#12 Chaga Mushroom and Other Superfoods You Should Be Eating with Jaakko Halmetoja

Siim Land (0:01)

In the urban environment of supermarkets and fast food restaurants, it's very difficult to find something to eat that doesn't have a ton of empty calories, that doesn't cause systemic inflammation, brain fog or even lead to disease. In the midst of this nutritional nightmare, there are some people who are taking their research and adventures to their utmost limit by traveling around the world and searching for the key ingredients that are missing from our menu.

Welcome to the Body Mind Empowerment Podcast, I'm your host Siim Land and in today's episode, we have one of those experts as a guest for us. His name is Jaako Halmetoja. Jaako is a nutrition and superfood expert from Finland who has written some books, does a lot of public speaking and is involved with some entrepreneurship as well. He says that his passion is making health and wellness cool again. Our conversation is going to be about some of the superfoods that are growing right at your backyard, but we also talk about some of the other compounds that can be found worldwide and that you can use in your food right now.

If you want to support this podcast, then make sure you leave us a review on iTunes and other social media platforms. But the show must go on and let's now delve into the world of superfoods.

SPEAKER_2 (1:23)

Do you want to know what it is?

Siim Land (1:27)

Body Mind Empowerment.

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Get stronger, faster, smarter, quicker, friendlier, more helpful, more driven.

Siim Land (1:35)

Everything the body needs.

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Control your mind.

Siim Land (1:40)

Jaako, welcome to the show.

Jaakko Halmetoja (1:43)

Great to be here Siim. Thanks for the introduction.

Siim Land (1:46)

Nice.

And why don't we start off with some of your personal backstory? What got you into this kind of field of research and exploration in particular?

Jaakko Halmetoja (1:56)

Yeah, I think my background is mainly in the athletic world. Both of my parents are physical exercise teachers or were.

And by that I've been just doing all kinds of sports my whole life.

And especially the first 20 years of my life, I was just training a lot. And I went to, you know, special forces to become a paratrooper. And, you know, did martial arts pretty hardcore for a decade. And by that, of course, you get more and more interested of arch recovery and nutrition and all of these things. But then around a decade ago, I just changed my diet quite a bit. I went to become a raw vegan for several years. And stuff like that. So I understood or get more interested about the side of like how how, how sensitive you can become and how much you can actually also understand about your inner processes and stuff like that. So it was kind of a shift from more kind of a performance oriented approach to health and your body and mind to just more straightforward to what type of emotions do you carry around all the time? And how can you change? How do you look at the world? And it's been an interesting journey.

Siim Land (3:19)

Can you tell me a little bit about what made you transition from vegan diet to a different one?

Jaakko Halmetoja (3:27)

Well, I've been just playing around for all kinds of things. Before that, I was following a paleo diet for several years. And so I'm not seeing these things as kind of that.

My identity is now locked into this one thing. But I've just been, you know, trying a lot of things and you learn through the process, a lot of different things.

And then, you know, I learned a lot from, as I said, from the sensitivity side of things and about plans and the connection and all that. And after it's been more into herbs and more into actually growing the food and, you know, adding back a lot of stuff from also animal kingdom and other kingdoms. So I'm just, you know, following anything that is under my interest. So I've been fixing it a lot during the years.

Siim Land (4:22)

How has living in Finland influenced your passion about this nutrition topic?

Jaakko Halmetoja (4:29)

Well, I think that I'm quite a naturalist in a sense that I was grown up in a northern part of Finland or northern from Helsinki and so.

So I've spent a lot of time in nature and just, you know, in Finland, we have, of course, four seasons and you get exposed to different elements and different things. So whether it was swimming in the ice cold waters or, you know, I've been drinking spring water from nature almost 10 years now and just foraging mushrooms and wild herbs and stuff like that. So I think that we have more connection to the nature still left. So because of that, it's even more popular in here. I think that we use wild herbs and all of these things are kind of cool these days. So it's a good momentum with all of the other health stuff that we've been talking for a long time.