The Hidden Problems With Modern Food w/ Steven Rofrano

00:00When 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 sort of 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, right? And then this creates a whole bunch of psychological and physiological misery as people are trying to suppress their appetite and whatnot.

00:37What's going on, everybody? Hey, you guys. Welcome back to another episode of The WarriorBabe Show. And 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.

01:13So, Steven, welcome to The WarriorBabe Show. Thanks, Nikki. Happy to be here. And as I was just saying, like I'm really excited to dive into this topic because this is something that hasn't been exposed on The WarriorBabe Show yet. So before we first, though, dive into all of the things I want to chat with you about and how I'm going to navigate this is like I have like five different buckets that I want to dive in to you around this whole topic. But first, can you tell us like a bit about what led you into this space?

01:43So as a kid, like many kids, unfortunately, I had just a ton of chronic health issues that no one really ever 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. And then, you know, you get sick, you take antibiotics, then you get sick again, so you need more antibiotics or whatever. 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.

02:17And she did an elimination diet after the doctors told her, you know, it's fine, don't worry about it. She went and was like, that's not, that's not fine. That's not normal. Figured out that when I stopped eating gluten, I would, 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. And, you know, I would just get sick a lot. So 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 the freshman year of college where I was doing the study abroad in Belgium. And at European universities, they don't have dining halls.

02:50And so I had to cook for myself for the first time. And 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 was what I found at the time that was popular. And that really worked. I felt great for probably the first time in my life. I didn't have to, say, carry around a box of tissues with me whenever I went outside.

03:24I wasn't getting sick or groggy all the time. And so that sort of I became obsessed with this idea that our circumstance is not just limited by external factors. Like 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. And so from then, I became super obsessed with all this stuff. And yeah, ultimately, that's how we ended up here. Wow. Well, I love that. That's a cool story. And you are living out your mission because of your based on your own experience, knowing that there's so many people that are going through it.

04:00So I want to start with one of probably your most talked about topics, and that's the seeds, the seed oils. Of course, naturally. Why are they such a problem? It's a great question. So there's a little bit of history, I suppose, 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. To make seeds contain a naturally small proportion of oil. And to make seed oils at large scale, you need industrial equipment that literally did not exist and chemical processes that literally did not exist 150 years ago to make them.

04:39Unfortunately for humanity, that machinery and those processes were invented in the late 1800s to the 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 sea in Procter & Gamble, who started selling Crisco in 1924. That was like the first edible seed oil really pushed. They spent tons, like 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.

05:19And seed oils really took off as the culinary item in the American diet starting in like 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 which I'm happy to describe, not only are they bad for you because you eat so much of them, the impact is very large.

05:51And so you could say a 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? Like two, I don't know. But you eat kilograms of seed oils. And so if you're ingesting that volume of this not very healthy thing, it's a big problem. And it's behind – it's not the only reason why people are sick, of course, but it's behind many – it is a significant influence on the chronic diseases that everyone finds themselves afflicted with today. That's wild. Why are they – like what are they doing?

06:21So you said that they oxidize and they slowly like drive inflammation. Can you break that down more at a cellular level? Like why does that happen? Sure. So the molecules – so fats are made up of molecules called triglycerides, which is a glycerol molecule. It's like this – you usually draw this vertically with like three fatty acids. And so those fatty acids, they look like little chains. And when it's a saturated fat, those chains are very strong and so they're stable. When they are unsaturated fatty acids, which is the type of fatty acids prevalent in seed oils, those chains of fatty acids break apart.

06:57And the place where they break apart is a very reactive molecule. It's called reactive oxygen species or people may have heard of this. And that molecule, what it 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. So if you have – I don't know if you have like a pile of paperclips, right? And it's like stable. It's all organized, neat, you know, in a row on your desk. And you move a magnet over and it's just going to mess up. It's going to pull the paperclips and mess up your pile.

07:28That's kind of what reactive oxygen species do. It's like wherever they – whatever they touch, you know, whatever biological matter they touch, they pull electrons away. They interrupt molecules and then that interrupts cells and it breaks things apart. And the problem, of course, with seed oils and why it's such a big issue and why it sounds so crazy to believe is because if this is a fundamental biological thing, all biological tissue is susceptible to the inflammatory influence of seed oils. That means the diseases or disease conditions that you can see from seed oils will show up everywhere.

08:01And some people say seed oils make you obese and seed oils cause acne and they cause irritable bowel syndrome and they give you skin cancer and they cause macular degeneration and brain cancer, all these things. It sounds kind of incredible like 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 tear apart biological tissue wherever they go and they go everywhere in your body, therefore 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.

08:35So to the conditions point, how would somebody know if those oils are contributing to their health issues? If you're eating them, they're contributing to your health issues. You know, 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, I think, to health matters in general than other people are. It's just a natural variation. Like I had a very weak immune system and weak constitution, as they say, as a kid.

09:05Some people have very strong constitutions, and so they may not notice the health effects so much, at least when they're younger. Then people get older, and then people, like the rates of cancer are increasing. And the age at which people first get cancer is decreasing. It's like 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. 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, right? From snacks, from restaurant food, from everything that pretty much-

09:40From meals, you know, baking recipes. Oh, yeah. Your cup and a half of canola oil to make your banana bread. Yeah, everywhere. And you were touching on this a little bit earlier. Maybe we can unpack it a little bit more. How did they become so dominant, and why did they become so dominant in the food industry and the food supply? Sure. So 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.

10:14Coconut oil wasn't a thing. We were not getting oil from tropics. Hawaii wasn't even a state, you know? So people ate animal fats, which were solid. Bacon grease, which is lard, right? Butter and tallow being the most obvious and common ones. So 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, right? You go 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 throw it away as a company, you can make more money.

10:44So that was what they were first applied to. And specifically, Procter & Gamble was involved because Procter & Gamble makes soap. And soap is made from fat. And 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, right? Because there was more demand for it. So they were able to extract the oil from the cotton seeds, which were a waste product of the cotton industry, and therefore 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.

11:15That didn't really work. It like foamed and it had a weird smell. It just wasn't good. They didn't have the right filtering processing to turn seed oils into soap back then. But there was another researcher who 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 actually making, chemically and artificially making the fatty acids saturated, which makes them solid at room temperature.

11:48And so the result is a fat that looks like lard. And that was, they were like, oh, cool. Let's turn this, 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, making oil the product from Gamble bought for cheap, turning it solid through artificial means, and then saying you should eat this. And so that was, that launched in 1924. It became very popular. There was a whole futurism social dynamic at the time where people wanted like laboratory created things.

12:18People were inspired by science fiction. Well, science fiction didn't really show up yet, but the futurism was a thing. And so if it came from a lab and doctors and 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. Like you want the feathers on your chicken eggs. You want the dirt on your broccoli or whatever. You want it to be natural. Back then, that was not culturally desirable. And so the fact that it was created in the lab was actually a selling point and Crisco just became a smash hit. That was very popular up until the mid-century when during World War II, you know, the raw oils from seeds were commonly used as machine lubricant and in other industrial applications.

13:01Truly, like 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 machinery, you know, as much machinery for the war. And so there was this weird moment where all the people who had the crops to make the seed oils and then the processing to make the oils from the seeds, they're like, what do we do with all these oils? And that's around the time when you see the vegetable oils themselves being pushed. And so Dwight Eisenhower famously had his heart attack. His doctor, of course, ascribed it to smoking and not vegetable oils that he had been eating.

13:35And then people were rushing to go buy vegetable oils because they were told that 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. But yeah, 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 like it was engineered to look like you should eat seed oils when the actual results are the opposite.

14:06And over time, of course, it's like 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 then now you have this point in time where anyone over the age of 40 just 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. Wow. Why is it being masked like that? Why is it being masked that seed oils are okay and being used in the food if it's not there? And seed oils are a $100 billion industry globally.

14:39It's a lot of money. I mean, they're cheaper to produce and they're cheaper to use and buy relative to animal fats. So when people want their Doritos at like 50 cents an ounce, you have to use vegetable oil, right? There's not a way to make a 50 cent an ounce bag of chips without vegetable oil, at least not today. Possible that tallow could get there in the future with enough scale and other industrial support, but certainly not today.

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16:18What are your top strategies? Right. So I would argue the single biggest volume usage of seed oils is in fried foods. So unless you're eating a fried food that is made explicitly without seed oils, such that, you know, maybe it's fried beef tallow, even canola, sorry, coconut oil, coconut oil. Unless you're eating fried foods that are fried in good oils, you should not eat fried foods whatsoever. That's just like a nuke. You know, that's like a seed oil nuke. But secondarily, there are a lot of baked goods, as I mentioned, where people use just like massive quantities of vegetable oil in like a cake or a pie or whatever.

16:56Avoid that. Relatively easy to do. If you go to the grocery store, just look at labels. Just don't buy some seed oils in them. Relatively harder to do at a restaurant. But again, if you avoid the fried foods and if you can ask the waiter to like replace this with that or whatever, 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. Okay, cool. I love that. When people start eliminating this stuff, how soon can someone start noticing like the changes that they start, you know, once they start removing seed oils from their lifestyle?

17:29So 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. Kate Shanahan. And she talks about in her practice how she got people off seed oils and all the results people saw. It seems based on what I've read, I haven't eaten seed oils in a long time, so I don't have direct personal experience with this, to be honest. But it seems that people within 30 days are like, wow, I feel like a different person. And then in 90 days, you know, a whole host of chronic issues start to get alleviated. The problem with seed oils is that they are stored in our body fat.

17:59So unlike some other toxin, that's like if you stop ingesting it, it goes away. The residual, like 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 counting around with you. So it's actually a pretty big problem because 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.

18:33Because by metabolizing it, you're releasing all that stored up bad stuff. And then that's overwhelming your liver and your kidneys and whatever. And 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 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, right?

19:06Then 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. I know you're not a doctor, and neither am I, but I'm curious based off of that statement that you just made that people have a hard time losing the stubborn fat, and this is what's happening with the toxification going throughout their body or going in 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?

19:38Will they no longer be there, or are they still lingering throughout the body? They're mostly stored in body fat tissue. So if you have a relatively small percentage of body fat on your body, therefore you also have a relatively small percentage of seed oils on your body, even if the remaining body fat itself does have seed oils in them. Over time, they go away, right? So if you eat no more seed oils, you'll stop accumulating them. Over time, it gets burned off slowly. You replace it with good fats that you eat. I mean, people need body fat to survive.

20:09Like women, I think, need at least 20% or 25% body fat. I forget what the number is. Probably more as people age. So antioxidants are a thing. 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 every time it goes away and it gets replaced by good fats. But the one study that people talk about that has been done on this issue found that the more or less that seed oil will stick around your body for up to seven years.

20:48Seven or eight years. Right? It was not like a study where people tried to remove them quicker. It was like an accidental result of some study that was looking at something else. So I would assume that if you tried and put yourself on a regimen of like, oh, I'm going to take certain supplements and I'm going to work out and sauna and eat like no more seed oils and do all these things, I'd imagine it can go away faster. But the only result that we have ever seen to date says that, yeah, seed oils stick around for like seven years. Interesting.

21:19That's a very, that's a long time. Long time. Yeah. Okay. So that was like the bucket of seed oils that I wanted to navigate down with you. And also for everyone listening, I know that Steven mentioned at the beginning that it wasn't the gluten that was a problem. I'm definitely going to circle back to that. I want you to unpack that. But this next bucket that I want to get into is why real health food, like why that actually tastes good. And I know that that's like one of your core beliefs is that real food tastes good because it's what we're meant to eat.

21:51Right. Why do you think so many people still associate health food with like. Gross stuff. Yeah, exactly. Punishment. Like even women in like our programs, like they associate with like, if I eat healthy food, it's going to suck. Right. Why do they associate that? It's a good question. I think a good way to think about this is imagine you're a lion in the savannah in Africa. What do you, 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.

22:22Eh, 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. Like 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.

22:54What other signal would an animal have in the wild? You know, you don't know. You know, if you imagine you're some caveman or hunter-gatherer or whatever, something tastes good. You're like, oh, I should eat more of that. Something tastes bad. I should eat more of that. What other, you don't have studies. You don't have the USDA food pyramid. You don't have even necessarily family recipes, right? You're living in a, not even living in a hut. You're walking around with a stick, you know? No one's there to tell you what to eat except what your instinct, aka your taste buds, will tell you tastes good. And that's, 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 was never evolved to understand what to do with, then you have the possibility of foods that both taste good and are bad for you.

23:36So it's only when you're exposed to artificial foods where, and artificial meaning like not available in some natural setting. Only when you're exposed to artificial foods is 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. And so you're going to make stuff that tastes good explicitly that's not healthy. And that is what's happened to food over the past, say, 150 years.

24:11And because of that amount of time and modernity and the industrial revolution or whatever, we're used to this idea that the 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 that 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.

24:44We're going to throw all that out because, you know, if it tastes good, it must be out for you. So we're going to throw out everything that tastes good. And like it's the literal opposite. We'll use bad taste as a signal for health food. So we've become so disillusioned with how our taste buds work because we eat artificial food that we don't trust them at all. And 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. There's the exact opposite of how they're evolved to work. And so then you get the situation now where people are like, oh, if I want to be healthy, I have to suffer through all this like pain of not eating what I want.

25:20And a lot of people, they're just not willing or interested or able or whatever to do that. Not that it would work if they tried, right? And 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 like getting healthy because they don't want to have to give up eating things that they like. So to piggyback off of that statement, do you think that modern ultra processed food has dulled people's ability to like enjoy or crave real food?

25:50I think temporarily. I think it's something that's easily you're easily able to overcome, right? If you were to cut out artificial things, I don't know, your taste buds would rewire themselves in like two weeks, right? You would learn pretty quickly what actual good tastes like. So I don't think it's a permanent issue. But yeah, certainly like if you're addicted to the Doritos flavor, like you're going to have a bad time. That being said, like go get some cheese and pepper and tomato and garlic and onion powder and like sprinkle those on whatever. And it's going to be delicious. The other issue, of course, that the processed food industry has is that they use like cheap ingredients.

26:26That's their whole thing. And so the cheap thing is never as good as the real thing, right? Hagen-Dazs vanilla bean, which uses vanilla beans, is better tasting than Hagen-Dazs vanilla, which uses like artificial vanilla flavor. And it's more expensive, right? But it's better. People sort of like science has as yet been unable to create artificial flavors that actually taste better than real flavors. There's other tricks that they use, like they put MSG and stuff and all sorts of other chemicals. But like an artificial chili powder flavor is not as good as a real chili powder flavor.

26:59An artificial oregano or vanilla or whatever you want, it's not as good as the real thing. It's just cheaper. 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 a 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 some top like – what are your favorite like go-to examples of real food, like nutrient-dense foods that people are surprised – like would be surprised to love once they try?

27:36Yeah. Beef and all its varieties. Steak. Hamburgers. Whatever. Cheese. Like real cheese. So cheese is like – the milk should be high quality. You shouldn't have additives or preservatives or artificial colors. We're not talking craft cheese or like talking Gruyere from Switzerland or Parmigiano from Italy or whatever. Real cheese. Delicious. Fruit. Delicious. You know, of course, organic, non-super GMO, watery, watered-down, like Bill Gates-coated apples, but like actual fruit is delicious.

28:07Berries. Delicious. Bread. Right? Make bread the right way. Delicious. Put butter on it. Like I think, in my opinion, the two most delicious foods in general are like bread and dairy products. Just like hands down, they're the best. I know people are listening to this. I'm all about carbs. Trust me. I love carbs. I know people are listening to this feeling like he just said bread that's crazy because people are afraid. At least the women like, you know, listen to this episode or in our program are like, oh, they fear carbs or, you know, they come from keto and X, Y, and Z.

28:39And I'm trying to, you know, reinstill the belief of carbs are good for you. Look, the Roman army conquered the entire known world on a diet of bread and cheese. Say that louder for the people in the back, Steven. They paid, I don't know if you're familiar with Pecorino Romano, which is a cheese from central Italy, big in my house growing up. That was, it's a hard cheese, so it's shelf stable at room temperature. They brought that on the campaigns when they go to war and like that, they paid the soldiers and cheese. And to make bread, they didn't bring bread. They brought grain.

29:10They brought wheat around. They would make bread fresh in their little camps. And that was food. You know, you can't necessarily have a ton of meat in that environment. And they conquered the world, right? Clearly doing all right on that diet. So, yeah, I think I have a particular affinity for bread and dairy products in general. But I think the easiest way to think about it is like, imagine your great grandma, maybe great great grandma, whatever country she came from. What was she eating? That's good for you.

29:40You know? Yeah. So, the next one that I want to dive into is why it's so hard to be healthy today. And like, I would love to hear your opinion on that. Why? Because I have my opinion in terms of, I used to work in the ER, used to work in the medical field. And I left because I had so many views on it in terms of, you know, the medical system. But your take, like you said, modern life is designed to make us sick. Can you explain what you mean by that? I think one way of thinking about it is just look around your room, your house, and think about all the things that are there that are not good for you.

30:15From the screen that you're looking at with the blue light, to the device that you're listening to or watching this on with the EMF radiation. The plastics and glues and the cheap furniture, you know, off-gassing VOCs and toxic chemicals. So, the water with fluoride and chlorine and birth control hormone pill residue and other stuff in it. To like your pots and pans in your kitchen with plastics. To your clothing that's made of plastic that gets in your skin. And when you wash it and dry it, like the microplastics get in the air and you start breathing them in.

30:47To the paint, you know, that's on the walls. The polyurethane on the floor. It's like all this plastic derived chemical, like all these petroleum derived chemicals. Not even to mention the food that you eat. Everything around us is unhealthy. And not can 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 method of doing, of producing the environment of the modern world uses methods that are toxic. Because, and most of it is like petroleum derived products in one way or another.

31:19Whether it's plastic. Whether it's paints, coatings, you know, oil and it's exhaust. Pharmaceuticals are made of petroleum, right? All the synthetic chemicals that we know of. Synthetic really means like 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 like petroleum derived toxic foreign to our environment stuff. Sure, there's heavy metals as well, which are another, you know, source of toxicity. But it's even the pesticides, right? The pesticides of the food, petroleum derived products.

31:49So, yeah, 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. And the toxic things are easily available and convenient. And the unhealthy things, largely due to the fact that they are slower, more expensive, whatever, are less available. And so, when you, if you're a person in the 1950s and you go to your, go to the diner. And they have milkshakes. And the milkshakes are made with like hormone-free milk. Because hormones were not put in milk at the time, right? And the cows were fed grass at the time.

32:21So, way farming wasn't really a big thing back then. You go get the burger and the cows were mostly fed on grass. Same thing. Good burger, right? The wheat glyphosate wasn't invented. You can't have a burger with glyphosate if glyphosate doesn't exist. The cheese didn't have yellow 50 or whatever the heck because that didn't exist. And so, you just go to the random diner and the things were healthier because the unhealthy things simply did not exist. The technology to make them didn't exist. And nowadays, it's the opposite. Every standard place you go to has all of the toxic stuff I listed or more.

32:55So, 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, right? Like, there are not really any healthy computers. But healthy food, healthy furniture, paints, clothing, whatever, you can do that. But if you go out in public, like, no one else is paying attention to it. And so, you're just put into this default state where the thing that you do, the easy thing to go do, is the unhealthy thing. You go to the food store to buy food. It's bad food. You go to the doctor. Say, hey, what food should I eat? He tells you the bad food.

33:25You go to the restaurant. What food do you eat? It's bad food. You know, it's not as if people in the 50s worked out every day. There's no Weight Watchers. There was no calorie counting. There was no food pyramid. The food pyramid didn't even exist. And yet, everyone was fit. And, like, obesity was non-existent. 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, like, buildings and cities and whatever, they're still, like, made of natural, fundamentally natural materials. And today, that's not the case. What a trip thought that we could go down on that one.

33:58So, everything that basically you said there is, like, there's so much stacked against us from the unprocessed, ultra-processed foods, from the artificial light, from the things that are in the room. So, if someone's listening to this and they're like, okay, yeah, they're resonating with everything you're saying. They're very, you know, intrigued by your knowledge. What would you recommend that would be some of the most, like, underrated shifts but could be really easy to make for people in their daily environment to feel better? Cotton sheets, cotton towels, organic cotton, preferably, but cotton's still better than plastic.

34:32Organic mattress. You can, like, you can get naturally produced mattresses made with, like, wool and cotton and latex, like, natural tree rubber latex from, like, way cheaper than a mattress at whatever store you go to get a mattress from. So, I think the linens are a big one. I mean, like, again, we spend eight hours a day in our beds, a third of our time surrounded by plastic if you have polyester sheets in a normal mattress. And that's, so, plastic is bad not only when you touch it but also if you're near it because it off-gases chemicals, like, solvents or whatever, and puts microplastics into the air that you breathe in.

35:06So, like, plastic is bad. Fragrance is a huge one. More or less every fragrance chemical, unless it's explicitly some, like, natural essential oil thing, 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 just inherently toxic, you know, even if they're natural. We're just, like, you know, cyanide is a natural thing and it's toxic, right?

35:38It's not that everything that's natural is healthy. But, you know, it's, like, burn some orange peels on your stove, you know? I don't know. But, yeah, 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. Like, it's not optimal light source, but there are LEDs that have full-spectrum light and low flicker. Less blue light and whatever.

36:11I think those are, yeah, and then your kitchen. Get rid of everything that's plastic and replace it with wood, glass, or stainless steel. So get rid of the Tupperwares. Replace them with Pyrex. Get rid of the nonstick pan. 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. Yeah, the plastic wrap. Yeah, the microwave. Don't put stuff in the microwave.

36:42I'm sure I could go down the list more with the kitchen stuff. But yeah, like wood, glass, or stainless steel is what you need to be using for everything in the kitchen. Okay. Off that note, off that thought. Like, well, first of all, thank you. Those are all very helpful in ways that people can start making some small shifts. But also kind of catching on to like, okay, what about if someone's like so type A and they're like, I want to get rid of everything and I want to get all this new stuff. And they're obsessed with the clean living aspect of it. How can you find, like, there could be like a too obsessed aspect. How do you find like the balance if there is a balance to it?

37:14What would you recommend? I mean, 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 like impact, right? 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 and or inconvenient is it to replace it with something that's not? Love that. Those are maybe not a helpful framework and rank things, right?

37:45Yeah. How expensive, right? Like 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. 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. Yeah. Like even me, right? It's annoying to do and probably I have to get an electrician and whatever. So that I didn't do. But yeah, whole house water filter is like $10,000.

38:17But you can get a better water filter for your countertop that's like maybe a few hundred bucks. So yeah, it really, I think that's a helpful thought pattern is like toxic level, toxicity, time spent, and then how expensive or inconvenient is to replace it. And then rank the objects in your life, like think about everything, and then go through it one by one, right? Are you going to replace the paint in your walls tomorrow? Probably not. But because you switch out some light bulbs, yeah, it's pretty easy. Yeah. No, I love that framework a lot.

38:49That's super helpful. And I'm sure that's helpful for people for the listeners as well. One, two, navigate to talking about – because you kind of brought this up and I was like, oh, there could be a thought trip to this. And then I was like, how can I frame this in a way that we could actually like navigate this conversation? You've said in a way like food became toxic when it stopped being food and became more – right? Like people lived naturally back in the day and then it's become more of like product nowadays. Can you unpack a little bit about like – unpack that a little bit more?

39:20I feel like that would be – So like what about modern food is bad specifically or why it happened? What do you mean? Yeah. Like when you mentioned like when food became toxic, it stopped being food and it became more of like a product, right? It became more of this like the way that the food was made. It was the money, the way that it just like – it shifted gears from being natural living to now the seed oils and all of this being put into our food became more of a product.

39:54I guess what I'm saying is like maybe what do we mean? Like when you say like – so we unpack that a little bit more. How it became like more of a product. Does that make sense? I can totally navigate something different. I think – yeah. So there's two things about food. There's the ingredients and then how you combine them into the resulting end product. So ingredient quality matters and this is mostly due to farming, right? How did you raise the apples?

40:25Did you put this fertilizer on them? Did you put this pesticide on them? Did you coat them in this Bill Gates toxic thing? Like 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, right? Like there's all these things about – that go into farming that like make food good or bad in its raw form. And then there's the question of processing. Actually, yeah, okay. So there's three things. There's the raw food ingredients, which I mean even the most artificial of artificial foods has some raw food ingredients. Something somewhere came from the ground.

40:55So you want to make sure if you're going to eat – if something's going to be called food properly, the ingredients themselves should be grown with attention to high quality and minimal toxicity. Then the next question is how do you process the thing? And maybe this we'll get into with 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 flour, you grind the wheat into flour, and then you combine it with water and salt.

41:29Add your sourdough starter, which is a combination of flour and water that's been fermented over time, and 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, I want to say 1870s maybe, commercial yeast became available for the first time, which was like a little packet, as people know, yeast, right? You stick it in the dough, and then it magically rises. The problem with this is that it is like one GMO strain of yeast, and that's it. And a natural sourdough culture will have like 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 that do all sorts of things to the flour to make it better for us to eat.

42:13They reduce like a sourdough bread as like a lower gluten content when it's done fermenting than a yeast-risen bread. Certain enzymes and acid in the culture will act on the proteins that we eat in other ways. It'll remove certain antinutrients and mycotoxins and whatever have you. We don't need to get into this whole list. But you lose out on those things when you have yeast in a packet. But again, yeast in a packet is cheap and fast. It rises the bread in four hours instead of eight hours.

42:44So if you want cheap bread, use yeast in a packet. For making, let's see, what's another one? For making quinoa. This is a common one. Health food. Quinoa, like a lot of seeds, have some natural toxic things on them to prevent animals from eating them in the wild. Because the quinoa plant reproduces via its seeds. And so they put stuff, you know, the quinoa plant has stuff in the seeds to prevent animals from eating it so that it can reproduce. Same with like soybeans or whatever. In different plants, they have different versions of these substances, but they all serve the same purpose, which is to limit people, animals eating those seeds.

43:19So to make quinoa, for example, you have to rinse it. Like if you put quinoa in a pot, dry, and then you add water, it'll fill them up. That's saponins, which is the same word as soap, like foamy things. Which you shouldn't be eating. They also make the quinoa bitter. So instead of just putting it in a rice cooker and then boiling all the saponins back into the quinoa, you take the quinoa, you put it, water in a pot, rinse it, it foams up. You dump that out. You rinse it again until it stops foaming. Then you let it soak for like 12 hours. Dump that water, add new fresh water, and then boil it again.

43:51Boil it like pasta, then strain it out instead of cooking it down. That's how you would make quinoa. That's natural preparation method. A lot of work. It takes a lot of time. But that's how you would make that edible. And there's a similar version of this for basically every food, right? You don't eat raw mushrooms, but you cook mushrooms. You wouldn't eat raw rice. You have to cook it first. You don't eat just corn. You would nixtamalize it, which is the whole Aztec thing that you use 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, right?

44:24You think people back in the day wanted to waste all that water, like in the Andes, like the Peruvians living in the Andes wanted to waste all that water to cook quinoa in this way? Of course not. Like it's not convenient. But they knew that if they didn't do it, it was not good for them. So they did it. So if it was worth it to those people who had no electricity and no running water to like waste all this water on making quinoa in this way, we should probably do the same thing. Anyway, I can go on. But point is, there's a preparation method that has to be paid attention to.

44:54And the last thing is one of the additives. Like what are the actual ingredients, right? Are you adding carrageenan? Are you adding MSG? Are you adding citric acid? Whatever. All those preservative artificial things. And most food scores an F on all three of those categories today. Use unhealthy, poorly prepared, poorly grown ingredients, not prepared in a traditional way with a whole bunch of additives. And so the opposite, of course, makes food good. And that's what makes food food. You know, real, naturally grown ingredients, prepared traditionally, and no weird, fake additives.

45:29I don't know if that answers your question. No, that definitely answered my question. That's the way I wanted it to be navigated because when you brought up the, well, first of all, I just take it as like the way to actually make some foods that's actually really good for you and healthy for you. It takes a really long time naturally to make. So in way to become product was easier, faster, processed, X, Y, Z. So yeah, that definitely answers my question. Back to the key ingredients. What are some of the key ingredients and or like process packaging terms that signal that an item or product has been like overly engineered?

46:02I think the easiest thing, honestly, is to look at the ingredients. I don't pay attention to nutrition facts like the numbers at all. I don't think it matters. They're also all fake. I don't know if anyone knows that. No, wait, unpack that because I'm big on like protein, fats and carbs. Unpack that for a second. It's all fake. So there's what people think you have to do to put a nutrition label on your package is that you have to bring it to a lab and some lab will like dissolve it in beakers and like do some analysis and figure out exactly how much protein, exactly how much salt, exactly how much whatever is in that particular like serving of food.

46:33It's not at all what happens. In order to just create a label, you simply like do the math on what the ingredients are. Like you go to the USDA, the Department of Agriculture, maintains a database of like nutrition facts for base ingredients. And so it'll say flour has this much protein and this much carbohydrate and whatever. It doesn't say your flour. It's just like they've collected this number over how many years, you know, it may or may not have any bearing on the actual flour that's in that particular package. But the USDA's database, that's the numbers and these are the rules.

47:04So you go and say, oh, I have 20 grams of flour in a serving of this thing. So let me just take, you know, 20 grams worth of the protein and the carbohydrate. And then I have butter. So I go to the USDA database and I say, oh, butter has this much fat and this much whatever. And then I add up how much of those parts from the butter are in there. And then if I have salt, maybe I have cheese. I made a cheese it, right? I go into the USDA database, look up cheese. And it says, geez, that's this much protein and this much fat. And then I just add it all up. And that's my number. And that's on the nutrition panel. There is no testing done on that.

47:36But it's still coming from the USDA though, right? Which is. Sure. But like, you know, maybe they tested one type of cheese 50 years ago. And like the cheese that is being used by the producer today is not the same cheese, right? Cheese is super. And some things I'm sure are more accurate than others. But like salt is salt. Like cheese is different. Eggs are different. And especially with vitamins. Like micronutrients change in butter depending on the season at like the time of year that you milked the cow to produce the butter. Right? How is the USDA going to tell you accurately how much of whatever is in that butter?

48:09I'm not saying it's completely wrong. Maybe it's directionally true. But it's not. It's not real. It is not precise by or accurate in any sense of the term. I can understand it not being essentially 100% accurate. But I think food has to be made up of some things and has to come from somewhere. Yeah, of course. So maybe a good example. There's a famous, maybe infamous YouTube video done years ago, maybe decades ago. I believe it was done by Casey Neistat where it was in response to some law where the New York City restaurants had to start putting calories next to menu items.

48:43Yeah. And so 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 the food. And it was like off by hundreds of calories. Right? Like that's kind of the result that you get. Okay. I understand that. And they're not like precise. It's just like a bunch of math that maybe is somewhat accurate or at least could have been. I could definitely understand that. Calories next to food items in restaurants drives me nuts all the time. Yeah. But it's the same thing with any packaged food, right?

49:15It's not a legal requirement that any laboratory actual measurements are done to tell you the number of calories in the serving of whatever. Interesting. Interesting. I'm not saying it's- Happy Ray would unpack that there a little bit. Yeah. I'm not saying it's useless, but I don't pay attention to that at all. I think ingredients- Anyway, to answer the original question, ingredients are far more important. Yeah. So the things that matter, if so- The question again, people trying to like look at a package and figure out if it's good or not. Seed oils are actually really good because the types of foods that don't have seed oils often don't have all the other things.

49:45Like if they're actually avoiding seed oils, like the manufacturer probably knows to avoid other things that are bad for you. Not true 100% of the time, certainly. So I would look for presence of seed oils. That's a big one. Most ultra-processed food has it. Obviously, anything that says artificial flavors, no go. And then lastly, like, you know, not everyone knows what every word means on a label. The easy way to think about it is like if you recognize- If you see a term that doesn't look like something your great-grandma had in her cupboard, then it's probably faking. You shouldn't buy it, right? Did great-granny have a citric acid bottle in her cupboard?

50:19Does she have the carrageenan tube? You know, what about her, like, vanillin extract? No, not vanilla, vanillin. No, she did not have that. She did not have allulose. All the non-calorie sweetener is complete bogus. She didn't have allulose. She didn't have stevia. She didn't have erythritol, right? Yeah. Yeah, that's kind of the metric that I'd apply. And then on quality, like, organic is probably the best, like, standard to evaluate, at least on a per-ingredient basis.

50:54It breaks down a bit when you're getting animal foods. Organic doesn't mean a ton when it comes to, say, meat and dairy. But when you're looking at anything that's not those things, organic is a pretty helpful term to see. And yeah, just use the great-grandy test. Love that. Okay, I want to circle back before we close out this podcast, going back to what you said at the beginning with the story that you shared growing up that it wasn't the gluten. So can you unpack that a little bit? What was it? Why not the gluten?

51:25And what did it turn out to be your solution? Yes, this goes back to the whole ingredients grown and then the preparation method. So people, you know this funny thing where if you call something by name, all things with that name start to become the same. So that's very abstract. But what I mean by this is, like, 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 completely, you know, made differently. It's just the term bread is not a detailed enough form of expression to encapsulate all the potential differences between those two things.

51:56If I say this is bread, but I'm talking about 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. And 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. It's bread, right? Like, we would call it bread, but it's very different from the other bread over there that's like the homemade sourdough, freshly milled flour I made myself from ancient grains that are organic, which has three ingredients.

52:27They're all grown organically and, you know, none of the other additives. And sourdough fermented and all that. So we'll call both those two things bread, but they're completely different things. And so, at least personally, myself, and I assume most, maybe not all, but most of the people that have a gluten issue, they don't have an issue with gluten, as in, like, the protein that naturally occurs in wheat and therefore flour and bread products. They have an issue with that bread, the Wonder Bread-style concoction. And typically, the things that people have issues with are the folic acid, which is a big problem.

53:00So folic acid is non-nutrient. This is a synthetic form of folate, which is a nutrient, but it's, like, legally required to be sprayed and added to all flour products that are not organic. So it might be folic acid. It might be the glyphosate or other pesticides that are put on the bread. Or it might simply be the fact that the bioengineered form of wheat that the flour comes from has a lot more gluten in it inherently, and there is no sourdough fermentation that reduces 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.

53:34I would bet my life that if my mom was feeding me the baby food and it was, like, the sourdough bread that you make at home from organic flour, I would have had an issue. Well, thank you for unpacking that. It's a decent concept. Well, Stephen, thank you. Thank you for joining us here on the podcast and for challenging us to just rethink about what health really looks like and, like, the foods that we're consuming on a daily basis. I think that, you know, for me, consuming and processing your knowledge here, it's definitely a wake-up call for our bodies.

54:07Like, our wake-up call, our bodies are wired for vitality, but we have to create the right condition for that to happen. Absolutely. So I appreciate your knowledge. I appreciate your passion. And most importantly, I appreciate your work and the mission that you were on and your commitment to this, like, real food and getting that out there in your work. So thank you. Yeah, my pleasure. It was a great conversation. Happy to be here. Hope this was helpful for people. Yeah, absolutely. And I'll link all your descriptions. Where can people find you?

54:38Where? Your website and all that jazz. I'll look at down below, but I also like to have everybody say it out loud. Yeah, so me personally, my social media account is really tan man 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 and beef tallow. And so you can find those at mosschips, M-A-S-S-A-C-H-I-P-S dot com. Or the potato chips are VandyCrisps, V-A-N-D-Y-C-R-I-S-P-S dot com.

55:09I'll add them in links below too as well. Well, thank you, Steven. I appreciate your time. Yeah, I appreciate you. Real quick, if this episode resonated with you or gave you the push that 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, so much for your support.

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