The Clothing Fabric That Is Harming Your Health | MASA Chips Founders Steve & Mia Rofrano

Summary

Culture Apothecary with Alex Clark Episode: The Clothing Fabric That Is Harming Your Health | MASA Chips Founders Steve & Mia Rofrano
Release Date: March 7, 2025

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Introduction

In this episode of Culture Apothecary with Alex Clark, host Alex engages in an in-depth conversation with Steve and Mia Rofrano, the founders of MASA Chips. As pioneers in the seed oil-free snack industry, Steve and Mia share their insights on the detrimental effects of seed oils, the importance of clothing fabric on health, and their personal experiences with natural living. The discussion spans various topics, including diet, environmental impact, pregnancy choices, and holistic wellness.

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The Dangers of Seed Oils

Steve and Mia delve into the pervasive use of seed oils in the American diet, highlighting their significant contribution to chronic health issues.

• Health Impacts:
  Steve: "Seed oils make up about 25% of the average American's calories... they cause inflammation in the body when consumed in excess." [10:24]

• Estrogenic Effects:
  Steve: "Seed oils are estrogenic; they mimic estrogen in the body, contributing to conditions like cellulite, PCOS, and even affecting men's hormone levels." [21:11]

• Body Fat Accumulation:
  Steve: "Most people's body fat is made up of the fat that you personally eat. Seed oils are stored in body fat and remain there for years." [22:11]

• Detoxification Challenges:
  Steven: "Seed oils disrupt mitochondria, making it difficult to burn body fat without causing toxic overload in the system." [33:08]

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Clothing Fabrics and Health

A significant portion of the discussion focuses on how modern fabrics like polyester negatively impact health and the environment.

• Microplastics Exposure:
  Steven: "Polyester sheds microplastic particles mixed with sweat, which can dissolve into the skin. Your skin absorbs everything it touches." [00:00]

• Hormonal Disruption:
  Steven: "Microplastics mimic estrogen, contributing to estrogen dominance—a major factor in various health issues for women." [46:10]

• Environmental Concerns:
  Steven: "Polyester is plastic derived from petroleum, leading to environmental degradation through microplastics in water and air." [46:10]

• Alternative Fabrics:
  Mia: "We prefer wireless bras made from natural materials like wool or cotton to avoid blocking lymphatic flow and to support natural muscle development." [42:19]

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Personal Health Journeys and Choices

Steve and Mia share their personal decisions to lead a seed oil-free lifestyle and the challenges they faced, particularly during pregnancy.

• Pregnancy Without Medical Intervention:
  Mia: "I chose to have zero ultrasounds and no medical intervention during pregnancy because it's a natural process. My baby was healthy without it." [50:13]

• Dietary Adjustments:
  Mia: "I consumed raw milk, oysters, liver, and limited processed foods during pregnancy, which I believe contributed to a healthy birth." [59:33]

• Challenges with Mainstream Diets:
  Mia: "Growing up on a standard American diet led to health issues, pushing me to research and adopt a healthier lifestyle." [14:39]

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Holistic Wellness and Lifestyle Recommendations

The Rofranos provide actionable advice for listeners aiming to improve their health by eliminating seed oils and adopting natural practices.

• Eliminating Seed Oils:
  Mia: "Cook at home more and eat out less. When you do eat out, choose restaurants that support seed oil-free options." [75:59]

• Reading Labels and Ingredient Awareness:
  Steven: "Read ingredient labels meticulously. Avoid products that contain seed oils and other harmful additives." [76:15]

• Supporting Detoxification:
  Steven: "Load up on antioxidants like Vitamin E and C to combat the oxidative stress caused by seed oils." [30:02]

• Switching to Natural Fabrics:
  Steven: "Choose natural fabrics like cotton, linen, or wool for clothing and bedding to reduce exposure to harmful microplastics." [46:18]

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Product Insights: MASA Chips and Beyond

Steve and Mia discuss their product, MASA Chips, emphasizing its benefits over conventional seed oil-laden snacks.

• Ingredients and Production:
  Steven: "MASA Chips are made with organic nixtamalized corn, grass-fed beef tallow, and real sea salt. No seed oils, no chemicals." [71:28]

• Sustainability and Quality:
  Mia: "Our chips are not just snacks; they're meals. We focus on quality ingredients and sustainable practices." [71:28]

• Challenges in Scaling:
  Steven: "Competing with giants like Frito Lay is tough due to their infrastructure and pricing. Our focus remains on quality over quantity." [73:07]

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Pregnancy and Natural Birth Practices

The founders elaborate on their choice for a natural birth process, free from medical interventions, discussing the benefits and societal perceptions.

• Natural Birth Advocacy:
  Mia: "Pregnancy is a natural process. Medical interventions often lead to unnecessary complications and stress." [50:25]

• Epidurals and Their Risks:
  Steven: "Epidurals numb the lower half of the body, preventing natural feedback and potentially causing long-term issues." [56:15]

• Holistic Parenting Choices:
  Mia: "Feeding babies raw honey and avoiding synthetic products fosters healthier development and immunity." [59:56]

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Conclusion: Healing a Sick Culture

Steve and Mia reiterate their commitment to promoting natural living through their products and lifestyle choices, advocating for systemic changes to support health and environmental sustainability.

• Faith and Community Support:
  Mia: "Having faith and a supportive community is crucial in navigating health and wellness challenges." [76:38]

• Systemic Change Advocacy:
  Steven: "Transforming the food industry requires collaboration, rebuilding infrastructure, and providing alternatives to harmful practices." [40:37]

• Final Thoughts:
  Mia: "Balance is key. Incorporate real, natural foods and practices into your life, and adapt as your body changes." [68:32]

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Notable Quotes

• Steve on Seed Oils:
  "Seed oils are estrogenic; they have an estrogenic effect in the body." [21:11]

• Mia on Natural Pregnancy:
  "Being pregnant is not a sickness. It is not an illness. It is a totally normal thing." [00:15]

• Steven on Clothing Fabrics:
  "Polyester is plastic derived from petroleum, leading to environmental degradation through microplastics in water and air." [46:10]

• Mia on Detoxification:
  "We always have vitamin E in case we accidentally consume seed oils at restaurants." [31:26]

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Key Takeaways

1. Eliminate Seed Oils: Start by removing seed oils from your diet to reduce inflammation and hormonal disruptions.
2. Choose Natural Fabrics: Opt for clothing and bedding made from natural materials like cotton, linen, and wool to avoid microplastics and hormonal mimics.
3. Adopt Holistic Practices: Embrace natural living through home cooking, mindful ingredient selection, and supporting sustainable products like MASA Chips.

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This episode offers a comprehensive look into the interconnectedness of diet, environment, and holistic health practices, encouraging listeners to make informed choices that benefit both personal well-being and the broader culture.

Transcript

[Steven]

If you have a pair of pants made of polyester, it's plastic. And so now we have plastic right up against our skin that like sheds little microplastic particles mixed in with warm sweat in between our skin and it dissolves in our skin. Right, because your skin absorbs everything that it touches.

[Alex Clark]

How many ultrasounds did you get?

[Mia]

0. Being pregnant is not a sickness. It is not an illness. It is a totally normal thing. If you're normal and healthy, you can have a perfectly fine pregnancy and birthday.

[Alex Clark]

Welcome to Tan Land, home to the really Tan Man, Olive Oil Queen and really Tan Olive Oil Baby. Not their real names of course, but there Internet Personas. As the founders of one of the newest and biggest names in the seed oil free snack space, Masa Chips. Steven and Mia arena are the creators of Masa Chips, clean food activists and just a young mom and dad helping you to live your healthiest and most aesthetic life. On this episode, of course we're going to talk about seed oils, but also why the fabric of your clothing matters for your health, how to have a baby without going to the doctor or having a single ultrasound, why constant ultrasounds may not be the best idea during pregnancy. Also concern with underwire bras, running a healthy life that everyone in the family is on board with and much, much more. They're the most fascinating crunchy couple in America and you can watch this episode on the culture Apothecary, Spotify or real Alex Clark on YouTube. Please do me one huge favor though. Pause the show right now. Five seconds. Go to the main profile of the podcast on Spotify or Apple and leave a five star review for us. This is the best way that you can support us so other people and potential guests discover us and then we look legit, right? Okay. Please welcome the founders of Masa Chips, really Tan man and the Olive oil Queen to culture Apothecary. You're in the clean snack industry. Seed oil free specifically. And two seed oil free snacks, or at least almost seed oil free as far as simple meal goes, just sold to other big food names. So in your opinion, do you think consumers should be worried about these sales?

[Steven]

I mean this happens all the time. So it's not just these two. Although it's recent news. There's Primal Kitchen is owned by Kraft. Hue Chocolate is owned by Mondelez. Epic is owned by General Mills. The list goes on and on and on. The way this works, theoretically, is that a big company wants to buy a small company. They know that it's successful and they know that if they owned it they could put it on all their trucks, get into all their stores, and it would blow it up. They want to buy the thing that's working, and they don't really want to change it, at least at first. And I know for a fact, at least off the record, that certain of these acquisitions have, like, parts of the contract where they're not allowed to change the ingredients. But that doesn't last forever. Right. And then also, it's like you don't change the ingredient label, but what about the sourcing? What if you find a different farmer for this one ingredient or another farmer for the other ingredient? Over time, I could imagine the ingredient quality suffers, but I don't think anyone's going to change it quickly because they have no economic incentive to. The customers want that product, and so they're going to keep it that way.

[Mia]

Yeah, like, if you want to buy Hue Chocolate in the airport, like, these companies are able to do that better than.

[Steven]

Yeah, it's very helpful. Right. Like, before that happened, like, Epic. I can get Epic bars in the airport. Yeah, you couldn't do that before it was blocked.

[Alex Clark]

Speaking of airports and snacks, you guys have some kind of cool situation in Nashville. There's a great airport snack stand that has all of these, like, they have tinned fish and amazing snacks. They have tons of masa chips and stuff in there. And I'm like, why isn't this in every airport?

[Mia]

Yeah, we've heard about this, but we haven't seen it. I've not been in national yet, but.

[Steven]

When I do, it's like. It's like, Sounds like it's Air 1 in an airport.

[Alex Clark]

It is. It is. It's Air 1 in an airport. And yeah, every time I fly into Nashville, I get excited. I'm like, oh, yes, I can stop.

[Steven]

You actually eat here?

[Alex Clark]

Yeah, it's great. So we need that. That's a huge problem, I feel like, is options at airports.

[Steven]

Right. It's like, that's kind of the thing. Distribution is like, okay, it's one thing to make a product, but it's another thing to get it everywhere. And so every random gas station in the middle of nowhere or every convenience store or every grocery store. Right. Like, the big companies kind of own that little sector, and so it's relatively difficult for a small company to then go do that. And so one of the benefits of these big companies buying a small thing is like, you don't have to be in the national airport to get something good because they'll just put it everywhere. At the same time, though, Instead of paying the person who created this natural thing, who's like, probably a family or whatever, you're paying General Mills or, you know, the shareholders of BlackRock, that's who you're paying. Think about where your dollar goes when you're buying something from this giant company.

[Alex Clark]

What would it take for Masa Chips to sell?

[Steven]

Probably an offer that no one would give us.

[Alex Clark]

So no plans in the immediate future?

[Steven]

Plans? No plans. I don't want to comment on any specific companies, like production setup, but like, we make every single product we have from scratch by hand, like in our factory. And we've done that since day one. We almost had to. Because the way food production is done in the country is like there's a handful of giant factories that just pump out billions and billions and billions of bags of whatever, and then the companies just slap their label on it. And so, you know, there's maybe a thousand tortilla chip brands in the country, but probably like less than 100 tortilla chip factories. And so none of those factories would make our product the way that we wanted with quality ingredients, with the tallow and all that stuff. And so we had to do it ourselves from day one. We always have.

[Mia]

Yeah.

[Steven]

And so selling that company doesn't really make that much sense because we have all our own infrastructure. It's not just selling a brand, you know, and selling like a trademark. It's. It would be the entire infrastructure that we've already built, which why would we sell to Coke? They don't need it. Yeah. It's not like they'd have another use.

[Alex Clark]

For it, you know, do you trust Steak and Shake? Who recently said we're going to go to 100% beef tallow for our fries?

[Steven]

I would have to look more into it, honestly. I've heard some rumors. I don't know what's true or what's not that the tallow they've acquired has a bunch of stuff in it.

[Mia]

Preservatives.

[Steven]

Yeah.

[Mia]

It's probably better than seed oils. Like, I would eat there over Chick fil a or something.

[Steven]

100%.

[Alex Clark]

But my question is, is what I've seen is they're saying their fries are seed oil free. You know, think about all the other things in the restaurant. I would have to see. We're committed as a restaurant chain to being 100% seed oil free.

[Steven]

Or.

[Alex Clark]

Or at least, you know, the food, the burgers, everything else is, you know, think about the buns and everything. All that is going to have seed oil.

[Steven]

Well, this is one of the Big issues about diet culture, which is like X free. Like, you know, no peanuts, no gluten, no this. It's like, well, what is in it? It could. It could be bad. Yeah, right. Like keto is no sugar, but like seed oils are keto. Right. Or like non calorie, like stevia and splenda and all sorts of non calorie sweeteners. They're keto because they have no, like, carbohydrate calories.

[Alex Clark]

So somebody could think that they're eating healthy because they're keto. And there's a lot of stuff sneaking in.

[Mia]

Right.

[Steven]

Like vegan is like seed oils are vegan. Right. Pesticides are probably vegan.

[Alex Clark]

Right. Oh, well, the vegan food is the nastiest processed food out there.

[Mia]

And it's all pretending to be real food, like burger and fries and milk and whatever. So.

[Steven]

And so you can't define your thing based off of what it's not, is what I'm trying to say. So, like, oh, steak and shake has no seedles anymore. Okay, great. But what about this? What about that? What about that? And that's why food is so complicated. I think it was one of the reasons why it's so difficult for people is because there's so many damn things to keep track of.

[Mia]

Yeah.

[Steven]

Oh, this doesn't have red 40, but doesn't have red 4. Like, oh, it doesn't have Glenda, but does it have stevia or xylitol or this doesn't have gluten, but does it have this other thing that I can't eat?

[Alex Clark]

Why do you guys not like stevia?

[Mia]

So I was pregnant like a year ago and I was kind of averse to stevia because I knew it was fake. And I was like, I'm not scared of sugar. I'm going to eat sugar. But I had an element packet. No hate on element, but I had an element packet that had stevia in it. And I was in the toilet the next day, like, throwing up, like, pregnancy. Just did not like it. And then I did some research and I found out stevia was used like in the jungle for natural birth control. So my body literally was like, we have a life growing in here. We're going to reject this. And yeah, I didn't eat for like two days and then I was fine.

[Alex Clark]

So you stayed away from it?

[Mia]

I stayed away from it after that for sure.

[Alex Clark]

Something to be said for there's right and wrong ways to source it is.

[Steven]

What I've heard that's true about everything. Okay, but like, at the base level, the molecule is the molecule. Another example of this is like vitamin E. Right. Vitamin E is good. And you get vitamin E from all sorts of places once. And if it's distilled and properly filtered and whatever chemistry process, once the molecule's there, it doesn't really matter where it comes from. It's the molecule. Right. Table salt, sodium chloride is. Table is salt. Whether it comes from a rock or the ocean or whatever. You know, if it's properly purified, it's going to be the same thing. So I don't, I don't think that's really the issue. And we, we do know that the natives in somewhere in South America.

[Mia]

Yeah.

[Steven]

Like Use it as natural contraceptive.

[Alex Clark]

Yeah.

[Steven]

So I mean that's not saying no one should ever eat stuff ever. But.

[Mia]

And some people do fine with it. You know, like there's tons of people that took element packets during their pregnancy and they were fine.

[Alex Clark]

But. And that's why there's options. I mean there's, you know, some people, you could make something with monk fruit or whatever. There's other things if, if you have an aversion like you seem to. Definitely. And was that really one of the only times that you got mega sick.

[Mia]

With your pregnancy that accidentally ate a seed oil chicken wing? And I was up all night. My friend was like really worried about me. She was like, is she going into labor? Is she going to die? It was really, really bad. Which is crazy because I had raw milk, oysters, liver. Raw liver. And I felt great after all of those throughout my whole pregnancy. And I had the one seed oil chicken wing and I was just like. And I was terrible the whole night.

[Alex Clark]

Well, you know who is now officially the first national restaurant chain to be completely 100 seed oil free is true food.

[Mia]

Oh, yeah.

[Alex Clark]

So my question is, do you think that we're going to just start seeing a surgeon of all of these restaurants and all these people saying we're seed oil free snack brands? Like, is this the next thing?

[Steven]

Yeah, I think so.

[Mia]

I think so. I think you can already start to see it. Like burger and butcher in New Jersey they do grass fed tallow fries, sourdough.

[Steven]

Organic grass fed tallow fried doughnuts.

[Mia]

Oh my gosh, it's.

[Steven]

Wow.

[Alex Clark]

I have to go there. Team write down I'm taking Jersey.

[Steven]

Yeah. Obviously those aren't everything. Right. Which we talked about with steak and shake. Like you can avoid seed oils and still have a bunch of other bad stuff. That's true about basically all things that you avoid. However, Seed oils are pretty key because they make up about 25% of the average American's calories, which is the single largest source of calories. Right. Like, people eat a lot of meat, but it's from all over. The seed oil block in that little pie chart of your calories is the biggest, which is insane. And so if we're thinking about cutting stuff out, it makes sense to start cutting stuff out that's most impactful. And so, yeah, Red 40 is bad. I'm not advocating for this. But like, what, you eat 5 milligrams of red 40 in a year on the standard American diet, but you ate dozens of pounds of seed oil.

[Alex Clark]

Yeah, that's a good point.

[Steven]

At the same time.

[Alex Clark]

So you're saying that is why we should care about this is because we are consuming an ungodly amount of it.

[Steven]

Yeah, it's like the low hanging fruit. Like, pick the easiest battles to win first and then we can talk about the citric acid in your kombucha or something.

[Alex Clark]

One of the pieces of advice that I always give people who are new to starting to eat healthier and changing their diet is when they're feeling overwhelmed about all these different ingredients that they're learning about on the show. I'm like, you know what's helpful? Pick one thing, focus on that. Eliminate that from your pantry. When you feel confident, like, I know how to spot that on an ingredient label. I'm gonna move on to this thing. So in your opinion, would you guys say it should be seed oils that you start with?

[Steven]

Definitely 100. So if you're gonna cut out one thing, it should be seed oils. And not only because seed oils are bad and we consume so much of them more than any other ingredient. It's also because the foods that contain seed oils usually also contain a ton of other stuff.

[Mia]

Like fried foods have flour with glyphosate and other pesticides. And yeah, like mayo sauces that have seed oils and like, yeah, coloring the.

[Steven]

Pesticides, all the other low quality ingredients. So if you cut out the seed oils to cut out all that other stuff too. And some people confuse that in saying that. Like, oh, the reason why the seed oil free thing works is because you're actually avoiding all this other stuff. Like, no, it works because you're hoing seed oils. And a benefit is you get to avoid all this other stuff. But it's. It's both. Right? Like, all of these things are not stuff that we're naturally supposed to be eating. Most of the companies that are intentionally not Using cedar oils will also not include most of the other terrible things that are common in all the rest of food. So it's not going to be perfect, but generally it's a pretty good proxy for, for getting quality stuff.

[Mia]

And I also feel like seed oil free, especially going out to restaurants, like pretty much any restaurant can cook in butter. Like that's. It's simple. You get to keep all the good stuff. And it's not that hard to avoid. I feel like a lot of things like gluten free or dairy free are really, really hard to avoid it. And that's when you get the fake ingredients.

[Steven]

And that's because these, like gluten and dairy are foundational cornerstones of, I guess you could call it, the European diet. They are in everything and they have been for many thousands of years and most of which throughout that period, people were healthy. And so if you avoid them, you're going to naturally introduce fake things to kind of mimic the experience. But on the contrary, seed oils are the fake thing. The butter was the real thing, the tallow was the real thing, the olive oil was the real thing and the seed oils were already the fake thing. So we're getting rid of seed oils is getting rid of the fake counterfeit thing and going back to the real thing, which was the butter of the tallow.

[Alex Clark]

You guys have built this entire seed oil free chip empire. When you first met each other and were dating, did you connect because you were both so health conscious?

[Mia]

We definitely connected because we were both health conscious. Actually we met on Hinge. In my bio I had something about like, I believe in real health and he thought I was like some vegan. He was like, what do you mean by that?

[Alex Clark]

You were curious?

[Steven]

My second hinge message to her was like, what does real food mean to you? Or something.

[Mia]

I was like, oh, you know, like grass fed meats and blah, blah. He's like, okay, okay, okay.

[Alex Clark]

Love that.

[Steven]

Because I thought she was vegan because every girl at her age at that time was like vegan.

[Mia]

I remember the first couple times we went on a date, we actually cooked together. The only like processed food he had was tortilla chips. Like so we would cook, have our butter and carrots and meat and eggs and whatever the heck we cooked. He brought his own cast iron pan, but in the corner there was like tortilla chips. And that was the only processed thing he had. And so we kind of went our separate ways a little bit. We stayed in touch. We were just.

[Steven]

And by the way, we met before either of Us had a health Instagram.

[Mia]

Yeah, this is before Instagram.

[Alex Clark]

Oh, wow.

[Steven]

It's like in 2020. So it was like, really? We were both personally interested in health, but had no professional or any other.

[Alex Clark]

You weren't really Tammy and yet or olive oil.

[Mia]

Yeah. And then he started Instagram, and then I was like, huh, that looks fun. Like, I want to start an Instagram. And so I was like, asking him for tips. And then we connect. After that, we started dating, and he was like, sending me design options for Masa. He was like, I'm doing this little side project, and I'm like, okay, cool.

[Alex Clark]

So you were really involved in the beginning.

[Mia]

Oh, yeah.

[Steven]

Someone was joking. Because when not everyone knows a masa means. And if you don't know, it's like a Spanish word that refers to the tortilla dough after it's been nixed. But her mom, or was it your mom?

[Mia]

My mom's mom. We call her Xena. She doesn't like the word grandma.

[Steven]

She thought because we just started dating and she was like this moss thing, she was like. She thought it was me and Stephen always, yeah, cute.

[Mia]

Isn't that cute?

[Alex Clark]

If you guys had kind of started to be radicalized on this before you met each other, then what were your own perspective turning points on food in America?

[Mia]

I grew up on a standard American diet, so I had a lot of health issues as a teenager. I went to a gastroenterologist for several years, and I was starting, like, they would just prescribe me a new pill every couple of weeks, and I started to pick up on it. I was like, this isn't working. They had me see a dietitian once, and she was like, everything you're eating is fine. Because I started doing all my own research, and I was, like, the only one in my family eating healthy. And so I had to grocery shop for myself. I cooked for myself, and then I went off to college and did all of that. And then I had to, like, you know, try to influence my friends to eat healthy and whatever. But, yeah, I realized pretty young that the food in America is not good.

[Steven]

Yeah, she was a little younger than me. For me, it was the freshman year of college. So I grew up. My grandparents are Sicilian. And so food snobbery runs deep in. In my bloodline, if you will. And so we always ate well, but not necessarily by the modern standard of organic this and whatever. But it was. We would never have super processed meat, for example, or we'd have pasta from Italy. And the problem was, when I was a. A Baby. My mom, as she was weaning me, started feeding me all sorts of baby food and realized I stopped growing. And so for about like three months, there was no weight gain at a period when, you know, a six month old baby should be gaining weight. And so she, way ahead of her time, did an elimination diet to figure out like, what was causing the problem. And so she figured out that it was the gluten in the baby food that was causing me to stop growing. So from very early on, I was largely raised gluten free. When I was a kid, I. I hated this. Right. Because bread tastes good.

[Alex Clark]

Of course.

[Steven]

Yeah. And all the other kids could eat all their food and I had to eat my, whatever, rice cake or something. And so I never really understood it because of course, kids don't understand this kind of thing. They just want to eat what tastes good. After freshman year of college, I was doing some study abroad thing in, in Europe and I had to cook for myself because they don't have dormitories with dining halls over there. My stipend for the internship was too low for me to go and buy like, you know, restaurant food or something. So I had to cook for the first time in my life. And that's when I started putting meals together and realizing that I felt a certain way if I ate a certain thing, because I had never seen that before. Right. Everything I'd ever eaten was handed to me, so I didn't know really what was in it. But by cooking for the first time, I could trace every ingredient through the process and then feel it afterward and then figure out, oh, I had this.

[Alex Clark]

Reaction, geez, maybe that's the solution in American colleges. Because, you know, that's something I get from my audience that's currently in school and living on campus. That's like, what am I supposed to do? Like, the only options I have to eat are the fast food restaurants in their food court area or whatever.

[Steven]

Yeah.

[Alex Clark]

There is nothing.

[Mia]

Yeah.

[Alex Clark]

And so, but I wonder if they made it so that they had a little kitchen area and these kids could start cooking and learning how to cook and understanding where their food comes from. Man, I bet that would open a lot of eyes.

[Mia]

That's what happened to me. Like in college, they forced me to get a meal plan. The first year I had to go to them and ask them to cook separately for me. I was just like plain chicken, plain vegetables, and then I would douse olive oil on it. That's when I really got into olive oil. I had literally what I would go through. So Much olive oil. It's crazy. And then the second year they told me I had to have a meal plan. I was like, I, I want to cook for myself. Like we have kitchens, like a community kitchen in the storm. Like, why can't I use it? I had to fight them. I sent all my paperwork about like my IBS, you know, my whatever. I had GERD and all this stuff. Like 28 pages of paperwork from my doctors. And then they told me no to apply for like, like a letter of grief or something. And then I did that and then they were like, okay, fine, but only for one semester will allow you to do this.

[Alex Clark]

What?

[Mia]

It was insane. Yeah.

[Alex Clark]

So it's because Big food has a contract with these.

[Mia]

Yeah, yeah.

[Alex Clark]

And they want you eating this stuff. I mean, that is a huge fast food business for them as these college students on campus. Like, if every kid starts cooking for themselves, they're going to lose money.

[Mia]

Yeah.

[Alex Clark]

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[Mia]

I knew the cellulite one was coming.

[Steven]

True, True.

[Alex Clark]

Tell me about cellulite and seed oils.

[Steven]

One of the things I learned about cellulite, and this is not like crazy news to anyone, is that cellulite is more concentrated in places where there's more estrogen. So that means women get cellulite more than men. Everyone knows this. But also if women will self reflect on where they have observed cellulite, it's in the tissues that are most feminine. The more estrogen is in those tissues. That's like where the fat storage is and all that stuff. Stuff. And so you have this crazy phenomenon where seed oils are estrogenic, they have an estrogenic effect in the body. The RA people will talk your ears off about this. And so nowadays you'll see like really fat guys, like they'll start to get cellulite on their thighs and butts cuz like the. They will even be overwhelmed with estrogen in those tissues, even though they're a man.

[Alex Clark]

Soy boy syndrome.

[Steven]

Soy syndrome, yeah. So you have that one piece of information, the seal estrogen connection, and then you have the other thing, which is that most people's body fat is made up of. Of seed oils, because your body fat is made up of the fat that you personally eat.

[Alex Clark]

And so it's making up 25% of our calories.

[Mia]

Yeah.

[Steven]

And so over time, there's some study, I'm sure people can Google this easily, that, like, calculated the amount of polyunsaturated fats, which is the type of fat in seed oils that we care about. They calculated the amount of that fat in people's body tissue over time. And in, like, the 1900s, it was, I don't know, 1 or 2%, and now it's approaching 20, 25% in the average person. And. Yeah, terrifying. And so seed oils also stay in the body for a very long time. We know this, that the half life is like two years or something. So it'll take, like, two years for 50% of the seed oils to, like, get out. I actually don't think that's been rigorously studied that well. I think there could be more interesting analysis done, but whatever. That's the best data we have. Seed oils are estrogenic. They are in your body tissue. They stay there for a long time. Cellulite is encouraged in the presence of estrogen.

[Alex Clark]

And how long do seed oil stay in the body once you consume them?

[Steven]

Several years is the punchline.

[Mia]

Seven to eight is what?

[Steven]

Yeah, like seven years for 90 to go away.

[Alex Clark]

How do seed oils cause inflammation in the body?

[Steven]

So seed oil specifically mess with your, like, mitochondria and every other cellular piece of cellular machinery because they have little reactive oxygen species, whatever. They have little molecules that take away electrons from other molecules, and so they get in your body and they, like, sort of destroy cells. It's like, I don't know, I'm a kid and I just. Just built all my Lego sets perfectly. And then my older brother comes in with, like, a hammer and breaks it all down. It's like the seed oils are this hammer molecule that just destroys stuff by, like, ripping, ripping it apart. That's called free radicals. If anyone wants to, like, look More into this, Dr. Kate Shanahan also has a great book that explains all this. It's called Dark Calories.

[Alex Clark]

So I interviewed Dr. Kate, but, you know, she doesn't travel a lot because she's very sick from seed Oils Right. Early on in her life. So we filmed that episode remote, and so I sent a crew to her to film to make sure it was, like, it would look good, sound good. All that while they were there, she said, oh, well, would you guys like a snack? And then she took out masa chips for them. And so they were so excited to have masa chips while they were working on that set. And I was like, how fun is that?

[Steven]

That's so.

[Alex Clark]

Yeah. So we love Dr. Kate.

[Steven]

Dr. Kate's incredible. Yeah. Her book on seed oils is very well written and explains all this stuff.

[Alex Clark]

Dark calories.

[Steven]

Yeah, dark calories. I don't know how much you want me to get into, but the. The punchline is that because they break cells, like, they break molecules in cells, they cause damage wherever they go. So a lot of people think, like, oh, if I sit too long, I'll hurt my back because, like, my back is affected. Or if I. I don't know, if I bump my elbow, my elbow will hurt because my elbow was hit. Seed oils do this damage everywhere. And so you. When you hear something that causes, like, macular degeneration and obesity and Alzheimer's and cellulite and all these things, it can sound kind of unbelievable. It's like, how can one thing cause so many problems? But the reason is because there's this fundamental incompatibility between seed oils and human biology that causes damage everywhere it goes, and that will manifest as all these different sort of symptoms.

[Alex Clark]

Is avocado oil a scam?

[Steven]

Mostly.

[Mia]

Mostly. Mostly. I would still eat it over seed oils, though.

[Steven]

Yeah. It's like you're kind of rolling the dice there. Yeah. But so the avocado industry, most people don't realize, is controlled by the drug cartels in Mexico. They use this as a money laundering operation.

[Alex Clark]

What?

[Steven]

Yeah, because they have all this money from, like, selling cocaine. They're like, well, what do I do with it? So they buy up avocado farms, and that's how they can, like, get in on legitimate industry.

[Alex Clark]

Like this little cute mom who's cooking with avocado oil, she doesn't know. She's like, really? In an episode of Narcos, Likely.

[Mia]

Yeah.

[Steven]

If it's Mexican derived. Yeah. They run that show.

[Mia]

Whoa.

[Steven]

And so, like, it's very ironic that you have these, like, ethical vegans in Brooklyn eating avocados because it's good for the world. World. When they're, like, funding the, you know, extortion and murder and God knows what else of, you know, the avocado industry in Mexico by the drug cartels.

[Mia]

Also, the more ripe they get, the more oil they produce. So most of them are like rotten avocados that they just squeeze more oil out of.

[Alex Clark]

And so it's bad for you to be eating the oil of a rotten avocado.

[Steven]

When the fats are exposed to water, they oxidize. And so if you think about an olive, it's like as soon as it's picked, right. It's like healthy on the tree. As soon as it's picked, it's crushed into olive oil. Oil, done. Oil separated from water. The oil goes into nice dark glass jugs and it's shipped all over the world. Eat it within two years. Very legit. Avocado oil, on the other hand, is sort of a waste product of the avocado industry. No one's buying olives, Right. But if you can charge 3, 4, however many dollars for an avocado, fresh and whole and whatever, you're going to do that because it's super valuable. So for me to take that avocado oil off the shelf and sell it as avocado oil, there's got to be a good reason. And there isn't, because avocados are super expensive. Instead, we just take the rotten avocados that don't make their way onto the shelves, so they're already rotting and oxidizing or whatever. At which point the oils have become compromised due to the water content of the avocado. Then we extract them, and then already it's kind of sus. Which is why in the study that looked into this, not only were some avocado oils, like, actually laced with seed oils, like food fraud.

[Alex Clark]

Food fraud.

[Steven]

So not only do we have this, like, fake avocado oil oil, we also have the part where they realized in the study that a lot of it was rancid. And that's because the avocado. Avocado oil in the water spent a lot of time interacting.

[Alex Clark]

What about a brand that we like, like Primal Kitchen and their avocado oil? Would you use it?

[Steven]

According to this study, 18 of avocado oil is good. Theoretically, I think it's fine. Right. The fatty acid profile is all good. I think there's a lot of just, like, secondary industrial effects and problems with it. However, theoretically, avocado oil is good. And I've heard that certain brands have good avocado oil.

[Alex Clark]

Okay.

[Steven]

I've heard good things about Primal Kitchen in particular. Good. But I have not gone and done the lab analysis on anything myself.

[Mia]

Sure, sure.

[Alex Clark]

What olive oil brands do you like.

[Mia]

So if you want like a local USA grown brand, I recommend Zim's Organic. It's in Northern California. And he has a couple different varieties of olives. So there's like a Narbakinia, there's Arbasona. So that's just like, you get different flavor profiles. Like, the Arbuchina is a little more fruity, the Arbasona is a little more nutty, and the polyphenols are pretty good. But if you want like old world, Italian, higher polyphenol, I really like Piro. It's a small brand. They have like the latest technology. So a lot of people think stone crushing olives is better because that's like the older process, but it actually exposes them to more oxygen, which is not good. So they have more modern technology that just like presses it, bottles it, so it's like protected by the oxyge.

[Alex Clark]

Is olive oil a biblical superfood?

[Mia]

According to my Instagram bio, yes. There's trees that are like thousands of years old. I think you can even buy olives from like, certain brands that have, like, really, really old trees. I don't think they actually used it as much for eating. I think they used it a lot for, like, lighting lamps, because where they were, they just had so much of it.

[Steven]

Yeah. In orthodox Christianity, and I'm sure also in Catholicism, much of the holy oils which are used in many cases are olive oil based. Yeah, it's like the foundational thing. Or you have these lamps in a church with that are like in a little red glass and they're like always glowing. They're all foil lamps.

[Alex Clark]

Oh, I didn't even know that they should be. Keep me away. She might start drinking them. One thing, and it honestly could have been you. I feel like I've seen people online who wake up and they pour a little shot of olive oil, squeeze a little lemon juice, and drink it. What are the benefits of having a shot of olive oil in the morning?

[Mia]

Yeah, so olive oil, if you have like fat first in the morning especially olive oil, is like a really good fat with lots of antioxidants. It stimulates your liver to produce bile, so it just gets your digestion going like this.

[Steven]

And then if you're stuck, it can help you out.

[Mia]

Yeah. Which is actually the main reason hack constipation, bloating, whatever you have. But yeah, I started drinking a lot of olive oil because of constipation.

[Alex Clark]

Do you like that better than what people say of having a glass of warm lemon water in the morning? Do you like olive oil better?

[Mia]

I like olive oil better because I feel like you get all the other benefits of, of, you know, there's a little bit of vitamin E. You get the antioxidants, the polyphenols, all of that.

[Alex Clark]

Is there a good way to detox from seed oils?

[Steven]

Yeah, actually there are. There are a few things. Before I get into that, I'll, I'll say that there's nothing that's been super rigorously studied because the people who fund science are not super interested in trying to figure out ways of detoxifying seed oils. But maybe in the coming years that'll change. However, seed oils cause oxidative stress. So what do you want to do to clean up the damage or prevent the damage is like load up on the antioxidants. And there are several of them. Vitamin E is one, Vitamin C is another, Glutathione is another. Again, Dr. Kate, we love her, has in her book all the antioxidants that take play a role in the seed oil metabolism chain. And so whenever we go to eat, for example, ashamedly happened the other day.

[Mia]

Oh my gosh.

[Steven]

We accidentally got laced. Well, I didn't. She got laced with seed oils.

[Alex Clark]

What happened?

[Mia]

We found this place that was supposedly seed oil free. They used like organic grass fed meat from a butcher shop next door. And so it was in. Yeah. She even used raw milk in her smoothie. So we just assumed like, oh, she makes these empanadas from scratch. It was a travel day. We were so hungry. Like my primal brain, I looked at those empanadas, I knew that they, the dough was definitely seed oil. But I was so hungry, my primal brain just overrode that logical thinking. So did you get sick? No, because we took two vitamin E's. Yeah, instantly. And I didn't feel bad. I was very surprised.

[Alex Clark]

I like the hack of vitamin E in the purse if you are going to consume seed oil.

[Mia]

Yeah, we always have it when we go out. Yeah.

[Steven]

And so I'll take like one vitamin E if I'm not, just in case, you know, if I'm not the one or she's not the one. Putting everything in a pan or a pot, it's like, you know, gonna be safe. So. Yeah, that's, that's a good idea. And that protects you if you're going out at restaurants or whatever. But then the other thing is you have body fat, you have to lose body fat. Right. Because the seed oils are in the body fat fat. So this is a big one though, because losing body Fat is not actually that easy. A lot of people blame, like, oh, you don't have willpower, you need to work out harder, you need to eat less, or whatever. That's not really how you lose body fat. And the reason is because seals are so damn toxic, by inserting them into the mitochondria to burn them as energy, they, like, tear the mitochondria apart from the inside. It's like they just implode. And again, Dr. Kate goes in details of how all this works in her book Imagine the kid with the hammer and the Legos. And those Legos are your mitochondria, which are what's supposed to generate energy in your cells. They just, like. They just blow up, basically. And so because of this effect, your body does not want to burn seed oils as energy, which is why they're in your body fat in the first place, because it's like, keeping them there to get them out of the way. And so it's kind of a. It's kind of unfortunate that we have this whole idea where if you're overweight, it's because you're lazy or something. It's so hard to lose that fat because burning it will creates this toxic overload that your body then has to deal with. And so if you're doing that too fast, like, if you're losing too much weight too quickly or whatever, you're introducing so much garbage into your system, and it's not even the seal. It's like most toxins in the environment, all the microplastics and all that stuff in our fabrics and whatever. Yeah, those get stuck in your body fat, too. So, like, unleashing all this fat, it just overwhelms your detoxification pathways. And so it's hard to do that very quickly. And that's a big barrier when people are like, oh, I'm not eating much, or I'm working out really hard, and I still don't. I still can't lose weight. Weight.

[Alex Clark]

Yeah, because, well, they're like, I'm counting calories. So I'm only eating this many calories from Taco Bell a day.

[Mia]

Right.

[Alex Clark]

Like, stuff like that.

[Steven]

Your body doesn't want to burn it, because if it does, you'll just poison yourself. Wow. And so you're just, like, walking around in this, like, fat suit of toxic sludge, basically.

[Alex Clark]

So what's the solution for those people?

[Steven]

Yeah, it takes a long time, and you have to, like, get all that stuff out slowly and support the liver and all these other things to allow that to Be excreted out of the body cleanly.

[Mia]

It might get worse before it gets better.

[Steven]

Yeah. And so. So you sauna, you have your antioxidants.

[Alex Clark]

You think sauna. If you're trying to lose weight, you need to be on a sauna journey.

[Steven]

Yeah. Because sauna is a very reliable way of getting junk out of your body through sweat. And so if the whole issue is that there's too much junk in your body, well, that's one way to do it.

[Alex Clark]

What do you think about sauna for a fever?

[Steven]

I personally don't like doing it if I'm already sick. I think it's a good thing to do, like, when you're healthy. Yeah, it doesn't feel right to me.

[Mia]

It might be dehydrating too. But I do know people that just, like, wrap up in blankets or in, like, traditional Chinese medicine, especially postpartum, when you're healing, you're supposed to, like, wrap up in blankets and be super, super hot. So I think the idea of trying to cool down a fever is not good, especially for babies. Like, a lot of people freak out when babies have fevers, but in the crunchy mom community, it's kind of a good thing. So you want them to have that fever and they always have an upgrade after. Like, they'll start walking more or they'll say new words. But yeah, you want to let your body, if it's inflamed and hot, you want to keep with that so that it can heal properly.

[Alex Clark]

So what is the temperature? Like? Okay, well, if my baby. Because you guys have a new baby, right? If my baby reaches this tempo, it's like, we have to go to the doctor.

[Mia]

I would say, like, if I can feel my head, like my hand, and it's just, like, warm. And I know he's a little feverish, but if it's like burning hot and he has other symptoms that are concerning, like, he's not, you know, drinking, not using the bathroom. He's seems like he's getting dehydrated. That's when I would do something about it. Typically every time I'm like, I'm going to give it a day or two. And typically he gets better after.

[Alex Clark]

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[Steven]

Oh wow.

[Mia]

I guess she's lot of experience.

[Steven]

Sounds off the first bat to me that RFK did not have a ton to do with that decision. Yeah. Secondly, I think it's very easy for us to talk about, you know, the seals in the food industry and whatever. We often forget that this is a several hundred billion dollar industry which sounds like just numbers that would even make any sense to anyone. It will not go gently into that good night as they say, you know, and if you think about this ignoring the health aspect, just, just for a second thought experiment to try to understand this, you have an industry that you know from the brands, the manufacturers, the ingredient producers, whatever it employs, I don't know, several hundred thousand Americans, like that's their full time job. There are entire towns in the Midwest dedicated to like making this stuff. If we were to snap our fingers and disappear it tomorrow, like there would be economic chaos. You would, you would not, like people would not be able to eat. Obviously I don't think sea dolls are food, but for a large proportion of people for whom they are food, they would not have food anymore. I think it's totally possible that we could have a food system in this country in particular built off of real food principles. But I don't think it's something that you can just snap your fingers and have happen overnight.

[Mia]

Everyone would be detoxing and.

[Steven]

Yeah, exactly. All our livers would be, would be overwhelmed. Yeah, no, I mean you'd have like, I don't know, half a million, a million people without a job. You'd have like entire pieces of infrastructure that like will, I don't know, fall apart, not going to use, you know, financial problems, you'd have food shortages, you'd have all this stuff. Obviously I'm not a fan of this personally. I Don't think it's a good idea. However, I can understand the idea that if we wanted to dismantle, or not even dismantle, but, like, convert this industry into something beneficial, it's not going to happen by just, like, forcing it down people's throats and, like, ordering it from above. You'll have to, like, work with them and teach people, hey, this is why this is bad. Bad. And importantly, this is what we can do instead. Take this giant factory that's meant to make whatever ingredient. Well, how can we take all, like, I don't know, half a billion dollars worth of equipment over all the factories in the country? How can we take this equipment and make something useful with it? How can we take all the trucks that Frito Lay has and repurpose them for something beneficial to people? What about all the jobs that people do? Can we find something for them to do instead? Political and economic chaos is also unhealthy.

[Alex Clark]

When I talked to Pasturebirds founder Paul about this, this I had said, I think it's okay to admit I don't like this choice. We really like the choice of rfk. We really like the FDA choice. You know, we had a lot of wins when it comes to health in this administration, and maybe this is just the L we have to take. But, you know, maybe she will have her eyes open being amongst these great people like RFK Jr or whatever. Who knows? Even though she's got all this. These seed oil ties, we can use it for good. She knows all the people. So then maybe if she. Her mind has changed, then she can go back and go to these people and teach them what she's learned. Learned. I mean, who knows? You know, that's being very optimistic. But I think overall, we still won big with the. The picks that we got for this administration.

[Steven]

So, I mean, everyone eats three times a day, and there's a lot of people, and there's a lot of days out there. And so food is a very, very, very big industry with a lot of people's livelihoods tied up in it. And so the process of creating something better is going to involve working with them to, like, fix what they're doing right, instead of just getting rid of them. You can't just do that.

[Alex Clark]

You guys are probably America's most crunchy couple, I think. And one thing that you guys are really big proponents on, that I've never had anybody discuss on the show, is fabrics in our clothing and in our materials in our home. I've actually never covered that, really, on any episode okay. The reason this even is on my radar is because I posted X rays from a chiropractor visit. And my audience, because some of them, I've, they, they've become too smart because now I'm getting called out and they saw like on my X rays that I had an underwire bra. So they were like, alex, why are you wearing underwire bras? And I was like, what are you talking about? Why am I getting hundreds of messages on this? What is the problem with underwire bras?

[Mia]

I haven't worn one in several years, minus the day of our wedding because I wanted to look nice. You know, there's a lot of lymph nodes up here, so they can prevent lymphatic flow. And breast tissue is mostly fat, so that has hormones, toxins. And so if you're blocking the lymph flow, that can just keep all those toxins up there. And then things can get stuck. And then you're, you know, this part of your body is all crooked because it can't like flush out the toxins. And then also because underwire bras provide support for you, then your muscles don't learn how to support. So actually underwire bras can cause more sagging in the future.

[Alex Clark]

Really?

[Mia]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Alex Clark]

Okay, I'm convinced. You talking about how they don't let you detox. You're keeping all your toxins up here. And then I'm thinking about the girls who are reluctant to get rid of that toxic deodorant. So not only are you wearing underwear bras, then the deodorant. Whoa.

[Mia]

And then I was thinking about it too. I was like, I wonder how much of that contributes to, like, moms who are breastfeeding that get mastitis and clogged ducks and everything because they just, you know, they've been wearing a underwire bra their whole life.

[Alex Clark]

So are you just braless or you're doing sports bras or what?

[Mia]

What's the solution? I need some support. Yeah. So I do like wireless BR bras. Bralettes. I found like a mostly wool one that I've been wearing postpartum. But what is it? Bra win? Something like that. But it's mostly wool, which it's really nice. But before I got pregnant, I was able to just get away with like a cotton bralette or I even found some merino wool ones, like fully merino wool that I would wear. And you know, obviously if I'm like going to see the parents or, you know, the parents in law or whatever, I will wear something more proper. And supportive, but. But I try to just let them hang out as much as they can.

[Alex Clark]

This is fascinating to me. Why does the fabric of our clothes really matter?

[Steven]

Bad fabric is bad for a number of reasons. And good fabric is good for a number of reasons. There's like, levels to these things. And one thing people like to think in is in terms of trade offs. And I know I'm getting a little off topic here, but something's good over here for this reason. For example, oh, that dude is very smart. He must also be bad at sports, for example. Good comes with bad. That's like a very, very common cultural idea that Americans have. It's like trade offs happen. If something's good for one reason, it's bad for another reason. Vegans say meat might taste good, but it's bad for the planet or whatever. But we know from health and regenerative agriculture that it's not the case, right? The food that tastes the best is the healthiest for us, and it's also good for the planet. We know that we win, win, win, win, win, along all those dimensions into the bad food. Lose, lose, lose, lose, loses on the other ones. So I think it's similar with fabrics. And so what I mean is if you have a pair of pants made of polyester, they are horrendous for the environment, right? It's plastic, right? So you're making thin little plastic filaments that looks like the things that used to be in a light bulb, like little tiny wires and weaving them into a fabric and then putting on your legs, right? So we're drilling oil to make the clothes first off. So not very good for the environment. Doesn't last very long. You end up throwing it out. Gets microplastics in the water, in the air and whatever. So bad. The other thing thing is that this stuff is on your skin. So now it's, now we're talking the health dimension. It's not the environment, it's the health dimension. Especially these polyester clothes, nylon, whatever. All these plastics are most commonly employed in form fitting, active wear, right? Yoga pants and athleisure and all this stuff. And so now we have plastic right up against our skin that like sheds little microplastic particles mixed in with warm sweat in between our skin. And it like dissolves in our skin, right? Because your skin absorbs everything that it touches. So now you're absorbing microplastics right into your body body. And microplastics are particularly insidious because they mimic estrogen. We already talked about estrogen so estrogen dominance is one of the chief causes of a lot of the symptoms that women have, like pcos, endometriosis, cellulite, all this, all this, all this garbage. And so estrogen dominance is this problem. Now we're introducing artificial chemicals that mimic estrogen, letting our, allowing our body to think we have even more estrogen than we do. It's basically like injecting yourself with estrogen, xenoestrogens, you know, all that stuff.

[Alex Clark]

What about rayon? Rayon?

[Steven]

Rayon is made of bamboo, so that's a separate topic.

[Mia]

I believe it's semi synthetic. So it's like kind of one of those. Could be good, could be bad.

[Steven]

Yeah. So, so bam. Like the bamboo derived fabrics. Bamboo is very hard if anyone's ever seen bamboo. So it takes a lot of chemicals to like kind of dissolve the cellulose to make it soft enough to weave into a fabric. And so it's questionable if the extent to which those chemicals remain in the resulting piece of clothing. Okay, so yeah, the modal intense cell and the rayon, those are all bamboo derived fabrics.

[Alex Clark]

So does our bedding and sheets and throw pillows and blankets be natural fabrics?

[Mia]

I think that's even more important than clothes because you're spending eight hours a night is there, you know, for your.

[Steven]

Life, breathing the dust, right. Like you have the dust in your dresser, right? What is that made of? It's made of the fibers of your clothes. If your clothes are made of plastic, it's made of plastic. And so you're breathing in the dust, you're breathing in plastic dust, and you're.

[Alex Clark]

Sweating at night and warming up those sheets.

[Steven]

Ooh, if I sleep in polyester sheets, I will like get night sweats and wake up and get.

[Mia]

Yeah, it's also just uncomfortable. Like cotton sheets, linen sheets, they're much better for whatever environment you're in. Cold, warm.

[Steven]

So that's, that's the last thing. So we talk about the environment and so we have, you know, it's bad, it's made of plastic. It's petroleum derived plastic. We have the health aspect, which is like you're dissolving microplastics in your body, which are bad because they mimic hormones. One last thing I'll say on that is that fake hormones can access your DNA. I think I forget the name of the author, but there's this book called Ester generation, which talks all about the types of synthetic hormones and whatever the, the cell, if you remember from biology class, has a nucle, has a membrane membrane right inside the cells, the nucleus. It holds the DNA, the nucleus has its own membrane, and so the cell membrane, a lot of stuff can go in and out as is needed for the cell to function, but the nucleus is just there to split, you know, for the DNA to replicate and then create new cells. So what is involved in the replication of new cells? Sex hormones. And so chemicals that mimic sex hormones are able to get into the nuclear DNA and do God knows what, you know, because they can pass that membrane, get into your. Where the DNA is stored, and who knows what the hell they do. So that's one of the reasons, in addition to hormones and hormonal damage and everything, why synthetic hormone chemicals are so insidious is like they can actually touch our physical DNA, which is kind of terrifying.

[Alex Clark]

Yeah, really terrifying.

[Steven]

Terrifying. That's the whole thing. And then the last thing is comfort. Right. Like, the. There's a good natural fabric for every use case. Right. So cotton is good in certain weather. Wool is better in other weather. Linen is also good in other things. So, like, it looks good. Good. It wears well, it's durable. It's like, I don't know, stylish, dare I say?

[Mia]

Yeah.

[Steven]

And it's. It's way more comfortable. Like, I don't know, the polyester sheets like we talked about, it's, like, icky. I always had a problem from the earliest days of my youth with, like, synthetic socks. It would just make my feet, like, skin crawl.

[Mia]

And then you're washing and drying in, and then you're releasing microplastics into the air. So, yeah, it's just a whole slurry of consequences.

[Alex Clark]

Well, I also did not realize until recently that when you are shopping places like Zara H M Sheehan, that clothing, a lot of times is filled with lead that they're making over in China, and it's just nasty synthetic dyes and.

[Steven]

God knows what else.

[Mia]

Also, the chemical structure of polyester and the chemical structure of fragrances stick to each other more. More. So if you're using something like Tide and polyester, then that, like, literally sticks forever in those clothes. You cannot get the smell of Tide.

[Steven]

Out of those clothes so bad.

[Mia]

Yeah. But if you buy, like, cotton and maybe someone use Tide, you could leave it out in the sun for two weeks and the tide will escape. But so polyester and fragrances just, like, make it even worse together.

[Alex Clark]

One thing that you guys chose to do, which has to be one of the most controversial parenting decisions I've ever seen, and some would call it gravely irresponsible, potentially, is that you chose to not only have an unmedicated birth. I mean, you chose to have zero doctor intervention period throughout your entire nine month pregnancy.

[Steven]

Well, gravely irresponsible. Only if it didn't work.

[Mia]

Yeah.

[Alex Clark]

If it did, you have a beautiful, healthy baby.

[Mia]

Yeah.

[Alex Clark]

So when we talk about zero medical intervention, how many ultrasounds did you get?

[Mia]

Zero.

[Alex Clark]

You gave birth weight where?

[Mia]

At home in our apartment. In our dining room.

[Steven]

Inflatable pool. Where our dining room table is.

[Mia]

Yep.

[Alex Clark]

Why did you choose not to have any ultrasounds throughout your pregnancy?

[Mia]

So I met a friend who we bonded about home birth. We were totally like on the home birth ride and she told me to check out this podcast called Free Birth Society. I listened to it. I realized all these women were having pregnancies in birth that were totally normal, totally healthy without any medical intervention. So, you know, I did a deep dive and realized that like a lot of people did this in the past. Being pregnant is not a sickness. It is not an illness. It is a totally normal thing. If you're normal and healthy, then you can have a perfectly fine pregnancy and birth. And because of my experience with the doctors when I was a teenager, I just like, was distrustful of doctors from that point on. You know, I'm like, they're not going to help me fix my stomach as a child. What are they going to do for me when I'm pregnant? Pregnant? I also watched the documentary Business of being Born. So yeah, I was totally bought in. And then my friend who told me about that podcast ended up getting pregnant. And so I watched her do the thing. She didn't go to any doctors throughout her pregnancy. And then she had her birth and I actually attended her birth. She wanted me there to be support. I feel like there's this whole thing like if you are in the free birth, that it's like better to do it by yourself or like it, you know, I feel like there's kind of that idea, but it's not like it's so nice to have a woman there to support you during your pregnancy and birth and like to go along with you throughout that whole journey, tell you everything's okay, like this symptom's normal. So I literally watched her birth and her baby was totally healthy. And I watched her baby like grow up a little bit and then I got pregnant.

[Alex Clark]

Did you also find out that ultrasounds could damage a baby?

[Mia]

Yes, definitely. And actually like even some of his extended family members back in the day were like anti ultrasound. I don't know exactly what it can do, but basically it can affect the DNA the exposure to radiation could be bad, but honestly, for me, it wasn't about that specifically. I could have gotten one ultrasound and I would have been fine. I even thought about it in the beginning of my pregnancy, you know, like, I'm like, is everything okay? Does it have all its kidneys or whatever? I didn't know if it was a girl or boy, but for me it was about being sucked into that cascade of injuries, interventions. And I didn't want to deal with the stress of that. I felt like I felt safer just staying away from it.

[Alex Clark]

And was it scary to you as a first time dad not even having one check?

[Steven]

No.

[Mia]

On one of our first dates, he was telling me like stories about how, you know, women used to go run in the woods and birth and do whatever with their placenta. And I was like, this man is crazy.

[Steven]

I mean, okay, so a more helpful answer, maybe a bit controversial commercial. But, you know, humans have two legs. We're meant to walk around, right? We have teeth, we're meant to eat. Women have the body parts that cause them to be meant to give birth. They're designed to do this. The best we as humans can do is just get out of the way and let nature take its course. The worst we can do is when we try to get involved with our big ideas and like, say, oh, no, birth should happen this way. Or like, go lie on your back or go take this medicine or this pill. None of us would be here if home birth were dangerous, right? We would not have evolved out of the amoeba stage or whatever. We'd be still asexually reproducing, producing like an amoeba if home birth or bad, right? Animals do it all the time, humans do it all the time. And so the question is, what caused all the difficulties commonly faced amongst women who give birth in, I guess, the past several hundred years, before we even started dating? It was just an interest of mine, like learning about this stuff because I was, you know, interested in health and whatnot. And a lot of the things that are problems are, have pretty specific causes. So one thing is that women in hospitals give birth on their, their backs, right? Because in the Victorian era, the British doctors, of course, are all men were like, it's indecent for us to like see a woman's butt sticking up in the air. So we're gonna have the women lying in the bed like a hospital patient so it's easier for us to do our thing. But no other mammal gives birth in that position. Every mammal gives birth on all fours. Like squatting down or whatever. And like the way that the hips rotate when you're on your back versus when you're hunched over. Completely different. The hips open up and so. So, you know, the child can emerge more naturally. So that's one thing. And obviously birth is a very complicated topic.

[Alex Clark]

The American College of Obstetricians say that home birth is less safe than hospital birth.

[Mia]

Yeah.

[Alex Clark]

But there's a reason why they're saying that.

[Mia]

It's because, you know, they're funded by all of these people because they're an organization. One of their biggest funders is this brand called Hologic. They sell all of their prenatal tests to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. So they influence the health insurance and say, you know, hospital birth is better because they want to sell all of these products and make billions and billions of dollars for all these companies that are funding them.

[Steven]

I think there's an element also which, like, as a man, like, birth sort of represents the primordial feminine chaos of the universe. So there's like this, Phil, philosophical idea where, like, women are like the ocean. Right. We've heard of this. And so if I'm like a Victorian era doctor and I'm this chaos, it kind of terrifies me. Right. And also, just like, empathy. Right. Picturing me giving birth, it's insane. Right. Terrifying. Like, right. Like, how. How can we do this? But men are very different from women, as we know. But if we have the idea that, like, oh, I'm going to bring in orderliness to this chaotic process. I'm going to introduce hospital bed. I'm going to introduce a C section. I'm going to introduce laying on your back. I'm going to have a Pitocin. I'm going to have this, I'm going to have that.

[Mia]

You need more interventions to deal, you know, to keep the chaos contained.

[Steven]

It's like you have the ocean and you're trying to stop the waves. Waves, right? So we're gonna put a wall here, and then the waves are gonna go over the wall. We'll build a taller wall, but the waves gonna go over here. It's like, you can't contain the freaking ocean. And you're just gonna be like, causing yourself a whole bunch of pain in the process, polluting the damn thing every step of the way. So the best thing is just let it do its thing. Make sure the process is supported by what it needs from a health standpoint. Right. Like, there was no lack of nutrients or overabundance of stress or anything. Right.

[Alex Clark]

Like, so letting nature run its course. Yeah, do what we were designed.

[Steven]

And I knew she was, like, a tough cookie. I knew she could do it, and she did, and it was great.

[Alex Clark]

Why are you guys against epidurals?

[Mia]

There's several reasons. The first thing that comes to my head is because you can't feel if you're tearing. And a lot of the times, even me, like, giving birth, I was, like, ready to get it out. And Stephen was like, slow down. Take your time. You know, in that position, you are more likely to tear because you can't feel what's going on. And I feel like that's. A lot of women have a fear of tearing, you know, being pregnant, birth, your body changes, whatever. That's like a huge fear. And epidurals kind of encourage that.

[Steven]

Similar to how everyone's addicted to opioids. Right? You go get surgery for your knee, then you're predict prescribed oxycontin, and then you can't feel the pain because it's such a good freaking painkiller. You get up before you're supposed to start walking on your knee. You think everything's fine because it doesn't hurt. Meanwhile, you're causing, you know, irreparable damage to your, you know, now weakened knee tissue that's recovering. You go back to the doctor, and then he's like, well, your knee's even worse now. It hurts even more. Get more OxyContin and you'll feel it anymore. And you're like, I gotta get back to my life. So you keep walking your knee, and then before you know it, you need a knee replacement. Whatever. God knows, like, you destroyed your knee. Pain is a useful thing to prevent us from exceeding our limits. And if you can't feel it, you're kind of.

[Mia]

You're.

[Steven]

You're operating without any sort of feedback there.

[Mia]

Also, if it's so strong to numb the entire lower half of your body, what does that do to your newborn baby? You know, like, you have no idea because it. Your baby's connected to you through, like, all of, you know, through the placenta. So they're getting exactly what's going in your bag. Blood, you know, minus the filtering. But you don't know what that does to your baby.

[Alex Clark]

Okay, let's talk about something that really grosses me out. Eating snacks with seed oils. It's like you're a rat eating chips over a sink at a truck stop diner. Your face is covered in greasy crumbs. You've got the grease dripping down your chin and you're just praying that your 79 year old ex boyfriend doesn't walk in, making this bad situation even worse. Well, the seed oils that are chemically deodorized to hide the rancid effects. Gross, right? Imagine what that does in your body. Actually, we don't have to imagine. Look at our record rates of chronic disease in America right now. That is why I ditched all of the seed oil junk from Masa chips. Seed oils are high in omega 6 fatty acids which can promote inflammation in the body when consumed in excess, disrupting the balance with anti inflammatory omega 3s. Additionally, the chemical processing of seed oils creates harmful compounds including trans fats, which can contribute to heart disease, obesity and other chronic health issues. Masa chips are made with only three ingredients. Organic nixtamalized corn, grass fed beef tallow and real sea salt. No seed oils, no chemical mess, just real food that's better for you. These chips are so crunchy, incredibly tasty, and actually good. Beef tallow is packed with nutrients and healthy fats that are better tasting chips than you've ever had. Okay. Visit masachips.com use code real Alex Clark for 20% off your first purchase. That's masachips.com code real Alex Clark for 20% OFF seed oil free masa chips. Were you consciously doing or eating certain things to prep your body for pregnancy?

[Mia]

I was just kind of living the lifestyle, you know, Like I was eating a lot of nutrient dense organic meats from our local farmer, local veggies, you know, good carbs, potatoes, rice, whatever. Raw milk. A lot of raw milk.

[Alex Clark]

Did you keep drinking raw milk while pregnant?

[Mia]

I did.

[Alex Clark]

What else did you eat while pregnant?

[Mia]

I had raw milk. I had oyster. Like once a week there was a happy hour. We would just walk to from our apartment. They would look at me like I was crazy every time we walked in there. I had liver. Oh, I did have sushi once. I had a sushi craving. I ate it once and then I was good.

[Alex Clark]

One question actually that hasn't been answered on the podcast that I've been getting lately about raw milk. Is, is raw milk safe for babies and toddlers?

[Mia]

Yes, definitely have tons of friends who feed their babies raw milk.

[Steven]

That's not to say one particular bottle of raw milk could be bad. I don't know. Is your farmer, like doing the right things to get spoiled? Is it refrigerated? Whatever. However, the vast majority of the babies fed high quality raw milk seem to be doing just fine.

[Mia]

I think there could be some period where like maybe the mom is drinking a lot of dairy and some of the cow protein can pass through the breast milk and the baby's not ready for it yet. And so some moms might have to cut out dairy for a little bit. I have a lot of moms on my Instagram who have had to cut out dairy just for a little bit until their baby's a little more developed. So you kind of just have to play with it, see how your child reacts and everything, but everything gradually.

[Alex Clark]

Were there any supplements that you like taking before giving birth?

[Mia]

I did dates and red raspberry tea like crazy toward the end of my pregnancy.

[Alex Clark]

What do dates do?

[Mia]

Dates help soften the cervix so it's easier for it to dilate. And then raspberry tea tones your uterus so you know, it makes the contractions a lot more efficient. I definitely took probably a few beef liver supplements, although I like like just eating the beef liver over the supplements, but I probably had some of those. A lot of magnesium. I did a combination of citrate and glycinate. I did some cod liver oil too, because that has vitamin A, vitamin D. And I was pregnant throughout the winter months, so you don't get a ton of vitamin D. So I did take some cod liver oil. I think that's it though. A lot of it was diet for me and I could see like the second pregnancy. I'd probably need to supplement more because I feel like I had really good reserves for my first pregnancy because I prepared with my diet for two, three years.

[Alex Clark]

What do you know about most sliced bread in stores?

[Steven]

So bread is bad for five reasons. Ready? One is that it doesn't have three ingredients. Bread must have three ingredients. Flour, salt and water. Right. Number two is that it's not sourdough. So yeast chemicals, gmo, you know, factory yeast from a chemistry lab that was stuck in the the bread to make it perfectly fluffy and white and whatever. Real bread should be made with sourdough. Ideally a sourdough starter collected from the air, like created from the air nearby where you live. Cuz you can just do that, you can just make a sourdough starter anywhere. Um, so yeah, that's number two bread sourdough, number three is not organic. So not only is most wheat sprayed with glyphosate, which everyone knows about, and all this stuff, wheat flour is enriched with a whole bunch of synthetic vitamins like iron and synthetic hormones. B vitamins and. And also, yeah, folic acid, which is.

[Mia]

B3, B5, which like 40% of the population can't even digest folic acid.

[Steven]

Yeah, Folic acid is synthetic for form of folate, the actual nutrient. And so it's mandated by law to be present in, like, non organic, like, white flour. So that's number three. Number four is it's probably not whole wheat. And whole wheat is ideal because when you wheat is three parts, and when you mill white flour, you only take one of the parts, not the whole thing. And so the last thing is that if it's whole wheat, though, it should be freshly milled. So a big thing is that when you mill flour, it starts to go bad relatively quickly.

[Mia]

There's a little bit of oil in there.

[Alex Clark]

Do you have one of those at home?

[Steven]

Oh, yeah, yeah.

[Alex Clark]

Where'd you get it?

[Steven]

I got it on the Internet. It's by this German company. It's like the mock mill. Mock.

[Mia]

It's just a little countertop. So keep it under, pull it out whenever we want to mill flour.

[Steven]

Literally got stones. Like, I'm like a miller, like, with a water wheel.

[Alex Clark]

Okay. I love the five tips from really tan man to ideal bread or what should be real bread.

[Steven]

So there's a bonus 6. One which is ancient grains. So the type of wheat matters, of course. And so there's, you know, super modern wheat, which is like a breed that's been gmoed or hybridized since the 1950s. There's like, less modern wheat that's like, probably it's. It's better, but, you know, maybe not ideal. It's like strains of wheat from the 1800s. And then there's ancient grains, which are like seven of them.

[Mia]

I forget, similar to, like a 1, a 2 milk. There's different proteins that are easier for humans to digest.

[Steven]

Yeah, these are like thousands of years old, like einkorn spelled. People have heard of these.

[Alex Clark]

Right.

[Steven]

And so ideally, the flour comes from those grains which are grown organically and freshly milled, made into sourdough bread without any other ingredients. And that's your ideal bread.

[Alex Clark]

Are you guys bought into the, like, number one superfood people don't give enough credit to is butter.

[Steven]

I think it's great. I wouldn't say it's the number one thing, but it's awesome.

[Alex Clark]

What in your opinion is, like, number one superfood?

[Steven]

Ice cream is the number one superfood.

[Alex Clark]

Why is ice cream. Isn't that unhealthy?

[Steven]

Absolutely not. So this is another one of those things where there's the. The wrong version of the food, which is common and everyone knows and, like, thinks it's bad. And there's the real version of the food made right. With the real ingredients grown in the right way. And that's always even more delicious than this thing everyone's familiar, familiar with. And it's healthier. And ice cream is the perfect, perfect example of this because what do you have, you have raw milk, right? Which is naturally high in all the relevant vitamins. So, like, milk is cool because it's the only. It's the only food designed to sustain mammalian life without anything else. Right.

[Mia]

Perfectly balanced carbs, fat, protein, you have all the vitamins. It's hydration, there's a lot of minerals.

[Steven]

Yeah. Every mammal goes from like, barely able to walk to like, mostly functional on a purely milk diet. Milk is great.

[Mia]

So that's how European survived winter.

[Steven]

Yeah, pretty much.

[Mia]

Right?

[Alex Clark]

Yeah. Nobody talks about that.

[Steven]

The ability to digest dairy is a massive evolutionary advantage to anyone that can do it because you have like, your food source is before refrigeration, right? Before packaging, before preservatives. And you just have your food that walks along with you and it feeds itself, it cleans itself, it waters itself, it poops itself, and you just like, get food from it that's like perfectly nutrient dense and calorically abundant. And you just, just eat it and it's great.

[Alex Clark]

Well, how about a food that everybody thinks is really healthy that you guys do not. Which is raw vegetables.

[Steven]

Oh, yeah. I mean, so cruciferous vegetables, I'd say, are the worst. Like kale. Kale's the worst. And the reason for this is largely due to the anti nutrients, specifically, like calcium oxalate. So oxalic acid is this indigestible, like, crystal thing made of calcium. And so my. My uncle's functional medicine doctor, he told me this really crazy thing once. A lot of his patients that come to him who are like big green smoothie gals mostly, they have these crystals in their urine which are precursors to kidney stones. And they're caused by calcium oxalate, which is in cruciferous vegetables. All those supposed vitamins that are in kale are not the right forms for humans. So it has vitamin K, but it's vitamin K1 and we need vitamin K2. It has vitamin D, but it's vitamin D2 and we need vitamin D3. It has calcium, but it's calcium oxalate and we can't digest it and gives us kidney stones. So it's like this deceptive thing. You know, we think that it's good for us, but we can't actually access any of it. It's kind of like I of the, the gold in Aladdin, right? We see it, we think we can get it, we take it out of the cave and the whole cave collapses and the gold like turns dust.

[Alex Clark]

Well, I had this woman, Sally Norton on. Do you know her?

[Mia]

I listened to that. It was really good.

[Alex Clark]

Okay, so do you agree with what she was saying? Because that was very interesting with my audience. It's pretty split people that thought that was crazy of her saying vegetables are not healthy, they might be making you sick. And then half were like this answered so many unanswered, bizarre symptoms I have health wise. And I'm cutting out vegetables now and see how I do.

[Mia]

I honestly believe that. I mean, I personally healed a lot when I just had cooked vegetables and I had to avoid a lot of vegetables like kale, garlic, onion for a while. Peppers, peppers. Yeah. Even still, like, it causes indigestion. And I feel like, because I was so, so sensitive to all of that before, I still am a little sensitive, which tells me something, right? Like I could eat tons of meat and I'd be fine, right? I mean, I totally buy it. And I feel like there's a lot of, of people above our generation that think you need to eat more vegetables and live like the blue zones and whatever. But if you go to the blue zones, it's all meat. Like we literally went there this summer in Sardinia and it was snails and.

[Steven]

A giant snail steak.

[Alex Clark]

Did they do the garlic and the butter and all that at least?

[Mia]

Oh yeah.

[Steven]

One of the things about should I eat this or should I not eat this? The first thing is like, if it's fake food, no one should eat it full stop. Like if it's made in a factory, if it requires like technology, post 1840, 50 to manufacture, you should not eat it. I don't care who you are, you shouldn't eat it. On the other hand, it's all the foods that are natural, right? Garlic grown well is natural, peppers grown well. All this stuff is natural. But maybe I can't eat some of them and maybe she can't eat others of them. Maybe you can't eat others of them and some people can eat them just fine. And I think the issue is that people misunderstand the point of a diet. And the point of a diet is to heal something. I want to lose weight or I need to heal my gut or I have acne or whatever. Like that's the point of the diet. But like the goal is not to be in a diet forever. You should heal yourself and then try to live a normal, functional life eating as much and variety of stuff as is interesting to you. Again with the rule that everything should be real natural occurring food, not technology.

[Mia]

I mean, I like a balance plate, you know, like a good chunk of meat, a little bit of carbs, and a little bit of vegetables. Not overdoing anything, you know, because if you overdo the carbs, you're gonna be super full. If you ever do the vegetables, you'll be super bloated. Like, like just a good balanced plate, you know, it's just, it's simple. And people get so crazy about it.

[Steven]

Yeah. And they hear like, what I don't want to happen is someone to hear this and be like, oh, I like peppers. I can eat peppers. I'm going to stop eating peppers because they said to naughty peppers. No, I didn't say naughty peppers.

[Alex Clark]

I. I'm so glad you're saying that.

[Steven]

Can't eat peppers because I burp them up when I eat them. But you might not.

[Alex Clark]

I have, you know, tons and tons of different episodes. The different people have different opinions. It's like, I am not interviewing every person saying, okay, now every tip that every guest gives, you have to apply this to your life. I've never said that.

[Mia]

Right.

[Alex Clark]

Some people in my audience get so bent out of shape, they're like, well, really? Tan man said this. But then the guest before that said this, so how am I supposed to incorporate this? Like, why is, you know, Sally Norton saying no vegetables? And now this person's saying this. I'm like, you take what works for you. You are getting. If you are getting sick and you are eating salads every meal and you can't figure out what's making you sick, maybe it is the vegetables, but it's like, that is not for every single person. So I'm glad that you said that. There is nuance to some of this is of what is going to apply to you and what isn't. And then, you know, finding new tips and new perspectives and, you know, adding things here and there. But it's like, like this. People get very bent out of shape, like creating rules.

[Mia]

We listen to a podcast and we're like, oh, found our solution to health. Now we're healthy.

[Alex Clark]

It's like never done that.

[Mia]

It's a rocky road. Like, you have to figure it out.

[Alex Clark]

If you're listening and doing that, stop doing that. I'm telling you to stop.

[Steven]

And even if you do find the thing that works, okay, let's say we found it let's say we got the right combination of tips and then we're perfect. Guess what? Your body's going to be different next week, next month, next year. Y goes from daytime to nighttime, different seasons.

[Alex Clark]

You're working pre kids after kids.

[Steven]

You're working out a lot now you're not working out a lot. You're doing, you're getting a lot of sun this year, you're not getting a lot of sun next year. Your body's going to change. And especially for women, who I imagine are most of the people listening to this, like, even if your life stays the same, you're going to change constantly every single month. Right. And you're going to have to deal with that in your diet. So a lot of the biohacking stuff is mostly like a male dominated cultural category.

[Alex Clark]

That's a good.

[Steven]

It's like I want to find the right set of supplements and the right set of food and I'm going to eat the same thing every day. I'm going to work out at the same time, do the same things and I'm going to have my routine and it's never going to change. That's good. Maybe that's possible for men. Although I'd still say life will cause changes you could not anticipate. But even still, it's like maybe potentially possible. But if you're a woman listening this not possible at all, don't even try.

[Mia]

Which is why it's nice to kind of be removed from the mainstream a little bit because then you can listen to. What am I craving? Oh, I'm craving a steak. I'm going to eat a steak. Not like, oh, they're telling me steak is back and I need to go eat beyond meat or being in tune.

[Alex Clark]

With your body, which is the overarching theme that is the consistent theme is being in tune with your own body. Body and paying attention to hear those signs. Would you put sunscreen on your baby?

[Mia]

Never. No.

[Alex Clark]

Would you feed your baby raw honey?

[Mia]

Yes.

[Steven]

Yeah.

[Mia]

Yes.

[Steven]

I mean, he's not really eating much solid food anyway, so it's not a question.

[Alex Clark]

So you would give a baby under one honey?

[Mia]

Yes. Also, most of those studies are done when babies are like two to four months, so pretty much from like six months up, you could be okay feeding them a little. And I have friends that, you know.

[Steven]

I mean, to be fair, our baby is like 10 months old and still mostly eating breast milk.

[Mia]

Yeah.

[Steven]

And so it's like not even an option. But I don't know. Seems reasonable.

[Mia]

Yeah. But if he's sick. The other day I was worried there was a little honey in the tincture. I'm like, he'll be fine.

[Alex Clark]

What is so special about masa chips?

[Steven]

So remember how we're talking about how it's not the things that you avoid, it's the things that you have. So what it has is corn. Organic corn cooks the way that it was originally done by the Aztecs who invented the process of making corn digestible like several thousand years ago. It has good quality sea salt and has beef tallow, which is not only not a seed oil, it is very full in fat. It's rich in fat soluble vitamins. It's the best cooking oil. It's high in saturated fat. It's the type of fat, when you detox seed oils from your body, you're going to want to replace it with saturated fat.

[Alex Clark]

I feel better when I actually eat your chips, I swear. And I think it is because of the beef tallow giving me those healthy fats. I love how I feel when I eat your chips.

[Mia]

It fills you up faster. So seed oils don't fill you up, but saturated fat does. So you need fewer to feel satisfied. Satisfied, yeah.

[Steven]

In short, it's like the tortilla chip as it was meant to be, if you will. There's all these things that we were used to in modern society of like a fake this. I mean, clothes like. Oh, fake pants made of polyester. Oh, a fake table made of plastic and not made of wood. Oh, fake food made out of chemicals and not actual ingredients. It's, I would say, the best, in my opinion, snack that conforms to this idea of actual food. Right. It's actual food in a bag. It's not a packaged processed food.

[Mia]

Yeah. So it's not just a snack. Like we have it at meals. Meals, you know, like we'll have nachos for dinner or we'll bring it on the road, bring it traveling. And then we have like that plus a few other things and we have a meal. You know, it's food.

[Alex Clark]

I think the, the flavor everybody's sleeping on is churro. Oh yeah, those slap. I mean, with a little scoop of vanilla ice cream. That is my jam. Are those churro chips? You guys really did those, right? And I have to bring it up because it's a question I get asked a lot. Why are masa chips so expensive?

[Steven]

Expensive goes back to what we were saying before about this several hundred billion dollar food industry. Take Frito Lay for example. Doritos are the toxin filled masa chip. If you will. Frito lay has a 30 factories across the country, each of which produces, I don't know, several million to tens of millions of bags a year. All their machinery is automated and robotic. They don't have people, you know, they have just conveyor belts and all this stuff. And they get the cheapest possible ingredients. Ingredients at the lowest possible prices because they're buying entire fields worth of horrendously grown corn and whatever else. And lastly, they have these deals because they're so big with the grocery stores where their markup on shelf is lower than say mine would be. So a normal chip might be 35 to 40% of the sale price goes to the grocery store when you buy it at the store. But for Frito Lay, their products, it's like 25. Because they have these deals negotiated.

[Mia]

And everyone's like, why aren't you guys in Whole Foods? Why aren't you guys in Whole Foods? Like, well, they have to build it from zero. They don't have all this infrastructure in place place to be able to produce that many chips to supply to all the Whole Foods in the US So it's like we have to work on it slowly.

[Alex Clark]

Yeah, slowly. And then when that happens, that's when you'll start seeing prices lower.

[Steven]

Yeah. In contrast, like, we have one factory that's like a few thousand square feet with fryers that are manually operated by people like lifting them and stirring them and doing that whole thing. Seasonings for the most part, are applied by hand with a salt shake shaker, put into bags by hand. We're buying the highest quality ingredients we can get, which. And we're buying them at relatively, I mean, decently sized now, but it's still relatively small quantities compared to Frit Delay. So it's like everything that they have going for them that enables them to be cheap, we do the exact opposite. And I think the result speaks for itself. But yes, it comes at a cost.

[Alex Clark]

Yeah. And you do get 20 off with real Alex Clark, that [e-mail] with your first purchase. So people do have that if they've been wanting to try. And that also works for Vandy Chips. You guys own the parent company, company, I guess you would say Vandy Chips is a seed oil free potato chip. Best I have ever had. And all of my team, they're like, when are you gonna bring those vanity chips in, Alex? Like, they are addicted to those. So that's the new thing. And when I interviewed you a couple years ago, do you remember what I said? My wish list Was for Ancient Crunch.

[Mia]

No.

[Steven]

Wow. Remind me.

[Alex Clark]

I want Ancient Crunch to produce a really good gluten free seed oil free pretzel. Oh, there is no interesting pretzel that is gluten free and cedo free. The only thing I can find is like cauliflower pretzels are disgusting. So there's nothing.

[Steven]

Right.

[Alex Clark]

If you guys can master that, I will be so happy.

[Steven]

I will, I will definitely note that one. Keep you posted.

[Alex Clark]

That's what you said before. So I'm reminding you, I'm reminding you.

[Steven]

Takes time. I get it, I get it.

[Alex Clark]

Give us three simple steps someone can do today to start becoming a seed oil disrespectful specter.

[Mia]

Cook at home more.

[Steven]

Yeah. Eat out less. Or at restaurants that you know, can.

[Mia]

Cook with proper oils and ask questions. Read ingredient labels. Don't blindly just eat things, you know, like, become interested in what, Read the labels. Basically be aware about your eating.

[Steven]

If you, if you read the labels and you don't buy things that have sedos in them, you cook things at home, which is very, you know, relatively. You can find a lot of things that are good that you can cook at home. And if you eat out at restaurants that are veggies headed or, you know, you make a big stink and ask for butter or whatever, you'll be, I don't know, 90 of the way there. That's pretty much it.

[Alex Clark]

If you had one remedy to heal a sick culture, physically, mentally or spiritually, what would it be? Mia, I'll start with you.

[Mia]

I would say to just have faith, which is, it's super important. I feel like it's what got me through my pregnancy, my birth. At the end of the day, everything's in God's hands. So you do your best and, and when you do it in God's name, I feel like you just surrender and everything comes out how it should.

[Steven]

Okay, going back to what we said before about you can't just change the $100,000 billion industry overnight. I just do that. Right? All food resources involved in the production or sale of food in America only making real food. None of this like, oh, this is all. It's banned. It's like, no. Anything after 1850 gone. Right. All our farms are not growing like sunflowers for sunflower oil. They're growing like, they're growing cattle. Regenerative agriculture. Cattle, you know, to make, make tallow our dairy farms. None of this warehouse BS like cows on grass. You know that we milk. Our bodies are made of food. Right. It's not going to fix everything. Certainly not. But if there's, you know, if you are, you eat and we are a bunch of toxic chemical crap because we eat a bunch of toxic chemical, chemical crap, then everything else downstream of that is going to be a bunch of toxic chemical crap. And we don't want that.

[Alex Clark]

Well, you guys are my fave Internet couple. I adore both of you. I love your mission. I love your company. You guys have so much integrity just throughout the years. And Mazda Chips is just growing. And you guys have maintained all of the values that you said you stood for, which I've loved. And, you know, the first time I interviewed you, I was just a fan, not a sponsor, whatever. And now this has blossomed and you guys sponsor the show. You guys believe in what I'm doing, and it's just like this beautiful friendship. You guys came to the senate hearing when I testified with RFK Jr. That was crazy. You guys drove in and did all that with little tan olive oil baby. And so you guys have just become such good friends to me and I just love seeing everything you're doing. And my audience loves you. They love the first interview. So I'm so happy that Mia could join on this one, which is very cool.

[Steven]

Thanks so much for having us.

[Mia]

This is great.

[Alex Clark]

Well, my entire outfit is definitely not really tan Man. Olive oil queen approved. But that's okay. They still love me anyway. They've been amazing friends of mine in the show for years. Several years ago, I had really tan man on. It was like one of the first health and wellness episodes that I ever did because I just loved Masa Chips so much. They were not even a sponsor then. And now look where we are. Sponsors of the show, but also great friends. And they give good advice and life hacks and tips and tricks for living a healthier life. Please leave a five star review. If you love this episode, tell others why they should listen to Culture Apothecary. We're on a mission to heal a sick culture. Mondays and Thursdays, 9pm Eastern, 6pm Pacific. Every guest brings their own unique remedy to heal a sick culture physically, mentally and spiritually. Subscribe to Real Alex Clark on YouTube. Follow me on Instagram @realx Clark also you can follow the show on Instagram for extra content at Culture Apothecary. Also, don't forget, try Masa chips. I do not just say this. I've been a fan for years now. Now they are the best chips you will ever try. Masachips. Com. You'll get 20% off with my discount code. Real Alex Clark on that first purchase. I'm Alex Clark, and this is Culture Apothecary.