Podcast Review: Peter Attia w/ Michael Easter
Michael Easter is an investigative journalist, author or The Comfort Crisis and a new book Scarcity Brain, discussed in this episode. Michael Easter makes the point that most of our behaviors as humans are based off what he calls “the scarcity loop,” which consists of three components.
Opportunity - you have an opportunity to get something of value
Unpredictable rewards - you don’t know when and how much, but you know something is coming
Quick repeatability - The faster a human or any animal can repeat a behavior the more likely they are to repeat that behavior
And it’s this evolutionary scarcity loop that food manufacturers, casinos, drugs, retailers, and social media take advantage of to keep us eating, gambling, inebriated, shopping and scrolling.
The episode dives into each one in further detail, but I’d like to focus on their discussion of food and diet as I believe it is the most relevant and important.
Food wasn’t always easy to come by, and when food was scarce, we had a necessity to store excess food for energy. But you also had to expel energy to get energy. Now, more than 10,000 items line grocery store shelves, which created an environment where over-nourishment now causes 4x more disease worldwide than under-nourishment. Simply put, the more options we have, the more we will eat. A behavior that has been termed the “buffet effect.”
The result is a population that consumes 60 - 70% of their calories from ultra-processed foods (i.e. fast food, potato chips, cereal), and where 70% of adults are overweight or obese. This trend towards consuming more and more processed food began in the 1970s with the invention of the “snack.” Food manufacturers discovered what Michael Easter refers to as the Three V’s of Snacking that would ensure a snack sells.
Value - it must be affordable (cheap)
Variety - the more flavors the better
Velocity - it must be fast to eat ensuring over consumption
The environment created by Big Food is at the root of our disease epidemic. Food that is designed to be extremely palatable, cheap (we spend 8% of our income on food today compared to 40% historically), non-perishable, and calorically dense has resulted in the dramatic rise in metabolic disease, which causes chronic illnesses such as obesity, diabetes, and heart disease.
A study discussed in the episode verifies this claim. The purpose of the study was to determine the impact of ultra-processed food on weight gain. A group of participants were kept in a tightly controlled environment for one month and fed a diet of ultra-processed foods for two weeks, followed by a diet of minimally processed food for two weeks.
The result showed that on the ultra-processed food diet participants ate on average 500 calories more per day, and gained 2 lbs. When they were on the minimally processed food diet they lost 2 lbs.
The lead researcher Kevin D. Hall Ph.D. concluded, “This is the first study to demonstrate causality — that ultra-processed foods cause people to eat too many calories and gain weight."
So what do we do in a world filled with cheap processed food? Michael Easter visited a group of hunter gatherers, the Tsimane, in Bolivia who do not suffer from heart disease, or any other diseases of the modern world, to find out.
He found that they’re diet consisted of fish, meat, rice, plantains, vegetables, and fruit. They consumed every type of macro, but never fried or overcooked their food, and always ate in moderationn. The one thing they didn’t consume, was ultra-processed foods. He broke it down as follows.
Eat foods that are ingredients, not food that contain ingredients (i.e. fruits, vegetables, lean protein).
Eat your food plain. Even adding something as innocuous as salt makes food taste better and can cause over-eating.
Eat slowly. The quicker you eat the more likely you are to over-eat.
Eat a balanced diet with a little bit of everything.
He also noted that they did not eat a ton of vegetables, about the equivalent of one Sweet Green salads worth of vegetables a day.
This was a great episode and I encourage you to listen to it in length to hear many more valuable insights. I have The Comfort Crisis in the queue to read next and report back on.
Cheers.