What Makes Junk Food Addictive?

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

When you take these processed ingredients that are highly refined, they taste awful, and the only way to make them taste.

Good is to put in salt, sugar, and fat. The industry calls fat the mouth feel, and there is a very precise formula that they want to hit in making snack foods.

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Week'S episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy. Hi, this is Lauren Fein, one of the producers of the Doctor's Pharmacy podcast. There's a very specific formula that hooks people on certain foods, specifically junk food or ultra-processed food. This formula includes the science behind the flavors of ultra-processed food, marketing tactics like the popular slogan no one can eat just one, and food policy that results in the flooding of these foods into the marketplace. In today's episode, we feature four conversations from the Doctors Pharmacy about the creation of addictive and the industry that supports them. Dr. Hyman speaks with Michael Moss about how salt, sugar, and fat are used to make ultra-processed food addictive. With Drew Proewett about how high fructose corn syrup acts in your body and why moderation doesn't work. With Cali Means about how money is used to influence the science of junk food. And with Nina Teicholz about how trans fats came to be and why they are dangerous.

Let's dive in. Kellogg's invited me in to Battle Creek, Michigan, into its secret research and development laboratory where they put these foods together. But they did something really cool. They prepared for me versions of their products without any salt in them at all to show me why they were struggling so much to reduce the salt. And I have to tell you, it was one of the most god-awful dining experiences experiences in my life because we started with the Cheez-Its, which, unlike you, I could normally eat day in and day out, right? The ones without salt, right? But they stuck to the roof of our mouth. We couldn't swallow them because salt provides texture and solubility. We moved on to the frozen waffles, put them in the toaster, they came out looking and tasting like straw because salt adds Color and taste. And the funnest part were the corn flakes. Put them in the bowl, added some milk, took a bite. And before I could say anything, the chief spokeswoman for the company is sitting there next to me and she goes, she gets this look of horror on her face and she swallows and she blurts out the word metal. I taste metal, M-E-T-A-L. And I'm thinking to myself, yeah, I thought one of my fillings came out of my mouth as I was sloshing around. And also with us at the table is the chief technical officer. who's in charge of all things scientific at the company. He starts chuckling and he goes, Not everybody will taste that, but one of the beautiful things about salt for us is that it will mask, cover up, some of the off notes they call them, or bad tastes, that are inherent to many processed foods. And so, all of those things make salt to the industry more than just flavor which you're adding when you're cooking yourself in salt. It's a great thing there. But it's doing all these things that makes the products sort of the industrial powerhouses that they are.

And the truth is, when you take these processed ingredients that are highly refined, they taste awful. And the only way to make them taste good is to put in salt, sugar and fat. And what was fascinating to me, Michael, was that you talked about the science behind the salt crystals and how they apply them and the different shapes of them and what they do and how they affect taste and the tongue and stimulation. This is not just, oh, let's throw some salt on. This is highly scientific processes that they use to actually hook us.

Yeah, and it is extraordinary science that they use, and it's not, I mean, it's a very real thing. And in fact, since you want to talk about salt.

He's pulling out a bag of chips.

I have, well, these are uts. My wife is from Baltimore, so this is actually a family favorite, even though it's actually made in Pennsylvania. So, the thing about the potato chip is that it kind of illustrates salt, sugar, and fat. The salt they call the flavor burst, and indeed it comes in some 40 different versions with different additives and packaging size and all of that, each one kind of designed for a special purpose. The cool thing about salt on a potato chip is that It's typically on the outside of the potato chip, or at least that's the first thing that touches the saliva, which I'm licking right now. Which of course goes into your taste buds and sends that signal to the reward center of your brain, which sends that feeling of pleasure back saying, Michael, I love that. Keep doing it. Excuse me so much. By the way, that noise, we can talk about the noise that the potato chips makes too. The other thing about noise about chips is that they are of course loaded with fat. The industry calls fat the mouth feel. And there is a very precise formula that they want to hit in making snack foods. And it's basically 50%, 50% of the calories should come from fat because that will allow those products to melt in your mouth. This is not good fat.

But the fat they use is not good fat. They use refined oils, processed fats and often very unhealthy fats. These are very bad for Yes, but.

Still a powerful weapon in the hands of the industry in terms of getting you to eat more than you otherwise would. And again, fat is a sensation that your trigeminal nerve picks up, also goes to the same part of your brain that sends back that feeling of pleasure. But what I didn't know, and you did, I'm sure, until I spent some time with these scientists developing these products, which is potato chips are also loaded with sugar in the form of the simple potato starch that gets converted into sugar in your body, and so you've got, Which, by the way, they call the bliss point when they get that perfect amount of sugar. So, the potato chips have all three things going for them. It's a great example.

It's unbelievable. And these aren't foods, they're science projects masquerading as food, essentially.

They like to refer to them as engineering projects and their invention of these products as engineering.

And one of the things you did, part of your research for the book, is you went looked at MRI scans, functional MRIs, looking at brain patterning that happens as a result of eating these foods in the areas in the brain that are stimulated that drive addictive behavior.

Can you just talk a little bit about that? Yeah, I mean, so the whole sort of area of brain science and studying the brain to sort of kind of figure out what's going on inside us when we do eat these products. I mean, obviously it's a very young science. You have to take much of it with a grain of salt. I think somebody at Harvard said recently that if really understanding the brain is a mile long journey, we've come about three inches so far. But they are able to slide people into the MRI and either show them pictures of food, which is a very cool thing because that sort of measures the wanting or the desire of those foods. And then if it's something that you can easily kind of suck on and digest like chocolate, for example, Then they can also record the pleasure part of the system. And I'll tell you a funny story on that. I was doing an interview recently with somebody who's doing these kinds of research. And they have a system where they can put milkshake into your mouth to measure and then show you pictures of that to measure both the wanting and the desire once the milkshake actually drips on your tongue. 'Cause you can't move your head in the MRI. And I said to him before, look, I mean, I'm not a huge milkshake drinker, but if we put some like Pinot Noir in the little tubing system and drip that in, I think you're gonna really see some reward, you know, signals going off in my brain.

It's pretty interesting. We think that it may be the mouth feel, the stimulation of the tongue, the taste buds, the pleasure that may be affecting that. And you go, okay, well it's just the design of the food, but we actually know from Dr. David Ludwig's work that people who had identical tasting looking milkshakes with the same calories, same protein, fat and carbs and fiber, one had a high glycemic starch, meaning it raised the blood sugar quickly, the other one didn't, had profoundly different effects. The ones that had the high sugar one, even that they didn't know they were eating something different, stimulated insulin, made their blood sugars higher, their cortisol higher, but also when they looked at the brain imaging, it stimulated the area called nucleus accumbens, which is the area that is the same stimulated area for addiction like heroin or cocaine. And it really is fascinating that you don't even have to know what you're eating. It's really the biology of these foods is designed to make you hooked. And that's what your new book's on.

Yes, it is. It's sort of looking at that question, is this stuff really addictive? Can we compare it to drugs or tobacco or an alcohol and kind of in what ways? And also kind of going forward too, is that sort of how we want to think about these foods? Is that sort of a, a good way to kind of wrestle with them as a social policy and a personal health issue.

Yeah, because then personal choice becomes a little bit of a fiction when you have products on the market that are highly addictive. Absolutely.

Yes.

And speaking to that, when I read your book Salt, Sugar, and Fat, which everybody should get, it's an extraordinary book, you talked about the sort of intentionality here where they create taste institutes and hire craving experts to create the bliss point of food, with the purpose of creating heavy users. These were their own internal terms. And you talk about Howard Moskowitz, who was a scientist, food scientist, who formulated a new tasting Dr. Pepper and had 61 different varieties that we tested over in 3,000 different taste tests. Yes. And they're looking for this magical point.

You call the bliss point. It was Howard Moskowitz who coined the term the bliss point to apply to that sort of perfect amount of sugar in foods. And it is kind of a precise point on a bell-shaped curve and anybody who likes sugar in their coffee, for example, can do the tests themselves at home. Just add sugar till you get to the point where you really love the coffee and keep adding sugar and pretty much you'll be going yuck. The really kind of important thing for me about that though was not that the companies hired people like Howard Moskowitz to engineer foods with the perfect bliss point of sweetness, foods that we know should be sweet and we already consider to be sort of treats like ice cream and soda and cookies. The food companies marched around the grocery store adding sugar to things that weren't sweet before.

Salad dressing.

Salad dressing, yogurt, pasta sauce, creating kind of this expectancy in us that everything should be sweet. So if you've got kids and you're trying to drag them over to the part of the grocery store where we should all be spending more time, the produce aisle, and they get hit with some sour bitter notes, the other four or five tastes that Aristotle wrote about way back when, that's why you have a riot on your hands because they are attuned, they are expecting everything to be sweet.

It's true. One of the surprising facts I uncovered was that your morning low-fat fruit sweetened yogurt, which is considered a health food, has more sugar per ounce than soda, which is startling, you know?

You know, I mean, who knew that walking into the grocery store was such a treacherous thing? I mean, you have to be on your guard at all times. And they will look, these are companies. I mean, and I always like to sort of make that point. It's not that I see them as this evil empire that intentionally set out to make us usually overweight or otherwise ill. I mean, these are companies doing what all companies want to do, which is to make as much money as possible by selling as much product as possible. And they just happen to have some very smart people working for them to work on the marketing, on the packaging, on the ingredients, everything.

But knowing what you know, and them, I think, knowing what they know, which is hard to not know it in 2018, Isn't there something nefarious about how they go about, for example, targeting children? I mean, I was with Senator Tom Harkin when he was a senator, charge of health, and he said he saw this little kindergarten preschool class with beautiful chairs all throughout the kindergarten. They were all labeled with Coca-Cola because Coca-Cola donated them and that they target children to try to get them brand loyal early on. And then they look at their population of users and the ones who were, they already drinking a lot of soda, they try to get them drinking more, like targeting the ones who drink over 1,000 cans a year to drink even more. They must know what they're doing here.

One of my favorite characters in the book was Jeffrey Dunn for 20 years, one of the biggest warriors in Coca-Cola. He rose to become president of Coca-Cola for North America, South America, and he walked me through those very marketing schemes that they used.

I mean, this was after he quit.

Well, yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, he had an epiphany. at one point and decided to- Couldn't.

Live with himself anymore.

Exactly. But one of those strategies is what they call up and down the street marketing, which refers to their trucks, like other snack food companies, driving from corner store to corner store, which in cities typically surround the schools and get the kids coming and going, and controlling the real estate in those stores. So it's the snack food companies that own the coolers, the racks up front near the cash register. And that's where the heavy salt, sugar, fat sort of snacking comes from, is they're controlling that very important space for kids, especially knowing that when a child goes in for the first time with their own spending money, they will become imprinted, brand loyal, and will start making a habit of that.

I mean, it seems that when you look at the science around how they develop these foods, that they're intentionally trying to create foods that hook people. So do you think they are blind to the idea that these are addictive, that they know it but just don't talk about it or hide it? I mean, what's really going on after all these conversations? Do the people in these companies know what they're doing?

Well, there was this really interesting moment. So after that 1999 meeting, I spoke about earlier, Kraft, which at the time was the largest processed food company. These insiders who had organized the meeting from Kraft went back and they actually managed to get Kraft to unilaterally adopt some reforms of their formulation and marketing of their products. And they sort of went after those things. And one of the hardest things for them was when they went to their food engineers and said, You know, thou shalt no longer simply add as much salt, sugar, fat as you want to these products as you want to. We're going to put caps on them. And the food engineers were sort of like a little non- I mean, they were like a little baffled, like, what's going on here? They spent their entire career in efforts to maximize the allure of their products. And here suddenly they were being asked to do something less than that. I think where they try to draw the line is saying that, We never intended to people that people pig out. Clearly, we intended to maximize the allure of our products. And I think that's where things got out of control, is where products designed to be irresistible became really irresistible and commonplace. And snacking became the fourth American meal, which turned their products into something very treacherous for people that maybe initially they weren't.

Yeah, no, it's frightening. And when you look at the research you did, you've interviewed over 300 food industry experts, scientists, former employees. You sort of did a little muck raking. And what was the most surprising thing you found that sort of, you went, oh my goodness, I didn't know that.

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Well, a few things. Being an investigative reporter, of course, behold and to go after the money, and there was certainly a lot of money to look at. But I kind of fell in love with the language that they use when they talk to each other about their efforts to maximize the allure of their products. They talk about, for instance, they don't have to use the word addiction. They talk about making their products craveable. And the difference is- Snack a ball, snack a ball. And one of my favorites is, you know, designing more-ish-ness into their products.

But going back to the extraordinary stomach share.

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

No, I will not eat that orange colored thing that's near.

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

So you're eating air.

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

And, you know, and, you know, and, I mean, it's easy to binge on a whole bag of Cheetos, but you're.

Not gonna eat 10 avocados, right? And, you know, and Margaret, you know, and they know that. And that was one of the more gripping things to me. So, that they were eating. Other surprising thing is that they don't eat their own products.

Yes.

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

And what I find it fascinating is that they have the capacity to reformulate their products that are somewhat healthier. Yes. And a friend of mine, Vani Hari, called the Food Babe, found out that Kraft in the UK was not allowed to have any artificial colors or chemicals or additives.

Right.

And so they produce products out there that are free of those. Yes. But in the United States, they didn't. And she forced them almost unilaterally under a lot of peer pressure and social pressure and social media pressure have them change their formulation.

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

And your book made a huge splash when it came out and I think raised a lot of eyebrows and certainly got my attention. and many others, how has the food industry's behavior or actions shifted as a result of this story coming out?

So less the food industry behavior than our own behavior. And again, more and more people have become concerned about what they're eating. And that concern has started to translate into purchase decisions in the grocery store. And it didn't take much to send the industry into a panic. So there was another meeting Just a couple of years ago, Florida with investors and one after another of the large companies stood up and reported dismal profit earnings and the more forthright of them confessed that they were losing stomach share, but also the trust of their consumers. And that's really where you started to see this new trend now of everybody cutting back on, especially on salt sugar fat, but other things like artificial colorings, etc. in sort of this desperate gamble to try to win back the trust of consumers. And I think I have really mixed feelings about it.

Yeah, it's really interesting because you have to look at this from a bigger perspective. If you look at the foods consumed by Americans, 60% of them come from commodity foods, wheat, corn, and soy in the form of flour, high fructose corn syrup, and soybean oil, refined soybean oil, which is often the fat that's in your mouthfeel thing. And those people who consume the most of those are the sickest. And no matter how they dial up or down the ingredients or tweak their products, it's still junk. So this is an interesting phenomenon where, as people become more aware, how are they responding to that?

Well, the companies, I mean, people are the companies.

People and companies.

I think we're all having to get smarter. I mean, even looking at the nutrition facts label on some of these products, I have sort of mixed feelings about it.

Fake news.

Well, yeah, because they're very good at adjusting these numbers to whatever is the immediate concern of people buying it. And in the past, it's sort of been sugar and and salt and then some kinds of fat and calories and fiber. And so you look at this, you go, okay, that seems kind of reasonable, but then you realize it's still junk.

Junk, right. It's a little less junky, but it's still junk.

So, I mean, it's better than nothing. At least we now know what's going in these products, especially because of the requirement that they list the ingredients. But I think it's incumbent upon us, and this is, easier for some people than others to think more about sort of what we're eating and is this real food and how can we make adjustments in our life to get better food for ourselves and our families?

High fructose corn syrup has a number of qualities. One, it is not like regular sugar, which is 50/50 glucose and fructose. It's sometimes 55% fructose, even up to 75% fructose. and fructose, and we've had podcasts about this, you've had Dr. Richard Johnson on your podcast about this, fructose is a very toxic compound when it's free and unattached to fruit, right? Fructose comes in fruit, but if it's just free in the product you're eating, which is in sodas and all kinds of sugary drinks, and it's in everything, it's in bread, it's in salad dressing, it's in tomato sauce for your pizza, I mean it's terrible. it actually has a very bad effect on your liver, causes fatty liver, high triglycerides, inflammation, insulin resistance, and it's really driving so many of the diseases of aging, heart disease, cancer, diabetes, obesity, dementia, etc. So you don't want to eat that. The other reason it's bad is because it seems to take a lot of energy to absorb across the gut. And so glucose gets in and sort of naturally gets in. Fructose requires energy. And so if you're having a lot of fructose, free fructose, basically depletes the energy in the gut, which is required to keep you from having a leaky gut. So your cells in your intestinal lining are stuck together like Legos. But if those Lego Junctions come apart, those tight Junctions come apart, you get what we call a leaky gut. And leaky gut leads to a whole host of downstream consequences that drive inflammation, because basically protein and from food and particles that shouldn't be getting in and foreign proteins from that and also poop and bacterial toxins get absorbed and your body's like, ah, and the immune system starts reacting and you start getting autoimmune disease and allergies and heart disease and cancer and everything. It's bad. So you really want to stay away from African corn. The other thing that's interesting is when they process it, they often use something called chloroalkali. And I'll tell you a funny story because what this scientist I knew wanted to study high fructose corn syrup. And so she asked the makers of high fructose corn syrup, Cargill and other big food companies to get a supply so she could test it. They wouldn't give it to her. But then she kind of changed her name and she pretended to be someone who was making a new soft drink or a new beverage. She said, I'm using this, I need it to make my new beverage. So they're like, okay, fine. They sent it to her. And then she analyzed it and found, almost all the samples had high levels of mercury because chloroalkali used to extract the high fructose corn syrup from the corn actually is a mercury dependent process. So you might be getting toxic from mercury too. So for a number of reasons, leaky gut, mercury, you know, fatty liver, inflammation.

You should never have high fructose corn syrup. Because these foods are so highly addictive, if you try to practice moderation around them, I'm talking about the ones in the first category, high fructose corn syrup, trans fats, and especially the artificial sweeteners and the ultra processed foods. If you try to do and practice what's called the moderation approach of, okay, I'm gonna just have a little bit. First of all, a little bit means different to every person, but secondly, you're gambling a little, you're gambling because you don't know how these foods are gonna play with your own level of addiction. And it's actually kind of hard to stop eating them that whole Chips Ahoy or Pringles commercial, once you start, you can't stop. It's kind of true.

They made these foods.

I ate the whole thing. That was the Lay's potato chips.

I can't believe I ate the whole bag. You eat a little bit, these foods.

Are addictive, and they just keep on.

Pulling you back in. Yeah, it's so true. And I think the science of this is really compelling. I'll just sort of break it down a little bit. But my friend David Ludwig, who's at Harvard, is one of the most brilliant scientists, clinical trialists, in the world has done a number of really elegant studies looking at this. One was he took a group of overweight guys and he fed them what seemed to be identical milkshakes on different days. So they were the same in protein, fat and carbohydrate, same percentages, same amount of fiber. Exactly the same, except for one difference. One of them, and they tasted the same. One of them had a very quickly absorbed carbohydrate that spiked blood sugar and the other one didn't. It was much more a slow carb, it's called a slowly absorbed carbohydrate. And then they fed the same guys different milkshakes on different days. And then they tracked their blood and they looked at functional MRI imaging. And when they look at their blood, the guys who had the high sugar spiky carb, their insulin went up, their sugar went up, their cholesterol went up, their triglycerides went up, their cortisol went up, their adrenaline went up. It was like a stress response. When you eat sugar, it literally creates a stress response. So when you eat a lot of sugar, it's like being chased by a tiger. Your body doesn't know the difference. And so cortisol causes all sorts of problems. It causes diabetes, causes you to have dementia, it causes you to gain weight, it causes you to lose muscle. It's really bad, causes your bones to dissolve. And this is what happens when we eat sugar. So then he took these guys and put them in these MRI machine and looked at their brains before and after the high sugar milkshake. and they found that the ones who had the high spiky sugar milkshake, the area of their brain that's the addiction center called the nucleus accumbens lit up like a Christmas tree. Essentially, it's the addiction center that gets stimulated by cocaine or heroin or anything else that is addictive. And so it proved that from a biological perspective, it's addictive. And there's studies in animal. I wrote the 10-day detox diet, which I cataloged a lot of the research, but that was like 10 years ago, almost eight years ago, I wrote that book. and they found, for example, with animals, if a rat was connected to an IV cocaine and they could hit the lever and give themselves IV cocaine, they would literally always switch over to sugar if given the chance. And they would work eight times harder to get the sugar than the cocaine. And they would, another experiment was kind of a terrible experiment, but they put them in this cage with an electric shock floor. And whenever they ate the sugar, they gave them electric shock. and they kept eating the sugar despite the fact they were getting shocked over and over. It's like getting electric shock therapy while you're eating sugar. And it's, think about it. I mean, how does someone get to 500 pounds? Not in one day. It's slow and they keep eating this stuff even though it's making them sick.

Even though it's making them incapacitated, they can't stop themselves. Their whole system, including their brain, has been hijacked. And they're more likely to be depressed, which also makes them feel like there's no hope and one thing leads to the next.

Most people don't realize that.

I think, well, if I eat junk over many years, it's going to cause problems.

I'll gain weight, I'll get diabetes.

But, you know, it's not an immediate issue, really. The truth is, it is. Literally, with every single bite of food you eat, it's code, it's messages. And what does it do? It changes your gene expression literally in real time, in seconds to second, time. It changes which genes are turned on or off. You can turn on the disease genes or the health genes. It controls inflammation. So you literally can see inflammation go up or down, literally depending on what you're eating with every bite. Your microbiome changes in real time. The bacteria multiply like this bazillions of times a second, and they're changing what you're feeding them affects which ones grow and which ones don't grow. You can be growing a whole crop of bad bugs in your gut that causes disease or you could be growing a crop of good bugs that helps you stay healthy. It regulates your hormones in real time, your brain chemistry in real time.

All.

Of your mitochondrial function, your energy production, all of it is regulated by what you're eating, not over decades, but literally over seconds. So you have the power to change how you feel by changing what you eat. And as a doctor, Drew, and I've had a very, you know, blessed career, and I'm very lucky to have seen a lot of people who are very self-aware and who are very, you know, well to do. And they really do want to take care of themselves and eat well. And it's shocking to me how few of those people have ever connected the dots between what they eat and how they feel. So they might have runny nose, they might have bloating, they might have a headache, they might have skin issues, they might have this, they might have that. and they have no idea that it's connected to what they're eating, even though if they paid attention, they would notice, oh, when I eat this, I feel this. Or when I eat that, I feel this. So people just disconnected from their food and health connection. And I think that's one of the most important things to recognize. I mean, I literally got a text from a friend of mine who is like 65 years old, and she's like, you know, I'm basically healthy, but I've got a little of this, I got all that, I go achy, a little tired, don't have energy, a little extra weight on me. And I said, look, I want to come see you, go to work. I'm like, save your money. I said, here's the 10-day detox. Just do this for 10 days. Just get rid of all the bad stuff. Put in all the good stuff. Just eat real whole food. Get rid of the junk and processed food. All these things we're talking about. She texts me back. You're right, you're right, you're right, you're right, you're right, you're right. She's like, I think I might do this for the rest of my life.

Because she had such a quantum jump.

In her wellbeing by simply changing what she ate.

If you look at the guidelines from most professional societies like the American Heart Association, American Diabetes Association, National Heart, Lung, and Blood Association, the first step of therapy for any of these cardiometabolic diseases, whether it's heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure, is diet and lifestyle. It's the first thing that's recommended. Yet, it's not fringe. It's actually part of the essential guidelines. And, you know, I want to get into sort of how to fix this in a minute, but I just want to dive deeper into how corrupt this whole system is that you're really so good articulating. There was a sort of investigative reports that use FOIA, which is Freedom of Information Act, to get emails and direct correspondence from food industry companies like Coca-Cola, for example.

And.

They were really so egregious in their behavior and it was so clear that they had a coordinated strategy. And this review in Critical Public Health called How Food Companies Influence Evidence and opinions straight from the horse's mouth. They said the results provide direct evidence that senior leaders in the food industry advocate for a deliberate and coordinated approach influenced scientific evidence and expert opinion. The paper reveals industry strategies to use external organizations, including scientific bodies and medical associations.

Right.

I think they, I think the American College of Cardiology has 192 million or the American Heart Association, $192 million in funding from food and pharma a year. They influence scientific bodies, medical associations, as tools to overcome the global scientific and regulatory challenges they face. Challenges of what? Not selling their shitty food. The evidence highlights the deliberate approach used by the food industry to influence public policy and opinion in their favor. And that is really the crux of this whole thing. And so the question is, you know, if we're and for battling, you know, billions of dollars of literally billions of dollars of money that's spent on either influencing public opinion through coordinated campaigns, through media, through co-opting the advertising on television and other channels, through lobbying, through these front groups, through corporate social responsibility, the co-opt social groups, through co-opting nutrition research, I mean, through co-opting universities and medical experts, you know, how do we battle that? Where do we start? And I, you know, I want to hear because I think it's really important to look at not just the problem, I think, and I've defined the problem well in Food Fix. I think we need to talk about the fix part as opposed to the food. I didn't call the book Food Apocalypse, I called it Food Fix.

And I think we're kind of in.

A food apocalypse, but I think we need to think about the fixing part.

Well, let's dive into solutions. I want to be really clear because it's bottoms up and top down, but I want to be clear. I think we'll dive into some top down. There's a big bottoms up empowerment message here. And my message here from being inside the room with these industries is that it's worse than you think. And these people are not smarter than you, they're not impressive. They are rigging the system and we're buying into it. We're still buying into it when there's a Harvard peer reviewed study. We're still letting these studies convince us that glyphosate, you know, essentially a neurotoxin that's banned in most of the rest of the world, is fine to give to our kids. We're letting them convinced us of this. And my message from the bottoms up is trust yourself, is that the system has completely let us down on managing and preventing chronic conditions. And we need to take much more responsibility for our health and our kids' health there. And frankly, listen to the experts, but not give them the benefit of the doubt. And that humans and animals we've domesticated are the Only animals that have systematic metabolic dysfunction. Like animals in the wild. Like cats. There's not, yeah, there's cats and dogs.

But there's real obesity in these animals.

But there's not many obese wolves.

No.

The obesity rate among dogs is over 50%.

Yeah.

By all measures, the depression rate is actually off the charts among dogs. It's like over 50%. There's not a lot of obese depressed wolves in the wild. There's not obese giraffes, there's not obese tigers.

Right?

Every single animal in the world.

I did see some pretty fat hippos.

When I went to the zoo.

So technically, by their measure, everyone breaks that up. Technically, they're not obese. They're made to have some extra fat. So you don't, you just, every animal is born, including humans, with an innate sense of what's right for them, and they gravitate to natural food, they gravitate to sunlight, they gravitate to movement. We, the experts, are beating that out of humans, and we rob our domesticated animals of that. So I really do think there's a spiritual crisis, a bottoms up situation, where we need we need to get back to understanding where our food comes from and trusting ourselves and giving a little less credence to the experts. But I want to be clear, we need to change the top down. There are trillions of dollars of incentives against the American people. I think we are entering a big year in 2024 where I think people are waking up and there are specific, easy things that we can do.

Yeah, I think it's amazing.

How.

Unaware most policymakers are of these issues. They're so co-opted. And like you were talking before about how they're influencing policy. Well, it even goes deeper than that. They literally show up in Congress with white papers and research and graphs and charts proving why all their facts, quote, facts are right. And then not only do they suggest policy, they literally write the policy. They write the legislation and they give it to the congressmen and the senators and have them submit it into bills. And so literally our policies are often being written by the industry. And I was talking to Sam Cass who worked in the Obama administration under food issues with Michelle Obama. And he said, you know, Mark, nobody came from the good guys. All we heard was from the food industry with these big briefing books and all this convincing data and people and stat, the congressional staff and the members of Congress don't have time to study this and learn about it. And so they basically just kind of buy it and move forward with it. And so he said, you know, we need to hear from the good guys. And, you know, you and I are not from some big lobby organizations with billions and millions of dollars behind us, but we've been actually hitting the street on our own dime, going into meeting with members who are open to meeting with us, actually, and talking about these issues. And I've been sort of shocked at how how much they get it once you unpack it for them, how they begin to kind of their light kind of comes on in their eyes and they go, holy cow, we need to do something about this.

The vegetable oil industry was kind of born in the early 1900s, right? The first vegetable oil product was Crisco.

Oh, yeah.

Right?

So it used to be that those oils were used for the Industrial Revolution. They were used to lubricate machinery. And then they figured out how to harden them to make them and they learned how to bleach them and make them look white. And then they thought, and it was actually Procter and Gamble that figured out how to do that. They were gonna make it into a soap. Soap is made from oil. Instead they're like, that looks an awful lot like lard. Let's try to sell it as a food. So they started to sell it as a food and- Trans fat. Yeah, so it turns out that they contained, it's what they, hardening vegetable oils is done through a process called hydrogenation and that produces trans fats. But so these trans fatty hardened oils were started to be sold to Americans in 1911. So coincidentally, heart disease starts to take off right around, maybe like 10 years later, we start seeing increases in death from heart disease. So then Procter and Gamble figures out how to just sell oil as oil. So one of the things to understand about these oils is they're- Procter and.

Gamble produced like shampoo.

Yeah, well they were a soap maker. So that's why they came up with this. But they were like, but Crisco was like a best selling thing. They convinced, you know, in America, so all these immigrants, so, and they want to become American, right? And so Procter & Gamble had this brilliant advertising campaign basically saying, you know, give up lard. Those are the bygone days of your grandmothers, like the spinning wheel of the olden days, and, you know, have Crisco instead. And this is the newfangled thing made in, you know, shiny scientist kitchens. so Proctor and Gamble figured out how to then make vegetable oils that were fluid in bottles. They kind of tinkered with the fatty acids to make them stable. And then, so here's where they started to influence nutrition science. In 1948, the American Heart Association, which is really just an association of cardiologists, right? Remember, heart disease is new. tiny little association. They barely had an office. They were just like, they barely had any funds. Procter & Gamble comes in and says, we're gonna make you the designee of this radio show for a week. And it was this huge deal. Overnight, literally according to the official history of the American Heart Association, they said millions of dollars flowed into our coffers. We became overnight the powerhouse, opening offices all across the country that we are today. They're still the number one largest non-for-profit in the country.

Amazing.

All thanks to Procter and Gamble. And pretty soon thereafter, they started to recommend that you start eating vegetable oils.

To prevent a heart attack. Which was the worst idea because it turns out that trans fats, everybody agrees in this, have killed hundreds of thousands.

Millions of people over the decades. Yeah, the trans fats and the hardened vegetable oils in Crisco are bad for.

Health, clearly bad for health, but in the liquid form. And now they're ruled as not safe to eat by the FDA after- 50 years of pressure to change that.

Right.

And finally took a lawsuit from a 97-year-old scientist who first discovered this 50 years ago to get them to change.

Right, right. And that's also another story I tell in my book about how he tried to get it to change, another woman, a scientist who was trying to, you know, lobby for change and how they were vilified and how they were raked over the coals by all the scientists who disagreed with him and how people would literally, the vegetable industry literally had people assigned to stand up in conferences and yell at these people when they were giving their presentations. I mean, this is the state of nutrition science. So, which again, continues today.

Food hecklers.

But so vegetable oils, so it turns out that when they're in the oil form, they're also dangerous. So they don't contain trans fats, right? But in the oil form, the oils are highly unstable. That means that they oxidize each other.

They go rancid.

They go rancid. Oxidation is, remember that's why we take antioxidants because oxidation causes inflammation in your body. Yes, that's actually true.

On the inside and the outside.

Causes heart disease on the inside. Oxidized LDL is what's thought to provoke that unstable plaque that causes blockage of the arteries.

Rancid cholesterol, that's the problem.

Yeah, so this is what, and in that, on all those studies, remember we talked about the Minnesota Coronary Survey where they had people, some people on on vegetable oil diets. In all of those studies again and again and again, the people on the vegetable oil diets died at much higher rates from cancer. This was considered a side effect of this heart-healthy diet. And they actually had a series of very high-level meetings at the NIH in the early 1980s to figure out what was going on with this side effect of cancer, and nobody could figure it out. And they basically just said, Look, we believe that vegetable oils will help people prevent heart disease, so we're gonna ignore the cancer effect.

So how do we explain to these top Harvard scientists who've studied this data for decades saying that we should all be consuming more of these oils? You know, I have- what's the dirty backstory on that?

You know, I don't have the whole story. I have to assume that a lot of it is cognitive dissonance, right? We're in the third generation now of scientists who believe saturated fats are bad and must be replaced by polyunsaturated vegetable oils. And that is just their boiled in the wool belief that they cannot back out of, right? 100 papers written on that subject. You're not going to change your mind. It is also true that the Harvard scientists have a close relationship with Unilever, one of the biggest vegetable oil manufacturers in the world, if not the biggest.

They're a big food company.

Unilever, another big big vegetable oil manufacturer. In fact, recently Harvard published a paper in which three of the authors were employees of Unilever.

Wow.

What? And they have Unilever fellows who come and work with them. And one of the biggest promoters of vegetable oils is on the Scientific Advisory Board of Unilever. So I mean, I just, I think that the, and what I found out from my research, because I actually started my book by writing about trans fat, I thought I was writing a book on trans fat. when I started. I didn't realize I would get sort of dragged into this whole larger world. So I spent like a year doing nothing but talking to vegetable oil executives when I started. And I came to understand how much they have controlled nutrition science for like the last 50, 60 years. They were involved in every single one of those trials. They would give them their products for free. They were intimately involved in trials at NIH. I mean, they've just had, they've really been brilliant. And executives from the vegetable oil industry have have almost always served as the top general counsel role at the Food and Drug Administration. So they just like, they're very, they've.

Been in the whole vegetable oil lobby.

Yeah, it's called the Institute for Shortening and Edible Oils.

Wow.

They still call it that? The Institute for Shortening.

Shortening.

You know what they call it shortening, right?

It shortens your life.

That's good.

Shortens your life.

Yeah, that stuff is not good. and what's fascinating is that we've increased our consumption of this. This is a new food. You know, I always worry about when we add new to nature foods. So we had olive oil, we had lard, we had tallow, we had other fats, but we didn't have vegetable oils. And these seed, they're not really vegetable like seed and nut and bean oils.

Yeah.

These were sort of invented 120 plus years ago, and we now have increased our consumption of soybean oil, for example, a thousand fold, and it's 10 of our calories, and it's in everything. It's stuff that you wouldn't imagine is in. So any processed food that you buy, it's made in a factory, probably has this oil in it or some variety of it. And I think, you know, when you look at the data, it is confusing. There's a lot of people who, who are looking at large observational processes that show that there's a risk for, you know, saturated fat and a benefit for Omega-3, Omega-6 oils. And there's other data that show this some actually randomized trials that show the opposite. When you just have people eat only the vegetable oil, they do worse.

Right, and let's just remember that latter data from trials is the rigorous cause and effect data, right? So, yeah, I mean- so what do you recommend?

No vegetable oils?

Well, I was just gonna tell briefly about my visit to a vegetable oil factory to explain- I do. what a bungi factory What a brutal process it is to get oil out of a bean or a seed, right? They have to go through this process of extracting the oil. It's not even really oil when it comes out, it's this gray, rancid, disgusting fluid.

It's chemically extracted with hexane and other nasty chemicals.

Right, they have to use hexane as a solvent to extract it, and then they have, and then it's this bad smelling gray liquid. It has to be deodorized, winterized, bleached, and all this. So it goes through like 17 steps in this giant industrial milk plant. And then it's Crisco. So compared to, and this is what we're told to eat instead of churning butter. She's like, you just milk the cow and then you churn the butter. So I think that it speaks to our, to me, it speaks to the craziness about food that we live in, which is so divorced from our history. Like, can you really believe that something that goes through this, you know, 17-step process in a factory is what you should be eating to restore your health? How many steps did it take from the field to your fork?

You know, if there's more than one or two, it's probably not a good idea. I always joke, I say it's easy to figure out what to eat. If man made it, leave it. If God made it, eat it.

Right?

That's good.

Or, you know, olive oil, man made it, but they step on the olives.

And smoosh them, and then you get the olive oil. Well, you know, the story of olive oil is a little bit funny because actually it was originally used in ancient times. It was not eaten. It was used as like a, people put it on their bodies like an ointment to make their muscles shine and they used it to make their skin look good, but they didn't eat it. They didn't start eating olive oil until like the late 1800s. Interesting. So it wasn't actually an ancient food stuff. What humans- I remember being in Greece.

And everybody was rubbing all over their bodies. I was like, wow, this is fascinating. Everybody smelled like a salad.

Did they really put it on their bodies?

Yeah, oh yeah.

Mickey Nose when I was 17 and there were these beaches and everybody was rubbing olive oil all over their bodies. And I'm like, okay.

Yeah, the other thing you notice in the Mediterranean is like, of course, the Mediterranean diet, high in meat, right? That's another thing that was kind of not, it's not been accurately transferred through history. But, so olive oil is relatively stable. So the huge worry about vegetable oils, to my mind is that when they are heated, and even if they're left out in a bottle where it's exposed to light, they will degrade.

Oxidize.

Right, they oxidize, they degrade. That means they break down into these oxidation products. When you put them under heat, like any chemical reaction, that speeds up and it creates literally hundreds of degraded oxidation products, some of which are known toxins. Look up the word aldehyde and see what that is. A known toxin that is created Deep.

Fryers, they call it acrylamide, which is.

Super toxic that it's formed. Acrylamide is another one. And they occur, so without going into too much detail, but when all the big fast food chains like Burger King and all those, McDonald's switched over to trans-free oils, oils without trans fats, they went right back to using just regular old vegetable oils. I mean, much as we don't like trans fats, what they did is that they stabilized the oil. That process of hardening the oil made it stable. Now we have these totally unstable oils in these fryers. They create hundreds of degraded toxic products. Those products are now known. There's experiments have been done to show that they enter into the food and that food enters into your body and that those products go past the blood-brain barrier. And if you eat a lot of those, you know, chicken McNuggets or french fries or whatever, they are going to build up in your body and cause toxic inflammation in your body.

I used to work when I was 17. I used to work in this mother's sandwich shop. And my job was to deliver the sandwiches in a little Volkswagen. But at night, at the end of the shift, I would have to go in the kitchen and clean the oil. So literally, it would run the oil through a filter so they could reuse it. And we used the same oil for a month. Heated, heated, reheated, reheated. It was terrible. And I think people don't realize that McDonald's and all those companies used to use beef tallow. to fry in and now they switched to Crisco basically, trans fats, and now they've gone to vegetable oils, which in some ways may be just as bad if not worse.

Oh, definitely worse. It's frightening. I think it's definitely worse. And you know, actually ironically it's probably like places like McDonald's and Burger King are probably safer than your mom and pop shop, right? Because they have all these regulations in the big stores about not reusing their oils too much and then they know about this oxidation product so they've developed things like nitrogen blankets and silicone beads they put in the oil to try to absorb all the toxic oxidation products. So their oils are probably better than your local Chinese stir fry or whatever where they're, I mean, that's probably where the real danger is.

Go to McDonald's over Chinese takeout, is that it?

Yeah, that's the take-home message here.

I don't know about that.

We're gonna work on that messaging.

Stay at home and cook. No, but I wanted to just tell you the amazing story that I discovered, which is how they found out that these trans-free oils were causing all these problems, is that when they switched over to trans-free oils, all of a sudden they were having this polymer-like build-up on their walls and in their fryers that they couldn't scrape off. It's like paint stickiness. And those toxic oxidation products were so unstable and volatile that they They would take the used uniforms from the workers to the dry cleaner and en route they would spontaneously combust in the back of the car. Because they were so- Throw on fire here.

Because those products are so unstable.

They're so unstable. They're mutating and changing minute by minute. And then they would wash the uniforms, put them in the dryer, and the dryers would combust. So there's just like this, it's just unbelievable that we're eating this stuff.

Yeah, that's a good take-home message is to stay away from the refined oils. deep fried stuff, maybe a treat once in a while, but definitely not a staple.

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