Dr. Casey Means

And when it really comes, there are obviously more things our body needs, but if we strive for these five things, we will ultimately, I think eat a really healthy diet.

And that is nutrition,

Fiber, omega-3s, adequate healthy protein, a good amount of probiotics, and high antioxidant sources.

And if we build our diet around knowing a few things in each of those categories that we really love and stock our kitchen with it and make our meals a mixing and matching of each of those components and we get a good amount of those, we will give the body a lot of what it needs to have mitochondrial health, reduce chronic inflammation, reduce oxidative stress.

if we eat natural food.

I think it's almost ridiculous to talk about calories in isolation because the reason we're eating more calories is because we're eating ultra-processed food.

But I love what you just said, Andrew, about

the brain and the polypharmacy.

I've never heard that said.

And I think it's like processed food is like polypharmacy of food.

It is the definition of processed food, which I know you talked about with Rob Lustig, the NOVA4 criteria is literally it's breaking down foods into these constituent parts that were never meant to be separated from each other, like the endosperm of

a wheat kernel separate from the bran and the, you know, the germ.

And then take that and like a little science experiment, pair it up with all these other individual components and synthetic chemicals that are made in a factory and put them together to create this thing that the body, I truly think our

insatiable hunger, again, we're eating ourselves to death in the United States.

That's the reality.

Our insatiable hunger and our chronic disease epidemic fundamentally is a lot of, it's mass cellular confusion.

And when you think about what chronic inflammation is, chronic inflammation is biochemical fear.

on the cellular level well when you put this stuff into the body that's never seen before obviously that's going to generate some confusion and you know you could you could trace that back to what that really means with leaky gut and you know all the sorts of the real physiology of that but um there's a wonderful book that is called the end of cravings by mark schatzer he also wrote the dorito effect but he talks a little bit about what you're talking about which is this ideal that processed food is actually the ultimate

sort of food-based variable reward.

So in the way that it – like things that – I mean, I'm speaking expert here, but things that the body can't predict what the outcome is going to be are going to kind of get you in that dopamine motivation pathway.