I was looking at an expiration date that had it was May tenth, and I thought to myself, Oh, well, that's already passed. It's the twelfth. So I did the same thing, confusing March and May. I don't know what it is, but I blame daylight saving time.
It's time for our wellness segment.
I feel terrible. He spends most of his day at the office, city into a variety of activities, and preferably some exercise late in the afternoon. I never exercised a day in my life.
You just got to sit here and wait to die.
Every morning, I smoke a cigarette and for lunch, I eat a bacon sandwich and I usually drink my dinner kit Star for Period period Guide for Wellness and Personal Improvement Health.
I loved that former life scientists at the National Institutes of Health are interested in answering this question. If ultra processed foods, especially those that are high in fent and sugar, can they cause a similarly outsized dopamine response, suggesting that they could be addictive? Yes, how much money do we spend at the National Institutes of Health to determine if oreos are addictive?
This is interesting? Yeah, right, But there's one addiction where you can be like, oh, these are so addicting, I love these, I want to keep eating them. And then there's like the real thing, which is, yes, it's clinically addictive, these processed foods, and I support to them doing studies like this so that then we can go after the ultra processed food industry, which creates the foods to make you addicted, which makes you unhealthy, and you're not gaining
any sort of real happiness out of these foods. It's just the stupid neurons in your brain telling you that you want more. It's not really making you happy. It's just making you think that it's making you happy. And I'm all about going after this industry. It is the same industry that got us hooked on cigarettes. It is the tobacco industry that is pivoted into ultra processed foods.
I really support this article out of the Washington Post, and it's about ultra process snacks and it says, yeah, they're bad, but here are the healthiest options, because listen, we've already been screwed over by the industry. We're already addicted to the ultra process snacks. So if we're going to have them from time to time, how can we get the healthiest one.
Well, and think about this, the difference between what we would consider healthy today and what was considered healthy, say twenty years ago, where if you went into a snack aisle you had things like snack wells and low sugar cookies and all.
Of those things.
But to if you take sugar out of a cookie as an example, you got to put a bunch of other stuff in there to make it palatableserve. And it's those extra things that are being put in there that completely destroy the inside of our bodies and sometimes the outsides of our bodies.
To your point about what used to be healthy, I was at a Target recently and I was looking at trail mix. Now, trail mix used to only be in the nature food stores, which was no fun, no fun at all, no taste, no salt, no sugar. Right, Well, the ultraprocessed food industry has taken your trail mix industry and revolutionized it. It's a candy aisle. It is a
candy isisle. There's about forty different types of using air quotes here trail mix at the target, and some of them are like peanut butter chips, chocolate chips, and toffee chips with some peanuts and a couple of almonds Boom trail mix and listen, I love all that stuff like. I'm not knocking it at all. I'm just saying that sometimes what's sold to you is healthy is not.
Well and that what I love about this article I think you do too, is that this doesn't say snacks are all bad. And some of what you would consider ultra sest foods, like chips, there are healthier alternatives, they say, for example, potato chips, tortilla chips.
I love that. I love that food group of.
Chips, I mean, but they say that a lot of them obviously going to have extra sodium, They're going to have extra saturated fats, and some of the more exotic ones, especially lately, are going to have more of those synthetic food dyes and additives like maltodextrin and quarn sine.
Me. I'm a cracker street worker. I love crackers. I enjoy the salt on crackers. I like saltea. I'll eat a sleeve of saltines and thinks nothing of it.
Well, and they had the same.
The crackers are similar to chips, and that you got to watch out for the enriched flour, the excess sodium, the sugars and fats. So in terms of chips, one of the things to look for, and as a general rule I think is pretty safe, is the fewer ingredients or the few west ingredients in some of these things. For example, the Siete Food It's dip chip, grain free tortilla chip. They have extra fiber in there, which is good for you. Coming from cilium husk and pumpkin powder
doesn't sound great, but they don't. They don't have any saturated fats, they don't have any emulsifiers or any cosmetic additives. In terms of crackers, the Merry's Gone Crackers herb original made with organic seeds and grains, high in protein and fiber compared to some of the other brands.
And it's it. If you see something like.
Maltodextrin or guar gum or emulsifiers or things like that, those are all things that don't necessarily have to be in your food. The other issue is food is necessary. Maybe we need to reclassify what we consider food.
Like cookies.
Cookies are Foodokies, they are not a food.
They are a food.
Cookies are a thing we eat, but it doesn't necessarily mean that they're food.
I'm sorry. I just got to the cookies portion of the article and that's all I could think about. Or cookies.
We'll think about it this way. You breathe, yeah, air breathe cookies. You know, you breathe air, yeah. But you can also inhale smoke from a cigarette. True, two things that you're doing. One of them is necessary, one of them is the same physical pattern of the necessary thing, the inhalation of something. But you're inhaling your cookies.
You're trying to get me to favor these blueberries here, which are delicious, But you're trying to say that blueberries and cookies are the same thing. So if I just eat the blueberries, I'll be fine without the cookies.
No, I would say it this way. Blueberries the way you're eating them are food. Blueberry candy is not a food, right, although it's the same.
I see zero. So, like, what's the healthy cookie option in your scenario?
Let me check. I don't think they have.
Oh, they do have healthy They do some.
Healthy cookies in there at the bottom. So we're talking about cookies, and my definition of food.
It's not the definition of food, but for the for a purpose of what we're talking about. My definition is.
That's a good dress on her is food.
That's is stuff that you eat that provides nutrition for you.
Right, the fewer ingredients the better.
The fewer ingredients the better. And cookies, I would have argued, are not a food because you can get minimal nutritional value out of them. But you're doing it, you're simply doing it for the pleasure of what you're eating.
My husband doing it out of necessity.
Yeah, my husband's been out of town, and I'll like cook when he's here, but he's been out of town. Very smart, And I said to myself in my head the other day, I really feel like food for dinner. I feel like like crackers and cookies and ice cream. But I had that thought, I don't really feel like food like I don't really feel like a meal.
I feel like crap. So we were talking about this Washington Post article. They looked at some of the healthiest options, even four processed snacks and cookies. Yes, whichever brand of cookie you choose, it's still a cookie, they said, watch out for the excess sugar. It's not uncommon to find some brands of cookies that are twenty grams of sugar
per cookie, that's about five tea spoons. A lot of them have saturated fats six or more grams of saturated right fat, which American Heart Association suggests only.
Two my favorite kind of fat.
Now, they said that there are some healthier options, the Urban Remedy Superfood Cookie chocolate chip, which is bite sized. One serving is three cookies by seven, four grams of added sugar.
It's like those Trader Joe's Baby Chocolate Chip cookies.
Yes, they come in.
Yeah, whatever monster came up with that should be taken out back.
The other option is Maxine's Heavenly Chocolate Chocolate Chunk Cookie. They said they're relatively low and sugar in saturated fat, and Pumpkin pecan spice by that same brand have just three grams of added sugar.
Or cookie two gram saturated fat.
But again, you're also talking about serving size, which is way below anything that anybody realistically eats.
If you're going to sit down in a cookie, Kelly.
The serving size, get out of here.
Yeah.
The other wellness story is just simply how and we've talked about this many times, using AI, using smartphones, using all of the digital technology that's available to us now completely erodes the ability of our brain.
To focus, work to work.
Think about how often or how how rarely you would use a map to get to where you needed to go on a regular basis.
I get mad at myself when I found myself reliant on that, especially when it's someplace I've been before, exactly so embarrassing.
I turn it on all the time simply because it's a habit.
Now, I don't need to know how to get to like my daughter's dorm room at cal Poly or something like that.
You've been there before. You you should have a memory of it. If you don't, you're too distracted, and that's a problem.
What I like is I like just to see the time that I'll get there.
And that's true. I do love that. I do love that.
That's how they get you.
That's how they get you. It's Bastard's ultra processed maps.
That's how they get you.
Chomp, chump, chomp,