124. The Health Coach Episode: We've All Been Taught to Ignore Our Bodies
Manage episode 328464009 series 2801148
Get some water before you listen to this episode: I had to remind myself to drink multiple times during this episode. In this episode, we talk to health coach and host of the podcast "Salad with a Side of Fries," Jenn Trepeck. She talks with us about all of the complexities of the health and food systems that we are a part of (she makes a point of not talking about the healthcare system because in reality, what we have is hardly a system, it's a disaggregated set of actors that are responsible for your health that almost never talk to each other) and the various problems with all of them.
For one thing, we have been told to ignore what our bodies tell us from a very young age: we are told to finish what is on our plates instead of listening to when we are actually full.
For another thing, we have a totally unrepresentative and inapproproate set of standards that we use to measure "health": most metrics are based entirely off of men, as if women did not exist. The 2,000 calorie diet was created to prevent soldiers during World War 2 from dying of diseases like scurvy when rations were in short supply. BMI was created to make it easier for doctors to talk to patients about weight and because it is cheaper and easier to measure a simple data point like weight with a scale than it is to give patients a more comprehensive understanding of what makes up their body, such as by measuring what percentage of your body mass is fat and what percentage is muscle.
We also talk about Big Pharma, GMOs, and how to figure out who to trust when it comes to health information given that so many actors in the nutrition and medical space have monetary incentives to lie or boas their studies, many of which have dubiously statistically significant results to begin with.
Links:
Jenn's podcast, "Salad with a Side of Fries": https://asaladwithasideoffries.com/
Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.
Note: In this episode, Jenn talked about the Nobel Prize-winning agronomist Norman Borlaug and his invention of dwarf wheat. She mentions that dwarf wheat was invented to solve world hunger and did not, in fact, solve world hunger, and therefore suggested that we should go back to eating other forms of wheat because dwarf wheat causes gluten sensitivities.
Upon further research after the episode, the articles we found mostly seem to suggest that although we have not solved world hunger, the invention of dwarf wheat has likely saved over a billion people from starvation, so we will allow you to judge for yourself how this use of GMO's might weigh against the current rise of gluten sensitivities.
Some articles on Norman Borlaug:
"The Man Who Saved a Billion Lives": https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-man-who-saved-a-billi_b_4099523
"Forgotten Benefactor of Humanity": https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1997/01/forgotten-benefactor-of-humanity/306101/
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