30: The Major Mistake Nutrition Education Keeps Making

We keep treating nutrition and weight management as a logic and reasoning problem when it is not.  The math is simple, eat fewer calories than you burn, and you'll lose weight.  If you know the number of calories in a food, you'll make the decision to eat it or not eat it to stay within your daily calorie budget.Yes, weight loss is a calories in/calories out math equation, but it is also so much more than that.  We need to spend more time looking at how food decisions are made and how to better control our food environment.The nutrition field seems to think that we can "educate" our way out of the obesity epidemic.  That if people had the "right" information, they would make better eating decisions.  But eating decisions are not born out of logic and reasoning.Eating decisions are controlled more by our emotions (whether conscious or subconscious), the food environment, and the pleasure and reward we get from eating sugar, fat, and/or salt, than by knowing what is "good" for us or "bad" for us.We're not going to out reason, or outwit, manipulate or hack our physiology to decrease our hunger or increase our metabolism through various diet strategies.  We've been there, tried that (food doesn't work but medicine can).Nutrition does not exist in a vacuum, separate from all the other parts of peoples' lives.  We need to take a more wholistic approach at looking at the individual's emotions and stressors that lead to food decisions.  Rather than focusing on the food, we need to focus on the individual.We also need to find ways to "replace" the pleasure people are getting from food by engineering other daily pleasure inducing opportunities into their lives whether that be phoning a friend, watching Netflix, or going for a walk.Some of the topics in today's episode include:Weight loss is about the person, not the food (0:42)We keep treating nutrition as a logic & reasoning problem (1:12)Everything you eat will kill you! (2:33)Muddying the waters of nutrition education (3:01)We treat nutrition as an isolated problem separate from the rest of your life (5:16)The logic & reasoning brain centers are separate from hunger and satiety (6:59)The frontal cortex has to override the primitive brain centers (9:00)Why we evolutionarily crave sugar, fat, and salt (9:37)Broccoli, bananas, and chocolate bars (11:13)The frontal cortex is lazy and only turns on when it needs to (12:27)Risk/reward and our inability to forecast into the future (13:12)Appetite regulation research is so super confusing (15:28)The 3 books that radically changed my view on obesity (18:20No one on this planet has categorized more papers on obesity than I have (20:17)Diet and exercise aren’t enough (22:32)Relying on willpower is just plain stupid (22:53)The grocery store and fast food chain explosion (26:06)From 3% to 40%: how the prevalence of obesity skyrocketed over the years (26:59)Knowledge is worthless without application (28:37)Weight loss comes from eating less garbage (28:58)The rider and the elephant (30:12)All diets target either your brain, your metabolism, or both (35:21)You can’t manipulate or hack 100,000+ years of evolution with food (36:30)But you can hack weight loss with medicine (37:28)Trying to get away with as much as you can (39:58)Atkins is a snack food company and not a weight loss company?!! (41:35)Obesity results from a prolonged, persistent energy surplus (44:59)An overreliance on food reward and food pleasure (45:27)I hate talking about eating as an addiction (46:29)Breaking the cycle: dissociating food from reward and pleasure (48:20)