You Shouldn’t Need A PhD In Nutrition To Read a Food Label

Coming up on this episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy. You shouldn't have to have a PhD in nutrition and biochemistry to understand a food label. Welcome to the Doctor's Pharmacy. I'm Dr. Mark Hyman, and that's Pharmacy with an F, F-A-R-M-A-C-Y, a place for conversations that matter. And if you care about what's in your food, you should listen closely to this conversation, because it's about the Food and Drug Administration and how they're asleep at the wheel in protecting us from harmful chemicals and antibiotics and even bad nutrition information. Now, the FDA regulates food labels, which is a prime example of how the agency fails the public. They're deliberately misleading and confusing, which serves the interests of big food, but not the rest of us. Jerry Mandy, who is now a professor at Tufts, a nutrition expert who was a key part of the administration in the Obama administration, worked on food labels at the FDA and the USDA, and he said, most food companies don't want you to know what's in their products. So they deliberately make their ingredients hard to read. A lot of companies use all capital letters, they squish them together, use very small font size, maybe 1/16 of an inch letter. The results are you look at most food packages and it's hard to read the ingredient list. They also require these companies to list the ingredients in order of their predominance. But that doesn't tell you how much is in the package. For example, if sugar is the second ingredient list on the package, it doesn't tell you if it's 30% or 5%. And have you ever picked up a jar of strawberry jam at the supermarket and looked at what's in it? A jar of Smucker's strawberry jam list strawberries as the first ingredient. Okay, sounds good. Then the second, third and fourth ingredients are high fructose corn syrup, corn syrup, and sugar. Now, this is a very common tactic, which is they create different kinds of sugars, which means they don't have to list sugar as the number one ingredient, which it actually is. We know from investigations that these companies often use five different sugars in their products so they don't show up high on the list. And you shouldn't have to have a PhD in nutrition and biochemistry to understand a food label, which you kind of do now. Even I have studied these for years and I understand nutrition deeply. I mean, it's a little confusing. I mean, what's a gram of sugar? I don't know. Well, I know it's 4 grams per teaspoon, but most people don't know. And many things are on labels that don't make any sense to you. Well, things like mono and diglycerides, carrageenan, maltodextrin, soy lethicin, it's in everything. These emulsifiers and additives are a big red warning sign to drop the package and run. If you can't pronounce the ingredient, it's probably not something you want to put in your body. and most people really don't take time to read it. What's worse is there are over 10,000 additives allowed in our food, yet only 43% of them are recognized as safe by the FDA, or what we call GRAS, generally recognized as safe. And guess what? Less than 5% have actually been tested for safety. And you know what? The average American consumes 3 to 5 pounds of these additives every year, including kids. which is far more concerning because of their lower body weight and increased effect of these compounds. Even more concerning is the fact that many of these additives which are allowed in our food are banned in other countries like Europe. Things like potassium bromate and yellow and red dyes and azodicarbonamide, which is a actual ingredient in yoga mats, which was in the bread of Subway, many processed food breads. In Singapore, if you use azodicarbonamide, you get a $450,000 fine and 15 years in jail. Also BHA and BHT, which are, which according to our own government are listed as reasonably anticipated to be a human carcinogen. But I guess that's not enough for the FDA to protect us, or maybe the food lobby is involved because they don't want to remove these popular preservatives from its processed food. Also in other countries, they have banned brominated vegetable oil or BVO. It's in many sports drinks and of course in Mountain Dew, but guess what? It's a flame retardant. It's been shown to cause memory loss, nerve damage and skin issues. And of course, a lot of animal drugs that we use in farms are banned in Europe like bovine growth hormone or ractopamine, which makes animals fat and is harmful to humans. I mean, even something as horrible as trans fat, which we've known for 50 years is harmful to human health, was left in the food supply because it's part of every processed packaged food. It's known as shortening or partially hydrogenated vegetable oil, Crisco, margarine, you know, all that stuff. We used to eat like candy because it was quote healthy. Turns out it's one of the biggest drivers of heart disease, diabetes and obesity. There's no doubt about it. All scientists agree, but it took 50 years from the time scientists found out that they were harmful to remove it from the grass list or they're generally recognized as safe. Even then, it was only after a lawsuit. Okay, so who's working for who here? The good news is you can do something about it. In fact, one woman, my friend, Bonnie Haring, who wrote Feeding youg Lies: How to Unravel the Food Industry's Playbook and Reclaim youm Health, documents how she, as one person with her Food Babe Army online, brought many food industry leaders to their knees. For example, she got Subway to remove the azodicarbonamide from its Subway sandwiches by pretending to eat her yoga mat in front of a Subway. She got Kraft, which in Europe is not allowed to put artificial dyes and colors in its Kraft macaroni and cheese, she got them to remove it in America as well. She got Chick-fil-A, which had a hundred different ingredients in their sandwich, including MSG and TBHQ, which is a derivative of butane from gasoline. To remove all those nasty products from their foods, she got Chipotle to get rid of the trans fats and GMO ingredients. They were claiming to be a healthy restaurant, and she called them out on it. And General Mills and Kellogg's agreed to stop using that toxic preservative BHT. So one person can make a difference. Next topic for the FDA where they're asleep at the wheel is antibiotics. In 2009 it was estimated that there were 29 million pounds of antibiotics used in America. 24 million of those pounds were used to prevent disease in livestock in overcrowded conditions and to promote growth. Get this, to promote growth in animals. We know that antibiotics makes animals gain weight but guess what, they do the same thing to humans by screwing up their microbiome. Today, we are using 32 million pounds of antibiotics. And though it's not the entire cause, antibiotic use in animal feed has led to significant antibiotic resistance, both in animals and humans, because the drug-resistant bacteria go from the farmers to the hospital and start spreading in hospitals, and it's contributing to 700,000 deaths worldwide. and in 2050 experts predict that this epidemic will kill more people than cancer. Why are we doing this? We're using antibiotics too much. Antibiotics are over prescribed by doctors, often for viral infections, which they're useless for. But the main factor is excessive use of antibiotics in animal food production. So how do these antibiotic resistant bacteria jump around to humans? Well there's a bunch of ways. One, farm workers can be affected while handling the animals. and the manure, and then they pass superbugs to other people. The superbugs can be spread to crops and in the groundwater through contaminated fertilizer. The manure and urine slurries containing antibiotics are often spread on fields, killing the microbiome of the soil, the same way antibiotics harm our microbiome, and that affects our health. And drug-resistant bacteria can spread through communities by the wind. In fact, in one study of people living near farms in rural Pennsylvania, found that nearly 40%, there was a 40% increased risk of getting a MRSA or a nasty staph infection than people who live further away from the farms. And the economic price is staggering. According to Rand Europe, which is a nonprofit research organization, they looked at the overuse of antibiotics in agricultural labor productivity and globally between now and 2050, the cost of antibiotic resistance is estimated to be climbing as high as $124 trillion. That's more than our entire global economy. The Union of Concerned Scientists estimates the United States alone the public health costs are $2 billion a year for antibiotic resistance. Now why is the FDA allowing the food industry to do this? Well, they announced in 2013, sounded good, that they wanted drug companies to change the way veterinary antibiotics are sold and labeled, and they asked drug companies to remove any indication for weight gain or growth promotion. It said that the antibiotics should only be fed to animals with a veterinarian's approval. And that means that in theory the drugs should not be prescribed specifically to make animals bigger and fatter or to prevent disease. But here's the catch. The recommendations were completely voluntary, no regulation, no legislation. They just politely advised Big Ag not to use antibiotics, advice which was promptly ignored, which is not surprising considering the Deputy Commissioner of the FDA from 2010 to 2016, Mike Taylor, was the former Vice President of Public Policy for Monsanto. So what do we do about all this problem with food labels and the problem with antibiotics and the FDA is asleep at the wheel dealing with? Well, There are a lot of groups trying to change that. The US Public Interest Research Group, or PIRG, is a consumer watchdog group that's been leading the charge on this issue. They helped California and Maryland pass laws banning their states' factory farms from routinely using medically important antibiotics. And other states are now doing similar things. The World Health Organization has called on the agricultural industry to stop giving antibiotics to healthy animals. So we have to support that. We should implement an outright ban on antibiotics for disease prevention and livestock. We should stop factory farms from using antibiotics that are especially valuable to human medicine, including some of the fluoroquinolones, macrolides, and other cephalosporins, which are critically important for human beings. We should bring in qualified vets to make sure that antibiotics are needed. We should promote and apply good practices at all steps of production and processing of foods so that we don't need that. transition from factory farms to regenerative agriculture, that will solve much of the problem. We should improve biosecurity on farms, and we should put in policies that aren't voluntary that track the misuse of antibiotics. The USDA and the FDA don't really track the use of antibiotics in livestock production very effectively. In fact, the drug and ag industry refused to release any data until 2003 and now only release limited data. We need full transparency. How can you protect yourself? Well, you can buy your meat from a trusted local farm. Check for products that have the American Grassfed Association label or logo. You can find certified grassfed products online. Check out Thrive Market, Amazon, American Grassfed Association, Mariposa Ranch. Look for labels on meat, poultry, dairy, and other foods that say hormone and antibiotic free. You can check out localharvest.org/organic-farms to find small farms in your area that Don't use hormones and antibiotics. You can eat whole real foods. You don't have to worry about all the food additives, right? You don't have to worry about eating azodicarbonamide or carrageenan or BHT or other weird gross stuff. I mean, an egg or an almond or an avocado doesn't have an ingredient list. It doesn't have a nutrition facts label. It's just what it is. That's what you should be eating. If you can't identify it by actually covering over the package and looking at the ingredient list, you shouldn't eat it. And you can support restaurants that are focused on providing food from antibiotic and hormone and healthier whole food sources. That's a great thing to do. Now, what about food labels? How do we fix that? Well, we have to lobby our senators and congressmen and the FDA and the government to change the food labeling laws, right? How about using something like the stoplight system, which is used in many countries. Green is good for you, yellow, eat with caution, red, this could kill you. And they're doing really simple, simple labels that people can understand that don't have a PhD in nutrition. They're gonna fight back. The industry is not gonna like it, but don't make it hard for consumers. Make the right choice, the easy choice. We could also list ingredients by their percentages like is done in many countries, right? If it's sugar as a second ingredient, it should say whether it's 1% or 90%. We should restrict health claims on packaged labels. This is a way of marketing, whether it's all natural, gluten free, lightly sweetened, low fat, high fiber, whatever, it's just a marketing scam. I always joke and say if somebody has a health claim on the label, don't eat it. It's probably not good for you. I mean, guess what? I saw a bag the other day of fried potato chips that was gluten free. It still ain't healthy, right? So you can also strengthen regulation on chemical food additives. So make sure that we really go through what's in our food and employ the precautionary principle. We don't have to wait till it causes harm to ban it. How about we make the food companies prove that they're safe before they're in the food? The good news is there's lots of forward progress in these areas and there's lots of things you can do and that we can do together as a society and politically. And that's really what I wrote the book Food Fix about, to solve these big problems, to think about them all as one interconnected issue that can be solved by doing the right thing. And we're going to talk more about how to do that in upcoming episodes. But for now, you can check out Food Fix: How to Save Our Health, Our Economy, Our Communities, and Our Planet One Bite at a Time by going to foodfixbook.com youm can also get access to my free video on five steps to a healthier planet and a healthier you, and even access to my action guide, which will give you all the steps you need to do to protect yourself and your family and your communities and inspire you to do other bigger things, maybe even politically. So if you love this podcast, We'd love to hear from you. Leave a comment. Please share with your friends and family on social media. Leave a subscribe wherever you get your podcast, and we'll see you next week for another minisode on food fix on the doctor's pharmacy. 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