Written by Christopher Kelly
Oct. 23, 2014
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Chris: Hello, and welcome to the Nourish Balance Thrive podcast. I'm joined today by Jeremy Hendon. Jeremy is the Editor of Paleo Living Magazine. Hi, Jeremy.
Jeremy: Hi, how are you?
Chris: Great, thank you. Thanks for coming on.
Jeremy: Oh, thank you so much. I appreciate it.
Chris: So tell me, what was your experience personally like with the Paleo diet? How did you get started in all this?
Jeremy: Yeah, that's an excellent question. I was the fat kid, growing up, when there weren't a whole lot of fat kids. Now you look at schools and there are a lot of very fat kids.
Chris: Yeah, it's the norm.
Jeremy: Yeah, exactly. But when I was growing up, I was one of only two or three fat kids. I felt like I was the only one. I wasn't more of the obese, but I was always fat from the time I was four, five, maybe even born. I was born as a heavy baby. So long story short, that kind of defined my existence.
I didn't feel comfortable with myself, didn't feel comfortable particularly around girls who I liked a lot, for my whole schooling up to college. In college, I decided to really make a change. At that time, of course, all there was, especially if you started reading online -- the Internet was kind of in its infancy at that point. I'm dating myself a little bit.
I went low fat. I started exercising a lot. Because I was 19 years old at the time, it worked. My freshman year in college, I lost about 55 pounds. I was ecstatic. I was really happy. I was like, "Oh, this is fantastic." But then for the next four, five years, really, really went back and forth. I'd gain a lot of it back. Lose a lot of it again. The story you've heard a lot of times so nothing particularly unique about that.
Then about ten years ago, I don't have the date exactly, but it was around ten years ago, I actually found low carb. I found Atkins. I found some other people ranting about low carb. I went low carb. Low carb actually worked very well for me. I managed to, for about a year-and-a-half, really stay low carb, not be hungry, lose weight. At that point in time, it worked well for me. I'm not sure it worked for a long term for me. We could talk about that probably in a different podcast.
About two years after that, I found Loren Cordain's book, The Paleo Diet. The one he published, I think, 2004. I found it probably around 2006 so about eight years ago. Just, I thought, "Well, let me try this."
Chris: It's such a low-risk intervention, isn't it, when you read a book like that. You're like, "Well, what have I really got to lose here? Not much."
Jeremy: Yeah, absolutely. The fact that I was already low carb, it meant that I'd already cut out a lot of the foods that I would have to cut out. So I'm like, "Well, yeah, this makes sense for me to go this direction." The rest is kind of history. I got more and more involved in both the low carb and Paleo communities. Not so much involved in the low carb community more not because I don't like it but because I think it's more of a tool than anything else.
My experience, I've been Paleo for about eight years. I've been seriously Paleo for about three or four of that. The first four to five years were off and on. It's been fantastic. I can maintain my weight better than I ever could, particularly as a kid. I'm more muscular. I feel better, more energy, all the things you would hear. I don't have one of those amazing success stories where, overnight, I lost 200 pounds or cured Crohn's or anything else.
For me, it's just been something that has dramatically increased the quality of my own life, and my wife too. She did have some issues, digestive and otherwise, that she was able to deal with. It took a little while longer for me to get her on Paleo. I tend to be the naïve one who jumps into anything. She's the skeptic who waits to see how it works.
Chris: Okay. I was very lucky actually. My wife -- well your wife is a professional chef, right? She's the Ancestral Chef. I hesitate to use that word with Julie because she's not a professional. She's a fantastic cook is what she is.
Jeremy: My wife's actually not a professional chef.
Chris: Okay.
Jeremy: Yeah. She just started the blog, Ancestral Chef, which we actually now combined with Paleomagazine.com.
Chris: Okay. She was not like that. The moment she thought that she could be helpful by making this change to her own diet too, she just did it which was really, really great for me.
Jeremy: Yeah. Well that's fantastic.
Chris: Yeah. So how did the magazine get started?
Jeremy: We started it July 31st, was the first issue of 2012. The reason we started is because I like media, and I saw both a need and an opportunity at that time. Particularly, digital magazines were just really starting out at that time. There were only -- I think at the Apple Store that time there were only less than 2,000 which is actually a very, very low number considering there are already half a million apps.
So I saw an opportunity for digital magazines. At the same time, I had been very involved in the low carb and Paleo communities, been to a lot of the conferences, knew a lot of people, and saw really a need for new magazines and new media to reach out to people. I think probably the same as you, the reason why your podcast makes sense because there's just this need for people to be reached in new and different ways, and that was one new and different way to reach people.
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Chris: Yeah. I miss magazines. I was a big, huge fan of printed magazine. I think you can still have that experience though, can't you, of just almost mindlessly paging through some magazine or media. You get to the point something attracts your eye. It's not mindless anymore. You give it your laser-sharp attention. There's something about a blog or reading any type of article that doesn't quite capture that.
Jeremy: Yeah, absolutely. I think magazines are going to have to evolve somewhat because the fact of the matter is that we still publish once a month, but we're looking at what we might do in the future. Because the once-a-month model, it's hard to remember that it's there. It's not like you see it now in a supermarket and pick it up in the same way. Both economically and also just in terms of outreach, there are going to have to be some changes. I think we'll see a lot of cool technological changes coming down the road for a lot of digital magazines.
Chris: Yeah. How have you seen the community change every -- have you seen the Paleo diet and the Paleo community, the people who are associated with it, have you seen that change over the years that you've been involved? Because not many people have been eating -- I'd certainly never even heard of the Paleo diet eight years ago.
Jeremy: Yeah. Well that's both a knock against me and a good thing I guess that I got in early, but I didn't really get in well early. It took me four, five years to actually figure out how well it worked.
Yeah, I have seen it change a lot. I guess the most obvious answer is that there's a lot more people, and it's grown in popularity. Also, there are a lot of really good ways that it's changed in that it's become more science-based. There are more scientific studies, not necessarily -- you might not call them randomized controlled trials just on Paleo itself but on a lot of the things surrounding Paleo.
For instance, gut health, gut bacteria; we're seeing a lot more of that. I'm not really arguing that's necessarily been driven by Paleo because that research was already in its infancy ten or 15 years ago, but we're seeing a lot more of that. That's getting a lot more incorporated into the Paleo diet, a lot more people doing them N=1 experiments where they're trying to figure out what works for them.
We've seen a lot more Paleo personalization which I think is really -- well it cuts two ways -- I think it's really good for people who have stuck to some sort of elimination diet like Paleo for a little while. It cuts the opposite way when people first get into it. They think, "Oh, maybe my body is different. I'll start out doing this differently," without ever getting the basics of human nutrition into their body. I guess those are some of the changes I've seen in Paleo. I think there are probably a lot more, but those are the ones that jump to mind.
Chris: Right. Do you think this whole thing, is it on the verge of becoming mainstream? Are we at the point now or sometime soon where I'll just be able to walk up to anybody in the street and they'll know exactly what the Paleo diet is or a Paleo diet?
Jeremy: I'll answer the question, but there's also a guy, if you haven't talked to him, Hamilton Stapell, he's a professor in upstate New York. I say upstate. It's just north. It's not too far north. He did a series of three talks, two of them at Paleo f(x) and one of them at the Ancestral Health Symposium -- or maybe I got that backwards, two at one place, one at the other -- where he did the past of Paleo, he likened it to the old physical culture movement from the early 20th century.
He did the present of Paleo, a lot about demographics. He did the future of Paleo. When he started those three, he thought that Paleo -- he hinted that Paleo was going to fail in the same way the physical culture movement failed which practically nobody remembers anymore. It was an early 20th century movement that had a lot of similarities with Paleo. By the end of the three talks though, he had changed his mind. He thought it was going to go mainstream.
Personally, I don't think Paleo itself will ever be mainstream. I think a lot of the concepts that Paleo brings to the table are ready to go mainstream. For instance, I mentioned gut health, gut bacteria. Gut bacteria, as you probably know, we've got at least ten times as many bacterial cells in our body as we do human cells so essential importance of gut bacteria to our health can't possibly be overstated. I think that's about to make a very, very mainstream jump within the next three to five years.
I think there are some parts of Paleo that will go mainstream. Will the whole thing go mainstream? I'm not sure because it's hard for -- I guess what that would have to mean is that mainstream itself would become Paleo which I can't see mainstream being anything other than mainstream. There's too much temptation. There's too much inertia in terms of eating out, eating fast food for everything to become Paleo as it were.
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I think the answer is yes and no. I think we're going to see a lot of aspects of Paleo jump into the mainstream, gut health, starting to deal with health issues. At least on a medical level from a preventative standpoint, I think it will become more mainstream. But I don't think we're going to see Paleo itself like a plurality or a majority of the population becomes Paleo.
Chris: Do you think the hyperpalatability of foods could be one of the things that holds that conversion back? Say I own a restaurant and I don't really care about people's health in the long term. All I care about is pleasing them in the short term. It will be very easy for me to create hyperpalatable combinations of foods and make my business quite successful.
I wanted to ask you about this, what your thoughts were on hyperpalatability in food reward. Do you think that's one of the things that could be holding it back?
Jeremy: Yeah, I think, definitely. I don't know if it will hold Paleo back per se. It definitely holds a lot of people back. It's definitely a problem that's not talked about in Paleo nearly enough. You and I have talked about this to some degree so I'm hesitating.
If you look at the scientific literature, there's a huge consensus on hyperpalatability in food reward, right? People who research obesity, that's what they do as PhDs or as researchers. There's pretty much an entire consensus that food reward and hyperpalatability are really what drives a lot of the obesity epidemic.
In Paleo, I see a lot of bloggers and writers, they skip over. They want to ignore it because nobody really wants to take on the fact that when we start creating a lot of Paleo desserts, a lot of Paleo treats, they do become hyperpalatable, and that hyperpalatability, as you probably know, is driven by a certain amount of sugar, a certain amount of fat and a certain amount of salt, right?
They've actually done plenty of tests on both rats and humans where if we put this combination in the right percentages then it becomes almost irresistible to humans. There's some genetic predisposition. It's more resistible to some people than others. But I think, yeah --
The only reason I'm saying all of that is to get back to the answer to your question. Is that what's holding Paleo back? I don't know that's holding Paleo back partially just because, like I said earlier, I think certain aspects of Paleo are going to jump mainstream regardless of that factor, like gut health and treating illnesses from a more preventative standpoint. I don't think hyperpalatability of certain Paleo foods is going to hold that back.
Yeah, I do think it's something that Paleo needs to address, and we need to talk about. It's one thing to make these treats and desserts as a kind of transitional mechanism to move from a Standard American Diet to a real food or Paleo diet. It's another thing to continue eating them all the time and wonder why we're not losing weight. I think that's a big issue.
Chris: The reason why I thought it might hold Paleo back is, imagine two food vendors. One is selling low food reward meat and vegetables, maybe high fat whatever. The guy next door is just serving pizza. If you've got a big crowd, you're relying on that crowd being educated and motivated to make the right decision. My guess would be the --
Apart from anything else, there's going to be a certain percentage of the population that just would never care. They can do pretty much anything, eat anything, live any way they like, and get away with it. They can just buy from the vendor that's selling pizza.
For everyone else, it requires that they be educated and completely onboard in order to make that decision. It's just too easy for somebody who's making foods just to go down that hyperpalatability and sell more stuff.
Jeremy: Yeah, I completely agree with you although if you're going to use that kind of analogy, I would take it further because that might keep Paleo from being mainstream, period, because there are always going to be a certain number of people who can eat a Standard American Diet and show no outward symptoms of the chronic inflammation or illness that it, statistically, leads to.
You're still relying on the other people to be educated whether it's on Paleo or something else, about the fact that it is that Standard American Diet and the chronic inflammation that's causing them issues. Yeah, I completely agree with you, although I think it's a bigger issue than just within Paleo treats and desserts.
Chris: Do you think it's good enough -- for someone who makes a living presenting information on the Paleo diet -- do you think it's good enough to just present information? I sometimes wonder whether it's -- say with this podcast, all its doing is just presenting you with facts in the hope that you'll make some change. There's no doing part to it. Do you think that's important or do you think it is enough to just try and educate people through the written word and spoken word?
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Jeremy: I think it's an interesting question. The reason I say interesting is, what's enough? We always ask ourselves what enough is, right? At some level, if we're living a life we love and we're helping people, even if you're just helping the people immediately around you, your family, really live a life they love and things like that, there's a very good argument that that's enough, that you're making a positive impact on the world.
At the same time, I completely, completely agree with you. When I told the story of how we got started, we didn't actually start the magazines first. We actually started a food company. We started a -- it was called "Louise's Foods." We had it for two years until we shut it down, was actually doing quite well.
We started with a low carb cereal that we really wanted to target at diabetics. Although targeting diabetics is hard because of FDA restrictions. It was made a lot from chia bran and had no grains. It was completely Paleo, and it was also low carb. The diabetics who bought it loved it because they would test their blood sugar afterwards and not only did it taste good, but it didn't spike their blood sugar at all.
Chris: That's interesting.
Jeremy: Yeah. It was really, really good. We also started making a grain-free granola which wasn't low carb because it had raisins in it, but it had much more widespread appeal because it tasted better, to be fair. We, Louise and I, fully believed that it's going to take a lot more than just information. I mean, look, you ask anybody on the street. Nobody is going to tell you that donuts and Coke are healthy for them, doesn't mean people don't drink them.
It's clearly not just having information. It's about making it easier, more accessible, more reasonable to do the things that are healthy and good for us. We fully believe that. We closed down that food business because we didn't have the time and the commitment at that time to make it work. We thought we could make more difference this way in the short term. We would actually like to get back --
I don't know what it will look like in the future for us personally, but I love food companies. I have a lot of friends who are running various Paleo food companies that are doing really good things. My friend, Darren, in Toronto is running a Paleo condiments company, doing a lot of great things that I think are going to make a lot of difference. I think you've got to have both. I do agree with that.
Chris: Yeah. We tried that ourselves actually. Like I said, Julie is a fantastic cook. She has a background in Food Science. She used to work for a company called Revolution Foods. I think their mission statement is to try and provide better food for children.
I go to all these bike races. There are lots of guys there. They're just hungry. They don't care. They don't know about any of this stuff. They just want something to eat. They'll just eat whatever tastes good. It just so happened that the two things are quite closely aligned. When you've good food scientists who know what they're doing with Paleo and who's a good cook, you can produce excellent foods.
These guys were moderately interested in the fact that it was Paleo, but really they cared about the fact that it was really good food. We thought, "Wow, this could be a great business, this. We could turn this into a thing where we just turn up with food for all these athletes. We could get into triathlons. It will be so much fun."
When we really got down to the nitty-gritty of it, when we tried to scale that business up beyond producing lunch for 20 people, we realized we wanted nothing to do with it. The first time you step inside an industrial kitchen, you're like, "Okay, this is not where I want to spend my weekend." They sold all the things that are not Paleo so windowless building with all kinds of horrible machinery and toxic chemicals.
Jeremy: We did that. We were in a commercial kitchen for a while. We labored in there for hours and hours. We eventually got into a co-packer where somebody else is making our food which is fantastic, but even once you start working away at that, it's hard. It's not just hard for you.
The thing is competing with big food is really difficult. I'm not saying it can't be done. I think it completely can, and people should. But you've got to know what you're getting into because, for instance, between distributors and grocery stores, they take about a 55 to 60% margin on any product. You're going to have huge margins, which is really hard when you're actually making it with ingredients that are not subsidized corn, and it actually costs real money. That part of it is difficult.
They want you to have huge marketing budgets because if the distributor gets into a nationwide store, they'll want you to have 3 to $5 million to be able to buy those products back if they don't work or if they fail for some reason. There are all these difficulties. It's a really big mess in our food system. I think people know it, but I don't think people can really comprehend the full extent to which our food system is really problematic for small food vendors and particularly for food vendors who want to make things with quality ingredients because it's just really hard to do that at the scale and at the costing you need to be able to do it to really make it nationally available.
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Chris: That's the problem, isn't it?
Jeremy: You and I were talking before this call. My wife and I lived in Scotland this summer. It's funny. In Paleo, we get a lot of emails from people, particularly from the UK. They always talk about how hard it is in the UK. Admittedly, some things are less available in the UK. But I've got to say, one of the things we loved living in Edinburgh this summer was, for instance, 99% of the beef that you can possibly buy in Edinburgh is grass-fed. There's just not much grain-fed beef at all.
Chris: Oh, it does exist then? You can get grain-fed beef in the UK now then?
Jeremy: The butchers tell me you can, but I didn't see it myself. I just talked to a couple of local butchers in Edinburgh and they said, "Yeah, there are some grain-fed," but pretty much 99% of it is all grass-fed. All your hogs are -- for lack of a better word -- pastured. I imagine they don't eat grass, but they're essentially free-range hogs.
Yeah, the food quality in the UK and in a lot of the rest of the world is still at a much higher level. It's going down in a lot of the world. The UK might head that way too, but the US makes it really hard for producers to put quality food on the market.
Chris: Yeah, the subsidies work quite differently. I'm not sure there are already subsidies at all especially for the grains. It's only soy, doesn't exist. People call it soya. I spoke to someone the other day in the UK. They said, "Soya." What's soya? It's quite a bizarre, exotic thing.
Jeremy: Well it's closer to the Mandarin pronunciation.
Chris: Oh, is it? I didn't know.
Jeremy: Yeah.
Chris: Yeah, I've definitely seen people make that mistake in the UK. They're like, "Oh, no, I can never do this diet because I can't get the grass-fed meat," not understanding that that was the only type that was available. The reason it doesn't say, "Grass-fed," on the steak in the supermarket in the UK is because it's meaningless. There is no other option.
Jeremy: Right, yeah.
Chris: How did you find -- I wanted to ask you about that specifically. I don't want my daughter growing up with an American accent obviously. The only way I can see that from not happening is to move back to the UK. I'm wondering what my experience will be like. Is it going to be really hard? How did you find it in Edinburgh or other parts of the UK?
Jeremy: No, I don't think it's hard at all.
Chris: Okay.
Jeremy: Well particularly for somebody -- I'm speaking from my point of view. We've been doing this for a while. I think what people find hard is when they first start they're looking to recreate a lot of things particularly like baked goods and things.
Chris: Yeah.
Jeremy: I've heard it's harder to find things like almond flour although, honestly, almond flour is pretty easy to make just by grinding almonds.
Chris: But all the almonds come from California, right? Ninety percent of all almonds come from here.
Jeremy: Yeah, it is true. I mean, starting things like that. If we're just talking about making seafood and meat and veggies and fruits, just basic things, it's pretty much the same. It's a little harder to find coconut oil there but, to the contrary, it's much, much easier to find tallow because tallow and true leaf lard actually are still used a lot in England, particularly in Europe and on the continent. I don't want to say it's easy. It's the same everywhere. It's a little bit different everywhere.
Chris: It's a different set of problems.
Jeremy: Yeah. It's not any harder.
Chris: Yeah, the tallow thing drives me nuts. I can remember as a kid, seeing like literally a wall of lard. Probably my parents shuddered at that at the time. I probably would have done too in my teens or early 20s. I'm sure that was real lard, proper. It wasn't some artificial crap or adulterated in any way. Of course, now in the US, my beef tallow, I order it from US Wellness Meats. It's impossible to get anywhere else. It's just ridiculous.
Jeremy: There are two places in the country you can get it.
Chris: The same with -- sorry.
Jeremy: Speaking of tallow and highly palatable treats, when we wanted a treat in England, we would go out to this place that would do chips, as you call them, fries in tallow. They're really good.
Chris: Oh, yeah. Yeah, I do remember fish and chips as a child. Yeah, I used to drown them in vinegar and put a ton of salt on them. That is a hyperpalatable food without any sugar which is quite difficult to achieve, I think.
Jeremy: Well it's got enough starch in it that it might as well be sugar.
Chris: Yes.
Jeremy: I think it has to be the same effect but, yeah.
Chris: I remember there being much more organ meat. I'm not sure if I would have noticed that here at that time too. That's another thing that I found almost impossible to get a hold of. In fact, we've talked to local farmers here in the Bay Area, half a lamb really means half a lamb worth of muscle meat and not half a lamb. They don't even have a license to butcher the animal and sell the organ meat which is something I think has got to change.
[0:25:01]
Jeremy: Well, two things. First of all, lamb is so much easier to get over there, and it's so much better, both there and in New Zealand. But with organ meats, yeah, honestly, I expected there to be more because I've been to Europe in the past. I actually feel like organ meats are starting to fall out of favor, the same way in the UK at least and America. Not to the same extent, they're still more accepted -- if you mention organ meats to people in the UK, they don't freak out like they do in the US often. But they're going downhill.
Actually, funnily enough, we're just talking about organ meats yesterday because some of my wife's family is visiting from China. Organ meats in Asia are still -- it's common. The funny thing is they're the most highly valued thing. They had the hardest time -- we couldn't convince them until we took them to the store -- had the hardest time believing that organ meats were some of the cheapest things here because in Asia, they're often the most expensive part of the animal because they're so highly sought after.
Chris: Yeah, it's crazy. I don't know how this happened. It's fascinating, isn't it? You spend a lot of money on supplements, but you can get some of these things quite easily from organ meats if you care to eat it. Having said that --
Jeremy: You know what else is fascinating? I saw this article. I think it was two years ago. What they had done, they have records of what all the Presidents of the United States' favorite foods were. You can look back -- going back, it was before -- maybe it was with Obama, I can't remember, maybe it was before -- you can look back to all the Presidents and see what all their favorite foods are.
There are two very interesting things. One is that before maybe Carter, maybe starting with Carter going backwards, organ meats were very common. Things like liver and onions, very common favorite food of a lot of Presidents. The other thing is, until you get to Reagan, not a single person has a brand name food on the list of their favorite foods. It's a type, like liver and onions, sea bass or something, whatever it is.
When you get to Reagan and on, at least half of their favorite foods are brand of foods. Often they are things like M&Ms so you can see that shift immediately. It's so funny that it starts with Reagan which is also the early '80s when our health started going really, really downhill fast.
Chris: Yeah. Yeah, I have to say that we have had one not so good organ meat experience lately. Like I said, Julie's a fantastic cook. One of the things that we got recently in a Meat CSA delivery was a kidney, a pork kidney. She put it into the meat grinder and mixed up with some minced beef which is normally a surefire recipe for no flavor of anything kind of gamey or liverish or anything.
I have to say, it did have a very characteristic aroma that reminded me of cattle sheds. It reminded Julie so much of that experience. She did her Master's degree in Dairy Science so she spent a ton of time ankle-deep in cow shit collecting milk samples from these dairy cows. The smell -- I understand what she's talking about with the kidney -- it's very similar.
Jeremy: But this was pork kidney.
Chris: Yeah, it was pork kidney, yeah. There must be -- I don't know what the smell is, where it's coming from, but I noticed -- I had it cold the next day, and it didn't have the same smell. It was only once you heated it that the smell -- I get people's point to some of this.
Jeremy: I'm actually not sure I've ever had pork kidney. I've had beef kidneys. Wow, I'm a little both interested and scared to try it now.
Chris: That's a frightening thought. It might be what the pig was eating. I went to visit that farm one time. It was impeccable, the farm. Apart from there's this big barrel of discarded bread which was presumably what they were feeding to the pigs. That was a little disheartening. I don't know if it's important or not, probably not.
Jeremy: Yeah. Pigs eat anything anyways.
Chris: Yeah, exactly. That's the point of them in a way. There's so much food waste left over from the supermarkets. They're fantastic in converting that into something useful.
Jeremy: Yeah, pigs and chickens both. They really will eat anything. They're amazing creatures.
Chris: Yeah, fascinating. Tell me. I've gotten so much out of the Paleo diet personally. It's literally a life-changing experience. Now we're running this functional medicine practice. For someone who comes to us and says, "I'm still eating the Standard American Diet," my first recommendation is not to do a whole bunch of expensive tests. It's to try a Whole30 program or Chris Kresser's Paleo Reset diet, something like that.
We're making money out of this, I guess. Julie is now coaching people especially on the Autoimmune Protocol which is quite difficult to do. I've had enormous -- I've taken so much from this diet and the community. I'm now wondering what is it you can do? It seems there are not many things that are nearly impossible to get back. The one thing that we've dabbled in a little bit, we've interviewed Lynda Frassetto on this podcast, the PCOS Paleo Study that you might have heard of. What do you think that people can do to get back to the community?
[0:30:28]
Jeremy: Honestly, the first thing that jumps to mind, this is going to make you laugh, but I'd say make more money doing what you're doing because within Paleo -- it's not just within Paleo. I consider this a broader real food, preventative medicine, holistic health movement, and I think Paleo is a piece of it. There are a few things that I think -- I'm going to sound like I'm criticizing the Paleo movement and the holistic health a little bit. Maybe I am, but it's not really my intent because I want to answer your question of what we can do to give back.
It goes back to your question of whether or not Paleo is going to become mainstream, and how it's going to catch on. I think there are a few things, now that you've mentioned this, that hold us back in a lot of areas. The first is that when we talk about big food like we did earlier, when we talk about big farm or big medicine, or even the subsidies we were talking about when we were talking about UK versus the United States, the money behind those interests is enormous, just enormous.
To be able to make a difference, it requires a grassroots movement like we've got going, but it also requires business and capitalism to actually take these ideas forward. When you tell me, "Oh, we're making money off of this. We're helping people, coaching them," that's fantastic. You've already said you have all these other ideas, some that works, some that won't, of how you can take these things and make them into businesses. I think that that's one of the best ways that people can move these kinds of things forward.
Because people often think of making money as somehow, not just evil, but degrading the concept of what we're trying to do. I think it's the exact opposite. I think that if we make true capitalist ventures where we're creating value, new added value to people's lives, making people's lives better, allowing people to really live lives they love, and making money in the process so we're creating value on multiple sides, I think that's one of the best and most sustainable ways that we can possibly move these ideas forward.
I'm going to cut it off there because I think that is the main way that other people, anybody who's thinking about it can really move these ideas forward.
Chris: That's an interesting idea that I have not thought of, I must admit. I was obviously very aware of it. I understand why Pfizer isn't into diet and lifestyle coaching because that's what we're doing really is just diet and lifestyle coaching. There's no molecule you can patent. There's no money in it.
At the moment I'm just confirming that belief. I used to work for a hedge fund until March of this year. So far in the last six months all I've done is, really, pay my rent and pretty much nothing else. It's yet to be seen for me whether I can actually make money. But you're right. If I do, if I'm successful and make money at this thing then people are going to take notice, and that's the exact point, right?
Jeremy: And you're going to be able to keep doing it. Because I imagine at some point you're not going to be able to keep doing it if you're not making any money.
Chris: Right, right, absolutely. Well this has been wonderful. Thank you so much for your time.
Jeremy: Oh, yeah, I greatly enjoyed it. Thank you so much.
Chris: How can people find you? Whereabouts should I go for Paleo Living Magazine?
Jeremy: Yes. There are two places people can find me. The first is on paleomagazine.com which is our website. We post a lot on there. There's a lot of information on there. You can join our seven-day challenge. We have a much shorter challenge because we wanted to get people who are worried about the 30-day challenges just into something quicker. Then also, just my own website which I'm starting to post more on, jeremyhendon.com. Yeah, those are the two places people can find me most.
Chris: Excellent. Well, yeah, that's been brilliant. Thanks very much for your time. I'll speak to you soon.
Jeremy: All right, thank you.
Chris: Cheers.
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