MODULE 7

ADVANCED PRACTITIONER SKILLS

Section 11

A conversation around where the field of Nutrition is headed.

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Greetings. Once again, friends. Mark David, founder of the Institute for the Psychology of Eating here. And let's have a conversation about nutrition. One of our favorite topics. In fact, more to the point, let's see if we can focus our sites on what might the future of nutrition look like. I think it's always good to look into the crystal ball, get a sense of where we think things might be going. And this is how every business stays ahead of the curve. This is how industry stays ahead of the curve. And this is how you and I stay ahead of the curve when it comes to our own personal health, our own personal care, our own self nourishment. Don't wait please for the mainstream to come up with the idea that it loves healthy, good, quality, organic, real, natural food. That's not what the mainstream does. And yet when you look at what's going on, you can determine, oh, that's where things are going. That's a little bit at the fringe right now, and that looks like the place where I wanna be today. So when I talk about the future of nutrition, I'm really talking about strategies that you and I can be looking for now can be doing now.
So in order to really wrap ourselves around the topic of the future of nutrition, it's good to ask some questions. Where is the field at today? If you wanna know the future, you gotta know the present a little bit. Who is driving the ship? Who makes all the big decisions in the nutrition universe? Does the field have a clear trajectory? That's a good question. What can we expect? What can we hope for? What are the obstacles? What's the good news? We always tend to hear the bad news in the field, or at least a lot of it. What's the good news and what's worth talking about in the field of nutrition? So these are some of the questions that swim around in my mind as again, I try to peer into where things are going when it comes to food, nourishment, nutrition, and how we care for the body.
Let's look at some postulations and some observations when it comes to nutrition. A lot of these are reminders. Nutrition, my friends, is a young science. That is simply how it is. There's no blame there. Uh, it's just that it is a relatively new field, honestly, as all the sciences are. But arguably, of all the sciences you've heard about, nutrition is extremely young, and it is always going through its growing phases. It's growth increases and it's growing through. Its growing pains because it is a young science, it can be very chaotic, it can be adolescent oftentimes, and it can be uncertain.
Nutrition is one of the more interesting sciences in that it bridges the gap between an art and a science, I believe, meaning nutrition is not an exact science.
There are no exact numbers in the field. Nutrition operates in ranges and in boundaries. Nutrition operates as a constant shifting ever-changing flow between organism and environment. Nutrition is not meant. The nutrition of the human body is not meant to work in absolutely exact, very specific nutrient number needs. You need exactly this amount, otherwise you're going to die. You must not have this amount, otherwise you're going to die. Whatever it is, the body has to have a range because that's how life works. That's how the environment works. That's how the seasons work. There's no, there's nothing predictable in the natural world, therefore the human body when it comes to how we nourish it with food is simply not an exact science. You've heard me say this before, people will still ask, well, exactly. How much of this do I need? If you ask that question, you need to go to the back of the classroom and sit down and take a deep breath and remember that everything is about a range. And oftentimes those ranges are generous. They're big
nutrition being an art. That's a beautiful thing. That's a wonderful thing. Humans, yes, we are biological machines. We are based on science, but you are just not a pure science. You're a being. You have a heart, you have a soul, you have creativity, you have unpredictability.
You have a little bit of magic in you. So if we as humans are an ongoing creation, we have our own artistic flow, so to speak. We are unpredictable. So is the nourishment of the body, you know, my friends, the field of nutrition as a whole, it, it reflects where humanity is at. So just look at where humanity is at and that's where nutrition is at. There's a lot of different opinions, there's a lot of different ways to look at it. There's no agreement in all of humanity about anything. All of humanity. Yeah, we'll agree about basic principles in math. We can agree about basic principles in physics.
And after that, humanity as a whole, we're, we're a very disparate group of creatures. So we cannot expect complete agreement in the field of nutrition doesn't exist. And the reality is we often expect too much from the field of nutrition. We just gotta get with the program of what it is, not what we want it necessarily to be. My guess is the field will likely never really provide us with all the exact answers that we seek about exactly what do I need to eat to have the exact perfect health for all time? Because we continue to grow and evolve as a biological organism, and we grow and change and evolve as a species. Uh, we move ourselves in different directions. We discover different things. We uncover different things.
So nutrition will always be in a lot of ways or for a long time to come. It's going to be a moving target as it has been since the beginning of nutritional science. It's grown very rapidly and it's changed, it's taken some bad turns in terms of the foods we've chosen to produce and eat on a maintenance sustainable day in, day out level. So we've had some interesting nutrition experiments in terms of what we choose to eat, um, as a population of humans. Um, and some of those experiments we're still doing and they don't work. You know, the kinds of poor quality foods I'm talking about. So the field lumbers along in its own particular strange sort of way. Now, I say we have a lot of expectations from nutrition. I want you to consider diving beneath your surface awareness for a moment. This is one of my favorite questions to ask an audience of people. If I am standing in front of a room of a hundred people, and I'll ask, Hey, what, what do you expect from nutrition? If you can just pull out your list of, you know, I want food to give me the following. I want a good nutritional approach. I want my nutritional system, the foods I eat. Here's what I wanted to give me. And when you start collecting answers on average, on average, here's what you're going to hear. People are gonna raise their hands. People are gonna say, I want good nutrition. I want nutrition to gimme more energy. I want it to gimme great health. Want it to gimme a long life. I want the food to gimme pleasure, taste really good, make me feel great. I want it to give me brain power. I want it to give me a good mood. You're gonna hear some version of, I want it to give me the perfect body and the perfect weight. You know, I want good nutrition to just make me feel satisfied. I want it to give me all this, you know, athletic ability. I wanted to give me great endurance.
And the list goes on and on and on, my friends. And after everybody hears each other for a while, you people start to laugh. And we start to laugh because you start to see how beneath the surface, we often, not always, but many of us, we put some rather voluminous expectations onto our food.
It's good to take notice of that.
So my friends nutrition as a field is like the wild west. You must be, I think, willing to embrace that reality. Otherwise, you will continue to feel victimized.
What I wish to say to you, this is my little intellectual intervention with you right now. If you're the kind of person that gets on the computer and sees another nutrition article and goes, oh my goodness, this article says this, but another article says that, and what should I do? If you say that you may no longer do that. Today is the last time you can ever do that. You must put that to rest. You must stop being a nutrition victim.
I mean that because the field is like the wild west. So what it is, is that the experts don't agree. The experts duke it out with each other. There is contradictory science.
So get over it. Like really just get over it already. That's what it is. Why complain that there's night and day? I can't believe this, it's nighttime already. I need seven more hours of daytime. Okay, complain about that like 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 times in your life, and then stop. It's not worth the energy.
The field of science is not a coherent field in any endeavor, in any scientific field, there is never complete agreement and coherency, there cannot be because humans are all different. Humans approach things different. And it is humans that are the scientists and the observers and the experimenters and the interpreters. For every single study you can read in the nutrition field, there's an equal and opposite study. You wanna moan and groan about that. Go for it. Let me know what that does for you. Let me know how much that empowers you. Quite the opposite. You have to become more powerful than victim consciousness about the fact that the field of nutrition is a wild west, and there's no certainty. You have to get outta that victim consciousness if you're gonna be a professional in this field. Meaning if you're gonna help others when it comes to their relationship with food, body, and health. Why? Because they're the persons walking around feeling like nutrition, refugees. They have gone from system to system, diet to diet, book to book, website to website. And they're frustrated, they're confused, and they don't know what to do.
Well, if they come to see you and you're frustrated and confused and you don't know what to do, you're not a very good use for them.
So you have to step into your empowerment. You've learned in this training about the field of nutrition. You've learned about the big picture. You have learned that we are here as professionals to be a conductor of nutrition information and to help people navigate the vast field of information so we can choose and experiment and explore what might work for them. Understanding that there are no certainties here, there is only exploration since every body is different. And these are the things you explain to your client.
You must remember that much of science is science for hire. It is industry driven.
If you don't work in industry, and if you haven't worked in the scientific community in a way that would lead you to notice that and see that and understand that, then that's understandable because you've worked in other places, you know things that other people don't. It. This is not a secret. I'm not telling you any big dark secret. And at the same time, once again, if you're not in industry and you're not in a field of science, where you are able to really peek behind the curtain and understand that a lot of science is science for hire, um, it's a shock to people. People have this, this religious belief in science that if some scientist says something, then all scientists are standing behind them, holding hands, nodding their heads in agreement. It does not exist. Industry drives the nutrition field. Industry drives nutrition research, and oftentimes that research is skewed. It is bad, it is misdirecting, it is dishonest, it is shady. It doesn't have consciousness because somebody's gonna make money
because it continues to promote certain industries, certain kinds of foods promotes the sugar lobby, the dairy lobby, the meat lobby, the snack food industry, the junk food industry, the bariatric surgery industry, and the list, my friends goes on and on and on. And government colludes with industry in this way. You've heard me say that the door between the FDA, that is the government organization that is charged with guarding your health relative to what industry is doing. There is a revolving door between government workers who work at high levels in the food and drug administration in the United States of America and with all industries relative to, um, the food industry, the supplement industry, and most importantly the pharmaceutical industry. So this is just the world. Take a deep breath. And the good news is there's people doing good work. And the good news is, you and I are piercing through that cloud, that unconsciousness and that veil, and we're raising our hands and saying, we see how it works and we're gonna create a different world.
So you're gonna understand that food production, meaning food quality, is driven by profit motives. So a majority of the food that is mass produced in this world is not produced for your health. It is produced to put money in the pockets of the people producing it. They do not care that it is making you unhealthy. In fact, the ways that it is making you unhealthy is driving other kinds of profit industries. The health industry, the hospital industry, believe it or not, the health insurance industry, the weight industry, the psychiatric industry, and the list goes on.
You also have to remember in the reality of this field that we, every expert is human. And I say that affectionately. So when an expert examines researches in a sincere way, a new way of eating, a different way of eating, a particular way of eating a particular nutrition system, they will often experiment on their own body. They will have a success and they will translate it onto yours. I did a paleo diet, I healed my cancer. Therefore, paleo diet is good for everybody.
Tell that to the vegans and vegetarians of the world, see how they feel about it. Because many of them went on a vegetarian or a vegan diet and they healed their diseases.
So there is no global application of any one nutritional approach to all human beings. Experts make that very common mistake. I like this TV show, therefore, all people should love this TV show because I'm a TV show expert. It's kind of what people are saying, it's a little silly.
So we're at a good and important crossroads right now because more and more of us, you and I are becoming aware of what's actually going on, which gives us power.
So stay empowered, even though there is chaos and uncertainty in the nutrition field, stay empowered because now you actually know what's going on. That ought to empower us because you see the big picture.
So the good news is the fringe community or cutting edge of nutrition happens to be very active and strong. When I say the fringe community, I put that in quotes because the fringe is the fringe that's often a negative word. I'm not using it in a negative way. When I say the fringe, I mean every place other than the mainstream of the field of nutrition. There is a fringe community, meaning the people at the cutting freaking edge, the people who are stepping out into the wilderness of nutrition and saying, okay, let's be with an open mind. Let's look around. Let's gather data. Let's gather evidence. Let's notice things. Let's try things and see what we learn.
That's the cutting edge. So there's a tremendous amount of innovation that comes from outside the field of nutrition academia. Honestly, most of the good in innovation starts outside of the traditional halls of nutrition academia. That's just the way it is. What, what do I mean when I say that? I'm talking about the grassroots efforts of numerous clinicians of all different kinds. Medical doctors, functional medicine doctors, naturopaths, chiropractors, um, dieticians, health coaches, nutrition enthusiasts, researchers. There's researchers on the fringe and all different kinds of self-appointed experts.
That's where the innovation comes from.
Vegetarian diet was seen as the, you know, as the realm of the hippies when it first got popular in the United States. It was pushed forth at the most grassroots level. And then more and more clinicians started experimenting with vegetarian diets, noticing what would happen. And over the decades there became a buzz. The buzz could not be avoided because so many people were adopting a, a vegan or vegetarian diet and seeing great results. Clinicians were using it with patients, seeing a great, seeing great results. People started doing legitimate scientific research and seeing some interesting results.
But it all starts with observation.
Every piece of scientific advancement starts with somebody making an observation. It comes from a real world observation. Uh, people don't understand that. People think, oh, it's just science. It it, it comes from God. Or something like, no comes from humans going, oh look, you take this ball, you throw it up in the air and it comes right back down. And it seems to do that every time. Hmm.
And from there we start to develop the laws of physics based on observation. Okay? So the field has truly been advancing, I believe, as fast as it can, as I've been observing it in the last five decades. And as I've studied what was happening, you know, previously in the field, it, it's, it's moving fast. I know for a fact that there are honest and caring people in the nutrition universe, um, who, who are doing really, really great work. And you don't have to do
extensive research to come up with useful conclusions. You just have to begin to notice, you have to experiment in your own realm, which is what a lot of clinicians do. And you start to make observations based on the people that you're seeing and the experiments that you do with your patients and your clients. The beautiful thing about the nutrition field, it's, it's, it's the ultimate outsider's field. Just about anyone can push the envelope in the field of nutrition, all you have to do is come up with a good idea that nobody thought about. It doesn't matter if you're not a scientist. All you have to do is, you know, start to market a food that you know nobody has been paying much attention to or is mostly used in a different country. And all of a sudden people love it and all of a sudden we dive into that food and we look, oh my goodness, it has a history of this kind of use that kind of use and or it has this nutrient profile and we start to see, oh, okay, wow. Let's all play with this. Let's all do this.
So the field of nutrition, you know, yeah, there's a lot of great clinicians, there's experts, there's doctors, there's PhDs, and, and there's a lot of wackos. And I say that affectionately, there's a lot of hippies in their gardens. Um, experimenting and fermenting and concocting. So just about anyone can push the envelope in the field of nutrition. That is a beautiful thing. Innovation should come from wherever it needs to come from.
So where does nutrition information come from? Here you are, you're alive on planet earth. How do you know what you know about nutrition? How does anyone know what they know about nutrition? Here's a list that I come up with of the possible ways that you and I know about nutrition. Number one is what you learned, what you learned in school, what you learned from the repetition of, I'm going to say old science. Old science isn't necessarily bad science, it's just old science. It's been with us. Old science is good when it's good. It's not good when it's not good. But you've learned it because there's certain ABCs in the field that have been accepted by the field that is more mainstream. So you learn because you read a mainstream nutrition book in junior high school, high school, college, medical school, wherever it was. So we learned from repetition of old science, we learned from industry driven science. And when I say industry driven science, I want you to think danger, danger. Warning, warning, red alert. Probably a little bit tainted if not a lot tainted.
We learn from academic driven science. It is, that's usually the old science. It is hard for the average person to distinguish what is academic driven science from what is industry driven science, because they get very interwoven.
One of the great ways we learn from we learn about nutrition is from clinical experience. So a lot of the nutrition information that you just heard somewhere you learn, somewhere you read in a book, actually really came from clinical experience.
Unless you've been a clinician, most people don't understand that so many of the advancements in the field of nutrition come from the front lines that clinicians are doing work and they're talking to each other. Oh my God, like this happened. That happened. I use this supplement, I use these herbs, I use these foods, I use these kind of diets. I got this kind of result. And people talk to each other. People experiment and there becomes a groundswell.
And eventually that can become more mainstream science. But clinical experience drives a lot of nutrition information. You wouldn't even know it. Wisdom traditions. So we're learning a lot from the past. We learn a lot from Ayurveda, we learn a lot from Chinese medicine. We learn a lot from European traditions. We learn a lot from the old smart dudes who came before us. Does that mean they knew everything? No. Does that mean that everything they said was correct? No, but man, have we had a lot of good food wisdom that has come down from the ages? What a great thing you learn from your culture and your family.
I learned a lot from my family. I learned a lot from my culture about nutrition, both good and bad. So I'm not saying all the information, just where does you do nutrition information come from? Your mama, your papa, whoever they fed you. This, that. The other thing though, that's what you think is nutrition. That's what you think is good.
Your culture eats a certain way, they eat certain foods, they eat it in a certain way, they celebrate it in a certain way. You learned about nutrition from culture, from family, from religion. Traditions that are passed on, both good and bad. You learn about nutrition from personal experience. Oh my god, every time I eat beans, I get gas ta. Some people eat beans and they don't get gas. So okay, I eat beans, I get gas. Personal experience, you know, a lot. Probably more than you realize about your own body from personal experience.
On a deeper level, we learn from body wisdom. Personal experience is body wisdom. But personal experience to me is not a strong enough term to describe that part of us that really can listen to the body. So on one level, I don't care what old science says, I don't care what academic science says. I don't care what clinical experiences or wisdom tradition says. Where the rubber meets the road, when it comes to what works for you or what doesn't, is what happens when you eat that freaking food?
Does it make you feel good? Does it make you feel bad? Does it give you an allergic reaction? If it's giving you an allergic reaction, guess what? I don't care how many people think it's the greatest food in the world, it ain't good for you. It might be great for someone else.
Body wisdom is perhaps the gold standard of nutrition information for any given human being. We the collective, we the scientific, we don't like that because we the collective scientific, we are the experts. We, we want you to listen to us. Experts from every field want to maintain their expertness because it's fun to be at the top of the pile. I'm the expert. Well, guess what? Yeah, I might know a lot, but at the end of the day, you are the expert of your own body. And how good of an expert are you? It depends on how much you've been paying attention. It depends on how much you wish to learn about yourself. It depends on, you know, what books you've read and how much you've studied and how much you've explored
as you remember. My friends, we have a deep, deep, deep need these days for nutritional wisdom. I cannot emphasize this enough, we are oversaturated with nutrition information.
There is goodness in that and there is challenge in that.
The goodness in that is that there's all kinds of information. Yes, we like that. We live in an information age. The bad news is there's so much freaking information that nobody knows what to do because all that information is contradictory. It's disparate, it's crazy making. That's why people are confused, understandable.
We tend to overvalue information in the nutrition realm. As soon as we hear information, everybody gets all excited.
Oh, okay, this is the new thing.
Nutrition runs on this, it, it's, it's, it runs on, okay, what's the latest, greatest thing that everybody can get excited about and think is gonna save them?
We're overvaluing information. And in times of excessive information, wisdom becomes extremely valuable. Wisdom here means a deeper and more holistic approach. Wisdom here means a highly individual approach. An approach where you look at each person differently, you look at all of them, you bring to bear all of the possibilities that can work for someone. And look at, okay, what might work for this person?
Nutritional wisdom means a sense of nutritional curiosity. Like, hey, I wonder what works for me. I wonder what doesn't? As opposed to, oh my god, what should I do? Observation and mature perceptions. Just observe, perceive notice.
That's nutritional wisdom, willingness to let go of dogma and just see what works. What works for me, what works for you? What works for him or her.
So we live in a time where nutritional uniqueness is beginning to become a useful concept.
Don't wait for nutritional science to let you know that you are nutritionally unique. If you wanna wait for that, fine, that's up to you. Then you're far behind the curve
and you miss out on some great opportunities. Just let me just tell you, you are nutritionally unique and there is no brilliant perfect far reaching science that can look into your body and say, and here is exactly how you are nutritionally unique. And here's exactly what you need to eat. Exactly what time of the day. Exactly how much. Let go of that my friends. So obviously, therefore it's different for everyone.
So part of what you have to ask yourself when we're looking at our own nutritional uniqueness is, number one, what do you want from nutrition to begin with? Like really, what do you want based on what you want? What is actually possible and practical? What have you already noticed works for you and doesn't work for you?
Have you noticed what your body is asking of you? Did you notice when your body wants you to move it more, love it more, feed it better food, drink it more water, give it more plants and fruits, give it more protein, give it more fat, give it less protein, less fat, less pro. Like what's your body asking of you?
Nutritional uniqueness. How do you wanna participate in the circle of life? Some people want their own garden. Some people wanna be more self-sufficient. Some people don't wanna kill animals and eat them fine. That's a choice. That's nutritional uniqueness because you're not just a human body, you're a set of beliefs, your personal beliefs, your emotional beliefs.
You have beliefs and guidelines for yourself about how you wish to participate in the world. That's a wonderful thing. Food often fits into that in a specific way for each person.
For a lot of people, this is not such good news because just tell me what to do and tell me what to eat and then I'm going to just never have to think about that again or worry about that again. And nutrition's a moving target that's just like saying, tell me how to exercise and this is the exercise I'll do for the rest of my life. Well, guess what? Your body changes. You're not gonna be running, you know, 10 miles a day for your entire life. If that's what you're doing now,
you're not gonna be lifting the same amount of weights 70 years from now. Your preferences might change, your body might change. We don't know. So yeah, there's the exercise that works for you today and there's gonna be something that works for you next month, next year you might. It's, it's, it's, there's a lot of personal preference there, as well as there's certain exercise that's gonna work for your body and exercise that definitely doesn't work for your body, but it works for someone else.
It's like saying, well, what's the perfect way to exercise?
Goodness gracious, no such thing. Same with food. And there are damn good guidelines, my friends and generalities that work for a hell of a lot of people. That's what you've been learning in this training. So the principles you've learned about mind, body, nutrition, stress and relaxation response, eating under the optimal state of digestion, assimilation and calorie burning, what you've learned about bio circadian nutrition, IE meal timing, what you've learned specifically about eating speed as it relates to the stress response, what you've learned about the cephalic phase digestive response, what you've learned about the body's need for pleasure, what you've learned about the body's need for time with a meal,
those principles can make a huge difference for anyone. What you've learned about food quality. So the basic nutritional principles, food quality is stupendous with that one nutritional change, you can make some magic happen.
Don't get all caught up in the, in the minutia that you think is so important.
Is minutia important? It is. When it is, the generalities are what you will be living by day in and day out. That's where you gotta focus a majority of your energy when it comes to the nutrition field. So a couple am musings on the present and the future of nutrition. It seems that in terms of the good news the nutrition field is doing its best to integrate the wisdom of the past with the science of today. That's what I've noticed. It's a great direction. I'm loving what I see coming down the pike about our collective interest and things like our Ayurveda, our collective noticing about the importance of probiotic rich foods. Excuse me. Um, but probiotic rich foods is so traditional in so many different cultures and we forgot it. The use of herbs is so traditional across the globe. Goodness, I don't know if you could find a single cultural group anywhere on the planet that didn't have some use of herbs.
Were starting to play around in the nutrition universe with principles from, you know, ancestral diets, paleo kinds of diets is kind of ging into the past and saying, okay, what, what, what makes sense in the now? And it's all an experiment. So I'm not saying you should eat Ayurvedic or you should eat ancestral diet. It is like no, like, but principles.
You know, it's this concept about the importance of health beginning in the gut has been around a couple hundred years. Science is slowly catching up to that. You know, your ancestors were doing sustainable living and growing. Chances are, um, we're getting back into that now. We're getting back into gardening. We're getting back into nutrient dense foods. We're paying attention to that. We're getting back to organically produced foods. That's what your ancestor did anyway. They didn't call it organic, it just was.
So we're integrating the present with the past and bringing that into the future. That's a good thing. You have to remember not to make the field of nutrition overly complex and out of touch with the simplicities of being an eater. This is one of the dangers I see happening is, you know, people go to a lecture, they listen to a lecture, they listen to something online, and the person who's talking uses so many big words and they have such a good gig and they have so much to say and what they have to say can be very complex
and everybody gets all confused. What I see happening is that there is a certain slice of humanity in the nutrition field that just over complexifies everything.
Yes, there are complexities to any topic.
I'm gonna guess that about 90% of what any human needs to know about good nutrition is very simple. You can get an A minus, which is an A, you can get a very good grade. You could be at the top of your class just knowing the simplicities of how to nourish your body and all the other complexities. Really that's, that's the next 10% that begins to put you into some interesting realms.
The average human being doesn't need to know the deep, deep complexities of it. The average human being needs to know the simplicities, quality food, real food, probiotic, rich food, variety of food.
Eat your plants. If you eat meat and dairy products, eat the healthiest versions of those.
Use traditional herbs.
Eat in, eat under the optimum state of digestion in assimilation and appetite regulation and calorie burning. Drink good water. Really there you are. You know, get enough healthy fat in your diet. Choose it from sources that you enjoy eating. It's so simple. We get so freaked out about the complexities.
You know, also, I wanna say it is useful because it's not just me and you in this world. The world has a lot of haves and have nots. Far as I can tell in my read of history. We always have haves and we have have nots, correct me if I'm wrong, just as you have people who are the haves and have-nots, the economic haves and have-nots is what I'm talking about.
We have our nutritional haves and have nots, meaning there are people who have access to good information and wisdom and those who do not. Generally speaking, the lower you are on the economic ladder, the less access you have to good information and good wisdom. The lower you are on the economic food chain, the less you are able to afford some of the great supplements you can get, some of the great
counseling you can get some of the great coaching you can get, some of the great medical services you can get. And you know, there's some foods that are high quality and tend to be a little more expensive. It is very true that one can eat a healthier diet on a low budget, but it actually takes a little bit of education.
There's a lot of people who are being fed very cheaply by Mama corporation, McDonald's sort of a thing. People who are just being fed the cheapest possible way
and there's those who have access to something else. I, I'm just saying, I'm just raising my hand. I'm not offering any solutions. The world has always been like this. I have no elegant solution here and I wonder if there's gonna be an end in sight. I really do. So I'm just aware of this. I notice this because this is the world we live in. I care And
it's good to track these things. At least for me. I just want you to know that big corporations are rapidly buying up all the smaller natural food companies. When this happens, quality gets diluted. Um, oftentimes in service to creating mass market products, big companies are often falsely capitalizing on the natural and organic trend. And they market products that they say are organic, but they're deeply inferior. It's hard for the average consumer to know that. And the good news is there's a return these days to farmers' markets, to community supported agriculture, IE CSAs to gardening and to more self-reliance around food and nutrition. What a beautiful thing that is. The antidote to corporations that could care less about you.
Just don't need 'em as much.
Go to your farmer's market, find out if your community, chances are it does, has a CSA, you know,
at the same time, the good news is also that big business and small business is realizing that healthy, high quality foods are a good business. So they're, they're, they're trying to be a little bit better. Nutrition awareness is also becoming more popular. It's becoming a little more hip these days, just a little. And it's becoming more accessible across different races and ethnic groups. That's what I'm noticing. Previously, good nutrition, holistic nutrition has been largely for people of a certain economic strata who can afford it. And people of a certain cultural strata who that's kind of what they have access to.
Different races in different ethnic groups are catching on and hallelujah, I love it.
I think the field of nutrition will continue to wet itself with the emerging field of eating psychology by necessity. In other words, you can't have nutrition without having eating psychology. Really? You wanna understand the body of the eater. You must understand the mind of the eater. Why? Because mind and body exists on a continuum. We will see a continued elevation of mind nutrition principles and practice in the nutrition professions, meaning it's slowly catching on. Nutritionists, dieticians, people who work in this field are slowly realizing, yes, it's about the food we eat, but it's also about the state under which we eat it.
It's about who we are, what we're bringing to the table. It's about levels of stress and relaxation and eating rhythm and pleasure and nourishment and awareness and presence in the professional realm. You are a professional. We are going from the delivery of nutrition information. Okay, here's me, I have the information. Eat this, don't eat that. We're going from delivery of nutrition information to information consulting. Your client comes in, well, I don't know what to eat. I don't know what to, I don't know what to do. I tried this. Okay, okay, great. I totally understand it. Now you're a consultant. You can work with anything. You're happy if your client's vegan, vegetarian, paleo, raw food, any food, I don't care. We are nutrition agnostic. We invite everyone to the table. And our question is, let's explore what works for you. What do you enjoy eating? What do you feel best on? What actually works for you? What is a, what is an easier way to eat for you?
We need experts and professionals and practitioners who can create order out of chaos for everyone else.
Yeah, you know something, I do best on a mostly vegetarian diet, but everybody keeps seeing this, this and that and no, no, nah. But you know, when I'm eating just, just mostly a vegetarian diet with a little bit of this and a little bit of that, I feel so much better. Like, huh, that's good information Mr. And Mrs. Client, I think we should hang out there for a while. Then let's look at breakfast. Let's look at lunch, let's look at dinner. Let's look at snacks. I know you complained about digestion. We're gonna see if there might be things you are eating that could potentially be allergenic foods for you. And we can also look at the way that you're eating, um, that might have, that might be contributing to digestive upset IE stress. So eating, eating fast, that sort of thing. So you're creating order outta chaos.
So individualized or personalized nutrition makes the most sense because they're all individual and we're all personal. And people have their own preferences. They're natural preferences. They're personal preferences. They have what works for them. They already have noticed certain things about their own body. And when they haven't, then great, you're gonna be their defacto body wisdom and you're gonna help them based on their complaint.
And when in doubt, you just move them to higher quality versions of what they're already eating.
Eliminate the poor quality food. It's not rocket science. My friends, people have complexified the field of nutrition when it comes to what should I eat?
My goodness, this is why you are here. It is a bizarre behavior of humankind that we have gotten to this point where people come to see you and their head is exploding because they don't know what to eat because they've heard so much differing opinions from the experts. Beautiful. So you're an information consultant.
You are willing for your client to be on whatever diet they need to be on to help serve them, and you're gonna explore that with them.
Now the question, what should I eat? What truly nourishes me? What nourishes anyone else, is one of the most important health questions of our times. Honestly, I love that question. Look around and you will notice that the human being appears to be the only organism that will knowingly go out of its way to create foods or obtain foods that are designed to slowly disease and kill it. People are tracking down eating and buying foods that are toxic to them.
When I observe creatures in the natural world, all creatures, including humans, we are humans the most nutritionally in the dark of all creatures. And I say that affectionately with a smile on my face because it's part of being human. Every other creature is locked and loaded with, here is what you eat.
There are a small amount of creatures in nature that have the vastness of the human diet. So the human humans eat anything and everything you could possibly imagine on planet earth. They eat every fish, every animal we eat, insects, we eat every plant we eat every fruit we eat every variation of any possible thing you got. We eat all kinds of artificial things that have almost zero nutritional value. We eat anything. You know what else eats anything in nature? This is just kind of funny. Um, the creatures that are the most nutritionally diverse other than humans are rats, cockroaches and sharks. Go figure, right? You, me, as human beings, we are in the pantheon of creatures that have the most diverse diet. Rats, cockroaches, sharks, and humans. Welcome to the club, my friends. You can understand why rats and cockroaches, they eat anything. You know, they have adopted to the human world. Sharks, you know, know we'll eat anything, you throw any the just they'll eat anything just about. Um, by the way, that's why sharks evolutionarily are one of the most unchanged creatures in the fossil records. Same with cockroaches, actually. Uh, 'cause they could eat anything. So that's a good thing for survival long term. So we're asking the question because we're human, we are not designed. You don't just pop out of the womb and you're not just a creature who knows, I just eat crash. I just eat other birds. I just eat tiny little sardines. I'm a big wailing. I just eat krill. We are not that person. We have to be trained, taught and told what to eat. And oftentimes how you are trained, taught, and told what to eat is completely foolish and erroneous. Nobody's fault. It's the fault of the world that has educated us and conditioned us. So I think you're hearing me say that one of the key missing pieces in nutrition is body wisdom. That's where the rubber meets the road. And because body wisdom is not sexy and it cannot be sold for a profit, it is not taught and is the next great nutritional frontier for us as individuals. Big time, big time.
That's how you empower yourself. That's how you empower another human being. You become more intelligent
int intelligence is the numero uno survival and thriving skill for any organism on the planet. The more intelligent you are, the more choices you have, the more you can see your world, alter it, change it, shift it, navigate it, learn about it. Avoid that which is not good. Move towards that which is good for you. Intelligence.
Now in honor of the topic of intelligence, let us remind each other that there are different kinds of intelligences. Unfortunately, you or most of us anyway, have not learned this. It is one of the, um, most stupefy principles that we are not taught the full spectrum of who we actually are. I mean this, this is a deep deficiency in our educational system, and I'm gonna get on my soapbox here. This is a deep deficiency in the field of psychology that says all different kinds of intelligences. You are taught that there is one kind of intelligence. You might not think this, but that's what you're taught. That's what's living in the back of your mind. You gotta iq, you were given a score when you were young. It measures a narrow view of intellectual logical intelligence.
So we have this intellectual, logical intelligence score that is IQ based. So it's IQ intelligence quotient. We give you the test, we give you the number
You ever meet certain people at a high iq, they're dumb in certain areas, they're smart in other areas. Hmm, well guess what? My friends, there are all different kinds of intelligences. Google it. And when you google it, understand that you will never get the full list
because there's, there's just not a lot of intelligence out there when it comes to intelligence. Um, but what you will generally see, you know, we will now talk about emotional intelligence. So there are various degrees, you know this, you have certain friends who are more emotionally intelligent than others. There are some people who are fantastically emotionally intelligent. IE they're geniuses in that realm. I have met them people who can be with you for two or three or four minutes and they actually see you. They see what you're feeling. They feel what you're feeling. They can point it out to you. They can connect it to other things going on. These are some of the great practitioners and therapists that I've met in my lifetime. Brilliantly emotional intelligence. So just as you can have an IQ based genius, you can have an emotional genius and and people who are emotionally kind of dumb and everything in between, really. Guess what? My friends look at a professional athlete. They have athletic intelligence. There are certain people who have an intelligence for a very specific kind of athletic endeavor. Athletic event, athletic skill.
There's a form of genius there. And watching a great soccer player, football player, basketball player, ballerina, whatever it is, they have a genius. They really do. There's body-based intelligence. I believe there are different kinds of body-based intelligence, but essentially a little bit different from athletic intelligence, body-based intelligence, the ability to read your own body, the ability to read other bodies, to notice what other bodies are doing. The best clinicians that I've ever met, and I'm of all different kinds, doctors, chiropractors, naturopaths, have have a uncanny sense to not only look at the blood tests so to speak, but they also can put all that information together. Look, look at you, listen to you notice you see you
and make some brilliant observations because they have body-based intelligence. People have musical intelligence. People can be musical geniuses, they could be emotionally unintelligent, they can be athletically unintelligent and they could be a musical genius. It's a genius. There are people who have spiritual intelligence, people who have logical intelligence. There are people who have animal based intelligence. They can communicate, understand, connect with, relate with animals in general or very specific kinds of animals. The horse whisperer, that's a genius. It's a form of genius. We don't recognize this and there are so many geniuses walking around our planet. You probably know a lot of them. You probably have people in your circle of friends and family who actually might have a genius level of intelligence in some very specific things.
There are some people who are mother geniuses or father geniuses. They just do that role so well as natural for them. There's scientific intelligence, there is social intelligence. You know, people who are socially intelligent. They know how to work a room. They can go from person to person. There are some people who are socially inept, they're just not good at it. It's a range. Viva, I difference my friend. So this is a long-winded way of saying number one, you might have some genius in you that you haven't acknowledged yet or some great intelligence. Uh, when it comes to nutrition and our relationship with food, I believe it is very helpful to have some amount of the following. Three intelligences body-based intelligence, which I'm calling body wisdom. Meaning if you want to know about nutrition, it is important for you to have body-based intelligence. IE body wisdom, listening to your body, noticing your body listening for feedback. I did this. I went to sleep at this time. I had this amount of food, I ate that. I didn't eat this. How do I feel? What do I notice? What are the connections? Huh? Wow. When I get more sunlight, I feel much better. Wow. When I get too much sunlight, I feel much worse. Huh? What is that number? What is that amount of out? What's can I feel once my body is starting to get too much sun? Too much water, too much sugar though. So that's body-based intelligence. Another intelligence I find that is very useful when it comes to nutrition interestingly enough is earth-based intelligence. So I find that a majority of humans do not have earth-based intelligence because we are not growing up on a farm. We're not growing up in a jungle, we're not growing up in a natural environment. So we are disconnected from that and we cannot see and understand the value of your bare feet on the ground. We can't see and understand the value of fresh air and putting your feet in a clean stream. We cannot understand plants really and their importance to us. We cannot understand that I don't want to eat this particular substance because it is so far from where it emerged from in the earth. It is not in natural alignment with the human body. Um, so a lot of people are missing that. And at the same time, another kind of intelligence, I think it's helpful to have when it comes to really understanding nutrition, um, is scientific intelligence. Meaning the ability to discern and understand nutrition science and not get caught up in to confused.
And most human beings have the ability to educate themselves around simple science. Arguably the more intelligent you get around science, the more you can understand complex science. But what I have noticed is the majority of people, they simply need simple scientific intelligence when it comes to nutrition in order to better understand all the nutrition information that's out there. By the way, just even in this conversation, what I wish to say to you is if you've been listening and these concepts were new to you, you ought to be more scientifically intelligent after this conversation. Just talking about how science works, how so much of science is industry driven, how scientific experts read their own body and translate that onto yours, you now have greater intelligence about science to understand, oh well not every thing that every scientist says actually is necessarily accurate or accurate for all people because science is coming from people and nutritional science is not a true pure science, which is fine. So this helps you be more scientific intelligent. What a good thing. Okay, some key reminders, my friends, when it comes to the field of nutrition, let me just belt this out to you in a minute and a half or less. There is a spectrum of nutrition. There is a nutritional system for every person on the planet. Meaning there is no perfect diet, there is no one perfect diet that all human beings should eat all the time. Nor is there one perfect diet that you should eat for all of existence for the rest of your life all the time. What works for you? There's just a spectrum. It depends on you, your desires, your genetics, your preferences, the time of year, the climate, the temperature that's out there, your level of health, male or female, pregnant or not doing a lot of athletic events or not.
What's going on in the body? Is there a disease condition that's gonna change your nutritional needs? So there's just a spectrum for different people. Some people do well on more cooked food, more raw food, more this food, more that food spectrum of nutrition. There is no perfect diet. Get the heck over that already, my friends. Okay? There are approximately three levels of diet, maintenance, therapeutic and experimental. We've talked about this before. Maintenance level is the kind of foods you would eat relatively speaking every day to maintain you. Your staple foods. Therapeutic diet is the kind of diet you would adopt when you have a certain condition, a dis disease condition, symptoms, challenges in the body that you wish to help heal. So you use diet as a medicinal, as a therapeutic strategy. Just because a diet is useful as a therapy, as a therapeutic strategy, as a medicinal strategy does not mean it is good on a maintenance level. You don't sit there taking antibiotics every day. You don't get open heart surgery every day. You do therapeutic actions for the duration that you need to do the therapeutic action. And then you stop. People confuse therapeutic aspect of diet with maintenance aspect of diet that happens all the time. Experimental diet simply this. Let's eat this and see what happens. Let's try this new supplement and see what happens. Oh, let's eat this paleo diet. See what happens. Let's go pure vegan and see what happens.
That's all. That's fine. Nothing wrong with that.
Last key reminder I wanna say to you right here is any nutritional system that I've ever heard of, I've always been able to find a nugget of wisdom in it, at least if not many. So whatever nutritional system you hear, it's not like, well it, I either have to do this nutritional system perfectly or it's all wrong. You know, like no, there's nuggets of wisdom in every nutritional system. You have to find them particularly for yourself. Like is there a nugget of wisdom from this nutritional system, that nutritional system, this approach, that approach that can work for me, that can work for my client, that can work for my student, my loved one who's ever on it. Every nutritional system that I've ever seen has nuggets of wisdom in it. Pull them out, pull the ones out that are useful to you. And just because part and parts or most of a nutritional system doesn't work for you, doesn't mean there's not a principle here or there in it that you can borrow from. Very simple, my friends. It's a good way to live life.
Okay, let's have a conversation about what I think are some clear directions for the future of nutrition. In other words, if you and I wanted to evolve the field of nutrition, here's what we would do. Here's what I would do. And here's what's starting to show up. Number one in a lot of ways, first and foremost, we must, we the collective, we must focus on a good nutritional beginning. How we begin things is oftentimes how we proceed with things. Good nutritional beginnings are important. Are they imperative? Huh? It's certainly, certainly helpful. Um, I personally did not have a good nutritional beginning. Not even close. Have I resurrected myself? Yes. Do I um, have lifelong certain kinds of challenges that come from not having a good nutritional beginning? Yes, you might have the same thing. You won't even know what chances are. So we have to focus on a good nutritional beginning, which means in the big picture, targeted in utero nutrition and understanding of, you know, what are some of the foods I should be eating if I'm a pregnant female and wishing to create the best health, metabolic and nutritional beginning for my child. What are some of the important nutrients or macronutrients that might be good to focus on at different trimesters, different times of the developing being that is in my midsection? Okay, so targeted and utero nutrition, meaning an understanding of, hey, let's be eating good food when this kid is inside. And a lot of it is also what you don't eat. When you have a sensitive human growing inside you, you'll wanna stay away from the extremes. Intense amount of caffeine, intense amount of sugar, intense amount of toxicity, intense amount of prescription drugs. Makes sense. You wanna breastfeed your children when possible. You do that. We wanna have a more focused and targeted infant nutrition. Really begin to understand that infants are sensitive beings. We need to give them food that is digestible. We need to give them low allergen food and not give them soy-based products and dairy-based products and wheat-based products. They have a sensitive system. We need to think about training taste buds from a young age. Taste is an intelligence. Intelligence is conditioned. Your taste buds are conditioned what you feed a young child, conditions them forward into the rest of their life. Can you decondition somebody who's been raised on junk food? Absolutely much easier to not raise them on junk food so you don't have to decondition them.
And good nutritional beginning means good guidelines for helping kids have a good relationship with food and body. That's a whole other conversation, but I believe that's extremely important, is to start to work on what actually does it mean to help a child have a healthy relationship with food and a healthy relationship with their body.
That's a whole other training. Okay, another great direction for the future of nutrition. You're starting to see this now. We've talked about this in our conversations around digestion, is the importance of the gut. I mean, really you're gonna talk about nutrition, like the gut is where the action is. So we are developing a deeper and deeper understanding of the gut microbiome. We need to focus on more options for quality, probiotic rich foods, fermented foods, real fermented foods. Okay? We need to have a right relationship with antibiotics. They are some of the most overprescribed medications on planet earth that are destroying our gut microbiome. And in a very intense way, we need to have more right relationship with soil and dirt and nature. The less you are exposed to nature, to soil, to dirt, to touching the plants, to walking through nature, to breathing it in, to feeling it, to having it exposed to your skin, um, the more unhealthy your gut will likely be or can be. So much of the population in our gut when it comes to gut microbiome, there is some amount that is simply driven by, created by, um, organisms that come from the environment, not from your food, soil-based organisms in general.
We must have a deeper understanding of how stress and relaxation impact the gut.
All the stresses, all the relaxations and everything. That means that you have been learning in this training. So, you know, already in this training, you are far advanced, certainly when it comes to the importance of the gut. And it's simple. You don't have to be some scientist. You wanna give your clients quality, probiotic rich foods. You wanna make sure they're not overdoing antibiotics.
Get 'em out in nature, helping them eat in a relaxed state, because that impacts the gut. It impacts the gut microbiome. You wanna kill off your gut microbiome, have as much unnecessary stress as you possibly can, have as much self chosen stress as you possibly can, and you will gradually, if not even rapidly, limit the capacity of your gut and mess with your gut microbiome.
Yet another direction for the future of nutrition is a resurgence of the natural. We've been seeing that for a while. We, we have to go a little bit beyond organic and not just use it as a label and a marketing tool. In other words, real food, real food, real food, real food. We need a right relationship with farms and community, meaning natural, organic, locally grown, like real support for community agriculture. We need a return to healthy soil and healthy water. That's where healthy food comes from. There's another way around it. You wanna have healthy food, you need a healthy substrate for that food. You need healthy soil, you need healthy water, and you need a healthy atmosphere.
I think an important direction for the future of nutrition is nutritional self defense and immunity.
We must understand my friends, that the body today, today is uniquely challenged. The body you have today and the body, your grandparents, or great-grandparents had many decades ago are under different kinds of pressures. Today. The body is under an unusual amount, unusual amount, like a lot of genetic pressure, epigenetic pressure, environmental pressure. There's a hell of a lot of toxicity that exists in the food chain, in the atmosphere, in the soil that we are absorbing in every direction that didn't exist a hundred years ago. Therefore, we have a challenge. So we're under some extreme conditions and extreme times require extreme measures. We're a little bit more extreme. So that's why I say nutritional self-defense and immunity, meaning different immune strategies for protecting against human-made toxins. This is important. What am I talking about? Different kinds of supplementation that just increase the health of the body. Antioxidant, um, herbs that increase our, that, that enhance immunity. More nutrient-dense food. A I'm using the term relaxed vigilance. I don't want you to freak out. Oh my God, everything's killing me. Um, if you go that way, you're stepping into victim consciousness and you've just gone down a bad rabbit hole. You've gone into a bad neighborhood in your head.
Your screaming and ranting about everything is toxic and everything is cancerous and everything is going to kill me, is a confused approach.
You are living on planet earth. This is the time you are born. You are subject to different kinds of genetic pressures from the environment. Toxic pressures from the environment. Great. What can you do? You can just notice things. You can have a relaxed vigilance, meaning be aware of where I'm going, what I'm eating, what I'm drinking. You don't have to freak out about it because if you freak out about it, that will be your existence constantly freaking out about it.
Instead, understand that you're a human being. You're living on planet earth. You will eventually die of something. The world is not perfect. The world is not all natural, and to some degree, we have to learn to live with that fact. Your body is learning to live with that fact. So the more you can support your body with foods, with good herbs, good supplementation, good strategies that help you build your health, build your immunity, exercise that works for you, getting out in nature, what works for you, what supports you, what rejuvenates you,
Yet another great direction for the future of nutrition, and we're certainly seeing that now, is the concept of nutritional makeover and or detoxification. So I'm talking about all the cleansing strategies in general that you might've heard of all the fasting strategies that you might've heard of. People are talking about nutritional reboots that you might've heard of. I just drank fresh juices for four weeks. You know, it's like, great. I love all of that stuff. Cleansing strategies, love them. Fasting strategies, love them. Nutritional reboots. What a great idea. So it's about our willingness to here and there and on occasion if necessary, if needed, if desired, to do some deep dietary change and transformation. It means carving out time in one's life, carving out the time and the space to spend time nourishing the body in more significant ways. If you want to go on a cleanse or a fast or nutritional reboot, you kind of need to have some extra time and attention in that direction.
That's not always easy for a lot of people. They don't have the extra time and the attention. Well, if you don't, then you don't. You do the best you can. Healthy and natural water, I, I kind of put in this category, um, you know, be able to say dream more water. Dream more water. We never talk about the quality of the water.
Uh, the healthiest and most natural water you can find is to me what is best.
You know, we've talked about this before, but I wanna remind you along with nutritional cleansing, we must begin to understand better the concept of nutritional rebuilding after you cleanse and detoxify your body naturally rebuilds. This is rarely discussed in the cleansing community by the cleaning out your body experts. And what does that mean? It means gradually reintroducing nutrient dense foods, clean foods, healthy protein, healthy fat, phytonutrient, rich foods, exercises, the kind of movement that rebuild the body. So you want to add onto the body. You want to, you know, when you go on a faster or cleanse, your body can get a little tired, your body can get a little weak because you're denying it X amount of food, X amount of calories, X amount of fat and protein. Um, so you wanna rebuild after that.
So I'm talking generalities here. I'm not giving you a program and a training on nutritional rebuilding. We're just, we're we're just speaking big picture right now.
I think a direction for the future of nutrition, for lack of a better term, functional nutrition. This is where the leading edge of nutrition generally is when it comes to the field of medicine. Medicine. The field of medicine has had a terrible understanding of nutrition. Of all the aspects of medicine that I see out there, traditional medicine, functional medicine is where functional nutrition is being, um, advanced. And I'm talking about very interesting lab work and distinctions around lab work, different kinds of advanced testing that are less traditional. And honestly, my friends more cutting edge. Uh, that's a lot of what functional nutrition IE functional medicine brings to the table. Functional medicine practitioners are taught to use food as medicine using natural medicines as medicines. They're focusing on epigenetics, understanding that, yeah, your DNA, your genes are driven by the environment and what you're doing. And certain genes will turn on and off depending on what you're eating, how you're being, how you're exercising.
So I'm just talking about this from the medical standpoint. You, you never need personally do study functional nutrition or understand it as a specialty field if you wanna go into that. Um, but our medical community needs to change, and this is the place where I see driving the change in the medical community. And it's slow, quite frankly. Um, and it doesn't mean functional nutrition is perfect at all. It just means I'm saying that's the best that I've seen within the field of medicine.
You know, some further directions for the future of nutrition is mind body nutrition once again, my friends. Yep. It is important what you eat and it is important who you are when you eat it. The state that your body is in when you eat the food, if the state that your body is in when you eat the perfectly healthy food and the best diet in the universe, if your body's not in the optimum state to receive that food, then we've missed something. This is so obvious, this is so obvious, my friends. So you know what I'm talking about when I say mind-body nutrition, everything you've learned, stress and relaxation, physiology, bio circadian nutrition, toxic nutritional beliefs, eating speed, awareness, pleasure. Taking time with meals, breathing and understanding of the cephalic phase, digestive response and how that factors into how you digest, assimilate, calorie, burn a meal, how you regulate your appetite in a good natural way.
That's the future of nutrition. Another future of nutrition is the inseparable connection between eating, psychology and nutrition. So our ability to nourish ourselves, to feel free with and body, to have a happy relationship with food, and to metabolize and digest and assimilate and eliminate. That's all profoundly impacted by our inner world. Our story, our journey, our emotional world, all the important life domains that you can imagine. Relationship, money, work purpose, family, spirituality, sexuality, your fears, your hopes, your dreams. Any domain in your life can impact your relationship with food, can impact your metabolism. Our life lessons, meaning our soul lessons can impact our metabolism, can impact our behaviors, can impact our food choices. Your story, your journey, your emotional world impacts your food choices, or it impacts how you digest and assimilate and calorie burn those food choices.
Woo. So we've just expanded the field of nutrition exponentially
by talking about MINDBODY nutrition, by talking about the connection between our inner world, our eating psychology and nutrition, our psychology. It's so important. That's what you've been learning. I think you've been seeing that for yourself, my friends. Nutritional experimentation is where it's at.
It'll be easy for you to see the field of nutrition as one big, juicy, lovely, fascinating, ongoing experiment. It's an exploration, it's a process. It's an unfoldment.
This is a beautiful way, my friends, to do our best, to evolve ourselves, to evolve the body, to reach your best personal and metabolic potentials is to explore nutritionally
just about any diet that anyone is drawn to, is worthy of considering and worthy of trying. In the spirit of this kind of journey,
you have to check your beliefs at the door, your moralism at the door, and see through the eyes of a true scientist,
we have to observe without bias.
So with this in mind, I wanna mention, just so we can exercise our nutritional brains a bit observing without bias. This is important in the nutrition field. Remember I said you can take the nugget of wisdom from any system. I can look at any nutritional system, what you eat, what I eat when anyone eats, and give me a little bit of time to understand what that nutritional system is. And it will be relatively easy to point out the potential advantages and the potential disadvantages.
There's potential advantages and disadvantages to just about anything. You wanna have a kid, there's advantages and there's gonna be some disadvantages. You wanna buy a house or you wanna rent advantages and disadvantages to eat to each one.
Welcome to life as it exists in the known universe. So I just wanna spend a little bit of time, I wanna look at three different diets and show you the positives and negatives potentially of each of those diets. Let's look at the paleo diet or the ancestral diet. Let's look at some of the upside potential of that.
So a paleo diet, if you follow it can create the chemical, medical, chemical metabolic state in your body called ketosis. Meaning the diet can be ketogenic without going into the details of that, that state of ketosis can not does, can have profound short-term to midterm health benefits and disease reversal. So that's just what I've seen, um, can then have profound long-term benefits. Sure it can, but I haven't observed that because I haven't observed people for 60, 70, 80 years eating a paleo diet. I've observed them being on a paleo diet for 2, 3, 4, 5 years. Okay? So I'm just giving you what I've seen. So the diet we know can be ketogenic, we know can have profound short to midterm health benefits and reverse certain diseases. It is a nutrient dense diet. We know observation, observation, it can be weight loss promoting for many people. It can promote very positive insulin regulation. It can promote muscle building for people. It can be a great, and I mean great lifestyle experiment because as you'll notice, many people who follow a paleo diet are exercising and or they're doing CrossFit and they like to, there's a certain natural component to people who are on a paleo diet. They oftentimes are doing very similar things. They're dunking in cold water, they're getting into nature. So it's a, it's a lifestyle experiment with exercise, food, nature, kind of combined. Paleo diet is rich in a lot of animal foods, and there are many nutritional X factors that we know about and that we don't know about in things like bone marrow, real meats, butter, et cetera. Vegetarians and vegans, close your ears on that one. Um, the diet can be very grounding for people. I've noticed people who've gone on it, uh, and all of a sudden they could be different people in terms of their little more present, a little more here, a little more in their body. It can be very balancing for many people who have been nutrient depleted. So these are the, some of the upsides that I've seen on this diet. Are there other upsides? Sure, but this is what I can fit on a slide that I believe is important. What are the potential downsides? Can you hear the word potential if you're on this diet? Like take a deep breath, talk about the downside. Now you gotta observe the good and the bad. My friends. Um, this a meat heavy diet. So we're having an impact on our animals. This may not be sustainable on a mass population level. When I watch what paleo people eat, I think to myself, if the world ate like this there, there's not enough animals eating a lot of animals. Um, so that's something to consider in that regard. There's an environmental impact and everybody was eating this diet. Now, some people say that there's a positive environmental impact. Some people say there's a negative one. Hard to know the diet itself. Here's a downside, is not necessarily sustainable for many individuals. Meaning for many individuals they can do this diet, they can do it short term, it could have a therapeutic benefit, but as a maintenance level diet, there's many people who just like doesn't work for them. It's fine. Noment against the diet that's just works for some people for x amount of time. Many people who have gone on a paleo diet, I have noticed the following. Some have intense carbohydrate cravings. Some have extremely intense carbohydrate cravings. They go on binges, they hate themselves, they go crazy and they're in this endless loop. Met a lot of those people. I've also seen people who go on a paleo diet, especially the men. Uh, not especially, I'm talking about the men, um, have hair loss. Are there other health issues? Mm, I haven't observed long enough, but I put some question marks there. But the ones, the two main challenges that I've seen are intense carbohydrate cravings and hair loss for men. This diet is not sus, is not suitable for all body types. And again, I've noticed, isn't it interesting? People who are on an intense paleo diet oftentimes get into CrossFit. CrossFit is very intense exercise. It's great if you like CrossFit, but you're burning, you're metabolizing. You're putting all that excess meat and protein in your body to work. So it's almost as if there's a hidden intelligence to people who are following this diet, understanding that it is very well suited for CrossFit. CrossFit is very well suited for paleo, vice versa. The two go hand in hand. They might even be necessary for each other.
Um, paleo downside. It it, it's not necessarily ancestral in the pure sense. It doesn't mean that this is what our ancestors actually ate in the same amounts, in the same ways. Uh, it it it's completely silly, um, to believe that, um, our ancestor didn't eat five different kinds of game every day and 12 different kinds of exotic vegetables. Um, you know, there's, there's no make wrong in that. I'm just saying don't think that this is what it is. This is how my ancestors ate. The diet may have a genetic timing to it for certain people, meaning once again, it works for a certain amount of time. Paleo enthusiasts don't really focus so much on the importance of food amount and meat use frequency. And I think this can have a, this can can potentially have a big impact long term for many people.
I've just noticed that it can be heavy on the meat scale and that just catches my attention because again, I, I know that can work. It can work short-term, sustainable therapeutic for people, long-term maintenance, I don't know. So you see what we're doing here, my friends. We're we're looking at a diet and we're being willing to critique it. Let's be adults.
Okay, let's talk about vegan. Here's an upside. Here's some upsides to the vegan diet. A vegan diet can be extremely cleansing. There's a lot of human beings who have been on a long-term junk food diet or a poor quality food diet. Um, we build up toxicity in the human body. A vegan diet can be extremely cleansing for many people. It has a quality where it can be extremely rejuvenating. A paleo diet can be rejuvenating for some people. I do not consider it a cleansing diet, paleo diet. I would consider it more of a building diet. Um, a vegan diet can have the emotional, mental quality of being expansive and a little bit deepening.
Vegans get very thoughtful, they get expansive. When you go onto a vegan diet there, there's an expansion that happens. There's a personal emotional expansion that can happen. There's a deepening that can happen unless you've done this. It's hard to know what I'm talking about. There can be a profound and proven short to midterm therapeutic dietary results for many people with various disease conditions. So there are many, many, many, many stories at the clinical front lines of people who adopt a vegan diet and they heal their heart disease, they change their body, they change their weight, they change their diabetic condition, they changed their gout. They, it's like, like the list is endless. I mean that I've seen this diet heal so many people. Um, by nature it is fiber and phytochemical. Rich phytochemical is a fancy term for the thousands and thousands and thousands of plant naturally occurring plant substances, plant chemicals, the majority of which we haven't even identified yet. So you're getting a lot of that potentially. Um, it is a very peaceful and honorable nutritional path. Meaning ain't no harm to animals. Um, and it builds awareness of the treatment of animals. So even if you're not a vegan vegans, they have some interesting points we have to pay attention to and listen to. By the way, if you're a vegan and you wanna spread vegan awareness, do your best to do it in a way where you're not beating people up and you're not making people wrong for eating animals. If you're making people wrong for eating animals, then you're making all your ancestors wrong and you come from your ancestors who ate animals. Just saying people will respond with inspiration to making dietary changes. People will not respond. Uh, this is so simple, my friends. People don't respond to being made wrong. Oh wow, you've shamed me. You've made me wrong. You've slapped me in the face. Of course, I'll change my diet. It doesn't work. Um, so the vegan diet can truly elevate the discussion about our relationship to animals. And I believe it has. Um, there may very well be an upside when it comes to the health of the environment, even though once again there's a lot of disagreement on that. But I believe there is an upside. Um, and it's a powerful nutritional experiment. Like it's just powerful. It could really work for you or not. It could work short term, it could work midterm. Does it work long term for a lot of people? Honestly, in my observation, unless you come from a clear tradition of vegans and there's not many of those on the planet, my friends. So there, it's a powerful nutritional experiment that can at least work short term. It can at least work midterm. Have I met people on long-term being in diets? Yeah, there's a lot of 'em that are very happy and they love it and they look good. Some of the downsides, once again, like any other diet, it may be genetically timed in its effectiveness, meaning it works for a short period of time, doesn't work for a long period of time. It might be an excellent therapeutic strategy for many people. There is no true historical precedent for this diet as a long-term generational diet. You cannot find me a population on planet earth that has been documented. Long-term vegan, no dairy, no meat doesn't exist. Our personal morals may, may overcome the body's need for animal foods. There might be a certain genetic pressure based on your biological organism of who you are as a human being. That even though morally you don't want to kill an animal, um, and I've dealt with this with vegetarians and vegans, their body's screaming for it and their health is screaming for it. So there's oftentimes a conflict there. And if people choose to go with their moral beliefs, then that's fine, but that can be a challenge for me. But that can be a downside. There is the potential. Notice the term potential for low protein or EFA deficiency.
A vegan diet I've seen can reverse various unwanted health symptoms and then it can cause various unwanted health symptoms. So I've seen that, um, for a lot of people they can end up being low energy. That can be due to various nutritional reasons. Could be deficiencies in iron, could be deficiencies. In B12, I mentioned EFAs and protein. So these are some of the things I will commonly look for with vegans or complaining about low energy. Um, looking at iron, looking at B12 EFAs and proteins, vegan diet I've seen can create a lot of separation in people. People can become so intense about it that they love animals, but they hate people who eat them. Um, which has never made sense to me. I love animals. I don't hate the people who eat them. Do I wish humans would eat less animals overall in general, absolutely. Um, the diet can also be ungrounding. For many people it can be. Okay, let's talk about raw food. Raw food upside people on a raw food diet. This is extremely cleansing and rejuvenating for many people. It can be very vitalizing and give you a lot of energy. It can be very expansive. Create an expansive state of mind for people, for lack of a better term. It can be very spiritualizing. Uh, a lot of people, they expand so much. It, it just connects them more to a different part of themselves. A more cosmic part, I've just noticed that happens or maybe such people are attracted to this diet, but I think it goes hand in hand. Um, like vegan and paleo. It can be disease reversing for many people. Um, I'm going to say of these three diets, the ones that I've seen to be the most age reversing, um, are people who go on a raw food diet. A lot of times people go on a raw food diet and, and you stick to it for a while. And if they were in bad shape to begin with, people can really, uh, it, it just looks like they got a lot younger. Um, there are nutritional X factors that are in raw foods that will be unavailable in cooked and processed foods. That's just, that's just simple science. Um, so there's certain X factors that we will get as we're eating more raw foods. Um, like paleo, like being a vegan. It's a lifestyle. A lot of people are into raw food or into nature. They're intra purity. They're into a sense of clean living. They are sensitive to what's going on in their environment. People on raw foods are very focused on superfood. They tend to focus on nutrient density. They focus on herbs. They tend to focus on other interesting health strategies. It is clearly from clinical experience, a therapeutic diet short to midterm. Long term. I haven't seen it work so well.
Downside of a raw food diet, it can create a dietary bubble, meaning you're really limited. You're less limited today as a vegan or a vegetarian, quite honestly, it's a little more accepted. It's a lot more accepted. Uh, when you're eating raw food, you are definitely a nutritional outsider on average. Um, some people don't mind that, but for a lot of people it's, it just separates you from everybody else. I've noticed for raw food, it can build a lot of what I'm gonna call ego, meaning I've just noticed a lot of people who are on a raw food diet, they, they just talk about raw foods all the time. Um, they're talking about raw foods. They're talking about eating raw foods. They're talking about their diet. It just gets, it's for some reason they can get very me focused. Um, 'cause you almost have to be a little bit more me focused to be on a raw food diet. It's a more intensive diet. It takes more energy. Um, it, you are more separated. You do need to really focus on this diet. Um, so a lot of people end up the, the, the diet becomes a lifestyle and there can be an overreliance on that. It can, it can take us out of the stream of life. Um, it can adversely impact nutritional status for many people. It can adversely impact muscle mass. Does it always? No. Are there people who are on raw food diet, who are, who build muscle? Yes, but I think for a significant amount of people, um, they often lose muscle mass because they're not protein savvy. Um, it can create oversensitivity or hypersensitivity because you cleanse so much that you become extremely sensitive to, to light, to sound to various kinds of other foods. Um, if not done properly, raw food died, especially from a young age. It can harm teeth. Um, and it create, it can create lightheadedness, especially if there's too much fruit. It can be very, when it, so when I say lightheadedness, very dispersive and very ungrounding, there's a potential for a state addiction here. Raw food is, is its own version of a drug. Um, it creates, it can create a certain state and that state, as I mentioned, can be very expansive. It can be very spiritualizing, but we can tend to get hooked on that state or stuck in that state and forget that there are other states, other mental states, other biologic states, metabolic states. So people get state addicted, meaning it, it's giving them a certain high. Um, raw food is often relying on weather and environment. My friends don't do raw foods in the winter of Montana and think you're gonna survive and thrive. Um, so you gotta be in a warm weather climate in general. And my experiences is not a long-term sustainable diet for most people. So what I'm hoping you're seeing, so, so this is just an example of a conversation that you and I can have where we can look at the upsides and the downsides.
I have no interest in getting into an argument with anybody about why this diet is perfect or not perfect. None of them are perfect. I don't know if there's any perfection anywhere. It might be perfect for you and good for you. I'm glad that's your nutritional experiment. And we're gonna try to take some of the nuggets of wisdom here from the upsides of these diets. And then you choose, you make your, you do your experiment and you see how it works for you. And you can end up anywhere on the continuum of this experiment was a long term midterm short success. Here's why it works. Here's why it doesn't, or here's all the reasons why it works and it's perfect. It doesn't matter. It's your experiment. Some final thoughts, my friends, the future of nutrition is available to you now and today in how you choose to nourish yourself and how you choose to nourish the world. You, you've already probably knew a lot before you came into this training. And I'm going to guess that you know a heck of a lot more since coming into this training. So you don't have to wait for the future to have the cutting edge that's gonna happen in the future now, because you know so many good principles.
Remember, do not, I, I I I mean this. Friends do not let friends get stuck in nutritional confusion and frustration and what should I eat? And this one says that. And that one says that. Don't do that. Every time you do that, go find a friend and have them spank you hard. Um, that is a, that is a no-no relax. Take a deep breath. Be a big girl. Be a big boy. All of it is an ongoing exploration. The field of nutrition, it's chaotic. It's the wild west, it's young, it's growing. Stop looking for the perfect diet. Enjoy the ride. Oh, welcome to the world. Your life is an ongoing experiment.
One of the great things you can do is learn to help other people. Be nutritional explorers. Help them stop being nutritional refugees and help take them out of their stress response and let them be empowered about life and empowered about themselves. Yeah, it would be great to know exactly what to eat and exactly what to do and not have to think about it and just do it. And we don't live in that world.
Let's live in the world that we actually live in. And what I'm saying, my friends, is what goes around comes around soul. Whatever you expect from your food, I want health, I want pleasure. I want beauty. I want longevity. I want it to nourish me. I want it to give me energy. I want it to give me all these beautiful things. Well, make sure you are living those qualities in the world. Make sure you are bringing those qualities to the table. Be that person. Bring it into your life. Don't just expect it all to come from the food. So much of what we want from food is can be generated from who we are, how we conduct ourselves. Empower yourself in the realm of nutrition. Feel good about yourself. Understand that you're gonna try things that work and you're gonna try things that don't work. Understand is that you are here to discover. Understand that there will be uncertainty. Understand that there will be success. Chances are you've had successes in this realm in your own personal life. You've figured out some ways to eat such that you feel better and you're a better person. Good for you. Congratulations. That's really an advancement these days in this world, and you could help others do the same.
Okay, my friends, that's the end of this conversation. Next we are going to talk about the future of our work, the future of the work in general. What's the work that we're doing? Where is it all going?
It's gonna be our final words. I'll see you on the other side.

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