Conversation between Vishen Lakhiani and Eric Edmeades about how sugar is pervasive in processed foods and how food manufacturers and political lobbying drive unhealthy dietary patterns. Key claims in this chunk: a high proportion of supermarket foods contain sugar (Vishen cites 74%; Eric references ranges up to 75–80% and not less than 60%), industry-funded research (e.g., Nestle, Kellogg influencing Malaysian nutrition research), lobbying and tariff manipulation (example: U.S. sugar tariffs favoring a few growers), and a cited Dairy Management Company lobbying budget of $165 million/year. The speakers propose consumer action (voting with purchases) and grassroots changes (one butcher removing sugar from sausages) as remedies.
Chapters
If you look at common American holidays, so many of them have been hijacked by food manufacturers. How is the resurrection of Jesus? What has that got to do with chocolate bunnies, Right, which is what is common at Easter. How is it that this ancient holiday that evolved into Halloween turned into something where we get our kids to stuff themselves with Snickers and Mars and M and M bars? And so food companies are sneaky, and they hijack our lifestyle through commercials, through habit creation. And that's one of the reasons why obesity is rising across the world. Eric, you speak a lot about this stunning statistic, and correct me if I'm wrong, 74% of the foods in the average supermarket contain sugar.
Yeah. Depending on what you read, I've read a number of different reports, some with more credibility, some with less, but they never are. Less than 60% in some state, as high as 75, 80% of production food is containing some kind of sugar, corn syrup and all the artificial sweeteners and so on. And when you really think about it, our ancestors would have faced a life where the vast majority of what was available to them on any given day did not have sugar in it at all. So your pancreas was never designed for that volume or that regularity of eating sugar. But you have to ask yourself, why would the food manufacturers want to put the sugar in there? I mean, it's a cost. Hell, if people don't need it, they should take it out, save themselves some money. But that's not really the way it works. They're looking at it from a different perspective, and that is that our ancestors, when fruit became available to them, they ate it in abundance because it was going to be there for a short period of time. In other words, Vishen, you and I could be walking along in the bush and we stumble upon a sour plum tree. We grab a couple pieces, we eat it. Our stomachs, normally, if we don't live in the Western civilized world, our stomachs are only about the size of our fist. How many pieces of fruit do we need? Four, Five? We would eat four or five, we would be satiated, and we would walk on inside our body. What would be happening is this sugar would come in and our pancreas would start producing insulin. And so the insulin would break down the sugar, and suddenly we would have a moment of insulin shock where we had not enough sugar, and suddenly we'd have a craving, and I or Vishen would turn to the other one and go, you want to go get another one? And we'd walk back to that tree, and we would eat that tree into oblivion. And our stomachs would expand the way they're meant to for weird circumstances like that. And that system was there to help make sure that we got the abundance we were supposed to get right before winter was going to come along and threaten our existence through starvation. The problem is that food manufacturers understand this. And so what they're doing is putting the sugar in there to stimulate your appetite. They put it in there to make you buy more. Look, we've had our fair share of time as marketers here in the world, and we know that marketing can be done in a lot of different ways. If you want to boost your revenues, we. One of the ways you can do it is by getting more clients. But if you're a food manufacturer, you might have all the clients you can get. So the next way to try to make more money is try to make more money per client. Well, to make more money per client, you're going to have to get them to eat more. If you're going to get them to eat more, I suggest two systems. Take the nutrition out of the food, keep them hungry, and put the sugar in the food to stimulate their hunger. And then. Well, but that couldn't be happening because if that was happening, the vast majority of the world would be approaching obesity.
And you know why? One of the things, why it's so important for us to get wildfit out to the world is that my country, Malaysia, recently got the distinction of being the fattest country in Asia. The fattest country in Asia, and a large part of it is food manufacturing companies, Nestle, Kellogg, they fund the Malaysian nutritional research programs by the government. So any research document that goes out that tries to attempt to suggest how people should eat has to be vetted by Kellogg, vetted by Nestle. And it's really disturbing how food companies can even hijack governments. What are your views on that? What can we as the public do to help create a better, healthy world for our kids?
We're in a tough place. Capitalism and democracy are. They just don't work. And the fact of the matter is they are the best possible financial and, you know, people management systems of a bad lot. We haven't figured out a way that works. And so one of the problems we have today is that there's a tremendous incentive toward profitability without any thought to what the impact of that is. So as an example, in the United States, the sugar growers. The sugar growers lobby the government, by the way, lobby is just a really fancy way of saying bribe and manipulate. You know, they just bribe and manipulate the government to put sugar tariffs in place to stop sugar from coming in from Costa Rica and the Dominican Republic and other places, forcing the Third World into deeper poverty in the meantime, raising prices of sugar in America for five or six big sugar growers. Now, the reason this works is because there's only five or six of them. They can afford to go out and hire a lobbyist that can make the law changing for them, that can change the laws for them and cost every American an extra $10 a year in sugar. The average American doesn't care about the $10. In the meantime, they get to make more money. Now, that doesn't particularly speak to people's health, but the same thing is happening with health all the time. We're in a position today where it is profitable to produce food that isn't healthy, because the less healthy the food is, the more hungry you are, the more hungry you get. And so when they go out to manipulate the system. Look, look, I don't want to go too far down the dairy hole, but I am going to say this. Years ago, I wrote a book about dairy products, and I did a bunch of research, and I found that there's a company called the Dairy Management Company, run by a guy at the time called Paul Rovi. Why this sticks with me 10 years later, I'm not sure. But 10 years ago, his annual budget for lobbying, bribery and manipulation, in my opinion, his annual budget for lobbying to carry out his manifesto, which was to influence lawmakers and educators to increase the demand for dairy products was $165 million a year. Give me $165 million a year and I will convince you Coca Cola is good for you. And that's what they've been doing. And the problem is, is that the current system is heavily flawed. What we can do. What we can do is vote with your dollars and your rubles and your pesos and your euros, because when you stop buying the garbage, they stop making the garbage. That's the only way. I thought a lot about this. I seriously considered getting involved in politics. I really did. I thought, I'm going to jump in there. And I thought, no. I did some research into that, and I thought, oh, good. I work really hard to get the job. And then two years into the job, I have to stop doing the job to spend the next two years to keep my job. I didn't want to do that. So I started thinking, how can I influence this? The best way? And it's through you, it's through the extended army. Because, look, this is anecdotal, but one of our clients got on a wildfit call with us one day, and they shared the cutest story, and that was that they'd gone to their local butcher where they were getting the most ethically produced sausages that they could. And so they were going in there. But the problem is, most sausages have sugar and syrup or something like that in them. So she goes into the butcher and says, can you do a special batch for me with no sugar in it? He's like, no problem. So she keeps going every couple of weeks and getting her special batch of sausages. One day she walks in and the butcher says, I'm sorry, I don't have your special batch anymore. And he says, why not? Or she says, why not? And he goes, well, because there's no sugar in any of our sausages anymore. She says, why? And he goes, well, because you kept making this custom order. And then another guy who's doing this crazy wildfit thing, he kept putting in this crazy order. And then my partner and I, we started asking ourselves, why are we putting sugar in there? Sugar and meat. Why are we doing that? And they then made a batch for her, and they tasted it, and they realized it had nothing to do with flavor. And so they changed it. One butcher at a time, one grocery store at a time, one chain at a time, they changed it. And when they changed it, they then changed the choices for the people that live in that neighborhood, because now those people in the neighborhood don't even know that they're now eating sausages without the sugar. That's how we're going to do this together.
