Truth About Health

Hey, this is Jim Graham from the Masculine Journey Podcast, where we explore relationship instead of religion every week. Your chosen Truth Network Podcast is starting in just a few seconds. Enjoy it, share it, but most of all, thank you for listening and for choosing the Truth Podcast Network. What is the truth about your health?

How is your health? Why would I even be talking about this? You've heard us talk about different partners and what they're doing to help us change lives here on the Truth Network. We have a special guest today who you're going to learn a whole lot from. I'm going to quote a couple of folks. One of my favorite quotes is from Dr. Tony Evans, also convicting, where he said that how many of us are digging our own grave with our spoon, our diet.

We complain about all these symptoms, about heart disease and strokes and all these things, but we just can't consistently eat horrible things and don't take care of ourselves. What do you do about that? I'm going to quote St. Paul, who said in 1 Corinthians 6, verse 19, your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit of God. How are you taking care of your temple is the natural question that comes out of that verse. So we have a gentleman on the air with us who is a nutritional scientist from Texas A&M University.

He's also the formulator of this delicious drink that we've been telling you about called Vintastic, and many of you have heard us talk about the Muscadine grape. Why is that important? What does that have to do with you? What does that have to do with nutrition and making you healthy and your body and all of that? Well, a lot of this is connected, and this is real important, especially because we want our audience to be healthy.

We want our audience to live abundantly, as the Lord has designed you to. So without any further ado, let's bring Dr. Talcott on from the great state of Texas. How you doing, sir?

Excellent. Wow, howdy from Texas and Texas A&M University. Hey, what's good to hear from you? Tell everyone a little bit about what you do with nutrition science there. This is fascinating. Tell everyone a little bit about your expertise and your background.

This is so cool. Well, you know, I'm actually a food chemist. I work with fruits and vegetables, and I study the chemical composition of these fruits and vegetables and botanicals, and then what these things do for our bodies as far as nutrition and health and wellness, and what these compounds do for our body, what our body does to these compounds, and what these compounds do to our bodies. It's just fun. We run human clinical trials down here at Texas A&M with different fruits and vegetables, and we see what the health outcome is and the populations that we study.

So it's fun. It's like Disneyland for food scientists. Wow, that is so cool. So what you're eating, what you're consuming, could have gone through Dr. Talcott's laboratory, and your wife is also a colleague of yours on a little different track with the nutrition science, right?

That's right. We actually work together. We're a husband and wife research team here, and so I do a lot of the chemistry and analysis of compounds and fruits and vegetables, and also analysis of compounds from your body. So we do a lot of blood samples, a lot of urine samples, and fecal samples to determine what your body is doing to the food you eat and what the food you eat are doing to your body. So my wife kind of does those.

What does it do to your body aspect? Yeah. So which brings me to my next obvious question. What would a food chemist scientist in Texas of your austere background and education, a doctor, have to do be concerned about the muscadine grape? What makes this grape so special?

Oh, my gracious. You know, we grow muscadines in southeast Texas. That's kind of the far western edge of where the grapes grow. And, you know, I tell people all the time, I grew up in southeast Texas, and when I was a kid, we used to pick wild muscadines. So my history with the muscadine grape goes back to when I was old enough to pick up a rock and pull it up a tree and try to hit a grape and knock it out of the vine growing off the top of the pine tree.

So I used to climb up those trees. It's one I didn't break my neck trying to get the grapes out. And, you know, I've been researching muscadines since about 1998, actually in graduate school when I was at the University of Arkansas, and, you know, started looking at this grape and going, holy cow, here is a grape that's unlike any other fruit I've ever studied, but basically because of its diversity of antioxidants found in this grape. It's just so impressive.

I remember the first time I ever tried to do an analysis of it, it was just so many compounds and such a diversity of compounds. I told myself, it may take the rest of my life to really fully understand what God's put in this grape. Wow.

So I was very excited. Yeah, and so, you know, that's the thing. People hear, there's tons of health products out there, they see things on TV, a lot of these people are over-promising, under-delivering, you know, making all these bodacious cure-all type of allegations and promises. But, Dr. Talcott, there's actually research, like science, not just sizzle, behind this grape, and there's a benefit to everybody listening. Like, this is a gift that the Lord has given us, correct?

Oh, absolutely. And, you know, I mean, the proof is in the grape. You can go out and, you know, if you really need a sleeping pill at night, you can read all the studies, but it is probably the most, as a single variety, the most studied grape out there. You know, there's studies conducted across the country, really across the globe, on muscadine grape. It's become an internationally famous grape, even though all the grapes in the United States, all the muscadine grapes grow in the southeastern United States. So if you're listening to this, if you're from New York or California or Oregon or Arizona, you've probably never seen this grape because it doesn't grow in your neck of the woods. But in the southeast, this is the predominant grape that we grow, and, yeah, it's just every day there's new discoveries being made about the grape.

Not only its composition, but in what the composition of this grape does for our bodies. Wow. So, it's very exciting. And you have put, somehow, you've been able to put this, thanks to our friends Jerry and Candy and Judy and the awesome team, Kathy at Mighty Muscadine, you all have put this in a beverage form. You're the guy behind, you're the one to blame for this VineTastic, this little drink.

I'm so fortunate. I mean, we got to work on the VineTastic team, and I met with Jerry probably a couple of years ago now, and we sat down in his office and just started ideating on how can we better get muscadine grape antioxidants, these compounds called polyphenols, these wonderful antioxidants from muscadine, that he was already extracting and concentrating and putting in a water extract that he offers for sale. Those compounds are kind of bitter. They're kind of astringent. They're not the most tasty products when you put them in their pure form.

So, how can we get these antioxidants into a product that people will love to drink, love to consume every day, taste good, smell good, looks good, and do this in an all natural manner? I like it. Now, answer that question when we come back. We may have a call or two with a question for you about their health.

This muscadine grape, what was America's first grape, and what is the state fruit of North Carolina? When we come back, someone tell me that, and how about a blessing with something? More coming up on Truth Talk Live with Dr. Talcott. You're listening to the Truth Network and truthnetwork.com.

We've got a special guest, a food chemist. Now, people listen to this show right now. They're thinking, wait a second, this is a Christian talk show. We're engaging the culture. We're engaging what God's doing in the world. And we're talking about health?

We're talking about some muscadine grape? What does this have to do with the mission here? Well, we're going to put the doctor in the hot seat.

He's going to tell us that in just a second. First, I want to remind you, stay tuned, because coming up in the next half hour, we're going to interview a judge who's also the president of a Christian university, who is going to tell you how Christianity is rapidly becoming the fastest growing hate crime. And people are getting their bank accounts canceled because the current presidential administration is sending messages through the IRS to Christian groups, solid good Christian groups like this one here, that they are involved in hate crime because they stand by the Bible.

Their bank account is getting canceled. Wow. So that's coming up, so stay tuned. But first, we've got Dr. Talcott on, who is with Texas A&M University, a food chemist, a very bright man. And Doc, people wonder, what does this have to do with Christian radio?

You know, all this stuff, VineTastic, Mighty Muscadine. There's a little thing called a health epidemic out there that's even prominent among people of faith, Dr. Talcott. Can you speak to that, and why this is important and relevant to right now? Absolutely. I mean, we've really got to treat, I mean, like you said, our bodies like temples. And, you know, just because we're Christians doesn't mean we're divorced from the idea that we need to take care of ourselves.

Yes, God's going to look after us, but we need to look after ourselves as well. And God's given us the tools through our diet and the ability of doing, you know, things like exercise and just looking after what we eat. You know, he's given us that ability, that innate ability to understand the foods that we eat and to choose the ones that are going to be most beneficial for us. These will put on earth for our pleasure, our enjoyment. They taste good, they smell good, but they're also good for you. So we've got to really realize that, you know, there's some divine intervention that goes into the foods that we eat. You know, as a chemist, I get to look kind of, you know, deep inside the plant cells and tissues and see which compounds that are formed. It is truly, I mean, it can only be of God. I mean, it's so complex and so amazing, the compounds that are there, and to see what these compounds can do to your body, it can only come from above.

Wow. And you talk to a lot of people. Obviously, you teach this at the university level and, you know, the Ph.D. level. Dr. Talcott, what do you see are the biggest mistakes we make about our diet? Because we can take wonderful supplements, and there's nothing better than the mighty muscadine supplements, the capsules, this vine-tastic drink, which you have personally been involved with in putting this together. But you can take all that, but if you don't eat healthy, what advice, where do we mess up on that side of it, on our diet? You know, I think it's pretty simple. You know, as Americans, we eat too much.

It's that simple. I mean, we don't move enough, and we don't, you know, eat the right things. When I say the right things, look at your average portion size. I mean, you know, think about a portion size for a piece of meat.

It's six ounces. I mean, that's smaller than the size of your fist. And you look at the size of the steaks that we get in restaurants or the portions that we're getting, or the french fries and the chocolate milkshakes.

They're ginormous. We just simply eat too much. And so I think the steaks I see, too, is people following diet fad. You know, if you're trying to lose weight or you're just trying to get healthy or you're just trying to eat the right things, you know, think about what Paul said. All things are permissible when it comes to food. There was no restrictions put on the Christians. They said, eat everything.

It's all available to you. Just don't eat so much. So, you know, when people say, hey, should we eat more of a plant-based diet versus an animal or meat-based diet? And which is better for you?

That's kind of a big controversial topic out there right now. I simply say, look, you know, the recommendation right now for fruits and vegetables is five servings a day. A serving is anywhere from, you know, say a cup of, you know, a measuring cup in your household of fruits and vegetables. Eat your five servings of fruits and vegetables every day. Let that be a starting point for your diet.

And I think you're going to see major changes. You're going to get more fiber, you're going to get more of these antioxidant compounds, and you're going to automatically see a massive change in your health benefit. You know, I'm pushing those fruits and vegetables. And if you're unable to do that, then you have products that can supplement your diet. Like our Vitastic product, you're almost getting a serving of fruits and vegetables by consuming a water product. Vitastic is nothing more than an antioxidant-enhanced water. So add hydration to that list as well. I mean, how much water are you drinking on a day-to-day basis?

Think about that. Most of us are not drinking enough. So if you're eating your five servings of fruits and vegetables, you're hydrating, you're going to see a major, major change in your health and wellness.

Wow. And it's no coincidence, by the way, that Jerry Smith and all the folks at Le Bleu Ultra-Pure Bottled Water and Mighty Muscadine are sponsoring Christian programming like this, and they see a direct connection between their faith and between wellness and wholeness of the body. And that's why they're offering these things so that the body can be more healthy and we can serve the Lord more and have better energy.

And I kind of cut you off at the last break, but this vine-tastic. I mean, how do you get something that has zero sugar, zero carbs, zero calories in a bottle that tastes so good? I don't know how you do it, Doc. Come on. Is this too good to be true?

No, it's not too good to be true. You know, the hardest part, you know, honestly was, you know, many of these antioxidants, if you taste them by themselves, they're bitter, they're astringent. They don't taste real good.

And that's fine, you know, in their pure form. But how do you then put those in water and make them taste good? Well, that's where it comes about with, you know, our using all-natural sweeteners. So using stevia, which is an all-natural sweetener, it's isolated from the stevia plant. And so that gives it a little bit of sweetness to it.

So a little bit of palatability to it. But other than that, there's no added sugars. There's natural colors in there. Those are anthocyanins and carotenoids. Anthocyanins are red pigments. So the red pigments go into the blueberry cherry pomegranate flavor and then carotenoids like beta carotene are in the pineapple mango flavor. So you're getting additional nutrients, additional antioxidants this way. And we covered it up with all natural flavors. So you get that wonderful, you know, fruity flavor with all your antioxidants behind it and all zero.

Zero sugars, zero carbohydrates, zero calories. It was a joy to develop this product. I mean, Barry gave me a good direction to get started. And, you know, it was just pure pleasure to put it all together. It just came together so nicely. I was very pleased with it.

Well, we're glad you did, because we made a lot of people happy at the Religious Broadcasters Convention. We passed out a bunch. And I chill it and I drink it after workout, before workout.

I feel like a million dollars. And I feel like I haven't, you know, peppered my body. I mean, like, quickly, in 10 seconds, diet drinks. What's so bad about the stuff in those, Doc, real quick? Because that's what we go to in these synthetic B12s and these energy drinks that people don't even know about. Yeah, they are all synthetic, you know, and you get a Diet Coke, it's got aspartame in it. That's a synthetic sweetener.

So the idea of going with all natural everything, colors, flavors, to the muscadine polyphenolic extract that's going in, it's all natural. Everything's extracted with water. It's dissolved in water. It is water. Fantastic as water.

But it's obviously an enhanced water. That's a funny story, too. You know, when we were putting this together, we kind of had a target amount of the polyphenolics from the muscadine that we wanted to put into it.

And our first generation had a concentration. You know, Jerry came back and said, you know what, Steve? He goes, double it. In fact, more than double it. So I had to go back and develop the whole product twice, because it was just like, we want to put as much as we possibly can into this product.

So that today's version of VineTastic is just super-powered. Unreal. Wow. Well, thank you. Listen, thank you so much for all you're doing to help us all with health. I didn't understand half the words you said, but you can find out more and meet Dr. Talcott at MightyMuscadine.com.

You can order your VineTastic and just enter promo code TRUTH at MightyMuscadine.com, and they'll bless you with some extra savings. Dr. Talcott, God bless you, my friend. Thank you so much. Thank you, sir. Yes, sir. What a conversation. More coming up. Could your bank account get canceled because you're a Christian? Stay tuned.