Robb Wolf explains Why Quitting Junk Food Is Hard - The Joe Rogan Experience

Hello, freak bitches. Yeah, I wonder how much of that is anxiety is dependent or caused by inflammation. They just had some great studies that were looking at alterations in gut microbiome and inflammatory status and depression and anxiety. And it was basically if they shifted things such that the gut microbiome looked healthier, the depression and anxiety basically disappeared. And then it could shift the other way. And it's interesting again where if you add something, so not everybody's going to change their diet. And I advocate for that and push and shove. But the reality is our world is set up and incentivized to not do that. The big junk food manufacturers, they study how to make this stuff addictive. Like, what's the Lay's potato chip line? Bet you can't eat just one. I was like, I'll take that thing to the bank all day long. So you can ridicule people, fat shame, do all this stuff. But there's a reality that our modern world is set up to work exactly against our genetics. Yeah. So what do we do then? Well, you could have something like CBD oil where you put it in a little bite of chocolate and the person has it one or two times a day or whatever the dosing regimen is. And maybe it puts their ulcerative colitis into remission. Maybe their depression is gone. And then maybe if we get a moving in a good direction, they don't feel like shit. Then maybe we can say, okay, let's now get some diet changes in there. Let's get you going to bed earlier. If you are going to stay up and work, put on some blue blockers so it doesn't mess with your sleep patterns as much. But it's a really accessible, inexpensive, no risk proposition that could add some really huge benefits for people. Yeah, I think what you said, too, that this system is sort of set up to get people to eat these crappy foods and make them incredibly available and very difficult to pass up. And once you start eating them, you consume them on a daily basis, your body starts craving them. You get addicted to them. I was at the supermarket the other day and I was under the influence and I was always wandering through the aisles. It was one of those weird moments where I went, is this always been like this? Like I was just looking at these cans of food. Everything's canned. Right. And I was thinking, this is all food, but it can last forever. And like food's not supposed to last forever. The whole idea is you're supposed to grow it. You take it out of the ground. It's alive. You eat it and then you're healthy. And then I was looking at this food that was just filled with preservatives and canned and these packages and plastic bags of it. And I was like, it's so strange that this is the prevalent food because it's so easy to store. It's so easy to ship. It's so easy to have for sale. You put a barcode on the package and you're good to go. But this is not really... I mean, you can eat it. It's food, kinda. But it's not really food. The real food is on the edges. Right. The real food is where the vegetables are and where the meats are and where the eggs are. That stuff in the middle in those aisles where you just see bright colored cans, it was so weird. It was like a little kid's toy store. Right. Like because I was high. So I was wandering through the aisle and I'm looking at all these different colors on me. This is so weird. It's like trying to draw me in with smiley faces on the cans and on the plastic bags. But unless you're going to a really good natural food store, you're probably inundated with that stuff. If you go to the regular Vons and just walk down the aisle, man, you're going to get hit with so much of this shit. Right. And it's interesting because the folks that make these foods, they study neurophysiology. They study evolutionary biology. They study how to make things addictive. So it's kind of funny on the one hand where like the gatekeepers, the medical establishment, a lot of the media, if you talk about like this ancestral health template or what have you, there's still a bunch of like pissing match and contention around that. Whereas the people who are making these foods addictive, they fully get it, but they're using it in such a way that they're like, okay, here's our predilection to eat more and move less. Here's how we're going to make that happen. And we have these really interesting flavor combinations and different experiences. And do you want to do you want to run that that video? So here's a really interesting example of this where, you know, you could get bored of even a really tasty food, but then you can figure out a way to bypass this whole process. Okay, so what's going on there is Andrew Zimmerman or no, Adam Rickman, a man versus food. He does these eating challenges and he's in this thing called the kitchen sink challenge. It's an eight pound ice cream sundae. And I think anybody would would say that an ice cream sundae is pretty tasty, you know, and it's hyper palatable, like it would make you want to eat it. But what happens to him is he gets completely bogged down in this process and can't go on until he orders a plate of extra salty, extra crunchy french fries. So he's actually gagging on the ice cream can't go on. He's not going to win this thing. And the way that he gets out of this situation is by eating more food. He would not have finished the Sunday were it not for eating the french fries. And so you have this situation where in our woven into our genetics is this process called palette fatigue, where even if we have a really tasty food in front of us, we will get bored of it and then we'll want something else. And if you have that other thing, that's something else immediately available and it's different enough from the thing that you just got bored with, you can eat more in total. And it's just so interesting. Like he would have failed eating this ice cream sundae were it just the Sunday. But not only did he eat the Sunday, he ate probably about 1500 calories of extra salty, extra crunchy french fries. How did he know? Did someone explain that to him? So if you go to professional eating websites, like people who go do these things where they like eat hot dogs and you know, whatever. Yeah, competitive eater. There are pairings. So it's like, okay, so with hot dogs, you need something like gummy bears because the hot dogs are salty and meaty and umami. So you need something kind of sweet and fruity and light. And so there are all these pairings that you do. And so with ice cream, because it's cold, creamy, sweet, the perfect complement to it is this salty, crunchy umami that you get out of the french fries. That's fascinating. You know, I've always found that if I'm eating, I'm eating something and it's really good, like a steak or something and I'm stuffed. Even if I don't want any more of the steak, if I have fries and I taste those salty fries, I'll start eating more fries. But I know I'm full. Why am I stuffing my fat face with these stupid fries? It's that novelty. And from an evolutionary biology perspective, it's great wiring. It's great engineering because we didn't have guaranteed food all the time. You know, like you had to eat when you could get it and then, you know, you might go a long period of time without having that food. But now we're in a situation where you have infinite variety. There's 50,000 different food like items in an average supermarket. It's 10 or 11,000 new food type items that are released each year. They're engineered to be hyper palatable, to bypass the neuroregulation of appetite. And it's super easy to just go fill up your pantry with a wide assortment of these things. So then you can do what he ended up doing here. You can eat one meal. You're like, man, a little sweet thing would be really good. So you have that sweet thing and then, gosh, a little salty, crunchy would be nice. And so you have the salty, crunchy and you can just keep eating through this whole process. And it really makes most of the standard like dietetics recommendation of, you know, eat less, move more, everything in moderation. There's no moderation in that environment. Like it doesn't exist. It's a hookers and cocaine experience. You know, I mean, it's like these things spin the dopamine centers in the brain. They are addictive. And if we are surprised by that process at all or feel bad about it, it's kind of crazy. Like it is not your fault if you find yourself entrapped in this world of hyper palatable foods. And I don't suggest that people just roll over and expose their belly to the world and let the world have its way with you. But I understand why it's so difficult. Like you should not feel guilt. There shouldn't be any drama. There should be no morality around it. Like if we just understand this is your basic biological wiring. And if you understand that and it's not your fault, but let's do something, then we can at least decouple ourselves from the emotionality and the drama and the guilt that we've had around this. And we can start making some changes. But so many times the reason why I've heard from people that they peel out of some sort of a new way of eating or lifestyle is that they're motoring along. They seem to be doing well and then they're like, they're just gone. And then you talk to them and they're like, ah, it was just hard. It's like, yeah, it is hard. But it wasn't just that it was hard. They usually start getting some sort of internal dialogue where, well, I suck. I must be weak. I can't do it. It's easier for that guy than it is for me. So they bail on it. And when I when I started putting this kind of spin of this evolutionary biology and this neuroregulation of appetite into working with people, particularly people who had had difficulties with with eating over the long haul and maybe like some weird relationships with food or what have you, there was like this light that went on. They're like, OK, so it's not my fault. I'm like, no, man, it's not your fault. We still need to do something and it's not necessarily going to be easy. But we can do this. And if you aren't beating yourself up about the fact that this thing is a difficult process, then we're going to be able to get a lot further down the road.