The Dr. Hyman Show - What Is The True Cost Of Your Food?

Episode Date: February 10, 2020

What is the true cost of what we’re eating to society, humans, to our natural resources, our natural capital and economies?
 Looking past sticker price, what is the cost when we consider the benefit or burden that food has on your health, our environment, our climate, our farmworkers, the economy, and so much more. ⁣ ⁣ Our food system drives the production of processed food which is the biggest killer on the planet, killing 11 million people a year. The biggest expenditure of the U.S. government is Medicare, and the Medicare trust fund is projected to run out of money by 2025 from dealing with the chronic illnesses caused by our food. ⁣ ⁣ Our food system is also causing a loss of biodiversity, which is essential to growing nutritious food. Conventional farming practices that rely on agricultural chemical inputs, over-tilling, nitrogen fertilizers, monoculture, deforestation, and more, contribute to a massive loss of biological diversity on the planet.⁣ In fact, we’re currently experiencing the most extreme loss of life on Earth since the extinction of the dinosaurs. This has major consequences for our food security, as we have less fertile soil, a decline in pollinators essential for food production, and other direct food losses like fish from polluted waterways. ⁣ ⁣ The good news is we can solve this issue together. ⁣ ⁣ Dr. Hyman speaks to all of these topics in this episode featuring topics from his new book, Food Fix, which is out on February 25th. Visit FoodFixBook.com⁣ to learn more.

Coming up on this episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. So there's huge amounts of costs that are embedded in our food system that are not paid for when you buy your food at the grocery cart. Hey everybody, it's Dr. Hyman. I'm here in my office at Cleveland Clinic and I'm super excited to talk to you today about my new book, Food Fix, How to Save Our Health, Our Economy, Our Communities, and Our Planet One Bite at a Time. And the reason I want to share these ideas with you is because this is the most important book I've ever written. It's about the cause of so many of our global problems. Chronic disease, climate change, environmental degradation, poverty, social injustice, national security, kids' poor academic performance, and I could go on and on. And you know what? Fixing the food system can fix all of it. It's such a beautiful thing because

at the end of the day, we know today the solution. We can't end war. We can't live for a thousand years, right? We can't solve natural disasters at this moment, but this is something we can solve. And it's going to take a big effort from grassroots people like you who are listening and policy change. And I'm working on that. I want to tell you more about that over time. But today I want to talk about the true cost of food. What is the true cost of what we're eating to society, to humans, to our natural resources and our natural capital, to our economies. It's staggering. So just to put in perspective, our food system drives the production of processed food that is the biggest killer on the planet. 11 million people die a year. What is the cost of that?

We know in this country, just for obesity and diabetes, just in direct and indirect causes, it's about $3.7 trillion a year. That's about one in every $5 for our economy, just for diabetes and obesity. The government's biggest expenditure is Medicare. It's basically a trillion dollar budget every year, which for a company would be the biggest company in the world. And one third of that is just for diabetes. If you added pre-diabetes, it would probably be double. And according to the government, we're going to run out of money of the Medicare trust fund in six years. In 2025, about 48% of our spending in federal dollars, 48%, almost 50%, half, one out of every $2 of our American government's mandatory spending will be on Medicare and Medicaid to deal with the

chronic illnesses caused by our food. That's a staggering cost to society. I mean, one study looked at the overall macroeconomic analysis and found that in direct and indirect costs, chronic disease, including obesity, diabetes, mental health issues, which by the way, are caused a lot by food. But that together is going to be $95 trillion over the next 35 years that it's going to be a cost aside. And that's all not direct costs. That's loss of productivity and other things, but it's a real number that's having an impact on our society. And what else are the costs? Well, besides the cost of chronic disease, besides the cost of human suffering, besides the cost of loss of life and the 11 million deaths that are resulting from ultra-processed food, which by the way, studies have shown that the ultra-processed food you're eating, it kills 11 million people.

It's the industrial products from soy, corn, wheat, and so forth that are sold and packaged in all kinds of size, shapes, and colors that are basically the same garbage of sugar and flour and refined oils, which are bad for you. So that's just one problem. What about the effect on our environment? How do we measure that? There's something called ecosystem services, which is the services that we use from the natural environment to keep our society running, whether it's natural resources like trees or water or minerals or oil, whatever it is, it's $125 trillion a year. That's about a third more than the entire global economy.

So it's a staggering amount of money. And when we use those up, sometimes they're not going to come back or it's going to be tough to get them back. So for example, we have lost a third of all of our topsoil in the last 150 years. It's contributed about a third to 40% of all the greenhouse gases in the environment because the soil holds carbon. It's basically a carbon sink like the rainforest. And when you destroy the soil through overtilling, through fertilizers, through pesticides, it destroys the microbial life, the organic matter in the soil, destroys the ability to hold water, hold carbon. It actually is contributing to about

a third to 40% of all the greenhouse gases that have been put in the environment since the Industrial Revolution. That's staggering. And we lose about 200,000 tons of soil every hour, 2 billion tons of topsoil every year. That's pretty staggering. And it's about the size, a country the size of Nicaragua or North Dakota. We lose to deserts every year. What is the cost of that? And according to the UN, we have about 60 harvests left of soil, which means that in 60 harvests, we will not be able to grow food anymore on the earth, which means no soil, no food, no humans. It's a big deal. What is the cost, for example, of the fertilizer that we use? First of all, people may not know this, but when you actually use fertilizer on the ground to help fertilize the plants, it requires a huge amount of energy

to actually make the fertilizer, take the nitrogen out of the air and put it in fertilizer. And in fact, the big fertilizer companies are the biggest consumers of natural gas from fracking, which releases about 40 to 50 percent more methane than other oil wells. And methane is 25 times more potent greenhouse gas. That's even before it gets on the field. Once it gets on the fields, it damages the soil, which further contributes to climate change and soil degradation and poor nutrient quality. I mean, what is the loss of the nutrients density in our food because the soil is so damaged, it can't put the nutrients in the plants. So in addition to the methane, when you put on the soil, it actually causes nitrous oxide production, which is 300 times

more potent in greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. So you're adding all this additional burden to the environment and climate change. What is the loss of the biodiversity from our agriculture? In other words, you know, we use pesticides and herbicides and fertilizer, which destroys the natural ecosystems in farms and on the land. And we're seeing a loss of 75% of our pollinator species, on which we depend to fertilize all the agricultural crops. We're also seeing incredible damage to our habitat and also livestock species. We've lost about half of all our livestock species, 90% of our edible plant species due to our breeding and seed methods. There's also some industrialization of agriculture. So what is the cost of the loss of all that natural capital?

And of course you put the fertilizer on, I forgot to mention, you put the fertilizer on and runs off into the rivers, lakes, and oceans. And it creates a dead zone the size of New Jersey in the Gulf of Mexico, which kills 212,000 metric tons of fish every year, which is a lot of gumbo, a lot of sushi. And there's 400 of these dead zones around the world that are the size of Europe collectively that 500 billion people depend on for food. So what is the cost of that? We're seeing also the cost on humans because of the poor diet that people eat. We're seeing the loss of kids' ability to have an academic career that's successful because they can't focus, concentrate, and affects their brain development.

Kids who eat ultra-processed foods have 10% smaller brains and seven points lower IQ, which is a massive loss of intellectual capital. We're 31st in America. And America's 31st in reading and math in the world. I think Vietnam's 21st. We're doing terrible in industrialized countries. And we're also seeing, you know, maybe threats to national security. What is the cost of that when 70% of military recruits are rejected because they're too fat or unfit to fight? This is a huge threat to our national

security and political stability. And of course, you've got the cost of farm and food workers. They're paid a minimum wage, not even minimum wage, sorry, they're excluded from the Fair Labor Standards Act, which is in the 1930s, it excluded food and farm workers because most of them were African American. And that was the way you got to pass through Congress because of all the Southern, you know, kind of, I would say white supremacists maybe back then. And when you think about the cost that we have to bear in terms of helping them with their healthcare costs, because they're often uninsured and they go to the emergency room, the urgent care, the cost of food stamps, which they depend on that we pay about $16 billion for them.

What about the cost of tips that we pay as well? So there's huge amounts of costs that are embedded in our food system that are not paid for when you buy your food at the grocery counter. For example, if you buy a feedlot steak, you're contributing to poor health for humans, obviously for the animals and the way they live, but you're having a major impact on climate change, soil degradation, overuse of fresh water supplies, increased use of pesticides or herbicides, fertilizers,

methane production. It's just a disaster. Whereas if you have a regeneratively raised cow, you might actually see the opposite. You won't see any use of fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides. You won't need to use water because it'll be all rainwater that they feed on. And it doesn't destroy the soil. It adds to the soil in terms of building soil carbon, increasing their biodiversity, their environments, helping pollinator species. It adds all these things called ecosystem services. So the net is a benefit. And maybe so a grass-fed steak should be $3 and a feedlot steak should be $30 or $40 or $100 or $1,000. I don't know. But something to actually

incorporate the real costs of what we're paying for. And then you've got all these embedded costs to humans, to society, to our economy. I mean, we've got a $22 trillion debt. I mean, the biggest threat to us in America now is the cannibalizing of our economy by the processed food and the consequences of how we grow it, how we eat it. And Warren Buffett said that our health care system is the tapeworm of business, meaning the amount of costs are so huge. I just talked to a guy the other day. He said his healthcare costs for his employees, he has a big company, was $66 million a year.

That eats into profits pretty fast and undermines their ability to actually be competitive globally. And the last thing is food waste. How do we measure that, right? That's a huge cost of our dysfunctional food system. We throw away the food because it's not got a good market price, because it's blemished, because it's thrown away in our houses when we don't manage our food well, and we throw all the stuff in the landfills. And food waste for a country would be the third largest emitter of greenhouse gases after the US and China, which is staggering. We waste 40% of our food. The cost annually is about $2.6 trillion. And if it were grown on landmass, it would take

the entire country of China to grow the food. So here we have a staggering amount of costs and loss in our food system because of how we handle food. So there's so many aspects of our food system that are driving the true cost of food to be much higher than it really is when you check out at the grocery store or at a restaurant or when you buy food anywhere. So we have to sort of re-establish a way of incorporating the real cost of food when we think about food systems. So why is the government supporting the food industry through, for example, paying for all the soda and processed food through the food stamp program, which is 75% of it is junk food, 10% is soda, or $7 billion, about 30 billion servings a year for the poor. Why are we doing that?

Why are we supporting agriculture, destroying the environment? Why are we supporting this gets turned into processed food that kills 11 million humans a year? I mean, why are we doing these things? Because our policies are screwed up and we need to fix those. So the solutions here are people understanding the problem, their advocacy for change. And I'm working really hard in Washington to create a whole strategy that allow us to reform some of these dysfunctional government food policies and actually pay, for example, farmers to put carbon in the soil, to conserve water, to increase biodiversity. We call it ecosystem services. And it's super profitable. I mean, there's a company called Farmland LP that buys conventional farms, turns them into regenerative farms, and they go from single

digit profits to profits like 70% a year return on their investment, which is huge. So this is not just a feel-good, do-good idea. This is essential, an economic imperative for us and society in order to fix these problems. So stay tuned. Check it out. Food Fix, How to Save Our Health, Our Economy, Our Communities, and Our Planet, one bite at a time. It's out February 23rd. Go to foodfixbook.com, foodfixbook.com, and you can get free bonuses, my five steps to help the planet and your health. You can get my longevity masterclass and lots more action guide on what you can do, how you can be active in your health, in your community, in your home,

in the government policy, and all the different ways in which you can contribute. So I hope you check it out, foodfixbook.com and stay tuned for another little mini episode about this, which will come out every week. Okay, bye-bye.