The Dr. Hyman Show - How Your Health Is Impacted By Food Marketing And Our Dietary Guidelines

Episode Date: November 14, 2022

This episode is brought to you by Rupa Health, Thrive Market, and Essentia. Food marketing and misguided dietary guidelines play a large role in the food choices we make. These foods are frequently devoid of nutritional value and, even worse, they are addictive and keep you going back for more. Our bodies are built and maintained by what we put in our mouths; we literally are what we eat. Unfortunately, that means the majority of people in our country are made of ultra-processed food-like substances that create disease.  In today’s episode, I talk with Nina Teicholz, Michael Moss, and Vani Hari on the influence of food marketing and why the US government’s dietary guidelines may not be so healthy after all. Nina Teicholz is a science journalist and author of the New York Times bestseller The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat, and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet, which upended the conventional wisdom on dietary fat—especially saturated fat—and spurred a new conversation about whether these fats in fact cause heart disease.   Michael Moss, a New York Times investigative reporter turned food-focused journalist, Pulitzer Prize winner for Explanatory Reporting, and author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us, as well as the book Hooked: Food and Free Will, focused around food and addiction.   Vani Hari is the revolutionary food activist behind foodbabe.com, cofounder of organic food brand Truvani, New York Times best selling author of The Food Babe Way and Feeding You Lies. She has led campaigns against food giants like Kraft, Starbucks, Chick-fil-A, Subway, and General Mills that attracted more than 500,000 signatures and led to the removal of several controversial ingredients used by these companies. This episode is brought to you by Rupa Health, Thrive Market, and Essentia. Rupa Health is a place where Functional Medicine practitioners can access more than 2,000 specialty lab tests from over 20 labs like DUTCH, Vibrant America, Genova, and Great Plains. You can check out a free, live demo with a Q&A or create an account at RupaHealth.com. Thrive Market is an online membership-based grocery store that makes eating well convenient and more affordable. Join today at thrivemarket.com/hyman and you will receive $80 worth of groceries for free. Right now you can get an extra $100 off your mattress purchase, on top of Essentia’s Black Friday sale, the biggest sale of the year, which will also take 25% off, plus you’ll get 2 FREE organic pillows (a $330 value) with your mattress purchase. Go to myessentia.com/drmarkhyman to learn more. Full-length episodes of these interviews can be found here: Nina Teicholz Michael Moss Vani Hari

Coming up on this episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. Guidelines are not based on good evidence. They have such a powerful control over how Americans eat. Probably the single most important lever. And they clearly are not working. Hey everyone, it's Dr. Mark. I know a lot of you out there are practitioners like me helping patients heal using real food and functional medicine as your framework for getting to the root cause. What's critical to understanding what each individual person and body needs is testing, which is why I'm excited to tell you about Rupa Health.

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you can get $80 worth of groceries free. That's T-H-R-I-B-E market.com forward slash Hyman. Now, let's get back to this week's episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. Hi, this is Lauren Fee, and one of the producers of The Doctor's Pharmacy podcast. We are seeing an ever-increasing burden of chronic disease, primarily driven by our food and food system. This is perpetuated by several things, agricultural food and healthcare policies in our government that don't support our health, and manipulative junk food marketing that tries to convince us that unhealthy processed food is healthy.

With a little effort, we can unearth the addictive mission of big food, understanding how untrustworthy food labeling and addictive ingredients hook consumers and keep them coming back for more. In today's episode, we feature three conversations from the doctor's pharmacy on why we need to examine what nutrition guidelines we follow and the influence of food marketing. Dr. Hyman speaks with Nina Teicholz on outdated government dietary guidelines, with Michael Moss on the formula to make food addictive, and with Vani Hari on food marketing to children and manipulation by food companies. Let's dive in. I want to dive into a topic that I know you're passionate about and that matters. So we've heard all this conflicting evidence about what to eat, about the recommendations

from the government. And these recommendations, which are called our dietary guidelines, have really shaped a lot of our thinking about what's good and what's not good to eat. And we followed it. And we followed it in terms of public health recommendations, in terms of what doctors say, nutritionists say, what scientists say, and more importantly, what the government tells people to eat in the form of nutrition programs from our school lunches to our military programs and so much more. And, you know, I just want to give you some credit because people say, oh, what can one person do to change the world? You know, Margaret Mead said, never doubt that a small group of people who are committed can change the

world. In fact, it's the only thing that ever has. And you understood the challenges with these guidelines that really were promoting ideas that were killing millions of people. And you said, I'm not going to stand for this. And you went to Congress and you shared this perspective and you said, we need to think about the guidelines in a different way. And you basically got the Congress to commission a million dollars so the National Academy of Sciences and Medicine would review how we come up with these guidelines and whether there was integrity in them, whether they looked at all the science, whether there was corruption in them.

And this report that was really initiated by you has come out, and it says some pretty shocking things. So can you tell us about what's wrong with the dietary guidelines and how you set about to go fixing them, and what's next? So, okay, well, so first of all, no one person can take credit for what Congress does. Like, Congress does what Congress does, and I— But you gave them a little zets in there.

Yeah, and it was that report by the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine was the first ever peer review of the dietary guidelines since they were launched in 1980. Amazing. 35 years of policy. And if you look at their... I mean, if you judge the guidelines by the outcome measures, the dietary guidelines were meant to prevent disease. We got pretty bad.

How has that progress gone? How's that working for you? Obesity going up, diabetes going up, heart disease still number one killer, cancer going up. So by any outcome measure, they have been a total failure, right? And the conventional explanation is that people don't follow the guidelines. And who even knows about the guidelines? I don't go to my.gov website to find out about a diet, and you don't. But you know about the food pyramid.

You know about the food pyramid, and the reality is that they are just downloaded into every doctor's office, every nurse, every dietitian, every nutritionist. When you go to their office, they are giving you the guidelines, right, with rare exception. And they determine school lunch programs, what your elderly parent gets at their feeding, you know, their nursing home, all of that. So, and hospital food. So I came to understand like how powerful they are. They have such a powerful control over how Americans eat, probably the single most important lever. And they

clearly are not working. The argument that Americans don't follow them, I looked at that. I was like, well, maybe Americans don't follow them and it is our fault. But I went and looked at all the best available government data that I could find. Since 1970, I mean, in every food category you looked at, you can look at Americans follow the guidelines. Low fat, less meat, less eggs, less-

Everything. High fat dairy. Red meat's down by 28%. We've increased our chicken by 120%. Vegetable oils we've increased by almost 90%. Animal fat's down by 17%. I mean, everything. There's not one area where we have deviated.

Eating more grains, right? 40% more grains, more fruits and vegetables. And the vegetables is not ketchup. It's like the greatest single increase in vegetables has been leafy greens. You mean iceberg lettuce? Like, I don't know, kale. We're all eating kale. It's the age of voting. So that argument that it's just that Americans don't follow the guidelines is not supported by the data. And then people also say, well, Americans eat more calories, right? And that's true. We do eat 270-something more calories per day than we used to.

But if you look at it, every single one of those calories is carbohydrates. So what we did, what the guidelines did is they put us on a high-grain diet, right? Seven to 11. Seven to 11 servings of bread, rice, cereal, and pasta a day. Every day. And we did it. And just the way you can fatten cattle on grains, it turns out you can fatten humans pretty well on grains. So I did. I mean, I felt like in Washington, D.C., there's just

so much defense of this policy and the status quo. And, you know, they're renewed every five years. And the expert committee that is supposed to review the science instead just kind of rubber stamps the status quo. Nobody wants a change. And many of them have conflicts of interest. Many of them have conflicts of interest. They're funded by food industry, people in the food industry. Nobody wants to change, rock that boat.

I mean, because to say that the guidelines are wrong is really a kind of heresy, right? So that's what I've done. I've committed an act of heresy. I wrote a paper that was on the cover story of the British Medical Journal saying that guidelines are not based on good evidence. They've ignored all those clinical trials we talked about.

They were never in there. You know- For the best available evidence about fat, they completely ignored. They ignored. So, you know, those of us who study the science, if you go and read the expert report, you're like, well, where's all the science I studied?

It's not there. Yeah, why do they say we have to drink three glasses of milk a day? There's no evidence for that. There's no evidence for that. So there's also, and I look to see, like there's been this huge body of evidence that's grown up around the benefits

of ramping back your carbohydrates a little bit and eating a little more fat. There's more than 70 clinical trials now. There were 64 when the 2015 Dietary Guideline Committee was reviewing the science. None of those were in there. So actually they reviewed them, but they decided to put it in the methodology section of the paper. And one of the committee members, I know this from emails that I got through Freedom of Information Act request. One of the committee's members...

Those damn emails, right? They get to you. That's right. Be careful what you write in your email. So one of the committee members said, you know, I don't think we should be burying, that was the word he used, burying this data in the methodology section where it doesn't belong. And then I was like, well, that was the end of that email chain.

Yeah. So, you know, I started this group, the Nutrition Coalition, and our goal, it's really, you know, we get no industry money. We don't want to be conflicted in any way. We just, our whole aim is just to say we want science in our guidelines and we want the best science. And we want it not to be cherry picked. We want the whole body of science. We want you to review those clinical trials that we paid for and put that in the evidence base. And we don't recommend any one diet.

You know, we're not an advocate for any one diet. You know, I'm confident if the clinical trial research is actually reviewed, which is the best, rigorous, most rigorous science, that we'll get good guidelines. So, you know, and the reason it's important for everyone is that, like, even if you fix your own diet, you've still got, you know, unless you live in a very privileged sphere, you've still got your child in school lunch program, your, you know, what food you get in a hospital, your parent at a nursing home, our military. Do you know that, do you know what the rate of obesity is in the military? Obesity. Yeah.

Not overweight. It's 14%. Unbelievable. And you cannot say those guys are not exercising those men and women are not exercising enough no you can't exercise you're way out of a bad diet who said that? I did

and actually two thirds are overweight or up to two thirds are overweight or obese and they have due to illness and injury and you know illness is something that happens is associated with being overweight right? 10% of our armed forces at any one time are not deployable. No, it's frightening. We are literally poisoning America. And I hate to say this, but I think it's true that our government recommendations in the original food pyramid, which was six to 11 servings of bread,

rice, cereal, and pasta a day, and very little fat, really led to millions of deaths. Not intentionally, but I think the consequence of that advice has really led to this greatest health crisis globally that we've ever seen in humanity. And you're really a pioneer in fighting for this. And I think it's curious to see what's going to happen next with the guidelines. Do you think they're going to shift? Do you think there's going to be a shift in the recommendations? Well, I'm somewhat hopeful in that I think that, you know, the USDA, which is the agency in charge of the guidelines, they, I believe that they're actually interested in real reform. They put it out as one of their legislative priorities to have reform of the dietary guidelines so that they are science-based. Those are their words. And they've taken a number of steps as they started off doing this next set of guidelines that suggests that they really are going for transparency.

Yeah, it was the first time they ever invited comments, right? Right. They had public comments on sort of the topics that they want to focus on for review. And among those topics, like hallelujah, included low- diets and saturated fats. And, you know, so those are two big areas where if you could change the current guidelines, like if you just simply allowed lower carbohydrate diets as one possible dietary pattern, that would be huge. And if you could recognize that the caps on saturated fats are really not, it shouldn't be a strong recommendation, if at all a recommendation, if you could get rid of that, that would also be big. That would reflect good science. It's true. And you know, there's a more and more emerging research. One of our colleagues, Sarah Halberg,

just published a paper on diabetes. Now this is a condition that in medical school I learned once you had it, you got it. There's no reversing type 2 diabetes. Type 1 for sure not, but that's an autoimmune disease. Type 2 is really a disease of carbohydrate intolerance. And in this study, which was remarkable, showed by using a very high-fat diet with lots of saturated fat, you literally could reverse 60% of type 2 diabetes in a year. You could get 100% of people off the main diabetes medication, which potentially is harmful and has been linked to heart attacks.

And you can get people off insulin or dramatically lower insulin in 94% of the people. That is unprecedented. And the average weight loss was 12%, which is unheard of in dietary studies or about 30 pounds. This is radical. And yet it's not mainstream. It's not something that doctors use or recommend, but there's an increasing awareness that different kinds of diets that

actually restrict carbohydrates and increase fats may actually help with certain metabolic conditions. And we're seeing this across the board in terms of diabetes, obesity, even things like cancer, fatty liver disease, Alzheimer's, autism, epilepsy, brain tumors. I mean, it's pretty interesting. This data is starting to come in at a rapid rate. And now I go on Amazon, look at the best-selling books, and a lot of them are ketogenic diets, which I find really fascinating. Yeah.

Well, and just to emphasize one of the numbers that you just said about that Sarah Hallberg study, that was at one year 60% reversal. Okay, that means they no longer have a diagnosis of diabetes. If you look at that same number, if you go on the standard American Diabetes Association diet, that number is 0.1. I'm sorry, give them credit, 0.1%. 0.1, all right, 0.1 compared to 60.

But I mean, just speaking to the politics of this field, you know, when I talk about my, my work and, or my book, I, you know, yes, it's about science, but really the story here is really about politics, right? I mean, this is really so much more about politics than it is about science. Cause as we've seen, the science is ignored so much of the time, and that is politics. And the story of Sarah Hallberg's diabetes study is like the current day version of that. Because can she get, I've been working with her to try to help her

get an op-ed placed or get any press coverage. There was zero mainstream press coverage of that study, which should be if, you know, headline news, headline news, we can reverse 60% of our nation's diabetes in a year. Yeah. She, everybody ignored it. And we, and she, we've actually, she's gotten back like angry notes from editors saying, how can you say this? Yeah. Well, it's not something we actually believe is possible as doctors. So we have to think something's wrong with the study. That's the assumption. We're seeing that. I mean, we were in our clinic in Cleveland Clinic

last week, and one of the patients who'd been on insulin for 20 years was off insulin in three weeks. It's unbelievable. It is. But you'd think that doctors would at least be, and this is the surprising thing, that they're so close-minded. Like you would think there are some doctors who are open. I mean, in the Nutrition Coalition, we have hundreds of doctors among our members or people who are now successfully helping people by ignoring the guidelines basically, right? But there are so many.

Including me. Yeah, including like most famous among them. But, you know, there are so many stories of people who go to their doctor and they find out about a lower-carb diet. They go to their doctor like, hey, But, you know, there are so many stories of people who go to their doctor and they find out about a lower carb diet. They go to their doctor like, hey doctor, you know, guess what? My blood pressure's down, my weight's down, all my cholesterol looks better.

Oh, and then my skin problem went away and the floater in my eye is gone or whatever. And then the doctor's like, well, just be careful of that dangerous diet you're on. Right, right. Don't confuse me with the facts. My mind's made up. Yeah.

All right, final question. If you were queen for a day and you could change something in our food space, what would it be? And if you had one piece of advice for people listening to change in their lives, what would it be? Wow.

My family asks me that every morning. Nina, would you like to be queen for the day? I don't think so. You know, I have to just be boring for the day? I don't think so. You know, I have to just be boring and say I would change our dietary guidelines. They're so powerful. So I would change them to be evidence-based. That would be the single biggest lever on how Americans eat. The truth is our guidelines influence global dietary guidelines. So it's not just here. It's the whole world. Hey everybody, it's Dr. Mark here. We all know how critical getting good quality sleep is to

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in your cart. Learn more at myascensia.com forward slash drmarkhyman. That's Dr. Mark Hyman. That's M-Y-E-S-S-E-N-T-I-A.com forward slash Dr. Mark Hyman, D-R-M-A-R-K-H-Y-M-A-N. And now let's get back to this week's episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. Let's talk about labels because you were mentioning the food label. And in this country, you kind of have to have a PhD in nutrition to understand the nutrition facts label. I think it should be called alternative facts or fake news because it's so risk representative of what really matters. And in other countries, they're implementing things like the stoplight version, which is green, this is good for you. Yellow, eat with caution.

Red, this is going to kill you. Or they put front of label packaging on or they actually have it much more sensible. In this country, it's almost impossible unless you have a PhD to understand that. And even then, it's hard. The first thing to realize is that the front of the package is the most valuable real estate. And that's where the companies put their best foot forward. And so, for example, these wonderful potato chips, ripples, original, these great words, but you also notice at the top. Gluten free. Gluten free. Now they might have put, on their reduced salt or reduced fat or added vitamins or minerals. That's typically what you'll

get. And if people do turn the package over and look at the fine print, one of the deceptive things that goes on there is that this package of chips, for example, is something that somebody might eat the whole thing. In fact, a good number of us will sit down and eat this entire bag of chips. But it says eight servings or something. Well, right. But all the numbers in here, if you're concerned about trans fats, you're concerned about cholesterol or sodium or fiber, maybe on the positive side, that's another story. Protein, the overall calories is per serving, and there's three of those. So you have to kind of do the math yourself and realize that's not. Well, I asked the former head of the FDA,

Food and Drug Administration, I said, why can't you make the labels better? Why can't you actually make them make sense and clear? He says, well, when we try to change them, we get enormous pressure from Congress, who's getting enormous pressure from the food industry, and they threaten to shut us down in terms of our funding, which I thought was very revealing. So we have money in politics that's driving policies that are making us sick and fat, and the government's not protecting us. Yeah, and in many ways, the food companies are more powerful than the regulators who are there supposedly to regulate them on behalf of us.

They're often the same people, right? They're often the revolving door of people from industry and government. There is that, and often with dueling missions, the Department of Agriculture being the best example. I mean, one of its missions is to promote American companies, American products here and overseas as commodities, et cetera. And then a teeny tiny fraction of 1% of their budget goes toward promoting better eating, better nutrition, better health for us. And the department,

you can imagine who sort of wins when push comes to shove. And there's so many conflicting policies out there. The government really, one of the greatest stories in your book was about cheese. So we were like, everybody get off fat, low fat, low saturated fat. So the government's pushing this message out there at the same time that they're aggressively promoting the overuse of cheese. Because when you take the fat out of dairy, you're left with some fat to do something with it. You turn it into cheese. And yet, so they're pushing it on the one hand there. It's just a complete contradictory mess. If only cows had made nonfat milk, which they didn't.

So the fat from the milk was a commodity. They weren't about to throw it away and they could only slough so much of it off on other countries in the world. So they made cheese and turned cheese from this kind of delightful, tasty treat, you know, in and of itself, or cheese sandwiches, into an ingredient to kind of increase the mouthfeel. And so suddenly you saw processed cheese made overnight in their factories going into everything in the grocery store, as a way. And if I did the rough math and basically

all of the fat that people took out of their diet from drinking low or nonfat milk snuck back in as a result of these government overseen programs to increase the consumption of processed cheese as a way of helping the dairy industry. And they're in cahoots with the dairy industry. So the National Dairy Promotion Research Board works with the Dairy Council. So the government works with the Dairy Council to promote it. They had these Got Milk ads, which actually had to be taken off the air

because they were not based in science and they're making health claims that the FTC said were illegal. So this is really where the government gets its hands dirty in a way that it's really in bed with industry. With maybe in some sense sort of a noble thought in the beginning. Look, I mean, it's hard not to be empathetic with dairy farmers.

But the fact was they were overproducing. And instead of taking that overproduction and like throwing it away or something. In fact, what they were doing was storing it, all that cheese in caves and realized the cheese was going moldy and they had to start like pumping it out into school food programs or et cetera. That's what they did. They sort of, that was their solution

was to promote more consumption. And often it wasn't great cheese, right? It was processed cheese. In fact, I love the story about Kraft. We call it American cheese, but it's actually not allowed to be called cheese yes because it's not 51 percent cheese yeah it's called craft slices right well there's all kinds of euphemisms that they have to use um because of the standards and and some of the fit my favorite 49 percent i'm 50 but but some of the in fact some

of the cheese engineers at craft you know were you know, in meeting them and tasting cheese, are just kind of appalled at American processed cheese, which to them is, you know, was not real cheese. It's not like your heirloom goat cheese from France or something like that. But again, it serves this incredibly powerful role in processed food. It's sort of that providing that mouthfeel texture allure. And it's in everything. It's just unbelievable. Yeah, I was pretty surprised how many things of it. Everywhere you go, restaurants, fast food places, I have to say, please don't put the cheese on.

And that was by design, by marketing plans overseen by the federal government and then they made it easy right they grated it they shredded it they have all these pre-packaged processed cheese so make it super easy to add to everything cheap easy yummy when you look at the research you did you've interviewed over 300 food industry experts scientists former employees you sort of did a little muckraking. And what was the most surprising thing you found that sort of, you went, oh my goodness, I didn't know that. Well, a few things. I, you know, being an investigative reporter, I, of course, am beholden to go after the money. And there was certainly a lot of money to look at.

But I kind of fell in love with the language that they use when they talk to each other about their efforts to maximize the allure of their products. They talk about, for instance, they don't have to use the word addiction. They talk about making their products craveable. And the difference is? Snackable. Snackable. And one of my favorites is designing more-ishness into their products. But going back to the extraordinary...

And they talk about stomach share. And stomach share. Well, here, we can talk about stomach share right here. So I've also brought for you a very orange and blue giant bag. Well, giant bag. This may be one serving for some people, which I'll open up right now to illustrate one of the other kind of language things that really got my attention. They realize that... And I'm going to do this since you didn't volunteer I will not I will not eat that orange colored thing that's so this orange thing about the size of my index

finger here very puffy looking is going to go into my mouth and when I press it against the roof of my mouth it will melt because of that 50% formula I mentioned before and disappear. And what the industry realized is that the signal to the brain when that disappears is that the calories have disappeared as well. So you're eating air. So you're eating air. Michael, you might as well finish this whole giant bag if you don't mind. And they call that phenomena the vanishing caloric density. It's a fabulous term that in so many ways kind of illustrates their drive to use extraordinary

science to make their products. And you just keep wanting more and more and more. I mean, it's easy to binge on a whole bag of Cheetos, but you're not going to eat 10 avocados, right? And they know that. And that was one of the more gripping things to me. So, the other surprising thing is that they don't eat their

own products, especially when they get into health trouble. A former chief technical officer of Kraft used to jog for keeping his health and weight in check. And at one point, he blew out his knee and couldn't run anymore. And the very first thing he did was stopped eating some of his favorite products in the grocery store, knowing that he was one of those people who could open up a bag of chips and have to eat the whole thing when he came home after work. He could not eat just a

handful of chips. So they themselves know how powerful their products are for many of us. And what I find fascinating is that they have the capacity to reformulate their products that are somewhat healthier. And a friend of mine, Vani Hari, called The Food Babe, found out that Kraft in the UK was not allowed to have any artificial colors or chemicals or additives. Right. And so they produce products out there.

They're free of those. Yes. But in the United States, they didn't. And she forced them almost unilaterally under a lot of peer pressure and social pressure and social media pressure to have them change their formulation. Right. There are different levels of salt, sugar, fat that they add to their products in different countries in the world, depending on

sort of habits that people then, you know, and I think that also kind of speaks to, speaks to kind of the, the, the, the phenomenon that the companies, they are responsive to public concern. It's just that their ability now to play a significant role going forward as more and more people are caring about what they're putting in their bodies is really pretty suspect because, again, these are miracle ingredients that they're using. They can dial back to a certain extent, but at some point their products just kind of fall off a cliff and they're not tasting very good. We're up against a mega PR campaign too against our health. And I'll just give you the example

of Kellogg's. We'll just go on this one. When they came out with their new waffles, there was press up the wazoo. Every single mainstream media outlet reported on the fact that Kellogg's has created this new unicorn mermaid waffles for kids, right? But when my friend who was very famous, you know him too, Jesse Itzler, the husband of Sarah Blakely, one of the billionaire women in this world that owns banks, he challenged the CEO of Kellogg's to a $100,000 live 15-minute interview on Instagram. He said he'd give $100,000 to any charity of the CEO of Kellogg's choice, and not a single media report on this, not one single anything. But you know, you watch, you know, you watch the mainstream media report on all sorts of garbage, and not, you know, interesting news. But this is like, real news that could affect children's health

and a debate, or, you know, even an interview about these new products that they've created, and no one's challenging these companies. And it's just's just you know we're in a really sad situation you are all five feet whatever you are i mean the uh the other thing about kelly i want to ask you about was that they recently announced that they were going to get glyphosate out of their products by 2025 is that a smokescreen? Is that real? Do they plan on doing it? They announced a lot of things that they say they're going to do, and I haven't seen it

done yet. So I'll believe it when I see it, for sure. You definitely, and that's another thing. There's this assumption when these companies announce these changes that they're going to actually go ahead with them. A lot of times they change leadership or they realize that, oh, they'll lose too much money or, oh, people suddenly don't care about this issue anymore because it's not a hot button topic in the media. You know, the glyphosate issue was very hot button topic because a bunch of different reports that the environmental working

group put out about glyphosate in food and the GMO debate at the government level. But once that, those issues became less important or people forgot about them, these companies think they can get away with murder. One of the things you help us understand is how to read labels and how to be a smart consumer. Because unless we're paying attention, and I even get duped sometimes. Sometimes I'll pick up something and look healthy and I'll forget to turn the ingredient list over. And I'm like, I get home like, oh God, this is terrible. Why would I even want to eat this? So how do you pay attention to what is important? What should you look for? I mean, if it says natural flavors, that sounds

like great, right? It's like healthy, right? But is it really? And, you know, one joke I always tell is that, you know, one of the natural flavors they use is vanilla natural flavor. And that comes from beaver's anal glands. So I think, you know, we got to be very careful. And also, you know, why should we be wary of fortification of foods? Yeah, all great questions. So in the first 55 pages of Food Babe Kitchen, I actually show you how to read labels, take you through every grocery store aisle so that you can stock your kitchen like a food babe. And everything from how do you prepare your foods

to how you warm them up and everything is in this book at the beginning. And then, of course, 100 plus recipes with color photos for each one. So just so excited to have this book out and so happy. I know you've written many cookbooks, Mark, and you know, it's this is my first one. So it's the first of many, though, because I've got I've definitely got more recipes in me. But, you know, I think what's really important about reading labels is that you know there's this kind of three question detox that I talk about at the end of feeding you lies and this

is kind of how you start the process of really training your mind to eat real food you start with the question the first question what are the? So you have to know kind of everything that you're eating. And so if you sit down for a meal and you don't know the ingredients, stop eating that meal and find out. And once you read the ingredients and look at them, do you understand them all? Are they real food? Are they, you know, is it an apple, cinnamon and sea salt you know is it an apple cinnamon and sea salt or is it tbhq and you know blue number one uh tbhq by the way is a very popular synthetic preservative that they use in very popular products and uh you know reese's peanut butter cups comes to mind, no, I used to love those. Oh, yeah. And, you know, this is actually an ingredient that negatively affects your T cells in your bodies and promotes allergies. So like,

if you have an allergic, just an allergy to anything, it can just increase your immune response to that allergy. And you can you can have a very adverse reaction. And if you eat a lot of foods with this, it's been linked to vision disturbances, stomach cancer, behavioral problems in children, all sorts of things. And this is a preservative that's in a lot of things. But when you read that on a label, TBHQ, you have to ask yourself what is that right you know and so that comes that leads you to the second question which is are these ingredients nutritious is tbhq nutritious hell no hell no right and um and so then you start to realize like why am i eating these non-nutritious ingredients and maybe i need to choose something different. And then the third question

you ask yourself is where do these ingredients come from? Are they made in a laboratory in a chemical factory? And in the case of natural flavors that you mentioned, yes, they are. People see the word natural and think it's coming from nature. Yeah, it starts in nature, but the way they manipulate, for example, a strawberry in a laboratory, or they can manipulate some other substance that comes from nature and make it act like a strawberry or taste like a strawberry or create the one millionth best part taste of something. So that they can put it in a product that normally would not taste good on the shelf that lasts there for, you know, nine to 12 months. They could put it in a product and it would taste like a real strawberry, even though it has no real strawberries in it. And that's what natural flavoring is. And so it tricks your brain into thinking you're eating real food when you're not, but your body is still wondering where the

nutrition from that strawberry is coming from. So you start to crave more than you should. And so natural flavors are one of the most evil ingredients, I believe, in our food supply because they trick your brain and they hijack your taste buds and they continue that craving so you eat more than you should. And with obesity, heart disease, and diabetes as our biggest issue in this country, and cancer, you know, we have to take control of our taste buds. And the only way to do that is not to allow the food industry to control them. And so removing natural flavors from your diet is like the number one thing, I think.

And it's so, you know, even though there's many more chemicals that are many more, much more harmful to you, almost 99% of the products on product shelves at the grocery store have natural flavors. So if you avoid natural flavor, you avoid many of those. And it's actually one of the reasons I started my company Truvani. I just want to mention because there are so many supplement companies out there, protein powder companies and supplement companies that use these natural flavors. Yeah. And I wanted to create a line of products that were made from real food and non-synthetic substances.

It didn't trick your brain into craving a flavor more than it should. I want people to be able to turn off their normal mechanism to crave food. And it's one of the reasons why we're doing what we're doing. I mean, that's so important what you're saying is because these chemicals and some of these things are not put in there necessarily as a preservative, but they're put in there deliberately to hijack our brain to make us eat more, crave more, want more. And one of those is MSG, which has got 50 different names or more. So it's hidden and it doesn't say necessarily MSG or monosodium glutamate because people are hip to that. They change the name like hydrolyzed yeast protein or extract. And that actually is what's used in

research to fatten up rats or mice to study obesity. So they give them MSG as a way to increase their appetite, make them eat more and get fat. And I remember once I was talking to a nutritionist who lived in Samoa, which has the most obese population in the entire world, and most of them are diabetic. And she said for breakfast, they had ramen noodles, sugar. They had MSG. They all had MSG. Yeah. And they, well, they put Kool-Aid powder on it, which has all these artificial colors, and they put MSG powder on it.

So it's extraordinary. That's their breakfast, basically Kool-Aid, MSG, and ramen noodles. And that's why they're so obese because they can't stop eating. And I think your book really points out a lot of these chemicals and goes through details about which ones you should pay attention to, what they are, what they're doing to our biology. In fact, where they're banned in other countries and why do we have them here? It's really powerful. And I encourage you to check it out because there's very other, a few other places where you can get this kind of information that tells you exactly what you should be looking for. Even my books, I don't go into as much detail because, you know, Bonnie's an expert on this food additive thing and she's been taking down

large companies based on her work. And I think it's, it's pretty exciting. So one of the things besides the companies I think we want to talk about is the government and how the government affects our food choices. And they have different programs that they do this with that we think are, you know, government programs for the public good, but they're actually helping companies not improve public health, but private profit. And one of these programs is called a checkoff program. Can you talk about that? Because you write about in your book, and it was very enlightening to read about. Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, in Feeding New Lives, I kind of go off all of the different, like, I guess, phases of things that the government has done in terms of trying to

help, you know, in terms of, you know, when we look at the root cause, and you know this, Mark, so the root cause of a lot of our issues is because of where our subsidies and our agriculture producers are basically being given subsidies so that they produce really cheap commodities for America. And those cheap commodities like corn and soy are what make up the majority of processed foods. And so these checkoff programs actually give the corn and soy and canola industries power in the government to make decisions, whether it's something that makes a decision on my plate, which the government creates to kind of give guidelines to children and schools on how their plate should look at the end of the day, if dairy should be on there or not be on there, how much of grain should be on there versus not be on there. And, you know, you've written a lot

about in your detox books and other books about how some of these ingredients, the things that we make the most of, corn and soy, have been very detrimental to our health because not only the glyphosate that's sprayed on majority of those crops that is linked to cancer, but also the fact that it imbalances your omega-3 to omega-6 fatty acid ratio in your body. And for people to understand, those corn and soy, you can eat corn on the cob and soybeans. That's not the problem. But about 1% of the stuff grown actually is eaten as the whole food. Most of it's turned into industrial products, food products, commercial products, gasoline.

I mean, it's just an enormous problem in terms of our government strategy. So keep going and tell us about the checkoff program. Yeah. So, you know, we have, and then this also happens within the meat industry too. And so there's so many different abuses in terms of the different checkoff programs. And it all stems from this one organization within the government it's the government accountability office or it's called the the gal the usda gal and it basically oversights all of these checkoff programs where they allow these food companies to continue to

market food to us even though it's unhealthy. Yeah. So, you know, think about the, so people kind of make sense of it, you know, programs like, you know, what's for dinner or, you know, pork, the other white, pork, the other white meat. Yeah. Got milk. These are all not industry funded programs. These are programs that are funded in collaboration with the government.

So the government is actually pushing these products into the marketplace through advertising and marketing. What the money is supposed to do is further research and understanding, not be marketing dollars to pay for ads that make these companies billions of dollars. So when the Got Milk ad was out there, it was so popular. They had every celebrity in it. Everybody had the white mustache. They had all these health claims. You know, it's going to make stronger bones.

It's going to be great for sports performance. It's going to do this, it's going to do that. Help you lose weight. And what happened was another branch of the government started paying attention to this, the Federal Trade Commission, which regulates truth in advertising. And they were like they were like hey guys there's no data to back up what you're saying in these ads you've got to stop these ads that's why you don't see got milk ads anymore because basically they went got proof and there was no proof yeah exactly and i'm thinking of another one you know the whole

grain um the grain society too was doing that a while with, you know, by saying whole grain was heart healthy. Yeah. Whole grain cookie crisp cereal. My favorite is the whole grain cookie crisp cereal with like, you know, seven teaspoons of sugar or something like that. It's ridiculous. 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 to gadgets

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