JB Interviewed on Night Talker Radio

Jonathan: Hey everyone, Jonathan Bailor coming at you with another bonus, yes a bonus part of the Smarter Science of Slim podcast episode. The goal with these bonus episodes is to provide you one spot where you can get all things audio Smarter Science of Slim related. A lot of listeners have emailed us saying there’s a bunch of stuff going on, Smarter Science of Slim related, it’s hard to keep tabs on all of it. Can you just give us one spot where we can listen to all things SSOS? That’s what these bonus episodes are trying to do.

Tune in to these podcasts you get, you get it all. Unfortunately some of the bonus episodes are going to be a little redundant, interviewers tend to ask me similar questions but hopefully, you’ll get at least something out of each bonus episodes and if not, Carrie and I will be back will be back with some new content in just few days. Hope they’re at least somewhat use for. So remember to eat smarter, exercise smarter and live better.

Micheal: Hi friends, I’m Micheal David McGuire here at the studio in New York. Welcome back for more of the Night Talker Show brought to you this hour and every hour by Media Consulting Services, world class media marketing, branding and PR, helping serious businesses worldwide reach the world. For details go to mediaconsultingservices.com.

As I got ready to do the show today, I knew that we’d be talking with Jonathan Bailor, the fitness and nutrition researcher, author of the new book The Smarter Science of Slim, Eat More, Exercise Less Smarter. As I headed into the studio, I couldn’t help but take a quick trip down the memory lane back to the early days of TV when television was black and white and there were three channels and the shows that you would get would be like I Love Lucy and Perry Mason.

For those of you who remember those days, including the news cast, people smoked cigarettes on television and that’s hard to believe today. The cigarette ads were featured faces of doctors telling us how healthy cigarette smoking was and to those of us today that’s just unbelievable and that is the parallel that I draw with some of the health and fitness research that Jonathan Bailor’s been doing.

Our guest, Jonathan Bailor, welcome to the show.

Jonathan: Thank you so much for having me.

Micheal: You know I’ve read the book and a lot of people now have read the book, the reviews that you’re for the Smarter Science of Slim are really quite impressive and I know when I first came across the concept of Eat more and Exercise Less Smarter, of course, my initial reaction and like the reaction of a lot of people, this is really too good, to be true. When I tried the program myself, the eat more part of it, by the way, I actually dropped five pound in about two weeks. I thank you for that. That’s something really I haven’t had the chance to talked to you about and it’s something that I sincerely appreciate.

Jonathan: Well my pleasure. I’m definitely happy to help.

Micheal: You know, it is so interesting to read your book and to understand the concepts that you’re talking about which, when one reads these concepts, they are so obvious, so intuitive, so absolutely right. A question for you, which I’m sure you can answer, when did diet and nutrition become a matter of opinion and not a matter of fact?

Jonathan: That’s a question I ask myself everyday Mike. It seems like we have, we go out, we read these books and we hear what everyone thinks about diet and nutrition and I’m just sort of scratching my head, and I was just like, wait, this isn’t really a matter of opinion right?”

When we eat food, our body does all kind of chemical reaction, not to sound too geeky and that’s a matter biology and chemistry, that’s not a matter of opinion. It’s something that could be studied and it’s something that has been studied. We just haven’t had access to that research, we’ve only had access to what people who profit off of our weight loss struggles for lack of better terms tell us.

Micheal: Well, it’s something that I think is obvious but I never really thought about much before and very few people that I’ve talked to have ever thought about is that, the so called diet industry, diet sodas, diet chips, this is a multi-billion dollar industry right next door to the multi-billion industry of exercise, going to the gym and there’s a lot of money to be made by keeping people fat.

Jonathan: It’s funny too because in what you just said, there’s a lot of money to be made in helping people to eat less and a lot of money to be made in helping people to exercise more because those are both very difficult things to do. What are the most basic needs we have? It’s to eat food, so when you tell people they have to eat less, well, there’s a lot of products and services you can buy to help you do that.

What’s the one thing we don’t have enough of today? We don’t have enough time, so was it like, “Oh, it’s fine you keep your weight. You just need to go exercise six hours a week.” There’s a lot of money to be made trying to bring that number down or try to make that number more palatable. You’d tell me I’ve got to go walk on a treadmill for six hours, that treadmill better have a freaking plasma screen TV hooked up to it or something because exercising more and eating less just really isn’t a practical option in today’s society.

Micheal: Well, I am a big fan of yours and of your book. I’ve put it into practice in my own life and, I don’t want this coming across like some sort of cheesy infomercial to sell your book. I think you’re doing just fine in the book sales department and the reviews that have been coming in have been really quite amazing but one of the things that really struck me in the book was, and this is a fact, back in the 1960’s though the word aerobic did not even exist, I’m correct on that, right?

Jonathan: Yes, it was actually I believe, 1968 when a doctor first wrote a book called, I think it was Dr. Cammeth Cooper, if I’m not mistaken, wrote a book in 1968 called Aerobics. Before that, we just, like that term didn’t even exist in the lexicon, to use a fancy words, no one talked about going to exercise or going to aerobics because the word didn’t even exist.

Michael: When I was a young actor in the 1970’s and working in New York and Los Angeles, there might have been, in the city of New York, maybe two gyms, YMCA downtown and one uptown, there might have been more but there were very few gyms. Now, fast forward 40 years, there are chain franchise gyms on virtually every other corner in every neighborhood, yet there are more fat people now than there are used to be. That doesn’t make any sense to me and that was one of the issues that you pointed out in your book.

There’s something else and this was, I think if I can offer you a compliment, shear genius. It’s the concept of calories in and calories out, and this is based on research, from some of the top research institutes in North America, where you show that if calorie in and calorie out was really true, a good calculation that if we were doing the “diet and exercise” routine correctly as big businesses led us to do, that very soon that people would weigh so little that they would disappear.

Jonathan: Well, I do a lot of fun calorie math in the book, things along the lines of this, if we ate one less saltine cracker a day, which would amount to about ten calories everyday for the next ten years, we’d all weigh about 15 pounds. It is funny right, it sounds ridiculous, even if you read the most recent dietary guidelines put out by the USDA, my pyramid food guide pyramid. Folks, they say the key to sustain weight loss is just to reduce your caloric intake by 50-100 calories a day and obviously, if that’s actually true and if that’s there all is to weight loss, then you’d think there’d be a lot more really, really, really thin people walking around because if I eat 50 fewer calories a day, does that mean I’m going to loose weight until I weigh 0 pounds? Of course, it’s not right. There’s a lot more biology going on, I don’t know if people just think we’re stupid but we’re not hearing the whole story, we’re hearing just bits and pieces of it and it’s causing the big, fat mess that we have today.

Micheal: Of course, I lean towards being very interested in these conspiracy theories and the second part of the show, we’ll talk about what I see as some of the heavy handed big business pushing concepts that maybe countered to the best interest of people but related to the calorie in and calorie out. One of the concepts in your book talks about a natural set point in terms of weight that we all have and that it’s possible for us as people to reach our….reset that set point.

Jonathan: Yeah, that’s really one of the crux of the book is that, we’ve been taught exactly like you said, we’ve been taught that our biology works like a balance scale, that it’s just calories in versus calories out like our body is like a simple machine. Our body is not that simple, that doesn’t mean it’s complicated for us to figure out our body to lose weight but it doesn’t mean it’s that simple. The way our body actually works if you look at the academic research that’s been done, we all have a set point .

It’s pre-determined by our genetics, there’s been all kinds of fun, twins, studies done, that proves this and all kinds of other interesting studies but the bottom line is that our bodies have a weight that they want us to weigh and that’s why… I you don’t know if you’ve heard of experiences that I have, where you get sick and you lose 10 or 15 pounds really quickly and you don’t change anything about your eating and your exercise but somehow all that weight come back and you’re not eating anymore and you’re not eating any less but that weight comes back or if you do start successfully eating less and exercising more but somehow you just stopped losing weight at some point and then you eventually go back to your original weight.

Our genes dictate our weight in many ways just like they dictate our height and what we can do and what researchers around the world are starting to uncover is that by manipulating the quality of the food we eat and the quality of the exercise we get, we can sort of retrain our set point and we can change our biology to work kind of like those people who are just naturally slim, people who eat whatever they want, never exercise and stay skinny. We can do that do and it has nothing to do with balancing calories.

Micheal: There’s something that we have here in New York and that I’m beginning to see around more in the contrary, if you go to a fast food restaurant or you go to a deli and they will offer sandwiches or soft drinks and associated with each item on the menu will be the number of calories and even before I read your book, I thought, “Wait a minute! This is bogus,” because X number of calories of a sugar sweetened drink is not the same with the number of calories in eating broccoli. It doesn’t make any sense to me, yet people are being taught that it is the calories in and calories out that keep people thin, yet by doing that, by starving ourselves we trick our body into thinking that we’re hungry, that we’re starving, that there’s a famine on, therefore our body retains more fat.
`
Jonathan: Absolutely, you hit the nail on the head there, when we talked about saying, “Oh just eat the same food you’ve always eaten, just eat lots of them,” let’s say that using different words, “starve yourself.” Take the RA and if you look at the typical diet, most people eat today is sufficient and nutrient and abundant in calories, so we just say, “Just eat less of that” but what we’re actually saying is that “Deprive your body of more nutrients and starving.” When you think about what the body perceives in that scenario, the body’s like “I’m starving.”

When the body is starving, the reason why we store fats is to avoid starvation, so when our body thinks we’re starving it’s not going to burn fats necessarily, it’s going to slow us down and it’s going to burn lean muscle tissues. In fact, studies show that when we do starve ourselves of the 70% of the weight we lose is actually our lean muscle tissue because that’s the tissue that burns all the calories. Our fat isn’t burning calories, so for bodies short on calories what’s it going to do? It’s going to get rid of the tissues burning calories, not the tissues designed to protect us from starvation.

Micheal: I know why I love to listen to you get wrapped up, you are so passionate of what you talk about. Hey, listen when we come back from this break, I want to talk about the bogus food pyramid. I think they call it “the plate” or “the flying saucer.” I don’t know what they call it now, but I want to talk about that and also friends, we’re going to talk about the National Soft Drink Association and the good news from them. I’m Micheal David McGuire and this is the Night Talk Show, here on the Night Talk Radio Network.

[Break]

Micheal: Hi, I’m Micheal David McGuire. It’s the Night Talker Show. Hey, if you have a question or comment that you’d like to get on the air in an upcoming show, call our studio line here in New York, (212) 333-8009, follow the directions and then leave your message after the beep then you’ll be on the show.

Our guest this hour is Jonathan Bailor, just before the break we were taking about his new book The Smarter Science of Slim where he proposes that we can eat more, exercise less smarter, be more fit, be more healthy and lose weight. As I started this show today, I had taken this trip down memory lane comparing some of the bogus information that big tobacco gave us as a people 50 years ago about how healthy cigarettes were for us in to some of the industry propaganda in terms of diet foods and exercise. Jonathan, welcome back to the show.

Jonathan: Thank you.

Micheal: Hey before that break, I hit on the food pyramid and I know they’re not calling it that anymore. What do they call it now?

Jonathan: I believe they call it “my plate.” It’s not my plate, Mike. I don’t know if it’s your plate but it’s definitely not my plate. Let’s call it “their plate.”

Micheal: No, it’s not my plate either. Run through the “my plate” guidelines quickly and why those are so bogus?

Jonathan: The “my plate” guidelines are actually really easy to describe because it’s the same guidelines we’ve been getting since 1976 when this information first got came out, which was far from scientific and it was basically that the foundation of our diet or the corner stone of our diet should be starch. There is no research to back that up and I spend a lot of time in my book talking about that, but it’s really we should eat, the cornerstone of our diet being starch and low in fat and fat is evil and protein is frankly irrelevant, so the only real change we’ve seen in the most recent guideline and I do have to tip my hat to this because it is going in the right direction, is truly a more emphasis on eating vegetables.

The previous graphic released by the Government, it was actually made very clear by them that we should eat more starch than we should eat the vegetables and I don’t understand how anybody could ever think that in their new graphic, that message, let’s say, improved. It’s still got a far way to go but there is, I guess a ray of hope but fundamentally, we’re still getting told the same stuff and it’s not right.

Micheal: Well, I understand why they’d say eat more starch. If I was the food industry, I would want people to eat lots more starch because that’s cheap to produce and expensive to sell and the profit margin is extremely high. One of the other things I’ve learned from your book is that for good food; broccoli, vegetables, flax seeds, fresh meat, fish, there’s less of a profit in selling those products.

Jonathan: Absolutely, step into the mind set of food company CEO for a second. When you can take starches and sweeteners, you can engineer food products. You can build a thing that you can put on the shelf in mass. They all look the same, they all taste the same and you can put it on the shelf and let it sit there for a year and you can sell it to people and you can charge a heck of a lot of money because no one knows what they should pay for it because it’s a new product, whereas, when you actually sell food, that can be kind of a pain.

Meat needs to be refrigerated, vegetables needs to be refrigerated, fish goes bad in just a few days. That’s not a product you can sell, that is something entirely different and it’s a pain from an economic point of view but it’s a great thing from a health point of view.

Micheal: Something that I told you one time when we were talking on the telephone is, even in my own family, when it’s a family gathering, a picnic or something, the beverage of choice is sugar sweetened, flavored water.

Jonathan: Of one form or another…

Micheal: Yeah. We’re talking soft drinks here, friends and people wonder why their kids are fat. If your kid is getting their hydration from sugar sweetened water, of course they’re going to get fat, of course diabetes is going to go up and the stupidity of this begins to make me very angry. One of the things that I’ve read on your book was a report of the National Soft Drink Association, here’s the quote, “As refreshing sources of needed liquids and energy, soft drink represents a positive addition to a well-balanced diet.” What?! I’m sorry.

Jonathan: I don’t know if that’s a balance between their new Rolls Royce, relatives are going to go buy or their G4 jets but it’s not a balance from our point of view. You hit the nail on the head when you were talking about your family gathering there, Mike. The idea that we can drink this soda and we can do these types of things.

The nuance and the irony there again, is not necessary about less eating, it’s just about changing what we are eating and in fact, once we change what we do eat, heck we can eat as much of it as we want and we will not gain weight because it has all of these positive impacts on the way our bodies work and our body will naturally keep us slim and that’s really the exciting research that’s covered in the book.

Micheal: One of the points that you just hit on is, it’s not about eating less it’s about eating more higher quality food and I think one of the real challenges with so-called diet industry is that it’s all about deprivation. We are needing to deprive ourselves of something, yet that’s not the issue. The issue is the quality of food that we’re eating. Here’s another quote, I had two of them here on the same page. This is from Coca-Cola company, “Actually, our product is quite healthy. Fluid replenishment is the key to health. Coca-Cola does a great service because it encourages people to take in more and more liquids.”

I’m sorry, I’m sure that these people mean well. I’ll make that assumption. Now with the billions of dollars that the soft drink industries has, if they want to encourage people to take in more liquids, I would suggest that they suggest people carry bottled water with them or that people make a point of drinking water but I guess there’s little profit in that.

Jonathan: It’s really funny that you bring that up Mike, and now that I think about that, I actually wish that I would had covered that in the book. It’s true, if you look at Coca-Cola and Pepsi, they have actually started making water profitable and I have nothing wrong with that. I’m all for capitalism like, let’s make a profit, but let’s make a profit helping people, rather than a profit hurting people. If you can get a dollar for a bottle of water that cost you nothing, that’s still a pretty good deal. You can even put some flavoring in that water, let’s just not saturate it with sweeteners that are proven to truly destroy our bodies from the inside out.

Micheal: I guess friends, you heard here first from Jonathan Bailor, he is a capitalist and happy to make money off of good advice which I guess, that’s a cheap plug for your book The Smarter Science of Slim. So many of these diet and exercise books come across the desk here at the studio, people pitching something or another and they’re all telling the same thing which is starve yourself and go to the gym and there’s always a picture of some very attractive guy or some skinny girl with the implication that if you just eat less and exercise more, you will look like these people, whereas, it doesn’t work for us regular folks, I mean none of that works.

Jonathan: That’s exactly right. In fact, it’s really been proven not to work, the eat less, exercise more guidance came out first in the late 70’s and if you look when obesity exploded it was between the late 70’s and today. So thinking practically or common sensibly, if something doesn’t work, the answer isn’t to do the same thing over and over again, harder and harder. In fact, I think Einstein actually defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting the different results.

The devastating part of it and the part that gets me worked up and the reason I was inspired to write this book is that it doesn’t have to be that way. There’s actual experts like there’s the most brilliant minds in the world at like Harvard, UCLA and also some other universities that are actually discovering what really causes obesity and what really causes diabetes and it’s not what we’re told. We just haven’t had access to that research because it’s buried in all these academic journals, trying to bring that science to the surface is really what the book is about.

Micheal: What kind of reactions do you get from some of these really smart doc’s like at Harvard University and UCLA and John Hopkins and other research organizations around the world? Were people glad to see you and embraced you?

Jonathan: Much like you said, there was originally a lot of skepticism like “Oh, this is just another diet sham.” But when they heard that the intention was to basically give them more of a voice. People who are brilliant Biologists are generally not brilliant publicist or brilliant marketers, their specialty is biology.

My goal was to say let me take your information and make it available to the masses and can we collaborate on that . More often than not, they were more than willing to help and I was actually very honored to be speaking with many of these people. They would take the time to talk with me but we’re both really happy with where we ended up. So it’s a real positive experience for all of us.

Micheal: As we get towards the end of the show, do you feel like this is your life’s mission?

Jonathan: Absolutely. Speaking just from my own personal experience. I used to subscribe to the traditional diet dogmas, I call it. I went to the gym five to six days a week for a decade. I ate the high starch, low fat, low protein diet and I got decent results. I’m not going to lie, I got decent results but the rest of life took a back seat.

Over the past decade, when I was doing this research and shifting my own life to eat more high quality foods and exercise less but with higher quality in accordance with all this research, I exercise one day a week for less than an hour and I eat more satisfying food than I ever had in my entire life. I’m in better shape and feel better than I ever have and the same is true for everyone in my family, it’s amazing.

Micheal: I know it’s worked for me, friends.

Our guest, Jonathan Bailor, the book The Smarter Science of Slim and believe it or not, you can eat more, exercise less smarter. It has changed my life and I thank you for that. Jonathan, final question quickly, what next for you and your work?

Jonathan: I think it’s really just more of the same, Mike. These researchers are a busy bunch. We just need to have ongoing research to stay abreast of the most recent Science when it comes to staying slim and not the most recent marketing when it comes to making money on us. I think more the same goodness, hopefully.

Micheal: Jonathan, thanks a lot for being on the show.

Jonathan: My pleasure. Thank you for having me.