How To Improve School Lunches, Grades, And Behavior At No Extra Cost with Jill Shah

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

Families who rely on school food are also probably relying on SNAP or some other federal subsidies or the food banks to bring food into their homes. And so school food's more critical than ever right now.

Yeah.

Welcome to the Doctor's Pharmacy. I'm Dr. Mark Hyman, and that's Pharmacy with an F, F-A-R-M-A-C-Y, a place for conversations that matter. If you care about your children and you care about our children's health as a nation, and their future, then this conversation is going to really matter because it's with my good friend, an incredible troublemaker in the best sense of the word, my friend Jill Shaw, who I've known for a long time as a friend and as a colleague. We've worked together years ago on something called Jill's List, which is a great compendium of all integrative and alternative therapies in Boston and around the world. And she's just one of the most extraordinary people I know. She's the president of the Shaw Family Foundation and she and her foundation and her husband support the most incredible initiatives that are transforming education, healthcare, and our communities in Boston and hopefully around the world. They're really focused right now on Boston schools and community organizations, and they basically figured out solutions to some of the toughest problems that we face in our schools today, which is school nutrition. She's focused on how do we take the abomination that is school lunch in America and turn it into something delicious, yummy, affordable and accessible for everybody. And we are going to talk a lot about that today. Her initiative with the Shaw Foundation, her husband, the My Way Cafe, which I talk about at length in my book, Food Fix. She is a major character in that book because it is such an impressive program. And we are going to talk about it and just get into the details of what is wrong with our school lunch program, why it's so important and how it can be fixed and why it's such an important initiative. She's a graduate of Providence College. She majored in English and she's just been a serial entrepreneur. It is S-E-R-I-A-L, not serial, because I'm a serial killer. I don't want serial, because it's serial. She started something called iXL and R-E-C-E-N-T-R-I-C. As I mentioned, she started Jill's List, which she sold the MindBody in 2013. She's received numerous awards and she's just an awesome human being. So welcome, Jill.

Thank you, Mark.

Yeah, well, you know, you're sequestered up in Boston. You've got your kids at home. You're like many trying to struggle through how to figure out how to make sense of this new world order. But you're continuing your work and it probably is an interesting moment for you because you're focused on schools and most schools are closed now. And often, schools are the place or often the only place kids who are underserved get their food. I mean, there's more than 30 million kids across America that rely on free lunches and sometimes free breakfast as their main source of nutrition. And yet, most of the food that they're eating is so horrible it ends up in the trash or worst it, they eat it and it makes them really sick. And so now it's a particularly tough time because kids are struggling at home with lack of food and lack of services. And, you know, I just, before we get into the My Way Cafe and what you've done, so how are you trying to figure out a way to help kids during this time when they're not able to access the limited food that they do get in school lunches on a good day? And it's not a good day today.

No, it's not a good day today. I mean, the current paradigm is just absolutely crazy. But school food is more important than ever, I think probably. If you think about families, so in the city of Boston, for example, we have free school lunch and we have free summer meals for all kids in the city of Boston because 70%, a little over 70% of families whose kids attend Boston Public Schools live at or below poverty. And so that qualifies- I say that at 70%. 70% of kids who attend Boston Public Schools live at or below poverty.

Wow.

Yeah, and that's not an unusual stat. I mean, it would be a similar stat for other major cities across the country. And those cities hold the majority of our students, right? And so when we talk about the fix that we're about to talk about, It's think about that, right? 'Cause it's really, if you rolled this out in all major cities across the country, you would have a total change in the diets of many, many Americans who are still young and healthy. In any case, what COVID-19 has done is flip, so everyone's now out of school. It's the summer meal program, which is the program that the USDA has allowed everyone to convert to. So that allows community partners as well as schools to prepare and serve meals for kids. You've got this added issue that parents and kids are afraid to come out of their homes, right? So we need to, you know, kind of supplement with delivery. There's amazing things happening across the country where school buses are being lit up as delivery vehicles to bring, it's amazing. And, you know, there's a whole variety of things that are happening. So really well-run school food programs are producing meals, churning them out and packaging them and sending them to families across the country. There's a lot of work to do. So, for example, in Boston, we're distributing probably probably around 10 or 12,000 meals a day currently. We're only a week into this, or two weeks into this, God, time just flies. But we feed 30,000 kids a day in the city of Boston, usually two or three meals a day. And so there's a lot of room too for growth here. What summer meals do though in this time is it's really that plus snap. plus the food bank that many families.

Are- SNAP food bank.

Yeah, yes, exactly. Exactly. So these government subsidized programs that provide food and it's in combination, right? Families who rely on school food are also probably relying on SNAP or some other federal subsidies or the food banks to bring food into their homes. And so school food's more critical than ever right now.

Yeah. Well, that's good to hear because, you know, it's a big worry of mine when you see, you know, 46 million people on SNAP and one in four kids on SNAP and food insecure.

Right.

You know, it's millions and millions of children. And I think we don't take our kids that seriously in this country. I feel we sort of neglect them. We neglect their health, their wellbeing, their safety, their vitality. And it's tragic. You know, we see now two out of 10 kids who are obese in America, four four out of ten are overweight. You know, if a kid is overweight, he's likely to live 13 years less than someone who's not overweight, more likely to struggle in life, earn less money, have worse jobs, have more disability, more unhappiness, more suffering. And, and, and this is a totally preventable thing. It's a totally preventable thing. And it often starts in schools. And, you know, you, you You had an interesting experience where you were volunteering in an elementary school and you were trying to get kids to eat arugula and other greens that were growing in the school garden.

Mustard.

And mustard. And then you that even though they were little, had a garden, which is kind of a big deal, they weren't actually eating the stuff in the school, inside the school. They were feeding them frozen food that was prepared in a factory in some other state that was packaged in plastic, shipped in by trucks and reheated in microwaves or re-warming ovens or deep fried. And you were like, what's going on here? And you were sort of astonished and it sort of got you thinking about what to do to fix the problem. Because you're a problem fixer and that's what I love about you. And you were like, I'm just not going to complain and whine about it.

Do something.

So can you experience and how that sort of led to your experiment in Boston City Schools? Well, you know, when I was there.

I was like, how can this be? Right? There's like an old folding table that has cracks in it and that's where the food gets dumped effectively. There's one person that does everything. Well, all they have to do is take frozen food out of the freezer and throw it into a warming oven that only I think heats to 170 degrees. Sorry, it literally is a warming oven. And so it was just, I remember going out with friends that night and I was describing my observations of the day. They were like, no, that can't be. You just can't possibly be. And so I called Billy Shore, who runs Share Our Strength, which is another amazing organization that helps feed kids across the country. And I said, is this possible that this is the way kids are fed in America? And he said, oh, absolutely, like, you know, mostly because there are no kitchens in lots of schools. And so in urban districts- Let me say that again.

There's no kitchens.

There are no kitchens.

Right.

There are no kitchens in school kitchens. Exactly.

To me.

A warming oven and a table and a person.

And deep fryers?

No deep fryers. Well, you know, so there are deep fryers in cafeterias that have kitchens. Yeah. Yeah, I've seen lots of deep fryers actually. I haven't seen them lit up though, because we're just taking tons of pre-wrapped packaged food and feeding it to kids across America. And there's a huge, you know, in Vegas, I don't know, maybe it's not there every year, but it was there last year. There's a huge trade show. And if you're a food nutrition services worker, you are more than invited. If you're you or me, you are absolutely not invited. And you just go and you walk the aisles. We sent two folks there.

Undercover.

Undercover. But it's just rows and rows and rows and rows of prepackaged food. There's not anything fresh, whole or real to be seen anywhere. And lots of brands that you know well, Domino's and Pepsi and all these other guys marketing, school food to these programs. And so these programs buy into it super easy, right? You can make the menus sound delicious and it's really easy to kind of take stuff out of plastic and put it in warming ovens. So we thought, you know, and I actually thought, okay, it's probably because there's just not enough money in the subsidy, right? And so that must be what it is. This is all we can afford. Well, you know, we get into the story and we started to do the analysis on it, it ends up, you absolutely can pay kids all whole real food. You can employ more people locally in doing it. And the prepackaged stuff actually costs more than the real food.

Wait, wait, so you're saying that the junk food and the processed food and the food is more expensive.

More expensive.

Real food cooked from scratch by real humans locally in the kitchens.

That'S exactly right. And, you know, when we were going through this process, we brought in chefs to just help us understand it. And so Ken Oringer, who is a celebrity chef in Boston, pointed this out to us. He said, you know, the prepackaged roast beef that they're slicing up has been processed, right? So the whole bunch of people have touched it, manipulated it, and, you know, injected it with preservatives and salt and all kinds of other things. And sugar. Right.

And sugar, lots of sugar. That's right.

Why do you put sugar in turkey? I have no idea. No, well, probably to hide whatever other things you're trying to hide because she cooked it so long ago. And so he said that costs way more than if we just order some roast beef and have it shipped to the schools. And so as we started to do the analysis, it was true in every case. If you buy prepackaged stuff, because it's been processed, there's so much more cost in it. And then you've got margin on it as well. So there's profit on it.

Wow. So you basically, decided you were going to take this on and you created something called My Way Cafe. And in the discovery of the challenges, you found a whole set of solutions, right? Because the basic mantra is, look, there's only a small amount of money that kids get for school lunch. What is it? $2 or something per lunch?

Yeah, it's a little more than that. $3.45.

$3.45.

But 20 cents of it is milk.

Okay. Which, by the way, we can talk about it.

Yeah, but skim. Skim or flavored.

Okay. Another topic. We'll get to it because I could go on for hours about that. But you, you, you hear the Mantra. Look, this is the best we can do. We can't serve kids delicious real whole food because it's too expensive, it's too difficult, it's not possible. And you actually figured out that not possible, but it's not that hard and it's totally scalable. So tell us about that process.

Yeah, well, it was fun to do it on paper, right? So if you pull out spreadsheets and you start to put in all the food costs and all the labor costs and all the transportation costs, you can show very easily in a model that you can take the same subsidy from the USDA, employ three times as many people, serve all real whole food, and the only single time investment you need to make we did it philanthropically and then the city has now taken it over, is to build these micro kitchens. And they're not even, I mean, they have a combination oven and they have the right number of sinks, they have prep tables and they have a freezer and fridge in them. So they're not, nothing out of this world, but it's exactly the amount of equipment, we have rice cookers as well, for people to prepare a full buffet of hot and cold food every day for kids. looks like a rainbow. Kids love it. It smells good. It doesn't smell like heated plastic in schools anymore. It smells like real food. And so. But that process took a long time. That process took about nine months of us pushing really hard. And is that a cat?

Yes, my cat.

I love it.

He's my work companion. I don't have any other people to hang around with anymore. That's my wife.

You have the cat. We have the cats too.

So.

We tripped over, it was like one thing at a time, every hurdle. And you can imagine why government alone can't do this because there are so many no's that get in the way. And so we just kind of, every time someone said no, we said, why not? And we would just solve the problem. And then we'd get to the next thing. One of the earliest problems we solved was everything was coming in wrapped. So apples were wrapped in plastic, oranges were wrapped in plastic. It just made it just made it look so unappetizing. And so the why, the answer to the why do we have to do it this way was, well, you don't have fruit washing sinks in the kitchens. So we said, if we put a fruit washing sink in the kitchen, do we have to wrap the fruit anymore? And they said, no, you just gotta wash the fruit. So like it was just, you know, super simple, like not expensive solution to a really big problem. Your kids weren't eating the fruit because it It took five minutes to unwrap the bloody thing and it didn't look appetizing anyway. So we just had to do that with everything. And we got it.

Instead of people saying, this is why not, and just stopping there, you were like, well, how do we fix this?

Yeah, exactly.

And you found it wasn't that hard, right? It's a sink. It's other simple things. And I think, what was interesting, you shared with me once, it was a little subversive because you sort of started this program in the school, you did it in one school, you showed it to be done. You've got them to not ship in the food from out of state all wrapped in plastic. And you didn't really tell anybody what you were doing. And by the time people caught on, it was sort of too late. And, you know, these big food service providers that were, you know, cashing in all the government supports and making crappy food were out of business.

Right. That's right. You know, so it was interesting because the one thiNg that we caught wind of is that the food provider, so the vendor that provided all the plastic wrap food, that opportunity was up for bid. And we happened to just walk in the door as that bidding process was being set up. And so the only recommendation we made, because we didn't want to have anything to do with plastic wrap food, is we said, make sure that you have the right to pull out any school. if for any reason you would want to shift the way you were feeding kids, so they wrote that into the bid. And the deal was done with that in mind. And we knew already, like, if this thing works, then we're just gonna be able to, you know, pull off. So, and that's what's happened. 30 schools a year have come off of that contract and have gone on to this, you know, fully managed by the Boston Public Schools. real whole food.

So who made those decisions about the contracts? Was it the school superintendents?

Was it- the head of food services.

The head of food services.

Yeah. Who came from LA. She had, you know, she was trying to do a lot of things in LA in terms of shifting the food also in what they were serving there. And so she was, she was, you know, this all seemed very risky to her. And we kept saying to her, we're here to carry the risk on this. We'll make sure that, like, We don't break anything. And, but you know, it was her decision to put the language into the contract and she really kind of made sure that we could keep pushing forward. It was because it was complicated.

Yeah, it is. You know, I think right now we're hearing a lot of mantras about school lunch. Oh, you know, we put in these nutrition guidelines that are better under the Hunger Free Kids Act that Obama passed in 2010, which improved the guide on what to eat more whole foods, more vegetables, et cetera, et cetera. Although they still passed potatoes, I mean, quote, french fries as a vegetable and ketchup and pizza as vegetables, which just still is hard to imagine. But now what's happening is these guidelines are being rolled back because they're saying the kids won't eat the healthy food. They throw it in the garbage. It tastes bad. It costs too much. And so they're rolling back these guidelines. And yet your model shows that that's just a bunch of nonsense.

Yeah, it's interesting. I think the one thing we did in terms of a service model, which I think changes the way kids behave around food, it's all child driven. So the protein is separate from the grains, is separate from the warm vegetables, is separate from all the cold fruits and vegetables, separate from the beans, et cetera. Nothing has to touch anything else, which is a big reason that kids don't like certain things. So if I walk down the line, I might take chicken and I might forego the rice because I don't like it, but maybe there's a roll that I want and I like the roasted broccoli, or I don't like any of the hot vegetables, but I do want an apple and I want some celery and I want a carrot, but I definitely don't want a salad and I do not want dressing. But I do want the hot sauce. So kids make their own meals. And this is not slow. This happens. There are servers on the other side. This is all within the $3.45 who are talking with kids. Kids are saying, Please and thank you. There's a whole conversation that's going on that wasn't happening before. And they're getting exactly what they want. They walk up the line pretty gleefully, actually.

And they eat it.

They eat it all because they asked for it. That's what they wanted. There's no food waste. There's no food waste. And then we insert opportunities for kids to try things. So while they're sitting around, they're sitting at the table eating, we might say, these are chickpeas. Would you like to try chickpeas? So we introduce new foods, tofu. Tofu is like, kids love tofu now. Love it. It's just so hard to hear the argument that kids won't eat the food. I think the adults, Don't know how to present the food to the kids.

So just to recap, the economics work. You can create better food, more locally sourced, made from scratch. All you need is a little bit of an improvement in the kitchens. You hire more people, which still is within the cost structure.

Totally.

Who are happier with their jobs because they're actually cooking and making kids happy.

Yeah.

And the kids are happy, they're not throwing out the food.

Yeah.

And how's their health and academic performance? Have you tracked that?

It's interesting. So we are doing, there's a study being done right now on the behavioral health because we were hearing from so many principals and teachers that negative behavioral events had gone way down in the schools. And so kids were just being disciplined less. and teachers and principals thought it was because of the school food, the new school food. We don't have data yet. We are going to start doing some research on their physical health as well. But I can tell you one story that I tell all the time. There was a child who was diagnosed with failure to thrive and part of the school's responsibility was to try to get a half a can of a protein drink into this child every day. His name was George. And I walked in about three days after the My Way Cafe program had started in his school. and the principal was kind of teary-eyed and she said, I got to tell you. She said, this boy, George, told me his situation. She said, he's eating every meal.

Wow.

And so I ended up meeting George a week later and he said, do you know the people who make the food? And I said, oh, I do, yeah. And he said, how does someone make a recipe? I said, well, it's kind of like coloring, you know, if you, take a red crayon and a blue crayon and you put them together, it's purple. So that's what they do, you know? And he's like, oh, and he's like, you know, I'm pretty sure that I want to be a chef. Like, this is a kid who a couple of weeks ago, his pediatrician came in to see what was happening. His mom wanted to be able to bring the food home so he would eat at night. I mean, this is like a game changer. And as far as I can tell, it was his relationship with one of these newly hired cafeteria service workers who just changed his mind about eating. It was mind-blowing, Mark. It still is. I don't know when he's such a cute kid.

Yeah, and then, you know, maybe you haven't collected the data yet, but I think it's gonna show remarkable things. You know, when you look at kids in schools and violent disruptive behavior, it's a big issue. I mean, kids at one in 10 kids are on ADHD medication. you know, we have to have special ed. It's an enormous problem in schools. School nurses are dishing out medications left and right. And, you know, we know from the studies that, you know, these are difficult kids. There's a 3,000 kids study which were incarcerated youth. And they basically replaced junk food with healthier options and got rid of sugar and refined foods. And in 12 months, there was a 20 1% reduction in antisocial behavior, a 25% reduction in assaults, a 75% reduction in use of restraints, and get this, Jill, there was a 100% reduction in suicides, which is basically, when you think about it, suicide is the third leading cause of death in children's age 10 to 19. And when you look at the CDC study, there was incredible study by the CDC looking at nutrition in kids and found that those kids perform far better when they're well nourished. If they're not, they're basically having poor academic performance. They're having more absenteeism. They're having more disruptive behavior. They're less likely to problem solve, less likely to pay attention. And I think this is something we just don't understand that we're we're doing to our kids. And it's something that's completely solvable with real food. I mean, the CDC published this in a report in 2014 called Health and Academic Achievement, and it was just such a clear link between poor nutrition and poor academic performance with lower test scores, lower grades, poor cognitive function, less alertness, less attention, poor memory. And it was just amazing. And so we have the ability to change this. we just don't do it. And I think the science is there. And now what you've shown is that the possibility of scaling this is there. And I think, you know, it's pretty remarkable what you've done. And there are other people around the country, there's groups like Conscious Kitchens and others who are working in the same problem. But, you know, one of the challenges with this whole school lunch thing is it's not a national program, right? So schools, Right. Are in, you know, under the purview of local governments. And there's just such a lack of sort of uniformity in this country around school nutrition. How do we solve for that? Because I know you've been in Washington, you've talked about this with our leaders. I mean, how are you seeing this scaling and building up? Because if you've done it, then it's doable and it should be done everywhere. And what are the challenges there?

Yeah, I think, you know, so the guidelines could get tighter. There's no guideline right now on sugar. I mean, the government has to want to take a stance on what is healthy versus what is not healthy, because right now everyone kind of has their own palette to paint with. And so I honestly wonder, there are so many principals and superintendents across the country who I think do actually very much care about this issue. And I really think it's probably with those folks that this program needs to get rolled out. And so what we're trying to do in Boston, and the mayor has been like an amazing proponent of this. I think, you know, that level of government is it makes it really easy to do something terrific like this. Some of those hurdles that we came up against he was the one who knocked them down.

Right.

And we did it, you know, we did it within the current guidelines, but we just, you know, it's like interpretations of guidelines or.

Sure.

So, so I think that level of government is probably the right level of government to address this because everything does have kind of a local flavor to it, if you will. And, and what we did in Boston, I think, shows that you can do it. Like, we have a very clear template now for how to, how to roll out exactly the same kind of program in your city. And in quite honestly, all the things that were hard for us to do should not be hard for anyone else to do because we can predict them and we can also show what the solution was for every single problem. So the pain doesn't need to be replicated, quite honestly.

So you've made the first effort that cleared the way and the obstacles and created a playbook.

Yeah, and there is a playbook actually. We have a playbook that will be available on our website, I think next month. That's mywaycafe.org It'll be on mywaycafe.org and it'll also be on the Shaw Family Foundation website, which is our family foundation. Yeah, and it should be pretty easy to access for anyone who wants it. Yeah, I mean, and then, you know, when we employ four or five people who just act as, right now they're consulting with BPS, but there's a number of others School systems across the country at this point who just use us to problem solve and help.

You know, I once gave a talk years ago to this sort of, this teachers and print, the principals, I think it was in Buffalo, all the Buffalo schools. And, and they told me there was this organization called the, the, sort of the superintendents of the greater city schools. So all the major cities in America. Yeah, there's this meeting of all the superintendents. Yeah, I mean, that would be seemed like to me a place to go to share the story to tell.

Yes.

Yeah.

So I think we well, you know, who knows what's going to happen now with COVID-19, but we I think we were supposed to be working our way onto the agenda for this year. And last year at the Council of Greater Great City Schools, which is all the yeah, so they showed the movie.

Yeah.

Wow.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

The movie you're talking about is a documentary called Eat Up, which tells the power of food and the future of our children and how hard it can be in America to do the right thing in the face of these crazy regulations and corporate interests. And you show how it can be done in the movie. So it's great to have this conversation, but people should definitely go to Amazon and iTunes and watch the movie Eat Up. And you can go to eatupfilm.com to learn more about it and to watch it. It's well worth the watch if you care about your kids, if you care about our kids, if you care about of our nation, because our kids are the future of our nation, then you got to watch this movie and get everybody you know to watch it. And particularly all the people who are involved in schools and local politics, this is a game changer. And I think your creativity, your ingenuity, your stick-to-it-iveness and your unwillingness to listen to why not is a really is a lesson for us all in how to actually to take a stand because it, you know, this is something we can fix. You know, when you think about some of the intractable problems in our food system, they're not so local. Like if you talk about industrial agriculture or regenerative ag or, you know, changing SNAP regulations, but school lunches and school food programs, these are local. These are things that parents and citizens can influence with their local governments, right?

Well, not only that, you know, some of the stuff that you talk about in food fix is can happen because of shifting the school food program. So as we moved the entire city to 125 schools, 54,000 kids fed three times a day, the buying power for whole real food that we have as a city is massive. And so what that allows us to do then is say, okay, what do we want to purchase locally? So we already purchase fish locally or Boston or coastal city. But should we be doing deals with local chicken farmers? Should we be promising them a certain amount of time of chicken, which allows them to then go get the investors that they need to expand their farms. All of this means that we help the local economy, we help the farming and the agricultural economy, and we keep it all kind of within our jurisdiction. So it's a beautiful, beautiful thing if we can get it to work. And then you can imagine, here's the Holy Grail, right? As you get the hospitals, and the colleges that are around you to all join in the same procurement function. I mean, like we really wouldn't have to go very like outside of New England. No, there's models for this.

There's models for this. There's one called the Good Food Purchasing Program out of California, which has become a model nationally for governments and institutions to source food that's grown ideally, that's grown humanely, that takes care of the workers, that's sustainable. I mean, there's just really great models for this. And there's a company, there's also innovative companies that are solving some of to the problems that are harder to solve. For example, how do you source for big institutions and programs like schools, all the local food, having a million different vendors? Well, there's a company called Azadi, which is based in Cleveland, where they've figured out how through using tech platforms to aggregate all these local producers and connect them to food service companies or to schools to actually drive a much more simpler supply chain that actually works. So there's a lot of people innovating in this food space. And, and I agree with you, you know, the schools can be, can be the beachhead where we actually land and start to change the food system. And I think you're right, starting with kids and starting with schools. I mean, who's gonna fight getting our kids better nutrition? I mean, you know, maybe there are people, but, you know, it's gonna be a hard position to defend. Well, I want my kids to have the right to eat donuts in school or whatever. And I think, how do you deal with this whole issue of what we call competitive foods? because in schools, you know, they're sort of big food companies have infiltrated schools in such a massive way by providing free, you know, sports and arts and music education. And they get to put in all their advertising in the bathroom stalls and them gymnasiums. And they buy little Coca-Cola chairs for the kindergartners to sit on. And, you know, and they have all these foods that they get to pick. So if they're on Jill Shaw's My Way Cafe lunch line, there's broccoli, but there's also cookies and donuts and chips and junk food or Domino's Pizza or McDonald's hamburgers. How do you fight that?

Yeah, I mean, so we actually have spent a lot of this year pulling together food policy for the city of Boston. And so we did that in collaboration, it was really led by food nutrition services in the city of Boston, and we agreed to a set of procurement rules. So here are the things that we absolutely will not serve, and here are the things that we want to serve, and here are some things in the middle that we are going to want to move away from and not serve, you know, whenever possible. That policy is super helpful, right? Because any of those things that you just listed wouldn't qualify. Like we've already said, we don't want these kinds of preservatives, additives, all of these things. So none of those food providers would meet the mark in terms of how we purchase food. And you know, in that, that'll get presented to the public. That'll, we started to do something that we call state of the plate. And so we have an annual celebration with the governor and the mayor and the heads of the hospital.

You've invited me to that. I hadn't been able to make it. Yes, I want to go.

No, no, no. Yeah, well, it's probably gonna be virtually this year. But, but yeah, and so, Are we.

Going to be eating virtual food?

I hope not. I hope not. We'll have to send everyone little bento boxes or something. But I think these things are really important, right, to be very clarifying and to say, this is what we will do and we won't do as a community, you know, to our kids. Because to your point, right, Mark, I like, when I was down in Washington, one of the meetings that I was at, worried me quite a bit, you know, is in terms of setting rules for like the next set of recommendations for Americans. And the question was asked, who are we setting the recommendations for, right? Of 80% of America, 80% of Americans are in some way sick, obese, overweight, suffering for some sort of chronic disease. Who are we setting these guidelines for, right? And then you think about, you know, kids, this 50 million Americans who are still pretty healthy, right? We haven't done anything terribly destructive to them.

40% of them are overweight and 1.

In 5 are obese. But imagine like, but I think this.

Is- They're better, yeah, but not that.

Yeah, but well, right. But if you're going to start somewhere, like this is- Absolutely. You already have a USDA subsidy. You already have a whole set of incentives, right? Like this could be the largest intervention that the U. S. healthcare system decides to deploy.

Right.

Just for that.

It's $25 billion just for that, right?

Yeah. I mean, just feeding every year. Like that would be such a game changer, at least according to you and other doctors who know well, I think it would be extraordinary.

So what about the schools that say, well, you know, we love this idea, but, you know, we get so much money from the vending machines and from all the stuff that we can't do without because, you know, you know, it was a great, I remember during, during the Vietnam War, there was a slogan which was, you know, maybe the military should have big sales to buy weapons and the kids should get school money. But now it's, you know, it's, it's so bad. So how do we solve that?

Well, I mean, I think this is where Advocate, local advocacy comes in. Right. Like as a, as a locality, you have to decide what is okay and what is not okay and what do you need and what you not need. And are there other resources that you can draw upon or do can you forego something?

Right?

Because, I mean, if it really, if it really is that, you know, we need to decide to feed our kids crappy food so that we have chairs, then, you know, I guess, I guess, you know, you really, that is a major decision point. But I, I wonder how each locality would handle that. And I think, you know, I totally respect any, any city or town's decision making. Right. There's lots of different things that they have to consider. I also think there are lots of folks out there who would be happy to support good food programs, right? And so I think to identify that, you know, we're going to lose chairs if we feed kids properly.

You know, it's just more like music and sports teams and all that stuff. It's just tough because, you know, we really have our priorities backwards here. And we're a generation of Americans today that's going to live sicker and die younger than their parents. This is the first generation of history where life expectancy is going down and one in three kids born today will have diabetes in their lifetime, type 2 diabetes.

Right, right. But I don't think you can just say to communities, okay, we'll forego the sports team. I think it's a little bit bigger than that. And that was the thing that happened in Boston is you really have to determine, okay, what is the sticking point here? If we want to have the sports team, do we then also have to serve pizza every day or whatever it is, or something even more gross than pizza. Or, is there a way that we can present the need and fund the sports team in a different way? And I think that's just like that is all about communities coming together and deciding what's important.

It's true. We really have kids in this country. We're 31st in reading and math in the world. We have such high rates of disease in kids and unhealthy behaviors. We have all these problems. And I think one of the things you can do, Jill, with My Way Cafe is to document the impact of the food that these kids are eating on their well-being, their emotional, mental, cognitive, academic performance, absenteeism, behavioral issues. If you can figure out how to do that, that's a game changer. It's a game changer, because I think there hasn't been enough. There are studies but they're far and few between and they have by changing diets in schools that you can have an impact on these kids dramatically. And I remember a story of a guy in Washington who developed charter school for some of the poorest, most underserved communities there, mostly immigrants, African Americans. And these kids were struggling. You know, there was very low graduation rates, very poor academic performance on standardized testing, lots of behavioral issues. And they decided to feed the kids three meals a day, like a real whole food.

Right.

And, you know, have a good academic program. But then these kids started doing so well on academic test scores that, you know, parents from other well-to-do neighborhoods wanted to ship their kids into this school.

Well, they were present, right? They were fed. And so they were present at school. You know, I agree with you about the testing, and I I think there's lots of things that we should do to better understand why the program is so important to kids physically and mentally. But, you know, when you, we've increased participation by about 20% with this program, right? So, and we've decreased waste. And so that means kids are taking whole real food off the line and they're putting it to their bodies and eating it and teachers are seeing that they show up in the classroom differently.

Right.

And when you show up in the classroom in a ready to learn state as opposed to some sort of, you know, state that where you're not present already, right? The results of it are pretty extraordinary. Yeah. And so, you know, I do think it's important. There's some, you know, obviously we're in the, we live in Boston. There's incredible academics who have proposed researching this in different ways. And it'll be amazing to see the results of that. At the end of the day though, like just seeing kids be present, be calm. Cafeterias go from being these raucous environments to kids literally sitting and eating and having conversation. All that's different is the food.

Yeah, yeah, food is medicine, that's for sure. So, Joe, people listening to this, mothers, fathers, parents, teachers, wondering, how do I get this in my school? What do I do? How do I figure this out? Can I scale it? Can you talk about how that could happen for them and what you're working on that happen. You talked about this handbook, but tell us more.

Yeah. So I think, you know, as a locality, I think it needs to be driven ultimately by decision makers, right? So food nutrition services heads, mayors, city councilors, folks who really can oversee any of the issues that are going to come up in making this change happen. And then as community or as that contingency, you want to kind of look at where you are today and where you want to get to, right? And then look at all the things that are stopping you from getting there, right? Because it means you have to procure differently. You may need different things in your kitchens. You may need to hire and train individuals. You may need logistics. All of our stuff comes into one warehouse and then gets shipped out to each locality on a daily basis. And so you have to think about where you want to be, and then all of the things that it work require to do those things. And then get permission to do them, right? And so, but I do think this is why it's most easily for parents to go and advocate to their food services head is probably the way to do this and to get that person on board so that they can lead the charge because really they hold the reins on all of those different pieces of the puzzle.

So each school district has a food service person.

Correct.

Not each school, but over each school district.

Each school district, correct. Right. And so the superintendent, the food services director, the head of the city or town, those folks are the folks that you would want to buy into an idea like this. What our resources can help folks do is really determine what sorts of investments are going to have to be made, where, or what sorts of things have to change. So if Buying all prepackaged food from one vendor, how do you then purchase real broccoli, real apples, real chicken? Like, so just what kind of processes have to change? We can help with all of that. Our foundation's website, which is shahfoundation.org, the Eat Up website, Eat Up Film, or is it Eat Up Movie?

EatUpFilm.com.

EatUpFilm.com and MyWayCafe.com. ORJ, all of those will have all of the materials available on them.

Oh, that's amazing, Joe.

I mean, I want to tell you one other thing, too, because My Way Cafe was not, we didn't brand it for the sake of, you know, having fun with a name. We did that because people, you know, every individual's voice is so important. And so we knew that if we gave parents something simple to say that when they walked into a school committee meeting and said, I want my school to have My Way Cafe, and it just came, it started over and over and over again as opposed to saying, I want my kid to have fresh, whole, real food every day. You know, it's like so much. So we just branded it from day one so that parents across the city could just say, when are we getting My Way Cafe?

Is your theme song, the Frank Sinatra song, My Way?

Oh my God, we did sing that for a little while. It was so hard to come up with something.

So I just want to take a minute to honor you to paint a picture of what the future would look like and why this is so important.

Yeah.

Because it's not just about kids in schools. It's, this is a lever, a leverage point for changing the whole food system, right? So you start with the supply chain, right? Which is where the food comes from. So you're going to incentivize the production, the growing, the distribution of real whole food. You're creating a giant marketplace for it. which is a $25 billion school lunch program.

Right.

And then you're catalyzing employment through training, hiring, and creating satisfying jobs for school workers who are working in those school kitchens. That's right. You're creating health for kids, which is going to have an impact for them throughout their whole lives in terms of their life success, their social success, their economic success, their ability to live healthier lives. You're going to be creating global economic competitiveness around our performance because kids who learn better are smarter, do better and have better jobs and are able to more contribute to society. You're going to be decreasing the obesity epidemic, decreasing the behavioral challenges that kids have, you're going to be showing that this model is something that actually can work within an economic model of the USDA school subsidies, which is very limited and show how it can be done well. And you're creating this whole cascade of changes throughout the food system that can actually show how this can be done, not just in schools, but in institutions, in universities, in colleges, in government buildings, in corporations, in hospitals. So this is just like a catalyst that shows that this model can be done at scale. And all of a sudden, you change the entire food service industry, which is massive. It's, I think, as big as the restaurant industry. It just serves so many people.

Yeah.

I'm not sure that I will do that, but- well, yeah, yeah, this can be an example.

Why not?

Why not? I'll go after it. Why not?

Well, you're like, you know, you're not, you're like, I'm not gonna take this anymore. This isn't right. This doesn't have to be this way, even though it's always been this way. It doesn't have to be this way. And we can innovate.

You know, the thing that really angered me was that we do this to our most vulnerable population. Yeah.

Right?

Like, you know, so many of us can choose what our kids eat. every day. But when you're dependent upon two or three meals a day coming from your school, it should not be that we're using those dollars to in more ways cripple.

To harm them.

Yeah.

Right. We're harming our children.

We should be making the best choices about the foods that we provide, giving then the recipients of that still choice. so that they can really eat what they want to eat every day.

Well, if there was a Mother of the World Award, I would give it to you. I think you're being a mother to all these children who are suffering and struggling. And it's just an incredible thing. I heard about it. First time I heard about it just blew my mind. I've been following it right from the beginning, cheering you on. And I really want people to take seriously being an activist. you know, in, in my book, food fix, I, I do talk about the things we can do personally to make a change, whether it's changing our diet or growing a garden, having a compost pile. Those are all nice and good, but the truth is, to get scale and to get real change in the food system, this idea, My Way Cafe is a catalyst that I think we can all get behind. And then we as parents, as citizens can go, even if we're not a parent, we just care about kids can go to the school district to find this food service head and talk to them and teach them. And everybody can do this. And it's something we can do in backyards in our communities and we can be empowered and literally can change the face of school food in America and change the future of our kids' cognitive, emotional and physical well-being, which for me, there's nothing more important.

Now, I think that's right on. I think that that was why we agreed to do the movie, too, is I think the movie just, it's a fun movie and it shows how actually anybody, right? You show up at a school committee meeting, you knock on the food services director's door, you call the superintendent, anybody can start to make change happen.

So Noah is an opportunity to get to yes, right?

Yes, exactly. Exactly.

And everybody should watch the movie and be inspired. This is a great conversation, but the movie will tell the story. You'll see the kids' faces, you'll see their smiles, you'll see them eating the broccoli. Super awesome movie. And Jill, thank you for the work you do, for the work the Shaw Foundation does, for being the awesome human you are. I love you, Jill, and I'm so.

Glad to have had you on the Doctor's Pharmacy podcast. Well, I love you too, and I appreciate the opportunity to talk about this.

And to share with more people. So thank you so much. Thank you. Well, you've been listening to the Doctor's Pharmacy, and if you love this conversation, please share with your friends and family. Leave a comment. We'd love to hear from you. Subscribe wherever you get your podcast. And we'll see you next time on the Doctor's Pharmacy. Hi, everyone. It's Dr. Mark Hyman. So, two quick things. Number one, thanks so much for listening to this week's podcast. It really means a lot to me. If you love the podcast, I'd really appreciate you sharing with your friends and family. Second, I want to tell you about a brand new newsletter I started called Mark's Picks. Every week, I'm going to send out a list of a few things that I've been using to take my own health to the next level. This could be books, podcasts, research that I found, supplement recommendations, recipes, or even gadgets. I use a few of those. And if you'd like to get access to this free weekly list, all you have to do is visit drhyman.com/picks that's drhyman.com/picks I'll only email you once a week I promise and I'll never send you anything else besides my own recommendations so just go to drhyman.com/picks that's P-I-C-K-S to sign up free today hi everyone.

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