The Dr. Hyman Show - How The Food And Pharma Industry Profit Off Our Ill-Health

Episode Date: August 7, 2023

This episode is brought to you by AG1, Pendulum, BiOptimizers, and Super Simple Grassfed Protein.   If we were to identify one big lever to pull to improve global health, create economic abundance, restore environmental health, and reverse climate change, it would be transforming our entire food system. The policies and industry interests that drive our current system must change to fix our broken food system from field to fork and beyond. In today’s episode, I talk with Calley Means, Robby Sansom, Taylor Collins, and Dhru Purohit about industry funding that influences the results of food studies, marketing, and government policy. Calley Means is the cofounder of TrueMed, a company that enables Americans to buy exercise equipment and healthy food with FSA/HSA dollars. He is also the coauthor (with his sister, Dr. Casey Means) of an upcoming book on food as medicine. Earlier in his career, he was a consultant for food and pharma companies; he is now exposing the practices they use to weaponize our institutions of trust. Robby Sansom is cofounder and CEO at Force of Nature, a regeneratively sourced meat company based in Austin, TX. Force of Nature works in partnership with land stewards, ranchers, and farmers committed to creating a positive return on the planet. Robby is also a land steward at ROAM Ranch, where he owns regeneratively managed bison. Taylor Collins is the Chief Bison Wrangler and a cofounder at Force of Nature. In 2017, Taylor and his family purchased ROAM Ranch, a 900-acre multispecies regenerative ecosystem. Within five years of management, the ranch has seen dramatic improvements in soil carbon, water infiltration, plant diversity, and soil health. Dhru Purohit is a podcast host, serial entrepreneur, and investor in the health and wellness industry. His podcast, The Dhru Purohit Podcast, is a top 50 global health podcast with over 30 million unique downloads. His interviews focus on the inner workings of the brain and the body and feature the brightest minds in wellness, medicine, and mindset. This episode is brought to you by AG1, Pendulum, BiOptimizers, and Super Simple Grassfed Protein.  Right now, AG1 is offering 10 FREE travel packs with your first purchase by visiting drinkAG1.com/HYMAN. Pendulum is offering my listeners 20% off their first month of an Akkermansia subscription with code HYMAN at Pendulumlife.com. This month only you can get a FREE bottle of BiOptimizers’ full-spectrum magnesium supplement at magbreakthrough.com/hymanfree using coupon code hyman10. Get 10% off Super Simple Grassfed Protein with the code protein10 at drhyman.com/protein. Full-length episodes of these interviews can be found here: Calley Means Robby Sansom and Taylor Collins Dhru Purohit

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And now let's get back to this week's episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. Hi, this is Lauren Feehan, one of the producers of The Doctor's Pharmacy podcast. We live in a world that claims to be based on science, goodwill, and policies intended to help people. But in reality, these things are often heavily influenced and manipulated by industry, particularly big food, big pharma, and big agriculture, which have corrupted many institutions, policymakers, professional associations, research institutions, and medical schools. And it has unfortunately led to mass confusion and illness in the public. In today's episode, we feature three conversations from the doctor's pharmacy about why our food

system is often at odds with the best interests of people and their health. Dr. Hyman speaks with Callie Means about how studies are funded to achieve certain goals instead of sharing objective information, with Robbie Sansom and Taylor Collins about the manipulation of food pricing, and with Drew Pruitt about the influence of big industry and how food companies program taste buds for addiction.

Let's dive in. When you see a study from your favorite think tank, or you see a study on the news from a leading university, I am telling you, most likely, that study was funded by unimpressive people sitting in an office in Washington, D.C. These PR offices, there were lists and there were strategies to deploy billions of dollars of research funding to achieve goals. With the case of food, that goes to foundational research studies like a study from Harvard that you've mentioned numerous times that was the foundation of the food pyramid. That study said that sugar does not cause obesity and we should shift to a higher carb diet.

That led to the food pyramid. That's still happening today. There are still studies coming out of universities, elite universities today saying sugar, it's unclear whether it causes obesity. So it's for specific outcomes like that. Also, a strategy I just have to say of the food companies is just to deploy money to nutrition studies. The fact that there are so many studies actually is the point.

We're all confused about nutrition right now. We have a new news article on the nightly news every night about a new nutrition study saying a different thing. My recommendation is that we cut all funding for nutrition studies and give everyone some of your books with simple principles, the blood sugar solution. Or at least fund the National Institute of Nutrition that actually is properly funded and spends billions of dollars on doing good nutrition research that's independent. That, and I also think there's just simple principles. It's just, let's limit sugar for kids. But this obfuscates that debate.

So it's a really conscious strategy. You talked about the kind of conscious weaponization of this. This is not complicated. If there is a bunch of studies from Harvard and other top universities that say different or even differing things, that confuses the debate. It does. Another thing we did – I wanted you to go on in a minute, but I want to pause to sort of highlight an example of what you're talking about.

Because this is from the Annals of Internal Medicine, one of the premier medical journals out there. The title of the article was called The Scientific Basis of Guideline Recommendations on Sugar Intake, a Systematic Review. So it seems like an objective review of the science on sugar intake, a systematic review. So it seems like an objective review of the science on sugar. And this is what the conclusion of this paper was from quote experts, guidelines on dietary sugar do not meet the criteria

for trustworthy recommendations and are based on low quality evidence. Public health officials, when promulgating these recommendations and their public audience, when considering dietary behavior, should be aware of these limitations. In other words, there's no evidence that sugar is harmful and we should be not promoting this through policy

and consumers should not change their behavior because of any public perception that sugar is bad for you because according to the data, it's not. This study was funded by the International Life Science Institute, which is funded by Coca-Cola, General Mills, Hershey's, Kellogg, Kraft, McDonald's, Monsanto, Nestle, PepsiCo, Procter & Gamble. And the lead author of the study is on the board of one of the largest makers of high fructose corn syrup. So what do we do? This is like the New England Journal equivalent of a paper

that kind of revealed the conflicts of interest in the conflict of interest section, but nobody reads that and they hear the headlines that sugar isn't a problem. I can tell you that that might not be on the radar of most people. That document is I think one of the most violent documents in America, right? What we do is we fund those studies and that's immediately, right, taken to politicians. Now let's not forget in 78% of US states, the largest employer is either a healthcare outfit or a food seller, Walmart, which is the largest. So there's huge pressure on these lawmakers. And when they have a study like that from the New England Journal of Medicine, that gives them plausible deniability.

There is blood on that study. What do we do? Well, thinking about this, humans are the only animal that get chronically obese that have chronic diabetes like that we have an innate ability right to know ourselves what we should be eating you know a baby born today isn't isn't lunging for processed food their lunch they're lunging for natural food we have been addicted and corrupted by these studies so what we need to do is step one, and we can talk about solutions in a bit, but step one is really embrace, really embrace this, really embrace that the elite levers of American

medicine are being weaponized, additionally in the medical groups. You talked about this in Food Fix, but I saw this in 2011, 2012. Again, in public relations offices, there's lists of professors. I think this is very important. The way you can get into policy and the way you can get into federal guidelines and the way you can get into drug approval and the way you get into policy is you can pay directly the medical organizations and professors. Let me take that one by one. Let me start with professors.

So the NIH research and academic professors are able to take both personal payments. And of course, their currency is research funding. As you mentioned, 11 times more research funding comes from food companies than the NIH, right? So we're literally able to like donate personal payments and fund the research for these academics. And then when we form policy, for instance, the nutritional guidelines, those aren't government bureaucrats. They appoint outside experts. So recently in 2020, the nutritional guide... These are the people...

Dietary guidelines for Americans. The dietary guidelines for Americans. This is the foundational document that's guiding nutrition for our kids. 95% had a conflict of interest. Yeah. So you're able, and this is very known. This is very strategic. You are able to pay these folks.

And I just ask, and this is just common sense for everyone. And it's very simple. Like, be empowered to just, like, use common sense here. If somebody is being paid millions of dollars for their research, personal payments, is that impacting their psychology? Even if the study says there's no, this doesn't impact their research. There's arm's length and they don't actually- The studies all say that. But these companies, I can tell you from experience, the PR consultants in Washington DC funneling billions of dollars are not assuming there's arm's length. Companies don't pay billions of dollars, which is what these processed food companies

are paying for research, out of a philanthropic goodwill to advance unbiased research. They want something, okay? It'd be against their fiduciary duty to spend that money. Yeah, well, it's true. I mean, there was a follow-up paper

in Public Health Nutrition in 2018 where they looked at 133 studies from 2001 to 2013. And they found that 82% of independently funded studies showed harm from sugar-sweetened beverages, but 93% of industry-funded studies showed no harm. Yeah. And I think it's tough taking it to a listener where I used to be. I went to Harvard and tried to rise up the elite ranks like Casey, and felt very proud of that and felt very trusting of these elite institutions telling us what to

think. I think it's very understandable for Americans to defer to the New England Journal of Medicine and Harvard studies and government studies, right? And just think, and I think people are waking up post COVID, but these are nothing better than PR documents. And relatedly- So you're saying it's not science, it's public relations? Oh, these studies, it was dispiriting looking back on this. And as you outlined in Food Fix, these studies are being directed by unimpressive PR consultants in Washington, D.C. You know, I think there are a lot of very dedicated researchers. And part, you alluded to this at the beginning, part of the, I think, beauty in a way of the

system is that most people at most levels are good people doing good work. They're conducting nutrition research. Even the Koch executives, you know, we're trying to get cheap calories into folks' hands. Everyone can go to sleep at night, but the end result is evil. The end result is that we're getting sicker, fatter, more depressed, more infertile because of food. And it's very, very simple. The other thing just related to the kind of buying off the professors who then go on the FDA panels who go on, on, you know, the nutrition guidelines is the medical groups. Now I saw this firsthand and this isn't complicated, but you know, these medical groups, the American Diabetes Association, the American Academy of

Pediatrics, there's obesity groups, you know, on down for every specialty. They are able to accept and are actually chiefly funded through outside funding. Totally. And you have, back when I was working for Coke, a direct donation strategy from Coke and other processed food companies to institutions like the American Diabetes Association. Imagine that. The American Diabetes Association has accepted millions of dollars from Coca-Cola, which is diabetes water. The American Diabetes Association

had a Coke logo on their website. They said small cans of Coke might be a good option. To this day, they say Diet Coke, which is microbiome disrupting, might be okay or is really recommended. What did they get? Well, as Dr. Lustig pointed out, and this is just absolutely shocking to me, until 2018, the American Diabetes Association said that as long as you're taking your drugs as a type two diabetic, as long as you're taking your insulin and other drugs, you can eat the diet you want. Yeah, which is insane. Just to, you know, use more insulin, but eat more cake, right? I mean, it's true. These professional societies are definitely co-opted. There was a paper published by John Ioannidis from Stanford that was in

circulation, basically saying that professional societies should abstain from authorship of guidelines and disease definition statements. And why? Because the American Heart Association received $182 million in industry funding and the European Society of Cardiology got 77% of its funding from industry. Academy of Nutrition Dietetics gets 40% of its funding from the food industry, which is insane. So this is why you think you're looking up to trusted organizations like the American Heart Association, American Diabetes Association, American Academy of Pediatrics, which has

recently recommended surgery and drugs to treat obesity in kids, which we're going to get to. It really is kind of driving so much confusion because you think, oh, well, these are independent groups. These are looking out for our welfare. These are not government groups. These are not industry groups. But essentially, they are.

And you mentioned the dietary guidelines. It's not just that the members have conflicts of interest. Under President George W. Bush, the guidelines were changed from the recommendations from the scientists being used as policy to shifting the final choice of what goes in the guidelines to government bureaucrats. And not only bureaucrats, but government industry appointed kind of people who are basically in the revolving door from working with government and industry. So that's really pretty frightening. And I think that we're unfortunately seeing amazing amounts of influence on our dietary guidelines. In fact, under President Trump, there was a woman who was a policy advisor for the dietary guidelines who previously worked for the Corn Refiners Association and the Snack Food Association of America, who was kind of in charge of the dietary guidelines, which doesn't make any sense. Well, the ag secretary after ag secretary is generally a food industry lobbyist. I'm on my personal campaign on Twitter that you should be ag secretary and be pulling this... We need people

like you in there, but it's totally co-opted. And I don't fault... I want to say this. I don't fault... You can fault them. The end result is evil. We're all, I mean, trillions of dollars of budget and, and, and, you know, crazy rates of chronic diseases we talked about, but you can kind of understand why the food companies in and of themselves want food cheaper and more addictive where the devil's bargain comes in. And what I also saw is the healthcare industry stands silent and profits. Hey everybody, it's Dr. Mark. Magnesium has been a constant in my supplement routine for years. And that's because magnesium is involved in hundreds and hundreds of enzyme reactions in the body,

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protein and use the code protein10. That's one and a zero. I mean, it is a beautiful sort of system of, quote, free enterprise, which is very free because the cost is so huge. But, you know, we basically, you know, Wendell Berry said this, we have a food system that pays no attention to health and a healthcare system that pays no attention to food. And I think they're mutually reinforcing each other. The worse our diet is, the more our healthcare system is utilized, the more profits there are, and the financial incentives are all perverse. I think that there are movements within healthcare to create value-based healthcare, which means

you pay for outcomes instead of just doing stuff, right? The more hospitalizations. I mean, if a patient's in the hospital, they get an amputation, they get a bypass, whatever, that's how the system makes money. But if you got paid for keeping people well, that changes. And that's starting to happen, but it's too slow.

And I think it's really, there's a lot of pushback on making this actually the way we run things, which is based on value creation, which is better outcomes and lower costs. Yeah. And I really support the efforts at value-based care and agree those have been too slow, but the reality and was very clear to me working for healthcare interests, and you still see this very much today, and we can go into specific examples, but is that very simply put, every lever, and I would say every lever of healthcare today predominantly makes money when they're intervening on sick people. The incentives of healthcare is for more people to be sicker for longer periods of time. And I don't think a person

at a pharma company or medical school dean is strategizing and trying to have more people sick, but that is what it's paying their paycheck. And it is happening. And speaking on this mission I've been on, speaking to senior people in academia, in medicine, in insurance, they say they are very disheartened because this is absolutely unmistakably where the incentives are. And I think you see doctors talking to Casey, doctors have among if not the highest rates of burnout, suicide and depression among any population, any profession.

I believe Casey believes that's largely because these are some of the smartest people in the world, most mission driven people in the world who are realizing that the patients aren't getting better, that they're actually incentivized to put band-aids on and not actually cure the root cause. But this is unmistakably the situation. When I was working on the food stamp issue, and Coke was working kind of unforgivably to have government subsidies continue to go to diabetes water, the American Academy of Diabetes was- Diabetes water, that's right. The American Diabetes Association- That's what we should put on the label, diabetes water.

It is diabetes. I mean, it's a weapon of mass destruction for diabetes. And you would expect the American Diabetes Association to be in that debate. The American Academy of Pediatrics says 25% of kids are getting pre-diabetes. Nowhere to be in that debate. The American Academy of Pediatrics says 25% of kids are getting pre-ABs. Nowhere to be found. But right now, right now when there's, as you mentioned, a drug that's about to get approval for teens and adults for obesity, now that so many people are obese, oh, they're speaking up. And what's happening, right? And just taking the case of pharma, let's look at chronic conditions let's look at

kids and i have a son going to this you know he's one year old and it's really inspiring me but looking what the buzzsaw that kids are going into i think it's like over 20 percent of college students are on adderall a methamphetamine created by nazi germany to make soldiers more effective and actually discontinued because everyone had psychosis. It's the same drug. It's actually more powerful. Adderall, 20% plus of college students are on that. We spend $250 billion on cancer treatments. Cancer rates are going up. We spend a ton on metformin. Diabetes is going up. We spend a ton, the most prescribed drug in the country, SSRIs, depression, suicide. You can go down the list. Statins, heart disease going up. Now- I mean, one in $3 in Medicare is spent on diabetes of the trillion plus dollar budget.

So it's real. And what's happening is it's waiting. This is just how the incentives work. The medical system waits for someone to get diabetes. They do not speak out about food stamp funding. They don't speak out about grain subsidies, you know, and corn subsidies that go to Fruit Coast. They don't speak out that there's not a sugar limit in school lunch programs that are funded by federal and state dollars, billions of dollars. They're not speaking out on that. They wait for someone to get diabetes.

And then, as you've pointed out, over a trillion dollars is going to somehow to diabetes management. So this playbook is playing out very well with this new Ozempic drug, which I think is something we can maybe tangibly dive into and explore the playbook and how that's used. Yeah. So it's really the case with sort of pretty much all of it. And I think, you know, whether it's the media with commercials and advertising, or whether it's sort of a celebrity that uses something and then it catches fire. You know, Ozempic, for those who are listening, don't know what that is. It's a, it's a peptide. It's a semaglutide. It's a, something called the GLP-1 agonist. And essentially what it does is impact your hunger and make you feel full full and and eat less um it also improves you know um insulin regulation so you can actually regulate your blood sugar a little better so it helps with diabetes and this is a diabetes drug

which can be helpful in some diabetic patients but the cure for diabetes is not a drug it's food and this drug is now being promoted as um sort of the next best thing for weight loss and wagobe which is a same drug with a different name that's sort of fda approved for weight loss these drugs are enormously expensive i mean they're about 1700 a month and if you look at you know the the 14 15 million kids that are overweight in this country, American Academy of Pediatrics is recommending this drug as a treatment. You're talking, and do the math, it's 15 million kids times $21,000 a year. That's's 3.1 trillion dollars a year for a drug that you have to stay on for life and what if we just gave people food i mean think of that seven hours a month

and yet studies have shown that giving families 2400 a year for food has saves 100 plus thousand dollars in health care costs per diabetic patient and has dramatic improvements in their biomarkers of diabetes. Why aren't we doing that? Yeah. So some people listening might logically think that, oh, well, if we prescribe more and we produce more Ozempic, maybe prices will go down. That's not how it works in healthcare.

So actually, because pharma spends three times more on lobbying than any other industry, five times more than the oil industry, there's a revolving door, as we know, between the FDA and pharma. The former FDA chair is now on the board of Pfizer. Actually, legally, Medicare and Medicaid are not able to negotiate drug prices. So there's not price controls for a drug like this. So you assume that that trillion dollar, multi-trillion dollar estimate sounds ridiculous. No, no, no. Healthcare is the largest and the fastest growing industry in the United States right now. I come from tech where usually innovation means lower prices, better outcomes. It's the opposite with healthcare. Again, I'm going to repeat that. The largest and the fastest growing industry. I think

we hear about the growth of healthcare and the GDP percentage, 20% now, it's going to be 40% in 15 years. Our eyes gloss over. We hear that so much. It is growing at an increasing rate. And there is an absolute full court press using the playbook. And I'm frankly impressed if it wasn't so tragic how well they're executing this playbook. Their goal is to get government funding for this drug, trillions of dollars, as you said, if you really do the math. And they're winning. And I actually think this is, you know, we hear about the corruption. I think driving into this, it's something every parent, every American should actually

be very concerned about. I think we're actually at a monumental moment right now. Are we going to see obesity again, which is a root of metabolic dysfunction, which is a symptom of metabolic dysfunction. Are we going to continue to see that as a whack-a-mole thing like diabetes, like heart disease, like all these things? Again, the more drugs for every chronic condition we prescribe, the worse things get because the problem is food making us metabolic dysfunctional showing itself. 15% of kids have fatty liver disease right now. Right?

Obesity is just one branch. I mean, there are kids now who are getting liver transplants as teenagers because of fatty liver from drinking soda. Right. 15% of kids have fatty liver disease. I mean, I remember being at an obesity, pediatric obesity conference in Atlanta and I was there with Bernice King, my other thing's daughter, who really deeply cares about this issue.

And I met this guy there who was a pediatric gastroenterologist. And I'm like, what are you doing here? And he was like, well, fatty liver in kids is real. And we're seeing kids as young as five years old, 15 years old who have severe fatty liver disease. Fat real. And we're seeing kids as young as five years old, 15 years old who have severe fatty liver disease. Fatty liver disease sounds like whatever, who cares, fatty liver, but it is a huge risk factor for cancer, for heart disease, for early death,

or diabetes. And it affects over 90 million Americans. The health of our land and our food system will be a reflection of our own health. And that's just a natural law that we can't refute. And yet when it comes to these regulations and systems that we put forth to promote synergy towards our food production, that resiliency, that conservation, that securing of our food production system is an afterthought. I think the other more that comes to mind is in learning as we've gone through all of this, it's just understanding how the consumer is taken advantage of and manipulated. Um, they, they, an average consumer sees cheap shelf prices, um, and, and, and, and is told that that's all that matters.

Everything else is hidden. And so you just see red meat and cellophane. And the only thing that's worth discussing and acknowledging is the price at the shelf. And the truth is, to obtain the outcome where we are today, there has had to be a significant compromise in value along the way. And even still, while we're losing that value, the truth is the food itself that has a cheap shelf price is among the most expensive.

It probably certainly is the most expensive. Can you explain that? I think that's a really important point because we think when we buy food in the grocery store, the price we're paying is the true cost of food. But the fact is that actually for every dollar we spend on food, there's another $2 in cost to society in terms of health care costs, loss of biodiversity, social justice issues, environmental damage. I mean, just the list goes on and on. And I think that's an underestimate. diversity social justice issues environmental damage i mean just the list goes on and on and

i think that's an underestimate the rockefeller foundation put out a report called the true cost of food and where they basically said we have over a trillion dollar food system but it costs three trillion dollars in damage and they left out a lot of things that also should be included that actually weren't even included in that calculus. So it's actually probably maybe even three, four, five, six times the cost to society, to humans, to the planet that we pay at the checkout counter. Oh, yeah, absolutely. No, I'm glad you asked because I love diving in on this one. And I think it sort of helps round out the initial question as well. So I think you pointed to some of the deferred costs and I'll get into those, but let's just talk about on an absolute basis, the direct cost. You know, if you look at Ruffles potato chips, they're twice as expensive per ounce.

I try not to look at them. No, I try not to look at them. Yeah. Taylor and I did a whole podcast on our own podcast called where hope grows. And I think ruffle ruffles were a dollar 19, uh, an ounce and our regenerative beef was 55 cents an ounce. So it was more than, more than twice as expensive. We, we never,

and we're told, you know, this meat is expensive, right? But we don't bat an off. He probably, probably price per nutrient. It actually was,

was far cheaper for the meat. Oh yeah. We did it. We did a joke, right? Oh, yeah, we did a joke. Right? Yeah, absolutely. You know, one's making you sick, one's making you healthy. We even went and bought a meal at a fast food restaurant. We did it at a gas station.

And it was less expensive to make a meal for our families at home. And Taylor jokingly bought a bottle of Pepto Bismol with his convenience store meal because he knew that you definitely need that. You need some Pepsi or something. I don't even want to glorify calling that food. I'm starting to call those things, those hyper processed offerings, food like substances, because that's effectively what they are. But again, we don't bat an eye at the price people pay for a $7 coffee or expensive bottle of wine

or $9 bottle of water and bourbons and vinegars. Or $7 coffee, yeah, it's crazy, right? But again, at the cash register, candies, these things are way more expensive. And yet we're told, we appreciate those as cheap, but we think of meat as expensive. So again, on an absolute basis, I'd say that this food is actually less expensive than people realize and it's valuable, but we're conditioned to think differently.

I think the other thing too, that we're told because it's cheap is that we can waste it. You know, something like 40% of all food is wasted. It's 60 million tons, $200 billion. I mean, it's just the things that we do because we've been conditioned to believe certain things are remarkable. When you come at it with a different perspective, it really changes how you may act. But then of course, there's what you talked about too. Some of the other things you don't see in the shelf price beyond the absolute basis. And the reality is for cheap food, consumers pay three times. They pay for it in the form of taxes that go to these

subsidy systems. They pay for it at the register. And of course, they pay for those deferred costs. And you mentioned the deferred costs. I mean, the U.S. has to pay the government of Brazil over $150 million a year because we've been flooding international markets with crops sold at below the cost of production. I have some pretty crazy stats on the big four meat companies. I'll save those for later. But ultimately, I was looking at the healthcare costs. You referenced those. I think you state $3.7 trillion as the cost to treat chronic disease in the U.S. You do the math on that, that's $557 per household per week. So if you want to begin to appreciate the hidden cost or the true cost of food, add $557 per week to your grocery bill

and you can start to understand the expectation that we're putting on ourselves. And then there's the social issues. There's farmers, farmer suicide. There's all of these compromises that we're making to the system stability and to the security. We've seen the U.S. government begin to feign acknowledging this by putting billions of dollars of incentives into opening in this world travel and in learning about regenerative, I've come to this realization that our food system and our food culture have been captured and it's killing us. And meanwhile, regenerative is thriving all over the world. 40% of farms on the planet are still subsistence farms.

We're told one thing that promotes the current system is the only option. But the truth and reality that I hope we'll discover on this podcast today tells an entirely different story. Yeah, that's incredible, Robbie. Thanks for that summary. And I just sort of reiterate, and then I want to jump to Taylor because I think I want to sort of dig into actually the reality of what it is to actually run and live on a regenerative ranch and farm. Because we talk about in the abstract a lot, but this is, it's really kind of got me into the weeds and the dirt and the soil literally when I was there. But, you know, just in terms of getting back to the cost thing, just let's just take the cost of corn,

which is just such a foundational product in our food system. It's the foundational substance through which most processed food is made. Most of the sugar we eat is from corn. And the cost is just astounding. So we have the damage to the soil that comes from the nitrogen fertilizers, the pesticides and the herbicides, the damage to humans that comes to that,

the loss of biodiversity. We have the nitrogen runoff from the soil into the rivers and lakes and streams that goes into the ocean that kills, you know, hundreds of thousands of metric tons of fish every year and, and, and seafood that's for human consumption, uh, that creates dead zones all over the world that affect 400 million people. Uh, what is the cost of that? I don't even know you could kind of quantify that. It's literally trillions of dollars. Uh, we thenillions of dollars. We then make that food into processed food, which then we subsidize for the government. Basically, 75% of food stamps or SNAP is processed food, 10% is soda, and most of that is coming from corn and other industrial products like soy. And then we pay for Medicare and Medicaid on the

back end. So we're paying three or four times for that corn as taxpayers. And we think we're in this financial crisis now. We're talking about the debt ceiling. The government's going to shut down. I mean, a lot of this has to do with our food system and the chronic consequences that come from the food system. This tweet is from Tamar Haspel. She's award-winning Washington Po columnist. This caught storm and I saw a bunch of people retweeting it from the more traditional food industry point of view. I want to just get your thoughts on it.

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, a lot of people have talked about subsidies. You talked about subsidies in your book. Well, more like insurance. Yeah. But yeah. 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 read kind of pull from 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 just don't like vegetables and they don't eat a lot of fruits and vegetables. So that's why these other foods end up becoming, you know, more eaten. And what are your thoughts?

Oh, my God. Well, that last sentence just kind of is a problem. It's a big problem. Well, I think I'm sort of paraphrasing that. Right, that exactly. But her, you know, people can look up the, the thing exactly. but she essentially says vegetables are way more expensive to grow. Growing a calorie of broccoli costs 50 times more than growing a calorie of corn. People, PS, people don't eat veg because they don't like them, not because they're expensive. What are your thoughts on this idea? I've heard a few people say this, by the way, and so I just want to stress test the idea.

I think, I think. Sam. What do kids in Japan eat? Seaweed, raw fish what do 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 that hijack their hormones that hijack their microbiome that make them eat this food through really a 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 hijacked. So I think I'm just going to say that at the start. Yeah. I don't disagree with you, by the way. Yeah. 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 subsidies. It's not just about funding more fruit and vegetable growing. It's 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 ecosystem, that stops the, you know, 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 and kills, you know, hundreds of thousands of tons of fish and, you know, just on and on and on. I could literally go on and on and on. So I think that it's about fixing the agricultural system as a whole to produce more high quality food. And that's possible. And I think it can happen at scale.

And I think it's about shifting our kind of government systems policies to a more regenerative 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 is 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 regenerative 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 them because they get bank loans to buy the seeds and the chemicals. They get crop insurance from the government. And so they're caught in this tribe between the seed and chemical companies, the banks, and the government, which is all supporting the system that keeps farmers locked producing the wrong food. Now, if they were given a chance and they were taught how and they were given an economic bridge, they would create an agricultural system that's much better than the 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 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, and, and, and that, you know, may take a long time to happen, but it's got to happen. And I think, you know, we, we, we don't, um, you know, have the support of institutions and, and, um, you know, group purchasing, uh, from, you know, industry, from government, from schools that produces an incentive to actually make more good food and cheaper. 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. We don't realize how much the food industry is embedded in our policies, in social groups that we think are representing people's best interests, like the NAACP or the Hispanic Federation, how much they're infiltrated in professional organizations like the AMA or American Diabetes Association, 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 in the face of corporate social responsibility for example like it brings about 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 you know 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 Bernice King, Martin Luther King's daughter, and, you know, got to have quite a bit of time with her. And she's, you know, she realized that, that nonviolence that her father talked about also meant nonviolence to the self and that, you know, really the African-American community really need to be inspired to also look at that. And, and we talked about showing the movie Fed Up in the King Center in Atlanta. Now, many of you know that the King Center is where Martin Luther King had his church, Ebenezer Baptist Church, but it's also where Coca-Cola's headquarters is. And Coca-Cola

funds the King Center. And at first, Bernice was very excited about sharing this movie in the King Center and having a show. Andice was very excited about sharing this movie in the King Center and having a show and we had it scheduled. It was all set up. And a few days before the screening, I got a call from her

saying, hey, we can't show the movie. And I was sort of flabbergasted and really it was because the King Center is funded by Coca-Cola. She said that outright?

She told you explicitly or is this 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 a 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 soda taxes. And they literally have funded the NAACP and Hispanic Federation

to influence them to oppose soda taxes. Which is a big part of what Callie was talking about and helping out with 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 they have. 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 of 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 gained the system. It was that blatant? That blatant.

Was anybody making noise about it? Did you see it written about? Yes. 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 the big soda companies, 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, the soda and sugar. And they realized that they could influence these groups and that they could get them to be even bigger users. So they have a view that if you're, you're, 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 discounted. They know when they're coming out and they have whole marketing campaigns around this. So the whole thing is corrupt. It's not, these groups are co-opted. The professional and medical nutrition 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 problematic. It's 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 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? Or 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 and 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 researched is through this massive financial influx of money into the

system. 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 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 conflicts of interest, that's helpful, but it's not enough. And there are a number of really stringent 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, if they want to advance things. For example, the Food Compass was, one of the researchers was funded by Danone, which is a big food company. So 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 at arm's 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. And a lot of times they're 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 a NIH or publicly funded study on the same product.

So if the dairy industry funds milk studies, they're going to show that milk's great. But if you have impartial researchers studying milk, they might not show it's great. Who was Dr. Gabriel Lyon's 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. He was funded by the meat board and people that are there. And so what are your thoughts about that?

And his work has been very influential in kind of updating some of even your ideas in protein and some of his students and people that have been inspired by him, like Dr. Gabriel Lyon. What do you think about that? 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 bias is- So you think the people who write paper should put it out there? Disclose. But what would it show in his case, for instance? You know, he is openly an omnivore, right? Yeah, for sure. And he's doing work in protein and obviously that's going to influence his findings are going to influence his probably dietary habits. Would that have discounted or you're just looking for more transparency? I think more transparency and then also being able to sort of sift through the research. And this is the problem with nutrition research. It's very tough to do. You know, if you basically, the ideal thing to do would be to take twins at birth, put them in different feeding wards for their entire

life, feed them different diets and sample their blood every week and watch what happened. You know, one pair of the twin pairs would get like a vegan diet, let's say, you know, there would be a carnivore diet or it 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 triglycerides were like well over 300 or her cholesterol was like

300, very low HDL and very much pre-diabetic. So I put her on 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 from 300 to 200, her triglycerides dropped 200 points, her HDL went up 30 points, which never happens. She lost 20 pounds and all her inflammation went away. So that worked for her. But I had another guy who was a 56-year-old avid bid biker cyclist who cycled like 50,

a hundred miles a day and was thin and fit and slim. And he wanted to try it just for performance. I said, okay, well, let's just track it and see what happens. I didn't recommend it to him, but he, but it turned out he, his cholesterol went nuts. It was just terrible. I said, this is really dangerous for you. I don't think you should do this because all his particles got small. All his particle numbers went up. His, you know, inflammation levels went up. I was like, well, this isn't good for you. Even 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 in 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. You're going to have very different

results depending on the population you're studying, but on the age and the ethnicity and the sex. I hope you enjoyed today's episode. One of the best ways you can support this podcast is by leaving us a rating and review below. Until next time, thanks for tuning in. Hey, everybody. It's Dr. Hyman. Thanks for tuning into The Doctor's Pharmacy. I hope you're loving this podcast. It's one of my favorite things to do and introducing you all the experts that I know and I love and that I've learned so much from. And I want to tell you about something else I'm doing, which is called Mark's Picks. It's my weekly newsletter. And in it, I share my favorite stuff from foods to supplements

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