Why aren’t cage-free people fat with Neurobiologist Stephan Guyenet

Grow Big Always

Food is #1. If you’re an American, there’s no dodging it— from turning on the tv and seeing that juicy hamburger, to reading article after article about how to lose weight, to gym memberships, to following crazy diets or eating philosophies, or hell just look at the most popular things on the internet. It's food and there’s a million points of view on it. In fact, if you haven’t had a conversation with a friend about how your pants are fitting or whose fat and how they look— you’re probably not living in our society.

I wanted to take a step out of that whole crazy zoo and look at things from more of an objective “zookeeper’s” perspective when it comes to what we eat, why we’re compelled to eat it, and what we can do if we want to outsmart our brains in this insane, food-focused environment.

I wanted to learn how our brain is naturally wired, how we ate for millions of years, how our eating patterns might be different from the rest of the world, why we crave the things we do, and why there’s so much tension about all this in our day-to-day societies. Ultimately, can we do anything about it?

To do that I reached out to Neurobiologist, Dr. Stephan Guyenet. He wrote a book on this very thing called, “The Hungry Brain.” It’s freaking awesome and frames things exactly in the way I was looking for. It helps you understand why we’re eating the way we are and what we can do, specifically, to get around all this and not fall trap to the marketplaces vying for our money or shove those greasy pork rinds in our mouth. In this episode, you’ll take away those specific things you can do and hopefully dodge those extremely unhealthy bullets.

Photo credit: Katie Sozie

Music credit: The Newbeats, Bread And Butter