Why America's Food System Is Making You Sick | Jason Karp

Summary

Realfoodology Podcast Summary

Episode Title:

"Why America's Food System Is Making You Sick"
Guest: Jason Karp
Host: Courtney Swan
Date: July 7, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode features Jason Karp, founder of Hu Kitchen and investor in clean food brands, discussing the structural failures of America's food system. Karp unpacks how profit-driven motives, regulatory gaps, and cultural attitudes have conspired to create a toxic food environment, harming public health. He and host Courtney Swan delve into the business realities, regulatory loopholes, societal influences, and the hope for a cleaner future. Listeners learn why the US food system is uniquely broken, what’s fueling positive changes, and practical insight for making healthier choices despite the challenges.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Genesis of Hu Kitchen & Jason’s Health Journey

• Jason Karp’s Background: Former hedge fund manager who became ill and was diagnosed with a degenerative eye disease expected to leave him blind by 30.
  • "I went from what I thought was a pinnacle of health in college... to literally dying, and nobody could figure out what was wrong with me." (01:21, Jason)
• Turning to Ancestral Diets and Research: Studied indigenous diets and realized healing potential in returning to clean, ancestral ways of eating.
• Creation of Hu Kitchen: Initially started as a restaurant for “crazy fanatics” seeking pure food, it shifted to a chocolate company when they couldn’t find clean baking chocolate, resulting in a unique two-ingredient product that became widely successful.
  • "We were way ahead of our time... people thought we were insane." (01:06, Jason)
• Transition Post-COVID: Restaurant closed, brand continued as a chocolate producer.

2. Business Realities & Ingredient Sourcing

• Ingredient Upgrading vs. Profit:
  • Companies often downgrade ingredients for higher profit margins.
  • Upgrading (e.g., switching from canola to olive oil) hurts margins but improves health outcomes.
  • "I've almost never, in 27 years of being a professional investor, seen companies upgrade ingredients over time instead of downgrade, because when you downgrade, it improves profit margins." (17:12, Jason)
• Example: True Food Kitchen:
  • Karp’s investment led to a commitment to 100% seed oil-free menus, a massive industry rarity.
  • "We're the only national restaurant that's 100% seed oil free." (16:14, Jason)
• Retail Channel Pressures:
  • Selling direct-to-consumer is easier for healthy brands; retail is brutal due to slotting fees and “trade spend” (bribes for shelf space).
    • "Almost all grocery stores make the super majority of their profits off of slotting and tradespend, not from selling the food." (21:09, Jason)
  • Pricing: Healthier products are more expensive, partly due to lack of subsidies and higher costs for better ingredients.

3. Societal Attitudes, Cost Myths, and the True Price of Food

• The “Healthy Food is Elitist” Myth:
  • Americans spend less of their income on food than Europeans, not because they’re richer, but due to ultra-processed, artificially cheap options.
  • Government subsidies keep junk ingredients cheap, distorting true food costs.
  • "We have figured out a way to make food artificially too cheap, because it's not real." (25:40, Jason)
• Consumer Choices & Priorities:
  • Data shows most US adults (except the very poor) choose to spend on luxury goods or conveniences rather than on higher-quality food.
  • "If you can afford a smartphone, then you absolutely can afford to eat much healthier." (29:34, Jason)
• Challenge and Mindset Shift:
  • Try clean eating for two weeks and note the improvement.
  • "I haven't had one of those ever come back... and say, no difference." (35:19, Jason)

4. Science, Regulation, and Global Differences

• US vs. Europe:
  • US uses the GRAS (Generally Recognized As Safe) framework, allowing companies to self-certify novel ingredients with little evidence or oversight.
  • Europe follows the “precautionary principle,” requiring much longer-term testing and frequently outright banning questionable ingredients/dyes before evidence of harm arises.
    • "In Europe... they actually have disdain for ultra cheap food." (28:46, Jason)
• Industry Tactics & Lobbying:
  • US food companies use lobbying and aggressive pricing to keep ultra-processed foods dominant, and adapt formulations to local restrictions abroad but don’t offer those safer versions in the US.
  • Issue of artificial dyes:
    • "Americans didn’t even have a choice to get the cleaner version." (48:53, Jason)
• Recent Regulation Advances:
  • Multiple states are moving to ban dangerous food chemicals/dyes in schools and consumer foods.
  • Companies will likely reformulate for all states due to the complexity of keeping different versions.

5. Politics, Bipartisanship, and Movement Building

• Healthy Food as Nonpartisan:
  • The clean food movement risks being politicized in the current climate, but the issue crosses party lines.
  • "Poisoning our children should not be a political or partisan thing." (56:28, Jason)
  • Need to separate message from messenger to unite for public health.
• Moms as Movement Leaders:
  • Cites the powerful grassroots activism from mothers driving change at the community and national levels.

6. Psychological Impact: Orthorexia and Risk Balance

• Danger of Extremes:
  • Warning against neurotic avoidance of all toxins ("orthorexia"), which can itself be harmful through social isolation and stress.
  • "If you get to the point where you no longer can eat out... that's going to be more self-destructive than not doing this." (66:04, Jason)
  • Focus on major, consistent improvements, not perfection:
    • "Control the controllables... it’s about consistency, not perfection." (67:25, Courtney)
  • Social connection outweighs the minor risks from occasional dietary lapse.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Profit-Driven Ingredient Downgrading:
  • "When you downgrade the ingredients, it improves your profit margins... that’s what's happened over the last 40 years with modern business." (00:00, Jason)
• On Food Prices and Consumer Choices:
  • "Americans have gotten hooked on artificially low-priced food." (22:54, Jason)
  • "If you can afford a smartphone, you can afford to eat healthier." (29:34, Jason)
• On Regulatory Failures:
  • "The FDA got overwhelmed and allowed self-certification... literally with their own 'research'... and then the FDA rubber stamps it." (45:07, Jason)
• On Bipartisanship in the Movement:
  • "Poisoning our children should not be a political or partisan thing." (56:28, Jason)
• On Balancing Caution and Living:
  • "You have to be logical with what different risks you're taking on in your life... if you’re isolating yourself and not hanging out with other people and you're lonely, you are having way higher health risk than any chemical you can avoid." (68:02, Jason)

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Important Timestamps

• [01:21] Jason’s health decline and healing journey
• [05:05] Origin of Hu Kitchen & clean chocolate
• [11:57] Discovery and investment in True Food Kitchen
• [16:14] The massive challenge of making a restaurant seed oil free
• [17:12] Why most companies downgrade ingredients for profit
• [21:09] Supermarkets and bribery: “slotting” and “trade spend”
• [25:40] Real cause of cheap, unhealthy food in America
• [29:34] Myth-busting the expense of eating healthy
• [35:19] Jason’s two-week clean eating challenge
• [45:07] How US food regulations allow new chemicals into the food supply
• [48:53] American parents denied access to clean-label food
• [52:04] Legislative progress on food dye bans
• [56:28] The dangers of politicizing food safety
• [66:04] Warning about orthorexia and balancing health risks
• [68:02] The risk of social isolation from extreme dietary vigilance

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Tone & Approach

The conversation balances policy critique, personal narrative, and pragmatic advice with strong, plain-spoken opinions and the passion of seasoned activists. Both host and guest employ humor and self-deprecation, aiming to empower and challenge listeners, while acknowledging the psychological realities of striving for wellness in a broken system.

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Actionable Takeaways for Listeners

• Know your food system history and regulatory landscape—America’s issues are systemic.
• Be skeptical of cheap, ultra-processed foods. True costs are hidden; healthier choices are often accessible with small shifts.
• Push for policy change and support grassroots advocacy—your voice matters, especially at the state level.
• Practice “control the controllables”: Focus on consistent improvements at home and avoid neurotic extremes.
• Lean on common sense as well as science: Be vigilant, but not paralyzed, and trust real-world results.

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Connect With Jason Karp

• Instagram & X: @humankarp

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Final Reflection

This episode is a must-listen for anyone seeking to understand why US supermarket shelves are full of “food-like substances” and what it takes—personally, economically, and politically—to make the needed changes for a healthier future. The message is hopeful, pragmatic, and deeply grounded in both research and lived experience.

Transcript

[A]

When you downgrade the ingredients, it improves your profit margins. And that's what's happened over the last 40 years with modern business. And part of the reason of why we're here today, when everyone's like, how did our food system get so fucking toxic? It's primarily because of capitalism.

[B]

Jason, thank you so much for coming on.

[A]

Thank you for having me. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[B]

This is going to be super fun.

[A]

Yeah. Let's get into it.

[B]

So actually, I don't know if we've ever talked about this. I've talked about it a lot with Jordan. I was a hu. Kitchen super fan when you had the actual restaurant in New York. Yeah. So I used to work as a nutritionist for a pop star on the road. I was with her for four years, and she was based out of New York in the very beginning of when we started working together.

[A]

Is that right?

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Which pop star?

[B]

Tovlo.

[A]

Oh, wow. Yeah, I remember. Yeah, sure.

[B]

Yeah. So I was with her for four years, and in the beginning, she was based out of New York. And so I would go and, you know, I'd spend, like, two, three weeks out there, and I would be Ubering or taking the train every day to Hugh Kitchen.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Because it was my little mecca. It was one of the only places I found that I could just eat freely and not have to worry about anything on the menu.

[A]

Yeah, we were crazy. I mean, we were way ahead of, like, so far ahead of our time that people thought we were insane. People. Most people don't realize or know that Hugh Kitchen started as a restaurant before it was a chocolate company.

[C]

I know.

[B]

Which is wild. That many people didn't know that.

[A]

Yeah, a very small percentage know that. The genesis behind it was several years earlier. I was a hedge fund manager for about 20 years, and in the early part of my career, I got really sick and I was going blind. I was diagnosed with degenerative eye disease, for which there's no cure. And I was supposed to be fully blind by the age of 30. And it was a deeply difficult, depressing, awful time for me. I couldn't understand how I went from what I thought was a pinnacle of health in college, where I was a Division 1 college athlete, to a few years later, I was literally dying, and nobody could figure out what was wrong with me. And I had all these different diseases, but the eye disease was the worst because it was literally making me go blind, and it was obviously impacting my daily life significantly. And it's probably too long of a story for this one, but I Went down these pretty esoteric areas of research. My background was as a data scientist and as a researcher on indigenous people and how they were significantly healthier than we were even 25 years ago. They generally have zero chronic disease, no obesity, no heart disease, no diabetes. And it sparked this thought in my mind that definitely was divinely inspired to see if I could cure myself with food at a time which was 25 years ago now, at a time when that wasn't like a thing. And this was very early Internet, there was not many resources out there. And I wanted to see if I could reverse my diseases through ancestral living. And it worked. And that ultimately became. There were several kind of inspirations that I was reading along the way. Dr. Mark Hyman, Dr. Andrew Weil, who was the founder of True Food Kitchen.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

And Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food, An Omnivore's Dilemma. And there were a bunch of these things that I just kept finding. And eventually my brother in law, Jordan, started reading them with me. And he wasn't sick like I was, but he started noticing how much better he felt and how much better everything in his life got. And he said to me one day, he was in real estate at the time. I was managing a hedge fund. And he said to me, he said, there needs to be the manifestation of all this stuff that we're doing as a restaurant. Like, we need somewhere to eat every day. And I was like, dude, I'm a professional investor. Restaurants are not easy businesses. Like, we don't know the first thing about restaurants. I said, no way. And if you know Jordan, you know, he can be very persuasive. And so we spent a lot of time together on it. And I'm like, you know what? Like, if I could just break even on this thing and I could have a place to eat every day and we could prove to New York City that you could actually have amazing, delicious food that happens to be super clean and done in a way that no one's ever done before. I just kind of said, okay. And we had no outside investors. It was incredibly imprudent the way we did it. But we hired a bunch of consultants who knew what we didn't know. We were at least humble enough to know what we didn't know. And Hugh Kitchen HU stands for human, most people call it. Who? Even though it's hu. We went to our absolute best efforts to try to make people pronounce it hu. Even on like the chocolate bar, it says get back to human with the HU logo in the word Human. And people still call it who, but fine. But it started as a restaurant.

[C]

And

[A]

our entire mission was the fact that we don't live in an optimal way the way humans thrive. And so hence the phrase get back to human, which is why it's called Hue. And the chocolate was an accident that came out of the restaurant where we had the. You may recall, we had that baked goods section. I remember, where we had gluten and grain free scones, muffins, cookies.

[B]

The paleo bread that you guys had.

[A]

Yeah, the pumpkin and the banana bread. But we needed chocolate chips for our stuff. And we wanted. It was right before we opened. We could not find chocolate chips that met our specs. Cause every chocolate chip that we could find had genetically modified white cane sugar in it. It had soy lecithin in it, it had preservatives in it. And we could not find chocolate chips. So we just said, you know, we gotta make our own chocolate chips for the baked goods. And we hired this consultant to help us do it with two ingredients, which is organic cacao and organic unrefined coconut sugar. And the consultant, who was a chocolatier, thought we were insane. He's like, you can't make chocolate this way. All chocolate, which we, again, we didn't know. But all chocolate that you could find, except for at like farmer's markets, was made with highly refined white cane sugar. That's like a global thing. And the first few versions that we tried with just those two ingredients. It only has two ingredients. Those first two versions we tried were disgusting. But we learned the hard way. There's incredible, if not close to infinite variability on how you make chocolate. And what I think made Hue chocolate so amazing, and I credit it to Jordan, was the way in which we make our chocolate was highly, highly differentiated and unique. And then we started selling. We liked the chocolate chips so much, Jordan said, hey, let's turn them into chocolate bars and sell them in the restaurant. And they were like handmade, and they didn't have ingredient labels on them.

[B]

I remember them.

[A]

And we were selling them for 10 bucks a bar, and people were buying them five at a time. And after a couple months, I said to Jordan, I go, jordan, I'm a businessman. We got something with this. People are coming in from out of state to buy our chocolate. And then we had this lucky break where one of our chefs, his girlfriend was a local forager at the Columbus Circle Whole Foods location back pre Amazon, when Whole Foods could have these local foragers, they'd basically buy local products and Just bring them into one store, even though they didn't have, like, the regulatory framework that you need to sell national product.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And she said. She's like, this is the best healthy chocolate I've ever had. Can we sell it in Whole Foods? And we said, sure. And that was the beginning of Hugh Chocolate.

[B]

Wow. I actually have never heard that story before. Yeah. And then you guys sadly closed during COVID I think. Right. Hue Kitchen. I was bummed.

[A]

Yeah. We were open almost nine years, and our lease was up, and we had kind of a lucky break in timing because by that point, the chocolate company or the chocolate part of Hugh had become, like, what Hue was. And the restaurant was almost more this, like, experience that people. Like, for the first four or five years, people would know about the restaurant and they discover the chocolate. And then in, like, the second five years, people knew about the chocolate and they'd come to the restaurant the same way you'd go to, like, the M and M store.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

In Times Square, and people would be like, this is the huge chocolate restaurant. And, you know, the restaurant was for a lot, for many of us, it was very bittersweet. It made a little bit of money, but it wasn't. It was a spectacular amount of work. Everything was homemade. Everything was homemade. It was basically seven days a week, breakfast, lunch, and dinner. We had infinite complexity. It was not run as a business. And the amount of work we had to put into the restaurant to just make it go relative to the chocolate was so insane that when Covid hit, we could see the writing on the wall very quickly that people just weren't showing up. And we had this huge overhead. We had all these employees, and the lease was basically up that year. And so we just said, you know what? Let's end that chapter. Let it go. And I had moved to Austin the year before, so I'd moved to Austin in 2019, and we closed Hugh New York in 2020. And then a year, you know, and then it just became the Chocolate Company.

[B]

Yeah. I remember I ran up to Yalls booth at Expo. It must have been in 2020. And I was like, no, you're closing Hugh Kitchen. I was so bummed.

[A]

But I know. But now True Food is. But now you have True Food Is my, like, second chapter of the clean

[B]

restaurant movement, which is so funny because you didn't even want to open Hue Kitchen. And now here you are opening all these true food kitchens.

[C]

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[B]

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[C]

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[B]

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[C]

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[A]

The True Food Kitchen story is also pretty amusing and when we had moved to Austin, I have two kids and we were just looking around for clean places to eat as a family and I hadn't heard of True Food Kitchen. I'D certainly heard of Andy Weil, and I'd heard he'd started a restaurant, but I didn't know there are two True Foods in Austin, and there's. There were none on the east coast, so I'd actually never come across one. And then we heard about it, and, you know, it's basically. It's a more approachable Hugh kitchen. It's obviously. It's bigger. It has servers, it has wine and alcohol. Yeah. Yeah. It's sort of, like, hard to describe if you've never been. I kind of describe it as, like, if you went to Houston's or Hillstones and, like, you made it healthy, or if you had like a. Like a healthier, more upscale Chili's, like, that's what True Food is.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And it was far more approachable to me than Hugh was. You know, Hugh was for the crazy fanatics like we are, but, like, definitely not mass market.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And we had this investment vehicle that I created under the human company, which is my. My business called Humanco. And we buy and build and invest in things that we try that allow people to live healthier lives. That's our mission. And we had this investment vehicle where we were looking to buy a stake of a big business. And one day we were at lunch, we were going there all the time, and my wife looked at me, and she goes, why don't you do it with True Food Kitchen? Because we were looking at all these other companies, and I was like, I don't even know anything about True Food Kitchen. I don't know how big it is. I don't know how many states it's in. I never looked into it. And then we looked into it, and the more we looked into it, the more I got excited. And it was started in 2008 by Andy Weil. He partnered with a very famous restaurateur, a guy named Sam Fox, who was the guy behind North Italia and the Henry and a bunch of other brands. The global ambassador is Sam Fox, and Andy was kind of like the North Star. And Sam Fox was the person who knew how to run a restaurant. And it started in Scottsdale, Arizona. There were about 40 of them when we were looking at buying a steak in it. And today there's 46. And it's the number one full service, kind of farm to table restaurant in the United States. And right after we made our first investment, they stopped cooking with seed oils, which was over two years ago. So this was. Now. It was interesting because I wanted to say that we were 100% seed oil free. And by the way, Hugh, Kitchen was seed oil free back in 2012. I remember it. And I wanted to say we were seed oil free at Truthful Kitchen. But what I realized is that there's still some ingredients that lurk in a couple of the condiments. One of the gluten free hamburger buns had seed oils in it. There were these dried cranberries that were in a couple of the salads that had. They're coated in sunflower seed oil. And I didn't realize you can't get dried cranberries that aren't coated in sunflower seed oil. You can't get them. They don't exist in this country because they don't want the dried cranberries to stick together. And I said to the team, I said, what would it take for us to go 100% seed oil free? And they're like, well, we got, you know, especially with like 46 restaurants, there's a lot of work that goes into that. It's not just like figuring out that this like, oh, get rid of the dried cranberries. There were recipes that had condiments in it that we didn't technically cook with it, but there was a mayo that had seed oil in it and there was a this that had seed oil in it. And it's like, wow. It's like a huge endeavor. And it took the true food team. Kudos to them almost like a year and a half from when we started to be able to go from 98 and a half percent seed oil free and certainly not cooking with it to 100% seed oil free. We're the only national restaurant that's 100% seed oil free.

[B]

That's so amazing.

[A]

And then we're constantly upgrading the ingredients. That's the other thing that I've done with some of my brands. We did it when we bought against the Grain Gourmet, which was our favorite gluten free, grain free pizza company in my house. So we bought that company under Human company. They make amazing clean labels, simple ingredient gluten and grain free pizzas out of this really cute facility in Brattleboro, Vermont. But they were using canola oil. And as soon as we bought it, we substituted out the canola oil for olive oil. But doing that was obviously not good for our margins. It obviously took a while to reformulate and figure it out. But I feel like entrepreneurs who have some flexibility with their investors, which fortunately I do. I feel like we have a duty to upgrade the ingredients, not downgrade the ingredients. And As a, like, lifelong professional investor, I can tell you that I've almost almost never, like, I could count on one hand in 25 years of being a 27 years of being a professional investor, the number of companies that have upgraded ingredients over time instead of downgraded. Because when you downgrade the ingredients, it improves your profit margins.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And so all these big companies, all these big private equity firms, whenever they buy companies, it's not that they're malicious and they're like, ooh, I want to poison Americans. It's that it's more profitable. So they look at it and they're like, oh, wait, we could substitute this thing out for something that's cheaper, more reliable, and that's going to improve our profits. Let's do that. And that's what's happened over the last 40 years with modern business. And part of the reason of why we're here today, when everyone's like, how did our food system get so fucking toxic? It's primarily because of capitalism and the profit mode and so True Food and Against the Grain and Cosmic Bliss and Amara Baby Foods, which is one of our businesses also, we have gold standard ingredients and we're constantly looking to upgrade them. And that's something that I rarely see.

[B]

I know. And how. Because I know so many people are asking, okay, first of all, how do we get here? But then how do we fix this? How do we incentivize these companies to actually make a good profit while also creating healthy, clean products for people?

[A]

That's the hardest thing, to be honest. You know what I have done, even though some of my investment outcomes have been very good, and we ended up selling Hugh Jordan still works there, but we ended up selling Hugh for a very high valuation. But Hugh never really made money. And the restaurant did, but the chocolate company didn't. And I view part of what I do as partially philanthropic. Now. I'm fortunate that I can do that because of all the success that I've been blessed with over the last 30 years. But it's really hard. And it's why you don't see more healthy food companies, because it is inherently lower margin. And the problem is that so much of food consumption comes from retail channels like grocery stores, places like Walmart and Costco and Target and H E B and you name it. And all these grocery stores have a promise of low prices. And some of them, like Walmart, have everyday low price where they're literally competing on price. And when you're competing on price, and that's the message you send to your consumer, Doritos will always be cheaper than Siete because they, they have much larger production capacity. It's made with a lot of chemicals and it's just inherently a higher profit margin item. And it's, it's much harder for the little guy to fight the bigger guys because they have a lot more marketing budget, they have a lot more profits, and then they have this, this really ins, insidious relationship with the grocers that very few people will tell you about. Most consumers don't know this, but almost all the grocery stores except for the club ones like Costco, they have two forms of payment that they receive from food companies that are basically bribery. But they have an industry term for the bribery. One is called slotting and one is called trade spend. Slotting is when you pay the grocery store for specific positioning and placement and you're like literally paying them to slot your product, which of course you shouldn't have to do because that's the business the grocery store is in.

[B]

Yeah, that's crazy.

[A]

But they pay for slotting. And tradespend is this catch all bullshit term for in store marketing. But they're paying the grocery store to do it. And it turns out, and the grocery stores don't disclose this, and they never will publicly disclose this, that most of the grocery stores make the super majority of their profits off of slotting and tradesmen. They don't make that much money off of selling the food. And so when you take a mega brand like Frito Lay, which is owned by Pepsi, which is what makes Doritos, they make so much money from selling bags of chemicals and air, which is what Doritos are, that they then take that money and they turn back to the grocery store and they keep re bribing them all the time. So that, that's why when you go in the center of a grocery aisle, you see a whole center section of the shittiest food. Cause they pay for that. And then the little guy who uses and procures real ingredients, they can't charge what they need to charge because these grocery stores have hooked all of us on artificially low priced food. This food should never have been this cheap in the first place. And then it turns into this whole gaslighting argument of like, oh, you have to be wealthy to eat healthy. And like it's bad for America if these prices are higher. That food should never have been that cheap in the first place. And what's happened is Americans have gotten hooked on artificially low priced food and this is not the Case in Europe, which again, most Americans don't know this, that 40, 50 years ago, the percentage of the paycheck was comparable in Europe on food as it is here in the US So the amount as the average person spends as a percentage of their paycheck, the percentage of that that they spend on food used to be comparable in Europe to what it is here in the US 40 years ago. Today, Americans spend half as a percentage of their paycheck on food that Europeans do.

[B]

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[C]

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[B]

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[C]

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[B]

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[B]

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[B]

But if you were to open my

[C]

medicine cabinet and look at the medicine that I have in my home, none of it is conventional. I always go for before the natural, cleaner versions that don't have dyes and artificial ingredients in there. And this is why I love beekeepers naturals. I keep a lot of beekeepers naturals stocked and on hand. And one ingredient I've learned a lot about lately is propolis. It's what bees use to protect their hive. And for us, it helps support the immune system with antioxidants and bioactive compounds. Two things I always keep around are their propolis immune throat spray and the

[B]

propolis vitamin C liposomal packets.

[C]

And actually, you know what? I got to throw a third one in there.

[B]

The nasal spray. I always travel with it.

[C]

I the throat spray is great for daily support, especially when traveling or around lots of people.

[B]

And the vitamin C packets are an

[C]

easy addition when I'm feeling Rundown. These have honestly become staples in my routine.

[B]

Today.

[C]

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[B]

I mean, it's crazy. I don't think a lot of people know this.

[A]

Actually. It's a startling statistic. And it's not because we've gotten richer, it's because we've gotten grosser. And again, it's normalized for everyone's paycheck. So this isn't just like for wealthy people. And the reason is that we have figured out a way to make food artificially too cheap because it's not real. And so then when I go into a grocery store and I try to sell Cosmic Bliss, and Cosmic Bliss is organic. We have a plant based, we have 100% grass fed dairy line. We have no refined sugar.

[B]

It's so good, by the way.

[C]

It's so good.

[A]

So when I go into a grocery store and I say, hey, I need to sell a pint of Cosmic bliss for about $8 to $9 for me to not lose money. This isn't like I'm making zero profit. And they're like, well, but we're selling blue bunny for 5.50. And then I say, yeah, but Blue Bunny is made out of all chemicals. And it's genetically modified white cane sugar. The first ingredient is sugar. All these ice creams have 40% on average more sugar than we do. And ours is coconut syrup or coconut sugar. So ours is unrefined. I'm like, ours is organic, theirs is not organic. If it's dairy. They're using conventionally sourced, like abused cows. And I'm using pastured regenerative cows that are grass fed, grass finished, like they're apples to oranges. And then I say like, I need to charge $8 just to not lose money. And they go, we can't even put your product in our store because we can't have a $5 pint of ice cream next to an $8 pint of ice cream. And that is the story of so many healthy food products. And if you have the luxury of being able to sell direct to consumer where it's something that's not refrigerated or not frozen, you can get away with it. And that's why there have been a lot of big success stories that are dtc, but when it comes to refrigeration or frozen, it's impossible. And so I think the entire system needs to change. And I think the first step is what we're doing with HHS in terms of banning some of the ingredients completely so that you don't even have the ability to do that. And then I think it's a big education thing. And what gives me some optimism is that in Europe. Cause sometimes people are like, well, that will be impossible. And I say, well, they're actually doing it in other countries. They do it in France, they do it in Italy, they do it in Japan. And they're like, well, how does it work in those countries? And the reason is that they actually have disdain for ultra cheap food in those countries. Like they won't buy it. That's why they spend twice as much per paycheck on food as we do. Because when they see ultra processed fake shit, they just literally look at it like the way you would look at poison. They just don't buy it. And so those companies don't succeed. And we unfortunately in America, ultra cheap food, the Sonic Burger, the Chick Fil A, the Doritos, because of our advertising budgets, we have made ultra cheap food cool.

[B]

Yeah, we've glorified it.

[A]

We've glorified it.

[B]

That's the thing. And I've said this for so long, I'm so glad that you brought this up because I've said this so much on the podcast that people don't really actually understand what the true cost of food is. Yeah, because we're not seeing it in the grocery store. Because also too alternatively, we have a government that's paying subsidies to farmers to grow certain crops, which is why in ultra processed foods you always see in the back of the label may contain corn, wheat and soy. It's in literally everything because it's so cheap and we have a surplus of it.

[A]

That's right.

[B]

And so we don't actually know what the true cost of food is. And we need a whole reframe of society to start waking up and understanding that we're spending more money on luxury cars and, you know, brand new iPhones every year and, you know, designer bags than we are on the very food that fuels us and keeps us alive. And everybody thinks like, oh, you know, yeah, I'll go, you know, buy a new iPhone every year. But God forbid I buy anything organic because it's so expensive.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, this is a topic I bring up a lot, and it's controversial, but it shouldn't be. I was on the board of one of the top nutrition schools for four years, and I got to see a lot of the studies and a lot of the research and a lot of the polls. And this comes up all the time, and this misnomer that you need to be wealthy to eat healthy. And one of the studies they found, and this is all common sense too, but is that if you. If you cut off. So if you look at all the different demographics in the US in terms of their socioeconomic status, and you cut off at, like, the poverty line, where people can either afford a smartphone or not afford a smartphone. So that's the delineation. Can you afford a smartphone or not? If you cannot afford a smartphone, which is about 94, 95% of the US has a smartphone of some kind, if you can afford a smartphone, then you absolutely. And I'll get into it in a second. Then you absolutely can afford to eat much healthier. If you're below the poverty line and you literally need calories and you're on snap, it's a different discussion. And so separate those for a second. And then when you double click into the lowest socioeconomic demographic of the people who can afford a smartphone, so these are people who are basically right on the line. And then you double click and you say, well, what are they spending money on? Because they do have a little bit of discretionary income. You find that they're spending money on things like beer and cigarettes and even, like, streaming apps, like, everyone has Netflix or Spotify or something, or they have a pair of nikes that are $180, and you start realizing, like, oh, wow, like, this is totally selective. And then you also discover that once in a while, they buy a Frappuccino or a Starbucks for $7, and you're just like, so wait a minute, you're complaining that you won't pay an extra $3 for a pint of ice cream that's organic. That's four servings, by the way.

[B]

Multiple servings.

[A]

That's four servings, right? You're complaining about that, but you're buying $150 pair of Nikes because they're cool. Or you have Netflix or you have Spot. Like, you don't need Spotify, you don't need Netflix, you don't need, like, ever Starbucks. And unfortunately, then you get into this, like, freedom of choice debate, and people start to get angry. But if you're just talking about true capacity, like, is There money for them to reallocate and say, you know what, maybe you don't buy that Frappuccino. And maybe like what we found, and the data might be a little outdated now, is if you spend two to three dollars a day extra and you spend a little bit more time in terms of shopping, you can dramatically upgrade the quality of your food and not be stuck with the way I think everyone thinks we have to be stuck with the ultra cheap food.

[B]

Well, and this is controversial, but I always bring up the point that, you know, when you start feeding your body with more nutritious foods, your brain gets clearer. You can actually get yourself hopefully out of maybe that lower socioeconomic situation because you're actually thinking clearer and you're able to show up for your job, you know, with more energy. And this is just my personality 100%. But like, nobody talks about that. Or for you, you are the perfect example. Think about how many people in those situations are suffering from type 2 diabetes. Maybe they have to get a leg chopped off. God forbid. Your eye situation that you had, you were able to actually completely reverse that. And now you're not blind anymore and you can see that greatly impacted your entire trajectory of your. Yeah. And we're not talking about that. Where this could actually greatly change the entire trajectory and quality and situation of your life if you just simply make a couple upgrades around your diet and lifestyle.

[A]

Yeah. And look, I've also had a lot of people that I've met over the years since I've been like an activist. And, and I've said, look, don't knock it until you try it.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

And. And I, I will make a recommendation to. And I have in the past to certain people where I'm like, look, if you just go to the grocery store. So the one thing. So the price thing is a misnomer. What's not a misnomer is time. And the convenience part of it is a big deal.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Because a lot of people don't have that much time to cook at home.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

But if you go to a grocery store, you know, you can buy grass fed beef that can feed your entire family for less than like a family meal at Chipotle. And like a whole meal. And what I say is, look, tell me what your budget is. I'll tell you what to buy. You gotta go buy it at a grocery store. Just eat this way for two weeks. Not months, not years, two weeks. Just two weeks. And I want you to come back to me in two weeks and tell me how you feel. And I haven't had one of those ever come back to me and say, no difference. And so it's almost like we need to figure out a way to, like, do a challenge with people where you're like, just try it for a couple weeks. Like, you can knock it all you want, you can make fun of me, you could call me crazy. Just try it for two weeks. You don't need any scientific data. Like, just try it. And that's also where I get, you know, and you've seen this too, where we've had so many like, like opponents that have been claiming pseudoscience with us, and they're claiming that we don't because we don't have a PhD next to our name, that we can't possibly know what we're talking about in some instances. Or they say, like, there's just not enough scientific research. And I'll say, like, purpose. Yeah. And I'll just be like, well, I don't need any scientific research. Just try this for two weeks and come back to me.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And then, like, you can't believe how frequently you'll change people's mind if they just try it themselves.

[C]

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[B]

Well, there's also that statistic that it on average takes about 17 years for the science to catch up to what we already logically know to be true. Yes, logic is fast, science is slow. That is just a general statistic that we know about this. So the people that are saying, oh, we need you Know, we don't have the science to back that up. Well, we have plenty of people just changing their lives and seeing the difference in how they feel to know that we're onto something. You know, and there another thing is there is plenty of science about it, but a lot of it's getting suppressed by, you know, the companies that stand to make money off of us being sick and eating our ultra processed or eating their ultra processed foods.

[A]

There's a lot of science and it's just in some of the instances like the battle that I was facing with the food dyes was, and the battle that we faced with some of the seed oils is that it's not overwhelmingly conclusive. Right. There is plenty of science that show that seed oils are bad. There's plenty of science that shows that all the synthetically derived petroleum based artificial food dyes are bad. But there's also quote, science that shows that it's fine. And the first thing I bring up, and again, I used to be a data scientist, so I've read countless nutritional studies for 20 years and my background was literally in statistics. And the thing that you have, one of the first things you learn when you're becoming like a data scientist or you're dealing with statistics is garbage in, garbage out in terms of the data itself. And is the study itself reliable? Is the study itself replicable? And what are the inherent flaws with any of these studies? And what most people don't talk about is that all human nutritional studies are flawed, every single one. And now it doesn't mean that you can't rely on it at all. But you have to understand that we have never been able to. And it's both unethical and it's also impossibly impractical to try to isolate all the variables when you're dealing with humans. And you could try to do a study and say, oh, like the example I always bring up was one of the most famous studies from about 25 years ago that tried to advocate for veganism was called the China Study.

[B]

Oh yeah.

[A]

And the China Study has now since been thoroughly debunked. But it was a very famous Harvard like legit study that basically showed that when the standard of living amongst some of the rural population in China started to improve and they went from eating basically grains and what you would consider basic stuff to being able to afford meat, that when they started bringing meat into their diet, modern western diseases, particularly cancer, started showing up. And so they made this unbelievably robust, thick, peer reviewed study that basically said when you bring meat into the diet, it brings cancer in. But they weren't able to isolate every single variable. And so, for example, like, they weren't able to isolate that. When people's standard of living goes up and they start eating meat, are they eating french fries with that meat? Are they eating like processed food with that meat? Are they smoking more with that meat? Are they living a more stressed lifestyle? Are they living in more industrial places? So did they move from a place that had no pollution to Beijing where the pollution is like top three in the world? And then the. Probably the most important variable that's never been tested that I bring up all the time with concepts around meat consumption is what is the quality of the meat.

[B]

Exactly. They never talk about this in the

[A]

what is the quality of the meat? So they went from like, were they eating grass fed, grass finished pastured cows or were they eating industrial factory farmed cows that are literally full of antibiotics and hormones and shoved in cages and abused? Like, we have no idea. Like, there should be a study on people who eat just meat. And then like you, you start asking questions, well, like, what else? What other variables can you isolate? And you realize that even at its simplest form, if you take identical twins who are literally the exact same DNA, and you take one twin and you massively sleep deprive them and you put them under a ton of stress and you can measure that by their cortisol, cortisol levels, and you take the other twin and you allow them to live with good sleep, low stress, and you feed them the identical diet, they will metabolize it differently, they will show different markers of inflammation just from sleep deprivation and just from stress. And we most certainly do not control for that variable.

[B]

No. Yeah, I mean, that's the thing. And I'm so glad that you brought this up. It is very hard to quantify any of this because of all these different lifestyle factors that you just mentioned. Also, there was this meat study that came out a couple years ago and all these people were sending it to me being like, see, I told you meat causes cancer. Well, you read into the study and they were labeling the meat that these people were eating in the study lasagna. Well, what's in lasagna? Pasta, along with the ground beef, hamburgers with the bun on. And that's what they were calling meat and saying that this causes cancer.

[C]

And it's just, we're not.

[B]

Yeah, we're not actually.

[A]

Like, that's why I think common sense and intuition are so important and valuable. And like one of the areas of common sense and intuition. So I have a gluten intolerance, and it never. And it kind of came out more and more and more pronounced as I've gotten older. And some of the functional medicine people just completely rule out gluten and say, like, gluten's bad, Gluten's inflammatory. You can't have any of it. And, like, I wanted to believe that because I'm gluten free, but then, you know, my common sense, I've developed this. I have a lot of different, like, common sense rules of thumb. But one of them is if it's a food that's been around for thousands of years and has literally been part of civilization, which bread has been. Yeah, Right. And there's also cultures that, like, Mediterranean. I go to Italy and France every year. They have bread five times a day. Right. And they don't have anywhere close to our autoimmune issues that we do. And so when I hear about somebody claiming that there is an ingredient that has been civilizational and been around for thousands of years and to say that it is poisonous, my red flags in my head go up and go, wait a minute. There's something else going on. Because there's just no way that there's something that bad that, like, literally found, like, civilizations and the foundations of which were built upon. Yes, yes. And. And so with the gluten as an example, I think glyphosate has a huge role in what's happened, if not like, the primary role. And I also know that, and they've shown this, that the ancient wheat varietals that were used in biblical days and are still used in many of these European countries have significantly less gluten than the gluten than the wheat crop we use today. And we've hybridized the plant for hundreds of years for robustness, and in doing so, we've massively increased the gluten quantity. And so there's, like, a lot of those things. Like, when you hear something's bad, the first thing I would tell, like, your listeners to ask is, like, is this something that my grandmother cooked with, or is this something that's been around for hundreds or thousands of years? And if it is, there's something else going on, and it's probably the processing, and it's probably what we've done to it. And it's not the food itself.

[B]

Exactly. Robin o', Brien, to quote her from her book years and years ago, it's not the food. It's what we've done to the food 100%. And you can apply this across the board. Dairy, meat and then our ultra processed food. Which brings me to how you and I first met, which is when we spoke to the Senate roundtable and you very famously were talking about the food dyes that are in Kellogg's Fruit Loops that are not here, that are here in America where they're not selling that in other countries.

[A]

Right.

[B]

Which this always blows people, people's minds. And I'm sure most people listening by now already know about all this. But I want to talk and talk about this a little bit because your perspective about all of this is just very important. So in America we're adding these artificial petroleum based food dyes. And then you look at other places like Canada, which companies are making these? 4 other countries in Canada they use things like watermelon juice, blueberry juice.

[A]

Yep.

[B]

So what's going on there? And let's talk about what just happened with the fda.

[A]

So like, first off, it's just awesome that this is now happening.

[C]

It's so cool.

[A]

It's so awesome and it's so encouraging and I'm so happy and excited that I've had a small part in making it happen. The so where this all started was that we have in the U.S. we have a different regulatory framework called the GRAS policy, or the GRAS framework, which stands for generally recognized as safe. That started in 1958 and it was originally done to allow food companies to take ingredients that everybody knew were fine things like salt, baking soda, and not have them go through the FDA process for you to add them to formulations of complex ingredients. And because of capitalism and because the FDA has never been well run, the FDA got kind of overwhelmed and they allowed or created something called self certification, which allowed individual companies to hire their own independent experts who could self certify literally with their own quote, research, and submit a research report to the FDA that if they came up with a new chemical or a new synthetically derived ingredient that doesn't exist in nature and has never been seen before. And these experts, in some cases, literally it's two months of research, that's it. They basically put together their own report, they send it to the fda, the FDA rubber stamps it, and then the ingredient is allowed in our food supply. And in Europe, by complete contrast, Europe takes a much more common sense approach to not subjecting their citizens to random non natural things. And it's just a, it's a, they call it the precautionary principle because it is clearly more precautionary to say like, we don't have enough evidence on whether this works or not, or if it's safe or not. We're not just going to subject our people to this unless it's conclusively proven that it's safe. And in some cases they require testing of up to 10 years before it's allowed in. Whereas in our much more capitalistic approach, we don't want to stifle innovation and we want more and more companies to be created and more things to come on the market. And we want to constantly cheapen food, which again, these seem like noble causes, but we didn't really consider the downstream effects of allowing that. And there have been dozens of ingredients and dozens, frankly, pharmaceuticals that at one point were deemed safe, at one point had many peer reviewed studies that said they were fine. So like, if you were like a hardcore scientist who's looking at the studies, you'd be like, oh, it says it's safe. And then five years later, 10 years later, 15 years later, we learned the hard way where these things were proven. This just happened with Red 3. Right. Where Red 3 was actually banned in everything but food. It was banned in cosmetics in 1990 because it's carcinogenic. And then enough quote studies were now done as of six months ago where they're like, oh wait, that shouldn't be in our food either. And then they pulled it out. You know, this happened with Olestra, this happened with trans fats, this happened with asbestos, this happened with pharmaceuticals like thalidomide and Vioxx. Yeah, and Vioxx. And like it's happening now with glyphosate. Yeah, Where? There. And the point of all this is not to get angry at the regulatory system. The point of this is to, is to highlight to humanity that science is flawed and that we shouldn't over rely on science at the expense of common sense.

[C]

Yes.

[A]

Because that's what it shows you. It shows you. If we could have all of these exhaustive peer reviewed studies, if for a decade say it's fine and then all of a sudden it's not fine, that needs to tell you that our quote like system is fragile and it's not perfect. And if you know it's not perfect, then you must allow for common sense and you must allow for intuition into the system. And that's what Europe has done a really good job of. And so the Europeans over time basically started requiring warning labels, cigarette like warning labels on these food dyes. And then some of the preservatives like BHT and titanium dioxide, and those are outright banned. And the big food companies, who are multinational corporations, they want to create a product that complies with the standards of these other countries. So they started making versions of the same exact products we have here, like Froot Loops with better, cleaner ingredients, because those countries won't allow the shittier ingredients in them. Or they require you to put a terrible warning label on the front, which they don't want to do. And most Americans prior to our Senate roundtable were not aware that we didn't have the option as Americans to get the cleaner version. Like, we didn't even have a choice. And a lot of the moms that were awakened by that Senate roundtable were like, can't we just have both choices? And then, like, if you put a Froot Loops on the shelf that has artificial food dyes and bht and then the Canadian version right next to it, that doesn't have that shit, and you make it the same price. Yeah, let's see how many American moms are gonna choose the toxic ones. But we don't have that choice. And that created the outrage and that created the momentum. And that's what started all the state legislature, which was amazing. And I've testified now in front of the Texas House and the Texas Senate three times.

[B]

What was the response like for that? Were they pretty receptive?

[A]

Oh, my God, it was amazing. Like, I was kind of nervous going into it that I was going to get like a bunch of, you know, gotcha questions. And they were, Texas is a very proud, patriotic state.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

That really cares about its people, which I didn't appreciate until I moved here. You know, I came from New York.

[B]

Oh, yeah.

[A]

Very different New York. Very different. And they were like, this is insane. Like, they wasn't even, like, you know, when I displayed it and explained it and showed it. And there's 26 states right now. Half the ha. Like more than half the country has some form of legislation or bill to ban a bunch of these synthetic chemicals either out of the entire state or out of the school food programs.

[B]

Well, and I'm so glad that you brought that up, because I've been seeing some, you know, pushback from people online saying, oh, this isn't actually a ban. This is just a. We're. We're asking them to. But this is what people don't understand is that these companies are going to be required to comply no matter what, because 26 plus states are already working on the legislation to ban them anyways.

[A]

Yeah, those are official bans. So the state levels are official. And like West Virginia's official now, Utah's official, Arizona's official, California's official. Texas will be official very shortly. Those are complete bans with timelines. And I believe that enough states have already moved that it's already done. Because again, if you know how corporations work, they're not gonna wanna produce different products for different states. It's too ridiculous. It's a nightmare. It's absurd. If in two years time, if we get to the end of 2027 and none of this has happened and no formulations have changed, I will concede and say, yes, you were right.

[B]

I know a lot of the listeners are on board with all of this. Right. But a lot of them are probably getting pushback from friends and family. What do you say to people that are like that, hating and pushing back on every move that we're trying to make? How can we come together and try to get everybody on board with this?

[A]

Yeah, this has probably been the most upsetting part of this whole process because I, you know, I didn't properly calibrate how politically divided this could become. And, you know, as you may remember on our Senate panel, which was, I think, 12 or 14 people, probably more than half were historically Democratic.

[B]

Oh, yeah. It was very bipartisan people. Yeah.

[A]

And during that entire Senate roundtable on chronic disease, and I remember this because it came up right afterwards, not once was the word Republican or Democratic mentioned. And I think, and obviously, you know, Senator Secretary Kennedy was historically extremely left and comes from the most Democratic family of all time. And I think as soon as he joined forces with Trump, who's obviously so polarizing, it turned a lot of people against Kennedy and it turned a lot of people against Make America Healthy Again, because they viewed it as an implicit endorsement of Trump. And I just think it's so silly because I think what a lot of us are is the people who have been involved in this movement is we are what I would call truth seekers. We're just looking for truth. We don't care. And I will, and I'm very open minded, but I will negatively judge somebody if they can't separate the message from the messenger.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

And there's a lot of things that I don't like about Trump. Like a lot. But there's some things he says that I'm like, yes, I completely agree with that. There's things that Bobby Kennedy says that I don't agree with. And I think a proper democratic society allows for free speech and allows for disagreement. And I think to be A productive citizen. You have to be able to. To separate the message from the messenger. And there will be people you don't like who happen to have a correct statement, and there will be people that you do like that happen to have an incorrect statement. And you have to be able to be intellectually honest and secure enough in your own convictions that you can separate those two. And for me, I view the epidemic of mental health, the epidemic of physical health, and the epidemic of planetary health, which I call the metacrisis, to be a completely existential situation for humanity. And if we do not address the root causes of this metacrisis, we could debate all we want about all of these other silly things, but if we're not here, it doesn't matter. And so, to me, the chronic disease epidemic is at the ground zero epicenter of the problem. And I will put aside my politics, I will put aside my feelings of individual people, because I know for the betterment of our children, we have to change this stuff. And I wish that I've gotten hate mail and hate DMs from my friends.

[B]

Me, too.

[A]

I have things from people I consider friends. I had to block somebody that I thought was a good friend who had such massive Trump derangement syndrome that they could not see that what I was doing had nothing to do with an endorsement of Trump, that it was simply, I need to stop poisoning my children. And you could just see it. It is like a mind virus that takes over people. And I think poisoning our children should not be a political or partisan thing. This should be something that we should objectively talk about. And I don't care if it makes Trump look good.

[B]

I don't care.

[A]

I don't care who it makes look good or who it makes look bad. Like, this is something we have to solve.

[B]

Yeah. And from my perspective, I mean, my message has largely stayed the same for the last 14 years, and it's still the same now. And I'm just grateful that we have somebody on a public political stage actually talking about these issues. Right. However we can get this move forward is, to me, the best way to do this. And if it's gonna be under Trump, then so be it. But there's so many other amazing people that are involved. Bobby Kennedy, Marty McCarry. You know, there's so many people that are pushing this forward, and this really has become this amazing grassroots movement that has been largely been moved by the people it has.

[A]

And the moms.

[B]

And the moms.

[A]

And the moms, you know, because I think the moms I mean, look, I, I, I think there, there are many concerned dads, and I'm a concerned dad. But, you know, the, the moms have really come out in a way that I was so pleasantly surprised by in terms of their grassroots activism. The number of people that showed up with us to the Kellogg's march was unbelievable. We had a thousand people show up for that in Battle Creek, Michigan, in, like, October. I mean, it was crazy. It was amazing, but it's such an interesting time. And the one thing I will say too, that sometimes I have publicly talked about with Callie and Vani, who are two of my partners on the initial food dye momentum is, I think in the beginning of this movement, we had to be more loud, antagonistic, and divisive to make our point and to be heard. But now, in some respects, we've won. And now I think it's really important that we drop the anger and we drop the antagonism, because all we're doing is we're creating more divisiveness instead of less. And I think compassion and more, what I would call feminine energy needs to be brought into the conversation because it's gotten very macho and very like, loud, angry, yelling, embarrassment. And that's not my style. And I also just don't believe you will get as many people on board if you're doing it through anger and antagonism than if you're doing it through compassion. And what I've seen, and I've had a lot of firsthand conversations with people who were on the other side, is that that humans in general have a really hard time drastically changing their mind. It's a natural, instinctive thing, and it requires a lot of strength and courage to take something that you held so deeply and be like, wait, I was wrong. Oh my God, I got to completely change my mind on this. That was a skill I had to develop early on as an investor, because to be a good investor, you have to change your mind when facts change rapidly. And it's very hard for people to change their mind. And I think to get people to embrace the fact that we have been lied to for so long about a lot of topics, not just food. You know, whether it's the JFK assassination or it's the UFO phenomenon, like, there's a lot of things we've been lied to about that historically everyone used to think were all conspiracy theory things, but they're not. And I mean, there's obviously plenty of conspiracy theory things that are insane, of course, but, but it's become clear to me that there was a lot more things we were lied to about than I even thought were possible. And then to be able to handle that and be able to wake up in the morning and not think like, oh my God, what do I do? My reality was just shattered. It requires some handholding and it requires some compassionate conversation to say, hey, everything's gonna be okay. And I think it's important that all of us in this movement, because we know we're right. We don't need to yell, we don't need to be angry, we don't need to embarrass people. We should just stand firm in our convictions of truth. Because the more I think you yell and the more angry you become, the more it looks like you might not be on the right side because you're going out of your way to try to embarrass somebody else.

[B]

Yeah. And that's not the way that you win people over too. You win more bees with honey than you do with fire.

[A]

Marty said, think it's a hard thing right now. Like, it's really hard, you know, and like, like I have two kids and like, they hate the fact that I'm right about food dies.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

You know, and they want to eat all the that that their friends are eating. And like, it's hard for them because their friends are like, your dad's crazy. Like, let's just eat this stuff, you know, and I, I'll tell you one funny story. This is amazing. This is amazing. We're not a micromanagement style parenting household and we believe in our kids learning their lessons on their own, but we obviously try to guide them the way we can. And my daughter was going away for this like, weekend school trip and my, and she asked my wife to help her pack. And my wife went, you know, and just started grabbing her bags. And you know, like, you're always, as a parent, you know, especially when you have a 16 year old daughter, you're expecting to find like weed, you know, or beer, you know, and there was a bunch of red food dye candy in her bag and that's what she was hiding. In her bag was red food dye candy.

[B]

That's funny.

[A]

And ironically, I was hurt more. I was like, I wish there was drugs in there. Like, I know, like, this was like such a, such a blow to me, you know, as like one of the visible leaders of the food dye movement. But it's funny because, like her, you know, it's so hard societally. And at some point I'm sure cigarettes reviewed the same way.

[B]

Oh, for sure.

[A]

And I think when people ask, like, what do I hope things feel like or look like in 15 years? I said, I would like that. We look at some of this stuff 15 years later, and they're like, I can't believe we ate that shit. Just like we couldn't believe people used to smoke in airplanes. And we look at that and we're like, those people were nuts. But, like, now we think they're nuts. But, like, 40 years ago, when I was on airplanes, like, people smoked on airplanes.

[B]

I know, it's crazy.

[A]

So that's where I think it's going. And I think it's just gonna be time.

[B]

Yeah, I think that's absolutely where this is headed. And, yeah, we just. We're early adopters to all of this, and that's why everybody is yelling at us and thinks that we're crazy. But, you know, give it 10 or 15 years. I've been in this movement long enough to see how all of us, you know, in the beginning, everybody thought I was crazy and like, oh, why do you eat that way?

[C]

You're nuts.

[B]

And then now, you know, I have people calling me all the time. Wait, you were onto something? Yeah, but it just takes some time, you know, to get there. Yeah.

[A]

The other thing I think that's come up a lot recently that I do think is an important topic for your listeners is orthorexia.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

And there's been some funny memes from some of our friends where it's like the phases of becoming awakened. And you go through this phase where you think every single thing around you is complete poison. And you're like, oh, my God, I can't live.

[B]

I live in a bubble.

[A]

I can't live. Everything's voices. Everything's voices. And I think what I. Because I've been in this for a long time now, the first thing to note to your listeners is that the body has natural detoxification methods. And there are a lot of things that, in small doses, and if you just can't avoid it, like microplastics or forever chemicals or red 40, like, you're going to be fine, fine. You know, obviously you don't need to have them, but there are sort of acute levels of toxic exposure, and there's a. And there's degrees of, I think, toxins that are out there. Like, I will never eat glyphosate if I can avoid it ever. Like, not even, like a dose.

[B]

Like, not even a drop.

[A]

Like, not even a drop if I can avoid it. But is it possible? That I could go a week without having any microplastics. It's literally impossible.

[B]

Possible.

[A]

It's not possible. I'm not going to drink out of a plastic bottle. But like when you go to a restaurant, you have no idea like where certain things came from. And what I will say is that the people who go too neurotic, your stress levels will go up so much that you will overpower all of the things that you're trying to do by living clean. Because if you get to the point where you no longer can eat out, you get to the point where you no longer can eat with friends, you become very isolated. You're constantly like hyper vigilant and you're on edge. That's gonna be more self destructive than not doing this.

[B]

And you're still gonna get exposed to

[A]

some of those things and you're still gonna get exposed. So I would just say like, I know this sounds terrifying and we're gonna clean this shit up. But there are things that you can do that will massively reduce your toxic burden. If you exercise daily, if you sweat daily, certain supplements that are basic supplements, not biohacking supplements will dramatically help. There's certain things you can do where you're gonna be fine. And I just wanted to like get that out there because these kind of conversations lead to incredible neurosis.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

And I just want people to know you don't need to be that neurotic.

[B]

Yeah. And if people have been listening to the podcast for a while, they know I have a personal story where I've talked about all this, where I got really neurotic about it. I was avoiding dinners with friends. I would eat before. Cause I wanted to make sure everything was organ and meticulous. And then I'd meet friends later when they were finishing dinner. And I had my own come to Jesus moment where I was like, this is not healthy. I'm no longer in community with people. I'm keeping myself from the amazing community and the ability just to enjoy a meal with friends and like laugh and be with people and. Yeah. And you can't control it. So I always tell people, control the controllables. Control as much as you can of what comes into your home. If you can encourage your friends to go eat at places like True Food Kitchen, there's things like that. And then it's all about consistency. It's not about perfection.

[A]

Yeah. And you have to understand how to handicap risk. Right. Like I know these like crazy biohacker types who are so insane with their food consumption, but they like race cars and like.

[B]

Yeah, all the microplastics from the tires and.

[A]

Well, it's just the danger of racing cars and like, you know, or they do these incredibly risky activities that, you know, they'll constantly be breaking bones or they'll like, whatever. They'll risk their death. But they're so insane about like never having like, you know, a non organic meal.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And you just like when you're just thinking about handicapping risk, like, that's just so dumb, you know? And so you have to also be like, logical with what different risks are you taking on in your life? And we all take risks every day. And you just have to think about, like, how much relative risk does this add to my life versus all this other shit I'm doing? And if you're isolating yourself and you're not hanging out with other people and you're lonely, you are having way higher health risk situation than any food or chemical you can avoid.

[B]

Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. It's incredibly important for people to hear. So before we go, I just want you to tell everybody where they can find you.

[A]

Yeah. So my. I'm not that active on social media. I probably have to get better at it. Is human carp. So human K A R P both on X and on Instagram.

[B]

Yeah. Awesome. Jason, thank you so much. This has been great.

[A]

Yeah, thanks for having me.

[B]

Yeah, I loved this. Thank you so much for listening to the Real Foodology podcast. This is a Wellness Loud production produced by Drake Peterson and mixed by Mike Fry. Theme song is by Georgie. You can watch the full video version of this podcast inside the Spotify app or on YouTube. As always, you can leave us a voicemail by clicking the link in our bio. And if you like this episode, please rate and review on your podcast app. For more shows by my team, go to wellnessloud.com see you next time. The content of this show is for educational and informational purposes only. It is not a substitute for individual medical and mental health advice and doesn't

[C]

constitute a provider patient relationship. I am a nutritionist, but I am not your nutritionist.

[B]

As always, talk to your doctor or your health team first.