Podcast Review: Peter Attia w/ Michael Easter
Takeaways from Peter Attia and Michael Easter’s conversation about his new book Scarcity Brain and the research that went into writing it.
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.
The Peter Attia Drive: Dr. Tom Catena
#40 – Tom Catena, M.D.: The world’s most important doctor
The Peter Attia Drive: Dr. Tom Catena (from 2019, recently re-aired)
“I think maybe the modus operandi of my life is always looking for, what’s the opposite of greener pastures? Browner pastures (laughs)”
That’s a quote from guest Tom Catena, M.D., the only physician working in the Nubah Mountains in Sudan, where a civil war has raged for over a decade, devastating the community, injuring thousands and taking countless lives. If it sounds like this episode is going to be a depressing one, it’s far from it. On the contrary it’s quite uplifting.
Tom Catena, M.D. is a fascinating man. He knew from a young age that he wanted to be a missionary but he didn’t know in what capacity, so he become a physician. He figured he could use his profession to serve others. And that's exactly what he’s been doing for more than a decade. Sacrificing time with family, the comforts of home (the U.S.), and an easy medical practice complete with all of the modernities the states have to offer.
I loved this conversation because I don’t think I’ve ever heard someone as authentic and genuinely good as Tom Catena. In every single way he is the person we all strive in our head to be, but very few actually become.
Throughout this episode there were a few things that stood out to me.
What are you willing to sacrifice?
During the conversation Dr. Attia starts to lament on wishing he was as good a person as Dr. Catena is. After all they are both physicians, and Dr. Attia has chosen a much different path than Dr. Catena. He’s chosen to serve people in the familiarity of home, on topics (longevity, lifespan) that he is passionate about. He is not in the classical sense of the definition, a missionary.
But Dr. Catena’s response is very real. Dr. Attia’s role in this world, or specifically in this struggle in the Nubah Mountains, is to use his platform (this podcast, his newsletter, and website) to bring awareness to the struggle where there hasn’t been much (if any) before. I know I had never heard of it prior to listening to this episode.
He asks the question in a sense, to think about what it is your willing to sacrifice. For Dr. Catena the answer is comfort, friends, family and high paying job. Everyone’s answer is going to be different. But it’s important that we all don’t fall into a feeling of apathy because we believe we aren’t able to contribute in the same manner as someone else. Rather we should ask ourselves, what are we willing to sacrifice, and use that to guide us.
The bloated U.S. healthcare system.
The hospital that Dr. Catena runs operated on donations. Dr. Catena earns $350 a week for his services. He serves a community of roughly 1,000,000 people. He (Dr. Catena) explains that if he had a $1,000,000 annual budget, he could:
treat 130,000 out patients
perform 2,000 surgeries
treat 6,000 in patients
treat several thousand maternity patients
deliver hundreds of babies
vaccinate thousands of children
For comparison a surgery in the U.S. could run anywhere from $20,000 - $150,000 depending on the surgery being performed and where. The U.S. spends over a trillion dollars per year on healthcare and yet we remain one of the most unhealthy nations in the world. So where is all of our money going and how much better could we be doing. Not just monetarily, but in serving the people who need it most.
Suicide, or lack thereof, in the Nubah Mountains
In all of his time in this war torn region of the world (over 10 years), Dr. Catena has only experienced one suicide. A man who shot himself and completely shook the community.
Meanwhile in the U.S. suicide ranks among the top ten causes of death in every age demographic except 0 - 10. That’s only counting fast suicide. Slow suicide (alcohol, drugs, over consumption of food) over a lifetime makes up pretty much all ten of the top ten causes of death in this country (heart disease, stroke, cancer, diabetes etc…).
How a war torn region of people can remain so steadfast in their desire to live, compared to a nation that has everything, is described in great detail in the book Tribe, by Sebastian Junger.
The Starfish Story
Lastly, this is just a great anecdote for anyone that feels like they couldn’t possibly make a difference. The Starfish Story.
I hope you enjoy this episode as much as I did.
This short article about Tom Catena, MD is a short version of the podcast episode: He’s Jesus Christ