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Secrets of Aging: Blue Zones and Plant-Based Diets with James Connolly! 529
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Ever wondered why certain societies are outliving the rest of us? Today's episode with the multi-talented James Connolly is a deep dive into the secrets of Blue Zones, heavily promoted in a recent Netflix documentary, which are considered to be the regions of the world where people live the longest. We take you on an intriguing journey, challenging popular perceptions around the misconceptions of a whole-food, plant-based diets in these societies.
From the history of Japanese food rationing during WWII to an engaging discourse on the cultural norms shaping Blue Zone diets, which are dubiously said to be 90-98% plant-based, this episode is an enlightening exploration of longevity and health. We also touch on the influence of the Seven-Day Adventist Church's massive impact on promoting plant-based diets.
Venturing further, we delve into urban infrastructure, discussing projects such as the $2 billion project in East New York and the consultation fees paid to the Blue Zones Project, owned by the Seventh-Day Adventist Church. Throughout this conversation, we consistently circle back to the significance of real, whole food, and the false narratives around plant-based lifestyles, and the dangers of the ultra-processed food industry. This episode is a must-listen for anyone interested in understanding the complex dynamics of diet, culture, and longevity!
Find James at-
IG- @primatekitchen
TW- @jamescphoto
Special love to-
Jake and Maren at Death In The Garden
The Sacred Cow by Dianna Ross and Robb Wolf @ www.sacredcow.info
Dr. Gary and Belinda Fettke
The Great Plant Based Con by Jayne Buxton
Also-
The Climate One Debate Featuring Nicolette Hahn Niman and Jonathan Kaplan
The Global Influence of the Seventh-Day Adventist Church on Diet
Find Boundless Body at-
Blue Zones and Confusing Plant-Based Diets
Speaker 1Hello and welcome to another episode of Boundless Body Radio . I'm your host , casey Ruff , and today we have another amazing guest to reintroduce to you . Now , james Connolly is a returning guest on our show . Be sure to check out his first appearance on episode 315 , and his more recent appearance on episode 511 of Boundless Body Radio .
Speaker 1James Connolly is an artist chef , non-profit founder and documentary film producer with Archer Grey Productions . He co-founded the Bubble Foundation , a non-profit focused on issues of wellness and food insecurity in inner city public schools . The Doctor Mania film team at Archer Grey Productions has produced a variety of films , from Trans Military , a film that explores equal opportunity and discrimination for the over 15,000 active duty transgender soldiers serving in the military , to Michael Moore's latest documentary when to Invade Next , where Moore explores issues like mass incarceration , school food , criminal justice and student debt . James Connolly is also the producer of documentary Sacred Cow and Death in the Garden , featuring former guest Jake Marquez and Marin Morgan , who we interviewed in episode 348 . He's also the co-producer of the Sustainable Dish podcast . You can find James on Instagram at Primate Kitchen . James Connolly would an episode on it as to welcome you back to Boundless Body Radio .
Speaker 2Always , always , always a great conversation .
Speaker 1Such a joy to chat with you . I keep bringing you back on this show because I am constantly confused about things centered around food . It's such an interesting world and , as I'm preparing for this conversation that we're going to have today , I'm hearing people that are in the animal-based space and they have their opinions on the topic we're going to talk about . I've also heard lots of content from people that are in the plant-based space . It's so funny , because everybody has so much conviction that what they're talking about is right , yet the approaches are completely opposite . It's just very easy to get confused about some of this stuff .
Speaker 2Yeah , yeah , and I think that the part of the reason why the confusion ends up happening is because , really , it's not a debate between two opposing worldviews . Really it comes down to we have the multinational ultra-processed food industry that dominates 90% of the supermarkets we walk into nowadays . Then we have whatever is left . It's not plant-based or however you want to consider it meat-based , animal-based or whatever . There are two functions of an ancestral diet that we know , we've survived and thrived on for hundreds of thousands of years , which we talked about in the last time . What we see that's happening over and over again is this constant bombardment through media , especially documentaries that are really heavily associated , around this idea . That conversation needs to focus on the removal of animal-based foods for any number of different reasons , whether you want to be an elite athlete , or if you want to run your first marathon , or you want to save the planet , if you want to live forever , because that's the new one Any number of different factors that are multifaceted aspects of how to get people into the plant-based movement .
Speaker 2My chief argument is the world is already plant-based . It's been plant-based for a very long time . The global diet is about 75% plant-based this nebulous , undefined thing that is called plant-based . Even in the US , which has heavy meat consumption , it will hover . Maybe 5% more meat is consumed in America , but really what we eat is ultra-processed foods . That happens on both sides of the equation plant-based or animal-based . Somebody just said to me recently the primary meat that Americans eat is chicken nuggets and burgers . Not really eating meat per se . We're eating ultra-processed food that has been conditioned so that we can just consume more and more calories of it .
Speaker 1Keeping in mind , too , that when I'm eating ground beef , I'm eating just ground beef . It's not the beef with the bun and the condiments and the fries and the soda . We forget all of that when we're talking about these numbers . To be sure you and I talked about offline . This episode is not going to be like . This is the definitive episode of what is best for nutrition , for health , whatever . We're just trying to learn about a concept that has become even more popularized recently due to a documentary like you mentioned .
Speaker 1We're going to be talking today about the Blue Zones , which is made again more popular by the work of Dan Butner and a recent documentary called Live to 100 . Maybe we could just start with what did you think of the documentary ? Did you enjoy it ? I thought it was absolutely beautifully shot . I would expect nothing less from Netflix . I come to expect these documentaries to be a little bit propaganda-y and some things just seem a little bit fishy to me . In general , I think we agree with 95% of everything they're showing in this documentary , save this , maybe . One thing that again seems really confusing to me .
Speaker 2Yeah , there is a lot to this documentary that if we wanted to say we took the diet wars out of it and say they never even mentioned diet , we'd probably look at this documentary in a very different way . There is a crisis in America of loneliness . I think most men over 40 couldn't say if they had one friend that they needed to talk to . We live in an economic system that goes through enormous amounts of turmoil . You notice , about all of these very traditional societies that they show in here you can mention the four that they focus on what you see is a very traditional , multi-generational culture that isn't constantly aborted by novelty and any number of different factors that we constantly deal with . We seem to move from crisis to crisis . The nature of their landscape changes not very much .
Speaker 2They're very traditional societies . There is movement . There's movement culture there . They spend time out of doors , they spend time with family . They don't shuttle their elderly off to retirement homes . Even if you mention that to them , they actually find that the idea absolutely important , like cathos for old people . Just remove them from society because we have to be constantly reminded of what would happen to us in 20 or 30 years . We remove a lot of our elderly from our society . This is all of these different things in there . Then he keeps on going back to this thing . Then the plant-based diet . I'm like why you know ?
Speaker 1That's why I just I get so confused . I hear Dan butener in interviews being asked like okay , you've got these nine tips and tricks that you want to give for longevity . Great , they're all , like , really valid . And and when he's asked the question , what should we prioritize ? Like , if we were only to choose one of these things , the first thing that is gone to is not loneliness , it's not keeping old people around , it's not have community and friendship and stay physically active . It is the number one thing that he says to do is eat meat no more than five times a month . So again , it's just really Confusing to me . Maybe we could talk a little bit about the history of blue zones as far as you know it , how they were kind of started and how Dan got involved in the project .
Speaker 2Yeah , I mean he tries to give the illusion that this is definitely something that he's sort of in the in , in the vein of like sea spiracy and cal spiracy . He's sort of a man on a mission . You know he gets on his bike , you know the rest of them get in their bands , you know they click a couple times on to you know the computer and next thing you know they're flying all over the world to discover all this stuff . And so this and the very basic narrative that kind of happens with most of these documentaries , especially search centered around food , is a man who's like slowly searching out . He's going on this Sort of Odyssey , you know , to sort of figure out who he is and what the world is and all this other stuff . So those things are kind of tropes and documentaries . I find that they don't really resonate with me anymore Because I know the amount of work that goes into pre-production on all .
Speaker 1You're not going out there , you know , like just doing that stuff you know Was a fat second really dead that the guy was going around with the blender and it was like you were on the journey with him .
Speaker 2Like no , give me a break .
Speaker 1No , that's not happening right now .
Speaker 2Yeah , I've met him many times . He's like a nice guy but he was , like you know , from fat , second nearly dead . You have a guy who was in chronic illness on 14 medications , who's living the the ultimate of like the American lifestyle parties every weekend , champagne , cocktails , all this other stuff , and now he has chronic heart disease , got all of these things . He does something absolutely radical in order to change this thing and as Americans we love that . We love like one solution fixes , right . But I , for me , the blues on thing is just it's , it's , it's a trademark , right , it's . It really has nothing to do with the reality of the way the world is . We really Condition the world in many different ways to be part of Sort of a Western , very capitalistic , like you know methodology of thinking about everything right , if you have a problem , here's the solution here , by your solution out of it . But blue zones was essentially trademarked . It was sold to the seven-day amtis church a few years ago for about 78 million dollars , and so the trademark became something else . And now it's like a methodology for instituting and talking about governmental policy that transitions mainly cities , towns and , like larger communities , into some of the basic premises that are sort of outlined in in there , right . And so now you have this like 78 million dollar , and , you know , payout to Dan . He puts together this four-part documentary that is meant to be a sort of consolidation of his original work with National Geographic and all this other stuff . But really , like the way that I view it now , it's it's an advertisement , you know . And so now you have this four-part series that you can essentially just go out and give to anybody and say , hey , this is , this is the way we should be moving , and there's nothing that you and I disagree with . We should have more sidewalks . We should have more . We should be like revitalizing Small communities so that the , the town center , then becomes sort of epicenter of community .
Speaker 2We see this throughout the film , right ? Well , why were all of these small towns essentially hollowed out ? Well , because multinational corporations involved in the food industry Essentially excised all of the wealth of those agricultural towns in smaller cities , so that the main street essentially disappeared everything . Big box stores came in , walmart came in all this other stuff , and now the centered downtown space is no longer adequate to keep up with all of the cheap prices and you know , cheap , like goods that we get . And so we . What you see is this hollered out town center where community no longer meets up .
Speaker 2But that happened because we transitioned so much of our agricultural landscape into this thing that just excises all of that right into cereals and ultra-processed food and fast food agencies and fast food joints and all this other stuff , and so he's looking at the end result of that . You know anything ? Oh , isn't this terrible ? Let's put in some community centers , in park spaces , and every time that I'm like Wait a second , there's no wealth being generated here , like we need . We need . We need to really understand what happened to farming communities as as we transition to the sort of Western diet , western modality of thinking of .
Speaker 1You know , yeah , very interesting now . Now the way you explain it is perfect . And the documentary depicts him on this quest , this Odyssey , and he's discovered , he's discovering all of these areas in the world . Now the way I understand it is he got involved After the original blue zone work was kind of done . Is that correct ? We didn't we already have a blue zone study that was completed by two demographers actually ?
Speaker 2Yeah , I think he . When I looked at the original trademark he's on there , but there were two other scientists were kind of looking into it . I haven't done a lot of research on who they are or anything like that . Yeah , that's , I don't really know .
Speaker 1Yeah , yeah well , in the documentary they kind of start out by going to Okinawa , which they call a blue zone , and can you tell us ? It's interesting the way they talk about diet specifically in that one , because they reference the purple potato as being like 67% of their diet . That's according to data that they got in the 1950s and the woman being interviewed I believe it was in Japanese and , you know , kind of dubbed down below , but the woman was saying like this this food sweet potatoes , purple sweet potatoes got us through a very , very difficult time . So you understood like , okay , this was a survival food at some point . What can you tell us a little about what you understand about Okinawa ? I hear that they consume massive amounts of pork , for example .
Speaker 2Mm-hmm . Well , I think I don't necessarily know if we can , through data , extrapolate what that diet was .
Meat Rationing and Agricultural Traditions
Speaker 2You know , I know one of the things I was thinking about when I was watching the documentary was all the meat rationing that happened in England and in the Americas During World War two . Right , and so what ? What happens when you meet ration ? Well , you say , well , we're gonna save all of this food for our soldiers who are fighting overseas , and so you get meat coupons and you know there was rationing of you know any number of different things , but , like , sugar was a small percentage of it , the meat was a larger percentage because you're using , utilizing a lot of that stuff . So you've essentially , like altered the ecosystem of the agricultural community To bring all of those necessary proteins for the war . So what is Okinawa at that point ? Right , it's , it is a large pork producer . A lot of the cooking actually involves , like , pork fats . So even if you're eating primarily a plant-based diet , the the fats that you're using the cooking and are coming from these pigs .
Speaker 2I recently just had a phone conversation with somebody I was so small aside , but it's actually kind of interesting he is a he's a second generation , third generation pig farmer who used to be used to be a vegetarian and now he raises Ancestral breed pigs . I think he's in Missouri now , but he was originally in Iowa . I found his article through , like , doing all this research he had , he was raising . What was these ? Like 50 pigs that were brought over from China , these men menalopian pigs that produce a lot of like really good they're . They're different than our pigs in that they're hindgun , hindgut fermenters . So they , like you , utilize them in every aspect of your so agricultural refuse is fed to them . They can also eat grasses and forage . You know they also get rid of human waste , right , anything that that is not being used for cooking or anything like that , and you know . So you're utilizing all of that stuff . You're feeding it to the pigs . Those pigs are pooping back nitrogen into the soil . You're utilizing all of that stuff and so it is integrated into the entire movements .
Speaker 2Their agricultural forum in Okinawa was to utilize these , these pigs that are like Hardy . They don't get the same diseases that that our pigs get they . You know there's all of these different factors , but I just kept on going back to like how much did the Japanese government Take all of those pigs in order to fund , you know , to bring Protein to the soldiers in the war . So what you're looking at when you're studying this , even in the late 40s and early 50s , you're looking at it in an agricultural tradition that's been completely upended by one like the . You know the war and then all the embargoes and everything that's sort of happening , but you also have the government essentially excising any amount of protein you can in order to To feed the soldiers as they're fighting , you know . So I'm like what are we looking at at that point ?
Speaker 1Yeah , you know . Yeah , it's just such a good example of confounding variables because , again , you're seeing these people . They're living longer lives Presumably . They show a graph that that shows . He said that , like , the rest of Japan doesn't have as good a longevity , but the graph to me looked like it was every bit about the same as it was in Okinawa , so I was a little confusing to me . But but you're seeing these people . They're happy , they have amazing dexterity , they're working with their hands , they're moving all the time . When you ask the locals like how are you guys living so long ? They don't say anything about food . They talk about living and laughing and having a good time . So there's so many other confounding variables . To say like , like you said , I don't know what they ate in 1950 . I truly don't even know what they eat now and what part of Okinawa . There's got to be all kinds of different sub factions anyway to be able to say that it's the whole foods plant-based diet that gave them those results is where things get confounded .
Speaker 2Yeah , you know , and he does this , you can see it in . There is a really funny camera trick where he's , like you know , it really focuses on these small parts of the island that have been fundamentally unchanged . But he has to go back to it in the fourth episode where he shows like , well , per capita , this now has the largest , you know , fast food to population in the world , right , and so he said we have to ignore this , like goliath sitting there , right . And so you do that with the camera , right , you don't focus on that . You don't pan around where you probably see , like McDonald's and Arby's and , you know , kfc and all this other stuff . You focus on these very traditional diets , you know . And so I look at that and , like you know , it made it like , yes , let's focus on what they're eating , let's focus on all of that stuff , but let's also focus on what they're not eating . Right , they didn't have all of this ultra process food . They didn't have food that was conditioned so that you , like you , would hit this ultra palatability so you couldn't shut off your mechanism for satiety . You know , like you're now , they're surrounded on all sides by this and it takes a very traditional , very like seasoned group of people who are probably the centenarians who grew up prior to , you know , the westernization of Japan , who said , no , we don't really want to be part of that , you know . But like any of us who kind of grew up like , the westernization of Japan was really interesting . Like in the 50s and 60s you start to see like rock and roll music come in , you start to see western designs , western clothing and then western fast food . So you start to see a gradual transition . Those people who were probably young enough , you know , or old enough at the end of World War Two . We're like , nah , we don't really want part of that , you know , and that could be a factor into it . The other thing that kind of goes into it is like we didn't necessarily have the birth records that we have nowadays and we see this throughout . All you know a lot of the pushback against the blue zones was you get .
Speaker 2Some of the arguments are centered around this idea of it's like all right , well , and it goes into kind of motivation . So some people will say if you didn't have the birth records then you would have to go to people and you say approximately what age are you ? You know , and you have to go through this idea of calendars . You have to go through years , you have to go through all of these different things . Give me an approximate age .
Speaker 2Some people have written literature saying well , this is also the birth of Social Security , this is birth of retirement age , this is the birth of different ideas . It may have incentivized people to say that they were older than they actually were because it got them closer to retirement , and so you know . But it's a problem with the data , right , like we didn't necessarily know , when we were fixing all of these different things associated with birth records , what that long term effect would have . So I don't know if we have the science to like , like you know , rings on a tree of an individual right to say , all right , no , this person is actually 92 instead of 102 . Yeah , we just don't know .
Speaker 1And the claimed ages in the show . Not everybody they show on the show is 100 years old or more . They call them mostly centenarians , but you see a lot of 80 year olds and 90 year olds and yeah , they're moving and playing sports and doing all kinds of different stuff , but it's not all just people that are older than 100 . And I think that's a really interesting point about the birth certificates . You know they spend another little bit of time in Sardinia , which is identified as another quote unquote blue zone , and again , lots of confounding variables . The first thing they really show is how much slant there is to the ground and people have to walk up and down . They're walking everywhere and they're getting lots of steps and doing it against an incline . Yet again , later in the episode it's they're thanking the minestrone soup that presumably they eat every single day and it's all 100% plant based . And yeah , there's just again . There's so many confounding variables when you're looking at some of these locations .
Speaker 2And you know , like , when you talk about land use , right , so say you're in that sort of agricultural , plant based versus animal based argument . One of the things you're constantly reminded of is that people say that 70% of our agricultural land is utilized for animals . Right , and if we converted that to plants , we could , we be much , much more efficient . But that's what you're talking about . You're talking about mountainous areas , you're talking talking about inclines that could support grasses . It could support , like you know , goat , goat herding , sheep herding , all of that stuff . You're not going to grow crops on that .
Speaker 2And so how does that episode start out ? It starts out with , you know , dairy farmers , right , starts out with the you know , milking of the sheep , and so it's like omnipresent in every single episode . In Costa Rica they have chicken and they have chicken and cages behind them . I think I saw during one of the cooking expositions there was chicken on on the table . They just didn't really film it , they kind of pan fasted . You see , all of this stuff it's a sort of omnipresently there .
Speaker 2But it's like , oh , just ignore that , because we're saying plant based . I'm like , well , that's sort of disingenuous really , I think . And so I remember actually talking to somebody who had spent some time in Kenya and they were saying one of the interesting aspects of it is that when you talk about there's a translation problem as well . You said when you talk about meat , they talk about fresh meat . When you're talking about salamis and you know foods like that that are dried they don't really consider that meat . So if you say how much meat do you eat , they'd be like all right , well , that's fresh meat , but you know there's also dried and cured and all this other stuff that's associated with their diet . That is also part of it as well , you know that's a really good point
Blue Zone Diets and Cultural Differences
Speaker 2.
Speaker 1I just listened to Dr Bill Schindler be featured on the plant free and be podcast . He just got back from there in Sardinia and he mentions exactly that any house they went to , immediately out came the salami and the cured meats . And he would ask them , like how often do you eat meat ? And they would say we eat it like once a week . It's about five times a month . He goes what are you talking about ? Like I've eaten more meat here than I probably do at home . And the translator was like no , no , no . Eating meat to them means we're going to kill an entire animal , have a banquet , that's what that means . And they do that once a week . It's not , it's not the same . You're not asking if you eat any meat ever . They eat meat every single day . It's a huge part of their diet .
Speaker 2Yeah , yeah . And you know and I think that's where the translation starts to come in you know , like , what we're choosing to see , what we don't see . You know the Ansel keys , I think one of the stories . It's perhaps apocryphal , but when he actually went to Italy to study it was during a period in time of lent I'm sorry , greece , it was during a period of lent when people abstained from meat and so he took he took his normative , what he saw in front of him , but really it's a time where you abstain from a lot of those foods because you're in preparation for Easter , which then becomes a huge feast , right ?
Speaker 1It's your most prized type food . Okay , so I have a factoid . I don't often get to impress you with little factoid , so I'm really hoping you don't know this already . Did you notice some of the goats have like painting on their lower back ? No , they were mostly white goats and they had like a spot of like blue on the smaller of their back . So what they do is goat farmers will paint the stomach of the male goats , so then they know which goat is mating with the other goats .
Speaker 2I didn't know that . Yeah , fact-oriented . I did know that that's great . They're rubs off on the back , so they know , yeah , exactly .
Speaker 1So the locations around the world that we ended up going to is Costa Rica . We went to Greece a part of Greece which was mentioned there was and so those are like the more what I would say kind of natural original blue zones . These are isolated communities . They've lived together , they were born together , they're going to die together . They don't leave the island their . You know , diets may have changed in a hundred years . It's reasonable to say that they weren't always eating the same things all the time . And we have this other one that's in the United States , loma Linda . This is something you've looked into quite extensively . What makes Loma Linda a blue zone ?
Speaker 2Well , I mean , let's look into it , they'll tell you exactly what they are right . So I have a couple of books . I actually have a huge library of seven-day Adventist books that I've read . Some I've given away to friends because they're just as interested . In the 19th century , as people moved away from agriculture and into cities , you started to see the birth of like a very specific vegetarian movement , especially in the Americas , in the United States , and so so I've got a like a number of different works on L and G White . Who is the founder of it , and I think we talked about it before . Right , we went through some of the history of that . But I have these two books .
Speaker 2So this one is the Healthiest People on Earth . It's John Howard Weeks and he is the great , great grandson of the seven-day Adventist founder , l and G White , and it's like you know , it's obviously proselytizing in every single way . It's like really fun , very comic book . He's a journalist , he writes about all of this stuff . And then the other book is called Jesus with Skinny . Jesus was thin , and that book I couldn't find because I wanted to pull out a couple of passages from it because there is an aspect of this and he's a preacher . He works a lot with congregations . There's an aspect of this that is really sort of shame-based around gaining weight within the seven-day Adventist community , and so it talks about all of the structural elements of , like you know , a fasting , of denying your body , denying your innate humanness . Things are almost sort of devilish in a way , and so you know , I'm just saying like , throughout the entire sort of , like you know , homily and the sort of religious congregational talk , everything is a lot of this is centered around health in positive and negative ways . Right , so they proselytize for overall health , but there's some aspects of it where they actually shame people who do gain weight , and so some of the aspects of that are kind of really interesting . So Weeks actually kind of talks about this , he says .
Speaker 2Growing up in Loma Linda , I knew it was a very special place , a different place . Meat was nowhere to be found . There were no restaurants that served it , there were no grocery stores that sold it , there was no meat that smelled in the air and you never sniffed a roast cooking in somebody's kitchen . I think in 1967 , when I was in high school at Loma Linda , a heathen cafe dared to open its doors in downtown Loma Linda and serve meat dishes . Believe me , it didn't last long , you know . And so and then he says later on , he says , oh , to be sure , in recent years , as Loma Linda has grown and prospered and attracted increasingly diverse additions to its population , it has become a more worldly . Flesh food restaurants , fast food drive-ins and markets with butcher counters can now be found . So it's like , look at the language . They kind of talk about flesh meat , you know .
Speaker 2And so one of the things that's sort of interesting about Loma Linda is he has in here where he kind of talks about zoning requirements . So you have no restaurants that contain meat , which really pushed back . San Bernardino County is the sort of origin of , like Taco Bell , it's the origin of McDonald's , it's the origin of a lot of fast food restaurants , is actually very close by , but through zoning regulation they wouldn't allow fast food joints to come in because they primarily sold meat . But they also wouldn't allow liquor stores to get zoning regulations , and then they heavily , heavily penalized anything to do with cigarettes , and so these are all confounding factors . Plus , you're living in California , like you're 60 miles away from LA , you're in this temperate zone . It's beautiful all the time , you know . I think there's one they call like the June Gloom , where it goes down like 60 degrees . They're like , come on , buddy , it like rains for a couple of days straight . They're like , oh , this is awful . So you live in this like idyllic paradise , but you also like , through all of the zoning regulations , you essentially create an epicenter .
Speaker 2That pushed back against a lot of the stuff that happened in that world the ultra processed foods , all of that stuff . Now they do have problems , right , because for them ultra processed means meat . But they were also in the 1930s where the first companies to come up with like meat based alternatives , and so there's a lot of ultra processed food around , the sort of impossible burger predecessors and everything like that . And so when you walk through a Loma Linda market , you will see some degree of ultra processed food . But they will emphasize over and over again they don't want you to have sugar , they want to limit caffeine , they want to limit alcohol consumption , they want to limit , like all of these different things , and they want to shuttle you towards what is , I guess , in essence sort of a very sort of low car plant based ideology .
Speaker 2And the book is really funny I mean the guy chronically throughout his entire life , even though his entire , the premise of his work , his great-great grandmother's work , is centered around health , he like ambles back and forth between obesity and , you know , losing weight and starving himself and doing all of these different things , and he also talks about , like , the problems , even within a community like that that abstains from all of these other foods that we would consider to be toxic and in abundance , like you know , like alcohol and stuff like that , he said , even within the obesity epidemic actually is starting to strike them a lot heavier , you know . So it's like you know . I mean , it's sort of an interesting story , right ?
Speaker 1Yeah , and unlike , unlike the other blue zones , it appears that people are moving there almost like a retirement community , not necessarily that they were born there , lived there , died there , like the other ones . So so also you have to assume these people have means , they've got good money . We know that can contribute to longevity as well . You see them playing sports a lot . So so in your research of the Seventh Day Adventist Church , how big of a part of their doctrine is nutrition itself ?
Speaker 2I mean it's , it's the way they proselytize , right , so it's their way in , and so a lot of it is really centered around that . Lng white's work was really so it lives between two different like modalities . The world is ending tomorrow . We need to prepare for it , and I think it has evolved in some sort of strange way into making a new garden of Eden on this planet , that is , a vegetarian garden of Eden . And so I think the the message originally was centered around the world in in the 1840s was going to end with , with the Millerites which she was a part of , to this sort of like movement into health but as a methodology for sort of bringing about the sort of second coming of Jesus and then eventually to the end of the world , or a new garden of Eden for this product .
Speaker 2And so I've listened to lectures at Loma Linda University where they , you know they talk in some of the absurdities that kind of happen within these closed ecosystems they'll talk about , like the genetic modification of lions so that they can tolerate grasses , so they , so you can actually move carnivores towards vegetarianism , so that in , you know , in the the original sort of books of the books of Genesis and the Bible , it says that the lion lays down with the lamb , and so what they're trying to do is advocate for new genetic technologies that essentially make lions hind good for mentors so that they could lay down with the lamb again .
Speaker 2You know so a lot of the health aspects of it is a method of proselytization , and so you know , originally as a religion , they were banned from China , but they have been able to get a really strong foothold in there because of their evangelical work in terms of health , and so this is , this is how they operate there in there , in every continent except for Antarctica I assume I do somebody there but it's the methodology about which they say they and a lot of their sermons are centered around health as an outward expression of your inner purity , right ?
Speaker 1But like , like for the normal run of the mill member , is that like a plant based diet ? Do a majority of them follow ? Do they try to just push in that direction ? Is it something they're loosely aware of ? Or is it something like every Sunday they're talking about it in a church meeting or something ? It would be Saturday , sorry , not Sunday Saturday .
Speaker 2Yeah , saturday , they do talk about it a lot . There are lacto-ovo vegetarians . We seems to have some of the same disdain for the , for those groups as well . So I think within within the seven day avatars community , there is a distinction that is made between people . I wanted to
Seven-Day Adventists' Influence on Plant-Based Diets
Speaker 2show you . There was a chapter here where he actually goes into it explicitly . You might have read this . No , please , this is called the chapter for the world's best diet . I'm not going to use the word vegan in this chapter . Well , except for just now , I guess , and but that's it .
Speaker 2My friend Tamara Thorn , the horror novelist , who is good at scaring people , especially me , has warned me that if I lose a lot of the readers if I use the word vegan , oh , there it is again . So you know . So he kind of talks . He said what about plant-based ? Does that work ?
Speaker 2Okay , I can use that in a sentence plant-based whole foods , diet as the power to improve health , protect against disease and prolong life , and so the the , the term plant-based is essentially just for , you know , for one of the higher ups in the church who spends a lot of their time talking about all this stuff . There's just an amalgam , like you know , just a utilize our placeholder for veganism , you know . And so what he wants to do is essentially move people towards that , but he also recognizes that they do . I mean , you know , like Costa Rica and all of these different places , animal foods are a necessary , necessary part of the diet , whether it's eggs , chicken , pork , pork , fat , you know all this other stuff . But in the ideal world , everybody would move towards what I would say is plant-only from his perspective .
Speaker 1Right , just completely different . Yeah , now I told you my hilarious foray into trying to get some information from a seven day Adventist . I had to call people for like 30 minutes . I finally got a hold of somebody to have a nice 10 minute conversation with them just to hear about their experience and whether there was something that was , you know , very much preached , and again in her own experience . And I just I want to reiterate this , we talked about this last time that you and I chatted but this is not a huge organization as far as churches go , like you know . There's not a ton , a ton of members . I had to call people that were strangers because I don't know any personally seven day Adventist myself that I could have asked . But can you , can you help the listener understand how influential they're ? What message is Like ? It affects way more things than I think people realize .
Speaker 2Yeah , I mean I think you know sometimes it's hard to get a sense of the alignment that sort of happens within a lot of organizations or advocating for plant-based or I like this term plant-only diets . I think sometimes it's hard to get a sense of that . I've gone through a lot of lectures , a lot of conferences that are seven-day amateurs sponsored . I've watched there . There are a lot of documentaries that are essentially funded and run by seven-day amateurs . A lot of them don't really make it above the threshold of what we would say is popular culture but they do talk to each other in that way and you'll find that Dr Michael Greger and Neil Barnard and the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine a lot of these groups , because of the alignment with it , will spend a lot of time talking to these groups and so the sort of back and forth that sort of happens between them is really sort of a cross-pollination of very acutely similar ideologies and so they sort of feed off of each other . You can find online a paper that was written by seven-day amateurs . It's called the Global Influence of Diet by Seven-Day Amateurs . I think it's called , and it's written by Joan Sabate , who is on a number of different coalitions associated with the USDA's diets . Nina talks about this very well and Belinda obviously is probably . Belinda Fetke is probably one of the best people to kind of go to on this . But in this paper when you go through the whole thing and you find that sort of diet aspect of it well one . I want to sort of backtrack a little bit . They say they will go through the amount of media influence that they try to have , from podcasts to journalism to any number of different ways . They're trying to get their message out and sometimes it's not become a seven-day adventist , it's moving people towards the diet . So it's not like we wear a seven-day adventist and this is what we believe they advocate for this . And then you have to kind of look them up and you're like , oh , wait , a second , you are a seven-day adventist . So you'll find that with Milton Mills who shows up in a lot of plant-based documentaries , he is an evangelical seven-day adventist . You'll sort of find that within that community . Now on the page on diet they will say I think it was of the five of the nine people in the committee that came up with the original . Let's see if I can get this right . A vegan and vegetarian diet is a properly planned vegan and vegetarian diet is safe for all ages , and properly planned is probably the lawyer is getting into it and so or alignment with seven-day adventists . So you're getting a lot of influence in terms of that . Plus , you have all of the capital that's sort of built up from the cereals . So you have these multi-billion dollar corporations that were essentially set up . You have Celestial Seasonings , tea , which was a seven-day adventist thing . You have sanatorium , sanitarium , health , which is the Australian seven-day adventist that is Whetabix , and any number of different things you'll see on the shelves . So I think when you walk through the supermarket , I think you would be kind of surprised how much of that stuff actually comes from this group .
Speaker 2There's a lot of peanut butters out there . A lot of meat alternatives are essentially created by that . In this book he talks about the 1930s as one of the first times that they created meat-based alternatives , coming out of Loma Linda . Prior to that , john Harvey Kellogg had a proteosloaf that he used to sell , sort of a weird concoction made out of peanuts and I don't know what else . It was like a meatloaf in a way .
Speaker 2So I don't know . I mean , you study this stuff enough and as a researcher you say , all right , well , now I'm going to start to see . It's like blue car syndrome , right ? You buy a blue car and suddenly you see blue cars everywhere . Your wife is pregnant , suddenly you see strollers and babies everywhere , and so I always try to fight against that . Is this group as influential as they are ? I think there are problems . I think they have aligned themselves with , I think with a lot of soda companies like Coca-Cola over the years , because I find a lot of their , even though they are working on health , you would say . I think it's much more important for them to reduce meat consumption than it is for anybody outside of their religious group to really focus on health per se .
Speaker 1Yeah , that's a really good point and you got to think back and say , okay , if they were the ones that set up the very first diet at schools and they've been controlling that narrative for 100 years , that's going to influence every dietitian for 100 years . The message is going to be pervasive when the aid of Senator McGovern , I believe , was the one to kind of set a lot of the nutritional guidelines in this country and that became what we decided to do . It's that influence that carries with it so much momentum that you almost feel crazy . You brought up last time you know I'm so crazy for thinking that we ever ate meat because this message has been told to us . The opposite is true for 100 years .
Speaker 2Yeah , and it's really hard to get it . I'm reading a book called Red Meat Republic right now and he's doing the same thing that I try not to do and it's actually a really good book . But he's really heavily focused on meat and mainly meat packers and the sort of transition of the West away from the sort of purposeful killing of the buffalo in order to provide landscaping space for cow production . But really with agricultural land it wouldn't have mattered , I don't think . But he's like you wouldn't believe how much people like eat meat back , and so it was like you were drawing people from Western Europe because you were like people were .
Speaker 2You could go to the butcher shop and you know your normal consumer could eat meat and you would have these anytime . You would see price fluctuations , mainly by the meat packers . Meat packers would consolidate and , you know , force farmers and ranchers into penury . Right Then the prices of meat would go up and then you would see these meat riots they were meat riots by mothers who go shopping who like break glass and break windows , and so you'd see that , all of this stuff and that latter part of the 19th century into the early part of the 20th century where it's like everybody seems to be eating meat all the time , and then you start to see this slow transition to the creation of the food pyramid , which then is , you know , even this guy is like it is absolutely absurd that we told people to eat eight to 10 servings of grains and pasta and stuff like that a day , you know .
Speaker 2Like who the hell came up with that ? I don't even know an ideology that that like push that , but you know . But it does seem really strange to me that we , that we push so hard for that for most of my adult life , right , yeah , totally .
Speaker 1Okay , so , so you know , we have another episode where they go to these two other places in Costa Rica and in Greece , and then the final episodes kind of talk about the Blue Zone project itself and I hope the listener at least took a little bit of pause to say like well , wait a second . Why is this a concept , first of all , in second of all , why was it bought by a church ? So what is the mission now with the Blue Zone project ?
Speaker 2So the Blue Zone project is a little bit akin to if you're following the news , you'll see C40 cities , you'll see the plant based treaty , you'll see a number of different things . They're trying to get these large urban areas to drastically reduce meat consumption . You'll see , like , like I said , you'll see Dr Michael Gregor showing up and he's the nutritional consultant to the mayor of New York City right , and so you get Eric Adams and pushing plant based , writing a plant based cookbook . They have all of these different people in large urban areas that are pushing for decreased meat consumption and the first places they do that are schools and nursing homes and places that they have control over the diet . Blue Zones is just another incorporated part of that .
Blue Zones and Urban Infrastructure Discussion
Speaker 2Belinda has been studying this very much deeper than I have . Her website , I think , actually goes into a number of different articles where they are having a lot of influence on sort of pushing this . The New York Times just had an article about a place in East New York which is a used to be an industrial space in Brooklyn . It's one of the poorest populations in New York City . There is a $2 billion project that's going in that's going to be based on Blue Zones and it'll be sort of housing , like affordable housing , going into this . And so the federal and US government New York government is paying in essence to enact a Blue Zone policy in New York City , and when you read it it's like you don't necessarily know what they're going to do . There's some illusion that they'll have some gardens and community spaces and everything like that . You don't necessarily know what that's going to look like . But it's also really strange to me because they're not dealing with any of the other problems , right ?
Speaker 2No other problems associated with living in New York . One is like food is practically un-earned . You can't afford to eat real food . You work so hard that you're working on average like 70 hours a week in order to just live and you're paying most of it in rent . Are you going to take siestas ? Are you going to take a two hour nap in the middle of the afternoon ? Are you going to , in the middle of winter , go and do a roast on your rooftop and bring all of your friends around and have the wine that was made by your neighbor ? None of that stuff exists . You're not going to work on any of those things that are associated with what is the problem in New York , right , but you're just going to advocate for plant-based diets because that's really all they do , right ? You have a $2 billion project . That's going to be like . I already eat more lettuce , you know . I'm like come on , man .
Speaker 1Yeah , now when the cities pay the fee I think Belinda told me this it's about $6 million to pay to the BlueZone project . It's really just the consultation , right ? The consultation team comes in , checks things out , give a list of suggestions and then it's still up to the city to make the changes right . They made a look in the documentary like the BlueZones project came in and built a bunch of bike paths in Fort Worth , texas . That's not necessarily the truth , right .
Speaker 2Yeah , I don't necessarily know what I mean . How much of that goes into consulting fees ? I mean you still have to deploy that capital in order to build these parks and everything like that . I mean I would love to see a refurbishment of downtown areas . I would love to see .
Speaker 2There's a wonderful book that came out about six months ago . It's about parking . It just talks about like car culture in America and how it just ruined cities , like ruined the ability for people to move around . You create these spaces that make it so that you have parking areas that are further away from these , like central shopping areas . Then you allow people to ambulate and walk around without fear of their kids getting runover all of a sudden . Suddenly , people show up . It's like revitalizing parts of that .
Speaker 2But we have to deal with some of the infrastructure problems that are part of that . We have to deal with the fact that Walmart is by far one of the largest corporations on the planet . The reason why they did that is they gutted every single aspect of the products that are in there so they can sell them cheaper to a populist of people who I just read an article on it today that one out of five people in America have to pay for groceries on credit . Now that's what we're dealing with . I don't know what you're supposed to do with that , like with a salad . You're never dealing with Keystone issues in America .
Speaker 2We had during COVID . We had close to $2.3 trillion move towards the billionaire class in America . Ex-is from the wealth of this country . They refuse to pay taxes mostly . Then they get to tell us what to do . We still have to pay for all of this stuff . Luzon's is not going to pay for it . All of that stuff . I just don't like the ideology of this . I would love for more moveable cities . I would love for more bike lanes . I'd love for more places where people can congregate and spend time together . I don't know . The diet thing is just really problematic to me .
Speaker 1I agree . They show a sixth blue zone at the very end , which they identify as Singapore . Why they didn't identify Hong Kong or Iceland or all these other places you hear about ? People live a very , very long time . You're avoiding some things there . I don't know what the diet is like in Singapore . I don't know what their longevity numbers are like I'm not really sure but obviously there's going to be some bias when they're choosing the next blue zone or whatever . They're going to avoid places where they know that people have a high consumption of animal products . Correct ?
Speaker 2Yeah , Spain , Iceland used to be , Western Europe had really high consumption , but they've been pushing back against that for a while . There are just so many aspects of it . I do fear they're winning the argument because you create this really slick documentary . I don't know how much people look at that and say wait a second , did I just see a ton of sheep barn there ? Even in Costa Rica , the 94-year-old guy who's chopping wood all the time what is he doing ? He's the cattle herder . He's a rancher .
Speaker 2What the fuck ? He's a rancher . I'm like how do you ? I don't know . This is really strange to me .
Speaker 1What do you need those cows for ? If you're just eating plant-based , you don't need those yeah no , it's very , very well done .
Speaker 1Like we said in the beginning , there's a lot of really cool positive things that they show . Obviously , it was always going to be very biased towards a plant-based , whole foods diet . I think if you just dropped the plant-based and just said whole foods and do what they recommend in the theme don't have lots of sugar , Don't have ultra-processed foods . Fast food is really terrible for human health . There's so many other things that we would agree on , but again it just looks like that A plus B equals D or whatever . It doesn't make sense why the plant-based message in that document was so so , so pervasive , unless you know the motives behind it . Was there anything else that stood out to you about the movie ?
Speaker 2No , but there was something that Somebody who followed me on Instagram is an absolute delight . She's a nursing student who was finishing up her program and the dietetics aspect of it just frustrated the shit out of her . She'll just DM me every once in a while . She'll be like , oh my God , can you believe this ? She sent me something that the name escapes her right now . I'll find it . Maybe you put it into the show notes .
Mars Exploration and Closed Loop Ecosystem
Speaker 2It was about a closed interloop community that was built in the 90s that was centered around . If we went to Mars , could you create a geodesic dome that would essentially be able to feed eight scientists over the course of an entire year or so . I think . The project lasted for , I think , about two years . I was just perusing and I was looking over it and she said one of the interesting aspects of it . So they could eat meat once a week , ate it on Sundays . What they tried to create was an interior closed loop . They had livestock in there . They grew food for livestock . They also grew vegetables and everything else that they thought that they needed . They needed to recycle nutrients , recycle the water , create this entire ecosystem loop that was conducive to keeping not only livestock alive but also themselves over the course of this period of time , to act as if they were on Mars .
Speaker 2She said that most of the scientists , for a long time , were starving . They were hungry all the time like irritable and hungry . A lot of the things they factored into it were the nutritional profiles in order to keep people healthy , but they were still hungry . A lot of them lost between 10 and 20% of body weight over that period of time Because of that . Even though they were getting adequate calories , they weren't getting enough nutrition for them to be able to stay .
Speaker 2I think it's a really interesting aspect of the way that we came on talking about this . You tried to create this ecosystem loop . You tried to create it in a way that would actually work , and because you did this thing where you I think it was a quarter pound of meat a week what ended up happening to these eight scientists who , by every measurable standard , were healthy before they went in ? They didn't take the normal American 70% of Americans are metabolically dysfunctional or anything . That's the healthiest people they could and they put them in this place and what ended up happening ? They were not getting enough food to satiate them . I think it's just a good cautionary metaphor because , as we're moving and transitioning people to this 21st century diet , what is the overall cost of that ? What are we going to do if we start to really remove all of these animal products from there ? We're just going to have a stuffed and starved population . Yeah , yeah .
Speaker 1Very interesting to reflect . I think there's a part in Sacred Cow where they talk about that as well , where if you're taking out all the inputs and outputs , you're not going to get the same results , and so you need that diversity , you need the animals , you need the plants , you need all of that stuff . Working together and trying to isolate out certain things is not necessarily going to get you there . I just think again . I want people to critically think when they watch things like this , because you could really easily be sucked into this message , this narrative , and think like , okay , I'm watching people live very long and healthy lives and they are all plant-based and you could try to do this yourself and be starving and malnourished , like you said . I just hope people keep that in the back of their minds when these things come out .
Speaker 2One of the other seven-day Adventist documentaries that had Dr Gregor on there and Neil Barnard , who were in their own minds , talking to a very smaller audience of people who were already on that road to a plants-only diet , or mostly plant-based . They would say stuff like eat like a gorilla . What does a rhino eat ? Guys , these are scientists , these are the top people in that plant-based movement and they're saying things that anybody who's ever thought about this for more than 10 seconds knows that I'm not eating 18 hours a day , I'm not a hind-gut fermenter , I don't have a colon like this . But they say that because it fits on a t-shirt . Right , it seems really easy . Human changers had that Patrick Bimonian . This t-shirt was like eat like a gorilla , or something like that .
Speaker 2I'm like come on , we got to start to move this along a little bit , but meanwhile , all of these little arguments that keep on going back and forth between people who are trying to eat whole animal or whole foods really the only thing that's winning at the end of the day is this ultra junk . In 30 days we're going to have Halloween . A billion and a half dollars will be made on one day by the sugar industry . It's like a day and you can deny your kids you're not going to do any of that stuff , but they must look forward to this day on every single level , right ? They're like a billion , like the money flowing in . I imagine in my head , cash register till just ding , just counting the cash and just fucking laughing at this argument that happens constantly on Twitter , where it's like plant-based , meat-based , all this stuff . I'm like dude , come on , yeah .
Speaker 1Oh man , I'd never thought about the Halloween thing before for some reason , so that makes a lot of sense . Yeah , oh , my God , it's so insane , that's insane .
Speaker 2And then you see these frenzied kids who were like throwing up because they ate a pound and a half of kids Totally Because they don't want to share it with their sister or something like that . You're like God , this stuff is just poison , you know yeah .
Speaker 1This has been just a really awesome conversation . I always learn something when I get to talk to you and you always have such great perspectives on things and I just really appreciate that . Where would you like people to go to find you and connect with you in your work ?
Speaker 2Yeah , I tend to be most active on Instagram at Primate Kitchen . That's where I'm sort of like building a little bit more of a base , away from some of the aspects of the diet culture wars , because I do think I think if you are focused on your health and the health of the ecosystem that's around you and the health of the planet and the healthier country , and if you're worried about your own national interest you know , I was just talking to that , the pig farmer the other day and we can kind of leave with this . So I had this conversation with Rob Wolf , but I also had this conversation with somebody Rob was for a time was working with the Joint Chiefs of Staff for the US military working on diet because they can't get the recruitment numbers up because people aren't healthy enough to join up . You know , and I remember looking at it we talked about this years ago and they looked at it and they were like , all right , well , we can deal with the problem of food in this country or we can move to drones and robotics , you know , and they were like we're going that way , right , so that's how big this thing is . Right , the , you know , 50% of your tax dollars goes to the US military in some sort of way or form veterans affairs or anything like that and so you have this enormous entity with flush with cash and they looked at the problem of this and they were like holy shit , we need to move people to like playing video games with drones and all this other stuff , right ? So that's the problem that we're in right now , you know , and so I'm trying to move away from some of that aspect of on Instagram , because I'm like you have to understand that they're .
Speaker 2You know , if you have corporations that are polluting the waterways , you know , upriver from you , this diet problem is , you know , like we have to work on all of this ecosystem stuff . We have to start to think about this thing's holistic and we have to start to think about it in ways of independent of the government entities that are essentially being bought off by food , pharmaceuticals and fossil fuels to creating these ecosystem environments that are conducive to our overall . You know , because I think it's like you know , and that that's the education that I'm trying to do on Instagram now . So it's not , it's not the diet wars , it's like I'm moving away from all that said . Diane is doing really good job on that , like Nina is doing . There's a lot of people kind of working through all of this stuff who stay focused on message . I'm trying to move a little bit away from that . So if it seems incongruous to the , to the debate , trust me , it's all there , right ?
Speaker 1Yeah , that's really interesting . And doing the work for this episode , I did learn that Dan Butner lives very close to Mark Sisson , so exact opposite polar opposite .
Speaker 2They live in the same building .
Speaker 1They're the same building and their friends is the good thing . They like each other they're friends , and so I think that's uplifting and hopeful to know that like that , you can have totally different view and avoid the diet wars , even though you have different opinions . James Connolly this has been amazing .
Speaker 1Thank you again so very much for coming on our show today . We really appreciate you . Thanks , and this has been another episode of Balanced Body Radio . As always , thank you so very much for listening to Balanced Body Radio . I know I say this all the time , but I really do mean it .
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