#3: Matt D (@MDono10): Discusses working in "Big Food", testing out different diets, and the future of food
Summary
Matt D is a difficult man to label. Calling him a Bitcoiner, ex-"Big Food" expert, carnivore/animal-based eater, world traveler and sommelier, would fall far too short in describing his skill set. In our podcast with him, we discuss his experience working in the "Big Food" industry and talk about some of the alarming health crises weighing on our world today. Get full access to The Meat Mafia Podcast at themeatmafiapodcast.substack.com/subscribeHere, I'm gonna let it
Speaker 2:This meeting is being recorded.
Speaker 1:Alright. We are recording. I'm gonna get it going here. Three, two, one. Welcome to the Playing with Fire podcast.
Speaker 1:I'm here with my cohost, Sollozzo. What's going on?
Speaker 3:Doing fabulous, buddy. How are you?
Speaker 1:I'm doing wonderful. We've got our our beautiful guest here, Matt. Matt, how are you doing?
Speaker 2:Oh, it's a beautiful day to be alive.
Speaker 1:Always. And you're calling in calling in from the beautiful city of Austin, Texas?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Austin, Texas. Not too sunny today, but that's just fine by me.
Speaker 3:And I think that we should make it a point to talk about the graciousness of Matt. Matt was our first guest that we had on about two weeks ago. Unfortunately, had some technical difficulties with the recording piece, and he's gracious enough to come back on. So we're looking forward to an amazing conversation.
Speaker 2:Oh, what they really meant to say was I was not so good the first time, but I've practiced, and it'll be better for round two.
Speaker 1:Not at all. So look look, we're really excited to have you on. Your background in the food industry is super unique. We think you have a a ton to to share, so we, we're excited to dive in. I think maybe just the right place to start is talking about your previous life.
Speaker 1:So you used to work in the food industry modeling out different components of your company's logistics and supply chains. I know that you know this industry, as big food. You know them extremely well. We would love to dive into this. So wherever you wanna start with your story on, you know, your past experience would be great.
Speaker 2:So I have worked in big food for right around a decade, and I have done, not nice things in big food. I worked for very large companies, and I would buy hundreds of millions of dollars worth of food products. These products would be deep frying oils, mayonnaises, frozen foods, burritos, onion rings, Asian foods, fried rice, dumplings, pot stickers. You name it. I've been purchasing it at scale, and that scale is billions of pounds or billions of dollars and also billions of pounds in the frozen food industry.
Speaker 2:So when we talk about health, like, I was a part of a system that didn't make people healthy. Right? So we can all agree that seed oils are bad, but I was on the purchasing and manufacturing side of it all. So I would buy ingredients to help our factories run at scale and pulling 500,000 people per facility in eight or nine facilities across The USA. Or I would go buy food that was too small of a scale to fit on our manufacturing line.
Speaker 2:So this puts me intimately familiar with both ingredients, purchasing, processing, distribution, and also the contract manufacturing arm where I say, like, hey.
Speaker 3:I need, you know, half a million pounds of
Speaker 2:this particular product. Can you manufacture it on my behalf? And so this led to a lot of plane flights, a lot of conference calls, way too many emails, and a general sense of, I think I'm helping the world, but that slowly started to change the more I became aware that maybe health is more than what you eat and the comparisons that this is better than that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's it's interesting because it it almost feels like you maybe felt the the two poles of let's feed the world and then how to do it in a way that makes people healthy. So you're kinda, like, stuck between that and the home. Right?
Speaker 2:It's, I used to have this weird idea that, like, work was what I did, not who I was. So I allowed myself zero self actualization at the office. Right? So the opposite would be a fireman or a preschool teacher. They go to work because they're a fireman or a preschool teacher at their core, and they do that because they feel good about it and they know they're making a difference.
Speaker 2:When you're buying commodities, soybean oil and canola oil, you don't really feel good about what you're doing, but you tell yourself I'm employing, you know, an organization of 5,000 people, and I'm supporting, supply chains, distribution centers, manufacturing facilities, restaurants. Like, an entire sector of people rely on me to make a correct purchase decision because if I get it wrong, everything all the other steps are gonna do is gonna be unprofitable or just an economic waste. And so when you're on the buy side, you kinda say, like, I make good decisions and I help other people be profitable. I'm helping. And while that's not entirely incorrect, it's probably the wrong answer.
Speaker 3:Interesting.
Speaker 2:And that wrong answer comes from just the understanding that food is kind of food's not what it used to be. Right? So there's this idea of creeping normality. And creeping normality is when something changes slowly over time. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:So let's take an example. I used to make frozen burritos for a living. And I did a project for a cost optimization. Now what that means is one of the ingredients in a beef, burrito got too expensive. And we need to figure out how to use less of it so that it could retail for 99¢ at a gas station.
Speaker 2:So right from the jump, eating a burrito at a gas station is probably not health food. It's I mean, like, we can just agree that, like, it's probably not. Right? But if that burrito needs to sell for 99¢, well, what levers can I pull? I can use less cheese.
Speaker 2:I can use a different quality cheese. I can use a different quality beef. I can use fake beef, textured vegetable protein or beef substitutes. Substitutes is a big hand wavy fake word. But, like, what can I do to make that cost hit the right point?
Speaker 2:And so that sounds reasonable. But if you're on the sixth, seventh, or eighth version of a cost optimization, that product that started at 50% beef, 50% beans as a meat and bean burrito is now 10% beef. Well, what's the rest of it? Is it more beans? Is it more textures or vegetables?
Speaker 2:Or what else am I putting in there as a meat substitute to keep it close enough, but not the same as what it started with? And so this type of, like, creeping normality is so weird because when it happens over time, people don't tend to notice. But if you took the original versus the new one, you'd say, like, well, yeah, the new one is clearly inferior.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And I think that's happening at almost every product that comes out of a factory. And there are teams of food scientists and people that add perfumes and all the other, fake lie non food items that get added into this product to make sure that it stays profitable. But as a consumer, you don't really notice these shifts because if you buy it in a box, you eat it for a month. Then when you buy your next box of it two to three months later, you're not doing, like, an AV taste test or comparison. You're not cutting it open and saying, is this roughly equivalent to what it was before?
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And so doing these type of projects just it always left a weird feeling in my stomach because we would say, you know, hey. We hit the profitability metrics. The company can stay economically viable. But then we kind of had, like, well, if we keep doing this, won't there be nothing left in the product if we roll this forward a decade or so? And that's that's where a lot of the food is going, and that's probably why so many people are so sick and tired of this mass industrial food complex because it started well intentioned.
Speaker 2:And then we got greedy with it and the cost of food changed, but we didn't wanna change the retail price of it. So we made small adjustments and just kept doing it, doing it, doing it until it turned into non ideal caloric intake.
Speaker 1:Do you think that system and and you kinda said this. Do you think it's sustainable from a, you know, a profitability standpoint on the big food side, but also just can can we continue to have the system where we're putting these poor poorly, designed foods out there and and expect It's we'll be healthy?
Speaker 2:It's crazy profitable. Right? The incentives are broken. And the easy one here is, like, hey. Farmers of soybean get a subsidy, which makes soybean oil really cheap to use.
Speaker 2:And so I can put soybean oil in a lot more products for the fat content to make a better flavor, crunch this, that, calorie content, and it's really cheap to use. So is it economically viable? Yeah. Because there's creative destruction. If I make a product that starts high quality, then I degrade it over time.
Speaker 2:Eventually, someone will come in with a new high quality product replacement. Mhmm. But that doesn't mean selling the super low quality seven times reformulated product is doing anybody any good.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:So it's sustainable from a profit prospect, but I don't think it's sustainable from a human. Like, if you had to eat that burrito or taquito or mayonnaise every day, like, you would you would have a failure to thrive. And we see that with obesity numbers through the roof, and we see that with, autoimmune issues that are nondiagnosed or spectrum diseases that people can't really figure out, digestive issues that make people crazy sensitive to certain types of food, Just a general lack of robust health and fault tolerance. I would say right now, there's never been as many people on medication and as narrowly defined, I am allowed these foods but not those foods instead of, like, I am robust. It can handle a spectrum of nutrients and anti nutrients.
Speaker 3:And that's where your burrito story is so fascinating because the regular consumer is maybe purchasing this burrito from a gas station or
Speaker 2:a supermarket. They heat it up
Speaker 3:in the microwave, and they're thinking about it as, oh, this is food. It's got cheese. It's got meat. It's got everything I need. Whereas you have this interesting perspective where you're behind the scenes, so you're watching the company engineer, modify, and tinker with the product to get it to a price point, and there's no consideration of nutrients or nourishing the end consumer.
Speaker 2:So if the if the gas station burrito is a low, low quality product, right, it's a deep fried gas station chimichanga, right, which is worse than a burrito. It's a burrito deep fried in seed oils that have been sitting there for a week. So, yay, probably not the best of eating. We could do the same thing with a, vegetarian pot sticker. Right?
Speaker 2:Like, it reads veg. It reads vegan. It reads, no allergies, all this other sort of stuff. Like, it's a high virtue signaling food, but you're gonna have it with almost no no benefit to consumption. Does that make sense?
Speaker 1:It makes that makes
Speaker 3:sense. The way that So,
Speaker 2:like, as much as I, like, ran on the garage burritos, you can have really high end products with the same exact thing. A a good example would be, cauliflower rice. Right? So keto is fairly popular. If you want a rice substitute, we can rice cauliflower.
Speaker 2:Okay. By itself, probably fine. But then we cover it in seed oil, cook it, throw in, like, exotic food, spices, and other parts and pieces to turn it different colors like we cooked it so it looks like rice. And then by the time you're done, you have a science fair product of something that's not rice trying to be rice in a cooking process that should not be cooked for cauliflower in that way. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Like, you you can have these projects all across the spectrum. And so it's not necessarily the replacement of beef. It's the replacement of what it started as. Because if you had to make the food yourself, you would say, great. Let's go get real ingredients and the traditional preparation method and go get after it.
Speaker 2:And then if you have to do it at a factory, you start making sacrifices. And the first sacrifice is, hey. Maybe you're gonna put some sort of dough enhancer in your dough so that you get a longer time to work with it. If you make it at home and you make a dumpling, you do it in your hands and you make one. You're gonna make a hundred million at a factory.
Speaker 2:Like, I'm gonna need, like, a dump truck size of dough. So what do I do to have that be plastic and pliable for a little longer? Well, we sprinkle it with some science. It's called dough elasticizer, couple other ingredients that you would say, oh, well, like, it's in a de minimis amount. But you would never include that stuff if you made it at home.
Speaker 1:You guys are the drug dealer putting flour in in the the drugs. Right? Like, trying to make it
Speaker 2:Yeah. All you gotta do is cut it. Yeah. And there's a million ways to cut it. Like, it sounds dumb, but a cost optimization project might switch types of tortilla.
Speaker 2:So you can make a type of tortilla that gets proofed. Essentially, like, you make, bread, and then you have that bread rise through the yeast, and you smash it and make a simply beautiful tortilla. This is what you would get if you've ever had a handmade tortilla. Right? Or we can use a lower cost option that's a die cut tortilla where I essentially steamroll dough into a sheet and just cut it out, and it's just much lower quality.
Speaker 1:Go ahead, Salton.
Speaker 3:I was no. I was I was gonna say, was there in your tenure at at with at these companies, Matt, was there any talk at all about this consideration over health of the end consumer, or is it always just focused on margins from your perspective?
Speaker 2:Because I was on the my with the buy side of stuff, it was always margin. Got it. But every product would have a brand manager, consumer voice advocate, whatever we're gonna call this person. Somebody would talk about that, but that person's idea of health was very different than mine. So they'd say, oh, but we need a healthy alternative.
Speaker 2:Let's have a cauliflower stuffed egg roll. Okay? But, like, in my experience, all of the brand managers were overweight, sedentary, like, nonhealthy people. So often, it was more of, like, a buzzword marketing than, like, a true health. And so Mhmm.
Speaker 2:This came to a head in one conference call session we had. They're like, oh, hey. We're looking for a new taquito. We should use, Beyond Beef in it. And I said, hey, guys.
Speaker 2:Like, one, why would we use this premium product in a non premium item? Like, a beef taquitos is not a premium item. No one's really gonna pay for the brand recognition, like and we have a perfectly acceptable textured vegetable protein substitute that does the same thing as Beyond Meat with half the ingredients. And so that type of health was health hand waving marketing market sentiment, not not health practitioner. That would make a difference of, like, is it broscience?
Speaker 2:Is this coming from someone who's fit and tan and jacked? No. It's just coming from market sentiment and data points that this is what the consumer who shops at Costco is looking for.
Speaker 3:Right.
Speaker 2:It's it's a good question because, like, there were people in the buildings that were incredibly healthy. Mhmm. But it was almost to a t that they would not eat the products that the company consumed. And it was always telling to go to a lunch meeting when I worked at the Mayonnaise company because every single lunch was catered by Subway. We made the Subway sauces.
Speaker 2:But, yes, many of the people would eat the entire Subway sandwich with the sauce. And then the healthy people would just eat the meat or the middle out of the sandwich and skip the bread, or some people would just skip the lunch in their entirety. And those would be the healthier people. So it was very weird, what you say is talking so loud or who you are is talking so loudly. I can't hear what you're saying.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Matt, where were you on on your personal health journey as you were working for this company?
Speaker 2:Good question. So I like to run my life, similar to a Tim Ferriss two week experiment type of guy. So I have tried an army's worth of diets. I like to ride, racing bicycles. And so I have tried it all just to see what it did to my performance.
Speaker 2:And I've been veg. I've been vegan. I've been raw. I did Soylent for two weeks. I did exogenous ketones only for a week.
Speaker 2:This is, like, drink the powder and then, like, don't eat anything else the rest of the day. I've been carnivore. I've been whole food. I've been slow food. You name it.
Speaker 2:Like, I've tested it all because I find it fascinating because I think as we all share, calories are not created equal. A hundred calories of beer, a hundred calories of butter, and a hundred calories of bacon all make me ride my bike differently. Right? So if I look at the performance output, I can ride my bike after a hundred calories of beer, but, like, I'm a little tipsy and wobbly. Right?
Speaker 2:I can ride my bike on a hundred calories of broccoli, but I don't go as far or as fast as I do on a hundred calories of bacon. Mhmm. So today, I am much more in the carnivore, Whole Foods type camp, and I would still say I'm a practitioner of the slow food movement. I'm very rare to eat at a restaurant just because there's a lot of, tips and tricks and, like, evil that hides there that you can't really get at. And so, actually, because so let's back up two steps.
Speaker 2:One year, I traveled 80% of days in a year. That makes you forget you have friends and family and why you pay a mortgage because you're never at home. So during that time, I ate out the vast majority of my meals, and it's incredibly difficult to eat healthy and stay satiated when you have to eat at restaurants because you're between different towns. And I was trying everything. Like, I was buying, Amy's vegan soups and just eating them cold or, like, microwaving them in the cafeteria microwave.
Speaker 2:Like, I was eating whatever there was. I was intermittent fasting. If there were no good options, like, tried it all. The things that I thought were really fun about it were the veg and vegan diet feels great at the beginning for the first two weeks. And then you fall off and you fall so hard because you're always hungry.
Speaker 2:And I don't think it's possible to take in enough caloric intake in a dense enough manner to actually sustain. So, like, I lost weight. And if that's what you're looking for, hey. It works, but it's not a long term fix because, like, you're starving. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:I would bring a salad to work every day because I worked at a salad company. I guess we made mayonnaise, salad dressings, and deep frying oil. So, like, yeah. I'm gonna be on the team. I'm gonna eat salad.
Speaker 2:I found myself getting hungry by, like, 09:30, ten o'clock in the morning. I was like, this is nuts. I had a workout in the morning, you know, play with some barbells and did some pull ups, and then I can't make it to lunch. This is nuts. On the raw, similar except, like, way hungrier.
Speaker 2:Oh my goodness. Raw just keeps you permanently like, you can make a blender and then drink it all, and you'll be hungry twenty minutes later. You're like, my stomach is so full. Why am I hungry?
Speaker 1:Interesting.
Speaker 2:The ketones one was pretty fun. I took a an exogenous ketone called keto o s. It's a salt ester with a beta hydroxybutyrate attached to it. Tastes like orange cream. It's a ton of your daily salt intake, like, close to 50% in one serving.
Speaker 2:So you're like, woah. But I that was the only thing I ate for a week. I'm like, I still live, which is pretty wild.
Speaker 1:That's crazy.
Speaker 3:How did you feel doing that, man?
Speaker 2:Oh, man. Like, the first one, like, you're kinda giddy because, like, you're in your head, like, I don't know if I can do this. And, like, day two, you're like, okay. I probably should be hungry now, but you're not. And then day three, you're like, okay.
Speaker 2:This is really weird. Like, I'm legitimately not hungry and, like, man, I'm feeling super alive. By day four or five, like, it was still, like, I'm very much alive and on fire and enthusiastic, but I got way more worried that, like, you know, as a fun science experiment, like, it's that. It's science. It's not food.
Speaker 2:It's you have to make it in a laboratory. You can't, like, I made this at home. Nobody is baking their own ketone esters and finding them to salt at home. If you are, call me because I'd love to see your lab set up, but, like, no one's doing that.
Speaker 3:Did you notice any digestion issues when you tried the raw? And the reason why I'm asking that is I started finding with when I got diagnosed with colitis, kale, spinach, leafy greens, sprouts, broccoli, things that doctors were telling me to eat was actually sitting terrible in my system, and I think a lot of people had issues. Did you find that to be similar to you?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Oh, yeah. The digestive issues, I guess, I was having disaster pants all the time on the, veg only and raw just because I think there's many, anti nutrients and inflammatory items inside many of these items that when you're eating them in super mega doses, like, you're gonna have a different different reaction. So one of these is tomatoes. Tomatoes fall in the nightshade family.
Speaker 2:And one in California, I home grew heirloom tomatoes, and they're beautiful and they're lovely. And I recommend everybody do it if you have the beans. The seeds are cheap, and you can get super pretty colorful fun tomatoes. But, again, like, you'd eat them seasonally. But if you needed to, like, calorie up for the day and you ate, like, 20 tomatoes because there's not that many calories and I'm like, yeah, you're gonna have a bad time.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And the ones that come through the commercial stores are very different in type, texture, and anatomy. So if I pick a tomato from my garden, I have this one type called pineapple tomatoes. They're, like, maybe a pound and a half a piece. Maybe 90% flesh. Truly beautiful tomatoes.
Speaker 2:And those ones, if I pick them in the evening, they would start to bruise and disintegrate by the next afternoon. So we're talking twelve, fourteen hours later. They just they're so fragile. Right? But a tomato that's coming out of the store is gonna taste like cardboard, and it's gonna be really boogery, and it can sit on your counter for a week and not fall apart.
Speaker 2:Like, there has been some adaptations like the breeding to create it, and it transports super well. But it is nowhere near as good or as enjoyable as a homemade tomato. And so I think a lot of people have this idea that, like, oh, I should be able to eat my food year round. Well, tomatoes don't grow year round. They grow once a year.
Speaker 2:Same for blueberries. Same for bananas. Same for a lot of other stuff that we can just, like, pop over in the middle of winter and get a mango. Now if you live where mangoes are and they're ripe in the winter, cool. But, like, why should I expect to have a mango in December?
Speaker 2:It just doesn't, like where does it come from? Why did I have to get food off of a plane?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Engineering the seasonality out of food creates the abundance problem. Right? Like, you can have whatever you want
Speaker 2:whenever If diseases are due to abundance, this is my hot take that, like, we live in a world without scarcity, and that's what's driving a lot of the diseases because you can get infinite of anything you want. And then all the scientists get involved and play with the flavors and manipulate the crunch. And, like, all of a sudden you have, like, this weaponized, addictive style food. Mhmm. And that's okay if it's seasonal.
Speaker 2:Right? Like, man, if peaches are in season, eat all the peaches you can get your hands on. When peaches go out of season, maybe stop eating them. Or maybe preserve a few and have a couple jars that you have for the remainder of the year instead of like, oh, I mean, 50 peaches a week. That that's not going to end well.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:I know this abundance and scarcity dynamic is an interesting one for you, because I know it doesn't just it's not just limited to the food system. Like, in a lot of ways, you know It's
Speaker 2:the same with people's attention. Right? Like, people have cell phones and, like, is the problem having a cell phone? No. I think maybe people's attention spans are just getting obliterated because they have a phone they can opt out of being in the moment with.
Speaker 2:Right? Go on board for ten seconds. Let me reach in my pocket and go start playing with this thing that's ridiculous. Right? Agree.
Speaker 2:But it it's the same for money. It's the same for housing. It's the same for, you name it. That, like, the world is truly abundant, and I think that's likely the cause of many of our problems. And, also, it I think it stopped people from appreciating things because nothing's scarce anymore and nothing takes time.
Speaker 2:I mean, if you touch your phone the right way, someone will bring you food. If you touch your phone in a different way, someone will bring you any product from the Internet in two days. Nobody can wait anymore. Right? If it's not instant, I don't want it.
Speaker 2:Weird.
Speaker 1:Super. I agree more.
Speaker 3:And, Matt, I know I think the stuff with your with the diet is fascinating, and I wanna make sure that we get through that because I think that that's really crucial to your story. So you've mentioned that you've pretty much done every diet under the sun, which I think makes you very unique because I think it's especially with diet, it's very easy to just land on the veganism camp or the carnivore camp and just experiment with that and mentioned is you've tried everything. You found that carnivore ish meat based has worked the best for you. How did you land on that approach for yourself?
Speaker 2:It was incremental. I I did this several years ago, and there was not a large carnivore community at the time. Like, I think I found out that you could eat this way on, like, a Joe Rogan, Mikaela Peterson podcast when she was talking about it. And I was like, that's nuts. But before before I found out that you could eat this way and maybe not kill yourself, I started dosing the protein in my daily salads.
Speaker 2:Just I ratcheted it way up because I sound like, okay. Like, this might be the what I'm eating, not how much of it I'm eating problem. And so if I'd make a salad, you know, I make a salad and I include one hard boiled egg. That didn't work, so I'd put in two or three or four. Then I'd put in two in a can of tuna.
Speaker 2:Then I'd put in two in a can of tuna and a slice of cheese, or I'd put in, like, six ounces of steak or whatever protein I had for dinner. I was, like, cooking enough to have leftover for the salad. And then at some point, like, I just kept ratcheting that number up because I said, like, hey. This is way more satiating. I'm not crashing mid afternoon.
Speaker 2:Like, the rest of the office needs a Starbucks and some some caffeine and sugar and a candy bar and a cigarette. I was like, no. Like, I'm I'm good. Like, I'm I'm okay. I just want a bottle of water.
Speaker 2:So as I started moving out of the, salad every day and rashing up the protein, I started looking into more about, like, well, what happens if you eat way more of this? Right? So, like, if the diet was about, like, landing on the extreme points of a compass, well, could I eat only animals? Could I simplify this all the way? I wonder what works best for my body.
Speaker 2:And so as you start playing with an experiment, you're, like, dial it up, dial it up, dial it up, and eventually, like, wow. Like, I'm eating super hardcore carnivore. During the lockdowns in California, I was god. I wouldn't say, like, 95, maybe 98% strict carnivore. Like, my other options were, like, coffee, which has, like, I don't know, de minimis calories, and then red wine because I hunger that.
Speaker 2:And, like, I did that for, I don't know, the majority of an entire year. They're, like, 95% strict. Like, that's that's gnarly. That is like a I think of food as, like, when people get dogmatic about it in the sense of religion. Oh, no.
Speaker 2:I ate the wrong thing. I'm going straight to hell. Right? Like, 95% is, like, super nails as far as adherence. Right?
Speaker 2:If you're at, like, 80%, you probably still get pretty good returns from it. You don't have to go a %. Now I I think that way because I really like cooking, and I really like flavors and textures and all the other trappings of my old profession. So, like, yeah, I'm gonna wanna have a dinner party where, like, oh, no. There's a brownie at the end.
Speaker 2:Yes. You're right. But, also, like, you're having one brownie a week. It's not like you're eating it every day. You're not committed to finishing the pan of it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You're going to an Ivy League school at 95%.
Speaker 2:Right. It's it's exactly that. It's like, hey. The direction is fantastic and gathers little wobbles. But overall, like, if I was looking to be in one percent of the population's health, just stick on the ninety five or the ninety percent adherence, and you're gonna be so far ahead of other people.
Speaker 2:Now I might not have the body of the Greek god, but, like, yeah, if I wanted, I know what levers to pull the dial it up.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 3:It's such a good point because you you see this a lot in the low carb community, like, the zealots and the morality associated around, you know, eating carbs or bread. And the perfect example of this is, I was out to dinner with my sister two nights ago at this amazing seafood restaurant in San Downtown San Diego, and we got this this delicious, like, baked clams dish. It was in, like, this white wine sauce, garlic, so good. And, of course, with the dish, they had some incredible locally baked sourdough. And I'm literally in my head playing this game of ping pong of, like, oh, should I have I want the sourdough, but I shouldn't because I shouldn't eat bread.
Speaker 3:I'm like, dude, have a piece of locally, like, delicious sourdough with the clams. It's okay. You're gonna you're gonna be fine. So you just don't have
Speaker 2:to eat brownies. I I think it's so important to, like, put it in perspective. Right? So, like, if you're right 85% of the week, oh my gosh. Even if you blow it out and have a cheat day on Saturday, even if your entire day is cheap, how much damage can you do in one day?
Speaker 2:Like, I there what's the running saying? You can't outrun your fork. Right? Like, it doesn't matter how many miles you train, but, like, you can't run faster than your fork can travel calories in. But if that's the case, if you're right six days a week, how bad how much damage can you do in a single day?
Speaker 2:I'm not saying, like, go out there and, like, know, blend cereal and try to put in 20,000 calories in a day. Right? Like, we've seen the YouTubes and, good lord, some people can't. I I don't hold myself to that crazy standard because I need more flexibility in my life because if I have to beat myself up, one, I'm not gonna be polite in my own head. Like, I'm already rude enough.
Speaker 2:I don't need more things to yell at myself about. Right? Mhmm. But I'm just not sure that the zealotry is helping anybody.
Speaker 1:It's not. I I think it sets this unrealistic expectation from the get go for people who are trying to get involved in improving their health that
Speaker 3:you need to
Speaker 1:be perfect to make vast improvements. And so for me, I think the people who have been doing it for ten plus years, like like all three of us, we can speak the language of the extreme and be the person who's sitting there looking at the sour dough bread and going, I can't eat this. I can't eat this. But, realistically, you need to be able to speak the language of the person who's just getting started and say, you you can do this at a 70% capacity for a while and make huge progress and then dial it up as you get better.
Speaker 2:And this is not something that you have to go zero to hero day one. Yeah. Right? Like, if you're I'm lucky. I live by myself.
Speaker 2:Right? No kids. No pets. But
Speaker 1:if
Speaker 2:you had a family to feed, you can't be like, alright. Everyone's switching on Monday. That that's gnarly. Right? You just dial it up and say, like, hey.
Speaker 2:We're gonna eat a meatloaf once a week instead of a salad on Mondays. Oh, no more meatless Mondays in this household. Right? Like, this is the type of thing that you can do that would make a big difference that you can trend it there without being crazy militant about it.
Speaker 1:No.
Speaker 2:And I think the the oh, go ahead.
Speaker 3:No. No. You go, man. You're good.
Speaker 2:I was gonna say the long term adherence is a way better predictor of success. Right? Some people, go to the gym and everyone signs up in January. And then by March, half the people aren't there anymore. But if you set yourself, like, a really low level goal of, like, I'm gonna go to the gym once a week for the first month.
Speaker 2:That's great because it'll make sure you go back once a week and month two. So by the time you get to December, maybe you're going two times a week, and at least you're still doing it.
Speaker 1:Absolutely.
Speaker 3:I yes. It it's an interesting dichotomy too because it's so important to be able to have the sourdough or the brownie once in a while and be able to get back on track and, you know, not associate any guilt with it. But I think the issue for a lot of people is, like, they open up the floodgates a little bit, and then they their their eating gradually decays. So that's something Clement and I have talked about is trying to help build the sustainable style of eating where people can you know, you're strict you're you're extremely strict in the beginning, and then you can get to a point where you enjoy that stuff, but you understand food so well that you're like, look. I'm eating this brownie, but I know it's not gonna it's not gonna be the best thing for me long term, so I'm gonna enjoy it now.
Speaker 3:And now I'm gonna get back on track as opposed to, like, falling back down at camp. It's like it it's an interesting balance. You know?
Speaker 2:I I think, like, where do I have the most control of my food? Monday through, Friday afternoon? I've got great control because those meals are likely gonna be all at home. Right? Friday evening, Saturday, and maybe Sunday, those meals are gonna be more sporadic.
Speaker 2:Maybe I'm out of town. Maybe I'm on vacation. Maybe I'm going out to eat. Maybe it's this. It's that.
Speaker 2:So I need to make sure those Monday through Friday afternoon, those ones need to be on point. That's where I have the locus of control. It's going to be harder to make a better decision at a restaurant, and I guess we should talk about that.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:While working in food, I worked at a company that made products for restaurants and food service. K. This is everything that you buy away from home. Some of the products that we made are huge that nobody's ever heard of. We make this thing called liquid butter alternative, l b a.
Speaker 2:Why do restaurants always have the best tasting food? Because they can cheat. That's the plain and simple answer. Liquid butter alternative is, pretty much like garbage in a bottle, but I can make it taste twice as good as butter. Right?
Speaker 2:How can I do this? Well, I put in a molecule called thiazotyl. Right? This is the butterscotch flavor and butterscotch. I can put that into my liquid butter alternative.
Speaker 2:So I'm at a cheaper price point than actual butter, which the restaurants love because they margin up. And their food tastes better, but it also lasts longer under the heat lamps, and it is much easier to dose correctly. Mhmm. Right? So that is a perfect example of, like, here's a product that's wildly successful that if you've never been in a commercial kitchen, you have no idea existed.
Speaker 2:And the ingredients on that thing lead like read like a science experiment, And you'd say, well, I can't make this at home, and no wonder my shrimp scampi is never as good as the restaurant. Yeah. The restaurants are cheating. I'm sorry.
Speaker 1:It's an interesting one to dig into and unpack because I would say most people are probably eating out, and most people, even healthy people, probably have no idea what what that hit what that product is.
Speaker 2:Right. They would select a, shrimp dish and have no idea that the shrimp skewer is coated in garbage.
Speaker 1:Wow. And you were saying beforehand that there's different flavors of this, like, five different flavors and Oh,
Speaker 2:yeah. I think it's a a no butter flavor, a double butter flavor, garlic rosemary flavor. Like, I'd like I can make this product in any flavor you desire. So let's get into another, really weird, margarine type product. So, like, if we have liquid margarine, I can also get a normal margarine, but I can make a margarine specifically for a hospital, which is, like, you know, 49% water.
Speaker 2:Well, what is a whipped product that says, you know, semi solid at room temperature that goes into a hospital system which says no salt because we got people on medications, but we need it to be, low calorie. That gotta taste like garbage. Like, if you put it on a piece of toast, you're like, this is not enjoyable. But, like, we're providing it to a health system, a hospital. It's kinda wild.
Speaker 2:Same way for school lunches. And so, again, like, I I can put in any flavor people want. But, also, what the restaurants can do is if they're looking to cut costs and corners, one of the things you can do at a restaurant is you can substitute fats. Now we know this from cooking at home, but let's say you're a bakery. Well, if the cost of butter goes up, maybe your products need to increase in price too.
Speaker 2:But you can bake icings for the top of cakes with margarine. Now I've had this experience that homemade cakes are always a million times better than store bought cakes. And I always thought it was just my girlfriend being, like, a phenomenal baker. And it's probably because she was using real ingredients that I knew the names of instead of, like, oh, hey. Look at this decadent chocolate cake.
Speaker 2:Well, the frosting is margarine, cocoa powder, and sugar. Like, of of course, the homemade one's gonna taste a million times better.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:But it's not like the cake is coming out with, like, here's what went into it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Go ahead, Sato.
Speaker 3:I was gonna say, Matt, I remember one of the things we talked about
Speaker 1:on one of
Speaker 3:our phone conversations that relates to what you're saying is that even if you're out in a restaurant and you think it's a pretty nice restaurant, there's, like, a 90% chance the butter you think you're eating is actually margarine. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Oh, yeah. The so if you went to IHOP, they sell pancakes. The what they're gonna put on top is not butter. Like, I I guarantee it.
Speaker 2:Right? Anybody that's getting you something that comes out in an ice cream scoop is almost always margarine. Mhmm. It's just easier to apply to food. So butter is very hard when it's cold.
Speaker 2:Right? If margarine doesn't need to be refrigerated, you don't have to worry about your health inspector coming in and saying, oh, man. That butter is room temperature. You can't have that here. Right?
Speaker 2:But, again, like, I can play the flavor game. If I wanted to taste like a double butter, I can do that. If I want a sweet cream, I can put that chemical in. If I want it to be more yellow oh, man. Yellow is the color of rich flavor.
Speaker 2:Okay. We dial up the yellow. Right? If you want it green for Saint Patrick's Day, I can make that product. It doesn't doesn't really matter what the product is.
Speaker 2:But when things are requested, often that's not what comes out of the kitchen. So a great example is olive oil. Olive oil is a fairly expensive ingredient. Right? And it should taste medicinal.
Speaker 2:But restaurants that serve bread I'm gonna take a point at any Italian restaurant. If they serve bread as an appetizer, every table is going to need olive oil. Well, if that's a high cost, how do you reduce that cost? Well, you go buy a mix of oil. So maybe it's, you know, 10% olive oil.
Speaker 2:Or maybe it's, like, oil flavored like olive oil. Right? And so right now, there's a bunch of people kinda waking up to reading the labels of the oils they're putting on their food. I would say, not as a cooking oil. That's something you're gonna heat, but as a finishing oil, something you're going to dip or something you'd like that, minerally or peppery taste in the sense of olive oil.
Speaker 2:Like, hey. You can go get extremely high quality olive oil. Right? This is gonna be cold pressed. But then as you move down the extraction methods, you can get, like, solvent extract pressure cooked garbage.
Speaker 2:Right? So the first one is, like, something you'd be familiar with. Grab the olive, squeeze it, eat the drips. Okay. That's a cold press.
Speaker 2:What do you do at the bottom? Well, I'm gonna chop and grind, and I'm gonna throw some, like, pretty aggressive, petrol chemicals in there, then I'm gonna vacuum it, then I'm gonna heat it ever so slightly so the petrol volatilizes off, and all of a sudden, it outcomes way more oil than just squeezing it. Yeah. So my price point is way lower on this oil. But now if I still need it lower, I can blend it with an industrial byproduct.
Speaker 2:Like, take canola, take soy, take any of your other seed oils. Oh, man. Now I've got a way lower price point, and I can advertise it as olive oil. But I throw in a little perfume, and you would have no idea that this is an olive oil when it comes to your table because, in food, there's product and there's application. Application is what you get served.
Speaker 2:So if we've got pure olive oil, they would come out and they would show you the bottle. They'd be proud of it.
Speaker 1:Right? Yep.
Speaker 2:But in application, you say, oh, it's olive oil. That's what I assume it's gonna be. Well, it comes on a tray, and then you get olive oil. Olive oil is in air quotes because it's all fake. Then you get balsamic vinegar, which is not from the region.
Speaker 2:It is cooked grape must. And then they're gonna throw in some herbs and spices. You're gonna be like, oh, look. It's dipping sauce for the bread. All of it's fake.
Speaker 2:The balsamic is not aged. It's cooked. The olive oil is not olive oil. It's some olive oil, something else, and a little bit of perfume. And they throw in some spices to make it taste funky because you'd never know because now there's seasoning on top as well.
Speaker 2:So, like, that entire dish is not real food. Like, you couldn't name the ingredients on the ingredient list. And if you had to make it at home, you would need a science kit instead of pots and pans. Good. Don't even get me started on the bread because, like, you again, you have all the dough modifiers and shelf stabilizers, and this bread loaf needs to last a week even though we sliced it on Monday because we're gonna serve it on Friday, and it needs to be supple blah blah blah.
Speaker 1:And it's a subtle manipulation too, that I think it's it's really well pulled off. And then the the hard thing is the reaction in the body is totally different than what the real thing is is gonna provide you.
Speaker 3:Oh my gosh.
Speaker 2:Right. So let's let's stay on olive oil for a minute. Have you guys ever had really, really high end olive oil?
Speaker 3:Yes. Harry has. You you lived in Italy for, like, six months. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. I was I was eating olive oil by the by the gallon.
Speaker 2:And it it has a different feel and effect when you eat it. Right? It tastes burny and medicinal, and, like, you get, like, a little zip in your step because of it. Yes. Samantha, would you say that that happens when you have US olive oil?
Speaker 1:No. You I think that there's there's some for me, like, some of these oils that, you know, I would pre education on on all this, there was some brain fog associated with, the the olive oils that I would eat. Definitely felt more sluggish after eating it. Whereas go to Italy, start getting the Italian, opinion on food. You know, my my host family would always ask me, why do you guys not care about the quality as much in The US?
Speaker 1:I'm like, what are you talking about? It's like, this is real olive oil. Try this. And the it it's actual fuel. It's not it's not disrupting the body.
Speaker 1:It's it is pure fuel. So the difference is, to me, night and day. But on the taste buds, it it tastes the same or, you know, there really isn't that big of a difference when it comes to the taste to the average person. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah. The flavor profile, you can have all the way from, like, super medicinal makes you cough all the way to, like, light heavy. You wouldn't even tell because it's almost flavorless odorless. Yeah. Right?
Speaker 2:And so knowing that olive oil has such a big spectrum, well, how do we get the other oils to not have that spectrum? Well, we can bleach them so they all look the same color. We can deodorize them. We can take out, like, big bumpy molecules so they look clear. We can whip them.
Speaker 2:We can put them on shelf stable. Like, the same tricks can be applied to all the other seed oils. Right? Because not every soybean comes from the same farm and the same growing conditions. So So soybean oil should have variation.
Speaker 2:When I look at the store shelves, it's all the same color.
Speaker 3:Matt, would you say that you're someone at this point, if you I I know you said you cook the majority of your meals. Are you someone that will tell your explicitly tell your waiter, hey. Make sure you cook this in butter. Hey. Are there seed oils in this?
Speaker 3:Because I think a lot that's what a lot of people struggle with is understanding, is there seed oil in this? Should I speak up for myself? I feel like you should speak up for yourself. You have a right to do that if you're a paying customer. So do you kinda do you fall into that same camp or have any tricks to navigate around that?
Speaker 2:I typically don't ask when I go to a restaurant because I'm familiar with what they're doing in the backside of the kitchen. So, like, instead of requesting, like, a custom dish be made for me, like, I'm comfortable leaving food on the plate. And this is a really weird non American idea. Like, Americans are taught, like, finish everything on your plate. I have no qualms leaving things behind untouched on the plate.
Speaker 2:So if the dish, if I order fajitas, like, oh, okay. Like, I might eat the, fajita meat, but I'm probably not gonna touch the refried beans. Mhmm. Oh, okay. Like, it doesn't bother me.
Speaker 2:Other people are like, woah. What a waste. How could you not? I'm like, oh, I'm sorry. Like, I get to pick what I eat, so I don't want that as fuel, so I'm not gonna eat it.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. But as far as how to navigate a restaurant menu, having eaten out just a stupid number of meals, the go tos are always fish because fish is pretty pure. Right? It comes from a coast, and they're gonna vacuum pack it, and they're gonna ship it across the country. Cool.
Speaker 2:The worst so, like, I look at this as, like, a damage mitigation strategy. The worst they can do to fish is cook it in some cheap oils. Mhmm. But if I look at them and say, like, you know, the total ingestion of oil on this piece of protein is gonna be, like, a teaspoon, maybe. So, like yeah.
Speaker 2:A teaspoon is not ideal, but it's still not like I'm having gallons of it. So the solution to pollution is always dilution. So, like, fish, always a great option. Most places will serve you a steak, and you can just ask for it, with no butter on it.
Speaker 1:Right. Yeah. Navigating these these incidents where it's out of your control is is fascinating. Like, the when you when you're going to the grocery store, when you're going to a restaurant, do you know the right tips and tricks?
Speaker 2:Yeah. I think the like, this is where the militancy of people's diets gets so weird for me because there are situations where, like, it's out of your control. And, like, if you're a guest in someone's house, yeah, I don't wanna, like, insult a cook and be like, hey. Did you use real butter on this? Like, no.
Speaker 2:You've gone to the trouble to make a preparation of something, and let's share it together. Let's have that human experience. But then let's also not beat ourselves up that, like, it was perfect or imperfect. Like, wait a minute. Food is more than just calories.
Speaker 2:Right? Like, it's an expression of love. It's an expression of community. It's nourishing both to the mind, body, and soul. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Because when I ate Soylent for two weeks, that's like a joyless experience. Right? You just drink your food. So you come to a meal and you kinda like guzzle, guzzle, guzzle, guzzle, and then you're done. And you can sit there and hang out, but it it's not as fun.
Speaker 2:It's not as wholesome. You don't you don't get the same spiritual uplift from eating in that style. So, like, yes, you feel the machine. Maybe the calories were or were not ideal. Maybe it's right or not right, but, like, there's something missing from that.
Speaker 2:And so I know this is, like, a little woo woo, but if you can cook at home, you can cook with love. Right? I don't know anybody who comes to a factory that cooks with love when they're running a deep frying manufacturing line. It's just not a feature that they add. Right?
Speaker 2:And so can I quantify it? No. Do I think there's something there? Absolutely. The intention is, oh, I've made this for friends versus, yeah, it's a day job and I kind of slacked off.
Speaker 2:Okay. There's something to it. Can I quantify it? Nah. I don't know what it is.
Speaker 2:So I'm not saying restaurants are cooking with hate or anger, but they're definitely not cooking with love.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And the
Speaker 2:higher up the food chain you go, like, if you went to, like, a five course prefix meal with wine pairing, they're more likely to cook with love because they're going to make that dish for a very limited number of people. But someone rocking a McDonald's fry line, they're not cooking glove.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And there's that ritualistic element of food that I experienced when I was living in Italy. It's there there are, there's a certain time of day where you get together with your family and you have conversation around quality food, and that element of their culture is deep rooted, and it's it's a part of most everyone who lives in Italy's daily life. Mhmm. US, that continues to get stripped from us.
Speaker 1:Like, we don't think about it in the same context of a ritual of, you know, enjoying and appreciating the food and giving it the respect that it deserves, whereas it's it goes back to that abundance problem where it's like, we just expect it to be there. It's like this industrialized food complex. We just expect this stuff to show up. And, it's it's, sad in a lot of senses.
Speaker 2:That industrial food process, That is like one of my biggest fears. I'm 36 years old. And I believe that everyone that is my age and younger, is unprepared for the ferocious instability that could come. And the only reason I think it's gonna be ferocious is we grew up in a period of unbroken economic prosperity and also a crazy interconnected world. It sounds dumb, but most people don't have any meaningful number of days of food in their house if the grocery stores were to go there.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. And that's okay because, you know, we grow the wheat once a year. So if we grew it, we know there's enough wheat. But if it has to go through a factory before it gets to your house and that factory calls off because of COVID sickness or there's no truckers to move it between the facilities. Yeah.
Speaker 2:We're not out of food, but it's not a format that most people wanna eat. And so this fear is because so many people have outsourced food in their lives. Right? Now I outsource car mechanics. I don't know how to do it.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. But I in source food because I do know how to do it. Mhmm. And I think too many people have pulled that lever to say I'm taking food out of my control and giving it to someone else because it's unenjoyable or everyone wants that Instagram perfect meal. I don't care how good it looks.
Speaker 2:I care how good it tastes. Right? I don't care what it looks like. I care what I feel like when I'm done eating it or the next day. I care about the output.
Speaker 2:A lot of people don't have that mindset and they've just outsourced this. And that's okay because I can outsource car mechanics. I can outsource house cleaning. I can outsource many parts of my life. I just don't understand why people outsource food.
Speaker 2:Maybe because it was easy. Mhmm. But I think the long term, they're starting to have a look at it and say, hey. I'm not getting healthier. Why is this?
Speaker 2:They can't spend enough dollars on outsourced food to get healthy. It seems weird, but the, the counterpoint to this trend would be a juice cleanse. Right? There are plenty of places making cold pressed juice. You can go buy yourself a $15 bottle a day of juices for a week.
Speaker 2:You could poop your brains out because you're not used to eating, like, two cups of spinner lino. Right? I had the green one. No. You you just blew your brains out through your butthole.
Speaker 2:Sorry,
Speaker 1:guys. Yeah.
Speaker 2:But, like, that would be, like, the best health food you could buy. Right. But eat like, is it health food? I would argue it's probably, like, anti healthy because all it did was just deplete you of everything and, like, run you, run you from a state of robustness into a state of scarcity. Yep.
Speaker 2:Or, like, yeah. You lost weight. Yeah. I mean, that's gonna happen. Like, you're drinking your calories.
Speaker 2:Right? Nothing's good.
Speaker 1:Done. It's a temporary fix for sure.
Speaker 3:And that's the and that's the beautiful thing about this approach that you've landed on to your point is if you make the investment to in source your food and learn a couple go to dishes, how to properly pan sear a steak, reverse sear it, bake chicken thighs, make really good delicious eggs a few different ways, you can spice up your diet in a way that gets you the maximum quality of protein, amino acids, everything that's great for you. And, also, with the carnivore diet, probably spent sometimes I can spend twenty ish minutes a day preparing a delicious, almost gourmet quality meal. So it's just yeah. It's it's interesting the way that that works for a lot of people, and it sounds like that's been the best thing that's helped you have a lot of success as well nutritionally.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And the other part is, like, just because the steaks are sexy, doesn't mean you have to eat steaks. Right? Like, I don't know. You can go to a thrift store and get a crock pot and make beautiful meals in a crock pot.
Speaker 2:Like, I love pot roast, and that is typically $3.50 a pound where I live. Right? That, man, that I you know, he does stuff every single week. It's beautiful. Right?
Speaker 2:Oh, man. I made pulled pork. Oh, I made pulled pork in a crock pot, and I got it for, like, 99¢ a pound. Right? Like, when people think, like, oh, man.
Speaker 2:Look at all these beautiful, glorious rib eyes. Now rib eyes are a great steak, but it doesn't mean you have to eat it every day. Like, there's plenty of options and techniques and, like, not everything has to be overly complicated. And, like, I can meal prep for a whole week and then stash it in the freezer and then pull it out, throw it in a sorry. Throw it in a crock pot every morning, and I'm good to go.
Speaker 2:Right? So, like, I can legitimately meal prep, like, a month worth of food and then bag it all and stick it in the freezer and pull it out as necessary. And so when people think of, like, well, I don't have time to cook. Okay. You don't have time to cook now.
Speaker 2:When could you make time to cook? Because if you can't figure out how to take something out of your freezer and into a crock pot, I can't save you. It's easier than touching your phone and figuring out what to order on Instacart or, Uber Eats. Right?
Speaker 1:And it becomes this thing of, like, how important is it to you and that it that I'm referring to is how important is your health to you because taking it under your own control is part of the process. Cooking is part of that process. Like, I think that it's essential.
Speaker 2:I look at the calories as prepaid health care. Right? Like, I can
Speaker 1:I love that? Figure this
Speaker 2:out and go experiment with it on my own to figure out what works best for me with an end of one experiment. What works for me might not work for you. That's okay. Right. You have different genotypes, phenotypes, expressions, stress.
Speaker 2:You you need it. Right? We're different. Yeah. But if I'm gonna go run the experiment and I'm gonna treat food as prepaid health care, oh, man.
Speaker 2:My food bill went up $20 a week. Okay? Did my health care go down? Yeah. It went down by hundreds of dollars a day at end of life care because I'm not obese.
Speaker 2:I'm not in long term medications. Like, if you change your total cost of ownership mindset to, oh, man, this steak is $10 a pound, to this steak prevents me from being hangry, eating a bunch of garbage, falling down that rabbit hole, and hating myself later in the week, that's probably a pretty good investment. And then if you start mapping it to a monthly, like, hey. My weight and BMI is turning to a place where I want it to be. My strength scores at the gym are going up whenever I measure them.
Speaker 2:My, mental clarity, my brain fog, my all the parts and pieces that I would say make for a successful, healthy person. If you look at it in totality, yeah, food is an input cost, but, man, I'm getting way bigger returns when I eat in a specific manner compared with other manners I've eaten in the past.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The unquantifiable components of it are, I think, are the ones that are or or maybe, like, nondirect benefits, like your quality of your relationships, things like that. Like, you have more energy to put into all the different things that you're doing. Like, you can't really quantify that until you get in the weeds and start doing it and experimenting and seeing those for yourself.
Speaker 2:And that's what I would encourage people to do like hey give it a try for two weeks. You don't have to go hard in the paint just like double your protein servings.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Two
Speaker 2:weeks later you're like hey this is working way better. Cool. Start cutting out some other stuff and see if you can triple it. Right? Like, the beat, the meat heavy one works for me now, and it's beautiful.
Speaker 2:But, like, at some point, if it doesn't work for me, so let's say at 45, I'm like, oh, man, life is different, different type of stress. I'm like, oh, hey, I find I'm functioning better on eating meat and potatoes or meat and rice or meat and bananas or meat and whatever it is. Okay. Cool. Because I don't think that there's one diet that works.
Speaker 2:There's one diet that works for you best now, and things will change. Like, do I wanna be able to eat five pounds of rib eye when I'm 90 years old? Absolutely. Do I think that I'll realistically be able to eat five pounds of rib eye in a single sitting when I'm 90? That's probably not gonna happen.
Speaker 1:Agreed. I think, I think you're just in a a unique position to answer a lot of questions around FoodNet. Just your personal experience with industry and your own health health journey and experimentation is just awesome to hear you talk about all this stuff.
Speaker 2:Thanks. Do you guys have any more questions? And how's our time doing? I'm sorry.
Speaker 1:We've we've gotten, we've gotten pretty far down this rabbit hole, and I would love to save some more for some, some conversations later on. I guess the the one last one I have is having your experience in the food industry, what is and you might have already touched on this. The thing that fears that creates the most fear or scares you the most about what you're seeing today in the food world?
Speaker 2:Good question. I'm I'm really concerned about that. I guess there's two things I'm really concerned about. One is the instability. Right?
Speaker 2:Like, supply chains are super big and super complicated and not at all local. And I mean that all the way down to, like, I have friends that are full blown adults that pay taxes that don't cook. If you can't figure out why you should own pots and pans and a knife or two, you probably should figure that out pretty quick. Right? You probably should maybe keep some extra calories in your house for in the event that a supply chain collapse happens and you need to feed your neighbors for a week.
Speaker 2:Right? So if we put the instability aside from a systemic risk problem, my biggest complaint or worry is the creeping normality. Right? So if we're on the seventh iteration of a burrito, what did it start as? If you had to go back a hundred and fifty years ago and say, which product do you prefer, this one or this one, Almost nobody would pick the current iterations of something.
Speaker 2:But because it's like a slow drip ever so slight change, people don't notice. Mhmm. And if people don't notice, it just continues. So I worry that the path we're on is not ideal and that the people pushing health often have bad incentives in place. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:We need to sell more pounds of food. Okay. Well, how do we sell more pounds of food? Well, we figure out how to make it less satiating.
Speaker 1:It's it's honestly, like, sobering to hear you talk about that because, you know, I think that we've all three gotten ourselves to a point where we're, independent about how we, you know, satiate ourselves and and provide for ourselves when it comes to food, but I think they're just like there's a lot of people out there who aren't focused on this type of thing.
Speaker 2:And it it's so easy to not focus on it because it would be so hard to know that the Cheez It you bought this month is different than the Cheez It you bought six months ago.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Like, you're not flinging them out and doing an a b testing. Right?
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:You're just getting a box of Cheez Its. Mhmm. And it's the same for cereal or it's the same for, I don't know, any manufactured product that when the people in the factory start playing with levers that you didn't even know existed, sometimes you get super cool products. Right? Other times, you get just the same thing, but a little less a little less quality, a little more science than food.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:It's almost mind blowing to compare the concept of going to a supermarket and buying Cheez Its versus buying half a cow from K and C Cattle, amazing farm in Central Austin like you did. Just thinking about the personal relationship that you now have with Cole, who's the owner of that farm that raised the cattle from the time they were a little baby calf, no antibiotics. Just just complete autonomy, control the relationship with your farmer and the way you're talking about incentives. You now have a relationship with him, and he's incentivized to wanna give you an amazing product that's gonna nourish you and make you feel amazing. Because if he doesn't do that, you're not gonna order from him anymore.
Speaker 3:So, it's just like it's it's fascinating that Cheez Its and grass fed beef both technically fall in the category of food, but couldn't be more opposite.
Speaker 2:To stay on that idea of incentives for a minute, the incentives of buying direct from a rancher or farmer or producer is pretty cool because they have a direct incentive to make sure that that product remains high quality because they're interacting with you. Mhmm. When I go through a supermarket or a supply chain, there's layers at every single step. Right? There's a grocery store.
Speaker 2:There's a distributor. There's a wholesaler. There's a processor. There's a feedlot. There's all of the government incentives subsizing particular products, which is how they make their way into food to, again, reduce the cost.
Speaker 2:All of those things show up at play. What I might not I guess, if dollars are votes, my vote is going to be far less if I have to vote in a representative democracy that aggregates at every single step. I buy a steak but the grocery store has a meat buyer. They're gonna buy steak and chicken and fish and shrimp and a bunch of other items instead of just steak. Okay.
Speaker 2:Then they have a distributor, then they have a wholesaler, then they have a manufacturer. All of these people are going to change the intent of that boat. Whereas if I go and I talk to somebody and say, this is what I'd like. Can you provide it? They know exactly what I'm looking for.
Speaker 2:And so I think some of these feedback loops are the main problem of how food got co opted because I can change other people's incentives.
Speaker 1:And the more nodes and layers you add to the system with different incentives at each at each layer, that that
Speaker 2:could noisy.
Speaker 1:I mean, it's not surprising that we're sitting here right now with eighty eight percent of the western society suffering from some sort of metabolic dysfunction.
Speaker 3:Mhmm. Eighty eight percent. Right? Yeah.
Speaker 2:And despite the metabolic the metabolic function problems, like, it's probably the same for health care. It's probably the same for any large industry. And this is not an original thought, but there are very few institutions that are worthy of our trust now. And this has been happening my whole life, but there are very few that you'd say, yeah, I trust it. I'm not gonna go verify.
Speaker 2:And that would be health care. That would be banking. That would be housing. That would be you pick it. Right?
Speaker 2:Like, my go to example here is pick three that you trust. Most people can't get three.
Speaker 1:K and C.
Speaker 2:We got one farmer. But, like, is it a church? I'm Catholic. We've done some pretty bad stuff pretty recently. It's like, maybe not.
Speaker 2:Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:I'm American. Do I trust our democracy? Maybe maybe not so great. Do I trust our health care system? No.
Speaker 2:Definitely not. Right? Like, when you start, like, digging this back and say, like, okay, where do I find trust and who do I give it to? Man, the incentives matter.
Speaker 1:You're baiting me to ask a Bitcoin question. I know you are. No. No. There's it's
Speaker 2:just interesting that there are many things that have effort and factors over your health, but it's really hard to get you a set of truth for it. Yeah. Right? And I this is where I think the experimental mindset has come in so, fortunate for me that if I wasn't comfortable going out and experiments and then figuring out the answer that worked for me, who do you trust?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Every item is so, so filled with vitriol and get on my team and vegans are bad for this or carnivores are bad for that. Like, it's so easy to get lost in the sauce because there's just too many opinions being shouted in the most weaponized way possible.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's almost the same. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I appreciate what you guys do having slow open discussions and bringing on people to look at many different viewpoints of the same, like, what is health? How do we make it better? What's working for you? What have you learned so far?
Speaker 1:Yeah. I appreciate that. And I think Solaso and I both are up in the camp of let's have as many different minds on here as possible who can, you know, bring out different sides and different angles to this topic that is just so, challenging. But or I think it's it's like health should be simple, but now it's just made challenging. And so I think just having a forum where people are open and honest and just trying to get the the right answers out there.
Speaker 1:Because I think, you you know, anyone who's healthy, you you could probably agree on 95% of the things. And then there's that 5% where it's like, okay. Like, why why are we letting that 5% dictate why we disagree so much?
Speaker 2:It it's such a for a historical reference, like, there's religion. Right? You got Judaism as one point o. Catholicism as two point o. Muslim as three point o.
Speaker 2:Right? Same storyline. We have, like, hundred year fights with other religions. What we're 99% in common, guys and gals. Why are we fighting?
Speaker 2:Well, like, if we can't even agree on religion, oh, there's zero chance we can agree on food. But I don't think the fighting militant style battles over this stuff on the Internet is what what needs to be done to get people healthy. Because at the end of the day, just go get started trying something. Because if you're doing what you're currently doing, that's how you arrive where you are. So if you're looking for a change, you can't do the same thing that got you to where you were.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. Really good. I think that's
Speaker 3:a really powerful point to close it out on as well.
Speaker 1:Yes. Perfectly said. I think that we we've covered so much here. And, Matt, we really appreciate, having you on. You are just a wealth of knowledge.
Speaker 1:We're gonna have to do this again soon.
Speaker 2:Gentlemen, thanks for the time. Appreciate it.
Speaker 1:Beautiful. I'm gonna stop the recording.
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