Episode 69: Are Cheat Days Bad For You?

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Episode Description

In this episode of The Up-Beet Dietitians podcast, Emily and Hannah break down the popular cheat days, 10,000 calorie challenges, and everything that comes in between. Do cheat days fit into an intuitive eating lifestyle? You’re probably always hearing people preach food in moderation, and aren’t cheat days promoting that flexibility and balance? Tune into this episode to learn more! We also bring our resident vet, Emily Michael, back on to debunk all of the silly things we said during the collagen episode bonus question (find out if chickens actually have hooves!). Enjoy!

Participant #1:
Hello everyone. Welcome back to another episode of the Up-beet Dietitians podcast. Hello friends. Welcome back. Today we are giving you the skinny on cheat days. We're going to be talking all about them, what they are, and we don't have a lot of good things to say about them. It's going to be most of the problems with them. We have quite a few things that we see to be problematic about them. And we are hoping this video will hit home because cheat days are very popular. I had cheat days back in my fitness pal, calorie counting, macro counting days. And when I was looking up information for today's video, I got on TikTok and just typed in cheat days. And of course there's tons of videos, many of them have like millions of views. Emily and I were just talking off air about how we used to watch them on YouTube, like a 10,000 calorie like cheap days that influencers will pose. So they're very popular celebrities like The Rock and Terry Crews, the Ultra Fit. People like them will post about their cheap days. And so that gives us the idea that they are something that is required in order to have hashtag body goals. Yeah,

Participant #1:
we've been doing some reflection. I think we can end this episode with alternatives. Let's put a positive spin on it. Let's see what you can do if you feel that you need a little bit more balance in your life and whatnot. But we will be talking, we will be breaking down kind of what a cheap day is from anti diet approach, why it might not be giving you as many benefits as you'd like. So let's kind of talk a little bit about why TJ even seem like a good idea because everyone always preaches balance and everything in moderation. It's just these very arbitrary things that no one really knows what it means, which can be good and bad. So from a cheap day's perspective, it allows you this flexibility in kind of your dietary regimen where you're able to take a break from being, quote unquote disciplined and allow yourself to eat some fun foods. But kind of what exactly do we think from a nine diet dietitian standpoint? And the big question is do cheat days fit into an intuitive eating lifestyle? So let's start off with what is a cheat day? What is even a cheap meal? Because that's something as well, where someone might not even just have a cheat day, it might just be a cheap meal. And this is when essentially you can eat any indulgent foods that aren't typically part of your diet. And from a cheap day standpoint, it's a day with no rules where you can eat whatever you want, including those quote, unquote bad foods that you're supposed to be avoiding. Right off the bat. First issue is perpetuating that good versus bad food mentality, that these are foods that we shouldn't be eating, but on this one day or this one meal, we can kind of indulge. So as we've been preaching, food does not have a moral value. We need to kind of step it's just food. Every food has different types of benefits to it. And if we continue to think have that mindset around food, where these are foods that we can only eat on this day, we start to view them a little bit more differently. And we also don't want to start to feel any guilt after eating them or like, it's okay, it's on my cheat day, I ate these foods. It can really affect our relationship with food in the long run, which we want to avoid. We want to have a good relationship with food. Yeah, I feel like we've talked about good food, bad food mentality a million times on here. But I think one of the glaringly obvious things about cheat days is it's like good foods on not cheat days, bad foods on cheat days. And it's just like it's not that easy to define a food as good or bad. Like, your bad food may not be the same as may not that I have bad food instead of being fished, but someone else has bad foods. Yeah. So it's just not a good way to label food because like Emily said, there is so much more than just even nutrition when it comes to our food choices. Yeah. So that's problem number one. Problem number two is that cheat days are essentially just planned binges. And we all know that binge eating is not a great thing. So why would we want to encourage that and have that be something we look forward to? I've heard arguments from people saying that going back to what Emily said earlier about how binges can be seen as a good thing because they can promote flexibility or allow for flexibility. So some people will say that having these bingees, these cheat days, aka binges, these cheat days in disguise exactly. With a mustache on these cheat days may prevent binges because it does allow them to have, again said, quote, unquote, flexibility. They know coming up, they're going to have a day where they can eat whatever they want, so they can just stay disciplined for these last couple of days. When they get to Saturday, they'll be able to finally eat whatever. And yes. This might work for a little while. A few weeks. Even a few months of this kind of cycle. But over time. It's going to get really hard to go from that cheat day back to your. Again. Quote. Unquote. Discipline and get. Again. Heavy air quotes. Quote. Unquote. Back on track when those binges become something you look forward to so much and the other days are days that you just like. Dread. I think we need to find a balance which will give some tips on what to do instead, like we said. But again, this isn't going to work long term because it's going to get you stuck in that diet cycle of, like, restrict binge, restrict binge, restrict binge. And over time that can lead to a lot of problems like weight cycling and increased food preoccupation. We always talk about how dieting is the number one predictor of weight gain and if you are having cheat days, that is a diet. So all those things we discussed in the previous episodes about diets not being good cheat days kind of falls into all of that. Yeah. And also the idea of cheap day seems to kind of give that illusion of flexibility. But what happens if your friends want to go out for dinner on a day that is not a cheap day? Or you have family come in or you have a date? We talk about all these things. We never talk about the dating aspect of food. I know. We're so out of reality with that. We do not know relationships yet. We have no idea how to date people. But I actually realized that talking to some of my patients because I just don't think about it because I'm out of touch, where they're like, yeah. And they'll ask me about alcohol, what the best alcohol they drink is, because they're like, I want to drink on my date. I'm like, oh, people go out for drinks some days. What, brunch with the girlfriend? What? Yeah, it's a planned binge. There's so structured to it. It's not really that flexible. But like, life happens, things happen. What happens if you aren't able to go to the grocery store that week? Or what happens if you're coming back from vacation and you aren't able to get your normal supplies and you have to rely more on those, like convenience items that are very beneficial in giving you kind of some food. It's not as flexible as it seems. And also it makes life really hard to live when you have maybe one cheap day a week. I don't even know how often people do cheap days. I was never in that realm because I was never even on the disciplined, quote unquote track. Very not sure what was going on there. But it makes it really hard to live and not fun because there is a way to include all foods in your everyday life.

Participant #1:
Exactly. Like, what if you just spread your cheat day foods out through every day of the week and strategically included them regularly? I think that's a lot more of a balanced approach. Probably not overeat them. Exactly. You probably might feel a little bit better if your buys going from the sun and change from a discipline day to a cheap day. It's a vicious cycle and it's a very polarizing way to think. And as we all know here, as we're all tight buds, nutrition is not as black and white as we want it to be. So typically, if there's something as polarizing with thought, it's not always correct or good to follow. Yeah. Let's go onto our next problems because we have more. Our next issue with cheat days is that it takes away from really big piece of intuitive eating, which is honoring your hunger and feeling your fullness, which just goes with dieting in general. For on a diet, which you are, the other days of the week that you're not doing the cheat day, you likely are going to be possibly ignoring some hunger. And then when you get to your cheat day, you're likely going to eat past fullness. You're not really staying in that middle ground there. And the cheat days, like I said, often lead to overeating because you have permission to do so on these days. Yeah. It's exciting to be able to eat whatever you want, which it doesn't need to be that restrictive. But people so many, so many times just push past because you're just so excited to eat, like, fun foods and then you're like, oh, no, I'm going to have to wait a week until I can eat this food again. So I'm going to overeat it now because I'm allowed to experience it today. I would never do a 10,000 calorie cheat take because I just know I would probably vomit. I would love to interview a YouTuber that did one and be like, yo, we can keep this on the download, but we're going to post it on. How did you feel? Like, wait, you felt good? Especially if your body is not used to that many. Like, no one's eating that much regularly unless you are like Michael Phelps. Right? Michael Phelps wasn't even doing that anymore because he is retired, but he was literally like a world renowned Olympian. So going from probably in restriction or whatever or even whatever phase people are in their disciplined diet, 10,000 calories is going to feel really different on your body. Yeah. It's just not going to feel good. It's going to feel forced. And even though you have permission, why would you want permission to do that? It's going to be terrible. You're going to have a terrible time. Yeah. And just even enjoy it. Oh, yeah. And a play, like, devil's advocate for people who are being like Emily Hannah people's cheap days don't consist of 10,000 calories. That's just the clickbait. I'm like, yes, that is the clickbait. I will agree with you on that. But it still drives over consumption, like large overconsumption of food that your body's just not used to. Like, your body doesn't, like, change. That's an overarching theme. With everything going on from like, weight changes to food consumption to the types of foods we're consuming, it wants to stay the same, and if we throw it off, it's going to take some time to recover and feel okay or wherever. Okay. Feel okay for whatever you have going on. Yeah. Period. So our last problem, you kind of touched on this, but there is that strong push for being disciplined, quote unquote, and having willpower, quote, unquote, for those other six days of the week. You have to stick to whatever planet is the grind is there. I think I was talking to someone recently who said they don't like the word grind. It's probably me. It was definitely you. I haven't really talked to many people in this, but it really emphasizes, like, the grind never stops. You have to push through, you have to be disciplined, and then you just go absolutely wild and bonkers on your cheat day. It's just like I'm thinking of weird things right now. I'm like Mickey Mouse playhouse. What? We can delete this. If you don't want to talk when you have covet, we can delete this. But Emily has covet. That's why her brain is like, okay, they can know. What does that mean? I've been absent from the Internet for, like, two weeks. So you're relying on old core memories from childhood figure. I have no short term memory. Right. I have not absorbed any information recently. I have to go really far back. But yeah, it's just a while, maybe. Fun house. That's what I'm thinking. Like, you know, the carnival fun house. That's what your due date? It's just crazy because you're being so strict with yourself on those other six days where it doesn't need to be that way. It does not need to be that way. If you need to hear this, you don't need to do cheap days or cheat meals. You don't need that. You don't have to label it as that. You can allow all foods. And for all those other people that say, well, you're telling me to eat donuts for every meal. No, we are not. Now, you would not feel good. You have permission to do that, but you would feel like actual trash. Yeah. Which I assume you want to feel semi okay in life, but that is an assumption that I will not make, cause, you know, life is hard. That's true. If you want to feel crummy, I guess that's your choice to do. So. Yeah, you can do whatever you want. But I guess the good segue into what we think you should do instead. So, yes, speaking to the willpower point in intuitive eating, willpower isn't a thing. There's going to be willpower when it comes to eating because willpower creates the assumption that you're doing something that is terrible, that you have to push through and have some motivation to do it. But eating should be a joyful experience. You don't need willpower, and consistency is going to get you a lot further. So honoring the hunger feeling that fullness, including these desserts, if that's your quote unquote bad food on a regular basis, that way you don't overeat them. That's going to get you a lot further than Willpower is. Because Willpower comes and goes, you've likely never felt motivated for longer than a couple of days on anything. Yeah, like Hannah said, food is supposed to be fun. Yes, food is fuel, but also it's so much more than that. It's social events, it's bonding, it's enjoying. You have to eat. That is like you have to eat. You don't get away around this. So may as well have a good time. While there are some little things you can control in this world, food is kind of one of them we have some control over. We eat. I say that lightly. But allowing yourself to eat a piece of chocolate every day is not only going to take that food off of the petal stool you have in your head, but you're not going to overeat as much. You're able to enjoy that fun food every day. Whereas maybe you hold off and then you end up eating an entire Portillo’s chocolate cake on your cheat day. That sounds so good. I love Portillo’s chocolate cake. And you're not a bad person if you eat chocolate. And you're not a good person if you just eat broccoli. So you're not being bad if you do have that chocolate cake or whatever else. Yeah. Know how we're on this floating rock? Yeah. We have much bigger issues going on than you eating chocolate every day or chips or whatever it is you enjoy eating. Right? I know people are going to hate this. The gym bros are going to come get me. But like, don't take it so seriously. Like, life is not that serious. Like you could have goals, have your goals, whatever. I'm at that age and time in my life now where I'm like, it's not that serious. No, I'm not going to be stressing about chocolate cake. That's going to add joy to my life. Actually. Not stress. Yeah, it's going to make me a little bit happier. Yeah. Well, another, I would say, like, general tip of what to do. Going back to the consistency piece, we always talk about like what a balanced meal looks like, trying to get protein at every meal. So I'd say that's a big one, too. We will need to do like a full episode on balanced blood sugars, balanced plates. We always touch on it, but we should definitely do a full episode. But like, you guys know if you are a long time listener, we always talk about trying to get protein at every meal. Be sure to have some carbs in there. Something I always say is we don't want to eat our carbs naked, which means you have any kind of carb rich food, like fruit or starch or sweets, that kind of thing. We always want to have some kind of protein, especially with it, because that will help to balance blood sugars. You'll feel fuller for longer things like that because you'll just feel better. Like if you just had on your cheat day, a dozen donuts, you'll get some protein there, which can be mostly carbs, a bunch of naked carbs. You're going to just feel terrible from that blood sugar roller coaster you're going to be experiencing. I think the blood sugar absolutely, really beneficial. Honestly, blood sugar is all kind of like its own little trend right now, sometimes in a not good way with like, have you seen the Blood sugar King or whatever his name is with this stupid monitor? Because we won't get into that. I have a lot of opinions. We won't get into that. Yeah, the guy who has like the monitor doctor, dr. King. I know, I know. Danielle talked about in our diabetes episode where if you aren't diabetic, you don't need continuous blood glucose monitor because, one, they're hard to get. It exactly, to sum it up, they're hard to get like a hold up. There's a shortage. Diabetics have enough to go through with how much they pay for insulin to keep them alive. But I know that electric disability is very important. We know this. I don't have to tell you this. You know this, but I feel like it's almost being pushed a little bit too much where it's like there's like a fear around it now where I'm like there are cues. Your body sends you cues when your blood sugar is too high or too low. So we'll definitely do an episode on that. And if you want to learn more about stabilizing blood sugars, you should join the waitlist for Our course coming out because we have an entire section on that. So if you want to learn a bit, a little bit more hands on, be sure to check it on our website. We don't talk about our course enough. Please tell your friends. We're really bad at marketing. It can be amazing. It's like literally everything. It's like all the intuitive eating principles. It's like actual practical, like grocery shopping, meal planning, balanced blood sugar tips, literally everything we have in our brain. And you can then have access to our brain, both of our brains, too. So we both are making all the slides together. So, like things that I don't think about or don't say, usually Emily is going to say or put in the slides. It's like both of our giant brains and one giant course. Giant. We'll link the course wait list in the episode description. Got it. I don't even know how many tips we've given. I don't know that's an alternative, but we hope you have. There's probably a lot. We talked about, like, consistency. We talked about blood sugar stability, like still practicing gentle nutrition, like building well balanced meals so you don't feel those crashes as much, including whatever you would classify as cheap foods into your regular day. If you want to have them, you don't have to. Exactly. You don't want to. You don't have to. I know. That's the beauty of it. Yeah. So, yeah, final thoughts with cheat days and cheat meals. So if you have to cheat on your diet is probably not the diet you should be doing and it's probably also not going to be sustainable. Cheat days also really perpetuate an unhealthy relationship with food, which we are not a fan of. That's kind of like one of our biggest passions in life, passion. Passion and grind make me want to like you don't like the word passion? No. It gives me grind vibes when people say I'm like passionate about I know. I think it can be used well. And I obviously have passions on my own. I'm very passionate about a lot of things, but just like the word passion gets overused. I actually remember in college at Purdue oh, yeah, okay. You were in that class. Of course you were. We had the goal of classes together. They always said, don't use the word passionate and cover letters or interviews because it's so overused as I use passionate all the time. Well, not the applications. I have the source on my side then. Yeah. Anyway, that doesn't matter. I just have a lot of thoughts. Passionate Grind. I think I'm another word. Hold on. Passionate Grind would be a good band's name. It would be I don't know what their vibe would be. Like an R amp b. Like 2000. Oh yeah, let's bring back 2000 music. It's a song that oh, gosh, what's her name? Mary J. Blige. With passionate grind. Okay. Anyway, we're just really excited. We get really excited talking about your relationship with food and we want to help you have a better relationship with food. And the biggest thing is cheat days often lead to that restricting binge cycle because they are binges and discards. We've got a little something up our sleeve for our bonus question today. We had an old guest pop back on so graciously because if you remember back in the Collagen episode, what episode number was that? Hold, please. 63. Oh, there we go. So, episode 63, we talked about Collagen for about half the episode and the other half of the episode we talked about is fish, meat and various other controversial questions. So our friend Emily, who we had back on in the day, who was a veterinarian, she listened to the episode, had a lot of thoughts about what we had to say, and she So graciously provided us with answers to our burning questions. And that Motors question. Yeah. So we are excited to share this with you. We learned a lot if you had a lot of concerns about what we had to say. Do you know where we are new individuals now with a better sense of farm animal food science. So enjoy so, Emily, you listened to our college. I will allow you to share how you felt about our experts, but we wanted to bring an expert on so I feel like we should start off with where the bonus question started. Is fish meat? I feel like we should just start off there because that's where from there now we kind of spiraled. But that's fine. I honestly feel like that part was mostly fine. It just kind of went off the rails. It went off like 20 minutes. Because I agreed, I think, with where you guys ended up, because yes, I agree that a lot of people don't consider fish to be meat because exactly what you said. Like, people saying they are a vegetarian, but then they eat meat and like pescetarians and all that. But at the heart of it, fish is meat. Meat is muscle. Meat is myofiber. So, like, any living animal that has muscle and you eat that, that is meat. So fish is meat, but as a culture, we sometimes just decided that it isn't. And I honestly couldn't tell you why that happened, but, yeah, it definitely is. It definitely gives you protein, and it definitely is meat at the heart of it. But then you start asking, okay, yes, please. Segue yes. Okay. You asked if eggs are meat. I don't 100% know where you guys ended up with that, but eggs aren't meat. I had asked, and then Emily went on this other topic about whatever else. I was like, no, Emily, I asked you a question. Are eggs meat? I think we said eggs were meat because of, like, those categories. Because it's not dairy. It's either dairy or it's meat. That's it. Yeah. So other categories is it so dairy is any product that either is milk or is derived from milk. So eggs are not milk, and eggs are not right away from milk. So eggs are not dairy. Though I agree again that a lot of grocery stores put it as dairy. And again, that's just like a cultural thing, I think, because you could call it an animal product, but that just doesn't sound as good. But yeah, not dairy. They're also not meat, though, because, see, again, meat is animal muscle, technically. Okay. Even our muscle, my arm is meat, technically. I wouldn't eat it, though. Eggs are not meat either. Eggs are protein. You could call them an animal product, but you would be wrong to call it meat, and you'd be wrong to call it dairy. And I did want to just clarify one thing because I think Hannah was you at one point you started asking about pro life chickens and like, do you realize that, like, the eggs that we eat are not fertilized? Right? Yes. Okay. It couldn't become a chicken if we wanted to. I'm very glad you clarified, but yes, thankfully, I don't have that knowledge somewhere in my brain. So no one thinks that we're eating because I feel like that's the whole, like, I understand if people don't want to eat eggs because they don't want to eat any animal products at all, but eating an egg isn't murdering anyone. That egg will never be alive, it will never turn into anything, it'll just rot away. That's so good. Yeah, we tried to do clear from going too much into like yeah, no, we don't have to say on that one, but I just want to say they aren't fertilized, the ones that we eat. I'm trying to think of you mentioned they've been animal products I totally agree on. I'm trying to think like, what other animal products we eat that aren't meat, dairy or eggs. I think that's really it, at least in our honey. Honey is a good one. And then there's animal products that we don't eat, so like wool and fiber, things like that. Okay. I think the issue is like, most animal products are dairy because most animal products are milk based. So it's like milk butter, which comes from milk, cheese, which comes from milk, yogurt, which comes from milk, everything is milk. So I feel like rather than call it animal products just so you can include eggs, they just call it dairy even though it's not. Okay, that's my assumption. I don't own a grocery store, but it makes a lot of sense for a marketing standpoint. Yeah. Should we get into the really heavy hitter? Do chickens have hooves? Okay, so I know that one blog said that they have hooves, but they don't have hooves. Okay. So like a hoof is just like the horny covering of the third digit of a foot and it's made of keratin, technically. And this is kind of depending on who you ask. Like, I'm sure you'll find farmers who say that their chickens have hoods or talons or whatever, but technically a chicken has feet and then those feet have nails. And because it's like a wild animal, you could call them claws if you wanted to. You couldn't call them talons because they have to be a bird of prey to have talons. Like a predator bird. I'm sorry, I think I said that they have to be a predator. And chickens are omnivores, but they don't like, eat other birds, they only eat insects. So I wouldn't call it talons. If someone did, I wouldn't fight them about it. But they're not hooves, so I could not call my toenails hooves or talons based on those descriptors. Okay, if you really want to call them claws, you probably could, but it's not really like a well defined term. Usually like a claw is basically just a nail but on like a feral animal. So you know me. Okay, you don't have homes. I don't.

Participant #1:
Okay. The only thing I want to ask about is the lamb versus sheep. Okay? Yeah. Okay, so first, a goat is a different animal than a sheep. I just. Want to make sure we go. Our heads are all over the place. I think we know that two different barnyard animals and we eat both of them. I have only ever eaten goat in the context of Mediterranean food and Indian food. So if you don't eat those things, maybe you've never had goat. It basically just takes like sheep, honestly, or lamb, but usually it's like so heavily spiced that I don't even know what protein I'm eating. Anyway, goat exists. We drink their milk and we eat their meat and then sheep. Okay, so please tell me that you know that a lamb is just a baby sheep. Okay, I think that's what we thought, but then we were like really? Like, you were just questioning everything. We had dairy and eggs and fish on the brain too. It was just a lot. Okay, so a lamb is a baby sheep. A lamb, there's no difference. It's just like we call a baby it's just a baby human. There you go. Technically, when you're talking about eating them, if you are like, served meat and that meat is lamb, that comes from a sheep that is less than a year old. And the difference is as sheep age, like any sheep younger than a year that meets really tender. Do you know what veal is? Lamb. Okay, yeah. So lamb is veal. It's the equivalent. It's a young sheep, and then if they're older than two years, it's mutton, which you may be heard of, like, from Renaissance fairs or like medieval set shows, mutton. And it's just much tougher and much chewier and generally not very good. It's not really common to find mutton because normally people don't want to buy that. They just want to eat lamb. And then technically, if you have a lamb or like a sheep that is between one and two years old, it's called hoggett. But not a lot of people outside of food scientists use that term. I don't think usually people just call that mutton, too, but it's like kind of better than mutton, but worse than my own. But yeah, like the naming convention, that just purely like we have names for things to signify that this is a young animal and the meat is tender and moist, just like veal for cows. Okay, makes sense. And you mentioned, like, goat milk. People drink goat's milk. Oh, yeah. Okay. What you're saying about dairy being specific to cows, I get what you're saying, but like, milk is definitely dairy. Okay. Like any milk is dairy. But I understand that. Normally if I was like, I'm going to go to the dairy section, I probably wouldn't buy goat's milk. But I think that's also like a cultural thing because if you're in India, I think they drink a lot more goat milk than us because cows are sacred. But I don't know for sure now. I'm just sort of reaching. I know about meat, not about natural dairy. Habits. That makes sense. Okay. I feel like there's definitely at least one other thing. I, like, wrote notes down about the questions you guys were talking about. I love that. Oh, yes. Okay, so you got really hung up on like, what type of meat is pork? Yes. Red meat or not? Or is it true, like, its own category? Yeah, I think you just confused yourself because pork is the category that's like saying pork. Yeah. Okay. If you're trying to place it in red versus white meat, I get that. But as far as what type of meat is it like pork is pork. Pork. That is the name for the type of meat that comes from swine. But yeah, red meat versus white meat is actually, like, a very hard question to answer. That's valid. But it's confusing because it really depends on who you ask, because technically so the reason why some meat we clearly are like this is red meat is because it physically is red. Beef is red compared to poultry, which is white just in appearance. And the reason for why that is is because meat from a cow has more myoglobin in it, which is a certain type of protein that contains heme, which is another protein, and it contains more iron. And the heme and the iron give it a red color. But then it gets really complicated because with a cow, it's really obvious there's so much myoglobin in there that it physically looks red. And in poultry, they have so little myoglobin that it physically looks white. But with pork, there's more myoglobin than chicken. But, like, where is the cut off and what is the barrier? And for a long time, pork was classified as red meat. And then because of have you guys heard the studies where it's talking about how red meat is worse for you than white meat? Yeah, maybe. Okay. Which that is also very controversial. That depends on who you ask. But in general, there were all of these studies that were like, oh, my God, red meat is bad for you. Don't eat red meat. So then all the pork producers were like, oh, heck, no one's going to buy our pork. So then there was a massive marketing campaign where they were like, it's pork the other white. I was going to say I've heard that. Yes. Literally, that's just marketing, like the drama. Because pork does have more myoglobin than poultry. But does it matter? Probably not. So does it really matter what they market it as? No. Like, at the end of the day, there's benefits to eating pork. It does that seating pork just the same way as any meat. And nobody really knows if it's good or bad, but yeah, it really depends on who you ask. I'm not sure if there's actually an official statement from the USDA, but I was always taught in my food science classes that red meat is any mammal, which would include pork and would include beef, deer, goat, lamb, every mammal. And then white meat is non mammals, which would be poultry and seafood. For the most part. That covers almost everything, but it really does depend on who you ask. So that one's up for debate. That's so interesting. Also, you just re triggered so much of my food science knowledge with the myoglobin and heme, and I was like, I forgot this information was in there. I've never had to use it. I'm, like picturing my food science workbook right now, so I can see in my head, I'm imagining the diagram of the pig, the different types, the areas. What was his name? Dr. Saviano. So who we had it doesn't matter anyway. It definitely starts with an S, but yeah, I got him and someone else, the two old professors. I love the poor drama. That is so the other drama, there is drama about bacon. Basically, it's a lot of just one study will come out and then the industry doesn't want their entire food to just be discarded. So they're like, how can we spin this? And it's hard to know what really is valid or isn't valid because a lot of the studies, especially with red versus white meat, a lot of the studies find that people who eat more red meat are less healthy, but they can't really prove is it because they ate the red meat or is it because something else they weren't healthy to begin with. Because the people who aren't eating red meat, like, half of them are vegetarians, so it's entirely different lifestyles to begin with. So the date is kind of garbage anyways, so I don't have an answer for that. That applies to most of the world of nutrition. Yeah, fair. What's actually real, we don't know. Yeah, I like the mammal and non mammal explanation, though. That helps. Yeah. And I mean, again, at the end of the day, it's just a label. It just is true that since the categories are subjective, if you think about it, fish are very white and chickens are very white. Both of them have less iron than everything else. So it kind of works out. It's a good way to put it. It's all just a label. So I don't know why we even have these bonus questions. We just, like, fighting about stuff, I think. No, it was a good question. I mean, like I said, I would definitely argue fish or meat, but I also completely understand why people just don't think of it as meat for some reason. Yeah. Well, thank you, Emily. It's so good to have our what's the word? Our residential veterinarian to answer these world turning questions for them. You have to say, any other burning livestock questions? Well, did you hear me saying the Bose question? I was like, I don't even know anything about farm animals. It seems like I'm embarrassing myself right now. I guess if you've never really had to know things about livestock. I can't blame you. Yeah. Well, if we ever have any other questions similar to this and you hear them and you are jarred by what we say, please text us and we can get you back on to answer. Fantastic. Cool. All right, Emily. Well, thank you so much for this bonus question. That we really appreciate it. Yeah, definitely. Hope you guys enjoyed that. I'm sure you learned. Answer the question. Do chickens have hubs? That was my most burning question from that bonus question. That was actually our fish meat. Yeah. We hope you enjoyed today's episode. Please

Participant #1:
go check out the course. We are linking it. You can check it out at www.theupbeetdietitians.com. Join the waitlist. We are so excited to share this with you this fall. I don't even know when this episode is coming out. September? Okay, perfect. It will probably not be out still. It'll either be out or you can join the waitlist. But anyway, there'll be information on the website, so definitely go check that out, and we will chat with you guys next week. Peace out. Go enjoy regular food every day. Peace out, girl scout. That's what the kids are saying now. I think the kids said that back in 2004. They're bringing it back. Okay. I seem to come up a lot more. Really? I'm trying to keep myself up to date with what the youth are saying. We are really living in the 90s these days. I was looking at jeans online, and, like, skinny jeans are not in. No. I'm kind of glad. Me too, because those were hard to get your calves around. Yeah, you're telling me. I got monster calves. Also, it's all at a low rise on the market. I do not want to go back to low rise. I'm not doing that. No. Maybe mid rise, but high rise till I die. Like, up to my belly button or higher. At least up to my sternum, please. If there's not a bony structure there, don't even think about it. How do we always do? Okay, episode over. We're done. All right, you guys have a good rest of your day.