Jono (00:24.514)

Hey food groupies, today we're gonna be talking about cheat meals, which to be perfectly honest, it's not a conversation I was expecting to have to have in 2024, but I think I've developed a pretty nice echo chamber, which is not always a good thing, don't get me wrong, but at least on social media, it means that a lot of the people who I interact with are pretty clever and pretty cool and understand that the phrase cheat meal might be problematic. So it's not a topic that I thought I'd to have address anymore, but I've been hearing about it a lot.

different areas lately. So I'm going to talk about it. I'm not angry. I'm just disappointed. no, look, if you have used the phrase or currently using the phrase cheat meal, please, I totally get it. mean, the rock, you know, bless that man. Sort of, I don't know, he's like, you know, as a gym going male, obviously, on some level, I admire the rock. And he's very big on his cheat meals.

So it's certainly still a very common terminology that is used. So I want to go through, I'll take you through very quickly what they are, how you can use them. And no, that's about it. I, something secret and special at the end. Basically a cheat meal is a meal that is not on your diet. You're having a meal that is not part of the plan. So presumably you have a plan that you're following to achieve a goal.

if you don't have a plan, you can't really cheat on it. So it's totally fine. Don't worry about it. But a cheat meal implies like it's a meal that you were eating that is not part of your plan. Now, sometimes cheat meals might be part of someone's plan. You know, you need to adhere to your macros or stick to the meals in your meal plan. But on Friday night, you can have a cheat meal. you know, and essentially what is it, it's implying is it's a free meal. It's a meal where you can do what you want before you get back to the structure and constraints of your plan. Now.

my main issue with it is the phrase cheat meal. I can't think of too many scenarios outside of like cheating death, which I suppose is good, depending on the person, then that cheating is ever really good, you know? And so that's the main thing. Now I know that this is just semantics and you probably notice that I often am quite particular with the language that we use, but that's for good reason because language is powerful. And if I'm referring to a meal as a cheat meal,

Jono (02:48.022)

that is, there's a lot of negative connotations that sit underneath that, right? Now, clearly if I'm cheating, I've done something wrong. And so I'm breaking my diet, I'm cheating on my diet. And that has a whole host of ramifications, right? How I'm gonna feel about that, I'm probably gonna feel very good during or after there's gonna be this underlying kind of like, yeah, I'm doing something bad. And then that also implies that to be

on the plan is good and to be off the plan is bad, which is too black and white and isn't really how we should be approaching this sort of thing as well. So this phrase cheat meal just really reinforces all of that. Also, it kind of reinforces the whole good food, bad food idea, right? This idea that all of the foods that you're not allowed on your diet, please hear the inverted commas clanging into place when I say that. The foods you're not allowed, the bad foods, you can have them.

only on your cheat meal. And you can see how this concept of a cheat meal, it just further reinforces this distinction between good foods and bad foods. Now, yes, there are foods that are more nutritious and foods that are less nutritious. There are foods that we want to be including more often and foods we want to be including less often. I'm not an idiot. And I don't want to argue that point. That's very true. But talking about it as foods I want to eat less often versus a bad food triggers two very different feelings in my brain, right? And those feelings are going to play out.

in my future dietary choices, my sense of self, my self -efficacy, i .e. how confident do I feel that I'm going to be able to achieve this thing? My relationship with food, like what happens when quote unquote I'm finished my diet? Are the bad foods still bad? Am I going to feel guilty when I eat them? How do I include them? Like all of these sorts of things, right? So basically how to use cheat meals is to not. That doesn't mean don't do a cheat meal, just stick perfectly to your plan. Really the main thing we need to do

is change the language. And so the phrase that I use with the people I work with all the time is a relaxed meal or a relaxed snack, right? Or you might call it unusual that sometimes a phrase that we've used as well, right? Because, you know, as much as I'd like a whole pizza is not a normal dinner for me. That's an unusual dinner for me. I would say that's me relaxing some of the parameters that I would typically use when building a nutritious, well -fueled meal. Right? And so

Jono (05:10.55)

This, I tend to default to relaxed meal. And that's also because I know if I called my wife and I said, Hey, guess what? I relaxed today. She'd be like, great. Good job you. I hope you had a good day. If I called my wife and said, Hey, I cheated today. The conversation would go slightly different. And that just, I feel like reinforces why this language is important. Right? If I've had a relaxed meal, I'm going to feel way less guilty. I'm not going to feel any guilt. I'm going to feel like, yeah, cool. I've got, I've been sticking to my plan.

having a bit of a relaxed meal, something that's a little bit different. And I'm just gonna get back to normal at my very next meal. Like big deal. It doesn't reinforce, there's no morals attached to it. There's no value attached to it. And so if you do wanna have some meals throughout your week or some snacks throughout your week that are not exactly in alignment with your plan, now how many you should be having and what they should look like is unfortunately not something I can cover in a podcast episode, because it's very context dependent. It's dependent on your goals, where you're up to in that progress.

all of your other previous relationship with food, what you're trying to build, all of those sorts of things, right? So I can't talk about the scope and the frequency of those meals, but whatever they are or whatever that is, I still strongly encourage you to use the phrase relaxed meal, not cheat meal. So if we can all agree to retire the phrase cheat meal, so I don't have to do this again in 2025, that would be awesome. So relaxed meals, relaxed snacks, unusual meals, unusual snacks, and then get back to normal.

and everything's gonna be okay. You haven't cheated on your diet. You're not in a monogamous relationship with your diet. You just ate something that wasn't a part of your everyday plan. That doesn't make you a bad person, it just makes you a person and that's all okay. So I hope this landed for a few of you. And if you are, like I said, if you're someone who's still using the phrase cheat meal, even just internally to yourself, I strongly encourage you to change that language, change that conversation, direct it away from such a negative word like cheat. And you'll probably find that you're gonna start to feel a little bit better about your progress overall, but.

Probably more importantly, your relationship with food. Catch you next time.

Welcome back to the Bite Me Nutrition podcast, Food Groupies. That's what I'm calling you from now on, Food Groupies. Just gotta deal with it. If you don't like it, please find our postal address on Google and send me an analog letter about it. But today we're gonna be talking about the placebo effect, which is, I think, a really, really fascinating topic and a really, really important topic for us to get our heads around because it can help give you some extra context towards

that you can put towards when you're evaluating maybe something you've heard, claim someone's made, and that may not just be a claim on social media, it could literally be a friend or a family member who's talking to you about their experience with a supplement or a diet or some kind of radical protocol. And particularly if their experience goes completely against quote unquote, the weight of the evidence. Now,

I'm certainly not suggesting that science knows everything. And there's, I'm sure going to be things as we move forwards that, you know, we find that, that person was experiencing that result because of this thing that we didn't know about, right? Cause it was a true effect. However, if we look into the placebo effect, I think you'll find that a huge majority of those experiences can be explained away. Explained away is a bit rude, but can be explained by the placebo effect. So,

I'll take you through what a placebo is, talk about something, a few things about it that are interesting, share with you a few crazy examples from the evidence from the literature of the placebo effect and what we've seen. And then also just kind of tell you why it's important and explain how you can use this information to make a better, more informed, honestly, just a more critical appraisal of all of the claims that you might hear someone make. So a placebo is essentially

some kind of, it's something that will be perceived as true treatment, right? That could be a supplement, a medication, an exercise protocol. It could be acupuncture. It could be a whole host of things. That is the intervention. And a placebo is a version of that, which is designed to actually have no effect. Okay. So the common, the most common example is a sugar pill, quote unquote. So you're testing this supplement to see if it has an effect and you're comparing it with someone getting a sugar pill. just for,

Jono (02:23.916)

very, very basic study design in the case of randomly controlled trials. What we do is not me, I'm not smart enough to do trials. The people who are smart enough to do trials, we typically have two, I just said we again, I'm just trying to be smart by association. There are typically two groups in that study at least, but there's always at the very least, well, hopefully there's often a control group. Now the control group is, they are designed to get no intervention.

you know, because we want to test to see if the group that's getting the supplement or the medication, what have you, is seeing an effect. And if they're seeing an effect, maybe then the supplement is helpful, or maybe then the exercise is helpful, and so on and so forth. Now, the issue with that is you can't just tell people, you're getting a supplement and you're not because of the placebo effect. Everyone who's getting the supplement will think, well, they'll have this bias towards I'm going to get better results because I've got the supplement versus the person who's, well, I'm not getting anything, so nothing's going to change for me.

So we use a placebo to make everyone unsure of whether they have the supplement or not. That's the goal of the placebo to kind of even the playing fields, right? And oftentimes in what's called a doubly blinded trial, the people taking the supplement or the placebo don't know which one they're getting and the people doing the research don't know which one the participants are getting, right? So they're kind of measuring everything and everyone's going in even. Now there's a whole host of other things you need to worry about with study design, which I won't go into now, i .e.

it's hard to have a control group sometimes for like a supplement because for example, you can't test a control group with no vitamin D levels and give someone a vitamin D supplement. The people in the control group are still going to have some vitamin D in different amounts and so on and so forth. But just for argument's sake, it's probably a bit simpler to think of it from like a study of a supplement where like we don't have naturally occurring ashwagandha for example. So you'd have a group getting the ashwagandha supplement and a group

getting the placebo supplement, but both pills would look exactly the same, so no one would know what they're getting. A fun one I found out about a while ago was they use toothpicks in acupuncture studies. So it's called sham acupuncture, where essentially the person doesn't know, because it's pretty hard to, how can you convince someone they're getting acupuncture if they're not? Apparently you just poke them with a toothpick. there's all, I'm sure there's lots of other creative ways that people have used a placebo in the literature. Anyway.

Jono (04:48.318)

One really, really key thing here is this idea of expectancy. We see if someone expects this thing to work, we're far more likely to see them actually get a result, regardless of whether that result was actually due to the thing that they've swallowed or the diet they have followed. Whoa, that rhymed. That was cool. Take that Dr. Zeus. I'm so distracted now. What was I saying? Yeah, right. If they expect that this thing will work.

it's there's already a high chance that it's going to work. And now the really crazy thing about expectancy is it's not just if the individual expects that because they've willed themselves to think so what's probably far more likely is they have been reading lots of things. They have been hearing lots of people they have been following lots of people they've been seeing groups, you know, social communal groups on the internet talking about certain diets and certain supplements that is amazing and have changed their life. And I'm sure those groups have no financial

gain or interest or anything like that. He says incredibly sarcastically, but because this person has come in and seen this overwhelming amount of evidence to show that this thing works, when they start the thing, they are already going to be expecting it to work. That power of expectancy is already there. So that's one reason why we need to be very careful with how we approach this, right? Because in that scenario, there is no control group. There's no blinding, right? Like the blinding, know, participants not knowing what they're doing and,

scientists not knowing what they're doing, not knowing what they're doing, not knowing who's getting what intervention. So there's no scientific method there. It is just kind of all anecdotal. And that's one of the reasons why the scientific method is so important because it can, with some clever work, kind of negate the impact of the placebo effect to a degree, right? And so we've seen pretty crazy examples of this in the literature. There's a study where a was told,

There was a group that said, we're going to train, we're going to exercise. Some of you get anabolic steroids and some of you don't. The thing was none of them got anabolic steroids. Just one group thought they did. And that group, I think it was out of like 75 % of the exercises, they performed way better, statistically significantly better than the group that didn't, right? Even though everyone was taking the same stuff, which was nothing. We've seen studies where our cyclists were given caffeine, which we know caffeine is an ergogenic aid, i .e. aids performance.

Jono (07:15.642)

But these people performed better, performed faster, and wildly everyone reported caffeine side effects, known caffeine side effects. And in that study, they had like a, I think it was four and a half milligrams and a nine milligram group of caffeine. So they had this dose response. And they told people you're in the four and a half milligram, you're in the nine milligram, piculogram group. And wildly, nobody got anything. But we almost saw like a dose dependent placebo effect.

which is pretty wild. And then my favorite, I don't know if that's the right way to put it, but I think the craziest one, there was someone in an antidepressant trial who took 29, what they believe to be antidepressants and felt that they were overdosing. I think they intentionally overdosed, which obviously I'm not gonna touch that, but they presented with, had hypotension, they really low blood pressure, they had to be placed on fluids and everything. And the thing that stopped those symptoms,

were when they were told, actually, no, you're in the placebo group. You just took 29 sugar pills and suddenly their symptoms subsided, which is wild. So why does this matter? I've probably already alluded to it, but the miraculous reports you're hearing about someone's new diet that they're following. Of course, now we've talked in other podcasts about how when you make certain changes to a diet, you often also make other healthy changes. I have talked about the carnivore diet before and people feeling better on it.

There's a whole host of other reasons that they might feel better on it. Increased protein, decreased processed foods, know, decreased calories, et cetera, et cetera, removal of food sensitivities. But it can also hugely be this belief that someone has when they go into that diet, that expectancy, because they have heard all of these other people raving about it. They believe it's going to work for them. So mentally they get these effects, right? Same thing with a supplement. If someone believes it's going to work for them, that placebo effect could be at play.

could have nothing to do with the supplement, which is why we need to be listening to these scientific studies. We need to be listening to the ones where there's a control arm and an intervention arm, or the arm is just group. We have these groups and we're done with all of the right protocols and things. And so I guess all of that is to say, I just want you to be aware of just how insanely high the impact from a placebo effect can be.

Jono (09:40.096)

And so if you are thinking, yeah, Jonah, I've heard this diet's dumb, but there's all these people that are saying good things about it. How can that be apart from people lie and survivorship bias, all these other issues. There's also this very strong placebo effect that as you can see, can make someone think they have overdosed on an antidepressant and give them physical symptoms. So in summary, stay critical, be extremely pessimistic. Worst case scenario, if you're really pessimistic about supplements,

You might be wrong, but you'll be right far more often than you're wrong. So it's still worth doing that. Anyway, thanks for listening. Like, rate, review, subscribe, share, tweet. Don't tweet, no one goes there anymore. But thanks for listening and I'll chat to you next time.