The BIGGEST Health Epidemic Making Us Sick! (FOOD INDUSTRY LIES)

it is the biggest cause of chronic disease period it kills more people than anything else so why aren't we studying it it's it's all because of how the system is set up I want to jump right in we've done a couple episodes recently where we've talked about food corruption and just how kind of messed up the whole industry is and with big food you have your own story in this area that you wrote about in the book food fix but I'd love for you to share it with our audience here yeah you know I think you know we we don't realize how much the food industry is embedded in our policies in social groups that we think are representing people's best interests like the NAACP or the Hispanic Federation how much they're infiltrated in professional organizations like the AMA or American Diabetes Association America College of Cardiology I mean there's every single Professional Organization social group policy organization they're all infiltrated and influenced by the food industry to the tune of literally millions and millions of dollars and it's it's something that sort of happens below the surface and the face of corporate social responsibility for example like it brings about an example of um something that happened personally to me when I was helping promote the movie Fed Up which was about the role of food and sugar in obesity particularly childhood obesity and it's you know exposed a lot of the sort of Industry uh issues that were going on and I went to Atlanta and a friend of mine introduced me to Bernice King Martin Luther King's Daughter and you know got to have quite a bit of time with her and she's you know she realized that that non-violence that her father talked about also meant non-violence to the self and that you know really the African-American Community who really need to be inspired to also look at that and and we talked about showing the movie Fed Up in the King Center in Atlanta now many of you know that the King Center is in Atlanta is is uh or Martin Luther King um had his church Ebenezer Baptist Church but also where Coca-Cola's headquarters is and Coca-Cola funds the King Center and at first Bernice was very excited about sharing this movie in the King Center and having a show and we had it scheduled it was all set up and a few days before the screening I got a call from her saying hey um we can't show the movie and and I was sort of flabbergasted and really it was because the King Center is funded by Coca-Cola she said that outright she told you explicitly or just implied I mean it was kind of implied and and then uh I went to visit Spelman College which was the you know it's one of the major colleges for women African-American women in Atlanta there's Morehouse which is a men's college in Spelman College and you know it's one of the top African-American colleges and I met with the dean there and she said that 50 of the entering class had a chronic disease of 18 year old women heart disease diabetes high blood pressure obesity and I was like wow I said then why are there Coca-Cola machines and bending things all over the campus and she goes well a big portion of our funding comes from Coca-Cola and if you look at the board of directors one of the key members of the board is very high level executive at Coca-Cola so you know she understood the problem of this but you know we have a problem in our society where we don't fund education we don't fund social groups we don't fund the social safety net and so these large corporations step in to fund these groups when there's nobody else funding them so for example they they really don't want soda taxes right so the soda Industries not want to soda taxes and they they literally have funded the NAACP and Hispanic Federation to influence them to oppose soda taxes which is part of what Cali was talking about and yeah helping out with the strategy exactly discriminating against against African-Americans and Hispanics by targeting them with taxes is and it's regressive and there's all these talking points United States is all these talking points they even funded uh an initiative in in Philadelphia that was going to pass a soda tax the Children's Hospital there a chop very famous Children's Hospital Philadelphia was in favor of a soda tax in Philadelphia and Coca-Cola gave them 10 million dollars as a quote donation which then led to them abruptly withdrawing their support for soda Texas so that's how they go is that blatant was anybody making noise about it did you see it written about yes this is like it's not hard to find I mean you do a little research and you don't have to dig very far to find these things and they in in in big soda companies they and particularly in they in Cocoa they targeted African-American and Latino populations because there already were using these compounds more I call them compounds because they're they like drugs that are bad for you the soda and sugar and they they realize that they could influence these groups and that they could get them to be even bigger users you know so they they have a view that if you're you know for me they're never going to get me to drink Coca-Cola but if someone's already using it you can get them to use more and that's basically the strategy they use and they and they use this through various tactics for example with uh electronic uh benefits the uh trans the the food stamp cards whenever they come out at the beginning of the month they'll go to the local markets and they'll give them discounts and then they'll have huge advertisements in the front of the stores that you can get your two liter bottle of soda for like a couple of bucks right so they get these things discounted they know when they're coming out and they have home marketing campaigns around this so the whole thing is corrupt it's it's not there's the these groups are co-opted the the Professional Medical Nutrition groups are co-opted Academy of nutrition dietetics 40 percent of their funding comes from the food industry so it's it's problematic is problematic and kind of why I wanted to have you on to talk a little bit more about it is that there's also a balance of and it's in the context of a lot of these organizations and groups are looking for funding right they're looking for resources you know earlier we were talking about you know uh Tufts University and we were talking about the food Compass right and there was recently an article written that there are over you know four 60 big food companies including several that ranked highly on the food compass and again is there going to be any big institution right that doesn't take that money but also I'm hearing you politely say that it's also corrupt so where do we find that balance that's there or what does a new system look like I mean it's it's a really great point I did talk about this in food fix uh and the the key is whether it's the pharmaceutical industry or the food industry they're all up in everybody's business and in academic centers a huge amount of the funding of academic medical centers comes from Pharma through quote funding research and funding academic programs in education so a lot of the the way that they influence prescribing practices and what drugs get promoted and what drugs get researched is through these is massive Financial influx of money into the system uh the the sort of one of the the original sort of things that happen around this which led to a lot of the conflict of interest disclosures that now have to happen in academic research was two of the biggest researchers at Harvard back in the 60s who sort of were paid by the sugar industry to vilify fat and exonerate sugar and they published a paper in the New England Journal of Medicine they were paid the equivalent of fifty thousand dollars in today's dollars to write this article which essentially was a shill article for the for the sugar industry posing as a New England Journal article that was supposed to be biasing and partial now there's been more rigorous conflict of interest statements that have to be released when you publish any kind of research so if you look at a research paper it'll say conflicts of interest and if there's conflicts of interest that's helpful but it's not enough and and there are there are a number of really stringent guidelines that have been proposed and that I write about in my book food fix they can be used to limit the influence of outside funders on the design the outcome the control of the research and so it's not terrible that if if a at arm's length somebody funds research if they want to advance things for example the food Compass was one of the researchers was funded by Danone which is a big food company so denone didn't end up using this food Compass rating system they used another European rating system which they thought it was better for them so they didn't mean abusing even though they funded this so a lot of companies will fund these arm's length they don't have control of the design they don't have control over the writing of the papers over the outcome so there can be a way to do it but but you have to have the firewalls in place a lot of times they're not and that's that's part of the problem if you look at uh food industry research if a food company has funded the study you're going to see a likelihood of a positive outcome eight times more than you would see if it's a NIH or publicly funded study on the same product so if the dairy industry funds milk studies they're going to show that milk's great but if you know you have impartial researchers studying milk they might not show it's great who was uh Dr Gabrielle Line's Mentor that you had on was Don Layman Don Layman so I saw another interview with him and one of the things that he was talking about with his important research in the area of protein is you know he explicitly came out and said that if I didn't have you know industry funding I wouldn't have been able to do the research that I did right because he was funded by the meat board and then he was funded by the meat board and people that are there yeah and so what are your thoughts about that and you know his work has been very influential and kind of updating some of even your ideas and protein and some of his students and people that have uh been inspired by him like Dr Gabrielle line what do you think about that you know I think it was probably more interesting is if actually there was disclosure of what people's personal beliefs and habits were so if you're a researcher and you're a vegan and you're studying meat that would be interesting or if you're a carnivore and you're studying a vegan diet and you're publishing research on that that would be interesting to me because I think that kind of biases is so you think the people who write papers should put it out there disclose what would it show in his case for instance you know he is omnivore right yeah for sure and you know he's doing work in protein and obviously that's gonna influence you know he is sort of his findings are going to influence his probably dietary habits would that have discounted or you're just looking for more transparency I think more transparency and then also being able to sort of sift through the research and this is the problem with nutrition research it's very tough to do you know if you basically the ideal thing to do would be to take twins at Birth put them in different feeding Wards for their entire life feed them different diets and Sample their blood every week and watch what happened you know one pair of the twin pairs would get like a vegan diet let's say another would be a carnivore diet or another would be like a you know a paleo diet and see what happens and that would be interesting but that's not going to happen because it's unethical it's impossible it would cost billions and billions of dollars and it's never going to be done so we have to sort of take the knowledge we have from you know basic science research on animals from clinical trials that are small clinical trials from population studies and it's fraught with with all sorts of problems I mean you try to draw conclusions so you have to look at this sum total of all the evidence and make your conclusions based on that data the best available data we have and and for me I I filter that data through the lens of my clinical practice of 30 years of being a doctor and treating real patients and seeing what happens in real time when you do different things I just changing them to this diet or that diet so you say oh keto diets are great but that may be true for one person but it may not be true for another person I had a patient for example who was an overweight woman who tried to eat healthy tried to exercise you know but had severe insulin resistance or triglycerides were like well over 300 or her her cholesterol is like 300 very low HDL and very much pre-diabetic so I put her in a keto diet basically butter and coconut oil which is all saturated fat and in the conventional view based on the quote literature you're going to see that this person is going to be at high risk for heart disease or lipids are going to get worse it's really bad for them but in her case her cholesterol dropped from 300 to 200 or triglycerides dropped 200 points her HD went up 30 points which never happens she lost 20 pounds and her all her inflammation went away so that worked for her but I had another guy who was a 56 year old Avid biker cyclist who cycled like 50 100 miles a day and was thin and fit and slim and he wanted to try it just for performance I said okay well let's just track it and see what happens I didn't recommend it to him but he but it turned out his cholesterol went nuts it was just terrible I said this is really dangerous for you I don't think you should do this because all his particles got small all his particle numbers went up his you know inflammation levels went up I was like well this isn't good for you even it was the same diet so I think we have to get you know real about what works in real people in real time Roger Williams said you know um I'm not interested in in statistical humans you know I think so I think that's the problem with research population studies look for Trends and populations and that can be helpful for guiding future research but it's associations and randomized controlled trials may be specific to a particular type of person in a particular setting but not generalizable to the population so if you're studying 70 kilogram white men from Kansas it's different than if you're studying little kids or Asians or African-Americans or if you're from India like you're going to just have very different results depending on the population you're studying but in the age and the ethnicity and the and the sex so I want to go back to the food Compass because as I mentioned to you I've had a lot of people on the podcast and people just bring it up naturally because it was such a viral moment yeah yeah and and you know just setting it up from that standpoint and uh I saw an interview that you recently did with uh Dr uh mazafarian uh from Tufts and I'd love for you to just set up for the audience here you know what was the food compass what was its you know sort of intent and why do you think it went so viral well first of all I think people misunderstood what it was for and what it was about so there are food rating systems that have been used for a long time to rate the quality of foods to guide policy to guide food manufacturing influence you know um and what what processor made to make food and and they can be very helpful but they're limited so for example in the past you know they might have just like almost like a saturated fat salt and calories as the markers or I'm gonna use you know some other 10 things that I look at to determine the rating system so there was really an opportunity to create a new rating system that looked across a broad category of foods that used a lot more relevant metrics that weren't used before so the food comes as an attempt and in by admission it's a limited attempt because we have limited access to certain types of data like glycemic index and other things and there's all sorts of problems when you start to kind of create algorithms because you know basically the algorithm is only good as the the sort of inputs to the algorithm do you feel like they by the way just to pause you there do you feel like they let people know that that I think that you know if you kind of read the fine print and you look at what it was I mean I think the the ambition was to create a better rating system that could be a guide to better food choices for consumers when they have to choose among a wide variety of food so if you're going to buy cereal what's the best cereal should you buy like fruit loops or should you buy Cheerios you know I think there's a reasonable attempt to try to guide people and and I think you know very clearly in a perfect world we none of us would be eating processed food or all especially Ultra processed food I mean you know sauerkrauts processed food yogurts processed food can sardines is processed food so that's all fine it's more the ultra processed food the 60 of our diet and I think the researchers and the authors would agree that in a perfect world no one would be eating Ultra processed food maybe only minimally processed food and Whole Foods and and that that's the aspiration but in the world we live in today that's just not possible so there are there are all sorts of reasons why we have to rate these foods and and it's an imperfect process and instead of using just a few metrics to assess the quality of the food they use nine domains and 54 different attributes of the food and they included polyphenols and and phytochemicals from Plants they included you know all these horrible additives that they didn't like whether it's MSG or trans fats or artificial sweeteners that Ding the food for being bad they looked at fiber and carbohydrate ratios just make sure that if there was carbohydrate how much fiber was you looked at sodium potassium ratios which are really important they looked at fatty acid ratios so I think I think that's really important we look at levels of Omega-3s they look at levels of mctrol they look at levels of trans fats they'll get a whole bunch of of different attributes 54 different attributes among nine different domains and I think it was it's more than ever was done before to look at food but it still was imperfect for example my big beef with it is that uh is that there are really no large great databases for the glycemic loader index of food which in my book is probably the most important attribute of food and determining its its ability to affect your health from the point of view of of your weight or the point of view of your cardiovascular risk from diabetes from cancer from dementia from even your microbiome and so many different things that require us to understand the way in which a food affects your blood sugar so that was just absent from the calculation there was a sort of an intermediate kind of calculation that included sugar as a dang or maybe if they didn't have enough fiber as a ding on the score but it wasn't really including the glycemic load or index of a food and to me that that was a big failure of this they're iterating it they're coming up with a new version a new version new version so they're learning and and it's not meant to be dietary guidelines it's not a government funded thing the national National Institute of Health um heart lung and Blood Institute actually did fund most of the study so it was a government-funded study but it still is not meant to be the dietary guidelines but it is meant to like encourage certain Investments right like that was one of the things that was noted inside of there especially companies that are focused on this whole ESG thing yeah so where companies should invest more in and then there was some recommendations inside of there of what should be encouraged to children or recommended to Children um yeah it was more of a guide around how how to pick among different foods within categories or across categories so I don't agree with how it all came out but the problem is when you create an algorithm you can't necessarily control the results if you think eggs are better than Cheerios well in the algorithm that didn't come out that way that doesn't necessarily mean that looking at all the way to the evidence that eggs are not better than Cheerios it just means that in the way they calculate the algorithm that's how it came out so I think that's a problem it's problematic and if you you know if you were to ask you know the authors of study do you think people should be eating processed cereals and the answer is no but if you're going to eat them should you eat ones with less sugar and more fiber yeah and do minimally processed whole grains have positive benefit across you know multiple studies yes um but you know does that mean you're gonna be better off eating a whole Oak Road versus steel cut oats versus oatmeal versus you know oat milk yeah of course or versus Cheerios which is pulverized oh it's so yeah I think there's no no date debate debate about that yeah I guess that you know going back to your earlier comment and and I'm not trying to play a journalistic moment on you over here you know I look up to you I want to get your honest thoughts about it and I feel like you're an individual that you that's all because I'm a few inches taller more equal you are both with food fix non-profit right the goal is to influence the discussion in a bipartisan level and have Congress talking about food food is medicine right and you gotta play on both sides of the aisle make sure you really get those individuals to listen so that's somebody would call that maybe change from the inside right you're at Cleveland Clinic previously you know setting up the Institute of functional medicine yeah and it's still there and uh you know that's another form of like you know change coming in from the a little bit of an Insider outside of thing and then obviously there's all your advocacy work right but because you're my friend I also want to make sure that I hold you to what you're saying earlier to get clarity yeah Clarity for me Clarity for the audience it's there so earlier you're saying like these things are sometimes so embedded that people don't even know right that their work is being influenced so I want to just read to you this is a post from our mutual friend Chris cresser Yeah just something that I put up earlier and I thought it kind of summarized it you know he said in a recent editorial I'm not gonna name the author uh but in a recent editorial an independent journalist asked what kind of dystopian world has nutrition science entered into science with a quote into whereby University a peer-reviewed journal and one of the Field's most influential leaders legitimized advice telling the public to eat more Lucky Charms and fewer eggs you talked about the first part of it this is the second part that I really want your thoughts on perhaps the fact that tough School of nutrition receives funding from 60 big food companies including several that rank highly on the food Compass has something to do with it it's a question mark that he's putting inside of it right now you've mentioned that the study itself was only funded by one food company yeah right Danone one of the authors right which didn't end up using the food right didn't end up using it are the majority of the authors from Tufts but they don't they don't get their salaries from the food but but I guess I'm pointing out in a little bit of what you're talking about in food fix and this is the part where people are trying to piece apart because you know there's a general sentiment that people feel that the world is kind of crazy when we don't see some of the obvious things that are there it kind of feels like the War I think the word of the year for 2021 was gaslighting right yeah yeah people kind of feel like wait you're telling me like you know so I think that people generally feel that there's a sense of like how can you say that like you know these things are not connected or influenced so do you feel that any of that General funding could be in the back of people's minds right I mean for sure people are human and they're influenced in ways that they may not even be aware of consciously or unconsciously and you know one of the the favorite books about this was written by Marion Nestle called unsavory truth and she talked both about the medical industry and and Pharma and and primarily about the food industry influencing research influencing professional societies influencing dietary guidelines influencing pretty much all of our food policies so there's no doubt that it's going on and that people have unconscious bias I certainly do uh for sure when I reached something and I for example I I think personally that that is very very tough to be a healthy vegan for a lot of reasons and I come to that conclusion both through my reading of the literature and through my practice as a physician where I see people who are attempting to be healthy beacons these aren't people who eat donuts and Coca-Cola and french fries and you know pasta all day these are people who are really working at it and I see just massive nutritional deficiencies and so I I do worry about about that and that's my unconscious bias so when I'm Reading literature I'm filtering it through my unconscious or maybe conscious bias that I don't think this is a good idea for most people right and then so and I've heard you talk about that before you publicly you know you've shared that that I have an unconscious bias even I'm sure you know your podcast and my podcast has exist because of sponsors right there's definitely unconscious bias that comes in even when you have sponsors that are there yeah I guess the one big difference is that you're kind of acknowledging it and you're saying look I'm a human being and that sort of thing right um where people feel that it gets a little bit messy is when there's not an acknowledgment that that sort of play can play a role in the background yeah I mean I mean part of the challenge though with research is that even if you do sort of aggregate research which is what the food Compass was it was basically taking all the existing nutritional databases all the enhanced data all the all the things that we kind of use to evaluate research on diet and nutrition and health and tried to use that data which by very nature is imperfect to come up with a rating system the inputs going into the algorithm themselves yeah are perfect all right perfect right so or even maybe in some cases you might say just based on our previous conversations misguided because they don't include things like in some instances with food the impact of a food would have on a glycemic index which would have an impact on somebody's metabolic Health yeah so it's basically you know what what can't be measured May matter and everything that can be measured may not matter right so if we can't measure accurately the glycemic load of food and it's not included in a food rating system that's a major flaw to me and that that brings the whole framework into question it doesn't mean that the motives or the intent of the people doing it were flawed it just means that we're dealing with an imperfect amount of data and information so I mean what I like to see funding of nutrition research so we can get answers to these questions absolutely right now you know we spent six billion dollars a year on cancer research which is okay but like it was a huge win to get a hundred million dollars to do nutrition research we should be funding literally billions and billions and billions of dollars from the NIH budget to focus on nutrition and chronic disease because it is the biggest cause of chronic disease period and it kills more people than anything else so why aren't we studying it it's it's all because of how the system is set up and is one of those proposals to be you know a National Institute of nutrition yeah so the idea I mean many other countries have it I mean India has one but we don't have one we should have a National Institute of nutrition and it should be funded to the tune of billions of dollars by the federal government I mean if we can I mean look at covet for example you know I wrote about this in March 2020 it was published in the Boston Globe basically saying hey the early data show that the people who are getting sick and dying of covid have a chronic lifestyle induced disease caused by food so we better get on this and basically it was like zero media about this and nobody was talking about it and still people aren't talking about it why why are we four percent of the world's population but had 16 percent of the coveted cases in deaths it wasn't because we don't have doctors in hospitals and Health Care System it's because we are a pre-inflamed pre-sick population when the virus hit it your immune systems weren't working because of our crappy diet because we have chronic diseases and that's why we were dying well this is another area that you know kind of plays right into this and sort of funding and criticism and other stuff people at the end of the day are allowed to put out whatever they do in the case of covid a lot of even individuals that have been on this podcast and then friends of mine who also interview top experts that are out there that do a lot of research they felt like they wanted to speak up more about nutrition they felt like they wanted to speak out more about public policy but the vast majority of their funding comes from the NIH which largely is controlled by a small you know group of people and the concern was if I criticize well I get sort of ostracized from the community and will my research get funded yeah I mean I think that's fair but I mean you know Tufts which published a food Compass they also published in Dr mazafarian published a paper that said that 63 percent of all hospitalizations and deaths from cobit could have been prevented by better diet because they were resulting from chronic diseases caused by food so imagine that like a major institution like that calls it out it's not like saying that they're saying that it's okay to be eating this junk food and processed food they're not saying that they're saying we need to really look at the quality of our diet and I know Dr mazafarian personally and he's you know tireless researcher he's a tireless worker for moving things forward in Washington I'm working with him for example on a medically tailored meal Bill to fund food as medicine for actually paying for food for chronic meal people instead of drugs so there's so many things that that people don't see below the surface and nobody's perfect I'm not perfect you know he's not perfect we're all doing the best we can with limited data we have and but I don't think we should sort of vilify efforts to try to improve things and unless you're in there in the trenches doing the work you know it's easy to throw stones from the outside so I I've been in Washington I could see I could see big soda saying the same thing yeah I could say big soda saying the same thing for people who criticize them right I heard this great podcast episode the other day uh where the guy who was talking was like look if you have criticisms about this other dude don't come to me because he's my friend you're not going to get an honest take on the situation right but I'm going to be out front and I'm going to let you know go to somebody else they might have a better honest take about it so I guess what I'm saying is that that same sort of idea that everybody's just doing the best they can everybody has that especially organizationally and I can imagine big soda coming out with that same sort of statement it's like look at the amount of jobs we do look at all the good that we invest in for sure this is one piece of the calorie component and who's to say that you should decide which you know communities don't have access or have access to soda so the question is always like that argument can be extended out further and further and further to essentially everyone and then nobody's corrupt and everything's the way that it is I mean there are there are sort of levels of Integrity that have to be in business or in science or in politics and and I think there are you know there are ways to look at and evaluate that if you're for example uh getting NIH funding and you're getting your your universities getting some funding from Pharma or from the food industry but there's conflict of interest uh requirements there's arms length transactions where you know the the funder doesn't have any authority to read the papers to look at them to determine the research design to do anything with the study which is the case in most of the ways that's one thing but it's another thing if Coca-Cola is giving the global energy balance Network 20 million dollars and funding research scientists and writing papers and producing them and building their websites and that's just total corruption and that's what happened with Rona Applebaum and Coca-Cola and with guys like James Hill at University of Colorado where they were putting out all these nonsense papers that is all about energy balance and soda and sugars from soda is no different than any other calories they're all calories are the same and basically if you don't you know overeat and if you don't under exercise you'll be fine and that's basically propaganda so I think there's a difference between you know corruption and you know Marsha Angel who was the New England Journal medicine editor for years uh has written a lot about this she wrote about the corruption and Pharma and medicine and basically says a lot a lot of the data we have is just is just compromise in many ways because of this but it doesn't mean that you can still learn and grow and learn how to kind of sift through the available evidence from a wide array of studies it's not like one study you should focus on but it's just looking at the cumulative load of evidence yeah so in terms of fixing it right so one idea which some people are a little wary of because the feeling is sometimes uh again looking back at like covid and the emphasis on certain approaches and public health you know generally speaking Public Health gets away with a lot looser science recommendations then what would need to happen for like a medicine for example yeah right when there's a pandemic people are going to want to act fast and but even outside of a pandemic even something I've heard you share a lot is a lot of our nutrition sort of guidelines come from you know the best done but still poorly designed done observational studies that we have right yeah and so is there a solution for that for doing better you know studies that are out there does yeah I think there are I mean you know it's not getting too technical I mean there are ways to look at um biology that determine sort of intermediate risk factors I mean it's hard to do long-term studies of nutrition and look for hard endpoints like heart attack stroke or death for example or cancer because it takes a long time so for example like there was a study done on seed oils this is a whole controversy about yeah I want to talk to you about it you know what else but um yeah I think I think you know doing nutrition research was very tough and and you know in the 60s and 70s there were some really large nutritional trials funded by the government to look at fat and heart disease and there's a whole interest in studying that and they did sort of large studies and and so based on on some of these studies you know there's sort of been view that and some of the more other observational data that drink having more soybean oil and refined oils or we call pufas polyunsaturated fatty acids was protective against heart disease it lowered cholesterol that reduced heart attacks and stroke because it primarily moved us away from animal fats yeah because it was moving away from animal fats that's at least that's that was what the Hope was yeah but but the problem with those studies was they were very confounded by lots of things including using trans fats and using you know you know oils that were some of their omega-6 some were combinations of omega-6 and three so for example soybean oil and canola oil are relatively good combos of both omega-6 and omega-3 whereas corn oil and safflower oil and cottonseed oil and peanut oil these are almost primarily omega-6 and so it depends on what you're studying and when they looked at for example all the trials that combined uh Omega 1603s threes there wasn't really a significant uh bad outcomes in fact there was a reduction in cardiovascular events when you looked at just the omega-6 studies there was actually a a worsening of the outcomes and and there was a couple of big trials in Minnesota coronary study and others where they literally had to lock people up in in psychiatric hospitals they gave like half of them this was like 9 000 people so a lot of people in a randomized controlled trial which you couldn't do now ethically but they basically gave half of them corn oil or half of them butter basically otherwise kept everything the same in their diets they basically had a controlled population because they were locked in a psychiatric hospital and they found that even though the LDL cholesterol dropped significantly which is we think a good marker for reducing the risk of heart disease there was a dramatic increase in the risk of heart attacks and deaths in the group that had the corn oil versus the butter now that's an omega-6 oil in other studies they looked at combinations of omega-6 and Omega-3 and and they found that the risk wasn't as bad now the the um the vet the veterans study there was a big uh veteran study that was an early veteran study that was a long-term study it was one of the few long-term studies but it was you know in the initial part of the study there was a reduction in cardiac events with you know soybean oil and there was a reduction in cholesterol and a reduction in deaths and Men all seemed good in the early Trends but as the study went on there were more deaths and there were more Cancers and so at eight years it looked like there was a higher risk of for example cancer with these oils but those studies aren't really talked about because you know they're kind of older studies but it's really hard to make conclusions when you're dealing with this sort of really complicated biology of omega-6 and Omega-3s and how the studies were done and how long they were done and what the populations were and what their underlying risks were and so you end up with like kind of squishy data so I would say that from my perspective it's better to eat fast from Whole Foods if you're going to have any kind of refined oils they should be expeller cold pressed if you're going to have any kind of cooking oil that you use and I really don't recommend this but soybean oil and canola oil have omega-6 and Omega-3s so they'd be less harmful definitely stay away from cottonseed oil grapeseed oil if you're Noel you know cook corn oil safflower oil those are all terrible so I think I think my view is is and always been sort of stick with more Whole Foods and avocado oil coconut oil grass-fed butter you know olive oil obviously extra virgin olive oil is probably the best so I think we kind of have to be careful when we look at these studies and when we do this whole all seed oils are bad or all are good well it's complicated but all the same is grapes are all the same as soybean oil no it's soybean oil from a regeneratively raised Farm that's not sprayed with glyphosate that's you know like you're very soybean out there like that do you well I think there's organic soybeans and there yeah there's organic tofu and organic tempeh and there's organic soybean oil you can buy so I and that are cold pressed and explore press so those are likely to be less contaminated less processed with hexane not processed full of deodorizers that are you know so this is all these sort of subtle things so at the end of the day you shouldn't have to combine common sense with some science and come up with sort of a reasonable way of looking at these things but you know as Mark Twain said they're probably common sense is not too common and the problem with Scientists is they go well it's all about the evidence well the evidence is fine if you have good evidence right if every day that you wake up and the sun comes up that's a pretty reliable evidence of scientific things happen the sun rises and sets every day nobody's going to argue with that but when you're talking about nutrition research it's not clear cut like that if you wanted to do a study to see are these highly process which that in itself doesn't obviously mean anything but if these highly processed vegetable oils really have a negative impact comparatively to what Humanity might have been eating before right as you mentioned virgin oils expeller press cold pressed and then potentially animal fats right we know that there's been consumption of that you know what would you be looking at right like what do you think would need to be done well I think I think you know there's so many variables that we can measure now that we can never measure before you look at gene expression you can look at metabolomics you can look at huge profiles of cytokines and inflammatory markers you can look at what happens to all these other various intermediate biomarkers and you can start to kind of see how these are influencing our biology and you know I've talked about this before but just because you're eating meat it doesn't mean it's all the same or just because you're in an oil doesn't mean it's all the same it depends where it's grown how it's grown what's happening what it's eating so for example you know um I just had a professor on from University Utah State who studies the metabolomics of animal food so what is the difference between a bison that is pasture raised that's eating a bazillion different plants versus a bison that's raised in a feedlot which is actually way better than a cow that's raising every lot for many reasons and there was 1500 different metabolites that were measured and they were profoundly different and they had profoundly different potential impacts on health from everything from the essential fatty acids in them to the level of minerals to level of antioxidants to the level of phytochemicals so there's so many variables in the food we eat that you know really it depends on the quality of what you're doing and where one might raise inflammation or they might lower inflammation so I think in the future as we begin to use machine learning AI metabolomics gene expression studies this is the price of the stuff comes down it's going to be a lot easier to sort of see what's going on um I think again no matter what we do it's going to be really tough to do these large randomized controlled Trials of human beings unless you lock people in a wart and there are some sort of studies that have done this like Kevin Hall has done small you know a couple of week or week-long studies looking at different changes in your biomarkers and your health and fat metabolism when you change for example data high or low carbohydrate diet or high fat or low-fat diet but that might not be relevant because it might take three to six weeks for your biology to adapt heating a low carbohydrate diet and switch to Fat metabolism so you might not see the benefits for six eight 12 weeks whereas he's looking at one or two weeks so it depends on how you do the studies how long they are what's going on and that's why the average consumer is so confused when they look at the data because pretty much anything you believe you could find evidence for I want to um including aliens which may be really a thing so I want to read you uh a tweet to just get your thoughts on something because we're talking about a lot of different ideas we're talking about corruption influence food system making healthier choices for people and a bunch of other things are there and and then we're going to get into some of the conversations around obesity and some of the drugs and interventions that people are proposing now um so this tweet is from uh Tamar hospital she's uh award-winning Washington po columnist and uh this kind of caught storm and I saw a bunch of people retweeting it um from the kind of more traditional food industry sort of point of view and I want to just get your thoughts yeah um so she wrote There's a Zombie idea that just won't die and I'm going to kill it with math if we put all crop subsidies into fruit and vegetables so all the subsidies you know a lot of people have talked about subsidies you talked about subseas in your book well they're more like Insurance yeah but right if we put all our crop subsidies into fruit and vegetable subsidies it would not change the way Americans eat one iota and then she says okay maybe one iota but not two here's why and here's the math so she goes into a whole bunch of things but I'm just going to re kind of pull with you the subsidies we have now mostly go to corn and soy will include both insurance premium subsidies and what used to be called direct payments which are now called a RC PLC the amount varies by year but it's reasonable to say that 11 billion for insurance and 5 billion for this Arc PLC program right which is a total of 16 billion and she says total amount to redistribute to fruit and vegetables right let's distribute distribute that uh 16 billion over the Acres that grow fruit and vegetables call that specialty crops by the USDA that's about 15 million acres for the sake of having a nice down round number let's say that means that we have a thousand dollars an acre for all fruit and vegetable jumping to kind of the conclusion of this because it's kind of a tweet storm we'll link to it in the show notes so people can see it she goes through a few different of these specialty crops and she says example one an acre of broccoli produces about 16 000 pounds the subsidy would make broccoli six cents a pound cheaper so the moral of the story that she's getting to is that we keep on talking about subsidies being a big problem but if we took that money and we put into fruit and vegetables and because fruit and vegetables and Specialty crops as they're considered by the FDA are so expensive to grow it wouldn't make them that much cheaper and then she concludes with the reality is that people just don't like vegetables and they don't eat a lot of fruits and vegetables so that's why these other Foods end up becoming you know more eaten and what are your thoughts oh my god well that last sentence just kind of is the problem it's a big problem I think I'm I'm sort of paraphrasing that yeah you write that exactly but her ex you know people can look up the the the the thing exactly but she essentially says vegetables are way more expensive to grow growing a calorie of broccoli costs 50 times more than growing a calorie of corn people PS people don't eat veg because they don't like them not because they're expensive what are your thoughts on this idea I've heard a few people say this by the way and so I'm just on a stress test I think Sam what what do kids in Japan eat seaweed raw fish what are they like pickle vegetables they eat what they're used to eating if we if we raise a generation of kids that are addicted to highly processed food that are hyper palatable that hijack their brains hijack their hormones they hijack their microbiome that make them eat this food through really a kind of various nefarious almost like the Body Snatchers are are driving our biology it's not about people not liking vegetables it's about people not understanding that their biology has been hijacked and if given the chance to eat delicious vegetables and getting their biology reset they would like them I strongly believe that and I've seen this over and over again in my patients and around the world where populations and little kids eat tons of vegetables so it's not that human beings by nature don't like vegetables it's because Americans have been completely corrupted by the food industry and have had their taste buds and their biology hijacks so I think I'm just going to say that at the start yeah they don't disagree with you by the way yeah and then and then we can get into the fact of how agriculture is finance what the challenges are with agriculture what we're doing and it's not just about crop insurance it's not just about you know subsidies it's not just about finding more fruit and vegetable growing is about reforming the entire agricultural system to create a regenive system that produces better quality more nutrient-dense food that's lower cost that makes Farmers more money that restores biodiversity restores the water tables and prevents the droughts and floods that we have that are destroying our agriculture system that stops the you know pollution of of our waterways and our and our our our environment by pesticides and glyphosate that prevents The Dumping of nitrogen fertilizers on the soil that goes into waterways and kills you know hundreds of thousands of tons of fish and you know just on and on and on I could literally go on and on so I think that it's about fixing the agriculture system as a whole to produce more high quality food and that's possible and I think it can happen at scale and I think it's about shifting our our kind of government systems policies to a form of regenerative system to fund Farmers to do this and this is what you know with food fix we worked on in Washington is part of the IRA Bill and maybe there is many issues with that bill but one of the things we did was we got 20 billion dollars for reform in agricultural policies and regenerative agriculture and funding Farmers education and finding them converting to regenerative farms and a lot of things that people don't even know about so things are moving in the right direction but it it's tough to take away the things from Farmers because they're stuck in a complete bind between the the need to grow Foods the way they've always grown them because they get bank loans to buy the seeds and the chemicals they get crop insurance from the government and so they're caught in this tribe between the seed and chemical companies the banks and the government which is all supporting the system that keeps Farmers locked producing the wrong food now if they were given a chance and they were taught how and they were given an economic Bridge they would create an agricultural system that's much better than what we have now and that this is being demonstrated over and over is is more profitable and more effective and produces better food so I don't completely agree with her I think I think it's not as simple as just uh you know ending in crop insurance for corn and soy although that is problematic it's about Shifting the whole system I guess what she was saying is that she hears a lot of people making that argument and what you're saying to her is that that may not be wrong the math may be right in what she's breaking down but what you're talking about is so much bigger than just that you're talking about a whole shift in the ecosystem yeah exactly it's a whole it's a whole reform of Agriculture and and and and that you know may take a long time to happen but it's got to happen and I think you know we we don't um you know have the support of Institutions and and um you know group purchasing uh from you know industry from government from schools that produces an incentive to actually make more good food and cheaper uh and and there are ways to do it at scale and the question is how do you how do you make stuff cheaper I think you can um and and and I mean it requires different methods of farming and different practices but it's totally doable all right we're going to Pivot to obesity here for a second my favorite topic there was a viral 60 Minutes clip um with uh White House advisor Dr Fatima Cody from Stanford University the government has named her one of the members of the 2025 dietary guidelines for America's advisory committee and she was on 60 Minutes basically saying the number one risk factor for obesity is genetics yeah let's get your hot take on the situation and her comments well if that were true then then our species has undergone a major genetic series of mutations since I was born because when I was born five percent of Americans were obese now it's 42 so an eight-fold increase and eight over 800 percent increase in obesity since I was born is not due to some massive genetic mutation it's just not and if you look at all the genes and this is a there's something called the G was analysis which is genome-wide Association studies so is any one particular Gene the Obesity Gene no so they go well is there a family of genes that all increase your risk and they they looked at all the genes that might potentially impact your hunger weight metabolism obesity risk and they determined that if if literally you fixed all these genes that the maximum weight loss would be 22 pounds in a person which is nothing when you think of the fact that the average American is is obese and overweight and has metabolic and healthy so that would not fix the Obesity problem it would not get people lose 50 60 100 pounds which many Americans need to do so this is not a genetic problem I mean I even heard this around kids like wait a minute we've seen a quadrupling of obesity rates in kids since the 60s is this genetic so all of a sudden we need drugs and surgery according to the academy American Academy and Pediatrics to fix the Obesity problem in children without addressing at all the food environment the way we process food the way it affects our biology the it just it makes me a little crazy when I hear that and I think that's very frightening now do genes play a role absolutely are people some people more predisposed to obesity absolutely like the Native Americans or the African-Americans or Latinos because of their genetics but that doesn't mean that they're destined to be obese if you look for example at the Pima Indians which I've written about for years in my books you know in in in in America they're the fattest population in the country they're second in the world only to the Samoans who put basically for breakfast they have ramen noodles with MSG powder which by the way makes you eat a lot more it's how they induce obesity in animals let's give them MSG and sugar so they put sugar and MSG powder and ramen noodles that's their breakfast so that's why they have like 80 rates of diabetes in the Pima Indians is the same thing 80 percent are diabetic by the time they're 30. the life expectancy is 45 it's like you know living in a developing country here in the U.S they're cousins in Mexico same genetics the only difference is an artificial border called the U.S Mexico border but genetically they're the same the same population they're thin and they're healthy and they're fit and they eat their traditional diets that they've eaten for thousands of years uh when they start to adapt their Western diet they also get obese so genetically they're more predisposed but that doesn't mean that it's a genetic problem so the question I have for you is this as somebody who's genuinely trying to make change from the inside as well as the outside right the advocacy of the podcast having on different people with different opinions and writing books and other stuff when you hear that you know our current president has made somebody who has this belief now I don't know if she still has this belief I looked up you know recent news articles I haven't seen any backtracking on it yeah I don't know what she actually said I'm just saying if that if that was the sound that's what you said that's literally what you said we can play it if you diet you lose weight right for many of us we can go on a diet something like The Biggest Loser right you go and you strict people you make them work out for 10 hours a day and then you feed them 500 calories for most people they will acutely lose weight but 96 of those participants in The Biggest Loser regain their weight because their brain worked well it was supposed to bring them back to store what they needed or what the brain thinks it needs so willpower throw that out the window so the question is that somebody who's trying to make change from the inside um as well as the outside when you hear that our president has appointed somebody who has that belief to the dietary committee um does it make you more disheartened does it change your Viewpoint about sort of working in collaboration with government to try to fix the food system how does it make you feel I mean listen and you know the whole subject of obesity is fraught I mean there are people who now believe that we shouldn't be treating obesity that it's okay that you're healthy at any size that it's racist to talk about obesity there's all sorts of memes going out there across the culture but the truth is that nobody wakes up and goes geez I want to be overweight I'm going to see if I can gain weight I mean maybe if you're really skinny in anorexic or something you've got cancer you may want to gain weight but for most of us like gaining weight is not something we aspire to that we want to do or that is good for us and then I think the data really support clearly that obesity is a huge risk factor for all age-related diseases and chronic illness the question is why are we overweight why are we obese and and that's a complicated question that has to do with genetics it has to do with the toxic food environment it has to do with our epigenome and how our genes were influenced by what our mother ate in utero really has to do with obesogens in the environment that are environmental toxins that affect our metabolism like bisphenol Aid it's on your credit card receipts that causes insulin resistance it has to do with cultural patterns it has to do with your Social Network I mean if you look at the christox's for example work at out of Harvard he showed that you're 171 percent more likely to be overweight if your friends are overweight then if your family's overweight you're about 40 percent more likely to be overweight so maybe is it a social problem or a genetic problem it's complex it's all the above and I think people who try to reduce it to one thing are kind of are missing the full story and then it's a complex disorder but for the most part it really wasn't a problem until the last 40 or 50 years and when you look back for example in the 50s you see now African Americans are among the worst affected they were the worst affected by Kobe because of their chronic illnesses in the 60s they were far healthier than whites and then they adopted and were targeted by the food industry and had become enormously overweight 80 of African-American women are overweight I mean it's just it's a big problem and I think it's it's because uh of the toxic food environment and all the things that are influencing our our choices and our behavior and and the kind of flood of marketing the flood of easy access the super sizing of everything the the the the policies of agriculture in the 70s under Nixon who wanted to make milk and meat prices cheap so basically his secretary of agriculture Earl butts and that's his real name basically said go big or go home which led to the massive scaling up of industrial agriculture the huge Productions of corn and soy is Staples the commodity commodification of our food system and the blood of processed foods so now 60 of adult and 67 of kids diet is ultra processed food which means food that comes from you know highly industrial ingredients that are pulverized beyond recognition and reassembled into all sizes color shapes and tastes of chemically extruded foods like substances that have nothing to do with their original form I mean eat tofu great you know that's a processed food eat tempeh that's fine but you know we're kind of soybean extract derivatives or corn extract derivatives that are in your food no that's not that's not really food and that that's really led to this this real problem I think so just going back to the question because I feel like you kind of didn't fully answer it so I just wanted to talk about the president having uh someone appointed who believes that obesity is genetic to the U.S dietary guidelines committee I mean I I think to be fair I I have to look at her whole perspective and all of her views and all of the data she's published and you know I think there are nuances and I'd probably want to ask her 100 questions and I think you know um the signs of obesity is complex so I think I I can't really make an opinion unless I have more information to be honest about her in particular and I'll do the homework and look at it but as as a as a rule a lot of the dietary guidelines had gotten better over the years but they're still fraught and for example Dairy is a great example how Dairy is well before we go to Dairy actually you kind of mentioned something that I don't want to go on a tangent yet yeah yeah you mentioned about obesity and how it's being used when you have certain beliefs that it impacts treatments so if you are making a statement that the number one cause of obesity is genetics which then kind of went into her explanation being not to pick on her but just using this as a statement because she's such a high profile figure and this kind of created this viral commentary is then she kind of said a little bit more of an you know being brought up in a house sort of obese parents then you're likely to be obese well it's probably the environment that you're being brought up in socio-economic condition all the things that you were mentioning right right those play a role and when you have somebody so high up who says that there's this genetic thing is the number one thing even for she added in at the end of the clip even for people who eat well and exercise now all of a sudden the interventions that you feel that are going to make a difference you're left primarily with pharmaceutical and that's kind of the big conversation right now right yeah so so talk to us a little bit about what's going on right now with how they're thinking about treating especially kids with a lot of these super aggressive drugs which a lot of people don't realize that even if they worked perfectly and didn't have you know any kind of side effects and you have to be on them for the rest of your life they literally have the potential to like you know bankrupt us yeah I mean look you know the the American Academy of Pediatrics is trying to address the Staggering rates of obese sitting overweight and kids 40 of kids are overweight one in two teenage boys has pre-diabetes or type 2 diabetes which I never saw when I was in medical school 35 years ago just didn't exist and now uh they're trying to Grapple with how do we manage this burgeoning epidemic of obesity in risking kids and it's serious because if your kids overweight and obese their life expectancy is 13 years less their economic earning capacity is lower their risk of disease is higher they have higher risk of mental illness and depression I mean it's really bad news so the idea that we should talk about it and address it is a good one the question is what are we saying and this is where I thought the the comments uh from the guidelines from the American Academy of Pediatrics were concerning because they were saying we need to aggressively screen for obesity great we need to aggressively treat it great we need to use drugs and bariatric surgery not so great okay so let's do the math if we looked at brugovi or ozempic which is being used off label for obesity it's about Seventeen hundred dollars a month through agovi you know depending on where you buy it 1330 you do the math 75 of Americans overweight if we prescribed it everybody as and being overweight is now considered you know a problem and a disease that's 425 billion dollars a month 5.1 trillion dollars a year that's more than our entire National expenditures on health care which is 4.1 trillion dollars so it's just a ludicrous idea that we should be approaching it from a pharmaceutical perspective or a bariatric surgery perspective I mean I I was talking to my daughter on my way over here and she's in medical school and she was talking about a case that of a guy that came in and presented at their medical school which was a bariatric surgery patient who ended up having severe vomiting and nutritional deficiencies and had thiamin deficiency and end up with something called Wernicke's encephalopathy which is a severe neurological condition with permanent consequences and he's suing the hospital I mean like having bariatric surgery is not a cakewalk you know and and these drugs may increase the risk of cancer and other things so the question is what's causing it and so I was so perplexed when I when I heard you know uh the New York Times had a podcast a daily where they had Gina claddon who's you know New York Times Reporter and health and she's very well educated and she said something just didn't make any sense to me she says well we've seen you know obesity rates grow up from like you know five percent to now like 20 in kids and just to you know 40 50 years um but we know that obesity is genetic and I'm like how do you make those two statements within 15 minutes of each other and make any sense at all because it's not it can't be right it just can't be and now what can be true is is epigenetics so epigenetics are influenced by what we do in our environment and toxins and everything and that can create genetic um programming that will influence your metabolism and your weight for sure but we know we can reverse epigenetic programming that's what my book Young Forever is about it's about how do we reverse the epigenetic programming that makes us age fast and how do we reverse that so we can do that but I think that the uh the notion that that we should be treating obesity with Pharma and bariatric surgery as a nation as the solution it's one solution for some people who might benefit okay but I you know I I've had patients who've lost you know 200 pounds without any drugs or surgery and kept it off and about other patients who've had bariatric surgery and lost a bunch of weight initially and then gained back 200 pounds because they just decided they could eat M M's all day long without stopping and they would get enough food to because it would satisfy their Cravings but they they wouldn't be too full because they only eat one m m at a time so I mean do you think this is a Doctor by the way yeah do you think that thinking is because I always try to put myself in different people's shoes right do you think the thinking is okay great Mark that's awesome for that patient who had the resources to be able to see you well it's awesome for that person who had the resource to be able to shop and get groceries and they don't live in a food desert we need to figure out you know is the thinking I'm not saying it's right right but is the thinking that oh yeah sure if you have the resources you can do it and education where you're not working three jobs so those people don't and we don't want to hurt people's feelings by telling them to do something they can't do so instead we have to look at the pharmaceutical option do you think it's that or do you think there's a little bit of a component of like hey you know everybody's already on Pharmaceuticals for all these other things that's the only thing that's going to move the needle forward sure it's not affordable long term but we've made it this far that's somebody else's problem to deal with like what do you think the thinking is I mean first of all I just want to say that that people need to understand that if you're overweight it's not your fault and to blame the person who's overweight for a lack of willpower or you know having poor moral character or being a glutton just ignores the biology and the effect of the foods we're eating on our health and our brains and our hormones our gut and and all that influences this obesity epidemic so we can't ignore that and we can't blame the person who's struggling with that said we we have to kind of take a hard look at our choices and if we if we don't honestly look at what we're doing as a nation we're in trouble both economically both from a global competitive standpoint and I think the basic meme out there is that if it lead us to talk about eating healthy it's elitist and and poor people can't do it and people have don't have means don't can't do it and it's just people know what to do but they don't do it because they just don't have the ability or the money I think that's a fallacy and I I honestly I I fully admit that I I bought into that many years ago and then I was part of this movie Fed Up that we talked about earlier and I I shared the story before but it's worth repeating because I met this family in South Carolina and they lived in one of the worst Food deserts in America and there's something called the retail food environment index which is how many like fast food restaurants there are to like grocery stores and stuff and it was like one of the worst in the country and this family lived on food stamps and disability the father was 42 on dialysis for kidney failure from diabetes from eating junk food the mother was hundreds of pounds a couple hundreds of pounds overweight I mean huge the sun was 16 years old 50 percent body fat should be 10 to 20 and almost diabetic at 16. and they lived in a trailer a family of five for a thousand dollars of food stamps and disability payments and I I basically sat with them and I'm like why do you want to be part of this why do you want to lose weight they start crying because their father could not get a new kidney until he lost 45 pounds they wouldn't do the surgery and they couldn't figure out how to do it and I said okay well rather than give me me give me a lecture on what to eat or tell you to eat vegetables I said let's go shopping let's buy some food let's cook a meal together and I used a guide called good food on a tight budget which is how to eat well for you well for the planet and well for your wallet right and we made turkey chili from scratch we made roasted sweet potatoes we made salad not from iceberg lettuce we made olive oil and vinegar dressing we made some stir-fried asparagus simple food and the when I went to their trailer I went in there a couple in their freezer and their fridge and I was like gosh this is just everything is bad in here and processed and packaged and so I started taking everything out and then we started going through it they had no idea it was bad for them if they were buying all the food entry claims this is a little whole grain this is zero trans fat I mean Cool Whip zero trans fat even though the two main ingredients are high fructose corn syrup and hydrogenated soybean oil and the reason they get away with it is because it's mostly air and it's less than half a gram per serving and so you can kind of you know get away with it according to the FDA loophole that was given to the food industry so they wouldn't have to get all the trans fat out of the food so it's just it's just more corruption and so they were like shocked and they were really uneducated about the what was going on what they were eating what they should eat and what they shouldn't eat their salad dressing it was just full of high fructose corn syrup and refined oils and all kinds of thickeners and gums and things that really damage your gut and so look look let's just cook a meal and they ate it and this one kid like quote hated vegetables and he made the chili you want to know if there were any vegetables in there because he didn't want to eat it and and we kind of joked and it's like it's all those onions like but they but they're kind of like candy because they get sweet when you cook them he's like all right so a kid ate it they loved it the father loved it they they ate all the food and they devoured it uh and I was like okay well I mean they didn't have cutting boards and you have knives I I didn't know what was gonna happen when I left I'm like okay well maybe this won't make a difference but let's try so I said here's my cookbook here's a guide on how to eat well for Less um you know you can buy inexpensive vegetables inexpensive cuts of meat and Grains and beans you can do this and I and I and I left and I bought him a cutting board and knives because they didn't have a cutting board or knives we cut the sweet potatoes with a butter knife which was not easy raw sweet potatoes and and the first week the the white uh the wife text me back the mother says like we lost 18 pounds as a family the first week I'm like wow great and they went on the mother lost over 100 pounds the father lost 45 was able to get a new kidney the sun lost 50 and then had to go get a job and worked at Bojangles getting it all back and more but then eventually you know reached out to me and I coached him a little bit he lost 136 pounds nobody in his family ever went to college she went to college and he actually reached out to me and asked for a letter recommendation to medical school and here was a kid was like terrified when I showed him his body composition because he says I'm 50 fat am I going to be 100 fat if I keep eating this way I'm like well no you're gonna have bones and some muscles and stuff but you can get up there and it was just it was a very enlightening experience for me because I was like wait a minute we're like one meal away from saving America if if we created millions of community health workers to go out in people's homes to show them what to buy to show them what was was good what wasn't good to teach them how to cook to show them you know how to you know choose foods that are you know reasonably priced that you don't have to kind of break the bank to get that we can really fix this and I've seen this all across the country I've seen it in Cleveland in underserved areas where it worked I've seen it you know in in many many places so I think you know there's an underlying belief that this is just an elitist idea that people cheat healthy and everybody should shop at Whole Foods that's not what I'm saying I'm saying we we need to as a nation create a national campaign to deal with this and to educate people about what to do and to help them and guide them and teach them but sometimes it's not telling them what to do it's showing them what to do you know I remember I was working with a friend who worked up in East Harlem and they they were working on a sort of this chronic disease program to try to help patients not end up in the emergency room all the time and not end up on the street and they told me to serve as one guy who kept coming back and back with heart failure every time to the hospital and they told them what to eat and they told them exactly what to buy and they they told them everything and this guy didn't know what to do so they sent someone to his house and and they were like what are you doing and they showed him his cupboard it was just full of junk he's like this is all I know how to make and I don't know what else to do so they took him shopping and they showed them how to cook and they they totally transformed him and literally saved hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars in hospital bills for this just simple home visit that cost close to nothing it's an inspiring story and it really shows number one early in the podcast you painted out a lot of the problem if we don't do something we're just headed off the cliff yeah right in fact we're more likely going to have a major divide in society you have a very small percentage of people that are just very healthy with all the new technologies advancements access Etc and the vast majority probably 80 or more that are just extremely unhealthy and we're already seeing a little preview of that and we don't want more of that we need to unwind that um but then also what does it look to have a true sort of almost like uh boots on the ground major [Music] um sort of like industrial undertaking of having people I don't mean Industrial in the industrial sense I mean like a large undertaking of truly what it would look like to invest in our health and get people who are suffering the most educated on at least the basics that we know that works I think it's true I mean you take snap which is food stamps for example I mean there's Provisions for SNAP education for nutrition education but it's like minuscule when you think of the farm bill it's a trillion plus dollar bill one of the biggest government programs that exists three quarters of it is food stamps and three quarters of food stamps is junk food and 10 percent of soda so we all know that's bad for people but nobody wants to create restrictive uh guidelines around what you can and can't buy and they think that's aggressive they think it victimizes the poor and there's a whole bunch of reasons for it but they could easily create snap education which guides people on how to use their food stamp benefits and get the most for their dollars and true stuff that's healthier for them and their families and not be hungry but we don't invest in that Mark anything else you want to get into right now yeah I just think that uh you know we kind of have to come together as a nation to address some of our biggest problems and the the biggest thing that you know breaks my hardest is the division and divisiveness and oppositional behavior and thinking among all different segments of society whether it's you know politics or nutrition our religion it's like we got to get over ourselves because you know we're on a sinking ship and I think it's time for us to sort of come together to really work on things together we've done this before whether it was you know World War II as a nation where we came together whether it was 9 11 when we came together whatever these moments are in American history where our better Angels take over I think it's time for that I would add maybe one other layer that I'd love to get your opinion on I think that polarization and divisiveness is not so much the issue because we want actually smart people who disagree with us to fight for their version is great it's really the kindness that we're looking for and the compassion yeah right and I think that long format podcast is a really great opportunity and Independent Media is a really good opportunity to do that but we want people to have different opinions we want people to have different viewpoints because it you know we've changed our mind on things you've changed our minds because of people who have had different viewpoints the questions can you do in a way that is kind and then there's another layer which just goes back to some of the things we talked about before you know some people again would say that you know you calling big soda corrupt is that being you know is that not understanding all the components and things so I think we're always trying to find a balance that's there and I'm not saying don't call them corrupt right what I'm saying is that you know we're in a little bit of the sort of free market version of this right people speak up and if you're lucky enough to speak up where you catch a sort of viral moment in society on something that needs attention more people start focusing and then your hope is that the Next Generation starts working on better and better versions of a problem and Strat instead of trying to keep the system intact that was there previously yeah no it's true we need to like Bob Minster Fuller said this well he said you know you don't have to sort of fight the system you just have to create a new one that makes the old one obsolete or some barriers to that some version of that yeah if you love that last video You're Gonna Love the next one check it out here now we're maybe your broccoli today is 50 less nutritious than it was 50 years ago so that's another problem and then we have increased nutrient needs because we're under chronic stress because we're exposed to environmental toxins I mean there are 80 000 new chemicals introduced into the marketplace

Channel: Mark Hyman, MD

Views: 230,842

Keywords: Mark Hyman, Mark Hyman interview, Mark Hyman live longer, Mark Hyman diet, how to live longer, how to age in reverse, nutrition tips, healthy foods, health tips, health theory, fasting tips, how to never get sick again, prevent disease, self help, self improvement, self development, personal development, inspiration, motivation

Id: v85Zf0DxTbU

Length: 75min 52sec (4552 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 24 2023