106: Why Eating Like Your Grandparents Won’t Save You

MK: Should you eat like your grandparents to maintain optimal health? You know, that's a question I've been asking myself for a while because a lot of people believe that, well, most of the health issues we're dealing with today have been introduced for with food choices and the way we make and produce food in the last, I dunno, maybe a hundred years or so, maybe 50 years, you know, processed foods, trunk foods, you know, pfas and BPA and all of the things that are now related to.

Less than ideal food and how we store and consume food. And the idea is if you just eat like you know people did back in the days, everything is gonna be good. Welcome to the Primer Chef podcast. And I thought about how have I been eating when I was a kid and how do my grandparents still eat? I mean, they're now 92 and 93 years old respectively.

And how did they eat to maintain reasonable health? You know. And I thought about it along a lot, and when I grew up in Austria in the 1980s, no one I knew counted calories or prioritized protein. In fact, we didn't even think much about how food impacted our long-term health. The only obvious connection that I remember between diet and poor health was sugar's effect on teeth.

Like, don't eat too much candy, otherwise you're gonna get bad teeth. You know, that's the only thing that I remember from back in the days. Looking back, our meals were super high in carbohydrates, you know, from starches and grains and sugars. We ate pasta and potatoes and bread that were low in fat, relatively speaking, and only moderate in protein.

You know, we didn't make sure that protein was the center of every meal like we do now. You know, I had cereal for breakfast. I had and sugary cereal. That is, I had bread for dinner. We had sugary drinks all day. I don't even remember just drinking plain water, you know, there was always something in there.

Typically a syrup or something, you know, sometimes mom made it out of elder berries, but it was still loaded with just regular cane sugar or stuff we bought in the store. Yet, no one that. I mean, there were a few exceptions, but in the grander scheme of things, nobody was overweight or dealing with chronic illness.

Now, you know, we had gut issues. My dad and I, and we'll talk about this in a, in a little bit, but just overall specifically from a, from a weight perspective, trying to lose weight or not gaining weight, it wasn't an issue. And in many ways our eating habits at the time mirrored those of our grandparents.

You know, my mom cooked based on how her mom cooked and she probably cooked, you know, based on how her mom, uh, prepared food. And again, I mentioned it before, but my grandparents, um, or my grandfather just turned 92 and my grandmother will be 93 in August. They still live independently. They walk daily and they still travel on their own.

And that's pretty impressive. W wouldn't it make sense to just replicate the way of, you know, their diet, you know, eat like our grand or my grandparents and I'll just live as long and healthfully as as they do. And that's certainly the belief behind much of the homesteading and ancestral living movements.

You know, grow your own food, bake your own bread like our grandparents did, you know, ditch the processed trunk food, which didn't exist at a time. Problem solved. But here's the paradox. You know, if you look around, you know, most of the homesteaders that we follow, they deal with excess weight. So they are not, they're overweight to varying degrees.

They deal with inflammation, you know, and you can often see it, you know, with skin issues like eczema and, and stuff, and pimples, autoimmune issues and, and a lot of other things. And I'm like, why is that? If you grow your own food. And you, you eat how our grandparents ate. You know, you bake your own sourdough bread.

You, you know, grow your own veggies, you grow your own, um, animals or raise your own animals for food. How is it that many of us are still struggling? Something must have changed between back then and now. And I brought this topic up with my wife the other day, uh, while we were walking Rabbi or Chairman Shepherd, something we do on most mornings.

You know, we go for just 40, 45 minute walk and use the time to, to talk about stuff. And so I brought this up and. You know, we came up with a couple of potential factors that might be involved here. And there are by no means, you know, saying that, okay, this is the reason why that is. You know, those are just things that we could come up with that we thought maybe those are factors that are involved.

And, you know, obviously like to hear in all yours, uh, thought on that. Um, if your watch is on a, on a platform that supports comments, you know, by all means let me know what you think. But the number one thing that we could come up with was.

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You know, modern life is a constant loop of have tos, and that's a huge shift from. My childhood were even during tough times, you know, we lived more in the moment.

I do not remember my parents saying all the time, oh, we have to, or I have to, you know, there was a lot of more, and we didn't live, you know, we didn't have an easy life per se. We weren't rich. You know, there were struggling financially at times. Um, we lived a very modest life, but it was still, you know, I think more in the moment.

We enjoyed what we were doing and we didn't think as much about what we'll have to do next. Or that what we did yesterday, you know, and, but these days if, if I just think about how often I use the words. I have to every single day. And if you then, you know, add in how often my wife says it, there's a lot of have tos that are constantly going on.

And don't get me wrong, I really like what I'm doing. I love what I'm doing, and I'm doing it out of free choice. But even so, there are a lot of things that I perceive as I have to do them, you know, for whatever reason, you know, to make money to, you know, keep customers happy, to, you know, whatever the cases might be.

There is a lot of. Have tos that I feel like I need to do. There is a lot of noise. There is just a lot of stuff going on every single day that I did not have when I was younger and that my parents and my grandparents, I would argue still don't have, they live a slower. Less stressful life. And the problem with stress, with chronic stress in particular is that it drains your body's resources for detoxification, digestion, and healing.

It's a, at the end of the day, and that's something that, um, that the, the founder of Apollo, when I interviewed him, uh, said, he said it's a resource. It's a resource, um, allocation issue, stress that is, you know, the more stressed you are, the less resources you have for other things that are important to keep you healthy.

You know, and it. Stress also makes you more reactive to food you might otherwise tolerate. And I notice this every time I go on vacation. You know, we go to, you know, Mexico quite a bit and you know, if I eat there, you know, tacos and have a margarita, whatever, or maybe two or sometimes even three, I respond entirely differently to that.

If I, if I had those same foods and drinks here at home where I'm more stressed and under pressure, so the lack of of stress while I'm on vacation has a direct impact on how my body responds to less than ideal food choices. There is no bloating, there is no sluggishness, there is no, you know, negatively impacting sleep.

I mean. Obviously I can also overdo it on vacation, you know, don't get me wrong, but for the most part it signif, it impacts me significantly less in a negative way. So it's not just what you eat, it's also when you eat it and how stressed you are when you do. And I think that's one of the major factors that at just, you know, where you, where you can see the difference between.

Eating something that our, that your grandparents maybe ate. And if you do this today in our, in your current environment, it affects you differently. The second thing or the second factor is I think that food isn't today, isn't what it used to be. And what I mean by that is, you know, seeds for example, have been genetically selected to grow faster and resist herbicides like glyphosate and, you know, resist.

Pests and there has been a lot of changes. Uh, milk from modern dairy cows contains predominantly a one casein, you know, and that's a protein linked to inflammation in many people. And historically, cows produced a two casein, which is better tolerated by the human gut overall. And then at some point, you know, a genetic and natural genetic.

Uh, uh, mutation caused the appearance of a one, and then we started selecting for that because those cows who had that defect, so to say, they just happened to produce more milk than other cows. And so it was like a, you know, humans again, um, interfere or not interfered, but selectively than bread, something that's less than ideal.

For us overall. And even, you know, cows in general, they, these days produce so much more milk than a calf could ever drink. That you have to milk them twice a day. Otherwise they would get mastitis and ultimately, you know, die a painful death if you don't relieve the pressure, so to say, and milk them twice a day.

And those are just two examples, but. The bottom line here really is whenever we do something, be it either genetic modification or selective breeding or cross-breeding or hybridization, we change protein structures and new proteins. Uh. The problem with new proteins is that then develop as part of that, um, interaction interference, at the end of the day, they can be identified as invaders by the immune system because it's a new protein that our bodies, our immune system isn't familiar with.

And so we respond. With an with inflammation to it, you know, we think, oh, there's an innovator. We need to launch an attack because something is trying to get into our bloodstream that's not supposed to be there. And that causes then issues down the line. And that might be the reason why, you know, eating as sourdough bread, even if it's, you know, made from organic grains, uh, is different to maybe the bread that I had when I was a kid that I did not respond negatively to as far as I could tell.

And so the, the bottom end there really is that the inputs may, may be familiar, but the outcomes are not. And so that's. Those are the two main reasons. But the third one, and those really is a combination of other factors. You know, environmental factors that are, might be multiplying the effects that we see today.

You know, when I was a kid in the eighties, we spent hours and hours outdoors. There were no smart phones or cell phones for that matter. We didn't have wifi at home. Even our lighting was. Different, you know, we had warm incandescent bulbs instead of blue spectrum flickering LEDs that we have now that are so prevalent now.

You can't even get incandescent anymore for the most part. And it's not farfetched to think that, you know, reduced sunlight by spending more time indoors, increased screen time, uh, disrupted circadian rhythms and nonstop exposure to manmade EMFs that are now prevalent at levels that are, that we never had before in history.

Would've an impact on our health and our body's ability to deal with stressors in the sense of, you know, less than ideal food choices and some of the other chronic stressors that we deal with today. Now here is the interesting thing, though. You know, my family in Austria still eats pretty much the same way we did when I was a kid, including my grandparents, you know, and I have a picture here I'm gonna, I'm gonna show you, uh, that's from 2012 when, uh.

My wife and I, we just got married not too long before we visited them. And if you look at the, uh, the, the food on the table, it's a big bread basket. It's corn, it's zucchini, it's beer, it's soda. Um, and there was also some grilled meat, so it was not completely protein less. And there was a salad, uh, in the back it looks like.

But it was very, very if. If I were to eat like that every single day, and that's what they do, I would be in different health. My health would be wrecked. I'm sure about this because I've tested it. You know, if I eat sourdough bread more than once a week, I do feel and see the consequences, and so does my wife.

So how is it possible that they can do it? We cannot, and I'm not saying that my family in Austria is in, in, in perfect health, you know, everyone has issues, but at least from a fat accumulation perspective, there is a huge difference between what we see over here in the United States and what we see elsewhere where life is.

Slower where food is maybe different, where there are more laws that prevent the messing with, you know, with, with food, with grains, with, I dunno, glyphosate and those things, even though, you know, I'm not saying the European Union is perfect because it's, it's certainly not. But there are significantly less toxins in the food supply.

Then it is over here. You know, so what can we do about this? You know, that's really at the end of the day, or do, do we wanna do anything about it? Or just, you know, continue moving on without, without doing anything. But at least for us, you know, I, I think there are, there are things that we can do to mimic, to a degree what we had in the past and, you know, mesh it together with our.

With a different, more modern life maybe than we have now. Because I, you know, and I told my wife the other day, I said, look, how cool would it be? If we didn't have to think about food the way we do today, where like every time we pick something up, we have to look at the label. We have to think about, okay, should I have this second slice of bread or might it be, uh, you know, counterproductive.

You know, we, we spend so much time thinking about food and how it impacts us, and if it's a good choice or a bad choice. It's, it's exhausting for most people, you know, and I, I think, do a little bit better than, than most people. I, I, I'm capable and able to handle those stressors, I think relatively well, but it's nonetheless a burden that I wish, at the end of the day I did not have, and I could just eat how, you know.

Careless at the end of the day, uh, not irresponsible, but more careless. Um, similar to how I did back in the days growing up in Australia and, and how my, you know, family in Austria still does. And so for us, I think what, what we do and with what we've started doing is, you know, to remove our ourself to a degree from that fast paced life by buying some land in the sticks where life is slower and, you know, move out there.

Just enjoy a slower, less stressful life because I think the environment plays a major role. If you're in an environment where everyone is hectic, everyone is go, go, go, go. Everyone is like, oh, I need to have, I need to buy. I need to do, I need to do, you know, it's very difficult to, to not do that. And so by moving out to the country and being closer to the land, you know, being forced by, you know, living in a tiny home, you know, for a while at least, you know, being forced to spend more time outdoors, to cook outside, you know, to be closer to nature.

That's another thing that, you know, we did a lot when I was a kid. We spent a lot of time outdoors. You know, except when the weather was terrible, we would be outdoors in, in, in whatever shape or form, you know, grow your own food so you really know what's going in there. If you wanna, you know, bake your own bread, then, you know, grow your own wheat and make it, you know, ancient grains that have not been modified and hybridized and, and, and changed in a way that could be potentially an issue because again.

When I was a kid, we ate a ton of bread and it was not an issue, you know, and now eating two slices a week, you almost feel like, oh, I'm, I'm doing something wrong because I can kind of feel already that it's negatively impacting me. I don't think that's how it's supposed to be, you know? And. Uh, from a home, again, perspective, you know, live in a, maybe a smaller but non or less toxic home, you know, we do, when we are in the process of, of building a tiny home that's gonna have copper piping, you know, for water supply instead of pecks or, or PVC or whatever, you know, plastic cabinet that.

You know, leeches, microplastic, and then all kinds of crap into the water that you drink every day. So copper piping, you know, which is more affordable if it's a smaller home because the copper, the length of the copper pipe is less, et cetera. You know, keep the, uh, as much, let us not as much natural sunlight in by having a lot of windows, you know, instead of relying on, on artificial light.

You know, stay connected to community, you know, express gratitude and, and share, you know, what we learn and share what we have with others so they can hopefully. Pick up on that as well. And so always, you know, it's not about perfection because that doesn't exist. I cannot wind back and and live exactly that, you know, with everything we had when I was a kid.

That's not impossible. I live in a different country, different environment, but I can at least try to. Uh, cut out and mitigate some of those major factors that we have identified and that we believe are at the root of what's going on today. And, you know, it's about peeling back those individual layers and, and just removing what no longer serves us.

And I think the hectic life is one of the things that no longer serves us. Stress is a killer and it's not a silent one. Um, and I, I, I just wanna, you know. Live peacefully. Not having to think about every single choice I make, whether it's healthy or not. I just wanna be in an environment where making an unhealthy choice is incredibly difficult, like it was back in the days without having to obsess about every single bite and every single biohack.

And with that, we're gonna wrap it up again. If you watch this on a platform that supports comments, you know, let me know what you think. What do you think are the factors that make it so difficult to, even for those that that have a. A reasonably healthy diet and still have issues losing weight, um, or gain weight and don't know exactly why.

You know, let me know. I'd like to hear from you or just shoot me an email and let me know if you are listening to this, maybe on a platform that doesn't support comments and, um, hope I'll see you in the next episode.