Aug. 23, 2020 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| One, they fund 12 times as much, 12 billion dollars a year, compared to the government of nutrition science that shows candy is great for weight loss for kids, and that soda is not linked to obesity, which is just nonsense. | ||
| They co-opt professional societies like the American Heart Association, the Academy of Nutrition Dietetics, and fund their organizations. | ||
| The nutrition organization gets 40% of their funding from the food industry. | ||
| And in their annual conference, you're not allowed to take pictures in the exhibit hall | ||
| because they don't want people to see all the junk food that they're promoting. | ||
|
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(upbeat music) | |
| I'm Dave Rubin and this is the Rubin Report. | ||
| And joining me today is a doctor who is a leader in the field of functional medicine, as well as a 13-time New York Times bestselling author. | ||
| And his newest book is Food Fix, how to save our health, our economy, our communities, and our planet, one bite at a time. | ||
| Dr. Mark Hyman, welcome to The Rubin Report. | ||
| Thanks for having me, Dave. | ||
| I think that was my longest intro ever. | ||
| I mean, this is a serious- Yeah, it updated, because that book just hit the list yesterday. | ||
| Yeah, I'm doing this on the fly, man. | ||
| You can see as I edited it right there, it said 12 on the prompter there. | ||
| I'm super psyched to talk to you, because as I just said to you before we started, getting away a little bit from politics is always a nice break for me. | ||
| But this is not purely away from politics, so we're gonna do a little of that. | ||
| Food is probably the most political issue of our time, even though we don't talk about it that way. | ||
| Yeah, and quite literally, you bit off a lot in this title because you talk about economics and communities and the planet and all of those things and how it's related. | ||
| So before we get into any of that stuff, How did you get into this field? | ||
| What made you care about all of this stuff? | ||
| Where did it all come from? | ||
| That's great. | ||
| Well, I've always been interested in health and nutrition. | ||
| I grew up in Spain. | ||
| My parents lived there for 11 years after the war. | ||
| They missed the whole junk food, fast food, processed food revolution in America, and I always grew up eating real whole food. | ||
| And in college, I lived with a guy who was a nutrition PhD student, and he introduced me to this whole idea about nutrition against disease. | ||
| And I became a yoga teacher before I was a doctor, then I became a doctor and kind of got indoctrinated, literally. | ||
| And became very focused on, you know, traditional good medicine. | ||
| But I realized the limits of it and I then got sick myself and ended up having to fix myself using functional medicine, which is looking at systems and looking at root causes. | ||
| And after 30 years of sitting in my office seeing chronically ill patients, which by the way is 6 out of 10 Americans have a chronic disease, It kills 11 million people a year from food. | ||
| I realized that food was causing my patients to be sick, and that I had to look at why they were eating the food they were eating. | ||
| And then I thought, well, it's the food system. | ||
| I'm like, well, why do we have the food system? | ||
| It's our food policies. | ||
| And why do we have our policies? | ||
| It's because of the food industry influence driving our policies. | ||
| And some of its legacy from good intentions that we still have from policies 50 to 70 years ago. | ||
| It occurred to me that if I really want to cure my patients, I have to step back and look at the big picture of what's wrong with our food system, the impact it's causing on disease, on our economy, on social justice issues, poverty, mental health, kids' academic performance, national security, environment, climate. | ||
| It's all one problem. | ||
| That is predominantly driven by our food and our food system, and it's fixable. | ||
| If food is the cause, it's also the cure. | ||
| And that's exactly what this book is about. | ||
| It's called Food Fix, not Food Apocalypse. | ||
| We'll see about that. | ||
| Give me another 50 minutes here. | ||
| So you know I had your buddy Max Lugavere on recently. | ||
| I do. | ||
| And he was also talking about how regular Western medicine, when his mom got sick, They did not have enough answers, or it was as he calls it, diagnose and adios. | ||
| You just referenced something there about indoctrination and relative to Western medicine and how they don't really talk about food. | ||
| Can you explore that a little bit? | ||
| The food system produces food paying no attention to health, and the healthcare system treats disease with no attention to food. | ||
| And I think food is the biggest driver of chronic disease. | ||
| It's something that I've learned as a functional medicine doctor that food is medicine. | ||
| It can heal, but it also can harm. | ||
| And so that's really why I wrote this book, was to sort of help our country and hopefully our global population understand that if we want to deal with some of the biggest crises we're facing today in America and globally, we have to focus on the food system. | ||
| It's the most invisible cause. | ||
| There's no real conversation about it in the political discourse, and yet it's probably the biggest political issue of our time. | ||
| So since we're having the conversation right now, what are some of just like the basic things we should know about the foods we're eating and what we're being force-fed that we shouldn't eat and maybe some things that we should be incorporating? | ||
| What are all that stuff? | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| So how we grow food from the seed. | ||
| to how we produce food and process food, to how we eat it and how we waste it | ||
| is driving so much of our issues. | ||
| So the food we're producing predominantly today is what we call ultra-processed calories, | ||
| or ultra-processed food. | ||
| What is that? | ||
| It's food made from a few simple ingredients, refined white flour, high fructose corn syrup | ||
| and other corn additives and ingredients, and refined soybean oil that are turned into | ||
| literally hundreds of thousands of processed foods that are all made from the same ingredients | ||
| that are different colors, sizes, and shapes of food-like extruded substances. | ||
| And the frightening thing is the data is-- | ||
| Fresh, that's what you're telling me. | ||
| Well, they're not fresh. | ||
| They're ingredients that you might not even recognize. | ||
| If you cover the front of a Pop-Tart or a Corndog of the box, you probably could barely tell the difference in the ingredients, right? | ||
| And these are foods that are made because the government helps support these commodity crops, which are 60% of our calories. | ||
| The people who consume them the most are the sickest. | ||
| Globally, it kills 11 million people a year. | ||
| That's like a holocaust. | ||
| Every single year, people dying from eating the wrong foods and not eating the right foods. | ||
| And it's because our whole agricultural system has been moved to make those foods which are causing heart disease, diabetes, cancer, dementia, obviously obesity, and it's frightening to me. | ||
| When I was born, there were 5% of Americans who were obese. | ||
| When I graduated medical school, it was less than 20%. | ||
| There was not a single state that had an obesity rate over 20%. | ||
| Now, it's 42%. | ||
| And most states have obesity rates over 40%. | ||
| And most states have obesity rates over 40%. | ||
| That's 42% of Americans are obese, 75% overweight. | ||
| It's going to be one in two people in 10 years that will be obese, not just overweight. | ||
| And this is crippling our economy. | ||
| We now have one in three dollars in Medicare that's spent for diabetes alone. | ||
| Our entire chronic disease epidemic, 80% of Medicare costs are from chronic disease. | ||
| We have 1 in 3 federal dollars that are spent on Medicare. | ||
| Soon it will be 1 in 2. | ||
| I mean, Medicare for our company would be the biggest company in the world with a $1.3 trillion a year budget. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| And a lot of that is unnecessary. | ||
| 80% of that is unnecessary. | ||
| It's caused by the food and the food system. | ||
| So you mentioned the way our policies going back decades sort of led to some of this. | ||
| Is there like a moment? | ||
| Yeah, so here's what happened. | ||
| You know, nobody was like a big cabal of evil food companies that got together. | ||
| Because I think that, I'm glad you started with that, because I think that's what people think. | ||
| That it's like these evil companies or the evil government that sit down and how do we screw No, no. | ||
| It's the unintended consequences of good intentions, right? | ||
| So after the World War II, there was a lot of hunger in the world, there was a need to produce a lot of starchy calories which we thought were good sources of carbohydrates and energy to fuel a growing population. | ||
| And so industrial agriculture Came onto the scene with mass mechanization, with intensive use of fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, which no one knew were bad at the time. | ||
| I mean, Silent Spring was written in the 60s by Rachel Carson, which exposed the harm of DDT and pesticides. | ||
| That wasn't eliminated until the 70s. | ||
| And we didn't know that fertilizer was destroying oceans and lakes and rivers and killing hundreds of thousands of tons of fish every year. | ||
| Did really nobody know? | ||
| I don't believe that people really said, oh, these pesticides are going to kill people, but we're going to use them anyway, or that glyphosate is going to cause cancer and destroy your microbiome. | ||
| You think these companies, they really just, they thought they had answers? | ||
| Yeah, of course. | ||
| We need to create a food for a growing population. | ||
| But then people started to understand these things and then the cat was out of the bag and they didn't want to lose the business and the profitability of growing food in this way. | ||
| And there's been over the last 40 years incredible consolidation of the food industry from hundreds of seed companies to like four major companies that control 60% of our seeds. | ||
| We've got many fertilizer companies that are consolidating into a few fertilizer companies. | ||
| We have about nine or ten big food companies that own all the other companies, like, you know, Hagenaas is owned by, you know, Danone, right? | ||
| Or Nestle, you know? | ||
| Or, you know, Danone owns, or Unilever owns Ben & Jerry's. | ||
| So, we don't really understand how much, even in the healthy food brands, that these big companies own. | ||
| And so we have this sort of, this juggernaut that has hit our population, our economy, and our politics in ways that I don't think anybody really still understands, because it's so fast. | ||
| Like, even when I, like I said, graduated from medical school, this wasn't a problem. | ||
| And within the last 30 years, it's just exploded. | ||
| And now we're seeing six out of 10 Americans, like I said, who have a chronic disease that's caused by food. | ||
| So we didn't have a bunch of bad people doing bad things, but now we have people trying to protect They're turf. | ||
| But I see change. | ||
| I'm hopeful because companies like Nestle, Danone, Unilever, General Mills, they're saying, Kellogg's are saying, no, we're going to change what we're doing, right? | ||
| General Mills said, we're going to commit a million acres to regenerative ag. | ||
| Danone says, we're going to pay farmers to convert from traditional farming to what's called regenerative ag, which actually fixes a lot of these problems. | ||
| Unilever said, we're not gonna advertise to kids anymore ice cream, right? | ||
| And they're one of the biggest ice cream producers. | ||
| Even Burger King. | ||
| No, they're not turning against ice cream, are they? | ||
| No, they're not, but they're saying we're not gonna sell crap to kids, right? | ||
| Because that's one of the biggest things that the food industry does, is they spend billions marketing junk food to kids, which hooks them young. | ||
| It causes them to have learning disabilities, cognitive impairment, poor academic performance, be able to, less likely to go to college, earn poor incomes, | ||
| have more chronic disease, and they're really, really in a way, kind of predatory on | ||
| children. | ||
| And it's terrifying to me because we're threatening our future generation, | ||
| we're threatening our global economic competitiveness, we're threatening our ability to actually have good | ||
| national security, because 70% of the recruits for the military are rejected | ||
| because they're unfit to fight. | ||
| It's a national security threat that the generals and admirals have written a report saying unhealthy and unprepared. | ||
| I mean, just from the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, there were 70 plus percent more evacuations for obesity-related injuries than for war injuries. | ||
| That's incredible. | ||
| That actually almost doesn't sound possible. | ||
| It doesn't sound possible. | ||
| And then I just talked to a woman who works at the top level in the Department of Defense a couple of days ago. | ||
| She said on the military bases that are just loaded with fast food restaurants, the Combat troops are not combat ready because they become so unfit. | ||
| So how do you get from knowing that this stuff ain't right to having all these fast food joints on the combat bases? | ||
| Well, it's just like they have fast food in schools. | ||
| They have McDonald's Monday and Taco Bell Tuesday and Wendy's Wednesday. | ||
| 80% of the schools have contracts with soda companies. | ||
| These companies are very smart and deliberate. | ||
| So while there may not have been bad intentions to start, there is a lot of bad behavior now. | ||
| They have a massive way of controlling the narrative about food and confusing consumers, confusing scientists, and confusing politicians. | ||
| One, they fund 12 times as much, $12 billion a year, Compared to the government of nutrition science that shows candy is great for weight loss for kids, and that soda is not linked to obesity, which is just nonsense. | ||
| They co-op professional societies, like the American Heart Association, the Academy of Nutrition Dietetics, and fund their organizations. | ||
| The nutrition organization gets 40% of their funding from the food industry, and in their annual conference, you're not allowed to take pictures in the exhibit hall, because they don't want people to see all the junk food that they're promoting. | ||
| They fund the American Heart Association, which allows them to say tricks are a heart-healthy food because it's low in fat. | ||
| I mean, it's frightening. | ||
| They create front groups. | ||
| Four companies spent half a billion dollars on front groups to confuse consumers, saying that, for example, that pesticides and high fructose corn syrup and trans fats and smoking are not bad for you, like the American Council on Science and Health. | ||
| They spent $30 million fighting GMO labeling in California when they won that battle. | ||
| They fund social groups like the NAACP and Hispanic Federation, so they co-opt the very groups | ||
| that are most affected by these conditions like diabetes and obesity, | ||
| so they will oppose things like soda taxes. | ||
| They were one of the biggest opposition groups to the Big Gulp recommendations from Michael Bloomberg, | ||
| which I think was an ill-advised idea, but still, they were opposing it | ||
| because they were funded by these groups. | ||
| They fund nutritionists and dietitians to go on social media saying we shouldn't have soda taxes or that soda is okay. | ||
| I mean, it's just insidious. | ||
| And then they fund the political process. | ||
| So just on one bill. | ||
| The GMO labeling bill, which was euphemistically called the Dark Act, denying Americans the right to know. | ||
| They spent $192 million in one year on one bill. | ||
| They spent half a billion dollars on the Farm Bill, which is governing most of our food programs, like food stamps. | ||
| They fund Feeding America, which is a hunger group. | ||
| Which is great, a hunger advocacy group to make sure we deal with hunger in America. | ||
| On the board of that group are high-level executives from the food industry, which is why they oppose restricting food stamps for soda or other junk food, right? | ||
| So now government is paying seven billion dollars a year, the single biggest light item for food stamps, for soda for the poor. | ||
| That's $30 billion spent a year. | ||
| Then they get sicker, then back to the Medicare problem you mentioned. | ||
| And the true cost of food is not in the price we pay at the checkout counter. | ||
| So you buy a can of soda. | ||
| Well, let's look at what happens to the corn, right? | ||
| For the record, I'm off the soda. | ||
| Good, good. | ||
| I just feel that I have to tell you that. | ||
| I haven't had a regular soda in God knows how long. | ||
| Good, so here's just how- Club soda, club soda. | ||
| Club soda's good. | ||
| Here's how the sort of connectivity works in corn. | ||
| So government funds subsidies that support corn production. These monocrops | ||
| that are heavy use of fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides. That corn production itself | ||
| destroys the soil, releases the carbon into the atmosphere. Soil carbon is a third of all the | ||
| carbon in the atmosphere from the way we farm and contributing to climate change. It actually | ||
| destroys the ecosystem. Pollinators and bees are killed. Who's paying for that? It destroys the | ||
| rivers, lakes, and oceans, as I mentioned, and creates dead zones because of the | ||
| fertilizer runoff. Then the food that's produced is the raw materials for junk food and for soda. | ||
| Then we pay for that to be given at the tune of about $75 billion a year to the poor in food | ||
| stamp products. | ||
| 75% of that is junk food, 10% is soda. | ||
| So they eat that. | ||
| And then we pay for Medicare and Medicaid on the back end. | ||
| When they have diabetes and obesity-related illnesses. | ||
| And so we're not paying for the economic, the impact on our environment and climate. | ||
| We're paying for it literally four times. | ||
| And that price is not in the can of Coke. | ||
| It should be maybe $100 for a can of Coke when you include all those costs. | ||
| Right, okay. | ||
| You gave me a lot there. | ||
| Yeah, sorry. | ||
| First, I have to jump back for a second. | ||
| You're calling it Danone. | ||
| I always thought it was Dannon. | ||
| In America, it's Dannon. | ||
| In Europe, it's called Danone. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| Now, all right. | ||
| That was sticking with me this whole time, so I'm glad we got the important thing out of the way. | ||
| You say tomato, I say tomato. | ||
| Okay, so you did grow up in Spain. | ||
| Now I accept it. | ||
| It's a European company, so that's how they say it. | ||
| Okay, fair enough. | ||
| That actually is a perfect segue to my next question, which is, how much of this is uniquely an American problem? | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| Yes, we have basically created the worst diet in the world and are exporting it to every country on the planet. | ||
| And what's frightening to me is, you know, I was in China in 1984. | ||
| There was no obesity. | ||
| There was no diabetes. | ||
| Now they have a hundred plus million diabetics in China. | ||
| It's the number one country in the world with diabetics. | ||
| That's probably just a numbers game though, right? | ||
| It used to be 1 in 50. | ||
| Now it's 1 in 10. | ||
| India is number 2. | ||
| And in the Middle East, 1 in 4 have diabetes. | ||
| In the developing world, 80% of the diabetics and obesity-related issues and chronic disease are in the developing world. | ||
| 80%. | ||
| So in countries like Africa, in India, in China, junk food, fast food is aspirational. | ||
| If you want to take your date out in America for a good time, you don't take her to McDonald's. | ||
| But that's what they do in the developing world. | ||
| KFC is a premium brand. | ||
| McDonald's is a premium brand. | ||
| Domino's is a premium brand. | ||
| My brother-in-law was living in El Salvador doing some research work down there, and we went down there, and basically I saw Wendy's, and there was a lot of Wendy's, I think it was Wendy's, and a couple other chain things, and that's where everyone wanted to go, because that was sort of thought of as the nice stuff, which is a very backwards way of looking at it. | ||
| Thank God for you and these kinds of shows, because this kind of conversation wouldn't happen on traditional TV. | ||
| I was watching Good Morning America the other day, I was in a green room about to go on a show, and I don't usually watch TV, and there was a whole segment where they gave free Wendy's breakfast burgers, or whatever junk they'd give them, to the entire audience. | ||
| And then they were talking about these great Wendy's breakfast things, and the hosts were eating them. | ||
| They had a big ad after. | ||
| And it's like, you know the hosts would never eat that stuff normally. | ||
| No, they wouldn't. | ||
| But the media's co-opted. | ||
| Who funds the media and advertising today? | ||
| Big pharma and food, big food, right? | ||
| That's where you see most of the ads. | ||
| Well, right, every ad now is for a prescription drug, and half the ad is about telling you the bad stuff that it's gonna do to you. | ||
| Right, and they should have that when they advertise food. | ||
| You know, you can eat this, and here's all the side effects, right? | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| And they do that in cigarettes. | ||
| You go to, you know, I love when you go to Europe or other countries. | ||
| Half the packet is, this will kill you if you use it as directed. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, with pictures. | ||
| Yeah, it's like, it's gruesome, like, I mean, it's like, wow, like, it's not like some little thing on the side of a cigarette packet. | ||
| It's like, the front of the packet is like, smoke this and you will die. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Up to you. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So when you talk about obesity rates and the unique American It's called the sad diet, the standard American diet. | ||
| It's so sad. | ||
| Who talks to you about the American diet? | ||
| Like what would you say is the average American diet? | ||
| Give me the three meals a day and then whatever else you're filling in | ||
| between the three meals. - Oh my God. | ||
| It's called the sad diet, the standard American diet. | ||
| It's so sad. | ||
| Give me that sad diet. | ||
| First of all, Americans have dessert for breakfast. | ||
| And that means bagels, muffins, croissants, cereal, cereal. | ||
| Cereal is a toxic food. | ||
| It's 75% sugar, mostly. | ||
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We eat- So I shouldn't have done a bowl of Fruity Pebbles this morning? | |
| Definitely not. | ||
| No, I'm kidding. | ||
| I had, you'll be very happy to know, I had two organic eggs with grass-fed butter. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| A cup of coffee, that's it. | ||
| Protein. | ||
| You got protein and fat, which is what we should be eating for breakfast. | ||
| Not sugary, starchy carbs. | ||
| So flour. | ||
| Which is most of our breakfast products. | ||
| are actually the worst for your blood sugar than table sugar. | ||
| So whether you're eating a bagel or a bowl of sugar, below the neck, your body doesn't know the difference, right? | ||
| So that's the first thing that Americans do, is eat huge amounts of starch and sugar. | ||
| For lunch, they'll have sandwiches, they'll have burgers, fries, soda, dinner. | ||
| Again, most people in this country, 60% of their calories comes from processed food. | ||
| And even if they're eating at home, which is only 50% of the time, It's usually from a box of package or some industrial product. | ||
| Is that right? | ||
| So only 50% of Americans are eating dinner at home? | ||
| Meaning they're eating out or they're just not? | ||
| 50% of Americans eat out. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| You know, half the time. | ||
| So it's half the time. | ||
| I'm sorry, half our meals are eaten out. | ||
| In 1900, it was 2% of our meals. | ||
| People don't know how to cook. | ||
| You remember the whole, you deserve a break today? | ||
| It was not an accident. | ||
| The food industry deliberately, in the 50s and 60s, when there was this advent of a backlash against processed food, there was a woman named Betty, who was a home ec teacher, who decided she wanted to go around and advocate for families to learn how to cook and grow gardens and eat whole food. | ||
| And this big cabal of food companies got together in Minnesota, General Mills and others, and basically concocted this idea that we should create convenience as a value in food. | ||
| And they invented somebody called Betty Crocker, who I thought was a real person. | ||
| My mother had the Betty Crocker cookbook. | ||
| I swear to you that until you just said that, I've always thought it was real. | ||
| Yeah, and it had her picture! | ||
| There was like a cartoon picture of Betty Crocker on the front of the cookbook! | ||
| And your mime is real though, right? | ||
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I don't know. | |
| Colonel Sanders? | ||
| That was a guy. | ||
| I know he was a guy. | ||
| But I remember those recipes. | ||
| My mother still has that cookbook. | ||
| She died, but I think I still have it. | ||
| Look at the recipe. | ||
| It says crumble a row of Ritz crackers on top of your broccoli casserole. | ||
| Add one can of Campbell's cream of chicken soup to the sauce or whatever. | ||
| And so it was insinuating processed foods. | ||
| And then it became TV dinners, and then it became more and more processed foods. | ||
| And literally, we've hijacked, the food industry has hijacked the American kitchen, has created two generations of Americans who don't know how to cook, who watch more cooking on TV than they actually spend time cooking, and have created a generation of people who are dependent on industrial processed food that's made in factories. | ||
| So when you then add in sort of a generation now of, I want everything fast no matter what, and I can have everything delivered, Uber Eats and everything else, people just, it's a secondary problem to have to fight. | ||
| It's not that it's all so, it's just that it's so accessible, it's just that we now no longer expect To have to put any work into anything. | ||
| I've come to love cooking now. | ||
| Yeah, I mean it's something, if you have a human body, it's a basic life skill. | ||
| Like brushing your teeth, or taking care of the basic functions of your life. | ||
| If you don't know how to cook, you're at a disadvantage. | ||
| Unless you're rich enough to have a chef, great. | ||
| But that's not most of us. | ||
| And there's a myth out there that cooking is hard. | ||
| That it's complicated, that it takes too much time, that eating whole foods is too expensive. | ||
| And these are the mantras of the food industry that we have bought and we have consumed and believe. | ||
| And it's just not true. | ||
| And I've demonstrated this over and over in various communities where people can do it even in the worst environments. | ||
| So just a quick story. | ||
| I was part of this movie, Fed Up, about how the food industry was driving sugar consumption and led to this whole obesity thing. | ||
| problem and they were profiling a family in South Carolina that I went to their house and was a trailer with | ||
| where they live with a family of five the father was 42 had diabetes on dialysis couldn't lose the weight | ||
| to get a kidney, a new kidney, because he was very overweight. The mother was | ||
| this big, the son was 16 and almost diabetic and they never cooked a meal in their life and I went into | ||
| their trailer and I pulled everything out and I showed them what they were | ||
| eating and they thought it was all healthy They thought it was Cool Whip, which is a healthy topping, but it says zero trans fat on the label because the government gave the food industry a loophole, which says if it's less than half a gram per serving, it says zero trans fat. | ||
| But if you look at the ingredient list, it's like high fructose corn syrup, trans fat. | ||
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Right. | |
| And so I showed them all this stuff, and they were shocked. | ||
| And I said, OK, let's cook a meal from simple ingredients. | ||
| And I'm on the board of the Environmental Working Group, and there's a guide called Good Food on a Tight Budget. | ||
| How to eat well for you, eat well for your wallet, and for the planet. | ||
| And it's ingredients that are real food, but that are less expensive. | ||
| So what are the less expensive? | ||
| Cuts of meat, the less expensive vegetables, and the less expensive things you can buy, beans and grains, and so forth. | ||
| And we cooked a simple meal. | ||
| They loved it. | ||
| I said, here's a guide, here's my cookbook, you guys can do this. | ||
| And they lived in one of the worst food deserts in America on food stamps and disability for 1,000 bucks a month for a family of five to eat, right? | ||
| So they did it and they lost 200 pounds as a family. | ||
| The son ended up losing 50 but gained it back because he went to work at Bojangles and said it was like putting an alcoholic to work in a bar. | ||
| And then he finally got his act together and he lost 138 pounds. | ||
| His family had never gone to college or anything. | ||
| He asked me for a letter of recommendation for medical school, and now he's in medical school. | ||
| So it's possible, and they did it in one of the worst food deserts in America, but it was just education. | ||
| People just don't understand how to do it. | ||
| They don't know how to choose. | ||
| And to eat healthy food, it doesn't have to be more expensive. | ||
| It's shown that you can actually, for 50 cents more a day, or $15 a month per person, you can eat a whole real food diet. | ||
| In some sense, it should be the must. | ||
| Let's unpack that a little bit, 'cause you hear people say, | ||
| "Oh, well, the reason poor people have to eat fast food is because it's eight bucks and you're getting the burger, | ||
| you're getting the fries, you're getting the cookie, blah, blah, blah." | ||
| But I do find now, since I've become much more aware of all this, | ||
| if you have eight bucks, you can eat a pretty damn good meal | ||
| that you could get at Trader Joe's or a local thing that you might have to heat it up for a second | ||
| So can you lay out a couple ways that you could change your diet on a really economic level? | ||
| First of all, you know, chicken's not that expensive. | ||
| There are certain cuts of meat that are not that expensive. | ||
| I mean, you can even get regeneratively raised grass-fed beef if you buy directly from the rancher for an average of $8 a pound or $2 a serving, which is less than a McDonald's hamburger. | ||
| Oh, I bet you could. | ||
| Even at Whole Foods here, I think it's only now $5.99 a pound. | ||
| Yeah, for, wait, what'd you say, regenerative? | ||
| Regeneratively raised beef, which is grass-fed, but it's a whole next level of how do you restore soil, and we talked about climate reversal and all that. | ||
| So it's like a next level up. | ||
| Oh, so that's next level past just grass-fed. | ||
| Yeah, it's even like a next level up, which doesn't really exist that widely, but you can buy vegetables that aren't like heirloom radishes from Japan or something, but you can buy carrots and onions and cabbage and small potatoes. | ||
| You can buy real whole food. | ||
| And you can make grains and beans, which are extremely cheap, whole grains, if you know how to make it. | ||
| And you can make delicious food. | ||
| And people just have no clue how to shop and buy and find the right foods. | ||
| And there's great resources out there where you can bypass the middleman, like Thrive Market, where you can buy really good ingredients for 50 to 25% to 50% off of the retail price, and you can get whole foods. | ||
|
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Right. | |
| Is that because they're either close to expiration? | ||
| No, it's a membership program, so they make money on the memberships, like Costco. | ||
| It's sort of like Costco meets Whole Foods meets Amazon. | ||
| Interesting, a lot of big business in on this. | ||
| Okay, so people start cleaning up their diets, they start losing weight, but what do they have to do after that to kind of keep this thing going? | ||
| Well, I think what we have to realize is that we need change, right? | ||
| Food Fix, the book I wrote, is about what the problems are and how they're connected and what the solutions are. | ||
| And there's citizen solutions, there's things that businesses can do, There's things that governments need to do. | ||
| So nothing is going to work unless it's all happening. | ||
|
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So let's do one at a time. | |
| So citizens can choose what they eat. | ||
| So imagine if everybody in America just ate food from real ingredients, from whole food. | ||
| It doesn't have to be whole foods, whole paycheck, but it could be just real food. | ||
| We got rid of industrial ingredients. | ||
| So I'm going to not eat refined white flour, I'm not going to eat high fructose corn syrup, I'm not going to eat refined soybean oil, and I'm not going to eat any foods with weird ingredients that are coming from these plants. | ||
| That you can just look at the label, and if you don't recognize it, you can't pronounce it, or it's in Latin, or it has 45 ingredients, don't eat it. | ||
| So let's just give some people some real things to eat in the morning. | ||
| Have some eggs, have some oatmeal. | ||
| Yeah, eggs! | ||
| Have some eggs. | ||
| Have some steel-cut oats. | ||
| Have yogurt if you want. | ||
| Berries, nuts, seeds, all that's great. | ||
| A shake. | ||
| Don't eat GMO if you can avoid it. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Not necessarily because we know GMO foods are bad for your health, but we do know that the stuff they put on them is bad, like the pesticides and the glyphosate, which causes cancer. | ||
| That's weed killer. | ||
| In Cheerios, there's more weed killer in your Cheerios than there is vitamin D and B12, which they add to the cereal. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| And that's why Kellogg's has said we're gonna get it out. | ||
| Can you explain the GMO thing a little bit more? | ||
| We've talked a bit about this on the show, but GMO, genetically modified organisms, in and of themselves aren't bad, right? | ||
| We don't know. | ||
| That process. | ||
| We don't know. | ||
| I think it's a big uncontrolled experiment on humanity. | ||
| But haven't we modified bananas for years to get them to be a certain shape and size and things like that? | ||
| Yes, we definitely have. | ||
| Bread plants for years. | ||
| Mendel and his peas. | ||
| That's different than inserting genes into plants that are novel to that plant. | ||
| So we don't know. | ||
| But we do know that the stuff they put on them is bad. | ||
| So glyphosate is a great example. | ||
| Weed killer. | ||
| It's put on 70% of our crops. | ||
| It's 3.5 billion pounds that we've sprayed on America since it's been introduced. | ||
| It's 70% of all the chemicals in agriculture used across the world. | ||
| It has been, by the committee that was gathered from international scientists as part of the WHO's research on what cancer is and what's carcinogenic, they said that it's a probable carcinogen. | ||
| There have been billions of dollars of lawsuits that have been won against glyphosate in court recently because | ||
| it's linked to non-hodgkin's lymphoma and that has led to a 35 billion dollar loss in stock price and also the firing | ||
| of the CEO of Bayer which bought Monsanto which makes a weed killer | ||
| that that also is Clearly linked to destruction of the microbiome which is | ||
| the most important thing in your body that controls everything | ||
| It's the gut bacteria that controls heart disease, cancer, diabetes, obesity, autoimmune disease, allergies. | ||
| It literally destroys your microbiome. | ||
| And you're getting that all the time in your food. | ||
| It's sprayed on 70 crops of wheat, on all wheat products. | ||
| It's sprayed right at the end of harvest, so they dry it out so they can harvest it easier, and it's in your food. | ||
| So it's not good for you. | ||
| So whether or not GMO is bad or not, if you don't eat GMO foods, you're telling a message to the marketplace to stop what they're doing. | ||
| And Campbell's recently announced they're getting all GMO out of their food chain, right? | ||
| And so Kellogg's announced they're getting glyphosate out of their cereal, which is happening because the consumers want change. | ||
| Can you explain a bit more on, so we use these chemicals. | ||
| It's not just that it's getting into the food, but then the runoff into the water. | ||
| Yeah, so I mean, look, agriculture depends on pollinators, right? | ||
| Butterflies, bees, we've lost 75% of our pollinators because the things that they use for pesticides are neurotoxic and they kill pests and they don't discriminate between bees or potato beetles, right? | ||
| And so they're really destroying our pollinators, which has enormous impact. | ||
| And the fertilizer, that's not even to mention the human impact. | ||
| So there's a study, for example, of kids who are exposed to pesticides. | ||
| It's led to a loss of 41 million IQ points. | ||
| It increases the risk of cancer dramatically. | ||
| It causes 10,000 to 20,000 deaths a year in farm workers from pesticide poisoning. | ||
| So it's a real human cost. | ||
| But then there's the fertilizer story, which is a whole different game. | ||
| And I was sort of shocked as a doctor to start to dig into this. | ||
| And can I just kind of expand on it for a minute? | ||
| That's what we're doing here. | ||
| I actually didn't think fertilizer was just so bad. | ||
| I'm like, so you put a little nitrogen on the soil, what's the big deal? | ||
| It helps the plants grow. | ||
| Turns out that about 2% of all energy use in the world is for making fertilizer. | ||
| It's made using natural gas that comes from fracking. | ||
| They're the biggest purchaser of natural gas. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| The fertilizer industry, because it's a very energy-intensive process to make it. | ||
| Then, the methane released from the fracking wells is about 40-50% more methane than that released from traditional oil wells. | ||
| Then you put it on the soil, and it causes nitrous oxide to be produced, which is 300 times more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. | ||
| And it destroys also the microbiome of the soil, the microbiology, which is how our plants get nutritious. | ||
| So what we're eating today is far less nutritious than before. | ||
| You eat broccoli today, it's got 50% less nutrition than it did 50 years ago because of the soil requiring the microbiology to extract the nutrients that the plants eat. | ||
| Is that why my mom always says you can't get a good tomato anymore? | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Is there something to it? | ||
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100%, 100%. | |
| So it's all dependent on the soil. | ||
| And then once it's, It runs off into the water, into the rivers, lakes, and oceans. | ||
| It fertilizes the algae. | ||
| Because it's indiscriminate. | ||
| That's why you see these algal blooms in Lake Erie and why Toledo had no fresh water and cost the city a billion dollars to provide water to its citizens. | ||
| And then it runs off into the Gulf of Mexico, through the Mississippi, and creates a dead zone the size of New Jersey that kills 212,000 metric tons of fish. | ||
| And there's 400 of these around the world that are the size of Europe that 500 million people depend on for food every year. | ||
| And it's 400 billion pounds of this shit that's poured on the earth. | ||
| And these companies are super powerful, and they're nefarious. | ||
| They started something called Climate Smart Agriculture. | ||
| Now, who's not for Climate Smart Agriculture? | ||
| That sounds good. | ||
| I know if it sounds good, it's automatically good, right? | ||
| Right, crop life, you know. | ||
| Like all these front groups. | ||
| And so they create these, like the Global Alliance on Sustainable Agriculture. | ||
| It's all big food and big ag. | ||
| And the major contributors and partners in the climate smart agriculture movement are fertilizer companies. | ||
| So it's interesting though, because on one hand you're saying some of these companies have started to do some good things, and then on the other hand clearly it ain't... It's a mixed bag, right? | ||
| Some people are fighting for, you know, survival and claw and tooth and nail. | ||
| The Grocery Manufacture of America, which represented a lot of the big food companies, was pretty nefarious in its tactics to obstruct any progress on | ||
| changing our food system for the better. | ||
| So they, for example, in Washington State, spent a huge amount of money on fighting GMO | ||
| labeling and they did it in a way by creating funding from the food companies through a | ||
| mechanism that was illegal. | ||
| And it was the biggest illegal campaign finance violation ever. | ||
| The state of Washington sued them for $18 million and won, which is nothing compared to the billions they're making. | ||
| And the law didn't pass because their campaign was effective, right? | ||
| And after that, a bunch of these companies like Nestle, Danone, Unilever, Mars, they bailed on the grocery manufacturer America. | ||
| They started the Sustainable Food Policy Alliance. | ||
| Remains to be seen what they're going to do. | ||
| The Grocery Manufacturers of America now is defunct. | ||
| Everybody started pulling out because they're just not acting great. | ||
| And then they formed this new version of it that's sort of a smaller version. | ||
| Not a lot of members join now. | ||
| So that's a good sign that the food industry is starting to kind of wake up and you've got big companies talking about sustainability, about regenerative ag. | ||
| And now that I'm talking about it, they're actually doing something about it. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Why would they care? | ||
| It's not responding to the consumer, because only 10% of consumers know about ReginaVag. | ||
| I mean, Amazon Whole Foods announced that ReginaVag was one of the biggest, most important business innovations and trends, and that that is really important. | ||
| Are they labeling meat now? | ||
| Why can't I say regenerative? | ||
| You can, yes you can. | ||
| So these companies aren't doing it because their consumers are asking, they're doing it because they realize the way we're growing our food today is threatening our future ability to grow food. | ||
| So, they're like, wait a minute, we need to buy these raw materials from the farmers, and if they keep farming this way, there ain't going to be any food for us to buy, and our companies are going to go bad. | ||
| So, they're paying farmers, which the government should be doing, to actually convert to regenerative ag. | ||
| So, citizens can do a lot with changing their diet. | ||
| They can also actually do small things that actually make a big difference. | ||
| They can start, for example, joining community-supported agriculture. | ||
| have a community garden, they can have their own garden, and they can start composting. | ||
| Food waste is the third biggest emitter of greenhouse gases after the U.S. | ||
| and China, because when you throw all your vegetables and food scraps and wasted stuff into the landfill, it rots, causing methane, right? | ||
| So you're a vegetarian, you're a vegan, you think you're not eating meat and doing a good job, but you throw out your vegetable shit, and it goes in the landfill, and you're actually, you know, it's more methane than cows produce, right? | ||
| So it's all complicated, but the key is you could start doing a compost in San Francisco, They have mandatory compost in France, it's mandatory. | ||
| In Massachusetts, they've created a law that if you're a company that produces a ton of food waste a week, you can't throw it out. | ||
| So they have to figure out what to do with it, give it to farmers or whatever. | ||
| It spurs business innovation. | ||
| So those kinds of laws spurred Vanguard Renewables to partner with dairy farmers who are losing money in Massachusetts, because nobody's drinking milk anymore. | ||
| And they built anaerobic digesters, which basically they take three tractor trailers from Whole Foods and grocery stores every day on this one farm, and they put it in this digester with cow poop. | ||
| It basically creates electricity for 1,500 homes. | ||
| The farmer gets free electricity. | ||
| The farmer makes $100,000 a year instead of losing $1,600 a year. | ||
| Vanguard then sells it back up to the grid, and everybody's happy, and you solve manure, food waste, and you make electricity, and it's just like, and there's a few of these in this country, but there's 17,000 in Europe, because they're way ahead of us. | ||
| Yeah, so are we just behind on it because of the power that these big companies have over legislators, or the fact that they can pump into the system? | ||
| Yes, I mean, you know, when you look at the lobby effort, and you look at the different industries in lobbying, it's like, if you look at a graph, it's like, Agriculture and food is here and everything else is down here. | ||
| It's just the massive amount of money that's pouring in that is, quote, educating the lawmakers about what to do and they're not hearing the other side. | ||
| It's not that they're bad people. | ||
| It's not that they're not well-intentioned. | ||
| is that they just don't know. | ||
| And I've been meeting with senators and congressmen, and I'm just sort of shocked at the level of awareness of these issues. | ||
| And when you start to talk about it, they get very engaged and interested. | ||
| So how do you decide how much government should be involved? | ||
| This is where the libertarian side, the alarms are going off, like, oh yeah, we can tell the government to start giving these regulations, and stop doing this, stop doing that, and A, we know someone will always get around it, the law of unintended Consequences, et cetera, et cetera. | ||
| So how do you decide, as someone who's trying to do this from a holistic approach? | ||
| Well, I think it's really about, you know, sort of being honest about what we're doing and how the government is funding the growing of food that's making us sick. | ||
| It's funding the provision of that food to a large portion of the population, and it's paying for the Medicare and the Medicaid. | ||
| So we need to actually incentivize The right things and de-incentivize the wrong things. | ||
| So give people on Snap more benefits for eating fruits and vegetables and basically a habit to pay a little more for buying junk food. | ||
| Or have them incentivize. | ||
| But oddly, there's a lot of lefties that are often against that, right? | ||
| Because they say, oh, we shouldn't tell these people what to do with this. | ||
| But this is not necessarily lefties. | ||
| This is the hunger groups that are funded by the food industry Who are on their boards, who are opposing the changes in SNAP regulation. | ||
| Why can't we put nutrition guidelines in food stamps? | ||
| It's a great program developed by Johnson and 64 to deal with food insecurity and hunger in America. | ||
| Great idea. | ||
| But there are no nutrition guidelines. | ||
| So for school lunch, there are nutrition guidelines. | ||
| Right, so at Burger King, you literally say outside, sometimes it'll say, we accept snap, or we accept this or that. | ||
| So this is a tough one for me on the libertarian side, which like, I wouldn't want... | ||
| I don't love those programs generally, but I wouldn't want the government then telling people what they have to eat, and yet I completely understand. | ||
| But we do. | ||
| We do with school lunches. | ||
| Do you think they should be able to serve, you know, soda and McDonald's for every kid's school lunch? | ||
| Well, I would say for kids' school lunches that are given by the government, it's probably a little different. | ||
| Rather than you giving, if you're giving people money for food, you want to have them have as much choice, but I get it. | ||
| I do get it. | ||
| I'm not saying there should be I agree. | ||
| And then for incentives for farming, for example, they could create incentives for regenerative agriculture. | ||
| So now there's regulations in the USDA that if you have a 10,000 acre soybean farm and you want to grow a five acre piece of plot for regenerative vegetables or whatever, you can't do that. | ||
| Because the government will take away all your crop supports if you grow vegetables, which are speciality crops. | ||
| So it's just weird. | ||
| The government tells us in our dietary guidelines that 50% of our plate should be fruits and vegetables. | ||
| should be, I'm sorry, 50% of our plate should be fruits and vegetables. | ||
| Through subsidies, we support 4.45% for vegetables. | ||
| for vegetables. | ||
| So less than half a percent of our agricultural supports are for vegetables, mostly apples. | ||
| And these are called specialty crops, and yet we're telling people to eat lots of fruits and vegetables. | ||
| And so if our plate actually looked like the government subsidies were, we wouldn't be eating half our plate of fruits and vegetables, we'd be having a giant corn fritter, deep fried in soybean oil, with a giant cotton napkin. | ||
| Well, corn is a vegetable. | ||
| And maybe one green bean. | ||
|
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Right. | |
| Wait, let's talk about corn a little bit, because the high fructose corn syrup, what always strikes me as the craziest thing, that if you buy a Coca-Cola in the United States, I believe it's the second ingredient, it's water, and then it's high fructose corn syrup. | ||
| If you buy a Mexican Coke, Coke in Mexico, or that one that's been brought here, the second ingredient is sugar. | ||
| How did we in America, we're so advanced, and yet we can't even do the sugar thing right? | ||
| Even though sugar ain't that great for you? | ||
| I met the vice president of Pepsi once, vice chairman of Pepsi, and we became friends. | ||
| He's a doctor, and he had some interesting conversations. | ||
| And I said, why do you guys use high fructose corn syrup? | ||
| He says, the government makes it too cheap for us not to use it. | ||
| There's all kinds of tariffs on sugar to prevent importing sugar to keep the prices, you know, higher and to actually help corn farmers use their products for the sugar, which helps Americans, but it also kills Americans. | ||
| Yeah, geez. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What a screwy one! | ||
| I mean it's just nuts. | ||
| It is screwy, yeah. | ||
| You go to a store and you gotta pay more for the sugar one. | ||
| Because the prices are artificially low, right? | ||
| So it's challenging and I think we kind of have to look at how do we create things that aren't overly onerous for people but that incentivize them to do the right thing and disincentivize them to the wrong thing. | ||
| I think that's what we do through our tax code. | ||
| We can incentivize through our tax code. | ||
| Why do we, for example, allow the food industry to take a $15 billion tax cut or not pay taxes on marketing junk food? | ||
| Why do we do that? | ||
| I mean, cigarettes, there's enormous taxes, there's enormous disincentives, you can't advertise. | ||
| Why do we let them do that? | ||
| I mean, we can say free speech, fine, but why should we let them have the benefit of that? | ||
| Right. | ||
| So what model is better for us? | ||
| I see what you're saying. | ||
| So, okay, we're exporting a lot of this, but where are the places that have a model that maybe makes a little more sense? | ||
| Well, I mean, listen, Europe is so far ahead of us. | ||
| There's no GMO. | ||
| Half the ingredients in our food that we allow, they don't allow. | ||
| Food additives, colors, dyes, something like azodicarbonamide, which is a yoga mat material that is used in- Oh, isn't that in the McRib? | ||
| Is that the one that's in the McRib? | ||
| It was in Subway. | ||
| It was in Subway buns. | ||
| It's in a lot of the fast food buns. | ||
| And it's still allowed in this country. | ||
| It's a demon curse. | ||
| As a yoga teacher and a food guy, this must kill you. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| And in Singapore, for example, Right. | ||
| which is a very, you know, restrictive country. If you use that as a food | ||
| manufacturer in your product, you get a $450,000 fine and 15 years in jail. | ||
| And we allow it here. Products like DHT and our preservatives that | ||
| are not allowed in Europe. There's a whole list of these in my book. | ||
| Why do we have them here and not there? | ||
| And so we have to look at how different countries are addressing this, and Europe collectively is focusing on regenerative agriculture, on changing their system. | ||
| Chile is a great example of a country that has implemented a whole series of food policies that have had great impact in reducing obesity and ill health, which are completely unpalatable in this country. | ||
| The only way it got done was the Vice President of the Senate and the President of the country at the same time were doctors. | ||
| And they got this. | ||
| And they're like, we're going to fight the food industry. | ||
| So they put in a ban on junk food advertising to kids from 6 in the morning to 11 at night. | ||
| They banned all cartoon characters on kids' food. | ||
| So no more Tony the Tiger. | ||
| They killed two-canned salmon, Tony the Tiger. | ||
| Yeah, and they put warning labels on the front of packaging, like cigarettes for bad food. | ||
| They eliminated advertising of formula to kids. | ||
| They eliminated any junk food in schools. | ||
| And they put in 18% soda tax. | ||
| And they've funded, there's been funding to assess the impact of this. | ||
| 30 million dollars from Bloomberg actually to fund what this actually is doing. | ||
| And they found dramatic improvements and the most dramatic benefit wasn't even from the soda tax. | ||
| It was from the ban on marketing. | ||
| Is the increasing of taxes on these things, is that just really a short-term stop though? | ||
| Because eventually if you get enough people to stop then you don't have the tax money anymore and then you might be funding other things with the tax money? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I mean, it's been a model that, you know, is very controversial, but Larry Summers and Michael Bloomberg created a fiscal task force around the world of financial finance ministers to look at how do we use financial policies to change behavior, right? | ||
| So, you tax the things you don't want people to do, and you incentivize the things you want people to do, right? | ||
| So, savings you don't tax. | ||
| You know and maybe soda you should tax right and I think that it's been effective across the world | ||
| It's just it's just a challenging thing to do the data is really clear that it works. Yeah cigarettes | ||
| We do it on cigarettes and we've done in Berkeley. We've done in Philadelphia | ||
| We've done it in many many cities, but the problem is the food industry fights back. So so in | ||
| the last election 2016 four cities in California passed a soda tax | ||
| There are six cities totally in the country. | ||
| And the food industry freaked out. | ||
| So the big soda companies then created a strategy to prohibit future taxes. | ||
| So what they did, for example, they went in California and they created a ballot measure that would prohibit local taxes unless it was a two-thirds majority. | ||
| Which would mean it would cripple local governments to fund schools, to fund police departments, fire departments. | ||
| And they didn't care about that, but they spent $7 million funding this campaign | ||
| that would have passed, 'cause people don't like taxes, right? | ||
| Five days before the election, they went to Governor Brown, | ||
| who was also called Governor Moonbeam, probably the most liberal governor in history. | ||
| They said, "If you don't pass this preemptive law "that prohibits future taxes on soda and junk food, | ||
| We're going to leave this ballot measure in, and you're going to be screwed. | ||
| So he basically was bullied. | ||
| They made him an offer he couldn't refuse, like the mafia. | ||
| And he had to pass this tax, which now prohibits future taxes. | ||
| And they're doing this in state after state after state. | ||
| So all this happens behind the scenes. | ||
| Politics is messy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And so as consumers, we're sort of stuck with this system that is perpetuating a disease-creating system and a disease-creating economy. | ||
| And it's threatening our entire way of life. | ||
| And people just don't get it. | ||
| It's like, if we don't fix this, You know, we're all going to be really sick and fat and get all these chronic illnesses, which we already are. | ||
| Our economy is going to be crippled by this. | ||
| I mean, think about it. | ||
| If one in two dollars of our entire federal budget is for Medicare, I mean, there's no money for anything else, right? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| All right. | ||
| So we have sick people suddenly from all of this, or I guess not so suddenly. | ||
| It's happened over generations. | ||
| We've got an economy that the incentives are completely out of whack. | ||
| Let's talk about that planet thing too. | ||
| How is this affecting the planet? | ||
| We talked a little bit about it. | ||
| Yeah, so here we talk about some of the environmental impacts, but what people don't realize is that the very way we grow food is threatening our ability to grow food because of its impact on our climate and weather, right? | ||
| So if you look at end-to-end our entire food system, it's 50% of climate change. | ||
| Well, fossil fuels is about a third. | ||
| So it's worse than fossil fuels. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Deforestation. | ||
| You know, we kill 7 billion trees a year, the size of Costa Rica. | ||
| Soil erosion from our way of farming and the tilling. | ||
| Factory farming of animals. | ||
| Food waste. | ||
| Transport. | ||
| Refrigeration. | ||
| All these things end to end. | ||
| You add them up and it's 50%. | ||
| The good news is that if that's true, we can fix it. | ||
| And the UN said that if we took 2 million of the 5 million degraded hectares of land around | ||
| the world from overgrazing and from poor farm techniques And we convert it to regenerative agriculture, which is a | ||
| way of farming that restores and builds soil that conserves water that increases biodiversity | ||
| Pollinators etc. etc. produces better food more food. That's more profitable for the farmers if we did that | ||
| We could stop climate change for 20 years and it would cost 300 billion dollars | ||
| Which is less than Medicare spends on diabetes every year in America | ||
| What does that actually look like? | ||
| So we go to this land that's been barren? | ||
| So Farmland LP is a private equity company that is buying up conventional farms. | ||
| They're converting them to regenerative agriculture. | ||
| which includes creating diverse plantings, crop rotations, cover crops, no tilling of the soil, | ||
| and integrating animals who poo and pee and build soil. | ||
| They have actually taken their profits on those farms from single digits to 60 to 70 percent profits. | ||
| And they add all these benefits to the environment we call ecosystem services. | ||
| So as humans we extract about 125 trillion dollars a year from nature and use it for our purposes without putting it back. | ||
| The global economy is about 80 to 90 trillion. | ||
| So it's a lot. | ||
| There's a whole concept called ecosystem services where farmers can actually add benefit to the environment. | ||
| Build soil, conserve water, increase pollinators, all that stuff. | ||
| And they're finding they add 21 million dollars on the farms that they bought of benefit versus the conventional farms which remove 8 million. | ||
| And there are companies like Indigo that are paying farmers through very high-tech measurements of those benefits to the environment for the benefit they create. | ||
| In Costa Rica, they're paying farmers to build soil and conserve water and increase biodiversity. | ||
| So, Danone and General Mills are now paying farmers to do this. | ||
| So, there's incentives that government could create to say, like, we're talking about carbon capture technology, right? | ||
| So, the most powerful carbon capture technology in the world is available everywhere. | ||
| It's free. | ||
| It works better than anything else. | ||
| It can completely reverse carbon in the environment and draw down all the carbon. | ||
| And it's called photosynthesis. | ||
| And it's been around for billions of years. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You mean that green stuff and the sun and the whole thing and it works? | ||
| I mean, that's how it happens. | ||
| Carbon dioxide, plants eat that. | ||
| Sunlight turns it into energy. | ||
| It goes into the roots and into the soil. | ||
| 30 to 40 percent of all the carbon in our atmosphere, which is a trillion tons, about 3 to 4 billion, comes from the destruction of carbon in the soil. | ||
| From soil erosion, from the tilling, from the way we farm, and it can all be put back. | ||
| The soil can literally hold three times the amount of carbon in our entire atmosphere right now, if we were to do it right. | ||
| I wish we had more time here, but I got a hard out today. | ||
| Give me the one minute, if you want people to understand all of this, or the call to action. | ||
| Call to action, yes. | ||
| Give me the call to action. | ||
| One minute. | ||
| Finish strong here. | ||
| First of all, they can go to foodfixbook.com. | ||
| I was gonna do that part. | ||
| And there's a food fix action guide, which lists all the citizen actions, business innovations, and government actions that can be done to actually start to solve this. | ||
| And you can also go to foodfix.org. | ||
| We've started a campaign, a non-profit and a lobby group, because I've decried lobbyists my whole life. | ||
| Now I'm going to become one, because I want to be one for the good guys. | ||
| And we're raising money, we're mobilizing grassroots efforts, we're educating people, we're educating lawmakers. | ||
| And if you want to be part of that movement, go to foodfix.org and learn more about it. | ||
| And let's do this together. | ||
| All right, Dr. Mark Hyman, we're gonna do this again. | ||
| Guys, go to drhyman.com or foodfix.org. | ||
| If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about lifestyles instead of nonstop yelling, check out our lifestyle playlist. | ||
| And if you wanna watch full interviews on a variety of topics, check out our full episode playlist. | ||
| They're both right over here. |
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