Special Episode: Mark Hyman on Feel Better, Live More with Dr. Rangan Chatterjee - Why We Need To Fix Our Food System

Hi everyone, this is Kaya Perowne, one of the producers of the Doctors Pharmacy podcast. This week we're going to be sharing some interviews that Dr. Hyman recently did for his new book, Food Fix. Dr. Hyman was recently interviewed by Dr. Rangan Chatterjee about the American food system. We thought this interview was so great.

That we wanted to share it with you. Hope you enjoy it. We talk about climate change. People go, I get climate change, but nobody's talking about the impact of the food system. not just on chronic disease and the economy and our kids brains and mental health, even violence, you know, we know is linked to bad food and prisons. Violent prisoners can reduce violent crime in prisons by 56% just by eating a healthy diet. But we also know that it's destroying our environment, our climate, that food, the food system is the number one cause of climate change. People don't get that. People don't understand that when you put it all together, whether it's deforestation, soil erosion, factory farming, whether it's food waste, processing, distribution, refrigeration of food. All that together makes the food system the number one cause of climate change.

Hi, my name is Rangan Chatterjee, GP, television presenter and author of the best-selling.

Books, the Stress Solution and the Four Pillar Plan. I believe that all of us have.

The ability to feel better than we currently do, but getting healthy has become far too complicated.

With this podcast, I aim to simplify it.

I'm going to be having conversations with some of the most interesting and exciting people both within as well as outside.

The health space to hopefully inspire you.

As well as empower you with simple tips that you can put into practice immediately to transform the way that you feel.

I believe that when we are healthier.

We are happier because when we feel better, we live more. Hello and welcome back to episode 98 of my Feel Better Live More podcast. My name is It's Rangan Chatterjee and I am your host. As a practicing doctor, one of the commonest things I see in clinic is people complaining of low energy. Now, of course there can be many different reasons for this, some of which may require medical help, but most of the reasons actually can be fixed with small changes to our lifestyle. Now, last year I created a series of six free videos to help you with this, and thousands of you have watched them so far and found them really, really useful. If this is something that you or someone else close to you would benefit from watching, simply go to www.drchatterjee.com/energy and follow the instructions. Now, the topic of today's conversation is food. Is it possible to create a food system that promotes health and not disease? One that regenerates ecosystems, reverses climate change, and ensures that no one, least of all the poorest in society, is endangered. My guest on this week's podcast believes that it is. He is Dr. Mark Hyman, medical doctor and author of an incredible 12 New York Times best selling books. Mark and I talk about everything from how processed food is addicted by design to the powerful role good nutrition from real food could have in hospitals, schools and prisons. We also discuss why soil depletion from intensive farming is one of the biggest drivers of climate change and why that vegan burger may not not be the most environmentally friendly option. Despite the serious subject matter of this conversation, I'm sure you'll come away feeling hopeful. Mark doesn't simply highlight the problems that we're facing. He identifies the fix, providing practical and positive solutions. It's a call to action that we can all do our bit to answer. Now, on to today's conversation.

Mark, welcome to the Feel Better Live More podcast.

Well, I definitely want to feel better and I want to live so I'm so happy to be on this podcast.

Well, it's putting concepts to people. We're here in Santa Monica in California. I'm over here doing some promotion for my book, the Stress Solution. But today we're going to talk a lot about your work and in particular, an issue which you've gone into in a very deep way in your new book, Food Fix. And that's something I don't think you've covered before in previous books. So can you tell me what is Food Fix about? And What was your drive to write it?

Well, the title of the book is Food Fix: How to Save Our Health, Our Economy, Our Communities, and Our Planet One Bite at a Time. And the reason I wrote this book, it's about the social and political and bigger context of the food system and how it's driving all the things that are wrong with society today, whether it's chronic disease, our economic burden of chronic disease, whether it's social injustice or climate change or mental illness or environmental destruction, all these things are connected to food, even challenges with our kids' education and national security, because we can't actually recruit enough healthy people to join the military in the United States, because 70% are rejected. So I'm thinking to myself, how are these things connected? And as a functional medicine doctor, my job has always been to think about the root cause. So for the last 30 years, I've been treating thousands of patients in my office, one by one, seeing the power of food to change their health, to get rid of the bad food and put in the good food, and remarkable transformations happen. But then I began to ask myself, like, why am I just working on this end of the problem? I'm just waiting for people to come to my office who are sick from all this bad food. The question you know, rose in my head, which is, why? Why do we have all this bad food? And then I began to realize, well, we have a $15 trillion food system. It's the biggest industry on the planet. It's controlled by a few dozen companies and CEOs that control the big food companies and fast food and processed food companies, the agriculture and agrochemical companies, the seed, the fertilizer companies. And I began to say, well, If these companies are controlling the food that's grown and produced, then why do we have the food system we do? Why do we have the food that we're producing? And then it occurred to me, well, it's our policies. It's the policies that drive the food system and what food is grown and produced and sold, distributed, all of that is determined by the government's policies around food and agriculture. So, I began to think about as a doctor, if I'm really going to help my patients, I have to go upstream to think about these problems. I can't just wait until they show up in my office with diabetes, right? How do they get diabetes? It wasn't bad luck. It was a toxic nutritional wasteland that we all live in where it's easier to find a Pop-Tart than a peach, right? So, I began to think deeply about this and I began to research it and think about it and, well, why is this going on? And what's the problem? And I realized that the food industry is driving so many of our global crises. Let's just go through them because they're all connected. And the good news is that there are solutions. So there's a lot of bad news, but there's also a lot of good news in terms of how we can as citizens, as businesses, as philanthropists, as policymakers, change the system we have. And we think, oh, wow, we have this giant food system. It's so difficult, it's so big, it's so embedded. It's the way we do things. But the truth is that American society was founded on slavery. and an agricultural system that depended on slavery, that changed. It seemed impossible to change. I mean, the abolitionists working at the turn of the 1800s probably couldn't imagine a world without it, but they still fought for what was right. And I think we are in that same situation. We have a very destructive food system. So what does it do? One, it produces massive amounts of chronic disease. We know that 11 million people die every single year from eating bad food and not eating enough good food. And I think that's an underestimate. And it's the number one killer on the planet, more than smoking, more than lack of exercise, more than accidents, guns, violence, more than anything else. It's the number one cause of disease. I mean, think about it. If Ebola or Zika was killing 11 million people a year, don't you think there'd be a massive global collective effort to change that. Scientists, policymakers, businesses, everybody would be on board to solve these terrible epidemics. But we have it right in front of us and nobody's dealing with it.

So why is that, Mark? Because the stats you've just mentioned are mind-blowing. I hope by now most listeners to this podcast are aware that actually food is not important just for our physical health, but our minds, our emotional health. There's so many different components of our health. But why are we not giving it the attention societally that we are, you know, on an individual level? Because you have spent your career writing, you know, bestseller after bestseller, trying to empower people to make better food choices, more helpful food choices for them. You've spent your career seeing patients one-on-one and helping them on an individual level change their food choices and see a consequent improvement in their health.

That's true.

So you've seen that, but are you, Or have you found, like I have found, that sometimes you give the best advice that you possibly can to the patient in front of you, yet they then go out into a food landscape where they simply cannot, or it is too challenging to make those choices that you and I would like them to make.

It's true. I mean, we live in a food system where it's super easy to make the wrong choice. super hard to make the right choice. We're in America, 23 million Americans live in a food desert where they can't find a vegetable. I met a woman from Cleveland who lived in the projects. She said her mother wanted to feed her healthy food. She had to literally take four buses on a two-hour round trip to just buy some vegetables for her family. That's the world we live in. We live in a world where 80% of the food in grocery stores is processed and contains sugar. where the food we're eating is all commodities. 60% of the food we eat is basically derived from a number of few products, wheat, corn and soy, which is basically flour, sugar and refined oils that are turned into all varieties of processed food. Basically, if you cover the front of the package, you couldn't tell what's in the box if it's a pizza or a corn dog because it's all the same nonsense. And so we have a very tough time for people to change. And that's why I realize it's not people's fault when they're advertised food that is addictive, when the food's designed to be biologically hijacking their brain chemistry and their metabolism, when we know the science is so clear on this and yet we do nothing about it. In America, we have one in two people with a chronic disease and that's increasing dramatically. We have children 40% overweight, 70% of Americans overweight, and increasingly across the globe, we're seeing the same thing as the food industry is exporting its toxic products across the globe. We're seeing people suffering mental illness, we're seeing people driven, which is driven in part by the food we're eating. And we're still trying to solve the problem in the doctor's office. And the costs are staggering. I mean, just in America alone over the next 35 years, the cost of chronic illness, both direct and indirect costs, is $95 trillion. Let me just put that in perspective. That's $3.1 trillion a year and the entire federal tax revenue, The amount that the government collects from its citizens is 3.8 million. So it's almost the entire federal budget that's needed to pay for climate change.

I'm glad you put that in context because these figures, they're so big, they're so staggering that for many of us, we don't even know what that means.

What is 1 trillion, 2 trillion, 3 trillion? What does that mean? Let me tell you, a trillion, if you take $95 trillion and you stack them in dollar bills up into the sky, it would reach 6.4 billion miles. Now, the New Horizon spaceship, has been traveling for 13 years to get past Pluto at 36,000 miles an hour, and it's only gone 4 billion miles. So can you imagine how much money that is? It's basically the entire economy of the entire world.

And I guess that is what you were saying at the start, that food is, yes, it's about health, but you're making the case that it's so much more than that. It's about politics, it's about the economy, it's about the environment, it's about climate change. All of these things come from food, which is very powerful.

If we figured out how to fix this money thing, we'd have money for free education for everybody on the planet, for free healthcare, for social services for the needy among us. We'd be able to create a very vibrant economy and society rather than being burdened by this food caused epidemic of chronic disease.

It's kind of as if on one level, we've got this the wrong way round. We're accepting the food system the way it is and saying, okay, that's the food system. We need to pour more money into this system because it's not working. You know, in the UK, the National Health Service, we need to pour more money into the National Health Service. But actually, it looks so, you know, we're both interested in against the root cause of our patients problems. But actually, the root cause of many a society's problems, from what you're saying- Also food.

Is food.

Yeah, let's go into it. So we've got the chronic disease epidemic, we've got the economic burden, Let's talk about some of the social justice issues around this.

Yeah, well, I think what will tie in really nicely there is something you said, which is, I realised that for many of my patients, it's not their fault. Now, I think that was really poignant because when people talk about healthy food choices, a lot of people on social media, a lot of people in the media still think it is the person's fault. They know what they should be doing. They're simply not following the advice. They need more willpower. They need to get a grip of their life. It's not good enough. But I guess what you're saying is it's not their fault. Why do so many people think it is their fault? And why do you think it's not their fault?

Well, that's a great question. So, the reason people think it's their fault is because we've been told by doctors, nutritionists, our governments, and of course, the food industry, that all calories are the same. That, calories in, calories out, exercise more, eat less, you'll lose weight. And if you don't do it, it's your fault that all calories are the same. It's just about moderation. And that, you know, 20 ounce soda with 250 calories is exactly the same as eight and a half cups of broccoli with 250 calories that, I mean, even a five-year-old can get. That's ridiculous. But that's exactly the message out there. And when all calories are the same, then, you know, there's a sense of, well, just, you know, control yourself. Right? Control yourself. It's your fault. But the truth is, we know from the science that not all calories are the same. And ultra-processed food calories affect the body, the brain and metabolism very differently.

So what are ultra-processed foods for people who are listening to this?

It's pretty much everything in the supermarket in the Middle Isles. It's packaged food. It's refined foods. It's white flour, it's white sugar, it's high fructose corn syrup, trans fats, all the food additives and chemicals that are in food.

When you buy a package of processed.

Food, it's basically what's made by the food industry. It's the opposite of whole foods, right? Yes. I make it really simple. When I teach in churches, I say, you know, it's really simple to know what to eat. Leave the food that man made, eat the food that God made. Did God make a Twinkie? No. Did God make an avocado?

Yeah.

Does it have an ingredient list? It's probably not good to eat. Now, of course, there are some foods that are simple ingredient lists. There's sardines, olive oil and salt, or tomatoes, water and salt, or, you know, there's stuff that you can buy that's canned or packaged that is real food. But most of them are not. And what's true, and this is validated with over 300 interviews with food industry insiders, whistleblowers, food scientists, it was done by Michael Moss. These foods are designed to be biologically addictive. They have craving and experts that work in taste institutes to create the bliss point of food, the quote bliss point of food designed to create what they call heavy users. These are their internal terms that they use. within the food industry, they know actually how to create that perfect mouthfeel, that perfect brain hook where your brain is literally addicted. So it's like if I said to a patient, listen, I want you to hold your breath underwater for 10 minutes. I'm gonna give you $5 million. Darn right, they're gonna wanna do that, but they won't be able to do that.

Right?

And it's the same thing when we're eating these foods, they alter our brain chemistry and our hormones in a way that affects our ability to control our behavior. And if you shut that off, it changes everything. So, I'll just tell you a quick story about this woman, Janice, who came to our center, the Center for Functional Medicine at Cleveland, and joined one of our groups. And she was 66. She had type 2 diabetes. She had been on insulin for 10 years. She had a body mass index of 43, which is very overweight. 25 or less is normal. 30 is obese. She was 43. She had high blood pressure, heart failure, kidneys were starting to fail, her liver was starting to fail, and she was on a boatload of medications, blood thinners, blood pressure medications, cholesterol meds, diuretics, you name it, she was on it. And her whole life, I mean, she was a very educated woman, but her whole life she had never learned about food. She grew up in a home that all they ate was packaged and processed food. She grew up in a home where they didn't cook, and she was just focused on her career and her life and was doing really great things, but was really on her way out. and we just literally put her on a whole foods anti-inflammatory detoxifying diet, basically similar to the 10-day detox diet, the book that I wrote, which is very low in starch and sugar. Within three days, she was off her insulin. In three months, she was off all her medications. Her blood sugar was normal. Her A1C went from 11 to five and a half, which, as a doctor, you know, is extremely dramatic.

And I mean, that, to put in context to people listening, that's from being a very, very poorly controlled type two diabetic. to not actually going into the pre-diabetic range, actually into the normal range.

And then her heart failure, which by the way, heart failure never reverses in conventional medicine. You can manage it with medications. Her ejection fraction was 35%. If it's under 30, you're headed towards a heart transplant. And it went up to 50 after her three months. And her kidney failure, she was on her way to dialysis, reversed just using the power of food. and putting her in a group setting where she was given support and education and knowledge.

Wow. That is so inspiring.

And she lost over the course of a year £116 and now has her life back and is off all medication and saved about $20,000 in co-pays for her medication. And I don't know what her insurance company was paying.

Yeah. I mean, Mark, you have got countless stories like that because you have been talking about using food as medicine. for years now. I remember before I even got into this way of thinking, I was reading blogs that you'd been writing and thinking, wow, this is incredible. I wonder if that will work if I try that. You can see how impassioned you are talking about this. But you mentioned the addictive qualities of foods. I think it reminds me of a conversation I had recently on the podcast with Professor Felice Jacka. You may not know her, but you'll be familiar with her work. She was in charge of the first randomized controlled trial, Smiles trial that was done in Australia to look at whether diet can, you know, can improve depression. Yeah, and she showed the first exactly 67 patients, so she showed that the group who changed their diet to a modified Mediterranean diet after 12 weeks had above a 30% remission rate compared to only 8% in the control group, which was social supports. And when I spoke to her on my podcast, I also mentioned to her, that my cousin, who's in his late 20s, he's now working, he drives to work every day in his car. And he says when he's driving home after a busy day's work, there is one roundabout in particular where there is a KFC. And he says, I can smell the food every time I go through that roundabout, and I can't always resist. I will often succumb to that smell.

So, he put his windows up in the recirculation button on his car so he doesn't get the smell.

But what's interesting is that you mentioned the taste of these foods is formulated in such a way that they almost have that sort of addictive quality to them.

Not almost actually measurable on brain scans looking at the part of the brain that's affected just like heroin or cocaine. It's not an emotional addiction, it's a biological addiction.

Wow. Do you know much about the smell of these foods, whether it can do similar things?

I bet it can. I mean, I've been succumbing and sometimes, like, ones that are very stressful, cold trip and I was coming back from somewhere and I was coming back from somewhere and it was, I was, my flame was delayed and I was gonna eat at two in the morning and I'd see patients the next day and I felt sorry for myself and there was a Cinnabon stand and they blow the, like, I think they have a fan where they blow the, yeah. Smell towards you and I just went.

And had a Cinnabon. But yeah, it was terrible. I felt horrible after. Yeah, but you're just showing that we're all human. We can know as much as we want about the right food choices. Yeah. you clearly know about the right food choices, but even you are susceptible when life gets tough, when you're stressed, when you're tired, if the food environment around you is blowing out that smell, is tempting you with their offerings, ultimately, it's going to be very hard to make those good choices.

And that's why we have to change the food system. That's why this book, Food Fix, is for me such an important part of how I think about the world now. And I think about, yes, it's about obesity and diabetes and chronic disease, but also it's about mental health as you said, and even in our kids, you know, we see our kids not functioning well. One in 10 kids have attention deficit. 40% of our kids in America are overweight in school. We have increasing amounts of performance issues. We have what we call an achievement gap. You know, we're 31st in the world in education, math, and reading and so forth. We're worse than Vietnam. And the reason is because it's affecting our kids' brains and their cognitive function. This is well documented. These kids are nutritionally deficient. And the kids who grew up in poor environments or don't have adequate but high quality nutrition, their brains are 10% smaller, their IQ points seven points lower. We've literally lost millions of IQ points in our children.

You mentioned kids who are growing up in poor environments, so these deprived communities. And we know full well what the research says about people living in areas of lower socioeconomic status. Is the way the food industry is set up, does it unfairly penalize those with the least in society.

So when we look at the social injustice around food, it's massive. You know, when you look at how the food industry targets poor and minorities, it's disproportionate. So they're targeting them with more ads and more marketing, and they're providing their communities with more of these foods, such as soda and processed food. And it has a big impact on them. African-Americans are 80% more likely to get diabetes. There four times more likely to get kidney failure, they're three and a half more times more likely to get amputations. And these communities are being targeted by the food industry in direct ways. And then there's accessibility to them for environments where there's no grocery stores, where there's, you know, convenience stores and no produce stores.

Yeah, so for seven years, Mark, I worked in a place called Oldham in North Manchester in the UK. And it was in right at the center of Oldham and the practice was in quite a deprived area, what most people would consider a deprived area. most of my patients were, you know, were certainly on very low incomes. Many were working two jobs. But what was interesting is that these guys really cared about themselves and their families. They were trying to make the best decisions. And I think it's really important to highlight this because I think a lot of blame gets put on people who are struggling with their health and they're making certain food choices, but I saw firsthand how, for example, I would usually bring my lunch into work with me. On the rare occasion where I forgot to bring it, sometimes I think, okay, I'm just going to go and walk and buy something. It certainly is not like Santa Monica where we're currently recording this podcast, which is probably the wellness capital in the world, where it's super easy to buy something healthy.

Yes. Right?

I would walk for about a mile in diameter around that practice and I struggled to find anything because there was at least seven fried chicken and kebab shops with big signs on there saying something like, you know, £1.99 eat as much as you can. You know, that's what, £2. That's what, maybe about $3. You, it's very hard to compete with that. And I thought, I thought I can give them the best advice that I possibly can, but they're moving into an environment where it's simply too difficult day in, day out to make those healthy choices. In addition, They, I found were very trusting of the government and the supermarkets. So when I explained to them about certain breakfast cereals that they were having in the morning.

It was all sugar.

Yeah, they were shocked. And they said, well, that's sh*tty, but yeah, but why are they being sold in the supermarkets? There's a picture of, you know, heart, it says heart's healthy on it.

Because there's no fat.

No, no, but what's interesting for me, Mark, is that these guys were trying their best. They literally were shocked when I was telling this information. So when we think that everyone knows this stuff now. They don't. And it is these deprived areas which are getting hit the hardest.

Absolutely. I remember when I was helping with this movie Fed Up, which was released a few years ago about the effect of the food industry and sugar on the health of our nation. There was a family that I worked with and they lived in one of the worst food deserts in America. They were very overweight. The father was 42, already had kidney failure on dialysis from diabetes at 42. The mother was severely overweight. The son was severely overweight at 16, had almost diabetes and struggled. And they lived in a trailer on food stamps and disability. They were, you know, trying to lose weight because the father couldn't get a new kidney until he lost 40 pounds. But they didn't know what to do. And they were eating all this stuff that they thought was healthy, like Cool Whip, because it had zero trans fats, which is basically all trans fats and sugar. It just basically threw a loophole in government that allowed them to actually say zero trans fat. They had processed salad dressings. They use iceberg lettuce. They didn't never knew how to cook. They didn't have any utensils. They didn't have knives, cutting knives. They didn't have cutting boards. So I said, well, rather than me giving you a lecture on how to eat healthy, let's just go into your kitchen. Let's get some groceries and make simple food. We made turkey chili. We made a salad from real lettuce and real vegetables and olive oil and vinegar dressing. We roasted some sweet potatoes with some herbs. We stir fried some asparagus. they didn't know how to do any of that. They didn't know how to roast, they didn't know how to saute, they didn't know nothing. And they, what vegetables they had were canned green beans and iceberg lettuce. And that was pretty much it. Everything else was from a box or a package. And they really didn't know. And I said, here's what it's going on. And I took everything out of their cupboard. I showed them everything. I covered over, like, front of the boxes and said, what is this? And they couldn't tell by looking at the ingredient list. They said, it's all the same stuff just in different size, shapes, and colors. And, and they were so eager and they, I said, let's cook a meal together. So we sat together, we cooked, we talked, we had fun. They loved the food. It was delicious. And I said, look, you guys can do this. Here's a cookbook. Here's a guide on eat well for less, you know, good food on a tight budget. And I didn't know what was going to happen. In the first week, she texted me back. We lost 18 pounds as a family. Within a year, the mother lost about 100 pounds. The son lost 50, gained it back by working fast food restaurant, which is only place to work down there. But eventually he got his act together. He lost 138 pounds. He asked me for a letter of recommendation for medical school, and now he's in medical school.

Wow.

You know, which is just staggering and amazing. And we have, you know, the ability to actually do this if people understand what's going on. But most people don't understand that they're being taken advantage of, that they're being targeted. The system is set up for them to fail. And And it's not an accident. We have sort of alluding to the reason we have these policies is because the food industry controls the government. They spend half a billion dollars just on our farm bill in the US, which controls our food and ag policy. There's 100% of the Senate and House ag committee members are on the take from Big Food and Big Ag in terms of campaign donations. Who do you think they're gonna support, corporate interests or citizens? And it's really unfortunate. The policies we have are so destructive. I'll just go through them. One, you know, we, we support the growing of commodity foods, corn, soy and wheat, which gets turned into processed foods. So we make it cheap to have processed food. It's high fructose corn syrup. I mean, the vice chairman of Pepsi said, when I asked him why do you use high fructose corn syrup? He said, because the government makes it too cheap for us not to use it. And I said, you know, we, we have policies that allow unlimited marketing of junk food to our children and the rest of us, or it's proven to cause harm. We'll, the FDA makes food the federal Food and Drug Administration, that are so confusing that the average person can't understand them and doesn't prohibit the use of toxic chemicals that are used in our food supply, which are mostly banned in Europe, things like BHT and other things. We have policies that support food stamps. In other words, not only are we helping grow the food that's the bad food, but then we provide it to our poor with $75 billion a year in food stamps, $7 billion of which is soda and Coca-Cola major source of American revenue, 20% of it comes from food stamps. That is so sad.

So they're the biggest welfare queen. For a lot of my UK listeners, could you explain what food stamps are? Yeah, food stamps are basically food assistance.

If you're poor, there are 46 million Americans who need food support because they're basically, it's like a card, credit card that you can go buy food with, and they can't afford to buy food, so the government gives them money to do it, but it's all processed food. and one in four children in this country depend on food stamps.

So it seems maddening this because on one hand, you've got potentially the government doing a good thing, which is, okay, you can't afford food, we're gonna help you. But with the other hand, they're supporting, if I understand this right, they're supporting completely the wrong food choices or the unhelpful food choices. So they could keep the food stamp system, but encourage whole foods instead of processed foods, and then suddenly, you're helping these communities out and supporting their health.

Absolutely. And it's been shown you can save billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of deaths by incentivizing good food and de-incentivizing bad food. But they won't happen because the government is so locked up with the food industry.

Mark, I want to ask you a question. In all the years I've known you and seen you speak, you've always been very passionate about getting to the root cause of problems. You've always been extremely passionate about how powerful food is.

Yeah.

But I don't think I've ever seen you this impassioned about a particular topic. And it's really...

I'm just getting started.

Yeah, but it's really interesting for me is that you've dived deep into the research on this over the last few years. I know that when writing this book, you sort of locked yourself away. You've actually really tried to understand systemically what is going on here. Has what you have found Is that what's driving this new sort of supercharged passion? Has that made you angry?

It has made me angry because, well, it made me angry. It's also made me optimistic because if we can identify and name the problem, we can do something about it. We talk about climate change. People go, I get climate change. But nobody's talking about the impact of the food system, not just on chronic disease and the economy and our kids' brains and mental health, even violence, we know is linked to bad food and prisons. Violent prisoners can reduce violent crime in prisons by 56% just by eating a healthy diet. But we also know that it's destroying our environment, our climate, that food, the food system is the number one cause of climate change. People don't get that. People don't understand that when you put it all together, whether it's deforestation, soil erosion, factory farming, whether it's food waste, processing, distribution, refrigeration of food, all that together, makes the food system the number one cause of climate change. It's not driving electric car, we've got to fix the food system.

Well, let's get into climate change because it's clearly a topic that is at the tip of many people's tongues these days. There's a very hot political agenda. There have been many documentaries made on what is driving climate change, but it's also a bit like the diet wars in terms of what foods we should be eating. The climate change wars potentially it can be quite polarizing in terms of, you know, what foods are driving this. And I know, you know, I don't know how much you've gone into that, you know, what are those foods that are driving it? And I wonder whether we can help broaden out that discussion in terms of soil health, regenerative agriculture, you know, climate change. What are the foods that are driving this and how do we change it?

Great question. So, you know, I think, I think, we've pretty much gotten into this conversation that meat is the cause of climate change, that we should not eat meat and I'll be vegans, and that would solve climate change.

Would it?

Depends. And it's a more nuanced answer. So factory farming of animals absolutely is a significant contributor to climate change, whether it's 10%, 14%, it's a significant contributor. Why? Because factory farm animals, it's not just about the methane burps from the cows, it's about the way we grow the food that feeds the cows. So we grow a lot of corn through industrial processes that destroy the soil, which use up enormous water resources that depends on huge amounts of fossil fuel dependent things like fertilizer, which takes a lot of energy to make herbicides and pesticides, which are fossil fuel derived. And so we, we have a real problem. And then all the the factory farming of animals also drives huge amounts of methane in the environment. So you've got this whole problem of factory farming of animals. But as a friend of mine said, it's not the cow, it's the how. So when you look at one of the biggest drivers of climate change, it's the loss of soil. We think of the rainforest, but the soil on the earth is a far bigger carbon sink than all the rainforests.

Well, let's dive into that. I think a lot of people listen to this will not be familiar with this. What does the soil do? why is soil health so important for the environment, but also for human health?

So we have lost huge amounts of soil. So we lose about 2 billion tons of soil every year, 200,000 tons an hour. We lose farmland the size of North Korea or Nicaragua to desert every year. Soil, if it's healthy, not the soil that we now have in America because we've lost so much soil. We've lost a third of all the soil on the planet for farming. of the way we grow food. We basically till it and then we pour these chemicals into it that destroy the organic matter of the soil. Now, organic matter is basically carbon. It's carbon in the soil. How does it get there? Through a very powerful, the most powerful technology in the planet to reduce carbon. It's called photosynthesis. It's this ancient technology.

It'll be nature that sucks carbon out.

Of the what the plants and grasses breathe. They breathe carbon dioxide and they suck it in and then they build plant material, right? They build carbon. It goes into the soil. Every 1% of carbon in the soil, of organic matter in the soil will help to draw down carbon and it'll also help to restore water in the soil. 1% organic matter in the soil leads to an extra 27,000 gallons of water that can be stored in there. Why are we having droughts and floods and wildfires? because the soil can't hold the water anymore. It either runs through it or it just kind of runs off it. And that leads to this huge amounts of droughts and floods. So organic matter in the soil is the thing we have to build and we've lost most of it. In fact, we had so many in America, we had places with 50 feet of topsoil that's now almost gone because it was built by the bison and the elk, 60 million bison. We had more ruminants running around America than we have cows. and there was no climate change from it. It wasn't that because they basically grazed the grass in a certain way, moving around frequently. They dug with their hooves, they pooped and peed, and that's what builds soil. It uses natural fertilizer, right? The cows become part of the cycle. And I think, you know, regenerative agriculture is the science of how do we build new soil as a solution to creating a healthy ecosystem, to dealing with our scarce water resources, to increasing biodiversity, which we all depend on to, I mean, we've lost 75% of our pollinator species because of all the chemical agriculture. And Einstein said that if we lose bees off the face of the earth, humans have four years to live.

So you say it's not the cow, it's the how. So therefore, has your research basically shown that if we go, I guess, to more traditional ways, or I don't know if we have to find new ways.

Well, it's almost mimicking nature, right? Mimicking how natural herds moved around these big herds moved around in concentrated groups. They would not graze the grass to the nub. They would graze it down halfway. They'd move along, they'd poop and pee, and they kept doing this. And this is what built the soil. So when we look, for example, at life cycle analysis that was done by Qantas of both a GMO soy burger was actually the impossible burger compared to a regenerative farms grass-fed regeneratively raised beef burger, they found that while the Impossible Burger was far better than a feedlot burger in terms of its carbon footprint, it added three and a half kilos of carbon to the environment. So it was a net add of carbon and greenhouse gases to the environment by eating an Impossible Burger or a GMO soy burger. The grass-fed burger pulled out three and a half kilos of carbon from the atmosphere. Okay, okay. So you wait, so you basically have to eat one regeneratively raised grass-fed burger.

To offset the carbon emissions of a soy burger. Mind blowing.

That is mind blowing, actually. That's exactly what the words I was- this isn't my opinion, this is an.

Independent scientific group that analyzed both of those- so just to clarify that, essentially what this research is saying is that an impossible burger is better than a feedlot burger. So a convention, you know, these sort of factory farms, absolutely. Burgers. So on that, if you make an argument between those two, yes, an Impossible Burger is better for sure. But if you compare an Impossible Burger to a generally raised grass-fed burger, then that is better for the environment than the Impossible Burger. Now, that is not the narrative that is being played out in the media at the moment. And I guess the question is, is that also on purpose? Is that also part of this big structural problem with the food industry?

Yeah, it's huge. I mean, I think, yes, we should be finding other alternatives and protein sources. That's great. But it's also a highly processed industrial food. And when we talk about growing the soy, what does that mean? Well, we're growing soy in large monocrop fields. Often these are rainforests that have been destroyed and taken down. I don't know if they use, they may use American sources. the amount of fertilizer destroys the soil and the organic matter in the soil. It off-gasses greenhouse gases. It takes a lot of energy, fossil fuels to produce, and it runs off into the rivers and lakes and oceans. In fact, in the Gulf of Mexico, there's a dead zone the size of New Jersey that kills 212,000 metric tons of fish every year. There are 400 dead zones like that across the world. in areas of coastal areas that feed half a billion people on the planet. And if you put them all together, it would be the size of Europe. That's just the nitrogen fertilizer. And then let's talk about the herbicides and the pesticides. They also kill pollinator species in the biodiversity in the soil, and they don't promote organic matter. So they kill the organic matter in the soil. So you end up with, then the soil needs massive amounts of irrigation because it can't hold water. We have 70% of human use of fresh water is for irrigation of crops, mostly for animal production. So we have water depletion, which we're losing our water resources. We have the killing of the soil, we have the polluting of our lakes and rivers, we have the loss of biodiversity when you're eating your impossible burger. Now, that is a shock, right, for most people to hear because it sounds like it's a soy burger, grass fed and all that. Or, I mean, the GM, it's a, you know, plant-based burger. But it's, you know, it's not as simple as that. And when you look at the, the ecosystem services that are provided by a regenerative farm, it's massive. So there's, there's been huge Investments now in buying up all regular Farms and converting them to grass-fed or regenerative Farms because they provide so much benefit.

So we are, they provide an economic benefit.

Yes.

So we provide, that's, that's important. This is going to be part of solution.

Yes.

And it has to also be an economic benefit. That's the harsh reality of life.

We use about, I don't know, it's $120 trillion a year of ecosystem services from the planet. We're basically extracting these and using them, whereas regenerative agriculture can actually provide value. It increases the biodiversity of soil, it increases the water retention, increase the organic matter, it sucks carbon out of the environment. And it's been estimated, I mean, that the soil can hold three times the amount of carbon that's in the atmosphere today. And if you actually were to scale this up and it needs to be scaled up, then it could literally draw down all the carbon from the industrial revolution.

I mean, aren't we essentially saying if.

We fix the soil, the solution's under our feet.

We fix our health, we fix the food industry, we fix climate change.

Yes, because not only are you growing different kinds of food, the food you're growing is so much more nutrient dense. Why do plants plants get nutrients, they get it from the soil. If you don't have the right microbes in the soil, you can't extract the minerals and vitamins from the soil. We know that our plants, even if they're healthy organic plants, have 50% less nutrient levels than they did 50 years ago.

And that's something really important for many of us to remember, and I've seen plenty of data supporting this that the broccoli from 2019 is not the same broccoli as the one in 1970 in terms of the nutrients available. So we could be trying our best and trying to eat as many vegetables as we can, trying our best if we can afford it to go for these organic vegetables, but we still are not getting the nutrients that pretty much everyone was getting 40, 50 years ago.

And the problem is that there are basically a couple of dozen companies that control the food system. The big food companies, the big ag and processing companies, the agrochemical companies, the seed companies, the fertilizer companies, there's just a few that have massively consolidated. There used to be over 100 seed companies 30 years ago. Now there's like four, big ones that control 60% of our food.

Well, you mentioned all these pesticides and herbicides that are getting used and the damage that's causing to the soil. But I was reading bits of your book where I think you were suggesting that being a farmer in the United States is quite a dangerous job.

Yes.

So as well as the systemic implications of that, this, what are the implications for that individual farmer?

Well, this is another part of the social injustice issue. There's many aspects of that, but food and farm workers were excluded from the Fair Labor Act that was developed in the 30s to create fair labor standards in the United States. Minimum wage, working conditions and so forth. Why? Because most of the food and farm workers were former slaves, so they weren't protected. And that has carried over even now, you know, 80 or 90 years later, we're seeing lack of protection. So the average, you know, food worker may make $2 an hour and depend on tips. They make, you know, minimum wage or less, and they're unable to take care of their own health care. They're unable to provide their food services. Many of the, the, these workers have to be on food stamps or food assistance. And the farming itself is highly dangerous. They are, are, I mean, the pesticides, the chemicals they use, the working conditions.

I mean, you see pictures, I think, of strawberry farmers wearing face masks on. Gas masks. Yeah, the whole thing is covered whilst they're spraying pesticides.

And the food workers, I mean, it's, you know, working in a big chicken factory, for example, processing chickens. It's like a one step after the other, repetitive motion injuries. They even don't let them go to the bathroom and they come to work in diapers. So next time you're having your factory farm chicken, think of that food worker who can't even go to the bathroom and has to pee in a diaper. because she can't leave the food line. Think about that.

Yeah, Mark, this really changes the conversational food, really, doesn't it?

Because- well, it's not so personal. It's political.

Yeah, it is. It's not just political, economical, yes, health. But even I think, I saw this on Twitter recently, actually, someone, I can't remember who it was, who wasn't a huge believer in organic food. tweeted something. I wish I could remember who it was and said, actually, you know what? I was wrong because I didn't realize the implications it had on those individual farmers.

Oh, yeah.

And I was just thinking about my own health. And that's a separate story, which if we had time, we can go into, but he said, I realized how selfish I was being because actually the implications for that individual farmer is huge. And I think- and there are kids.

You know, the data has been looked at, but the pesticide exposure in these groups has led to a loss of 41 million IQ points in these kids. We're literally sacrificing the minds of our future generation. We're destroying the intellectual capital of our society.

I think that this appears to be, I think it's a global problem, but from what I see, and I'm interested as to where the bulk of your research has been on this, Is this more of a problem in the United States than anywhere else in the world?

Well, like the United States, it leads in many things, but it's not just the United States. It's everywhere. It's global. 80% of the world's type two diabetics in the developing world, China and India are number one and two in diabetes. We're seeing Africa being inundated with the fast food companies taking over. It's aspirational, it's a sign of affluence to eat at KFC. in Ghana. And they are controlling the narrative and manipulating the science all around the world. In Malaysia, they're partnering with nutrition scientists to produce research that shows that their products are healthy.

It's interesting. I just had a thought as you were talking about that these so-called developing countries, which I guess is a, in many ways, a misnomer now. And it's very soon, I think China and India are going to probably be more developed than we are here. But I remember as a kid, when I used to go to Calcutta in India, every other summer, we'd go for six weeks because my family, you know, all my aunts- Wow, that's a rough place. Well, it's a beautiful place actually. But yes, there's a lot of poverty, a lot of problems there. But I remember as a kid going there and in the summer, in our British summer, in July and August, the schools were still running. So I'd go and see my cousins, but they'd be going to school I remember in the morning, breakfast would be served and they had proper meals. So, meal would be prepared, so there'd be like two or three vegetable curries, maybe a bit of fish, maybe some chapati breads, maybe a bit of rice, but they had a proper meal before they went to school. And I used to think, this is so different because I have a quick bowl of cereal that takes two minutes to prepare. If that probably takes 30 seconds to pour the milk over. and eat that. And I didn't really realize the significance of it at the time. But now, as I reflect, and now when I go back, I've not been for a few years, but culture has changed. What you said about the middle classes aspiring to this Western way of living, now they're too busy. Now they don't want a proper meal. They want the quick cereal. And you see the big adverts everywhere that the food companies have come in, they're advertising how healthy these foods are. They want the quick, highly processed bread that you can put in the toaster for 20 seconds. It's toasted and you can slap on some jam and get out to work quickly. And it's amazing that actually, you know, this was only like 20 years ago, 25 years ago, where they were having the middle classes in India were having these proper meals before they went out for the day, whereas now they've aspired for this what they consider this Western ideal. And it's quite striking how quickly that's changed.

It's true. And the good news though, in researching the book, is there's a lot of bad news. But the good news is that there is a lot that can be done to fix this problem. That's why I call the book Food Fix, because there are solutions that citizens can do in terms of choosing what they eat, in terms of composting. For example, food waste is a huge issue. This third largest emitter of greenhouse gases, if it were a country, after US and China. We have ways we can influence our choices with our wallets and our votes. People often are cynical about the political process and voting, but it matters. We do have control. There are grassroots movements and efforts happening all around. I think there are a lot of things that people can do to get involved and to actually change their personal life, their personal health, and their communities. That's really what Food Fix is about. It's about outlining what those solutions are and how to do them.

So you sound, as well as sounding impassioned and almost, I wouldn't say angry. Angry is the wrong word, but- A.

Little, a little angry. A little frustrated. A little like, oh, there's a real- Wake up, everybody. This is happening.

There's a real notes of optimism here. And I think let's go into that optimism because I think If people are listening to this and they're affected by this and they think, yeah, well, actually, okay, fine. I can't maybe influence the political system, although maybe there is a way that they can. Absolutely you can. But on an individual level, let's talk about some of the things they can do. And I tell you, on a personal level, as I've been reading more about factory farming, as I've understood it more, yeah, sure, the financial case, the political case, but just the moral and ethical case around it in terms of how animals are treated. Absolutely. There's a Thai restaurant near to where we live where sometimes my wife and my kids will go out and eat there. We like the food there. And I, in the past, maybe a few years ago, would have had, let's say, pad thai chicken noodles. But recently, for the last couple of years, I will now no longer have that because I know that the chicken being served there I don't think is a high quality. I don't think, I think it's factory farms. They're very unclear on where this chicken comes from. And so, you know, you could say we should boycott the restaurant, okay? You can make that case, but we don't, we go, but I will have a, you know, I'll have the vegetarian pad thai noodles now. So I won't support and pay for something on the menu as much as I possibly can that actually is going to support that industry. And I feel, I'm doing a little bit. I had this conversation a few weeks ago with my kids. They wanted the chicken. And I said, look guys, do you know where that chicken comes from? Do you know what is happening? Do you still want that chicken? And look, I'm not saying I'm doing this the right way with my kids, but I think kids are the future. And I think if we can teach and have these conversations with our kids, then they're gonna see this from a young age. And they were like, yeah, actually, daddy will have the vegetarian one as well. How much of a difference does a simple choice for a family of four like that actually make?

It can make a difference. Imagine if everybody in the world decided for one day, they were going to not eat any processed food or any fast food. Don't you think that would have a big impact on the global markets? I think we have more influence than we believe. I think it all starts with grassroots efforts and movements. So, people start demanding things, it changes. I mean, I got a text today because I did a podcast with Tom Newmark about the carbon underground, which is essentially about carbon underground, meaning getting the soil full of carbon again. And I talked about regenerative agriculture and how important it is. I talked about the fact that General Mills was sort of guilted and forced into committing a million acres to be converted to regenerative ag. And the person who texted me works at Nestle and she says, I'm going to bring this to the CEO of Nestle. Would you be willing to meet with the CEO of Nestle to talk about these issues and get them to start changing their supply chain? Because if these companies start, it can make a big difference. And not everybody has that ability to make those levers that I maybe can, but it's possible. There's a guy named Jeremy Kohler who is a business guy from the UK who aggregated $12 trillion in assets from institutional investors and pension funds and said, look, guys, we're going to try to end factory farming of animals. First, we're going to start with antibiotics. We're going to go to the top 20 fast food companies who we are all invested in. And we're going to tell them we're going to divest if you don't stop antibiotics by this date from all your food, like McDonald's and Burger King and all that stuff. And they did, and it worked. So there are levers that can be pulled in the system, whether it's through business, whether it's through the market from the bottom them up. The groundswell is pushing companies to do the right thing into sustainability, into thinking about their communities. I think there is more consciousness now happening in those companies because they're hearing it from the consumers who want this. And so the consumer demand is driving the marketplace.

Yes, the more we all can make these choices, the more people listening to this can go, you, know what? I'm going to see what small difference I can make in my life. have a significant knock-on effect.

We all see the growth in electric cars. That is going to replace the combustion engine very soon. Why? Because consumers and people are demanding it. Same thing can happen with food.

You mentioned prisons before. I found that really interesting. Both you and I have spoken to Dan Buettner on our podcasts, the chap who has studied extensively these so-called blue zones around the world, these areas of high longevity, these longevity hotspots. And what's striking about that is that a lot of people are debating what are the various components of that. But one thing that seems to be really consistent is that the environment is set up in such a way that it makes the healthy choice the easy choice. Yeah.

Right.

And you mentioned a statistic, something like if you serve healthy food in a prison, it was 50 something percent.

Basically we're looking at, you talked about the smile study about the effect of food on depression, and we know mental illness is really driven by a lot of nutritional deficiencies. In violence and behavior change, we don't really think about it that way, but in prisons they've done randomized trials where they put half the group on a healthy diet, half the group on the same prison diet, who were violent criminals, violent in prison, and they reduced violent crime by 56%. And if they added a multivitamin, they reduced it by 80%. And I remember once coming home from, I mean, coming into my office at work, and there was a letter, a handwritten letter, that was from a prisoner in prison who said, Dr. Hyman, I read your book in prison. I changed my diet, and I don't know how we did it in prison. He said, I realized my whole life as a violent criminal was because of what I was eating. I feel like a completely different person.

So that is powerful, isn't it? That is so incredibly powerful to see the power of foods. Yeah. There is something going on in the UK at the moment, actually, which I'm just going to bring up here. And a lot of people are getting quite annoyed and very frustrated with the term food as medicine or food as medicine. It's really interesting.

Yeah. And I know they have a quarrel with Hippocrates.

Yeah, I know my thoughts on it. And I think they're probably very similar to yours. But maybe it'd just be a nice little offshoot here to touch on these stories you're mentioning, the Smiles trial, this prisoner who wrote to you, all the countless case studies you've got and I've got, is food medicine?

Absolutely. I mean, there is no doubt about it. William Lee just wrote a book called Eat to Beat Disease. It was a hard Harvard physician.

Yeah, I'm not ready.

I've seen everyone. I've not actually read this. It's really brilliant. But he, he showed a slide, and this is very sophisticated analysis, testing food components compared to drug components. So a blood pressure drug, a cholesterol drug, you know, heart failure drug, whatever the drug is, and looked at various food components and how it compared in terms of the effectiveness using very sophisticated models for testing these. in biology. And they found that almost every single time food beat out the drug in terms of effectiveness. And what food is far more than calories, as I was talking about, not all calories are the same. That's the biggest myth that's perpetuating everything. Because in the fast food world, if all calories are the same, it doesn't matter if it's KFC or soda or French fries, as long as balance your calories, doesn't matter what you eat. That's not true because food is information. So we know that food influences the body in multiple ways. One, it changes gene expression. You literally can turn on or off genes by what you eat. If you eat broccoli, you can turn on genes that help you detoxify and produce glutathione. If you eat green tea, drink green tea, you increase the level of catechins, which have the ability to detoxify heavy metals and activate various enzymes. if you eat the right foods, you can balance your hormones. If you eat the wrong foods, you eat too much insulin, your testosterone goes down. If you eat too much sugar, you eat the right fats, it's the opposite. If you look at what it does to your brain chemistry, you can either hijack your brain chemistry or it can make you calm and peaceful and your mood. It can change your microbiome. You literally have trillions of bacteria in your gut that control almost every function of your body. And when you eat the wrong foods, you grow the bad ones that make you sick. And when you eat the right foods, you grow the good ones that make you healthy. So literally with every bite in real time, you're changing your biochemistry, your physiology, your genetics every single minute of the day.

Yeah. Yep. You're absolutely right.

I mean, it is that powerful. I mean, this is not my opinion, by the way.

This is just hard science.

Yeah.

And I would extend that out. Of course, we're talking about food, but even sleep. There's a really good study showing that a single night sleep deprivation changes the expression, I think, of over 700 genes. Yeah. You know that if you haven't slept well, the genes are actually predisposed to inflammation, the pro-inflammatory genes get turned on and the anti-inflammatory ones start getting switched off. So our lifestyle literally is medicine. It's not just prevention of health problems, it can often be used as the treatment as well. And that's something that I think is still not recognised enough. It always comes down to prevention. And of course, prevention is better than cure. But you can use lifestyle a lot of the time as treatment as well.

As like the story with Janice, I mean, we weren't preventing her heart failure, preventing her diabetes, preventing her high blood pressure. We were treating it with food and with lifestyle. So yes, food is medicine, exercise is medicine, sleep is medicine, stress reduction is medicine, you know, connection and love is medicine. Yeah, these are all medicines.

And they work well.

Better than drugs.

And most importantly, this is the medicine we need primarily for the health problems of the 21st century. That's the key. Maybe 30, 40 years ago, maybe we didn't need these things as medicine in the same way. Maybe our conventional opinion of medicine, like a drug that we prescribe, if you've got an acute problem and you come in with that, I can understand where that rationale has come from, but the health landscape of the US, of the UK has changed dramatically. So, we now need these lifestyle tools as our medicine.

By the way, twice as many people die from chronic lifestyle diseases as infectious diseases, not just here, but globally. So, even in Africa, they're suffering the double burden of malnutrition and obesity.

Exactly. It's slightly ironic in many ways. I think not calling food medicine, I think is doing our patients a disservice because then it's not put on the same level or a higher level than, let's say, the pharmaceutical drug that we might have to offer. that's the danger when we don't talk about it in these terms.

I mean, listen, what happened to Jess? There's no drug on the planet that can do that. There's no drug on the planet that can reverse your need for insulin in three days or can reverse your heart failure or can reverse your kidney failure. They just don't exist. Yeah. And food can do it. And I've seen it over and over again. I may sound like a crazy man, but the truth is, this is actually what the science shows. It's actually what people who are using.

Food in this way see all Well, you know, you don't sound crazy. You know what you sound like? You sound like someone... A little crazy. Who has been practicing medicine for many years. How many years now? 32 years of seeing tens of thousands of patients. You have seen firsthand the impact. And literally, you just sound someone to me who's just very passionate. You've seen it. You've seen the structural problems. And you want to take on something that not many people are taking on. You're not writing another book. You've written many great books, but this feels very different to me. This has taken on the political structure, the economic structure. You're looking at food in a different way. I think that's very, very important. And I want to thank you for that, because I think it's very important that this sort of message gets out there. Coming back to systemic change, and we talked about making the food environment easier, and we're talking about prisons. I want to talk about schools. I'm a father, as you are. I've got two young children. They're both at primary school at the moment. And what's interesting for me is that while my kids are a bit younger, they're currently nine and six, I was okay at sort of, I wouldn't say controlling, but I could sort of control in many ways.

You can make them eat their breakfast, you can make them eat their lunch.

What they're eating. And as my children are getting older, particularly my son now who's nine and he's been exposed to more and more things, it's getting harder and harder. So, this may be controversial to some, but I'm going to share my view on this. So, on the final day of school last year, before the summer break, a lot of the teachers brought in Haribo's for the kids.

What's that?

So, Haribo's are a very popular food mate, certainly in the UK of sweets. Candy, basically. I don't know if they're here or you must have an equivalent here.

Yeah, probably.

But these are bags of sweets that are very, very common. Now, the reality is my kids don't eat that stuff because I've never given it to them. Now, a lot of people will probably say, well, that's too brutal. You need to expose them to this sort of stuff. And I, like all parents, am trying to do the best that I can. This is what I consider to be the best decision. Maybe time will tell that I was wrong, but I'm certainly trying to do the best that I can.

You- could have given them more junk food.

No, but it's about trying to teach them a balance. And I just think the norm in society is so skewed away from health at the moment that fitting in with what quite a sick society. I don't think necessarily is biologically normal. I don't think it's the right thing. And so I'm trying to protect my kids as much as possible. Now, Jamie Oliver has been involved with trying to change various things in the UK. I helped him with his last campaign about junk food advertising. And I think that's something that is different in Europe compared to America. We do have some regulation around that. Maybe it's not perfect, but there is something still there. Now, at the last meeting, I was down in Jamie's office where a lot of opinion makers were there. We were discussing things. This whole idea of schools being a safe zone came up. And for me, I really like that, something I've been talking about for years, that essentially a school or a hospital or even a prison. But let's get back to schools, particularly schools. I think schools should be the model educationally, but also health-wise. I genuinely don't see why there is a case in 2019, in 2020, why when we're facing this chronic disease epidemic, when in the UK, one in three kids leave primary school to go to secondary school at the age of 10 or 11, are either overweight or obese. I find it very hard to justify the case now where any school should be serving these sort of, these sweets, sugar, sweetened beverages, packets of sweets. Because what that also does is it normalizes the food. It allows us to start associating reward and doing well with sweet foods. And you know what? I had difficult conversations with my son. My son said to me, daddy, why is everyone having a Haribo at school? I mean, you've been telling me this isn't very good for my health, but why is everyone giving it out? I said, what does that do? This is another problem which is not getting spoken about enough, Mark, is that if you are a parent who is trying to do the right thing with your children, you are then making your children social outcasts because they're not engaging in a society that is actually engaging in a lot of unhealthy behaviors. I'm confused. Help me out, Mark.

Well, you know, I don't know what it's like in the UK, but in the United States, schools have been infiltrated by the food industry. 80% of schools have contract with soda companies. 50% of schools sell brand name fast food at lunch. McDonald's, Burger King, Domino's Pizza. In schools.

In schools. I don't know Thomas in the UK. If anyone knows the taco. Please tweet me and Mark and let us know. We'll let us know on Instagram.

That'll be super interesting.

I went to a school.

I'm not aware of that. I went to an underserved school in Cleveland, and it was a poor African-American Hispanic school. 43% of kids are absent. 1% by the time they graduate are qualified to go to college. I walked down the hall, there was a young girl very overweight, one hand she had a 32 ounce, like a liter slushy, and another 32 ounce or a liter soda in the other hand. And you know, these schools have fast you know, food in them and they have deep fryers and microwaves in the kitchen. I walked through the kitchen, there was not a stove. You couldn't cook food. It all came out of boxes, packages, processed food, burgers, fries.

Clearly this is a problem. It's a problem for their health.

But there's advertising in school. So, in the bathroom stalls, there's like Coca-Cola ads. It's everywhere in the school.

Where I see the problem, Mark, is that, yes, that's bad for their health. But I think the problem is deeper than that, because what that does is it almost ingrains the kids- Of course, in a certain way of thinking. -Hook 'em while they're young. Hook 'em while they're young.

Absolutely. That's the science of what they're doing, and they're deliberate and intentional about it. And there are schools that are fighting back. There's, for example, a friend of mine who's created a program with the schools to rehab the kitchens, to get local chefs to create great recipes that are within the school school lunch budget and the school lunch guidelines and has revolutionized the Boston City School District and the mayor is now involved and they literally have transformed schools and getting these kids eating real whole healthy food that they love.

What about the parents who say that actually our kids should be allowed these sweet treats at school? It's too draconian not allowing them to have this at school. What is your view there?

Maybe they should just give them a few lines of cocaine in school along with their lunch a little heroin booth there where they can get a shot of heroin. I mean, listen, the science is so clear that these foods are harmful, they're deadly, they're addictive. Why would you give them to your kids? Yes, you can have a sweet treat. Yes, you can have sugar, of course, but make it from real food, not ultra processed food that's gonna hijack your brain and your metabolism. Make a real cookie from butter and flour and sugar.

That's fine. Did Michael Pollan say eat whatever you want as long as you make it.

Right, so you want french fries, make.

Your french fries at home. Yeah, because it's different when you're making it yourself. And I think the problem also for me is if schools do this, is that you take away a lot of the choice from parents. So parents want to engage in a sweet treat with their children. Actually, if they're getting loads of it at school, then they're already going past their daily quota, if you even agree with daily quotas. But you're then taking away that choice and I feel schools should be safe. and then it's up to parents what they choose to do with their children outside school. That's the way I would like to see it.

Absolutely, school should be safe zone. Your home should be a safe zone. I mean, there's, you know, I once said to my son, once said, you know, I want to invite some friends over. He says, but there's nothing to eat.

In the house, right?

What he meant was there's no junk food. So I'm like, all right, let's go to the grocery store and there's only one rule. You can't buy anything with trans fat in it. He went around and around and around, couldn't find one thing to buy. I mean, that's the problem. So we can make a pizza at home and we did, you know?

Well, and that can be fun, right? We've done that with our kids. You make a healthy pizza. You get the kids involved, you know, they put it in the oven, they're engaged with that. And I guess that's something we've not covered yet is you mentioned the political structure, the farming structure, the economic structure, but how important teaching our children, teaching the population at large, one of the most basic human skills of all, which is how to cook.

Yeah. I just wrote a cookbook called Food, what the Heck Should I Cook? And a lot of the cookbook is about, yeah, there's a lot of great recipes, but here's how you can just learn how to cook with the basic skills that you can put the ingredients together. You don't have a fancy recipe. And I think it's a crime that we have lost that. And it's not an accident. And this is where I, I talk about the food industry. In the 50s in America, there was a woman named Betty who was an advocate for, she was a home economics teacher, and she was an advocate for teaching families how to cook food and how to prepare food and how to grow Gardens. And she was really creating this great movement. The food industry freaked out, and they said, look, they gathered all in Minnesota where the, the general Mills headquarters was, they bring all the food companies. and they basically colluded to decide that we're going to make convenience a value. You deserve a break today. Let us do the cooking for you. And so they created a cookbook called the Betty Crocker Cookbook. Now, you're probably not familiar with this cookbook, but there was a cookbook. My mother had it. Pretty much every family in America had this cookbook. And the cookbook was basically recipes that included processed food. So it was like take one bag of Ritz crackers and sprinkle it on your broccoli casserole or add one can of Campbell's cream of mushroom soup to this or that. And so they were insinuating processed food. And then they came up with TV dinners. And then, you know, we moved into fast food. And now, you know, we had basically 2% of meals eaten outside the home in the turn of the last century. And now we have 50% of the meals eaten outside the home. And we have generations who don't know how to cook. really don't know how to cook anything. And it's pretty frightening. So bringing that skill back is critical. I mean, how do we teach our kids things that often are irrelevant in school, but don't teach them the three things that matter most? How to take care of your body and nutrition and cooking is part of that. How to have healthy relationships and how to manage your money. We don't learn any of that in school.

Yeah, I mean, this is a great place to sort of close down this podcast. Think, Mark, those are three great tips on what what we should be teaching kids in school. So there's many teachers who listen to this podcast. If you can actually go back to school, if you agree with those, let us know for one on social media. If you've got some new additions to that that you think we haven't mentioned, please let us know on social media. We'd love to hear from you. But in terms of we all can make a difference, if you're a teacher and you go into your school, if you're a parent, you go into your school and you have these conversations with the headmaster, with the parents You know, I find the parents committee sometimes actually quite problematic because the whole fundraising system around everything revolves around sugar, revolves around treats. My wife and I literally, we were chatting about it just this past weekend. But this podcast, as we mentioned at the start, it's called Feel Better, Live More. I genuinely believe that when we feel better in ourselves, Mark, we get more out of our lives. I always like to leave my listeners with actionable tips, things that they can put into practice into their own life immediately to improve how they feel. Now, because of the topic we've covered today, which is basically what you've written about in your book, Food Fix, I wonder if we could do this in two parts. The first one is, if people feel inspired by what you said, I recommend for a start, people go out and buy this book because I think it.

Will.

Really thought you to re-examine what you thought about foods. I think it is so well researched. You've clearly spent a lot of time delving into this. So thank you for that. But if people at home want to start making a difference to this structural food problem that exists, what are some topics they can do?

Well, I think the first thing is change your diet so that you're eating real food. Don't participate in this junk food culture. To make your home a safe three. We didn't talk about it, but food waste is a big problem. So make a compost bucket in your kitchen. You can have a home composter, you can have in your backyard, you can have a garden. Four. If you're a parent, be a school activist. Get your schools to shift to what's going on in there around healthy food. And there's a lot of examples of how to do that.

Five.

If you work somewhere, get your workplace to be a safe Zone, too. At Cleveland Clinic, the CEO eliminated any sugar, sweet and beverages from the campus. It's possible. And also think about getting engaged with organizations that are making a difference in the food system and that are part of grassroots efforts. And there's a lot of them out there and I detail them in the book. And then lastly, vote with your vote. Be an activist politically where you actually can make a difference. You look at the voices that are heard out there that make a difference. Margaret Mead said, Never doubt that a small group of committed citizens can change the world. In fact, it's the only thing that ever has. And I think we should remember that because our actions matter, our work matters. I mean, Greta Stremberg, the young girl. Yeah, it was like, you know, raising consciousness about climate change. She's 16 years old. She's raising her voice. She's going up against the powers that be. She's getting attention. Each one of us can be part of that, whether it's in our homes and our families and our schools and our workplaces, our communities, our faith-based communities. That's a place to start. And I think if people if people are interested in learning more about other ways to get involved, they should check out the book Food Fix, because I detail it in there as a real.

Whole citizens action guide. Mark, I was going to go to the second part, which is how to help people on an individual level. But what's really striking is that if you make those changes that you just.

Mentioned, it's all connected.

It's all connected. You will change your own health.

What you do to your body, you do to the planet, what you do to the planet, you do to your body. It's a complete circle. We live in an ecosystem, and we have to understand that everything is connected.

In terms of just finishing off then on that second point, which is semi-irrelevant given what you just said, but I think someone like yourself who's written so many books on empowering people to take control of their health, as you say, you've been seeing patients for over 30 years now. What are your top five tips that people can put into practice immediately?

Read your book. I mean, you know, I hate to say it, because we work really hard, but we make a good living and we're doing good work. But what we're telling people is just common sense. Eat real food, exercise, sleep, learn how to deal with stress, and learn how to connect to what matters in your life and the people who you love and connect with. And then that will give you the vibrancy to be a contribution to society. to be able to be a voice for change, to be able to do the things in your community. If you feel like crap, you're not going to want to do anything at schools or do anything at work. You just want to go home and watch Netflix. But if you actually feel vibrant, if you, you know, what's your title again? The podcast, feel better, live more.

Feel better, live more.

You can feel better to live more. And I think that's the purpose of it all. The purpose of it isn't some narcissistic purpose to, you know, look great on Instagram. It's really how do you become engaged, vibrant human being? How do you wake up every day full of life and joy and be present in your life for your relationships, for your kids, for the job that you're doing, for your family? That's what matters.

Mark, what an inspiring place to finish. Thank you for all the great work that you've been doing over the years. Thank you for writing such a wonderful book. And thank you for joining me on the podcast.

Thank you, Rangan. Appreciate it.

That concludes today's episode of the feel better live more podcast. I think that was a super inspiring conversation. I really like all of the tips that Mark finished with, both for how we change the food system, but also for how we start to improve our own health. As always, do think about something you heard today that you can apply in your own life immediately. Of course, Do let Mark and I know what you thought of today's conversation. Mark and I are both on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn. Also, if you want to continue your learning experience after this show is over, do check out the show notes page for this episode, drchastity.com/98 where you will see links to Mark's brand new book Food Fix, his social media channels and some really interesting articles and videos about his work. Mark's tips at the end of the show will be tips you are already familiar with if you have heard previous podcasts of mine. He basically mentioned the four components of health that I have written extensively about in my first book, the Four Pillar Plan. If you are confused with where to start with your health, I would simply ask you to look at those four areas of health and ask yourself which pillar do you need the most work in? Most of us intuitively know that when we ask ourselves. Pick something small in that particular pillar and start there. If you're looking for practical tips you can read much more about these four areas in my very first book the Four Pillar Plan which is also available in America and Canada with the title How to Make Disease Disappear. You can see how this all applies to stress in my second book the stress solution.

And if you're looking for a really.

Practical guide for bringing in highly effective lifestyle changes into your life in five minute chunks that is based on the latest science and behavior change, I would really encourage you check out my latest book, Feel Better in Five. Many of you have asked me when this book will also be available in the US and Canada, and it looks very likely that this will be in September later this year.

Year.

All of my books are available in the usual places as paperback, ebook or as an audiobook which I am narrating. If you know someone who you feel would benefit from the information in this podcast but does not listen to audio podcasts, this episode like all of mine are now available to watch in full on YouTube. The best way to find that is drchastity.com/yt YouTube, so please do tell people close to you who you feel would benefit from watching these videos. If you enjoy my weekly shows please do consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts or whichever platform you listen to podcasts on. You can also help me spread the word by taking a screenshot right now and sharing with your friends and family on your social media channels. Or you can simply do it the good old-fashioned way and tell your friends about the show. I really do appreciate your support. A big thank you to Richard Hughes for editing and Vidar To Chatsagi for producing this week's podcast. That is it for today. I hope you have a fabulous week. Make sure that you have pressed subscribe and I'll be back in one week's time with my latest conversation. Remember you are the architect of your own health. Making life such Change is always worth it, because when you feel better, you live more.

I'll see you next time.

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