The Dr. Hyman Show - Why Pizza And Fries Can Be Claimed As Vegetables Through School Lunch Programs with Sam Kass

Episode Date: May 13, 2020

Food is political, whether we like it or not.   From the subsidies used to grow the crops that produce our massive amounts of ultra-processed foods, to school lunches, to the meals being served on our own dinner tables and even in the White House, the state of our food system is impacted by policy on an incredible scale. My guest on today’s episode of The Doctor’s Farmacy has played a very positive role in trying to impact those policies for the better to make America healthier as a whole. Sam Kass is the former Senior Policy Advisor for Nutrition in the Obama administration. After cooking for the Obamas in Chicago for two years, Sam joined the White House kitchen staff in 2009. During his White House tenure, he took on several additional roles including Executive Director of First Lady Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move!” campaign and Senior White House Policy Advisor for Nutrition. As one of the First Lady’s longest-serving advisors, he helped the First Lady create the first major vegetable garden at the White House since Eleanor Roosevelt’s victory garden. Currently, Sam is a Partner at Acre Venture Partners. Acre is a venture capital fund investing in the future of food with a mission to improve human and environmental health in the food system. The fund focuses on early-stage, highly disruptive impactful companies in the food system focused on agriculture, supply chain, and consumer. Sam is also the author of Eat a Little Better: Great Flavor, Good Health, Better World. *For context, this episode was recorded in March 2020. This episode is sponsored by Athletic Greens, Thrive Market, Theragun and Farmacy. I use Athletic Greens in the morning as part of my daily routine. It’s really one supplement that covers so many bases and you’d be hard-pressed to find something else this comprehensive in one place. Right now Athletic Greens is offering my audience their Vitamin D3/K2 Liquid Formula free with your first purchase. Just go to athleticgreens.com/hyman to get your free bottle of Vitamin D3 and K2 with your first purchase.  Thrive Market has made it so easy for me to stay healthy, even with my intense travel schedule. Not only does Thrive offer 25 to 50% off all of my favorite brands, but they also give back. For every membership purchased, they give a membership to a family in need. Get up to $20 in shopping credit when you sign up and any time you spend more than $49 you’ll get free carbon-neutral shipping. All you have to do is head over to thrivemarket.com/Hyman. The Theragun is a percussive handheld therapy tool that I can use at home on myself or you can use it on a partner. There are a variety of devices to choose from and multiple head attachments to get different kinds of targeted muscle treatments. The Gen Four series, with an OLED screen, personalized Theragun app, and plenty of power for deep relaxation start at just $199. Just go to theragun.com/Hyman to get your Theragun today. Here are more of the details from our interview :  Sam’s experience training as a chef in Vienna and how it led him to think about agriculture and food policy (8:34) How Sam began cooking for the Obama family and his experience working in the White House (12:24) The passage of the Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act and the challenges around school lunch reform (16:05) How tomato sauce, French fries, and pizza came to be considered vegetables in schools (19:39) The impactfulness of the “Community Eligibility Program” provision in the Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act which allows schools to serve free breakfast to students (25:24) The current administration’s attempts to roll back standards put into place through the Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act (31:26) The reason why junk food is more affordable than healthy food (41:07) Why government is not well positioned to change our food system (43:00) Innovation in the food industry (45:00) The negative feedback loop between food production and climate change (48:36) Check out Sam’s cookbook, “Eat a Little Better: Great Flavor, Good Health, Better World: A Cookbook” here. Follow Sam on Twitter @chefsamkass and on Instagram @samkassdc Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Coming up on this episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. These budgets have been cut so much that schools are depending on basically selling these kids junk food to key programs that we all care about alive. So there's a real, you know, tense conflict there. Hey everyone, it's Dr. Mark. Now my goal with my diet is to use food as medicine. But even when we eat super well, most of us are missing out on certain essential nutrients. Now our soils have become depleted and our digestive systems might be considered compromised by stress and toxins. So they just can't absorb as efficiently

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By now, most of you know I love fat and having plenty of healthy fats in my diet makes me feel focused and energized and pretty happy throughout the day. Good fats also help me avoid reaching for sugary, high-carb foods because of a food emergency. One of my all-time favorite ways to eat nourishing fats is macadamia nuts. I keep them at my home, in my office, in my car. They're an amazing source of monounsaturated fats, sort of like the olive oil of nuts that support heart health and the

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they give back. For every membership purchase, they give a membership to a family in need. I believe in Thrive's mission so much that I'm proud to be one of their first investors because I wanted people to have access to low cost but healthy food. And right now, Thrive is offering all Doctors Pharmacy listeners a great deal. You'll get up to $20 in shopping credit when you sign up that you can spend on all your favorite natural food, body, and household items. Anytime you spend more than $49, you'll get free carbon neutral shipping, which is awesome. All you have to do is head over to thrivemarket.com forward slash Hyman. That's thrivemarket.com forward slash Hyman. Now let's get back to this episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy.

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. Welcome to The Doctor's Pharmacy. I'm Dr. Mark Hyman, and that's pharmacy with an F, F-A-R-M-A-C-Y, a place for conversations that matter. If you care about our food system and want to know the inside scoop from Washington and what happens and what doesn't happen, you're going to love this podcast

because it's with my friend Sam Kass, who's the former senior policy advisor for nutrition in the Obama administration. And he was also the executive director of Michelle Obama's Let's Move campaign and the Obama family chef. He's currently a partner in Acre Venture Partners. Now, he kind of fell into this,

seems like he was, we had lunch recently, and he was telling me how he really never went to chef school, and he sort of fell into learning how to cook when he went to Europe. But he basically found his way into cooking for the Obamas in Chicago during the Obama run for president. And then, of course, he joined them in the White House and the staff in 2009. He took on lots of roles, including the chef and the residents, but also the executive director of First Lady Michelle Obama's Let's Move campaign. He was the senior White House policy advisor in nutrition.

He's the first person in history of the White House to have a position in the executive office of the president and the residents, which is kind of cool. So he'd go from basically the office to home and cook for them. As one of the first lady's longest serving advisors, he helped the first lady create the first major vegetable garden at the White House since Eleanor Roosevelt's Victory Garden, which is interesting because a lot of people are now talking about creating gardens. And not only is toilet paper flying off the shelves, but so are seeds and garden equipment for people who never had a garden before. Sam is now a partner at Acre Venture Partners, which is a venture capital fund investing in the

future of food with a mission to improve human and environmental health in the food system. What a great thing to do. The fund focuses on early stage, highly disruptible, impactful companies in the food system, focused on agriculture, supply chain, and consumers. Fast Company named Sam in 2011 on their list of 100 most creative people. He also helped create the American Chef Corps in 2012, which is dedicated to promoting diplomacy through culinary initiatives. I love that. He's an MIT Media Lab Fellow and a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader. And he graduated from the University of Chicago. Welcome, Sam.

There's nothing else to know about me. Well, he wrote a book called Eat a Little Better, Great Flavor, Good Health, and Better World, which was published in 2018 about his time in the White House, which was great. So good to be here. Yeah, thanks, Sam. Thanks for doing this. This is an interesting time for all of us. We're all sequestered in our homes, trying to figure out how the world's going to look during the age of Corona and after.

But whatever it looks like, we're going to have to deal with this pesky issue of food in our food system because while coronavirus is killing us in the short term, in the long term, it's chronic disease. And what most people don't realize is that those who are at most risk of dying from COVID-19, the disease caused by coronavirus, are those with chronic illness, whether it's diabetes, heart disease, even being overweight. I mean, if you're overweight, you're about three times more likely to die. If you're have heart disease, you're 10 times more likely to die. If you're diabetes, you're seven times more likely to die. And this is already burdening our healthcare system, which we can see now as being crippled under the weight of the coronavirus. So we're going to have

to deal with this. Yes, coronavirus is acute, but chronic disease is chronic. And unfortunately, we don't do well with chronic things. We push them off. And it's like a slow moving tsunami that's coming for us once this coronavirus is over. So we're going to talk about that today. And we're going to start out by talking with Sam about how he is the accidental chef. You spent your first trimester in college working in one of the best restaurants abroad in Vienna. Your plan was to study a lot and cook occasionally and you actually did the opposite. So you worked super hard 10 hour shift as a tryout and you were hooked. So how did this get you thinking about food in a different way,

especially the implications of what's on our plate about our farmers and our land? Yeah. It was actually a very specific moment for me while I was training in Vienna. I was, I ended up staying there after my semester, my final semester of school was done and worked there illegally for about a year. But very early on in that process. So that's I got run out of town. But that's very early on in the process. The sous chef asked me to make a rhubarb dish, a sauce to go with the dish we were making.

And I'll clean this story up for, for the people at home. But he basically told me, he called me Yankee and he said, you know, Yankee cook the, cook the rhubarb down, puree it and then in the butter. And I was like, okay, all right, I'll put a ton of butter. And so I go and I do that. I put a huge amount of butter in. He said, no, no, Yankee. I said, you know, in the butter. And I was like, wow, that's crazy. And so I put another huge thing in. And he came up to me pissed.

And he said, I said, in the butter. He said, you know, if the guest walks out of this restaurant and drops dead of a heart attack, that's not my problem. The guest asked me to make food that tastes good to them not that's good for them and you know it just totally rocked me mostly because he was right and that was true you know for the whole food system that we've been demanding food that tasted good but we're not really that concerned with the well-being of the food that we were eating yeah and so i went I went back to my station, and I looked out, you could I could see out into the dining room. And I looked out and I just started thinking about what he said to me and

realizing that everybody in that dining room looked terrible, like they looked completely overweight, and unhealthy. And I just, I asked myself, well, what is the implications of what I was, you know, preparing for them to eat on their, on their lives and their well being. And I just started, I asked myself, well, what is the implications of what I was, you know, preparing for them to eat on their lives and their well-being? And then just as I was sort of in this middle of asking myself these questions after getting chewed out by the chef. By the way, he's like the most wonderful human. I love that man. He taught me. But he loved butter.

Yeah. Well, he was doing what he thought the guests wanted. And right then, the purveyor of all our ducks and chickens and eggs came in through this door onto my left. And I immediately just asked, well, I wonder what the implications of what I'm serving has on the land that's producing it and the farm that's growing it and the environment that it comes from. And that was very early on. It was just like the first few months of my serious training um and that sent me down a path of you know obscure history of agriculture books and weird policy taxation books and i stopped reading cookbooks and just started you know there were i can now start to say this it's crazy but like there wasn't kindles or things i would pack my my bag and my travels through the next five years or so, mostly with books. So you basically spend backpacking around with a backpack full of policy and food and ag books.

Yeah. Not cookbooks. Yeah, not cookbooks. And so, yeah, so that was a multi-year journey and ended up coming back to Chicago the year that, just a few months after then Senator Obama launched his campaign, to organize chefs around food policy. I didn't know what I wanted to do much beyond that sentence, but I knew that chefs had a big role to play and that we weren't raising our voices at all. That was my intent. And then, so the week I got back, I reconnected with, uh, with Michelle who, you know, was a single mom with not much, I mean, not a single mom, a working mom with a husband who wasn't there. So I'm sure at times she felt

like a single mom, uh, and, um, and started helping her a few times a week, uh, as the campaign really got, got going and sort of the rest, the rest was history. Yeah. And then you just went right from the Obama's house in Chicago to the White House. Basically. There's a lot in between.

Obviously, you know, I did a lot to overhaul their kitchen and how they ate. And she saw the impact not only on herself, but on the well-being of the girls and you know we started talking a lot about you know just the there's the toll that what we were eating was taking on the health of the nation on the economy of the nation um and you know as she started to see the power of what can be done with not that huge change but some real change um and how much she had been struggling with that. And, you know, her doctor, her nutritionist, she talked about this a lot when we were in the White House,

but it sort of tapped on her shoulder and said, hey, you know, they're okay, but they're starting to move in, their numbers are starting to move in a direction that is concerning. And you should just start taking a little bit more precaution about what they're eating, even though she thought she was eating them really good food. Yeah. And she realized for somebody who, you know, as well educated as her, as a woman who had plenty of resources, if she was struggling with that, you know, God, how hard is this for parents around the country? And so that's really how we got started down the path that we did. That's pretty amazing. And what was it like working in the White House?

I mean, that would have been just sort of like a mind-blowing experience, I imagine. Yeah, it was pretty intense. I had pretty crazy days. I'd start my days, I'd start the morning, I'd get a workout in with the president or first lady. And then from there, so every day, it was a pretty good way to start the day. And then would change into a suit and go work on policy issues and working on Let's Move. So that would be anything from like child nutrition to antibiotics to food safety to working with businesses and trying to get them to change their practices to MyPlate or all the different things we did. It was a really broad range of issues around

food systems and then um and then you know oftentimes i'd be caught in some big meeting uh that would run over and i'd realize like oh you know damn you gotta make dinner i got 20 minutes to get dinner on the table and so i'd run through run sprint to the kitchen like tear off my my tie and cook as fast as I can. I will say that, you know, I now have two young kids. I have two boys under three. So my time in the White House really has prepared me well for this because my skills went down over those years, but I got really fast.

Yeah. I could get dinner on the table in a light speed. No problem. And so it served me well and wait you can make delicious good food that tastes good and is good for you and isn't going to break the bank in 20 minutes absolutely yeah see that is the myth that the food industry propagates on us that is very difficult that takes so much time that's expensive to eat well and i think that myth is keeping a lot of american families

down and it's an interesting moment today in america because everybody has to be home cooking restaurants are closed you know and i think people are starting to cook and figure out what to do but uh it's not the time to start making a lot of cakes and cookies because they're going to suppress your immune system definitely so yeah that's how it happened amazing so you know one of the things we really worked on was school nutrition uh and the obese i mean two out of ten kids now are obese not just overweight four out of ten are overweight um we're seeing this affect their cognitive behavior and academic performance uh what's most striking in the studies that really shocked me was that the kids who are the most obese are also the most nutrient deficient.

When 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 outcomes in life, 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 I mean, I went to the school.

They had 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, the Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act, which was signed into 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 that like? There are lots of them. You know, so when we got there, there was no rules at all about what you could sell in schools.

So in vending machines and in the a la carte lines and the lunchrooms, there was literally zero standards. You could sell anything you wanted. And the guidelines hadn't been updated in terms of the new standards for the school lunch meal itself in 20 years. And there had been new 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 collapse not too you know different from what's happening right now um that was 2008 right yeah and so you know it was in we were working on this in 2000 you know through 2009 so um you know pretty pretty

intense time to try to get a bill like that done um but you know for us in the administration and it by the way, took President Obama intervening and push, 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 school's budget. Yeah, for sports.

So these budgets have been cut so much that schools are depending on basically selling these kids junk food to key programs that we all care about alive. So there's a real, you know, tense conflict there. But, you know, obviously, you know, killing them prematurely over the long term is not a solution for art. They can write great poems as they're dying and great songs as they're dying. We had to work this out.

You know, there was huge raging. And sometimes, you know, the debates in Washington just, you know, leave you scratching your head. But huge debates on whether you had to just offer the vegetable to the kid or actually had to serve them the vegetable. Well, they talk 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, big fights there. Um, uh, and you know, then there was a pretty infamous effort by the frozen, uh, food Institute, which is basically the pizza franchise is yeah that got that made 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 a vegetable. Right. Exactly. You didn't know.

Ketchup also is a vegetable. Yeah. Yeah. And so they got Congress to intervene and they, they, they attached that onto another bill and got that through. So we were able to then increase the serving of vegetables. So you could serve fries,

but you still also had to serve like broccoli or something like that. So it really kind of defeated the purpose of serving the fries. So we were able to constrain 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. And Amy Klobuchar, who's the senator 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 have nothing to do with science. Yeah, that is true.

We had big fights on potatoes in many arenas, similar to school lunch as well as with WIC. You know, so, but I got to say, like, so there was real fights. I do think there's this, like, 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 out there 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 the

congressmen and senators would be your allies did you find that I mean clearly mean, clearly the food industry pushed back. Yes, sometimes they will. We got it all passed 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 wasn't 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 the given and everything else that was going on in Washington. Hey, everyone. It's Dr. Hyman. I make time to move and sweat every single day. And I also love

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Honestly, after using the Theragun, I feel like my whole body is relaxed and all my pain goes away, even after really tough workouts. It's seriously like getting a massage anywhere at any time. In fact, it's better than most massages I've had. It's perfect for getting some of that great self care and during all this time at home right now. Now you can get a bunch of super cool features on the Gen 4 series with the OLED screen, personalized Theragun app, and plenty of power for deep relaxation. And they start just at $199. Now, there are a variety of devices to choose from and multiple head attachments to get different kinds of targeted muscle treatments. Whatever kind of exercise or everyday activities you're doing, everyone can benefit from deep tension release. We all need it, God knows.

Especially since many of us are sitting at a computer for most of the day. It's also lightweight and ergonomically designed so you don't have to strain to target the hard to reach areas. The Theragun made a huge difference in my recovery and I know you're going to love it too. It might be one of my most favorite tools of the year. Just go to theragun.com forward slash Hyman right now to get your Theragun today. That's T-H-E-R-A-G-U-N dot com slash Hyman, H-Y-M-A-N. You can try it risk-free for 30 days and you got nothing to lose. Now let's get back to the episode. So, you know, look, I mean i that was just a huge win and um and was there was there any

follow-up data on how kids did in terms of their weight their academic performance the the impact of the new school lunch guidelines the uh the i haven't seen a robust uh 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 look at it yet, but maybe the most impactful thing in this bill, I don't know when you could debate it, was a provision that basically said, 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 their 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'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 bag of chips 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 before. Wow. And so by serving it in the, in the, in breakfast in the classroom and serving it to everybody, all like millions of poor kids are getting food now that otherwise wouldn't.

And so you saw there increased participation, significantly improved attendance, and significantly improved reading and math scores because, you know, those kids, you know, can you remember when you were like 12 or 13 how hungry you were all the time? Yeah. And imagine you hadn't eaten since, you know, lunch, and it's now 9 o'clock. You didn't lunch the day before, and it's now 9 o'clock. And you're asked to, like, focus on the math test. Yeah, forget it.

Forget that. I could barely do that if I was full, let alone if I was tired. Right? And so, you know, so it was a transformational piece of legislation in that regard. And for the addition of done, 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 or their businesses. Sometimes in ways that, you know, I can understand. Sometimes that I find disgusting and just abhorrent. Can you share some stories of what you experienced that, you know, kind of reveal the underbelly about what you're fighting against? I mean, look, it cut both ways i mean i think you know when we were we banned trans fats uh which uh you know there was an attempt to try to figure out from the industry side if you know they could still because of a few people who wanted various icing and other a couple products where you know it was harder to replace they wanted to like go fight uh to try to allow a certain level right in under the ban 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 fats that is a known 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 um and sometimes just like ready for a nasty fight but i will also say and it's important for everybody to understand there's a lot of nuance and a lot of gray so there's some issues like pizza in you pizza as a vegetable or trans fat, which is a black and white issue.

But there's a lot of other companies that have done tremendous work to try to make it easier and more affordable for 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 month period, they're going to get fired. Right. So there, those efforts are, you know, would be undone in a minute. So if you're trying to get something to change, there's a pragmatism that has to be taken from them as well. Um, 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. And that's because that food likes them, it's addictive, and it sort of sets up the biology of hunger and craving and 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 create they box themselves into a problem of creating you know highly craveable food and now that's there it's people want it and they like it and they identify themselves with eating it so it becomes the whole you know what we eat is really how we understand who we are yeah 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 some for a ceo who's like i get it like my portfolio is not good i've got to make some real change it's not like they're in the position to say i get these products are terrible i'm just gonna get rid of them like it doesn't well they're innovating these companies are innovating they're getting the crap out they're reformulating their products they're getting there they're getting i just i just think we have to be careful to see like the monolith 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 and won. And then work strategically to make progress, you know, to work collaboratively when you can and fight when you have to. Yeah, it's hard to have the sniffed test around 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 that's challenging and all the hard work you did with the Obama's to get the healthy hunger-free kids act passed in 2010, the current administration is trying to roll that back. And their, their arguments are that, Oh, kids are throwing out the food. It doesn't taste good. People won't eat it. You know, so we have to fix those guidelines, fix the guidelines, which means roll them back so that more junk can be in the schools. 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 were talking about before, you've learned how to make delicious, yummy meals in a short order from ingredients that 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've talked to you about her. Uh, who's also gonna 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've seen 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. The School 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've 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 cafeterias 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, ConAgra and a few others are the most influential companies on their board. And they were very supportive of the Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act and the work that we were doing, and we were real allies of theirs. And then they realized that standards were going too far and kind of in the middle of the whole thing they fired the the ceo uh brought in a bunch of hacks for uh big food and have then since started fighting us uh and um and now have been lobbying the Trump administration to roll back these standards.

And so if they're listening, I haven't talked to you guys in a while, but shame, shame on you. It's just 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, 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'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, kids have been throwing out school lunch since the day it 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. If it's on their plate, they're more likely to eat it. What do you know? In fact, we had to research that, but it's true. It turns out that's how it goes.

So that's where these things really get backward, and they're going to push on and do that, which is really troubling, especially given the fact that while we made a tremendous amount of progress, this is a generational effort, and we have a long way to go. And so we should be tripling down on our efforts, not rolling them back.

And as a chef, you believe that if we somehow figured out how to get food service providers to recalibrate what they're doing and get, you know, cooks, I mean, getting the ladies and the guys who are in the kitchens in schools actually cooking, that it's doable. So I think it's doable if there was a tremendous increase in funding. But right now, most of these schools don't, a lot of them don't have real kitchens. Infrastructure is lagging. Schools have been upgraded in years. Schools have way bigger, a big part of the problem for school lunch

is that these school kitchens and cafeterias were designed for like 300 students. Now there's 700 in the school. And a big part of the problem that nobody really talks about is like a lot of kids are getting lunch starting like 10 o'clock and then they have like 20 minutes to eat.

Yeah. And they're just not, they just don't have enough time to eat um so there's a lot of really just structural problems and so i think there's a middle ground where if we could bring some capacity of cooking back into kitchens or have better sort of hub and spoke models where food is being prepared more fresh and integrating that with high quality sort of pre-made foods. I think that's a likely scenario, but you're talking about billions and billions and billions of dollars of infrastructure needs hundreds of billions.

You mean, you mean kitchens? Is that what you mean? Yeah. Kitchens and staff. Like now all of a sudden you need a lot more people to cook. Well, this is what, you know, Jill Shaw showed that you, you, you actually don't increase costs at all that you can do it if you put the kitchens in and then teach the staff how to do it and create the right recipes with food that's low cost but delicious and nutritious that it's doable it really i'm not saying it's not doable i'm just saying that uh it's definitely

hard and there's some people that do it i'm just saying it it's definitely hard. There's some school to do it. I'm just saying it takes increased resources. The food cost don't necessarily need to go. I agree with her, but there's no way she's, I just, and I love her, so I don't want to disagree with her about anything. There's just, each school is different. So it's hard to speak just, you know, general, you know, just complete generalities. But if you have a staff that all they're doing is taking frozen things and heating them up you have a pretty lean team if you're going to prepare everything and chop every vegetable uh then you're just going to need more hands most likely depend now there could be some things

that have a big staff and you could do that but for the most part i think there's some increased cost there most likely and it's it's more decentralized, right? It's not a federal program. It's all based on local school districts and everybody decides themselves. So it's a harder thing to sort of nationalize, right? Much harder. Yeah, that part is hard.

And look, what we found in these schools is that for the school chefs who really were excited about, you know, serving better food, passionate about it, really wanted to do right by their kids. They figured out how to make really delicious food within the budget and meeting the standards and sometimes dramatically exceeding the standards. And we found that in districts where they didn't believe in it, they didn't care about health. They thought that, you know, these Democrats in the white house were, you know, like trying to tell them what to eat.

Nanny state. Nanny state. They just, they serve food that tastes terrible. And so, you know, a lot of it is just about your will and your commitment to doing. Well, we need to do it because we are destroying our children and the future generation. And it's, you know, a friend of mine said, it was a doctor that was a pediatrician, said if a foreign nation was doing to our children what we're doing to them, we'd go to war to fight it.

You know what I mean? All right, well, you doing all this work on the front lines of food and politics, you sort of came to a revelation about how to make real progress on the challenges facing our health and the planet. Can you talk about what that was? A few of them.

Which one? Well, I think you had some insights about working on the front lines that made you realize how to make progress on certain challenges that were, I think, an insight that you got during that work? Oh, God. You probably had a lot of them. Yeah, a lot of them. I mean, look, I think, well, I think, you know, for me, change, you know, there's sort of a roadmap for it. But most of it is rooted in our culture. And I think a lot of times we like to blame government. We like to think that there's a very convenient narrative that government subsidies are the reason why junk food is cheap. And if only we could change those subsidies, everything would be fine and we would fix it and healthy food would be more affordable. And I just came to realize one that's unfortunately just utterly not true. There's no

basis in fact of that. The subsidies are stupid policy. We actually changed a lot of the ones that people have heard a lot about, but it's just such a developed market that they're just really a drop in the bucket. The reason why junk food is much more affordable than healthier food often is because we've figured out how to make junk food in a very efficient manner and grow the two crops that are really the foundation of unhealthy food, namely corn and soy in a, in a hyper efficient manner. I mean, we can have fields of hundreds of thousands of acres of corn that nobody

ever touches that are planted, grown and harvested without a single person on the land. The corn used to be many feet apart. Now it's grown 18 inches next to each other. It's just an amazing amount of energy and resources that have innovated on the system. And we've invested statistically insignificant, like statistically $0 in figuring out how to grow nutrient-dense fruit, vegetables, and whole grains in that manner. And so we have just a gaping hole on on on our innovation of how we do that. And and I think that's really where we need to put our attention the whole answer to solving these problems, that businesses have to innovate and that you have now moved on to working with an organization that focuses on accelerating businesses that are innovating

around solutions. So rather than talk about all the things that go bad and what's terrible, how about we talk about what people are actually doing in the innovation space around food and ag and consumer solutions that are addressing chronic disease, that are addressing climate change, that are addressing the food system. It's so exciting, man. We've had these conversations before, but it'd be really great to hear how actually you're seeing this happen. Yeah, I mean, what I did realize, and it's just worth a minute to touch on, you know, I think government has a really important role to play in our food system. So it's not to say that it's not a, you know, has they're huge, obviously. And some other areas where rules and regulations are quite important and leadership matters. But for the most part, food is a private sector endeavor. And it's farmers that are growing it and companies that are processing it and distributors that are selling it. And so if we don't affect that chain, then we're not going to make much progress.

And so I think what we're seeing, we have a food system that's basically been built on a few things, a few key elements. One, we've had the most stable climate in kind of a recorded history of the last hundred or so years. Yeah, not anymore. Right. Well, the climate has been completely stable. We've had unlimited natural resources, namely soil and water, just plentiful. And we've had cheap energy. And it's that sort of formulation that has allowed this system that we have currently to be built. And all those things are done. And so you're seeing a tremendous amount of pressure on the supply chain from all the way upstream down.

And you're seeing a transformation in consumer preferences, attitudes, and behaviors being driven around climate and health. And so you're getting a really powerful ecosystem of of of the potential for real change because we've seen really no innovation in food systems outside of some things around corn and soy kind of really for the last like 60 70 years if you think about like think about your kitchen is a good way to uh think about it in a way that we can touch the only innovation in the kitchen has been the microwave over the last like 75 years 50 years or something like that right like once we have a refrigerator that was a big deal uh we've had ovens they've gotten better but they're basically yeah i got crushed by i've dropped my cookbook and there's like two instapot cookbooks and it's

like i got buried by instapot what is this instapot thing and it turns out i was like living in the dark um yeah it's a pot in the microwave this is about like hats off that's great you know the microwave but the microwave if you stop and think about it was kind of the only real innovation that we've seen you know the rest of our world is being transformed by our phones and everything is changing technology at this point but and that's true throughout the whole supply chain um and so the time is ripe so you have all these young entrepreneurs who are founding businesses to try to solve the issues of food climate uh to try to solve the issues around

our health and our well-being and this goes all the way up from like genetics of plants to different ways of bringing nutrients to the soil, the microbiome of the soil all the way to how do we trace and provide transparency and through the supply chain, alternative proteins, alternative ingredients, and then, you know, down into the convergence of the healthcare system and the food system. Finally, there's a major part of the economy that is waking up to the realization that if they don't help make a healthier country, they're going to go out of business. You know, the tidal wave of just diabetes alone, 34 million pre-diabetics and over 80 million pre-diabetics. It's just a tidal wave of health of a healthcare crisis coming at,

at the industry. And so there's just all this innovation coming, but how do we deliver more nutrient dense foods in a price point that people can afford? And, and I think there's a, it gives me a lot of hope. Now we're running out. The clock is ticking. We're running out of time. The problems are particularly on the climate side, are happening faster than I think anybody could have realized. I didn't know if I told you this. I do these dinners called The Last Supper where I would cook.

I still do it sometimes where you take ingredients that basically experts are predicting that our kids or grandkids aren't going to have because of climate. So these are things like coffee and wine and chocolate. So let me just repeat that. Coffee, wine, chocolate. So we're not going to be able to eat those. And now everybody's got a stake in solving climate change if they didn't realize it before. and crabs and lobsters and the you know real foods you know base space bedrocks of the you know ocean uh nuts and all kinds of different uh different foods and then you know i a couple

weeks ago i got a a little push alert around you know basically dungeness crabs are populations have collapsed because the acidification the ocean which we thought was going to happen in 20 or 30, 40 years, it's increasing so fast that they're not, the babies can't form shells. And so they're starting to get wiped out. You know, the things that I was, you know, had been talking about up until like a couple of months ago that were like way off in the future, but like in our kids and grandkids are happening now. So you know, I think the sense of urgency to change how we're eating

and to innovate is growing ever more dire. Yeah, so what's really interesting is that we talk about how the way we grow food is going to be threatened by climate change. So the way we're growing food contributes to climate change and the food that we're trying to grow is going to be impacted by climate change. Can you talk about that and what innovations are happening in technology that's going to be necessary to actually make progress on both those aspects? Yeah, it's a pretty negative feedback loop that we're under right now. You know, food and ag is the number two driver of emissions globally. And, you know, give or take a decade, the next 20 or 30 years,

it's going to be the number one driver because unlike energy, where we can see a future where our footprint is coming down, food and ag is going straight up. Yeah. Some estimate that even now when you add it all in, it's the first. Depending on how you cut the numbers. Yeah. I think you can make a good argument, but either way, it's a huge part of the footprint. And, and, you know, and it's a wildly inefficient system. We're wasting a third of what we've produced,

which is a huge emitter in and of itself. And we're getting these terrible waste, terrible health outcomes um so it's a system that is wildly inefficient um and as climate gets worse food is and food security is on the front lines one of the places where we're going to feel the impacts of climate first and we already are um uh and what so what you're starting to see is because with climate instability then you the agricultural environments change and you can't grow the food that you used to be able to grow where you used to grow it.

Yeah, so what we're starting to see, I'm actually... You beat me to the punch with your incredible book, but I'm writing a different version of the same issues that we've got to talk about. You're just faster than me, unfortunately. You've been busy. You've been busy with the babies and all that but i'm working on you know what i'm working on right now is you actually what you're seeing is a a massive migration north of plants and animals uh uh north and south trying to get to more temperate climates because volatility and increasing temperatures are making the areas where we grew food you know inhospitable

now there's some areas for time being that will benefit right uh but um all those soils are different in the north if you're growing you know food north dakota and you want to go grow it in northern saskatchewan it might not be the same and we're gonna run out of room like uh we're you know and so you're seeing this just real disruption and there's some you know plants that can move you know they're planted year over year so they can you know move as the climate moves and farmers realize oh i can plant corn now like they're gonna plant it for a while because they can make some real money but there's other crops like anything that grows on a tree that's not as easily moved and you know for fishermen who've been fishing certain areas for generations uh you know when the fish are gone there's nothing to catch yeah i remember going to newfoundland which was one of

the biggest cod fisheries in the world. And we went to this remote little bay. We had to literally take a boat around to this town that was isolated. And there was this incredible fish hatchery, this giant fish processing plant. And there were a couple of fishermen on the dock. And they brought in these really puny little cod. And it was just so sad. And the whole town was going out of business sale.

Everything was shutting down and it was just sort of, you know, firsthand experience of what actually is going on. Yep. Yeah. It's pretty devastating. And so we're just at the very beginnings of this. And so, you know, I think we're going to have to, you know, and so look, I think that we're going to have to use, we're going to have to, you know, and so look, I think that we're going to have to use, we're going to have to innovate in meaningful ways and sometimes in uncomfortable ways. And, and, you know, we don't really like the idea of high tech things in our food and we shouldn't,

you know, I think that sort of sense of, you know, tradition and that sense of, you know, this is how we've always done it is a is a healthy there's a healthy aspect to that um but given you know what's happening and how bad i think it's going to get and how bad i think it's going to get in a relatively short amount of time um that i think we're going to keep an open mind about looking at different tools that could help us solve these challenges what do you see coming up in these businesses that you're looking at? Like what you're sort of sitting in? I think the biggest one that is both has the biggest potential to help us manage the crisis that we're entering, as well as has potential to be used in all kinds of ways that could not be beneficial is gene editing. And just like you kind of hear, you hear a lot about it right now around human health

and sort of designer babies and all those sort of things. That same sort of technology can be used to basically express or silence genetic material in the genome of a plant, not foreign DNA, but what currently resides in a... This is not literally genetically modified organisms in the sense of inserting like a bacterial gene in a plant or... Right. So, like I said...

Yeah, GMO is as it exists now, and as you hear it, it's about foreign DNA being inserted into the genome of a plant. CRISPR, what it does is it allows you to both silence genes that are being expressed or express genes, more importantly, that have been silenced and kind of lost over, like, you know, thousands, hundreds of years, if not thousands of years of breeding. So the power of the, and to do multiple expressions or silencing in one plant, it has transformational potential.

Give me an example of how that would be used in agriculture. You could use it to improve. So like wheat has a lot of fungus problems. You could use it to help target the genes that could be resistant to fungus while increasing the fiber in the plant and improving nutrient density potentially. Yeah. Or needing, allowing it to be more drought tolerant.

You can do things. You can breed it for more nutrient density and flavor, which would always be good. Absolutely. Like their ability to basically target, sequence the genome of a plant, target the characteristics of that plant you want or silence the ones you don't,

is just much cheaper now and much, much much much more efficient now the question is like what are the values that we're going to employ these tools on they're very powerful and i think instead of saying tool like genetics bad which is just not how you know it's really not been the case we've been tinkering with the genetics of plants since the beginning right well and Mendel. Right? Well, and far before him. Far before him, for sure. It's the foundation of civilization was our ability to take plants and breed them over time. This is able to do that in a much more dramatic

and efficient manner. And the question is, are we going to use these tools for the benefit of a few big companies so they can spray more chemicals and extract more profit? Or are we going to use this in a way that's going to help and lighten our footprint on the agricultural system and improve the health outcomes of eaters? And, you know, so where I've come to after, you know, grappling,

and there's going to be a lot of gray. It's going to be, I think, complicated. But I'm going to judge these new innovations based on that. So I don't think tools are inherently good or bad. I think it's how you use them. And, um, and so, you know, that's how I think we need to see this. So if it's helping us meet these goals of a much more, uh, sustainable, sustainable and healthier food system, then I support it.

And if not, then I don't. Amazing. That's a simple metric to look at. Is it helping or hurting? Yeah. And there's a lot of things that are hurting. So yeah. So as individuals, what can we do to shift our patterns? And is that even relevant? I mean, do we have to wait for business and governments to act or can we as individuals actually make a difference to live a way that's more healthful and more climate smart? Oh, there's no question about it. You've written about it in many of your books. I took my stab in my cookbook, hybrid cookbook. I think there's no question that here's the thing that people

don't realize. And this is true of both politicians and of businesses. They're scared to death of us. They spend hundreds of millions of dollars trying to figure out what we're thinking, what do we want, and just figuring out how they can somehow deliver it in some way, shape, or form. They feel powerful, and they are,

and they'll fight for things when their interests are threatened, but they're scared. And they're listening intently to everything, like every micro trend. They're like, oh my God, I think they may be going this way. We got to figure out how to, you know, move that way. And we're driving so much of their behavior and we're more powerful than we realize. They'll see CBD, Coca-Cola, I'm sure.

Of course, that's right. I guarantee it. I guarantee that. And think about that. So I think, you know, we have to, the key for us and the way I always, you know, try to put this out there is, you know, I think we need to set ourselves up for success.

We need to make it as easy on ourselves as we can to make the best choice. A lot of times when we're buying food that's pretty unhealthy, and then just trying to rely on willpower to just not eat it in our home. And like, no matter who you are, if that cookie is in front of you, eventually you're going to eat it. Like you can hold off for a while, but there's nobody, myself included, who is not eventually going to eat a cookie if it's there yeah and a lot of times and this is how marketing works and i know you know you made me want to cook chocolate chip cookies tonight after dinner i'm like exactly but that's exactly how it works that's exactly how marketing works and you've talked a lot about this but you know it's such a bad like when you see a picture of a burger you hear somebody say

chocolate chip cookie and then you're like oh i love. It's like, you didn't want a cookie. You just saw a picture of a cookie. And that made you want the cookie. Yeah. So in our home, especially, I think we have to do a much better job at, you know, fighting the fight in the grocery store, like being really conscious about making good choices there. And then relaxing when we get home, because we have ourselves surrounded by things that are good for us. And, and if we continue to do that and focus on just more plants, nutrient-dense fruits, vegetables, nuts, whole grains, we're going to continue to drive the market and make that known. Make that known to your friends.

Make that known to your family. Make that known on social media. That has a huge impact on our culture. And as that becomes our norm, you're going to see both policy and politics and food companies starting to try to increasingly respond to what we're saying we want and what we're saying we need and what we're saying we're going to do and doing. And that for me is, yeah, that for me is actually the main job. Like that's the hard work, but that's the work that

actually allows both the industry and, and our, and our policy and politics to, uh, to act as they should, because they're supposed to follow us. These people aren't leaders. Business people are not leaders. No politicians are not leaders. They're not, they're designed. They're supposed to follow democracy is about following the will of the people. That's what they're supposed to do. And so really, like, we have more power in this than we realize. And so I think we, the more we activate on that, the better we're going to be. I think that's true. And I think that the take-home message is make your home a safe zone. Yeah. You know, don't introduce foods in there that are not good for your family and introduce foods that

taste good or amazing. I mean, my, my son, when he was, uh, I think 15 or 14, he wanted a bunch of, invite a bunch of friends over for dinner. He goes, there's nothing to eat in the house. I'm like, all right. I said, let's go to the grocery store. And, uh, there's only one rule. You can't buy anything with trans fat, period. Nothing. Yeah. He couldn't find a single thing to buy pizza, whatever you want to buy. All I had trans fat transfer it was a good lesson you know i think yeah i mean look we i think a real rule on that is too when you get into your home it's true in society you eat what you see like that's right that's what you're going to eat and so even in your home it's not to say that you shouldn't have a like a you know do you want a couple cookies i got chocolate yeah

and coffee and wine i got plenty of wine especially right now let me tell you uh but just put it out of sight you know put on the top shelf behind something so you're only going to eat it when you like know you really really want it um and what and this is honestly what i what happened this is how it all started with the obamas is that instinctually and i didn't even know they have the research that had been done at that time but you know i took the fruit that was in the bottom shelf which we you know everything goes to waste on there why because like we don't see it so we open the fridge we don't open it we don't see what's down there and then you remember oh man i should look down there and it's like yeah we got green beans tonight because we found them in the bottom our

right but you know i put the fruit out on the counter so when the girls would run by if i had and it's like, God, we got green beans tonight because we found them in the bottom of our drawer. Right. But, you know, I put the fruit out on the counter so when the girls would run by, if I had a bowl of chips there,

they would have grabbed a bowl of chips, a handful of chips. But I had some grapes there so they grabbed grapes, right? It's just because that's what was easy

and that's what they saw. And so the more you can surround yourself with those things, you're not having to think about it and you're just eating whatever's around you, the better,

like the more successful we're going to be um because we're going to eat what we see so just think about that like about setting up what what what you're going to make eye contact with as you move through today it's going to have a huge impact on ultimately what you eat even in our homes yeah and i love what michael pawn says if you want to eat something just eat it but make it yourself if you want french fries make them yourself yeah if you want a cookie make it yourself from real ingredients and you know well also like yeah the the because the the truth that's true mostly because like we would never put as much of the junk in there as like these guys would right because they're they're trying to maximize the profit margins on every product. If you're going to, you know, cook something,

you're not going to like throw like 10 times the amount of sugar and some acid and some salt just to amp the whole thing up and not have any real good other ingredients that actually carry the flavor. Okay, well, I'm going to go. Cooking is one of those great solves for all of that.

Okay, well, this week I'm going to fries uh from scratch uh with some beef tallow just like the old mcdonald's french fries and i might make some chocolate chip cookies but i'm trying to i'm trying to eat healthy and i i think all of us should should uh you know keep our homes safe from industrial food if we did that it would be a game changer uh you know you know if you just and i did this when this when my kids were growing up. There were two things on the menu, take it or leave it. That was it. And they did fine. And my son's now a chef, my daughter cooks, and they eat delicious food, and they understand. And they went off the wagon for a little bit, but they had it embedded in their consciousness when

they were growing up, and that's what they loved. And I think we we can all do that for our families and that's the place to start. And what that does, like you said, Sam, it drives the marketplace. It drives innovation. It drives policy. So, so that's what we can all do. And I, and I really applied your efforts, both on the political front and fighting the good fight, which was not easy. I'm sure you got a lot of battle wounds and now, you know, thinking about how do we stimulate business and innovation in food and agriculture to actually solve some of these big problems. So my hat's off to you, Sam.

Thank you for joining us on The Doctor's Pharmacy. Such a pleasure being here. And, you know, thank you for all of your incredible leadership and advocacy over the years. You're like a one man army with a much bigger army behind you. And so we just had such an impact and just, just an honor to be here with you. Well, thanks, Sam. So if you've been listening to the doctor's pharmacy and you love this podcast, please share it with your friends and family, leave a comment. We'd love to hear from you, subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, and we'll see you next week

on the doctor's pharmacy. Hey everybody, it's Dr. Hyman. Thanks for tuning into the doctor's pharmacy. I hope you're loving this podcast. It's one of my favorite things to do and introducing you all the experts that I know and I love and that I've learned so much from. And I want to tell you about something else I'm doing, which is called Mark's Picks. It's my weekly newsletter. And in it, I share my favorite stuff from foods to supplements to gadgets to tools to enhance your health. It's all the cool stuff that I use and that my team uses to optimize and enhance our health. And I'd love you to sign up for the weekly newsletter. I'll only send it to you once a week on Fridays. Nothing else, I promise.

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