Dr. Doug Lisle & Dr. Alan Goldhamer On Mastering the Hidden Force That Undermines Health & Happiness

and welcome to Chef AJ live I'm your host Chef AJ and this is where I introduce you to amazing people like you who are doing great things in the world that I think you should know about well today is my 64th birthday and who better to celebrate it with with the co-authors of the book the pleasure trap I think they've come on my show the last four years since I've been doing the show for my birthday and today they're going to talk about the hidden force that underlies your health and your happiness please welcome Dr alen goldhammer and Dr Doug L thank you gentlemen for spending part of my birthday with me I really appreciate it Happy Birthday Happy Birthday well thank you you know it's interesting because you say the hidden Force but is it really hidden yeah the the whole damn world of psychology doesn't even know it's there the the hidden force is the instincts in you that are essentially responsing uh responding to automated value systems that are in your sensory system or or actually in your uh higher order ability to run cost benefit analysis so you can be addicted to gambling for exactly the same reason that you're addicted to you know sugar fat salt which is that g gambling is uh an attempt to get resources out of exchanges and so if you could get a super normal feedback uh out of an exchange then that that would be potentially addicting so yeah the force is hidden because um the force is basically understood by almost nobody I mean there are a few people that understand it but very few people understand it particularly the people themselves so this is why you know multitudes of analysis on the pleasure trap uh if you read the we didn't even write some of the words that describe the pleasure trap in on the book jacket that was written by a consultant that that actually read our book and um I forget her name she's quite a dynamic character but she basically the the message that she pulled out of it was hey the reason why people are in trouble isn't because you know there there's something wrong with them it's because they've been trapped okay and so the uh basically what we're saying is is that quit looking for psychodynamic childhood traumatic or other reasons why it is uh this is what I call the mysterious motivation why is it that I just can't why is it it's like yeah well I've been hearing that you know for the 20 years since we published this book why is it that I just can't seem to well we explained why it is that you just can't seem to is because your environment is pathological not you and until until you get it extremely clear that it is the environment that is pathological not you you know you're you're going to keep missing ing the hidden Force so the hidden force is the motivational force that takes place as a dynamic between in this case a pathological environment and the native neural circuits to the organism that tell it what it ought to be doing so if you follow your instincts in a in a pathological environment you have a disaster on your hands which is the the health state of the average American you know and a good example of this is really the situation people face with obesity um for 100,000 years there's been modern humans on the planet and for 9,800 of that year obesity was a rare thing you know they and people that got obese then got the same diseases we get now heart disease and cancer and diabetes the problem were they were called Kings because it was only very few people that could consistently overeat or get access to the highly concentrated foods that would allow them to achieve and maintain obesity just like in nature there's very few instances where you'll see obese animals even whales who are you know you think of as fat they're not fat at all they're 90% body fat they're lean mean machines they happen to wear their adapost tissue on the outside of their body but there's no obesity in nature unless they get exposed to the pleasure trap and then they get the same problems we do and they get the same diseases kind of diseases we do and it's not because of psychological reasons it's not Mommy not loving them or daddy loving them too much or it's not because they have stress from going to work it's biological they fool the satiety mechanism of the brain with this hidden force that undermines their ability to regulate their appropriate dietary intake it works in humans it works in rats it works in Birds it works in everybody and everything and so yeah is it hidden yeah why do you think three quarters of people are now overweight or obese and they're busy out there looking for every possible explanation except the one that's actually accurate you know excuse me Dr L because you know it's funny you had mentioned the cover and one of the questions was because I didn't quite understand the cover but the words that are there are coffee drugs tobacco alcohol sex and medications but there's no reference to food and you did say that for some people sugar fat and salt is an addictive process well anything's supern normal so the the correct way to think about addiction is to think about it on a Continuum so the ultimately what's happening in all motivation which when we say all motivation that's going to include every animal down to a mosquito okay so uh trees don't have motives they don't have brains so they're not running calculus and they're not moving in order to reorient themselves relative to their environment they do have automated mechanisms for essentially making decisions about whether to put out New Growth or not put out New Growth or put out more Roots Etc and they're responsive to environmental inputs that that actually alter their their growth patterns but that's not the same thing as movement so time-lapse photography that shows some plant you know climbing up a a a rail in order to get to the Sun that that is not movement that's growth that's something different but animal behavior is fundamentally different than plants so animals have brains so animals move okay and they don't move randomly they move with a purpose the purpose this is to uh obtain or or secure resources that are uh improving the statistical likelihood of survival or reproductive success so that is why animals move doesn't look like it when your cat curls up and and and and lounges and goes to sleep you're like well what what is it doing answer it's prob sleeping so it's restoring its brain uh cleanliness and function uh it's resting its body it's also if it's a little bit cold it may curl up in order to actually conserve a little bit of energy and if it's really warm you'll find them loue out on the carpet because they don't need to be in that in that space they'll actually be in a different posture so when you look at uh all movement all movements have underneath of them decisions and under those decisions there's cost benefit analysis and under the cost benefit analysis there's pre-programmed mechanisms for evaluating the value of environmental opportunities and threats and so the the pleasure trap is when human beings have artificially change the environment and so to the extent that you artificially change the environment um you're going to alter the calculus that that people are going to do now some some changes in the environment are not going to be quote pleasure traps so if you build a really pretty home on a river and a person says gee I'd really rather be in there than camp by that River that's an artificial set of circumstances that has improved matters for Humanity okay but when you start talking about some other possible um values that can be concentrated so there's values inside that house temperature regulation uh uh freedom from predators freedom from bugs in other words there's a bunch of advantages that that make quote that house valuable we can break those down and actually list what they are including showing off to our friends how cool our house is there's a whole bunch of things that are advantages in there all of them are directly related to some kind of improvement over the sensory inputs that go into that organism that say that this is a a good thing for me to be working for and a good set of circumstances for me to be in however the uh those very same sensory experiences that what life is is just one series of sensory experiences after the next so we are uh you can some of those sensory experiences can be intensified in a way that will alter the cost benefit analysis of the organism in order to do what it's actually in its best interest that is incredibly dangerous so it goes from a mild problem like bubblegum which is absolutely potentially quote addictive in other words is it going to be difficult for a person to get stop doing it even if they find out it's not in their best interest the answer is yes why because it's a supernormal stimula okay then we're going to go all the way to heroin and methamphetamine just absolutely LIF destroying intensified uh pleasure experiences sensory experiences so everything is in between sugar fat and salt are down there on the low end of the intensity but they're enough to trap the whole damn human race so they're not going to kill people people are going to be Keeling over from heart attacks at 26 years old that isn't going to happen but they'll be in incredibly poor shape for the vast majority of their existences because they are there's a hidden Force that's undermining their health and when you undermine your health you undermine your happiness because your your health is an enormously important feature in your overall well-being was there anything back in the day that was anything like the pleasure Trap Back in the Stone Age or is this a relatively new phenomenon no there's absolutely nothing in the Stone Age that was like this so this is now I have to tell you AJ it's run itself you're looking at all the way to Zuckerberg's meta who's going to try to put you in a room with a bunch of eyeglasses on and then some chemo computer that can put stuff in your nose I mean you're you're looking at the matrix it's a fiasco the uh but it's you with with digital media now drawing in people back basically in what I call the spin like they can't get out of it because they're so attached to digital media it's just pulling their eyeballs towards essential sensory experiences over and over and over again you know this is you know Thomas Edison's lament of his life was that when he he or his Engineers of course invented the record player and and when they did Edison was delighted and he was like this is fantastic this is going to revolutionize education it did nothing of the kind 80 years later you get good Great Courses on tape sold a few copies like nobody gives a damn okay it immediately became apparent and he was unhappy about this that oh no it's all going to music that's what it that's what humanity is going to do with this invention and he's like what an incredible waste and it's the same way with our incredible manufacturing capabilities uh and abilities to lift burdens off of people's backs in the world it's like wow Humanity you know could you could live an incredibly great life and the Beautiful Thing is in individual you can but when you look at Humanity RIT large not a chance man and they they took the they took the opportunity that is given available to us and they just wa watched it they're going to watch their hours and their bodies right down the drain behind supernormal stimuli and it's like it's not their fault they've been trapped and that's what our book was about you have anything to add to that Dr goldhammer what he said oh well then okay is I'll run out of steam pretty soon but you just the thing I want to mention AJ was that you know today I'm I get a little bit frustrated because people look at things like obesity and they treat it as if it's a cosmetic problem that the that the stress is that well because you're bigger you have to wear different clothes and it Alters your fashion statement or something and that's the extent of the problem and so that people get caught in the dietary pleasure trap the inevitable consequence of it is obesity the problem is not only is it a cosmetic issue but it's also a very very important health heal issue because part of that fat is visceral fat and that visceral fat basically functions like a tumor in the body and it produces inflammatory products it leads to specific diseases like heart disease cancer diabetes autoimmune diseases that are sucking the quality and the quantity of people's lives out of them and because they're thinking well I just need to love myself the way that I am and accept the way that it is and everybody's overweight there's nothing that can be done with it you just have to kind of accept your lot now the problem is there ultimately accepting not just the the um uh superficial cosmetic effects and the devastating effects that that can have but also these overwhelming Health consequences that are now accepted as the norm and that it's not even worth talking about it's not even politically correct to talk about it to actually tell somebody oh you have these diseases that are inally tied with how many pounds of visceral fat that you have on your body is considered a inappro or socially inappropriate kind of thing to do and so to me that's a it's just compounding the Insidious nature of the pleasure trap with this overriding social nonsense that's basically dooming people because they they aren't even given an opportunity to recognize that there's something they could actually do about it if they you know if they could figure out a strategy to escape the dietary pleasure trap which you know granted is very very difficult but at least it's possible and we were able to prove that it is possible recently in a study that we did where we actually um took 29 people with high blood pressure and showed that they normalize their blood pressure with fasting and diet and at six weeks when we flew them back we were able to show that they were able to sustain the dietary change at least for six weeks and and were able to as a consequence maintain weight loss in a drug-free and blood pressure State and then Dr L and I had a chance to make a little wager because we said what percentage of these people do we think a year later without ongoing support There Was You Know study was over but if we track those people down would any of them be able to keep their weight and their blood pressure and their drug-free State and he um Dougs pointed out that you know in the medical literature about 5% of people are able to make lifestyle changes you know there's pretty good evidence that one in 20 people can do that um but that most people don't do that most of the evidence when you look at most studies that trying to make behavioral change they fail whatever it is whether it's quitting smoking or quitting drinking or changing diets or losing weight or anything and I said that our people were special and that I thought a third of them would be able to be successful with that well it turns out of the follow-up group 75% had maintained enough had maintained their weight loss and maintained enough Improvement that they didn't have to go back on drugs for blood pressure now they weren't all 100% compliant in fact many of them weren't as compliant as I liked them to be but they were good enough that they kept their weight off and the consequence was the normal blood pressure without drugs that was 75% that was more than twice as much as I thought was going to happen and so I was wrong but Dr L was more wrong and so I win now In fairness he's going to tell you right now he's going to tell you he was talking about the you know population as a whole you know the normal population and our people are highly self- selected pre-selected pre you know more motivated Etc but in when we made the BET who do you think we were going to recruit for this study we weren't like dragging them off the street of course it was going to be our self- selected people so I still claim I win that that bet that's good it's reminiscent of Dean ornish you know saying I'm not here to do what's practical I'm here to show what's possible and and that's uh all Grand good job Alan now well now the next step would be is if we did provide ongoing support phone coaching additional you know ease of uh reduce Channel factors by getting companies that we have now that will offer SOS free food Etc ongoing educational support where they participate in groups like what AJ does with on you know that social emotional support stuff yeah would that improve adherence and compliance even more that's my question to you well I think the the answer is the most important part of the question is going to be who it is that's going to be selecting yeah so of the if you take a random bunch of people out of the population that wants to lose weight your odds of being successful you you'll be successful with 2% of the people so you know we've talked about trying to identify characteristics personality characteristics that might predict adherence and we looked at uh conscientiousness and we didn't find in that particular study that seeming like like that was in of itself very predictive so the real issue is going to be how can we do a better job of identifying people that are likely to be successful versus those that are going to struggle because the pleasure trap is so overwhelming they just can't they just can't State yeah I would what I've said on AJ's show a bunch of times is that and it wasn't meant to cleverly you know B basically defend any of my thinking it's just what I said which is that this is such a difficult problem it takes unusual personality and unusual motivation so it takes both okay so you're you could be highly motivated but you don't have the personality characteristics to pull it off right and you you could have a great deal of conscientiousness you may have uh the personality to pull it off which you're just not that motivated so the it takes a combination of those two things that's uh probably why that um the whatever the and also probably a third variable that's actually significant that's in there that that I I'm not saying is that the person's life circumstances you know are interacting with that so if you are sufficiently disagreeable and motivated those may not matter that much you know I mean you're going to just railroad this down through everybody that's around you and you're going to bite back at anybody that tries to stop you so such individuals exist in the world uh and then those individuals are occasionally uh highly motivated uh to pursue this however the the fact that that the people that you did have that were successful that we couldn't pick up any personality characteristics tells me well if personality is not the deciding factor and it has to be other things and it has to be either their life circumstance combination of Life circumstances uh IE the the the ease of of process as well uh in that uh there's also personality starts being subdivided in in the the con concept that uh conscientiousness people are not equally conscientious about brushing their teeth and and changing the oil in their car in other words it's a heterogeneous process wow so some people are um are willing to put in significant energy in the kitchen and some people are not okay that's a individual natural variable between individuals so that's a that's something that would take place so you're saying that somebody might be highly conscientious but in specific areas like I I find that hard to imagine like if you're diligent about changing your oil on time and you know but you would be a slob about something else I hadn't even considered that because your conscientiousness in the personality profile doesn't differentiate right so we might have to have a more sophisticated screening to determine who's conscientious in regard to dietary lifestyle issues yes that's correct that is actually what that would be because somebody could be incredibly conscientiousness over their finances or their Architecture Firm all kinds of you know how it is they do that but actually have a uh we knew somebody your the dentist that was an outstanding dentist that you had referred me to that we won't use his name here the point is is that that man was phenomenally conscientious good point though he absolutely self-indulgent as hell right yeah hey AJ change your oil on time oh yeah I do I I'm very conscientious with are there any areas Doug where you know me not to be conscientious um yes they're being worried about the the the waitress's feelings what's interesting though is because of my concern about my wife's feelings right right I've overridden that concern barely and I'm telling you you you you barely get to the middle of the bell curve day so AJ are there any areas where you're not hyper conscientious I I would say it's only if if I really don't care about something right well that's the question what do you not care enough about that you wouldn't be you'd be comfortable being unconscientious checking my email there's like 700 and I hate doing it there see I would have trouble with that I would I will I will get to it but I I go through periods where I get overwhelmed but but in general I think my conscientiousness pretty much translates to almost every area unless I really just don't care yeah just so just to just to give you a uh just to give you all three minutes of understanding on personality okay so what's causing personality is Gene variances and what the genes are is they're just coding for for the little differences in in um they're coding for the little differences in neurotransmitter production and release and sensitivity okay so there is no such thing as quote I got I got an 88 percentile squirt of conscientiousness okay that's not what you have what you have is trillions of neurological connections and and an immeasurable amount of little little tiny units of neurotransmitters that are going through all these different circuits okay so what what you're looking at is that the brain is highly heterogeneous all every tiny little cubic centimeter of that thing is doing something different than than one inch away and what what's happening there so what we can see though is genetically you're going to find that the um the cost benefit analysis of alternative courses of action in is going to have patterns the way a given machine is set up so so for example the um um uh extraversion okay so it's going to be the case that if we watch that person over time there's all of these different kinds of social situations and if you watch if you watched inside their head if you had a pet scan you could actually see an attraction versus repulsion like calculation that goes on inside their head with respect to every Poss possible social interaction that that person faces okay and you could have that person essentially facing an almost identical set of circumstances that someone else faces and our guy is quite a bit more positive than another guy okay so you watch those two Brands but you wouldn't know that actually our guy is attracted to joining a little group when there's you know six or fewer people in that little group but if there's 15 people in the group he's intimidated and he's not going to do it okay the uh the other guy for example doesn't want to join any group that's an introvert okay he's looking for a single individual that he already knows at that party he's going to Corner that person off into a corner and they're going to have a one-on-one conversation so those two nervous systems are built differently but someone else who's extroverted is going to have a different different kind of subtle patterns are going to even though they both score on a checklist at the 77 percentile those are not the same two people got it they're actually quite a bit different okay so you don't you can't say oh that's person's 99 percentile conscientiousness they're going to be able to translate this into action not even close the uh it would be a factor it's amazing I I have a thing I have an issue that probably the um that the people that would have been interested enough to come to True North and fast Etc have enough General conscientiousness that at that point that measurement starts to not be very worthwhile okay I also have a problem with the way that's measured a lot of extremely high conscientious people will actually score at the 50th percentile or lower on a conscientious scale because they're so damn conscientious about how they're reading the questions do you ever do you always well not always I don't always do it right right okay and so there's actually there's noise in the calculation of that characteristic so basically you didn't give me adequate filtration devices and you need to come up with a better filtration device that'll actually work because the limitations of your neuros pych testing and stuff are just kind of pitiful well yeah particularly I think that we we tripped on something today which is that if you did a conscientiousness about health which is now walking your way into motivation you know what I'm saying so in other words it it starts to blur the lines as to what it is that we're actually talking about but I think those are actually two separate things so a person a person's motivation needs to be unusually high but their conscientiousness in and around Health you know health or health related behaviors uh Etc that also needs to be high so those two things need to be together for people to fight the triap right so basically you should known that before we did the last study so we would have had a more sophisticated uh Port you know portfolio of questions and then we might have gotten a decent answer you see you see what I've been putting up with for 50 years s oh well speaking of 50 years I if you don't mind I want to just share my screen and show you I don't know how I even got this photo this is really interesting um I know Dr Lyall won't believe any of the things I think about that are not like more metaphysical however it's really weird that today is my 1,00 968 show and you guys met in 1968 correct so I just I just want to know do you recognize this photo at all oh yeah yeah I recognize that photo yeah see here's here's me and Doug yeah and a and a and John a gentleman that was all all three of us interesting enough had the top grades but we also were all on the basketball team that's true you're holding some trophies yes so uh that's a little bit disgusting by the way the whole story whole should I tell this story yeah you go right ahead Alan okay so Dr ly when we were in school took all like the hard classes you know the trigonometry and all this stuff and I tried to focus on the ones that wouldn't take as much time or effort but we both had one class in common which was an art class and he as you know everything he does he turned into very nice project carefully I think it was a little building he designed and built whatever it was I forgot to do my main project and so I was walking in and I saw he had this very nice project that he was turning in and I pulled something out of the trash can that was somebody had spilled some paint on a on a piece of paper whatever but I thought I turned something in because I didn't want to fail the class you know so I got this drippy messy thing and I turned that in as my art project and I called it junk art that I had I had recycled stuff you know I was being environmentally correct anyway since you know at the end of the towards the end of the term they picked your best project and they hung it up at a local uh Car Wash well since I had only turned in that one project that was the project that got selected and they put it up on the wall at the car wash and the guy that owned the car wash didn't like it on the wall because it was kind of a piece of junk and so he bought it I think for 50 cents to get it off the wall okay now come the end of the year um we both get bees in in art because you know everybody gets a be right unless you're really good well I took offense and I went to the teacher Mrs Nichols remember her and I said you know all of my art has sold my public has spoken who are you to judge my art quality when I've got 100% success and she agreed and changed my grade to an a well it turned out that that one grade difference was enough to give me a half a point extra point on the grade point average and so I beat Doug and got the valid dictorian because I got the A and R and he got the B and of course he had A's in all his other fancy classes and I had A's and all my other easy classes we won't really talk about that because they don't grade the quality of the class you're taking they just you know it's just a GPA thing so the point was I got the bigger trophy because I was willing to protest my grade and the best part of it all is they spelled valid dictorian wrong on the trophy which was very fitting because I wasn't a particular efficient speller and I the thing I'll never forget is my father looking at the trophy saying well this is interesting they spelled badi dictorian [Laughter] wrong all of that is true it's beautiful beautiful story I think I think I might have one more H Photo let me see if I can find it interesting enough AJ I threw that trophy away a long time ago but I saved the little valid dictorian spelled ien on it oh yeah who who are these guys well this was Doug and I at my wedding oh my goodness that's your house back there yeah this was uh this was when uh I got married and uh uh my best man was there and uh God for once in my life I looked taller Alan's actually a good chunk taller tonight like I don't know what the same height you probably got tired of wearing your shoes just you just got you got longer monkey arms there you so that's why you look taller when we play basketball but I think I think we're the same height yeah he how old were you guys in the first photo and how old were you guys in this photo well I'm 23 here so he's 23 and in the first what what that would be seventh uh eth nth grade so that would be what about 14 yeah about 14 14 15 yeah amazing you guys have been friends almost 60 years God man it seems like 160 oh my God it's actually weird looking at those photos it's like I can't believe it okay it feels like we haven't done anything wow where did the time go but yeah it has it has gone gone fairly quickly he's still beating me every time we play basketball which is disgusting but I'm working hard at it four times a week I'm putting about 10 hours a week in now trying to trying to increase the skill set but unfortunately it's hard to over come the genetics right you guys are amazing well we have a few questions if you wouldn't mind answering there's one from a live viewer on Instagram named Diane and she's asking to what degree does the lack of immediate consequence to an unhealthy decision impair our ability to stay the good course of action great question Diane thank you it's practically Checkmate okay so the um this is this is ex this is is what makes the pleasure trap such a problem is that when you eat some greasy crap you can't feel any pain in your arteries that's that is the problem so that's why autoimmune patients often make better patients because they get more immediate feedback so they eat crap they feel crappy that's a really good thing if you eat crap and feel great and it takes like a week or a year or 10 years before you get the consequences oh my gosh try to train a dog where instead of giving them immediate conse quences for Behavior wait a couple days and then give them some Behavior you know give them the newspaper whatever it is and see how effective a training technique that is yeah so that that's that is the the great problem with uh supernormal stimuli is that that it's confusing so just to to try to just say this once because I'll say it a thousand times between now and the time I'm dead is that your decisions are made by very complicated unconscious cost benefit analysis that's what makes your decisions that's what you are your your your mind is an extraordinarily complex calculating sh and um and so it it's designed to do being doing those calculations in the environment that it evolved in so it has to um it's just built for it so rabbit is built to to you know when it looks at a fox analyze how far away it is analyze its movements when the fox goes behind a tree the Rabbit doesn't forget it's there it's got a memory system that keeps it on a red alert the uh and it has to judge all the different uh options that it's going to have depending upon what the fox does those are all instinctual these are all instinctual doesn't mean you you don't there's no calculations it's not some automated reflex no these are complicated instinctual cost benefit algorithms it's like a business that has 17 different little uh software programs to analyze different aspects of its business so if you're Walmart you've got a just in time thing to figure out how to get this stuff in then you got an accounting program over here then you got a business management tool you got a lot of different computers and computer systems that are doing all kinds of different aspects of that organization that's how the brain is the brain has all kinds of different subsystems that are analyzing different aspects of the choice that an animal is facing the problem is is that in order to get that kind of complexity you have to evolve to be sensitive to how what is the the law of perspective on how far away is that fox is that a fox that's two inches high and 30 feet away or is it a fox that's two feet high and 80 feet away your brain has to automatically know that these are you have to automatically know that the fox is dangers if you're a rabbit you can't learn it it's not it's not possible for animals to learn these things so you don't learn that sugar is a good thing because if if you learned so you don't get to choose what you value because you could say well how come I can't make the choices that I want to make because you don't want to make them because they're not designed by nature to want those choices if that were true then you could just say oh well I want to live in a hub instead of a of a fancy house oh I want to live out in the rain and it's freezing cold and sleep in the snow and my bare naked no you don't get to choose that these are automated calculating systems that are designed by nature to actually have you survive in the environment that you're designed for if you radically change aspects of that environment very good things could happen in other words I.E our nice house by the river and very bad things could happen I.E heroin addiction and everything in between and so the uh of course that it is a an enormous problem that when you taste something that is ringing the system as highly valuable because it's super normal because it's three times car density of anything you were designed to eat yeah that's going to be a serious problem it's going to be an enormous deterrent to you actually getting on a healthy path so yeah you it's a that that is pretty close to being the problem yeah yeah yep so here's a question that was written in and the question is Dr goldhammer describes women as estrogen producing hormon producing fat storage machines when it comes to pleasure trap foods and weight Dr Lyle seems to describe the pleasure trap is more an equal opportunity affecting both men and women equally based on their genes and evolution can you please explain the difference I love both of them look at women have to be more efficient at storing fat because they have to survive pregnancy and lactation if women were not more efficient um their survival capacity would be limited men don't have have that disadvantage because they cannot become pregnant they do not go through lactation so they don't have that particular vulnerability they may have other issues that are important but for in the case of fat storage women are more efficient on average everything else being equal at storing fat than men are and they maintain a higher percent body fat in order to be optimally healthy than men do and so there's differences these are biological differences there's lots of differences between male and females and that happens to be of them yeah in other words certainly the everybody's eating way too many cies so the last the last analysis that that I've seen it's a you can look at an awful lot of different numbers and it's a little tricky to triangulate on what the truth is but it looks like the average American eats somewhere on the order of 3,500 cies a day so that means that probably the men are eating about 4,000 calories a day and the women are eating about 3,000 calories a day now we know how many calories they're burning the women are burning about 2,000 calories a day and the men are burning about 2500 so you can see that people are overeating by some incredible range they're overeating by a good solid thousand calories a day that is incredible okay and what happens is is that you know if they stored all of that they that the amount of fat storage would be insane everybody be walking around 600 pounds and then they peel over and die okay but that's not what happens the body doesn't store all of the excess calories that you eat it only stores a portion of them it does all kinds of compensatory mechanisms you're pooping out fat all over the place so people are are um way out of wine okay so it's going to turn out that that as Alan is saying women start out with bodies that are are are are supposed to be fatter than and so then then you add a bunch of excess fat on top of that and that's what you got that's a problem and you know it is true a if you take men and put a bunch of estrogen into them they grow breasts and get hips yeah and if you put a bunch of testosterone in the women they their fat comes off but they get hairy and get cancer and die so it's not a good weight loss strategy but the point is those differences in estrog and testosterone are a component in the overall picture so if both male and females are both pigging out on all kinds of concentrated Foods they're all going to get fat but women will get slightly more fat efficiently than men will be on average there you go that's so like everything else women have to work a little harder to get the same results you know get used to it so it's not just in weight L it's everything else too so just you know adapt how do you both feel or and what are your predictions about drugs like OIC what do you think is going to happen with this scenario well the same thing that's happened every other time they've introduced some magic potion drill you're going to see gastroparesis you're going to see all kinds of Downstream consequences then there's going to be all this shocking on then there's going to be a bunch of lawsuits yeah yep and then yeah and then they'll pull it off the mark this has already been all worked out by a by a team of really smart mathematicians somewhere in Europe okay like there there's no way that they haven't gained this thing out and they know how big the lawsuits are likely to be how much they're going to have to pay versus how much money they're going to make in the main time okay so until you know I mean the there we're never going to fix this problem problem so the the pharmaceutical industry has been captured by the corporate interests you no longer have any legitimate oversight and so uh so you don't have legitimate science being done in order to seek quote FDA approval this is FDA approval has now become nothing other than a tool to keep competitors out of the game so it's called pay to play and the only question is how much percentage of the overall po are they going to be able to take before the thing blows up that's it yeah it's it's basically a Ponzi scheme for I mean it's more or less maybe maybe not but that's what it feels like it's exactly so I.E we think we're going to make make about you know $118 billion dollars off of this thing we're GNA have to probably shell out you know 18 billion of it for for class action lawsuits we're fine orad get a couple congressmen to pass a rule exempting them from any liability like they did on some of the vaccination issues so that the the taxpayer takes the the responsibility and the liability for the downstream consequences so they'll be Exempted from it that's exactly just how it's done yeah nice let me just take a moment to thank Angela for the Super Chat donation this is a sort of I want to get back to the OIC but first this is a fun question from Randy do you guys have a bet going to see who who's going to live longer no no yeah it you've got random variation Allen is a is a more vidious liver than I am um so in theory uh all things being equal you should outl me by a little bit but um but there I I the bigger variable is the genetics though the bigger variable is the genetics and it's hard to really evaluate that because that's a much bigger impact the difference between our lifestyle is infantes not like to have a measurable result that piece of carrot cake you have every year hardly is going to cause you to age out but the the genetic variables you know that's probably going to ultimately make the difference or it could be bad luck yes um you know I'm more likely to piss somebody off and get taken out um so you might have a slight Edge on me there that's yeah you know there's there I mean I I my prediction is that Dr gold was going to outlive both of us yeah I you know that's that's a perfectly good bet but he he's accurately analyzing that that random variation actually drowns out uh any any of the differences that you're going to see in lifestyle neither of us I'm a better driver than he I was gonna say neither of us have particularly High risk-taking Behavior you're a better driver but you drive much more that's correct so because I don't drive very much y my lack of being being as a focused a driver as you are puts us at a you know more risk factor you got the advantage y yeah you you play basketball though in um less restricted environments yes so you never know when somebody might pull a gun out and shoot you because you you know beat them and embarrassed them and stuff whereas you know I'm not likely to be able to do that so you know your extra skill set there may put you at slightly higher risk in the wrong environment all right all right AJ what else we got yeah well well you know going back to the OIC you know if people read this book you tell them exactly what they do right what to do and if they do it it it it works 100% of the time but people aren't really interested in doing this because it takes a lot longer than OIC Well it's worse than that much more difficult than OIC that's the whole well you have to go against the pleasure trap the the the whole point of the pleasure trap is that it's a trap what do we mean by a trap okay a trap the the word trap is explaining that there's a cost to something that you did not see that essentially you are you are being deceived by what what what your senses are telling you that is what a trap is okay so a trap is something that if I knew the actual situation I would not have done it okay but I didn't know the situation I stuck my foot in a trap and now I'm in trouble okay so that's what a trap is that's why when you try to when the people trap animals they they camouflage them so the animals nervous system can't pick it up okay so that's that's what that's what you're seeing now is you're seeing human Ingenuity uh now at first it was an unconscious Market driven uh process of just food manufacturing trying to figure out to give people what they want okay and that was completely innocent in other words they they didn't they they wouldn't have known that the grease that they Ed to make burritos potato chips causes some significant health problems they had no evidence at all that any of this was there okay so now they do so now we're 75 80 years later and now now we're 21st century and they absolutely believe me PepsiCo freay all these people know the whole Schmo they're they are not ignorant as to what's happened they couldn't care less they they it's not their responsibility their their responsibility is rate of return of capital to their stockholders that's it so now what you have is um a completely and utterly unprincipled assault on the human nervous system how can we fool it okay so that's that's what it's going to be and now it's OIC so how how we're going to how going to fool the human nervous system into to not eating as much and and we're going to do that we don't really care what the hell the consequences are to the body as long as we get you know some objective but pleasure trap's not going away and all of its guyses I mean one of the major chapters of the Trap was the miracle and Madness of modern medicine and so OIC is a perfect example of the miracle and Madness of modern medicine so how can we get to the result without removing the cause that's it what an anti-inflammatory medication is that's what aspirin is how can we get rid of the thing that we don't want without actually removing the cause of it that is modern medicine yeah almost entirely not entirely that's that's 95% of what modern medicine is how can we get get you to to to not have the consequences of of the self-destructive behavior that you're doing it's not it's 99% of the profit of modern medicine yes there's a big chunk of modern medicine that isn't that they just don't make any money on that so nobody cares right so if people do good example though AJ is look at the new the definition of a great drug now is a drug that not that you take for 10 days or a week or a month but one that you have to be on the rest of your life and a zic is a good example where they'll telling you right up front well you'll be doing this forever because the moment you stop or at least until the gastroparesis sort of the downstream consequences you know limit you um so they don't want a drug that you just take once they want neuros psychiatric drugs that once they get you addicted you have to come back forever because that's where the real profit is not just you know the cost of getting a customer is high you want to keep that customer so that means you want to good act and even the drug pushers know that you know the difference between recreational drugs and prescription drugs is the recreational drugs are the drugs that work well at at you know fooling the plge trap drugs that you take and don't work that well that people don't like those but the drugs that really bang on the pleasure trap those are the ones that become the most successful and they become super profitable Pharmaceuticals IE opiates especially if you make them illegal where you know you have the police force basically keeping your competition out so that you limit the supply yeah it's pretty Grizzly when you actually when you understand that a bunch of high IQ people are actually looking at Humanity like a like like a bunch of effectively like a bunch of mice okay and they're basically what we want to get we want those mice to do a bunch of work for us and we want to scrape off and we don't really care how it is that we do it we're just going to maneuver them around this is absolutely you know evil and uh but it is what it is you've become cynical it's interesting uh the very first pages of the pleasure trap uh we we got some help in writing the very very first you know page page or two uh by a friend of ours Jim Lennon and Jim lennin uh was I think closer to he was he's older than us and uh he was a little bit more cynical uh in general about the the government and the FDA and all this kind of stuff I didn't care any about that 25 years ago none of that was on my radar I was like yeah whatever that's that's not what I'm thinking about I'm thinking about the person in front of me that can't make behavioral changes that's what I'm thinking about but Jim was thinking more about that and so when he was writing uh a couple paragraphs for us there he talked about how there's powerful interest in groups that are dead set against the pleasure about dead set against any any uh essentially explanation and public education about the clure crow and I remember thinking do I really buy that argument and I thought well I'd buy it a little bit now I buy it a lot okay it is absolutely a I mean certainly they don't have to do this but there's a a very expensive conspiracy to make sure that that people remain totally confused and hear good news about their bad habits all over the place and and basically the the only viable solution I mean I had that many people call me that have said well my doctor's just saying it's really important for my health to get on on OIC because you know obesity is such this big thing and it's like careful okay the that is not the solution to the problem and believe me anything that could possibly take 18 pounds off of you is a pretty damn Dangerous Drug by the way uh I I hope I'm not wrong here because I'm being recorded uh but I believe that I'm right that when I looked at the original safety data on outcomes for ozempic I believe the the lot the weight loss was something on the order of about 18 pounds so you're talking about taking people that you're talking about average weight loss yeah average weight loss you're talking about people that were 215 and then they wound up 197 in other words okay but that's not I I don't think it's being used the way that the safety studies were done I think they're using higher dosages in order to get bigger weight losses out of people so now when when you do that it's like well doctors doctors got latitude because doctors prescribe and that's what doctors do yeah okay so now you slide through a flaky safety study that doesn't study long-term effects of this thing but it's enough that you can get 18 pounds of fat loss off of people the then we do that but meanwhile the doctors are immediately going to have this justification in their hands to give them bigger doses to lose 30 or 40 pounds nobody's even remotely touched that scientifically so here we are off to the races with a total FiOS and all you have to do is cut your leg off at the hip with the chainsaw and you lose 40 pounds overnight what's the problem what else we have AJ just there's a couple more questions but do you think that people are looking for what you might call shortcuts so that they can continue indulging in the pleasure trap but still get the results that they're seeking at the same time is that I don't think that they have any idea they are completely confused and have absolutely no idea what direction to do for weight loss it is not like they know but what they should do is get rid of the Fried Chicken get rid of the beef get rid of the oil get rid of the butter and and and rid of the Coca-Cola they actually don't know that if you if you actually cross-examine the average person who is completely mystified remember the average person has an average IQ and an average IQ is not very smart Okay so they they they're not very smart they are completely pleasure trapped they have where is where are they this is as if they know what direction to go they have no idea what direction to go they go to their doctor and they say oh I heard this weird thing that I should be eating potatoes oh no don't eat potatoes okay that's what their doctor's going to say you know I was just reading something I don't know some American Academy of nutrition well we we really think that uh you know the whole idea of energy IM balance is probably not the cause of the overweight the weight problem it's really this insulin resistance it's like oh really you guys are a bunch of paid off freaking shills is what you are obviously it's an energy balance problem for God's sakes any any insulin resistance is the result of the fact that we've had a long-term energy imbalance and the person's walking around with 50 extra pounds on it for God's sakes and what can you say you sit here and you realize we will go to our Graves and then basically the entire world will have been completely confused they just they just released a study 91% increased risk of cardiovascular disease associated with intermittent fasting where they're trying to argue that people that narrow their feeding window have a higher death rate but the city if you look at the say doesn't have anything to do with what people eat other words we would perfectly agree the most important variable is what you eat not necessarily when you're eating it or whatever and you know the recommendations we make to people to not eat three hours before you go to bed has nothing to do with increasing your risk factors from heart disease and this study doesn't suggest that it is but they'll take that that gets National publicity and now it's a wonderful opportunity to attack the people that are recommending people try to narrow their feeding window um you know as some kind of uh secondary tool to try to reduce how much crap they're eating super interesting that that'll get great generalized publicity and then people can go oh that means I need to be eating at least 16 hours a day so that's going to solve my problem I didn't eat in hours of that junk actually instead of recognizing you know it's all about how do you regulate what you put in your mouth it's actually really interesting uh uh that I'm sure that if I were to look at that study that's that study is uh effectively a criminal Enterprise so in other words somebody has very selectively gone in and found something that is extremely misleading uh and and somebody got paid to do it okay and somebody got paid to publicize this so there this didn't happen by accident the what Allan is saying must to be true other words and probably a lot of the people that are going to be using some some kind of a gimmicky behavior pattern try to lose weight so they're going to be on keto and and they're going to be um doing a fasting window so that's what they're reporting um those people not surprisingly if you're gor merging in a narrow fasting window a bunch of fried chicken uh to lose weight then no surprise that your heart attack rate went up over people that didn't bother okay because people that didn't bother were still eating some mashed potatoes uh as opposed to just straight steak so anyway to do a study and try to draw inferences where what you're eating is not a part of that parameter is obviously disingenuous and of course that's exactly what goes on though people you know they say statistics don't lie but Liars you do use statistics and there's no place that's more true in this Health Arena when it comes to dietary evaluations oh it's yeah the problem is the media you can have a hundred studies that'll be released that show that you know the better you eat the better you do nobody says too much but you get one poorly done study that misrepresents the the facts and you know and then people go uh you know that's that's what people want to hear so that's what will get sold by the media oh totally yeah it's not believe me those studies I know exactly what Alan's saying but I want to point out the studies aren't poorly done they are ingeniously done they are ingeniously done studies that are designed by nature to put something in a publication whose editorial board has been bought off so that that can get that can be Front Page New York Times this is all paid for okay so what the the BS that you're reading has been paid for this is not honest science that's being done so of course because this is because why because the very confused person that you just talked about is is trying to search for an answer to the reason that she's 50 pounds overweight you better believe she's trying to figure that out and so when she gets this she e one of two things absolute cacophony where you can't even tell because everybody's saying something different but there's a thread of consilience as to what it is that you hear so that the consensus is you just better go on OIC and I'm telling you and make sure you don't stop eating three hours before you go to sleep because I got dozens of emails since then saying am I at risk because I've stopped eating at six or S o'clock at night and you know now the steady says I'm gonna have a 91% increase of getting a heart attack because I I didn't have that late night snack now break out the Cheetos all right AJ let's take a couple okay well I'm just curious where you guys stand on this concept of fat shaming because so many people in our community are we're called fat shamers because we're even having a discussion and you can't even use words now like if you say um obese if you use it as an adjective like doctors will correctly you you can't say an obese patient you have to you know like everything is changing with language you have to say a person they're they're making it like really hard to even talk about it well you know these kinds of interesting sociological problems I have a colleague uh Dr Jen Hawk with her PhD in political science from Harvard um and so she's a person that is uh if if any of you are having struggling with this in your lives socially uh you may want to get a consultation with her because there there's nobody that knows more about that stuff from the inside you know she she was on the other side of that fence so I call it Berkeley speak like it's its own language that you have to choose the words just carefully and put them in just exactly the right order or else you get sued by somebody I mean what do I think about about this I think as follows and that is that uh my objective in communication is to educate and help people and that that means I do my best to try to tell the truth as clearly as I can uh I'm certainly not attempting to be insensitive but if people's feelings are hurt by what it is that I say because I didn't use Berkeley speak I don't care okay the the truth is I and a great deal of the re reactions that come from quote transgressions verly speak are actually uh what's happening on the other side of that equation is people have learned that there are resources that they can get uh by actually uh making a bunch of artificial social rules that don't make any sense and so this is this has been a this has been slowly rolled out in Academia over the last 30 years or so and this is now a tool of of uh various political factions for various reasons and as far as I'm concerned it's utterly disgusting okay I never intend to actually hurt somebody's feeling I'm I'm not interested in how the way Allan and I talk I me it's the entire flure Tru is basically saying listen if you have a problem with your weight the we're not shaming you that that that isn't the issue we'll try to educate you so that you understand the underlying cause and the once you understand the underlying cause that that is step one to correcting the problem the problem is difficult to correct and if you understand the underlying cause and you don't correct it I'm still not shaming you I'm just saying this is a problem that this is excruciatingly difficult you know I don't know that there's any any other place other than inside the book of the pleasure trout that makes such a concentrated exhortation about this is a difficult problem because the nervous system is being trapped if you ever wanted an excuse for being obese it's in the pleasure trap y it's telling you you've been duped by a pathological environment designed by nature to make you fat and sick for God's sakes once you understand that's true that isn't the solution that's the first step and that's all it is the rest of it is the dog fight of your life so anyway that's how so that's how I look at this thing and I'm not uh and but to say that it isn't Jen Hawk has had a beautiful phrase that came out of her mouth three or four years ago in one of these discussions she said it's not your fault but it's your responsibility right that and if you don't get that you never get out of it right and blaming doesn't get there and a lot of people even though they're not allowed to talk about it they're blaming themselves they're feeling their damaged goods they don't understand it's not their fault but the only person that's ever going to help them is them yes yeah that's that's the that that's a that's the key essential phrase it isn't your fault but it is your responsibility okay and of course because it's so overwhelming and confusing people would like to offload that responsibility blame other people blame the things that have happened to them blame the fact the world is shaming them because that they have weight problem it's like no there there are unfortunate and completely unnatural consequences to following your instincts in the modern environment that means some people a whole hell of a lot of people are they're going to have various addictive problems and one of them is going to result in people being obese and there are going to be enormous psychological consequences to that maybe for some people not that much but for a lot of people the price is going to be high that's why you know Allan very carefully sat down to figure out the subtitle of the pleasure cup we had the title for a while we're already working on the book but he was working on a subtitle that would really encapsulate the message that we were coming up with and he did it the hidden force that undermines health and happiness how accurate can you possibly get that is dead on and that that is the you know that is the issue it's not just your health also it's your happiness uh in many people the cost of the happiness is extraordinarily H yep it's true that thank you so got to thank Colleen for the Super Chat the only other questions I see are with the t-w and I've learned not to ask you then anymore we're not gonna go there all right the uh all right Allan anything else final words no you said it all will there be a sequel oh here's an important question who are you rooting for in the in the March Madness basketball game am I rooting for Doug I I'm not even paying any attention the uh I'm interested to watch this kid Caitlyn Clark in the women's and the women's at University of Iowa that that girl has the curry motion and she's dominated C college basketball withen so we're you know I really like the women's game now because they're actually doing a lot of the fundamentals and it's not just you know size dribble dribble dunk they're actually playing some basketball they they are playing very they are actually a joy and we're finding out that women are tremendous Shooters oh yeah they uh they have great technique and uh you know the women's game has has has arrived it's it's actually quite a thing to watch will there ever be a sequel to the pleasure trap um there won't be a sequel Allan has a something of a sequel that's coming out tell them about that alen well we have a new book it's coming out in June it's called confast save your life and it takes some of the core material from the pleasure trap and dramatically expands it to incorporate the new research that we've done and other people have done so can fasting save your life is definitely an extension of the part of the pleasure trap that dealt with fasting very good thank thank you so much Dr Lyall this is so funny I have this calendar and look what look what the quote is for my birthday it's one of your favorite quotes I can't say what it is not my circus not my monkey that's something I hear you say all the time and it's today on my birthday well thank you very much gentlemen I really appreciate this and and we'll see you sooner but we'll also see you next year and uh guys there might be a conference coming up pretty soon and they both might be speaking so make sure you get on my mailing list so you can get there and please come back tomorrow for another episode of Chef AJ live my guests are Dr Jim Lewis and Karen Dugan we're going to be talking about anti-inflammatory drugs versus turmeric

Channel: CHEF AJ

Views: 14,321

Keywords: aj, aj chef, alan goldhamer, broccoli mum youtube, chef a. j., chef aj, chef aj live, chef aj live today, doug lisle, dr alan goldhamer, dr doug lisle, dr lisle

Id: 8OpY8fmWG5U

Length: 70min 53sec (4253 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 22 2024