The Food Pyramid Lied — And It Made America Sick

As the Quest Nutrition founder of an early unicorn in the food space, somebody who was fought against big government when it comes to nutrition and food and what's best for human health, how does the new food pyramid impact you? What was your initial reaction when you heard about it? This is incredible. I could not be happier about this. There is a reality to be faced, which is that you are having a biological experience. Whether God, whether the simulation, whatever, this universe runs on rules and your cells react to food. This is why it drives me absolutely bananas when people just talk about, Tom, being obese is purely a calorie problem. The thing is, from the perspective of thermodynamics, they are correct. You're not going to get fat if you're not overeating. There was not a single obese person at the camps in Auschwitz. Nice and simple. I don't care what disease you had. You can give them whatever medication you want. No one is going to be obese if you give them no calories. It's not possible. At the same time, your body is a chemical processing plant and chemicals can react in weird ass ways. You can get people to produce additional heat and that will burn additional calories. You can give people substances that will cause the fat to not be absorbed. We know all of these things. The body is an incredibly complex system. Our food that we've been giving people already has been engineered and is doing weird ******* things to the body. You are what you eat. Your cells are made of the substances that you consume. If you're consuming a bunch of plastic, you're going to have a problem. When you tell people to eat a whole bunch of grains, what you're telling them to eat a whole bunch of, and most people still do not understand this, when you tell people to eat something that's made of carbohydrates, you are telling them to eat sugar. It turns to blood sugar in your body. It may go there slowly. It may have some of its effect blunted by fiber content, but it is sugar. What people need to ask themselves, if there is, and this is a true statement, if there is only a quarter teaspoon of sugar difference in the blood between somebody who's not diabetic and somebody who's diabetic, why does the body care so much about sugar that it regulates it that tightly? Knowing that the body is regulating blood sugar that tightly, why would you tell them to eat a loaf of bread is a loaf of sugar to your body? It is going to break that down into blood glucose. If you eat bread, you're going to see a spike of blood glucose. There's a whole bunch of other stuff with the wheat and why are so many people, especially in the US, responding to the gluten, allergen, and stuff like that. It's a biomimic that looks like, there's a cell in the brain that looks exactly like the gluten protein. Once you have a response to it, this is why people get brain fog because your immune system starts attacking those proteins in your brain. Anyway, this stuff gets very, very scary very fast. Seeing people finally understand what you should actually be eating because your body processes things based on a set of rules. There's a knowing way that you will respond to animal protein versus a loaf of bread. It will be wildly different. I'm excited. Now, I don't think that you should force people to eat certain foods. If somebody wants to get morbidly obese and die, that's their business. But at least letting people know what is true and being more accurate. Now, they'll need to update this because obviously, we'll learn things over time and maybe there are things that we think are great. Maybe olive oil secretly is terrible for us. Who knows? We'll find out in the fullness of time. I want them to update this as things change. But yes, this is a huge step in the right direction. Yeah. Then, what do you think is some of the second and third order consequences of this? Is it just one of those things that if people eat better, we're going to see the- Ray, my chair just broke. We're going to see the ripple effects of all over health. Do you think that it has that power to change our healthcare costs and stuff like that or is this the first step? I think most people do not control their body. They don't have discipline and so they're just going to eat terribly. But at least we're not lying to people anymore. When this starts showing up in schools and things, well-meaning people that are paying attention aren't going to go, oh, I'm supposed to feed my kids a bunch of toast and cereal. They're going to be like, okay, cool. I get what the ideal is. Maybe some of that I can't get my kids to eat and so I'm giving them other stuff. But at least I know what ideal looks like. So a step in the right direction that I don't expect to have any sort of big impact right now. The big impact is going to be making food from ingredients that taste amazing but are actually good for you. That was the mission at Quest was we wanted to make food you could choose based on taste. You didn't have to worry about being healthy. I like the way this bar tastes and it happened to be good for you. So that was always the goal. But I don't think education is the problem anymore, to be honest. You can get a free ChatGBT account and then just say, what should I eat? It's going to give you a decent breakdown. It's getting people to actually do it. Most people won't. So unfortunately, in a world of abundance, most people will suffer because they have no willpower. That makes me very sad. This is why I say AI making all of our problems go away creates another problem which is that most people are not in control of their own mind. Somebody just put this in the chat and it kind of stuck out to me. Do you think that there is a one-size-fits-all to nutrition or there is some nuance when you get person to person? Okay, I'm going to give you the quick answer. There's a one-size-fits-all. Now I'm going to give you the truth. There's no one-size-fits-all. Human biology is wild. It is crazy to me that my brother-in-law can eat every artificial sweetener known to man in contents that I am expecting him to just fall over and die. If I ate a tenth of what he eats, I either start itching like crazy and break out in horrifying rashes, I've actually had that happen, and or I get massive fatigue and brain fog. Why? I have no idea. I don't know what's different. I don't know if it's something that you could find in our genetics and you'd actually be able to see, oh, it's a combination of these 17 alleles or if it's a microbiome and he just happened to have a better hand of it or one time when he was traveling in the mountains of Cyprus, he got dirt on his hand that happened to have a fantastic microbe that he's been carrying with him his whole life that allows him to metabolize artificial sweeteners and I have no idea. But yes, honestly, like if you said the magic question to ask is, Tom, I'm about to be stranded on a boat for three years and I need to come back in perfect health but I can only take one food item with me. What food item should I take? Do you know what answer is? Because there is an answer. No, what's the answer? Red meat. You won't get scurvy, which everybody thinks you have to have citrus or whatever to avoid. You do not. If you eat just red meat, it's the only thing where I'm like, if you isolated just down to that, you'll be fine. For years, everything else is a question mark. If you want to be a vegetarian and you're willing to go out of your way to make sure that you find, oh God, all of the different things that you need to eat to get a full amino acid profile, great. But you're made of the things in that red meat. You are not made of carbohydrates. Your body can turn protein into glucose. You don't need protein or you don't need glucose. I, for a while, lived on a four to one ratio of for every combined gram of protein and carbohydrates that I ate, I had four grams of fat. It's a horrible way to live, and if you're not careful, you go through something called keto flu. But when I say to your blood sugar be low, I'm talking like you're getting warnings from your glucose monitor. You do not need to eat glucose to survive. So you need fat, you need protein, otherwise you're toast. But you don't need alcohol, which is technically the fourth macronutrient, and you certainly don't need carbohydrate. Now, am I advising that you live that? No. If you know how to eat a wider variety of stuff, your microbiome is going to be in way better shape. So my advice is eat the widest variety of whole foods that you can get your hands on, but whole foods. Got you.