210. Recovering Our Lost Nutritional Wisdom feat. Mark Schatzker

Nov 11, 2022

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When it comes to nutrition, conventional wisdom suggeststhat we are at the mercy of an unhinged appetite and an addiction to calories. But as science shows, we're much smarter when it comes to eating than we previously thought.

Mark Schatzker is an award-winning writer based in Toronto and author of such books as “The End of Craving, rediscovering, or Recovering the Lost Wisdom of Eating”. He is also a writer-in-residence at the Modern Diet and Physiology Research Center at Yale University, and a frequent contributor to The Globe and Mail (Toronto), Condé Nast Traveler, and Bloomberg Pursuits.

Mark and Greg talk about regaining our body’s lost nutritional wisdom as the secret to a healthy diet and why the way food tastes is not some frivolous pleasure disconnected from nutrition but rather an essential part of how the brain understands food, and how it guides metabolism.

Episode Quotes:

The relationship between socioeconomic status and obesity

44:48: There's a relationship between socioeconomic status and obesity. And right there, there's a material uncertainty in people's lives. And more interestingly, that connection becomes more solid when they look at actual food uncertainty when they look at whether people have difficulty paying the bills. Sometimes it looks irrational. People will think lower-income people, and it just seems so crazy. Why would you consume too much food? You can't afford it. You're giving yourself health problems. But it's a brain response that when there's times of scarcity, it's built-in by evolution, I should want more.

How did we lose sight of the idea of homeostasis concerning food?

27:50: Our brain is like a paranoid accountant. It is fixated on measurement and measures food as it comes in. That's what we experience as taste and aroma.

Pleasure as a universal currency that drives human action

17:43: The most interesting thing about pleasure is that he ( Michel Cabanac) described it as the kind of universal currency that drives human action. Whether it has to do with thirst, temperature, itchiness, all these things are driven by pleasure. It is the language through which all the body's needs and requirements are understood and mediated by the brain.

Obesity is a disease of desire

35:49 One of the most interesting things about obesity is that most people think it's an indulgence and pleasure that people with obesity lose themselves in the joy of eating. And neuroscience tells us this is, in fact, not true...(36:31)It is a disease of desire, of motivation, and this is what we see with reward prediction error with uncertainty, that you provoke a motivation response.

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