126: The Nutrition Question Almost Everyone Gets Wrong!

Speaker: Most nutrition debates are framed the same way. Should he eat vegetables or not grains, or no grains, dairy, or no dairy, animal-based or plant-based? And I think that framing is a trap, not because food choices don't matter, but because food categories are a terrible proxy for food quality in the modern world.

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Now back to the episode. And this really hit me the other day when I was in a Delta lounge at the Atlanta Airport, staring at the breakfast buffet. I didn't have breakfast that day and my flight was close to noon, so I figured like maybe we can eat something, you know?

And on paper that buffet looked fine. Eggs, meat, fruit, yogurt, granola. If you zoom out and think in categories, you could say. This isn't that bad. But as I stood there, all I could see wasn't food. Iso pesticides, glyphosate hormones, antibiotics, inflammatory seed oils, animal raised in conditions that don't resemble anything natural.

And then I had this immediate contrast or flashback in my head a few years ago. My wife and I went to Norway, and while we were sitting in an airport lounge. With a similar looking breakfast bread, you know, including the eggs and meat and fruit bread, and granola for that matter. It occurred to me that, you know, I, I would feel comfortable eating most of the foods that I saw there without hesitation.

Same food categories, but completely different reality. And this is where most nutrition conversations break down. You know, we argue endlessly about what category of food humans should or shouldn't eat while ignoring how that food was grown, raised, processed, and handled. An egg is just not an egg.

Chicken is not just chicken. Grains are not just grains and vegetables are not just vegetables. The difference between a pasture raised egg from a healthy bird eating a species appropriate diet and an industrial egg from a stressed hand fed a high pufa soy heavy ration. Is massive. Same goes for produce grown in living soil versus produce sprayed repeatedly with herbicides and pesticides designed to kill life from a physiological perspective, your body doesn't just respond to micronutrients, it responds to residues, toxins, fatty acid profiles, micronutrients and inflammatory signals.

Food quality isn't the detail. It's the main variable I would argue, but this also explains something I've noticed in myself. In a lot of people I work with, it's often easier to cut out entire food categories than it is to source perfectly within them. Not eating poy at all is easier than trying to find truly pasture raised chicken that wasn't fed a terrible diet.

Avoiding grains entirely is easier than hunting down chemical-free, properly prepared grains. Grown in healthy soil may be fermented and sprouted, et cetera. Saying no is cognitively simple. Sourcing well is cognitively expensive and in a food environment, like in the US especially when traveling. Eating out or relying on institutional food, that simplification often improves health outcomes, not because those foods are inherently evil, but because the default versions are, and I'll be honest, I used to believe that certain food categories were always detrimental to human health, that most or all vegetables were inherently problematic, that all grains were a bad idea no matter what.

And over time. I've softened that stance, not because modern food improved, but because I zoomed out. Historically and biologically, humans have eaten a wide range of foods across different environments in small amounts seasonally, and often with proper preparation. The issue isn't that grains or vegetables cannot be part of a human diet.

The issue is that modern versions are often contaminated, nutrient poor, and biologically mismatched to our physiology. In a low toxin environment with properly grown food, small amounts of these foods are far less problematic than we make them out to be, but that's a big if. This is where ideologically nutrition completely misses the mark.

Plant-based dogma ignores chemical exposure and bioavailability. Animal-based dogma sometimes ignores sourcing and animal welfare realities. Government guidelines focus on categories because they're easy to standardize and impossible to personalize. Like we talked in the last episode. Real health lives in a nuance.

The same food category can either support metabolic health or quietly undermine it depending on how it was produced. And when you are standing in an airport lounge in Atlanta versus one in Norway, that difference becomes painfully obvious. Now, here's some practical takeaways. If you're trying to get healthier.

Here is the reframe I'd offer. First, prioritize food quality over food categories whenever possible. Second, recognize that eliminating entire categories can be a temporary strategy, not a belief system. And third, don't assume that if food is good or bad in isolation from how it was grown or erased. If sourcing high quality versions of food add stress, complexity, or constant compromise.

It's okay to step away from that category entirely For now, that's not dogma, that's pragmatism. The goal isn't to win a nutrition debate. The goal is to build a food environment that actually supports health in the real world we live in, not the theoretical one. Nutrition charts are based on. And once you see that, you stop arguing about whether human should eat this or that category of food, and you start asking a much better question, where did this food come from and what did it come with in our home?

What that means is we still center most or all of our meals around animal based, well raised, animal based products, ideally, as much of which come from our own land. The ones that we raise for food like pigs, chickens, Turkey, guineas, honeybees, rabbits, and soon cattle, and then we source from. Others that do equally well or that have the same kind of principle as we have, but we also include foods from the plant-based world.

Again, ideally ones that we've grown ourselves for. We know what we are getting and what we are not getting, and based on that we just listen to our bodies. Your body, if you're in tune with it, will tell you what you can and cannot handle. And if it turns out that you know dairy is not sitting well with us, well then we have to reduce our intake or completely avoid it.

And last but not least, before we wrap this episode up, I wanna say that there just happen to be a few categories of food where you can, where it's very difficult to mess up. Having a plain piece of red meat is the safest bet out there. I would argue by far. Even if you go to a restaurant, even if you go to McDonald's, ordering the patties only is probably the safest bet because there's nothing they could have potentially done with it.

It might not be grain, grass finished beef, but even grain finished beef is nutritionally superior and with fewer problematic ingredients then. Best raised plant out there, in my opinion. So with that, we're gonna wrap it up. If you like this episode, share with someone who could, who might need it. Leave a comment if you're watching this or listening to this on a platform, supporting comment, subscribe, stick around and I hope I'll see you next week.