Part V Ben: How much? Mike: It's very close to zero. The only money I've spent is getting my blood tested to prove my own health statistics. I spend money on acupuncture therapy, massage therapy and visiting naturopaths, but that's just maintenance. I don't go in there and say, "Gee doc, I can't get out of bed. I'm sleeping 16 hours a day, what's wrong with me? I'm hyperventilating. I'm feeling I'm going to pass out." I don't go into my doctors with complaints. I go in and say, "I'm in perfect health. Can you help me be healthier, or is there anything else I can do to have better nervous system function or better stamina?" I don't spend any money on treating disease because I spend my money on healthy foods, and thus I don't have disease. Ben: And thus you save money. Mike: Exactly. Ben: I've noticed that the new USDA food pyramid guide has an emphasis on personalization. Their pyramid ostensibly works differently for each person. Now, the Honest Food Guide doesn't seem to have anything like that. It's more like the old food pyramid in that it looks like it should apply to everyone. Why would the USDA emphasize personalizing your food consumption? Mike: They claim it's personalized, but no matter what you chose, it still says three cups of milk a day. So it's the illusion of being personalized. It is true that different people need different quantities of food. You know, a 120-pound female needs a lot less food than a 200-pound male. This is common sense. I don't think that we need someone to have to log into a website and put in their weight and age and sex to understand this point. People know that. What people need to know is something that applies to all human beings, and that is which foods are healthy and which foods are unhealthy. People can figure out portions for themselves if they are eating healthy foods. It's very hard to become overweight consuming the foods I list on the health side. You can pig out on just about everything I list over here -- berries, vegetables and even nuts, although that's something I wouldn't consume pounds of a day. You can eat large, large quantities of these foods, and my guess is, if you're overweight, you'll probably lose weight, even consuming as much as you can handle. The challenge is not trying to individualize it; the challenge is speaking the truth about foods. I think that we need a guide that is simple enough that people can hand it to their friends, and say, "Here's the food guide I'm using. You can check it out, too." People shouldn't have to go online and log in to get some dietary advice. The other thing that the USDA has forgotten is that some of the people who need food information and nutritional information the most in this country are low-income people. Low-income people aren't sitting around with a couple of PCs in their house just ready to log on so they can find out they should drink three cups of milk a day. That's not the reality. Ben: They can listen to traditional media to find that out. Mike: Sure, yeah. They can find plenty of milk ads on TV and radio. I think the challenge is not personalizing but rather giving people a fundamental basis of nutrition from which to personalize it on their own. As human beings, we are 99.9 percent identical genetically. The biochemical laws that govern the way we use foods are nearly identical. I know there is some variation. Some people handle carbohydrates better than others. Some people have a higher metabolism than others. There's some variation, but we are 99.9 percent the same. In fact, we are probably more than 99 percent the same as other primates, like monkeys and apes too. The foods that I present on this guide, on the health side, are healthy for all primates. The foods that are disease-causing will cause disease for all primates. If you feed this stuff on the disease side to a monkey, you will kill the monkey. You will give the monkey diseases, and it's the same diseases we see today -- diabetes, cancer, heart disease. It would be animal cruelty, but human parents feed these same foods to their children, and it's not cruelty; it's popular culture. It's the American way. So my chart is based on the fundamental laws of biochemistry in human beings, and that's as personalized as we need to be. Make sense? Ben: It makes sense. The only other question I had was this: Earlier you said that we can figure out portion size ourselves and that that's usually not an issue, but I believe the old and the new food guide pyramids have the portions laid out for you, at least . Does theHonest Food Guide have portion sizes? Mike: No, but I want to get back to the portion sizes that you mention because some people will say, "I don't believe that people can control their own portions." The issue is what they're eating, because if you're eating processed foods then it's true: You can't "control your own portions." Processed foods give you too many calories in too small a physical factor for a person to effectively control portions. When you eat foods from nature, portion control is automatic. You know why? Because people's stomachs will physically fill up before they can get too many calories. When your stomach gets physically full, there are signals that go to your endocrine system that say, "Stop eating." Again, you can eat, for example, 200 calories worth of grapes -- that's probably I'm guessing about a cup and a half of grapes, maybe two cups -- and physically, that's a pretty large mass but it's only 200 calories. You might say the same amount of mass could be found in one slice of pizza, but that one slice of pizza might have 800 calories. The person feels the same level of fullness but they've consumed four times as many calories because it's processed food, manufactured food. What I'm saying is that if you eat natural foods on the healthy side of this guide, then you automatically get full before you make yourself obese. That's one of the big secrets of weight loss, is to eat foods that have a lot of water in them. Ben: And all these foods come with other nutritional benefits on the side, as well as being too filling to make you obese. Mike: Absolutely. You know, it's funny; people out there are getting gastric bypass surgery, or bariatric surgery as it's sometimes called, in huge numbers. This is a procedure that can cost anywhere from $20,000 to $60,000. I call it a lobotomy of your digestive tract because they literally rip out a portion of your stomach and sort of rework your plumbing down there. You can save yourself all that money and all that scar tissues by consuming foods on the healthy side of my chart, because these foods will give you the effect of having a small stomach because you'll physically fill up before you have too many calories. It's food choice that's the problem, not that people's stomachs are too big. It is so ridiculous that modern medicine wants to go in and surgically mess with everything. Gee, does your arm hurt? Cut it off. Does your gallbladder have some pain? Take it out. Got a migraine headache? They're doing this now, they are surgically removing muscles from your head. Ben: And your face. Mike: Because your muscles are hurting. Come on. Ben: That way you don't have to eat responsibly or make your own decisions as to what you eat. Mike: I know. I was saying, in a previous report, that if you're a man and your prostate hurts, they just take it out. I read an article on women, especially women from the U.K., and 31 percent said they would have both breasts surgically removed if they had a history of breast cancer in their family. Ben: Right. I read that too. Mike: Healthy organs. The person doesn't even have breast cancer yet. Ben: And may never. Mike: They're going to do a double mastectomy because they might get breast cancer someday. Are you serious? And 31 percent of the women said yes. Ben: Yet the same people won't eat healthier foods, and they'll probably get disease from the unhealthy ones. Mike: I tell you what. There's some insanity out there, and part of the insanity is the USDA's food guide pyramid. It doesn't give people the information they need, and I believe this Honest Food Guide chart is one of the few that actually does. There's another one out there that I know of that's pretty good; I think it's called the Healing Food Guide. It's good as well. I encourage people to check out this information from several different sources. You'll find that you keep hearing the same truths over and over again. You should avoid certain foods and you should consume certain foods if you want to be healthy. You'll hear that there's a recipe for health and there's a recipe for disease. No matter what you think you're doing, you are following some recipe today, every time you go to the grocery store and every time you order food from a restaurant. Every time you make a meal, you are following a recipe. That recipe will produce a result. The result is based on the recipe. The result can be disease or health or anywhere in between, but you, as an individual, have to decide what results you want and then modify your recipe to match those results. Ben: Well, that clears up all the questions I had about the Honest Food Guide. It seems very clear and simple to use. Mike: Thank you Ben. I appreciate your questions and I enjoyed the discussion, and I know we got off track a few times. It is a simple thing to look at and understand. We went through, I believe, 26 revisions on this to make it this simple. It certainly didn't start out this way, but the USDA spent $2.5 millions dollars, and we did this for $0, and ours actually makes sense. Imagine that. Ben: And how much did you get paid for it? Mike: I got paid another $0. Anyway, again, it's HonestFoodGuide.org. That's where you can download it or print it. You can copy it. You can give it away. You just can't sell it. Please don't. Give it away -- it's much better. Ben: And you don't have to log in to anything to get it? Mike: No. You don't have to give me your email address or anything. Just go to the website, and download it. It's yours to enjoy, so learn from it. Put it on your refrigerator, or print it out and take it shopping with you. Hopefully this will help people make some good healthy choices about food.