Why Weight Matters and How to Break the Chains of Obesity
Dr. Mark Hyman and experts discuss why obesity rates are climbing in children, examining diet, genetics, marketing, and policy. They explore how food systems and social factors drive the epidemic, and what prevention and nutrition changes could help break the cycle.
Coming up on this episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy.
I do think that it's important that we understand that the food environment we create for our children determines their whole life. If you're obese as a kid, your life expectancy is 13 years less than if you're not. Now, I know there are a ton.
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And finally, Dr. Casey Means and I.
Discuss the role of obesogens and how they have a huge role in increasing fat mass. So let's jump in.
When a child gets obese or overweight as a child, it makes it so much more likely much harder for them when they're an adult.
It kind of programs them.
It programs them to give them extra fat cells. It makes it very hard for them to maintain a normal weight as an adult. Prevention is really key here. It's very important that we deal with prevention because it makes it easier for that child for their whole life if we prevent that weight gain in the first place.
And it's not just the health consequences, which are staggering, right? Increased heart disease, gallstones, fatty liver, sleep apnea. high blood pressure, asthma, sleep apnea, all kinds of orthopedic problems. Those are bad enough, but it is the worst stigma for a kid to be overweight. I mean, they've studied kids and they'd rather hang out with a kid in a wheelchair who's a quadriplegic than a kid who's overweight. That's how bad the stigma is. And we often stigmatize each other and the kids because we have this view that it's personal choice. But when you're dumped into an environment with foods that are highly addictive, that are designed to hijack your brain chemistry, hijack your hormones, hijack your metabolism, deliberately designed by food companies in taste institutes who hire craving experts to create the.
Bliss point of food, I'm not making.
This s*** up, literally the terms they use in their internal corporate documents to create heavy users, I mean, this is just criminal in my view.
Yes.
It's criminal. And the food marketing to kids, I mean, the average two-year-old, you know, barely talk, but they can recognize junk food and call for it by name when they go to the grocery store and they can't even walk. You know, that is terrifying to me. And kids can't distinguish on television or an ad between reality and fiction till they're eight years old. And there's now stealth marketing, which is terrifying because, you know, you know, kids see, you know, thousands and thousands, maybe 10,000 commercials a year on television. But Facebook, for example, had 5 billion with a B, billion ads for junk food targeted at kids in one year. How do you fight that?
It's so hard. It's so hard to fight it. But it's important. I mean, when you go, when you bring your child to the doctors, what you're looking at, they look at the growth chart and they look at the BMI. And if, you know, the BMI or body mass index is not a perfect marker. I mean, there's problems with it, but it is something we use as a guide and it can give you some indication of where your child's at. So if you're greater than the 85th percentile for your child's age and sex, they're considered overweight. And greater than 95th percentile on that growth chart, you're considered obese. And now we have a category for the severe obesity, which is super obese, which is 20% over that 95th percentile.
It's talking to be more than 100%.
I know.
It's like you're 120%.
Right.
And so if your BMI is greater than 35, for example, just to put.
That in perspective, you know, these, these, these percentile graphs are made on population data where they look at the entire population and the whole population has to fit into 100%.
Right. Right.
Zero to a hundred. Now they had to create a new category of 120% or more. Yeah. Well, how does that happen? It happens because the entire population shifts into a category that never existed before. There were no kids who were that overweight unless they had some weird genetic disorder, like, you know, Pickwick syndrome or something.
Yeah.
You know, I think we are really in this crisis now because we're threatening the next generation of our entire human race. And this is happening globally. It's not just here.
Absolutely. We see it's 5% of children are adolescents in the US. And for those teenage years, 7% of girls and 9% of boys are in that severe obesity category. And as you mentioned earlier, a third of children are either overweight or obese. And as we have just talked about, prevention is key here. That's just making it so much harder for them throughout their whole lives. And whatever we can do at this stage of the game with your young children, whatever you can do at this stage of the game is really critical for setting them up for success.
And it's often a lack of education, awareness, understanding, it's generational. It's food apartheid, which is this term that's been used over the last few years by people in these communities to talk about what's really going on. Because the food desert sounds like a natural phenomenon. Oh, it's a desert. It's a forest. It's a river. No, this is much more serious. This is segregation and division of our culture in ways that lead and perpetuate to racial injustice, to structural racism and structural violence that drives these communities to continue to suffer from chronic disease and health disparities and obesity. I mean, the average African-American kids drinks twice as much soda as a white kid. Not because they like it more, it's because there's just a lack of education, awareness, and there's also increased pressure of marketing in these communities. I mean, every time there's a food stamp come out every month and you get your food stamps for the month. The, the local bodegas will actually put giant ads up for, you know, get your two liter bottle of soda. We take EFP, electronic funds, whatever they call efts. And it's like, it's, it's just, it's just unconscionable to me.
Yeah.
And it's, it's terrifying to me because we're really threatening the next generation of, of our population. And if we don't stop and take care of this now, it's terrifying. Harvey Karp, who's A friend, a physician who was a pediatrician said, if a foreign nation were doing to our children what we are doing, we would go to war to protect them. We would go to war. We are not doing anything to protect our kids.
Nothing.
We're not limiting food marketing.
We're not getting rid of all these junk crap foods that they're targeting kids. Not fixing the school lunch program. Not fixing the school lunch program.
School lunches are better because of Obama's.
Healthy Hunger Free Kids Act, but it's still not where it needs to be. A pizza is still a vegetable.
You know?
Yeah, and I mean, that's a great place to start is just with the added sugar, you know? I mean, they say that the average child is consuming 270 calories a day, which is 10 to 15% of their total caloric intake on sugar-sweetened beverages. So that's 10 to 15% of calories that are nutrient-void, no nutritional value, and are only leading to this whole problem of weight gain, insulin resistance, type two diabetes and metabolic issues throughout their whole life. You know, as we've talked in the past all about how that shifts your fertility and, I mean, there's so many aspects to it. So, I mean, that's a great place to start. And no, really, most of our kids, all our kids, very few of our kids need any sort of sports drinks at all.
Energy drinks, sports drinks, juice boxes. Yeah. I mean, it's terrible. One soda. increases a kid's risk of being obese by 60%. One soda a day.
It's, it's crazy.
It's pretty crazy. And, and, and it's, it's, it's, it's a huge part of their caloric intake. It's up to 15 of the average kids intake. And it's, it's something that's just so unnecessary. That was at a conference on childhood obesity, and it was in Atlanta, and Bernice King was there. It was really fascinating. It was with, was with, I, I.
You know, one of the major universities there.
Emory, I think.
And.
There was a guy, a doctor there who was a liver specialist. And I'm like, what are you doing here? He said, a pediatric liver. I'm like, he said, well, you know, we're seeing enormous rates of fatty liver in kids. And we're seeing teenagers on the transplant list for livers.
Yep. All because of insulin resistance and mostly from sugar-sweetened beverages.
Yeah. Right.
From high fructose corn syrup, which specifically targets the liver in terms of creating a fatty liver. And for those of you who really want to understand a lot about these issues, there was a movie a few.
Years ago came out in 2014 that.
I starred in, well, not really started, but I was in it. And it's called Fed Up. It's on Netflix and I encourage you to watch it because it really highlights the ways in which our children are so affected by this. I mean, there's a kid who's 16 years old who needs a gastric bypass.
Right.
Right. How does that make sense?
It does not make any sense. So we want to talk about what can we do? What can you do when, you know, how can you feed your child right from the start? Right? And so the first thing we always talk about is the importance of breastfeeding. You know, we know that whenever possible you want to breastfeed your child because it decreases their risk of obesity lifelong. So, you know, that is an important thing. There's, you really- How does that work? So, you know, that's a great question.
I have some ideas, but I want.
To hear your ideas.
You know, there's, you're shifting, it's the composition of the breast milk, you're shifting, there's better limitations on what the baby will consume. So when they're breastfeeding, they don't consume as much as when they're bottle fed. You know, the bottle feeding, you get more milk faster through a bottle than you do through a breast. And so that actually impacts the amount of calories that the baby consumes. It There's probably issues, sure, there's issues with the microbiome that gets shifted through breastfeeding that is not happening when babies are bottle-fed. There could be even what's in the bottle itself, right? So if the bottle is a hard plastic, we know, for example, BPA is impacting our metabolism and our weight.
Pre-diabetes, insulin resistance.
Yes. So there's probably so many issues with the with breast milk.
Yeah, it's fascinating is when you drink formula, it actually changes the microbiome and, and feeds bugs that are pretty toxic and create inflammation in the body.
Yep.
And what's really fascinating about breast milk is that there's all these undigestible fibers and starches in there called these oligosaccharides that, you know, have no nutritional value for the baby. But they're designed completely to feed the microbiome, which is just this beautiful sort of virtuous cycle that is allowing these kids to thrive and get healthy and reduce inflammation and really get them healthy. So not everybody can breastfeed, but it is really important. I think that's really key. What else can parents do?
And avoiding those sugar-sweetened beverages, as we've mentioned, that's no liquid sugar calories.
Period.
Period.
No juice. No juice, no sports drinks, no soda, you know, no, I don't know, Kool-Aid or any of those. There's just no need for any of it. It's empty calories and there's no need. Every once in a while, you know, you can give a child some diluted 100% juice if you want to, but it's not necessary. It's not something they should have every day. And it's not part of their fruit and vegetable consumption? No, it's not part of their fruit and vegetable consumption. So that's key. You know, getting your kids moving, getting them outside every day, you know, that's really important. It gets them, you know, unfortunately, it's harder to move these days unless you put it into your schedule and we need to put it into our kids' schedule. We need to make it part of their day that they get out and they move and they either they're playing a sport or they're just having fun and they, you know, they're doing a.
Lot of finger exercises on their phone.
Oh, my goodness, the phone. It's, you know, it's- Scrolling. It's making it so much harder for parents. It's making it so much harder for parents to help their kids grow and develop. So screen time, really the recommendations are none for kids under the age of two. And then, you know, less than two hours after that, you know, you want to limit screens in the bedroom. You know, there's no need for a TV, a phone or computer in the bedroom. So you just have the kids not have it in there. It helps with their sleep, which is another thing that's critical. most kids are not sleeping enough in this country, and that has a huge impact on their metabolism. We know that when we're sleep deprived, we're more likely to gain weight. We have higher levels of insulin, we have higher levels of insulin resistance and metabolic syndrome. So it's really important that you put restrictions on your children's sleep and wake cycle. That really is helpful. You know, our teenagers still need eight to 10 hours a night. Those six to 12 year olds need nine to 12 hours of sleep a night. And of course, you know, we, you know, the one to two year olds are needing 11 to 14 hours. So, you know, as you get younger, you're needing more sleep. But even though teenagers need eight to 10 hours of night of sleep, and that's, you know, gets harder when they get older. They wanna stay up late, they wanna be on their phone, they wanna talk to somebody. And, you know, it's, it's really important.
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We know that children in the children years, if they get to sleep before 8:00 PM, they have a lower rate of obesity, and they have a lower.
Rate of.
Weight gain. They have less, of course, sleep deprivation. Better sleep. We know that sleep deprivation, as I mentioned, increases insulin, it increases ghrelin, which makes them hungry.
Yeah, if you don't sleep enough, you're.
Hungrier and you crave more sugar and carbs. Absolutely. And then you create- It's true for adults as well. It creates this inflammatory process in the body that even if you're eating the right foods, you're more likely to gain weight, which I think is important to remember that even if you're eating the right foods, if you're not sleeping enough, your metabolism can be messed up. I talk to my daughter about this.
One all the time.
I bet.
You know, well, you know, the other thing I often talk about is, is how do you make your home a safe zone?
Yes.
I mean, you know, the kid who's three years old who's gaining weight or five years old isn't saying, hey, dad, can I have the keys?
Go car.
I'm going to go to McDonald's or I'm going to 7-Eleven to get a big gulp. They're not doing that. How do you make your home a safe zone? I think this is so important. Yes. It's okay to have treats if you're making Make cookies yourself. Like make it from real ingredients. Don't, you know, eat a ton of them. You can have stuff, but if you want french fries, make 'em yourself. You know, like, I think there's a level of responsibility that the parents have, which was also important for themselves, to actually create a safe home environment for their children. People put little things in the plugs. I mean, the kid is less likely to die from electrocution than they are from the bad food that you have in your cupboard than the Froot Loops you're serving them for breakfast or the French toast or the, you know, the, the, the sweetened yogurt, which has more sugar prawns than a can of soda.
Yeah.
So we really have to take that seriously. And in my house, you know, my, my son once said, you know, Dad, I want to invite my friends over, but there's nothing to eat in the house. Right.
And of course, there was a lot to eat.
It just was stuff you had to cook and make, and it was, you know, real food. I said, okay, let's go to the grocery store. I said, you can get whatever you want, buy whatever you want. There's one condition. You have to read the label and it can't have any trans fats or high fructose corn syrup. He's like, Dad, there's nothing to buy.
Nothing.
And I'm like, exactly. There are grocery stores where you can buy healthier forms of snacks. There are A place like Thrive Market, you can go to thrive market.com and find delicious snacks that are lower in sugar, that are higher in protein, that have good fats, that don't have all the refined starches and sugars. So you can do it, but it takes a little work and it takes a little education. And I think that's the problem is.
We are, we really aren't taking this seriously as a society. And now your son is an amazing cook and he loves to cook and make delicious food that I've gotten the great opportunity to consume. So, I mean, I think it's, I think we have to be getting our kids into the kitchen at a young age, as you know, even when they're two, you know, having that high chair or, you know, their bouncy seat right in the kitchen, getting them used to and around your cooking, getting them involved, having them have input, you know, really is helpful.
Yeah.
You know, we don't want to be just like, oh, you can't have this and you want to have this. You want them involved in the process. It makes it a lot better. Absolutely. You know, you want them having suggestions like, Let's come up together with some healthy food that you want to have tonight. What would you like to help me cook? Can you help with preparation, peeling, or cutting, or mixing? That really gets them involved. And they become part of the recipe and the preparation, and then they love it more, and then they want to eat it more.
Yeah, you can make cool stuff that's delicious. Instead of making waffles from white flour, you can make waffles from cashews, for example. So, I make cashew waffles. or you make almond flour pancakes. So there's substitutes and swaps that kids can still have fun. And you don't have to put a ton of maple syrup. You can use fruit, you can use fruit spreads. So there's a lot of hacks. When my kids were young, we had a book called Pretend Soup, which was like 50 recipes that are fun to make with your kids that have fun names, that are delicious to eat, that are made from real ingredients. And so I think we all have to get back in the kitchen. I think the average person in America spends more time watching Cooking on television than actually cooking themselves. So I think we have to get back into the cooking situation. It doesn't have to be that hard. We had a doctor dinner at our house the other night and, you know, you came a little bit late, but like George was there and Todd was there early and literally nothing was ready and it was 5:15 and everybody's come over 5:30 and literally dinner was ready on the table at 5:45 and we made this incredible meal. I just stuck some, you know, lion's mane mushrooms in the oven. We sauteed some Chinese cabbage and garlic, which took three minutes. We put a roasted salmon in the oven for 20 minutes and roasted squash, butternut and kabocha squash and tossed some cinnamon on there.
And we just threw it all in the oven.
It was delicious. It was delicious. My gourme meal, but it doesn't have to be so hard and it can.
Be incredibly yummy and delicious. And I think You know, that was delicious. Thank you. And I think what's really critical is just recognizing how important it is to.
Be.
Working right from the beginning, right when your kids are, when they're born and early in life and not just sort of putting it off because it really makes a huge difference for them later on. The first case I have is this 10 year old. And, you know, for boys, it's actually a common age where they do start to gain some weight because it's before they start to grow. And so, Sometimes, you know, a little bit of extra weight around that age may be okay, but this mom was getting concerned and he was gaining a little too much weight around his belly. And, you know, he was starting to play more on his phone and playing more games on his phone. So he was becoming less active outside. And when we got his detailed food intake, you know, we realized, and mom actually realized how much some of these processed refined carbohydrates were sneaking into his diet. Not that he had a bad diet, but they sneak in, right? He was having some pancakes for breakfast and he'd come home from school and snack on crackers and pretzels and with some juice. And he was kind of picky. He wasn't a big vegetable eater. So what was really critical and what we really focused on with him and as you know, we have a nutritionist with every patient who comes in. They see a nutritionist as well. So our nutritionist really focused on, you know, getting him cooking and getting him excited about all the different things that he could prepare and cook. And that was great for him. He started to experiment with different vegetables in the kitchen and, you know, went shopping with Mom. And, you know, we encouraged Mom to really and Dad to pull out some of the refined and processed foods at home. So they weren't even around, like you said, make it a safe zone. So he's not like, he doesn't have to, oh, okay, I'm gonna not want to eat those extra cookies or the extra crackers. You don't even have to make the decision.
The food's just not there at that level. I mean, yeah, I think you can go out and stuff if you want a treat or whatever, but it's an effort.
If you have to like drive five.
Miles to go get ice cream, you might not do it, right? And listen, there are many nights when I would be home, if there was a Häagen-Dazs, you know, vanilla Swiss almond or Ben and Jerry's Chunky Monkey, in the fridge, I would eat it.
I would eat it.
Even me, who knows more than most people about nutrition and has written many, many books about it, I would eat it. So I just don't have it in the house. Yep. You know, my daughter, we're on vacation in Martha's Vineyard. It's like, Dad, let's go get ice cream. I'm like, okay, it's like a 20 minute drive. Like, do we really want to go? Okay, we'll go once, you know, and it'll be a treat and I'll do it like once or twice a summer. you know, it's fine, but it's, it's the daily inundation with the ultra processed foods, which is 60 of our calories, is killing our kids. And I, I think, you know, we really have to understand the role of the, the family. And even if you have a, you know, a weird family, you know, like a single parent or I was a single parent, you know, you can do it. And, and I, I made it a huge point to have family dinners, and I'm just amazed at how many families Don't eat together. And I was interviewing Shawn Stevenson, who grew up in a very underserved area, very food insecure, lived on food stamps. He said he can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times he sat down with his entire family for a family dinner. And it was something that I insisted on. even when I was working hard, even when I was, you know, a single parent, had a job, you know, just.
Trying to do it all.
It was so important to me to come home, to cook with the kids, bring them in the kitchen, have them.
Help, teach them about food.
And now they're both amazing Cooks. They love to make food. I didn't teach them to cook. We just did it as part of life. And it's sort of how we all grew up learning the traditions. And now we have Generations who don't know how to cook. Yeah. Who've never cooked a meal. We don't know how to stir fry a vegetable. We don't know how to cook an egg. We don't know how to just do.
The most simple things other than to open a package and stick it in a microwave. Yeah, and I think that's what really was great with this first case here of the 10-year-old boy is that he learned a lot more about nutrition and he got involved in it. And then he was the one leading the way in terms of let's make this mom and let's add in this vegetable. And we really also focused on his sleep. At age 10, you need you know, that 10 to 12 hours of sleep a night. And a lot of times parents forget that, you know, and they don't realize they still need a lot, a lot of sleep, those kids. So that was really important. And, you know, he's doing great. He grew, he's grown, he grew, and so his weight is now in the normal range and he's just really thriving and doing really well.
That's wonderful. You know, it's not always easy and it is a struggle. I mean, I used to make my kids lunch every day and healthy lunches and bring them to school. and they would like trade with other kids. So you can only go so far, but there's a lot we can do as parents to make a difference. And there's also a lot we need to do as a society to address this at a bigger scale. You know, in some countries like Chile, they've eliminated all food marketing to kids between 6 in the morning and 10 at night. They've put warning labels on boxes. They've taken off Tony the Tiger and all cartoon characters from any kids foods. They've not allowed any junk in schools. You know, now in our schools, they have what we call competitive foods, right?
Yep.
So competitive foods.
So let's see, do you want an apple or do you want a cookie? Like, well, the kids are gonna eat a cookie, of course, right? So the whole system is terrible in our schools. The school lunches need a long way to go. You know, 50% of schools have brand name fast food companies serving food in their school cafeteria. It's Taco Bell Tuesday, it's McDonald's Monday, it's Wendy's Wednesday. I mean, it's terrible out there. And, you know, Pizza Hut and this and that, and, you know, 80% get funding from soda companies and their soda machines, and it's just, it's really criminal. And even if, you know, the school lunch is okay, and then of course they circle the kids schools in the school districts, especially in underserved areas with bodegas, with all kinds of crap, with fast food restaurants. I mean, think about it. You wouldn't let crack dealers stand outside the playground and be ready for when your kids come off the playground to give them some crack.
And that's exactly what we're doing with our kids. And then sports drinks, you know, a lot of times parents think, oh, my kid just played four hours of soccer today and they need a Gatorade or two. You just don't need to do that. You know, you can use, you can just give orange slices at halftime and give them water, you know, and there's electrolyte replacements if you want to use that of that are, that are, that don't have added sugar. And you can just use, like, coconut water, too. There's lots of ways to avoid all that extra sugar.
It's true. I mean, we have to, as parents, stand, take a stand. We have to go into our schools and take a stand. But, but also we, we need bigger systemic change.
And I think that's one of the.
Things I've really focused on. And with food fix book I wrote last, I really talked about the bigger systemic issues because we can do all we want as parents. But if, you know, if their kids are seeing five billion ads on Facebook, if they're getting 10,000 commercials if they're targeting poor minorities, if they're using basically mind manipulation techniques to get these kids to become addicted to these foods if they're using all these cartoon characters. I mean, Disney went so far as to say, we're gonna take out all this stuff from McDonald's, the food, we're.
Not allowing that to happen anymore.
There are companies that are doing it, but we need real serious policy change 'cause our children are so threatened. And I do think we need to go to war to solve this because we are heading towards this horrible crisis. It's like COVID, right? You say, oh, there's 180,000 new cases. Okay, great. And then the hospitalizations aren't so bad. But three weeks later, the hospitals are full. It's not three weeks with obesity, but it's, you know, 10 years, 20 years later. And what's, what's really frightening to me, Liz, is when you look at the data on how these kids do, not only are they stigmatized as kids, not only are there these social ramifications, but these kids are less likely to graduate high school. They're less likely to get a job. They're less likely to have a good career. They're less likely to earn a significant income. They're less likely to have successful relationships and marriages. And it's like, Wow, like this is unconscionable.
Yeah.
Like it's unconscionable.
And, and, you know, as we mentioned, what, you know, if you're overweight at a young age, it's just much, much, much harder to maintain a healthy weight as an adult. And so it's really important for us to deal with prevention and not just then, you know, working on, oh, we've got to get the weight down, weight down, weight down as an adult. You want to prevent it from the big, the start.
Yeah, I agree.
I mean, I think We are in a crisis moment.
And, you know, when I read that.
Stat that one in four teenage boys has diabetes or type 2 diabetes or prediabetes.
Prediabetes, yeah.
I mean, how do we live with ourselves as a nation if we let.
This happen to our children?
We think it's obvious if you really step back, the biggest issue in the country right now is that we're all getting sicker, fatter, more depressed, more infertile. you know, just, just to go over the stats that I, I think we, our eyes can gloss over the stats, but, you know, more than 25% of young adults having prediabetes, you know, 20% of teens having fatty liver disease, 50% of teens now being overweight or obese, and then that going to close to 80% now overweight or obese for adults. I mean, the, the truly, this is the biggest issue in the country.
The, the, the incredible, Kelly, that it's not part of our political discourse. When you hear people campaigning, when you hear debates on the debate stage, when you hear news reports about what's wrong with our country or what's going on, this is absent from the conversation.
It's just so striking to me. Yeah, the most striking thing is that when you really, and again, Mark, I'm coming from a different direction than a lot of people you talk to and you, I'm coming from a swamp creature, but I don't think it's that complicated that we're getting sicker because of food. and the most shocking thing, and I think the most appalling thing that's happening, is not only is the medical system not ringing the alarm bell about food, not only is the dean of Harvard Med School or the head of the NIH not standing before Congress saying, let's not give kids sugar, let's at least not recommend it like the USDA does, they're actually in bed with the food companies. The most shocking thing I saw is the Heritage Foundation taking money from Coca-Cola to say that it's immoral and against conservative principles to not give poor kids Coke.
The.
American Diabetes Association taking money from Coke. Medical groups that should be fighting against this liquid sugar that's causing pre-diabetes and diabetes among kids. They're taking money. So it's actually the direct ties, the direct ties, as you pointed out, of nutrition schools taking 11 times more money from processed food companies than they take from the NIH.
Yeah.
That's a lifeblood. The food industry basically funds almost 12.
Times as much research dollar-wise as the NIH in food and nutrition. And those studies are 8 to 50 times more likely, 8 to 50 times more likely to show a positive result. In other words, if you're studying dairy and you're funded by the dairy council, you're gonna find it's a great sports drink, it's healthy for you, and we should be recommending it. and yet independent science doesn't show that.
I was just at Stanford Med School with my sister a week ago. You walk into where students learn and there's a coke machine. And I actually worked, when I was working for Coke, we really tried. It was a concerted effort to funnel monies and sponsor hospitals and hospitals took that money. It is like drug rehab clinics taking money from heroin makers. It's like these hospitals are full of people with metabolic conditions.
That's what's overflowing our hospitals. And the fact that it's like, it's like having a, it's like having a heroin dispenser in a rehab center.
Exactly.
The hospitals, 85 of costs, 85, roughly, of deaths are tied to preventable foodborne metabolic conditions. And the strategy working for the food companies, how do we funnel money to the pharmaceutical and healthcare industries? And they take that money.
Yeah.
And they're silent on why we're getting sick. So that, that, that's really the I believe the biggest issue in the world that we need to address.
It's really insidious. The food industry, and not including the pharma industry, is the biggest industry in the planet. Ag, big fast food, processed food companies, it's about $16 trillion globally. It employs more people than any industry. And again, it's driving so much of the problems. I just got back from Africa and I visited the Masai and I, I was shocked to see, you know, in this village where they don't have running water, they don't have electricity, that was just a giant truck full of Coca-Cola and Fanta, which is a Coke product, pulled up within minutes. All these tribal people in, you know, really traditional tribal dress who were living on the milk, meat, and blood of their cows for their diet were just sucking back these Cokes. And literally the whole thing emptied out and the bottles were stacked up and within minutes.
And I was just shocked.
And I said to the chief, I said, does this truck come off? And he's like, yeah, it comes every day like this. I said, you understand that sugar is not good for you and that it may cause diabetes? He says, really? I said, yeah. He says, well, that's amazing because most of our population is now dying of diabetes. And this is the Masai tribe. So, you know, really never had exposure to this and where you can't even get running water, you can get Coca-Cola. And I think this is part of the problem. It's so insidious. And as I began to sort of unpack this myself and look at the cause, the cause, the cause, because as a functional medicine doctor, I'm very interested in what's the cause, what's the root cause, and then what's the cause of the cause, the cause. And I began to look at the way the food industry operated and why are my patients reading this stuff and why the population at large was so sick. And I realized it was really a multifaceted coordinated, very detailed strategy. It wasn't something random. One, like you said, nutrition industry funds or the food industry, let's say, nutritionist, because there's not much nutrition in there. Funds 12 times as much research as in age. Two, they co-op social groups and corporate responsibilities. As you mentioned, they fund the NAACP. I remember, you know, being down at the King Center in Atlanta. with Bernice King and we wanted to show the movie Fed Up, which talked about childhood obesity. And she was very inspired about it and wanted to show the movie there. And we had it scheduled and just a few days before the screening of the movie, we were called and said, no, no, we can't show the movie there. I'm like, why? Coca-Cola funds the King Center in Atlanta. They fund Morehouse College and they fund Spelman College, Morehouse, Spelman are black colleges in Atlanta. Spelman College is a female, Black College, 50% of the entering class of 18 year olds have a chronic disease, either diabetes, obesity, hypertension, and all over the campus, Coca-Cola machines. They also not only co-op social groups, but they create front groups, things like the American Council on Science and Health, which sound great, or crop life, or various kinds of things that have great sounding names, but are actually controlled and funded by food pharma, big ag, and they actually recommend things like pesticides are good for you and trans fats are okay and smoking is not bad. And they're calling out all these issues that are making them seem like they're a high level scientific organization. And as you said, there's also incredible lobbying. Just on one bill in the GMO labeling bill a number of years ago, there was five $192 million spent on this one bill. The farm bill has half a billion dollars in lobbying spent on just one bill, which it shouldn't really call the farm bill. It's mostly the food bill. And so we have all these concerted efforts and co-opting of different aspects that are really problematic and that are creating a kind of almost a, I would say, an archetized population that doesn't realize this is happening and has co-opted the government. I mean, I think there are good people in government. You and I have been in Washington. last year, and I've been working on the food fix campaign, my nonprofit, to try to address these issues through policy change. And, and, and people are getting it. And I've been meeting with, you know, literally well over a hundred plus members of, of Senate and Congress and the White House and various health departments. And, and to a person, nobody, nobody is, is seeing this as not a problem. They don't quite understand it. They don't, their educational line is pretty low. One guy I met with Really sweet guy who was a congressman and he was like, you know, lost 25 pounds. I did a talk earlier into a group of congressmen and he read my book and he followed the program. He looks so much better. We had a drink after work one day. He's like, this is so great. I feel so good. I said, great, why don't we do a sugar detox for Congress? He's like, I love the idea. But I'm on the candy caucus. I'm on the candy caucus because my district has a lot of candy makers, so I can't really do it. That is sort of a story that I think that underscores the problem we see in Washington and why we're so screwed. And I think what I'm so happy about with what you're doing is you're bringing to light across so many different channels of media, social media, television, these issues, and now people are starting to listen and you're getting called up on on major news shows and major programs, so the trust brand or Fox News or, you know, you know, other media outlets that are able to actually start to pay attention to this issue. So I'm just really grateful for you. What have you found as you've gone out and start to kind of hammer these messages that you were so good at articulating?
Yeah, I think there's a couple things, because I've been in dozens of conversations behind closed doors with members of Congress. And I think the question I'm really wondering, and I think probably a lot of people are, is like, why is it the way it is? And I actually asked that to people. And you hit on this a little bit, but I really dig into that because as you've seen, bipartisan almost to a person, people are concerned about this issue. People have kids go into a classroom and see that there's clearly something wrong happening in America. I think there's an innate sense that our food is compromised and clearly something bad has so it's a couple things. I think actually, number one, it just goes to this corruption and the rigging of the institutions of trust. What I hear time and time again from members of Congress is that they came in and aren't health experts, right? They were military guys or they were, you know, focused on farming or something or some, some small issue. They can't comprehend the large scale scope of health. And then they say every single day, people come into their office lobbyists with new studies, new studies saying GMOs are good, new studies saying glyphosate is fine, new studies saying aspartame is fine, new studies saying, you know, the recently the USDA, a large scale study that was brought all around the halls of Congress saying 91% diet of ultra processed food is perfectly healthy. The USDA literally just created that study. So these studies are coming again and.
Again relating to that contradicts so much other independent research.
Exactly, exactly. You used to have a big debate on aspartame. I think it's 91% of the studies funded by industry show it's fine, and then 100% of the studies that are truly independent, which is a small portion of the studies, show it's very harmful. That's been for decades. So these members of Congress, to a person, are saying again and again and again, it's just relentless study after study after study. There were 50,000 nutrition studies created in just the past two years, 50,000 peer-reviewed nutrition studies. My opinion is that the vast majority of those studies are nothing more than PR research for processed food. You don't need studies saying that organic broccoli or pasture-raised meat, there's not a big lobby for those industries. The only reason these studies are funded and let's be really clear, Coca-Cola is not out there funding hundreds of millions of dollars to advance unbiased scholarship. They're expecting a return and the return and the reason the nutrition industry, research industry is so propped up by food is because those companies expect a return. Those studies go directly to Congress. So that's what I'm hearing from members of Congress. They're being bombarded by confusion and then the corruption and then the money comes in. So if they go against what those studies say, if they go against supporting glyphosate, if they go against the USDA recommendations on sugar, if they go against this idea of that I think is absolutely existential of steering more healthcare dollars to food instead of drugs once people get sick. Then the threats come in. And they say that the member, it's cordial, but the lobbyists come in and say, if you're gonna go against this pharmaceutical policies, we're gonna run millions of dollars of ads in your district. Literally, they run ads of the fictitious member of Congress pushing old person off of a cliff in a wheelchair. So they threaten those ads if they don't go against the rigged research. So that's the trap. What I think needs to happen, what I'm hearing again and again and again, is this has to be national leadership. I actually do think this is the most important issue to most Americans, that they're getting sicker, their kids are getting sicker, life expectancy is going down for the most sustained period since 1860. and I am hopeful people are waking up and there's going to be some national leadership here.
Yeah, I think you're right. I think people don't understand how insidious this is and how deliberate it is and how it seems like it's cloaked in all these kind of legitimate organizations. And, you know, friends of ours talked about this concept of a corporate kleptocracy or corporate capture of agencies or government. I think it's not, and even a medical institutions of academic institutions of ag institutions like the land grant colleges, you know, that are funded by the government, established by Abraham Lincoln in order to actually build up agricultural research are in large part also funded by the agro industry and they're pushing huge amounts of chemical agriculture, fertilizer-based agriculture, and it's creating massive destruction in the soil and climate. Now, one of the studies that I want to quote, which is in in the Annals of Internal Medicine. This was published in 2017. And Annals of Internal Medicine is a very highly respected, peer reviewed, legitimate medical journal. And in that journal, there was an article, review article called the Scientific Basis of Guideline Recommendations on Sugar Intake, a systematic review. And the conclusion after reviewing, quote, all the literature independently, quote unquote, air quotes, On sugar was this guidelines on dietary sugar do not meet criteria for trustworthy recommendations and are based on low quality evidence. Meaning if we say don't eat sugar, it's based on crappy evidence. Public health officials, when promulgating these recommendations and their public audience, when considering dietary behavior should be aware of these limitations. In other words, sugar ain't bad. The study doesn't prove it. and it was funded by something called the ILSI, which is a, quote, this Lobby Research Association. I think it's International Life Sciences Institute. And the major funders are, guess who? Coca-Cola General Mills, Hershey Foods, Kellogg, Kraft, McDonald's, Monsanto, Nestle, PepsiCo, Procter and Gamble, and the lead author of this study. is on the board of Tate & Lyle, which is one of the largest makers of high fructose corn syrup. Now, how can you take a study like that seriously? This is the kind of stuff that we're facing, and it's something that unfortunately we're not addressing and we're not talking about. And I think we've seen such widespread co-optation of the public narrative and the scientific narrative and the political narrative by these companies. And, and it's, it's really Insidious. I mean, Coca-Cola did, did the same thing. They created this thing called the global energy balance Network. They funded millions and millions of dollars into, quote, research showing that all calories are the same. So if you drink a 2, 000 calories of Coca-Cola a day or 2, 000 calories of broccoli is actually identical for your body. Well, any five-year-old knows that this just doesn't make sense even, you know, but that's what they're promoting. And I think, you know, what, what I would like to sort of talk about is some of the things that we're also, also doing to our children, because I think this is an area where, where I'm deeply concerned. You mentioned obesity, but mental health issues are huge. Attention deficit disorder, one in six kids have neurodevelopmental issue, whether it's learning disabilities, ADHD, and, and it's in, in, we're seeing increasing suicides in kids and and increasing use of medication. Now, this is another example I want to get into, which is Ozempic. Ozempic in adults is a big enough problem and I did a whole podcast on that and really did unpack that in one of my health bites. But what really I didn't talk about actually was the way in which the American Academy of Pediatrics is now saying we should progressively treat obesity in kids.
Agreed.
But their recommendations are to treat it with medication. Now they're doing studies in kids as young as six years old taking Ozempic, which has serious consequences. So can you talk about the problem with this and why this is happening and what your thoughts are on it?
So I have a two-year-old and I was recently at a playground with him and I looked around about 20 kids and every single kid I saw was clearly visibly obese. and rampantly, like almost to a person, that kid was eating something out of a package and many had sugary drinks. Right now, puberty, the New York Times reported, puberty is starting dramatically earlier, particularly in America. Seven-year-old girls are growing breasts at an increasing rate, and that's more common now. The New York Times in that headline, the front page headline said, Puberty starting early in America, nobody knows why? We know why our food is compromised. We have kids literally almost strapped to an IV of hormone disrupting chemicals in our water and our food. We know really clearly what's happening. And you got to ask, why isn't there moral clarity? Right? Why isn't there more clarity to say, let's stop that root cause clearly. If we're drugging our kids and addicting our kids to highly dopamine enhancing products early on. And we're shoving hormone disrupting chemicals into their veins again and again and again. And their bodies are rebelling at an early age. Clearly we need to solve that root cause. So why aren't we? And the answer, the only answer I can really come to is that those kids on that playground are gonna be the most profitable. people in the world for the largest industry in the country. The healthcare industry is the largest industry and the fastest growing industry in the United States. It is not one evil person, but the overall structure of that industry is predicated on people getting sicker earlier.
I mean, that's the problem. It's, you know, we privatize the profits and socialize the costs, and these companies are not immoral, they're amoral.
Right?
And they basically are doing things to maximize profit at the expense of health and expense of the environment. And this is really what terrifies me. I think we have an opportunity to really change this, but it's not going to be simple. And I think, you know, when we're talking about giving drugs to kids like Ozempic as young as six years old and now it's approved for 12 to 19 year olds, I mean, this is, it might be criminal. I mean, we're not addressing the root cause. instead of saying, why are we also sick and fat? Why are our kids so depressed? And why are we needing all these things to actually support their health, like drugs? How do we fix that?
Well, here's why it's criminal.
If you have a dirty fish tank, you clean the tank. You don't drug the fish. What we're saying is we need to drug the fish and not even touch the tank. That's a beautiful analogy. It's criminal because that kid, right, it's not just so sick. So let's just think about the median teenager in this country who is overweight or obese and on the verge of pre-diabetes or has pre-diabetes, that kid is almost certainly going to be have attention deficit disorder, be put on Adderall, methamphetamine, which 20% of high school seniors are on. SSRI prescriptions, you know, they're highly much more likely to be depressed with metabolic dysfunction. 40% of high school seniors qualify as having mental health disorder. You talk to any parent now, SSRI or being prescribed widely in high school. That kid is going to be on an antidepressant, statin use among teens is going way up, metformin use, you know, because of the skyrocketing pre-diabetes high blood pressure. That kid, right, that four-year-old who's eating highly processed food, unless they change their behavior, they're going to be on a chronic disease treadmill for the rest of their life and just cast skating these interventions. The big problem with Ozempic is that literally hand in hand with the Ozempic argument is this idea that obesity is genetic, that obesity is this disease you can't really control, that it's a thing that you need to manage for the rest of your life. A six-year-old put on Ozempic, the instructions for the drug is that they need to take that injection for the rest of their lives.
Yeah.
And you actually, again, have doctors on 60 Minutes saying, don't worry, throw Willpower out the window. You can manage this with a drug. The criminal part for our country is that that kid is gonna have a more tortured, shorter life. If that kid is ingesting hormone-disrupting, toxic, inflammatory food and not learning how to exercise, not learning how to eat healthy, they're going to live a less optimal life. They're going to live a more depressed life. If you put, you know, the link to mental health, if you put any animal in a box with limited sun, sedentary, you know, force feeding them ultra processed food, they're going to exhibit mental health problems.
Yeah.
That if you put a dog in a little sunless box, which we do to kids, by the way, at schools, not moving, as you mentioned, 80% of 21 year olds aren't even eligible to join the because they're so sedentary. Admiral Mike Mullen, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs, who's gracious enough to write a blurb for our book, has said this is one of the biggest national security threats in the country.
It was 700 retired admirals and generals created a report called Mission Readiness. And it was shocking in there for me to read that there were 72% more evacuations from Iraq and Afghanistan for obesity-related problems. in soldiers than from war injuries.
We're.
Spending more as a government on diabetes management and related costs than the entire Defense Department. The biggest line item for the Defense Department right now is healthcare largely tied to metabolic conditions. So we have this clear problem and what's criminal is that the way you grow that system is to get kids on that treadmill. There's no nothing more disruptive to the healthcare system than a child learning metabolically healthy habits. And what do you have? You have the media that's funded by pharma, not investigating why pre-diabetes and obesity is skyrocketing among kids, but actually saying it's anti-science to question a pharmaceutical protocol. They're actually saying it's fringe and anti-science to talk too much about nutrition, to talk too much about meditation, to talk too much about exercise and that's actually for read as fringed by the media.
Well, it's interesting, though, because 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, the, the, 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 at articulating. There was a, a, you know, sort of investigative reports that use FOIA, which is Freedom of Information Act, to, to get emails and direct correspondence from food industry companies like Coca-Cola for example. And, and, and, and they were really so egregious in their behavior and 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 influence scientific evidence and expert opinion. The paper reveals industry strategies to use external organizations including scientific bodies and medical associations. I think the American College of Cardiology has 192 million or the American Heart Association has $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, if we're battling billions of dollars, 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-op social groups, through co-opting nutrition research, I mean, co-opting universities and medical experts. You know, how do we battle that? Where do we start? And I, you know, I wanna hear what you're doing 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 fixed part as opposed to the.
Food, I didn't call the book food, food apocalypse. I call it food fix.
And I think, you know, we couldn't.
We'Re kind of in a food apocalypse, but I think we, we, we need.
To think about the fixing part. Well, let's dive into solutions. I want, I want to be really clear because it's bottoms up and top down. But, but I want to be clear. Um, 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 convince 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.
Yeah.
Like animals in the wild. 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.
They, 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. Well, so technically, by their measure, everyone brings 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 to, get back to understanding where our food comes from and trusting ourselves and giving a little less credence to the experts.
The average American consumes about 133 pounds of flour in there every year. Now, it used to be 146.8 pounds in 1995, but 133 pounds from the USDA data is a lot of flour. And by the way, that's about a.
Third of a pound per person per day.
Some of us have a lot more. And that's going to include all the other grains and all the other potatoes and all those starches and sugars, which is about 152 pounds a year. So I wrote a book called Food, what the Heck Should I Eat? Because people are so confused about what to eat. And even me, I get confused because research is all over the place. And, and I talk about in, in, in the book, food, what the heck should I eat? That whole grains can be a good source of vitamins, minerals, fiber, and, and it's okay to eat them. But I talk about what and how and why, right? Now, they taste pretty good, but the toxic amounts we eat, the pharmacologic doses we eat, are huge drivers of obesity, diabetes, heart disease, cancer, dementia. And most of the grains we eat are not like whole grains, right? They're not like we're not eating wheat berries, we're eating white flour predominantly, and even whole wheat flour. The way we mill it and grind it, it's just so fine. Essentially, it's like white flour. maybe a little bit better as a few extra vitamins, a few extra minerals, a little extra fiber, but essentially its effect on your blood sugar is bad. In fact, the glycemic index of whole wheat flour is higher than table sugar, meaning it raises your blood sugar more than table sugar. If you look at most things that have whole wheat in them, you've got to read all the ingredients. It's not just the whole, they can put whole wheat, but it can be filled with sugar and all kinds of stuff. So we're going to talk about why grains are such a controversial food, how to look at the pros and cons of whether or not they should be in your diet, and which grains are actually probably okay to eat. So first thing you should know is this, and this is really important. There is no such thing as an essential carbohydrate. There are essential fatty acids, right, the omega-3s, and there are essential amino acids, which we need in large doses from protein. But there is no such thing as an essential carbohydrate, even the natural the Academy of Sciences, the Dietary Reference Index says there's no biological requirement for carbohydrates. Now, that's not to say they're not okay to eat. They're not good for us. I mean, vegetables are carbohydrates. Broccoli is carbohydrate. There's carbohydrates and nuts. None of that they're bad, but it depends on the type of carbohydrates. So first of all, there's a myth that we have to eat grains to be healthy. We do not. We do not need to eat them. Now, you can eat them, and we'll talk about how and why, but. basically don't buy the propaganda that we need them. In fact, for most of human history, we haven't had grains. Until the agricultural revolution 10,000 years ago, 12,000 years ago, we never had any grains, we never any beans. We basically were hunters and gatherers. Our bodies work very well without them. And yes, there are plenty of vitamins, minerals, fiber, nutrients in whole grains, but you can get all that from other sources, including vegetables, fruits, seeds, nuts, and other other foods that don't have the same baggage as grains. Now, there are some cases where, you know, patients and people can eat grains and be healthy, but I'm going to talk about how to be very careful about that. And particularly people who do not do well with them are people who have insulin resistance, pre-diabetes, type 2 diabetes, people who are overweight, obese. Now, how many people is that? Well, one in two Americans is pre-diabetes or diabetes. 75% are overweight, 93% are metabolic and healthy. so maybe 6% of the population can tolerate them and not get into trouble. I mean, that's not too good. So I think we'd be very smart about what we're doing. And after you talk about what kind of grains, how we're eating them, and, and how different grains affect us differently. Now, in terms of whole grains, that's just a bunch of BS, right? If you were, if you look at the marketing propaganda from the food industry, it's talking about whole grain flours. or we think it's healthy, it's just a bunch of nonsense. For example, I want you to read labels carefully so you can tell whether what you're buying is actually truly healthy or not, or it's just marketing hype.
For example, you can get a whole.
Grain cookie crisp cereal. Sounds great, whole grain cookie crisp cereal. Well, the cookie crisp is not healthy, but it's got 22 grams of sugar. How much is that?
That's five teaspoons, five and a half.
Teaspoons, of sugar in your serving of cereal that you give your kid in the morning. Not a healthy, right?
Not a healthy.
Just because they put a few flakes of whole grain flour doesn't make it healthy.
Right.
Also understand your body below the neck. Your body can't tell the difference between a bowl of corn flakes and a bowl of sugar. Sugar and flour are the same in the body. I mean, actually, flour. Flour might be a little worse because it has only glucose, whereas sugar has fructose and glucose, which are different metabolisms, but they're both bad. Basically eating two slices of whole wheat bread can raise your blood sugar more than having two tablespoons of table sugar.
Think about that.
So whenever you eat something containing whole wheat flour, you might as well be mainlining sugar unless certain caveats are taken into consideration, which we'll talk about in a minute. Also, you're not eating the same grains that we used to eat.
Right?
We're not eating ancient grains, heirloom grains. We're eating these new hybrids that are developed. For example, like dwarf wheat. Dwarf wheat was a very important innovation in agriculture, led the Nobel Prize being awarded to the scientists who were able to hybridize, not GMO, but hybridize wheat so that it was short and stubby, not tall and thin, and then produced much more starch and much more drought resistant, much more resilient and could help, you know, feed the world, which all sounds great except for one thing. There's a starch that's produced there called amylopectin, which is a super starch. It's the worst. And it's basically the wheat we're eating today. Not only that, they spray with glyphosate often at the end to desiccate it so these are harvest and basically just bad news. And the new hybrids have higher methanol gluten in them. and more likely to cause autoimmune disease. So basically, we want to be very careful. Now, heirloom strains like Zia wheat, like I was talking about, might be okay or other types of whole grains like farro, which have gluten, might be okay. But they're more ancient grains that people are not consuming. And by the way, they're not even, I said whole wheat berries, right? I used to make, you know, wheat berries something like we'd have wheat berries and salad, cook them up and do that, but that's not that common, right? So we have so much flour, it's mostly dwarf wheat, it's mostly sprayed with glyphosate, it's super high glycemic index, high gluten antibodies, definitely not helpful, definitely not something you should be consuming. Even healthy grains may be problems. Like if you over consume grains that are, quote, healthy grains, even if it's like amaranth or brown rice, right? When they turn into flour, they're basically pulverizing it and the surface area is much higher and it's quickly absorbed and it spikes your blood sugar. So even if it sounds like, oh, I'm having brown rice bread or something, it's actually may be even worse. So make sure you're really smart about what you're reading. Look at the label very carefully and look at the where the food is on the label. If it's a, by the way, I think most people shouldn't eat food I mean, it basically, you know, it was a can, it has sardines and olive oil, salt, fine. But if it's, you know, has 45 ingredients, you should just not even put it back. What about oatmeal? Oatmeal is such a healthy food, right? Meat? Nah, really? No. It's, it's, you know, it actually raises your blood sugar. And most of the oatmeal we eat is actually pretty refined oatmeal. it's not steel cut oats. It's not whole oats. Those might be a little bit better. But, but when you eat oatmeal, it basically spikes your sugar. In one study, they looked at kids who had oatmeal, eggs or silked oats, basically same calorie, right? Same calorie. And the kids were a little overweight. They basically get said, okay, if you're hungry, just tell us you won't give you food. And when they looked and they put a catheter in their vein and basically draw their blood every hour, once a day. and the kids who ate oatmeal had 81% more food in the day because they were hungrier and their blood sugar spiked more, their insulin spiked more. They had more adrenaline, more cortisol, more stress hormones. So basically eating oatmeal is stressful for the body and led to all these things that cause weight gain. So I'm not a big fan of starting the day with oatmeal. Now, depends if you have whole oats and you put nuts in there and fat and other things, it slows the absorption, it might be okay, but just your quaker oats, definitely not. Now, what about gluten? Now, you all heard about I'm gluten free, gluten's bad for you and it's that. And generally, it's pretty new in the human diet, especially the dwarf wheat, which I mentioned, which has much more gliding proteins that are much more inflammatory. Now, some people are fine. If you have, if you're healthy, if you have, if you don't have a leaky gut, not everybody's sensitive. About a third of the population has the gene for celiac, about 1% of the population has celiac. And by the way, there's been about a 400% true increase in celiac disease in 50 years, right? Because of the damage we've done to our gut. And part of that damage is from the new wheat and the gluten and the antibiotics and the things. But basically we have a society that is now rampant with gluten sensitivity, which probably affects up to 20% of the population, whereas true celiac is about 1%. But your body really doesn't know what to do with gluten, right? And celiac disease is an autoimmune disease and it can cause over 50, maybe a hundred different diseases like type 1 diabetes, like rheumatoid arthritis, like osteoporosis, like colitis, like iron deficiency anemia. I mean, the list goes on because of how it affects your gut. Now, a lot of us, like I said, have this non-celiac gluten sensitivity and basically our body starts reacting inflammation and so we don't want that. it's sometimes it's worth doing a trial of a gluten elimination diet, basically to see how your body does. Do it for three weeks, see what happens, add gluten back, see what happens. You might be fine. For example, I don't have a reaction to gluten. I do the dairy, but I don't have a reaction to gluten. I've checked, I don't have any antibodies. My gut was okay. So basically I can eat gluten, but I don't eat that much of it because it's mostly flour, right? I don't eat the wheat berries. But there are other grains now. Now, one of the problems is that Dr. Alessio Fasano at Harvard, the world expert in celiac and gluten, basically talks about how everybody who eats gluten has some little damage to their gut because gluten increases something called zonulin. Zonulin is a protein that produces in our bodies which actually causes damage to our gut lining. It's a leaky gut, little tight junctions which are like Legos that are stuck together, come apart, it's only one cell thick between you and a sewer, and then you end up flood your body with all these foreign proteins and antibodies, I mean, foreign proteins and antigens and also bacterial toxins and proteins that are really quite bad. And so basically 60 to 70% of our immune system is right under our gut. A lot of our inflammatory diseases are caused by gut. I mean, I was reading about insomnia recently that there's been a big correlation between dysbiosis and balances in the gut flora, leaky gut and sleep disorders. So even sleep, for example, may be a Now, when we have these leaky gut food particles, antigens, microbes leak through our protective lining, they activate our gut immune system and that creates systemic inflammation, obesity, heart disease, cancer, dementia, diabetes, but also obviously allergies, skin disorders, asthma, and autoimmune diseases. So, I think everybody with gluten has some degree of leaky gut, but some people kind of manage it and can tolerate it. Other people can't. And so, I think we have to really take stock of the fact that gluten and celiac is a real problem. And if you don't look for it, you don't find it. I started a company called, I co-founded a company called functionhealth.com where we do full celiac testing. Often your doctor won't order it and they won't do the right one. So you can go to functionhealth.com and learn more. So now, gluten-free, by the way, isn't necessarily healthy either. Gluten-free cake and cookies is still cake and cookies.
Right?
So remember, you know, you had fat free yogurt. Well, fat free yogurt, your yogurt play fat free yogurt has more sugar per ounce than a can of soda, right? Doesn't make it healthy, right? Remember what we call them snack well cookies, right? Fat free, but full of sugar doesn't mean they're healthy. So just because it says gluten free doesn't mean it's healthy. I saw a package of potato chips the other day that had gluten free on the COVID right? Coca-Cola is gluten free. Doesn't mean it's healthy. so the word gluten-free doesn't mean anything. It just means that the gluten's not there and that's fine if you're celiac, but it doesn't mean it's a healthy food. And usually it's replaced with something more, more harmful in terms of maybe other refined grains that are more glycemic in nature, additives, comes to sugar, high glycemic flours, refined oils. So just remember, gluten-free cookie, sell a cookie.
So.
And by the way, not all grains are bad. And food, what the heck should I talk about? The ones that I'm concerned about, like oatmeal, corn, wheat, and yes, gluten's a real issue for people. Other forms of grains are, are not so problematic.
Right.
So, for example, quinoa is a South American grain that's very, very helpful. That actually has a lot of protein in it, has good amino acids in it. It's problematic because we're taking the food from the indigenous people in South America, which is their staple, and now they can't even afford it. So that's a whole other problem. Even other grains, for example, like Himalayan tari buckwheat, which is from the Himalayas, super dense in nutrients, 132 phytochemicals, lots of protein, lots of fiber, lots of magnesium, lots of minerals. That could be fine. So I'm going to make pancakes from Himalayan buckwheat flour. But we don't want to eat all the traditional grains we're eating that are in Twinkies and cookies, pizza, not good. So also, you can start to make other things. I make the Buckwheat Pancakes, which are actually quite good. You make Buckwheat breads. And by the way, Buckwheat's not even a grain, so it's a flour.
What about bread?
Do we have to give up bread? Well, no, not necessarily. There's lots of bread made with whole kernel grains. not just the flour or no flour, you can make it with nuts and seeds. Rye bread, rye can be healthy, that's gluten for many people, but it can be problematic, but actually it's super helpful in many ways. And in Germany, I went to visit a friend once and they had a meat slicer in their house. And I'm like, what's that for? Like, you know, what they have in a deli to slice the, you know, whatever, the meats. And they're like, oh, that's the cutter bread. I'm like, what do you mean? Yeah, we can't cut it with a knife, it's too dense. so literally this fresh bread comes out and basically my rule for bread is if you can stand on it and it doesn't squish, you can probably eat it. So basically if it's made from whole kernels and it's made from nuts and seeds, other types of flours can be occupying. I have recipes in my book food. What the heck should I cook for non flour breads? And they can be quite delicious. And how often should you eat whole grains? By the way, when you're eating grains, only whole grains, right? Get away from flours, whole grains. So brown rice, quinoa, black rice, you know, stay away from flour, but eat whole grains, right? Brown rice, black rice, red rice, quinoa, other grains can be fine. Pharaoh barley if you want, if you're not gluten sensitive. And even, you know, pimentary buckwheat, it's not something you eat as a whole grain, but that that flour is okay because it doesn't have a high glycemic load and you mixed with eggs and other things are going to be great. So you should be eating a lot, particularly if you're diabetic, pre-diabetic and some resistant, overweight, you probably want to cut them out for a while until you're healthy and then you can add them back. Probably, you know, half a cup a day is fine. I think that's okay if it's whole grain, probably once a day. So what are the things that I talk about? And it can be, again, not the main dish, right? You know, in some countries they do eat a lot of grains, right? And trying, oh, they eat rice and they're in you know, in India, they eat brown rice. Well, you know, I just, you know, came back from Nepal and, you know, they, they were eating a lot of rice, white rice. But these guys were literally carrying 70, 80 pounds on their back up and down the Himalayan mountains all day long. So they needed the energy. But if you're not doing that, I, I would stick over a lot of grains. Buckwheat, the Himalayan Tartary buckwheat's my favorite. You can go to bigboldhelp.com and learn more about that whole kernel rice. You're not gluten sensitive. quinoa. Also, it's not a grain. It's actually a pseudo grain. Black rice, red rice, sorghum, Tef, millet, amaranth, all can be great. What about white rice? White rice is something that, you know, a lot of cultures eat. Now, white rice doesn't always have to be bad. There's a research that's been done on white rice that if you cool it and then you reheat it, not too hot, but just if you basically cook it and even potatoes and then put it in the fridge, let it get cold, and then kind of reheat it gently. It actually causes something we produce called resistant starch, which helps resist the digestion of it. It's lower glycemic. It actually can help with your microbiome. It's great for as a prebiotic and maybe even improve metabolism. So you can use that. So what grains should I avoid if I might be gluten sensitive? well, all the gluten-containing grains, wheat, barley, rye, spelt, Kamut, farro, bulgur, oats, semolina, couscous, any refined grains, all these you want to avoid. And I think, you know, grains can be part of a healthful diet, but only if you're metabolically healthy and only if you're eating the right grains and only if they're whole grains. So in general, we need to recognize grains for what they are. They're a recreational treat, not a staple. An occasional indulgence, fine. Not an everyday thing for me. I'm not a fan of most grains. It's fine to include small amounts of your diet, but only if they're whole grains, only if they're organic, only if they're gluten-free. By the way, if you're not gluten sensitive, you may be able to tolerate a little bit of the healthier gluten grains, but for most people they're problematic. And if you're wondering who should not be eating them, well, if you have type 2 diabetes or high blood sugar, pre-diabetes, if you have weight issues, cravings, if you have food sensitivities, digestive issues, autoimmune diseases, if you've bloated after you eat, our blood tests show the high levels of inflammation markers. Probably not great to eat a lot of grains at all.
Like you said, obesogens are toxins and obesogens, as you can tell from the name, it has to do with fat and obesity. And so the real landmark thing that's kind of happened recently is we've realized that obesogens are specific metabolism disrupting chemicals in the environment that it directly increased fat mass. So this is not a correlation, this is causation. And there was this great paper that came out earlier this year. It was 49 pages. It was a tome. And Dr. Rob Lustig was one of the authors and it was called Obesity 2 and it was all about obesity and it concluded that these chemicals we now know directly increase Fat mass through about a dozen different mechanisms. And it is thought that potentially 15% of obesity is directly attributable to these chemical exposures. So where are they from? They are basically all around us. They are in the air we breathe. They are in the food we eat. They are on the food we eat. They are in our cosmetics and our personal care products, our home care products. they're in our furniture, our electronics, papers, they are all over the place. And actually a few come from natural origins like lead and cadmium, and you mentioned mercury, but most are industrially manufactured chemicals that are largely unregulated. And so some of the specific examples of where you can find these. So- but mercury is natural, but it.
Doesn'T mean it's healthy, right? Lead and mercury are natural, but they're not healthy.
And there is that handful of natural obesogens like the mercury and the cadmium and the lead that can increase fat mass, but you want to be conscious of how much of this you're consuming. But the vast majority of these are coming out of factories, coming out of companies that have huge lobbying power and that are putting these in everything. And so this is things like can linings, thermal papers, toner, printer toner, Vinyl floorings, they are in basically all plastics, even if the plastic is BPA free. They're found in our personal care products, especially shampoos, conditioners, lotions, deodorants, sunscreens, makeups, food preservatives, food colorings. They're actually in drugs. Antidepressants have been known to have obesogenic properties. They're in car exhaust, so it gets in our air. paint that goes on our walls, our clothing, they're in flame retardants on children's toys, on mattresses, on couches, a lot of different home care products like disinfectants, and then of course one that is on everything, which is agricultural pesticides. So all of these things that I just mentioned have been shown to have mechanistic properties that increase fat, basically the printing of fat in our bodies. So So this is kind of fascinating. And the mechanisms are, it's not just one thing. They really all work together synergistically to cause metabolic problems. And some of the big ones touch on one you were talking about earlier today, which is microbiome. So these chemicals can directly impact our microbiome, the diversity and function of the microbiome. These chemicals can alter the hormonal control of eating behavior. actually affecting our satiety hormones and our hunger hormones. They affect thyroid function, which is directly linked to metabolism. They impact sirtuin genes, which are, of course, as Dr. Sinclair has popularized, these are very important for our longevity. They change the folding of our genome. So actually our epigenetics and the way genes are expressed, they can directly cause gene mutations, they cause inflammation. And then they can really affect our hormone receptors. So this is a big one. They can either be activators of hormone receptors or blockers of hormone receptors. And of course, hormones are so, so critical. This nuanced balance of our health and our day-to-day functioning, and these chemicals can literally go in and block or activate those receptors. One frightening thing I'll just mention is that they not only affect all these things in our bodies, but they also do it to our sex cells. So our germ cells, like our sperm and eggs, which means that the impact of these chemicals that are all over our environment can affect our offspring through germ cell, which is essentially our sperm or eggs, epigenetics and DNA. So we really need to all be familiar with the term obesogen understand where they come from and understand how to advocate both for ourselves and on a systems level to minimize the exposure that we're getting to these in our environment. And many of them last for generations. So, yeah.
Like you were saying, yeah, I mean, just thinking about how, for example, leptin is, you know, you get leptin resistance with increased environmental toxins. You get, which makes you feel like you're, you're hungry all the time and you get effects on your mitochondria, which helps affect your metabolism and helps faster metabolism works. So there's so many different mechanisms that are underlying this. And I think we're now beginning to understand this. And we also see how they trigger inflammation. So any, any toxins, they're also immunotoxins.
So they increase this, this process of.
Making more inflammatory cytokines through this mechanism called NF Kappa B. And you get high levels of these cytokines like TNF Alpha, interleukin six. it's so central to everything. So this sort of sort of inflammation from any cause will cause weight gain and obesity.
And, and then here's the problem.
It's even worse when people start to lose weight. Guess where all the toxins are stored? They're stored in our fat tissue.
So when you start to liberate fat.
Tissue, you start to liberate more toxins. And actually, there's a phenomena of resistance to weight loss as you're, as you're losing weight, you're gonna actually stop losing weight because the toxins interfere with the very process of weight loss. They affect your thyroid function and many other things. So it's a little bit of a mess. So you have to really help people detoxify properly and learn how to get their systems working. And that's, that's kind of what's so great about functional medicine. And I, you know, I wrote an article. I guess it was kind of, I don't know, I know it was kind of, it was probably forever ago. It was, it was, it was called systems biology. Systems Biology, toxins, obesity and functional medicine. And it was, I think, gosh, in.
The probably early 2000s.
And it was really just looking back then at the data that we had on this. And now, like you said, there's so much more data and we're so exposed to toxins and they're really pretty much everywhere.
So it's a little discouraging for people.
Because like, what do you do? How do you start to think about this. You have these toxins. So people listening are, okay, well, gosh, we live in a sea of toxins. This is pretty depressing.
What do I do? Like, how do we avoid them?
How do we get them out? What do we do to help address this sort of phenomena of obesity in.
Our, in our, in our environment?
This is the key question. And I think, you know, I think it's a battle that's going to be fought on many different axes. And I say battle because it really is an uphill. battle against industry that uses these chemicals and wants them in a lot of different things. And, you know, of course, aren't necessarily top priority is not necessarily our health. So I think there's, I think there's really four main axes that we're gonna need to approach this on. And one is on the systems level, one is on the individual choice level. So we can, of course, Advocate through our vote and our dollar about what happens at the systems level. But then, of course, day to day, we also just have to choose like what we're putting in on and around our body. Then the second, the other two axes really is focusing on personal avoidance, but also improving biologic resilience. So how do we actually build a body that processes these chemicals effectively, detoxifies them, gets them out, and is healthy enough at baseline that we can manage this additional stress, which unfortunately is almost inevitable. So I think just briefly touching on that systems level, which you have written about in such detail and Food Fix gets into this a lot. And so I'll just very briefly touch on this one. I think it's a crazy statistic, but our rate of global chemical production is increasing at a rate of almost 4% a year and will probably double by 2030. since just the year 2000, deaths from just ambient air pollution linked to fossil fuels and chemical pollution has risen by almost 70%, and very little regulation has come from this. We have a law that's meant to protect us, which is called the Toxic Substances Control Act, which came out in the 1970s, but has really been poorly poorly implemented, and we see things happening all the time where strong science comes out. Like recently, the EPA put forward a proposal to get rid of a chemical called trichloroethylene, which is used in dry cleaning and removing grease from different things like clothing or car parts or bikes or things like that. And the proposal to ban this was strongly supported by science and was completely basically rejected and withdrawn because of strong complaints and lobbying from the chemical industry. So it's so that's so the systems level we can think about using our dollar and advocating for, you know, for legislation that helps. But really it comes down to, you know, acutely what we're doing on a day to day basis. So there's definitely some easy practical tips that we can do to kind of help ourselves. I think the first one is eat real, clean, sustainably grown food. This is the basic building block of the body for improving biologic resilience. And if you're eating whole foods that are grown in a clean, sustainable way, you're getting a lot of the way there. It means that you're getting the micronutrients that are going to help your body process these chemicals. It means that you're getting the different plant chemicals that are going to upregulate our antioxidant defenses and our anti-inflammatory pathways. It means that we're going to be avoiding pesticides, which is an obesogen. It means that we're not buying things that come in plastic. So just by eating, you know, fresh, whole, clean, sustainably grown food, you're hitting a lot of the different boxes with the obesogen problem. Within whole foods, there are some that are extra special. So of course, cruciferous vegetables, which are going to have the sulforaphane that activates our antioxidant defense system. So this is the cauliflower, broccoli, kale, box choy, cabbage, sauerkraut, these things that are directly gonna change gene expression to protect us from some of these obesogenic chemicals. Then of course it's like what's your food stored in? So we wanna avoid plastic storage as much as we can and really try and opt for glass and other materials. And now it's so easy to find this stuff. You can go on Amazon, you get glass Tupperware, glass water bottles, aluminum or ceramic, things like this. And again, it's not just about BPA. I think that's a little bit of a, we often now look for BPA free plastic plastics, but plastics contain as many as 15 endocrine-disrupting chemicals. So BPA is just one and it's great that it doesn't have that, but there's other things like BPF and DPS and these other chemicals that we know are endocrine disruptors. So be the weirdo who brings, you know, the bamboo fork and knife in your purse to the takeout restaurant. Get, you know, be the person who always has the glass water bottle and be the weirdo. Be the weirdo. I mean, I, you know, and, and this, and, you know, give these things as gifts. I, I have a running Google doc of, of gift ideas, and a lot of them are becoming basically these types of things, like give people the portable, reusable wood cutlery, you know, and things like this that they might not think about, but that can to help their health. I am someone who loves personal care products. I love cosmetics and all this stuff. And so this one has been really important to me, figuring out how to basically reduce the toxins and toxic load of all these products I'm using. And so I think this is a really low-hanging fruit. So basically, look at your bathroom, look at your shampoos, conditioners, lotions, makeup, deodorant, toothpaste, and probably throw out most of what's in there and look for the brands that have very few ingredients that are ingredients that you recognize and know, and that are approved ideally by the Environmental Working Group website, which has a basically a registry of all personal care products. And you can just walk through the store and search things on your phone and find out what is least likely to be toxic. So I've really moved away from a lot of the the complex products to things like for moisturizer, like you can use organic coconut oil or jojoba oil. You can use castile soap like Dr. Bronner's for dish soap, for hand soap, for body soap. You can use vinegar and water for disinfecting sprays for your countertops. Like it's actually once you get on this train, it's quite easy. There's so many great brands these day. It's not that hard.
Yeah, it's super important. and then of course you need to.
Give your body the things to detoxify, right?
Right. And actually supplements can be helpful in that regard. Whole food of course is the foundation, but supplements like vitamin C, curcumin, probiotics, resveratrol, vitamin E, these have all been shown to have basically resilience boosting effects on our ability to process toxic chemicals. And I think the last one I would mention, I mean we could go on and on forever about how to avoid these, but I think another important one is air filtration because air pollution is such an under-recognized contributor of chronic disease. And so getting a really high quality air filtration system actually has been studied and has been shown to have a clinical effect on mitigating the effects of toxic air pollution. So really personal care products, whole foods, making sure you're including cruciferous vegetables and anti-inflammatory foods, avoiding plastics, and getting your air under control and maybe supplementing with some high yield supplements. Those are definitely some of the things that we can do that are pretty simple to avoid our, to avoid the impact, the mega impact of these chemicals.
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