The Dr. Hyman Show - Why Do Our Tax Dollars Support Unhealthy Food?

Episode Date: February 24, 2020

U.S. taxpayers are footing the bill for the growing of processed foods (through agricultural subsidies for the raw materials of processed food—namely wheat, corn, and soy), and for providing the poor quality processed food and soda to the poor (through our food stamps program). Yet the federal government has repeatedly denied cities and states the right to enact basic policy reform measures, despite evidence to show that incentivizing healthy food and disincentivizing unhealthy food has been proven effective.  And it is not just bureaucrats who have opposed policy change. Many anti-hunger groups and national food banks, like the Food Research Action Center, or FRAC, have used their political influence to resist efforts to ban sugary drinks from the food stamp program, or SNAP.  In this mini-epissode, Dr. Hyman examines three government agencies that are promoting unhealthy foods and how a change in food policy could shift our health and the health of our communities and planet. Learn more in Dr. Hyman's new book, Food Fix. foodfixbook.com

Coming up on this episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. 60% of our diet comes from these foods which are ultra-processed into all sorts of ingredients that make us really sick. Hey everybody, it's Dr. Hyman. Today I want to focus on something really kind of scary, which is our government food policies. And part of how I got into this as a doctor, I'm like, my patients are sick from eating the wrong food. Why are they eating the wrong food? It's the food system. Why do we have the food system?

Well, it's our food policies. Why do we have the food policies? Well, it's our food industry that's driving the policies and funding so much, literally billions of dollars. So I'll just sort of take you through a few of the simple policies that I think could be changed and that I'm working to change through the Food Fix campaign, which I'd love you all to be a part of. The first thing we're going to talk about is food stamps or SNAP. Now, they're a great thing and they help relieve hunger and food insecurity. There are 46 million people in America who are part of the SNAP program, including one in four children. That's the good news. And it does help address the hunger issues,

but it definitely doesn't address the health issues. And study after study has shown that people who are on SNAP are not as healthy and that actually more likely to have disease and other risk issues. Why? Because there are no nutrition guidelines in SNAP. Now, you have to realize this is probably the biggest government program ever. It's $735 to $50 billion depending on the year. It's basically a 10-year program. It's $75 billion a year, which is mostly junk food. When you look at the stats on what the things that people buy are, it's 75% junk food and 10% is soda or 30 plus billion servings a year for the poor that we pay for as taxpayers. The government pays for it.

And why isn't there nutrition guidelines in there? It seems like there's something that should be like that. There's school lunch guidelines. There's women and children program guidelines. But for some reason, there's no guidelines. And it's not by accident. There's a huge amount of lobby effort that prevents the government from changing it. There's hunger groups, for example, funded by the soda industry that fight any reduction or removal of processed food or sugar or sodas from the food stamp program. And there's a huge amount of benefit

that goes to these companies. I read, I think that 20% of Coke's American revenue comes from food stamps. Walmart, out of the $735 billion, about $130 billion go to Walmart for food and not all of it's good food. Walmart has some great food, but I doubt they're buying the veggies. So it's really a huge issue that we're helping the poor not be hungry, but we're not making them healthy. And so there's a lot of effort to think about how do we put nutrition or

N back in the food stamps, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, because right now it's a lot of calories, but not a lot of nutrients. And we need to improve that. I think it's really an important initiative. And there's groups like the Bipartisan Policy Initiative in Washington. That's a group of senators and congressmen and agriculture secretaries from both parties that have really come together to look at this. And they said we should ban soda from the food stamp program. We should put nutrition guidelines. There's great studies showing that if you incentivize people and use incentives and also disincentives, it works. In other words, if you increase the amount of money you get to buy vegetables, let's say they do it with, for example, a 30% increase of dollars. So you get $1.3 or an extra 30 cents to buy on vegetables.

If you do that, great with your food stamps. But if you want to buy soda, it's maybe you get 70 cents on the dollar instead of 130 cents. So there's a lot of ways to incentivize people. And it works. They show that it really works. There's double bucks, for example, for farmer's markets where you can go. If you go to a farmer's market, you get, you know, instead of $1 food stamps, you get two to buy whatever you want as long as it's fresh food. There's all sorts of great ways to do that.

So the food stamp program really is a big issue and it can be really improved and it can really help because we're paying also for the Medicare and Medicaid that these patients need after they get sick. The next big category is dietary guidelines, which have improved over the years for sure, but it's a little scary because they are now a political tool. The dietary guidelines are recommended by an advisory group that's a science group, although many of them have conflicts of interest, and then they give it to the government, and then the government decides what's in or out. So for example, last time they recommended we should have environmental considerations in our dietary guidelines and the government said no way and that was a problem. And then we have, for example, the

corruption of the science. In the last guidelines approach, the Trump administration recently said we cannot look at anything about ultra-processed food, by the way, which kills 11 million people. So we can't look at any science about that. We can't look at anything, for example, on the dietary guidelines that have to do with looking at mead or low-carb diets or any other restrictions. They looked at, oh, you can only look at studies that were done after 2000. That cuts out a lot of really good studies that should inform our guidelines that were well done. They said we should only look at government studies. You can't look at independent science studies.

So how does that make any sense? So it's really pretty corrupt. The National Academy of Sciences put a report showing just how bad it was a number of years ago and made a series of recommendations, which sadly are not being followed. So the dietary guidelines should represent science and should look at all the data

and should have fair public comments so people can look at it and make comments on it. And it should be driven by science and not a bunch of bureaucrats who don't actually necessarily have the public health interest at heart. So they're improving, but it's still not great. And then, of course, we have the FDA, the Food and Drug Administration, which is supposed to protect us, but it's kind of failing. Why? Because, one, they allow 30 million pounds of antibiotics in our animal feed that is affecting us, creating superbugs that cost $2 trillion a year, that kills 700,000 people a year around the world from antibiotic resistance. Not all from the farms, obviously, but it's a huge factor. And we know that antibiotics cause obesity. They cause weight gain.

That's actually what they give them for, just prevention but for weight gain and they're not regulated they give them voluntary guidelines oh don't do that please don't do that but it's kind of garbage because they do it anyway uh they also allow things that are banned in other countries for example azodicarbonamide which is a yoga mat material and it also is used in bread and subway sandwiches and stuff. And if you use it in Singapore, you get a $450,000 fine, and you get 15 years in jail. Whereas here, you can just put it in your sandwich stuff at any of the fast food places, although many of them have taken it out. There's BPA, which, again, is banned in other countries.

It causes obesity. It's an endocrine disruptor. BHT. And these are preservatives that are, again, seen to be carcinogenic. So there's all sorts of things that the FDA is not helping us with in terms of regulating that. So that's a big problem. And I think, and also what's grass.

You know, there's a grass certification. They allow all sorts of grass certification, which is generally safe for things that aren't really safe. Like glyphosate, for example, is not necessarily safe and yet it's permitted in our food supply. So there's all sorts of issues the FDA is failing at. So you've got the USDA, the food stamp program, the dietary guidelines, the FDA, and there are other departments that are concerned. For example, food marketing. Now, the First Amendment is important, but I don't know if free speech counts when you're talking about targeting kids and manipulating them. So that's a big issue. And I think we know that marketing drives huge amounts of behavior changing kids. And kids will buy whatever they see on TV. A little two-year-old

can actually go in and name the brand names before they can walk and ask for it in the store if they've seen it on TV. And in some countries, like in Chile, they ban food marketing to kids. Many other countries have been very successful at it and seen great reductions in obesity and purchasing of the bad foods. For example, in Chile, you can't have any TV or any other advertising between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m. for any junk food. They've taken off the cartoon characters from the boxes like No More Tony the Tiger. They killed him. And they eliminated any junk food in schools.

And they've seen dramatic improvements. So there's so many great policies that are being demonstrated around the world that we can model here. And I think the take-home here is that there's a lot of aspects of our government policy that need to be fixed. And of course, we talked before about regenerative ag and not just subsidizing commodity crops like corn, wheat, and soy that make us sick and fat. I mean, 60% of our diet comes from these foods, which are ultra processed into all sorts of ingredients that make us really sick and kill 11 million people a year. 60% of our calories is this ultra processed food. And for every 10% of your food that's ultra-processed, your risk of death goes up by 14%.

And yet we subsidize it on the front end with crop supports. And then we pay for it with food stamps. And then we pay for the Medicare and Medicaid on the other end. So the taxpayers are really footing the bill for this when it's really a preventable problem. So we need lots of reform across government policies. And that's what I'm working on with this book, Food Fix. I'm getting it to every member of Congress, getting it to the White House. It's a tough slog, I know, but I've got an

amazing team around me for our Food Fix campaign. Stay tuned for more about that. I'd love you to be part of it. We're all going to need to move this forward on a grassroots level. And I think this isn't just a book for me, it's a mission. And it's just the beginning of an effort to really change the food system at so many levels so we can solve so many of our global crises. And I really encourage you to pick up a copy, foodfixbook.com, and tell your friends about it, tell your family about it. It's really important. It is the most important issue of our time. It connects to everything that matters to us, our health, our economy, the climate, the social justice, academic performance, our kids' future.

So much is dependent on getting this right. And I know you're going to be in there with me. So check it out, Food Fix, and I'll see you soon.