Posted by in mind

Podcast 274:
My Obsession with Money

Money Bags

It was pretty much all I thought about.

All day. Every day.

I wanted more of it.

No, I needed more of it.

But my habitual daydreams of actually acquiring it typically ended in nothing other than consternation and incongruence, awakening to a reality that never seemed to change.

A bizarre feeling, it is. To want something, but to not want it. To convince myself that I didn’t really need it. To perpetually rationalize that I was somehow above it. And to despise those who had it.

To be a have-not.

I assume that my red badge of poverty was first pinned to my psyche sometime before my dirt bike lost its training wheels. When I began to wrap my impressionable brain around the concept of social strata.

We were us. They were them.

And to want what “they” had was to concede all loyalty to my side.

It took me over 30 years to finally understand that. That what lied at the root of my low credit score and umpteen overdraft charges was a set of limiting beliefs inherited from my upbringing.

This revelation didn’t happen overnight, however. The first chink in my poverty armor came from an unlikely source.


Posted by in wellness

Top 5 Reasons Why Bone Broth is The Bomb.

by Sean Croxton

This stuff is awesome.

Never in my life did I imagine I’d be so head over heels about a soup made from bones.

I guess you can say I have quite the man crush on the rich, brown liquid that fills my coffee cup each morning.

It makes me feel warm inside, and puts a little pep in my step.

And oh my, is it tasty!

But my fondness for bone broth goes well beyond its taste and warmth. There’s a reason why it’s called the magic elixir — and it’s a darn shame that more people aren’t drinking it.

There was a time, not long ago, when bone broth was a part of just about every meal we consumed in this country, as it provided the base for soups, gravies, and stews. Unfortunately, with the disappearance of the local butcher as well as the invention of brain-cell-killing MSG — which gave processed foods an artificial meaty flavor — preparing broth became a lost art.

These days, very few of us even know what it is, or why we should be consuming it.

So today I thought I’d share with you my own personal Top 5 Reasons Why Bone Broth is The Bomb. Here we go!


Posted by in wellness

These Ain’t the Same Grains!

by Sean Croxton

Last night, I cracked open my copy of Wheat Belly by next Tuesday’s Underground Wellness Radio guest Dr. William Davis. I’ll admit that after reading hundreds of health-related books, I’m becoming quite the book snob. If the author can’t get my attention within the first ten pages, I’m done. Moving on!

Wheat Belly had me hooked from page one. This guy can write! The information is scientifically backed, written in plain English, and absolutely spot-on. I even let out a giggle here and there. Can’t wait for our interview!

You know a book is good when you’re carrying it around the house with you – which is exactly what I was doing around dinner time. While cooking up a lamb burger (no bun), I recommended Dr. Davis’s book to my very fitness-minded roommate Jennifer. She and I have talked about the evils of grains several times before. Despite our discussions, she’s still not sold.

It’s cool. She’ll come around. 🙂

To her credit, my roomy brandished what I consider to be the most powerful dogma-defeating weaponry in the entire arsenal: logic.

When confronted with the erroneous misgivings of saturated fat and cholesterol by Real Food skeptics, I routinely respond by wondering aloud how an old school food (or nutrient) can cause brand new diseases. To her credit, Jennifer threw that very same logic right back at me. She wondered how grains – which have been around for at least ten thousand years – can all of a sudden cause so many health problems.

How can something that The Bible refers to as The Staff of Life be the source of so much modern illness? Didn’t God nourish the Israelites with the bread (manna) from Heaven? Well, according to gluten expert Dr. Thomas O’Bryan, seven out of ten people are sensitive to gluten, the toxic protein found in most grains! Were the Israelites somehow exempt from gluten’s wrath? Or was the all-knowing God just a little behind on his research?

The truth is that we are not eating the same grains that Moses may have snacked on as he hiked up Mount Sinai. In fact, we’re not even eating the same grains our grandparents ate! In just a mere 50 years, grains – wheat, in particular – have become a mutant species crafted by the hands of human intervention in the name of increased crop yields, resistance to drought, disease, and heat, as well as an end to world hunger – all of which are honorable causes and tremendous scientific achievements. However, the accelerated evolution of wheat through hybridization – a feat that would make Gregor Mendel proud – has been to the detriment of human health.

To understand how wheat has gone from a comparatively innocent wild grass to what the New England Journal of Medicine recently declared the cause of 55 diseases, we have to go back.

Way back.


Posted by in wellness

This is Silly.

by Sean Croxton

Long time, no blog.

I wish I could tell you all about how busy I’ve been, but to be honest I’ve just been kinda chillin’. The radio show has been on a month-long hiatus (Robb Wolf this Thursday!). The “did you know” Facebook posts have taken a break. And I finally dusted off the Tweetdeck last night.

The TV show is in production. Just yesterday, my crew and I went over to Mark Sisson’s place and filmed our third episode. So far, we’ve shot with Gary Taubes, Todd Durkin, Dr. Tom O’Bryan, and Steve Cotter. You guys are going to LOVE the show!

What else is going on in Croxton World?

Well, I think I’m going through a phase that all health bloggers go through at some point or another. It’s the point at which we ask ourselves just what the heck else can we say about food that we haven’t said before. And how do we continue the discussion without losing the average Joes and Janes who just want to eat/live well and without attracting the neurotic orthorectics who turn food into a religion?


Posted by in podcast, wellness

Is Your Low-Fat Diet Making You Depressed & Anxious?

Fat makes me happy.

If you haven’t noticed, the low-fat era has not only coincided with a tremendous surge in obesity and diabetes, but also depression, anxiety, and addiction.

Seldom do we consider that the root cause of our mood issues is literally on our plates.

Or NOT on our plates.

On Monday, I blogged about the fact that 99.99% of our genes were formed before the Agricultural Revolution (just 10,000 years ago). Despite advancements in technology and our personal opinions regarding what we should be eating, we’re still genetically hardwired like hunter-gatherers.

We are hunter-gatherers.

Although we have no written or eyewitness accounts of the mental and emotional state of cavemen and women, we can look at the works of Weston A. Price and Vilhjalmur Stefansson, PhD to draw some conclusions as to the role of diet in mental health. In the case of Stefansson, a Canadian explorer and anthropologist, the Eskimos he studied and lived with were “the happiest people in the world”. Not only were they happy, but they were also extremely healthy, free of cancer, heart disease, and the diseases of civilization.

The Eskimo diet consisted of 80% animal fat. In fact, they warned Stefansson of the dangers of eating lean meat. They said it would make him sick, just as it making us sick.

I have long believed that in order to be healthy and happy, we must do as healthy and happy people do. Weston Price found that the native people he studied and lived with consumed ten times more fat-soluble vitamins and four times more minerals than we consume. These primitive people had no need for jails or mental institutions. Similar to Stefansson, Price consistently found that with adequate fats and nutrients came not only superior health, but also a pleasing, cheerful disposition.

We can learn a lot from “primitives”.