Episode #185
Mark Schatzker: Blocked Cravings + The Failures Of Food Enrichment

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Our Mark Schatzker interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Dave Chapman interviews Mark Schatzker, January 2024:

Dave Chapman 0:00
I’m talking today with Mark Schatzker. Mark, welcome. Welcome to my home. Welcome to this podcast.

Mark Schatzker 0:07
Nice to do it in person.

Dave Chapman 0:08
It is great. And we’ve we’ve done several of these always virtually first interview, and then the book club. And I appreciate it all from i, i will say for our audience that I think that you are, you know, one of the really important teachers of our time about food, and about the food we eat. What’s wrong, what’s right, and, and, and we’ll see about where to go from here. So, thanks. You’ve got three books, I’ll just hold them up. I don’t always do this. But there are three important books, the end of craving, steak, and the Dorito effect. And all three books. It’s it’s a trilogy, really, you started with steak, and then the Dorito effect, and and then the end of craving. Let’s just briefly introduce people to these and what your evolution was as you as you research them and wrote them.

Mark Schatzker 1:07
Yes, steak was really it began and was a travel adventure book, kind of in the Bill Bryson sense of a travel book. The subtitle is one man’s search for the world’s tastiest piece of beef. And that’s what it was, I traveled the world looking for the greatest steak. But the books start to ask some deeper questions it had to did we evolved to eat meat? Why does meat taste the way it does? Where does flavor come from? Why do we like what we like? Really interesting questions like how do cows know what to eat? Because cows don’t they don’t read men’s health or they don’t go to nutrition class. And yet how do they nourish themselves? That’s when I start to have the some really interesting experiences. I visit a farm or a ranch and they say, you know, these, these mama cows over in this field are eating Clover because they need the protein because they’re supporting fetus. And the steers are over in this field. And they’re laying on on fats. They’re eating rye, rye grass. And you think, how do they know I got very interested in flavor. The lesson of steak was that the whole world is eating an awful lot of mediocre beef. We’ve gotten very good at producing a lot of beef, and it’s come at a cost. And that is its flavor. Beef looks red, it just doesn’t taste red anymore. It doesn’t have that deep, resonant, beefy punch that we so badly want it to have. And every steaks in some sense of letdown. And then you have a really great steak like I did, I went to visit my brother. I think it’s 9096 or 97. And he was living in Chile, and we had an Argentine tenderloin. And it was a mind blowing experience. It was one of those experiences, you put the beef in your mouth and everything slows down and you go like what’s going on? And I asked the question that really did change the course of my life. I asked why did this steak tastes so good? And that’s what led to the book. And that led to this deeper question about flavor. And what I found about steak, this trend of quantity and quality, I remember was sitting with Temple Grandin. I interviewed her for the book, we spent some time together, which is terrific. Ate steak with Temple Grandin, which is awesome. And she said, it’s not just steak. She said it’s time to romaine lettuce. It’s happening to everything and it was such an astute comment. And I started to get more interested in well, what’s going on with food that led to the Dorito effect, which looked at our food system and what’s happened to food. Everyone’s concerned, you know, what’s happened to food? It’s a question everybody wants to wants the answer to. And I look at it through the lens of flavor. And I you know, that was intentional, very purposeful, because we are all nutritionists. Ever since I can remember the discussion has been about fat. It’s been about carbs. It’s been about protein. It’s been about calories. And we have this talk about food as though nutrition takes place from the neck down. But the funny thing is, every time we sit down to eat a meal, we want it to taste good. And we behave as though flavor is some kind of a hangover from the Stone Age. It’s meaningless. It’s frivolous, it’s, it’s gonna get you into trouble. Well, in this book, I just want to say what has happened to food. I knew there was something going on with farm food and what Temple Grandin, her Inkling turned out to be absolutely correct. All the food we grow is getting blander everything that comes off a farm, whether it walks out the farm or whether we pull it out of the ground or pluck it from a tree. It’s getting blender because we keep on asking the land to produce more food. And there is doesn’t have to be, but there is this trade off between quantity and quality. Now it’s good thing we’ve got the quantity the Green Revolution saved many lives. It’d be a lot of dead bodies because we got less farmland than we used to have and we got far more bodies, but there’s been a quality trade off. And the food that we’re told to eat the wholesome food is getting bland. At the same time there’s been a complimentary reverse trend, which is that processed foods we call them now Ultra processed foods are getting ever more flavorful because literally the flavor compounds that are being lost at the farm level are being manufactured in flavor factories. There are factories that produce flavor compounds, and they’re being put onto Ultra processed foods that are making all the processes It’s evermore irresistible. So if you think of flavor as the incentive to eat, if you think of the, the pleasure and joy we take in the taste of food as being, you know, one of the big reasons we eat well, we took that incentive from the food we’re supposed to eat, namely Whole Foods, wholesome foods, stuff from the farm, and we layered it on we glossed onto Ultra processed foods to foods that don’t taste like what they are. So I think it was the very first page of the Dorito effect. I said, the definition of junk food, everyone’s got these you know, high calorie this or that I said, it’s food that tastes like something that it isn’t. And that led to the end of craving, because I knew in a in a very limited sense when you when you put flavorings on a Dorito chip. So okay, the backup of it. The reason I called it, the Dorito effect was because the first ever Doritos were just salted tortilla chips, and they bombed they it was a disaster. And the complaint was that the sake the snack sounded Mexican, but it didn’t taste Mexican. And the guy who actually created the Doritos, he, he wasn’t supposed they told them not to do it. And he went ahead and did it. And he created this tortilla chip snack that was bombing. And he had to explain himself. And he said, What are you going to do about Doritos, and he said, Let’s make them taste like Taco. And this actually elicited laughs. They said, You know, this was down in Texas, that’s where Frito Lay was located. And they said, our Yankee friend from the north doesn’t understand the difference between a thing and a flavor. And this was the seminal moment when flavor technology had changed, since that you can make anything you want. Tastes like whatever you want it to taste like. So this is very important, because we can talk about salt, sugar and fat and calories. The difference between that salted tortilla chip and a taco flavored Doritos had nothing to do with calories, salt, fat, sugar, anything like that. It had to do with this dusting of flavor compounds. So what we know is in this acute sense, I can put these flavor compounds on a tortilla chip, you’ll eat more of them. If you think about soft drinks, everyone talks about soft drinks, they’re sugary drinks. That’s not why you drink them. If I gave you a glass of soda water, with seven tablespoons or whatever it is of sugar, you’d find it quite disgusting. I’ve tried it just doesn’t taste good. It’s the flavorings that makes coke tastes like Coke. And Dr. Pepper tastes like Dr. Pepper, and Mountain Dew tastes like Mountain Dew. And seven updates X seven up. So I know that’ll make people eat more in the moment. But in the end of craving, there’s my most recent book, I guess a deeper question is, what is the effect of all this fooling around of all this? This these false sensations that we’re layering on the food? What does that do to us over time. And, and my belief is that this is so much of what’s responsible for the obesity epidemic because it’s it’s really confusing our brains, our brains are getting signals about food that are misleading. And this is something we were never meant to deal with, from an evolutionary point of view. It’s not salt, or fat, or carbs or sugar that’s changed. These are still the same fundamental nutrients they’ve always been. It’s the signals the brain gets about the food that it’s eating, that’s changed. And, and it’s had a profound effect.

Dave Chapman 8:06
That’s such an interesting evolution there. You know, the those three stages, I can’t help but think of the organic movement. And the organic movement really began in the 30s. Organic Farming has existed for 1000s of years. But it became a movement. And it was a political movement in response to the advent of chemical fertilizers and pesticides. And there were a group of people famously in Europe, who said, this isn’t right, we’re not we’re not improving our agriculture, we’re D proving it. And Albert Howard, famously was in India meant to be as an extension agent. And instead he said he became the student. And he said, The peasant in the past became my teachers, because they were doing a very traditional agriculture. And he looked and he said, the results are better. So the interesting thing to me is they were very focused on health. They were focused, they weren’t worrying about obesity, they were focused on health, and the health of the animals, the health of the ground, and the health of the people who were who are part of that system. And this was before Ultra processed food. So it’s interesting. So this is like going back to Temple Grandin. His comment about you know, lettuce isn’t what led us used to be beef isn’t what beef used to be. So already we’re seeing this, this lessening of nutrition and flavor

Mark Schatzker 9:37
and we this is stuff we’ve all heard from our grandparents so they remember what cream tastes like on the farm or what eggs used to taste like. Right? And and you think it’s just the kind of the, you know, you see the past through rose tinted lens, but it’s not true that when what they’re saying is, they’re picking up something real, and

Dave Chapman 9:52
the USDA agrees they’ve done the testing on on the food since the 40s. And they see that it’s nutritionally is becoming less and less vital, you know, more and more simple, less, less complex and diluted and diluted. Okay. So it’s interesting to me that there was a movement before we were dealing with obesity, and, you know, all this ultra processing. And what I think is that things are getting worse in our food system, as this becomes dominant. And we’re seeing even worse outcomes. It’s not just lower health, but it’s it’s now dramatic health outcomes, through obesity. We’re through other things to do you think through this, this masking of nutritional, you know, failure, thinness, the things that actually nourish us. Do you think there are other health problems? Or do you think obesity is really well, obesity is central you know,

Mark Schatzker 10:56
obesity is it raises your risk profile for so many other diseases, type two diabetes, cardiovascular disease, Alzheimer’s, as far as other diseases go, it’s tough to say because this is what the scientists would call ecological data, which you’re looking at a whole society country over time. So you might see like a rise in things like autism is that because the food we eat is that because we’re better at diagnosing it, you know, people who are diagnosed with autism or being on a spectrum, today, 40 years ago, were just weirdos or something like that. So it’s difficult to say, I don’t think it’s a good thing. But I would say the the other part of it, there’s, there’s the pleasure part of it, you see, we’re being very this part of the problem, we’re having this technical discussion about disease, and that’s important. But the other part of it is that we’ve drained pleasure from real food. And it’s, this is also really important because we eat three times a day. And pleasure is important to us, it’s meant to nourish, it does nourish the soul. And when you take that away, you lose something really important. And I don’t think these ultra processed foods there’s there’s, they do have some kind of a hold on the brain. You know, we know when you start eating those Doritos, it’s hard to stop, but they’re not truly pleasurable. The way good food is the way that you and I would think about the way a great tomato tastes or a great steak or, or mushroom toast or a great piece of sourdough bread. And that’s what we’re also losing is a connection to how food was meant to taste food. That is the its flavor is connected to its past, that what you’re tasting is what the food is. And I know it sounds it can sound kind of spiritual, but I really think there’s something to that. Well,

Dave Chapman 12:29
you actually offered a lot of proof to what you’re saying. I mean, you know, a lot of scientific research to that. So, sure, let’s go to teasing apart the difference between craving, wanting and liking pleasure, that they’re not the same. Yeah.

Mark Schatzker 12:48
So this is a really important point. I spent a lot of time in the book talking about the research that starts with a guy named Kent Berridge, I think it was 1985. You’ve all you’ve probably heard of the neurotransmitter called dopamine. Everybody’s you know, we keep on talking about dopamine hits, you get a dopamine hit from your smartphone, or, and they make it sound as though what was the prevailing belief at the time was that dopamine was pleasure. And can’t Berridge believe that dopamine was pleasure, so much so that he was trying to add to the body of research, which is what scientists do, showing that dopamine was pleasure. And what he did is he gave rats a drug that blocks dopamine in the brain. And he fired a little blast of sugar water into their mouths. And when rats eat something they like, they kind of lick their paws, they stick their tongue out, they make these cute little red faces. And he thought well, with, you know, dopamine suppress, we’re not going to get the pleasure response. And he got the pleasure response. And he’s like, Well, I screwed up. He did it again. It happened again, and he was trying to scratching his head were like, What is going on? So we thought, okay, it’s gonna He’s gonna crank up the artillery, and he lesions, the dopamine channels in the rats brain, that part of the brain. Dopamine is wiped out. These rats are incapable of experiencing pleasure. They were so kind of catatonic they had to be fed through a feeding tube, because they just weren’t interested in feeding. So it looks like pleasures gone. He fires sugar water back into their mouth. They make that cute little joyful rat expression. And he’s really confused. This is not making sense. So nice, does something completely different. He sticks electrodes in their brains and cranks up dopamine, these dopamine pleasure centers of the brain, and now the rats are just eating voraciously. Well, that seems right, doesn’t it except now they’re making the reverse facial expressions that they make when they don’t like something. So they’re saying, I can’t stop eating, but I’m not enjoying this. And he was so flummoxed by this. But eventually he put the piece of the puzzle together. And what he realized is that what we talk of his pleasure is actually two things. There’s the quest, and then there’s the receipt of pleasure there is wanting and then there is liking. And this is so important because we really lacked this vocabulary for understanding how our pleasure relationship with the world because they’re two related but different sensations. And one of the most interesting thing To me about our modern food environment is that it’s really tweaked this wanting sense. One of the most interesting things about obesity, everybody thinks people with obesity, well, they just indulge themselves too much they lose themselves in the pleasures of food. But when we look at the neuro imaging of obesity, we find that they actually don’t, they don’t receive more pleasure from food, they receive less pleasure. The difference comes in this plume of wanting when they see the slice of pizza, when they smell the hamburger. When they see that milkshake, they really want it, but it doesn’t deliver that expected pleasure. So it’s a really a miserable state of affairs. And I think this is really important because we’ve deluded ourselves into thinking that we live in this ultra pleasurable food environment. We talk about foods like cheeseburgers and Doritos being hyper palatable. I don’t think they are. There’s there’s a cheap quality. It’s like, it’s like watching a, like a stupid movie that you know, it’s a stupid movie, but it’s got this plot that just want to see what happens. They have a hold on us, but it’s doesn’t deliver true pleasure. And I think this is really important. I’ll tell you why. Because when you look at the cultures that value food the most in the West, it’s Italy, and the East is Japan. Their BMI is are microscopic compared to Americans behind them. In Italy, in the north of Italy, where they don’t they don’t eat a Mediterranean diet. By the way, they eat a lot of cream, a lot of pasta, a lot of Parmesan cheese, a lot of cured pork products. The rate of obesity is less than 10%. It’s been holding steady. It’s not budging, and they eat incredible food. I spent so much time in Bologna. This is this is a city that’s obsessed with food, you might almost think they have an eating disorder. Because of their Chamber of Commerce. They have an official repository of official recipes if you’re gonna make lasagna. This is how you make lasagna if you’re gonna make tortellini. This is how you make tortellini. If you’re gonna make their their famous Bolognese Ragu alla bolognese that wonderful sauce that they have with Italia tele noodle, this is how you make that sauce. And they actually have that noodle. It’s their favorite noodles. It’s about the size of Fettuccine, but it’s made with fresh ingredients it’s made with with fresh flour, and eggs, fresh eggs, carbs, and fat, these two nutrients we’ve been freaking out over for decades. They have that noodle cast and gold. This is the perfect tagliatelle a noodle. That’s how much they revere food. So you’d think these people, people visit bologna from all over the world, people go to Italy just so they can eat. As the Italians are eating well, you think well, if delicious food is our enemy, and it’s delicious food that is making us eat ourselves into an early grave? Well, surely the Italians will be the plumpest. And yet, they’re the truest. And then you look across the Pacific Ocean in Japan, the Japanese are equally if not more fixated on. On definitions in the provenance of food, they call it brands, everyone’s heard of Kobe beef, that is a brand of beef, it must be made a certain way. And it must come from Kobe. If you if you break those rules, you can get in trouble with the law. The Japanese have these rules for so many things. They teach their kids how to eat. They teach their kids what words like umami means that’s that’s a Japanese word. The food in Japan is unbelievable. I was there for almost two weeks, I don’t think I could have found a bad meal. If I wanted to, I ate a rice ball on a train that’s raw fish surrounded by rice. If you eat food on a train in North America, you know, you’re it’s like a suicide quest, if you can imagine eating raw fish on a train. And it was incredible. The the rate of obese in Japan is even less than Italy. It’s like four or 5%. So on the one hand, this is telling us something very encouraging. It means that you can have an incredible relationship with food, eat wonderful food, and not pay this terrible price of being tremendously overweight and having all these health problems. But it’s also telling us something even more important that we’re getting this completely wrong.

Dave Chapman 18:54
Just one thing before we move on that amazing. Pasta is made out of flour and eggs. I’m guessing that that was not American flour and industrial eggs,

Mark Schatzker 19:08
not industrial eggs. The flour is probably Canadian. There’s actually a brand of flour in Italy called Manitoba. I know is it from Manitoba? I don’t know might be from Saskatchewan might be from Alberta. They cannot grow their own wheat in Italy. It is different from ours though and that it’s not enriched. So it’s, it’s although it’s Canadian flour, it’s not the flower that is a Canadian would buy. Yeah. Okay. And that’s important. We’ll get to that. But that’s a very important distinction. Yeah,

Dave Chapman 19:32
I just, you know, we go back to those initial depletion of the raw ingredients. Yeah, being significant and all this. I think that that that depletion drives the flavor industry, as part of what fuels that it becomes self propelling after a while. It doesn’t, you know, it doesn’t care. We’re in a system where people are constantly Getting the latest flavor of Doritos. And the latest power eight and the latest version. It seems like what you’re describing has set it off as continuing to fuel it, but it seems like a kind of a crazy machine that is running amok. Yeah.

Mark Schatzker 20:20
Yeah, it is. It’s it’s sort of a, it’s sort of a self fueling thing. Although not in certain cultures, you know, it’s funny, if you go to Italy, you go to like a little convenience store. And they have this little fridge at the front of the store where you can get a coke or a Fanta. They have their, you know, potato chips that tastes like prosciutto. I think there was another they have like paprika flavored potato chips. So it’s not as though junk food doesn’t exist there. And they do drink soft drinks, but they only drink about 1/5 The amount of soft drinks that we do. So far, far less, you don’t really see people eating potato chips, certainly not as often as you would hear. They do have, it’s not like they’re banned or something. They’re there. They just don’t have, you know, what’s funny is in the middle of the street law firm, there’s this little stand. And so selling junk food, they’re selling things like mortadella, and these little panini sandwiches. So they’ve just got a much better food culture.

Dave Chapman 21:11
Okay, so that’s a question. Is this about culture?

Mark Schatzker 21:17
I mean, it’s, it’s difficult to say, everyone says, Oh, it sounds like that’s a culture thing. Well, if it is a culture thing, then all we should be doing is talking about culture. I think it goes deeper than that. I got really interested in this question of Italy. And I want to know, what is it that’s different about Italy versus us. And I start to look back in the history books. And what I found actually surprised me, because I found out that there was a time in Italy, northern Italy, in particular, when it wasn’t actually different from us, it was actually the same. This is going back a little more than a century, they had an epidemic of something called pellagra, which is an Italian word and a local dialect. It means rough skin. And it was this mysterious disease. It was one of the first people to notice it was the famous German writer. He knows that when he was doing this kind of tour of Italy, and it would start in the spring, and it would be like these strange skin scales. And then it might go away. But we’ll come back the next spring, it might be worse, and it would get worse and worse. People get diarrhea, they get delirium. They they attack children did all sorts of bizarre things and eventually would lead to death. Well, pellagra mysteriously crossed the pond and showed up. I think it was in Georgia first and it start to spread across the south. And the south became a pellagra belt. And it was very much like the obesity epidemic insofar as it was an epidemic and it had to do and no one knew what was what was causing it. There was all sorts of strange theories. Sometimes they thought it had to do with moisture. They said if you live too close to a river, or too far from a river, you could get pellagra. But if you live just the right distance, he didn’t. For some reason, divorced men would get pellagra but married men didn’t. Jews didn’t seem to get pellagra some people thought it was mosquitoes. Some people said it was sandflies. There was 100 different theories. Nobody knew what it was until this guy and epidemiologist named Joseph Goldberger was sent down to a sanatorium. And they thought he was nuts because he said, Don’t touch a thing. He said, don’t clean the rooms don’t do any more extra laundry. But he said, Let’s feed them differently. And he said, let’s give the inmates things like peas and milk, and cheese and maybe meat if they could afford it, and the Palazzo went away. And that was one of the most important findings in what would become the science of nutrition, because they realized that there was some essential element and food that that caused this disease. If this element wasn’t there in a sufficient quantity, you’ve got this strange disease. That element is what we now call Niacin, Vitamin d3. And that was the understood the beginning of our comprehension of of essential nutrients. So the discovery of niacin and the discovery of this pellagra preventing diet really changed nutrition. But what’s so interesting is when you look at how North America dealt with a lager problem, and Italy dealt with it, North America married cutting edge science with public policy. We mandated the fortification of flour, we said let’s add a people need niacin. Let’s add an ice and they also said let’s have these other B vitamins riboflavin and firemen. They also said let’s throw in some iron for good measure. It started with I think was white bread, but then it slowly expanded things like pasta, and now it’s in pretty much any flour product even even in corn flour. It’s all enriched, enriched is when it’s enrichment, the fortification of the same thing. They call it enrichment when the government says you got to do it. What’s so funny is Italy didn’t do that. The approach that Italy took it’s like they were like they were still stuck in the Dark Ages. They said things like well, poor people should raise rabbits because rabbits are you know, an economical form of meat and we should have communal bread ovens and oh, maybe people with pellagra should drink wine. You just think like are you guys idiots? Funnily enough, it actually wasn’t bad advice because back then the wines weren’t very well filtered. They had all sorts of yeast in them and yeast is an amazing source of niacin. What’s even more interesting is that it acts Sleep worked, didn’t work as quickly. But Italy literally ate itself ate its way out of a nutritional deficiency. Now, here’s where things get more interesting. Fast forward the clock 100 years, what was the pulgar belt has become the obesity belt was become the Diabetes Belt, you look at Italy, and what was the pellagra belt is now northern Italy, arguably the most economically productive part of Europe, even more economically productive than the Rhine Valley, Northern Italy has got serious amounts of money. And I just don’t want to create the sense it’s a bunch of rich people. It’s an incredibly functional, beautiful society. It’s where they design the beautiful sports cars where the fashion comes from. They really have lifestyle nailed down. Architecture is beautiful, the food’s great. Northern Italy is an amazing place to live. And they have this wonderful relationship with food. Meanwhile, what the heck happened in the American South, you’d think that this exact exacting science of nutrition would have fixed the problem. And on the surface, it sort of looks like it made it worse. Now, what I find so interesting about this approach is the sort of the assumptions behind each one because the American approach said, Okay, there’s something wrong with food, and that sometimes food doesn’t have these nutrients that you need. And there’s something wrong with humans, because we don’t know what to eat, we’ll eat this food that makes us sick. So let’s step in and fix what’s wrong with food. And that’s what we did. Italy said, no, no, there’s nothing wrong with food. The problem is, people are too poor to afford food. So let’s give poor people food. What’s so interesting about the American approach is that this is the approach we kept on taking. Now we fortify breakfast cereals, you can get energy drinks from Starbucks that have twice the amount of riboflavin I think it is nice that you actually need. We thought that the cold precise hand of science can fix everything to do with food. If you look at things like plant based meats, they call it the Impossible Burger. Because there’s this idea that we can break these these these bonds of nature, and do something almost supernatural, and it doesn’t work. Even the idea that you can flavor a Doritos to taste like Taco, we never questioned it, because we just thought flavored with this stupid thing that didn’t make any sense in the first place. Whereas over in Italy, they say things like, Well, you can’t call them plant based milk milk, because it’s not milk or plant based meat, meat is not meat. So and we think they’re kind of these, you know, what’s this funny, traditional attitude. Their system works much better than ours, because they have a reverence for, for food, the way it tastes and where it comes from. Because they think tastes really does matter. And it does matter. Okay,

Dave Chapman 27:36
so I am struck by something here. I’m curious what you think about it, the power of how you look at something. I mean, we’re talking about two enormously different ways of responding to the same problem, which is a bunch of people who are eating a poor diet, because they’re economically disadvantaged. And in America, it was, let’s add all these inputs, which actually sounds a great deal like chemical agriculture to me, we have a problem. The land is not thriving, let’s add chemical fertilizers. And then voila, we get big green plants. And and voila, I think it leads to a great many problems. In northern Italy, they’re taking the same problem. And let’s figure out how we can change people’s access to good food, which I think is more like saying how can we build an organic system so that the land maintains its fertility by improving the cycling of nutrients and water? And, yeah, and that the outcome is we don’t need the pesticides. We you know, we don’t have the we haven’t created a whole secondary set of problems. Does that? Does that hold up for you? Yeah,

Mark Schatzker 28:53
it does. I don’t know if I thought of it specifically in those terms, but there is a knock on effect that is, I think directly like that. And that has to do with the effects of these vitamins that we’re adding to food. This is something I got interested in the Dorito effect, because I talked about the work of Fred Provenza and how the work he would do with goats where you could make them deficient in a needed nutrient. He did phosphorous and then he pair that to a flavoring. So like something like coconut so that when the goats became deficient phosphorus, they would crave the, the flavor of coconut. So you pair the you pair this flavoring with with vitamin A. But I also realized is it could work the other way around. If you start putting vitamins and things does that start to mess things up? And I got curious about what are these? Has there been a consequence of this dumping of vitamins into foods that we haven’t seen? I know it sounds nuts. I mean, we’re going to tinfoil hat territory here. Because vitamins I mean, like the word vital is part of vitamins. There’s no calories and vitamins. How could there be anything wrong with vitamins vitamins are the the nourishing elements of what make food nourishing to begin with. But there is a problem with that. And the reason we know is because we can look at how animal agriculture changed. And I knew this, I had suspected this for a long time. But I couldn’t find the science. It wasn’t until the algorithms and Google Scholar got good enough that I finally found the body of research. And it comes to us from pig farming. If you look at pig farming in the 1950s, they were doing all sorts of things to try and improve yield, because that’s what the animal scientists have always been trying to do is, is just get more bang for our buck, so to speak. And they were doing things like they were in breeding pigs for generations to try and, and get these these traits to grow bigger, faster. Most of it didn’t work. But they also knew as this as the science of nutrition came along and start to change things. What they knew back then, was that there was a rocket fuel feed for pigs, it was corn and soy, that if you gave them corn and soy, they would grow they would just take off. But they also knew that’s not all you could give them because if that’s all you gave him for the growth takes off, then it craters and then they start to like lose their hair. They seem to get dizzy, they can’t walk, they get terrible diarrhea, scours, and then they die. They were getting something like the pig version of pellagra, or different nutritional deficiency. They knew back then that you had to send the pigs out into pasture to balance the diet. They didn’t know why. But everybody pastured pork back then not because it was trendy. But because you had to because you couldn’t just feed pigs corn and soy, then comes the B vitamins. And there’s these amazing trials where they start to take this corn soy diet, and they started to sprinkle in one B vitamin at a time. And all of a sudden, we see, instead of cratering, the growth takes off, and it keeps going. And this changed pig farming, they start to get levels of growth that were unimaginable, they call it optimal. And very quickly, the model of pig farming changed they there’s this great document I found I think was put out by the University of Illinois in the late 1950s. basically telling farmers, this is what you do now, it said things like you know, pigs have a reasonable ability to naturally balance their diet. But we have a better science of it now. And they talked about optimal weight gain. So when we talk about CAFOs and confinement, animal agriculture, whether it’s feedlots or whether it’s chicken houses, or whether it’s, you know, these these facilities we’ve created for pigs, I don’t even know what to call them. It’s not a barn, I don’t know what it is they’ve got these like factories now in China, none of that would have been possible without the science of micro nutrition vitamins is what made that possible. Because before that you needed to send your chickens you need to give them green feed and table scraps or send them outside. Pigs had to be pastures. And cows had to have access to grass, you can give them some grain, but they needed grass, vitamins changed everything without without the revolution in our understanding of essential nutrients, we wouldn’t would not have confinement, animal feeding, it wouldn’t exist. So so in that regard, it’s very much like what you’re talking about. That’s

Dave Chapman 32:57
actually a really stunning thing. I don’t think most people understand that. I think people think, well, we’ve got confinement livestock mouse. Let’s say lots of people think that they’re not in love with that, because the animals lead such a hard life there. But they think that this is the inevitable consequence of increasing efficiency. But it actually is not about efficiency in terms of the systems. Yes, you can make a very efficient system, if you don’t have to pay attention to a whole diet for the animal because you can just hit him with the vitamins. Yeah,

Mark Schatzker 33:34
well, what’s also interesting is that they have to feed restrict the seedstock the the animals that you use to get your eggs or your your piglets or your calves because they will get morbidly obese. So this is not really a sustainable diet. But here’s where it gets really scary. Because I’m talking about additives we put into animal feed, but we’re putting the same stuff into human feed. If you look at a box of cereal, it’s the same vitamins. So we talked about the obesity epidemic. And I think one of the things that is so empowered it is the fact that we’ve created the rocket fuel, that we’ve taken these empty carbs and put in the B vitamins that are necessary to to process to to metabolize those carbs. So here’s what’s really interesting about the pellagra diet. It was not this starvation diet of people, you know, starving the it was actually an incredibly calorie rich diet. One of the poor southerners eat, they ate grits, which is cornmeal, with molasses and pork fat, carbs, sugar and fat. They had calories galore, and yet they were starving. Why? Because a calorie we think of calories like energy in the wall. Calories are pure energy. They’re not without the necessary micronutrients, the body can’t metabolize those calories. So nice is a really interesting one. Because it turns out that fructose metabolism fructose is a simple sugar. It’s the it’s the fruit sugar. It’s one half of sucrose. Sucrose is glucose. plus fructose. Fructose is also an high fructose corn syrup, which we’ve been using, you know, in soft drinks and all sorts of processed food for for a few decades now. Well, there’s something interesting about fructose is that it requires a whole boatload of niacin to be metabolized. So we’re worried about sugar consumption. We talked about kids drinking way too much soda and eating too much candy. All this sugar consumption if you’re gonna metabolize that sugar, you need a boatload of nice and high sugar metabolism requires niacin. So we think that vitamins are, are pure and blameless, but they are playing a role in this. And so I think one of the things that makes Italians skinny is the fact that they’re not getting their B vitamins in their flour that they have to get it in, in their leafy greens, for example. And then when you eat leafy greens, it sticks up stomach capacity means you’re not eating something calorie dense. And they actually, they love those foods. They actually have a whole party in Veneto they love they love the these, you know, these members of the chicory family that are so bitter, they have street parties, they love it. So you say it’s culture, it is culture. But I think there’s something even more elements when it comes down to nutrition and the relationship with the food that enters your body and how that food is made, how it’s grown and how it’s made and how it’s altered or not altered.

Dave Chapman 36:18
So just just to be clear,

Mark Schatzker 36:22
oh, radicchio, by the way it’s ridiculous. Yeah,

Dave Chapman 36:24
right. So when we talk about when when the the motivation for enriching this rocket fuel for the for the livestock was that they would grow fast, they would put on weight fast. Yeah.

Mark Schatzker 36:37
Yeah. And you can look at the exactly, and, you know, the pigs, we now are bigger, but much younger than then the pork, we would not

Dave Chapman 36:47
make them healthier. I wouldn’t say so. No, no. And you know, they don’t last so long, but, but they grow very quickly. So we’re doing the same thing to our own food. Not to mention, we’re eating those animals, which are not the same meat, as animals fed very differently. And we’re enriching the food that we’re getting that are not animals with the same kind of rocket fuel. It kind of sounds like we’re creating CAFOs for ourselves.

Mark Schatzker 37:15
Yeah, that’s a good way of looking at it. I think there’s a lot of striking a nerve there and unnerving parallels between the food that we feed ourselves and our kids especially, and the foods that we feed livestock.

Dave Chapman 37:29
And it’s not making us healthier, either. No, I

Mark Schatzker 37:32
mean, look like childhood, they had to change the name of type two used to be adult onset diabetes, and they had to change the name to type two because kids started getting it. That’s a new thing. I mean, it’s it’s a, we see the rates of obesity with kids, it’s it’s taking off. It’s frightening. It’s also you know, he said that the obesity rate in Italy is less than 10%. That’s true. But here’s what’s even more interesting. There’s like class two and class three obesity. I think class three is a BMI of over 40. I think, Oh, I can’t remember the I think it’s 13% of Americans now or they’re in Italy, it’s like vanishingly small. I mean, it barely exists. So it’s almost as though their food doesn’t have the capacity to to generate the levels of obesity that we can pull off. So to me, that’s kind of like an input output thing. They just can’t do what we’re doing. I don’t I don’t know if it’s possible to be fat in Italy, the way Americans are. I just, I just don’t think it’s possible.

Dave Chapman 38:26
Because they’re not getting enough rocket fuel. Yeah. So just get it to talk about the cultural piece. I just interviewed a woman, a chef named Eliza Daly. Wonderful doing his wonderful education programs in the schools around San Diego region. And for kids who don’t have access to great food at home, they have a breakfast program there. And she was stunned to learn that the kids were being fed like large chocolate donuts for breakfast. Yeah. And it’s like, well, wait a minute. What crazy world is that? Where this is the food. You’re saying? These kids aren’t getting good food. We’re gonna give him chocolate donuts for breakfast.

Mark Schatzker 39:10
It’s great. And the thing is, we’re a wealthy country. This is a wealthy society we live in. We look at GDP per capita. I mean, we are way up there. So you know, another aspect of culture you can talk about is how they feed school children in Italy in France. I had a friend in Italy. I had a summer job in Brussels when I was in university, and there’s an Italian kid and he raved about the pasta that ate at school he loved the chef was like this, his grandmother said the food was so great. A friend of mine, Bill Buford, a great author, spent many years in Lyon, where his kids enter the local school system. And they were learning with all the great French sauces. It’s part of their culture, the Japanese teach their kids about food. And the food that we feed our kids in the school system is it’s I don’t want to say it’s like we’re trying to kill them. But you’re just like, I mean, who would think a chocolate donut is a breakfast for a kid. I’d slept on my child’s hand. I think what you eating can’t eat that. Right.

Dave Chapman 40:05
Right. Okay, so that’s part of our culture too. You know, as we as we contemplate, how do we change this mark?

Mark Schatzker 40:15
Yeah, well, part of it’s this attitude like, so what would make someone think it’s okay to eat a doughnut? And I think the idea is that, I don’t know, that’s a tough one. But I think part of it, what I thought was talking about earlier was this idea of that this idea that nutrition takes place from the neck down, that we’re so fixated on nutrients that we think there’s some way we can figure this out. And they will also think that we can control if we just make the right decisions. If I go on a ketogenic diet, if I go on this kind of a diet, it’s all going to work. I don’t think that works. The problem with eating the problem, the appetite is that it’s controlled by the same parts of the brain that control things like breathing, or blinking, or sweating, or the your heart rate. This is a controlled system. This idea that we can control our body weight by decisions we make as it’s folly. It’s just not true. The brain regulates body weight. It was I think it was Jules Hirsch, at Rockefeller University. Think this is the 1950s as well, maybe the early 60s, it might be in the dates wrong, but he didn’t he did an experiment where he took a, you know, morbidly obese patients and put them on a liquid diet. Low calorie diet, I think was something like 600 calories a day, maybe higher, but but they all lost weight, they were all thin, they all became trim. And it was this glorious day when they you know, they also their tearful goodbyes, and went off to live these wonderful lives, and they all gained the weight right back. And this is when science began to understand that that appetite isn’t this kind of voluntary thing that there’s something deep going on in the brain. It’s, it’s neurologically controlled. But what’s so interesting about it is that the brain defends against losing weight. We know that from the Minnesota starvation experiments where you start to starve people, they just become obsessed with food. What’s also interesting is that when you put people with obesity on a on a strict diet, they have a similar response is called semi starvation, neurosis. It’s as though they’re starving, even though they’re not. But what’s also really interesting is that the brain doesn’t just defend against losing weight, is also defense against gaining weight. This is where it gets mind blown. It was Ethan Simpson did an experiment start to do it first with rodents, he tried to get them fat, and he couldn’t get to force feed them. And then they would like work hard and try to it’s like they’re trying to lose weight or something. And he tried it with college students, he thought well, college students are always looking for free meals. If you can get anyone federally college student, he couldn’t get them fat, he had to go to a prison. And even then it was hard to keep these prisoners enrolled in the study, because they found being forced to eat too much food was miserable. And the ones that he did get to gain weight. When the experiment ended, they would snap back to their old way, just the way people go on a diet snap back to their old weight. So there’s this thing going on where there’s this deep part of your brain saying, This is how much I want you to weigh.

Dave Chapman 43:04
Okay, okay. So these people who are morbidly obese, and then they went on the liquid diet, and they got skinny, and then they went out on the street, and they put all the weight back on if they’d gone back if we’d said, and here’s the ticket to northern Italy. Great question. Would they have not put the weight back?

Mark Schatzker 43:23
That’s a such a good question. And the problem is, I can’t find data, we’ve got a lot of data on people immigrating to the United States, because this is a magnet for people to come to. And we know that when it doesn’t matter who you are, if you’re Italian or you Japanese or Korean. Everybody comes here and they gain weight. Well, we don’t have as good data on people going to these other countries. What I have is anecdotal data. And I was going to put this in the book, but I decided not to because I wanted the book to strictly adhere to peer reviewed science. But I have lots of anecdotes. I talked to a guy who worked. He worked for a company that made the nacelles that’s the casing for jet engines. And he got a contract to work in Bordeaux for Airbus for something like six months, and he and a bunch of Americans. I think he was from Oklahoma. They went and lived in Bordeaux. And he was the guy who said he loved cycling. And all he could say is I mean they live to eat when they were there. They racked up the biggest bills the cafeteria, people would marvel at them. He loved going out to eat in the end of the problem is he was not getting on his bike as often as he was just different country. You know, he was not putting the miles on and he dreaded getting on the scale. Turns out he lost weight. He worked with a woman who said she could she could you know now felt okay wearing a bikini again. I got sick shortly after I’d written the first draft and I remember there was a nurse, I was getting kind of this complex procedure and she would go to visit her. I think it was or some kind of a relative in Italy every year and she said every year she would go and she said I you know eat like a queen and lose weight. I talked I was contacted by a nutritionist in Chicago and she talked about it I think it was I think she has a sister who lives in Japan and was Japan. Raising with the food last week So that’s a really good question. Had those people in joules versus experiment been sent to northern Italy? Would they lose weight? I think they would. But that’s something I’d love to see real science done on that.

Dave Chapman 45:10
I mean, it’s, there’s gotta be something there, because everyone comes here and they put on weight. Yes. And and, you know, it’s interesting thing. There’s, there’s also the question about, well, the quality of how the food is prepared and all that. My wife went to Italy, and she was blown away by how good the

Mark Schatzker 45:28
food tasted. It’s really I mean, it’s, it’s, it was just yeah, it’s just simple food. Yeah. And the simpler, the better. The funny thing when Italian food is when they tried to get fancy, like if I mean never do this, but if you go to a Michelin two or three star restaurant, Italy, it’s like one of the it’s not very good. They they’re not good at rinsing it up. It’s these beautiful kind of peasant inspired dishes that are just, they make you cry. There’s so good, right?

Dave Chapman 45:51
How much of that do you think is, of course, okay? There’s the lack of the flavors being put in the fake flavors. How much of that is the quality of the raw materials of the food? That’s

Mark Schatzker 46:05
a huge, important part of it hugely important. And Italians. This is what they care about. You know, this is why we like it strikes us as funny. They’ve got these DLP products in here in Europe. It’s basically domain origin protect, I’m not gonna get it right. But it means where it the origin, where it comes from is protected. And Italy has more of these products than anybody. A good example would be a Parmigiano Reggiano. We call it Parmesan cheese. But this is to be Parmigiano Reggiano. It’s got to be certain cow’s milk can only eat grass. It’s got to be made a certain way. In this region. There San Marzano tomatoes, what’s the San Marzano tomato, it’s this kind of tomato genetic strain raised in this area according to the standards. If you want to call it a San Marzano, you’ve got to meet those criteria. Italy has more of these foods than anybody. The Japanese are also big. I’ve mentioned Kobe beef, they’ve got Matsuzaka beef, they’ve got what they call brands, for all sorts of things. Apples, they think where food comes from, tells you an awful lot about how it’s going to taste and its value. And we think it’s cute and funny, and we love it. We go there, the food tastes great. I think they’re really onto something. I think they understand something very important about food. They also care about pleasure in a way that we don’t I mean, we say if it tastes good, spit it out. And we’re, you know, we think I gotta eat more protein and stuff like that. For them every meal isn’t it is an opportunity to indulge yourself. One of the most interesting statistics I came across when, when researching this book is that Italians and French eat, not double but significant or not half but significantly fewer calories than Americans. And yet it takes them twice as long. And you’re like, are you just like chewing and slow motion like what’s going on? Well, in a way they are because their meals are more like social occasions. They don’t eat in front of the TV, they don’t eat in the car, not because they have a rule, NACA, some nutrition said, don’t eat in the car. It’s a bad habit. They’d be like, why would you distract yourself from this wonderful meal you’re having while you’re, you know, trying to drive a car. They don’t. And I’m guilty of this, I drink coffee in the car, they go to a coffee place, they sit at the bar, they get their espresso, they talk to one another. So their whole relationship with food is much more social. And I think this is important. Because when you think about we love to eat, there’s two interesting things. It’s awful to watch a comedy by yourself. And it’s awful to eat a great meal by yourself. In both cases, you’re always thinking, wouldn’t it be great if someone else were here, it enriches the experience and Eastern people to relationships, I think about my wife, for example, when we have a great meal together, the experience of me sharing that meal with my wife makes the food taste better. But there’s this reciprocal thing happening where this great food makes our relationship better. So there’s this aspect of food and being a social animal that’s really important that we’ve totally lost track of.

Dave Chapman 48:48
You know, this makes me think about one of the famous debates in the organic movement was the organic Twinkie debate. And John Gazelle had this debate with the guy who started Cascadian farms Jean Cohn, and they were both on the National Organic Standards Board. Do you know who Joan is She’s a professor of nutrition at Columbia. And she was the chair and she invented these create this great course about food and agriculture. And like, let’s look at it and talk about it and dive in. Really, she’s an amazing teacher. She just retired last year at like 92 or 93. Right still going. And Joan did not believe that you could have an organic Twinkie that that’s not what organic meant. And Mark, I won’t speak for Jean, let’s just say that, that some people would say why not? If the corn is grown organically, and the sugar has grown organically that it’s an organic Twinkie. And it’s a really interesting question about what does organic mean and can there be such a thing as organic junk food I’ve seen for sale in a store, certified organic gummy bears. And, you know, I would say, well, that’s not really organic, that organic really is about a food revolution. I’m not saying you should never eat a gummy bear a Twinkie, have added whatever you want. But it’s not what organic means. Organic is about a whole system and ecosystem. It’s not about a product. It’s not about an ingredient. It’s not even about a practice. It’s about a system to me. And, and, you know, and to many others, not just to me. So this is an interesting question about do we look at the system? Or do we just look at and we don’t care what you use these ingredients for? Well, I

Mark Schatzker 50:49
to me, it comes down to the difference between complexity and simplicity. So the reason I would say, you know, maybe you can’t have an organic Twinkies because the ingredients you’re using are essential elements you’ve taken out of these Whole Foods. This is the issue of a plant based meat because they’ve taken all the things that make plants so special, the fiber, the plant secondary compounds, and they’ve just taken these extracts like pea protein and so forth. Now it comes from a plant technically, but I mean, if that’s plant based Coca Cola was plant based Doritos or plant based plant based is not the same as being a plant. I mean, when I look at it that way, I think well isn’t a hamburger from a cow PLANT BASE because the cow ate the plant and the cow process that into meat just the way some factory have processed it into into one of these you know confectionery burgers. And I think a cow especially a pasture is one actually honors the plant more and more of, of that plant is measurable, you know, you can taste it, grass fed beef, as it expresses the land that it came from. So I think what is the difference in complexity and simplicity, humans are great simplify errs, one of the things I learned in the Dorito effect was when we make flavors, we simplify, if you take something like vanilla, there’s going to be hundreds of flavor compounds in vanilla. Well, what we did originally with vanilla was we just found vanowen, which is the character character, flavor impact compound. And Ventolin is like the cartoon, vanilla. It’s yeah, it’s like it’s just kind of a simple sort of dumb, like panting Irish setter version of vanilla. Whereas if you get really good Madagascar, vanilla, it’s just this nuanced, wonderful, rich, deep experience. And that I think, is the difference between junk food and real food is the experience of eating it. And it’s, it’s not, I can talk about complexity. But it’s not just registering complexity, it’s not just like the way like a symphony has more notes than playing a chord. It’s the way it makes you feel. And this gets back to the distinction between wanting and liking that we talked about, when you eat junk food, there’s foods that make you eat faster, and there’s foods that make you eat slower. And this is a really important distinction, because if you start to eat Doritos, like we’ve all been in that situation, go to a party, you’re like, I’ll just have one, you have one and you have another and then your hands get zesty, you can help you wash your hands. And then you go and do it again. And your hands get zesty again, you’re like What is wrong with me? The same thing happens on those rare occasions, I’m stuck in an airport and I have to eat fast food. I’m blown away at how quickly this like 1300 calorie meal goes down. I mean, you can almost measure it in seconds, because there’s not very many minutes that transpire. And yet I’m still kind of hungry, but the gap has not been filled. And then there’s meals that slow things down. And I spent some time with a researcher in Germany who looks at to disordered eating. And a really good example is dark chocolate. We did this experiment where she well, we we did it first with potato chips. And she gave me these two potato chips. And she said no, you can’t eat them. She said you can nibble them, you can sniff them. And she said something I thought was odd. She said you can rub them together. Stupid is gonna rub potato chips together. But I did and I couldn’t believe I was seized by this, this wave of wanting I want to eat those chips so badly. And he said, Now throw those in the garbage. And it just seemed like awful to do that. But I did when she said that take two friends. And I had to even fresher, more pristine, more beautiful chips. And it was amazing to experience this, this gripping, wanting. I mean, this really captures some people and ruins their lives, but we’ve all experienced it. And it really made me understand the strange power these foods have over us. And then we got rid of that. And now we did an experiment that focused on the experience of liking and she gave me this this chocolate you know we’re in Germany, the Europeans have wonderful chocolate it was it was dark chocolate surrounding this little biscuit Center. She said just put in your mouth and close your eyes. And at first nothing happened. I thought there’s not a whole lot going on. It’s kind of cold and square and I could kind of feel the corners of my mouth. And then slowly start to melt and kind of move there’s this little smudge of chocolate and other chocolate land on my tongue and then the This plume of flavor kind of erupts in my mouth and then the chocolate starts to melt. And then all of a sudden I got to the biscuit part I forgot. I was like, oh my god, I forgot that had this like biscuit cookie center, and I crunched it, and it had this crunch. And this little square of chocolate. I don’t know how long it took it. It was like it was like on a journey. Like I kind of woke up and I was like, she was like my Shaman. I was like, it was remarkable. And it was amazing how much pleasure this one little square of dark chocolate delivered, versus those potato chips that such completely different experiences, both of which we call delicious of some level when you’re eating like Doritos versus dark chocolate. And I think it’s that experience we need to focus on. I think the food experiences in Italy, and in Japan are more like the dark chocolate. They are immersive experiences that you contemplate that you remember, no one ever says, Wow, the best food I’ve ever had was a bag of potato chips. I think it was North Carolina. I was at a truckstop no one ever says that. But you might talk about I remember some mushroom toast I had in northern Spain. I can talk about some of the steaks, I’ve had glass of wine, peaches, fruit, I love fruit. Some of the pizza I’ve had in Italy. These are foods that make you lose that steak that changed my life that made me go Why does the steak tastes so good? It slowed everything down. And these are, these are moments you remember and and you chase, you want to get them back. It’s why you and I will talk about great tomatoes. And we’ll trade recipes, because the experience of food can be so absolutely wonderful. So I mean, wouldn’t it be great if we could get back towards that and and away from these foods that are taking us to such a bad place?

Dave Chapman 56:40
All right, I want to go there. And just second, I have one question before you’ve talked about food is information. And I think that’s a very important idea. Could you explain a little bit? Yeah.

Mark Schatzker 56:58
Your brain it’s it has a sensorium we sense your brain. When it comes to food. Your brain doesn’t read. It doesn’t take nutrition courses, it doesn’t read the nutrition panel or the ingredient panel. All it has is what it consents. And it’s very important that your brain senses what’s in food, because it takes at least 20 minutes more to metabolize a meal. So your brain has to figure out what to eat. And it has to do so in a particular amount of time to make sure it’s gotten enough but not too much. Because gotta go and do other things. So your brain predicts what’s coming in, what does it do? Well, first by seeing then by smelling than by tasting. And it turns out this, this whole system of sensing, it goes on constantly, it doesn’t end at the mouth, there’s actually sensors in your stomach and the digestive track. And this is how your brain creates a map of the world around it by what it consents and what it can predict. And the sensory information of food for millions of years was stable. If something tasted sweet, it’s because it had sugar in it. The more sweet it tasted, the more sugar the more energy it had. The mouth. If you think of your genome as your as your instruction manual, the nose and mouth are the biggest chapters. This is obviously really important from an evolutionary point of view, very complex, when you taste food engages more gray matter than than any other activity more than having sex or doing calculus. So there’s something really elemental and important happening when you taste food. One of the reasons also that we have to predict what’s coming in is because we’re not like a fighter jet that can refuel like like you could never eat while you’re running, for example. So we have to partition food and we have to partition what the body’s doing with it. There was I talked about this kid, it was like 100 years ago, he he drank this clam chowder that was like searingly hot, and actually ended up seeing his esophagus shut. It’s tragic story. Doctors created a fistula in his stomach, and he would feed himself with it with just by putting food in kind of through a funnel. But what was so interesting is he couldn’t just put the food in this this great act of nourishment of just putting nutrients in his stomach, which is what we think it’s all about. He had to taste it first. Otherwise, he didn’t feel right. So there’s also this thing called the cephalic phase that you start to secrete insulin, just when you start to taste food, because your brain knows it’s coming. I gotta get ready, I gotta get the body ready. So if you look at glucose, in particular, it’s really interesting that your brain is like a suspicious accountant, because it tastes glucose in the in the mouth than in the stomach. But it’s like it doesn’t trust what’s going on, it actually waits to see if the glucose gets oxidized. Because in rats, if you if you use a drug that blocks glucose oxidation that the glucose can’t get burned, the rats will lose their preference for that sipper or that food or that flavor that’s carrying the glucose. So that’s how complex X, our sensory apparatus isn’t that’s how smart your brain is. So this whole idea that we’re like this, you know, ogre from the Stone Age that’s just wants to stuff our faces. And you know, it’s just you have this flavor here. And then it’s just all nutrients, it’s wrong. The brain controls so much of you know how much we weigh, but what we want to eat. But this whole system has to do with prediction and measurement. And when we start to, to fool the brain, when we think it’s going to get 200 calories, and it gets 100, or gets 200. This creates what psychologists call uncertainty, that more technical term for it is reward prediction error, very, something very simple that the expected reward I didn’t receive, or maybe it was even better than what I expected. And every time this happens, your brain starts to kind of recalibrate to a recalculation. But when it when it’s uncertain when it really doesn’t know what’s coming next. That’s what we call uncertainty. This is a very predictable effect on brains. This is a there’s a big body of psychological scholarship on it. And what it does, cause it causes enhanced motivation. When something becomes uncertain, we work harder for it. And it’s Universal House office give you a great example, you know, you’re waiting for an elevator and you press the call button and it lights up. Nothing’s happening. So what do you do? You press it again, to jab that stupid thing, right? Or you know, the walk signal, or your TV’s not working, you start to slap it. Because it’s this motivation thing, we get extra motivated, and we work harder to achieve the uncertain reward. So evolution did not craft us to be calorie mongers that are on a lifelong quest to stuff ourselves. But it did craft us to respond to uncertainty with enhanced motivation. That’s why we gamble. Gamble’s are always about uncertainty. Do you want to bet on the game tonight? Do you want to pull this lever for the slot machine? It gets us excited. That’s the most interesting thing about it, it gets us excited. And remember how I told you that when we look at brain images of people with obesity, we see more wanting less liking. That’s the motivation. That’s where we see this evidence of what this uncertainty that we’ve literally baked into all our food is having it’s making people want food more, because the brain is getting confused. It’s not it’s getting these signals that don’t match what it’s getting. And it responds by wanting more. So do

Dave Chapman 1:02:20
you think, Mark, do you think that if we gave people food that did not give them distorted signals. So if we said, these people just lost a lot of weight, they came out of this liquid diet, and they have a choice, we can give them a ticket to northern Italy, where hopefully, they’re going to maintain that and they can eat whatever they want. And their body will self regulate. Do you think that if we said, Well look, you know, what, if we ship that food from northern Italy, and of course we don’t have to go that far we can provide provide that food ourselves. And you can eat whatever you want, you can eat as much cream and cheese and pasta as you want. But it’s all going to be I will say grown in a Real Organic manner. And it’s going to be with no artificial flavorings whatsoever. You think that their system would would find balance?

Mark Schatzker 1:03:14
That’s a great question. I mean, and that’s the question we should be looking at scientifically, because I have my opinion. And I think the answer is yes, but we should be testing this scientifically. But there’s the other problem that when you get to a level of obesity, that’s a hard problem to fix far better that we’d never get there in the first place. You know, we’re finding with these new GLP, one based drugs like ozempic, and Manjaro, and so forth, they say that once you come off the drugs, the weight comes back. Maybe there’s some cases where it doesn’t. But what that tells you is once you get to that level, it’s hard to deal with, I think far better that we never get there in the first place. And I think you’re far less likely, as we see in Italy or Japan to have these problems with obesity when you have a more honest food system. Yeah.

Dave Chapman 1:03:58
You. You came to our book club with Dan Barber. Yeah, that was great. Right. And, and, and we had a great book club with Mark also. I really enjoyed it. Great conversations. And you had a question for Dan, which he was so pleased to see you there. Do you remember the question? Do you remember his answer?

Mark Schatzker 1:04:20
I think it was something like, you know, if you think of these two kinds of tracks, you can be on sort of the junk food track or the Real Food Track. Is there a food that’s like a transformative food that can that can get you into the better lane? I think it was something like that.

Dave Chapman 1:04:33
Yeah. Because because we’re so confused. Yeah, our senses are hijacked. Yeah. And once your senses are confused and hijack, I know this, you know, you say no, no, all you have to do and dances is all you have to do. This is you know, deliciousness will save us and I go Yeah, well people think Doritos are delicious. I mean, you can say well, they aren’t really and I understand what you mean. But it’s confusing. We are confused. So how do we get to a place Have less confusion where we can taste the difference between good delicious nourishment and stuff that’s actually bad for us. Yeah,

Mark Schatzker 1:05:09
well, I so I use the example of dark chocolate, because there was a woman I met, and she had a binge eating disorder. And she said, dark chocolate helps you said at first she didn’t like it, it was bitter. But then she, you know, she kind of liked and then she liked it more. But she said, the thing about dark chocolate is you can’t binge eat it, you can’t eat it quickly. It sort of forces you to slow down. And now she loves it. And then when she puts milk chocolate around, she’s like, Oh my god, this is like way too sweet. So I think, you know, the palate changes. I mean, part of it is that we’re all teenagers and teenagers really do need a lot of energy. They they’re growing. Their metabolisms are a lot more faster than my metabolism would be. I think part of our problem is we never stopped being teenagers, we never stopped being the kids menu of hotdogs and you know, chicken fingers and stuff like that, or pizza, crappy pizza. But your palate can change, there was a time in my life, I never would have contemplated eating arugula. I love it now. And you’d never feed for a child seventh birthday party, which you might serve at my 50th birthday party because the palate changes as the needs of the body change. I saw recently there was this guy on Twitter saying how, you know, children are so much more in kind of the the grasp of of reinforcing palatable foods, because it’s talked about how his kids just want to eat dessert. And to some degree, that’s true, but we got to remember kids also, they’re growing. They sprint everywhere. There’s a recent kids like sugar because they’re their bodies are different. There’s a reason kids don’t like vegetables, because vegetables are filled with what can be toxic compounds. So one of the reasons we don’t want moms to smoke, or pregnant women is because growing bodies are much more sensitive to plant toxic compounds than grown bodies where those those compounds like bitter comments can can be good for you. So there’s, I think there’s a wisdom in all of our dietary preferences. It’s just a question of whether the food matches that wisdom.

Dave Chapman 1:07:04
I want to go there, but let’s finish with Dan. Do you remember what Dan’s answer

Mark Schatzker 1:07:08
was my question? Was it sourdough bread? Bread?

Dave Chapman 1:07:10
Yeah, brand word.

Mark Schatzker 1:07:12
Good bread, though. Real, bro. Of

Dave Chapman 1:07:13
course. Yeah. Yeah, of course. Because we know that most bread isn’t going to be that, that gateway that that, you know, yeah. exit ramp.

Mark Schatzker 1:07:21
I’ve had Dan’s but I think I could just live on that I’d be I’d be happy.

Dave Chapman 1:07:24
I agree. It’s fantastic. I mean, it’s truly, truly memorable. And, and it creates a great pleasure. And and some craving. I will say when I last time, I went down to see Dan, my wife on the way out, so make sure you bring back some of that. Oh, yeah, that’s Yeah, yeah. So I thought what an interesting answer, though, bread. It’s such a simple basic food. It used to be the staple of Europe, right? People got most of their calories from bread. Yeah. Now, it’s not just bread that’s well made. It’s bread. That’s well grown. Yeah. There’s a lot that goes into this. There’s a lot that goes into it. I’ve had the whole wheat bialys out of his kitchen. Just amazing. Yeah. You know,

Mark Schatzker 1:08:12
you should have catered this conversation, get down to cater. And that would have been something I know.

Dave Chapman 1:08:16
Well, you know, anybody that gets a chance to have a nice little cafe that is not super expensive. You can go and get some astonishingly good food there at Stone barns. So okay, so let’s talk about money just for a minute here. And let’s talk about power. How does how is this perpetuated? I mean, I don’t believe that this system is being driven by philanthropy. I don’t think that this is being driven by people who are going, what can we do to make people healthier? And and, you know, happier in life? I think it’s being driven by profit.

Mark Schatzker 1:08:55
Yeah. Well, you know, if we look at something like enrichment, I think that was well intended. I think to this day, there’s a lot of people who think Rice Krispies with vitamins are more healthy than rice krispies. Without I don’t I think that’s actually wrong. I think you’re better off giving your kids the rice krispies without because then they’re not getting the vitamins, they’re they’ll they will start to crave them and want them in other foods. That’s my belief. So I think that was well intended. I think if you look at you know, the guy who invented Doritos was named arch, arch West. I think it was a good person. I think maybe in later parts of his life, he may have realized that the monster he created, but the food companies, I’ve met people there, they’re not pure evil people. A lot of them have masters and PhDs. They’re quite smart. They think food is a personal choice. I think it’s deeper than that. When Starbucks puts vitamins in his energy drink, I don’t know why they do that. Did they think people will think it’s healthy? You know, I see my kids getting them. And I think sometimes they really think if you Put vitamins and people will think it’s healthier, because it’s got vitamins. This is all a profit driven system. That’s true. But this system in Italy is also profit driven. I mean, the people selling San Marzano tomatoes are making a good living. Those people making their pasta in Bologna are not doing it for free. They’re not philanthropists, they’re, I mean, I’m not saying they’re crazy, greedy, billionaire capitalists, but they make money too. So I think I think the system can work. I don’t think it’s capitalism that’s gone amok. I think it’s, I think it’s our culture, in the sense that we don’t, it comes down to that decision to fortify versus to give poor people access to better food. It’s the way we honor food and what we believe about it, I think, the way we talk about these cell based meats and plant based meats, the fact I mean, if you want to eat them, go ahead. But the fact that people just said there, you know, there was like a standing ovation, they just assumed this is much better. Because we always think technology, we can we can science is gonna get us out of this. And maybe one day it will. But I think nature is far more complex than we’re capable of understanding. So I’m, I’m with nature at this point. Yeah.

Dave Chapman 1:11:12
It’s very well said, you know, people, I have a friend who gives me the food as a personal choice argument. And, you know, basically, it’s a conservative perspective of don’t tell me what to eat, and don’t tell anyone else what to eat. And I say, if you think no one’s telling you what to eat, you’re sadly mistaken. Because you are being told you just don’t you’re just not understanding the persuasion that’s going on well,

Mark Schatzker 1:11:39
but put this back to your friend then why is that enrichment is the law in I think more than half the state such that every meet most major flour, Millers do it because they don’t want to have to say I can’t sell my flower in the state. That’s I mean, a conservative would rail against that the government telling you right, you know,

Dave Chapman 1:11:55
right. Right, and and, and many other ways. I mean, there’s we know the hidden Persuaders, we know that the power of of marketing is enormous. And I don’t know, it’s an interesting question about personal choice. You know, when you talk about, well, they’re not evil people. I agree. I know lots of people who work in those worlds, and they’re not personally evil, but the system seems to be enormously destructive. And the question is, not how do we, how do we find people and say, you know, you’re bad, but how do we say how do we change this? Yeah. How do we create a system that is more beneficial for all of us?

Mark Schatzker 1:12:38
No. And it’s, it gets back to this issue of complexity. Because, you know, even I talked about enrichment. I’m not against, I think maybe iodine in salt probably is a good idea. And maybe folate isn’t a bad idea. Which is just to say these things are so complex. But I think how do you change these? I wish I had like a 10 word answer that really nailed it. And I don’t know if I do. But what I will say is there is evidence of positive change. Like it sounds as though everything’s constantly getting worse. But the examples I often talk about are craft beer. If you got a time machine, I use example, all the time, you got a time machine went back to like 1988 and got a bunch of beer executives together. And this is when people drink I think it was Miller Lite Bud Light and Michelob light. And they tasted exactly the same to the point that a loyal Bud Light drinker could not tell the difference between Bud Light and Michelob light and Miller Lite, they would do tests it all came down to like advertising and girls and bikinis and you know, guys and hot rods and stuff. If you said to them, in several decades, the beer market will be dominated by by IPAs, and dudes with beards who drink you know, beer like insanely bitter beer, and that and that these craft beers will have something like half the market, and that there will be major marketing crises for brands like but like they would just say, you’re insane. That’ll never happen. And that’s the world we live in. Why do craft beer drinkers drink craft beer, it’s not because someone told him it’s healthy. Maybe it started because it’s cool. But they like it. It’s driven by flavor. And they have an awareness of the different kinds of beer they have an awareness of the different kinds of hops the different greetings the different traditions of beer making. Some of them make beer themselves. This you know, leads into things like making their own bread they get interested in yeast. I think the chocolate palette has improved that there’s some brands of really dark chocolate that have gotten really popular. I think the wine palette has improved I think there’s better cheese around that’s not to say it’s it’s all what it’s to say that we we can worship at the throne of flavor and it takes us to a good place. I just think we kind of have to expand it.

Dave Chapman 1:14:41
That’s a remarkably radical statement that we should worship at the throwing of flavor and

Mark Schatzker 1:14:50
and real flavor

Dave Chapman 1:14:51
and real flavor. And let me add something you said to me earlier that flavor is the ambassador of nutrition. Yeah, and and not that we have to think about nutrition that if we take away all the flavorings and everything flavor will lead us not it will lead us to the right place. Yes.

Mark Schatzker 1:15:09
Yes. That I think that’s true.

Dave Chapman 1:15:15
Any any last words of of something. There’s so much more we have already talked about and could talk about but you know, it’s it’s late. We it’s time for us to go make an older spring steak, but is there anything else you’d like to add mark?

Mark Schatzker 1:15:31
I think we’ve covered a lot. You know, something will occur to me and it’ll be you know, two in the morning when I wake up and go, “Oh, you know, I should’ve said…”

Dave Chapman 1:15:39
Okay, well, thank you so much.

Mark Schatzker 1:15:40
Thank you.