Become a member and get more exclusive content! ➡️ https://bit.ly/37esL8i

Follow us on Instagram:
@drmikeisraetel https://bit.ly/3tm6kak
@rpstrength https://bit.ly/3nktLwO

Visit our webstore for all things diet and training, including templates, eBooks, and 1:1 coaching: https://bit.ly/3fjUd5E

Put your diet on autopilot with the RP Diet Coach app. Start your fitness journey today with a free 14-day trial: https://bit.ly/3trybpT

Join Team Full ROM ➡️ https://bit.ly/3GmbuqD
A private community with Q&As, technique checks, lives with Dr. Mike, Jared Feather, and Charly Joung, tons of resources, and members-only training programs and diets!

Want to learn more about hypertrophy training? Check out our Hypertrophy Hub: https://bit.ly/3raJZKc

Maybe some of you could remind me in the comments.

People talk about and constantly search for good foods and bad foods.

1 of the most preeminent examples of this I can think of off the top of my head is, I can send this in an earlier video, my dad actually watches most if not all of my YouTube videos and he also watches the commercials before the video and during and after and sometimes it watches that like you know like when 1 of the ads is like 6 minutes long and it's really just an embedded YouTube video for some other person.

Gundry, who I think was like a pretty good medical doctor, and then he decided to just sell out and make money saying nonsense.

So he like, 1 of these commercials, I was like chilling with my dad, and I was like, Bucket, I'll watch this with you.

It was like going through random foods and he was like, tomatoes, they're bad because there's like 1 ingredient.

This other food, they're good because there's 1 ingredient.

I was like, holy shit, they still do this.

So it's definitely a thing people still do.

They're always trying to look good or bad.

This comes not from just evil former medical doctors that are just trying to make money at everyone's expense, offense intended.

There is another group of people, much larger and more innocent, are just regular folks that just don't know any better.

You know, They come to diet and nutrition in an attempt to lose weight or become healthy or, you know, get into better shape somehow.

A lot of times, they come with no heuristic and no sort of representational schema of what they're looking at.

The first layer they can apply, the first filter is, well, you know, they say, can you tell me what's good foods and what's bad foods and what they really mean is foods that I should be eating and foods that I maybe shouldn't be eating.

Because like in a lot of things, if you get specific enough, Good and bad really do – can be understood as an effective way to generalize about the world.

However, just good and bad foods with no goal in mind is totally wrong because just by themselves, good and bad are really moral questions, right?

It can only help you get closer to a goal or make getting closer to that goal marginally more difficult.

Itchy whiz, you know, that doesn't sound like good versus evil, because it's fucking not.

And once you get specific on the goal and you still try to apply good and evil, it still makes a ton of mistakes.

So for example, weight loss is your goal.

Does that mean peanut butter is a bad food?

If you have a certain amount of it that's not over your calories and macros, no.

Okay, but if you have a ton of it, then yeah.

Well, if you push muscle gain high enough, you have to contract how many veggies you're eating.

Otherwise, they take up too much room in your stomach, they make you super full, and you're not able to really push the caloric surplus as high as you'd like.

Like, gee, I wouldn't really say they're bad.

It's a little bit more logical and less emotional than good and bad.

If you're optimizing for health, does that mean grandma's homemade chocolate chip cookies?

You know them chips that like break off and they're fucking, they're gooey and the chocolate chips slide apart like they only do in the commercials or at grandma's house.

And then at 1 point, you visit grandma and the cookie slides apart, but it's like somebody's finger and you're like, what the fuck?

And you look over and grandma's eyes are bloodshot.

Wouldn't that be a cool movie that's probably been done a hundred times?

In any case, if you eat, you know, grandma's like, oh, what do you want?

She hasn't remembered your name in years.

And you're like, no, grandma, those are bad.

Grandma's not going to make sense of that shit.

So good and bad, like that's some cool stuff that is really good for children.

Like, you don't wanna expand on the reason that kids shouldn't be doing XYZ or should be doing XYZ.

If they don't have the cognitive bandwidth to understand the reason, you can just overlay good and bad.

And when they get smart enough, they'll say, why?

But we're dealing with adults who mostly are people choosing their foods and subscribing to diets and all this other stuff, good and bad, it's just not really useful terms.

Imagine you're buying a computer online and you're buying a new laptop and your friend is like a computer expert and you're like, hey, which computers are good and which ones are bad?

He's like, well, it's really like a price and performance spectrum.

Some computers are probably not worth the value and some are overpriced, underpriced, et cetera.

But good and bad, geez, a little bit more complex than that.

You know, military hardware, like is that a good tank or a bad tank?

It's like, you know, it's got 10 different performance metrics you can test it on.

It gets a certain grade, But if 1 tank gets a 72 out of 100 and 1 tank gets a 75 out of 100, is 1 of them good and bad?

The thing is, the real world is a little bit more complicated and a little bit less emotional than good and bad.

So we should probably not try to look at foods as much with good and bad, but is this food in this amount going to get me closer to my goal or make that journey closer to the goal a little bit more difficult than it has to be?

I know that's a bit more complex than good and bad, but you wish it's also a whole lot more useful.

So if we say, okay, peanut butter is bad, veggies are bad, cookies are bad, and per the goal, we can still use good and bad, but even then, like, per the goal, you have to include the quantity and the macronutrient composition to see if a food is good and bad for that goal.

So for example, if someone's on a fat loss diet and they go, hey, can I have a cookie?

If you asked me, can I have 10 cookies, I would have said no?

You're like, okay, so 1 cookie's fine, but 10 is bad?

No, it is not, this is not a bimodal distribution with the insane valley of good, bad, okay?

Cookies have a certain amount of calories, certain amount of fats, proteins, carbs.

If that fits and plugs in to your daily plan, which if you use the RP Diet Coach app, it sure can automatically, shameless plug, Then a cookie's fine.

If on top of that, another intellectual layer, if a cookie's fine to hit your macros and calories, but after eating just 1, you want a bunch more and you get super rebound hungry and you're miserable, then All of a sudden, it's bad.

So what is good and what is bad is so context-dependent, depending on at least 3 things, macros, calories, and hunger signaling.

All of a sudden, every food isn't good and bad.

Imagine playing like 1 of those like video games where you have no friends and role player games.

And someone's like, oh, I got the staff of Dildon or some shit.

And you're like, is that a good weapon to have?

You're like, well, on level 8, yes, because it's the fire level.

But on level 10, it's the underwater level.

Like even in video games, the shit is too complex.

And that's as simple as it gets to say the good and bad, like that.

Leave that shit for 4 year olds is my humble recommendation.

Even junk foods, which we could say, okay, those are bad, right?

They are OK as long as most of your intake is fundamentally healthy foods, like veggies, fruits, whole grains, lean meats, healthy fats.

Then you can have up to 25% per day, every day, of a good deal of junk food.

And most doctors and medical procedures can't even tell your health differently for years and potentially ever.

It's not a situation in which someone's like, I'm going to be healthy and lead for longevity and they have 1 cookie and everyone around them is like, fucking no.

And to fucking scream painting by, who the fuck was that?

So in any case, it's not true that 1 cookie is going to fuck you up because It's a bad thing, right?

It's all in context, all on the margins, where some things are more clearly good and bad.

If you get a gun out and shoot grandma in the face in the middle of the street, it's probably more good and bad, more on the bad side.

But even there, there's context and nuance.

What if you had very good reason to believe that grandma was like a sleeper cell agent with a fucking nerve gas balloon instead of a stomach?

She was just going to go into a big ass church in New York City and nerve gas comes out of her mouth.

Then yeah, grandma gets a fucking cap to the face.

But again, good and bad, it's very childlike, don't work super well for most of life and because food and diet and nutrition are most of life, they probably won't work here that well either.

So next time someone asks you or you overhear and you rudely insert yourself into the conversation, you know, is a food good or bad?

You can at least ask, well, good or bad for what?

But then you can start to tell them about the topography of the situation.

You can be like, hey, I'm eating cookies.

Which is every time I fly in a fucking plane, without fail, someone next to me begins to eat and because I'm that fucking hard, I notice, I notice my surroundings.

Unless you fly with me when I'm on a shitload of edibles." They may not notice anything or really notice it.

I look over and a lot of times, I get the reaction of like, I know these are bad.

I'm like, well, you seem to be of a healthy body weight.

And for a cookie, a few cookies every now and again, it's no big deal.

Sometimes they're in disbelief and sometimes they're relieved.

And sometimes they even offer me a cookie.

And then I'm like, I don't eat that shit.

Fun story, randomly, my friend, Marcos Rodriguez, at MrMarcos is on Instagram.

It'll be fun when this video hits and you guys all follow him at the same time.

But once Marcos and I were flying to California from the East Coast, And we were sitting next to this absolutely lovely older Indian woman, who – Indian American.

And she's like, so – see, I have a young son and he's thinking about supplements.

And I like began to open my mouth to be like, well, you know, totally fine and monohydrate is the best And don't get the stuff that is super expensive.

I was like, And Marcos was like, absolutely not.

It took me everything not to just start laughing, and laughing, and laughing.

And Marcos corrected himself, and I helped.

I was like, god damn, this woman is going to leave thinking creatine is poison.

There's a lot of people, say, like a school nurse, my doctor says creatine is poison.

Lots of good and bad thinking everywhere, right?

Most bad foods are good at at least 1 thing, taste, right?

Almost no 1 eats junk food that tastes bad, at least not to them.

Imagine someone just eating like, I don't know, a bowl of lard.

And you're like, what the fuck are you doing?

And every now and again in the context of a plan, it's awesome to just have really tasty food.

So already the food can't be good and bad because good and bad for what?

Like you don't see kids having a pizza party and you're like, Jesus, that's it.

There's nothing at all wrong with eating junky, tasty food in the context of a well-balanced diet and a healthy amount of physical activity.

There's just nothing wrong with it because demonizing foods, calling foods good and bad, is, say it with me now, bullshit.


Speaker 0: Hey folks, Dr. Mike here for Renaissance Periodization. I forgot my last name. Maybe some of you could remind me in the comments. Good foods versus bad foods.

Forget DC versus the Marvel universe. This is the real battle of our time. That sounds like a whole lot of BS. Let's find out why. So here's the deal.

People talk about and constantly search for good foods and bad foods. 1 of the most preeminent examples of this I can think of off the top of my head is, I can send this in an earlier video, my dad actually watches most if not all of my YouTube videos and he also watches the commercials before the video and during and after and sometimes it watches that like you know like when 1 of the ads is like 6 minutes long and it's really just an embedded YouTube video for some other person. My dad does that shit. So there's this guy named Dr. Gundry, who I think was like a pretty good medical doctor, and then he decided to just sell out and make money saying nonsense.

So he like, 1 of these commercials, I was like chilling with my dad, and I was like, Bucket, I'll watch this with you. It was like going through random foods and he was like, tomatoes, they're bad because there's like 1 ingredient. This other food, they're good because there's 1 ingredient. I was like, holy shit, they still do this. So it's definitely a thing people still do.

They're always trying to look good or bad. This comes not from just evil former medical doctors that are just trying to make money at everyone's expense, offense intended. There is another group of people, much larger and more innocent, are just regular folks that just don't know any better. You know, They come to diet and nutrition in an attempt to lose weight or become healthy or, you know, get into better shape somehow. A lot of times, they come with no heuristic and no sort of representational schema of what they're looking at.

The first layer they can apply, the first filter is, well, you know, they say, can you tell me what's good foods and what's bad foods and what they really mean is foods that I should be eating and foods that I maybe shouldn't be eating. Because like in a lot of things, if you get specific enough, Good and bad really do – can be understood as an effective way to generalize about the world. However, just good and bad foods with no goal in mind is totally wrong because just by themselves, good and bad are really moral questions, right? And food isn't a moral thing. It can only help you get closer to a goal or make getting closer to that goal marginally more difficult.

Itchy whiz, you know, that doesn't sound like good versus evil, because it's fucking not. So what kind of goal really matters? And once you get specific on the goal and you still try to apply good and evil, it still makes a ton of mistakes. So for example, weight loss is your goal. Does that mean peanut butter is a bad food?

Like, I don't know. If you have a certain amount of it that's not over your calories and macros, no. Okay, but if you have a ton of it, then yeah. What about muscle gain? Well, if you push muscle gain high enough, you have to contract how many veggies you're eating.

Otherwise, they take up too much room in your stomach, they make you super full, and you're not able to really push the caloric surplus as high as you'd like. So like, are veggies bad? Like, gee, I wouldn't really say they're bad. It's a little bit more logical and less emotional than good and bad. And then what about health?

If you're optimizing for health, does that mean grandma's homemade chocolate chip cookies? You know them chips that like break off and they're fucking, they're gooey and the chocolate chips slide apart like they only do in the commercials or at grandma's house. And then at 1 point, you visit grandma and the cookie slides apart, but it's like somebody's finger and you're like, what the fuck? And you look over and grandma's eyes are bloodshot. She's like, gah!

Wouldn't that be a cool movie that's probably been done a hundred times? In any case, if you eat, you know, grandma's like, oh, what do you want? Some cookies, sonny? She hasn't remembered your name in years. And you're like, no, grandma, those are bad.

Come on. Grandma's not going to make sense of that shit. Her cookies are bad? Like, did she intention them to be bad? She's gonna feel guilty.

That's crazy, right? So good and bad, like that's some cool stuff that is really good for children. Like, you don't wanna expand on the reason that kids shouldn't be doing XYZ or should be doing XYZ. If they don't have the cognitive bandwidth to understand the reason, you can just overlay good and bad. And when they get smart enough, they'll say, why?

And you go, oh, I'm glad you asked. I have good reasons. But we're dealing with adults who mostly are people choosing their foods and subscribing to diets and all this other stuff, good and bad, it's just not really useful terms. Imagine this in any other context. Imagine you're buying a computer online and you're buying a new laptop and your friend is like a computer expert and you're like, hey, which computers are good and which ones are bad?

He's like, well, it's really like a price and performance spectrum. Some computers are probably not worth the value and some are overpriced, underpriced, et cetera. But good and bad, geez, a little bit more complex than that. You know, military hardware, like is that a good tank or a bad tank? It's like, you know, it's got 10 different performance metrics you can test it on.

It gets a certain grade, But if 1 tank gets a 72 out of 100 and 1 tank gets a 75 out of 100, is 1 of them good and bad? Compared to what? The thing is, the real world is a little bit more complicated and a little bit less emotional than good and bad. So we should probably not try to look at foods as much with good and bad, but is this food in this amount going to get me closer to my goal or make that journey closer to the goal a little bit more difficult than it has to be? I know that's a bit more complex than good and bad, but you wish it's also a whole lot more useful.

So if we say, okay, peanut butter is bad, veggies are bad, cookies are bad, and per the goal, we can still use good and bad, but even then, like, per the goal, you have to include the quantity and the macronutrient composition to see if a food is good and bad for that goal. So for example, if someone's on a fat loss diet and they go, hey, can I have a cookie? And I go, yes. And they go, OK, great. So cookies are good?

And I go, no, hold on a second. If you asked me, can I have 10 cookies, I would have said no? You're like, okay, so 1 cookie's fine, but 10 is bad? No, it is not, this is not a bimodal distribution with the insane valley of good, bad, okay? There's not 1 in 10.

There's 5 cookies is neutral. That doesn't affect your metabolism. That's not how it works. Cookies have a certain amount of calories, certain amount of fats, proteins, carbs. If that fits and plugs in to your daily plan, which if you use the RP Diet Coach app, it sure can automatically, shameless plug, Then a cookie's fine.

If on top of that, another intellectual layer, if a cookie's fine to hit your macros and calories, but after eating just 1, you want a bunch more and you get super rebound hungry and you're miserable, then All of a sudden, it's bad. So what is good and what is bad is so context-dependent, depending on at least 3 things, macros, calories, and hunger signaling. All of a sudden, every food isn't good and bad. It's like good and bad in context. Imagine playing like 1 of those like video games where you have no friends and role player games.

That's right. And someone's like, oh, I got the staff of Dildon or some shit. And you're like, is that a good weapon to have? You're like, well, on level 8, yes, because it's the fire level. But on level 10, it's the underwater level.

It doesn't actually work. Like even in video games, the shit is too complex. And that's as simple as it gets to say the good and bad, like that. Leave that shit for 4 year olds is my humble recommendation. Here's another cool fact.

Even junk foods, which we could say, okay, those are bad, right? They are OK as long as most of your intake is fundamentally healthy foods, like veggies, fruits, whole grains, lean meats, healthy fats. Then you can have up to 25% per day, every day, of a good deal of junk food. And most doctors and medical procedures can't even tell your health differently for years and potentially ever. It's not a situation in which someone's like, I'm going to be healthy and lead for longevity and they have 1 cookie and everyone around them is like, fucking no.

And to fucking scream painting by, who the fuck was that? Was that Van Gogh? Scott, is the scream by Van Gogh? Fucking, good enough. You're Googling it?

Edward, Edward Munch. Get out of here, really? Yeah. That's embarrassing. Who the fuck is that guy?

Fuck that guy. The scream is by Van Gogh. I stand correct. So in any case, it's not true that 1 cookie is going to fuck you up because It's a bad thing, right? It's all in context, all on the margins, where some things are more clearly good and bad.

Notice I said more, not completely. If you get a gun out and shoot grandma in the face in the middle of the street, it's probably more good and bad, more on the bad side. But even there, there's context and nuance. What if you had very good reason to believe that grandma was like a sleeper cell agent with a fucking nerve gas balloon instead of a stomach? She was just going to go into a big ass church in New York City and nerve gas comes out of her mouth.

I don't know. Then yeah, grandma gets a fucking cap to the face. Fuck that bitch. But again, good and bad, it's very childlike, don't work super well for most of life and because food and diet and nutrition are most of life, they probably won't work here that well either. So next time someone asks you or you overhear and you rudely insert yourself into the conversation, you know, is a food good or bad?

You can at least ask, well, good or bad for what? Ask them and usually they don't know. But then you can start to tell them about the topography of the situation. You can be like, hey, I'm eating cookies. Is that bad?

Which is every time I fly in a fucking plane, without fail, someone next to me begins to eat and because I'm that fucking hard, I notice, I notice my surroundings. Unless you fly with me when I'm on a shitload of edibles." They may not notice anything or really notice it. I look over and a lot of times, I get the reaction of like, I know these are bad. I'm like, yeah, that's right. I look like this.

I got to be like, well, bad for what? They're like, for health, right? I'm like, well, you seem to be of a healthy body weight. And for a cookie, a few cookies every now and again, it's no big deal. And they're always like, oh my God.

Like, they're like, really? Sometimes they're in disbelief and sometimes they're relieved. And sometimes they even offer me a cookie. And then I'm like, I don't eat that shit. I don't let that poison touch my body.

Fun story, randomly, my friend, Marcos Rodriguez, at MrMarcos is on Instagram. It'll be fun when this video hits and you guys all follow him at the same time. But once Marcos and I were flying to California from the East Coast, And we were sitting next to this absolutely lovely older Indian woman, who – Indian American. And she's like, so – see, I have a young son and he's thinking about supplements. Do you guys take creatine?

And I like began to open my mouth to be like, well, you know, totally fine and monohydrate is the best And don't get the stuff that is super expensive. I was like, And Marcos was like, absolutely not. I don't put that poison in my body. It took me everything not to just start laughing, and laughing, and laughing. Luckily, I was like, ah, ah.

And Marcos corrected himself, and I helped. But it was just amazing. I was like, god damn, this woman is going to leave thinking creatine is poison. Which, again, wouldn't surprise anyone. There's a lot of people, say, like a school nurse, my doctor says creatine is poison.

It's bad. Lots of good and bad thinking everywhere, right? Here's the thing. Most bad foods are good at at least 1 thing, taste, right? Almost no 1 eats junk food that tastes bad, at least not to them.

Imagine someone just eating like, I don't know, a bowl of lard. And you're like, what the fuck are you doing? And they're like, man, I love it. I can't, I can't. Junk food's the best.

You're like, what? Junk food at least tastes good. And every now and again in the context of a plan, it's awesome to just have really tasty food. So already the food can't be good and bad because good and bad for what? Like you don't see kids having a pizza party and you're like, Jesus, that's it.

Our country's ruined. You know, that's not how it works. There's nothing at all wrong with eating junky, tasty food in the context of a well-balanced diet and a healthy amount of physical activity. There's just nothing wrong with it because demonizing foods, calling foods good and bad, is, say it with me now, bullshit. See you

See all Renaissance Periodization transcripts on Youtube

There Are Good And Bad Foods- BULLSH*T!