The Book That's Pissed Me Off The Most This Year (& How To Fix America's Food System) - The Mark Hyman Podcast With Ben Greenfield.

On this episode of the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast.

If we really want to heal my patients in my office, that's impossible. I need to focus on the bigger picture. On their kitchen, the grocery store, their restaurants, the policies that drive all that food. If we actually put into the price of the food the true cost of food, good, whole, real food would be far cheaper and processed food and factory farmed animals would be super expensive.

187Lobbies for every member of Congress.

When you look at all of them together, it's pretty frightening.

Health, performance, nutrition, longevity, ancestral living, biohacking, and much more. My name is Ben Greenfield. Welcome to the show. All right, folks, I had a chance to sit down with my friend Mark Hyman. He's doing a lot of cool things in the industry when it comes to fixing the way that we eat food in America. And his new book was absolutely amazing. I was thrilled to be able to chat with him about this. And speaking of books, if you have read my book, Boundless, my new book, Boundless, please, please, please leave a quick, brief, honest review. Get the book if you haven't yet, at BoundlessBook.com, but once you have it, go to Amazon, go to Barnes and Noble, go to Goodreads wherever you can and leave a review. It's the best thing you can do for my brand new book about how to have lasting energy at your beck all day long. So wherever you got the book, go, leave a review. And out of the bottom of my heart, thank you. All right, folks. Well, I recently read a book that, frankly, pardon the language, it pissed me off. This book upset me quite a bit. Not because I disagreed with the content that was in it, but because it was kind of an expose on the big, bad, big problem behind food, behind food, especially in America, and how that food has really become to be one of the biggest contributors to not just the national, but the global epidemic of chronic disease. And what I found interesting about this book was a, it had a lot in there that I was unaware of when it comes to food politics and how much what we eat is influenced by everything from lobbying to politics to seed monopolies to a whole lot of other pretty inconvenient. And even as my podcast guest alludes to in the book, invisible truths that we're walking around completely unaware of. But what I also appreciate about this book was it gives actionable steps that you can take to fix some of these issues in your own community and in your own life. The guy who wrote the book is a wonderful functional medicine doc who has now turned into almost kind of like a. A Mr. Smith goes to Washington kind of guy in terms of affecting political change in addition to health change. And his name is Dr. Mark Hyman. You're probably familiar with him because he's a very well known functional medicine doc and New York Times best selling author of multiple books. He is the director of the Ultra Wellness center in New York City. I had a chance to actually drop in and visit with him briefly for his podcast, actually, the last time I was in the Big Apple. And today he's on my show. Today I am in the driver's seat. Mark, how's that feel?

That's amazing because I don't have to do as much work, arguably.

Although sometimes it can be easy to be the interviewer too, because all you have to do is ask one question, then sit back and let someone talk. Assuming they're a good guest and they can do so.

Absolutely.

All right, so that's, that's going to be, that's going to be today's podcast. I'm going to ask you one question, then I'm going to walk away and go have a couple beers and come back and see if you're still talking.

Okay, that sounds good. I can go for an hour, no problem.

All right, awesome. Non GMO kombucha, apparently. All right, so this book is called Food Fix. I even say the title of the book, I don't think, but it's called Food how to Save Our Health, Our Economy, Our Communities, and Our Planet One Bite at a Time. Now, Mark, you're a physician, you're caring for patients, you're running the Ultra Wellness Center. I'm curious if there was some kind of a trigger that caused you to want to write this particular book, which in my opinion is almost like I alluded to as much of a political book as a medical book.

It's true. You know, it's something that has been brewing for a long time and, you know, takes me back to my activist days back in college, you know, working on dealing with the nuclear crisis as part of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, and also focused on really just trying to deal with social justice issues. And as I began to sort of see patients over and over my office with the same types of problems that were caused by food, or mostly caused by food, I realized that if I need to think about their diseases, I have to include the bigger picture of what they're eating and why they're eating what they're eating. And it just struck me that if I figure out the why, then I can help my patients. And as I began to go down that rabbit hole, it was clear to me that our food system is the biggest driver of the food they're eating, which is poor quality, ultra processed food that 60% of the diet of Americans, which kills 11 million people a year. I think that's an underestimate globally. So I'm like, wait a minute. Well, if we have a food system that's doing this, why do we have the food system we have? Well, it's because of our food policies, which are actually promoting a form of agriculture and food and allowing food policies and practices that actually make America sick and fat and destroy the environment, climate. So I'm like, well, why do we have those policies? And it became clear that it was the food industry. And most people don't know this, but the biggest lobby group in Washington by far, by a factor of, you know, probably four or five fold, are the food and ag industries.

You said the food and ag industries.

Yeah, food and agriculture.

Just for people who may. Because those terms get thrown around like food industry, ag industry. Are these specific organizations, like do they have actual names?

Well, yes, they do have names and I talk about them in my book. And they're about a couple of dozen companies that control all the big aspects of our food system. The big food producers, things like Nestle, Pepsi and those. Then there's the fast food companies, there's the seed companies, the agrochemical companies, fertilizer companies. That's the food industry. And it's a $15 trillion industry. That's about 17% of the world's economic production a year. And it's probably the biggest employer globally. In fact, the United states, it employs 20 million workers, which is more than any company or government. So it's a big, big monster that is run by a few dozen people that had been consolidated into monopolies over the last few decades and is really driving a lot of destruction of human health, destruction of our children's futures by destroying their intellectual capital because they can't focus or think or learn and they do poorly and their brains are affected and their IQs are lower. I mean, kids who eat ultra processed food have a 10% smaller brain and seven points lower IQ.

Really? That's been shown?

Yes.

I had no clue.

And then behavior issue, I mean, it just goes on and on, behavior issues and national security issues. So it really is clear to me that we have to solve this problem. And then I began to connect the dots with environment and climate, like what does climate change have to do with what we eat? Well, it turns out the way we grow food and our food system as a whole is the biggest cause of climate change, about 50% compared to fossil fuels, which is about a third. So that's a shock to me. And I began to go, well, if we really want to heal my patients in my office, that's impossible. I can't do it. I need to focus on the bigger picture, on their kitchen, the grocery store, their restaurants, the policies that drive all that food. And that's really why I began to sort of drive more and more into this. But even eight years ago, I wrote a book called the Blood Sugar Solution. I had a whole chapter on the toxic triad. Big Food, Big Pharma and Big Ag driving so many of these issues. But it's only in the last couple of years that there's an increased awareness of how these things are all connected and how we have to solve them holistically, like sort of functional medicine. It's a systems problem.

That's interesting what you said about the ultra processed food and children's cognitive function. Is this an actual systematic review that was done? Was it like an observational study or how exactly did they look at that?

It was looking at kids whose diets were poor compared to kids whose diet weren't and looking at brain imaging and IQ testing. But there have been randomized trials that actually look at behavior. And that's really, it was striking to me because, you know, I always, you know, sort of knew that, oh yeah, well, if kids are eating junk, it's probably not good for them and maybe, you know, whatever. But what we actually know is that it's a huge driver of mental health issues such as depression, anxiety that is actually, you know, driving adhd. There was a review by the CDC that was called Health and Academic Achievement and it documents the clear link between poor nutrition and kids academic performance, including things like lower test scores, lower grades, poor cognitive function, with less alertness, less attention, poor memory, less processing of visual information, worse problem solving, and increased absenteeism. I went to a school in Cleveland that was in a very underserved area, mostly African American, Hispanic school. And the superintendent of their school, the head of the school, was brought in to save the school because it got an F grade for 10 years in a row, which is terrible. 1% of those kids, 1% are eligible to go to college when they graduate and 40% of them are absent most of the time. Wow. And when I walked down the hall, there was this very overweight young Hispanic girl who was double fisting. She had one 32 ounce slushy in one hand and one 32 ounce soda in the other. And I was like, this is a nightmare and this is what we're doing to our children and their future. So I really began to understand that in order to be a doctor and do my job, I had to think bigger and I had to look at the whole food system and I had to address these issues holistically. And we had to drive a grassroots effort and a policy effort to try to change these things.

Yeah. And I feel like right now we're probably to a certain extent kind of preaching to the choir. Right. Like my listeners know that ultra processed food is probably not that great for the human body. They're aware that there is a link between what we put into our mouths and chronic disease. But I want to delve into some of the things I learned in your book that I wasn't aware of. For example, the actual cost of food, the actual true cost of food. I think you use corn as an example and maybe that would be the best illustrative example for you to give. But you say the true cost of food is not on the actual price tag of the food that we buy. And I'm curious if you could get into that, maybe using some examples for people of what the true cost of food really is.

Absolutely. So when we go to buy something at the grocery store or the restaurant, the price we pay is not the true cost of that food because we have to take into account the entire life cycle of that food and all the costs that are incurred in producing it, eating it and often wasting it. Just take sort of beef because it's kind of a. People sort of talk a lot about beef and climate and so forth. But if you look at the way we grow beef from factory farming animals, we grow massive mono crops of soy and corn. They're fed mostly corn. We use herbicides, we use pesticides, we use fertilizer intensively. We deforest rainforests in Brazil. I mean, it's just in order to grow our beef. We are creating massive environmental destruction. Who's paying for the climate change costs? Who's paying for the depletion of our freshwater uses? Who's paying for the damage to soil from the chemicals and the fertilizers that actually destroys the soil carbon leading to more climate change? I mean, there's 30 to 40% of our entire carbon in the atmosphere, which the total is about a trillion tons. A third of that comes from the destruction of Soil, organic matter from the way we farm. So just growing the food to feed the animals causes all this harm? Of course, the pesticides.

And is that primarily when you say the way we farm, is that because of monocropping and poor soil turnover or a combination of factors?

Yeah. So the methods that we use for industrial farming are large scale monocrop farms with extensive tilling of the soil that turns up the soil, basically kills the soil. So you're literally running a knife through the soil and turning it over and all the life that's in the soil dies and then it erodes and we lose the topsoil on top of that. I mean, what is the price of topsoil? We have no topsoil in 60 years according to the UN. That means no food for humans. Right. That's a serious problem. Who's paying for that? And then there's a harm to human health from pesticides. I mean, kids exposed to pesticides have lost 41 million IQ points in this cohort that was looked at from kids who were exposed around farms and so forth. So there's enormous. What is the price of that intellectual capital? What is the price that we pay for when people eat the food then and have processed food, the obesity and chronic disease that results? Who's paying for that? We are. Right. If we grow corn for processed foods, the government's paying for that. One, to grow it through subsidies. Two, we're paying for the environmental costs and damage. Three, we're paying for that food to be given to the poor through food stamps, which is about 75% of the food stamps, which is about $75 billion a year is for buying processed food. And about 10% of that or 7 billion is used to buy soda. So in terms of who's paying for the cost of them consuming that food? We are, through Medicaid and Medicare. So we're literally paying for the environmental costs. We're paying for the cost on the subsidies for our tax dollar. We're paying for giving it free to the poor. We're paying for the Medicare Medicaid bill. So we're paying four times as taxpayers for this. But the companies who create the damage aren't paying for it. Right. If General Electric dumps PCBs into the Hudson river as part of their business operations, they're not paying for the harm that that's causing the environment. They were held to account through lawsuits and actually had to pay over a billion dollars to clean up the Hudson river because of the consequence of their behavior. But the food Industry is not being held to account for all these consequences, which some people call externalities, just like people call things they don't like with drugs side effects. They're not side effects, they're effects that we don't like. Right. Yeah, but nobody's paying for those and that's enormous cost. So maybe if we actually look at a regenerative, a regenerative farm which grows grass, finished grass fed beef, in a way that restores the ecosystem, puts back soil organic matter, doesn't use as much water, doesn't use those chemicals, doesn't lead to all the consequences of destruction, increases biodiversity, restores pollinator habitats, restores animal ecosystems. Maybe that should be a $3 steak and a feedlot beef should be $100 steak. Right. Except the opposite is true now. And I think there are companies that are incentivizing farmers to do this. They're calling, it's called payment for ecosystem services. So they actually put value back in the land. There's a company called Farmland L.P. that's a, I think an investment company that buys up conventional farms, converts them to regenerative farms. Their profits go from single digit profits to 60 to 70% profits and returns. And they add benefit to the environment in their farms that they bought of $21 million compared to the same farms that previously removed $8 million of environmental benefit that basically cost us. So if we actually put into the price of the food the true cost of food, good whole, real food would be far cheaper and processed food and factory farmed animals would be super expensive.

Yeah. And one thing you get into, like you talk about beef in the book and all of these issues in terms of declining property values surrounding these cafo food lots because nobody wants to live near a stinky, polluted, you know, hog, chicken or beef operation to the cleanup of manure and the asthma and other issues that, that causes from the, from the, from the aerosol toxins that gets breathed in during that. You talk about pesticide poisoning and how that costs over a billion dollars a year in addition to the death of birds and the death of a lot of these insect pollinators like bees and butterflies. And then you've got the antibiotic cost which can kill another. I think it's close to a million people a year from antibiotic resistance. But then you also bring up the actual employees, like the fast food employees, and you tie food stamps into the actual cost of food. And I felt kind of dumb reading your book because I didn't know what SNAP meant and wasn't that familiar with how food stamps work. But can you describe how food stamps could actually be contributing to this issue and where you see the biggest issues with SNAP and what exactly SNAP is?

Yeah, sure. Well, there are two things you brought up there. One was in this country, again, this is another cost of the food. We don't account for the fact that food and farm workers are paid almost nothing, which means they can't make a livable wage, which means they can't afford health care and they need food stamps. So the very people who are producing our food or helping us serving our food can't make a living wage. And the government spends about 150, something, billion dollars in services for the poor because who are working in our food system because they can't pay for things themselves. This is terrible. And then of course, we pay about $16 billion in tips because the restaurant don't pay them any money. And so the whole tipping culture was a holdover from slavery and from how African Americans who were often in those positions were not paid anything and only had to survive on tips. So the average restaurant worker makes $2 an hour and then they depend on chips.

And so the food stamp program, from what I understand, it essentially provides money to people. This. What's, what's SNAP stand for again? Supplemental Nutrition Assistance.

Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. So this is a great program to help the poor deal with food insecurity and hunger. Super important. And it worked. It was great. It provided that safety net that was needed for the poor so there wouldn't be the massive amounts of hunger that we saw in America. However, unlike other government food programs like school lunches and dietary guidelines and so forth, and women influence in children's food programs, there were no nutrition standards put in, which means that you get your food stamp allotment, your 100 bucks a week or whatever it is, 40 bucks a week, and you can buy pretty much anything you want except cooked food or alcohol or cigarettes. There's no requirements for it has to be health promoting. It can't be health damaging. And so it's led to the fact that 75% of the food purchased by food stamp recipients is high calorie, low nutrient processed foods, that those who eat it are sicker and fatter and die worse younger than those who don't eat it. And while it's helped with food insecurity, it hasn't helped with health. It hasn't helped with the incredible crippling, chronic disease burden that affects actually six out of 10Americans today. And we're suffering the consequences of that, and every family is touched by it. And so we have to think about, how do we improve this SNAP, which is one of the largest government programs. It's $750 billion over 10 years, and it's part of the farm bill. It should be called the food bill. And 7 billion a year, or 31 billion servings, are used to buy soda for the poor, which doesn't make any sense. Right. And so it needs to be completely reformed in a way that allows us to put nutrition guidelines back in and create incentives for people to buy good stuff. So when they've done experiments where they give and say, well, if you buy more fruits and vegetables, we'll give you a 30% benefit. In other words, you'll get a $1.30 to spend if you buy fruits and vegetables. However, if you buy junk food, you only get 70 cents on every dollar to spend. So you get a disincentive. And those things have shown dramatic improvements in the health of the people using it and also the decrease in the actual. The actual purchase of the bad food. So putting that. And also, we should. I mean, there's no reason we should be getting sugary drinks, although the food industry certainly doesn't want to remove that. We should go have those incentives for purchasing fruits and vegetables. We should try pilot programs that help people use SNAP for better food choices. And the other thing is, there are good things happening there. There's like the Double Bucks program, for example, for farmers markets, if you use your food stamps, instead of 100 bucks, you get 200 bucks to buy fruits and vegetables. So there's all sorts of great things happening, and I think it's pretty exciting.

So when it comes to the SNAP program, I think what you said about the incentives is really important because I was actually just going through a book on health insurance policies. It was about the somewhat broken American health insurance setup, and it discussed how much more meaningful and effective incentives are for people who are trying to get lower insurance premiums through healthy lifestyle activities. And this idea of doing that instead of penalizing unhealthy behaviors is far more effective. This idea of incentivizing the healthy behavior. So it's a good point. And the whole. The whole SNAP program, it's the carrot.

Not the stick, right?

Right, right, exactly. So the whole SNAP program, is that something that's being actively looked at and changed right now? Like, are there people actually working on fixing the way the food stamps are working in America?

Absolutely. There's an incredible group called the Bipartisan Policy center, which is, you know, put out a whole report about how we can leverage SNAP to improve Americans health. And that is a whole series of policy strategies that I sort of just laid out that they put together. And there you've got the former, two former agriculture secretaries, Republican and Democrat. You've got, you know, two former Senate majority leaders, Democrat and Republican, who are getting behind these issues because they understand regardless of your political party, these are, these are imperatives for us, for our health, for preserving our human capital, natural capital, intellectual capital, economic capital. We're screwed if we don't fix this.

Yeah, well, you brought up soda as one thing that these food stamps are primarily being used to consume. But what I think you may have underemphasized, and what I'd love to hear you highlight is that if we actually look at the cost of the can of soda, we can take into account the healthcare costs of obesity and chronic disease. Disease from excess fructose consumption combined with a hypercaloric state, which, which we already know is an issue. You mentioned environmental consequences when you're talking about beef. But the same kind of modern chemical intensive till farming and the loss of topsoil is also caused by, by the monocropping of corn. And then there's the subsidized corn aspect. You know, we, we pay, I think it's like what, $250 million a year to subsidize corn. That a lot of it is used to make high fructose corn syrup. But then the other thing is that Coca Cola is technically a welfare recipient based on the way that things are set up with the SNAP program. And you highlight that in the book. How exactly are these big companies like Powerade or Vitamin Water or Coca Cola or Pepsi actually profiting from something like a food stamp program?

For sure, there's a lot of opposition to changing the SNAP program and putting any limits on these kinds of purchases. And what's sort of striking is that even the hunger groups are behind this. You look at the Food Action Network and other groups that are really about solving hunger in America. They're opposed to any changes snap. And part of the reason why is that they're heavily funded by the food industry. So these guys are super smart at manipulating things. And the ways in which they're benefiting is really clear. In fact, Coca Cola, about 20% of the American revenue estimated is from food stamps. Walmart, which has good and bad in it obviously. But of the 735 or $50 billion of food stamp money, about 130 something billion goes directly to Walmart. So they have a lot to lose. And, you know, I think basically it makes Coca Cola probably America's biggest welfare recipient.

That's nuts. It's nuts.

Yeah.

So that was obviously one of the inconvenient truths that you discuss in the book. But you also talk about something that you call. Well, you bring up the inconvenient truth, but then you also bring up the invisible truth when you talk about the tale of two foods. What's the inconvenient truth? And then what's the invisible truth?

The inconvenient truth is that our food system is driving most of the crises that are. And the invisible truth is the same. It's driving most of the crises that we see in the world today. Chronic disease, the economic burden of $22 trillion, federal debt and Medicare, for example, will be. And the trust fund will be out of money by 2026. About 50% of our federal budget will be required to pay for Medicare by 2025. We're not talking decades out here. We're talking five years. And we're seeing the climate impacts, the environmental impacts, the social impacts, the academic impacts, even national security impacts because kids who try to join the military are too overweight or unfit to fight. 70% get rejected. So these are all the truths that nobody is connecting. These are invisible, and they think they're all siloed. Problems, problems. Let's deal with kids learning. Let's deal with national security. Let's deal with the economy, let's deal with health. They're one problem that are all connected. And of course, there are many causes of all of them, but a large part of it is our food system. And fixing that can have a dramatic impact on fixing all of it.

Now, what about the seeds themselves? I feel like that's a big part of your book, is how we're actually distributing seeds for food growth. Can you go into what you call the monopoly of seeds?

Yeah. So the problem with agriculture is that we used to grow so many hundreds of varieties of foods. And increasingly there's been monopolization and cannibalization of all the seed companies in the world. So that was just like a few, probably four to six seed companies that control 60% of the seeds. And it's usually GMO seeds. It's usually seeds that are hybrid ICs that aren't necessarily nutritionally dense. So the food quality we get is far less. And it also drives huge problems for the farmers because they get stuck in the cycle of having to use these seeds, buy them, because historically, farmers kept their seeds and then they replanted their seeds and it was an internal cycle. They didn't need inputs from the outside. They had their farm animals, they had their seeds, they kept. And there wasn't pesticides and herbicides, so it was a closed ecosystem. Whereas now they have to get it off from the outside. And that makes them indebted to the big food companies, I'm sorry, the big ag companies who provide the seeds, which entice them into pesticides and fertilizers and herbicides and having to buy these seeds which ultimately are not providing really nutrient dense whole foods. And then in the worst cases, for example in India, where they sort of convert over to this industrial process, they can't afford to buy the seeds, they can't afford to buy the fertilizer, they can't afford to turn their farms back and they go bankrupt. And the suicide rates in India are extraordinary in farmers because of the pressures that they're being squeezed by the big food companies and their livelihood is being threatened.

It's crazy how we can actually have what like five big companies that control most of what we're using to grow food. Is it what buyers want?

I know Bayer, Monsanto, you know, Syngenta, ChemChina, BASF, Corteva, these are like, these are the big companies that are behind this. And what's interesting, there used to be hundreds of seed companies like 40 years ago, and now there's like a handful. Right. So how. That's not a good, that's not a good thing.

Now the way that these seeds, once they get into the farmer's hands are to going grown is another issue. And you've already alluded to this idea of monocropping and you know, only, only parts of these crops are grown for feedlot animals. I think the bigger issue is the huge amount of, you know, corn and wheat, etc. That's being grown. But can you get into, you know, you've alluded to it a little bit, but I still think people don't quite understand the difference between dirt and soil, dirt versus soil, and how monocropping contributes to a big, big issue here.

Yeah. So I think again, these are not things that we really understood in depth until fairly recently. But you know, soil, dirt, whatever, you just throw the plant in there, you throw some stuff on it and some nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium fertilize, little pesticides, herbicides, you get your plants, everything seems great. It turns out that, you know, soil is a living organism. You know, they're in a hint In a thimble full of soil, there's more microbial life than there were humans ever on the planet. Okay? It's a rich, live organic entity that is required to do a number of things. One, if you have organic matter in the soil, live soil versus dirt, which is just dead, right, it's just more like dust where there's very little organic matter, it cannot hold water, it cannot store carbon very well. And it's essentially something you need to put tons of inputs in to actually grow food. Whereas soil is alive and it's full of microbes and mycorrhizal fungi and nematodes and worms and all kinds of stuff that is required to do a number of key functions that we need on a farm and we need for the planet. One, when you have organic matter in the soil and you grow plants on it, it puts more carbon in the soil. So, of course, 30 to 40% of all the carbon in the atmosphere, like I said, a trillion tons, comes from the loss of soil organic matter and erosion of the soil from tillage. So when you put that back, you use this ancient carbon capture technology called photosynthesis. It's been around for billions of years. It's free. That literally can suck out carbon from the atmosphere through the plants, put it in the soil and actually store this excess carbon that's in the atmosphere and save us from climate disaster. It also can hold water. So every 1% organic matter can hold 20 to 30,000 gallons of water, which means you're resistant to droughts and floods and climate and weather instabilities. And in the biodiversity allows the plants to take up more nutrients. You know, we don't think about this, but even if you're eating like a vegan, healthy whole foods diet, if the soil is depleted, you're still getting 50% less nutrients than you did 50 years ago in your plants because of the quality of the soil that's required to extract the nutrients from the soil into the plant. So there's a lot that the soil does. It's sort of invisible to most of us, but it's probably, you know, I think it's probably the most important, overlooked, invisible thing that we have to pay attention to because it is also the solution to some of what's wrong. Because if we grow regenerative food, we grow better whole foods, the farmers make more money. It restores the biodiversity in the environment, the ecosystem, and it actually draws down climate and saves us from climate disaster.

Yeah, yeah. It's interesting because those are, those are the three plants I'm aware of, you know, rice, wheat and corn, that's like 60% of the world's calories. And we're pretty much destroying these more complex perennial ecosystems as we're cutting down forests and you know, plowing prairies to create all these, these monocropped, poor soil, dirt rich type of growing scenarios. It's interesting, I was actually earlier this week, I don't know if you heard about this, but there's a, there's a couple of food pioneers, farmers who are actually looking into tapping into nut producing trees and shrubs as some of our staple crops. They discovered that basically the biome with the widest distribution in North America is the savannah, which is this grassy area that's covered with shrubs and trees. And this thing's just chock full of oaks and chestnuts and beaches and all these different berry producing plants and grapes and fungi and mushrooms. And so one proposal that these guys are making is that we begin to rely more upon trees and shrubs as opposed to cutting them down for all these monocropping type of scenarios, and do things like acorns and acorn flour and oaks and nuts that can be stored literally for like a decade and can produce something like 6,000 pounds of food per acre. And that was a new concept for me, this idea of relying upon not just regenerative agriculture, but also trees and shrubs. And the savannah scenario, right?

Well, trees are part of regenerative agriculture. It's called agroforestry is a whole part of the solution. So there's lots of solutions. It's not just grass fed cows, but like Silvopasture, where you raise animals in forests like chickens and hazelnut orchards, right, where they eat all the hazelnuts that fall off and then they fertilize the ground, they make it hold more water, they need less irrigation. The hazelnuts win, the farmers make more money, the chickens are healthier, we're healthier. It's like a wonderful, beautiful, virtuous cycle. And they're doing that in Spain. They've done that for centuries with the Patanegra pigs who live in oak forests and they eat all the acorns and it produces meat that's actually very anti inflammatory and has very good fat profiles that aren't like regular pork.

It's some good meat. I hunt some wild pig down in Hawaii, but I ate at a place called, last time I was in Asheville, North Carolina, this place called Karate, where the pigs are just all fed on these wonderful acorns and the meat is just absolutely through the roof. And yeah, this idea of using trees and shrubs, I find that pretty appealing. And then another thing that you get into in the book, this was near and dear to my heart because I'm one of those guys who, when the family is done eating dinner, I go over to the kids bowls and the kids plates and I'm just kind of like the garbage disposal. I finish off everybody's food because it just breaks my heart if I see food getting tossed in the trash or shoved into the garbage disposal, the actual garbage disposal, not the bend garbage disposal. And you get into food waste in the book and how big of a problem food waste is. How big of a problem is it?

Big, big, big, big. So we waste 40% of our food. Imagine going to the grocery store, bringing home bags of groceries, and then throwing away 40% of the garbage. It's basically what we do in America. It's about $1,800 every year we throw away for a family of four. And globally, it's a massive problem. We throw away enough food every year that would require the entire landmass of China to grow that food at a cost of $2.6 trillion of loss. And we're seeing people who have lack. There's 800 million people who go to bed hungry, and there's of course, more than 2.3 billion who go to bed overweight. But we're having this inequity in distribution of calories and food, and a lot of it has to do with food waste. And it's also not only contributing to just this horrible human crisis of hunger and maldistribution of resources, but it's actually causing climate change. In fact, if food waste were a country, it would be the third largest emitter of greenhouse gases after the US And China. And why is that? Because when you throw your vegetables out and you stick them in the garbage, they go to a landfill and they rot and they off gas methane. And that methane causes climate change. It's 25 times more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. So a simple thing everybody can do because people feel powerless. What can I do? A simple thing everybody can do is start a compost pile. Whether you live in the city or country, you can do it in the city, in an apartment, you can get a little canister that you put your food scraps in that automatically composts it. You can bring it to the farmers market and give it away to the farmers. They'll love it. Or if you live in the country like I've done for years, I basically have A compost bucket in my sink. I fill it up with all the food scraps I throw in. My. I have a big little. I basically like with some two by fours constructed a really kind of rudimentary like box. And I just throw the food scraps in there. And it's unbelievable. I've done it for 20 years and I've got like this huge pile of incredible black rich fertilizer. And in some cities they're actually mandatory. Now in San Francisco, there's mandatory composting. And in Europe you can't actually, in France, you can't throw out the food from any kind of commercial operation. It has to go to either feed animals with food scraps, it has to go to a compost pile, it has to go to food banks. You just can't throw it out or you get fined or go to jail. And in Massachusetts, where I have a house, there's a local law that got established in the state which prohibits anybody from throwing out a ton or more food waste a week. So if you're Whole Foods or your grocery chain, you got all this food waste, you're not allowed to throw it in the garbage anymore. You can't put it in the dumpster, you put it in the food waste. So they get three tractor trailers full every day from Whole Foods, like 100 tons of waste. They put it in the digester, they add some cow manure from their dairy cows and it turns into energy and it fuels 1500 homes. The farmers make 100 grand, it produces free electricity, it ends the methane from the poop and the food waste. Everybody wins. There's all kinds of great solutions like that. So it is a big, big problem. But it's a lot of people working on it. Even in the Trump administration, the epa, FDA and the USDA came together and said, we're going to solve food waste and nobody's for food waste. You know, people can be against, you know, stopping food stamps and soda or against food market ending food, food marketing or better dietary guidelines. But like, nobody's like, yeah, we should throw away more food. That's a good thing. Right. So it's a total bipartisan issue and that's pretty exciting.

Yeah. Are you familiar with. You probably are. Because he's back there in New York City with Dan Barber, who runs Stone.

Barns out there, of course.

Yeah, he's got that new, I think it's called Wasted, his pop up where they're doing things like ugly vegetables and serving like kale ribs and beef tallow and vegetable pulp. Pulp and you know, all this waste that would normally just get tossed out and contribute to the issues that you just talked about. You know, this dude's basically serving up, like, bruised food and old food to people. Not old food, but parts of the animals and the vegetables that would normally just get tossed. This Dan Barber guy is doing some good work.

It's great. Yeah, I actually went to one of his dinners where he basically made the entire gourmet meal from, like, the ends of celeries and the mushroom stems and, like, the peels of carrots and, you know, things that we would throw out. It was amazing.

Yeah, yeah, there's. There's also a book. I bought it for my kids because they have a little food podcast, and they're actually going to be doing a podcast on how to use the parts that we would normally throw out. But it's. It's really good. The book's relatively new. It's called Waste Not. And there's recipes from all these top chefs around the country for things like, you know, asparagus bottom aioli from the bottoms of the asparagus we usually throw out, or squash seed tahini from the seeds of a squash that you might cook. He's got a bunch of recipes in there for just taking skins of fruit that you'd normally peel and throw out and how to dehydrate those and turn them into rubs for fish and for meat. It's a great, great book. But, yeah, I mean, just thinking outside the box like that can be tremendous for the food waste picture. Now, lobbying. Lobbying is a big issue here, and I found this pretty concerning in the book how Big Food and Big Egg actually control food policy. And I realize that this might be a little bit of a can of worms to open up, but I would love for you to get into how exactly it works when Big Food and Big Ag are controlling food policy. Like, how they can actually do that.

Well, I just had lunch with a guy named Sam Kass, who was in the Obama administration helping Michelle Obama with her initiatives around food, including school lunches and various things. And what he said to me was really striking. He said, you know, we were sitting there and, you know, normally the way things work in Washington is the lobbyists will show up at Senator, Congressman, the White House with, like, a giant book full of, you know, 50 policy solutions, all the regulations that need to get changed, what to do in what order, how to think about it, what the background resources, research is, and providing them with a whole roadmap of how to do what they want them to do right, whether it's the oil industry or the food industry. He said there was not a single group that came to the White House that had any organization behind them with any kind of concept of what policies need to be changed or what need to be fixed or how to do it. Because, you know, policymakers and presidents and their teams and agencies are just deluged with so much to do. They're trying to the country and they need help and guidance, and they're only getting it from the lobbyists. Now, there's a few examples of how this works. Someone told me a great story the other day, which is kind of funny. There was a hearing on the Dietary Guidelines recently, and there was a woman who got up to speak in front of the congressional hearing, and she said, you know, we're really having a problem with over abuse of antibiotics in this country and, and with antibiotic resistant bugs and with factory farming and so forth, and we really need to create a solution for this. And the thing is, cranberries are such a great antibacterial food that needs to be consumed more by Americans to prevent bladder infections. And she's like, okay. And then she went on to say that and in order for us to provide more cranberry because it's bitter, we need to be able to add more sugar. So the dietary guidelines shouldn't have the limits to. Because it prevents us from. I'm like, what? This is a lobbyist telling the Congress with all this science nonsense about why they need to not have lower limits on sugar. That's just an example. But the fact is there's about 187 lobbyists for every member of Congress. Both.

187 lobbies for every member of Congress?

Yeah, yeah, for every. And they're, you know, some of them are less official, but when you look at all of them together, it's pretty frightening. And some have literally hundreds companies have hundreds of lobbyists in one bill. Just to put in perspective, in one bill, which was the GMO labeling law bill, which was an attempt to try to force GMO labeling, there was $192 million spent by dozens of food companies to fight this one bill. You think, who has $192 million? Who wants more transparency in our food? Nobody. Like, you're fighting a very tough battle. And so you have to outmaneuver them, you have to outsmart them. And it's very tough to do because they're super sophisticated. They know the messaging and they have all the access to the inside Washington. And it gets Even worse, because I'll just give an example. There was a bill that was introduced a number of years ago called the Personal Responsibility in Food act, which was nicknamed the Cheeseburger Bill because it indemnified food companies against being sued from the harm their food causes. In other words, if you go to McDonald's or you drink Coca Cola, you can't sue them because you got sick. Right. Because people are starting to do that. It passed in the House, believe it or not. It didn't pass in the Senate, but then they kind of had a workaround strategy that allowed them to pass similar bills in many, many states across the country. And the guy who spearheaded it was a guy who received $300,000 for his political campaign through political action committees through from Wendy's and burger King and McDonald's. So, you know, how do you actually make sense of that?

Right.

You've got every single member of the Ag Committee funded in some way by the food industry.

Yeah. And another concerning thing that you talk about in the book, and from what I understand, it gets kind of makes contributions for lobbyists from some of these big companies a little bit more untraceable is the use of political action committees, or PACs or super PACs that pool money from all these different companies and donors to fund candidates and political parties. But it's not as simple as you simply seeing that Coca Cola has, say, funded some presidential candidate's campaign because instead, it's simply a political action committee. Am I interpreting that correctly?

Absolutely. It's called dark money. Dark money. And there's been a book, there's books written about this. And it's untraceable. And normally people have to disclose where their campaign contributions come from. But these political action committees work outside of that and can put unlimited funds, literally hundreds of millions of dollars. I mean, I think there were like, I got the exact number, like maybe 10 or a dozen billionaires who put in about a billion dollars total. And it was Democrats and Republicans. So it's both. Right. Putting unlimited funds into trying to change things the way they want them. And I think there's a beautiful book about this called America Compromise, which is a little depressing, but it's about. By Lawrence Lessing from Harvard, who's a Harvard law professor, about the way in which our political system is run by very few people with a lot of money who drive, who gets chosen as political candidates and who gets promoted and marketed. And that's why it's very hard for anybody to sort of break through. So I think, you know, as people become aware of this, as we begin to sort of figure out new ways to fight it, I think we're going to actually be able to sort of really get a handle on this.

This. Okay, got it. So the packs are another issue, and you've got a whole host of other problems in the book. But I would say one question that I have for you is you also have a lot of solutions in the book. Teach you the problem. At the end of each chapter, you have a list of the top things people can do, either after hearing this podcast or after reading the book. And I'm curious if you could go into some of the bigger wins, like, if someone's listening to this right away and they're just like, I want to get involved, what are some of the big things, like, right off the top of your head that you think people could do more of?

Well, you know, on my website, foodfixbook.com, i have a whole action guide which runs through a whole series of things that we can do as individuals, things that we can do within our communities, things that we can do on a political level, and also things that businesses and innovators need to think about doing as well as policymakers. So the innovation, for example, around these anaerobic digesters and food waste, that's not a political thing. Innovative thing that these farmers decided to do because they were losing money, they were sort of struggling to stay ahead and actually be able to do this innovation, help them to solve the problem. So for each person, I think there's a few things that they can do. One is you can lean into. You don't have to be perfect, because you can at this point in time, time is lean into the idea of being a regeneratarian, which regenerates your health and regenerates the health of the planet, regenerates the health of our economy, and regenerates the health of communities. And that means choosing foods that are raised and grown in ways that help are restorative. Right? So organic, okay, Regenerative is enough. That's the next level, which essentially means building soil and using these techniques like cover crops, crop rotation, you know, not using chemicals, integrating animals into the ecosystem, and so forth. So that's like a really simple idea to learn more about and do. And I talked about that in the book and how to do that. The second is, you know, simple things you can do matter, like have a compost pile. You know, it matters. If all of us in America had a compost pile and we didn't throw any Food waste. We would. We would actually help really contribute to the solution of climate change. Right. The third thing is you can do is if wherever you are inspired to act, whether it's in your schools with your kids, whether it's at your workplace, whether it's, you know, being active in your local community starting a community garden, or whether it's maybe something more like you want to work with your local municipal government to implement a composting ordinance so that, you know, it's mandatory composting in your community, or whether you work on a bigger political level in your Congress or state. And having a voice there, it's really important. And there's a great resource called Food Policy Action, which is a great resource for people to look at their senators and congressmen and figure out, you know, who's voting on what. And there's a scorecard they get for how they vote on these food and ag issues, and you can see who's doing what. And some of these congressmen who are in the pocket of big food have been outed by their constituents for social media campaigns.

You talk about that in the book the Food Policy Action Network has the Eaters Guide to Congress. It's a scorecard. You can get it online and it shows you, like, how certain politicians are voting and how dismal their score might be with regards to food policy.

Exactly, exactly. So in the Action Guide, at the top 20 citizen food fixes, the top 20 policy food fixes, the top 10 fixes for schools and education, the business fixes, the agriculture fixes. So there's a lot of stuff that we can do.

Yeah, I think starting with kids, in my opinion, and maybe I'm jaded as a parent, but I think that's one of the most important things that we can do, like taking a child to go tour a regenerative farm to see how it works, and maybe even taking them to a cafo lot too, to compare and contrast, or having them watch these wonderful documentaries like Kiss the Ground for the Soil or the Biggest Little Farm is another good new one on regenerative egg. And it's one of the best ways kids learn even better from documentaries than they do from books. And I was reticent to accept that fact for a while because I'm not a huge fan of screen time. But it actually is true. If I want my kids to learn something quickly, I'll get a documentary. And we rarely watch our tv, but when I put that thing on, the last one they watched was on Earthing and Grounding. Whenever they Go outside and it's not super cold out. They're in their bare feet. And they never did that before the documentary, but after watching it, they're inspired. And taking your kid to shop at the farmer's market, teaching them how to, you know, grow a garden, even, even a windowsill of herbs. There's all sorts of really, really great tips that you have in the book. And so I recommend that folks go through this just to educate themselves on all the different issues that we're facing right now. And more importantly, not just scare tactics, what you can do about it now.

Exactly.

That all being said, you know, boots on the streets, I'm curious how you eat, not just as a guy who's aware of all these issues, but as a healthy, functional medicine doc who sees a lot of patients. And I realize the diet that works for Mark might not be the diet for everybody, but what does your plate look like? How are you kind of structuring food throughout the day?

Everybody talks about plant based diets. I think the key is a plant rich diet, or plant forward we can call it. I would say probably 70, 80% of my diet is plant based foods. And that would be lots of veggies, nuts and seeds, good quality fruit, some grains and beans. I try to eat non gluten or I tell them to eat weird food. Himalayan tartary buckwheat, for example, is one of the most phytonutrient protein rich, low sugar starch food on the planet. But it's kind of a weird grain. Or black rice, for example, or certain grains like lupini beans, or certain beans like lupini beans, which are less starchy and more protein. So I try to sort of pick within each category what are the most high quality, nutrient dense foods. And then if I'm choosing animal foods, I make sure it's regenerative. I make sure grass is finished if it can't be regenerative or pasture raised or sustainably harvested or farmed. If it's fish, I make sure I'm really diligent about that because if we don't do that, we're kind of in trouble.

Right? Right. I mean, even at a steakhouse business dinner, people don't think about this. They don't actually look at the farm from which the meat came or ask whether it's regeneratively farmed food. You know, fresh on my mind because I ate a Bel Campo down in LA three days ago and we had this wonderful meal of pate and steak and some duck and some tallow Fries and everything was from a regenerative farm in Northern California. Whereas if I walk into some other steakhouse and I just order straight off the menu because my mouth is watering, I'm not affecting change with that personal decision. The same could be said for GMO foods, which the research goes back and forth on the biological impact. I feel there's an issue with them, but perhaps even the bigger issue is how much they contribute to monocropping and these rice and wheat and corn production that we know are harming the planet, harming the water system, harming the soil. And so being aware of choosing GMO versus non gmo, I mean, it's so easy to get up on your soapbox and talk about this stuff. It's another to make sure every little personal decision that you make is pretty myopically focused on the health of the planet and the health of other people in our country and how much you're subsidizing in companies that might be contributing to poor health via food in addition to just your own health. So I think just being an honest consumer and taking into consideration via educating yourself and then making the right decisions and then turning around educating your kids is a pretty important piece of this.

Absolutely. So educate yourself, learn, study, read my book, Food Fix. Watch documentaries, movies. There's a new one coming out soon called Kiss the Ground about regenerative agriculture. It's really important to become aware, because if you don't become aware, it's hard to change. And if we don't change, we're all screwed. I mean, I hate to be a doomsday guy, but, you know, when you look at what's happening to the health of our country and the health of the world and all the other impacts we talked about and the climate impacts, you know, the climate stuff, people argue it's a hoax, whatever, but it's hard to argue with facts and math. And climate scientists have been incredibly accurate in predicting what's happened, and now their predictions are getting far worse. So I'm concerned for myself. I'm concerned for my children and their children.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, you've certainly made a difference in writing this book. So thank you for writing. It's why I wanted to get you on the show. Just because after reading it, I realized that with my own platform, I want to make sure that I'm spreading this messages that people are aware of how broken the food system is in our country, but perhaps most importantly, or more importantly, what we can do to change it. So this book I would recommend to all of you guys, along with the website that Mark set up for the book, that allows you to take some of these actionable changes in your own community, in your own life. And so if you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com FoodFix, that's BenGreenfieldFitness.com food fix. I'll link to the book, I'll link to some of the documentaries that we mentioned, some of the stories about food waste, and also over to the Food Fix website where you can get lists of different action steps that you can take and support Dr. Hyman too, I would say, by getting the book, because it's a wonderful read, it's easy to get through. I read it in a couple of days when I first got it. I just couldn't put it down. And you're going to come away with a lot that's going to hopefully change your life, your neighborhood, your community, your children, and teach you how to be a responsible consumer of something. I think most of us, except those obsessed with these five day water fasts, are consuming every day food. So, Mark, thank you for coming on the show and sharing all the stuff with us, man.

Thank you so much. You know, and I think, you know, just so people know, I'm also launching a whole campaign movement bringing in all kinds of stakeholders called the Food Fix Campaign, where we're creating grassroots education, awareness and also driving policy change. So we're going to be educating lawmakers, we're going to be those lobbyists, but the good guys. And I've got an incredible team put together and you can kind of go on my site, foodfixbook.com and learn more about how to get involved. It's super exciting. And I think, you know, it's one thing to write a book, but it's another thing to really go in and actually make sure to have. And that's really what I think has to be done.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, you're doing a good thing and I truly appreciate you, man. So thank you for writing the book. And again, folks, you can find it at BenGreenfieldFitness.com FoodFix and Mark's got a podcast as well you can listen into and it's just a wonderful resource. So until next time, I'm Ben Greenfield along with Dr. Mark Hyman signing out from Ben Greenfield fitness.com have an amazing week. Well, thanks for listening to today's show. You can grab all the show notes, the resources, pretty much everything that I mentioned over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com along with plenty of other goodies from me, including the highly helpful Ben Recommends page, which is a list of pretty much everything that I've ever recommended for hormones, sleep digestion, fat loss, performance, and plenty more. Please also know that all the links, all the promo codes that I mentioned during this and every episode help to make this podcast happen and to generate income that enables me to keep bringing you this content every single week. So when you listen in, be sure to use the links in the show notes. Use the promo code codes that I generate because that helps to float this thing and keep it coming to you each and every week.