How to Teach Your Mouth to Like Healthier Foods with James Barry - #128

How to Teach Your Mouth to Like Healthier Foods with James Barry - #128

00:00

Hey everybody, welcome back to the EnergyMD podcast, where we help you resolve your chronic fatigue syndrome, otherwise known as ME-CFS and long COVID so that you can live your best life. So really excited about today's episode, because we're going to be talking about why you choose the foods that you choose and what you can do about it in order to change that. And we're going to be talking with my friend, James Berry.

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So let's learn a little bit about him. So his 16 plus years in the culinary field started as a private chef cooking for celebrities such as Tom Cruise, Mariska Haggerty, George Clooney, Gerard Butler, Sean Puffy Combs, Barbara Streisand, and John Cusack. Most recently, James launched his first functional food product called Pluck, an Oregon-based seasoning.

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It's the first of its kind and amazingly easy and delicious way for people to get organ meats into their diet. I totally agree, we're big fans. James is also a published cookbook author, having co-authored the recipes in Margaret Floyd's book called Eat Naked, and co-authored the follow-up cookbook, The Naked Foods Cookbook. He most recently co-authored the recipes in Dr. Alejandro Junger's book, Clean Seven. James, thanks so much for joining me today.

01:24

So let's talk about food preferences and kind of like how that works neurologically and what you call the lingual neural response. Can you tell us, let's start off there. Can you tell us what that is? Yeah, well, so if you think about it, we're using a physical body that's been basically,

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worked on for the last hundred thousand years and we're basically homo sapiens, you know, so that's that is the body that we're in. And, and if you think about it, there are within that time frame, there are these biological processes that have been created to enable our survival. If you know, we take for granted that, you know,

02:13

We live in an age now where we can go into a grocery store and the food's all packaged and labeled and you see what the ingredients are and you hope that it's accurate. But we live in a very packaged and presented food system, but that's not how our bodies were created. They were created during a time when there was nothing like that. And if anything, you had no clue whether something was gonna kill you or feed you. And so if you think about it,

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what were the systems within our body that were created during that time? And I like to use the image of like, okay, well, let's imagine we're foraging, we're in the forest. And what's going to happen first is you're going to hear something drop. So it's going to start the communication that's happening outside your body towards what's inside starts with hearing.

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You hear something drop. What is that? Now you look to where it dropped. So you're visually looking towards something. You see a tree and you see something plump hanging from there. So now your visual communication is happening and you draws you in. Curiosity wise draws you closer as you get closer. There's smells in the air as you get closer. So now your olfactory senses are firing and everything is leading you towards. Is this something that's going to kill me or something I can eat? Right. So.

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As you get closer, you have these smells, you then touch it. So now you get in touch, tactile communication. You're touching that piece of whatever it is. You don't know what it is yet, but it feels plump. Feels like there's something in it. You then bring it closer to your mouth. The smells increase even more, and it's a sweet smell, which is very key because typically, if sweet smells represent a nutrition, bitter taste represented poisonous, you know, or something that was not good for you.

04:02

So you're getting a smell and that smell is, whether you even know what that smell is, it's communicating your body of like, oh, I wanna put this in my mouth because there's a draw, there's something happening. Now you put in your mouth, the juices are flowing down your mouth, you get your, the mastication that's happening is now deepening the flavors that you first got when you bit into it. And all to say that these senses are communicating, so there's a neural response within your mouth from your taste buds.

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on your senses in general that are contributing to the communication that your body gets instantly of whether this is something that you should continue eating or stop eating. And we all can experience this on a certain level by just putting salt on our tongue. When you put salt on your tongue, your body will either accept it and say, give me more or it will reject it.

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typically, excuse me, typically for most people, you might get one dip of your finger on your tongue with salt once, it will taste good. You maybe get a second, but most likely, if you try to do a third, it will literally, the salt will start to taste different. Now why is that, right? That is our, that is the neural, lingual response. That is your body saying, I'm good, I don't need any more salt. This happens physically as well,

05:27

you're with your grip. So the neural lingual response is internal and that's supporting the food we ingest. But we can experience this physically as well. So basically when you are trying to lift something that you physically cannot lift, like it's physically heavier than what your muscles can lift, what happens? You lose your grip. So the body is a beautiful designed machine that is there for your survival.

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And what I think is fascinating is that there's a great quote from Dr. Bill Schindler. He's a food archaeologist at this point. But his quote is that we are the only species in the world that looks to someone else to tell us what to eat. That's kind of like hard hitting to a degree, but it's even more hard hitting when you think about that there's nearly 9 million species on the planet. So

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How is it that we are the only one that doesn't have that instinct anymore about what we should be eating because we didn't know at one point in our bodies were formed around that instinct. And so I believe that there's obviously a marketing behemoth of a machine that is that is constantly targeting us, constantly confusing us, constantly pushing.

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an agenda that may not be what our body wants, but clearly manipulating our minds to want the thing that they're marketing us to. I don't think we can change that. I think that that is just part of modern society. However, I do believe that that innate knowledge of what we should be eating and what our body wants is still there and that there are things that we can do to get closer and more intimate with it.

07:24

Right. Yeah, it's interesting when I have people ask me, well, if why, why is it, how can it possibly be bad for me when it tastes good? Yeah. And that and that's the that's the kind of rub, isn't it? Because I was just talking to someone about this about how I think I remember this feeling when I was a kid.

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And I think in general, we just assume it, but when you walk into a grocery store, there's just this general assumption or trust that if it's being sold in this grocery store, that means it's okay for me to eat. That we almost walk in and it's not something, it's not a negotiation that we're making before we walk in. It's almost kind of built into our Zygots. It's built into our society that, oh, well, if it's something I

08:16

It's kind of almost like freedoms depending on what country you're born in, right? Like depending on the country, we just assume these freedoms will always be there. And you see it play out a lot of times when Americans go abroad. They act like, well, you're not going to do this to me. I'm an American. You think this is kind of like behavior as though like you can't do this to me, even though they're in a completely different environment. And and and that the rules that we have in America may not apply to where that person is visiting. Right.

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The same thing is true with our diets and the food that's available. And I really think that it does kind of, there are stages and happily we can get into those, but I do think that we almost have to kind of accept that our perspective is skewed. We cannot accept that A equals A anymore around our food systems. We just can't. We are manipulated. We're manipulated through marketing.

09:14

And then of course, through ingredients. So the physical food is manipulating our taste buds. It's manipulating that neuro-lingual response. Because as I said, historically, when something had flavor, that meant it was nutritious. But now I could eat something that says it has strawberry flavor, but it might have zero nutrition and zero strawberries. So that is a complete manipulation of my neuro-lingual response.

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the one that has been developed for hundreds of thousands of years, right? So it's like that is, we can't assume that that's not gonna be confusing. It's absolutely confusing. And I believe that the first step is just acknowledging, okay, we're kind of in a rigged system. We're in a system that keeps us confused. We're in a system that is not transparent, something that's really hot topic right now, and I hope-

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I wish by the time people listen to this podcast that it will have been solved, but I guarantee it will not, which is that there are companies where they allow certain ingredients in the U.S. that they don't allow in European products. And it's the same company, it's the same product. So I'll just use like, I don't know, cereal, for example, the cereal here in the U.S.

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has ingredients in it that the European version of that same cereal does not. And it's because those governments don't allow those specific ingredients that we are allowing.

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So what does that tell you right there? My wife is Canadian, and I remember when we first met, she made this comment about saying how like, oh, my country has my back. And I was like, what? Like, I never even thought about that. I never even thought like, well, of course my country has my back. Like, why wouldn't they? Like, we live, this is the country where we live and we follow the societal rules. So of course they've got our back.

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But then she would talk about like, well, no, but we get all these medical, you know, we have a different medical system and we have these different processes that are part of our society that are supporting us. You guys have to pay for everything and da da da da da. And it just kind of took me down this whole, I've like, oh my gosh, you're right. And then now skip ahead 20 years. And I'm like, oh, gosh, I mean, does our government have our back? Because A, they're allowing ingredients that are clearly

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causing more issues than they are helping. Many industry are kind of a joke. They're actually, instead of them being, having oversight from the FDA, they actually oversee themselves. Like the flavor additive industry is completely like a joke. They oversee themselves. So in all intents and purposes, we don't really know what are in all those flavor additives that are in ultra processed foods. We don't fully understand it because it's not, it's not.

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a regulated company by our government. They're self-regulating. So there's lots of issues. I mean, even within the animal-based community, there's certain parts of the animal you can't even get access to via retail. Me being, you know, my focus being on animal-based nutrition and focusing on organ meat specifically, that's a big deal for me. Like it bothers me that we can't get access to sort of like brain, for example.

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you can't get access to it, they'll say, oh, it's because of mad cow. But historically, our ancestors, when I say our ancestors, I mean our grandparents, particularly if they grew up on a farm, they ate brain with their eggs. And it was a very common part of the animal to eat. And now we don't. And I, because I'm looking at things from this lens, I correlate, I'm like, okay, well, that's interesting. So there's parts of the animal that we can't get access to. And then,

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Alzheimer's and dementia have gone, they've skyrocketed. Now, obviously there's reasons for that. There's potentially environmental reasons for that. But I have to wonder if, because our diets have changed so much and we're skewed so much further, a higher percentage of our diet is ultra processed foods. I have to wonder if we were getting these kind of more...

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nature-made foods, all-natural foods, if they might help to offset some of these symptoms that we're seeing increasing, which I'm confident you're seeing increases. I mean, you and I met, I think, four years ago. I mean, you must be seeing huge increases in issues from long COVID, of course, to high anxiety, right? Yeah, chronic fatigue, yeah. Yeah, you raise a number of important points that I wanna touch on. I think that

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There is a reason why we migrate or why our programming is really to consume more sugar and fatty foods because those have a lot of nutritional value when they are in fact as close to nature as possible, when they are good sugars, when you're getting your fruits, which also come with a whole bunch of other nutrients that are going to be really supportive for you. And the fats, when they are in fact good fats.

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But like you said, the food establishment, unfortunately, utilizes products in order to be able to get us to taste those things so that they are desirable, but in fact, they're void of the nutrients. So I think that's an important point that you made that I wanted to bring back up. And then also, I think that it's really important in order for us to advocate for ourselves. Because like you were talking about, the FDA,

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I, when I was growing up, I, you know, food, drug administration, they're supposed to be monitoring what's going on. But in fact, like you mentioned, oftentimes the head of some of these government organizations are just coming from the companies that they're supposed to be monitoring. So we have to be really good advocates for ourselves. And it really comes with going back to basics, right? And trying to make sure that we're eating things that are as close to nature as possible.

15:27

How else do you recommend that we advocate for ourselves in this challenging environment? Well, one is definitely using that neuro-lingual response. So that is really key. And how does that look? Well, it means you need to eat your food versus swallow it. So if you find that you're taking a lot of supplements and you're kind of supplementing your diet with those

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micronutrients through supplement form through capsules. I would, I'm not, obviously I'm not a doctor. I'm not telling you to just go rogue. Like you should consult the person you're working with if you are working with someone. However, see if you can get some of those micronutrients from real food. Like just see if you can because it's, there's a whole communication pathway. There's a whole knowledge that comes when you eat your food. Going back to that salt,

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example. So in the example I gave where you're putting salt in your tongue, your body is telling you when to stop. Well, if I were to swallow a salt tablet, I don't get any communication. Maybe 30 minutes later, I feel bloated. Why am I bloated? Oh, I got too much salt, right? So one is working with my body's own communication. And one is just guesswork. So absolutely trying to eat your nutrition versus swallow it is really, really key. And then

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take that even further, and then now try to get in more of a parasympathetic state when you're eating. That is key, because people undermine how stress affects digestion. They undermine how stress affects aren't the choices we make with food. So when you're, what's happening right now, and sadly it starts at a very young age, because I have two daughters and I remember,

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Once that my oldest daughter started in kindergarten, so she's about five, I think, and they had 30 minute lunches.

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30 minutes. So how much time is that really, right? So right away we're teaching our kids when you only have 30 minutes, and that's not true 30 minutes. That's like you leave, the bell's gone off, and now you start walking from your room to get to the cafeteria to eventually get to where you're eating. So technically it's more like a 25 minute, 20 to 25 minute lunch. And that's truly not a lot of time for particularly a kid who's...

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main priorities, wanting to play and socialize with their friends, right? So, so right away, we're teaching kids like, oh, we'll just just eat on the go, or like, quickly, do it quickly, and then get to your playtime. And then we transfer that into as adults, right? What we see a lot is people that people are eating in their car on the way to their next meeting, they're rushing, they're microwaving their food, because they can't eat at home and make, you know, fresh food. And so they're buying

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processed foods, they're microwaving it there because they're in a rush. And then they're not even eating it sitting down in a calm state. They're like eating standing up and like at their desk still working. So there's a disconnect in not only what they're eating, but how they're eating it. And those three things, just using your senses, so allowing that neural...

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response to work, making sure that you're eating your food, doing it in a parasympathetic state, cooking from home as much as you can. Those things right away, if you just start doing those, like simplify the draw, like simplify your current dietary regime and just focus on those things. And I'll even kind of quantify it in a food pyramid. So at the top of the pyramid

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we have natural flavors. So only flavors that are found in nature. Nothing that's artificial, nothing that's artificial, but naturally sourced artificial. It's just things that are found in nature. So what are those things? Well, those are ingredients, not things that have ingredients. And then in the middle of that pyramid, I would choose nutrient-dead foods. What are nutrient-dead foods? Well, they're not fortified foods. These are nutrient-dead foods. These are foods that already have the nutrients in them. They haven't been adulterated.

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Manipulated nothing. And then at the bottom of that pyramid, mindfully eat. Mindfully eat. What does that mean? You know, eat sitting down. Take a breath before you start eating. Put your fork down in between each bite. Maybe do a prayer or a grace before you start eating. Make sure you're eating in an environment that's conducive towards not feeling stressed, but that's actually relaxing. Maybe be conscious about the people you're eating with.

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so that it's, you're not gonna, Thanksgiving's a perfect one. It's like, if you're eating with family and it's stressing you out, well, maybe that's something to think about. Try to create the environment that's gonna be conducive towards you, not only relaxing, but with what comes with relaxing is absorption, digestibility, and really well-being. I love the fact that you said, saying a prayer, because I feel like,

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eating really should be a sacred experience, right? It can even be spiritual. Here you are, we are an animal and we are communicating and we're able to survive because of the food that's been provided to us by the planet. And so it's like, how do we want to assimilate this? We're not shoving an apple into our cheek or into our shoulder trying to get the nutrients, right?

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there's this process that we have to go through. And there's all sorts of wonderful physiologic things that are happening, right? When you see something, when you see a food and you start to smell it, salivary enzymes start being produced by the salivary gland, by the pancreas, by the stomach acid in the stomach starts to be produced. You start biting and you start eating, right? Eating your food.

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every bite should be like chewing about 20 to 50 times, right? In order to get these juices going, right? So it really is that, you know, slow and steady wins the race. And it really is this kind of a spiritual experience. I think also, you know, there was a French study that was done probably a decade or two ago, where, you know, they had less heart disease than we did. And the thinking was that, oh, it's because they have wine with their meals.

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But then when we went back and re-examined the study, it was because they have so much time for eating, and they're relaxing. And it's like when you take an hour or two for lunch, they leave work, they go in and meet their friends, they go to a little cafe or whatever, they're having a nice meal, they're relaxing, they're having some wine. Like it's a very different experience than what you described with what's happening mostly in a lot of first world countries and especially the US. So.

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I just wanted to reiterate those things because they're so important. One thing that's interesting is you mentioned the salt example. For the people that we work with, oftentimes they have adrenal gland dysfunction and the adrenal gland produces aldosterone which causes salt reabsorption from the kidneys and oftentimes they're not producing enough aldosterone and they're actually salt-efficient. And so...

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knowing how much salt they're supposed to consume, because we haven't put it on their food, we haven't put it in their water, really is based on this lingual neural response. Like when they start off the program, sometimes they can dump like a whole bunch of salt into their water bottle, they're drinking it throughout the day. And as their adrenals get better over the course of the program, then they need less and less salt. So if they- Perfect example.

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Perfect example. Yeah, so I tell them, I said, if you feel like the salt is making you nauseous, then it's time to kind of like decrease that again. Yeah, and who is informing them of that? It's not necessarily you, you're just mirroring back to them, here are the things to look for, but guess who is their leader and their best advisor in this process? It's their own body. Right. Right, and I think that is a piece that we, that if I can support people in helping them get back to that.

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I really believe we're gonna be better off because in many ways social media and technology has allowed for us to get more information, world information, quicker, faster, and more of it, right? Well, you would think that that wouldn't make us all smarter and it would make us feel like, oh, I understand things better, but what's ultimately happening, and I don't think I'm wrong in saying this, is that we're just in an.

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completely stressed out, overwhelmed state because we're getting information that we normally would not get. If you think about it, even back in the day, I mean, even when I was born in the 70s, like we were limited in our communication by really our community and maybe that person that has our phone number and they could have lived anywhere in the US, but even then you weren't getting worldly calls because it was really expensive. You would maybe get

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That person from the if I was I was on the West Coast it was like my grandma on the East Coast and even then it was like still expensive because if you're on the phone too long because you're getting charged you know we forget we used to get charged by the minute now we get charged like you just get charged monthly for and you can have unlimited. But communication was localized it was limited. And it felt easier and yet people would argue well but you didn't know as much as you have knowledge of now I'm like yeah but.

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I could take it in bites, sound bites that my body and my system could actually handle. You know, and I think that that that we're we're losing a lot by getting too much information. And so, I mean, my judgment, the only way to truly kind of quiet that down is to go internal, whether that's through meditation, whether that's through self reflection, any, you know.

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quiet walks, whatever, but just kind of making sure that you set time aside where you're not wired in, but where you're actually fully just listening to the sounds around you versus the sounds from your phone. I think that the more we can kind of unwire, the more that we can just focus on eating our food and then also focus on the environment we're in when we're eating it, we will see huge leaps in our nervous system.

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in our digestibility, in our health. And I love that that's kind of what you're mirroring to your clients regarding their salt intake. I just think it's such a perfect example of this. Well, and what you mentioned about being in the parasympathetic and doing nervous system retraining really is a core part of the work that we do. Yes, we're removing heavy metals and chemicals and molds and infections and all that. But I found that

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people get better a lot faster when they're working on being in more of a mindful state, you know, and trying to practice mindfulness and meditation and working on retraining their nervous system. And like you're mentioning, food is just another way of doing that. You know, it's not, it's part and parcel with this whole thing. If you want to be healthier, you got to exist more in a parasympathetic aspect of your nervous system and retrain your nervous system.

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And consequently, that goes for whether you're walking, working, or eating. And so I think it's just a really important part of the whole conversation. And I think that there is also, you know, there's also this kind of assumption or expectation that we're gonna go from zero to 99. That I can strong arm addiction, I can get healthier.

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you know, I can make a decision one day and suddenly I'm going to stop eating junk and I'll be healthier or that I can control my portions. You know, I can go out and eat at certain restaurants so I can get that bag of chips or that ice cream and I can make it so that I don't eat it all in one sitting. You know, like we have this idea that these things aren't bigger than us and that we are still the masters of our domain. But yet at the same time, we also typically people think like that.

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are also the ones that completely abandon themselves when things are not within their control.

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The minute something doesn't go the way they thought it was going to go, they abandon this intelligence about what works or doesn't work for their body. I think that a lot of that, sure, there's some mindset stuff to it, but I believe that a big piece of it is that we have to take a step back and realize that potentially the issue is bigger than us. This marketing machine, the...

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chemicals that are in foods that these things are more manipulative than we even give it credit for and that Intellectually, we might think I got you you got it figured out but that physically we don't and So the more that we can kind of like take almost like baby steps with ourselves around these these addictive foods or these These kind of this these processes that are not working for us

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I think the better we are. So even in terms of like, let's say if someone's listening to this and they're like, oh man, I eat like that. I gotta like make changes and I gotta like not eat when I'm in my car, something like that, right? And so they might try to go cold turkey, but it's like, well, I don't know if it's eating your car. That's the biggest issue. Maybe the issue is actually what you're eating in your car. So maybe it's about the first step back is like, can you make sure that the food that you're eating is homemade?

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versus store-bought. You know what I mean? Like look at what step is gonna be the one that moves the needle the most, but with the least, with the smallest step, if that makes sense. Because I think sometimes we try to do both at the same time. We're trying to look for the best outcome or the highest outcome, but also taking too big of a leap, if that makes sense. It does. And I think some of this has to...

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I think it's important to start questioning the status quo. Yes. You know, all different aspects, you know. So we see these things in movies and we're like, okay, that person's doing it. And so consequently, that's kind of the norm for the society. But you know, let's just pick the hours that we're supposed to work per week. Who came up with the idea that we're supposed to work 40 hours per week, right? Is that healthy for humans? Is that kind of how it was chosen?

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Or was it actually the amount of hours that you could get people to work without them complaining too much, which is the reality of the situation, right? Where there are companies that tried to get people to work more than that. And there was a lot of pushback. So they were like, okay, 40 hours a week, five days a week, two days off that allowed people to recover and then go back to the mines or the warehouse or whatever it was. Right. So the question is, what is a healthy amount to be working? And it's just an example of just questioning the status quo, right?

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So then when you're sitting down to eat, like just because your grandma made it for you and it has not just, it has the psychological component which is hard to break, right? Just because she made it for you does not mean necessarily that it's healthy. My wife grew up with bread with butter and sugar on it and it was delicious and it meant your grandma loved you. But yeah, I mean, there's really no nutrition in that, right? And so then...

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What can we do in order to create something like that that's more healthy or how do we navigate? What do you think? Well, I think the thing that I look for is not the health trend, but the health food that I can make lifestyle. So I'm always looking for, as I said earlier, I'm always looking for things that are ingredients versus have ingredients. That's the first thing I look for is like, I would much rather choose an ingredient.

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and make the food myself rather than buy it already pre-made. Because when it's pre-made, and this is a very important distinction, it's not pre-made the way that you would do it in your house. It's pre-made to have shelf stability. So when you go to a grocery store, grocery stores have very low margins, very, very low margins. So it's not, it's only a cash grab because there's so many of them.

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in terms of like the more they have, the more they can profit. But if you only have like one grocery store, you're not gonna be that wealthy because the margins are not that great. And so what companies are doing to be part of that market is they're making sure that their product has shelf stability and shelf life because the longer that they can keep their product in the grocery store to be sold, the better off. If it's a perishable item that only lasts for a week and they can't sell everything that that store

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put on the shelf in that week, guess where that product goes? It goes back to the company that distributed or manufactured it, and they have to pay the store for the fees of carrying it. So it's a lose-lose situation for the manufacturer. And for the market, they just want products that A, sell, and that have long enough shelf life so that they can sell. So the ingredients of that product

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that you find at the grocery store will never be as healthy as what you can do at home, never. They're gonna skimp somewhere because they have a bottom line, they might skimp with the oils they use in that dressing, let's say, if it's a dressing. They might skimp in the salt that they use, maybe they're using a table salt versus a sea salt. They might skimp in the actual, is it organic? Is it not organic? They might skimp there as well. So there's lots of things that they're gonna do differently than you would.

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So I really advocate that we have to be the gatekeeper for ourselves. So be the gatekeeper, whatever passes your mouth threshold into your mouth is up to you. And yes, sure, we can beat ourselves up. We can put pressure on ourselves and say, no, I have to do this, I can't do that. And shame ourselves, which is really where a lot of like kind of food issues come from is the shaming that you potentially had when you were a child around certain foods.

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Yes, you can go down that route. Clearly people have. But is that the route that's going to give you the best outcome? Is that the route that's going to be conducive towards that long-term health journey, the lifestyle? And so I'm looking for little things we can do daily that will move my health needle, but more importantly, that I can do daily that I also can do in a lifetime versus I'm just going to do it for a week and then give up. And I believe it has to be a little movement.

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for that to happen, because you think about it, if you had to brush your teeth an hour every day, would you do it daily? Probably wouldn't. If you had to take an hour to actually brush your teeth, I guarantee we would have less people brushing our teeth nightly. The fact that it's a two to four minute process is very important.

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So I think that as humans, we really, not only does our body assimilate things in small amounts better, but I also believe that we energetically and mentally can assimilate it easier when it's in small amounts, despite our very Americana kind of belief that you should go big or go home. It's like, I just don't think that applies to human nature. It might be a socialized nature, but I don't think it's a part of our human nature. I don't think it's the way the body works best.

35:55

Yeah, you're talking about habits, right? And behavioral change. And it's really so much easier to add a habit to something that you're already doing. So, if we're gonna take it into the context of food, what is a habit that somebody can change? Kind of like what you were talking about where it's like, okay, so if you can't change where you eat, if you gotta eat in your car, let's change the choice that you make.

36:25

Yeah, so I would start like so okay, so organ meats are really important to me. I believe eating whole animal is what many of us are missing from our nutrition. So right away, that's why I created pluck, which you mentioned at the top, because pluck so pluck is a seasoning with organ meats in it. It's got freeze dried powdered liver heart, can you explain it?

36:49

So literally, if you can salt it, you can pluck it. So right there, it's no new habit. You're already seasoning your food. I'm just saying, season it with this and you get the micronutrients of organ meats every time you use it, which is cumulative effect. So that's right away one thing someone could do because a lot of seasonings are actually contributing to chronic issues. They're not actually helping to just flavor. And how you know that is just look at the ingredients. Does it have sugar in it? Does it have seed oils? Does it have...

37:16

silicon dioxide, does it have anything that's preservative or shelf-stabilizing or anything like that? Those things are not going to be good for our health. So right away, I would focus on those kinds of things. But then I wouldn't stop there. I would graduate to, well, what are some other ways that we're getting these very inflammatory foods or that are hurting us rather than helping us? And I would say dressings. It's a huge one, huge one, sauces and dressings. So right away, I would suggest...

37:44

Make your own and here's a tip on how to do it. It takes you literally 30 seconds as long as you have the ingredients in house. And here's the ratio you follow. You get a Mason jar with a lid. You use this ratio for a dressing, three to one. So three parts oil to one part acid. And acid is a vinegar, could be lemon juice, could be lime juice, could be pineapple juice. That's an acid. So it's literally three to one.

38:11

And the key with any ratio is you got to use the same vessel. So if you're using a tablespoon, it's three tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil, one tablespoon balsamic vinegar. Put that in the mace jar, shake it. You now have a delicious dressing. You can then go further with it. You can add salt, you can add pepper, you can add a little Dijon mustard. Like you can add to it, but that is the base. That is the simple, simple base for now making your own dressing and eliminating all these kind of toxic

38:39

ingredients that are contributing to potentially brain frog contributing to anxiety that are contributed to inflammation, chronic inflammation. So there's so many things that just remove it, just making your own dressings will do. And then from there, there's other things like if we go back to organ meats, you could get grinds like ground meat that already has the organs in it. There's lots of them on the market. They're usually in the freezer aisle. Force of nature has them

39:08

companies sell them now meat companies and they're usually called paleo blend or they're called ancestral blends and they usually will have heart and liver at minimum in them. Minimum of those two sometimes more than that maybe kidney but usually you don't see any that have more than just those three and it's like you know between five to twelve fifteen percent of it is organ meat but that's all you need you don't need a lot just a little bit here and there and try to do it you know every week or.

39:38

since you're eating it versus swallowing organ capsules, you let your body dictate it, because sometimes there'll be times in the month if you're a female that you may want more. There's some times where you may not, but by eating it, your body will tell you, guaranteed. It will literally start to taste different. It will taste, let's just say you go to eat an organ meat and you kind of already don't like it. Now I'm not talking about dislike or like something. I'm talking about the actual flavor of it.

40:05

and you go to put in your mouth and it tastes a little metallic and so or and maybe you don't like the texture so i'm not saying like oh that means your body doesn't want to i'm saying like if you go to eat it and you're like like you try it once and maybe try to get it tastes different this time like it actually tastes more intense or more uh kind of metallic that could be your body telling you hey you don't need this today like pull back you know

40:34

And I think it's, I guess when I'm kind of admitting it, it is sometimes a fine line because we all have to relearn how to listen to our bodies. So there is gonna be a learning curve. Don't expect like the first time you eat something that, oh, I don't, spinach doesn't taste good to me, so that means that's not good for my body, my body doesn't want it. It's like not necessarily. That just means that you're not used to it.

40:57

and take it slowly and let's see how it plays out the more you do it and if and you will know because they're they're very clear indications like your body will not like using the salt your body will not let you pass go if it's getting too much salt it the salt starts to taste differently it doesn't taste like salt anymore to actually taste worse it tastes it tastes like something foreign that your body does it's going to reject it and that's kind of what i'm talking about is the food will start to taste different

41:27

I'm glad you brought up food preferences because I remember when my daughter was growing up and she would say, I don't like that and she would be talking about a particular vegetable and we coached her to change the way that she was saying it to I don't like that right now. That's great. Yeah. Right. I mean, it's this idea that like we can reprogram our taste buds, right? And so it's...

41:55

it's so important to continue to have a flexible diet and to continue to eat variety. So because it's going to, it's kind of, it's gonna serve us in a number of different ways, but we have to practice in order to be able to get all the different nutrients that we need from a varied diet. Oh, I mean, you're so wise in that you know these things because a lot of people don't actually realize that you can change picky eating just through the palate.

42:22

like that by removing certain foods and introducing other foods, that a lot of times it's not as psychological, like yes, we might have food addictions or we might have emotional ties to certain foods. I'm not saying that that doesn't exist. Of course it exists. However, it's also more physical than people realize. And we know this, for example, when we pull out sugars from someone's diet.

42:46

Back in the day, I had a meal delivery service and we used to have this program, a two-week program called the sugar-controlled detox. And what it was, it was basically a low-carb diet. So there was no sweets, no alcohols, very little fruit. We only included certain berries, not even strawberries. Those were considered too sweet. So it was like blueberries, blackberries, raspberries kind of thing. And then no grains, no starches. So really just protein.

43:16

some fat, vegetables, and potentially some resistant starches in the form of like sweet potato or cellurac or something, you know, butternut squash, something like that. And in two weeks, people who came into that program eating tons of sweets, drinking three glasses of wine, in two weeks, not only did they lose weight, but they could barely finish a glass of wine. So we had recalibrated their palate by removing certain foods.

43:46

to the point where they can now taste things for what they really were, that something was very sweet. So now when they went to eat a strawberry, they were like, oh my gosh, it's so full of flavor. It's so sweet. And then when they went to taste the ice cream, it was like, oh, this is way over the top sweet, right? So they now had a more accurate judgment of what the flavors of the foods they're eating is, are. And...

44:14

And it literally took two weeks and it is that simple. And I'm always telling my parents, one of the things you could do with picky eating kids is so if you think about it. So we have the four tastes that were drilled in school. So salty, sweet, bitter, sour. Those are the four. There's a fifth that they discovered in the 90s. It's called umami, which I would describe kind of like meatier savory. Right. Those five are the ones that we really know about.

44:44

And we're primarily skewed here in the U.S. with salty and sweet. Most of the foods that are coming out of stores and in restaurants that went on in people's homes are salty and sweet. So the palates of those kids are skewed to salty sweet. So how do you get a kid out of that salt sweet? Will you pull back on salty and sweet things and you introduce the other flavors? You introduce bitter, you introduce sour, you introduce more umami.

45:12

And it doesn't have to be huge movements because you want to treat the situation no differently than you would change pets food. Like when pets have very delicate digestive systems, if you change their food too quickly, they can get diarrhea and not do well. And so what you're always advised when you change a pet's food is you go 95 percent of the old food, five percent of the new food. And then over time, those ratios change so that it's now 95 percent of the new food.

45:41

and 5% of the old to eventually now no longer having the old one, but it's a gradual, you know, week to two week shift. You do the same with the kid. So you can take what are some sour foods? Well, there's the juice from sauerkraut or fermented vegetables. You could take some of that juice. You can mix it with their mashes. You could add it to if they're, if your kid is older and they're not eating mashed foods, but they're eating like chicken fingers and they're dipping it in a sauce, then mix a little bit of it into the sauce. It doesn't have to be a lot, just a little bit.

46:09

and they'll start to get a little sour into their diet. And then you just kind of keep doing it. We get the same comments around pluck. People who have picky eaters, they just put pluck on their food. That's the only thing they do differently. And their kids start to get more adventurous because the umami in the in the organ meats starts to expand their palate. So very simple moves with huge reward. You just gotta, you know, you gotta take a breath as you do it. You can't expect to happen overnight. It's a gradual progression.

46:39

Yeah. And I think it's easy to get overwhelmed when people think about food and having to plan for seven meals a night. But sometimes it's just like, okay, we'll do the same thing you're doing for six nights and the seventh, let's do something different. Or let's start to, let's think creatively, how can we make things easier? So I recently stepped up in my family to do more cooking. I'm not a good cook.

47:08

don't have a lot of skills. I did some research. I'm like, okay, I'm gonna get the Instant Pot and I'm gonna use Chat GPT to create some recipes for me. So I created my own GPT called my cooking assistant. And I told it only to give me recipes that were gluten-free, dairy-free, paleo, sugar-free and gave it some other stipulations as well. And I only wanted to use certain settings because I wanted to pressure cook. I didn't wanna saute also.

47:36

But, and then I got something to help me chop vegetables because I was realizing it was taking forever to chop vegetables. So I got like a tool to help me chop vegetables a little bit. My girls laugh at me. But the reality is that I'm just trying to get creative knowing that I don't have these skills and I'm not cooking every single night, but it's just, I'm taking a step in, in a way. And plus I like technology. So applying with ChatGPT is kind of interesting for me. So I'm figuring out a way where I can

48:05

make some improvement in my ability to cook and start cooking healthy things in a way that I haven't done before. Evan, what is so brilliant about what you just said and I want to review and realize how important what you just said is because this is everything I'm trying to share with people is that so there's nothing wrong with modern society with technology. There's nothing wrong with our current life, but it doesn't mean we have to abandon the knowledge we had.

48:34

previously from our ancestral, you know, that ancestral knowledge. And so what are you doing? You're realizing that this is, this is kind of my relationship to cooking. You're owning your relationship to cooking. You are utilizing technology to fill the gaps or to simplify it for yourself so that it is not only more enjoyable, but it's also just easier. But here's what's really key is you're not abandoning your knowledge of what foods you should be eating.

49:04

And that's really important because you don't want to like a lot of people sometimes confuse that it's like, okay, I want I recognize I have this whole and I don't like this part of cooking. I want to utilize all this technology to make the food. Well, oh, look, look at the store. Here's this package product that goes into my insula. I'm just making this up. It goes into my insta pot, but it's got all these ingredients that I don't understand. But it goes to my end spot. I'm just going to use this. I'm going to take.

49:33

modern technology and modern food, and I'm gonna mash it all together. And it's like, no, don't do that. Like what we know is that despite all these health trends that have happened, I mean, I've been in this business 20 years. In the 20 years I've been in this business, there is one thing that has not changed is that we are omnivores. Simple put, we're omnivores and doesn't matter what.

50:00

health trend comes in, it doesn't matter what the trending diet is, it's that real food matters. It just needs to be real food. And what I hear you saying when you say that is like, you're not abandoning that knowledge. I'm still making real food, but I'm accommodating the skills I'm using to make that food with modern technology and modern practices. And to me, that is what we should all be striving to do, is no one is saying like, hey,

50:28

I'm not here trying to say like, oh, you should eat Ancestor, but you should also go out and hunt your own animal and you should like, you know, like dress it and you should, you know, um, eat, you know, in outside under the fire and the, and the stars, like no one's time. I'm not, I just don't believe that's realistic. I just, I think that realistically we live in this society. So let's, let's make that work, but let's not abandon our, our innate knowledge of what we should be eating. And I know.

50:58

I don't know if you remember this back in the day, like Weight Watchers, they were so adamant about like, calories matter, like they were really pushing, and calories do matter, but they were pushing the agenda that it didn't matter where the calories came from, that the calorie of a cookie was the same as the calorie of an apple. And you only have this many calories in a day, so go ahead and eat as many cookies as you want, as long as it fits within this calorie.

51:26

And that huge mistake of those people, we all bought it. We were like, oh, great. So I can eat that fat-free cookie and I can eat the whole box because it said fat-free and that's not gonna affect me negatively. Or I can eat a cookie instead of an apple and still have the same effect. It's like, no, the food choices you make matter. And so I love that you're not abandoning that for the convenience of modern society or whatever it is. Right, thank you.

51:53

James, this has been great. I so appreciate you coming on and talking about all this stuff with me. Where can people go and find out more about you and PLUK? So we have a website eatpluk.com. Speaking about recipes, we have some great recipes on that. And they're all recipes either using PLUK, those regular recipes, but some of them even show you how to get organ meats into your diet. So some of them are utilizing PLUK and other organs.

52:21

And then you can find us on Amazon as well. Just do a search, but Pluck is sold on Amazon, eatpluck.com as well. And then on socials, we're at Eat Pluck and I'm Chef James Berry. Wonderful. Thanks so much for joining me today, James. Thank you.