Transcript of Episode 176: Why Our Kids Are Fat
With Dr. Daniel Pompa, Meredith Dykstra and Tom Naughton
Meredith:
Hello everyone, and welcome to Cellular Healing TV. I'm your host Meredith Dykstra, and this is Episode Number 176. We have our resident cellular healing specialist, Dr. Dan Pompa, on the line, and today we welcome special guest Tom Naughton. Today, we have a really exciting topic. We haven't delved into this a lot on Cellular Healing TV, and we're going to talk about kids and obesity, and the epidemic, and some of the challenges going on with kids’ health today. Tom wrote an incredible new book geared towards kids and having them understand their health, and weight, and the importance of taking good care of themselves at their young age, so we’re really excited to dig into this topic. Before we get started, let me tell you a little bit more about Tom.
Tom Naughton began his professional life as a writer and editor for Family Safety and Health Magazine. In many years since, he's worked as a freelance writer, a touring stand-up comedian, and a software programmer. Fat Head, his humorous documentary about the lousy health advice handed down from official sources, has been on Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime, as well as on television networks in several countries. His speeches and other health related videos have been viewed by millions of people online. Tom now lives on a small hobby farm with one wife, two daughters, two dogs, one cat, and dozens of chickens. Welcome to Cellular Healing TV, Tom. We're so excited to have you.
Tom:
I'm excited to be here.
Dr. Pompa:
Well, Tom, I have to say, I thoroughly enjoyed your book, and I'm not sure if I should call you a brain, a nerd, a dork, or a dweeb. I don't know.
Tom:
I've gotten used to all of the above.
Dr. Pompa:
All of the above? Yeah, if you haven't read the book, I'm not just being mean to Tom, but Tom says he was the kid in school that was the brain and called all of those names, right? I identified with something that you said. You said you were not just the strong-looking fat kid. You were the skinny fat kid. Well, skinny fat is actually what I describe. You said look, I had the boobs. I had the skinny arms and legs and fat around the belly. Okay, that's how I get fat, by the way, so I got that. At a certain point when I started getting sick in my life, I became skinny fat, and Tom, I'd agree with you. It's far worse looking than people who just kind of get that nice, full, round blubber look, you know?
Tom:
I had a couple of friends in high school who were fat, but they were also really strong. A couple of them played on the football team, and I was thinking if I'm going to be fat, could I please at least be strong too? I wasn't.
Dr. Pompa:
I love that you made fun of yourself. You couldn't run. You were the last pick on all the teams, right? You know what? I'll tell you what. You figured it out. You figured out a lot of things that most people haven't figured out. When I read the book—first of all, I'll show the book. It's called Fat Head Kids, right? No doubt this communicates to children what they need to hear. I said, this is a book perfect for kids, but it's actually probably more perfect for adults and even doctors because you communicated things that we've been communicating on this show for years, but you did it in such an amazing way.
I'm telling you, the illustrations in here are fabulous, and the examples, and I'm telling you, if people understand something, they're more likely to actually do it and follow through. This book, I'll hold it up as the greatest book I've ever read as far as getting these principles across, as far as what's happening. The real reason why people are fat today, you've got it. It's not about eating less, no doubt about it. It is about hormones. Dude, you nailed it, man.
I talk about something called the 180 degree principle. If you do the exact opposite of what we're taught in the media, you somehow nail it right every time. That's the basis of this book. I mean, I'm telling you. Kind of give us just an overview of where this came from. You might want to fill them in on your story a little bit because that's what inspired this. Start there in kind of an overview of what the book talks about.
Tom:
Sure. Before I do that, I need to give a shout out to my wife, who also happens to be the illustrator because there's a saying in film that sound is half the picture. In this book, the pictures were really half of it. I think she just did an amazing job. I would discuss, here's what I'm trying to get across. This is what kind of visual we need, and she just kept banging them out. I think when I finally counted, she had done 200 and some illustrations for this book, and honestly I think I could have searched the world over for an artist to illustrate these concepts and not found anyone better than the one I happened to be married to, which was awesome. She's probably going to ask for a raise in pay if she hears me say that.
The reason the book came—I mean first off, just very briefly, my history as I explain in the book. I was the fat kid. I was the fat, slow, weak kid. I was the guy picked last for the sports teams. I did all kinds of various exercise and diet programs throughout my life. Because of the exercise, I actually did get stronger, but I was always gaining a little weight extra a year, and that just seemed to hang around. It didn't seem to respond to diet. It didn't seem to respond to exercise.
It was finally when I made Fat Head, I realized how much of the standard dietary advice is wrong, but things turned around for me and lost the weight, got even stronger, got way healthier, which to me is as important, more important really than just losing the weight and ended up making my documentary Fat Head based partly on that. What caused us to look into doing a book specifically for kids—Fat Head kind of flew under the radar for a couple of years. Its really big launch just kind of went to Netflix. That's when thousands and thousands of people finally saw it, and I was surprised, pleasantly surprised, but surprised by the number of parents who emailed me and said, “Thank you for making this. My kids love it. My sons watched it six times,” which just blew me away because I didn't make Fat Head for kids, but there are those kind of funny, animated scenes. I guess kids were responding to the animations and the humor.
That kind of got the idea going in my brain. There's a message out there for kids that they need to hear. The other thing, as a fat kid myself, and as I say in the introduction to the book, so many people, adults, have emailed me and told me they watched Fat Head. They changed their diet. They lost weight, and I can't tell you how many of them would say something like, “I wish I'd known this when I was a kid. My whole life would have been different.” That is absolutely true in my case because I'm 58 now, and I'm actually in pretty good shape, and I'm healthy, and I'm strong. I'm thinking, what if I'd figured this out when I was 10 or 12? How different would my life have been? My wife and I discussed it and said let's do something fun, and animated, and actually directed at a kid level. That's where the book came from.
Dr. Pompa:
That's awesome. I have to read this little part here. Here's the illustration, right? If you look, some of these little conversations go down. I mean, just nailed it. I was reading them to people, even my kids. I just thought this was funny, but yet such a really important point. This is basically saying back in the day, there was only one or two fat kids in class. It says, you know what? After I became one of them, I never once got together with the other fat kid in class and said, and then here's the illustration. “Isn't it great that we're the only ones? Yes, I'm happy our classmates are all skinny enough to make fun of us.” Then, here's the kids making fun of them. “Nice boobs, fat boy. Maybe you should skip a meal every now and then and get off your big butt and move a little.” Because that's insinuating something.
Then here's what they're saying over here. “It's all about calories in versus calories out.” See, this is what people think, right? It says, “Yeah, there are 3,500 calories in a pound of fat, so if you decrease your intake to 500 calories per day, you'll automatically lose one pound every seven days, right?” This is what people think. It says, “Yeah, it's just that simple.” Yeah, man, if it were that simple. See? That takes the words out of everyone's mouth because this is what people think. They think if you just simply decrease the calories—you're so darn gluttonous. Stop eating so damn much, and get off your lazy butt. That is the sentiment of everybody including our government. What do you say about that, Tom?
Tom:
That's absolutely the sentiment, and of course, I picked that sentiment up as a kid. I mean, these cartoons didn't come out of my imagination. That's partly what I remember hearing, and I remember hearing it from guys who were eating french fries, and donuts, and cokes, and they weren't—they thought, well, Naughton's fat. He must be eating too much. I wasn't eating too much. I was eating the wrong food, and probably, I get a greater insulin response than they did, at least at that age.
Once you realize how this is all driven by hormones, you realize just how ridiculous that advice is. We are not doing the nation, and certainly not the nation's children any favors by telling them, if you're fat, you just need to eat less, especially with the diet that most people have nowadays. All they will do is take a diet that's already nutrient deficient, and eat less of it, and become even more nutrient deficient. The current advice, it's just horrible. It's just wrong. It's not going to help anyone.
Dr. Pompa:
I loved you analogy. Let's start with your piggy bank theory because—talk about the piggy bank theory, and then we'll kind of build upon that because I kind of want to take them through this evolution of thinking because the piggy bank theory is really the way people think. Describe it.
Tom:
Sure. I call it the piggy bank theory because people think eating is kind of like depositing dollars in the bank, only the dollars happen to be calories. You have your daily energy bill which gets paid out of your deposits. They think that remains kind of steady, and you can raise the energy bill a little bit by exercising, and other than that, any calories you consume, if you've paid the energy bill, and you've made your contributions to the building and repair fund, they think any extra calories just automatically get converted to fat.
The flip side of that, they think losing weight is as simple as making smaller deposits, so then your bank has to go to your savings account, withdraw those calories to pay your energy bill and bing, bang, boom, you automatically lose weight at exactly the rate of cut 500 calories out of your diet, you're going to lose one pound every seven days. The only problem is that has been tried many times. The math doesn't work out. Not surprisingly, human metabolism is slightly more complicated than a piggy bank.
Dr. Pompa:
I don't want to keep showing these amazing pictures that your wife did because people will think there's not science in this book, though trust me, there is. This is an illustration. You can see. I probably won't do it justice here behind it. You can see here's the food intake. Some of it goes for building and repair fund. Some of it goes for daily energy bill, or needs, and then, of course, from here, what you don't use up in energy ends up converting to fat. I thought that was a great illustration, but again, not so simple, so talk about the Nautilus in this example you gave. Marty, right? You're going to kind of have to walk them through this. I'll show them a little picture of Marty here. Okay. There's Marty, okay?
Tom:
There's Marty Metabolism, the chief engineer. We kicked around so many ideas on how do we explain this at a kid level, and when I wrote that chapter on metabolism, I wrote it about 13 different times before it finally occurred to me what if we—because I was trying to explain different ways. Your house has a heating system. It's kind of like your metabolism. Nothing I came up with quite seemed right to me until we came up with this idea. What if we compare the body to a starship, a starship that is run by software and has crew members who respond automatically because they're programmed, kind of like C3PO in Star Wars or whatever? They respond to messages and according to their program, they do what those messages tell them to do.
The chief character in all that is Marty Metabolism, the ship's chief engineer who controls the heating system, and the energy expenditure, and the building and repair projects. Marty responds to messages, and unfortunately, even though you're the captain of the ship, Marty doesn't actually take orders directly from you. You can't just say, Marty, crank up the systems, and burn off ten pounds. I want to lose a little weight. Marty's just going to respond to messages, and the point we keep bringing up over and over—the food you eat determines what messages Marty receives, and whether you like it or not, Marty's just going to act on those messages. That was the analogy we came up with where I finally felt like I think kids can wrap their heads around this now.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, you said something in here that I talk about all the time. The body, all it really wants to do is survive. Marty's job is just to make the ship survive, right? Talk about the get hungry signal, these hormonal signals that our body gets, right? It could be, hey, put fat, let's start storing fat. It's not trying to just make you the nerd, or the skinny fat kid, or the fat kid. It's trying to get you to survive, and arguably, people who get fatter easily have a better survival mechanism. Talk about the message. I think you gave another analogy, if I recall, about the message could be get taller, right? Kind of give that message of get taller to get fatter, and why it could be the good thing or work against you.
Tom:
Sure. We started with your body—you grow taller because your body runs the get taller program. In order to make the get taller program work, Marty has to make sure that you take in more calories than you consume. If your body's going to get bigger, you have to take in more calories than you consume. The reason we started with the get taller program is I think even kids kind of understand, you don’t get taller because you ate more. You can't just change your height by how much you decide to eat.
Dr. Pompa:
I love that.
Tom:
So when Marty's running the get taller program, he's going to make sure he has those leftover calories, and if you just decide I don't want to be 6'5″, so I'm going to eat a little less, Marty's going to say, sorry. I'm under orders to make you 6'5″, so if you eat less, I'm going to burn just a little less energy, so I have the leftover calories for building materials. We started with that, so people understand when Marty gets a command that says store fat, he's going to find a way to store fat, and if you just eat a little less without dealing with that store fat signal first, Marty's going to say, well, he's eating less, but I'm supposed to store fat. I have orders. I will just slow the metabolism down, cancel a few building and repair projects, make sure I have those leftover calories to store fat. That was the way we wanted kids to understand this isn't a bank account. It's about Marty following orders.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, so I mean ultimately, the questions is okay, how do we change the orders, right? How do we get our body to say, let's not keep storing fat? Hey, we're good here. You talked about hormones like insulin, leptin. Kind of build on that now that you've kind of built the argument through Marty's Nautilus ship.
Tom:
Sure. One thing we wanted kids to understand is, we wanted them to understand a little bit more about hunger. Most of us grow up thinking you're hungry because food goes into your fuel tank, and when your fuel tank gets a little low, you get hungry. You're supposed to add more fuel to the system. What we wanted kids to understand is there are other reasons you get hungry. We only have, as we explain in the book, a car has different hatches for oil, for radiator fluid, for wiper fluid, and you get a signal saying fill this one fluid, this one thing I need.
Our bodies, unfortunately, aren't coded that way. There's only one hatch. It's right here, and the only way Marty can tell you to fill that hatch is to make you hungry, so when your body needs things, he's going to make you hungry, and it's not just about fuel. Marty will make you hungry if he decides he needs more protein for building and repair projects. He'll make you hungry if he doesn’t think you've taken in enough nutrients. He'll make you hungry if you're not taking in the right fats because fat is your body's second most important building material after protein.
We kind of explain hunger in that way. It's Marty's way of saying I need something. One way you can end up eating less, naturally, without being hungry is to make sure you're giving Marty what he needs. Make sure you're giving him enough protein, enough actual nutrients, and enough quality fats. Then we move on to explaining how the fuel system works, and that's where we get into the insulin, and the blood sugar, and all the rest.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, that's awesome. You know it's -inaudible-, I think adults as well as kids have been understanding. Of course, when you have high insulin, your body wants to store fat. Then there's the communication with the hormone called leptin. Kind of explain that a little bit because we have on past shows. You know, leptin is a signal from your fat cell to your brain that says, hey, we have plenty down here. Burn fat. We know that insulin and other things can interfere with that signal. Kind of explain that because I think that's a really good understanding of really why people get fat. It's not calories in versus calories out. [18:59] is the problem.
Tom:
Yeah, absolutely. Well, we start by explaining the dangers of high blood sugar. High blood sugar will damage what we call the Nautilus, your body, your starship. -inaudible-
Dr. Pompa:
So all of the carbohydrates, all the sugars—and we'll talk specifically about fructose in a minute, really are the big part of the problem. Go ahead.
Tom:
Sure. All of those processed carbohydrates they jack your blood sugar up incredibly. Marty knows that high blood sugar will damage the ship, and he is programmed to bring it down as fast as possible, so he does that by releasing the hormone insulin. That's what he's programmed to do. Unfortunately, insulin, and we couldn't live without insulin, but when you have too much insulin, it sends this very powerful signal to your body to make and store fat. By putting Marty in a situation where he has to bring down this blood sugar that you've sent through the roof with bad food, at the same time, you're commanding him to store fat because he has to burn away that blood sugar first.
He doesn't want to burn fat when your blood sugar's high. He wants to burn away the blood sugar to prevent damage to the ship. That's one way high insulin makes us fat, but getting back to the leptin angle, as you explained, leptin is your body's—when leptin goes to your brain, it says the fat supplies are sufficient. You can burn fat. You don't have to store more fat. Unfortunately, among its other very negative effects, when insulin is too high, it actually blocks that signal from reaching the brain, so even though your fat cells are releasing leptin, which should signal your brain there's plenty of fat in this ship. You don't have to make more. The brain doesn't see the signal. It thinks the fat supplies are dangerously low, so it makes you hungry, and worse, it slows down your metabolism to try to avoid burning away what it now considers precious fat stores, and sets up exactly the wrong situation.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. Well said. You know, we interviewed Jason Fung. I don't know when that one will air. It may or may not be before this one. I hope it does because Jason hits the science, right? Then we follow it with this example. I think it's just two perfect shows back-to-back because we talked about insulin in depth and its relation to diabetes. I thought Jason did a spectacular job. I mean talking about how insulin is forcing glucose in our cells and they get filled. He has a whole really unique concept. Anyway, watch that for sure, Tom. I think you'll really like it.
Tom:
I will.
Dr. Pompa:
I think you also talked about the importance of sleep. I think at least when we talk about kids, I look at my kids, and oftentimes they're not getting sleep. Then all of a sudden they sleep for 16 hours, and I wonder what the heck happened to them, and I think they died The body is like it's so important that it says okay, we're going to catch up now. Talk about sleep and its relationship to this whole thing.
Tom:
Sure, and I have a 12 year old and a 13 year old, so I know exactly what you're talking about. Sleep is very important for a number of reasons. First and foremost, there are certain kinds of repairs to your body or to the ship, the Nautilus, as we explain in the book, that can only be done when the ship is powered down, in other words, when you're asleep. It really takes that good eight, maybe nine hours for kids, especially, to make those building and repair projects work, so when they're not sleeping enough, they are not allowing the body to do all the building and repair that it does, and if you're not doing those daily repairs, the ship eventually breaks down. You get sick.
The other thing is, boys especially, not saying that sleep is more important for boys, but one thing we bring up is those adolescent years, it's crucial that boys are producing the correct amount of testosterone that's going to make them grow their muscles, and keep lean, and have their energy high, and all the rest of that. Well, a good chunk of your body's testosterone is only made when you're sleeping, and there have been experiments that showed when they took healthy young men, and they cut their sleep from eight hours to four hours, guess what? They produced half as much testosterone.
I think kids today, maybe more than in previous generations, kind of have a problem with not getting enough sleep because they want to stay up all night and check their Facebook page, and mess around on their pads, and all the rest of that. While we were writing the book, I read a case about a girl who was diagnosed with ADD. She was put on drugs. Turned out, she just wasn't sleeping enough. She was obsessed with Facebook, and she would sneak to her pad in the middle of the night, and spend half the night checking Facebook. When her parents finally realized what was going on, they started locking the pad up at night, and suddenly she didn't have ADD anymore. Sleep's important for all of us, but I think for a growing child, when your body's being really kind of formed, especially important.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. I agree. Let's talk about another thing. Sleep, no doubt affecting kids. I think you hit on another one that even Dr. Fung hit on as well. Fructose. We have kids today who are drinking energy drinks loaded with fructose, plain old juice, probably from the time they were babies. You know, fructose is in all the drinks that they're doing. I mean, it's in everything, in ketchup, high fructose corn syrup. Talk about fructose because it's not the average sugar, and you bring that out really well, some great illustrations again.
Tom:
Yeah, there are a lot of reasons it's not your average sugar, but I think maybe the one that's the most important—well, first let's talk about glucose. When you eat starch, it turns to glucose. Taking in too much glucose is a bad idea, but your body at least has a somewhat generous capacity to store glucose in your glycogen stores, and we explain that in the book. If you're not completely overdoing it, your body can store away that glucose, and then when you're not eating, it will release the glucose.
Fructose, unfortunately, cannot be stored in your glycogen stores, so when you take in a big old fructose drink, or eat too much sugar that has fructose in it, there's really no good place to store it, so your body does what it has to do, what it's programmed to do, sends it off to the liver and converts it into fat, and you can end up with fatty liver. We have kids nowadays who have fatty liver disease, which just blows my mind. That used to be something you saw, what, mostly in adult alcoholics.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, first time in history we have kids with non-alcoholic fatty liver.
Tom:
Yeah, just blows my mind, and every time I'm somewhere, and I see a kid running over to the soda machine and grabbing a 44 ounce sodait's not my business. I'm not going to go tell them don't do that, or have a talk with the parents, but I'm sitting there tearing out what little hair I have left thinking oh, my god.
Dr. Pompa:
Here's the other misnomer. We see this skinny kid drinking the fructose and think, well, he's getting away with it. What we don't realize is the skinny kid actually has the fattier liver than the fat kid because it's a matter of where they're storing it.
Tom:
Absolutely. In fact, I came across an article which we—in the film version of the book, which is coming out later, we do put various articles up onscreen to show what we're talking about, and one of the articles was how fatty liver disease and type 2 diabetes are now becoming an increasing problem among young people who appear to be thin.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I know. It's remarkable. Oftentimes we see the heart attacks and the diabetes more in the thin population because it's the fatty liver, and no doubt, fructose is the biggest player out of all of it, and kids today, they're just getting exposed to it. High fructose corn syrup is so cheap as a sweetener. That's why they put it in everything, so they're not out to kill you. They're just out to make a faster buck.
Tom:
Yeah, and it's partly because it's cheap, of course, largely because corn is subsidized by the government, so they subsidize the foods that make us fat, and then they try to come up with programs to make us thin, which don't work. This way, we get to waste tax payer dollars twice. It's also because high fructose corn syrup acts a little bit as a preservative, so by switching to high fructose corn syrup, they give these products a longer shelf life. They can sit there, some of them, for years.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, and honestly, we could talk about a lot of the chemicals too, Tom. What about the artificial sweeteners? That's in all the drinks they're drinking too, the diet drinks and foods.
Tom:
Yeah, we didn't really get into that much in the book. As with any book, you start out with every topic under the sun you want to put in there, and then you start thinking what do we have to pare down, so this isn't a thousand page book. We can't all write Good Calories, Bad Calories, especially if we want kids to read it.
Dr. Pompa:
It's true.
Tom:
Yeah, I'm not a big fan of the artificial sweeteners. We have actually started buying the Zevia sodas now and then where they're sweetened with stevia instead of aspartame. I didn't do a whole lot of research into what dangers there may be with the artificial sweeteners. My mission in this book was to get kids away from the sugars.
Dr. Pompa:
Our friend, Mercola, just put out an article. It might've been yesterday. Someone sent it to me this morning, talking about artificial sweeteners, how they're causing, leading to obesity and weight gain, in a different way, cancer, so it's just another problem that kids are getting inundated with bad information. I don't want to get political here, but basically what you're saying is Michelle Obama went in the wrong direction because basically it was eating less calories. Let's get calories more emphasized on the labels, definitely low fat. You're saying it's the opposite of what our protective government bodies are telling us. What's the real answer, Tom? I mean, we know the answer, but make it simple like you do.
Tom:
Yeah, I'm a fan of saying that there's a certain class of people who think they have the answers. They come up with these grand plans, and when the plan doesn't work, they always think the answer is to do the same thing again, only bigger. We tried cutting the fat, and telling people to eat their grains, and when that didn't work, and we ended up with a population that's fatter and more diabetic, a lot of the so-called experts told us to do the same thing again, only bigger, and even more fat, even more grains, only it's okay because they're whole grains, which is silly because those whole grains are really not good for you.
I actually would prefer to just see the government get out of the diet advice business completely. I don't think they're competent to handle it. I don't think it's really a legitimate function of government. People were much better off when they were getting their dietary advice basically based on wisdom of the generations. They were getting it from their great-grandmother. Your great-grandmother would have told you that too much bread and sugar's going to make you fat. Your great grandmother would have told you there's nothing wrong with bacon.
We had what I called the wisdom of crowds, which is based on many generations of experience. It got replaced by the quote, unquote wisdom of a handful of experts, who turned out to be wrong, and part of the problem whenever you put a decision in the hand of a small group of experts and allow them to make decisions for everyone as Nicholas Taleb likes to say, or Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the problem with centralizing decisions is you amplify the mistakes. I would really like to see—get us to the point where we don't have a central authority telling us how we should eat. I would like to see it return to a wisdom of crowds type situation that's based on actual experience, based on the experiences of countless people over the generations.
Dr. Pompa:
He's a man after my own heart, chipping away at government. I couldn't agree more. The more government gets involved, the more everything gets screwed up including our health. That is absolutely the case every time. Meredith, you hear how simple Tom makes it. I love this book, and I love this guy. What questions do you have?
Meredith:
Oh gosh, I love this book too, so Tom, thank you for writing it because this is just going to be such an incredible resource for so many families, young, old, everybody out there to really understand these concepts that seem kind of esoteric and confusing for a lot of us to just digest in a really simple form, so fabulous. Thank you for writing the book, number one. Number two, I'm just curious how writing this book and your own health journey has impacted how you've raised your girls.
Tom:
I would say if anything, it was a little more the other way around. The way I've raised my girls was an influence on how I wrote the book because we've seen the effects of a good diet, not a perfect diet, and we can talk about that later because that's the name of the last chapter, “It's Perfectly Good To Be Good Instead of Perfect.” We have our daughters on a good diet, and the diet that I came to understand was the correct diet based on my own experiences in the years since making Fat Head.
This information's always evolving. I never want to think I have all the answers; I can stop learning now, but I've learned a lot, and we put that into action for ourselves, for our kids. My daughters are lean. They're healthy. They're happy. They don't have the kind of senseless emotional breakdowns that you see in a lot of kids, which is the results of their blood sugar crashing after bad food. My daughters are 12 and 13. They have never had a single cavity. We based the facts of what a good diet can do for kids. By the same token, I see what some of their friends eat.
One daughter went and spent a weekend with a friend of hers. She came back. She told me breakfast was Pop-Tarts and orange juice, and I was pleased she didn't know the name of the cereal because we don't keep cereal in the house, but she said it looked like little woven things, and it was covered with sugar. To them, and these are intelligent people, but to them that's breakfast, and when I see what my kids friends eat compared to what they eat, that was part of what inspired this book. You know what?
People are free to ignore the information, but I know if someone had made me read this book when I was ten, I'm not saying I would have adopted a perfect diet. I'm not saying I never would have had a donut again, but I certainly would have eaten a lot less junk just because it would have been clear in my brain what I was about to do to myself. Really, it was seeing the effect of good diet on us and on our kids that made me want to write the book.
Meredith:
How have you taught your girls to interact socially with food because I know for a lot of parents it's such a challenge? You can have them eat really well in your household, but do you just kind of send them out and trust them to make the right decisions with food, or how do you handle that?
Tom:
Well, that's where we get into the last chapter called, “It's Perfectly Good to be Good Instead of Perfect.” You know, back in the day, back in the days when there were one or two fat kids in each class, kids weren't on perfect diets. They ate the cake and ice cream at a birthday party, but they didn't go home and have Pop-Tarts as an afternoon snack, and wash it down with a big glass of Gatorade or whatever. We go by the it's perfectly good to be good instead of perfect idea.
When our kids go to birthday parties, if they're serving pizza, and sloppy joes on white bread, and cake, and ice cream, we tell them if you want to eat that stuff at this party, go ahead. You know what it's going to do to you, and what's interesting is my older daughter, in particular, has become more self-limiting because I think she feels the effects more. If they're going out to a party, if it's a special occasion, if they want to indulge, okay. We know when they come back home, most meals are going to be good meals.
Dr. Pompa:
We follow the same thing, Tom. My kids, they explore, experimented. They know because we've developed the contrast the way we eat, and when they eat that, they don't feel good. For my kids, they'll all tell you the same thing. You know what, I just choose not to do it anymore because I just don't feel good. Every one of my kids, and Meredith, you know that. You've spoken to them all. They've all turned from—we raised them a certain way. They went out and explored, and they learned what you just said. It's just simply I don't feel good. My brain doesn't work, and therefore, I don't want it.
Unfortunately, kids today never have the opportunity to feel normal, Tom. If they did, they would choose otherwise because who's going to choose to feel that way? Once you get a kid on a certain diet for long enough, they go my gosh, it's like if I have a choice for my brain to work this way and to feel this way, to sleep this way, to have this amount of energy, or this way, they're going to make the right choice, but unfortunately, we don't create the change or educate them. That's where this book can come in, man, just educate them. Kids will make the right decision, no doubt.
Tom:
Yeah, I'm a big—this kind of gets back to the government and central authority thing. I'm much more of a proponent of persuasion over coercion. We don't want to give our kids a complex by being the food fascists in the house. I think all you're doing then is setting them up to go wild when they leave home. We'd much rather just make them aware. You know what this does to you.
Like I said, my older daughter in particular, is a little more self-limiting. She noticed, for example, when she eats wheat products, she gets little red, itchy bumps on her arms for a while, so she understands if I'm getting these little rashes on my arm, that means something bad is happening inside, so we don't really have to tell her don't eat wheat. She just kind of gets it like this isn't good for me. Like I said, if I had known what I know now when I was 13, I'm not saying I never would have eaten junk food, but I can promise you I would have eaten a whole lot less because I was feeling that shame of being the fat, weak kid, and if someone had told me, you can get over this by giving up the Cap'n Crunch and eating bacon and eggs instead, I can guarantee you I would have done it.
Dr. Pompa:
I couldn't agree more. We interviewed my daughter on here, and she said her big thing was she realized grains were causing her acne, making it worse. When she would give grains up, her acne would get better, so she convinced a whole lot more kids than I did to get grains out of their diet because they care about the way their skin looks, no doubt. Of course, they care about how fat they are or not. Well, Tom, I thank you just so much for writing this book. Matter of fact, where—is it on Amazon? How do people buy it? Do you have a website? Where can they see the movie?
Tom:
The movie version of this is not done yet. Fat Head is still out there. It's on—I think probably the easiest way to see it now is to go to either iTunes or Amazon Prime. It did have a run on Netflix, but that was a two-year deal that ended a while back. It's on Netflix. It's on Amazon Prime. There's actually a licensed version on YouTube. There may be some unlicensed ones out there as well, but there is a licensed version of Fat Head on YouTube.
The book is currently available on Amazon here, Europe, UK, and if people go to the website, we have a link to it. Our site is Fathead-movie.com. The film version of this book—we're taking all these characters that you liked so much, thank you very much. I'll pass that compliment on to my wife. We took them all and animated them, and made them move and talk, and we show Marty at his controls doing things, so we kind of hope to have that film released maybe September, somewhere around there.
Dr. Pompa:
That's awesome. Can't wait.
Meredith:
Awesome. Yeah, I will definitely be on the lookout for that movie, and this book's amazing, and I think just in closing, if you don’t mind, I love how you end the book with focus on being good and not perfect. I think so many of us often can get caught up in just always doing the right thing with our health, and especially on Cellular Healing TV, we teach so many amazing strategies for health and wellness, but there is a balance, of course, in life too, and the importance of not beating ourselves up when we get off track as we all do.
I'd love to kind of read this quote at the end. “When you discover your talents, they'll lead you to the most exciting and life-changing missions for the Nautilus, but you can only be the pilot of your own ship, so don't waste your time and mental energy comparing yourself to people who are born to look awesome. Don't waste your life wishing you had their version of the Nautilus instead of yours. Don't waste years thinking that if you exercise enough or starve yourself enough, you'll have a perfect body, and then you'll be happy. It's perfectly good to be good instead of perfect, so focus on being healthy, and then get on with what truly matters in life. That will make you happy.”
I love how you ended it, Tom, there, and just a fabulous book. Everybody, go check out that book, and thank you, Tom. Any closing words for our viewers?
Tom:
No, I really appreciate you having me on. I think this is a very, very important thing that we get the message out there to the younger generation. All of us who have been fat, weak, sick people, who have managed to overcome that understand it's way easier to prevent damage in the first place than it is to try to heal yourself later. I really, really want kids to get this.
Dr. Pompa:
Awesome, great.
Meredith:
So important. Alright. Thank you, Tom. Thank you, Dr. Pompa. Thanks everybody for tuning in. Have a fabulous weekend, and we'll see you next week. Bye bye.
