Your Ayurvedic Mother Will HATE This Podcast | Dostcast w/ Krish Ashok

Dostcast

In this episode, science educator Krish Ashok joins the host to debunk widespread nutritional myths and explore the intersection of food, po

Key takeaways

• The sugar industry funded research in the 1960s specifically to shift the blame for heart disease from sugar to saturated fat.
• Humans are actually slightly less numerous than the bacteria in our bodies, with roughly 38 trillion bacterial cells versus 30 trillion human cells.

Main topics

• Nutritional misinformation
• Food politics and caste in India

Notable quotes

You are actually slightly more... bacteria than you are human.

Conclusion

The episode provides a much-needed skeptical lens on modern wellness t

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) In India, is Speaker 2 (0:01) food political and religious? I think food is political and religious everywhere to varying degrees. Why should one examine Speaker 1 (0:07) their poop and typically what should they look at? If you eat some... If ghee is helping me become satiated, then what is the problem? Is saturated fat really bad? Speaker 2 (0:17) The sugar industry absolutely paid to have research blame saturated fat far more than it needed to be. The Speaker 1 (0:25) issue is the excessiveness of protein consumption because the gut is not supposed to take that much protein. You Speaker 2 (0:31) are actually slightly more... Speaker 1 (0:53) So people eat like Speaker 2 (0:55) a heavy meal. spicy food, etc. And then they're like, oh, I need Eno. So basically what Eno is doing is neutralizing the acid in your stomach. Speaker 1 (1:02) Now, almost everyone I know who is healthy on paper, for some reason, they always fill the vitamin E test. Speaker 2 (1:07) More melanin means that you can spend your entire day in the sun and you will not get skin cancer. You can either protect your skin from skin cancer or you can make vitamin D. It's like the trade-off that nature has sort of designed for us. Brandolini's law, which essentially says that it takes a fraction of the effort to... create nonsensical content on the internet than the effort it takes to debug it. Speaker 1 (1:30) My biggest concern is so many of the foods we eat are less a consequence of personal choice and more a systematic concealed effort by private organizations to make something stable. How do people prevent that? Speaker 1 (1:48) Krish, you are now a famous science educator, but I spoke with you last year about everything that you do. My first and continuing introduction to your work is, yes, this is fine. Yes, microwave food is okay. Yes, you can drink water. You've largely given relief to people who feel like they've committed a sin against their own culture by doing something as taboo as drinking water after food or during food. Or worse yet, cold water during food. How the hell would they, right? Thank you for your time and thank you for writing the wonderful book, Masala Body. I want to get very tactical and start with something I am very complicit in myself, which is clickbait. You know, food influencers and fake science bros have scared people into believing all food is bad. You have a wonderful illustration in your own book. This food is killing you. We are masters of that. Podcasters are perhaps the third largest body in... influencing the minds of others through negative verbs. What do you have to say about this food, food, fear crisis in the country? Speaker 2 (2:55) I think it's, it's, you know, maybe let's start with the fact that thankfully there's not just an India specific phenomenon. It's a pretty global phenomenon, although there are cultural variations across the world, right? Speaker 1 (3:07) A Speaker 2 (3:07) lot of neuroscience research does tell us that we have a negativity bias, right? I mean, in the sense that you're, Evolution also tells us you want to pay attention to the danger, however slight it is, than the zero-risk situation. Because I think evolution rewarded you with better reproductive success if you were able to run away from danger and so on, right? Back in the hunter-gatherer days and so on. So clearly, I think our brains are kind of wired for seeing the newspaper and saying that, one murder happened and oh my God, the entire city is unsafe versus a headline every day that says that no murder happened in this location, this location, this location. It's just that our brains are wired for this. So clearly, obviously, I think social media algorithms are exploiting that same thing. And I think, therefore, by extension, Speaker 2 (4:01) anyone who is a creator very quickly, like you or me, quickly learns that this is how you write a headline. That's the first thing you learn. In fact, the first thing somebody who will advise you will tell you, change the thumbnail. Make it scary. Even though your content may not be scary, but you know, and so on. So I think it is, but there's this, I also feel, and I say this in the book, And there are very clear commercial benefits to scaring people, right? Because I think you can make them fear something, then you can sell them a premium replacement, right? And then you persuade them to buy that premium replacement. And, you know, that's that entire... So, India is still very early in that stage, but you can see in the West that the entire podcast and social media ecosystem is, oh my God, seed oils are scarce. Therefore, you know... Cold-pressed, whatever, expensive, some fancy oil, avocado oil, and, you know, virgin coconut oil, and all those kinds of things, right? So I think it's just that it becomes easy to scare people about a single ingredient, particularly on social media, because nutrition, one, is complicated, right? And most people don't realize that you cannot lock up a thousand people in a room. and just feed them just seed oils for one month and see what happens. That would be a human rights violation, right? So therefore, all we have are observational studies. Or you can feed a rat, right? Or you can put it in a, take cells and put it in a peddry dish. And so therefore, scientists will do that because, you know, they need to publish. And so, like, for example, you will find that you take this one isolated chemical and give a rat an insane amount of it over an impractical amount of it that you are never likely to, you know, encounter as a human. And then you give that and you publish the fact that, by the way, there is a 15 % increased chance of tumor formation and so on, which then translates to, oh my God, this causes cancer, gluten causes cancer, or this causes gut inflammation and so on. Immediately in social media, it has what I call a complete asymmetric bias where when one bad thing happens, and suppose it has a one in a million chances of happening, but it has nearly a 100 % chance that a creator will pick that up and post it in your feed you're going to see it 100 times and seeing it 100 times makes it feel like that thing is actually far more common than it actually is right Speaker 1 (6:24) because Speaker 2 (6:25) a trending topic is in fact you know as strange as it sounds when something is trending a smart person should probably think this is probably a rare but sensational thing because that's why everybody's making content about it Speaker 1 (6:39) And Speaker 2 (6:39) I think, you know, that is the, you know, from seed oils to maida to dairy to wheat. And by the way, you know, you can go through in a cycle. So like you can start with in summer, you can start with color injections into watermelon, which I've been hearing for the last like 20 years, but I've not seen a single hospitalized case of anybody. getting sick from eating those watermelons, right? Then food colors, then you could be meta and gluten. It can be dairy because, you know, oxytocin and hormones. It can be wheat because, oh my God, the modern wheat is genetically modified. Then it is like whey protein will damage your chicken. They're giving hormones to broiler chicken. And so you can keep cycling this and then go back to the first one by the time, you know, it's a new set of people seeing it, right? It's quite remarkable. So I think, you know, also... Brandolini's law, which essentially says that it takes a fraction of the effort to create nonsensical content on the internet than the effort it takes to debug it. Speaker 1 (7:35) So Speaker 2 (7:35) that's why the internet is filled with nonsensical content. It's just simply too expensive to debug all of this sort of stuff. So it's never really about your health. It's really just about convincing you that something is bad. So there is a premium replacement and off you go. Speaker 1 (7:53) Which brings me to my next question. I am on a diet. I went to a dietitian I would normally never go to. The guy is good for what he does. He helped one of my family members lose 5 kilos. My family member lost 5 kilos. I figured there's less time. I've become a little skinny fat over the past few days. I go to the washroom often, perhaps. He said that your body doesn't really absorb protein as much. So I cut out the protein for the week. And then he put me on this... Largely vegetarian diet for this week. And I'm eating from morning till afternoon. A couple of good things have happened. One is my hangriness from pure caffeine consumption and random sporadic fasting has gone away. So I'm more level-headed. But he's also given me some strange things. And now the reason I'm talking to you about this because I feel like food is religious and food is political. Because when I was talking to my mother who... who espouses the values of Ayurveda and intuitive eating, I said that, you know, one of the medications I've been given is this Himalayan's LIV-52 pill, right? Whatever. I looked up some studies. It doesn't really help with the cirrhosis in liver patients and whatnot. So it has practically no effect, right? And it has some minor effects in studies for making you feel less hungry. Speaker 1 (9:18) I was surprised. My own mother said that anything that is trying to fight against allopathy, you will consider it a scam. Because she is invested in the philosophy that all Ayurveda and all of these guys are good. So then I ask you again, in India, is food political and Speaker 2 (9:34) religious? Speaker 1 (9:36) I Speaker 2 (9:36) think food is political and religious everywhere to varying degrees. And it's very, very, very deeply political in India. I keep actually saying that Two things, slightly controversial things. Food. India has some of the finest cuisine anywhere in the world. Some of the most amazing food. And without a doubt, it has the most delicious vegetarian cuisine in the world. No doubt at all. And I also think, and we have like a different cuisine, a different amazing cuisine every 100 kilometers. And by the way, it's not every 100 kilometers either. The uncomfortable fact is that the cuisine varies vertically across social class. People who will not eat onion and garlic and meat at one level of the social spectrum and then people who will eat that. And then the poorest who will eat organ meats, which by the way, the rich may not eat. And so I think there's vertical slicing, there's horizontal slicing across geographies. And it is such a, this richness. Speaker 2 (10:46) primarily comes because food is deeply tied to identity and therefore religion, right? And I think that is rather unique in India, right? In the sense that food habits associated with your identity, religion, caste, community, what have you, is the easiest way to establish political loyalty within that tribe. Because food habits are hard to change. And you also have to convince people that this is superior. your diet, they will convince you this is the right way to eat, etc. To the level I'm telling you, there are people who will say that in Tamil Nadu that we do not add this spice to Sampar, which is a way of signaling that we are a different caste. It's not even at the level of like, we don't eat meat, you don't eat meat. We don't eat beef, we don't eat pork. But this is like, our Sampar powder does not contain saunf, is a very subtle statement of caste. So in a sense, food has always been political. And I think it is, you can even see historically the distinction between what is sort of kacha and pakka. Food that you cook at home that you can only share with family members. Therefore, by extension, only people from your own caste and so on. Oh, you mean juta? Speaker 1 (12:02) Yeah, Speaker 2 (12:03) juta is a different concept. Kacha pakka is food that you can take outside versus food you can only eat at home. That was more of a food safety thing. Pakka food is generally tend to be deep. deep fried and drier. So it'll spoil less. The stuff that you take on a train travel and so on, you know, puris and, you know, and those kinds of things versus the stuff that will spoil sooner. Juta, et cetera, is sort of like who can make contact with your food, with your water. right? Down to, you know, you can sort of see across India, tea shops will have like separate glasses to serve different communities. And so on, you will sort of see also see people not making contact with their lips when they drink water from a public, just because they don't know who else has touched it. And they do not often do that in their own houses. And so in the sense that I think this is a, food has always been deeply political, tied very close to identity. And so therefore, that we absolutely let that affect everything else that comes downstream of it comes from that. Speaker 1 (13:00) What about the genuine hygiene concerns around sharing water from a public source? Speaker 2 (13:05) If you want to sort of think about water safety, you have to fix the water safety at the source for everyone, right? Speaker 1 (13:12) In Speaker 2 (13:12) the sense that you clean the water, you filter the water, you chlorinate the water, and you make the water drinkable from a public place, then honestly, it should not matter. I think the relative risk from, or you make disposable cups. India is a place, again, I know it's expensive to have disposable cups. But yeah, but you keep a steel tumbler, people will wash the tumbler and eat it. I mean, I think you have to recognize that there are certain things that are hygiene, but there are certain things that come from your sense of identity, caste, religion, and so on. There may be some overlap, right? But I think people use one or the other to justify. more than, you know, the hygiene actually sort of tells you what you need to do. Speaker 1 (13:56) Talking about hygiene, I want to move from the ass to the mouth. I'm not trying to make any innuendos here. It is simply the contents of your book. You've described the digestive processes and the anatomy involved in very extensive detail. I want people to go and read those paragraphs and passages for themselves. But I want to begin with the poop, right? Very simple question is why should one examine their poop and typically what should they look at? I'll start with a very fascinating anecdote. Speaker 2 (14:23) Let's start with the fact that at any given point of time, it's estimated that you have about 30 trillion human cells in your body and roughly 38 trillion bacterial cells in your body. So at any given point of time, you are actually slightly more bacteria than you are human. Most of those 38 trillion cells are in your body. gut, by the way, right? And in a sense, whatever you cannot digest, they are digesting and only the stuff that even they cannot digest is, you know, is sort of thrown out eventually, right? And we know that the gut bacteria play a huge role in your immunity and a whole bunch of other things that we are only now starting to understand and so on, right? So before we get to poop, so the interesting thing is that for starters, more than 50 % of your poop is dead bacteria and living bacteria, by the way. So if you thought it's just only 15 % is fiber and things that you absolutely, from the food that you cannot digest, like all the other things that neither you or your bacteria can digest. So given that more than half of your poop is basically dead bacteria, the fun fact is that after you do your business in the body, you are briefly more human than bacteria. That Speaker 1 (15:44) is insane. Speaker 2 (15:46) Right? For about 15 minutes till the bacteria multiply and number of bacterial cells goes over the number of human cells. So it's sort of, I want people to picture this. You know, we have this very simplistic view of the world, but yeah, we are basically containers for this bacterial colony, if you will, right? And the second interesting thing is obviously the fact that So the Bristol stool scale, which is what I think, you know, your labs will all use. It kind of looks at seven types, right? From the scale of extreme constipation to like diarrhea. Seven types of poop, right? Yeah, seven types of poop, right? So, and by the way, you know, also a fun story about why it's called stool, right? Which is not called poop. So incidentally, in like the Middle Ages. uh the british kings uh uh used to have something called uh the groom of the stool which is a person who used to carry a stool with a hole and like a pot underneath uh for the king to do his business and that person was called he was given the official title the groom of the stool god bless modernity man so when the british king wanted to do his business so he you know used the stool and that furniture then became a term for this because when doctors started asking patients, they couldn't really ask them for their SHIT or poop because it was too impolite in Victorian society. So they said they used the stool as the term, if you will. So the ideal stool is sort of in the middle, which is not too hard, not too soft, and so on, versus like... too hard versus too watery and so on. And I think the idea is to see that it's sort of in the middle. It should not be too difficult to pass and so on. And also quite interesting that if you can try this test at home, if you eat some popcorn or sweet corn or beetroot, it's got lots of stuff that your body doesn't digest. And so you will see evidence of that. You will see the actual corn seeds. uh the yellow uh concedes uh in your poop and also the purple color of the beetroot uh by the way you can use that to measure what is your transit time from both to it that's Speaker 1 (18:04) crazy it Speaker 2 (18:04) varies from people so for men it is anywhere from you know between 24 to 48 hours and for women it can be 36 to 72 hours so women Speaker 1 (18:13) yeah Speaker 2 (18:14) the so that's why when when they go to a doctor with a stomach upset you're often asked what you ate a day or two before not just what you ate, right? So the funny thing is that when you eat something and you immediately feel, oh my God, I'm feeling a little bit of an upset and I want to use the bathroom. We instantly think you're blaming the food that you just ate. No, it's no way going to reach your gut that soon. It's going to be, you know, yesterday's or day before yesterday's food. Speaker 1 (18:41) Yeah, that's very interesting because a lot of people say that their body doesn't adequately absorb food and then they go... The moment they eat, they end up going to the bathroom and they assume it's the food they ate, but it's actually the other stuff being passed down. Speaker 2 (18:55) Actually, that's an interesting point you made. There are people with serious issues where they have valerius atrophy and others where your small intestine is not absorbing properly at all. And undigested food is going straight into the colon. That's a very dangerous situation. Did you want to get that treated, right? And so on. But in most cases, that illusion comes actually from the fact that when you suddenly eat like a large amount of biryani and it just reaches your stomach, your stomach is sending a message to the large intestine saying that, hey, by the way, a big load of food has come. So please clear the dock, right? So that reflexes what then gives you a sense that, okay, I got to go clear my backlog from yesterday so that new stuff can arrive over the next few hours. That's the point. Speaker 1 (19:35) I recently read this and I found this in your book. I found it to be very interesting. How is fat actually lost? Because common parlance says, you know, after a lot of hard work and running, I burnt about 3 kilos of fat in a month. People say burnt fat in a month. What is the actual mechanism of fat loss? The largest pathway for fat loss is Speaker 2 (19:56) breathing out. Speaker 2 (19:59) So that's the way you lose weight, right? So you think about it. You take in oxygen and food is what has carbon and everything else, right? And then your fat is just basically carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, right? And then when it's oxidized, and by the way, sugar is oxidized much more easily, protein a little bit more difficultly because you have to strip out the nitrogen. That's why your urine has urea and all of that. Nitrogen has to be removed. And that takes 30 % of the calories of protein are used up in just that process. Fat, on the other hand, takes a very complicated process because it's optimized for storage, not for immediate use. And our South Asian genetics also gives us a lot of these very reluctant and highly stubborn... fat cells Speaker 1 (20:48) that do not want to be Speaker 2 (20:50) used at all, right? So, because you never know when a famine is coming and so on. So, the way we primarily lose weight, when people think when they lose weight and you ask people, how do you lose weight? What is the mechanism? Like, are you excreting it? No, you're not excreting it, right? Is it sweat? No, it's not sweat. Sweat is just mostly water for the most part, right? So, there's no carbon there, right? So, how does carbon go out? Carbon goes out through your breath. through the carbon dioxide so um and so interestingly right so therefore does that mean that if you breathe like really hard uh you will burn more fat not really because what will happen is that your body adjusts other things right so incidentally um your body a metabolic rate adjusts so if your body needs to burn more it will automatically increase your breath rate all of that happens unconsciously right and if it needs to preserve it will lower your heart rate so that's why very healthy people have low heart rates. Therefore also lower like breathing rates because you know, your body wants to adjust all of that, right? Your body also uses it to like, for example, carbon dioxide in the blood makes it acidic, right? If your body has to adjust pH, right? It will make you breathe out faster so that your, your, your actually your, your blood becomes neutral as, as, as opposed to acidic. uh and so on right so in the sense that your primary mechanism of fat loss is through breathing Speaker 1 (22:13) to Speaker 2 (22:14) get to that point you have to persuade your body uh to well you got to run out of glycogen uh which is your body's preferred first fuel which is just glucose in your muscle uh in your liver and so on and beyond all of that you have to persuade it to start and you have to repeatedly ensure that you're not giving it new carbs every single day right And so your body is slowly encouraging itself to start burning more of that fat. And even then, there are parts of that fat that will resist it. Like, for example, some people, they will lose fat in places where they do not want to, like their face and start looking like really gaunt and other things. But their belly fat will remain stubbornly there. So the whole Indian skinny fat thing also is that we have very, very, very stubborn. uh fat as well so that's the sort of mechanism by which you so basically simple answer is that you breathe out fat well Speaker 1 (23:09) i'm experiencing some of losing that skinny fat uh skinny fat physique right now with some success i had much more success on tirs appetite by the way i use monjaro for about those are actually quite uh very Speaker 2 (23:22) early days and i don't want to like sort of sound like uh somebody who Speaker 1 (23:25) hypes these things up but it does definitely feel like a Speaker 2 (23:27) game changing yeah the game changing things we are in early days and i think hopefully as these drugs become more generic and we address some of the other side effects and so on, I think, you know, this is going to be game changing. I feel for India, for our overall burden of health that we have with these diseases, you know, I think it could be game changing. Speaker 1 (23:50) My only contention on that is one, my own experience is very anecdotal. So this is no research. I mean, I tried to pull research, but all I could find is anecdotal accounts, which is that, uh, seems to be something around blocking the reward pathway in the brain. So after losing a lot of the fat, I noticed a sense of equilibrium, which is not a Buddhist equilibrium, right? Where I've sort of arrived at this kind