ATHE_Transcript_Ep 565_Shawn Stevenson
JJ Virgin: [00:00:00] I am JJ Virgin, PhD Dropout. Sorry, mom, turn four time New York Times bestselling author. Yes, I'm a certified nutrition specialist, fitness Hall of Famer, and I speak at health conferences and trainings around the globe. But I'm driven by my insatiable curiosity and love of science to keep asking questions, digging for answers, and sharing the information I uncover with as many people as I can, and that's why I created the Well Beyond 40 podcast.
To synthesize and simplify the science of health into actionable strategies to help you thrive. In each episode we'll talk about what's working in the world of wellness, from personalized nutrition and healing your metabolism to healthy aging and prescriptive fitness. Join me on the journey to better health.
So you can love how you look and feel right now and have the energy to play full out at 100.
So the interview you're about to see, I [00:01:00] actually got to record in person with Shawn Stevenson at his podcast studio. I was coming into LA to go to a gala for Dr. Daniel Amen and his wife Tana, they had their end of mental illness gala, and Dr. Amen has done so much to support me over the years, so I wanted to make sure I was there to support him back.
So I went to the gala with Shawn and his awesome wife, Anne, who I've had the opportunity to hang out with a bunch. And then also my girlfriend, Cynthia Garcia of the Institute for Transformational Nutrition and the Modern Coach School. And then my buddy, Dr. Reef Karim, and his girlfriend Liz, by the way, funny fact, Dr. Reef Karim was supposed to be my co-star on Freaky Eaters, but he ended up getting another show that never even ended up going. So I ended up doing this show with Dr. Mike Dow. So finally I find out I'm coming into LA. I'm like, Shawn, we can actually do this in person. So I did his podcast, the Model Health Show, which you definitely want to [00:02:00] subscribe to.
So much great information there. And then he did my show and what I. Figured out after we did my show was that I need to have Shawn on as a regular. He has so much great information all around, eating, sleeping. You think of his two books, eat Smarter and Sleep Smarter, and then he's done so many great podcast interviews.
I mean, his show has millions of downloads a year. It's the number one health podcast. So, He has so much great actionable information and we dig into fat loss and metabolism. You know, those are two of my favorite subjects and I'm guessing if you're dialed in here, yours too. So let me tell you a little bit about Shawn.
Beyond just the Model Health show, he has been featured in so many different media outlets, Forbes Fast Company in the New York Times, Muscle and Fitness, ABC News, espn, et cetera. And he also co-founded the Advanced Integrative Health Alliance as well. He wrote two books. You'll want both of them eat Smarter and Sleep Smarter, and we'll be talking a [00:03:00] lot about the information from Eat Smarter Today, so you'll get a little taste of what you'll get when you grab the book.
I'm gonna put all of the information from today. Because we refer to a lot of good stuff, and I know he is gonna supply us with some studies and, and, and more goodness at jjvirgin.com/ModelHealthShow. All right, I'll be right back with Shawn. Stay with me. Okay, so I'm so excited to dig into everything around fat loss and metabolism.
I think you know a little bit about this. I'm pretty sure. Pretty sure we might have touched sleep. We'll definitely talk eating all the good stuff cuz I finally have you in person, Shawn. Darn. How long did that take? Years. Forever.
Shawn Stevenson: Forever. I'm grateful to, to hang out with you.
JJ Virgin: I had to push my way into your office.
Take the jacket off. Let's go. Let's go dude. Well, let's talk first. You know, I still get crap about fighting around calories. Mm-hmm. What do you think about the whole [00:04:00] calories in, calories out model here?
Shawn Stevenson: I think the best way to be able to kind of dissect the conversation and get to a place of.
Reality and congruency is to just step back and just think about what is this exactly? Like, most importantly, where did it come from? Where did this scientific tenet come from? And so it sent me on this journey and I spent quite a bit of time just exploring where the concept of the calorie came from, and I traced it back to its origins, which funny enough, didn't begin in nutrition.
This was something used in like physics and engineering. And it parlayed its way into nutrition. Once we were able to look at the energy content of a food, they were using something called a bomb calorimeter to actually basically incinerate a food and to see how much energy it was expending. Already we have an inaccuracy point because it's incinerating everything.
And our human body is not like that. So this is one immediate friction [00:05:00] point. There are also parts of nutrition that are not digestible. You know, if we're taking a, talking about a specific food and or how the body digests that thing, we might have a net change or net profit. Net gain based on the macronutrient construct of the food.
The list goes on and on and on. But anyway, so that's where it began. From there, where did it become popularized in nutrition? Because still it was just like looking at what is all of the potential caloric construct of this food when it became popular Nutrition was, thanks in large part to a massive bestselling book in the early part of the 19 hundreds from Dr.
Lulu Hunt Peters and her book was basically focusing on this change from thinking of food as food to looking at food as calories. So it was a paradigm shift. And so one of her tenets was from now on, you're no longer going to eat a slice of bread. You're going to eat a hundred calories of bread.
JJ Virgin: Oh my gosh.
This woman, just… right. There's certain people in nutritional history that have just taken us [00:06:00] down a really bad path.
Shawn Stevenson: Yeah. And this was around wartime World War 1, World War 2, there's this time span where there was rationing of food as well. So coupling this idea of our push now is starting to become something in culture where in particular, women were wanting to lose weight and to be this idealistic figure.
And to do that, she used the science of calories to again, shift our perspective. No longer looking at food is this incredibly complex asset, really that becomes human tissue, and I struggle to even give it a name because it becomes who you are. So it's so much more than just numbers. Two, looking at it strictly as numbers.
And by the way, little sidebar, she struggled with her weight throughout her lifetime.
JJ Virgin: Of course she did because she thought a calorie was a calorie. I literally had a doctor. I had one client who could not lose weight, and so she goes to her doctor and the doctor says It is calories in, calories out. It does not matter if you eat those calories from apple pie.
Or Brussels sprouts. It's [00:07:00] the same. And I'm like, it's just obvious that couldn't be the case.
Shawn Stevenson: Well, now we have really sound science to affirm this, what you just said. Let me give one example. The quality of food itself, the type of food itself, is gonna determine the caloric impact that it has on your body.
What I'm gonna share with you, the, I call these epi caloric controllers. These control what calories do in your body. We already have this very simplistic label. We've put on a piece of science, right? The energy content within a certain food, which is gonna vary dramatically from person to person, from food to food.
Because we are not a bomb calorimeter. Right.
JJ Virgin: And by the way, the, probably the labels are not quite right either.
Shawn Stevenson: Oh, there not even remotely close all. And also the number of calories you burning on the treadmill, right?
JJ Virgin: Like is that close? Well, you didn't count your basal metabolic rate in there, so you just thought you burned 300 calories, which you already were.
Shawn Stevenson: We are living and dying by these things. Again..
So this is one epicaloric controller, which is the type of food itself. And this was published in the journal Food and Nutrition Research. So the researchers decided to [00:08:00] see what would the. Caloric impact B or the expenditure of calories B for test subjects who are eating a processed food sandwich versus a whole food sandwich.
All right. The processed food sandwich was white bread and cheese product.
JJ Virgin: That was like my lunch every day growing up. I kid you not, I just had bologna on it too.
Shawn Stevenson: Oh yeah. Got that bologna. The Oscar Meyer
JJ Virgin: margarine, bologna, white bread. Oh my gosh. I know and fries, man.
Shawn Stevenson: I remember when they put the cheese into the bologna itself.
Do you remember that?
JJ Virgin: The little, no, I don't remember that.
Shawn Stevenson: Oh, yeah, that was, that was innovation. Of humanity right there. So I remember my grandma would make me the lunch, the bologna now had little squares of cheese inside the bologna. Why have to do more work? It's not cheese. Here's the thing I said.
It's cheese food, cheese product or cheese product, or, which is what Kraft singles are. And I just saw there's a big social media account that was doing a video on this yesterday. I just saw this and I pushed that into culture a couple years ago because I was looking into this like why? Why is it called Kraft [00:09:00] singles?
And it's because there, there has to be a certain amount of cheese in the cheese.
JJ Virgin: Ah, it's just like cheese cocktail, right? Juice cocktail can be like a little juice with a lot of sugar.
Shawn Stevenson: Like a cheese blend. Yeah. You know, like a, like a olive oil blend. But anyways, so that's what craft singles is. It's cheese product.
There's not enough cheese in the cheese. So we've got this sandwich, and then we've got the whole food version of the sandwich, which again, this is, I'm not gonna get into, you know, the little, the politics of bread. Yes. We won't go there. Now we've got, we've got a whole grain bread and cheddar cheese. The test subjects eat these various sandwiches, and the scientists look at the path of caloric assimilation and expenditure, and here's what they found.
These two sandwiches on paper are the same. Same amount of calories, same amount of fats, proteins, and carbohydrates. They should be the same. Well, here's what happened. When the test subjects ate the processed food sandwich, they had a 50% reduction in calorie expenditure, a calorie burn post, eating that sandwich, the whole food sandwich.
They burned a certain amount of calories [00:10:00] eating the processed food sandwich. They burned 50% less calories. Something happened with their metabolism. That made it more sticky. It made that consumption of those calories. Made the body hold onto it. I call it a hormonal clog happened. It changed the way their metabolism was functioning.
It created a disruption and really purely by the nature of the abnormality of the food itself, it's a confusing thing for our metabolism. These are newly invented things versus things that are a little bit more, have more of a resonance with the human body. Now again, we can battle in this calories in, calories out paradigm, but guess what?
There was a problem with the calories out. Something happened here and we have to acknowledge that, that that took place. And so that's one. Epi caloric controller is the type and quality of food itself is going to determine what your body's gonna do with those calories you consume. Right? And that's just one of 'em.
JJ Virgin: That's one I would imagine like the gut microbiome. This is another one. It's gotta be another one.
Shawn Stevenson: This is a huge, this is a huge [00:11:00] epi caloric controller and this research, one of them, this was published in the journal cell. And the researchers found
JJ Virgin: you're like a walking research manual. This is fantastic.
I've got like, I've got Google right here. Boom, boom, boom. Okay, go ahead.
Shawn Stevenson: So this was published in the journal cell and the researchers discovered there's a particular bacteria strain, and this was using an animal model that literally blocked these little rodents guts from absorbing as many calories from the food they were giving them.
So there was a bacteria that suppressed their absorption of calories. Now first glance, humans, were gonna be like, gimme that bacteria, whatever. That isn't gonna kill me. Oh, you know, I don't care. I just wanna get these pounds off. So this particular bacteria strain. Now, couple that with human studies, and this was from the Wiseman Institute and they're doing great work on the microbiome there.
They uncovered that there's a particular bacteria profile that's far more prevalent, people who are overweight or obese, right? And we're dubbing these fat [00:12:00] bacteria. It's a shift. And what the microbiome makeup is. There's so many ways we can articulate this, but I'm gonna break this down into two classes of bacteria.
We've got firmicutes. We've got Bacteroidetes.
JJ Virgin: I've been pronouncing them wrong all these years.
Shawn Stevenson: There's so many ways you could say any of these. All right. Potato, potato.
JJ Virgin: Okay, all good I was like, okay, Firmicutes.
Shawn Stevenson: I like firmicutes because firmin – cute. All right. If you want, and this is from,
JJ Virgin: It makes so much sense cuz I was always like, okay, which one is the one I want more of?
Which one? What's about
Shawn Stevenson: the firmicute? If you want to be firmicute, you gotta, you gotta, I'll never forget it. Minimize the firmicute stuff. Oh yes. With the high ratio of firmicutes compared to Bacteroidetes, we see a higher rate of insulin resistance and higher rates of obesity. And this was from a huge database of identical twins.
JJ Virgin: Wow. That is so cool. That just had changed their diets.
Shawn Stevenson: Identical twins. Okay. You can't get more similar in a study. And what they would do is look at the, the [00:13:00] various twins, and this is coming out of Washington University in St. Louis, these huge data sets, and this is from my home.
JJ Virgin: So what did they do to shift the Fand Bs?
Because. Did it make it then that they extracted more calories? Cuz from what I've seen, when you have them out balance, you extract more calories from the food you eat and stored as fat. I was like, that is like ridiculously unfair. But did they take the sets and then one poor twin got their microbiome.
Shawn Stevenson: So this is more of an outcome than an intervention. Right. So they were, this is observational.
JJ Virgin: Okay. Cause that would be mean. Yeah. Like who'd wanna be the one.
Shawn Stevenson: Exactly. You know, the great news about this is that we're taking, and by the way, I said you can't say f and bs because it sounded like super dirty.
JJ Virgin: F and B is a food beverage.
Shawn Stevenson: You just said it again and you're looking at me and you said it f and bs.
JJ Virgin: My brain didn't go there, Shawn.
Anyway, you know, I come from putting on events f and b is food and beverage for any of you Dirty, dirty mind people out there like, quit it.
All right. Okay, go ahead, come back to me. [00:14:00]
Shawn Stevenson: So the great news is that we've got a pretty. Identical data set with these identical twins, which is they're coming from the same environment, same parents, same genetic makeup, and they're generally eating the same diet. They're getting the same environmental inputs, but something happens along the way that creates an alteration in the microbiome of one or the other.
And this might be something very minute or something extreme. By the way, there's a range here because what we know now is that even if you're an identical twin with identical genes, you have a unique metabolic fingerprint. That's largely due to your unique microbial fingerprint because your microbiome has genes as well.
We've got trillions of bacteria that all have their genes. If we go gene for gene in the human body, yeah, we are not, 99% of our genes are bacterial, and those genetic expressions impact our genetic expressions, right? So these are epigenetic influences, and so it's gonna lead to different expressions, different outcomes with our health based on what our [00:15:00] microbiome is looking like.
And so when they found a higher ratio of firmicutes in each respective twin, they would see a higher ratio of obesity, insulin resistance. Right? So this is one of those, again, this is a very general classification. I'm saying this because we have a problem with black or white thinking too. Mm-hmm. Right?
And even making these bacteria bad firmicutes are not bad. Everything has its place. And we want to have optimal ratios of things, but to villainize a certain class of bacteria, even h pylori for example. Now this is another dirty word in a volatile subject, but this was identified to be a causative agent of ulcers, for example.
Like we just, like we found this thing that's causing these ulcers. Damn, the stress, you know? And so, but another study paralleling that. The vagus nerve is super popular now, right? Mm-hmm. What happens if Vegas doesn't stay in Vegas? And this is communication between the gut and the brain. A lot of that data is the gut informing the brain, but there's this kind of information superhighway.[00:16:00]
People that were dealing with severe ulcers. One of the treatments not that long ago, a few decades back, was to actually cut the vagus nerve and help the ulcers to go away. All right? This is not recommended. Holy smokes. Yeah. Don't try that one at home. It was a very effective treatment because that stress input is clearly a causative agent.
And just again, identify it didn't make h pylori disappear. They cut off this stress signal. Right? But now having this deficiency, because we went so hard after trying to destroy a certain class of bacteria, that we have these kind of rebound conditions or what we've seen in the data, and by the way, this is coming from, some of my colleagues are just the most accredited gastroenterologists in the world.
One of them is Dr. Emeran A. Mayer out of UCLA. He's been studying the microbiome for 40 years. And so seeing this decrease in h Pylori, an increase in food sensitivities and allergies, right? Mm-hmm. So was this playing a role somewhere with our, our immune system to relate to itself, to [00:17:00] our bodies, to our tissues properly, right.
Because again, we keep drilling down, trying to find this microorganism, this tiny, tiny little thing that's causing all these problems and let's kill it, right? Well, it's just like trying to lower cholesterol too low. Same thing. You know, again, it's this isolated thing. And we are not isolated beings. And this is part of the problem with the calory paradigm and this bomb calorimeter paradigm.
You are not. A machine. I like the analogy a little bit better than the human body being like a calculator, being more like a chemistry lab.
JJ Virgin: That's the, I actually have trademarked this phrase is your body, and I started saying it 30 years ago, and you can imagine the heat I took for this. Yeah, well you were right.
When you were, right when it, well, all I knew was I, I had these clients and you know, back then everyone wanted to lose weight and I would bring skin fold calibers in my little scale and. I was having them do weight training and I was modifying their diet and, and for some people it wasn't working and we were, everything I was being taught in grad school was like calories in, [00:18:00] calories out.
And I thought, God, they're paying me a lot of money to cheat. This is so weird, you know? And then I got to take them away for a week and I controlled everything. And the same thing happened. Some gained weight, some lost weight. And I had this one woman, Vicky, she had so damaged her metabolism from chronic dieting.
She was obese, and if she ate more than 1200 calories a day, she would gain weight. And back then I had no clue what the heck to do with this. Now I know what you need to do there, but it's like, holy smokes. And that's why I said, we've got this wrong paradigm. What if your body's not a bank account? It's a chemistry lab.
And the crap I got, I was like, ah. And it's, it's like, Calories count, but I, but where they come from, the source creates that. And I love this caloric impact. You know, that's what we've gotta look at is what's the impact and that's what's going on with your hormones. And it makes so much sense. And we talked earlier about the shift of looking at losing weight to putting on muscle and losing fat.
And I know [00:19:00] you really have done some great work in fat loss. And what I think we need to start with because it's so confusing, like I look back. 20, 30 years ago and it was like, just don't eat fat because fat makes you fat. If you just eat carbs, it's too hard for them to turn to fat. I'm like, I wish that was true.
You know, we learned it wasn't. Absolutely. So let's talk just in, you know, kind of high level, someone wants to lose fat. How does our body lose fat? What has to happen?
Shawn Stevenson: Mm. So I just gotta finish up a point here with that because you just help me to remember something which is. Unfortunately, we look at a calorie as it is a fixed object, like a meter is like a unit of distance and it's fixed.
A meter is a meter anywhere. A calorie is not a calorie in your body versus my body versus anybody else. The
JJ Virgin: calorie is an absolute number and that's where the scientists get mad at us because they're like, it's an absolute number. I go, but. It's not, but it's not in your body, like in a, in a bomb [00:20:00] calorimeter.
It's an absolute number, but it's not once it gets over
Shawn Stevenson: here. And I would add onto that, with it being this chemistry lab, the part that I was gonna add is the environment. This chemistry lab is different versus the lab across the street. Mm-hmm. And this speaks to the epi caloric, or epigenetic influence of all these different pieces is gonna determine again, what calories are gonna do in your body versus someone else.
And so shifting over into this fat loss paradigm, I wanna give people this really important heads up because it's a huge issue that most people are not talking about. And truly, if we're gonna get our metabolism, our metabolic health into a good state, we're going to have to heal our brains. All right?
When you think about fat loss, your brain is controlling your metabolism more than any other organ in your body. And we even know, for example, about the hypothalamus, which is kind of integration point with your nervous system and your endocrine system. And this communication [00:21:00] and your hypothalamus is kind of like an internal thermostat that's determining your calorie expenditure in the first place.
And it's also informing what's happening in your gut with assimilation of calories from the food that you eat. And for example, researchers at Yale found that. In essence, your brain could, based on its assessment of what you need, right? Your assessment of your bank account of calories, energy stored, nutrience stored, it can inform your gut to increase or decrease the assimilation of nutrients and calories from the food that you're eating.
Your brain can just decide, I'm gonna tamper down on the calories I'm absorbing. This isn't put into this calories in, calories out paradigm.
JJ Virgin: I'm trying to remember where this like you, I am not the Mr. Dr. Google like you are here. But I remember reading, because I never remember where I read these research studies, but I remember reading about where they overfed athletes.
All of a sudden they just started having more NEAT , you know, more non-exercise activity, thermogenesis. Their body [00:22:00] just naturally started to move more just to liberate those calories for them. So I never thought about it. I was like, oh, that's interesting. But you know, to think of that brain control for fat loss.
Now I wanna get into like at that point then what would we need to do? Yeah. To have our brain support us being able to hold onto, or build muscle and burn off fat.
Shawn Stevenson: Yes. Well this is gonna tie in with our diet as well, obviously, and it's reducing inflammation. All right, so the biggest epidemic from my perspective that's not being talked about right now is neuroinflammation inflammation of the brain.
And the reason it's not being talked about is the brain is so protective. If you've got an injury to, you know, your leg, you can see the inflammation. If your brain is on fire. It's very, very difficult to know about until something goes completely wrong. Just like we have all of these sensors throughout our body and our nervous system to kind of give feedback if there's pain.
Your brain doesn't have pain receptors, so it can't tell you if it's hurting. It's this very strange cosmic [00:23:00] joke. You know, that the brain can tell you about pain anywhere else except in itself. Mm-hmm. This is, is really a game changer, and this is from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. These researchers found that.
As we are experiencing more inflammation in our brain, specifically hypothalamic inflammation. And how were they able to tell that you were one of my friends and colleagues, NYU neuroscientists and also. Her work is so incredible because she's also world-class researcher, nutrition. She's looking at the brain.
We both know Daniel Amen for example.
JJ Virgin: You can do a spec and see a brain on fire,
Shawn Stevenson: A brain scan can see if the brain is inflamed. And specifically again, it's hypothalamic inflammation. So we've gotta actually look at your brain. We can't just guess on this. And so what the researchers found was that the more inflammation was rising in the hypothalamus or in the in the brain, the higher the rate of obesity and insulin resistance downstream.
Mm-hmm. Now, here's the rub. Higher amounts of body fat and insulin resistance was causing more brain inflammation. So [00:24:00] here's where it all ties together. Our body fat, our excessive body fat we're carrying is creating inflammation in our brain. Our brains are on fire, and it's creating this vicious circle.
And so to start to heal this, I'm gonna give you a trigger food and I'm gonna give you a solution. And this again, backed by peer reviewed data. Our brain is, everybody's heard this by now. It's primarily made of fat. Right now, there are some fats that are highly inflammatory. They're highly combustible.
These are fats that you don't want to have around if you're having a smoke in a pancake. All right? You don't want these Austin Powers joke for, I was like, what? I know. Yeah. So there's gonna be some people out there that get this, all right, gold member.
JJ Virgin: Those three people laughing, I was like, huh? A smoke and a pancake.
Shawn Stevenson: But this is something that is, is highly inflammatory just by its nature. And I'm talking about. Seed oils, right? So canola oil, vegetable oil. Mm-hmm. Now there's also [00:25:00] camps and you know, this, you, you get this like this ridicule, this strange ridicule that, and these are some well-meaning, Whether it's a physician or a researcher who's saying, actually, this study says that canola oil is one of the best foods ever.
I just, I'm gonna give you a very simple principle to deconstruct that. Is it a highly processed food? Is it an ultra processed food? Right. Answer that question. To take that rape seed, the canola, and turn it into this product that's on store shelves. We have to expose it to extremely high heats, which has taken these volatile Omega six fatty acids.
And we're creating rampant amounts of reactive oxygen species,
JJ Virgin: and there's omega-3 S in there too.
Shawn Stevenson: There is, which is even worse, even more volatile. We're creating this massive amount of oxidation in these reactive oxygen species that when we consume it, it's just bathing in inflammation components.
Right? So high heat. We have to use chemical solvents to extract the oils to quote, wash it. So you're adding in all these different chemical ingredients. Then we have to add deodorizers because it [00:26:00] smells horrible and the list goes on and on and on in the treatment making this an ultra processed food. So just to deconstruct that argument piece, should that be something we're consuming and the fact that it's brand new?
Right in the human story. This has only been done a couple of decades and now it's in everything as the brain is absorbing some of these fat compounds and or your, your tissues are using it for fuel, it's gonna create inflammation in the brain, in, in multiple ways. So that's one aspect. What are we making our brains out of and our tissues out of?
Dr. Kate, probably the foremost expert in these, in these oils. She shared with me this study, again, looking at humans from the early part of the 19 hundreds and doing a biopsy of their fat cell, maybe 2% poly unsaturated fatty acids that we're getting primarily back then, even more so from Whole Foods, but.
This is a primary thing that's seen in in these vegetable oils versus today taking a biopsy from test subjects. Just recently, we're seeing about 20 to 25% or even more of the fat cell of the average human is now made [00:27:00] of these polyunsaturated fatty acids. Again, very volatile. The ingredients to make up a human body has changed dramatically.
So what is a solution? Swapping out that oil because your body is hungry for oils because they're used to make our cell membranes. They're used to support and kind of regenerate our brain cells. Allow for signal transaction.
JJ Virgin: How quickly can you shift, like let's say you're 25% pfa'd and you want to like get your balance back. Like, how do we have any clue how we can make
a, a change starting today, a six month shift to shift that balance?
Shawn Stevenson: It takes some time because again, and you really have to push heavier, get rid of those PFA's.
We can start the healing process because your body is so intelligent, it's always gonna go for the higher quality substrate. So this is from researchers at Auburn, and they found that extra virgin olive oil, oleo can alridge, extra virgin olive oil is able to, number one, reduce neuroinflammation somehow, some way it has, its.
[00:28:00] Proclivity towards reducing the fire in your brain. It's cuz it's swapping those oils out. And also it was found to help to repair the blood-brain barrier. I'll tell you
JJ Virgin: something funny. We I was doing a, a little interview with Dr. Gundry right before I went to Italy this summer. And so I was getting the whole olive oil thing, and then he sent me some new olive oil and I went to Italy.
I probably was drinking, I probably had a cup of olive oil. I had so much olive oil. It was ridiculous, but it was so great. But, you know, his whole thing was a leader. The, the research for this was like a leader a week. Any clue on how much, cuz that's all we do at home now is olive oil. What would it be? A tablespoon a day, two tablespoons a day.
And then people have to understand, we are not talking about an olive oil blend. You know that you have to spend the money here that cheap olive oil is.
Shawn Stevenson: And here's the thing too, I don't have a dog in the fight. My guy, Dr. Gundry, has his pristine, wonderful olive oil. I don't care. I'm just going based on the research and also my bias is what have humans been doing the longest?
Mm-hmm. Right. This is a processed food, but humans have been processing foods forever. We're not [00:29:00] talking about ultra processed food. Yeah. This is the first press, this is the bmj, and you've probably heard this or said this. 60% of the average Americans diet today is ultra processed foods. You can't tell where they come from anymore.
So obviously, you know the cereals and cookies and pizzas and all this stuff, extra virgin olive oil. On the other hand, I encourage everybody to go, just go to YouTube and look at how is extra virgin olive oil made? And I highly, highly encourage you to see just Google or go to YouTube. How is Canola Oil made?
All right. And prepare to have some bad dreams. All right. Prepare to have Freddie Krueger showing up with like canola oil fingertips. All right? Because it is really, really tough to watch and then realize that that's what we're consuming.
JJ Virgin: Well, and just taste wise. Like who'd wanna have canola oil over extra virgin olive oil?
Why do we use it? It's cheap. Like
Shawn Stevenson: it's, we are using it because it's cheap. The stability preservative aspects.
JJ Virgin: It's, I bet the bugs, I had a great [00:30:00] nutrition mentor early on and he was talking about margarine. I mean it's, there's still margarine, which amazes me that we still have margarine. But he said, you know, you could stick that outside and the bugs wouldn't want it.
And you want competition for your food. If the bugs will not eat what you're eating, you should not be eating it.
Shawn Stevenson: Yeah, they're running from it. And so, you know, as far as the amount, I would encourage people, you know, a couple tablespoons a day, you know, at, at minimum. But also, again, the quality matters.
What traditionally is done, it's stored in dark glass because again, the oils are very Sensitive to heat and to light. Mm-hmm. I've never seen a pristinely, bottled soybean oil. You know, like it's because it's already shit. So it's just, they're putting it in plastic bottles. It's a terrible, terrible food product that integrates itself into our tissues.
And so extra virgin olive oil. That means, you know, that first press is cold, processed, bottled in dark glass and yeah, the funny thing is, and I actually shared a couple of these studies in, in my latest book, eat [00:31:00] Smarter on Olive Oil, going up head to head against a long chain fats that are coming from soybean oil, for example, and seeing just the implementation of olive oil to the diet.
No other changes in the diet or calory changes for the test participants. People lost more weight by consuming olive oil. And of course we know it's not just about the weight loss. Mm-hmm. But improving insulin sensitivity. But that is all these other biomarkers getting healthier. Exactly, yeah. The weight loss is coming as a result of improved health.
JJ Virgin: Yeah. Fantastic. And I always love things like I've built everything around swaps, you know, so, and what I find with most people is they get into a rut. They're used to buying the same things. You have 'em swap something and oh yes, it might be a little bit more expensive. However, you know, when you look at the overall scheme of things and where you're spending money, it's like it's really not.
You know, you look at these things now and you go, okay, you're gonna spend a little bit more for the wild, a little bit more for the grass fed, a little bit more for the [00:32:00] extra virgin olive oil. And you probably won't be as hungry. You won't be eating the processed foods that are crappy and cost more, and you'll save money in the long term on hospital bills.
Shawn Stevenson: Facts. It's a great investment, right? And you, you're the most important investment.
JJ Virgin: Exactly. You're worth it. You know this whole thing when you look at things like body positivity, I go, all right, here's the, here's the real through line of that. Love yourself wherever you are. Enough to take the time and the strategies and, and invest in yourself to make yourself your best version, your healthiest version.
That's what you truly, truly deserve. Let's talk, like besides the seed oils, are there any other like super heinous things out there that can really damage you, that we should know about?
Shawn Stevenson: Of course, you know the one, you know, but the sugar conversation is, has been. People have been hammering away on this, but they're missing.
Really important component, and this was thanks to my friend Mark Schatzker, really bringing this to bear, [00:33:00] which is not just the, the sugar. Now, today, the average American is consuming about 80 pounds of added sugar annually. That's added in addition to the existing sugars and carbohydrates. Right, and the highly processed diet.
JJ Virgin: We're not talking about the apple juice that you're having. It's an addition to the apple juice.
Shawn Stevenson: Add it! Versus again, earlier, part 19 hundreds, a little bit prior. Average American four to six pounds of added sugars. Okay. So 10 times more plus, you know, plus 10 times more.
JJ Virgin: And could this be a correlation as to what's happened with our health
Shawn Stevenson: Now, obviously we know the ramifications, we know the, the impact on insulin, we know the impact on our fat cells.
And our fat cells can actually, their volume can grow a thousand times their size, right? So we can pack in a lot of stuff, but we, we were in a way designed to, but we're really pushing against. Evolution where I would even say de-evolution in a sense, because when we're doing that, when we're stuffing our fat cells full of all these contents, it's sending out an an inflammatory stress [00:34:00] response.
It's basically cytokine, cytokine storm. Mm-hmm. Has become a new term, a new popularized term, but that's taking place because our fat cells are sending out a kind of a false distress signal in a sense saying, Hey, we're carrying an infection. And this is why we see these increased rates of, again, inflammation measured by things like homocystine, C-reactive protein.
We can measure this stuff and we know that it's a ticking time bomb. This is why obesity is tied to really seven to maybe even upwards of nine of the 10 leading causes of death in the United States is again, we're tying it back to, we're tying back to our huge shift in our consumption of sugar. But here's a piece that's missing.
Would you just sit around and lick a plate of sugar or would you just sit around and drink sugar water? That'd be tough to, to really stomach. It doesn't, it doesn't taste good. It's not enjoyable when you add that the sugar with the artificial flavors making it taste like something. Mm-hmm. There was a big [00:35:00] change that took place, again, this was just a few decades ago with the invention.
It's called a gas chromatograph, and scientists were able to, Basically identify flavors are just a chemical makeup, right? And once you can identify what those are, now you can take that strawberry code and add it to other stuff that's not a strawberry. So you can start making stuff that's not a strawberry.
Taste like strawberry, right? So now you got strawberry ice cream and candy and cakes, no strawberries necessary. Now here's the thing, cuz we'll be like, it doesn't taste like a strawberry. It doesn't have to, but it's enough to muddy up the waters of your biology. And now, Through our evolution, certain flavors meant certain things.
Nutritionally flavor is feedback. There's a paradigm, it's called post ingestive feedback. When you eat a food and your body absorbs nutrients from that food, it takes mental labels, a biological labels, it's like, oh, I got some coppers, some magnesium. Got this amount of calories from this particular food.
And so if you become deficient, [00:36:00] we have a craving for that food, right? And animals do this in nature. So, so many studies have been done on this humans when left to our own devices. That's what we do as well. Today though, we're existing in a paradigm. We don't have natural foods,
JJ Virgin: so we're craving the strawberry poptart,
Shawn Stevenson: right?
Because we really want the strawberry. We think it's intuitive eating, right?
JJ Virgin: Yeah. I love this, this is such a great response to the intuitive eating piece of things, because intuitive eating doesn't work with ultra processed foods when we're healthy.
Shawn Stevenson: When our, when our biology, when we're eating real food, when we are in an environment that is a little bit more conducive to our health, our health, that intuition is the most important thing because your body knows far more than any diet book or any expert what you need, but to be able to hear your body's signals and your body's cries and your body's feedback.
We've gotta get to a certain state of health. Right? So with that said, making a shift here in our sugar consumption, ultra processed food consumption, [00:37:00] my advocation is we don't have to do this all overnight. And you gotta pay attention to your personality type too. There are people who rip the bandaid.
Yeah, they wanna do it all overnight, right? But what I would implore people to do is simply make a shift, right? So right now, average American, 60% of their diet is ultra processed food. Me growing up, and this is a true story. When I transformed my own health when I was 22 years old, and I was diagnosed with this so-called incurable degenerative spinal condition, at the time I was living in Ferguson, Missouri, so this is like a really glorified food desert, right?
This new term. Again, I was just surrounded within a two mile radius. Every fast food place you can name it, I'm not exaggerating, and liquor stores just like on every block. Like it's crazy. I was able to really take control of my health, even in that environment, cuz there is something important speaking to the power of choice, right?
But I needed awareness. Mm-hmm. Accessibility's important. Yes. [00:38:00] But I didn't know that it mattered. Right? So just being aware that I could actually change what I'm making my body out of and change how I feel. All these things really start to stack conditions in my favor. Even in that situation, making the investment in myself.
And we talked about this. A little bit earlier, it's the most important investment cuz it started to pay back in so many other areas of my life. And so what I did was I shifted the ratio from, at the time, I'm not exaggerating, I was probably eating at least 80% ultra processed foods. Wow. Right. I ate fast food every day, unless I didn't have a couple of dollars every day.
And if I wasn't eating fast food, then I had a couple, like I had some ramen noodles. Like the super cheap stuff. Mm-hmm. You know, 10 cents a pack with that little packet of like, it's got like a chicken on the packet or a little beef, no chicken or beef required by the way. Right. It's flavor. Right. All kinds of chemicals.
Or I eat like a family can of SpaghettiOs or something like that. Wow. This is what I was making my tissues out of again, I didn't know. And so when I became aware [00:39:00] that I could do something to improve my health, where I came from, all that I knew about was weight loss. That's the only thing. That's the only, and weight
JJ Virgin: loss relative to like just eat less calories.
Shawn Stevenson: Exactly right. I didn't know that my food choices would determine whether or not I had this condition. Right. I didn't know that food choices influenced things like heart disease, that my, I lost my grandfather from diabetes, my grandmother, like the list goes on and on. I didn't know. It
JJ Virgin: just makes me so sad to think that there's still people out there now, hopefully.
With the internet, you know, this is shifting.
Shawn Stevenson: They're not using the internet to study this stuff, jj, but,
JJ Virgin: but you look at it, and go, we're sicker now than ever.
Shawn Stevenson: So they're watching cat videos. No, no disrespect because a cute cat video is good . You know what I mean? But people are not using, using this to, to get informed, you know, we've got, again, we're inundated with things that distract us.
This is the golden age of television. There's so much stuff and you know, content creation, all the things. And because of [00:40:00] that, people. We we're still not at a place and just look at our society. We're not, we're not doing well. This is the great thing about what you're doing. You are a beacon of light for real.
I mean, you're the walking, talking representation of what's possible straight up.
JJ Virgin: And I grew up on Poptarts and Captain Crunch
Shawn Stevenson: And so again, when we can come Phoenix rising from the ashes type of scenario, you know what we, what we can do right now in your consistency and ability to create and to share this information.
It's just getting to more and more people as time is going on, but not just through you, through the people that you're impacting. And Mindshare like you've created an army of wellness warriors and so there's a tipping point. I believe that's going to happen or it's happening right now.
JJ Virgin: I feel like the last two years really started making people realize what we've been saying for so long is you have to take charge of your own health and like, yeah, yeah, yeah.
I'll go talk to my doctor. And then kind of going like, if this last two years didn't show us that, Body fat is problematic because it's going to create all sorts of other issues like it did [00:41:00] with covid. If you look at what happened there, you talked about the inflammatory cytokines. Well, you had to have the body fat for the inflammatory cytokines, right?
Shawn Stevenson: JJ, I don't know if you saw this, but I did a big Treatise on this and it was a study published by the C D C and they, it was a huge meta-analysis. They looked at over 540,000 covid, 19 patients from over 800 US hospitals, and they looked at. The leading risk factors for death from Covid. The number one was obesity.
Again, huge dataset. The number one risk factor for death was, was obesity. Again, this isn't getting the headlines. It's more, again, we're trying to superficially treat a thing instead of removing the underlying susceptibility. Right? Here's the the second leading risk factor for death from Covid vitamin D.
No, no, it was anxiety and fear related disorders that the whole thing created. I'm gonna give you the link to put into the show notes. Mm-hmm. Because this is one of those things seeing is believing. This is published by the C D C, but
JJ Virgin: These studies will ignore the most critical [00:42:00] things.
Like if there wasn't something to say, hey, you know what, like, I think body positivity is loving yourself enough to put yourself first and take care of yourself. Because if we're saying, Hey, it's okay to be any size, what the last couple years has showed us is it's not, it's really dangerous.
Shawn Stevenson: It's a major susceptibility to all manner of chronic and infectious diseases.
And this is not a joke. And we don't have, this doesn't have to be our story. It's one humans, we come in so many different sizes and shapes, and that's okay. That's beautiful. But when we are inundated with a, a sick society, truly a society that just cultivates and encourages sickness, you know, like, again, where I'm from, where all I know is poor health, 80% of my family members are obese.
I, that's all I saw. And all we did, we ate processed food because that was what was around us, and that was what was accessible. And affordable. We didn't [00:43:00] know, oh, by the way, I gotta, the third one was diabetes, of course. Mm-hmm. Diabetes and its complications. But that second one. Doesn't get a lot of attention as well, and this is the power of our mind and how much our stress, and you talked about this with me earlier, impacts our biology and our health outcomes.
Because you having chronic anxiety or thoughts of stress and worry, you're just setting off again, a cytokine storm, a inflammatory cascade because your thoughts create chemistry in your body instantaneously. And the good news is you could change your thoughts. Yes. You could think how you want to think.
You could think the thoughts. You wanna think We believe that my thoughts are just happening. You know, I'm a victim of my thoughts when in reality you are so powerful. Of course, thoughts are just gonna go on automatic, but like our friend, Dr. Joe says, automatic negative thoughts, right.
Get rid of them. We do have this repetition, but there's positive automatic thoughts that we can start to implement, but it takes work. And if we've been [00:44:00] through tough times, if we've been through challenges in our lives, if we've been through traumatic experiences, it's gonna start to create neurons that fire together, wire together, right?
And emotion lays down a lot of mile over thought processes as well. It takes time to create new pathways, but we can do it if we were mandating that for you to learn about how your mind works. And for you to learn about nutrition, right?
JJ Virgin: This is what needs to be in school. Exercise, nutrition, meditation,
Shawn Stevenson: a self mandate.
You don't wanna force anybody to do anything against their will, but to create a society conditions where that is normalized, right? Because your child being able to understand their thinking, for them to manage their thoughts and their perspective. For them to manage anxiety is far more valuable than learning about the Pythagorean theorem, right?
JJ Virgin: That they won't remember.
My son's getting a PhD in math. However, I've never used it in real life, but I remember it. I remember it. He uses it to cook. He's like the best chef with all of his math and chemistry skills, so, but [00:45:00] yeah, just imagine. Just imagine if we'd like started some national meditation practices during the pandemic and let everyone out to walk
Shawn Stevenson: It would be a game changer.
Game changer,
JJ Virgin: and we gave everyone vitamin D and how to eat healthy. Just imagine. Anyway. Oh my gosh. We, we have to continue this conversation.
Shawn Stevenson: I thought John Lennon was about to start playing right there.
JJ Virgin: I'm super excited about your book. I know we can't talk about that one yet, but for everyone who hasn't read Eat Smarter or Sleep Smarter, there's definitely a theme here.
So you're gonna wanna grab those, and I'm gonna link to these studies you were talking about too. So we've got lots to link to. And I'm gonna put that at jjvirgin.com/ModelHealth for your Model Health show. Where are some of the places, we'll also put this in the show notes, but if someone's looking you up, is it Model Health show?
Do they go to your website? Where's the best place to get you? Of course.
Shawn Stevenson: I mean, today, more than ever, the accessibility is so easy where people are listening to this amazing podcast they could find me is called the Model Health Show.
JJ Virgin: I know, and that has got like that, that's one of the top health podcasts.
Like it always [00:46:00] is.
Shawn Stevenson: Yeah. Thank you. I mean time. This is so great. It's kind of like billboard charts in a sense, but we've been number one in the entire United States many, many times over, and I think it's really just a testament to the care, you know, that I'm putting into it and also just making learning fun.
So yeah, the Model Health Show, theModelhealthshow.com is my home online, and of course, you can find my books anywhere books are sold. Eat Smarter and Sleep Smarter. And Eat Smarter is just a absolute game changer. It came out the first week of 2021. All kinds of craziness was going on in the world, but it was a number one new release.
In the country when it came up. Nice. You know, so again, it, it's very encouraging because people do care about this stuff.
JJ Virgin: Yeah. You know, so well you make it easy for people to put this into practice, and I think one of the things that I'm gonna pull out is like, just. Take one thing in there, do that.
Like if all you did right now is go, you know, I'm gonna start to make an oil, change that alone, like one thing, then then do the next, then do the next, and all of a sudden you look back a year later and you're like an entirely different human.
Shawn Stevenson: Yeah. [00:47:00] You're changing the ingredients. Yes. Thank you. Of course, my pleasure.
JJ Virgin: Be sure to join me next time for more tools, tips, and techniques you can incorporate into everyday life to ensure you look and feel great, and more importantly that you're built to last. And check me out on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and my website jjvirgin.com. And make sure to follow my podcast so you don't miss a single episode at subscribetojj.com.
See you next time.

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