Ultra-Processed Food Is the New Tobacco—How Big Food Manipulates Science, Policy, & Your Cravings | Michael Pollan

Coming up on this episode of the Dr. Hyman Show.

Ultra-processed food, I think is, yeah, it's a scourge. If you go to Latin America or South America, where these food companies don't exert as much domestic power, you'll find some powerful labels. I mean, skulls and crossbones and stop signs. Other countries are starting to deal with it. Unfortunately, we haven't yet.

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Website store and a summary of my favorite and thoroughly tested products. So, Michael, it's great to have you back. Last time was before COVID and the world changed a lot since then.

2019, I believe, yeah.

That's right.

I know a lot's happened since then to both of us and to the world.

It's true. It was just pre-COVID and you launched your book, How to Change youe Mind, which changed the world, I think, in a big way, which is good. And then your documentary series on Netflix was just remarkable. and I think it really helped people understand that there's another way to think about addressing mental health and working with some of the struggles we have as human beings, which are often challenging. And great to see how that book has just exploded and how it's become this catalyst for change, just like Omno Wars Dilemma did the same thing for the food and food system. So you kind of have this really unique kind of role in our culture of being kind of the truth-sayer and the truth-teller in a way that people really have a way of warming up to in challenging subjects, because you're talking about psychedelics and food, and these are controversial topics, but it's great to see how you sort of threaded that needle and it is beautiful. So I loved that book and I loved what you've done.

So congrats on that, Michael.

Oh, thank you, Mark. I really appreciate your saying that. So, you know, today we're going to talk about something that you wouldn't talk about with me last time, which was food. Because you're like, I want to talk about consciousness and psychedelics. Like, okay, okay. So we're going to get back to food because you just were part of a movie, you helped produce it called Food, Inc. 2. Most people have heard about Food, Inc. came out in 2008. Between 2008 and 2014, things have gotten a lot worse, not better. There is a food movement and you were a catalyst in helping establish that. Unfortunately, there's so many forces working against it and there's been consolidation of companies in the food industry. There's been the explosion of ultra-processed food even more than it was. It's led to a real crisis. And what's really exciting to me though is it seems like the world is sort of waking up to this. Like the movie exposes this. So maybe you can share a little bit about your inspiration for doing a Food Inc. 2 and why that was important and what the main lessons that you learned doing it and that you hope that the audience would take from watching. And by the way, everybody's got to watch the movie. It's great. It's up on streaming services now.

Well, you know, when we did Food Inc. in 2008, it really did help launch a conversation and There hadn't been a film that looked at the whole system quite the way that one did. And it had a big impact. It also led to a backlash. I just remember how much pushback there was from the industry, from the Farm Bureau, which is not really a farmers organization. They hide behind farmers, but they're really an agribusiness organization. And they came after me and they came after Eric Schlosser. And it was a real reminder how much power there is.

Wow.

In the status quo in food. I had a series, I used to get invited to speak at agricultural schools, land grant colleges, and I love going to talk to young farmers. And all of a sudden, those invitations would get canceled or I would go and there would be some counter programming.

They had Beyonce doing a concert at the same time.

That kind of stuff. And, And then I had a gig at Cal Poly where they announced that it couldn't be a speech without challenge. I had to do a debate instead. It subsequently came out in the Los Angeles Times that the owner of the biggest feedlot in California, Harris Ranch, had threatened the president of Cal Poly if I was allowed to speak unchallenged and threatened to withdraw a gift. Yeah. And in the same letter, which they got a hold of at the LA Times, he insisted they cancel a course on the grass feeding of livestock, of ruminants.

Wow.

And then I had a gig canceled at Western Washington University. And it all turned out to be Farm Bureau organized. And so it was an interesting reminder to me.

It was like the McCarthy era, you're blacklisted. Like being a communist.

Yeah, I mean, you know, the idea they don't want, They don't want young farmers to hear from somebody like me as a sign of, I think, insecurity. Anyway, but I thought I was done after I did that. I wrote several books on food. In addition to Omnivore's Dilemma, there was In Defense of Food and Food Rules. Botany of Desire had a lot of material on food. So I thought I had said what I had to say, and there was a whole generation of young food journalists who had taken the baton. and that was wonderful to see. And I moved on to other topics. But then when the pandemic hit, something really interesting and revealing happened with the food system. And you'll remember, you have to go back to those early days in March and April and May of 2020, when suddenly you couldn't find food in the supermarket. The shelves were bare. And at the same time, you saw on your television this incredible split screen, the bare shelves on one side, on the other farmers euthanizing chickens and pigs and spilling milk out on the ground. And the reason was that our food system, it turns out we have two food systems. One supplies supermarkets and consumers, and the other supplies institutions, whether it's restaurants or schools or factories and that one completely shut down because nobody was going to work or school. And so everyone got all their food at the supermarket or tried to and the system crashed for a period of time. And the two systems don't relate to one another because we've had such concentration. So the kinds of companies that are selling, say, liquefied eggs in the institutional food chain didn't have the containers to sell their eggs in a supermarket. Right. Ditto toilet paper. Remember the famous toilet paper shortage?

There were giant rolls.

Well, you know, the way that toilet paper is sold to institutions is on these giant rolls, and they couldn't sell those in the supermarket chain. So we really learned something about the system, that it was highly centralized and specialized and really brittle. And that, of course, is the cost of efficiency. You can get a very efficient system, and we have that in some ways, but it's only efficient if there are no shocks. And as soon as you get a shock, the brittleness of the system reveals itself. The other thing that revealed itself was the political power behind the food system. And the most telling instance here, and this really got our attention that spring when we were deciding whether to make a sequel or not, was the day that John Tyson took out ads in the Washington Post, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, an open letter to the president. And the reason they were doing that is because the public health authorities were trying to shut down some of their processing plants in the high plains.

I remember that.

And in Iowa, because they had become vectors. They were bringing COVID into these communities. These people were working really close to one another in the cold with no PPE and people were like turning off the production lines and vomiting and going right back to work. They were sick. And the public health authorities in these towns and Waterloo, Iowa is the one we focused on, were trying to like close them down for a while to clean them up and put some protocols in place. And rather than do that, the president of Tyson writes this letter asking the president of the United States, who was Donald Trump at the time, to invoke the Defense Production Act to force open their production lines. And lo and behold, two or three days later, the president does it. The president writes an executive, signs an executive order written or drafted by Tyson, opening up their production lines. And if you, you know, the reason we have antitrust laws in this country is to avoid concentrations of power. It's not just to protect consumers from price gouging, it's to protect the Republic from overly powerful interests. And if you ever needed an example that we had gone too far in that direction, when you can have a company force the president's hand And the Defense Production Act, you should understand, was something passed in the '50s, giving the president the power to force a company to do things in the public interest that they don't want to do. Like, say, a car company should start making tanks because we're in wartime or planes. And basically, this was a perversion of the act because it It was allowing the company to do exactly what it wanted to do, but using the federal power to do it. So all of this told us that the food system had reached a point of crisis in terms of concentration, and that was a reason to reopen the story and take another look at the food system.

Yeah, and most people don't realize that the food industry is the biggest industry on the planet. I think it's 16 or $17 trillion a year because everybody eats. and that it's controlled by just a few dozen CEOs. When you look at the seed companies, there used to be dozens and dozens of them. Now there's like five or so. The fertilizer companies- yeah, or meat.

There are four companies slaughter all the beef. Look at infant formula, remember that crisis. You know, there are only two companies that sell all the infant formula. And when one of them had a contamination problem on their production lines, mothers couldn't get formula. So if you had 20 companies or 10 companies, a screw up at one of them would not have affected everybody. But so, you know, it's the old adage, we're putting all our eggs in one basket and that's never a good idea.

And also, you know, they're insidious in how they work because they work, you know, to kind of gobble up other companies that seem to have a halo of health. So a lot of the health brands that you're having are actually bought by these big food companies.

And that- yeah, it's one of the saddest things. You see these creative startups doing healthy food or doing innovation and they get gobbled up right away. And invariably when they get gobbled up, they add to the amount of sugar in the products, which always increases sales and add salt. and, you know, kind of destroy the golden egg that they've just bought.

Yeah, you know, in Michael Moss's book, it was fascinating to read about how the food industry got together. I think it was in the late '50s in Minnesota because there was a pushback on processed food. And there was this woman named Betty who was a home ec teacher who basically was trying to get families to cook and garden and basically be self-sufficient around food. and they wanted to get their processed foods into the American kitchen. And they got together and kind of colluded to kind of make convenience king and they succeeded. And it's just gotten worse and worse and worse. And I grew up on TV dinners. I'm sure you said you're about my age.

I did, too. I love TV dinners.

And Pop-Tarts and all that crap. This industry has become so controlled by so few people, by so few companies that are all working towards making a profit, which is what they're supposed to do, but at the same time they're killing us. And what I think the movie really did also was sort of expose this, one, this consolidation and concentration around the food companies that control our entire food supply and how fragile it is, but also how they've just kind of aggressively pushed more and more processed food and fought at every turn to stop any attempt to try to limit access to or label or restrict or change policies around ultra-processed food.

Yeah, well, that's the other big story that we focus on in Food Inc. 2 because that's the other big change since 2008. The term ultra-processed food was not in use then. We talked about junk food a lot or processed food, but a lot of research has been done since then to really pinpoint the fact that the degree of processing of food matters greatly to our health. And ultra-processed food, the term was coined by Carlos Monteiro, who was an epidemiologist in Brazil, in Sao Paulo. And he's a very interesting character who's in the movie. And he was trying to understand, you know, 10 or 15 years ago, why was it that Brazilians were putting on so much weight and having rising rates of diabetes when the amounts of, say, meat or sugar or salt hadn't actually changed. And this was kind of a paradox. And what he found was that, yes, even though the amounts of sugar and salt and fat hadn't changed, people were getting them in a new form instead of in home-cooked food, They were getting them in highly processed food. Sweetened yogurt came into the market, sodas came into the market, prepared meals came into the market. And he hypothesized that there was something about ultra-processed food that caused people to eat more of it. This idea was controversial until a man named Kevin Hall at the NEH decided to do a very controlled test where he had people live in a hotel for 30 days and gave them one of two meals. One was ultra processed and the other was, you know, cooked normal food matched for percentages of fat and salt and all the macronutrients. And lo and behold, he found that on the people, and people could eat as much as they wanted of either, the people on the ultra processed diet ate 500 more calories per person per day. and that is because the study didn't determine exactly why that was true. That work is going on now, but it clearly has to do with the way this food has been engineered, that it is engineered to be irresistible, addictive in various ways, but also that it's also engineered to be very quickly absorbed in the body. It has very little fiber, ultra processed food. and that leads, I mean, you know this as a doctor, that leads to quick insulin spikes, and that terrible cycle that gets started. So ultra-processed food, I think, is, yeah, it's a scourge. And other countries are starting to deal with it. Unfortunately, we haven't yet. you know, if you go to Latin America or South America, where these food companies don't exert as much domestic power, you'll find some powerful labels. I mean, skulls and crossbones and stop signs. Right. And, you know, it's, it's pretty intense if you go to Mexico or Chile or, or Brazil. But so far, you know, there's, I mean, Biden was supposed to announce front of package labeling of some kind. Hasn't happened yet, I don't think. But let's hope, and let's hope it doesn't get diluted by the industry.

No, no. I've been in the conversations around this front of package labeling with the FDA as part of my nonprofit Food Fix. And they're going to do something, but I kind of talked to someone who talked to the FDA commissioner and kind of was pushing him. He said, look, you're gonna get something, but it's probably not what you want.

And I've heard the same.

The subtext there is it's like, you know, the food industry still got its hands on the reins. And that just really concerns me because what we're talking about is just putting front of package labeling to protect our children. Like, if we can't protect our children from the harms of these foods, you know, as a nation, then who are we? And the fact that the food industry is so powerful and so consolidated and it drives so much of the policy in Washington is something that most people don't realize. And like this effort you mentioned with Tyson Foods and President Trump, I mean that stuff goes on all the time. And the voices that actually need to get heard aren't getting heard. And so I'm just a little guy, I have a little nonprofit, and I've got a team, they're very sophisticated and smart. But when we go and talk to the senators and congressmen, They don't know much about this at all and it's not their fault. It's just there's just zero education and all they're hearing from is the other side. I mean Sam Cass said this to me, he said, Mark, when I was in the White House, we would have a parade of food industries coming and telling what the science says, which is funded by them, what the legislation should be. They write the legislation, they give it to us, they create all the rationale. We don't hear from anybody else. We don't hear from the other side. And so I wonder, Michael, you've been this a long time and you've been thinking about this a long time. Where do you see the biggest levers to pull? Is it grassroots? Is it huge efforts with our policymakers? Is it trying to sort of learn from other countries and put pressure on America to kind of follow the suit? I mean, I wrote an article in Time magazine about it sort of as it's about ultra-processed food. and front of package labeling and sort of this being the new cigarettes. And I think, you know, what do you see as the lever that's gonna really make a difference?

I think it's gonna take power in Washington and specifically in Congress. I mean, that's where the problem lies. We've had a couple of White Houses that wanted to do the right thing and got stymied. The Obama administration didn't achieve all they'd hoped to around food, although Michelle Obama did some positive things. But, you know, I think they sort of chickened out on some issues, especially around antitrust. during the Obama years. I have more hope for Biden's antitrust policies, which have some real teeth, much to the upset of the industry.

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One positive change since 2008 is like allies in Washington. And I'm sure you've had this experience, too. There's a group of people in the House and now a couple in the Senate who are committed to food issues. We spent a lot of time with Cory Booker making the film. Here is a person who is an urban legislator and a mayor who gets to Congress and decides to use his political capital to get on the Ag Committee, the Agriculture Committee. That is not a place that ambitious urban legislators go. But he understands that the health of his constituents in New Jersey depends on what's going on on the farm. And if we're growing monocultures of corn and soy, his constituents are going to be eating ultra processed food. And that until you change agricultural policies, you're not going to have an impact on nutrition and the issues we care about. And yeah, I mean, labels are really important and better information is really important. But in the end, food choice is driven in large part by price. And the unhealthiest calories are the cheapest calories in our food system. and that is what has to change. And that won't change until you have policy. So I think building, you know, a caucus of people who care. John Tester is another one who has, he's a farmer himself, an organic farmer in Montana, very popular despite the fact.

That he's a great guy.

Yeah, he is a great guy. And he gets it. He understands this industry. He sees what they're doing to farmers. And, you know, I also think the Democrats have to do a better job talking to farmers. I mean, they've completely lost that register, that vocabulary, and rural America has turned against Democrats. And it's true. We forget that Obama won Iowa twice. That is unimaginable today. Although I think one of the reasons that the Democrats lost it is because he disappointed expectations that he had created that he was going to be more helpful to farmers. So anyway, it's political organizing, it's hard work, and there is not a natural business constituency in favor of reform. You do have all these great small farmers and small food companies, but the food companies, the only exit for them is to sell to a big company.

Yeah, right.

And that, you know, that's how you do it. You, the returns on food are not very high compared to other parts of the economy.

I wonder who the natural allies are, like insurance companies. I mean, in terms of, well, it's.

Interesting you bring that up, Mark. I, I remember a few, I always thought that the natural Ally of the food industry were health insurers, because if you can prevent, you know, for every case of type two diabetes you prevent, I remember seeing a number, and this 10 or 15 years old, they saved half a million dollars over the life of that person. And I was invited to give a speech in Scottsdale, Arizona to a group of presidents of health insurance companies. And I got up there and I gave a stemwinder about how they should be allies of the food movement and how preventing chronic disease could make them money. and that they should really be in there fighting for a farm bill that privileged health over productivity. And this president of a health insurance company comes up to me after and he says, you know, with all due respect, you don't understand our business.

Really?

We have so much churn. We anticipate holding on to a customer for one year. So, we don't make any money with prevention. And if the contracts were five years, that would change everything. So, there's a lever you could pull, right? Longer contracts for health insurance. Or starting three years.

Portability. There's different ideas I've heard tossed around about how to get insurers to sort of be working together to sort of have it align incentives so they're not, you know, just passing the buck to the next one. so that's what happens. You're right, the churn is a big issue. And I think you're right, in Washington there is a growing array of allies, both on the right and the left. I mean, I met with Senator Cassidy, Senator Marshall, who were very active in trying to move food is medicine policy forward, nutrition education in medical schools, creating reimbursement for nutrition through Medicare and nutrition services and food is medicine. So there's a lot of people in Congress now, I think, and Senate very interested in this. But it's like really slow going and I worry for us as a nation. I mean, think about the cost of our national debt. I just consolidated end to end. Our healthcare bill in America is about 4.5 billion trillion, sorry, trillion with a T. And when you add up all the government payers that are paying for Medicare, Medicaid, any health service, defense, VA, all federal health workers, it's 40% of the entire healthcare bill. So it's like about $2 trillion. We're racking up that debt every year and most of that's preventable. But somehow the government hasn't figured this all out and looked at it. I was just met with Sammy Inkin, who started Virta Health. You may know him. He basically created an online company to cure diabetes using a ketogenic diet. And he's got over 100,000 people. They've run through it. They save an average of 6,000 $1.5 billion per patient, which is the average cost of a diabetic is about $9,600. So for the 16.5 million people on Medicare, if everybody did this and the government paid for it, they'd save literally $100 billion just with one simple reimbursement change in Washington. So I'm actually going to testify on September 18th in Washington in front of the subcommittee of Health, Ways and Means for the Health Subcommittee. and try to move forward the needle on this. But I think you're right, Michael. There's an incrementalism that drives me, and I'm sure you're crazy, but there's an opportunity for, I think, a tipping point to happen in this. And I think the movie, the Food Inc. was part of that, number one, and two also contributed. The book is great. It's a number of essays that go along with Food Inc. too. I encourage people to read it. You have an essay in there, and so does that guy from Brazil you.

Mentioned who developed the alternative-- yeah, Carlos Monteiro.

And Eric Schlosser is a very good piece in there, too. I was talking to a guy from Europe who's working on the UK and similar issues and other doctor about how do we kind of start to really deal with the ultra-processed food issue? Because in some ways, it's controversy about the definition, about, you know, what it means, about, you know, which foods are bad or good, or is all processed food bad? And so the food industry tries to obfuscate all the time. But I think it's pretty clear what it is. People know what ultra-processed food is when they see it. and I think he's talking about the best lever really is around kind of awareness and labeling. And you mentioned Chile, I was just in South America for a few months and yeah, the warning labels are clear. You get a little snack on the airplane and it's got like three giant black stop signs on it. I'm like, I'm not eating that. And it works. But getting that through America is hard. in terms of ultra-processed food being kind of the smoking gun, do you think it's the smoking gun that should be the thing we go after?

I think it's a great place to start. I mean, I think that there are other issues too. You know, to the extent that our interest is about the health of the individual, but also the health of the planet, we have to look at meat eating and the amount of meat we're eating. I think that's an issue too, even if it's unprocessed. we're eating altogether too much meat or more than the planet can afford to make, particularly a beef. But I think ultra-processed food, look, the message that works for people is their health.

And.

I think that's a good place to start. You know, in terms of the definition, I think Carlos's definition is kind of brilliant. I mean, he basically says, this is food made with ingredients you don't have at home.

Right.

Just look at the label and you do not have all that stuff, all those weird long chemicals.

A jar of butylated hydroxytoluene in your cupboard? No.

I don't know about your pantry, but I can't find it. And then the other thing is, and you can't make it without a factory. Right. And I think we know what that is. So, it's hard to put in a law, I suppose, but there you have it. I think most people recognize it. I think we do have to educate people about it. Cured meats people don't think of as ultra processed, but of course, it's not a complicated process, but it renders them much less healthy as we're learning.

Yeah, I wonder how. I mean, I wonder if, like, I was in Iqaluit when I was researching my book and Sardiña, and they have like, you know, legs of ham they make and they cure it in like a grape leaves and seaweed and all this stuff. I mean, I wonder if that's as bad as what you would get made in sort of a, like, you know, processed meat that you get.

Carmel or somebody. Yeah, I don't know the answer. I don't know how the processes differ. I mean, certainly we've been smoking meat for a long time, but, you know, the thing we have to remember is the quantities are so different today. You know, Americans eat nine ounces of meat per person per day, and that's unprecedented in the history of humankind. There just wasn't that much meat around.

Unless you got all the bison in the mid- and your plains Indians.

Yeah, I mean, there were moments of, you know, where people splurged on meat. But meat in most cultures is a flavoring and not a main course, you know? I mean, think of the way the Asians use it or the Indians use it. and there's another way to eat meat and have the advantage of eating meat because it is nutritious food. But our idea that you have this big slab of animal on your plate and with some vegetables cowering in the corners, that's a kind of very novel Anglo-American idea.

I guess that sort of speaks to Dan Barber's third third plate concept, which is basically meat as a side dish and having the veggies as the main dish and as opposed to two asparagus on a plate next to a steak.

Exactly.

I think that I do want to go deeper into the meat thing because there's a number of really arguments around meat. There's moral, ethical, there's environmental climate, and there's health, and they all get conflated. and I think, you know, then there's also the scale of like, you know, can we actually scale up regenerative agriculture to have enough animal food for a growing planet? And, you know, there's a lot of controversy and a lot of different opinions about that. A farmer, rancher Williams, who's done work on this and said, you know, we looked at all the, like, BLM land and all the unused land and all the land we used to grow sewing corn to feed the animals. like we could actually have far more meat produced in America in a regenerative way than we do now even in feed loss. You know, and I'd love to hear your opinion about this because I think that, you know, like you said, meat is a nutritious food. We need protein. There's significant protein deficiency around the world. And yet the way we do it now, as you sort of exposed in Omnivore's Dilemma and Food, Inc. 1 and also Food, Inc. 2, it It's horrible for the animals, it's horrible for the planet, it's horrible for the humans who eat it. It should be outlawed, period. Everybody, I think, can agree on that, except maybe your friend out in California.

Who blacklisted you from Cal Polytech.

John Harris. But basically, I think there's general consensus about that. But if we could change the sort of agricultural policies to incentivize regenerative agriculture, which is one of the things I'm working on in my nonprofit. Do you think we could move away from these feedlots or are they just so entrenched and so consolidated and so stuck we're just never going to be able to do that?

Well, I don't think we're going to eliminate them. I don't picture them going away entirely, but I could imagine them getting a lot smaller and a regenerative agriculture getting a lot bigger, acre by acre. The fact is that most of our best land in the Midwest is being used to grow feed for animals, not food for people. And that is, you know, not just the result of this is how capitalism works. It's it's the way we've organized the incentives. And we make it very easy for farmers to grow lots of corn and soy, neither of which are foods directly. They they have to be processed. This is not corn on the cob. We're growing or edamame. Right. These are industrial commodities. raw ingredients that get, and they get broken down and teased into all those ingredients that become ultra processed food. So we're subsidizing the unhealthy calories directly, and we don't have to. And we could in turn instead subsidize people who are, you know, pasturing their animals, you know, letting them live outdoors, which produces meat that is more flavorful and more nutritious. Can you do it at the same scale? Well, I think we have to look at that scale. I don't think we want to do it at that scale. It's just way too much. I mean, meat is, you know, for most of history has been a luxury food, and we're treating it as a three meals a day food. And that's just not sustainable. I remember reading years ago a study, and I think it was World Watch or somebody, was looking at trends in meat consumption in China, where of course they're eager to eat meat at our rates and their rate of meat eating is going up very quickly. In fact, we're growing a lot of their meat now. They're too smart to want to grow the feed for it, so they let companies like Tyson take on all the environmental and labor problems and then they just ship over the sides of pork.

That's right, Smithfield's been like really China owned by the Chinese.

Smithfield is now owned by the Chinese, yeah. But it's very much of a colonial situation where we keep the pollution and they get the meat.

But anyway, our evil ways are coming back to bite us.

Yeah, in a lot of ways, they are. And the study found that if the Chinese were eating meat at the rates we do, we would need 2.3 more worlds to grow all the grain necessary, and that's just not gonna happen. So we need to, you know, if the Chinese are gonna eat more, we need to eat less and a lot less. So I just think the goal should not be one-to-one convert from feedlot agriculture to, you know, pastured agriculture. But, but I think we have to just reexamine the whole system. And, you know, this move toward synthetic meat is...

Lab meat. You talked a lot about that in the movie, yeah.

Yeah, is, you know, is an effort to confront this. The premise of the industry, and this goes for both the people making plant-based meat and the people making what's called cultured meat, which is actually meat cells that fermented in a laboratory, basically. And this is starting to hit the market. And all these companies are founded on the premise that the way we're eating meat now is unsustainable and it should change. And a lot of the big companies are behind these cultured meat companies, including Tyson. But there's a few problems with that. So their premise is, of course, you're never going to get people to change their habits. so let's just change what a hamburger is or a chicken breast. And I don't buy that premise. I think changing people's behavior based on education and knowledge and experience is well worth trying. It certainly worked with cigarettes and worked with littering and, you know, we can change deeply ingrained habits, but we have to work at it and we have to tax them probably. But their premise is, no, that's never gonna happen. So let's change what the meat is made out of. The problem with the synthetic meat is that it's ultra processed food. I mean, it's, you know, got, I mean, look at the ingredient list on Impossible or Beyond. It's got 20, 21 ingredients. And we did this, you know, we went to their factory and I interviewed Pat Brown. And, you know, it's an impressive piece of food science, I have to say. He's got this plant-based thing to behave like a burger on the grill. But it has an ingredient that hasn't been part of the human diet before, this heme iron from soybeans. And it's got all these ingredients and lots of methyl cellulose and stuff like that, which is essentially wood pulp.

And it's GMO soy. So they're spraying glyphosate on it.

That'S right. And that's a real concern. And so, you know, you're trading in, yes, you may be not killing a cow to make this burger, but you're eating an ultra processed food that has its own issues. So, and then on the case of-.

I bet he didn't probably like that when you challenged him on that, I imagine.

No, he didn't. You know, so he has his eye on one thing. I mean, Pat Brown is an environmentalist first, and his goal as a vegan himself is to destroy the meat industry. And he's not selling health, or he wasn't. I mean, now they figured out you have to make a health claim to sell anything processed. The more bogus, the better. But his interest was just take, you know, whatever we have to do to take down the meat industry.

Isn't that one of your health rules? Was that one of your food rules? Don't eat anything with a health claim on it?

Yes, yes. It was counterintuitive, but the basic idea was only packaged foods make health claims.

I know.

And that the, you know, the fresh produce is sitting there quietly in the produce aisle, not, you know, the broccoli's not saying anything.

Yeah, I'm filled with all these phytonutrients and like that.

Yeah, it's one of the ironies. I mean, you know, because if you have to have, I mean, look, I mean, under, under lying this whole conversation, of course, as you know, is you can't sell real food very, for a lot of money. You know, I'm talking about produce and, you know, flowers and grains and things like that. You, you can't make money without processing it. And the more you process it, the more money you and that is the problem, the value added in terms of convenience and novelty and snackability and craveability. And that is our problem. I mean, and look at the percentage of the food dollar farmers get. It's 10 or 12%. And the reason is that the processors, that's where you want to be. I mean, you can talk to executives in the food industry and they'll say, yeah, the farmers are not the way to make money making food. And, you know, as long as we are not cooking as a culture, that's going to be an issue because who's going to buy the raw, unprocessed whole foods? It's going to be the people who are setting out to process it.

Yeah, I mean, that was one of the most beautiful things I'd ever seen you write was really the book Cooked and also the sort of, I'm going to I bought the sentence. I quoted it in one of my books, which is basically, you know, cooking is one of the essential acts of being human. It's sort of this essential part of who we are and what makes us different and unique. And it brings together us to nature, to each other, to community, and that we've lost that. And the industry has literally hijacked American kitchens.

I think it is so important on so many levels. It takes care of this health conversation automatically. Whatever you cook at home is going to be healthier than what you're buying. You're not going to make fried chicken every day. You're not going to make French fries every day. It's too messy and it's too big a pain. In the end, you're going to cook simply and you're going to your family is going to benefit. But then there are all the spiritual benefits of it and even the political benefits. I really believe that what happens at the family dinner, is a nursery of democracy. I mean, think about it now. We have such centrifugal lives. Everybody goes off to their room and they have their screens. And when do they come together in the car and at the dinner table? And that's where we kind of learn how to talk in a civilized way, how to argue without fighting. It really is training for really important social and civic skills that we lack. So, yeah, there's the food piece and the health piece, which is profound, but there's this other piece that we're losing too. And the problem is it's very hard for a man to make an argument for cooking.

Well, I'm the one who cooks in my house.

Well, I share it with my wife. We're really 50-50 about it. We divvy up each meal. Who's going to do the protein, who's going to do the vegetable or the salad. But in general, when a lot of women hear a man saying cooking is really important, often they hear go back to the kitchen. And that's certainly not what I meant in that book. It was really about sharing this work. It's the responsibility of both parents and the kids. I mean, I think we need to get our kids to cook, too. That was a big deal in our family when Isaac was growing up. that he had to do something to contribute to each meal. And I know he had sports and he had, you know, and he had his homework to do, and they always pull the homework excuse. But, but even if he had a lot of homework, he at least had to cut up an onion or mince some garlic or do something to contribute to what we were doing. And now he's a wonderful cook and he cooks for pleasure.

That's right. Same thing with my family. I always started cooking with my kids, brought them in the kitchen. Even they were making a mess, I didn't care. And there was that Molly Katzen had that great kids cookbook, 10 Soup. And it was like all these really healthy recipes, but they're kind of kid friendly and they're delicious and they're fun. And so, you know, I think, you know, it's an incredible way to bring families together and to create health. I, I was in this movie fed up, where we went to South Carolina and Easley, South Carolina. And I was with this family of five that lived in a trailer. They were on food stamps, disability. The father was on dialysis at 42 from kidney failure from diabetes. The mother was 100 plus pounds overweight. The 16 year old my son was almost diabetic and 50 body fat. It should be 10 at that age. And they didn't have a single fresh food in their house. And they had only packaged box, packaged frozen foods. And I didn't even know what they were eating. And I showed them what they're eating. I didn't give them a lecture on how to, you know, eat healthy. But I said, like, do you know how to cook? Let's, let's make a meal together. And I, I basically got the guide from the environmental working group, ewg. called Good Food on a Budget. It's good for you, good for your wild, good for the planet. And I showed them how to peel garlic, how to stir fry, how to make turkey chili, how to make simple salad dressing, how to make a salad. And they were shocked, and they loved the food. And then they were like, one kid goes, Dr. Hyman, do you do this with your family every night? I'm like, yeah, we do. And then they ended up doing it. They didn't have a cutting board or knife. I mean, I was trying to cut like three potatoes into pieces with a butter knife. It was not that easy. So I bought him a cutting board, I bought him knives, I was on my way home on the plane from Amazon, sent to their house, and I gave them a cookbook and I said, you, could try it, here you go. And they did it, and the father lost 50 pounds, got a new kidney, the mother lost 100 pounds, the son lost 50, regained it and ended up going to work in Bojangles, which is like a fast food chain down in the South, 'cause there's no other place to work for these kids. It was one of the worst food deserts in America. And I was like, wow, we're basically just one meal away from solving our health crisis. Like one? and I, and I, and, and the son then, you know, gained the weight back. But then he called me and I helped him. He lost 132 pounds and ended up asking me for a letter of recommendation for medical school. So it gave me such hope that, like, if, if, you know, we can get out there in the community with each other, helping and supporting each other, it works. You know, I did this with the church and Saddleback Church with Rick Warren. We did it with 15, 000 people, and they lost a quarter million pounds in a year by doing it together. I, I did this Cleveland Clinic, you know, at South Pointe Hospital, which is mostly African-American community, we got 300 African-American women coming to a cooking class that I led. You know, I was just like, what's going on here? And I think there's a real hunger for people to know they just don't know. And I actually say I had implicit bias, which was people kind of know.

But they're lazy, they don't want to do it. But I don't think people really know. They don't. They don't have the skills. I mean, you know, we, that chain of transmission from parents to kids to their kids and their kids of how you cook has been lost. And home ec doesn't happen the way it did because that was too gendered. But I do think that, I mean, what you're talking is really important. The question is how do you plant these values in the society? And I really think you do it in the public schools. I think as time goes on, you were asking for where the important leverage points are. It seems to me, it's very exciting that the new vice presidential candidate is associated with a program to give two meals a day to children in Minneapolis, walls past this, you know, and it's for everybody. It's not means tested or anything. It's a universal program. Now, you know, this could all be Cisco processed food, you know, I hesitate to dig in too far, but the basic idea that we have this opportunity to educate children about food by feeding them, but we have to pay attention to what we're feeding them, certainly. And we have to give them two more things. One is classes where they can learn how to cook, which they love. I mean, you know, the Edible Schoolyard is around the corner for me. This is Alice Waters' project. And there they have a beautiful school garden where the kids grow food, and then they have a cooking class where they learn how to cook it, and then they eat it at lunch. And it's their favorite time of the day. And what happens is they start bringing these skills home, and they start introducing foods to their family that their family didn't ordinarily eat. and so, you know, human habits are hard to change and you got to start young. And so I think as a focus of our energy, Alice Waters talks about school supported agriculture and she's trying very hard to get the schools in California to commit to buying locally to support the farmers. There's so much buying power in schools. But anyway, and to the extent that this next administration is talking about a set of policies around children, child tax credits and things like that, I think it's a really good opportunity to inject these ideas of educating kids about how to eat, how to prepare food and how to grow it.

I think it's so essential, Michael, because as a doctor, you know, I've been giving lectures on, you know, the state of our health and for 30 years. And I keep having to change my slides because the, the percent of kids overweight and obese keeps going up and up and up. And now 40% plus kids are overweight, 20 are obese. You know, one in 10 kids are on psych meds and, you know, a lot of other meds. They're talking about giving little kids those epic now for obesity. And it's terrifying because we're literally have a state of the world now with kids where their futures are really in jeopardy in terms of their health and well-being, their future happiness, earning capacity, life expectancy are all being threatened by what's happening in the food system and their food supply and in the schools. And so I 100% agree with you. that's why the front of package labeling effort is really focused on kids. How can we not protect our kids? Save the children should be our basically calling cry for actually dealing with this. Because who can argue that? Who can argue that we should be poisoning our kids? But it happens. The Dietary Guidelines Committee is supposed to be an independent group of scientists, but often they're highly conflicted. The last group is a little bit than the previous one, but they still came out with a ruling that ultra-processed food did not have enough data to connect it to obesity, so they weren't going to make any guidelines around it. And I was like, Gee, this is terrible. There's mountains of evidence that this is doing 11 million people a year. And you're like, well, what is going on here? And I think the kids thing is key, and I think parents have to get get involved, I think they can make a difference in schools. I'm not sure you probably know EAT REAL, which is a George Plane initiative in California. They're doing great work in child schools. Kimball Musk, Big Green, getting edible school schoolyards, similar thing with gardens and schools around the country. And it's happening. But it seems like too slow. And I don't know if we're just gonna poison ourselves to death. I think lead was the death of Rome, as the lead pipes. Well, I think the ultra-processed food is gonna be the death of America.

And look, I mean, we're talking about political money, right? And the influence of money in politics has a tremendous influence on this, like so many other issues. But I also think that taboos arise in society. I mean, it's entirely possible that ultra-processed food can acquire the image of something, you know, that it's like candy. It's like something, it's an indulgence you have every now and then, but as a regular way to eat is just really dangerous. And the problem though, too, is that the budgets, I remember Marion Nestle did this calculation that the entire government budget for educating people about food and, you know, showing them the nutritional recommendations when they come out, zero, equaled a single SKU, a single product from PepsiCo.

I went to Washington, I met with the folks who were involved in the dietary guidelines who are not the political, but the sort of people who have been working there in the trenches. And they're like, you know, Mark, we don't have any money. The Congress mandates that we create these dietary guidelines, but we don't actually have a budget to do it. So we have to go around all the other, no, not to promote them, just to develop them. We have to go around with a tin cup to the other departments in their agency and ask for money. And there's no money to promote them, to educate people about them, to kind of create awareness. It's incredible. Like, what would be the one bomb fighter jet, we could literally change everything, right?

But you know, the defense, actually the food industry spends more on lobbying than the defense industry. So that gives you some idea of the scale of it. It's vast.

Yeah, it is. And just to kind of loop back a little bit about the lab-grown meat, because it seems like that could be a good idea, but there are issues with it. And I'd love to hear your kind of thoughts about the challenges around that.

Well, we went to a company called Upside, which is near me here in Emeryville, and they are a very well financed a listed company with all the big players in agribusiness owning a piece of it. And I don't know why exactly, whether they believe in it or they want to control it or have a window on it, I don't know. But they're all there. It started by a doctor actually, a cardiologist who adopted some of the techniques he was using to repair the heart with stem cells.

This is Uma Valeti, right?

Uma Valeti. Yeah. And he's very dedicated, very idealistic. And we were given a tour and we saw these great stainless steel vats. It looks like a brewery. And it's very similar kind of equipment. And in those vats are cells that are removed almost by, you know, it's a biopsy essentially. You don't have to kill the animal. You just need cells and you start duplicating them. and you have to feed them. And one of the challenges, there are two big challenges to scaling this, is that the feedstock, which has to be pharmaceutical grade, this is the kind of feedstock you would use if you were growing cell lines in a laboratory. It has to be perfectly clean, and it's a mix of amino acids and fats and sugars. and micronutrients, I assume. But you get a single bacteria in there and the bacteria will multiply much faster than your meat cells and you've got to throw out the whole tank. So the issue is, and pharmaceutical grade feedstock for cells is not cheap. The issue is, can a company like Cargill make trainloads of this stuff that will be so clean that you can use it? And that's a really open question. There's nothing that clean in our food system. If you've been in a slaughterhouse, if you've been, you know, in in a grain elevator. Doing things at that level of cleanliness is going to be very difficult. The other though is that in these tanks you can multiply cells, but the final product doesn't look like a chicken breast and doesn't look like a steak. It looks like a slurry. And you can form that into chicken nuggets and form it into hamburgers, but to make cuts of meat takes another very expensive process that hasn't been perfected expected. And so when we went there, I got the full tour with Uma and he explained what he was up to, and then he sat me down and they cooked me a chicken breast.

And that was- Where'd you get that? A Costco.

Not quite. But they were, you know, we were fooled into thinking that the process we had just seen had produced this chicken breast. And this chicken breast It was an impressive piece of technology in that it was a chicken breast. It wasn't like a beyond meat chicken breast. It was a chicken breast. It was kind of tough and, you know, and it cost, he said, like $500 to produce. It was this big. But subsequently we learned through the work of another journalist, not me, that the process I was shown cannot produce cuts of meat. and that that's produced in a very bespoke system that's basically designed for journalists and chefs.

Right, right, right.

So, I think that Upside is a long way from having a marketable product that's inexpensive. Their plan is to mix this slurry with plant-based materials to create things that feel like chicken breasts and feel like steaks. but there we're back to processed food again.

Yeah, I mean part of the problem and I know Uma and I spent a weekend with him and he's a beautiful man.

Yeah, he's a very good guy.

Brilliant guy, cardiologist, trying to really do the right thing. And I said to him two things which he really never considered. I said, well, if you're gonna scale this, where is the feed gonna come from? And you mentioned Cargill, which is one of the biggest food manufacturers and processed food companies in the world. It has to come from somewhere. Are we growing fields of corn and soy and industrial agriculture to feed lab-grown meat and at scale, it's going to get worse? Then what energy inputs are you using? Are you using fossil fuels to fuel these bioreactors that take huge amounts of energy are using renewables? We're solving one problem but maybe creating another problem. I said, unless you can figure out how to source your your food sources for the cultures from regenerative sources and you can get renewal energy, you're kind of in a downward spiral, I think. It's just going to have good order effects.

And I think that the feedstock is going to be the same old same old. It's going to be the corn and soy, the monocultures of the Midwest, because that's the cheapest source of those ingredients. because that's what we, you know, that was an issue too with Impossible that they were gonna initially, I think they wanted to use pea protein or something like that or, you know, something that would diversify if they got big, that would diversify agriculture. But in the end, they used GMO soy. And that, and economically, it's hard to argue with that. So, you know, it's very interesting that these monocultures at the, at the very base of our food the corn and soy grown in the Midwest. Even when we change our food system, we're still on that same foundation. And that foundation has lots of problems. I mean, as you pointed to glyphosate, you know, there's so much glyphosate in the food supply now. A lot of it comes from soy. Some of it comes from wheat, though. One of the most absurd practices in recent years was that farmers found that if they sprayed their wheat fields with glyphosate immediately before harvest, they could harvest earlier because they didn't have to wait for the plants to die and dry out. They have to get to a certain level of hydration in the wheat berry before they can harvest. So they spray our food with this wheat killer immediately before we eat it. I mean, this shouldn't be allowed. And so that's one of the reasons I will only buy organic flour because the rest of the flour now is contaminated. But it's on everything. It's on 70% of our food crops.

And if you eat at a restaurant, you know what you're getting. And I'm like really careful, but I checked my urinary levels of glyphosate and they were relatively high. I mean, if you look at the average American, their bodies are full of it and it destroys the microbiome. that has epigenetic effects that's two or three generations down the line. It's quite harmful and yet we don't regulate it and we don't do anything about it. I think Monsanto who makes it was sold to Bayer.

Bayer.

Which, yeah, which is gonna, I think, probably shelve it and create another product that's probably even worse or just as bad and kind of distract us for a minute. But we're in it. To me, we're in an existential crisis. It's a national emergency that no one's talking about. And even in the presidential campaign, I remember you wrote that letter to, I think, Obama. Obama, yeah. There was in the New York Times magazine where you kind of laid out, hey, pay attention to this. But, I don't know, does it take a litigation like we did for tobacco? Is it antitrust laws that we need to go after? these are the levers that I'm thinking about.

Yeah, I think it's all of the above. I mean, I think, you know, antitrust is focused now on tech. But Lina Khan knows a lot about the food industry. That was her first, she first wrote about it. She's the person who runs antitrust at the Federal Trade Commission, and she's kind of amazing. She's fearless, and that's why you hear all these wealthy Democratic donors telling Kamala Harris a fire. No, they've been doing it openly. Barry Diller and somebody else came out and said, She's got to go. And it'll be a real test of Kamala Harris whether she succumbs to that or not. Well, if she gets to be president, right?

Yes.

Well, that has to happen first, you're right. But- interesting, she hasn't, by the way.

I imagine you know her because you're from California, but she hasn't been talking about these issues. And you know, President Trump has talked about them. He was on a teleprompter, so I don't know, but at least he was talking about these issues. Bobby Kennedy is talking about chronic disease, whether you agree with his other policies or not, as this existential crisis for America. But it's just sort of absent from the political discourse. And it doesn't make sense to me because I think people really care about.

These issues and they want to make them. So, you know, I think they do, and Obama understood that. And, you know, I had a little window into what was going on in his his process.

And.

It was calculated that Michelle got involved in food issues. That was not her plan. She was going to do veterans families, I think. And it grew out of conversations that they were having with people in the food movement, not me. But I think Obama's analysis was that there wasn't enough pressure, you know, is what you were talking about earlier, that he didn't feel the heat from the food movement enough to spend the political capital. And that, you know, leaders don't really lead. I mean, they need to be pushed.

I think you're right.

And he said to people I know, he said, Show me the movement and I'll move. and I think we failed to do that. I don't think we're well enough organized and I don't think we've got the numbers. And so, you know, some of it's on us. But yes, we're up against a really formidable set of enemies.

Well, I think this is a sort of part of our strategy, you know, is with Food Fix and we're partnering with Food Fight USA, which is Mark Cuban and Todd Wagner's profit to try to create a documentary series really that takes us even deeper. It's more than just one, but multiple docuseries episodes that sort of catalog the harm that our current food and food system is doing from everything from mental health to physical health to economic health to national security to academic performance and global competitiveness to the environment, climate, social justice. I mean, the list goes on and on, because food is the nexus for all these things coming together, and they're all siloed, and they're talked about as separate issues, the economic impact. These are all things that are connected to food and climate change.

Well, and the climate impact, which only recently have people begun to hear about. You know, the fact that the food system is a huge contributor to greenhouse gas production, and that in ways people don't fully understand. And, you know, you go back to the first inconvenient truth, with, you know, landmark film that Al Gore did about, and, and really helped put climate change on the national agenda. There was not a word about agriculture or food in that film. Well, he's getting- it just wasn't on anyone's radar.

Yeah.

And now he's, he definitely understands it. And I think everybody in the climate activism world understands it. But the public still needs to be educated about that, that the way you eat is, is much in a part of your your footprint, your environmental footprint as the kind of car you drive or how you heat your house. And we have to think about it that way. Yeah.

So, Michael, this is such a great conversation. You're, you're been such an inspiration to me and so many, and you've been the Catalyst for really important change in our food system and our mental health system now.

Well, the same goes for you, Mark.

And, and you know what, what is exciting now is that, like, people are able to tap into resources and tools and things that are available, like your book, Omnivore's Dilemma, should be mandatory reading for everybody in America. All the other books too, obviously, In Defense of Food, Food Rules is really fun, but Food, Inc. now is a great book that came out. And also, this is yous Mind on Plants, which is another book you wrote that's more around the mental health and the psychedelic space. You're a journalist, you're a professor, you're an outspoken advocate for telling the truth when no one else wants to tell the truth, and it's not that popular. But somehow you do it in such a way, in such a nice way that people aren't too mad at you. But I think we have a lot of work to do, and we have a lot of education to do. But I think we just got to keep at it, and I think we just got to keep educating people, and I'm going to keep pushing Washington, keep telling stories, and hopefully we'll get there. As a final question, I'm curious, where do you see us in five, 10 years with all this?

Well, there's a history in America of pushing on issues like this, and things proceed with incredible slowness and frustration for years and years and years, and then something happens, and suddenly history speeds up. And that's why you got to stay at it. it. It's really important to stay at it. And it's hard to tell when you're going to have that confluence of factors, you know, come together and give an issue the kind of prominence in the political debate. You know, sometimes it's a disaster. Sometimes it's. But it can be. It's very serendipitous. I mean, I've watched this with the psychedelic, you know, movement, you know, another movement I'm very involved in. and to bring psychedelics back into medicine. And it's been very different than the food movement and kind of thrilling because it's been so fast. Why has it been so fast? Well, there's no opposition to speak of.

Well, the pharma industry probably wouldn't like it. Nobody's gonna be taking SSRIs anymore.

Yeah, pharma has been notably quiet. And I think they're starting to wake up and notice what's happening. They're often kind of late. But in general, it's been a good education to me on how politics works and the strength of your opposition is a big part of it. But things can change really fast in this country. We just, the last month has shown us that how much can happen in a month. It's true. It's true. So I don't think we should assume because it's an uphill slog now that it will always be that. I think that the conditions will be right. that the issue is ripe for the kind of attention that it needs to really move it forward. You know, when an issue is not front and center in our politics is when the lobbyists have the most power.

That's right. That's right.

Because they go unnoticed. But if we can raise the profile in the public conversation, you know, that can do it. And, you know, we do have a ticket now on the Democratic side with two people who really understand the importance of food and children. And so we should be lobbying them too.

Yeah, I agree. I'm a pathological optimist, Michael, so I think- Me too.

Me too.

And I think you're right about this. I always say change doesn't start in Congress, it ends in Congress. Abolition didn't start in civil rights and women's rights and gay marriage and all the things that have happened over the last 100 years.

It was pressure from outside.

Some of it took 100 years, women's vote. getting women to vote, you know, it was more than a hundred.

But then gay marriage, you know, happened really quickly. I mean, amazingly fast. You know, Obama got flat-footed, it was flat-footed. You know, Biden came out, Biden came out and like, what are you talking about? And then months later. So yeah, history speeds up sometimes.

Okay, let's count on that, Michael, and Michael keep the good work up and for your next book on consciousness. We'll have you back talking about that when it comes out. And everybody go watch the film Food, Inc. 2 and read the book Food, Inc. 2 and check out Michael's other work and keep on fighting the good fight, Michael.

Thank you. You too, Mark. Take care.

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