The Power of Twelve Meals: A Safety Talk on Food
Presentation Speech - Refined Version
Good morning, everyone. Last week we talked about Halloween safety and sugar, and a lot of you were surprised at how much sugar is actually in things—like a handful of crackers having half a day's worth. So this week, I want to continue that conversation with some good news and practical solutions.
The Most Dangerous Thing in Your Home
When we think about safety, we usually think about things like emergency exits, proper lifting techniques, or being careful on the road. But there's something more insidious that affects us every single day: what we eat.
Whether we're working from home or in the office, we all have to eat three times a day. And most of us—especially in America—are genuinely confused about what to eat. This isn't just about weight. It comes back to mental health, physical health, and how you're going to live your life with what kind of energy for the rest of your life.
So here's the good news: It's actually pretty simple.
The Power of Twelve Meals
On average, we're all eating the same 12 meals on repeat. The average family, the average person—we rotate through about a dozen meals over and over again.
Think about it: if you just spend a little bit of time thinking intentionally about those 12 things, and you consider that you're going to eat each of those meals thousands of times over the next 20 years—that's not just food on a plate. That is literally what becomes your body.
So put an engineer's hat on. Look at food as a system. This is something we're going to do over and over again. What inputs do you want to put in so you have better outputs?
I really enjoy this philosophy. It's empowering. You're going to eat on repeat anyway—you might as well choose those 12 meals intentionally.
Why This Matters
We already know we're exceeding sugar limits dramatically:
Adults are given a 25-gram daily limit
Children under three should have zero added sugar
Yet kids are consuming double that, adults triple, and teenagers are eating six times what they should
And teenagers' brains are still growing until they're 25 years old. So there are serious implications here.
But here's what I think we're missing: We're confusing calories with nutrients.
When you eat a handful of almonds, it's very different for your body than eating 100 calories of Skittles. Sugar was always meant to come with something else—whether it was fruit or honey. You cannot live on sugar alone. It doesn't have the fat and protein you need.
The Animal Studies
They've actually done studies with animals—cats and monkeys—and within 10 generations of just a potato chip diet, they were infertile. They were so sick they could no longer reproduce.
And I think a lot of people today aren't eating much better than a potato chip diet. We're maybe two or three generations into people eating non-traditional foods—things that don't grow from the ground, that have been excessively processed and actually engineered to be addictive.
There are food engineers who study: What does it take to get a human to eat as much as possible? That's what happened throughout the 1900s. We got too good at making addictive food, and now we have to go back to those same engineers and say, "Can you make it less addicting?" because our health problems are too big.
When you think about it that way, it's kind of silly. How do we make it less complicated?
The Monkey Biscuit Story
Here's a study I love: Scientists were trying to induce heart disease in healthy monkeys to study it.
First try: They gave them pure fat (lard). Result? Nothing. The monkeys were healthy.
Second try: They gave them pure starch (baked bread). Result? Still healthy.
Third try: They gave them fat plus starch—but fried together as fried dough. Result? Heart disease everywhere. The animals started dying.
They called these "monkey biscuits."
Later, when the scientists were in a lab meeting discussing their findings, someone brought in donuts. One researcher picked one up, looked at it, and said: "Oh my God, this is a monkey biscuit! This is literally what's causing heart disease!"
Those researchers never ate donuts again.
The lesson: It's not just sugar. It's not just fat. It's the combination, cooked in ways our bodies weren't designed to handle, that makes us addicted, sick, and unable to feel full.
The Bigger Picture: Why We're Here
Today, children are born with 200 known toxins in their umbilical cord bloodstream. We can test this after mothers give birth. None of these chemicals existed 100 years ago. So yes, of course it's getting worse.
Each generation is dealing with more buildup, and it affects everything:
Their taste buds and food preferences
Their microbiome—the bacteria in their gut that affects mood, stress response, behavior, digestion, hormone production
And here's the thing about safety studies: they only look at chemicals in isolation. But we're exposed to hundreds of chemicals simultaneously. Nobody's studying what happens when you combine fragrance from candles, cleaning spray residue, pesticides tracked in on shoes, and plastics heated in the microwave.
Why Organic Matters
95% of American food is sprayed with pesticides. Anything ending in "-cide"—insecticide, pesticide, herbicide—is meant to kill things. And it kills those beneficial gut bacteria in your stomach.
Glyphosate (Roundup) was actually created from a component of Agent Orange during wartime. They realized it killed bugs, then started spraying it on food. They genetically modified crops to withstand more of it without dying immediately—and without killing us immediately.
But it is killing us from the inside out over 30, 50, 100 years. It's not going to kill you tomorrow. But it slowly deteriorates your health.
And this matters for animals too. 97% of American cows, pigs, and even farmed salmon are being fed grain. Cows are not meant to eat grain—they're meant to eat grass. When they eat the wrong food, they get sick. And when we eat sick animals, we get sick too.
Their omega-6 to omega-3 ratios change based on what they eat. The antibiotics they're given come straight down into us.
There's No Such Thing as User Error
Here's a really good engineering principle: There's no such thing as user error—only poorly designed systems.
If you build something and people keep messing up, you need to redesign the system to guide them in a better direction.
The same goes for food. You're going to have defaults. You're going to eat on autopilot. You just want to make sure your defaults are better set up—that you've set the grooves so you naturally fall into healthier patterns.
Why Food Preferences Are So Hard
Food preferences are extremely hard to change. History shows us it's easier to change someone's religion than their food preferences.
Why? Biology. When you're up to one year old, you're more willing to try new things. But from one to three, you become that picky toddler. And that's evolutionary: out in the wild for hundreds of thousands of years, we depended on what our parents gave us. If we were overly adventurous when we started walking, we'd probably eat poison.
So those preferences stick with us.
There's even evidence in our language. English is a mix of French and Germanic words. The French words—sauté, beef, bouillon—are the refined, finished products, the "high-class" foods. The Germanic words—apple, milk, cow, sheep, pig—are the simple, base foods.
That's because when Julius Caesar went into Germany, he saw them as barbarians, as "other," as less refined. And that bias is still embedded in our language today. We still think of "progress" as better, even when modern processed food is actually worse for us than traditional food.
Traditional Wisdom Works
You see this pattern globally. When traditional cultures adopt the American diet, they start having health problems. There was a study on Japanese women: they have the same number of cancer cells as everyone else in the world, but when they moved to America and adopted our diet, those cancer cells activated.
It's not just genetics. It's environment—stress, pollutants, but very much the food.
The Solution: Keep It Simple
So what can we do? How do we upgrade ourselves?
Here's the simple framework:
Breakfast:
A smoothie (cold but simple and fast)
Eggs
Different kinds of porridges, hot or cold
Easy pancakes with better ingredients
Lunch:
Heat up leftovers
I'm often eating frozen cauliflower pizza or chicken nuggets—but the upgraded versions with organic, grass-fed meat
Salads with last night's protein
You can even get upgraded versions of convenience foods if you're willing to spend a little more
Dinner:
Keep it really simple: meat and veggies
Rotate all the different colors and seasons of vegetables
One good chef's knife (spend $100, throw out the rest)
One good cutting board
Toss everything with upgraded oils, some good salt, and bake in the oven for 40 minutes
Everything tastes good like that.
Stocking Your Kitchen
Get rid of canola oil. It was not made for food—it was made for cleaning airplane parts or something similar. Once it's overheated, it creates oxidative stress in your brain.
Even seed oils can be fine if you do the old-style traditional method—stone-pressed, not heated excessively. It's when you add all that extra heat that it becomes toxic.
Going back to the most simple, "barbaric" method—as Julius Caesar might say—is actually the smartest, because that's real food, closest to the ground.
Think about it: the farm-to-table restaurants, the most expensive and best-tasting ones, are using real food—real vanilla, real butter, real ingredients, not the fake version that tries to replicate one note of flavor.
It's More Worth It Than You Think
For me, it's more worth it to spend money on food than on clothing or anything external. Because what goes in becomes your health. It becomes literally your skin, the way your body looks. That's so much more valuable than the clothes or products you place on top of it.
Why Vegetables Matter Even More Now
Vegetables basically feed what processed foods and pesticides destroy. We need them—even more than people in the past did—to rebuild our gut bacteria and get the nutrients we're missing.
Find the veggies you like. There are good ones. Just find your favorites and make them well.
This Isn't Doom and Gloom
I don't see any of this as negative. I love this conversation. Yes, there's a lot to talk about that sounds scary, but it's so empowering to see what good food changes will do.
Your 12 meals will be different from mine, and that's wonderful. This is just to spark conversation and inspiration.
The Epigenetics of Hope
I want to mention one book briefly: Deep Nutrition talks about epigenetics. It's not just about your DNA or your behaviors—your DNA actually coils and uncoils based on what you give it.
If you give your body real food and real nutrients, it can actually unwrap things and express different DNA. The two worst things for your DNA? Sugar and bad oils. They literally damage you at a DNA level.
But the empowering part is: these changes affect your future and your children. Even if you don't have kids, your behaviors affect the health of people on the planet.
Another book, Biology of Belief, explains that every single cell in your body is always in either growth mode or defense mode. If you're in growth mode, you're regenerating, healing. If you're in stress mode—whether from fear or toxins—your cells are busy dealing with that instead of doing the thousand other things they're supposed to be doing.
That's huge for our children. If they're stressed or full of toxins, they can't grow properly.
Take Action Today
So here's what I want you to do:
Write down your current 12 meals. You probably already know them.
Pick one meal to upgrade. Just one. Keep it simple.
Try the dinner rule once this week: Pick a meat, pick a veggie, rotate through colors.
That's it. One baby step at a time.
Final Thoughts
I've been eating this way for almost 10 years now. My family kind of laughed at me at first, but slowly, one by one, they started coming around. They'd say, "Oh my God, I get it now. This matters."
You can hear it in some people—in the way they breathe, in their voices—that they're having blood flow problems, not getting enough oxygen to their brain. Your blood is trying to get nutrients everywhere through your body. If you help your body out by giving it real food, everything works better.
It's too late when someone has a heart attack and can't do anything anymore. But we can change things before that point.
The most dangerous thing in our homes is what's on our plates.
But that also means you have more control than you think.
Thank you so much for listening. I really appreciate your time, and I hope this sparks some good conversations.
Next week, we'll talk about removing toxins from the home—cleaning products, fragrances, and all those other things. But for now: go have a healthy lunch. No judging—just think about your choices. Ask yourself: Is this healthy? Is this a good option?
Make your body happy.
Thank you.
[Optional Q&A Section]
If someone asks about continuous glucose monitoring or pre-diabetes:
"That's a great point. Mixing foods together matters too—like eating fruit with protein or fat to level out the glucose response. A lot of us here, when we get to a certain age, are going to hear from our doctors, 'You just showed up pre-diabetic.' And that's reversible with diet. But once you're actually diabetic, you're on insulin shots for life. So do this now while you're young. Get in the habit of eating healthy before it becomes a 'you have to or you're gonna die' conversation with your doctor."
If someone asks about favorite veggie recipes:
"Yes! I'd love to create a list. Find the veggies you like and make them delicious. For example, Brussels sprouts with olive oil, Frank's Hot Sauce powder, and red pepper flakes in an air fryer at 310°F for 25 minutes—fantastic. Or add some bacon and an orange glaze if you want. The point is: make vegetables taste good so you actually want to eat them."
