Come to Dinner:
 An Invitation to a Healthy Life

That's the sound of geese flying high, welcoming this Thanksgiving week. That's my interpretation. This is Dick Vose with Stories from the Road and we're going to do something that we haven't done, I think, but once before perhaps and that is to reprise a Thanksgiving podcast from a few years back. This is from 2019 and I get to introduce to you again a couple of friends of mine. Have a blessed Thanksgiving. Bye-bye. Well, it's great to be with you again, known stories to make sense of it all. And I have a couple of friends that have really interesting stories. And I just like to share that with you in the next few minutes. And our theme for this podcast is something that I'm really pretty excited about. You know, we get all kinds of input from all kinds of sources. You get articles. You have books. You have people trying to sell you stuff that say, how do you become healthy? And it always comes back to four things. How you eat, how you exercise, how you sleep, and how you rest your mind. Are you eating the right things? Are you exercising enough? Are you sleeping enough and getting quality sleep? Or how do you rest yourself inside your cranium? So it seems entirely appropriate. Since we're going to be speaking of eating, that's our focus on this podcast, that we're running up to Thanksgiving. We're almost there. And I just think that that combines several things about the health of our lives, food on the one hand, and this thing they call mindfulness these days. That happens in my head. How do I, how do I rest that part of me? How does that part stay healthy? Food and that part are connected. And one of the places they connect is the Thanksgiving table. You know, the eating habits that we have here in the United States changed after the Great Depression and World War II. Things started getting healthier economically in America. And this thing called fast food came into play. I'll never forget. I grew up as a kid in church and after sunny service, we run across the street to this brand new fast food place called, I think it was called Quickway, where you could get a hamburger for 15 cents and fries for a dime so you can tell sort of how old I am. But that process that brought in processed food, that is not whole foods, changed not only how we eat and ultimately changed how we look. So that's one of my experiences with food as a kid. Those moments in childhood associated with food that we like pretty much always stay with us. What I'm about to read you is not from the Bible, but it is a part of a page from one of my favorite writers, Phil and I'm Rick Bragg, who now teaches journalism University of Alabama. But he wrote a book about his mother, called All Over But The Shouting. And he talked about being raised in the South in poor circumstances. And this is what he said about breakfast. The one great meal of the day was breakfast because breakfast is cheap. Every morning of my childhood, I woke up to the smell of biscuits into the overpowering aroma and popping sound of frying fat back, which we call white meat. Mama fried eggs laid by her own chickens and made gravy and grits. Sometimes there was nothing but biscuits and gravy made from yesterday's bacon grease, which I would take right now in place of just about anything I usually eat at this writing he was living in New York City. We always had a hog, not hogs, a hog. And at hog killing time, we ate like kings until he had been reduced to snout and toenails. If I was late for the school bus, she would shove a piece of fat back or bacon into a biscuit and I would eat it on the run. To this day, I dream not of beautiful women and wealth and power, as often as I dream, of sausage gravy over biscuits with a slice tomato on the side and a small lake of real grits, not that bland pale, watery restaurant stuff I would not serve on death row. But grits cooked with butter and plenty of salt and black pepper makes me want to have some grits and a biscuit right there. So let's just talk about food though and I'm not a dietician, a nutritional specialist. I'm not here to get on you about weight because then I'd have to get on myself if we're just talking about weight, which we're not. But let's just talk about the idea of food or the genesis of food literally. The genesis of food. It's fascinating that from the get-go, as one would say, in Scripture, you find food. From the first book in Scripture, Genesis to the Revelation, you've got the garden on the one end, you've got a marriage feast at the end of the book and all the way through you've got all these pieces, you know, can't enable in the garden sort of had a food fight. The Israel and the wilderness, when Moses was leading the children of Israel out to freedom, they were in the wilderness for decades. And the thing that pops up is apparently they're talking about what food was like back in Egypt. They talked about the leaks and all of that. And then they had to find food, had to get food so they had quail. God gave them quail, they gave them mana, which was this mysterious substance that showed up in the morning. And if you didn't eat it that day, it rotted. And literally it meant what is it? In the Gospels, food is talked about more than a hundred times. Anyway, all the way through Scripture, you find this food track more than a hundred times in the Gospels, food and meals are mentioned. And Jesus even calls himself the bread of life. So I'm saying, what's all that about? Anyway, with that as kind of a template or a backdrop, let's move on. So I thought it'd be fun. If we just talked to somebody who really studied this stuff, and this is not an iron chef or anything like that, this is a PhD in nutritional sciences. His friend of mine, his name is Dr. Chris Melby, and Chris grew up in Cortez, Colorado. He is in his mid-60s. He is fit as a fiddle literally, rides his bike to work every day at Colorado State University. And just on the side, he goes in Hikes mountains. Now here in Colorado, one of the key questions is, have you hiked to 14 or yet? Because we have 50 some peaks that are over 14,000 feet, but he goes for the big boys. So he goes to places like Peru and Ecuador and Hikes mountains that are 20,000 feet high. So some weeks back, I went over to Colorado State and interviewed Chris in his office and asked him about nutritional sciences and the sort of subsets there are of that whole discipline. Here he is. Nutrition is a discipline that borrows from many other disciplines, from biochemistry, from physiology, from behavioral sciences, from even some microbiology, as I mentioned here in a minute. So people, for example, in my department, we have individuals that study antipose tissue or fat tissue, but the idea of where is it located, and is it going to have a different influence if you have fat that is stored in one deep hole in the body, more so than another deep hole? There are individuals in my department that study, that are vascular biologist. So they study blood system? Yeah, they're looking at the circuitatory system. They're looking at blood vessels and the cells that line the blood vessels that become dysfunctional that are endothelial cells. They look at nutrients and the impact on those. But we have individuals that study more of the behavioral area where they're looking at, if we can educate parents and children, can we help prevent childhood obesity? Because some of the offices just down the hall from here are psychologists. That's correct. So we have a number of people in my department that are studying public health nutrition, that focus on the masses. There are individuals like myself that have been involved in clinical nutrition studies, over-studying individuals, so we'll intervene with dietary changes or exercise changes are both. And then we'll look at changes that occur in their blood pressure, we'll look at changes that occur in their blood lipids. Just a variety of different things, risk fractures for diabetes, and that's more of the clinical arena. So Chris's specialty area is metabolism, and I just asked him about it. My areas of research have focused primarily on metabolism, and also health inequities that have occurred historically in the Hispanic population and also in the African-American population. The former in regard to increased risk for diabetes, the latter in terms of increased risk for hypertension, metabolism has a very complex definition. I would say that if we wanted to simplify it, we would look at these are the metabolic processes or the physiologic processes that enable us to stay alive as a result of our ability to use calories that we ingest to then provide the energy necessary for us to live, to maintain a heart rate, to breathe, to think, to engage in all the activities of daily living. So listening to what Chris was saying, I just had this question, what over the years has changed? Historically, humans have had to work very hard to get their food. So there's been an appropriate match between the amount of physical activity that they need to engage in, and then the food that they ingest and so obesity and chronic disease, typically were not problems. There were problems oftentimes with under-nutrition and adequate nutrients and adequate food availability. But we're living in unprecedented times now because we do not have to work hard to obtain our food. We can drive in, you know, up to a fast food, we don't have to get out of our car, we have to expend very few calories. And yet, when we look at the calorie content of a lot of our processed foods today, I, in fact, high in sugar, high in salt, incredibly palatable, incredibly tasty, and our ancestors didn't have access to these. Food wasn't almost tasty. Oftentimes, food was eaten, even though it didn't taste necessarily very good because they needed it. But we tend to view food more, I think, as sort of a recreation rather than something that is just a necessity. And I understand that. Foods need to be, you know, part of our social gatherings and things, but I think we've gotten out of whack a bit. This was the person who introduced me to this word, microbiome. That's a big word that I don't ordinarily use. But here, here's sort of his take on that. You actually challenged me in a talk to see if I could use the word. I won the challenge, but I never got the meal or the dollar or whatever I was supposed to get. But I guess I owe you. Well, this, this will do it. This conversation. Microbiome. All right. Well, definitely. One of the things that's fascinating and this has become a very interesting area of nutrition. We actually have a couple of microbiologists in our department now that study the influence of microbiome or bacteria that reside primarily in our gut. But the human body actually has more bacteria in our bodies than we have cells that are our own living cells. We have trillions of cells. Absolutely. Well, we have so many more bacteria and they have a dramatic impact on how we function as humans. We live in a symbiotic relationship with our bacteria. Symbiotic meaning. Symbiotic meaning that we provide the environment for bacteria, but they also provide benefits for us. So the relationship would be like a good marriage. So this is like a leech hanging onto a shark, a leech fish. No, I'm not looking at that way. I'm not looking into a good marriage. We need a wide diversity of bacteria in our gut and what happens if we end up in a situation where we have the wrong kind of bacteria or we overwhelm our gut with a population of detrimental bacteria, this can occur because of infection. It can occur also as a result of a poor diet. So what we recognize now is that the gut needs to be healthy because if it's not, the bacteria will actually release some factors into circulation that can have a detrimental effect on our bodies and cause inflammation. Well, we know of course that inflammation now is at the root of diabetes, it's at the root of heart disease, it's involved in cancer. And individuals who are predisposed to chronic disease oftentimes have a microbiome or the genes of their bacteria are quite different than individuals who are quite healthy. So we have people, there's still a lot that isn't known, but we've got scientists in my department, I don't work in this area directly, but we have scientists in our department that are looking at how do we modify, beneficially improve the microbiota in our gut to lessen inflammation and lower risk for chronic disease. So it's a fascinating new area ongoing, there will be a lot more discoveries that will occur in the future. Right now I would say that it's in a different way. So the issues that Chris brings up about metabolism, about the best kind of nutrition, these certainly aren't localized to the United States. They are issues around the world and he's had quite an investment in that arena. So the work that I've been doing recently is sort of outside the box for me at the opportunity to do a full bright fellowship in Ecuador back in 2015 and I had a research project there that I developed looking at the nutrition transition where we see changes from the typical ancestral dietary patterns to those that are much more like what we see in the United States. With a lot of soft drinks, a lot of fast foods, desserts, candies, cookies, etc. And what we see is that in urban areas this is a huge problem in Ecuador, obesity is becoming a major problem, diabetes and heart disease are skyrocketing in terms of their incidence rates and it's even creeping into the rural areas as well. And I have been up 11, 12,000 feet and there are small tiendas or stores that are selling cookies and cakes and ice cream and soft drinks. And you would think, well this is a long way from any city, it's a long way even from any little village or town and yet they still have access to these foods. And we as humans are ill equipped to live in this current environment where we are inactive and we can purchase an incredible array of calories that are very delicious. And historically we as humans have not been in this situation. In Ecuador, especially in rural areas, protein deficiency, vitamin A deficiency, iron deficiency and zinc deficiency are the most common nutritional deficiencies that they occur in children. Why? Oftentimes because the variety of foods that they have in their diet is inadequate to supply those foods. For example, if I've been up in high altitude areas and it's primarily potatoes that are consumed. Well, potatoes are not going to be a great source of protein, they're not going to be a great source of iron. There needs to be a variety of food that individuals ingest in order to meet all of their nutrient needs. And when there is lack of variety, this is a major problem. I think I've introduced the concept of epigenetics to you before. Have you heard the term? I've heard the term. I just don't remember what it means exactly. All right, so let me talk to you about this because I think it's a fascinating area. So epigenetics is the study and the understanding of how the regulation of gene expression influences our physical characteristics. So this is my biology. This is my genetic structure. And what we see often is that I don't have any control over it. Well, you don't have a whole lot of control over some of this. Okay. Now, obviously, we didn't have the opportunity to pick our parents. When it comes to epigenetics, what we see is that children that are born in situations where they've been malnourished in the uterus, they now are going to express genes that are going to enable them to survive in times of low-food availability. Okay. So their metabolism may be slower. There's a variety of factors that influence their ability to survive in the face of inadequate nutrition. Now, what happens? Being in those rural areas sometimes is extremely difficult, and so the families will migrate to the cities, and now the cities they've got access to fast foods. Even though scientific language is being used here in our conversation with Chris, as he explains it, it makes sense. I asked him the question, what might a person do to have a stronger metabolism? This was his answer. One of the things that I think most people in the field of nutrition would agree on, and there's a lot we don't agree on, because we've got ketogenic diets, we've got vegetarian diets, we've got paleo diet, I mean, there's one diet after another, but I think what most universal would agree on is that having most of our calories come from the plant kingdom is beneficial. Okay. It's beneficial for our bodies. So veggies? Vegetables, fruits, paleo, you know, the paleo diet doesn't allow legumes. I think beans have a place for most individuals. I think it's good for the planet, it's good for individuals, there's a lot of micronutrients, a lot of vitamins and minerals in these foods. If individuals need to make sure they get plenty of protein, legumes are a good source, lean meats are a good source. So I think that what we have to avoid, at least to some extent, is excessive amounts of fat and sugar together, because fat and sugar together are those foods that we like the most. If you go to a fast food restaurant, soft drink and fries, you deserts, you know, think ice cream. You got sugar and you got fat together and we tend to over consume these foods. Nutrition oftentimes is sort of boring because you think, well, who wants to hear that and I just need to have more vegetables and fruits and legumes and the grains that I'm going to eat. I'm going to choose the whole grains because I need the dietary fiber and the other micronutrients that are found in those and I'm going to eat lean meats and that's kind of boring. People want something that's sort of exotic and exciting and yet honestly we come back to eating a whole foods diet. When it comes to exercise, most people overestimate how much they actually, how much they actually eat and they overestimate how much they're engaged in activity. And our ancestors had to work hard to get their food. We need to be active and I think most individuals need to shoot for 10 to 12,000 steps a day. There are some individuals that are just going to be heavier than others and we've got to understand what our genetic constitution is and be able to accept that and live with that. But recognize that I don't have to have the perfect appearing body what I need to have is a healthy body that's very functional and that's where we get into functional exercise. We don't have to run marathons but we want to be able to have the flexibility, the strength and the endurance to carry out the tasks that we engage in to be healthy, to more off some of these chronic diseases to play with our grandchildren and to enjoy the things in life that involve movement. My deep thanks to Chris Melby, he's a dear friend, I love being with him, I learn so much. When I hear Chris explain the intricacies of how we are designed. By extension I also like to see how food plays out in the why we are designed. That is how is food used for social connections and it plays such a big part to explore that more. I take you to Washington, D.C. A few months ago I sat in a unique place with a unique friend, here he is. We're here in Washington, D.C., just south of M Street, southeast on 4th at Chloe's restaurant and I'm sitting with a bunch of friends and my newest friend, Jose Madara, who is a restaurant guy. Jose, how old are you? 37, but I usually say 29, and you are either owner or involved with how many restaurants. So a managing partner of a farmer's restaurant group, seven restaurants currently, and expanding. What kind of restaurants are they decide to good? So we currently have restaurants that are based on American comfort and really supporting the American farmer family. So our belief of good food and good drink stems on it or is founded on the vision that good products can be achieved here in the United States and we try to remove the middle man from the farmer to the table by reading menus and tiny experiences that really focus on holistic, fresh, freshly made and prepared food that's the state, the American farmer family. Great. I have a farmer friend in Illinois by the name of Lynn Warhol, who now farms almost by himself, 800 acres. He says one farmer, he's 156 people, talk to me about food, just, I mean, everybody listening knows about food. We need it. Just talk to me about just your philosophy or thoughts about it. So food, I think over the years since, of course, agricultural revolution, we saw to create wheat in America and then around the world, we saw to create food that perhaps we sacrifice quality and excellence in the production of food to feed the masses and in that process we've lost our soul. So in that there's a disconnect when we know that historically speaking, our country has founded on an agrarian kind of society and when you remove the connection between what you have in front of you at a table or at a countertop from where it came from, it is easy to just adjust whatever is in front of you without questioning. And what we've seen, I'm not a scientist and I'm not a medical professional. I like food and I like to feed people in hospitality is my jam, but what I'll say is it's much easier today for an up and coming adult to just adjust whatever is in front of them as opposed to someone where they had to labor the land or at least love the land, understand where the product was coming from and understand what they were ingesting and kind of make that connection. Now that connection is not there anymore, it's absent. And so what we've seen in the country in the last 20 years is scientific research, medical research and other types of research that is making the public more conscientious of we're ingesting, we're bringing into our bodies and is creating this sort of responsible culture of like restaurant tours, chefs and other food creatives that are now coming to the table literally with what's fresher, what's best, what's more local, not only does it, not only you have micro economic reasons for that, but you have macro economic reasons for that as well. What can we do to sustain the local economy, how do we build our community and how does food bring us together in doing so and we're becoming more conscientious of what we're bringing into our bodies. So I think the food conversation is shifting completely. This chat was the first time I heard the phrase food creative. It got even more interesting when Hoseway described his calling. So hospitality is a calling of mine. I feel like God has, not just for myself but for all of us, I think that the table represents not only the unification of different people from different backgrounds, but I think historically speaking the call I have felt in my heart has spurred from the reality for me at least that every major human event in history, whether it's political, whether it's social, celebratory, mourning, it always ends or begins at a table. And I think that as a church and as a body of Christ or believers and followers of Christ, I think we've ignored a really big part of, or really one of the quintessential foundational parts of our faith and community building tools, which is the table. I realized early on about 20 years ago after college that a way of bringing people together regardless of their background, spiritual background, straight backgrounds was at a table. And now that I'm following Christ closer and understanding or hearing from him a little clearer, I understand that the table is one of the most powerful tools we have in our arsenal to bring people not only together, to seek to understand each other, to hear each other in a world that's convoluted with dissonchant and differences. And then bring people to a place of faith and inspiration. And to me, hospitality is actually conduit to doing so. So when I witness to my friends and family and community, it's usually at a table. It's usually after a long day or after a long week and it's normally 100% of the time actually happens at a table where we feel like God just brings us together and we're able to break bread. Sherry Terkel, who's a professor, a psych professor at MIT in Boston, has written a tremendous book called Alone Together. Why we expect more of technology and less of each other. And in the course of writing the book, she makes this observation that the loss of the of the dinner table in America is a huge loss because that's the place where you can have conversations that start one evening. You put a comment in it and it goes on to two or three more evenings. It's the it's the place of hospitable engagement where children learn how to ask questions. They learn how to disagree and agree. And it's a it's a safe place. And in talking with Hoseway, I think in his world and his arena, he would absolutely affirm that idea, not just for children, but for anybody from any background, any context, the table is safe. And it's amazing just because you know, breaking a bread really does break those divisive sort of barriers that we create in society. I think food is so that's a term I like to use as like art. It is art because I think food is just more than just a recipe and getting products for hearing products from a vendor or a farmer. Really, it's understanding what it does to when paired up with other things. And so I think that it like an artist, you know, that maybe what creates culture or a painting. Food is I think just as beautiful and important when it is prepared with a creative talent and gifts. And so I've had the good pleasure and amazing privilege to work with food creators in my career and to see the the drive. And it's something beyond passion. I would say it's the air they breathe. You know, one of my favorite things is to go work out at the gym and walk on the treadmill and on the little TVs they have on those. I like to watch the food channel while I'm working out. You know, nothing, nothing helps you like walking two miles, watching diners, drive-ins and dives with a guy Vieti. But every once in a while on a program like chopped where you have food, food competition, one of the judges will say when I eat this food, I can tell it was prepared with love. And I just said to Hoseway, do you get that phrase? When you have a dish that the temperature, the flavor profiles, the the balance of ingredients, presentation, the entire dish connotes excellence. There's something that happens when you have a dish that almost looks like you can't dig into it because it is and it can be simple. It can become for food, right? But it almost feels when it looks, smells like it's too good to be true. So I do understand that phrase and I do understand the idea that when something is made with love, it does translate to the table, into the dish, into the plate. You can taste it, you can feel it. And it's food that you digest differently. One meal, your last meal, what would it be? Great question. I would have to say a country-french dish of duck. I love duck. Duck? Duck. Simply prepared. Crispy duck, comfy on the top. Maybe a nice polenta. Just simple, comfort country-french. That's my favorite cuisine. That would be my last meal. Any desserts? I'm a sweet tooth guy, so I believe that we see and feel God's Jesus's love to sweets. Yes. Sugar? There's a new theological perspective. Yeah, we a lot to talk about at some other times. That would be great. But sweets I do, I love sweets, but my favorite ultimate favorite is ice cream. What kind? Me too. Yeah, so I'm not going to plug the brand, but it's high in fat vanilla, Swiss vanilla almond, so like just nice thick almonds covered in nice dark chocolate. Yes. Vanilla, simple. So offer, you'll tell me what this is. Yes, I will. Yes, you can try. My deep thanks to Hosway Madera for just giving me, at the very least, and now you some context for the world we live in, the world of nutrition and food. I mean, on this podcast, we've, we start in Genesis with fruit and end up with vanilla ice cream, almonds and with the chocolate. I love that. So here we have it. We have some better understanding of what good nutrition does for our bodies. As from Chris, from Hosway, we have what not only gathering and presentation has to do with the nurturing of our souls, but just to tie it together a bit, what's fascinating to me when I read Jesus in the New Testament is how many places he is where he eats. And one of the one of the most interesting pieces is as he gets toward the end of his earthly life, quite apart from miracles that are done with food. You know, the biggest observable miracle that is done is recorded in all four gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. And it's the feeding of the 5,000. You get this kid with the lunch and he does this miracle. It's the only miracle that is in all four gospels. But when you get to the end of Jesus' life, he has these encounters over food. And one of the big ones is he goes to a tax collector's house. This guy is a rip-off artist. And he goes and sits at table with him. And he is accused of eating with people who are disreputable. Instead of hanging out with reputable people, he goes to these other people. And at some level, that triggers his death because he's identifying with the wrong people. When he is crucified and comes back the night before he's crucified, he has a meal with his disciples. He comes back. And on Resurrection Day, he's walking down the road, makes a couple of guys who are just stunned by what happens. They don't recognize him. They ask him to sit for an evening meal and when he broke the bread, they recognize him. Later, he shows up in Jerusalem and they think he's a ghost. And he says, anybody have any broiled fish? He uses food and the table to identify himself as human. That here's the God of all the universe who comes in this moment from my perspective and uses food as the great identifier. And then Peter, the guy who bailed on him, he goes and finds him back at commercial fishing. And he fixes him breakfast. Have a friend who says, what do you do when you fail terribly? And Jesus hunts you down and finds you on the beach. And instead of vaporizing your fishing boat, he fixes your breakfast. What do you do with that? Well, you follow him. That's what you do with it. I have this thought that I don't think that Simon Peter could ever eat roasted fish for breakfast because they did that. In this case, I think it's probably tilapia that they were eating. He could never eat roasted tilapia again without thinking of that moment of restoration and transformation in his own life. I just am caught up by this idea that the God of all the universe essentially invites me to dinner. As a matter of fact, he goes out of his way to say this, look, I'm going to come knock on your door. I stand at the door and knock. If anybody opens the door to me, I'll come in and have dinner at his house. That's how he describes personal transformation. I just think that's a hoot on the one hand, but it's profoundly transforming on the other. So come to dinner, food for the body, food for the soul. That's it. I'm out. I think I'm going to grab a bite somewhere. God bless.