Weekend Special Update: "How To Grow a Healthy Baby"

Ben Greenfield (0:02)

Hey, podcast listeners, this is Ben Greenfield, and I am here with a special guest for a special weekend update podcast. And this is just going to be a brief podcast for those of you who are interested in babies, baby food, growing healthy babies, as well as green organic investment opportunities.

So the person that I have sitting with me right now just so happens to be my wife, Jessa. How's it going, Jessa?

And we're sitting here because Jessa and her business partner, Marta, have been working diligently for nearly a year now on a special project that I wanted to let you guys know about. And this project has been going on essentially almost since the birth of our twin boys, River and Taryn, and came to fruition during the raising of those children and more specifically the feeding of those children. So Jessa, how did you come about to be involved in this project that you're involved in right now? And tell me a little bit more about it. And what's driving you, what's motivating you, and why the audience should be interested in this project and also what it's called.

Jessa Greenfield (1:33)

Well, that's a big question.

Ben Greenfield (1:37)

Sorry.

Jessa Greenfield (1:37)

I got started is obviously to employees, and I was lucky enough to be able to cook and make all the food for them instead of having to buy packaged food like herbs or any kind of other organic canned baby food.

Ben Greenfield (1:53)

Well, I'm going to stop you right there, Jessa, because why didn't you buy the canned stuff or the stuff at the grocery store?

Jessa Greenfield (2:02)

The main reason is there's a lot of problems with the method of canning. Canning, for one, it requires a heat seal to kill basically bacteria that could possibly kill you or your baby. And so they have to do this heat seal, which ends up killing a lot of the nutrients that's in the food.

Another reason is a lot of the food...

Ben Greenfield (2:28)

So the vegetables and the fruits are heated to really high temperatures.

Jessa Greenfield (2:33)

And the second reason would be, I would say, most of the baby foods out there are not organic, for one, which means they're sprayed heavily with pesticides and herbicides.

Ben Greenfield (2:49)

Which we've talked about on the show before.

Jessa Greenfield (2:52)

Yes, and one of the scary things about that is, there's multiple neurotoxins, carcinogens, pesticides that disrupt normal function of hormone systems, and many of them are category one.

Ben Greenfield (3:12)

Which means what?

Jessa Greenfield (3:13)

Basically, that means it's the highest designation of oral toxicity, and that's going into your baby's food. And one of the reasons this is such a big problem is, in the first two years of your baby's life, their digestive systems aren't fully developed, they absorb a lot more of their food than we do as adults, and in that, they're absorbing all of those toxins with them, and it can cause ADD, a lot of neural...

Ben Greenfield (3:48)

Like, neural development problems, from what I've heard, like brain development problems.

Now, obviously, I guess, if I were listening to this, I would think, well, why not just go out and buy the organic Gerber? And the reason for that would be because you still get the heat seal on it, so you still get a lot of nutrients destroyed.

Jessa Greenfield (4:07)

And I think that's one of the reasons, as well. A lot of them, if it just says organic on it, it does not mean it's 100% organic. They can put in 40% non-organic foods into that.

And a lot of that actually is fillers. Gerber is one of the worst that I know of with fillers.

For example, their stage one, which is early baby food. They do them in stages. Their stage one baby food, the banana specifically, has more nutrients in their stage one than their stage two bananas because their stage two bananas are so chock full of fillers, which fillers are generally soy, corn, flour, empty calories, that you could be filling your baby with something that's a lot better than that.

So they put a lot of fillers. The food that generally goes into the making of baby food is grown across the world. We don't have bananas here in the United States. They pick them when they're green. This produce is so green. They just throw them into bins, and they don't get bruised. That's how young they are. So you're not getting the full nutrients that fruit could possibly be getting. And that's true of all of the produce that goes into their food.