I am delighted to reintroduce Shawn Stephenson today! Shawn is a leading figure within the world of health and well-being, where his insights have had a profound impact!
Shawn's USA Today national bestseller, Eat Smarter, and his international sensation, Sleep Smarter, have redefined how we approach vitality. He is also the creator and driving force behind the Model Health Show podcast, which has millions of devoted listeners.
In today's conversation, we discuss Shawn’s latest book, the Eat Smarter Family Cookbook, and deeply explore how family culture can shape our children's future.
The pandemic has changed our world irrevocably, and some worrisome numbers about how it has impacted childhood obesity have been catching our attention lately. We dive into that today and also share some obesity statistics for adults.
Additionally, we explore the decline of family meals, dissect the effects of feeling isolated, and discuss the importance of staying connected.
Get ready to delve into the interconnected threads of food, family, and nurturing body and soul. This talk is not just valuable- it is vitally important!
IN THIS EPISODE YOU WILL LEARN:
One of the most overlooked aspects of all of the pandemic shutdowns.
Why are the majority of Americans overweight and not well?
We are currently looking at a situation where you are not normal if you are healthy.
How can we eliminate the suffering within American society?
Some staggering statistics on American health.
The problem with ultra-processed foods.
The value of the hunter-gatherer culture.
Family eating behaviors and health outcomes.
How the dinner table is a unifier in many senses.
The importance of relationships.
About Shawn Stevenson:
Shawn Stevenson is the author of the USA Today National bestseller Eat Smarter, and the international bestselling book Sleep Smarter. He’s also the creator of The Model Health Show, featured as the number #1 health podcast in the U.S. with millions of listener downloads each month. A graduate of the University of Missouri–St. Louis, Shawn studied business, biology, and nutritional science and became the cofounder of Advanced Integrative Health Alliance. Shawn has been featured in Forbes, Fast Company, The New York Times, Muscle & Fitness, ABC News, ESPN, and many other major media outlets.
“For our genes to have healthy expression, we need good nutrition we need movement, sleep, rest, and recovery. We need to have the ability for our bodies to manage stress optimally, and our relationships play such a huge role!”
- Shawn Stevenson
Connect with Cynthia Thurlow
Check out Cynthia’s website
Submit your questions to support@cynthiathurlow.com
Connect with Shawn Stevenson
Transcript:
Cynthia Thurlow: Welcome to Everyday Wellness podcast. I'm your host Nurse Practitioner Cynthia Thurlow. This podcast is designed to educate, empower, and inspire you to achieve your health and wellness goals. My goal and intent, is to provide you with the best content and conversations from leaders in the health and wellness industry each week and impact over a million lives.
Today, I had the honor of reconnecting with Shawn Stevenson. We last connected for Episode 248 earlier this year. He is the author of the USA Today national bestseller, Eat Smarter and the international bestselling book Sleep Smarter. He is also the creator of the Model Health Show, the OG of health podcasts in the United States with millions of listeners downloads each month. Today, we connected and discussed his new cookbook Eat Smarter Family Cookbook. We discussed the culture around family, the value and the impact on our children, current statistics on how childhood obesity has been impacted by the pandemic, as well as statistics on adults, why family meals are on the endangered list and how to create a culture in your home that will facilitate connection, the impact of eating in isolation, the role of ultra processed foods and so much more. I know you will find this conversation invaluable and I hope that you will check out his book, Eat Smarter Family Cookbook.
I'm so glad that you're here with me today. Thank you, Shawn, for coming back on the podcast. I'm really excited not only to wish you happy birthday virtually, but also talk about your new book. And I'd really love to start the conversation talking about what has been the research discussing the net impact of the pandemic on our health, especially children. I know that we both share a love and passion for our families. I think you do a particularly beautiful job talking about some of the things that have impacted family rituals, family communication, families enjoying meals together, nutrition together, but what is the research showing in terms of the net impact of the pandemic, especially on kids?
Shawn Stevenson: You know, what's so great is that we have a lot of data on this now and it's kind of after the fact, unfortunately. And first of all, I want to thank you so much for the birthday love. I was with you on your anniversary-
Cynthia Thurlow: I know.
Shawn Stevenson: -recording and I'm with you today for my birthday. So, it's just a really great a full circle moment. But as far as the data, one of the things that really jumped out for me was some research published by the CDC looking at the annual rate of weight gain in children in the United States over the course of the first phase of the pandemic and all the related shutdowns and mandates and all those types of things. What the researchers uncover was that moderately obese children which that is a significant percentage of children today, their annual rate of weight gain doubled over the course of again, just take a snapshot of about a year.
And even children who of normal weight, their annual rate of weight gain increased by over 2 pounds. So, not to mention children who are clinically obese and their annual rate of weight gain almost doubling as well. So, it's just like, “What in the world is going on? Why would something like that happen?” And this points to one of the most overlooked aspects of all of the related shutdowns and the mandates and trying to create a structure where we're protecting ourselves, protecting our children, and then having all of these residual problems or what would be in this category, unfortunately labelled as collateral damage? And for me, the thing that really jumped out is there's this concept of something called recidivism. Basically, what that is pointing to is that when we have this excessive weight gain when we're younger, it becomes much more difficult to reach a healthy weight or a healthy metabolic state when we get older. It sets our internal thermostat higher. And because you could hear something like that, “Well, okay, that's just a temporary thing.” No, that's not what the data shows. We know this also as adults. Once we start to put weight on, it becomes exceedingly more difficult to get it off. And not to mention, of course, the weight gained by adults over the pandemic as well. There's a variety of different sources. The real numbers have not really come forward yet. But the thing is, even prior to that, we were on a trajectory that was scary-- prior to pandemic related shutdowns here in the United States, we were at a place where 42.5% of our citizens, American adults, were clinically obese. And that's not to mention, by the way, that number is based on BMI, body mass index. It's not 100% accurate of course.
And I'll just share with you why. Because for example, somebody could be 5’10” and be 210 pounds and be a running back and then they're like categorized as overweight/moderately obese. And so, it's just really going to depend on body composition, that kind of thing. But what we're talking about is something that we can all see just looking out around us in the environment. The majority of our citizens have tipped their way into obesity and/or being overweight. And right now, that number collectively being overweight and obese is somewhere in the ballpark of 250 to 270 million Americans. So, we're talking about the vast majority of our citizens up near 75-80% of the population is now, according to BMI, up in the range of overweight or obese. So, this was prior to all that's happened in the past couple of years.
And now, that's really what we're looking at here. We're looking at let's actually address the root cause of these issues and of course, understanding things are going to happen. Some of the most unexpected crazy things are going to happen that can make things worse. And so, we really need to grab the bull by its horns and help to get our citizens and our families, our communities in a healthier place so that we're more resilient when the next thing happens, whatever that is. That might be a societal thing, it might be a family thing, but things are going to happen. So, that's what really this is dedicated to where my research has been in the past couple of years. I've been working adamantly, ferociously behind the scenes, really looking at root cause with our epidemics of disturbances with metabolic health, chronic diseases, and the last stat I'll share with you before we talk about root causes is the CDC's recent numbers. This was just published last year.
The CDC has now determined that 6/10 American adults or 60% of all United States adults have at least one chronic disease now, and 40% of American adults have two or more chronic diseases. So again, the majority of our citizens are not well. So, we're looking at a situation where if you are healthy, you are not normal, you're not within what is considered to be the normal state of health in our society. I know in my heart and I know you know this as well, we can change this. We can shift this. We can get ourselves to a tipping point to normalize health, because this is not about vanity metrics. This is not about appearances and what things are supposed to be. We're talking about eliminating suffering. We're talking about being able to really maximize our life here on this planet and maximize our time with our families and doing the things that we love and creating a shield really around our families and really looking out for our children, who are really taking the worst of all of this right now.
Because one of the common arguments would be that, yeah, well, if you just look at our lifespan has expanded despite all of these chronic disease issues. There're two parts to this. Number one, it's not that our lifespan has necessarily extended. We've really extended our suffering. We've really gotten to this place where, “Yes, our life is longer, but we're not necessarily living longer, we're dying longer.” And so, we're slowing the degradation in a way superficially, but there's a lot more suffering in those elderly years now. So, we're talking about quality of life. We know that that's possible because we've got many places on the globe where people are living into their 70s, 80s, 90s, 100s plus still maintaining faculties of their memory functionality, being able to work and to play and to contribute to society. We know that those things are possible. But here in the United States, that's not what's happening. So that's number one.
And number two, about 20 years ago, that consistent generation after generation after generation as far back in documented human history as we have, lifespan has continued to go up until about 20 years ago. That has now reversed. We are now living with the first generation that is not going to outlive our predecessors based on lifespan. Something is dramatically wrong here where we have so much apparent innovation on the surface, and yet we are experiencing more disease and dysfunction than we ever have as a species. And so again, we're here to talk about root cause. We're here to address those things and to really work on getting our families healthier well.
Cynthia Thurlow: It's interesting because you hear those statistics and they're staggering. As a clinician, I started in healthcare over 25 years ago. I recall saying to a colleague of mine probably 20 years ago, we are really headed in the wrong direction because there's so much emphasis on prolonging life, but it's not focused on quality-of-life metrics. As an example, if your loved ones in the ICU and they're in their 90s, it's highly unusual that they're not going to have a constellation of comorbidities. More often than not, most of the physicians I work with were very uncomfortable having conversations about end-of-life care. The nurse practitioners had no problems because we're very focused on quality-of-life metrics. I'm making a generality, but for argument's sake, it's a purposeful one.
The conversation would be this 95-year-old person who's had a massive heart attack. They've got triple vascular disease. They've got a bunch of comorbidities. They have lung disease, they have renal disease, let’s put them on dialysis. I would look at the family who didn't want that, but the physicians were uncomfortable to have those conversations. So, to your point, we can live longer, but at what expense? I think that everyone listening wants to be able to walk and wants to be able to exercise and engage with their loved ones and have a high quality of life. They don't want to be bedridden. They don't want to be unable to move their bodies. They don't want to be in a position where they're taking 25 medications a day. And that more often than not is this polypharmacy is becoming normalcy. And much to your point, we are a nation that is becoming increasingly unhealthy.
For many times you leave the United States and you see how other people live and you start to recognize how incredibly unhealthy we are. So, I love that we're focused on finding out what is at the root of these changes that are occurring. And in your estimation, looking at the research, what are the things that are contributing the most to this poor metabolic health, this degradation in relationships with our loved ones, this evolving pandemic of poor health? What are some of the biggest contributors in your estimation?
Shawn Stevenson: Absolutely. I know that a lot of people have discussed these things, of course, on your show, and just conversations that a lot of people have been exposed to. But we're going to look at this through a different lens. We all know the basic things that our genes expect from us to have healthy expression. We need good nutrition. We need movement, sleep, rest, and recovery. We need an ability for our bodies to optimally manage stress. Our relationships play such a huge role. One of my friends and colleagues at Harvard University, he's the lead researcher, the director of the longest running longitudinal human study on longevity. They found that in their data and they didn't necessarily want to believe it and they had to double check with other researchers that our relationships are the most impactful determinant on our lifespan, the quality of our relationships in particular.
So, all of these things are built into our DNA. These are things that we evolved having exposure to for healthy outcomes. And for whatever reason, we can get into some of those reasons that has been skewed to the degree that we're seeing all of this manifestation of disease symptoms. Unfortunately, we get into this kind of game of placing labels on people because we have a manifestation of certain symptoms. Then once that happens, we get that label and then that's my identity. What most disease expressions are, are adaptations by the body. They're adaptations to continue functioning under an ideal circumstance. They're adaptations to keep us alive despite whatever internal turmoil is happening. So, it's looking at this label of disease as something completely different, which is what it really is. Again, it's just an adaptation by our bodies. If we just take type 2 diabetes, for example, and this is at epidemic proportions as well. Here in the United States, the latest data is indicating that upwards of 130 million, Americans are now type 2 diabetic or prediabetic.
This is something, this was a paper published in the New England Journal of Medicine, one of the most prestigious journals in the world. There was a paper published not too long ago and effectively the title was 200 Years of Diabetes. And just looking at data, like literally a 200-year time span and seeing everything being pretty consistent until about 40 years ago, when since that point, up until recently, rates of type 2 diabetes have essentially quadrupled just in that time span, consistent all of those years, decades and decades and decades over 100 years, and then suddenly exploded. And what type 2 diabetes really is at its core, this is, again, it's an adaptation where our body is experiencing this heavy influx of blood glucose through a variety of forms of food. And we'll talk more about this in a moment, but predominantly carbohydrate, sugar-based things that then that is getting transferred into glucose in our bloodstream.
And our bodies have to do whatever it can to shuttle that glucose somewhere because it's very dangerous to just be roaming around in our bloodstream. It can start to tear things apart basically, if there's too much, in particular capillaries, things that are in our extremities. This is why you see some of the outcomes long term with diabetes being loss of vision, loss of limbs, loss of function and neuropathic pain and things like that. So, understanding that this is the case, our body with all of that influx of-- and I'm just going to be [unintelligible 00:15:22] you. For myself personally, prior to making this transformation of my own health, I ate fast food at least 300 days a year. I'm not exaggerating. The data indicates that I'm not necessarily unique in that. So, I'm coming from that place, living in what's deemed to be a glorified food desert in the inner city and government assistance. We got food from charities.
And what we're inundated with around in my environment was fast food and ultra-processed food at every turn. I couldn't escape it. It's all that I knew. So, I'm making my tissues out of these foods. I'm making the fuel that's running processes in my body out of this very low-quality material. And most of it is based on sugar. So, consuming this stuff, it would not be abnormal for my blood sugar to spike up over 200. This is happening for a lot of people on a regular basis. You chugging down-- one of my favorite beverages was like, for example, Mountain Dew. You're drinking that stuff, what do you think is going to happen? Not only is it just all of this glucose, it's delivered in liquid form. It's one of the most disruptive things to our metabolism. So over time doing that practice which I used to go to the 7-Eleven by our house from my mother every single day and I'm talking about summer vacation. But every day I would cross a street that I shouldn't have been crossing. It was pretty multilane, never mind.
Cynthia Thurlow: [laughs]
Shawn Stevenson: I was going to 7-Eleven and I would get her, it started off as a Big Gulp and super Big Gulp. Then they came out with the double Big Gulp and the container was so big that you had to fold it up in the store yourself, like it was flat. So, you pull it out of the section and then you put it together. You do like arts and crafts and then fill it up with all this soda. And my mother would drink that every day. And if I wasn't there, she would get it herself.
So, I'm not exaggerating-- every single day full of Pepsi. That was her drink of choice. And seeing my mother's weight gain just happening, really exponential growth, it would just jump up to these different degrees and it's just like, “I wonder why, why” of course, she's drinking all of this liquid sugar, not to mention all the ultra-processed foods. So, I'm saying all this to say that when we're doing this and all of that sugar is getting shuttled into our bodies, insulin is getting spiked. Your pancreas is releasing insulin to help to shuttle that into your cells, in particular your muscle cells and fat cells. But what if you don't have a lot of muscle? Your fat cells are going to eventually become insulin resistant because it just can't handle all of that. We didn't evolve having that much exposure. So, it’s just is going to create an adaptation to we got to send this to another part of the body to figure this out.
Your liver is going to take a lot of this. And nonalcoholic fatty liver disease is one of the fastest growing conditions as well. All that dysfunction, your liver is responsible for so many aspects of our health, but also, it's storing some glycogen, like converting some of that into glycogen, but it can only store so much. So, once we reach a certain point with our liver, your liver has to convert that into something else. So, this is where lipogenesis takes place and your liver can literally create fat and package it in VLDL particles, very low-density lipoprotein. Now we've got a situation where, “Whoa,” the chances of inflammation happening and a cardiovascular event are going up. Not to mention the pancreas taking all of this heat over time, still churning out insulin as it's supposed to, but now the cells aren't listening to it.
It's basically getting sent to spam. So, now we're at this place where we get this label, this disease label, and we're broken. I have type 2 diabetes now. Here's some metformin. Eventually, we can look at giving you more insulin, even though your body's still producing it with type 2 diabetes. Let's just shuttle more in to try to yell spam, absolutely spam like these Instagram posts now-- never mind, “I'm not even going to open that up.”
Cynthia Thurlow: [laughs]
Shawn Stevenson: But all of this spam. So, it's just like you have to pay attention now to get some of this glucose into your body. We're not addressing the root cause. So, let's talk about now and steer the conversation towards why are we in this situation to begin with? Why do we have that kind of exposure? And as I mentioned, we're looking at this through an entirely new lens. And this is truly looking at the root cause here. And what it really boils down to is our culture. We have a culture that enables us to access these things at will with great ease.
We have a culture that makes it challenging to access health-affirming things. As I mentioned, I was inundated with ultra-processed foods in my environment and I said that I'm not unique in this. A lot of people have heard this by now. But the BMJ published a study noting that American adults currently right now, about 60% of the average adults’ diet in the United States is made of ultra-processed foods. So, these are foods that are so far removed from anything natural, they're so denatured. This is like, again, at some point, maybe it was like corn and it was utilized as some of the particulate matter from that corn and maybe made into high fructose corn syrup, and then eventually that corn becomes Lucky Charms.
It has no resemblance to anywhere that it came from. That's what an ultra-processed food is. And of course, that's shocking, “Like 60% of our diet, that's crazy.” But that was me and worse. But what people don't realize yet and I'm thankful, but also, I have a sense of urgency around this because this is the first book published with this data in it and that's my new book really focused on family wellness. This was recently published in The Journal of the American Medical Association, JAMA. They looked at the ultra-processed food intake by American children and so they looked at children from the age of 2 to 19, so children in adolescents and tracked their ultra-processed food intake from 1999 to 2018. They found that in 1999, the average American child was eating over 61% ultra-processed foods already. Then 20 years later, 2018, the average American child is now eating almost 70% ultra-processed foods, is making up their diet.
So, we have a culture that has created this exposure for our children to have this to be such a huge part of their reality. So, what I'm saying by this and let's unpack what culture really is. So, the definition of culture is essentially the shared beliefs, values, attitudes, and behaviors of a group that is then passed on to future generations. So, these are the collective attitudes, beliefs, values, behaviors, what we do that we inherently pass on to our children. That's what culture is at its core. There are cultures still today that are hunter-gatherer cultures for example. There are still a few left but within that context, we'll talk about the Hadza, for example. Yes, they've had some interaction with modern humans, “Sophisticated humans,” but for the most part, they have a hunter-gatherer creed or tribe or way of life.
So, part of the inherent cultural belief that their community has is that if I don't move, I will die, because me procuring my food is dependent upon me moving. So, movement equals life. If I stop moving, if I become sedentary, I will die. That is an ingrained cultural belief. If we just look back even prior to when there were many more hunter-gatherer civilizations and tribes throughout history, that was the tenet underneath. They don't have to consciously think of that, but it was built in. If I don't move, I die. In our culture here in the United States, movement is optional. It is incredibly optional. So much movement has been taken out of the process of procuring our food to the degree, literally, I can sit in my chair, push a couple buttons on my phone, and have just about any food you can imagine put right into my hand.
I could leave the door open for the Uber Eats person just hand me the bag. Now, here's the cool thing. That's cool. We could do that. That's cool to have that option. But is that normal? Is that something our genes expect from us to be so far removed from our food, from where it comes from, from the preparation, and from essentially also looking at the quality of those foods. Because that's another thing with that hunter gatherer tribe is. They're eating foods that are very close proximity to their natural source. So, humans have evolved. We've had processing of food, so we might have the animal that they hunt and have some cooking practices or having some different processing methods for something maybe chocolate beans getting crushed down or olives getting crushed and turned into olive oil. We've been doing that for a long time.
Those are minimally processed foods. It's not that processing is bad. It's that when we get into this category of ultra-processed foods, where not only is it so denatured, but also, we have all of these synthetic ingredients, manmade chemicals, additives, preservatives, food dyes the list goes on and on that we know we've got mountains of data affirming how it damages our health, especially the health of our children. So, within that hunter-gatherer tribe, part of their exposure, their culture, is that this is the food that we eat. We have to work to get it, and we eat it close to its source. They're not really aware currently that they can just go to 711 and do like I did if they're thirsty and get a super Big Gulp. That's not a part of their culture. For me, it was normal. It was a daily thing.
I went across the street to 7-Eleven every day and if I wasn't just getting sodas for myself, my family, my little brothers and sisters, the food there is one of my favorite things. They had the hot dogs on that little rotation thing. They're already dead, but they're like I don't know. They're like zombified. They're like mummifying these hot dogs. My favorite thing was the nachos with chili and cheese. So, you get the nachos. I got to a place I don't know if I've said this before, but instead of just pumping some nacho cheese and chili on top of the nacho chips, I would take the chips out of the container. I would put chili and cheese on the bottom of the tray and then put the cheese, the chips on top, and then pump the cheese and the chili. Well, first of all, why are we pumping meat from a pump? That's really weird.
So, I was just, like, engulfing this stuff. Then, funny enough, I would have these side effects of heartburn, of this discomfort, and I would tell my mom, like, “Oh my god, I don't feel good. She was like, “Just drink a white soda.” So, it's just like even the food was giving me feedback that this was hurting me. But my culture informed me that that was just a deficiency of 7 Up. That's what I was experiencing. “You're just deficient in 7 Up.” Forget that. So that's really what we're addressing here is, targeting cultural change. I'm telling you this is so powerful. Once you really get this and understand that we're existing in a culture right now that is to be healthy, as I mentioned earlier, you are abnormal. That's the culture that we exist in right now. But here's the cool thing.
We have the power to create microcultures. Number one, cultural change starts with ourselves, and then it really starts to become exponentially more powerful when we're doing this within our household and creating a microculture within our household. And this is one of the things that I've seen over and over again, and I know that this is going to lead to that tipping point that I mentioned earlier. The cool thing is that once we create a culture of health and fitness and connection and love within our own household, the cool thing about a culture is that when you go into another culture, you take your culture with you. We can't help but do that. We are a product of our environment. We're a product of our culture. So, no matter where I go, I'm taking this culture with me. So, when people see my family, they see what's possible.
They get an opportunity to see what health and connection looks like. And that's what I didn't have when I was living in those conditions that I was living in. I didn't have healthy examples. And so that's what made it so difficult. I wanted to be healthy. I wanted to feel good. I wanted to be successful. But I didn't have any examples on what that looked like. So, for me it took a tremendous amount of trial and error, trial and success trying to figure things out. This is why I'm so passionate about this, is that now we have the opportunity to replicate this, to deliver an incredible podcast or to deliver a book where people can get a blueprint for how all this stuff works. But most importantly, if we can stack conditions in your favor culturally, create an environment around you to make the choices easy, that's really where the magic is.
Cynthia Thurlow: Well, and I think you bring up such a beautiful point that the way to make the most impact is to start with our own families, setting a good example for our own children, helping them build good habits that they can then take with them when they leave the nest, go to college or at a friend's house. So, one of the things that really stood out to me when I was reading your book was talking about the role of family meals, how critically important this is. You actually mentioned in the book, “Why are family meals on the endangered list?” And I started to reflect back on the impact of the pandemic and how we went from two kids going to school, both in middle school, to everyone being home, everyone working from home. There was a solid six-month stretch where we never ate at the same time.
Yeah, kids had lunches that were whenever they could grab and go, dinner became the same kind of thing. And I remember saying to my kids how disconnected I felt from them because we weren't sharing as many meals together. And you bring up the point in the book about how important it is to eat together and the statistics around sharing meals together. Something like Harvard said that families that eat dinner together consume more fruits and vegetables, they drink less soda, they consume less processed food. So that shared experience is so important. Our children, even as teenagers, are still modeling behavior when they see how their parents are living their lives. So, let's unpack the whole concept of family meals, being able to learn how to cook all the way up to sharing those meals together.
Shawn Stevenson: Absolutely, and so this is again looking at addressing cultural change, but also using really sound, deep science, so current science, but also just looking at evolutionary biology, looking at how humans evolved. Because for thousands of years prior to our current generation, food centered around more than just the act of eating. Food was really about family. It was about sharing, it was about cooperation, it was about community, it was about celebration. All of these things were baked into the process of food and the process of taking something from the environment and putting it into our bodies and making tissues out of these things. However, we've quickly devolved from a species that ate together on a consistent basis, prepared food together, hunting, gathering, the preparation, eating together, the celebration. All of those things were a part of tribal culture to, more recently, more and more eating in isolation and in front of mind-numbing media.
Again, this is not to vilify that because kicking back and having some delicious food of your choice and watching your favorite show or catching a YouTube video or whatever the case might be, that's all good, that's cool that we have opportunity like that. But when that becomes the norm, when that becomes what you do, pretty much every time you eat a meal and/or a daily thing that you're doing. My question was, could we be missing out on an incredibly important genetic input that's protecting our health? And that's really what the data was indicating, as you mentioned that research from Harvard, and I was shocked. First of all, when I came across their data, all this data that had been compiled about family eating behaviors and health outcomes. I wish-- I couldn't believe people didn't know this stuff. So, what the researchers determined, as you mentioned, when families eat together on a consistent basis, they have much higher intake of vital nutrients that effectively help to reduce the risk of chronic diseases and also far less consumption of ultra-processed foods.
But from there were so many. By the way, those researchers found that whereas this was something that pretty much every person tribal family construct was eating together, today, the average American family, only about 30% of families eat together on a consistent basis. So, this is something that is on the endangered species list. So, I came across another study. This was published in the Journal of Nutrition, Education and Behavior. And these were researchers we're looking at. This really hit me and it was kind of one of the big catalysts to writing this book. They were looking at minority children, who would generally be in the construct of a low-income community, which is where I come from. So, this really gave me an important insight and also offered up some hope that regardless of our circumstances, could eating together be protective for our children?
So, what they uncovered was that children who eat together with their families four times a week had significantly less intake of ultra-processed foods and much higher intake of real foods, in particular fruits and vegetables, basically five servings a day, most days of the week, when eating together with their family on a consistent basis. The researchers noted that they ate significantly less ultra-processed foods even without their eating together with the family when family meals included, rarely or never having the television on while eating. So, there's something about that television, the advertisements and all this stuff or just the distraction from our bodies that then led to eating less ultra-processed foods. Or if we're watching that stuff and I know what it is, those commercials, those Pizza Hut commercials back in the day, [Cynthia laughs] just like how they tear the pizza and it's like--
It never does that in real life, but just like, that's so attractive. We all know what that's like. And it's a delicious part of life. It's not to, again, vilify the pizza. It's just like if we're constantly getting inundated because of our culture, they're able to advertise all of these ultra-processed foods. They're not advertising for anything real. There are no real food advertisements. It's all ultra-processed foods. Toucan Sam Follow Your Nose, That Damn Leprechaun, The Lucky Charms, and the Fruity Pebbles that was one of my first food memories, was eating Fruity Pebbles with my great grandmother. As she took me, I got on the senior citizen bus with her, and I remember all the other senior citizens. They were like, “Oh, is this your grandson?” pitching my cheeks and all that stuff, and went to the grocery store. We came back to her place. She poured me a bowl of Fruity Pebbles, it changed my life.
I was like, “This what, this exists.” Again, for her, that's speaking her love language. She wanted to give me something that I would enjoy as a child. But our culture has made it so that she doesn't know that this is going to potentially cause metabolic dysfunction for me, but there's not even real food. There is nothing real about it. So, that study really, for me again, if my family would have known, if my parents would have known not to say that they would have done it, but they would have had an opportunity to choose, like, “Okay, I can reduce the risk of possible chronic disease in my children if we eat together on a semiregular basis,” because I'm not exaggerating as well. The times that I sat down and ate a meal with my family, I can count on my two hands.
We just didn't do that in those times that we did. It was a holiday of some sort. We ate at the same time frequently, but it would again be again kind of disperse. I ate with my brother and sister frequently at the same time, but we just didn't have that kind of family network. And now let's lead this into some actual, like, “What are we helping here with our children?” Well, there're two studies. This was published. One of them was published in the journal JAMA Network. So, Journal of the American Medical Association Network and the Journal Pediatrics. What these researchers found was that and this is one of the big takeaways from today for everybody. When families ate together just three times a week, there was a dramatic reduction in obesity outcomes in the children and there was a reduced expression of disordered eating in the children as well.
So, there's a significant impact on reducing the rate of obesity and eating disorders in children when families eat together three meals a week or more. Three appears to be that kind of minimum bar of success, that minimum barrier of entry. So, let's make this a mandate for ourselves. Let's take it upon ourselves to create a new culture. So, this might be going from zero to three or one to three or whatever the case might be for a lot of people. So that's why I provided so many tools and strategies in the book, like, “How do we actually make this happen?” But the first thing is, number one, awareness. And the second thing is deciding. Just deciding to do this to protect our children, because I'm a big why person, as you know, and I'm just like, “Why? How is this even possible? How is this eating together reducing the risk of obesity in children, like what?
Some of the obvious things that come up would be something like when there's a family dinner that's scheduled, we'll just say that every Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday. Those are family dinner nights. If this is just a part of your culture, it's already there, unconscious as it might be, that we have this family dinner and there's like this proclivity towards planning. What are we going to eat? Whereas today, a lot of stuff we could stumble into these meals a lot. So, there is just a natural inclination towards planning for it. And a lot of times when we do that, we're going to plan for what we deem to be a healthy meal construct, which 9/10 is actually going to better than ultra-processed foods of any sort.
So, that's part of it. And another part is the psychology and what this is doing with our nervous system. Because really, the dinner table is a unifier in many senses because this is a time for the family to connect that has often been disconnected for the day, living their respective lives. So, this is a place where you get to unify and offload things, to talk about things, to check in. To actually be able to see your child and to be able to pick up cues, what they're saying, nonverbal cues, whatever the case might be, it's inherently going to create more of a connection if you are paying attention, because the attention part could be a problem. You might be eating together but still having some poor outcomes. This could be because of the attention not really being there. I talk about that in the book as well, and how our devices, even having the cell phone at the table pulls away. I share some fascinating studies on how that distracts our minds and reduces our ability to pay attention just as if our phone is in sight.
So, again, proactively for families, creating a new kitchen culture and a new dinner table culture, and especially if we've become addicted, which we are. This is a safe space. We could admit this. We're addicted to our technology. We're addicted to our devices. It's so easy to pick up our phone and just swipe right to a social media app just to check. Let me just check. Before you know it, you're there. This is because we have brilliant engineers who have crafted these platforms to be highly addictive for our brains. It's like a little a slot machine in our pocket, constantly looking for that hit of-- dopamine, of course, has been brought into this conversation a lot, but there's far more than dopamine that's in the mix here.
Also, there's a buildup of pressure when we're not on it. So, we start to build up this pressure that we need to relieve just by tapping on that app on that-- see that there is--. Anyways, we build up-- never mind, I'm not even going to open that up, tapping that app. So, here's the thing, we can proactively understand, number one, yes, this is an issue here and we can start to leverage our psychology with addiction knowing that that's going on. First of all, we have to admit that we have a problem. If we're just like, “No, it's not a big deal,” then we're lying to ourselves. So, here's one of the core things with basically habit swapping. Dropping what we deem to be a negative habit, putting in a positive habit, most often people fail because they're replacing something they really enjoy with something that they don't.
We need to replace the behavior with something of equal or greater value. So, we have to find ways that we can create more joy in that family connection. We have to find ways. There’re so many cool things, so many cool ideas that you can employ and so that you look forward to it. Also, of course, there's an energy context here as well. A lot of this stuff is more difficult when we're tired, when we're stressed, when we're drained. I'm here to tell you, just like getting to bed and getting a good night's sleep, sometimes we just want to relax, watch a bunch of shows. But relaxation is different from restoration. The same thing holds true with I'm too stressed to eat with my family and missing out on the fact that that's restorative. So, this was done by some researchers looking at workers from IBM.
This was actually published in the Journal of Family and Consumer Sciences. What the researchers uncovered was that when workers were able to make it home in time to sit down and have dinner with their families, their work morale stayed high and their productivity, all those things. But as soon as their work started to cut into their ability to spend time with their family at the dinner table, their work morale was plummeting, levels of stress were increasing. This couples with some of the pretty well-known data now, but some people might not have heard this yet again published in JAMA, Journal of the American Medical Association, up to 80% of physician visits today are for stress-related illnesses. The stress component of so many of these chronic diseases is that unifying aspect of our chronic disease epidemics. So could this process of eating together with people that we love, family and friends are included as well, be one of those things that acts as a powerful stress defense mechanism, stress relief mechanism. I'm here to tell you, based on the data, that absolutely is.
Cynthia Thurlow: It's really interesting because when we are around people that we love and feel connected to, we release oxytocin. Oxytocin is this hormone that helps lower cortisol. So, I remind people that even when our teenagers push back, my kids are now 18 and almost 16, we do get some pushback about family dinners. But we've started saying, bring the girlfriends, bring your friend. They're welcome. So, I always alleviate any distraction or type of conflict that will come up. We do have a pretty strong, no phone at the table, no TV being on. And I'll tell my kids, I was like, “You need to understand that during the day, I might see you for five minutes because you're going to work, you're going to school, you're coming home, you're distracted, you're doing homework. But when we spend 30, 40 minutes preparing a meal, sitting down together, connecting, that is really valuable time.”
I think for those of us that maybe you have younger children, you're in the throes of child rearing. The days are long, the years are short, as I like to say, “You certainly understand it's because your kids are teens and young adults.” But I think it's one of those things that you just start to recognize that those shared moments of preparing meals together, my mom is Italian, so Italians, a lot of how they demonstrate their love is they cook for you. So, my kids know how to cook. I have one that's a little bit of a food snob. So, he makes compounded butters and he does all these elaborate things that he'll do alongside. He's like the sous-chef. But that time we spend together is so important. I actually have said to my husband, there are a lot of things that I would be willing to say aren't as important, except for when we come together, we aim for three days a week. We probably get two consistently because of work schedules and everything else.
But I think it is certainly one of those things where we're trying and I think it's important to be transparent and say that we're not perfect. And I can tell you, during the pandemic, it was certainly a bigger struggle. But understanding if we're dealing with chronic stress, if what most people are seeing their healthcare practitioners for is stress mediated. Oxytocin is a really important hormone. It can be involved in a lot of other activities. But that family connection, the love that you're feeling for one another when you're sitting down and feeling like you're listening to one another, hearing one another, that is critically important.
Shawn Stevenson: Yeah, you just said especially oxytocin is just one of these things that humans produce when in proximity to people that we care about. It is one of the reasons why this works, is that switching over from that sympathetic fight or flight kind of stress hormone-related space that we're often in most of the day today, that's even abnormal. We're supposed to have ebb and flows with that. But today it just kind of like we're very good at going 0 to 100. We're not very good at going 100 to 0. So, that's one of the reasons why this is shown to be so successful in reducing disease outcomes, is that it helps to shut off stress. Now, there can be, of course there's going to be stressful interactions with family. Especially, again, kids, everybody has their own personality. But here's the superpower and you just mentioned this already, which is like, "We actually know our family better than anybody.” We know what excites them. We know what deexcites them. We know what irritates them. We know what inspires them. A lot of times, though, we just want them to do what we want them to do. Let's just be completely honest about this. Relationships would be completely easy if people just don't mess up my vibe, just do what I want you to do.
Cynthia Thurlow: [laughs]
Shawn Stevenson: But that's not what happens a lot of our lives. So, it's being able to develop these skills. But again, this is an energy equation as well, to have the energy to be more patient, to be more compassionate, to be more understanding. Because, it's not that we can't be patient and compassionate when we don't feel well. It's just a lot harder. It's a lot harder when we're tired and stressed. So, we want to stack conditions in our favor. And again, one of the things, as you said, this not being perfect about this. This is so important for all of us. We've got to drop that, especially as parents. This is not about perfection at all. We cannot try to live by that. It's just about stacking conditions. Doing the best that we can with what we have. And a good example of this is even last night we're supposed to have our scheduled family dinner. My oldest son actually texted last week because he had missed a couple of days of our dinners and he asked if we can do Tuesday. He asked, I didn't say anything. He said, “Could we have family dinner Tuesday?” So, Tuesday, my wife had plans. She was going to make whatever it was. Then she got herself caught out here in the streets, birthday shopping for me, which I didn't ask for, but “Hey, I'm grateful, I am grateful.” So, she kind of got tied up and I was just like, “Babe, don't try and rush back. Just grab yourself something and we'll figure it out.”
So, guess what I did, because at this point it was getting late. So, I door-dashed a meal, but I still sat down and ate with my boys. We still sat down and ate together. We put everything to the side. We just sat down and ate together. So again, it's just like, I'm making the most of that moment and I got to connect with them, got to hear some stuff, got to see their interaction in a new way that I noticed. My 11-year-old, he's about to turn 12 in a couple of weeks. My 22-year-old who's in his last semester of college is about turn 23. I could see this dynamic emerging and it was really cool. I would have missed it had I just been like, I'll forget it, let's just grab some food and watch TV or whatever the case might be. Not to say that that's bad, but I got to check in with my boys and it's so valuable for them and for me.
And last little piece here. Just looking at all the things that are going on in our lives today, it's a lot we live in it, even that just the exposures that we have today, there's so much distraction. So being able to unplug truly and to connect in the real world is something deeply human that, as we both have said, is on the endangered species list right now. And having that skill set, it's not just about us of preparing food. You mentioned your family have everybody being able to cook. I shared this study in the Eat Smarter Family Cookbook looking at this devolving ability of new generations to be able to cook for themselves. It is like becoming more and more rare that young people know how to make meals.
That's scary because here's what's going to happen. They're going to eat more ultra-processed foods because they don't know how to cook for themselves. And my kids, including like I've been really online mentally with my youngest son and through this whole process, by the time he was like seven or eight, he could cook like breakfast foods, make some eggs and cut up some fruit, stuff like that. So, just being able to add in a couple of these things. But here's why sometimes that doesn't happen, is because of being stressed, lack of patience, feeling time constraints. This is a place that I struggled with a few years back. Definitely much better with it now. But it's not about perfection, is when my kids were offering to help or wanting to help in the kitchen, “Hey, can I help cook? or can I do this?” We're like, “Not not right now, buddy. I'm just trying to get us” and all of those times that I would say no and unknowingly missing out on the opportunity to invite him in to something that is going to be so valuable for him because of my stress or my energy.
So, after coming across some of this data a few years ago, I just started to turn that no into a yes. Like as soon as I felt that no coming up just like, “Absolutely, let's do it.” And switching my energy and being able to, again, create an environment where he has all of these food experiences now of him helping out in the kitchen. We got a bunch of little videos of when he could barely even talk, like, helping to make, like, noodles, zucchini noodles and things like that. And it's just been again, we've created a new family culture. I didn't come from this, but humans are not just a product of my environment. We're also creators of our environment. So, by getting this information in our hands, we can start to put these things in place.
Cynthia Thurlow: Such a beautiful message. One thing, I want to congratulate you on when I got a copy of the book, the love for you and your family for one another is so conveyed in that beautiful photography. The recipes look delicious. I can't wait to try them. Please let my listeners know how to connect with you on social media if they're living underneath a rock, how to purchase your book, how to find out more about you and your beautiful family?
Shawn Stevenson: Oh, wow. Thank you so much. That means everything. They can pick up the book anywhere books are sold. It's the Eat Smarter Family Cookbook and Amazon, Barnes & Noble, local bookstores, all that good stuff. But going to eatsmartercookbook.com, we also have a very special event that we're doing for people who purchase the cookbook, which is we're doing the 2023 Family Health and Fitness Summit. This is going to be-- not just access to me, but some of the other leading folks in health and fitness who have kids and being able to hear how they've created a family culture of health despite all of the craziness and the busyness in their lives. So, like, finding out how do they deal with picky eaters, how do they save money on groceries, how do they find time to even prepare healthy meals? And a couple of people, Dr. Amy Shaw, we've got Laila Ali, undefeated boxing champion, but also, she's probably one of the busiest people I've ever met. She's got all these different things she's doing, but she makes dinner for her family three or four nights a week. She's, like, made that just a part of the culture. She also won the cooking show Chopped twice, by the way she cooks.
Cynthia Thurlow: Hmm
Shawn Stevenson: She's amazing. And Chalene Johnson, the list goes on and on. Just people who found a way to be successful while being family oriented, because we're also part of our culture today is telling us that it's either/or. You're going to have to sacrifice your family essentially and time with your family in order for you to be successful. I'm here to tell you that there is a way and it's being able to point out, because if you ask and you know this as well, we ask people what's most important to them, “Oh, my family. My family is the most important thing.” But does our life actually demonstrate that that is true? Where are our hours going? Because I know for myself personally, because of the culture that I came from, me spending all this time working so hard, I'm working so hard behind the scenes. My children never get to see me, but I'm putting clothes on their back, food on the table, all the things when what they need most is me. What they need most is time with me to know that I love them, that I'm proud of them, that I see them, that I acknowledge them.
Here's the cool thing, is that doesn't even have to be a lot of time, by the way. It's just about attention and focus, the quality of that time and making it a priority. So, this is really about creating a movement, truly, because our children mostly are the ones who are the victim of these abnormal shifts in our culture. I know we can do something about this. So, as mentioned, Eat Smarter Family Cookbook people, get free access to the 2023 Family Health and Fitness Summit. The ticket for the event is 297, so you get a free ticket. You can attend anywhere. It's virtual event as well, so you could attend from anywhere in the world. So, you get that free as a bonus. So, you can get the book from anywhere. But head over there to eatsmartercookbook.com and definitely take advantage of that. I'm on Instagram. I'm @shawnmodel, S-H-A-W-N model. And yeah, of course, it's one of the cool places to hang out. I definitely share some really good stuff over there. So those are the places that people can find me.
Cynthia Thurlow: Thanks again.
Shawn Stevenson: It's my pleasure.
Cynthia Thurlow: If you love this podcast episode, please leave a rating and review, subscribe and tell a friend.
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