#211 What to Eat & How -- What's ACTUALLY Healthy? Our Food Journey

Rachel Denning (00:11.246)
Hey everybody. Welcome to the extraordinary family life podcast. We are your hosts, Greg and Rachel Denning. And today is Carnival in.

Austria so you can hear yeah, they just started and we ended up renting a place like right in downtown You wanted to experience carnival in Willak, Austria. We rented the perfect place We saw the whole parade today and the mayhem and chaos is going on on the main street right now outside our window is a fascinating study

in humanity and social traditions and psychology. Oh man, it's awesome. So if you hear some loud shouting and music and there's a lot of drunkenness and mayhem and chaos going on. Already, even though it's 430. It's been happening since 10 a .m. Yeah, 10 a .m. The party started out here. So let's go on. We are excited to talk about, excited and a little hesitant, at least from my part. I'm actually just...

Very excited. Okay, Rachel's fully excited. I'm hesitant. I geek out about this. As do I, and I talk about it a lot of time, but it's, it's very complicated subject, or at least it seems that way. And it's a very, uh, how would you say it? Like, uh,

sensitive. In some ways it's controversial. Yeah, controversial and it's triggered like, like people get really upset about it and we're quick to attack each other and get really defensive or offensive. Uh, and there's entire books, massive libraries on every viewpoint with research about the exact opposite thing. Right. And so people were like, well, I read this and had all this research that says this, and then I read this and it had all the exact opposite research. So what do I believe? Exactly. And, and,

Rachel Denning (01:59.886)
We're obviously going to talk about food and how to eat. How to eat. What to eat. What is healthy? Some of you are like, well, duh, just eat. Feed your body. And others are like, oh no, I read this book or I talked to this person or I had this experience. And we'll get into this later, but it's easy to get really... Well, food's interesting because we all have a relationship with food. It's not just like this...

unemotional, unconnected thing. It's not just like, yeah, it's not totally objective like, oh, there's food, I'll put it in my body and like, okay, done. It's never been like that. I don't know that that's accurate saying it's never been like that because I think it actually, and this is why it's more complicated now. In earlier times, I think it was more like that.

It was very much whatever is available, that's what you eat. There wasn't a lot of choice. Especially if you're, well, yeah, the older tribes, you're out hunting and wherever you happen to be, whatever animals exist at that time, you shoot it. Or berries or whatever. Yeah. In season in the local area and you kill it and that's what you eat. You're right. There's no question. You're not going to say, oh, I'm not going to eat that because that's not good for me. You're like, this is food.

I'm hungry, I want to live. I don't quite feel like that today. I'm not really in the mood for milk. I'm not sure I should eat that fat, you know. No, there was no question. You just ate whatever was available. And so things were much simpler then. Absolutely, you're true. And because of, essentially because of industrialization, well first of all agriculture that started it, that made it, you know, changed the eating. And then industrialization, the industrialization of food drastically changed.

and has made everything significantly more complicated. And all of the research I have done definitely points to that, that a lot of our diseases that we have now, a lot of our confusion about food and what to eat has come about because of the industrialization of food. Which is interesting. I was actually reading something about that just this morning. And just as short as 70 years ago, health as a whole in...

Rachel Denning (04:13.806)
Well, in America in particular, it was so much better. Obesity, heart disease. The scaled industrialization that's come in the last 50, 60, 70 years, just unbelievable. And so you're right. So there's this relationship with money, and I guess not with money, with food. There's a relationship with food and it's a very emotional relationship now. And it gets really complicated, it gets fired up. And we can become, I guess I want to point this out, some people get like crazy.

lazy religious about it. Like you're attacking their religion and like, this is everything. And it's easy to get caught up in that and get fired up about it. And it's also easy to be mistaken about it. Absolutely. And to grab hold of this idea, maybe not fully understanding it or misunderstanding it. And oh man. And the long -term results are gigantic.

Yeah, that's the other challenge and irony is that it is a big deal. It's not like this is not significant. It is because whatever choices you are making on a daily basis on what to put in your mouth are going to have long -term consequences, positive or negative. And so we need to figure it out. We need to figure out, hey, what is going on? What should we eat? But it is also very challenging. And part of the reason if you go back to...

it was easier before because you just ate what was available. Well, now there's so much that's available. You walk into a grocery store and what do you pick? You know, do you pick fruits, vegetables? Do you pick the low fat stuff, the keto stuff? Like what do you pick to eat, you know? Plant -based. The irony, I would be bold enough to say, is that the vast majority of what is for sale in a grocery store is actually not good for you. And I, in fact,

So essentially in this episode, my plan is to share my entire food story and journey. And I'll just give a peek right here that along that way, and this was several, this is maybe even a decade ago, we were traveling and living abroad, which we've done for a long time, of course. But I remember like every time I went to the grocery store, just feeling this sense of almost helplessness or hopelessness.

Rachel Denning (06:38.414)
that I was studying all of this stuff about food, but I felt like there was nothing healthy to eat in the grocery store. I remember that point because we had read maybe five or six books in a row, and by the time we were done with five books, there wasn't anything we could eat. Fruit wasn't good for you, vegetables weren't good, milk wasn't good for you, meat wasn't good. And so I would go to the grocery store and I would stand there thinking, I don't know what to buy. I literally don't. Because this book says no, this other book says no to that. And then...

I remember that moment where we're like, what in the world's left to eat? I know, exactly. What else can you actually eat that's good for you? So we're going to walk through our whole journey and where we are currently, knowing that it does change, like our way of eating, our style of eating, what we eat has changed over the years. And it may change again, although I feel like personally, we've come to, we've kind of come full circle and we're like, okay.

feel like we're in a good spot here. For the most part, I have a sense of what I believe is actually healthy after having studied every different philosophy. For years and experimented and worked with thousands of people. So there I was. There we were. I'll start with me because it starts a little bit before you. I was living out on my own and

without knowing what I was doing, I turned to fitness and exercise as my outlet for - Because you had left home at a young age. Yeah, family fell apart, I left home out on my own. Lots of - Life is tough. I was constantly insecure, afraid, angry. I was pissed. Lonely. A lot. I was lonely a lot. And so I turned, luckily, to keep me away from drugs and alcohol and crime and all kinds of other garbage. I turned to the gym. And so I started boxing.

kickboxing and I started lifting weights and it was a great place to be. I was taking out all my anger and frustration and all that pain in exertion of weight. So it's really great. And so I'm like, man, the perfect job, cause I'm broke, the perfect job would be to get a job at a gym. So I don't have to pay for the membership and I can work here for free. And so I did and essentially became kind of a personal trainer around 16 or 17. I got some jobs at some gyms. So I had a free membership and then

Rachel Denning (09:05.038)
The gyms were just packed with books and magazines and surrounded with like big dudes. And so I'm like, man, I want to be, you know, it's again, a classic example of your environment affecting you and input determining output, right? So I'm in this spot. I'm like, well, I want to be really good at this. So I want to, and so I started researching and studying and devouring like what actually works. I didn't want to take steroids like a bunch of my buddies were doing. I'm like, I want to be natural. I want to just get just jacked and I want to be healthy.

So I pick up these magazines and I'm like, you know, I'm of course open magazine like, what's the best exercise? How can I get the biggest biceps? And there was these great articles in there and they're like, hey, let me break down what caffeine is doing to your muscles. Let me break down what water does. Let me break down what sugar does. Let me break down what like fast food and junk food does. And so I'm reading these articles as a 16, 17 year old kid and I'm like, that's it, I'm done.

Once I understood like the direct harm, the sugar specifically, I remember reading that what sugar does, caffeine and carbonation, and I'm like, I'm out, I'm done, I'm done with fast food, I'm done with junk food, I'm done with sugars and carbonation. And so at that point I could drink a two liter Dr. Pepper and eat a half gallon of mint chocolate chip ice cream on my own and call it a meal. I was like, I'm out. Because I understood at a...

you know, the molecular biology, what was happening at a cellular level in my body, I'm like that it's just, it's an obstacle from what I want, which I wanted phenomenal health and muscles. And I'm like, okay, this, this actually, I can see the science, how this doesn't help. And so I dropped it. So by the time I met Rachel, when you were probably 21, 22 on, I was 22.

met and man I was in I hadn't eaten junk. You had large muscles. I was all muscles and and I hadn't eaten junk for almost five six years at that point so my body was clean and I remember being so ravenously hungry one night as a poor college student over at your house and the only thing you guys had to eat was chocolate chip cookies so I'm like oh my gosh I'm like I'll have one.

Rachel Denning (11:29.71)
And I could just immediately just taste like, this is garbage. And I think your parents cooked with Crisco back then. Oh, yes. I grew up on Crisco and just - Margarine. Yeah, exactly. Why would we have butter when there's margarine? It's healthier for you too. Oh my gosh. There's all this. And I was on welfare. My family was on welfare when I was a kid, but -

you know, every once in a while we'd still get Captain Crunch or Fruity Pebbles or Lucky Charms and I was like, this is the life. And that stuff is just poison in a box. So we grew up on candy. I mean Halloween was just a pillowcase full of candy and we would eat it as fast as we could. So I grew up just unbelievably healthy. And then as I started reading - Unhealthy. Unhealthy, yes. Unbelievably unhealthy, thank you. And then at 16, 17 I was like, oh, now I understand what -

does what causes what in my body. I'm like, okay, there's a clear, easy decision for me. That stuff's gone. Right. So now on the other side of it, I also grew up standard American diet, the sad diet. I never remember thinking about anything being good or bad for you. We just ate whatever, you know, we ate cookies all the time. We ate ice cream all the time. We ate whatever we wanted all the time. The only thing, ironically,

that I remember ever being pointed out as not being good was like butter. Oh, butter's not good, get the margarine. You know, because that was the agenda being pushed at that time in the 80s that margarine, margarine, margarine, you know, because butter is bad for you, which now is not true whatsoever. 100 % the opposite. Yeah, and so that's the only thing I ever remember standing out is get the margarine, not the butter. But you know, all of that. So then - Wait, I gotta pause right there in the story.

We have to understand, ladies and gentlemen, that clever marketers and business people will throw down hard a quote, health agenda to sell more of their product. They have no qualms persuading you to buy something, to buy their product because it's supposedly good for you or whatever.

Rachel Denning (13:48.91)
I mean, they're really clever and sly about it. So we all need to be aware that some of the stuff we've been taught and told for decades was only, it was done by marketers trying to sell a product, not by real research. Which is another reason that this whole thing becomes complicated because it's not objective. There's not an objective truth somewhere that's being published. It's all determined by...

Businesses and marketing and all kinds of things that are going into it. So that adds to the challenge I did want to point out really fast before I get to this next part of our story because I think this is an important principle and One of the things that you started doing you didn't yet know what was good per se But you knew for sure what was bad and I think that that's a great place for everyone to start if you want to get healthier It's easy

to start for sure with what's bad. If you know mint chocolate chip ice cream, especially the one that has high fructose corn syrup, is bad, well that's easy, cut that out. If you still wanna buy ice cream, great, just buy a better quality ice cream or one with better ingredients. And this is the second principle, everything has levels. Nothing's necessarily just good or bad. I mean, there's a few things that are just bad. But a lot of things just have levels, like,

They're on a scale of what's good and bad. And they fit somewhere in that scale. Thank you for bringing that up. Because it's a foundational element of this entire conversation. Like you can't just say, well, a dessert's a dessert. Bread's bread. Or meat is meat. Or milk is milk. No way! You cannot do that. I think that's where we get into trouble. You're like, oh, everyone's telling you to have a dessert. Well, yeah, but a dessert is, they're not all created equal.

Some desserts are okay, some are just like suicide by spoonful, man. And so you're right, we have to get some clarity on that level, that scale, that grade of quality and try to get as high up as possible as often as possible. Right. So the first two principles there are cut out for sure what you know is bad. And as I'll tell later in the story, one of the things I cut out when we started our...

Rachel Denning (16:10.062)
journey together was high fructose corn syrup. Like I just knew that that wasn't good. So I started the process by reading all the labels and I just committed to not buying anything that had high fructose corn syrup. That was one of the first things I did. Right, or corn syrup at all now. Yeah, any version of that. And actually I would, I'll just come out and say anything that's corn. And nowadays you also... Corn is just not good for the human body. Yeah, and you also have to look it up because they also use other names. That's one of the other trickier things. Like it's also called maltrous...

Dextrin or something other like that. So they come up with other names to confuse you because they catch on Oh people don't want to buy high fructose corn syrup. They know something else exactly They know the sales dropping because there's a lot of publicity now with high fructose corn syrup or MSG and so they call something like oh, let's rename that and sales are back up where they were. Yay So you have to read the ingredient label on everything and I have literally

I know I've said this before, read the ingredient label on every single thing I've bought for the past 15 years at least. That makes a huge difference. More than that even. Almost in our entire marriage, which is part of the story. Okay, so anyways, those are a couple of principles there. So we come to the point where Greg meets me, he's in his 20s, 22, and at this point I had never really thought that much about food at all. At all.

I hadn't thought about it. I just ate whatever was provided at any time. Luckily, she had somehow, were actually really... I had a really great metabolism. I was very thin. Thick and skinny. Yeah. And the week after... But her parents were not. They were... Yeah. The week... Well, let me say this part even. We had our first date. It was a blind date for me. I'd never seen you and...

I remember after our date, we came back to the house, my parents' house, and you came inside for a minute, and I remember vividly you standing there talking to my dad, and I was watching, and all of the sudden I looked at him and I thought, he doesn't look very good. Like he just looks very unhealthy. He was obese, of course, but his skin and everything just looked kind of pale, and he just looked sickly.

Rachel Denning (18:32.974)
A week later, he was diagnosed with colon cancer. And so literally one week after our first date, my dad is diagnosed with colon cancer, given three to six months to live. And that became a very defining element of our entire marriage, our entire life, really, because here we are in love, wanting to get married and do all this, and my dad is dying from cancer. Start a family as he's ending his life and...

Well, okay. His surgeons and oncologists were very, very clear like this is a result of your diet. Well, okay, so let's not fast forward too much because so he did have to have surgery and they were planning to remove part of his colon but then they realized so at first they were just gonna do that and they realized it had metastasized that's when they said he had three to six months to live and there was actually a nurse I remember that we came in and she was there and she

told my parents, she said, I really think that you need to read this book or watch this video or something. And that had a huge impact on actually extending my dad's life. So he was given three to six months to live. He actually ended up living two and a half years. So he saw us get married. He saw us adopt our first child. He actually saw my brother get married.

And this was another thing I want to point out. What he ended up doing was he went on a raw diet for a while. So he went raw, drastically changed his diet because he grew up on this diet of junk food and cookies and all this stuff. And it extended his life. Now, I want to point this out because one of the things I have learned along the way is that a drastic change in diet like that has a very positive effect.

on people. They pick something, they go raw, they go vegan, they go this, they go that, and it has such a drastic, powerful effect on their life that they think, okay, I have found it. I have found the truth, this is it. And this is where they become very emotionally religious about it. And we were that way for a while. We didn't go raw, but we really went, you know, healthy, as healthy as we could, and we were very religious about it too.

Rachel Denning (20:54.286)
But as we have learned over the years, that just because that change in diet worked,

temporarily doesn't mean it's actually a good long -term solution. And we have seen this play out in our own life, in the lives of friends that we've had and other people we've observed or kept tabs on. They'll have this positive change in their life, their body, their health, because of the change in their diet, but not all of these diets are sustainable long -term. Does that make sense?

Absolutely. Yeah. So that's something, that's something that we definitely learned over the. So you can, you can't confuse, you can't confuse like immediate, like if you're unhealthy and then you make a switch and now you feel better, that's fantastic. That's great. But you can't just be like, okay, this is it. This is it for the rest of my life. Now that this is the only answer. You're like, well, okay, you got to change. That's great. But you have to find.

A sustainable long -term plan for longevity and health. And that's ultimately what I was always looking for. I was looking for what is the common denominator diet that's healthy, positive, sustainable in the long term, right? So I want to point that out about my dad though because it did, switching to a raw diet did extend his life. It did give him a better quality of life ultimately. And I think that this is important too.

He didn't find it sustainable. He didn't enjoy life because he was on this very strict raw diet. And I think partly...

Rachel Denning (22:45.006)
that may have been why he ended up dying is because he wasn't enjoying living as much. But then of course the cancer had already, you know, it had progressed enough that he reached a point where he couldn't eat anymore. He had to stop eating and, you know, a lot of cancer patients, that's actually how they end up dying is they essentially starve to death because they can no longer eat. And so that's what happened with him. He could no longer eat and eventually it took his life.

But for our family, I knew that things were going to be different with us. Because when we were registering for our wedding, you know you do your little wedding registry, and we went together to Target, and we were going around clicking things with the little scanner to put them on our registry. And we went to the utensil aisles, and we were getting spatulas and everything. And I'm like, oh, we need to put this ice cream scoop on the registry. And you're like, no, we're not doing that.

I said, yes, babe, we need an ice cream scoop. I can't scoop it with a spoon because the spoon bends. I need a scoop. And you looked at me and you said, I just remember it so clearly. You looked at me and you said, we don't need an ice cream scoop. And it took me a minute and then I thought, oh, that's because we won't be eating ice cream. And you're like, yes, exactly. And right then that defined, yeah, we won't be eating ice cream because...

That's at the time we were like, that's not healthy. We're not going to do that. And now we do eat ice cream, but we make our own. Craig's over here like, wait a second. Wait a second. Don't go don't go over saying that because when you say now we eat ice cream, then everyone's like, oh, sweet ice cream is good. Yeah. Like we the kind of ice cream we eat now did not exist back then. There was no option for what we eat. So the kind of ice cream we eat now we eat in.

very small amounts and it's so much healthier than the normal just run -of -the -mill ice cream. So back then cutting out ice cream was essentially the only option because they didn't have healthier better options and we preferred of course to make our own. That's what I love to do is to make our own ice cream. Okay so anyways so we don't buy an ice cream scoop we get married and then...

Rachel Denning (25:07.278)
I just felt like we were, I was on this constant kick of reading another book about food, about eating, about diet. And I've read so many books. I've read books about milk is poison. I think that was literally like the title, Milk is Poison. I've read about dairy products being terrible for you. I've read about, you know, the China diet, the, I don't know, like I've forgotten all of the names of the books ever. I remember, and we've met.

You guys, because we've traveled now to well over 50 countries and we've met people from every walk of life and every kind of philosophy and we've had just these fascinating conversations all over the spectrum and people get so fired up. And I remember one guy like, you know, milk, cow's milk is for an animal that has four stomachs. And I remember thinking.

She's right. But then I realized, no, the stomach's for the grass. Duh. It's for the grass. It's not for the milk. Okay, but the point is, all of those books did influence us. So we did cut out milk out of our diet for several years and we cut out butter because that wasn't good. We knew margarine wasn't good, so we didn't have that either. We cut out, so we were drinking essentially soy milk, almond milk, all of that stuff.

We're lucky we survived that period. We'll get to that. So we made all of those switches. Well, like you were talking about though, meeting all these different people around the world, when we lived in Costa Rica, this was now probably nine years ago, it was very fascinating because we lived in this kind of hippie expat community. And as soon as we moved there, we moved on to an organic farm that...

There was multiple families or couples living there. And the whole farm was edible. It was awesome. Yes. It was awesome. We'll talk about that in a minute. But one of the first things that they would say to us when you met them in this whole community of hippies, how do you eat? That's like how you would get to know someone. Oh, hey, this is my name. How do you eat?

Rachel Denning (27:30.414)
And if you think about it, that's such a strange question, but it's also indicative of the time we live in, I guess. It's like, how do you eat? What kind of foods do you eat? How would you describe your diet? You know, because we had vegans and we had raw people and we had, I don't know, vegetarians and like all these different unique diets. And some people would explain, I eat like this, but I allow this and I do this. You know, it's like all these mixtures and complications.

And so we lived there for a while. And they really build an identity and lifestyle around it. Absolutely. Absolutely. They built an identity and lifestyle. We have too, I guess. We travel all over the world eating delicious food. Yes. It's true. In our favorite restaurants everywhere. So anyways, on our journey here, we still were, at this point, we're not really eating milk or drinking milk or eating butter, things like that. We didn't do a lot of meat.

because you know meat was not good for you too much meat wasn't good but we started to notice a few things I started to notice a few things one of them was our kids teeth were having a lot of issues they were having a lot of cavities and in fact my I had a serious well one of the catalysts was I had a serious toothache after giving birth to our sixth child and that became a catalyst for me to read a book called

the dental diet, which actually has had a huge impact on my life and food choices. And I had also before that read a lot of nourishing traditions and the Weston Price information, which he was a dentist. Yeah, his stuff's fascinating. Yeah, he was a dentist in like the 50s, I think, and he actually traveled around the world with his wife, studying the teeth of...

people in indigenous cultures. And this is significant, we won't go into it deeply, but it's significant because the health of the teeth is an indication of the quality of the diet. And it's also an indication of the health of the body. In fact, there's another book that's similar to the dental diet. I don't remember what it's called, but I read that one just a couple years ago. And he talks about how by studying and looking at the teeth and the type of saliva and the chemicals that are in your saliva,

Rachel Denning (29:53.166)
You can tell if someone is developing diabetes, heart disease, like all of these different diseases. So it's like your mouth is an indicator of the health of your body. So if you have cavities and mouth problems, that's directly connected to the overall health of your body. So it's, I just said this, directly connected, but I want to emphasize how directly connected it is. It's hugely connected. It's a huge deal.

And so... Is this... Maybe this is a good time to throw in the whole Genghis Khan. Well, I was actually just getting into that. So, it was around the same time Rachel's learning this stuff and being like, wait a minute, whoa, the mouth is an indicator of overall health and overall health is in a huge way determined by the nutrient quality of what we're getting and that's indicated in the teeth. The teeth is just a reflection of the bones and the blood.

So you can really tell how well things are going on in your body. And you guys, this is huge. You'll start seeing this and noticing it in yourself and in other people. But around the same time, we're just voraciously reading all the time. And I come across this biography on Genghis Khan. I actually came across it first. Of course, she did. Rachel gets credit for all awesomeness in our life. Rachel came across a wonderful book and recommended it to me. And I listened to it. It's called Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World.

Absolutely love it. It's a phenomenal book. I highly recommend it as a biography, as world history because he literally changed the world. But the buyer, and here's what I love. I love people who just share interesting information they came across without an agenda. And this guy did not, he did not have a health agenda. He wasn't trying to promote lucky charms or you know, he didn't, he wasn't secretly bought in through his brother -in -law into,

the golden margarine or whatever. He was a bargapher. He's telling a story and inside the story he's researching, how did the Mongols have seemingly endless amounts of energy and strength and stamina and they would just ride their horses for weeks, whip whoever they wanted, turn around and ride back for weeks. And the people they went to fight didn't even have a chance. He's like, what's going on?

Rachel Denning (32:16.558)
And the biography realized he's like, it was what they were eating. And he just mentions this in passing, but because we had been studying it and I'd read the dental diet, we gravitated and grabbed on to it. Well, because he talked about teeth specifically, the Mongols had phenomenal teeth and big open jaws and their teeth just white, clean, straight teeth, strong mouths, where the Chinese, for example, were eating massive amounts of grains and vegetables and their teeth were missing and they were small and short and weak.

And the Mongols next to them just, they came in like Mongols and just annihilate him. And he points out in this biography, he's just telling history and he's like, the Concord nation were tiny, skinny and missing teeth and horrible dental health. And the Mongols come in, ride their horses all the way across the continent, kick their butts, turn around right back and they have bright smiling white teeth. And he talks about it and he talks about what they were eating. And I was like.

Oh! He talked about what they were eating and how that influenced their ability to conquer all the countries that they did. But what stood out so much to us, because we were still in this, is meat good for you? Is milk good for you? Is butter good for you? Is cream and yogurt good for you? We were literally eating tons of grains. Like our diet consisted mostly of grains and like soy milk, almond milk.

fruits and vegetables, like that was the majority of our diet. And we were having dental problems. And we were having dental problems. And then he mentions this in passing in this book, and he says, the Mongols lived on, and they still live on because you traveled to Mongolia, and it was true, meat. Well, not just meat, the whole animal. The whole animal. They eat the whole daggum thing. Nose to tail. Tail is pretty decent. I had some. Goat tail. Milk.

Mare's milk, fermented milk. So fermented foods, that's all. Fresh yak milk and yogurts. Yogurts and butters and cheeses. That's about it. That's literally about all they eat. And it's funny because when you went to visit, they made you a goat stew. Which was amazing. And they said, oh yeah, we only throw the vegetables in for the tourists. We don't eat vegetables. And they don't. They eat no vegetables.

Rachel Denning (34:43.214)
They eat meat, milk, butter, cheese, and yogurt. And they wrestle, and they all whipped me. And I was strong, I was fit, and I wrestled these guys. They kicked my butt. And, ah man, they're such great people. So this right here was the first moment when we started to open our mind to maybe the way we're eating and this healthy way we've been trying to live that's going with the hippies and the vegans and the raw and all this. Maybe there's something wrong with that.

And well, it's all tied in fundamentally that before you and I were born, they really started pushing hard this low fat diet because fat makes you fat. And the saturated fats were bad. Right? Which was a huge lie to sell something. It was a huge push in the 80s. And they just replaced it with sugar. And so sugar comes in and look at America now. We've reached a new level of obesity. 40 % of Americans are obese.

Heart disease. And 30 some odd percent of them are overweight. Diabetes. So that's well over 70 % of Americans are obese or overweight all because we're on this low fat diet. Exactly. So we're living in Costa Rica. We're having tooth problems with our children. Oh, sorry. When these things come to my mind, I gotta share. I know. Low fat diets actually lead to depression. And so that's also indicative of the...

insane amounts of depression and other issues going on that's a contributing factor. So it's actually leading to obesity and depression. I just got to throw that in. We're in Costa Rica. I read the dental diet. We're having tooth problems. We read the book about Genghis Khan and then it was almost just like then we were like, okay, we've got to make some changes. So we started eating more milk, drinking more milk, started eating more butter.

cheeses, meat. And before that, I remember we had one son especially who we would occasionally buy butter to cook, you know, bake something like if we're gonna make pancakes or something like that, we would buy butter. And this kid would sneak the butter and eat it. Just eat butter. And at the time we thought, oh my gosh, that's terrible. You're gonna get a heart attack. You're gonna get fat. This is so bad. Why are you doing this? And then later we figured, well, yeah.

Rachel Denning (37:03.374)
This kid is craving butter. He needs these fats and he's craving it. We also had a daughter. Now I understand why because the brain and the body need those fats and crave them because the brain especially needs a lot of fat. The brain operates primarily on fats and it needs it. Then our oldest daughter who's actually adopted and African -American, she's always loved meat and needed meat. And so we would...

especially get meat for her because she just like needed it and wanted it so bad. And so we started to think, okay, we need to add more of this into our diet. And so we started making those changes.

Rachel Denning (37:47.982)
Then, what do we fast forward to here? Well, so we just kept researching, just kept experimenting, just kept meeting more and more and more people. We would talk to people who had been vegan or raw for years and years and years. In fact, we have some very close friends, multiple close friends who did the whole vegan and raw for years. And then they realized, man, over a while, my health started to deteriorate and it just wasn't sustainable. Like it didn't work. I was just feeling scrawny and weak and...

and depleted and so they're like, we couldn't keep doing that. So we kept reading, kept studying, kept experimenting ourselves and I guess we'll share where we're at right now, but this has been a long journey of testing all of those things. We tried that. We've gone vegetarian, we've gone with the grain, we've gone with like super fruit and then super vegetable where I was just ...

I was walking through gardens just eating. I was more like a rabbit than a human. Well, and that's why I was laughing a minute because when you said, oh yeah, living on the farm was great. I did. I did. I walked through the greenhouses and just eat the kale and the spinach. But now, I mean fast forwarding, I'm to the point where I don't eat very many vegetables at all and I definitely don't eat leaves and salad. Kale is not good. Spinach is not good. Salad is not good.

Now, just you saying that is like... I know, it sounds crazy. What? Are you crazy? Salads, I truly believe right now, salads are not good for you. Because one, they're coated with salad dressing, which is filled with seed oils, and we're gonna get to that. Seed oils are terrible for you. Two, if they're not... I did make... When we were eating salads, I made my own dressing and it was healthy. But you still used, I mean olive oil, usually. A little bit of olive oil, yep.

Two, if they're not toxic, the leaves may themselves be toxic, they're for sure not nutritious. There's just not nutritional value in there. Our approach now is that... You realize what you're saying is against all the current narrative. It's against everything that everyone thinks. That salads are healthy. They're not. They're not healthy because the real definition of health is getting nutritious food and nutriciously dense food. Salad is not a nutriciously dense food. It's not. Steak is.

Rachel Denning (40:06.51)
It is filled with nutrition. Milk is good, butter is good. This is a good point to say not all meat is created equal. Not even all steak is created equal. And this is extremely important because grass fed raw milk is on a completely different plane than the highly pasteurized. RSBT skim milk.

Not even the same thing. You buy at the store and you think, no, they've done studies on milk. You're like, yeah, a study on those two different, those should not be on the same category or even included in the same study. Right. Because one milk is not the same as the other. Same with meats. If you buy your steak from this cow that was raised on a plot of dirt and cow manure. And fed grains. And fed grains that are just. Injected with hormones. And all kinds of processed crap. And antibiotics. And corn. It's just eating straight corn and garbage and.

Yeah, all that crap. And then some cow that just lived a happy existence on the hills of New Zealand, totally different animal. Completely different outcome of product. So it's not the same. So even when you hear us saying like, look, meat and animal organs, especially beef organs and liver, like those are nutrient dense.

But please do not misunderstand this and say like, it's just a steak is a steak, it's not. And milk and milk, not the same. And butter and your, now you, oh man, and I saw this the other day, you can walk into a store and I've seen this for years and years and years, the tub says butter and you pick it up and look in the ingredients, it's mostly vegetable oils. Well, okay, so I wanna clarify a couple things here. First of all, most people I grew up calling,

calling them vegetable oils, but that's actually a misnomer. They are not made from vegetables. They are made from seeds. So they're really seed oils and they are toxic for you, literally toxic. And seed oils include pretty much everything you see at the store. Canola oil, safflower oil, sunflower oil, rapeseed oil, like all of these things are toxic. So number one right there, I would say eliminate that for ever.

Rachel Denning (42:33.486)
from your diet. And yet that's hard to do because it's in everything. And so you start looking at all the labels. All of the tortilla chips. If it has oil in it, go buy it. All of the potato chips, all of the mayonnaise, all of the everything is made with seed oils. And seed oils are one of the contributing factors, major contributing factors to heart disease, obesity. And we even read studies that said it contributes directly to COVID deaths. Like it's literally making people more susceptible to die from COVID.

because of all the seed oils that are being ingested. That stuff is just bad news. So start with your elimination diet. Just eliminate anything that has, yeah, vegetable oils or seed oils or whatever. Now you can use, you might be like, oh, what do I use? Coconut oil is a phenomenal substitute. Butter is amazing. Butter is tallow or lard. A lard. What was the other one? There's one more.

Gee, gee. Yes, that's the one which is clarified butter and and you know Well, that was the other thing back when I was growing up those things were bad Don't use the lard or the tallow use the Crisco instead. Well, no, that's a huge lie. That is not true tallow and lard are Healthy for you and Crisco is literally toxic It's so crazy. The flip -flop was told there with for marketing

So now there is one other thing I want to point out because I do feel that this is important. I've read it before and I was reminded of it again on Instagram. And that is there are some body types and I think perhaps cultures who do not process milk as well as others. And one of the reasons was because I think specifically the research shows that it was people in North America, not North America, Northern Europe that specifically.

Adopted milk early on and evolved to be able to process it But there are some I think they mentioned specifically Asian cultures perhaps African cultures that Are more lactose intolerant. There's not a lot of there's not a lot of dairies exactly in Those deserts. Yes, and so there so when I say milk is good I do realize that there are some people and cultures that may not be able to drink it our daughter oldest daughter She just does not like milk. She really just can't stand it. So she's never

Rachel Denning (44:53.934)
been a milk drinker. She has African ancestry for those who aren't familiar with that. So I just wanted to mention that this isn't you know ultimately you still have to work with your own body type too. There's some common denominators but there's also going to be some variation depending on your own history, genetics, body type. I think it's worth maybe shifting and just addressing lightly here like some of the philosophical things. I know some people are like well

I'm vegetarian or vegan because I don't want to harm animals. And I get that. I get that you're conscious of satian beings and not wanting to harm them. And it's interesting, we'll meet when people are like, no, I'm healthy, I'm vegan. And they pull out a tub of Nutella. Yeah, because Nutella is vegan. And they're just spooning it. And they're like, no, I'm vegan. And I'm like, oh, that Nutella is not good for you, bro.

It may be vegan but it is not healthy. And so we end up eating literally spoons of poison in the name of why I'm on a healthy diet, vegan or whatever. And the other aspect is, and this is what gets me, in order to have a vegan diet, it demands in the manufacturing and the growing of…

strictly vegan things, it actually kills far, far, far more animals and ecosystems. It kills bees and that just that one thing. If you want to just geek out and do a fascinating study, just realize, study about how needed bees are, how absolutely critical they are to life on the planet.

And how they are being killed out because of the monoculture that's happening to support rain and plant -based diets. Exactly, eating those things. And so, like you have to spray, well, maybe you don't have to, there's other ways to do it, but they're being sprayed with pesticides and insecticides and all this stuff and chemical fertilizers. So we're poisoning our lakes and our rivers in a desire to kill off all the...

Rachel Denning (47:15.886)
Bugs that come to monoculture were actually killing all the bees and then they're going in and you have to kill all the mice and the voles and well if you kill the mice and the voles and the and the raccoons and whatever now you just you're wiping out entire ecosystems including birds of prey, you know In order to protect your soybeans so you can make soy milk. Exactly. So there's there's countless literally countless numbers of creatures insects and animals and

going up the scale that are being killed so that you don't kill animals. Right, so that you can have your almond milk and your soy and your tofu. Well, maybe we can go there because we haven't touched that yet. Almonds don't have tits or nipples or udders. Like, what? There's no milk. Well, no, this is a good point. So we touched on that, the vegan aspect of it. A lot of people think it's better for the planet. It actually is not better for the planet.

It is better for us to be closer to how our ancestors ate, which was animals, you know, eating nutrient -dense animals. And I loved studying about that. There was one especially that really touched me. There was an indigenous culture in Canada and Alaska, what's currently Canada and Alaska. And they ate salmon and they ate deer and moose and reindeer and bear and they would hunt. But they, every time they killed, they like thanked the animals.

thank the spirit of the animal and they reverenced it and they let it go and they knew that it was giving its life for their life. And they had a lot of reverence and respect for that. Now, I mean, we go to the grocery store so we don't get to thank the animal. We don't even get to see it be slaughtered or anything, but we don't know. But we can still have, again, all we're doing here is sharing our personal journey. Some of you might hate us afterwards for eating beef or whatever, but we're just sharing our journey here.

And you guys have to make your own decisions and find your own journey. But I do, I have reverence for life. In fact, there was a time period as we were going through a whole journey, I'm like, okay, with a whole family, I'm like, if we're gonna eat it, we have to kill it ourselves. I want you to know where food comes from and I want you to be involved in the entire process so you know, like turkey doesn't just come from the store, it comes from a live bird. So there was one year where we went out and.

Rachel Denning (49:43.662)
bought our own live turkey and then we harvested it ourselves. For Thanksgiving. We've raised rabbits and killed them. We've raised a pig and done that. So that our kids were aware and we were aware. We're not, it's not like we're totally ignorant of what's happening. That there are actually animals being killed to be eaten. But we, having gone through this whole moral dilemma of that and having respect for life, I have respect for animal life.

we still just feel that that's the natural order of things. Like whether you believe in creation or evolution, that's how the world has operated for thousands, if not tens of thousands or millions of years. And I think this whole industrialization of food, which is one of the primary bases of a vegan or vegetarian diet, really, is industrialized food. If you think about it, soy milk, almond milk,

I mean, basically everything you're eating is industrialized. It's processed food. And that's not the natural order. another book that I read along this way was one called The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan. And he talks about what to eat. And he said, if you can't make it, if your grandmother couldn't make it in her kitchen, it's not food. I love that. You can't make, okay, you can, some people can make almond milk in their kitchen. I get that.

but it's not shelf stable, right? Like the ones you buy in the store. And you know, there's just so many things that back to the Nutella example, like I'm vegan, so I'm going to eat these things, but that's not real food. It's not really healthy. If you can't grow it on a farm and, you know, harvest it or produce it yourself, it's not real food. And if it has to have massive amounts of laboratory injected

ingredients into it. Yeah, that's not real food. That's not good. Yeah, so I think that's another point to another important principle along this journey that we had. We came to that point of like, okay, real food is things that are whole. Usually they come from real sources. They're not laboratory produced or, you know, chemically injected. That's the definition of a real food. And so we've, we started focusing a lot on real foods.

Rachel Denning (52:06.35)
where we went. And we did that for a long time. And then I guess another important part of our journey then is when I got on this whole carnivore kick, right? And that just happened probably a year or two ago. And because I love one of the ways... We went to grass -fed a long time ago so we only purchased grass -fed butter and we purchased grass -fed milk and...

In those cases where we simply cannot find grass -fed milk, we buy organic milk. And it's always whole. We never buy the skim crap. Or anything down the aisle. It's always whole. We want the fats. We try to get the organic yogurts and creams. And we try only to get grass -fed meat if it's possible. If not organic at least. And what's interesting is we've traveled around the world.

Man, food quality changes drastically and it's shocking to me, actually terrifying to me what the US and particular other countries allow to be put into their food. It is just unbelievable to me. Where Europe, for the most part, is doing a much, much better job at regulating as a whole. Some countries don't even allow at all the artificial...

fertilizers or chemical fertilizers, insecticides, pesticides. It's just not even allowed at all, period. So anything that's out there eating, it's good. It's way better. And then access to raw milk and grass -fed meats and the quality of meats and the quality of food, even the berries and the fruits, it's so, so, so much better because it hasn't been just poisoned to death. Yes, exactly.

Well, just a side note, it's kind of been sad to me because we lived in Europe five years ago, and now we're back here traveling again, and I'm noticing a lot more of the push for veganism and vegan foods and almond milks and soy milks and all this stuff, and I guess everyone has to go through that phase, but I'm kind of like, no, don't do it. Stay with the raw milks and the...

Rachel Denning (54:26.062)
and the meats and everything because Europe's known for that. The meats and the cheeses and the milks and like real whole foods. And so I feel like they're kind of adopting, in my mind, it's a trend and there's going to be, we've seen it, there's consequences from it. It's just because there's research coming out now that it's just, it's actually causing malnutrition.

People are literally suffering from malnutrition because they're eating food that's not very nutritious. Or it's not food. If you're eating rice cakes and rice and oatmeal and Nutella, I don't care what you think. That's not healthy and nutritious. It's not nutrient dense. So it's just... It's damaging.

Rice box says it has all these vitamins on it. Yeah, exactly. Because they were injected some kind of artificial vitamin in there. Okay, so we kind of want to summarize and then I do want to get into because we received a question. That's why we're doing this podcast and she specifically also wanted to know about getting kids on board and how you help them keep eating healthy, especially with all the influences of peers and family, extend family members and things like that. But so where we are today,

Is justifying beating our kids when they eat candy. I'm not talking about that again. I'm talking about what we're eating today. Because like you said, we've experimented a lot and our experimenting generally looks like swinging, kind of like a pendulum, like let's try this and we go to this kind of diet. Let's try this. We've done keto. We've done paleo. We've done whatever else, you know. There was a time I almost went raw. Actually, I want to talk about this because I don't think I did. I was telling Greg before but there were

There was a time, so there was a time when we lived in Guatemala, I was still trying to figure all of this out, we kind of already had thought, okay, we'll drink milk and we'll have butter. But I still read books about how fruit would spike your blood sugar and so that wasn't good and honey wasn't good for you because it was spiking your blood sugar and so you needed this coconut sugar and this wasn't good and the vegetables and you had to eat it in combinations and, because if you ate vegetables with this, it was like all of these rules that I remember just almost feeling crazy.

Rachel Denning (56:47.664)
like I don't know what to eat because I don't know what's actually good and healthy right and my friend at the time now we were living in Guatemala and my friend had given me a book and it was about being raw and it was interesting because you know this is what I did okay I'm gonna try it I'm gonna go raw.

But I also remember reading the book and it seemed controversial to me because in one chapter the woman was talking about how you needed to listen to your body and your body needs things and so if you feel like eating all these raw mangoes, that's good. You need to eat all of those mangoes. But then the next chapter it said, whenever you're feeling this craving to eat cooked foods, that's just your old conditioning. Don't listen to your body. Ignore it. And I was like, wait a second, you just contradicted yourself in this book. But anyways, I had still decided. That's because it comes from like this agenda of like,

Listen to it if it says this but don't listen to it if it says this. Exactly. And I do get the point where you can get addicted, you could get addicted to soda or donuts and so your body wants that. Oh absolutely. You should not listen to your body when it craves sugar. Because it will. So you're contradicting right? Yeah. But what I've learned is that when you...

get clean like you've said you cleanse your body of these all these chemicals you've been ingesting then I think it is fair to say listen to your body that's when you can listen to your body right oh I love that Rachel you you can really listen when you've

gotten your machine really fine -tuned and detoxed when all the crap is out and flushed out for a while and all that sensory stuff, all the addictive, literally addictive stuff is flushed.

Rachel Denning (58:35.854)
then you're in this place where the body is optimized and it is clear and it will communicate. Yeah, and it does. I mean, I'll crave fats and so I'll eat a lot of fats or I'll crave meat or I'll crave fruit and I now will eat what my body is craving, but based off of this, you know, if I'm craving something sweet, I don't go for a donut, right? I have this foundational standard of eating.

So anyways, I thought about - Exactly, on the levels again, I think this is important. So if you're craving something, it's like why? And understand the cravings, and then you're like, yeah, I do want something a little sweeter. Don't just be like, sweet, Oreos, I'm eating the whole package because I'm listening to my body. I will never, ever eat an Oreo, ever.

So, like, when I crave something, I'm like, oh, not going to the Oreos, go back to the levels. Like, what is the healthiest sweet thing I can enjoy? Right. Yeah. So anyways, I had considered going raw. I literally almost did it. I remember specifically having this thought, okay, tomorrow I'll go raw and I'll try the raw diet. And I got up in the morning and ironically, my body was craving soup.

But you can't have soup, soup is cooked.

It's not raw. So the book had a recipe for raw soup and I made myself a raw soup and I felt like vomiting when I ate it, right? And I couldn't, my body rejected. And so I decided right then, I'm like, no, I'm not gonna do this. I'm not gonna go on this raw diet because my body doesn't want this. My body wants and needs cooked foods. Now there's also, that's a whole nother thing. The cooked foods are actually healthier and more nutritious and they're more nutrient dense. If you were gonna eat spinach, this is how you should eat it. Cooking it.

Rachel Denning (01:00:24.24)
and slathering it with butter. That's the best way to eat spinach.

That brings up a good point, like peaches and cream. Yeah, that's another thing. It's the natural sugar with the fat. That makes it more absorbable. The nutrition is more absorbable when you combine it with fats. It's the combinations that are amazing. And we actually, we love that. We love peaches and cream, right? Because it's good for you. And the body knows like that makes it more digestible and more, and it's like it fits together. You're getting the fats with the sugars, the healthy food. So, but there was still a time,

fast forward now we were eating more meat, we were eating more butter, but we still felt like the foundation was, I guess this is the piece I want to bring up, I still felt like everyone says eat more greens, eat more vegetables, like that's the way to a healthier diet. And we did that for a while, in fact we even taught that for a while. Absolutely we did and what I love with learning things is I love things that make you question everything you've ever thought and I thought that's a standard, of course. Eat more greens, eat more vegetables, that's

Everyone knows that's the way to better health. And I remember coming across, it was actually carnivore MD on Instagram, and he said, vegetables aren't good for you. And I thought, what? What do you mean vegetables aren't good for you? What? Who says that? Everyone knows vegetables are good for you, right? But because it was so foreign to everything I'd ever thought, I was intrigued by it. And so I started digging into it and researching, and the whole premise of this is that plants are essentially,

Well, they don't want to be eaten. They have evolved to reproduce themselves, right? And in order to reproduce themselves, they have to produce fruit or flowers, seeds. And so the entire process of a plant is that the seed, the roots, the stems, the leaves,

Rachel Denning (01:02:20.142)
all want to protect themselves from being eaten or consumed or destroyed so that they can reproduce fruit or seeds and flowers to then perpetuate themselves, right? And so as a result, they have toxins in them to keep you from not wanting to eat them, right? This is his whole premise. And so I decided, oh, I'm gonna try it. I'm gonna try this whole carnivore thing. And I did.

And that I think is what helped us to switch into more of a primarily meat -based diet. Like before that, I think we had still tons of vegetables and... And again, not all meat is created... Like we don't even do chicken. I don't eat chicken. I'll do some chicken. I'll make a... Very, very little pork. And I like duck and I like beef. Yeah, we eat a lot of steak. But...

I guess the point I'm making here is we have settled where we have after a lot of input from a lot of different books, a lot of different philosophies, a lot of different experiments. And right now I feel that this is a good place. We feel healthy. I feel like we're getting the most nutrition.

we've gotten, I used to take tons of vitamins because I just thought, oh, that's the modern world today. Our food isn't as nutritious, which is also another thing that's true. Our food today is not as nutritious as it used to be. So an apple 100 years ago was a lot more nutritious than an apple today. So I took a lot of vitamins. I'm actually not taking vitamins. The only thing we take is liver supplements and like actual liver that's dried. Grass -fed liver.

grass -fed organs as supplements, and you actually take those more than I do, but I feel like now we just have more bang for our buck in nutrition, right? Because it's so dense, it's so densely nutritious. I keep saying that word because nutrition is important. So that's kind of where we're at now. It's primarily steak, milk, meat, but we also get very creative with...

Rachel Denning (01:04:39.886)
everything we make. It's not just like the same thing all the time. Because we love variety. I think food should be both, and you've heard me say this, both delicious and nutritious. And there's so many varieties. You can put butter on almost everything. I put butter on my eggs. I put butter on my fruit. I put butter on everything. And again, what are you going after, right? Each person has to say, what do you want to go after? And I hope you desire to be fit and thin.

that we shouldn't be carrying around extra weight. And I hope you desire to be of energy and vitality.

And so it's gonna be a combination of moving your body and exercising and eating for those outcomes. We do need some carbohydrates, but for the most part, simple carbohydrates should be to a very minimum. So like breads and rices and grains and things should be a real minimum. We right now are at a minimum with vegetables and we eat a fair amount of fruit. Yeah, and we do eat bread, but for me, bread is a...

another way of eating butter. So I pile the butter on my bread. And again, like, we eat lots of eggs. Yeah, lots of organic, but they're free range. Yeah, free range eggs. There's a difference. And not all eggs are the same. You run in and buy those eggs where that chicken spent its entire life in a cage being fed with all kinds of crap and chemicals. Not the same egg. So anyways, that's, that's where we're at. But I love what you said because.

Our lifestyle is a very energy... It requires a lot of energy to live our life. It really does. Tomorrow morning we have to get up early and walk to the bus station and take a bus for four hours and then we're going to go explore Venice. It just requires a lot of energy to do life the way we do it. And I feel like this...

Rachel Denning (01:06:39.694)
way of eating sustains that. Without it, I can feel the difference. If I haven't had meat for a day or two, like a steak, I feel it. And we have seven children and multiple businesses and we travel all over the world and we're out having epic adventures all the time. We have energy demands and we want to be high energy. And I think the point I want to drive home so powerfully to everybody, and I just did a full training on this in my Be The Man Masterclass and try it because we're doing this

and health challenge together. It's like your body is the vehicle through which you experience every single aspect of this life. So from marriage and sex to parenting and having energy levels and engaging with your kids to be able to play and wrestle and have fun to think clearly and make good decisions to show up to work and give your all to your clients and patients and like whatever it is like even just enjoyment and hobbies and recreation.

and fitness and fun, like everything is experienced and filtered through your vehicle. And food is the fuel for your vehicle. So if you're putting kind of crap fuel in there, you're - Or just fuel that's not things we think are healthy, but not filled with, like a salad. I'm sorry, but a salad just - It's an empty fuel. Yeah. It might fill your belly, but it's not...

I want to use the word, neutrifying. It's not neutrifying you. I like it. It's good. You're not getting it. So that's where we're at. Let's talk about getting our kids on board. Okay, so because part of the question she actually she said, I want to know about what you're eating and how you got there because there's plenty of books about it and everything, right? You know, specifically was asking about the soy milk and the almond milk because I'd mentioned that in passing before. Yeah, they're not good for you.

But then the question is how do you get your kids to get on board with it? Especially when they're surrounded by all the not so good foods of their peers.

Rachel Denning (01:08:50.062)
So they think I need to find some good videos for kids on why certain foods are not good for you. That can be helpful. But again, there's so many different opinions out there and very, you know, and viewpoints that even that can get confusing. I get it. It gets so confusing. And I can see how that can be so confusing for kids. Now for me, the way I do it is I keep learning and learning and then I tell them what I've learned and what I've known. And I acknowledge, you know, when they say something, well, this is

this can be good for you and I say, yeah, it can. And then I talk about why and where and how it fits on a scale. Like, yeah, it's not bad for you, but it's better for you than this and maybe it's worse for you than this, you know. It's not black and white. So you've got to acknowledge that with your kids. And we're constantly teaching them in a positive way. Like presentation matter, teaching matters. If you're super ineffective at teaching or you haven't earned any influence with your kids or they just don't want to hear it, you've got to teach them effectively.

because even kids, even the smallest ones, if they understand something, then they're happy to cooperate and go along. And sometimes they'll be like, oh, oh, I really want this. And we let our kids choose for the most part, but we don't allow that crap to come in our house, right? So there's no junk coming in the house, period. We're not bringing it in. We're not bringing in toxic stuff. So yeah, that's essentially where we start. And I know...

A lot of times parents will ask us this and they're like, well, how do you get your kids to not eat these things? And then we'll ask them, well, do you have it in your house? Well, yeah. That's the problem right there. So for us, here's how we start. And this is our approach. And Greg and I vary a little bit on this approach. But for me,

I know I can't control my kids. None of us can really. You have to allow them to learn to make their own decisions. But what I can control... But that does not imply just, good luck kids, make good choices. Right. It's like we're teaching and teaching and teaching and teaching and helping them make good decisions. Right. Not controlling them, but helping them make good decisions. But we do know that when they go out or they go stay with friends or family or whatever, like they're going to choose what they're going to eat. Now here's something that's fascinating is, you know, during last summer we had two

Rachel Denning (01:11:08.048)
two, well, at least two of our teenagers went and stayed and worked with friends or family. And they obviously ate whatever they were eating, which was not the same as the way we eat. But when they came back, they both specifically mentioned how much better they felt eating our food, how glad they were back to be on our quote unquote diet.

So they've noticed the difference. And for me, that's the key lesson because when they consciously recognize that there's a difference, then when they are making their own food choices and own their own food purchases as they grow up, they're going to remember that that's important and be more prone to making those decisions. Right. Because ultimately that's what you're going for. Like I'm looking for the lifetime value of this. Right. Not just that my kids eat every day.

healthy every single day of their life that's not going to happen it's not realistic but over a lifetime are they going to be more likely to make healthier choices because I in a healthy way had

healthy foods available and they can feel the difference with that. So that's one thing. And so the first thing is we just don't buy it. We don't buy Oreos. We don't buy. And if they're like, please can we get some more? I'm like, no. And that's where I draw the line. We're at the grocery store and they're like, hey, can I throw this in the cart? And I'm like, no way. That is garbage, poison, nope.

And then, like, I have a great relationship with them and I know I'll be like smiling, joking, I'm like, I'm not being rude or mean or, I'm just like, no way, that is not coming out, I will never buy that crap. And the funny thing is that this is often something like pretzels, or, you know, because they know we're not, there's no way we're getting Oreos or Twinkies or, you know, Gatorade. They're like, oh hey, can we get these, you know.

Rachel Denning (01:12:57.23)
chips or crackers or whatever, you know? Yeah, and I'm like, no, it's junk, it's garbage. So that's where it begins. Your health literally starts at the grocery store. When you are shopping, making the decisions, that's impacting the health of yourself and your entire family. That's where it begins. So I just have hard and fast rules about what I allow in my cart. And if you have a hard time with that with the kids, don't bring them or order your groceries online and have them be the adult dead.

But if you're trying to like...

start out doing this and you're trying yourself to decide what's good and what's not. When I'm standing, when I was doing this in the beginning and I'm standing there reading everything on the label, that's hard when you've got kids pulling on you and da da da da. So you know, take some time yourself. Go to the store by yourself and go through and read all the labels and decide this is okay, this isn't. So you know when you get to the store what's good and what's not. I mean for me it's easy now. I go and I'm like, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, yes, yes, yes, that's it.

You know and we'll do the same thing. We're going out and okay So here's a here's actually a strategy like let your kids know ahead of time like hey, we're not buying any junk food We're not getting that crap. No sodas and then when we go out we're out in at Carnival or we're out at a fair or Christmas market. Whatever. It's like we're not getting crap

Like, please, please, like, no, we're not getting crap and there's not going to be tantrums. There's not going to be overreactions. We're not getting crap. And you teach them. And then when they're going out with other people, we remind them ahead of time, like, hey, there's going to be junk there. Like, I want you guys to choose to eat good stuff. And sometimes they don't. And sometimes they do. And like, hey, if they do a good job, they didn't, uh, hey, this stuff's not good for you, buddy. Remember that. And then sometimes we'll, um, reward them. Yeah. We'll incentivize with, with money or toys.

Rachel Denning (01:14:47.664)
In fact, this is happening the other day. I took the girls out and they're just so adorable. People would just give them candy. And so we were out somewhere and someone was like, oh, you guys are so cute. And they gave them suckers and the girls were just thrilled. And they pull off the covers and they just start licking on them. And then they both look at me. I didn't say a thing. I didn't even give them a look. Nothing. I was like, oh, just let us slide. They both on their own came up to me separately. It was amazing. And they're like, dad, if I give you my sucker, they'd have a few licks. And they're like, if I gave you this, will you give me a...

some euros? I was like, of course. And they're like, sweet. And they went over and threw in the garbage can. And the other one did it. Like, they did it separately. They knew, like, they would rather have a euro instead of the sucker so then they can go buy, they bought some shlike animals. Yeah, so that's another way we do it. And I think that that can work really great when you know that they're going out. Like, you know, our kids will go to church or friend's house and they love to pass out candy at all of these places and it drives me crazy. But...

If it's chronic like that, we just make that a standard rule. Don't eat it, gather it, give it to me. You don't even have to tell them to say no, you know, because sometimes that's the reason. I feel stupid if I'm the only one saying no. They can take it, bring it home and give it to me and I exchange it for money. We're teaching them to value.

the money or the other things that they want with the money they earn. To value their health primarily but then there's other external... It's an external motivation to do that when it's hard and tempting to... Like they need to have something that they want more than the momentary.

Sweetness, satisfaction. As do you, dear listener. Yeah, exactly. You gotta have something you want more. And it may be energy, it might be vitality, it might be just feeling or looking fantastic. But for me, it's a long life. I wanna be dancing and playing at my great grandkids' weddings.

Rachel Denning (01:16:44.846)
So I'm planning on sticking around, so I'm going to take care of my body. There are heavy consequences and you have moral obligations and responsibilities far beyond what you feel like snacking on tonight. So.

So I know that there's probably plenty of questions that would have occurred along the way of what about this and what about that and what about this and we can't, we could answer all of those if you were here asking them, but we can't do that right now. So we just gave you the quote unquote quick overview and of sharing our story. And what's working for us. Why we are where we are now, not that we just grew up eating meat and so we're still going to eat meat.

by golly, you know, that's not where we're at. It's been a long journey over more than a decade that has brought us to where we are now and I truly believe that it is in alignment with...

what I think is natural, normal, healthy, like it fits into, it fits in, the way I define something as being true, and I really, Jordan Peterson articulated this well for me, is that something is true when it's true in multiple domains or genres. If something's true in philosophy and it's true in religion and it's true in psychology and it's true here, it's true because it's being proven as true in more than one place. So for me,

For me, that's how I've come to this landing spot with our diet is that I've found it to be true in more than one domain.

Rachel Denning (01:18:31.214)
And as I've studied over the years and read about diets here and food here and this and that and ancestors and Genghis Khan and all of these things, I've come to find these common denominators. And this is where we are now. These are the common denominators of what's healthy for many human beings.

Love it. Okay, remember, your body is your vehicle. Take phenomenal care of it. Eat delicious and nutritious things. Love you guys. Reach upper.

Rachel Denning (01:19:06.062)
you