Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - Mini Show #58: Jackson Water Crisis, Saudi Arabia, & Seed Oils!

Episode Date: October 8, 2022

Krystal, Saagar, & friends discuss the Jackson water crisis, Saudi Arabia, and the seed oil debate online!To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show uncut and 1 hour early visit: https://breakingpoints.supercast.com/To listen to Breaking Points as a podcast, check them out on Apple and SpotifyApple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/breaking-points-with-krystal-and-saagar/id1570045623 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4Kbsy61zJSzPxNZZ3PKbXl Merch: https://breaking-points.myshopify.com/The Lever: https://www.levernews.com/James Li: https://www.youtube.com/c/5149withJamesLiThe Intercept: https://theintercept.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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All right, everybody, time now for our weekly partnership segment with The Lever. This week we have journalist Matthew Cunningham-Cook, who has a deep dive into the roots of the Jackson, Mississippi water crisis. Let's go ahead and put this up on the screen here. And great to see you, Matthew, by the way. Thanks for having me on, Crystal. Always, always. So let's take a look at this tariff sheet.

We say Wall Street is behind Jackson's water crisis. Why am I not surprised? A major credit rating agency jacked up interest rates in Jackson, Mississippi, curtailing infrastructure investments in the years leading up to the city's recent disaster. But you, Matthew, and your colleague here, Ricardo Gomez, you all go even deeper than the past couple of years into the real origins of this crisis. And I'm really glad you did because, you know, we covered back when Jackson had that terrible winter storm and there were massive issues then, and there was a massive awareness and understanding that this could be a continuing ongoing problem. And yet, of course,

the problems don't ultimately get fixed and then fast forward and we're covering once again, Oh my God, they don't have water. The water's not safe to drink. There's, you know, boil notice for weeks and weeks on end. So I would love for you to take us back to the beginning of how we ended up in this place where the infrastructure is so degraded, so dilapidated, and yet residents are still getting sky high water bills in spite of the fact that the service is so poor? Yeah. So, I mean, the real beginning is the EPA, like they did in Flint, fell down on the job and we're not monitoring the extreme levels of industrial waste dumping into Jackson's water system. So that's the reason why this system is so degraded,

is mass industrial dumping that was not regulated by the EPA. But there's some more recent stuff. So in 2013, prior to the election of the current mayor's father, who was also a progressive, the city, under the leadership of a mayor who didn't have the tightest ethical practices, decided to automate the city's water billing system and issued a huge bond of $90 million to finance those upgrades. Turned out it was a total scam with Siemens. And the city, Siemens had to pay a huge settlement back to the city, but it never addressed kind of the core issues with this initial bond, which was the interest rates were very high, as high as 6.75 percent. Wow. The mayor's father, who's also named Shokwe Lumumba, died shortly after taking office in 2014

and was replaced by another mayor with significantly compromised ethics, Tony Yarber, who was investigated by the FBI, and he refused to do anything to address the issues with the Siemens contract or with the bond. Shokwe Lumumba, the younger, when he was running in 2017, said, you know, very cogently, we have a major crisis with our water system. It needs to be addressed stat. I am going to issue a new bond that will allow us to take the needed necessary upgrades. And because I have tighter ethical standards, you can be assured, Jackson voters, that it's going to actually happen. Gotcha. Right after he takes office, Moody's, the main bond rating agency, jacks down the bond credit rating of the city of Jackson into junk status. That means you can't refinance

this big 2013 bond for a scam. And you can't, and any new bond is going to have very high interest rates. So he was never able to do it. And that is really kind of the root at the local level. And what makes it so outrageous, though, is that Moody's and the other bond ratings agencies do not rate municipalities based on the likelihood of default. Because if they did, then almost and they've said this themselves, that almost all municipalities would be rated very highly, either triple A or double A, very, very, very highly. And instead, they use all these other determinations to determine the creditworthiness of a given city, including wealth and poverty. And that's really what happened here. And again, Moody's was explicit, you know, we're, we're shoving this city's bond rating into junk. We're kneecapping this new progressive mayor, uh, because this city has a high level of poverty. Um, and, uh, that is just so different from how Moody's treats, uh,

wall streets and the corporate market. So, uh, even recently, you know, I mean, in the lead up to COVID, they were rating tranches of commercial mortgage backed securities at AAA, the highest rating ever, right before there's a world historic global pandemic that sends millions of people out of offices to work from home. And here's the core problem, is that corporate and Wall Street don't have taxing power. Municipalities do have unlimited taxing power. There are no consequences, meaningful consequences for Wall Street or corporate executives who default on their debt. Politicians who default on their debt face very real consequences. You've seen, I think, four governors of Puerto Rico since they defaulted

on their debt. You saw the former, you know, you've seen many politicians from Detroit sent to prison. And those are really the only two major places where you've seen debt default recently. The last time Jackson defaulted on its debt was during World War II. So it's really an outrageous double standard that ends up driving up the cost of public services for ordinary Americans, especially Americans who live in high poverty areas, while Wall Street faces no meaningful accountability whatsoever. And where is the state of Mississippi and the federal government? Where are they when all of this is happening? Do they have money or tools at their disposal that could be used to aid the city that seems to have been forgotten by everybody? Yeah, I mean, this was, you know, so, I mean, I followed the Jackson stuff very closely for the last few years.

And it was always very clear the Mississippi legislature is dominated by a Tea Party kind of elite. And the governor as well comes out of that. And they're totally uninterested in helping the city of Jackson. And this is something we've seen time and again. There's that at the state level. And then at the federal level, you've seen, I believe, a close to 80 percent decrease in federal government investments in water infrastructure since the mid-'70s. So those are real consequences. But in terms of, you know, just in the last few years, you know, how could this city address its bond infrastructure, address its infrastructure

crisis? It would have happened had Moody's and the other bond rating agencies not kneecapped Marilyn Mumba. And that's exactly what happened. Wow. And so what is the status of the water system in Jackson, Mississippi today? The last I had seen, but this has been a couple weeks ago, they were still under, there was water flowing, but it was still under a boil advisory. Is the water safe to drink today? It seems like no. I mean, it's certainly not safe for pregnant women or small children, you know. So there's disputes, you know, between the city and the state over this issue. And, yeah, you know, this is a major problem. And unfortunately, congressional Democrats are not proposing to address the full scale of the crisis.

So Benny Thompson, the congressman from Jackson, has proposed $200 million when Mayor Lumumba has said that they're probably going to need closer to a billion dollars to address this problem. So it's an ongoing problem. It's an ongoing crisis. The federal government absolutely needs to step in right away with the correct amount of money. Now that's the only thing that can be done. But we have pending water crises all around the country. And Moody's decision to rate municipalities so much more harshly than any other section of the debt market really is going to drive additional water crises exactly like Jackson in the years and decades to come. It is so important to understand this. I mean, we just had news coming out still out of

Flint about now. Charges were dropped against some of the officials who could have been held liable here. There was news about, I believe it was Chicago with high lead levels. I mean, this is really an issue across the country and not just in urban areas either. There are a lot of rural parts of the country that suffer with degraded water infrastructure. I know a lot of places in West Virginia and Eastern Kentucky that we've done stories on as well. It is a real sign of societal decay, decline, collapse, whatever you want to call it, that in such a wealthy society,

we have so many places where people can't even take for granted the very basics of having clean drinking water. That's absolutely right. Thank you so much for digging into this. This reporting is crucial in helping us understand the mechanics being used by Wall Street to make things so difficult for these cities as well. Matthew, great to see you.

Thank you so much, Crystal. Really appreciate it. Hey, everyone. I'm Ken Klippenstein with Breaking Points, the Intercept Edition. I'm joined today for a second time with Rayy Jarar, Advocacy Director of Democracy in the Arab World Now, or DON for short. We're going to be talking to you about the Biden administration and Mohammed bin Salman, the leader of Saudi Arabia, at the same time that President Biden is giving all the soaring rhetoric about the situation in Ukraine, the unjust war, invasion by Russia. There's also a sort of corollary story to that that's getting much less attention,

which is our relationship to one of the most despotic regimes on earth. And not just that, this week is the anniversary week of the brutal murder civil case against him for information about that the U.S. government has with regard to the murder of Khashoggi. And in addition to that, civil liabilities for his widow. And so could you talk to us a bit, not just about the suit, but what the Biden administration did, not just this week of the anniversary, but on the day anniversary of Khashoggi's murder. It's good to be on the show again. I think the Biden administration has been making one mistake after the other when it comes to Jamal Khashoggi.

Jamal Khashoggi is a case study of the failure of this administration to change course on our foreign policy. So what we saw happen this weekend, around the fourth anniversary of the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, is not exceptional. It's actually another example of making wrong decisions. So what happened is we have a lawsuit against MBS and many of his team in Saudi Arabia, government officials who participated in planning and conducting, executing the murder of Jamal Khashoggi.

And the lawsuit got to a point where the judge requested from the U.S. government to give an opinion whether or not MBS has foreign immunity. So rather than declaring that they're not going to get involved in the issue, the Biden administration requested from the judge an extension to weigh in. And that request for an extension happened literally around the weekend of his fourth anniversary. So the Biden administration once again chooses, they get out of their way. They had the option to tell the judge, we're not going to weigh in on this. This is a civil lawsuit. You forget it, our judge.

But what the Biden administration said, we are going to weigh in. Give us 45 more days to give our opinion on whether or not MBS deserves immunity. Which, by the way, what a weaselly way out of this. You know, when I was talking to people that follow this case very closely, they told me, they said, I expect that they're going to ask for an extension because that neither grants MBS precisely what he wants, nor does it really take an antagonistic position to him. And, you know, this is a very oil-rich country in the context of gas prices being what they are, and the administration is very sensitive to that. But when you do something like this, it's kind of like they're trying to have the best of both worlds, it seems like. You know, I mean, I am a pragmatist, and I know that this administration does not have the political will to make grand statements about Jamal Khashoggi. But the easy way for the administration

to get out of this would have been saying nothing. If they just missed the deadline, which was last week, without saying, yes, MBS deserves immunity, or no, MBS does not deserve immunity, that would have given them an easy way out. But they put themselves in a worse situation by requesting an extension, because now the implication is that they will give an opinion. So they put themselves in a place where they are required now to give an opinion on whether it's a yes or no answer. And of course that opinion is not automatically adopted by the judge, but it has its weight with the decision. It suggests that the US government is considering it. Of course.

And I think like the fact that the administration is not willing to stay quiet, to stay out of this. And we're not expecting them necessarily to come to our rescue and to help with the effort to hold MBS and his cronies accountable. But we were expecting them to at least stay quiet, and they failed. Even with that very low bar, they failed. What's incredible to me is what is this administration getting out of this? Because I could go through any number of cases, take say just the last few days when OPEC has announced that they're going to decrease oil production, which is going to have the effect of driving up gas prices and the price of everything because oil figures into every aspect of our economy, how things are shipped, how they're manufactured since we have a fossil fuel based economic

system. So not only are they saying they're going to increase you know, we have a fossil fuel based economic system. So not only are they saying they're going to increase production, Saudi Arabia also announced that they're going to continue their relationship, renew their relationship with Russia as part of OPEC, which wasn't something that was always the case. And that is just a slap in the face to this administration to say nothing of the fact of Biden's visit, which itself was always up in the air. No one was really sure, you know, what or when that was going to happen.

And, you know, I could go through any number of embarrassing kind of details about how that unfolded. my Saudi friends were like, oh my God, that is like a middle finger in diplomatic terms, to them immediately leaking the contents of the meeting and claiming that Biden never brought up Khashoggi's death. It's just one, you know, humiliation after another. What are they getting out of this? I don't understand. Nothing. They're getting nothing. And what we're told, the human rights community in Washington, D.C. and the nonprofit community, we're told that we're too naive, we're too principled and purist in our demands for accountability. So before the visit happened, we were told that President Biden has to go because in real life, we have to make some concessions to keep the oil flowing and bring the oil prices down. But the oil is not flowing. Exactly. That's what we said as well.

Like many, many U.S. organizations before President Biden went, we said they're not going to comply even with your, you know, real politic demands of oil. There are no signs that they're going to do this. And obviously, they did not. So the trip was not only a humiliating trip, not only a trip that gave away the United States' political capital and moral capital. At the same time that they're, you know, trying to mount a case against Russia's conduct and talking about freedom and democracy versus autocracy, which, what is a better embodiment of autocracy than a, you know, government where there is a literal king, not figurative, they behead people for crimes like sorcery and witchcraft. How are we supposed to take seriously anything they have to say about rights?

I mean, yeah, the point that I was saying is that they not only lost this moral argument, which is the US has some sort of a moral high grounds to criticize Russia or criticize Cuba or criticize China for human rights violations, but also nothing came out of this trip. The oil production did not change. OPEC Plus agreement with Russia did not change. The rhetoric from the Saudi production did not change. OPEC Plus agreement with Russia did not change. The rhetoric from the Saudi government did not change. Actually, the Saudi government led a crackdown on human rights defenders immediately after President Biden left. They have not changed any of that. That's a really important aspect to this. This is a lot bigger than just Khashoggi,

although that's an important case. This sends a signal to autocrats like him about what they can get away with. And remember, Khashoggi was a U.S. resident. So this is saying the U.S. government, you know, to whatever extent is not going to bring the hammer down if a, you know, foreign autocrat does something to its residents. That's something really important for Americans to understand that they have a stake in this beyond, you know, abstract conceptions of human rights. That is the message that was transmitted by this administration, loud and clear, that the United States government will not hold other governments accountable,

even if they kill a U.S. resident. A prominent one who's wealthy. Even if they go that far, in case there are some geopolitical calculations that the U.S. will deem in its interest to keep that relationship going. So the U.S. has like other calculations about Saudi Arabia, oil and the relationship between Saudi Arabia and Israel and the relationship between Saudi Arabia and Iran and they're doing those kinds of calculations. But meanwhile, you will have a massive scandalous violation of human rights, such as the planet and is getting signals from the Biden administration that,

you know what, we're not going to do anything. I'm thinking, what is a young new leader messages going to take for that? We're going to be seeing this guy for conceivably the next 30 or 40 years. Yeah, and this guy is being taught by the US and Europe and international allies that he can get away with murder, literally. That's what he's being taught before he became king. The stunt that he pulled last week when they made an announcement that he is the new prime minister of Saudi Arabia is nothing short than a political stunt to evade accountability. So what he's trying to play with his legal team is that he's trying to claim head of state immunity

by making himself the prime minister. And this is... So this is what the lawfare is around, that the Biden administration was asked to weigh in on, okay, do you... Here's the thing. So it's being covered as though, oh, the king is now the prime minister,

so we can't do anything about him in court. But that's not really how it works. So they can claim that, but the U.S. government, the Justice Department, the State Department, and the National Security Council have to come together and say, okay, we recognize him as that. That's making things extremely awkward for this administration because they don't want to make that determination, but they also don't want to go against this Petro state.

That's right. And the stunt is very, it's like a joke. The timing of it is very transparent, that he just made himself, the prime minister, literally the week of the deadline of making a determination in the lawsuit. And his attorney filed a motion immediately after requesting that the judge take into account the fact that MBS has become prime minister. So the causal connection is very, very transparent. It's clearly about this lawsuit. I mean, like the timing and the motion,

you know, this is not something happening in a vacuum. But legally, you know, it's not a slam dunk for their side because there is one head of state in Saudi Arabia and that one head of state in the kingdom is the king. So the father is still the head of state. And there are very strong legal arguments that when you try to obtain political immunity for the sake of obtaining political immunity, like what he's doing now, that it's invalid. It's obviously happening to evade responsibility, recuse himself from accountability. And the judge should not take that into account. We are going to make these arguments whether or not the Biden administration comes back to say we recognize him as the second head of state, which is not a thing, but we are going to make these arguments.

But you're right, like now, the legal case has become a political circus. And the reason why it became a political circus is the actions of this administration. This administration could have chosen a path to not get involved in the legal lawsuit by just staying out of it. They didn't have to say yes, they didn't have to say no, they didn't have to respond. They could have just missed the deadline, stayed quiet, and stayed out of it. But now the Biden administration has chosen actively to become a party to a lawsuit that might lead to exonerating MBS.

So that's kind of what I want to end on here, is what do you expect to happen when the deadline, which I believe is what, 45 days or so? That's right. Rolls around and then they have to make the decision. Do you think the Biden administration will end up making a filing or request that the judge behave in a certain way? Or will at that point, they just wash their hands of it?

I mean, I think they put themselves in a very bad spot now. It's very difficult for them to not give an opinion. I'm expecting bad news, looking at the pattern of what this administration has done in the last couple of years. I don't expect them to come up with a grand gesture and, you know, speak truth to power and take the side of the, you know, oppressed. I don't see it happening. So I'm expecting bad news. But, you know, we're going to do our best to explain to the judge our point of view. And I think most legal scholars in the U.S. understand that our position is stronger legally. But, of course, politics will play its role as well. So freedom against autocracy, some conditions may apply. It depends on what hemisphere in the world that we're talking about.

That's right. Rai, thanks for joining me. Once again, this is Ken Klippenstein with Breaking Points, the Intercept Edition. I'll ask it some pieces to you. Donald Banger, seed oil disrespector. I've been listening to you guys since I heard Sagar on Paul Saladino's podcast. I'm just curious if you, Sagar, consider yourself a seed oil disrespector. I love this question.

So for the uninitiated, there is a huge debate online. I need to get in on this debate. My name is James Lee. Welcome to another segment of 5149 on Breaking Points, where we dive into different topics at the intersection of business, politics, and society. And today, we're going to try to answer this question. Is there something about the food that we're eating that is causing us to be fatter and sicker than we've ever been in history?

We'll start with an interesting graph, the one that you see on your screen from a paper published earlier this year in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, a peer-reviewed primary research journal in nutrition and dietetics showing trends in U.S. energy intake. If you look at the blue and orange line, which represents energy available and energy consumed, over the last 20 years our caloric intake has pretty much stayed the same around 2200 calories a day yet for some reason the obesity rate the red line is continued to skyrocket from about 30 in 2000 to 43 in 2018 so according to the study americans on average have been taking in roughly the same amount of calories, but obesity rates are continuing to explode.

So something is going on that's destroying our metabolic health. And I think there are probably a number of different contributors like eating too much sugar and processed foods. But today we're going to focus on one potential contributor that is perhaps a bit more hidden, but just as prevalent in our diet and one that has been hotly debated online in recent months and years. And that is the prevalence of seed oils in our diets. First off, what is a seed oil? It's a subset of vegetable oils that are derived from seeds of crops.

Canola oil, sunflower oil, corn oil, grapeseed oil, soybean oil, just to name a few. My guess is that you have at least one of these in your kitchen that you cook with, but they are everywhere. Mazola corn oil. Crisco oil. Vegetable corn and sunflower oil.

Low-cost vegetable oil is in everything from packaged foods to restaurants and kitchens across the world. Vegetable oil. Canola oil. Vegetable oil. in everything from packaged foods to restaurants and kitchens across the world. Vegetable oil. Canola oil. Vegetable oil. Canola oil. As consumption of vegetable oils exploded, rates of obesity and diabetes happened to explode with it.

Two important things to point out. One, it's very important to make a distinction between correlation and causation. We have to be careful there. And two, seeing a montage like that makes me wonder how vegetable oils came to replace animal fat in our diet. This is from an article in the American Conservative, quote, Indeed, vegetable oils rose to popularity in large part due to a marketing campaign by Procter & Gamble that framed these oils as a health food. Beginning with Ivory Soap, the entrepreneurial brothers found ways to produce a plethora of household staples for sheep by replacing animal

fats with partially hydrogenated vegetable oils to earn a profit during the economic recession of the 1870s. So this I think was a good opportunity to point out that in many instances you can find these underlying economic drivers and changes in public health guidance. In this case, a certain company would most certainly benefit almost in perpetuity from the public acceptance of a particular new product that they sell. So they'll fund certain nonprofit organizations and academic institutions to conduct studies on their behalf to convince people that their new product is better for you than what's already existing on the market. Those institutions that help them out also gain more prominence as a result. It's certainly an interesting ecosystem, this relationship between economics and science. I want to read to you an excerpt from a Wall Street Journal article entitled The Questionable Link Between Saturated Fat and Heart Disease.

Quote, butter and lard had long been staples of the American pantry until Crisco, introduced in 1911, became the first vegetable-based fat to win wide acceptance in U.S. kitchens. Then came margarines made from vegetable oil and then just plain vegetable oil in bottles. All these got a boost from the American Heart Association, which Procter & Gamble, the maker of Crisco oil, coincidentally helped launch as a national organization. In 1948, P&G made the AHA the beneficiary of the popular Walking Man radio contest, which the company sponsored. The show raised $1.7 million for the group and transformed it, according to the AHA's official history, from a small, underfunded professional society into the powerhouse that it remains today. After the AHA advised the public to eat less saturated fat and switch to vegetable oils for

a quote-unquote healthy heart in 1961, Americans changed their diets. Now, these oils represent 7 to 8% of all calories in our diet, up from nearly zero in 1900, the biggest increase in consumption of any type of food over the past century. Okay, so there's a little bit of the history. Correct or incorrect, there was certainly some collaboration between corporations and the scientific community to convince Americans that vegetable oil is better for you than animal fat. So now that we understand that piece of history, let's talk a little bit about why doctors today are concerned about vegetable oil being a regular part of our diet. Average Americans today are eating five to six tablespoons

of vegetable oils per day. That's around 700 calories of oil filled with polyunsaturated fat. It's almost impossible to get this amount naturally. There's so little oil per ear of corn that it takes 98 ears or 12,000 calories of corn to get you five tablespoons of corn oil. So a long industrial process is dedicated to ripping oil out of these tiny seeds. As mentioned earlier, polyunsaturated vegetable fats oxidize very easily. Oxidize simply means to react with oxygen. This is how metals rust, and this is why meat that you leave out turns brown after a while.

Oxidation changes the structure and properties of fats for the worse. Heat is a great way to oxidize fats, and vegetable oil is repeatedly heated long before it ever arrives in a kitchen. There are many steps to create edible oil, and several of them involve very high heat. Vegetable oils also oxidize while sitting in your body, creating toxic oxidation products like an aldehyde called 4-HNE. 4-HNE is actually considered to be the most toxic aldehyde and this compound has been associated with aging, heart disease, diabetes, and Alzheimer's. Neuroscientist Tetsumori Yamashima has done plenty of research on vegetable oils and 4-HNE. He's published multiple papers on the damaging effects of this compound

and why people need to avoid vegetable oils because they oxidize into 4-HNE in our bodies. Polyunsaturated fats, oxidation, aldehydes, 4-HNE, it's all very technical, but essentially some experts are claiming that the manufacturing process of these seed oils makes the substance more or less a toxin that can harm our bodies and lead to illnesses like diabetes, heart disease, obesity, and many others if we consume it regularly. But with that being said, these claims aren't conclusive. Like we talked about earlier, correlation is not causation, right? You'll find some articles out there like this one from Consumer Reports. The headline reads, do seed oils make you sick? Critics say they raise your risk for weight gain,

heart issues, and more, but the science doesn't support those claims, right? This isn't going to be the first time and it won't be the last time scientific studies come to differing conclusions. Science is just confusing. We have to think about and consider so many things like which research group conducted this study, who funded the study, how were the trials designed, was it peer-reviewed, and so many other variables. I think the truth is based on all my research so far on this topic, these trials are just too short. The proof, this is an excerpt from a 1969 clinical trial studying the effects of eating unsaturated fat, quote, as indicated in Table 29 and discussed in some detail above, the excess mortality in non-atherosclerotic categories was not sufficiently impressive

to justify the conclusion that harmful effects had been demonstrated. Nonetheless, this small excess non-atherosclerotic mortality in the late years of the study raises the very important and difficult question of whether future clinical trials of diets rich in unsaturated fat must be planned for periods well in excess of eight years rather than the five-year periods that have been the usual goal. Okay, so the situation is we don't really know for sure whether seed oils can be linked to obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and many other ailments. And my opinion is obviously that while the relationship between diseases like obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and eating vegetable oil is at this point at best correlational and not causational, we also cannot deny that our diet

has changed tremendously in the last half century. Even Asian countries are getting fatter, which we all think of them as being much more healthy. Countries like Japan, China, and India all have recent documented surges in obesity rates because they too have increasingly adopted more Western food habits, like eating more sugar, which we know is bad for you, and also eating more processed foods, which all contain vegetable oil. Look, I think the causes for something like obesity is obviously a multifaceted issue. Vegetable oil is perhaps just one small component of why we're getting fatter and sicker. We'll have to wait for better designed,

longer clinical trials. But in the meantime, I don't think we could talk about this topic and not mention the overall structure of food and drug regulation. The Food and Drug Administration, the FDA, is responsible for assuring that foods sold in the United States are safe, wholesome, and properly labeled. But at the same time, a not insignificant portion of the FDA is funded by Big Pharma. According to their website, 54%, that's $3.3 billion of their funding, comes from the federal government. But the other 46%, that's $2.8 billion, comes from Big Pharma vis-a-vis industry user fees. And if Big Pharma's profit engine is fueled by the existence of sick patients,

wouldn't it be great for them if, say, half or two-thirds or whatever the obesity number is today of adults in America were sick? Here's a headline for you. Buy Eli Lilly stock. Its obesity drug will be a blockbuster, analyst says. So here's the deal. I can't sit here in good conscience and say that there is some kind of global conspiracy of food and pharmaceutical executives and regulators and dark rooms devising ways to make people sick. But what I can say is that there is a certain economic benefit of normalizing obesity or convincing us to eat foods that sound healthy

rather than to eat foods that are actually healthy. Anyway, those are just my thoughts about seed oils. What are yours? Please share them with us in the comment section below. I hope you found this segment to be helpful and informative. I actually have another segment on the food industry about the effects of fiber in our diet on my YouTube channel. So I would encourage you to go ahead and check that out. Subscribe to my channel 5149 with James Lee. The link will be in the description below. Thank you so much for tuning into Breaking Points. And as always, I appreciate your time today. This is an iHeart Podcast.