How The Food And Pharma Industry Profit Off Our Ill-Health

Coming up on this episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy.

The American Diabetes Association has accepted millions of dollars from Coca-Cola, which is diabetes water.

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Hi, this is Lauren Fein, one of the producers of the Doctors Pharmacy podcast. We live in a world that claims to be based on science, goodwill, and policies intended to help people. But in reality, these things are often heavily influenced and manipulated by industry, particularly big food, big pharma, and big agriculture, which have corrupted many institutions, policy makers, professional associations, research institutions, and medical and it has unfortunately led to mass confusion and illness in the public. In today's episode, we feature three conversations from the Doctor's Pharmacy about why our food system is often at odds with the best interests of people and their health. Dr. Hyman speaks with Cali Mems about how studies are funded to achieve certain goals instead of sharing objective information. With Robbie Sansom and Taylor Collins about the manipulation of food pricing. And with Drew Prott about the influence of big industry and how food companies program taste buds For Addiction. Let's dive in.

When you see a study from your favorite think tank or you see a study on the news from a leading university, I am telling you most likely that study was funded by unimpressive people sitting in an office in Washington, D.C. These PR offices, there were lists and there were strategies to deploy billions of dollars of research funding to achieve goals. With the case of food, that goes to foundational research studies, like a study from Harvard that you've mentioned numerous times, that was the foundation of the food pyramid. That study said that sugar does not cause obesity and we should shift to a higher carb diet. That led to the food pyramid. That's still happening today. There are still studies coming out of universities, elite universities, today saying sugar It's unclear whether it causes obesity. So it's for specific outcomes like that. Also, a strategy I just have to say of the food companies is just to deploy money to nutrition studies. The fact that there are so many studies actually is the point. We're all confused about nutrition right now. We have a new news article and new, you know, on the nightly news every night about a new nutrition study saying a different thing. My recommendation is that we cut all funding for nutrition studies and give everyone some of your books with simple principles, the Blood Sugar Solution, which are funded.

By the National Institute of Nutrition that actually is properly funded and spends billions of dollars on doing good nutrition research that's independent.

And I also think there's just simple principles. It's just let's limit sugar for kids, but this obfuscates that debate. So it's a really conscious strategy. You talked about the kind of conscious weaponization of this. This is not complicated. If there's a bunch of studies from Harvard, you know, and other top universities that say different or even differing things, that confuses the debate.

It does.

Another thing we did.

I'm gonna, I wanted you to go on in a minute, but I wanna pause to highlight an example of what you're talking about, because this is, you know, from the Annals of Internal Medicine, one of the premier medical journals out there. The title of the article was called the Scientific Basis guideline recommendations on sugar intake, a systematic review. So it seems like an objective review of the science on sugar. And this is what the conclusion of this paper was from experts. Guidelines on dietary sugar do not meet the criteria for trustworthy recommendations and are based on low quality evidence. Public health officials when promulgating these recommendations and their public audience when considering dietary behavior should be aware of these limitations. In other words, there's no evidence that sugar is harmful and we should be not promoting this through policy and consumers should not change their behavior because of any public perception that sugar is bad for you because according to the data, it's not. This study was funded by the International Life Sciences Institute, which is funded by Coca-Cola, General Mills, Hershey's, Kellogg, Kraft, McDonald's, Monsanto, Nestle, PepsiCo, Procter & Gamble, and the lead author of the study is on the board of one of the largest makers of high fructose corn syrup. So what do we do? Like when this is in a, like this is like the New England Journal equivalent of a paper that kind of revealed the conflicts of interest in the conflict of interest section, but nobody reads that and they hear the headlines that sugar isn't a problem.

I can tell you that that might not be on the radar of most people. That document is, I think, one of the most violent documents in America. What we do is we fund those studies and that's immediately taken to politicians. Now, let's not forget, in 78% of US states, the largest employer is either a healthcare outfit or a food seller, Walmart, which is the largest. So, there's huge pressure on these lawmakers. And when they have a study like that from the New England Journal of Medicine, that gives them plausible deniability. There is blood on that study. What do we do? Well, thinking about this, humans are the only animal that get chronically obese, that have chronic diabetes. We have an innate ability. to know ourselves what we should be eating. You know, a baby born today isn't lunging for processed food. They're lunging for natural food. We have been addicted and corrupted by these studies. So what we need to do is step one, and we can talk about solutions in a bit, but step one is really embrace, really embrace this, really embrace that the elite levers of American medicine are being weaponized, additionally, the medical groups. You talked about this in Food Fix, but I saw this in 2011, 2012. Again, in public relations offices, there's lists of professors. I think this is very important. The way you can get into policy, and the way you can get into federal guidelines, and the way you can get into drug approval, and the way you get into policy is you can pay directly to medical organizations and professors. Let me take that one by one. Let me start with professors. So, the NIH research and academic professors are able to take both personal payments and of course their currency is research funding. As you mentioned, 11 times more research funding comes from food companies than the NIH. So, you're literally able to donate personal payments and fund the research for these academics. And then when we form policy, for instance, the nutritional guidelines, those aren't government bureaucrats. They appoint outside experts. So, recently in 2020, the nutritional guide, this is the dietary guidelines for Americans. This is the foundational document that's guiding nutrition for our kids. 95% had a conflict of interest. So you're able, and this is very known, this is very strategic. You are able to pay these folks. And I just ask, and this is just common sense for everyone, and it's very simple. Be empowered to just like use common sense here. If somebody's being paid millions of dollars for their research, personal payments, Is that impacting their psychology? Even if the study says there's no.

This doesn't impact their research.

They're not changing their behavior. The studies all say that. But these companies, I can tell you from experience, the PR consultants in Washington, D.C. funneling billions of dollars are not assuming there's arm's length. Companies don't pay billions of dollars, which is what these processed food companies are paying for research, out of a philanthropic goodwill to advance unbiased research. They want something, okay? It'd be against their fiduciary duty to spend that money.

Yeah. Well, it's true. I mean, there was a follow up paper in Public Health Nutrition in 2018 where they looked at 133 studies from 2001 to 2013, and they found that 82% of independently funded studies showed harm from sugar-sweetened beverages, but 93% of industry-funded studies showed no harm.

Yeah, and I think it's tough taking it to a listener where I used to be. I went to Harvard and tried to rise up the elite ranks like Casey, and felt very proud of that and felt very trusting of these elite institutions telling us what to think. I think it's very understandable for Americans to defer to the New England Journal of Medicine and Harvard studies and government studies, right? I just think, and I think people are waking up post-COVID, but these are nothing better than PR documents. And relatedly- so you're saying it's not.

Science, it's public relations?

Oh, these studies, It was dispiriting looking back on this, and as you outlined in Food Fix, these studies are being directed by unimpressive PR consultants in Washington, DC. Now, I think there are a lot of very dedicated researchers, and part, you alluded to this at the beginning, part of the, I think, beauty in a way of the system is that most people at most levels are good people doing good work. They're conducting nutrition research. Even the Koch executives, they're over trying to get cheap calories into folks' hands. Everyone can go to sleep at night. But the end result is evil. The end result is that we're getting sicker, fatter, more depressed, more infertile because of food. And it's very, very simple. Another thing just related to the kind of buying off the professors who then go on the FDA panels who go on the nutrition guidelines is the medical groups. Now, I saw this firsthand and this isn't complicated, but these medical groups, the American Diabetes Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, there's obesity groups on down for every specialty. they are able to accept and are actually chiefly funded through outside funding.

Totally.

And you have, back when I was working for Coke, a direct donation strategy from Coke and other processed food companies to institutions like the American Diabetes Association. Imagine that. The American Diabetes Association has accepted millions of dollars from Coca-Cola, which is diabetes water. The American Diabetes Association had a Coke logo on their website. They said small cans of Coke might be a good option. To this day, they say Diet Coke, which is microbiome disrupting, might be okay or is really recommended. What do they get? Well, as Dr. Lustig pointed out, and this is just absolutely shocking to me, until 2018, the American Diabetes Association said that as long as you're taking your drugs as a type 2 diabetic, as long as you're taking your insulin and other drugs, you can eat the diet you want.

Yeah, which is insane. Just to use more insulin but eat more cake, right? I mean, it's true, these professional societies are definitely co-opted. There was a paper published by John Ioannidis from Stanford that was in circulation basically saying that professional societies should abstain from authorship of guidelines and disease definition statements. And why? Because the American Heart Association, received $182 million in industry funding and the European Society of Cardiology got 77% of its funding from industry. Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics gets 40% of its funding from the food industry, which is insane. So, this is why you think you're looking up to trusted organizations like the American Heart Association, American Diabetes Association, American Academy of Pediatrics, which has recently recommended surgery and drugs to treat obesity in kids, which we're going to get to. It really is kind of driving so much confusion because you think, oh, well, these are independent groups. These are looking out for our welfare. These are not government groups. These are not industry groups. But essentially they are. And you mentioned the Dietary Guidelines. It's not just that the members have conflicts of interest. Under President George W. Bush, the guidelines were changed from the recommendations from the scientists being used as policy to shifting the final choice of what goes in the guidelines to government bureaucrats. And not only bureaucrats, but government industry appointed kind of people who are basically in the revolving door from working with government and industry. So that's really pretty frightening. And I think that we're unfortunately seeing amazing amounts of influence on our dietary guidelines. In fact, under President Trump, there was a woman who was a policy advisor for the Dietary Guidelines who previously worked for the Corn Refiners Association and the Snack Food Association of America, who was kind of in charge of the dietary guidelines, which doesn't make any sense.

Well, the AG Secretary after AG Secretary is generally a food industry lobbyist. I'm on my personal campaign on Twitter that you should be secretary and be pulling this, we need people like you in there, but it's totally co-opted. And I don't fault that, I want to say, I don't fault, like you can fault them, the end result is evil. We're all, I mean, trillions of dollars of budget and crazy rates of chronic diseases we talked about, but you can kind of understand why the food companies in and of themselves want food cheaper and more addictive. where the devil's bargain comes in. And what I also saw is the healthcare industry stands silent in profits. Hey, everybody, it's Dr. Mark.

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Yeah, and I really support the efforts at Value-Based Care and agree those have been too slow. But the reality and was very clear to me working for healthcare interests and you still see this very much today and we can go into specific examples, but is that very simply put, every lever and I would say every lever of healthcare today predominantly makes money when they're intervening on sick people. The incentives of healthcare is for more people to be sicker for longer periods of time. And I don't think a person at a pharma company or medical school, like Dean, is strategizing and trying to have more people sick. But that is what it's paying their paycheck. And it is happening. And speaking on this mission I've been on, speaking to senior people in academia, in medicine, in insurance, they say they are very disheartened because this is absolutely unmistakably where the incentives are. And I think you see doctors talking to Casey, doctors have among, if not the highest rates of burnout, suicide and depression among any population, any profession. I believe Casey believes that's largely because these are some of the smartest people in the world, most mission driven people in the world who are realizing that the patients aren't getting better, that they're actually incentivized to put Band-Aids on and not actually cure the root cause. But this is unmistakably the situation. You know, when I was working on the food stamp issue, right, and Coke was working, you know, kind of unforgivably to have government subsidies continue to go to diabetes water. The American Academy of Pediatrics- Diabetes water.

That's-.

The American Diabetes Association- that's not.

Something we should put on the label. Diabetes water.

It is diabetes. I mean, it's a weapon of mass destruction for diabetes. And you would expect the American Diabetes Association to be in that debate. The American Academy of Pediatrics has 25% of kids are getting pre-diabetes, nowhere to be found. But right now, right now when there's, as you mentioned, a drug that's about to get approval for teens and adults for obesity, now that so many people are obese, oh, they're speaking up. And you know what's happening, right? And just taking the case of pharma, you know, let's look at chronic conditions. Let's look at kids. And I have a son going to this, you know, as a one-year-old and it's really inspiring me. But looking what the buzz saw that kids are going into, I think it's like over 20% of College students are on Adderall, a methamphetamine created by Nazi Germany to make soldiers more effective and actually discontinued because everyone had psychosis. It's the same drug. It's actually more powerful. Adderall, 20% plus of college students are on that. We spend $250 billion on cancer treatments. Cancer rates are going up. We spend a ton on metformin, diabetes is going up. We spend a ton, the most prescribed drug in the country, SSRIs, depression, suicide. you can go down the list, statins, heart disease going up now.

I mean, one in three dollars in Medicare is spent on diabetes of the trillion plus dollar budget.

So it's real. And what's happening is it's waiting. This is just how the incentives work. You, the medical system waits for someone to get diabetes. They do not speak out about food stamp funding. They don't speak out about grain subsidies. You know, in corn subsidies, they go to Fruit Coast. They don't speak out that there's not a sugar limit in school lunch programs that are funded by federal and state dollars. They're not out on that. They wait for somewhere to get diabetes and then, as you've pointed out, over a trillion dollars is going to somehow to diabetes management. So, this playbook is playing out very well with this new Ozempic drug, which I think is something we can maybe tangibly dive into and explore the playbook and how that's used.

Yeah. So, it's really the case with sort of pretty much all of it. And, I think, you know, whether it's the media with commercials and advertising or whether it's sort of a celebrity that uses something and then it catches fire. You know, Ozempic, for those who are listening, don't know what that is. It's a peptide, it's a semaglutide. It's a something called the GLP-1 agonist. And essentially what it does is impact your hunger and make you feel full and eat less. It also improves, you know, insulin regulation so you can actually regulate your blood sugar a little better. So it helps with diabetes. And this is a diabetes drug, which can be helpful in some diabetic patients. But the cure for diabetes is not a drug, it's food. And this drug is now being promoted as sort of the next best thing for weight loss. And Wegovy, which is a same drug with a different name that's sort of FDA approved for weight loss. these drugs are enormously expensive. I mean, they're about $1700 a month. And if you look at, you know, the the 14, 15 million kids that are overweight in this country, American Academy of Pediatrics is recommending this drug as a treatment. You're talking and do the math. It's, you know, 15 million kids times $21,000 a year. That's 3.1 trillion dollars a year for a drug. that you have to stay on for life. And what if we just gave people food? I mean, think of that, $70 a month. And yet studies have shown that giving families $2,400 a year for food has saves $100 plus thousand dollars in healthcare costs per diabetic patient and has dramatic improvements in their biomarkers of diabetes. Why aren't we doing that?

Yeah, so some people listening might logically think that, oh, well, if we prescribe more and we produce more Ozempic, maybe prices will go down. That's not how it works in healthcare. So actually, because pharma spends three times more on lobbying than any other industry, five times more than the oil industry, there's a revolving door, as we know, between the FDA and pharma. The former FDA chair is now on the board of Pfizer. Actually, legally, Medicare and Medicaid are not able to negotiate drug prices. So there's not price controls for a drug like this. So you assume, right, that that trillion dollar, you know, multi-trillion dollar estimate sounds ridiculous. No, no, no. Healthcare is the largest and the fastest growing industry in the United States right now. I come from tech where usually innovation means lower prices, better outcomes. It's the opposite with healthcare. Again, I'm gonna repeat that. The largest. The biggest. And the fastest growing industry. I think we hear about the growth of healthcare and the GDP percentage, 20% now, it's gonna be 40% in 15 years, our eyes gloss over. We hear that so much. it is growing at an increasing rate. And there is an absolute full court press using the playbook. And I'm frankly impressed if it wasn't so tragic how well they're executing this playbook. Their goal is to get government funding for this drug, trillions of dollars, as you said, if you really do the math. And they're winning. And I actually think this is, you know, we hear about the corruption. I think driving into this, it's something every parent, every American, should actually be very concerned about. I think we're actually at a monumental moment right now where are we going to see obesity again, which is a root of metabolic dysfunction? Was it a symptom of metabolic dysfunction? Are we going to continue to see that as a whacK-A-Mole thing like diabetes, like heart disease, like all these things? Again, the more drugs for every chronic condition we prescribe, the worse things get because the problem is food making us metabolic dysfunctional, showing itself. 15% of kids have fatty liver disease right now. Obesity is just one branch.

I mean, there are kids now who are getting liver transplants as teenagers because of fatty liver from drinking soda.

15% of kids have fatty liver disease.

I remember being at an obesity, pediatric obesity conference in Atlanta and I was there with Bernice King, Martin Luther King's daughter who really deeply cares about this issue. And I met this guy there who was a Pediatric Gastroenterologist. And I'm like, I'm like, what are you doing here? And he's like, well, you know, fatty liver in kids is real. And we're seeing kids as young as five years old, 15 years old, who have severe fatty liver disease. Fatty liver disease sounds like whatever, who cares? Fatty liver. But it is a huge risk factor for cancer, for heart disease, for early death, diabetes, and it's affects over 90 million Americans.

The health of our land and our food system will be a reflection of our own health. And that's just a natural law. that we can't refute. And yet, when it comes to these regulations and systems that we put forth to promote synergy towards our food production, that resiliency, that conservation, that securing of our food production system is an afterthought. I think the other more that comes to mind in learning as we've gone through all of this is just understanding how the consumer is taken advantage of and manipulated. An average consumer sees cheap shelf prices and is told that that's all that matters. Everything else is hidden. And so you just see red meat and cellophane, and the only thing that's worth discussing and acknowledging is the price at the shelf. And the truth is, to obtain the outcome where we are today, there has had to be a significant compromise in value along the way. And even still, while we're losing that value, the truth is the food itself that has a cheap shelf price is among the most expensive. It probably certainly is the most expensive. And can you explain that?

I think that's a really important point because we think when we buy food in the grocery store, the price we're paying is the true cost of food. But the fact is that actually for every dollar we spend on food, there's another $2 in cost to society in terms of health care costs, loss of biodiversity, social justice issues, environmental damage. I mean, just the list goes on and on. And I think that's an underestimate. The Rockefeller Foundation put out a report called the True Cost of Food and where they basically said, we have over a trillion dollar food system, but it costs us three trillion dollars in damage. And they left out a lot of things that also should be included that actually weren't even included in that calculus. So it's actually probably maybe even three, four, five, six times the cost to society, to humans, to the planet that we pay at the checkout counter.

Oh, yeah, absolutely. No, I'm glad you asked because I love diving in on this one and I think it sort of helps round out the initial question as well. So I think you pointed to some of the deferred costs and I'll get into those, but let's just talk about on an absolute basis, the direct cost. If you look at Ruffles potato chips, they're twice as expensive per ounce.

I try not to look at them. No, I try not to look at them.

Taylor and I did a whole podcast on our own podcast called Where Hope Grows and I think Ruffles were $1.19 an ounce and our regenerative beef was 55 cents an ounce. So it was more than twice as expensive. We never, and we're told this meat is expensive, but we don't bat an offie.

Probably price per per nutrient, it actually was far cheaper for the meat.

Oh, yeah, we did a joke, right? Yeah, absolutely. One's making you sick, one's making you healthy. We even went and bought a meal.

At.

A fast food restaurant. We did it at a gas station and it was less expensive to make a meal for our families at home. And Taylor jokingly bought a bottle of Pepto-Bismol with his convenience store meal because he knew that. You definitely need that.

You need some pepcid or something.

I don't even want to glorify calling that food. I'm starting to call those things, those hyper-processed offerings food like substances because that's effectively what they are. But again, we don't bat an eye at the price people pay for $7 coffee or expensive bottle of wine or $9 bottle of water and bourbons and vinegars.

Or $7 caviar.

It's crazy, right? We just But again, at the cash register, candies, these things are way more expensive and yet we're told, we appreciate those as cheap, but we think of meat as expensive. So again, on an absolute basis, I'd say that this food is actually less expensive than people realize and it's valuable, but we're conditioned to think differently. I think the other thing too that we're told because it's cheap is that we can waste it. Something like 40% of all food is wasted, it's 60 million tons, $200 billion. I mean, it's just the things that we do because we've been conditioned to believe certain things are remarkable when you come at it with a different perspective. It really changes how you may act. But then, then, of course, there's what you talked about, too. Some of the, the, the other things you don't see in the shelf price beyond the absolute basis. And the reality is for cheap food, consumers pay three times. They pay for it in the form of taxes that go to these subsidy systems. They pay for it at the register, and of course they pay for those. deferred costs. And you mentioned the deferred costs. I mean, the US has to pay the government of Brazil over $150 million a year because we've been flooding international markets with crops sold at below the cost of production. I have some pretty crazy stats on the big four meat companies. I'll save those for later. But ultimately, even in, I was looking at the healthcare costs. You referenced those. I think you state 3.7 trillion $500 as the cost to treat chronic disease in the US. You do the math on that, that's $557 per household per week. So if you want to begin to appreciate the hidden cost or the true cost of feud, add $557 per week to your grocery bill and you can start to understand the expectation that we're putting on ourselves. And then there's the social issues. There's farmers, farmer suicide, there's all of these compromises that we're making to the system stability and to the security. We've seen the US government begin to feign acknowledging this by putting billions of dollars of incentives into opening up more processing plants and doing some of these things.

But.

At the end of the day, in this world travel and in learning about regenerative, I've come to this realization that our food system and our food culture have been captured and it's killing us. And meanwhile, regenerative is thriving all over the world. 40% of farms on the planet are still subsistence farms. We're told one thing that promotes the current system is the only option, but the truth in reality that I hope we'll discover on this podcast today tells an entirely different story.

Yeah, that's incredible, Robbie. Thanks for that summary. And I just sort of reiterate and then I want to jump to Taylor because I think I want to sort of dig into actually the reality of what it is to actually run and live on a regenerative ranch and farm. Because we talk about in the abstract a lot, but this is really kind of got me into the weeds and the dirt and the soil literally when I was there. but, you know, just in terms of getting back to the cost thing, just, just, let's just take the cost of corn, which is just such a foundational product in our food system. It's the, it's the foundational substance through which most processed food is made, most of the sugar we eat is from corn, and, and the cost is just astounding. So we, we, we have the damage to the soil that comes from the nitrogen fertilizers, the pesticides, the herbicides, the damage to humans that comes to that, the loss of biodiversity. We have the nitrogen runoff from the soil into the rivers and lakes and streams that goes into the ocean that kills, you know, hundreds of thousands of metric tons of fish every year and, and, and Seafood. That's for human consumption that creates dead zones all over the world that affect 400 million people. What is the cost of that? I don't even know. You could kind of quantify that. It's literally trillions of dollars. We then, we then make that food into processed food, which then we subsidize for the government. Basically 75% of food stamps or SNAP is processed food, 10% is soda, and most of that is coming from corn and other industrial products like soy. And then we pay for Medicare, Medicaid on the back end. So we're paying three or four times for that corn as taxpayers. And we think we're in this financial crisis now. We're talking about the debt ceiling, the government's going to shut down. A lot of this has to do with our food system and the chronic consequences that come from the food system.

This tweet is from Tamar Haspel. She's award-winning Washington Post columnist. This kind of caught storm and I saw a bunch of people retweeting it from the more traditional food industry point of view. I want to just get your thoughts on it. 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 yeah.

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 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 idea. I think-- Sam-- what do kids in Japan eat? Seaweed, raw fish, what do they eat? 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 hijack. So I think I'm just going to.

Say that at the start. Yeah.

I disagree with you, by the way. Yeah. And then we can get into 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, you know, 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 pollution of our waterways and our environment by pesticides and glyphosate that prevents the dumping of nitrogen fertilizers on the soil that goes into waterways and kills hundreds of thousands of tons of fish and just on and on and on. I could literally go on and 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 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 and agricultural policies and regenerative agriculture and funding farmers education and 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. They 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 we don't have the support of institutions and group purchasing from 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. 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, it's something that sort of happens below the surface and the face of corporate social responsibility, for example. It brings 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. we got to have quite a bit of time with her and she realized that non-violence that her father talked about also meant non-violence to the self and that 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 like Coca-Cola.

She said that outright. She told you explicitly or is 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 a very high level executive at Coca-Cola. 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, they really don't want soda taxes, right? So the soda industry does not want a soda taxes. And they, 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 the strategy.

Exactly, discriminating against African-Americans and Hispanics by targeting them with taxes and it's regressive and there's all these talking points in the state. All these talking points. They even funded an initiative in Philadelphia that was going to pass a soda tax. The Children's Hospital there, a Copa Shop, 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 did it. Was anybody making noise about it? Did you see it written about?

Yes, it's like it's not hard to find. I mean, you do a little research and you don't have to dig very very far to find these things. And in the big soda companies, 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. you know, so they, they have a view that if you're, you know, 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, and they use this through various tactics, for example, with electronic benefits, the trans, the, 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, right? 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 medical nutrition groups are co-opted. Academy of Nutrition, Dietetics, 40% of their funding comes from the food industry. So it's problematic.

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 there were 60 big food companies, including several that ranked highly on the Food Compass. And again, is there going to be any big institution 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 does a new system look like?

It's a really great point. I did talk about this in Food Fix and the 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 what drugs get promoted and what drugs get researched is through these 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. 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 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 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 if 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 Denon 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 end up using even though they funded this. So a lot of companies will fund these at arm's length. They don't have control of the design. They don't have control over the writing of the papers, over the outcomes. So there can be a way to do it, but you have to have the firewalls in place. A lot of times they're not, and that's part of the problem. If you look at food industry research, 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 going to 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, you know, he explicitly came out and said that if I didn't have, you know, 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, you know, 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? Yeah, for sure.

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 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 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, 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 gonna see that this person's gonna be at high risk for heart disease, her lipids are gonna 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 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 it 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 it 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 if 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.

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