The Don’t Eat At Night and Protein Causes Cancer Myths and More
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Carrie Brown: Hey everybody, this is Carrie Brown and Jonathan Bailor!
Jonathan Bailor: Woo!
Carrie Brown: How are you?
Jonathan Bailor: I’m doing great, because we are in a red room.
Carrie Brown: It’s pretty energizing.
Jonathan Bailor: It is. Literally, the walls in this room are stop sign red.
Carrie Brown: And the chairs are.
Jonathan Bailor: It is, it’s energizing. There’s gotta be some research on that. Listeners, if you are aware of any research about a room’s color, that would be a fascinating thing to learn about. Smarter Science of Painting.
Carrie Brown: What are we talking about?
Jonathan Bailor: We’re speaking about all sorts of wonderful topics today. I’m going to speak in Olde English. Thou shalt respect my-anyway…
Carrie Brown: Oh good grief.
Jonathan Bailor: I had to get a little silly here, Carrie, because the first question for today’s podcast is something I get a little fired up about. I wanted to start out a little lighter because you’re going to have to reel me in. This is one of those myths that really causes people a lot of frustration, unnecessary suffering, and complexity. It’s just not founded in anything. We’re about minimizing suffering here at the Smarter Science of Slim.
Carrie Brown: Yes, we are.
Jonathan Bailor: Anytime anyone tells us to do anything that doesn’t actually help us and causes us to suffer-
Carrie Brown: We ain’t gonna do it.
Jonathan Bailor: I bet you are wondering what this nefarious myth is.
Carrie Brown: We’re waiting with bated breath.
Jonathan Bailor: Carrie, don’t eat anything after 6pm.
Carrie Brown: Starvation is bad for you. My mate Jonathan told me that.
Jonathan Bailor: Don’t eat anything after 6pm. I’m actually pulling on me ears right now. There are so many reasons this is wrong.
Carrie Brown: If I couldn’t eat after 6pm, I would never eat dinner. Ever.
Jonathan Bailor: Exactly. Let’s say you are going to eat three 600 calorie meals a day. You’re a more petite female, you aren’t particularly active. 1800 Calories is all the energy you need to feel good and feel full throughout the day. You want to do that in three sane meals with 600 calories in each. If you eat all three meals before 6pm, how much food have you eaten?
Carrie Brown: 1800 calories worth.
Jonathan Bailor: If you ate them after 6pm, how much food have you eaten?
Carrie Brown: 1800 calories!
Jonathan Bailor: Folks might be saying “well, isn’t the reason that we are told not to eat after 6pm because our metabolism slows down at night? Aren’t we much more likely to store those calories as fat?”. Well, yes, but if you ate those 1800 calories after 6pm, and you were looking at it in a 48 hour scale, there is just as much time for your body to burn those calories regardless of when you ate them. This is artificial. The reason I get kind of amped up on this is that our body is biology. When we take things that humans have invented-for example, 24 hours in a day-the body does not care about 24 hours in a day. Our body clock actually varies with age. If we were to correlate what to eat with anything, it would be better to correlate it with whether it is light or dark outside. But even that becomes a little weird, because in some areas it is dark for months at a time.
Carrie Brown: And daylight for months at a time.
Jonathan Bailor: Again, not looking outside of our body to another person or human constructed system or chronology but biology, when should we eat?
Together: When we are hungry!
Jonathan Bailor: It doesn’t have to be so complex!
Carrie Brown: Breathe, Bailor, breathe!
Jonathan Bailor: If you’re-for example like me-are hungry in the morning, very hungry at about noon, and then not hungry until about 8pm and then famished. I could create some artificial system in which I blah blah blah. My body is probably hungry at those times for a reason. Who am I to try to outsmart it? As long as you eat sane food, eat when you’re hungry.
Carrie Brown: And eat until you’re not.
Jonathan Bailor: And if anyone tells you “don’t eat after 6pm because your body will store the fat”, ask them in terms of a two day time period instead of a one day time period, and their brain will explode. It just falls down. Makes sense?
Carrie Brown: Makes sense to me because I eat at night every night.
Jonathan Bailor: Anyway, that’s my soap box. On to another topic. This has to do with last weeks show. We got some questions about the two primary flavors of sanity-sweeter sanity, where you focus on fruits; and a savory sanity, where you focus more on your whole food fats. I said that I prefer the whole food fat route, because I get to experience sweetness. There are calorie free of very very low calorie ways-not because we are afraid of calories, but we don’t need excessive calories-to enjoy the taste of sweet while also enjoying the taste of fat. It’s very difficult to enjoy the taste of fat through anything other than fat. There’s no such thing as Stevia for fat. There is no herb that makes something taste fatter. There is an herb that makes things taste sweeter.
Carrie Brown: For people in England, he means “Herb”.
Jonathan Bailor: The thing here folks, is remember when we talk about sanity-and Carrie covered this very well in last week’s podcast when she talked about her sane treats-we are not talking about giving up tastes. You do not have to give up the taste of sweet for the rest of your life. There are always sane ways to enjoy sweetness. You don’t have to give up the taste of fat at all, it’s very good for you. You don’t have to give up the umami or meaty taste. You don’t have to give up the salty taste. We have a way of eating here that enables us to enjoy all tastes. All we are asking you to do is change where you get those tastes from. That’s why it works. Any way of eating that asks you to deprive yourself for the rest of your life, regardless of it’s efficacy, is not enjoyable. We’re about efficacy and enjoyability.
Carrie Brown: We do not want you to feel deprived, and there is no reason you should feel deprived.
Jonathan Bailor: In fact, if we want to talk about efficacy, the studies are quite clear that any non-standard American way of eating that people maintain is effective; but people don’t maintain them, because they are not enjoyable. Literally, you can’t think of effective without asking “is it also enjoyable”, because unless you are a very, very rare individual-like a monk who can do without any visceral, bodily pleasure. Certainly, I am not one of those people. I don’t think Carrie is either.
Carrie Brown: Hell no!
Jonathan Bailor: Efficacy in many ways is a function of enjoyability. The good news here is that we can enjoy sweet, umami, meat, salt and savory-just do it sanely. It’s effective, it is enjoyable. I like it.
Carrie Brown: When my ice creams finally get published, you will find that you will not be able to tell the difference between them and regular ice creams. There are packed with protein and healthy fats. You will not be able to taste the difference. You do not have to give stuff up. You don’t have to deny yourself. You just need to find a sane version.
Jonathan Bailor: I wanna harp on this for a little bit. Truly, this is the Holy Grail. It’s not too good to be true, because we as humans are designed to enjoy food. That sounds stupid, but so many of the things we think we have to eat nowadays are not food. They are things that happen to be edible. Food is defined as something you can find directly in nature. There are foods that can satisfy anything that a human naturally feels. We just have to get back to that and we need people like Carrie-because God knows I’m not a chef-and people in the palial community doing this kind of stuff, we can literally have our cake and eat it too. Just make it with coconut flour.
Carrie Brown: Yes! Oh, let’s talk about strange ingredients. There are a few. In order to do what Jonathan has just been talking about, which is that you don’t have to give up the taste, it requires some of what may be possibly strange ingredients. We make baked goods, but we don’t use flour. In fact, we don’t use any grains at all. There’s going to be some things which you aren’t familiar with, such as almond flour or almond meal. Chia seeds. A lot of my baked goods have Chia seeds in them. Cocoa nibs is something that I like to use instead of chocolate chips.
Jonathan Bailor: I want to get a cute little dog and name him “Nibs”…sorry, go ahead.
Carrie Brown: Heaven help me. Coconut milk, coconut cream, all sorts of different things going on there. There is coconut milk that is so thick you can’t shake it out of the cans. Coconut oil. If you aren’t used to coconut, you can get a lot of coconut into your diet by cooking my recipes. For the most part, none of them taste like coconut. Guar Gum. That’s one of the very more strange ingredients. I use Guar Gum quite extensively. It helps create a fabulous inconstancy and texture. It keeps things in suspension. For example, some of the smoothies are a lot more smooth and they don’t separate out if you put a ton of veggies in it. Guar Gum will give it a creamy, milkshakey consistency. Xantham Gum is another gum I use, and that is mainly used in hot applications. It helps to strengthen the structure since you don’t have the gluten in the flour or the other proteins in grains. Xantham Gums enable you to have a cake without grain. Whey Protein Powder-I think most of you are familiar with that now-but I use it a lot in baking too. Xylitol-you will all know by now-is my go to sugar replacement.
Jonathan Bailor: And you aren’t opposed to Arithrotol, it just doesn’t work as well.
Carrie Brown: I’m not opposed to it, but in my opinion it doesn’t taste as good as Xylitol and doesn’t taste as much like sugar. You also have to do quite a bit of math to work out how much to use. It doesn’t perform the same as Xylitol. But no, I’m not against it. I just personally don’t use it. Some people find that they prefer Arithrotol, which is absolutely fine.
Jonathan Bailor: Carrie, if I understand correctly-listeners, I hope you’re not just scrambling to write this down. It is up on Carrie’s blog as well as descriptions and why they matter.
Carrie Brown: I called the post “What Are Those Strange Ingredients And Where Do I Get Them?”.
Jonathan Bailor: So type “Carrie Brown” and “strange” into your search engine. You’ll get a million hits. One of them will be this blog post.
Carrie Brown: Yeah. It’ll give you a run down on most of the stranger things that you may not have in your cupboard that you will want to make staples for you before you start doing all of this sane baking, which I hope you will. It will fill the void if you have a baking void in your life.
Jonathan Bailor: Here’s what makes me so happy about this, folks. Often times when we find an approach that is effective, you will notice that things just kind of fall into place. If you’ve been lucky enough to find a great friend or a great partner, stuff just clicks and works and you don’t know how or why. It’s like the stars are aligned. Carrie brought up Guar Gum, and one of the most exciting areas of research in the homeostatic regulation of weigh gain or the system underlying weight health that automatically counts calories for us; a big component of that is our gut bacteria. Our stomach is like a second brain. It controls a lot. In many ways, our brain is how we react to the external world-sights and sounds and things like that-but also our stomach. We take things from the external world and put them into our body through our stomach. The point is, a lot of this research is showing that the type of bacteria in our stomach is very indicative of our overall health and metabolic health. Obese individuals and metabolically have a consistent and different set of gut bacteria than naturally thin people. It shows some of the causal agents involved. One of the ways to make your gut bacteria be more like that of a naturally thin person is to eat substances called prebiotics. They end up fermenting in part of your digestive tracts. If you look at the research, one of the key ingerdients they use to cause this set-point lowering behavior in these studies is Guar Gum.
Carrie Brown: Really?
Jonathan Bailor: Yes.
Carrie Brown: Wow!
Jonathan Bailor: Isn’t that crazy? These are animal studies, but a lot of these studies are not possible to do on humans. If you look at the list, there is garlic, onions, artichokes, and Guar Gum.
Carrie Brown: Awww, we love Guar Gum.
Jonathan Bailor: Who knows? Guar Gum not only makes things delicious and more filling, but it may just lower your set-point. That does not mean eat a pound of Guar Gum.
Carrie Brown: Yeah. You’ve probably done this at home when you’re slinging it around your kitchen-if you get that stuff wet, you’ve got a big old mess. Also, you’ll find out, if you start doubling the amounts of Guar Gum, that you won’t want to do that.
Jonathan Bailor: We know the logic that “if some is good than more is better” is false. It’s just a beautiful example of stumbling upon something that is right, it won’t be hard continuously. It won’t be a struggle. This has been my observation throughout life. When it is right, stuff like this-like Guar Gum contributing to lowering your set point and creating sane baked goods-just works out.
Carrie Brown: That’s kind of boggling my mind that you said that. You’ve never mentioned that to me.
Jonathan Bailor: There’s really been very recent research in this area. Some other examples of that-we love coconut, and coconut is another one. The fiber in coconut is so wonderfully good for you and the fat find in coconut plays a critical role in metabolic healing. They’re a bit like Omega-3 fats in the sense that unless you go out of your way, you aren’t really ever going to eat them. They aren’t everyone. There are a handful of foods that have them in significant amounts and THE food that has what is best characterized as therapeutic to metabolic healing is coconut. There is a small list of foods and one of them is the key components of our lifestyle. It is cool that that works out.
Carrie Brown: It just reminded me that I had a delivery of three cases of coconut milk today, and it is at my desk. You can carry that to the car for me.
Jonathan Bailor: Just one disclaimer around coconuts. I hate to say this, because you know I love me some Costco. We were at Costco and they got on the coconut bandwagon with this bag of shredded “coconut”. Flip it over-
Carrie Brown: Sugar.
Jonathan Bailor: Sugar. We’re talking coconut. Just coconut. Not coconut with sugar or chocolate covered coconut.
Carrie Brown: If you’re in America, Bob’s Red Mill brand does unsweetened coconut. You have to read the labels.
Jonathan Bailor: I do Amazon subscribe and save for a twelve pack of organic coconut. I get them delivered once a month. Unsweetened. Glorious. Just two things I wanted to mention really quick to follow up on your wonderful list. You can have stupendous success baking with casein, which is the other protein found in Whey. I always talk about this product called the UMP, which is primarily a casein blend. If you’ve tried cooking with whey protein and haven’t liked it so much-you can’t just swapped casein in. Carrie’s recipes are like chemistry. If you are just experimenting, I would recommend experimenting with casein. In my experiments, there is much fruit.
Carrie Brown: I’m glad you brought that up. The reason that I’ve stuck with whey protein is because I don’t want people to be overwhelmed thinking that they have to get all of these new things. I’m trying to keep the number of new things to a minimum. I’m thinking too about people’s budgets. I don’t want to tell people that if they want to eat sane that they have to have whey protein and casein. Casein is more expensive.
Jonathan Bailor: And it’s harder to find.
Carrie Brown: If you wonder why my recipes are all based on whey protein-I stick to one flavor of one whey powder for everything. It is more simple and to help you feel like you don’t have to have a pantry full of weird stuff with more expense. That’s why I’ve kept it to that one flavor of whey protein, which I now use for everything.
Jonathan Bailor: And just really quick, if you have read a book and that book talked about studies where casein was fed to rats and the rats got cancer and the rats that didn’t get fed casein didn’t get cancer-this study is misrepresenting the truth. Casein does not give you cancer. Here’s what’s actually true. Protein stimulates growth in your body. It releases a hormone called IGF-1. Insulin Growth Factor Hormone 1. If we aren’t growing, we are dying. Our body is constantly turning over cells. We want muscle tissue. We want growth. Protein promotes growth. Protein promotes life. Protein will promote the growth of whatever is growing in your body. If there is a cancerous tumor in your body, and you eat protein-just like it promotes the growth of everything, it will promote the growth of cancer. Saying “protein causes cancer” is a bit like saying “watering your garden causes weeds”. Water in your garden causes things to grow. If the system is screwed up and there are weeds there, then the more you water it, the more the weeds grow. If you don’t water it, everything dies. The issue is not “don’t eat protein” it is to not do things that plant weeds in your garden; AKA give you cancer. Do eat protein, because it will cause all of the beautiful, metabolic flowers to grow. It’s not about killing everything. It is about preventing the growth of the weeds in the first place. Make sense?
Carrie Brown: I love your analogies.
Jonathan Bailor: Thank you very much.
Carrie Brown: I particularly loved that one. It’s been awhile, thank you.
Jonathan Bailor: You got your analogy fix?
Carrie Brown: I have.
Jonathan Bailor: Folks, Carrie and I just had a moment. Next week, we’re going to talk about fun stuff. I’m going to talk about the difference between Arithrotol, Xylitiol, and Stevia and other stuff. Folks, thanks for joining us. Remember: this week and every week after; eat more and exercise less, but do it smarter. See you soon.
Carrie Brown: See ya!