The Toxic Ingredients Hiding in Your “Healthy” Food with Vani Hari (Food Babe)

Food activist and Food Babe founder Vani Hari returns to Live Like a Girl to break down what's actually hiding in many of the foods we buy every day. We get into ultra-processed foods, ingredient labels, added flavors, artificial sweeteners, food dyes, MSG, cooking oils, food noise, and the simple grocery-store habits Vani uses with her own family. Vani also shares how to make the transition toward more real food without making food boring or giving up birthdays, holidays, French fries, pizza, and the traditions you love. _ IN THIS EPISODE: How to identify ultra-processed foodsWhat Vani looks for on ingredient labelsIngredients she personally avoidsFood noise and highly palatable foodsHelping kids develop a wider palateEasy real-food swapsNavigating holidays and celebrations_ RESOURCES MENTIONED Food Babe Feast Cookbook https://foodbabefeast.com/Vani’s speech at HHS in Washington DC https://foodbabe.com/i-warned-big-food-what-happens-if-they-keep-poisoning-us-my-speech-at-hhs-in-washington-dc/ Vani’s speech at HHS in Washington DC https://www.instagram.com/reel/DIzCIVfTeEp/?hl=en Vani’s Senate Testimony https://www.instagram.com/reel/DAT-VogSpXE/?hl=en _ MORE ON VANI HARI Vani Hari, widely known as the Food Babe, is a food activist, author, entrepreneur, and founder of FoodBabe.com. For more than two decades, she has investigated ingredients used in the American food supply and advocated for changes in the way major food companies formulate their products. Facebook: @thefoodbabe https://www.facebook.com/thefoodbabeInstagram: @thefoodbabe https://www.instagram.com/thefoodbabe/YouTube: @thefoodbabe http://youtube.com/thefoodbabeFor more resources related to today’s episode, visit the podcast episode page: drmindypelz.com/ep377 https://www.drmindypelz.com/ep377 Connect with Dr. Mindy: Join Reset Academy https://resetacademy.drmindypelz.com/reset-academy?utm_source=libsyn&utm_medium=podcast&utm_term=&utm_content=loc-description&utm_campaign=reset-academyWatch the episodes on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@DrMindyPelz?sub_confirmation=1Follow Dr. Mindy on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/dr.mindypelz/Subscribe to Dr. Mindy’s newsletter https://www.drmindypelz.com/ Disclaimer: This podcast is intended for educational and informational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional medical advice. Always consult a qualified healthcare professional before making changes to your diet, fasting routine, or lifestyle.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Mindy Pelz?

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• 0:43Mindy Pelz?

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• 1:23Mindy Pelz?

  Qualia Creatine Plus is creatine built for a woman's body, and it's an effortless, tasteful scoop of powder that you dissolve into your favorite beverage for a quick daily support. Personally, I put it in my coffee every single morning, and I think it's a no-brainer for aging well. So go to qualialife.com/mindy and use the code Mindy, and you will get 15% off this amazing creatine complex. So that's Qualia Creatine Plus code Mindy at qualialife.com/mindy.

• 2:07Mindy Pelz?

  Let me know what you think.

• 2:12Mindy Pelz?

  Hey, Dr. Mindy here, and welcome to the Live Like a Girl podcast, where I bring you icons, disruptors, educators, scientists, and doctors that show you what can be possible when you love and celebrate the female body you are blessed to live in. Let's dive in.

• 2:37Mindy Pelz?

  About 15 years ago, I took one of my patients, who had been recently diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer, to the grocery store. Her name was Lanny, and she had heard that I could help her build a healthy lifestyle. At the time, my practice largely centered around teaching my patients how their daily activities either built them health or built them disease. I taught my patients how to eat, how to fast, how to detox, how to move. We even went into how to think in a way that would build them health. Many of the patients who came to me were learning how to navigate a cancer diagnosis.

• 3:22Mindy Pelz?

  With those patients, I'd tell them that they have two things to focus on: kill the cancer cells that were already there and stop making new cancer cells. For many of my patients, the latter required that they eat differently. So I'd walk them through the supermarket, pulling boxes off the shelf and turning them over and teaching them what each ingredient did in their bodies. The day I walked Lanny through the grocery store, she stopped me halfway down the aisle. She looked at me and said, "Mindy, we're in a store called Safeway.

• 4:04Mindy Pelz?

  Are you telling me the food in this store isn't safe?" I had tears in my eyes, and I said, "Yeah, that's what I'm, exactly what I'm telling you." I've never forgotten that moment because she wasn't asking a nutrition question. She was asking how this happened and why nobody told her. She was asking, "How was it possible that the grocery store she bought all the food for her family from had cancer-causing ingredients?" The look of shock and extreme disappointment took over her face

• 4:46Mindy Pelz?

  as her brain tried to process this new realization. Lanny is not the only one who has fallen to the chemicals that are allowed in our foods. 55% of the calories the average American adult eats comes from these chemical-laden foods. We call these foods now ultra-processed foods. And for our kids and teens, 61% of their calories are coming from foods with these chemicals. And these foods are legitimately destroying our bodies. We now live in a world

• 5:29Mindy Pelz?

  where chronic disease and poor health have become the norm. Currently, only about 7% of American adults have ideal blood sugar, blood pressure, cholesterol, weight, and heart health all at the same time, not due to any medication aid. We call this metabolic fitness, and we are failing at it. When I went digging through the research to prepare for today's interview, I found studies linking heavy ultra-processed food intake to a higher risk of infertility,

• 6:10Mindy Pelz?

  depression, anxiety, even hot flashes and sleep during menopause. For women, this isn't a diet issue. It touches nearly everything we are trying to accomplish with our health.

• 6:29Mindy Pelz?

  So when I think about who has been in the ultra-processed food fight the longest, there is only one name that comes to mind: a woman I have been cheering on from the sidelines long before we ever met. A woman who years ago boldly walked into the lobby of a potato chip company demanding answers as to why they allow cancer-causing chemicals into their products. She has worked tirelessly to get toxic oils out of fast food restaurants and took on the fight of ensuring that sandwich bread didn't have the same chemicals used in making yoga mats.

• 7:14Mindy Pelz?

  I want to introduce you to Vani Hari. Vani is the food babe, one of the most relentless food activists of our time. Her passion started at 22 in a hospital bed after emergency surgery when she decided to treat her health like a debate round and read everything she could find. That decision turned into a blog, then a movement, then a seat at the table with some of the biggest food companies in the country. She's now bringing us her latest cookbook called Food Babe Feast, and it's all about celebrating the holidays with real ingredients.

• 7:58Mindy Pelz?

  In this conversation, Vani and I talk about what ultra-processed foods actually do inside a woman's body and why the food industry engineered it to outsmart our cravings. And more importantly, what you can do on your next grocery run to stay healthy. We go through the top ingredients to look out for and what lateral changes you can make so that you don't fall prey to their destruction. And there's something you're going to hear that she says that just blows my mind. No one is coming to save us. The power of your health is in your cart.

• 8:43Mindy Pelz?

  I am not joking when I say this is a life-changing interview. If you resonate with it at all, please send it to everyone you know that cares deeply about their health. Are you ready? Let's dive in. Welcome, Vani Hari. Well, first, let me welcome you, Vani, back to my podcast. So this, we've met, we've done this several times now. You helped me with the launch of Eat Like a Girl, and I just want to welcome you and thank you for all the hard work you're doing to help us get healthy food.

• 9:21Speaker 01

  Thank you, Mindy. I'm just honored to be here. I'm such a huge fan of yours and all the information that you share. I, I tell you, every time you write a book, every time you put out information, I'm so excited to see that we're aligned in the way we think about food. And that's really exciting for me because for so long, I feel like I was screaming into the ether about eating real food. And it's just so wonderful to have physicians such as yourself to actually, you know, preach this gospel. So it's great.

• 9:52Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah, yeah. And I told you when we met in person, I had been cheering you on from the sidelines before we actually met, when I watched you go into the lobby of Lay's potato chips and get the, you know, get all the junk out of the french fries at In-N-Out and the yoga mat material and Subway breads. Like you have been a true food activist. So again, thank you for your relentless enthusiasm for helping us try to eat good food. In preparation for this interview, I actually shocked myself because I wanted to see how

• 10:32Mindy Pelz?

  many studies were linked to chronic disease and ultra-processed foods. And I want to read some of these statistics because the studies are insane. For those of you who are watching this on YouTube, there are endless pages and pages of research showing that the food we are eating is literally killing us. So here are some of the things I want to point out, and I want your opinion on them, Vani. For starters, 40%, probably higher now, of adults have obesity. 21% of children and teens have obesity.

• 11:12Mindy Pelz?

  Only 6.8% US adults have ideal blood pressure, blood sugar, cholesterol, weight, and heart health all at once. The American Heart Association found 25% to 58% higher cardiometabolic risk in heavy ultra-processed foods user. Heavy ultra-processed food eaters have 55% higher odds of obesity. We have a 26% higher infertility risk in heavy ultra-processed food eaters. Post-menopausal women who have hot flashes, sweating, and sleep problems has been linked to ultra-processed foods.

• 11:56Mindy Pelz?

  27% higher risk of depression and anxiety with ultra-processed foods eaters. We have 50% risk of depression, 58% risk of dementia. I mean, it goes on and on. Digestive cancers, 12% risk of digestive cancers, 3% to 11% risk of breast cancer. And currently, we have 55% of adult Americans are getting their calories from ultra-processed foods.

• 12:33Mindy Pelz?

  And from the ages of 1 to 18, we have 61% of that age group getting their food from ultra-processed foods. This is the crisis of health of our moment. How, how do we unwind this? How do we come back from this?

• 12:54Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, and this is, this is truly what I've been fighting for since I had my revelation 20 years ago, 20-plus years ago now. I'm 47, so around 22 years old. I was sick in the hospital, overweight, feeling terrible about myself. My digestive system had failed me. My appendix was about to burst. I had it surgically removed in an emergency surgery. The first doctor that saw me thought it was something to do with my menstrual cycle, sent me home. If my parents hadn't had me go to the doctor the next day to get a second opinion, because I still was in pain, I might not be here today. So it was a wake-up call for me.

• 13:37Speaker 01

  And lying in that hospital bed, overweight and sick, and deciding that I wanted to live a different life and a more healthy life, and to make health my number one priority, and to treat my health like a debate round, where I learned in high school to be a top-tier debater, and going and investigating and looking at, you know, health books and, and journals and other things to find out what is truly the healthiest way to eat.

• 14:06Mindy Pelz?

  Right.

• 14:07Speaker 01

  The thing that I found out, that was the reoccurring theme in all the nutrition books and, and all of the nutrition facts that I read, was that you have to avoid ultra-processed food. And back then, we didn't even use the word ultra-processed.

• 14:22Mindy Pelz?

  Right.

• 14:22Speaker 01

  Processed food, right?

• 14:24Mindy Pelz?

  Right.

• 14:24Speaker 01

  And I think honestly, the, the ultra in front of it really describes actually 99% of the processed foods you see at the grocery store. Like, you know, and so ultra means that that food has been adulterated by the food industry in the way that it has been processed by adding additional chemicals, additional additives, additional preservation material that makes that product last longer on the shelf. They have taken food that in the normal state is completely different than where it started, and it looks like a completely different product.

• 15:07Speaker 01

  It, it may even, not even have the nutritional component and the value left over in the final product. And so, so what the people are getting is actually dead food.

• 15:20Mindy Pelz?

  Right? I was just going to say it's dead.

• 15:22Speaker 01

  It's dead, right? There's, there's nothing alive about it left. There's no nutritional components to it. So all your body and your cells have to do with that food is to figure out what to do with it, how to process it, where to store it, how does your liver work through it? And that's how these statistics that you just read are happening. The reason why we are getting cancer at an alarming rate is because our bodies were not evolved to handle this amount of chemicals, this, this amount of low-nutrition food.

• 15:58Mindy Pelz?

  Right.

• 15:59Speaker 01

  And so we have to get back to unadulterated, real food.

• 16:04Mindy Pelz?

  Right.

• 16:05Speaker 01

  And, you know, I, I thought when I first started reading about the chemicals in our food, and I started to understand that these chemicals had been invented for one sole purpose. It's not something that the consumers out there demanded or wanted. Hey, I want more chemicals in my food. I want it to last longer on the shelf. I want to have it taste like the one millionth best part of something. Yes, we all love something that tastes amazing, right? But it's not something the consumers ever asked for. This was something that the food industry invented to make more money so that they could addict us to their products.

• 16:47Speaker 01

  And so that's the reason why you see these things go on social media where someone's taking a Chick-fil-A chicken sandwich or a McDonald's french fry and combo Happy Meal and put it on the shelf for, you know, 10 years.

• 17:00Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah, we did that in my office. I did that, I did that, yeah, to show, because we were a family practice. I left a Happy Meal on my counter right when people signed in, and it stayed looking just like it had started. It was there at least 30 days without even a change in how it originally looked.

• 17:17Speaker 01

  I mean, that's, that's the best example to show what's happening inside of your body, why you can't lose the weight, why you can't feel better, why you're not having the energy, right? Because your body's not moving through that food. Your body needs to expel this food, and you get that through fiber. And so fiber really truly comes from plant-based foods, right?

• 17:38Mindy Pelz?

  Right.

• 17:39Speaker 01

  Like fruits and vegetables, things that you find in nature. And so it's, it's, once I found out that this experiment was happening out there, I just made a conscious decision to say enough's enough. No, I'm not going to do this. And, and because people begged me to share the things that I was learning and saw the outside of my body changing and saw me losing the weight and saw that I started to feel better than I ever have before and look like a different person, you know, I started my blog, Food Babe. And, you know, at first, I just wanted to share my healthy recipes and my way of life. And, and I wasn't even thinking about becoming a food activist and demanding that these food

• 18:23Speaker 01

  companies change and remove these very problematic chemicals and demanding the government start to, you know, wake up and start to change. And, and it's, it's been a real eye-opening situation for me, even in the past two years, working as an unofficial advisor to the administration on a lot of these topics, because I am an expert in chemicals and, and food and which ones to regulate and which ones we should get out of the food system, because I've been studying them for so long. What I found out is that there is no one going to save us. And it's not going to happen fast enough. Your life is going to fly by and the food system is still going to be corrupt.

• 19:06Speaker 01

  And it's still going to be designed there to sell more chemicals and more non-real food to you. And so the work that you're doing, Mindy, by doing this podcast and doing these videos and teaching people how to eat and how to break free from this is truly the most important thing we can do in this day and age because I see what we're up against. Not only are we up against the robots at Pepsi that, you know, have a robot that mimics human taste buds and are engineering their food to, you know, outwit every mode of resistance we have in our bodies to say no to that food, right?

• 19:50Speaker 01

  Like, not only are we up against that, but we're also up against the enormous amount of lobbying dollars and money happening in Washington right now to stop any progress. Right? They are like, there might be some really great people in Washington that have, have wanted to make big changes and are talking the talk and doing, you know, publicly saying the right thing. But behind the scenes, those changes and those policies are being blocked because of money and money exchanging hands at the highest levels of government. It's a shadow government that nobody sees happening. You, you wonder why so many people have, for example, it's something as little as

• 20:35Speaker 01

  an ultra-processed food definition. Just define what ultra-processed food is for Americans. I mean, California's already done it, right? And, and so it can't be that hard for our federal government to do it, right? No, it is being blocked by the White House currently because they are so scared to see what will happen once Americans learn the truth about ultra-processed foods and what they truly are. Ultra-processed foods start with an abundance of what we have in this country being grown, which is corn and soybeans, right? Corn and soybeans in this country is largely being grown with GMO seed.

• 21:19Speaker 01

  And that GMO seed came from Monsanto and now it's, it's owned by Bayer, one of the largest German pharmaceutical companies in the world. And, yes, very convenient. And that seed is designed to withstand heavy doses of a chemical called glyphosate in Roundup. Roundup is the, the brand name of that chem- formulation. It's very toxic here in the United States. And we have a, a government that has largely been captured by these chemical corporations.

• 21:57Speaker 01

  And they have figured out how to use the farm bureaus and other voting blocks to prevent our leaders from making real progress in this area. And so ultra-processed foods are coming from corn and soy. All the little additives you see in ultra-processed foods, 90% of them are starting with a corn or soy. The seed oils that you hear that are so, you know, controversial and in your, you hear to avoid it, you should avoid them because let's, we can talk about the processing of those and what actually ends up in your body after you have one of those. But like, it's coming from a genetically engineered corn or soybean that's designed

• 22:39Speaker 01

  to withstand heavy doses of these chemicals that in court cases across America have been implicated to cause cancer. Juries have awarded billions of dollars to these people who've been exposed to glyphosate. And this is now something that the International Agency for Research on Cancer has deemed a carcinogen, has in, in, in multiple independent third-party reviews have indicated that glyphosate can hurt fertility, can hurt autoimmune disorders, can lead to cancer, obviously. It's linked to obesity because the way it destroys your gut bacteria and it harms the gut.

• 23:22Speaker 01

  Um, it is truly something that we need to regulate in this country, but that's what our ultra-processed foods start with.

• 23:32Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah.

• 23:32Speaker 01

  And

• 23:33Mindy Pelz?

  Nothing good there.

• 23:35Speaker 01

  So, so, so when we, when we think about what, you know, you, you said, you know, our, our government's preventing real reg-, you know, real regulation from happening on glyphosate, you know, I was floored when, uh, the Supreme Court just ruled that the EPA is going to be the final authority on, on chemicals when they have been caught colluding with industry over and over again to prevent the harms of these chemicals from being released to the public. And so it is absolutely crucial for people to watch podcasts like this, watch videos like this and share them like vigorously with their loved ones.

• 24:18Speaker 01

  So they know that, know the truth about these chemicals that are being inundated in our food supply and, and that our government is completely in bed with these chemical corporations. And it doesn't matter which party is in office.

• 24:36Mindy Pelz?

  It's been going on for decades.

• 24:37Speaker 01

  Yeah. I've seen it in both.

• 24:39Mindy Pelz?

  Yep.

• 24:40Speaker 01

  I've worked with multiple admins and I've seen it. And, and it's, it's something that we are going to have to fight back with our own consumer choices. Not because, not only we want better health, but that's the only way that we're going to be able to change this food system. And so let's talk about like, what are the things that you would want to go purchase at the grocery?

• 25:04Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah. And, and I want to, I want to point one thing out because I do want, I don't want everybody to be, uh, walk away from this completely scared, but I think you, you did a great job of hopefully waking people up and going, this isn't a joke anymore. This isn't like earthy crunchy people drink, you know, eat organic because they're neurotic about their food. This is life-saving. And I, I think I shared this story with you one time that I got really heavily involved in my practice with helping patients who had a cancer diagnosis. And I told these beautiful, most of them were women. I told them, we have two jobs. Well, we have one job, but as a person who has been diagnosed with cancer, you have

• 25:48Mindy Pelz?

  two things to think about. One is how to kill the cells that have already formed. And the second is how to not form more cancer cells. And I expressed that my, what I could help them do is learn to eat in a way that they wouldn't form more cancer cells. So I would take these women to the supermarket and I would literally pull out the boxes and I would look at the ingredient list and I would say, this one's a problem, this one's a problem. Did you know that the order of the ingredient list is showing how much of each chemical is in here? And I'll never forget a patient who had metastatic breast cancer looked at me halfway through

• 26:31Mindy Pelz?

  the supermarket tour and she said, Mindy, we are in a store called Safeway. Are you telling me that the foods in this store are not safe? And this was like 15 years ago. And I looked at her and I was like, I had tears in my eyes. I'm like, yeah, that's what I'm telling you. I'm telling you that you have to know how to navigate your grocery store so that you don't blindly sign yourself up for chronic disease. And I think I can't say that more boldly now than ever before.

• 27:11Mindy Pelz?

  So please understand what Vani is saying and why I have brought Vani here is because this is the difference between you and a cancer diagnosis. They are, the food industry is not looking out for your health. They are looking out for profits along with our, with the government. So you have to learn for yourself. So with that in mind, I also want to point out something you said because I want to give people something to do and fiber. I, fiber is a really important, I know you have a whole cookbook with fiber-filled recipes. Like, let's just start while you're learning what Vani is about to share with you about these foods and these ingredients.

• 27:55Mindy Pelz?

  The first thing you can do is up your fiber. 25 grams a day. Make it a pact because it will start to clean and it, you know, it's not expensive. It can start to clean out the damage that's happening in your gut from these things. Would you agree?

• 28:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. And one of the easiest ways that I just add more fiber to my diet is I don't ever even count the grams because sometimes that can just be a little daunting to count everything, right? I'm not like a macro girl where I'm counting everything. I literally just add raw fruits or vegetables to every meal. Every meal I have, I'm having something raw. It's unadulterated by the food industry. Hopefully it's organic, so it hasn't been sprayed with heavy pesticides. It hasn't been grown with genetically engineered seeds, right? Um, and then you're having a ton of fiber because you're eating raw fruits and vegetables, right? And it can be anything you like, right? It can be blueberries. It can be blackberries. It can be celery sticks or carrots.

• 28:54Speaker 01

  You know, my kids sometimes like red peppers, but my other child likes raw carrot sticks better. So they're going differently in the lunch, right? But it's a raw vegetable for every single meal. You know, at breakfast, it's usually really easy to add some kind of raw fruit, you know? And at lunch, you can have a salad with your meal, whatever you like. You know what I mean? So, and then, you know, for your snack, have an apple and some peanut butter, right? Have something and then, you know, you're choosing one ingredient peanut butter that isn't full of seed oils or additional ingredients, right? So think one ingredient, raw fruits and vegetables, and you're going to get a lot of fiber in your diet.

• 29:34Mindy Pelz?

  And would you say that a good rule for avoiding these ultra-processed foods would ultimately be to eat foods without a label?

• 29:43Speaker 01

  Yes, yes, absolutely. Anytime you can eat a food without a label, that is going to be your best bet. And it's like, just go to nature. And it's, it's so interesting because the food industry is, is really the one who has made food so complicated to us, right?

• 29:58Mindy Pelz?

  Right.

• 29:59Speaker 01

  All the different labels on the front of the package to, to, you know, gluten free, non-GMO, you know, organic, uh, uh, you know, now it's ultra-processed food, non-ultra-processed food. I mean, there's so many things, low fat, no sugar, you know, all of these things you see on the label, added omega-3. I mean, it goes on and on and on. And it's, it can be very confusing and daunting, but you have to ignore all of that and just turn the package over and look at the ingredients. The ingredients will tell the full story. You'll know whether the ingredients are organic or not. You'll know whether they're one ingredient foods. You'll know if there's a bunch of chemicals you don't recognize. And if you don't recognize them, you need to go find out what those are.

• 30:41Mindy Pelz?

  Go look them up.

• 30:42Speaker 01

  Put them in your body. Yeah. Look them up. It's all over the internet. It's on my website. It's in my new book, Food Babe Feast. You know, it's, it's, you can see exactly which ingredients are problematic.

• 30:53Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah.

• 30:53Speaker 01

  It's especially if you don't recognize something, right? Like when I, when I pick up bread at the grocery store and it has monodiglycerides in it, and it's like, what the hell is that?

• 31:03Mindy Pelz?

  Right. Can you picture it in your mind?

• 31:05Speaker 01

  Right. It's, it's common sense, right? That what, why do I want to eat monodiglycerides? And then when you go and Google it and foodbabe.com shows up or whatever, and it tells you the truth about that chemical. It's actually an additive they invented after trans fats was banned to make the oils not separate in processed food and, and bread that you find on the grocery store shelf. And that's what they added instead. And it still has those minute amounts of trans fats that were implicated, it caused, you know, 20,000 heart attacks a year. So this is something you don't want to put in your body. Um, one of the, one of the, the biggest hacks that I follow

• 31:45Speaker 01

  to find processed foods that are actually healthier than the ultra-processed foods that are out there, is I will choose a processed product that doesn't have the words flavor on it. Natural flavor, organic flavor, even, you know, artificial flavor, any kind of additional flavor they are adding to the food. They are using something that has been created in a laboratory to create the one millionth best part of the taste, to hijack your entire old factory system. People don't know that when they're putting flavoring in food, it's smell too.

• 32:25Speaker 01

  They're actually lining the packages of ice cream sandwiches and other unhealthy foods uh, in the freezer section with this flavoring, because when something's frozen, you can't smell it as well. And they want that sniff, that, that smell to come out of the package as soon as you open that ice cream sandwich. So you're like, oh, yes, I gotta eat this right now. But normally you wouldn't be able to smell it if it was like real, you know, real just frozen cream, right? Right? And that's also why they have vanilla ice cream, because it smells, right? It's just like, oh yeah, I want to eat this, right?

• 33:04Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah.

• 33:05Speaker 01

  It wouldn't taste as good without that flavoring added. And, and I think what's so beautiful about nature is the flavor is there on purpose and it's, it's, it's in the product. So your body can handle the variations of the seasons and how things are growing. And it also helps your kids get unhooked from processed foods. I talk about this example all the time where, you know, if you give your kids goldfish every day for their snack, their body is going to be accustomed to eating ultra-processed foods because they're adding different, there's additives in goldfish, like autolyzed yeast extract and flavoring and other things in there

• 33:47Speaker 01

  that keep them hooked to that flavor, but it also keeps them hooked to the same flavor, the same taste. They don't get a variety. And so when they, when you ask why your kids are so picky, it's because they're not eating real food. When if you were to give them blueberries every day at snack, when sometimes the blueberries are huge because of the season, sometimes they're smaller. Sometimes they're mealy, sometimes they're sour, sometimes they're sweet. They're different all the time.

• 34:16Mindy Pelz?

  Fascinating.

• 34:17Speaker 01

  And so your body becomes, oh, I can handle all these different flavors because I'm getting nutrition, right? But when you're eating the goldfish, you're not getting that. And so we wonder why our kids are picky and they only eat off the kids menu and the chicken fingers. It's because you're giving them the chicken fingers, right? You have to give them variety from nature to outwit this processed food engineered culture.

• 34:43Mindy Pelz?

  I want to tell you about something that genuinely moves me. And that's watching what happens when women come together around real health science. There's something powerful that shifts when a woman realizes she's not broken. She's just been given the wrong information. And when she is surrounded by other women who are waking up to that same truth, wow, it's magic. The healing accelerates. The consistency becomes easier. The loneliness of the health journey just literally dissolves. And that's what I have been watching over and over again, happen inside my Reset Academy, month after month.

• 35:27Mindy Pelz?

  Women who come in frustrated and depleted, they start to find their rhythm, they start to reclaim their energy. And the most beautiful part is they start rebuilding trust with their bodies. Inside my academy, you get monthly trainings, live coaching calls, and an incredible community of women who are all doing this work right alongside you. And I show up every single month with new content, new tools, new ways to explain things, because your body is always changing and your health education should grow with it. So come join me over there. All you've got to do is find us on resetacademy.drmindypelz.com.

• 36:07Mindy Pelz?

  That's resetacademy.drmindypelz.com. I can't wait to see you there. So you just had me thinking now because I'm dealing with or helping unwind many midlife women who have gained weight and have either chosen to go on Ozempic, Wegovy, the weight, weight loss drugs, or many of the people in my world actually don't want to go on that. And so the conversation of food noise has really surfaced. And I'm, I've been like, what is food? We never had food noise when we were a kid. And you just gave me an insight. If I'm eating ultra-processed foods,

• 36:51Mindy Pelz?

  it's changing my taste buds, which my taste buds now expect a certain flavor to get a certain dopamine response. So when I switch over to a blueberry that has more variation, and I don't get the same dopamine response, so I can just eat a bowl of blueberries and I still have the food noise because my brain is addicted to the flavor that I've trained it to give me a dopamine high from. Would that be accurate?

• 37:20Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, you, you have to, to, to eliminate ultra-processed foods from your diet for a few weeks to eliminate that food noise, right? And, and if you do that successfully, you, and don't go back to that lifestyle and you eat real food, the ultra-processed food actually are, starts to gross you out. It starts to, I mean, for me, I eat something that's out of a package or something and I'm just like, not that great. Thank you. I'll stick with this apple. Like, it just, it doesn't make me feel good, right? I can tell it sits with me different, right?

• 37:58Mindy Pelz?

  I can do that with oils. I can literally walk into a restaurant and be like, I don't want to eat here. I can smell the oils. I've even, when I was working with patients one-on-one, I could smell the oils on them. And I could smell the ones that were eating the seed oils, it, because I don't eat them. And so I was really sensitive to it. So you're absolutely right on that.

• 38:21Speaker 01

  Yeah. Um, I think it's, I think it's so important that when we're talking about medicating ourselves out of this situation, we look at historical facts.

• 38:39Speaker 01

  None of the chronic diseases that we've ever created a pharmaceutical drug for has solved it or reduced the amount

• 38:49Speaker 01

  of that chronic disease. And I think that's needs to be said, right?

• 38:53Mindy Pelz?

  Right.

• 38:54Speaker 01

  We have more SSRIs than ever, but we still have more depression. We have more kids getting depressed. Right?

• 39:00Mindy Pelz?

  Yep.

• 39:01Speaker 01

  We have a serious problem in this country with depression.

• 39:04Mindy Pelz?

  Yep.

• 39:05Speaker 01

  Um, the same goes with heart disease. The same goes with cancer.

• 39:09Mindy Pelz?

  Yep.

• 39:09Speaker 01

  And even though people are losing the weight with the with with Ozempic and and these weight loss drugs, there is a fundamental shift in the side effects and what I'm witnessing happening with our population on the fact that yes, maybe some of the food noise is getting dulled out, but also motivation and other things that are happening to the psyche. And I can tell you just from my personal experience of my dad being on one of these drugs for his diabetes. You know, the doctor said, you know, this is experimental. This is a drug we can put him on. His diabetes medication has not been responding.

• 39:53Speaker 01

  And, you know, my mom texted me and she goes, we're going to put him on this new drug. And I said, Mom, don't do it. You know, this, this, this, this, this. She took the advice of the doctor. She put him on it. Six months later, he was he had stomach paralysis. Could not eat, could not swallow food. And a year later, he died.

• 40:15Mindy Pelz?

  Wow. Yeah.

• 40:17Speaker 01

  Um.

• 40:18Mindy Pelz?

  I'm sorry.

• 40:19Speaker 01

  He didn't need to go through that, right?

• 40:22Mindy Pelz?

  Right.

• 40:22Speaker 01

  Like, we could have found a different way.

• 40:26Mindy Pelz?

  Yep.

• 40:27Speaker 01

  And in and my dad was in a really tough situation. If if there was a case study for what ultra-processed foods do to you, he was the perfect, you know, subject of that.

• 40:40Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah.

• 40:40Speaker 01

  Um, and and watching him in the last 14 years of his life, struggle and suffer instead of enjoying his retirement and enjoying those years that you're supposed to go travel and be with your wife and enjoy the empty nest and like have a good time and really like spend time with your grandkids and do all the things that you think you're going to do at those ages. And he got to do very little of that.

• 41:06Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah.

• 41:07Speaker 01

  That is something that we all need to think about in terms of how we are getting ourselves out of the situation that we're into today. And what's going to lead to the best life in future for your kids, your grandkids in your in your life that you want to live, right?

• 41:27Mindy Pelz?

  Right. Yeah, you know, one of my favorite quotes is do something today your tomorrow self will thank you for. And I think one of the problems with food is we only think of the today in the moment self. We're just thinking, what do my taste buds want? That's another food rule that I really changed for myself, my patients, was don't ask what your taste buds want. Ask what your body wants. And then ask and how what sounds good. So because your taste buds, if they've been hijacked by these ultra-processed foods, will end up steering you in the wrong direction. So you I do want to point out, you said something. This has been a thing I've been wondering.

• 42:09Mindy Pelz?

  If somebody completely went cold turkey and they just got completely off the ultra-processed foods, what kind of side effects would we see? And how long would it take before their body would reset? Because I I'm starting, you know, Fast Like a Girl did really well. It sold over a million copies. The thing just took off. And a part of me thinks it was because people were getting a break half the day. They were taking a break from the horrible food they were eating. And so the body was given a chance to reset itself.

• 42:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:46Mindy Pelz?

  Do like.

• 42:47Speaker 01

  I mean, I think I mean, I think the body is really truly remarkable. I mean,

• 42:50Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah, it is. I know what it's able to put up with.

• 42:53Speaker 01

  Myself. I mean, I had eczema all over my body. My lungs were a mess. I was on three medications just to control the asthma and to be able to breathe normal. And, you know, I I I think about where I was and how poor my health was for for half of my life, really, you know? And and to think how I have more energy now and I don't feel like a zombie and I'm not walking around dead. I mean, I've really felt dead. And I just think about your body's ability to heal itself. And so I want everyone to know that it's never too late to start today.

• 43:34Mindy Pelz?

  Yes.

• 43:34Speaker 01

  And start to heal itself. And I think the reason why my dad was able to extend even his life to 84, even in the situation that he was in, I think he would have died a lot sooner had he not start to change his lifestyle. And we were able to change his diet and start to reduce the dementia symptoms he was having and so much through diet and lifestyle. It was really like diabetes of the brain dementia, right? And that was coming from the ultra-processed foods and the amount of sugar and all the other additives he was eating and all the things that he was taking. And it was just, it's it's so interesting to see that, like, watching even his, you know, really severe dementia diagnosis start to subside.

• 44:15Mindy Pelz?

  Right, change.

• 44:16Speaker 01

  With with diet was so remarkable. And I'm like, imagine if we had gotten him walking because he had a knee problem and all these other things we could have done, right?

• 44:25Mindy Pelz?

  Right.

• 44:25Speaker 01

  In hindsight, and it's like, and and I'm seeing even with my mother who is 80 now, and she just started going to the gym for the first time in her life. She never went to the gym, right? She's going three times a week. And she's like, Mom, I she, you know, she's like, Bonnie, you know, I could, I'm moving without my back hurting. I'm, you know, I'm doing this, I'm doing that. And it's like, it's never too late, right?

• 44:47Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah.

• 44:47Speaker 01

  To start today. And it's like, if you could just do that simple trick that we talked about earlier, adding raw fruits and vegetables to every meal, start, start there. You don't have to do cold turkey, but start there. Start to find alternatives to your favorite processed foods that are least processed. And I think this is one of the reasons why I loved writing my new cookbook, Food Babe Feast, because it's all about the holidays. It's all about.

• 45:17Mindy Pelz?

  Oh, perfect.

• 45:17Speaker 01

  Celebrating.

• 45:18Mindy Pelz?

  The worst time. That's the worst time. That's when everybody loses their way.

• 45:23Speaker 01

  Remaking your favorites in a healthy, holistic way.

• 45:28Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah.

• 45:28Speaker 01

  With real ingredients. And these are the recipes that I make for my own family when we celebrate Thanksgiving, Christmas, you know, Valentine's Day, every single holiday throughout the year.

• 45:39Mindy Pelz?

  Those become like a treat. And I'm always like, it's not a treat. So that's not a treat to kill yourself.

• 45:47Speaker 01

  The food industry has a sophisticated marketing arm that is dedicated to holidays, right? And I call it the holiday death aisle, that that aisle that you see down the grocery store that is all the bright colors of that season, right? Christmas is red, white and green. You know, Halloween, the black, the oranges, you know, Thanksgiving is all brown. Like, you see this, you know, Valentine's Day is all red and pink. And you see it and it overtakes the nostalgia in your body and your your memory and your receptors of like, oh, yes, I want to have fun. I want the heart-shaped cookies and I want, you know,

• 46:26Mindy Pelz?

  When I was a kid, I did it this way.

• 46:29Speaker 01

  You know what I mean? And it's it's, I want people to to go into the grocery store and say, no holiday death aisle, not today, devil, right? Like, I really want them to say that. And I want it to be a revolutionary act. I really want them to say, today, I'm going to say no to the holiday death aisle. I'm going to make something from Bonnie's cookbook instead. I I and I make it fun. And I have two little children. They're five and nine, so they love to celebrate all these different holidays. And I I I share all of my tricks and tips and everything about how I I celebrate and have fun with real food.

• 47:05Mindy Pelz?

  And yeah.

• 47:06Speaker 01

  And what I do, like, you know, when my daughter's class, instead of, you know, buying all of the candy and the cupcakes and the orange soda and the purple drinks and all the things that you see it during class time during these holidays. You know, I'm making little, you know, tangerine pumpkins and putting a celery stick in the middle for the stem. I'm doing these things. We're making a banana ghost with two little chocolate chips on the head. And and and doing these things that are still fun and exciting, but it's with real food and it's food that's going to nourish you and you still can have a lot of fun in it. And and I've always loved to have fun with food. I've always loved food. And and I think that's the the most important part about when you make this shift, this lifestyle of eating

• 47:50Speaker 01

  real food. It doesn't have to be boring. You don't have to take the joy out of it, right? The choice isn't the birthday cake or no birthday cake, right? The choice is what's in the birthday cake, right?

• 48:04Mindy Pelz?

  Like, I can still have the birthday cake, but let me look at the ingredients and can I make a better version of that? Do is there an order in which you would approach some of these ultra-processed foods? Like, recently I saw that the first category of ultra-processed foods you should take out of your diet is deli meats. Do we? Do we still believe that? Or is there is?

• 48:27Speaker 01

  I mean, I think deli meats are very problematic. They are, first of all, they have nitrates in them. A lot of them have MSG. A lot of them have the flavoring that I already talked about.

• 48:40Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah.

• 48:41Speaker 01

  They have caraginin, which is a very controversial emulsifier that they're using to keep the meat together from like getting soggy and separating and, you know, getting mushy. Um, so when you're buying meat, what I love to do when I buy a sand, when I make a sandwich or anything, I'm I'm roasting whole turkey breast and just slicing it. I'm roasting a chicken and slicing that. I'm buying organic pasteurized bacon, if I can find it, right? Like, and making that for my BLT if I'm making a sandwich. So it's it's how do you get the meat that's not processed to replace the deli meat that you're normally used to?

• 49:22Speaker 01

  And I think there's a lot of options for that. I don't think, you know, you can make an egg salad. You can make a chicken salad. You know, there's all kinds of things you can make for a sandwich, a hummus sandwich. I make that a lot. You know, there's all kinds of things that you can do instead of the deli meat. But I think one of the first things people really should remove is seed oils. I think seed oils are very problematic.

• 49:43Mindy Pelz?

  Agreed.

• 49:44Speaker 01

  60% of the Americans diet because of the fact that it's in most ultra-processed foods, but it's also in fried food and it's in fast food.

• 49:54Mindy Pelz?

  Yep.

• 49:54Speaker 01

  So anytime you get a french fry out and about, that is being doused with these seed oils. And these seed oils, the reason they're so problematic is not only are they coming from this genetically engineered corn and soy that's designed to withstand this heavy cancerous chemical being sprayed on it, which it, you know, the residue is getting in your body, but the way it's processed, those seed oils start by getting extracted using a chemical called hexane that the FDA doesn't even regulate the amount that still exists in the product, doesn't even require the manufacturers to test that. So hexane is a very toxic carcinogen. Then you are having that product be, after it's extracted, it smells really bad.

• 50:39Speaker 01

  So they have to deodorize it. Okay?

• 50:42Mindy Pelz?

  Wow.

• 50:42Speaker 01

  Once they deodorize the, the, the oil, then they need to make it look okay. So they bleach it and, and clear it and refine it even more. And so by the time it ends up in that plastic bottle that you're buying it out of, it's been through so many different chemical processes and the nutritional quality of those omega-6 acids that it still exists are very low. Not to mention the ratio is completely off because you really want to have a better ratio of omega-3 in your diet. And the reason why, you know, Americans are so deficient in omega-3 is because of this abundance of seed oils in our processed foods and in the majority of foods that you eat at a restaurant or a fast food chain.

• 51:25Speaker 01

  So seed oils are one of the first things and that's an easy switch. It's, it's switched to 100% olive oil, 100% unrefined organic coconut oil. Uh, you can use ghee or butter. I use grass-fed butter and ghee in my cooking. And, and those are the three things that I use the most of.

• 51:44Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah.

• 51:44Speaker 01

  On occasion, I will use avocado oil too, on occasion for certain things.

• 51:48Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah.

• 51:49Speaker 01

  Um, there's an amazing brand, um, I'm not affiliated with them, but they're called Roots. They make two ingredient organic french fries that you can get at the grocery store that you can bake.

• 51:59Mindy Pelz?

  Oh, they, they make a potato chip. So I was in, my daughter lives in Idaho and we went to go visit her. We were just in an average grocery store and there were these root chips. I don't know if it's the same company.

• 52:13Speaker 01

  It might be.

• 52:14Mindy Pelz?

  I picked them up. They had all the right oils. They were potatoes grown on a regenerative farm. I was like, what? I've never seen this. So we actually reached out to the company and we're like, how do we promote you? How do we get it out there? But to the, to the point is that we're not talking about deprivation because

• 52:32Speaker 01

  Still make french fries, right?

• 52:33Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah.

• 52:33Speaker 01

  If you need a quick thing.

• 52:35Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah.

• 52:35Speaker 01

  These are organic. You can get them in the freezer section. You don't even have to cut them yourself. Just throw them in your air fryer. Done. You know?

• 52:43Mindy Pelz?

  Something has gone very wrong with our food. And I think deep down, you already know it. The chemicals that are legally allowed in our food are quietly disrupting your hormones. They're driving your cravings and they're making it nearly impossible to feel good in your body. And when you can't feel good, what do you do? You blame yourself, but this is not a you problem. It's a food system problem. My mom knew this before anyone was talking about it. She was a health food pioneer in the 1970s, filling our home with fresh, real food while every other kid at school had Twinkies in their lunchbox. But she was trying to teach me something I've spent my whole career building on.

• 53:27Mindy Pelz?

  The quality of what you put in your body matters, especially as a woman. This is the heart of my book, Eat Like a Girl. I'm going to show you exactly which foods nourish your hormonal system, which ones are destroying it and how to tell the difference. Plus there are over a hundred recipes, plant-based and omnivore, created by incredible professional chefs. When you learn to eat like a girl, everything shifts. Your energy, your cravings, your mood, your cycle, your relationship with food itself. So you can get Eat Like a Girl anywhere that you get your books normally, or you can find Eat Like a Girl at drmindypelz.com/books.

• 54:09Mindy Pelz?

  And let's together start changing the way that we think about every meal. I'm cheering on. So talk, go back though on seed oils, list them out because I don't understand why we're still arguing about seed oils.

• 54:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:25Mindy Pelz?

  Like, why is this controversial?

• 54:27Speaker 01

  Well, there are a lot of interested parties that want to keep us eating seed oils. And that is the chemical industry that are making these seeds, the corn and soy. So it's, it's the corn and soy industry that is largely, you know, captured our government and also captured certain, you know, they pay social media influencers and other people.

• 54:46Mindy Pelz?

  Talk about that. Talk about that because a lot, that's happening a lot.

• 54:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's been a huge investigation in The Guardian that even showed that, uh, you know, there's been many people paid by the Center for Food Integrity. Now you see those words, Center for Food Integrity and you're like, oh, that sounds like such a reputable organization, but it's actually a shadow dark money group that is a front group for the food industry. The food industry is paying this group. Then this group is going out and getting influencers to say that seed oils are completely fine.

• 55:15Mindy Pelz?

  Yep.

• 55:15Speaker 01

  And, and so you need to use your common sense and your better judgment and say, are seed oils okay based on what I've just heard about them? Um, are they fine for me? You know? And, and when you compare it to a coconut oil that's coming from a, you know, from a tree, you're, you're comparing olive oil that's extracted with cold, you know, uh, in a cold way that's not adulterated. It's the full olive oil. They don't need to do any deodorizing and chemicalizing and bleaching and extracting with hexane of it. Right? Like when you're comparing that in itself, just the processing, don't even start with the, the, the base product,

• 55:57Speaker 01

  you can make a common sense decision that that's something I probably I shouldn't put in my body.

• 56:02Mindy Pelz?

  Right, right. You know, the other thing, because I'm such a chip lover, uh, I had to find a nice way and a healthy way. So I either make my own or I do Roots. I do another one. Again, I don't have any affiliation with this. Jackson's Own.

• 56:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:16Mindy Pelz?

  Um, and they have like coconut oil in some of their sweet, sweet potato chips. Boulder Chips now has some interesting.

• 56:23Speaker 01

  I love Zax, their, their corn chips. I don't know if you've seen those.

• 56:26Mindy Pelz?

  I haven't.

• 56:26Speaker 01

  Fantastic. They're really thick and good. They're really good.

• 56:29Mindy Pelz?

  But you know what? You know what I noticed is you can't eat the whole bag.

• 56:32Speaker 01

  No, you don't because they, they're actually, those companies are better for you companies. And they're not adding the flavoring.

• 56:39Mindy Pelz?

  Right.

• 56:39Speaker 01

  So as long as you stay away from the flavored chips and just the regular old chips, you eat a few and you're good. Like you're getting like

• 56:45Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah, you're totally satisfied.

• 56:46Speaker 01

  You're not like, your body's just like not, yeah, it's, it's not as addictive. And also

• 56:51Mindy Pelz?

  List out that seed oils, just so I want people to leave this podcast and be able to spot this stuff.

• 56:56Speaker 01

  Soy oil, soybean oil, corn oil, canola oil, sunflower oil. Um, those are the main ones that you'll see out there. Am I missing any?

• 57:08Mindy Pelz?

  Do we still have partially hydrogenated or is it out?

• 57:11Speaker 01

  We don't. Uh, it is now banned, but you will see hydrogenated and you will see cottonseed oil. Cottonseed oil is probably the worst oil because it is a byproduct of the textile industry. It's not even regulated like food. And this is actually one of the oils I got removed out of In-N-Out Burger. They were, they were frying all of their fried food in cottonseed oil. Cottonseed oil is one of the worst. So if you ever see that, that's, that's actually what Crisco used to, uh, may still have that, but that's what that was, was cottonseed oil.

• 57:43Mindy Pelz?

  Wow. Crisco. Oh my God. My mom used to cook with Crisco.

• 57:47Speaker 01

  Yeah. Um, so seed oils is one of the other things that I would 100% remove. The other thing I would want people to think about is artificial sweeteners.

• 57:56Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah, I was, go into that.

• 57:58Speaker 01

  Yeah. So artificial sweeteners like aspartame, sucralose, uh, you'll find them, uh, under, uh, names like Splenda. Those ingredients are cancer-causing. When you look at the rat studies and you see

• 58:16Mindy Pelz?

  Yep.

• 58:17Speaker 01

  them causing tumors in these rats, this is something you don't want to be consuming. And this, these are, I feel like artificial sweeteners are something that a lot of people wouldn't, wouldn't say grab a hold of them. I mean, it's in gum.

• 58:29Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah. I was just gonna say, it's in gum. That's what people don't know.

• 58:33Speaker 01

  And, and when, when they start to consume them, they don't realize how much they're consuming. You know, it's in their protein powder. It's one of the reasons why we don't use any artificial ingredients in Truvani, my company, for our protein powder. It's in, you know, artificial sweeteners are being added into yogurt. They're being added into all, I mean, you know, when you see a no sugar cookie, it's usually an artificial sweetener. So this is something that you need to really look out for because that, from a cancer risk perspective, is something I would, I would stay away from.

• 59:06Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah. Um, yeah.

• 59:08Speaker 01

  The other

• 59:08Mindy Pelz?

  That's a good one. Yeah. Keep going. Cause there's a lot. I'm, I hope people are taking notes because these are, this is powerful.

• 59:14Speaker 01

  We talked about natural flavor, artificial flavor, organic flavor. I would definitely avoid those. I would avoid also MSG and MSG additives. So natural flavor could also include MSG. So that's one of the ways that they trick your brain and hijack your taste buds. But MSG, it's one of the ingredients in Chick-fil-A chicken sandwiches. It's one of the things you'd find in Raising Cane. They say that their chicken's better and this and that. And it's, it's in their fried chicken. It's in a lot of fried chicken places. Um, it's one of the things that they, uh, have figured out how to, to, to hide by using a different name like autolyzed yeast extract or yeast extract. That's actually something they'll add to potato chips. Doritos have MSG. A lot of people don't know that.

• 59:58Speaker 01

  Uh, the reason why I can't stop eating Doritos is because of the MSG. Now, this is the only thing you need to know about MSG. In obesity studies, when they are trying to make rats fat, what do they give the rats to make them fat? They give them food laced with MSG.

• 1:00:18Mindy Pelz?

  That's crazy.

• 1:00:20Speaker 01

  So, do you want to be part of that experiment? That is something you need to ask yourself. And then you need to look in, why was MSG even created? And this is one of the fascinating conversations I had with a Senator, uh, two years ago. He was the ambassador for Japan. And he told me, he said, the, the reason MSG was invented is because in war, people get so much PTSD and they get so much adrenaline that they stop eating. And so they wanted their soldiers to eat. And so they invented MSG to lace the foods that the soldiers would eat in times of really bad war and hardships for soldiers.

• 1:00:59Mindy Pelz?

  That is insane.

• 1:01:00Speaker 01

  So, this is something you should not be giving to your kids. You should not be bringing into the house.

• 1:01:06Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:06Speaker 01

  This is something that is 100% related to obesity.

• 1:01:10Mindy Pelz?

  And, and, uh, so two things on that. One is it also, we have glutamate and GABA counterbalance each other. They're just like, you know, like, you know, night and day kind of thing. So if you bring in a lot of glutamate, monosodium glutamate, you suppress GABA. Glutamate is excitatory, GABA is calming. So when you feed that to your children or you feed it to yourself, you're putting them in an excitatory state. And, you know, anybody who's ever fed a four-year-old on, or ever seen it, like a four or five-year-old on Halloween, knows what that looks like and they think it's the sugar, but it actually is, is the glutamate piece of it that goes through the roof.

• 1:01:55Mindy Pelz?

  Um, I've had on this show, a metabolic psychiatrist, who is really emphasizing GABA foods, emphasizing things like ketones, because they're calming us from the over excitatory chemical.

• 1:02:11Speaker 01

  Was that Chris Palmer?

• 1:02:12Mindy Pelz?

  Uh, no, it's Georgia Eady.

• 1:02:14Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:02:15Mindy Pelz?

  Have you talked, she's another one you need to look at.

• 1:02:17Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:02:17Mindy Pelz?

  Um, she's doing incredible work and she has literally said that if we could raise GABA, we could stop chronic disease, chronic anxiety, dementia, schizophrenia. And she's working in her neck of the woods to get more GABA-producing foods, to get more ketones. She's a big fan of the ketogenic diet. Um, because it counterbalances exactly what you just said. So obesity is big. Yes, cancer is big. Your appetite goes up, but your anxiety goes up because you've just hijacked your whole neurochemical system.

• 1:02:53Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:02:54Mindy Pelz?

  Like, that's what, when you start to break this down, you're like, oh my gosh, this is, this is insane.

• 1:03:01Speaker 01

  And the food, and the food industry has, has known that when they put these chemicals together, we can't resist it. And they use the same science as the tobacco industry to hook people to tobacco, to hook us to foods.

• 1:03:14Mindy Pelz?

  It's the same thing.

• 1:03:15Speaker 01

  And so it's the same science. And, uh, when the crackdown started happening with tobacco, the, the food companies, you know, the tobacco companies started buying up food companies and they figured out how to addict us to those foods.

• 1:03:28Mindy Pelz?

  Right, right.

• 1:03:29Speaker 01

  And it's, it's, it's not that we're, you know, I'm saying that there is a boogeyman. What I am saying is, we are up against quite a lot.

• 1:03:39Mindy Pelz?

  Right.

• 1:03:39Speaker 01

  But we also have our willpower and we have the ability to choose.

• 1:03:43Mindy Pelz?

  Yes.

• 1:03:43Speaker 01

  And we can become educated on these substances and we can say no to this experiment. And it, and when I say it is a revolutionary act to say no to the holiday death aisle and like to say this, it truly is because not only are you protecting yourself and your family, but like, you're protecting your generational health, right?

• 1:04:03Mindy Pelz?

  You're protecting your pocketbook too, by the way. All you have to do is look at the expense of cancer and you can start to see how much you're protecting that.

• 1:04:11Speaker 01

  I mean, I can't think of how much I was spending on nine prescription drugs every month.

• 1:04:16Mindy Pelz?

  Right, yeah.

• 1:04:17Speaker 01

  And, and how, maybe, you know, when I started switching this diet, like complaining about how organic food costs a little bit more, but I'm like, wait a minute, I'm not taking these drugs anymore, right?

• 1:04:29Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah, you gotta put it in perspective.

• 1:04:30Speaker 01

  It's either you pay the farmer or you pay the other pharma.

• 1:04:35Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah, pharma or farmer. That's a good way to look at it.

• 1:04:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:04:38Mindy Pelz?

  What about, like, I know red dyes and food dyes became a hot issue recently. Um, where, I mean, that's not great, but where does it fit on this list of absolute no's?

• 1:04:49Speaker 01

  Well, this is something that if you have children in your house, you should not have a single artificial dye in your house.

• 1:04:53Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:54Speaker 01

  I mean, truly, and clearly.

• 1:04:57Mindy Pelz?

  By the way, I pulled my son out of Little League because every time we finished a game, he'd come home with a blue tongue. And I'm like, no, we can't play this sport because going to the, the snack shack after Little League and your tongue and, and, and lips being blue is boiling my blood. We're not playing this sport anymore.

• 1:05:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, well, you know,

• 1:05:21Speaker 01

  keeping kids away from these artificial dyes is a full-time job. And it's one of the reasons why I advocated for Kellogg's to remove artificial dyes, which they have now. The cereal industry has largely all removed artificial dyes. So you don't need to worry about it in cereal. However, it's still lurking out there. I think the, the main places that you'll find it is the candy section at any grocery store or, or fast food place or, um, convenience store. Um, you're going to find it in baked goods, um, in the grocery store, um, aisles of like, you know, baked goods.

• 1:06:00Speaker 01

  You're going to find it, um, in, in mostly products that are smaller companies that haven't made some of these commitments to remove dyes. I'd say about 50% of the food industry has made a commitment to do it. The government still hasn't regulated it though. And, and I think, uh, we need to get there. I don't know when we're going to get there, but you know, if I'm still screaming about this in five years, I'm going to be pretty mad. Um, considering all the advocacy I've done on this, but, um, but I think people, because people are now been educated about artificial dyes, I feel like because it's been a main national talking point, that the industry is going to have to move away from this.

• 1:06:44Speaker 01

  And you're going to start to see less and less products with it. But it's still something that you should make a conscious effort to avoid because artificial dyes are linked to hyperactivity in children. In Europe, there is a warning label. If any product contains artificial dyes, that it warns parents not to buy it for them.

• 1:07:03Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah, that, well, at least there's a warning label. That, that's awesome. So, so here's what I'm hearing. Uh, government's not going to fix this problem. Um, people are having all kinds of health side effects that big pharma is actually profiting from. So we don't have a medicine or a physician that's going to come to save us. And we're highly addicted to these foods. What, what's the exit door here? How do we move out of this? Is it self-responsibility? Is it really making a commitment to understanding the foods? Like how do, where do we go?

• 1:07:44Mindy Pelz?

  Because I think as a culture, we're used to some big entity saving us.

• 1:07:49Speaker 01

  Right. We, we can't rely on anybody saving us. And I think that's the most important part of this podcast.

• 1:07:55Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:56Speaker 01

  Is that it is literally going to be your individual choices. It's going to be you going to the grocery store, reading the ingredient label and choosing real food over ultra-processed foods every single day, what you bring into your household, what's in your pantry. And I know these changes are not easy and that's why we write books, me and you. And we, we walk people through this. And I'd say all my books are really helpful on how to do that. And, you know, my latest book is all about celebrating the holidays and how to enjoy like these gatherings with people that you love and how to, you know, inspire them to eat more real food and how you can still hold on to your habits when you're in these environments, right? But also I think it's a way to like, you know,

• 1:08:39Speaker 01

  it took years of me being the food babe for my brother to finally catch on to this lifestyle. And it, and people always ask me.

• 1:08:46Mindy Pelz?

  Like you model it.

• 1:08:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, you, you have to model it. You have to be the change and you have to be the person in your family that starts to evangelize other people in the family. And, and, and by you saying, no, I'm not going to have that food or no, I'm going to, I'm going to bring something to the party that I can eat and then I'm going to share with you and show you that you can eat really healthy. By modeling this behavior, you're going to change the people around you. I know it because I've changed so many people around me that I never thought was possible to change, especially my older brother, seven years. Like, he didn't want to do anything his little sister had told him to do, right? And so, um, and so even, even that, you know, you're going to, and, and there's going to be lost causes too.

• 1:09:30Speaker 01

  You know, you're going to take a couple of steps forward and a couple of steps back. But if you can start moving in the right direction, eating more fruits and vegetables, avoiding ultra-processed food, avoiding those additives that we talked about today, the seed oils, the flavoring, the MSG and MSG additives, the artificial sweeteners, the artificial dyes. Um, you could even start to just make a conscious decision. If I don't know what this chemical is and if it's not there for nutritional purpose, I'm not going to buy it because why would you buy it, right? Why would you put that in your body? Um, and then I want people to know too, That you can still have fun with food, you can still eat

• 1:10:09Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah, agreed.

• 1:10:10Speaker 01

  Pizza, you know,

• 1:10:11Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:12Speaker 01

  Hamburgers, french fries, all of that. But just choose real food and it will taste good. You will enjoy it and you're not going to deprive yourself forever. And there's going to be that moment where you start to see the changes in your bodies and in your energy and the ability to like, control some of the situation you thought you had no control over. And I think that's going to be really making the difference and, and really allowing you to become who you're supposed to be in this life. And I think this is so important. I just don't think your brain can truly connect to that higher spiritual level until you become clear of these toxins in your body.

• 1:10:53Mindy Pelz?

  Yep.

• 1:10:53Speaker 01

  And you're able to like, understand why you were put on this earth and find your calling and do what you need to do.

• 1:11:00Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah, so beautiful. Well, talk about your new book. I'll tell you one thing I love about a cookbook that I didn't realize I loved until I wrote one is the front matter. It's what, did you do much with the front matter?

• 1:11:13Speaker 01

  Yes, I did.

• 1:11:15Mindy Pelz?

  I had so much fun with my front matter because they could artistically give it like boxes and pictures. Talk about the front matter.

• 1:11:22Speaker 01

  It's so funny, all of my cookbooks, I've always had so much fun in the front matter because you know, a lot of cookbooks don't have any front matter. They go straight into the recipes. But I wanted to give people real tips and real strategies and a grocery store guide to like, understanding how to shop and what to avoid and how to, at every holiday, I break down every holiday, July 4th, it's Super Bowl, like everything, right? Of like, here's what you need to look out for and here's what you do instead. And so that there is like, clear guidelines on how to handle, you know, big gatherings and, and situations where you're going out with your boss to dinner and like, you still want to eat healthy, what do you do in that circumstance, right?

• 1:12:06Mindy Pelz?

  Yes.

• 1:12:06Speaker 01

  Um, and, and I think these like, real world strategies will help people live a very, it is somewhat unconventional way of life in a, in a conventional setting. And I think the more we live that unconventional life, it becomes more conventional. It, it persuades other people to start to change their businesses and provide more real food and more options to people like us who have seen the light and understand what's happening to our food supply and say, enough's enough. We don't want to be part of that experiment anymore. We know the truth and we know how to heal our bodies and we're going to do it.

• 1:12:40Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah, so beautiful. I, I'm excited for the book. I, um, and I love that you put all that in the front matter. That is so smart because it's a quick resource that people can go to. Um, so recently I changed the name of this podcast. We call it Live Like a Girl now because I really see that there are lifestyle tools that work really well for women. And I also know that many of us have lost that little girl essence, especially as we get older. So I end every, every interview with, what does living like a girl mean to you when you hear that phrase?

• 1:13:16Speaker 01

  Oh, having fun.

• 1:13:18Mindy Pelz?

  Exactly, right?

• 1:13:20Speaker 01

  Yeah. Having fun, right?

• 1:13:22Mindy Pelz?

  Yep.

• 1:13:23Speaker 01

  Having fun.

• 1:13:24Mindy Pelz?

  Where do we, it's like, when did it become that being an adult meant that you gave up fun?

• 1:13:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't know. I don't know.

• 1:13:32Mindy Pelz?

  Right? Because when we were little girls, we would play for hours in an imaginary play. You probably see it even in your, you have one daughter, right? Daughter and a son?

• 1:13:42Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:13:42Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah. So you see it in them and that's one of the beautiful things about being a parent, right? You get to be a little girl again, um, in certain moments. So, yeah. So where can we find your book? And, and how can we support your, your activism? Because you're still relentless and you're out there taking some serious punches. So let us know how we can support you.

• 1:14:04Speaker 01

  Well, the book is everywhere books are sold. It's called Food Babe Feast. And, um, and you can come follow me at foodbabe.com, sign up for my email newsletter or on social media, uh, Instagram, X, Facebook, uh, TikTok, all of it, thefoodbabe, at thefoodbabe. Um, and if you join and you become part of the Food Babe Army, I'll be always telling you about like, things that I'm working on or legislation or

• 1:14:30Mindy Pelz?

  Perfect.

• 1:14:30Speaker 01

  A fight in a state that we can make an impact for. Usually the Food Babe Army wins and so we've not always been the winner, but, um, we lost this glyphosate thing, that's for sure. But, um, you know, it was beyond our control, I guess, with the Supreme Court. But when we have a chance to win, like, it is so cool to see how our voices, when we call, when we show up, when we, you know, contact our leaders in Washington, how they start to listen to us.

• 1:15:00Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:01Speaker 01

  And it's really cool to see that we can make some dents in the system. Now, we can't change everything overnight and, you know, I still think we're up against Goliath, but, uh, but I do think that if we stick together and we focus on the things where we can make changes, like the fact that we did get 50% of the food companies to remove artificial dyes is pretty amazing. Uh, it took 30 years to ban one dye, right? And so, um, I think that's a great accomplishment, but that's something because of the power of the people, right? And so that's really what I'm harnessing. If you care about the food movement and you care about learning about chemicals in food, come follow me.

• 1:15:42Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah, amazing, amazing. Well, thank you again. I love talking to you. I always get all riled up. I feel like I need to go for a walk now. So, um, but yeah, you know, I really appreciate everything you're doing and, um, thank you for educating my following because I really want them to see this from as many angles as they can. So appreciate you.

• 1:16:02Speaker 01

  Thank you. Love seeing you, Mindy.

• 1:16:04Mindy Pelz?

  Thanks. Thank you so much for joining me in today's episode. I love bringing thoughtful discussions about all things health to you. If you enjoyed it, we'd love to know about it. So please leave us a review, share it with your friends and let me know what your biggest takeaway is.