596: The hidden cost of chasing perfect health | Jason Karp
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Welcome to the MindBodyGreen podcast. I'm Jason Wachub, founder and co-CEO of MindBodyGreen, and your host. This podcast was made in partnership with Solarae SharpMind Memory. When you're busy, do you feel like you're not always as sharp as you could be? Well, research shows that even occasional stress can impact your working memory. That's where science-backed nootropics come in, like Solarae SharpMind Memory.

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It's easy to feel overwhelmed by everything we're told to do for our health. Track this, avoid that, optimize every hour of the day. The wellness world can start to feel like a never-ending to-do list. But what if true health isn't about doing more, but about getting clear on what really matters?

That's a question my longtime friend Jason Karp has spent years exploring. Jason is the co-founder of Hue Kitchen, Hue Chocolate, and Human Co. And through Human Co., he's helped build some of my favorite best-for-you brands, including Cosmic Bliss Ice Cream,

He's also the majority owner of our go-to family restaurant, True Food Kitchen. More on that in a bit. What I love most about Jason is that we share the same uncompromising standards when it comes to what we eat and what we supplement with. As a successful entrepreneur and a passionate advocate for clean food and mindful living, Jason has seen both the inside of the food industry and the inner workings of the health world.

He's not here to promote the latest biohack or tell you how to completely overhaul your routine. Instead, he offers something far more valuable, a refreshingly grounded perspective on what it truly means to feel well. In today's show, Jason opens up about how in his 20s, he reversed an incurable degenerative eye disease through diet and lifestyle changes. He also shares why stress might be today's most overlooked health threat and why modern wellness has become far too complex.

We dive into the fertility crisis, the dangers of hustle culture, and systemic issues within the food industry. Now back to True Food Kitchen.

I am so excited about this because it's our favorite family-friendly restaurant for a reason. They're 100% seed oil free. They use only the highest quality organic and seasonal ingredients and everything on the menu is absolutely delicious. I am personally obsessed with their air fried chicken tenders and salmon and it's the only place we'll take our kids and let them order anything they want. We are literally there twice a week.

And here is the big news. MindBody Greens Electrolytes with Creatine Plus in Lemon Lime will officially be featured on the True Food Kitchen new summer menu, launching May 20th. Yes, that's right. You're going to find our Electrolytes with Creatine Plus in their delicious Bright Eyes drink and On the Rocks, both available in Lemon Lime at all True Food Kitchen locations around the country.

And to celebrate this, we've got a special offer just for you. Use code MBGXTRU10 when you dine in and get $10 off any order over 50 bucks. That's incredible. Go to trufoodkitchen.com, find your nearest location, and enjoy one of our drinks alongside all of their nourishing, delicious food. And don't worry, guys, all the details are in the show notes. Please go check it out.

So let's start by recapping your own personal health journey. Sure. I've had quite an interesting life. I got into health and wellness in a serendipitous kind of way. I was a professional investor and hedge fund manager for 21 years living in New York City. When I started working

In my early 20s, I had a really quick rise in my company, but I started getting very sick in my second and third year of working. And I developed a few different pretty severe autoimmune diseases that they couldn't quite figure out where they came from.

And when things got really difficult was when I started going blind and I was diagnosed with a degenerative eye disease for which there's no cure. They told me I would be fully blind by the age of 30 based on the progression of my eye disease. And there was nothing I could do about it. And it was a very, very difficult period for me.

Because I always thought I was healthy. I was a division one college athlete. I never remembered feeling anywhere close to how I was feeling at the time. And, you know, what I thought mattered in life, which at the time was work and making money, that was going way beyond my expectations.

And I was in a dark depression. I was very ashamed because I wanted to appear like a hero and appear like I was doing what I always thought I was supposed to do. And I had no other options. And this was very early internet. There was not much online about any of this stuff. This is the year 2001. And I ended up, based on some intuition,

And so I frankly, Jason, I don't really know where it came from. I mean, I think it was divine, but I kind of got a nudge to say that you could cure this with food and lifestyle and that all of your diseases, which all the doctors at the time seemingly thought were unrelated, were wrong. And I went on this really deep health journey, primarily focused on ancestral living.

I was studying and learned about a lot of indigenous peoples, hunter-gatherers, what we as modern Americans would probably think of as like cavemen or heathens because many of these cultures don't have running water. And what I noticed at the time was, which I believe is still true today, if you can find indigenous peoples who have been untouched by Western habits and food,

They have no chronic disease. They have no obesity. They have no diabetes. They have no heart disease. They have no allergies. There's almost no incidence of autism or ADHD, certainly depression. And I became deeply curious about, and this was also around the beginning of the blue zones, and I became deeply curious about what is it that all of these different groups of people that are scattered all over the world in different climates,

Because you go to the Arctic and they're living off of whale blubber and seal blubber and meat and there's no fruits and vegetables in the Arctic. And then you go to places like Africa and you look at the Maasai tribe and they have cow blood and cow meat. And then there's tribes that live off of fruits, nuts and seeds. And the only common thread that I found was that they live as close to nature as possible with the least amount of processing.

So the animals are wild. The fruits and vegetables and nuts and seeds are straight from the earth or straight from the plant. And I also noticed that there was some lifestyle stuff. You know, they tend not none of them are workaholics. They tend to have time for community and faith and each other. They get a ton of sunlight. They get a ton of physical movement. They take naps.

And this was antithetical to what I was taught that I was supposed to do. And I adopted an ancestral lifestyle with ancestral eating and gave up a lot of the things that I loved at the time, which was very hard. And all of my diseases went away over time. And my eye disease started to reverse. And I noticed my vision was coming back.

And after many months of this, I finally went into my ophthalmologist and I said, hey, I think I cured my eye disease. And he said, that's impossible. There's no cure for your disease. It's a degenerative disease. And I said to him, I said, give me the test. And thankfully, there's an objective test for this eye disease that's not based on my own opinion. And after the test, he said, it's gone. And he asked me, he said, what did you do?

And I told him and he said, nah, I must have misdiagnosed you. And and he did it in a way that was very condescending and very close minded. And I walked out of that doctor's office and I just had this kind of, you know, eureka moment, this revelation.

And I said, you know what? And I was trained as a data scientist. Like my background was pure science, pure empiricism, data, data, data. And when I walked out of that office, I thought, you know what? I am no longer going to blindly accept Western medicine dogma. I am going to listen to my intuition and I am going to devote a significant amount of my time

To helping others, waking up others about how toxic our modern living is in our modern food system. And that was ultimately the genesis of why my family and I created Hugh Kitchen, which was the first restaurant of its kind in New York City that you obviously know. And we were I mean, we were crazy at the time. Like we when we opened that restaurant in 2012, we had no seed oils in 2012.

And, you know, all the animal products that we source were wild or or consistent with the kind of natural habitats of those animals. So if it was beef, it was grass fed, grass finished, pasture raised. If it was fish, it was pole caught from the ocean, you know, no fish farms. And, you know, that.

I've been kind of in this space now of let's call it healthy living. And my main MO, because it was so difficult for me to live the way I was living, even in New York City where they have everything, my main MO was I need to make it easier for people to live healthier lives, not just being able to find the products, but also making it less confusing.

And probably most importantly for what I've done is that one of the greatest challenges I had when I was sick was I had to give up all the foods that I loved. And it made me feel like a medical patient. And I believe that nobody wants to feel like a medical patient and that we can still eat all the things that we love, but there's a way to do it where you don't have to adulterate it. You don't have to fill it with chemicals and synthetic lab made crap.

But it's very hard to find. And so that has been kind of my life arc of creating products

that everyone actually wants to eat and consume, but also doing it in a way that has standards that really haven't been done before. Well, I appreciate everything you've done. Definitely a pioneer in the space. I remember Hugh Kitchen very well, and you are correct. No one was doing what you were doing at the time, and that's over a decade ago. And I always appreciate your personal story. I tell it often. I can't think of a better food is medicine story. You're literally going blind. Yeah, yeah, thank you. And completely reversed that, mind-blowing.

So if we were to fast forward to today, how has your wellness philosophy changed? Quite a bit. I'd say it's been iterative. I still believe in the concept of getting back to nature. Our slogan for Hugh when we opened, which still is, is get back to human. And I believe that a lot of our modern problems

of both physical health and mental health. And I believe, Jason, that we are in what I have heard and now call a meta crisis, which is a crisis of several variables happening all at once that many people don't realize are interrelated, but I believe strongly are. And that is our physical health crisis, our mental health crisis, and our planetary health crisis. And on all three of those kind of metrics, we are the worst we've ever been.

in human history. And I went through a period in the early days of what is now known as biohacking with really weird, esoteric, extreme things, because I have always been willing to subject myself to be the guinea pig. And what I have found, particularly in the last five years, and I'd say it's sort of with the rise of the podcasts,

and a lot of the very prominent biohackers. I don't think the super majority of any of that stuff is necessary. So what's the example? You've probably seen some high-profile figures who spend hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars a year doing very, very advanced technological things of filtering their blood, doing plasma transfers, using...

bizarre peptides that they're injecting all the time. And even some of the more simple things, which I like some of the simple, more simple things of, you know, cold plunging and sauna and hyperbaric chambers and, you know, NAD IV drips. And I, obviously these all exist for a reason and there's a scientific basis for how they work. But the thing that I think is lost in this discussion is,

is the neurosis that comes with living a biohacking lifestyle. And, and I can say this because I did this for a while and where I was so insanely neurotic about my calendar and my day. And, you know, I wake up at six and from six to six 15, I journal. And from six 15 to six 30, I drink my electrolytes. And from six 30 to six 45, I review emails in my day. And, and,

And what I found is that when you're extremely neurotic, you know, and I've also been around a lot of people who bring their own food everywhere and they won't eat in restaurants and they won't eat out with people. And and what happened to me and what I've seen happen to a lot of people is they underestimate the role of stress.

And the role of and I think people mistake the word stress for, you know, we typically associate stress with acute stressors like, you know, I'm going to be late for something or I didn't study for my exam. But there's also something called chronic stress, which is which is much closer to anxiety than it is to what we think of as stress.

And that is this constant state of being hypervigilant where your cortisol is always elevated. You're always like worried about like everything that's going to screw up your perfect plan for the day. And life never works according to plan. And what I had to learn the hard way is that I believe we all need to have flexibility in our lives. We need to have some grace for life.

just the way life goes. And there was a time where I was so crazy about getting to bed by 10 o'clock. And if I didn't get to bed at 10 o'clock, my sleep would be ruined. And I'd look at my aura ray and I'd be like, oh my God, my sleep score was low. Today's going to be a bad day. And when I spent time in places like Europe, and Europe is a fabulous place to study. And it's the basis for a lot of the food policy work that I've been doing recently.

The Europeans live five to seven years longer than us. They have significantly lower diseases in all the chronic disease states. So lower heart disease, lower obesity, lower diabetes. They have significantly better mental health than we do. And they spend half to a third on health care per person that we do.

And so, and probably most importantly, Jason, they're much happier than we are. And my old belief system was everything's about money. Everything's about accomplishment. Everything's about how many companies I build. Everything's about work ethic. And I would think the Europeans are lazy and they would take naps in the middle of the day. And I would have disdain for that. Be like, oh, Americans aren't like that. And then I just had a lot of moments over my life where I sort of wondered, like, what are we optimizing for?

And I think we're all optimizing for how long we live in a happy way. And the money doesn't matter. If you're sick, it doesn't matter how much money you have. And the Europeans have a much more flexible approach to their life. They are not workaholics. They don't embrace hustle culture.

They respect nature. They respect each other. They respect farming. And so I have very firmly come to the conclusion over the last five years that I think we're overcomplicating what it takes to live a healthier life. And I think the simple things can get almost everybody 90 to 95% of the way there. And I know a lot of people who live this incredibly neurotic, disciplined, biohacking lifestyle that

And they're not happy. They're not as healthy as I am. And I don't do any of that stuff. And so I think a very positive take on this is almost everything you need to live a healthy, vibrant lifestyle is actually free.

And it's not something that you have to buy or build or, you know, or take part of in terms of significant like technology. So in terms of biohacking, specifically to men, there are two that stand out to me, which I think are becoming more widely accepted. And I love your quick take on them. One is testosterone replacement therapy and the other PCSK9 inhibitors for those men.

concerned about cardiovascular disease. Do you have a quick take on those two specifically? Yeah. We also are in the middle of a fertility crisis. So in the meta crisis, in addition to everything I mentioned, we are also at the lowest level of fertility as a species that we've ever been in recorded human history, both in terms of women's ability to get pregnant, as well as men's sperm count. Men's sperm count is down 50% in the last 40 years.

And that's obviously terrifying. And hopefully the new administration or RFK and the new HHS, this is a prime focus of like, how did all of these things, whether it's autism rates, whether it's fertility, whether it's chronic disease, whether it's mental health disorders in the last 40 years. And if you plot it, and this is not a measurement measure.

thing. Some people say like, oh, we weren't measuring it. We didn't know how to measure it. That's been debunked. It has gone parabolic in the last 40 years. And there is a very significant effort underway to try to untangle where this could come from. And I think a lot of people are hoping it's like one thing. They're hoping it's like microplastics or they're hoping it's forever chemicals or they're hoping it's, you know, seed oils.

I don't think any one of those in isolation is the main factor. I think Americans in particular like to look for like the smoking gun, the one thing. I think it's kind of everything. And I think with testosterone, I had very low testosterone for a while. And I tried hormone replacement therapy in different forms.

And I noticed that when I brought my testosterone back to levels, this is like 10 years ago, when I brought my testosterone back to levels that were sort of normal for men, everything improved for me. Everything.

And, and, and so I don't consider if you have abnormally low hormones for your age, I don't consider hormone replacement therapy like biohacking. Right. I think like that's the sort of where you should be. I view it the same way you would view as like, what is like normal insulin levels for a person and, you know, or are you pre-diabetic and do you need something to help you with that? So I'm not anti-medicine at all. I think on the cholesterol stuff, I,

I have avoided statins like the plague and I've had chronically high cholesterol for 25 years. And from all of my work, and I do think that having studied nutritional studies and epidemiological studies on humans, and this has been part of what I've been doing for a very long time, I've become less and less enamored with studies

Because you realize that most of these studies are flawed and most of these studies have significant limitations to them that make it hard to make conclusive decisions around. And we can I don't think we have time, but we can maybe go down like the rabbit hole as to why that is. But, you know, you know this as a as a as just sort of a regular person.

How many times they've said like eggs are good, eggs are bad, fat is good, fat is bad. Like red wine is okay, it's not okay. Most of these nutritional studies and most of these studies on things like cholesterol, they can't even be replicated when they try to reproduce these studies. And you have a lot of hard, hardcore scientists saying,

who try to shame people like me because I don't have a PhD and say, oh, anything Jason says is pseudoscience. Don't listen to him. He doesn't have a PhD at the end of his name. And I'll go head to head with any of them in a debate. And the problem is, is a lot of these studies cannot be relied upon. So it's not that I'm anti-science, but I am against the notion

of, of overly relying on things that have a lot of flaws in them and can't be reproduced. And cholesterol is the building block for all of your hormone production. And there's now studies coming out that statins actually have far more side effects than we thought. Uh, and so I think there are more natural ways to boost your testosterone, which I have now figured out.

getting a lot of sunlight, doing a lot of heavy lifting, certain foods that build things that are contributive to testosterone, like selenium, which you can get from Brazil nuts,

So I have done a lot of natural ways to get my testosterone back up. And on the cholesterol thing, like I don't think it's conclusive that elevated cholesterol necessarily creates problematic heart conditions or heart disease. And I think the jury's out. And there was a study that I saw that referenced, I believe it was people in like one of the Arctic regions.

that were just basically eating fat and blubber all the time. And they had cholesterol levels that were two to three times what we would consider okay. And their incidence of heart disease was basically non-existent. So here you lot in clear, I'm curious, is there, and we can move on from this part. Do you look at ApoB? Do you do a clearly exam? How do you personally assess your cardiovascular risk that you're looking at cholesterol? I think ApoB has some real significant science behind it.

But I think the variable that's very hard to isolate. So just to give you an example of why I always take all these studies with a grain of salt, your levels of sleep and your levels of stress.

which they do not control for. They definitely don't control for your levels of stress because it's hard to quantify. If you take identical twins, so biologically identical, and you take one of the twins and you subject them to massive sleep deprivation, chronically elevated cortisol, tons of stress, and you take the other twin and that twin is doing great,

you know, just really happy, lots of sleep, no stress. And you feed them the identical foods, the way they metabolize it, the inflammation that shows up in their blood will be drastically different. And they don't control for either of those in any of these studies. And I have a belief, I can't prove it,

But I have a belief that stress is the main variable that turns problematic eating into disease. And so for me, I think like I obviously I eat very clean, but I do eat a fair amount of of organic animal products. And my cholesterol has has never been on the low side.

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You know, look, I think anecdotally we could all relate to that. Personally, I remember this is about three or four years ago. I was getting a colonoscopy and endoscopy and I was super nervous about it. Very nervous. I remember I'm about to get wheeled in and I'm not really an anxious guy, but I was like I was feeling it. They took my blood pressure. It was like 150 over like 90, like insane.

And then right after I go back to like, you know, 115 over 70. Yeah. I honestly, I tell a lot of people like, if you're not getting adequate sunlight and you're not getting adequate movement and you're not getting adequate sleep,

Everything else doesn't matter. Like you can be on the strictest, most perfect diet imaginable and you are not going to have optimal health. Agreed. So, you know, you are a data scientist by training and you are a data nerd. But what else sticks out to you today in terms of trends more broadly in our world? Yeah. So here's another thing that's hard to measure, but there have been studies. There was a Yale study that came out that showed that loneliness is

is the best predictor of early death, better than cigarettes. The study showed that being, and again, it's hard to measure what lonely truly means, but they said that loneliness was tantamount to smoking 15 cigarettes a day. And one of the great trends I see starting to reverse, which is part of what we're trying to do with True Food Kitchen as well,

is that people's health dramatically improves with community, with love, with connection, with getting back to being with each other. We are a social species, and I think there is a trend of moving away from kind of the isolation, workaholism, hustle culture of sitting at your desk for 12 hours a day,

Picking up from a cover Chipotle and eating by yourself, spending the rest of your free time on your phone. I think there is going to be a big improvement as people start to realize that being with each other has incredible health benefits. And the reason why it's it's you know, it's harder to talk about is it's much harder to quantify health.

And there's nobody that profits off of it, right? There's no pill for that. So I think there is a trend. And you're also seeing this in the last few years, bookstores, physical bookstores have gone like this. And we remember the time when Amazon was first coming in and all the Barnes and Nobles went out of business. And I'm seeing in all the stuff that I do across a variety of sectors,

that experiences being outside, being with other people,

you know, being in person, there's this growing movement of people realizing like, I want to get back out in the world. And you notice that actually their health and their mental health dramatically improves when you do so. So you mentioned Blue Zones. So Dan Buettner is a good friend. He's here in Miami. He's been on the show numerous times. And I would always push back. I'd say, Dan, I think the secret of the Blue Zones, it's not the beans, so to speak, even though we love Whole Foods.

it's the connection and the purpose. No question. It's not necessarily the vegetarian diet, Dan. Come on. Yeah, I agree. I agree. And look, again, it's very hard to isolate these different variables, except what I pointed out in some of my government testimony is we want to isolate variables and we want to do studies on just taking seed oils out, what happens? And what I point out is like,

We might be able to do that with certain variables. I'm not disputing that that's not possible. However, we have entire populations, you know, hundreds of millions of people in other countries that are doing way better than we are doing. And they're doing things much simpler than we're doing.

And so instead of trying to set up this insanely complex scientific controlled study, like let's look at other populations that are doing way better than us and have been for generations. And let's figure out what is it they're doing. And it might not be one variable. And so I completely agree with you about that, about the connection.

Well, the study piece is, to your point, so incredibly difficult. I think Peter Atiyah, many people would view as a brilliant mind and something he tried a decade ago and couldn't do. Yeah. And look, like this is where and permit me to go a little woo, but I didn't used to be spiritual at all. You know, I was an atheist for probably 20 years.

Um, because everything to me was science and data and science and data. And if I can't prove it and I don't see it in the data, it must not be real. And obviously curing my eye disease violates science. You know, I'm, I'm literally a walking living miracle in scientific terms. I've met over 20 years, hundreds, if not thousands of people.

who have cured things or diseases that most scientists would deem impossible. And they call these anecdotes and they dismiss them. But this goes back hundreds, if not thousands of years of understanding. There's a lot of things we can't measure. And there's a lot of things we don't fully understand. But it doesn't mean it's not real. And the biggest example, obviously, in health is the placebo effect.

The placebo effect is incorporated into every single human controlled trial because we know that humans have an ability to influence their health with what is in their mind and their thoughts. But we have no idea today how the placebo effect works. No idea. Zero. But we acknowledge that it's a real phenomenon.

And there are a lot of other things that we can't measure. We can't set up a scientific control trial for it, but it doesn't mean it's not real. And I believe we need to have more common sense. We need to have more understanding of our intuition. And the example I gave in the Senate testimony back in September was,

was there was a debate going on about glyphosate. And obviously there's enough data now to show that it's severely toxic and there've been high number of billions of settlements already. But the scientists have argued that it's not overwhelmingly conclusive and that the dose matters. And in small enough doses, it's fine for humans. And what I said was, look,

Like I could probably set up a trial that shows the other side or, and that would take 10 years, or we could look at the fact that glyphosate is an incredibly destructive toxic herbicide that obliterates every living organism around it that hasn't been genetically engineered to tolerate it. And for us to presume that if it kills every bug, every microorganism, all the bacteria, everything around it,

For us to presume that when we put that in our body, just because it's low dose, that it doesn't affect us is insane to me. It's literally insane. I don't need 10 years of study to say, I don't want to put that in my kids' bodies. And the Europeans in their regulatory approach to new chemicals and new ingredients and things that big industry wants to bring into the food supply, they have a completely opposite approach to regulation that we do.

In this country, and hopefully this is going to change soon, we have something called the GRAS policy or generally recognized as SAFE. It's an acronym where we presume that food, that new ingredients, new chemicals, new things made in a laboratory are innocent until proven guilty. And we have allowed companies to create their own synthetics, their own chemicals, their own laboratory produced concoctions.

They can hire their own independent experts who claim it's fine. And in a matter of months, they give it to the FDA. The FDA doesn't have time to do their own analysis. If it's an independent expert that one of the big food companies hired, they say it's fine. And then it shows up in our food supply. And the Europeans take a completely opposite approach of guilty until proven innocent. If it's a new synthetic manmade chemical that doesn't exist in nature. And again,

I think it's travesty because we have seen there have been dozens of things, whether it's pharmaceuticals or things like red number three or trans fats or Alestra or asbestos or thalidomide. You did a whole list of things that had scientific studies for five years or 10 years. We thought they were fine. And then we learned the hard way like, oh, wait, it's not fine. And and so I think this approach is.

Of incorporating common sense into,

It's not anti-science. It's how we've always lived and thrived as human beings. And we've gotten away from common sense and we've gotten away from intuition because the studies aren't conclusive and we are paying the price for it. What else do you think is the low hanging fruit here? Glyphosate is clearly one of them. Like what else do you think? Did the dyes, like what's on your top five? I mean, the artificial feed dyes are what I chose, uh,

to make a stink out of because most Americans didn't know that all the big food companies make a safer, cleaner version of the identical products for other countries.

where some of these things are actually banned. And so I became known as like the Fruit Loops guy when I held up those two bags of cereal in Congress to point out that the Fruit Loops in the US has red 40, yellow five, yellow six, blue one, and a carcinogenic preservative called BHT. And in Canada, Australia, Europe, UK, Japan, India,

These chemicals are either regulated and require a cigarette-like warning label that says, you know, this product contains ingredients known to cause behavioral disorders in children or they're outright banned. And so because these things exist in these other countries, companies like Kellogg's actually make a version of Froot Loops for Canada right across the border.

That has colorants that are come from fruit and vegetables and it has no BHT in it. They make a better version already and they know how to do it. And I pointed this out, like how insane this was that like American moms and my kids are deeply affected by food diets deeply. Like I can tell within two hours, if my children have had food diets in terms of their behavior every time. And for American people to not have access to,

to the better version that these companies already make is insane and it's anti-American. And I chose that topic, not because I think that if we get rid of artificial food dyes, all of our health problems are going to go away. It's not entirely clear what kind of damage these things do, but we know how they're processed. They're made and derived from coal tar and petroleum.

We know instinctively we shouldn't be consuming coal tar and patrolling, right? We know this, right? But the food companies have tried to convince the lawmakers that it's fine in low doses, even though all these other countries have determined it's not fine. And so I chose artificial food dives as the first shot across the bow because it's an unassailable topic.

The only people that are in favor of keeping artificial food dyes are the big food companies. There is no functional purpose for it. It just makes the food brighter, makes it more attractive to children. And they have shown that when you serve much brighter colors to children, they not only want it more, they eat more of it.

it. And so I chose that one. So that's really low hanging fruit is artificial food dyes because there's no functional use for it. When you start getting into other things that are a little more nuanced, preservatives, that's more nuanced because there's a whole shelf life argument and there's a cost of food argument. You start getting into things like genetically modified sugar versus not. How much sugar should be in products? What's the definition of ultra processed foods? There's a lot more topics that are nuanced and

And I think the lowest hanging fruit is the grass standard. So basically moving to a European approach and saying, if you're going to introduce a new synthetic man-made chemical that doesn't exist in nature, and we don't have very long-term data on how it affects humans, the onus should be on you as a company to pay for the studies. This is how it works in Europe. It can be up to 10 years.

And you pay for it. And if you can prove without a shadow of a doubt that it's fine for human consumption, great. But you're bearing the cost for it. And I think repealing the grass loophole and new ingredients will have to go through this kind of testing, which they didn't have to before. That's low-hanging fruit. The food dyes are low-hanging fruit. I think glyphosate is absurd. I think the prevalence of microplastics...

And the prevalence of what they now call forever chemicals, which are the coatings that go in pots and pans like Teflon to make it nonstick. But these coatings are in everything. They're in all packaging, any cardboard paper packaging where they don't want the liquid to seep through.

and make the packaging soggy. Like when you get like a burger in one of those cardboard things, or you get a coffee cup, pizza box, and there's that kind of shiny lining. That's almost always Forever Chemicals that's doing that. And so we know that that's toxic. They're trying to get rid of all of that, but there's just not enough options right now that do the function

of what that lining is supposed to do that isn't harmful to humans. Agreed. I'm curious your take. It feels to me, and we were discussing, we started recording that seed oil-free

has so much momentum. I was saying before we started recording, I was in Tampa, it's the West Coast of Florida, incredible restaurants, seed oil free, I'm proud of it. It feels like, why do you think it has so much momentum right now? You know, seed oils have become very controversial. And again, this is one of the ones that the hardcore scientists get very angry about because the peer reviewed studies on seed oils are neutral at best.

There's a bunch that show that they're inflammatory and there's a bunch that show that they're fine. And they will go to the studies and say, the studies don't show that if you consume seed oils that you get sicker.

And again, there's a presupposition in there, which is that the studies are accurate and that the studies are not flawed. What I've tried to do is make it much simpler, which has come back to common sense. And I've been grilled on this many times. I think if you took organic sunflower seeds that you knew the source of and you put them in your food processor at home,

And out of the blending of the sunflower seeds came a layer of oil like what happens when you blend up nuts. I think that's probably fine to consume in whatever low doses you have. For me, I'm very specific that I have an issue with what I call industrially processed seed oil. And I've seen how they're made. And I encourage your listeners to go look online at some of the industrial processing of seed oils.

And they are made in, in many cases, they're made in the same facilities as where oil refinery takes place, including biodiesel refinery for, for cars, same machinery and, and with seed oils to do it in the quantities that we need for industry.

You're dealing with the extraction process, which is not done with a food processor. The extraction process is done with a petroleum derivative like hexane and butane so that they can do it at scale.

They typically are rancid when they get the seeds. They're getting seeds that are very old relative to versus when they were harvested. And they tend to go rancid very quickly. And so they have to deodorize them because they stink. And they deodorize them with a man-made chemical. There's a few chemicals that they use. And then when it comes out after this very elaborate process, it looks like sludge.

And nobody wants to consume sludge, so they have to bleach it. And they also use chemicals for bleaching. Many of the seeds are genetically modified. Many of them have glyphosate residue on them. And there's been plenty of testing that has been done that shows that these chemicals that are part of the process do not go away. They're still in the seed oils, whether it's the glyphosate or some of the petroleum derivatives or some of the byproduct that's in there.

And so my point on seed oils is if you showed Americans how these are made and you showed them what went into the process, let them make a decision. You know, we don't have to wait for 10 years of studies that are perfectly designed to isolate a variable like people don't want this.

And whereas a lot of things like beef tallow, extra virgin olive oil, again, there's industries that corrupt even the clean oils, but avocado oil, coconut oil, butter, ghee, these things are minimally processed. And so I just try to appeal to people's sense.

and say, look, you want things that are minimally processed and you want things that don't involve a whole host of toxic chemicals that are used to make it. That's why I think this is getting a lot of attention because I've also said to some people like, don't knock until you try it. And if you're eating a ton of fried food all the time that's made with industrial seed oils, try eating similar foods that are made with minimally processed, not industrial oils,

And just see how you feel. Give it two, three weeks. See what happens. Like, don't take my word for it. Just try it. And I found a lot of people come back to me after I've given them recommendations on a variety of food changes. And they come back and they're like, wow, like, I just feel a lot better. And I look better and I'm sleeping better and my skin is clear and I no longer have eczema or psoriasis. And like all these things start happening.

And again, the scientists will be like, well, that could be placebo effect. Who knows what's happening, Jason? That could be healthy user bias, yada, yada. I don't really care. I just don't want to be putting those kinds of toxic chemicals into my kid's body. And I don't need to wait for the scientific studies to tell me that that shouldn't happen. Well, in that regard, I do think there's consensus that ultra processed foods are bad. And as you pointed out,

it's pretty hard to argue that canola oil is not ultra processed, ultra pro like it is, is an ultra processed oil. So if you're of the mindset that ultra processed foods are bad, something I generally probably want to avoid. If I'm going to limit my intake, you're probably on board. Yeah. I think I'm not going to never have a French fry again. Like Kate Shanahan has been on, you know, and she's lovely, but like, you know, she, you know, well,

She maybe takes a little too far. Look, I will tell you that once in a while, I either knowingly or accidentally am consuming seed oils. And, you know, I think I think that's fine. I think that's fine. I think you need to give yourself a little grace. And, you know, if and when it happens, I think it's OK.

But I'll segue like giving yourself grace and circling back to your mission, you know, brings us full circle to your work at Human Co. Your brands there and True Food Kitchen. And one of the reasons I love you and your brands is I know your standards. And it's True Food Kitchen specifically is the one place we can bring our two little girls. They're eight and about to be six. We can go there. They can order whatever they want.

You want tenders? You have tenders. You want a burger? You can have a burger. You want pizza? We'll get the pizza. I know it's sourdough. You want ice cream? I know it's good. It's cosmic bliss. And so this idea of kids don't want to eat like their medical patients and bringing comfort and joy into food that has...

the utmost standards, I think is important and worth noting. And I do think the world is going to quickly move there as consumers demand it. But what's your take as we bring this full circle? Well, obviously I'm wildly biased because this is what I've devoted my life to. But we recently became the majority investor in True Food Kitchen through Humanco because it was our favorite restaurant in Austin.

It was started by Dr. Andrew Weil about 17 years ago, who was a pioneer in functional medicine. And I found as a consumer that it was really hard to find these standards in restaurants that were widely available and that wasn't going to break the bank.

I've been to plenty of farm-to-table restaurants where it's $100 a person, and that's not approachable for the mainstream. And I felt like True Food, which is, we have 46 restaurants in 18 states. We're the only national restaurant chain that is 100% seed oil free, 100%. And it took us a lot of work to do that.

When I first got involved a couple of years ago, we immediately stopped cooking with seed oils, but we still had some condiments and we still had a couple items that still had seed oils in them. Mayo is very hard to find without seed oils. We had these dried cranberries that were in one of our salads, and you can't find dried cranberries in bulk that don't have seed oils on them.

because they don't want the dried cranberries to clump together. So the seed oils prevent the clumping. We had to just get rid of them. We literally can't find them. So we just got rid of dried cranberries because we can't do it. And to be able to make the claim that you're 100% cereal free, we were like 98, 99% cereal free when we stopped cooking with it, but we still had a few items. Our gluten-free hamburger buns that they were sourcing had seed oils in them.

So I replaced them with against the grain hamburger buns, which are seed oil free. It's very hard to do this. And it obviously wasn't positive for our margins either. And I think what's really important to me as a entrepreneur and a philanthropist is sometimes making decisions that are actually negative for the bottom line, but positive for humanity.

And I haven't encountered many companies that do that. And I believe that hopefully in the long run, it pays off in terms of more people coming to trust and respect True Food Kitchen for our authenticity and that we demonstrated multiple times. We've made decisions that are bad for our bottom line, but better for our consumer. I hope that that accrues over time. But I also feel like just as a citizen, as a father, there needs to be more companies that stand up and say, you know what?

This is less profitable, but I'm not doing this because it's not good for people. And we've introduced, you pointed out the chicken tenders, you know, fried chicken fingers or chicken tenders has been in vogue for a long time and everyone loves them. I love them. My kids love them. But most of the chicken tenders that you find are deep fried with genetically modified wheat gluten. So it probably has glyphosate on it.

Um, and it's deep fried in seed oils and everywhere, everywhere you go. And so I thought, you know what? We had him at Hugh kitchen. We had a gluten-free chicken tender at Hugh kitchen. It did great. And we tweaked the recipe. We brought it back. We created a new version in true food kitchen. Um, that is air fried instead of deep fried. It uses, um, avocado oil and it's gluten-free.

And you've had them, you know, they're terrific chicken tenders and you don't feel like you're sacrificing, you're compromising. And one of the things that I'm trying to do, and I would encourage your listeners as you keep coming to True Food over time, watch how our menu continues to evolve because we want to keep bringing in more customers.

Comfort foods made clean. We want to bring in more dishes that you actually want to eat and you crave, but are done in a clean way. So we use these chicken tenders and we now make a gluten-free chicken parm.

That also has no seed oils. And we're doing really fun dishes. We have two different grass fed burgers that I think are both terrific. And and we have just a lot of things that you crave and you might even consider indulgent. But we do it without the fake crap. The chicken tenders, I get the buffalo ones brings me back to my youth and I get the blue cheese and the whole I was I never thought this could be healthy.

And they're incredible. Yeah. And look, like the running joke when people go to Europe for vacation is they see how the Italians or the French or the Spanish, they see what they eat every day. And like we spend, we usually go to Italy at least once a year, me and my family. And you look around and they're eating bread at every meal. They're eating pasta one, two times a day. They're having gelato all the time. And, you know, you just, you naturally think like,

These people should be unhealthy and they should be very overweight and they should be, you know, like what we would expect if you're eating pasta and pizza and gelato all the time. And they're way healthier than we are. I don't think it is the food choices. I know for a fact in the 70s and there's data on this and you just have to go and look at old movies.

In the 70s, people were not healthy. They were eating burgers and fries all the time. Pizzas, milkshakes. They were smoking cigarettes. They were way healthier than we are and thinner. I don't think it's that we have to eat salads every day. I think it's what's in the food. And so I believe you can still have all of those things that you want. You just have to make sure what goes into it. I eat grass-fed burger.

Three days a week. Three days a week, I have a grass-fed burger. I love it. Well, on the subject of the evolving menu, I have to plug our collaboration. So our electrolytes with creatine and lemon-lime, which I take daily and is absolutely delicious, is going to be a true food kitchen over the summer in a cocktail glass with ice. I love it. So you can... It is...

A fantastic collaboration. And we encourage everyone to go to True Food Kitchen and try our absolutely delicious electrolytes with creatine and lemon lime. As we like to say, you make your strong hydration.

Yeah, it's great. I take your creatine every single day. Amazing. You look a little bigger. Yeah, I'm actually pretty fit right now. I'm pretty fit right now. So we covered a lot of ground. Is there anything we didn't cover that you want to touch on before we wrap? Look, I would just say, obviously, everyone listening to this is conscientious.

They're thinking about their daily life choices and their food choices. And I think you're going to see a lot more progress and momentum. I mean, I can tell you, I've been working on this kind of stuff. I've been in advocacy for a long time. There has never been this amount of momentum and progress before.

And the last few months alone, when you look at, I mean, there are five states now, five states that have banned artificial food dives from kids' lunches just in the last two months. And this is obviously some of what I've been working on, on my social and government advocacy work. But.

The Americans are ready now and they're all saying like, we're done with this. Like, we don't want this crap in my kids food. And I just want to thank, you know, all the people listening that the reason that this has happened is because there have been so many people that have called their local members of government and said, like, we want to get this shit out of our food.

And it really is working. Like I didn't used to think this is actually how it could work. I used to think that like, you know, we learn this in school, but it's not really how it works. And I've been part of three different Texas states testimonies on artificial food dyes, on cleaning up school food lunches, on getting soda out of the SNAP program. And when I talked to the members, the various decision makers of the government,

They say that the reason that this is moving so fast is because of the number of constituents, people, moms, you know, just ordinary citizens that called up or sent an email in and said like, this is crazy. Get rid of it. And it actually worked. And it's just so exciting and heartening to see that it can actually work because like

you know, I'm not that important and I'm not that powerful. And like, yeah, I raised the conversation to a point where they're talking about it, but none of this would have happened without all the people calling in and emailing in and being part of it. And so this has been a huge monumental team effort and it's just awesome to watch. And so I would just say like everybody listening, like keep doing what you're doing and keep demanding better, right?

and voting with your wallets by rewarding companies that are doing it right and punishing companies. And by punishing, I mean, just don't give them your money. And you will see over time that the free market and the invisible hand always works. And if people are not buying a lot of garbage and they start rewarding companies that are doing it better,

you will start seeing all the changes that you want to see. Well said, Jason. Always a pleasure. Thanks for having me, Jason.

And again, guys, please go to truefoodkitchen.com, find a location near you, and go have our incredibly delicious electrolytes with creatine plus, both featured in the Bright Eyes drink and on the Rocks drink, both in lemon-lime, both delicious. I know you're going to love it. And again, spend $50, get $10 off. Use code MBXTRU10. All the details are in the show notes. Thank you again.