Why Big Food Spends Millions Every Year in Washington

Coming up on this episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy. The combined lobbying effort between 2013 and 2015 was $143 million that was spent by the food industry to prevent GMO labeling. Welcome to the Doctor's Pharmacy. I'm Dr. Mark Hyman, and that's Farmacy with an F-A-R-M-A-C-Y, a place for conversations that matter. And if you care about our food system, today's conversation is going to matter because it's another one of my mini-sows on my new book, Food Fix. how to save our health, our economy, our communities, and our planet one bite at a time. And today's subject is the dirty politics of big food and how that influences our government food policies and why we need to change it. You know, if you look at our government's food policies, it's just a mess. Eight agencies oversee the government's food related policies and they all work in silos. They don't coordinate with each other very often and their policies are confused, contradictory, and conflicted in many they're completely in opposition to each other. For example, we tell people to avoid sugar and to eat whole foods and to avoid junk food and processed foods. On the one hand with our dietary guidelines and on the other hand with our food stamper SNAP program, we spend $75 billion a year, three quarters of which is for junk food and 10% of that is for soda. So how does that make any sense? The problem is that most of our food and agriculture policies undermine public health, harm the environment, and increase private profits. They put private profits over public good. I'm going to show you in this podcast how big food plays a big role in this mess. Through its corporate lobbying efforts, the food industry has hijacked some of the most powerful food programs like the Farm Bill. It profits from sickness, and disease, and environmental destruction. And then it sticks you, the taxpayer, with the bill. Big food companies claim to be good stewards of public health. They argue that obesity is complex and that they have an important role to play. Okay, great. Well, show us. They say, well, you know, we have to engage government agencies and we have to work on policy issues. It's a critical part of the effort to change things. But they have a much more insidious motive. The real reason they spend so much money in Washington is so they can block policies that hurt their bottom lines. and promote policies that make them money. They have to answer to their shareholders. They have a responsibility to maximize the shareholder profits and they are focused on this goal, whether or not it's harmful to society or the environment. And that is not a good thing. But the good news is that there are lots of grassroots efforts and there's just now an undeniable harm from our food system and what it's doing to human health, to our environment, our climate, and that causing many big and food ad companies to now focus on solutions including healthy product development and even regenerative agriculture. You know, the sad thing is our nation's disjointed food policies drive a disease creating economy, not to mention climate change, social inequities and a host of other bad consequences. And most people have no idea. All you have to do is follow the money. You know, we see what the food industry is doing on the front end. We see the advertisements, we see the marketing, We see this stuff everywhere, but what's invisible is even more scary because there are very few citizen activists or people spending their own money to go to Washington to lobby their congressmen and senators. And literally there's billions of dollars spent by industry, by the food industry, the agri-industry, and other industries lobbying our government. to get what they want and not what's good for us. Big Ag, big food, big pharma, they spent $500 million just on the 2014 Farm Bill alone. And hundreds of millions more have been spent in the last decade lobbying a whole range of government programs to get what they want. They're in there at every level, from the City Hall to the State Capitol to the halls of Congress to the White House, the USDA, the FDA, and even globally. What's often more concerning is what we call the revolving door, where lobbyists and then up in government positions. In the first six months of the Trump administration, 133 registered lobbyists were appointed to government positions. That's crazy. 60 of them have been active in the last two years, and 36 had lobbied agencies with issues that were directly related to their new government roles. They had ethics pledges, of course, which were vague and not enforced. And recently, the FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, who was the head of the Food and Drug Administration, recently took a post at Pfizer right after he left the government. How does that make sense? There was another sugar lobbyist named Kayla Zak, who was an advisor on the Dietary Guidelines. Before that, she was the lobbyist for the Corn Refiners Association, which represents the biggest producers of high fructose corn syrup in the world. And prior to that, she was a lobbyist for the Snack Food Association, nicknamed Sugar's Voice for Sugar, Fat and Salt because its members include companies like Kraft and Frito-Lay. She had a blatant conflict of interest and it should have disqualified her, but the White House permitted her appointment saying she was uniquely qualified to assist the Secretary of Agriculture and a senior leadership team in issuing the 2020 Dietary Guidelines. Really? How does that make sense for someone who's lobbying for Sugar and snacks is qualified to create our dietary guidelines. What's pretty bad is these lobbying groups are doing things to harm us. For example, 97% of the time, the American Beverage Association took positions that were antagonistic to public health, opposing limits to marketing junk food to kids or even for better childhood nutrition. The American Beverage Association formerly called the American Sodapop Association, is super active in lobbying Congress. They issued 80 different lobbying reports related to 24 bills in 2009. And one of the pieces of legislation that they sought to influence was the Banned Poisonous Additives Act of 2009, or BPA. And it would have ended the use of bisphenol A, which is commonly known as BPA, which is found in children's food and drink containers. Now, BPA we know is a dangerous synthetic hormone that imitates estrogen in the body. It's been linked to cancer, obesity and heart disease. It's banned in most other countries. Why would anyone want to keep these chemicals in kids' food and beverage containers? It's simple. For many in the food industry, including soft drink companies, profit trumps public health and replacing BPA costs money. The American Beverage Association filed more than dozen lobbying reports documenting its effort to stop the BPA Act. And you know what? It worked. The bill failed. It never made it out of committee for a vote. Now some states have banned the use of BPA, but the FDA still says it's safe. Who are they protecting? Citizens or these corporations? Now one of the things that the food industry is most scared of is lawsuits. So working with a Republican congressman from Florida, Rick Keller, who sponsored two separate bills protecting fast food makers from obesity related lawsuits. It was called the Personal Responsibility in Food Consumption Act. And it passed the House but not the Senate. Why would Keller support these ridiculous bills? Well, it could be the fact that he took hundreds of thousands of dollars from donations from a PAC that represented or political action committee that represented McDonald's, Wendy's, and Burger King, and from the NRA, not the one you're thinking about, but the National Restaurant Association, who represents Taco Bell, Dunkin' Donuts, Domino's, and lots more. Now, the issue here isn't whether someone's gonna get a little settlement. The issue is discovery process, which scares them more than big jury verdicts. Why? Well, when you have a discovery process, lawyers are allowed to access defendant's documents and other inside information, which can unearth damning information about these dishonest industry practices. And that can open up a door to a plethora of new government regulation. And that's what happened with the tobacco industry. There was an avalanche of damning documents through litigation against the tobacco industry, which revealed so much information that there's an entire research group at University of California that's dedicated just to studying the documents that they were able to discover. they don't want any lawsuits and they're doing everything they can to prevent them. Another big effort by the food industry was to block the GMO labeling law. Now, 64 countries have laws mandating GMO labeling, including the 28 nations of the European Union and most other developed countries, including China and Russia, which are generally not known for their consumer protections or transparency. And there are a number of states that passed GMO labeling laws including Vermont, Maine, and Connecticut. Now that caused a big outcry from the food industry who didn't like that. So they lobbied Congress to create an act referred to by its opponents as the DARK Act known for denying Americans the right to know. Big Food poured huge amounts of money into this bill and more than $50 million was spent lobbying Congress for the first half of 2015 alone. that money could have been better spent on labeling and better ingredients in their products, which they said was going to cost a lot, but an independent study showed it wouldn't cost more to label them. The combined lobbying effort between 2013 and 2015 was $143 million that was spent by the food industry to prevent GMO labeling. The Grocery Manufacturers of America, which is now defunct because of some of its shenanigans, which represents most or represented most of the big food companies, launched a campaign to fight a ballot initiative called Initiative 522 in Washington state that was to label GMOs. Well, they didn't like that. And between 2005 and 2016, the Grocery Manufacturers of America spent about $50 million lobbying the federal government. And the top agenda was GMO labeling. If the GMO labeling law went into effect, well, they'd have to slap their GMO labels on packages of Cinnamon Toast Crunch or Honey Nut Cheerios, and Coke and Pepsi would have to put it on their soft drinks, and Kellogg's would be forced to put on their frozen waffles and Pop-Tarts and Corn Flakes. Even Welch's fruit juice would have to carry a GMO label. And they were wanting to stop that. And Washington was one of their big efforts. And they gathered all the big food companies and got people to contribute to an illegal fund that was supported by its member organizations about $15 million to create a no on 522 campaign. Pepsi put in about $3 million, Coca-Nestle put in about $1.7 million, General Mills put in a million. Now without getting too much in the details which I get into in my book Food Fix, GMA violated campaign finance laws in ways that were a little bit shady. and they in court were forced to pay an $18 million fine for knowingly breaking the law to conceal the identities of corporations behind its Aftershock campaigns. It was the largest campaign finance penalty in American history and even more than the Attorney General who brought the case, the Attorney General of Washington who brought the case recommended. And they were ordered to pay the state's legal fees as well. The penalty was later reduced by an appeals court because they fought it obviously to $6 million. which the Attorney General said he would fight. He said it was a good day for the law and for integrity, a bad day for Big Food and its playbook of dirty tricks. It's one of the happiest days of my life, he said. GMA's conduct was just so egregious. Still, for them, the law didn't pass. It was like, Don't ask for permission. Ask for forgiveness. So what's a few million dollars in fines compared to hundreds of billions in profit? The lawsuit was lost, but the battle was won anyway. There's no GMO labels in Washington State. Now you may say GMO, we don't know it's bad. Well, we could debate all day about that, but we do know that glyphosate, which is sprayed as an herbicide on soybeans that are Monsanto soybeans now bear, are toxic. That they've been linked to cancer, that they destroy your gut microbiome, that they have intergenerational effects leading to many diseases, They're not super safe. In the four decades since Monsanto released its blockbuster weed killer, the amount sprayed on the nation's crop has risen more than a hundredfold. According to the EPA, some 220 million pounds of Roundup's active ingredient were used in the US in 2015. In one year. It is sprayed on all wheat just before harvest, even though wheat isn't GMO, because it defoliates the wheat, making it easier to harvest. It's pretty scary stuff. It puts your children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren at risk. So what can you do to stop this mess? Well, you can donate to campaigns that have integrity and politicians who talk about and care about these issues. You can buy non-GMO foods and increasingly companies are labeling their food as non-GMO, which is good. Look out for the Non-GMO Project Verified seal, which guarantees this. Look out for the USDA Organic seal, which also means it's not going to be GMO. Use refillable containers to avoid BPA and lots of other harmful substances and plastics. Try to buy locally sourced meat and lobby your representatives to shift nutrition and ag policies to ones that promote health and promote regenerative sustainable agriculture. You can support new rules on lobbying and corporate responsibility. And we should stop the revolving door. If you worked as a lobbyist for the sugar industry or McDonald's, you shouldn't be allowed to take a job at the USDA or an advisor on the dietary guidelines. How does that make any sense? We got a lot of work to do, but we can fix it. I know we can. And I think there are countries that have shown us how to do this. I think the industry is changing its behavior. Politicians are waking up to these issues. Consumers are becoming more aware. And that's really the purpose of my book, Food Fix: How to Save Our Health, Our Economy, Our Communities, and Our Planet One Bite at a Time. It's to raise awareness, is to start the conversation about how we can change the food industry and how we need to change the food industry to save ourselves and everything else that matters to us. So I encourage you to check out the book, go to foodfixbook.com, and you can get a free video called How to Save the Planet and youd Health at the Same Time. You can also get access to my action guide, which gives you detailed instructions on many things that you can do, as well as policy strategies that we've talked about, sort of a one-stop shop for how to fix the food system. It's just a start. It's the beginning of a conversation. But I hope you'll join me in this conversation. I hope you'll join me in changing the food system and doing things that actually can make a big difference. And if you love this podcast, please share with your friends and family on social media. Leave a comment. I'd love to hear from you. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And we'll see you next time on the Doctor's Pharmacy. Don't forget, there's a way to listen completely ad free. With Hyman Plus on Apple Podcasts, you can enjoy every episode without any breaks. Just open Apple Podcasts and tap Try Free to start your Get your seven-day free trial.