The Ultimate Guide To Nutrition w/ Shawn Stevenson

This week, we're slicing into a topic that’s as crucial as your next heartbeat: the POWER of FOOD. And who better to serve up the wisdom than SHAWN STEVENSON, a man who's turned his life around with the secrets hidden in what we eat. At 20, Shawn was staring down a LIFE SENTENCE handed down by his own body - degenerative disc disease. Imagine having the spine of an 80-year-old in the prime of your youth! But instead of throwing in the towel, Shawn flipped the script. He dove headfirst into the world of biology and nutritional science. The result? Not just a rebuilt spine, but a reborn purpose – to guide others to a better life through smart, conscious eating. Shawn's journey didn't just give him a new lease on life; it led him to becoming an entrepreneur, host the top-charting MODEL HEALTH SHOW, and a bestselling author. So, what’s on the menu this week? We're talking FOOD – not just what’s on your plate, but what it means for your life. Shawn dishes out insights on: Food as a cornerstone of SOCIAL CONNECTION. How what we eat is packed with GENETIC information. The tricky balance of FOOD and LOVE. The void left by PROCESSED FOODS. Why real NUTRIENTS beat SUPPLEMENTS every time. Cooking OILS: the good, the bad, and the tasty. Decoding the processed food mystery. The undeniable link between food, MOOD, and your BRAIN. His top 40 foods for MAXIMUM HEALTH. It's easy to forget just how pivotal our relationship with food is. But Shawn's not just thinking about it; he's living and breathing this wisdom. And lucky for us, he's here to share his recipe for a life well-nourished. Remember, transforming your plate can transform your life. Shawn’s got the blueprint – all you need to do is dig in. 🍽🌟 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:00Ed Mylett?

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• 0:45Ed Mylett?

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• 1:01Speaker 01

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• 1:36Speaker 02

  This is the Ed Mileage Show.

• 1:40Ed Mylett?

  All right. Welcome back to the show, everybody. I have a good friend here this week. He's in the three-time club. There's only been three people, as far as I know, to ever be on the show three times. So Dr. Joe Dispenza, Tony Robbins, and Sean Stevenson, who's my guest today. And he is one of the world's experts on health.

• 2:02Ed Mylett?

  In fact, I will just tell you this behind the scenes. A lot of these experts you follow online that are expert experts, and they're all wonderful. They consult with this dude and a lot of them copy his stuff, to be honest with you too. He is the expert of the experts and that's why he's been on here three times. Every time he's on, the show blows up. And he's got a new cookbook to do out. Last time I was on, we talked about eating smarter. Now he's got the Eat Smarter Family Cookbook right here, everybody. Which is rare that someone with this type of health background will talk to you about food and then show you how to cook it. And then also delicious recipes for all three different meals as well and snack stuff as well. So we got a lot to cover today. This is gonna be heavy note taking for so many of you. Shawn Stevenson, welcome back to the show, brother.

• 2:40Shawn Stevenson?

  Man, I'm in esteemed category.

• 2:43Ed Mylett?

  You are.

• 2:43Shawn Stevenson?

  That's amazing.

• 2:44Ed Mylett?

  It is.

• 2:45Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah, that's, that's, I'm, I'm so grateful.

• 2:47Ed Mylett?

  Yeah, I'm grateful you're here because I learn every single time. So let's start, we're gonna talk a lot of food stuff today. And by the way, today, everyone, when we're talking about food, this is in your average stuff. We're gonna talk about preparation, the right microbiome stuff, fat burning, all kinds of different stuff. Cognitive function, emotional function, mood. We're going deep today. I prepare when this dude comes on because you have to, you have to pack a lunch, no pun intended, when you interview this man. I want to start with something basic, though, and that is families eating together.

• 3:15Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah.

• 3:15Ed Mylett?

  Little research. It says 30% of families eat together. I find even that hard to believe. Like, I don't think 30% of my friends eat together every single day with their families. But talk about that a little bit, about families eating together, why that matters, what the data really says about whether it happens or not, et cetera.

• 3:33Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah, it's on the endangered species list, for sure. You know, it's kind of been something devolving out of our culture. This was something that we evolved doing. It wasn't just the family unit, we evolved in tribes. And it was a part of the process. We hunted together, we gathered together, prepared food together, we ate together, we celebrated together. We can see a dramatization of this in something like a luau. You know, we watch and entertainment, but really that's how it was throughout human evolution. We did this together. And so my question was, is there something protective about eating together that we're missing out on? And the data blew my mind. So I've got a bunch of colleagues at Harvard and one team compiled a huge data set

• 4:17Shawn Stevenson?

  looking at eating behaviors of families and food intake. Like, what happens if families eat together frequently? And they found that families that eat together on a regular basis consume significantly more whole foods, so fruits and vegetables, which by nature included a lot more essential nutrients that helped them prevent diseases. So they saw lower disease incidence in these families and significantly less ultra-processed food consumption. Now, to tie this all together, like, what's the minimum effective dose? That was my question, too, because I'm always asking why and also like, how little can we do to get away with something, right? Because that's how we think as a culture today. And so, two studies, I'll combine these together, I'll smush them together for you.

• 4:59Shawn Stevenson?

  So one was published in Pediatrics and one was published in JAMA, which is the Journal of the American Medical Association. And these researchers found that three meals a week, that's the bare minimum, if you eat three or more meals per week, your children will have far less incidence of developing obesity and eating disorders. Really? Yeah, yeah. There's something remarkable. I'm gonna talk about the why, why it's happening, but also I want to reference this, what about us as parents? Because sometimes getting all that stuff together can be stressful, and we'll talk about taking the stress out of that as well today. But one of these studies, this was conducted with office workers at IBM, and they found, they found, and you know, of course, working in a tech, it could be stressful, all the

• 5:41Shawn Stevenson?

  things, but when folks, when folks were able to make it home and have dinner with their families, their stress levels stayed low, work productivity stayed high, and work morale stayed high, which is very important. But as soon as work started cutting into family meals, their productivity dropped, their morale dropped, and stress levels were exceedingly high. Why does this matter? At the end of the day, and for all the experts that you talk with, and I want this to be the underpinning moving forward for everybody to understand this, this was published in JAMA, they found that about 80% of all physician visits today are for stress-related illnesses. Stress is that seed of so many of the outer expression or symptoms that we see with diseases.

• 6:25Shawn Stevenson?

  And so, there's something protective, stress-reducing, about eating with the people that we love. And if you want to dig into the why, I could tell you exactly why. Please, I'm, you see me leaning, yeah. So, let's talk about a couple of these factors. So number one. Being around people that we love instantly, right now, our oxytocin is going up.

• 6:44Ed Mylett?

  Yeah, you and I get together. Yeah, for sure.

• 6:47Shawn Stevenson?

  And this is oftentimes called the love hormone. All right, it's something that it creates bonding in humans. And humans do this really well, especially women are really good at oxytocin when they get around other women. But also their family as well, especially in close proximity. Hugs get an extra boost of oxytocin, but just being around people that you love. And what the research indicates is that oxytocin is one of the few hormones that really counteracts cortisol. So this kind of glorified stress hormone.

• 7:16Ed Mylett?

  No way.

• 7:17Shawn Stevenson?

  And so when we're eating with people that we care about, we're switching over from this fight or flight.

• 7:23Ed Mylett?

  Bro, that's brilliant right there.

• 7:24Shawn Stevenson?

  Stress and it's called the sympathetic nervous system. And it's a switch over, it's binary, it's switching over to the parasympathetic rest and digest. So we're literally changing the station on our nervous system.

• 7:37Ed Mylett?

  Wow.

• 7:38Shawn Stevenson?

  When we get around people that we love.

• 7:39Ed Mylett?

  So you theoretically could actually eat the same meal alone or at work or in your car. And have a different metabolic influence in your body than eating around people that you love because this oxytocin is being produced.

• 7:50Shawn Stevenson?

  How profound is that?

• 7:51Ed Mylett?

  Holy crap, that's huge.

• 7:52Shawn Stevenson?

  This is real. And also, I shared one of these studies, this was from Nutrition Journal. And by the way, all this stuff we're talking about is in the book.

• 7:58Ed Mylett?

  It's in the book and with this dude, everything is scientifically backed with some kind of a study. And his ability to recite and regurgitate these studies is some type of savant crap this man has. Just FYI, you're gonna hear it through the whole interview. Anytime on the phone with this dude, hey, I gotta tell you about this new study, blah, blah, blah, I'm like, okay, here we go. Okay, keep going though.

• 8:16Shawn Stevenson?

  Thank you, man. You know, this is, it is something unique. There's over 250 scientific references in a cookbook. It's never been done before.

• 8:22Ed Mylett?

  It's awesome.

• 8:22Shawn Stevenson?

  But also in a way that's entertaining, that's engaging, that makes sense.

• 8:26Ed Mylett?

  It is.

• 8:26Shawn Stevenson?

  And also just laying it out in a beautiful way. And so this study was published in Nutrition Journal. And they found that people who frequently eat in isolation, who frequently eat alone, do in fact have an overall poorer diet quality and substantially less intake of vital nutrients that help to prevent diseases. And now, in particular, when I mentioned how we evolved, it's only been in the last couple of decades that it's got to this extreme where we went from eating face to face with people in our tribe, or at least people in our nuclear family, to now oftentimes eating in isolation in front of a screen.

• 9:02Shawn Stevenson?

  It's changed just so dramatically in just the last couple of decades. And the question is, and we already know this, this is, there's probably some things that are gonna happen as a result. Because we're not getting these epigenetic inputs. And so this is the, another part of this proximity thing. This is one of the biggest studies that's ever been done. This was a huge meta-analysis, and this was from researchers at Brigham Young University. This was 148 studies. So it's not one study. It's looking at 148 studies, about 300,000 people. And they found that being in close proximity to people that you care about on a consistent basis, or what they regarded as healthy social bonds, resulted in a 50% reduction in all-cause mortality.

• 9:43Shawn Stevenson?

  This means a 50% reduction in your risk of dying from everything prematurely, when you have healthy social connections.

• 9:52Ed Mylett?

  Wow.

• 9:53Shawn Stevenson?

  Now, where do we connect most often? How are we connecting? Food is involved in so much of our culture, right? Whether it's after the baseball game, whether it's the first date, whether it's date night, whether it's, you know, the list goes on, on holidays. Our lives revolve around food.

• 10:09Ed Mylett?

  It's true.

• 10:10Shawn Stevenson?

  You know, and now what if we can intentionally put this into our, our culture again? Because right now, the larger culture, as you, as you stated, about 30%, according to research at Harvard, and this was a couple of years ago, by the way, it's devolved more, only about 30% of families eat together on a regular basis now.

• 10:26Ed Mylett?

  You know what I wonder, Sean? This, this hasn't been studied. Not only are there the nutritional benefits, all of the stuff you're describing about switching their, from cortisol, and you've got more of this oxytocin. I wonder though, man, I wonder if you made a study of families that eat together, and you looked at even teenage pregnancy rates? If you looked at alcohol and drug addiction? My bet is that it is lower with families that eat together. I bet there's a lower teenage pregnancy rate. I'll bet you there's a lower drug and alcohol use rate in teenagers when they eat with their families together. Just, just anecdotally, I think I'm probably right about that, don't you?

• 11:01Shawn Stevenson?

  Absolutely, absolutely.

• 11:03Ed Mylett?

  There's all these other benefits.

• 11:04Shawn Stevenson?

  Part of this is, and let's just be very practical. When we're sitting down with our children, we're able to see them. What a concept. Yeah. You know, especially today, when everybody's kind of moving 100 miles a minute, to slow down, because the dinner table is a unifier in many ways. Yep. And to see, most of our communication is nonverbal as well. Especially when it comes to children. They can tell you so much beyond the words that they're saying by how they're carrying themselves. And you can pick up subtleties if there is something that's brewing, or, you know, maybe something that needs to be offloaded that they're sharing, or even for you. Because one of the things that I've been able to demonstrate, which a lot of men don't get exposed to, which is like, being able to demonstrate a softness and compassion.

• 11:50Shawn Stevenson?

  And also, of course, demonstrating strength, but also for my, for my son to know that this is not easy for me, you know? Because they would think, and I know my oldest son shared that with me, which he's a big part of the book too, that I make it look easy. So he, he never really thinks about me struggling or dealing with anything, right? Dad's like Superman. Yeah. Right?

• 12:14Ed Mylett?

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• 12:57Ed Mylett?

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• 13:41Ed Mylett?

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• 14:18Shawn Stevenson?

  And so, one of the things that we created as one of our family rituals, we occasionally do this now, but we had done this for quite some time, is we go around the table before we eat and we'd share one thing that we failed at that day.

• 14:31Ed Mylett?

  Failed at, interesting.

• 14:32Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah, one thing that we failed at slash struggled with. And it's not about advocating failure per se, but it's more so opening up the conversation of our struggle points and also to start to talk about potential solutions.

• 14:48Ed Mylett?

  Yeah, reframing it, reframing too, reframing what it means. I gotta tell you, one of my regrets, my kids are gone now and I try to talk to them somehow every single day at some length. Here's what's weird, man. I actually have a deeper connection with them, I think, now that they're out of my house and it didn't need to be that way. And one of the reasons was although we did eat together, this is just a small thing, TV was on in the background most of the time. I'm embarrassed to say that, but like sports centers playing behind my son's head. I said, oh, Brady did this or, you know, or there's some political thing on TV. Just getting quiet together, everybody put their phones down, turn the TV off and just be together for an hour. I gotta think that number's even lower than 30%. Just, just my opinion. Let's talk about the food part for a minute.

• 15:33Ed Mylett?

  You say the food piece of it, and by the way, that's what's wonderful about the book, because there's all this different stuff on food, which we're going to cover in a minute, the preparation of the food, different ways to do it. But let me ask you about this. Food is information, something that you say. Food is information. What, what the heck does that mean? How is food information?

• 15:53Shawn Stevenson?

  You know, first and foremost, you know, where we, where we are with science right now, everything is really even more so than just information, it's energy. And food isn't just food, it's information. And there's like a data transfer that takes place. And let me talk about this from a very practical place, and then we can get a little bit deeper.

• 16:14Ed Mylett?

  Okay.

• 16:14Shawn Stevenson?

  From a practical place, the microbiome is having a minute right now. It's having a moment in the sun. A lot of people are talking about this. But I like to point out the obvious that's overlooked. And if we're talking about the influence on our microbiome, whenever you eat a food, you're eating that food's microbiome. So whenever you eat a blueberry, you're eating that blueberry's microbiome. Whenever you eat an avocado, you're eating that avocado's microbiome. You're taking on that data. So in this context, it's a file transfer of microbial data. All right? Now, to go deeper, being that food is information, one of the things I've been working to get into popular culture is this growing field of nutrigenomics.

• 16:58Shawn Stevenson?

  So there's nutrigenomics and nutrigenetics. And essentially, we've uncovered that every bite of food that you eat changes your genetic expression. It alters how your genes are being expressed. All right? And so for years, in particular when I was in my university classes, we were really taught that genes are, were our destiny.

• 17:17Ed Mylett?

  By the way, that's a huge statement you just made. I mean, you're saying food alters the genetic expression in our bodies. But just pause on that, everybody. I mean, I don't want to jump in and interrupt you, but that's a pretty profound. Somewhat revolutionary statement. You're saying I can turn on and off particular genes based on the information I'm giving my body through food.

• 17:36Shawn Stevenson?

  Absolutely. So when Hippocrates, the father of modern medicine, has this quote that gets passed around on social media that let food be thy medicine, medicine be thy food. Sometimes that can get lost in translation because we become kind of tunnel vision and especially medicine where medicine is medicine, right? Medicine is medicine, food is food.

• 17:57Ed Mylett?

  Yeah.

• 17:58Shawn Stevenson?

  But if we look at the sheer amount of pounds of food that we're eating compared to oftentimes micrograms of a drug.

• 18:05Ed Mylett?

  Great point.

• 18:06Shawn Stevenson?

  And understanding that this food is literally changing your genes, which then downstream are determining which proteins are getting built. Downstream is determining what your DNA is doing, what kind of copies are getting made of you.

• 18:17Ed Mylett?

  Wow.

• 18:18Shawn Stevenson?

  Where's the real power at?

• 18:19Ed Mylett?

  Wow, food.

• 18:20Shawn Stevenson?

  Exactly. And so, again, it's complementary with medicine, you know, conventional medicine today. But if we don't understand the food portion, we're really, really missing the mark. And this is one of the other big insights that I want to impress upon everyone. And, you know, you know, a lot of Dr. Gabrielle Lyon, you know, good friend. We know so many wonderful people who have worked in conventional medicine. I went to a traditional university. I went to a conventional nutritional science class and was largely miseducated, full caveat. But my friend who's a cardiologist and award-winning, matter of fact, let me talk about my friend, Dr. Will Bolsova, who's an award-winning, top-tier gastroenterologist. He studies the gut.

• 19:05Ed Mylett?

  Yep.

• 19:06Shawn Stevenson?

  All right. And his training and his practice is revolving around the organ responsible for digestion, assimilation, and elimination of food. Guess how much he learned about food in his 12-year education?

• 19:21Ed Mylett?

  Not much.

• 19:22Shawn Stevenson?

  A couple of months.

• 19:23Ed Mylett?

  That's crazy, man. That is absolutely crazy.

• 19:25Shawn Stevenson?

  12 years, a couple of months, and it wasn't this particular food can cause this or it was like.

• 19:32Shawn Stevenson?

  This is what happens when you have a rare B12 deficiency in your patient. So it's literally missing the mark because it's not just about what's traveling through there. It's what's making the tissues themselves. It's all made from food. Your intestinal tract is made from food. Your heart is made from food. Your brain. Top-tier cardiologists, top-tier neuroscientists and neurologists. If you don't understand that you're looking at food when you see your patient, we're really missing the point.

• 19:57Ed Mylett?

  I don't know if a lot of people know this about you, by the way. We covered it on the first show, but I'm making the assumption everybody knows this about you and they may not. How does this man have such a passion for what he's doing and a depth of knowledge that's so diverse? And by the way, on the cutting edge, I have a funny feeling, five, eight, 10 years from now, food will become central to all these conversations. For right now, you're one of the very few people who's describing it in this way. I mean, people talk about, hey, make sure you get so much protein and your carbs should be this. And you're approaching it a much different way. I don't know if most people know how the heck you even ended up here. Let's just, let's, let's digress just one minute and let them know about you. You're 20 years old.

• 20:39Ed Mylett?

  You've got this massal, massive problem going on with your spine that they believe is deteriorating. You're headed for like a wheelchair, basically, right? And then what?

• 20:51Shawn Stevenson?

  So at 20, I was diagnosed with a severe disc degeneration. So my intervertebral disc, L4, L5, S1 were severely degenerated. To the degree when you looked at them through the MRI, they look black. They look like thin burnt pieces of baloney in my, you know, that's, I come from that. And so the light is supposed to be shining through it and they were for my other disc. But those two were so severely degenerated that it was causing dysfunction with my leg. And I couldn't get it to fire correctly. It's constant pain, but it was more like a nuisance of a pain. And after getting this MRI done and went in to see my physician, and I asked him, you know, what do we do to fix this? Because, you know, being an athlete, I just, you know, I'd actually broke my hip

• 21:36Shawn Stevenson?

  a couple of years earlier at track practices I shared with you before. And this was doing a time trial. I didn't fall. This was not trauma. It didn't happen on the football field. I was just running a 200 meter sprint and my hip broke. Because my bones were so brittle, my bone density was so low. And my spine was deteriorating. I basically had an extremely advanced arthritic condition. And he told me, when I asked him, what do we do to fix this? He said, "I'm sorry, son, but you have the spine of an 80 year old man. And this is something that, you know, you're just gonna have to learn to live with." And my young brain at the time, solution oriented, analytical, which I muted, by the way, after this conversation,

• 22:17Shawn Stevenson?

  didn't really get it. It didn't register. So I asked again, I was like, well, does this have anything to do with what I'm eating? Should I change the way I'm exercising? That was just an intuitive thing. I had no grounds to talk to him about that. And he looked at me like I was from another planet. He like cocked his head. He was like, "This has nothing to do with what you're eating." Mind you, he's over 300 pounds himself. And, you know, not, again, not any judgment, but this individual who is meaning, well meaning, he's in a position where he can deeply influence me about my health outcomes and he's struggling as well. And that's been another one of my missions is to help our healers to heal themselves. But we have a system that just even,

• 22:59Shawn Stevenson?

  when I was working at the university gym for a while, for several years, actually, while I was in college, a lot of the people I was working with were, you know, pre-med students and nurses and people doing clinicals. Man, they were some of the most messed up population, you know, as far as like they're struggling with their weight. They're young. We're talking early twenties, struggling with their weight, struggling to be able to sleep, having manifestation of different disease symptoms, whether it's like psoriasis or, you know, anxiety. All this stuff was just, it just turned on once they started medical school. And it's kind of like a badge of honor as well. And I felt that. I went to a private university in St. Charles, tried to stay close to home in St. Louis.

• 23:43Shawn Stevenson?

  And I went there to do the pre-med program based on television because I'd never, I didn't know anybody who, let alone went to college, but let alone, you know, was successful in life. I just, I didn't grow up around that. So I was the first in my family to go to college. And I did that based off The Cosby Show because he was a doctor and a lawyer. It's like, they look happy. They got jokes and, you know, Theo and, you know, whatever. The Huxtables. The Huxtables, yeah. So I'm just like, I'm gonna do that. But at the time, ironically, and this is crazy to say this, but I hated science. I hated it. That blows my mind with you. I hated it. I would have nightmare, this recurring nightmare about this biology class.

• 24:23Shawn Stevenson?

  And fate had other plans for me, or should I say that God doesn't call the qualified. God qualifies the called. Amen. And so life was qualifying me to revisit science from a new perspective. And I'm so grateful for that. I got chills. I just, yeah. I'm so grateful for that because it wasn't the fact that I hated science. It was how I was being taught. And this is why I do what I do to teach this in a way that makes sense, that empowers people, that provides some of this connective tissue. Because as we were studying the cell in my university biology class, my teacher's not telling me that your mitochondria are made from your menu, that your nucleus in your cell is made

• 25:07Shawn Stevenson?

  from the nutrients you eat, that your membranes of your cell are made from your meals. That was a disconnect. I didn't have any power in this. And so, fast forward that story. After getting this diagnosis and being sent on my way, got a new prescription for Celebrex, was hot at the time, so right around the time of Vioxx as well, which I was a prescription pad away from potentially dying. Killing, yeah, killing. Yeah, about 40,000 people were confirmed to have died from Vioxx, non-steroidal anti-inflammatory. And I just wanted to feel better, so I would have done whatever he said. And taking Celebrex, though, I did have the side effect that wasn't. Diagnosed you had her put in the data, which was restless leg syndrome. So I struggled to sleep at night. And if you're not sleeping, you're not healing.

• 25:51Shawn Stevenson?

  So it felt like my, I'd go to bed, it felt like my legs were trying to get up and leave me. Right? It was like some Addams Family type of vibe. And so, but from that process, from that moment, I struggled for the next two years. Definitely was struggling with depression and increasing loss of function because every physician that I saw, because I did have the wherewithal to get a second and third opinion, but they gave me the same. It's really standard of care. And basically telling me that this is something I'm just gonna have to live with. We're gonna help you manage it. Here's a new prescription. So now I'm leaving with another drug and another note for bed rest. So I don't gotta work. Right? And so not only is my spine atrophying, now everything is.

• 26:34Ed Mylett?

  Oh my gosh.

• 26:35Shawn Stevenson?

  And I'm gaining all this weight because I'm eating my drive through diet that I grew up eating. And now I at least had that low hanging fruit of movement prior. But here's the bottom line. After two years, I had an incredible revelation, really. And it was through my grandmother, who's a big inspiration for this book and for this project. She saw something in me and I didn't see it in myself. And she, living in that environment with her, I lived in two very different environments, which we'll talk about because we gotta circle back to something that you mentioned earlier. In that environment, we lived in a, a pretty safe neighborhood. And I walked one block to go to school, to elementary school. This was when my mother was sometimes, you know, didn't have a place to stay.

• 27:20Shawn Stevenson?

  My mother and my stepfather. And whenever I go to visit them, you know, I'd sleep on the floor. And there were mousetraps and like, this is real, that was my life. But living with my grandmother to go to school for those couple of years, she made me feel like I mattered. I felt seen.

• 27:37Ed Mylett?

  Your face just changed.

• 27:40Shawn Stevenson?

  I. I also experienced a lot of certainty, which is important as well for your psyche. So we had our routines and she showed me love as many grandmothers do through food. Right? And now this is also the beginning of the golden age of ultra-processed foods in the eighties. You know, so this is like, and I want to eat what my friends are eating. My friend Jeff, who lived across the street, who is my friend to this day, he runs this fantastic gym in St. Louis now, both of him and I were messed up though. And Jeff was eating like he had Capri Suns. That when they hit the scenes, I didn't have Capri Suns, so I wanted what Jeff had. And so to kind of fit in, I would like ask my grandmother to give me these foods and she did because she, she loved me.

• 28:24Shawn Stevenson?

  And so it's kind of setting the template for my eating behaviors. But in this instance, my grandmother would call and check on me. And it was, it honestly was annoying at the time, just like, I'm fine. Grandma, like what, why you keep calling me? But she knew I wasn't fine. And I realized that all the investment that she made in me and all the, the moments that she gave me of feeling like I mattered, feeling like I was special, that I was going to do something remarkable. I was just letting it die. And it was my choice. I was letting it die, but I was blaming my physicians. I was blaming the environment. I was blaming my family.

• 29:08Shawn Stevenson?

  Why won't somebody help me? And I realized that I was letting my dream die. And so in that moment, I decided to get well. It sounds so simple, but I decided. And we've talked about this before, but it's not like I instantly healed. Right. But that change in my perspective, it changed, I changed my filter. That decision changed your destiny. Absolutely, absolutely. And we see what we filter for. And so now I'm looking for wellness. Yep. Prior to that, I'm looking for disease. I'm looking and affirming constantly that question, why me? Why won't anybody help me? Why am I in so much pain?

• 29:52Shawn Stevenson?

  Why do I have to suffer? I'm looking for data to affirm, why me? Right. You know, and so now my lens has changed and now I'm starting to see opportunity. And crazy thing is, my path to wellness was there the whole time, I just couldn't see it. And so I had a friend who was in chiropractic school. And I've, I've, I've been seeing her off and on for like two or three years. And it's just like, that thing over there, that's weird, you guys are weird. And she, after about a week, maybe a week and a half after this revelation, she took me to Wild Oats, which has since been bought up by Whole Foods. And I didn't know that existed. I've drove, I drove, drove past there a hundred times. It wasn't near my neighborhood in Ferguson, Missouri, by the way.

• 30:36Shawn Stevenson?

  But this was like forty minutes away. And by the way, St. Louis is a big city. There's only one Whole Foods at this time, alright? In LA, you could throw a rock any direction and hit one.

• 30:48Ed Mylett?

  Yeah, you also don't put Whole Foods in impoverished neighborhoods either. And that's one of the other challenges we have in this country is, is folks that don't have the financial resources to get access to this food. What's great about this podcast and yours is that it takes no resources to get access to the information now. Thank God, right? So times are changing, but still, it's still an issue in our country. One of the reasons that people with money live long is they get access to better healthcare. Yeah, and A, and B, they are eating better foods most of the time. They actually can have eggs for breakfast instead of eating, you know, processed foods like cereals and things like that. And so there's a big difference in this country financially between food as well, but that's a whole other topic.

• 31:30Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah, but it's important. It's important for us to know because there's both. There's the personal accountability and there's the environment.

• 31:36Ed Mylett?

  That's right. But in your case, you took responsibility for your environment and it changed.

• 31:41Shawn Stevenson?

  That part, exactly. Because we're not just products of our environment, we're creators of our environment.

• 31:46Ed Mylett?

  A hundred percent, and you were perpetuating it and, and that pattern was reinforcing it over and over again. So you make this decision, this chiropractic friend, and then what? Did you just change the way you were eating? Is that what happened once you started going there?

• 31:58Shawn Stevenson?

  The first thing I did, I was just operating on logic. And I was just like, now I'm significantly overweight and I'm just like, To ease some of this pain maybe if I get some of this weight off of my frame. And also, I was going off of commercials for what I was. The first thing I did prior to hanging out with her, I did Slim Fast. This is a true story, based on the commercial. What is it? A shake for breakfast, a shake for lunch, and then a sensible dinner. Right? So I got that nasty ass Slim Fast. I had those too. And unfortunately, I tried it not cold the first time. And it was, yeah, it was terrible. Um, which I lost a couple of pounds, but then. From throwing up.

• 32:37Shawn Stevenson?

  But that's the power of marketing too. It's just like, if I don't know, I'm just doing, as you mentioned, part of the transformation for impoverished communities like I come from is awareness. That's right. I just didn't know. Yeah. I didn't know that it existed. Mm-hmm. And so, in that environment, so I did that, then I connected with her, and I go there. And I'm a researcher, I'm in school, and I'm just kinda known for that, helping friends and stuff like that. And I went directly to the books. And I was looking at my condition. There was like this kinda nutrition prescription, this thick book. And I went to the reference section, because what they were saying was just like, is this backed by science? And I went and looked at the references, and I'm like, oh my god, this is a published study. On omega threes and bone density?

• 33:22Shawn Stevenson?

  Mm-hmm. Nobody ever told me that. And examining my diet, and this is not an exaggeration. I might not get a valuable source of DHA and EPA omega threes in years. I was eating ultra-processed foods, fast food, every single day. If I wasn't, if I didn't have like two dollars to go to Jack in the Box and get two tacos, I would, I'd eat like a family can of SpaghettiOs or something like that. Like, that's how I was living. Yeah. And it was cheap, it was accessible, and really, again, living in that environment, that's all that I knew. Yeah.

• 33:56Shawn Stevenson?

  And so, the first thing that I did was, I found out about these nutrients that I needed to regenerate my tissues, my bone, my spine, that I was not giving my body to do, then to, to provide the raw materials for the intelligence to do what it does. For your body to heal itself. And now, I go to natural pill popping. So I'm like getting all these supplements. Yeah. Which was hard on my college diet, you know? And, um. Can you stay on that for a second? Cause you talk about this, um, often.

• 34:24Ed Mylett?

  A lot of people listen to go, alright, yeah, I got it, food. Okay, I probably get some omegas, I better get some vitamin E, I'm gonna get a little vitamin C. But you know what, I can just get all this stuff in pills. But you make the case and talk, this is important right here, you guys, this is an interjection. The difference between synthetically receiving these vitamins and getting them naturally from food. So you think you may be getting all that stuff, because by the way, I do, I take supplements as well. But there's a difference in your body from getting it synthetically as compared to getting it from food, correct?

• 34:54Shawn Stevenson?

  Absolutely, and I'm sharing the data. I'm not just, it's not a hypothesis. I shared several studies in the book identifying this. Even because again, I don't care if it's true or not, I'm just going on what the data says. And also bringing in some logic as well.

• 35:09Ed Mylett?

  What's the data say?

• 35:10Shawn Stevenson?

  So one of the studies, we just use vitamin E, for example. Which is critical for helping your body to manage inflammation, for cognitive function. It's a really remarkable antioxidant, there's a bunch of benefits to it. And one of the studies that I cited in the book, found that synthetic, well, let's just clarify what synthetic is. Okay, how to best put this? So a naturally occurring nutrient, or a whole food concentrate of a nutrient, which something like camu camu berry, which is a very dense source of vitamin C. That food-based vitamin C, in a concentrate of that camu camu berry, is surrounded by thousands of other micronutrients.

• 35:53Shawn Stevenson?

  Many that we don't even know yet, that we haven't identified. All these cofactors have this kind of synergy that enables our body to use it better. And I'm gonna come back and talk about vitamin C in a moment. But synthetic versions of this is a highly refined, but even when we talk about synthetic, by the way, it's still coming from the planet somewhere, you know, but it's going to become from a very kind of artificial,

• 36:16Ed Mylett?

  Right.

• 36:16Shawn Stevenson?

  constructed, man-made version of it. And so what the researchers found was that, Food-based vitamin E was twice as bioavailable, twice as usable by your cells than synthetic vitamin E. All right? There's something about food. And the thing is, really simple explanation. We evolved eating food. We evolved. Our genes have this interaction with food. Right? Not to say that synthetic things cannot be helpful in some instances.

• 36:46Ed Mylett?

  What they are is supplements. They're not the... And it means that word, at least based on reading your work. You can supplement your vitamin E, but it ought to not be your primary source of it, right? And you're gonna say something about vitamin C as well. I know what's in the book, but we'll give them this little flavor. I want to also get the book, but tell them about the vitamin C piece, too.

• 37:03Shawn Stevenson?

  Sure. This is gonna be a news flash, maybe a little heartbreaking for a lot of people, but most of the vitamin C out there and vitamin C supplements and even the little energy packs that are like at the checkout counter, the vast majority of it, we're talking over 90%, is made from genetically modified corn syrup and genetically modified cornstarch. So like some of the worst, cheapest, crappiest stuff. And because they can isolate this nutrient, it gets put into all these fancy pants supplements.

• 37:34Ed Mylett?

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• 38:19Ed Mylett?

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• 39:02Ed Mylett?

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• 39:36Shawn Stevenson?

  And so one of the studies that I that I mentioned looked at people who were exposing themselves because vitamin C, we hear about that for their immune system. It does so much more. It is a it is a master antioxidant in the human body. Your skin health is dependent upon vitamin C, helping to reduce the risk of cardiovascular events. And so specifically, they were looking at individuals who are doing high-risk behaviors, being smoking in this study, and to see if taking vitamin C would have an impact on their cardiovascular and inflammation risk factors. And so this was a placebo-controlled study. All right. So part of the study, the smokers are getting camu camu berry, which is very likely the most dense source of vitamin C of any food ever discovered.

• 40:22Shawn Stevenson?

  And in another part of the study, they're getting synthetic vitamin C like you would find in these different supplements. And so at the end of the study, they found that when the individuals were taking the whole food-based vitamin C in the form of camu camu berry, they had significant reductions in their inflammatory biomarkers like C-reactive protein. So it's just showing this lowering of risk for pretty much everything, especially a cardiovascular event. And there was no change in the people taking the synthetic version of vitamin C.

• 40:52Ed Mylett?

  That's bananas.

• 40:53Shawn Stevenson?

  All right. And so again, this isn't just hearsay. This is the real deal. And hearing this from me is a little bit different because I paid good money at a two universities, actually. To get miseducated because we were not taught about a distinction with vitamin C. The professor would say, uh, if you work with patients and for yourself as well, just make sure you're getting all your vitamins and minerals. Take a multivitamin.

• 41:21Ed Mylett?

  Yeah.

• 41:21Shawn Stevenson?

  That was it.

• 41:22Ed Mylett?

  Yep.

• 41:22Shawn Stevenson?

  We weren't taught that there's multiple versions of vitamin C, that there's multiple versions of B12, that there's multiple versions of you name it. It's not just this. So if you're taking it in this synthetic form, are you getting the magnesium that your body is really looking for? Right? And so this food picture is so much bigger, but you can trust you're going to get a variety of these things if you're eating food.

• 41:44Ed Mylett?

  Okay, this is crazy to me. The other thing that you did, and then we're going to talk about how to prepare food too, because that's a big part of the book. So then there's this idea of all this ultra-processed foods. Like if you're wondering whether this is real or not. I didn't realize this till I started prepping for the interview. You're saying now that they've actually studied fat cells from like 1900. See, I prepare, brother. So they studied these fat cells over time from like 1900 to now. And the difference in the makeup and the composition of these fat cells, based on what we're now doing to ourselves and our diet is just stark to me. So if you're wondering whether or not this stuff really matters, it's, it's affecting you at a cellular level and it's been proven. So go ahead.

• 42:21Shawn Stevenson?

  Oh, wow. You're, I love you, man. All right. So one of the studies that I cite in the book, which it should be shocking for people and everybody should know this. So this was published in the BMJ, which is, this is top tier, the British Medical Journal, top tier of all time. We're talking top three. And this was published in BMJ Open and looking at specifically heart health. And the researchers determined that our large consumption now of highly refined vegetable oil, canola oil, soy oil, corn oil, is one of the leading dietary factors of heart attacks, strokes and other cardiovascular events.

• 43:04Shawn Stevenson?

  You don't hear that every day. As a matter of fact, the marketing was the opposite of that.

• 43:08Ed Mylett?

  That's right.

• 43:09Shawn Stevenson?

  And another study, and I'll just throw this out there really quickly. This was published in Inhalation Toxicology. Just the smells of stuff. All right. They're looking at how smells can affect you. And they found that just smelling vegetable oil during cooking, the fumes of it can damage your DNA.

• 43:24Ed Mylett?

  Oh my gosh.

• 43:25Shawn Stevenson?

  It's crazy.

• 43:25Ed Mylett?

  It's crazy.

• 43:26Shawn Stevenson?

  And it's the, it's the, the vast majority of these ultra-processed foods, which, what is ultra-processed food? Let's clarify that just for everybody, because humans have been processing food forever. All right, just cooking a food is processing the food, whether it's cooking a steak. It's changing the, the, the protein availability, it's changing the chemistry of the food in many ways. Many, in many instances, real food is making many things more bioavailable. This is one of the advantages that humans had when we started to cook our food. That really helped the development of our prefrontal cortex that makes us who we are, right? And so it's basically, in some instances, helping to unlock certain capacities. Now, there is an extreme of that too, of course, but just in general, cooking is processing.

• 44:09Shawn Stevenson?

  Taking olives and pressing the oil out, that's a processing, all right? It's minimally processed, and I've got to finesse this in here, if they're just like, what oils to have? Olive oil. Auburn University researchers found olive oil is one of the few foods ever discovered that can reduce inflammation in your brain and repair your blood-brain barrier. Which, that's one of the leading risk factors for insulin resistance, is actually brain inflammation. This is from researchers at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. But anyways.

• 44:39Ed Mylett?

  Insulin resistance and brain inflammation?

• 44:41Shawn Stevenson?

  Yes, yes.

• 44:42Ed Mylett?

  Okay, so, but in the book, though, you have extra virgin olive oil as a sufficient choice for oil to use. But you actually talk, actually about organic avocado oil. You talk, I'm gonna have him read the book, but are there even better oils than, than olive oil?

• 44:58Shawn Stevenson?

  For cooking purposes, yes, because those oils are sensitive. And that's exactly the point, I love you, man, that I was gonna get to was, olive oil for centuries had been bottled in dark glass.

• 45:08Ed Mylett?

  Yes.

• 45:09Shawn Stevenson?

  Our ancestors knew that this, this oil is sensitive, all right? It's like, it's the, uh, it's the, the boy band, it's the Journey. It's the love ballad of oils, alright? It's still powerful, but it's a little more sensitive.

• 45:24Ed Mylett?

  But you're saying when you cook with it, there's a deterioration and has benefits? Is that what you're saying?

• 45:29Shawn Stevenson?

  Because these oils are volatile, they're very sensitive, they can be damaged very easily.

• 45:34Ed Mylett?

  Okay.

• 45:34Shawn Stevenson?

  And you can cook with olive oil, don't get me wrong.

• 45:37Ed Mylett?

  You say it's a sufficient choice in the book.

• 45:41Shawn Stevenson?

  Ideally, however, we would be cooking with oils that are more stable under high heats, because you're not micromanaging the heat of your food.

• 45:48Ed Mylett?

  Sean, this is a big deal. This isn't stuff anyone's talking about right here, so keep going. This is very, very good stuff right here.

• 45:55Shawn Stevenson?

  So what would we deem to be something more stable? This would be something that's higher in saturated fat. So this would be grass-fed butter, ghee, tallow, coconut oil, right? And so, humans have been using these for thousands of years. Canola oil was just invented a few decades ago, by the way. It's very different. And if you see the process of making coconut oil, if you see the process of making olive oil, extra virgin olive oil, it is very simple. They're pressing out the oil. When you see how canola oil is made, it looks like gasoline, it looks like garbage, it looks like mud.

• 46:35Ed Mylett?

  It's terrible. So canola, corn, soybean, vegetable oils in general, no bueno.

• 46:41Shawn Stevenson?

  It's marketing.

• 46:42Ed Mylett?

  Yeah.

• 46:42Shawn Stevenson?

  Vegetable oil, it implies it's health washing.

• 46:45Ed Mylett?

  It sure, yeah, right.

• 46:46Shawn Stevenson?

  It implies that it's healthy. My mother switched over from Crisco to vegetable oil to be healthier, alright? It's nefarious.

• 46:53Ed Mylett?

  Guys, this is huge right here. Now, by the way, I diverted us, but it leads down the road about how our processed foods working in our lives. So I took us off track there, but I just feel like one of the secrets in the book, to me, was this, because I've always thought, by the way, and you say coconut oil, butter, avocado oil, those are sufficient choices, but I've always thought, man, the healthiest thing you can cook with is extra virgin olive oil. And you're like, nah, once you've destabilized it to some extent, there's stuff that's better, which is what you've already told us about here. So let's go back a little bit, let's stay on there. So we're back now to ultra-processed foods, we kind of understand what that is, and then what did they find in these cells? Because I want to make sure that they get that.

• 47:33Shawn Stevenson?

  Precisely. And the closing point with that is ultra-processed foods, on the other hand, are the minimally-processed foods humans have been eating forever. Ultra-processed foods is when you see a field of wheat. And somehow it becomes a bowl of frosted flakes. Or you see a field of wheat and it somehow becomes some twisted version of some cheezits. Right? There's no longer any connection to anything real. All right? And so same thing with corn. That's one of my favorite snacks, you know, growing up in the inner city was Funyuns. You know? Funyuns. We've got, you know, puffs cereal, you know, smacks, the honey smacks, the list goes on and on.

• 48:18Shawn Stevenson?

  But if you were coming from an indigenous culture of like a hunter gatherer tribe and you saw a bowl of fruity pebbles, you had no idea where it comes from, not to mention all of these chemical additives, right? So the food dies and the, you know, the pesticides used in the growing process, the list goes on and on. It's so denatured, it's no longer real food. That's ultra processed food. And so here's what they found in those fat cells.

• 48:44Shawn Stevenson?

  As you mentioned, doing biopsies to look what makes up humans and our fat cells back closer to the 1900s, only about 2% of our fat cells consisted of polyunsaturated fatty acids or PUFA's. All right? Which is the primary fatty acids that you're getting in these vegetable oils, by the way. More recently, biopsies taken of multiple humans, find about 25% of fat cells are now made of polyunsaturated fatty acids or PUFA's. These are far more inflammatory fatty acids that our fat cells are just getting packed up with. And what I'm saying with this, Ed, is that we're literally changing the ingredients that make humans. Our recipe has changed.

• 49:30Shawn Stevenson?

  This is why we're seeing all of these epidemics of disease and dysfunction. We're changing what we're made of. You say in the book, 11 million people a year basically die, at least that we know of, just from eating wrong. That was a massive study. That was published in The Lancet, another top tier medical journal. They looked at all these different countries, over a hundred countries. They found that poor diet is the number one cause of death in the world.

• 49:58Shawn Stevenson?

  In the world.

• 49:59Ed Mylett?

  Y'all hearing this? He just said a minute ago on top of that, that what it is to be human is being changed by this stuff. What it, the composition of a human is being changed. This is crazy. And yet, yet like, someone heard an interview go, oh, he's got a cookbook out. That's great. No, no, no, no. We're talking, even when we were talking about this interview, like, brother, just, just get me there. Trust me, right? And then I started reading this and I'm like, my gosh, this is unbelievable how much people need to know this. And here's another little thing that I didn't know. I didn't really understand this stuff. You're saying there's a connection between food and mood, but food and cognitive function. Like, I never thought about, man, I, I just ate a Jack in the Box.

• 50:43Ed Mylett?

  I had two of those tacos, which by the way, they're still a dollar there, right? So they, you can still get access to this crap food. But if I, if I'm eating that regularly, that cognitively, I can cause myself to function at a lower level as opposed to eating what? And then that's, there's a real connection between, because I always thought, heart disease, cancer, I got all that. Okay, I can definitely see the connection between pounding my body with fat, creating inflammation in my body. It's the breeding ground for a disease, no question. But cognitive function and mood is altered by food as well?

• 51:13Shawn Stevenson?

  Oh, man. This makes complete sense once you have that revelation that your brain itself is made from the food that you eat.

• 51:18Ed Mylett?

  Yeah, you said that earlier.

• 51:20Shawn Stevenson?

  Number one, but it's even deeper than that. The energy exchange, how all your cells are talking, the fuel that all the processes are running on is made from the food that you're eating. And so it's kind of even with your car, you know? If you're getting the premium stuff versus you putting vegetable oil in your tank. You're going to have very different outcomes in your car's performance. All right? And so this is, and what I, what I really wanted to do was also to bring this back to simplicity.

• 51:51Ed Mylett?

  Yeah.

• 51:51Shawn Stevenson?

  Because

• 51:52Ed Mylett?

  You are.

• 51:52Shawn Stevenson?

  We live, we live in emoji, in emoji culture.

• 51:55Ed Mylett?

  Yeah.

• 51:55Shawn Stevenson?

  All right?

• 51:56Ed Mylett?

  Yeah.

• 51:56Shawn Stevenson?

  So we, we don't even like to use words anymore, which is cool because emojis can, you know, reflect a lot of, you know, qualities. And we can have a conversation with emojis, but because we have an emoji culture, what I wanted to do was. Put the top tier forty plus foods, science-backed foods for improving metabolic health, supporting fat loss, improving cognitive function, improving mood and mental health, heart health, sleep wellness. What are the best foods? Here's the science, but each of those foods have a little emoji by it. If it's targeting metabolic health, you're gonna see the little muscle emoji. If it's backing your cardiovascular fitness, you're gonna see a heart emoji, et cetera, et cetera. And so, taking that

• 52:38Shawn Stevenson?

  food, and now, okay, cool, I know all this cool stuff, Sean, about sweet potatoes, right? And one of the benefits, they have these really remarkable anthocyanins that can improve your cognitive function. Now, what do I do with it? Just bake a sweet potato every day? That can be boring after a while. Now, guess what? I got you. We're gonna make some sweet potato pancakes. Yep. Right? We're gonna have a good, we're gonna, we're gonna take that amazing food and those benefits, and we're gonna have a really good time.

• 53:06Speaker 01

  Mr. President, my company, for me, of the explosion on our rig, on October 2nd. Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me. Tom Cruise is.

• 53:17Speaker 02

  Digger got us into this mess, and Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and The Revenant.

• 53:23Speaker 03

  What would happen if I stopped drilling? You stop, you freeze in there, that's what?

• 53:27Speaker 02

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 53:30Speaker 03

  I'm not the first then.

• 53:31Speaker 02

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only appears October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17. Not a minute without parent.

• 53:38Ed Mylett?

  Do you want to have for breakfast this morning?

• 53:40Shawn Stevenson?

  What'd you have?

• 53:40Ed Mylett?

  I'm not kidding you, I swear to you, sweet potato pancakes.

• 53:45Ed Mylett?

  No, I'm dead serious.

• 53:45Shawn Stevenson?

  Amazing. See, we're linked up.

• 53:47Ed Mylett?

  No, I got, I got his book a week ago. I think it was a week ago. That's no joke. My wife's gonna hear this and laugh really hard. That's what we actually had this morning. I actually had that this morning. I take this stuff really seriously. Like, I don't know about all of you listening to this, but I wanna know this stuff. I wanna perform at my optimum rate for as long as I freaking can. And I wanna know how to cook my food, I wanna know how to prepare it, I want it to still taste great. The same time, I want to understand. I don't need just the emoji thing. I, because the book is that. It's simple on that, but it's also detailed. I mean, obviously you can listen to this man and understand this. I want to understand the mechanism at work in my body. And that's what's great about your work. Like little things that aren't little. He talks about sweeteners in the book. I'm just gonna give you guys a little taste, okay?

• 54:30Ed Mylett?

  But this is something like you walk from this show today, you could live healthier right now. So you went through, he does this thing in the book that's awesome. Scary choice, sufficient choice, smarter choice. So let's just talk about sweeteners. Right before you came in, this is my third podcast of the day. You know, I've got somewhere pretty important after this and I wanted to be my peak with my brother here. So Sasha asks me, can I get you a coffee? I'm not a big coffee drinker and I'm never a coffee drinker in the middle of the day. But I want to be on my game. Turns out the coffee machine wasn't working. That doesn't matter. What did matter was I was gonna add a sweetener to my coffee. And it's changed because I read the book. So I just want to have everybody hear this. Scary choices, artificial sweeteners, conventional sugar, corn syrup, high fructose corn syrup, which most people have heard of that. Here's what surprised me. I won't say what the sufficient choices were.

• 55:16Ed Mylett?

  I was surprised that stevia is a smarter choice. I was surprised to hear that. I, you recommend raw honey. I, I, I got that monk fruit. But stevia is a good sweetener? Like that's, that's cool with you.

• 55:29Shawn Stevenson?

  All right. There's a distinction here.

• 55:31Ed Mylett?

  Okay.

• 55:32Shawn Stevenson?

  Because I've been in this field for 21 years.

• 55:35Ed Mylett?

  Okay.

• 55:35Shawn Stevenson?

  I've experimented more than any human should. And, you know, maybe 15 years ago, I first started utilizing stevia, but I got the real stevia.

• 55:46Ed Mylett?

  The real stevia. It's the, it would be raw stevia?

• 55:49Shawn Stevenson?

  So it's like a dehydrated leaf.

• 55:50Ed Mylett?

  Yeah.

• 55:51Shawn Stevenson?

  And it provides a nice little sweetness. It's so interesting that nature has that.

• 55:55Ed Mylett?

  Okay.

• 55:56Shawn Stevenson?

  But it can, it has a little bit of a, maybe like a medicine-y aftertaste.

• 56:00Ed Mylett?

  Okay.

• 56:00Shawn Stevenson?

  You know, and so you have to know how to, to manage that.

• 56:03Ed Mylett?

  Okay.

• 56:04Shawn Stevenson?

  And if we, because of its concentration and it's so much sweeter than sugar, a tiny amount can make a big difference. So a couple of drops of liquid stevia. Can can do you okay. Okay. And we've got some data on being beneficial for the microbiome versus artificial sweeteners having some significant downsides. And by the way, I shared some of the latest data with artificial sweeteners. And by the way, even as I'm saying that, even if something's scary, that doesn't mean you don't watch the movie. Yeah. All right. Yeah. You could still have a tryst with things from time to time and also finding what works for you, but just work to stack conditions in your favor. Let's do more of the smarter choice as often as we can. And I cannot have this conversation right now without talking a little bit about honey

• 56:49Shawn Stevenson?

  because I'm very bullish on honey right now. Okay, talk about it. This is the sweetener we've been having as as a species the longest. And they dig up tombs, the pharaohs, and find honey. It's still good. Not not that you should probably eat it. Yeah. But it's you can you can. Right. It's still active. It's still enzymatically alive. Okay. What can live that long? That is absolutely crazy. What is what is in that stuff that makes it so special? And I shared this mind blowing study on honey that found that this, by the way, to call it a sweetener is a is a disrespect. We're like in a radio station vibe here. And it makes me think about put some respect on my name, you know, when that happened. But honey is not a mere sweetener.

• 57:31Shawn Stevenson?

  These researchers found that not only can honey reduce your fasting blood sugar. Okay, it can help to reduce your fasting blood sugar and normalize your blood sugar. Interesting. What sweetener can do that? Yeah, it does the reverse. But also reducing your blood lipids, so blood fats, and helping to reduce overall cardiovascular risk. So to call it a sweetener, but raw honey, just to be clear, it's it's also, we got to put this full caveat in as well. Everybody's different. Okay, because even with that study, they're still going to be looking at the average. There can still be people that honey is not your not your vibe. You're not Winnie the Pooh. All right, but for other people, for the majority of people, honey is going to be the ideal sweetener. But even with that, how do we use it?

• 58:16Shawn Stevenson?

  Right, how do we actually use this as a sweetener when traditionally we use this other thing, which the other thing isn't off limits, but I don't want us to lie to ourselves because even with stevia, if you got that powdered stevia. Yeah. That looks like sugar. It looks like an illicit drug. Yes. You know, that's an ultra processed food and we gotta be mindful of that. So glad you made that distinction. Because a lot of my colleagues. Are very well meaning and of course we can, there's degrees of this. But they're saying swap out your baking and use all of this. Use all this silatol powder or whatever the case might be. Yeah, we might have some improvement in health potentially versus them using conventional cane sugar.

• 58:57Ed Mylett?

  Yep.

• 58:58Shawn Stevenson?

  But is that an ultra processed food? And absolutely.

• 59:02Ed Mylett?

  It is.

• 59:02Shawn Stevenson?

  At the definition of the word, it is an ultra processed food as well.

• 59:05Ed Mylett?

  Okay, what about preparation of food? We're gonna run out of time. I feel like I have Albert Einstein in front of me. And I get to pepper him with like 11 questions and then we gotta go when I wanna ask you about 300 of them, right? But let's talk about the where food is being prepared as well. So there's no secret, there's these issues with plastics, right? Okay, so chemicals that make plastics. What about these phthalates like in food, right? So whether we're, how do you feel about that? Like that's, should that be a worry about how we store our food? What we cook the food on? Not just what we cook it with, but how we actually cook it?

• 59:44Shawn Stevenson?

  We grew up in the age of nonstick cookware, you know? It's glory days. And when that hit the scene, it's a game changer. Like everything's easier, nonstick, that's a, it's a vibe. Teflon, right?

• 59:58Shawn Stevenson?

  This was just about 10 years ago. One of the components of Teflon was outlawed. It's banned. Alright, so this is PFOA. So this is poly, this is perfluoro octanoic acid. Perfluoro octanoic acid. Because also sometimes I can get them combined with these forever chemicals, right? This is a forever chemical. Alright, so PFOAs. It was taken out of Teflon. Why was it in there in the first place? But the reason it was taken out, and I shared the study, this was published in one of the top cancer journals. It was found to be a strong renal cancer causative agent, kidney cancer. So this was a strong kidney carcinogen, right? So it was pulled out. No harm, no foul, right?

• 1:00:44Shawn Stevenson?

  No, there's all these other chemicals that just keep coming out. What they're doing is just like, instead of them scrapping the thing and like, let's create something safer. They're just trying to keep skating by. Let the data just pile up until we're forced to change it.

• 1:00:59Ed Mylett?

  It's crazy.

• 1:01:00Shawn Stevenson?

  Now, here's, I, again, we don't wanna villainize anything because

• 1:01:06Shawn Stevenson?

  It's if you have a couple of nonstick pans, that's okay. All right. What we did over time was just add in a piece from time to time. Right. And so what are some of the options? Well, number one, cast iron skillet. It's one of the most time-tested things. And a well-seasoned cast iron skillet. For a while, because of the industry with the nonstick, they start to go after the cast iron and say, you know, where are you gonna get all this iron? You know? And it is negligible compared to the other chemicals that you're getting

• 1:01:37Ed Mylett?

  I'm sure.

• 1:01:37Shawn Stevenson?

  from these nonstick pans. All right. But again, we can find, we can create some alternatives like ceramic. Ceramic is great as well as a nonstick option.

• 1:01:49Ed Mylett?

  Okay.

• 1:01:49Shawn Stevenson?

  It has some potential issues, but we know that Teflon is a problem. All right. Also stainless steel has been used for centuries as well. And but of course, you've got to be more creative. That might not be necessarily for like nonstick cooking purposes. But let's bring those things back into the kitchen.

• 1:02:07Ed Mylett?

  Okay.

• 1:02:08Shawn Stevenson?

  A well-seasoned cast iron pan, some stainless steel. Start swapping out pieces every now and then. But over time, as you see that nonstick pan and all those chips that are just getting scraped off, those are in your body. And they don't go anywhere. These are forever chemicals. And so, you know, we're having a revolution where not just with our food. This is a big part of this mission with the new cookbook is we're transforming the kitchen culture. Right? And just providing some education, but also in this conversation, it could be a little bit more harsh. But it's a soft place to land. It's very empowering, providing options, telling you like it is, but also like, okay, this is cool. Let's do this. Let's try this.

• 1:02:48Ed Mylett?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:49Shawn Stevenson?

  You know?

• 1:02:49Ed Mylett?

  You guys, I could tell you the thing with the book too is like the recipes in there, the few that I have had are delicious. Like you're not sacrificing flavor. You're actually not. I'm just telling you straight up like you're not like it's really great stuff. All right, let me, I got, I got time for one more question. We're actually already over. Like this flew by, brother. Let's say you eat between, depending on how you eat. And by the way, he covers intermittent fasting in there. You can go through, he'll give you the preferred windows. Just eating in general. Let's give everybody a break or maybe we won't based on your answer. Seven days a week, if you have seven days in a week, that means the average person is eating somewhere between, let's say, twenty and forty meals a week. Somewhere around there, right?

• 1:03:31Ed Mylett?

  Depending whether they eat, you know, three times a day, or twice a day, or four or five times a day, depending on their, their deal. How many of them can be not good meals? How do you feel about a cheat meal? Or like, just eat whatever the hell you want. Go get a pizza, go get a hamburger, go blah blah blah. In your house, because by the way, it's beautiful families on the cover of the cookbook, you can go on Instagram in a minute and you just see this man's, they walk the walk, right? As a family. How many, what percentage of my meals can I just not give a crap and eat whatever the heck I want? Give me some permission here. And, and I want to even know with you, as fit as you are, you gotta eat bad once in a while. Like, and so what's, what are we allowed to do within reason?

• 1:04:16Ed Mylett?

  I bet you haven't been asked that one this week.

• 1:04:18Shawn Stevenson?

  No, I haven't, absolutely not. And where I start is, I don't, I don't give morality to food. There isn't a bad food, to me. There's even, again, scary, sufficient, smarter, it's still an option. Because if we were stranded on a deserted island and somebody left a box of honey buns, they're gonna help us survive, alright? There's a context to where all these foods still have some kind of value. And I'm a big foodie, you know?

• 1:04:49Ed Mylett?

  I know, that's the irony about you. Right.

• 1:04:52Shawn Stevenson?

  We love food, and I grew up in a culture, you know, household, my, my stepfather was an executive chef at Morton's of Chicago. And so he could cook, it was amazing, but a lot of times we didn't have much to eat, ironically, you know, and not being there and all the things, so we turned towards ultra processed food, but we still had the skillset, so we're big foodies. And also, humans evolved to chasing tasty things. Have you ever thought about why certain animals eat certain things? What, did they get a book that said like, lambs eat this? Why are they eating this today? The lambs are like going over to those bushes. We are driven to eat things that taste good. Food scientists have manipulated our desires for tasty things, absolutely. But there's nothing wrong with enjoying food. It's something special about humanity.

• 1:05:35Shawn Stevenson?

  And so with that being said, the context of ultra-processed foods, 60% of American adults' diet is now made of ultra-processed food, according to the BMJ.

• 1:05:44Ed Mylett?

  Horrible. I know you said, "Don't make a judgment," but my gosh, that's crazy.

• 1:05:48Shawn Stevenson?

  But it's worse for our children. And this is the first book that's publishing this data. I'm grateful for that, but this is a call to arms. The Journal of the American Medical Association, they analyze US children's diet for 20 years, tracking this. They found that in 1999, the average child in the United States, their diet was made of 61% ultra-processed food. By 2018, it was almost 70%. And it's continuing to climb. Most of our children's diet is not real food. And in that time span, by the way, we've seen about a doubling in childhood obesity.

• 1:06:18Ed Mylett?

  Obesity, yeah.

• 1:06:19Shawn Stevenson?

  All right, is that an accident? Did it just happen? And so with all that being said, so now we know the domain that we're dealing with. We know that ultra-processed foods are out there on the streets. But I encourage us to not give morality to the food. We don't have to have a cheat day. You know, even putting the term on there can evoke some changes in our chemistry for some people that can cause them to struggle. Right, because there are not many things that you can cheat on in our society and still be okay.

• 1:06:48Ed Mylett?

  You're right.

• 1:06:48Shawn Stevenson?

  Right? Relationship, if you cheat, that can be a... Business, you know, sports. We put that label on there, but with food, it's cool. Maybe not. Depends on your psychology. So I would drop the labels. And I'll tell you this, the very best time to have a food that might not be the best for you is when you feel well.

• 1:07:10Shawn Stevenson?

  When your parasympathetic nervous system is toned, when you're having a good time and you're enjoying life and you're feeling good. But we tend to do it when we feel bad.

• 1:07:21Ed Mylett?

  Absolutely right.

• 1:07:23Shawn Stevenson?

  And what we're doing is compounding the problem, right? Stress eating is a real thing. And simple things like, what we're looking for, even a little hit of carbohydrates, boosts your serotonin production. And so maybe we can ask them discernment in where we're getting those carbs. You know, like I'm a big fan of sweet potatoes, for example. But, you know, especially when there's joyous times, times of celebration, if you want to dabble in some things, I'm a fan of that, right? We're here to experience and to taste. And I'm saying this from a person who's been in this field for 21 years. And I've lived a time period where I was very dogmatic, as many people are. When they find out about all these problems, it's hard to not be angry and wanting to, you know, revolt.

• 1:08:08Shawn Stevenson?

  But I found a place of balance and to really advocate for finding more joy. Because here's the cool thing. Despite all the ultra-processed food out there, what we have access to when we change that ratio, which I'll give you a ratio right after I say this. When we change that ratio, what we're opening up is the door of abundance. There are thousands, tens of thousands of foods, let alone meals, that we can create with all of these real foods that have been around forever. The most amazing meal experiences that we have, if we think about it in our mental database, are often going to be incorporating real food. Right? When something is made from scratch, especially by somebody that you love, it's special, it's special.

• 1:08:51Shawn Stevenson?

  And so, okay, let's talk about a ratio. This is not the same for everybody. That's why I don't like to give this cookie cutter thing. But I'm a big fan of 80/20, right? 80% real food, 20% other stuff. I think it's a good balance in our society. I think it's a pretty good balance. And doable. And doable. Exactly. And so, we get a tremendous amount of these health benefits from the real food and also reducing the risk of, you know, all manner of problems if we're dabbling a little too much in the ultra-processed stuff. Again, keep in mind, the average person in our society, it's almost 70/30. Ultra-processed, right? And so, just what if we switch, what if we flip that? Right. The transformation that we can see in our families and our children.

• 1:09:36Shawn Stevenson?

  Can be remarkable.

• 1:09:38Ed Mylett?

  You're remarkable and I love you. Just so y'all know the behind the scenes, this is also one of the best people in public life. He's just a very good man and he truly cares about his work. He's passionate about his work. I don't even feel like if, I don't even think it's work for him. It's just a part of who he is now. It's his identity and he's the best of the best. Today flew by, flew by. I promise him, we are not going past this time and we blew past that time by about 15 minutes, just so you know, brother, because it went so quickly. Thank you for being here and thank you for the work you do. I'm grateful that you exist in the world and I hope there's a fourth time we can break the record and let Tony and Joe know that you came on for the fourth time. Would you come back?

• 1:10:21Shawn Stevenson?

  Absolutely. You know, I love you, man, and I really do appreciate you. Every time we get together, it's just, it's really special.

• 1:10:26Ed Mylett?

  It's just not frequent enough. It's, it's, it's...

• 1:10:29Shawn Stevenson?

  And I live in LA now, so...

• 1:10:30Ed Mylett?

  I know. Well, I'm leaving, but that's a whole other thing my office doesn't know about yet, so I'm not going to tell them yet. Okay, listen to me. You guys, follow him, by the way, on social, okay, at Sean Model. He's got the Model Health Show as well that most of you already know about and go get Eat Smarter, the family cookbook. Trust me on this one thing, on this cookbook, the food, you're not going to prepare every single thing in the book, but the three or four things that we've already prepared in our home were delicious and it made me want to eat better and I got to tell you, and eat smarter going forward. So there's no morality to the food, but at the same time, I like that 80/20 or at least that 70/30 that you shared with us. All right, everybody, max out your life. Shawn this with anybody who's alive, who you would like to live longer, healthier and with more energy. So that's a pretty big demo to share this episode,

• 1:11:15Ed Mylett?

  too. God bless you all. Max out. This is the Ed Mylett Show.