Special Episode: Mark Hyman on The Drive with Peter Attia MD - The Impact of the Food System on Our Health and the Environment

Hi everyone, this is Kaya Perowne, one.

Of the producers of the Doctors Pharmacy podcast. Today we're going to be sharing a really fantastic interview that was recently aired on Dr. Peter Attia's podcast with Dr. Mark Hyman. Peter Attia's podcast, the Drive, takes a deep dive into all things health. If you love to nerd out on the science, this podcast is for you. I hope you enjoy this interview as much as we did. Hey everyone, welcome Welcome to the DRIVE podcast. I'm your host, Peter Attia. This podcast, my website, and my weekly newsletter all focus on the goal of translating the science of longevity into something accessible for everyone. Our goal is to provide the best content in health and wellness, full stop, and we've assembled a great team of analysts to make this happen. If you enjoy this podcast, we've created a membership program that brings you far more in-depth content if you want to take your knowledge of this space to the next level. At the end of this episode, I'll explain what those benefits are, or if you want to learn more now, head over to peterattia.md/subscribe .com slash subscribe. Now, without further delay, here's today's episode. My guest this week is Dr. Mark Hyman. Mark is a family physician, a New York Times bestselling author, and the director of the Cleveland Clinic Center for Functional Medicine. Turns out we're going to talk about pretty much none of that today. We talk almost exclusively on his new book, which is due out tomorrow, called Food Fix: How to Save Our Health, Our Economy, Our Communities, and Our Planet One Bite at a Time. And if that sounds like a mouthful, it's because it is a mouthful. This is a kind of staggering topic. And even by the standards of this podcast, it's probably too much for one episode. Mark basically lays out a thesis that if you fix the food system, you fix a lot of problems. So it's not a one for, it's not a two for, it's like somewhere between a three fur and a four fur. We don't spend a lot of time talking about the health consequences of fixing food, although we open our discussion with that, talking about the health impact of food. We talk a little bit about gut health, but we spend more of our time probably speaking about some of the social consequences and the environmental consequences. And of course, it ultimately does come down to health at the individual level. We do get a lot into agriculture energy usage around food. We talk a lot about the impact on climate. We also talk quite a lot about GMO, the strength of the evidence for and against it. We go through a lot of the policy ideas around how one might fix the food system. And actually we close with a nice anecdote of an explanation that I thought Mark provided that was pretty interesting around the difference between food in Europe and North America. Many people, myself included, have commented on this, which is, why is it that when you go to Europe, you seem to be able to eat with impunity things that in the United States just feel like they're about to kill you? Anyway, this is a really interesting episode. I learned a lot in kind of preparing for it, and truthfully, I still feel like there's a lot I just don't understand in this system. There's probably a lot I need to go back and get smarter on. There are so many big numbers in this type of a discussion that the scale sort of doesn't make sense at times when you start to think about what it means to feed the world and how making changes in that system can have enormous knock-on effects for both good and bad. Without further delay, please enjoy my discussion with Mark Hyman, and we may end up revisiting this topic with other guests should people find this interesting. Hey Mark, thanks for coming over, man.

No, I'm so happy to be here. It's beautiful, chickens running around and everything. Venison in the freezer, my kind of place.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's in keeping with a lot of what we're going to talk about today. I think, Mark, a lot of people would associate you with other topics that we might get into, functional medicine, the role of toxins in the environment, certainly food, but from the standpoint of health, what to eat. But what we're talking about today is actually something that when you first mentioned to me you were working on this book, actually at the time you were putting the finishing touches on it about a year ago, I was like, wow, that's definitely something I want to understand more. So I can't wait to kind of have this discussion with you today. And that is basically how food is made, how food is delivered and how food is consumed and what the impacts of that are. I mean, what made you decide to tackle a problem of this magnitude, which is not just a scientific problem, but it's a political problem.

Totally.

It's a religious problem, if we're going to be brutally honest.

You mean the nutrition religion?

Yes, exactly. So it's about as complicated as a topic as one would go after.

It is. And I think as a doctor seeing patients day after day for 30 years as a functional medicine doctor, my focus is on why? Why are my patients so sick? And not always, but the majority of them, It has some relationship to food. And then I began to wonder, well, I could sit here all day bailing the bucket and the boat with a hole in it, but I have to figure out why they're eating the food they're eating. And then I began to think about it and go upstream and, well, the food they're eating is caused by the food system. And I'm like, well, why do we have the food system we have? Well, our food policies. And then I'm like, why do we have our food policies? It's the food industry that influences our government policies through lobbying and other influences that they do across the spectrum of society to drive their products to the market and sell them, which are predominantly killing us. I mean, there's 11 million people that die every year from eating ultra processed food and not enough of the good food. And I think it's an underestimate. So basically the answer to your question is I realized I couldn't treat my patients in my office or in the hospital or the clinic. I had to go to where the source of the problem was.

Yeah, yeah. And I want to sort of put this in context, which is the evolution of this. domestication of crops, the institutionalization of agriculture, has for, we're going to demonize it a little bit here, but the reality of it is it's been kind of a remarkable transformation. It would certainly be akin to the printing press when you think about step function changes in our civilization when we went from hunter-gatherers to an agricultural society. So I want to be careful that we're not just sort of saying, the answer is agriculture is the end of.

The- the agriculture is a solution if we do it right.

Yeah, so let's start with what you see as the sort of main pillars of the problem. How did we get to a point where the food environment is toxic? Because that's effectively what you're saying, right? If you eat on default, you're going to probably eat the wrong things.

Yeah, it goes deeper than that. The food system as a whole, as I began to dig in this rabbit hole, I realized it wasn't just causing chronic disease, but it was causing most of the global crises that we're thinking about in silos that are all connected. And I'll just quickly lay them out and it would be good to go over them in detail as we go through the podcast. But clearly, food is the biggest driver of chronic disease, affecting six out of 10 people. It's clearly the biggest driver of economic stress in this country in our $22 trillion debt. One third of all Medicare expenses are for diabetes alone, and one third of all of our federal budget is Medicare. If it was a company, it would be the biggest company in the world at a trillion dollars. annually. It's also driving climate change, a food system end to end. And we'll unpack it is the number one cause of climate change more than fossil fuels. It's causing massive environmental degradation, including loss of biodiversity, plant species, animal species, livestock species. It's driving social injustice in many ways through how it affects our kids' cognitive development and ability to learn. And there's huge academic achievement gaps. It leads to massive health disparities because poor communities are more affected by these foods and are more targeted by them. It affects even behavior, violence, conflict. We see such a divisive society today. Why do we have that 40 years ago? It wasn't like that. And I think our diet has changed so radically, not just in the last 10,000 years, but in the last 40 years with the advent of massive amounts of ultra-processed food. And that's driving cognitive behavioral issues, violence, suicide, conflict, and even threatens our national security because 70% of military recruits are unfit to fight and are rejected. So we've got these global problems that are affecting us. And then of course that leads to massive political instability because of our food system, of climate refugees, because the food system is driving climate. What is that going to do? I mean, think about it. We had a million Syrian refugees and that created a global crisis. The UN estimates that within a decade or a few decades, we're going to have 200 to a billion climate refugees. That's unimaginable. So how do we begin to sort of grapple with these problems and think about the solutions. And the beauty is, since they're all connected by food, they can all be solved by going to the root and fixing our food system. And that's the leverage we have, which is so exciting to me because it's not, oh doom and gloom, the world's ending. It's, yeah, we identify the problem, how it's connected, think of it as a system, and then be able to solve.

The problem by going to the root and dealing with these issues collectively. So which one of those would you like to start with? Would you like to start with sort of the impact of processed food on health, which is probably not one that we need to spend a lot of time on. I don't think there's many people that would debate that.

Are there? You'd be surprised. I mean, there's $12 billion spent by the food industry on nutrition research that confuses people, muddies the waters, declares that Gatorade is a great sports drink and that sugar doesn't cause obesity and that, I mean, I could go on and on. People are confused and it certainly our political leaders certainly don't get this. And I think when you think of our healthcare system, it certainly doesn't get that food is medicine.

Do you really think that political leaders, I know you've spent some time interacting with said folks, do you really think they don't get it or do you think that they're just in a difficult position, which is how do you appease all of these constituents? On the one hand, a lot of the bills get paid by the entities that endorse these agendas, and on the other end, they probably have empathy for the damage that's done. Do you actually think there's a lack of awareness?

I do. Forget about politicians. academics, doctors, health professionals have no clue how powerful food is to heal disease. I mean, they get that if you eat too much, you're going to get fat, right? But that's about it. Or if you eat too much carbs, maybe now, maybe you'll get diabetes. But not even that. I mean, the American Diabetes Association is still telling people to eat a lot of carbohydrates. I think we have a real lack of understanding of the power of food to cause disease and the power of food to cure disease. And so, there's a real gap in that. I think it's starting to become in the public awareness that food is medicine, that there's a food is medicine working group in Congress, Cleveland Clinic where I work now as a food is medicine initiative. There's hospitals around the country that are talking about this. It's more the exception than the rule. So I do think people don't understand the magnitude. I mean, if you say to a politician, what is the biggest killer on the planet? They're going to go smoking or lack of exercise or whatever. Maybe they're going to get this being overweight, but they don't get that it's the ultra processed food that kills more people than smoking. Violence, wars, everything else. So, I mean, I think there was a disease like Ebola or Zika that was killing 11 million people a year. I mean, people would be talking about it and it's just not in the conversation that's happening. Even, for example, Medicare, Medicare for all. Has anybody said the reason we have such trouble with Medicare is because people are eating bad food and that we need to fix the food? They're not saying, let's get Medicare for all, let's repeal Obamacare. I mean, those aren't the solutions. It's like, that would be a disaster if we had Medicare for all because everybody's sick and it's just going to bankrupt the country unless we fix why.

They'Re sick in the first place. What do you think it is about processed foods that are particularly difficult metabolically for our species?

Historically, we ate 800 different species of plants, a lot of roots and tubers, 100 grams of fiber a day. Now, the average American eats about eight grams, which is nothing. And we had, you know, a very complex diet, which It was very difficult to obtain sugar. You got lucky if you found a honey thing. I remember reading this article about these Nepalese honey hunters where they have to climb up 100 feet into the trees with a burning bush. If you had to climb a tree with a burning bush to get a cookie, you probably wouldn't eat cookies. And I think it's just become so easy for us to have this abundance of sugar and flour and refined foods. The good intentions that were there in the postwar period that led to the development of industrial agriculture were to provide a lot of starchy, abundant calories to feed the hungry and solve real hunger issues around the world. And I think that was a good thing, but there was unintended consequences of the intensive chemical agriculture that we're using, intensive fertilizer use, and the commodity products, which are wheat, corn, soy, and rice and some other areas of the world that are driving this obesity epidemic. So our biology isn't adapted to eating highly refined foods, which essentially is most of what we're eating now. It's 60% of our calories and every 10% of your calories that's ultra processed food, your risk of death goes up by 14%. So it's not, it's not something our bodies like. It's not something you're adapted to. And then of course there's all the other stuff in there that may be problematic, like refined soybean oil or food additives or chemicals that are in our food that have all sorts of metabolic consequences like BPA or other metabolic toxins that are consumed within the food we're eating. So it's complicated. It's sugar and starch and flour are the big drivers, but there's all these other components. and then who knows what's happening with pesticides and glyphosate affecting our microbiome. It's such a complex web of different factors that alter our metabolic pathways that drives disease.

And just kind of digging into this a little bit more, how much of it do you think is the energy balance and the dysregulation of energy balance that comes from these processed foods? So there are certainly people out there that would argue that part of the trouble with processed food is it sort of hijacks our energy homeostatic systems. So if you put a human in an environment akin to what our ancestors evolved in, there was enough auto-feedback and regulation that you sort of maintained energy balance. You would eat more when you needed to eat more, you would eat less when you needed to eat less. One of the drawbacks of processed food, if not the biggest drawback, is it sort of hijacks that system. And if you cut the feedback out of that loop, they're eating when they don't really need additional energy. Do you think that's the biggest issue or do you think it's the void of nutrient that then creates sort of an abundance of junk calorie as the body search for nutrients. Do you think it's this loss of fiber?

Probably both. I mean, kids who are iron deficient eat dirt. It's called pica. And, it's well known that if you're looking for nutrients, you're just going to eat anything. So, that may be part of it. I think the main part of it is, and you've talked about this a lot, is the ways in which these refined starches and sugars affect your biology. They raise insulin, which has a cascading effect of fat storage in your belly, which is a dangerous fat. It leads to increased hunger, affects your brain chemistry. It actually locks the fat in the fat cells so they can't get out. So it gets like a one-way turnstile. It gets in but can't get out, and it slows your metabolism. So you're in this Cascade of vicious Cycles. So you talked about energy balance. I think most people, when they hear that, think about calories in, calories out. I You know, I both understand that it's more complex than that, that there's different effects of food on your biology independent of calories. In a lab, all calories are the same. 750 calories of Coke, 50 calories of Coke is the same as 750 calories of broccoli. But to get 750 calories of soda, you'd have a big gulp, which is 46 teaspoons of sugar, and 750 calories of broccoli is 21 cups of broccoli with 35 grams of fiber and no sugar. profoundly different effects on your biology, same calories. But we don't really appreciate that medicine. And most of our current thinking about weight loss is focused on calories in, calories out. It suits the food industry because they go, well, it's all about moderation. There's no good or bad calories. It's exercise more, eat less. Like that's their mantra. And it serves them to sell more of their junk food as long as it's part of a, quote, balanced diet. But the truth is that these foods affect our brain chemistry. and create all sorts of metabolic issues that are incredibly difficult. I was chatting with my friend David Perlmutter, who just wrote a book called Brainwash, where he's talking about, he's a neurologist, where the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala are uncoupled with an inflammatory diet, which is what we're eating most of us in America and around the world. What that means is that the adult in the room, the prefrontal cortex, which is the decision maker that understands the consequences of its behavior, is not talking to the impulse part of your brain, the fight or flight part of your brain, the pleasure seeking part of your brain. So there's this disconnection and your decisions are not in your best interest. And that's why we have so much bad behavior and conflict and so forth because we're eating this inflammatory diet that's literally dysregulating our brain so the adult.

In the room is asleep. Say a bit more about that. What is it about the diet that could be inflammatory and how could one measure the consequences of that? Because Is it possible that two people could consume the exact same subpar diet and have very different inflammatory responses? Yeah, sure.

I mean, there is a, listen, if people are eating junk food and processed food, their metabolism, whatever they look like, whether they're overweight or not, is not going to be as good as someone who's eating a whole foods, unprocessed diet. But there is a lot of genetic variability. But you can actually measure inflammation in response to diet through various biomarkers. There's new panels of sort of looking at the inflammasome, which is really cool. It's more than just a CRP or a sed rate, which are blood tests you can do to look at inflammation. And the ways in which it causes it, particularly it was talking about insulin, it also drives this visceral belly fat, which is a basically metabolic fire that starts in these cells and it spreads inflammation throughout the body. So just the nature of eating sugar.

And processed food drives up inflammation. If a patient has normal biomarkers through the lens of all of those things, their interleukins and C-reactive protein, fibrinogen, if all of those things were normal, would you still think that there's potentially an inflammatory response that's coming through their diet?

The question is how sensitive are our current tools for assessing the immune response to food? And I think they're pretty crappy. And I think there's more and more lab diagnostic measures that are coming about that are going to help us look at that. I was talking to someone from the Buck Institute of Aging last week and he said, yeah, there's this whole new panel of inflammatory biomarkers that are much more specific and much more sensitive and enable us to really look at the inflammatory response that's happening in the body related to aging or diet or anything else.

How much of that inflammatory response do you think is mediated by permeability in the gut specifically versus because I have to be honest with you, Mark, this is an area that I've never understood. It gets talked about a lot. There's lots of hand waving. Sometimes I see it certainly in patients. I when we see subtle elevations in fibrinogen and/or C-reactive protein, or at least two of the interleukins, we usually put patients on elimination diets until we find out what the culprit was. And we're trying to basically titrate symptoms versus these biomarkers. But I find that to be staggeringly crude. And to your point, I don't know what we're missing. And I don't know what's true, true and unrelated. And then of course it gets back to the question of what's the mechanism of this? And so one potential mechanism is that the permeability of the gut is altered and if bacteria that could normally not translocate across the lining of the gut do so, that would certainly be a reason for inflammation. A, do you think that that's a prevalent source of it? Oh, huge. I mean, all our guts are messed.

Up and there's a whole phenomena called metabolic endotoxemia. It's been well described and studied. And the fact that your gut microbiome plays a huge role in regulation of weight independent of calories. So they literally can take the poop out of a skinny rat into a fat rat and make them skinny and vice versa. they've done in humans. I think the way in which it works is that your microbiome is regulated by what you eat. A lot of fiber, prebiotics, the phytonutrients, the phytochemicals, the polyphenols all affect the quality of the garden you have growing inside of you. And you can get a lot of nasty weeds in there. When that starts to happen, they start to disrupt the gut microbiome. They disrupt the lining of the gut. They cause what we call leaky gut. on top of everything else, which is our low fiber diet, high sugar, processed food increases bad bugs in the gut, antibiotics, acid blockers, anti-inflammatory drugs, hormones all screw up our gut. And of course, toxins, environmental toxins, glyphosate is super toxic to the microbiome. And so all these things that we know and those things we don't know are disrupting the microbiome. And when that happens, the lining of the gut becomes slightly damaged, the biofilms get disrupted and you end up absorbing bacterial products, bacterial toxins, as well as food antigens things that we should normally tolerate that start to create an inflammatory response and 60% of your immune system is in your gut. And you know, what's really striking to me, Peter, is, you know, sort of the discovery that many of our metabolites in our blood, probably a third or more, may be from microbiome. In other words, when you check your blood tests, we're checking human analytes, but when you actually start to do some more sophisticated metabolic testing and metabolome, you find all these things that aren't human that come from bacteria that are regulating your immune system, that activating your mitochondria that are regulating your DNA, that are affecting your brain chemistry, affecting your mood, affecting all sorts of diseases. So, this is a really exciting area and I think getting people's microbiome sorted often happens when you shift to a whole foods plant-rich diet, not plant-based but plant-rich.

How can one measure these things? I mean, one of the things that I've found difficult is finding valid commercial tests that can enable patients or physicians to understand if they're in this sort of regulated state. I mean, to me, the black box is when someone comes in and says, I have gut dysbiosis or I have poor gut health. And they may be right, but it's very different than someone who says, I have type 2 diabetes, where we have really clear ways to diagnose it. We kind of have some understanding what the pathophysiology is here. This is much more squishy. And frankly, there's an enormous disconnect between people like you and sort of the stuffy, upper lipped gastroenterologist who makes his or her living in the gut, but doesn't necessarily sort of see the problem this way, right? They're looking at different problems.

You know, honestly, Peter, the evidence has become so overwhelming that mainstream medicine is bought into this whole microbiome story. And Cleveland Clinic, for example, they're studying the microbiome and heart disease and arthritis and cancer. And it's like they just got a $12 million grant from the NIH to.

Study the microbiome and heart disease, which is pretty amazing. And yet, if you go to your.

Doctor and say, is there any evidence that I should be on this probiotic or this? They don't know. The clinical translation is challenging. So, I'm somebody who's been practicing functional medicine for 30 years and the gut has been the number one focus of ability to really move diseases in a powerful way. And they used to call me Dr. C every poop because I've done literally tens of thousands of stool tests and I've looked at all the different ones. And you're looking at a moving target. You're looking at an ecosystem. And so we look at a lot of different biomarkers to assess what's going on in the gut. Is there adequate pancreatic enzyme function? Looking at pancreatic elastase, are there absorption issues looking at fecal fats? Are there inflammatory markers in there? For example, Calprotectin or Eosinophil Protein X, which are standard markers to look at inflammation in the gut. What's your IGA level, your antibody levels? And then we look at indicators of dysregulated gut microbiome such as short-chain fatty acids, which are essentially produced by good bacteria that are the fuel for the gut and have anti-cancer properties, anti-inflammatory properties. And those can be low like butyrate, and we can see that. Then we look at sort different microbiome characteristics using DNA or PCR analysis through the microRNAs. And that allows us to see, for example, if there's low Akkermansia, which is a very important bacteria that regulates your biofilm, that regulates immunity, that's linked to autoimmune disease and cardiometabolic diseases, cancer treatment therapy risk. So we can modify those things. And then we look at culture, we look at other kinds of testing for parasites, it's PCR testing. So there's a lot of things that we look at. and get a gestalt, it changes over time, but you can see if someone's got a good gut or an okay gut or a terrible gut.

So if you take a patient who is both symptomatic and by some constellation of tests has a quote unquote bad gut, what percentage of those are quote unquote fixable by subtraction? So you take things out of their diet or addition, you add more of certain food to their diet, or the third choice would be intervention based where you have to use sort of supplements and antibiotics or probiotics or things like that. So, that's an oversimplified look at this. But if there's three levers you have, which means take something out of their food, add something to their food or add a different type of food or then use a bigger gun like a supplement, how do those tools fit into this treatment?

Well, functional medicine is a very organized framework for addressing gut dysfunction called the 5R Program. The first R is to remove, remove things that shouldn't be there, whether it's foods that are triggering a problem like gluten, which affects permeability or dairy, grains for some people, remove bad bugs. So if you have a parasite, I mean, I just had a patient who had a common parasite. She had stomach issues for 20 years. She was always waking up feeling like crap. I gave her alinia, which is an anti-parasitic medication. Six days, she said she's never felt better. So sometimes you just need to do and maybe bacterial overgrowth you have, maybe there's yeast overgrowth, you need to address that. And so that's the first step. The second step is to replace what might be missing. So fiber, prebiotics, enzymes, various things that.

May be needed to support the system. And sometimes that's just through food, but sometimes that's also supplements.

Sure. You can take prebiotic fibers and prebiotic foods like plantain and artichokes and all kinds of different foods, and then reinoculate, which would be provide probiotics where necessary, and that can be through foods like fermented foods, or can be through probiotic supplements. And those are, that's still sort of a wild west, but there are things that up there that really work. And then to replace what's missing. So maybe there's nutrients that the body needs to heal things like glutamine, vitamin A, fish oil, maybe even things like butyrate and replace things that might be needed for healing the gut. Like polyphenols, for example, are a wonderful thing you can get from food, pomegranate, cranberries, green tea, et cetera. That have powerful great effects on the microbiome that we didn't really appreciate. So we thought it was prebiotics and probiotics. But it turns out the polyphenols in plant foods are super helpful for the gut microbiome. the microbiome. And then the last R is to restore, which means to sort of restore your nervous system because you need to sort of deal with the way in which your stress level and everything affects your gut and your gut microbiome. You can get a leaky gut just from stress, for example. So, working on all those in a systematic way that's personalized is really the approach. There's no sort of, oh, take this.

Or do that, it's going to work. So, bringing it back to what you.

Started this point with. Yeah, we got down to the rabbit hole. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, it's such an interesting topic. you've laid out basically the enormous health consequences of eating poorly.

Six out of 10 Americans have a chronic disease. Four out of 10 have two or more. In 10 years, 83 million Americans are left with three or more, which is bankrupting our country. And one in two Americans has pre-diabetes or type two diabetes. These statistics are staggering. 75% of us are overweight. Most states now have 40% obesity rates. I mean, when I graduated medical school, there wasn't a single state that had a 20% obesity rate. Now, everybody's got 30 or almost 40. These are massive things that are happening at a scale that we've never seen in human history that we haven't been equipped to deal with, we haven't really thought of how to address. And it's like we're trying to scramble to fix it.

And you certainly in the book talk about how there are racial differences in terms of the susceptibility to the bad policy, which we'll get to down the line. Is there also sort of racial variability and discrepancy in the actual physiology in response to this?

There's clearly economic health disparities. There's health disparities as a result of targeted marketing from the food industry that are driving various problems. There's obviously the food swamps and the food deserts and food apartheid. All of that is true. But genetically, there's certain segments of the population that are much more likely when they are in an abundance of sugar and flour to get diabetes and obesity. And that includes Native Americans, probably the worst. African Americans, Latinos, and of course the people from the South Pacific and even Indians from India, Chinese and Asians often are at much higher risk even at lower body rates. So this is really a global problem and that's why we're seeing 80% of the world's type 2 diabetics in the developing world.

Is there any country or government in particular that seems more attuned to this problem than the American government?

Many, in fact most. Chile, for example, was seeing massive obesity rates in kids and adults, healthcare costs staggering for that country. And again, we're inundated by all the processed food from the food industry and soda industry. And it took a doctor who was elected to the Senate, who was vice president of the Senate, and a doctor who was elected president, Michelle Bachmann, who's a pediatrician, to stand up and say enough and put in a set of regulations to try to stop the onslaught of these conditions on their population driven by the food industry. So, they did a number of things. One, they put in an 18% soda tax. Two, they put on warning labels on the front of bad foods. So, on your Frosted Flake cereal box, there's black warning labels. They eliminated any cartoon characters from all the kids' foods. So, no Tony the Tiger, no Toucan Sam on Fruit Loops. They eliminate any processed food schools and they made the school lunches healthy. They eliminated any advertising on junk food from six in the morning till 10 at night so kids wouldn't see it. And then they measured these outcomes based on that and they've seen tremendous improvements. And it was surprising to me, I talked to Barry Popkin who's from UNC who worked with them on developing these. And Michael Bloomberg, I think gave him $30 million to assess the impact and so forth. So they're studying this. And even more than the 80% soda tax the restriction of food marketing and the warning label and so forth had a fourfold increased benefit compared to the soda tax, which is being heavily fought here. There's incredible opposition to any limiting of marketing to kids. And, you know, the saying it's the breach of the First Amendment and free speech and so forth. The First Amendment doesn't abdicate our responsibility to protect our children. If a foreign nation was doing to our kids what food industry is and our government is to his policies. And we'd go to war to protect our kids and we just sort of sit back and let this happen. It's interesting.

I'm not a constitutional expert, which would be such an overstatement. I know nothing about the Constitution. There is a Constitution. I know. There's a few. My understanding of the First Amendment is provided the advertising is quote unquote honest, it is constitutional. Is that, and that's a gray area because if you say Froot Loops are part of a healthy breakfast, how do we know that's honest? I can't help but think about the analogous situation, which is tobacco. And what I think most people don't know, and it's possible I'm wrong, but I believe everything I'm about to say is correct because at one point I knew this story well. When the Surgeon General came out with his declaration of the harm of tobacco, which was in about the mid 60s, and that was the peak of smoking in the United States, I believe something to the tune of 50-55% of people over the age of 18 smoked cigarettes at the time the Surgeon General came out and said definitively cigarettes are causing lung cancer. A number of things took place that got us to where we are today, which is somewhere below 20% of people. Last time I looked, it was about 18% of adults smoked.

Yeah, a lawsuit is what worked.

Well, but here's a big one. A big one was the removal of advertising. But here's the part that I was surprised to learn. It was voluntary on the part of tobacco. In other words, the tobacco industry was not banned from advertising. What the policymakers said is the law is now that every time a tobacco commercial airs, it must be followed by an anti-tobacco commercial. So they didn't ban tobacco, they added anti-tobacco.

So every time you have a McDonald's commercial, you say, how bad the food.

Is, it's going to kill you, right? I think that's not true. Well, what's interesting is the anti-tobacco ads were so devastating that the tobacco industry voluntarily withdrew its ads. They were getting hurt so bad by the anti-tobacco ads that they said enough is enough. And that's, to this day, we don't have tobacco ads on television. So, A, someone needs to fact check that to make sure I have that story correct, but I believe it is correct. And secondly, if it at least suggests another angle to this problem, which is rather than go down the First Amendment fight, maybe great, okay. I love that idea. Keep all the commercials you want on, but we're going to come up with something different.

Now, of course, it's not like a drug ad. You can eat this soda, but it's going to cause obesity, diabetes, cancer, dementia, and kill you early.

Fine, maybe that's a good idea. Yeah, and of course tobacco is the easiest thing to demonize because you just show somebody a hole in their throat after they've had throat cancer or a black lung or a corps. I mean, there's so many grotesque ways that you can make the point that are more difficult with food.

Limp cigarette. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

But nevertheless, I've always found that to be a very powerful point because it's true that eventually taxes were introduced into tobacco and they turned out to be quite powerful. Additional measures in 1989 was also a big step when secondhand smoking became well enough understood that they banned tobacco in airplanes and things like that. but I wonder how much of a playbook there is there on tobacco to copy.

Well, there is, but guess what? The food industry is copying tobacco's playbook to slow or stall or stop this. And one of the most egregious things was something they've picked up recently, which is from the tobacco playbook. There have been soda taxes that passed predominantly in the 2016 election in California and other states. And the soda industry is a Viet Minh opposed to this. The past in California, they spent about $38 million avoiding these taxes against these taxes. The Bloomberg and the Arnold Foundation spent about 20 million and it didn't pass. I mean, taxes did pass. And it freaked out the soda companies. So the American Beverage Association essentially went and tried subversive tactics. So they went to California where most of these taxes were passed and they put in a ballot measure which was designed to prohibit local taxes unless it was a two-thirds majority, meaning you couldn't fund your school, your police department, your fire department, your cleanup, road cleanup, unless there's a two-thirds majority. That would hamper local governments dramatically. And they spent millions of dollars pushing this ballot measure, even though it had nothing to do with food. And at the last minute before the election, They went to Governor Brown, who's probably the most liberal governor in the history of the United States, Governor Moonbeam, and they said, look, we'll pull this measure, but you have to put in place a preemptive law that prohibits any future taxes on soda or junk food. And it happened all behind closed doors, completely co-opted the government, it pressured them to do something that they didn't want to do. And they're doing this in state after state after state. And this is exactly what tobacco did. So we could say, oh, they're not bad actors, they're trying to do things that good, they're making water, they're making lotion, sugar beverages, they know exactly what they're doing. They have an existential threat and they're trying to fight it in every way possible.

That's just one example. There's another funny example, which is an initiative called the Global Energy Balance Network, Gurn or something like this, right? Yeah. Yeah. Anahad O'Connor, I believe, played a pretty important role at the New York Times exposing this for what the sham it was. Do you want to tell people a.

Little bit about that? Sure. The Global Energy Balance Network. So the whole idea of this is that that energy balance is the mantra of the food industry. And what that means is all calories are the same. Soda calories, broccoli calories, no difference. So it's just a matter of balance. Calories in, calories out, moderation, et cetera, et cetera. And so they essentially, Rona Applebaum, who was one of the top VPs at Coca-Cola put together a strategy because she saw the vilification of soda and all these horrible outcries against sugar that unmet by enough aggressive force from the sugar industry and the soda industry. And she said, look, let's start this something called the Global Energy Balance Network. She found a bunch of scientists so she could co-op, paid them lots of money, funded their research to actually promote the idea that all calories are the same. Like James Hill, for example, who was part of an NIH study, legitimate scientist, but completely co-opted. And they funded about 20 million and they built the website, they organized this messaging and the talking points. and they did it all sort of behind the scenes. And when there was discovery and so the FOIA Freedom of Information Act was a public university. We got all the data. It was really clear how they were behind the scenes manipulating all this to fund literally millions of dollars of corrupt research to prove their point and tell a different story. And then as soon as the New York Times article came out overnight, it was disbanded saying it's run out of resources. I mean, come on, Coca-Cola has what? Billions and millions of dollars of sales over here. They have plenty of resources. and the whole thing collapsed because of investigative journalism. But it just goes to show how these food companies are co-opting scientists, co-opting professional associations, co-opting social groups, co-opting the government, putting forth front groups and spinning all kinds of misinformation in a very coordinated strategic strategy to disrupt public opinion, to confuse the public, and to allow their shenanigans to keep going.

Is the opposition to this industry that you can't fight this at the individual level? In other words, it has to be solved structurally because of the economic disparity? Let me ask the question another way. Why not focus all of the efforts on helping people understand so they can make the informed choice, which is if you have to have a Coke, make it a Diet Coke.

That may not be as good either.

Yeah, but using that as an example, right? But in other words, do we really believe that this has to be solved at the level that seems almost unwinnable, which is fighting an unethical opponent with infinite resources? I mean, that's a very dangerous combination.

Yeah, well, look what happened to tobacco. I mean, think about this country.

But you don't need tobacco to live, right? The advantage that you would have as an anti-tobacco crusade person is the ground is not muddied by the notion that tobacco is part of a group called food that you need to live.

Although it depends how you define food. Are Froot Loops food? I don't think so. I mean, they're a highly industrialized processed product.

But they still fit into this bucket of food. And therefore, they ride a little bit of the coattails of they're still riding on the, Hey, we're putting B vitamins in these things and they're fortified and all this other stuff. sort of nonsense.

So what you're asking is, do we need just a grassroots effort to focus on individual choice and action, or do we need a public policy change?

Well, and I wouldn't even ask it as either or because the obvious answer to that would be you could do both. I guess what I'm getting at is, would you be better off putting more effort into sort of the grassroots campaign?

It's complicated. When you think of the big changes that happened in policy in this country, the abolition, I mean, there were a few people running people on the underground railroad and pushing for abolition back in the early 1800s. And it took decades and decades for change. But eventually our entire agricultural and economic system collapsed. It was founded on slavery and it was reimagined and rebuilt. And I think, look at women's rights, same thing, gay rights, civil rights. All those things are things that were really starting on the periphery through grassroots movements, but had to push Congress to make different laws. And I think that's what has to happen. But I think we have to be smart about it as well. I mean, yes, consumers make a difference. That's why we're seeing General Mills commit a million acres to regenerative ag. It's why we're seeing big companies necessarily reformulating their products and why there's sustainable regenerative ag initiatives at Danone. I mean, these companies are starting to see that the consumers want different things and they're starting to shift their product lines. They're starting to shift their focus on how their supply chain works and where they get and source their products to regenerative agriculture. So I do believe that the individual has a huge impact through their vote, with what they're eating, their fork, with their wallet, and of course, even with their vote and their voice. And I think we don't use a ladder enough. That has to all happen. I, and unfortunately, I do believe that the individual's voice matters. Yes, we can all have compost piles, we can have community gardens, we can have a garden in our backyard, we can choose to eat organically, meet, we can be like you, Peter, and go hunting our wild deer. I mean, I'm, like, I'm jealous, but that that alone is not enough because there are structural problems that are not solvable unless we change how we grow food, what we grow, how we process, distribute, market, sell, eat and waste it. And if we don't deal with every aspect along that food chain, we're really not going to solve this problem. And I, we haven't really talked about it yet, but things like climate change are an increasingly important part of the conversation about food. And that is something that's just in the radar. Like how does fixing food fix climate? It does. It's actually one of the only ways to really reverse climate change.

Let's talk about that.

Some people don't think climate change is real. They call it weather. I mean, whatever you want to call it. There's stuff happening. We're having a million acres flooded in the Midwest. Cropland that's destroying farmers' livelihood. We're seeing, you know, increasing weather patterns of hurricanes and wildfires in Australia and California. We're seeing melting of three trillion tons of ice from the Antarctica. These are just undeniable facts.

Can I give you my two cents on this?

Yeah.

I think the term climate change, global warming were sort of, in retrospect, not the best ways to describe this phenomenon. And climate volatility would have been a better way to have explained it because one, it's actually more accurate, and two, it provides a better explanation for what you're describing. Because when you say global warming is a problem, well, then how do you explain a record cold year? It's the high highs, the low lows, and the frequency with which they're cycling both through hurricanes, fires, things like that. I wish we could have gone back in time and said, Look, the problem is climate volatility.

Instability. 2019 was the hottest year on record other than 2016 in human history. So all of us can feel it. We know it. so the question is why is it happening and what's the cause of it? And clearly most people think it's fossil fuels and taking up all the carbon that was stored in the Earth's crust and burning it and releasing that carbon through fossil fuels. And that's a big part of it, maybe a third, but half of it comes from our food system through all sorts of different mechanisms. One, deforestation, you lose the carbon capture from the trees, the soil destruction from destructive agriculture, which we have, which essentially is a method of industrial growing of food that tills the soil, which disrupts the normal organic matter, causes soil erosion, releases carbon in the environment. It also, when you look at the soil as an issue itself, it's probably the biggest cause and the biggest solution to fixing climate change. And most people don't think about that. They think about oil, not soil, but a third to 40% of all the carbon in the atmosphere today that's causing climate volatility is from the loss of soil. That's a staggering amount.

So explain how that's the case.

Yeah, well, the soil, when it's alive and has living matter and carbon in the soil, organic matter, which is carbon, it can hold three times the amount of carbon that's in the atmosphere today, which is a trillion tons of carbon. It can hold 3 trillion tons. The UN estimated that if we took 2 million of the 5 million degraded hectares of land around the world. And we intensively use regenerative agriculture, which I'll explain in a minute, and to restore the soil, we could stop climate change and delay the progression for about 20 years. And it would cost $300 billion, which is essentially what we pay every year for diabetes in America through Medicare. And it's basically the amount of budget for the total global military spend for just two months or 60 days. So this is solvable problem. And the reason that the soil is such an issue is that it basically takes when the grasses are on there and the plants are on there, it sucks the carbon out of the environment.

Can you explain the difference between soil and dirt?

Yeah, soil is alive. Soil has all kinds of bugs in it, mycorrhizal fungi, it has all kinds of bacteria, it has all kinds of carbon in it from the plants, and it holds a huge amount of water. For example, for every 1% organic matter, it can hold 27,000 gallons of water, which would prevent floods and droughts, which it does and creates more resilient farms. Explain that again. When you have soil, it's like a sponge. So when it rains, instead of the rain running off or running through, it gets stored like a sponge in the soil so that you don't need to irrigate, that you don't have to worry about floods and droughts. Now, the reason we had so much of these floods and these flooded farm fields in the Midwest was because these soils are just dead. And then you have to do more and more fertilizer. So we're killing the soil by using fertilizer, by pesticides, herbicides, tilling, not using cover crops, not using crop rotations, not using animals in an integrated way to actually create more soil. And everything we're doing is just destroying the soil. When you have a live soil, when you have the ability of these plants to suck out carbon dioxide, because they breathe carbon dioxide, that's what plants do. They breathe out oxygen, which we breathe, and it's a vicious, I mean, a beautiful virtuous and the carbon dioxide from the atmosphere gets pulled through the plants into the soil and stays there. And you can build soil simply by using this technology and integrating animals that poop and pee.

So I don't think I was aware of that. I'll put my ignorance on full display. I always assumed that the majority of the carbon that came in that the plant brought in through the photocell was for carbon fixation. which was creating biomatter. So in other words, carbon and oxygen are coming in the form of carbon dioxide. That carbon is being fixated to other carbons. That's how we make hydrocarbons within the plants. Yeah, carbohydrates. That's right. And then the oxygen is being released. But I didn't realize that there was.

Any carbon dioxide stored in soil. Yeah, and if you look at the mechanism, it goes into the plant, but it also goes into the roots.

And so you've got this incredible root system, and you've got microbe, fungi that are- oh, I see. So you're just saying the carbon within the roots of the plant is the storage. Yeah, but not in the soil per se, not in the actual dirt and bacteria.

No, no. Then it gets eaten by the bacteria, eaten by this massive mycorrhizal fungi, and it creates a lot of necrotic dead, but like actually organic matter. It's an incredibly rich living organism. And dirt is just dead. Dirt doesn't hold water. It doesn't have much carbon in it. It doesn't have much nutrients. And in order to actually to extract the nutrients from the plants, you have to have organic matter, which allows us and bacteria and all these microbe fungi, which make the nutrients in the soil available to the plant. And since we are growing food in dirt, we see 50% less nutrient density of even healthy food like broccoli has less minerals than it did 50 years ago. So you have all these complicated factors that are driving the destruction of our soil. Fertilizer is another one. I don't think people really understand the fertilizer story. There's 400 billion pounds of fertilizer used everywhere in the world. It's a sevenfold increase over the last 40 years because they're two-thirds as effective. The way you make fertilizer is a chemically intensive process that uses energy. It's one of the biggest utilizers of energy and the number one utilizer of fracking produced natural gas, which I didn't even know. So when you look at the fertilizer industry, they use more natural gas than Exxon. And in order to make the gas.

I'm sorry, they use more fertilizer than Exxon produces. So they use more energy to produce gas. Natural gas produces.

Yes, they use more natural gas than Exxon uses. So Yara and Mosaic, these big fertilizer companies, are making fertilizer using this intensive energy process that needs natural gas. When you frack, you actually release methane from these methane leaks that come out of these fracking wells. Recently, there's one in Ohio that you could see from space. And then that actually is about a quarter of all methane released gas in the environment today, which is as much as factory farm cows. And that's from growing plants.

Do you know what percent of, I don't know the numbers anymore, but there was a day when the United States was consuming 20 million barrels of oil and oil equivalent per day. It's probably a bit less than that today. Do you know what What amount of that is in the production, transport, and consumption of food?

Oh, yeah. One-fifth of all our oil consumption is for the food system. It's more than all cars, planes, boats, transportation combined. So it's a staggering amount of oil. And part of it is a system.

It can't be combined though, because- Combined.

No, combined. All transportation combined is less than one-fifth.

Of our total oil consumption.

Because a lot of it's industry and other things. Yeah, it's pretty staggering. And so the fracking, so 20% of.

Our energy utilization is to make fertilizer, deliver seed, harvest, pesticides, herbicides, all come from fossil fuels.

So the fertilizer story gets even worse because now you have all the gas you're using, the methane release from that. When you put on the soil, it kills the soil.

And sorry, the purpose of fertilizer is.

To provide nitrogen, phosphorus, right?

Nitrogen, yes, nitrogen to the plants. So again, just taking a step back for the biochemistry understanding of this. I think plant biology, by the way, is so incredible. Because I don't think people appreciate the significance of carbon fixation, how complicated a chemical reaction it is to take carbon and join it to carbon like a plant can do. So, I mean, it's very energy intensive, which is why it requires sunlight. So you've got this photosynthetic thing. But basically, plants need carbon, which they're getting from the air, they need nitrogen and phosphorus, which they're getting from their soil, and they need energy and water, which they're getting from the environment, and then they make biomass. Yeah, exactly. So the fertilizer is where we give them the nitrogen and the phosphorus, correct?

Yes, but most of the fertilizer that was growing plants historically came from either nitrogen fixing plants like the legumes or from the animals. The reason we have 50 feet of topsoil in some areas in this country 150 years ago was because of all millions of bison running around. There was like bison and elk and all these ruminants that were running around in big herds, chomping things down, moving on to the next spot, peeing and pooping, digging the thing. Saliva makes the grass grow. So it was this beautiful symbiotic system that built literally tens of feet of topsoil.

And it's not that we have too many cows, it's how we're growing. I mean, I think it's worth pausing for a moment to explain for folks. I'll try to do it quickly. There was a day, believe it or not, like 10 years ago when I was obsessed with understanding agriculture. So everything I'm saying is 10 years old. So you can correct me if if I'm wrong. But basically, if you use corn as the model system and you look at the only metric that really matters, which is bushels per acre per year, yield, it all comes down to yield. Basically, from the Civil War to about the end of World War II, if you look at crop yield and you see the plot, it was about 20 bushels per acre per so every acre could produce 20 bushels of corn per year. Obviously it fluctuated quite a bit from year to year, but it was a largely horizontal jagged line from about the end of the Civil War to the end of World War II. And then something really interesting happens. At the end of World War II, that line just turns up and just almost in a linear fashion rises to 200 bushels per acre per year. And I think what a lot of people erroneously assume is, oh, it's the goddamn GMO. Well, actually, no, not at all. GMO didn't even kick in until that number was 160. It was nitrogen-based fertilizer, crop rotation, industrial farming, meaning the ability to actually use machines to not just have a farmer out there doing something. It was selective breeding, crossing. So it was a bunch of things that came in, and then basically GMO has put like a 10% plus up on that from a yield perspective.

Maybe, that's debatable.

So yeah, anyway, the point here is this process really began in earnest about 70 years ago. And prior to 70 years ago, it's been remarkably flat. So of course, this goes back to something you said earlier, which is post-World War II, we had to figure out how to feed a bunch of people. And 20 bushels per acre per year was not cutting it. we're now 10 times the yield, as you're pointing out, at quite a cost.

At quite a cost, yeah.

So the question then is, I mean, you talk about in your book how we're wasting a third of the food produced. So we don't really need 2,200 bushels per acre per year if we stop wasting. Have you figured out, or at least calculated, what you think the sweet spot is, which is if you were to back off the aggressive yield measures, not waste, how much how much of the benefit could you recapture that was there when, for example, we used animals as our fertilizer? That's right.

There's sort of a fallacy in the idea that we can't produce the same amount of food using regenerative methods. I think that's been disproven. Do you believe, in other words, there.

Is 200 bushels per acre per year using regenerative methods? Well, let me just share a quick story.

I want to share this story and I'm going to come back to the fertilizer and talk about the rest of the different aspects that are causing climate change. I think people need to understand that. There's a guy named Gabe Brown who was a North Dakota farmer, 5,000 acre farm, devastated by hail, devastated by weather, and was about to go bankrupt. And then decided he wanted to try regenerative agriculture. And many years ago he started it. And now he says he's built 29 inches of soil. He uses no chemical inputs, makes his own fertilizer from the animals and the plants that he plants, the nitrogen fixing plants. He produces more food, better quality food, and makes 20 times as much money as his neighbor. So in terms of productivity, regenerative farm is far more productive. And I think there's this fallacy that we need green revolution, we need industrial agriculture to feed the world. That's really been disproven. And I think that's the mantra of big ag. It's the mantra of Monsanto and now, which is Bayer and a lot of these big agrochemical companies that are trying to push their products on the marketplace. And so I think we have to sort of be smart about going, wait a minute, it's not just about trying to sort of go back to some old form of agriculture that isn't going to produce the yields. No, I think this is not what was done. This is a sort of a new way of thinking. It combines organic, but it also goes beyond that. And the reason is it sort of interrupts all these problems that are actually driving climate change. So we talked about the fertilizer. Once you put it on the soil, it damages the soil and it releases nitrous oxide. which is 300 times more potent of greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. So you're getting all the fracking, you're getting the destruction of the soil on top of that. And it's like a, it's like a triple threat. As a back end side effect, all that runs off into the rivers, streams and lakes and goes into the oceans and it's created dead zones in 400 areas around the world the size of Europe. There's one the size of New Jersey in the Gulf of Mexico that kills 212,000 metric tons of fish every year. It's a lot of gumbo and sushi. and there's 400 of those around the world that are feeding 500 billion people. So this is what fertilizer does alone. And then of course you have deforestation, the soil erosion, so forth.

And why is that not a problem when the fertilizer is coming from an organic nitrogen source versus an inorganic one?

Of course, right. So an organic nitrogen source, poop goes in there and nitrogen fixing plants and it stays in the soil. as opposed to running off through this degraded soil into the river stream.

So is the issue the fertilizer or the nature of the soil that can't hold the fertilizer?

Both. In order to get dirt to produce plants, you need to put on huge amounts of fertilizer. Like I said, the increase in the use of fertilizer is sevenfold compared to 40 years ago.

So if I'm understanding what you're saying, the problem with fertilizer is it allows us to be lazy and rely less on healthy soil. Because you can dump fertilizer on dirt beating a dead horse.

But if you actually want the healthiest.

Soil possible, you will get your nitrogen contribution from an element that stays within the ecosystem of the soil because it's a part of it, and therefore you're not going to have the runoff. Is that accurate? Exactly.

And so you've got deforestation, you've got damage to the soil and all the ways we talked about, and you've got transportation, refrigeration, processing, distribution, those all cost energy, and then food waste. which is a big cost.

How do you estimate that? That is a staggering number that a third of our food is wasted.

That is just what the sort of conventional assessments are around food waste in the world. It's not my opinion, that's what the UN says.

Right, but I mean, what's the methodology.

By which one calculates that? Good question. I don't know the answer to that question, but that's a good question. But I think it's a generally accepted thing. It's between 30 to 40%. It's different for different reasons in the developing world versus here. We throw out food in our kitchen. They have loose food in the food chain because of lack of storage and transportation, refrigeration. So you've got all these causes which add up to about 50% of climate change. And by shifting how we grow food and focusing on regenerative agriculture, which specifically means regenerating soil and ecosystems, in other words, increasing the amount of organic matter in the soil, increasing water retention using crop rotations, using cover crops, so there's no bare soil, so the soil doesn't... Using animals in very specific grazing patterns that mimics nature to actually intensively graze the land and move the animals around to actually stimulate the growth of the plants, stimulate the soil and so forth. So all those techniques could be easily applied and are done in literally millions of acres around the world with great benefit and high productivity and mitigating climate.

At the same time.

What's the obstacle to it? The obstacle is, you know, you've got That's a $15 trillion food industry that's dependent on the products of industrial farming and is actually selling the seeds, it's selling the fertilizer, it's selling the pesticides.

And herbicides, it's selling all the- Is it the convenience? For example, when you talk about the gentleman you alluded to earlier who basically switched- How many acres does he have? 5,000. 5,000 acres and he switched over to fully regenerative.

Sounds like he's increased his profitability. Dramatically. And climate and resilience.

And has that increase in profitability come through higher price, higher volume or lower cost?

I mean, these farmers lose an average in this country about $1,600 a year. That's their net, is minus $1,600 per acre. No, per farm. Like if you're a farmer, the average farmer, according to the USDA and other statistics, loses money every year. He's making money because- On the subsidy. What do you mean?

It's the only reason he can make a living because of the subsidy?

This guy in North Dakota?

No, no, no, no.

The farmer who's losing $1600 a year? Yeah, I mean, they have write-offs and subsidies and so forth. But Trump just bailed them out for $20 billion, which is almost as much as all the subsidies that exist in the country annually, which is a lot of money. And the farmers struggle and they're caught between basically the big ag and the government. The government's saying, you need to produce these foods. Here's the money. to support you to do it. But that money then goes to buy the seed from Monsanto or the glyphosate from Monsanto or the other agrochemicals and fertilizers from Yara. So they're taking, they're just sort of the pass through of the money from the government to Big Ag and the industry. And that's the problem. Whereas this guy, Gay Brown in North Dakota, he doesn't have to buy seed. He doesn't have to buy fertilizer. He doesn't have to buy glyphosate. He doesn't have to buy pesticides. He doesn't need a lot of irrigation because of soil so much water. He has a diverse ecosystem of animals and plants that he can grow and sell and make a profit. That's more than the others.

And how long would it take someone like him to make that transition? So it's about three to five years, depending.

So we need a massive effort for supporting and transforming our agricultural system to regenerative ag. And there's groups that are working on this, like Kiss the Ground and Carbon Underground that are consulting with governments around the world to help them understand this. the UN gets this. There's a huge report called Climate Change and Land Use that came out in August 20, I think August 2019, which laid these problems out and how we are degrading our land that's contributing to climate. And the solution is multifaceted but includes in restoring these degraded lands. And people say, oh, we can't do this at scale. It's too expensive. The truth is, if you look at all the conservation land in this country, if you look at all the conservation land in this country, if you look at degraded lands that aren't being used properly, if you get land that's used to grow corn and soy for factory farm animals, that could be converted and we can literally double the amount of cows we produce every year on regenerative farms than we do now. Not that we should, not that we need all that meat, but I'm just saying the argument that it's not scalable, that's not cost effective, is just not true. And the truth is you can say you can be vegan, fine, but we should all grow more plants. But there's a lot of land on the planet, about 40% of the arable land, you can't grow food for humans. So these animals upcycle in edible food and put it into a form that we can eat that's extremely nutrient dense. There's a beautiful symbiotic ecosystem here and you don't have to eat the animals if you don't want to, I don't.

Care, but they're needed for the regeneration of soil. Who has done the most comprehensive life cycle assessment on this transformation as you describe it?

So how many acres are there of agricultural land in the United States approximately?

Oh good Lord, I should know that. I don't. It's a lot of millions. It's a lot of millions. So if you if you take that number and on a per acre basis do the calculation of over five years, everybody transitions to a more regenerative, appropriately rotated, covered ag position. How many tons of CO2 can be sequestered per acre under those scenarios?

A lot. So the book called Drawdown is a wonderful explanation of the top solutions that exist today that don't need to be invented, that can draw down carbon out of the environment and collectively the food solution. Did you know the author?

Paul Hawken, yeah.

He's a good friend of mine.

Yeah, actually I'd like to interview him. He looks like someone who would be.

Interesting to interview on this topic. Yeah, he's coming out with a new book called Regenerate, which is how do we regenerate our health, regenerate the soil and so forth. And unexpectedly found that the food solutions were the top solutions to fix climate change that aren't really being implemented. And it's been estimated that this much investment in billions results in this much value in trillions and it reduces carbon by this many gigatons. And it's all in the book. So the calculations have been done, the analysis has been done, and I think it's been estimated by some that we could draw it down anywhere from 30 to 100% of all the carbon that's been released since the Industrial Revolution if.

We can scale this up.

What's the biggest counter argument to this? There isn't any. I mean, I think the argument is we need to have industrial agriculture to feed the world. That's the mantra. It's like calories are all the same. It's that same mantra that isn't science-based but that suits the needs of agrochemical and agribusiness.

But there's no one that's got a pushback argument that says, no, these calculations are overly optimistic and you would introduce.

A new problem if you did this. Of course, there are people all the time who are trying to refute this. And whether it's agribusiness or even the vegan community has come out and said regenerative agriculture is not going to solve the problem. people like Pat Brown from Impossible Foods has been really clearly stating that we need to get rid of all meat, that even regenerative meat doesn't work in terms of protecting the environment. And he quotes various studies that were, I do analyze in my book, Food Fix, talk about, you know, how they're flawed and actually miss a lot of the data. So I think it does take time to create regenerative agriculture. It does take effort. But once you do it, there's an incredible value chain that gets put in place. And, you know, there are countries that are understanding this. You know, we take out give the earth a lot of natural capital, about $125 trillion a year of resources and soil and everything else that we steal from the earth. We don't put it back and it's running out. And- Wait, how much did you say? $125 trillion and the global GDP is probably 80 to 90- I was about.

To say that's more than the global.

GDP, which is about 80 to 90. It's more than that every year. And there's a lot of people working on this. For example, there's a private equity company called Farmland LP that's buying conventional farms, converting them to regenerative agriculture, and moving those farms from single digit profits to high double digit. Their first fund had a 67% return. And when they look at the benefit they provide to the environment, we call ecosystem services. That's the $125 million of ecosystem services, the natural capital we borrow. They add $21 million of value on their farms versus a similar amount of conventional farms. farms would actually steal $8 million of value from the earth. And countries like Costa Rica are paying for ecosystem services for their farmers, are paying them to produce more soil to actually conserve water, to increase biodiversity, which we haven't even talked about, which is.

A whole another topic. I want to get to it. Let's see. Talk to me a little bit about, it's funny, Pat Brown was one of my professors in medical school. Oh, geez. Okay. So, I mean, I don't know if a lot of people realize what a prominent scientist Pat was. and if you look at the type of work Pat did in the 90s, I mean, it's not inconceivable he could have gone down the path of a Nobel Prize. Yeah, I mean, he's a smart guy.

But the challenge is you don't have to vilify people wanting to do regenerative agriculture. I was just going to say, I.

Don'T know anything about Pat. I know very little about their philosophy around why they've created the- Impossible Burger. There's two of these out there.

One's- Beyond Burger, Beyond Meat.

And Impossible Burger.

Okay, and I can never get the two of them straight, but I mean, one is pea based, which is the.

Beyond Meat, and one is GMO soy.

Based, which is- okay, and that's how the GMO one must be pats. If you look at the last about a life cycle analysis, Qantas, which is an independent life cycle analysis company, did an analysis of the Impossible Burger compared to regeneratively raised beef burger. And the Impossible Burger was far better than a conventional factory farm burger. But it added three and a half kilos of carbon for every burger you ate. Which one the Impossible Burger.

So say that again.

So the Impossible Burger was better than a factory farmed burger by far, but it still added three and a half kilos of carbon to the environment for every burger. A regeneratively raised burger, including methane, everything, all the inputs took out three and a half kilos of carbon, meaning you'd have to eat one regeneratively raised beef burger to offset the carbon emissions of a Impossible Burger.

So I'm not against plant-based meats, but I think we can't overstate the importance of and what, by comparison, what was the factory farm burger?

Do you remember how much carbon was added? Three and a half kilos of carbon were removed. No, no, sorry, the factory. Oh, it was a lot. It was like 50 or it was a lot. It was significantly less. But still, it's not the only answer. When you think about scaling up impossible burgers on a GMO monocrop soy field using tons of glyphosate, which has all sorts of harmful consequences, causing soil erosion to the way we farm, damaging the waterways, damaging everything else, I mean, it's just. It doesn't even add up, right? So let's do it right.

So let's talk a little bit about GMO. This is a loaded topic. Again, I think people don't understand what it means and that's sort of, I want to talk about it, but I also want to just put it in context for people so that we understand what GM means and why it came about. So we go back to the 1940s. We had growing old maize on 20 bushels per acre per year. well, we got to remember that used to be something called Tia Senté. That was like this little tiny silly crop that was the size of our finger and it had like four little kernels on it. That's where corn came from. So I was explaining this to my kids the other day because we were, my kids are obsessed with gardening and stuff. And I was saying, look, there's four things about a plant that really matter. If you're planting crops, yield matters. How much do you have? Product profile.

Is it good eat or not?

Yeah, or in the case of Tia Senté, it had a lousy product profile because it just had four kernels on it. Harvestability, the other problem with Tia Senté is the little kernels would always fall off it. You actually wanted the kernels to stay on the thing so you could harvest the whole plant. And crop protection, can you keep it away, can you keep the critters away from it? So GMO has had by far its greatest impact in crop protection. The BT insertion is basically what allowed roundup ready crops to be resistant to glyphosate. We'll use the terms glyphosate.

The Bt is for the cotton, right?

Oh, yes, pesticide resistance. Yeah, pesticide resistance. So, there's a glyphosate resistance that, and we'll use, like I said, we'll use glyphosate and round up interchangeably. But, if you could basically genetically modify.

A plant to be resistant to the thing that you use to kill the pest, you can use that thing liberally, right? Yeah, I mean, for all the promise of GMO, basically the only two two inventions have been the BT pesticide resistance and the glyphosate resistance. Yeah, that's it. And that's led to massive increases in the use of pesticides.

The first point to make here is most of the yield gains came long before this. So obviously you do get some yield gain with crop protection, so there's an overlap, but virtually all of it came before this. All of the harvestability, to my knowledge, there's been no GM addition to harvestability and no GM addition to product profile, although some might argue that it's low hanging fruit. For example, I know Monsanto was very aggressively looking at trying to engineer tomatoes that could grow in brackish water, and that way you would obviously open up the ability to grow it in areas that where you don't have fresh water. Okay, so with all of that said, the next question for the person to be thinking about that you're going to take us through is there are at least two things about GM that could be problematic. The first is it could be problematic that you are eating an organism that now has a gene that looks different from the gene that we evolved to consume it. In other words, it now makes different proteins that it didn't make that are foreign.

And because food is information, so how is that different information affecting your biology and how is it regulating the different body functions? I don't think we know much about that.

The second thing that could be harmful about GM is that by its very success, it enables the use of chemicals in a higher concentration than you would be able to use them in the absence of GM. And we'll use Roundup or glyphosate as the poster child for that. Can you talk through both of those and what the state of the evidence is for the harm of GM? Because it should be noted that that what you're about to say is that the backdrop or stands at odds with what the USDA would tell us, what the National Association of Scientists would tell us, which is GMO is safe, feel free to consume it liberally. And so tell us where you think that might be questionable.

Well, there's a bunch of issues there. First is it's a large uncontrolled experiment on humanity. Just like Crisco was invented in 1911 as this great new invention, was in our food supply for for, I don't know, 80 or 90 years more before people were like, wait a minute, this isn't good for us. It's killing hundreds of thousands of people a year. Let's get it out. So we don't know. I think there's animal studies that looks concerning. There's various issues. I think in terms of the use of these chemicals, there's two issues there. One is the plants are increasingly mutating to be resistant to these substances. So you need more pesticides and more glyphosate to do the same job. So there's all these weeds that are becoming resistant to glyphosate that they're trying to fight. And that's a problem because we're using more and more of these chemicals. Europe followed a different path. It didn't allow GMO foods, didn't allow any of that. And so what the comparative analysis of agriculture in the US versus Europe was, no difference in yields and far less use of pesticides and herbicides. It sort of didn't fulfill its promise.

Of yields and decreased use of chemicals. It was transient. I believe there was a transient reduction.

In pesticide use until we started to see resistance. Is that correct? Yeah. And we're using more and more of these chemicals. and glyphosate is 70% of the agrochemicals used on the planet. It's increasingly being linked to harmful human effects. So forget about the insertion of the gene as an issue.

We know that these chemicals are harmful.

Because do we know this? This is an important point. Yeah, I mean, aside from the litigation, which is not a scientific judgment, it's a traditional judgment, but there's 14,000 lawsuits around glyphosate. There's been billion dollar settlements. A friend of mine is a lawyer involved with those lawsuits. He told me that on discovery they found that the Trump administration said to Monsanto and Alber, we have your back. And the EPA recently is trying to shut down any further lawsuits on glyphosate, which is fascinating to me because it's these sort of disclosed emails. And I think the effects on animal studies are really clear. I just read a study on epigenetics and glyphosate where they looked at interventional studies on rats where they looked at giving the generation zero glyphosate and it affected their grand rats in multiple ways through prostate disease, cancer, various things. But we've seen this before, Mark.

I mean, we've seen lots of things where in the lab they're using doses that are significantly higher than the human exposure and/or laboratory animals behave differently than humans. Okay, fine.

But are we willing to take that risk? I know some other study where glyphosate disrupts the microbiome in significant ways in animals. And the dose that's in one impossible Burger is 110 times the dose that was used in the animal studies to.

Totally disrupt the microbiome of the rats. But do we know how bioavailable it.

Is and how much it remains? Well, it's in the. On the food. I mean, I. I try to eat organic. I try to eat non-GMO. Like, I travel. I'm not perfect. And I did my urine test to look at my glyphosate levels, and I was shocked. I have a 50th percentile glyphosate in my urine. How do we do this test? You can pee in a bucket. Send it into the lab. Great Plains Lab has this test available and you can check your glyphosate levels. I was shocked. And I think most of us are sort of walking toxic dumps. And if you looked at average fat biopsy of a human, it's full of DDT, dioxin, pesticides. It's like, it's pretty bad. So I think we are still in an uncontrolled experiment.

So your view is basically to take the precautionary principle, which is, look, we may never know this definitively. there's enough suggestion that this could be harmful through animal models or other things like that. I mean, for example, I mean, again, I'm just, I'm pushing back not because I don't necessarily agree with you on a personal level and make a lot of the same choices myself.

You're not sprinkling glyphosate on your salads?

You know, I stopped a couple weeks ago, actually.

I used to, I just, I love the taste of it.

You got a big lawn here. You're like putting it all over your lawn. But again, I always think it's important to sort of at least let people understand when something is, where our level of confidence is very high versus modest, but there's a precautionary approach to take out of it. In other words, I feel much more comfortable saying tobacco is causally responsible for lung cancer than I feel saying glyphosate is causally responsible for human disease. I just haven't been convinced by the data.

If it was the only way to grow food, fine. We deal with the risk. It's not the best way, it's not the most effective way, and there is potential risk. And there's real concern about our industrial agricultural system on the earth and so on biodiversity.

And also- I sort of interrupted you when you were about to make a point about biodiversity. That was something I learned recently.

Yeah, it's an important issue. But before I get to that, I just want to finish this thought about how this industrial system has sort of usurped small farm holders, which are the majority of farmers that feed the majority of the world. And these farmers are are getting squeezed by these big ag companies that are coming in and saying they're going to improve their livelihood, but then force them to buy their seed, force them to buy their chemicals. And there's increasing suicides and terrible economic consequences from these farmers around the world because they're, they're not able to maintain a livelihood doing what they're doing. So it's not just that it's a, it's an issue around health. It's also issue around squeezing a lot of the people who do grow most of the food in the world. So it's another issue I talk about in the book.

Before we leave that then, do you know what the median farm is in the United States in terms of acreage?

I don't. I did know, but I can't keep.

All the facts in my- that's all right.

And what is approximately, most farmers in the world is like less than five acres is most of the farmers in.

The world that feed most of the world.

Does that include the United States?

No.

We're more industrial. Yeah, more industrial. Yeah, for sure. I mean, there's less and less farms for you and for farmers, it's decreasing.

All the time, bigger and bigger farms. I mean, Earl Butz said it under.

Nixon, go big or go home.

In doing the research for your book, Mark, did you spend any time with these farmers and did you sense in them a degree of dissatisfaction or let down with this promise of big ag that came about 20 years ago? Oh my God, yeah.

I think more and more farmers are thinking about this. There was an article in Time Magazine where all the Democratic candidates in Iowa were going out to the farms and the farmers were like, look, our livelihoods are being destroyed, that we're having floods, we're not able to grow food, this system isn't working, we want to explore regenerative agriculture, agriculture. So it's definitely happening not because they're hippies who want to go back to the land, it's happening just from an economic imperative and a way to restore and save their farms.

But do farmers feel captive now to Monsanto and Pioneer and these other companies? They do.

They have a system and they don't have a way to get out of it. So they're in a vicious cycle. They've got all this capital in their equipment. They're stuck in this vicious cycle of growing the same crops and they have no way out. So we do need a bridge for these people and we do need mechanisms through government and private equity and others to help fund the transition. I think, like I said, the U.N. said $300 billion, boom, we could solve the problem of climate change and give us 20 years more runway to solve the bigger issues. So it's a massive effort that could actually transform our quality of our food, the quality of our soils, save our water, increase biodiversity, which we'll talk about, and so many of our global problems just starting at the seed. So back to biodiversity. So what that means is that we talk about extinction of species, but it's not just some frog in the Amazon. We've lost 90 of our edible plant species. Basically, 60 of our calories comes from corn and wheat and rice and soy and mostly from 12 species. We've lost 90 of our edible plant species, half of all our livestock species. You know, there's a lot of weird animals all over the place. And you travel the foreign countries, see these weird cows and weird pigs and weird goats, and they all look different. And now they're all the same that we produce in this country. and we have lost 75% of our pollinator species, which our agriculture depends, which Einstein said, if we lose bees from the face of the earth, humans have four years left to live, which may be true or not, but it's an existential threat. Butterflies, pollinators, all damaged also by these pesticides and chemicals that are indiscriminate in what they kill. They were basically nerve gases that were produced in the World War I and two that were factories retooled to produce agrochemicals. That's what the bombs were. I mean, how Timothy McVeigh bombed in Oklahoma, that building was through going to like a farm store and buying nitrogen fertilizer and turning into a bomb. That's where it actually came from. So these chemicals that we use in the soil, the methods of farming destroy the ecosystems both from all those, but also the biodiversity of the soil, the organisms in the soil, they are so critical. The mycorrhizal fungi, the bacteria, the nematodes, the worms, all these different animals that live in the soil that are necessary to actually create food to create sustainable agriculture. And so I think we're sort of asleep to the idea that we're sort of running out of soil, running out of these biodiverse animals that are essential for our health and our survival. I mean, coral reefs, I mean, with climate change, we're destroying all the coral reefs.

And again, 500 billion people depend on these coral reefs for food.

So how would one go about moving the needle on this? Well, I'm trying, I'm trying. So I wrote the book, Food Fix: How to Save Our Health, Our Economy, our communities and our planet one bite at a time in order to lay out the problem and lay out the solutions. And they're multifaceted. They're what citizens can do, what can happen in business innovation, like I mentioned, bring come back and talking about an example around food waste. And they're what policymakers need to do. And there needs to be the political will, but it's really tough.

So can we start at the bottom of that? And let me ask you another couple of questions. What does organic really mean when it comes to plant or meat? If a person says, okay, Mark, you've definitely convinced me that I want to be more mindful of what I'm buying. Let's just assume that this is a person who has the economic flexibility to make the food choices that might even increase their budget on groceries. So first of all, what does it mean when you go to the grocery store and you see two boxes of strawberries, one's organic, one's not?

Well, organic is a certification that's delivered by the government that means no antibiotics, no pesticides, no herbicides and has to be certified that it's clean of all of that. However, it doesn't certify the method of growing the food. So Michael Pollan in his book, Omnivore's Dilemma, talked about industrial organic. So if you have these massive monocrop lettuce fields, you're doing tillage, you're not doing cover crops, you're not doing crop rotations, you're also not super helping the soil. It's better than industrial farming, but it's not fully regenerative. Regenerative is a method of farming that actually includes organic but goes beyond it. And there is now a regenerative organic certification, which you can look up and I talk about in my book. But the chemicals and the pesticides that we consume have an impact on our health. It's been estimated that pesticide exposure just in children is responsible for an average loss of seven IQ points or 41 million IQ points in kids. So there's a lot brain power that's killed. And not to mention how many per kid. I think it's like seven IQ points. There's literally millions of pounds of these pesticides and herbicides that are in our food supply and our water. And some plants have more than others. So I'm on the board of the Environmental Working Group and they produce a really great guide called the Dirty Dozen and the Clean 15. So you can look at that list. And if you're having economic issues or whatever, you can say, well, strawberries are the worst thing I could buy if they're not organic. whereas banana or an avocado may be not a big deal if it's not organic. So, you can look at that list and go, I'm going to save money by buying organic of the things that are the worst contaminated and I can cheat on the other ones that are not.

And, as part of that, because in the case of bananas and avocado, you're eating what's inside and not outside, whereas in the strawberry, it's like got this.

Surface that collects it all up. Celery is terrible. Never have any anything about organic celery, for example.

And meat, besides not using hormones in the animals and not giving them antibiotics, is there anything else that comes in the distinction of organic meat?

Again, it's not using the inputs that are chemical inputs that are on the corn that they have or the soil that they have. So that's good. But again, it doesn't mean that they couldn't be fed organic corn that's still grown in ways that are destroying the soil. So, we really have to sort of think more nuanced about what that means. That's why regenerative is sort of organic plus. It's like a whole next level.

How ubiquitous is that regenerative organic label? It's not.

It's not. It's not even a label yet. There's just a proposal for a regenerative organic certification. And yet, there are farms who are doing this and there's ways to regulate it and measure it. And I think the government's going to be able to sort of put out field service workers to measure soil, to measure these things, to look at, is it regenerative? and places like Mariposa Ranch in California, you can buy half a cow with a bunch of friends and it's eight bucks a pound, which for a four ounce serving is less than you'd pay for McDonald's hamburger. So you can, with little ingenuity and effort, you can actually start to sort of find how to get these things. But it's the demand that's going to increase. And that's why, for example, General Mills and Danone and Nestle and Pepsi even are looking at how do we get our supply chain to be more regenerative and how are we to move that needle. It's kind of exciting to me.

Is there anything else a consumer can do absent the types of bigger changes that you're pushing for and hoping for?

I mean, I think being really focused on what you eat and where it comes from, buying at local farmers markets, joining a community supported agriculture, looking for regenerative sources online, buying things together with friends. What are the resources people can use.

To find those things? Are they centralized in any way?

Yeah, they're on my book. They're in my book. and they're on our website.

What's the URL?

FoodFixBook.com and there's a video in there, Five Steps to Heal the Planet and Yourself, and there's an action guide that is good for citizens, businesses, governments and so forth, so that it says, you know, what can you do? And so yes, you can vote with your fork and all the ways I just mentioned. You can be active in your community. Maybe you should have a compost pile. We'll talk about that.

But you can be active to sort of have community garden, to get... You know, my son, for his fifth birthday, It's like, okay, what do you want, Reese?

He wanted a compost box.

All right, there you go. You know how hard it was to find one? You couldn't go to Home Depot and get one.

You couldn't go to the local garden store.

It took — Really? — Really. They have them on Amazon. You can buy them and have them shipped to you. I think ultimately, it sounds silly, I.

Think ultimately we did that, but I think with kids, sometimes it's fun to take them to the place and get the thing. I was amazed how hard it was to get a big compost. You don't even need that. I just put a little fence, kind of some two-by-fours and built a little box and and you just throw it in my backyard and just throw it in there year after year. And I've got like tons of feet of this dark, rich soil, like a humus that goes on the garden. It's great. If you want to be politically active, you can go in your municipality and say to your local government, say, look, let's have a composting law. Let's make it mandatory like San Francisco did. And you can't go in and throw your garbage in San Francisco anymore.

And for example, in- I just don't know if I want to do anything.

San Francisco is doing. I gotta be honest with you. Well, whatever. But I mean, I mean, France, if you have mandatory composting there and if you don't, you get a fine or you go to jail. In Massachusetts, they passed a law that if you make a ton of organic waste every week, you can't throw it out in the landfill. And they actually have created innovation there. There's people coming up like dairy farmers are making less money, struggling. This dairy farmer creates these anaerobic digesters, which gets food waste. They get about a hundred tons of food waste every week in this one farm from whole foods and other gross grocery stores. They put in their manure from the animals. It basically combusts in this digester, produces electricity for 1500 homes and makes the farmer an extra 100 grand a year. And it's a win-win-win for everybody.

To me, I always feel like that's the better, whether that particular example works at scale or not, I have no idea. But it seems to me the we're going to put you in jail if you don't compost approach is the wrong approach versus the let's economically incentivize to do this thing differently. And I worry that there's too much emphasis on the punishment side of things. I don't think humans work that way. And it's also a slippery slope because the government doesn't exactly have a track record of great competence. So for everything that they do right, they're probably doing three things wrong. And therefore, I mean, again, I don't want to sound like too much of a libertarian anti-nanny state guy, But I feel like I kind of need to sound like the libertarian anti nanny state guy when it comes to these things because the government, as you point out, is a big part of the reason we got in this mess. And to quote Einstein again, and I might be bastardizing this quote, but the same level of consciousness that produced these problems will be incapable of solving them.

That's true. But we do have a lot of regulations that protect citizens, right? We have seatbelt laws and emission controlled laws in cars. baby seats and all sorts of things that we mandated that now people accept. And we have airbags, which the industry didn't like, and seatbelts, which they hated. And we just sort of accept that. And I think there's a role for government in actually helping incentivize the right thing. And I think the law making it not okay for big companies to throw out all their waste in a landfill. And the reason to sort of back up a little on that is food waste, incredible problem. Like we said, 30 to 40% of all food produced is wasted. if it was grown on landmass, it would require the entire country of China to grow all that food that we throw out. The average family throws out about a pound a day or about $1,800 a year of food. And if it were a country in terms of the greenhouse gases that get produced when you throw it in landfills and it rots and emits methane, it would be the third largest emitter of greenhouse gases after the US and China. And it's about $2 trillion of resources that we waste in throwing out all the food. we produce more than enough food for 10 billion people on the planet. It's just not equitably distributed. It's a big problem to solve and nobody's for it. Even the Trump administration has created a food waste initiative, the EPA, the FDA and the USDA. And they basically like, it's the FDA, the EPA, yeah, and USDA to actually deal with the food waste issue. So I think each of us can stop that. That's an easy thing to do. And there's a lot of other things we can do to get involved. in our political process through being involved in communicating with your congressmen, senators, there's something called the Food Policy Action Group, which is foodpolicyaction.org that rates your senators and congressmen on their voting records on food and ag policy. So you can see, and they've literally unseated congressmen who are doing bad things and voting the wrong way around food and policy issues that people care about. So there's a lot of things we.

Can do as individuals. USDA, what's their role in this?

Oh my God, you have another couple of hours. I go through all this in the book, but just at the high level, the USDA is responsible for a number of different food and ag policies that are the majority of the things that are going on. Our dietary guidelines, which are messed up, our school lunch guidelines, which are messed up, our SNAP program, or food stamp program, which is 75 billion a year. It's one of our biggest government programs that feeds 46 million Americans, including one in four kids who are food insecure. great idea, but there's no nutrition guidelines in that. So there are $7 billion a year just in soda that we spend, about 30 billion servings a year.

You can buy soda with food stamps?

Oh yeah, of course. You can buy anything except alcohol and cooked food. So you can buy a two-liter bottle of soda, but you can't buy rotisserie chicken in the grocery store. And 75% of the food stamps is junk food or soda. That's about a $730 billion program, which is massive over a period of 10 years. And so there's no nutrition guidelines in there. And so you've got all these government programs, plus the crop insurance and agricultural supports that support an industrial agricultural system. And those are harmful in a sense. So if you have a big soy and corn farm and you want to grow a whole bunch of veggies, you can't, even if you want to, because you will get penalized and not get your crop insurance. insurance. So farmers are disincentivized from growing fruits and vegetables. The government tells us on the one hand to eat half of our plate as fruits and vegetables, but less than half a percent of industrial supports, of agricultural supports from the government are for fruits and vegetables. So it's like basically if we were eating what the government actually funded in agricultural supports, we'd be having a giant corn fritter deep fried in soybean oil, you know, and that's not exactly what we should be eating.

That's a very powerful image, Mark, is that not that necessarily the USDA's recommendations on nutrition are correct, but even if you took that as an aspiration, it's interesting to note that the funding doesn't align with that. So how does the USDA respond to that, especially because it's not a subtle, they're not off by a little bit, they're off by an order of magnitude.

A quarter less than a half a percent versus 50%.

So what is their response to that?

I don't know. I think it's just the right hand's not talking to the left hand. And so there's all these disparate policies. I was working with Tim Ryan and my friend Darish Mazafarian from Harvard Tufts to get an analysis by the government accountability office to look at what our disparate policies were doing to our public health and to our economic health as a nation because they're all cross purposes. We say, don't drink soda, eat healthy diet, so forth with dietary guidelines, but then we pay for $75 billion a year in junk food for the poor. How does that make sense? And so I think we have all these government agencies, which the FDA that has confusing food labels or that allows antibiotics in our animal feed or that allows substances that are banned in other countries to be, that are toxic to be in our food supply like azodicarbonamide, which is basically a softener for flour products for bread. I mean, if you use that in Singapore, you get a $450,000 fine and you go to jail for 15 years. I mean, Singapore is Singapore, but still, it's not even allowed. And we have the FDA. The FTC, which regulates the airwaves, allows all this unrestricted marketing to kids. So you've got all these different agencies that are working across purposes that aren't coordinated and aren't creating a coherent food policy. So we need a national food policy. We need activism to change some of these food policies and support regenerative ag and to reform food stamps and functional policies to reform school lunches and to actually help advance in healthcare, food is medicine. All these things can be done. And I'm actually working on a campaign with some extraordinary people who are launching a nonprofit and an advocacy group, otherwise known as a lobby group for the good guys, to start to work on these issues in Washington. Because while it may seem like nothing can be done, I think behind the scenes a lot can be done. And I think there are a lot of these issues are bipartisan issues. I just think people are ready for this. There's a movement and a readiness around the country and even in Washington to address these issues. I mean, I just gave a talk at somewhere and someone knew one of the senators from Maine and they called me the next day and was like, well, can you help with this? And I said, well, 70 of the military recruits are unfit to fight and 70% of the evacuations from Afghanistan and Iraq were not for war injuries but were for obesity related injuries. So, and the and they want to figure this out. I am hopeful because I see that despite all these issues, people are waking up to these problems. I see these big food companies like Nestle, Danone, Unilever and so forth. General Mills actually starting to take on these issues. They still are part of the problem but they are trying to move their super tanker ships and it takes a while but I do see room for hope. I see business innovations, food and ag tech companies are billions and billions are flowing into these areas for innovation, which is all a good thing.

What do you think are the top three changes if you were food czar and you had to rank order sort of the biggest, are there three things that could make 70% of the difference?

Yes, I would immediately transform healthcare reimbursement to focus on food as medicine, through paying for food for those who are food insecure, for reimbursing fruit and vegetable prescriptions, for making food a central part of the government. And that would include having all, government is probably the biggest food purchaser in the country, have them only purchase food that is going to promote health and not disease. I would then secondly reform these dysfunctional food policies. I would transform SNAP, transform school lunches, transform the dietary guidelines to be science-based. And lastly, I would actually support RegenerAg in every way possible through government policies and through business innovations, incentives, and other things. So those three pillars, one, fixing food as medicine into the healthcare system and reimbursement policies and every government institution reforming dysfunctional government food policies and supporting Regenerag. And that's really the whole agenda of the food fix campaign.

We sort of glossed over it a little bit, but I guess no discussion on this would be complete without coming back to maybe some of the confusion that exists around a plant-based diet exclusively as a solution for, and let's put aside the health issues for a moment, because there's obviously lots to debate around whether animal-based products have deleterious health consequences. And let's put aside also the sort of egregious cruelty to animals that takes place under farm conditions.

Factory farming should be banned, period, full stop.

Yeah, I don't think anybody that's spent any time actually going and watching how animals are harvested in that would disagree with that. So let's instead focus on specifically the environmental concerns. You've already talked about it a little bit, but can you say a bit more about it?

Yeah, you know, there's an interesting report came out called the EAT Lancet report, which was very well intentioned and had a lot of great science in it that talked about how we link climate and diet and food and what is a healthy diet and how do you define that. And there's a lot of great science in there. There were challenges though, because some of the language in there was really driven through the food industry and a lot of the sponsors for that were big food and big ag. One of the, for example, messages is we need to grow more plants, more grains and more beans through something called sustainable intensification or climate smart agriculture. These are buzzwords sort of like clean coal, wood which sound good, but when you look behind the curtain, who funds those organizations? 60% of the members of Climate Smart Agriculture are the fertilizer companies. Sustainable intensification means using more and more chemical inputs on farms in the developing world to grow more grains and beans. That's not the solution. And lastly, without animals integrated into regenerative agricultural systems, you cannot restore soil in the way we need to restore it as fast as we need to restore it. It's just a scientific fact.

So, is that based on the need for the, basically the transfer of nitrogen through the animal?

Yeah, pooping, peeing, digging, the saliva makes the plants grow. It's a whole symbiotic ecosystem. And, when used properly, not overgrazing but proper management which is called holistic management or managed grazing or adaptive multi-paddock grazing. There's a science to it, you can dramatically increase soil. So it takes like, I think, a thousand years to get three centimeters of soil naturally. Gay Brown in North Dakota got 29 inches of soil just through these methods that are sort of supercharged methods. They're like sort of agriculture 2.0. It's not about going back to old ways. It's about inventing new ways, using all the science to actually grow soil. Because a lot of, I mean, through human history, we were destructive. I mean, we would grow food on land, we would deplete the land, we'd move to the next plot of land. Problem is now we're running a land. There's no more place to go. So, I think we absolutely need to actually scale this regenerative agriculture model in.

Order to solve all these global issues.

Can regenerative ag be superimposed on fallow land? Yeah, then people are basically taking degraded land, which is almost desert, and turning it back into lush fields and lush agriculture practices. So, when those people say we have to be vegan to save the planet, it. It's actually not accurate. Whether you eat meat or not is a personal choice, a moral choice. If you think it's a health choice, fine. But whether or not you believe in eating meat or not from an environmental, from a regenerative, from an eat climate standpoint, we must have animals integrated into the process in order to restore soil, which is the biggest carbon sink. So the take-home message here for people is there are a lot of ways to fix climate change, but the quickest, fastest and most effective and scalable way and using ancient carbon capture technology that is more effective than anything that exists today and is free called photosynthesis. It's basically sun and carbon dioxide in the air. We can solve a lot of the global issues that we have.

So, Mark, how are you spending your time today? You wear a top hat. I mean, you're involved in the education of functional medicine at the Cleveland Clinic. You commute there and back from your home New York. You're obviously very involved in this initiative. What does the pie graph look like of how you allocate your time?

Well, I'm always doing the same thing in my mind. I'm trying to end the suffering through the power of functional medicine, systems thinking, and sort of restoring communities and behavioral change through that. And this is just part of that story. Like I said, there's so much suffering that's unnecessary, whether it's chronic chronic disease or poverty or mental illness or kids struggling with learning in schools or violence. These are all needless suffering. If we have the solutions, then we need to focus on them. And as I again began at the beginning to talk about, as I sort of went down the rabbit hole of why are my patients sick, I came to this bigger conclusion that unless we deal with these systems issues, unless we go upstream, we're just going to be treading water or bailing a sinking boat. And the acceleration of these problems is so big that I feel like focusing more and more on these bigger issues in order to solve them. So, yes, I write books and I feel like this is my last one for a while, but like to write books and teach and speak and do all these things, have clinics. But at the end of the day, this is an existential threat. And once you've seen it, you can't unsee it. I just were researching the book for the last two and a half years. I just sort of was shocked by a lot of things that I learned that are not really common knowledge, even with really highly educated people. If I go in a room of highly educated people and say, what's the number one source of climate change? They're not going to say food, but when you actually unpack it, that's the biggest threat.

Well, Mark, thank you very much for making the time today and more importantly, of course, for doing this work and bringing it to our attention. This is an area that I have become increasingly interested in and my views are kind of constantly evolving. I mean, I think there was a day when I I didn't question the health of GMO. I'll just share with you an anecdote, which is when I went to Europe a year ago, I just made the glib observation, which was sort of the bread, the pasta, all of the food that I ate in Europe, which I actually went out of my way to eat, did not seem to produce the same effect as it did here. And that was actually kind of the thin end of the in my mind that said, what's going on? What is the difference between the crops that they are using in Europe? And it's funny because it reminded me.

I can give you four reasons why that's true. Yeah.

Well, it reminded me of my childhood because when I was a kid, we used to go to Egypt every year. That's where my parents are from. And I'd go with my mom each year and usually spend two months there. And I remember the way bread tasted there. It had a very distinct taste that you'll never taste. Even if you buy pita bread or other Middle Eastern bread here in the US, it tastes very different. And I remember sort of having those neurons tickled again when I was in Europe going out of my way because most of the previous times I'd gone to Europe, I kind of don't eat that sort of stuff. But on this trip, I was like, Hey, I'm going to go in Rome. So yeah, tell me about what you.

Think those four differences are. You're talking about wheat products. So what's happened to wheat is that we've hybridized the wheat to make it extremely drought resistant and hardy, and it's called dwarf wheat. And the guy who invented did it, Norman Borlaug won the Nobel Prize and increased yields. But what was sort of the unintended consequences is the starch in there is called amylopectin A. It's a super starch that raises your blood sugar more than regular sugar. So one, it's basically just like eating sugar or worse. Two, when they breed plants, it's not like humans, you get 23 pairs of chromosomes. One from your mom, one from your dad, 46 chromosomes. In plants, it's 46 plus 46, so it's like 92. And so there's extra proteins that are formed and there are many more glycosides protein, which are inflammatory and more active in terms of causing disruptions in the gut. So they're more likely to cause a leaky gut inflammation. The third thing is they spray wheat, even though it's not a GMO food plant, they spray it with glyphosate at harvest. Why? Because it defoliates the plants. It gets rid of all the sort of leaves and stuff, so it makes it easier to harvest. So right at harvest, they spray this with glyphosate. And your Cheerios have more glyphosate than.

Vitamin A and vitamin D. They're actually.

In there per amount of weight.

So even if you buy organic wheat?

Organic wheat, no. Organic wheat can still be the dwarf wheat. And then lastly, this is interesting, actually maybe five reasons. But second to last, the calcium propionate, which is a preservative, is added to the wheat in this country and it's known to cause toxic neurological effects, behavioral hyperactivity and it has been linked to autism. In fact, when you give babies breast milk, it increases butyrate, which is a powerful short chain fat in the gut that makes your gut healthy. when you have formula, it causes high propionate levels, which can cause neurotoxic effects. And in animal models, it has caused autism if you put propionate in rats' brains. And then lastly, in Europe, they have different methods of making the bread. Here, it's like quick, quick, quick, quick. They want it to leaven and rise in a couple hours. There, it can take overnight, 12 hours, 14 hours, and it tastes very different. It's a very different structure, and it does different things to the gluten and so forth. So there's a lot of reasons that that happens. But I would say over and over, I see this happen with my patients who can't eat this stuff here and they go over there and there's no GMO over there. It's a complex web of things.

Can one make bread here in the US on their own using wheat, like an actual wheat that comes from Europe?

Sure. You could, or you could get heirloom wheats like einkorn wheat, which is very different, or now there's new forms of wheat like Kernza wheat by Wes Jackson that was developed in the Midwest. It has incredibly deep roots. It's a perennial weed, super nutrient dense, really amazing, amazing product. So there's incredible grains out there that I was talking to my friend Jeff Blan the other day who's developing his company and he's working with this guy to develop these phytochemical rich foods, superfoods. And he got a bunch of things from the USDA, a bunch of seeds. And one packet came in, it was like 43216 or something. He's like, what's this? I don't know what this is. And they sent it to accident. And it was this Himalayan buckwheat, which apparently is one of the most protein rich, low glycemic, phytochemical dense, hearty superfood on the planet. And they're now, they have this sort of seed because they're not selling it, distributing it, but they couldn't give it back. So he's like literally taking this packet of seeds and turning it into a whole business, which is pretty amazing. So there's a lot of stuff out there that we could use. It's much better for us, but we just kind of homogenized our food supply and we've taken out all, like I said, we 800 species of plants before we were hunter gatherers. our bodies need all those different phytochemicals and nutrients and minerals and so forth and vitamins to actually run itself. And, we're now just in this sort of nutrient-devoid diet, even if we're eating organic stuff. If it's not grown in good soils, if it's hybridized plants, it's just not great. I always say eat weird food.

So, I always try to eat weird food. I gotta tell you, I'm hungry right now.

I know, me too. All right, Mark.

Well, thanks very much. Sure. Thanks a lot, Peter, for me. Thank you for listening to this week's episode of the drive. If you're interested in diving deeper into any topics we discuss, we've created a membership program that allows us to bring you more in-depth exclusive content without relying on paid ads. It's our goal to ensure members get back much more than the price of the subscription. Now, to that end, membership benefits include a bunch of things. One, totally kickass comprehensive podcast show notes that detail Every topic, paper, person, thing we discuss on each episode. The word on the street is nobody's show notes rival these monthly AMA episodes or ask me anything episodes, hearing these episodes completely. Access to our private podcast feed that allows you to hear everything without having to listen to spiels like this. The Q&A's, which are a super short podcast, typically less than five minutes that we release every Tuesday through Friday Highlighting the best questions, topics, and tactics discussed on previous episodes of the drive. This is a great way to catch up on previous episodes without having to go back and necessarily listen to everyone. Steep discounts on products that I believe in, but for which I'm not getting paid to endorse, and a whole bunch of other benefits that we continue to trickle in as time goes on. If you want to learn more and access these member only benefits, you can head over to peterattia.md.com/subscribe subscribe. You can find me on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, all with the ID Peter Attia MD. You can also leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or whatever podcast player you listen on. This podcast is for general informational purposes only and does not constitute the practice of medicine, nursing, or other professional healthcare services, including the giving of medical advice. No doctor-patient relationship is disformed. The use of this information and the materials linked to this podcast is at the user's own risk. The content on this podcast is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Users should not disregard or delay in obtaining medical advice from any medical condition they have, and they should seek the assistance of their healthcare professionals for any such conditions. Finally, I take conflicts of interest very seriously. For all of my disclosures and the companies I invest in or advise, please visit PeterAtiaMD.com/About where I keep an up-to-date and active list of such companies.

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