Mm

... causing the problem? And I would argue that those are factors that we normally routinely, uh, identify.

For instance, food, pollution, screens, ideologues.

I would argue that those are actually downstream, not upstream.

And what I've learned in my forty-five years of practice is that if you're gonna fix a problem, you have to fix it upstream if it's gonna actually solve the problem.

Fixing the problem downstream only fixes the result, doesn't fix the problem.

Kinda like what Desmond Tutu used to say.

... a- and so many of these additives, uh, directly shape our sense of self.

And how does Eat Real come in and upgrade it? I know you-

Okay.

So let's do our origin story.

So 2019, we hired Nora, and we needed to basically develop the business model that Eat Real runs on.

My colleague and cookbook co-author, Cindy Gershen, worked in the Mount Diablo Unified School District, uh, in Contra Costa County, right across from San Francisco.

We wrote a, a cookbook back in 2014 called The Fat Chance Cookbook.

She had a very enterprising and smart and go-getting food services director working in that school district, and his name was Dominic Maki.

Yeah.

Well put.

And the thermostat's at, you know, got a floor but no ceiling.

So it's not like, you know, you go too high, but there is a, a floor below which if you're below that, then your brain sees starvation.

Now, this hormone leptin was discovered in 1994.

Now, I knew it was coming, and the reason was because it was discovered at Rockefeller University, where I was a postdoc, and I knew all of the protagonists that were involved in that because we all had to share call at the hospital.

So I knew what everybody else was doing, and so I knew this was coming.

And in 1994, it did.

Wow.

What do you think is the actual root cause of most of the tiredness that people are facing today?

Really good question.

Super question.

Um, no, and first of all, there's no doubt that that is true.

Some people call it burnout, and that's true to some extent, although we tend to associate burnout with a job.

But people are feeling burned out even just from daily life.

And the question is, you know, like, where is that coming from? Short answer, cortisol.

[laughs]

Happiness is not getting a dopamine

hit.

That's one way to frame it.

There are actually seven differences between pleasure and happiness.

And Americans don't know.

They don't understand because they've been told their entire lives that pleasure is happiness.

buy Coca-Cola, buy, you know, bars, you know, like happy hour, okay? And we can go down the list, okay? So what are the differences between pleasure and happiness? Seven that I can count.

Is there any kind of cure for obesity or is it a simple answer of just eating better?

I want you to tell us what big food, how have they been doing this to us? How have they been able to get away with it? And how are we as a grassroots movement? to be able to put a stop to this so that people can rediscover a proper human diet and rediscover that the food you eat and the junk you avoid actually makes all the difference for your health what's the plan and what have you seen so far

indeed so what i want to just finish with before we get into that is that i had to write this book behind me here metabolical to update the information because what i realized was that what i said in 2013 was wrong i said in fat chance you are what you do with what you eat but really the real story is you are what they did with what you eat and we're not going to be able to solve this problem Until number one, we own up to that and the food industry owns up to that.

And so basically this book behind me, Metabolical, is half science and half expose.

If this were a Hollywood book, we'd call it a kiss and tell.

But, you know, since it's about diabetes, it's really a piss and tell.

Yes, sir.

So.

How are they doing it on purpose? How do we know they're doing it on purpose? What are they doing on purpose? And then ultimately, what the hell can we do about this just as individuals?

Yep.

And what we do, uh, is we develop business models for different school districts around the country, 'cause every school district has their own challenges, and so every school district needs something a little bit different.

And we basically help train the people in that district on how to procure, serve, market real food in schools K to 12.

Okay? And it turns out when you actually know what you're doing and how to do it, it ends up being cheaper than buying it from Guggenheim and Aramark and McDonald's and Pizza Hut.

And you don't have to hire all the lunch ladies, although you do have to have a food preparation facility.

So you may have to either buy an abandoned warehouse or, uh, you know, some other, uh, uh, you know, edifice, you know, and convert it, and, you know, into a food preparation facility, you know, that would then serve that entire district.

And that's how we got started, and we are now, uh, serving, servicing one million students-

Uh-huh.

Well, you break down.

You'll break down.

(laughs) So, brain fog, difficulty concentrating, irritability, and ultimately all the way to depression.

So, the amount of ATP within any given neuron is the, uh, proximate cause of neuronal dysfunction that we see as neuro-cognitive and neuro-behavioral change.

Now, how do mitochondria and how do ROS's fit into this? Mitochondria make ATP, but every time they make ATP, they make, also make ROS's.

There are 11 steps in mitochondria and they all give off ROS's.

Now, those ROS's are gonna damage the cell.

Eh, well, depends what you think.

And- and- and why does that harm me, having an insulin response?

'Cause insulin's a bad guy.

So we always talk about glucose being a bad guy in terms of diabetes, and it is, of course, but insulin's a bad guy too.

Glucose causes small vessels to be dysfunctional, causes endothelial cell dysfunction.

It causes high blood pressure because it causes those small vessels to constrict.

It interferes with nitric oxide, uh, which is one of the things that relaxes the blood vessel, and it will, you know, basically reduce, uh, blood flow to specific organs.

So high glucose is not good for you, and it's bad for small vessel disease, and that's why diabetics get retinopathy, nephropathy, neuropathy, um, uh, kidney disease, nerve- nerve- nerve damage, and, um, eye disease.

... they're not a scientist.