January 11, 2024

From podcast: https://bengreenfieldlife.com/podcast/shawn-stevenson-eatsmarter/

[00:00:00] Introduction

[00:00:56] Shawn Stevenson

[00:02:35] Eating meals together as a family

[00:10:35] What is it about eating with friends and family that is protective for our health?

[00:17:31] Different inputs of reward when eating

[00:25:15] Family meals in Stevenson's house

[00:37:27] What to do with divisive devices?

[00:44:58] Dealing with ultra-processed foods

[00:56:04] End of Podcast

[00:56:26] Legal Disclaimer

Ben:  My name is Ben Greenfield. And, on this episode of the Ben Greenfield Life podcast.

Shawn:  We're very cyclical creatures. Our brains are always looking for certainty and automation, and we have these circadian rhythms. I wasn't taught this stuff in my very expensive university education about how the time of day and the sequence of things influences our gene expression. And, these circadian clocks, by the way, they are themselves functional genes and proteins that control the expression of other genes and proteins. This is a huge part of our reality.

Ben:  Fitness, nutrition, biohacking, longevity, life optimization, spirituality, and a whole lot more. Welcome to the Ben Greenfield Life Show. Are you ready to hack your life? Let's do this.

Alright. So, my guest on today's show was a guest of mine eight years ago. He broke the internet or at least the small sector of the health podcasting internets when he revealed on my show how he healed up some really serious back issues using not surgery, using not some crazy front squat kettlebell method, but instead using nutrition: Aloe vera and stem cell precursors and all these crazy ingredients. I'd never heard off, frankly, when I interviewed him and I've learned a ton from him since he has written an excellent book called “Eat Smarter.” He has the book “Sleep Smarter,” which is an amazing resource for amplifying your sleep quality. And, he also has an extremely popular podcast called the Model Health Show, which you can find wherever fine podcasts are found. But, perhaps most importantly and relevant to today's discussion is he has followed up his nutrition book, “Eat Smarter,” with his book called “Eat Smarter: The Family Cookbook.”

Now, I'm going to link to everything you guys hear about at BenGreenfieldLife.com/EatSmarter. But, his name is Shawn Stevenson and he's a man after my own heart because this book is all about celebrating food together as a family, which is a staple in the Greenfield house, Shawn. So, this book, when I when I read through it, I literally read it last night. So, this is all just fresh on my mind. I had roast chicken and carrots and yams and sat there reading your book for a couple hours and it's fantastic, first of all, by the way.

Shawn:  Thank you. It means a lot to me.

Ben:  It's fun reading cookbook while you're eating.

So anyways, it's “Eat Smarter: The Family Cookbook,” and there's not a lot of families, particularly in America who, I think, understand the extreme importance of what might seem trite, and that's eating meals together as a family. Do you guys actually do that every day?

Shawn:  Not every day. I'm a big minimum effective dose guy. And, I put that into the book as well, but it's something that is definitely a part of our family culture and it has been even prior to knowing some of the data just because you could see some of the health outcomes and the psychological benefits as well. And, for us, and this is just according to the data. Let's just go ahead and throw out a few studies on why this matters.

Ben:  Go straight into the science. Let's do it.

Shawn:  Some researchers at Harvard were gathering data on family eating behaviors for years and looking at what food choices and health outcomes of the family members, and they found that families who eat together on a consistent basis not denoting what that number was though, and I'll share that in another study. But, families that eat together on a consistent basis consume significantly higher amounts of real food. So, predominantly what they noted was fruits and vegetables and all of these micronutrients they were tracking that helped prevent diseases in these family members. And, they also noted that they consumed significantly less ultra-processed foods, namely chips and soda. And, of course, I'm just like, “Why don't people know this is fascinating.” And, that was the catalyst to starting this project, but what really did it for me were a couple of other studies. One of them was published in JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association and one was published in Pediatrics. And so, looking at outcomes for our kids specifically when eating with their family. What the researchers found, and this was that minimum effective dose, three meals a week, at least three or more could be more.

Ben:  Eating three meals a week together.

Shawn:  Yes.

Ben:  Okay.

Shawn:  Eating three meals a week together, kids eating with at least one parent, three meals a week led to significantly less development of obesity in those kids and less development of eating disorders in those kids. And then, tie that in with, and this was what hit me the hardest and I was like, “I have to talk about this,” because even with that data, I'm just like, “Okay, does that apply? What if you're in a low-income environment? What if you don't have good food quality?” Like, “Does all that stuff matter?” And, one of the most fascinating studies was tracking minority kids generally in construct of a low-income environment, which is where I come from, and they found that eating together with the kids, it could be any meal: Breakfast lunch or dinner, four meals a week, these children ate significantly higher amounts of fruits and vegetables. It was five servings of fruits and vegetables each day, at least five days a week, and significantly less ultra-processed foods, chips, and soda specifically they named. But, here's what they noted as well. When the TV was never or rarely on, there was some protective mechanism happening.

Ben:  Really, the TV?

Shawn:  There was some protective mechanism happening when people were eating together with their kids. And, we're going to talk about, of course, today the behind-the-scenes like why is it leading to these beneficial health outcomes, but there's this huge shift that's happening in our culture right now where we're moving away from that. And, I would put this on the endangered species list because according to those Harvard researchers, only about 30% of families eat together on a regular basis.

Now, defining what that regular basis is for them and their data, I don't know, but I would imagine it's four to five meals a week. But, the minimum effective doses I noted was three meals a week.

Ben:  Three meals a week is pretty doable. I don't get the TV piece. You mean when you're watching TV during–

Shawn:  During meals. So, when TV was never or rarely on during family meals. So, even during watching TV, there's marketing for processed foods.

Ben:  Okay.

Shawn:  Right?

Ben:  Yeah.

Shawn:  And so, they noted that that had a particular impact on the consumption of processed foods.

Ben:  Well, you may have kind of sort of ruined once a month we do family dinner movie theater where we'll choose either a documentary that we've really been wanting to watch or a movie, and we spread towels on the floor of the living room. And, we go downstairs to our TV that's rarely ever watched anyways and isn't in the dining room, and we watch TV together and eat, but it doesn't have commercials because it's usually movie. So, we're safe if we're not seeing processed food commercials.

Shawn:  Just last night my youngest son and my wife and I watched the “Adam Project” together while having dinner. Alright. And, shout out to Ryan Reynolds, it's pretty good family movie.

Ben:  Yeah.

Shawn:  But, it doesn't take away from those moments. That's a part of our culture as well, movie night and watching the game with family and friends and things like that. But, when we're replacing that because that's what's happened is our devices can be divisive really. They can divide us even more so. And so, we've gone from eating together as a species. We evolved doing this. And, I had a recent experience of going to Hawaii for the first time and taking my family with me, and my wife went to sign us up to do the Luau to watch this presentation or whatever. But, I'm looking at it through a different lens because I've just written this book and I'm watching this on display. There's, of course, the procurement of the food, which would have happened as a tribe. Everybody has their roles to play: The preparation of the food, the serving of the food.

Ben:  Hunting the pig out in the forest.

Shawn:  Right. And, they coming in with the [00:08:11] _____. They just did that, right?

Ben:  Yeah.

Shawn:  But, within that though, there's this element of celebration.

Ben:  Yeah.

Shawn:  There's this element of storytelling. And, this is how we pass down tradition. Prior to the advent of books, it was through story and through song and through celebration. And, this was a part of our kind of tribal construct and we kind of evolved or devolved however you want to look at it from that to eventually we have communities and neighborhoods. But usually, we still had extended family and close proximity, but we moved further and further into neighborhoods. And now, a lot of folks don't live near family. And, from that, now within our own household with our nuclear family often people are very divided because everybody's in front of a device.

Ben:  Yeah. Or, they're like ships passing in the night because one kid's got basketball practice, and somebody's a soccer, and mom's gone yoga or whatever, and you just don't find the time for the dinner.

Shawn:  Exactly. We got so much going on, but my question was, what's going on? All the stuff we have going on, is that preventing or taking away something that's been protecting our health as a species? And so, let's talk a little bit about what was going on like, why do you see these beneficial health outcomes

And, by the way, another study looked at IBM workers, so people working in tech. And, they tracked some of their just kind of objective measurements but also subjective measurements of stress. Alright. So, what they found was that their work stress was, and to put a term on it kind of metabolized better when they were able to make it at home consistently to have family dinners. Alright. So, regardless of how high stress was at work, having dinners with their family consistently helped them. Their work morale stayed high, productivity, stress stayed negligible.

Ben:  And, this wasn't because all the booze they were having with the family dinner table, I would imagine.

Shawn:  Not necessarily. But, what they found was that once work obligations or other things cut into their ability to “make it home for dinner,” work morale began to go down, their ability to metabolize stress, so their stress levels. Even though prior with stress levels being high at work, they were still okay being able to have dinner with their families. That no longer was the case. They weren't handling stress very well.

And so, the question is, what is it about eating with friends and family that is protective for our health? First and foremost, well, let's just take a meta-perspective like when we are in our modern society as you know, this system, it's largely kind of binary. If you think about the sympathetic nervous system and parasympathetic, everybody's talking about the fight or flight. We're fight or flight sympathetic, but we need that. It's an important part of being human.

Ben:  Yeah, it's part of the excitement of life. It's, whatever, heart rate variability. People are constantly measuring that and looking at the readiness score. That's not indicative of a really high level of parasympathetic and low sympathetic, it's balance between the two.

Shawn:  Yes, exactly. That's the key, but some of these things can get villainized. Even cortisol becomes this like cortisols causing me to, I can't lose weight. Cortisol is messing up–

Ben:  You'd be dead without cortisol.

Shawn:  Exactly. You need cortisol. You need it. My dog is lost now because of cortisol.

Ben:  Yeah.

Shawn:  But, cortisol is even just to build thyroid hormone. Cortisol is involved in so many beneficial things. But, when this is out of balance, it can be problematic for all those things, including losing your dog, apparently. But, at the end of the day, we would naturally have these ebbs and flows where we shift over to that parasympathetic, which the nickname for that one is rest and digest. Rest and digest. This is key for this family food element. Because what some of the coolest data is indicating is that when we are in that parasympathetic state and eating food, our bodies, our immune system, our ability to assimilate nutrients, all these things are being influenced when we're with friends and family. Now, to use this intelligently, a lot of us, I happen to point it on accident. But, to proactively know like my body is better associating with the food that I'm eating when I'm with people that I care about. So, we see this shift over from the sympathetic to the parasympathetic, improvements in assimilation, digestion, elimination, but also we see a shift in hormones. Alright.

Humans, especially women, do oxytocin really well. Alright, oxytocin is being talked about a lot now as you know, and it's referred to as the cuddle hormone or love hormone, but we produce oxytocin when we're around people that we care about, in particular, close proximity. So, hugs are great for releasing oxytocin. But, as I said, women tend to produce more oxytocin being around other women, surprisingly or maybe not so surprisingly. But, this is something that we all have access to, our bodies automatically do it because the people that we love and that we care about tends to relax us, tends to make us feel better being around them. And so, what's so fascinating about oxytocin in this context is that it appears to neutralize the activity of cortisol. If it's kind of running rampant and you're running hot, it tends to kind of neutralize things, bring you back into balance. And, it's this very powerful, but are we using it? Because a lot of times we're in that fight or flight all day and then we're not as Kelly Starrett would talk about, we're very good at going zero to 100 but we're not good at downregulating.

Ben:  Yeah.

Shawn:  Going 100 to zero.

Ben:  Yeah. Working out but not working in.

Shawn:  Exactly. But, it's kind of like a hack, a biohack to be able to like, “Let me proactively get around people that I love because your chemistry changes.”

Ben:  Yeah.

Shawn:  And, the bottom-line piece of this and a big walkway for everybody today is that all of our thoughts create chemistry in our bodies, whether we're conscious or unconscious. It's immediately altering what our body's producing: Hormones, neurotransmitters, different enzymes, whatever the case might be. And so, even living in that state with these chronically stressful thoughts, there's something that's beyond our conscious awareness when we get around people that care about us and that we care about that helps to nullify those things or better yet I used the word earlier of metabolizing those things. And so, those are a couple of the reasons behind the scenes of why we see these better health outcomes, and we could talk about more if you want to, but one other one is just a psychological piece. Alright. Especially today when there's so many things vying for our attention and in particular with our kids and their exposure to things like social media and feeling we were never meant — we're not designed to care about maybe what a hundred people think maybe in our tribe, let alone a thousand or 10,000 or a million.

Ben:  Bars, number, something like that, the community that we're equipped from an ancestral standpoint to be able to communicate with on a regular basis and get meaning from.

Shawn:  I think it's less than 120.

Ben:  125 or something. Yeah, yeah.

Shawn:  Yeah, I was going to say something like that. But then, after that, things start going haywire. We start having problems.

Ben:   Saying “I can't keep in touch with all 5,000 of my Facebook friends.”

Shawn:  Right.

Ben:  Yeah. I accept that friend request because 499,999 happened because I pissed somebody off so I got to refill the bucket with the extra one.

Shawn:  Even with that, we don't really even know a lot of these people but we care so much about. It's just our system, we're not really hardwired to be able to deal with that. And so, with that being said also the ability to watch everybody else's highlights basically because 99% of people are not posting how shitty their life is.

Ben:  Yeah. Alright, how bad their hair looked that morning.

Shawn:  Alright. They're showing their highlights, and we see that and we compare ourselves. It's just something we tend to do as a species because there's always this hierarchy thing that we've evolved with, but we're doing that. And, what tends to happen, as you know, we see these dramatic increases in anxiety and depression and all manner of mental health struggles, in particular with younger populations, but it's with us as well. But, feeling this feeling that you're inadequate, inadequate is really the big thing. And, one of our deep psychological human needs is significance, feeling like we matter, whether that's going back to that tribal construct. We need to feel like we are contributing and we matter and we're seen. And, we'll do things to try to get that experience.

Giving our children the opportunity to feel seen, getting real face time with them around the construct of a family meal is one of the most valuable things you can give them for their psychology.

Ben:  Oh, yeah. I got teenage boys and it's pretty easy to give them to be a captive audience when there's food on the line. They'll sit down to that for sure.

It's interesting because I have a confession, actually. It's not embarrassing, but it's vulnerable. I'm staying in Santa Monica right now, and I was out on the walk last night and I walked past an ice cream store. I sometimes take my son's out for ice cream. We even do one-on-one date nights, mother-son, father-son. We go off. Sometimes we get different tables at the same restaurant and we just have that one-on-one connection time that you don't get necessarily when you're a big group at the family table but we often meet up for dessert afterwards, and nine times out of 10 is gelato or ice cream.

So, I walked past this ice cream store and I got all nostalgic because I'm traveling without my family I thought, “Gosh, you know what, I want ice cream cone.” So, I went in there and I ordered the cinnamon cookie dough pumpkin ice cream and in a waffle cone with brownie bites on top of it. And, it was a little bit anticlimactic as I sat there eating my ice cream cone by myself because I wasn't with the people I loved and I wasn't making jokes and telling stupid dad puns to my kids and I wasn't giving my wife a hug as we waited in line for the ice cream. And, it's very interesting because you can take these foods that are hedonistic or highly palatable or dopaminergic, the enjoyment of them remarkably decreases. And, I don't know what you think about this or if you've come across any studies and writing this book about this. But, I would not be surprised if there's a different biochemical response as well in terms of how high your blood sugar stays up or how well you digest it or even how impactful from a negative standpoint of so-called junk food like ice cream. This was the good stuff. It was natural dairy vegan ice cream, whatever, but I wouldn't be surprised if there were even health risks that you would normally experience from a bad food that you might be at a lower risk of when you're enjoying it with other people.

Shawn:  Yeah. I talked with Kelly about this, Kelly Starrett, and we were talking about this interesting phenomenon of essentially the best time to eat what we would consider a “bad food” but not to give morality to food but say a fancy pants ice cream cone with all the–

Ben:  Brownie bites, the chewy ones. They're really good.

Shawn:  All the bells and whistles. And, the best time to eat that is when you're happy, is when you're in a positive state because you have all of this positive chemistry going on in your body that just helps your body to metabolize things and interact with things. Not necessarily just better but more intelligently and efficiently, and it's not on this hyper-alert versus this new phenomenon we have in our culture where we have a name for is stress eating. So, the worst time just looking from the perspective of your body handling that food in an efficacious way is when you're highly stressed and you don't feel good, but that's when we tend to do it.

Ben:  Oh, yeah, just imagine you hear about email apnea, people holding their breaths and begin a stressed-out state during emails. I'm guilty of this, eating lunch while I'm looking at emails. I know there's a different physiological response to that.

Shawn:  Yeah. And, also just you staring into that screen, especially a tiny screen like your phone, that is inherently going to be tuning up the volume on your sympathetic nervous system because you being hyper focused on a small space, you just got back from hunting. That's one of the things. Again, you have to have heightened senses. Your stress is going to be a little bit higher staring into that small space because you've got to be able to make that decision.

Ben:  Every time you look at that backlit LED, your myopia kicks in, your senses are less tuned, absolutely. Yeah.

Shawn:  And so, this is putting our nervous system in a place that is not advantageous to interacting with that food. And also, here's something I thought about when you talked about that. Sometimes we have these food experiences like having that ice cream cone with friends in family and it is nostalgic, it's beautiful. And then, sometimes we seek that behavior when the people aren't around, whether that's with marijuana, whether that's with alcohol, whether that's with food. We have these experiences and we link it up. Neurons that fire together wire together. And then, we'll look for that behavior even though we're not getting that same–we're really looking for connection.

Ben:  Yeah.

Shawn:  Right. And so, really important part of this whole food equation is awareness like, how do you feel? What are you getting from this experience and also finding the enjoyment? In particular, when we're with family and friends, it's so much more than just the food. And so, one of the cool things is you talked about this a little bit earlier in our conversation of your game nights, family game nights.

Ben:  Family game nights during dinner we played almost–just to clarify, almost every family dinner we have, besides the ones that are typically about once a week where we want to have a family discussion, we want to talk about something, we want to chance for our sons to discuss, whatever. Most recently, it was to set aside some time to process this recent conflict that's going on in Palestine and Israel, and for our sons to ask questions for us to talk about it because these are conversations that don't organically happen during the day that you need to make space for at some point. But, besides that about once a week, almost every night and all of our games are covered in food particles and oils and crumbs and bread and whatever, you can almost eat off of our game cards, but we play games during dinner because it's fantastic and it's fun. And, we talk in between but we have a giant closet, 100 games, and we bust them out almost every night. My sons often go down. They'll pick three out and then we decide amongst the three that we're going to play. And, it's a wonderful way to celebrate food together while you're playing games.

Shawn:  Yeah. What you're doing with that proactively is you're creating different levels or different inputs of reward. It's not just the food. And so, you're tying this to something. And, part of the struggle today is that especially with the advent of all these ultra-processed foods, which we got to come back and talk about what does the state actually look like with that, there's a lot of brilliant food scientists who creating these products to target those pathways. They're not looking for one-time customers, they're wanting people to be addicted to their foods. And so, we can't just pull that food away and say, “Eat this broccoli or eat this liver,” it has to be replaced with something of equal or greater value ideally if you want to see long-term change. 

And so, this is where eating with people that you care about, friends and family, comes into play. Because yes, we tend to eat better when we're with family and friends because of this. And, I didn't mention this earlier. When you know that family dinners are Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday, subconsciously, you're going to be planning like, “Okay, what are we going to eat?” We know that I'm eating those days, what are we going to eat? And, we tend to have an idea of what that meal looks like, like a square meal in our culture, right? But, when we purposefully implement cultural pieces around that meal, it makes it even more desirable and attractive. So, our family and friends and our kids look forward to it. That's the key. It's not like, “Ah, shit, I got to eat this cob salad or whatever with my family and not eat McDonald's.”

Ben:  Raw liver with salt on it. So, long story short is I should have called you up to have the ice cream cone with me and that would have solved these issues.

Shawn:  Exactly, man.

Ben:  Next time. Tonight, I'll ring you.

So, how's it go down at the Stevenson's house when you're having a family dinner? What's the actual scenario look like? Do you guys all meet up at the kitchen at a specific time? Do you do something special that's predictable each night of the week? Do the kids pitch in to cook? Describe to me how it actually looks.

Shawn:  Alright. We definitely have certain preferences. Alright, this is the important part and I talk about this in the book as well. Knowing thyself and creating a kitchen culture that you feel good about because there isn't a cookie-cutter way to do this. And so, I'm generally the morning guy. I make a lot of the breakfast stuff, make my wife's coffee for her, those kind of things. I'm in the kitchen playing music.

Ben:  Don't tell my wife you make your coffee for your wife.

Shawn:  She calls me a barista.

Ben:  She's very particular.

Shawn:  Garçon. She calls me garçon. Yeah. But, I know the vibe that I like. And so, I'm putting on music. And, actually Apple just sent me my top 10, whatever, I listened to this past year. It's a lot of vibey singing kind of, whatever. And, my youngest son actually came over to me yesterday. He's 12 and I'm just like, it was one of the coolest compliments. He was like, “Dad, you have a beautiful singing voice.” I was like, “Oh, damn, you noticed?” I wasn't really paying attention, he was paying attention. But, I mean, just how he know that it's because I'm in the kitchen singing and dancing around and whatever, getting my vibe going. And, sometimes they might not like it if I'm bumping Jodeci or whatever it is or John Mayer or whatever it is that day. And, they might be wanting to do something else or maybe they want quiet. I don't know. But, if you want this food, the kitchen culture that I like. 

But, towards the end of the day, nine times out of 10, my wife is the one making dinner. And, she doesn't like people being in the kitchen with her. Alright, that's her solace. Alright. Usually, for her, she will either talk to her mom or her sister and prepare food or she'll put on some, dare I say, trashy show that she normally wouldn't watch her. She knows I'm not going to watch with her, Real Housewives something. No disrespect if there's any housewives listening, but she'll put that on and that's just the vibe that she likes.

Now, we have purposefully, of course, implemented times where we invite the boys in and my daughter as well, who's my oldest, to learn some different skills, to be included in certain things.

Ben:  That's what I was wondering when your kids actually learn how to cook if there's a certain time of day when they're helping pitch in.

Shawn:  Yeah. We've just kind of put aside certain days when that happens or she, during this time of year, just got a bunch of stuff to make Christmas cookies or whatever, like my son will make it with her, my youngest son. And so, all my kids know how to cook. Alright. So, my youngest son has been preparing. He could whip up some eggs and things like that when he was maybe 6 or 7, and it's just been adding things along the way.

And so, also the thing is when kids are really young, they want to be there. But, what we tend to do, and I made this mistake and I shared this as well and it's one of those things that if I can go back and change I would, but because of our busyness when the kids ask the help, it's just like, “Not today, bud.”

Ben:  Oh, yeah. It takes three times longer to make a steak when my 10-year-old boy wants to help you do it.

Shawn:  Exactly, especially if you're trying to be efficient with the schedule, you got stuff to do. But, eventually, I caught myself and I started exercising that, yes, muscle big time and it paid off because my oldest son is a fantastic cook. He can cook so many incredible things. He's one of those people, he's got a sixth sense essentially with ingredients, and putting stuff together like this will go good with this, very creative. But, my youngest son is very methodical, he wants to know exactly how to do the thing, follow this. It's just like being able to pay attention to their personalities, what inputs they need. 

But, to answer the question fully, my wife is generally preparing whatever the meal is going to be, something probably delicious from the “Eat Smarter Family Cookbook.” And, me and the boys are usually just hanging out doing something. We might be gaming. We might be playing pool. We might be doing our respective things. I might be reading a book. My son might be talking to his friends, whatever the case might be, but we come together. We all sit down. And, the first thing that we do is we go around the table and everybody shares three things that they're grateful for from that day. And, we've been doing that for years, years and years. And, a couple times we've subbed in different things like, what did you fail at today? And, we've shared that kind of stuff too.

And, what it does is it's a unifier because sometimes we haven't talked to each other all day and we're in different vibes. And so, it's opening up that proactive communication, get the kids talking that kind of thing, seeing where their head is at. And, one of the biggest benefits of eating together with your kids is you get to keep your finger on the pulse of their livelihood. So much of our communication is non-verbal as you know. And so, being able to pick up on those subtle cues to catch things early before it festers into a big monster. And, I've seen it firsthand when we moved away from having our consistent family dinners and shit happening like things that we weren't able to really pay attention to. And, we might do all this other stuff together, but it's that family dinner and that kind of connection because the dinner table is a unifier that you can miss on certain things.

We are careful when we are looking at sports and activities and excursions and extracurriculars for our sons at how many nights of the week are going to be full. Right now, they have a Wednesday night youth group, and then every couple times a month they've got a Thursday night speech and debate. Most other evenings, they are home because we value that family time that bookends the day with our family huddle at the beginning in the morning. We all meet at 7:30 a.m. in the family living room. We do meditation, we do prayer, we devotions. We talk about what everybody's doing that day. And then, related to my question to you about who's cooking what, we actually do dinnertime assignments in the morning like, “Hey, River, you're going to do carrot fries and Dad's going to go pull the chicken from the freezer. So, that's going to be ready for Mom to spice it and put it in the oven at 6:30. And, I'm going to take care of setting the table and doing beverages. And then, Terran, you're going to slice and toast the sourdough bread.”

So, in the morning, everybody knows what they need to have ready at 7:00 p.m. That's usually our actual time. Common thread though that's interesting that you guys have the gratitude discussions or what failures did you have type of discussion or a systematic planned predictable conversation opener, we do a very similar thing. So, my sons and I, we go through a book about every two weeks, I take them through a book. And, we reserve when we all meet in the kitchen at 7:00. The first thing we do is we have a 10-minute discussion about the book. What did you learn from this chapter? I share what I learned. They share what they've learned. Mom just kind of sits in and listens because she doesn't like to read but she learns as we talk about it. Then, I play a song on the guitar, then we sit down to play games, but it's systematic, it's planned. I don't know what you think about this, but I think kids thrive on some element of predictability.

Shawn:  We all do. We all do. We're very cyclical creatures. Our brains are always looking for certainty and automation, and we have these circadian rhythms. And, one of the most interesting. I wasn't taught this stuff in my university, my very expensive university education, about how the time of day and the sequence of things influences our gene expression. And, these circadian clocks, by the way, they are themselves functional genes and proteins that control the expression of other genes and proteins. This is a huge part of our reality and our bodies are synced up to the 24-hour solar day, and our bodies are trying to find out what time it is and what to do at this time. And so, having those routines helps your body to find that balance that we talked a little bit about earlier. It's helping to guide our bodies so that they can heal, regenerate, and all these other things when we just tend to be pushing that gas pedal down. And, by the way, to anchor in what we do as well because with the family game night, we've done that many times. We'll do it after, of course, the meal typically which I love it of doing it during. That's an awesome thing for us to try out.

Ben:  It's a time hack, too, admittedly. We're old fuddy daddies. We go to bed at 9:30. So, if we're finishing up dinner around 8:30, we're not going to go have game night afterwards.

Shawn:  I love it. Life hack.

Ben:  Yeah. And so, we'll play a game from time to time, but what we've done for whatever reason, it wasn't planned but we started a lot of family dinners. We end up freestyling, freestyle rapping. And, maybe for some reason, there's a lot of videos of us dancing after dinner because we usually playing music in the background but that'll just organically happen. And so, the funny thing is I wasn't thinking about all the creative faculties that were taking place like they're finding ways to put words together to communicate, whether it's a story, whether it's targeting the other like a battle, going at the other person, who's better or complimenting the other person in a more of a complimentary cipher type of thing. It's just these things organically happened. And, this manifested in this very special moment recently where I went to New York City, I took my family with me. When the book came out actually, I went to do Good Morning America and even more fun by far was going on this show called Sway in the morning or Sway's Universe. And, Sway was a MTV VJ. That's where a lot of people might know him from. But, he's got one of the longest-running most popular hip-hop shows in the world. At SiriusXM headquarters, Howard Stern had his domain of the place and then Sway had his. Sway is a pretty big deal. The week before LL Cool J was there, Missy Elliott sat in that seat, Kanye West, you name it. And, I'm sitting there.

Ben:  There you are with your family dinner book.

Shawn:  Right. But, it's because one of his co-hosts listens to my show and she's been following me for a while, and it's a big part of what he's trying to do as well. Give these artists a chance to speak freely but also to empower people. And so, that's what I came there for. And so, it was phenomenal. The room was buzzing. It was amazing, but when the artists come on there, these different hip-hop artists, they do a freestyle at the end of the show. I didn't come there for that shit, alright.

Ben:  But you're ready.

Shawn:  And, Sway did not, he did not plan on that either, but it was my oldest son. When he met Sway, he literally whispered in his ear, “My dad can freestyle.” And, I had no idea with this. I thought the interview was over. I'm just sitting back like, “Man, that was amazing.” But, the music is coming on and Sway is getting hyped. You can see my face on the videos where I'm like, “What is going on here?” But then, he passed it over to me and I did what I had to do. And, I just used things from the room, just using creativity, but my family co-created that moment. And, the room was just flipping out because I'm not an artist in that construct. And so, to see me perform like that, they couldn't believe it.

Ben:  Oh, man, you would have put me on the spot, I would have just said some like wiki, wiki, wiki, next question.

It's interesting you talk about that because I feel the same thing about games, for example, conflict resolution, rhetoric, math, strategic planning, logic. There's a lot that goes into so-called game theory, and these are lessons that you learn while gathered around food, celebrating food. There's obviously the elephant in the room here. I love your title, the devices. What'd you call them?

Shawn:  Divisive.

Ben:  Divisive devices. What do you do about that?

Shawn: Alright, this is of high importance today because it's just a part of our culture. It is what it is especially with kids, teenagers. And, first of all, my kids are always the last in their class to get on board with having a cell phone, and I'm a huge advocate of that. No screens until teens I think is the terminology for it. Because there's kids at my youngest son's elementary school who have cell phones.

Ben:  Yeah.

Shawn:  But anyways, that's a whole other [00:38:29] _____.

Ben:  Every 8-year-old needs a cell phone.

Shawn:  Right. They got to stay in touch. But, what we do is, and I shared this really interesting study in the book, these researchers found that just having the phone in your sight line, in your line of sight, even if it's turned over, even if it's turned off, creates distraction in your brain. Alright. And, what they found was that even having it on your person as well or if it's in a book bag but it's still in the room, the best effects was if it's not around, of course, it greatly diminishes when it's in your back pocket or not to put it on your body, by the way, but on your person or in your book bag greatly increases your presence and your ability to pay attention. But, what we've done, and this has been years ago, we don't bring them to the table and it's just kind of this sacred space, we don't need it, we're about to hang out with each other, have a good time.

Ben:  Start playing Scrabble and somebody's got to look up whether or not that's a word in the Scrabble dictionary. I have to admit that's the one time when a phone gets busted out of our table. Somebody's like, “Wait, what's the rules say?” And, I turn on the phone, but that's pretty rare.

Shawn:  That's alright. I would say that that's alright. But, just creating a culture where no devices at the table, we're just here with each other hanging out and the device is still there. Sometimes even after dinner as that kind of reward, my son and I might go and play a video game. We might go and maybe we might go watch a show after dinner. But, just having that real face time is so important. It doesn't negate all these other cool things we have access to in the world. But truly, we know that those things when they're replacing this real face time, we're creating a lot of dysfunction and we're creating some huge issues with our health as well. But, I'm finding a way to anchor in some kind of reward with the dinner. So, this could be in food form but you got to be careful about that using food as a reward.

Ben:  Yeah, loving with food. Yeah.

Shawn:  You've got to know the context and the personalities of people. But, if I know, for example, that my youngest son maybe we pivoted and we're having our family dinner because he likes to know, my youngest son likes to know. He's totally down with everything. He'll be the first one there if he knows, a Wednesday's family dinner, Friday, whatever it is. But, if we say, “Oh, actually, this is going on” and it was just literally an hour before dinner and we're like, “We're going to do family dinner right now,” and it's on a Tuesday instead, then you can see a little grumbling because he had his other plans mentally. But then, I can come in like, “Hey, do you want the Ben Greenfield specialty carrot cake for dessert or do you want these?”

Ben:  He would be a fool to decline, yeah.

Shawn:  Or, “Do you want these cherry frozen yogurt pops? What do you want for dessert?” “Oh, I like dessert.”

Ben:  Yeah, the illusion of choice.

Shawn:  Exactly.

Ben:  A wise parent.

Shawn:  Yeah, it's just being able to leverage that. And so, now he's much more inclined to like, “Let me participate in this thing.” Even though it wasn't in my plan per se, my oldest son, he's very fluid. So, just flexible, “Okay, this is what we're doing, so be it.” But, this also, these family diners have given me the opportunity to pay attention to these character traits of my kids and to see their personalities. Because truly, you can come up in the same environment and you have twins so you could see the differences in their personality.

Ben:  Yeah.

Shawn:  And, it's something special, we're all so unique. But, being able to honor that and to see it, to witness it, it does something special for our kids. We need it as well. And, another thing that I've seen is, in particular with my youngest son, he has his deep sense of compassion for me. He knows when I'm not good and he'll come over and hug me. And, it's like, “How the hell do you know?” Part of these family dinners has been if we're sharing what we failed at, for example, they realize dad's not invincible, he's not superhuman, because that's what I can sometimes portray thinking from their perspective that I don't get hurt, that I can handle anything. And, I feel that in my personality. I do feel like I can do whatever needs to be done, but that does not mean that I don't suffer. That does not mean that things aren't hard for me. 

And so, to share that, to be open with them has humanized me and has created a stronger vehicle for not just their compassion for me but for other people, and just had the parent-teacher conference with my youngest son. And, this was interesting, it's a different type of school. It's definitely more student-focused, and the three teachers he has for middle school, he's in sixth grade, they all sit together and share together, and that each one is going around. They're just echoing. Literally, you get to the next guy, they're just like, “I'm just going to echo what he said.” Braden is a light in our room. He is an anchor. He brings a sense of peace and calmness. I can always count on Braden. And, it's just like, they're just going around. And also, Braden is always there to help other people as well, make new students feel welcome. I didn't ask my kid to do none of that stuff.

Ben:  Yeah.

Shawn:  He's just inclined because he wants everybody to feel they matter. But, here's the cool thing, he wrote essay on what he feels is his greatest character trait and he shared that, that he makes it intentional to make sure people feel included. And so, he wants people to be happy. And, that worried me as I was reading at first because it's just like, is he looking at people pleasing from that lens? But, he shared within that, but he's like, “But, I've got to make sure that I'm happy first.”

Ben:  Yeah.

Shawn:  And, I was like, “Oh, damn.”

Ben:  Look how you got a young psychologist on your hands, young future psychologist. Look out, Sigmund Freud. That phone study, by the way, you mentioned, I saw that one. And, you don't know how many times I've had a waiter or waitress at a restaurant come up and be like, “Sir, you dropped your phone” because I always put it underneath my chair when I'm at a restaurant now because I know that they always pick it up and put on the table, I'm like, “Just put that back down. That's where I need it to be.”

The ultra-processed foods that you brought up, it's obviously a problem. I don't think that's a secret. But, do you have a method of dealing with that at your house when somehow the colorful crinkly package winds up in the pantry and you need to navigate what you're going to do about that with your kids or at the dinner table or whatever else? How do you deal with that without creating, I don't know, fear of food or orthorexia or something like that?

Shawn:  Yeah. Such a good question. And, by the way, just a quick snapshot of what is the current state of affairs here in the United States. So, the BMJ published an analysis looking at adult Americans.

Ben:  British Medical Journal.

Shawn:  Yeah, the BMJ, British Medical Journal, one of our top five that are alive. That's a wrap.

Ben:  I got it, you're freestyling.

Shawn:  Okay. So, top five medical journal.

Ben:  Wiki, wiki, wiki.

Shawn:  And, they uncovered that about 60% of the average American adult's diet is now made of ultra-processed really fake food really if you want to just call it what it is. So, what is ultra-processed food? Let's just clarify that. Humans have been processing food for a long time. Processing food isn't the issue. When you cook a food, you're processing the food.

Ben:  Yeah, mortar and pestle. There's lots of way you can process, yeah.

Shawn:  You've been doing that forever. Alright. And also, simple processing, so what we call minimally processing. Pressing the oil out of olives or coconuts, making tomato sauce or spaghetti sauce with tomatoes and spices and things like that, but you could still tell where it came from. There's still proximity to something real. Ultra-processed foods on the other hand or when you have a field of wheat that somehow some way becomes a bowl of frosted flakes or pop-tarts or a field of corn becoming the ingredient for soda or I got to have my pops, cereal.

Ben:  Never found any corn in my soda.

Shawn:  Corn syrup. There is actually, never mind.

Ben:  I mean, kernels.

Shawn:  I was at my friend's house for his birthday, Lewis' house, and they had corn ice cream popsicles. So, there was some chefs came in from Hawaii. I don't know if they're doing that in Hawaii for real, but it was corn-flavored or it was actual corn popsicles.

Ben:  I'd try it.

Shawn:  Yeah, yeah. That's the thing about you, Ben, that I respect. You'll do it at least once.

Ben:  As good as carrot cake but try it.

Shawn:  And so, this is the current state of affairs where most of our food as adults is ultra-processed foods. And so, not to mention all of these newly invented synthetic additives, preservatives and chemical food dyes and many of these compounds now just as each week or day goes by are being found to have carcinogens, carcinogenic properties or obesogens is this new kind of category that's being talked about. But, these are obesity-causing agents or cancer-causing agents, one of them being glyphosate, for example. The WHO classified it as a group 2A carcinogen, which is probable cancer-causing agent in humans, not definitive, but that's concerning. And, that's used to treat a lot of the grain products. And, another one, the environmental working group did an analysis of the most popular grain products on us store shelves and found that 80 to 90% are contaminated with glyphosate. And again, this is what we see with these ultra-processed foods.

With that being said, with our children, and this is the first major book to share this study that was published in JAMA, Journal of the American Medical Association, they tracked ultra-processed food consumption by U.S. children for 20 years, from 1999, which at that time the average child was eating 61% ultra-processed food and up until 2018, that number was almost at 70%. Alright. So, the vast majority of our children die in the United States for the average child is ultra-processed foods. And, not to mention, in about a 30, 40-year time span, childhood obesity is tripled in our population.

Ben:  Not to mention obviously this is highly debatable, but everything from early onset of cancer to increased prevalence of ADD, ADHD. There's a lot of other potential threads that you could draw there.

Shawn:  Yeah, we can't definitively say causality here.

Ben:  Right.

Shawn:  The correlations are strong, very strong.

Ben:  I'm just saying if your kids walking around eating cotton candy and Cheetos that there might be a psychological effect of that.

Shawn:  Maybe, just maybe.

Ben:  Yeah, possibly. Call me crazy.

Shawn:  So, with this being said, this is the current state of affairs. So, this is what we're dealing with. And, what we need, first and foremost, is to acknowledge and honor what is, honor what is, not tolerance but to see it and to accept it because that is the current state of affairs in our society right now. They're all of these newly invented tasty fun things to eat whether that's the Chocodile from the Hostess Factory that we talked about before or it's that bowl of Lucky Charms or some kind of Fancy Pants, different kind of ice cream.

Ben:  Children equivalent of our giant cocktail sippy cup plastic glitter-filled beverages that we walk down the streets of Vegas drinking as adults. It could just have way more of that.

Shawn:  Who doesn't want to eat glitter?

Ben:  Yeah, yeah.

Shawn:  And so, it's acknowledging what is and honoring that that's what's out here on the streets, and that our kids there's a high probability that they are going to interact with these things. If they have friends, if they're going to have birthday parties, whatever, you can go and create a commune and just be off the whole thing and do everything yourself. That is incredibly rare situation in particular here in the United States. The reality is you're going to be living in the world and your kids going to be living in the world. What we need to do is prepare them, give them a great foundation, especially when you are controlling. They're not really online yet. And, being aware of these things, you're just giving them real food. They're built from real sustainable raw materials. And, what's going to happen when they have those twists later on with things that are not that good for them for their biology, they're probably not going to feel that good. And, I've seen it, I've allowed it to happen. I've witnessed it and it's just being there to be a direct [00:51:36] _____.

Ben:  So, you mean if you're not getting a bunch of, I don't know, gluten growing up the first time that you have half a loaf of Wonder Bread you're probably going to paint the back of the toilet seat and learn a lesson.

Shawn:  One example that's coming to mind is my youngest son going to a birthday party and the cake and the ice cream, and prior to that, of course, I would have some input on what those things are, giving them a little bit of education but also in a very, this is not in a right or wrong kind of way but just letting them know these things tend to do this.

Ben:  Yeah.

Shawn:  But, letting him experience it, not up here like, “You better not do that.” Because I have had that experience with my older son for example of trying to micromanage things and really changing the food culture in the house, which can lead to rebellion. Like, you're going out here on the streets and you want to go to your friend's house so you can eat all the shit.

Ben:  And, it's not just about their bodies, too. By the way, I do this with my kids. What's it do to the planet? What do CAFO feedlots do to animals? There's a lot more than just your body like, what are we doing as far as soil depletion with monocropping of agriculture, and how are we actually treating the planet Earth, how we treating animals, and how we're treating our bodies. But, sometimes it's not just about what it does to your biology, I mean there's bigger implications in that or at least significant implications.

Shawn:  Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And, there's also knowing your child. What leverage points to utilize? But, rather than even with the birthday party thing, which he didn't feel that well afterwards, whatever, but I got an even closer example of this where I was speaking at an event in Mexico and it was awesome. It was like the family got to come along. It was a weeklong thing. But, every night, him and his older brother would go and get churros and tacos or whatever it was. But, they do this 11:00 p.m. at night, whatever.

Ben:  Although, I would have been along for the ride if they were getting those Mexican coconut popsicles. It's pretty good.

Shawn:  Right, yeah. So, they were doing this for we'll just say five days. And, on the day that we're going back, they had done it the night before we got up for early flight. My youngest son was on this five-hour flight, miserable. I'm talking like I looked at his face, I couldn't even look at him. Alright.

Ben:  Yeah.

Shawn:  And, he knew, he looked me in my eyes with the Bambi eyes like, “Dad.” He ended up puking and his brother's the one who helped facilitate this, by the way. That little puke bag that I've never seen anybody use before, my baby boy used it, but he didn't hit all of it in the bag. And, I'm sorry that this is taking this turn in this, but his brother who helped facilitate this–

Ben:  Sorry, I talked about the toilet seat before you did.

Shawn:  His brother who helped facilitate this had to help facilitate cleaning that up as well. And, since that occasion, my youngest son has been much more judicious or cautious about eating too much. Not that he doesn't engage with a donut or a piece of cake or whatever, but he's not going hard like he did in Mexico.

Ben:  Yeah, some of the best lessons are learned in the trenches. Well, I mean, when it comes to alternatives, like you mentioned, to some of the so-called bad stuff for the ultra-processed stuff, check this out, folks, sweet potato pie smoothie. I could get behind that. That sounds like the stuff I make. Buffalo chicken tacos, avocado fries, hazelnut chocolate ice cream, smarter Snickers bites, I love that, quick and easy deviled eggs, pumpkin muffins, all sorts of bowls and burgers and wraps, and of course, a giant database of nutrition education that just scratches the surface of what Shawn talked about today. This book, it's really, really good because it's written from what I can tell is practical experience and the intention behind it is really good, getting families together to eat dinner, so I can get behind that. Shawn, thanks for coming on the show.

Shawn:  It's my honor. Thank you.

Ben:  Check out BenGreenfieldLife.com/EatSmarter. Grab the book. You'll love it.

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