Why We Overeat: with Stephan Guyenet

hey guys so today I'm here with Stefan GNA he's the author of a book called the hungry brain about the science of overeating Stefan is actually a really good friend of mine he was one of my first parkour students and it was kind of a funny situation because we'd end up talking about diet nutrition and evolution after class like the whole group of people just sit around on this watch us talk for an hour so we became friends after that and gotten together and had chats for years and I just think that he has a really amazing take on on the science well reading that is really poorly understood and when you understand the brain the way that Stefan does and the implications about a reading it actually has major implications about the way that we deal with life in general so we're gonna have a little bit of a conversation about what's in the book and then kind of getting beyond that scope into what understanding kind of the roar'd hypothesis about diet tells us about the way that we engage in movement the way we engage in our social lives the way we engage with technology Devon thank you for being here my pleasure so tell us a little bit about the hungry brain what what is it about and what drove you to write it yeah so it's about the neuroscience of overeating and the basic thing that drove me to write it was the gap that I perceived between the what the scientific literature had to say about eating behavior and body fatness and the common general understanding of that in the pot in the general population so my background is in biochemistry and neuroscience and most recently I've applied that neuroscience to the study of eating behavior and obesity and essentially I feel like those fields provide extremely profound insights into why we eat too much and why we accumulate body fat and I saw that most people were not we're not getting those insights and so one of those I mean the basic of those insights that I think is is really just common sense but a lot of people really haven't incorporated into their worldview around eating behavior is that all behavior is generated by the brain and so and not just all behavior but all feelings all impulses all cravings all of those things are generated by brain activity and so once you realize that you realize that the brain is really a very useful frame for thinking about eating behavior and obesity and so that's essentially what I did with my book is I tried to bring all that science and that framework of looking at eating behavior and obesity in a way that's never really been done before in a general audience book yeah I mean it's yeah I mean it's it's a funny question but I think it does kind of get into some pretty important topics that I deal with in the book and I think to start to approach this topic a good way to do it is to acknowledge that both of those approaches can be effective and if you want to have a worldview that can explain all of the evidence it has to be able to explain both of those observations it has to explain the fact that randomized controlled trials of low-fat diets show that it promotes reduced calorie intake in weight loss and the more you restrict fat the more of a weight-loss you get and conversely the exact same thing is true of low carbohydrate diets so low carbohydrate diets and randomized control trials cause weight loss and the more you restrict carbohydrate the more weight loss you get and so the hypothesis that carbohydrate is bad and it's fattening and the less of it eat the more weight we lose is simply not consistent with the entirety of the evidence and neither is the hypothesis that it's all about fat and the less of that we eat the more weight we're going to lose so I think you have to come up with the worldview that incorporates all of that evidence and that is in a sense that's not dominated by macronutrients it acknowledges that macronutrients can matter but it's not dominated by macronutrients and so that perspective kind of I like to zoom out to you really it forces you to zoom out to more macro level principles that apply to both low carb and low fat diets and can explain both of those phenomena yeah so I believe that you you describe it that most people in the obesity research community struck something they call the reward hypothesis you describe to the audience a little bit what the reward hypothesis is and why that maybe explains why both a low carb and a low fat diet can actually be effective approaches to weight loss yeah so and I just wanted to start off by saying that it's usually not discussed explicitly as the reward hypothesis that is my attempt to kind of make it more explicit for the purposes of discussing it and evaluating it but there's yeah there's definitely a very strong prevailing belief that food reward and I'll get into what that is in a second is a major driver of excess calorie intake and excess body fatness and so reward is this concept that is it has three components it is our motivation it's our learning to be motivated and it's pleasure and so I think one concept that encompasses all of that and makes it easy to for us to understand is seductiveness so very high reward foods our foods that are very seductive and so for example plain boiled potatoes or plain celery or plain lentils plain almost anything is pretty low reward it's not something that is going to stimulate your motivation to eat it it's not a food that has a very high intrinsic motivational value so if you're hungry you'll eat a plain boiled potato but if you're not hungry you won't eat a plain boiled potato if you're not hungry you may eat a molten chocolate cake you know I was thinking about you yesterday actually I was reading the book and and yesterday I had the Maine potatoes it almost makes me think of you so many potatoes in my head duck fat and duck broth leftover and so I mix duck fat and duck broth salt and pepper and and butter into these potatoes and afterwards I was eating them Alaska is really hitting the glutamate there the mommy aspect of reward so it's healthy food in some sense but from a weight-loss perspective maybe much less effective in eating those potatoes without less added fats and without that added oh you know the duck broth is extremely concentrated in my liver yeah exactly and I mean that's what you want to do like that that's what your brain intuitively pushes you to do when you're eating a plain boiled potato your brain says what can I put on this to make it taste better right that is your motivational drive to increase the reward value of your food and that is a major driver that reward or the seductiveness of food is a major driver of our eating behavior and there are a few different ways to demonstrate that but a few that I like to do is break down foods so the the reward value of the food is very closely related to specific physical and chemical properties of that food so basically the reward value of food is your brains intuitive best guess as to how valuable that food is to you based on your species evolutionary history and so there are specific things that the brain is looking for in food that it uses to judge how valuable that food is how intuitively valuable that food is to you and it sets your motivation accordingly and so foods that are very concentrated in carbohydrate and fat and protein and salt and glutamate which is that Amami flavor that was in your potatoes and duck those things there are specific receptors in your digestive tract including your mouth but mostly in your small intestine your upper small intestine that detect the concentration of those things and cause dopamine to spike in your brain in proportion to their concentration and so you have this this system that senses nutrients and causes dopamine which is a motivation and learning chemical to spike in your brain basically in proportion to how valuable that presumably how valuable those nutrients would have been to our ancestors so your brain doesn't spike like your dopamine doesn't spike like crazy when you're eating plain celery and kale or plain boiled potatoes but when you're eating a mixture of highly concentrated rewarding nutrients like you have you have your potato but now you're gonna put butter on it which is highly concentrated fat and now you're gonna put some salt on it which is you know cute literally pure a purified reward factor all those things together then start to really get your dopamine going and yeah so essentially so you have this this palette of rewarding factors some of them you can subtract from your diet and some of you can't you can't subtract protein from your diet right I mean that's just not compatible with health but you can subtract carbohydrate or fat from your diet and when you do that when you systematically limit carbohydrate fat you're limiting the reward value of your diet and you're limiting the that intrinsic motivation will drive in your brain to eat more food and so I think this is at least part of the explanation for why you see spontaneous calorie intake decline on low carbohydrate or low fat diets you're basically giving the brain a pallet of foods that they could even be fairly satisfying foods maybe even tasty foods but you're not giving your brain one of these very fundamental reward elements that it wants to get out of its optimal diet so technical difficulty we switch spots you guys can see Stefan's beautiful face leave them be more easily so what I was saying is ok cool so the roar hypothesis allows you to understand why these two competing ideas can actually both have positive results but besides that does give you some leverage to to actually maybe create a better effect or help recognize how either of those things can go wrong because you know myself in the movement initially teaching people constantly have people who want to talk to me about food and want to berate me about how they only eat sprouted oats that they you know spread it for 16 hours or something like that and then the vegans are like it's got to be like this and Calum is like well you're really fit and you're really fit you have totally different theories so congratulations maybe its genetic so it's one point is okay I'm cool well now you understand something that helps both people but then also as soon as I see people who are vegan who are or suffering health-wise who I see them you know not achieving the results of the important the same thing with paleo people it's like they're a lot of people do well obviously but then there are people who who who who are not seeing the body composition changes that they want or like myself almost kind of very low strict low carbohydrate and I ended up becoming very physically exhausted and fatigued and unable to sustain the type of training that I want so okay that's a lot of things on pack but I wanted it to think how do how does this perspective help you set yourself up to make better decisions as opposed to adopting the low carb or the low fat perspective yeah I mean it's compatible with any perspective these are ideas that you could apply in a low carbohydrate setting the vegan setting the Paleo setting any of those and I would say as a matter of fact I would say that all of those all of those diets are already applying elements of this idea and that's probably part of the reason that they tend to promote weight loss but they're just not doing it explicitly and so I think it all depends on your goal because you know not everyone has a weight management goal and especially athletes may or may not have a weight management goal but I think that if you do have a weight management goal which typically people want to lose fat then reducing the reward value of your diet can provide some benefit and I think that and I mean basically you know the big concept I think that all this revolves around is basically ease of fat loss because if you I mean you can lose fat just by restricting calories if you just bean count your calories and you know how many calories you need or you just restrict until you start losing weight you can lose weight the problem is that it's not sustainable for most people so most people simply are incapable of struggling with themselves over the long term to to lose weight by simple portion control and so the question is how do you achieve that most easily and I think that eating a low reward diet is one tool in the toolbox and part of the reason and and it depends on how attached you are to reward you know one of the things I've learned is that some people are so attached to the way they eat there they're essentially completely dependent on having their palates entertained three times a day to such an extent that they almost are incapable of not doing that and that that's been actually a really amazing revelation for me to see that because I mean the way ie is it's not like it's a lot more interesting or as I would say a lot more appealing than like a hunter-gatherer diet if you really look at what actual hunter-gatherers eat it's like you're just eating like plain meat and plain tubers and berries off a bush and drinking straight honey and you know yeah yeah and like there's no salt for most groups there's little or no salt there's limited or no spices and herbs I mean the way I eat would be like extravagant to a hundred gather but you know I'll have a plate of food with a plain potato on it and I don't put butter or salt or anything on the potato and to me that's fine but to some people that's like abhorrent it's like unbelievably difficult to just eat a potato with that that's not like smeared with all kinds of stuff and so anyway the point I'm trying to get around to is I mean I think that each person has to find their point of greatest ease with weight maintenance and I think that for a lot of people despite what I just said I think for a lot of people there is an unrealized potential there with restricting reward the point is that the point I'm trying to get at is that it's all about finding your point of greatest ease for weight maintenance and despite what I just said that a lot of people have difficulty implementing a low reward diet I think once they're able to get over that speed bump and get more accustomed to a lower reward diet which for most people is possible they will find that it will make weight maintenance easier and essentially the reason is that you are not going to have non conscious brain systems that are constantly pushing you to eat more calories and you're not going to have to fight those systems all the time so this is the this is a really important tension that my book focuses on between the conscious rational mind and the impulsive non conscious irrational circuits that are the ones that control or at least that strongly influence much of our eating behavior so we have circuits to generate hunger we have circuits to generate cravings we have circuits that make us want to grab things that are in front of us and stuff it in our mouths we have circuits that like free food and all of this stuff is pushing us to eat more so some of the most important of those circuits their activity is basically dampened by low reward food so they their ability to push you to eat more is dampened by eating very very simple food or just simpler food in general and one of those is the system that we were talking about the reward system that pushes you to eat food that has these specific chemical properties that the brain finds very appealing and so essentially if you're eating simple food you're not going to be driven to the same degree you're not going to experience the same craving to eat more calories than you need and the second thing is that low reward diets actually appear to impact the way the body regulates your body fat so your body fatness is actually actively regulated and that ties in to your appetite and when you're surrounded by food that is very very appealing to the brain very very rewarding very very seductive the brain actually appears to increase the set point around which it regulates your body fat in that scenario and if you lower reward it seems to lower the set point around which your brain regulates body fats and the implication of that is that this struggle that you have when you're losing weight of I'm feeling hungry I'm feeling really tempted all of those things are dampened because those motivational systems are kind of curtailed by that lower reward diet yeah I remember when you first started talking about this because I think when when when we met you were more on the Paleo low-carb camp and and that and I can see why it's a little bit harder so because you know the low carbs are like you can have all the delicious steak and bacon that you want as long as you don't eat the cardboard you know on the flip side the low fats like as long as you stay away from saturated fats then you can have cookies you can have lots of sweet things so choosing to eat plain potatoes this is a weird it's it's a weird place to go but but having been myself through peers of cutting weight and and having struggled with the the psychological aspect of how strong your motivational systems will try to manipulate you into eating something and then like I cut my I cut weight so hard at one point I was feeding 1,700 calories a day and I was fasting for 16 hours a day and I started experiencing some starvation symptoms of extreme lethargy and fatigue and feeling cold all the time and you know that's no good that's a bad thing you don't want to be an esse to it especially if you're an athlete so one of the things that that was really amazing to me that you tell the story of a liquid diet experiment where people are drinking from a straw can you explain to the audience what happens when you feed something an extremely low reward diet yeah so yeah so just to back up a little bit the essentially the brain since it regulates body fatness when your body fat and starts to drop it activates what really is literally a starvation response and the strength of that starvation response is determined by the degree to which your brain thinks your body is starving so essentially it's listening to signals of energy status coming from your body especially the hormone leptin which represents your body fatness and if that starts to drop you start to get these compensatory responses which you described quite well basically the brain tries to find ways to get more energy coming into the body and less energy leaving the body and to build up its fat stores and so the in the 1960s there was a group of researchers who kind of stumbled upon this pretty extraordinary discovery and I don't think they were trying to they weren't really trying to study body fatness or weight loss but what they did is they had this setup where they had a bland liquid diet that was available to subjects in a very controlled hospital setting so this group of investigators they really weren't trying to study body weight or obesity at all what they were trying to do is figure out a way to really accurately measure food intake calorie intake I should say and that turns out to be a really difficult thing to do so they decided to take all the variables out of the equation and just basically give people access to a straw that with a button on it and every time they press the button 7.4 milliliters of this bland liquid diet came out and they could just press it as many times as they wanted to until they felt full and so they these people were in a hospital setting where they had access to no other food and this was the only food they had access to so basically their entire calorie intake was coming from this bland liquid diet and they were determining how many calories they ate by the number of pushes on this button that they were hitting and they were not told to you know restrict or anything like that they were just told to eat as much as they needed to feel comfortably full and so they had a they started with lean subjects and those people essentially maintained their calorie intake at a normal level for weight maintenance so those people ate a totally normal number of calories and they didn't gain or lose any weight in this plan liquid diet setting then they tried the same thing with people with obesity and it was the the result was remarkable essentially the people with obesity consumed very few calories per day on this blind liquid diet they're eating between like 150 and 300 calories a day and they began to lose weight rapidly and these people were the the key thing to note about this is that they were told to eat as much as they needed to feel full and they were doing that they were reporting feeling full eating very few calories and essentially as long as they remained on this bland liquid diet unrestricted again calories were not restricted they lose they lost weight rapidly and one of the subjects started at 400 pounds and over the course of about a year lost half of his body weight and all of this time he was reporting not feeling any hunger and this is very consistent with animal research suggesting that the type of diet that the animal eats has a very profound impact on how that animal regulates its body fatness so it's not just the passive process where you're like hey this doesn't taste as good I don't want to eat as much of it it actually affects the circuits in your brain that determine how much body fat your brain wants to carry or your brain defends against changes so I saw I wanted to elucidate that just a little bit more because I think it's a really key point that that generally we have a body fat setpoint that our body will defend through motivational changes so if you overfeed lean people what tends to happen yeah so overfeeding lean people it depends on the person what exactly happened what exactly happens at least in the short term some people will literally incinerate almost every last excess calorie you can you can feed people in a very tightly controlled setting where there's no other food going on the excess calorie amount is exactly the same for everyone some people will just incinerate almost all of it almost all the excess and not gain any fat some people will pack every single excess calorie directly into their body fat and then there's everything in between however what you tend to see is that after you stopped over feeding most of those lean people will lose the excess the ones that had gained fat will lose the excess fat back down to where they started so there is a system that at least in some people defends against fat gain although it's it's more effective in some people than in others and the mechanisms by which it does that there are several mechanisms and not all those operate to the same degree in every individual so then when you when you under feed people without respect to to food reward basically the converse happens you get people who are highly motivated like I talked a little bit about there's the Minnesota starvation study yeah absolutely so the the response of the brain I mean I don't think anyone listening will be surprised to know that the response of the brain to weight loss is a lot more vigorous and consistent than it is to weight gain and I mean I think that's consistent with the fact that more than half of Americans will be obese at some point in life but it's very difficult for that person with obesity to become lean once again so the the lower limit is defended much more consistently and vigorously than the upper limit for most people yeah so the Minnesota starvation study is a really interesting really interesting example of that it was conducted by Ansel keys the famous nutrition researcher famous of the seven countries study and it was done in conscientious objectors around World War two these people were didn't want to go fight didn't want to go kill people or be killed and so the government said all right fine well you can get out of fighting in the war if you agree to participate in this really challenging experiment basically what we're gonna do is we're gonna under feed you by something like 30% of your normal calorie intake for I don't remember whether it was six months or a year or something in that range and these people lost a lot of weight they lost like a quarter of their body weight so I mean you see photos of them and they looked like normal lean people in the beginning and then by the end they're just like you know you can see all their ribs their skeletal it's it's they're quite weight reduced and he took a number of very detailed measurements of these people during the course of this process some of those measurements were physiological you know and body composition and then some of them were just observing behavior and psychological and what he noted is that these people their mental lives their internal psychological lives began to revolve around food so in the beginning you know they just had normal everyday thought process like all of us but by the end of it they were collecting cooking utensils they were thinking about recipes all day they were just daydreaming about food and dreaming at night about food their entire mental existence kind of started revolving around food and they actually it was so pronounced that they actually named it semi-starvation neurosis this type of obsession that developed in these people so these systems that regulate body fatness and regulate our motivation they're very powerful and they reach into a number of different brain systems and can kind of hijack a number of different brain systems in order to try to get you to eat food and some of those systems are you know high-level conscious systems that are the ones that are determining what we think about in our daily lives and this comes back to the way this lipo stat as I call it this fat regulating system works basically it's a negative feedback homeostatic system which is similar to what's in your thermostat so what what all those words mean is that in your thermostat you have a thermometer that measures the ambient temperature in your house and when and and there's a set value in that thermostat that you program and when the temperature deviates from that it kicks in corrective response to maintain stability or homeostasis of the temperature of your home so if the temperature starts to drop the thermometer detects that it kicks in a heating response so it turns out that there are many things in the body that are regulated homeostatic aliy like that because they have to maintain a stable range or else you get yourself in trouble things like blood pH blood co2 blood pressure body temperature is a great example that's a very tightly regulated variable and I think it's a really great illustration of this because your brain literally works like a thermostat in how it regulates body temperature except that the responses that uses are much more complex than your thermostat so the brain has literally thermometers it's listening to in your core and on your skin that allow it to detect your current core temperature as well as future threats to your core temperature and when temperature and and it has its set point right it's its set point of 98.6 plus or minus a degree or so that's the thing it's trying to defend and that's programmed into the brain and if your temperature starts to decline a little bit relative to that setpoint it kicks in a variety of behavioral and physiological responses to maintain that temperature so on the physiological side your blood vessels in your skin constrict you may start shivering you may it may activate your brown fat to generate heat and then on the behavioral side your brain makes you really want to put on a sweater or turn up the heat or have some hot cocoa or adopt postures that are heat conserving like this and then conversely there are a whole suite of physiological and behavioral responses when the heat when your body heat starts to increase too high and these responses are so effective that they can maintain our body temperature to within about a degree Fahrenheit when the outside temperature may be varying by seventy or more degrees so it's incredibly effective and as it turns out as I said many things are regulated like this and one of them is body fatness and body fatness is of course not defended as vigorously or as accurately as as body temperature but it's the same in the sense that it acts by a suite of behavioral and physiological responses that attempt to defend a set value that's in the brain and so if you start to lose weight like they did in the Minnesota starvation experiments your brain has a sensor and that is leptin which is a hormone that's in the circulation in proportion to how much fat you have so your brain measures the leptin just like your thermostat measures temperature and then if the leptin drops below the value that the brain wants that the brain is looking for and this is all non conscious of course then it starts to kick in a series of behavioral and physiological responses and those are aimed at getting more energy into the body and reducing the amount of energy that's leaving the body and so on the behavioral side you're going to have impulses and feelings that drive you to eat more food and drive you to be more interested in calorie dense foods so you're going to feel more hunger you're going to feel more cravings it's going to be harder to walk by the ice-cream aisle in the in the grocery store and then on the physiological side your calorie expenditure is going to decline so your your metabolic rate your basal metabolic rate will go down a little bit the calories that your body expends and physical activity will go down and all of that together the appetites the main thing the I should say the food intake piece is the main place where your body regulates so the changes in calorie expenditure are a much smaller lever than changes in calorie intake because they can calorie intake can vary much much more than your body's ability to restrict its own calorie expenditure so all of that together basically explains why weight loss is so difficult because when your weight goes down your brain kicks in all these systems all these systems that again in non conscious regions but and start to impinge on our conscious behaviors and experiences as they interact with other brain systems and those things are literally fighting our fat loss effort so the old idea that you know we all just need to eat less and anymore it's it's not really answering the central problem that we face exactly so it is correct in the narrow sense I mean there's no doubt that your calorie balance that is the number of calories you eat versus the number you expend is the I mean that's literally that the calorie value of food is literally the only food property that we know of that impacts body fatness it's the only property that's been convincingly shown to impact body fatness and so you know there's all kinds of nonsense on the internet about how calories don't matter and yadda-yadda it does it's incredibly important it's it's central but it's not the end of the story so even though eat less move more does work if you can implement it and maintain it it's very difficult to implement and maintain it's surprisingly difficult because of these regulatory systems that oppose it and so this comes back to the --use concept it's not that it's wrong it's just not for most people it's difficult enough that it's not a sustainable path you know the central idea that when I get out of this is like you can you can eat less or you can move more IA exercise of will but then you're always having to exercise that will and that seems to be unsustainable for most people over a prolonged period of time but if you can manipulate the that the body fat setpoint by changing the war value of your foods over time and some habits around you know the things that you're exposed to you can actually save yourself to a lower body fat setpoint so that you you don't have to consciously exert control and I think that's that it may not strike people as really exciting to to decide to take on a diet that involves eating multiple meals of plain potatoes or rice or or meat that's boiled instead of instead of fried and doesn't have salt and pepper added to it right like all these things are it sound kind of miserable um but but but it's probably less miserable to eat a meal that's a little bit less rewarding a couple times a day or three times a day than to be hungry all the time yeah that's right and and and really it comes back down to the ease thing like if the easiest thing for you is just to like willpower your way through calorie restriction then by all means do it but I I think that that's just not true for most people and we actually have a lot of randomized controlled trials that show that the simple portion control method does not work for most people it does not lead to durable fat loss I think there is a subset of people who just have like iron wills and you can make it work but I think that's a very small minority of people yeah and so I mean the bigger picture here there's there's the d'lai post at the energy regulating system that we're talking about but there's an even bigger principle over top of that and that is the simply the dichotomy between these non-conscious these non-conscious impulsive systems and the conscious rational systems that are butting heads in many waves in our lives and essentially you know to make the concept a little bit more exciting nobody wants to overeat right yet most of us do so there's something that is causing us to engage in behaviors that we do not consciously irrationally want to engage in and that harm us profoundly in terms of you know our health goals in terms of our athletic goals in terms of our appearance goals and so essentially the reason is that there are these non-conscious circuits that are driving us to eat too much because of how we evolved and so the higher-level principle that I'm getting at here is that giving those circuits the circuits are very reactive to the cues in your environment that you're giving it via your external environment as well as signals that are coming from the environment inside your body and if you can provide those systems with the right signals then you can essentially instead of fighting them all the time you can essentially recruit them to help you to help you control your calorie intake in an easier more sustainable and natural way and one way to do that is by the reward thing but I want to emphasize that there are multiple tools you can deploy to do that and I talked about multiple ways in my book so you know if you find that the reward idea is not very appealing to you there are other tools you can use that fall under that broader umbrella that could still be effective yeah sure I think one of the most straightforward ones is giving the satiety system the right cues so there we talked about the lipo stat or the energy homeostasis system that regulates body fatness but there's another system so that's that's the part of your brain that regulates your long-term energy status which is represented by your fat stores but there's a part of your brain in the brainstem that regulates your short-term energy status and that is regulated by your meal to meal food intake and so basically how this works is when you eat a meal all that food goes into your digestive tract and there are sensors primarily in your upper small intestine that signal what you ate back up to your brain and they tell your brain about many different things that's in that food but some of the most important ones for satiety are the volume of the food the volume of what you ate so that's coming from your stomach stretch receptors in your stomach the carbohydrate content the fat content and the protein content and essentially the brain and and based on all that information your brain stem generates a satiety response so it starts to make you feel full and and what what is satiety it's it's a motivational state or rather a lack of a motivational state to eat and it's a in it's a sensation and so essentially when your brain stem decides that you've eaten enough it sends out signals to motivational systems in your brain and to other places that shut down your eating behavior shut down your motivation to continue consuming food and so what are the principles that guide that process what causes your brain stem to say hey you've eaten enough well it turns out that those principles I'll get into those in a second but it turns out that they don't correspond very closely to the number of calories that you ate so the the brain stem is not really very accurate at matching satiety to the number of calories that you ate certain types of foods will cause more per calorie than others and it turns out that there are certain very simple food properties that predict how satiating it will be per calorie and so one of the most important is the calorie density so that just means how many calories are there in this food per unit weight so like a piece of chocolate has a very high calorie density whereas a piece of celery has a very low calorie density those are kind of the opposite ends of the spectrum and so the lower the calorie density the more satiety per calorie you experience and that's simply because the same number of calories will fill your stomach got more activate those stretch receptors more and that's a piece of the satiety puzzle in your brain also higher protein creates more satiety per calorie lower palatability or pleasure of eating basically creates more satiety per calorie and higher fiber creates more satiety per calorie in a lot of ways lower satiety Maps - so what is having this tiny piece well I think that you can create more satiety basically you can exact I mean you can accentuate that effect so you're basically approaching satiety trying to increase the satiety response by two different using two different tools that are both very powerful and if you put those together you're gonna get a larger response than if you use either one individually but one thing I really want to emphasize about this satiety concept that I'm talking about is that it corresponds really well to our intuitive ideas about what foods are fattening and what foods are not so if you look at foods that have properties that are there low satiety per calorie so high calorie density sometimes low protein not always low fiber because they're refined high palatability what you're gonna find is that that basically describes most junk foods it describes all junk foods so pizza cake chocolate cookies all of those things fit perfectly into that into that rubric now if you take the converse of that you get essentially unrefined whole foods more similar to what our ancestors used to eat you get fresh fruits fresh meats eggs oatmeal very simple unrefined foods that have a high water content high protein sometimes not always often high fiber and just very simple foods like what our ancestors used to eat those tend to have properties that are higher satiety so I think this concept really kind of gives a an empirical basis it gives a I should say a mechanistic basis really to some of our intuitions about food and what's fattening and what's not so I want to start bridging off into some of the how how this is basically understanding the brain helps us think about our life in a modern world in a more general sense before we get there I wanted to go back to the warp factors and and there's something you just said about our brain isn't very good at actually cal calculating calorie density they it wraps into a big issue which is our brains evolved for very specific purposes they evolved to solve problems in very specific environments and they and they're they're not perfectly efficient or objective read they you you you don't the book you talk about the fact that the only micronutrients that we can detect by flavor is salt because for some reason we needed enough salt in our diet that it was useful for us to seek that and then many other animals don't have receptors for salt but we don't have receptors for state vitamin A or fur or magnesium for calcium for all these other things that that that we may be missing in our diet today because it wasn't worth it for evolution to build that capacity in it's expensive to build things into a human being see you you want very simply heuristics that allow you to get the benefit of it and that's big that's conditioned on the evolutionary environment so can you go over the the primary satiety factors again and then what those might have signaled as far as the nourishments that were available the broader nutrition is available in the concessional yeah absolutely so first of all I just wanted to say that I I don't know if all animals have it but I think most animals do sense salt and a lot of them are motivated by it but not necessarily all of them but the yeah so for protein that's a big satiety factor per unit calorie that's the most satiating macronutrient and well not primarily it is so it depends on whether you're looking at it from reward perspective or from a satiety perspective because those are actually different separate pathways which is kind of strange but but true what at what I mean by that is separate like all the way down to the gut even though they're detecting some of the same things they do it doesn't seem to be carried by the same nerve impulses it's really surprising but if you're looking at it from a satiety perspective I believe it's just amino acids in general and there may be specific amino acids I don't remember but it's not specifically tied to glutamate although glutamate does glutamate specifically does have a satiety effect and but if you're if you're talking about reward protein and glutamate so amino acids in general and glutamate seem to have kind of separate effects but I wanted to take things just a little step back to answer your question I think that it's better to look at it from a reward perspective than a satiety perspective because reward is really that's where you're talking about what the brain wants and so if we're talking if we're thinking about why evolution if we're thinking about evolutionary drive for certain types of nutrients I think looking at it from a reward perspective is more informative and so for protein I think it's pretty obvious you know our tissues are made of protein most of them and it performs a lot of essential functions in the body carbohydrate and fat are principal sources of calories calories are very very important obviously and I spend a lot of time in the book talking about why it's important in a natural setting and talking in illustrating empirical going over empirical evidence that natural selection really has selected for a calorie seeking brains specifically now aside from their calorie value I think fat and carbohydrate have some intrinsic value because carbohydrate is used for a variety of things in the body and if you're not eating it your body is going to make it so no matter you know if you eat zero carbohydrate in your diet your body is going to maintain a level of fasting glucose that's not that different then if you're eating tons of carbohydrate it might be somewhat different but it's not radically different so glucose is something your body needs and if you don't eat it from your diet it's going to make it so that's something the body wants to obtain it's more costly it's more difficult to make it than to just ingest it furthermore carbohydrate supports high intensity physical activity and that is probably would have been really important in an ancestral context if you're eating a very low carbohydrate diet it's pretty clear from the research at this point that that will impair your physical performance and at least anecdotally some people feel that it impairs their recovery that is the most calorie dense substance on the planet by a long shot the only thing that comes close is alcohol and so I think that explains why our brains really really want it but it also carries some essential nutrients such as polyunsaturated fatty acids that are you know essential to health so then there is actually a bit of a distinction that the brain makes between sugars and starches and we seem to have the special affinity for sugar and you can't really taste starch in your mouth but you can taste sugar there are specific receptors for sugar for free sugars and my guess is that that's simply because sugar evolutionarily is associated with or honey both of which are very safe calorie sources I mean fruit literally evolved to feed animals that's its purpose and so doesn't mean every fruit is good for you but I mean if you find the right fruit that evolved to feed you it's probably not gonna hurt you it literally evolved to feed you and then honey of course you're stealing this amazing resource that bees painstakingly hoard and and it doesn't contain any any toxins and then glutamate is is kind of an interesting one because it is not only an amino acid a constituent of protein but it's specifically something that occurs in cooked meats and so I would I don't know if this is literally true but I would speculate that we have a particular affinity for glutamate because cooked meats have lower parasite burdens you get rid of all the parasites and you can extract more calories and protein from cooked meat than you can from raw me I'm not sure I think I've I think I may have read some study to that effect I'm not I'm not well-versed on that but the brain is very good I mean basically your dopamine system responds in part to the amount of protein in your food and if you're able to extract more protein and faster then you probably get more of a dopamine spike so it would make sense that chimps would respond to that just in the same way that they would respond to like a candy bar yeah you know so a couple years ago we were sitting down to drinks and you said what the food industry has effectively done has been able to divorce flavor from nutrition so all these were war pathways that we have there now they can now be hyper stimulated by things that don't contain the micronutrients that we didn't involve to seek so now we can get things that that the Jack the reward system up and create essentially an addictive response room to food but don't deliver the nutrition so we can actually in some sense end up in a place where we're hyper nourished for calories but actually malnourished for nutrients because we didn't evolve to seek the micro yeah absolutely so in and and this comes back to your previous question that we evolved heuristics as you put it very simple heuristics to get ourselves nourished and those heuristics are simply going for these calorie rich substances plus salt I mean that's really what our primary food heuristics boil down to in terms of our motivation well yeah any anything that's acting directly on the reward system that's like a workaround but I mean in an ancestral setting where our ancestors lived if you're eating fat and protein and starch you're getting the whole package you're getting the because there's nothing but unrefined whole nutritious foods there's nothing else available you don't have the technology to extract the things that spike your dopamine from the things that don't so as long as you're getting enough calories you're getting everything you need in terms of the micronutrients and the fiber etc yeah so what technology has essentially allowed us to do is concentrate and extract the active ingredients that spike dopamine in the brain that's literally if you look at the march of progress throughout history in terms of food technology you can trace that cultures throughout history have basically been able to get better and better at concentrating the things that spike dopamine in the brain and mixing those together in ever more appealing ways and so the history of glutamate is a great example so the first source of free glutamate was probably just to meet and we evolved to really really like that flavor and then as time went on we probably developed pots and then we could make bone broth and that has higher levels and then eventually we learned how to make fish sauce in ancient Roman times and in ancient China they were making fish sauce they were making soy sauce and that has very high levels of glutamate and then this process culminated with the discovery of monosodium glutamate in Japan which is literally the crystalline purified form of that reward factor that our brain looks for that spikes dopamine and now you can just take this pure dopamine powder and just sprinkle it on your food same for salt same for sugar those are crystalline reward substances and it's very analogous to cocaine I mean the coca leaf is a leaf that was chewed is chewed by certain South American cultures that's a mild stimulant it's like drinking a cup of coffee but if you purify and concentrate the reward factor the thing that spikes your dopamine in it you get cocaine which is a much more addictive substance and then if you further chemically alter it such that it crosses your blood brain barrier faster and that's as crack cocaine then it becomes even more rewarding and so essentially each processing step makes it more and more effective at spiking your dopamine it makes gives it a greater and greater addictive potential and so that's exactly what we've done we have through technology that our ancestors didn't have they literally did not have the ability to do this or they would have done it at least I should say the average person didn't have the ability to engage in this regularly but now we have the ability to extract pure fats and have them in unlimited abundance we have monosodium glutamate and everything related to it like yeast extract and all these things that the food industry adds to our foods to avoid saying that they have msg even though it's the same thing we have the purified salt we have purified sugar we have purified starch and all of that other stuff that naturally comes along with it in a natural environment the vitamins and the fibers and the polyphenols and all the other things that play supporting roles for our health our brains just don't instinctively care about that stuff they would rather have just the concentrated fat sugar starch and salt and forget about all this other crap so I think you I think you may have actually discovered what I think is perhaps the central problem of modern life because it's not just a problem that's associated food the obesity epidemic is part of a broader set of problems that all come down to the fact that we can hijack reward centers in the brain with technology in a way that we never had before and in doing so we can create addictive responses in people so when you you said that to me the thing that I thought immediately was okay if if if junk food or industrial food these flavored wars from nutrition what about pornography that's just that's that sexual pleasure divorced from the context or relationship you don't have to work for it anymore I don't have to maintain a positive relationship with a partner a video game like is a way of essentially experiencing what it feels like to be able to be a great parkour athlete a great martial artist a great a hunter without ever having to leave your your house and and then the big one that that that that really struck me hard at that time was that social media is a way of of essentially getting the hit of dopamine that get from from the approval of your friends in in it in a consistent little drip it's like the the moment that that they invented that little like button it's like we're like little rats in a giant operant conditioning experiments the biggest operant conditioning experiment in history and we're hitting and we're reinforcing it and it's interesting because I had never heard anyone describe it like that when I put out a video about two years ago about this but more and more intelligent people talk with this idea of the dopamine drip so social media and I lost them you now were chatting you're talking about how you're trying to train yourself away from from Twitter so I think that this the fact that we that we have this learning hormone dopamine there reinforces behaviors that that there are signals of something from the ancestral environment that can now be hijacked by a product but maybe that's the best way to make a product right now the best way to make a product is to make something that hijacks a reward center that you can deliver as cheaply as possible and gain as much control of people just be hey view so if that's if we can do that in all these different pathways and and there's an obvious and scent of structure to do that then what we do will be less and less decided by us and more and more a way of creating capital for some some broader system so so I'm not sure the audience will necessarily completely understand the dopamine system and why this is so powerful and what this indicates about this broader picture but that's what I really wanted to dig in be with you so you can you go in in greater depth into what dopamine is how it interacts was Brandon how how the motivational systems in the selection of behavior is driven by these specific neural processes yeah absolutely so I think you know food is a great example that we and we can generalize from there but essentially your brain has a series of hardwired goals things that you know natural selection has wired into your brain as important goals that you should try to achieve in your life things like eating food having sex thing you know warm avoiding certain types of dangers you know not liking spiders and snakes stuff like that the so and then essentially when you engage in a behavior the degree to which it accomplishes one of those goals will determine how much dopamine gets released basically at least initially so if you're eating a food and it has tons of sugar tons of fat in a very concentrated form your brain gets wind of it and you're gonna get a bunch of dopamine and essentially that does two things one of them is it sets your motivational state so when that dopamine is spiking you're gonna want to keep engaging in the behavior that you're engaging in so eating a piece of pizza or whatever the second thing that it does and arguably more important is it causes it sets your future motivation for that thing and so the way that works is that whatever you're doing when the dopamine hits it your brain pays very close attention to everything that's happening at that moment and it takes in all the sensory cues that are associated with that situation so it remembers the appearance of the slice of pizza what the pepperonis look like what the box looks like where you were what it tastes like what the texture is who you're with all those things it remembers by virtue of that dopamine release and those things become motivational triggers in the future so the next time you encounter and so dopamine it actually climbs up the causal ladder to the furthest cue that predicts that reward so the next time you smell the pizza the dopamine starts to spike and that triggers your motivation to engage in eating that pizza that's basically the brain saying this is a situation in which you can achieve an important goal creates an intrinsic motivation for you to do that and then you know at first maybe it's the smell that motivates you and then eventually one you know maybe just driving by the sign of the pizza store or seeing that logo on TV the most distal cue that's an accurate predictor of pizza in your belly is what's going to spike your dopamine the most and and that dopamine essentially reinforces pathways of motivation and behavior in your brain and it sets so and and what that does reinforcing those pathways essentially sets your behavioral intensity and your behavioral priorities and so this is essentially why people who are addicted to cocaine or crack or whatever meth their lives can be destroyed essentially because dopamine mediated reinforcement of drug seeking and drug use is so powerful that they will prioritize behaviors related to that over every single other thing in their lives their brain has set its priorities because that dopamine is saying this is the most important goal you can achieve right now and so that may be more important than social relationships and they be more important than holding down a job may be more important than then eating than having a home whatever it is having teeth so so that's what it does priorities prioritize your behaviors and and your sets your level of behavioral intensity or motivations is another way to say that and so and as I said there are certain hard-wired goals that dopamine responds to and these specific food properties are a very powerful one obviously sex is another very powerful one and social interaction is another very powerful one like social accolades for example and some people have argued and I think convincingly that information acquisition is another one and so there's this book called the distracted mind that I found really interesting that I've brought up with you a couple times that argues that you can apply very similar principles to understanding human information seeking that you can apply to human food seeking so basically these principles of foraging for food in a natural environment the the mathematical principles that I talked about a little bit in my book that explain what humans try to you know forage for and what they don't not just humans but many animals those can be applied to information foraging so one of the key things that makes humans unique is that we live or die by information you know in an ancestral environment that's really one of the key things that drives our success in our survival is our ability to acquire and retain information that's probably a big reason why we have such long lifespans is because information you know your ability to accumulate information over a life span makes you a really valuable person to your descendants and so anyway so we have this intrinsic motivation to acquire information and social media and there are many types of information some of us just factual some of this social information about what people are doing in your social environment and social media I think for me Twitter I'm immune to Facebook fortunately but Twitter really pushes my buttons and it's that you're getting those little dopamine hits with these little information nuggets and one of the things that the brain seeks the most they argue in this book is novel novel information and so you know if you check the news once and then you check it five minutes later it's the same so that's not a novel stimulus but with Twitter there's this cascading series of novel information nuggets that you can read you can click through on and it has that social reinforcement aspect it's like did did they like my tweet did you know did I like their tweet did they retweet it there's like a social ladder it's a social climbing aspect it's interesting because I use Twitter very passively and I use Facebook very actively so I I can see that there's two very different kind of systems that are triggered there because when I post a new video on Facebook sometimes you know some of our videos have over a hundred thousand views and you know four hundred lights or you know foreigner shares on some of the videos so we post a video and and and I just get this this feed of information saying we love you you're awesome right and it's incredibly reinforcing and I and four weeks after I put out something really successful I'll find myself refreshing my feed so subconsciously all the time just just because I've been so reinforced by what I did you know it's it was a huge hit of dopamine and it reinforced all the behavior around that on the flip side I don't tend to post a lot on Twitter mostly it you know just feeds my Instagram to Twitter but why do with Twitter is well actually I pretty much isolated myself from Facebook to some degree for various reasons I took I killed my my newsfeed so I was not looking at it but then I started using Twitter and Twitter is the same thing for me where it's like it's just interesting information over and over again one of the things that they say in the book that's really Justin to me though is that that dopamine is not in its in itself inherently pleasurable necessarily but it's associated with with hormones that cause pleasure but this is something that I find interesting about Twitter I'll be like I'll be strolling through Twitter and I can feel it's reinforcing to get these little bytes of information but I actually don't feel like it increases my happiness or well-being this is it's the same thing with social or with social media right it's like it's a very cheap delivery system of something maybe very constant it's very reinforcing of the behavior but it doesn't have the same full-depth emotional experience that's something like you know the ultimate experience for me is like I climbed through a waterfall with 15 of my friends and then we're all deeply scared and you're cold and it was amazing and then we would and sat down and had an amazing meal and then we're in the sauna together like that's that's rewarding on a much broader set of levels and it gives me some sense of meaning in whereas they're the addictive thing of going you know what are people saying about this new issue this initiative just initiated actually I I think it makes me depressed actually anything that the information is coming out more and more that social media use is certainly highly correlated with depression and it's not clear what the causality is there's a bunch of new studies that are showing that basically the more you use social media the more likely you are to be depressed they talked about that in the distracted mind as well yeah I think it's really interesting I mean I I haven't really noticed a mood linked with myself but I do notice that Twitter in particular can really cut into my productivity and I and you know being so immersed in this understanding the reward system the motivation system and also having a background in meditation that I've spent many years kind of observing my own mind I really can very acutely feel this this poll that Twitter exerts on my mind my behavior that is not entirely constructive and and you know I I want to acknowledge that these things do have some value you know Twitter does have value it is very informative it keeps me up to date and I do have social interactions that I enjoy on Twitter so I don't want to just say it's just a bad thing but I think that you know we have this marketplace of food and of Technology and all these things that's very competitive and basically the things that are the most addictive are the ones that survive in this hyper-competitive marketplace and I think despite its value Twitter and Facebook and those things are reinforcing to the point of being disruptive and so at least in in many people and so I've personally started to withdraw from it at least withdraw my active participation I still use it professionally to post things but it's been really interesting feeling the pull of it subside like I would kind of almost compulsively check it throughout the day and whenever I needed a break I would just automatically go to Twitter and not using it almost at all for a week those impulses are really subsided and it feels good it feels like I'm regaining control over aspects of my behavior yeah so I've been trying to D train myself off of using social media and also off of consuming information primarily through the internet so rather than like reading blogs I've been trying to read a lot more books so couple things have been interesting you know if doing that is one the compulsiveness that comes with it also you know books are great because you can read them much a much more in-depth argument you can think a little more deeply about things but the thing that I'm thinking about is that like your brain actually meets fallow periods it means like if you are constantly addicted to social media um you never stop receiving input from outside of your own internal system which makes it harder to listen to your intrinsic systems I I've been thinking about what about nothing like not even meditation but just like contemplation just sitting down and not having something but there's something so addictive about that that information yeah I agree I mean just look at people these days with the smartphones I know I'm sounding like an old old man these days isn't it the smartphone's but I mean there's no downtime for the mind like whenever there's a break and I'm sure many of the people watching this will will feel that this describes them but we pull out our smart phones and we fill it up with looking at something and you know I'm not I'm not a psychologist I'm not a psychology researcher but just my own speculation is that there's value to boredom I mean when I was a kid I was bored all time I don't think kids are born these days no I don't think we're bored and I think well there's two things that are really interesting about that one is there's research that shows that boredom is is a source of creativity people people will make up things because they're bored and that's useful the other is this this idea of like where do your what is the where did you come from in some sense or where do your thoughts come to there's a quote in the book I've I think I think it's from our Scott Baker's work principle nothing serious but it's a fictional philosopher in this world he says something along the lines of to read is to voluntarily allow your self to be moved by another soul your your thoughts your letting your brain be taken over by somebody else's thoughts in a sense so when we when we when we become reliant and dependent on external sources of information constantly we are you're actually in some sense outsourcing the creation of our thoughts to some broader societal entity which which may which may be positive and I want to go into why I think there's really some positive things that we have to acknowledge because I don't think we can get rid of it without recognizing what it or where it's useful but I think it's really potentially dangerous it's like it's very easy to fall into a stream of information whether it's you know the Albright or the social justice warriors and you can get that little behavior pathway that little set of thoughts constantly reinforcing you never have to think about anything outside of the scope of what those people are thinking about and you can constantly feed yourself that so here I'm gonna drop for Dan Peterson's Angela mm-hmm every time we talk that name comes up Fenna dollars bugs you by - but you talked about the idea that social media isn't an echo chamber it's actually an amplifier right it's actually building the signal on these things so when we when we jump into that we're actually participating in in these applications of any sort of extremes of thought and maybe becoming less complete individuals because of that less left self developed less self could be I mean I think another issue that I that concerns me is we are living in a high dopamine world now and we know that if you induce a high dopamine world in animals by giving them some highly rewarding stimulus like drug access or human junk food for example it changes their brain in ways that are not good and we are surrounded by dopamine stimuli to an extraordinary extent compared to our ancestors it's in food it's porn its media it's our you know social media it's many different things that surround us that have basically been selected because they spike dopamine as well as drugs you know we we think oh I don't do drugs but most people do they either drink caffeine or alcohol it's always both yeah and most people smoke marijuana I mean honestly we're in Seattle except it's legal here I actually don't smoke myself but but I you know I think I could probably count on one hand a number of my friends who never participate yeah yeah so I mean essentially we're just kind of like saturated with these dopamine spiking stimuli and I I don't know exactly what effects that has on the brain but I think there is strong reason to speculate that it might be really not good and certainly since dopamine prioritizes your behaviors it's going to prioritize your behaviors toward those things that spike your dopamine and the manifestations of that can be pretty negative like addiction to drugs addiction the gambling addiction to porn you know there's video games I think video games are a great example actually that's video games are probably the one thing I've won rewards stimulus that I'd struggled with the most in my life yeah I completely banished video games from my life not completely but almost completely when after college it just was such a motivational draw on me and such a waste of time that I said I can't do this anymore I don't want to do this and so I just never put another one on my computer and that was it so I actually I think have relatively low responsibility games like when all the kids start playing video games when I was young I was like not that interested but when I was 15 or 16 them for the first of the Elder Scrolls series came out the second of the other school services for some reason that game really triggered whatever was in my brain that was available triggered so I played the elder scrolls so the last one the last one we came out with Skyrim which came out a lot I think 2011 or 12 came out before my daughter was born and I ended up playing 230 hours of Skyrim and I would play till 3:00 in the morning Wow and and so I I was like beat the gears you get some power metal for that I was done with it and I thought to myself what could I have done with those 230 hours and like it was super fun while I was doing it but what did I gain as a human being yeah I played those to her so he obviously hit a lot of Japanese you did you know and it's like it's not that that that things that are just pleasurable worth doing sometimes just from ourselves it's like you need it to blow off steam occasionally but if the thing that you blow off steam doing is going to automatically blow up like you can you can read a attraction novel for 30 minutes and put it down right but you pick up Skyrim it's like six hours go by and you don't know what happened and that that's a I think that's a real problem and I think that you know I think it's particularly big differ young men because of the way the video yeah the senton we can see that men are falling behind him in in school starting boys are falling behind in school it you know basically from the time they enter school not a majority of college graduates are female like women are competing at the workplace now like if you're under 35 I think the women are now our learning men if they're you know you control for them being in the same professional fields now you know that's great the women's are doing well but it's it's problematic if men fall too far behind right because you know well that's bad for men it's also bad for women because women have to meet with men the most part not all of them but uh but that's it you know it's a real problem so but I wanted to go back to social media for a second because I I've been thinking about this a lot because my professional life owes itself to social media I'm able to travel the world and teach what I teach because it's been spread through social media I've been thinking about this a lot myself because my professional life in many ways it's dependent on social media it's it's it's become possible like I devoted mininum years of my life to parkour which I only knew about through social media innocence and that community developed through social media and I've been able to travel a world and teach had developed business because of social media and in even going back before that like I grew up pretty isolated and I was interested in very sophisticated intellectual things that are very young age and that did not really work with the peer group that have available for me in the small town I grew up in so it's very socially isolated and I remember the first time I was like really motivated to care about a group of people was a online Tolkien fandom the Lord of the Rings fandom and and so for the time I was like 15 years old I was always embedded in these online communities that that ended up being very meaningful to me and I've made friends all around the world from so there's a there's something that's there that it's very powerful and I thought for many years that that the Internet in some senses like uh it increases the spread of outcomes than you can experience right because now you have almost you have a huge amount of the world's potential information right all the tons of books and Wikipedia articles and whatever tip to understand any subject or you can play farmville or you can look at pornography all day right so you can either be the most distracted person or or you can make yourself a so much more informative person and actually embed yourself in useful communities through the internet it seems to me that the net effect is probably to the negative and that even if you're the type of person who tries to make the positive happen that well maybe this the systems are actually getting more and more sophisticated and manipulating your behavior and so I'm I'm curious and this is maybe this is too difficult of a question of something but the how do we recognize what was useful and building systems that we can maintain was useful Wow starting to recognize how it's moving our behavior yeah it's a tough one I think I think first of all there are gonna be winners and losers and essentially the winners are going to be the people who can carve a constructive path through all of these reward stimuli that are fighting for their attention fighting for their behavior and but I think most people have a hard time with that and they're going to honestly be ruled by their impulses and engage in destructive behavior and I think that's a lot of what we're seeing in this country right now and how do we find that path though I'm not sure I mean for myself I can literally feel the pull of reward on my behavior when it's strong and I've learned to identify that as a potentially problematic feeling it's not always problematic I mean sometimes it's it's there for a reason and it's good but especially when I'm feel rewarded I know that that reward has been created by some corporate entity for its own profit motive that to me is kind of a red flag then we have maybe intrinsic signals that are we talked about regulation of appetite like is there a positive regulation of appetite that you can tune in to effectively beyond beyond you just have to rationally control what your food is or is there actually like a point at which you can learn to listen effectively to your appetite um I mean I think that's a pretty tall order honestly I think that that involves some pretty powerful conscious manipulation of unconscious urges and I think that unconscious impulses let's say are very resistant to conscious control and I think that's by design those are basically your fail-safes that in an ancestral environment keep you from doing stupid things like starving yourself but something is telling you that the war that you're experiencing on Twitter is not worth the cost yeah and that's that's a there's a longer term system yeah telling you so right so I guess the the distinction I would make is there's a difference between trying to control your behavior the moment and planning in advance and planning in advance is much easier than trying to control it in the moment because if you're sitting and just to create a concrete example of that if you're sitting in front of pizza or brownies or ice cream or whatever your favorite food is it's a lot harder to tell yourself not to eat that then if you're not sitting in front of pizza and brownies and ice cream right and so I think that's the key to that's a key to regulate your impulses in a productive constructive direction is to create an environment for yourself where you're feeding your brain the right incentives essentially and I mean the incentives that I'm familiar with most familiar with revolve around food and I don't know as much about how you would do that for other incentives but certainly you know one example for my life is not allowing myself to go to Twitter very often and I'm making that decision in advance I'm not putting myself in front of Twitter although it's hard when you have your computer in front of you and a click of a button and you're there so yeah it's one of the few things that I've been doing to kind of improve my social media hygiene is i-i-i have kids right so I wake up but I feed my kids and then I actually walk them to school it's a one of my rules is that I don't get to look at my feed of any any electronic feed until after I get home from school so that provides basically two hours that my brain is not immediately going into that reward cycle and then another one that I've been trying to do is is to is to minimize how many windows I have open it'll any one time so I can't click away hmm and also if I am gonna read something I now tell myself you have to read the whole thing you don't get to like hmm you don't get to to reward you're distracted Villa but I like having four different interesting articles open and reading multiple at the same time it's like if your brain is too tired to continue reading this thing stop and allow yourself to be bored for a second and when your attention ya who's ready to get you you stay on task yeah makes sense I think another thing that could work that has worked for me and that I think could be a powerful tool is deleting certain things off your smartphone so I deleted the Twitter app off my smartphone that was the worst offender I did that a long time ago I would wake up in the morning just grab my phone and then I was on Twitter and half an hour later I'm like what the hell happened but I mean you could either also delete your browser or make it difficult to access so that it is so that there's an effort barrier to get to it if you want to look something up on the internet that way you're not going to do it unless there's a really good reason to do it and get rid of all those apps like Facebook app and all that that kind of sucks you in keeps you in maybe you have like the only type of media on your phone is like your Kindle app with books on it or something like that if you need to kill time or you're on the bus or something so wanna be respectful of your time we should wrap up pretty soon I think one of my central ideas is basically what we need is is cultural technology to deal with whatever the present problems are and the fact the fundamental problem that we have is that the environment is actually changing faster now than ever because of technology technology is expanding exponentially so we exist in an obesogenic environment and what we're really actually need to build is a cultural toolkit that helps us moves through that in the same way that people who had to eat things that were potentially poisonous had to build a cultural toolkit that they that got rid of the poisons so before we we break could you break down what you currently think are the most important sort of cultural technologies that someone can adopt in order to control their weight management over time I think wow yeah that's a big topic and I guess it it all depends on what you mean by culture but I'm assuming you mean like a something that's not just about individual behavior but something that's like about family or social behavior and it's transmitted through generations culture to me is it's repeated patterns of behavior that are that are not they're not innate right that they're built right it's like a it's like a form of technology basically that we carry forward into the future so so having for instance three meals a day is is a cultural technology one meal a day would be a cultural technology eating every time that you eat with summit with your family that's a cultural to note eating only eating and not eating and watching Technica TV that's that's like those can be rituals look those can be decisions that you make about the way that you you operate that will have effects so you know the big things that I'm thinking about a things like well how do you use the grocery store how do you wear D how do you put food in your environment such that it's less likely to cause that I love the experiment talked about in the book of where they did the Hershey's Kisses mm-hmm right if you have a ball of Hershey's Kisses on your desk versus in your drawer versus six feet away yeah what does that have an effect in that I think I like my mom was lean and fit til til she started an office job and then she immediately gained 20 pounds and she told me it was because there's M&Ms like everybody was like she can't not eat the M and s not like that's a decision that people could change I they could say okay let's not have sugar yeah it's amazing though to what degree people will rationalize the desire to have junk food around it's some people are in in to making changes and not having that stuff around and some people will fight tooth and nail to have their M&Ms it's powerful stuff but yeah I mean I think I think there are a lot of ways that we can behave culturally that would kind of passively control our food intake in a more in a more healthy and slimming direction by passively I mean without having to you know explicitly and specifically exert willpower to control behavior in the moment obviously it takes some willpower in advance to make certain decisions to set yourself up in certain ways but a lot less than just controlling yourself in the moment so and a lot of this is stuff that I cover in the book and I can't fit it all in but I think a really simple heuristic that you can use is to eat unrefined foods I think that that is something that is it might kind of seem like common sense it might seem trivial but I think that is one of the basic things that you're going to get most that you're going to get the most value out of in your life if you apply it consistently unrefined foods tend to have a lower calorie density that tend to have a lower palatability naturally they tend to have more nutrients and fiber and essential and non-essential nutrients that tend to support health better so I think that's a really simple heuristic I think active commuting is a really great simple heuristic I think that selecting foods based on their satiety per calorie is a technology that you could apply I think cooking food for yourself is a really simple cultural thing I mean if we look at how our how our relationship with food has changed in the US and every affluent nation as the obesity epidemic has progressed what you see is that we've gradually outsourced our food preparation to professionals either the restaurant industry or the processed food industry that represented by foods in the grocery store we do a lot less work in the kitchen than we used to we make a lot less food from scratch than we used to we're letting other people do that and those people's motivations are not necessarily those people's motivations and goals are not necessarily aligned with all of our motivation and goals and particularly when it comes to health and weight they may not value those outcomes their primary thing that they value is getting you to engage in purchase behavior and the ability to do that effectively tends to correlate with the ability to cause you to eat more because you make highly rewarding foods that reinforce purchase and consumption behavior so I think if you can take food processing back into your own hands and start having your guiding principles be the ones that you want to reinforce and your own life whether it's health or weight or whatever I think that is is one way to do it a lot of people don't know how to cook you know I think that in this country we have kind of lost the ability to do that effectively at least so many people have part of that is because the food industry has eviscerated our our hummock education which used to actually teach people how to cook that's what I mean about cultural technology like to me maybe the biggest problem that I see is that we used to be creatures that had broad competencies and we could largely like 104 basically can accomplish all the primary tasks that are there that are necessary for the replication of their culture in fur right and then like farmers maybe rely on somebody who makes the wheels and somebody that does this but they can they can broadly do the majority of it and we live in a world where where where as a culture we have more capacity than we've ever had and yet as individuals were we're more reliant on everybody else than we've ever been and so you used to have have to be able to sing dance cook fight run hunt gather build make fire etc and now most people can't do any of those things they can only do one thing which is yeah whatever makes the money this yeah yeah we've turned ourselves into key peckers yeah I think there's basically two big reasons why most people don't like sitting in a classroom all day that much and they don't like working all day that much one of them is that we evolved to be generalists who do many tasks over the course of the day instead of doing the same thing all day and that's just boring and the the second one is that we evolved to be be intrinsically motivated by specific things that served our interest in an ancestral environment like little boys play with guns like anything that looks like a gun they'll pick it up and basically boys gravitate toward the most powerful weapon some representation of the most powerful weapon that they know of and they play with it yeah and so like boys in you know hunter-gatherer cultures pick up a bow at like three years old and they're just spend all day playing with it and by 5:00 they're decent archers and so what we do today for work and in class are not things that align very well with our intrinsic motivations and so I think between that and the repetitiveness it's like I mean a hunter-gatherer it's not it doesn't get up in the beginning and then early in the day and be like oh I have to go hunt animals or dig tubers again I can't believe this I feel like we could maybe do a home of the podcast on this because I think this is really fascinating because I'm sure you've to know that the research on rats that finds that that addiction to cocaine is ameliorated by immersing in a highly enriching environment so if they can run and play and socially engage and have sex and have good food then they're not addicted of cocaine so we're addicted to food ridiculous pornography we're addicted to drugs we're addicted to all these things partially it may be because our environment is so unrewarding i-i-i wanted to talk to you more about you research on hunter foragers because I think that'd be a really interesting topic for us to talk about but one of the ideas that I've come across in that literature is that there's not really a word that defines there's not really a strong distinction between play and work many hundred further cultures that the thing that they say kids are doing when they're playing or the thing that they save it that adults are doing when they're doing productive work they use the same wood hmm and that that makes sense because because we do what they do for work for fun right we garden yeah we hunt we fish we go pick berries all that basically is recreation yeah and it's well it makes sense because we are motivationally set up to be rewarded by doing those things but yeah they kept us alive and we've been more and more having to take on tasks that are inherently not motivational and and I think that's a it's a really fundamental problem and I'm not sure how we get around it maybe that's a topic for the next time I don't know if you have any closing thoughts on unwove talked about no not really well stop thank you very much someone I think conversation as always and yeah Stefan's blog is called hole health source this book's called the hungry brain highly recommend it anything else that people should know about you and where to find you in your work um my twitter handle is at wh source i still post things to twitter although i am not engaging as much as I used to and back and forth yeah so definitely you gotta read the book if you're at all interested in in the obesity end at MIT should be and really many of the epidemics that we face because understanding more about the roarin system and how the brain works will will help you understand the world that we live in so thanks again Stefan

Channel: Rafe Kelley

Views: 7,937

Rating: 4.7866669 out of 5

Keywords: Stephan Guyenet, Rafe Kelley, Evolve Move Play Podcast, Evolve Move Play, Ancestral health, Whole Health Source, Stephan Guyenet Interview, Rafe Kelley Interview, Paleo Diet, Paleo Lifestyle, Vegan Diet, Low Carb, Low Fat, Food Reward, Ketogenic diet, Primal Health

Id: eV5EtWkDIeg

Length: 110min 45sec (6645 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 01 2018