The Peter Attia Drive - Qualy #73 - How can we change the food system when 10 companies control almost 90 percent of the calories we consume in the US?

Episode Date: December 10, 2019

Today's episode of The Qualys is from podcast #14 – Robert Lustig, M.D., M.S.L.: fructose, processed food, NAFLD, and changing the food system. The Qualys is a subscriber-exclusive podcast, released Tuesday through Friday, and published exclusively on our private, subscriber-only podcast feed. Qualys is short-hand for “qualifying round,” which are typically the fastest laps driven in a race car—done before the race to determine starting position on the grid for race day. The Qualys are short (i.e., “fast”), typically less than ten minutes, and highlight the best questions, topics, and tactics discussed on The Drive. Occasionally, we will also release an episode on the main podcast feed for non-subscribers, which is what you are listening to now. Learn more: https://peterattiamd.com/podcast/qualys/   Subscribe to receive access to all episodes of The Qualys (and other exclusive subscriber-only content): https://peterattiamd.com/subscribe/  Connect with Peter on Facebook.com/PeterAttiaMD | Twitter.com/PeterAttiaMD | Instagram.com/PeterAttiaMD 

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So without further delay, I hope you enjoy today's quality. I looked into this a few years ago, and maybe the numbers have changed, So without further delay, I hope you enjoy today's quality. I looked into this a few years ago and maybe the numbers have changed, but directionally, I think this is still correct. There were something like nine companies that controlled basically all of CPG, consumer package goods. There's 10. Okay. 10 control 90% of the food.

Yeah. That's best. My calculation was 10 of them controlled 85% of the calories that people consumed. You face a very uphill battle. Because you're trying to get them to change the way they do business, but they answer to shareholders, not to you. And the way they're doing things right now

is working out reasonably for their shareholders. Not great. These aren't the most high performing companies in the world, but how in the world when such a small group of companies control so much and going back to what you said earlier, you're asking parents to double their food budget, defeat their kids correctly, and spend twice the time doing it. What does this look like in 10 years?

How does the story end? I don't know how it ends. This is a battle royal like tobacco was. And it took a long time to win that. And there are people who say we haven't even won that one yet. You know, e-cigarettes now come, but we're have another proposition here in San Francisco tomorrow about tobacco to kids. Here's the deal. The food system needs to change. They're not going to change it from the inside because right now sugar is their business model. It's the thing that increases their sales.

When high-fructose corn syrup and the dietary guidelines of 1977 were first available, the profit margin of the food industry went from 1% per year to 5% per year. This is their juggernaut, this is their gravy train. They had more sugar, they sell more food, and they know it. And that's why they're sugar and all the food, because when they add it, you buy more. For all the reasons we've discussed, they have to change the food, which means they have to change the business model. So how do you change the business model?

Well, there are four potential ways to change the business model. So how do you change the business model? Well, there are four potential ways to change the business model. One is educate the public so that they don't want that food, in which case then they won't sell it. We're trying to do that. That's one reason I am the chief science officer of a nonprofit trying to do just that, okay, called eat real. Real is an acronym, responsible Epicurean and Agricultural Leadership. We are trying to change the food system by praising the good and hoping that that will induce competition amongst restaurants,

cafeterias, hospitals, schools to procure market and sell real food. Or you can have executive branch efforts like the FDA or the USDA, but not in this administration, if anything, they've rolled back opportunities for that like the nutrition facts label. Or you can have Congress legislate specific changes. They're not doing that because they're all paid off from the American legislative exchange council and other concerns like the Koch brothers, what have you. Or you can have judicial impact. And so there are lawsuits against the food industry going on, as we speak, in an attempt to try to, shall we say, regulate from the bench, which

no one thinks is optimal, but seems to be the only thing that's available at the moment, aside from education. So those are the four ways to do this. My goal would be to get rid of food subsidies. Are the food subsidies what enable the junk food to be basically half the price of real food, or is it that the real food is twice as much to make? Not independent of the subsidy.

It's about the subsidy making junk food cheap. If you got rid of the subsidies, then the market would work, okay? Right now, any subsidy distorts the market. And there's no reason for food subsidies. In fact, there's no economist worth their salt today that believe in food subsidies because they distort the market.

So the question is, would food get more expensive if we got rid of all food subsidies? The Genini Foundation at UC Berkeley engaged in this exercise several years ago, and they computed what would happen to the price of food, and it turned out that the price of food wouldn't change, except for two items. Corn and sugar would go up. But how would that not impact the cost of all other foods given how ubiquitous they are? It's a complex modeling, and I'm not an expert in how they arrived at this, butically, this is what fell out of it,

is that the price of wheat wouldn't change, the price of soy wouldn't change, only corn and sugar. And that is where the dietary sugar in our food comes from. So I think that that would be a really smart way to start. The farm bill is re-, proportioned every five years and right now there's actually tension around that farm bill. It has to do with other things but I would like to see the issue of the metabolic cost of food built into the farm bill because right now our government has not linked or yoked the productivity and economic

cost of Medicare, Medicaid, social security with food. I would like to see that link strengthened because we have the data. Is there anything that is there anything that's right now that you consider a victory? Because when you look at the smoking story, you had surgeon generals report first, you had changes in advertising next, you had excise taxes and then ultimately environmental changes. We have excise taxes for soda. Do you have any advertising rule changes yet? Well, here in San Francisco, we have a warning label on billboards that is right now there's

a temporary injunction about because the food industry. But the smoking one was interesting. I didn't know this until a few years ago But basically a law came out that said any time a tobacco commercial was on TV It had to be followed by an anti tobacco commercial right it turned out the fairness doctrine Yeah, it turned out the anti tobacco commercials were so popular and so effective that tobacco voluntarily were so popular and so effective that tobacco voluntarily withdrew from television. Indeed. Is there anything around creating that type of awareness? No, what there is is the question of marketing to children. And the thing is that many of the conglomerates have said they voluntarily will not market

to children, at least during certain times of the day when kids are more likely to watch. But in fact, watch dogs have been looking at this and they say that it's slip service that they're not actually doing it. So you cannot expect the food industry to police itself. I hope you enjoyed today's quality. Now sit tight for that legal disclaimer. This podcast is for general informational purposes only and does not constitute the practice

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