Dhru Purohit Show - Food Corruption, Tainted Science, And The Nuances Around Nutrition Research With Dr. Mark Hyman

Episode Date: February 16, 2023

This episode is brought to you by InsideTracker, WHOOP, and BiOptimizers Magnesium Breakthrough.  This week on The Dhru Purohit Podcast, Dhru welcomes Dr. Mark Hyman for part two of their conversation. This time, their discussion focuses on themes from Dr. Hyman’s previous book, Food Fix, and the need for a radical shift in food policy. Dr. Mark Hyman is a practicing family physician and an internationally recognized leader, speaker, educator, and advocate in the field of Functional Medicine. He is the host of one of the leading health podcasts, The Doctor’s Farmacy. His new book, Young Forever, is available for purchase everywhere on February 21 or for preorder here.  In this episode, Dhru and Dr. Mark Hyman dive into: -Dr. Hyman’s latest take on the corruption in the food industry (0:58) -How industry-funded nutrition research yields biased outcomes (4:00) -Tufts University’s Food Compass: what it is and why it went viral (18:43) -Potential solutions for fixing corruption in the food industry (38:05) -Why we need to reform food policy from the ground up (47:24) -Addressing the “obesity is genetic” segment on 60 Minutes (55:06) -Why healthy eating is not elitist (1:09:45) -Kindness, community, and coming together for change (1:19:44) Also mentioned in this episode: -Tamar Haspel’s Tweet -EWG Good Food on a Tight Budget Shopping Guide -Young Forever, available for preorder here.  For more on Dr. Mark Hyman, follow him on Instagram @drmarkhyman, YouTube @drmarkhyman, or his website, https://www.drhyman.com. InsideTracker provides detailed nutrition and lifestyle guidance based on your individual needs. Right now, they’re offering my podcast community 20% off. Just go to https://www.insidetracker.com/DHRU to get your discount and try it out for yourself. WHOOP is a personalized digital fitness tracker and health coaching platform that monitors your physiology 24/7 and provides personalized recommendations based on what your body needs. To get yours, go to https://www.join.whoop.com and get 15% off your membership with code DHRU15. Magnesium Breakthrough really stands out from the other magnesium supplements out there. BiOptimizers is offering my community 10% off plus special gift with purchase, so just head over to https://www.magbreakthrough.com/dhru with code DHRU10. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If you look at 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 an NIH or publicly funded study on the same product. Hi, everyone. Drew Brode here. Today we have Mark Hyman back on the podcast for a whole new conversation. Yeah, he has a new book out. It's called Young Forever. We had him on the podcast recently talking all about it. Today, we're going into a part two, which is more focused on food corruption, the hidden tricks. of big food that are out there, how to make changes from the inside and how to make changes from the outside, controversial topics like seed oils and the food compass that was recently put out there. Mark has a lot of thoughts on that.

And most importantly, how we actually genuinely make a difference and get the most vulnerable populations healthy. It's a fantastic episode. Stay tuned. Mark, welcome back to the podcast. A pleasure to have you here. 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 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 NACP or the Hispanic Federation, how much they're infiltrated in professional organizations like the AMA or American Diabetes Association, American College of Cardiology.

I mean, 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 something that sort of happens below the surface and the face of. corporate social responsibility, for example. It brings them out an example of 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 exposed a lot of the sort of industry issues that were going on. And I went to Atlanta and a friend of mine introduced me to Bernie King, Martin Luther King's daughter. And, you know, got to have quite a bit of time with her. And she realized that nonviolence that her father talked about also met nonviolence to the self. And that, you know, really the African-American community really need to be inspired to also look at that. 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, Atlanta is where Martin Luther King had his church,

the Ebenezer Baptist Church, but it's also where Coca-Cola's headquarters is. and Coca-Cola funds the King's Center. And at first, Bernice was very excited about sharing this movie in the King's Center and having a show and we had it scheduled, it was all set up. And a few days before this screening, I got a call from her saying, hey, we can't show the movie. And I was sort of flabbergasted and really it was because the King's Center is funded by Coca-Cola. She said that outright?

She told you explicitly or was just implied? I mean, it was kind of implied. And then 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 and 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 vending 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 a 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 really don't want soda taxes, right? So the soda industry does not want a soda taxes. And they literally have funded the NWACP and Hispanic Federation to influence them to oppose soda taxes. Which is a big part of what Cali was talking about and helping out of the strategy. Exactly.

Discriminating against African Americans. and Hispanics by targeting them with taxes and it's regressive and there's all these talking points. Manistate. All these talking points. They even funded an initiative 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 as a, quote, donation, which then led to them abruptly withdrawing their support for soda taxes. So that's how they gave the system. That blatant. Was anybody making noise about it? Did you see it written about? Yes. This is like, it's not hard to find.

You do a little research and you don't have to dig very far to find these things. And in big soda companies, they, in, particularly in Coca-Cola, they targeted African-American and Latino populations because they already were using these compounds more. I call them compounds because they're basically like drugs that are bad for you. with the soda and sugar. And they realize that they could influence these groups and that they could get them to be even bigger users. You know, so 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 use this through various tactics, for example, with electronic benefits, 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 discount. They know when they're coming out and they have whole marketing campaigns around this. So the whole thing is corrupt. It's not, there's, the, these groups are co-opted. The professional and medical nutrition groups are co-opted. Academy of Nutrition Dietetics, 40% of their funding comes from the food industry. So it's, it's, it's, it's problematic. I've experimented with every eating approach in the book. I'm talking about raw foodist, vegan, vegetarian, meat eater, you name it, I've tried it. And the truth is, at first, I felt pretty good on all of them until I didn't. The common denominator for all these diets is the fact that they're all made up of mostly whole foods and free from processed foods,

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which is super helpful for giving me the nudge I need on busy weeks to make fitness a priority. Right now, Woop is offering my key. community 15% off their whoop membership. Just go to join.wop.com and use the code Drew 15 at checkout. That's join dot W-H-O-O-P.com and enter the code D-H-R-U-15 at checkout for 15% off any Woop membership. It 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, Tufts University. And we were talking about the food compass, right? And there was recently an article written that there are over, you know, 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 blatantly say that it's also corrupt.

So where do we find that balance that's there? What does a new system look like? I mean, it's a really great point. I did talk about this in Food Fix. And 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.

funding academic programs and education. So a lot of the way that they influence prescribing practices and what drugs get promoted and what drugs get research is through these massive financial influx of money into the system. That's sort of one of the original sort of things that happened 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, 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 $50,000 in today's dollars to write this article,

which essentially was a shill article for the sugar industry, posing as a New England journal article that was supposed to be biased and impartial. 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 complex of interest, that's helpful. But it's not enough. And there are a number of really stringing guidelines that have been proposed

and that I write about in my book Food Fix that 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 at arm's length somebody funds research, they want to advance things. For example, the food compass was one of the researchers was funded by Danone, which was a big food company. So Danone didn't end up using this food compass rating system. They used another European rating system because they thought it was better for them.

So they didn't end up using even though they funded this. So a lot of companies will fund these arms length. They don't have control over 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 you have to have the firewalls in place. A lot of times are not. And that's part of the problem. If you look at 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 an 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 Dr. Gabriel Lyons mentor that you had on recently? Don Lehman. Don Lehman. 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 the, you know, 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 in kind of updating some of even your ideas and protein and some of his students and people that have. been inspired by him like Dr. Gabriel Lyne, 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. I think that kind of biases. So you think the people who write paper should put it out there? Disclose. But what would it show in his case, for instance? He is openly an omnivore. right? Yeah, for sure. And, you know, he's doing work in protein. And obviously that's going to influence, you know, his 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 in the 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 diet, and 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. You know, there 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 cause 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 all sorts of problems. I mean, you try to draw conclusions. So you have to look at the sum total of all the evidence and make your conclusions based on that data, the best available data we have. And for me, 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 changed them to this diet or that diet. So you can 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 triglysteroides were like well over 300 or her cholesterol was 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, her lipids are going to get worse, it's really bad for them. But in her case, her cholesterol dropped 300 to 200. Her glycerized 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

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 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 inflammation levels went up. I was like, well, this isn't good for you. Even if 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, I'm not interested 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 people from India. Like, you're going to just have very different results, depending on the population you're studying, but on 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, you know, just setting it up from that standpoint. And I saw an interview that you recently did with Dr. Mazafarian from Tufts. And I'd love for you to just set up for the audience here. You know, what was the food company? 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, what process are made to make food. And they can be very helpful, but they're limited. So, for example, in the past, you know, they might have just like, I'm going to look at saturated fat, salt, and calories as the markers. Or I'm going to use, you know, some other 10 things that I look at that 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 compass was an attempt. And 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 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? 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 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? So, do you. you buy like fruit loops or should you buy Cheerios?

You know, I think it's a reasonable attempt to try to guide people. And I think, you know, very clearly in a perfect world, none of us would be eating processed food or especially ultra-processed food. I mean, you know, sourcrow's processed food, yogurt's processed food, canned 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 that's the aspiration. But in the world we live in today, that's just not possible. So there are all sorts of reasons why we have to rate these foods. 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 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 to 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 that's really important. They looked at levels of omega-3s. They looked at levels of MCT oil. They looked at levels of trans fats. They looked at a whole bunch of different attributes, 54 different attributes among nine different domains.

And I think it was more than ever was done before to look at food, but it still was imperfect. For example, my big beef with it is that there are really no large, great databases for the glycemic load or index of food, which in my book is probably the most important attribute of food in determining its ability to affect your health from the point of view of your weight, from 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 ding or maybe if it didn't have

a 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 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 it's not meant to be dietary guidelines. It's not a government funded thing. The National Institute of Health, 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 in of there, especially companies that are focused on this whole ESG thing. 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. Yeah, it was more of a guide around how to pick among different foods within categories or cross 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 come out that way. That doesn't necessarily mean that looking at all the weight of the evidence that eggs are not better than Cheerios, it just means that in the way they calculated the algorithm, that's how it came out. So I think that's problematic. It's problematic. And if you, you know,

if you were to ask, you know, the authors of study, 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. But, you know, does that mean you're going to be better off eating a whole oat groat versus steel-cote versus oatmeal versus, you know, oat milk? Yeah, of course. Or versus Cheerios, which is pulverized oats. So, yeah, I think there's no debate debate about that. Yeah, I guess that, you know, going back to your earlier comment, and I'm not trying to play a journalistic moment on you over here. I'm just trying to get, you know, I look up to you.

I want to get your honest thoughts about it. And I think, you know, feel like you're an individual that you are both. That's only because a few inches taller. Otherwise, it's fine. We're equal. You are both with food fixed nonprofit, right? The goal is to influence the discussion in a bipartisan level and have Congress talking about food. Food is medicine, right? And you got to play on both sides of the aisle and 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 over there. Yeah. And, and still there.

And, you know, that's another form of like, you know, change coming in from the little bit of an insider outsider 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, for me, clarity for the audience. It's there. So earlier you were saying like these things are sometimes so embedded that people don't

even know 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 going to name the author, 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 a 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 Tufts 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. One of the authors. One of the authors is funded. One of the authors is funded. One of the authors. Right. Didn't end up using the food companies.

Right. Didn't end up using it. Are the majority of the authors from Tufts, including the lead-ups? But they don't get their salaries from the food industry. 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 of part 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 word. I think the word of the year for 2021 was gaslighting. Yeah, 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 influence? So do you feel that any of that general funding? could be in the back of people's minds, right?

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or unconsciously. And one of the favorite books about this was written by Mary Nessel called Unsavory Truth. And she talked both about the medical industry and pharma and primarily about the food industry, influence. 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 for sure when I read something.

And I, for example, I think personally that it 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 are people who eating 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 do worry 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 so. And I've heard you talk about that before. You public,

you know, you've shared that that I have an unconscious bias. Even I'm sure, you know, your podcast and my podcast has exists because of sponsors, right? There's definitely unconscious bias that comes in even when you have sponsors that are there. 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? Where people feel that it gets a little bit messy is when there's not an acknowledgement that that sort of can play a role in the background. Yeah, 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 it was, it was basically taking all the existing nutritional databases, all the N-Haines data, 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 are imperfect, right? 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 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, would I like to see funding of nutrition research so we can get answers to these questions? Absolutely. Right now,

you know, we spend $6 billion a year on cancer research, which is okay. But like, It was a huge win to get $100 million to do nutrition research. We should be funding literally billions and billions and billions of dollars in 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 all because of how the system is set up. And is one of those proposals to be 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 200 billions of dollars by the federal government. I mean, if we can, I mean, look at COVID, 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've got to 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 are we 4% of the world's population but had 16% of the COVID cases and deaths? It wasn't because we don't have doctors and hospitals and healthcare system. It's because we are a pre-inflamed, pre-sick population.

When the virus hit, your immune systems weren't working because of our crappy diet and 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 up more about public policy. But the vast majority of their funding comes from the NIH, which largely is controlled by a small group of people. And the concern was, if I criticize, will 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 the Food Compass, they also published, and Dr. Mazafiram published a paper that said that 63% of all hospitalization deaths from COVID 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. Mazafrin 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 meals bill to fund food as medicine for actually paying for food for chronic ill people instead of drugs. So there's so many things that people don't see below the surface.

And nobody's perfect. I'm not perfect. No, he's not perfect. We're all doing the best we can with limited data we have. 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've been in Washington. 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 of the day 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 up 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 is 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 is the way that it is. I mean, there are sort of levels of integrity that have to be in business or in science or in politics. And I think there are, you know, there are ways to look at and evaluate. that. If you're, for example, getting NIH funding and you're getting your university is getting

some funding from pharma or from the food industry, but there's conflict of interest requirements, there's arm's length transactions where, you know, 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 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 growing in Applebaum and Coca-Cola. And with guys like James Hill at University of Colorado, where they were putting on 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 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 of Medicine editor for years, has written a lot about this. You're all about the corruption in pharma and medicine. And basically said that a lot of the data we have is just compromise in many ways because of this. But it doesn't mean that you can't 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, 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 than what would need to happen for like a medicine, for example. example. Yeah. Well, there's a pandemic. People kind of want to act fast. 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 biology that determine sort of intermediate risk factors. I mean, it's hard to do long-term studies in nutrition and look for hard end points 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 in seed oils. This is a whole controversy about seed oils. Yeah, I want to talk to you about that. Seed oils. Yeah, I think, you know, doing nutrition research is very tough. 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 was a whole interest in studying that. And they did sort of large studies.

And so based on some of these studies, you know, there was sort of been view that and some of the more other observational data that drinking, having more soybean oil and refined oils, what we call PUFAs, polyunsatur fatty acids, was protective against heart disease. that it lowered cholesterol, that it reduced heart attacks and strokes. Because it primarily moved us away from animal fats. Yeah, because it was moving away from animal fats. At least that was what the hope was. Yeah, but the problem with those studies was they were very confounded by lots of things,

including using trans fats and using, you know, oils that were some of their omega-6, some were a combination of omega-6 and 3. 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 omega-6-0-3s, there wasn't really a significant bad outcomes.

In fact, there was a reduction in cardiovascular events. When you looked at just the omega-6 studies, there was actually a worsening of the outcomes. And there was a couple of big trials in Minnesota coronary study and others where they literally had locked people up in psychiatric hospitals. They gave like half of them. This was like 9,000 people. So a lot of people in a randomized control 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 when their diets. And 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 they found that the risk wasn't as bad. Now, the veteran study, there was a big, uh, uh, uh, veteran study, there was an alley veteran study. It 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 then 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 high 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 fats from whole foods. if you're going to have any kind of refined oils, they should be expeller or coal 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-3, so they'd be less harmful.

Definitely stay away from cottonseed oil, grape seed oil, peanut oil, you know, cook-orne oil, safflor oil, those are all terrible. So I think my view 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 version of 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 and all the same. Is grape seed oil the same as soybean oil? No, is soybean oil from a regenerally raised farm that's not sprayed with glyphosate? That's, you know, like it's very... I don't know what soybean out there like that, do you? Well, I think there's organic soybeans and there, yeah, there's organic tofu and organic

Tempe and there's organic soybean oil you can buy. So I ended up in the air cold press, an explorer press. So those are likely to be less contaminated, less processed with hexane, not processed of deodorizers that are, you know, so there's all these sort of subtle things. So at the end of the day, you shouldn't have to you combine common sense with science and come up with sort of a reasonable way of looking at these things. But, you know, as Mark Twain said, the problem with common sense is not too common. And the problem with scientists is they go, well, it's all about.

about the evidence. Well, the evidence is fine if you have good evidence, right? If every day 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 processed, 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, you know, there's so many variables that we can measure now that we can never measure before. You can look at gene expression. You can look at metabolomics.

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 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 eating an oil, it 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, I just had a professor on from, you know,

Utah State who studies the metabolomics of animal food. So what is the 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 raised in a feedlot for many reasons. And there was 1,500 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 the 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, the price of this stuff comes down. It's going to be a lot easier to sort of see what's going on. 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 war. there are some sort of studies that have done this, like Kevin Hall has done small, you know, a couple of week or a week-long studies looking at different changes in your biomarkers and your health and fat metabolism when you change, for example, to eat a high or low-carboh-carbohyte 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 eating 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... Including aliens, which may be really a thing. So I want to read you 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 that 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. So this tweet is from Tamar Haspell. She's award-winning Washington Poe columnist. And this kind of caught storm and I saw a bunch of people retweeting it from the kind of more traditional food industry sort of point of view. And I want to just get your thoughts on. Yeah. 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 subsidies in your book. Well, more like insurance, yeah. 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 kind of pull for a few. The subsidies we have now mostly go to corn and soy. We'll include both insurance premium subsidies and what used to be called direct payments, which are now called ARC 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 that $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 round number, let's say that means that we have $1,000 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 are. 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 about that? Oh my God. Well, that last sentence is kind of is a problem. It's a big problem. I think I'm, I'm sort of

paraphrasing that. She didn't write that exactly. But her, 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 course. corn. People, P.S. 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 want to stress test idea. Sam, what do kids in Japan eat? Seweed, raw fish. What are they like pickled 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,

to hijack their hormones, to hijack their microbiome, that make them eat this food through really kind of various nefarious, almost like the body snatchers 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. I don't disagree with you, by the way. And then we can get into the fact of how agriculture is financed, 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 funding more fruit and vegetable growing. is about reforming the entire agricultural system to create a regenerative 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 agricultural system, that stops the pollution of our waterways and our environment by pesticides and glyphosate, that prevents the dumping of nitrogen fertilizers on the soil that goes into waterways.

weighs and kills hundreds of thousands of tons of fish and, you know, just on and on and on. I could literally go on and on and on. So I think that it's about fixing the agriculture system as a whole to boost more high-quality food. And that's possible. And I think it can happen at scale. And I think it's about shifting our kind of government systems policies to a form of a generative system to fund farmers to do this.

And this is what, you know, with food fix we worked on in Washington as part of the IRA bill. And maybe there are many issues with that bill. But one of the things we did was we got $20 billion for reform and agricultural policies and regenerative agriculture and funding farmers' education and funding them converting to regentive farms. And a lot of things that people don't even know about. So things are moving in the right direction. But it's tough to take away the things from farmers because they're stuck in a complete

bind between the need to grow foods the way they've always grown in 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 lock 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 one we have now. And that this is being demonstrated over and over is more profitable and more effective and produces better food. So I don't completely agree with her. I think it's not as simple as just,

you know, ending 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 reform of agriculture. And that may take a long time to happen, but it's got to happen. And I think, you know, we don't, you know, have the support of institutions and, you know, group purchasing from, you know, industry, from government, from schools that produces an incentive to actually

make more good food and cheaper. 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. 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 with White House advisor, Dr. Fatima Cody from Stanford University. The government is named her one of the members of the 2025 dietary guidelines for Americans 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 our species has undergone a major genetic series of mutations since I was born. Because when I was born, 5% of Americans were obese. Now it's 42%. So an eightfold increase, an eight over. 800% 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 looked at all the genes that might potentially impact your hunger, weight, metabolism, obesity risk, and they determine that 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 obese and overweight and is 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 and 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. 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 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, which, by the way, makes you eat a lot more. It's how they induce obesity and 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, it's the same thing. 80% are diabetic by the time they're 30. Their 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. 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 that 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, 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. I don't know what she actually said. I'm just saying if that, if that was the sound like, that's what she said. That's literally what she 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 restrict people. You make them work out for 10 hours. It's 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 regained 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 as well as the outside, when you hear that our president has appointed somebody who has that belief to the dietary committee, 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, 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 antaracts 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 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 uter. It has to do with obesity,gens 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 Christoxys, for example, work at a Harvard, he showed that you're 171% more likely to be overweight if your friends are overweight than if your family's overweight, you're about 40% 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 that 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're you look back, for example, in the 50s, you see now African Americans are among the worst affected. They were the worst affected by COVID 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 because of the toxic food environment and all the things that are influencing our choices and our behavior and the kind of flood of marketing, the flood of easy access, the supersizing of everything, 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 bigger, go home, which led to the massive scaling up of industrial agriculture, the huge productions, of corn and soy as staples, the commodity, commodification of our food system and the bluet of processed food. 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 polarized beyond recognition and reassembled into all sizes, colors, 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 tempe, that's fine. But, you know, weird kind of soybean extract derivatives or corn extract derivatives that are in your food? No, that's not really food. And 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 want to make sure. How about the president having someone appointed who believes obesity is genetic to the U.S. dietary guidelines committee? I mean, I think to be fair, 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, the science of obesity is complex. So I think 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 a rule, a lot of the dietary guidelines have gotten better over the years, but they're still fraught. And for example, dairy is a great example how dairy is part. Before we go to dairy, actually, you kind of mentioned something that I don't want to go on a tangent yet. You mentioned about obesity and how it's being used. When you have certain beliefs, that 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 create this viral commentary, is then she kind of

said a little bit more of an, you know, being brought up in a household of obese parents, then you're likely to be obese. Well, it's probably the environment that you're being brought up in socioeconomic condition, all the things that you were mentioned. 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? 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 American Academy ofiatrics is trying to address the staggering rates of obesity and overweight and kids. 40% of kids are overweight, one and two teenage boys has pre-diabetes or type two diabetes, which I never saw when I was in medical school 35 years ago, just didn't exist.

And now they're trying to grapple with how do we manage this burgeoning epidemic of obesity and risk in kids. And it's serious because if your kids overweight, and obese, their life expectancies 13 years less. Their economic earning capacity is lower. Their risk of diseases 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 comments from the guidelines from the American Academy Piatrics 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 just do the math. If we looked at Wagovi or Ozympic, which is being used off-label for obesity, it's about $1,700 a month for Wagovi. You know, depending on where you buy it, 1300. You do the math. 75% of Americans are 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 a year. That's more than our entire national expenditures on health care, which is $4.1 trillion. 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 was talking to my daughter on my way over here. And she's in medical school. And she was talking about a case 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 thiamond efficiency and end up with something called Warnockies encephalopathy, which is a severe neurological condition with permanent consequences. And he's suing the hospital. I mean, like, having pediatric surgery is not a cakewalk,

you know, 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 heard, you know, New York Times had a podcast a daily where they had Gina Klaude on, who's, you know, New York Times reporter in health, and she's very well educated. She said something, it just didn't make any sense to me. She says, well, we've seen, you know, obesity rates grow up from like, you know, 5% to now, like 20% in kids and just, you know, 40, 50 years. 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. Now, what can be true is epigenetics. So epigenetics are influenced by what we do in our environment and toxins and everything. And that can create genetic 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 notion 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'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 gain back 200 pounds because they just decided they could eat M&Ms all day long without stopping, and they would get enough food because they would satisfy their cravings, but they wouldn't be too full because they only eat one M&M at a time. So, I mean, do you think the thinking? This was a doctor, by the way. Yeah. Do you think the 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? or it's awesome for that person who had the resources 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 the education or 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 that 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 the 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 people need to understand that if you're overweight, it's not your fault. and to blame the person who is 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 all of 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 have to kind of take a hard look at our thoughts. choices. And if we don't honestly look at what we're doing as a nation, we're in trouble,

both economically, both from a global competitiveness standpoint. And I think the basic meme out there is that it's elitist to talk about eating healthy. It's elitist and poor people can't do it. And people don't have means, 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 honestly, I fully admit that I bought into that many years ago. And then I was part of this movie Fed Up that we talked about earlier. And I tried 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 drunk food. The mother was hundreds of pounds, a couple of hundreds of pounds overweight. I mean, huge. The son was 16 years old.

50% body fat should be 10 to 20 and almost diabetic at 16. And they lived in a trailer, a family of five for $1,000 of food stamps and disability payments. And 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? And 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 me give me a lecture on what to eat or tell you to eat vegetables, I said, let's go chopping, 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 stirfied asparagus, simple food. And when I went to their trailer, I went in their cup 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. 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 more corruption. And so they were like shocked. And they were really uneducated about what they were eating, what they were eating, what they shouldn't eat their salad dressing 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. He wanted to know if there were any vegetables in there because they didn't want to eat it. And we kind of joked and it's like, so there's onions, like, 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 ate all the food. And then, they devoured it. And I was like, okay, well, I mean, they didn't have cutting boards, they didn't have knives. I didn't know what was going to 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. You know, you can buy inexpensive vegetables, inexpensive cuts of meat, grains and beans, you can do this. And I left and I bought them 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. Ross, so he was dancing the butter knife. And the first week, the wife texted me back to the mother.

She's 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 son lost 50 and then had to go get a job and worked at Bojangles, gained 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. He 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 going to have bones and some muscles and stuff. 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 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, and what wasn't good, to teach them how to cook, to show them how to 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 and underserved areas where we worked. I've seen it, you know, in many, many places. So I think, you know, there's an underlying belief that this is just an elitist idea, that people sheet healthy

and everybody should shop at Whole Foods. That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying 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. I remember I was working with a friend who worked up in East Harlem and they were working on this chronic disease program to try to help patients not end up in the emergency all the time and not end up on the street.

And they told me this story about this 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 told them everything and this guy didn't know what to do so they sent someone to his house and they were like what are you doing and they showed him it's covered it was just full of junk and this is well I know how to make and I don't know what else to do so they took them shopping and they showed them how to cook and 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 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 in 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. But then also, what does it look to have a true sort of almost like boots on the ground, major sort of like industrial undertaking of having people, I don't mean industrial and 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. Yes, I think that'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 exist, three quarters of it is food stamps, and three quarters of food stamps is junk food and 10% is 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. 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 choose stuff that's healthier for them and their families and not be hungry. But we don't invest in that. Yeah. Well, I'm hoping that things will change. And obviously that was the topic of your last book, and we had you on for that. And we also had you on for Young Forever. But, you know, the book is coming out now. We didn't chat really any bit about the longevity stuff. If you want

to be Young Forever, the first thing to do is deal with insulin resistance, which is what's caused by eating our crap diet, which is driving all the age-related diseases. So it's very relevant. And we just didn't kid it straight on. Well, you know what's funny because from the listener's standpoint, this podcast will come out, you know, just a couple weeks after the podcast. We just, we had you on last week. You and I recorded it last. fall because you were in town, but we just had you on last week. So from their standpoint, this is just the continuation of conversation. Mark, anything else you want to get into right now? Yeah, I just think that, you know, we kind of have to come together as a nation to

address some of our biggest problems. And the biggest thing that, you know, breaks my heart is just the division and divisiveness and oppositional behavior and thinking among all different segments of society, whether it's, you know, politics or nutrition or religion or religious 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 of the layer that I'd love to get your opinion on. I think that polarization and divisiveness is not so much the issue. you because we want actually smart people who disagree with us to fight for their version of what they want. It's really the kindness that we're looking for and the compassion. 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 we've changed our mind on things. You've changed your mind on things because of people who have had different viewpoints. The question is can you do it in a way that is kind? And then there's

The other 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 instead of trying to keep the system intact that was there previously. Yeah, no, it's true. We need to, like Mr. 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 variation of that quote.

Some version of that. Yeah. Awesome. Well, Mark, it was a pleasure to have you out. Young Forever, the book is out. It's already sold a ton of ton of copies. I'm super excited for you, super excited for the entire team working on it. People can get it on the web.

Everywhere. Everywhere. Amazing. Pick it up. There's a bunch of pre-order bonuses and stuff. And they can follow you at Dr. Mark Hyman, MD. Thank you. Or Mark Hyman, M.D. No, Dr. Mark Hyman. Dr. Mark, thanks for coming on. You're my boss. You should know.