Only A Few Companies Control Our Entire Food System

Coming up on this episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy. Only 1% of corn grown in America is actually eaten by human beings as actual corn. The rest is for animal feed, biofuels, a high fructose corn syrup for your sugary soda. Welcome to the Doctor's Pharmacy. I'm Dr. Mark Hyman and that's Pharmacy with an F-A-R-M-A-C-Y, a place for conversations that matter. I just want to take a little bit of a journey here on a couple of foods we eat and talk about the invisible truth behind the food we eat. So let's take a journey with an average burger, can of soda story. Starts in Iowa, maybe Brazil goes all the way to your drive-through window where it's handed over for consumption. First, you need this stuff that feeds conventional cows that is grown in these controlled feeding or confined feeding operations. Typically consists of corn and soy grown in monocrop mega farms. And these mega farms or CAFOs, these confined animal feeding operations, are causing major issues. Let's look at what's actually happening when you eat that conventionally raised burger. First, the GMO seeds are sold by Big Ag monopolies to farmers. They have to buy them. And there's about four big companies: Bayer Monsanto, which is now one company, ChemChina Syngenta, DowDuPont, one company, I think they split up, and BASF control most of the seeds in the world, including 60% of vegetable seeds. Now these companies then burden the farmers with less choice, higher prices, making farmers dependent on their seeds, but not only the seeds, the chemicals like pesticides, herbicides that are actually used on those special seeds because they're resistant to these pesticides and herbicides. It's a great business model. You basically sell the farmers the seeds and then you sell them the chemicals that are used on the seeds. Now, the consequence of this consolidation of seed production around the world from hundreds of companies to just a few that control most of the seeds in the world that are used to produce our food, means we have less food biodiversity, right? We've lost 90% of our plant species from agriculture and half our livestock species. And we've lost resiliency in the system, which threatens our food security. If you had robust regenerative farms that have multiple types of food grown, animals grown, its whole ecosystem, it's much more resilient if something breaks down. if you have something that affects the corn or the soy, we're done, like it happened to the farmers. When there was the enormous floods and storms that destroyed the farmland in the Midwest, there was no recovering from that. In fact, President Trump had to give $20 billion in additional support to farmers because of the damage resulting from the weather patterns caused by climate change, which in a strange ironic way is actually caused by the agricultural system we have. So the very system that grows our food is also being damaged by the food we grow, causing climate change which makes it harder to grow the food and it's just this horrible vicious cycle. Now let's talk about corn which is probably the most abundant crop grown in America. Only 1% of corn grown in America is actually eaten by human beings as actual corn. The rest is for animal feed, biofuels, high fructose corn syrup for your sugary soda, food starch, food additives for your hamburger bun. Now how these crops are grown causes all these other consequences that have immeasurable costs, the loss of our soil. I mean we're farming in a way that causes soil erosion that depletes the organic matter in the soil, which we'll talk about how important that is to perversion climate change. We're destroying rainforests by cutting them down to grow food for animals or for raising cattle. The climate change cost of the way we grow agriculture is enormous. I mean, in fact, we're losing so much soil that we lose 12 million hectares of land, which is basically the size of North Korea, every year to desert. So aside from destroying our soils, we're also depleting our freshwater resources because 70% of the world's freshwater is used for agriculture. And most of that is used for growing food for animals rather than humans. have animals that are supposed to be eating grass and grown on rangelands and drinking rainwater, not eating corn and soy that are irrigated by fresh water from precious aquifers. We're seeing tremendous depletions. I mean, we in America are depleting our Ogallala aquifer in the Midwest, which supplies most of the irrigation for the farmland in the Midwest. We're depleting it about 1.3 trillion gallons faster than can be replenished by rainfall. It's just completely unsustainable and we're seeing real issues around water scarcity and water shortages around the world which need to be addressed. We saw the drought in California that affected us here in America. These are all caused by how we grow food. If you grow food in depleted soils, the soil can't hold water, the water runs off, it goes in rivers and streams, or it just floods the fields like it did in the Midwest last year. And you end up having real crisis because you can't actually hold water in the soil. When you deplete the soil, you need more water to irrigate. and when you actually have organic matter in the soil, 1% organic matter in an acre of land can hold 27,000 gallons of water. And if you have, you know, 5-10% organic matter, you can actually hold hundreds of thousands of gallons per acre of water that will protect the soil, that will protect the plants from drought, will cause more resilience. You don't need all those chemicals and things. And the cost of these, are huge. What is the cost of losing our fresh water supplies? What is the cost of depleting our soil? And of course, not to mention when we farm the way we do, it's driving so much climate change. It's increasing CO2 in the atmosphere. It's increasing the nitrous oxide, which is 300 times more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide because of use of nitrogen fertilizers. Factory farming of animals leads to increased methane production without any ability to sequester it. So we're seeing all these consequences of climate change because of how we grow food as well. And what is the price of the cost of climate change? It's literally trillions of dollars that it's gonna cost our global economy to deal with the consequences of climate change, the effect on natural disasters, the effect on climate refugees, the destabilization of political environments, the economic burden of all. I mean, it's staggering when you think about it. I know I don't wanna be depressing here, but I think it's important to understand these consequences because we can do something about it. We actually can change the way we grow food. We can change the system, and unless we identify and name what the issues are, we're not going to be effective at doing that. So what else happens? Well, when you increase CO2 in the atmosphere because of the way we farm, among other things, fossil fuels, you're acidifying the oceans. Now, the oceans are the biggest carbon sink. Guess what? When the oceans acidify because of the carbon dioxide, and when they heat up, it changes the ability ocean life to survive. And one of the most important things is phytoplankton, which are tiny microscopic organisms at the bottom of the food chain. And when we acidify the oceans, they die. And then everything up the food chain doesn't survive. And not only that, they produce 50% of our oxygen. So what is the price tag of losing 50% of our oxygen on Earth? I think it's a lot. Of course, and then you have not only all these other issues related to the soil, the water, the acidification of the oceans, climate change, you also have nitrogen issues. So nitrogen runoff from the fertilizer, we use 200 million tons of nitrogen fertilizer, which is produced by a high energy intensive process that requires natural gas. Most of it comes from fracking, which releases tons of methane. I mean, it's not a carbon neutral solution to create nitrogen fertilizer. It's a massive energy intensive process. That fertilizer not only causes damage from the use of fossil fuels to make the fertilizer, but it also drives huge amounts of climate change through the release of nitrous oxide into the environment, which is hundreds of times more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. And if that weren't enough, when the nitrogen runs off into the lakes and rivers, streams and goes in the oceans, it causes immeasurable damage because it basically causes these algal blooms. Remember how Lake Erie was dying because of your hamburger? Because it was suffocated by these algal blooms that killed the fish, created a dead zone in the lake, and toxic drinking water for the residents. What is the cost of that? And in the Gulf of Mexico, it kills 212,000 metric tons of fish every year because the nitrogen runs off the farms, goes into the rivers, goes into the Gulf of Mexico, creates a dead zone the size of New Jersey where all the oxygen is sucked out, all the ocean life dies, and you're left with this huge basically morgue of fish floating around in the Gulf of Mexico. And there are 400 dead zones like this around the world that supply food for half a billion people on the planet, and it's the size of Europe. So what is the cost of that? I don't know, it's a lot. It's more than my annual salary for sure. Now, these are just some of the side effects of the consequences. There are others too. What about the pesticide poisoning of farm workers? what about the pesticide cost to the death of birds and insects and in biodiversity? What about living near a CAFO and having to clean up the manure? Remember that Hurricane North Carolina that caused a huge flooding of the hog and chicken farms down there that polluted all the neighboring environments? Who wants to live near a stinky polluted hog or chicken or beef operation? I mean, the property values go down. So how do you measure that? There's just so many costs. And then fast food employees, I mean, food workers are the biggest, food and farm workers are the biggest sector of employees in America, about 20 million people. They don't make much money. They're often having to use things like Medicaid and health care that's paid for by the state. They're needing food stamps or SNAP to eat. So we're basically subsidizing them with our tips, with our government subsidies through health care, through food stamps. What about antibiotic use? Antibiotic use is used to create growth in animals also to prevent infection. And it's required because they're overcrowding these animals in terrible confined feeding operations. So that's a big problem. So not only the fact that we use basically of our 32 million pounds of antibiotics, about 24 million are used for animals for growth or prevention of infection. But the real issue is the resulting antibiotic resistance. Now 700,000 people die around the world every year at a cost of estimated trillions of dollars because of antibiotic resistance, and a large part of that is due to the antibiotic resistance that comes from overuse of antibiotics in animal feeding operations. So maybe we should have a very different price tag on the food you buy. Maybe if the real cost of food in our food system was actually built into the price you paid, maybe that factory farm burger should cost maybe $1,000 a pound. And maybe your soda should cost $100 a can because of the way we grow corn and the consequences of that. Now, just in terms of policy change, we can do so much around this stuff. We can support regenerative agriculture. We can stop the allowing of marketing of junk food to kids. We can incorporate the true cost of food into the price we pay at the checkout counter. One of the simplest things we can do is stop food waste. Everybody's for it. Nobody's against it. Nobody thinks it's a bad idea. It's not a partisan issue. Nobody's for throwing away 40% of our food, which is basically what we do now in the field and transportation, the retail environment, and restaurants and food service companies and our homes. And it's all sent to landfills. We're at off-gases, and if it were a country, it would be the third largest emitter of greenhouse gases after the US and China. You know, it's crazy. far more than enough food to feed every man, woman, child in the world that's hungry today. Six times over. That's over 800 million people six times over. Now, there are solutions for this. And cities like San Francisco are mandated composting. France, it's actually mandated to actually have composting. You go to jail if you don't do it. And it's a huge issue. Think of all the land that we use to grow the food that we throw out. It's the size of China. Now there's another cost too, besides just food waste and all these other consequences that we've talked about. Climate change is a huge cost to climate change. I mean just the extreme weather events in 2017, there were 712 extreme weather events resulted in $326 billion in economic losses, which was triple the economic losses from just a year earlier. Heat waves have resulted in people not being able to work because it's too hot, has resulted in 153 billion hours of labor loss because it was too hot to work, right? And those higher Cold temperatures increase disease like cholera and malaria and dengue fever, which worsens people's health. And if you're sick with heart disease or diabetes or lung issues, again, heat really damages your health and makes the cost of health care far much more. And of course, as I mentioned, the hotter the climate is, the harder it is to grow food, creating a vicious cycle, which is a huge cost. 73% of the members of the Senate Committee on Agriculture and 90% of the House Agricultural Committee received donations from Monsanto, which is now owned by Bayer and Syngenta. Now, if you add on all the other food and ag companies, basically 100% of the members would have received donations. Now, you can say, well, maybe that's not going to influence what they're doing, but it clearly plays a role. Now, I just want to make one thing really clear. I don't think that the current situation was created by bad intentions. I think a lot of the current system we have was created by good intentions: increased productivity, better seeds, trying to feed the world. A lot of good things that happened as a result of the wave of industrial agriculture that happened after World War II. I mean, food stamps were designed to be a good thing, right? They were helping prevent food insecurity, which they're good at doing, but they're not focusing on nutrition, which they also should do. you know, agricultural policies protected farmers from weather and price fluctuations and they helped them produce more crops, which is all great. But now those same practices cause climate change, deplete global water resources and drive environmental destruction and produce really cheap ingredients that are turned into processed food that promotes disease. This is not a good situation, but it's not necessarily starting as a bad thing. Fertilizers were great because they help increase crop yields and help farmers around the world produce more food. We actually had a lot of good things happen. Even the food production we have has been good to help with hunger around the world, but it's created foods that are paradoxically causing disease. And this has led to this incredibly catastrophic juggernaut of economic bird. Throughout my book, Food Fix, I go through what the issues are, how to fix them, what the ideas exist that are there now, and how we actually fix the problem. We need to go from the grassroots, we need to go from the top down, we need to go every which direction, but we can use the power of our forks and our collective behaviors to move in the right direction. And that's what I wrote Food Fix to do, was to help us think about the ways in which citizens, businesses, policymakers can solve this biggest problem we face today, our broken food system and its consequences. So I hope you've enjoyed this podcast. And if you like this podcast, please share with your friends and family on social media. Please leave a comment. I'd love to hear from you and your thoughts about this. And I hope this inspired you to think differently a little bit. We'll see you next week on the Doctor's Pharmacy. Don't forget, there's a way to listen completely ad free. 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