The Dr. Hyman Show - Is Food A Laughing Matter? with Mia Lux

Episode Date: November 20, 2019

Eating unhealthy food and trying to improve your health is like mopping up the floor while the sink is still overflowing—it just doesn’t work! But it can be hard to decide what we really should be eating for optimal health, considering the diet wars (Paleo or vegan?), the non-stop exposure to sugary foods in every market isle, and clever marketing by Big Food to make us think things are good for us when they really aren’t. Instead of getting overwhelmed and defeated, I like to take a lighter look at food and focus on solutions. That’s what this week’s episode of The Doctor’s Farmacy is all about, where I’m actually the guest. My talented and funny wife Mia Lux interviews me on her show, The Conscious-ish Show, and we focus on taking the many confusing ideas about food with a grain of salt and approaching wellness with humor and action. Mia merges the playful and the profound, drawing on her experience as a stand-up comedian, personal growth junkie, and recovering lawyer. For over 5 years, Mia has been an international host, comedian, and facilitator, specializing in top wellness/personal development events around the world. Last year, I was thrilled to have her help host my Feel Good Summit. It is her mission to make the world's most powerful ideas more accessible by making them truly enjoyable. I personally love seeing how she inspires others to take a positive spin on life.  Here are more of the details from our interview:  Why food is the most powerful drug on the planet (16:41) How I came to understand the power of food in creating health or disease (17:42) Two success stories of patients whose health was turned around by using food as medicine (18:38) Why we are so confused about what to eat (21:27) So what should we eat? (22:40) How whole grain flour acts like sugar in your body (23:52) Is meat good or bad for your health? (24:42) Why food policy matters and why our food policies are so bad (27:27) How Big Food takes away our personal choice (31:06) What are the possibilities for changing our food system (33:30) Watch all six episodes of The Conscious-ish Show at https://www.consciousish.com/. Follow on Facebook @consciousish and on Instagram @consciousish.  Follow Mia Lux on Instagram at @mymialux.

Coming up on this week's episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. A lot of people do assume that it's Dr. Hyman's wife that I eat healthy. And I do, when he's watching. Hey everybody, it's Dr. Hyman. Welcome to a special episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. Now this is a very special episode because it's hosted by my wife, Mia Lux, who's created something extraordinary called The Conscious-ish Show, where I'm a guest and we're talking about food. We're talking about, is what you eat a laughing matter? And first of

all, she is the funniest person I know. Not just saying that because she's my wife, but literally she had me in stitches in this show. She explains, for example, why we have it all wrong about grass fed beef, why the diet wars don't make sense, why nutrition is more divisive than politics, and it includes a special preview interview with me about my new book called Food Fix coming out in February 2020 about how to fix our broken food system. Her show is sort of like personal growth meets comedy, like The Daily Show, but without the politics. Super awesome. I encourage you to listen. Just stay tuned for this special episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy is What You Eat, A Laughing Matter, hosted by my wife, Mia Lux. You can watch all six episodes of her new comedy show at consciousish.com. That's consciousish.com. Now get ready and get your Kleenex because you'll be

laughing so hard you'll be crying. And now on to the episode. Hi, everyone. Just wanted to let you know that this episode contains some colorful language. So if you're listening with kids, you might want to save this episode for later. Hit it, boys. Thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Thank you so much. Namaste. And welcome to the Conscious-ish Show. I'm Mia Lux, and tonight we take on the difficult question you have to ask yourself every single day.

What should I eat for lunch? And my guest tonight, I hope will help me answer that question because he is a functional medicine doctor. He's an 11 times New York Times bestselling author and a leader in the food as medicine space, Dr. Mark Hyman. Hey! Yeah! Yeah!

And as you know, millions of people around the world, when faced with this daily dilemma of like, how do I choose between foods? They simply ask themselves, what would Dr. Hyman do? But not me. No, uh-uh. Because I'm married to him. Which means that I have no choice in the matter. No really, like our wedding vows are pretty much just to have and to hold without gluten, dairy or sugar. Until death of a non-diet related nature do us part. A lot of people do assume that as Dr. Hyman's wife that I eat healthy. And I do. When he's watching. No, no, but like I do. I mean does he sometimes find handfuls of Milky Way wrappers in my car? I mean maybe. But you can't prove it's me. I am a former sugar addict. I'm recovering. And you know it's really hard because sugar is biologically addictive.

Like it lights up the same part of your brain that cocaine does. Listen, I'm not saying it's like harder to kick than cocaine, but they don't sell cocaine at every supermarket checkout. Like there are boy scouts knocking on your door like, excuse me miss, would you like to buy some cocaine? It's for a good cause. It's hard to quit sugar when your local dealer is CVS. I just wanted to get tweezers and now I'm huffing M&Ms again.

Tough. And the thing is that we don't really have a lot of self-control when it comes to sugar because for the vast majority of human history, sugar was a scarce and precious resource. There were no cave ladies passing up on the berries like, oh no I'm trying to cut out sugar, summer is coming you know. No! Winter is coming! And if your ancestors hadn't eaten every handful of berries and honeycomb that came their way, they may not have put on enough weight to survive.

That's why when you try to say no to a cookie, it feels like you're saying no to life itself. There's some voice in the back of your brain that's like, if I don't eat this cookie, I might die. That's why the greatest lie we tell ourselves is, oh, I'll just have one. Just one. Just one at a time.

No, because our evolutionary sugar strategy, handed down from generation to generation to generation to us, is simply, eat it till it's gone. By the way, food companies know this. That's why 80% of food in the supermarket has added sugar. They're like, oh, so if we just put this in, they'll eat it till it's gone? Huh, yeah, but it kills them.

Ah, details. Yeah, well, aside from just never leaving my apartment to avoid sugar, I have a lot of other dietary restrictions, or as I like to call them, dietary parameters, because I'm not restricted, it's a choice. So I tell myself when I watch other people eating pastries and I sip liquid salad, it's delicious, it's salad. I choose this. It's delicious. It's salad. I choose this.

I'm also completely, mostly sort of gluten free. Croissants don't count, right? And like most gluten free people, I have no idea what gluten actually is. But I'm free of it! I mean, does anybody? It's so hard to know what's even true about food these days because there's so much conflicting information. They're like, don't eat eggs, it's gonna kill you. No, but you can, but just the egg whites.

But actually eat the whole egg. And eat plenty of fruit, but actually it's mostly sugar, so don't. But make sure you have enough sugar so you have energy and pep, and it will give you dementia. But definitely eat meat. But don't eat meat, you monster! But fish is super healthy and it will give you dementia. But definitely eat meat. But don't eat meat you monster! But fish is super healthy and will absolutely give you mercury poisoning.

So just drink plenty of water, just not from the tap, bottles, rivers, lakes, the sky. Woo! No wonder most people are just like, you know what, I'm gonna stick with my tater tots. You guys come back to me on that. And it doesn't help that all the food labeling and marketing is all the wrong way around. I grew up in New Zealand, a small country at the bottom of the world, very rural, cows and sheep and rolling hills, everyone's a pock up's back up plan. And when I came to America, I was very puzzled by this very special thing they were advertising, special grass fed beef.. Special grass-fed beef.

It's grass-fed. Like they take the cows and they feed them grass. Isn't that crazy? Super fancy. Uh, that's what cows eat. Actually, that's all cows eat. What have you been feeding them, America? Other cows? America's like, no, no, no, no, no, we don't feed our cows other cows anymore. No, just GMO corn, sawdust, lots and lots of chicken shit, ground up cats and dogs from

shelters, crabs, and candy with the wrapper still on. Because this is America, and even cows deserve sugar. No! Guys, that's not what goes in cows. And now because of the trend, everyone in New Zealand is labelling their food grass-fed. Stop it! This is what's wrong with our food system. We have the labeling wrong.

I think all the normal foods should just be able to call themselves what they are. And all the freaky deaky frankenfoods should have to out themselves for what they really are. It shouldn't be called grass fed beef. That should just be beef. And the unnatural factory farmed meat should be called quite accurately what it is. Shit-fed beef. And then listen, people can make their own choice.

Would you like a steak or a shit-fed steak? Huh? Huh? Shit-fed steak's cheaper. But yes, they did actually feed it like that. I think it would help us make better food choices. And with the food companies as powerful and as profit-driven as they are, making healthy food choices now is pretty much a political statement. Have you noticed how everyone has started announcing their food identities?

Hashtag Team Pagan. I think in the future, wars won't be fought between religions, between Muslims or Christians. No. The future wars will be fought between vegans and ketonites. And the paleons and the pagans and even the breatharians are going to get in there. People are taking the term diet regime a little too literally. They have propaganda machines, they have celebrity advocates, they hold rallies. I don't even ask people if they have dietary restrictions anymore. I just ask, to whom do you hail?

But you know, with the utter rubbish that is being passed off as food, we have to make our own rules and draw our own line in the sand. Understanding the impact of what you eat is more important now than ever before. So let's take a closer look at the state of food with Behind a Desk, where everything I say is 20% more important because I have a serious desk. It's real. It's a real desk. I built it myself.

Well, it turns out that what we put into our bodies magically impacts our bodies. Oh my God, crazy! Who knew? Everybody. Everybody knew. We've all been in denial because sugar tastes so good and is super profitable. But with 70% of Americans now overweight or obese, chronic disease being rampant across the world, with 11 million people worldwide dying, it is time we stop pretending that Pop-Tarts are a legitimate breakfast food.

They're just diabetes in a toaster, people. And in news that surprises absolutely no one, Americans aren't eating their vegetables. Most commonly eaten vegetable in America is the potato in the form of french fries, followed by tomatoes in the form of French fries followed by tomatoes in the form of ketchup yeah no listen I'm not angry America I'm just disappointed do you know the time of year where I see the

most vegetables out on American tables Halloween yeah you know your country's in trouble when one of its biggest vegetable crops is just decorative pumpkins like are you sure you don't want to eat that no we just want to put You know your country's in trouble when one of its biggest vegetable crops is just decorative pumpkins. Like, are you sure you don't want to eat that? No, we just want to put it out and watch it slowly rot. Millions of them. Really? Because like 12% of American households experience food insecurity and like hunger.

You sure you don't want to grow something you can eat? No! Watch it slowly rot from the inside out. Like our democracy. And carving pumpkins aren't the only not food foods going around. There's genuine confusion about what counts as food in America.

It seems that simply being non-toxic is enough to get the thumbs up for lunch. Food companies are like, will it kill them the moment they eat it? No? Great! it's food. No, it's a little bit more complicated. And this is an important distinction because how do I explain this?

Okay, so Play-Doh. Play-Doh is non-toxic. Like you could eat it and not die immediately. But it doesn't make it food. Although I bet if I cover it in sugar and deep-fried it, you could probably sell it as a snack in America, right? Mmm, sugar-fried play-doh. And I joke, but honestly, the food being produced by the food industry isn't much better. Like, what is liquid bacon? Really, like, what is that? And Twinkies. I mean this isn't real food. Most of it is just a remix of three key nasty ingredients. High fructose corn

syrup, nasty weirdo Monsanto wheat and GMO soy. Sprinkled liberally with yet to be verified as safe preservatives, herbicides and pesticides. Like I think I'll take the sugar-fried platter, you, you know? And FYI, for every 10% of processed food that's in your diet, your risk of death goes up 14%. And the average American diet, 60% processed food. You do the math. No, really, can someone do the math? I only do words. I don't know what they are.

No, but pretty much it's just slow death by a thousand donuts. But there is good news. We are fighting back because in the last year there have been multiple billion dollar judgments against Monsanto Bear for their herbicide Roundup, which includes our favorite of all time carcinogen, glyphosate. And glyphosate is so prevalent in American foods. It's like pretty much a condiment now. It's like your hot sauce, your ketchup, a little extra glyphosate if you want your tongue to go completely numb. And this is a real worry because even the World Health Organization's Cancer Research Agency, 17 scientists unanimously declared that glyphosate is, and I quote, probably

carcinogenic for humans. It's probably going to give you cancer. Really? Thank you for that. You probably shouldn't have let 10 million tons of it be put into our food system. And Monsanto should probably fire whoever forgot to pay off those scientists in time. Like, oh shit, we missed one. And they, of course, came out saying,

well, this is outrageous. This is nonsense nonsense look at all the science we funded it is becoming clearer and clearer that the nasty stuff in our food or the fact that it's not even food at all but what my guest tonight dr. Mark Hyman calls food like substances that this stuff is contributing big-time to our escalating global health crisis. Hundreds of millions of people around the world are suffering from preventable diet-related diseases. So the good news is that, yeah, food seems to cause all this disease, but there's also the possibility that it can prevent and cure it too. So what role does food really play in our health? How do we navigate the confusion,

the conflicting reports, and all the marketing to figure out what the we should eat? I think we should ask an expert. My guest tonight is Dr. Mark Hyman, who is a functional medicine physician, 11 times New York Times bestselling author. He's the director of the Cleveland Clinic Center for Functional Medicine, and he is the host of the Cleveland Clinic Center for Functional Medicine and he is the host of the Doctors Pharmacy podcast and Broken Brain docuseries. He is a leader in the food as medicine movement and he is coming tonight to help me answer the question, what should we eat?

And more than that, because his new book, Food Fix, which comes out in February 2020, actually goes beyond just fixing our own personal health and explores the central role that food plays in the world, in the environment, in our society, in our communities and how we can leverage that to fix it. So please welcome Dr. Mark Hyman. Well, thanks for coming tonight, Mark. Normally we do this at home anyway. We just sit on the couch and talk about food. But it's nice to have an excuse to put pants on and come out.

Yeah, as soon as we get in the house, she just takes off her pants. It's a thing. Absolutely. I don't understand. Pants or leg prisons, right? So this is your new cookbook, Food, What the Heck Should I Cook? Yes. The answer to all our problems is here. It is, actually.

Okay, fantastic. So let's start then with one of the kind of most fundamental controversies about food. Is food just energy to fuel our bodies bodies or is it more complicated than that? Yeah, well the biggest mistake people make about food is that they think it's just calories. So if you eat less, exercise more, you lose weight and you'll be fine. But how's that working out for everybody? Not so good. And the reason is that food isn't just calories, it's information. It's literally instructions. It's like code that can upgrade your biological software or downgrade it with every bite. So what is the information in 250 calories of broccoli, which is eight and a half cups, or 250 calories of soda, which

is a 20 ounce soda? Very different information. And that has huge effects on your brain chemistry, your metabolism, your hormones, your microbiome, your immune system. Every single bite, literally in real time, changes your biology. And it is the most powerful drug on the planet. It works faster, better, and cheaper than any drug ever invented and it's available to almost everybody. And it has no side effects except good ones. Okay, so tell me about that because you're a doctor who's now gone from, you know, traditional medical training to going around the world telling people about food.

So how did that come about? When did you decide that food is the drug? Well, actually, the truth is I moved into a house with about eight hippies in college. And one of them was a PhD student in nutrition who was a vegetarian. And we all cooked and ate delicious vegetarian food. He gave me a book called Nutrition Against Disease by Roger Williams.

I read that book in college and it changed my thinking forever. So since that time, I really understood the role that food plays in changing our gene expression, changing our biology and creating healthy disease. And I've made it part of my life. But then when I got really sick, I realized that I had to discover a way to fix myself, and food was a big part of that.

And that's when I discovered functional medicine. And the central tenet of that is that food is medicine. And you've worked with, I mean, thousands and thousands of patients now testing out these theories. Can you give us just like a rundown of what are some of the common diseases and conditions you see improved by food? I'll give you an example. A patient recently came to see us, Janice. She was 243 pounds.

Her body mass index was 43. Anything over 30 is obese. She was 25 or less than normal. She had type 2 diabetes and insulin. She had heart failure. She had kidneys starting to fail. Her liver was starting to fail. She had high blood pressure and a pile of other stuff.

And she was on a whole list of drugs. And all we did was basically shift her to a diet. That's basically what I write about in Food, What the Heck Should I Cook? That was whole foods, that was anti-inflammatory, that's detoxifying, that removes a lot of starch and sugar, pretty much most of the starch and sugar. In three days, she was off her insulin. In three months, her heart failure reversed, which, by the way, never happens. She was on her way to having a heart transplant and a kidney transplant.

Her heart failure reversed, her kidney failure reversed, her liver normalized, her blood pressure normalized, and she got off all her medications in three months and lost 43 pounds. And in a year, she lost 116 pounds. There's no drug on the planet that can do that. There's just no drug. I mean, I had a little boy who was like

the most malnourished little kid I'd ever seen. I mean, he looked normal from a weight perspective, but he was 12 years old. He had severe ADD. He got kicked out of kindergarten for, you know, bad behavior. Imagine that. And he had all these other issues. He had asthma, allergies, eczema, irritable bowel, headaches, muscle cramps, insomnia, anxiety, anal itching. I mean, he pretty much had everything. And all I did,

and I tested him, and he was deficient in omega-3 fats, magnesium, zinc, B6, all the basic nutrients, because all he was eating was junk food. So that's stuff you get from the food. And there's no, yeah, there's no nutrients. I mean, there was a kid recently that went blind from eating Pringles and French fries, he got no vitamin A and that causes blindness. Within two months, this kid went from all that to normal, no symptoms, no medications, and only that his handwriting went from completely illegible to perfect penmanship without any handwriting training.

It's because the body has enormous ability to respond quickly to the food we eat to fix our body and our brain. So something like that where you're dealing with multiple things wrong with a person. You're saying rather than treating this and this and this and this, you're working systemically. Yeah, you treat the system, not the symptoms. You treat with food and see what happens. And it's a miracle it happened.

It's not really a miracle. It just seems like a miracle because everything else we do in medicine doesn't work as well. Okay, okay. So if food is that powerful, what food should we be eating? Because it sounds like eating the wrong food could lead to like death and disaster and eating the right food to a healthy life. But you know, it's super confusing. There's so much sort of confusion about what the good food is.

So can you give us a rundown on what you think are the ways to guide your meal decisions? I mean, I spent 40 years studying nutrition and looking at all the studies, writing lots of books about it. And nutrition is confusing because the science is hard to do. Like it's basically ask a bunch of people what they ate over 30 years and hope they'll remember what they ate last week. I mean, what did you have for lunch last Thursday or breakfast last Wednesday? You probably don't remember, but that's what they do. And they try to see if there's a correlation. It's very hard to figure it out.

But there is good science that gives us direction. And you combine that with common sense, and you come up with a set of principles that I've jokingly called the Pagan diet. Sort of a combination of paleo and vegan because I was sitting on a panel with two docs. One was paleo, one was vegan. They were fighting. And I'm like, hey, if you're paleo, you're vegan. I must be pegan.

And that was like trending on Pinterest. And now it's become a thing. And it's on the USA Today, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Telegraph. And I talk about just really simple principles. First, eat food, right? If it's got stuff that you wouldn't have in your cupboard, don't eat it. If you don't have butylated hydroxy toluene in your cupboard that you sprinkle on your veggies, don't eat it.

If you don't have pesticides and herbicides and glyphosate, then don't put it on your salad dressing. So don't eat any of that stuff. Second, eat tons of veggies. You should have a plant-rich diet. Not plant-based, plant-rich, meaning 70% to 80% of your diet should be colorful plant fruits. Next, eat animal products that are good for you,

good for the environment, and good for the animals. I mean, it's never good for the animal, you kill them, but it can be quality of their life and the quality of the way it's done. There's a new approach to farming called regenerative farming that actually puts the soil in the equation and actually can

draw down enough carbon to restore our climate to its pre-industrial time, can hold water, and can reduce or eliminate the need for pestilized fertilizers and herbicides. And then, obviously organic if you can can, pasteurized, small fish, lots of nuts and seeds. Beans are fine.

Eat the smaller, not starchy ones. And whole grains are fine. And I mean whole grains. I don't mean brown rice flour. I don't mean whole wheat flour. Why can't we have flour, but we can have the whole grains? When you grind it into a fine powder, it acts like sugar in your body. In fact, you actually, when you look at whole wheat bread or bread, it has a higher gly it acts like sugar in your body in fact you you actually when you look

at whole wheat bread or bread it has a higher glycemic index than sugar meaning that you could actually replace your sandwich bread with two tablespoons of table sugar and be better off for it wow wow this is so hard to imagine that like you know we've been sold this idea of you know like healthy sandwiches and loaves of bread it's it's so hard to imagine that. Like, you know, we've been sold this idea of, you know, like healthy sandwiches and loaves of bread. It's so hard to separate the nostalgia from the biological reality. Yeah, I mean, in the book I have bread, but it's like seed and nut bread. It's not made from flour. I have pancakes, but it's made from coconut and almond flour.

It's not necessarily ground flour. It's things that are protein or lots of other beneficial ingredients. So what about meat? I mean, everybody's confused about meat, because one day the headlines say it's gonna kill you and cause cancer and heart disease, diabetes, and the next day they say it's fine and eat as much as you want.

It's super confusing, and I've looked at all the data, and I wanna look to be 120, and I don't wanna die, so I'm not gonna eat meat if it's bad for me. So I decided to look at all the research, and when we actually look at the data, it doesn't really show anything that impressive in terms of bad things. In terms of your health. In terms of your health.

Because what they do with these studies is they look at half a million people, they follow what they ate over 30 years, and they ask them a couple of questionnaires during that 30 years so they learn what they ate last week, but not necessarily what they ate overall, and you see if there's a correlation. But correlation doesn't prove causation. In other words, it doesn't prove cause and effect. It's just an association.

So, like I could do a study of women over 55 who have sex, and I would conclude that sex never leads to pregnancy. I mean, it would be 100% accurate, but completely invalid. So, with the meat studies, the ones who ate meat during the time when the studies were done, meat was thought to be bad. So they basically weren't healthy. They didn't care about their health. They smoked more, they drank more, they exercised less, they ate less fruits and vegetables, and they ate more processed food. So there's a whole lot of added variables going on.

Yeah, and the effect size is so small. Like if you look at meat, you might see a 15% increase or 20% increase in risk. It's essentially meaningless because when you look at big effect sizes in these kinds of studies, it's like a 20 to 1 risk, not a 0.18 or increased risk. So it's a very small risk, and I think meat has great protein. It has lots of nutrients and vitamins and minerals, B12. And the only caveat I would make is that we shouldn't be eating shit-fed beef. Because factory farmed animals are bad for the animals, bad for the planet, and bad for

humans. They are one of the biggest causes of climate change, and we should essentially ban it from the face of the earth. However, regeneratively raised beef, grass-fed beef, is actually healthy. It's a great source of protein, and it's much higher in omega-3 fats, antioxidants, and lots of other things. So it's hard to find, but you can get it. And what if you're someone who, for religious or spiritual reasons, doesn't eat meat? Are there ways to be healthy and to live the vegan principles without it?

Yeah. Actually, my cookbook was number one in the vegan category of cookbooks, which is pretty funny. But actually you can. I think it's harder to be, but you have to be smart. You can't eat a lot of processed food. You can't be a starch and sugar vegan, pasta and potatoes and rice. You have to eat dense, nutrient-dense whole foods, including nuts and seeds. You can get vegan protein powders, and there are ways to accommodate, but it's harder.

Excellent. So that's the food and the food we should be eating. Let's take a step back because your new book that's coming out next year in February, Food Fix, it takes a big step back from just food for our own personal health. And you've gone and started talking about policy and the food system. And you've taken on these huge issues. So tell us about how you went from being a doctor healing people with food to going down that road. Well basically I was like I felt like I was mopping up the floor while the sink's overflowing and never getting anywhere

because people were in a toxic food environment and I kept asking well food is causing my patient to be sick what's causing the food? And it's the food system, which is basically the biggest industry on the planet, because everybody eats, $15 trillion. It's big food, making processed food. It's big ag. It's the chemical companies, the seed companies, the fertilizer companies, all working together. And there's very few of them, about a couple of dozen that are driving all this. And then I began to say, well, if we have that food system,

then why do we have that food system? Well, it's the policies. So I kept asking why, which is what we do in functional medicine. And it's clear that our food policies and our ag policies are promoting the production, the marketing, and distribution of all the wrong foods. We tell everybody to eat five to nine servings of fruits and vegetables, yet 1% of government supports are for that.

We tell people to eat five to nine servings of fruits and vegetables, and only 2% of our land grows fruits and vegetables. So it isn't enough for every American to actually follow the guidelines and recommendations that we give. We allow unrestricted food marketing to kids, which we know promotes overconsumption of this junk. We target poor minorities. We have guidelines, dietary guidelines in the country that are basically corrupt.

Thirteen out of the twenty members of the new guideline committee have worked for industry, and the one who's overseeing it for the government used to be the head of the Corn Refiners Association who makes high fructose corn syrup and the Snack Food Association. It's like the fox guarding the hen house. How does that make any sense? So if we have these really bad food policies that result in us making all this really bad food which results in all of us getting really sick, like why?

Why is that happening? Why are our policies so atrocious? Well, there just happens to be about 187 lobbyists for every member of Congress. They spend billions of dollars corrupting our government. We don't have a government for the people, by the people, of the people. We have a government for the corporations, of the corporations, and by the corporations. And I don't say that lightly because when you look at what's going on, it really is true.

I'll give you an example. Jerry Brown is the most liberal governor in the world, probably, was pressured by the food industry and by Big Soda to pass a law. Now, here's what happened. The food industry, the soda industry put a ballot measure in place and spent $7 million promoting it. They would have limited local governments from passing new taxes unless they had a two-thirds majority, which means that Sacramento couldn't pass a tax to fund its fire department or its police department. And it was nothing to do with soda. But then they used that to basically make Jerry Brown an offer

he couldn't refuse, which was, you do what I want, and I'll pull that ballot measure. And what they wanted was a preemptive tax to prevent any future taxes on soda or junk food because there were so many taxes being passed. So they used these sneaky taxes behind closed doors. Nobody knew about it. And now it's out. But it's too late. Jerry Brown folded. And now we have a preemptive tax so there can be no future taxes on soda or junk food in California. That's heartbreaking. They're doing it state after state after state. It's okay, well, that's depressing. It's dark. And then, okay, let's talk about the consumer perspective.

Because, I mean, we are the ones buying this stuff. And we often talk about this, you know, is food truly a free choice? Is it truly a personal choice? If we're living in this country that's swimming with junk, like, is it really fair to say to people, like, well, you're responsible for eating healthy. Can you speak a little bit about whether you feel that food is a personal choice or the addictive nature of food and the manipulation takes it away from us? I mean, we have all personal preferences, and that's fine. You can eat Lebanese food, you can eat Chinese food. I like Chinese food. You don't like Chinese food, it's fine. Japanese, we agree on, it's fine.

But only no boo, because that's what, you know. That's why I have to work so hard. But there is a whole industry devoted to hijacking our brain chemistry and our metabolism. And the food industry has deliberately created taste institutes where they hire craving experts to create the bliss point of food designed to create heavy users. These are their own marketing terms. I once met the vice chairman of Pepsi. He says, Mark, come to me in Westchester and I'll show you our plant because we've harvested taste buds from humans and we're growing in the lab and we can tell how to maximally

stimulate those taste buds. And I'm like, do you really want me to go? Haven't you heard of social media? And so they know this. It's designed this way. Michael Moss, a New York Times reporter, interviewed 300 food industry former employees, experts, chemists, and really found the underbelly of what's going on. They know exactly how to create the mouthfeel, the taste, and hijack our biology. And what that does is it takes away free

choice. It takes away free choice. When your brain is hijacked, when your metabolism is hijacked, when your hormones are wacky, and your brain chemistry is wacky, it's almost impossible to make the right choice. And then on top of that, access is an issue. There's 23 million Americans who live in food deserts that can't even get a fresh vegetable. I met a girl in Cleveland whose mother wanted to feed her healthy food. She had to take four buses, two hours round trip to get a vegetable. Yeah. So if we have this, we have money influencing politics and policies to create huge subsidies for all this junk, and then we have a lack of access, all these issues,

I'm pretty depressed. I'm kind of of the view like, oh, the world issues, I'm pretty depressed. I'm kind of of the view like, oh, the world's in the... No. But I do wonder, like, your new book, Food Fix, it does outline all the problems, but what's hopeful about it is that you also outline all the solutions. So our audience doesn't go to bed crying themselves to sleep at night. Can you maybe just give us a little bit of the pathway forward? What are some of the possibilities for changing the system and changing our food and changing our

whole planet in the process? Absolutely. You know, we have to name the problem in order to be awake to what we need to do. And that's really what the first part of the book is. And throughout the book, there are really clear pathways for people to take action. Citizens, businesses, governments, philanthropists, to actually step in. I mean, here's a great example of what someone's doing. There's a guy in the UK, he was a very rich guy, aggregated a lot of his friends and pension,

institutional investors, and said, we're gonna end factory farming of animals. And they basically got $12 trillion in assets from these investors and said, okay, we're all invested in these fast food companies. We're gonna say to them, we want antibiotics out of animal feed by this date or we're divesting. And guess what?

20 of the top fast food companies agreed because they didn't want to lose all their investors. So that's an example. Or we have people who are working on committees. I'm working in Washington, a food is medicine working group, which is a great group in Congress that's trying to move this forward. There are policies that can be shifted in the Farm Bill. And there's also a movement of regenerative agriculture, which is pretty exciting because the number one cause of climate change is our entire food system from end to end, whether

it's deforestation, soil erosion, food waste, factory farming animals, the processing distribution, and transportation of food. All that is the number one cause. And if we actually want to end that, one of the biggest ways is to support regenerative agriculture. And that means growing food in a way that includes animals in the ecosystem to build soil, which draw down carbon in the environment,

which can hold water, so we don't have droughts and floods and wildfires, that can actually rebuild the biodiversity of the soil, which our health depends on. Our microbiome depends on the microbiome of the soil. And you always say, how many harvests do we have left? Yeah, I mean, according to the UN, we have 60 harvests left. That means no soil, no food, no humans.

What will your grandkids eat, right? This is a big problem. It's actually a bigger problem than climate change, and it's how we grow food. And that can all be changed, and it's starting to happen at scale. There's billions of dollars of investment, and the government, I just read a report from the government of Kentucky. Their agriculture plan, I just read it today, actually lays out a plan for regenerative agriculture, which is just mind-blowing to me. Okay, so then the last question, I know it's a difficult one, but for people who aren't in organizations or boards or have $12 trillion to divest, what would you say to them?

Well, there's two ways. Yeah, there's two ways. One is vote with your fork. I mean, you eat three times a day, imagine if the entire world boycotted anything made in a factory for one day. That would change everything, right? If we had an eat-in as opposed to a sit-in, right? Imagine if you'd just started to choose real whole food

and shipped your diet. What if everybody started a compost pile? Because food waste is the number one cause of climate change, and you look at it in terms of methane and greenhouse gases. If it were a country, it would be the third largest emitter of greenhouse gases. That means if it were a country, it would be the third largest emitter of greenhouse gases. That means bigger, second to China,

and I mean US and China, right? And if you start a compost pile, that makes a huge difference. You're not throwing your garbage. We throw up 40% of our food. And then you can also have a garden. You can grow a little bit of garden. There's a guy named Ron Finley,

called the gangster gardener in LA, he was South Central LA, who literally started growing food in the strip between the sidewalk and the road and got arrested for it, but then he got the law passed. But, you know, that's amazing. And now he's growing gardens in urban gardens and urban farms, started a community garden.

Be part of the solution. Advocate. Vote with your vote. You know, it matters. The Food Policy Action Network has a scorecard for every single member of Congress on how they vote on food. And if they're in the pocket of big food, they found two congressmen who were right in the pocket of big food and they launched a social media campaign and they outed them

from Congress. So we have the power. We don't use it. Well, it sounds like we kind of need a bit of a food revolution. We do. So maybe this is the call to action to join with your fork as your weapon, take up arms, and put down the soda. Thank you so much for your time. It's been such a pleasure.

I'll see you back home at bed. We all eat every single day, and it turns out that what we eat has a massive impact on our own bodies, on our communities, our society, and the planet. So even though it's really hard, especially with all the crazy, addictive food around us, choosing to eat well, like Dr. Hyman said, could be one of the most revolutionary actions of our time, in a time where we truly do need a food revolution. So till next time, put down the soda and stay conscious-ish.

Hi everyone, it's Dr. Mark Hyman. So two quick things. Number one, thanks so much for listening to this week's podcast. It really means a lot to me. If you love the podcast, I'd really appreciate you sharing with your friends and family. Second, I want to tell you about a brand new newsletter I started called Mark's Picks. Every week, I'm going to send out a list of a few things that I've been using to take my own health to the next level. This could be books, podcasts, research that I found, supplement recommendations, recipes, or even gadgets. I use a few of those.

And if you'd like to get access to this free weekly list, all you have to do is visit drhyman.com forward slash pics. That's drhyman.com forward slash pics. I'll only email you once a week, I promise, and i'll never send you anything else besides my own recommendations so just go to drhyman.com forward slash pics that's p-i-c-k-s to sign up free today