Dr. Casey Means

And food is so important because, again, we take in 70 metric tons of food in a lifetime, two to three pounds per day, one metric ton per year on average.

And that is like the printer ink.

That's the 3D printer ink to create tomorrow's version of ourself, which is molecularly different than the Casey of today.

That's a hopeful message because if we can give the body food, which I think we – again, our conception of food I think is very limited.

Food is the molecular building blocks of the body.

It is the cell signaling functional molecules that tell our cells what to do.

They act as –

transcription factors, epigenetic modifiers, cell signaling pathway intermediates.

It's also, of course, the substrate to change what the microbiome does and the composition of the microbiome, which is basically a pharmacy inside our bodies to create different molecules that can affect our health.

Food is certainly a calorie is a calorie from the concept of thermodynamics, but from the concept of molecular information, it has three massively important parts that are unavoidable for creating cellular health.

So I would just say that that is the pillar that we can be happy to drill into of like, what do we really do to build as much metabolic health as possible?

Well, just drilling in on two things you just said there.

So one thing you said that was interesting was that you're lucky that you like all of those foods.

And then the second thing was, is it just about not getting excess calories?

But I think what's interesting about both of those is that I would argue that the reason you like those foods is because you have given your body enough whole real foods that now everything in your biology, neurobiologically, your reward circuitry, your microbiome,

your satiety hormone threshold, all of these are now basically creating a situation in which you like those foods.

And then the caloric thing fits into that because the reason we're eating excess calories, the reason chronic nutrition is happening, and the reason we are quite literally in the United States eating ourselves to death for the first time in human history is

is because we're not eating real food.

And we're eating 60% to 75% of our calories of ultra-processed, nutrient-depleted foods that fundamentally

don't give our cells what they need.