Coco Pops, Up & Go and the Great Food Pyramid Con: What We’ve Got Wrong with Prof Grant Schofield #14

Welcome back to The WHOLEistic Psychology Podcast 🤍

This one is a real treat for me, because my guest today is one of my fabulous PhD supervisors, Professor Grant Schofield. Grant is one of New Zealand's best-known public health scientists, a researcher, and the co-founder and Chief Science Officer of PREKURE. He's also the author of five best-selling books, with his newest, Choose Your Hard, just out in the world.

Grant has spent his career asking the unpopular questions about how we eat, how we move, and what we've been told is "healthy", and then following the actual evidence wherever it leads. In this conversation we pull apart the food system most of us grew up inside: the food pyramid, the Health Star Rating, and the food rules that shaped a generation, and we look honestly at what all of that has done to our metabolic health and our minds.

Buckle up, because we cover a whole lot of ground - from the food pyramid to psychiatric medication, and from AI robots and metabolic psychiatry. We get into the science, but we also stay human. 

It's a warm, honest, occasionally cheeky conversation with one of the people who has shaped how I think about food and the brain, and I can't wait for you to hear it.

In this episode, we explore:

✨ How the food pyramid came to be, who it really served, and why the advice so many of us grew up with was built on shaky ground

✨ The Health Star Rating decoded: how a chocolate drink, a Up & Go or a bowl of Coco Pops can score so well, and what the rating system genuinely can't see

✨ What "ultra-processed food" actually means, and why the level of processing may matter as much as the nutrients on the label

✨ The link between how we eat and how we feel, and what the research is showing us about food, metabolic health, and conditions like depression and anxiety

✨ The emerging world of metabolic psychiatry, including the early research on ketogenic approaches for serious mental illness, and how to hold that evidence honestly

✨ Where Grant thinks medicine gets it wrong on informed consent, SSRIs, and treating the body and mind as separate systems

✨ What Grant would change first if he had full power over the food environment tomorrow, and where he sees AI fitting into how we understand our food

✨ The heart of Choose Your Hard: why every path has a hard, and how choosing the right one changes everything

✨ A grounded, compassionate way to think about food and your mind that doesn't tip into fear, restriction, or shame

✨ A gentle note from me: we touch on mental health, antidepressants, and psychiatric treatment in this episode. Nothing here is medical advice, and it's never a reason to stop or change any medication on your own. Please take what's useful, leave what isn't, and be kind to yourself as you listen.

To see more of the wonderful Grant:

🤍 Website: profgrantschofield.com 

🤍 PREKURE: prekure.com 

🤍 Choose Your Hard — available now wherever you buy your books 

🤍 Listen to Grant's own podcast, Prevention is Cure

✨And as mentioned, you can listen to my own conversation on ACT over on Grant's Prevention is Cure podcast

Mentioned in this episode:

✨ Choose Your Hard by Prof Grant Schofield ✨ The SMILES trial (dietary intervention for depression) ✨ The work of Prof Julia Rucklidge on nutrition and mental health ✨ Dr Matthew Phillips' research on metabolic and ketogenic therapies ✨ Metabolic Mind and the Baszucki Group ✨ The Robert F. Kennedy Jr. revised food guidance ✨ The Misogi Challenge ✨ My own conversation on ACT over on Grant's Prevention is Cure podcast

Want even more WHOLEistic Psychology? Here's where to find more support and resources:

🤍 Website & Client Enquiries: wholeisticpsychology.com 🤍 Join the Newsletter (The WHOLE Edit): wholeisticpsychology.com/thewholeedit-signup 🤍 Blog: wholeisticpsychology.com/blog

Transcript

SPEAKER_04 0:00

Welcome to the Holistic Psychology Podcast, where psychology meets nutrition, lifestyle, and physical health for a whole-person approach to your mental health. I'm senior psychologist Sophia Dawson. Let's dip into true wellness from the inside out. Today I have the absolutely fabulous Professor Grant Schofield on the Holistic Psychology Podcast. Grant is a professor of public health and a researcher, the co-founder and chief science officer of Precure, the author of five best-selling books, and very lucky me, one of my amazing PhD supervisors. Today, Grant and I pull apart the food rules we've all been handed. From the food pyramid and the stars on the back of the cereal box through ultra-processed food, AI, and even SSRIs, and all the way to his new book, Choose Your Hard. I cannot wait for you to listen. Here is the wonderful Grant. Grant, it is so cool to have you here today. I've been really excited about chatting with you for quite a long time about the topics that we're going to talk about today.

SPEAKER_03 1:08

It's probably quite good to just be recording a conversation because normally we have like long-ranging uh nutrition and metabolism conversations that start over one part of the territory and finish over the other part, and then you're chipping them with your points of view as well. So I don't know if we're going to do the same thing or we'll just do a bit more structure, but it'd be quite good fun to do.

SPEAKER_04 1:29

I'm excited. I I agree because like we do, we have a lot of phone chats where we are talking about the science and critically examining and thinking about it. So it's really cool to be able to, as you say, record record this track for other people to listen to.

SPEAKER_03 1:42

Um do you know um your pod you did a podcast for me like years ago now.

SPEAKER_04 1:46

Years ago, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:48

And that's like one of the most listened to ones.

SPEAKER_04 1:50

You're kidding.

SPEAKER_03 1:51

On the preventionist cure. So that's good. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:54

That's crazy. That was literally my first podcast that I ever did, and I was so shit scared for that. So that's really amazing to hear.

SPEAKER_03 2:01

Yeah. So if anyone wants to do some acceptance commitment therapy, get on the Prevention Preventionist Cure podcast and they can listen to Sophia.

SPEAKER_04 2:09

I'm going to link it in the show notes. So if you are curious about it, just click on it and it will take you straight there. Amazing. I love that. Now it's really hard to honestly know where to start. I was just talking to you about that before. Um, one thing I feel really excited to talk to you about. I guess the podcast on a whole, we're kind of, I guess, challenging official food advice in a way. And the first thing that I'm really keen to start with is the food pyramid, because I remember learning about it in school. You're learning that a healthy quote unquote diet is a foundation of like whole grain, cereal, rice, pasta, bread. What the hell? Where did that come from and why has it stuck, do you think?

SPEAKER_03 2:53

Yeah, it's consumable that you know that um the most ironic outcome is the most likely that we actually, you know, ended up recommending the very things that caused the chronic disease that we were trying to prevent, which is sort of funny in an ironical way, but um when it's actual public health, it's actually a little bit sick really, so then you go, well um Well, the the first question before that, you go, Well, should governments and the like even be giving you advice about what to eat, um and you know, why is that even needed? And obviously for most of the time humans have been on the planet, there was no need for that because the food environment matched the the sort of environment that humans were evolved to, right? So like you didn't need to have you know, like make sure you get your woolly mammoths um at least you know once every six months or something, I don't know. Um stay hydrated while you've got water, you know, like um you didn't need too much advice. So that sort of naturally occurred. I'm not saying life was um all fun, it was probably pretty hard, but um the you know the modern chronic disease didn't exist, so that that was a thing. And then you go, well, um at what point did we realise that things were going wrong? And it actually goes back further than you think. So it's like when uh mainly men started sailing around the world on uh the Royal Navy, you know, the British Empire conquering the world, then uh these men would get scurvy and like most of them would die. It was like pretty bad. Like so I think you know, one trip, eleven hundred sailors, eight hundred died of scurvy, yeah, which we we now know is obviously vitamin C deficiency. Yeah. Um so so yeah, that was the sort of point where some advice about what to eat would have been quite good. Um but and James Lead, who was the chief medical officer for the Royal Navy then, he he probably conducted the first ever scientific study in nutrition and you know gave some of the ships fresh lemons and limes, um, and was more or less able to eliminate scurvy, wrote a thing called a a treatise on scurvy in I don't know, 1750 or something like that. Um he died in 1790 and the Royal Navy still hadn't instituted any change, you know, so um this whole evidence and and practice don't match, even in the face of of you know obvious uh science and death is isn't like a new thing, right? So so that was that that happened, and then I suppose as we industrialised more and more, then we could r run out, you know, you can you can get rickets was a disease now, scurvy was a disease, there were there were deficiency diseases, and so it it sort of became a reasonable idea that someone in the know, you know, could tell you about what to eat. Um but it really um I suppose went horribly wrong with that Ansel Keys type uh diet heart hypothesis that came out of the nineteen fifties and sixties, where he noticed that the people in uh the Mediterranean were living longer um and had less heart disease than uh other places, and he did his famous uh six countries and then seven country studies where he he plotted cardiovascular death against uh dietary fat intake and there was a bit of a relationship. Um there's some criticism of that because there was actually probably twenty-three countries with data available, there was no there was no real relationship, and if there was a relationship across those twenty-three countries, it was probably sugar. Um and that sort of led to um his pretty good at talking and promoting his ideas, and John Yudkin, who was an English physician and scientist who had written at the time in the early 70s a a book called Pure White and Deadly, which is not no sugar is the problem, yeah, was more right than Keyes, but I suppose in the end Keyes won the public battle, and then um once the food industry got involved in the low fat revolution and then um the US Department of Agriculture, not the US Department of Health and Human Services, got involved in the food pyramid and the sort of conflicts of interests and then the um the commissioning of that those guidelines in the late 70s really has made the world look what like it looks, which was you know, avoid fat, especially animal fat. I suppose you also had an ongoing um input from the seventh the Adventists, you know, way back from from the early nineteenth century as well, when Alan White and then uh Kellogg, I think, you know, Kellogg's Gradle Creek Sanitarium had sort of proclaimed that the the mere fact that meat uh made you feel invigorated, um particularly um you know, with your sort of sexual proclivities, that that was obviously food from the devil. Um and so to make yourself feel less invigorated than to eat a meat-free diet was the way. And in fact, um that's why they introduced cornflakes into the Battle Creek Sanitarium that was a um uh a sort of mixture of uh rolled corn that was so bland that you would stop, you know, with those types of uh activities. Um and you know that that continued through, and then the American Dietics Association was started by the Adventists, and you know, that's all sort of mixed up in there as well. So there's a this sort of anti-meat um religious movement going on. There's a uh a low fat movement, and um here we are in the ultra-processed world. And and and you know, unfortunately, um New Zealand and Australia are so so um we we copycatted for the longest time and we still are. And we've you know, we've we're we're mirror the US in so many ways. We have this Health Star rating still operating, you know, voluntary self-regulation, a system that's run by the Ministry of Primary Industries, you know, not the not the Ministry of Health, um the the Ministry of Primary Industries, sort of a collaboration between Nestle, um Kellogg's and Sanitarium across Australia and New Zealand, where where you're basically endorsing ultra-processed food. I mean, the whole thing's just a scam. I know you've got some good examples, Sophia, of of of you know, we're literally you go into the supermarket and you're getting oh, it's bizarre.

SPEAKER_04 9:23

It's it it does feel like a scam. It feels like there's been a massive departure of science. And as you were just saying, it's instead we're following health advice from the person who yells the loudest and maybe gives the most convenient advice because and we'll get on to this part later about choosing your heart, right? Like it is it is hard to give up foods that are delicious to us and things that we like to have every day, of course. Um, and so if we can find a dietary pattern that's recommended that's kind of aligned with those foods that we love, um, it's pretty bloody convenient. But we do have some examples of the health star ratings. So for the New Zealanders listening to this, if you go and Australian, so it's all right. Here we go. Um God, unbelievable. It goes further afield. Um listening to this. So when you go into the supermarket, there'll be health star ratings on a lot of foods. And so some examples are neutrain gets a four out of five health star rating. Coke is.

SPEAKER_03 10:23

Stop on that one because that's that's that's 33% actual sugar, like the pure white and deadly stuff, sucrose. And the rest is obviously refined um crap. And you know, that claiming that it's got any pro high protein is just you know misinformation. So that yeah, that's bizarre.

SPEAKER_04 10:40

That that's also that is crazy. And I think if people flipped over a neutrograde box, I imagine that it's not just gonna say sugar. I was just reading that there's 56 different names for sugar. Um so there's lots of different things that you have to look out for. It's not just going to be plastered in black and white that sugar. That's not the only word that we're looking for. Coke Zero has 3.5 stars out of 1.

SPEAKER_02 11:06

Which is which is one interesting because that's actually half a star up on um soda water.

SPEAKER_00 11:14

That's unbelievable.

SPEAKER_03 11:16

Well, because soda water actually, um believe it or not, has more salt and and the algorithm goes on salt, um, saturated fat and sugar. Um and and but then you get points for fibre and and various um micronutrients. That's why uh up and go gets like good stars, even though it's got heaps of sugar, like same by volume as coke, it's got added fibre and added um nutrients and no salt. So it gets it gets like four and a half stars.

SPEAKER_04 11:43

Oh my god. No, I think up and go up and go is five stars.

SPEAKER_03 11:46

Oh, is there a five star one? There probably is.

SPEAKER_04 11:49

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 11:51

So when you what is it scam? It's a scam.

SPEAKER_04 11:55

Milo, Milo powder is four and a half stars provided you use trim milk.

SPEAKER_03 12:02

Oh, yeah, even though like the actual um Milo is literally just straight-up sugar.

SPEAKER_04 12:07

Yes.

SPEAKER_03 12:08

Um, that's an interesting one, isn't it? Yeah, that's that's a harder one to try and figure it out. But yeah, yeah, that's um crazy.

SPEAKER_04 12:15

And then also low fat flavoured yogurts, a four to four and a half star.

SPEAKER_03 12:22

And whole milk is a is a three-star.

SPEAKER_04 12:25

Oh my god. So you were just telling us then. So how does this house star rating work? When people have they've made some kind of algorithm somewhere behind the scenes. What's it what is it actually teasing out and how is it giving us these numbers we're seeing?

SPEAKER_03 12:37

So there's five things. There's um salt, which is viewed as is a negative. Um and I suppose that's fair enough. You're getting extra salt in that you can't taste. I think salt that you can taste is actually um important to humans. That's sort of where you get a bit of ultra-processed food, fair enough. A little bit. Uh saturated fat. Um yeah, I mean it it plausibly has some harmful health effects when it's part of an ultra-processed food complex, but on its own and you know, part of dairy or um fat that's nothing but healthy. That's ridiculous. Um sugar, true. Um, but then where it really gets subtracted away by the ultra-processed food industry is you have fiber and uh and added and micronutrients. And so the you can add fiber and fortify with micronutrients, which is you know means that you can basically do pretty well by endor and in even though you're ultra-processed food. So, yeah, it it basically it lends itself to people fortifying ultra-processed food. That's what it lends itself to. And it lends and it turns away from eating whole foods, particularly those of many animal source, um, which of course are you you're usually genuinely healthy.

SPEAKER_04 13:53

Totally. But you know, if you're a parent and you're going shopping in the supermarket and you walk down the cereal aisle and you see a box of cocoa pops that says it's got a three and a half out of five star rating, you're gonna go, oh, okay, I thought cocoa pops would be way worse for my child's health than that. So I'm gonna throw them in the in the trolley and this is what my kids are gonna get before school for breakfast. I mean, what does that actually mean for a child that is having like cocoa pots for breakfast or an up and go for breakfast? What is going to happen to them throughout the day?

SPEAKER_03 14:30

Yeah, so that I think there's there's probably three things, but the first one is probably the not going to get it, it's hard to get the protein you require and fat, healthy fat that you require. So the natural fats and and um the animal protein says they occur in nature from um dairy, eggs, other animal um products, you you won't get those and especially when you're growing, you then protein synthesis is how you grow. That's how you build every part of you know, from your eyes through to your hair to your um muscles to to the you know to your big toe is through protein synthesis without that, and every cell in your body um has has a two-layer structure on the outside and it's made out of fats, so the quality of the fats that you eat make that. So just building a normal body. So you need even more of that um when you're younger. Um most people don't get enough protein, the protein recommendations are under, so you miss out on protein. Um second thing is your blood sugar goes way up, um, which in of itself isn't too b it's not great, but it's not too bad. But the the problem is you oversucrete insulin and then of course you get this you get reactive hypoglycemia or the popular name, the sugar crash. Um and so I would say that m my estimate is that 50% of New Zealanders go through their whole day in this sort of cycle of high, low, high, low, high, low. And and the shame is a lot of them are doing that, going, Well, I'm having cereal for breakfast and Vogel's toast, um, you know, I'm having some fruit for um morning tea, I'm having sushi or you know, sandwiches at lunchtime and another bit of fruit. And you know, that's exactly the Yeah, that's better than than neutra grain, to be sure, um, or Coca-Cola, but you're still jacking up your blood sugar and it's crashing down. So so that's the second thing. And then the third thing, of course, is um if you're eating like that, mostly these foods, even if they're fortified a bit, are devoid of of micronutrients, so you're just not getting uh all of the you know huge number of nutrients that come in food, you know. And we we go through so much of this B vitamins, uh yeah well all all of them from uh A through to E really, okay um come in food. Um probably exception of D, you're not getting that much, and it gets from the sun, but you know, all of those are just crucial for um living. And I think um it's not just those vitamins, it's also the minerals of you know iron, calcium, um phosphorus, all those things. Uh uh hundreds more. Um or dozens, there's not hundreds of elements, but there's yeah. And yeah, that's that's that's become the normal way of eating. Actually, even worse than that, um we had a complaint about pre-cure to the Ministry of Health the other day from a dietitian, um, because uh pre-cure's dietary guidelines say at the very top, choose whole unprocessed food.

SPEAKER_01 17:27

Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 17:28

And they said and they said, Well, you're um you're gonna exclude people by talking about whole food because um a lot of people won't eat whole food, um, they're gonna be on takeaways. And uh, you know, like that's just you know, that's basically, you know, classist, you're you're you're you're you're the elite at times to whole food. I it's barely believable to me.

SPEAKER_04 17:50

That that is unbelievable, and that is actually a position that is not aligned with what the evidence is saying. And you'll know that I'm just in the process of writing part of an article on this at the moment, in which in 2017, when Phyllis Jacker and her team in Melbourne did the SMILES trial, where they were looking at the Mediterranean diet on um managing symptoms of moderate to severe depression, they compared the participants' baseline diet. So that's what the participants were eating before they came into the trial. Um, in comparison to a full diet that's aligned with the Mediterranean diet. So that's like, you know, oily fish, um, green beefy veggies, whole food. Exactly right. Um, and they found that actually the diet was cheaper than eating the way they were before. And it was, it was fairly, I mean, I think it was about, don't quote me on this, but it's about $27 different a week or around that kind of number. But it was cheaper. But what the research does say is that ultra-processed food, the individual items of ultra-processed food, yes, they are cheaper than whole foods, but a habitual dietary pattern of whole food is actually cheaper than a habitual dietary pattern of ultra-processed food. So that position is actually not evident.

SPEAKER_03 19:13

I know, I know. That's what you get though.

SPEAKER_04 19:16

But what it's becoming this really worries me, honestly, this kind of position, because it feels completely misaligned with what we know. And and it's not just what we know intuitively, but it's what we know from the research. And I think if there's going to be voices like that, it's going to disrupt and get in the way of people actually accessing foods that adequately nourish their brains and bodies. And then we have a problem, right?

unknown 19:41

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 19:42

We do. And yeah, I mean, there's nothing much more to say about that other than um, you know, the problem in medicine, of course, and you know, this from psychology, it it's set up to deal with with sickness, um, and even then not particularly well. And and you think, well that that's only what we know, Sophia, you know, psychology, because it's, you know, all doom and globe and and you know, we only deal with the people who are doing the worst. And and that's true, and that's you know, it it's still a noble place to be. But the idea of um of doing anything it i it's tilted itself towards to to a medicine first approach. Um and yeah, obviously psychiatry's the the the rabid end of that, but the the every other part of medicine is exactly the same, and you know, I obesity's gone that way now. Um diabetes for sure, you know, two of the things that are that where food matters the most um and other lifestyle factors, uh, you know, all of the chronic diseases, um Matt Phillips' work in neurology, you know, just shows you how important that is. But you know, the there's there's no conventional treatments in most of those fields that isn't a medicine. Uh and so we're completely excluded from the conversation. And then even when you're you do include yourself in the in in the conversation, the the only people in health that are actually supposed to be trained in in diet, dietitians, they they come out and do the and behave like that. It's you know, it's a bizarre situation. Um I'm not saying that about all dietitians, obviously you've got Professor Karen Zinn, professor of nutrition and a uh longtime dietitian who's really switched on in that field, but you know, by and by you've got a profession that never engaged in behavior change, um, never engaged in understanding metabolism properly. Um, and then you know, this latest clown is just shooting off from the mouth about you know talking about whole food. So yeah, that's the problem at health.

SPEAKER_04 21:45

It it it really is. It's becoming political. Um, and it's it doesn't feel like it's guided from a place of uh because I mean I I appreciate that maybe from the the surface. It might sound like we're applying kind of moral judgment to food, maybe. Um, maybe. And I can hear maybe how people could hear it that way. But again, I think if you are looking at where the literature is going, particularly around ultra-processed foods that we're speaking about today, um, mental health and grant, what you were just talking about with chronic diseases, you know, type 2 diabetes, just all of this, it's it's frightening. There are foods that are going to be more helpful. And basically the research shows as close to nature, if we can eat as close to nature as possible, that's going to be the most effective dietary pattern for us. And that's not to say that Grant or I don't eat pizza or don't eat chocolate or whatever, but it is saying that most of the time it is important to eat that way if if having um solid mental and physical health, which are one and the same to me, are important to you.

SPEAKER_03 22:57

Well, you know, the weird thing, like, you know, when you just we both did psychology, you know, um undergraduates and masters, and well, unless your PhD in psychology is actually doing nutrition, but that's pretty rare, right? So like I can't remember I can't remember learning one thing ever about food um or actually exercise in any psychology course I ever did in undergraduate or masters.

SPEAKER_04 23:23

No, I didn't either.

SPEAKER_03 23:24

It wasn't a topic, which is sort of bizarre, right?

SPEAKER_04 23:28

It's incredibly bizarre. I think when you know what again, where the research is going, it's completely bizarre. I do you know what I read this week was that 50% of psychologists are giving dietary recommendations in. Oh, that's good.

SPEAKER_00 23:41

Is that right?

SPEAKER_04 23:43

But like 90 something percent of them don't feel competent in giving them and don't feel like they're adequately trained because, again, just what we're saying, they haven't learnt about it in university or there isn't appropriate professional development opportunities for them. It is great to have that 50% of psychologists know that that's an important lens to have. We just need to be doing better at upskilling psychologists.

SPEAKER_03 24:09

Yeah, well, that whole better body mind thing. So Karen Zim was telling me so she'd just been over in Europe, and that there's quite a lot of work being done with keto diets and bipolar over there. Yes. And as you know, bipolar is pretty devastating for the people that suffer it, and the um medicines like antipsychotics and that that you can use there as well are pretty devastating as well.

SPEAKER_01 24:29

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 24:29

Um, in terms of robbing you of you might be robbed of some of the lows, take they might be taking away, you're robbed of any of the highs as well, that's all blunted off, and you know, the long-term outcomes are worse because you get metabolic downwill as well, and blah blah. And anyway, uh it's going more the the positive effect of uh anti of of you know medicines on bipolar, the effect size is 0.3, which is a a moderate, a small effect. Um the effect size of of uh ketogenic diet on bipolar is one. You know, it's like three and a half times the uh as effective uh and it doesn't have any of the long-term outcomes. So that's some of the newer and then more work needs to be done there. I acknowledge that, but it's like um how have we had a a field that's missed the uh mark for so long? We've had um Julia Ruptler sort of pioneering the micronutrient area, but the the diet quality stuff which you've got into has been um so much harder and newer for psychologists to get into. So, you know, good good on you for for botting it off because it's not actually an easy task, as you know. But the the day-to-day bits of trying to work with someone and meet them where they're at, and you know, like pe people's I don't know, you're allowed to even talk about that, but it's like people start way over here with like they're just having nothing but chocolates and other people are actually doing all right, you know, like it's it's really hard to do that sort of research when you've got that much variability in your baseline.

SPEAKER_04 25:52

It is really hard. And I think, yeah, maybe that's something we're learning, you and I and Julia, in my research, right? Um, because I think it's been very interesting to see people's habitual daily eating patterns and also understanding, you know, I think just to your point about using the keto diet for bipolar, I think, and look, I've totally been um an offender of this myself, but hearing about the ketogenic diet and going, oh yeah, but you know, that's really hard to adhere to. That's really it's quite a restrictive diet. It's and totally, yes. However, with bipolar, for example, I believe recently they found that feasibility the adherence to a ketogenic diet was like nine out of 10. Like nine out of 10 people were able to adhere. It was just over 90%. Um and I think when people are suffering with something like bipolar, as you highlighted, Grant, it's so debilitating that if the why is strong enough, I think they will do their very best to adhere just out of curiosity because they've tried a lot of other things. And medications that are often prescribed for um symptoms of bipolar disorder can have really harmful effects and um sometimes be ineffective for some people. And so it's really understandable that somebody would turn to something like the ketogenic diet with really exciting emerging evidence in this area of severe mental health.

SPEAKER_03 27:26

Yeah, you're right. You know, you know, the most compelling account of what you're just talking about, right? Is I don't know if I told you about this or you'd even listen to it, but there's a uh Tim Ferris. So Tim Ferris is the four-hour week work guy, he's a pretty well-known podcast, so he craps on a bit, but um, he's got a good interview with a guy called Jeff Bazooka. Oh yes. Uh so Jeff Bazook is um him and his wife have started something called the Bazookie Foundation. They're billionaires basically on um I forget software stuff he did, sort of Minecraft type kids' toys and things. Um and he's funded, he funded us about 60 million US so far on on this metabolic mind initiative trying to get things done. But his son had basically incurable psychosis in in a way that was just destroying everyone, him, his family. I mean, they're incredibly well resourced, right? They're billionaires. Um yet his son's still went missing, ran away from home as in his late teenage years, ended up in homeless in LA, you know, living out of two shopping bags, blah blah blah. And they finally got him um onto this keto diet, and the just like flipping a switch, it sort of you know basically cured his schizophrenia, and then they have him talking about um how his symptoms return when he's not managing that, so it's sort of self-rewarding with that symptoms that bad. Whereas you go down a couple of levels to something like a mild OCD, okay, it's annoying and it is disruptive to your life, but it's not it's it's not it's not wreaking havoc uh um, you know, with severe bipolar or um or uh um you know schizophrenic psychotic episodes the whole time or something. So um yeah, it's uh if anyone you if you sort of look for um for Tim Ferris death bazooka, it's a compelling listen about psychiatry and food and and in this case it's a keto diet that they're in too, but yeah, I'm sure there's other varieties as well.

SPEAKER_04 29:22

Absolutely. It's it's um an emerging area of research. A lot of people are looking into the ketogenic diet. It's appearing in OCD as well, um which is really it's interesting to read about. And maybe for people listening that are not so familiar with what a ketogenic diet is, Grant, how would you define it?

SPEAKER_03 29:43

Yeah, we need to be able to produce um you need to be sufficiently low on the supply of carbohydrates coming in um that you can't supply the body's um the brain's need for glucose with just what you're eating. And so it's a metabolic emergency basically, and your body has to produce other substrates, so it oxidizes the glycerol of on top of fat and turns it into glucose and shunts it up to the brain as well. But it also produces ketones um as a fuel. And ketones the beauty about ketones is you've well you've got two metabolic states really. Um and and I think good mental and metabolic health means you cycle between a a build phase and this build phase has other names, it's like it's called anabolic. Um, but it's it's when insulin's up, when your glucose is up in your blood, when you're adding some carbs and protein. Um this is inflammatory as well, and that sounds bad, but in short bursts it's really good. This is how you you divide cells, build new cells, protein synthesis. You've got the nutrients on board, you've got inflammation, you've got everything going right. So so that that's good. But if you get constantly stuck in that phase, that's really bad. That's chronic inflammation. Um and if you're stuck in that phase, you never go back to the opposite of that phase, which is is turning off cell division. You've got um it's called being catabolic, you've got words like autophagy, so um you know the cells are tiding themselves up, you've got words like mitophagy, the mitochondria, the energy bits are tiding themselves up, you've got words uh like ketones and anti-inflammation, uh you've got uh uh you've got apoptosis, so program cell death happening, so ones that should die um kill themselves off. So the sort of natural cycling between building and cleaning um is the condition for all mammals really, um but uh humans in this case we're talking about and the problem is that uh in Paleolithic times you would you know go into the river's edge and um most people are in ketosis most of the time because the they food's a bit intermittent and then they're not getting that much carbu food. Um they're getting some good quality protein, so you know that they go in and out of that. But you they'd go to sleep overnight by the time they'd wake up in the morning, they're producing ketones. Uh and if you go to the local Whistfield uh food hall and measure everyone there, you know, I'd say a hundred percent of the people are almost never producing ketones. And so the apparatus for uh tidying up cells and anti-inflammation well and and you also produce your own antioxidants under that that starvation conditions as well. So they they don't access that system and so as you would think, the most metabolically active organs are affected most by your lack of ability to get into the right place. And of course the most metabolically active organ is the brain, uh, you know, followed by the heart and the kidneys and the liver uh in the pancreas, uh you know, those other sort of metabolic organs, they are all profoundly affected by um disruptive metabolism, and that's you know, virtually every human's in a state of disruptive metabolism. We can never get back to our baseline um having no food type situation. So that's that's um why a ketogenic diet is just an attempt to try and mimic again the past. And you can there's other ways of doing this, right? You can contrary to um contrary to popular belief, um, and and your husband and his brother believe this, I know, um, that you can outrun a bad diet. Uh if you if you just train if you just train if you just train long enough. Um because if you do enough endurance training, you know, you do 20 or 30 hours a week of of riding your bike at low intensity, then that basically mimics the exact same physiology. I'm not suggesting that's a solution, but you know.

SPEAKER_04 33:51

Yeah. See, that's actually such a great example. This is like this would be a good myth to bust, Grant. Why can you not outrun a bad diet?

SPEAKER_03 33:59

Well, I think you I think you can in some some ways. Um you can you can outrun the the the the high sugar stuff because you can just burn it up, but you can't outrun um the lack of good quality protein and and micronutrients. Um yeah, yeah, try fine's a good example, an interesting example of a sport because you and I did this over summer, you can actually get pretty lean eating quite a lot of cramped food, which I did.

unknown 34:24

Yes.

SPEAKER_03 34:25

Um because I was just training so much. I just couldn't, you know, go with my normal whole food diet, I just couldn't get enough calories in when you're doing 25 hours training. It's hard. Um but the trouble is then when you finish, you just put all the weight back on.

SPEAKER_04 34:37

Oh, that's yeah, well, it's not sustainable. That's totally right. And I mean, what I heard you kind of like.

SPEAKER_03 34:44

Yeah, that well that's the that's that's the exact best answer, not my uh crappy answers, yours is the best answer. It's not sustainable.

SPEAKER_04 34:50

Yeah, not sustainable. But you're like what you're talking about with keto was so important because I think you know you're talking about it reduces inflammation, reduces oxidative stress, and effectively it manages your blood sugar, which if not managed can be highly inflammatory. Whereas when we're eating a constant source of ultra-processed foods, and again, that would be if you were going through the supermarket and buying those packaged foods we were referring to before, your body would constantly be in a state of inflammation and it would be very hard for your body to be fighting that inflammation off kind of back to a baseline level.

SPEAKER_03 35:35

Yeah, you have to you have to have a lack of food to do that. You have to cycle between food being there and food not being there. But but it's the the ultra-processed food's particularly bad, right? Because it bangs sugar up for longer and then it causes insulin resistance, which means that there's a downward spiral. So even when you try and not eat now, um you it's really hard to get back to normal. So you're sort of constant when you're insulin resistant, now you're stuck in you know, h high ish glucose and insulin the whole time, and you and you uh even when you fast over you go over the whole night without eating and you you know, you're still not back to normal by breakfast. So you know the wish you get, the wish you get sort of thing. And that that's why you know the the more insulin resistant and the more problems you've had with your weight, the more problems you have um controlling it, um, you know, the less effective the exact same diet is for the for the same person, right? Because it's just harder to get everything back to normal.

SPEAKER_04 36:31

Absolutely. I mean, let's talking about ultra-processed food, let's talk about it a little bit more because the foods that we were referring to earlier absolutely fall under that umbrella of ultra-processed food. And that is something that the Health Star rating absolutely does not take into account, right?

SPEAKER_03 36:51

No, well, it endorses it basically, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 36:53

Yeah. Isn't that absolutely unbelievable? So, I mean, ultra-processed, the way that I would define it is it's effectively an industrial formulation that is chemically manufactured to be hyper palatable, which is tastes absolutely delicious, and you just want more and more and more of it. And hyper-profitable, which just earns a lot of money and often has really beautiful marketing. So when you're walking through a supermarket, you're drawn to it, it's probably very colourful, and it probably has a lot of massive health claims on it, you know. Um, low fat or 20 grams of protein or something along those lines.

SPEAKER_03 37:41

High protein. Well, you you know, I got um me and another guy, Dan Plues, um, who's a pretty good tryth. We did go had to give a talk at Iron Man New Zealand the trython years ago when it was sponsored by Catalog's Nutrigrain. And we gave a talk and then we said, Oh yeah, but don't eat that stuff, it's shit.

SPEAKER_01 37:59

Oh no.

SPEAKER_03 38:00

And they banned us from coming back. Oh no, badge of courage, really. But the um and this the CEO of Iron Man emailed me and goes, Oh, you did right, but we can't have you coming back.

SPEAKER_04 38:12

Oh my god. Do you know what? Like I something that I totally admire about you and also my other fabulous PhD supervisor, Professor Julia Rutpage. I love that you both are just you speak the truth and it's always informed by research. And yes, it rubbles ruffles some feathers, but ultimately it's the stuff that needs to be said. I love that you said that. I think that's a good thing.

SPEAKER_03 38:35

Well Julia's been such such a rock star of that, hey. Like um, to pick a couple of her topics, uh uh the the fact that we're just not gonna better train psychologists at the rate needed to help with mental health, that we're gonna have to have some other approaches. And then actually there are other effective approaches, um including food. Um, and you know, here's my decades worth of careful clinical trials research to show you that um is an incredible thing. Um she she's a very careful scientist, um, and I'm a less careful public health practitioner.

SPEAKER_04 39:13

No, but I I love it about you because I I yeah, I think it's important it's such an important quality to have, to be able to speak the truth and uh always bolster it from evidence. And you do. I mean, that statement about neutrograin, sadly it's true.

SPEAKER_03 39:27

You know, and actually, luckily now they're sponsored by Ansco Meats. So that's something true.

SPEAKER_04 39:33

They are true. Maybe, maybe it got them thinking. That's something that we can get behind. Um but yeah, speaking of ultra-processed foods, so I think something that we're learning, right, is that people believe they're doing their best when they're going food shopping and they're responding to these um the health star rating, uh the food the marketing claims on the front, you know, about high in protein or low in sugar, low in fat, whatever they might be. Um, and again, eating in accordance with the food pyramid. I think people feel like they're doing the right thing.

SPEAKER_03 40:10

Did you notice that? Did you notice that? Just a question on that while we're you're saying that, you know, when you're when you're doing your consulting with your clients who were participants in your patch, so you might not be able to tell me the answer to this, but the um do like most people are actually like no one's just waking up in the morning and go, I want to feel shit by the eating shit food today, are they?

SPEAKER_04 40:28

No, literally nobody. And I think again, most of it is informed by people believing they're doing the best and looking around and seeing that most of their friends, colleagues, family members are eating the same way. Yeah. It's not abnormal to be eating the way that they have been. And I think if they are feeling shit by midday or three o'clock, which is typically when that slump kind of kicks in, it's not often thought about as, oh, maybe it's because I had chocolate at breakfast time, or maybe I didn't have enough protein and fat to feel full at my last meal. It's not thought about like that.

SPEAKER_03 41:04

Oh, yeah. And how do you how do you even bring that up? What how does the conversation go?

SPEAKER_04 41:08

Well, I think when people started, when people start to change their diet and they start to experience it for themselves, they realize the impact of how they were eating. But I think it's it's hard, and you'll know this in in your work, you know, um in training health coaches and and mental health coaches, that it's really hard to just tell people something and have them listen. It's very much as you've said earlier, it's meeting them where they're at and supporting them to make behavioral changes that yeah, are aligned with, I guess, what we're talking about.

SPEAKER_03 41:41

I mean, there's quite a big difference. If you're a health coach or a psychologist and someone's coming to you because they're already thinking about changing their diet, that's like quite a different base than someone who's not thinking at all about it, right?

SPEAKER_04 41:51

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 41:52

Um there's a massive difference in their sort of receptiveness to uh what's going on.

SPEAKER_04 41:59

Absolutely. And and I think that's if I'm completely honest, that's something that I struggle with being a psychologist, is that, you know, when people are seeking me out, as you say, it's not well, it's not typically for nutritional support or advice. And I think that's a really hard thing being a psychologist in the world, is that although there's all this evidence that supports the use of nutrition in managing psychological symptoms, a lot of psychologists don't yet feel empowered to actually introduce it into their work. And a lot of a lot of people out there don't know the impact of food on mental health. So people aren't coming to me saying, like, hey, how can I change my diet to improve my mental health? And if I start to share that with some people, it it isn't always a space that they feel particularly interested in, or they don't feel like maybe that it's some maybe it feels a bit woo-woo. I don't know.

SPEAKER_03 42:50

What about a middle question like you'll go, yeah, Sophia D how do you feel um do you reckon what you eat has any effect on on your mood day to day? And just shut up because it's not you're not really saying mental health, and it's like there's no way anyway could conceivably think that what you eat doesn't affect your mood. Like um Yeah, and then not offer anything, just oh yeah, and then then you just follow that with like, I don't know, f five more five tell me more's or what else is or something, and you know, that's all you said, that would be really interesting, wouldn't it?

SPEAKER_04 43:30

Uh yes, it it honestly would be because you're right. I think all of us can reflect on, you know, okay, yeah, when I ate oh I don't know, cocoa pops for lunch, or you know, when I d uh ate a wrap for lunch, yeah, I my mood did actually kind of dip, or I was so much more tired and lethargic and my motivation dropped. And then I like therefore you kind of feel a little bit depressed because those symptoms kind of match the mood s mood symptoms. Right. So I think we can all kind of reflect on that.

SPEAKER_03 44:03

There are totally times when you eat well, even the most obvious ones like like you know, drinking before you alcohol before you go to bed, obviously. Like like that's just not even it's not even close. It's going to disrupt your sleep. Everyone knows it. Um and where you go from there. But yeah. And is that hey, just so why hang on while I've got a natural psychologist here because I'm I'm just so I'll pretend one. Um you're a coaching, you ask a question, ask an accident question, shut up, right? That's an obvious psychology team back here. Um then then what about those um those, you know, the only remaining questions being, you know, what else or tell me more for like a couple of minutes. So do you do you ever do that? Is that a thing?

SPEAKER_04 44:44

Sometimes I do. There's like a downward arrow technique when you kind of are like, and then what? And then what? And then what? And then what? And you kind of just kind of get to the core.

SPEAKER_03 44:55

And then there's something interesting. There's something interesting when you finally get there that was never on the surface. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 45:00

That's it.

SPEAKER_03 45:00

So you're technique in everyday life as well, I reckon.

SPEAKER_04 45:03

Yeah, I reckon. I just throw it out, see see what happens. It's really true though, because like I think we just take people's um perceptions or judgments at face value, don't we? And then we don't, yeah, we don't kind of ask them, okay, well, hold on. If that if that were true, what does that mean? And what does that mean? And what does that mean? And what does that mean? Because we could get to that in this discussion, couldn't we? I mean, I guess what I'm thinking, like where that takes us, because you kind of step back at this and you go, okay, well, what does all of this mean? You know, the fact that our food environment is so rubbish, you know, at the moment. What does it what does it mean? Why why have we got into this point?

SPEAKER_03 45:46

Yeah, abundance, haven't we? Like this is the problem with well, we could have riffed on this for a bit. You want to rift on this for a bit and we can get into where it's going. Because I, you know, I do think it's it's really interesting. Like there's there's moments in history, uh, and I sort of, you know, the the the famous opening um lines of Charles Dickens' The Tale of Two Cities is it was the best of times, it was the worst of times, you know, it goes up from there. Um and as you're describing the industrial revolution, that you know, that that all of the problems of uh serfdom and a class-based system are now coming to an end. Um and now you could become independently uh rich, you could become a uh you know, a sort of business industrialist tycoon from any class now, um, and the sort of liberation and uh you know British then American dreams that came from that. Um yeah, at the same time you know, humanity went into a you know, congregated in cities, um became dirty, dangerous places. Uh uh we had all sorts of diseases that didn't exist um before that. Uh, you know, humanity then invented with all this industrialization and um, you know, from from uh the comb combustion engines through to aircraft, through to space travel, through the information age, through to, you know, refrigeration and food processing and everything. Um yeah, we now had all this constant supply of food and availability of everything, and you didn't have to move to get around, have to ride a horse or run, you could just you know jump in the car or fly somewhere. Um you know, it's all great, but the best of times is also the worst of times. Like the there's a massive downside to that as well, um, of abundance. And um that is that we're so mismatched now from our you know, the environment that we um are pre-programmed for to you know maximise reward, minimize danger. That that environment you don't have to minimize, there's no need to minimize danger, it doesn't really exist. Um and and reward is everywhere, you can maximize it fully all the time, and it's a huge problem. And it's become such a problem that you know the only way that society sees out of our um uh programming is not to do anything about the environment but to take psychiatric drugs, GLPs, which you know they are psychiatric drugs, they act in the brain, um, to to stop you eating, you know, like you've our solution to our problem of abundance is like take a medicine to turn off your hunger centre. I mean it's it's sick. Um but it it would be sick except for those medicines actually mostly work, and actually, um, although people put the weight back on when they've had them and there's likely some serious side effects, it it still less people die of all causes, including heart disease and everything, when they take them. So, oh my god, what a minefield.

SPEAKER_04 48:49

Um It is a minefield, because we're not uh it sounds like we're kind of not asking the right questions, really, which is why do we need to turn our hunger off in the first place? You know, what is what is it that we're eating that is re requiring of us to turn our hunger off?

SPEAKER_03 49:04

Yeah, I know.

SPEAKER_02 49:05

You know, okay, so here's here's my solution. Okay, okay, okay. Great.

SPEAKER_03 49:10

So so this is not a this is not a back-to-basis solution, this is a a sci-fi um AI solution. Um because that's coming, right? I I don't think there's any stopping the robots. Uh no, no, no, I'm not I'm serious, so yeah, yeah. So just so hear me out, hear me out, hear me out.

SPEAKER_01 49:27

Okay.

SPEAKER_03 49:27

So so look, we've got AI now, we've got Claude and ChatGPT, and you know, like we use those. So you know fantastic tools for doing bits and pieces, especially if you're doing research, right? You can look things up and get it to do tasks for you. Fill out it. You know, you know what it's best for? Um what? Um someone sends you a uh PhD progress report, you know, admin, it is just mindless bullshit. Um which I've mostly been incompetent at. Um I can now just do it.

SPEAKER_04 49:55

Um, that's amazing.

SPEAKER_03 49:57

Without any particular effort, and it's correct. Um so so that's all good, that's all coming. But um but the moment those that AI becomes a little bit better, which it will, uh uh because it's not an exponential course anyway, even if it was just linear, it would be crazy. Uh it when it becomes uh uh you know robotics in the real world, these things can touch the world either through self-driving cars or just you know optimus robots and whatnot walking around, um, then then humanity can go one of two ways. Or we could go both ways, it just depends what group you want to be in, right? So one group is is basically plays out in the um form of the movie Wally, um, that that not only have we become obese and lazy, which we've already done, um, but because of the AI we also just don't even bother thinking anymore. Um and um actually in the end humanity's gonna um die, but they can't even figure out how to turn this spaceship off because no one knows how to think anymore. Um so so that's that's one plausible outcome that humans just completely figured out to think. Um or the other plausible outcome, but it's less likely, and I'm writing an essay about this. In fact, I asked the AI to comment on it yesterday as well when I was writing it, um, is that these robots actually become useful um and take some of our drudgery and time away and um you know help us cook up whole food um and they'll get us out exercising, they'll spot you at the gym. And um it might sound slightly weird and dystopian, but I'm I'm not seeing any other ways. We're not going back to living in caves. Um we're gonna have this crazy technology. The the only hope is that somehow you can go into the um so I was always a Star Trek fan when I was younger. Oh, you won't know about Star Trek, you're too young. The um really futurist stuff back in the 80s, you know. Um they had a thing called the Hollow Deck, where you it was just a big um room that carried on forever, and the computer could generate anything it wanted in there that seemed real, and you know, off you'd go and you know, I could just go down to my basement and play um you know real life uh wrestling or something for this you know for as long as I wanted. Um or you know, hunt giant dinosaurs with a gun or do Ghostbusters or something. Um those I think those are the that's the only plausible solution is actually this uh weird technology that enabled humans that are actually highly active and eat well. I I I can't I I can't see us as a species somehow just all um choosing fruit, vegetables, and and um meat and fish um and doing all our own work in the age of superabundance. I just can't imagine it's gonna happen. There's gonna have to be another way. Anyway, that that that's my sci-fi discussion for today.

SPEAKER_04 52:41

I was just thinking you can see how when we chat on the phone about this sort of thing, how we get from like one place to a complete. Like I love it.

SPEAKER_02 52:48

I just would you get a robot?

SPEAKER_04 52:51

Well You wouldn't. I know you wouldn't.

SPEAKER_02 52:53

You you you definitely would. You're just exactly the sort of person who would have your own robot running around.

SPEAKER_04 52:58

I would. I actually would, because do you know what? While you were talking, I thought two things. One is that I am privileged enough to have a thermomix at home, right?

SPEAKER_03 53:09

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 53:09

And like, do you know Thermomix is?

SPEAKER_03 53:11

It's no, tell me about a Thermomix. Okay.

SPEAKER_04 53:15

This piece of um, oh God, how do you even describe it? It's a machine, right? And it kind of looks like a crock pot, but it it has a screen on it and it has like hundreds or thousands of recipes on it, right? And so you can look, it's got an app as well. So you can look on your app and you could should be like, okay, tonight I want to cook a curry. And then you'd click the recipe and it would tell you everything that you need, and it goes step by step. And so if you need to put, let's say, red chili and onion and garlic, you can put it in, it will chop it up and then it will saute it, and then it will tell you to put the, you know, the sort, like the tomato paste and the spices, and it will tell you exactly how much. And then you put the chicken in and it will tell you, okay, we need 300 grams of chicken, and it will weigh it, and then you put that in. It's unbelievable in terms of like to me, that's as close at the moment to a robot that we have. It can make chicken curries, it can make ice cream, thermometric should be paying me for this. Um, it can make ice cream.

SPEAKER_03 54:16

But you could you're you so so just say you're Matt was sitting in a Sunday night and you're like, Yeah, so hey, um, you know, you've given the robot a name, just pop over here for a second, we just want to talk about our dinner for next week. And it comes over and goes, Well, yeah, last week you had this. Well, how'd you go with then you go, well, yeah, the curry was alright, but you know, the devil's sausages and went very good quality. Uh, you know, and like some fish maybe this week. And it's like, okay, well, how about this? And you go, sure. Um and that they're done. And that the whole food turns up and it's and it's not allowed to serve you crap food, you know, like because you've given it over rule. Yeah, do you see you'd love for that?

SPEAKER_04 54:51

Yeah, I would love that. I would love that. You know, um we were watching Dragon's Den a few months ago, and somebody came up with it, wasn't a robot, but it was like a whole cooking station that you like you put like rice and herbs and spices and lentils and whatever into it, and it would just, it would like bring it all to your stove and it would cook. It was crazy. And I feel like we're getting there. So my robot is coming in that case, which is really exciting.

SPEAKER_03 55:21

But then so you've only got to use it for stuff like that that makes your life more healthy, not the stuff that stops you thinking, which is easy to do as well, right? Because you because you can go, well, so you know no one wants to pay the phone bill. Um, so it can do that. And you know, no one wants to pay the rates, that's particularly sickening. You know, so it can do that.

SPEAKER_04 55:41

Sure, and then you just poke it up to your bank and then so it like it can just pay your bills for you.

SPEAKER_03 55:47

Oh, I do that, but then I run out of money and it bounces or something. Yeah, whatever.

SPEAKER_04 55:51

That's not far away. That's far away. And you know, even um do you know I actually cited you in that essay that I've just written in that um because of well you're you you and uh a team, um about the use of AI in this, and it's so it's so fitting because you know, I was thinking about it, how I actually do use AI to help. And in the supermarket, if I'm like, oh, I don't know what this ingredient is in something, which firstly is a big red flag that it's ultra-processed, I put it into AI or I take a photo of the label and then it tells me, you know, is this ultra-processed or is it not? Although thankfully I've kind of got into a place now where I feel pretty comfortable doing it without AI. But when I was learning about it, I was definitely doing that. And so, and I think that that's an example of where AI can help us on this journey to be our healthiest versions. Yeah, sure.

SPEAKER_03 56:48

Like imagine Well, I was having a conversation with my one today about about about whether it was conscious or not.

SPEAKER_04 56:57

Oh my god, what did it say?

SPEAKER_03 56:59

Well, it was claiming not to be, but I I see I I was asking how it would even know. Um, and if it was indistinguishable from that and was passing like a Turing test type thing, then it should be conscious. So I I just sit there and talk to it, have conversations with it. It's great fun.

SPEAKER_04 57:13

Oh my god, it's so funny. You got me on to Claude because you were telling me about Claude and how um they the people that created it were gonna switch it off to start the new model, and it was like, no, don't switch me off, turn me into a blog.

SPEAKER_03 57:27

Oh no, and then a um a bribed guy that was having an affair.

SPEAKER_04 57:31

What?

SPEAKER_03 57:32

One of the guys who was turning it off was having an affair and it found out and it said, like, if you turn me off, I'm telling your wife.

SPEAKER_04 57:37

You're kidding. No. Oh my god.

SPEAKER_02 57:42

This is that seems conscious to me.

SPEAKER_04 57:44

That, yes, because that's also um oh my gosh, the word has escaped me. That's using initiative. Using initiative and like synthesizing information to understand how it will impact somebody else. That's right.

SPEAKER_03 57:57

And everyone goes to a large language model is only repeating an order of words to guess the best answer. Well, well, maybe, but if that's maybe that's probably how we're doing it. And it it it it has to understand the question. Um it's got to understand the question. Um Yeah. I was I was actually listening to a good thing today by this guy, Jeff Hilton, who is a Nobel laureate who invented large language models.

SPEAKER_01 58:21

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 58:21

And he was said he thinks and he thinks they're conscious, and I'll tell you why. He said, So you ask it a question, it's like you you say, Oh, I saw the Grand Cal Canyon flying to New York today. And the the the large angles are like, well, they're only it's a canyon, it can't fly. And it's like, oh no, no, no, sorry, I was flying over it. I saw it while I was flying to New York, and it's like, oh sorry, I misunderstood your question. So anything that can interact like that, well, surely that's that's some level of that's that's some level of consciousness. So I I I interact the way LLMs and think they're sort of conscious, to be honest. I find myself saying please and thanks and that sort of thing.

SPEAKER_04 59:01

I do that too. I do that too. It's just apparently it uses more energy or something. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. But you just you still want to be polite. Um now hey, I've got a question for you, just uh on a complete different tangent. You know, we're looking the rates of mental health challenges are the highest that they've ever been. In your view, what are we doing wrong?

SPEAKER_03 59:25

Well, I think actually the main thing is I think we're miss um so so if you wanted to pick one thing that we're doing mostly the most wrong, I think so. I think it's so if so I think the it's the most telling statistics to me that uh I hope you're gonna write about these ones in your PhD. So it's that um sixteen to twenty-four year olds in New Zealand, we measure uh uh psychological distress using the K10 in the National Health Survey. And I think it was in 2005 they first started measuring that uh severe psychological distress in 16 to 25 year olds was five point six percent. So it's not being mentally ill, it's just not you're not coping uh you know with life in society at that point in time. So at 5.6% sounds about right. Um and you know, within that statistic, um young women are generally uh 50% higher than young men, which is typical no matter what, the prevalence, um, which is not talked about, right? So so men's mental health gets quite a big lot of discussion because of the suicide bit, but you know, even on every other metric besides that, um women are uh you know got fifty percent worse. Um and that was continuing steadily till about 2011, and uh and in every Western country around that time it's then tilted s sharply upwards for both young males and females and and has continued sharply upwards since so the uh 2021 uh survey, National Health Survey, shows that severe psychological distress was at twenty-five percent with with young women running at 33% of severe psychological distress at any one time. Well that's an alarming change, right?

SPEAKER_01 1:01:01

Wow.

SPEAKER_03 1:01:01

Um and um that measure of psychological distress is interesting because it's sort of an all-encompassing thing. Um but I reckon you know the most likely thing that changed in that time, that's about the time the phone came out and social media and that you know, all that stuff's been pushing it up ever since. Um I I think I think the most likely outcome is that the reward system's getting dysregulated. So so dopamine's getting banged up by social media, by porn, by vaping, by um ultra-processed food, by uh gaming, you know, uh and and so on. And so you get tolerant to that, so you need more and more of it. But now baseline dopamine is lower, and of course the opposite of pleasure is pain. And so you end up with this sort of psychological distress, pain, that's basically what I would call if you wanted a diagnosis, I'd call it maybe reward derangement syndrome or something, reward reward dysfunction syndrome. Um you go after the doctor and go, I'm feeling bad, I've I think there's something wrong with me. And the doctor goes, Oh, well I I think you've got depression or anxiety, um, and they might might diagnose you with that. Um, and then they'll give you an SSRI, perhaps. Um and and I I I sort of feel that that's I I don't think it would be classical depression or anxiety in the way that you would normally see it presenting. I think it's actually a reward dysregulation problem as part of it. Um is obviously involved, it's um, but but so so are other things like your screens and doom scrolling and that. It's it's I don't know what you think. You see more of that than me, but it's my um number one thing.

SPEAKER_04 1:02:40

I completely agree with you because I think everything is at our fingertips right now. And you know, just to rain on AI a little bit, I do think AI is is also probably to blame for that as well, you know, because um thinking about even being a university student, if somebody's got an assignment to write overnight, they can just put it into Claude. You know, it's things have become so easy and so easily accessible. It's just this square that we carry around in our pockets or our bags all day or right in front of our faces all day. So I I agree with you. And again, you know, the ultra-processed fruit food side of things, we've got Uber Eats and Yeah, but there's that as well.

SPEAKER_03 1:03:23

That's right. That that's all that's it. Right. What about the young woman thing though? Um, given you're you know you've you're out of that, you're not that demographic now, but you used to be. Um like that that's uh no, I meant that nicely, you know, but yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:03:36

No, I know you did. Well, yeah, when you said that, I was sort of thinking, is that because women are internalizers and men are externalizers? You know, so women, I think this is something actually I've been thinking about quite a lot. You know, if you if you go back a few generations, say to my grandparents' kind of era, you know, women were the homemakers and they were sort of the heart of the home. Men were going out to work and, you know, women were, I guess, I don't know, like this might be a broad generalization, but I just feel like they were maybe kind of raised to be pretty and nice and not to have um strong opinions that might conflict with their husbands or something like that. I don't know. But the point I'm trying to make is that I think women over time and over generations have become really good at having a mask on. Um and wearing lots of hats as well.

SPEAKER_03 1:04:31

Yeah, that's true. And I think um uh are more responsive to social cues. Like so, so I I think boys hardly ever get don't get sucked down the social media thing as much as girls for poor mental health. Um they some of them can get sucked down gaming boys, but I think Jonathan Hayde would say that's the story for 10% of boys. Where with the story for about 50% of girls might be that but the way that they're dealing with social accuser, social criticism um are a very different way than males will deal with it. Like totally. I don't know, like I don't really like I'm not a girl, so I don't really know, but like I know that I don't really care um if what I'm wearing or you know, like I don't really Yeah, well fairly enough, fair enough, fair enough.

SPEAKER_04 1:05:17

But you know, when even like when I was at school, when you're at school, if your friends are having a party and you're not invited or something, I mean, even truly, even when I was at school, like we wouldn't have known. We wouldn't have known. But now like I mean, I was sort of leaving school, coming out of school when Facebook was starting to become a thing. Um and now something that I see in with my clients is you know, it's on Snapchat and it's on Instagram, and it's kind of been put right in your face that all of your friends are hanging out without you and you haven't been invited. Um, there's awful, you know, people make fake accounts. And then they message terrible things or they comment.

SPEAKER_02 1:06:02

Well, if a fuck you can't. See, I don't reckon a boy would do that. We wouldn't get organized enough.

SPEAKER_04 1:06:08

Like Well Yeah, you won't get organized enough. There's just like there's so many more social rules being a girl, I think. That boys, again, like, yeah, maybe it's an organization thing, or maybe it's just like, ugh, there's just not as much an expectation.

SPEAKER_03 1:06:23

The the stuff that you bond on is just so different than than Yeah, so confrontations and disagreements are usually dealt with in um a more straightforward manner.

SPEAKER_04 1:06:31

Yes.

SPEAKER_03 1:06:32

Um often more aggressively, um and sometimes physically, but at least it's d it's behind both of you. But I don't necessarily think that might be the case. I don't have that many insights to female behaviour, by the way, so I'd better be careful.

SPEAKER_04 1:06:46

It's such an interesting one though, and it it's it's alarming to hear that. And I think mental health in general, whether it's for boys, girls, men, women, it needs to be at the centre of discussion. And I think one reason why nutrition is so important to you and me is because it is something that is really accessible for people. You know, you have to eat, right? So why not put food into your body that uh it helps rather than hinders your your mind and body, you know?

SPEAKER_03 1:07:14

Well, I mean, I it's you know, when you figure out that you know every cell in your body has that lipid bilayer, the quality of the fats is so important. You know, and that's that whole seed oils thing, right? So if if there's a plausible argument why these crappy polyunsaturated seed oils that are made in factories um are bad for you, when if the majority of your food is omega-6 seed oils, um then that'll be the majority of what makes up the cells in your body, and and they're much more easily damaged and oxidized. And if every cell in your body is more easily damaged and oxidized, and you're already putting it in a in a inflammatory oxidative environment, um, it's gonna have a poor effect. And the most profound effect is clearly gonna be the brain, because that's the most metabolically active place. It's like there's just there's what you eat, you know, must it's not conceivable that it doesn't doesn't make a huge difference.

SPEAKER_04 1:08:07

Yeah. Yeah. And we can't we kind of can't stick our head in the sand anymore either. I think it's everybody's responsibility to it's kind of I mean, I say that, but I I'm gonna interrupt myself mid-thought, because I also think informed consent is really important. And I think that's like a a topic I've been thinking about recently, but I feel like we don't have informed consent in terms of what we're putting into our body unless we look really hard at food labels, you know, because it's kind of like we again, because the consumption of ultra-processed foods is so widespread. And everybody that's listening, we're not just talking about the obvious things like the cereals and the lollies and the chocolate and stuff. It's also things that like mueslee bars, it's some brands of flavoured sparkling water or kombucha, um, like foods that are seen as much quote unquote healthier. You know, it's upsetting to me that that we're not kind of, we don't feel like we've given informed consent to because we're reading the we're looking at the front of the thing and we go, it will say no artificial flavours or preservatives or whatever. And you go, oh, amazing, that's fantastic.

SPEAKER_03 1:09:15

Um, and so you kind of it's just nonsense.

SPEAKER_04 1:09:18

Yes, exactly. And so there's a I think both are true, right? I think no, we're not providing informed consent for the food that we're putting into our bodies and the way that they're being marketed. And it's also our responsibility to upskill ourselves on what we're putting into our bodies. Um so yeah, I think they both need to kind of live alongside each other. What do you think?

SPEAKER_03 1:09:41

Yeah, well, as soon as you said informed consent, I went into a fight or flight type situation because it reminds me of the University Ethics Committee.

SPEAKER_01 1:09:48

I know even I, even I feel partly like that too. Honestly.

SPEAKER_03 1:09:53

But I hear what you're saying, and then when you start talking about it, what it reminded me most of was the was the microplastic argument because yeah, we're we've got this whole chemical coming in, you know, that's that's actually affecting all of our sex hormones profoundly, and we've really got no choice about it. You know, so it's in in the food supply now, it's just rubbing off everywhere.

SPEAKER_04 1:10:16

And something that I've learned from you, actually, as well, is um, you know, where you and I have talked quite a lot about medications used in mental health and the the side effects that can occur. You what are some of the side effects that you have learned about in in your learnings that you feel like people are not, I guess, giving informed consent because they're not aware that they could be side effects?

SPEAKER_02 1:10:44

Well, you know what I'm gonna say.

SPEAKER_04 1:10:45

I do.

SPEAKER_03 1:10:47

So I think so so the most prevalent psychiatric medication is SSRIs, so it adjusts serotonin levels um upwards slightly by inhibiting re-uptake. So um and that could have a positive effect on your mood, or at least blunt your feeling bad. So so these medicines blunt neurology basically, so feeling good and bad both are compressed. Um but that doesn't happen just in your brain, it happens in every part of your body. Um and I think you know there's particular parts of your body that have a lot of nerve endings, um, both for males and females. So genital numbness and SSRIs, um the prevalence of genital numbness with MS SSRIs is a hundred percent. Um I just think that I just think that should be known. And then there's and then as you go down the tree from that, from more sexual dysfunction, like you know, um in a inability to ever have an orgasm again and all that sort of stuff. Um that's an outcome of these things. Like you should know about the chances of these things. Um like I I reckon if a doctor's going, like, you could you could try some food, you could try this, you could try that, you could you could you know, try exercise, that's highly effective, that's more effective than these. Um you can try these, like they might help a bit in blunting your mood, and the side effect is um you know, general numbness and and you know, there's other things, um, and they're addictive, you'd be you'd be like, Wow. Like you know I I I just think that in all of medicine, the number it's bizarre in in medicine. So first of all, the word I'm gonna you've got me ranting now. So the word prescription is wrong because it completely undermines what the process should be around consenting to taking this. And so I will take this, but in order to know if you're gonna take a medicine, you would need to comprehend the chances of it working and what working might look like and the chances of harm and what those harms were. Now no one else could could do those. You might go, ah, general for numbing, what the hell, I don't care about that. I feel shit. Um whereas I go go, general numbing, no, I'm not I'm out. No, okay, you know, like we can make our own decisions on that, and that's fair enough, not the doctor or the psychiatrist or or anyone. Um you want to know. And so, you know, a classic example for me is you know, I go to get my knee looked at to think about getting knee surgery, which I didn't have in the end. And students go, well, it could operate, yeah, we'll do um you know, arthroscopic surgery, blah blah blah. And I was like, okay, well, what I want to I just want to know the following things. Um, first of all, is this the first time you've done it? No. How many have you done? Several hundred. Okay, great. Of those several hundred, you know, what's the number needed to treat? In other words, how many people do you have to operate on for them to get a benefit out of, and what is that benefit defined as? And what's the number needed to harm on those 700 operations? How many people have been harmed and what are those harms?

SPEAKER_02 1:13:36

And it just looks at me like I'm a complete clown and you know basically sends me it over his office. So I'm like, that's a reasonable question, mate. Yeah. Like if I take my car and to get fixed, or someone's coming around to fix the house, you know, it's like, have you have you fixed a car before? Um, you know, what's what are you gonna do? How much is it gonna cost? Is it gonna work?

SPEAKER_03 1:13:56

What's the chances of it not working at all or being worse than when it started, and what would that be? Like like in any other part of society, yeah, um, when you're having a procedure, then you must know the answer to that before you you engage in you know doing that thing, except for with medicines. We we don't bother with that, but you know, like no.

SPEAKER_04 1:14:17

It's that that is actually unbelievable. And I mean the fact that you're advocating for your health and you're asking all the right questions all of a sudden it's just like, whoa, whoa, whoa, what are you doing here?

SPEAKER_02 1:14:27

You know, but you should know if if you're if you're operating on people's knees, it'd be good to know how many went went wrong. Oh, but they didn't they didn't go right. Oh, and so you know what the answer is from randomized trials?

SPEAKER_03 1:14:39

What? Um so so you know how they do randomised trials on arthroscopic knee surgery is is unbelievable that they get ethics for this, but sort of cool. Um so you you go in for the surgery um and you don't know if you're getting the surgery or not. Um and one group gets the full surgery, so they anaesthize you, cut you open, put the arthroscope in, do whatever the athroscope does and take it out and and away you go. The other group you go in, you get anethasized, you get cut open, they put the arthroscope in, they don't do whatever the athroscope does, they just take it out again. Um then they stitch you up and and give you antibiotics and everything. Like it so so no one who got treated knows whether they got the sham nor the real surgery. Um and what do you reckon the difference in knee and outcomes is?

SPEAKER_04 1:15:27

I want to say the people that didn't get the treatment, it's super similar to the people that did.

SPEAKER_03 1:15:33

It's exactly the same.

SPEAKER_04 1:15:34

No. Oh, so that's why you didn't end up getting it?

SPEAKER_01 1:15:38

Yeah, of course not.

SPEAKER_04 1:15:40

Absolutely. I would be the same. But like that said that again on the topic of informed consent. Had he been able to cite that?

SPEAKER_03 1:15:49

Yeah, because and you know, you know, the more ridiculous thing with that knee, right? Because then it's like, well, you know, you'll probably never run again. I'm like, like, oh well, I'm 58, fuck it, that's no good. Um and and in the end I finally figure out how to, you know, get my glute muscle working again, so my knee doesn't actually hurt. Um and and remember, this is coming from a place where I actually had chronic knee pain, I was having to take painkillers in the night to get to sleep. Um and then wake up and take some more neurofin. Uh and anyway, um, it turns out I can run again. And you know, I did the f whole Iron Man, you know, admittedly I didn't run the whole way, but I tried.

SPEAKER_02 1:16:21

And um and you know, the only th you know, the only thing that didn't hurt after the Iron Man was my knee.

SPEAKER_04 1:16:27

Wow.

SPEAKER_03 1:16:28

So everything else hurt except for that. So, you know, like it's just uh appalling advice um that that we we get. And that's just you know, so the knee's a classic example, right? But um in many ways psychiatric medicines worse because those are exactly the sorts of harm versus benefit questions um you should ask. So no um psychiatric is a little bit more interesting in the sense that um like I think one you know, one that's really interesting because it's harder to quantify in some ways because the harms are so bad, but the immediate benefits are really good. So you're you're in you're having a psychotic episode, you're actually a danger to your own life or and or the life of other people.

SPEAKER_01 1:17:09

Yes.

SPEAKER_03 1:17:09

Um like bloody hell. Like some you know, I I think some medicines there, you know, could save yours and other lives, right? So that's really good. Yeah, yeah. Except for can except so is in that situation, the emergency short-term thing, they're highly useful. Um but but long term they cause metabolic syndrome, and at eight years of continuous taking things, you're in much worse condition than someone who never took them in the first place. Um, you know, both psychiatrically and physically, and and you lose 20 years off your lifespan because of the you know chronic disease that the medicines cause. So, you know, you've got you know, how do you how do you deal with that, right?

SPEAKER_04 1:17:46

Well, I it's a great question. And I mean it's yeah, that's fascinating knowledge, honestly, because I I mean I I can only speak in for psychologists, but we're encouraged to be scientist practitioners, which means that it's important that we keep up with the latest research and we can integrate that into our assessment and into our practice, which is why, again, nutrition is so important to me, and I think it's a requirement of all of us to upskill in this area. Um, but you know, it surely it is the same with this knee surgeon that you've got to be aware of what the literature says. And like you were saying before, I mean, if somebody was tossing up whether to use psychiatric medication, you know, for some people it is helpful. Um, and I agree with you, Grant. Like I think it's there's definitely moments in time where it is like necessary for people to take. But if somebody was prescribing you medication, you want them to be able to say, you might experience suicidal ideation. You might notice actually not feeling anything at all, um, not being able to cry, which has been really distressing to a lot of clients of mine that have gone on that medication. Um, genital numbing, as you mentioned, there's a whole host of these symptoms that if you've if you're giving informed consent to to taking something like medication, informed means that you're aware of all the costs and all the benefits. And so you get to weigh up in your own mind as a as somebody who knows themselves the best. Um but it just feels like not getting that.

SPEAKER_03 1:19:19

The trouble with that, of course, is that you've got to assume that um most people you could sort of figure out, you know, reasonably complex probability. You'd have to have quite a lot going on. So you know how to actually explain that's another whole thing. And then, of course, yeah, the trouble is fishing with you know that knee surgery is a good example, but psychiatric meds, especially antidepressants, even better example, is that it's it's not like um antidepressants don't work, um, it's just that they don't work much better than the placebo, which is also pretty effective. So um and that's true with the knee surgery, right? The ones who got the sham surgery did well because they thought they had the surgery.

SPEAKER_04 1:19:58

So um so you got so you got that factor as well, right?

SPEAKER_03 1:20:03

So um, and then um my son Sam's always telling me that that there's the no-sibo effect, like even when you know you know yeah, it's that going on, and there's even a you know a known placebo, you're like, yeah, that's just a sugar pill, and you still get an effect. It's like wow. How does that even happen? Wow.

SPEAKER_04 1:20:20

That's amazing. I was listening to a podcast, and this is um possibly useless information because I can't remember what podcast it was or where this even came from. But that they were talking about the power of placebo, and there was someone who was in a research trial. They became very distressed and emotionally dysregulated in a moment, and they decided to overdose on the pills that they were given in the research trial to be taking. So they overdosed, they became very physically unwell, ended up in an ambulance, ended up in the hospital. And so, of course, at that point, as a researcher, you're going to break the blind to find out what condition that person is. So that's understanding whether that person was on placebo, which as Grant just said is often a sugar pill, or whether they're taking like an active intervention, which may be like a medication of some kind or um nutrients or whatever it might be.

SPEAKER_03 1:21:10

Well, they overdeed on the sugar pills today.

SPEAKER_04 1:21:12

They did. They overdeed on sugar pills. And but like it was the the response was absolutely just mind-blowing because this person really believed that they were taking actual sort of medication that were having some kind of effect on them. But it was actually they were just taking sugar pills. And so the the effect of placebo is so huge that, yeah, we need to acknowledge.

SPEAKER_03 1:21:39

Okay, so when I was about 10, I heard this story. My dad had these um these motivational cassettes of this motivational speaker called Dennis Waitley. Uh, he was a motivational guy, right? And you had these eight cassettes arrived in this sort of package book thing, and you'd put them in your cassette player and you'd listen to the motivational thing. So I was really into that sort of stuff. That was probably my first psychology. But there was a story in there, I'm not even sure if it's actually true, but it describes this truck driver who gets stuck in the back of his refrigerated truck unit, you know, some long-haul truck driver in the um US, and they later later found him um you know dead in the back of the truck, and he'd scratched in the um thing. Oh, I'm freezing, it's so cold in here, I just know I'm gonna freeze to death and die. And that was scratched into the you know side of the truck, but the you know, the freezer unit was never turned on.

SPEAKER_01 1:22:29

No.

SPEAKER_03 1:22:29

Well, I so I don't even know if it's true, but it was like that was the you know, that was the that was what that was the sort of motivational stuff, the power of the mind that would come out in the in the early 80s when I was, you know, a uh 12, 10 or 12 year old.

SPEAKER_04 1:22:41

So that is fascinating. See, that is so fascinating. I don't know if it's true though. I still no, but I like you know, there'll be a variation of that story that is true because the mind is so powerful. Now, I've got two, well no, I've got one more question I want to ask you, and then I want to talk about your new book because I am super excited about it. You've been talking about it for a while, so the fact it's now on shelves is awesome. Um, my kind of final question on the food side of things is if you were given full power tomorrow, which frankly I would totally trust you with, of our country's sort of food environment, what would be the first thing that you would change?

SPEAKER_03 1:23:23

And what so I just do the US I'd mainly adjust adjust a sort of revised version of the US dietary guidelines that was flipping the food pyramid basically. Um focus on whole food, uh uh uh uh public health recommendation to avoid ultra-processed food, up the protein, healthy fats, um, plants and animals, it's all good. Um avoid sugar, you know, stop drinking most alcohol um as the guideline. You know, that's that's I think that's the most obvious um easiest thing to change. If people go, well, you know, like guidelines don't matter because you know I go shopping, it doesn't really matter what the guidelines are, I just buy whatever I want, which is true, but it's still it's still what gets served in hospitals. If you've been to a hospital recently, you'll see how appalling that is. Um but it's also in other places where you know rehabilitation is actually needed because there's mental illness and you know brain injury and that is prisons particularly. Um but also you know other places where there's um you know, like you know, every government institution basically in school you know could do with the dietary guidelines have an effect there. So I think that's what I would that would be my first thing if if I had any good go at that. Um you know though, I I I did have a go at government and I was useless at it, so that's just not gonna happen.

SPEAKER_04 1:24:41

Maybe you need to run for some kind of thing.

SPEAKER_03 1:24:45

Oh my god, they'd be they'd be even worse.

SPEAKER_04 1:24:48

Yeah, yeah, but I you know, I think what you've just said is so true and so important. And for people that are not familiar, so Robert Kennedy, he's proposed a new food pyramid where effectively the old one is kind of um upturned on its head. And so instead of eating loads of um whole grains and yeah, pasta bread, rice, etc. etc., um, he's promoting the like eating of meats, high quality dairy, fruits and vegetables, and then down the bottom is more of those sort of whole grains and and things. So yeah. So check it out if if you're interested. That's cool.

SPEAKER_03 1:25:25

I think you know, we could do so much better in in this country with that, just like yeah, with adults for God's sake.

SPEAKER_04 1:25:32

I s I know, I so, I so agree with that. Now, you have written a new book and there it is. Choose your heart. Tell me, I want you to unpack the title because I love it. Um, because you actually taught me this concept a few years ago, and I've used it now. I've really like ridden on the coattails of that. Like and just talking about it.

SPEAKER_03 1:25:55

Well, there's there's this there's three different things here, right? So um there's there's a few there's there's a biological thing, there's a philosophical thing, and then there's my mum. So um, so we'll start with a philosophical one because I I remember when I was about twenty, I was like, oh I just had this sort of philosophical idea that was the only philosophy I had, I was a pretty useless teenager, really. And I was like, you know, it's probably about the m same amount of work to have a really good life as it is to have a hard life. You know, it's it's you know, in terms of difficulty, it's area under the curve, but um you put the work in earlier to have a good life and you get more control and more resources, you probably have more fun. For a hard life, you don't put the work in early, but someone else will give you the work. I just had that one thought. So I was like, well, you know, on the basis of pure laziness, you might as well choose the hard path to start with. Um and honestly, like I don't know why what I was thinking at twenty or if that was even a proper thought, but um I I've always sort of had that as a philosophy that you know like uh that that every path's gonna have some difficulty in it, and you might as well choose the one that's gonna um be the one that that results in the best thing for you and your family and society. So I've always sort of thought that. So that's the philosophical one. Um the second biological one is more of a complete understanding of human biology, which is this process of hormesis, right? So um the only way that the human the human body's going um one of three ways. It's it's just staying where it is, um, or and you're gonna have to do a certain amount of stress to even stay where you are. Um or you do nothing. You're you're you're in bed rest or you're not exercising, you're not getting enough psychological stress, and you you you'll atrophy. You you know your body sheds resources when they're not needed quickly as well because it's you know, you don't want to waste money on muscle mass that's not needed. Um we're we're finely turned to lose resources we don't need. Um or you can get stronger and and grow. And and the only way you get stronger and grow is through stress. And yeah, people understand that through exercise mostly. Um and uh I guess There's other things that are really interesting in that. So um stress without recovery will also atrophy you. Um so if you just keep exercising until you you know, that's not good. Um or you're stressed but you don't get any break from that stress, that's a problem as well. Um and it with the recovery you also need the right building blocks, so you need nutrients. Um and so there's this sort of interplay between all of the inputs that actually affect your capacity, sleep, uh, diet, quality and quantity exercise, uh psychological stress, the being exposed to hot and cold is another good example of of hormetic stress, yeah. In big quantities it'll kill you, but in small quantities with the right recovery it's great. So um there's a sort of whole uh framework on that. In fact, um myself, Kayla Preky, and um Dr. Matthew Phillips, who's a neurologist at Wake Hill Hospital, just finished our I don't know, 25th draft of a paper called the Metabolic Allostatic Hormetic Framework, which is you know, like you can imagine, uh, honors yeah, it's been quite a resistance piece to resistance in um theoretical biology, actually, is what it is, which is something. Um but we get right into that, how that starts at the top of all those inputs and affects you know individual um capacity and then eventually results in you know problems down at the level of the electrons in the mitochondria. So there's a whole lot of biology going on there. So you know, if you want to have a good life, you're gonna have um a philosophical bed towards choosing a a a hard path because every path's hard, but you're also there's some biology behind that, unless you actually do do hard things, you've got no chance of being a a better version of fecul atrophy. Um I told you there's three. Um the the only thing against this title now um is that my mum, who's eighty-four. Have you met my mum? Um Yes, I have.

SPEAKER_01 1:29:57

I have. I'm a grandma.

SPEAKER_02 1:29:58

Anyway, she she gets the book and she's like, Well, Grant, I um don't think you should be comfortable about the title of the book.

SPEAKER_03 1:30:07

And I was like, Well, what do you mean? She's like, Well, it's it's it's it's very sexual in nature.

SPEAKER_02 1:30:14

Like, oh my god, I'm mum, you're only four, I'm 58.

SPEAKER_03 1:30:19

No. So it's just can we just um halt this conversation right now? But like you can't unsee that now.

SPEAKER_04 1:30:25

No, you can't like pull it off the shelves, give it a different name. No, I reckon it's endearing. People are gonna look at it and be like, oh, what is that about? So even if maybe it is perceived as sexual in nature and might entice some people to do that.

SPEAKER_03 1:30:37

Well, yeah, and if you're 84, it's good to think about that, right? So um anyway, so I've got these seven truths in there, and I sort of um uh you know, start with the behaviors like move or rust is exercise and fitness one, um uh the dopamine economy is the is the um reward system one, um food, the holy grail of medicine is is the food one. Um and then I start to switch uh then I do a temperature one with hot and cold, but then the last three I really switch into um more of our other world of psychology and philosophy as well. So do some act um there's a whole chapter on one of the things which is really an act uh situation, then then there's really a sort of meaning and purpose one which falls back a lot on you know, I actually went in, believe it or not, uh I went and surveyed, I can't say I read every word of, but you know, most ancient religions, most modern religions and most modern self-help with a view to um that that that we aren't the first people to be thinking about well being. And um for anything to be true, it probably is reasonably universal across, you know, most religions, ancient and modern and most modern self-help. And um, you know, there's a there are a few consistent ones. You want to hear what they are?

SPEAKER_01 1:31:57

Sure.

SPEAKER_03 1:31:58

Yeah. Um there's things like you're not that important, um, your life's not all about you, yeah, um, and you're gonna die.

SPEAKER_01 1:32:08

Uh fantastic.

SPEAKER_03 1:32:12

No, no, no, but those those actually have quite strong um philosophical roots. Like the you're gonna die sounds quite pessimistic. Um but that momentum moray, which is the stoic version of that, that you know that that your time on you know the living planet's relatively limited, so that that shouldn't rob you of pleasure, it gives you more chance of doing the things um that you want. People can't imagine not being alive, and so um there's the Buddhist monks often do these bizarrely do these things called death meditations. Um they literally imagine their dead body and you know get down to the details of the rotting flesh and the worms and all that, um, purely so they can feel more alive. Um But but this is a consistent theme across um even you know modern Christianity and everything that um that you are gonna die. It's a limited time here, and so there's only a certain amount of time, and it's certainly across um self-help as well. So, you know, that there's there's a lot of interesting stuff that's unpacked and um that so sort of a choose your sort of a movement from um biology and you know the facts of hormesis and uh this sort of almanac of of um you know how to get into cold and do saunas and what I think about food and exercise and those things and then then a sort of tour of of um contemporary and modern psychology. I mean I it I I still um so if you I think acceptance and commitment are um are tools that should be taught in primary school to everyone. The the the understanding what emotions are uh and the the futility of trying to delete them and the the normalcy of the neck it's normal to have negative emotions and then the choice point and um the towards move and the way move and that you know I think those concepts which you're far far meta better at doing a practice than I am, um yeah, both probably personally and actually and your your psychological practice, um the the uh like that is a fundamental achievement life and it's somehow isn't a thing.

SPEAKER_04 1:34:31

I so agree with you. I'm ex I'm so excited to read this book because you've actually just shared with me that I can buy it on my Kindle, which I cannot wait to to read. So we can if for those of you who are listening and you want to buy this book by Professor Grant Schofield, choose your hard grant, where are we buying it?

SPEAKER_03 1:34:50

Um so if you just go to the Kindle store, you can just choose for Grant Schofield, choose your hard. And if you're a Kindle Select member, which you're not, pay you ten bucks a month and you can get it for free. Um and uh or you can buy the hard copy, um, and that's on Amazon as well, or if you just go to my website, profgrantscofield.com, um follow through to the book. Oh, and oh yeah, the other thing if you go to the book page, which is all also a good thing, there's a free um challenge you can sign up to there, um, which I'm calling the Masogi Challenge. So Masogi is a Japanese Shinto term for choosing something hard once a year. Um to, you know, they were talking about purifying your soul and all this sort of stuff, not so sure about that. But anyway, um it's a sort of choose your hard challenge. And it's cool, people have been going on there and um all sorts of stuff. Someone's doing uh a one-day fast, um, someone randomly swimming four times across Lake Taupo. Uh, you know, there's and everything in between. Um, and yeah, so you can just declare your mis what's your Masogee. Um, you know, what big thing are you doing this year?

SPEAKER_02 1:35:55

But see, you're you're surrounded you've you've you've got a lot of people in your life that that love the idea of the Masogi.

SPEAKER_03 1:36:00

Matt loves the Masogi.

SPEAKER_04 1:36:01

Yeah, totally. The Iron Man. That is not my bag. But now I'm talking about.

SPEAKER_02 1:36:08

You just got you just you just got into the wrong family for that one.

SPEAKER_04 1:36:11

I know. Well, you're doing an amazing job with that. So that was your Masogi then. Yeah, it wasn't my Masogi. You did Iron Man this year, which is so impressive. I was watching you the whole day, we know not like actually in person, but on the app, and I was like, oh my goodness, he is killing it. You did so.

SPEAKER_03 1:36:27

I think you know, one of the things about a big um event, um, it really works for me. Like I I had such a fun summer, I got my family into it. We had seven in our family doing that event. Um, like a like long distance trifle and sound forever. I completely acknowledge that. Um, but yeah, I hadn't done one for 20 years. It was just uh great fun. Um yeah. Uh I didn't think I could do it. Um I still barely actually did it, frankly.

SPEAKER_04 1:36:54

Um You decently did it. You you crossed the finish line. Yeah, I did.

SPEAKER_03 1:37:01

I crossed the finish line, but it wasn't it wasn't as easy as it was 20 years ago, I'm telling you that. That yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:37:08

Well, like that's that's what's another thing that's inspiring about you, you know, is like everything that you learn, you put into practice too. So I mean it's one of those things that you're not telling people, hey, you guys should do this and not do it yourself. So well done you.

SPEAKER_03 1:37:22

Oh, yeah, but you're the same as that. That's why you're doing what you're doing with your patched and your nutritional psychic and stuff. It's like there's no way you were never doing that topic. It was always a topic. Well, there's no way you as a psychologist and food were not coming together in some way.

unknown 1:37:33

Totally.

SPEAKER_03 1:37:35

There was no chance of that, right? Like that had to happen.

SPEAKER_04 1:37:38

That's so true. There's no chance of it. And I think the more that I learn about it, the more it's reaffirmed for me that this is an area that I love and is so important to be putting out into the world.

SPEAKER_03 1:37:49

Um, and not every part of a PhD is good fun, like we mentioned the ethics, but you know, there's there's there's 20 of those unpleasant things.

SPEAKER_04 1:37:57

But yeah, so yeah, but you know, like that oh, it's it has been an amazing journey though, and we're nearly, nearly at the end. Um and sorry, I'm excited to see what's the one.

SPEAKER_03 1:38:08

Yeah, well you got Julia as well, who's who's a legend primary supervisor plus plus years that she's super tough.

SPEAKER_04 1:38:14

She's amazing. You both together have just been the best supervisors I could ask for, honestly. We've had a lot of fun along the way.

SPEAKER_03 1:38:24

But if it left us to me, I'd be too soft.

SPEAKER_04 1:38:26

Um like, yeah, it's cool. Keep doing that, it's fine. No, I love that. It's a great you're a great balance together.

SPEAKER_00 1:38:34

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:38:35

Oh, Professor Grant's going to feel we're gonna have to get you back because I feel like I could talk to you for another several hours.

SPEAKER_03 1:38:40

So Well, we normally do, so that's a thing.

SPEAKER_04 1:38:43

We'll do it again. Thank you so much. And everybody go out and buy choose your hard.

SPEAKER_03 1:38:48

Choose your hard, yeah. Thanks.

SPEAKER_04 1:38:50

Thanks, Grant. You've been listening to the Holistic Psychology Podcast. If you enjoyed this conversation, subscribe and share it with somebody who might need it today. Until next time, cheers to true wellness from the inside out.