Are Seed Oils Bad for You? What's Wrong With Modern Food

Steven: When you try to lose weight, but your body fat is full of seed oils and other impurities and other toxins, burning that fat creates a toxic situation, because by metabolizing it, you're releasing all that bad stuff. Your body might literally decide, hey, I don't want to be overwhelmed by toxic stuff, so no matter what you do to me, I'm not going to burn this fat. The body is saying it's literally preferable to keep being fat while also starving than to burn this stuff and release it into your blood. And people don't know this and they fight against their body. And then this creates a whole bunch of psychological and physiological misery as people are trying to suppress their appetite and whatnot.

Nikkiey: What's going on, everybody? Hey, you guys. Welcome back to another episode of The WarriorBabe Show. Today, I am sitting down with Steven Rofrano. He is the co-founder and CEO of Ancient Crunch, and someone who has made it his mission to expose what's really going on in our food system. So today, we're going to talk about stuff most people don't want to admit, like why it's hard to feel good in today's world, how food became toxic, and what it actually takes to reclaim your health.

So, Steven, welcome to The WarriorBabe Show.

Steven: Thanks, Nikkiey. Happy to be here.

Nikkiey: As I was just saying, I'm really excited to dive into this topic, because this is something that hasn't been exposed on The WarriorBabe Show yet. How I'm going to navigate this is I have five different buckets that I want to dive into with you around this whole topic. But first, can you tell us a bit about what led you into this space?

Steven: As a kid, like many kids, unfortunately, I had a ton of chronic health issues that no one really knew was going on. This all started, I think, because of antibiotics when I was super young, and then of course other sorts of medical treatments. You get sick, you take antibiotics, then you get sick again, so you need more antibiotics. So from a young age, I had these gut problems, and this manifested firstly in my mom observing that I didn't gain weight when she started feeding me food that was not breast milk.

She did an elimination diet after the doctors told her it's fine, don't worry about it. She was like, that's not fine. That's not normal. She figured out that when I stopped eating gluten, I gained weight. And so I grew up basically gluten free, but still never healthy. It wasn't really the gluten, as we'll probably talk about. I would just get sick a lot. In eighth grade, I got the swine flu, and then two weeks later, I had the normal flu. In college, I got sick probably once a month. And it was not until after freshman year of college, when I was doing a study abroad in Belgium. At European universities, they don't have dining halls.

So I had to cook for myself for the first time. That's when I was really able to see the whole chain from food buying to preparation to eating to how I felt after, where I was able to determine, oh, if I eat this thing, I feel good, and if I eat that thing, I feel bad. I don't like feeling bad. Maybe I should eat things that make me feel good. And then I started doing that. I think it was the paleo diet that was popular at the time. And that really worked. I felt great for probably the first time in my life. I didn't have to carry around a box of tissues with me whenever I went outside.

I wasn't getting sick or groggy all the time. And so I became obsessed with this idea that our circumstance is not just limited by external factors. You have not full control, but a lot of influence over how you feel based on how you live and what you put in your body. That was a pretty empowering idea, maybe obvious to people, but not to me at the time. I was 19 years old. From then, I became super obsessed with all this stuff. And ultimately, that's how we ended up here.

Nikkiey: Wow. Well, I love that. That's a cool story. And you are living out your mission based on your own experience, knowing that there are so many people going through it.

So I want to start with probably one of your most talked-about topics, and that's the seed oils. Why are they such a problem?

Steven: It's a great question. A little bit of history is always helpful. A hundred or 150 years ago, people did not eat vegetable oils, oils made from seeds, not because they didn't want to necessarily, but because they didn't exist. Seeds contain a naturally small proportion of oil. To make seed oils at large scale, you need industrial equipment and chemical processes that literally did not exist 150 years ago.

Unfortunately for humanity, that machinery and those processes were invented in the late 1800s to early 1900s. And it produced an oil that was considered to be edible. As we know, it's not really, but it was considered to be edible. And of course, it was much cheaper than the lard, butter and tallow that Americans and basically everyone in Western Europe had been eating for millennia. Seed oils came onto the scene with Procter & Gamble, who started selling Crisco in 1924. That was the first edible seed oil really pushed. They spent tens of millions of dollars back then donating money to the American Heart Association and other sort of medical science, quote unquote, boards that would legitimize their new food.

And seed oils really took off as a culinary item in the American diet starting in the early 1900s. At this point in history, 25 to 30% of the average American's calories come from seed oils. It's the single largest source of calories that people eat on a regular basis. And therefore, because they're bad for you, for reasons I'm happy to describe, and because you eat so much of them, the impact is very large.

You could say Red 40 is bad, and Red 40 of course is bad, or other food dyes or additives. But how many milligrams of Red 40 do you eat in a year? Two, I don't know. But you eat kilograms of seed oils. So if you're ingesting that volume of this not very healthy thing, it's a big problem. It's not the only reason why people are sick, of course, but it is a significant influence on the chronic diseases that everyone finds themselves afflicted with today.

Nikkiey: That's wild. What are they doing? You said that they oxidize and they slowly drive inflammation. Can you break that down more at a cellular level? Why does that happen?

Steven: Sure. Fats are made up of molecules called triglycerides, which is a glycerol molecule, you usually draw it vertically, with three fatty acids. Those fatty acids look like little chains. When it's a saturated fat, those chains are very strong, so they're stable. When they are unsaturated fatty acids, which is the type of fatty acid prevalent in seed oils, those chains break apart.

The place where they break apart is a very reactive molecule. It's called a reactive oxygen species, which people may have heard of. What that molecule does is it goes around and more or less steals electrons from other molecules that it interacts with. It's kind of like a magnet, if you will. Say you have a pile of paperclips, and it's stable. It's all organized, neat, in a row on your desk. You move a magnet over and it's going to pull the paperclips and mess up your pile.

That's kind of what reactive oxygen species do. Whatever biological matter they touch, they pull electrons away. They interrupt molecules, then that interrupts cells, and it breaks things apart. And the problem with seed oils, why it's such a big issue and why it sounds so crazy to believe, is that if this is a fundamental biological thing, all biological tissue is susceptible to the inflammatory influence of seed oils. That means the disease conditions that you can see from seed oils will show up everywhere.

Some people say seed oils make you obese, seed oils cause acne, they cause irritable bowel syndrome, they give you skin cancer, they cause macular degeneration and brain cancer, all these things. It sounds incredible, in the sense of unbelievable, that this one thing could be causing all those problems. But if you understand that it's simply an issue of these things tearing apart biological tissue wherever they go, and they go everywhere in your body, then everywhere in your body is susceptible to their destructive influence. And that's why you have such a wide range of conditions that you can ascribe to seed oils.

Nikkiey: To the conditions point, how would somebody know if those oils are contributing to their health issues?

Steven: If you're eating them, they're contributing to your health issues. You can not eat them and still have health problems for other reasons, sure. But if you're eating them, they're not good for you. They're certainly not helping. They're most likely actively hurting. Some people are more resilient to health matters in general than other people. It's just natural variation. I had a very weak immune system and a weak constitution, as they say, as a kid.

Some people have very strong constitutions, so they may not notice the health effects so much, at least when they're younger. Then people get older, and the rates of cancer are increasing, and the age at which people first get cancer is decreasing. People are getting sick. Even if you don't feel it when you're 25, you're going to feel it when you're 65.

Nikkiey: Interesting. My mind is blown by all that information you just shared. Very scientific. Okay. So these things are in everything, as you're saying. Snacks, restaurant food, pretty much everything.

Steven: Meals, baking recipes. Oh, yeah. Your cup and a half of canola oil to make your banana bread. Everywhere.

Nikkiey: You were touching on this a little bit earlier. Maybe we can unpack it a little more. How and why did they become so dominant in the food industry and the food supply?

Steven: Sure. There were two main phases. The first one was around the 1920s when they were first invented. You have to understand, back then, oil was not a thing that Americans or Western Europeans would have consumed as food. The Italians and the Greeks hadn't really brought olive oil in large volumes to the U.S.

Coconut oil wasn't a thing. We were not getting oil from the tropics. Hawaii wasn't even a state. So people ate animal fats, which were solid. Bacon grease, which is lard, butter and tallow being the most obvious and common ones. When they first figured out how to extract oil from seeds, it was applied to cotton seeds, because cotton seeds were a waste product of the cotton industry. You pick the cotton, you have the fibers that you want to make clothing, but the seeds are left over. If you can figure out how to sell your garbage instead of throwing it away as a company, you can make more money.

So that's what it was first applied to. Specifically, Procter & Gamble was involved because Procter & Gamble makes soap, and soap is made from fat. If they were making soap from lard or tallow or butter, things that people were buying for food, the price of those ingredients was very high, because there was more demand for them. So they were able to extract the oil from the cotton seeds, a waste product of the cotton industry, and buy their raw materials very cheaply relative to the other ingredients that would be needed for soap. And they were like, cool, what can we do with this? So they tried making soap out of it.

That didn't really work. It foamed and it had a weird smell. It just wasn't good. They didn't have the right filtering and processing to turn seed oils into soap back then. But another researcher invented a way of turning liquid oil solid. This is called hydrogenation. Anyone who was around in the 90s would know hydrogenated vegetable oil. Hydrogenation is the process of chemically and artificially making the fatty acids saturated, which makes them solid at room temperature.

The result is a fat that looks like lard. And they were like, oh, cool, let's call this Crisco and we're going to sell it for food. That was Crisco. It was the waste product of the cotton industry, made into oil that Procter & Gamble bought for cheap, turned solid through artificial means, and then they said you should eat this. That launched in 1924. It became very popular. There was a whole futurism social dynamic at the time where people wanted laboratory-created things.

People were inspired by science fiction. Well, science fiction didn't really show up yet, but futurism was a thing. If it came from a lab and doctors in white coats and scientists and engineers made it, you thought it was good, which is very interesting. It's the opposite of the cultural mood today. Today you want the feathers on your chicken eggs. You want the dirt on your broccoli. You want it to be natural. Back then, that was not culturally desirable. So the fact that it was created in a lab was actually a selling point, and Crisco became a smash hit. It was very popular up until the mid-century. During World War II, the raw oils from seeds were commonly used as machine lubricant and in other industrial applications.

Truly, that's what they were used for, running battleships and that sort of thing. But after the war was over, you had all this oil production that had nowhere to go, because no one needed battleships, and no one needed as much machinery for the war. So there was this weird moment where all the people who had the crops to make the seed oils and the processing to make the oils from the seeds were like, what do we do with all these oils? And that's around the time when you see the vegetable oils themselves being pushed. Dwight Eisenhower famously had his heart attack. His doctor, of course, ascribed it to smoking and not the vegetable oils he had been eating.

Then people were rushing to buy vegetable oils because they were told that was what was going to prevent men from getting heart attacks. That was not true. People still had heart attacks, and health conditions have only deteriorated since then. So the second wave of seed oil dominance occurred at that time, supported by industry money and fake science and fake medical literature. Not fake in the sense that it wasn't real, but it was engineered to look like you should eat seed oils when the actual results are the opposite.

And over time, of course, it's a snowball effect. Those industries sold more product. They made more money. They spent more money on propaganda. So then they sold more product. And now you have this point in time where anyone over the age of 40 by default thinks that vegetable oils are good for you, saturated fat is bad for you, cook with heart-healthy canola oil. And they're all sick.

Nikkiey: Wow. Why is it being masked like that? Why is it being masked that seed oils are okay and being used in food if it's not?

Steven: Seed oils are a $100 billion industry globally. It's a lot of money. They're cheaper to produce and cheaper to use and buy relative to animal fats. So when people want their Doritos at 50 cents an ounce, you have to use vegetable oil. There's not a way to make a 50-cent-an-ounce bag of chips without vegetable oil, at least not today. It's possible tallow could get there in the future with enough scale and other industrial support, but certainly not today.

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Interesting. So how can people start minimizing, reducing or eliminating this stuff from their diet? What are your top strategies?

Steven: I would argue the single biggest volume usage of seed oils is in fried foods. Unless you're eating a fried food that is made explicitly without seed oils, maybe it's fried in beef tallow, or even coconut oil, unless you're eating fried foods that are fried in good oils, you should not eat fried foods whatsoever. That's like a seed oil nuke. But secondarily, there are a lot of baked goods, as I mentioned, where people use massive quantities of vegetable oil in a cake or a pie or whatever.

Avoid that. It's relatively easy to do. If you go to the grocery store, just look at labels. Just don't buy anything with seed oils in it. It's relatively harder to do at a restaurant. But again, if you avoid the fried foods and you ask the waiter to replace this with that, maybe that doesn't work at Applebee's, but it certainly works at any restaurant where they actually cook the food, you can do a pretty good job of avoiding them.

Nikkiey: Okay, cool. I love that. When people start eliminating this stuff, how soon can someone start noticing the changes once they start removing seed oils from their lifestyle?

Steven: I'm not a doctor, but there's a very good book written by a doctor on this topic called Dark Calories. It's by Dr. Cate Shanahan. She talks about how in her practice she got people off seed oils and all the results people saw. I haven't eaten seed oils in a long time, so I don't have direct personal experience with this, to be honest. But based on what I've read, it seems that within 30 days people are like, wow, I feel like a different person. And then in 90 days, a whole host of chronic issues start to get alleviated. The problem with seed oils is that they are stored in our body fat.

So it's unlike some other toxin where if you stop ingesting it, it goes away. Your body tissue is made up of vegetable oil if you eat a lot of seed oils. And the more body fat you have, the more seed oils you're carrying around with you. So it's actually a pretty big problem when people try to lose weight, and there's actually a secret that no one really understands. When you try to lose weight, but your body fat is full of seed oils and other impurities and other toxins that are stored in your body fat, burning that fat creates a toxic situation.

Because by metabolizing it, you're releasing all that stored-up bad stuff. And then that's overwhelming your liver and your kidneys and whatever. Depending on the severity of the problem, your body might literally decide, hey, I don't want to be overwhelmed by toxic stuff, so no matter what you do to me, I'm not going to burn this fat. And that's when you get people talking about stubborn fat, and how it's so hard to lose weight even though they're starving themselves. The body is saying it's literally preferable to keep being fat while also starving than to burn this stuff and release it into your blood. And people don't know this, and they fight against their body.

Then this creates a whole bunch of psychological and physiological misery as people are trying to suppress their appetite and whatnot. But yeah, they're stored in our fat, and it's not a very easy problem to resolve, at least not quickly. They stick around for a long time.

Nikkiey: I know you're not a doctor, and neither am I, but I'm curious based on that statement that people have a hard time losing the stubborn fat, and this is what's happening with the toxins going through their body or through their liver. Eventually, when the fat does come off, let's say they break through that stubborn body fat, will that eventually nix all those toxins? Will they no longer be there, or are they still lingering throughout the body?

Steven: They're mostly stored in body fat tissue. So if you have a relatively small percentage of body fat, you also have a relatively small amount of seed oils in your body, even if the remaining body fat itself does have seed oils in it. Over time, they go away. If you eat no more seed oils, you'll stop accumulating them. Over time, it gets burned off slowly, and you replace it with the good fats that you eat. People need body fat to survive.

Women, I think, need at least 20% or 25% body fat. I forget what the number is. Probably more as people age. Antioxidants are a thing, and they help with this because, again, it's oxidative stress. Vitamin E is a very large and very influential fat-soluble antioxidant that plays a large role in the metabolism of seed oil-based oxidative byproducts. So over time it goes away and gets replaced by good fats. But the one study that people talk about on this issue found that, more or less, seed oil will stick around in your body for up to seven years.

Seven or eight years. It was not a study where people tried to remove them quicker. It was an accidental result of a study that was looking at something else. So I would assume that if you tried, if you put yourself on a regimen of, oh, I'm going to take certain supplements and work out and sauna and eat no more seed oils and do all these things, I'd imagine it can go away faster. But the only result we have ever seen to date says that seed oils stick around for about seven years.

Nikkiey: Interesting. That's a long time.

Steven: Long time. Yeah.

Nikkiey: Okay. So that was the bucket of seed oils that I wanted to navigate with you. And for everyone listening, I know Steven mentioned at the beginning that it wasn't the gluten that was the problem. I'm definitely going to circle back to that, because I want you to unpack it. But the next bucket I want to get into is why real health food actually tastes good. I know that's one of your core beliefs, that real food tastes good because it's what we're meant to eat.

Why do you think so many people still associate health food with—

Steven: Gross stuff.

Nikkiey: Exactly. Punishment. Even women in our programs associate it with, if I eat healthy food, it's going to suck. Why do they associate that?

Steven: It's a good question. A good way to think about this is to imagine you're a lion in the savannah in Africa. How do you know what to eat? You go and eat what tastes good. Damn, that gazelle tastes really good. Let me eat more of that.

Eh, that grass doesn't taste so good. I'm not going to eat that. Let's say you're an elephant. Oh, wow, those leaves. Delicious. I'm going to eat 400 pounds of leaves a day. But that gazelle, I don't really like gazelle. So in the wild, you'll notice that animals eat what tastes good to them, and that is the healthy food for them. Elephants are supposed to eat leaves. Lions are supposed to eat gazelles. And both of those animals like eating those things. In fact, you might even argue by extension that the taste bud system is designed to literally tell you what's healthy for you.

What other signal would an animal have in the wild? Imagine you're some caveman or hunter-gatherer. Something tastes good, you're like, oh, I should eat more of that. Something tastes bad, I should eat less of that. You don't have studies. You don't have the USDA food pyramid. You don't even necessarily have family recipes. You're not even living in a hut. You're walking around with a stick. No one's there to tell you what to eat except your instinct, aka your taste buds, telling you what tastes good, and you go eat more of that. And that works. That's a pretty valid principle. The problem is that when you start to introduce artificial foods, foods that your taste bud system never evolved to understand, then you have the possibility of foods that both taste good and are bad for you.

So only when you're exposed to artificial foods, and artificial meaning not available in some natural setting, do your taste buds start to fail on you. And what actually tastes good might not be healthy. And of course, if you're a giant food company and you want to sell stuff that people want to eat, you're going to artificially engineer things to taste good regardless of the health effects, because you don't give a crap. You just want people to buy your stuff. So you're going to make stuff that tastes good that's explicitly not healthy. And that is what's happened to food over the past, say, 150 years.

And because of that amount of time and modernity and the industrial revolution, we're used to the idea that things that taste good might not be good for us. In fact, they're often the opposite, because they're engineered to be that way. On the other hand, you have this crazy health food movement that says, we're going to throw out all of the tradition we've had for years. We're going to throw out steak and baked potatoes and butter and bread and butter and ice cream, all these recipes that have been part of culinary civilization for centuries or more.

We're going to throw all that out because if it tastes good, it must be bad for you. So we're going to throw out everything that tastes good. It's the literal opposite. We'll use bad taste as a signal for health food. We've become so disillusioned with how our taste buds work, because we eat artificial food, that we don't trust them at all. In fact, we trust the opposite. If it tastes good, it must be bad for me. And if it tastes bad, it must be good for me. That's the exact opposite of how they evolved to work. And so you get the situation now where people are like, oh, if I want to be healthy, I have to suffer through all this pain of not eating what I want.

A lot of people just aren't willing or interested or able to do that. Not that it would work if they tried. If all you're going to eat is kale and chia seeds, you're not going to be very healthy. But people don't even want to try. And it's a big problem, because that prevents 95% of people from getting healthy, because they don't want to give up eating things they like.

Nikkiey: To piggyback off that statement, do you think modern ultra-processed food has dulled people's ability to enjoy or crave real food?

Steven: I think temporarily. I think it's something you're easily able to overcome. If you were to cut out artificial things, your taste buds would rewire themselves in about two weeks. You would learn pretty quickly what actual good tastes like. So I don't think it's a permanent issue. But certainly, if you're addicted to the Doritos flavor, you're going to have a bad time. That being said, go get some cheese and pepper and tomato and garlic and onion powder and sprinkle those on whatever, and it's going to be delicious. The other issue the processed food industry has, of course, is that they use cheap ingredients.

That's their whole thing. And the cheap thing is never as good as the real thing. Häagen-Dazs vanilla bean, which uses vanilla beans, tastes better than Häagen-Dazs vanilla, which uses artificial vanilla flavor. It's more expensive, but it's better. Science has as yet been unable to create artificial flavors that actually taste better than real flavors. There are other tricks they use, like MSG and all sorts of other chemicals. But an artificial chili powder flavor is not as good as real chili powder.

An artificial oregano or vanilla or whatever you want, it's not as good as the real thing. It's just cheaper.

Nikkiey: Interesting. Quick break. If you're finding this episode helpful so far, it would mean a lot if you could hit pause for just a second, leave a quick rating or review, or share it with someone who could benefit from it. Your support helps more women discover these tools to build muscle, lose fat and feel confident. Thank you so much for being a part of this journey with me.

Okay. So what are your favorite go-to examples of real food, nutrient-dense foods, that people would be surprised to love once they try them?

Steven: Beef in all its varieties. Steak. Hamburgers. Whatever. Cheese. Real cheese. The milk should be high quality. You shouldn't have additives or preservatives or artificial colors. We're not talking Kraft cheese. We're talking Gruyère from Switzerland or Parmigiano from Italy. Real cheese. Delicious. Fruit. Delicious. Of course, organic, not the super GMO, watery, watered-down, Bill Gates-coated apples, but actual fruit is delicious.

Berries. Delicious. Bread. Make bread the right way. Delicious. Put butter on it. In my opinion, the two most delicious foods in general are bread and dairy products. Hands down, they're the best.

Nikkiey: I'm all about carbs. Trust me, I love carbs. I know people listening to this are feeling like, he just said bread, that's crazy, because people are afraid. At least the women listening to this episode or in our program fear carbs, or they come from keto and X, Y and Z. And I'm trying to reinstill the belief that carbs are good for you.

Steven: Look, the Roman army conquered the entire known world on a diet of bread and cheese.

Nikkiey: Say that louder for the people in the back, Steven.

Steven: I don't know if you're familiar with Pecorino Romano, which is a cheese from central Italy. It was big in my house growing up. It's a hard cheese, so it's shelf stable at room temperature. They brought that on campaigns when they went to war, and they paid the soldiers in cheese. And to make bread, they didn't bring bread. They brought grain.

They brought wheat around, and they would make bread fresh in their little camps. And that was food. You can't necessarily have a ton of meat in that environment. And they conquered the world. Clearly they were doing all right on that diet. So I have a particular affinity for bread and dairy products in general. But I think the easiest way to think about it is to imagine your great-grandma, maybe great-great-grandma, whatever country she came from. What was she eating? That's good for you.

Nikkiey: Yeah. So the next one I want to dive into is why it's so hard to be healthy today. I would love to hear your opinion on that, because I have my opinion. I used to work in the ER, I used to work in the medical field, and I left because I had so many views on the medical system. But your take, like you said, is that modern life is designed to make us sick. Can you explain what you mean by that?

Steven: One way of thinking about it is to just look around your room, your house, and think about all the things there that are not good for you.

From the screen you're looking at with the blue light, to the device you're listening to or watching this on with the EMF radiation. The plastics and glues and the cheap furniture off-gassing VOCs and toxic chemicals. The water with fluoride and chlorine and birth control hormone residue and other stuff in it. Your pots and pans in your kitchen with plastics. Your clothing that's made of plastic that gets in your skin, and when you wash it and dry it, the microplastics get in the air and you start breathing them in.

The paint on the walls. The polyurethane on the floor. It's all these petroleum-derived chemicals. Not even to mention the food you eat. Everything around us is unhealthy. I can't necessarily say that it's by design, that people want to poison us, although there could be some evidence for that in certain cases here or there. It just so happens that the methods of producing the environment of the modern world are toxic. Most of it is petroleum-derived products in one way or another.

Whether it's plastic, whether it's paints, coatings, oil and its exhaust. Pharmaceuticals are made from petroleum. All the synthetic chemicals that we know of, synthetic really means a petroleum-derived thing. Without that, we don't really have the modern world. I'm not saying there's no way to fix it. But the trappings of the modern world are all made from petroleum-derived, toxic stuff foreign to our environment. Sure, there are heavy metals as well, which are another source of toxicity. But it's even the pesticides on the food, which are petroleum-derived products.

So it's a whole bunch of toxic chemicals everywhere you go. And that's why it's so hard to be healthy. Because everything matters. The toxic things are easily available and convenient, and the healthy things, largely because they are slower or more expensive, are less available. If you're a person in the 1950s and you go to the diner, they have milkshakes, and the milkshakes are made with hormone-free milk, because hormones were not put in milk at the time, and the cows were fed grass at the time.

Factory farming wasn't really a big thing back then. You get the burger, and the cows were mostly fed on grass. Same thing. Good burger. Glyphosate on the wheat wasn't invented. You can't have a burger with glyphosate if glyphosate doesn't exist. The cheese didn't have Yellow 5 or whatever the heck, because that didn't exist. So you could go to a random diner and the things were healthier, because the unhealthy things simply did not exist. The technology to make them didn't exist. Nowadays, it's the opposite. Every standard place you go has all of the toxic stuff I listed, or more.

So if you want to avoid it, you have to just kind of go crazy. It's relatively possible to do in your own home, although there are some difficulties. There aren't really any healthy computers. But healthy food, healthy furniture, paints, clothing, you can do that. But if you go out in public, no one else is paying attention to it. So you're put into this default state where the easy thing to do is the unhealthy thing. You go to the food store to buy food, it's bad food. You go to the doctor and say, hey, what food should I eat? He tells you the bad food.

You go to the restaurant. What food do you eat? It's bad food. It's not as if people in the 50s worked out every day. There was no Weight Watchers. There was no calorie counting. The food pyramid didn't even exist. And yet everyone was fit, and obesity was nonexistent. People didn't really get cancer. Why is that? It's because the world around them was natural, in a sense. Even though it was buildings and cities, they were still made of fundamentally natural materials. And today, that's not the case.

Nikkiey: What a thought trip we could go down on that one. So basically, everything you said there is that there's so much stacked against us, from the ultra-processed foods, to the artificial light, to the things in the room. If someone's listening to this and they're resonating with everything you're saying, they're very intrigued by your knowledge, what would you recommend as some of the most underrated shifts that could be really easy for people to make in their daily environment to feel better?

Steven: Cotton sheets, cotton towels. Organic cotton preferably, but cotton's still better than plastic.

An organic mattress. You can get naturally produced mattresses made with wool and cotton and latex, natural tree rubber latex, for way cheaper than a mattress from whatever store you go to. So I think the linens are a big one. We spend eight hours a day in our beds, a third of our time surrounded by plastic if you have polyester sheets and a normal mattress. And plastic is bad not only when you touch it but also if you're near it, because it off-gases chemicals like solvents and puts microplastics into the air that you breathe in.

So plastic is bad. Fragrance is a huge one. More or less every fragrance chemical, unless it's explicitly some natural essential oil, is a petroleum-derived toxic product, hormone-disrupting and all the rest. So get rid of your Glades. Get rid of your stupid Yankee Candles. If you want fragrances of some kind, you can get them. Just make sure you get natural essential oils. That's a whole other rabbit hole, because some essential oils are inherently toxic even if they're natural. Cyanide is a natural thing and it's toxic.

It's not that everything natural is healthy. But burn some orange peels on your stove, I don't know. But get rid of the artificial fragrances. Get rid of the plastic fabrics. Turn your Wi-Fi off at night. Turn the router off. You don't need that radiation. Keep your phone away from you. Light bulbs: get incandescent light bulbs. Or if that's too hardcore for you, you can get LEDs that are better. I still don't think there are any LEDs that are great. It's not an optimal light source, but there are LEDs that have full-spectrum light and low flicker, less blue light and whatever.

And then your kitchen. Get rid of everything that's plastic and replace it with wood, glass or stainless steel. Get rid of the Tupperware and replace it with Pyrex. Get rid of the nonstick pans and replace them with stainless steel pans. You can, in fact, cook fried eggs in a stainless steel pan without them sticking. You have to get a good pan. I think All-Clad is what we use, and my wife rarely has issues with eggs sticking. Cast iron works too, but you have to take care of it, so it's annoying. The plastic wrap. The microwave. Don't put stuff in the microwave.

I'm sure I could go down the list more with the kitchen stuff. But wood, glass or stainless steel is what you need to be using for everything in the kitchen.

Nikkiey: Okay. First of all, thank you. Those are all very helpful ways people can start making some small shifts. But what about someone who's so type A and they're like, I want to get rid of everything and get all this new stuff, and they're obsessed with the clean living aspect of it? There could be a too-obsessed aspect. How do you find the balance, if there is a balance to it? What would you recommend?

Steven: I think that's an individual preference. You just have to go as hard as you want to. You can go very hard. You can go moderately hard. I think it comes down to cost and impact. Think about things in terms of: how toxic is it inherently? How much time do I spend interacting with the toxic thing and therefore absorbing its toxicity? And how expensive or inconvenient is it to replace it with something that's not?

Nikkiey: Love that.

Steven: That's maybe a helpful framework to rank things. How expensive is it? I'm on Wi-Fi right now. The router's in my basement. My laptop's in front of me. I have an EMF meter, so I can measure how strong it is. It's not nothing. It's not terrible. Could I wire my house with Ethernet so I have my computer plugged in and turn the Wi-Fi off? Probably. Have I done that yet? No. Even me. It's annoying to do, and I'd probably have to get an electrician. So that I didn't do. A whole-house water filter is like $10,000.

But you can get a better water filter for your countertop that's maybe a few hundred bucks. So I think that's a helpful thought pattern: toxicity, time spent, and then how expensive or inconvenient it is to replace. Then rank the objects in your life, think about everything, and go through it one by one. Are you going to replace the paint on your walls tomorrow? Probably not. But switching out some light bulbs is pretty easy.

Nikkiey: I love that framework a lot. That's super helpful, and I'm sure it's helpful for the listeners as well. You kind of brought this up and I thought, oh, there could be a thought trip to this, so how can I frame it so we can actually navigate this conversation? You've said that food became toxic when it stopped being food and became more of a product. People lived naturally back in the day, and now it's become more of a product. Can you unpack that a little bit more?

Steven: So what about modern food is bad specifically, or why it happened? What do you mean?

Nikkiey: When you mentioned that food became toxic when it stopped being food and became more of a product. The way the food was made, the money, it shifted gears from natural living to seed oils and all of this being put into our food, and it became more of a product.

I guess what I'm asking is how it became more of a product. Does that make sense? I can totally navigate to something different.

Steven: I think so. There are two things about food. There are the ingredients, and then how you combine them into the resulting end product. Ingredient quality matters, and this is mostly due to farming. How did you raise the apples?

Did you put this fertilizer on them? Did you put this pesticide on them? Did you coat them in this Bill Gates toxic thing? Is the soil full of heavy metals that the apples absorb because there was pollution in the air? Did you water them with water that was toxic? There are all these things that go into farming that make food good or bad in its raw form. And then there's the question of processing. Actually, okay, there are three things. There are the raw food ingredients. Even the most artificial of artificial foods has some raw food ingredients. Something somewhere came from the ground.

If something's going to be properly called food, the ingredients themselves should be grown with attention to high quality and minimal toxicity. The next question is how you process the thing. Maybe this is where we get into the bread. There's the right way of doing something, which is the traditional way, and then there's the shortcut, modern, quick, cheap way. The right way of making bread, for example, is you grind the wheat into flour, and then you combine it with water and salt.

You add your sourdough starter, which is a combination of flour and water that's been fermented over time, so it has bacteria and yeast active in it. You combine that into your dough, you let it rise over time, and then you bake it. Thus you make bread. In the 1860s, maybe the 1870s, commercial yeast became available for the first time, the little packet of yeast people know. You stick it in the dough and it magically rises. The problem is that it's one GMO strain of yeast, and that's it. A natural sourdough culture will have hundreds, if not thousands, of different types of yeast, along with hundreds, if not thousands, of different types of bacteria that ideally come from the local environment where you live, and they do all sorts of things to the flour to make it better for us to eat.

A sourdough bread has a lower gluten content when it's done fermenting than a yeast-risen bread. Certain enzymes and acids in the culture act on the proteins in other ways. It'll remove certain antinutrients and mycotoxins and whatever have you. We don't need to get into the whole list. But you lose out on those things when you use yeast in a packet. Yeast in a packet is cheap and fast, though. It rises the bread in four hours instead of eight hours.

So if you want cheap bread, use yeast in a packet. What's another one? Quinoa. This is a common one. Health food. Quinoa, like a lot of seeds, has some natural toxic things on it to prevent animals from eating it in the wild, because the quinoa plant reproduces via its seeds. So the quinoa plant has stuff in the seeds to prevent animals from eating them so that it can reproduce. Same with soybeans or whatever. Different plants have different versions of these substances, but they all serve the same purpose, which is to limit animals eating those seeds.

So to make quinoa, you have to rinse it. If you put quinoa in a pot dry and then add water, it'll foam up. That's saponins, which is the same root as soap, foamy things, which you shouldn't be eating. They also make the quinoa bitter. So instead of putting it in a rice cooker and boiling all the saponins back into the quinoa, you take the quinoa, put it in a pot with water, rinse it, it foams up, you dump that out. You rinse it again until it stops foaming. Then you let it soak for about 12 hours. Dump that water, add fresh water, and boil it again.

Boil it like pasta, then strain it out instead of cooking it down. That's how you would make quinoa. That's the natural preparation method. It's a lot of work. It takes a lot of time. But that's how you would make it edible. And there's a similar version of this for basically every food. You don't eat raw mushrooms, you cook mushrooms. You wouldn't eat raw rice, you have to cook it first. You don't just eat corn, you nixtamalize it, which is the whole Aztec process used to make tortillas, which is what we do for our tortilla chips. For the most part, every food has some traditional method of preparation that was done for a reason.

Do you think the Peruvians living in the Andes wanted to waste all that water to cook quinoa this way? Of course not. It's not convenient. But they knew that if they didn't do it, it was not good for them. So they did it. If it was worth it to those people, who had no electricity and no running water, to use all this water making quinoa this way, we should probably do the same thing. Anyway, I could go on. But the point is, there's a preparation method that has to be paid attention to.

And the last thing is the additives. What are the actual ingredients? Are you adding carrageenan? Are you adding MSG? Are you adding citric acid? All those preservatives and artificial things. Most food scores an F on all three of those categories today. It uses unhealthy, poorly grown ingredients, not prepared in a traditional way, with a whole bunch of additives. The opposite, of course, makes food good. And that's what makes food food: real, naturally grown ingredients, prepared traditionally, with no weird, fake additives.

I don't know if that answers your question.

Nikkiey: No, that definitely answered my question. That's the way I wanted it to be navigated. I take it as: the way to make some foods that are actually really good and healthy for you takes a really long time naturally. So as food became a product, it was made easier, faster, processed, X, Y, Z. So that definitely answers my question. Back to the key ingredients. What are some of the key ingredients, or processing or packaging terms, that signal that an item or product has been overly engineered?

Steven: I think the easiest thing, honestly, is to look at the ingredients. I don't pay attention to the nutrition facts, the numbers, at all. I don't think they matter. They're also all fake. I don't know if anyone knows that.

Nikkiey: No, wait, unpack that, because I'm big on protein, fats and carbs. Unpack that for a second. It's all fake?

Steven: What people think you have to do to put a nutrition label on your package is bring it to a lab, and some lab will dissolve it in beakers and do some analysis and figure out exactly how much protein, exactly how much salt, exactly how much of whatever is in that particular serving of food.

That's not at all what happens. To create a label, you simply do the math on what the ingredients are. The USDA, the Department of Agriculture, maintains a database of nutrition facts for base ingredients. It'll say flour has this much protein and this much carbohydrate. It doesn't say your flour. They've collected this number over however many years, and it may or may not have any bearing on the actual flour in that particular package. But that's the USDA database, those are the numbers, and those are the rules.

So you say, oh, I have 20 grams of flour in a serving of this thing, so let me take 20 grams' worth of the protein and the carbohydrate. Then I have butter, so I go to the USDA database and it says butter has this much fat and this much whatever, and I add up how much of those parts from the butter are in there. Then I have salt, maybe I have cheese. Say I made a Cheez-It. I go into the USDA database and look up cheese, and it says cheese has this much protein and this much fat. Then I add it all up, and that's my number, and that's what's on the nutrition panel. There is no testing done on that.

Nikkiey: But it's still coming from the USDA, though, right?

Steven: Sure. But maybe they tested one type of cheese 50 years ago, and the cheese being used by the producer today is not the same cheese. Some things I'm sure are more accurate than others. Salt is salt. But cheese is different. Eggs are different. And especially with vitamins. The micronutrients in butter change depending on the season, the time of year you milked the cow to produce the butter. How is the USDA going to tell you accurately how much of whatever is in that butter?

I'm not saying it's completely wrong. Maybe it's directionally true. But it's not real. It is not precise or accurate in any sense of the term.

Nikkiey: I can understand it not being 100% accurate. But food has to be made up of some things and has to come from somewhere.

Steven: Yeah, of course. Maybe a good example: there's a famous, maybe infamous, YouTube video from years ago, maybe decades ago. I believe it was done by Casey Neistat, in response to a law where New York City restaurants had to start putting calories next to menu items.

Nikkiey: Yeah.

Steven: He went around and ordered the food that was listed, and then he actually brought it to a lab and had them figure out how many calories were in it. And it was off by hundreds of calories. That's the kind of result you get.

Nikkiey: Okay. I understand that.

Steven: They're not precise. It's just a bunch of math that maybe is somewhat accurate, or at least could have been.

Nikkiey: I can definitely understand that. Calories next to food items in restaurants drive me nuts all the time.

Steven: But it's the same thing with any packaged food. It's not a legal requirement that any actual laboratory measurements are done to tell you the number of calories in a serving of whatever.

Nikkiey: Interesting. Happy you unpacked that a little bit.

Steven: I'm not saying it's useless, but I don't pay attention to it at all. Anyway, to answer the original question, ingredients are far more important. So what matters when people are trying to look at a package and figure out if it's good or not? Seed oils are actually a really good signal, because the types of foods that don't have seed oils often don't have all the other things.

If the manufacturer is actually avoiding seed oils, they probably know to avoid other things that are bad for you. Not true 100% of the time, certainly. So I would look for the presence of seed oils. That's a big one. Most ultra-processed food has it. Obviously, anything that says artificial flavors is a no-go. And lastly, not everyone knows what every word on a label means. The easy way to think about it is, if you see a term that doesn't look like something your great-grandma had in her cupboard, it's probably fake. You shouldn't buy it. Did great-granny have a citric acid bottle in her cupboard?

Did she have the carrageenan tube? What about her vanillin extract? Not vanilla, vanillin. No, she did not have that. She did not have allulose. All the non-calorie sweeteners are complete bogus. She didn't have allulose. She didn't have stevia. She didn't have erythritol. That's the metric I'd apply. And then on quality, organic is probably the best standard to evaluate by, at least on a per-ingredient basis.

It breaks down a bit with animal foods. Organic doesn't mean a ton when it comes to meat and dairy. But when you're looking at anything that's not those things, organic is a pretty helpful term to see. And just use the great-granny test.

Nikkiey: Love that. Okay, before we close out this podcast, I want to circle back to what you said at the beginning, in the story you shared about growing up, that it wasn't the gluten. Can you unpack that a little? What was it? Why not the gluten?

And what turned out to be your solution?

Steven: This goes back to the whole idea of how ingredients are grown and then the preparation method. There's this funny thing where if you call things by a name, all things with that name start to seem the same. That's very abstract. What I mean is, if you say that's bread and that other thing is bread, in your mind you think they're the same thing, even if they're made completely differently. The term bread is not a detailed enough form of expression to capture all the potential differences between those two things.

If I say this is bread, and I'm pointing to Wonder Bread, it's got soybean oil in it. It has a whole bunch of artificial flavors and preservatives and bleaching and deodorizing. It's got nutrient fortification. It's got folic acid in it. It's got fake iron. It's got bromine. The wheat was grown with pesticides, glyphosate, atrazine, whatever. We would call it bread, but it's very different from the other bread over there, the homemade sourdough with freshly milled flour I made myself from organic ancient grains, which has three ingredients.

They're all grown organically, with none of the other additives, and sourdough fermented and all that. We call both of those things bread, but they're completely different things. So, at least for myself, and I assume most, maybe not all, people who have a gluten issue, they don't have an issue with gluten as in the protein that naturally occurs in wheat and therefore flour and bread products. They have an issue with that Wonder Bread-style concoction. And typically, the things people have issues with are, first, the folic acid, which is a big problem.

Folic acid is a non-nutrient. It's a synthetic form of folate, which is a nutrient, and it's legally required to be sprayed on and added to all flour products that are not organic. So it might be the folic acid. It might be the glyphosate or other pesticides put on the wheat. Or it might simply be that the bioengineered form of wheat the flour comes from has a lot more gluten in it inherently, and there's no sourdough fermentation to reduce it. So one of those, or some combination of those three things, is why that bread is bad and why people have a gluten intolerance.

I would bet my life that if my mom had been feeding me baby food that was sourdough bread made at home from organic flour, I wouldn't have had an issue.

Nikkiey: Well, thank you for unpacking that. It's a dense concept. Steven, thank you for joining us here on the podcast and for challenging us to rethink what health really looks like and the foods we're consuming on a daily basis. For me, consuming and processing your knowledge here, it's definitely a wake-up call.

Our bodies are wired for vitality, but we have to create the right conditions for that to happen.

Steven: Absolutely.

Nikkiey: So I appreciate your knowledge. I appreciate your passion. And most importantly, I appreciate your work, the mission you're on, and your commitment to getting real food out there. So thank you.

Steven: My pleasure. It was a great conversation. Happy to be here. I hope this was helpful for people.

Nikkiey: Absolutely. I'll link everything in the description, but I also like to have everybody say it out loud. Where can people find you? Your website and all that jazz.

Steven: Me personally, my social media account is @reallytanman on most platforms. I don't really post. I'm not too active these days. I spend most of my time running the business, Ancient Crunch. We make tortilla chips and potato chips fried in beef tallow. You can find those at masachips.com, M-A-S-A-C-H-I-P-S dot com. And the potato chips are Vandy Crisps, V-A-N-D-Y-C-R-I-S-P-S dot com.

Nikkiey: I'll add them in the links below as well. Thank you, Steven. I appreciate your time.

Steven: I appreciate you.

Nikkiey: Real quick, if this episode resonated with you or gave you the push you needed, I'd love for you to pay it forward. Drop a quick rating and review, share the podcast with someone who might need it, and help me keep spreading the word. Your feedback not only helps the show grow, but it might just be the nudge someone else needs to kickstart their transformation. Thank you so, so much for your support.