Shawn Stevenson
Shawn Stevenson is the creator and host of The Model Health Show, featured as the #1 Fitness & Nutrition podcast on iTunes. He’s one of my favorite people in this space. You’ll see why…
Listen to the episode on Spotify here or on your favorite podcast platform and check out the Urban Monk Academy here.
Get Shawn’s new Family Cookbook HERE.
Podcast transcript:
Eating Together – with Guest Shawn Stevenson
[00:00:00]
Welcome back urban monk here with an old buddy Shawn Stevenson. He’s been around the block have known him for years. I love the work that he’s doing. Why. It’s just a raw, honest, uh, sane voice in the health and wellness space. He’s not touting the miracle stuff he’s telling you what to do in lifestyle and the parameters that actually get the job done without all the hyperbole, uh, love honest people who are telling the truth. It’s not the quick easy fix, but it is the way forward.
Today we’re going to talk about. Eating together. We’re going to talk about spending time as a family spending time with loved ones, all the important stuff that we all know we should be doing. Sean jumps into the science. He delves deep into the why. And I think after this, you’re going to want to break bread, whether it’s gluten or gluten free with the people you love in your life.
Enjoy.
Dr Pedram Shojai: Sean, it is so good to see you. I’m so happy to be back in touch with you. Uh, you’re one of my favorites on planet [00:01:00] Earth, man.
Shawn Stevenson: On earth. That’s huge, man. I’m so grateful. So grateful for that.
Dr Pedram Shojai: You, um, you’re one of the most authentic, Originally, you know, you’ve been here for a long time doing this stuff and you’ve just stayed true to the message and true to the real stuff. There’s a lot of flashy shit that’s come and gone. Um, health and wellness, you know, shiny objects. There’s, there’s a lot of that we could talk about.
Um, but you’re, you’re a dude that’s been seasoned, that’s been around talking about stuff like sleep and eating with your family. And you know, just that, that really important key lifestyle stuff. That’s so highly leveraged, but sometimes it’s not as sexy to talk about because it doesn’t seem like a get rich quick scheme.
And so I just love this conversation and I love being able to have it with someone who’s been around the block and I know you do your homework. So how’d you get into this as your next big project?
Shawn Stevenson: I didn’t know you were going to do this, but you said the key word. You [00:02:00] said sexy. You said sexy. And you know what? I think that my gift and, you know, kind of my Dharma, you know, what I was kind of put together through my own patchwork quilt of life experiences was to make these topics sexy, you know, because like you said, humans are a lot like big, you know, Uh, adult weird cats, you know, just shining object and we’re just chasing after.
And, um, I just had a whole image of the play cats, by the way, which the film apparently didn’t turn out very well. Um, but with that being said, really bringing some, uh, attractiveness to the things that are most pertinent, that are most obvious because we humans have been doing them for thousands and thousands of years.
And they helped us to become the very, very remarkable species that we are. But today we are just inundated with so much, so much of everything, everything. [00:03:00] And so I believe that we are, uh, in an age of great distraction. You know, I see kids hanging out now with their friends on their phone, right? So the kids get together as five friends.
They’re hanging out together, but they’re all on their phone. They might stop to share a meme or something. But that’s hanging out now. They’re not really connecting. They’re literally in another place, you know, these devices divide us and, but there’s a right use of, of technology for sure. You know, and that’s part like right now and being able to see my friend and to connect, but we also do this in the real world.
And that’s the thing for us to understand. Like this can be a bridge, this can be a supplement. But we cannot replace the real food of human connection and the biggest data set that we have on human longevity. I know the guy, all right, Harvard director of the longest running longitudinal human study on how long we [00:04:00] live, how long humans live, and he came into it much like myself.
He’s very skeptical. You know, I’m not, let me not say that. We’re not very skeptical, but we tend to be more skeptical, but open, all right? And so he went into the data because he felt like the lifespan is going to be determined by, you know, diet. It’s going to be determined by, you know, health care access, by exercise, all these different things.
But their data revealed that the number one factor that determines how long people live and how long they live healthfully, that’s the key. Is the quality of their relationships humans with what he refers to as strong social bonds live longer and more healthfully than anyone else. And this was mirrored and kind of like that conversation a couple years ago that I had with him was an affirmation, but the jumping off point for me, even connecting with him in the first place [00:05:00] was a huge meta analysis.
It’s one of the biggest studies ever conducted on human longevity. It included 148 studies and about 300, 000 humans and the researchers compiled all the data on the various lifestyle factors of these, you know, again, 300, 000, uh, human beings. And what stood out in the data was that humans who have strong social bonds, humans who have strong, healthy relationships had a listen to this bedroom had a 50 percent reduction.
In all cause mortality, right? A 50 percent reduction from death from essentially all causes when people have healthy relationships. And yes, obesity mattered. Yes. Uh, quitting smoking mattered, like all these things we know to be true, but this was by far the most impactful thing on how people, how long people live.
And [00:06:00] I’m on a mission to, you know, I’m shouting this from the rooftops, but also, you know, doing my, my brand. of communication, which is let’s make this sexy. We know that relationships matter, but we don’t know that it matters this much. And we’re living at a time when we’re more fractured than ever. We’re superficially connected.
We’ve got all of these quote friends and followers. We are more fractured even in our own house, let alone the fact that we are this generation, you know, the most recent generations. have been more and more separate from, uh, you know, our, our, our parents, grandparents, like we evolved in tribes and being close together.
And so so many families are, are, are distant, but now we’re distant in our own households because we can be under the same roof, but be in completely different universes because of our devices. Right. And so this message is more important than ever not to [00:07:00] villainize our devices. But to use them with intelligence so that they’re not using us and to make sure that we’re getting these.
And this is what we’ll talk about. I’m going to pass it back to you, but these are epigenetic inputs. Our relationships are one of the most powerful epigenetic controllers. So the things that are above genetic control, determining how in which genes, what kind of compilation of our genes are getting expressed and how other genes are getting muted.
And we can kind of dig in on why. And how it’s affecting our gene expression.
Dr Pedram Shojai: I want to quickly highlight, double click, underline what you said in just within the context of the impact would have the nuclear bomb that would go off in the pharma industry. If they had that kind of results with anything, right? I mean, you have big blockbuster drugs that are barely performing 1 percent over high placebo [00:08:00] responders and they are pummeling the cable news networks with advertising.
Day in, day out saying, take, you know, whatever it is, here’s all the side effects, but it doesn’t matter because I’ve told you to do it enough times. You’re going to do it ridiculous amounts of propaganda and messaging for meager results. This is so huge. The problem is. How the hell are you making money telling people to make friends and hang out with their family?
So there’s no, it’s not market driven because there’s no blockbuster drug on it. But I just want our listeners to hear the magnitude of the importance of something like this. There is no drug that can do this, this well,
Shawn Stevenson: Not even close, not even close. And then just to reframe it, we’re talking about a 50 percent increase in your longevity, a 50 percent increase, a 50 percent [00:09:00] boost in your longevity when you have strong social bonds. And versus, like you said, meager results. And part of this is because again, our relationships impact so many facets of our health, our metabolic health, what’s going on with our hormones, our microbiome, the list goes on.
All these boxes are getting checked in this powerful cascade versus we have a system that has I almost said perfected, but that would be the wrong term that has personified and kind of focused on isolating one thing, right? Oh, GLP 1. We got it. All right. this is a true, this is coming from, I’ve been in this field for 22 years.
I’m a college educated nutritionist. All right. In my book before this whole massive wave of these GLP 1 drugs came, In my book that, you know, I wrote [00:10:00] essentially in 2020, um, in 2019, 2018, I was working on this book. I was talking about all manner of these, uh, appetite, appetite regulating hormones, neurotransmitters.
You know, I was talking about GLP 1. I was talking about CCK. I was talking about adiponectin. Because in school, of course, I got a little, little sprinkling of like leptin and ghrelin there. They exist there around, but the stories, the human body is so magnificent. We still don’t know a fraction of the stuff.
All right. And so, but I was looking at this through the lens because again, I didn’t know that these were in the pipeline of how food and how certain exposures, environmental exposures. lifestyle factors that we kind of put in this blanket statement, you know, exercise how all these things affect GLP leptin and all this stuff.
And so they found this. isolated thing. And the market has exploded because they are effective in doing a certain thing. Now, when you mentioned [00:11:00] those drug commercials, I just, because my, my youngest son is 13 and, uh, he plays AAU basketball here in LA and I’m in Irvine a lot, you know, in your neck of the woods, you know, these different tournaments.
And, uh, so we started watching a lot more NBA. And because of that, I, you know, we haven’t had cable for years, but I got like a little program, whatever, YouTube TV or something. So we could watch some of these games, but there’s commercial breaks between them. I have never in my, I’m talking every commercial break.
There’s a drug ad. And one of them that just kept coming on, on repeat over and over again was for the GLP, uh, GLP one drugs. And this one was Uh, I think it was Manjaro, but in this particular one, again, there’s only two countries that really allow this. And New Zealand has so much more stringent regulations on what people can, these companies can, can do because [00:12:00] in these commercials, they’re putting on all of this imagery of joy of happiness and the particular commercial they’re in like a flight simulator, like basically a skydiving simulator, right.
Getting blown around. And they’re like, why there’s some other people line dancing. While they’re saying, you know, uh, violent diarrhea, you know, vomiting death. Right. And I look over my son. I’m like, what if the violent diarrhea happens while they’re in the flight simulator? He’s like the, the poop’s going to go up, dad, you know, it’s going to hit the fan.
You’re going to hit the ceiling. And, um, but you know, we’ve got, uh, and many of us, especially if they’re listening to this, they’ve, uh, they’re, they’re aware they’re awake to this. They could see this stuff that’s happening right in front of us. But for many people, this is very powerful. It’s called programming, you know, and it’s just like normalizing this capacity to [00:13:00] ask your doctor to tell your doc, tell your doctor the drugs that you want and not having a real relationship.
And just kind of feeding into the system that already exists, regardless of how, um, well intentioned a physician might be, or even the person, because they want to get a result. They want to be in the flight simulator. They want to line dance and be happy. I want that. This is the way to do it. Ask your doctor for this new drug we have for you.
So I’m saying all that to say that, you know, right now there is never in, in, in again, my 22 years, I’ve never seen such a. Such a massive wave of people who are interested in being healthy, who are proactively. And by the way, let me, let me say this too. I’ve never met somebody who didn’t want to be healthy.
All right. I had a clinical practice, clinical practice for many, many years. Everybody wanted to be healthy. They might have stories as to why they can’t have that health. You know, my, [00:14:00] my family, you know, my background, all the things that I’ve been through, you know, I don’t have the resources, all these different things.
I’ve seen all these reasons why they’ve, you know, Relented, they’ve developed and learned helplessness, possibly, and they say, you know, well, that’s not for me, but they want it. If they could have it, they’d get it. And so right now there’s this movement putting, uh, we can’t say putting it into people’s hands, waking people up to the fact that it’s already in their hands.
The power is in your hands already. And I believe, you know, being somebody again, food was my bridge into this, into my own health, into impacting the lives of so many people. But then I saw a gap. I saw that even with the best diet, even with the exercise dialed in, if people aren’t sleeping, they’re not healing.
They’re not, they’re not there. That can be the thing that’s tearing their immune system apart. Insulin resistance. The list goes on and on. Once we got that right, we got people well. Even through that exercise, [00:15:00] you know, I trained as a strength conditioning coach for many years as well. The university that I went to, all of these things matter.
Stress, you know, meditation. I’ve been meditating for, you know, almost 20 years now too. Okay. I love it. I love it. And the most powerful thing appears to be our relationships because guess, guess what influences my meditation practice more than anything? My family. My family. All right. Guess who impacts my exercise practice more than anything?
My family. My sleep. My family. What I’m eating. My family. My friends. My community. Are the biggest influence on all the choices that I’m making. So it’s an epi social controller. All right. But to dig in on the epi genetic portion of this. And why I’ve married this together with a very obvious, but maybe not so obvious way.
How do we get this input? Well, the way that we’ve done this traditionally, when the [00:16:00] tribe comes together is when it’s time to eat is, you know, if people want to visualize what we see, um, with, uh, this kind of dramatization of something that’s historic, a luau, right? So it’s like, of course there’s song and dance and all these beautiful things.
But this was something that existed where people were hunting and gathering and everybody had a job. Everybody was everybody was participating and celebrating the fact that we are exchanging. We are imbuing this food from nature to be a part of us as people and to celebrate that. And also it was through that, that history was passed down as well through song and dance because there’s certain things about us, music, sound, deeply embed stuff.
I can, I guarantee you, if I played a certain song right now from somebody [00:17:00] had, maybe they haven’t heard in 30 years. All right. It might be a Snoop Dogg song. All right. Or it might be a Billy Joel song, but you’re going to know those lyrics front and back because music embedded that. And so if you want to think about that paradigm, that’s when everybody got together under the umbrella of food and celebration.
And so with all the busyness of our lives. I was looking at how, how can we marry these together? Is there data on this? And this is what I found. I’m going to rattle off three quick studies. One study was conducted by researchers at Harvard and they’d been tracking, uh, family eating behaviors and health outcomes for years.
And I couldn’t believe that nobody knew this. And the, of course, you know, there’s sometimes these, you know, some of these scientists are not very vocal and able to communicate. And so I found this data and they found that essentially when families eat together on a regular basis, which I’ll, I’ll give some specifics on what that regular basis means.
Thank you. [00:18:00] They found that they had a significant increase, like radically higher intake of vital nutrients that protected those family members from chronic diseases. Like that’s weird. And they ate significantly less,
Dr Pedram Shojai: same food, same meals,
Shawn Stevenson: yes,
Dr Pedram Shojai: food, same meals. Yes.
Shawn Stevenson: they also found significantly less consumption of ultra processed foods by these family members, namely chips and soda.
And these kind of, um, villain esque compounds in food that are kind of tied to some chronic diseases. They tended to eat less of those things when they were eating together with their family. There was something strange here. Now pivot that over into I’m a big minimum effective dose guy for education.
What does it mean? Consistent? Like on a regular basis? What does it mean? Well, a study published in the journal pediatrics looked at the health outcome for children and they found that when children ate with [00:19:00] their family, At least three meals a week. Three was that minimum effective dose, three or more meals a week.
So their parents, caregivers, um, you know, the adults were entrusted with caring for them. When they ate dinner with them, at least three meals a week, they had a dramatically lowered incidence of developing eating disorders and obesity. Their risk of developing obesity plummeted when they ate with their family on a consistent basis.
And you couple that with, and I’ll just share one more, this really interesting study that was done looking at, because for me, I also, I’m always looking at what’s the argument. What’s the argument? Because that sounds nice. You had to sit down and eat with your family. I didn’t do that when I was a kid. I ate what I can.
I’m not exaggerating. I can count on my hands. How many times I sat down and ate a meal with my parents. My mother and my stepfather, one of them was always gone. And the other one just kind of just wasn’t like the kids, my, me and my brother and sister would just kind of grab [00:20:00] food and sit around somewhere, find a place to sit.
We didn’t have that unless it was a holiday. Right. And so for me, that brings up the argument of access. Well, that sounds nice. You could sit and eat with your family. Well, this study was done on minority children who were generally in this context of a lower income environment. And they found that when these children ate with their family members, At least four meals a week, didn’t matter which meal, lunch, dinner, breakfast, didn’t matter.
A lot of it was breakfast, actually. And, the researchers noted, when the TV was never or rarely on, these children ate five servings of fruits and vegetables at least five days a week, and dramatically less consumption of ultra processed foods, chips and soda. There’s something psychological that changes the environment when you know we have a culture of eating together.
And it’s protective regardless of where we are on the social spectrum, the income spectrum. If my family would have known that this would have helped the health of [00:21:00] us, you know, my parents, the health of their children, I know that they would have been more adamant about doing it. They just didn’t know.
They didn’t know that it matters. And so that’s just scratching the surface. I kind of focused on kids there a little bit, but there’s a lot of data on adults as well.
Dr Pedram Shojai: There’s a lot to be said around breakdown of traditions last 50 years. I mean, the, the way three, four generations ago probably did, it was different than the last couple of generations. I’m curious. Did you find any data suggesting that being together like this epigenetic expression and what’s happening when you’re just with people, is it bringing down cortisol levels?
Is it shifting secretory IGA? Is it fixing certain secretions in the microbiome or hydrochloric acid? I mean, there must be all sorts of endogenous pathways and endocrine functionality that gets triggered when you’re sitting down with your [00:22:00] loved ones and saying, it’s safe. We get to eat.
Shawn Stevenson: I’m going to lead into it and then bullet point what those are. But I think a very telling kind of, uh, overarching, like a meta picture at this. was a study that was done with researchers at IBM. So people working in tech, which can be, you know, very stressful. And they, they were tracking these workers and they found that when they were able to consistently quote, make it home for dinner and have dinner with their family on a consistent basis.
And Their work morale stayed high, productivity stayed high, and their stress levels stayed low or manageable as far as like, you know, just being able to, this is the key word, metabolize stress. They were able to metabolize stress, but when obligations or choices led to them not eating with their family on a consistent basis, Work productivity plummets, job satisfaction [00:23:00] plummets, stress levels skyrocket.
And so this is really the place to look is the impact that it has on stress. Being around people that you know and love, as you know, you’ve talked about this many times as well, it changes our chemistry, right? And this is, a lot of this is very, very unconscious. One of those hormones that is getting its time in the, in the sun right now is oxytocin.
You know, both of us again, been talking about this for years and our mutual friend, Sarah Gottfried, uh, as well. And I remember she’s jumping in my mind for some reason, but I remember her saying that women do oxytocin really good. Women do oxytocin really good being around other women, but oxytocin has gotten a couple of nicknames, the love hormone, cuddle hormone. I don’t like to place a label on any of these because they do so many other things and so many other things are involved in love and feelings of affection, but it’s very powerful in that. And so just [00:24:00] being around, especially close proximity to people that you care about, you start to produce more oxytocin.
Now here’s why this matters. Oxytocin is one of the few compounds that we’ve seen. has this neutralizing effect on cortisol. All right. And obviously cortisol has gotten so much conversation over the years. A lot of it is skewed too far into it’s a bad guy. It’s not, we need cortisol deeply. We cannot, we cannot live without it, but when it’s produced.
Too much too low at the wrong times and heavy amounts all these different things. It can really mess this up a lot All right Oxytocin has been found to kind of come in and balance out neutralize Cortisol bring it down and this speaks to let’s step out a little bit What are these two things involved in our nervous system parasympathetic?
Sympathetic, right? Sympathetic being that fight or [00:25:00] flight. Parasympathetic rest and digest. Rest and digest. So this marries so perfectly with our food and with sitting down and eating a meal together because we are going to assimilate that nutrition so much better. Di and this is what we know, digestion is improved when we eat with others.
assimilation, elimination, all of these things are improved because of this shift over to that relaxation, parasympathetic rest and digest. And let me take another little pivot really quickly and just talk about one of the psychological implications. Today, When we are so fractured, when we have massive epidemics, I just was talking with, uh, incredibly, he’s arguably the top psychiatrist out there right now, a Harvard [00:26:00] psychiatrist.
And he was sharing with me that this mental health epidemic, it’s not because of, you know, better testing, you know, it’s not because of, you know, we’re just, uh, you know, we’re just looking for it. It he’s, he’s seen it in his practice. an explosion of all manner of mental health issues. And today, depression, if people don’t know this, and this is according to the NIH, it’s the number one cause of disability and absenteeism today in the United States.
Number one cause. And so we are existing in an environment where we feel so isolated. We feel alone, even if we’re with other people. And it’s because we’re not truly connecting. It’s a part of it. There’s many layers to this, but this is an incredible, this is an important part of this. And I gotta share this.
We have a psychological need to feel seen. To feel like we matter. [00:27:00] To know that we exist. And that we have value and we cannot have that affirmed if our parents, if our caregivers, if our teachers, if the adults in our life are not truly seeing us and being present. This epidemic with children and their technology is because of us, us in our, you know, iPhone teddy bears that we’re sleeping with.
All right. This has become normalized. And so the kids are just being born into it. We have a need to feel seen and sitting down at the dinner table together. It’s a unifier. It’s an opportunity for our children, for our significant other, for our family members to know that they matter, to look at them, to see them, to listen to the sound of their voice, to be present with them, to let them know that their voice matters, that their perspective matters, that they have [00:28:00] value.
And so I just want to add that little pivot point in there of just this kind of psychological and all the thing that does because all of our thoughts create chemistry in our bodies. And we’re instantly releasing a cascade of tonic chemicals, you know, things that are affirmative that reduce inflammation.
That’s another thing seen in the data is when we’re eating with our family member, when we’re in close proximity to people that we love, we have a shift over in a gene in our gene expression that, um, that involves genes related to inflammation. And inflammation, as you know, is another one of those things that’s killing us.
It’s not, but it’s not, it’s not all bad if we need inflammation, but if it’s too high, yeah, it could take us out prematurely.
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There’s so many places to go with this. I want to start by saying there’s. Someone listening to this right now that is pondering how they would need to rehabilitate themselves back into three dimensions. Right? Like the idea of sitting at a table with people that you don’t have. Relations with and haven’t really engaged with in three, four, five years sounds daunting, right?
So you have this like I’m isolated as a human and I don’t really hang with my family side of this And then you [00:30:00] also have the orthorexic side, which is like everything is poison. Everything is gmo Everything is out to get you you could have one organic chia seed with you know Uh filtered water and that’s your dinner and that’s the only thing that’s going to not give you cancer And so all these stressors around food supply You And the stressors around isolation coming together at the table.
How do we rehab our way into this? How do we tip to our way back to the dinner table and, and kind of, you know, light the fire again and get back to this tradition.
Shawn Stevenson: Yeah. That’s a great question. Thank you for that. Because the number one thing it’s already, it’s already happened. If somebody’s like, I want this, the awareness is the first domino. The intention is so powerful. That power of intention and just knowing that this is something that I want to do and moving towards that is going to start to reveal and bring things as a fold.
Now, if this has not been your culture, no one said this was going to be easy, especially if kids are involved and [00:31:00] they have a certain culture and way that they like to go about stuff. Everybody has their own personality, their own hopes and dreams. But this brings into the power of presence right now.
Right. Us getting off of our devices. And understanding a powerful truth. We know our family members. We know our kids. We know our significant other better than anybody. We know them. We know what motivates them. We know what demotivates them. We know exactly what to say and do for them to do things that we kind of want them to do.
All right. And, but sometimes, honestly, again, like I know the things that my wife likes, but sometimes just, I rebel. Like, why do I gotta, why don’t you just, you know, I’m just, it’s that internal, but I make myself suffer when I don’t just speak to her, give her the things that she wants, communicate in the way that she likes.
And then everything works out for me, you [00:32:00] know, but it takes me to be present to suspend my own biases. And there’s this powerful quote that’s coming up for me. That was from St. Francis of Assisi. And he said, seek first to understand and then to be understood, right? Seek first to understand and then to be understood.
And so if we’re paying attention and seeking to understand our children, we know exactly what to do to get them on board with sitting down and having a great family dinner together, just spending time together like this. We know what to do. Now I can give you a couple of examples. Um, you know, my, my two youngest are my, my sons and One of them is very much the last minute guy, alright?
Paper’s due tomorrow, I’m gonna work on it tonight. You know, he’s had [00:33:00] three weeks. Like, that’s, he’s that personality. Um, but also very, uh, a lot of variety, a lot of, uh, sporadic, you know, joy, you know, like, Hey, you want to go do this? Yeah, let’s go. Like that kind of thing. My youngest son, complete opposite.
As soon as he gets home, he wants to do his homework. It’s his choice. Never told him a time, not once he wants to take care of this thing. So he could do whatever he wants. He loves routine. He loves to know what’s coming. A sporadic pop up of something that is, I’m talking, it needs to be explicitly, explicitly joyful.
He doesn’t want to be involved. He’d rather not, not to say that he won’t, but he’s going to have some grumbles. All right. And so I know the two personalities of my kids. And so having, and this is the key, and I’m, so I’m going to give a tip here as well. [00:34:00] Having it scheduled checks the box for just about everybody.
All right. If it’s not scheduled today, it’s not real. So just like we’ve got all these worked tasks, schedules, meetings, all this stuff with people who are not our family, doesn’t our family matter enough to, to put them on the schedule on the calendar, those family dinners, keeping in mind three nights a week is the minimum effective dose.
It doesn’t have to be nights by the way. It could be brunch, Sunday brunch. Two dinners, whatever, however you want to stack it. All right. So that’s the key schedule it. So my youngest son knows it’s coming up. And also my oldest son knows is there anyways, but he would be open to a pivot like last minute, like, Hey, actually such and such going on.
We’re going to move the family dinner to tomorrow. Uh, no, I’m sorry. I know family dinner is supposed to be tomorrow. We’re going to do it tonight. He’d be cool. Cool. Let’s do it. My youngest son grumbles. All right. So this brings to the next tip. [00:35:00] Since I know both of them, I’m going to bring in a mental reward because this is the key.
They’re addicted. We’re all addicted to our devices. My kids. I mean, not so much, not so much, but we are, you know, we, uh, we really are, uh, video games, TV. All this stuff is so, so seductive and attractive. We need to replace it with something of equal or greater value. That’s the key. So somehow, some way, I don’t know how it happened.
Maybe it was an unconscious intention, but so many nights for years, we, during our dinner, sitting down and eating together, we would end up like having like a freestyle battle or like, you know, like my, my youngest son got an iPad and like somebody would make beats. And then we’d all just kind of like freestyle, you know, and eventually I got a little microphone off of Amazon.
We pass this around, you know, sometimes it’d be dancing involved, you know, like we’ve just, [00:36:00] just creative. Like it was a creative mental exercise, expression, and fun. We’ve got so many videos of us doing this and that led to, and, and, and Pedram, I don’t know if I share this with you. When the smarter family cookbook came out, I went to New York, I took my family with me, you know, I went to the good morning America, but I went on this incredible show called sway in the morning and sway was a MTV VJ for many years.
And he has one of the most iconic, um, voices and shows dedicated to, you know, kind of the urban hip hop culture. And he just like the week before I think like LL Cool J was there, you know, Missy Elliot, like all these icons and in that space. And I’m coming up there to talk about health and wellness for the community.
And so that’s what I came there for. That’s that the artists when they come, they do a freestyle at the end. All right. I didn’t come there for that. All right. But when my oldest [00:37:00] son met the host, he whispered in his ear. That my dad can freestyle. I had no idea. I thought the interview was over. It was phenomenal.
It was great interview ended on a high note, but the host, he starts like turning on these music, his DJ cues up some music, he was like, there’s a healthy, you know, healthy hyena in the building. I heard he’s got bars. And I’m just like, what? You can see my face on the YouTube video. Like, I’m just like, what is happening?
But I was prepared. I was prepared. And I just literally freestyled off of what was happening in the room, you know, and created this epic moment. I even put my kids into the bars. And that family culture, my point being, we take our culture with us. That’s one of the most powerful takeaways from today. The reason that we’re making the choices that we’re making is because of this larger culture scape.
Right? It’s an invisible guidance system for us. That’s what culture [00:38:00] is. It is affecting our thoughts, our beliefs, our actions, and our beliefs about reality is based on our culture. And the culture we need to focus on, everybody listening to my voice right now, focus on the culture inside of your own household.
Focus on that. I know myself included, we’ve spent a lot of time trying to change the larger culture scape. I feel like I’ve made a couple of dents, which is awesome, but the most powerful impact I’ve ever made, and that’s just the feedback that I’ve gotten over the years, which I finally paid attention to, is my family.
On that trip to Hawaii, which was the first time I’ve been to Hawaii, and seeing the Luau, on that trip, I cannot, I cannot tell you, even on the flight over, This woman, she had to be mid 60s, 70 years old. She was getting on the plane and she stopped, she was like, I just gotta tell you, your family is so beautiful.
And I was just wondering if, if you could [00:39:00] adopt me. And I’m just like, that is the cutest thing. But I just, I didn’t even process it then. Because I’m used to that. But after the trip, it really hit me like, whoa. Because people kept coming up to us, even in Hawaii, you know, just wanting to be around my family.
And I know it’s because we take our culture of connection and health with us and it’s infectious. There’s a lot of other stuff that’s infectious out there that people are thinking about in a negative perspective. But love, connection, good health, those things are infectious too.
Dr Pedram Shojai: There’s someone listening to this saying, you know, lucky you, you’ve got a great family are, you know, we got a shit show over here. We have a hard time. I sit down and ask my kids how they’re doing. They’re like, fine. Right. And, and that to me is an invitation to keep trying and keep going. And the art of engagement.
for someone who hasn’t been doing this for a while might [00:40:00] look a little different than freestyling, but it could be, you know, like I have a friend, they play Rosebud thorn, like what was good about your day was, but you know, what’s budding and, and having certain tools that allow for you to stoke conversation in an area that might potentially have gone stale or never really blossomed in your family life, but it’s so, Vitally important for, so for someone who hasn’t been watering this soil, right, for a while, how would you tiptoe in?
How do you make it less awkward? How do you get them to sit around and not be draconian about you sit down and you sit with your family, right? Like people kind of overshoot this mark and then it gets weird and it gets hard. Right.
Shawn Stevenson: Yeah, yeah. And just to be clear, every, every tool is, is applicable. All right. You know, kind of whatever it takes. Sometimes you just got, you got to be like that. But again, if we want it to be sustainable and to feel like a [00:41:00] choice, it’s understanding the temperament, the desires, the motivation of our family members.
And doing things to, to pull them all into this family, family unit, family culture. And I gave that example of the rap battle, but this could be anything. This could be, you know, everybody is getting together and maybe telling a story, you know, sharing something that what is the weirdest thing that happened in your day to day?
Or, you know, what is something that really pissed you off today? Let’s go, let’s go around and have a piss off story. You know, if you know, you’re, if your family is like on that kind of energy, Which, you know, um, I’m trying to think of a family that’s just chronically pissed off. Maybe the Adams family. I don’t know.
Um, but like, they’re going to be families that that really vibes with and that’s okay. You know, this could be a game, you know, having games at the table. You know, there are quite a few families that I’ve talked to over the years that actually do that. Because for me, we’d have, you know, a lot of times actually after dinner, we’d have a game.
But some families play a [00:42:00] game during dinner. And I was like, really? That’s that’s interesting. People’s like literally playing Monopoly while they’re having their dinner together. And so experiment, give yourself permission, but keep in mind your family’s temperament. Don’t come in necessarily with like, I like this thing.
If you know your family, cause this also tends to happen by the way, especially today, families tend to have like a standout, um, pop culture connection. So whether that’s Harry Potter. Whether that’s Marvel, whether that’s, you know, I don’t know, Fifty Shades of Grey, that’s crazy. That’s crazy. Whatever it might be, tie in some of that kind of energy and entertainment.
So with Harry Potter, maybe you guys have a Harry Potter trivia game. And I know there are tons of like little card decks and things like that that you bring into the, into the family dynamic. And now they get to participate in Harry Potter and be a [00:43:00] part of it, you know, in, in a really interesting way. So I’m going in on so many options.
Music is huge, you know, having some, some background vibes. You know, um, that’s huge as well. And also just for creating the kitchen environment for you to cook in and enjoy, uh, the process of cooking and being in the kitchen. Um, there’s so many different ways to go about this. And I would say also something that’s coming up for me is, you mentioned it actually, going, everybody doing the, you know, going around basically and sharing, was it the Rose Thorn?
Dr Pedram Shojai: Sorry, the, the rosebud
Shawn Stevenson: Rose
Dr Pedram Shojai: right? Which is what’s the, what’s the rose, what’s budding in your life and what’s the thorn in your side today. Um, and it’s, it’s just one of many ways to elicit, uh, emotional intelligence and dialogue in a culture that, and you brought it up at the top of the call. [00:44:00] Man, it’s been hijacked, right?
Our ability to communicate has been superseded by our ability to sit there and be told what’s cool, what to think, what’s popular, what’s trending by the social feeds and all the crap. And so we almost have to rehabilitate ourselves into being back in a room with our loved ones and having something to say.
But from what I’m hearing, this is life or death. I mean, 50 percent bump in longevity is no joke.
Shawn Stevenson: Yeah. And also I want to throw this in there too. The environment itself, knowing the thing that’s dividing us, we want to make it a screen free environment, you know, and this could be some people put their phones in like a little box, you know, but my kids, we just don’t bring it to the table. And this was established early on, you know, even my youngest son just getting a phone.
He doesn’t bring that bad boy to the table. A lot. Matter of fact, to be honest, my kid doesn’t have his phone a lot, which is unique. And I know that I know it’s unique, [00:45:00] but it’s just the thing. Cause we also keep him engaged. You know, we keep him not to say he’s not on his phone and he’s texting and he’s connected with his friends, but just being a part of his life and also bringing in his friends, like creating, you know, there’s play dates are are out here on the streets.
It’s a new term for me still, you know, because we just played, we went out and played. Um, but I saw recently when I mentioned about kids hanging out on their phones together, it reminded me because I saw my son do it. Uh, he just got together with his best friend. I took them to the movies, hang out at the mall, you know, I kept my distance, you know, they let them hang out.
But I saw there’s a moment where they’re both hanging out, but they’re both on their phone. And I saw after maybe five minutes, my son put his phone down. He put it down and just sat there. And he waited for like, you know, maybe a minute. And then he started talking to his friend, like trying to get him basically get him out of there.
You know, he’s like, so what did you guys, you know, [00:46:00] eat for Thanksgiving? You know, like he, I was like, Whoa, that’s amazing. He’s aware. He has these checkpoints, you know, to check in with himself. And so make it a front phone, free environment. Um, You can use food as a tool as well. I found that that’s really helpful.
But again, you gotta be mindful of the personality type. Um, you know, so family dinner tonight. What do you guys want for dessert? Right? And, or even in the planning of the family dinner. You know, if you know you got family dinner on Wednesday night. You know, checking in with everybody. Hey, who, um, taco night?
Or, and kids are very good with options. Right? Not even open ended, but like this or that. We all love options. And so, you know, there’s so many different ways. Again, if we’re paying attention to our family, we can find a way in. No one said that it’s going to be a straight line or that it would be easy, but it will be well worth [00:47:00] it.
It will be well worth it. Eventually it will manage itself and everybody will be healthier and more connected for it.
Dr Pedram Shojai: you know, it’s funny as I think the last time I had you on my show, you were writing sleep and sleep was such a big deal in your life because it was a big part of your journey and all that. But if you look at the two things we’ve talked about, Sleep being book says eight hours a night out of your 24 and meals being at least two to three of those hours.
If you are doing it right, frankly, between all the meals and all that, let’s just say two hours, that is more than a third of the time and the majority of the time you’re at home. And so these are highly leveraged places to do the things that make you well. Like you can’t be well without sleep. And from everything that we’ve learned in the last hour, you, you [00:48:00] simply cannot live a long, healthy life without tapping into the magic juju of being with loved ones and bringing it around the family table.
So you’re like a leverage guy, man. Like you’re finding the highest leverage places for health and wellness. And helping people find those. So I really appreciate that because these are, these are the places where I think we can get the most bang for our buck.
Shawn Stevenson: You just said one of my favorite words. It’s where we’re connected, you know, leverage. Yes. I’m always seeking that. I’m always aware that there is a point here, you know, there’s something that’s going to get leveraged, whether it’s, you know, in the context of somebody, you know, getting well, whether it’s the context in a family connection or healing, yeah, there’s always leverage.
There’s a, there’s a leverage point and I’m always looking for it.
Dr Pedram Shojai: What’s the name of the book? Where can people find it?
Shawn Stevenson: It’s called the eat smarter family cookbook and it’s available everywhere books are sold. Uh, I’m grateful to say it’s a, it’s a national bestseller and all that good stuff, but [00:49:00] If you just even look at the reviews on Amazon, it’s a, I don’t, I don’t know these people, you know, these wonderful people who’ve gotten copies, but people are making the food.
Go to one of these chefs shows, cookbooks, people aren’t frequently making the food and posting it on Amazon. And I didn’t ask people to do that. You know, nobody, a lot of these, you know, they’re not necessarily, uh, professionals at plating food and stuff like that, but people are. There’s something about this book that is motivating people to actually make the food and invite their kids in and kids are making the food.
And that was my intention. That was my intention. That was kind of, I didn’t come out and say that, but I was really hopeful that families would get their kids involved because the skill of cooking is on the endangered species list. And I talk about that. And by the way, I didn’t mention this. There’s over 250 peer reviewed [00:50:00] references embedded into the content of the book with beautiful story with, you know, so even with that, I use the Marvel universe and the superheroes.
So there’s sequences where I’m tying this, all these like fancy pants, complex studies into the superhero scenario so that everybody can understand them. It’s fun to read. So it’s got this great education and why we’re doing some of the things that we’re doing in this book. But most importantly, I, I’m a big fan of deliciousness.
I’m a big time foodie. I love, I love food. And we even express the joy of food and how it’s supposed to be. You know, so there’s, it’s not about deprivation or restriction. Everybody’s invited, no matter what your diet framework is. We have plenty of delicious meals for you as well. And again, Eat Smarter Cookbook.
Eat Smarter Family Cookbook. Uh, everywhere their books are sold. www. eatsmartercookbook. [00:51:00] com
Dr Pedram Shojai: Love it. Sean. Always good to see you keep up the good work. Looking forward to our next encounter.
Shawn Stevenson: Same man. Can’t wait. Thank you.
Dr Pedram Shojai: Well, I certainly hope you enjoyed that as much as I did love the guy. I’ve been, like I said, I’ve known him for years. I just love that he’s holding it down for the things that are important. Get his family cookbook. Do yourself a favor, share this podcast with the people in your life that you want to spend some time eating meals with.
Listen to the podcast, take the cookbook, make a couple meals together. Get back with your people. Get back to communicating, drop the devices. Let’s come back. To each other, let’s come back to vitality and it starts. At the next meal. I’ll see you in the next one.