Food Is Information: What Every Bite Is Really Telling Your Body

0:02Welcome to Super Life with me, Darin Olien. A podcast where we explore, discover, and share solutions that promote a healthier life and a better world. Together, we'll ignite possibilities, inspire change, and build sovereignty, creating a roadmap towards a super life for you and for all. Get ready to start living your super life.

0:32Darin Olien:By 2050, there will be more plastic in the ocean than fish. Over 500 toothpaste tubes have been thrown away since I've started this ad. You don't think of these small little things, but they add up a lot over time, and we can do something about it. That ends up to be over a billion plastic toothpaste tubes a year alone. that ultimately end up in our environment and in our waterways and ultimately ends up in the ocean. Do you want to add to this or do you want to do something different? Plus, maybe that exposure to that plastic, getting the plasticizers and the endocrine disruptors and then putting that toothpaste in your mouth also is not a good idea.

1:21Darin Olien:There's some great solutions. You can DIY stuff. I've got many of these in my fatal conveniences, but the easy ones that I use every day and I'm about to travel a lot more and the traveling makes them really easy. I go to bite. I bite down on a little tablet, which is not interacting with any plastics because it's in a glass bottle and it's refillable and reusable and sustainable. And there's no unwanted toxic fluorides, flow agents, and solvents in my mouth. So my favorite is this Bite Toothpaste. 100 % home, compostable pouches, subscription models. You don't even have to think about it again.

2:06Darin Olien:You're helping you by putting clean products in your mouth. And you're helping the environment because Bite Toothpaste is one of the best companies I've seen looking at all aspects of their supply chain and their refillable, reusable, sustainable, regenerative practices. So Bite is offering you, all my listeners, 20 % off your first order. Go to trybite.com, T-R-Y-B-I-T-E forward slash Darren 20, or just use the promo code Darren 20, D-A-R-I-N, and you can get 20 % off your first order with a great new toothpaste without using the tube. If you slice a carrot clockwise, look at it. You're looking at the eye, radiating lines fanning out from the center, almost like the pupil, the iris.

3:00Slice open a tomato, you're looking at chambers, red chambers, arranged almost like a heart. Crack open a walnut and you're looking like you're looking at the brain. Two hemispheres, wrinkled, folded, kind of like the brain. Even a little brain stem is in there. Coincidence? Well, maybe. But here's the part that stopped me in my tracks years ago while I was superfood hunting around the world. The carrot is loaded because superfood hunting I saw around the world and some of our exotic foods were people's staple foods. One of those staple foods, a carrot, which is loaded with beta carotene, which protects the retina.

3:49The tomato is loaded with lycopene, which protects the heart. And the walnut is one of the only nuts on earth packed with alpha linoleic acid, a plant omega-3 that feeds the brain. The shape isn't proof of anything by itself, but it's a clue. And I want to spend the next 20 or so minutes convincing you that food has been dropping clues right in front of us, right in front of me for our entire existence. and we've been too busy counting freaking calories to notice it. This is Super Life. I'm Darren O 'Lean, and today we're looking at food differently. I've been looking at it for a very long time.

4:42Being plant-based, I look at food as information. The calorie is a lie upon omission. What do I mean by that? For around 100 years now, we've been taught to see food as fuel. Carbs, proteins, fats. Calories in, calories out. An almond and 100 calories of jelly beans. Same energy, same math on paper. Here's what that framework leaves out. A calorie is a unit of heat. That's how they measure a calorie. Literally, it's how much a substance raises the temperature of water when you burn it. That's a measurement built for a furnace, not a body. And your body is not a furnace. It's a hundred trillion cells having a conversation with you.

5:43And food is a huge part of what they're saying to each other. the communication. Dr. Mark Hyman, a physician in the functional medical space, has been around for decades, and some of the things he says I agree with, and which is one, quote, food is information, not calories. He calls food the biggest signal transduction system, cell messenger system that we interact with, and says that in every single bite, There are thousands of informational molecules that can upgrade or downgrade your biological software, and that is absolutely true. That's a real field of science, nutrigenomics. The study of how food talks directly to your genes.

6:38Nutrients like folate, B12, plant polyphenols participate in epigenetics. genetics, the chemical switches that turn genes on or off through processes like DNA methylation. Your genome is fixed at birth, but which parts of it get expressed is being negotiated at every freaking meal. Fatty acids bind to transcription factors called PPARs, plant compounds, the same ones giving vegetables their bitterness and color, activate your cells, antioxidants, defense switchboards. So when you eat, you're sending a memo literally to your DNA. The question I want you to sit with for the rest of this episode is what does the memo say?

7:34Build, repair or defend or inflame, store, break down. That's the lens. So let's test it against the evidence. Harder than I've ever shown on this show before talked about. Let's start with the food itself while it's still alive. Here's a strange fact that most people have never heard. Every living cell on Earth emits a faint stream of light. Not warmth, actual photons in the ultraviolet to visible range. Far too weak, though, for our eyes to see, but real and measurable with the right instruments, of course. A German biophysicist named Fritz Albert Popp spent decades studying this since the 1970s, first told to me by a good friend of mine, Dr.

8:33Mohsen-Hurmanisch. Dr. Popp called them biophotons, and what he found wasn't random noise. It was coherent, ordered, almost laser-like, which suggested to him it might be a form of cellular communication. Dr. Popp and his colleague Bernard Ruth extended their research into food, and the finding that should stop you in your tracks is this. Fresh, living food emits measurable, more coherent light than processed food. Not so surprising, but when the data actually shares it, this is important. Viable seeds emit more than seeds that are dead and won't germinate. Hop's later work even suggested healthy tissue in our bodies emits different and stronger signals than diseased and dead tissue.

9:34Again, I'm making a point here. I'll be honest, though, about where this sits scientifically. Biophoton research is still, as long as it's been going on, is still frontier science. It's not settled. And plenty of mainstream biologists want more replication before calling it established. I get it. But even the skeptics agree on the basic facts. Cells emit light. and the freshest foods emits the most of it. Eating something raw off the vine versus something that sat in a box for eight freaking months is a lot different. You may be getting a different intensity of this signaling altogether. Now, water.

10:27Because food is mostly water and not all water behaves the same, that's right, A biophysicist at the University of Washington, a buddy I haven't talked to in a while, but a buddy, Dr. Gerald Pollack, spent his career studying what happens to water at the surface of every living cell and plant fiber. What he found was something incredible. He found something that overturned a basic assumption of chemistry. Water next to a hydrophilic surface, and by the way, every cell membrane is hydrophilic, was in turn structured. It was this water next to it, very thin layer of it next to this hydrophilic cell created something that was a different phase, a gel-like structure called easy water.

11:27It was called an exclusion zone water, a fourth phase of this water beyond solid, liquid, or gas. It's built like when they look at it, it's built like it has a hexagonal lattice, which creates kind of that gel-like substance. And it also is interesting. It carries a negative charge and excludes solutes. So it almost desalinates itself. So why does this matter? because the structured water is exactly what runs through raw fruits and vegetables and exactly what heat and processing destroys. Bite into a ripe piece of fruit and you may be getting water that's already organized, already primed in a form your cells can use with less energy cost.

12:26cook it, can it, ultra-process it, and that structure collapses back to ordinary bulk water. And then there's enzymes.

12:37Darin Olien:Back in the 1930s, before we continue the pod, I want to share something. I've tried so many supplements. I've been in the space for 25 years, and every so often something really pops out. Mana Vitality is that difference. It's not just about adding minerals. It's about tuning your body to the higher frequency physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually because this is the mana from the earth, the Shilajit, the Ormus minerals, and so on. There's so much going on with this brand. I'm so excited beyond the Shilajit. they're expanding into other elementals. The brand is built on ancient alchemy with ingredients like gold nanoparicles, beta-glucans, shilajit, ormus, all geared to elevate you.

13:30Darin Olien:Especially in today's world, you need bioavailable, a bio-delivery system that upgrades your body from the inside out. Every formula is frequency charged to promote balanced energy immune system and cellular renewal. And the wild part, the more consistently you take it, the more you feel everything in your body. It's the same with me. The more I use it, the better I feel. My sleep improved. My skin glows. My stress goes down. My testosterone goes off. It's like my whole system is humming again. So if you're tired of low energy, brain fog, and or just not feeling the same and like something's missing, check out MANA.

14:17Darin Olien:Go to manavitality.com. That's M-A-N-A vitality.com. Use the code DAREN20 and you get 20 % off your order. This isn't about health. It's about living in harmony with your greatest and highest potential. Back in the 1930s, a physician named Edward Howell put forward the food enzyme concept. Raw food carries with itself its own enzymes, ready to assist in their own digestion. And cooking and heating destroys it, which then forces your pancreas, my pancreas, to manufacture entire enzymes so that your body can start to break it down. His theory was that you have a certain level of enzyme potential, maybe controversial, and it remains an unproven hypothesis.

15:16So whether that's true or not, what's not up for debate is raw and especially sprouted food contains active enzymes that heat completely destroys. something is biochemically different about food that's alive versus food that's cooked into submission light structured water living enzymes none of these are things you'll find on the nutrition label all three vanish or nearly vanish the moment food is heavily processed that's the hidden layer of information that we lose and we haven't even gotten to the color yet so what if color could unlock many of your potentials you know since i've dedicated my life to food and finding superfoods and i always say eat the rainbow and i meant every every word of it i mean it even more it's not mystical it's chemistry that happens to be visible by the naked eye, like anthocyanins.

16:25That pigment behind red, purple, deep blue, and blueberries, black rice, purple, sweet potatoes, red cabbage, elderberries, research published in the Food of Nutritional Research and the Pharmacological Research shows anthocyanins have measurable antioxidant and antimicrobial activity, improve visual and neurological outcomes in study models, and correlate to the epidemiological research with reduced cardiovascular disease, inflammation, and even diabetes risk. These anthocyanins scavenge free radicals directly and modulate inflammatory signaling. Scientists are honest. We need more large human trials to nail down exact dosing.

17:25But the color is not an accident. It's a label the plant put on itself. Same story goes with orange and yellow, the carotenoids, beta-carotene, lycopenes, lutein, zeaxanthin. Behind carrots, tomatoes, sweet potatoes, leafy greens, and the green amazing chlorophyll sitting on the top of the library of sulfur compounds in the cruciferous vegetables. Every color family is the produce aisle correspondence to a distinct family of protective compounds, most of which the plant evolved to protect itself from UV radiation pests, oxidative damage, but the precise small dose is what turns on and supports us.

18:18How amazing is that? So when we say eat the rainbow, what we're really saying is don't limit your diet to one narrow band of chemical information. Each color is a different message, a different set of instructions, a different defense system behind helping you out, free of charge by a plant that spent millions of years protecting itself. Now, a beige diet, white bread, white sugar, white rice, tan meats all day, isn't just low in vitamins. It's chemically neutered. It's the same short message repeated when your body was built to receive the whole library of colors. Here's the layer of food as information.

19:16What I think is the most underrated of all, you are not eating just for yourself. You're eating for roughly 38 trillion microbes living in your gut. a population that cell for cell rivals your own body. And a huge amount of what we eat isn't digested by you. Most of the food is digested by them, your microbes. Dietary fiber, particularly from whole plants, is fermented by gut bacteria into short-chain fatty acids, acetate, probutyrate, and other compounds and chemicals. These aren't waste products. Research published in Cell shows they regulate metabolism, calm inflammation in your intestinal tract.

20:15They feed the cells of lining the colon and even play in this epigenetic role of reducing things like colon cancer. Polyphenols, the compounds given plants their color and bitterness, get metabolized by specific gut bacteria into further bioactive compounds that wouldn't even exist without this microbial step from the food you ate of the compounds that they created by that interaction. The plant isn't just talking to you. It's talking to the trillions of bacteria living inside you who translate the message and pass a modified version to your own bloodstream. It's a freaking miracle. Feed a diverse range of plants and you're diversifying an ecosystem that upregulates your immune system, your mood chemistry, and your hormone metabolism.

21:20Are you starting to see it? Are you starting to see that food is incredible when left to its own wholeness? Here's a study that surprised the researchers ran it. In 2021, a team at Stanford put adults on either a high fiber or a high fermented food diet, yogurt, kefir, sauerkraut, kombucha, cottage cheese for 10 weeks. The expectation was that the fiber would win for the gut diversity every time. Instead, the high fiber group showed almost no change over 10 weeks. The fermented group saw we are getting to the incredible results of that Stanford study, where the fermented group actually saw their microbiome diversity increase and their inflammatory markers drop, proving that live fermented foods introduce entirely new microbes into our ecosystem.

22:23But to hear the rest of the breakdown and to get into the remainder of today's deep dive on how ultra-processed food literally triggered measurable inflammation and and my honest, evidence-based take on the WHO's classifications regarding meat, you're going to have to head over to my Patreon. By joining the Patreon community, you get the full, uninterrupted second half of these solo episodes, and you directly support the work we are doing here. So to unlock the rest of the conversation right now, go to patreon.com slash Darren O 'Lean. Let me spell that out. Patreon.com, D-A-R-I-N-O-L-I-E-N. Click the link in the show notes, type it in, and I will see you over there to finish this incredible deep dive into food as information.

23:21Let's keep building that super life.