S1E06 - The Ugly Truth About the Food that Keeps You Hungry

SUMMARY KEYWORDS 

eat, hungry, food, processed food, calorie, body, healthy, combination, chips, remember, satisfied, myth, nutrients, preprint, goal, scientists, cardiac surgeon, people, era, essential nutrients 

SPEAKERS 

Jack Heald, Dr. Philip Ovadia 

Jack Heald  00:00 

Welcome back to the Stay Off My Operating Table podcast with cardiac surgeon Dr. Philip Ovadia. Dr. Ovadia shares. Good to have you here. 

Dr. Philip Ovadia  00:09 

Thanks, jack, pleasure to be back again with you. 

Jack Heald  00:12 

You know, last time we were talking about some myths, some common myths, I was reading a preprint of your book. And Myth number four said, the people who produce our food want us to be healthy. And I asked you to talk a little bit about that. And you drop this bomb on me where you said, and it's obviously true, but it kind of shocked me. If you are running a corporation, your job is to make money, obviously. And if you're running a food Corporation, the best way to make more money is to keep people hungry. That's where I my brain went, Whoa. So can we revisit that? And then I just like you to unpack that for us. 

Dr. Philip Ovadia  01:01 

Sure. Yeah. So again, what I started to say was that the food companies are in the business of increasing the profits for their shareholders in their owners, and the waiting room with that, exactly, that's what businesses are supposed to do. And the way to do that, if you are producing food is to make people more hungry, so that they'll buy more of your food. 

Jack Heald  01:30 

Okay, but that makes sense. Obviously, they're feeding us they're, they're making us less hungry? 

Dr. Philip Ovadia  01:36 

Well, you would think so. And again, if we go back to a time before most of our food was manufactured, and instead the vast majority of our food was either grown harvested from the field or hunted, came from animal products. The goal? You know, basically, that type of food is very nutritionally dense, and is going to make you hungry less often. And then we got into an era where we thought 

Jack Heald  02:15 

it was burning calories that made you hungry. 

Dr. Philip Ovadia  02:19 

Well ultimately, yes you get hungry when your body doesn't have enough available energy to sustain the activities that you're trying to perform. 

Jack Heald  02:33 

But they say that a calorie is a calorie. 

Dr. Philip Ovadia  02:36 

Well, they say that, but again, the ones that say that are the ones that are making our food, that was not actually a concept prior to the era of processed food. I think that if you ask the scientists from the 1800s, the early 1900s, before processed food became very common. They it was very apparent to them, that different foods had different effects on how hungry you are. And, and then you know, how much you would eat, and how healthy you became. 

Jack Heald  03:23 

Okay, so give me an example. When you when you talk about, they make foods that make us hungry? I'm 

Dr. Philip Ovadia  03:32 

so you know, one of my favorite examples of this, that I think many of the people in the audience or member are the famous Lay's potato chips commercial and the slugline was I bet you can't eat just one. Right? And they came up with that, because they knew that no one can eat just one. Because in fact the company that made Lay's potato chips and many other companies that were making the process foods at the time, had hired scientists were called food scientists to specifically figure out what combination of ingredients was going to make people most hungry. And they found out just 

Jack Heald  04:19 

the combination of ingredients that would make people hungry, I'm just my brain is grinding to a halt here. Because I think I eat to not be hungry. 

Dr. Philip Ovadia  04:30 

I and that's the trick. You think you're eating to not be hungry, but when you're eating these foods, the food itself is making you more hungry. And 

Jack Heald  04:43 

food itself is making you more hungry. Yes. 

Dr. Philip Ovadia  04:51 

And we can let that sink in for a minute. But you know, when they said I bet you can't eat just one they knew exactly what They were talking about, because the reality is, is that you can't eat just one. And they know that the specific combination of fats and salt, and sugars in that food is going to make you more hungry and keep you coming back to eat more of that food. And that's what's most interesting, when you really start to look into the majority of our of our foods buy the majority of the processed food that's available in the supermarket, it all is within a very narrow range of certain combination of bath, and sugars, and salt are basically the three magic ingredients that get combined to make us more hungry. 

Jack Heald  05:55 

Wow. So I mean, I've, I've heard this kind of, I haven't really paid attention, just kind of I hear people say, Oh, this combination of food makes you hungry. But you're saying that, that these foods that are coming from these big corporations that aren't trying to keep us healthy, they're actually designing these processed foods, so that we will crave more of them, because we're not being satisfied by what we eat. My stating that correctly? 

Dr. Philip Ovadia  06:32 

Yeah, you're stating that exactly correctly. And unfortunately it gets even a little bit more scarier, a little bit more diabolical than that. Because not only do they put that combination that they know is going to make you more hungry. But the other thing that they do is they basically strip out all of the essential nutrients from these foods. That's what the food processing does. And so again the reason that we eat as humans, the reason our bodies tell us that we're hungry, is because there are certain essential nutrients that we need to get from food that our body is looking for. Your body does not have any sensor for how many calories eat, your body only has sensors, or it only monitors the amount of nutrients that we eat. And if we are not getting enough of the nutrients that we need, your body is going to keep telling you that you're hungry, no matter how much volume of food we eat. 

Jack Heald  07:43 

Holy smoke. There it is. That's the that's the golden truth. It's not the count the amount of calories you're putting in your body. It's the amount of nutrients. 

Dr. Philip Ovadia  07:59 

Yes, and that is the truth that can help people to break out of this cycle. Because if you reset your goals, when you eat, to get the nutrients that you need, and you eat nutritionally dense food, you're going to eat less food. 

Jack Heald  08:25 

This is so counterintuitive to, to everything that I've experienced in my life, but when I guess when I think about it, I remember maybe a month ago, six weeks ago, for some reason I was I was just exhausted in the evening, I'd probably be working outside this Phoenix heat. And I, I didn't want to cook and my fiancé’ didn't want to cook. And I can remember I pulled out a bag of corn chips, and I started eating. And I remember this very clearly. On the back of the nutritional information. It says a serving is 9 chips. It's like - I don't know 180 calories or something. I bet I ate I probably ate 150 of course. I just kept eating and kept eating and kept eat and I can remember thinking I'm gonna get full here pretty soon or die. And I just kept eating. And I think at some point my body just finally said Oh, that is enough junk. But I do remember I never felt like I was getting satisfied. I was so tired and so hungry and I just kept shoving I think these things down my mouth. And I guess that's what it was I wasn't getting the nutrition my body wanted, I was just filling myself up with calorie. Am I? Is that right? 

Dr. Philip Ovadia  10:12 

Am I getting it? Yeah, no, that's exactly right. And, and that's exactly what the food industry intended to happen. Because you, you, you ate that bag of chips, and you know, whatever that bag of chips costs, but you essentially gained nothing from it. So you're going to then go back and eat some more of that or eat something else. But they've basically they've made the money off of you and they've accomplished their goal is the food industry. And the beginning part of this conversation is that the people who make our food want us to be healthy is a myth. Because the reality is, is that the people who make our food have no interest, they have no incentive to keep us healthy. And that's one of the major things that has led to us as a society ending up where we are today. 

Jack Heald  11:16 

Well, I think that's a really good place to wrap this up. There's so much more I could, I'd love to ask you about this. The ethics for example, but we're not going to go down that road. All right. Well, Doctor Oh, thank you so much. This one's been very enlightening for me and I, I recognize now some of my bad eating habits, why they exist. I'd love some time in the future to talk about nutrient dense foods that actually satisfy Can we do that? 

Dr. Philip Ovadia  11:47 

Yes, definitely. 

Jack Heald  11:48 

So all right. Well, this has been the Stay Off My Operating Table podcast with Dr. Philip Ovadia. I'm Jack Heald. Be sure to subscribe so you're updated every time we release a new episode, and we'll talk to you next time.