The Dr. Hyman Show - The School Lunch Revolution: Nourishing Minds, One Meal at a Time

Episode Date: November 17, 2025

What if changing what kids eat at school could transform their behavior, boost learning, and even save lives? Studies show that when kids swap junk food for real, nourishing meals, behavior problems drop, focus improves, and learning soars—with one study finding a 100% reduction in suicides among youth simply by changing their diet. Across the country, schools are proving that scratch-cooked, colorful meals made from whole ingredients can fit tight budgets, reduce waste, and make kids excited to eat. By putting nutritious food at the center of education, we can help raise a generation that’s healthier, happier, and ready to learn. In this episode, Jill Shah, Sam Kass, Kimbal Musk, and I talk about the powerful connection between nutrition and education, showing that healthy school meals can transform not just kids’ diets but their futures. Jill Shah is the President of the Shah Family Foundation, which drives innovative work at the intersection of education, healthcare, and community in Boston. Her leadership focuses on improving access to healthy school food, supporting neighborhood food equity, and fostering collaboration between schools and healthcare to strengthen children’s physical, emotional, and social well-being. Before launching the foundation, Jill was a successful entrepreneur involved in several internet startups, including iXL, RxCentric, and Mercator Software, and later founded Jill’s List, which she sold to MINDBODY in 2013. A graduate of Providence College, she now serves on the boards of the Red Sox Foundation, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, the Museum of Fine Arts, Belmont Hill School, and the Winsor School. Jill’s commitment to community innovation has earned her honors such as the Boston Chamber of Commerce Distinguished Bostonian Award and the Playworks Game Changer Award. Sam Kass was senior policy advisor for nutrition policy in the Obama Administration and is currently an investor in several food technology start-ups. One of Michelle Obama's longest-serving advisors, Sam was the executive director of her Let's Move initiative and helped create the first major vegetable garden at the White House since Eleanor Roosevelt's Victory Garden. He is a graduate of the University of Chicago and was trained by one of Austria's greatest chefs, Christian Domschitz. Kimbal Musk is the co-founder of The Kitchen, an American bistro with restaurant locations in Boulder, Denver, Chicago, and soon Austin. Now marking its twentieth anniversary, The Kitchen serves thoughtfully sourced, Seasonal American Shared Plates with global influences. Musk is also the co-founder of Big Green, a philanthropic organization devoted to getting every American growing food. His personal mission is to empower and invest in the next generation who are building a healthier, happier future. The Wall Street Journal has called him a "cheerful crusader for real food," and The Guardian has lauded how he “takes the tech entrepreneur ethos and applies it to food.” Musk has been named a Global Social Entrepreneur by the World Economic Forum. Musk currently sits on the board of Tesla Inc. and formerly served on the board of Chipotle Mexican Grill and SpaceX. This episode is brought to you by BIOptimizers. Head to bioptimizers.com/hyman and use code HYMAN to save 15%. Full-length episodes can be found here:How To Improve School Lunches, Grades, And Behavior At No Extra Cost Why Pizza And Fries Can Be Claimed As Vegetables Through School Lunch Programs How To Fix Nutrition In Schools

Coming up on this episode of the Dr. Hyman Show. There was an incredible study by the CDC looking at nutrition in kids and found that those kids perform far better when they're well nourished. If they're not, they're basically having poor academic performance. They're having more absenteeism. They're having more disruptive behavior. They're less likely to problem solve, less likely to pay attention. And I think this is something we just don't understand that we're doing to our kids.

And it's something that's completely solvable with real food. Before we jump into, have you been feeling stressed or tired lately? You might be low in one powerful mineral. That mineral is magnesium. Most people are, and most supplements don't fix it because they only include one or two forms. I use magnesium breakthrough from bioptimizers because it has all seven forms of magnesium your body needs for sleep, stress, and recovery. It actually works.

You can feel the difference. From November 23rd through December the 3rd, you get 25% off. This is the once-a-year sale you do not want to miss. Go right now to buy. bioptimizers.com slash hymen and use code hymen. In today's episode, I want to share a few ways you can go deeper on your health journey. While I wish I could work with everyone one-on-one, there just isn't enough time in the day, so I've built several tools to help you take control of your health.

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Just open Apple podcasts and tap try free to start your seven-day free trial. I think that the junk food and the processed food and food is more expensive than real food cooked from scratch by real humans locally in the kitchens. That's exactly right. And, you know, when we were going through this process, we brought in chefs to just help us understand it. And so Ken Oranger, who is a celebrity chef in Boston, pointed this out to us.

He said, you know, the pre-packaged roast beef that they're slicing up has been processed, right? So the whole bunch of people have touched it, manipulated it, and, you know, injected it with preservatives and salt and all kinds of other things. And sugar. And sugar. Lots of sugar. That's right. Well, I didn't much sugar in turkey. I have no idea.

No. Well, probably to hide whatever other things you're trying to hide because she cooked it so long ago. but the and so he said you know that costs way more than if we just order some roast beef and have it shipped to the schools and so as we started to do the analysis it was true in every case if you buy prepackaged stuff because it's been processed there's so much more cost in it and then you've got margin on it as well so you know there's profit on it wow so you basically decided you were going to take this on and you created something called my way cafe yeah uh and and and you know know, in the discovery of the challenges, you found a whole set of solutions, right? Because the basic mantra is, look, there's only a small amount of money that kids get for school lunch. What is it, $2 or something per lunch? Yeah, it's, yeah, it's a little more than that $3.45. $3.45. But $0.25. But 20 cents of it is milk. Okay, which by the way, we need to talk about this. Yeah, but skim, skim or flavored.

Like, okay. Another topic. We'll get to it in a, because I can go on for hours about that. But you hear the mantra, look, this is the best we can do. We can't serve kids delicious real whole food because it's too expensive. It's too difficult. It's not possible. And you actually figured out that not possible, but it's not that hard and it's totally scalable. So tell us about that process. Yeah.

Well, it was fun to do it on paper, right? So if you pull out spreadsheets and you start to put in all the food costs and all the labor costs and all the transportation costs, you can show very easily in a model that you can take the same subsidy from the USDA, employed three times as many people, serve all real whole food. And the only single time investment you need to make, we did it philanthropically, and then the city has now taken it over, is to build these microchitchens. And they're not even, I mean, they have, they have a combination oven, and they have the right number of sinks, they have prep tables, and they have a freezer and fridge in them. So they're not, nothing out of this world, but it's exactly the

amount of equipment, we have rice cookers as well, for people to prepare a full buffet of hot and cold food every day for kids. Looks like a rainbow. Kids love it. It smells good. It doesn't smell like heated plastic in schools anymore. It smells like real food. But that process took a long time. That process took about nine months of us pushing really hard. Is that a cat? Yes, my cat. So cute. I love it. He's my work companion. I don't have any other people to hang out with anymore.

It's not my wife. You have the cat. We have the cats too. So we, so, you know, we tripped over, it was like one thing at a time, every hurdle. And you can imagine why government alone can't do this, because there are so many noes that get in the way. And so we just kind of, every time someone said, no, we said, why not? And we would just solve the problem.

And then we'd get to the next thing. You know, like, one of the earliest problems we solved was everything was coming in wrapped. So apples were wrapped in plastic. Oranges were wrapped in plastic. It just made it look so unappetizing. And so the answer to the why do we have to do it this way was, well, you don't have fruit washing sinks in the in the kitchens. So we said, if we put a fruit washing sink in the kitchen, do we have to wrap the fruit anymore? And they said, no, you just got to wash the fruit.

So like it was just, you know, super simple. not expensive solution to a really big problem. If kids weren't eating the fruit because it took five minutes to unwrap the bloody thing and it didn't look appetizing anyway. So we just had to do that with everything. And we, instead of saying, instead of people saying,

you know, this is why not and just stopping there, you were like, well, how do we fix this? Yeah, exactly. And you found it wasn't that hard,

right? It's a sink. It's other simple things. And I think, you know, it was interesting you shared me once it was a little subversive because you sort of started this program in the school you did it in one school you showed it could be done you got them to not ship in the food from out of state all wrapped in plastic and you didn't really tell

anybody what you were doing and by the time people caught on it was sort of too late and you know these these big food service providers that were you know cashing in all the government supports and making crappy food we're out of business right that's right You know, so it was, it was interesting because the one thing that we caught wind up is that the food provider, so the vendor that provided all the plastic rep food, that opportunity was up for bid. And so, and we happened to just walk in the door as that bidding process is being set up. And so the only recommendation we made, because we didn't want anything to do with plastic wrapped food is we said, make sure that you have the right to pull out any. school if you if for any reason you would want to shift the way you're feeding kids so they wrote that into the bid and and the deal was done with that in mind and we knew already like if this thing

works then we're just going to be able to you know pull off so and that's what's happened 30 schools a year have come off of that contract and have gone on to this you know fully managed by the Boston public schools real whole food so who made those decisions about the contracts. Was it the school superintendents? Was it? The head of food services. Who's terrific? Yeah, who came from L.A. She had, you know, she was trying to do a lot of things in L.A. in terms of shifting the food also in what they were serving there. And so she was, she was, you know, this all seemed very risky to her. And we kept saying to her, we're here to carry the risk on this. We'll, we'll make sure that, like, we don't break anything. And, but, you know, it was her decision to put

the language into the contract, and she really kind of made sure that we could keep pushing forward. It was because it was complicated. Yeah, it is. You know, I think right now we're hearing a lot of mantras about school lunch. Oh, you know, we put in these nutrition guidelines that are better under the Hunger Free Kids Act that Obama passed in 2010, which improved the guide about what to eat more whole foods, more vegetables, et cetera, et cetera, although they still past potatoes, I mean, quote, French fries as a vegetable and ketchup and pizza as vegetables, which, you know, just still is hard to imagine. But now what's happening is these guidelines are being rolled back because they're saying

the kids won't eat the healthy food. They throw it in the garbage. It tastes bad. It costs too much. And so they're rolling back these guidelines. And yet your model shows that that's just a bunch of nonsense. It's interesting. I think the one thing we did in terms of a service model, which I think changes the way kids behave around food, is we, it's all child-driven. So the protein is separate

from the grains, is separate from the warm vegetables, is separate from all the cold fruits and vegetables, separate from the beans, et cetera. And so nothing has to touch anything else, which is a big reason that kids don't like certain things. So if I, if I, if I, If I walk down the line, right, I might pay protein, I may take chicken, and I might forego the rice because I don't like it, but maybe there's a roll that I want and I like the roasted broccoli or I don't like any of the hot vegetables, so maybe, but I do want an apple and I want some celery and I want a carrot, but I definitely don't want a salad and I do not want dressing, but I do want the hot sauce.

So kids make their own meals, and this is not slow. This happens. There are servers on the other side. This is all within the $3.45 who are talking with kids. Kids are saying, please, and thank you. There's a whole conversation that's going on that wasn't happening before, and they're getting exactly what they want. They walk up the line pretty gleefully, actually.

And they eat it. They eat it all because they asked for it. That's what they wanted. There's no food waste. There's no food waste. And then we insert opportunities for kids to try things, right? So while they're sitting around, they're sitting at the table eating, we might say, these are chickpeas.

Would you like to try chickpeas? So that we introduce new foods, tofu. Tofu's like, kids love tofu now. Love it. You know, and so it's just so hard to hear the argument that kids won't eat the food. I think the adults don't know how to present the food to the kids. So just to recap, the economics work. You can create better food, more locally sourced, made from scratch.

All you need is a little bit of an improvement in the kitchens. Yep. you hire more people, which still is within the cost structure, who are happier with their jobs because they're actually cooking and making kids happy. Yeah. And the kids are happy. They're not throwing out the food. Yeah.

And how is their health and academic performance? Have you tracked that? It's interesting. So we are doing, there's a study being done right now on the behavioral health because we were hearing from so many principals and teachers that negative behavioral events had gone way down in the schools. And so kids were just being disciplined less. And teachers and principals thought it was because of the school food, the new school food. We don't have data yet. We are going to start doing some research on their physical health as well. But I can tell you one story that I tell

all the time. There was a child who was diagnosed with failure to thrive. And part of the school's responsibility was to try to get a half a can of a protein drink into this child every day. His name was George. And I walked in about three days after the My Way Cafe program had started in his school. And the principal was kind of teary-eyed. And she said, I got to tell you. She said, this boy, George told me his situation. She said, he's eating every meal.

Wow. And so I ended up meeting George a week later. And he said, do you know, do you know the people who make? the food. And I said, oh, I do. Yeah. He said, how do you, how does someone make a recipe? I said, oh, it's kind of like coloring. You know, if you take a red crayon and a blue crayon and you put them together, it's purple. So that's what they do, you know, and he's like, oh, and he's like, you know, it's like, I'm pretty sure that I want to be a chef. Like, this is a kid who a couple of weeks ago, his pediatrician came in to see what was happening. His mom wanted to be able to bring

the food home so he would eat at night. I mean, this is like a game changer. And as far as I can tell, it was his relationship with one of these newly hired cafeteria service workers who just changed his mind about eating. It was mind-blowing work. It still is. Yeah, and then, you know, that maybe you haven't collected the data yet, but I think it's going to show remarkable things.

You know, when you look at kids in schools and violent, disruptive behavior, it's a big issue. I mean, kids, one in 10 kids are on ADD medication. You know, we have to have special ed. There's, it's just, it's an enormous problem in school. School nurses are additioning on medications left and right. And, you know, we know from the studies that, you know, these are, these are difficult kids. There's a 3,000 kids study, which were incarcerated youth. And they basically replaced junk food with healthier options and got rid of sugar and refined foods.

And in 12 months, there was a 21%. reduction in antisocial behavior, a 25% reduction in assaults, a 75% reduction in use of restraints. And get this, Jill, there was 100% reduction in suicides, which is basically, you think about it, suicide is the third leading cause of death in children's age 10 to 19. And when you look at the CDC study, there was incredible study by the CDC looking at nutrition in kids and found that those. Those kids perform far better when they're well nourished.

If they're not, they're basically having poor academic performance. They're having more absenteeism. They're having more disruptive behavior. They're less likely to problem solve, less likely to pay attention. But I think this is something we just don't understand that we're doing to our kids. And it's something that's completely solvable with real food. I mean, the CDC published this in a report in 2014 called Health and Academic Achievement, and it was just such a clear link between poor nutrition and poor academic performance

with lower test scores, lower grades, poor cognitive function, less alertness, less attention, poor memory. It was just amazing. And so we have the ability to change this. We just don't do it. And I think the science is there. and now what you've shown is that the possibility of scaling this is there. Do you ever wonder why you still feel stressed, wired, or wake up tired, even when you're doing everything right?

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Use code hymen and grab your favorites before this deal disappears. After December 3rd, it's gone. Don't miss it. Two out of ten kids now are obese, not just overweight, four out of ten are overweight. We're seeing this effect their cognitive behavior and academic performance. What's most striking in the studies, it really shocked me was that the ones, the kids were the most obese are also the most nutrient deficient. You look at their vitamin and mineral levels.

They are among the lowest because they're eating crap. And it's affecting their cognitive function, their metabolism, and setting them up for really bad, bad outcomes in lives, lower life expectancy, lower ability to earn higher incomes. And in schools, it's a cesspool there. Sugar, salt, processed carbs, industrial, refined fats. And they let, I mean, I went to the school. They had, you know, McDonald's Monday, Taco Bell Tuesday, Wendy's Wednesday. They had advertising all over the gymnasiums and bathroom stalls. And you guys really went to work on this with the Hunger Free Kids Act to help the

Hunger Free Kids Act, which was signed in law in 2010. Can you tell us about that? And what were the challenges you found that you faced in addressing changes to the school lunch program from the food industry and from the Congress? And, you know, what was there like? There are a lot to them. You know, so when we got there, there was no rules at all about what you could sell in schools. So, inventing machines and in the Alicart lines and the lunch rooms, there was literally zero standards.

You could sell anything you were. And the guidelines had had been updated in terms of the Newtrian standards for the school lunch meal itself. In 20 years, there have been a resource for the program in 30. Wow. And, you know, part of the challenge, there's lots of different challenges. One, we were trying to do it in the middle of economic black, not too, you know, different from what's happening right now. It's probably in 2008, right? Yeah.

And so, you know, we were working on this in, you know, through 2009. So, you know, pretty intense time and try to get a bill like that done. But, you know, for us in the administration, and by the way, it took President Obama intervening and helping to push with the first lady to get that done. you know, as we think it was the bedrock of the future of the nation. And so that's why it was such a priority for us. You know, I think there's a lot of challenges. One, like on the vending machines, you know, they are huge sources of revenue for things that we care about in schools like art class and music class.

The schools budget. Yeah, for sports. So these budgets have been cut so much that schools are depending on basically selling these kids junk food to keep programs that we all. care about alive. So there's a real, you know, tense conflict there. Um, uh, but, you know, obviously, you know, killing them or prematurely over the long of the country, like not a solution for art. So they can, they can write great poems as they're dying and great songs. As turns out. You're like, we should work. We had to work this out. Um, you know, there is huge raging. And sometimes,

you know, the debates in Washington just, you know, make, how to leave you scratch in your head. huge debates on whether you had to just offer the vegetable of the kid or actually had to serve them. Well, he's talking about competitive foods in schools, which makes me crazy. I mean, a competitive food is a donut versus an apple. So if you put them side by side, guess which one the kid's going to pick? Yeah. So exactly competitive. Big, big fights there. And, you know, then there was a pretty infamous effort by the frozen food institute, which is basically the pizza and friend five is, yeah, cool, that got, that made the, the tomato sauce on the pizza to be counted as a vegetable. Yeah. And French fries, we were working very hard

to put limit. We proposed limitations on the amount of fries that could be served in a given week. Which was also vegetable. right exactly you didn't know uh and the ketchup also is a vegetable yeah yeah and so they got congress to intervene and they they attach that on to another bill and got that through so we were able to then increase the serving a vegetable so you could serve fries but you still also had to serve like broccoli or something like that uh so it really kind of defeated the purpose of serving the fries so yeah we were able to constrain that signature that significantly at the time anyway.

I remember a story that, you know, Swanson's pizza, which is a big pizza company in Minnesota, is the largest supplier of pizza to schools. Yeah, and Amy Klobuchar, who's the center from Minnesota, a Democrat, was instrumental in getting pizza being included as a vegetable, which just goes to show you the ways in which the food industry is so influential in driving our policies, which had nothing to do with science yeah that is true we had big fights on potatoes in many arenas uh similar to school lines as well as with wick um you know so but i got to say like so there was real fights i do think there's this like um i have gotten over the outrage that industry is going to pursue

their interests i'm sort of just like we got to get over it and just win and just beat them at their at this game. And we need to be smarter and more strategic and get in power, run for office, get in power and win. So you think that the congressmen and senators would be your allies. Did you find that? I mean, clearly the food industry pushback. Yes, sometimes they, well, we got it all paths. And the bill was actually quite good. Outside of those things that I mentioned, you know, the whole grain provisions, the sodium provisions, the amount of vegetables we had to serve, like all those things were actually quite very, very strong. There was enough money for the program could it be improved of course could it be significantly improved absolutely but was it

just a transformational bill compared to what was there before absolutely so you know and it took a herculean effort to get it done at be given everything else that was going on in washington so um so you know look i mean i that was just a huge win and uh and did was there was there any follow-up data on how kids who did in terms of their weight, their academic performance, the impact of the new school lunch guidelines? I have been seen a robust analysis for the whole program in its entirety. The other part of the bill that we buried and didn't really talk much about because we didn't get it. But maybe the most impactful thing in this bill, I don't know, one you could debate it was a provision that basically said that it's called the community

eligibility program and it allowed schools that had 40% free or reduced basically where the majority, almost the majority of your kids were low-income kids. You could serve breakfast to every kid in the school for free and every kid got lunch for free. And so it was what was What's very powerful about that is not as much at lunch, but at breakfast because at lunch, everybody's eating together and you don't know who's who, but breakfast was only in the cafeteria for the poor kids. And so what would happen is those kids would have lunch at school. They'd go home.

Most of them don't get food at home when they get there. Maybe a lot of baggage or something. And then they come back to school, but they were so ashamed of being identified as poor that they would skip breakfast, even though they hadn't eaten since lunch the day. Wow. And so by serving it in the, in breakfast in the classroom and serving it to everybody, all like millions of four kids are getting food that otherwise wouldn't. And so you saw there increased participation, better improved significantly improved attendance

and significantly improved reading and math scores because, you know, those kids, you know, can you remember when you're like 12 or 13? how hungry you were all the time. Yeah. And imagine we hadn't eaten since, you know, lunch and it's now nine o'clock. Then lunch the day before, and it's now nine o'clock. And you're like, focus. Focus.

Yeah, forget it. Forget that. I could barely do that if I was full, let alone if I was strong. Right? And so, you know, so it was a transformational piece of legislation in that regard. And for the, they've seen just incredible results. There's been challenges to implement it. But those resources remain and more and more districts each year are signing up for it.

And so, you know, I think we have to be careful. Like things are messy and politics is messy and you're going to have people lobbying for their own interests of their businesses. Sometimes in ways that, you know, I can understand sometimes that I find disgusting and just up for it. But there's a way of what you experience that, you know, kind of reveal the underbelly of what you're fighting against. I mean, look at cut both ways. I mean, I think, you know, when we banned trans fats, which, you know, there was an attempt to try to figure out from the industry side, you know, they could still, because of a few people who wanted in various ice sinks

and other couple products where, you know, it was harder to replace. They wanted to, like, go fight to try to allow a certain level in under the band. Am I allowed to swear on this podcast? You can. I mean, and I told a lot of the head lobbyists for these guys. Like, if you want to have that fucking fight, like, let's go, because I cannot wait to take it to you on this. If you want to make sure that you're pumping trans stats, that is a no killer. Like, let's go at it.

So, you know, there's people, like, that's like clearly something that was killing everybody, a very specific thing that had ample evidence. And sometimes you just like, ready for a nasty fight. But I will also say, and it's important for everybody to understand. And there's a lot of nuance and a lot of gray. So there's some issues like pizza in, you know, as a vegetable or trans fat, which is a black and white issue. But there's a lot of other companies that, you know, have done tremendous work to try to make

it easier and more affordable families to get decent food that are working with real constraints from Wall Street. You know, like if CEOs try to change too much too fast and lose some revenue in a three or six a month period, they're going to get fired. Right? So those efforts are, you know, would be undone in a minute. So if you're trying to get to me to change, there's a pragmatism that has to be taken. And by the way, like a lot of people talk about wanting to eat better and how we need better food. But consumers, you know, tend to eat what they eat and tend to like pretty unhealthy food. That's because that food likes them.

It's addictive. And it sort of sets up the biology of hunger and craving and addiction. addiction, which is very hard to fight with willpower, and that's part of the problem. I told that. That's absolutely right, but it's also a real problem for the industry. So they've created, they boxed themselves into a problem of creating, you know, highly craveable food. And now it's, people want it and they like it. And they identify themselves with eating. So it becomes the whole, you know, what we eat is really how we understand who we are. And so when you start to change, you're saying, you want to change me as a human. And so It gets super complicated and people aren't changing as fast as we think they are.

And so for a CEO who's like, I get it. Like my portfolio is not good. I'm sure got to make the real change. It's not like they are in the position to say, I get these products are terrible. I'm just going to get rid of them. Yeah. Well, they're innovating. These companies are innovating.

They're getting the crap out. They're reformulating their products. They're getting. I just think we have to be careful to see like the modelless evil food industry. I agree. versus everybody because it just actually doesn't capture the reality, nor is it going to go away. And so I think we have to work to figure out who's a good actor trying to do the right thing, who's not, and just needs to get called out and pressured and fought in one.

And they work strategically to make progress with, you know, to work collaborative when you can and fight when you have to. Yeah, it's hard. It's hard to have the sniff to tester on for the greenwashing, you know, what's true, what's not. And a lot of people are saying the right things. Are they doing the right things? You know, one of the things is challenging, all the hard work you did with the Obama is to get the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act passed in 2010. The current administration is trying to roll that back. And their arguments are that, oh, kids are throwing out the food. It doesn't taste good.

You don't eat it. You know, so we have to fix those guidelines, quote, fix the guidelines, which means roll them back so that more junk can be in the schools. Yeah. And I think, you know, there's a real challenge in the culinary world in, school lunches. And as a chef, I'd love your opinion about this because like we're talking about before, you've learned how to make delicious yummy meals in a short order from ingredients and aren't going to break the bank and that can be done. And I think there are models of this. You know, my friend Jill Shaw, I think I might have talked to you about her who's also going to

be on the podcast talking about My Way Cafe where she got top chefs to create delicious meals within the school and nutrition guidelines within the school budget for school lunches, which is not very much. And kids love it and they're not throwing it out and they're eating it. And I see this happen over and over throughout the country. So can you speak to the rollbacks that are happening, why they're happening, and what we can do to fight those? Yeah, well, the main reason they're happening is because of the School Nutrition Association. And that is an organization whose name it does not deserve. Could be the School Malnutrition Association? Yeah, basically. So basically what's happened

with them is, you know, they represent the school chefs, as I call them. And, you know, they been under a lot of pressure for many years. And, you know, I will say that school chefs around this country have, for the most part, they go into these capitarias with very little resource with almost no support. They love those kids and they're really trying to do right by them. Fortunately, the organization that represents them is one that is just dominated by some of the worst players in the food system, those same pizza and French fries guys, Kanagra, and a few others are the most influential companies on their board. And they were very supportive of the Healthy, Young, or Free Kids Act and the work that we

were doing, and we were real allies of theirs, and then they realized that this was, standards were going too far, and kind of in the middle of the whole thing, they fired the, the CEO brought in a bunch of hacks for big food and have then since started fighting us and now I've been lobbying the Trump administration to roll back the standards. So if they're listening, I haven't been talked to you guys in a while, but shame, shame on you. It should have an abomination of your role in our society to be safeguarding the well-being of the kids that are eating in our schools and representing and supporting the people and mostly women who are working so hard with so little support day in and day out to do the best they can with these resources.

And I just am so disappointed in how that has played out. You know, the argument that it's just good enough to have some green beans on the line that that's like a serious argument for a 10-year-old to say they want it. It's just a joke. The reality is all the evidence shows that the evidence shows two things. One, people, kids have been throwing out school lunch since the day was invented. And that is nothing new, and there's zero evidence that our new standards led to any increased food waste. Secondly, the evidence shows that there's a substantial increase in consumption if you actually serve the food to the child.

If you put it on their plate. on their plate, they're more likely to eat it. What do you know? Actually, we had to research that, but it's true. It turns out that's how it goes. And our curriculums have been disrupted so that there is no longer Homek. It was an intentional initiative by the food industry to remove Homek from schools, and it was successful.

That is so sad. And we have changed, now raised generations of Americans who don't know how to cook. So you're trying to change all that. And what's interesting is that a lot of people are talking about school gardens. and helping with school lunches and all that's great. But at the end of the day, you have to retrain kids to learn about food, nutrition. And you've done it not just with the gardens,

but integrating the gardens into the curriculum. So can you talk about how that works? And why Big Green is such an important initiative. Big Green has become my proudest achievement. And I am so happy, the team that we have a Big Green, what we've done. So PayPal was kind of a footnote? Yeah, exactly. That was the old days.

And, you know, I think what I found, when we opened the kitchen in 2004, we took some of the profits and we supported school gardens in the community. One of our first employees wanted to do that, and we thought that would be a nice way to get back. And every year, with a lot of financial support from us and others, this person was able to open two new school gardens a year. And I had a very serious accident in 2010. And so between 2004 and 2010, I was getting really frustrated that we couldn't reach that. many more kids. It was very effective. You get a school garden into a school, food literacy goes up, access to food increases, the choice of fruits and vegetables goes up, test scores go up. I mean, if you do the same science lesson in fifth grade in a school garden versus in the class,

test scores go up by 15 points on a hundred point scale. Is it because they're eating that food? Well, I mean, it's experiential, they're having fun. Exactly. I mean, imagine learning out of a textbook versus being in a garden. I mean, you're just going to remember and learn that better. So it did work, but it just didn't scale. And I got really frustrated. And I had a, in 2010, had a very serious accident. I went down a ski hill on an energy one of those sanctioned children's runs.

It wasn't an illegal thing. You never saw the age limit. You're not supposed to be on that over 10 years old. They should have been a height limit. I'm six, I was six four, weirdly. I'm six five now because of the surgery. But, um, now that's an index. No, no, exactly.

I had it. People are going to be writing it. How do I get the height extension surgery? Well, you need to stick your spine. You break your neck. And so I went down the ski hill, the tube flipped. It was meant for a kid. So I'm 6'5 and it just really wasn't meant from someone to my size.

It threw me, landed on my head going 35 miles an hour, broke my spine at C6 and C7, ruptured the spinal column, paralyzed. for three days and if it's just impossible to describe the lack of feeling with paralysis there's no pain

there's just nothing like the void it's just you watch your body and you just can't move it you'd send the signal to your left hand to go move and it just doesn't move you just can't believe it you just cannot process it

and the doctors actually were telling me that the way I broke my spine, my neck was they could fix it. There was bleeding in the spinal column, so that was causing the paralysis. But if they can get in and fix it fast enough, I'd get feeling back and hopefully motion and so forth. But I remember them telling me this and I'm paralyzed and I'm thinking to myself, oh, no, okay, this is going to be fine, it's going to be fine. And there were just tears streaming down the side of my face. I just had no, no ability to process what was going on. It was just absolutely awful. And three days later, they did, the surgery was successful,

but I also had to be horizontal for two months as part of the therapy. And I think, so while I was in hospital, while I was paralyzed, and they were telling me they could fix me, I said to myself that if I did, they did fix me, I would figure out food and how to scale real food, bring real food to everyone. Why, because the hospital food was so bad? Well, partly because I had been working in food, but I couldn't scale. I had this block in my head that you can't scale school gardens, you can't scale restaurants.

That's more precious. You never heard of McDonald's? Yeah, you know, that's the weird thing. It's obviously scalable. But I had this block in my head. And when I had this accident and I was sitting in hospital, I said to myself, you know, I'm going to give. this a dry. I'm going to focus entirely on food. It was a restart in my life. When you break your neck, you get permission from everyone to do anything at all. It's if not for, my joke about it is,

if not for the physical trauma, I highly recommend the psychological awakening. Yeah. Because what I got out of that was permission to be myself. And myself was with you. You came right up against your mortality. Exactly. And you look. back on your life and you say to yourself that I sold myself that, you know, I have a capacity to do good things and I'm good at building businesses or I'm good at leading people. And I had done my restaurant and I'd done a little bit of work in school gardens. But most of my effort was in the technology space, which really just did not get me going. Didn't hit your soul. Yeah. And many other people are even better at it than me. You know, and good for them. And they should do it. But for me,

where I'm uniquely gifted at is I love food and I love cooking for people and I'm good of building businesses and so I just gave myself permission to combine my purpose and my passion and it's just been amazing. Yeah, that's such an incredible story. I went through a similar crisis that changed the course of my life which was I got very ill like 25 years ago and having to figure out how to get better led me to sort of want to tell the world about a new way of thinking about medicine and the body, but it's really about systems thinking and it's about ecosystems and that's sort of what's led me to think about farming and all the things that we're talking about today because they're all connected. If we don't fix these problems, we're not

going to fix our health. We're not going to fix our economy. I've got to give you a shout out. One of my team members, his name's Kevin, his daughter struggled with asthma for years. Yeah. Chronic asthma. And we go to the doctor that give her medications and never worked. And he read your book, eating to be disease. That was William Lee. Sorry, that's William Lee's book. Yours is, what the heck should I eat.

Food, what the heck should I eat? Sorry about that. William Lee is good. Well, I love William Lee. Sorry. But he read your book and changed the way his daughter ate. And not only did she improving she's a healthier kid right now, but he actually went to her doctor and took your book in.

And the doctor said that your book was the best approach to eating that she as a doctor had seen and is now prescribing that book to her patient. Well, it's not based on ideology. It's like really honest. It's like, here's what we know. Here's what we don't know. Here's what we're sort of learning. And like, here's how to eat this better for you in the planet.

And it's sort of pretty simple. Yeah. Brings common sense. I mean, I'm just a shout out for you. Thank you. I really appreciate that. I know, like, I interact with every day. That's amazing.

So you're going to get this school of curriculum out there to not just thousands, but We're at 350,000 kids every school day. We're 650 schools. We combine the curriculum of science, what kids learn in science in the classroom. We bring it into the garden, and they actually learn their science lessons in the garden. So that the teachers don't have to do extra work. They just go outside to teach the same lesson. It's one of the maybe right or wrong thing to do,

but we actually know what paragraph of what textbook is being taught at what hour. of the day in every district. So we can, I mean, it's just because that's how teachers are trained to focus on, it's amazing how structured it is. Unfortunately, I wish teachers had a bit more freedom. But as a result, we can say, we know that you're going to teach, but we do plant a seed day on the first day of spring. So March 19th, this coming year, we get teachers across the country to pledge to plan

a seat with their kids. But what we do is we know the paragraph in the science textbook, they have to teach on that day. And so we can say, here's the lesson. So let's all go teach together. Yeah. And in the classroom, if you're in the northern climates and outdoors, if you're in the southern climates, and you'll plant a seed with your kids. And our goal of this coming plant a seed day is to get every teacher in America to pledge to plant the seed with your kids. So you're teaching also them cooking, you're teaching about food, you're teaching about nutrition. Well, anytime the food comes out of the garden, you deal with kitchens in schools, which are not

very sophisticated. So they're really... Deep friars and microwaves, most of them. Basically, warming ovens. And so there are things that you can do really well. So if you give kale from the garden to a kitchen worker, they can put the kale in an oven, warming oven, and bake it. Make kale crisps.

And it's absolutely delicious. A little bit of drizzle of olive oil, a little touch of salt, and you put it in these warming ovens. And so that's a very popular ingredient that's cooked for. from our learning gardens, that it's absolutely delicious. And anyone at home, go get some kale, make sure there's no water on it, put it in the oven, 350 degrees for about 30 minutes, a little salt and olive oil, and you'll have kale chips, which is like French fries.

It's sort of like your chicken. With all the nutrition, you can imagine. Sort of like your magic one-hour chicken. Yes, exactly, exactly. Cooking is not that hard. Yeah, it's really true. So you've been thinking long and hard about the food space, and you've been acting in these sectors, farming, school gardens, and learning, and restaurants, you know, as someone who's really deep in

this, looking at our global food system, looking at our food policies, what really needs to change? And how are you sort of working in the advocacy space? Or are you? You know, I did work, I toured the Congress Congressional halls with Tom Colicchio, who was so passionate around policy. And he does great things in that area. And I, and I, I respect it. It's just not good. It's not like I don't, I didn't find it good for me. You know, like I, I, I, I, I, I don't ring your bell. Yeah, for me, I'd rather. You don't like hanging out with politicians so don't get anything done. No, exactly. Oh, my God. It's so against my DNA. It's just crazy. So I support Tom and I do everything I can to help him succeed.

Yeah. And there's another group called the young, the National Young Farmers Coalition, which is a, which is a lobbyist for young farmers, which, of course, the young farmers don't pay them anything. So it's, it's a nonprofit that, that people who care about farming, support, like myself and a few other folks. But those folks understand Capitol Hill. They understand the patience that's required. And I trust them to help move legislation forward. But they need more help. They need as much of us as possible to help them either with political support, where we actually go to the congressional hill and support folks like Tom and national young farmers, but also financial support. If there's a non-profit out there, you guys want to support

it's called the National Young Farmers Coalition. Yeah. And that's how those guys are really working on to figure out how to get young people into farming, gives them access to land. If they don't know about square roots, they'll let people, let young farmers know about square roots if they happen to live in one of the cities we're working in. But it's about getting those young farmers engaged, which is going to be both political support, which I support others to do because I don't have that DNA, and then actual entrepreneurial support of figuring out how to create businesses that work for young farmers. Well, it's true.

There's so much innovation in this space, you know, in food and ag. It's a very exciting time, actually. It's really one of the fastest growing sectors of innovation and funding from venture capitalists. I mean, it's just striking and, you know, it's sort of bypassing the government in a way, which is actually what's needed. I mean, I've, I grew up. in South Africa where I grew up during the apartheid era. I was in protests, anti-aparid protests, you know, my teen years. I grew up with such a skepticism of what, of government's

role, you know, just how bad it could be, frankly. And, you know, in America, you know, I'm not suggesting government shouldn't play a part, they should do their part, but I don't, I don't come at it from a perspective of the government's going to solve our problems. I come from the perspective that we're going to probably solve it despite the government. And unfortunately, I think in the food world, that is becoming the case. You know, it was interesting. We were at a conference where we met called Food Tank and Sam Cass, who worked with the Obamas on their food policy and nutrition standards.

He said, you know, we don't have a food movement. And many people sort of disputed that who were in the audience. But I think what he meant was we don't really have an organized force that's lobbying and creating coordinated policy and strategy. There is that group, the National Young Farmers Coalition. But that's one sector. I think he's right, though. I think for the most part, the only lobbyists out there are the ones protecting the entrenched corn and soybean industry, the ethanol industry.

And those are the wrong people to succeed. And unfortunately, because there's no one to be a counterbalance, we do struggle on Capitol Hill. That being said, Tom Kaliko got up right after that and said, hey, wait a minute, let's give ourselves some credit. It's wonderful programs that have been successful because of the food movement in Washington, D.C. So I think it's good for the provocative talk, but I actually do think that there is some success happening, and we should be proud of our achievements. It's just the beginning, though, and we have a lot of work to do. If you love this podcast, please share it with someone else you think would also enjoy it. You can find me on all social media channels at Dr. Mark Hyman.

Please reach out. I'd love to hear your comments and questions. Don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe to the Dr. Hyman show, where, you get your podcasts. And don't forget to check out my YouTube channel at Dr. Mark Hyman for video versions of this podcast and more. Thank you so much again for tuning in. We'll see you next time on the Dr. Hyman Show. This podcast is separate from my clinical practice at the Ultra Wellness Center, my work at Cleveland Clinic and Function Health, where I am chief medical officer. This podcast represents my opinions and my guest's opinions. Neither myself nor the podcast endorses

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