The Peter Attia Drive - #94 - Mark Hyman, M.D.: The impact of the food system on our health and the environment

Episode Date: February 24, 2020

In this episode, Mark Hyman, M.D., director of the Cleveland Clinic Center for Functional Medicine and the author of Food Fix, discusses that if we can fix the food system, we can solve many big problems—namely the chronic disease/obesity epidemic, the rising costs of healthcare, as well as the big problems facing the environment. Mark first briefly lays out the health consequences of processed food with a focus on the gut microbiome. From there, Mark discusses the environmental consequences of industrial farming and lays out how we can affect change on the individual level, through policy and regulations, and perhaps most importantly through regenerative agriculture. Additionally, Mark talks about the potential health risks of consuming GMO foods, herbicides, and other chemicals used in industrial farming as well as the environmental consequences, such as the loss of soil, caused by those same fertilizers and methods of farming. We discuss: The negative consequences of the existing food environment [3:25]; What makes processed food so unhealthy? [9:00]; The gut microbiome: Inflammation from gut permeability and how to measure gut health [18:30]; Steps to fixing a bad gut—The Five R’s [24:30]; Some staggering health statistics, and which races might be more genetically susceptible [27:15]; An argument for government regulations and policies to fight back against a massive food industry with unlimited resources (and what we can learn from the tobacco story) [29:00]; Industrial farming and climate change: The degradation of soil and use of fertilizer [41:45]; Regenerative agriculture: Could it be the answer to food waste, our health problems, and the environment? [51:45]; Comparing the Impossible Burger to regeneratively raised beef [1:06:00]; GMO and Roundup—The potential health risks of consuming GMO foods sprayed with Roundup (glyphosate) and other herbicides and pesticides [1:08:15]; How the livelihood of farmers are being affected by big ag companies and the current industrial farming system [1:16:30]; The loss of biodiversity in our food, and what “organic” really means [1:19:00]; What can people do on the individual level to protect themselves as well as affect change to the toxic food system? [1:25:00]; What role does the USDA play in this “toxic” food environment and how do we fix it? [1:30:15]; The top 3 changes Mark would make if he was “food czar” [1:35:15]; Mark’s rebuttal against the argument that it’s best for the environment if we stop farming animals and move to a fully plant-based diet (and his argument for “agriculture 2.0") [1:36:30]; What is Mark’s overall mission with the work that he’s doing? [1:40:30]; Bread in the US vs. Europe: Why does bread (and wheat products) taste different and potentially cause less health problems in Europe versus the US? [1:42:00]; and More. Learn more: https://peterattiamd.com/ Show notes page for this episode: https://peterattiamd.com/markhyman Subscribe to receive exclusive subscriber-only content: https://peterattiamd.com/subscribe/ Sign up to receive Peter's email newsletter: https://peterattiamd.com/newsletter/ Connect with Peter on Facebook | Twitter | Instagram.

Hey everyone, welcome to the Drive Podcast. I'm your host, Peter Atia. This podcast, my website, and my weekly newsletter, all focus on the goal of translating the science of longevity into something accessible for everyone. Our goal is to provide the best content in health and wellness, full stop, and we've assembled a great team of analysts to make this happen. If you enjoy this podcast, we've created a membership program that brings you far more in-depth content if you want to take your knowledge of this space to the next level. At the end of this episode, I'll explain what those benefits are, or if you want to learn

more now, head over to peteratia MD dot com forward slash subscribe. Now without further delay, here's today's episode. I guess this week is Dr. Mark Heimann. Mark is a family physician, a New York Times best selling author and the director of the Cleveland Clinic Center for Functional Medicine. It turns out we're going to talk about pretty much none of that today. We talk almost exclusively on his new book, which is due out tomorrow called Food Fix, how to save our health, our economy, our communities, and our planet one bite at a time. And if that sounds like a mouthful, it's because it is a mouthful. This is a kind of staggering topic. And even by the standards of this podcast, it's probably too much for one episode.

Mark basically lays out a thesis that if you fix the food system, you fix a lot of problems. So it's not a one for, it's not a two for, it's like somewhere between a three for and a four for. We don't spend a lot of time talking about the health consequences of fixing food, although we open our discussion with that, talking about the health impact of food. We talk a little bit about gut health, but we spend more of our time probably speaking about some of the social consequences and the environmental consequences. And of course, it ultimately does come down to health at the individual level.

We do get a lot into agriculture, energy usage around food. We talk a lot about the impact on climate. We also talk quite a lot about GMO, the strength of the evidence for and against it. We go through a lot of the policy ideas around how one might fix the food system. And actually, we closed with a nice anecdote of an explanation

that I thought Mark provided that was pretty interesting around the difference between food in Europe and North America. Many people myself included have commented on this, which is why is it that when you go to Europe, you seem to be able to eat with impunity things that in the United States just feel like they're about to kill you.

Anyway, this is a really interesting episode. I learned a lot in kind of preparing for it. And truthfully, I still feel like there's a lot I just don't understand in this system. There's probably a lot I need to go back and get smarter on. There are so many big numbers in this type of a discussion that the scale sort of doesn't make sense at times when you start to think about what it means to feed the world and how making changes in that system can

have enormous knock-on effects for both good and bad. So without further delay, please enjoy my discussion with Mark Heimann, and we may end up revisiting this topic with other guests should people find this interesting. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Hey Mark, thanks for coming over, man. No, I'm so happy to be here.

It's beautiful. Chickens running around and everything. Venice and the freezer are my kind of place. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's in keeping with a lot of what we're going to talk about today. I think Mark, a lot of people would associate you with other topics that we might get into functional medicine, the role of toxins in the environment, certainly food, but from the standpoint of health, what to eat.

But what we're talking about today is actually something that when you first mentioned to me, you were working on this book, actually, at the time you were putting the finishing touches on it about a year ago, I was like, wow, that's definitely something I want to understand more. So I can't wait to kind of have this discussion with you today. And that is basically how food is made, how food is delivered and how food is consumed and what the impacts of that are. I mean, what made you decide to tackle a problem

of this magnitude which is not just a scientific problem, but it's a political problem, totally. It's a religious problem if we're gonna be brutally honest. I mean, the nutrition religion? Yes, exactly. So it's about as complicated as a topic as one would go after. It is. And I think as a doctor, seeing patients day after day for 30 years, is a functional medicine

doctor. My focus is on why? Why are my patients so sick? And not always, but the majority of them, it has some relationship to food. And then I began to wonder, well, I could sit here all day, bailing the bucket and the boat with a hole in it. But I have to figure out why they're eating the food they're eating. And then you're going to think about it and go upstream and weld the food they're eating is caused by the food system. And I'm like, well, why do we have

the food system we have? Well, our food policies. And then I'm like, why do we have our food policies? It's the food industry that influences our government policies through lobbying and other influences that they do across the spectrum of society to drive their products to the market and sell them, which are predominantly killing us. I mean, there's 11 million people that die every year

from eating ultra-process food and not enough for the good food. And I think it's an underestimate. So basically, the answer to the question is, I realized I couldn't treat my patients in my office or in the hospital or the clinic. I had to go to where the source of the problem was. Yeah, yeah.

And I want to sort of put this in context, which is the evolution of this. The domestication of crops, the institutionalization of agriculture, has, for, we're going to demonize it a little bit here, but the reality, but it's been kind of a remarkable transformation. It would certainly be akin to the printing press when you think about step function changes in our civilization, when we went from hunter-gatherers to an agricultural society. So I want to be careful that we're not just sort of saying the answer is agriculture is – No.

– The end of the – The agriculture is a solution if we do it right? Yeah, so let's start with what you see as the sort of main pillars of the problem. How did we get to a point where the food environment is toxic? Because that's effectively what you're saying, right? If you eat on default, you're going to probably eat the wrong things. Yeah, it goes deeper than that. The food system, as a whole, I began to dig in this rabbit hole.

I realized it wasn't just causing chronic disease, but it was causing most of the global crises that were thinking about in silos that are all connected. And I'll just sort of quickly lay them out and it would be good to go over them in details if you go through the podcast. But clearly food is the biggest driver of chronic disease affecting six out of 10 people. It's clearly the biggest driver of economic stress in this country in our $22 trillion debt. One-third of all, Medicare expenses are for alone, and one-third of all of our federal budget is Medicare. If it was a company, it would be the biggest company

in the world that are trillion dollars annually. It's also driving climate change. A food system end-to-end and a loan packet is the number one cause of climate change. More than fossil fuels, it's causing massive environmental degradation, including loss about diversity, plants, species, animal species, livestock species. It's driving social injustice in many ways through how it affects our kids cognitive development and ability to learn. And there's huge academic achievement gaps. It leads to massive health disparities

because poor communities are more affected by these foods and are more targeted by them. And it affects even behavior, violence, conflict. We see such a divisive society today. Why do we have that? 40 years ago, it wasn't like that. And I think our diet has changed so radically, not just in the last 10,000 years,

but in the last 40 years, with the advent of massive amounts of ultra-processed food. And that's driving cognitive behavioral issues, violence, suicide, conflict, and even threatens our national security because 70% of military recruits are unfit to fight and are rejected. So we've got these global problems that are affecting us. And then of course, at least to massive political instability because of our food system,

of climate refugees, because the food system is driving climate, what is that going to do? I mean, think about it. We have a million Syrian refugees and that created a global crisis. The UN estimates that within a decade or a few decades, we're going to have 200 to a billion climate refugees. That's unimaginable. So how do we begin to sort of grapple with these problems and think about the solutions? And the beauty is, since they're all connected by food,

they can all be solved by going to the root and fixing our food system. And that's the leverage we have, which is so exciting to me because it's not, oh, doom and gloom, the world's ending, it's, yeah. We identify the problem, how it's connected, think of it as a system, and then be able to solve the problem by going to the root and dealing with these issues

collectively. So which one of those would you like to start with? Would you like to start with sort of the impact of processed food on health, which is probably not one that we need to spend a lot of time on? I don't think there's many people that would debate that, are there? Oh, you'd be surprised. I mean, there's $12 billion spent by the food industry on nutrition,

quote, research that confuses people's muddies, the waters, the clear is that Gatorade is great sports drink and that sugar doesn't cause obesity and that, I mean, I could go on and on. People are confused, and certainly our political leader certainly don't get this. And I think when you think of our healthcare system, it certainly doesn't get that food is medicine.

Do you really think that political leaders, I know you've spent some time interacting with said folks, do you really think they don't get it or do you think that they're just in a difficult position which is how do you appease all of these constituents? On the one hand, a lot of the bills get paid by the entities that endorse these agendas. And on the other end, they probably have empathy for the damage that's done. I mean, do you actually think there's a lack of awareness? I do. I mean, forget about politicians, academics, doctors, health professionals. I mean, forget about politicians, academics, doctors, health professionals, have no clue how powerful food is to heal disease. I mean, they get that if you eat too much, you're going to get fat, right?

But that's about it. Or if you eat too much carbs, maybe now, maybe you'll get diabetes. But not even that. I mean, the American Diabetes Association is still telling people to eat a lot of carbohydrates. I think we have a real lack of understanding of the power of food to cause disease and the power of food to cure disease. And so there's a real gap in that. I think it's starting to become in the public awareness that food is medicine, that there's

a food is medicine working in group in Congress, Cleveland Clinic where I work now is a food is medicine initiative. There's hospitals around the country that are talking about this. It's more the exception than the rule. So I do think people don't understand the magnitude. I mean, if you say to a politician, what is the biggest killer on the planet? They're going to go smoking or like a vector size or maybe they're going to get this being overweight, but they don't get that it's the ultra-processed food that kills more people

than smoking, violence, wars, everything else. So I mean, I think if there was a disease like Ebola or Zika that was killing 11 million people a year, I mean people would be talking about it and it's just not in the conversation that's happening. Even for example, Medicare, Medicare for All has anybody said the reason we have the trouble of Medicare is because people are eating bad food and that we need to fix the food? No, no, saying let's get Medicare for All. Let's repeal Obamacare. I mean, those aren't the solutions. It's like, that would be a disaster if we had Medicare for all because everybody's sick and it's just going to bankrupt the country unless

we fix why they're sick in the first place. What do you think it is about processed foods that are particularly difficult metabolically for our species? Historically, we ate 800 different species of plants, a lot of roots and tubers, 100 grams of fiber a day, and now in the average American, it's about 8 grams, which is nothing. And we had a very complex diet, which was very difficult to obtain sugar. You got lucky if you found a honey thing. I mean, I remember this reading this article about these Nepalese honey hunters, or they have to climb up 100 feet in the trees with a burning bush and it's like, if you had to climb a tree with a burning bush to get's like, if you had to climb a tree with

a burning bush to get a cookie, you're probably one eats away. And I think it just becomes so easy for us to have this abundance of sugar and flour and refined foods. And the good intentions that were there in the post-war period that led to the development of industrial agriculture were to provide a lot of starchy abundant calories to feed the hungry and solve real hunger issues around the world. And I think that was a good thing, but there was unintended consequences of the intensive chemical agriculture

that we're using, intensive fertilizer use, and the commodity products, which are wheat corn and soy and rice and some other areas of the world, that are driving this obesity epidemic. So our biology isn't adapted to eating highly refined foods, which essentially is most of what we're eating now. It's 60% of our calories, and every 10% of your calories that's ultra-processed food, your risk of death goes up by 14%.

So it's not something our bodies like, it's not something you're adapted to. And then of course, there's all the other stuff in there that may be problematically refined soybean oil or food additives or chemicals that are in our food that have also it's a metabolic consequence. It's like BPA or other metabolic toxins that are consumed within the food we're eating. So it's complicated. It's sugar and starch and flour, the big drivers, but there's all these other components. And then who knows what's happening with pesticides and glyphosate affecting our microbiome. It's such a complex web of different factors that alter our metabolic pathways that drives disease.

And just kind of digging into this a little bit more, how much of it do you think is the energy balance and the dysregulation of energy balance that comes from these processed food? So there are certainly people out there that would argue that part of the trouble with processed food is it sort of hijacks our energy homostatic systems. So if you put a human in an environment akin to what our ancestors evolved in, there is enough auto feedback and regulation that you sort of maintained energy balance. You would eat more when you needed to eat more, you would eat less when you needed to eat less.

One of the drawbacks of processed food, if not the biggest drawback, is it sort of hijacks that system. And if you cut the feedback out of that loop, they're eating when they don't really need additional energy. Do you think that's the biggest issue? Or do you think it's the void of nutrient that then creates sort of an abundance of junk calorie as the body search for nutrients? Do you think it's this loss of fiber?

Probably both. I mean, kids who were ironed fish and eat dirt. It's called pica. And it's, well, no, then if you're looking for nutrients, you're just going to eat anything. So that may be part of it. I think the main part of it is, and you've talked about this a lot, is the ways in which these refined starches and sugars affect your biology. They raise insulin, which has a cascading effect of fat storage in your belly, which is a dangerous fat. It leads to increased hunger, affects your brain chemistry. It actually locks the fat in the fat cells

so they can't get out. So it gets like a one way turn style that gets in but can't get out. And it slows your metabolism. So you're in this cascade of vicious cycles. So you talk about energy balance. I think most people when they hear that think about calories and calories out, I think, you know, I both understand that it's more complex than that that there's different

effects of food on your biology independent of calories in a lab, all calories the same. Seven of herpes of coke, 50 calories of coke is the same as 750 calories a broccoli. But to get 750 calories of soda, you'd have a big gulp, which is 40, 60s with a sugar and 750 calories a broccoli is 21 cups a broccoli with 35 grams of fiber and no sugar, profoundly different effects on your biology, same calories. But we don't really appreciate that medicine and most of our current thing about weight loss is focused on calories and calories out. It suits the food industry because they go, well, it's all about moderation. There's no good or bad calories.

It's exercise more, eat less. That's their mantra. And it serves them to sell more of their junk food as long as this part of a post balanced diet. But the truth is that these foods affect our brain chemistry and create all sorts of metabolic issues that are incredibly difficult. I was chatting with my friend David Promo, who just wrote a book called Brain Wash, where

he's talking about, he's a neurologist, where the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala are uncoupled with an inflammatory diet, which is what we're eating most of us in America and around the world. What that means is that the adult in the room, the prefrontal cortex, which is the decision maker that understands the consequences of its behavior, is not talking to the impulse part of your brain, the fight or flight part of your brain, the pleasure of seeking part of your brain. So there's this disconnection and your decisions are not in your best interest. And that's why we have so much bad behavior and conflict and so forth because we're eating

this inflammatory diet that's literally disregulating our our brain so the adult in the room is asleep. Say a bit more about that. What is it about the diet that could be inflammatory and how could one measure the consequences of that? Because is it possible that two people could consume the exact same subpar diet and have very different inflammatory responses? Yeah, sure. I mean, there is a... Listen, if people are eating junk food and processed food, their metabolism,

whatever they look like, whether they're overweight or not, it's not going to be as good as someone who's eating a Whole Foods on processed diet. But there is a lot of genetic variability, but you can actually measure inflammation and response to diet through various biomarkers. There's new panels of sort of looking at the inflammatory zone, which is really cool. It's more than just a CRP or a sedate, which are blood tests you can do to look at inflammation. And the ways in which it caused it, particularly it was talking about insulin, it also

drives this visceral belly fat, which is a basically metabolic fire that starts in these cells and it spreads inflammation throughout the body. So just the nature of eating sugar and processed food drives up inflammation. If a patient has normal biomarkers through the lens of all of those things, they're interleukins and C-rective protein,

fiber-injury, and if all of those things were normal, would you still think that there's potentially an inflammatory response that's coming through their diet? The question is, how sensitive are our current tools for assessing the immune response to food? And I think they're pretty crappy. And I think there's more and more lab diagnostic measures that are coming about that are going to help us look at that.

I was talking to someone from the Buck Institute of Aging last week, and he said, yeah, there's a whole new panel of inflammatory biomarkers that are much more specific and much more sensitive and enable us to have a look at the inflammatory response that's happening in the body related to aging or diet or anything else. How much of that inflammatory response do you think is mediated by permeability in the gut specifically versus because I've been honest with you, Mark, this is an area that I've never understood. It gets talked about a lot.

There's lots of hand-waving. Sometimes I see it, certainly, in patients. I mean, when we see subtle elevations in fibrinogen and or C-reactive protein, or at least two of the interleukins, we usually put patients on elimination diets until we find out what the culprit was. And we're trying to basically titrate symptoms versus these biomarkers. But I find that to be staggeringly crude. And to your point, I don't know what we're missing.

And I don't know what's true, true, and unrelated. And then, of course, it gets back to the question of what's the mechanism of this? And so one potential mechanism is that the permeability of the gut is altered. And if bacteria that could normally not translocate across the lining of the gut do so, that would certainly be a reason for inflammation.

A, do you think that that's a prevalent source of it? A huge. I mean, all our guts are messed up. And there's a whole phenomenon called metabolic endotoxemia. It's been well described and studied. And the fact that you're got microbiome was a huge role in regulation of weight independent of calories.

So they literally can take the poop out of a skinny rat into a fat rat and make them skinny and vice versa. They've done it in humans. I think the way in which it works is that your microbiome is regulated by what you eat. A lot of fiber, prebiotics, the phytonutrients, the phytochemicals, the polyphenols, all affect the quality of the garden you have growing inside of you. And you can get a lot of nasty weeds in there. When that starts to happen, they start to disrupt the gut microbiome. They disrupt the lining of the gut. They cause what we call leaky gut on top of everything else, which is our low fiber diet, high sugar, processed food, increases bad bugs in the gut, antibiotics, acid blockers, anti-inflammatory drugs, hormones, all.

Squirtbar got, and of course, toxins and environmental toxins. Glyphosate is super toxic to the microbiome. And so all these things that we know and those things we don't know are disrupting the microbiome. And when that happens, the lining of the gut becomes slightly damaged. The biophilms get disrupted and you end up absorbing bacterial products, bacterial toxins, as well as food antigens, things that we should normally

tolerate, to start to create an inflammatory response and 60% of your immune system is in your gut. And what's really striking to me, Peter, is sort of the discovery that many of our metabolites in our blood, probably a third or more, may be from microbiome. In other words, when you check your blood tests, we're checking human analytes, but when you actually start to do more sophisticated metabolic

testing and the metabolism, you find all these things that aren't human that come from bacteria that are regulating your immune system that are activating your mitochondria, that are regulating your DNA, that are affecting your brain chemistry, affecting your mood, affecting all sorts of diseases. So this is like a really exciting area. And I think getting people's microbiome sorted often happens when you shift to a Whole Foods plant-rich diet, not plant-based, but plant-rich. How can one measure these things?

I mean, one of the things that I've found difficult is finding valid commercial tests that can enable patients or physicians to understand if they're in this sort of regulated state. I mean, to me, the black box is when someone comes in and says, I have got dysbiosis or I have poor gut health and they may be right, but it's very different than someone who says, I have type two diabetes where we have really clear ways to

diagnose it. We kind of have some understanding what the pathophysiology is here. This is much more squishy, and frankly, there's an enormous disconnect between people like you and sort of the stuffy upper-lipped gastroenterologist who makes his or her living in the gut, but doesn't necessarily sort of see the problem this way, right? They're looking at different problems. You know, honestly, Peter, the evidence has become so overwhelming that mainstream medicine is bought into this whole microbiome story. And Cleveland Clinic, for example, they're studying the microbiome and heart disease

in arthritis and cancer. And it's like, they just got a $12 million grant from the NIH to study the microbiome and heart disease, which is pretty amazing. And yet, if you go to your doctor and say, is there any evidence that I should be on this probiotic or this? Yeah, they don't know. The clinical translation is challenging. So, I'm somebody who's been practicing monochromatism for 30, and the gut is been the number one focus of our ability to really move diseases in a powerful way. And they used to call me Dr. C every poop because I've done literally tens of thousands of stool tests and I've looked at all the different ones. And you're looking at a moving target.

You're looking at an ecosystem. And so we look at a lot of different biomarkers to assess what's going on in the gut. Is there adequate pancreatic enzyme function looking at pancreatic clastase? Are there absorption issues looking at fecal fats? Are there inflammatory markers in there? For example, Cal protectin or yeast and lymphoprotein X, which are standard markers to look at inflammation in the gut. What's your IGA levels, your antibody levels?

Then we look at indicators of dysregulated gut microbiomes, such as short-chain fatty acids, which are essentially produced by good bacteria that are the fuel for the gut and have anti-cancer properties, anti-inflammatory properties, and those can be low like buterate. And we can see that. Then we look at different microbiome characteristics using DNA or PCR analysis through the microRNAs. And that allows us to see, for example, if there's low acrimanseo, which is a very important bacteria that regulates your biofilm, that regulates immunity, that's linked to autoimmune disease, and cardiac metabolic disease is cancer treatment therapy risk.

So we can modify those things. And then we look at culture, we look at other kinds of testing for parasites, it's PCR testing. So there's a lot of things that we look at and get a gestalt. It changes over time, but you can see if someone's got a good gut or a okay gut or a terrible gut. So if you take a patient who is both symptomatic and by some consolation of tests has a quote-unquote bad gut. What percentage of those are quote-unquote fixable by subtraction? So you take things out of their diet, or addition, you add more of certain food to their diet, or the third choice would be intervention-based, where you have to use sort of supplements and antibiotics or probiotics or things like that.

So that's an oversimplified look at this. But if there's three levers you have, which means take something out of their food, add something to their food or add a different type of food, or then use a bigger gun like a supplement. How do those tools fit into this treatment? Well, functionalism is a very organized framework for addressing gut dysfunction called the

5R program. The first R is to remove. Remove things that shouldn't be there, whether it's foods that are triggering a problem like gluten, which affects permeability or dairy grains for some people. Remove bad bugs. So if you have a parasite, I mean, I just had a patient who had a common parasite. She had stomach issues for 20 years. She was always making up feeling like crap.

She gave her a lenient, which is an anti-parasitic medication. Six days, she said she's never felt better. So sometimes you just need to do that. And maybe bacterial overgrowth you have. Maybe there's yeast overgrowth. You need to address that. And so that's the first step. The second step is to replace what might be missing.

So fiber, prebiotics, enzymes, various things that maybe need to support the system. And sometimes that's just through food, but sometimes that's also supplementary. You can take prebiotic fibers and prebiotic foods like plantain and artichokes and all kinds of different foods and then re-enoculate, which would be provide probiotics where necessary. And that can be through foods like fermented foods or can be through probiotic supplements. those are still sort of a wild west but there are things that are that really work and then to replace what's missing. So maybe there's nutrients that the body needs to heal, things like glutamine, vitamin A, fish oil, maybe even things like butyrate and replace things that might be needed for healing that got like polyphenols. For example, or wonderful thing you can get from

food, pomegranate cranberries, minty, etc. And a powerful grade effects on the microbiome that we didn't really appreciate. So we thought it was pre-bottom and probiotic, which turns out the polyphenols and plant foods are super helpful for the gut microbiome. And then the last R is to restore, which means to restore your nervous system, because you need to deal with the way in which you're stressed level and everything affects your gut and your gut microbiome. You can get a leaky gut just from stress, for example.

So working on all those in a systematic way that's personalized is really the approach. There's no sort of, oh, take this or do that. It's going to work. So bringing it back to what you started this point. Yeah, we got down with the rabbit hole. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, it's such an interesting topic. You've laid out basically the enormous health consequences of eating poorly.

Yeah. Six out of 10 Americans have a chronic disease. Four out of 10 have two or more. And 10 years, 83 million Americans are left three or more, which is bankrupting our country. And one in two Americans has prediabetes or type two diabetes. These statistics are staggering. 75% of us are overweight. Most states now have 40% obesity rates. I mean, when I graduated medical school, there wasn't a single state that had, 75% of us are overweight. Most states now have 40% obesity rates.

I mean, when I graduated medical school, there wasn't a single state that had a 20% of obesity rate now. Everybody's got 30 or almost 40. These are massive things that are happening at a scale that we've never seen in human history that we haven't been equipped to deal with. We haven't really thought of how to address

and it's like we're trying to scramble to fix it. And you certainly in the book talk about how there are racial differences in terms of the susceptibility to the bad policy, which we'll get to down the line. Is there also sort of racial variability and discrepancy in the actual physiology in response to this? There's clearly economic health disparities. There's health disparities or results of targeted marketing from the food industry that are driving various problems or obviously the food swamps and the food deserts and food apart that all of that is true. But genetically there's

certain segments of the population that are much more likely when they are in an abundance of sugar and flour to get diabetes and obesity. And that includes Native Americans, probably the worst. African Americans, Latinos, and of course, the people from the South Pacific, and even Indians from India, Chinese, and Asians, often are much higher risk, even at lower body rates. So this is really a global problem, and that's why we're seeing 80% of the world's

type 2 diabetics in the developing world. Is there any country or government in particular that seems more attuned to this problem than the American government? Many, in fact most. Chile, for example, was seeing massive obesity rates and kids and adults, healthcare costs staggering for that country. And again, we're inundated by all the process food from the food industry and soda industry. And it took a doctor who was elected to the Senate, who was vice president of Senate, and a doctor who was elected president, Michelle Bachelet, who's a pediatrician, to stand up and say enough and put in a set of regulations to try to stop the onslaught of

these conditions on their population driven by the food industry. So they did a number of things. One, they put an 18% soda tax to, they put on warning labels on the front of bad food. So on your frosted like cereal box, there's black warning labels. They eliminated any cartoon characters from all the kids' food. So no, Tony the Tiger, no two-can-sam on fruit loops. They eliminated any prices from schools and they made the school lunch as healthy. They eliminated any advertising

on junk food from six in the morning on 10 at night, so kids wouldn't see it. And then they measured these outcomes based on that and they seemed tremendous improvements. And it was surprising to me, I talked to Barry Popkin, who from UNC, who worked with them on the development ease. And Michael Bloomberg, I think, gave him $30 million to assess the impact and so forth. So they're studying this. And even more than that, he presented soda texts,

the restriction of food marketing and the warning labels and so forth, had a four-fold increased benefit compared to the soda tax, which is being heavily fought here. There's incredible opposition to any limiting of marketing to kids. And you know, the saying it's the breach of the first amendment and free speech and so forth. The first amendment doesn't have to cater responsibility to protect

our children. If a foreign nation was doing to our kids, what the food industry is in our government is to his policies, you know, we'd go to war to protect our our kids and we just sort of sit back and let this happen. It's interesting not a constitutional expert which would be such an overstatement. I know nothing about the Constitution. There is a Constitution. Yeah, I know. Well, my understanding of the First Amendment is provided the advertising is quote unquote honest, it is constitutional. Is that, is that, and that's a gray area because what, if you say fruit loops are part of a healthy breakfast, how do we know that's honest.

I can't help but think about the analogous situation, which is tobacco. And what I think most people don't know, and it's possible I'm wrong, but I believe everything I'm about to say is correct, because at one point I knew this story well. When the surgeon general came out with his declaration of the harm of tobacco, which was in about the mid-60s, and that was the peak of smoking in the United States. I believe something to the tune of 50, 55% of people over the age of 18 smoked cigarettes at the time the surgeon general came out

and said definitively cigarettes are causing lung cancer. A number of things took place that got us to where we are today, which is somewhere below 20% of people. Last time I looked, it was about 18% of adults smoked. Yeah, a lawsuit is what worked. Well, but here's a big one. A big one was the removal of advertising. But here's the part that I was surprised to learn. It was voluntary on the part of tobacco. In other words, the tobacco industry was not banned from advertising. What the policymakers said is, the law is now that every time a tobacco commercial airs, it must be followed by an anti-tabacco commercial. So they didn't ban tobacco, they added anti tobacco. So every time you have a McDonald's commercial,

you say how bad food is, it's gonna kill you, right? I think it's interesting. Well, what's interesting is the anti tobacco ads were so devastating that the tobacco industry voluntarily withdrew its ads. They were getting hurt so bad by the anti-tabacco ads that they said enough is enough. And that's to this day,

we don't have tobacco ads on television. So, A, someone needs to fact check that to make sure I have that story correct, but I believe it is correct. And secondly, if it is, it at least suggests another angle to this problem, which is rather than go down the first amendment fight. Maybe, great, okay.

I love that idea. Keep all the commercials you want on, but we're gonna come up with something different. Now, of course, it's like a drug ad. You can eat this soda, but it's gonna cause obesity, diabetes, cancer, dementia, and kill you early. Fine, maybe that's a good idea. Yeah, and of course, tobacco is the easiest thing to demonize

because you just show somebody, you know, a hole in their throat after they've had throat cancer or a black lung or a corpse. I mean, there's so many grotesque ways that you can make the point that are more difficult with food. Let it cigarette. Yeah, yeah, exactly. But nevertheless, I've always found that to be a very powerful point because it's true that eventually taxes were introduced into tobacco and they turned out to be quite

powerful. Additional measures in 1989 was also a big step when secondhand smoking became well enough understood that they banned tobacco in airplanes and things like that. But I wonder how much of a playbook there is there on tobacco to copy? Well, there is, but guess what? The food industry is copying Tobacco's playbook to slower stall or stop this. And one of the most egregious things was something they've picked up recently, which is from the Tobacco Playbook. There have been soda taxes that passed, predominantly in the 2016 election in California and other states. And the soda industry has, I mean Vietnamese opposed to this. The past in California, they they spent about $38 million, avoiding these taxes against

these taxes. The Bloomberg and the Arnold Foundation spent about 20 million and it didn't pass. I mean, it did taxes did pass. And it freaked out the soda company. So the American beverage association essentially went and tried some bursts of tactics. So they went to California where the most of these tax were passed and they put in a ballot measure, which was designed to prohibit local taxes unless there was a 2-thirds majority, meaning you couldn't fund your school, your police department, your fire department, your cleanup, road cleanup, unless there was a 2-thirds majority.

That would hamper local governments dramatically, and they spent millions of dollars pushing this ballot measure, even though I had nothing to do with food. And at the last minute before the election, they went to Governor Brown, who's probably the most liberal government in the history of the United States, Governor Moonbeam, and they said, look, we'll pull this measure, but you have to put in place a preemptive law that prohibits any future taxes on soda or junk food. And it happened all behind closed doors, completely co-opted the government, impression them to do something that they didn't want to do. And they're doing this in state after state after state. And this is exactly what tobacco

did. So we can say, oh, they're not bad actors are trying to do things that good, they're making water, they're making low sugar beverages, they know exactly what they're doing. And they have an existential threat and they're trying to fight it in every way possible. Let's just one example. There's another funny example, which is an initiative called the global energy balance network, GERN or something like that. Yeah. On a hot O'Connor, I believe played a pretty important role at the New York Times exposing this for what the shamit was. Do you want to tell people a little bit about that? Sure, the global energy balance network.

So the whole idea of this is that energy balance is the mantra of the food industry. And what that means is all calories are the same. So to calories, broccoli, calories, no difference. So it's just a matter of balance. Calories in, calories out, moderation, et cetera, et cetera. And so they essentially run Apple Bomb, who was one of the top BP's at Coca Cola, put together a strategy because she saw the vilification of soda and all these horrible outcries against sugar that were unmet by enough aggressive force

from the sugar industry and the soda industry. And she said, look, let's start to something called the Global Energy Balance Network. She found a bunch of scientists who she could co-op paid them lots of money, funded their research to actually promote the idea that all calories are the same. It's like James Hill, for example, who was part of an NIH study, legitimate scientists, but completely co-opted. And they funded about 20 million, and they built the website. They organized this messaging and the talking points and they did it also to behind the scenes

and when there was discovery, and so they foiled free of information and that it was a public university, we got all the data. It was really clear how they were behind the scenes manipulating all this to fund little millions of dollars of corrupt research to prove their point and tell a different story.

And then soon as the New York Times article came out overnight, it was disbanded, saying it's run out of resources. I mean, come on, Coca-Cola has what? Billions and dollars are sales over here. They have plenty of resources and the whole thing plaps because of investigative journalism. But it just goes to show how these food companies are co-opting scientists, co-opting professional associations, co-opting social groups, co-opting the government, putting forth front groups and spinning all

kinds of misinformation in a very coordinated strategic strategy to disrupt public opinion, to confuse the public and to allow their shenanigans to keep going. Is the opposition to this industry that you can't fight this at the individual level? In other words, it has to be solved structurally because of the economic disparity. Let me ask the question another way. Why not focus all of the efforts on helping people understand so that they can make the informed choice, which is if you have to have a Coke, make it a diet Coke.

That may not be as good as I die. Yeah, but using that as an example, right? and so they can make the informed choice, which is if you have to have a Coke, make it a diet Coke. That may not be as good as I die. Yeah, but using that as an example, right? But in other words, do we really believe that this has to be solved at the level that seems almost unwinnable, which is fighting an unethical opponent with infinite resources?

I mean, that's a very dangerous combination. Yeah, well, if I have a tobacco, I mean, think about this country. But you don't need tobacco to live, right? The advantage that you would have as an antique tobacco crusade person is the ground is not muddied by the notion that tobacco is part of a group called food

that you need to live. Although it depends how you define food. Our fruit loops food, I don't think so. I mean, they're a highly industrialized process product. But they still fit into this bucket of food. And therefore, they sort of, they ride a little bit of the coat tails of, they're still riding on the, hey, we're putting B vitamins in these things and they're fortified and that that that that all this other sort of nonsense. So you're asking, do we need just a grassroots effort to focus on individual choice and action or do we need a public policy change?

Well, and I wouldn't even ask it as either or because the obvious answer to that would be you could do both. I guess what I'm getting at is, would you be better off putting more effort into sort of the grassroots campaign? It's complicated. When you think of the big changes that happened in policy in this country, the abolition. I mean, there were a few people running people

on the underground railroad and pushing for abolition back in their early 1800s, and it took decades and decades for change. But eventually our entire agricultural and economic system collapsed, that was founded on slavery, and it was reimagined and rebuilt. And I think look at women's rights, same thing, gay rights, civil rights. All those things are things that were really starting on the periphery through

grassroots movements, but had to push Congress to make different laws. And I think that's what has to happen. But I think we have to be smart about it as well. I mean, yes, consumers make a difference. That's why we're seeing General Mills committed a million acres to regenerative ag. It's why we're seeing big companies that nestly reformulating their products and why there's sustainable regenerative ag initiatives that are known. I mean, these companies are starting to see that the consumers want different things and they're starting to shift their product lines, they're starting to shift their

focus on how their supply chain works and where they get and source their products to regenerative agriculture So I do believe that the individual has a huge impact through their Vote with what they're eating their fork with their wallet and of course even with their vote and their voice And I think we don't use a ladder enough that has to all happen. I unfortunately I do believe that the individual is close matters. Yes, we can all have compost piles We can have community gardens we can have a garden in our backyard, we can choose to eat, we generally meet, we can feel like you, Peter, and go hunting our wild deer. I mean, I'm jealous, but that alone is not enough because they are structural problems that are not solvable unless we change

how we grow food, what we grow, how we process, distribute, market, sell, eat, and waste it. And if we don't deal with every aspect along that food chain, we're really not going to solve this problem. And we haven't really talked about it yet, but things like climate change are an increasingly important part of the conversation about food. And that is something that's just not in the radar, like how does fixing food fix climate. It does. It's actually one of the only ways to

really reverse climate change. Let's talk about that. Some people don't think climate change is real. They call it weather. I mean, whatever you want to call it, there's stuff happening. We're having a million acres flooded in the Midwest, cropland that's destroying farmers livelihood. We're seeing, you know, increasing weather patterns of hurricanes and wildfires in Australia and California. We're seeing melting of three trillion tons of ice from the Antarctica. These are just undeniable facts. Can I give you my two cents on this? Yeah. I think the term climate change global warming were sort of in retrospect, not the best ways to describe this phenomenon. And climate volatility would have been a better way to have explained it because one, it's actually more accurate.

And two, it provides a better explanation for what you're describing. Because when you say global warming is a problem, well then how do you explain a record cold year? It's the high highs, the low lows, and the frequency with which they're cycling, both through hurricanes, fires, things like that. So I wish we could have gone back in time and said, look, the problem is climate volatility. Yeah, instability. 2019 was the hottest year on record other than 2016 in human history.

So it all just can feel, we know it. And I think, so the question is, why is it happening? And what's the cause of it? And clearly most people think it's fossil fuels and picking up all the carbon that was stored in the earth's the cause of it. And clearly most people think it's fossil fuels and picking up all the carbon that was stored in the earth's crust and burning it and deleting that carbon through fossil fuels. And that's a big part of it, maybe a third, but half of it comes from our food system through all sorts of different mechanisms. One deforestation, you lose the carbon capture from the trees,

the soil destruction from destructive agriculture, which we have, which essentially is a method of industrial growing a food that tills the soil, which disrupts the normal organic matter, causes soil erosion, releases carbon environment. It also, when you look at the soil as an issue itself, it's probably the biggest cause and the biggest solution to fixing climate change. And most people don't think about that. They think about oil, not soil, but a third to 40% of all the carbon in the atmosphere today that's causing climate volatility is from the loss of soil. That's a staggering amount. Explain how that's the case.

Yeah, well, the soil, when it's alive and has living matter and carbon in the soil Organic matter which is carbon it can hold three times the amount of carbon It's in the atmosphere today, which is a trillion tons of carbon it can hold three trillion tons The UN estimated that if we take two million of the five million degraded hectares of land around the world and We intensively use regenerative agriculture, which I'll explain a minute, and restore the soil. We could stop climate change and delay the progression for about 20 years. And it would cost 300 billion dollars, which is essentially what we pay for

year for diabetes in America through Medicare. And it's basically the amount of budget for the total global military spend for just two months or 60 days. So this is a solvable problem. And the reason that the soil is such an issue is that it basically takes when the grasses are on there and the plants are on there, it sucks the carbon out of the environment. Can you explain that difference between soil and dirt? Yes. Soil is alive.

Soil has all kinds of bugs in it, micro-risal fungi. It has all kinds of bacteria. It has all kinds of carbon in it from the plants. And it holds a huge amount of water. You can hold, for example, for every 1% organic matter, you can hold 27,000 gallons of water, which would prevent floods and droughts, which it does, and creates more resilient farms. Explain that again. When you have soil, it's like a sponge. So when it rains, instead of the rain running off or running through, gets stored like a sponge in the soil so that you don't need to irrigate, that you don't have to worry about floods and droughts. Now the reason we had so much of these floods and these flooded farm fields in the Midwest was because these soils

are just dead. And the Ipsosumore and more fertilizer. So we're killing the soil by using fertilizer, by pesticides, herbicides, tilling, not using cover crops, not using crop rotations, not using animals in an integrated way to actually create more soil. And everything we're doing is just destroying the soil. When you have a live soil, when you have the ability of these plants to suck out carbon dioxide, because they breathe carbon dioxide. That's what plants do. They breathe out oxygen,, virtuous cycle. And the carbon dioxide from the atmosphere gets pulled through the plants into the soil and stays there. And you can build soil simply by using this technology and integrating animals that poop and pee. So I don't think I was aware of that.

I'll put my ignorance on full display. I always assume that the majority of the carbon that came in, that the plant brought in through the photo cell, was for carbon fixation, which was creating biomatter. So in other words, carbon and oxygen are coming in the form of carbon dioxide. That carbon is being fixated to other carbons.

That's how we make hydrocarbons within the plants. Yeah, carbon hydrates. That's right. And then the oxygen is being fixated to other carbons. That's how we make hydrocarbons within the plant. Carpahydrates, that's right. And then the oxygen is being released, but I didn't realize that there was any carbon dioxide stored in soil. Yeah, and if you look at the mechanism, it goes into the plant, but it also goes into the roots. And so you've got this incredible root system,

and you've got microisol fungi that are fed up. Oh, I see. So you're just saying the hydrocarbon within the roots of the plant is the storage, not in the soil, per se, not in the actual dirt and bacteria. Well, no, no. Then it gets eaten by the bacteria, eaten by its mass of micro-risal fungi, and it creates a lot of necrotic dead, but like actually organic matter.

It's an incredibly rich living organism, and dirt is just dead. Dirt doesn't hold water. It doesn't have much carbon in it, it doesn't have much nutrients. And in order to actually extract the nutrients from the plants, you have to have organic matter, which allows this end bacteria and all these microzole fungi, which make the nutrients in the soil available to the plant. And since we are growing food in dirt,

we see 50% less nutrient density of even healthy food, like broccoli has less minerals than it did 50 years ago. So you have all these complicated factors that are driving the destruction of our soil. Fertilizer is another one. I don't think people really understand that fertilizer store. There's 400 billion pounds of fertilizer

used everywhere in the world. It's a seven-fold increase over the last 40 years because there are two-thirds as effective. The way you make fertilizer is a chemically intensive process that uses energy. It's one of the biggest utilizers of energy and the number one, fertilizer of fracking produced natural gas, which I didn't even know. So when you look at the fertilizer, they use more natural gas and exon and in order to make the gas i'm sorry they use more fertilizer that exon produces so they use more energy natural gas produces yes these more natural gas and then exon uses so the yara and mosaic is big fertilizer companies are making using this intensive energy process that needs natural gas. When you frack, you actually release methane from these methane leaks that come out of these fracking wells.

Recently, there's an Ohio that you could see from space, and that actually is about a quarter of all methane-release gas in the environment today, which is as much as factory farm cows. And that's from growing plants. Do you know what percent of, I don't know the numbers anymore, but there was a day when the United States was consuming 20 million barrels of oil and oil equivalent per day.

It's probably a bit less than that today. Do you know what amount of that is in the production, transport, consumption of food? One fifth of all our oil consumption is for the food system. That's more than all cars, planes, boats, transportation combined. So it's a staggering amount of oil,

and part of it is a set. It can't be combined though, because there's no combined. All transportation combined is less than one fifth of our total oil consumption. Because a lot of it's industry and other things. So yeah, it's pretty staggering. And so the fracking and 20% of our energy utilization is to make fertilizer, deliver seed, harvest, pesticides, herbicides, all come from fossil fuels. So the fertilizer

starting to even worse because once you know you have all the gas you're using, the methane release from that, when you put on the soil, it kills the soil. And sorry, the purpose of fertilizer is to provide nitrogen phosphorus, right? And nitrogen, yes, nitrogen to the plant. So again, just taking us to back for the biochemistry understanding of this, I think plant biology by the way is so incredible. Pretty. Because I don't think people appreciate the significance of carbon fixation, how complicated a chemical reaction it is, to take carbon and join it to carbon like

a plant can do. So, I mean, it's very energy intensive, which is why it requires sunlight. So, you get this photosynthetic thing. But basically, plants need carbon, which they're getting from the air. They need nitrogen and phosphorus, which they're getting from their soil, and they need energy and water, which they're getting from the environment, and then they make biomass. Yeah.

Exactly. So, the fertilizer is where we give them the nitrogen and the phosphorus, correct? Yeah. But most of the fertilizer that was growing plants historically came from either nitrogen fixing plants like the legumes or from the animals. The reason we have 50 feet of topsoil in some areas in this country, 150 years ago, is because of all millions of bison running around. They're like bison and elk and all these ruminants that were running around in big herds, chomping things down, moving on to the next spot,

peeing and pooping, digging the thing, saliva makes the grass grow. So it's this beautiful, symbiotic system that literally tends to feed of topsoil. And it's not that we have too many cows, it's how we're growing. I mean, I think it's worth pausing for a moment to explain for folks. I'll try to do it quickly. There was a day, believe it or not, like 10 years ago, when I was obsessed with understanding agriculture. So everything I'm saying is 10 years old.

So you can correct me if I'm wrong. But basically, if you use corn as the model system and you look at the only metric that really matters, which is bushels per acre per year, yield. It all comes down to yield. Basically, from the Civil War to about the end of World War II, if you look at crop yield and you see the plot, it was about 20 bushels per acre per year. So every acre could produce 20 bushels of corn per year. Obviously it fluctuated quite a bit from year to year, but it was a largely horizontal jagged line from about the end of the Civil War to the end of World War II.

And then something really interesting happens at the end of World War II, that line just turns up and just almost in a linear fashion rises to 200 bushels per acre per year. And I think what a lot of people erroneously assume is, oh, it's the goddamn GMO. Well, actually no, not at all. GMO didn't even kick in until that number was 160. It was nitrogen-based fertilizer, crop rotation, industrial farming, meaning the ability to actually use machines to not just have a farmer out there doing something. It was selective breeding, crossing. So it was a bunch of things that came in and then basically GMO has put like a 10% plus up on that from a yielding perspective. Maybe that's debatable. So yeah, anyway, the point here is this process really began in earnest about 70 years ago.

And prior to 70 years ago, it's been remarkably flat. So of course, this goes back to something you said earlier, which is post-World War II, we had to figure out how to feed a bunch of people. And 20 bushels per acre per year was not cutting it. We're now 10 times the yield as you're pointing out at quite a cost. Quite a cost, yeah. So the question then is, I mean, you talk about in your book how we're wasting a third of the food produced.

So we don't really need 20, 200 bushels per acre per year if we stop wasting. Have you figured out or at least calculated what you think the sweet spot is, which is if you were to back off the aggressive yield measures, not waste how much of the benefit could you recapture that was there when, for example, we used animals as our fertilizer? That's right. That's sort of a fallacy in the idea that we can't produce the same amount of food using regenerative methods. I think that's been disproven.

You believe, in other words, there is 200 bushels per acre per year using regenerative methods? Well, let me just share a quick story. Now, I want to share this story and I'm going to come back to the fertilizer and talk about the rest of the different aspects that are causing climate change.

I think people need to understand that. There's a guy named Gabe Brown who was a North Dakota farmer, 5,000 acre farm devastated by Hale, devastated by weather, and was about to go bankrupt. And then decided he wanted to try regenerative agriculture and many years ago he started it. And now he says he's built 29 inches of soil. He uses no chemical inputs, makes his own fertilizer

from the animals and the plants that he plants, the nitrogen fixing plants. He produces more food, better quality food, and makes 20 times as much money as his neighbor. So in terms of productivity, our regenerative farm is far more productive. And I think there's this fallacy that we need green revolution, we need industrial agriculture to feed the world. That's really been disproven. And I think that's the mantra of big ag. It's the mantra of Monsanto, and now, which is bare, and a lot of these Big Ag

Rechemical companies that are trying to push their products on the marketplace. And so I think we have to sort of be smart about going, wait a minute, it's not just about trying to sort of go back to some old form of agriculture that isn't going to produce the yields. No, I think this is not what was done. This is a sort of a new way of thinking. It combines organic. It also goes beyond that. And the reason is it sort of interrupts all these problems that are actually driving climate change. So we talked about the fertilizer. Once you put it on the soil, it damages the soil and it releases nitrous oxide, which is 300 times more potent of greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. So you're getting all the fracking, you're getting the destruction of the soil on top of that. And it's like a triple threat.

As a back end side effect, all that runs off into the river streams and lakes and goes into the oceans and it's created dead zones and 400 areas around the world decides a Europe. There's one the size of New Jersey in the Gulf of Mexico that kills 212,000 metric tons of fish every year. It's a lot of gumbo and sushi. And there's 400 of those around the world that are feeding 500 billion people. So this is what fertilizer does alone.

And then of course you have theforestation, the solar erosion, and so forth. And why is that not a problem when the fertilizer is coming from an organic nitrogen source versus an inorganic one. Right, so an organic nitrogen source poop goes in there and nitrogen fixing plants and it stays in the soil as opposed to running off through this degraded soil into the river stream. So is the issue the fertilizer or the nature of the soil that can't hold the fertilizer? Both. In order to get dirt to produce plants, you need to put on huge amounts of fertilizer. Like I said, the increase in the use of fertilizer is sevenfold compared to 40 years ago. So, if I'm understanding what you're saying, the problem with fertilizer is it allows us

to be lazy and rely less on healthy soil. Because you can dump fertilizer on dirt and eventually grow. Beating a dead horse. But if you actually want the healthiest soil possible, you will get your nitrogen contribution from an element that stays within the ecosystem of the soil because it's a part of it. And therefore, you're not going to have the runoff. Is that accurate? Exactly. And so you've got the frustration, you've got the amateurs of soil and all the ways we talked about.

And you've got transportation, refrigeration, processing, distribution, those all cost energy, and then food waste, which is a big cost. So how do you estimate that that is a staggering number that a third of our food is wasted? That is just what the sort of conventional assessments are around food waste in the world. It's not my opinion, it's what the UN says.

But I mean, what's the methodology by which one calculates that? Good question, I don't know the answer. Good question, but that's a good question. But I think it's a generally accepted thing. It's between 30 to 40%. It's different for different reasons in the developing world versus here. We throw out food in our kitchen.

They have loose food in the food chain because of lack of storage and transportation refrigeration. So you've got all these causes of, which add up to about 50% of climate change. And by shifting how we grow food and focusing on regenerative agriculture, which specifically means regenerating soil and ecosystems, in other words,

increasing the amount of organic matter in the soil, increasing water retention, using crop rotations, using cover crops, so there's no bare soil, so the soil doesn't. We're using animals in very specific grazing patterns that mimics nature to actually intensively graze the land and move the animals around to actually stimulate the growth of the plants, stimulate the soil, and so forth. So all those techniques could be easily applied and are done in literally millions of acres around the world with great benefit and high productivity

and mitigating climate at the same time. What's the obstacle to it? The obstacle is, you know, you've got a $15 trillion food industry that's dependent on the products of industrial farming and is actually selling the seeds, it's selling the fertilizer, it's selling the pesticides and herbicides, it's selling all the... Is it the convenience? Like, for example, when you talk about the gentleman you alluded to earlier, who basically switched, how many acres does he have? 5,000. 5,000 acres and he switched over to fully regenerative. Sounds like he's increased his profitability dramatically. And climb and resilience. And has that increase in profitability come through higher price, higher volume or lower cost? I mean, the farmers lose an average in this country

about $1,600 a year. That's their net is minus $1,600 a year. Her acre. No, per farm. Like if you're a farmer, the average farmer, according to the USDA and other statistics, loses money every year. He's making money because of the subsidies.

What do you mean? Like, it's the only reason he can make a living because of the subsidy. This guy in North Dakota? No, no, no, no. The performer who's losing $1,600 is... Yeah, I mean, they have right off the subsidies and so forth. But I mean, Trump just bailed them out for $20 billion,

which is almost as much as all the subsidies that exist in the country annually, which is a lot of money. And the farmers struggle, and they're caught between basically the big ag and the government. The government saying you need to produce these foods. Here's the money to support you to do it.

But that money then goes to buy the seed from Monsanto or the glyphosate from Monsanto or the other agrochemicals and fertilizers from Yara. So they're taking, they're just sort of the pass-through of the money from the government to big ag and the industry. And that's the problem. Whereas this guy gave Brown and North Dakota, he doesn't have to buy seed, he doesn't have to buy fertilizer, he doesn't have to buy glyphosate, he doesn't have to buy pesticides, he doesn't need a lot of irrigation because his soil holds so much water. He has a diverse ecosystem of animals and plants

that he can grow and sell and make a profit. It's more than the others. And how long would it take someone like him to make that transition? So it's about three to five years depending. So we need a massive effort for supporting and transforming our agricultural system to regenerative ag. And there's groups that are working on this like Kishtaground and Carbon Underground that are consulting with governments around the world to help them understand this. And the UN gets this.

There's a huge report called Climate Change in land use that came out in August, 20, I think August, 2019, which laid these problems out and how we were degrading our land that's contributing to climate. And the solution is multifaceted, but includes restoring these degraded lands. And people say, oh, you know, we can't do this at scale. It's too expensive. The truth is, if you look at all the conservation land in this country, if you look at all the conservation land in this country, if you look at the greater lands that aren't being used properly, if you look at land that's used to grow corn and soy for factory farm animals, that could be converted.

And we literally double the amount of cows we produce every year on regenerative farms than we do now, not that we should, not that we need all that meat, but I'm just saying the argument that it's not scalable, it's not cost-effective, it's just not true. And the truth is, you can say you can be vegan, fine, but we should all grow more plants, but there's a lot of land on the planet, about 40% of the arable land, you can't grow food for humans. So these animals upcycle, inedible food, and put it into a form that we can eat that's extremely nutrient dense. There's a beautiful symbiotic ecosystem here, and you don't have to eat the animals if you don't want to, I don't care, but they're needed for the regeneration of soil.

Who has done the most comprehensive life cycle assessment on this transformation as you describe it? So how many acres are there of agricultural land in the United States approximately? Oh, good. Lord, I should know that. I don't. It's a lot of millions. It's a lot of millions. So if you take that number and on a per acre basis, do the calculation of over five years, everybody transitions to a more regenerative, appropriately rotated, covered egg position. How many tons of CO2 can be sequestered per acre under those scenarios. A lot. So, the book called Drawdown is a wonderful explanation of the top solutions that exist today that don't need to be invented, that can draw down carbon out of the environment and collectively the food solutions. Do you know the author?

Paul Hock, and yeah, he's a good friend of mine. Yeah, actually, I'd like to interview him. He looks like someone who would be interesting to interview on this topic. Yeah, he's coming up with a new book called Regenerate, which is how do we regenerate our health regenerate the soil and so forth And I've expectedly found that the food solutions were the top solutions to fixed climate change that aren't really being implemented And it's been estimated at this much investment in billions of real results and this much value in tr in trillions reduces carbon by this many gigatons, and it's all in the book. So the calculations have been done, the analysis have been done, and I think it's been estimated by some that we could draw it anywhere from 30 to 100% of all the carbon that's

been released since the Industrial Revolution if we can scale this up. What's the biggest counter argument to this? There isn't any. I mean, I think the argument is we need to have industrial agriculture to feed the world. That's the mantra. It's like calories are all the same. It's that same mantra that isn't science-based, but that suits the needs of agriculture and agriculture business. But there's no one that's got a pushback argument that says no, these calculations are overly optimistic, and you would introduce a new problem if you do this. Of course, there are people all the time who were trying to refute this and whether it's agribusiness

or even the vegan communities come out and said, regenerative agriculture is not going to solve a problem. People like Pat Brown from Possible Foods has been really clearly stating that we need to get rid of all meat that even regenerative meat doesn't work in terms of protecting the environment

and in quotes various studies that were, I do analyze in my book, FoodFix, talk about, you know, how they're flawed and actually miss a lot of the data. So, I think does take time to create regenerative agriculture, it does take effort. But once you do it, there's an incredible value chain that gets put in place.

And, you know, there are countries that are understanding this. You know, we take out of the earth, a lot of natural capital, about $125 trillion a year of resources and soil and everything else that we steal from the earth. We don't put it back and it's running out. And how much did you say?

125 trillion and the global GDP is probably 80 to 90%. I was about to say that's more than the global GDP. Yeah, which is about 80 to 90, right? It's more than that every year. And there's a lot of people working on this. For example, it's a private equity company called Farmland LP that's buying up conventional farms, converting them to regenerative agriculture, and moving those farms

from single-digit profits to high double digit. Their first fund had a 67% return. And when they look at the benefit they provide to the environment, we call ecosystem services. That's the $125 million of ecosystem services, the natural capital we borrow. They add $21 million of value on their farms versus a similar amount of conventional farms would actually steal $8 million of value from the earth. And countries like Costa Rica are paying for ecosystem services for their farmers or

paying them to produce more soil to actually conserve water to increase biodiversity which we haven't even talked about, which is another topic. I want to get to it. Let's see. Talk to me a little bit about, you know, it's funny, Pat Brown was one of my professors in medical school. Oh geez. Okay. So, I mean, I don't know if a lot of people realize what a prominent scientist Pat was and if you look at the type of work Pat did in the 90s, I mean, it's not inconceivable he could have gone down the path of a Nobel Prize. I mean, that's smart guy, but the challenge is you don't have to vilify people wanting to do regenerative agriculture. Yeah, and I was just going to say, I don't know anything about Pat.

I know very little about their philosophy around why they've created the, is it the impossible burger? What are the, there's two of these out there ones beyond beyond burger beyond meat and Impossible burger, okay, and I can never get the two of them straight But I mean one is P based which is the beyond meat and one is GMO soy based, which is okay, and that's up the GMO one must be pets If you look at the light you last about a life cycle analysis Quantis which is an independent life cycle analysis company did analysis of the impossible burger compared to Secondly, the analysis company did an analysis of the Impossible Burger compared to Regenerly raised beef burger.

And the Impossible Burger was far better than a conventional factory farm burger. But it added 3.5 kilos of carbon for every burger you ate, which one did? The Impossible Burger. So say that again. So the Impossible Burger was better than a factory farm burger by far, but it still added 3.5 kilos of carbon to the environment for every burger. Are we generally raised burger, including methane, everything, all the inputs, took out three and a half kilos of carbon, meaning you'd have to eat one, we generally raised

beef burger to offset the carbon emissions of an impossible burger. So I'm not against plant-based means, but I think we can't overstate the importance of and what by comparison, what was the factory farm burger? Do you remember how much carbon was added? Three and a half kilos of carbon were removed. No, no, sorry, the factory... Oh, it was a lot. It was like 50 or who was a lot. It was significantly less. But still, it's not the only answer when you think about scaling up impossible burgers on a GMO monocrop soy field using tons of life estate, which has all sorts of harmful consequences, causing soil erosion to the way we farm, damaging the waterways,

damaging everything else. I mean, just it doesn't even add up, right? So let's do it right. So let's talk a little bit about GMO. This is a loaded topic. Again, I think people don't understand what it means. And that's sort of, I want to talk about it, but I also wanna just put it in context for people so that we understand what GM means and why it came about.

So we go back to the 1940s, we had growing old maze on 20 bushels per acre per year. Well, we gotta remember that used to be something called Tia Cente. That was like this little tiny silly crop that was the size of our finger and it had like four little kernels crop that was the size of our finger and it had like four little kernels on it.

That's where corn came from. So I was explaining this to my kids the other day because my kids are obsessed with gardening and stuff. And I was saying, look, there's four things about a plant that really matter. If your planting crops yield matters, how much do you have? Product profile. Is it good eater now? Yeah. Or in the case of Tia Centae, it had a lousy product profile because it just had four kernels on it.

Harvest ability, the other problem with Tia Centae is the little kernels would always fall off it. You actually wanted the kernels to stay on the thing so you could harvest the whole plant and crop protection. Can you keep it away? Can you keep the critters away from it? So GMO has had by far its greatest impact in crop protection. The BT insertion is basically what allowed roundup ready crops to be resistant to glyphosate. We'll use the terms glyphosate. BC is for the cotton, right? Oh, yeah. It's pesticide resistant. Yeah, pesticide

resistant. So there's a glyphosate resistance that, and'll use like I said, we'll use glyphosate and round up interchangeably. But if you could basically genetically modify a plant to be resistant to the thing that you use to kill the pest, you can use that thing liberally, right? I mean, for all the promise of GMO, but basically the only two inventions have been the BTS to sideM is a lot of the things that exist. Yeah, that's it. And that's like two massive increases in the use of pesticides. The first point to make here is most of the yield gains came long before this. So obviously you do get some yield gain with crop protection. So there's an overlap.

But virtually all of it came before this. All of the harvestability, to my knowledge, there's been no GM addition to harvestability and no GM addition to product profile. Although some might argue that it's low hanging fruit. For example, I know Monsanto was very aggressively looking at trying to engineer tomatoes that could grow in brackish water. And that way you would obviously open up the

ability to grow it in areas that where you don't have fresh water. Okay, so with all of that said, the next question for the person to be thinking about that you're going to take us through is, there are at least two things about GM that could be problematic. The first is, it could be problematic that you were eating an organism that now has a gene that looks different from the gene that we evolved to consume it. In other words, it now makes different proteins that it didn't make that are foreign. And because food is information, so how is that different information affecting your biology and how is it regulating the different body functions? I don't think we know much about that. The second thing that could be harmful about GM is that by its very success,

it enables the use of chemicals in a higher concentration than you would be able to use them in the absence of GM. And we'll use Roundup or Glyphosate as the poster child for that. Can you talk through both of those and what the state of the evidence is for the harm of GM, because it should be noted that what you're about to say is that the backdrop or stands at odds with what the USDA would tell us, what the National Association of Scientists would tell us,

which is GMO is safe, feel free to consume it liberally. And so tell us where you think that might be questionable. Well, there's a bunch of issues there. First is it's a large uncontrolled experiment on humanity. Just like Chris Goe was invented in 1911 as this great new invention and was in our food supply for, I don't know, 80 or 90 years more before people were like, wait a minute,

this isn't good for us since killing hundreds of thousands of people a year. Let's get it out. So we don't know. I think there's animal studies that look concerning, there's various issues. I think in terms of the use of these chemicals, there's two issues. There are one is the plants are increasingly mutating to be resistant to these substances. So, you need more pesticides and more glyphosate to do the same job. So, there's always weeds that are becoming resistant to glyphosate that they're trying to fight.

And that's a problem because we're using more and more of these chemicals. Europe followed a different path. It didn't allow GMO foods, didn't allow any of that. And so what the comparative analysis of agriculture in the US versus Europe was no difference in yields and far less used to pesticides and herbicides. So it didn't fulfill its promise of yields and decrease use of chemicals. It was transient. I believe there was a transient reduction in pesticide use until we started to see resistance. Is that correct? Yeah. And we're using

more and more of these chemicals. And glyphosate is 70% of the agrochemicals use on the planet. It's increasingly being linked to harmful human effects. So forget about the insertion of the gene as an issue. We know that these chemicals are harmful because do we know this? This is an important point. Yeah, I mean, aside from the litigation, which is not a scientific judgment, it's this additional judgment, but there's 14,000 lawsuits around glyphosate. There's been billion dollar settlements.

A friend of mine's a lawyer is involved with those lawsuits. He told me that on Discovery, they found that the Trump administration said to Monsanto Naubeir, we have your back, and the EPA recently is trying to shut down any further lawsuits on glyphosate, which is fascinating because it is disclosed emails. And I think the effects on animal studies are really clear. I just read a study on epigenetics in glyphosate where they looked at interventional studies on rats, where they looked at giving the generation zero glyphosate and infected their grant rats in multiple ways through prostate disease, cancer, various things. But we've seen this before, Mark. I mean, we've seen lots of things where in the lab,

they're using doses that are significantly higher than the human exposure and or laboratory animals behave differently than humans. Okay, fine, but are we willing to take that risk? I know some of their study where glyphosate disrupts the microbiome in significant ways in animals, and the dose that's in one impossible burger is 110 times the dose that was using the animal studies to totally disrupt the microbiome of the rats. But do we know how bioavailable it is and how much it remains? Well, it's in on the food. I mean, I try to eat organic. I try to eat

non-chimmo. Like I travel. I'm not perfect. And I did my urine test. I look at my glyphosate levels. And I was shocked. I have a 50th percent hog glyphosate in my urine. How do we do this test? You could pee in a bucket and you send it into the lab. Great Plains lab has this test available and you can check your glyphosate levels. I was shocked. And I think most of us are sort of walking toxic dumps. And if you look at average fat biopsy of a human, that's full of DDT, dioxin, pesticides,

that's just like, it's pretty bad. So I think we are still in an uncontrolled experiment. So your view is basically to take the precautionary principle, which is look, we may never know this definitively. There's enough suggestion that this could be harmful through animal models or other things like that. I mean, for example, I mean, again, I'm just, I'm pushing back not because I don't necessarily agree

with you on a personal level and make a lot of the same choices myself. You're not sprinkling glyphosate on your salads? You know, I stopped a couple of weeks ago. I used, I just, I love the taste of glyphosate. your salads? You know, I stopped a couple of weeks ago. I used, I just love the taste of glyphosate. You're not a big glyphosate. You're like putting it all over your salon. But again, I always think it's important to sort of at least

let people understand when something is where our level of confidence is very high versus modest, but there's a precautionary approach to take out of. In other words, I feel much more comfortable saying tobacco is causally responsible for lung cancer than I feel saying glyphosate is causally responsible for human disease. I just don't I just haven't been convinced by the day. If it was the only way to grow food, fine, deal with the risk. It's not it's not the best way.

It's not the most effective way. And there is potential risk. And there's real concern about our industrial agricultural system on the earth and so on, biodiversity. And also, I sort of interrupted you when you were about to make a point about biodiversity. That was something I learned recently. Yeah, it's an important issue. Before I get to, I just want to finish this thought about how this industrial system has

sort of usurped small farmholders, which are the majority of farmers that feed the majority of the world. And these farmers are getting squeezed by these big ag companies are coming in and thing they're going to improve their livelihood, but then forced them to buy their seed, forced them to buy their chemicals, and there's increasing suicides and terrible economic consequences from these farmers around the world because they're not able to maintain a livelihood doing what they're doing.

So it's not just that it's an issue around health, it's also a issue around squeezing a lot of the people who do grow most of the food in the world. So it's another issue I talk about in the book. Before we leave that then, do you know what the median farm is in the United States in terms of acreage? I don't, I did know, but I can't keep all the facts.

It's a, and what is approximately, most farmers in the world is like less than five acres is most of the farmers in the world that feed most of the world. Does that include the United States? No. We're more industrial. Yeah, more industrial. Yeah, for sure. I mean, there's less and less farms for you and for farmers. It's decreasing all the time bigger and bigger farms. I mean, girl butts set it under nicks and go bigger, go home. In doing the research for your bookmark, did you spend any time with these farmers and did you sense in them a degree of dissatisfaction

or let down with this promise of big egg that came about 20 years ago? Oh my God, yeah, I think more and more farmers are thinking about this. It was an article in Time Magazine where all the democratic candidates and Iowa were going out of the farms. And the farmers were like, look, our livelihoods are being destroyed. We're having floods or not able to grow food.

The system isn't working. We want to explore regenerative agriculture. So it's definitely happening not because they're hippies who want to go back to the land. It's happening just from an economic imperative and the way to restore and save their farms. But do farmers feel captive now to Monsanto and Pioneer and these other companies? They do. They have a system and they don't have a way to get out of it. So they're in a vicious cycle. They've got all this capital and their equipment. They're stuck in this vicious cycle of growing the same crops and they have no way out.

So we do need a bridge for these people and we do need mechanisms through government and private equity and others to actually help fund the transition. I think, like I said, the U.S. had $300 billion, boom, we could solve the problem of climate change and give us 20 years more runway to solve the bigger issues. So it's a massive effort that could actually transform our quality of our food, the quality of our soils, save our water, increase biodiversity, which we'll talk about, and so many of our global problems just starting at the seed. So back to biodiversity. So what that means is that we talk about extinction of species, but it's not just some frog in the Amazon. We've lost 90% of our edible plant species. Basically 60% of our calories comes from corn and wheat and rice

and soy. And mostly from 12 species, we've lost 90% of our edible plant species, half of all our livestock species. You know, there's a lot of weird animals all over the place, and you travel the foreign countries, you see these weird cows and weird pigs and weird goats, and they all look different. Now they're all the same that we produce in this country. And we have lost 75% of our pollinator species,

from which our agriculture depends, which Pynethine said, if we lose bees from the face of the earth humans have four years left to live, which may be true or not, but it's an existential threat butterflies pollinators all damage also by these pesticides and chemicals that were factories retooled to produce agrochemicals. That's what the bombs were, I mean how Timothy McVey bombed an Oklahoma, that building was through going to a farm store and buying nitrogen fertilizer and turning into a bomb. That's where it actually came from. So these chemicals that we use in the soil, the methods of farming,

destroy the ecosystems, both from all those, but also the biodiversity of the soil, the organism of farming, destroy the ecosystems, both from all those, but also the biodiversity of the soil, the organism of the soil that are so critical, the micro-risal fungi, the bacteria, the nematose, the worms, all these different animals that live in the soil that are necessary to actually create food and to create sustainable agriculture. And so I think we're sort of asleep to the idea

that we're sort of running out of soil, running out of these biodiversity animals that are essential for our health and our survival. I mean, coral reefs, I mean, the climate change, we're destroying all the coral reefs. And again, 500 billion people depend on these coral reefs for food. So how would one go about moving the needle on this? Well, I'm trying. I'm trying. So I wrote the book, Food Fix, How to Save Our Health, Our Economy, our communities, and our planet one by two time in order to lay out the problem

and lay out the solutions. And they're multifaceted. They're what citizens can do, and what can happen in business innovation. Like I mentioned, bring, come back and talk about an example around food waste. And they're what policymakers need to do. And there needs to be the political well, but it's really tough. So can we start at the bottom of that? And let me ask you another couple of questions. What does organic really mean when it comes to plant or meat? If a person says, okay, Mark, you've definitely convinced me that I want to be more mindful of what I'm buying. Let's just assume that this is a person who has the economic flexibility to make the food choices that might even increase their their budget on groceries. So first of all, what does it mean when you go to the grocery store and you see two boxes

of strawberries, one's organic, one's not? Well, organic is a certification that's delivered by the government. It means no antibiotics, no pesticides, no herbicides, and has it to be certified that it's clean of all of that. However, it doesn't certify the method of growing the food. So Michael Paul in his book on where it's lemma talked about industrial organic. So if you have these massive monocrop lettuce fields, you're doing tillage, you're not to uncover crops, you're not to encroperations, you're also not super helping the soils better than industrial farming, but it's not fully regenerative. industrial farming, but it's not fully regenerative. Regenitive is the method of farming that actually includes organic, but goes beyond it. And there is now a regenerative organic certification,

which you can look up and I talk about my book. But the chemicals and the pesticides that we consume have an impact on our health. It's been estimated that pesticide exposure, just in children, is responsible for an average loss of seven IQ points or 41 million IQ points in kids. So there's a lot of brain power that's killed and not to mention how many per kid. I think it's like seven IQ points. There's literally millions of pounds of these pesticides that are in our food supply and our water.

And some plants have more than others. So I'm on the board of the environmental working group and they produce a really great guide called the dirty dozen and the clean 15 so you can look at that list And if you're having economic issues or whatever you as well strawberries are the worst thing I could buy if they're not organic whereas you know banana or an avocado Maybe not a big deal if it's not organic so you can look at that list and go I'm gonna say money by buying organic of the things that are the worst contaminated. And I can cheat on the other ones that are not. And as part of that, because in the case of bananas and avocado, you're eating what's inside

and not outside, whereas in the strawberry, it's like got this surface that collects it all. Celery is terrible. And there were have anything but organic celery, for example. And meat, besides not using hormones in the animals and not giving them antibiotics, is there anything else that comes in the distinction of organic meat? Again, it's not using the inputs that are chemical inputs that are on the corn that you have or the soy that they have. So that's good. But again, it doesn't mean that they couldn't be fed organic corn

that's still grown in ways that are destroying the soil. So we really have to sort of think more nuanced about what that means. That's why regenerative is sort of organic plus. You know, it's like a home-lux level. How ubiquitous is that regenerative, it's not organic label. It's not.

It's not. It's not even a label yet. There's just a proposal for a regenerative organic certification. And yet there are farms who are doing this and there's ways to regulate and measure it. And I think the government's going to be able to sort of put out field service workers to measure soil, the measure of these things to look at. Is it regenerative? And places like Meriposa Ranch in California, you can buy half a cow with a bunch of friends and it's eight bucks a pound, which for a foreign-owned serving is less than you'd pay for McDonald's hamburger. So you can do a little ingenuity and effort you can actually start to find how to get these things. But it's the demand that's going to increase. And

that's why for example, General Mills and Denon and Nestle and Pepsi even are looking at how do we get our supply chain to be more regenerative and how are we going to move that needle? It's kind of exciting to me. Is there anything else a consumer can do absent the types of bigger changes that you're pushing for and hoping for? I mean, I think being really focused on what you eat and where it comes from, buying at local farmers markets,

joining a community supported agriculture, looking for regenerative sources online, buying things together with friends. What are the resources people can use to find those things? Are these centralized in any way? Yeah, they're on my book. They're on my book, Food Fix. And they're on our website. What's the URL? FoodFixBook.com. And there's a video in there in five steps to heal the planet

in yourself. And there's an action guide that is good for citizens, businesses, governments and so forth, so that it says, no, what can you do? And so yes, you can vote with your fork and all the ways I just mentioned, you can be active in your community. Maybe you should have a compost pile. I'm talking about that, but you can be active to sort of have community garden. You know, my son for his fifth birthday, it's like, okay, what do you want, Reese? You wanted a compost box. All right. There you have. Hard it was to find one. You couldn't go to Home Depot and get one. You couldn't go to the local garden store like it took.

Really? They had a lot of Amazon. You can buy them and have them shipped to you. I think ultimately, it sounds silly. I think ultimately we did that, but I was, I think with kids, sometimes it's fun to take them to the place and get the thing.

I was amazed how hard it was to get a big compost. You don't even need that. I just put a little fence, like kind of some two by fours and built a little box and you just throw it in my backyard and just throw it in there year after year. And I've got like tons of feet of this dark, rich soil, like a humus that goes on the garden. It's great. If you want to be politically active, you can go in your municipality and say, look to

your local governments, he, look, let's have a composting law. Let's make it mandatory, like San Francisco did. You you can't go and throw your garbage in San Francisco anymore. And for example, in I just don't know if I want to do anything San Francisco is doing it. I mean France if you have mandatory composting there and if you don't you get to find you go to jail and mass chooses they passed a law that if you make a ton of organic waste every week, you can't throw it out in the landfill. And they actually created innovation there. There's people coming up like dairy farmers are making less money, struggling. The dairy farmer creates these anaerobic digesters, which gets food waste. They get about a hundred tons of food waste every week in this one farm from like whole foods

and other grocery stores. They put in their manure from the animals. It basically combusts in this digester, produces electricity for 1,500 homes, it makes the farmer an extra 100 grand a year, and it's a win-win-win for everybody. Yeah, to me, I always feel like that's the better, whether that particular example works at scale

or not I have no idea, but it seems to me, we're gonna put you in jail if you don't compost approach is the wrong approach versus the, let's economically incentivize you to do this thing differently. And I worry that there's There's too much emphasis on the punishment side of things. I don't think humans worked that way. And it's also a slippery slope because the government doesn't exactly have a track record of great competence. So for everything that they do right,

they're probably doing three things wrong. And therefore, I mean, again, I don't want to sound like too much of a libertarian anti-Nanny state guy, but I feel like I kind of need to sound like the libertarian anti-Nanny state guy when it comes to these things because the government, as you point out, is a big part of the reason we got in this mess and to quote

Einstein again, and I might be bastardizing this quote, but the same level of consciousness that produced these problems will be incapable of solving them. This true, but we do have a lot of regulations that protect citizens, right? We have seatbelt laws and emission-controlled laws and cars. We have baby seats and all sorts of things that we mandated that now people accept and we have airbags which the industry didn't like and seat belts which they hated and we just sort of accept that and I think there's a role for government in actually helping incentivize the right thing and I think the law making it not okay for big companies to throw out all their waste in a landfill and the reason

to sort of back up a little on that is food waste incredible problem like we said 30 to 40% of all food producers wasted. If it was grown on landmass, it would require the entire country of China to grow all that food that we throw out. The average family throws out about a pound a day or about $1800 a year of food. And if it were a country in terms of the greenhouse gases that can produce when you throw it in landfills in it, rots and emits methane, it would be the third largest emitter of greenhouse gases after the U.S. and China, and it's about $2 trillion of resources that we waste

in throwing out all the food. And it's, we produce more than a food for 10 million people on the planet. It's just not, I could have really distributed. It's a big problem to solve, and nobody's for it. Even Trump administration has created a food waste initiative with the EPA, the FDA, and the USDA. And they basically like, it's the FDA, the EPA, and USDA, to actually deal with the food waste issue.

So I think each of us can stop that. That's an easy thing to do. And there's a lot of other things we can do to get involved in our political process through being involved and communicating with your congressman's senators or something called the food policy action group, which is food policy action.org that rachers centers and congressmen on their voting records on food and ag policy. So you can see and they can they've literally

unseeded congressmen who are doing bad things and voting the wrong way around food and policy issues that people care about. So there's a lot of things we can do as individuals. USDA, what's their role in this? Oh my God, you have another couple hours. I go through all this in the book, but just at the high level, the USDA is responsible for a number of different food and egg policies that are the majority of the things that are going on. Our dietary guidelines, which were messed up, our school lunch guidelines, which were messed up, our SNAP program or food stamp program, which is 75 billion a year. It's one of our biggest government programs

that feeds 46 million Americans, including one and four kids who are food insecure, great idea, but there's no nutrition guidelines in that. So there are $7 billion a year, just in soda that we spend about 30 billion servings a year. You can buy soda with food stamps? Oh yeah, of course, you can buy soda with food stamps? No, yeah. Of course, you can buy anything,

except alcohol and cooked food. So you can buy a two liter bottle of soda, but you can't buy a rotisserie chicken in the grocery store. And 75% of the food stamps is junk food or soda. That's about a $730 billion program, which is massive over a period of 10 years. And so there's no nutrition guidelines in there. And so you've got all these government programs plus the crop insurance and agricultural

supports that support an industrial agricultural system. And those are harmful in sense. So if you have a big soy and corn farm and you want to grow a whole bunch of veggies, you can't. Even if you want to because you will get penalized and not get your crop insurance. So farmers are disentivized from growing fruits and vegetables. The government tells us on the one hand to eat half of our plate as fruits and vegetables, but less than half a percent of industrial supports, agricultural supports from the government,

are for fruits and vegetables. So it's like, basically, if we were eating what the government actually funded in agricultural supports, we'd be having a giant corn fritter, deep fried and soybean oil, you know, and it's like, that's not exactly what we should be eating. That's a very powerful image mark is that not that necessarily the USDA's recommendations on nutrition are correct, but even if you took that as an aspiration, it's interesting to note that the funding doesn't align with that.

So how does the USDA respond to that, especially because it's not a subtle, they're not off by a little bit. They're off by an order of magnitude. A quarter less than a half a percent versus 50%. So what is their response to that? I don't know. I just like, I think it's just,

the right hand is not talking to left hand. And so there's all these disparate policies. I was working with Tim Ryan and my friend, Daryl Schmuss-Affarian from Harvard Tufts, to get an analysis by the government accountability office to look at what our disparate policies were doing to our public health and to our economic health as a nation because they're all cross purposes. We say, don't drink soda, eat healthy diet, so forth with dietary guidelines, but then we pay for 75 billion a year in junk food for the poor.

How does that make sense? And so I think we have all these government agencies, which the FDA has confusing food labels, or that allows antibiotics in our animal feed, or that allows substances that are banned in other countries to be, they their toxic to be in our food supply like azo di carbonamide which is basically a softener for flower products for bread. I mean if you use that in Singapore you get a $450,000 fine and you go to jail for 15 years. I mean Singapore is Singapore but still like it's not even allowed and we have the the FDA the FTC which regulates the airwaves, allows all this unrestricted marketing to kids. So you've got all these different agencies that are working

cross-burposes that aren't coordinated, aren't creating a coherent food policy. So we need a national food policy. We need activism to change some of these food policies and support regenerative ag and to reform food stamps and dysfunctional policies to reform school lunches and to actually help advance in healthcare, food is medicine. All of these things can be done. And I'm actually working on a campaign with some extraordinary people who are launching a nonprofit

and an advocacy group. Otherwise, one is a lobby group for the good guys to start to work on these issues in Washington. Because while it may seem like nothing can be done, I think behind the scenes a lot can be done. And I think there are a lot of these issues are bipartisan issues. I just think people are ready for this. There's a movement and a readiness around the country. And even in Washington to address these issues, I mean, I just gave a talk at somewhere and someone knew one of the centers from Maine and they called me the next day

and was like, what can you help with this? And I say, well, 70% of the military recruits are unfit to fight and 70% of the evacuations from Afghanistan and Iraq were not for more injuries, but were for obesity related injuries and the soldiers. And then they want to figure this out. So I am hopeful because I see that despite all these issues, people are waking up to these problems. I see these big food companies like Nestle, Dino, and Unilever and so forth. General Mills actually started to take on these issues.

I mean, they still are part of the problem, but they are trying to move their super tanker ships and it takes a while. But I do see room for hope. I see business innovations, food and act tech companies, our billions and billions are flowing into these areas for innovation, which is all a good thing. What do you think of the top three changes?

If you or foods are, you had to rank order sort of the biggest. Are there three things that could make 70% of the difference? Yes. I would immediately transform healthcare reimbursement to focus on food as medicine, through paying for food for those who are food insecure, for reimbursing food and vegetable prescriptions, for making food central part of the government. And that would include having all the government is probably the biggest food purchaser in the country, have them only purchase food that is going to promote health

and not disease. I would then secondly, perform these dysfunctional food policies. I would transform snap, transform school lunches, transform the dietary guidelines to be science-based. And lastly, I would actually support Regenerative Ag in every way possible through government policies and through business innovations, incentives, and other things. So those three pillars, one, fixing food is medicine into the healthcare system and reimbursement policies and every government institution, reforming dysfunctional government food policies and supporting regenerative ag. And that's really the whole agenda of the food fix campaign. We've sort of glossed over it a little bit, but I guess no discussion on this would be complete without coming back to maybe some of the confusion that exists around a plant-based diet exclusively as a solution for...

And let's put aside the health issues for a moment because there's obviously lots to debate around whether animal-based products have deleterious health consequences. And let's put aside also the sort of egregious cruelty to animals that takes place under farmed conditions. And factory farming should be banned period full stop. Yeah, I don't think anybody that's spent any time actually going and watching how animals are harvested in that way would would disagree with that. So let's instead focus on specifically the environmental concerns. You've already talked about it a little bit, but can you say a bit more about

it? Yeah, you know, this interesting report came out called the Eat Lance Report, which was very well intentioned and had a lot of great science in it that talked about how we link climate and diet and food and what is a healthy diet and how do you define that. There's a lot of great science in there. There were challenges though, because some of the language in there was really driven through the food industry and a lot of the sponsors for that were big food and big egg.

One of the, for example, messages is we need to grow more plants, more grains and more beans through something called sustainable intensification or climate smart agriculture. These are buzzwords, sort of like clean coal, which sound good. But when you look behind the curtain, who funds those organizations, 60% of the members of climates from our agriculture are the fertilizer companies, sustainable intensification means using more and more chemical inputs on farms and developing world to grow more grains and beans. That's not the solution. And lastly, without animals integrated into regenerative agricultural systems, you cannot restore soil in the way we need to restore it as fast as we need to

restore it. It's just a scientific fact. So what you- Is that based on the need for the, basically the transfer of nitrogen through the animal? Yeah, pooping, peeing, digging, saliva makes the plants grow. It's a whole symbionic ecosystem. And when used properly, not over grazing, but proper management, which is called holistic management or manage grazing or adaptive multi-patter grazing, there's a science to it. You can dramatically increase soil. So it takes like I think a thousand years to get three centimeters of soil. Naturally, gate brown and North Dakota got 29 inches of soil just through these methods that are sort of supercharged methods.

They're like sort of agriculture 2.0. It's not about going back to old ways, it's about inventing new ways, using all the science to actually grow soil. Because a lot of, I mean, through human history, we were destructive. I mean, we would grow food on land, and we would deplete the land,

and we'd move to the next plot of land. Problem is now, we're running the land. There's no more place to go. So I think we absolutely need to actually scale this regenerator culture model in order to solve all these global issues. Can regenerative egg be superimposed on follow land? Yeah, then people are basically taking degraded land, which is almost desert and turning it back into lush fields and luch agriculture practices.

So when those people say we have to be vegan to save the planet, it's actually not accurate. Whether you eat meat or not is a personal choice, a moral choice. If you think it's a health choice, fine. But whether or not you believe in eating meat or not from an environmental, from a regenerative, from an climate standpoint, we must have animals integrated into the process in order to restore soil, which is the biggest carbon sink. So the take home message here for people is there are a lot of ways to fix climate change, but the quickest, fastest,

and most effective and scalable way, and using ancient carbon capture technology that is more effective than anything exists today is free called photosynthesis. It's basically sun and carbon dioxide in the air. We can solve a lot of the global issues that we have. So Mark, how are you spending your time today? You wear a ton of hats. Talking to you.

Yeah. I mean, you're involved in the education of functional medicine at the Cleveland Clinic. You commute there and back from your home in New York. You're obviously very involved in this initiative. What does the pygraph look like of how you allocate your time? Well, I'm always doing the same thing in my mind. I'm trying to end the lead in the suffering through the power of functional medicine, systems thinking, and sort of restoring communities and behavioral change through that. And this is just part of that story. Like I said,

there's so much suffering that's unnecessary, whether it's chronic disease or poverty or mental illness or kids struggling with learning in schools or violence. These are all needless suffering. If we have the solutions, then we need to focus on them. And as I begin, begin, at the beginning, talk about, as I sort of went down the rap hole of why are my patients sick, I came to this bigger conclusion that unless we deal with the system's issues, unless we go upstream, we're just going to be treading water or bailing a sinking boat. And the acceleration of these problems is so big that I feel like I'm focusing more and more on these bigger issues in order to solve them.

So yes, I write books and I feel like this is my last one for a while, but like write books and teach and speak and do all these things have clinics. But at the end of the day, this is an existential threat. And once you've seen it, you can't unsee it. I just were researching the book for the last two and a half years. I just sort of was shocked by a lot of things that I learned that are not really common knowledge and even really educated people by going a room of highly educated people and say, what's the number one source of climate change?

They're not going to say food, but when you actually unpack it, that's the biggest threat. Well, Mark, thank you very much for making the time today, and more importantly, of course, for doing this work and bringing it to our attention. This is an area that I have become increasingly interested in, and my views are kind of constantly evolving. I mean, I think there was a day when I didn't question the health of GMO. I'll just share with you an anecdote, which is when I went to Europe a year ago, I just made the Glyb observation, which was sort of the bread, the pasta, all of the food that I ate in Europe, which I actually went

out of my way to eat, did not seem to produce the same effect as it did here. And that was actually kind of the thin end of the wedge in my mind that said, what's going on? What is the difference between the crops that they are using in Europe? And it's funny because it really... I can give you four reasons. Yeah, yeah. Well, it reminded me of my childhood because when I was a kid, we used to go to Egypt every year and because my parents are from,

and I've go with my mom each year, and usually spend two months there. And I remember the way bread tasted there. It had a very distinct taste that you'll never taste. Even if you buy like pita bread or other Middle Eastern bread here in the U.S., it tastes very different. And I remember sort of having those neurons tickled again when I was in Europe going out of my way,

because most of the previous times I'd gone to Europe, I kind of don't eat that sort of stuff. But on this trip, I was like, hey, I'm going to win in Rome, right? So yeah, tell me about what you think those four differences are. So you're talking about wheat products, right? So what's happened to wheat is that we've hybridized the wheat to make it extremely drought resistant and hearty and it's called dwarf wheat and the guy who invented Norman Borlaug won the Nobel Prize and increased in yields. But what was sort of the unintended consequences is the starch in there is called amyl pectin A. It's a super starch. So raises your

blood sugar more than regular sugar. So one, it's basically just like eating sugar worse. Two, when they breed plants, it's not like humans. You get 23 pairs of chromosomes, one from your mom, one from your dad, 46 chromosomes. And plants is 46 plus 46. So it's like 92. And so there's extra proteins that are formed. And there are many more gliding proteins, which are inflammatory and more active in terms of causing Disruptions in the gut so they're more likely to cause a leaky gut inflammation. The third thing is They spray wheat even though it's not a GMO food plant. They spray it with glyphosate at harvest. Why? Because it Defolates the plants it gets rid of all the sort of leaves and stuff, so it makes it easier to harvest.

So right at harvest, they spray this with glyphosate. And your Cheerios have more glyphosate than vitamin A and vitamin D, they're at in their per amount of weight. So even if you buy organic wheat? Organic wheat, no. Organic wheat could still be the dwarf wheat. Yeah, yep, yep.

And then lastly, this is interesting, maybe five reasons. But second, lastly, calcium propane, which is a preservative, is added to the wheat in this country. And lastly, this is interesting, maybe five reasons. But second, last, the calcium proprenate, which is a preservative, is added to the wheat in this country. And it's known to cause toxic neurological effects, behavioral, hyperactivity, and it is mainly to autism. In fact, when you give babies breast milk,

they increase their butyrate, which is an powerful, short-chain fat in the gut that makes your gut healthy. When you have formula, it causes high proprenate levels, which can cause neurotoxic effects and an animal model says cause autism if you put propionate in rat's brains. And then lastly, in Europe, they have different methods of making the bread here. It's like quick, quick, quick, quick. They want it to live in a rise in a couple of hours. There it can take overnight, 12 hours, 14 hours, and it tastes very different. It's a very different structure and it does different things

to the gluten and so forth. So there's a lot of reasons that that happens, but I would say over and over, I see this happen with my patients who can't eat this stuff here, and they go over there, and there's no GMO over there. It's a complex web of things. It's kind of one make bread here in the US

on their own using wheat, like an actual wheat that comes from Europe. Sure. You could, or you could get heirloom wheat, like incorn wheat, which is very different. Or now, there's new forms of wheat, like kerns of wheat, by West Jackson, was developed in Midwest. It has incredibly deep roots. It's a perennial wheat, super nutrient dense, really amazing, amazing product. So there's incredible grains out there that I was talking my friend Jeff

Blan the other day, who's developing his company. And he's working with this guy to develop these phytochemical rich foods, super foods. And he got a bunch of things from the USDA, a bunch of seeds. And one pack that came in, it was like, 4, 3, 2, 1, sick or something. He's like, what's this? I don't know what this is. And I sent it to my accident. And it was this Himalayan buckwheat, which apparently is one of the most protein rich, low glycemic, phytochemical dense,

hearty, superfood on the planet. And they're now, they have this sort of seed, because they're not selling it, distributing it, but they couldn't give it back. So he's like, literally taking this packet, and he's turning it into a whole business, which is really amazing. So there's a lot of stuff out there that we could use.

It's much better for us, but we just kind of homogenized our food supply and we've taken out all, like I said, we 800 species of plants before 100 gathers. Our bodies need all those different phytochemicals and nutrients and minerals and so forth in vitamins to actually run itself. And we're now just in this sort of nutrient-devoid diet, even if we're eating organic stuff, if it's not grown in good soils, if it's hybridized plants, it's just not great. I would say eat weird food,

so I was trying to eat weird food. I got to say I'm hungry right now. I'm not so... I know, eat ya. All right, Mark, well, thanks very much. Shared, thanks a lot Peter, have me. Thank you for listening to this week's episode of The Drive. If you're interested in diving deeper into any topics

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