No Bad Food Transcript (033)

GREG JACKSON: Hi, I’m Greg Jackson, owner of Action J Productions, and you are at the Point of Learning with my friend and former high school English teacher, Peter Horn. Today Pete is talking with Britt Schuman-Humbert, a registered dietitian whose YouTube show RD Unfiltered I produce and edit. I’d say I’m excited to hear what they’ll be discussing, but I already know it’s good, because I listened in on their whole Zoom session. I’ve been in touch with Pete at various points over the 22 years since I graduated high school, including reaching out after his interview with conductor JoAnn Falletta last fall, which brought back some happy memories for me about the power of music, especially when I was a little kid. When Point of Learning joined Patreon, I was one of the first to join. It’s true that I pledge on the “Collaborator” tier, but that’s not the reason I’ve recently literally collaborated with Pete, consulting on recent episodes and helping to create this one. I do that because I believe in this podcast all about what and how and why we learn. If you’d like to join me, hit pause for just a second and visit patreon.com/pointoflearningpodcast. Thank you, and enjoy the show!

[01:28] * NOTE: Times indicated are for audio version. Video companion timings vary slightly.

PETER HORN (voiceover): On today’s show ...

BRITT SCHUMAN-HUMBERT: Diets do not work. They do not work. They never have. And they never probably will.

[VO]: … clinical dietitian Britt Schuman-Humbert. We talk about her fabulous YouTube cooking series featuring tasty, balanced recipes for real people.

BRITT: People just want to feel good and they want to be healthier, and they just want to figure out: How do I take my crazy life—and here’s my health issues, and here’s my family’s health issues, and how do I put this all together and not feel bad that I didn’t have everybody eating kale and tofu for dinner?

[VO]: Britt has extensive experience working alongside mental health professionals to treat eating disorders.

BRITT: The highest level that your relationship with food can be is where you look at food and it’s not “Do I deserve this? Do I not deserve this? Am I allowed to eat this? Should I eat this? Is this against the rules?”— whatever the torment is in your brain.

[VO]: Her YouTube show is called RD Unfiltered, and she is a registered dietitian who speaks her mind.

BRITT: I would love to teach children about sex, about drugs, about Stranger Danger, about guns. They should learn this as early as possible. But what I really want is I want them to not learn about calories until they’re 21 years old!

[VO]: Coming up: the toxic messages we can unwittingly transmit to kids, how your liver is really in charge, nutritional support for trans youth and adults, and so much more! All right, here’s the show! 

[03:28]

PETER: Britt Schuman-Humbert is a clinical dietitian with over 25 years of experience in the field of clinical nutrition. Growing up not too far from where I am in New York State, Britt is a graduate of Syracuse University who is board certified in pediatrics and sports nutrition, and she’s currently preparing for additional certification in strength and conditioning, studying how exercise and food interact. [NOTE: Since recording, Britt has earned this certification.] As a dietitian, she has worked with a wide range of clients and patients: from little kids and athletes to people living with cancer and diabetes and various kidney conditions, to name a few. But she came onto my radar as a cook who happens to know a lot about nutrition. I knew I wanted to speak with her after watching many episodes of her fantastic YouTube series RD Unfiltered and trying more than a few of the delicious recipes she guides viewers through in a laidback, no-nonsense, playful style that would make me feel comfortable in the kitchen even if I didn’t love cooking already. I’ve made her Maximum Protein Mac ‘n’ Cheese and “Air-Fried Chicken Wings Without the Air Fryer” (those are actual video titles). Both great, and when it comes to wings, remember I grew up here in Sunny Buffalo. Robyn made her double chocolate peanut butter banana bread—even yummier, and far healthier than you imagine—which we both loved, pretty much inhaling it in two days. But maybe I’m most grateful for her video “How to Roast a Turkey: No Apologies,” which I studied last December 25th when I found myself hosting Christmas dinner for the first time in my 45 years. Tender, tasty, juicy, and maybe almost as pleasant—no basting! We’ll get back to her YouTube show in just a few minutes, but I want to start with Britt’s day job as a clinical dietitian who collaborates with two mental health professionals at Oak City Psychology in Raleigh, NC, a practice that specializes in supporting people with eating disorders, as well as those who identify as LGBTQ+.

PETER: Britt, welcome! So good to have you here!

BRITT: Thank you so much. Thank you! I’m extremely excited to be here.

PETER: So let's start big picture. According to a 2019 independent market research study, around 97 million people in the U.S., mostly women, have set weight loss as their major goal. This morning I searched the term “nutrition diet books” and Google took less than 2 seconds to yield about 248 million results—just about nutrition and diet books. Without even considering online webinars or TikTok videos dispensing diet advice, there are lots of places to get nutritional information. Asking as somebody who has never worked with a dietitian or nutritionist, what’s the benefit of consulting one-on-one with a trained professional, as opposed to reading a book, say, written for a general audience?

BRITT: Well, you know, one of the things that I really think would help nutrition in general is I really wish there were more registered dietitians out there in the universe. Nutrition is very personal. It is like a thumbprint, and how you grow up, what your personal preferences are, what you have done as far as your health, your exercise, what you have not done, what kind of medications you take, what your activity or stress level is during the day, what your genetic makeup might be … all of these things make up who you are and actually create a nutrition profile for a registered dietitian. And so when you take a book off a shelf and you open it up, the odds that that book is going to have the right information for you are extremely low. And at best, what you will do is try to conform your life into something that it’s not, and it doesn’t really fit. And you’re going to end up considering yourself a failure and that you have a lack of willpower and that it makes you feel bad. And then there is a cascade of events that occurs from restricting and so on that comes down, and then it compromises your health even further. And usually you end up with even more weight gain or more health problems than when you started in the first place. So that is why I strongly recommend you find a registered dietitian to help anybody or yourself to improve your nutritional status and your health.

PETER: Wow. So there’s a significant chance that it’s not only not going to be as helpful as it could, it could actually backfire!

BRITT: It will backfire. It almost always backfires.

PETER: You’ve said that you got started to get really interested in nutrition in your teens, which is when what some call “Diet Culture” was really starting to take hold in the U.S. Weight Watchers, now known as “WW,” has been around since the ‘60s, but around the time you were in high school there was a proliferation of diet systems, plans, and scams coming from all over. I think I’m pretty close to your age, and I remember the ads all over TV promising miracles. Do you think that what some call Diet Culture is partially to blame for the now widespread sense of food having a moral value—that there’s “good food” and “bad food”?

BRITT: Yes. Just absolutely yes. So in the 1980s, and actually it’s kind of really funny. So when I talk to my patients with eating disorders, we sort of, we call them “ED”—

PETER: Oh, [ED] for Eating Disorder.

BRITT: Yeah. And like we create like a different persona for this person that’s fighting it. I’m like, “Oh, that’s ED talking,” or something. Quite often, the way I envision ED in my mind is as a 1980s registered dietitian where, you know, we have made eggs completely taboo, and something has fat in it, or you’re not supposed to do this. And you have all these rules that came out of the 1980s and, you know, milk went completely skim and everything was like NO FAT. And it just went crazy and it was exercise all the time. And if you look, you will see that’s right where obesity and, you know, people with issues with weight and diabetes really started to rise. It’s right at that time, because we started to deprive ourselves a little bit more than we probably should have. So back to your question, I think, yes, there’s absolutely a Diet Culture, and it’s not going away. It’s getting worse with social media and TikTok and these types of things that now the teenagers are looking at all the time. So when I chose to become a registered dietitian, I was, you know, 16, 17. And it was the late ‘80s. (Yes, we’re about the same age.) And so I grew up—my mother actually is super awesome, and I talk about her all the time in our YouTube videos—

PETER: Wonderful baker, that’s what I know!

BRITT: She’s a wonderful baker. She’s also like one of 10 kids and she grew up on a farm and they didn’t have soda. They didn’t have candy bars. They didn’t get those things. They grew up poor. You know, they just had what they had. And so as a response to that, I actually grew up having a lot of candy bars and a lot of soda, because it was things that she did not have as a child. And actually that is a very typical response in parenting for children: you give your child what you kind of really valued yourself or missed as a child. And so I started to get into nutrition when I realized I could get a candy bar in my lunch box and the other kids would be like, “Oh, that’s not good for you!” And my mom was doing me a great service, in a way. You know, I was fine. I was perfectly healthy. I was running around, but I never actually created a feeling of taboo around soda or a candy bar or chocolate. I mean, I love that stuff, but I can take it or leave it. And it wasn’t actually until I became a dietitian that I started—and we’ll talk about those in the YouTube videos too, where I’ll do terrible things to chocolate chip cookies and try to make them fat-free or something like that. So that’s how I became a dietitian, and how I made mistakes as a dietitian, and how the Diet Culture is still there, long story short.

[12:52]

PETER: Well when you talked about messages that kids can internalize, I have to say that when we spoke together last month to brainstorm a little bit and spitball about what we might talk about today, one of the things you said that really gave me pause was that nutrition as a topic can be “lethal” in some instances, if somebody says the wrong thing to a child and they internalize it. Could you elaborate on that a little bit?

BRITT: It can be anything, and it can be completely benign and meant a certain way. And it doesn’t even have to be towards them. For example, you know, as an adult, you might say, you know, “I’m not going to have any more carbs today. I way overdid it for breakfast” or something like that. And it could be an innocent diet reference that a child sitting next to you—it wasn’t intended for them at all, but they could hear it and they can process it. And they’re going to be like, “Oh, those pancakes I had for breakfast were bad for me? That was not good? So I shouldn’t have bread now?” And they start to process, because they’re just trying to figure out the world. And so they’re trying to get the answers to some of these questions. And so it can be a real problem. And you can have children as young as 10 or 11, you know, concerned about carbohydrates. So that can be extremely dangerous. Yes.

PETER: This is one of the things that I think is an interesting point, because I think when many of us think about eating disorders, I think a lot of us assume that like, teenage girls are very much at risk, you know, because in large part to the barrage of messages, particularly about female body image that they’ve been exposed to through various media since before they were old enough to speak, and of course, toxic messages can come from family and friends as well. But recently a friend of mine wrote a very powerful blog post about her family’s struggle with the disordered eating of a child that started well before the child was 10. Especially because this is something that a lot of us may not be aware of or attuned to, what are some of the warning signs of possible eating disorders for younger kids?

BRITT: Ritualistic behaviors is a big one. I think when you see young kids suddenly get very involved in making meals in the kitchen, people are often very proud of that. “Oh, my daughter who’s nine makes dinner for everybody. She made us zucchini taco boats!” I start looking at that. I start thinking about that. So it’s like ritualistic behaviors, or if they start asking about serving sizes and they start weighing their food, or they won’t eat their food unless they know how many calories is in that item. Sometimes you’ll see kids just choose pre-packaged foods because they know the calories are [indicated] on there. So it could be that they’re eating just wrappers. If they start having negative self-talk about their body. They’re complaining about the size of their shoulders, or their belly, or their legs. Or another really interesting one is if they start making really interesting foods in the kitchen that are missing an ingredient. For example, they’re trying to make muffins, but there’s no flour in them and there’s no fat in them and there’s no sugar in them.

PETER: Is that a muffin though? Is that a muffin?

BRITT: It is not a muffin! You know, one of the other things … not a patient, this was just a random kid asking me a question the other day. She’s like, “You know, I saw that you can make chicken on TikTok using flour and water.” I’m like, “Chicken? You can make chicken out of flour and water on TikTok?” She’s like, “Yeah, I saw it on TikTok. So that that’s gotta be true.” So these are the things that are now hitting us, which makes it a brave new world that we have to navigate.

PETER: Yeah. I wanted to thank you so much for that, for the detail about how they’re making recipes. Because of course, you know, you could see some kids just getting involved in cooking and really enjoying it and still making the same kinds of recipes that they grew up with. And that is something. So there are some twists to it. You know, if it feels like they’re taking control of the meal time or—

BRITT: Exactly. It’s not that they’re making dinner. If they’re making dinner and they have used butter and white flour and that’s the recipe and they’re just doing it because they want to make dinner. That’s great. Two things: 1.) Did they eat it, or did they just make it for you? That can be a sign. So that’s one sign. 2.) If they didn’t use regular butter and flour and they used a banana or they found something on TikTok and it’s low-carb or keto or something like that, that’s when you start asking questions, like “Why? What brought you to think that this was a good idea to make this?” That kind of thing.

[18:55]

PETER: One more question about your practice, because you work alongside, you work with two mental health professionals in a practice that specializes in supporting people not only with eating disorders, but also people who identify as LGBTQ+, right?

BRITT: Correct.

PETER: Like many people, I’ve been thinking a lot about trans kids in recent weeks, as so many states are pushing misguided laws and regulations that put this especially vulnerable population of young people, and in some cases their health providers at real risk, even though the supporters purport to be protecting children. Keeping our focus on food and eating, I wanted to ask whether you are consulted as a clinical dietitian with those LGBTQ+ clients at your practice. Just to back up for some context for you, 20 years ago, when I was working at Westfield High School in New Jersey (where I met your producer), we were starting the first Gay-Straight Alliance in the county—this is the year 2000—which became a safe space for kids from all throughout the region. Part of the case we made when we were doing that—part of the case we made to our colleagues was that LGBT youth were at greater risk of suicide, depression, drug abuse, homelessness, even pregnancy. And that’s why WHS needed a Gay-Straight Alliance. We said to those colleagues, “You know, we know you care about kids. These kids are at greater risk. This isn’t about a possible moral objection to homosexuality, for instance. This is about your moral commitment to all kids.” So do you find that people who identify as LGBTQ+ are also at greater risk for, for example, disordered eating, and coupled with that, is your approach as a dietitian any different?

BRITT: Yes, they are at much greater risk for disordered eating and eating disorders because their body, and how they feel about their body, and where their body is in relation to their mind or what they want to be, can be at odds, especially when they are young. And so it is a problem. In addition to that, being a registered dietitian, in treating a patient that is trans— You know, if you think about the calculations that are used when we determine energy levels, when we determine estimated calorie needs … let’s take the Harris-Benedict Equation. This has a male and a female version: male, female all the way down the line. There are very few, with the exception of another one—it’s called the Cunningham Equation, which then you have to obtain body composition, which means you have to determine how much body fat they have, which is definitely not appropriate. So treating somebody that is trans and potentially identifies with a different gender from when they were born, you don’t want to put them “male” or “female,” and they may be taking hormones at this point that are physically changing their energy usage. So how to manage this? We use something called indirect calorimetry, which is actually considered the gold standard for determining energy needs. And what that is: it’s actually very unexciting. It looks like the size of a toaster. And it’s kind of like a tube, and it goes over your mouth and your nose, and it measures how much carbon dioxide and oxygen you use for a period of time. And from those numbers, we can extrapolate exactly how many calories your body burns, regardless of if you have thyroid issues, if you’ve been on diets your whole life, if you’re taking estrogen or if you’re taking testosterone, I get real numbers based on your body. And I don’t have to know what sex you identify with. It’s just your body. These are your numbers. And so by doing that, we can actually treat the person as the person, and they don’t have to identify one way or another. So that’s really what makes us unique in providing nutrition counseling for this community. If you have a young child that is trans and they need to see a dietitian—and they often do, for just the reasons you said: they are at higher risk for depression, they are at higher risk for all kinds of mental health issues, as well as eating disorders. And so just being able to calculate their estimated needs and being able to provide them with a healthy diet and have them feel body-positive and take care of their body is the ultimate goal.

[24:59]

PETER: Shifting gears, booze!

BRITT: Good stuff!

PETER: Right? Another round! Just kidding. I’ll wait. You said when we talked last month that part of the misunderstanding many people have about working out is that we are under the impression that we can almost choose what our bodies burn for fuel, like, “I’m gonna run this morning, so I’m gonna burn some fat.” Instead, you explained, it’s your liver that decides. The liver decides if the body is going to burn carbs, or fat, or muscle—or, I imagine, metabolize alcohol, if it’s in the body—at any given time. Do I have that right? It sounds like [that’s right].

BRITT: Yes, yes.

PETER: Okay, so hypothetical—let’s say I have a couple cocktails some Saturday evening. I get to bed by midnight, say, and get up for an 8:30 Mark Fisher Fitness or Shawn Blakeslee training session on Zoom. I have water and coffee before I work out, but that’s it. What’s my liver gonna do?

BRITT: Well, it depends. It really does depend on what else you did the day before, as far as nourishing your body, and how hard that particular workout is going to be for you. What I mean by that is there is a whole spectrum of how you burn fuel based on your heart rate and how intense that is. The higher your intensity goes, the more likely you are burning carbohydrate for fuel, the more likely you are what we call anaerobic, where you’re actually burning carbohydrate. Now alcohol. If you only had two cocktails—if you really only had two, and it’s several hours later, it’s pretty much been worked through your system. However, you could be, and very likely are, a little dehydrated. And as [little] as a 2% change in body weight will cause a change in how well you can exercise. And so what that means is what you normally find easy, you find a lot more difficult, and because you find it more difficult, you actually burn less fat and burn more carbohydrate. Does that make any sense?

PETER: It does. So if you were doing something that would be a little bit easier for you, you might get into the fat because you’d still be doing aerobic respiration.

BRITT: Yes. You would still be using aerobic respiration.

PETER: And does the amount of water—like having that before the workout or before you go to bed, is that going to affect that?

BRITT: Yeah, if you are well hydrated before you go to bed and you’ve been drinking a lot of water and you wake up and you drink a good half a liter, you know, two 16-ounce glasses of water, you know, about an hour before you actually go to exercise— Don’t do it any closer than that, because then it’s just kind of sitting and sloshing around in your gut and it’s not really giving you any performance benefit. Then you’re probably going to be okay. Now if you drink alcohol after you work out, there is a lot of research that shows that it actually inhibits the ability for your body to build muscle or repair muscle, which is actually what you want to happen when you work out. So that’s something to keep in mind too. So if you’ve worked out that day and you’re planning to go have some cocktails later that afternoon, know that it may not be as effective as a workout if you hadn’t.

PETER: All right. Because that’s just a little depressing, I’m going to move on to your fabulous show …

BRITT: Sorry. I know. Dietitians can be depressing.

PETER: No, just kidding! No, it makes sense and it’s helpful to know.

[29:30]

PETER: On to your fabulous show on YouTube! The show is called RD Unfiltered, as in “Registered Dietitian giving it to you straight”—or at least that’s how I take it, and people can check it out by searching that on YouTube and/or visiting and subscribing to your [YouTube] channel, Britt RD. As I said earlier, the show is totally delightful, with no-nonsense, healthy but delicious recipes presented in about 10 minutes or less for soups, desserts, quick weeknight meals, great holiday classics like roast turkey and ham, or cranberry sorbet with prosecco. A recent episode compared two chilis, one made with beef and one with a beef-substitute. And you had some interesting information about how the body metabolizes the vegetable-based protein a little differently from beef-based protein. There’s even a 38-second gem called “Pizza Happens,” where you announce that there will be no “nutritioning” or cooking because you’re spent and you’re just gonna order in some pizza. That’s an obvious outlier, but it totally fits with your vibe that this is about real food solutions for real people who lead real lives that don’t always allow time for a home-cooked meal—even an easy home-cooked meal. I want to note that you usually include some message about nutrition or food science as you work through a recipe, but it never feels like anything approaching a lecture. For instance, in a recent installment called “Strawberry Shortcake and Other Dessert Discussions,” you emphasized that dessert should be considered part of a meal—not a reward for “cleaning your plate,” for instance—but part of the meal. In your demo of split pea soup with ham, you mentioned how important it is for kids to see adults eating different kinds of food. But it never feels preachy. After a quarter-century in nutrition, why’d you decide to make this show?

BRITT: So the “unfiltered” part, we had originally planned to have a lot more swearing or cursing in the show, but I just didn’t feel the need, so we haven’t done any of that. But so I feel like now the “RD Unfiltered” is—you’re right. I’m actually just sharing how I live. I’m sharing how does a dietitian really live? We are not the food police. We actually order pizza and eat strawberry shortcake because it tastes good. So that’s really the purpose of it, I think, at this point— So, with kids, here’s the thing. It’s called Ellyn Satter’s Division of Responsibility, and here’s where we all screwed it up and we got it all broken is that, when they’re babies, we are taught to trust the child. Like they say, “You know, your baby will tell you when he’s hungry. Your baby will tell you when they’re not. Don’t worry about it! Your baby will let you know.” Actually they have those internal cues up until easily the age of eight years old, and it’s called “eating competency” or Ellyn Satter’s Division of Responsibility, where the kids, you just have to trust them. And they will sometimes eat a tremendous amount. And sometimes they won’t and that’s why we don’t want them to clean their plate. And don’t get too crazy about it! Don’t get caught up in the whole craziness about everything, all the hype in the books, all the hype on the internet—even though I’m on the internet, you’re on the internet, we’re all on the internet. But you know, it’s just, you know, it’s okay. Pizza is allowed, you know? Dessert tastes good, and you want to eat it. It could be where, if you’re feeding a child who probably didn’t eat a lot of dinner, this way you might be able to use some vanilla yogurt and have them crush some Oreo cookies into it and have them eat that. It enhances the texture, it enhances their calcium intake, their protein intake … and they think you’re a hero because you gave them dessert! So it’s that kind of stuff. Everybody needs to just take a breath. So that’s what the “unfiltered” means now.

[34:10]

PETER: One of the things I was thinking about it as I was preparing for this interview, and especially when you said we’re both on the internet, you know, it’s a little bit of a similar place. I mean, like for example, the way I describe this podcast, it’s a show about what and how and why we learn. But part of the reason that I wanted to make it was to be able to communicate some of the most important ideas that I’ve figured out about what and how and why we learn with a larger audience, that is to say, larger than any given class that I would have, or any given group of colleagues, you know, that I could do at one time, so that people who might be interested in some of these things about a range of topics could have access to them asynchronously, as we say. And I wondered if there was a little bit of a comparison: you figured out some stuff, some things that you’ve found yourself saying, or ideas that you’ve relied on, or perhaps refined, over the course of your professional clinical experience. And this is a way to almost like, you know, I mean, maybe a lump of sugar makes the medicine go down! I mean, you are sharing valuable nutritional information, but it’s presented in these recipes. So I wondered if that was consciously part of the project for you to have that those ideas find a wider audience than just the students you might be teaching at the time, or clients you might be working with. I wondered if that was part of it, because I certainly end up learning.

BRITT: It is. It’s for everyone. I’ve sat with thousands of people, just, you know, “Hey!” like kind of open door, “Come and tell me what kinds of nutrition questions you have.” And there does seem to be a little bit of a pattern. You know, people just want to feel good and they want to be healthier and they just want to figure out: How do I take my crazy life—and here’s my health issues, and here’s my family’s health issues, and how do I put this all together and not feel bad that I didn’t have everybody eating kale and tofu for dinner? You know, that’s what the internet is doing to us. Everybody needs to like take a breath. Like strawberry shortcake and pizza are great. There’s no reason that you can’t. And we actually find that when you start giving yourself permission, and you take a breath and you relax into it, people’s health improves, their body composition changes. They actually stop trying to diet and they actually lose body fat and they feel better. And their blood pressure goes down, and their blood sugars are well controlled. It’s called intuitive eating. And that’s why dietitians all the time say diets do not work. They do not work. They never have. And they never probably will.

[37:33]

PETER: That’s one of the things that I recalled from what we talked about you know, when we chatted last month, that you want to give people permission to like what they’re eating. But also that your show, again, based on your professional clientele, that you also want it to be a safe space for kids, for example, with eating disorders, or ballet dancers and everybody else. To circle back to that calorie question, I noticed you don’t talk in specific terms about calories, for example, how many calories might be in a serving of a given dish. And I’m fairly certain, that’s an intentional choice, right?

BRITT: It is intentional. Well, I think when we were first starting out, we started to include some [calorie counts], and then we pushed that to the side and were like, “That’s not what we want. We want to make this safe space because there are not a lot of safe spaces for patients with eating disorders.” We don’t [include calorie information], but you know what [the recipes] are, they’re balanced. They are healthy. Even the strawberry shortcake. The one that I did for dessert has strawberries in it. It’s high in vitamin C, you know. Yes, there’s a biscuit mix, but it’s a really cool biscuit that we make, and they’re not out of control and it’s delicious and it makes you happy. And guess what? Then, you’re not, you know, secretly eating a bag of chips or doing some other crazy things with it. So that’s really how I like to think of it. One of the things that I say a lot is “I would love to teach children about sex, about drugs, about Stranger Danger, about guns. They should learn this as early as possible. But what I really want is I want them to not learn about calories until they’re 21 years old!”

PETER: Yeah, that’s right!

BRITT: That’s what I really want. They should not learn about calories until they are much older.

PETER: Oh man! Outside of chemistry class, for example, but those are different. [The “calorie” we refer to with respect to food is actually a kilocalorie in chemistry. A kilocalorie is the amount of heat required to raise the temperature of 1 kilogram of water one degree Celsius.]

BRITT: Different kinds of calories. Yeah.

[39:52]

PETER: This is one of the ways that I think that getting healthier with respect to food is so much different than say, a habit like tobacco, you know, which you can just cut out. It’s hard, but you can just cut it out of your life and you’ll be okay. But you can’t not eat. You’re going to have to eat. And so your relationship with food can’t be one of complete denial and feeling self- abnegation all the time or you’re gonna snap. And I guess that’s the rationale behind diets not working, or too restrictive a diet not working.

BRITT: Yeah, you know, anorexia has the highest mortality rate among all of the mental illnesses. And so the hardest thing about treating someone with an eating disorder is you can’t take food and take it out of their life. You have to bring it into their lives and you have to constantly talk about it, and challenge them, and bring them back to safety. And many people in the United States do have what we call disordered eating. They do not necessarily have an eating disorder, but they do have disordered eating, and there are situations where they are afraid of food or where if they’re going to eat this piece of cake, well, “I have to go to the gym tomorrow and I’m going to have to burn 400 more calories to compensate for this piece of cake,” which by the way, is the definition of purging. So yes, those are the things that make it very, very difficult to treat eating disorders or improve on habits. So giving people permission to just like what they like and take a step back and take a breath and learn to eat when they’re hungry and eat the cookie because they want the cookie, not because the cookie is forbidden or is taboo, or they’re eating the cookie because they’re dehydrated or they’re eating the cookie because they haven’t had any protein because they’re trying to be vegan. Whatever the reason that you might want to go for the cookie, I want it to be the cookie, because you know what? The chocolate chip cookie tastes good and you want to eat it! And once you have one and it felt good and that’s great. And maybe you want two. Great. If you don’t, great also. Get a glass of milk. You know, that’s what we want it to be. We want food to be like air. It’s neutral. You can enjoy some things and you can dislike other things, but that’s hopefully the ultimate objective. The highest level that your relationship with food can be is where you look at food and it’s not “Do I deserve this? Do I not deserve this? Am I allowed to eat this? Should I eat this? Is this against the rules?”— whatever the torment is in your brain. We’ve got to get to the point where you’re just eating the food. There are things, we call them “fear foods,” where people are just absolutely terrified to eat a piece of whole grain bread or a slice of pizza or ice cream, or put sugar in a cup of tea. Like these are just terrifying things to them. And they’re truly afraid of those things.

[43:34]

PETER: I haven’t watched lots of cooking shows. I do enjoy some Great British Bake Off every once in a while—

BRITT: Me too!

PETER: —and I definitely had an Iron Chef moment when the Japanese version first came to the U.S. But mostly I never really got down with Emeril or Rachel Ray or any of those, and I think sometimes it was because the cooking experience seems so artificial. The recipe calls for a half-cup of chopped onion, and look over there! It’s a prep bowl with half a cup of chopped onion ready to pick up! Almost always, everything comes off without a hitch and the finished product looks like it’s ready to be photographed for a magazine. In other words, it’s kind of hard for the home cook to try themself and not end up feeling a little inadequate. And then there’s you, Britt—

BRITT (laughing): Nailed it!

PETER: —getting in there, chopping your own onions—often in time-lapse, but we can see what’s involved. When stuff goes wrong, you roll with it. When you reached for a bag of tortilla chips recently, you discovered that your kids had eaten half of it.

BRITT: Totally!

PETER: Maybe my favorite example comes from the roast turkey procedure, which involves flipping the bird at one point, which you say—and I believe you!—you usually do without incident (and I was able to do, humble brag by the host), but when you tried to flip it for the video, the bird fell apart! And as if you were channeling Julia Child, you were like, “No harm, no foul, no one’s gonna know, I’m carving it anyway, it’s gonna taste great.” It’s like a reality show, except, you know, real! In addition to being absolutely endearing and encouraging, I’m assuming this vibe is quite intentional, that you want people to be okay with what happens in there.

BRITT: All right. Well, I gotta be honest. You know, I don’t intend the turkey to come apart when I’m in the middle [of taping]!

PETER: No, I don’t mean the “turkey foul,” but like the way you respond to it, you know, like it’s not a crisis, you know?

BRITT: Okay. Yeah. It’s not a crisis. This is cooking! This is real-life cooking. You’re going to open a bag of chips, or you’re going to think you have a bag of chips and you discover you only have half a bag of chips, because there’s other people in the house. Or like, yeah, you pull the bird apart and it literally comes apart. Or, you know— Okay, I gotta tell this story.

PETER: Please!

BRITT: So the story is, you know, for starters, I’m not a talented cook. There’s no talent; it’s practice. So I’m making dinner for the first time for my boyfriend / future husband, who’s French, right? And so he’s French, and I’m making him French onion soup and this garlicky like scallops and shrimp dish, and he’s coming over and I’m like cooking the onions in my not cast-iron skillet, but a regular, like non-stick fry pan in my first apartment. And [the recipe] says caramelize for two and a half hours, so I slap that pan down, high heat, put my onions in there, moved them around and let them cook for two and a half hours like that. I made a bowl of ashes! I never tasted them. So then I’m like putting the beef broth in, and the wine, and I melt the cheese over the top. And of course I never tasted the food, because why would I taste it? I didn’t know any better. I give it to my husband. And like, I taste it. It looked gorgeous because the cheese was melted over the top. And it was a dark black, beautiful color. But if you tasted it, it was literally a bowl of ashes I served him for his very first meal. And so, you know, I’m like, “Don’t eat it, don’t eat it, just don’t eat it!” So then the point is that, you know, this stuff takes practice, and you’re never going to be perfectly good, and you’re going to have to roll with it and think on your feet and just be like—I mean, Julia Child was right: Don’t apologize. You’re making dinner for somebody. Just let it go. So it’s not intentional. It’s just literally what happens. It’s just what happens. And it’s going to be that way.

[48:36]

PETER: We’ve touched on a number of topics. Is there anything you would have liked me to ask that I did not ask, or is there any other really widespread misconception about nutrition or diet that you’d like to touch on briefly?

BRITT: If you’re listening to this podcast and you suspect that somebody you love potentially—or you yourself potentially—does have an eating disorder, I strongly recommend you get some help. And that can be through the National Eating Disorders Association, which is nationaleatingdisorders.org—very easy to figure out—or the International Association of Eating Disorder Professionals, which is iaedp.com. I just wanted to put those out there because it is COVID. People have been isolated for a very long time. You’re probably very stressed. It’s stressful out there now. And so you might find that more people are at greater risk. And so if you need help, that’s where you can start.

[49:46]

[VO]: That’s it for today’s show! My great thanks to Britt Schuman-Humbert for joining me, and to Greg Jackson for introducing me to Britt, and then masterfully coordinating many production elements for this episode, including making the video companion. I can’t wait to see it! You can find Britt’s show RD Unfiltered as well as subscribe to her channel by searching “Britt RD” on YouTube. That’s Britt with two Ts. You will thank me for it! Thanks as always to Shayfer James for intro and outro music. Today’s soundtrack additionally features some of the music heard on episodes of RD Unfiltered; information about those tracks, links to the episode transcript and YouTube version and a whole lot more is available on the show page for this episode. Every show page for all 33 flavors of Point of Learning as well as voluminous supplemental materials are always available at hornedconsulting.org/pointoflearningpodcast. If you’ve ever heard me mention the “show page” but not known what I’m talking about, that’s one way to find it. Or you can scroll down in your podcast app of choice, where the episode show page is usually linked. If it isn’t, please let me know—I always love to hear from you. Thanks to each and every one of you for listening, sharing, reviewing and rating this podcast. A proud member of the Lyceum consortium of education podcasts, Point of Learning is usually written, recorded, edited, and mixed by me here in Sunny Buffalo, but today I’m fortunate for the prodigious contributions of Greg “Action” Jackson, owner of Action J Productions in Stamford, Connecticut. As he mentioned at the top of the show, you can support this work at patreon.com/pointoflearningpodcast. I’m Peter Horn, and I’ll be back at you just as soon as I can with another episode all about what and how and why we learn! 

[51:52]

PETER: We’re speaking today almost halfway through April, which T.S. Eliot famously described as “the cruelest month.” You say that’s because swimsuit season is coming up!

BRITT: Yeah, it’s actually one of the busiest times of year for a dietitian. That is when most people start to decide they need to get healthy and shed their winter weight. I really hope that instead people this year just take a breath and are kinder to themselves and are more body-positive and say like, “Yeah, this is who I am. And this is me healthy.” And just try to get more in touch with eating when you’re hungry and try to eat what you feel, instead of being on a very strict diet and see how it works for you. Or, get a registered dietitian to help you. Even better!