The Surprising Power of Silence & How to Overcome Your Cravings - SYSK Choice

Summary

Podcast Summary: "The Surprising Power of Silence & How to Overcome Your Cravings"

Episode Information

• Title: The Surprising Power of Silence & How to Overcome Your Cravings - SYSK Choice
• Host: Mike Carruthers | OmniCast Media
• Guests:
  • Lee Mars: Consultant, Coach, and Co-author of The Power of Silence in a World of Noise
  • Amy Shaw: Board-Certified Medical Doctor, Nutrition Expert, and Author of I'm So Effing Hungry: Why We Crave What We Crave and What to Do About It
• Release Date: March 22, 2025

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1. The Surprising Power of Silence

Guest: Lee Mars
Timestamps: [00:02] - [26:34]

Overview: In the first segment, Mike Carruthers engages in a profound discussion with Lee Mars about the escalating noise levels in our modern world and the transformative power of silence. Lee Mars, co-author of The Power of Silence in a World of Noise, delves into both the external and internal dimensions of silence, highlighting its critical role in mental health, creativity, and overall well-being.

Key Discussions:

• Escalation of Environmental Noise:

  • Lee Mars explains that emergency sirens have become six times louder in the past century to penetrate the increasing ambient noise. She cites that approximately 65% of the global population is exposed to harmful decibel levels, which adversely affect health ([00:15]).

• Defining Silence:

  • Silence is not merely the absence of external noise but also encompasses a deep internal quietude. Lee emphasizes the importance of internal silence for presence, healing, and connection ([05:23]).

• Health Implications of Noise:

  • Chronic exposure to noise is linked to various health issues, including cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, and sleep disturbances ([10:00]). Additionally, silence has been shown to promote neuronal growth in the hippocampus, enhancing memory and cognitive functions ([10:55]).

• Cultural Perspectives on Silence:

  • Lee introduces the Japanese concept of "ma," which values empty space as pure potentiality. She highlights how shared silence in rituals and ceremonies fosters intimacy and collective transformation ([22:57]).

Notable Quotes:

• Lee Mars: "When you're preoccupied with thoughts of finding the closest bathroom, your ego is in check. You're much less likely to overthink things or give into unrelated impulses." ([04:42])
• Mike Carruthers: "Silence is golden. But what you said a moment ago, that silence is scary, that rings true to me." ([22:57])

Insights and Conclusions: Lee Mars advocates for integrating micro-moments of silence into our daily lives to counteract the relentless noise bombardment. She suggests practical approaches, such as embracing unexpected quiet moments during commutes or long lines, to harness the benefits of silence without retreating entirely from the noisy environment.

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2. How to Overcome Your Cravings

Guest: Amy Shaw
Timestamps: [28:26] - [48:22]

Overview: The second segment features Amy Shaw, a nutrition expert and author, who explores the nature of cravings, their physiological underpinnings, and effective strategies to manage and overcome them. Shaw distinguishes between hunger and cravings, emphasizing the role of dopamine pathways in driving specific food desires.

Key Discussions:

• Understanding Cravings vs. Hunger:

  • Amy Shaw clarifies that cravings are distinct from general hunger. While hunger signals the need for food, cravings are specific desires triggered by dopamine pathways in the brain ([29:38]). For example, wanting dessert after a meal despite feeling full illustrates a craving.

• Physiology of Cravings:

  • Cravings are driven by dopamine release, which reinforces behaviors that lead to pleasure. This mechanism, while evolutionarily beneficial for survival, is exploited by modern food industries to encourage repeat consumption of highly palatable foods ([31:04]).

• Impact of Processed Foods:

  • Shaw criticizes the food industry's manipulation of salt, sugar, and fat to create hyper-craveable products like Doritos and Coca-Cola, which perpetuate the dopamine-driven craving cycle ([35:06]).

• Strategies to Curb Cravings:

  • Dietary Adjustments:
    • Incorporating fiber, polyphenols, high-amino acid foods, dopamine-producing foods, omega-3 fatty acids, and glucosinolates can help regulate hunger hormones and reduce cravings ([33:50]).
  • Behavioral Techniques:
    • Shaw suggests practical hacks such as using peppermint to calm craving centers and replacing highly craveable foods with healthier alternatives to retrain the brain's reward pathways ([44:10]).
  • Mindfulness and Timing:
    • Allowing time between a meal and dessert can let satiation hormones kick in, diminishing the desire for additional food ([42:54]).

Notable Quotes:

• Amy Shaw: "The cravings pathway is a dopamine pathway that will keep you coming back for more." ([32:47])
• Mike Carruthers: "If you just have the Snickers bar, shouldn't that... can't you just give in to your craving and you're done?" ([37:47])
• Amy Shaw: "Our brain is plastic. Much more so when we're young, but even as adults, if you recognize you have a craving, you can anticipate and change that." ([45:52])

Insights and Conclusions: Amy Shaw emphasizes the importance of understanding the biological and psychological mechanisms behind cravings to effectively manage them. By adjusting dietary habits and employing strategic behavioral interventions, individuals can retrain their brains to reduce dependence on high-craveability foods and foster healthier eating patterns.

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3. Practical Takeaways

For Embracing Silence:

• Integrate Micro-Moments of Silence: Utilize unexpected quiet times in daily routines to foster mental clarity and reduce stress.
• Seek Shared Silence: Engage in activities with others that promote shared moments of quiet, enhancing interpersonal connections.

For Managing Cravings:

• Optimize Diet: Focus on high-fiber, high-protein foods rich in polyphenols and omega-3 fatty acids to regulate hunger hormones.
• Behavioral Hacks: Use peppermint or replace highly craveable foods with healthier alternatives to diminish craving intensity.
• Mindful Timing: Delay satisfying cravings to allow natural satiation signals to override impulse-driven desires.

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Conclusion In this episode of Something You Should Know, Mike Carruthers effectively navigates two critical aspects of modern life: the omnipresent noise and its detrimental effects, and the pervasive nature of cravings that influence our dietary choices. Through insightful conversations with Lee Mars and Amy Shaw, listeners gain a deeper understanding of how to reclaim silence for better mental health and how to manage cravings for a healthier lifestyle. By implementing the discussed strategies, individuals can enhance their well-being and make more informed decisions in both personal and professional spheres.

Transcript

[Mike Carothers]

Today on Something you should know why the next time you need to make a decision, you might want to wait till you have to go to the bathroom. Then. The power of silence. It's magical because we live in a very noisy world.

[Lee Mars]

One way we know that is we look to emergency sirens. So in the past hundred years, those sirens have gotten six times louder. In order to cut through the noise around us, the estimates that 65% of the population, about 450 million people, live with decibel levels that are harmful to their health.

[Mike Carothers]

Also, you might be surprised, in a good way, what your homeowners or renter's policy actually covers, and food cravings, why we get them and how to stop them.

[Amy Shaw]

Getting sunlight activates a hormone called Alpha msh. That hormone makes you feel satiated, it calms the cravings, and it makes you feel fuller.

[Mike Carothers]

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[Lee Mars]

Hey, thanks for having me, Mike.

[Mike Carothers]

So I think everyone has heard the phrase silence is golden. And there was a hit record in the 60s called Silence is Golden by the Tremolos. And I think there's this general belief that silence is good, that in the right situation, silence can be very profound and just good for you. I'm not sure how or why, but I think there's a belief in that. But why is silence good? And maybe an even better first question would be, what is silence? I mean, is silence a thing or is silence the absence of something?

[Lee Mars]

Oh, that's a great question. Well, on one level, it really is the absence of noise. And we look at it coming, the noise coming to us through our ears and through our screens in many cases, and also the noise that's just generated by our own darn minds. But as we explore this question, the deepest silences, when we asked all those interesting people, neuroscientists, politicians, artists, poets, a man incarcerated, death on death row, all kinds of people, we asked them that question and they point us towards a deep internal silence. So it's not necessarily just about what's happening outside of us, although that's also a lovely type of silence. But a silence internal that brings about a type of presence where we believe there can be healing and enjoyment and connection and all kinds of things.

[Mike Carothers]

And you believe that because why? Because you want to believe that or you have real evidence to believe that?

[Lee Mars]

Well, it's not so much that we're researchers studying that, but what we are doing in our work in the world is, for example, I work with a lot of scientists and engineers who are trying to get harmful toxic chemicals out of our products and out of our environment. And they were coming at these issues, these really complex and intractable issues in a certain way in the four walls of their offices and under fluorescent lighting and all these things. But we took them out into the redwoods and really contemplating these issues with big open space and open calendars and no WI fi. And they're came to some novel thinking, breakthrough thinking. So really, time and time and again I am seeing the results of people tapping into silence, connecting with one another in a different way to come through that breakthrough thinking.

[Mike Carothers]

In your definition of silence, is it all audio? Because when you say we went out to the redwoods, to me that's also like a visual silence. Like you're getting away from the clutter of your life and you're seeing something. It isn't nothing, but it's very peaceful.

[Lee Mars]

Yeah. The taxonomy of noise we take on in this and we could take on visual and things like that, but we kept it to auditory noise, that which happens in our ears and the decibel levels, which has been exponentially on the rise, in case you're wondering. And the research really does bear that out.

[Mike Carothers]

So let's talk about that, because that's something that. Because it's so gradual, I think that people don't realize that. But the world is getting louder. Yes. And how do we know that?

[Lee Mars]

Yeah, it feels like it's getting louder and it really is getting louder. So one way we know that is we look to emergency sirens as a proxy indicator for the surrounding environments, because of course they need to cut through the din in order to get our attention. So in the past hundred years, to your point, it's been gradual, but those sirens have gotten six times louder in order to get cut through the noise around us. And we do a better job measuring decibel levels in Europe overall than we do in the United States. But the estimates from the World Health organization is that 65% of the population, about 450 million people, live with decibel levels that are harmful to their health. So on that auditory level, it is definitely Getting louder. But we also thought it was important to look at information. In 2010, the past CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, estimated that every two days we listen to as much information as we did from the dawn of civilization to 2003. We are taking in the studies show about five times as much information as we did just a generation ago. There's just this overwhelming amount of information being generated and that we're trying to take in on a day to day level that we believe actually increases our internal chatter, our internal noise. Ethan Cross, professor at the University of Michigan, estimates that we listen to something like 320 State of the Union addresses of internal compressed speech every day. So our concern is with all this auditory, informational and internal noise that we're really not able to tune into what is most important to us in our lives, our relationships, our work and our purpose for being here.

[Mike Carothers]

So you mentioned a moment ago that all this noise, all this chatter that we have to turn the sirens up louder to get over is harmful to our health. Well, how so? Because I think people have a sense, just a sense without knowing anything, that quiet is nice and it's probably better than lots and lots of noise. But how do we know it's health related?

[Lee Mars]

We know this through different studies which look at not just the harm that comes to us in the ears. You know, certainly hearing loss is a serious issue that can lead to isolation and things, but it actually is also tied to cardiovascular disease, to diabetes, to loss of sleep and all of the downstream effects of loss of sleep as well. So there's a lot of science coming out. Initially we looked at silence as more of a control variable. So the other side of that is the benefits of silence. So it used to be that silence was sort of where we considered a baseline to return to, but now it's actually showing in all these studies where they look at different inputs, say like pup sounds or music, classical music, or silence as a control variable or so on, that silence actually leads to growth of neurons in the brain, in the hippocampus, in the area associated with memory.

[Mike Carothers]

I've had the experience being in the business I'm in, of being in walking into certain recording studios, radio studios that are very well built. And that silence is different than the silence that you hear just because you turn everything off. It is a profound silence that is deafening almost and it feels good. It's like, wow, that's real. It's just very relaxing and it's an amazing experience if you've never had it.

[Lee Mars]

Yeah, I had that experience Also walking into my brother's sound studio and I noticed it wasn't just like what was happening in my ears, but what was happening in my nervous system. I just felt calmer. So it is a delicious experience to try to seek out if you can. Not all of us have a sound studio or an anechoic chamber available to us, but those who have really report to the that being an extraordinary experience of sound being so different. The refracted sounds are being absorbed in those rooms. That's why it's so different.

[Mike Carothers]

Well, I do love that experience. And it's not only a lack of sound, it's a feeling. You feel that silence, you not only hear it.

[Lee Mars]

Yeah, There's a great story of John Cage, the famous composer, who walking into an anechoic chamber. You know, he was very excited about silence. As a musician, he certainly understood the importance of silence, the silence between the notes that makes music what it is. So he walked into the sanechoic chamber in Harvard University and when he got in there, he heard two sounds. A high pitched sound and a low pitch whooshing. And so he stepped outside again after a while and asked the engineer, well, wait a minute, that room wasn't silent at all. I heard this high pitch, I heard this low pitch. And the engineer said, ah, the high is your nervous system and the low is your blood in circulation. So we ask this question, is there even really a thing is silence is pure silence in a world that is vibrating and whooshing and whirling. And the answer is probably not. But there is an experience of silence, an experience of our attention being able to put it where we want it, where we intend it.

[Mike Carothers]

And so what about because there's silence and there's noise, but there's also sound. And to me, I don't know how you define it, but sound would be something that isn't noise, isn't chatter, isn't objectionable, it's what you want. It's music or whatever. And even a lot of people who meditate, meditate to music. People who study, meditate or study to music. And as if that's. Well, I don't know why people do that. Why do people do that?

[Lee Mars]

Well, you're right in that when we're talking about noise, we're talking about unwanted distractions. So that is different from sound or certainly music and things like that. It's also different on the informational level from data, which is neutral. You know, we like data or internally. It's also different from thought, which we also enjoy. So the distinction is that unwanted distraction.

[Mike Carothers]

We're talking about silence and why it's so good for you. My guest is Lee Mars. She's co author of a book called the Power of Silence in a World of Noise.

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[Mike Carothers]

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[Lee Mars]

Well we wrote this book not for the people who can run off to retreats for six months at a time. We really wrote this book for people looking for silence in their noise soaked full lives. And we argue that you can find those micro moments and those micro moments for finding quiet can make a big difference. So that can be even when you find yourself stuck in a long line unexpectedly, or maybe you're commuting and you're radio or podcast goes out, that you could actually welcome that silence, sink into it and take advantage of that unstructured time and that open space to just not have information again coming in to you all the time, but to just appreciate the openness of that.

[Mike Carothers]

But is there a sense of you really optimally should have so many hours of silence every day or no one's done that study.

[Lee Mars]

No one's really doing that study. And so we say, like, do the study yourself. Notice what really the difference is. So the signals in the body that tell us that we are saturated by noise are different for each one of us. But I'll tell you mine, for example, I notice a clinching in my jaw when I'm feeling saturated by noise. I'll notice an irritability with those I love most, I confess. And I'll notice that I start to kind of lose track of things. I'm repeating tasks or, you know, going back over. Things are falling through the cracks. So that's what I'm saturated with noise. Those are the signals. That's the evidence, if you will. And then when I am actually getting enough quiet, what I'll notice is that my creative thinking is much more amplified. I'm more generous with myself, with my time with others. I do more favors for people. I just feel more abundance in life. And so for each of us, it's to look at really what are the signals that we're saturated by noise and how can we take care of that? Maybe turn down the dial a bit and. And what are the signals that we are finding the silence that we need and require to really be the kind of person that we want to be in this world.

[Mike Carothers]

So I get that silence has its benefits, but it also seems sometimes that when you're sitting in silence, you can start to ruminate and think about problems and things and that really what you want to do is distract yourself with maybe music or a podcast like this one, so you're not ruminating and thinking about your own problems as opposed to just, you know, sitting in total silence.

[Lee Mars]

Well, it's like I think we, we think of it as sort of, it's the place to start because in this noise soaked environment where it is so loud and jarring and the, the impact of that on our health is, you know, is without, without question as the science. We lay it out and then the, the desire to get into a place of, of a qu state, it just doesn't require absolute silence on the outside. Although that could help. That does help some. But you mentioned for yourself, it's maybe a little better to have a soundtrack or a podcast or a different place to focus. And so we're just trying to create a little bit more space for the ways that we find that internal silence that is so nourishing to us, that helps us get clear on what it is we care most about, where we put our energies and what is true in our life. And that could be in a, in a loud environment. Like I said, sort of like in my dance studio. That's, that's how it is. It's loud, but I'm quiet.

[Mike Carothers]

When you think about it, when there's a problem, when there's conflict, the tendency is to talk more about it, argue about it, and maybe a little silence would help rather than trying to hammer it out.

[Lee Mars]

The Quakers have been doing that for hundreds of years. When there's a sense of polarity or positionality or rigidity in a meeting, the clerk will call for silence. And in that silence an answer will come some resolution. And so even if it means like, you know, taking a break from that problem at hand, sleeping on it for a night and coming back together, just giving a little space to it, the clarity can come through that place.

[Mike Carothers]

I wonder why people don't seek this out just on their own. That. Because it does tend to feel good and relax you and make you sharper. Why we don't tend to gravitate to this just because I know if silence.

[Lee Mars]

Is so good for us, why aren't we doing more of it? There's a few answers to that. I mean, we, that there might be some things that we're, you know, uncomfortable with or not wanting to face about our lives or behavior or whatever, the way things are going that make it challenging. And certainly Nietzsche spoke of that years, hundreds of years ago, the horror of the vacuum. So. And my teenager will tell you awkward silence is the worst thing under the sun to go through. So there's, I think, some nervousness and varying degrees of fear. So it's not just our personal choices that we're not, you know, choosing silence when it's so clearly good for us. It's also, we have systems that are driving towards more content and data. Whether it's eyeballs on a page and click through, there are pristine. Attention is valued at zero. Our time playing with children or looking at art or walking through nature. But if we're clicking through and eyeballs on a page, it's being valued by gdp. So we're set up. The system is set up to make noise. So it's not just our own personal failings here. There are things we can do to bring more silence to our lives, but there's also a system that's driving us towards making more and more noise.

[Mike Carothers]

Yeah, well, again, there's not a lot of money in silence.

[Lee Mars]

Apparently not. But there is a lot of value which takes us back to that silence. That silence is golden. So speech is silver. Silence is golden is that aphorism that shows up in cultures all over the world. And the polymath Thomas Carlyle, he liked to think of that as speeches of time, silences of eternity.

[Mike Carothers]

But what you said a moment ago, that silence is scary, that. That rings true to me. That awkward silence that somebody's got to be talking if there's two people together because you can't have silence. That's something odd about that.

[Lee Mars]

Yeah. I think for many of us it's a new terrain, and yet it's pretty old technology if you think about it, just allowing for space for people to be together. There's certainly cultures that value that more. We look at Japanese ancient principle called ma, where the empty space is seen as pure potentiality. So the. The kanji character is a temple gate with slats through it, and there's golden sunlight pouring through those slats. That's the kanji character of ma. So this the synonym of silence, the synonym for silence, for emptiness. But pure potentiality, which is found in the artwork of, say, ikebana flower arrangements, where the petals and the leaves of the art piece are important and featured. But so is the silence around that, the emptiness around that. Or in scroll painting, the swoosh of the brushstroke is what's at the center of the scroll. But the empty space around it is also of equal importance. And we find that in conversation there's more emptiness and more space to reflect. So it's really trickles throughout the culture.

[Mike Carothers]

Well, that's true too, here. I mean, there aren't too many people that are. It's your good friends that you can sit in a room with and each read a book or do your own thing and not feel compelled to chat. There's something very comforting about that.

[Lee Mars]

Absolutely. Yeah. One of my favorite things is to share silence, because silence is magnified when it's shared. What I mean by that is that there's something inherently close to sharing. Silence is something that creates an intimacy in that space. And of course, when we think about rituals and ceremonies, often those moments of shared silence, they feel pretty transformational. It's a little hard to explain because it's a little bit in the realm of the ineffable. But what I notice in those shared moments of like a wedding or even a funeral or something, when there's just some silence where the. The collection, the collective is holding that silence together, it's not just the poignancy of the importance of that moment. The sacredness of that moment is shared. And I feel like we come out different people with different. A different sense of connection.

[Mike Carothers]

Yeah, that's really interesting, that group silence at an important event like that, you know, that's why people have, you know, we're going to have a moment of silence and that there's something very moving about that.

[Lee Mars]

Yeah, it's an old technology. This is not a new hack. We've been doing this for a long time, and our argument is really just we need to bring a little bit more space in for more silence. We've swung a little too far in one direction. Let's swing it back.

[Mike Carothers]

Well, it's interesting. This is, I think, the first time on this podcast the topic has been not about something, but about the lack of something. That silence is that lack of noise and the power that's really in that silence. I've been talking to Lee Mars. She is a consultant and coach and co author of a book called the Power of Silence in a World of Noise. And there's a link to that book in the show notes. Thanks, Lee. I appreciate you sharing this.

[Lee Mars]

Thanks, Mike. What a pleasure.

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[Mike Carothers]

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[Lee Mars]

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[Lee Mars]

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[Lee Mars]

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[Lee Mars]

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[Mike Carothers]

I'm sure you get food cravings. I crave Thai food sometimes, and chocolate sometimes, Mexican food, and a few other things. Anyone who's had a craving knows a craving can be very powerful. But what is a craving? It's kind of like hunger, but it's very specific hunger. So how is it different from just being plain hungry? And perhaps more importantly, what can you do to curb those cravings and maybe even prevent them so they don't sabotage your diet? Here to discuss all of this is Amy Shaw. Amy is a board certified medical doctor and nutrition expert with training from Cornell, Columbia and Harvard. And she's author of a book called I'm so Effing Hungry why We Crave what We Crave and what to Do About It. Hi Amy, welcome to Something youg Should Know.

[Amy Shaw]

Thank you so much for having me.

[Mike Carothers]

My sense is that a craving hungry is when you're hungry and you you want to eat something. And a craving is you're hungry and you want to eat ice cream or brownies or something very specific. Is that a fair definition?

[Amy Shaw]

Yeah, I definitely think that that's one definition. I think even clearer to me is that it's two separate areas in the brain in fact working independently of each other. Meaning that you could be hungry without activating the cravings area of your brain and you could be craving something without actually being hungry at all.

[Mike Carothers]

Really? That seems weird. It seems like every time I've ever had a craving, it's because I was really hungry and I wanted that particular thing.

[Amy Shaw]

Well, I'll give you an example. Say you finished a beautiful dinner. You have eaten all things when the check comes, and they say, oh, did you guys want any dessert? And everyone at the table looks at each other and they're like, oh, I'm full, but kind of do want to look at the dessert menu. You know, it's like you kind of want to see what's on there. That's cravings. That's like you want that dopamine release in your brain that would come from chocolate or ice cream or, you know, some kind of dessert, like, item that even though you're full, you're willing to order something that will give you that feeling.

[Mike Carothers]

And so what is that? Because I've been in that situation where I've been at a table and the waiter comes over and says, do you want to see the dessert menu? And I have no interest. But other times I think, well, that sounds pretty good. Let's take a look. So what's the difference?

[Amy Shaw]

Our brain will want something that creates a dopamine release. And it depends on so many different things. But in general, our brain loves the feeling of a dopamine release release that comes from either food or enjoyment. Like, you know, going to something that you really enjoy. Gambling and gaming kind of fits in that category where you get a release of dopamine by doing that activity. Sometimes it's a matter of, have I done it before? And now my brain wants more of it. It's related to stress. It's related to what else has happened in your day. I'll give you this example. Dopamine in our brain is created this pathway, this cravings pathway is created to keep us going back for more. So if you've had a big dessert and you had a great dopamine explosion in your brain, what your brain will do is like say, oh, I want that again. That's the dopamine pathways. Like, it's pleasure mixed with motivation to try to get it again. And it's a pathway that probably was created, we think, to keep us motivated to find more housing, to procreate, to find more food. So body does not want you to give up once you've found a beautiful food source. It wants you to keep coming back for more. And so dopamine, the cravings pathway, is a dopamine pathway that will keep you coming back for more. And that's what gambling is. That's what gaming is. That's what desserts do for you. That's what processed foods do.

[Mike Carothers]

And when you don't want to give in to those cravings, you resist it. And resisting a craving can be very difficult and often ends in failure.

[Amy Shaw]

Instead of resisting your cravings, start retraining your cravings, start retraining yourself so that you don't have to seek out that late night dessert that the alcohol, the, the drugs, the gambling, all of that. So I talk about like a five step plan, but the number one thing is changing the way you eat. So we now know that our gut bacteria is very responsible for sending signals to the brain about when we're full, when we need more, when we're craving. So getting that gut bacteria to feel full itself, to be happy is the number one goal. Eating the right foods, foods that the gut bacteria love, will help you send signals to the brain that you're full.

[Mike Carothers]

And those foods are, number one is.

[Amy Shaw]

Fiber, so probiotic and prebiotic fiber. Number two is polyphenols. These are the brightly colored fruits and vegetables and spices, teas and chocolate. Number three is high amino acid foods. So these are your high protein foods that really signal to the brain that you're feeling satisfied and full. Number four is dopamine producing food. So like I mentioned, cravings pathway is due to your body wanting a dopamine release. And there are foods that you can be eating to raise your baseline levels of dopamine. Number five is omega 3 fatty acid rich foods. These are things like salmon and nuts. And these also trigger something called cck, which is cholecystokin, is a satiation hormone. And number six is glucosinolates. Glucosinolates are a plant compound found in cruciferous vegetables like broccoli, cauliflower, kale, cabbage. They are full of this glucosinolate compound that tell the gut bacteria or feed the gut bacteria and then in turn the gut bacteria tell the body that we're full.

[Mike Carothers]

But when people crave stuff, is it typically sweet?

[Amy Shaw]

It can be sweet or it can be savory. Remember, there's people who love french fries and they would have those over any kind of sweet. So salt, sugar and fat are the three things that people typically crave. And the thing is, Mike, is that food companies know this. Food companies know the science that we're talking about right now. They know how to rewire our brains to have the most explosive dopamine release from their foods. So what they do is they figure out, okay, if we put this much salt, this much sugar, this much fat, we could actually create a food that would be so craveable that people would keep coming back for more. And that's literally the problem with the food industry today, is that they're creating foods that would never have this combination in nature. They're creating foods that are so craveable that whether we're hungry or not, we're going to go after those foods. And I'm not. It's not just the food industry. The gaming industry, Instagram, gambling, porn, they all know how these pathways work.

[Mike Carothers]

What are some examples of craveable foods?

[Amy Shaw]

Doritos, pepsi and Coke. McDonald's Happy Meal. You know, it's called Happy Meal for a reason. It's literally creating a explosion in your brain of dopamine and makes you feel happy in the moment. But remember, dopamine is very smart. It dissipates quickly and you feel uncomfortable. Right after you eat something that's got a huge dopamine release, you immediately feel a mix of pleasure and discomfort. Like, oh, gosh, when am I going to get this again? You know, I got a. Am I eating too much? Should I be eating this? It's like this pleasure mixed with discomfort. And our processed food industry is full of those. So McDonald's is a classic one that everybody kind of talks about. And Doritos, you know, all the soda companies really work on this a lot. Candies.

[Mike Carothers]

So I've always thought. I mean, I remember hearing the advice that, you know, if you're hungry for a Snickers bar, I mean, you can fight it or. But if you just have the Snickers bar, shouldn't that. And doesn't that. Have you ever studied this where you have the Snickers bar and you go, okay, that was great, and life goes on? Or does it create more problems? Can't you just give in to your craving and you're done?

[Amy Shaw]

Absolutely not. It's actually the opposite. So when you understand how cravings pathways work, is that the more you do it, the more you reinforce that pathway. And so it's just like alcohol. Exactly the same pathway. You have a drink or you have a lot of drinks, and the next day you say to yourself, well, I feel like having a drink. And I feel like if I just have one, it's going to be fine. I'll not have that craving anymore. And, you know, we know now the biology behind it. You have one drink, and it kind of reinforces that pathway to have. Want more of that. And that's exactly the same thing with processed foods. If you have that Snickers bar today just to just to give in to your cravings. What it does is it reinforces the pathway and it makes you want more of the Snickers. And then tomorrow you're probably going to want a Snickers and a half. And this is very true. If you ever know anyone who loves Starbucks or those Frappuccino type drinks, in the beginning they taste really sweet and you can only have a little bit. But then over time, you start craving it more and more. You can have a tall and then you have a Grande, then you have a Venti, and then before you know it, you're having a extra large jumbo size frappuccino when your craving hits.

[Mike Carothers]

So is this primarily or exclusively a food problem or are there other things in life that affect this?

[Amy Shaw]

No, this is a modern life problem. Actually, gambling is the best example of very, very strong craveability. So what happens is when you gamble, you lose, you lose, you lose. And then all of a sudden, without you anticipating it, you win and you create this huge dopamine explosion and it creates this pathway in your brain. Because now once that dissipates, you're like, oh my God, I gotta do that again because, wow, that feeling was just so delightful. Right? So that's what the cravings pathways does.

[Mike Carothers]

Are there other things, things that might seem unrelated to the craving itself that actually help to fight the craving? I guess what I mean is, so for example, if you sleep more, do you crave less? If you're bored, do you crave more? Are there other things that can affect how much you crave something?

[Amy Shaw]

I would love to give you an example. Easy, lazy. I call it the lazy example because people love this example. Getting sunlight into your eyes activates a hormone called alpha msh. That hormone makes you feel satiated. And when you get adequate sunlight during the day, you increase your chances of feeling full after meals. It calms the cravings and it makes you feel fuller. And if you think about it, you know, some people will say, oh yeah, you know, if I go for a nice sunny walk, not only is my mood better, but I'm not craving the bad foods or bad things in my life as much.

[Mike Carothers]

What else? What else works besides sunlight?

[Amy Shaw]

Eating foods with protein. So when you start to replace the right foods back into your body, you reset your hunger hormones and your neurologic pathways. And most importantly, your gut bacteria. The gut bacteria will sense amino acids from proteins in your gut and it will tell your brain that, hey, you're getting nutrition. There is a very interesting hypothesis called the protein threshold hypothesis that says when you get enough protein in your GI tract, your brain starts to create satiation hormones, the neuropeptide yy, the cck, the leptin, to say to your body, all right, we got what we need, time to stop. But if you're eating foods that are really low in protein, which is, you know, ultra processed food, snacks, you will keep eating because your body hasn't hit that threshold yet of protein. And so this might makes it so usable to me. I said, oh, well, okay. If I want to have better control of my cravings, I need to increase the level of protein in my meals, especially early in my meal, so that by the time I start to digest the protein, I start to get the fullness signals and so I'm not diving into the cake or the dessert at the end of the meal.

[Mike Carothers]

It seems that with food cravings at least, and maybe other kind of cravings, that just letting time go by will help that the thing that you're craving to eat, if you don't eat it pretty soon, I don't know, you just don't crave it anymore.

[Amy Shaw]

Say you ate a meal. This happens to me all the time. Say you ate a meal and you did order dessert, but it took forever for the waiter to put in the dessert order and for it to come back. And by that time your satiation hormones have kicked in, right? You're like, oh, I don't want it anymore, I'm done. That is a very common way to kind of get over cravings is after a meal, just go for a walk or maybe you do something else before you reach for that dessert. And often your hunger hormones have kicked in and you are fine with not having that craving at the end of the meal. It's much harder, as you know, when your cravings are very strong. Cravings are the strongest pathways in our body. They motivate us to move, to get up out of our seat, to get in the car, to drive across town and have that thing that we're craving. So it's often not as easy as just saying, oh well, just take a walk or distract yourself for 15 minutes. It just depends on how strong and how deeply rooted that craving might be for you.

[Mike Carothers]

What are some of the other hacks, tricks, first aid, whatever you want to call it, that help to work on cravings in the moment.

[Amy Shaw]

Oh, I love the peppermint one. So peppermint oil or dark chocolate with peppermint. Peppermint works to calm the craving centers in our brain. What they did is they actually experimented on people who sniffed peppermint every two, three hours. And then they actually looked at their brain waves through mri and they found that those people who had sniffed the peppermint were much less likely to have cravings for food than the people who didn't. That's a really easy one. You can allude that that would be true for even though they use peppermint oil in the study, you can imagine that it could be like, you know, drinking a peppermint tea or having a peppermint dark chocolate. Like it could help you with those. There was another study where they used walnuts, walnuts in a smoothie. And the interesting thing, Mike, is that they gave two groups smoothies. One group had walnuts in their smoothie and the other group had something that had a texture of walnuts but not walnuts, a placebo. And they found that over two weeks time, the group that drank the walnut smoothie had craving centers in their brain that were calmer and less likely to light up at the visual cues of cravings as compared to the group that just had the shake with the placebo.

[Mike Carothers]

Are cravings predictable? Can you then say, well, given this set of circumstances, I know I'm going to end up craving something, so maybe I can stop it before it starts?

[Amy Shaw]

Yes, absolutely. We are in control. Our brain is plastic. Much more so when we're young, zero to five, they're super plastic. But then even as adults, if you recognize you have a craving for something unhealthy, you can anticipate and change that. So I'll give you an example. When I know for me, for example, that baked cookies, like freshly baked chocolate chip cookies, is something I often crave. And I know that if I keep it in the house, all I think about is when I can have that cookie, when I can have the next cookie, when I'm allowed to have that again. And I recognized that that was a craving pathway signal. And I recognized that I wanted to change that. So what I did is instead of having chocolate chip cookies in the house, freshly baked, I had just some really high quality dark chocolate. And what I would do is when I would crave the chocolate chip cookie freshly baked, I would say to myself, well, you know what? I'm going to do a better thing. I'm going to give my body a reward, a dopamine explosion, but something that's positive, something that I could, like, live with and be happy with. So I gave myself the dark chocolate and I call it the intermittent reward schedule. So what you want to do is the best way to create a pathway for a new craving is to intermittently and randomly reward yourself with a positive food or item that can reshape that pathway. And so I actually retrained my brain to crave dark chocolate. Now, for some people, that might not be good enough. They might switch it for something else, but it has to be something that creates a dopamine response in your brain so that when you replace one for the other, you still get a good feeling. So you can't replace the baked hot chocolate chip cookie with a celery stick because that's not gonna give you the dopamine response to help you retrain your brain.

[Mike Carothers]

Yeah, well, you got that right. I'm pretty sure that's not gonna work. I've been speaking with Amy Shaw. She's a board certified medical doctor and author of the book I'm so Effing Hungry, why We Crave, what We Crave and what to Do About It. And there's a link to that book in the show notes. Thanks for being here, Amy.

[Amy Shaw]

Thank you so much.

[Mike Carothers]

You probably assume that your homeowner's insurance policy covers your home. And it probably does. But it may also cover a lot more things than just your house. There's a good chance that your homeowner's policy covers you if you get stuck with counterfeit money or a forged check. It might also protect you if you get sued for libel. Fraudulent purchases and money transfers on your credit or debit card might also be covered by your homeowner's policy. If something gets stolen out of your car, your auto policy probably won't cover it, but your homeowner's policy probably will. If you have renters insurance, those things might be covered as well. It's a good idea to actually read the fine print of your policy. You might find some nice surprises and that is something you should know. I know that leaving reviews for things can be a pain in the neck. I don't do it a lot, but I do do it for things that I do really like or experiences I really didn't like. Hopefully you have some good feelings about this podcast and you would just take a moment and leave a rating and review wherever you listen. I'm Micah Ruthers. Thanks for listening today to something you should know.

[Amy Shaw]

I'm Amy Nicholson, the film critic for the LA Times.

[Mike Carothers]

And I'm Paul Scheer, an actor, writer and director. You might know me from the League, Veep, or my non eligible for Academy Award role in Twisters.

[Amy Shaw]

We love movies and we come at them from different perspectives.

[Mike Carothers]

Yeah, like, Amy thinks that, you know, Joe Pesci was miscast in Goodfellas, and I don't. He's too old.

[Amy Shaw]

Let's not forget that Paul thinks that Dude 2 is overrated.

[Mike Carothers]

It is.

[Amy Shaw]

Anyway, despite this, we come together to host Unspooled, a podcast where we talk about good movies, critical hits, fan favorites.

[Mike Carothers]

Must sees, and in case you missed.

[Amy Shaw]

Ems, we're talking Parasite, the Home Alone.

[Mike Carothers]

From Grease to the Dark Knight.

[Amy Shaw]

We've done deep dives on popcorn flicks, we've talked about why Independence Day deserves a second look, and we've talked about.

[Mike Carothers]

Horror movies, some that you've never even heard of, like Ganja and Hess.

[Amy Shaw]

So if you love movies like we do, come along on our cinematic adventure.

[Mike Carothers]

Listen to Unspooled wherever you get your.

[Amy Shaw]

Podcasts, and don't forget to hit the follow button.

[Lee Mars]

Hello, I am Kristen Russo. And I am Jenny Owen Youngs. We are the hosts of Buffering the Vampire Slayer. Once more with spoilers, a rewatch podcast covering all 144 episodes of you guessed it, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. We are here to humbly invite you to join us for our fifth Buffy prom, which, if you can believe it, we are hosting at the actual Sunnydale High School. That's right. On April 4th and 5th, we will be descending upon the campus of Torrance High School, which was the filming location for Buffy's Sunnydale High, to dance the night away to 90s music in the iconic courtyard, to sip on punch right next to the Sunnydale High fountain, and to nerd out together in our prom best inside of the set of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. All information and tickets can be found at bufferingcast.com/prom. Come join us.