How Our Health Suffers Because Of Corruption In The Food System

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Hi, this is Lauren Feen, one of the producers of the Doctors Pharmacy podcast.

Today we're bringing you part two of Dr. Hyman's conversation with his good friend.

Business partner, and podcast host, Drew Proett. I hope you enjoy the episode. Mark, welcome back to the podcast. Pleasure to have you here. I want to jump right in. We've done a couple episodes recently where we've talked about food. corruption and just how kind of messed up the whole industry is and with big food. You have your own story in this area that you wrote about in the book, Food Fix, but I'd love for you to share it with our audience here.

Yeah, you know, I think, you know, we don't realize how much the food industry is embedded in our policies, in social groups that we think are representing people's best interests like the NAACP or the Hispanic Federation, how much they're infiltrated in professional organizations like the AMA or American Diabetes Association or American College of Cardiology. I mean, there's every single professional organization, social group, policy organization, they're all infiltrated and influenced by the food industry to the tune of literally millions and millions of dollars. And it's something that sort of happens below the surface in the face of corporate social responsibility, for example. It brings somebody an example of, something that happened personally to me when I was helping promote the movie Fed Up, which was about the role of food and sugar in obesity, particularly childhood obesity, and exposed a lot of the sort of industry issues that were going on. I went to Atlanta and a friend of mine introduced me to Bernice King, Martin Luther King's daughter. And, you know, got to have quite a bit of time with her. And she's, you know, she realized that that nonviolence that her father talked about also meant nonviolence to the self. And that, you know, really the African-American community really need to be inspired to also look at that. And we talked about showing the movie Fed Up in the King Center in Atlanta. Now, many of you know that the King Center is in Atlanta is where Martin Luther King had his church, Ebenezer Baptist Church, but it's also where Coca-Cola's headquarters is. And Coca-Cola, Funds the King Center. And at first, Bernice was very excited about sharing this movie in the King Center and having a showing. We had it scheduled. It was all set up. And a few days before the screening, I got a call from her saying, Hey, we can't show the movie. And I was sort of flabbergasted. And really it was because the King Center is funded by Coca-Cola.

She said that outright? She told you explicitly or was this implied?

I mean, it was kind of implied. And then, I went to visit Spelman College, which was the, you know, it's one of the major colleges for women, African-American women in Atlanta. There's Morehouse, which is a men's college, and Spelman College. And, you know, it's one of the top African-American colleges. And I met with the dean there, and she said that 50% of the entering class had a chronic disease of 18 year old women, heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure, obesity. and I was like, wow, I said, then why are there Coca-Cola machines and vending things all over the campus? And she goes, well, a big portion of our funding comes from Coca-Cola and if you look at the board of directors, one of the key members of the board is very high level executive at Coca-Cola so, you know, she understood the problem of this, but, you know, we have a problem in our society where we don't fund education, we don't fund social groups. We don't fund the social safety net. And so these large corporations step in to fund these groups when there's nobody else funding them. So, for example, they really don't want soda taxes, right? So the soda industry does not want a soda taxes. And they literally have funded the NAACP and Hispanic Federation to influence them to oppose soda taxes.

Which is a big part of what Cali was talking about and helping out with the strategy.

Exactly. Discriminating against against African-Americans and Hispanics by targeting them with taxes and it's regressive. And there's all these talking points they have. And all these talking points. They even funded an initiative in Philadelphia that was going to pass a soda tax. The Children's Hospital there, CHOP, very famous Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, was in favor of a soda tax in Philadelphia. And Coca-Cola gave them $10 million. as a donation, which then led to them abruptly withdrawing their support for soda taxes. So that's how they got that.

Was that blatant?

That blatant.

Was anybody making noise about it? Did you see it written about?

Yes, it's not hard to find. You do a little research and you don't have to dig very far to find these things. And in the big soda companies, in particular in Coca-Cola, they targeted African-American and Latino populations because they already were using these compounds more. I call them compounds because they're basically like drugs that are bad for you, the soda and sugar. And they realized that they could influence these groups and that they could get them to be even bigger users. So they have a view that if you're, for me, they're never going to get me to drink Coca-Cola. But if someone's already using it, you can get them to use more. And that's basically the strategy they use. And they use this through various tactics, for example, with electronic benefits, the food stamp cards. Whenever they come out at the beginning of the month, they'll go to the local markets and they'll give them discounts and then they'll have huge advertisements in the front of the stores that you can get your two-liter bottle of soda for like a couple of bucks. So they get these things discounted, they know when they're coming out and they have whole marketing campaigns around this. So the whole thing is corrupt. It's not, these groups are co-opted, the professional and medical nutrition groups are co-opted, Academy of Nutrition Dietetics, 40% of their funding comes from the food industry. So it's problematic.

It is problematic and kind of why I wanted to have you on to talk a little bit more about it is that there's also a balance of, and it's in the context of a lot of these organizations and groups are looking for funding.

Right?

They're looking for resources. Earlier we were talking about Tufts University, and we were talking about the Food Compass, right? And there was recently an article written that there are over 60 big food companies, including several that ranked highly on the Food Compass. And again, is there going to be any big institution, right, that doesn't take that money, but also I'm hearing you blatantly say that it's also corrupt. So where do we find that balance that's there? What is a new system look like?

I mean, it's a really great point. I did talk about this in Food Fix and the key is whether it's the pharmaceutical industry or the food industry, they're all up in everybody's business. And in academic centers, a huge amount of the funding of academic medical centers comes from pharma through funding research and funding academic programs and education. So a lot of the way that they influence prescribing practices and when drugs get promoted and when drugs get researched is through this massive financial influx of money into the system. One of the original things that happened around this, which led to a lot of the conflict of interest disclosures that now have to happen in academic research, was two of the biggest researchers at Harvard back in the '60s who were paid by the sugar industry to vilify fat and exonerate sugar. And they published a paper in the New England Journal of Medicine. They were paid the equivalent of $50,000 in today's dollars to write this article, which essentially was a shill article for the for the sugar industry, posing as a New England Journal article that was supposed to be biased and impartial. Now there's been more rigorous conflict of interest statements that have to be released when you publish any kind of research. So if you look at a research paper, it'll say conflicts of interest and if there's conflicts of interest, that's helpful, but it's not enough. And there are a number of really stringent guidelines that have been proposed and that I write about in my book, Food Fix, that can be used to limit the influence of outside funders on the design, the outcome, the control of the research. And so it's not terrible that at arm's length somebody funds research if they want to advance things. For example, the Food Compass was one of the researchers was funded by Danone, which is a big food company. So Danone didn't end up using this food compass rating system. They used another European rating system because they thought it was better for them. So they didn't mean abusing even though they funded this. So a lot of companies will fundings at arm's length. They don't have control over the design. They don't have control over the writing of the papers, over the outcome. So there can be a way to do it, but, but you have to have the firewalls in place. A lot of times they're not. And that's, that's part of the problem. If you look at food industry research, if, if a food company has funded the study, you're going to see a likelihood of a positive outcome eight times more than you would see if it's a NIH or publicly funded study on the same product. So, if the dairy industry funds milk studies, they're gonna show that milk's great. But if you have impartial researchers studying milk, they might not show it's great.

Who was Dr. Gabriel Lyons' mentor that you had on? Don Layman. Don Layman. So, I saw another interview with him and one of the things that he was talking about with his important research in the area of protein, is he explicitly came out and said that if I didn't have industry funding, I wouldn't have been able to do the research that I did.

Right, because he was funded by the Meat Board.

He was funded by the Meat Board and people that are there. And so what are your thoughts about that? And his work has been very influential in kind of updating some of even your ideas in protein and some of his students and people that have been inspired by him, like Dr. Gabriel Lyon, What do you think about that? I think it was probably more interesting.

Is if actually there was disclosure of what people's personal beliefs and habits were. So, if you're a researcher and you're a vegan and you're studying meat, that would be interesting. Or if you're a carnivore and you're studying a vegan diet and you're publishing.

Research on that, that would be interesting to me. I think that kind of bias is- so, you think the people who write paper should put it out there? Disclose? What would it show in his case, for instance? He is openly an omnivore, right? And, you know, he's doing work in protein and obviously that's going to influence, you know, his sort of, his findings are going to influence his probably dietary habits. Would that have discounted or you're just looking for more transparency?

I think more transparency and then also being able to sort of sift through the research. And this is the problem with nutrition research. It's very tough to do. You know, if you basically the ideal thing to do would be to take twins at birth, put them in different feeding wards for their entire life, feed them different diets and sample their blood every week and watch what happened. You know, one pair of the twin pairs would get like a vegan diet, let's say. Another would be a carnivore diet or another would be like a, you know, a paleo diet and see what happens. And, that would be interesting, but that's not going to happen because it's unethical, it's impossible, it would cost billions and billions of dollars and it's never going to be done. So, we have to sort of take the knowledge we have from basic science research on animals, from clinical trials that are small clinical trials, from population studies, and it's fraught with all sorts of problems. I mean, you try to draw conclusions. So you have to look at the sum total of all the evidence and make your conclusions based on that data, the best available data we have. And for me, I filter that data through the lens of my clinical practice of 30 years of being a doctor and treating real patients and seeing what happens in real time when you do different things. I just changed them to this diet or that diet. So you can say, oh, keto diets are great, but that may be true for one person, but it may not be true for another person. I had a patient, for example, who was an overweight woman who tried to eat healthy, tried to exercise, you know, but had severe insulin resistance. Her triglycerides were like well over 300 or her cholesterol was like 300, very low HDL. and very much pre-diabetic. So I put her on a keto diet, basically butter and coconut oil, which is all saturated fat. And in the conventional view, based on the quote literature, you're going to see that this person is going to be at high risk for heart disease. Her lipids are going to get worse. It's really bad for them. But in her case, her cholesterol dropped from 300 to 200. Her triglycerides dropped 200 points. Her HDL went up 30 points, which never happens. She lost 20 pounds and her, all her inflammation went away, so. that worked for her. But I had another guy who was a 56 year old avid biker, cyclist who cycled like 50, 100 miles a day and was thin and fit and slim. And he wanted to try it just for performance. I said, okay, well, let's just track it and see what happens. I didn't recommend it to him, but he. But turned out he. His cholesterol went nuts. It was just terrible. I said, this is really dangerous for you. I don't think you should do this because all his particles got small, all his particle numbers went up, his inflammation levels went up. I was like, well, this isn't good for you. Even it was the same diet. So I think we have to get real about what works in real people in real time. Roger Williams said, I'm not interested in statistical humans. So I think that's the problem with research. Population studies look for trends in populations and that can be helpful for guiding future research. But it's associations and randomized controlled trials may be specific to a particular type of person in a particular setting, but not generalizable to the population. So if you're studying 70 kilogram white men from Kansas, it's different than if you're studying little kids or Asians or African-Americans or people from India. You're going to just have very different results depending on the population you're studying, but on the age and ethnicity and the sex.

So I want to go back to the food compass because as I mentioned to you, I've had a lot of people on the podcast people just bring it up naturally because it was such a viral moment.

Yeah, yeah.

And and, you know, just setting it up from that standpoint. And I saw an interview that you recently did with Dr. Mazharian from Tufts. And I'd love for you to just set up for the audience here, you know, what was the food compass? What was its, you know, sort of intent? And why do you think it went so viral?

Well, first of all, I think people misunderstand stood what it was for and what it was about. So there are food rating systems that have been used for a long time to rate the quality of foods, to guide policy, to guide food manufacturing, influence, you know, what, what process are made to make food, and, and they can be very helpful, but they're limited. So, for example, in the past, you know, they might have just, like, I'm just looking at saturated fat, salt and calories as the markers, or I'm going to use you know, some other 10 things that I look at that determine the rating system. So there was a really an opportunity to create a new rating system that looked across a broad category of foods that used a lot more relevant metrics that weren't used before. So the food compass was an attempt and in, in, by admission, it's a limited attempt because we have limited access to certain types of data like glycemic index and other things. And there's all sorts of problems when you start to kind of create algorithms because basically the algorithm is only good as the sort of inputs to the algorithm.

Do you feel like they, by the way, just to pause you there, do you feel like they let people know that?

I think that if you kind of read the fine print and you look at what it was, I think the ambition was to create a better rating system that could be a guide to better food choices for consumers when they have to choose among a wide variety of foods. So, if you're going to buy cereal, what's the best cereal? Should you buy, like, fruit loops or should you buy Cheerios? You know, I think it's a reasonable attempt to try to guide people. And I think, you know, very clearly in a perfect world, none of us would be eating processed food or especially ultra processed food. I mean, you know, sauerkraut's processed food, yogurt's processed food, canned sardines is processed food. So that's all fine. It's more the ultra processed food that's 60% of our diet. And I think the researchers and the authors would agree that in a perfect world, no one would be eating ultra processed food. maybe only minimally processed food and whole foods. And that's the aspiration. But in the world we live in today, that's just not possible. So there are all sorts of reasons why we have to rate these foods. And it's an imperfect process. And instead of using just a few metrics to assess the quality of the food, they used nine domains and 54 different attributes of the food. And they included polyphenols and phytochemicals from plants. They included, you know, all these horrible additives that they didn't like, whether it's MSG or trans fats or artificial sweeteners that ding the food for being bad. They looked at fiber and carbohydrate ratios to make sure that if there was carbohydrate, how much fiber was, they looked at sodium potassium ratios, which are really important. They looked at fatty acid ratios. So I think, I think that's really important. They looked at levels of Omega-3s they looked at levels of MCT oil. They looked at levels of trans fats. They looked at a whole bunch of, of different attributes, 54 different attributes among nine different domains. And I think it was more than ever was done before to look at food, but it still was imperfect. For example, my big beef with it is that there are really no large, great databases for the glycemic load or index of food, which in my book is probably the most important attribute of food in determining its ability to affect your health from the point of view of your weight, from the point of view of your cardiovascular risk, from diabetes, from cancer, from dementia, from even your microbiome and so many different things that require us to understand the way in which a food affects your blood sugar. So that was just absent from the calculation. There was a sort of an intermediate kind of calculation that included sugar as a ding or maybe if it didn't have enough fiber as a ding on the score, but it wasn't really including the glycemic load or index of a food. And to me, that, that was a big failure of this. They're iterating it. They're coming up with a new version, a new version, new version.

So.

They'Re learning and it's not meant to be dietary guidelines. It's not a government funded thing. The National Institute of Health, Heart, Lung and Blood Institute actually did fund most of the study. So it was a government funded study, but it still is not meant to be the dietary guidelines.

But it is meant to encourage certain investments, right? That was one of the things that was noted inside of there, especially companies that are focused on this whole ESG thing. So where companies should invest more in, and then there was some recommendations inside of there of what should be encouraged to children or recommended to children.

Yeah, it was more of a guide around how to pick among different foods within categories or across categories. So, I don't agree with how it all came out, but the problem is when you create an algorithm, you can't necessarily control the results. If you think eggs are better than Cheerios, well, in the algorithm that didn't come out that way. That doesn't necessarily mean that looking at all the weight of the evidence that eggs are not better than Cheerios, it just means that in the way they calculate the algorithm, that's how it came out. I think that's problematic. It's problematic. And if you were to ask the authors of the study, do you think people should be eating processed cereals? And the answer is no. But if you're going to eat them, should you eat ones with less sugar and more fiber? Yeah, and do minimally processed whole grains have positive benefit across multiple studies? Yes. But does that mean you're going to be better off eating a whole oat groat versus steel cut oats versus oatmeal versus oat milk? Yeah, of course. Or versus Cheerios, which is pulverized oats. So, yeah, I think there's no debate about that.

Yeah, I guess that going back to your earlier comment, And I'm not trying to play a journalistic moment on you over here. I'm just trying to go ahead. You know, I look up to you. I want to get your honest thoughts about it.

And I feel like you're an individual that you-- that's only because I'm a few inches taller.

Otherwise, we're equal. You are both with Food Fix nonprofit, right? The goal is to influence the discussion in a bipartisan level and have Congress talking about food. Food is medicine, right? And you got to play on both sides of the aisle and make sure you really get those individuals to listen. So that's somebody would call that maybe change from the inside.

Right?

You were at Cleveland Clinic previously, you know, setting up the Institute of Functional Medicine. Still there, yeah. And still there. And, you know, that's another form of, like, you know, change coming in from the little bit of an insider, outsider thing. And then obviously there's all your advocacy work, right? But because you're my friend, I also want to make sure that I hold you to what you're saying earlier to get clarity. Clarity for me, clarity for the audience, it's there. So earlier you were saying, like, these things are sometimes so embedded that people don't even know, that their work is being influenced. So I want to just read to you, this is a post from our mutual friend, Chris Kresser. Yeah. Just something that I put up earlier and I thought it kind of summarized it. You know, he said in a recent editorial, I'm not going to name the author, but in a recent editorial, an independent journalist asked, what kind of dystopian world has nutrition science entered into? Science with a quote into whereby a university, a peer reviewed journal and one of the field's most influential leaders legitimized advice telling the public to eat more lucky charms and fewer eggs. You talked about the first part of it. This is the second part that I really want your thoughts on, perhaps the fact I think that Tufts School of Nutrition receives funding from 60 big food companies, including several that rank highly on the Food Compass, has something to do with it. It's a question mark that he's putting inside of it. Now, you've mentioned that the study itself was only funded by one food company, right?

Danone? One of the authors, one of the authors, got some of their funding from Danone.

Right.

Which didn't end up using the food company.

Right, didn't end up using it. Are the majority of the authors from Tufts?

Yeah, from Tufts. But they don't get their salaries from food in it.

But I guess I'm pointing out in a little bit of what you're talking about in food fix. And this is the part where people are trying to piece apart because, you know, there's a general sentiment that people feel that the world is kind of crazy when we don't see some of the obvious things that are there. It kind of feels like the word, I think the word of the year for 2021 was gaslighting.

Right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. People kind of feel like, wait, you're telling me, like, you know, so I think that people generally feel that there's a sense of, like, how can you say that, like, these things are not connected or influenced. So, do you feel that any of that general funding could be in the back of people's minds?

I mean, for sure, people are human and they're influenced in ways that they may not even be aware of consciously or unconsciously. And one of the favorite books about this was written by Marion Nestle called Unsavory Truth. And she talked both about the medical industry and pharma and primarily about the food industry influencing research, influencing professional societies, influencing dietary guidelines, influencing pretty much all of our food policies. So there's no doubt that it's going on and that people have unconscious bias. I certainly do, for sure. When I read something and I, for example, I, I think personally that, that it's very, very tough to be a healthy vegan for a lot of reasons. And I come to that conclusion both through my reading of the literature and through my practice as a physician, where I see people who are attempting to be healthy vegans. These are people who are eating donuts and Coca-Cola and French fries and pasta all day. These are people who are really working at it. And I see just massive nutritional deficiencies. And so I do worry about that and that's my unconscious bias. So when I'm reading literature, I'm filtering it through my unconscious or maybe conscious bias that I don't think this is.

A good idea for most people. And I've heard you talk about that before. You've shared that, that I have an unconscious bias. Even I'm sure, your podcast and my podcast exists because of sponsors, right? There's definitely unconscious bias that comes in even when you have sponsors that are there. I guess the one big difference is that you're kind of acknowledging it and you're saying, look, I'm a human being and that sort of thing, right? Where people feel that it gets a little bit messy is when there's not.

An acknowledgement that that sort of play can play a role in the background. Yeah, I mean, part of the challenge though with research is that even if you do sort of aggregate research, which is what the Food Compass was. It was basically taking all the existing nutritional databases, all the NHANES data, all the things that we kind of use to evaluate research on diet and nutrition and health, and tried to use that data, which by very nature is imperfect to come up with a rating system.

The inputs going into the algorithm themselves.

Yeah.

Are imperfect.

Right.

So, or even maybe in some cases you might say just based on our previous conversations misguided because they don't include things like in some instances with food, the impact of a food would have on a glycemic index which would have an impact on somebody's metabolic health.

Yeah, so it's basically, you know, what can't be measured may matter and everything that can be measured may not matter, right? So if we can't measure accurately the glycemic load of food, and it's not included in a food rating system, that's a major flaw to me. And that brings the whole framework into question. It doesn't mean that the motives or the intent of the people doing it were flawed. It just means that we're dealing with an imperfect amount of data and information. So, I mean, would I like to see funding of nutrition research so we can get answers to these questions? Absolutely. Right now, you know, we spend $6 billion a year on cancer research. which is okay, but like it was a huge win to get a hundred million dollars to do nutrition research. We should be funding literally billions and billions and billions of dollars from the NIH budget to focus on nutrition and chronic disease because it is the biggest cause of chronic disease, period. And it kills more people than anything else. So why aren't we studying it? It's all because of how the system is set up.

And is one of those proposals to be, you know, a National Institute of Nutrition?

Yeah. So the idea, I mean, many other countries have it. I mean, India has one, but we don't have one. We should have a National Institute of Nutrition, and it should be funded to the tune of billions of dollars by the federal government. I mean, if we can, I mean, look at COVID, for example. You know, I wrote about this in March 2020. It was published in the Boston Globe, basically saying, hey, the early data show that the people who are getting sick and dying of COVID have a chronic lifestyle-induced disease caused by food. so we better get on this. And basically it was like zero media about this and nobody was talking about it. And still people aren't talking about it. Why? Why are we 4% of the world's population but had 16% of the COVID cases and deaths? It wasn't because we don't have doctors and hospitals and healthcare system. It's because we are a pre-inflamed, pre-sick population. When the virus hit, it, you know, our immune systems weren't working because of our crappy diet and because we have chronic diseases. And that's why we were Dying.

Well, this is another area that, you know, kind of plays right into this and sort of funding and criticism and other stuff. People at the end of the day are allowed to put out whatever they do. In the case of COVID a lot of even individuals that have been on this podcast and then friends of mine who also interview top experts that are out there that do a lot of research, they felt like they wanted to speak up more about nutrition. They felt like they wanted to speak up more about public policy. But the vast majority of their funding comes from the NIH, which largely is controlled by a small group of people. And the concern was, if I criticize, will I get ostracized from the community and will my research get funded?

Yeah, I think that's fair. But I mean, Tufts, which published the Food Compass, they also published, and Dr. Mozaffarian published a paper that said that 63% of all hospitalization deaths from COVID could have been prevented by better diet. because they were resulting from chronic diseases caused by food. So imagine that, like a major institution like that calls it out. It's not like saying that they're saying that it's okay to be eating this junk food and processed food. They're not saying that. They're saying we need to really look at the quality of our diet. And I know Dr. Mazzafran personally, and he's, you know, a tireless researcher. He's a tireless worker for moving things forward in Washington. I'm working with him, for example, on a medically tailored meals bill to fund food as medicine for actually paying for food for chronically ill people instead of drugs. So there's so many things that people don't see below the surface and nobody's perfect. I'm not perfect. You know, he's not perfect. We're all doing the best we can with limited data we have. But I don't think we should sort of vilify efforts to try to improve things. And unless you're in there in the trenches doing the work, you know, it's easy to throw stones from the outside.

So I've been in Washington. I could see big soda saying the same thing. Yeah, I could say big soda saying the same thing for people who criticize them. Right. I heard this great podcast episode the other day where the guy who was talking was like, look, if you have criticisms about this other dude, don't come to me because he's my friend. You're not going to get an honest take on the situation. Right. But I'm going to be upfront and I'm going to let you know, go to somebody else. They might have a better honest take about it. So I guess what I'm saying is that that same sort of idea that everybody is just doing the best they can, everybody has that especially organizationally. And I can imagine Big Soda coming out with that same sort of statement. It's like, look at the amount of jobs we do. Look at all the good that we invest in. This is one piece of the calorie component. And who's to say that you should decide which, you know, communities don't have access or have access to soda. So the question is always like, that argument can be extended out further and further and further to essentially everyone. And then nobody's corrupt and everything's the way that it is.

I mean, there are, there are sort of levels of integrity that have to be in business or in science or in politics. And I think there are, you know, there are ways to look at and evaluate that. If you're, for example, getting NIH funding and you're getting your university is getting some funding from pharma or from the food industry, but there's conflict of interest requirements, there's arm's length transactions where, you know, the funder doesn't have any authority to read the papers, to look at them, to determine the research design, to do anything with the study, which is the case in most of the ways. That's one thing. But it's another thing if Coca-Cola is giving the Global Energy Balance Network $20 million and funding research scientists and writing papers and producing them and building their websites. That's just total corruption. That's what happened with Rona Applebaum and Coca-Cola. With guys like James Hill at University of Colorado where they were putting out all these nonsense papers that is all about energy balance and sugar's from soda is no different than any other calories. They're all calories are the same. And basically, if you don't overeat and if you don't under exercise, you'll be fine. And that's basically propaganda. So I think there's a difference between corruption and Marcia Angel, who was the New England Journal of Medicine editor for years, has written a lot about this. She wrote about the corruption in Pharma and medicine and basically said that a lot of the data we have is just compromised in many ways because of this. But it doesn't mean that you can't still learn and grow and learn how kind of sift through the available evidence from a wide array of studies. It's not like one study you should focus on, but it's just looking at the cumulative load of evidence.

Yeah, so in terms of fixing it, right? So one idea, which some people are a little wary of because the feeling is sometimes, again, looking back at like COVID and the emphasis on certain approaches and public health, you know, generally speaking, public health gets away with a lot looser science recommendations than what would need to happen for like a medicine, for example.

Yeah. When there's a pandemic, people kind of want to act fast.

But even outside of a pandemic, even something I've heard you share a lot is a lot of our nutrition sort of guidelines come from, you know, the best done but still poorly designed done observational studies that we have, right? And so, is there a solution for that, for doing better studies that are out there?

Yeah, I think there are. I mean, without getting too technical, there are ways to look at biology that determine intermediate risk factors. It's hard to do long-term studies in nutrition and look for hard endpoints like heart attack, stroke, or death, for example, or cancer, because it takes a long time. So, for example, there was a study done on seed oils. This is a whole controversy about- yeah.

I want to talk to you about seed oils.

Yeah, I think doing nutritional research was very tough. And in the 60s and 70s, there were some really large nutritional trials funded by the government to look at fat and heart disease. And there was a whole interest in studying that. And they did sort of large studies. And so based on some of these studies, there has sort of been view that, and some of the more other observational data that drink having more soybean oil and refined oils, or we call pufas, polyunsaturated fatty acids, was protective against heart disease. It lowered cholesterol, it reduced heart attacks and strokes. Because it primarily moved us away from animal fats. Yeah, because it was moving away from animal fats.

That's, at least that's, that, that was.

What the hope was. Yeah, but, but the problem with those studies was they were very confounded by lots of things, including using trans fats and using, you know, you know, oils that were some of their Omega-6, some were combinations of Omega-6 and 3. So for example, soybean oil and canola oil are relatively good combos of both Omega-6 and Omega-3, whereas corn oil and safflower oil and cottonseed oil and peanut oil, these are almost primarily Omega-6. And so it depends on what you're studying. And when they looked at, for example, all the trials that combined Omega-6 and 03s, there wasn't really significant bad outcomes. In fact, there was a reduction in cardiovascular events. When you looked at just the Omega-6 studies, there was actually a worsening of the outcomes. And there was a couple of big trials in Minnesota coronary study and others where they literally had locked people up in psychiatric hospitals. They gave like half of them, this was like 9,000 people, so a lot of people in a randomized controlled trial, which you couldn't do now ethically, but they basically gave half of them corn oil or half of them butter basically, otherwise kept everything the same in their diet. So they basically had a controlled population because they were locked in on psychiatric hospital. And they found that even though the LDL cholesterol dropped significantly, which is we think a good marker for reducing the risk of heart disease, there was a dramatic increase in the risk of heart attacks and deaths in the group that had the corn oil versus the butter. Now, that's an Omega-6 oil. In other studies, they looked at combinations of Omega-6 and Omega-3 and they found that the risk wasn't as bad. Now, the veterans study, there was a big veterans study, that was an LA veterans study, that was a long-term study, it was one of the few long-term studies, but it was, you know, in the initial part of the study, there was a reduction in cardiac events with soybean oil. And there was a reduction in cholesterol and a reduction in deaths and that all seemed good in the early trends. But as the study went on, there were more deaths and there were more cancers. And so at eight years, it looked like there was a higher risk of, for example, cancer with these oils. But those studies aren't really talked about because they're kind of older studies, but it's really hard to make conclusions when you're dealing with this sort of really complicated biology of Omega-6 and Omega-3s and how the studies were done and how long they were done and what the populations were and what their underlying risks were. And so you end up with like kind of squishy data. So I would say that from my perspective, it's better to eat fats from whole foods. If you're going to have any kind of refined oils, they should be expeller cold pressed. If you're going to have any kind of cooking oil that you use, and I really don't recommend this, but soybean oil and canola oil, have Omega-6 and Omega-3 so they'd be less harmful. Definitely stay away from cottonseed oil, grape seed oil, if you're gonna peanut oil, you know, coconut oil, safflower oil, those are all terrible. So I think, I think my view is, is and always been sort of stick with more Whole Foods and avocado oil, coconut oil, grass-fed butter, you know, olive oil, obviously, extra virgin olive oil is probably the best. So I think we kind of have to be careful when we look at these studies and when we do this whole all seed oils are bad or all are good. Well, it's, it's complicated, but all the same. Is grape seed oil the same as soybean oil? No, is soybean oil from a regeneratively.

Raised farm that's not sprayed with glyphosate.

That'S, you know, like, I don't know, soybean oil out there like that. Well, I think there's organic soybeans and there, yeah, there's organic tofu and organic tempeh and there's organic soybean oil you can buy. So I, and that are cold pressed and expeller pressed. So those are likely to be. less contaminated, less processed with hexane, not processed full of deodorizers that are, you know, so there's all these sort of subtle things. So at the end of the day, you should have to combine common sense with science and come up with sort of a reasonable way of looking at these things. But, you know, as Mark Twain said, the problem with common sense is not too common. And the problem with scientists is they go, well, it's all about the evidence. Well, the evidence is fine if you have good evidence.

Right.

If every day that you wake up and the sun comes up, that's pretty reliable evidence scientific things happen. The sun rises and sets every day. Nobody's going to argue with that. But when you're talking about nutrition research, it's not clear-cut like that.

If you wanted to do a study to see are these highly processed, which that in itself doesn't obviously mean anything, but if these highly processed vegetable oils really have a negative impact comparatively to what humanity might have been eating before, right? As you mentioned, virgin oils, expeller pressed, cold pressed, and then potentially animal fats, right? We know that there's been consumption of that. What would you be looking at, right? What do you think would need to be done?

Well, I think there's so many variables that we can measure now that we can never measure before. You can look at gene expression, you can look at metabolomics, you can look at huge profiles of cytokines and inflammatory markers, you can look at what happens to all these other various intermediate biomarkers, and you you can start to kind of see how these are influencing our biology. And, you know, I've talked about this before, but just because you're eating meat, it doesn't mean it's all the same. Or just because you're eating an oil, it doesn't mean it's all the same. It depends where it's grown, how it's grown, what's happening, what it's eating. So, for example, you know, I just had a professor on from University, Utah State, who studies the metabolomics of animal food. So what is the difference between a bison that is pasture raised that's eating a bazillion different plants versus a pison that's raised in a feedlot, which is actually way better than a cow that's raised in a feedlot for many reasons. And there was 1500 different metabolites that were measured, and they were profoundly different. And they had profoundly different potential impacts on health, from everything from the essential fatty acids in them to the level of minerals, to the level of antioxidants, to the level of phytochemicals. So there's so many variables in the food we eat that really it depends on the quality of what you're doing and where one might raise inflammation or they might lower inflammation. So I think in the future as we begin to use machine learning, AI, metabolomics, gene expression studies, the price of this stuff comes down, it's going to be a lot easier to sort of see what's going on. I think again, no matter what we do, it's going to be really tough to do these large randomized control trials of human beings unless you lock people in a ward. and there are some sort of studies that have done this, like Kevin Hall has done small, you know, couple of week or week-long studies looking at different changes in your biomarkers and your health and fat metabolism when you change, for example, to eat a high or low carbohydrate diet or high fat or low fat diet. But that might not be relevant because it might take 3 to 6 weeks for your biology to adapt to eating a low carbohydrate diet and switch to fat metabolism. So you might not see the benefits for six, eight 12 weeks, whereas he's looking at one or two weeks. So it depends on how you do the studies, how long they are, what's going on. And that's why the average consumer is so confused when they look at the data, because pretty much anything you believe you could find evidence for.

I want to...

Including aliens, which may be really a thing.

So I want to read you a tweet to just get your thoughts on something, because we're talking about a lot of different ideas. We're talking about corruption, influence, food system, making healthier choices for people. and a bunch of other things that are there. And then we're going to get into some of the conversations around obesity and some of the drugs and interventions that people are proposing now. So this tweet is from Tamar Haspel. She's award-winning Washington Post columnist. And this kind of caught storm and I saw a bunch of people retweeting it from the kind of more traditional food industry sort of point of view. And I want to just get your thoughts on that. Yeah, yeah. So she wrote, There's a zombie idea that just won't die and I'm going to kill it with math. If we put all crop subsidies into fruit and vegetables, so all the subsidies, you know, a lot of people have talked about subsidies. You talked about subsidies in your book.

Well, more like insurance, yeah, but, right?

If we put all our crop subsidies into fruit and vegetable subsidies, it would not change the way Americans eat one iota. and then she says, okay, maybe one iota, but not two. Here's why and here's the math. So she goes into a whole bunch of things, but I'm just going to kind of pull from a few. The subsidies we have now mostly go to corn and soy. We'll include both insurance premium subsidies and what used to be called direct payments, which are now called ARC PLC. The amount varies by year, but it's reasonable to say that 11 billion for insurance and 5 billion for this ARC PLC program, right?

Yeah.

Which is a total of 16 billion and she says total amount to redistribute to fruit and vegetables. Let's distribute that 16 billion over the acres that grow fruit and vegetables. Call that specialty crops by the USDA. That's about 15 million acres. For the sake of having a nice down round number, let's say that means that we have $1,000 an acre for all fruit and vegetable. Jumping to kind of the conclusion of this, because it's kind of a tweet storm, we'll link to it in the show notes so people can see it. She goes through a few different of these specialty crops and she says example one, an acre of broccoli produces about 16,000 pounds. The subsidy would make broccoli six cents a pound cheaper. So the moral of the story that she's getting to is that we keep on talking about subsidies being a big problem, but if we took that money and we put into fruit and vegetables and because fruit and vegetables and specialty crops, as they're considered by the FDA, are so expensive to grow, It wouldn't make them that much cheaper. And then she concludes with, the reality is that people just don't like vegetables and they don't eat a lot of fruits and vegetables. So that's why these other foods end up becoming more eaten. And what are your thoughts on that?

Oh, my God. Well, that last sentence is kind of, it's a problem. It's a big problem.

I think I'm sort of paraphrasing that. She didn't write that exactly, but her, you know, People can look up the thing exactly, but she essentially says vegetables are way more expensive to grow. Growing a calorie of broccoli costs 50 times more than growing a calorie of corn. People, PS, people don't eat veg because they don't like them, not because they're expensive. What are your thoughts on this idea? I've heard a few people say this, by the way, and so I just.

Want to stress test that. I think, I think, Sam, what do kids in Japan eat? Seaweed, raw fish, what do they like? pickled vegetables, they eat what they're used to eating. If we raise a generation of kids that are addicted to highly processed food, that are hyper palatable, that hijack their brains, that hijack their hormones, that hijack their microbiome, that make them eat this food through really a kind of various nefarious, almost like the body snatchers are driving our biology. It's not about people not liking vegetables. It's about People not understanding that their biology has been hijacked and if given the chance to eat delicious vegetables and getting their biology reset, they would like them. I strongly believe that and I've seen this over and over again in my patients and around the world where populations and little kids eat tons of vegetables. So it's not that human beings by nature don't like vegetables. It's because Americans have been completely corrupted by the food industry and have had their taste buds and their biology hijacked.

So I think I'm just going to say that at the start.

Yeah. I don't disagree with you, by the way.

Yeah.

And then we can get into to the fact of how agriculture is financed, what the challenges are with agriculture, what we're doing. And it's not just about crop insurance. It's not just about subsidies. It's not just about funding more fruit and vegetable growing. It's about reforming the entire agricultural system to create a regenerative system that produces better quality, more nutrient-dense food that's lower cost, that makes farmers more money, that restores biodiversity, restores the water tables, and prevents the droughts and floods that we have that are destroying our agricultural system that stops the, you know, pollution of, of our waterways and our, and our, our, our, our environment by pesticides and glyphosate that prevents the dumping of nitrogen fertilizers on the soil that goes into waterways and kills, you know, hundreds of thousands of tons of fish and, you know, just on and on and on. I could literally go on and on. So I think that it's about fixing the agriculture system as a whole to produce more high quality food. And that's possible. And I think it can happen at scale. And I think it's about shifting our kind of government systems policies to a more regenerative system, to fund farmers, to do this. And this is what, you know, with Food Fix we worked on in Washington as part of the IRA bill. And maybe there is many issues with that bill. But one of the things we did was we got $20 billion for reform in agricultural policies and regenerative agriculture. and funding farmers' education, funding them converting to regenerative farms, and a lot of things that people don't even know about. So things are moving in the right direction, but it's tough to take away the things from farmers because they're stuck in a complete bind between the need to grow foods the way they've always grown them because they get bank loans to buy the seeds and the chemicals. get crop insurance from the government. And so they're caught in this tribe between the seed and chemical companies, the banks and the government, which is all supporting this system that keeps farmers locked producing the wrong food. Now, if they were given a chance and they were taught how and they were given an economic bridge, they would create an agricultural system that's much better than what we have now. And that this is being demonstrated over and over is more profitable and more effective and produces better food. So I don't completely agree with her. I think it's not as simple as just ending crop insurance for corn and soy, although that is problematic, it's about shifting the whole system.

I guess what she was saying is that she hears a lot of people making that argument and what you're saying to her is that that may not be wrong, the math may be right in what she's breaking down, but what you're talking about is so much bigger than just that. You're talking about a whole shift in the ecosystem.

Yeah, exactly. It's a whole reform of agriculture. and that may take a long time to happen, but it's got to happen. And I think, you know, we don't, you know, have the support of institutions and, you know, group purchasing from, you know, industry, from government, from schools that produces an incentive to actually make more good food and cheaper. And there are ways to do it at scale. And the question is, how do you make stuff cheaper? I think you can, and I mean, it requires different methods of farming and different practices, but it's totally doable.

All right, we're going to pivot to obesity here for a second.

My favorite topic.

There was a viral 60 Minutes clip with White House advisor, Dr. Fatima Cody from Stanford University. The government is named her one of the members of the 2025 Dietary Guidelines for Americans Advisory Committee. and she was on 60 Minutes basically saying the number one risk factor for obesity is genetics.

Yeah.

Let's get your hot take on the situation and her comments.

Well, if that were true, then our species has undergone a major genetic series of mutations since I was born. Because when I was born, 5% of Americans were obese. Now it's 42%. So an eightfold increase, an over 800% increase in obesity since I was born is not due to some massive genetic mutation. It's just not. And if you look at all the genes, and this is a, there's something called the GWAS analysis, which is genome-wide association studies. So is any one particular gene the obesity gene?

No.

So they go, well, is there a family of genes that all increase your risk? and they looked at all the genes that might potentially impact your hunger, weight, metabolism, obesity risk, and they determined that if literally you fixed all these genes, that the maximum weight loss would be 22 pounds in a person, which is nothing when you think of the fact that the average American is obese and overweight and is metabolically unhealthy. that would not fix the obesity problem. It would not get people to lose 50, 60, 100 pounds, which many Americans need to do. So this is not a genetic problem. I even heard this around kids, like, wait a minute, we've seen a quadrupling of obesity rates in kids since the 60s. Is this genetic? So all of a sudden we need drugs and surgery according to the American Academy of Pediatrics to fix the obesity problem in children without addressing at all the food environment, the way we process food, the way it affects our biology, it just makes me a little crazy when I hear that. And I think that's very frightening. Now, do genes play a role? Absolutely. Are people, some people more predisposed to obesity? Absolutely. Like the Native Americans or the African Americans or Latinos because of their genetics. But that doesn't mean that they're destined to be obese. If you look, for example, at the Pima Indians, which I've written about for years in my books, In America, they're the fattest population in the country. They're second in the world only to the Samoans who put basically for breakfast they have ramen noodles with MSG powder, which by the way makes you eat a lot more. It's how they induce obesity in animals. Let's give them MSG and sugar. So, they put sugar and MSG powder and ramen noodles. That's their breakfast. So, that's why they have like 80% rates of diabetes. In the Pima Indians is the same thing. 80% are diabetic by the time they're 30. Their life expectancy is 45. It's like, you know, living in a developing country here in the US. They're cousins in Mexico, same genetics. The only difference is an artificial border called the US-Mexico border. But genetically they're the same, the same population. They're thin and they're healthy and they're fit and they eat their traditional diets that they've eaten for thousands of years. When they start to adapt their Western diet, they also get obese. So genetically they're more predisposed, but that doesn't mean that it's a genetic problem.

So the question I have for you is this, as somebody who's genuinely trying to make change from the inside as well as the outside, right? The advocacy, the podcast, having on different people with different opinions and writing books and other stuff. When you hear that, you know, our current president has made somebody who has this belief Now, I don't know if she still has this belief. I looked up recent news articles. I haven't seen any backtracking on it.

I don't know what she actually said.

I'm just saying if that was the sound bite.

That's what she said.

That's literally what she said. We can play it. If you diet, you lose weight, right?

For many of us, we can go on a diet, something like the Biggest Loser, right? You go and you restrict people, you make them work out for 10 hours a day, and then you feed them 500 calories. For most people, they work acutely lose weight. But 96% of those participants in the Biggest Loser regained their weight because their brain worked well. It was supposed to bring them back to store what they needed or what the brain thinks it needs. So willpower throw that out the window?

So the question is, as somebody who's trying to make change from the inside as well as the outside, when you hear that our president has appointed somebody who has that belief, to the Dietary Committee? Does it make you more disheartened? Does it change your viewpoint about sort of working in collaboration with government to try to fix the food system? How does it make you feel?

I mean, listen, you know, the whole subject of obesity is fraught. I mean, there are people who now believe that we shouldn't be treating obesity, that it's okay that you're healthy at any size, that it's racist to talk about obesity. There's all sorts of memes going out there across the culture, but the truth is it Nobody wakes up and goes, geez, I want to be overweight. I'm going to see if I can gain weight. I mean, maybe if you're really skinny and anorexic or something, you've got cancer, you may want to gain weight. But for most of us, like gaining weight is not something we aspire to, that we want to do or that is good for us. And then I think the data really support clearly that obesity is a huge risk factor for all age related diseases and chronic illness. The question is, why are we overweight? Why are we obese? And, and, and that's a complicated question. It has to do with genetics. It has to do with the toxic food environment. It has to do with our epigenome and how our genes were influenced by what our mother ate in utero. It has to do with obesogens in the environment that are environmental toxins that affect our metabolism like bisphenol A. It's on your credit card receipts that causes insulin resistance. It has to do with cultural patterns. It has to do with your social network. I mean, if you look at the Christakis, for example, work at out of Harvard, he showed that you're 171% more likely to be overweight if your friends are overweight than if your family is overweight. You're about 40% more likely to be overweight. So maybe is it a social problem or a genetic problem? It's complex. It's all of the above. And I think people who try to reduce it to one thing are kind of are missing the full story and that it's a complex disorder. But for the most part, it really wasn't a problem until the last 40 or 50 years. And when you look back, for example, in the 50s, you see now African Americans are among the worst affected. They were the worst affected by COVID because of their chronic illnesses. In the 60s, they were far healthier than whites. And then they adopted and were targeted by the food industry and had become enormously overweight. 80% of African American women are overweight. I mean, it's just, it's a big problem. And I think It's because of the toxic food environment and all the things that are influencing our choices and our behavior and the flood of marketing, the flood of easy access, the supersizing of everything, the policies of agriculture in the 70s under Nixon who wanted to make milk and meat prices cheap. Basically, his Secretary of Agriculture, Earl Butz, and that's his real name, basically said, Go big or go home, which led to the massive scaling up of industrial agriculture, the huge productions of corn and soy as staples, the commodity commodification of our food system and the blood of processed foods. So now 60% of adult and 67% of kids diet is ultra-processed food, which means food that comes from highly industrial ingredients that are pulverized beyond recognition and reassembled into all sizes, colors, shapes, and tastes of chemically extruded foods like substances that have nothing to do with their original form. I mean, eat tofu, great. You know, that's a processed food. Eat tempeh, that's fine. But, you know, weird kind of soybean extract derivatives or corn extract derivatives that are in your food? No, that's not really food. And that's really led to this real problem, I think. So, just going back to the question.

Because I feel like you kind of didn't fully answer it. So, I just want to make sure.

How do I feel about the president having someone appointed who believes that obesity is genetic to the US Dietary Guidelines Committee? I mean, I think to be fair, I have to look at her whole perspective and all of her views and all of the data she's published. And, you know, I think there are nuances and I'd probably wanna ask her a hundred questions. And I think, you know, the science of obesity is complex. So I think, I can't really make an opinion unless I have more information, to be honest, about her in particular. And I'll do the homework and look at it. But as a rule, a lot of the dietary guidelines have gotten better over the years, but they're still fraught. And for example, dairy is a great example how dairy is... Before we go.

To dairy, actually, you kind of mentioned something that I don't want to go on a tangent yet.

Yeah, yeah.

You mentioned about obesity and how it's being used. When you have certain beliefs, that impacts treatments. So, if you are making a statement that the number one cause of obesity is genetics, which then kind of went into her explanation being not to pick on her, but just using this as a statement because she's such a high profile figure and this kind of created this viral commentary is then she kind of said a little bit more of an, you know, being brought up in a household of obese parents, then you're likely to be obese. Well, it's probably the environment that you're being brought up in, socioeconomic condition, all the things that you were mentioning.

Right. Right.

Those play a role. And when you have somebody so high up, who says that there's this genetic thing is the number one thing, even for she added in at the end of the clip, even for people who eat well and exercise, now all of a sudden the interventions that you feel that are gonna make a difference, you're left primarily with pharmaceutical. And that's kind of the big conversation right now, right?

Yeah.

So talk to us a little bit about what's going on right now with how they're thinking about treating especially kids with a lot of these super aggressive drugs, which a lot of people don't realize that even if they worked perfectly and didn't have any kind of side effects and you have to be on them for the rest of your life, they literally have the potential to bankrupt us.

Yeah, I mean, look, the American Academy of Pediatrics is trying to address the staggering rates of obesity and overweight in kids. 40% of kids are overweight. One in two teenage boys has pre-diabetes or type 2 diabetes, which I never saw when I was in medical school 35 years ago. Just didn't exist. And now they're trying to grapple with how do we manage this burgeoning epidemic of obesity and risk in kids? And it's serious because if your kid's overweight and obese, their life expectancy is 13 years less, their economic earning capacity is lower, their risk of disease is higher, they have higher risk of mental illness and depression. I mean, it's really bad news. So the idea that we should talk about it and address it is a good one. The question is, what are we saying? And this is where I thought the, the comments from the guidelines from the American Academy of Pediatrics were concerning because they were saying we need to aggressively screen for obesity. Great. We need to aggressively treat it. Great. We need to use drugs and bariatric surgery. Not so great. Okay, so just do the math. If we looked Rogov or Ozempic, which is being used off-label for obesity, it's about $1,700 a month for Rogov, you know, depending on where you buy it, 1,300, 1,700. You do the math, 75% of Americans are overweight. If we prescribed it, everybody, and being overweight is now considered, you know, a problem and a disease. That's $425 billion a month, $5.1 trillion a year. That's more than our entire national expenditures on healthcare, which is $4.1 trillion. So it's just a ludicrous idea that we should be approaching it from a pharmaceutical perspective or a bariatric surgery perspective. I was talking to my daughter on my way over here, and she's in medical school, and she was talking about a case of a guy that came in and presented at their medical school, which was a bariatric surgery patient who ended up having severe vomiting and nutritional deficiencies and had thiamine deficiency and ended up with something called Wernicke's encephalopathy, which is a severe neurological with permanent consequences. And he's suing the hospital. I mean, like having bariatric surgery is not a cakewalk, you know, and these drugs may increase the risk of cancer and other things. So the question is what's causing it? And so I was so perplexed when I heard, you know, the New York Times had a podcast, a daily, where they had Gina Claudio on who's, you know, a New York Times reporter in health and she's very well educated. And she said something just didn't make any sense to me. She says, well, we've seen, you know, obesity rates grow up from like you know, 5% to now like 20% in kids and just to, you know, 40, 50 years. But we know that obesity is genetic. And I'm like, how do you make those two statements within 15 minutes of each other and make any sense at all? Because it's not, it can't be, right? It just can't be. And now what can be true is epigenetics. So epigenetics are influenced by what we do in our environment and toxins and everything, and that can create genetic programming that will influence your metabolism and your weight, for sure. But we know we can reverse epigenetic programming. That's what my book Young Forever is about. It's about how do we reverse the epigenetic programming that makes us age fast and how do we reverse that? So we can do that. But I think that the notion that we should be treating obesity with pharma and bariatric surgery as a nation as the solution. It's one solution for some people who might benefit. Okay. But I, you know, I, I've had patients who've lost, you know, 200 pounds without any drugs or surgery and kept it off. And about other patients have had bariatric surgery and lost a bunch of weight initially and then gained back 200 pounds because they just decided they could eat M& Ms all day long without stopping, and they would get enough food. to, because they would satisfy their Cravings, but they, they wouldn't be too full because they only eat one M&M at a time. So, I mean, do you think this was a doctor, by the way? Yeah.

Do you think the thinking is, because I always try to put myself in different people's shoes. Right. Do you think the thinking is, okay, great, Mark, that's awesome for that patient who had the resources to be able to see you, or it's awesome for that person who had the resources to be able to shop. and get groceries and they don't live in a food desert, we need to figure out, you know, is the thinking, I'm not saying it's right, right? But is the thinking that, oh yeah, sure, if you have the resources, you can do it and the education, or you're not working three jobs, so those people don't, and we don't want to hurt people's feelings by telling them to do something that they can't do. So instead we have to look at the pharmaceutical option. Do you think it's that, or do you think there's a little bit of the component of like, hey, you know, everybody's already on pharmaceuticals for all these other things. That's the only thing that's going to move the needle forward. Sure, it's not affordable long term, but we've made it this far. That's somebody else's problem to deal with. Like, what do you think the thinking is?

I mean, first of all, I just want to say that, that people need to understand that if you're overweight, it's not your fault. And to blame the person who's overweight for lack of willpower, or, you know, having poor moral character or being a glutton just ignores the biology and the effect of the foods we're eating on our health and our brains and our hormones, our gut, and, and all that influences this obesity epidemic. So we, we can't ignore that and we can't blame the person who's struggling. With that said, we, we have to kind of take a hard look at our choices and. If we don't honestly look at what we're doing as a nation, we're in trouble both economically, both from a global competitiveness standpoint. And I think the basic meme out there is that it's elitists to talk about eating healthy, it's elitist and poor people can't do it, and people who don't have means can't do it, and it's just people know what to do, but they don't do it because they just don't have the ability or the money. I think that's a fallacy. And I honestly, I fully admit that I bought into that many years ago. And then I was part of this movie fed up that we talked about earlier. And I shared this story before, but it's worth repeating because I met this family in South Carolina and they lived in one of the worst food deserts in America. And there's something called the retail food environment index, which is how many fast food restaurants there are to grocery stores and stuff. And it was like one of the worst in the country. And this family lived on food stamps and disability. The father was 42 on dialysis for kidney failure from diabetes, from eating junk food. The mother was hundreds of pound, couple hundreds of pounds overweight. I mean, huge. The son was 16 years old, 50 body fat should be 10 to 20 and almost diabetic at 16. and they lived in a trailer, a family of five for a thousand dollars of food stamps and disability payments. And I, I basically sat with them and I'm like, why do you want to be part of this? Why do you want to lose weight? They start crying because their father could not get a new kidney until he lost 45 pounds. They wouldn't do the surgery and they couldn't figure out how to do it. And I said, okay, well, rather than give me, me giving you a lecture on what to eat or tell you to eat vegetables, I said, let's go. chopping, let's buy some food, let's cook a meal together. And I used a guide called Good Food on a Tight Budget, which is how to eat well for you, well for the planet, and well for your wallet. And we made turkey chili from scratch. We made roasted sweet potatoes. We made salad, not from iceberg lettuce. We made olive oil and vinegar dressing. We made some stir-fried asparagus, simple food. And when I went to their trailer, I went in there, cupboards in their freezer and their fridge. And I was like, gosh, this is just, everything is bad in here and process and package. And so I started taking everything out, and then we started going through it. They had no idea it was bad for them. They were buying all the food industry claims. This is a little whole grain. This is zero trans fat. I mean, Cool Whip, zero trans fat, even though the two main ingredients are high fructose corn syrup and hydrogenated soybean oil. And the reason they get away with it is because it's mostly air. and it's less than half a gram per serving. And so you can kind of, you know, get away with it. According to the FDA loophole that was given to the food industry, so they wouldn't have to get all the trans fat out of the food. So it's just, it's just more corruption. And so they were, like, shocked. And they were really uneducated about the, what was going on, what they were eating, what they should eat, and what they shouldn't eat. Their salad dressing was just full of high fructose corn syrup and refined oils and all kinds of thickeners and gums and things that really damage your and so look, look, let's just cook a meal. And they ate it. And this one kid, like, quote, hated vegetables. And he made the chili. He wanted to know if there were any vegetables in there because he didn't want to eat it. And, and we kind of joked, and it's like, he's all his onions, like, but they, but they're kind of like candy because they get sweet when you cook them. He's like, all right, so the kid ate it. They loved it. The father loved it. They, they ate all the food, and they devoured it. And I was like, okay, well, I mean, they didn't have cutting boards, they didn't have knives. I didn't know what was gonna happen when I left. I'm like, okay, well, maybe this won't make a difference, but let's try. So I said, here's my cookbook. Here's a guide on how to eat well for less. You know, you can buy inexpensive vegetables, inexpensive cuts of meat, grains and beans. You can do this. And I left and I bought him a cutting board and knives because they didn't have a cutting board or knives. We cut the sweet potatoes with a butter knife, which was not easy. Raw sweet potatoes and a butter knife. and the first week, the wife texted me back, the mother says, like, we lost 18 pounds as a family first week. I'm like, wow, great. And they went on, the mother lost over 100 pounds, the father lost 45, was able to get a new kidney, the son lost 50, and then had to go get a job and worked at Bojangles, gained it all back and more, but then eventually, you know, reached out to me and I coached him a little bit. He lost 136 pounds. Nobody in his family ever went to college. He went to college and he actually reached out to me and asked for a letter of recommendation to medical school. And here was a kid was like terrified when I showed him his body composition because he says, I'm 50% fat. Am I going to be 100% fat if I keep eating this way? I'm like, well, no, you're going to have bones and some muscles and stuff, but you can get up there. And it was just, it was a very enlightening experience for me because I was like, wait a minute. We're like one meal away from saving America. If, if we created millions of community health workers to go out in people's homes to show them what to buy, to show them what was was good, what wasn't good, to teach them how to cook, to show them how to choose foods that are reasonably priced, that you don't have to break the bank to get, that we can really fix this. And I've seen this all across the country. I've seen it in Cleveland, in underserved areas where we worked. I've seen it in many, many places. So I think there's an underlying belief that this is just an elitist idea, that people should eat healthy and everybody should shop at Whole Foods. That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying we need to, as a nation, create a national campaign to deal with this and to educate people about what to do and to help them and guide them and teach them. But sometimes it's not telling them what to do, it's showing them what to do. You know, I remember I was working with a friend who worked up in East Harlem and they were working on this chronic disease program to try to help patients not end up in the emergency room all the time and not end up on the street and they told me the story about this one guy who kept coming back and back with heart failure every time to the hospital, and they told him what to eat, and they told him exactly what to buy, and they told him everything, and this guy didn't know what to do, so they sent someone to his house, and they were like, what are you doing? And they showed him his cupboard, and it was just full of junk, and he's like, this is well I know how to make, and I don't know what else to do. So they took him shopping, and they showed him how to cook, and they totally transformed him, and literally saved hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars in hospital bills for this just simple home visit that cost close to nothing.

It's an inspiring story and it really shows, number one, early in the podcast you painted out a lot of the problem. If we don't do something, we're just headed off the cliff.

Yeah.

Right? In fact, we're more likely going to have a major divide in society. You have a very small percentage of people that are just very healthy with all the new technologies, advancements, access, etc. and the vast majority, probably 80% or more, that are just extremely unhealthy. And we're already seeing a little preview of that, and we don't want more of that. We need to unwind that. But then also, what does it look to have a true sort of almost like boots on the ground, major sort of like industrial undertaking of having people I don't mean industrial in the industrial sense. I mean a large undertaking of truly what it would look like to invest in our health and get people who are suffering the most educated on at least the basics that we know that works.

Yes, I think it's true. I mean, you take SNAP, which is food stamps for example. There's provisions for SNAP education, for nutrition education, but it's minuscule. When you think of the farm bill, it's a trillion plus dollar bill. one of the biggest government programs that exists. Three quarters of it is food stamps, and three quarters of food stamps is junk food, and 10% is soda. So we all know that's bad for people, but nobody wants to create restrictive guidelines around what you can and can't buy. They think that's regressive, they think it victimizes the poor, and there's a whole bunch of reasons for it. But they could easily create SNAP education. which guides people on how to use their food stamp benefits and get the most for their dollars and choose stuff that's healthier for them and their families and not be hungry. But we don't invest in that.

Mark, anything else you want to get into right now?

Yeah, I just think that, you know, we kind of have to come together as a nation to address some of our biggest problems. And the biggest thing that, you know, breaks my heart is just the division. and divisiveness and oppositional behavior and thinking among all different segments of society, whether it's politics or nutrition or religion. It's like we got to get over ourselves because we're on a sinking ship and I think it's time for us to come together to really work on things together. We've done this before, whether it was World War II as a nation where we came together, whether it was 9/11 when we came together, whatever these moments are. American history where our better angels take over, I think it's time for that.

I would add maybe one other layer that I'd love to get your opinion on. I think that polarization and divisiveness is not so much the issue because we want actually smart people who disagree with us to fight for their version of what's right.

The debate is great.

It's really the kindness that we're looking for and the compassion. And I think that long format podcast is a really great opportunity and independent media is a really good opportunity to do that. But we want people to have different opinions. We want people to have different viewpoints because we've changed our mind on things. You've changed your mind on things.

Totally.

Because of people who have had different viewpoints. The question is can you do it in a way that is kind? And then there's another layer which just goes back to some of the things we talked about before. Some people again would say that you calling Big Soda corrupt is that being, is that not understanding all the components and things. So I think we're always trying to find a balance that's there. And I'm not saying don't call them corrupt, right? What I'm saying is that, you know, we're in a little bit of the sort of free market version of this, right? People speak up and if you're lucky enough to speak up where you catch a sort of viral moment in society on something that needs attention, more people start focusing and then your hope is that the next generation starts working on better and better versions of a problem instead of trying to keep the system intact that was there previously.

Yeah, no, it's true. Like Buckminster Fuller said this well, he said, you know, you don't have to sort of fight the system, you just have to create a new one that makes the old one obsolete or some variation of that. Some version of that.

Yeah. Awesome. Well, Mark, it was a pleasure to have you out. Young Forever, the book is out. It's already sold a ton of ton of copies. I'm super excited for you, super excited for the entire team working on it. People can get it on the web. Everywhere. Amazing. Pick it up. there's a bunch of pre-order bonuses and stuff and they can follow you at Dr. Mark Hyman MD.

Thank you.

Or Mark Hyman MD.

Well, Dr. Mark Hyman.

Dr. Mark Hyman. Mark, thanks for coming on.

You're my boss. You should know. If you like this conversation, I know you'll love my new book, Young Forever. If you pre-order this book now, you'll get access to my discount bundle with deals from all my favorite health and wellness brands. Visit youngforeverbook.com to order my book and get access to these deals. I hope you're loving this podcast. It's one of my favorite things to do and introducing you all the experts that I know and I love and that I've learned so much from. And I want to tell you about something else I'm doing, which is called Mark's Picks. It's my weekly newsletter. And in it, I share my favorite stuff from foods to supplements to gadgets to tools to enhance your health. It's all the cool stuff that I use and that my team uses to optimize and enhance our health. And I'd love you to sign up for the weekly newsletter. I'll only send it to you once a week on Fridays. Nothing else, I promise. And all you have to do is go to drhyman.com/picks to sign up. That's drhyman.com/picks, P-I-C-K-S, and sign up for the newsletter and I'll share with you my favorite stuff that I use to enhance my health and get healthier and better and live younger longer.

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