In this episode 5 of the Simple Nourished Living podcast, ( hosts Martha McKinnon and Peter Morrison explore the journey of embracing new habits and the powerful connection between the mind and body. They discuss the milkshake experiment, which reveals how beliefs about food can influence our physiological responses, particularly the ghrelin hormone.
The conversation emphasizes the importance of mindful eating, slowing down during meals, and the cultural insights that shape our eating habits. Ultimately, they highlight the transformative power of mindset in achieving better health and nutrition.
Key Takeaways
- Embracing new beginnings can be challenging but rewarding.
- The mind-body connection plays a crucial role in health.
- Beliefs about food can significantly impact our physical responses.
- Mindful eating enhances satisfaction and helps control hunger.
- Slowing down during meals can prevent overeating.
- Cultural practices can influence our eating habits positively.
- Understanding ghrelin can help manage hunger effectively.
- Quality of food matters more than just calorie counting.
- Mindset transformation is key to lasting dietary changes.
- You can always have your favorite foods again.
The Milkshake Experiment Podcast
Video Transcript
Martha McKinnon (00:02)
Hi, welcome to the Simple Nourish Living podcast. I’m Martha McKinnon and this is my partner and brother, Peter Morrison. How are you?
Peter Morrison (00:08)
Hi everyone. I’m good, how are you doing?
Martha McKinnon (00:12)
Good. So have you heard of the milkshake experiment?
Peter Morrison (00:17)
I haven’t, but before we get started, this is podcast number five. And I just wanted to say that I’m super excited that we’re still trying to figure this out.
Martha McKinnon (00:23)
Okay. Yeah, we are. But we keep hanging in there. So we’re giving ourselves credit. And I think this is really, I think this is good for for our readers to understand because for me, this is very much like the, you know, any journey and any time you’re trying to change things and make things better or try new things and start something new.
Peter Morrison (00:49)
Start something new.
Martha McKinnon (00:59)
I mean, and so and, you know, when you’re wanting to like slim down, take off some pounds, eat better, live healthier. That can be brand new, right? And so it’s the same. And here, like doing video is brand new for us. And so what we’re demonstrating is that you just keep trying different things and you keep showing up and you don’t say tomorrow or when everything’s perfect and you just keep doing it.
Peter Morrison (01:03)
Mm-hmm. And I would say the first one was difficult, the second one less and it’s getting a little less difficult. I wouldn’t say it’s super comfortable by any means at this point, but it is.
Martha McKinnon (01:30)
Right? It does get easier. It does. Well, and think about like writing posts. How hard was writing posts when we started like more than a decade ago versus now? Right. Or figuring out, I know for us a big hurdle in within the world of our website was switching over right to blocks and that new technology. And how long did we delay doing that? I mean, right in WordPress, we just, we just write.
Peter Morrison (01:45)
Right. A couple years actually. I’m ashamed to say.
Martha McKinnon (02:08)
We just tried, but it took a day of sitting down and working it. And there were years ago, I switched from a regular laptop to Mac. I mean, and that was like, that was a painful, you know, are there days I just wanted to transition. I just wanted to like put it back in the box. mean, so I think it’s natural to get frustrated, especially as we’re older, you know, I think young people, young kids can just go for it. Yeah, they’ll try anything.
Peter Morrison (02:21)
Hmm.
Martha McKinnon (02:36.815)
But as we get older, we get kind of stuck in our ways. So, but you got to keep trying new things.
Peter Morrison (02:41)
For sure. Yeah, milk milkshakes you, well, you got my attention by saying milkshake. I haven’t had a milkshake in ages, but I’m kind of curious.
Martha McKinnon (02:53)
Right? Yeah, so this this one may blow your mind. You know, one of my big areas of interest is the whole mind body connection, the placebo effect. I mean, I’ve been reading about this and studying it for years because it just it kind of it just gives me boost goosebumps. I mean, when you start to read all the research and studies that show how powerful our mind is and the powerful effect it can have on our body.
You know, from I think the first real time I tuned into this, was listening to, I think it was a book, like a book or an audio story. And again, any story I’m going to share, you’ll find it out in the research. But this was a story where this orthopedic doctor did various kinds of knee surgery on patients who were really debilitated, experiencing pain and lack of mobility.
And so he’d go in and do these different laparoscopic procedures. He had different techniques and he didn’t really know which one worked best or why they worked. And I think this is a study that maybe would never even be approved in this day and age, but somehow they were able to do this study where they took some patients and actually did procedure number one, some did procedure number two, and then some patients, all they did was make the incision. They didn’t really do the procedure.
And all of the patients basically had the same healing response. The people who only got the incision but never really had anything done beyond that were up playing basketball and they recovered the same as the people who had the real surgeries. And as a result of that, this doctor ended up leaving his practice and going into study this whole concept of like mind, body medicine and the power of the placebo effect because he was just gobsmacked.
Peter Morrison (04:48)
That doesn’t sound possible.
Martha McKinnon (04:49)
Not possible, right? Right. But the more you read about it, and like I said, and I’ve read tons about it, and it just, it’s irrefutable. I mean, there’s studies that that date back. And again, I’ve got other examples, like in my mind that I’ve show up again, and again, and again, because they’re sort of classic examples of it in the research. So, so it’s real, even though we don’t understand it. And even though we, you know, have some question about, well, how does that work?
Because there’s like life is a mystery on our bodies and minds clearly can be a mystery. The ice cream, the milkshake experiment really relates to what we’re talking about here. I think it’s just a tremendous aspect to start considering when you’re looking to manage your weight. So do you want to watch it?
Peter Morrison (05:44)
Yeah, that’d be great. I actually have it queued up.
Martha McKinnon (05:45)
Okay, it’s a pretty short clip that explains the experiment that was conducted, I think at Columbia, by a researcher named Alia Crum.
Peter Morrison (05:57)
Okay, and give me one minute.
Martha McKinnon (06:00)
Yeah, so I think it’s worth watching and then we can talk about it.
Peter Morrison (09:53)
Wow.
Martha McKinnon (09:53)
What did you think about that?
Peter Morrison (09:56)
Shocking.
Martha McKinnon (09:58)
It’s shocking.
Peter Morrison (10:02)
And I would say I have less, relatability with nutrition and eating, but it made me think about sports. I know a lot of pro athletes work with psychologists and one of the big factors for athletic performance is visualization. Sort of like imagine your yourself winning the match.
Martha McKinnon (10:15)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Peter Morrison (10:32)
What I’ve read and the way I understand it is the body, you’re thinking it in your mind, you’re seeing it and experiencing it and the body, no, how does it work? The mind doesn’t know the difference or the mind doesn’t know the difference.
Martha McKinnon (10:52)
The body doesn’t know the difference between what’s real and what you’re programming, what you’re visualizing. And yeah, as you mentioned that there have been, again, because I have read a lot on this topic because it’s so interesting to me. So they have done studies where they actually, like you talk about this, for example, they’ll take somebody, they’ll take two groups and they’ll tell one group to visualize like playing this simple song on the piano and the other group will actually like play the piano.
You know, and the people who visualized will often have the same or similar response as the people who actually so like you’re talking about, you could actually go out and practice your free throws, right?
Peter Morrison (11:23)
Mm-hmm.
Martha Mckinnon (11:51)
Or you could visualize yourself practicing and just that activity of visualization is going to improve your performance which seems and again like you said there’s a lot of top athletes who work with sports psychologists for all these kinds of reasons.
Peter Morrison (12:03)
So this study in this video, she made one batch of milkshakes labeled one side for one group of people, like the super indulgent high calorie treat. And the other is like the low fat version and that’s all the people knew.
Martha McKinnon (12:23)
Right. Right. And I think what they did was they actually tested like, the same group of people, like on different days, they got the different shake. they, they, they controlled for all of the, like, so they controlled for, you know, and in many ways as they could. Like all the people eventually took each shake so that they could compare apples to apples.
Essentially, it was like what your body did with the shake that you thought was skinny or, you know, less caloric versus the one that you thought was more indulgent. So they could compare side by side the results in each person.
Peter Morrison (13:10)
And that resulted in this ghrelin hormone, its levels in the body.
Martha McKinnon (13:16)
Yeah, so, so ghrelin is that hormone they call the medical community calls it the hunger hormone. And so when, when your ghrelin levels go up, you’re going to feel experienced like hunger. And so there’s been lots of research around that, how, know, how do we control? And I think there have been, if you go and look like ghrelin diets to try to like help you control your ghrelin levels and all kinds of things, because it is a powerful hormone that makes you feel hungry.
Peter Morrison (13:40)
Mm.
Martha McKinnon (13:47)
But this demonstrated that it was your beliefs around what you were eating that actually affected that hormone, not what you were actually eating or drinking. And that’s where I think that I’m really impassioned because I love what we do here.
As the research keeps changing and as our understanding keeps expanding, I think it’s really important to be considering all of these aspects of the journey that we’re talking about undertaking because we can’t think of ourselves as just like a physical body, you know, or just a mind. I think it’s a mistake if you just focus on like Alia talked about like calories in calories out.
I mean, that’s one thing to consider, but we have to think about, I think I like to think of ourselves as, I’ve heard the term recently called biopsychosocial beings. We’re not just animals. We’re not just, it’s biopsychosocial. So physical, mental, and like social. I mean, those that can, like we’re social animals too.
Martha McKinnon (15:10)
And so you have to really consider all of those aspects when you’re trying to put together a plan that’s really going to be most beneficial for you. So when you think about this, know, in terms of of trying to eat better, trying to maybe, you know, slim down, maintain your weight. What I take away from this is that some of the things that we’re doing that we think are going to be helpful to us might be we might be working against ourselves in ways that we didn’t really understand. Right?
Peter Morrison (15:40)
Meaning like low fat, low calorie label, like the label that influences what we’re purchasing because we think it’s the best, you know.
Martha McKinnon (15:45)
Right. Right. Yeah. So, so, you know, so for example, it’s like, and again, this is not like this was never intended, right? We were intending to try to like, because it would make who would ever think that, our, that our body wouldn’t react just to what we were eating, that somehow what we thought about what we were eating would actually change our biology. I who, nobody, right. I mean, right.
Peter Morrison (16:08)
Exactly. That’s what I’m struggling with.
Martha McKinnon (16:21)
And so, but if you really can grasp this, it has powerful implications and I think about it in terms of my own journey. Because I’ve been through all these, I’ve been doing this since the seventh grade, trying to figure this out, trying to understand this connection between food and health and weight for decades now. And I think about my own journey and I think about all of the low fat movement.
Peter Morrison (16:48)
Mm-hmm.
Martha McKinnon (16:49)
Was that the… I guess that was the 80s and the 90s, right? The big low fat movement. I mean, I remember Snackwells. I remember low fat Entenmann’s Danish, you know, and I think about the fact that I ate so many of those products. And I remember like the Snackwells, for example, it was a Nabisco product, you know, and there was this chocolate cookie that you could eat. I could eat it forever and it would never satisfy me.
Peter Morrison (17:13.794)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Martha McKinnon (17:19)
And it’s like, is part of this what we’re talking about here. The fact that I thought it was low fat and I thought it was better for me, consequently the ghrelin levels you know never went down. Was it was it really my mind or was it just the fact that physically it wasn’t satisfying. I don’t know but it’s interesting to think about. What if those experiments had been you know a similar experiment had been done back then comparing those cookies with like Oreos.
Peter Morrison (17:34.37)
Hmm. Right, right.
Martha McKinnon (17:48)
It was the replacement for the Oreo conceivably. But what I came, but it took me a long time to realize that one Oreo or a couple of Oreos would satisfy me in a way that a whole box of those cookies would not. You know, so it makes me think, was this exactly what, you know, what I was experiencing, what was demonstrated through this milkshake experiment? And there’s so many other examples of that for me personally.
Peter Morrison (18:04)
Mm-hmm.
Martha McKinnon (18:17)
So that I’ve become a person and there’s no right or wrong and we all have to do this journey the way that works for us. But through all of my years of experimentation, I’ve come to understand that for me personally, I am much better off eating a little bit of the what I would call the real thing. I don’t really do sugar free. It just doesn’t work for me.
Peter Morrison (18:45)
It’s the artificial sweetener.
Martha McKinnon (18:46)
Well, the artificial stuff for me physically causes like this, like a headache, specifically, specifically, some of them. Others, I just don’t like the taste really. And I’ve spent, I think my eyes started to get opened up when I had some opportunity to travel to, you know, Italy and France and take a few food tours. And I really came to appreciate the love of like the higher, like the quality of their food.
Peter Morrison (18:51)
Mm-hmm.
Martha McKinnon (19:15)
I’m becoming kind of a food snob to be quite honest and I like to be more selective about what I was eating more like a French woman. I was a big fan of French ladies don’t get fat. And so I would kind of pretend I’m a French lady and try to eat more like that, you know, really savoring the high quality chocolate versus, you know, devouring, several candy bars.
And stuff like that. So I’ve played with that and it seems to have worked better for me. And I always thought though that the difference was just in the sort of the quality of the food. I never really gave thought to the fact that it could actually be what was exposed here for us in this study. Pretty wild.
Martha McKinnon (20:10)
And so I really think about because what they said here in this video is that for some of these products like low sugar, low this, low that, they might work better for us if we believed it was really decadent. And so how do we use this? How do we use this understanding that our mind and our beliefs are really part of the equation to help us on our journey?
I think there’s lots of things we can think about like they talked about. You really want to be thinking about whatever you’re doing as being like you want to tap into the satisfaction and the indulgence and the enjoyment. If you’re just eating something that doesn’t satisfy you physically just because you think it’s healthier, you could be working against yourself, you know, as this video showed us.
Peter Morrison (20:46)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Peter Morrison (21:06)
For me, I think regardless of if I’m eating something I think is healthy or not or full fat, think for me personally, slowing down is a big thing, I’m often the last person done eating. If we’re out at a restaurant, I always feel bad because the plates are being cleared and I’m, you I still have half or a third left of my meal.
Martha McKinnon (21:16)
Mm-hmm.
Peter Morrison (21:35)
It’s not, it is purposeful, but it’s not, I’m not, I’m not doing it for any particular reason.
Martha McKinnon (21:41)
It’s a good quality. I mean, I think and again, I’m going to go back to Mindless Eating forever because it has been for me such a great resource. But I think in that book, it talks about one of the strategies that you can use when you’re with people is to try to be the last one to start and to try to time yourself and pace yourself with the slower eater to help train yourself to slow down.
Peter Morrison (22:01)
Mm.
Martha McKinnon (22:11)
So you can actually be serving a really good purpose for folks you’re dining with, if they wanted to follow your cues and to try to actually eat, you know, more at your pace, because like you’re saying, I mean, there’s a lot of studies that have shown that it takes us, you know, I think it’s they say 20 minutes at least for the message to get from your stomach back to your brain to say you’ve had enough.
Peter Morrison (22:30)
That’s it.
Martha McKinnon (22:40)
And that’s been another strategy that has helped me very much in that I’ll eat and I’ll finish and I’ll think, well, I’m not sure. I’m not sure I’m satisfied yet. I think I might want a little more. And I’ve played this game to say, well, we’re just going to wait. We’re going to sit here we’re just going to, we’re going to just sit and wait and relax and have conversation. And invariably, you know, in 10 or 15 minutes or less no, I don’t, I don’t want more.I mean, so, so that’s a, so slowing down.
And paying attention is, I think, paramount to what we’re talking about, because again, it’s all about these signals and the hormones and what has to happen. And sometimes, like, if you don’t listen, then you end up overful. Right. If you you go back for the seconds, you think you needed it and then then you’re in misery because now you’ve overshot the runway and and you’re uncomfortable.
Peter Morrison (23:21)
Absolutely. Mm hmm. The hardest is when something’s really good or tastes really good. And we have this conversation a lot at dinner. It’s like, I really want some more. But, it really is a conversation because you could easily go back for seconds, but then.
Martha Mckinnon (23:35)
Right?
Martha McKinnon (23:55)
Right.
Peter Morrison (23:55)
As soon as you know you’ve sort of overfilled, it’s not exactly comfortable.
Martha McKinnon (24:00)
It’s almost instant regret because it’s not comfortable. And it’s interesting that you talk about that because there’s a term in the Okinawans. The Okinawans are known for I think being some of the or they have been in the past. They’re one of those blue zones and they’re known for their long lives and they have a term. Have you heard it? It’s like Hara Hachi Bu or something. And so it’s a term that basically says 80% full.
So they’re trying to remind themselves always to only be filling up to like the 80% level and to never be topping off. So it’s part of the culture and it’s this term, Hara Hachi Bu, that they’ll be trying to remind themselves for this very reason, think that you’re because ideally your stomach isn’t so full that it can actually do its work of digestion. You know, if you overfill it, then it’s over challenged.
Peter Morrison (24:41)
I like that. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Martha McKinnon (24:55)
And I think, like you said, part of it is a conversation that you have with yourself to say, well, I don’t want to feel bad. So I know it tasted wonderful, but I, I often will say out loud, like it’s, and I don’t know that this is true, but I will say it’s not my last meal. It might be, but I, but I don’t know it. And I’ll remind myself that it’s not, and that I can have it. I will have it again, as again, a way to calm the, that part of you that wants more.
Peter Morrison (25:14)
Right. Right and if there are leftovers and it was really good, then you know you’ve got another really good meal coming.
Martha McKinnon (25:28)
Right, right. Yeah, exactly. So it’s that that ability to just kind of slow down and trust that there will be tomorrow and you are going to eat again. And I think a lot of it is just you’re changing your self talk. I mean, I’ve often said that I feel like all of this is about, you know, 95% mindset and mental and like 5% physical, because there really is a lot to be considered with the mind part of all of this.
Peter Morrison (25:54)
Well, that video really enforced that point. Thanks for sharing that.
Martha McKinnon (25:57)
And that really puts it, it punctuates it, doesn’t it? Yeah.
Martha McKinnon (26:05)
Yeah, so I would love again to get readers thoughts and ideas about how they would use and can use this knowledge and this information as they move forward and thinking about how they’re going to approach their meals, you know, in meal planning and how they’re going to approach, you know, what they’re thinking and just realizing that what you’re believing is extremely powerful, extremely powerful.
Peter Morrison (26:34)
Very good.
Martha McKinnon (26:35)
Alright, well thank you so much for tuning in. We’d love to have your comments. We would love to have you to subscribe to our channel and we’ll be back again soon. Take care. Bye bye.
Peter Morrison (26:45)
Have a great day.
