How Your Health Is Impacted By Food Marketing And Our Dietary Guidelines

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

Guidelines are not based on good evidence. They have such a powerful control over how Americans eat. Probably the single most important lever, and they clearly are not working.

Hey everyone, it's Dr. Mark. I know a lot of you out there are practitioners like me, helping patients heal using real food and functional medicine as your framework for getting to the root cause. what's critical to understanding what each individual person and body needs is testing, which is why I'm excited to tell you about Rupa Health. Looking at hormones, organic acids, nutrient levels, inflammatory factors, gut bacteria, and so many other internal variables can help us find the most effective path to optimize health and reverse disease. But up till now, that meant you are usually ordering tests for one patient from multiple labs. and I'm sure many of you can relate how time consuming this process was, and then it could all feel like a lot of work to keep track of. Now there's Rupa Health, a place for functional medicine practitioners to access more than 2000 specialty labs from over 20 labs like Dutch, Vibrant America, Genova, Great Plains and more. Rupa Health helps provide a significantly better patient experience and it's 90% faster, letting you simplify the entire process of getting the functional medicine lab tests you need and giving you more time to focus on patients. this is really a much needed option in functional medicine space and I'm so excited about it. It means better service for you and your patients. You can check it out and look at a free live demo with a Q&A or create an account at RupaHealth.com that's R-U-P-A-Health.com Now time and again I've had my patients tell me they're too busy to eat as healthy as they like and that's when I ask them how much time they spend on email or social media. I like to tell them if they have time to scroll, they have time to shop online for healthy foods. With Thrive Market, you can order all your favorite healthy pantry staples, snacks, household and body care goods, and so much more and have it delivered right to your door. Thrive Market is an online membership based grocery store that makes eating well convenient and more affordable. They've got everything from ethically sourced cabinet essentials to sustainable meat and seafood, non-toxic cleaning products, personal care items, and lots more. And they make it super easy to search by category like paleo, vegan, low sugar, or gluten free. You can get a monthly or annual Thrive Market membership to find the perfect fit for your family. Even with a crazy schedule and tons of travel, I'm always able to have what I need when I get home, thanks to Thrive Market. Right now, if you go to thrivemarket.com/hymen, you can get $80 worth of groceries free. That's T-H-R-I-V-E-Market.com/hymen. Now let's get back to this week's episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy.

Hi, this is Lauren Feehan, one of the producers of the Doctors Pharmacy podcast. We are seeing an ever-increasing burden of chronic disease, primarily driven by our food and food system. This is perpetuated by several things: agricultural food and health care policies in our government that don't support our health, and manipulative junk food marketing that tries to convince us that unhealthy processed food is healthy. With a little effort, we can unearth the addictive mission of big food, understanding how untrustworthy food labeling and addictive ingredients, hook consumers, and keep them coming back for more. In today's episode, we feature three conversations from the Doctor's Pharmacy on why we need to examine what nutrition guidelines we follow and the influence of food marketing. Dr. Hyman speaks with Nina Teicholz on outdated government dietary guidelines, with Michael Moss on the formula to make food addictive, and with Vani Hari on food marketing to children and manipulation by food companies.

Let's dive in. I want to dive into a topic that I know you're passionate about and that matters. So we've heard all this conflicting evidence about what to eat, about the recommendations from the government. And these recommendations, which are called our dietary guidelines, have really shaped a lot of our thinking about what's good and what's not good to eat. And we followed it. And we followed it in terms of public health recommendations, in terms of what doctors say, nutritionists say, what scientists say. and more importantly, what the government tells people to eat in the form of nutrition programs, from our school lunches to our military programs, and so much more. And, you know, I just want to give you some credit because people say, oh, what can one person do to change the world? You know, Margaret Mead said, Never doubt that a small group of people who are committed can change the world. In fact, it's the only thing that ever has. And you understood the challenges with these guidelines that really were, promoting ideas that were killing millions of people. And you said, I'm not gonna stand for this. And you went to Congress and you shared this perspective and you said, we need to think about the guidelines in a different way. And you basically got the Congress to commission a million dollars to the National Academy of Sciences and Medicine would review how we come up with these guidelines and whether there was integrity in them, whether they looked at all the science, whether there was corruption in them. And this report that was really initiated by you has come out and it says some pretty shocking things. So can you tell us about what's wrong with the dietary guidelines and how you set about to go fixing them and what's next?

So, okay, well, so first of all, no one person can take credit for what Congress does. Congress does what Congress does and I-.

But you gave them a little zets in there.

Yeah, and it was that report by the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine was the first ever peer review of the dietary guidelines since they were launched in 1980. Amazing, 35 years of policy. And if you look at their, I mean, if you judge the guidelines by the outcome measures, dietary guidelines were meant to prevent disease.

We got pretty bad.

How has that progress gone? You know, like here, you know, how's.

That working for you?

Obesity going up, diabetes going up, heart disease still number one killer, cancer going up. So like by any outcome measure, they have been a total failure, right? And the conventional explanation is that People don't follow the guidelines. And who even knows about the guidelines? I don't go to my.gov website to find out about a diet, and you don't. But the food pyramid... You know about the food pyramid. You know about the food pyramid, and the reality is that they are just downloaded into every doctor's office, every nurse, every dietitian, every nutritionist. When you go to their office, they are giving you the guidelines, with rare exception. And they determine school lunch programs, feeding what your elderly parent gets at their feeding, you know, their nursing home, all of that. So, and hospital food. So I came to understand like how powerful they are. They have such a powerful control over how Americans eat, probably the single most important lever. And they clearly are not working. The argument that Americans don't follow them, I looked at that. I was like, well, maybe Americans don't follow them and it is our fault. But I went and looked at all the best available government data that I could find. Since 1970, I mean, in every food category you looked at, you can look at Americans follow the guidelines.

Low fat, less meat, less eggs, less high fat dairy.

Meat's down by red meat's down by 28% and we've increased our chicken by 120%. Animal, you know, vegetable oils we've increased by almost 90%. Animal fats down by 17%. I mean, everything. There's not one area where we have deviated.

Eating more grains, right?

40% more grains, more fruits and vegetables, and the vegetables is not ketchup. It's like the greatest single increase in.

Vegetables has been leafy greens.

You mean iceberg lettuce? I don't know, kale. We're all eating kale. It's the age of kale. So that argument that it's just that Americans don't follow the guidelines is not supported by the data. And then people also say, well, Americans eat more calories, right? And that's true. We do eat more calories. 200 and 70 something more calories per day than we used to. But if you look at every single one of those calories is carbohydrates. So what we did, what the guidelines did is they put us on a high grain diet, right?

7 to 11 servings of bread, rice, serum pasta day.

Every day and we did it. And just the way you can fatten cattle on grains, it turns out you can fatten humans pretty well on grains. So I did, I mean, I felt like the In Washington, D.C., there's just so much defense of this policy and the status quo. And they're renewed every five years, and the expert committee that is supposed to review the science instead just kind of rubber stamps the status quo.

Nobody wants a change.

Food doesn't need enough conflicts of interest. Many of them have conflicts of interest. They're funded by a food industry, people in the food industry. Nobody wants to change, rock that boat. I mean, to say that the guidelines are wrong is really a kind of heresy, right? So that's what I've done. I've committed an act of heresy. I wrote a paper that was on the COVID story of the British Medical Journal saying that guidelines are not based on good evidence. They've ignored all those clinical trials we.

Talked about that were never in there. The best available evidence about fat, they completely ignored.

They ignored. So those of us who study the science, if you go and read the expert report, you're like, well, where's all.

The science I studied?

Yeah, why do they say we have to drink three glasses of milk a day? There's no evidence for that. There's no evidence for that. So there's also, and I look to see like there's been this huge body of evidence that's grown up around the benefits of ramping back your carbohydrates a little bit and eating a little more fat. There's more than 70 clinical trials now. There were 64 when the 2015 Dietary Guidelines Committee was reviewing the science. None of those were in there. So actually they reviewed them, but they decided to put it in the methodology section of the paper. And one of the committee members, I know this from emails that I, got through Freedom of Information Act request.

One of the committee's members- Spam emails, right?

They get to you.

That's right.

Be careful what you write in your email. So one of the committee members said, you know, I don't think we should be burying, that was the word he used, burying this data in the methodology section where it doesn't belong. And then it was like, well, that was the end of that email chain. Yeah. So, you know, I started this group, the Nutrition Coalition, and our goal, it's really, you know, we get no industry money. We don't wanna be conflicted in any way. We just, our whole aim is just to say we want science in our guidelines and we want the best science and we want it not to be cherry-picked. We want the whole body of science. We want you to review those clinical trials that we paid for and put that in the evidence base and we don't recommend any one diet. You know, we're not an advocate for any one diet. You know, I'm confident if the clinical trial research is actually reviewed, which is the best rigorous, most rigorous science that.

Will get good guidelines.

Yeah.

So, you know, and the reason it's important for everyone is that like even if you fix your own diet, you've still got, you know, unless you live in a very privileged sphere, you've still got your child in school lunch program, your, you know, what food you get in a hospital, your parent at a nursing home are military. Do you know what the rate of obesity is in the military? Obesity, not overweight, it's 14%. Unbelievable. And you cannot say those guys are not exercising, those men and women are not exercising enough.

No, you can't exercise your way out of a bad diet.

Who said that?

I did.

And actually, two-thirds are overweight or up to two-thirds are overweight or obese. And they have, due to illness and injury, and you know, illness is something that happens is associated with being overweight, right? Yeah, of course. 10% of our armed forces at any one time are not deployable.

No, it's frightening. We are literally poisoning America. And I hate to say this, but I think it's true that, that our government recommendations in the original food pyramid, which was six to 11 servings of bread, rice, cereal, and pasta a day and very little fat, really led to millions of deaths. Not intentionally, but I think the consequence of that advice has really led to this greatest health crisis and globally that we've ever seen in humanity. And you're really a pioneer in fighting for this. And I think, you know, it's curious to see what's gonna happen next with the guidelines. Do you think they're gonna shift? Do you think there's gonna be a shift in the recommendations?

Well, I'm somewhat hopeful in that I think that, you know, the USDA, which is the agency in charge of the guidelines, I believe that they are actually interested in real reform. They put it out as one of their legislative priorities to have reform of the dietary guidelines so that they are science-based, those are their words. And they've taken a number of steps as they started off doing this next set of guidelines that suggests that they really are going for transparency.

Yeah, it was the first time they ever invited comments, right?

Right, they had public comments on sort of the topics that they wanna focus on for review. And among those topics, like hallelujah, included low carbohydrate diets and saturated fats. And, you know, so those are two big areas where if you could change the current guidelines, like if you just simply allowed lower carbohydrate diets is one possible dietary pattern, that would be huge. And if you could recognize that the caps on saturated fats are really not, it shouldn't be a strong recommendation, if at all a recommendation, if you could get rid of that, that would also be big. That would reflect good science.

It's true. And there's more and more emerging research. One of our colleagues, Sarah Halberg, just published a paper on diabetes. Now, this is a condition that in medical school I learned once you had it, you got it. There's no reversing diet, type 2 diabetes, type 1 for sure not, but that's an autoimmune disease. Type 2 is really a disease of carbohydrate intolerance. And in this study, which was remarkable, showed by using a very high fat diet with lots of saturated fat, you literally could reverse 60% of type 2 diabetes in a year. You can get 100% of people off the main diabetes medication, which potentially is harmful and has been linked to heart attacks, and you can get people off insulin or dramatically lower insulin in 94% of the people. that is unprecedented. And the average weight loss was 12%, which is unheard of in dietary studies or about 30 pounds. This is radical, and yet it's not mainstream. It's not something that doctors use or recommend. But there's an increasing awareness that different kinds of diets that actually restrict carbohydrates and increase fats may actually help with certain metabolic conditions. And we're seeing this across the board in terms of diabetes, obesity, even things like Cancer, fatty liver disease, Alzheimer's, autism, epilepsy, brain tumors. I mean, it's pretty interesting. This data is starting to come in at a rapid rate. And now I go on Amazon, look at the best-selling books, and a lot of them are ketogenic diets, which I find really fascinating.

Yeah. Well, and just to emphasize one of the numbers that you just said about that Sarah Hallberg study, that was at one year, 60% Reversal, okay, that means they no longer have a diagnosis of diabetes. If you go to, if you look at that same number, if you go on the standard American Diabetes Association diet, that number is 0.1, I'm sorry, give them credit, 0.1%.

0.1, all right, 0.1 compared to 60.

So, and I, and so, and, and, but I mean, just speaking to the politics of this field, you know, when I talk about my work and, or my book, I, you know, Yes, it's about science, but really the story here is really about politics, right? I mean, this is really so much more about politics than it is about science, because as we've seen, the science is ignored so much of the time, and that is politics. And the story of Sarah Hallberg's diabetes study is like the current day version of that, because can she get, I've been working with her to try to help her get an op-ed placed or get any press coverage. There was zero mainstream press coverage of that study, which should be if, you know, headline news. Headline news. We can reverse 60% of our nation's diabetes in a year.

Yeah.

She, everybody ignored it. And we actually, she's gotten back like angry notes from editors saying, how can you say this?

Yeah, well, it's not something we actually believe is possible as doctors. So we have to think something's wrong with the study. That's the assumption.

Yeah, I guess so.

We're saying that, I mean, we were in our clinic in Cleveland Clinic last week and one of the patients who'd been on insulin for 20 years was off insulin in three weeks. It's unbelievable.

It is. But you'd think that doctors would at least be, and this is the surprising thing, that they're so closed-minded. Like you would think there are some doctors who are open. I mean, in the Nutrition Coalition, we have hundreds of doctors among our members, our people who are now successfully helping people through by ignoring the guidelines basically, right? But there are so many.

So many.

Oh yeah, including like most famous among them. But there are so many stories of people who go to their doctor and they find out about a lower carb diet, they go to their doctor like, Hey doctor, guess what, my blood pressure's down, my weight's down, all my cholesterol looks better, oh and my skin problem went away and the floater in my eye is gone or whatever. And then the doctor's like, well, just be careful of that dangerous diet you're on.

Right, right. Don't confuse me with the facts, my mind's made up. All right, final question. If you were queen for a day and you could change something in our food space, what would it be? And if you had one piece of advice for people listening to change in their lives, what would it be?

Wow. That's, you know, my family asked me that every morning. Nina, would you like to be queen for the day? I don't think so. You know, I have to just be boring and say, I would change our dietary guidelines. They're so powerful. So I would change them to be evidence based. That would be the single biggest lever on how Americans eat. The truth is our guidelines influence global dietary guidelines.

So it's not just here. It's the whole world. Hey, everybody, it's Dr. Mark here. We all know how critical getting good quality sleep is to our overall well-being and optimizing our health. But if your mattress is not holding up to its end of the bargain, getting a good night's sleep can be almost impossible. And that's where Essentia comes in. It's hand-mating in Canada, these organic, non-toxic latex mattresses are packed with technology to promote sleep. An Essentia mattress is the perfect environment for you to experience unmatched REM sleep and deep sleep and benefit from all the amazing outcomes quality sleep provides. Essentia's certified organic performance mattresses feature brand new organic foam formulas to help you experience truly rejuvenating sleep. Plus, there are no Springs or fiber batting to Harbor dust mites and no proteins to cause latex allergies. Essentia believes there is nothing more powerful than the body's own ability to itself physically and mentally. And these performance mattresses are proven to help you do just that. In fact, I have one and I would not sleep on any other mattress. And I haven't, in fact, I even bought my daughter one so I can go have one when I go visit her in, in medical school. Essentia has made a special offer available to my doctors Pharmacy listeners. Right now you can get an extra 100 off your mattress purchase on top of Essentia's Black Friday sale, the biggest sale of the year, which will also take 25 off plus get you two free organic pillows, a 330 value with mattress purchase. This is really an amazing deal. So be sure to use the code HYMAN in your cart. Learn more at myessentia.com/DR-Mark-Hyman. That's Dr. Mark Hyman. That's M-Y-E-S-S-E-N-T-I-A.com/DR-Mark-Hyman. D-R-M-A-R-K-H-Y-M-A-N. And now let's get back to this week's episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy. Let's talk about labels because you were mentioning the food label. And you know in this in the country, you kind of have to have a PhD in nutrition to understand the nutrition facts label. I think it should be called alternative facts or fake news because it's so risk representative of what really matters. And in other countries, they're implementing things like the stoplight version, which is green, this is good for you, yellow, eat with caution, red, this is going to kill you. Or they put front-of-label packaging on, or they actually have it much more sensible. In this country, it's almost impossible, unless you have a PhD to understand that.

And even then, it's hard. The first thing you realize is that the front of the package is the most valuable real estate. And that's where the companies put their best foot forward. And so, for example, these wonderful potato chips, ripples, original, these great words, but you also notice at the top- Gluten free. Gluten free. Now they might have put, you know, on their reduced salt or reduced fat or added vitamins or minerals. That's typically what you'll get. One of the, and if people do turn the package over and look at the fine print, one of the deceptive things that goes on there is that, you know, this package of chips, for example, is something that somebody might eat the whole thing. In fact, a good number of us will sit down and eat the whole thing.

But it says eight servings or something.

Well, right, but all the numbers in here, if you're concerned about trans fats, you're concerned about cholesterol or sodium or or fiber maybe on the positive side, that's another story, protein, the overall calories is per serving and there's three of those, so you have to kind of do the math yourself and realize that's not. Well, I asked the former head of.

The FDA, Food and Drug Administration, I said, why can't you make the labels better? Why can't you actually make them make sense and clear? He says, well, when we try to change them, we get enormous pressure from Congress who's getting enormous pressure from the food industry. and they threaten to shut us down in terms of our funding, which I thought was very revealing. So we have money in politics that's driving policies that are making us sick and fat, and the government's not protecting us.

Yeah, in many ways, the food companies are more powerful than the regulators who are there supposedly to regulate them.

They're often the same people, right? They're often the revolving door of people from industry and government.

They're often that and often with dueling missions, the Department of Agriculture being the best example. I mean, one of its missions is to promote American companies, American products here and overseas as commodities, et cetera. And then a teeny tiny fraction of 1% of their budget goes toward promoting better eating, better nutrition, better health for us. And the Department, you can imagine who sort of wins when push comes to shove.

And there's so many conflicting policies out there. The government really, one of the greatest stories in your book was about cheese. So we were like, everybody get off fat, low fat, low saturated fat. So the government's pushing this message out there at the same time that they're aggressively promoting the overuse of cheese because when you take the fat out of dairy, you're left with some fat to do something with and you turn into cheese. And yet, so they're pushing it on the one hand, It's just a complete contradictory mess.

If only cows had made non-fat milk, which they didn't. So, the fat from the milk was a commodity. They weren't about to throw it away and they could only slough so much of it off on other countries in the world. So, they made cheese and turned cheese from this kind of delightful, tasty treat in and of itself or cheese sandwiches. into an ingredient to kind of increase the mouthfeel. And so suddenly you saw processed cheese made overnight in their factories going into everything in the grocery store, seemingly as a way. And if I did the rough math and basically all of the fat that people took out of their diet from drinking low or non-fat milk snuck back in as a result of these government overseeing programs to increase the consumption of processed cheese as a way of helping the dairy industry.

And they're in cahoots with the dairy industry. So the National Dairy Promotion Research Board works with the Dairy Council. So the government works with the Dairy Council to promote. They had these got milk ads, which actually had to be taken off the air because they were not based in science and they're making health claims that the FTC said were illegal. So this is really where the government gets its hands dirty in a way that is really in bed with industry.

With maybe in some sense sort of a noble thought in the beginning. Look, I mean, It's hard not to be empathetic with dairy farmers, but the fact was they were overproducing and instead of taking that overproduction and throwing it away or something, in fact what they were doing was storing it, all that cheese in caves and realized the cheese was going moldy and they had to start pumping it out into school food programs or et cetera. That's what they did. That was their solution, was to promote you know, more consumption.

And often it wasn't great cheese, right? It was processed cheese. In fact, I love the story about Kraft, we call it American cheese, but it's actually not allowed to be called cheese because it's not 51% cheese. It's called Kraft slices.

Right, right. Well, there's all kinds of euphemisms that they have to use because of the standards and some of the fit- what.

Is the other 49%? 51%.

But some of the, in fact, some of the cheese engineers at Kraft, you know, were, were, you know, in meeting them and tasting cheese are just kind of appalled at, at American processed cheese, which to them is, you know, was not real cheese.

It's not like your heirloom goat cheese from France or something like that.

No, but, but again, it's, it's, it serves this incredibly powerful role in processed food of sort of that providing that mouth feel, texture, allure.

And it's in everything. It's just unbelievable.

Yeah, I was pretty surprised how many-.

It's like everywhere you go, restaurants, fast food places, it's, you know, I have to say, please don't put the cheese on, you know.

And that was by design, by marketing plans overseen by the federal government.

And then they made it easy, right? They graded it, they shredded it, they have all these prepackaged processed cheese to.

Make it super easy to add to everything. cheap, easy, yummy.

When you look at the research you did, you've interviewed over 300 food industry experts, scientists, former employees. You sort of did a little muck raking. And what was the most surprising thing you found that sort of, you went, oh, my goodness, I didn't know that.

And, well, a few things. I, you know, being an investigative reporter, I, I, of course, and behold, and to go after the money. And there was certainly a lot of money to, to look at. But I kind of fell in love with the language that they use when they talk to each other about their efforts to maximize the allure of their products. They talk about, for instance, they don't have to use the word addiction. They talk about making their products craveable.

And the difference is... Snackable.

Snackable. And one of my favorites is, you know, designing more-ish-ness into their products.

But going back to the extraordinary stomach share.

And stomach share. Well, here we can talk about stomach share right here. So I've also brought for you a very orange and blue giant bag. Well, giant bag. This may be one serving for some people, which I'll open up right now to illustrate one of the other kind of language things that really got my attention. They realized that, and I'm going to do this since you didn't volunteer.

I will not eat that orange colored thing that's near the index.

So this orange colored thing about the size of my index finger here, very puffy looking, is going to go into my mouth. And when I press it against the roof of my mouth, it will melt because of that 50% formula I mentioned before and disappear. And what the industry realized is that the signal to the brain when that disappears is that the calories have disappeared as well, right?

So you're eating air.

So you're eating air. Michael, you might as well finish this whole giant bag if you don't mind. And they call that phenomena the vanishing caloric density. It's a fabulous term that in so many ways kind of illustrates their drive to use extraordinary science to make their products.

And you just keep wanting more and more and more. And it's easy to binge on a whole bag of Cheetos, but you're not gonna eat 10 avocados, right?

And Margaret, and they know that, and that was one of the more gripping things to me.

So, that they were doing.

Other surprising thing is that they don't eat their own products. Yes. Especially when they get into health trouble. The former Chief Technical Officer of Kraft used to jog for keeping his health and weight in check. And at one point he blew out his knee and couldn't run anymore. And the very first thing he did was stopped eating some of his favorite products in the grocery store. knowing that he was one of those people who could open up a bag of chips and have to eat the whole thing when he came home after work. He could not eat just a handful of chips. So they themselves know how powerful their products are for many of us.

And what I find fascinating is that they have the capacity to reformulate their products that are somewhat healthier. And a friend of mine, Vani Hari, called the Food Babe, found out that Kraft in the UK was not allowed to have any artificial colors or chemicals or additives. And so they produce products out there that are free of those. But in the United States, they didn't. And she forced them almost unilaterally under a lot of peer pressure and social pressure and social media pressure to have them change their formulation. Right.

There are different levels of salt sugar fat that they add to their products in different countries in the world, depending on sort of habits to people then. And I think that also speaks to the phenomena that the companies, they are responsive to public concern. It's just that their ability now to play a significant role going forward as more and more people are caring about what they're putting in their bodies is really pretty suspect. Because again, these are miracle ingredients that they're using. They can dial back to a certain extent, but at some point their products just kind of fall off a cliff and they're not tasting very good.

We're up against a mega PR campaign too against our health. And I'll just give you the example of Kellogg's. We'll just go on this one. When they came out with their new waffles, there was press up the wazoo. Every single mainstream media outlet reported on the fact that Kellogg's has created this new unicorn mermaid waffles for kids, right? But when my friend who was very famous, you know him too, Jesse Itzler, the husband of Sarah Blakely, one of the billionaire women in this world that owns Spanx, he challenged the CEO of Kellogg's to a $100,000 live 15-minute interview on Instagram. He said he'd give $100,000 to any charity of the CEO of Kellogg's Choice and not a single media report on this. Not one single anything, but you watch the mainstream media report on all sorts of garbage and not interesting news. But this is real news that could affect children's health and a debate or even an interview about these new products that they've created and no one's challenging these companies. And it's just, you know, we're in a really small situation.

You are. Oh, five feet, whatever you are. You know, the other thing about Kellogg I want to ask you about was that they recently announced that they were going to get glyphosate out of their products by 2025. Is that a smoke screen? Is that real? Do they plan on doing it? I don't know.

They announced a lot of things that they say they're going to do, and I haven't seen it done yet. So I'll believe it when I see it for sure. You definitely, and that's another thing. There's this assumption when these companies announce these changes that they're gonna actually go ahead with them. A lot of times they change leadership or they realize that, oh, they'll lose too much money or, oh, people suddenly don't care about this issue anymore because it's not a hot button topic in the media. The glyphosate issue was very hot button topic because of a bunch of different reports that the environmental working group put out about glyphosate in food and, the GMO debate at the government level. But once that those issues became less important or people forgot about them, these companies think they can get away with murder.

One of the things you help us understand is how to read labels and how to be a smart consumer because unless we're paying attention, and I even get duped sometimes, sometimes I'll pick up something and look healthy and I'll forget to turn the ingredient list over and I get home, I'm like, oh, God, this is terrible. Why would I even want to eat this? So how do you, how do you, pay attention to what is important, what should you look for? I mean, if it says natural flavors, that sounds like great, right? It's like healthy, right? But is it really? And, you know, one joke I always tell is that, you know, one of the natural flavors they use is vanilla natural flavor, and that comes from beaver's anal glands. So, I think, you know, we got to be very careful. And also, you know, why should we be wary of fortification of foods?

Yeah, all great questions. So, in the first, first 55 pages of Food Babe Kitchen, I actually show you how to read labels, take you through every grocery store aisle so that you can stock your kitchen like a Food Babe. And everything from how do you prepare your foods to how you warm them up and everything is in this book at the beginning. And then, you know, of course, a hundred plus recipes with color photos for each one. So just so excited to have this book out and so happy. I know you've written many cookbooks, Mark, and this is my first one. So it's the first of many, though, because I've definitely got more recipes than me. But I think what's really important about reading labels is that there's this kind of three question detox that I talk about at the end of Feeding youg Lies. And this is kind of how you start the process of really training your mind to eat real food. You start with the question the first question, what are the ingredients? So you have to know kind of everything that you're eating. And so if you sit down for a meal and you don't know the ingredients, stop eating that meal and find out. And once you read the ingredients and look at them, do you understand them all? Are they real food? Are they, you know, is it an apple, cinnamon, and sea salt, or is it TBHQ and blue number one. TBHQ, by the way, is a very popular synthetic preservative that they use in very popular products. Reese's Peanut Butter Cups comes to mind.

Oh, no, I used to love those.

Oh, yeah.

And.

This is actually an ingredient that negatively affects your T-cells in your bodies and promotes allergies. So, if you have an allergic just an allergy to anything. It can just increase your immune response to that allergy and you can have a very adverse reaction. And if you eat a lot of foods with this, it's been linked to vision disturbances, stomach cancer, behavioral problems in children, all sorts of things. And this is a preservative that's in a lot of things. But, you know, when you read that on a label, TBHQ, you have to ask yourself, what is that? Right? You know, and so that comes That leads you to the second question, which is, are these ingredients nutritious? Is TBHQ nutritious?

Hell no.

Hell no, right? And so then you start to realize, why am I eating these non-nutritious ingredients? And maybe I need to choose something different. And then the third question you ask yourself is, where do these ingredients come from? Are they made in a laboratory, in a chemical factory? And in the case of natural flavors that you mentioned, yes, they are. People see the word natural and think it's coming from nature. Yeah, it starts in nature, but the way they manipulate, for example, a strawberry in a laboratory, or they can manipulate some other substance that comes from nature and make it act like a strawberry or taste like a strawberry or create the 1,000,000th best part taste of something so that they can put it in a product that normally would not taste good on the shelf that lasts there for, you know, nine to 12 months, they could put it in a product and it would taste like a real strawberry even though it has no real strawberries in it. And that's what natural flavoring is. And so it tricks your brain into thinking you're eating real food when you're not, but your body is still wondering where the nutrition from that strawberry is coming from. So you start to crave more than you should. And so natural flavors are one of the most evil ingredients, I believe, in our food supply because they trick your brain and they hijack your taste buds and they continue that craving so you eat more than you should. And with obesity, heart disease, and diabetes as our biggest issue in this country and cancer, we have to take control of our taste buds. And the only way to do that is not to allow the food industry to control them. And so removing natural flavors from your diet is the number one thing, I think. Even though there's many more chemicals that are much more harmful to you, almost 99% of the products on product shelves at the grocery store have natural flavor. So if you avoid natural flavor, you avoid many of those. And it's actually one of the reasons I started my company, Truvani. I just want to mention because there are so many supplement companies out there, protein powder companies and supplement companies that use these natural flavors. And I wanted to create a line of products that were made from real food and non-synthetic substances. It didn't trick your brain into craving a flavor more than it should. I want people to be able to turn off their normal mechanism to crave food. It's so important. And it's one of the reasons why.

We'Re doing what we're doing at True Food. I mean, that's so important what you're saying is because these chemicals and some of these things are not put in there, necessarily as a preservative, but they're put in there deliberately to hijack our brain to make us eat more, crave more, want more. And one of those is MSG, which is got 50 different names or more. So it's hidden. And it doesn't say necessarily MSG or monosodium glutamate because people are, are hip to that. They change the name like hydrolyzed yeast protein or extract. And, and that actually is what's used in research to fatten up rats or mice to study obesity. So they give them MSG as a way to increase their appetite, make them eat more and get fat. and I remember once I was talking to a nutritionist who lived in Samoa, which has the most obese population in the entire world, and most of them are diabetic. And she said, for breakfast, they had ramen noodles, sugar, they had MSG. Yeah, and they, well, they put Kool-Aid powder on it, which has all these artificial colors, and they put MSG powder on it. so it's extraordinary. That's their breakfast, basically Kool-Aid, MSG and ramen noodles. And that's why they're so obese because they can't stop eating. And I think your book really points out a lot of these chemicals and goes through details about which ones you should pay attention to, what they are, what they're doing to our biology, in fact, where they're banned in other countries and why do we have them here. It's really powerful. And I encourage you to check it out because there's very other, a few other places where you can get this kind of information that tells you exactly what you should be looking for. Even my books, I don't go into as much detail because, you know, Vani's an expert on this food additive thing and she's been taking down large companies based on her work. And I think it's pretty exciting. So one of the things besides the companies I think we want to talk about is the government and how the government affects our food choices. And they have different programs that they do this with that we think are, you know, government programs for the public good. but they're actually helping companies not improve public health, but private profit. And one of these programs is called a checkoff program. Can you talk about that? Because you write about it in your book and it was very enlightening to read about.

Yeah, absolutely. So, in Feeding youg Lies, I kind of go off all of the different phases of things that the government has done in terms of trying to.

Help.

You know, in terms of, you know, when we look at the root cause, and you know this, Mark, so the root cause of a lot of our issues is because of where our subsidies and our agriculture producers are basically being given subsidies so that they produce really cheap commodities for America. And those cheap commodities like corn and soy are what make up the majority of processed foods. And so these checkoff programs actually give the corn and soy and canola industries power in the government to make decisions, whether it's something that makes a decision on my plate, which the government creates to kind of give guidelines to children and schools on how their plate should look at the end of the day. If dairy should be on there or not be on there, how much of grain should be on there versus not be on there. And you've written a lot about in your detox books and other books about how some of these ingredients, the things that we make the most of corn and soy have been very detrimental to our health because not only the glyphosate that's sprayed on majority of those crops that is linked to cancer, but also the fact that it imbalances your omega-3 to omega-6 fatty acid ratio in your body.

And for people to understand, the corn and soy, you can eat corn on the cob and soybeans, that's not the problem. But about 1% of the stuff grown actually is eaten as the whole food. Most of it's turned into industrial products, food products, commercial products, gasoline. I mean, it's just an enormous problem in terms of our government strategy. So keep going and tell us about the checkoff program.

Yeah, so we have, and then this also happens within the meat industry, too. And so there's so many different abuses in terms of the, the different checkoff programs. And it all stems from this one organization within the government. It's the government accountability office, or it's called the GAO, the USDA GAO. And it basically oversights all of these checkoff programs where they allow these food companies to continue to market food to us even though it's unhealthy.

Yeah. So think about it. So people kind of make sense of it. Programs like, what's for dinner or, you know, pork the other white meat. Yeah, got milk. These are all not industry funded programs. These are programs that are funded in collaboration with the government. So the government is actually pushing these products into the marketplace through advertising and marketing. What the money is supposed to do is further research and understanding, not be marketing dollars. to pay for ads that make these companies billions of dollars. So when Got Milk ad was out there, it was so popular, they had every celebrity in it, everybody had the white mustache, they had all these health claims, you know, it's going to make stronger bones, it's going to be great for sports performance, it's going to do this, it's going to do that, help you lose weight. And what happened was another branch of the government started paying attention to this, the Federal Trade Commission, which regulates truth in advertising, and they were like, hey guys, there's no data to back up what you're saying in these ads. You've got to stop these ads. That's why you don't see Got Milk ads anymore because basically they went, Got proof and there was no proof.

Yeah, exactly. And I'm thinking of another one, you know, the whole grain, the grain society too was doing that a while with, you know, by saying whole grain was heart healthy.

Yeah. Whole grain cookie crisp cereal. My favorite is the whole grain cookie crisp cereal with like, you know, seven teaspoons of sugar or something like that. It's like, it's ridiculous.

I hope you enjoyed today's episode. One of the best ways you can support this podcast is by leaving us a rating and review below. Until next time, thanks for tuning in.

Hey, everybody, it's Dr. Hyman. Thanks for tuning into the Doctor's pharmacy. I hope you're loving this podcast. It's one of my favorite things to do and introducing you all the experts that I know and I love and that I've learned so much from. And I want to tell you about something else I'm doing, which is called Mark's Picks. It's my weekly newsletter. And in it, I share my favorite stuff from foods to supplements to gadgets to tools to enhance your health. It's all the cool stuff that I use and that my team uses to optimize and enhance our health. And I'd love you to sign up for the weekly newsletter. I'll only send it to you once a week on Fridays, nothing else, I promise. And all you have to do is go to drhyman.com/picks to sign up. That's drhyman.com/picks, P-I-C-K-S, and sign up for the newsletter and I'll share with you my favorite stuff that I use to enhance my health and get healthier and better and live younger longer.

Just a reminder that this podcast is for educational purposes only. this podcast is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical professional. This podcast is provided on the understanding that it does not constitute medical or other professional advice or services. If you're looking for help in your journey, seek out a qualified medical practitioner. If you're looking for a functional medicine practitioner, you can visit ifm.org and search their find a practitioner database. It's important that you have someone in your corner who's trained, who's a licensed.

Healthcare practitioner, and can help you make.

Changes, especially when it comes to your health.

Don't forget, there's a way to listen completely ad free with Hyman plus on Apple podcasts. You can enjoy every episode without any breaks. Just open Apple podcasts and tap try free to start your seven day free trial.