Dr. Robert Lustig The Hacking of the American Mind at the San Francisco Public Library

okay thank you I I'm just the messenger Jill Thank You Jana thank you for that kind introduction thank you for inviting me I also want to thank Melissa Riley who works at the West Portal branch of the yes uh very our this appealed for suggesting that we have this discussion tonight and I got to tell you I love it's a public library and so should you and the reason I love it is because they have fiction and they have nonfiction but there's one thing they don't have they don't have fake news which is fiction masquerading as nonfiction but tonight we're going to talk about the fourth group that is the nonfiction that masquerades as fiction and what I'm going to argue is that you're all caught in the matrix a fictitious Assembly of things that you don't know about that have been hidden from you and I'm going to try to expose that over the course of the next hour and a half so I do have some disclosures I did write these two books one we're talking about tonight I am the chief science officer of this nonprofit called eat real which certifies restaurants hospital cafeterias schools that serve real food with the idea that by doing a bottom-up effort we can actually teach people what is real food and try to get processed food out of our lives because that's where the big problem is and also I am the chief medical officer of a for-profit company called Slendy which is developing specific products to try to mitigate the metabolic risks associated with processed food because as much as I would like it processed food ain't never going away because there's just too much money involved but as long as health hangs in the balance we have to do something to try to mitigate it we have some ideas on how we might be able to do that and so that's a for-profit company and I you know stand by that okay so that's what those are my disclosures so I have a very modest agenda tonight hopefully by the end of the evening we will solve the healthcare crisis solve the social security crisis solve the opioid crisis solve the depression crisis which no one's talking about and make America happy again okay so we'll start here let's start with health care anybody know this guy anybody ever seen him before that's right Ezekiel Emanuel brother of Rahm Emanuel mayor of Chicago sorry I don't know that he's at University of Pennsylvania he's a bioethicists and hematologist oncologist and he's also the architect of Obamacare that's right well he wrote this article in the Atlantic three years ago now why I hope to die at 75 because he had to justify why Obamacare now to be honest with you if you read this article it's pretty horrible and the reason is horrible is because he misses the entire point not once in the entire article is the word diet ever mentioned we're gonna spend a lot of time on that as we go through this okay so I hope not to die at 75 I hope to die much later and hope be much healthier than our current 75 year-olds are and the reason is because I think I understand what's going on and I'm gonna try to convey that to you tonight so the question on our minds is did Obamacare deliver sorry move it closer oh okay because I is is that better okay did Obamacare deliver so Obamacare promised to put thirty two million sick people onto the rolls and believe it or not it's still the law of the land although the individual mandate is now gone which is going to create major problems the point is that President Obama told us that we could pay for this by providing preventative services that is by having everybody have access to medical care to their doctor that we could keep people healthier and out of the emergency room where costs are fifty times higher that's the idea so that creates cartoons like this the government can't make me buy health insurance on why would I when I can just go here and you'll pay for it and now that we've lost the individual mandate because of the tax reform bill in fact we'll be paying for it okay we will be paying for it because now they won't be paying for it so even worse well here's the fallacy of Obamacare in fact we didn't keep a people out of the emergency room there's been an actual uptick in emergency room visits to the point where health care plans had to increase their premiums by over 25 percent and three of the insurers left the exchanges entirely Aetna Humana and United which of course led to the election of 2016 I think you all remember that wasn't that long ago okay in fact if you look at what's going on in terms of the dollar amount it's been enormous a 100 billion dollar increase per year in just four years just for diabetes alone never mind everything else and 75% of all the healthcare dollars spent in this country are for chronic metabolic disease so you can see this is breaking the bank and if these people don't have to even pay for the individual mandate how in the world are we going to be able to provide health care trunk care which is not really there but is really there ultimately says this because this is Nik Mulvaney OMB director who says got diabetes your fault you brought it on yourself no health care for you like the Soup Nazi the point is that this is predicated on two inconvenient truths that no one wants to utter but I'm gonna uh Terr them the first is there is no medicalised prevention for chronic metabolic disease there's only treatment there's treatment for hypertension there's treatment for high lipids there's treatment for heart disease there's treatment for type 2 diabetes but there's no prevention no-one's talking about what it takes to prevent those diseases and until we prevent them we can't afford them this is a meta-analysis of type 2 diabetes prevention strategies that just came out about a month two months ago now okay and if you look at the diamond over here okay it is to the left of the identity line which means that it is statistically significant these prevention strategies work whether it be a lifestyle or whether it be drugs here's the problem here's the relative risk for lifestyle here's the relative risk for medicines so you say well that's good these things work but here's the real problem the number needed to treat the NNT which is the really important thing 25 you have to invoke treat or prevent 25 different people to be able to prevent one of them from going on to develop diabetes and currently we have a nine point four percent diabetes rate and a 40 percent pre-diabetes rate in this country if we have a number needed to treat of 25 for these strategies we ain't never going to catch up that's what this comes down to irrespective of whether these things quote work or not we can't do it the second inconvenient truth is you can't fix healthcare until you fix health and you can't fix health until you fix diet and you can't figures diet until you know what the hell is wrong and that's where I came in what the hell is wrong so this is what we thought was wrong everybody remember this 1984 it's all about dietary fat all about cholesterol all about heart disease get your cholesterol down everybody said get rid of the saturated fat etc etcetera you know that story ok so we did it and this is what happened instead this is the unintended consequence and this was from 2001 is now 2018 and it is 20 times worse here's the fiction it's on this slide any of you watch football ok about five years ago this was on every football game every telecast one of the commercials from Coca Cola a two-minute video called coming together and this is a direct quote from that video and said leading obesity we'll take action by all of us based on one simple common-sense fact all calories count no matter where they come from including Coca Cola and everything else with calories direct quote so as far as they're concerned you can get your calories from carrots or you can get your calories from cheesecake get your calories from coca-cola or you can get your calories from kumquats done that because it's the first law of thermodynamics which says energy can neither be created nor destroyed just shifted around which in human terms means energy balance therefore it's about calories in calories out therefore it's about diet and exercise therefore if you're fat it's your fault because these are two behaviors that you are presumably in charge of yourself therefore any calorie can be part of a balanced diet therefore don't pick on our calories go pick on somebody else's calories oh that comes from this simple mantra that a calorie is a calorie and after all it's common-sense law I don't believe in common-sense I believe in science I believe in data at ucsf we have a motto In God We Trust everyone else has to produce the data that's called truth as opposed to post truth which is what we have now and who is it that's been saying the calories of calorie well these guys familiar with all of them right they control 90% of the world's food 90% so they'll tell you it's about calories it's about obesity you get fat you get sick you get fat because you're a glutton and a sloth or your fault that's what they say so the question is is that true what do you think what does the science say so on this slide we have a scattergram obesity prevalence country-by-country on the x-axis and diabetes prevalence country-by-country on the y-axis and you would look at this scatter gram you say well very clearly dr. Lustig there there's clearly a correlation and there it is and indeed there is a correlation and I don't argue that this correlation the correlation is not concordance they're not the same because we have countries that are obese without being diabetic such as Iceland Mongolia Micronesia we also have countries that are diabetic without being obese such as India Pakistan and China India and China today have an 11% diet is rate we the fattest nation on earth have a 9.4% diabetes rate if it's about obesity how come the non obese countries have more diabetes than we do first problem second problem obesity is increasing worldwide by the rate the annualized amortization rate of two point seven eight percent per year over the past 40 years yet diabetes is increasing at the amortization rate per year of four point zero percent for those same years if diabetes is just a subset of the larger subgroup of obese persons then how can you explain the fact that the diabetes rates going up faster well you can't because ah maybe it's not true and finally here's another piece of data this is from JAMA and it's looking at the secular trend over time in diabetes cases in the United States here's the total here and we're gonna look at the right side here first okay so here is the rate of increase in the obese population a 25% increase in incidents per year within the obese population however there's also been a 25% increase in the incidence in the normal weight population - if diabetes is really about obesity how come the normal weight people are getting it just as fast problem number three this does not compute so this is the most important thing I'm going to tell you tonight here we have a Venn diagram of the entire US adult population okay 240 million total 30% obese in this circle that's 72 million 70 percent normal weight 168 million mutually exclusive circles everybody got that everyone in this in one of the two circles you got that right okay BMI over 30 BMI under 30 everybody's in one of them so here's the problem the medical profession the dietary profession the Institute of Medicine the National Institutes of Health the Surgeon General the White House Congress and the food industry say the follower 80% of those Opie's people 80% of those people with a BMI over 30 these 57 million people they're sick they're fat and they're sick and they're sick because they're fat and if they would only just diet and exercise we could solve this problem that's what they say garbage total complete trash everyone except me why is it garbage it's on the slide well it is true that 80% of 30% are metabolically I don't argue that but that means that 20% or not 20% are obese and healthy we actually have a name for them an H Oh metabolically healthy obese we study them to try to figure out how come they didn't gets it they will live a completely normal life died a completely normal age not cost the taxpayer a dime are not the problem of Obamacare they're just fat conversely and this is the important part 7 the 40% of the normal weight population 40% of 70% have the exact same diseases for the exact same reason as did the obese they're just not obese they get type 2 diabetes they get hypertension they get the lipid problems they get cardiovascular disease they get answer they get dementia too now they don't get it at the same prevalence eighty percent versus forty percent so obesity is without question a risk factor I don't argue that okay if you're obese you have a much greater chance of being sick than if you are normal weight I don't argue that that's true but turns out when you do the math there's actually more thin sick people than there are fat sick people and these are the ones who are saying it's their problem and when you do the math on the whole thing it's more than half the u.s. population which is what makes this a public health crisis and if thin people get it too how can it be about behavior they're not eating too much in exercising too little because their normal weight this does not look like behavior this looks like exposure this looks like cholera or influence or tuberculosis or something like that now I'm not saying it's an infection but it is an environmental exposure the question is what is the exposure that explains this how do thin people get sick - with the same chronic metabolic diseases that the fat people get that's the question for tonight and that's the question that no one in the medical profession and no one in Washington is answer asking or answering and that's the fiction and I'll prove it to you so here are two equally weighted people notice trunk fat 12.8 right there okay equally weighted people one of these people is healthy one of these people is sick which one's the sick one a or B I heard both B is the sick one hey he's just got big love handles not a subcutaneous fat or big but fat if you will okay turns out big butt fat isn't particularly dangerous might be unsightly in a bathing suit but not particularly dangerous whereas this guy he's got fat all around his organs intra-abdominal fat he's got a visceral fat big belly fat and everyone will tell you big belly fats worse than big butt fat yet they're equally weighted and we have a name for this it's called tophi tof i thin on the outside fat on the inside real medical term swear to God 1500 MEDLINE citations go look it up and it turns out it's not even the visceral fat it's worse than that it's even deeper than that so here is a metabolically healthy obese person mhm oh okay no joke so they're the love handles you see those now I want you to take a look at this guy's liver right there nice and dark notice dark 2.6 percent fat that's actually pretty good okay this guy has MHO this is a healthy obese person with a low liver fat now here's another fat fraction map on somebody who has metabolic syndrome now he has obesity you can see the love handles there take a look at his liver 24% liver fat this guy's got all the metabolic diseases that you know about type 2 diabetes fatty that's fatty liver that's what that is okay everybody would think flog Gras okay no difference okay and it looks the same looks the same under the microscope it looks the same in the autopsy pen okay it looks like foie gras well here is a thin person notice not too much in the way I love handles there but take a look at his liver 23% this person is just as sick as the person in the center thin thin sick fat sick fat healthy so my question to you sitting there now are you at OFI do you know how would you know would your doctor know how would he find out or she find out that's what we're gonna talk about so maybe you'll teach your doctor something which would be very good because most doctors don't know too much as I have found out the hard way in fact the fad hypothesis has actually been debunked and who debunked it first the American Heart Association yet if you go to the American Heart Association's website today it's still up there so this is from Ron Krause who is just across the bay Children's Oakland Research Institute head of the nutrition committee the aah a who they have debunked it but the aah a was so invested in this message they're having a hard time walking it back now they are walking it back and I was actually a member of the board of directors of the Bay Area iha and I'm proud to say that we have in fact walked it back but not every society has for instance the American Diabetes Association has not walked it back in fact they're still saying the same old thing so who do you trust who do you trust do you trust doctors or do you trust bankers I trust bankers and the reason I trust bankers is because they only have one directive to make money and they want to know what's going on in order to make money and so they can look at data with a clear eye without the bias that has come with the last 40 years and that was what happened at this with this report quote Credit Suisse Research Institute and it's called that the new health paradigm and they looked at all the data without medical bias and here's what they said a high intake of omega-6 fats as vegetable oils has not been proven as beneficial for our health and trans fats have been shown to have negative health effects the higher intake of vegetable oils and the increase in carbohydrate consumption in the last 3040 years are the two leading factors behind the high rates of obesity and metabolic syndrome in the United States saturated and monounsaturated fats are not exactly right couldn't agree more absolutely 100% and I had nothing to do with this report okay the bankers got it right because they looked at all the data and analyzed it without a bias because they won't know who to invest in in fact doctors are coming around and this is a editorial that was in JAMA I started on British journalist horse medicine sorry the another one coming from John written by my colleague Essene Malhotra who is a member of the NHL's NHS Health Trust in Britain read a read Berg who's here at UCSF who is the editor-in-chief of JAMA internal medicine and also Pascale Meyer who happens to be the editor-in-chief of BMJ open heart not exactly lightweights and they came out and said saturated fat does not clog the arteries coronary heart disease is a chronic inflammatory condition the risk of which can be effectively reduced by healthy lifestyle interventions I couldn't agree more it's not about the saturated fat 40 years of saturated fat being taken out of our diet and all we did was get sicker in fact the saturated fat is irrelevant it does have to do with omega-3s and omega-6s I don't argue that we're going to talk about that in a little bit it has to do with sugar and refined carbohydrate which drives insulin resistance and systemic inflammation and we think we know actually what the compound in the liver that causes this is but I'm gonna not tell you because we haven't proven it yet but we think we know and that's what's driving all of this but that's not what we've been told and it's still not what several societies such as the American Diabetes Association is saying today so who do you trust in fact we wrote this editorial that came out two months ago the cholesterol and calorie hypotheses are both dead it's time to focus on the real culprit insulin resistance the fact that insulins levels are high but the insulin is not working and because it's not working the pancreas has to make extra and it turns out the insulin itself is a bad actor in this story the goal is to bring your insulin levels down and how do you do that well you get rid of the fatty liver and how do you do that that's where we're going okay everybody with me turns out that fatty liver is worse than fat anywhere else in your body and the reason is because that's the organ that the insulin works on is the liver anybody knowing in anatomy and he turns out the pancreas drains right into the liver now the rest of the body it goes artery organ vein heart but there are two places in the body where COEs artery Oregon vein ii oregon ii vein heart' series okay it's called a portal system there are two portal systems in the body one is hypothalamus pituitary and we know why that is that's as an endocrinologist that's what I do and pancreas liver also endocrinologist that's what I do the reasons because delivers the primary target of insulin action and when your liver sick you're sick and that liver fat that I showed you before it's the driver and what is the driver of the liver fat sugar sure and that's what we have shown in a series of papers that have come out over the last couple of about year and a half now and you've probably seen them reported in The New York Times The Washington Post and you know on TV and for good reason okay these are the three papers that we've had in obesity atherosclerosis gastroenterology and here's what we've shown so when you consume a lot of sugar you end up with a lot of liver fat and you also end up with a lot of triglyceride in your bloodstream called VLDL very low density lipoproteins now your doctor ignores those because he doesn't know what to do with them and he doesn't even know where they came from everyone thinks LDL is the problem turns out LDL is not nearly as dangerous as VLDL the LDL has a hazard risk ratio for heart disease of 1.8 lvo has a hazard risk ratio for heart disease of 1.3 so it's at least 50% more dangerous and probably more and your doctor isn't doing a damn thing about it he's not even telling you about it and he doesn't know what to do she doesn't know what to do about it and that's what we're talking about okay so what we did was we took 43 kids from our clinic at UCSF who had metabolic syndrome that is obesity plus at least one of these comorbidities what we did was we figured out what they were eating at home on their normal diet we studied them on that normal diet and then for the next nine days we took all of the added sugar out of their diet we reduced their dietary intake of sugar from 28% of calories to 10% of calories we got rid of all of the refined sugar got it now if you do that you're gonna reduce the total caloric intake by 350 to 400 calories and if you do that then well people might lose weight and if people lost weight at least kids lost weight then people say well of course they got better they lost weight so we didn't want them to lose weight we wanted them to stay the same weight so we took the 340 350 to 400 calories out of the diet as sugar and we put it back in as starch so in the vernacular we took the pastries out we put the bagels in we took the sweetened yogurt out we put the baked potato chips in we took the chicken teriyaki out we put the turkey hotdogs in everybody got it we can give him good food we give them crappy food we gave him processed food we gave him the kid food food kids would eat but it was no added sugar food everybody got that and we didn't let him lose weight ten days and then we brought him back and we studied him again at the same weight everybody got it the liver fat went down like crazy they're turning sugar into fat went down like crazy and their VLDL went down by 49% and their insulin got better their pancreas got put to rest because now the liver was healthy and here's just an example of here's the change in big butt fat subcutaneous fat no change because we didn't let them lose weight here's the change in visceral or big belly fat down seven percent that's good and here's the change in liver fat 22 reduction in liver fat with no change in calories and no change in weight just by getting rid of the offending agent dietary sugar well it turns out we've known about the problem of sugar for a long time in fact back in the 1960s there was a battle going on between sugar and fat that whole battle royal we talked about earlier and it turns out that we gave up on sugar and fingered saturated fat as the bad guy and we've altered the last 40 to 50 years of nutrition policy and information in this country based on that and it turns out that it was all a fraud all of it and this is an example and these were this was done by my colleagues at UCSF Kristin Karns Laura Schmidt and Stan glans who unearthed the documents that demonstrated that the sugar industry had actually paid off to Harvard School of Public Health scientists Fred stair the chairman of the department of nutrition at HS pH and Mark hagstead his assistant who became the head of the USDA back in the late 60s who exonerated sugar as the problem and fingered saturated fat as the bad guy and they got paid $6,500 in the in 1965 dollars which would be equivalent to $50,000 today they singled out fat and cholesterol as the dietary cause of coronary disease and downplayed evidence that sugar consumption was also a risk factor the sugar Research Foundation set the reviews objective contributed articles for inclusion and received drafts the sugar research foundations funding and role was not disclosed it's been one big lie it was a put-up job you're sick because they took a nonfiction and created fiction just like the tobacco industry no different so here's what happened at that exact same time with the advent that processed food 1965 when these articles were coming out here's the growth of sugar okay in this country we started out eating about four pounds per day from fruits and vegetables in the occasional honey here's the growth of the sugar industry like CNH and Domino etc you know Louisiana Texas Hawaii here's stabilization when price net demand here's the rationing of World War two right here came back to the same level and then you got the advent of processed food and also the advent of high fructose corn syrup and the advent of the Dietary Guidelines for Americans saying cut the saturated fat but the flavor was in the fat so what do they do they replaced it with sugar and so we got up to 125 grams of sugar per day we started out with 4 we ended up with 125 a 25 fold increase in one macronutrient had never been seen before in the history of man and the question is what did it do the answer is they added more salt - but that's not what that's not what's driving this ok because there are plenty of countries that have plenty of excess salt and they don't have this problem this here is the percent of health care a percent of GDP in this country spent on health care and what you can see is until 1965 it was relatively flat and now look at it this is the driver of this entire chronic metabolic disease debacle through this pathway and this is where why health care can't be fixed we can't fix health care until we fix diet we can't fix diet until we know what's wrong well this is what's wrong and no one's fixing it so let's do the math the food industry grosses in this country 1.4 trillion dollars a year big number of which 657 billion is gross so they're making a 45% gross profit margin on their revenue here we got that 45% the next highest industry is Big Pharma at 18% and everybody's yelling about Big Pharma being you know the the thieves okay 45% 18% are you kidding me yet health care costs in the United States are three point two trillion dollars a year of which 75% is chronic metabolic disease of which 75% of that would be preventable if we could go back to 1970 rates so that's all added on if you will so if you do 75% of 75% it's three point two trillion you get one point eight trillion dollars a year going down a friggin rathole we lose triple what the food industry makes that is unsustainable and that's why everything's going broke and that's why Obamacare can't work and that's why nothing can work now what do you think we could do if we could recoup even a fraction of that 1.8 trillion dollars a year you think we could solve health care you think we could solve the federal budget oh yeah make yourself a federal budget if we could recoup even half of that but we can't recoup it because our food supply is contaminated by the industry because we like it in fact my colleagues at UCSF and I Jim Kahn Alex Goodell Luis Rodriguez what we did I'm Rick Bremen actually was the lead in this what we did was we modeled using something called advanced Markov modelling going 20 years into the future based on what would happen to disease in terms of prevalence and incidence if we could reduce consumption of sugar by 20% which would be like a tax or 50% which would be like actually hearing to USDA guidelines so in blue and and red and you can see the fatty liver disease the heart disease the type-2 diabetes the OBC all getting better and if you looked at the amount of money that that would save it would be on the order of about fifty billion dollars a year just to start and that would be just for you know for for just like three diseases I mean you know all the chronic disease so that's health care that's how to fix health care now let's look at Social Security now you know that Social Security is a Ponzi scheme right you know that okay the only difference between Bernie Madoff and Social Security is that with Bernie Madoff you had a chance of seeing it back till the end okay that's the difference in fact it's a pyramid scheme where the young healthy people pay in at the bottom so that the old infirm people at the top can take out everybody with me that's how Social Security was built and if you die before you hit 65 too bad right that's why the American government didn't do anything about cigarettes for so long you know because the actuaries had figured out that the average the median age of death of smokers was 64 that was in 1980 they figured that out they paid in but they didn't take out which was how the Social Security stayed afloat all those years but now we have people with chronic disease so the bottom of the pyramid those young healthy people they're not so healthy and guess what they're not paying in they're on disability and you know what some of them are taken out like the people who were on dialysis okay so what happens to a pyramid if you eat away at the base the whole pyramid crumbles and in fact the Congressional Budget Office has said that by the Year 2029 you can see here here's the projected that's what's going to happen with payable benefits so basically no Social Security for you now I'll be honest with you I'm gonna be 72 so at 66 in the year 2026 and the 2029 and I want my freaking Social Security okay I worked for it I worked hard for it I want my friggin Medicare to our hard worked hard for that paid in and I'm not gonna get out and neither are you because of this yeah in fact again let's look at what the bank's say because they don't have a horse in the race so this is from Morgan Stanley another global investment bank and this is a report they've published two years ago called the bittersweet actually three years ago the bitter sweet aftertaste of sugar where they modeled economic growth on the y axis against the next 20 years based on a low sugar model which we don't have in blue against a high sugar model which we do have in gold what you can see is that with the high sugar model we reach a mean economic productivity of zero point zero percent by the year 2035 now who is that good for is that even good for the food industry so this is a problem that the banks know but Washington doesn't and neither do you but now you do so in fact credit suisse again another report from 2013 sugar consumption at a crossroads and here's what they said about this issue we believe higher taxation on sugary food and drinks would be the best option to reduce sugar intake and help fund the fast growing health care associated with type-2 diabetes and obesity a global investment bank is calling for taxation now how dumb is that but that's what we got well it turns out San Francisco got it and that's another reason I'm proud to live here and I'm proud to talk to all of you because you got it but you know who didn't get it Chicago because they passed a tax and then they rescinded it under pressure from the beverage industry just a month ago they didn't get it so not everyone gets it in fact National Geographic gets it they published this sugar why we can't resist it in fact they have it absolutely right we can't resist it and the food industry knows that because they know when they add at you buy more it's the hook it's the hook it's the legal addiction and that's where we're going everybody with me that was in 2013 they could have put cocaine in the food in fact they did until 1903 had to come up with something else so now we have to this thing called the opioid crisis right Trump declares opioid crisis a national emergency remember that just like two months ago but requests no funds hey how you gonna fight that with no funds right and Jeff Sessions said people should just say no to opioids so my question to you is did Nancy Reagan's just say no work that's why they're addictive because you can know that whatever it is that you're addicted to is ruining your health your life your family and you can't do a damn thing about it because the biochemistry of the addictive substance alters your behavior so that you can't do anything about it that's the definition of addiction so just say no ain't going to work so this is useless to say the least so the question is who does get this who gets this I'm going to show you a clip and you're gonna love this my favorite piece my favorite 20 seconds in the history of television you ready five six years old I was crying sugar down my throat as fast as I forgive you dad sweets you know sugar on bread and butter I'll be kind of dictated you because it changed the way I felt so there's Eric Clapton talking about how he got into heroin sugar is a gateway drug you're laughing I'm not that's exactly what's going on so is food addictive is processed food addictive well you know a lot of authors are saying that and some of them even have like degrees after their names okay it's not all like junk okay the question is you know what's the data in fact this book came out as a text book called food and addiction back in nineteen 2012 by you know reputable psychiatrists and psychologists who are friends of mine to be honest with you so this concept I'm gonna pose to you that we have abdicated our responsibility based on addiction so everybody recognize this document what does it say everybody knows one Clause the whole world knows one Clause from this document life liberty and the pursuit of happiness so my question to you is like Ed Koch would say how am i doing how are we doing on each of those life liberty and the pursuit of happiness well let's look let's start with life so here is the life expectancy of a whole bunch of different countries you can see here tonight Naseer Ethiopia Peru they're all getting older lifes you know I mean as they've dealt with infectious diseases they're sort of catching up which is that's good that's good but here's the United States over here and you notice we've been pretty flat and in fact we've actually gone down recently in fact u.s. life expectancy has now declined for the first time since 1993 two quarters in a row first time that's ever happened the median age of death has gone down by about five months over the last six months from seven seventy eight point six down to 78 point two years we are dying sooner now heart disease is getting better but diabetes has gone through the friggin roof we're not dying a heart disease were dying the diabetes chronic metabolic disease so let's look at the death rates in the United States so here's France Germany UK Canada Australia Sweden everyone's death rates going down and here's United States Hispanics going down but look who isn't going down u.s. White's death rates going up and who among us whites ages 45 to 54 middle-aged u.s. whites and what are they dying of poisonings and suicides poisonings and suicides in middle-aged u.s. whites that's the opioid crisis now why is that happening illicit drug use up marijuana well now it's legal hallucinogens illicit drugs cocaine said here's illicit drug use in older adults older adults we're not talking about teenagers here older adults look at this 50 to 54 double here's heroin and fentanyl deaths here's cocaine deaths here's deaths from benzodiazepines and this next one is the worst are you ready this one's the worst alcohol use disorder amongst women women so you always think of Alcoholics as men right but look at this from 2001 to 2012 a virtual doubling an eighty three point seven percent increase in alcohol abuse disorder amongst women and which women the older the worse why are older women becoming luscious that's the question do you think that's okay so why is that why is that their drug of choice so not doing too well on life how about Liberty how we doing there so this is from Raj Chetty who was an economist at Harvard University a very brilliant guy and he runs a project called the equality of opportunity project and I'm gonna show you some data from that project here we have the prediction of whether or not you're going to have a higher income or a lower income than your parents based on where you live where you were born actually where you were born not where you live but where you were born okay and where you were born does seem to matter quite a bit doesn't it so let's look at New York City where I'm from okay so here's Bergen County over here on the west side of the Hudson River and here's the Bronx over here on the east side of the Hudson River everybody familiar George Washington Bridge connecting the two right so if you grew up we're born and grew up in the Bronx you have an 11% lower salary than your parents do if your parents were at the 25th percentile for income whereas if you grew up in Bergen you have a 14% higher salary just across the bridge now you say well that's poor people but what about the rich people let's look at the 75th percentile same thing so we're trapped in our own ghettos that we make whether it has graffiti or whether it has roses we are all trapped in our own ghettos so here are the 10 worst counties to be born in whatever you do oh sorry the 10 best counties to be born in I'm sorry on the side I hear the 10 worst counties to be born in so whatever you do what don't move to Baltimore yeah Wow really and finally the pursuit of happiness how are we doing on that so let's look here we have ages 5 to 17 and we're looking at Children's Hospital admissions with a diagnosis of suicidal ideation or self-harm over a decade here the number of patients here the number of encounters and you can see how high that's gone and the number of encounters in the clinic have tripled in the same time period kids are depressed they want to hurt themselves and we know that the is my least favorite slide of the entire deck here we have suicides in children ages 10 to 14 okay young teenagers you'll notice the motor vehicle accident deaths are going down significantly but look what's gone up suicide so that suicides are now greater than motor vehicle accident deaths in this age group you know why the motor vehicle accident deaths have gone down because the kids aren't being carted anywhere because they're home playing video games getting depressed and killing themselves any depressant use is up nationwide in females and in males and it's up all over the world this is the World Health Organization 322 million people globally are now have a diagnosis of clinical depression and eighteen point five percent increase in prevalence over a decade and it's not because of increased awareness it's because more people are sick so my argument tonight these four crises the healthcare crisis the social security crisis the opioid crisis the depression crisis are really actually just four manifestations of one crisis and when we understand that crisis then we know how to deal with the four outcomes of that crisis and that pricess is the systemic confusion and conflation within our society of these two words pleasure and happiness now they're both positive emotions we like both of them we want both of them in our lives can anybody give me the definitions of those two words and how are they different anybody so pleasure is short-lived happiness is long-lived that's one six more to go come on come on this is San Francisco you got it you got to be able to do this huh good pleasure is visceral happiness is ethereal you know pleasure you feel in your body happiness you feel above the neck number two good job come on come on five more getting it yeah that's number four we're gonna get there okay it's like family feud survey says almost you get your clothes your clothes pleasure is taking happiness is giving pleasure is experienced alone happiness is usually experienced in social groups pleasure is achievable with substances happiness is not achievable with substances the extremes of pleasure whether it be substances or behaviors so substances like cocaine heroin nicotine alcohol sugar or behaviour shopping gambling internet social media porn in the extreme all lead to addiction every one of those has an a holic after it right shopaholic sexaholic chocoholic right whereas there's no such thing as being addicted to too much happiness and finally number seven dope pleasure is dopamine and happiness is serotonin two different bio chemicals two different neurotransmitters two different chemicals that are used in the brain to convey information two different sets of receptors two different mechanisms of action so you say like why do we care so uh they both feel good and what I would say is that understanding the difference between these two is exactly what you need to know and exactly why we're in the mess we're in today and I'll show you why before I do that let's have a little levity the MRI shows that your brain has been hijacked by dopamine pirates you are now under the full control of social media corporations gambling casinos and big pharma are you writing me a prescription no I'm buying stock in those companies and that's what we've done that's not funny I mean it is but it isn't so why do we care here's why we care dopamine is an excitatory neurotransmitter when it's released from one neuron to the next which happens in an area of the brain called the reward center or the nucleus accumbens it's a specific area of the brain which we can see with fancy MRIs and PET scanners when dopamine is released it excites the next neuron now that's important and the reason is because neurons that like to be excited that's why they have receptors in the first place but they like to be tickled not bludgeoned cronic over stimulation of any neuron leads to neuronal cell death and we know that from all the kids who have chronic seizure disorders who end up frying their brains which you know I used to take care of until three months ago when I clinically retired okay so over stimulation of neurons is not good so to protect themselves the second neuron the receiving neuron has a option B a failsafe a method of self-defence what it does is it down regulates the number of receptors that it has for that transmitter specifically to try to limit its exposure everybody got that that's on purpose it does that on purpose so what does it mean in human terms what it means is you get a hit you get a rush receptors good now next time you need a bigger hit to get the same rush because there are fewer receptors and the receptors go down and then a bigger hit a bigger hit a bigger hit a bigger hit until finally you get a huge hit to get nothing that's called tolerance and then when the neurons start to die that's called addiction so every substance every behavior that stimulates dopamine has as its endpoint addiction that's why it matters so far so good so let me prove it here we have cocaine meth alcohol heroin and here the dopamine receptors in that area called the nucleus accumbens and this is in a control brain and here's in a addicted brain so what you see here is the dopamine binding to lots of receptors over here in a non drug abuser versus dopamine only binding to a couple of receptors because they're way down in the drug abuser everybody got the picture now well take a look at what happens if you look at obesity so here's a control brain and here's an obese brain same thing same phenomenon okay and that's the method the degree of binding because there are fewer receptors so that's what's going on with dopamine however serotonin this other neurotransmitter the neurotransmitter of contentment were happiness if you will is an inhibitory neurotransmitter it doesn't stimulate the next neuron it actually puts the next neuron to rest so can you kill it if you put it to rest so do you have to down regulate your receptors no so serotonin does not down regulate its own receptor but there's one thing and so you can't overdose on too much happiness but there's one thing that down regulate serotonin dopamine so the more pleasure you seek the more unhappy you get and then throw a soup sign of stress on top of it and I'll show you what happens then and things get even worse because what stress does it inactivates the part of your brain which controls the dopamine and makes it worse it's called the prefrontal cortex the part in the front the executive function part the Jiminy Cricket of your brain that keeps you from doing stupid things puts it into suspended animation and makes the dopamine run rampant and at the same time it makes the serotonin receptors go down so you can derive less contentment from whatever it is you're experiencing and that's the path the the cycle of addiction and depression so here's the dopamine pathway here here's where it starts it starts in this little nucleus here called the ventral tegmental area that's where the cell bodies are here's that nucleus accumbens that reward center and then you have this area over here called the prefrontal cortex and there the dopamine and the prefrontal cortex are in a reciprocal relationship with each other here's the contentment pathway it starts in a different area of the brain called the dorsal raphe here and it innervates the entire brain notice the dopamine didn't do that right dopamine did not do that serotonin does okay and then you have this stress fear memory pathway and that prefrontal cortex is basically inhibiting an area of your brain called the amygdala and the amygdala is your stress Center when you walk down a deserted Street at 3:00 a.m. your amygdala is what you're feeling everybody got the idea take that anxiety about what might happen whether there's somebody in that you know ally or not okay that's the amygdala okay and these two areas are in reciprocal contact with each other you also have the hippocampus which is your memory center that's the part of your brain when you put your hand down on the stove when you were three years old okay that's the part you remember okay that's there yeah everybody got that so these are in reciprocal relationship with each other and it turns out that BMI or weight or obesity is in inverse association with that prefrontal cortex so the heavier you are the less while it's working and in part because of this dopamine phenomenon so here's the thesis if you will the whole book on one slide here's what we've done to our society technology processed food sugar sleep deprivation and drugs all of those drive dopamine but dopamine lowers its own receptor and so this is the vicious pathway of tolerance throw some stress on top which activates the inhibitory mechanism and you end up with addiction conversely all these things contribute to metabolic syndrome all those chronic metabolic diseases which lowers serotonin add some stress which lowers the receptor for that serotonin and now you can't even conduct that feeling of contentment and that's depression so addiction and depression are two sides of the same coin born out of what has happened to our environment sure we'll throw shopping on there - you bet so to summarize what I've told you addiction is excessive reward from too much dopamine which down regulates its own receptors it had some stress and you get the munition of pleasure depression is deficient contentment because of not enough serotonin metabolic syndrome down regulates serotonin the stress reduces the number of receptors and therefore you get the motion of happiness - and we have both so the hack the question is where it comes from who perpetrated this pact upon us why is this nonfiction disguised dis fiction that's the question and I'm gonna argue that this is industry driven and government sanctioned that this is willful not accidental and it's very well orchestrated and it's a plot not a conspiracy because the conspiracy would require collusion between industry actors specifically to cause our detriment I'm not arguing that what am arguing is that every single industry has figured out for its own sake how to increase its market share not talking to any of the other companies but they're all doing the same thing because it works and it's engineered with a profit motive only it's only about the money only about the money okay here's an example everybody familiar with this right ten year campaign by coca-cola open happiness ok longest-running campaign in the history of the company why cuz it worked any happiness in that bottle sugar caffeine dopamine anything us water phosphoric acid caramel coloring huh aspartame well fats Diet Coke yep alright but you get the idea nothing in there yeah right used to be cocaine that's why it's called coca-cola right okay how about this one a little closer to home the road to your happy place is paved with raisins and flakes and pavement in other words get off your fat ass it's your fault that's what that says for raisin bran now raisin bran is healthy right No are those the raisins in raisin bran those are the raisins in raisin bran in fact 18 grams of sugar when you do the math on the number of raisins and I did this in a cup of raisin bran okay there is nine grams of sugar in the raisins which means that nine grams of sugar has been added in the form of these the the sugar coating on these to make them reader so that you would eat it and if you like Raisin Bran crunch we have 29 grams of sugar for you and sugar is second to the wheat brown sugar syrup corn syrup honey yep now let's look at Nestle okay they actually have a wellness website and they have a wellness objective they say here this is correct this is actually truth studies show that happiness and health are intimately linked together the healthier you are the happier you'll be and vice versa that is true I won't argue that but then comes this part happiness comes from spending time with loved ones fostering relationships or learning how to cope with stress or depression agreed so does happiness and health translate in other words if you're happy are you healthy so there's a study called the UK million women's study where they asked this question does happiness actually affect mortality and the answer is no it doesn't you can be the most crotchety old you know what and that's not gonna make you dead okay so don't think your uncle is gonna die anytime soon what does affect mortality are the behaviors that come from your unhappiness the hedonic behaviors that you engage in in order to try to mollify your unhappiness that's what kills you not the unhappiness itself so what does nestle do okay here's what they do they want to sell you both sugary snacks and diabetes pills they're getting into the pharma business so they can create the disease in order to treat it and in fact they've done that all over the world this was in the New York Times how big business got Brazil hooked on junk food all about Nestle and these promotoras going around to these you know favelas peddling Nestle products how about the happy meal not so happy okay 1.5 billion toys worldwide okay and there they are Oh Disney stopped selling him in 2006 to their credit the good news is there are fewer happy meals sold the bad news is where the kids are ordering off the dollar menu instead not a big win okay and the toy thing you know we have the toy ban here in in San Francisco right you have to pay a dime for the toy you know there it's not free with the with with the Happy Meal ok after San Francisco instituted the toy ban three states banned boy bands oh yeah later how about happy hour you know it's five o'clock somewhere you know where it's five o'clock it's five o'clock at ten o'clock on NBC why do you think that alcohol abuse is up eighty three point seven percent in older women because they've been told it's okay that's why and this is particularly pernicious because Hoda is a breast cancer survivor and alcohol leads to breast cancer there was just an article in Nature yesterday that shows how Red Bull [Music] [Music] so my question to you is if you're drinking Red Bull at midnight in South Central LA in a convenience store how happy are you and that's only going to cause sleep deprivation which is only gonna make you more unhappy that's called product placement people that's on purpose that ain't by accident how about this let's add some stress we think that's stress right will you be ready men don't be ready because you know you might your your name might be mentioned on the network TV tonight how about more stress how about sleep deprivation right we go well got that and technology that causes sleep deprivation let's look a little click more carefully at this everybody see this article came out in Axios from Sean Parker co-founder Facebook we built Facebook to exploit you in fact he says very specifically exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology we sort need to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever it's on purpose and I'll prove it to you who here uses Gmail Gmail quite a few of you ever notice that when you open up your mail it takes about one-and-a-half to two seconds for the new emails to populate you think Google is just slow that's been baked in that's engineered in to give you a dopamine hit to the anticipation to keep you coming back to check it and check it and check it some more now I'm not saying all technology is bad like for instance who here uses their GPS has it ever saved your life save mine okay but to keep checking it because it's the same every time you check it you need variable reward it has to be different every time and God knows emails and likes are different every time and that's on purpose in fact there's a company that's actually called dopamine dot-com I think dopamine makes your app addictive they'll actually program your app that you make in order to drive addiction and there's a four step cycle to addiction this is from near Isles book he's an internet entrepreneur down in the valley called hooked how to market habit-forming products and there are four parts to it the first is called the trigger or the itch if you will it's got to be a acceptable itch in society like for instance your email going off in your pocket which leads to the action which is the proverbial scratch which is like checking your email which currently is still socially acceptable I think it should not be okay that should be done behind closed doors in fact if you text and walk in Honolulu you get a ticket now which i think is very good we should be doing that all over the country the third part is variable reward so it can't be the same every time okay so your likes your emails you know it's got to be something good something bad like overstock or Groupon those are addictive on purpose because they're supplying you with something and they're actually increasing stress do it now or it's gonna go away how about the airlines how many of you have shopped fares on line only to find that when you come back ten minutes later after you've actually checked with your family that the price went up you think that's by accident and then finally the only one they care about investment you got to plunk down a thousand bucks for a new iPhone in fact we know this because we've done the studies now Mark Zuckerberg says well yes Facebook is addictive but it's only addictive for the people who are depressed the people who are depressed or the problem okay so correlational studies show that people who are depressed use more Facebook the people who are not depressed which is true that is true but that's correlation not causation in order to causation you have to do time lag studies well we've done them and here they are okay in fact if you're depressed yes moment a moment and long-term you are going to decrease your life satisfaction and emotional well-being if you'd start out depressed but even if you're not you still do now not to the same degree this is the chi-square value okay but it's still highly significant everyone gets more depressed on Facebook okay the whole world gets more depressed on Facebook this isn't a good thing it's a bad thing a very bad thing and it's very bad for our children who are the ones who are committing suicide over it in fact just two days ago iPhones and children are toxic pair say to Big Apple investors Jana Partners and California Retirement System and Zuckerberg dilemma when Facebook success is bad for society indeed anybody know who this guy is name's Tristan Harris and he's a former ghoul exact who left the company because Google was actually building addiction into its products like Gmail and he knew it and he now runs a what he called a nonprofit called time well-spent and he is going to be one of the keynotes and I'm going to be the other keynote at a meeting in Washington two weeks from now on tech addiction Jean Twenge down at UC San Diego wrote a book called ijen about this whole phenomenon and wrote this article in the Atlantic have smartphones destroyed a generation indeed they have and Common Sense Media and Kaiser are sponsoring this tech addiction seminar workshop in DC and Cory Booker is going to be there as well as Katie Couric so here we are Tec processed food sugar sleep deprivation drugs all the things that have happened to our society except they haven't just happened they've been engineered to happen they're not by accident driving addiction and depression consuming healthcare killing social security and at the root of the opioid and depression crises in America so what can we do about it okay so reward is not contentment and pleasure is not happiness reward is dopamine contentment of serotonin chronic excess reward interferes with contentment stress drives reward at the expense of contentment and business has intentionally conflated those two terms pleasure and happiness so that you think they mean the same thing because that is how they get you to buy their crap you're unhappy you need this and you need more of it in fact Marco Zuckerberg when faced with this do you know he said the cure to Facebook was more Facebook to engage in hedonic behaviors that are profitable to them not to you government legislation and Supreme Court decisions have actually made it easier to buy that junk and engage in those behaviors and I take those slides out otherwise we'd be here for three hours individuals in society have become fat sick stupid broke addicted depressed and most decidedly unhappy so what can we do about it well there are some things you yourself sitting in that chair right now can do about it for yourself they're called the four C's they're all evidence-based they're all clinically proven to work they all up your serotonin tamp down your dopamine and lower your cortisol or your money back except none of them cost anything so don't look for a refund and they're all things your mother told you but you forgot while you were coughing that coca-cola while texting your BFF first connect now what does that mean connect that means face-to-face eye-to-eye in your face connection that's what that means why why does it have to be in person reason you have a set of neurons in the back ear head called mirror neurons and what those mirror neurons are doing is they're reading the facial expressions of the person you're talking to in real-time and translating that into a motion so that you end up adopting the emotions of the person you're talking to Paul Ekman psychologist at UC Berkeley went to Papua New Guinea they never saw white people never saw any people they had the same facial expressions for the same emotions as we did it's baked in it's part of our DNA so your brain is interpreting that signal in real time and what that does is it generates a process that ups your serotonin it has a name is called empathy and if you can't do that you're a psychopath think about it [Music] how about religion turns out religions kind of the best way to explain this whole damn thing okay I don't care if you believe in religion or not irrelevant there are 4,200 religions on the planet you think any of them got it right if any of them got it right there only be one but every religion on the planet all 4,200 have one thing in common community a meeting place a place where you see other people okay the place where you belong place where you are see and be seen okay and that's on purpose because that's the serotonin it turns out what the religion is espousing is the dopamine the vitriol the anger the xenophobia the jealousy that's the dopamine and how do we know this we know this because patients with parkinson's disease who have defects in dopamine neurons and there are two parts of the brain that have dopamine neurons ones the reward center and the other ones called the substantia [ __ ] which is in charge of gross motor movements they have problems with both we started treating these patients with l-dopa two precursor to dopamine to make them better back in the early 70s and they got better from their motor disturbance which is good and we still do it we give them patients cinnamon today for that reason okay but what we found out was that a significant about 20 to 30 percent of patients became either compulsive gamblers or religious zealots there's a whole literature on dopamine excess from pharmacotherapy for Parkinson's disease so it's the zealot tree is the dopamine the community is the serotonin kind of cool when you think about it interpersonal face-to-face connection that's what you're looking for empathy with social media generates dopamine and worse yet you end up in this thing called an echo chamber you've heard about those what do you think that is that's just making dopamine go right out of control and up in your stress and studies show that Facebook use leads to social isolation and depression sherry Turkle at MIT a media watcher very famous and I've subscribed to this entirely she coined the term alone together that's what we are today alone together number two for second see contribute now what does that mean means outside of yourself contributing to your IRA is not contribution outside of yourself to others not for Game Boy Scout badges is not contribution padding your bank account is not contribution lottery winners are not happy those who value financial success derive less contentment and saving generates more contentment than spending by a lot and spending money on yourself increases your pleasure makes you a consumer in fact that's what we're now called the Consumer Price Index right we're all consumers we stop being individuals and now our consumers they want us to be consumers that's what they're doing and that's how we judge it it's called gross domestic product GDP it's based on consumption that's how we measure progress except it's not increase it and that's what make spending money on others makes you an individual that's called charity and that increases happiness can you derive happiness from your work everyone wants to know the answer is yes you can if you can see how your work helps others and your boss can see it too if that's the case you can use your work for happiness I used to that was my job at UCSF but not everybody has that opportunity okay in which case then we have methods like altruism volunteerism philanthropy anything that contributes to the greater good will up your serotonin and tamp down your dopamine number three cope now cope means three specific things sleep mindfulness and exercise because all of those are exercise for your prefrontal cortex that's what you're doing you're exercising your prefrontal cortex sleep deprivation increases the amygdala and puts the prefrontal cortex to sleep 35% of adults get less than seven hours of sleep per night and 23 have clinical insomnia and some of those have obstructive sleep apnea which makes it even worse and caffeine reduces sleep and increases your dopamine only to make things worse the word of the millennium multitasking if you're not a multitasker you lose your job everyone has to be a multitasker today be able to do five things at once turns out only 2.5 percent of the population can actually multitask the rest of us are all serial uni-tasker 'he's switching from one thing to another so fast and every time that happens you get a cortisol pump making things worse but that's what is prized we've created that thing screens are the antithesis of sleep in part because of the stress and the blue light activating the midbrain my colleague Chris Madsen at UC Berkeley showed that kids who get who have no charge their cell phone in their room get 28 minutes less sleep per night than kids who charge their cell phone outside their room you're going why do you think and smartphone apps for wellness have not yet shown benefit 27,000 apps for wellness none of them work because they're all providing data not information none of them have figured out how to actually take that data and actually use it for something that actually helps you mindfulness activates the prefrontal cortex that's why meditation works because you are focusing on one thing improves metabolic health alleviates depression and it turns out exercises as good as SSRIs at alleviating depression problem is getting somebody who's depressed exercise that's the tough part and finally cook there's our next president on the cover [Applause] why cook because there are three items in food that actually matter to up your serotonin first one trip to fame the precursor to serotonin the rarest amino acid in the diet so what has it fish eggs poultry not things commonly found in processed food okay so you're not getting very much if you're eating processed food process was low in tryptophan low in omega-3 fatty acids which are anti-inflammatory it's been shown that the serotonin Bouton's on the in in the brain have an inflammatory haze around them in omega-3 deficient animals and it goes away when you give them the omega-3 so you improve neurotransmission and then finally high sugar sugar ups your dopamine like crazy downs your serotonin so a low tryptophan low omega-3 high sugar diet that's called processed food a high tryptophane high omega-3 low sugar diet that's called real food problem is one third of Americans don't know how to cook and if you don't know how to cook your hostage to the food industry for the rest of your life and that's where we are okay real food matters and the real food movement is in high gear and companies who don't change will be left in the dust unless they are bought up and the startups and we will see what amazon does with Whole Foods Campbell Soup broke with the grocery Manufacturers Association of America on this issue of real food cooking is all things at once it's connecting over a meal with your friends or family not your extended family that's called Thanksgiving forget that contributing coping because it's mindful because you actually have to pay attention and cooking sitting down cooking a meal and sharing it with your family is the single best thing you can do for yourselves and no one's doing it so what can we do societally or professionally so five modest proposals for you to ponder first at UCSF we've gotten rid of sodas the healthy beverage initiative at Swedish Hospital in Seattle they've gotten rid of juice and just today the NHS in Britain has banned sodas and sweet beverages from all hospitals in all of the UK today January 9th 2018 Wow holy crap and you know why they did that because we did it here at UCSF they did it proposal number two let's call type 2 diabetes' what it really is you know diabetes is an Egyptian Greek word means siphon do you know that because you're peeing your brains out the whole day you know like let's call it what it is you got processed food disease I think that might make a difference in how people dealt with it because that's what it is proposal number three let's roll back the subsidies for all the things that are killing us these are all commodity crops it's a legacy from 1933 the original Farm Bill when we had the Dust Bowl in the Depression when we needed storable food today we don't need storable food it's actually killing us so people say well that'll make prices go like up like crazy not true so this is from UC Berkeley the Gini Foundation farm subsidies and obesity in the United States and they actually modeled what food would look like if we got rid of all food subsidies and it turns out the only things that would go up corn and sugar exactly what we want to go up [Music] indeed indeed proposal number four a trust mark so if you see this in a restaurant you know that whatever they're serving can't kill you okay and then competitors will say wait we're losing business to people who are serving real food maybe we need to serve real food this is our nonprofit that I mentioned at the beginning eat real and finally oh and by the way UCSF cafeteria is real certified so is Boulder Valley School District we're trying to do that here and finally number five let's get sugar off the generally recognized as safe list because it's not safe it's just like alcohol the reason kids are getting type 2 diabetes and fatty liver disease today is because those are the diseases of alcohol but kids don't drink alcohol and the reason is because sugar and alcohol are metabolized exactly the same way in the liver causing that fatty liver disease I showed you and driving all the chronic metabolic diseases we know of today so in summary we have solved the healthcare crisis we have solved the social security crisis we have solved the opioid crisis we have solved the depression crisis and I hope I've made you happy you came [Applause]

Channel: San Francisco Public Library

Views: 183,467

Rating: 4.8297873 out of 5

Keywords: sfpl, san francisco public library, san francisco, sfpl.org, robert lustig, health, dr robert lustig, sugar, dopamine, real food, neuromarketing, brain science, marketing, reward centers, fat chance, serotonin

Id: x4sRsb0a30Y

Length: 99min 1sec (5941 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 10 2018