Earth Day Bonus: How to Fix the Global Food System and Save the Planet – Dr. Mark Hyman

Our food system, end to end, is the number one cause of climate change, which is a big shock for me. When I, when I started writing this book, I was like, oh yeah, greenhouse gases, cow farts, cow burps, methane, all that. Yeah, I got that 14%, whatever the kind of estimate is. But when you add it all up, you know, the deforestation, the soil erosion, the factory farming. Oh yeah, the processing, distributing, transport, refrigeration, food waste. You add it all up, it's almost 50% of our climate change contribution. More than oil. You know, we need to think about multiple types of solutions.

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You're listening to Bulletproof Radio with Dave Asprey. Now today's guest knows a thing or two about food systems and health. He's a dear friend who's been on the show several times, a 12 times New York Times best selling author who makes little old me look like just a piker of an author. If you don't know what a piker is, you'll have to Google that. And someone who's really done some powerful work to change the world, a family physician, director of functional medicine at the Cleveland Clinic. And I think you've by now guessed who I'm talking about. I'm talking about Dr. Mark Hyman. Mark, welcome back to Bulletproof Radio, my friend.

Thanks, Dave, Always good to be with you.

Now you wrote a new book, which is something I love because I started Bulletproof with the intent of disrupting big food. They're just like Big Pharma or our military industrial food complex or something like that, where I don't believe that people set out to do evil, but I do believe that emergent behaviors from micro decisions have created some pretty profoundly bad food. And you've after 12 books, years, actually decades in practice, you've actually sat down and said, all right, as a doctor, fixing our food system is going to fix our health, fix the economy, fix communities, restore the environment. So I want to talk to you about that because we've never hit it on the show. We've talked about what to eat, what not to eat, all of your body of work. And this is the time to go into how do we hack the food system that's hacking us.

Yes, exactly. That's really well put, Dave. We are in the middle of probably the biggest crisis humanity has ever faced and a large part of it has to do with our food system. And the reason I got to that conclusion was as a doctor, I sit in my office and I see patients with chronic disease Day in and day out. And as a functional medicine doctor, I'm always asking, why? Why are my patients sick? And for. For the most part, not always, but for the most part, it's food.

Come on in. It's cause they're lazy.

It's because they're lazy.

They're fat and lazy. Mark, did no one just tell you this? They're not trying hard enough. And they should be in the gym for two hours a day. Come on, man.

Three hours.

All right. It is about the food, obviously, okay?

It's actually the food, and it's the lack of the right foods and too much of the bad foods. And so I began to ask myself, well, if food is making my patients sick, and also it's what makes them well. I mean, food is both the cause and the cure for almost everything that's wrong with our health and the world. I asked myself, well, why do we have the food? We do. And then I was like, well, it's the food system. And I'm like, well, why do we have the food system? We do. Well, it's our food policies. And I'm like, well, I'm always asking, why, why, why? And why do we have our food policies? Well, it's the food industry. I mean, just for example, in one year, 2015, the food industry spent almost $200 million lobbying against one bill, which is the anti GMO labeling bill. And that, you know, that's a striking amount of money. So I'm like, wait a minute. So if our food system is so screwed up, it's driving all these issues, and it's not only health. As I began to go down the rabbit hole, I was like, wait a minute. Food is not only making people sick, it's also destroying our environment. It's causing climate change, it's causing social injustice. It's threatening our kids academic performance in school, their future productivity and success, our global competitiveness, our national security because kids are too fat or unfit to fight, leading to poverty, mental illness, violence. I mean, I was like, wait a minute. This is extraordinary. Because if this is true, if food is the cause of all these things, then the good news is we can fix the food. We can fix all these things that are downstream from the food, and I can unpack all that for you. But it just. It sort of hit me like it's an elegant solution. When you get to the root cause, it's like pulling on that one thread that connects everything. And if you solve that, you don't fix everything. Everything in the world, but you fix so much of chronic disease, probably 80% of it. You fix the burden on the economy, which is crippling us. You fix the climate change, which is the number one cause of it, which is our food system. You help kids start to learn and function better in schools. You bolster our national security because kids can join the military. And it just goes on and on and on. I'm like, this is just a beautiful solution. But it took me a while to unpack all of the sort of interesting connections that are linking all these things together. It's really one problem. It looks like separate problems. And that's really what functional medicine is. People come in with 10 or 20 different symptoms or diseases and you go, wait a minute, it's this, right? And then you, you kind of narrow it down to what the root causes.

Mark, you and I have both had a chance to meet with, I'm not going to call out specific names, but the, the few remaining low fat mafia doctor nutritionist types, they're actually not nutritionists, they're just doctors who are in league with some of the very large sugar and corn syrup water companies out there. You know who, you know there is a payment that goes between these companies saying oh, it's about the calories. Just eat some low fat plant based corn syru and you'll be just fine. Because it's plant based. That kind of garbage knowing full well that real plants are good for us and that this stuff isn't. So we've both talked with people like that, but I've also met with those same executives, not necessarily the doctors pushing it, and privately they'll say, look, we know that our stuff isn't that good for people. So our job is to make it less bad for people because we know that someone's willing to spend a nickel and if we don't provide something for them at a nickel, even if it's crap, well someone else is going to provide it for them for a nickel because they've got to eat. And if we could get them to spend six cents, we would gladly make it a higher quality food. So it feels like the problem is just that, look, there's a great number of people out there who don't have the means or don't have the training and education to buy the 6 cent thing versus the 5 cent thing. So is this a demand problem or.

Is it a supply problem? No, listen, I mean the real cost of what we pay at the checkout counter is not the cost of the food we eat, is not the cost we pay. And Let me just unpack that for a minute. The first chapter of my book Food Fix goes into what's the true cost of food? It's called true cost accounting. And people call it externalities. It's not really an externality. It's actually part of the problem. It's embedded in the actual production, processing, marketing, distribution, sale wasting of our food. And just take for example, when someone buys a can of soda with high fructose corn syrup. Let's just talk about the real cost of that. The cost to our environment because of how we grow the corn using pesticides and herbicides and fertilizers. Right. And what is the cost of all that? Well, cost in human health, the cost of biodiversity, the loss of 75% of our pollinator species, the destruction of the soil through the tilling methods. We've basically lost probably 30 to 40% of all of our topsoil through erosion, which has released the carbon in the atmosphere. So 30 to 40% of all the carbon in the atmosphere, the CO2 in the atmosphere, comes from the soil and it can go back in there using regenerative agriculture, which is one of the solutions. Right. So what is the cost of the loss of that? I mean, some estimates by the UN say we have only 60 harvests left of soil, which means no soil, no food, no humans. So what is the cost of that? What is the cost of the irrigation and the water depletion of our natural fresh water resources? So what is the cost of climate change as a consequence of all that? How do you pay for that? What is the cost? Then once you, you make the corn, it gets turned into ultra processed food, high fructose corn syrup. The government pays for it again through the food stamp program or SNAP. Right. So 75% of the food stamp program is processed food and about 10% or $7 billion is soda. That's 31 billion servings of soda for the poor every year. Coca Cola is the biggest welfare recipient in America, getting most of those dollars, like billions, like 20% of their American revenue. I think we pay for the illnesses caused by the consumption of those foods through Medicare and Medicaid. So we're paying for subsidizing the corn being grown. We're paying for the destruction of the environment, which you talked about in climate, the chronic. They're paying for it again by providing it to the poor 46 million Americans, and we're providing it again through Medicare, Medicaid. So what should be the cost of that soda? Maybe a hundred dollars or five hundred dollars. When you embed all those costs because the manufacturer is not paying for it. You know, when GE dumped, you know, so much PCB to the Hudson river, they didn't pay for the environmental consequences of that, but they were held to account later by my friend Bobby Kennedy where he got them to spend literally over a billion dollars to fix the Hudson river and clean up the PCBs. Right? So those, those costs should be embedded. And that's actually not fair. So maybe if you have, you know, actually a whole food that's grown in a regenerative way, instead of being 40% more than it was 30 years ago, it should be 40% less. So maybe fruits and vegetables should be cheap and you have to pay a lot for your Coca Cola. And that's part of the problem. And with that said, there's a lot of ways that people can eat well for less. You don't have to actually eat junk just because you don't have enough money. There's plenty of data that's showing that you can eat well for less, that you can eat a whole foods healthy diet. Maybe you're not having a $70 grass fed rib eye steak, but you can eat real food that's unprocessed and do well for less. And there's a great guide by the Environmental Working Group called Good Food on a Tight Budget which teaches you how to do that. And I've seen it. I've worked with families on disability and food stamps and help them lose hundreds of pounds in the worst food desert in America simply by giving them the education on how to do this.

It's definitely doable when you get off the processed food. And I mean, you're singling out Coca Cola, which probably isn't really fair, to be perfectly honest.

I'll just use an example. I guess any kind of. It could be a Starbucks Frappuccino with all that sugar.

Yeah, it's systemic and the thing. And I'm really stuck on this because I run a sizable food company, not sizable. By Coke and Pepsi and Procter and Gamble and all those guys. Those are many billions of dollars. But Bulletproof is a lot bigger than I ever expected when I started the blog eight years ago. And I've had a chance to look at grocery distribution. I know how much stuff costs and I know how much it goes around the shelf. And I know what a tiny slice of that actually goes back into. Profits for Bulletproof compared to paying all the people in the middle. And so I look at just the difficulties of this. And when everyone is out there going, we want to make better stuff, but we're afraid people won't buy it. And actually people won't buy it unless it's cheaper. But the actual cost of buying it is still higher for a manufacturer. Certainly like me, if I was to do that garbage chicken industrial collagen that you can buy that looks all fancy, that isn't good for you, if I do that, I could cut my costs in half, but I'm not going to. But either people don't know or people are willing to do it. So how do we as creators of food, how do we solve this problem?

Right. It has to be solved through incentives and tax incentives and other kinds of penalties for doing the wrong thing. Just for example, there's a great company called Indigo, which is relatively new company that's through very sophisticated metrics, tracking regenerative farms.

I love that.

And how much soil, how much soil they build, the ecosystem services they provide and paying farmers for the benefits that they're creating for the environment and that they're providing climate. So once we start to accelerate these things, and that's really why I'm building a whole food fix campaign to drive policy change, because it's got to come through business innovation, but it's also got to come through policy change. If we keep the status quo in policy, it's going to be very difficult.

Now I live on a 32 acre permaculture farm. I've been building soil like a madman. We just got a shipment of 12 pigs yesterday. Little tiny, little tiny piglets. And they're going to go clear some of the land that used to be a gravel pit that we've restored. And they're going to clear the brush that's been growing on there. And we're actually putting on feet of topsoil based on this amazing thing called animal poop. I'm living what you're talking about here. I live in an affordable part of the world on Vancouver island. So I can do that. Property here is a tiny fraction of what it would cost if I lived in most of the parts of the US where I've lived.

Yeah, I have a little 800 square foot box here in New York and I don't own it, but it's like a million and a half dollars square box for 800 square feet.

You have a window planter with some herbs. You're totally doing it. Yeah, but you know, there's other. So most of us can't actually go start a farm. But I wanted to experience this. So I'm really in alignment with you here, Mark. And I'm actually starting to make food for my community. We have, you know, if you go to a local grocery store, you might find, you know, some Asprey farms, you know, pork or lamb or something. But the distributed production of food is something that was common. There's pictures during just the 1920s or 1930s, during the dust bowl, people in New York City had little window like little balconies with goats. They'd have one goat and they'd feed the goat their scraps and then the goat would make them milk and cheese. I'm not even kidding. Like this whole skyscrapers. But all of our distributed food production's gone. No one gardens, you know, their backyard, they spray it with Roundup ones every three months and put in some astroturf. Are we going to go back to distributed food production?

I think we have to start looking at all different kinds of solutions. We may still need some big farms, but the data is really clear that smaller farms can be more productive, provide far more profits for farmers, can provide ecosystem services, can provide better food at lower cost. So I think that the data is really clear and I think this is one of the key solutions. So yes, food, and I want to unpack this, for example. So food, the food system is providing ultra processed food at scale. We've got 60% of our calories in America coming from ultra processed food. For every 10% of your calories it's ultra processed food, your risk of death goes up by 14%. Globally, 11 million people die every year from ultra processed food and not enough good food. I think that's an underestimate, actually. I think it's probably more like 30 or 40 million. It's the majority of deaths that happen in the world every year are caused by our diet, far exceeding smoking and other causes like war, violence and so forth. So that's a huge issue. Second is the economic issues around that are so massive that we don't really understand them. We kind of vaguely get it. But one of every five dollars in our economy is for health care for mostly chronic disease. That's not sustainable. The Medicare trust fund is going to run out of money by 2025. About 1 in $2 of the mandatory federal spending in the Federal budget in 2025 is going to be for Medicare. Means one of every two federal dollars is for Medicare. Right. That's crazy. And that's because of chronic disease. So these are all things that are happening as a consequence in our food system. And then the other issue is the environmental issues, right? So the climate change issues that have to do with the fact that our food system, end to end, is the number one cause of climate change, which is a big shock for me. When I started writing this book, I was like, oh yeah, greenhouse gases, cow farts, cow burps, methane, all that. I got that 14%, whatever the kind of estimate is. But when you add it all up, you know, the deforestation, the soil erosion, the factory farming, the processing, distributing, transport, refrigeration, food waste, you add it all up, it's almost 50% of our climate change contribution, more than oil. And so I began to sort of connect the dots on this and go, we need to think about multiple types of solutions. So yes, we do need to solve all these problems. But in a sense, it starts at the farm. And most of the world's farms are small farms. They're small farm holders. Billions of these farmers, billions of farms that are producing most of the food for the world. And when we look at the technology available now, it's not like sort of going back to the old days because we used to have screwed up agriculture, right? We used to destroy the land, then move on to the next land. There's no more land to move onto. That's the problem now. So we need to rethink it. That's what this whole new concept of regenerative ag, which incorporates organic, but it goes far beyond that into providing ecosystem services. Because within organic, you could be tilling, you could use all kinds of other stuff. It's water, irrigation, deplete the soil and not be as bad, but certainly be a problem. So I think the answer is we do need distributed farm system. We need more local, more smaller farms. We need more regional farm system food hubs. And we need to be able to support those through farmers markets, community support, agriculture, community gardens, our own gardens, compost, municipal composting. I mean, San Francisco's made mandatory composting. Now. You can't throw out your food base. You go to the airport in San Francisco and you've probably seen it. It's like compost buckets in the airport. And that should be in every city and every town in America. So we have to think through multiple solutions, but we do need to reimagine farming.

Are we being a little simplistic here? I mean, I am a pretty darn good composter in that. Just like in your gut, if you eat certain foods, your gut bacteria go crazy and you put certain things in your compost and it's not going to actually make soil that you'd want to grow food in. For instance, all the compostable food containers contain chemicals that are toxic and ruin the soil for food production. And do you really want compost that's made out of industrially processed mayonnaise and corn syrup and NutraSweet? Because that's what people are putting in the compost. Like that doesn't grow soil. Really? Absolutely. All the crap that people actually eat, the processed airport food crap, which is some of the worst, they put it in the airport compost. They put it. So if someone tried to sell me city compost, I would actually be like, no, I'm sorry, my sheep can't.

There are, there are good ways to do compost. I think that's fine.

There are. But in other words, it means don't put, you know, your McNuggets in the compost because they will never decompose properly.

It's made for, for plant based food scraps. Pretty much.

Exactly right. And if you put a bucket of bacon grease in there, it's not going to work either. And so I, I feel like our, our kind of, oh, we're going to recycle this and you go to the dump and there's, you know, square miles of compostable or sorry, of recyclable plastic that just got thrown in the dump. And then the compost is basically not composting because it was put together wrong. And you realize we're kind of in trouble because if we don't eat stuff that will spoil, we will not be able to make soil out of it either.

Yeah, for sure. I mean, that's a fair point. Dave. The truth is that composting is a huge solution to food waste and we need to do it right. So because some people do it wrong doesn't mean we shouldn't do it.

I fully agree. I want what comes out of it to be additive to our soil. And Dr. Mercola, who's been on the show a few times, I know you know him as well, he just did a big piece on here's the chemicals in our compostable food stuff, which by the way is probably still better than the plastic stuff that floats in the ocean. But it feels like when you go really deep into your book on food fix, yes, we need distributed production. And I have another policy question for you on that. You look at food safety regulations and recently there was a war on backyard chickens because some people got E. Coli from licking their chickens and things that no farmer should ever do. And so they actually did a Whole bunch of stuff. Oh, all of these E. Coli and salmonella outbreaks, they're coming from small farmers, small factories, small. Take that away. We're not going to allow that anymore. And how do we handle this incredibly high regulatory burden in order to sell a piece of chicken or in order to even sell a carrot for small farmers who can't handle that?

That's a good point. First of all, nobody should be licking their chickens.

Agreed. It's gross. If you've ever seen a chicken, don't lick your chicken.

Don't lick your chicken finger. Licking good, but. Oh, chicken, lick it. So your point is very well taken. And this is exactly why a lot of the book is focused on food policy. Yeah. Because our food policies are driving so much of the problem. For example, a farmer who has a 5000 acre soy monocross says, I want to grow a cash crop of vegetables on my land. I want to take five acres and make my 5,000. I want to make it a vegetable farm. He can't do that. Or she can't do that. Why? Because the government will not provide the crop subsidies and supports for the farmer if they grow vegetables. Yeah, I mean, the government tells us to eat half of our plate is fruits and vegetables. Half. When you look at the amount allocated in the farm bill, it's 0.45%.

What's the rest of it versus meat and milk?

It's corn.

Oh, that's not a vegetable. Gross.

It's soybean oil. It's like, basically, if your plate looked like the plate that would be represented by the farm subsidies, it would be a giant deep fried corn fritter with like less than half a percent of your plate as fruits and vegetables. Maybe one string bean.

And on top of your giant corn fritter.

And you'd be having a giant napkin. Napkin. Because of the cotton subsidies. Giant cotton napkin. It would be pretty bad. There'd be like a little bit of milk.

And, you know, that's pretty horrifying as a picture. So it's basically, it's a giant fried corn fritter with a strip of cheese on top and a decorative sprig of parsley.

Yeah, basically, that's it. That would be your food pyramid. That's like the. My plate. The My plate. That's what it is. And so all the policies we have are some of them were designed by good intentions. Some of them came about because we were trying to create a food system that provided an abundance of starchy calories to feed a growing, hungry population globally and in The United States. The use of chemicals was thought to be in advance and would help increase yields and production and help control pests and weeds. Sounds great, but nobody foresaw the unintended consequences of that, and not even those consequences, which are horrific. But the fact that in 1960, a year after I was born, the obesity rate in America was 5%. And now most states are at 40 or pushing 40%. That's an eight fold increase in my lifetime in obesity. And that has led to this catastrophic burden of chronic disease that's crippling our economy. And I think that's something that we can't overlook any longer. This is a chronic disease epidemic. It's come on lightning fast in human history. I mean, think about it. In 40 years, just since I graduated medical school, I mean, when I graduated medical school, there wasn't one state that had an obesity rate over 20%. Now there's not a state that has it under 20 and most don't have it under 30, and most have it close to 40% obesity. That's on top of 75% of us are overweight. So it's pretty frightening. And I think we have to look towards these unintended consequences of these policies. And they're all. So all the agencies and I talk about this in the book. All the agencies in charge of various food policies don't work together. So the USDA says the farmers grow commodity crops which are turned into processed food. At the same time, another part of that agency, the Dietary Guidelines, says, don't eat that stuff. Eat fruits and vegetables. But then the FTC that regulates marketing says, well, we're going to promote these, allow you to promote these on, on the air and market the worst foods on the planet to kids who don't know how to protect themselves. And that's okay. And then the FDA was like, well, you know, we're not going to really control the food additives because they're all generally recognized as safe, even though most other countries have banned them. Like azodicarbonamide, which is our friend Bonnie Hari. The famous yoga mat material is in Subway Bread and many other fast food companies in Singapore. If you use that chemical in food, which is still used here in America, you get a $450,000 fine and 15 years in jail. Wow. As a food manufacturer, I mean, you know, you get in jail for spitting on the street too, there. But just the point is, they're not protecting us from these chemicals in our food. Whether it's, I mean, there was 100, I think 110 or something petitions filed against the BPA act, which is the, you know, basically to, to get BPA out of our food. Bisphenol A, which is highly toxic, causes obesity, cancer and many other things. And there's so much lobbying that never passed and still in our food supply. And they don't. I mean, the fact that they allow antibiotics in the feed.

I mean, glyphosate, it was just reapproved last week.

Oh, well, yeah, well, that was the epa. So here's an interesting story. So Kellogg's good news. The good news, things are happening, right? Kellogg. Kellogg said no more glyphosate in our cereals because they got outed for having more, more glyphosate than vitamin A and vitamin D in their Cheerios.

But you know what? Good for them. I got to give them credit for that. It requires that sort of things like, hey, we won't buy this. The farmers will change.

Yeah, that's right. And the General Mills committed a million acres to regenerative agriculture. Danone and Nestle and all these big companies are starting to have regenerative agriculture.

That makes me really happy.

All these will drive the downstream, but the government has to support that. And then the FDA also doesn't really deal with the fact that there's 37 million pounds of antibiotics used in this country and 30 million are used for prevention and growth promotion in animals.

And this is why, just flat out, I mean, you wrote a really popular post a while back on the Pegan diet. You know, paleo and vegan. Hey, eat mostly plants, a little bit of meat. Don't eat industrial meat. You and I, 100% alignment. That's been my recommendation since 2011. So if you eat an animal, they antibiotics, number one, you're a bad person. Even one time you don't go to the restaurant. Oh, this one time I'm going to do it. Just seriously, the animal was tortured. You ruined soil. It's like peeing in your sandbox. You don't do that. Go vegan before you eat industrial meat. You have to do this if you want to be here for a week.

Wait, did Dave Asprey say just go eat vegan?

I did indeed. I always order a vegan meal, which by the way, would include that soy corn thing. I won't eat that either. Right, but I will eat a plate of just vegetables before I'll eat an industrial animal because I don't do that. And so it's that big of a deal. So we all need less meat and you call that out. But if we all went to a vegan diet, what would happen to our soil?

Well, that's a very good point, Dave Asprey. So here's the deal. Whether you are vegan or you're a Buddhist monk, or you're a carnivore, it doesn't matter. Animals are required to actually build soil. It's just a fact of the ecosystem.

Does this mean vegans are eating vegan? You're eating animal poop if you're a vegan?

Well, no, no, I mean, no, it means, you know, actually, honestly, honestly, if you eat regeneratively raised grass fed beef, you'd be killing a lot less animals than if you ate vegetables.

0.3 deaths per year. I did the math.

Well, actually, there's 7 billion animals, it's estimated, that are killed every year by growing plants. How? Well, when you do any kind of agriculture except regenerative agriculture, it's inherently destructive. So you're destroying the habitats of birds, of moles, of rabbits, of gophers, all.

These turtles and bunnies and butterflies.

All those seven animals die every year from growing vegetables. I went to the rooftop Brooklyn Grain show, the biggest rooftop farm in America, I think, and it's this beautiful organic vegetable thing. And I'm like, wow, this is amazing. How do you take care of the soil up here on the rooftop? They said, oh, we put in bone meal and oyster shells. So really putting ground up carcasses from feedlot cows. I said, so your broccoli is a carnivore. Your broccoli is a carnivore.

Living on a farm will teach you that very, very quickly. The places where the animals poop, the grass is green and it's unirrigated, and the places where the animals can't go because there's a fence, the grass is like. It's so obvious.

Really. It's so obvious. Yeah, but there's actually so much data about this and most people don't understand what a regenerative farm is and what it is. So let's sort of just unpack it because it is really the solution and think about, you know, why is a doctor talking about farming? But actually, when I was in college, I studied soil, I studied organic regenerative farming. We didn't call it that then, we called it biological agriculture. But it was all about how soil is such an intimate, integral part of our whole story. I mean, Albert Howard, sir, Albert Howard, who was the father of organic agriculture, wrote a book in 1947 called the Soil and Health. He said the the problem of health in soil, plant, animal and human is one great subject. It's one subject and I think that's such an important thing. So it has to start at the farm, with the seeds we put in, with the way we farm, the chemicals we use or don't use, with the water we use or don't use, with the animals we use or don't use, and how that actually can actually turn the tide to create good food that's going to solve all the downstream problems we talked about. So what is a regenerative farm? Essentially, it's a method of farming that restores ecosystems. There's a concept that's really kind of cool that I came across called ecosystem services. So the Earth provides to humans every year about $120 trillion of ecosystem services, natural resources, soil, water, etc. Etc. And we don't pay for that, we just take it right On a regular farm, you're using up eco, you're using up soil, using up water, you're destroying the biodiversity of the soil, you're killing the pollinator species, et cetera, et cetera, right? Whether you're a gender farm, you're adding ecosystem services, you're restoring soil, you're conserving water, you're increasing biodiversity, you're increasing the complexity of the microbiology of the soil. You're actually creating a wonderful set of additions, not subtractions. Gabe Brown, who's a regenerative farmer in North Dakota, had this 5,000 acre farm he'd had in his family for generations. And it was basically about to close because it was damaged by hail and weather and so forth. He said, well, I'm doing something different. He started a regenerative farm. Now he's built 29 inches of soil. He conserves water, barely uses anything. They call it dry farming. He doesn't use chemicals, he doesn't use fertilizer. I make my own fertilizer by my animals integrated into the whole ecosystem of the farm. I'm more productive, produce more food. On my land, I make 20 times the profit of my neighbor. I'm completely resistant to drought and floods because my soil holds water. Regenerative agriculture leads to increase in organic matter. And for every 1% organic matter, you can conserve 27,000 gallons of water per acre. So if you have 10% organic matter, that's 250,000 gallons of water or more per acre. And that doesn't end up washing away or being run off and losing it. So it's a really powerful model and it is involved with A number of methods. One is not tilling, not turning over the soil because that leads to soil erosion. Cover crops, never leaving bare soil, so always having crops that actually add nutrients to the soil. All these different grasses and plants. The complexity of an ecosystem puts different nutrients into the soil from different plants. So it actually enriches the soil, enriches the animals who eat the soil. So if you eat an animal just eating grass fed, it's just eating one kind of hay. It's not going to be as good as an animal eating this complex array which is adding all these nutrients in the soil and helping extract nutrients from the soil. It's using crop rotation. So you're actually putting nitrogen back into the land, which is fertilizing, self fertilizing through various plants like legumes, which put nitrogen back in the soil. Involves integrating animals in a very specific way, which is, we call it adaptive multi paddock grazing, holistic management, managed grazing. Essentially what it means is typically animals, they just overgraze the land and they destroy it and they cause desertification. There's an area the size of Nicaragua or North Korea that turns to desert every year in the world because of how we're overgrazing animals. So it's not just random grazing, it's moving them around like mob herds, like they did in traditional wild animals, like the buffalo. We got 50 to 80ft of topsoil in some areas in America because we had these buffalo, 60 million buffalo and tens of millions of elk and deer and other ruminants who just grazed in mobs moved around because they stayed together. They didn't want to be by themselves in case somebody wanted to eat them. So they stayed in this tight pack. They moved frequently. And this is what they do with these managed grazing systems. They'll move them very quickly from paddock to paddock. They graze down partway, they move on the next. They pee poo, dig it. Saliva makes the plants grow. They dig in the earth, the strips a little and everything wins. Everybody wins. And it's a whole ecosystem. So it's adds ecosystem services. And you know, people think, oh, it's not scalable, it's not profitable. Alan Williams, who's a incredible regenerative rancher, estimates that if you look at conservation land, that we're not using degraded lands, converting some of the soy and cornfields that are used for animal feed into regenerative farms, we could literally have twice as many regeneratively raised grass fed finished cows as we do now from feedlots, twice as many yeah, with way less.

Of an environmental footprint.

Right, exactly. And there's a company called Farmland lp, I think it's a private equity company. And they in buying regular farms and then they convert them to regenerative farms and their profits go from single digits to 60, 70% profit on these regenerative farms. And they add ecosystem services. In their cohort of farms, they added about $21 million of benefit to the environment, whereas the same conventional farms before took out $8 million of ecosystem services. And we need to be paying for these, the government needs to be paying farmers for providing these services. Right now they're not getting any supports, they're not getting any subsidies, they're not doing. And they're actually doing better. But it's hard to convert over because you have a time period to convert your farm and it takes a little while. So we need to actually create that model. And that's really why I'm working on the government level to change these policies.

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No. So it's definitely a hard hitting investigative journalistic book about what's wrong, but it also flips the story and says, how do we fix this? What do citizens need to do? What do businesses need to do? What can philanthropists and NGOs do, and what can governments do and policymakers do? And in fact, I created a whole action guide that's derived from the book that's free on my website. Go to foodfixbook.com you can get my five steps video to A Healthier Plan and Healthier your and the action guide, which will actually give you a map of all things you can do personally. So what can you do personally? Some of the things are obvious. You can eat and become a regeneratarian, which is hard to do, but it's going to be increasingly easier to do. And there are places like Thrive Market where you can get regeneratively raised meat. And there are places like Mariposa Ranch where you can order online. There's places like Butcherbox, which are pretty good. I don't know if they're completely regenerative, but there's a lot of great resources.

There's grassroots co op, there's a bunch. And it's not expensive either. Some of that stuff is. But if you order your 20 pounds of frozen grass fed ground beef, it's going to cost you less than it would cost you in your local store.

Well, actually, Mariposa Ranch, basically you can go in and get a cow, share with somebody and buy half a cow and split it up and it's about eight bucks a pound on average, which is for a four ounce serving is less than a McDonald's hamburger.

There you go.

Okay, so for regeneratively raised grass fed beef, so it's harder to do, but you can do it. And then there's other things you can do Right. You can eat like a pegan, which is basically good for you, good for the planet, and good for your wallet.

Ideally, don't eat too much meat. It's not good for you. You don't need a pound of steak a day.

No. And then you can do more things like have a compost pile. Food waste is a huge problem. 40% of our food is wasted. If it were a country, it would be the third largest emitter of greenhouse gases after us and China, because when the scraps go to the landfill, they emit methane, which is, yeah, 25 times more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. And not to mention all the wasted energy. I mean, the energy, the soil, the water, the chemicals, everything we use to grow that food is also wasted. Right. If it were grown, the entire amount of to grow the amount of food we waste every year would take the entire entire landmass of China and we waste $2.6 trillion worth of food. We have more than enough calories for everybody on the planet right now.

Wow.

So have a compost pile. If you live in the city, you can get a little in house compost bucket, and it'll make the compost in your apartment and won't smell. And you can bring it to the local compost depository like in Union Square. Here in New York, they have it. In many cities they have it. Go, go talk with your local city council or your municipal government, get them to pass a composting ordinance like they did in San Francisco. Make sure there's no shitty compost. Exactly.

There's two technologies if you want to do composting at home. The first one is the proper compost bins have an activated charcoal filter in them so stuff doesn't come out and smell. It's really important. And that's built into the good compost bins. The second one, and this is a blatant plug for a company I started, is called Homebiotic. It's a spray that has healthy bacteria from soil that eat toxic mold and other mold before it can grow. So if you missed your compost thing with that stuff, you're not going to get the fuzzy stuff that you would have got. And you're not going to have to worry about stuff escaping into your house. And it's like a $29 product called Homebiotic, and that lasts for a very your compost. So it's not expensive. But if you're going to have basically food that's turning into soil on your deck or on the corner of things, you don't want it to smell and you don't want it to mold. But these are hackable, solvable problems. And if we did that though, and you live in New York City and now you've got a big bag full of dirt and maybe you added some worms, what do you do with a bag full of dirt in New York City?

Well, there's a lot of city gardens.

So you take it to the city garden.

Yeah, but actually in, in Union Square, there's a. You can compost drop off in all the farmers markets. You can do compost drop offs to basically give them your compost. They'll give you vegetables so good you can join a community supported agriculture in your community. You can start a community garden, rooftop gardens. You can have little windowsill garden. I mean, there's simple things you can do. There's also things politically that you can do. I think that people don't realize how much we matter and we've sort of become apathetic when it comes to politics, but actually we can make a difference. And there's a group called Food Policy Action. I think it's foodpolicyaction.org, where they rate every senator and congressman on their voting records on different food policies, and they score them. And the bad ones, you can see who they are. And if you don't want to vote for those people, you don't have to. They've also started campaigns, social media campaigns, where they've literally unseated two particularly nefarious congressmen who are in the pocket of big food.

Is it legal to leave your halfway done compost on the doorstep of the bad politicians?

No.

Okay. Just thinking about creative solutions to the problem.

It's good, it's good. I'll put that in my addendum to the book, Dump your partially fermented compost. Yeah, stuff like that works. There was a great story of this guy who sort of got policy change in Chile because there are examples of other countries who are stepping up. And I think this is the kind of thing we need to pay attention to. This guy was a doctor and he was the vice president of the Senate in Chile. And finally a doctor who was also a politician became the president. Michel Bachelet. But before that, there was a guy who was the president who was obstructing this. And basically this vice president of the Senate went to this prime minister of the president's house and sat in front with a sign saying, this guy is working with big food to poison and kill our children. Wow. And they really wouldn't, you know, because he wouldn't work with him. Finally, he got them to work with him and they implemented a sweeping set of reforms. An 18% soda tax, ending all food marketing, junk food marketing, having no more cartoon characters on kids food, only healthy food in kids schools. No more infant formula marketing. And it was just astounding. And warning labels. If a food had too much sugar or processed food, it would have these big warning labels on the front. No more Tony the Tiger, they killed Toucan Sam. You know, it was all done. The impact from the ending of food marketing was four times greater than the soda tax, which was 18%, which is a very high soda. So the most powerful intervention was ending the food marketing, which is what these companies spend billions of dollars, like billions and billions of dollars targeting kids, targeting poor minorities and driving the chronic disease epidemic.

How does that work though? So I do food marketing. I teach people why eating quality food matters. And then I do my best, very best, to make the highest quality food that costs more than the cheap crap, but is much better for you and uses things like grass fed collagen for a reason. Now if we ban food marketing, how do I teach people how to eat and how do I make the stuff they should eat? I'm a little concerned about that.

Yeah. Well, that's fair. I think what needs to happen is truth in marketing.

There we go.

Right. And it should be like drug companies. If something you're eating is known to cause harm, it should have like, this is going to kill you, make you fat, give you heart disease, cancer, diabetes and dementia. But buy if you want it.

Is there like a cigarette label on food that deserves it?

Yeah, I mean like we have on drug advertising. I think there can be all kinds of things. Or we can have. For example, make the grade is a great concept we're working on for our food Fix campaign, which is grading food based on the level of quality, based on the number of parameters. So if companies want to get a good grade like an A, it has to meet certain requirements. Otherwise they have to put an F on the label. Right. So you can have. Okay, this is an F. So Dave asked you if we would get an A and Coca Cola would get an F. Right. And it has to be in the advertising so people know what's what. Right.

So that's some powerful stuff there. And Mark, this is a very complex systems problem. It goes beyond systems biology, it's ecology. And it's hard because it also is driven by human behavior. A lot of human behavior is unconscious and it itself is driven by MITOCHONDRIA which themselves talk to the environment. So it's this incredible spaghetti monster of a problem. But I think if anyone out there is well positioned to solve it, it's going to require from pushing it on it from multiple angles at the same time. That's how you manipulate a system. And I think I nailed it in your book. And if anyone's going to put the amount of energy into the world to help do that, it is actually you. And I just genuinely want to thank you for writing the book because it's harder to create a book like this both to do the research and to get people to read it. Compared to what the heck should we eat? Kind of book, which is also a good book you wrote, people care about this. People care deeply. And it's not that hard. And the book doesn't hit you over the head saying you're a bad person like I just did. If you eat industrial meat, because you are. But aside from that little thing, don't.

Let your karma run over your dogma.

Totally. It's more hopeful, I would just say. So you did a good job of saying, look, it's not an insurmountable problem. So when we all feel helpless, we feel apathy when we realize there's nothing we can do. But when you read this book and you're saying, oh, actually there's enough I can do, I don't have to solve the whole problem, but I'm going to just help to push on the system so that it'll change. And I firmly believe when people stop buying industrial animals, people stop buying the soybean oil fried corn fritters, which are a large part of what we eat. When we do that, magically things will shift over the course of just five years. And if you don't believe me, go back to 2011. I started pounding as hard as I could on grass Fed matters and so did you and so did some of our mutual friends. And it didn't take very many of us. And you go to Whole Foods right now, the number of grass fed yogurts you can buy, the amount of grass fed butter you can buy compared to 2011, it's completely shifted in only nine years.

I mean, listen, Dave, if you watch the super bowl, if you watch the super bowl, it was an ad from none other than a beer company saying we're going organic. Right? Did you see?

I didn't see that one.

Yeah, Michelob, like they're going organic. Purdue Farms is got all antibiotics out of their chickens.

Purdue is a massive chicken farm and the fact there's no, like, this is world changing stuff and we don't think about it that way.

And they're talking about regenerative agriculture. I heard, you know, Mr. Perdue talk about this, and I was like, wow, this is incredible. Like, it's so. Everybody's moving this direction. So I am. I wrote the book because I was feeling very frustrated and I felt a little bit overwhelmed and was sort of desperate to try to put a name on the problem and to create a possibility of a solution. And as I got to the end of the book, I was like, wait a minute, we can fix this. That's why it's called Food Fix. It's not called Food Apocalypse. Right? Although I could have called it that. But it's really a hopeful book because it maps out the problem and you have to name it to know what to deal with. And then it talks about how things can shift. But I am seeing a tide shifting. I'm seeing farmers talking about regenerative agriculture from Iowa. I mean, people who are just the average Joe farmer caring about these issues. I'm seeing politicians starting to talk about regenerative agriculture. I'm seeing these large businesses talking about. I see people starting to talk about the chronic disease epidemic, the effect on Medicare and Medicaid and all these issues. So my job is really to tell the story, to lay out the map of the. Where we can get started. It's not intended to provide a comprehensive review of all the solutions, but I'm now working on an incredible new initiative which is a nonprofit and an advocacy group. There's a lot of lobbyists for the bad guys, but not enough for the good guys. So we're creating a 501C3 and 501C4 called the Food Fix Campaign and Food Fix Action. And we are designing an incredible strategy with strategists who help bono raise almost $100 million to Congress for AIDS and poverty relief in Africa, with an incredible elite team of policymakers, Washington insiders, celebrities, scientists, you know, politicians. Really an incredible core group of people who understand these issues, want to see change, and are working together to make it happen. So I'm. I can't be more excited and happy that actually is happening. And I literally think the universe is conspiring to make this happen. I got an email today randomly from a patient who referred this woman to me who just. Her husband died. She sold the company for $4 billion, and she's all about fixing the food system. And she wanted to reach out to me. And I'm like, wants to give money and I'm like, I don't even have to do anything. And it's just, like, coming. And I. Yeah. So nice.

Well, you have my support as well. And this is the work that needs doing for all of us to live longer than we're supposed to and feel better. And I read the book and left feeling hopeful, which is also a gift. So, Mark, thank you for the amazing work you're doing in the world. And this book is yet another one of your dozen New York Times bestsellers that have changed a lot of people's lives. Actually, it hasn't hit the New York Times yet because this is coming out the week of. But we already know what's going to happen. And I really. I just think this book is worthy. So if you're reading this or you're listening to this going, man, I don't know. It's too much work. It's overwhelming. It's actually not that hard. You have to do everything. Just do something that's in the book. And you're saying, I'll never compost. It's too much work. Then don't compost. But you can still do things that are easy, that'll make a difference. Thank you.

Absolutely. Thank you, Dave. This is the biggest issue of our time, and I'm glad you had me on, because I think people are hungry to understand how to connect the dots and make sense of what we should do. Should we be vegan? Should we be Paleo? Should we, you know, eat beef or not? Like, what is the story behind this and how do we sort it out and how do we actually get to.

The root of it?

And that's why I'm so thrilled to be able to share this on your podcast.

It's all in there. And foodfixbook.com and you guys know I interview a lot of authors about a lot of different things. And I usually say, I used to read this book. And I mean it, because seriously, if you're going to make it onto the show, there's thousands of people who tried to get on, and I am pretty selective about who comes on the show, whether they have something new and interesting to share with you. I promise you that what Mark Hyman has written in Food Fix is something you haven't read before. It's a new environmental take, but it's also a new systems take on how to change the environment around you so that you can live longer and feel better. And maybe so the environment around you will continue to exist. And it's not alarmist. It's fun, it's interesting, it's actionable, and it's just worth your time. So you should read it. And as always, you know that if you read a book just like you would tip someone at a restaurant, go to Amazon, leave a review because it will make you live longer to express gratitude.

The science is in it also stimulates the same receptors as sugar and cocaine.

So that's good. Exactly, exactly. It's easier than eating a corn syrup burger. Fried fake whatever. All right, Mark, I will see you soon in person, my friend. And I will support your nonprofit as well.

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