Jaden Smith feels like he’s in a better and healthier place than he was just two years ago.
The 23-year-old son of Jada Pinkett Smith and Will Smith was a special cohost on this week’s new “Red Table Talk,” appearing alongside his mother and grandmother for an episode all about gut health.
“We’ve had digestive issues for years,” Jada said at the top of the episode, before the three of them all explained the stomach problems they’ve experienced.
“Bloating and kind of a non-descriptive discomfort. It’s not pain,” said “Gammy’ Adrienne Banfield Norris, while Jada — calling herself “very food sensitive” — said she would have “no appetite and discomfort when I eat.”
“My biggest gut problem would be, like, just not being hungry when I need to be or being stressed. I do have pain,” said Jaden. “I eat so much sugar that I have a candida buildup that happens in my stomach.”
Why the buildup? Well, according to Gam, Jaden’s sugar issues likely stem from the fact he’s been “eating pancakes for breakfast since he was a child,” every single day. “Just doing that for literally the past–like, just my entire freaking life of 23 years, I feel like it’s just built up for a long time,” he admitted.
The Smith family as a whole addressed their health during a “Red Table Talk” episode back in 2019, where Jaden found out gluten and dairy were both “big problems” for him after a battery of tests. Also, because he doesn’t eat meat, he had a lot of vitamin and Omega-3 deficiencies. At the time, the doctor appearing on the show suggested some dietary tweaks and supplements.
“Do you feel better from last time we did the family health show?” Jada asked her son, who said that he “definitely” did.
“I was able to work with the doctors and really get my vitamins and get my supplements and, you know, protein shakes, and that’s half of my diet,” he revealed. “It’s like a password that I have to find to my body. I’m like ten pounds heavier now at this point, and I feel like I’m keeping on my weight. I’m able to put on more muscle.”
As Jada said he’s “worked hard on bulking up” his body, a recent pair of shirtless photos were flashed on screen, showing his progress (above) — a far cry from another throwback photo they showed of him at Coachella in 2019 (around 2:45 in the full episode).
“That was a long way from where I was when I was at Coachella where I was just like bones. I thought I was so tight. I thought I was so tight,” he said with a laugh. “I was like, ‘This, I’m swaggin on this.’ Like, ‘I need to take off my shirt right now!'”
The episode then followed Jada and Gam as they got colonoscopies — and highlighted just how much Pinkett Smith yammered away at her doctors while coming out on anesthesia — before the trio once again talked about some of their eating issues.
“I have a lot of problem eating food when I’m on set, when I’m getting ready to perform, when I’m doing anything that is stressful,” said Jaden, a problem with which Jada could relate. “I find it ridiculously–I actually find it repulsing to think about eating food,” he added.
“I think people should have more understanding, too, that if we’re putting toxic foods in our body, it’s going to help create toxic emotion, toxic moods. I’ve seen that in my own eating lifestyle, you know?” said Jada, before she explained that she cut gluten, eggs, chicken and oatmeal out of her life.
“I started to realize how happy I became, how emotionally happy I became,” she said, saying that before she made the tweaks to her diet, she would spend her mornings “trying to figure out why I was so low, so down, so depressed. I mean, literally dragging my feet to get through life.”
“Now I wake up in the morning ready to go,” she added, “happy, ‘Let’s get this done.'”
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