Corruption In The Food Industry And The Challenge With Our Dietary Guidelines

Coming up on this week's episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy. It's the number one source of lobbying in Washington is the food and ag industry. It's the biggest industry on the planet. Hey everybody, it's Dr. Mark. I am so excited. I just got the actual copy, the hard copy of my new book, Food Fix, how to save our health, our economy, our communities and our planet one bite at a time. And I'm so excited. It's coming out February 25th. I want y'all to get a copy because we're starting a movement. an actual campaign to fix the food system and it darn well needs fixing. Why? Because it's driving so many of our global problems. You know, imagine if there was a virus like Zika or Ebola that was killing 11 million people a year around the world. I think that's an underestimate. I mean, there'd be a global effort to solve a problem and yet we just continue life as usual and ignore the issue that food is the biggest crisis in our planet. planet right now because it's driving chronic disease, climate change, environmental degradation and so much more. And you know what? The beautiful thing is that there are solutions. There are real solutions about how to fix this, how we change policy, how we change our agricultural system, how we grow food, how we process it, produce it, distribute it, market it, eat it, and even waste it. All can be a strategy for fixing our food system. I'm just going to tell you more and more about this stuff over the next months because I've been studying this for a couple of years now. I mean, actually 30 years, but I really dug into the science around this. And I just want to speak today about why our food system is so screwed up. I mean, at the high level, there are lobbyists. There's about 187 lobbyists for every member of Congress and literally billions of dollars flowing in to drive our food policy. It's the number one source of lobbying in Washington is the food and ag industry. It's the biggest industry on the planet, $15 trillion a year, and is controlled by a few dozen CEOs who are very interested in actually making their company successful, which is the nature of business. But unfortunately, the more successful they are, the sicker we are, the worse climate changes. So how is our government complicit in this? Now, there was a bunch of policies that got established that weren't bad when they were established. They were basically thought to be helping grow more food, grow more calories, provide more access to food for people through the industrial revolution in agriculture, the Green Revolution, we call it. The problem was that there's a lot of unintended consequences. One, it produced food that's really bad for us. Processed food, basically the commodity crops, corn, soy, we turn into all variety of processed food. And two, it unbeknownst to us at the time, is growing food in a way that is the biggest driver of climate change, period. Far more than fossil fuels when you put it all together end to end from deforestation to grow the food or raise the cattle for factory farms. soil degradation and industrial farming that destroys the soil which holds all the carbon, the amazing amount of climate change that comes from fertilizer and nitrous oxide, that's a whole other conversation, and fracking which is actually used to produce the fertilizer, the loss of biodiversity of our species, pollinator species, I mean there's so many ways that it's destructive. So how do we end up with all these destructive policies? Well, again, it was not necessarily bad intentions at the beginning, but it's turned out to be not so great. Now here's how it works. Our government agencies are supposed to do things to help promote the well-being of its citizens, but unfortunately, its policies now don't do that because they're not coordinated. And no agency talks to the other one. I remember being at a conference on obesity. It was in 2002 when Tommy Thompson was the head of Health and Human Services. And I said, Tommy, in an election, I got up, you know, he gave election, I got up and I asked a question. I said, Do you ever talk to the head of the USDA, the United States Department of Agriculture? Do you actually coordinate on what you're doing? And he looked at me as like, Well, not really. And I mean, there's some areas they do, the dietary guidelines, but most of the time the policies are not coordinated. For example, and I know, by the way, there's some more agencies that are involved. The FDA, the Food and Drug Administration, the USDA, the Health and Human Services, the CDC, Federal Trade Commission are all involved in some level, and others, Department of Defense and so forth, are involved in education with schools school lunches are involved in our food system and they don't coordinate, they're not organized together, and it ends up with really strange policies. Like, for example, we pay as taxpayers four times for the harm that growing corn does. One, the harm that it does to the environment, because the way we grow corn destroys the soil, uses lots of pesticides and herbicides, and overuses water for irrigation and destroys biodiversity of pollinator species and so on and so forth. so it's really a huge contributor to climate change. Second, it produces the raw materials for processed food, and ultra-processed food kills 11 million people a year. So we're killing people from obesity, diabetes, heart disease, from all this processed food. And then we actually get it turned into processed food by the food company, which when the government pays for it, in the tune of $75 billion a year through the SNAP, or the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or food stamps. Now, it shouldn't be called the supplemental nutrition assistance. It should be the food assistance because it's not nutritious food at all for the most part. 75% is junk food. So then we pay for that, right? And $7 billion of that a year is soda. That's 31 billion servings of soda for the poor every year through the SNAP program. And then we pay for it in Medicare and Medicaid on the back end because of all the diabetes and disease that comes from eating that food. So, we're literally taxed four times four. It doesn't make any sense. And then the government, on the other hand, the USDA, another part of the USDA, which is the Dietary Guidelines part, and the Health and Human Services, devise our dietary guidelines, which tell us not to eat all that crap. So, on one hand, we're growing it, we're funding it, we're taking care of it, we're paying for it, billions of dollars, and we're telling people not to eat it. So, we say eat five to nine servings of fruits and vegetables a day. in our dietary guidelines? Well, we only fund less than a half a percent of our government subsidies are for what we call especially crops or these fruits and vegetables, which doesn't make any sense, right? And of course, the dietary guidelines also are not completely squeaky clean either. They were developed a time in the 70s under George McGovern when he saw Americans getting sicker and said, we need some nutritional recommendations. And he hired a guy from Harvard who turned out to be funded by the sugar industry in part to write an editorial for the New York Times basically debunking the idea that sugar was a problem and implicating fat in heart disease, which turned out to be completely wrong. And he helped develop those guidelines, which were not really based on good science. In fact, most of the articles that were randomized control trials at the time that looked at sugar and fat and so forth didn't validate their conclusions and they didn't include them in the guidelines, which doesn't make any sense. They just used population data, which is less reliable. So that's the guidelines. And then of course they told us to eat 6 to 11 servings of rice bread serum pasta every day, which is like crazy. Why 11 servings of bread a day? That's a healthy diet? I don't think so. It's mostly carbs and sugar. So then there was the dietary guidelines that got established that started having all these competing interests. So they couldn't say don't eat meat. They said don't have saturated fat. They couldn't say don't have eggs. They said don't have cholesterol. So they kind of had all these buzzwords. that didn't implicate the food industry. So not only did the guidelines sort of have problems starting out, but they continue to have problems. You know, the recent dietary guidelines in 2005, George W. Bush was president and he basically said, we're not going to have scientists determine what the guidelines are anymore. They're going to advise us, but the politicians and the bureaucrats are going to decide what we put in or not in the guidelines. So last guidelines, for example, the advisory group, well-meaning and good intention and actually created a very good guideline, which was we should think about sustainability and the environment in our choices of what we're eating. And they were saying eat less meat, which is problematic because of the issues around regenerative ag. Regenerative ag actually may be a better way to restore the environment, but factory farm meat 100%. So they basically created these guidelines that are vetted by politicians, not scientists. That's the problem. And then of course even the scientists who are on the panel In the last administration of Trump now, for the 2020 guidelines, 13 of the 20 guideline members who are scientists have conflicts of interest with the food industry. So it's not squeaky clean. And the National Academy of Sciences reported on how the guidelines were made. This was back before Trump. And so there were problems with it, and we need to fix it, such as conflicts of interest, not looking at all the science and so forth. Well, guess what? We've regressed. We've regressed. And that is because under the Trump administration, we now have rules about what can be looked at or not in the guidelines development process. So as these guidelines are used for everything, used for establishing what we feed our children in school, for what's fed institutions and government buildings and taking as sort of national guidelines. And by the way, I just go back to the last conversation. If the, Guidelines match what the USDA funds. We'd be eating a giant corn fritter, which would take out most of our plate with a little bit of a quarter, like maybe a half a percent of our plate is vegetables, which is not that great. So getting back to the guidelines. So then they decided in this latest Trump administration rule about what could be looked at in the guidelines to eliminate any ability of the scientists to review any data before 2000 when a lot of good studies were done. and two, to eliminate any guidelines around processed food or ultra processed food. So we couldn't say, oh, ultra processed food is bad. You can't look at any of the data on that. Even though it kills 11 million people a year, I'll just ignore that for the minute, okay? And then of course, they actually can't look at issues around environment or climate and so forth. So it's just completely gutted the process and that's why we're all so confused about what to eat. So that's the USDA and there's other problems with them too. We can go into it, but the farm bill is lobbied by about a half a billion dollars worth of lobbying dollars from 600 different lobby groups that determine what goes in or not to the farm bill, which means that they want to fund subsidies and support these farmers to do industrial farming using glyphosate and pesticides and fertilizers, which benefits all the big ag and big food. The farmers get squeezed. I mean, the average farm income is about $1,600 minus every year. So they're not doing so great. It's not the farmer's problem, it's the whole system. And then of course we have other problems like the FDA. Now the FDA, Food and Drug Administration, is responsible for food safety and food guidelines and they're kind of asleep at the wheel. First of all, many of the chemicals in our food like BPA, azodicarbonamide, BHT, and so forth, these are banned substances in most countries. In fact, in Singapore, if you use azodicarbonamide, which is used a lot of baked goods to make the bread more fluffy and doughy, you get a $450,000 fine and you go to jail for 15 years for using this chemical if you're a food manufacturer. So nobody's doing it over in Singapore. Maybe they got it right with their food policies, I don't know. But the problem is that these food and drug administration rules about what's safe or not are really guided by industry. There were literally hundreds of food companies that determined whether or not we should be having these in the food or not. There was a whole rule to get these out and they didn't. There was, I mean, there's a staggering amount of lobby dollars around GMO labeling. You heard about that, right? GMO labeling. So it was an act that was trying to pass to make GMO labeling mandatory. There are a few states like Vermont and others that had passed it. Well, the federal government decided to overrule that in what's known as, kind of facetiously, as the DARK Act, denying Americans the right to know. And the food industry, spent $192 million in 2015 to stop the labeling. Crazy. It's crazy. And there's just story after story. In the book, I go through all of this and how it all works and what happened and what we need to do. But we're like one of the only countries in the world. Even China and Russia have GMO labeling. I mean, they're not known for transparency and democracy, but they at least do the GMO labeling. In Europe, you know, there's no GMO, there's no GMO in the food. In fact, it's been banned and they have better yields and less fertilizer and pesticide use. So the promise of them really isn't that great. That's another story. Of course, then we have not only the GMO labeling, not only all these banned ingredients, we have antibiotics. The FDA allows of the about 37 million pounds of antibiotics that are used every year in America. 30 million, 30 million are used for animals for prevention or grow bigger. They make animals fatter and they make humans fatter too. And so, so that doesn't make any sense. And the government says, the FDA says, well, would you pretty please not use antibiotics to make your animals grow and not use it for prevention? Just only treat them with antibiotics when they're sick. Pretty please. Well, it's a voluntary guideline. Guess what they do? Nothing. No change, nada. And it's a big problem because there are 700,000 deaths around the world from antibiotic resistant superbugs and the antibiotics don't work and it costs trillions of dollars, not just from the farm related antibiotic business, but just in general. So it's a big problem. And then of course we have not only the bad chemicals, not only the GMO labeling, not only antibiotics, but we have the food label, which is so darn confusing. You have to have a PhD in nutrition just to really understand the label and even then good luck. And I mean, I've been studying nutrition for 40 years and I look at it, I'm like, oh God, this is not helpful. And I said to this woman who has worked for the FDA, I said, why can't you put on the label instead of like 39 grams of sugar, why can't you put 10 teaspoons? She goes, oh, well, you know, there's differences among sugar, honey, maple syrup. This one is not exactly the same and we can't. I'm like, I'm sure you can figure out an equivalent number, like a gram equivalent or teaspoon equivalent. So people know when they pick it up a 20 ounce bottle of soda that they go, oh, it says 15 teaspoons of sugar and I should put it down, right? They don't want that in the food industry because it's totally co-opted by co-opting government. So we have really confusing food labels. In many countries, there are stoplights, red, light green. So there's so many different dysfunctional parts. And then, of course, we have the FTC, the Federal Trade Commission, which creates policies that allow unrestricted food marketing to kids. Now, this is documented to be deliberate. and undermines kids' actually agency in the sense that kids don't know when they're watching a commercial versus when they're actually watching something real. It's in stealth marketing, which is even worse through the internet and social media. And literally spend literally billions and billions of dollars marketing directly to kids. These advergames on social media that embed Oreo cookies and McDonald's into the stories and the games. It's kind of pretty subliminal and very powerful. 50 countries that are developed countries have regulations around food marketing to kids and it's been associated with lower weights, better health and so forth. The only country that doesn't restrict other than us is a very well-known really great democracy known as Syria. So, I don't know. So we need to deal with this because Chile is a great example of a country that changed food overnight like that. And there was a, I'll just tell you this last story, let you go. There was an amazing, and this is why I have hope, because this can be done. We can fix this. And that's really why I wrote the book, Food Fix. Wasn't to depress you, wasn't to tell you how terrible the world is, because, you know, it's not. It's a great place. We just have some screwed up things around the food system we have to fix. And in Chile, what they did, well, they had a doctor who was the head of the Senate, or the head, I think the vice president of the Senate, and they finally got a doctor as a pediatrician as president. And the two of them being doctors, they go, well, yeah, there's a real problem with the food. And Chile was having massive levels of obesity and children and adults and so forth and chronic disease and was burdening their economy. So they basically got together and they decided they were going to implement a sweeping range of policies that I think would be great to do here. One, food labeling. I mean, they had on the front cover of any junk food a warning label. You know, it's a big warning label says, this could be bad for you. And it's for every different thing that's bad. I mean, you could argue with what they pick, like saturated fat or salt or sugar, whatever, but it's still a warning label that this is probably not good for you. The second thing is they banned all cartoon characters from any kids' stuff. They banned any kids' advertising. So no Tony the Tiger, no Toucan Sam on Fruit Loops, I mean, nothing like gone. And it's just, you want Frosted Flakes, it just says Frosted Flakes and that's it with no cartoon characters with the warning labels on the front, which deters people from eating it. And then they eliminate any advertising from six in the morning till ten at night. So no advertising at all of junk food, which is amazing. So kids don't get exposed to that and people don't. They implemented a elimination of all everything for formula, all junk food in schools, which would be great for us. That's another thing we didn't talk about. Leave that for another day. And by the way, Trump just rolled back all the advances in nutrition guidelines for schools. So that's a problem. So in Chile, they also got rid of all the advertising, like I said, and they put in an 18 soda tax. So they put in these sweeping changes around food labeling, around marketing, around taxes, and they've had tremendous benefits. So we need to create sweeping policies here. We're all going to have to join in. I'm working on leading a food fix campaign. It's a non-profit to really Advance this on a grassroots level and to do lobbying. I want to be a lobbyist. I want to be the good kind of lobbyist. It lobbies for science and the people. I never thought I'd say that, but how else are we gonna get things done if we don't change things at the top and get things to happen? So I'm super excited about this book, Food Fix, How to Save Our Health, Our Economy, Our Communities, and Our Planet One Bite at a Time. I encourage you to check it out. Coming out February 25th. You can pre-order now, foodfixbook.com, I got bonus videos, really awesome. And I just hope you join in the fight with me because We need everybody on the team to make the world a better place, to solve chronic disease, to end social injustice, to fix climate change, reverse it and live a happy life. Because that's what I want to do anyway, get back to this happy life rather than having to do all this nonsense. But somebody's got to do it. So I think I picked myself. I elected myself. And I want you to do it with me. So I'll see you along the way. I'll give you updates on the book and I hope you're all doing great. 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