Food impacts every aspect of your life | Walter Robb on Big Bold Immunity #34

Let's be honest that food touches everything about the human experience, whether it's the individual's health, the community's health, planetary health, and, as you point out, relationship health. And so, you know, whether it's the convening at a dinner table and the sharing of a family meal to the way our food system works holistically, all those things have been exposed radically this past year or year and a half. In a way, that's. The connections are very clear.

So welcome to the big bold Immunity podcast. And we are really excited again this episode to have another one of the PACE leaders in this whole field of the transformation of health in the country, probably even worldwide. And that's Walter Raab, a person I've had the privilege of knowing now for the better part of 40 years. Past CEO, co CEO at Whole Foods, and a real leader in the field of how nutrition fits into the agriculture system, the food production system, and ultimately delivering to individuals solid approaches towards prevention and improved health. So with that, let's turn to an extraordinary discussion with Walter Raab. Well, welcome once again. Here we are at that extraordinary opportunity for me to talk with a person of great significance around my most, I guess, important and interesting topic for me, which is immunity. And, you know, I think about immunity for a second before I introduce our extraordinary luminary for this podcast, Walter Raab. I think about immunity from the broad context that we're all interconnected through this immunological system, from the planet to the plants, to the microbes, to the animals, to us. There's this kind of common immunity that we share that then determines kind of the outcome of how we are resilient. And so I ask myself the question quite frequently, do the people that we meet and the relationships that we have over the course of our life, do they then influence somehow our immune system individually? And my answer as I've traveled on this path down the last 75 years is an unequivocal, unambiguous yes. The relationships that we have fortune to share, the types of bonds we make with other people, the way we think about ideas and beliefs and attitudes and share our concepts and get feedback and refine ourselves as we go forward, translates through our receptor system into our immune system. And so with that as kind of an introduction, I want to acknowledge my great fortune and probably more than I even deserve to have met people in my travels of living like Walter Raab, because Walter Raab has had a direct, positive impact on my immune system, if this metaphor that I'm describing is correct. Why? So let Me give a quick little thumbnail bio of Walter Raab. I'm not going to go through his childhood. He might want to talk about that himself, but I'll start at college. Being educated in the east coast, he went to Stanford, graduated in 1976 Phi Beta Kappa, and was a history major, but had a big, broad interest in ecology. Recall earth day in 1970. He had a lot of interest in food, nutrition, health, the environment. That ultimately led him down the road to go back to Atlanta, Georgia, to teach high school in inner city Atlanta, and from that, to come back to California and be involved with agriculture, ultimately to start in Weaverville, California, Northern California, a health food store. Remembering what the early dawn of health food stores were, the fruit, nuts and berries of the world, where a lot of this whole groundswell that we now see in the organic food movement and now Food for Health was really born out of these early health food stores. And Walter then kind of brought his wisdom, his experience, his background, his perspective, also his passion, his dedication, his authenticity, and his, I would say, focus into his small health food store, which ultimately then got acquired by the Whole Foods chain. Ultimately became then the manager of the Pacific Northwest division of the Whole Foods chain, moving it from two stores to seven stores over a short period of time. And away he went with his colleague John Mackey, the founder and CEO of Whole Foods. Walter quickly rose up into the Whole Foods family to be a very strong principal in expanding and setting the tone and the architecture and the mission and the vision of Whole Foods, ultimately to go through the rank of EVP and then to coo, and then finally to become the co president with John Mackey in 2004, which he continued for a decade. And his path is broad, but it's also deep, I think is the measure of an individual. I can say this without any equivocation. I've had many, many people I've known who know Walter Robb, and singularly, every one of them always says, oh, Walter Raab. Yeah, he's one of the sharpest, most dedicated, most insightful people you will meet in this industry of organic agriculture, Food for health, and the new emerging view of the role that agriculture is going to play across the range of different concerns that we have in our culture right now, from planetary health to climate change to nutrition status and. And everything in between. So that's just a short little vignette of the fortune I've had on my immune system for getting to know Walter Robb. So with that introduction, Walter, welcome to the Big Bold Health podcast. It's such A privilege and pleasure to have you.

Jeff, thank you for such kind words. So many years have gone by since we first met, and it's a pleasure to be with you again today and to talk about, you know, what you're working on now. But for those listeners to know that you were really the first real scientist to come into the natural food industry back over 30 years ago, bringing the perspective of a different world. And it's just amazing that we find ourselves today at the place where these two worlds are now really beginning to converge. And we'll talk about that. But equally, I loved you from the start, even more so now as we had a chance to spend some time together on this latest project and, and appreciate you having me on the show today.

Well, thank you. You know, one of the things that you're associated with is a sound bite, which I think is a fantastic sound bite. You stand for a humane and healthy planet. Could you tell our listeners in your context what that means?

Well, a lot of things, but maybe this, that, you know, I stumbled into natural food out of a reading of Wendell Berry and Francis Mortal Pei many years ago. But let's be honest that food touches everything about the human experience, whether it's the individual's health, the community's health, planetary health, and as you point out, relationship health. And so, you know, whether it's the convening at a dinner table and the sharing of a family meal to the way our food system works holistically. All those things have been exposed radically this past year, year and a half. In a way, that's the connections are very clear. And so as you start thinking about generationally, if we think about the modern food system born after World War II, after the use of the world, of the war materials converted to production agriculture, you think about what we started in the late 70s with the natural food saying, hey, we got to think about whole foods. And you think about this moment in time right now where we've been able to see the changes that we really do need to make in terms of transforming the food system to support the. It's really. It's really what is our desire to create a more just, more sustainable, more inclusive society. And the food system is very much integral to all those efforts. And so what I mean by that is what do we, what do we. What are we looking to create here? What do we look into? What are our expectations? What are our hopes? What are our dreams for or how this world can function? And I think Albert Schweitzer, to your point of relationship, said it the best. And he was my hero growing up. He said, the future of humanity depends on each and every one of us in every moment that we find ourselves displaying true humanity to one another. And I really hope that out of this experience we've all realized that we do need one another, that we do miss one another when we're not together, that we can do more together, and that those that humanity that we will find in ourselves and for one another and for the larger ones that we may not know, but are still nonetheless at risk or are not included in some way or their concerns are not being met, that is really where we're trying to go and where we're trying to get to. So that is the future I want to continue to work for, continue to believe in and continue to believe it's possible to strive for. I think it's always good to have a North Star, and that's mine.

Well, you know, I. In the conversations you have had over the privileged now nearly four decades that we've known one another, it's hard to even believe that that's true. You talked. Yeah, it's pretty unbelievable, scary. But you've talked a lot about different experiences that you've had in your life that kind of patterned you and gave you some of the insights that you, you know, shared with many others now through your activities at Whole Foods and other places. One of those that struck me way back when in your life was you were the, I believe, the captain of the soccer team at Stanford. You know, that whole concept of teamsmanship and its relationship to athletics and fitness and, you know, did that play a role, do you think, in your early development of some of your perspectives?

I think that the team thing, it was certainly incredibly enjoyable to take the field with a group of teammates and. And I think also the power of competition, you know, it makes you raise your game. And I think they both. Both of those ideas translated to Whole Foods in this. In the following sense, with respect to competition was always like, I would tell the team, you can always learn something from every single competitor, and your mind should. Should not be that there's something wrong, but it should be like, what's the one thing I can take away from this competitor? And to look at those if. To. If. How you can use that to make yourself and your own work better. And so let's have an appreciation for the power of competition and how it helps us to all raise our game, which is when you take the field in soccer and you got to play against a better team, you've got to you got to step it up, you know, that's. That's the way the marketplace works, and that's the power of competition with respect to teamwork. I think learning this lesson, I think you learn it over and over and again as you get older, that you can do more together than you can do individually. And. And that ultimately as a leader. For me, the greatest realization was the greatest feeling you can have as leaders is to actually create space for others to grow and to create a culture and put together a culture in a way that allows others to find and stretch and find more of themselves. There's nothing more rewarding than seeing somebody grow before your eyes. And so. But the team thing in particular is just that. What does it really mean to be part of a team and what are your responsibilities therein?

And.

Learned that lesson again over and over again. That by realizing you don't have to do it all yourself, but in fact you want to actually include and lean on others to do theirs. And the power of a team comes when people are together, using their respective skills, respecting the skills of others, leaving the space for them to use. It is when you find the true power of team and the power of being part of a team.

So now I want to take what you just said to a very interesting example that you were one of a small group of individuals could really speak to very intimately. And that's the development of the designation organic as a standard of identity within the USDA and the Organic Standards Act. And I recall so vividly your role with a fairly small group of people on the percentage population at large. It was not a large group, but was eventually capable as a team with disparate interests and different backgrounds to. To push that through. Can you give us some insight about the Organic Standards act and how that all occurred?

Well, you gotta give a shout out to Kathleen Merrigan, who at that time was working for Senator Leahy, who ultimately was the vessel through which this was able to all happen. But member of California passed the first organic act in 1990, first state to do so, to set a actual standard. Because prior to that time, it was like, we're selling organic, but what does that actually mean? There was a lot of yogurts and wrinkled vegetables and things like that. When the first standard really paved the way, it took about 10 years to get that standard pulled together. And the process was just like we have got. As this thing has grown, we could all feel the momentum. And we had this disparate situation in different states that we were doing business in. Whether it was transport growers or retailers. We didn't have a standard that we could rally around. And the customers were. As the organic industry grew and folks were taking potshots at it or saying this is a marketing scheme or something like that, without something to fall back on that was a guardrail, we could just see that this sort of confusion was going to continue and that it was time to put a stake in the ground. And so it was not an easy journey to convince at that time. It's not like what you see today where people just accept it and expect the seal. It was a lot of work and to build the political coalition and so forth and get the support. Senator Leahy did a masterful job. Kathleen did a fantastic job. Catherine Dimanio from the, the trade association did a wonderful job. And a number of folks from different companies all participated in just building the momentum to get this thing passed and set the standard in place. And also the, the mechanism to be able to let the standards continue to evolve as to ingredients that were appropriate or so forth. So what I have seen is that I do think the appropriate role of government is to set the guardrails so that the rules are clear. And what happened is when that seal landed and it was put in place, the market took off because the rules of the road were clear. Capital could flow in, companies could grow and the customer got a clear proposition as to what they were making they're using their dollars for. And as a result, as you know, the compounded growth rate of organic since that time has been north of double digits continues that today as customers are clear that choice, despite folks still taking shots at it, etc, it's an established marker in the marketplace now, but 21 years on, so maybe 2010 before the seal fully went into effect. But unfortunately what's happened is that the process around evolving the standards, which was always contemplated, remember we didn't think about animal welfare at that time. We didn't think about social conditions, we didn't think about improving soil quality. We were just trying to get a baseline standard in place that we could certify. There's work to do to continue to take those standards forward. That falls to this generation to do that work. But I will say that clearly it was a very important moment for the industry to rally around something that was that had the seal of the government in the USDA organic seal, which I believe in this current administration, they will continue to invest in, that seal has real equity in the market. And time and time again on any survey that you see or do the customers have accepted it, they value it, they understand it. And so it, you know, it was a pivotal moment. And that industry, depending on which numbers you look at, you could argue now that's in the 70, $80 billion neighborhood in a grocery marketplace that's a trillion, close to a trillion dollars in the United States. It's a very meaningful. And the growth rate is at north of double digits is very meaningful as well.

So let me take you back for a second because I'm now going to make the connection to immunity. And I'm taking you and I both back to the early 80s. At that time I was research faculty at the Linus Pauling Institute of Science and Medicine in Palo Alto and I was visited by this young guy from the Whole Foods store in Berkeley and he was asking me, are there any analytic procedures that we could use to document the presence or absence of a whole family of different biocides that might be present as residues in commercially grown products? And this was Rachel Carson revisited. This was silenced just as you were talking about Francis Moore Lepe who died for a small planet. These were the vestiges of starting this new mentality about how we would steward the relationship with our soil, with our crops and ultimately with our food. And at that early Stage in the 80s, the analytical technology was not so well defined that we could get a really hard and fast set of analytical tools to demonstrate the absence of this whole range of different chemicals that could end up in foods. But over time, thanks to the advocacy of you and your colleagues, it put pressure on the system which then brought not only information but also capital into the system to do the research. It was necessary to develop the analytical tools to make the testing procedures more secure so that you could actually have a documented. So this is an example where science and society can work together, I think successfully. And I think that's going on right now with regard to regenerative agriculture as to how we go to the next step in our stewardship.

That's right. And those next steps are. We talked a little bit about the bigger purpose of those next steps and what sort of society, what sort of food system do we imagine or want to have now that we know the things that we know? Regenerative is kind of a two sided thing though, Jeff, because on the one hand it's striving towards to really go out soil health and carbon capture. On the other hand, it's confusing to customers because there's so many versions of it out there and different companies saying things about it that in the End doesn't have the clarity. So there's only one seal out there now that I think is recognized for example by Whole Foods, which is the rock standard, but there's many others in formation. And as you know, the climate solutions bill that Senator Stabenhouse put forth is, will ultimately task USDA with creating a standard round carbon capture. So the potential here is that folks can customers easily get confused as to, you know what, there's no more confusion or inorganic, right. There maybe still be some folks who don't choose it because they can't afford it. And there's nothing wrong with that. It's only a choice. But with respect to this, that we're in a period now where there's a desire for the standard to capture more of the, you know, the soil health and the soil quality in particular. But on the other hand there's real, there's real confusion going on out there about what regenerative means and how it gets measured over time. And why do the people who are just now starting to get more credit under this and those who've been doing it for 20 years and all those sorts of questions that we really need to work through and resolve. And I think the new generation of leaders, I think the government does need to step back up here in this time and put a more robust standards process and really get the process moving. During, during the President Trump's administration, we just had no investment in any of this infrastructure and that's the role that needs to be played. And there are a number of brands out there that have taken this on and are working hard to, to work on the supply chain directionally correct. You know what I just, I think is how do we do this in a way that, that ultimately customers can trust and have confidence in and it's measurable and those sorts of questions that are really what's before us right now.

You know, it's interesting when I reflect on you and your extraordinary both breadth of what you've been involved with over your years as well as the depth of which you've gone into it. I'm reminded that often as we get into a field and we start to bring our presence to it in total immersion, that unexpected things happen, things that we didn't anticipate. And I'm thinking here about organic specifically. I believe that was well founded to try to get chemicals out of our food supply system. But I don't believe that we as a culture, even those founding people in the organic movement fully understood the impact of these low level hormetic or small concentrations of these residues, the effect that they could have on our immune systems. And now we're starting to see this immunotoxicology field grow up. Moving from where we thought toxicology was just the amount that would kill a person, like what's the lethal dose that would cause a sickness or an illness or cancer, to where now we're looking at functional changes in the immune system. How does it change the personality of our immune system to become less resilient, less. Less adaptive, less capable? And that particular emergence of the science of immunology, when tied together with the advocacy for organic and now regenerative agriculture, frames a whole different complexion of how we look forward, not only in development of the food industry, but also how we as consumers make intelligent choices about the planet that we want to steward.

Well, I think you're exactly right. And I think the. You know what's exciting about your new company, Big Bold Health, Jeff, is that you're starting to look at some of those cross currents and some of those connections in a new way. And I'm sure we're going to get into that in just a moment, but we really are at a moment in time more broadly for the food system, but more broadly than that even is the convergence of food and healthcare and health. And these new. These new capabilities that we have and that you bring with your experience are pretty exciting to unlock, you know, possibilities and pathways for health that we've not had, you know, up to this point.

So let's look at the wild card for a second that we've all been confronted with. I think every person on the globe, no matter where they have lived, has been impacted by the SARS CoV2 virus in one way or another. And it's a frame shifter. It changes so much in the way of perspective. It changes so much in the way of our sense of mortality or vulnerability or isolation. I mean, there's so many different words that we can attach to this pandemic, the COVID 19 pandemic. I know you've had some experience yourself, as is often for many of us, with this virus, traveling through your life, your family's life. So what have you observed as learning about how these connect into our ultimate questions about our lifestyle, our environment, our eating habits, our relationships? What's your learning from this whole experience?

Well, that's a big question that I think it's funny because my friend Sarah Eisen and I, we hosted a dinner for 16 CEOs in New York about a month ago, kind of exploring the Zeitgeist of this moment around that and all the leaders, these were all CEOs expressed how this experience had cracked them open to really realizing, affected their empathy, their ability to listen, their ability to respect the viewpoints of different generations around their business and where it was going. That was the single. This was a life changing experience in terms of their role as a leader and their role as a citizen and their appreciation for their fellow human beings. But look, we know that exposed the supply chain which was 5050 food service and retail, that didn't work. It exposed the over concentration in certain industries that were not resilient or duplicate to being able to supply and keep in stock. It exposed the hard and essential nature of people's work every day that bring groceries to people and expose that and has raised up that appreciation to a new level in terms of minimum wage or in terms of working conditions. And that's taking all sorts of shape. And it raised up I think some of the disparities in healthcare. And why is it that you know, the average black is losing has lost three years of life in this, the Latino two and a third and the white person 1.7 or something like that. Why is that? And what are the underlying conditions for those sorts of questions have all been raised as a result of this experience. And the average person in America put on £29 in Covid. Right. So I think looking forward you come back to this idea that you know what shift it is obviously one where we work and how we work. 50% of Americans have said they're going to use this as an opportunity to reshape their life. So you know, home, the home has obviously become a new hub. To quote the new CEO Pepsi Ramon, who just shared this idea of home as a hub. It's kind of, I think he's right about that. We've obviously seen the increase in digital options. So companies growing, companies going to market the way customers are using multiple channels to do their live their lives, where they get their information and how they do business. And third, I think more broadly is just that it has put a new emphasis on the lens of health and I use the word in the broadest sense of the term health and wellness that there's a recognition in some ways that, that really at the end of the day you can't take it for granted. You can't take anything for granted with respect to the climate right now, with respect to the COVID stopping or going in, your individual health is at risk at any moment. But the whole ball of wax is here that I Think this younger generation is also saying, I don't want to go to. I don't want to have a view on senescence where I'm just going to live till I'm 50 and then hit the. The aging home and then. Which are very undignified places for the most part anyways. I want to think differently about a life of wellness and making the most of the time that I have. And so I think that the biggest shift really is around a reorientation around a view towards health and wellness in general and everything that that touches. As we've discussed that the food system is certainly part of that. But whether it's your lifestyle, your relationships, the food you eat, the activities you choose, where you do them, you know, all that is up is up in a way that it just. This thing broke this thing wide open. But I do think that broader lens of health and wellness is what we have before us now.

Well, that was just so beautifully stated. That gave me goosebumps. You know, there's a term that has become much more understood now and used a lot more frequently called social determinants of disease. And I thought a lot about that term as it relates to what we're doing with Big Wolf health and the immune system. You know, how does a social determinant translate into a functional change in our immune system? And this is to me, a really interesting question because those people that have, they have low sense of self regulation, people who have maybe lack of feeling loved or accepted or appreciated or supported, maybe they're living out of fear, deprivation, isolation. All of those things which are words that are hard to quantify because they're a little squishy, translate through a person's immune system into what we call comorbidity, into increasing risk to all sorts of diseases. Heart disease, cancer, diabetes, hypertension, stroke, all these things that come down and now we see increased the relative virulence and risk to SARS CoV2 becoming not only infected, but maybe a cause of death. And so we say, how does that happen? How is it the social determinants of disease, which are not like virus or a bacterium, they don't float around and then you can measure them under a microscope or something. How could they actually influence our immune system to create all these downstream effects? And I think what we have started to really explore, and not just we alone, I mean we plural in the community science of immunology, is how are these signals, the signals that we're receiving from our lifestyle, the signals of love or the sign of appreciation, or the Signals of isolation, how do they get translated? Through receptors that pick up that information into our immune system to change the way our immune system actually looks and feels and can even scar the immune system, leading to bad memories in the immune system that stay with us for some period of time. This epigenetic effect, those are the things that Big Bold Health is really trying to focus on. I mean, I mean, we're not alone in the world in trying to do this, but if, in fact, there is a way that we could, as you used the really great statement, crack the code or break the nut of how you could get a person to understand how these social determinants, as well as the physical determinants, like how we eat and exercise and sleep and so forth, are influencing their own personal immune system and help them to do something about that. We could reduce so much unnecessary morbidity and premature serious illness. So that is really, I think, the germ seed of the reason that some two and a half years ago, I decided to try my hand in Big Bold Health as a company focused on personalizing immunity.

Well, as you said to me, Jeff, you know the three ways, three major highways to health, and that's the brain, the gut, and the immune system. And that was helpful for me to hear that sort of framing because we know the brain, blood, brain barrier is tough to cross. And it's. I know that because my boys have a genetic condition and we've learned from the years of living with that, that's a tough way to go. The gut is confusing. There's a lot of stuff out there. Prebiotic, probiotic. Looks like it's in the first inning to me. There's promise there in terms of understanding that connection to health. But it's, it's very hard for customers to get wrapped their hand around. Plus there's been some, some funky news out there about some of these various companies manipulating information, et cetera. And then you come to the immune system, which under your tutelage, I've learned to appreciate just the role that it plays with respect to inflammation, which from my view and experience lays at the root of all chronic disease, which affects some 75% of healthcare spend, is chronic disease. And inflammation is the root cause for all of those conditions. And the immune system is the modulator of that, of that, or the one that has to deal with inflammation. And so, I mean, I think you've touched on the fact that we're, we're dealing with one of the three main highways into health, that. And we're dealing with the fact that people can begin to take charge of their health as opposed to wait for it to happen to them, which is what I think has come out of this Covid is realization you can't take for granted. You want to take responsibility for yourself. And third is this idea that you can actually personalize it so that we've accepted now that there's not one size fits all, that there's no diet that's right for everybody, generally speaking, more plants. Yes, but, you know, your own body will tell you what's right for you. And, and so this idea that you're going to begin to think about it on a more personal level of your own direct experiences, all these things are directionally correct. And why Big Bold Health is there to kind of bring those together as we shape this future narrative that you're in charge of your own health, you have to make your own choices, you're responsible for those choices. You can begin to personalize those things to things that are actually fit who you are and where you are. That is happening in real time, which is a new realization that epigenetics says to us that what is you're experiencing or what you're feeling, as you point out, is going to get expressed in how you show up in the world. And you actually have the ability to affect that through the decisions you make. And then. And then the. And that the products that you use or the foods that you eat are going to directly impact what comes out on the other side. So in the case of tartar buckwheat, which is at the core of big bulb health, this combination of the two phytonutrients that are found in this buckwheat have the ability to directly, in real time, modulate your immune system in a way that can be very powerful. And I personally been using it for close to a year now, since we started talking about this. And I did have the COVID very badly deep in my lungs. And now some 20 or 22 months later, my antibodies are still off the charts. And some of which I give credit to Big Bold Health for. I mean, they're testing north of 3 across all four of the major antibodies. That should not be the case this far away from when I actually had the thing. But I think what Big Bold Health represents is this idea. We can put it thing up there naming this major highway to your health. We can say we can see the power of discovering compounds in plants that perhaps we wouldn't have found before. We can actually use clinicals, which is your expertise, Jeff, to do the trials to show real evidence around how this can connect to greater health and empower people with those, with those tools and information which wouldn't have been possible five or 10 years ago, I don't think to find these compounds and then be tie it to clinicals and give people new, a new way to think about the power of immuno rejuvenation which is really the big idea here. With big bolt as that, we're not going to just improve it, we're not going to just boost it for today or tomorrow. We're actually going to give you the capacity to real time rejuvenate your immune system which is a direct modulation of inflammation and the other things going on in your life. It's a, it's a very powerful idea that you've come up with here and that you found in this 3,000 year old grain. And as you continue to build out this company, the potential and the progress is exciting for me to think of this idea that people could actually understand the power of the immune system, find their own personal profile and begin to measure the actual impact of their actions and their decisions and their choices on their personal health.

Wow, that was unbelievably well stated. You know, I'm often trying to find ways of taking the complexity of these ideas that relate to our immune system, which is a very complex system, and to distill it down into simple concepts that still retreat. Retain truth, but don't get lost in the noise of all the details. And that concept of simplexity was just beautifully stated by you. You did it magnificently. I was listening intently to try to capture some of that brilliance of how to take complex ideas and make them more simply articulated.

Well, we're complimentary Jeff, because your deep background in research and clinicals, you can get cranked up on the sites and the medical research and the linkage and the science and you can go deep with anyone. And there's no way in God's green earth that I could ever do that with you. I just can't keep up with that. Although I can read it, but I am spend a lot lifetime serving the customer and think about how they think about things. And so I try to take what I hear from you and say, well how does this make sense in terms of the customer who's saying looking at the world trying to figure out how to go. And so I think that's where we're complements. I mean I do think your approach is absolutely essential at this point. We've got to be able to Move beyond to a label claim, beyond just these vague legal claims of structure function that are out there right now that don't really have only have gone as far as they can go. And we need a breakthrough around this that actually ties these things together. And I think that Big bold health is at the forefront of that next generation of label claim. It's not just about the label claim. It's about what the label claim represents in terms of embracing a view that there actually is a connection here, which nobody's been willing to say or go out there on a limb. And you're willing to go out there and say, no, I'm going to back it up and I'm going to show you this and people are going to be able to experience it. And so again, I think it's because of your deep bench and all that science that, you know, all those studies and the way you keep up with all the particulars of how this actually works. And yeah, you're gonna have to find a way to synthesize that and put it out more simply because no one's going to be able to keep up with you, you know, on the depth of all that. But they're, but they're interested in the headline of that. And the headlines seem to be coming together around this idea that the immune system is the great highway to health and that you have the ability to affect that and that you actually have your own personal profile there. These are ideas that people can get behind and understand as they choose to look at their life and say, how do I live a healthier life? So the potential that big bold health is really around this idea that it is a big, bold idea that we could approach it in this new way and it would actually be out of the science and the data behind it. Back up how our system actually works in real time. In real time. It's like you've got AI and machine learning in your body, but you have to turn it on and you have to be willing to use the data to correct. And so software principles in effect here. But I do think we're a good compliment in that respect.

Well, you've just given me a really interesting idea. Thank you. Let me, let me feed it back to you, see if you think I'm way off the line. You know, we're all seeking some kind of languaging around health claims. But then it begs the question, what is really healthy? Is health the absence of disease or is it the presence of something else other than just the absence of disease? And it's My belief that when you talk to people about their health, it's not they're just talking about absence of a disease, they're talking about something related to their function. And so when I think back to claims under DSHEA structure, function claims, maybe what we need to do is redefine function in a different way, so. So that the claims are compliant with the shea, but they're really talking about health as a functional determinant, not health as the absence of a disease determinant. And if you do that, then it ties directly to the immune system, because the immune system has this functional capability of plasticity. It has the capability to renew itself, to rejuvenate itself, to reform itself. It is every two months turning over. So the immune cells in our body every two months are not the same ones that they were two months previously. So are they going to be the same as better than or worse than those that they were there two months previously? So all of this construct that we're starting to see developed is around function, which is around health in a different concept than just the absence of disease. So health claims could not be a disease claim. They might be a functional claim. And I think that's a really powerful concept that you've just kind of thrown out there, throwing the gauntlet out that I think deserves more deep, drilled thought about it.

Well, frankly, I think the customer's sick of claims. I think we need a different word. But as I've already told you, I do think there's a new lens around thinking about your life in this way. An openness and a desire to take responsibility because everybody can see the alternative. It's expensive, doesn't really work that well. Yes, we can. You know, people get sick, they live in, in suboptimal conditions for a number of years, and it's just kind of a slow decline. I think there's a yearning for an opposite view, which is not the absence of disease, but the presence of real vitality to the end of our days. And so that desire to live life fully is what we want to try to support. And somehow we've got it. We've got to bring this. It's more than just the big bowl of hot products. It's got to be more than the sum of the parts. It's got to be this idea that this is a new way to think about it and to understand how our health actually works and to support that.

Well, you know, we've unfortunately coming to the end of this opportunity for us to have this discussion, but I wanted to Throw out one last question, which I think you speak of commonly when we've had our discussions. And that is the vision of what is ahead of us. What's the future look like? Because if we can see the future, we can make that future happen. If we can't see it, then it's an ephemeral kind of fog for which it's hard to direct our energies in the right way. And I think you have a very clear sense as to what you'd like to see the future, future look like with regard to your zone of impact. All of us have our own zone of impact. Some are broader than others. Yours is quite large. What would you like to see in the years ahead as it relates to how we're going to transform our culture into a sustainable culture?

Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, almost 40 years ago, grocer, I think that, you know, as part of a team, I think we established that the quality of food is. Does matter, that all food is not created equal. It does matter how it's raised. It's matter how you think about soil. You know, I think the market has proven there's a demand out there for quality, not just commodity foods that have, you know, that have rained for so long. The big challenge there really is around making that quality accessible. We have, if Whole Foods started out serving a couple percent of people, maybe it's up to 25%. We still want to make this fresh, healthy food accessible to everyone. Everyone deserves to have that sort of opportunity. And we've got that challenge of accessibility ahead of us to make it more broadly available at a more affordable prices. But I think, I think in general, just the recognition that in and through the food system, whether it's working at the supplier diversification, whether it's working at the flavor, bringing flavor back into food as opposed to just productivity and yield, whether it's around the customer's knowledge, around the power of fresh foods and this connection to health, all these things are possible. It's the work of a new generation. You know, our generation laid down the base notes, if you will, that food does matter. It impacts a lot of things. It has a real positive potential. Quality matters. The work now, particularly as we're creating a new generation of foods through food tech, new options of food that we could never have imagined. There'll be a new set of choices to be made that I hope will be done in service of this larger idea of a healthier society that we talked about when we started.

Well, Walter, on behalf of myself personally and all of our supporters of the big, bold health imperative. I want to thank you for not only this time, but your vision, your leadership, your insight, your passion, and your tenacity through all these decades of change. It's a model for me to continue to push on, and I hope it's a model for everyone that's had an opportunity to listen to this, to bring their energy to bear on this global opportunity for transformation of self. So thanks a million.

Thanks so much, Chef. Good to be with you as always.

Be well. Thank you.

Sam.