00:00:00

Introduction

00:00:35

Would you like to work with me?

00:07:15

An elaboration on my thoughts on the carnivore + keto diets

00:12:35

How diet and identity get intertwined and why that’s a problem

00:19:35

Clarification on Opportunity Cost

00:28:00

A review of the nocebo effect

00:29:30

How our ideas of what’s healthy and what isn’t differ

00:35:00

The law of diminishing returns

00:00:00

Introduction

Welcome to episode 159 of Real Health Radio. You can find the links talked about as part of the show notes, which is www.seven. So the word all spelled out, S E V E N hyphen health.com forward slash 159 (www.seven-health.com/159).

Welcome to real health radio. Health advice that’s more than just about how you look. And here’s your host Chris Sandel.

00:00:35

Would you like to work with me?

Chris Sandel: Hi everybody. Welcome back to another episode of Real Health Radio. So one tiny piece of housekeeping before I get started with this. Next week I’m going to be opening up my practice again to new clients. I’m going to be doing more of a push with talking about it and putting out more content starting next week. but if you want to find out more now, you can go to www.seven-health.com/help, that’s all I’m going to say on it for now. But if you’re interested in finding out more about working together, then go check out that link.

So on with today’s show. A handful of weeks ago, it is now, I released my episode Understanding Carbohydrates. And this was the second edition. So this was my update of an episode I’d recorded over three years prior. On the whole, the feedback from that episode was great. People mentioned they liked the way I went through the science and the physiology, but done in a way that was balanced and kind of suggesting things where it would be client led, I guess giving permission and encouragement for people to use my advice while paying attention to their body and the symptoms and seeing what works for them. And it was lovely to get this feedback because that was what I was going for. But I did also get some pushback on certain ideas and also a question about something I’d gone through where they wanted clarification. So I wanted to do something that I haven’t done before and do an addendum episode. And I know on some podcasts, I’ll include this in the housekeeping at the start of an episode, but there’s a couple of reasons why I prefer to keep this separate.

One is that I specifically want to flag this up. So anyone looking in the podcast list, it will instantly become obvious that there’s an additional episode that I’ve done connected to the carbohydrate episode. Secondly is that this will take a bit of time, so rather than it just being a brief comment, I want to properly respond and this would then make the guest episode incredibly long if I was putting this at the start. And then thirdly, this has nothing to do with the next episode I’m going to release. The next episode is a guest interview and when they share this with their audience, I don’t want those people to have to go through a long section on housekeeping where I’m answering questions relating to a podcast that they potentially haven’t listened to. So that’s why I’m separating this out and doing it as a standalone sort of addendum.

The reason I’m also doing this is more general that just my thoughts about carbohydrates. Many of the questions and the ideas I’m going to be talking about here are applicable to how to think about ideas more broadly, which is why I think it’s important to respond to this stuff. And I also just want to mention that it’s difficult when I’m putting together podcast episodes like this or the original episode or just episodes where I’m talking more on the nutrition end of things and why it’s difficult is because I have a very varied audience. So we have nutrition practitioners and laypeople who are interested in nutrition science and they have a good relationship with food and just trying to learn more about the science of things. I then have those who are chronic dieters and are still unsure of what their next step should be. So they spend some of their time listening to more sort of heavy nutrition podcasts and then some of their time listening to more of the sort of anti-diet and intuitive eating style podcasts. And they’ve got that kind of one foot in, one foot out and there’s ambivalence about next steps. And then I have those who are more clearly suffering with disordered eating and eating disorders who are also struggling with making changes. But at the core, they need to be hearing the message that all foods fit and that they should be eating more and getting more rest and relaxing their thinking around sort of “healthy eating” and their sort of orthorexia tendencies. And so it’s really hard to talk about topics like this where it is applicable to all people and where there’s one message that ticks the boxes for all of those different groups and for every individual.

And so I would just say that when you’re listening to this episode and if you haven’t listened to the one previous to this on carbohydrates, then I definitely suggest you do that first. But when you do that, like please think about where you’re at and therefore what is relevant and what is appropriate for you. So if you’re struggling with an eating disorder, calories trumps everything else. Like you need to be resting, you need to be eating more food. Getting into the weeds around the difference in nutritional value between an apple versus a piece of white bread is irrelevant, and until your body is back in energy balance and you’re out of debt, a heavy focus on the quality of food is really a red herring because you need more food but you also need to be challenging yourself and eating food and that kind of thing.

If you’re dieting, yes much of this information can be useful but it needs to be used in the context with the other skills that are crucial to eating. So being able to listen to hunger and fullness cues, rejecting the dieting mentality, discovering how other non-food elements like, say sleep, for example, can impact on health. Like when the focus for so long has been on weight loss by any means, it’s learning how to pay attention to and notice all the non-scale bits of feedback the body’s sending.

I always try my best when doing these solo episodes to make content that is going to be appropriate or be appropriate for a diverse range of people that listen to the show. But undoubtedly I’ll make mistakes or say things that are triggering or are misconstrued or I simply didn’t imagine a certain scenario, and if I did, I would have explained it differently. So as an imperfect human, I’m trying my best with this stuff.

00:07:15

An elaboration on my thoughts on the carnivore + keto diets

So the first bit of pushback that I got to the episode was surrounding my comments about the carnivore diet. So the carnivore diet is a meat-only diet and I commented that I was surprised that it had become so popular. The carnivore diet has probably been humming in the background for quite a few years but was much more on the fringes. I don’t spend time in that scene. I’m not in carnivore blogs or reading carnivore diet books. So my knowledge around its rise in prominence is kind of hazy at best. But personally, I started hearing about it because of Joe Rogan’s podcast. He’d had a handful of guests on to talk about it, most of which I didn’t listen to, but had just seen it in the description.

I then did listen to some of the episodes that he did with Jordan Peterson, who is the psychologist from Canada who wrote 12 Rules For Life and has become rather famous or infamous depending on who you ask, over the last handful of years.

And as part of the episodes that I listened to, he talked about how he changed over to the carnivore diet after his daughter Mikhaila had changed over and noticed huge improvements in her health. So she has many autoimmune conditions and the story that he tells was basically bedridden and unable to function. And she has now since recovered and it’s attributed to the carnivore diet. Jordan also has multiple autoimmune conditions and he talks about seeing drastic improvements in himself by making these changes. And I think it’s through the prominence of people like Jordan and Mikhaila and I imagine others names that I don’t know of that the carnivore diet has reached the place of popularity that it is now at.

And so I received a couple of emails from people saying that they had recently changed over to the carnivore diet and that it had been life-changing for them and they said that if I was disregarding it, then I would be missing out on helping people.

I received another email in a similar vein about the Keto diet. So the Keto diet is short for ketogenic diet and it’s the diet that is very high in fat and very low in carbohydrates. The idea is that by reducing carbohydrates to such a level that the body stops running on glucose and instead it starts running on ketones.

The same thing happens as part of the carnivore diet, but with keto, you are allowed more than just meat. Keto was originally used to assist children with epilepsy. So when glucose was kept low and these children were in ketosis, which is the term for when the body is producing and using ketones, they noticed that they were having less seizures. So within this population, there is evidence that the keto diet can be beneficial but it has been in the more recent years that it’s been picked up and become popular irrespective of whether someone has epilepsy. And it’s now talked about as if it’s good for health across the board.

And probably at the moment, ketogenic diet is the most popular diet out there. I recently spoke to someone where they’ve talked about that it is now surpassed paleo and it is like the most search for diet as part of Google or something to that effect. So a former client emailed me and mentioned that two of her friends had started doing the keto diet and they’d seen huge improvements in their symptoms and that given this, should she really be telling them that what they are doing is wrong.

So to answer the question or these questions, I’m going to lump the carnivore diet and the keto diet together. And I acknowledged that they are not the exact same, but my responses to these questions are the same.

So maybe unsurprisingly, or maybe surprisingly sorry, I’m not going to completely write off either of these two diets. Like, if these genuinely work for someone and it is improving their symptoms, then who am I to say they shouldn’t be doing it?

And when I hear from Jordan Peterson and heard him talk about the turnaround in Mikhaila’s health, then it’s hard for me to think that it’s a bad idea for her or at least a bad idea in the short term. So to go from, as he described it, unable to function and now being able to have a child, be in remission, that’s an incredible change. So I would say that there is probably a place for these approaches just like there is evidence to show that keto has been helpful for epilepsy, there are probably going to be all the conditions that we find that it can be helpful for and maybe even the preferred approach. So I completely open to that but, with that said. Let me give some caveat and reasons why I am apprehensive.

00:12:35

How diet and identity get intertwined and why that’s a problem

I’ve been working with clients for over a decade now and what I’ve seen with clients time and again is that diets seem to be a miracle cure in the short term that then turn into their undoing in the long-term. It’s typically the diets that are more extreme or are sort of at the extreme end of the spectrum where there’s this stronger honeymoon period before the crash.

So the amount of clients that I’ve had who talk about how amazing low carb was for them for six months or a year or even two years and then just fell apart, is very high. Same thing with those who’ve gone low fat or clients who’ve gone vegan. Pretty much when you start cutting out a lot of different sections of food groups or macronutrients, what happens in the short term is very different to what happens in the long-term.

Now within each of these categories, there will be people where it seems to work for them and they can keep it up indefinitely and it genuinely helps them. But within my client population, the percentage for whom it is a temporary fix only to become an issue is incredibly high. And this also creates the problem that at the time when someone is really vocal about following some diet and how amazing it is for them, is at the point in which it is working for them, and typically in the early stages.

So I’ve had a handful of clients who started some new diet, it started working really well for them. They set up a blog, they become evangelical about it, and they were telling everyone that they could how amazing it was. But then when it started to fall apart, they try and find a backdoor out of it. So rather than shout about how it’s no longer working and risks kind of the mob of followers attacking them, they want to just shut it all down, move on with their life, have their diet-based identity just secretly disappear in the night.

And I know from clients who I work with, like how much identity impacts on what the outside world really sees and how there can be this mismatch between what people believe and then what’s really going on behind closed doors. So someone is seen as the healthy one, but actually, they’re dealing with all these health complications because of restriction. Someone is regularly congratulated on their dedication to exercise and the reality is they feel compelled and addicted to exercise. Like, this wouldn’t be something that they would wish on anyone else because of just how tormenting it is. But the shame they have around this prevents them from ever saying anything.

The same is true with diet ideologies. Like, I’ve known someone who is like low carb or keto or vegan and this is a big part of their identity, and this identity probably came about again when it was really working for them and when they were most vocal about it. But when it starts failing, they want to keep that failure a secret. And so I think this is a problem for regular people when their way of eating becomes enmeshed with their identity. But this really becomes an issue when you bring economics into it. When someone’s income and their livelihood depends on them keeping up an identity, then it’s even murkier about what the truth really is.

So, with someone like Mikhaila Peterson, this started out as something very personal of her trying to get over her autoimmune conditions and trying to get to a better place. So she made the improvements, and she made the changes, she saw the improvements, but she’s now turned this into her livelihood. So she now coaches people and has a brand built around being carnivore. So if her results were now starting to change and things were starting to get worse, it’s much more difficult to now get off that merry-go-round, because this involves not just a change in identity but a hit to her income, a hit to a brand, et cetera.

Let me just say like I’m not casting aspersions on Mikhaila. I have no idea what is happening behind closed doors. I just know from clients I’ve worked with and also guests that I’ve had on the podcast that when someone’s income and diet ideology is part of their identity, what is presented on Instagram or what is presented on their blog isn’t always a true representation about what is really going on.

I’d say connected to all this is the idea of survivorship bias, that the people who are shouting the loudest are the ones where there’s the most benefit for. And then there are a hundred or a thousand other people who have tried it and saw negative consequences but just aren’t telling anyone about it. And it’s kind of the equivalent of the file drawer effects that you have within research.

I’d also add that this isn’t just a problem with keto or with carnivores; it’s the same with all diets. Like typically those who are seeing the most success are going to be the most vocal and when you get enough of a concentration of this, then the appearance is that this is everywhere and it works for everyone. Especially because there is a lag time as I talked about, like between something that someone is doing, working for them and then when it stops working for them. I think if there was an embargo that you had to have been on a diet and you’ve done it for five years before you could tell anyone about how great it is, there would be barely any diets. Because nearly everyone who has jumped on that bandwagon would have jumped ship by that point because it has now stopped working for them.

And this is why I’m reluctant to endorse the carnivore or the keto diet. Like while I would never completely rule it out or make a misstatement that it can never be helpful under no circumstances, from experience with clients these diets don’t work out well long-term except for like the tiniest fraction of the population. And they are regularly part of the reason that clients go on to develop disordered eating and eating disorders and given the client population that I work with, and given the kind of people that listen to this podcast, like it is a genuine concern. So that is my thoughts on keto and carnivore. So it’s not that I wouldn’t consider these things for anyone, it’s just within the people that I work with, it is not the kind of recommendation that I’m going to be making.

00:19:35

Clarification on Opportunity Cost

So the other question I got related to my comments about opportunity costs. So I talked about this in relation to more refined carbohydrates or sugar or that kind of thing. So the question, I’ll read it out.

It says: “I have a question regarding your opportunity costs theory. If a lack of healthy comes from displacing nutrients/vitamins due to process carbohydrates or junk food, would this still hold true if you had someone consume a large amount of processed simple sugars in addition to getting all their required nutrients and vitamins? Wouldn’t poor health outcome arise from having lots of sugar in one’s diet? Is there a threshold where opportunity costs can be applied? For example, a typical person eats three meals per day and one to two snacks, including substantial calories, fiber, vitamins, minerals, macronutrients, et cetera, but in addition also consumes one pint of ice cream per day and a soft drink at every meal. Wouldn’t this lead to poor health in the future? Thank you again and I thank you for your podcast. They are very factual and unbiased.”

So let me preface my answer to this question by saying that everything is context-dependent. Context in terms of someone’s goals and what they’re working on, but also context in terms of the body that this food is going into and where someone’s health is currently at. So in the example that this person has given where someone is eating three meals a day and one or two snacks that is meeting their calories and their fiber and their vitamin and mineral and macronutrient needs. But in addition to this, at each meal they’re having some ice cream and having a soft drink.

So there’s two ways I can think about this question. If their regular meals and snacks are truly meeting their calorie and nutrient need, and then there’s the ice cream and the soft drinks in addition to this, and this is providing excess calories, then this can be creating a problem.

And when I say excess calories, I mean it in terms of what the body is using each day. It’s not that there’s any judgment associated with that term. But I would say if this is the case, the issue really isn’t about an opportunity cost in terms of the way that I explained it in the podcast, it’s about excess.

So this would be a problem irrespective of what the food is. Like with foods like ice cream, because of calorie density, it is easier to consume them. But in theory, if someone was eating this amount of extra calories in the form of pasta or potatoes or even whatever you deem to be a health food, if they were creating an excess of calories for what their body needs, then this can create a problem.

But I’ll add some caveats to this. So one, the word excess needs to be thought again in context here. So say for someone recovering from an eating disorder or a restriction or over-exercising, a meal or just even their whole way of eating may appear to them to be excess. But when they take into consideration all the missed calories over the years and over the decades, this is no longer excessive.

And in fact, it could still be taking a long time to get them to where they need to get to, to get rid of all the debt from their past behaviors. So it’s not just what they need today, but also what has proceeded this. So in this scenario, it wouldn’t be excessive.

The second caveat that I’ll also add is what the body needs isn’t a static amount. And so I’ve done a whole podcast on the concept of energy flux before – it’s episode 87 and basically you can be weight steady at 1,800 calories a day or you could be weight steady at 2,800 calories a day. It just depends on how you’re living your life and how your body is functioning.

So what I’m always working on with clients is increasing their energy flux or the ability at which they are taking in and using those calories so that they can be in a place where they’re able to eat and use more and more calories. And this isn’t because I’m then telling them that they should spend hours a day in the gym, it’s because you’re getting the body as a whole and all the various systems to be using more calories and to be less thrifty. So with this idea in mind, what might appear like an excess of calories isn’t actually an excess because the body is actually needing and using these calories.

So outside of those caveats, and there’s probably others that I’ve forgotten, if someone is eating more than their body truly need, then this can cause an issue. And if this is the case, I just wouldn’t be thinking about it as an opportunity cost, I’d be thinking about it for other reasons. And I’d be wanting to look at like, why is this happening? What is causing this? Like, what are they like listening to hunger and fullness? How much do they enjoy their eating? Like is it that they’re bored with their normal eating and is the Coke and the ice cream the only enjoyable part. What are their cooking skills like? What is their food prep like? Are they eating while distracted? Is food being used as a coping strategy? If so, what’s underneath this? Is it sort of general, everyday stress? Is it anxiety or depression? Do they feel safe? Do they have a history of trauma? Are they restricting it to some meals only to consume more than others? Where this then leads them to be consuming more than they otherwise would. What is happening with their sleep and how is this impacting on the kinds of foods they’re craving or the amounts of foods they’re craving? Connect to this, what’s going on with their circadian rhythm? Are they getting outside time during the day? Like, this is just sort of a snippet of all the potential drivers for this.

And the point for mentioning this is because the solution isn’t simply to stay, like just stop doing that, but to understand like why it’s occurring and therefore what would be appropriate to help in terms of that changing if someone wants to make that change.

Now, let me interpret the question another way. Let’s imagine that when you include the meals and the snacks and the ice cream and the soft drinks, that they’re then hitting the calorie needs that their body has. So it’s not under-eating, it’s not overeating, it’s where they need to be. So now would this be a problem? Would the opportunity costs be creating an issue? Cause this was kind of more of how I’d explained it as part of the original podcast.

And again, really with this, it would depend. Like are you providing the body with the vitamins and minerals and fiber and phytonutrients, et cetera that they need to be healthy? Like if so, then it is then going to be working for that person. If not, then there is an opportunity cost that is having a negative impact on what they’re doing.

But again, there’s a couple of things that I would add to this. And this is more broad than just this question. So one is that we often think about food in this very one-dimensional way, purely from what supposed nutritional value it has, all from a nutritional perspective. So what are the things that it has in it? What does it on paper provide us with? But food is more complex than this. Like how much you, for example, enjoy eating a food can impact on how well you digest and assimilate it. How much you fear a food can impact on how poorly it performs for you.

00:28:00

A review of the nocebo effect

And so I know at some point on this podcast, I’ve talked about the nocebo effect. But it probably bears repeating. Like most people know of the placebo effect where people are given an inert pill and because they believe it’s gonna work, things get better. This even happens with surgery where you do a sham surgery and you simply open someone up, do nothing else and then stitch them back together. And then after the surgery or the sham surgery, because of the placebo effect, and because someone believes that something has been done, now their knee no longer bothers them because they believe it’s fixed.

So we know our beliefs have a really strong impact, and this is not just in our head that these actually translates to changes in functioning and changes in symptoms. So the opposite of the placebo effect is the nocebo effect. And so this is when you give someone an inert substance, but because they believe it is bad for them, they then get a symptom.

And again, it’s not just in someone’s head. This leads to real symptoms that they experience within their body. And so our thinking is really important to what food does and doesn’t do for us and how healthy or unhealthy a food can be. We also have a fairly biased perspective about what foods are really healthy and what foods are really not healthy and this is impacted upon by whatever diet is in vogue and sort of where the public consciousness is around food at that time. So it’s part of the original question here. The person mentioned ice cream.

00:29:30

How our ideas of what’s healthy and what isn’t differ

Now in many people’s minds, ice cream would be thought of as an unhealthy food and if I was to ask those people why or what makes it unhealthy, many people would say it’s because of the sugar content. That it is the sugar content that is the problem and that was what was alluded to within this question.

If we went back 20 years ago and asked the same question and someone said that it was an unhealthy food, I imagined that the answer would lean more towards the fact that it’s unhealthy because it is high in fat. Sugar wasn’t on the radar in the same way and fat was seen more of the problem. So where diet culture is at with it’s sort of dietary leanings has an impact on our beliefs around food.

Like my take on all this is that it’s less about foods being inherently bad or inherently healthy and unhealthy. It just depends on the person and the context. And that’s not to deny there aren’t certain foods that are going to be more likely to be helpful, but none of this stuff is set in stone.

And so interestingly, like from a nutritional standpoint, ice cream actually ticks many of the boxes that people are after. So for example, I went on to Cronometer and I looked up ice cream, a company called Kemps ice cream. And so one cup of ice cream is just shy of 300 calories. It provides 27% of the RDA for B12, 17% of the RDA for B5, 23% of the RDA for B12. I’m sorry, the first one should be 27% of the RDA for B2, 17% of the RDA for B5 and 23% for B12. And then 20% for Vitamin A. On the mineral front, it provides 18% of the RDA for calcium and 22% of the RDA for phosphorus. And for many other vitamins and minerals, it’s providing anywhere from about 5 to 9%. It contains 5 grams of protein, so a similar amount to an egg. It provides 16% of the RDA for Omega 3 and it provides a decent amount of carbohydrates, albeit as more simple sugars. So a food that many people would refer to as empty calories actually contains quite a lot of nutrients that people are after.

And connected to all this I would also say is that people have unrealistic ideas about what healthy eating should look like and what they’re also capable of. So while I don’t think about food in terms of healthy and unhealthy, let me just use those labels as part of a sort of a thought experiment.

So let’s say that someone is currently eating 60% healthy and then 40% unhealthy. They look at what they’re doing and they think it’s not good enough. So they decide that they’re going to make some change and that change is they’re going to eat 100% healthy because obviously, that’s what we’re taught to do. And if you care about your health or you care about your body, that’s what you should be doing too; at least that’s the message we get.

So this person then makes changes and they start heating 100% healthy. They make this switch overnight. They keep it up for a while and in the beginning, it feels easy. It is amazing how strong a motivator self-righteousness can be. But with time they get bored, they’re feeling unsatisfied and so they crack. And normally the pendulum swings back in the other direction.

So now they’ve gone from 100% healthy to just 30% healthy. So 70% of what they’re eating is unhealthy. And again, I’m only using these labels for this thought experiment. Like food is never this simple, but someone’s pushed to eat only healthy actually leads to a rebellion where they spend a lot of their time eating not so healthy. And this is how it goes, like back and forth between really healthy and really unhealthy.

Now let’s imagine that that person at the start of the process again where they’re eating 60% healthy and 40% unhealthy. Instead of changing everything overnight, they start to make small changes in improvement. So it goes from 60% to 65% to 70% and in each point, they’re creating a new normal and it feels sustainable.

Even with doing this, there’s going to be a point where trying to further pass these percentages causes a backlash. So for example, maybe an 85% healthy and 15% unhealthy things feel fine, and then for someone else it’s more like 70% healthy, 30% unhealthy.

Like people are different and enjoy different levels, and this can change depending on stress levels or age or a multitude of factors. But irrespective of what the percentage breakdown is, when they try and push things further than this, it just feels too much and the pendulum swings the other way.

I think keeping this in mind is important because it could be easy to mentally think about how much better things would be if I swapped out this food and that food and just changed that unhealthy percentage for healthier food. But the reality turns out that when you do this, it’s completely unsustainable and actually leads to worse eating. It’s the fact that you have the Coke with lunch or the bit of ice cream, if I’m referring back to that original question, that someone’s then able to enjoy eating the vegetables or eating the chicken or whatever else is included in that meal.

00:35:00

The law of diminishing returns

The final thing I will add to this question around opportunity costs is that there is a law of diminishing returns. So if someone is eating in a way that provides low amounts of nutrition for what they really need and then they make improvements to this, then they’re going to see some fairly drastic changes.

But if someone is on the food front is already doing really well, making small tweaks is going to be less noticeable. And I definitely believe in the aggregation of marginal gains, that small improvements that are kept up consistently over years do make a difference.

And obviously this is only true if someone is actually able to keep them up, but there’s often so many other areas that could provide a bigger return on investment for someone. And this is important because we can only focus on so many things at once.

So for example, let’s imagine your food is in a great place already. You could use your time to see if you could make this even better. Or alternatively, you could start focusing on sleep. So for example, currently you’re getting to bed around midnight, you’re only getting seven hours sleep when actually you do better on nine. And for the last three hours of that time, you’re looking at a screen which is then impacting on your circadian rhythm and the quality of your sleep. So you could spend more time in the kitchen and try to further improve your food, or you could focus on changing your sleep routine. And I know for me, which one is going to give a bigger improvement.

I mentioned in the previous podcast when I talked about opportunity costs really in terms of like comparing one meal to another. But I’d really expand this out and say that opportunity cost is all about choices. And really it’s about how you spend your time.

Like if making healthier food means you get a lot less sleep, these two things need to be thought about together. It’s not just simply comparing one meal to another meal. And while choices aren’t always mutually exclusive, like as I said before, we do have a finite amount of time and a finite amount of focus that we can put towards these things.

So for example, you could make a quick meal that is less nutritious, but the extra time allows for you and your partner to hang out, for you to connect and spend quality time together. Or you could spend longer making food and making it more nutritious, but then you have limited relationship time and you feel more disconnected. Or you then spend the extra time making the food and then the extra time connecting with your partner and now you’re getting less sleep.

So in these scenarios, what is the right choice? Is the better-quality food more beneficial? Is the sleep more beneficial? Like, there is no right answer to this question because it really depends on you. It depends on the situation.

But I would say that food is often put up on this pedestal that it just doesn’t deserve or at the very least, it’s not thought about in the full context of how certain food choices then impact on all other areas of life. So that is what I imagine to be a very long-winded answer to what was intended for a straightforward question.

But I wanted to spend this time going through all the different areas because I want to demonstrate that it is not as simple as it’s often made out. Like there are a lot of variables that come into play with all this.

So that is it for this episode. I hope that it was helpful for me to go through this stuff and it didn’t feel tedious. I will be back with another guest episode next week, which I’m super excited about and I will catch you then.

Thanks for listening to real health radio. If you are interested in more details, you can find them at www.seven-health.com