The Science of Eating Well Without Losing Your Mind | Jessica Knurick

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28:58A few minutes ago, you mentioned frozen foods. And my understanding is that some in the Maha movement and elsewhere have raised some concerns about canned and frozen foods as maybe being too processed or unhealthy in some sort of way. do they have a point or are these safe? No, they don't have a point. And that seems extremely elitist to me. Frozen foods actually often have a higher nutritional density than raw foods when you're talking about fruits and vegetables because they flash freeze them and that keeps in the nutrition. So frozen foods are a wonderful option. Frozen vegetables, frozen fruits, wonderful options to get more produce.

29:42especially for kids. I mean, my kids love this like frozen mixed vegetables. And so I buy that at the grocery store and I just, you know, I heat that up for them and they will always reliably eat it. It's like a mix of like peas, carrots and green beans and they love it. And it's, I know that they're getting good nutrition and, you know, and they like it more than if I like roast Brussels sprouts. Unfortunately, they don't like my roasted Brussels sprouts, but yeah. So I, I absolutely do not agree and neither does the scientific evidence. Where are you on bread? Bread has had a tough decade or so reputationally.

30:21I'll just say where I am and then you can tell me if you think I'm wrong. Sure. But I sometimes describe myself as gluten plus. I love bread. and if you don't have celiac disease or some sort of gluten intolerance my view is it can be a great part of an of a overall balanced diet yeah i think um i think you're right that bread i think it's been more than a decade that people and for whatever reason it's like some people will be like bread is the first thing i need to cut out um i think there's a huge variability when we're talking about bread so um you know bread traditionally is just a few ingredients if you're like baking your own bread or you're going to the grocery store and getting like a loaf of bread from the dairy section.

31:02And then we certainly have these packaged breads too, which are tend to be more ultra processed and tend to, you know, have like more sugar in them. A lot of people will like a lot of these breads will add sugar. And so it does make them a bit more hypersatiating. So I think it depends on the type of bread, but bread itself is just a grain. It's just a carbohydrate that you're consuming. And you have to, again, view it in the context of a healthy dietary eating pattern or your overall dietary eating pattern. I eat bread most days of the week. I am a fan of bread as well. My kids are fans of bread.

31:34They love bread with like olive oil and balsamic vinegar. It's a staple in terms of our overall healthful dietary eating pattern. So there's no like unique thing outside of if you're gluten intolerant or you have celiac disease, no reason that you would need to like just specifically avoid bread. Okay. What about dairy? Also has had a tough decade or so. And again, we're setting aside folks who are, you know, medical diagnosis like lactose intolerance, whatever. But there have been a lot of concerns about dairy. I'm not sure they're entirely fair. What what say you? Yeah, I think that there are certainly lactose intolerance, I think, is higher than a lot of people realize.

32:13And so I do think that there are quite a few people who feel better when they remove it. But for those of us who aren't lactose intolerance, which in the United States, there's a lot of like European Americans and they tend to have the highest lactose tolerance in the world. A lot of us are not lactose intolerant. And so dairy is a really like nutrient dense food. It's a good source of protein, a good source of fat. It's kind of got all three macronutrients, fat, protein, and carbohydrates. That's why it's often a great choice for like kids because it's just a really like nutrient dense, wholesome, not meal, but thing that they can consume pretty easily and get calories and nutrition.

32:51And so I think a lot of people who tolerate dairy fine, it's a good kind of option for them in terms of nutritional adequacy. One of the things that maybe you'll ask me about is raw dairy. I would, from a public health perspective, always recommend us purchasing pasteurized dairy, which pasteurization is just to heat milk. The most kind of common way is to heat it for 15 seconds to less than boiling and then rapidly cool it. And that process is just, and that's it. There's no like, it's not a chemical process or anything. It's just heating it. And that process just kills any pathogens. So any like harmful, potentially harmful germs that would be living in the milk that would be existing in the milk.

33:30And so, you know, any anything that's sold on shelves generally in the United States, the vast majority of milk is going to be pasteurized milk. OK, here's another food issue that has gotten a lot of heat recently. High fructose corn syrup. Should we run for the hills when we see that listed as an ingredient? So high fructose corn syrup is sugar that's made from corn. It's called high fructose corn syrup because it's compared to corn syrup. Corn syrup is 100 % glucose, whereas high fructose corn syrup is anywhere from 45 to 55 % fructose and the rest glucose. And so that's the reason for the name high fructose is because it's higher than just plain old glucose.

34:13But if you look at cane sugar, which is our traditional table sugar, that's about 50 % fructose and 50 % glucose. So those are kind of like your main monosaccharides. Those are sugars. So when you consume both of those, your body recognizes the glucose and the fructose and they break that down. And so again, high fructose corn syrup, anywhere from 45 to 55 % fructose, whereas cane sugar is 50 % fructose. So very similar. And when we look metabolically at the difference, your body really doesn't tell them apart. And so if we're thinking about, you know, should we avoid this and switch to cane sugar, there's no evidence to suggest that cane sugar is any better.

34:54Now, the problem comes in when we look at high fructose corn syrup is that a lot of these food companies, because they are, you know, operating, their number one goal is profitability, right? Profit and growth. That's what all of these corporations working under our society are trying to do. They're trying to maximize profit and growth, oftentimes at the expense of our health. And so when you think about what foods are they trying to source, they're trying to source the cheapest foods. And because U.S. government policy, we subsidize corn heavily in this country, corn, high fructose corn syrup is a cheaper sugar source than cane sugar for a lot of these manufacturers.

35:32And so that's the sugar source that they use. So you'll see it in a lot of these kind of low nutrient ultra processed foods like candies, like, you know, baked goods, all these different things that we otherwise wouldn't necessarily recommend that you consume a lot of because, again, they have a lot of sugar, a lot of, you know, salt, sugar, fat, and low in nutrition, low in nutrients, low in fiber, low in protein, low in nutrients. And so I think people tend to be over-consuming these foods. But the idea that swapping high fructose corn syrup out and putting the exact same amount of cane sugar back in is any healthier is a fallacy.

36:08We just don't have any evidence to suggest that's true. And in fact, we have evidence to suggest the opposite is true. It's pretty much the exact same. Okay, very helpful. Let's double click, though, on sugar writ large. Once again, I'm going to give you my take on this and then please fact check me. But if anybody ever asks me about my attitudes about sugar, I tell the truth, which is I love it. I love baked goods. I love going to the movies and eating Twizzlers with my son. Sometimes it doesn't make me feel that good. So I don't eat it all the time. And I have a basic understanding of nutrition and it you know, you don't want to over index on sugar because it's not super healthy.

36:53But having it once in a while, like, yeah, enjoy your cookies. So that's my basic take. Where are you? Yeah, our body's primary source of fuel and its preferred source of fuel is glucose, and glucose is sugar. So there's only three monosaccharides, glucose, fructose, and galactose. And all of the sugars that you can think of contain a mixture of those monosaccharides. And that's kind of like the basis of carbohydrates. We're really getting in a biochemical lens here, but I think that's very important to kind of understand what I'm about to say about sugar. So if you eat bread, it breaks down into these monosaccharides, mostly glucose.

37:36If you drink milk, it breaks down into these monosaccharides. If you eat candy, it breaks down into these monosaccharides. All of these things are sugars and our body is using them as energy. And so the idea is you just don't want to overconsume sugar. And what we see is that a lot of people are overconsuming what we term added sugars, which, you know, if you're just eating candy, if you're just drinking a Coke, if you're just eating Twizzlers, that's just straight sugar. You're not getting any nutrition in that package. And so it's not necessarily about the type of sugar that makes the difference.

38:11It's what it's packaged in. And so, for example, if you're consuming sugar that's packaged in yogurt, okay, you're also getting protein in that yogurt and some probiotics in that yogurt, and you're getting more nutrition, some vitamins in that yogurt. So you're getting more nutrition. And because it has more protein, it's going to be released a bit slower, especially if the sugar is packaged in something that has a lot of fiber in it, even more so. It's going to be released into your bloodstream a bit slower than if you just drink a soda and you're drinking that pretty quickly. And that's just a huge sugar kind of rush.

38:48And it goes into your bloodstream quite quickly. And you're more likely to overconsume it. So at the end of the day, and this is the same with everything, it's about eating kind of without overconsuming. Because overconsuming literally anything is the problem. And you can overconsume anything. You can over consume any vitamin, any mineral, because that's why we have toxicity levels for different vitamins. So at a certain dose, they're very important and healthful for your body. And then if you over consume it, it can be quite detrimental. I mean, even water, if you need a certain amount of water, if you over consume water, it can cause something called hyponatremia that can be lethal.

39:25And so the idea is, is that it's not that sugar is bad. It's that the over consumption of sugar, just like the over consumption of anything, is problematic. And so when you're thinking about what you're going to consume, if it contains sugar, you generally want to choose things that are packaged in other nutrients, right? Packaged in things that have fat and protein and fiber. But that doesn't mean you can never have candy or you can never have, you know, a juice. It just means that you want to be conscious that that's just sugar that you're getting. So if you're looking at your dietary pattern, you want to make sure that you're getting your other nutrients elsewhere as well.

39:58I got a really nice heuristic from or like a rule of thumb from a dietician friend of mine, Evelyn Triboli, who says that you might ask yourself, how do I want to feel right now? And so I don't I'm I don't like disallow. I've gone through periods in my life where I wouldn't allow myself to have cookies, even though I love them. But now I'm like, I can have a cookie. But I might ask myself if it's nine o 'clock at night and I'm tempted to tuck into a sleeve of Oreos. How do I want to do I want to sleep tonight? Because I probably won't if I do this. So how does that sound to you as a as a rule of thumb?

40:41I think it's a good rule of thumb. I think also, we have to understand that food is not just fuel. It's also culture. And we have memories tied to foods and it's nostalgic and we celebrate with food. And so I think we sometimes, especially like in these kinds of conversations, we think of it only through this like health lens and only through this, this fueling lens. When it's when in practice in the real world, we don't, we don't operate like that. Right. So if you're at a birthday party, we have to figure out how to live kind of in the, in the maintenance phase. Right. So, so, and that's like a term when you're not like in diet culture, people are dieting and then they're maintaining.

41:30And maintaining is just like you're living life. So you want to live your life. And so if you're at a birthday party and they have cake and you have a piece of cake, again, you just have to think like it's in the overall context of your diet. And so if you have a piece of cake there, just make sure you get your protein and your nutrient needs and your fiber elsewhere. And over the long term, it's about kind of your overall pattern. So I think that that's a really important kind of way to view it is like it's all about dietary pattern. It's not what I'm doing in this moment necessarily, as much as it's what am I doing consistently day in and day out over the long term?

42:11And am I giving my body the nutrients that it needs to feel its best over the long term? You've come back to this in lots of the annoying questions I've asked you over the last 30 minutes or so. you've come back to this, hey, look, this kind of commonsensical response of like, consider the overall context of your diet. And it reminds me of something I believe I've heard you say, which is that we have all these influencers out there pushing their pet theories and making you scared, et cetera, et cetera, when in fact the truth is kind of boring. Can you say more about that? Yeah. I mean, if I were to tell you kind of about nutrition science, I think a lot of the prevailing idea is that nutrition science is ever changing and it's really confusing.

42:56And I would say that as a nutrition scientist, the basics of nutrition science have been very consistent over decades with a few changes. What really changes is kind of the discourse about it. And so, you know, if you think about what do I want to do to improve my health, there are some major pillars of health that are going to have the biggest, you're going to get the biggest bang for your buck. They're going to have the biggest impact on your health. Like I'm just, you know, what do they say? All like 90 % of percentages that people throw out there are just made up. So I'm going to throw out a made up percentage, but let's say it's like, that's going to be 95 % of your health is going to be these major pillars.

43:37And then, you know, there's 5 % that maybe is like playing in the margins. And for whatever reason, like most of our attention goes to that 5 % that is playing in the margins and completely ignores the 95 % that are these major pillars. So those major pillars are for nutrition specifically, you know, making sure you're meeting your calorie needs, your energy needs every day and not over consuming calories, making sure you're getting adequate fiber, making sure you're getting a variety of foods. So making half your plate fruits and vegetables, and that's going to help you hit those nutrient needs and your vitamins and your minerals and your fiber needs and, you know, staying hydrated, getting a variety of proteins from both plants and animal sources.

44:22All of those things are kind of, that's been consistent dietary advice over decades. And it's, and it's what works. It's what I see work over and over. It's what has worked for me personally. It's what's, you know, what it's what we know works in the data from a general perspective. And then it's going to be physical activity, you know, moving your body most days of the week, getting movement. That's something, you know, 80 % of Americans don't meet physical activity guidelines in this country. 95 % of Americans don't meet fiber intake guidelines in this country. And so, you know, we have these evidence-based recommendations that we are not meeting, and then we're ignoring those.

45:00And then again, like really focusing on the 5 % in the margin. So, you know, you have your nutrition, you have your physical activity, getting eight to nine hours of sleep, practicing kind of stress reduction techniques that work for you. And then getting prevent, making sure you're getting going to preventive care visits. Like those are really like the pillars of health and wellness that if we just kind of focused on those really boring things, we would all be much better off and we wouldn't have to be so overwhelmed by so much social media misinformation all the time related to health. The problem, and this gets back to your asymmetry, is that everything you just said is, I think, unimpeachably true, but it's so much less interesting than you should be freaking out about high fructose corn syrup and big food is trying to kill you.

45:49I know. I hope I haven't bored your audience too much. But yeah, I, you know, I think, yeah, I get it. I understand kind of like the perverse incentives and how this all works. And I just, I think the most important thing that I keep trying to drive home is, is that a lot of people out there have a really strong incentive to keep you engaged and keep you enraged because that is what works on social media. And the more eyeballs you get on social media, the more people they can convert in terms of sales for their different products that, you know, they say are going to do what these five pillars of wellness really, really do.

46:29I have many more very specific questions about, you know, the food and the types of food. And I do want to get to vaccines. But since you're talking about wellness grifters, my term, not yours, I don't want to put words in your mouth, but how do we know who to trust? Like, what are the red flags to look for when we're fed wellness or nutrition information via the algorithm? Yeah, I think there's a couple of things to look for. I think that looking for credentials can help, right? So knowing that somebody has an education in the area that they're talking about, don't come to me for accounting advice.

47:07Go to an accountant. Don't come to me for aeronautical engineering advice. Go to an aeronautical engineer if you want to know how to fly a plane. So that could be a good starting point. But it's not foolproof. So also then look at the type of content they're putting out. Experts who are being genuine in wanting to educate and wanting to help people understand things are not going to do, are not going to use like fear-based language. They're not going to start a video with something like, are you poisoning your kids? Or these are secrets that nobody wants you to know. That plays again, really well on social media.

47:41I'm sure that people just perked up hearing that, right? Because it's like, it plays on something that's innate within us. And you're like, yeah, I need to know that. It's especially like if you are a young mom and you're vulnerable, you're in a vulnerable life stage. Someone says, are you poisoning your kids? You're going to watch that. But people who are trying to really educate and help you understand this information are not going to do that. And even if it is kind of scary information, they're going to put it in context to help you really fully understand it. So if you're coming away from content with more questions than answers, that can be an indicator.

48:13If you're coming away with like a fear-based response, that's probably an indicator. If you're coming away thinking, I really need that product they just told me about at the very end of this very scary video, that's a good indicator that it's not good evidence-based information. And it's more of a marketing plan on their end. So is it always a red flag if an alleged expert is trying to sell you their own branded products? I don't know that it's always a red flag. I don't think that that's probably not true. But I think it's a really good, it's a really good like spidey sense to have. And then it like can help you to identify some of these other things.

48:51So certainly it's something to look for. People have businesses and so they're making social media content. So I wouldn't discount them just because they're selling something. I just think that you should watch if it's a fear-based video, it's just watch, like know what to look for to see, you know, are they, is this just like a lead generator for them? And they're just trying to get people into this like funnel to then sell me some kind of like solution to a problem they made up. I think that's kind of what you want to look for. The springtime thaw is finally here. Flowers are blooming. days are getting longer.

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51:27I have some more food questions, but let me just dwell on vaccines. This is where RFK kind of made its bones in the public sphere. And it's just a huge theme in Maha. What's your view on vaccines? Yeah, I mean, first a disclaimer that I have a PhD in nutrition science and my work's really been in chronic disease, not infectious disease. So having said that, I look at this not from like, what does this science say? I can't explain to you the science because I'm not a vaccinologist. But what I can say is that RFK Jr., I've been watching him for 20 years and he has been very prevalent in these anti-vaccine spaces for a very long time.

52:12And, you know, it came from his work. He started as like an environmental attorney and identified that, you know, mercury in the environment was harmful to children, which is true. And then, you know, I think realized like, oh, there's mercury in vaccines. And I think that was his entry into this kind of anti-vax area, kind of not understanding that those are different types of mercury and the dose is the most important thing when we're talking about these ingredients. I think a lot of what we see in the vaccine space is the same as what we see in the food space, which is this kind of natural fallacy, which is this idea that you could just pull out ingredients and say an ingredient is toxic without any mention of dose, without any mention of safety data that is backing it.

52:59I think that's really important. Vaccines in and of themselves are an incredible public health success. Infectious diseases that used to be huge public health issues, we never see, we never hear about. But vaccines are a victim of their own success, which a lot of public health measures are a victim of their own success. So when they're working, people think we don't need them because they're like, I never see this disease. Why do we need to all be vaccinated for it? We have a lot of people who don't even remember a time. You know, you have like Congress people who remember when polio was a big issue.

53:28And so you see them kind of like in favor of those vaccines because they're like, hey, we don't want polio to come back. But we also have a lot of younger people who never have seen polio and never really even heard about it. I think that's what we're seeing with vaccines right now is this not only this distrust in science, this lack of understanding and this idea of this naturalistic fallacy, but also, again, a victim of their own success. And so we don't remember a time before vaccines when all of these infectious diseases were a real problem. So I think that's a lot of what we're seeing in terms of in terms of vaccines right now.

54:03With the caveat that I fully understand your expertise is nutrition science, not vaccines. And yet you are out there kind of, as I said before, doing the Lord's work in the face of this just fire hose of bullshit coming from Maha. What do you say when anxious moms say to you that there's a link between vaccines and autism? I think that it's really important to point people to sources that can help them to understand what the evidence actually shows. There's an incredible amount of information out there of evidence out there to suggest that there is not a link between vaccines and autism. And so I would point them to resources and people who are demonstrating that.

54:47Again, not just saying, trust me, vaccines don't cause autism, but actually showing them like, what evidence do we have? Where does that claim even come from? And then how do we know that it's not the case? And I think there's a lot of people out there doing really great work in those areas. CHOP, which is the Children's Hospital of Pennsylvania, has a really great vaccine education resource that goes through a lot of that. And so, again, I think it's really important to help people to understand why that's not the case versus just saying, trust me, they don't. This administration has kind of backtracked on that even because not just is there not evidence to suggest, we actually have evidence that vaccines do not cause autism.

55:27It's really important to just kind of set the record straight on that and then lead people to the right resources. A couple more food questions before I let you go. Butter. Where are you on butter? Butter is a saturated fat. We have different types of fats. You have unsaturated fats and you have saturated fats. Unsaturated fats, you have polyunsaturated fats and then monounsaturated fats and then you have saturated fats. And the best way to tell if a fat is saturated or not is, is it hard at room temperature? So if a fat is hard at room temperature, it tends to be saturated. So butter, think of like bacon grease when you're making bacon and then you pour the grease into whatever you pour it into.

56:06We always poured it into like a coffee, one of those like old Folgers cans. I don't know if that was like a universal experience, but it always like sat under our sink growing up. And that hardens, right? So that is something like that is a saturated fat. So animal fats tend to be saturated fats. Monounsaturated fats are things like avocados or olive oil. And then polyunsaturated fats contain our essential fatty acids. So if you've heard that term before, in nutrition science, the word essential means something. So it means that your body cannot make it itself. So most fats, your body can actually synthesize itself, but there's a couple of them that are essential fatty acids like omega-6s and omega-3s that are really important for your body, but your body can't make itself.

56:51And those come from our polyunsaturated fats. Nuts, seeds, seed oils, that's where you're getting your polyunsaturated fats. Fish, and then monounsaturated, and then saturated. So butter sits in the saturated fat category along with most animal fat or all animal fats. And what we know from evidence, I mean, our current dietary guidelines as well as previous dietary guidelines say to keep saturated fats is less than 10 % of total calories. And so that's really the evidence based on global nutrition science research, the overall recommendation is to keep saturated fat at less than 10 % of total calories.

57:24And so butter would just fall in that. So you want to look at your overall dietary pattern and just make sure that, you know, most of the time you're choosing fat options that are unsaturated fatty acids. And then certainly butter can fit in. And if you like butter, like you like it on your bread or your toast or whatever it is, wherever you use it, your baked potato, that's fine. It can be incorporated, but you just want to make sure that it's limited because saturated fats play a direct role in cardiovascular disease. Very helpful, as with everything you've said here today. You did mention seed oils.

57:56I understand that there's been some fear mongering or a little bit around seed oils. Is there anything to that? Yeah, there's been a lot of fear mongering related to seed oils. And this one is so interesting because it just like flies in the face of what we know in nutrition science. And so seed oils are the oils of seeds. So sunflower seeds or sunflower, safflower, canola, grapeseed, rapeseed, all of those, rapeseed is oil, is canola oil in the United States. All of those are what we term seed oils. And they're used globally. They're commonly used kind of like all around the world. And they're a source of essential fatty acids and polyunsaturated fatty acids.

58:38So they're liquid at room temperature. They give us things like omega-3s and omega-6 fatty acids. And all the evidence that we have suggests that dietary eating patterns that incorporate these oils tend to be healthier dietary eating patterns. They tend to have better health outcomes. When you replace saturated fat with these polyunsaturated fatty acids from seed oils, we see better cardiometabolic outcomes and better markers, so better cardiovascular killer markers. And so, you know, the prevailing idea on social media is that they're toxic and harming our health. And we just don't have evidence for that.

59:14I think the idea comes from, again, this natural fallacy where it's like seed oils do go through a processing, which kind of strips them from any nutrients that are in the oils. If you compare them to something like an olive oil, olive oil has some nutrition in it. So it's got some vitamins and minerals. It has a flavor as well. So it tastes. Whereas these seed oils are pretty flavorless and pretty cheap compared relative to something like an olive oil or an avocado oil. And so because of that, these food manufacturers that are trying to maximize the amount of money that they're making, maximize their profit, are going to oftentimes will use those oils in their kind of low-nutrient, ultra-processed foods.

59:55So because of that, and we overconsume these low-nutrient, ultra-processed foods, we tend to overconsume seed oils in this country. So again, just like anything, the overconsumption of anything can be problematic. And so that's really the biggest issue with seed oils is they're in so many of these prepackaged foods that many of us are overconsuming them. But if you're not overconsuming them and you're just doing like what my mother-in-law does, which is using canola oil to saute her vegetables on the stove and she's done it her whole life, there's no evidence to suggest that that's a problematic thing to do.

1:00:27I believe that some people have used fears around seed oils to cast aspersions on infant formula. Am I right about that? And if so, what's the truth? Yeah, you are right about that. And this is where our previous conversation about all the science behind fats will come into play here. So infant formulas contain seed oils, often a combination of some different ones. every single infant formula all around the world contains seed oils. And that, you know, I think a lot of narrative online sometimes is like, America allows this and European formulas don't have them. No, no. Every infant formula all around the world, I've never seen one that doesn't contain seed oils.

1:01:13And the reason is because of what I said before, those are the oils that contain the essential fatty acids. So omega-3s and omega-6s. Those are the fats that your body can't make themselves. So infants who are formula fed, exclusively formula fed, are only getting infant formula as their only food for the first six months of life. And so it has to contain those particular fats. And seed oils are the best way to kind of get those into that formulation with no harm and no negative impact. That's why every single infant formula all around the world contains one or a mixture of different seed oils, which are those polyunsaturated fatty acids.

1:01:54Since we're talking about kids and you mentioned this earlier, this is just such a loaded area because after you've had a child, it's a vulnerable time for a bunch of reasons. And this can last from, you know, the newborn and toddler stage all the way up until your kids are teenagers. I'm thinking, for example, about one of my younger cousins who is very smart and reasonably well informed. But she's existing in this environment where, you know, she's online and seeing the information that comes her way. Not all of it vetted or high quality. And she I mean, she's turned to me at a family gathering not long ago and said, you know, I'm just like I'm I'm not for Trump, but like, you know, some of this stuff around the contaminants in our food supply and what that's doing to our kids.

1:02:44Like that's that's a big deal to me. And I feel like there are a lot of people like that. And I know we've addressed some of this earlier, but maybe worth, you know, going back to it. Like, what what would you say to my cousin? Yeah, I think the thing is, is that one of the things that this Maha movement has done and RFK Jr. has done is it's really tapped into something in a very bipartisan way that many of us feel, which is that we have a food environment that's not supporting us. And we have a country with many different systems that are not supporting us. And so when they think about the food environment and what their children are eating, and they look at kind of health outcomes, which are health outcomes specifically around chronic disease are quite poor relative to the rest of the world.

1:03:26They want to understand why. And RFK Jr. is giving them an answer. And I always say like they get the problem right, but the causes of the problem largely wrong. And when you get the causes of the problem largely wrong, you're going to get the solutions wrong. So the important thing for people like me to do is to help explain what the causes actually are. And so if we're thinking about, OK, we are looking at our children who are having negative health outcomes. Why are they having negative health outcomes? Well, we have to look at their dietary pattern and we have to look at the food environments.

1:03:58And what we see is a food environment that is not supporting our kids. We see it completely dominated by these prepackaged, low-nutrient foods like chips, like soda, like candy. They're very accessible, very convenient, quite cheap relative to other foods. And so our kids are overeating those foods. And it's not necessarily because they're being poisoned by toxins. We don't have evidence for that. Again, our food supply is extremely safe. And that doesn't mean that we couldn't do better. You know, I'm all for having more funding that goes towards the FDA food division so that we can have even more oversight of the additives and ingredients in our food supply.

1:04:37But we don't have evidence that there's individual additives or ingredients that are causing all of this harm. It's really these dietary eating patterns. It's really this food environment that we have built over decades that is very profitable for industry at the expense of the health for our kids and ourselves. And so I think we have to really understand like what is actually causing the problem in order to identify the solutions to that problem. And so we all agree that we're having negative health outcomes and our food supply is a problem. But what is causing that? And we have to look at their overall dietary eating pattern.

1:05:13So I think really helping people understand that point is kind of the most important thing here. So that we, you know, we tend to like as humans to have like a really simple cause and effect, right? So like it's the red dye 40 and Skittles. And if we just swap out the red dye 40 and we put in a natural red dye, then that's going to help solve problems. But that's not it. It's actually the nutrient patterns that we're all consuming. We're over consuming Skittles. We're over consuming this added sugar, not consuming enough nutrition. And that's really that's a harder sell, I think, than just, you know, it's a toxin and Skittles.

1:05:47Salt, another vilified but very common ingredient. Where do you come down on salt? Salt is a mineral that our bodies need to survive. And so this is one of those things where we need enough salt, but we don't need too much salt. So too much or too little salt is going to be problematic, but we still need salt. So this is one of those things where we can't vilify individual nutrients. We have to just understand we need enough salt, but we don't need too much. So current recommendations are to keep sodium intake under 2 ,300 milligrams, which has been fairly consistent for a while now. And many Americans tend to over consume salt because they're eating out a lot and restaurants use a ton of salt because salt makes foods more flavorful.

1:06:34It kind of like pulls out the flavor of foods. So soups tend to be really high in salt too, especially like canned foods tend to be high in salt. So that's something you want to watch with canned foods because they use it for preservation. And then these ultra processed foods, they contain a lot of salt because, again, it brings out flavor. So if a food is going through processing and you kind of like strip out some of the flavor, you have to add that flavor back in and salt really helps to do that. So it's kind of looking at how many of these like prepackaged foods are you consuming and then making sure that you're keeping those sodium levels in check because, you know, restaurants are a big thing, but also these these prepackaged foods are also a big source of sodium.

1:07:18So you want to get sodium, but you don't want to get too much sodium. That's really that's really it at the end of the day. I'm forcing you to say the same thing over and over again. Hopefully these these last two questions won't do that to you. When we're looking at nutritional information on food, there's often there's always something about serving size. I've always wondered how accurate is that? Yeah, serving size is a really interesting thing. It used to be that like food manufacturers would get like cereal and it'd be like serving size three fourths of a cup. And you actually like pour that into the bowl and it's like no cereal.

1:07:57And you're like, that's not what people actually consume. And so it is something that you kind of have to be conscious of in terms of if you're eating these packaged foods and it says like serving size, whatever it is, the nutrients on that nutrient label are the nutrients in the serving size. So if you're eating like a frozen burrito, right, and you eat the whole burrito, but the nutrition label says serving size half a burrito, then you have to double everything on that nutrition label because you're eating twice as much as the serving size. So you're eating two servings of the burrito, even though like your brain thinks you're just eating a burrito because that seems like a serving size to you.

1:08:35So in terms of packaged foods, that's kind of something to be really aware of when you're looking at those nutrition labels. Like whatever the serving size is, is what you're seeing. So if it says serving size, half a cup, and then sugar, five grams, it's five grams of sugar in half a cup. If you have a glass and that glass is a cup and a half, you're having three servings. So you're getting 15 grams of sugar. And then when we're thinking about serving sizes in terms of just like food, there's oftentimes ways that we look at that. So usually like we'll recommend three to four servings of vegetables a day and a serving might be like half a cup.

1:09:11And sometimes we use the palm method to show like what we might be expecting in terms of what a serving would look like. And then you're wanting to get like three or four of those. So in the dietary guidelines, it will recommend a certain amount of servings for each one per day. And that's what that's saying. Okay, last question. We recently did an episode on supplements, although it's possible that many people listening to this or watching this haven't listened to or watched that episode. So let me just briefly ask you, we are living in an information environment where people are peddling supplements to us all the time.

1:09:47How should we think about that? Yeah, I think there's a couple of things to understand about supplements. So the supplement industry, as opposed to the food and drug industries, so the pharmaceutical industry and the food industry, the supplement industry is highly unregulated. So largely unregulated. That doesn't mean there's no regulation, but because of something that happened in the early 90s where the FDA tried to get more regulatory oversight and ability over the dietary supplement industry. But they had a very strong lobbying arm. They actually, the FDA lost that battle. And so supplements really kind of operate in this regulatory gray zone where they make a lot of claims where they won't say that it diagnoses something, but it'll say supports your immune system.

1:10:32And it doesn't need to show any evidence of that. There's no requirement for it to show evidence that it supports your immune system. And then they can be sold that way. And so a lot of supplements, the vast majority of supplements, I would argue out there have never been shown to do what they are saying that they do. And a lot of it is just very good marketing. That doesn't mean that all supplements are problematic. You know, there's some supplements that have better data than others. So, you know, something like prenatal vitamin, strong evidence base for people of childbearing age to be taking a prenatal vitamin to ensure that their nutrient levels are where they need to be.

1:11:09Something like creatine, it's probably one of the best researched supplements, particularly for lifting and recovery. And certainly, by the way, vitamins, right? So if you're deficient in something, if you have like iron deficiency anemia, supplementing with iron is the right move. But many of these supplements are kind of operating. There'll be like a rat study and there's a mechanism. And so then they create a supplement based on that mechanism. And they expect that to, or they promote it as if that's going to do that in a human model. And what we know from scientific research is the vast majority of things we think are going to work because of something that works in a rat or something that works in a Petri dish never actually works in a human model.

1:11:54And when I say human model, I mean like our body, because we are very complex. Our bodies are very complex and you think something's going to work and then it doesn't. And so a lot of people are spending a lot of money on supplements and there's just no evidence that they're actually beneficial. Yeah, I in the course of this interview I recently did with an expert on supplements, she had a bottom line that I kept forcing her to come back to, just like in the course of this conversation, you've had to repeat, you know, it's OK to have fill in the blank sugar, salt, carbs, as long as you're you know, viewing it within the context of an overall healthy diet.

1:12:33She had to keep coming back. And as I was asking her about various supplements, she had to keep coming back to like, get a blood test, talk to your doctor. Anything that you were hoping to cover today that we have not gotten to? Maybe maybe like food dyes. Maybe I'll just talk about that for a second, because I think that's a hot topic, too, in nutrition right now. We have these kind of synthetic food dyes in the United States. There's five of them. So there's red 40, yellow 5, yellow 6, blue 1, and blue 2. Those are really the five synthetic food dyes that you'll hear talked about often. Those are the most commonly used in these kind of usually low-nutrient, ultra-processed foods.

1:13:10And I think it's really important to understand that. They're usually used in foods kids eat a lot of because they make them bright, and they make them like kids want to eat them, make them exciting. And they're used because they're stable and they work really well in food formulations. And I think there's a misconception out there that the United States allows these food dyes and other countries ban them. And I think it's really important to just explain that that's not the case. So, you know, regulatory agencies all over the world allow those five synthetic food dyes in the EU, in Australia, in Canada.

1:13:46All of those regulatory bodies have deemed them safe and approved them for use in those countries. They use them less than the United States. That's just kind of like a function of culture. And also the United States, the goal of these food manufacturers are to sell a lot of food. And there's some good psychology research that shows that, you know, even in salmon, if you go to this grocery store and one salmon looks less orange than the other salmon, people will choose the more orange salmon, which is often dyes often added to that salmon because it makes the food more appealing. And so that's why these dyes are really used in these foods, particularly in these ultra-processed foods, because processing really strips the color.

1:14:27And so, you know, the idea is generally, again, these food dyes are used in these low-nutrient foods. And so what we would recommend is you eat less of those low-nutrient foods. Again, you don't always, you don't need to avoid all of them all the time. It's just we make our diet kind of centered around more nutrient-dense foods, and then we can add those in. But there's no evidence to suggest that swapping out that dye and adding in a natural dye will have any meaningful impact on health. And so, again, that's kind of like majoring in the minors. Like there's there's just not a lot of evidence where we have so much evidence for all of these other like dietary behavior changes that people could be making to actually make a huge improvement and a meaningful improvement on their health.

1:15:10So I do think it's important to kind of just understand what we know in terms of the science to be true and what we know in terms of the effect that would have on chronic disease outcomes and health outcomes in this country. If people want to follow you and learn more from you, how can they do that? I'm on all the platforms that you probably can think of. My main one is Instagram, probably. And then I have a sub stack where I publish a couple of times a week and I get more in depth on these different topics. And so Instagram and sub stack are probably the best places. OK, well, I will put links to all things Dr.

1:15:44Jessica Nurick in the show notes. And let me just say in closing, I really appreciate your time today and I just generally appreciate what you're doing in the world. Thank you. I really appreciate you having me. Thank you so much to everybody who works so hard on this show. 10 % Happier is produced by Tara Anderson and Eleanor Vasily. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our managing producer. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Kashmir is our executive producer. And Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme. Also, one last thing to say before I let you go.

1:16:19Please don't forget to check out my new-ish meditation app. It's called 10 % with Dan Harris. We've got a growing library of meditations from many of the world's greatest meditation teachers. We also do weekly live events where we meditate together and take your questions. There's a lot of evidence to show that one of the best ways to create an abiding habit is to do so in the carpool lane. And that's one of the big ideas behind this app. There's a free 14 day trial. If you want to try before you buy, you can check it out at DanHarris.com. Join the party. This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance.

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