Your Diet is Changing Your Brain | Dr. Chris Palmer & Dr. Andrew Huberman

00:00:00.000 | the more ultra-processed foods you eat,

00:00:04.420 | the worse your physical and mental health, both.

00:00:08.980 | It's cardiovascular disease, it's obesity, it's diabetes,

00:00:13.440 | it's mortality, it's cancer.

00:00:15.940 | It's also a broad range of mental disorders.

00:00:19.980 | And so we know that.

00:00:23.920 | We've got more granular data that hyper-focuses on the mental health story.

00:00:30.380 | You know, one study, over 300,000 people,

00:00:32.960 | the more ultra-processed foods you eat, a direct linear relationship.

00:00:38.340 | It was shocking how linear it was.

00:00:40.360 | The more ultra-processed foods you eat, the worse your mental health.

00:00:45.040 | And it was so striking.

00:00:47.660 | It was not a subtle difference.

00:00:49.260 | It wasn't like, you know, oh, it was a 3% difference between the lowest.

00:00:54.280 | It was a three-fold difference.

00:00:58.280 | The people who consumed ultra-processed foods every day,

00:01:03.920 | multiple times a day, 58% of them had poor mental health,

00:01:10.260 | compared to only 18% of the people who rarely or never consumed ultra-processed foods.

00:01:18.820 | Wow.

00:01:19.120 | So this would be even just, like, somebody has, like, a bag of chips and some, you know,

00:01:25.160 | just pour-in-water type pre-made soup or something like that.

00:01:28.380 | Those are ultra-processed.

00:01:30.280 | This would be somebody orders a sandwich at the deli for lunch,

00:01:35.040 | which can be done in a relatively healthy way, depending on what's in that sandwich,

00:01:39.220 | and then does soda and bag of chips on the side.

00:01:43.980 | Like, I mean, you're, that's a lot of, in my opinion, highly processed food.

00:01:47.780 | But people, I think sometimes people don't think of it that way.

00:01:51.820 | One of the, I was surprised and somewhat delighted to learn that one of the ways that

00:01:56.860 | the, you know, the public health folks got kids to smoke fewer cigarettes,

00:02:05.420 | because when I was growing up, like, smoking was cool.

00:02:07.920 | Like, if you smoke cigarettes, it was cool.

00:02:09.320 | People thought it was cool.

00:02:10.660 | It definitely is reinforcing because of the nicotine, the dopamine increases.

00:02:13.940 | And it was considered cool.

00:02:15.840 | You had your, like, Marble Man image from the preceding decades.

00:02:20.100 | But then it was really the, the, the 90s kind of, it was the actors and models and stuff

00:02:26.240 | that made it cool.

00:02:27.020 | Like, people smoked and it was supposed to be cool.

00:02:28.920 | And one of the ways that we ended up with people smoking far less was not just to ban it

00:02:36.160 | on campuses, because that just makes teens want to do it more, right?

00:02:39.780 | In college, you want to do it more, was to have these commercials of these, it was all

00:02:46.500 | to be direct.

00:02:47.500 | It was just like these rich white guys in a room that was portraying, like, the boardroom

00:02:55.920 | of a tobacco company.

00:02:57.040 | And they were, like, cackling and talking about, like, ha, ha, ha.

00:02:59.460 | They think we're going to, they don't think it causes cancer and this kind of thing.

00:03:02.580 | Basically, pitting youth against adults so that the youth felt like their money was being

00:03:08.180 | taken by the, by the establishment.

00:03:09.920 | So is there a world where, you know, kids are going to be like, you know, forgive me,

00:03:16.460 | but, you know, like, F that.

00:03:17.560 | I'm not eating Doritos.

00:03:19.260 | You know, like, I'm not going to be manipulated by highly processed foods, or I'm going to hold

00:03:23.440 | on to my mental health by making healthy choices in terms of food.

00:03:26.680 | It's tricky.

00:03:27.400 | But it has a lot of the same parallels to cigarette use or alcohol use.

00:03:31.120 | But I feel like the only way to really get Americans to change their behavior, besides

00:03:35.920 | scaring them fundamentally, but even if you do that, is to incentivize it.

00:03:40.120 | And one of the best incentives historically for public health change has been to pit the,

00:03:44.620 | make the public feel like they're pitted against the people that are trying to take their money

00:03:48.680 | unfairly and make them unhealthy at the same time.

00:03:51.680 | You got to activate that kind of rebellious spirit.

00:03:53.680 | No, uh-uh, not going to do it.

00:03:55.520 | Just telling people it's bad for you doesn't work, right?

00:03:58.960 | We know that.

00:03:59.540 | How do we incentivize people?

00:04:01.160 | Yeah, I'm not going to give a cliche answer because this is the trillion dollar question

00:04:07.820 | that everybody's asking, and it really, you know, the health of our country really kind

00:04:18.100 | of depends on it.

00:04:19.180 | With billions of dollars that this industry has in revenue annually, they can spend a lot

00:04:30.640 | of that money on really impactful marketing campaigns, getting people to believe that it's not as unhealthy

00:04:39.200 | as Chris Palmer and Andrew Huberman are saying.

00:04:42.820 | It's fine.

00:04:44.120 | Everybody deserves a treat.

00:04:47.600 | Within the last couple of weeks, the American Heart Association was actively lobbying against

00:04:58.040 | a Texas bill that was trying to restrict spending food stamp money on junk food.

00:05:06.480 | I saw that clip.

00:05:07.580 | It's so disturbing to see someone from the American Heart Association actively lobbying to keep tax

00:05:15.300 | dollars directed towards including sugary soda, not even diet soda, but sugary soda in lunches

00:05:23.360 | and food for people who are low income.

00:05:27.140 | And he went on record as saying this junk food, this ultra-processed food is not the root cause

00:05:36.200 | of obesity or diabetes or any of these health conditions, which is an absolute abject lie.

00:05:44.520 | And when you have supposedly respected organizations being bought by industry, promoting misinformation,

00:05:59.280 | it's really hard.

00:06:04.120 | You know, everybody's all upset that like, oh, people don't trust the science.

00:06:08.080 | They're not respecting the respected organizations.

00:06:11.460 | Well, the respected organizations need to step up and start behaving in a respectable manner.

00:06:16.640 | They need to stop.

00:06:18.720 | The American Heart Association should not be taking a dime from any industry that plays a

00:06:27.260 | role in heart disease.

00:06:29.480 | Like they, it would be like, it would be like the American Heart Association taking money from

00:06:36.000 | tobacco companies and tobacco companies and then coming out and say, smoking doesn't really cause

00:06:41.020 | heart disease, people.

00:06:42.080 | Everybody calm down.

00:06:44.520 | There's still a lot that we don't know.

00:06:47.300 | We need more research.

00:06:48.680 | We need more research.

00:06:49.980 | Smoking doesn't cause heart disease, people.

00:06:52.940 | This is just scaremongering.

00:06:55.560 | This is just paranoid conspiracy theories.

00:06:59.020 | That is exactly what's happening now.

00:07:02.560 | They're taking money from food companies that have no vested interest in the human, in the

00:07:09.660 | health of the population that they are feeding.

00:07:13.880 | They know perfectly well that these foods are highly palatable.

00:07:18.660 | And what does that mean?

00:07:21.860 | It means addictive.

00:07:22.620 | And again, if I was selling food, I would want people to be addicted to the food I was selling.

00:07:28.940 | Why?

00:07:29.280 | Because you sell more.

00:07:30.220 | Higher margins.

00:07:33.480 | If you sell food that people aren't addicted to, they'll just move on to the other food that is

00:07:39.160 | addictive and then you'll be out of business.

00:07:41.580 | So it's not an easy problem to solve.

00:07:43.860 | I don't mean to imply it's easy because if, if one or two companies steps up and does the

00:07:49.780 | right thing, they'll just go out of business.

00:07:52.520 | Well, I feel like the, the smoking parallel is, is critical and maybe the trans fat, um,

00:07:58.340 | the history of, of entire cities banning the use of trans fats, for instance, or the use

00:08:02.980 | of a styrofoam containers, right?

00:08:04.920 | I mean, it's very different, uh, very different issue.

00:08:07.400 | This doesn't directly get to human health of the styrofoam is not good, but it's about,

00:08:11.440 | it's about waste and, and, um, environment.

00:08:14.080 | But I feel like there has to be a top down ban and Americans also don't like bans, right?

00:08:20.960 | We don't, we don't like things we like choice, but we don't like the consequences of those

00:08:25.920 | of choice.

00:08:26.760 | And then we want people to fix the consequences of those choices, um, with treatments that

00:08:34.800 | don't have side effects.

00:08:35.660 | And then this is like kind of the cycle that, that I've observed in my lifetime over and

00:08:39.880 | over again.

00:08:40.400 | You know, I think it's the rebellion piece.

00:08:43.960 | It's when people realize they're being manipulated.

00:08:46.380 | Once people realize they're being manipulated, I feel like that's when they're,

00:08:50.940 | willing to intervene, uh, and stop a, uh, otherwise reinforcing activity, uh, reinforced

00:08:58.740 | addictive activity, save money and like take a different direction.

00:09:04.460 | Like that's, that's inherent to the American spirit.

00:09:07.040 | As much as we love freedom, we also, we have this like, no, you're not going to, you're not

00:09:12.940 | going to do this to me kind of spirit.

00:09:14.900 | We see it everywhere.

00:09:15.640 | This is my belief.

00:09:16.780 | But then again, I was kind of a rebellious teen, but, but if it's in service to health,

00:09:20.960 | I'm, I'm hopeful.

00:09:22.660 | I mean, my, my understanding, by no means am I an expert, but my understanding of what

00:09:29.100 | really drove the reduction in tobacco use was the taxes and the ban on advertising, the ban

00:09:39.480 | on television advertisements.

00:09:41.040 | Interesting.

00:09:41.780 | That, that when you get rid of the advertisements, you're no longer tempting people with it.

00:09:46.700 | Um, you're no longer able to spread misinformation.

00:09:49.260 | Um, and when you make the product so expensive, people just, even if they want to try it, even

00:09:58.380 | if they're already addicted to try it, already addicted to it, now they are highly motivated

00:10:03.960 | to get off of it.

00:10:05.000 | Why?

00:10:05.380 | Because it's costing them an arm and a leg.

00:10:07.060 | Yeah.

00:10:07.240 | Money hurts.

00:10:07.740 | And, and they, and they realize that I, I just don't want this.

00:10:11.620 | We could do similar things with ultra processed foods.

00:10:15.200 | If rebellion, education, whatever, I, I don't care what works, but we're all of the above.

00:10:23.160 | We're, we're, we're really fighting an uphill battle.

00:10:26.140 | We're, we're, we're, we're, we're, we're, we're, we're, we're, we're.

Your Diet is Changing Your Brain | Dr. Chris Palmer & Dr. Andrew Huberman

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