What to Eat | Marion Nestle | Talks at Google

Thanks, Juan. First of all, it's Nestle. No relation to the chocolate company, now the baby food company. Alas, no relation. It's very nice to be here. I was here about four years ago in the infancy of Google, and I was brought down to do a consult about the food. So if the food here is wonderful, I'm the one who gets credit for it because I gave them really good advice. I said tune it up was my advice. And I gather they've done that. So I hope to get a chance to look at that later. I thought what I would do would be just to go through my usual way of talking about these things. This is the Google version of a talk that I give pretty much routinely. Because the issues that I'm talking about these days really start with consumer confusion about diet. And there is enormous public confusion about what a healthful diet is supposed to consist of. And I think that, and I mean, a lot of this has to do with the research, but I think it's really too bad because as Time magazine put it a couple of years ago, you don't have to be an Einstein to figure out what it is you're supposed to have for dinner. In fact, it's so simple that I can summarize it in one slide. Eat less, move more. Eat fruits and vegetables. Don't eat too much junk food. Enjoy what you're eating, and please don't eat my book. So if it's confusing and if people find the whole question of what to eat a major source of anxiety, a lot of it has to do because with the fact that obesity has become such an enormous public health problem in this country, and it's not only a problem for individuals who are overweight and worried about their health, obesity also poses an enormous problem for the food industry. As Advertising Age said about a week or so ago, a fear frenzy grips the food industry. The food companies are terrified about what obesity means for their bottom line. It used to be this small, manageable issue in the United States, and now it is affecting everything that the food industry is doing and has become an enormous, enormous crisis for them. Or as this executive of Koch said, a huge, huge issue. Well, the reason for that, of course, has to do with the fact that obesity is, in fact, a public health problem. It's not a public health problem for everybody, but for a small fraction of people who are overweight, the risk of a lot of different diseases increases, particularly type 2 diabetes, which is a particularly unpleasant problem and a very difficult one to manage. And if obesity is a problem and is a health problem, then the question is what you do about it? And there are two approaches to dealing with problems of obesity. The first is the personal responsibility approach, as shown in the Economist a few years ago. And the personal responsibility approach goes like this. You're an adult, you're responsible for what you eat. If you want to eat your way to grossness at an early grave, go ahead. It's your fault. It's not anybody else's fault. And of course, the remedy, if you're a public health person in dealing with the personal responsibility issue is you want to fix what people are eating. You educate them to eat better. And this is the idea that if you just taught people what it was they were supposed to eat, they would go ahead and eat what they were supposed to, right? The alternative approach, and I'm expressing this as a dichotomy, but obviously both are required. The alternative approach is the social responsibility approach, which what the New York Times called a few years ago as the gorge yourself environment. An environment in which food is present everywhere and it's almost impossible not to eat it. And here, if you're concerned about trying to do something about the environment of food choice, you have to change society. And of course it seems like it's much easier to change the way individuals think than to try to change society. But I want to talk mostly about the changing society approach because I think it's much more important. And in order to do that, we need to do a little history. And that history begins in 1980, at the dawn of the very sharp rise in rates of obesity in the United states. Prior to 1980, rates of obesity ticked along at about the same low level. Starting in the early 1980s, rates began to rise quite dramatically. So we need to ask the question, what happened in 1980 that might have encouraged people to eat more food or be less active? I'm only going to be talking about the food side of this equation, although I do think the activity side is equally important. It's just harder to talk about the food side and fewer people do. Well, one thing that happened in 1980 was a big change in farm policy. When President Reagan was elected, he came in with a very pro industry agenda and one that was very deregulatory in its approach. The idea was to deregulate industry and one of the industries that got deregulated was the agriculture industry. And long term controls on production that had been around for decades were removed. And as a result, farmers had an incentive to plant more crops and which they did very efficiently. And the result was mountains of corn in a sea of farm subsidies. That may change now that so much corn is going to ethanol. But until very recently, it was a big issue. The increased production of food had several effects. For one thing, it continued a long term trend toward keeping the price of food as the cost of food as a percentage of income very low, and that it continued to decline. And that activity acted as an incentive to encourage people to eat out more because food was so cheap, you could eat out more at a lower cost. The more important one, and the one that I really want to emphasize, is that the number of calories available in the food supply increased in the early 1980s. There were about 3,200 calories a day available for every man, woman and child in the country. And that number increased to 3,900 calories a day by 1980, a steady increase during that period. What that means, that increase of 700 calories does not reflect what people are actually eating, because these are production figures. Less exports, plus imports, people eat less than that. And there's wastage and stuff like that. Nevertheless, There are now 3,900 calories available in the food supply for every person in the country, no matter how old or how young. And food companies have to sell that. If you're a food company in this marketplace, you've got a really tough job. It's really competitive to try to sell food in an environment in which there are twice as many calories available as the country on average needs. But that wasn't all. The second thing that happened in the early 1980s was the advent of what is called the shareholder value movement, which is a movement attributed to a speech by Jack Welch, who was the head of General Electric in 1981, in which he talked about the need for stockholders to obtain more immediate returns on investment, faster and higher returns on investment. And what that did to food companies, did it to all companies. But food companies in particular were affected by that because they not only had to sell food in an environment in which there were twice as many calories available as anybody needed, but they had to report growth to Wall street every 90 days. So this puts food companies in a really difficult position. It's not as if food companies are trying to make people fat. That's not what they're about. They're just trying to sell food in an extremely competitive environment in which they not only have competition to deal with, but they have growth to deal with. So the result of that was that food companies, starting in the early 1980s, took efforts to Sell food that actually changed society. And I want to talk about those ways. The idea that you would eat more food outside the home increased the variety of food available. It increased people eating in groups outside the home. And every single one of the things that I'm going to be talking about with an exclamation point after it means something that research shows increases the number of calories that people eat without their really being aware of it. So food, if you eat outside the home, you're going to take in more calories than if you eat at home. If there's variety of food available, you'll eat more calories. And if you're eating with your friends, you're going to eat more calories. Every single one of those, the most important one is probably portion size. The red curve on this is the increase in calories and the food supply referred to, expressed in megajoules. Never mind, it's the same thing. And the blue lines, the blue bars are introductions of larger size portions. And starting in the early 1980s, companies began to make larger amounts of, of food and serve larger amounts of food because the cost of basic food ingredients was so low compared to labor and other kinds of costs that they could. And everybody loves bargains. So portion sizes increased. And portion sizes have three problems. Number one is that they have more calories. If there was one thing that I could teach that would a concept that would get across to everybody, it would be larger portions have more calories. It's not intuitively obvious. This is my former doctoral student, now Dr. Lisa Young, and her book, the Portion Teller. The white cup on the left is a standard 8 ounce Department of Agriculture portion size For a soft drink. If it doesn't have too much ice in it, it holds 100 calories. The large cup on the right, the double gulp, if it doesn't have too much ice in it, holds 60 ounces and has 800 calories. And the research shows that that cup is not passed up and down the movie aisles. It's all consumed by one person. Larger portions have more calories. But there are two other problems, and this is the work of Brian Wansink, who is a researcher at Cornell, who does, who had the famous super bowl study in which he fed some of his graduate students popcorn at a Super bowl and he gave it to them either in two quart bowls or four quart bowls. And guess what? The people with the larger bowls ate nearly twice as many calories and they underestimated the number of calories they were eating by a much larger percentage than the people who had gotten the popcorn in smaller bowls. So larger portions have more calories, encourage people to eat more calories, and encourage people to underestimate the number of calories they're eating more than smaller portions. A big problem. Ubiquity is another one. Just having food available everywhere is an incentive to eat more calories. I like to ask the question, when did it become okay to eat in bookstores? I mean, there it is. That was part of trying to get food sold everywhere. Proximity is another one. The reason that nutritionists are so upset about vending machines in school schools is that if there's a vending machine there and the kids have money, they're going to buy stuff from the vending machines. And vending machines didn't go into schools until big time, until the late 1990s. So that's a relatively recent trend. And then another one is frequency. The more times a day you eat, the more calories you'll take in, which is why Taco bell's fourth meal campaign is so particularly amusing. And then the last one is low prices. If there's too much food available, that's supply and demand. The cost will be low. And the example that I love to give is that if you've got $5 and go into McDonald's, you've got two choices. You can buy five hamburgers or one salad. Now, what's that about? Well, that's about federal policy that subsidizes some foods rather than others and makes the cost of salads apparently much higher. Higher than the cost of hamburgers. So those are the kinds of issues that I discussed in my previous two books, Food Politics and safe Food. And those books came out in 2002 and 2003, respectively, and they generated a lot of interest. And I went around the country giving talks about them, and everywhere I went, people would say, great books, but you didn't tell us what to eat, and how come you didn't tell us what to eat Eat and what we really want to know. We don't want to know all that political stuff. Just tell us what to eat. And when I heard that for the first time, I was kind of surprised because I didn't think I had written a diet book. And as I started asking people, well, what is it about what to eat that you don't understand? They would start talking about what it was like for them in supermarkets. And it had never occurred to me that supermarkets were a source of great anxiety for people because I live in Manhattan and we don't have any but it turns out that people would say things like, I go into a supermarket and I feel like a deer caught in headlights. I go into a supermarket and I burst into tears. I mean, this is really serious stuff. So I started going to supermarkets, and what I heard from people was, I go into a supermarket, I feel like there's danger everywhere. I don't know how to make choices. I can't figure it out. And what I really want is somebody just to tell me what foods are good for me and what are bad for me so I don't have to think about it. So I started going to supermarkets, and I started going to a chain called Wegmans, which is upstate New York, to a place where I go a lot. And I just went around the supermarket as an anthropologist kind of trying to figure out what it was that supermarket were about, and answering every question that I could think of that anybody might have about any of the products in supermarkets. And the result was my book, what to Eat, which is really about how to think about food. It's not really about what to eat. Sorry about that. Well, the first thing I learned was that supermarkets go by research and that there's an enormous research basis for the way they're constructed. And the research says you always put fruit or flowers or produce first because that brings people into the store. What? Michael Pollan, who's the author of Omnivore's Dilemma called Supermarket Pastoral, and I love showing this picture because he's got a poster of my book on his desk. I like that. Rule number two is that the idea of the purpose of the supermarket is to expose people who to want walk into it to as many products as possible. Because there is a direct linear relationship between the number of products you see and the number of products that you buy. And you must remember that supermarkets, although they perform an enormous public service in presenting everything in one stop shopping, they're businesses and their job is to sell more food, not less. They're not helping you with your diet. So the way that they sell food is by forcing you to look at as many products as possible. And they do that in a way. All supermarkets are designed in exactly the same way. The fresh foods are around the periphery. The other foods are in these great big long aisles. And the length of the aisles is calculated to be exactly the length that people can stand walking up and down without running screaming from the store. Because remember, you want people to see as many products as possible. And the dairy products are always in the far diagonal corner from the entrance, because almost Everybody who comes into a supermarket buys some dairy products, and you want them walking through the store as much as possible. In fact, there's a chain of stores in the Northeast called Stu Leonard that only has one aisle. Once you get into the store, you're in that aisle, and you don't get out of that aisle until you reach the cash register. It's just brilliant. And actually, they have very entertaining things in that store. And it's so entertaining to go there that you don't really mind, but you spend a lot of money. Rule number three is you put the highest profit items at eye level. And this is where slotting fees come in. Companies pay the stores in order to put their products in the places where people can see them the most. So that would be at eye level, at the ends of the aisles, or close to the cash register. And that's the business with slotting fees. And then that brings us to the whole question of the center aisles, which is where the high profit junk foods are. Now, I'm a nutritionist, and we are not supposed to call them junk foods. We are supposed to to call them foods of minimal nutritional value. So let me define what I mean by junk foods. These are foods that are high in calories, they're extremely highly processed, they're not particularly nutritious, and they're very, very profitable. And in fact, there are some stores that even call them that. This is a store in an Asian immigrant area in Southern California, and it just calls it that. And underneath that sign is exactly what you would expect to find there. So the junk food aisles, one of the ways in which you increase value and can sell foods as high profit is you put a lot of sugars in them. And we're not talking about sugar that comes in boxes here. We're really talking about sugar in other forms. Last year, when I was on book tour, I got taken by a reporter for the Los Angeles Times to a Vons supermarket in downtown la, in a very poor area of downtown la. Vons is owned by Safeway, and I was really struck by the number of places in the store where soft drinks were sold. Remember, the more products you see, the more you buy. There was a big aisle devoted to soft drinks that you can see here, and soft drinks at the end of that aisle. There was a wall of soft drinks at the entrance when you came in. So it was the first thing you saw before you got to the produce section. There were soft drinks at the end of another aisle. There were soft drinks at the end of another aisle. There were soft drinks at the end of another aisle, there were soft drinks at the end of another aisle, and there were soft drinks at the end of another aisle and a platform of soft soft drinks on which they had garden furniture displayed. You could not go into that store without buying soft drinks, not easily, because you saw them a lot. And I asked the produce manager of that store whether they had any organic vegetables. And the produce manager didn't know, couldn't answer that question, but it was Safeway and they had just introduced their big organic line. They had organic vegetables there, but he didn't even know it. There's also a pricing strategy connected with that. And in this pricing strategy, a 2 liter bottle of soft drink goes for less than 3 cents per ounce. But if you want the 8 ounce cans that are going to have many fewer calories, you have to pay more than 10 cents an ounce for them. And I once asked supermarket managers why they had such a sharp demarcation between the sizes. I didn't think those cans could possibly cost that much. And they said, well, if people want smaller sizes, they ought to be willing to pay for them. Interesting philosophy. So I haven't said anything up until now about the obvious way in which companies sell food, which is through advertising. But there's about $36 billion worth of advertising, advertising for food and beverages in this country every year. About a third of that goes for what is measurable, which means it goes through advertising agency and agencies and is reported to Advertising Age, and that's radio, television, print, in these days, the Internet. But then for every dollar spent that way, there's another $2 that are spent on things like slotting fees and coupon code campaigns and point of purchase things and trade shows and stuff like that. $36 billion is a number that's too big for me to understand. You may be able to understand it, but it's too big for me to comprehend. So let's look at a smaller one. A mere $32 million, which was Kellogg's 2005 budget for direct media marketing for Cheez Its, just for Cheez itself. Every single nationally advertised product has an advertising budget just for direct media. Somewhere between 10 and $150 million a year, depending on what the product is. McDonald's has advertising a direct media budget of $1.2 billion a year. So $32 million just for Cheez Its. I can assure you that the entire budget of the federal government for nutrition education is less than 10% of that on an annual basis, if that much. So there's a huge amount of money that goes into advertising junk food. Now, I have some sympathy for what food companies are subjected to these days because they are, as Michelle Simon says in her book Appetite for Profit, which is a manual of how to fight food, the food industry, that food companies are under enormous pressure from advocates, people like me, who are advocating for children's health, from regulators, from lawyers dying to sue them, and from Wall street, which puts endless pressure on them to make more money faster. And their response has been either to do nothing, to ignore it, to deny it, or as I'm going to be talking about, to make products that are healthier, or to attack their critics and to fight back. And I'm not going to say so much about that. But if you're interested in how they fight back, you can go on my website, I put foodpolitics.com I put all that stuff up there. So let me just say a word about denial. Here's denial in action. This was a statement made by the guy who's the head of Kentucky Fried Chicken. So he just says, you know, don't pay any attention to this. This is just these weird people who are complaining about this. Okay, that's his point of view. But most of food companies have taken questions about health very seriously in recent years. And they use nutrition and health as a means to sell products. And that's really what I want to concentrate on. Companies didn't used to be able to use health to sell products because the Food and Drug Administration said that if they were making a health claim on a food package, they were advertising it as a drug. And if they were advertising it as a drug, it had to be treated like a drug. And they had to do clinical trials to prove that Cheerios reduced heart disease risk. And if you just give it a moment's thought, you can imagine that that probably wouldn't produce very impressive results from a statistical standpoint. But starting in 1990, Congress, when it passed the bill that put the nutrition facts label on food products, cut a deal with the food industry, which didn't want to do that, and said, okay, we'll force you to disclose on food labels how much fat's in the product, how many calories are in the product, but we will allow health claims on food products, and they ordered the Food and Drug Administration to begin approving health claims. And so these are some FDA approved health claims. Soy will help reduce heart disease and cancer. Cheerios will reduce cholesterol, and so forth and so on. Well, over the years, the FDA has been forced to relax and relax and relax its standards so that now everything has a health claim. And now fruits and vegetables, which are basically healthy, feel like they have to fight back and have health claims on them. And I just got this postcard from Ocean Mist Artichokes, which is now advertising itself as an antioxidant powerhouse because it's got antioxidants. Well, all fruits and vegetables have antioxidants. So this is really silly. But that's what they feel like they have to do to compete. Here's an advertisement I picked up a couple of weeks ago that I thought was amusing for Vitamin Water. Vitamin Water is sugar and vitamin supplemented water. And they had this front page ad on a local handout thing and they're now advertising Vitamin Water as being better for you than orange juice because it's got less sugar. It's not. Here's a standard Kellogg's cereal with five health claims on it. One is, it's got those little tokens up in the upper right hand corner are sort of self congratulatory statements of what the company thinks is good about it. Then you're smart. If you eat it, it'll make your heart healthy. It lowers both blood pressure and cholesterol. And it's got an endorsement from the American Heart association, even though Sugars are listed 11 times in the ingredient list. Here's another one. I just got this one last month. Frosted shredded wheats that are now a diet aid. Why diet hungry? You can lose six pounds in two weeks. And in fact you can if you follow their diet plan, which is to substitute one serving of this cereal for two meals a day. And that ought to do it if you don't overcompensate on the third meal. Companies throughout the stores are self endorsing. They set up their own criteria for self endorsement of the healthy qualities of what the products are. And here's PepsiCo, which has its smart spot made easy. They've decided which of their product lines qualify for this spot. And here's Kraft, which has a sensible solution on a product that nobody would consider to be a health food. It says it's an excellent source of calcium because it's got cheese in it, but it's got a quarter. This product alone has a full ounce of sugars and a quarter of the day's allotment of saturated concentrated fat and sodium. No nutritionist would accuse this of being a health food, but the company claims it as such. Now, a supermarket chain in the Northeast a couple of years ago set up a group of independent scientists to advise it about how to set up criteria for putting one, two or three stars on products, depending on how healthy the products were. And they went through 27,000 products and applied those criteria to 27,000 products in the store and discovered that less than one quarter of the products in the store qualified for even one star by independently organized criteria. And of those 25% or less than 25%, most of them were fruits and vegetables in the produce section. So the minute you get into the center aisles, you're into junk food territory. And there's a lot of junk food out there. Now, Safeway, I mentioned earlier, developed its own organic line last year. Beautifully designed packages. And they have organic carrots and organic yogurt and organic milk, which are fine products, but they also have organic frozen burritos, not my taste, macaroni and cheese, not a health food, and fruit flavored cereal, which has no fruit in it. So just because it's organic doesn't mean it's particularly healthy. And they make they're now organic snack foods for children. And my feeling is an organic junk food is still a junk food, even if the ingredients are organic. But this brings me to the whole question of marketing to children, which brings us into another realm because you can always argue that adults need to exercise personal responsibility, but kids can't really do that. And kids marketing, Marketing to children is not something that people like me are just whining about. But the Institute of Medicine, which is a think tank in Washington that advises the government, did a big report a year ago on marketing to children in which they documented the size of the research enterprise that is specifically devoted to selling foods directly to kids. There is such a research enterprise, the kinds of methods that they use, which are pretty draconian, how much money they spent on marketing to kids, the sales of the products that come back as a result. Remember cheeses, the effects on requests and the effects on kids health. And they came out with exactly the result that you would expect, which is that marketing works. They reviewed an enormous number of papers and there are three reasons why companies want to market to children. The first is brand loyalty. The idea is if you become attached to a brand early in life, you will stick with that brand through life. The second is the pester factor, and that's what the marketing to kids industry calls it. The the object of the game is to get kids to pester their parents for the products. And if you're ever in a supermarket and are watching a mom with a two year old wandering around, you get to see this in action. And also they not only want kids to pester their parents, but to do it in a really sophisticated way. But the third one is the one that troubles me the most, and that is what I call kids foods. The idea is to try to convince kids that they're supposed to eat their own foods. They're not supposed to eat what adults eat. They're supposed to eat foods that come in packages with cartoons on them. Unidentified Food objects in funny colors and shapes. And this is, I think, so subversive of parental authority that it is reason enough for parents to be really concerned about what companies are doing. So there's been a lot of pressure on companies to try to do something about it. And most of the large food companies have said that they're not going to market to kids in the same way that they used to do that. And so I want to show you just a few examples of the ways in which companies are changing their product mix. Here's a craft product, a sensible solution. They've added vitamins to macaroni and cheese to turn it into a health food. We can ask whether kids are vitamin deficient in this country. They're not. But it makes it look like it's a health food. And the kids can go up and say, see, it's got all these good things in it. Buy it. Here's an example. This is also a craft. Kraft is owned by Altria. Altria owns Philip Morris. I don't know. They learn a lot from each other, the cigarette and food companies. But this, these two boxes of cereal were bought by one of my graduate students on the same day in two different stores, though. And the one on the left has about a tablespoon of sugar and zero grams of fiber. The one on the right has a half a teaspoon less sugar per serving. And they have added 3 grams of polydextrose, which is an artificial fiber. So they can claim that it's a high fiber cereal and they're advertising it as such and it qualifies as a sensible solution. Here's one, A smart choice from Pepsico. And this is a product made specifically for kids. And I show it so that you can see the ingredient list on it. Anytime you see an ingredient list like that, that means it's highly processed. Now, I haven't said anything about activity and extra exercise. I do think it's important. But companies love the idea of activity because it deflects attention from the kind of food and the calories that they're doing. So this is McDonald's. A brochure I picked up in McDonald's a couple of weeks ago showing Ronald McDonald being active. And then I've shown that on the same page as a McDonald's that's in a children's children's hospital in Pennsylvania. And they had this sign on. It doesn't say anything about activity there. And then Shrek is being active. In fact, Shrek is so active that the government has recruited Shrek to do a physical activity program for kids. Be a real player. And some people are so shocked by that that the New York Times wrote an editorial a few weeks ago saying that if you eat the way Shrek does, it's no wonder that he looks the way he does. And of course, for kids, this must be very confusing because the side panel of this box of Shrek cereal says eat your greens. But this is what the cereal looks like. It's one of those candy fiberless cereals. Anyway, it's all very confusing out there. And it can be understood as desperate attempts by food companies to try to sell junk food food in a very, very overheated environment. And while companies are trying to appear to do the right thing, they are working behind the scenes to defend their first amendment rights to market foods directly to children. So that's kind of the situation that we're in. And I would be depressed about it, except that I think that there is so much happening around food in this country that's positive that I actually see it as a new social movement. And the social movement isn't organized and it's not coordinated. It's very grassroots from the bottom up. It's individuals doing things, it's companies doing things, and it's lots and lots of people doing lots of different things. It's going to be really interesting to see where it goes. But this was Senator Tom Harkin who is leading the anti marketing to children movement. And he had a press conference a few years ago in which he made the very clear association between Shrek marketing to kids and the way Joe Camel used to market cigarettes to kids. Another aspect is what's called the good, clean, fair, slow movement. Slow food movement. Good food means food that is healthy for you. Clean food is food that is clean for the environment. Fair food means that the people who produce the food are paid adequately. And Slow food is part of this Italian run international organization that is with the purpose of trying to encourage local artisanal food producers to make really great food slowly. It's the opposite of fast food. The organic movement is a big piece of this. And notice how these are all framed in movement terms. Organics are the fastest growing system segment of the food industry. In fact, they're the only growing segment of the food industry. Remember, there's too much food, and so everybody has their eye on organics. And to the extent that the organic standards are maintained, I think this will be a trend that is very, very positive. One that puzzles me, and that kind of surprised me, was the animal welfare movement, which used to to be the province of extremist groups like People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. It's now gone completely mainstream. And groups like the Union of Concerned Scientists, Pew foundation center for Science in the Public Interest, other groups that never used to be interested in animal welfare issues are now very seriously trying to get companies to change the way they raise farm animals in order to do. Because if farm animals were raised in a healthier way, it would be better for them and better for us. The local food movement is another one. When local food hits the COVID of Time magazine, you know it's mainstream. And I wish that Time magazine hadn't phrased this as a dichotomy between organics and local food. I wish they had something about both. I don't see why they can't be both. But mainstreaming of local agriculture and local foods, also part of this incredible movement. The number of farmers markets, for example, which is trackable pretty easily, has more than doubled in the last 10 years or so, and they're just booming. And then I think one of the most important ones is what's going on in public schools and in private schools. But the school food movement, a lot of that has been spearheaded by people in Berkeley like Ann Cooper and Alice Waters, who are trying to change the old school lunch program into something that's much more healthy for kids and for the environment and for everybody else. And again, it's not just advocates that are doing this, but the Institute of Medicine came out on April 23rd with a new report on nutrition standards for food security in schools, in which they just said, get the junk food out of school. Period, End of story. And also mentioned one of my favorite issues, which is that every school, they said every school will have a source of clean, potable water available to children at no cost, because there's been this big trend to try to get rid of school drinking fountains and make the kids buy bottled water. So a lot of people think this is very elitist. It is in some places, but even the New York City school system, where there are 1200 schools with a Lot of really, really poor kids has hired a chef to try to improve it. And he's doing a great job, school by school, trying to improve what kids are eating. And finally, the city health movement, with New York City banning trans fats and requiring calorie labeling on food menus in order to help people get a better idea of what it is they're supposed to be eating. So I see this as an enormous movement that combines personal responsibility with social responsibility for personal responsibility. In supermarkets, I have these sort of semi facetious rules. You know, you don't buy anything with more than five ingredients or anything you can't pronounce. And you don't buy junk food if you don't want kids eating it. And then for those of you who are eating out all the time, you can deal with the food service by, you know, trying to eat smaller portions and sharing entrees and fighting the waiter. Remember, the purpose of waiters in restaurants is to get you to eat more, not less. And if you don't want kids eating junk food, don't take them to places that serve it. And then on the policy side, which is what I think ultimately will make a greater difference, because what you really want is to create a food environment that will promote healthful eating without anybody having to give it a moment's thought. In other words, making healthful eating the default. For this, I think we have to look at policies that deal with marketing to foods and marketing to kids in school meals, doing something about the pricing structure, proportion sizes, so smaller portions become the default. And then I think there are lots of policies in communities at the national level. We have to do something about farm supports. The farm bill is up for reauthorization this year, and there are a lot of people who are working on that. And then ultimately, if we want our legislation, regulators making decisions that are in favor of public health rather than corporate health, you need to change the way that campaign financing laws are done, because right now they are beholden to corporations. And then I think as a country, we could review the way our investment system works and see if we can get Wall street to reduce some of the pressure that it puts on companies and maybe have somewhat longer term strategies for corporate growth. I think that might help all the way around. And those are the kinds of things that I talk about in my book what to Eat, which I think you've just been given copies of. So I hope you enjoy reading it. And thanks for the opportunity to talk to you about this. Thanks. Does anyone have questions, comments, arguments?

I'm originally from Colorado and one of the reasons that I moved to California is because the availability of food out.

Here is so much better.

Good organic produce and local food and grass fed beef, that kind of thing. Do you have any suggestions for how to make good food available in the inner part of the.

Yeah, it's a huge. I mean, I come out to California and I cry when I walk into a supermarket because the food is so beautiful and it tastes so much better. One of the things I was really interested in when I was writing what to Eat, one of my first questions was how long does it take to get produce from California to a supermarket or one of those small stores in Manhattan? And the answer turned out to be be two weeks. Well, it's no wonder that it tastes the way it does and doesn't last in the refrigerator. I think it's coming and it's certainly coming to Cal. Certainly grass fed beef is coming to Colorado. I mean, without any question as there is a greater demand for it. The demand will drive. You know, you're not going to be eating locally grown in the middle of the frozen Midwest in December, but I'm not sure. Locally grown has to be the be all and end all. It has to be a trend and something that you care about for reasons of health, community and whatever reasons there are. But I think it's a supply and demand issue and there's no reason at all why you can't get better food in the Midwest or even in New York in the winter. Does it have to come from Chile? I don't think so. We could do a much better job of that. I think there are lots of people working on it. But the food out here is very good. You have no idea how lucky you are. What do you think of the vegetarian.

Diet versus one high in meat?

I think a vegetarian diet's great. Vegetarians are healthier than people who don't eat vegetarian diets. It's perfectly possible to eat a vegetarian diet and have it be excellent and healthful. It's great. I think a vegetarian diet is a complete non issue. There's nothing to talk about. Would it be healthier than one that. Oh, it is. There's plenty of research that shows that vegetarian diets are healthy. People who eat vegetarian diets have lower rates of heart disease, cancer and a whole lot of other conditions than people who eat a lot of meat. Loads of research on that.

Is there a way to eat out every day and still eat healthy?

Depends on where you eat. I'm very interested to see what's going on here because I was very impressed when I was here four years ago that at that time, the food was set up in every possible way to get people to eat more calories than they needed. And, you know, you're young and you use personal, active transportation to get here. And it's probably not a problem. But I was floored by the thing that's open all night long where you could get any breakfast cereal, any power bar, any junk food. Is that still here? It's right there. I'm going to have to look. I was really impressed that every single way in which it was set up four years ago, free food, that's an incentive to eat more. Food available all day long, that's an incentive to eat more. You have to learn how to manage that. If you're in a place like this, one of the first things you have to learn how to manage is the availability of calories at all times of day or night. And I work in a department in which we have a kitchen and there's a lot of cooking going on, and so there's a lot of food. And the new faculty who come always gain 15 pounds in the first couple of years, like the freshman 15. Right. And they have to learn how to manage it. So you gotta learn how to manage it. You can pick healthier things to eat with lower calories. You can try not to eat, eat all day long. You can get over the snacks and just not feel like you have to have them. But it's hard. I would have a really hard time working in a place that had free food available all the time. It would be a big effort to keep the weight down.

I want to rephrase my question slightly. So I've been here for seven years and I haven't gained £50 the last paycheck. So I find the food here very tasty and very healthy. One day, even when I leave Google, I'm gonna have a hard time surviving.

The outside world because the food is so much worse. Yes.

Is there anywhere like outside of Google where we can get healthy, good and tasty food on a consistent places outside of.

Yeah, you have to find them. You have to look for places that sell that you get to explore lots of of restaurants to do that. Fortunately, you know, if you like eating Asian food, that's a pretty easy way to get a lot of vegetables into your diet. You know, if they aren't putting too much oil in it, then the calories are okay. But you just, you just have to look and be careful and watch out for portion size because that's where the calories are. And maybe you're one of these lucky people who doesn't gain weight or you're active enough so you burn it off, though. But I would have a hard time here. I'd have to watch it. Yes.

Actually, to answer your question, there's a Slow Food guide to the Bay Area. This is a book you can get on Amazon.

Oh, that's a good idea. Yeah.

I have a question for you. So I have a background in nutrition, and it's really difficult when the FDA and the USDA are manipulating figures and studies, for example, like how much protein you really need in the day, how much dairy is actually necessary, or how much calcium you're actually even absorbing for the dairy. So where are really good, factual sources of data that isn't manipulated or skewed?

Read my book. You know, I get asked that question in lots of different ways. And, you know, I say, well, me anyway, try my book and see, because I was very careful with the references. I do think there are government sources that are incredibly reliable. The Institute of Medicine is really pretty reliable. And the difficulty with. I mean, you had mentioned the amount of protein that people need that's really pretty well established by the Institute of Medicine. And it's roughly half of what most Americans eat. So what's required, that's one of the reasons why vegetarian diets are just fine, is the amount of protein that they provide is much closer to what actual needs are than what most people are eating. The business about dairy foods I discuss at great length in this book, and I talk about the lobbying effort, efforts of the National Dairy Council in trying to make people believe that dairy is an essential food. Even people who are intolerant to lactose and can't really handle dairy products, they are trying very hard to get people to eat more dairy food. So it depends on who the source is. If the source is a food company, the purpose of that food company is to try to sell more. More of the product that company makes. So that would not be a particularly reliable source. But most of the government agencies are pretty reliable. It's just mostly they express things in euphemisms and don't say them very directly. But I don't think they're lying. I think they're just being euphemistic. So you have to read between the lines. You know, the government can't tell people to eat less because if it did, it would have to tell people what to eat less of, and that would be politically impossible. Just Couldn't do that. So see what you think. I don't know what else to say about that except you should be skeptical about everybody, even me. Oh, you can shout. I'll repeat it. I can hear you.

I have a question about what the reaction to your book and your talks have been outside of California and the coast where the food movement seems much more progressive.

Yeah, it depends on who I'm talking to. I do a lot of speaking to food industry groups a lot. And in fact, I met the owners of Google at Fortune magazine meetings and at the World Economic Forum and places like that. And I speak to restaurant executives, supermarket executives. Who else have I talked to? I don't know. I'm invited to do a lot of that. It's never very pleasant. Their reaction is always, why isn't this a matter of personal responsibility? We don't have any responsibility for this. We're not pointing a gun to people's heads saying, you have to eat our food. This is a matter. We're just giving people what they want anyway. It's not a matter of food, it's a matter of physical activity. Isn't the real problem that people aren't active enough? Those kinds of reactions? They get very, very, very angry. And I spoke to a group of restaurant chain executives, the owners of places like Dardens and Applebee's and restaurants in that sort of mid level, quick service restaurants. And you know, I gave a sort of similar talk. But I also went down there with an agenda. I have an agenda for them and it's a threefold agenda. Number one is to serve only healthful kids meals, all kids meals. The default children's meal will be a healthful meal for a child. If parents want to give their kids junk food, that's fine, they can do that. I want them to give a price break for a smaller portion and to make a smaller portion the default. If people want larger portions, they can pay a little more for them. And I want them to stop funding a group called the center for Consumer Freedom, which is a group that is devoted to personal choice. And they're a public relations arm of the cigarette restaurant. Alcohol Industries. And the restaurant industry hides behind them. They're attack dogs. And the restaurant industry industry hides behind them. And they just go ballistic. You know, they just go absolutely ballistic. You're trying to put us out of business. If we served healthy kids meals, if we served smaller portions, we'd go out of business. We're just giving consumers what they want. And I can talk until I'm blue. In the face about how the environment. How the research shows that the environment influences. Influences food choice. Nobody believes it. You know, Brian wansink, who did the super bowl popcorn experiment? Those were his students that were eating popcorn out of bowls. And they didn't believe that they were influenced by anything as, you know, as simple as the size of the bowl. They just didn't believe it. And yet he was able to take them, to have them watch television while they were doing it and mindlessly eat. And they ate more calories without even knowing it. We're completely unaware of those kinds of social cues, which is why it's so important to change the environment, which is why I'm so interested in how the environment works here. You know, you don't have to pay for it. That's an incentive to eat more. It's here 24 7. That's an incentive to. To eat more. And I would, you know, I think a lot of people would find it very hard. You know, most of you are young and you're active and your weight isn't as much of a problem as it becomes later in life. Alas, you know, one of the really unhappy things about getting old is your metabolism goes down and you can't eat as much as you. It's the dirtiest trick of all. Never mind frailty, you can't eat as much. It's no fun at all. And so I don't know. I accept invitations to corporate groups. When I went to the world economic forum, I talked to a group of food company executives, and I'm talking about CEO level executives. And one of them was the head of general mills. And he said, what are you talking about? All this stuff about, about junk food cereal. How else are you going to get kids to drink milk? So the purpose of junk food cereal is to get kids to drink milk. I didn't know that. That's what I learned at the world economic forum. So, you know, I mean, the companies are not evil. The people who are working for the companies are not evil. Many of them are genuinely interested in the health of their consumers and the health of the people who are buying their products. They're stuck. They're stuck. And so food company executives say, what do you want us to do? Well, that's hard because what I want them to do is all negatives. I can't think of any positives. I want them to stop marketing to junk food. Start marketing junk food to kids. I want them to stop making junk food for kids. I want them to stop fighting. Advocates who are Trying to get soft drinks out of schools. You know, they're all negatives. I want them to make healthier foods for kids, that kind of thing. And they just say they can't do that and stay in business. So that's a very, very interesting problem, and it's not one that I have a solution for, you know, and I think that companies, the reason why food companies are in a frenzy over obesity is that they know what its implications are for their bottom line. I want them to not have to grow every quarter. That's unfortunate. I mean, they're stuck. They have to grow every quarter. That's why Wall street is such an important factor in rising rates of obesity. You know, who would think of this? You would never think of that, but it's true. So I can't wait to see what's going on here and see how this works. And I haven't said anything about physical activity. When I was here four years ago, I was in another building. And the halls of that building were lined with everybody's personality, transportation equipment, bicycles, scooters, skateboards, segways, you know, those kinds of things. And I thought, well, that's a good insurance policy against putting on excess weight. And you're lucky enough to live in a place where you can do that kind of thing. But physical activity isn't enough. It's not enough for most people. And the example that I like to give is that a 20 ounce soft drink, the kind that is in high school vending machines, those hold 275 calories of soft drink. And a rough rule of thumb is it takes a mile to work off 100 calories of either walking or running. And if that's the case, then that's two and three quarter miles of walking or running to work off the calories in one 20 ounce soda. You know, in a monster burger, which is 1400 calories, that's 14 miles of exercise. It's not enough. You got to do both. So that's why the food side of the equation is so important. Okay. Yeah.

We haven't really talked about fish at all.

And I was wondering.

Some people think it's a really healthy food. And there's a lot of toxins.

I have five chapters in what to eat about fish. The fish section of the supermarket was so complicated that it took five chapters to work out what I call the dilemmas and quandaries around fish. With the most obvious one being that it's a big source of omega 3 fats, which are good fats, but has methylmercury and PCBs, which are toxins that you don't want to have. My bottom line on it is that the fish situation is so complicated that you can't do it without a crib sheet. And fortunately the Monterey Bay Aquarium produces them. And you can go online at the Monterey Bay Aquarium website and just download their fish lists for different parts of the country. And this will tell you which ones are endangered, which ones have toxins in them, which ones have, you know, are the best ones eat in blue oceans or oceans alive, I think it calls it's called also has crib sheets on how to do it. But there are certain fish that are more you want to eat low on the fish food chain and then you don't have to worry about very much. So you don't want to eat sharks, you don't want to eat tile fish. You don't want to eat these big predatory fish because those are the ones that accumulate toxins. And you particularly don't want to do that if you're pregnant or likely to become pregnant because the growing fetus is most sensitive to the toxins that are in feed. But fish are the wild west of the supermarket because there are lots of rules about what they're supposed to do. And hardly anybody does it. And they don't know they're supposed to identify where the fish are caught. Fish from some waters are cleaner than fish from other waters. The ones from Chile are better than the ones from the North Sea, for example. But it's very hard to keep it straight. And I can't remember the names of all those fish. There's just too much, many of them. So I get a card from the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Mbaq.org I think it is, or maybe it's. Com. Can't remember. Anyway, five chapters. Enjoy them. We're just about out of time, but thanks for coming and. My pleasure, My pleasure. Thank you.