that close proximity. So that's number one. Number two, we see a clear switch over even in that same kind of vein from the sympathetic fight-or-flight to your parasympathetic, which is the nickname is rest and digest, which might help with the dinner table, by the way. So we're seeing a switch over in the nervous system. And some of the lead-ins even that traditionally, like with prayer, for example, taking a moment of presence. Of course. Slowing down or having a gratitude practice. As we go around the table. You know, it's something we've been doing for years with my family. We'll share three things we're grateful for. It's like, it's changing the tone of the day. It's also getting people to like open up, to vocalize, to feel seen as well. That's another deep human need is to feel seen. And this is another reason that is so effective with our kids in the studies is that when you're able to see your child to get real face time, you can actually, number one, be able, they can offload stress and you can offload stress, but also you can catch things because a lot of our communication is non-verbal. Right. And you could see, because the thing is we know our kids better than anybody. And you can see certain patterns of behavior. Notice when something is a little off and help to create a space so that nothing ends up being a problem that explodes later on. Right. So this is another reason it's so helpful for again, like even reducing the risk of eating disorders. And one of the thing is that having those family dinners planned and my recommendation again is three is that minimum, schedule it. That's one of the walkways from today. Put it on your calendar. We have, when I would ask people all those years of work, what's the most important thing in their life? 99% of the time in my family. Sure. But then when I would ask, is your life a reflection of that? There's a mismatch. Yep. And so we have things that are far less important on our calendars. Schedule these family dinners. Pick it what, not dinners, it can be any meal. Right. Maybe it's like family dinners on Monday and Wednesday and then brunch on Sunday. That's what we typically do, by the way. And it can change and adjust. Give yourself grace. Even sometimes like my wife wasn't able to make it home and she planned on cooking one day recently. And I had to hit the door dash button, got kids, go to school, all the things. But I just sat down to eat with my sons. You know, we still got that face time. And it was a great experience. You know, got to laugh, got to connect, you know. And so part of the reason it works is if you know, if it's scheduled, your brain automatically or subconscious is planning. Okay. So we're having dinner. What is that going to look like? It's just helping the thing to unfold and also giving you ability to pivot. You just said something that I'm okay. I wonder if there is any studies around this. It'd be really interesting to see if there was a connection or any sort of correlation with kids that don't have family dinners and their anxiety, depression, suicidal thoughts, all these other things that a lot of teenage kids are going through. And we see how crazy that is right now. Did you come across anything like that? I would love to see something on that. This is a great question. And here's the cool thing, even all these studies that I'm sharing already, the fact that scientists are asking these questions is profound and awesome. Right. We don't have much date on that as far as mental health yet. But I can share one in particular on one of the excuses. Or it's a valid reason. What if you don't have access? Or what if, you know, you don't have a lot of money? Or what if you are eating ultra processed foods? Or what if you don't have both parents in the house? Right. These are all things that I experienced. I grew up in it. Right. So my stepfather, my mother worked overnight at a convenience store. And, you know, even again, living in that environment, one of those nights, she was stabbed multiple times, eight times actually. And but my mom is different, man. She's like very tough. She ended up like detaining the guy. He got arrested. Oh, wow. She went to the hospital. She got stabbed eight times and detain the dude. Oh, yeah, man. Wow, mom. Gangsters. Fuck, bro. Yeah, yeah. She's different, man. She's different. Don't mess with mom. And but the physician, when she got stitched up, he was like, if you weren't heavy set, this was like the way to say it at the time. She was overweight. Yeah. If you weren't heavy, if you weren't a heavy set woman, you would have died. So her fat saved her. Wow. Do you think she's ever going to want to let that go? Yeah. Right. So it's like the psychological anchor. And so she would literally sell her blood. You can get $20 to get us food from time to time. And my stepfather had a gambling problem, but he worked hard. Like he never missed a day at work. Never. Even like cut part of his finger off and was at work the next day. You know, like, because he's a chef. And he worked at Morton's of Chicago, which is like more of a high end place. But, you know, we can just never really put the pieces together because of the alcoholism, you know, just the the environment, you know, that we were in. And so I'm setting all this up to say that a lot of people that say, well, that's easy for you to say, we're having family dinners and getting these benefits, you have privilege. Like, you don't, you don't understand. Most of people that say that are not from where I'm from. Had we known that it would be helpful, we would have done it. My family didn't know. Right. Regardless of what we were eating. One of my greatest memories, my core memories about food, and part of the reason I wrote this book was my stepfather was home one of these days and we didn't have anything in the cabinets. You know, we opened up the cabinet. It was like some tomato sauce. And in the refrigerator, there was like some milk and some Texas toast, which is like thick bread. We got from like WIC program. And in the freezer, my grandfather sent us some deer sausage that he had hunted, which was, you know, frozen. I didn't know it was deer sausage at the time till later. And in the fridge, there was also some government cheese. All right. So it was like a block cheese. Now, I remember me and my little brother went, knocked on the door like we're hungry. There's no food, you know, there's nothing to eat. And he came, he kind of dragged himself out and he looked around and looked at these things and we didn't have any money. And he made pizza out of those ingredients that I just mentioned. All right. He used the Texas toast as the, as the crust. He spiced up the tomato sauce and, you know, made the deer sausage into like little sausage. Like it would look on a pizza, use the government cheese, which didn't melt, didn't melt, right? But the fact that I got to have pizza, kids love pizza. Yeah. It didn't. But you all did it together too. Yes, that part. But this didn't taste like dominoes or like little Caesars. But the fact that I'm a kid and I'm eating pizza, like, oh my God, like we're pumped. Yeah. And the fact that I got to eat with him. Yeah. I'll never forget that, man. And this speaks to how that environment, when you have lack or seemingly lack of resources, we have this kind of accelerated ability to access creativity and to make something out of nothing. And so this study found that minority children who were generally in the context of low income environment like I come from, when they ate with their family four meals per week, this could be breakfast, lunch or dinner. Those children ate five servings of fruits and vegetables five days out of the week, at least, and a significantly less ultra-processed foods, namely chips and soda. All right. This is all documented and that researchers noted specifically when the TV was never or rarely on during family meals. And again, we all love to watch the game, have a movie night, watch whatever show. But when that starts to encroach on your real face time with your family, with your loved ones, with your children, we've got to check ourselves. We can do the other thing, have fun, kick it, watch TV, be on our device, but we need that time to connect. There's something protective for our children and ourselves. And this is what I'm really advocating for everybody, to take control of their microculture. And so much the dinner table is a unifier. It's something that unites us, you know, and we evolved doing that together. It's one of the last threads of being in a tribe that we still kind of have. And we can't lose it. If we lose that, it's the last one. You put in your title, a family cookbook. Yeah. Yeah. It makes sense. Yeah. You know, I haven't really shared this. The publisher, shout out to my publisher, okay, one of the big five. But putting family in the title, they were like, oh, we should put in the subtitle. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. I'm like, no, no, no, no. This is about family. The science in this book is about family. And I had to stand on that, but also I know my power now. You know, this is my third major book. Yeah. Yeah. They need me. Yeah. You know what I'm saying? So I'm just like, no, this is what the title is, you know, this is not even a conversation. And also, you know, it's really special because writing a sleep wellness book, this was like 20, it was that, 2015, I think. Yeah. It put me in a different category as a nutritionist to talk. Now when I speak about food, my voice is louder. Mm-hmm. And so, and also we're big foodies. Like growing up, my stepfather being a chef. I mean, my mother being an amazing cook. My brother is an amazing cook. Oh my God. My wife, my mother-in-law, my oldest son. Man, he might be, I can't say he's the best cook because I don't want to create no controversy, but he's an amazing cook as well. We're big foodies. We love food. And also we got to talk about this too, which is like, there are certain groups of our colleagues who are more on food is fuel. Mm-hmm. And I respect that and I understand it, but it's ignoring our biology. It's, it's, I hate, I hate that. Over-simplication. I hate that because, yes, food is fuel, but who the hell, I mean, you're, you're blind if you can't, if you don't realize that food is culture, food is celebration, food is mourning, food is life. Obviously, food means a lot more to us than just fuel. Obviously. So it's far more complicated than it's just fuel. If it was just fuel that we would have no, we'd have no health issues related to food. Yeah. That, and even that, you just mentioned the psychological part. Yeah. The biological part is like, why do we eat? Why, why do any animals eat what they eat? Why does a cheetah eat that? Why does a bison eat that? Every species is driven to eat what tastes good to them. That's the motivation. Yeah, but why does it taste good to them is the question you're asking. Yeah, and to the biology part, and we talk about this, and I think we've, most people don't even know what this feels like because our, you know, our taste buds have been hijacked by processed foods, but when you really eliminate all that and eat whole foods, it's amazing what the body naturally craves and it's amazing how it points you in the right direction if you allow it to do that. So I mean, talk about the power of that. I mean, there's so much more there than just fuel. I mean, you can get fuel from a pop tart, but you're not going to get that from, you're not, you're not going to get that where it signals the right things for your body to go after and then be able to seek it and get it. It's crazy. Humans, we have a very dynamic flavor palette. Like we can taste such a variety of, but it's because of our nose as well. Yeah. You know, we have this really intricate, amazing interaction. And so we've been driven as a species through our evolution to eat tasty things. That's how we're, it's our biology that drives us to do it. Yes. Food scientists have hijacked our desire for tasty things. Absolutely. And there's nothing wrong with loving food or enjoying different flavors and enjoying food. We, it's a, it's a part of being human. And so how about we lean into that? As you just said, with real food. And so knowing one of the things that I did, you know, like my family loves brunch, we just had brunch on a Sunday. Bad cakes. All right. But let's be clear. It's a cake. Assume the title. Yeah. And so it's not necessarily a health food, but what if we can take and identify like what are, I hate this term too, when we say like a fat loss food, because it's all situation dependent. But there are certain foods in the data that improve our metabolic health. Right. One of those foods, interestingly, is sweet potatoes. All right. And also it's been found to be beneficial for a cognitive function. So I share one of the, like the anthocyanins in sweet potatoes. And so it's got these benefits for metabolic health for potentially improving our memory. What if we can take the sweet potato, which is can be pretty like whatever sweet potato. You bake it. Okay. Cool. Or are you like have a, have a hash. What if I can make pancakes out of this sweet potato? And so that's what I use as the base for these sweet potato protein pancakes and also changing the protein fraction because it's naturally going to be very carb dominant if you're having pancakes. And so it took, I had to like craft it and find different ways to put it together. But also I had to make it simple because that's another thing about recipe books. It could be over complicated with like, I don't need all them ingredients. Like what are the simplest things we can do to make something delicious? You said, you said you cited over 200 studies in your book, which already makes it very different. I don't know too many other cookbooks that cite scientific studies. What else makes this book different from other cookbooks? Within that, with the 250 plus studies, it's in an entertaining way. You wouldn't, unless you knew, you wouldn't know. You're just reading an entertaining fun packed with all these different nuggets of wisdom and inspiring book. And it's just like interwoven. And there's a bunch of like Easter eggs in there of like the one chapter is just like all these different superhero references and whatnot. Just very family friendly. So that's a big part of it. Obviously as a scientist in a different league, it's very beautiful book as well. And most importantly, man, when it boils down to it, I want to eat delicious things. And making this, putting this under the umbrella of real foods, like another example is we've got just like burgers, bowls, and wraps is one of the sections. I'm like, we're burger guys, we're burger families. But going back to when we talked earlier about the Omega threes and DHA and EPA, there's different types of, how can I get that four grams? It's going to depend on the type of salmon that you're eating. There's like king salmon, wild caught. You can get in a maybe six ounce serving, maybe eight ounces, you can get five grams of those Omega threes. And because of the Azazanthin in there, they're going to be really protected and while available. Then there's like coho salmon, it's going to be less and there's different forms. But we all have had salmon before, that's cool. And I've got a great Honey Sriracha salmon in here, but the salmon burgers, like the salmon burgers, that's probably my favorite thing that I'm into right now, but being able to make a delicious food experience where we got salmon burgers, we've got, I'm a big fan of breakfast sandwiches growing up, specifically growing up in the hood and making it to McDonald's to have the McDonald's breakfast sandwiches. So we have an upgraded breakfast sandwich in the book, which is my youngest son's favorite breakfast. Were these recipes inspired by your family? So like my son likes this, my wife does, I like this. Yep, very much, very much so. And just of course, when I really started in this field, even before the podcast, I was teaching cooking classes. I don't know that. Yeah, I was working as a nutritionist. I was still part-time working at the university gym too. I was teaching cooking classes. And sometimes even like uncooking classes, very minimal, whatever. We started out actually doing it in my mother-in-law's kitchen. And I remember the first class that I taught was three people. And I was terrified. I was so scared. I never, since like school, like really talked in front of people, multiple people. And I knew them. They were like, I knew they were my clients. You know? But then it was just like six people, then 10, then 20, then like we can't fit people in here anymore and now we got to rent a space. So, you know, we're, again, big, big-time foodies. And a lot of that transformation that took place to this day, even whatever, 10 years plus later, these folks are still, like some of them have had these physical transformations that they're still with them. They didn't just like, it's not like the biggest loser, right? Because they found, they had an experience where real food tastes amazing, potentially better than this shit. But here's the other last part of this is we can't take away something that we're addicted to and replace it with nothing. That's going to create withdrawal. And we're going to rebel. Right. So even coming into the game, like, if your family is not eating together and everybody's on their respective devices, we're addicted. And you're just like, we're eating dinner today. As a family. My pump says so, you know. The kids might not be happy. You've got to replace it with something of equal or greater value. And so I love the practice of anchoring in a reward intentionally into that family dinner. Right. And so this could be a food reward. You've got to understand that it can be a little bit sketchy. Right. So for example, if my youngest son is like gaming with his friends, I'm like, but my youngest son, I know his personality. If he knows we're having family dinner on such such days, he's cool. My older son, he's very like, kind of go with the flow. So I could just tell him last minute, oh, like we're switching family dinner night. My youngest son, he's going to, he's going to give something, you know. But if he knows he's the brightest kid in the room. Right. It's just, he likes to have a schedule. Yeah. And so if I know I'm bringing a pivot to him and I'm like, hey, bud, we're actually going to switch to family dinner tonight. Do you want to have the, do you want to have the frozen, do you want to have the cherry frozen yogurt pops or the snicker bites all in the book, by the way, for dessert? Oh, it's because now he's just on dessert. I know him. He's like his mother. They want some sweet, not something, some sweet after dinner. Right. And so he's like, oh, the popsicles. Right. We've already eliminated that. But also outside of food, which again, you got to know the personalities and know we're not trying to use food as a reward per se. But, you know, this could be an anchor of like, you know, maybe after family dinner, you do play a video game with your kid or you guys have a family game night. Or, you know, you have a rap battle or you, you know, whatever it might be, you dance off, like find something that you know your family is into that can bring about that experience, that dopamine, right? And be able to actually experience something that's some pleasure, some reward tied to not just the food, but to the activity. I like food prep. I like preparing the food with the family. We play music. We have a good time. Yeah. It's my absolute favorite thing. When you talk about how you grew up in your past, because obviously your kids grow very different than you. Yeah. You're very successful. You're obviously a good person. I'm sure your wife is amazing. When you talk, tell stories and stuff to your, are you kids like, come on, really? Do they give you that look? Or are they believe you? Or are they rise? Yeah. Do you drive them through the neighborhood and go, no, no, this is, this is what, this is where it was. I have my kid, my first two kids, very young. Oh, so they knew. My daughter's my oldest and my oldest son who's still in my house, as I mentioned, you know, last semester, hopefully, which ended up, he ended up playing college football. And so, but he was probably about three years old, maybe when I made this decision to get well. He was there with me in Ferguson sleeping on air mattress. He saw it. And so he's different, man. Even now, like his level of blown away by all of this is on par with me. Mm-hmm. My youngest son, he came into it, right? So he's just like, but here, this is the thing. When I, when I do take him back, because my stepfather passed away about three months ago and I took him, you know, we went back to St. Louis for the funeral. Like my son was, when we got back, he was on a different level of gratitude and just like, dad, like, I'm so grateful for you. And, you know, all that you've been through. And, you know, it's just like, but also those abilities to be compassionate and empathetic, the seeds of that have been planted during family meals. This is real talk. One of the things we did for a while was like, we go around the table and share something that we failed at, right? And so for him to hear his dad, who he's just like, I don't go through hard shit. He just, I'm just Superman to him. And for me to share my struggles or the pain I'm experiencing, it like helped to humanize me. And so he has like this window of empathy open for me, but it really kind of flowered. And so now, all the time, man, you know, he's just like kind of having these reflection moments. Like, like even, it was within the last week, we were just at our house. He was like, guys, look at our house. This is crazy. Like we live here. And I'm just like, man, like I didn't really say this, but I'm just like, wow, like he has perspective. That's good. You know, and it's so hard. You guys know this. How do we create conditions for our kids to be resilient, strong, well-adjusted, the ability to have perspective take when they have so much advantage, right? Because coming from an environment where I had to figure it out. And so it's been a struggle. And I talked to a lot of my friends like about this, like, how do we, how do we challenge our kids? And I call it safe stress, safe stressors. I put them in safe, stressful conditions. Just randomly turn the lights off in the house and no electricity to make kids. I say manufactured adversity. Shut down the power box. I'll never figure this out. But, you know, one part is putting them into challenging situations where I can still be observant, you know? Of course, like even training, you know what I'm saying? Like, this is a big part of our family culture is fitness culture, right? And so as many times as possible, because I used to go off to the gym and, like, my kids wouldn't see what I was doing. As soon as my oldest son, who is actually he's a personal trainer now. That's cool. Right. As soon as he was old enough to go to Golds with me in Floreson, Ferguson, Missouri, he was 12 and you can bring a kid and, like, he's ever since. He's been about that life. But for my youngest son, it was finding the thing he's interested in and tying it to that. Because he is in as, like, my oldest son will, no matter what, he'll get up at five in the morning. I saw him today before I came on this flight today. He was headed to the gym, all right? Was he the one you were talking about last time I came and said I was on your show and you were talking about how your son still challenged you at basketball but you had to show him what time, I think it was him, right? Both of them, really. Both, okay. Yeah. You had to show him what time, what time was it. Oh, yeah, for sure, for sure. But my youngest son now that he's playing basketball, we tie it to that. And so, like, that's the fitness. So he knows, like, I'm doing this so I could be dominant in this sport, right? So it's like understanding the character of your kids. Right, and what drives them. But with that, we're going to really, we're going to push it. We're going to, we're going to, we're going to go past where you think you can go. But it's a safe stressor, safe conditions. There's so many ways you could do this. My, the best advice I got, because I'm one generation removed, so my, my, my father, my parents were very poor from Sicily. And then I was, I grew up here. And I, it was a culture show when I was 12, I went back to Sicily and got to actually see where he grew up. And then it hit me like, oh my God, all those stories you told me, they are crazy. Oh, wow, this is real. But my kids are removed from that. And the best advice I got was to teach them that they have responsibility. So you got to grow up this way. You don't have these hardships. You're in a different position. You have a responsibility to use this for good. And so volunteer work and that kind of stuff. And I thought that was the best answer that I could hear. Because manufacturing at first, there's always a ripcord, right? They can always pull the parachute, right? It's different when you grow up and it's like, it's it. You don't, you don't make it, you don't figure out how to make a plane on the way down, you're going to crash. So that was the best answer I got. So, so that's, that's kind of- It has to be the hardest thing, especially you. I imagine if you look back at your journey, you have to believe that you wouldn't be where you're at had you not experienced all that. Yeah. So, and again, it's like, how do we instill that in our child? You know, and it's just the fact that we, again, like just even having these conversations and we're thinking about it, we're already winning. You're right. Yeah. I mean, that's what Arthur Brooks, I remember, said to Sal. Sal asked him that question about fatherhood. He said, good dads don't, good dads wonder if they're good dads or not and think about how to be better dads. So you're asking the question, which means you're doing all right. Yeah. That's powerful. Maybe feel better. So, well, I think you're going to, I think you're going to have another bestseller there. You're killing it. This is, this is great. So I didn't know any of that of your past. I think that makes everything very interesting and it puts a lot of context into what you do. So I appreciate those. I'm super excited to eat out of it, dude. It's going to be fun. You'll have to try. We're going, a lot of what we talked about today, I mean, I have a four-year-old right now. So this is a very big conversation in our house and how we make sure that we create this, this kind of structure and tradition around eating together and stuff like that because it's crazy how much our culture has shifted from that. And like just one generation, I see the difference of that. Like I grew up where we had to have dinners and all my friends did too. And now I look at all of us with our kids and it's not like that. Everybody's on a device and it's separate places eating. And so... 30% of families now, man, eat together on a regular basis. It's on the Endangered Species list. And what's so scary about that for the listener who may be struggling with this right now is that we don't even have enough time and data to be able to share the ramifications of that. I mean, that's literally like in the last generation or two. So it's like, I know you shared some things that we're seeing already, but... We don't know how deep the ramifications are. Yeah, we don't exactly... By the time we know, it's going to be bad. That's right. We don't know how bad it goes after it goes through another 20, 30, 40 years of people continuing to go the wrong direction, how bad it could actually get. Yeah. And can I share one more thing about conditions? One of the most valuable things I've ever seen for my children and their mindset is exposing them to different conditions, different people. Right? So even yesterday, I was at my studio with Jim Quick, who's like an accelerated learning experience, my guy, and my youngest son was out of school, guess what? You're coming to studio with me. And he's going to hear from Jim, not me. You know, as I'm like telling him about life and these things, if he hears it from somebody, because you've heard this, you know, you can't be a prophet in your own land. 100%. You know, so I've made it a big part of our lives because this is actually my first time traveling without my family, at least one of them in, I don't know, seven years. I don't know that. You always take them with you? Always. Wow. Somebody comes with me. Wow. And this time it didn't happen because it was so close on the launch. Even when I just went up to see Mark Bell about a month ago, I took my oldest son with me. Oh, wow. Right? Because I would come back and everything would be so different. Like I'd be on the road and like speaking at an event or a book signing, TV, whatever. And I come back a week later, it's like my kid just grew. Oh, yeah, that's true. So I started bringing everybody with me. That's great. And finding, now that I live in California though, because we could just drive down to an event, like Pedro just had an event I spoke at. And my family piled in the car. By me speaking at the event, Pedro's got me a couple of rooms for the kids. We do this together. And so yesterday in the elevator going down after the show, my youngest son was like, wow, that guy, Pedro's event, at that VIP dinner. First of all, he's saying VIP dinner. I'm just like, man, that's dope. Pedro's had a speaker as well. And the story resonated with my son like two weeks later, three weeks later, he's talking about that story of how that guy went through this incredible challenge and overcame it. And he brought it up. I didn't say anything about it. So it's like proactively put your kids in the environment so they can learn from other voices beside you. Very powerful. Oh, that's great. I'm going to take that. I'm going to think of that. That's a great idea. Very powerful. Well, Sean, it's great having you on the show again, man. It's been too long. Thank you, man. We have to do this again. Yeah. For sure, I appreciate it. Thank you, bro. Thank you.