December 4, 2023 • 43 mins
For our ancient ancestors food was just another thing they needed to survive - like sleep, shelter or warmth. But in the modern world, food has become a source of anxiety. Do we eat too much, or too little? And are we feeding ourself the "wrong" things?
Dr Laurie Santos has plenty of thoughts on our complicated relationship with eating and shared them on a recent episode of the PRX podcast Food, We Need to Talk. The show turned out great, so we thought we'd give you the chance to hear Laurie's chat with the hosts Juna Gjata and Dr. Eddie Phillips.
Just like The Happiness Lab, Food, We Need to Talk relies on the latest science to tackle issues like body image, nutrition, exercise and addiction. You can listen to other episodes of Food, We Need to Talk wherever you get your podcasts.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin Hey, Happiness Lab listeners. The intersection between eating and
happiness is pretty complicated and something I think about a lot,
but it's not a topic we've tackled a lot on
the show. Recently, I was invited to appear on the
podcast Food We Need to Talk, and preparing for my interview,
(00:37):
it really helped me focus my thoughts on this important subject.
Just like the Happiness Lab, Food we Need to Talk
relies on the latest science to tackle issues like body image, nutrition, exercise,
and addiction. I felt totally at home on the show
and really enjoyed my conversation with the host Yuna and Eddie,
and so I thought you would too. If afterwards you
want to hear more smart thoughts on eating, then you
(00:59):
should listen to other episodes of Food we Need to
Talk wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 2 (01:12):
Just a heads up to our listeners, this episode does
involve discussion of eating disorders. If you need more information
or need help finding help, go to National Eatingdisorders dot Org.
Speaker 3 (01:25):
I'm Unadjata and I'm doctor Eddie Phillips, Associate Professor at
Harvard Medical School.
Speaker 2 (01:30):
And you're listening to Food we Need to Talk, the
only podcast that has been scientifically proven to help you
be happy with your food again. Welcome back to food.
We need to talk. Thank you so much, Professor Santos
for coming back on to talk about food this time.
Speaker 1 (01:53):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (01:54):
So, the first question we wanted to ask you about
is do you think that we view food differently today
than we traditionally have in the past, Because I feel like,
to me, food has always seemed very utilitarian. You use
food to either be healthy or to manipulate your weight.
But I don't think that in the past people were
so preoccupied with their weight and so focused on health,
right because they were just eating food to survive. And
(02:15):
so I feel like it's completely you started to mean
this different thing.
Speaker 1 (02:18):
Yeah, I think so. I mean, I think it's worth
going really way back right to how we used to
think about food evolutionarily, right, you know. I think when
we were a hunter gatherers, food was just another one
of our basic needs, right, you know, we'd get sleepy
and we'd sleep, we'd be cold and maybe put on
a blanket or a fur or something. I think when
we were hungry, we wanted to eat. And I think
if you look at the foods that people were eating
(02:39):
back then, you know, like roots and tubers and whatever,
you know, in the back in the evolutionary day, very
little of it was this sort of highly palatable food.
And so I think sometimes we think, oh, today food's
so utilitarian. You know, maybe we need to get back
to pleasure. But in some ways, I think we need
to get back to what food really was. It's just
like a way to fulfill our needs. It wasn't necessarily
supposed to be this super pleasurable thing that you know,
(03:02):
we got a lot out of. And so I think
when you take that big historical approach, you realize, wow,
we're thinking about food in a really different way, and
it's one of the needs that we've gotten so obsessed about.
You know, you talked about regulating your weight or kind
of wanting to get fit and things like that. And
I think these days we really are super utilitarian when
it comes to food. And when you start to realize
(03:22):
that it's just an urge, this starts to feel kind
of weird, you know when you think about like, you know,
if I have urged to go to the bathroom, right,
I have to urinate, I'm not like making a schedule
or having an app or like there's not like influencers
who are telling me I wanted to go to eth,
Like if I'm feeling cold, there's very little infrastructure for
like how to get warmer or tips on getting what like.
You just kind of obey that need. And somehow we've
(03:45):
gotten off track with food.
Speaker 3 (03:47):
So I'm picturing the folks coming back from their hunting
and gathering and the food arrives, and it might just
be some tubers. Maybe it was an exceptional day and
you caught an animal of whatever size, if you really
went nuts and you were willing to climb up a
tree and smoke at the bees, you got a little
bit of honey. But what I'm hearing is that was
(04:08):
everyone clapping and saying hooray, I'm really happy. Or is
it just like, oh my god, I won't be starving
for another twenty four hours.
Speaker 4 (04:16):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (04:17):
I mean, I think there definitely even were foods back
in the evolutionary day that tasted better than others. You know,
you mentioned honey, and I think honey has these features
of the kind of thing that we're out there looking for.
It's really high caloric, you know, very sweet sort of food.
But my guess is that most of the time it
wasn't really this sort of pleasure thing. It wasn't like
we were, you know, going on our hunter gatherer yelp
(04:37):
to try to pick their best restaurant, you know, with
the best cocktails and food.
Speaker 2 (04:41):
Like.
Speaker 1 (04:42):
It was just food, right, And I think we've somehow
built food up a lot, in part because you know,
it really is a form of pleasure that we can
savor in our lives now done well, But I think
it wasn't always that. And I think, you know, some
of the kind of difficult, challenging relationships that some of
us have with food. Now, if we could get back
to thinking about food just as fuel, like gasoline that
(05:02):
we're putting into our big human meat tanks, and we
might end up developing a healthier relationship with eating.
Speaker 2 (05:08):
Okay, So that's a great s way into what is
a healthy relationship to food. I think it's become a buzzword. Yeah,
everybody loves to say, especially on Instagram. Itway was like, yeah,
I'm like really like working on my relationship with you,
or I'm really good or whatever. It's so vague at
this point that I have no idea what they're talking about.
So how do you define a good relationship with food.
Speaker 1 (05:27):
I mean, honestly, I think a good relationship with food
is one that you don't think about, right, you know,
like I have, you know, historically been part of diet culture, right,
Like I've picked up these norms. I too have a
complicated relationship with you know, should I be eating healthier?
You know? Is this going to make me fat? Like
these kinds of things come in right, even for me.
But when I watch people who have what I would
think of as a healthy relationship with food, they just
(05:48):
eat when they're hungry, and they eat something that seems
like it will make their bodies feel decent, and then
they don't really think about food very much. So I
think kind of just the act of worrying about this
healthy relationship with food and making hashtags about it that
go on Instagram already, that's signaling like something is a miss, right, Like,
no one's hashtagging like I have this great relationship with
my like you know, urination or like my body feel warm? Right,
(06:10):
Like it's just another urge that we have, is just
another need that our bodies have. And so already, as
we start asking this question, I think it means we
got off track. But I think you know, when we
think about a healthy relationship with food, it's one that's
not taking up a lot of mental bandwidth. I think
when you start having a take up mental bandwidth already,
this is problematic. You know, even maybe if it's pleasurable, right,
even if you're obsessed with, oh, what I'm going to
(06:32):
eat tonight, I'm really excited about this restaurant and things.
I think that already is signaling, but you might be
kind of getting off track a little bit. So that's
I think point number one is you shouldn't be obsessed
with it. You shouldn't have to talk about it. But
the second thing is I think that it's kind of
not an emotion that seems to be like very high arousal,
Like you're not feeling anxious or sad or stressed. It's
(06:53):
kind of much more one of these neutral emotions. Even
when it kind of verges on the positive relationship, like
you're savoring your food and you're enjoying it, it's not
this like extreme thing. It's kind of just like joy.
It's like walking around and seeing the nice flowers. It's
like that level of emotion and not one that's taking
up a lot of energy and mental bandwidth.
Speaker 3 (07:11):
Let's add in the texture of food is love, and
there's so many cultures where my god, if you told
my wife, if you told my mother in law like
not to worry about what they're going to serve when
we get together for dinner, that would be sort of
like a negative.
Speaker 1 (07:30):
So I think more I was answering Youn's question about
the influencer version of a healthy relationship with food. I
think if you're paying attention food from the perspective of
sort of diet culture and one you have to eat
to be healthy, then you have to kind of worry
about these sort of more negative emotions, like things like
anxiety and so on. Right, But if we stop that,
then we can ask, okay, how do we get a
(07:50):
more pleasurable relationship with food? And I think that brings
us into the healthier versions of cultures that we can
have with food, right, because food is really it's super
important part of our social connection. Right again, done well?
Speaker 2 (08:02):
Right?
Speaker 1 (08:03):
I think you know influencer version of orthorexia where you
just have your snacks in your bag and you just
eat your parents on the way to the That doesn't work.
But these you know, recipes that have been part of
your culture. For generations, food that's part of rituals that
are meaningful both for the social connection and for what
they represent in terms of how you're representing the world
and sort of life changes. These things can be really essential,
(08:25):
but they're often less about the food and more about
kind of how we're thinking about the food and what
it represents in our lives. Like, my guess is it's
it's not necessarily you know, if I think back to like,
you know, I don't know my grandmother is cooking. My
grandmother used to make these cupcakes and things. It's less
about what's in the particular cupcake and more the narrative
and the stories that I have going with it, the
(08:46):
fact that it's been part of this tradition and so on,
and so that healthy relationship with food is less about
the particular food itself. I don't think anybody cares about
the macros that are in the cupcake. It's really about
the narrative and the stories and the sort of cultural
background that comes with food.
Speaker 4 (09:01):
How do we reclaim that?
Speaker 1 (09:03):
I think it's really hard because that healthy relationship comes
with being in a culture that thinks about this stuff,
and in a lot of ways, we've sort of lost
those cultures. You all talk a lot about Michael Polland
who has a lot of discussion about kind of how
we can get back to a healthier relationship with food
and how we should think about our food decisions. You know,
he talks about, you know, you should go for food
and real food that you're you're like grandmothers would be
(09:25):
aware of. But even my grandmother, you know, I was
born in the it was a child of the eighties,
and already she was, you know, making food out of
boxes and doing these things right. Already, the cultural traditions
that I think she had grown up with were kind
of fading in my you know, American upbringing, and so
I think, you know, we've lost a lot of that
and we need to start building that back in. And
I think that's important both for our happiness but also
(09:47):
for our health.
Speaker 2 (09:48):
You know.
Speaker 1 (09:48):
I take Michael Pollan's point to be, if you're trying
to figure out what a healthy diet is, it's no
like one thing or one set of macros. It's often
more like the traditional kind of ways that people used
to eat kind of no matter what was in it. Right,
you take traditional cultures that are much more meat based
or much more plant based, and they have, you know,
some nuance there, but pretty much all the traditional die
(10:09):
it's are better than what I was growing up on
out of the box in the nineteen eighties.
Speaker 2 (10:13):
So I feel like the message of like not thinking
or stressing too much about food is really important. But
then I feel like, with the food environment that we
live in today, it's kind of hard to not think
about it and still eat. I think what's good for
your body. I have a new roommate that moved in.
She loves baking, so now there's just baked goods in
the house all the time. And it's like, if I
(10:34):
don't consciously think to myself like I probably shouldn't be
having this all the time, I just would because they
just taste good, do you know what I mean? So,
how do you like balance the idea of like these
things are everywhere all the time, and even all my
social gatherings, I've been noticing like I've just been going
out every other day guys and getting food that I
know isn't good for you, because I've just been meeting
my friends because this summer, and in the back of
my mind, I'm like kind of like, oh, like I
(10:54):
feel like it's just like happening a lot right now.
I don't really like it. I don't really feel like
I feel as good. But then I also don't want
to be becoming very stressed about it like I used to,
and I haven't been. I haven't not been going those
social gatherings because there's food there the way I used to.
Speaker 1 (11:07):
Yeah, And I think this is the problem, right is
as food becomes something that we get worried about that
we're paying more attention to, like that kind of in particular,
we might even think of it like a diet mentality,
that kind of diety mentality that comes in. Whether it's
based on health like really, I just want my body
to feel good, or whether it's based on some diet
notions like I want to change the size of my
(11:28):
body or I want to become fitter or so on.
Both of those have a particular psychological set of features,
which is like it's making us obsessed with stuff, right
like we kind of whether it's a sort of diet
mentality or a sort of fitness mentality, neither of them
are pretty good when they go along with this sort
of anxiousness. And so you know, the kind of anxiousness
you're describing about these sort of social events isn't ideal.
(11:50):
But then that of course raises the question like, okay,
but how do I do that in the environment where
there's this hyper palatable food that I know, even if
I don't care about, like, even if I'm not in
diet head, I still don't want my body to feel
super gross right afterwards, right, And so I think part
of that is really trying to come to terms with
actually paying attention to how these foods make us feel.
There's lots of evidence growing that these hyper palatable foods
(12:14):
really kind of hijack a certain part of our system,
and we often talk about it hijacking our sort of
pleasure system what we really like. But I think that's
sort of incorrect, because when you get down to it,
these foods don't necessarily feel that great if you're paying
attention to them. You know, a lot of people who
engage in mindful eating exercises sometimes have the realization that
whatever food they've been obsessing over, say like Hershey's kisses,
(12:36):
they finally eat them and they're like, oh, they're kind
of waxy, Like I didn't like in my brain, I
had this is this very delicious thing. But when I
mindfully really pay attention on what the taste is, I'm
kind of not digging it that much. And that plays
into this very dumb feature of the way our brains work.
It's like the one feature like if I could change
the way that this part of the human brain work,
I would, which is that there seems to be this
(12:57):
weird disconnect in our brains between wanting and liking, and
so liking is like I eat the Hershey kiss and
how it actually tastes, like what's my actual pleasure response
to is it is or whatever? But wanting is different.
Wanting is how much I start obsessing about it, how
much I want to go after it, how much when
I see it add for it, I'm like, oh, that
(13:18):
seems really good. You would assume that our brains would
be smart, that our brains would put those two circuits together,
that we would want only things that we actually liked,
But it turns out if you look that is not
how brains are organized. There seems to be this interesting
disconnect between liking and wanting, and so you can see
that most clearly with drugs of addiction. You know, so
(13:38):
take somebody who has a heroin addiction. That person has
a really strong wanting for heroin. Right, they're going to
you know, rob their family, get into all kinds of
bad behaviors to go after heroin. But because their bodies
are habituated to it, when they actually experience the drug,
they don't really even like it anymore. Right, They're not
getting the same blast that they got maybe the first
(13:58):
time they got it, and so that already shows us
that there's this disconnect. But I think this is the
same kind of thing that's happening with hyperpalatable food. Right,
Like you know, your roommate makes the bake goods and
you see them on the table, and your wanting system
is like go go go like take that, you know, like,
but maybe when you eat it, I guess you know,
I'm like no, no, Like shade to your room. She
(14:20):
really delicious, but it might not be as good as
your right. And what's frustrating about the wanting liking system
is I think it runs in reverse too. I think
there's lots of stuff that we like that the wanting
system just hasn't latched onto. Take exercise. Right, we were
just talking before we started about you know, all your
(14:41):
dead lifts and going up right, Like, I have never
had my wanting system like tell me to go to
the gym or tell me to do dead lifts. But
I'm pretty sure most of the time I engage in
like a hard plates class or a hard workout, my
liking system fires to that. In the end, when I'm
leaving the gym, I'm having like I'm in a sort
of euphoria of like that felt really good, but it
doesn't translate into this sort of wanting to go after things.
(15:04):
And I think that's true for healthier foods too. Right there,
you know, we're in the middle of summer when we're
having this conversation, and right now, like the peaches are
just like so good. I had a nectary in the
other day that was like on the verge of orgasmic,
but like, oh, I do not still do not have
the wanting for those nectaries and the same way I
would for the bake goods. And so I think understanding
the way this system works can help us a little bit. First,
(15:27):
it just gives us some knowledge about when I'm experiencing
this wanting. It might not be an honest signal I'm
probably not gonna like this as much as my brain
is telling me, my mind's kind of lying to me.
But in another way, it can cause us to really
start to pay attention more to the things we really
do like. And while it is true that the wanting
and liking systems are a little bit disconnected, they can
sort of update a little bit, like when you actually
(15:49):
start to pay attention to your liking. And we know
this from work by folks like Hetty Kobert, who's a
colleague of mine at Yale who studies drugs of addiction,
where she gets, for example, cigarette smokers to really pay
attention when they're smoking, to like do you like the
way this feels? To like the way this smells? You know,
do you like the way this feels? And people often
when they start to pay attention like, actually, this feels
kind of gross. I don't like the smell of that.
I don't like you know, I don't like what this
(16:10):
is doing to my body when I think about that.
And what she finds is that that can gradually start
to update the wanting system, not perfectly, but when you
really start to pay attention to like, hang on, this
was not rewarding, I like really didn't like this. Then
it can kind of do the update, and the same
with really mindfully paying attention to the healthy food. If
you really focus on the nectarine and think about it again,
(16:31):
you're not probably going to crave it. In the same
way your dopamine system goes to these highly palatable foods
that are literally engineered by engineers in a laboratory to
kind of you know, be like the heroine, but you
can kind of get your wanting system a little bit
more on board with going for it.
Speaker 2 (16:44):
So with other drugs of addiction, the biggest thing that
is always like so annoyed me is that, like you,
the ideal would be to like not have them at all,
right for the rest of your life. But with food, like,
it's impossible to do that because you're never going to
be able to like never have hyper palable food again, right,
unless you like live super super restrictively.
Speaker 1 (17:04):
Right, And I think and I can't imagine anyone honestly
doing that right out anxiety, right, I mean, I think
there's you know, there's lots of talk these days in
the field of psychology about orthorexia, right, which for listeners
that don't know, is this again, it's not a DSM,
like you know, like categorist official disorder, but it's one
that leads to people experiencing a lot of anxiety where
you're just really obsessed with eating healthy foods and so ostensibly,
(17:28):
you know, if your dietician or nutrition looked at your
what you were eating, they might be like, oh, that's great,
like you look so healthy, But in practice, you feel
really dysregulated. You feel like you're on this kind of
like verge of a binge all the time. It's taking
up all your airtime for you. It doesn't feel good.
And so I think that's the problem, is that living
in this environment of food being so hyper palatable, it's
(17:49):
so hard to pay attention without dipping into the orthorexia.
Speaker 2 (17:53):
I just I am such an all or nothing person,
Like I would just so much rather have like not
care at all, or like super care than like kind of.
Speaker 1 (17:59):
Care, do you know what I mean, totally have my
friend who says, I wish, you know, the soilent companies
would just like make the thing that was really healthy
and we would never But that's I think we need
to get back to the question that Eddie mentioned right,
which is to get back to kind of having real,
true pleasure in food. Beyond just the hyperpalatability, Right, can
we get back to like the way these things were
(18:21):
created over time, Like maybe like slowly creating healthy foods, right,
embedding them in our cultures and in our rituals. Even
if that's sort of starting new cultures and rituals, What
does that look like?
Speaker 2 (18:32):
Right?
Speaker 1 (18:32):
If you build up that narrative in that history, it
can help there be other things that maybe don't necessarily
replace the hyper palatable foods. Right, We're not going to
like wipe them out of our culture, but it gives
us an alternative of things to pay attention to that
might be kind of healthier in terms of our bodies too.
Speaker 3 (18:48):
Is there a kind of like a literacy around food?
And what I'm thinking of is, I'm sitting here with
a concert pianist to my right. I'm effectively musically illiterate.
I've never learned how to play an instrument. I will
listen to music. I have to remind myself to do it.
Speaker 4 (19:07):
It's all, oh my well, and.
Speaker 3 (19:09):
What's like who while I'm exercising, And I would say
I'm happier if I'm listening to music, but I'm musically illiterate.
I mean, I Okay, is the same with food, Like,
there are some people for whom that's all they focus on.
It can be pathological, as you're pointing out, and then
there's others that could be the happiest people I know,
(19:30):
and they just go like food just doesn't resonate with me.
Speaker 1 (19:33):
Yeah, I think it's it's complicated. I mean, I think,
you know, a lot of the research really suggests about
the narrative that we tell ourselves and again not really
what's in the food. You know. One of my favorite
examples of this that shows kind of how funny these
narratives can be looked at individuals who are paying attention
to different wines. Right, you're tasting wines, right, and you're
doing that, for example, like in an fMRI scanner, so
(19:56):
we can see what's happening in your brain as you're
tasting these things. And what you find is that the
simple label that you're showing people of the price of
this wine affects whether or not they taste it. You know,
literally the reward centers in their brain firing more as
they taste it. And so you can give someone exactly
the same wine and their brains will fire more for
that same wine. If it's labeled as more expensive, right,
(20:19):
And so that tells us something interesting, right, It tells
us it's not what we're tasting, it's kind of what
we're thinking about as we're tasting it. There's a similar
paper about tasting coke and pepsi, and so a lot
of people say that they like coke better. I also
like say that I like coke better. But if you
put people in the scanner and you don't tell them
which is which, people's reward centers fire more for pepsi,
I think, just because pepsi actually has more sugar in
(20:41):
it than the whole and coke. But if you tell
people it's pepsi as they're drinking it, then it will
fire less. So if they don't know what it is,
they like it more than coke. But if you tell
them it's pepsi, they're like.
Speaker 4 (20:50):
Oh, story sets the stage.
Speaker 1 (20:53):
And I think that's powerful, right, I mean, I think
it means that we can set our own stories. Right.
You know, so if your roommate's bringing out the cookies
that she bakes and she just says, oh, they're cookies
that might not taste as delicious as if you say,
these are my grandmother's secret rest if you deck get it,
chocolate cookies, Like just labeling something differently actually does make
(21:15):
it more delicious to us, right, And so there's there's
kind of funny hacks that we can engage in to
make things more delicious.
Speaker 2 (21:21):
Well, I wonder if part of like the reason I
feel that way about food is because like for most
of my life, really food was just like like I
was trying to eat less of it, like that was
its only purpose, you know what I mean. So I
don't know if like part of it is that, Like
I think one time I saw a nutritionis she's kind
of like kind of nutritionis kind of psychologist, and she
was like, you have a lot of fear associated with food,
(21:42):
and you're a migdala is really that miguala is the
part of the brain, guys, that's like the fear kind
of anxiety center of the brain, and it's the kind
of the oldest part of the brain. It's like very
very deep in your brain anyways, and she was saying,
like you just have all these connections between food and
you're amygdala, and like we need to like rewire to
have food and like pleasure associated together, not just food
and fear.
Speaker 1 (22:01):
Yeah, I mean, I think there's really something to that, right,
I mean, I think if you really have like a
clinically you know, diagnosed eating disorder, you know, you're building
in so many negative emotions that come with food, whether
it's about eating too much of it or which kinds
of it? Right, Like, it means that you're not no
longer thinking of food as this like fuel that's neutral,
or like a friend that you could savor, that you
(22:21):
might like, but is this negative, scary, like potentially harmful,
threatening thing. And so I think the process of trying
to engage a little bit more with food mindfully, you know,
might be might be pretty helpful, you know, because we
do know that both again, the stories we tell ourselves
about food matter, and so if you have a negative story,
that's only going to make it worse. But if you
have a positive story, that might be better. But also
(22:42):
the rituals that we have around food matter to right.
You know, a wine drunk and a really nice wine
glass at a beautiful restaurant's gonna taste different than you know,
out of a bag, like you know, I don't know,
in a dorm room somewhere like some ivy league dorm room, right,
you know, And so I think we can try to
develop different rituals to come up with food and a
lot of you know, therapeutic interventions for eating disorders as
(23:04):
people are eating more. You know, that's one of the things. Right,
It's like, let's let's try to kind of make this
thing not scary. Let's put it in a pretty dish,
you know, set thee have a nice ritual about it.
You really take a deep breath before you eat it,
really try to pay attention to what does this taste like?
You know, how would I describe this?
Speaker 2 (23:20):
Like that?
Speaker 1 (23:21):
Kind of mindful eating can at least make you more
pay more attention to how things taste. And often when
you're doing that, you can notice the pleasure that's associated
with that.
Speaker 4 (23:30):
So I have like several thoughts that may be related.
Let me give it a truck.
Speaker 3 (23:35):
So once a year, I have this joyous obligation of
going out to the healthy Kitchens.
Speaker 4 (23:40):
Healthy Kitchens. Course, it's a NAPA valley.
Speaker 3 (23:44):
It is at the Culinary Institute of America and part
of it you're in the middle of wine country, and
part of it they actually have these tables set up
and you can go from table to table and do
a wine tasting. And my first reaction when I tasted
some of these remarkable wines that cost like one hundred
dollars plus per bottle was like, oh, it's like velvet.
(24:06):
And I remember calling my wife and saying, remember how
I said, I don't like wine. I don't like cheap wine.
But what I'm learning from you, Laurie, is that what
sold the wine to me was again the setting and
the story that is it the venter is that they
were actually standing there pouring their their creation and setting
(24:27):
me up for this experience. And it was sort of like,
of course I was going to I mean, first off,
it really is objectively better. Put me in an FMR.
Speaker 4 (24:37):
We could test it. I'm sure someone has. I'll sign
up for that study.
Speaker 3 (24:40):
But I guess what I'm learning is that it's really
the setting, the story.
Speaker 4 (24:46):
Can we do that to get ourselves eating better?
Speaker 1 (24:50):
I think so? And I think you know, you know,
there's some evidence that even right, the palatability of you know,
not so palatable foods, right, you know, the healthier like
just a bunch of greens or roots or these kinds
of things, just the setting can make a lot of difference, right.
You know, if you walk into you know, one of
these like bougie New York kind of vegan places where
the stuff has plated really well, and you know you're
(25:10):
paying a lot of money, the kale that's there is
different than the kale that I you know, grab the supermarket,
like just to me to taste differently, right, So I
think that matters. I think who we are eating with
seems to matter too. You know there's lots of top
account what's that.
Speaker 2 (25:25):
My TikTok account? I'm just scrolling.
Speaker 1 (25:27):
Yeah, yeah, that is part of yeah, yeah, but I
think but you bring up a really important point, right,
which is that you know, we act like these healthier
foods don't taste good, but in practice we're not really
giving them the sort of mindfulness benefit of the doubt
when we're engaging with them. You know, I was joking about,
you know, the snacks that you have in your bag
kind of thing earlier. But you know, as I've made
(25:48):
a foray into trying to eat more healthfully again, not
for a weight loss or just like to you know,
make my body feel good. Sometimes that means eating on
the go. Sometimes that means grabbing you know, a few
carrot sticks that are in my bag, and that's not
often eating and the prettiest way possible with the best
narrative possible. It's just kind of like getting the fuel
in to go, right. And so it does feel like
we're sometimes because we're so busy and because we're so
(26:11):
easily distracted, missing out on these opportunities to really enjoy food. Well,
you know, one of the main complaints of people who
try to engage in more mindful eating is just like
it's boring, yes, Like you're like like I have to
just eat and not watch you know, like not look
at my TikTok videos or not watch root Pul's drag
(26:31):
race or whatever. It's like what, you know, Like how
am I expected to just eat? Right? Like? It just
seems so boring, right, And I think that tells us something, Right,
even if we're eating a hyper palatable food, it sometimes
seems boring, right, And that really tells us it wasn't
about the food, It wasn't about our enjoyment. It was
really about the wanting of the food, right. The getting
of it and enjoying didn't really matter as much as.
Speaker 3 (26:52):
The advertisements set the wanting.
Speaker 4 (26:55):
I mean, the double bacon cheeseburger, make it your way.
Speaker 1 (27:00):
I mean part of them is that, you know, like
most advertisements, they're often very inaccurate. Google how companies make
these palatable food exactly. Yeah, you know, like ice cream
with food ads is actually just like Crisco or like
because they can't it would melt under the lights, right,
and so you know, so a lot of them are
kind of faked. But yeah, I think those things are
created to really amp up our wanting system.
Speaker 2 (27:23):
I mean, it's even like I have an association with Starbucks.
I've loved Starbucks since I was like fifteen. I've been
a gold member since that age anyways, and so I
used to go there every day, and like now I
don't say I can't afford it anymore, but even when
I go, it's just like, oh my, oh, this latte
is so good. It's so much better than that. And
everybody hates Starbucks coffee. People that actually coffee are like
(27:43):
Starbucks is not good. And it's just like the even
the brand of Starbucks. Like I just love the idea
of I'm going to get my Starbucks, if that makes sense.
Just it's something I grew up with and it's so
comforting to.
Speaker 1 (27:54):
Me, and even branding right can matter a lot. You know,
I mentioned this coke and pepsi, you know again, Yeah,
when we drink it, the neural activation fire is more
for pepsi, But knowing it's pepsi versus coke makes us
think really differently about it. I think knowing something Starbucks
makes us think think differently about it. And I think
this gets also back to you know, we were talking
about why are these hyperpalatable foods, you know, so addictive?
(28:14):
Why do they kind of trigger this wanting system so much?
And I think part of it is that, like the
not so hyperpalatable foods, they don't tend to have the
marketers or the brand now, like my nectarine from the
Farmer's Market doesn't come with, like, you know, a logo
that I associate with that nectarine that's bright that you know,
triggers my memories about eating previous nectarines. It's just a nectarine, right,
(28:35):
And so I think that's that's one of the things
that we're pushing against as we try to engage in
eating more healthily, is that most of the healthy stuff
just doesn't have any of that kind of branding narrative.
Nuance that gets our wanting systems and.
Speaker 2 (28:49):
No health claims on the packaging too. So I think
we had a figure in our book that was like
the amounts of money spent on like food marketing by
food companies, and it was like billions of dollars. And
then the amounts of money spent on like agriculture marketings,
like marketing vegetables basically, and it was like two hundred million,
and it was like less than one percent of the
marketing budget or whatever. Also, all the packaging in the supermarket,
(29:10):
if you look at the packaging, you would think the
healthiest food is in the middle of the supermarket, right,
and then all the vegetables have zero packaging. So it's like,
I don't know, it is all very deceptive.
Speaker 3 (29:20):
We'll be right back, and we're back with Professor Laurie
Santos of the Happiness Lab, a professor of psychology at
Yale University.
Speaker 2 (29:38):
The other thing I wanted to ask you about was
weather restriction makes the wanting part even more mismatch with
the liking because I remember when I was like, oh,
I can't eat this, that and the other. The only
thing I was allowed to eat at the end of
the week. That was like, my treat thing was Halo
Top ice cream, which is like the high protein ice cream.
If you don't know itdy, it's like it's like ice
cream with protein powder. Yeah, okay, everybody says it's terrible.
(30:02):
Because I was having no other treats, I was like,
Halo Top is the best thing on the planet. And
remember I'd wait all week for my and I was like,
I can have a whole pint because it's only three
hundred whatever calories. And then I would get it and
I'd be like, this is like not good. Why did
I wait all week? But I would eat the whole things.
I was like, I waited all week for this. I
have to eat, you know what I mean?
Speaker 1 (30:20):
Yeah, I think your liking system was more honest, maybe
about the Halo Top, but yeah, I mean I think
you know. So, another kind of dumb feature in the
brain is that our brain really doesn't have any way
to kind of tell itself not to do something. So
take like, you know, let's get back to sort of
drugs of addiction. Like you're walking down the street and
you're a smoker and you see a non smoking sign, right, Ostensibly,
(30:42):
the sign is telling you not to smoke, but we
don't really have any representation in our brain for not smoke.
What our brain sees is smoking, and it tries to
shut that down. So it turns out that if you
look at the cravings that smokers experience, they experience more
craving in the presence of no smoking signs Oh my god.
And the reason is, like you just they're just like
(31:03):
walking down the street, maybe not thinking about smoking, and
they look and they're like smoking. Oh wait, don't do that.
But what's in their brain is like smoking, smoke, right.
I think that insight tells us why restricting often comes
with binges. Why In the words of someone who's been
on my podcast a lot, Andrea Walker, who studies mindful eating,
she calls it the diet riot roller coaster, the diets
often go with the riots and part because just the
(31:25):
act of telling yourself don't have it usually comes with
you thinking about having it. Right, So take your halo
top right, You're like, I'm not gonna have it till
the end of the week. I'm not gonna have it
till the end of a week. But your brain is
just like halo top, halo top, and like there's pressure
is to like kind of squish it down. But really
what it's thinking about is that food. And so a
better way to kind of get out of that restriction
(31:46):
mindset is actually to find the healthier food that you like.
You know, so instead of like, oh I can't I
just got to wait on the halotop, no halotop, no halotop.
If you thought like, ooh, today you're like really good
blueberries that just came from the supermarket, or like I
got these almonds that are like so fresh and I'm
excited about them. Right, thinking about the thing that you
(32:06):
actually want to do rather than the thing that you're
not supposed to do can be quite helpful. But yeah,
I mean, you know, pretty much every available study of
binge eating suggests it doesn't come from nowhere. It comes
from having a mindset of restriction. Right, That's what's kind
of leading people to. People don't necessarily binge unless they
also have a even in their head, if they're not
(32:27):
acting on it, this urge that they're not supposed to
do or these are the things they're not supposed to eat.
Speaker 4 (32:31):
I love this list of dumb things our brains do.
Speaker 1 (32:34):
Usual. My podcast is all about just like things that
Laurie think is stupidly designed in the brain.
Speaker 2 (32:39):
Yeah, Laurie's going to come out with like a human
brain two point zero that we can all transplant some point.
The other thing I want to ask you about binge
eating is that isn't it true that binges also serve
some sort of emotion regulation purpose? And we cited a
few studies that were interesting in our book that kind
of made binge eating analogous to food addiction, And it's
(32:59):
said that the research wasn't really conclusive on whether or
not food addiction is binge eating, whether or not food
adiction is actually a real thing. Maybe they're related, maybe
they're two separate things, but it did relate food addiction
or like not being able to regulate food intake. I
guess to substances of abuse because a lot of people,
when you ask them about it, it's like a behavior
they really want to stop and they're unable to stop,
(33:20):
and they kind of tell themselves to not do it,
not do it, not do it, and they end up
doing it and they feel really bad. So it kind
of had a lot of similarities to the addiction cycle.
So I was wondering what you think about that relationship
between addiction food.
Speaker 1 (33:31):
Yeah, I think, you know, the addiction literature in fields
of psychology and psychiatry right now is a little complicated,
right in the sense that you know, we know that
some addictions are kind of more classic addiction, say, you know,
like a heroin addiction, for example, Those drugs of abuse
are literally tapping into chemicals that are kind of part
of the wanting system, right, you know, like like heroin
(33:51):
is like you know, these are opiates that are tapping
into opiate systems that exist in our brain. So it's
like you're abusing the very chemical that is very very
close to the signal in the brain. There's a more
open question about addictions that seem to have all the
same features where people binge on these things, they overthink
about them, they want to stop, but they can't write. Like,
behaviorally and psychologically these look the same, But the substance
(34:14):
that you're feeling addicted to isn't like an opiate, right,
It isn't a chemical signaler in a brain, you know,
So things like a shopping addiction, or an internet addiction,
or a TikTok addiction, or you know, maybe in a
more nebulous case, a sugar addiction or a food addiction. Right, Obviously,
foods are you know, they're not direct opiates, but they're
chemicals that are playing a part in this process.
Speaker 3 (34:35):
Right.
Speaker 1 (34:35):
But there's some debate about whether we want to call
that addiction. Yeah, you know, to a psychologist like me,
if it's if it's taking up your thought pattern, if
it's like messing with your sense of self, if it's
messing with your daily life, it feels addictive, even though
we might not want to call it a capital a addiction.
And I think bending behaviors, food behaviors for a lot
of people feel addictive, you know, whether that's kind of
(34:57):
a drug of choice and that you're kind of eating
more food than you want to or comfortable with, whether
that's you know, something like orthorexia where the thought patterns
that you engage in are really you know, you don't
want to keep thinking about healthy food, but you're kind
of obsessing with it, like almost like in an OCD way.
And so I think, even though again there's some debate
about whether it kind of fits as a kind of
capital a addiction that would be in like the psychology journals,
(35:20):
it definitely for the people that are experiencing these things
is like deeply problematic, you know, beyond just being an
eating disorder or something like that.
Speaker 2 (35:27):
Well, it's also that a lot of people use food
to cope with things.
Speaker 1 (35:30):
Yeah, and I think that's a big thing, right. You know,
food really is about pleasure, right. It's a way of
getting pleasure. Sometimes it just gives us something to do, right,
you know, like you're feeling bored and it's like a
thing that you can turn to. Sometimes it's a way
of escaping reality, you know, so kind of it's it's
a behavior akin to something like cutting, which is another
sort of behavior like this, where it's like it just
(35:50):
is the only thing you can think about, so you
can't think about other things. And so yeah, I think
we're using these foods in functional ways. I think sometimes
when we think about disorders of eating, we say, like
what's going on? But you know, minds are smart, despite
what I was saying about all these problems with the
way brains are organized, Like, our minds are smart, right,
And sometimes the best go to for pleasure for when
(36:11):
you need to stop thinking about something is something related
to your eating.
Speaker 3 (36:15):
So as we start to wrap up absent paying, what
does Yale cost now seventy thousand dollars. What kind of
assignment would you give your students in your happiness course
about food?
Speaker 1 (36:28):
Yeah? Well, what is to start paying attention to kind
of how and why you're eating? Right? I think one
of the best early steps in mindful eating is to
start when you have the urge to eat something, kind
of ask like, why, what's going on? Am I actually hungry?
Maybe maybe I'm bored? Maybe I just saw the food,
Like when you have that craving kind of ask what's
going on? Not in a judgmental like I can't have
(36:49):
it way, but just in a like curious noticing, like
I wonder what caused that urge? And sometimes when you
start to engage in that process, you notice it wasn't
really about hunger. It was about some emotion like you
were bored, or maybe you were in a good mood,
or you were excited, or you just saw it, right, Like,
that's the first step I think to noticing whether you're
using food in the way that at least evolutionarily our
(37:09):
bodies intended, which is as fuel. Right, And you can
eat for other reasons, but like that's the main reason.
And then I think the second exercise is to really
pay attention to how a food really truly feels, the
real liking that you're getting from it when you experience it,
because again, sometimes these hyper palatable foods that are like
in our brain of like, oh, I'm so obsessed with that,
when you finally sit down and notice you're kind of
(37:31):
it sort of takes some of the magic away. You're like,
that actually wasn't like as super delicious as I thought.
And this is a practice that we use generally beyond
just the domain of food in the class, just a
practice of mindfulness trying to notice what things feel like.
And I think often that practice shows us this dissociation
between wanting and liking, where we're like, huh, I really
(37:52):
wanted that thing, you know whatever, it was shopping, buying something,
watching the TikTok videos, eating, but I didn't actually like
it as much as I thought. And sometimes, I think
in a more important way, it can tell us the opposite,
right Like I didn't really want to go to the gym,
but I enjoyed it more than I thought, Right Like,
I thought this salad was just gonna be the boring
thing I was going to eat because I was you know,
trying to eat healthier. But when I paid attention, it
(38:13):
was crunchy, it was delicious, It had these flavors that
I didn't expect, right, And so I think that that
mindful process can kind of allow us to get our
wanting and liking back in sync. And it can also
be you know, an important part of the presence that
just makes life better, and that we can savor it
and notice it more.
Speaker 2 (38:30):
M Okay, do we have our assignments.
Speaker 4 (38:33):
Yes, I'm going to savor more.
Speaker 3 (38:35):
I'm going to like more, want less.
Speaker 1 (38:41):
I think that's a great Yeah. Yeah, I mean, you know,
I think, you know, these ancient traditions were onto something
in so many domains. I think, for sure when it
comes to happiness, but probably when it came to food.
You know, I don't think that the ancients had as
complicated a relationship with food. You know, we went all
the way back to hunter gatherers, but I'm like, we
(39:01):
don't have to go back that far. I think even
if we rewind, honestly, like seventy five one hundred years,
we're already getting to cultural relationships with food that were
a lot healthier.
Speaker 2 (39:13):
That's what my parents always said when after they read
the book and stuff, and my mom said that she
was so surprised at how complicated my relationship with food was,
because she said, when she grew up in Albania, like
nobody was like dieting or like changing their food choices
on purpose. Do you know what I mean?
Speaker 1 (39:28):
Yeah, in some ways, it's a funny, weird privilege that
we have. Yeah, because we have a lot of food,
because we have an enormous variety of food. Yeah, But
it's not a fun privilege. It's one that causes people
a lot of pain and suffering.
Speaker 2 (39:40):
But do you think part of the reason why, like
we have more of that today than we did before
is because the food environment is so different today. I
feel like if the food environment is the way it
is now, these problems are always going to arise because
these aren't foods that necessarily promote the best eating patterns totally.
Speaker 1 (39:55):
And I think that that came hand in hand with
a kind of relaxing or maybe a removal of some
of the cultural traditions of food that came with it.
You know, So two things kind of happen. One is
I think we lost kind of culturally specific ways of
eating right for the most part, especially in the US
where maybe we didn't even grow up with them, but
a lot of people came from family backgrounds where they
you know, had kind of these traditions of eating food.
(40:16):
So those things were going away at the same time
as I think, you know, the food industrial complex was
telling us like, oh, these things are so healthy or
these things are so delicious. And there were advertisements on TV,
you know, I mean take an extreme example, take something
like breast milk versus formula. Right. You know, I was
from the generation my mom where they were like, oh,
breast milk so totally not good, like we want the
(40:37):
you know, food science energized formula like healthy. Yeah, some
ways it still is, you know. And I think that
you know, that basic thing was telling you, oh, you're
you know, the wisdom you thought you had about food
that was wrong. Let's follow what the nutrition science says,
you know, like doctor Kellogg who with his you know,
crackers of like we'll control those urges and make you
(40:59):
healthy eat these crackers, right, And so I think that
that really really was a moment in time that was
happening as again, culturally, we were kind of abandoning what
we used to do, and so in some ways it
was like a double edged sword of these more of
these hyper palatable foods around in a way there never
had been in human history. Plus the kind of loss
of our sort of ancestral wisdom about just how to eat.
Speaker 2 (41:20):
Yeah, when my parents came to America, they my mom
said that everybody here had like low fat milk and
like low fat yogurt and stuff, and like they could
not be converted because they were like it's so gross,
like it tastes so bad in comparison. And I remember
growing up and I was like, oh, you guys are
so unhealthy, like you're always getting you know, and my
mom would make her own yogurt and with whole milk,
should buy, right, I like, you guys are so unhealthy,
(41:40):
blah bah blah. And now the narratives completely changed where
it's like people always say don't have low fat things
because they've been manipulated to take out the fat and
blah blahlahlah blah. And I was like, damn it.
Speaker 4 (41:48):
They were right.
Speaker 2 (41:49):
They're always right in the end, damn it. Anyways, thank
you so much for coming back on the podcast to
talk to us about food.
Speaker 1 (41:56):
Thanks so much for having.
Speaker 2 (41:57):
Me and for telling us all the dumb things that
the human brain does.
Speaker 1 (42:02):
Yeah, welcome back next time and do it even more.
Speaker 2 (42:07):
Thank you so much to Professor Santis for coming on
today's episode again, it was so much fun. We will
link to her podcast as well as all her work
on our website, and if you want to hear bonus episodes,
you can go to food we Need to Talk dot com,
slash membership and become part of the foodie fam. You
can find us on Instagram at food we Need to Talk.
(42:27):
You can find me on Instagram at the official Una
and Yunajada. On YouTube and TikTok, you can find.
Speaker 4 (42:33):
Eddie savoring and really learning to like my food.
Speaker 2 (42:38):
Food we Need to Talk is a production of pr X.
Speaker 3 (42:42):
Our senior producer is Morgan Flannery and our producer is
Megan Aftermat.
Speaker 2 (42:47):
Tommy Bazarian is our mixed engineer.
Speaker 3 (42:49):
Jocelyn Gonzales is executive producer for PRX Productions.
Speaker 2 (42:54):
Food we Need to Talk was co created by Kerry Goldberg,
George Hicks, Eddie Phillips and me.
Speaker 3 (42:59):
For any personal health questions, please consult your personal health provider.
To find out more, go to foodwe Need to Talk
dot com thanks for listening, who WO,
Pushkin Hey, Happiness Lab listeners. The intersection between eating and
happiness is pretty complicated and something I think about a lot,
but it's not a topic we've tackled a lot on
the show. Recently, I was invited to appear on the
podcast Food We Need to Talk, and preparing for my interview,
(00:37):
it really helped me focus my thoughts on this important subject.
Just like the Happiness Lab, Food we Need to Talk
relies on the latest science to tackle issues like body image, nutrition, exercise,
and addiction. I felt totally at home on the show
and really enjoyed my conversation with the host Yuna and Eddie,
and so I thought you would too. If afterwards you
want to hear more smart thoughts on eating, then you
(00:59):
should listen to other episodes of Food we Need to
Talk wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 2 (01:12):
Just a heads up to our listeners, this episode does
involve discussion of eating disorders. If you need more information
or need help finding help, go to National Eatingdisorders dot Org.
Speaker 3 (01:25):
I'm Unadjata and I'm doctor Eddie Phillips, Associate Professor at
Harvard Medical School.
Speaker 2 (01:30):
And you're listening to Food we Need to Talk, the
only podcast that has been scientifically proven to help you
be happy with your food again. Welcome back to food.
We need to talk. Thank you so much, Professor Santos
for coming back on to talk about food this time.
Speaker 1 (01:53):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (01:54):
So, the first question we wanted to ask you about
is do you think that we view food differently today
than we traditionally have in the past, Because I feel like,
to me, food has always seemed very utilitarian. You use
food to either be healthy or to manipulate your weight.
But I don't think that in the past people were
so preoccupied with their weight and so focused on health,
right because they were just eating food to survive. And
(02:15):
so I feel like it's completely you started to mean
this different thing.
Speaker 1 (02:18):
Yeah, I think so. I mean, I think it's worth
going really way back right to how we used to
think about food evolutionarily, right, you know. I think when
we were a hunter gatherers, food was just another one
of our basic needs, right, you know, we'd get sleepy
and we'd sleep, we'd be cold and maybe put on
a blanket or a fur or something. I think when
we were hungry, we wanted to eat. And I think
if you look at the foods that people were eating
(02:39):
back then, you know, like roots and tubers and whatever,
you know, in the back in the evolutionary day, very
little of it was this sort of highly palatable food.
And so I think sometimes we think, oh, today food's
so utilitarian. You know, maybe we need to get back
to pleasure. But in some ways, I think we need
to get back to what food really was. It's just
like a way to fulfill our needs. It wasn't necessarily
supposed to be this super pleasurable thing that you know,
(03:02):
we got a lot out of. And so I think
when you take that big historical approach, you realize, wow,
we're thinking about food in a really different way, and
it's one of the needs that we've gotten so obsessed about.
You know, you talked about regulating your weight or kind
of wanting to get fit and things like that. And
I think these days we really are super utilitarian when
it comes to food. And when you start to realize
(03:22):
that it's just an urge, this starts to feel kind
of weird, you know when you think about like, you know,
if I have urged to go to the bathroom, right,
I have to urinate, I'm not like making a schedule
or having an app or like there's not like influencers
who are telling me I wanted to go to eth,
Like if I'm feeling cold, there's very little infrastructure for
like how to get warmer or tips on getting what like.
You just kind of obey that need. And somehow we've
(03:45):
gotten off track with food.
Speaker 3 (03:47):
So I'm picturing the folks coming back from their hunting
and gathering and the food arrives, and it might just
be some tubers. Maybe it was an exceptional day and
you caught an animal of whatever size, if you really
went nuts and you were willing to climb up a
tree and smoke at the bees, you got a little
bit of honey. But what I'm hearing is that was
(04:08):
everyone clapping and saying hooray, I'm really happy. Or is
it just like, oh my god, I won't be starving
for another twenty four hours.
Speaker 4 (04:16):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (04:17):
I mean, I think there definitely even were foods back
in the evolutionary day that tasted better than others. You know,
you mentioned honey, and I think honey has these features
of the kind of thing that we're out there looking for.
It's really high caloric, you know, very sweet sort of food.
But my guess is that most of the time it
wasn't really this sort of pleasure thing. It wasn't like
we were, you know, going on our hunter gatherer yelp
(04:37):
to try to pick their best restaurant, you know, with
the best cocktails and food.
Speaker 2 (04:41):
Like.
Speaker 1 (04:42):
It was just food, right, And I think we've somehow
built food up a lot, in part because you know,
it really is a form of pleasure that we can
savor in our lives now done well, But I think
it wasn't always that. And I think, you know, some
of the kind of difficult, challenging relationships that some of
us have with food. Now, if we could get back
to thinking about food just as fuel, like gasoline that
(05:02):
we're putting into our big human meat tanks, and we
might end up developing a healthier relationship with eating.
Speaker 2 (05:08):
Okay, So that's a great s way into what is
a healthy relationship to food. I think it's become a buzzword. Yeah,
everybody loves to say, especially on Instagram. Itway was like, yeah,
I'm like really like working on my relationship with you,
or I'm really good or whatever. It's so vague at
this point that I have no idea what they're talking about.
So how do you define a good relationship with food.
Speaker 1 (05:27):
I mean, honestly, I think a good relationship with food
is one that you don't think about, right, you know,
like I have, you know, historically been part of diet culture, right,
Like I've picked up these norms. I too have a
complicated relationship with you know, should I be eating healthier?
You know? Is this going to make me fat? Like
these kinds of things come in right, even for me.
But when I watch people who have what I would
think of as a healthy relationship with food, they just
(05:48):
eat when they're hungry, and they eat something that seems
like it will make their bodies feel decent, and then
they don't really think about food very much. So I
think kind of just the act of worrying about this
healthy relationship with food and making hashtags about it that
go on Instagram already, that's signaling like something is a miss, right, Like,
no one's hashtagging like I have this great relationship with
my like you know, urination or like my body feel warm? Right,
(06:10):
Like it's just another urge that we have, is just
another need that our bodies have. And so already, as
we start asking this question, I think it means we
got off track. But I think you know, when we
think about a healthy relationship with food, it's one that's
not taking up a lot of mental bandwidth. I think
when you start having a take up mental bandwidth already,
this is problematic. You know, even maybe if it's pleasurable, right,
even if you're obsessed with, oh, what I'm going to
(06:32):
eat tonight, I'm really excited about this restaurant and things.
I think that already is signaling, but you might be
kind of getting off track a little bit. So that's
I think point number one is you shouldn't be obsessed
with it. You shouldn't have to talk about it. But
the second thing is I think that it's kind of
not an emotion that seems to be like very high arousal,
Like you're not feeling anxious or sad or stressed. It's
(06:53):
kind of much more one of these neutral emotions. Even
when it kind of verges on the positive relationship, like
you're savoring your food and you're enjoying it, it's not
this like extreme thing. It's kind of just like joy.
It's like walking around and seeing the nice flowers. It's
like that level of emotion and not one that's taking
up a lot of energy and mental bandwidth.
Speaker 3 (07:11):
Let's add in the texture of food is love, and
there's so many cultures where my god, if you told
my wife, if you told my mother in law like
not to worry about what they're going to serve when
we get together for dinner, that would be sort of
like a negative.
Speaker 1 (07:30):
So I think more I was answering Youn's question about
the influencer version of a healthy relationship with food. I
think if you're paying attention food from the perspective of
sort of diet culture and one you have to eat
to be healthy, then you have to kind of worry
about these sort of more negative emotions, like things like
anxiety and so on. Right, But if we stop that,
then we can ask, okay, how do we get a
(07:50):
more pleasurable relationship with food? And I think that brings
us into the healthier versions of cultures that we can
have with food, right, because food is really it's super
important part of our social connection. Right again, done well?
Speaker 2 (08:02):
Right?
Speaker 1 (08:03):
I think you know influencer version of orthorexia where you
just have your snacks in your bag and you just
eat your parents on the way to the That doesn't work.
But these you know, recipes that have been part of
your culture. For generations, food that's part of rituals that
are meaningful both for the social connection and for what
they represent in terms of how you're representing the world
and sort of life changes. These things can be really essential,
(08:25):
but they're often less about the food and more about
kind of how we're thinking about the food and what
it represents in our lives. Like, my guess is it's
it's not necessarily you know, if I think back to like,
you know, I don't know my grandmother is cooking. My
grandmother used to make these cupcakes and things. It's less
about what's in the particular cupcake and more the narrative
and the stories that I have going with it, the
(08:46):
fact that it's been part of this tradition and so on,
and so that healthy relationship with food is less about
the particular food itself. I don't think anybody cares about
the macros that are in the cupcake. It's really about
the narrative and the stories and the sort of cultural
background that comes with food.
Speaker 4 (09:01):
How do we reclaim that?
Speaker 1 (09:03):
I think it's really hard because that healthy relationship comes
with being in a culture that thinks about this stuff,
and in a lot of ways, we've sort of lost
those cultures. You all talk a lot about Michael Polland
who has a lot of discussion about kind of how
we can get back to a healthier relationship with food
and how we should think about our food decisions. You know,
he talks about, you know, you should go for food
and real food that you're you're like grandmothers would be
(09:25):
aware of. But even my grandmother, you know, I was
born in the it was a child of the eighties,
and already she was, you know, making food out of
boxes and doing these things right. Already, the cultural traditions
that I think she had grown up with were kind
of fading in my you know, American upbringing, and so
I think, you know, we've lost a lot of that
and we need to start building that back in. And
I think that's important both for our happiness but also
(09:47):
for our health.
Speaker 2 (09:48):
You know.
Speaker 1 (09:48):
I take Michael Pollan's point to be, if you're trying
to figure out what a healthy diet is, it's no
like one thing or one set of macros. It's often
more like the traditional kind of ways that people used
to eat kind of no matter what was in it. Right,
you take traditional cultures that are much more meat based
or much more plant based, and they have, you know,
some nuance there, but pretty much all the traditional die
(10:09):
it's are better than what I was growing up on
out of the box in the nineteen eighties.
Speaker 2 (10:13):
So I feel like the message of like not thinking
or stressing too much about food is really important. But
then I feel like, with the food environment that we
live in today, it's kind of hard to not think
about it and still eat. I think what's good for
your body. I have a new roommate that moved in.
She loves baking, so now there's just baked goods in
the house all the time. And it's like, if I
(10:34):
don't consciously think to myself like I probably shouldn't be
having this all the time, I just would because they
just taste good, do you know what I mean? So,
how do you like balance the idea of like these
things are everywhere all the time, and even all my
social gatherings, I've been noticing like I've just been going
out every other day guys and getting food that I
know isn't good for you, because I've just been meeting
my friends because this summer, and in the back of
my mind, I'm like kind of like, oh, like I
(10:54):
feel like it's just like happening a lot right now.
I don't really like it. I don't really feel like
I feel as good. But then I also don't want
to be becoming very stressed about it like I used to,
and I haven't been. I haven't not been going those
social gatherings because there's food there the way I used to.
Speaker 1 (11:07):
Yeah, And I think this is the problem, right is
as food becomes something that we get worried about that
we're paying more attention to, like that kind of in particular,
we might even think of it like a diet mentality,
that kind of diety mentality that comes in. Whether it's
based on health like really, I just want my body
to feel good, or whether it's based on some diet
notions like I want to change the size of my
(11:28):
body or I want to become fitter or so on.
Both of those have a particular psychological set of features,
which is like it's making us obsessed with stuff, right
like we kind of whether it's a sort of diet
mentality or a sort of fitness mentality, neither of them
are pretty good when they go along with this sort
of anxiousness. And so you know, the kind of anxiousness
you're describing about these sort of social events isn't ideal.
(11:50):
But then that of course raises the question like, okay,
but how do I do that in the environment where
there's this hyper palatable food that I know, even if
I don't care about, like, even if I'm not in
diet head, I still don't want my body to feel
super gross right afterwards, right, And so I think part
of that is really trying to come to terms with
actually paying attention to how these foods make us feel.
There's lots of evidence growing that these hyper palatable foods
(12:14):
really kind of hijack a certain part of our system,
and we often talk about it hijacking our sort of
pleasure system what we really like. But I think that's
sort of incorrect, because when you get down to it,
these foods don't necessarily feel that great if you're paying
attention to them. You know, a lot of people who
engage in mindful eating exercises sometimes have the realization that
whatever food they've been obsessing over, say like Hershey's kisses,
(12:36):
they finally eat them and they're like, oh, they're kind
of waxy, Like I didn't like in my brain, I
had this is this very delicious thing. But when I
mindfully really pay attention on what the taste is, I'm
kind of not digging it that much. And that plays
into this very dumb feature of the way our brains work.
It's like the one feature like if I could change
the way that this part of the human brain work,
I would, which is that there seems to be this
(12:57):
weird disconnect in our brains between wanting and liking, and
so liking is like I eat the Hershey kiss and
how it actually tastes, like what's my actual pleasure response
to is it is or whatever? But wanting is different.
Wanting is how much I start obsessing about it, how
much I want to go after it, how much when
I see it add for it, I'm like, oh, that
(13:18):
seems really good. You would assume that our brains would
be smart, that our brains would put those two circuits together,
that we would want only things that we actually liked,
But it turns out if you look that is not
how brains are organized. There seems to be this interesting
disconnect between liking and wanting, and so you can see
that most clearly with drugs of addiction. You know, so
(13:38):
take somebody who has a heroin addiction. That person has
a really strong wanting for heroin. Right, they're going to
you know, rob their family, get into all kinds of
bad behaviors to go after heroin. But because their bodies
are habituated to it, when they actually experience the drug,
they don't really even like it anymore. Right, They're not
getting the same blast that they got maybe the first
(13:58):
time they got it, and so that already shows us
that there's this disconnect. But I think this is the
same kind of thing that's happening with hyperpalatable food. Right,
Like you know, your roommate makes the bake goods and
you see them on the table, and your wanting system
is like go go go like take that, you know, like,
but maybe when you eat it, I guess you know,
I'm like no, no, Like shade to your room. She
(14:20):
really delicious, but it might not be as good as
your right. And what's frustrating about the wanting liking system
is I think it runs in reverse too. I think
there's lots of stuff that we like that the wanting
system just hasn't latched onto. Take exercise. Right, we were
just talking before we started about you know, all your
(14:41):
dead lifts and going up right, Like, I have never
had my wanting system like tell me to go to
the gym or tell me to do dead lifts. But
I'm pretty sure most of the time I engage in
like a hard plates class or a hard workout, my
liking system fires to that. In the end, when I'm
leaving the gym, I'm having like I'm in a sort
of euphoria of like that felt really good, but it
doesn't translate into this sort of wanting to go after things.
(15:04):
And I think that's true for healthier foods too. Right there,
you know, we're in the middle of summer when we're
having this conversation, and right now, like the peaches are
just like so good. I had a nectary in the
other day that was like on the verge of orgasmic,
but like, oh, I do not still do not have
the wanting for those nectaries and the same way I
would for the bake goods. And so I think understanding
the way this system works can help us a little bit. First,
(15:27):
it just gives us some knowledge about when I'm experiencing
this wanting. It might not be an honest signal I'm
probably not gonna like this as much as my brain
is telling me, my mind's kind of lying to me.
But in another way, it can cause us to really
start to pay attention more to the things we really
do like. And while it is true that the wanting
and liking systems are a little bit disconnected, they can
sort of update a little bit, like when you actually
(15:49):
start to pay attention to your liking. And we know
this from work by folks like Hetty Kobert, who's a
colleague of mine at Yale who studies drugs of addiction,
where she gets, for example, cigarette smokers to really pay
attention when they're smoking, to like do you like the
way this feels? To like the way this smells? You know,
do you like the way this feels? And people often
when they start to pay attention like, actually, this feels
kind of gross. I don't like the smell of that.
I don't like you know, I don't like what this
(16:10):
is doing to my body when I think about that.
And what she finds is that that can gradually start
to update the wanting system, not perfectly, but when you
really start to pay attention to like, hang on, this
was not rewarding, I like really didn't like this. Then
it can kind of do the update, and the same
with really mindfully paying attention to the healthy food. If
you really focus on the nectarine and think about it again,
(16:31):
you're not probably going to crave it. In the same
way your dopamine system goes to these highly palatable foods
that are literally engineered by engineers in a laboratory to
kind of you know, be like the heroine, but you
can kind of get your wanting system a little bit
more on board with going for it.
Speaker 2 (16:44):
So with other drugs of addiction, the biggest thing that
is always like so annoyed me is that, like you,
the ideal would be to like not have them at all,
right for the rest of your life. But with food, like,
it's impossible to do that because you're never going to
be able to like never have hyper palable food again, right,
unless you like live super super restrictively.
Speaker 1 (17:04):
Right, And I think and I can't imagine anyone honestly
doing that right out anxiety, right, I mean, I think
there's you know, there's lots of talk these days in
the field of psychology about orthorexia, right, which for listeners
that don't know, is this again, it's not a DSM,
like you know, like categorist official disorder, but it's one
that leads to people experiencing a lot of anxiety where
you're just really obsessed with eating healthy foods and so ostensibly,
(17:28):
you know, if your dietician or nutrition looked at your
what you were eating, they might be like, oh, that's great,
like you look so healthy, But in practice, you feel
really dysregulated. You feel like you're on this kind of
like verge of a binge all the time. It's taking
up all your airtime for you. It doesn't feel good.
And so I think that's the problem, is that living
in this environment of food being so hyper palatable, it's
(17:49):
so hard to pay attention without dipping into the orthorexia.
Speaker 2 (17:53):
I just I am such an all or nothing person,
Like I would just so much rather have like not
care at all, or like super care than like kind of.
Speaker 1 (17:59):
Care, do you know what I mean, totally have my
friend who says, I wish, you know, the soilent companies
would just like make the thing that was really healthy
and we would never But that's I think we need
to get back to the question that Eddie mentioned right,
which is to get back to kind of having real,
true pleasure in food. Beyond just the hyperpalatability, Right, can
we get back to like the way these things were
(18:21):
created over time, Like maybe like slowly creating healthy foods, right,
embedding them in our cultures and in our rituals. Even
if that's sort of starting new cultures and rituals, What
does that look like?
Speaker 2 (18:32):
Right?
Speaker 1 (18:32):
If you build up that narrative in that history, it
can help there be other things that maybe don't necessarily
replace the hyper palatable foods. Right, We're not going to
like wipe them out of our culture, but it gives
us an alternative of things to pay attention to that
might be kind of healthier in terms of our bodies too.
Speaker 3 (18:48):
Is there a kind of like a literacy around food?
And what I'm thinking of is, I'm sitting here with
a concert pianist to my right. I'm effectively musically illiterate.
I've never learned how to play an instrument. I will
listen to music. I have to remind myself to do it.
Speaker 4 (19:07):
It's all, oh my well, and.
Speaker 3 (19:09):
What's like who while I'm exercising, And I would say
I'm happier if I'm listening to music, but I'm musically illiterate.
I mean, I Okay, is the same with food, Like,
there are some people for whom that's all they focus on.
It can be pathological, as you're pointing out, and then
there's others that could be the happiest people I know,
(19:30):
and they just go like food just doesn't resonate with me.
Speaker 1 (19:33):
Yeah, I think it's it's complicated. I mean, I think,
you know, a lot of the research really suggests about
the narrative that we tell ourselves and again not really
what's in the food. You know. One of my favorite
examples of this that shows kind of how funny these
narratives can be looked at individuals who are paying attention
to different wines. Right, you're tasting wines, right, and you're
doing that, for example, like in an fMRI scanner, so
(19:56):
we can see what's happening in your brain as you're
tasting these things. And what you find is that the
simple label that you're showing people of the price of
this wine affects whether or not they taste it. You know,
literally the reward centers in their brain firing more as
they taste it. And so you can give someone exactly
the same wine and their brains will fire more for
that same wine. If it's labeled as more expensive, right,
(20:19):
And so that tells us something interesting, right, It tells
us it's not what we're tasting, it's kind of what
we're thinking about as we're tasting it. There's a similar
paper about tasting coke and pepsi, and so a lot
of people say that they like coke better. I also
like say that I like coke better. But if you
put people in the scanner and you don't tell them
which is which, people's reward centers fire more for pepsi,
I think, just because pepsi actually has more sugar in
(20:41):
it than the whole and coke. But if you tell
people it's pepsi as they're drinking it, then it will
fire less. So if they don't know what it is,
they like it more than coke. But if you tell
them it's pepsi, they're like.
Speaker 4 (20:50):
Oh, story sets the stage.
Speaker 1 (20:53):
And I think that's powerful, right, I mean, I think
it means that we can set our own stories. Right.
You know, so if your roommate's bringing out the cookies
that she bakes and she just says, oh, they're cookies
that might not taste as delicious as if you say,
these are my grandmother's secret rest if you deck get it,
chocolate cookies, Like just labeling something differently actually does make
(21:15):
it more delicious to us, right, And so there's there's
kind of funny hacks that we can engage in to
make things more delicious.
Speaker 2 (21:21):
Well, I wonder if part of like the reason I
feel that way about food is because like for most
of my life, really food was just like like I
was trying to eat less of it, like that was
its only purpose, you know what I mean. So I
don't know if like part of it is that, Like
I think one time I saw a nutritionis she's kind
of like kind of nutritionis kind of psychologist, and she
was like, you have a lot of fear associated with food,
(21:42):
and you're a migdala is really that miguala is the
part of the brain, guys, that's like the fear kind
of anxiety center of the brain, and it's the kind
of the oldest part of the brain. It's like very
very deep in your brain anyways, and she was saying,
like you just have all these connections between food and
you're amygdala, and like we need to like rewire to
have food and like pleasure associated together, not just food
and fear.
Speaker 1 (22:01):
Yeah, I mean, I think there's really something to that, right,
I mean, I think if you really have like a
clinically you know, diagnosed eating disorder, you know, you're building
in so many negative emotions that come with food, whether
it's about eating too much of it or which kinds
of it? Right, Like, it means that you're not no
longer thinking of food as this like fuel that's neutral,
or like a friend that you could savor, that you
(22:21):
might like, but is this negative, scary, like potentially harmful,
threatening thing. And so I think the process of trying
to engage a little bit more with food mindfully, you know,
might be might be pretty helpful, you know, because we
do know that both again, the stories we tell ourselves
about food matter, and so if you have a negative story,
that's only going to make it worse. But if you
have a positive story, that might be better. But also
(22:42):
the rituals that we have around food matter to right.
You know, a wine drunk and a really nice wine
glass at a beautiful restaurant's gonna taste different than you know,
out of a bag, like you know, I don't know,
in a dorm room somewhere like some ivy league dorm room, right,
you know, And so I think we can try to
develop different rituals to come up with food and a
lot of you know, therapeutic interventions for eating disorders as
(23:04):
people are eating more. You know, that's one of the things. Right,
It's like, let's let's try to kind of make this
thing not scary. Let's put it in a pretty dish,
you know, set thee have a nice ritual about it.
You really take a deep breath before you eat it,
really try to pay attention to what does this taste like?
You know, how would I describe this?
Speaker 2 (23:20):
Like that?
Speaker 1 (23:21):
Kind of mindful eating can at least make you more
pay more attention to how things taste. And often when
you're doing that, you can notice the pleasure that's associated
with that.
Speaker 4 (23:30):
So I have like several thoughts that may be related.
Let me give it a truck.
Speaker 3 (23:35):
So once a year, I have this joyous obligation of
going out to the healthy Kitchens.
Speaker 4 (23:40):
Healthy Kitchens. Course, it's a NAPA valley.
Speaker 3 (23:44):
It is at the Culinary Institute of America and part
of it you're in the middle of wine country, and
part of it they actually have these tables set up
and you can go from table to table and do
a wine tasting. And my first reaction when I tasted
some of these remarkable wines that cost like one hundred
dollars plus per bottle was like, oh, it's like velvet.
(24:06):
And I remember calling my wife and saying, remember how
I said, I don't like wine. I don't like cheap wine.
But what I'm learning from you, Laurie, is that what
sold the wine to me was again the setting and
the story that is it the venter is that they
were actually standing there pouring their their creation and setting
(24:27):
me up for this experience. And it was sort of like,
of course I was going to I mean, first off,
it really is objectively better. Put me in an FMR.
Speaker 4 (24:37):
We could test it. I'm sure someone has. I'll sign
up for that study.
Speaker 3 (24:40):
But I guess what I'm learning is that it's really
the setting, the story.
Speaker 4 (24:46):
Can we do that to get ourselves eating better?
Speaker 1 (24:50):
I think so? And I think you know, you know,
there's some evidence that even right, the palatability of you know,
not so palatable foods, right, you know, the healthier like
just a bunch of greens or roots or these kinds
of things, just the setting can make a lot of difference, right.
You know, if you walk into you know, one of
these like bougie New York kind of vegan places where
the stuff has plated really well, and you know you're
(25:10):
paying a lot of money, the kale that's there is
different than the kale that I you know, grab the supermarket,
like just to me to taste differently, right, So I
think that matters. I think who we are eating with
seems to matter too. You know there's lots of top
account what's that.
Speaker 2 (25:25):
My TikTok account? I'm just scrolling.
Speaker 1 (25:27):
Yeah, yeah, that is part of yeah, yeah, but I
think but you bring up a really important point, right,
which is that you know, we act like these healthier
foods don't taste good, but in practice we're not really
giving them the sort of mindfulness benefit of the doubt
when we're engaging with them. You know, I was joking about,
you know, the snacks that you have in your bag
kind of thing earlier. But you know, as I've made
(25:48):
a foray into trying to eat more healthfully again, not
for a weight loss or just like to you know,
make my body feel good. Sometimes that means eating on
the go. Sometimes that means grabbing you know, a few
carrot sticks that are in my bag, and that's not
often eating and the prettiest way possible with the best
narrative possible. It's just kind of like getting the fuel
in to go, right. And so it does feel like
we're sometimes because we're so busy and because we're so
(26:11):
easily distracted, missing out on these opportunities to really enjoy food. Well,
you know, one of the main complaints of people who
try to engage in more mindful eating is just like
it's boring, yes, Like you're like like I have to
just eat and not watch you know, like not look
at my TikTok videos or not watch root Pul's drag
(26:31):
race or whatever. It's like what, you know, Like how
am I expected to just eat? Right? Like? It just
seems so boring, right, And I think that tells us something, Right,
even if we're eating a hyper palatable food, it sometimes
seems boring, right, And that really tells us it wasn't
about the food, It wasn't about our enjoyment. It was
really about the wanting of the food, right. The getting
of it and enjoying didn't really matter as much as.
Speaker 3 (26:52):
The advertisements set the wanting.
Speaker 4 (26:55):
I mean, the double bacon cheeseburger, make it your way.
Speaker 1 (27:00):
I mean part of them is that, you know, like
most advertisements, they're often very inaccurate. Google how companies make
these palatable food exactly. Yeah, you know, like ice cream
with food ads is actually just like Crisco or like
because they can't it would melt under the lights, right,
and so you know, so a lot of them are
kind of faked. But yeah, I think those things are
created to really amp up our wanting system.
Speaker 2 (27:23):
I mean, it's even like I have an association with Starbucks.
I've loved Starbucks since I was like fifteen. I've been
a gold member since that age anyways, and so I
used to go there every day, and like now I
don't say I can't afford it anymore, but even when
I go, it's just like, oh my, oh, this latte
is so good. It's so much better than that. And
everybody hates Starbucks coffee. People that actually coffee are like
(27:43):
Starbucks is not good. And it's just like the even
the brand of Starbucks. Like I just love the idea
of I'm going to get my Starbucks, if that makes sense.
Just it's something I grew up with and it's so
comforting to.
Speaker 1 (27:54):
Me, and even branding right can matter a lot. You know,
I mentioned this coke and pepsi, you know again, Yeah,
when we drink it, the neural activation fire is more
for pepsi, But knowing it's pepsi versus coke makes us
think really differently about it. I think knowing something Starbucks
makes us think think differently about it. And I think
this gets also back to you know, we were talking
about why are these hyperpalatable foods, you know, so addictive?
(28:14):
Why do they kind of trigger this wanting system so much?
And I think part of it is that, like the
not so hyperpalatable foods, they don't tend to have the
marketers or the brand now, like my nectarine from the
Farmer's Market doesn't come with, like, you know, a logo
that I associate with that nectarine that's bright that you know,
triggers my memories about eating previous nectarines. It's just a nectarine, right,
(28:35):
And so I think that's that's one of the things
that we're pushing against as we try to engage in
eating more healthily, is that most of the healthy stuff
just doesn't have any of that kind of branding narrative.
Nuance that gets our wanting systems and.
Speaker 2 (28:49):
No health claims on the packaging too. So I think
we had a figure in our book that was like
the amounts of money spent on like food marketing by
food companies, and it was like billions of dollars. And
then the amounts of money spent on like agriculture marketings,
like marketing vegetables basically, and it was like two hundred million,
and it was like less than one percent of the
marketing budget or whatever. Also, all the packaging in the supermarket,
(29:10):
if you look at the packaging, you would think the
healthiest food is in the middle of the supermarket, right,
and then all the vegetables have zero packaging. So it's like,
I don't know, it is all very deceptive.
Speaker 3 (29:20):
We'll be right back, and we're back with Professor Laurie
Santos of the Happiness Lab, a professor of psychology at
Yale University.
Speaker 2 (29:38):
The other thing I wanted to ask you about was
weather restriction makes the wanting part even more mismatch with
the liking because I remember when I was like, oh,
I can't eat this, that and the other. The only
thing I was allowed to eat at the end of
the week. That was like, my treat thing was Halo
Top ice cream, which is like the high protein ice cream.
If you don't know itdy, it's like it's like ice
cream with protein powder. Yeah, okay, everybody says it's terrible.
(30:02):
Because I was having no other treats, I was like,
Halo Top is the best thing on the planet. And
remember I'd wait all week for my and I was like,
I can have a whole pint because it's only three
hundred whatever calories. And then I would get it and
I'd be like, this is like not good. Why did
I wait all week? But I would eat the whole things.
I was like, I waited all week for this. I
have to eat, you know what I mean?
Speaker 1 (30:20):
Yeah, I think your liking system was more honest, maybe
about the Halo Top, but yeah, I mean I think
you know. So, another kind of dumb feature in the
brain is that our brain really doesn't have any way
to kind of tell itself not to do something. So
take like, you know, let's get back to sort of
drugs of addiction. Like you're walking down the street and
you're a smoker and you see a non smoking sign, right, Ostensibly,
(30:42):
the sign is telling you not to smoke, but we
don't really have any representation in our brain for not smoke.
What our brain sees is smoking, and it tries to
shut that down. So it turns out that if you
look at the cravings that smokers experience, they experience more
craving in the presence of no smoking signs Oh my god.
And the reason is, like you just they're just like
(31:03):
walking down the street, maybe not thinking about smoking, and
they look and they're like smoking. Oh wait, don't do that.
But what's in their brain is like smoking, smoke, right.
I think that insight tells us why restricting often comes
with binges. Why In the words of someone who's been
on my podcast a lot, Andrea Walker, who studies mindful eating,
she calls it the diet riot roller coaster, the diets
often go with the riots and part because just the
(31:25):
act of telling yourself don't have it usually comes with
you thinking about having it. Right, So take your halo
top right, You're like, I'm not gonna have it till
the end of the week. I'm not gonna have it
till the end of a week. But your brain is
just like halo top, halo top, and like there's pressure
is to like kind of squish it down. But really
what it's thinking about is that food. And so a
better way to kind of get out of that restriction
(31:46):
mindset is actually to find the healthier food that you like.
You know, so instead of like, oh I can't I
just got to wait on the halotop, no halotop, no halotop.
If you thought like, ooh, today you're like really good
blueberries that just came from the supermarket, or like I
got these almonds that are like so fresh and I'm
excited about them. Right, thinking about the thing that you
(32:06):
actually want to do rather than the thing that you're
not supposed to do can be quite helpful. But yeah,
I mean, you know, pretty much every available study of
binge eating suggests it doesn't come from nowhere. It comes
from having a mindset of restriction. Right, That's what's kind
of leading people to. People don't necessarily binge unless they
also have a even in their head, if they're not
(32:27):
acting on it, this urge that they're not supposed to
do or these are the things they're not supposed to eat.
Speaker 4 (32:31):
I love this list of dumb things our brains do.
Speaker 1 (32:34):
Usual. My podcast is all about just like things that
Laurie think is stupidly designed in the brain.
Speaker 2 (32:39):
Yeah, Laurie's going to come out with like a human
brain two point zero that we can all transplant some point.
The other thing I want to ask you about binge
eating is that isn't it true that binges also serve
some sort of emotion regulation purpose? And we cited a
few studies that were interesting in our book that kind
of made binge eating analogous to food addiction, And it's
(32:59):
said that the research wasn't really conclusive on whether or
not food addiction is binge eating, whether or not food
adiction is actually a real thing. Maybe they're related, maybe
they're two separate things, but it did relate food addiction
or like not being able to regulate food intake. I
guess to substances of abuse because a lot of people,
when you ask them about it, it's like a behavior
they really want to stop and they're unable to stop,
(33:20):
and they kind of tell themselves to not do it,
not do it, not do it, and they end up
doing it and they feel really bad. So it kind
of had a lot of similarities to the addiction cycle.
So I was wondering what you think about that relationship
between addiction food.
Speaker 1 (33:31):
Yeah, I think, you know, the addiction literature in fields
of psychology and psychiatry right now is a little complicated,
right in the sense that you know, we know that
some addictions are kind of more classic addiction, say, you know,
like a heroin addiction, for example, Those drugs of abuse
are literally tapping into chemicals that are kind of part
of the wanting system, right, you know, like like heroin
(33:51):
is like you know, these are opiates that are tapping
into opiate systems that exist in our brain. So it's
like you're abusing the very chemical that is very very
close to the signal in the brain. There's a more
open question about addictions that seem to have all the
same features where people binge on these things, they overthink
about them, they want to stop, but they can't write. Like,
behaviorally and psychologically these look the same, But the substance
(34:14):
that you're feeling addicted to isn't like an opiate, right,
It isn't a chemical signaler in a brain, you know,
So things like a shopping addiction, or an internet addiction,
or a TikTok addiction, or you know, maybe in a
more nebulous case, a sugar addiction or a food addiction. Right, Obviously,
foods are you know, they're not direct opiates, but they're
chemicals that are playing a part in this process.
Speaker 3 (34:35):
Right.
Speaker 1 (34:35):
But there's some debate about whether we want to call
that addiction. Yeah, you know, to a psychologist like me,
if it's if it's taking up your thought pattern, if
it's like messing with your sense of self, if it's
messing with your daily life, it feels addictive, even though
we might not want to call it a capital a addiction.
And I think bending behaviors, food behaviors for a lot
of people feel addictive, you know, whether that's kind of
(34:57):
a drug of choice and that you're kind of eating
more food than you want to or comfortable with, whether
that's you know, something like orthorexia where the thought patterns
that you engage in are really you know, you don't
want to keep thinking about healthy food, but you're kind
of obsessing with it, like almost like in an OCD way.
And so I think, even though again there's some debate
about whether it kind of fits as a kind of
capital a addiction that would be in like the psychology journals,
(35:20):
it definitely for the people that are experiencing these things
is like deeply problematic, you know, beyond just being an
eating disorder or something like that.
Speaker 2 (35:27):
Well, it's also that a lot of people use food
to cope with things.
Speaker 1 (35:30):
Yeah, and I think that's a big thing, right. You know,
food really is about pleasure, right. It's a way of
getting pleasure. Sometimes it just gives us something to do, right,
you know, like you're feeling bored and it's like a
thing that you can turn to. Sometimes it's a way
of escaping reality, you know, so kind of it's it's
a behavior akin to something like cutting, which is another
sort of behavior like this, where it's like it just
(35:50):
is the only thing you can think about, so you
can't think about other things. And so yeah, I think
we're using these foods in functional ways. I think sometimes
when we think about disorders of eating, we say, like
what's going on? But you know, minds are smart, despite
what I was saying about all these problems with the
way brains are organized, Like, our minds are smart, right,
And sometimes the best go to for pleasure for when
(36:11):
you need to stop thinking about something is something related
to your eating.
Speaker 3 (36:15):
So as we start to wrap up absent paying, what
does Yale cost now seventy thousand dollars. What kind of
assignment would you give your students in your happiness course
about food?
Speaker 1 (36:28):
Yeah? Well, what is to start paying attention to kind
of how and why you're eating? Right? I think one
of the best early steps in mindful eating is to
start when you have the urge to eat something, kind
of ask like, why, what's going on? Am I actually hungry?
Maybe maybe I'm bored? Maybe I just saw the food,
Like when you have that craving kind of ask what's
going on? Not in a judgmental like I can't have
(36:49):
it way, but just in a like curious noticing, like
I wonder what caused that urge? And sometimes when you
start to engage in that process, you notice it wasn't
really about hunger. It was about some emotion like you
were bored, or maybe you were in a good mood,
or you were excited, or you just saw it, right, Like,
that's the first step I think to noticing whether you're
using food in the way that at least evolutionarily our
(37:09):
bodies intended, which is as fuel. Right, And you can
eat for other reasons, but like that's the main reason.
And then I think the second exercise is to really
pay attention to how a food really truly feels, the
real liking that you're getting from it when you experience it,
because again, sometimes these hyper palatable foods that are like
in our brain of like, oh, I'm so obsessed with that,
when you finally sit down and notice you're kind of
(37:31):
it sort of takes some of the magic away. You're like,
that actually wasn't like as super delicious as I thought.
And this is a practice that we use generally beyond
just the domain of food in the class, just a
practice of mindfulness trying to notice what things feel like.
And I think often that practice shows us this dissociation
between wanting and liking, where we're like, huh, I really
(37:52):
wanted that thing, you know whatever, it was shopping, buying something,
watching the TikTok videos, eating, but I didn't actually like
it as much as I thought. And sometimes, I think
in a more important way, it can tell us the opposite,
right Like I didn't really want to go to the gym,
but I enjoyed it more than I thought, Right Like,
I thought this salad was just gonna be the boring
thing I was going to eat because I was you know,
trying to eat healthier. But when I paid attention, it
(38:13):
was crunchy, it was delicious, It had these flavors that
I didn't expect, right, And so I think that that
mindful process can kind of allow us to get our
wanting and liking back in sync. And it can also
be you know, an important part of the presence that
just makes life better, and that we can savor it
and notice it more.
Speaker 2 (38:30):
M Okay, do we have our assignments.
Speaker 4 (38:33):
Yes, I'm going to savor more.
Speaker 3 (38:35):
I'm going to like more, want less.
Speaker 1 (38:41):
I think that's a great Yeah. Yeah, I mean, you know,
I think, you know, these ancient traditions were onto something
in so many domains. I think, for sure when it
comes to happiness, but probably when it came to food.
You know, I don't think that the ancients had as
complicated a relationship with food. You know, we went all
the way back to hunter gatherers, but I'm like, we
(39:01):
don't have to go back that far. I think even
if we rewind, honestly, like seventy five one hundred years,
we're already getting to cultural relationships with food that were
a lot healthier.
Speaker 2 (39:13):
That's what my parents always said when after they read
the book and stuff, and my mom said that she
was so surprised at how complicated my relationship with food was,
because she said, when she grew up in Albania, like
nobody was like dieting or like changing their food choices
on purpose. Do you know what I mean?
Speaker 1 (39:28):
Yeah, in some ways, it's a funny, weird privilege that
we have. Yeah, because we have a lot of food,
because we have an enormous variety of food. Yeah, But
it's not a fun privilege. It's one that causes people
a lot of pain and suffering.
Speaker 2 (39:40):
But do you think part of the reason why, like
we have more of that today than we did before
is because the food environment is so different today. I
feel like if the food environment is the way it
is now, these problems are always going to arise because
these aren't foods that necessarily promote the best eating patterns totally.
Speaker 1 (39:55):
And I think that that came hand in hand with
a kind of relaxing or maybe a removal of some
of the cultural traditions of food that came with it.
You know, So two things kind of happen. One is
I think we lost kind of culturally specific ways of
eating right for the most part, especially in the US
where maybe we didn't even grow up with them, but
a lot of people came from family backgrounds where they
you know, had kind of these traditions of eating food.
(40:16):
So those things were going away at the same time
as I think, you know, the food industrial complex was
telling us like, oh, these things are so healthy or
these things are so delicious. And there were advertisements on TV,
you know, I mean take an extreme example, take something
like breast milk versus formula. Right. You know, I was
from the generation my mom where they were like, oh,
breast milk so totally not good, like we want the
(40:37):
you know, food science energized formula like healthy. Yeah, some
ways it still is, you know. And I think that
you know, that basic thing was telling you, oh, you're
you know, the wisdom you thought you had about food
that was wrong. Let's follow what the nutrition science says,
you know, like doctor Kellogg who with his you know,
crackers of like we'll control those urges and make you
(40:59):
healthy eat these crackers, right, And so I think that
that really really was a moment in time that was
happening as again, culturally, we were kind of abandoning what
we used to do, and so in some ways it
was like a double edged sword of these more of
these hyper palatable foods around in a way there never
had been in human history. Plus the kind of loss
of our sort of ancestral wisdom about just how to eat.
Speaker 2 (41:20):
Yeah, when my parents came to America, they my mom
said that everybody here had like low fat milk and
like low fat yogurt and stuff, and like they could
not be converted because they were like it's so gross,
like it tastes so bad in comparison. And I remember
growing up and I was like, oh, you guys are
so unhealthy, like you're always getting you know, and my
mom would make her own yogurt and with whole milk,
should buy, right, I like, you guys are so unhealthy,
(41:40):
blah bah blah. And now the narratives completely changed where
it's like people always say don't have low fat things
because they've been manipulated to take out the fat and
blah blahlahlah blah. And I was like, damn it.
Speaker 4 (41:48):
They were right.
Speaker 2 (41:49):
They're always right in the end, damn it. Anyways, thank
you so much for coming back on the podcast to
talk to us about food.
Speaker 1 (41:56):
Thanks so much for having.
Speaker 2 (41:57):
Me and for telling us all the dumb things that
the human brain does.
Speaker 1 (42:02):
Yeah, welcome back next time and do it even more.
Speaker 2 (42:07):
Thank you so much to Professor Santis for coming on
today's episode again, it was so much fun. We will
link to her podcast as well as all her work
on our website, and if you want to hear bonus episodes,
you can go to food we Need to Talk dot com,
slash membership and become part of the foodie fam. You
can find us on Instagram at food we Need to Talk.
(42:27):
You can find me on Instagram at the official Una
and Yunajada. On YouTube and TikTok, you can find.
Speaker 4 (42:33):
Eddie savoring and really learning to like my food.
Speaker 2 (42:38):
Food we Need to Talk is a production of pr X.
Speaker 3 (42:42):
Our senior producer is Morgan Flannery and our producer is
Megan Aftermat.
Speaker 2 (42:47):
Tommy Bazarian is our mixed engineer.
Speaker 3 (42:49):
Jocelyn Gonzales is executive producer for PRX Productions.
Speaker 2 (42:54):
Food we Need to Talk was co created by Kerry Goldberg,
George Hicks, Eddie Phillips and me.
Speaker 3 (42:59):
For any personal health questions, please consult your personal health provider.
To find out more, go to foodwe Need to Talk
dot com thanks for listening, who WO,
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