1116: Fake Foods | Skeptical Sunday

1116: Fake Foods | Skeptical Sunday

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[00:00:00] Jordan Harbinger: Welcome to Skeptical Sunday. I'm your host, Jordan Harbinger. Today I am here with Skeptical Sunday co-host, writer, and researcher Jessica Wynn. On The Jordan Harbinger Show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you.

Our mission is to help you become a better informed, more critical thinker. And during the week we have long form conversations with a variety of amazing folks from spies to CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers, and performers. On Sundays, though, we do skeptical Sunday, where a rotating guest, co-host and I break down a topic you may have never thought about and debunk.

Common misconceptions. Topics such as why expiration dates are nonsense, astrology, acupuncture, e-commerce scams, diet supplements, the lottery ear candling and more. And if you're new to the show or you wanna tell your friends about the show. I suggest our episode starter packs. These are collections of our favorite episodes on persuasion, negotiation, psychology, disinformation, cyber warfare, crime, and cults and more.

It'll help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show. Just visit Jordan harbinger.com/start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. Today, Fritos, figs, french fries, gra, and fondue. The line between what's real food and what's fake food is kind of blurry. What are we consuming at each meal?

How can we unravel the tangled web of ingredients and intentions and consequences of the food we eat? From lab grown meats to artificial flavors, how do fake foods affect our health environment? Society? We are uninformed about the food we eat and the labels and marketing schemes make food all the more confusing.

Writer Jessica Wynn joins me for a feast of knowledge and skepticism about fake foods. All right, Bon appetit, everybody.

[00:01:43] Jessica Wynn: Yeah. Hey, Jordan. So do you know the healthiest role of shopping in a supermarket?

[00:01:48] Jordan Harbinger: Now what is that?

[00:01:49] Jessica Wynn: Stick to the perimeter. So think about it, anything down an aisle is likely processed, but the perimeter is where we find fresh fruits, vegetables, meats, and fish.

So staying out of the aisles eliminates a lot of fake food choices.

[00:02:06] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, that's true. The middle aisles, that's where all the good stuff is. That's what the Pop-Tarts are. But let's be clear, when we say fake foods, I'm not talking about decorative fruit or plastic for a drawing. I'm not even talking about something that might just be frozen.

What are we talking about when we say fake foods?

[00:02:23] Jessica Wynn: Yeah, it's a pretty wide spectrum. So fake food refers to imitation or synthetic food, like any food that mimics the look, taste, texture, or nutritional profile of natural foods. Think foods with hydrogenated oils, additives, artificial sweeteners and flavors.

[00:02:44] Jordan Harbinger: So anything with the word artificial is probably a giveaway.

[00:02:48] Jessica Wynn: Yeah, and that word shows up a lot in our ingredient lists. There's also plant-based meat alternatives, molecular milk, processed cheese, lab grown meat. They're all fake foods.

[00:02:59] Jordan Harbinger: Our food sounds high tech, molecular milk. I don't even know what that is, but it sounds like something Milk from the future.

[00:03:06] Jessica Wynn: It is milk for the future for sure. A really complicated process of manipulating molecules, like a huge percentage of what we eat is engineered, and we do it by using a combination of synthetic ingredients, additives, and different processing techniques. So fake foods are trying to replicate the sensory experience of real fresh food without.

Using the same ingredients or production methods.

[00:03:33] Jordan Harbinger: So is this just a modern phenomenon? Is it just that as we get the technology, this gets worse?

[00:03:39] Jessica Wynn: I think people like to think that processed foods are fairly new, but processing food, it's an ancient technique and it's shaped human physiology. So humans are the only species that process their foods.

We are like processive bores, and compared to animals of our size, we have tiny jaws, tiny teeth, and tiny intestinal tracks. So humans develop techniques and tools to make food easier to chew and digest like. Mashing and cooking, using grinders and knives, salting and curing smoking, anything that makes food edible and delicious

[00:04:17] Jordan Harbinger: cooking.

I hadn't thought about that. We're the only species that cooks. There's no animal kingdom cooking show. We've always processed food. I guess as long as we've been throwing meat on the fire. I had not thought about it like that. So what is the difference today? Because obviously it's worse.

[00:04:32] Jessica Wynn: Yeah, of course there's processed foods, like we process them when we're cooking, but they're not the same as ultra processed foods.

So this is super, super important to understand. Processed foods are what we've always done and any kind of processing changes how our bodies metabolize the food. We've known since the seventies when it was found through studies that the body reacts differently to eating a whole apple versus eating a mashed apple versus eating just the juice.

And the only time it doesn't spike our sugar is when we eat the whole apple. It's that balance of the fiber and the sugars our body needs. So whole foods are what our bodies are designed to digest.

[00:05:16] Jordan Harbinger: Interesting that just chopping an apple is enough processing to change our body's digestion.

[00:05:21] Jessica Wynn: I know and ultra processing affects our body's reaction even more.

[00:05:26] Jordan Harbinger: Okay, so what is ultra processing compared to processing?

[00:05:30] Jessica Wynn: Ultra processing is when we eat things that have never been in the human diet before, like modern chemicals. There's an agreed upon like simple definition for ultra processed foods. It's wrapped in plastic with at least one ingredient that you wouldn't find in a standard home kitchen.

[00:05:48] Jordan Harbinger: Thinking of what the ingredient lists look like on the foods in my kitchen, I feel like a lot of this stuff is ultra processed for sure.

[00:05:56] Jessica Wynn: Yeah, and our food is labeled around what we all think of as the components of nutrition, right? Salt, sugar, carbs, fat, protein, and fiber. But research shows food is more than that.

It's what we do to the food, like how processed it is that matters. I. In 2019, a hypothesis was tested where researchers designed two diets and they tested two groups. One group was fed 80% of their calories from ultra processed foods, and the other 0%, it was the same sugar, the same carbs, the same fat, same everything.

The Ultra Processed Foods group, they ate an average of 500 calories more a day. So the studies suggests that there's something else about ultra processed foods that drive people to overeat because calorie for calorie, the diets were exactly the same.

[00:06:49] Jordan Harbinger: That's almost like. Trick in our brains from the sound of it.

[00:06:52] Jessica Wynn: Yeah, it absolutely is. Like animals are all attracted to the food they need and humans are no different. It's how we survive. But flavor is like nature's language of nutrition and flavor. Molecules are how the nutritional value of food is communicated to our brain. So ultra processed foods, they're introducing brand new molecules that have never been in our diet before.

And then there's new formulations of ancient molecules that have never been tried. And this is all problematic because we have an internal evolved system that isn't good at dealing with these new molecules because there's just no blueprint in our brains and bodies for what we do with them.

[00:07:34] Jordan Harbinger: Okay. So what do our bodies then end up doing when they get new molecules?

[00:07:39] Jessica Wynn: Yeah, it gets confusing because when our taste buds send a message of say, orange flavor to our brains, our body prepares for vitamin C. But if it's an artificial orange flavor with no vitamin C, the body doesn't know what to do with the information. When we fool our brains like this over and over the brain and the body's ability to metabolize food, it goes all outta whack.

[00:08:04] Jordan Harbinger: I know this is connected to why we've seen a rise in obesity, because obesity isn't just from inactivity, but research indicates obesity is more from the food we are eating.

[00:08:15] Jessica Wynn: Yeah, absolutely. We all burn the same amount of calories a day pretty much, but. We absorb these ultra processed foods very quickly, so we eat them really fast and we get.

Calories faster than our bodies can realize we're full. And then when you have sweetness without sugar and smoothness without fat and savory, without protein, it's just messing with our taste buds. Like we evolved to have an incredibly balanced diet. And so when you keep fooling your brain, it's just trying to balance things out.

[00:08:46] Jordan Harbinger: Okay? So if that orange flavor has little to no nutrition, your brain tells you, Hey, you gotta eat more of this. 'cause there's barely any. Vitamin C in here, we're not detecting any vitamin C. This, I assume works out well for food companies who just want you to eat as much as possible. So it's a great business plan, but sounds like a really bad health plan.

[00:09:07] Jessica Wynn: That's a hundred percent true. It's a lot of profit. And if you start really reading ingredient lists, so you'll notice a pattern where the first ingredient is typically a commodity crop. Like the top four are rice, soy, wheat, and corn. Then there's a commodity oil, like palm or sunflower.

[00:09:25] Jordan Harbinger: I know a lot of those commodity crops are grown at scale for feeding farm animals.

So why are they in my food too?

[00:09:31] Jessica Wynn: Yeah. Well, they grow so much of it for the farm animals that the leftovers are what's thrown into the human food supply. Then they're processed down into powders of fat, protein and the carbohydrates. And these powders are low cost. They're really easy to ship, and they store for a long time.

So alls they need is a ton of additives to reconstitute. And then you can turn the powders into anything. And we do.

[00:09:59] Jordan Harbinger: It's funny that as a human, I think, oh, my leftover food goes in a trough and then pigs eat it. Meanwhile. We're all eating the same stuff. That's actually the leftover pig food that's going into my stuff, right?

It's like, oh, we don't need this palm oil on this other. Soy and corn make a cereal out of this. Give it to Jordan and his kids. You make it sound like additives are a magic potion. So one of these mysterious additives that reconstitute powders and turn them into. Something resembling. Food

[00:10:26] Jessica Wynn: additives are definitely mysterious.

There's about five to 15,000 additives in our diets, but Oh, wow. The reason we don't know how many are actually used for sure. Is that for some reason the FDA just doesn't keep a list.

[00:10:42] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. For some reason. Okay, so it sounds like it's the Wild West when you see artificial flavor. As an ingredient, which is concerning.

So what do the additives do? I don't get how nobody cares if those exist and are thrown into everything.

[00:10:55] Jessica Wynn: Yeah. And they're just, they are kind of like a magic pot showed they emulsify and they stabilize the foods, they bind those basic ingredients together, and then they create textures that are pressed.

Fried baked or whatever, and then that can be turned into any shape you want. We have Dino nuggets or whatever, like everything you buy from bread to pizza to pies. All the ingredients are cheap crops and a bunch of additives to make it edible. So additives increase the shelf life of our foods and the artificial flavors and the colors.

They enhance the taste, smell and appearance of the food.

[00:11:31] Jordan Harbinger: So they say we taste with our eyes first. You know, anything about that

[00:11:35] Jessica Wynn: I. Yeah, absolutely. That's what gets us like salivating the first time we look at it, but we don't know how healthy. What we're looking at is when we're fooled behind all the packaging, so the artificial flavor and color.

It can come from natural compounds, but most are entirely synthetic chemicals that. We're just happily ingesting 'cause it makes the spicy chip red,

[00:11:58] Jordan Harbinger: mm, spicy chip red. So are these affecting our health, aside from packing on the pounds? Not that being super overweight isn't the most primary health concern of our entire nation right now.

But do they do anything else besides make us fat?

[00:12:12] Jessica Wynn: Yeah. I mean, my guess is yes, but we can only really look at the additives that have been specifically tested. Right? We don't know what they all are, but countless research shows that various additives are linked to. Mental health disorders, attention deficit disorder, cardiovascular disease, and cancers.

[00:12:33] Jordan Harbinger: I remember when we were kids, it was like red dye number four, and then it was like, oh my God, now you can't use that.

[00:12:39] Jessica Wynn: And people were upset to lose a red m and m.

[00:12:41] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. And it was causing, I don't even know what, but it was definitely bad for you. Yeah, I know some of this stuff is supposed to be bad for our guts as well.

Something we. Maybe in the last 10 years people started caring about but didn't even realize it was a thing back when we were growing up.

[00:12:55] Jessica Wynn: It just slowly crept in instead of not making foods that were harming our guts. There's just a whole new market for products, for good gut health and food companies put things like kombucha and probiotics on the shelves.

Just more for us to buy. It's like this insane loop, and many experts agree that a lot of those additives used should just be banned outright At the least, consumers should get health warnings about the ingredients.

[00:13:22] Jordan Harbinger: That's true. So instead of saying, Hey, we should make food that tells you the, for your gut.

It's like, no, continue buying this crap. But then also buy the one with probiotics and drink this kombucha to replenish the gut bacteria that you've murdered or starved by eating all this other stuff. So it's like everything has additives. Does this include artificial sweeteners? 'cause I feel like those must be doing some good, eliminating tons of sugar from our diet.

[00:13:49] Jessica Wynn: Decreasing sugar is a good idea for everyone on the planet, for sure. And artificial sweeteners are sugar and calorie free. That's great. But studies link them to weight gain, poor gut health, and increased cravings. So we do need sugar, right? But our brains need a balance of sweet and calorie intake. So two sweet or not sweet enough that affects the body's ability to metabolize those calories within a decade of artificial sweeteners hitting the market.

Type two diabetes. And obesity, which was basically unheard of in the past, became leading health problems in the United States.

[00:14:26] Jordan Harbinger: Okay? But some of that is correlation versus causation, right? We can't say, Hey, by the way, artificial sweeteners, and then everyone got fat. It's like, well, okay. A lot of things have changed and I got a friend, he drinks 20 diet sodas a day so he can brag about being sugar free.

Doesn't seem that good for him. There was a guy in my law school, this guy would show up to the library with a 12 pack of Diet Coke, these long ones that fit in the fridge, and he would just open the top and then he would slam a can open another one drink that can open another. By the lunchtime, that thing was empty.

He would go eat, come back with a fresh. 12 pack. So this dude was drinking two dozen diet Cokes per day, every day

[00:15:08] Jessica Wynn: that you knew of?

[00:15:09] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, we saw him drink that much. That's not counting what he drank before he got there, or what he drank when he got home. That dude must have been just immune to caffeine at that point.

I didn't even think about that.

[00:15:18] Jessica Wynn: Oh my God, that hurts my teeth.

[00:15:20] Jordan Harbinger: Oh God. Just sweating out caramel coloring.

[00:15:23] Jessica Wynn: Oh, gross. Yeah, that's just it though. Like diet sodas have so many people hooked. Look at the ingredients in a Diet Coke, which everybody loves to say that it has no fat, no sugar, no, no salt. But what are we drinking?

So the ingredients are the first one's always listed as carbonated water. That's fine. But the second ingredients, that caramel color, and it has nothing to do with caramel. It's just. A nice name describing the color of the chemicals that make soda brown. And it contains sulfates and aspartame, which trick your brain into thinking you're getting sugar.

And as we've said, that's a problem because when the sugar never arrives, your body has a stress response.

[00:16:06] Jordan Harbinger: Oh, really? I didn't realize that. I thought it was just more like, oh, I'm disappointed. But I guess that's what a stress response is for your body. That's bad news because I freaking love diet Coke, man.

None of this sounds refreshing at all. Your husband, he likes Diet Coke too.

[00:16:20] Jessica Wynn: Oh my God. He like hides them.

[00:16:22] Jordan Harbinger: I'm just trying to throw everybody under the buzz now.

[00:16:24] Jessica Wynn: Yeah. Why are they so addicting? Why don't they tell us? It could be the natural flavors, which are all those unknown additives. We don't really know what they're doing.

I. There's caffeine and then there's phosphoric acid and citric acids, which erode our teeth and they actually decrease bone density.

[00:16:44] Jordan Harbinger: So I try not to think about the bone density issues with all the diet Coke. Obviously I just drank it.

[00:16:49] Jessica Wynn: I know it's all about that fizz Jordan, because there's no flat version of Diet Coke like that just wouldn't sell.

[00:16:57] Jordan Harbinger: That is a good point. Fizz and caffeine. Okay. You know what's actually fit for human consumption? I. Define products and services that support this show. We'll be right back. This episode is sponsored in part by Shopify. When you see brands like Alo, Allbirds, skims, just, they're crushing it, you think, okay, great product, smart marketing, cool brand, the real secret.

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Alright, back to Skeptical Sunday. Fake foods are more than just additives, right? There's a lot of actually just totally fake stuff, or like the bulk of it's fake.

[00:20:18] Jessica Wynn: Yeah. I mean, of course the most common fake food is hydrogenated oils. Hydrogenated oils are used to improve the texture and shelf life of many processed foods, but they're linked to health risks because they're so high in trans fat content, which contributes to heart disease, stroke, and diabetes.

Yet. They're still sitting on all the supermarket shelves, and the same goes for processed cheeses. They're all fake foods.

[00:20:44] Jordan Harbinger: Processed cheese, that's still cheese though, right aside from Velv. Vita Lord knows what the hell that actually is. When I was a kid, there was cheese that came with a nozzle on the package.

I'm gonna guess that that was not actually cheese.

[00:20:57] Jessica Wynn: Oh, I remember that. Oh, again, so good in addicting. Why?

[00:21:01] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. What's with the nozzle like? It was probably like a squirt guns method. With that, you just launch it on your hot dog.

[00:21:07] Jessica Wynn: Oh yeah. High tech food. There it is. Maybe some portion of the product is cheese, but often it's a very small amount of natural cheese that's added to a ton of additives that increase the shelf life of whatever cheese product in 2016.

The CEO and some executives of castle cheese ink who make a lot of the Parmesan, we shake on our pasta, like I'm sure you'd know the container. It's got like green sides and a red top. They were convicted for selling fake Parmesan Romano and other cheeses. Their cheeses were cut with wood puls. Oh God, the containers said a hundred percent Real Parmesan.

[00:21:50] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, like 1% was a hundred percent real Parmesan. I'm not surprised. The tip off is it's in a can and it doesn't need to go in the refrigerator. One might not expect a hundred percent Parmesan wood pulp though. How was that even allowed or was that why they went to prison?

[00:22:08] Jessica Wynn: Yeah, no, uh, the actual argument in that case was that Sids goats naturally eat wood pulp.

It's classified as food.

[00:22:18] Jordan Harbinger: Hey, some living organisms can actually eat this without dying. So technically, and the judge is like, okay, I'll see it.

[00:22:26] Jessica Wynn: Gimme one more example. Termites. Yeah. Yeah, it's fine. Wood pulp is processed into cellulose, which food manufacturers use as a dec clumping agent in our foods. I don't know how they figured that out.

Whenever you see cellulose in your ingredient list, you're most likely having a little sawdust.

[00:22:45] Jordan Harbinger: Mm, tasty sawdust.

[00:22:48] Jessica Wynn: I, I know the have the FDA's. Hey, only 5% can be wood pulp though. Okay. And don't add it to stuff just to increase the weight so you make more money. Okay. The food companies are like, all right, fine.

But sure all of that can be so hard to prove regardless. The Castle Cheese Company, they didn't get convicted for selling wood pulp. They got convicted for mislabeling their product.

[00:23:12] Jordan Harbinger: Ah. So if they had labeled it wood pulp Parmesan, then there would've been no problem selling this stuff to everybody. Oh, that's so disappointing.

[00:23:23] Jessica Wynn: People would probably be into it.

[00:23:25] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Oh, you get the fancy wood pulp parm.

[00:23:28] Jessica Wynn: If you test any of those cans labeled Parmesan in every supermarket, I'd be shocked if you found any actual Parmesan. Like usually they're using other cheaper cheeses. I don't know how they get away with it, but they do because the FDA requirements for food are confusing.

[00:23:46] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, I wanna try that. Mahogany parm gross. The fact that the government is okay with giving people fake food, to me is crazy. What regulations are there? I feel like I'm gonna regret asking because you're gonna be like none but surely. At least some barriers exist here.

[00:24:02] Jessica Wynn: Yeah, I wish there were more, but FDA recognizes food fraud, but that doesn't have anything to do with healthy ingredients or ingredients at all.

If food doesn't make us sick almost immediately or kill us, the FDA is totally happy. Making us sick long-term seems to be perfectly fine,

[00:24:22] Jordan Harbinger: right? Yeah. If it kills you in a few decades, that's on you for eating too much of it.

[00:24:26] Jessica Wynn: Yeah. Try these pharmaceuticals we make. Yeah. But what they do have a problem with is the FDA has a classification of economically motivated adulteration, which is when companies profit by leaving out or substituting an expensive ingredient.

And this happens all the time, like I would bet. Everyone listening right now has been a victim of economically motivated adulteration at some point.

[00:24:54] Jordan Harbinger: Oh no, not economically motivated adulteration. How are you so sure that we've all eaten sawdust cheese or whatever? How do we know that?

[00:25:01] Jessica Wynn: Because the food fraud is everywhere.

[00:25:03] Jordan Harbinger: Ah, okay.

[00:25:04] Jessica Wynn: Like 25% of commercial fish is incorrectly labeled. Probably on purpose because when you drop like $35 a pound on Chilean sea bass, you're most likely buying tilapia, which is about $7 a pound. There was recently a scandal in the UK when. It was discovered that 25% of all beef in restaurants was horse.

[00:25:30] Jordan Harbinger: No, that's gross.

[00:25:32] Jessica Wynn: Yeah. It's turns my stomach. Some people also into that,

[00:25:36] Jordan Harbinger: the French don't care, but they're buying horse and know they know it's horse. I've heard it's popular in France. I'm not just picking on the French. I've heard horse meats popular there, but

[00:25:44] Jessica Wynn: yeah.

[00:25:44] Jordan Harbinger: Ugh. I still wanna know what I'm buying.

Yikes.

[00:25:47] Jessica Wynn: And if you think horse is bad, wait until you find out about the bogus extra virgin olive oil racket the Italian mafia has going on.

[00:25:56] Jordan Harbinger: Like the actual mafia.

[00:25:58] Jessica Wynn: Yeah, the Agro Mafia. It counts for 15% of the mafia's income.

[00:26:04] Jordan Harbinger: I can't believe that's a real thing. It sounds like something that dorky executives at agricultural companies call themselves like, yeah, drinks with the Agro Mafia tonight.

I'll write 'em in 7:00 PM I know

[00:26:13] Jessica Wynn: that sounds

[00:26:14] Jordan Harbinger: fake.

[00:26:15] Jessica Wynn: I know the Scorsese Farm film coming soon or something,

[00:26:19] Jordan Harbinger: the goat father,

[00:26:21] Jessica Wynn: but it's totally a thing. The Agriculture Mafia. So it's this part of the mafia that they don't deal in guns or drugs, just food. In 2016, Italian authorities completed Operation Mama Mia.

[00:26:35] Jordan Harbinger: Wow.

[00:26:36] Jessica Wynn: Where they seized over 2000 tons of fake, extra virgin olive oil from the region of ug. It was worth over 13 million Euro. The Mafia was taking adulterated, low quality Spanish and Greek oils, and were exporting it as primo Italian. E-V-O-O-O

[00:26:57] Jordan Harbinger: by the way, is if it was really in Italy, it was Operation Ma, mummy, uh, right.

They have to say it like, like Mario, and not only did they just name it the most cliche thing, you could possibly name an Italian law enforcement operation, but they still found a way to throw shade on the Spanish and Greece. It's not that you were exporting olive oil, it's that you were exporting the low quality adulterated Spanish and Greek stuff, which we all know is not as good.

Yeah. As the stuff we make here. And you're making us look bad

[00:27:25] Jessica Wynn: trash. Olives. That's

[00:27:27] Jordan Harbinger: so my surf and turf is tilapia slash horse cooked in cheap oil supplied by the mafia. I must have missed that scene in Goodfellas.

[00:27:35] Jessica Wynn: I know food is scandalous and oil's the most faked food in the world. With milk and honey coming in second and third, there are honey launderers.

[00:27:48] Jordan Harbinger: Wow. Yeah.

[00:27:50] Jessica Wynn: There's a lot of deliberately watered down milk. This food fraud is so extensive that the National Institutes of Health has kept a food fraud database since 1980. Like we're just fooled into buying all these expensive ingredients. There's saffron, which averages like $1,500 a pound on the cheap side.

You know when it comes in such a small amount in the photo bag or you know, those little black bags or whatever. It's all just for show because. When tested, it's mostly corn silk or coconut husk. Diet red.

[00:28:26] Jordan Harbinger: No. That means I'll probably never even had real saffron the humanity. I know. Yeah. I've seen fake honey.

I. Jen and I, when we went to Australia a zillion years ago, she picked this scammer out at a market down there because Jen used to be a beekeeper. And this guy was like, I have pineapple flavored honey. I have strawberry flavored honey, and my bees, they only feed on this one monocrop. And Jen was like, yeah, that's just not even possible.

You mean to tell me you have a giant greenhouse full of one crop? Then you could taste it and it was like really strawberry, like candy, really pineapple like candy and the consistency and the thing that it was almost totally clear. And Jen's like, you know, the honey we pull outta the hives at our house is like dark brown and has stuff in it, like little particles.

Real honey almost looks a bit dirty, right? And it tastes like honey. That's a mix of all kinds of different plants and things like that. She, this is definitely just corn syrup with flavoring in it. And yeah, if that guy was doing it at a farmer's market in Australia, then it's likely not just in that one isolated incident being sold to the public.

I.

[00:29:31] Jessica Wynn: Absolutely. It's like large scale. I love that Jen was a beekeeper. Did she confront the guy?

[00:29:37] Jordan Harbinger: No. She was just like, don't buy any. 'cause my parents were like, oh, it's so good. And she's like, don't buy any of this, it's fake. And they were like, oh, okay. And later I was like, what are you talking about? She's like, he's a con artist.

So once she explained it. It made sense and she said that, you know the little bear honey that you buy at the grocery store that you put on your cereal or in your tea? Oh, sure. That's basically just corn syrup.

[00:29:57] Jessica Wynn: I think they actually list the first ingredient as corn syrup. Like at least they're letting you know.

That's

[00:30:03] Jordan Harbinger: labeled as it says honey, but it's not. It's a 2% or 0% honey.

[00:30:08] Jessica Wynn: Yeah, I'm sure that was corn syrup. And people who don't have the information, Jen has, they're buying it and just. Getting sweet and thinking it's delicious. Like the corn syrup's often the first ingredient in honey, which it surprises us of how delicious honey is.

Like people just don't know. Yeah. The biggest bummer for me though is coffee. When you buy it just ground, it's often mixed with barley, legumes, and twigs.

[00:30:35] Jordan Harbinger: Literal twigs.

[00:30:37] Jessica Wynn: Yeah. I guess the goat law stands

[00:30:39] Jordan Harbinger: gross,

[00:30:40] Jessica Wynn: but as climate change reduces, like the coffee acreage, it's gonna make it all worse because we drink a lot of coffee and buying whole beans is gonna definitely.

Be the best option because the ground stuff will end up being more lentil than coffee bean.

[00:30:56] Jordan Harbinger: That's interesting. I grind my own beans because I do be fancy like that, but this is alarming. And you know what, it makes sense because I've noticed that ground coffee is really cheap and I thought, but I'm grinding it myself.

Why is it more expensive if I have an extra step? And the reason is because I'm getting coffee beans and that is 5% coffee beans and then fricking twigs.

[00:31:19] Jessica Wynn: Yeah. Yeah. You're getting real coffee snob.

[00:31:22] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. No kidding. Wow. So it makes me wonder, am I eating anything real? Come on. Everything's fake.

[00:31:28] Jessica Wynn: I mean, those are just a few examples of fake foods that we can get.

And there are some fake food companies that have good intentions and they're trying to address issues of sustainability and health and animal welfare, like plant-based meats.

[00:31:42] Jordan Harbinger: Ah, meat alternatives. Yeah. In the Bay Area is super popular. I had a plant-based chicken sandwich that tasted exactly like chicken the other day.

I think one of Jen's cousins works at one of these plant-based meat companies, but they don't strike me as healthy because isn't this all processed soybean stuff with, again, additives or oils packed in there to make it all stick together? I.

[00:32:04] Jessica Wynn: Oh, you nailed it. These products are just a joke on the health conscious food companies realized like, Hey, a lot of people aren't eating meat or cheese, so what if we processed the shit out of plant derived ingredients like soy and pea protein, emulated the taste and texture of animals, and sold it at a ridiculously high price,

[00:32:25] Jordan Harbinger: and just sort of larp slash pretended that fake food was also healthy because it wasn't meat while tripling the price.

[00:32:32] Jessica Wynn: Yeah. People who didn't eat meat were eating so much fresh food, like they didn't need the food company's help of buying all this processed stuff, and the health benefits of the meat alternatives are definitely not worth it. According to the National Institutes of Health, all meat imitations they tested, they are high in protein and fiber imitation sausages and milks.

They have lower total and saturated fat. Compared to animal-based products, which that's all good, but all imitation dairy has lower protein than animal-based dairy. And we don't really know as much in the states, but the Nutri score system, which is, it's like a color labeling system on foods in the EU and uk, all their foods have, um, they're like little traffic lights on the labels for calorie fat, sugar, and salt.

So it'll be. Green for a, which is the healthiest, and then goes down like light green, yellow, orange, and then the worst for you is when it's red and all imitation cheeses, whether it's the really fancy wildlife or whatever you think you're buying, they're all labeled a bright red E. So it's just the additives and processing used to make these imitations are being found to have negative effects on our health, but we need to do a lot.

More testing.

[00:33:57] Jordan Harbinger: I feel like the cheese sticks we buy, our kids are probably legit because I found one behind the bed the other day and it was hard as a rock, and I was like, oh, that, that seems to me I. Like what real cheese might do when left out just dehydrate and be really hard. Okay, my friend, I don't wanna out the guy, he bought a McDonald's hamburger and let's just say it ended up in his car for a long period of time and we were going on a road trip and we were cleaning out his car and we found it and it looked basically like the day he bought it and it was months old.

[00:34:30] Jessica Wynn: Yeah, there's so many documented cases of exactly that people buy a McDonald's Happy Meal and then they check in on it a year later, and there's no change,

[00:34:42] Jordan Harbinger: right? No mold, nothing,

[00:34:43] Jessica Wynn: and that's because all processed foods are dry as a bone and. Natural foods have moisture, so they mold. And when you eat a McDonald's hamburger, they're fooling you that you think it's moist.

There's sauces and oil that's put on at the last minute, like there's tricks. All those things are just dry. And so it's just like having a piece of cardboard sitting in the corner. It's not gonna change. And. It's just crazy how much we fool our eating habits.

[00:35:13] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. It seems like with the plant-based meats, animal welfare slash ethics are the reasons to add that fake meat to your diet, not for your health.

[00:35:21] Jessica Wynn: Yeah, totally. But it's confusing since the health food market is now overrun by big food companies passing off ultra processed foods as healthy choices. Impossible. Meat is impressive. It's really popular right now, but it's more modern chemicals than food. And the creator, he's really clear that it was never meant as a health food, that it's meant to reduce industrial farming.

Period. They did a study on the safety of Impossible Meat, and they found the burger's key ingredient, the thing that gives it its meatiness, which is called soy leg hemoglobin. Is safe for human consumption, but what the consumption's doing to our health is really debated.

[00:36:05] Jordan Harbinger: Leg hemoglobin really sounds like hemoglobin, which I know is in the blood, and I don't wanna be like, it sounds the same, so it must be the same thing.

It's plant blood. Oh my gosh, that's so bizarre. Wood pulp is safe for human consumption too. So I'm not sure I'm all in with impossible because it's not impossible that this stuff is slowly killing you if you eat a lot of it and there's a lot of additives and leg hemoglobin, plant blood, I don't know.

Maybe not as natural.

[00:36:31] Jessica Wynn: Yeah. For us, it's not that great. But if it could completely replace animals, or even if it just replaced cows, it would slow greenhouse gases and habitat destruction by incredible rates. There's no slaughter. There's no hormones. There's no antibiotics, but it is built on commodity agriculture and ultra processed foods, so there's a huge health trade off.

These products are just questionable. They solve one problem, like regarding animal welfare, but they create a ton of health issues. The phrase plant-based food, it fools the consumer into thinking it's healthy.

[00:37:07] Jordan Harbinger: Okay, so fake meats not the best choice. Are we going down the wrong path in terms of finding a solution for this stuff?

'cause it seems confusing.

[00:37:14] Jessica Wynn: Yeah, it's a really bumpy road. The one good thing is that it does lead to innovation and food technology. So food companies are continuously improving taste and texture, which is great, but it's the nutritional profile of fake foods that needs to be advanced in the processing.

[00:37:32] Jordan Harbinger: What about lab grown meat as opposed to fake meat? This is meat that's grown. That's actually real meat, right? It's just not from slaughtered animals. Do you know anything about this?

[00:37:42] Jessica Wynn: Lab grown meat is cultivated from animal cells, so it does start with an animal and they take the animal cell in a lab setting.

They cultivate it and it's su sustainable alternative to conventional meat production. But there's a lot of testing that needs to be done on lab grown meats. Most are in the developmental stage. There's two like main companies working furiously to get them on the market. They do eliminate animal slaughter, but again, the health pros and cons are really questionable.

[00:38:15] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. TBD on lab grown meats, I am curious about it because something is weird slash gross about eating vat grown meat, but admittedly slaughtering a cow in a really inhumane way and then cutting into the little pieces, that's also weird and gross. We're just used to it. The one thing I'd be really worried about that I guess I should be worried about with actual animals is if animals can get sick, like you can get mad cow disease or something.

I can't, that grown meat, I mean it still cells, those could get diseases too, right?

[00:38:48] Jessica Wynn: Oh my gosh. That's my biggest concern because yeah, like of course disease can spread through an industrial farm, but. The way these vats work, it looks like a brewery almost. And you put a few cells in one of the tanks and then it just keeps multiplying and multiplying.

And the empty vat is completely full with chicken in five days or something.

[00:39:12] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, air quotes chicken.

[00:39:14] Jessica Wynn: Yeah. And it's just so vulnerable to disease. And I would think in those kind of facilities it would spread even faster.

[00:39:22] Jordan Harbinger: Because everything's just in a bucket.

[00:39:24] Jessica Wynn: Yeah. They use a lot of antibiotics in lab grown meat.

There's a lot of pharmaceutical techniques being used, and so that's a big reason not to eat industrial farmed meat. Right. Is all the. Antibiotics that they give the animals, but they're putting even more in the lab grown stuff.

[00:39:42] Jordan Harbinger: So from a cruelty standpoint, it's better because you're not killing the animal.

But I didn't realize they were still using the same drugs and everything in that kind of stuff. Yeah, that sort of defeats the purpose for a lot of us.

[00:39:53] Jessica Wynn: You're not killing an animal, but it's weird. Frankenstein

[00:39:57] Jordan Harbinger: food. Yeah,

[00:39:57] Jessica Wynn: I dunno. It's really bizarre. Like, depends on who you ask though, because governments see it, only the positives in it.

But eventually when the technology improves, be a cheaper way to feed the masses. The UN wants the US government to promote lab grown and plant-based meats, but they are getting a ton of pushback from farm raised meat producers.

[00:40:19] Jordan Harbinger: Of course,

[00:40:19] Jessica Wynn: it's an interesting battle politically, and I'm not sure that either option is right.

What we should all agree on is that whether it's lab grown or farm raised, meat, producers need to focus on raising the nutritional content of these products.

[00:40:37] Jordan Harbinger: You know what's not grown in a vat with a boatload of antibiotics. Define products and services that support this show. We'll be right back.

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It is your support of our sponsors that does keep the lights on around here to learn more and get links to all the deals. Discounts and ways to support the show are all in one searchable, clickable place. Jordan harbinger.com/deals. Now for the rest of skeptical Sunday. So do we need alternatives to the alternatives because.

I dunno. It seems like the alternatives have just as many problems so far. Yeah.

[00:42:23] Jessica Wynn: Yeah. It's called Just eat an apple, go old school.

[00:42:27] Jordan Harbinger: But those apples might even grow in a wasteful way. It's like almonds, oh, they're so good for you. Ah, they're sucking all the water out of California. It seems like we want our foods to have a positive environmental impact as well, or at least a not super negative environmental impact.

[00:42:42] Jessica Wynn: Of course, and I get really frustrated with the almond controversy because that whole campaign was started by dairy farmers in California and their big argument was it takes so much water to. Grow an almond tree, which if you think about it rationally, like it's bullshit. It doesn't take any more water to grow an almond tree than any other tree.

That's not the problem. And it's just a baseless argument. But anyway,

[00:43:08] Jordan Harbinger: I feel like we did a skeptical Sunday on almonds and they take a ton of water to grow, but maybe that's just what trees need to grow.

[00:43:17] Jessica Wynn: I've heard it was kind of this manipulation by big dairy.

[00:43:20] Jordan Harbinger: They're wasting water. Give your water to us so we can waste it on cows.

Yeah.

[00:43:24] Jessica Wynn: I'm not saying almond farming doesn't use a ton of water, but it's not any higher than any other farm as far as I've read. And I think it was like a smear campaign because a lot of people are buying almond milk.

[00:43:36] Jordan Harbinger: That's right.

[00:43:38] Jessica Wynn: Dairy companies have a lot of lobbying power, and

[00:43:40] Jordan Harbinger: I can't remember if that was a skeptical Sunday or something a guest said on the show.

[00:43:44] Jessica Wynn: Oh, interesting. Yeah. Plant-based foods typically have a lower environmental footprint compared to animal-based foods, but they still make an impact. Almond trees still need water. Plant-based requires less land, typically less water, less energy, and it definitely generates fewer greenhouse gases. They reduce the demand for factory, farm meat, dairy, and eggs, which some big food companies are upset about.

I. We're just duped into thinking that these plant-based products are automatically a healthy choice. It's just a false equivalency.

[00:44:18] Jordan Harbinger: I know people with allergies turn to these products as well, so there's some health benefit there. If you swell up when you drink milk, maybe you drink almond milk instead.

[00:44:28] Jessica Wynn: Yeah, and fake foods, they absolutely provide options for people with allergies. Anybody that's lactose intolerant, it's a great product to have. They could probably not drink milk, I don't know, but not. Just for allergies though, like fake food that expands options for vegetarians, vegan or gluten-free diets.

But all the additives used to simulate the real thing. They all seem to have negative effects on our weight and health. That's the bottom line,

[00:44:56] Jordan Harbinger: but the environmental impact concerns that has to be weighed with the fact that we gotta eat right. Look, I'm all for the environment, but I'm not gonna like only eat sprouts that I grow in my house because I don't wanna have an impact on the environment.

[00:45:08] Jessica Wynn: We just need to mitigate these concerns. Like the industrialized production of fake foods, for example, relies a lot on palm oil, which contributes to environmental degradation. Big time.

[00:45:20] Jordan Harbinger: I have heard a lot about palm oil that I think that was also one of those. Caused de jour when I was in college, like palm oil iss, terrible.

Stop using it, and it was just in every snack food. There's a lot of negativity around the environmental impact of that stuff. It's like it's ruining the developing world because it's all they're growing or whatever.

[00:45:38] Jessica Wynn: Oh, totally. The processing of the plant, it destroys ecosystems. It's really bad. But the oil palm, like naturally where they're indigenous too.

Like around the equator in Africa, when it's locally grown, it produces this red, gooey, like really delicious liquid that's high in antioxidants. I. And because it's such an efficient crop though, we've been mass producing oil palms all throughout Asia, and then we send them to an oil refinery and we just strip all its nutrition out through ultra processing and turn it into the palm oil as we know it.

And this modern process of refining it allows for basically anything to be turned into oil. Quickly and cheaply.

[00:46:22] Jordan Harbinger: It seems like the big problem is that fake food is cheaper than non fake fresh foods.

[00:46:29] Jessica Wynn: Yeah. Produce is enormously expensive. I. We're mistaken when we think people are making bad choices by not buying fresh fruits and veggies.

It's not like the whole world just stopped having willpower of how to eat and got fat. There's something going on with the food we're eating, and for many people of low income. Ultra processed food is, is all that's available. Like a lot of people live in food deserts.

[00:46:56] Jordan Harbinger: For those who don't know, food deserts are communities with no convenient options for fresh foods, right?

So if you only have a liquor store nearby. You're probably not gonna have a produce section with a bunch of different choices and a fresh meat section or whatever it is. It's just gonna be like, all right, here's some packaged stuff that you can, he in your microwave.

[00:47:14] Jessica Wynn: And food deserts, they're disproportionately found in high poverty areas.

There's about 40 million Americans that are living in places considered food deserts, so. Stores like seven 11 or the Dollar Store are supplying those communities with their food and there's zero fresh options. There's just no access and it shows in the weight and health of these communities. It makes no sense that food options aren't equally available.

[00:47:42] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, it really doesn't. I know people that like live out of the Dollar General basically near their house, and it's just tragic. You can imagine what's available there.

[00:47:51] Jessica Wynn: We just adapt to it. But there is a movement to eliminate food deserts, but it takes people investing in these poor communities. Tiffany Haddish grew up in the food desert of South LA and she's made it her mission to change food options and food quality in that neighborhood.

So more than five years ago, she launched diaspora groceries and she opened a market in the neighborhood that has fresh, healthy choices where she grew up.

[00:48:20] Jordan Harbinger: So her philanthropy is terrific, but more than one store needs to be accessible to get 40 million people out of food deserts. Food equity is all about access.

It seems like the solution would be in community gardens and local farming and not a supermarket, but I know I'm asking for farms to crop up in the middle of downtown Detroit, which makes absolutely no sense.

[00:48:39] Jessica Wynn: I know, but why aren't there more community gardens like in Philadelphia, they have a neighborhood farmer's market and it's all raised beds, so you don't have to use the soil in the city, and that feeds a neighborhood in Philly.

But it's like, why aren't things like that? Everywhere.

[00:48:57] Jordan Harbinger: Convenience though, right? It's not convenient to grow your own food, it's easier just to be like, screw it. No.

[00:49:02] Jessica Wynn: Any place you see a garden, like a community garden, it's just long waiting lists. So one market's not gonna change it, but at least Tiffany Haddish is setting a good example.

Like if we had more people giving back to their communities. So it'll be interesting to see how it affects the neighborhood, but. Even if you do have access and, and can afford fresh produce, you also need to have a kitchen with energy and appliances and a knife and a cutting board and the time to cook and you'll need to make food in quantity and have Tupperware and put it in a fridge you might not have.

So there's a lot to food inequality and it just makes healthier, fresh options more expensive.

[00:49:46] Jordan Harbinger: So if you can't afford fresh food, I. You better be able to afford healthcare, which is a really crappy trade off.

[00:49:53] Jessica Wynn: The problem with fake foods, it's not just the cost, it's both the cost and the availability. So.

Instead of investing just in synthetic substitutes, we should be focusing on improving access to fresh, nutritious ingredients for everyone. Like we have to be careful that is the innovation and competition increase affordable food options, that those options aren't a hundred percent fake.

[00:50:19] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, fake food's gonna be so cheap in the near future, but is it all just gonna be totally bereft of nutrition?

[00:50:25] Jessica Wynn: It might be if we're not careful, but. Processing isn't going anywhere. And the reason you process food is not because there's anything wrong with it in its natural state, but because there's more money to be made when you process. There's a lot of money being made in the food industry, but it's not going to the farm end of things.

The farmer gets less than 15% of your food dollars. The money goes to food processors who are benefiting from the fact that we're overproducing. The philosophy is that if you complicate food to give it flavor and novelty, that's where the money is. And food companies know this, so the food industry, it's crazy.

They spend more on lobbying than the defense industry.

[00:51:09] Jordan Harbinger: Wow. I had no idea. That's huge money.

[00:51:12] Jessica Wynn: I know. It's crazy.

[00:51:15] Jordan Harbinger: What?

[00:51:15] Jessica Wynn: Yeah. But I think it's like 15 companies make all of our calories, and about 75% of those calories come from the top six companies that produce grain and oil.

[00:51:26] Jordan Harbinger: Holy cow, man. There's just such a big bag of money in making us sick from eating cheap crap.

I mean, the making us sick isn't their goal, it's the result. But wow. It's really easy to underestimate how much we eat of that stuff, that commodity food.

[00:51:41] Jessica Wynn: Yeah, it's wild. I mean, poor diet has overtaken tobacco as the leading cause of early death. Globally. The primary cause of diet related disease, including obesity, is the rise of a diet of industrially produced ultra processed foods.

This is all driven by profit incentives, so agriculturalists need to work with economists. We need to treat food companies like we've been treating the tobacco companies.

[00:52:09] Jordan Harbinger: Sounds like we're all part of a really. Gross experiment, whether we like it or not. Yeah, maybe. It's always been like that.

[00:52:15] Jessica Wynn: We are part of a weird experiment.

Cigarettes, they were chemicals. We chose to smoke, but now these chemicals are silently in our food and they have the same addictive properties and the same chemical makeup.

[00:52:28] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. We're a few centimeters on the timeline away from like nicotine flakes for breakfast. Ugh.

[00:52:33] Jessica Wynn: Odd. Yeah. With some fake watered down sawdust milk.

[00:52:37] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. For me, man, regular trips to the farmer's market. That's so gross.

[00:52:41] Jessica Wynn: I know. I, I wish we could all have that luxury, but when is your farmer's market open? Like

[00:52:47] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, the weekend. Four,

[00:52:49] Jessica Wynn: four hours a week.

[00:52:50] Jordan Harbinger: Yep. Trust me, we go every weekend. It's not the majority of the stuff that I eat, it's just some random things that we like from there.

So we come home with like mushrooms. And some eggs or whatever and some fruit. That's it. It's not like we buy everything from that place.

[00:53:05] Jessica Wynn: Yeah. I have one stand I go to like specifically for bok choy. I don't know what it is, but it's like a treat. It would be awesome if our food system aligned with our values and farmer's markets, who more available, but.

The food industry is just dominated by a very few big and powerful companies, and those companies are not in control of their business model. Their investors are like CEOs at Danin and Pepsi that proposed making foods better for people. They were voted out and replaced. The food companies have just made it clear what their motives are, and it is not public health.

[00:53:44] Jordan Harbinger: It seems hopeless, but what could we do to fight corporate influence on our diet? I don't have Nestle lobbying cash.

[00:53:50] Jessica Wynn: Yeah, I mean we just need a cultural change. We have to come to regard food companies, like tobacco companies 'cause their money is dirty. And ultra processed foods need to be in national dietary guidelines.

Policymakers and industry leaders must start prioritizing public health and sustainability and social equity all across food production. I. We need marketing restrictions, like Mexico has ruled that. No tiger on the cover of Frosted Flakes.

[00:54:23] Jordan Harbinger: I think it's funny. That's where they draw the line. You can't put that tiger on the front.

The sugar coated flakes. No problem. The tiger on the front. No sir. I.

[00:54:32] Jessica Wynn: Let me be clearer. Mexico passed a law insisting on the removal of all cartoon characters from labels, and, and that law also said that your warning label has to be bigger than your logo. That's I. Kind of genius.

[00:54:46] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, it is. So now there's just really small logos on things.

[00:54:49] Jessica Wynn: Yeah. Yeah. And it's effective in guiding the consumer to healthier choices. Mexico has seen a lot of sales of these popular garbage foods go down. As consumers, we should demand clear information so we can consider impacts on our health and the environment,

[00:55:07] Jordan Harbinger: whether you're pro, fake or Antifa, the future of food.

It sounds like it's a topic we must all digest. Thank you, Jessica. This has been a bar for of a skeptical Sunday, especially the vat meat was really. Yucky, go. Gross. Gross. Thank y'all for listening. Topic suggestions for future episodes of Skeptical Sunday toJordan@jordanharbinger.com. Show notes on the website, advertisers, deals, discounts, and ways to support the show.

All at Jordan harbinger.com/deals. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn. You can find Jessica on her substack between the lines. We'll link to that in the show notes as well. This show is created in association with Podcast one. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogerty, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi.

Our advice and opinions are our own, and I'm a lawyer, but I'm not your lawyer. I'm certainly not a nutritionist or anything like that, so do your own research before implementing anything you hear on the show. Also, we may get a few things wrong here and there, especially on Skeptical Sunday. If you think we really dropped the ball, let us know.

We're usually pretty receptive to that. I think a lot of people have a lot of opinions on a lot of things, and I'm always here for it. Y'all know how to reach me, jordan@jordanharbinger.com. Remember, we rise by lifting others. Share the show with those you love. And if you found the episode useful, please share it with somebody else who could use a good dose of the skepticism and knowledge we doled out today.

In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show. So you can live what you learn and we'll see you next time. You're about to hear a preview of the Jordan Harbinger show with a pain psychologist that helps people manage chronic pain when all else has failed.

[00:56:41] JHS Clip: None of us are going to escape pain.

Pain is part of being human. All of us, at some point, if we haven't already, are going to experience pain. Seems about time. We understood it, knew how it worked, and knew what to do about it. So I am what's called a pain psychologist, which no one has ever heard of. People say, oh, well you must treat emotional pain.

The answer to that is no. Pain is always both physical and emotional. That's what neuroscience says. And in fact, what we know is that negative emotions like stress and anxiety or depression or anger or frustration, turn up pain volume. In the brain, we think and are trained that pain lives in the body, like in your back or in your knee.

It is of course, true that things may be going wrong in your back or in your knee, but that isn't where pain lives. Pain lives in the brain. Pain does not always indicate danger. When you have chronic pain and your brain has become sensitive, small bits of non-dangerous input from the body are being interpreted incorrectly as dangerous.

You've seen that car alarm. You're looking out your window, and that car, the lights are flashing and the horn is beeping, and you're like, bruh, no one's breaking in. You're safe. The glass isn't even broken. That's a brain on chronic pain. So it's just so important for people with pain to know that part of what's happening for them is that their brain has become extra sensitive and it is alarming when it doesn't need to and it can be hacked.

Guess what you and I are doing today

[00:58:23] Jordan Harbinger: to hear more from Dr. Rachel's softness about how pain works in the body and brain. Check out episode 6 61 of the Jordan Harbinger Show.