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

00:00:00.000 Hey everyone, welcome to the drive podcast. I'm your host, Peter Atiyah. This podcast,

00:00:15.480 my website and my weekly newsletter all focus on the goal of translating the science of longevity

00:00:19.800 into something accessible for everyone. Our goal is to provide the best content in health

00:00:24.600 and wellness full stop. And we've assembled a great team of analysts to make this happen.

00:00:28.880 If you enjoy this podcast, we've created a membership program that brings you far more

00:00:33.280 in-depth content. If you want to take your knowledge of the space to the next level at

00:00:37.320 the end of this episode, I'll explain what those benefits are. Or if you want to learn more now,

00:00:41.720 head over to peteratiyahmd.com forward slash subscribe. Now, without further delay, here's

00:00:48.080 today's episode. My guest this week is Dr. Mark Hyman. Mark is a family physician, a New York

00:00:55.160 Times bestselling author and the director of the Cleveland Clinic Center for Functional

00:00:59.900 Medicine. It turns out we're going to talk about pretty much none of that today. We talk

00:01:05.280 almost exclusively on his new book, which is due out tomorrow called Food Fix, How to Save

00:01:12.560 Our Health, Our Economy, Our Communities, and Our Planet One Bite at a Time. And if that sounds

00:01:18.180 like a mouthful, it's because it is a mouthful. This is a kind of staggering topic. And even by

00:01:25.480 the standards of this podcast, it's probably too much for one episode. Mark basically lays

00:01:32.240 out a thesis that if you fix the food system, you fix a lot of problems. So it's not a one

00:01:38.720 fur, it's not a two fur. It's like somewhere between a three fur and a four fur. We don't

00:01:44.720 spend a lot of time talking about the health consequences of fixing food. Although we open

00:01:50.040 our discussion with that, talking about the health impact of food, we talk a little bit

00:01:53.480 about gut health, but we spend more of our time probably speaking about some of the social

00:01:58.980 consequences and the environmental consequences. And of course, it ultimately does come down

00:02:04.040 to health at the individual level. We do get a lot into agriculture, energy usage around

00:02:09.540 food. We talk a lot about the impact on climate. We also talk quite a lot about GMO, the strength of

00:02:15.980 the evidence for and against it. We go through a lot of the policy ideas around how one might fix

00:02:21.460 the food system. And actually, we close with a nice anecdote of an explanation that I thought

00:02:26.040 Mark provided that was pretty interesting around the difference between food in Europe and North

00:02:31.800 America. Many people, myself included, have commented on this, which is, why is it that when you go

00:02:36.640 to Europe, you seem to be able to eat with impunity things that in the United States just feel like

00:02:41.480 they're about to kill you? Anyway, this is a really interesting episode. I learned a lot in

00:02:47.220 kind of preparing for it. And truthfully, I still feel like there's a lot I just don't understand in

00:02:52.820 this system. There's probably a lot I need to go back and get smarter on. There are so many big

00:02:58.620 numbers in this type of a discussion that the scale sort of doesn't make sense at times when you start

00:03:04.560 to think about what it means to feed the world and how making changes in that system can have

00:03:10.920 enormous knock-on effects for both good and bad. So without further delay, please enjoy my discussion

00:03:16.440 with Mark Hyman. And we may end up revisiting this topic with other guests should people find this

00:03:22.420 interesting. Hey, Mark. Thanks for coming over, man. No, I'm so happy to be here. It's beautiful.

00:03:31.720 Chickens running around and everything. Venison in the freezer, my kind of place.

00:03:36.140 Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's in keeping with a lot of what we're going to talk about today.

00:03:38.860 I think, Mark, a lot of people would associate you with other topics that we might get into,

00:03:44.700 functional medicine, the role of toxins in the environment, certainly food, but from the standpoint

00:03:50.540 of health, what to eat. But what we're talking about today is actually something that when you first

00:03:55.760 mentioned to me, you were working on this book. Actually, at the time you were putting the finishing

00:04:00.560 touches on it about a year ago, I was like, wow, that's definitely something I want to understand

00:04:04.380 more. So I can't wait to kind of have this discussion with you today. And that is basically

00:04:08.440 how food is made, how food is delivered, and how food is consumed, and what the impacts of that are.

00:04:14.380 I mean, what made you decide to tackle a problem of this magnitude, which is not just a scientific

00:04:19.480 problem, but it's a political problem. Totally.

00:04:22.020 It's a religious problem, if we're going to be brutally honest.

00:04:24.640 You mean the nutrition religion?

00:04:25.940 Yes, exactly. So it's about as complicated a topic as one would go after.

00:04:31.820 It is. And I think as a doctor, seeing patients day after day for 30 years, as a functional

00:04:38.220 medicine doctor, my focus is on why. Why are my patients so sick? And not always, but the majority

00:04:44.800 of them, it has some relationship to food. And then I began to wonder, well, I could sit here all day

00:04:50.360 bailing the bucket and the boat with a hole in it, but I have to figure out why they're eating,

00:04:55.860 the food they're eating. And then you're going to think about it and go upstream. And well,

00:04:59.240 the food they're eating is caused by the food system. And I'm like, well, why do we have the

00:05:03.220 food system we have? Well, our food policies. And then I'm like, why do we have our food policies?

00:05:08.060 It's the food industry that influences our government policies through lobbying and other

00:05:12.620 influences that they do across the spectrum of society to drive their products to the market and

00:05:19.900 sell them, which are predominantly killing us. I mean, there's 11 million people that die every year

00:05:24.180 from eating ultra processed food and not enough for the good food. And I think it's an underestimate.

00:05:29.360 So basically the answer to your question is I realized I couldn't treat my patients in my office

00:05:32.380 or in the hospital or the clinic. I had to go to where the source of the problem was.

00:05:35.320 Yeah. Yeah. And I want to sort of put this in context, which is the evolution of this,

00:05:41.460 the domestication of crops, the institutionalization of agriculture has for, we're going to demonize it a

00:05:51.460 little bit here, but the reality of it is it's been kind of a remarkable transformation. It would

00:05:55.100 certainly be akin to the printing press. When you think about step function changes in our civilization,

00:06:00.820 when we went from hunter gatherers to an agricultural society. So I want to be careful

00:06:07.640 that we're not just sort of saying the answer is agriculture is no, the end of the, the agriculture

00:06:12.840 is a solution if we do it right. Yeah. So let's start with what you see as the sort of main

00:06:21.200 pillars of the problem. How did we get to a point where the food environment is toxic? Cause that's

00:06:29.660 effectively what you're saying, right? Is that if you eat on default, you're going to probably eat

00:06:33.920 the wrong things. Yeah. It goes deeper than that. The food system as a whole, as I began to dig in

00:06:38.540 this rabbit hole, I realized it wasn't just causing chronic disease, but it was causing most of the

00:06:42.500 global crises that we're thinking about in silos that are all connected. And I'll just sort of quickly

00:06:47.720 lay them out and it'd be good to go over them in detail as we go through the podcast. But

00:06:50.880 clearly food is the biggest driver of chronic disease affecting six out of 10 people. It's

00:06:56.060 clearly the biggest driver of economic stress in this country in our $22 trillion debt. One third

00:07:01.660 of all Medicare expenses are for diabetes alone. And one third of all of our federal budget is

00:07:07.100 Medicare. If it was a company, it would be the biggest company in the world at a trillion dollars

00:07:11.140 annually. It's also driving climate change, a food system end to end. And we'll unpack it is the

00:07:17.860 number one cause of climate change more than fossil fuels. It's causing massive environmental

00:07:21.720 degradation, including loss of biodiversity, plant species, animal species, livestock species.

00:07:27.840 It's driving social injustice in many ways through how it affects our kids' cognitive development

00:07:32.820 and ability to learn. And there's huge academic achievement gaps. It leads to massive health

00:07:38.520 disparities because poor communities are more affected by these foods and are more targeted by them.

00:07:44.060 And it affects even behavior, violence, conflict. We see such a divisive society today. Why did we

00:07:49.660 have that? 40 years ago, it wasn't like that. And I think our diet has changed so radically, not just

00:07:55.240 in the last 10,000 years, but in the last 40 years with the advent of massive amounts of ultra-processed

00:08:00.660 food. And that's driving cognitive behavioral issues, violence, suicide, conflict, and even

00:08:07.600 threatens our national security because 70% of military recruits are unfit to fight and are rejected.

00:08:13.200 So we've got these global problems that are affecting us. And then, of course, that leads to

00:08:16.840 massive political instability because of our food system, of climate refugees, because the food

00:08:21.480 system is driving climate. What is that going to do? I mean, think about it. We had a million Syrian

00:08:25.580 refugees, and that created a global crisis. The UN estimates that within a decade or a few decades,

00:08:31.620 we're going to have 200 to a billion climate refugees. That's unimaginable. So how do we begin to sort of

00:08:37.120 grapple with these problems and think about the solutions? And the beauty is, since they're all connected by

00:08:41.560 food, they can all be solved by going to the root and fixing our food system. And that's the leverage

00:08:46.140 we have, which is so exciting to me because it's not, oh, doom and gloom, the world's ending. It's,

00:08:50.940 yeah, we identify the problem, how it's connected, think of it as a system, and then be able to solve

00:08:55.740 the problem by going to the root and dealing with these issues collectively.

00:08:59.520 So which one of those would you like to start with? Would you like to start with sort of the impact

00:09:04.240 of processed food on health, which is probably not one that we need to spend a lot of time on. I don't

00:09:08.440 think there's many people that would debate that, are there?

00:09:12.160 You'd be surprised. I mean, there's $12 billion spent by the food industry on nutrition, quote,

00:09:19.600 research that confuses people, muddies the waters, declares that Gatorade is a great sports drink,

00:09:25.120 and that sugar doesn't cause obesity, and that, I mean, I could go on and on. People are confused,

00:09:30.360 and certainly our political leaders certainly don't get this. And I think when you think of our

00:09:34.080 healthcare system, it certainly doesn't get that food is medicine.

00:09:36.740 Do you really think that political leaders, I know you've spent some time interacting with said

00:09:40.620 folks, do you really think they don't get it? Or do you think that they're just in a difficult

00:09:44.140 position, which is how do you appease all of these constituents? On the one hand, a lot of the bills

00:09:50.520 get paid by the entities that endorse these agendas. And on the other end, they probably have

00:09:56.160 empathy for the damage that's done. I mean, do you actually think there's a lack of awareness?

00:09:59.700 I do. I mean, forget about politicians. Academics, doctors, health professionals have no clue how

00:10:06.580 powerful food is to heal disease. I mean, they get that if you eat too much, you're going to get fat,

00:10:11.480 right? But that's about it. Or if you eat too much carbs, maybe now, maybe you'll get diabetes. But

00:10:15.540 not even that. I mean, the American Diabetes Association is still telling people to eat a lot

00:10:19.700 of carbohydrates. I think we have a real lack of understanding of the power of food to cause disease

00:10:26.080 and the power of food to cure disease. And so there's a real gap in that. I think it's starting

00:10:31.260 to become in the public awareness that food is medicine. There's a food is medicine working group

00:10:36.020 in Congress. Cleveland Clinic, where I work now, is a food is medicine initiative. There's hospitals

00:10:40.740 around the country that are talking about this. It's more the exception than the rule. So I do think

00:10:44.600 people don't understand the magnitude. I mean, if you say to a politician, what is the biggest

00:10:49.200 killer on the planet? They're going to go smoking or lack of exercise. Maybe they're going to get

00:10:55.100 that it's being overweight, but they don't get that it's the ultra processed food that

00:10:58.900 kills more people than smoking, violence, wars, everything else. So I mean, I think if there

00:11:04.020 was a disease like Ebola or Zika that was killing 11 million people a year, I mean, people would

00:11:08.840 be talking about it. And it's just not in the conversation that's happening. Even for example,

00:11:13.740 Medicare, Medicare for all. Has anybody said the reason we have the trouble with Medicare is because

00:11:19.100 people are eating bad food and that we need to fix the food? No, no. Saying let's get

00:11:22.640 Medicare for all. Let's repeal Obamacare. I mean, those aren't the solutions. It's like,

00:11:26.540 that would be a disaster if we had Medicare for all because everybody's sick and it's just

00:11:30.720 going to bankrupt the country unless we fix why they're sick in the first place.

00:11:34.460 What do you think it is about processed foods that are particularly difficult metabolically

00:11:39.220 for our species? Historically, we ate 800 different species of plants, a lot of roots and tubers,

00:11:44.140 100 grams of fiber a day. And now on the average American, it's about eight grams, which is nothing.

00:11:48.520 And we had a very complex diet, which was very difficult to obtain sugar. You got lucky if you

00:11:55.040 found a honey thing. I mean, I remember reading this article about these Nepalese honey hunters,

00:11:59.640 where they have to climb up 100 feet into the trees with a burning bush. And it was like,

00:12:03.800 if you had to climb a tree with a burning bush to get a cookie, you probably wouldn't eat so many

00:12:08.400 cookies. And I think it's just become so easy for us to have this abundance of sugar and flour and

00:12:14.640 refined foods. And the good intentions that were there in the post-war period that led to the

00:12:20.200 development of industrial agriculture were to provide a lot of starchy, abundant calories to

00:12:24.800 feed the hungry and solve real hunger issues around the world. And I think that was a good thing,

00:12:29.920 but there was unintended consequences of the intensive chemical agriculture that we're using,

00:12:34.660 intensive fertilizer use, and the commodity products, which are wheat, corn, and soy, and rice,

00:12:40.200 and some other areas of the world that are driving this obesity epidemic. So our biology isn't adapted

00:12:45.000 to eating highly refined foods, which essentially is most of what we're eating now. It's 60% of our

00:12:50.580 calories. And every 10% of your calories that's ultra-processed food, your risk of death goes up

00:12:55.460 by 14%. So it's not something our bodies like. It's not something you're adapted to. And then,

00:13:00.540 of course, there's all the other stuff in there that may be problematically refined soybean oil

00:13:04.320 or food additives or chemicals that are in our food that have all sorts of metabolic consequences,

00:13:09.420 like BPA or other metabolic toxins that are consumed within the food we're eating. So it's

00:13:14.180 complicated. It's sugar and starch and flour are the big drivers, but there's all these other

00:13:17.980 components. And then who knows what's happening with pesticides and glyphosate affecting our

00:13:22.620 microbiome. I mean, it's such a complex web of different factors that alter our metabolic pathways

00:13:27.960 that drives disease. And just kind of digging into this a little bit more, how much of it do you

00:13:33.060 think is the energy balance and the dysregulation of energy balance that comes from these processed

00:13:37.800 foods. So there are certainly people out there that would argue that part of the trouble with

00:13:42.100 processed food is it sort of hijacks our energy homeostatic systems. So if you put a human in an

00:13:48.540 environment akin to what our ancestors evolved in, there was enough auto-feedback and regulation that

00:13:55.720 you sort of maintained energy balance. You would eat more when you needed to eat more. You would eat

00:14:00.240 less when you needed to eat less. One of the drawbacks of processed food, if not the biggest drawback,

00:14:04.460 is it sort of hijacks that system. And if you cut the feedback out of that loop, they're eating when

00:14:10.000 they don't really need additional energy. Do you think that's the biggest issue? Or do you think

00:14:14.100 it's the void of nutrient that then creates sort of an abundance of junk calorie as the body search

00:14:22.040 for nutrients? Do you think it's this loss of fiber? Probably both. I mean, kids who were iron deficient

00:14:27.060 eat dirt. It's called pica. And it's well known that if you're looking for nutrients, you're just going to

00:14:31.520 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,

00:14:36.480 is the ways in which these refined starches and sugars affect your biology. They raise insulin, which

00:14:44.560 has a cascading effect of fat storage in your belly, which is a dangerous fat. It leads to increased hunger,

00:14:51.360 affects your brain chemistry. It actually locks the fat in the fat cells so they can't get out. So it gets

00:14:56.480 like a one-way turnstile that gets in but can't get out. And it slows your metabolism. So you're

00:15:01.520 in this cascade of vicious cycles. So you talked about energy balance. I think most people, when

00:15:05.780 they hear that, think about calories in, calories out. I think, you know, I both understand that it's

00:15:10.040 more complex than that, that there's different effects of food on your biology independent of

00:15:15.940 calories. In a lab, all calories are the same. 750 calories of Coke, 50 calories of Coke is the same

00:15:22.040 as 750 calories of broccoli. But to get 750 calories of soda, you'd have a big gulp, which

00:15:29.060 is 46 teaspoons of sugar. And 750 calories of broccoli is 21 cups of broccoli with 35 grams

00:15:34.980 of fiber and no sugar. Profoundly different effects on your biology, same calories. But

00:15:39.180 we don't really appreciate that medicine. And most of our current thinking about weight loss is focused

00:15:44.580 on calories in, calories out. It suits the food industry because they go, well, it's all about

00:15:48.380 moderation. There's no good or bad calories. It's exercise more, eat less. Like that's their

00:15:53.500 mantra. And it serves them to sell more of their junk food as long as it's part of a, quote,

00:15:57.420 balanced diet. But the truth is that these foods affect our brain chemistry and create all sorts of

00:16:03.240 metabolic issues that are incredibly difficult. And I was chatting with my friend, David Perlmutter,

00:16:07.460 who just wrote a book called Brainwash, where he's talking about, he's a neurologist, where

00:16:10.420 the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala are uncoupled with an inflammatory diet, which is what we're

00:16:17.040 eating most of us in America and around the world. What that means is that the adult in the room,

00:16:21.340 the prefrontal cortex, which is the decision maker that understands the consequences of its

00:16:25.900 behavior, is not talking to the impulse part of your brain, the fight or flight part of your brain,

00:16:31.880 the pleasure-seeking part of your brain. So there's this disconnection and your decisions are not

00:16:35.540 in your best interest. And that's why we have so much bad behavior and conflict and so forth,

00:16:40.980 because we're eating this inflammatory diet that's literally dysregulating our brain. So the adult in the

00:16:45.800 room is asleep. Say a bit more about that. What is it about the diet that could be inflammatory

00:16:50.900 and how could one measure the consequences of that? Because is it possible that two people

00:16:57.720 could consume the exact same subpar diet and have very different inflammatory responses?

00:17:03.280 Yeah, sure. I mean, there is a, listen, if people are eating junk food and processed food,

00:17:06.920 their metabolism, whatever they look like, whether they're overweight or not, is not going to be as

00:17:10.420 good as someone who's eating a whole foods unprocessed diet. But there is a lot of genetic variability,

00:17:14.940 but you can actually measure inflammation in response to diet through various biomarkers.

00:17:20.700 There's new panels of sort of looking at the inflammasome, which is really cool. It's more

00:17:25.360 than just a CRP or a SED rate, which are blood tests you can do to look at inflammation. And the

00:17:29.700 ways in which it causes it, particularly if we're talking about insulin, it also drives this visceral

00:17:33.900 belly fat, which is a basically metabolic fire that starts in these cells and it spreads inflammation

00:17:41.620 throughout the body. So just the nature of eating sugar and processed food drives up inflammation.

00:17:46.780 If a patient has normal biomarkers through the lens of all of those things, their interleukins

00:17:52.140 and C-rective protein, fibrinogen, if all of those things were normal, would you still think that

00:17:57.860 there's potentially an inflammatory response that's coming through their diet?

00:18:02.000 And the question is, how sensitive are our current tools for assessing the immune response to food?

00:18:08.640 And I think they're pretty crappy. And I think there's more and more lab diagnostic measures that

00:18:15.780 are coming about that are going to help us look at that. I was talking to someone from the Buck

00:18:19.660 Institute of Aging last week, and he said, yeah, there's a whole new panel of inflammatory biomarkers

00:18:24.320 that are much more specific and much more sensitive and enable us to really look at the inflammatory

00:18:29.740 response that's happening in the body related to aging or diet or anything else.

00:18:33.420 How much of that inflammatory response do you think is mediated by permeability in the gut

00:18:38.500 specifically versus, because I have to be honest with you, Mark, this is an area that I've never

00:18:43.320 understood. It gets talked about a lot. There's lots of hand waving. Sometimes I see it certainly in

00:18:49.340 patients. I mean, when we see subtle elevations in fibrinogen and or C-reactive protein, or at least two of

00:18:55.380 the interleukins, we usually put patients on elimination diets till we find out what the

00:19:00.220 culprit was. And we're trying to basically titrate symptoms versus these biomarkers. But I find that

00:19:05.560 to be staggeringly crude. And to your point, I don't know what we're missing. And I don't know what's

00:19:11.220 true, true and unrelated. And then of course, it gets back to the question of what's the mechanism of

00:19:16.420 this. And so one potential mechanism is that the permeability of the gut is altered. And if bacteria

00:19:24.200 that could normally not translocate across the lining of the gut do so, that would certainly be

00:19:30.880 a reason for inflammation. A, do you think that that's a prevalent source of it?

00:19:35.040 Oh yeah, huge. I mean, all our guts are messed up. And there's a whole phenomenon called metabolic

00:19:39.020 endotoxemia. It's been well described and studied. And the fact that your gut microbiome plays a huge

00:19:44.180 role in regulation of weight independent of calories. So they literally can take the poop out

00:19:47.920 of a skinny rat into a fat rat and make them skinny and vice versa. They've done it in humans.

00:19:53.120 I think the way in which it works is that your microbiome is regulated by what you eat. A lot of

00:19:59.080 fiber, prebiotics, the phytonutrients, the phytochemicals, the polyphenols, all affect the

00:20:05.660 quality of the garden you have growing inside of you. And you can get a lot of nasty weeds in there.

00:20:11.000 And when that starts to happen, they start to disrupt the gut microbiome. They disrupt the

00:20:14.720 lining of the gut. They cause what we call leaky gut on top of everything else, which is our low

00:20:19.840 fiber diet, high sugar, processed food, increases bad bugs in the gut, antibiotics, acid blockers,

00:20:26.340 anti-inflammatory drugs, hormones, all screw up our gut. And of course, toxins, environmental toxins,

00:20:31.600 glyphosate is super toxic to the microbiome. And so all these things that we know and those things

00:20:36.380 we don't know are disrupting the microbiome. And when that happens, the lining of the gut becomes

00:20:41.680 slightly damaged. The biofilms get disrupted and you end up absorbing bacterial products,

00:20:46.980 bacterial toxins, as well as food antigens, things that we should normally tolerate that start to

00:20:51.560 create an inflammatory response. And 60% of your immune system is in your gut. And what's really

00:20:56.460 striking to me, Peter, is the discovery that many of our metabolites in our blood, probably a third or

00:21:02.320 more, may be from microbiome. In other words, when you check your blood tests, we're checking human

00:21:07.260 analytes. But when you actually start to do some more sophisticated metabolic testing and

00:21:12.560 metabolism, you find all these things that aren't human, that come from bacteria that are regulating

00:21:17.260 your immune system, that are activating your mitochondria, that are regulating your DNA,

00:21:21.840 that are affecting your brain chemistry, affecting your mood, affecting all sorts of diseases. So this is

00:21:27.040 like a really exciting area. And I think getting people's microbiome sorted often happens when you shift

00:21:32.100 to a whole foods, plant-rich diet, not plant-based, but plant-rich.

00:21:36.040 How can one measure these things? I mean, one of the things that I've found difficult is finding

00:21:41.580 valid commercial tests that can enable patients or physicians to understand if they're in this sort

00:21:48.680 of regulated state. I mean, to me, the black box is when someone comes in and says, I have gut dysbiosis

00:21:55.020 or I have poor gut health. And they may be right, but it's very different than someone who says,

00:22:01.760 I have type 2 diabetes, where we have really clear ways to diagnose it. We kind of have some

00:22:07.720 understanding what the pathophysiology is here. This is much more squishy. And frankly, there's an

00:22:15.120 enormous disconnect between people like you and sort of the stuffy, upper-lipped gastroenterologist

00:22:23.520 who makes his or her living in the gut, but doesn't necessarily sort of see the problem this

00:22:30.820 way, right? They're looking at different problems. You know, honestly, Peter, the evidence has become

00:22:34.940 so overwhelming that mainstream medicine is bought into this whole microbiome story. And Cleveland

00:22:39.780 Clinic, for example, they're studying the microbiome and heart disease and arthritis and cancer. And it's

00:22:44.000 like, they just got a $12 million grant from the NIH to study the microbiome and heart disease,

00:22:48.860 which is pretty amazing. And yet if you go to your doctor and say, is there any evidence that I should

00:22:54.600 be on this probiotic or this? Yeah, they don't know. The clinical translation is challenging. So

00:22:58.340 I'm somebody who's been practicing functional medicine for 30 years. And the gut has been the

00:23:02.860 number one focus of our ability to really move diseases in a powerful way. And they used to call

00:23:09.420 me Dr. C every poop because I've done literally tens of thousands of stool tests and I've looked at all the

00:23:14.320 different ones. And you're looking at a moving target. You're looking at an ecosystem. And so

00:23:19.400 we look at a lot of different biomarkers to assess what's going on in the gut. Is there adequate

00:23:25.280 pancreatic enzyme function looking at pancreatic elastase? Are there absorption issues looking at

00:23:31.180 fecal fats? Are there inflammatory markers in there? For example, calprotectin or eosinophil protein X,

00:23:37.620 which are standard markers to look at inflammation in the gut. What's your IGA levels, your antibody levels?

00:23:43.320 And then we look at indicators of dysregulated gut microbiome, such as short chain fatty acids,

00:23:49.380 which are essentially produced by good bacteria that are the fuel for the gut and have anti-cancer

00:23:54.640 properties, anti-inflammatory properties. And those can be low like butyrate. And we can see that.

00:24:00.100 Then we look at sort of different microbiome characteristics using DNA or PCR analysis through

00:24:06.020 the microRNAs. And that allows us to see, for example, if there's low acromantia, which is a very

00:24:10.680 important bacteria that regulates your biofilm, that regulates immunity, that's linked to autoimmune

00:24:15.220 disease and cardiometabolic diseases, cancer treatment therapy risk. So we can modify those

00:24:20.860 things. And then we look at culture. We look at other kinds of testing for parasites. It's

00:24:25.360 PCR testing. So there's a lot of things that we look at and get a gestalt. It changes over time,

00:24:30.180 but you can see if someone's got a good gut or an okay gut or a terrible gut.

00:24:34.200 So if you take a patient who is both symptomatic and by some consolation of tests has a quote unquote

00:24:42.480 bad gut, what percentage of those are quote unquote fixable by subtraction? So you take things out of

00:24:50.940 their diet or addition, you add more of certain food to their diet, or the third choice would be

00:24:58.380 intervention based where you have to use sort of supplements and antibiotics or probiotics or

00:25:05.340 things like that. So that's an oversimplified look at this. But if there's three levers you have,

00:25:09.580 which means take something out of their food, add something to their food or add a different type of

00:25:14.340 food, or then use a bigger gun, like a supplement, how do those tools fit into this treatment?

00:25:20.840 Well, functional medicine is a very organized framework for addressing gut dysfunction called

00:25:25.720 the five R program. The first R is to remove, remove things that shouldn't be there, whether

00:25:30.820 it's foods that are triggering a problem like gluten, which affects permeability or dairy grains for some

00:25:37.120 people, remove bad bugs. So if you have a parasite, I mean, I just had a patient who had a common

00:25:42.740 parasite. She had stomach issues for 20 years. She was always waking up feeling like crap. I gave her

00:25:48.140 Alinea, which is an anti-parasitic medication. Six days, she says she's never felt better. So sometimes you

00:25:52.840 need to do that. And maybe bacterial overgrowth you have, maybe there's yeast overgrowth,

00:25:57.740 you need to address that. And so that's the first step. The second step is to replace what

00:26:01.380 might be missing. So fiber, prebiotics, enzymes, various things that may be needing to support the

00:26:06.940 system. And sometimes that's just through food, but sometimes that's also supplements.

00:26:11.040 Sure. You can take prebiotic fibers and prebiotic foods like plantain and artichokes and all kinds of

00:26:16.060 different foods, and then re-inoculate, which would be provide probiotics where necessary. And that can be

00:26:21.520 through foods like fermented foods or can be through probiotic supplements. And that's still

00:26:26.000 sort of a wild west, but there are things out there that really work. And then to replace what's

00:26:30.220 missing. So maybe there's nutrients that the body needs to heal, things like glutamine, vitamin A,

00:26:35.580 fish oil, maybe even things like butyrate, and replace things that might be needed for healing

00:26:39.760 the gut. Like polyphenols, for example, are a wonderful thing that you can get from food,

00:26:43.740 pomegranate, cranberries, green tea, et cetera, that have powerful, great effects on the microbiome that we

00:26:49.220 didn't really appreciate. So we saw those prebiotics and probiotics, but turns out the

00:26:51.860 polyphenols in plant foods are super helpful for the gut microbiome. And then the last R is to

00:26:57.460 restore, which means to sort of restore your nervous system because you need to sort of deal with

00:27:02.160 the way in which your stress level and everything affects your gut and your gut microbiome. You can

00:27:06.380 get a leaky gut just from stress, for example. So working on all those in a systematic way that's

00:27:11.060 personalized is really the approach. There's no sort of, oh, take this or do that, it's going to work.

00:27:15.300 So bringing it back to what you started this point with.

00:27:19.640 Yeah, we got down to the rabbit hole.

00:27:20.560 Yeah, yeah.

00:27:22.600 Well, it's such an interesting topic. You've laid out basically the enormous health consequences of

00:27:27.260 eating poorly.

00:27:28.220 Six out of 10 Americans have a chronic disease. Four out of 10 have two or more. In 10 years,

00:27:33.000 83 million Americans are allowed three or more, which is bankrupting our country. And one in two

00:27:37.160 Americans has pre-diabetes or type 2 diabetes. These statistics are staggering. 75% of us are overweight.

00:27:42.780 Most states now have 40% obesity rates. I mean, when I graduated medical school, there wasn't a

00:27:46.900 single state that had a 20% obesity rate. Now, everybody's got 30 or almost 40. These are massive

00:27:52.160 things that are happening at a scale that we've never seen in human history, that we haven't been

00:27:56.040 equipped to deal with, that we haven't really thought of how to address. And it's like, we're

00:27:58.960 trying to scramble to fix it.

00:28:00.880 And you certainly in the book talk about how there are racial differences in terms of the susceptibility

00:28:07.960 to the bad policy, which we'll get to down the line. Is there also sort of racial variability

00:28:14.840 and discrepancy in the actual physiology in response to this?

00:28:18.860 There's clearly economic health disparities. There's health disparities are a result of

00:28:24.600 targeted marketing from the food industry that are driving various problems or obviously the food

00:28:29.880 swamps and the food deserts and food apartheid. All of that is true. But genetically, there's certain

00:28:35.200 segments of the population that are much more likely when they are in an abundance of sugar and

00:28:40.240 flour to get diabetes and obesity. And that includes Native Americans, probably the worst,

00:28:46.520 African Americans, Latinos, and of course, the people from the South Pacific and even Indians from

00:28:52.760 India, Chinese and Asians often are at much higher risk, even at lower body rates. So this is really a

00:28:59.400 global problem. And that's why we're seeing 80% of the world's type 2 diabetics in the developing world.

00:29:04.200 Is there any country or government in particular that seems more attuned to this problem than the

00:29:10.440 American government?

00:29:11.480 Many. In fact, most. Chile, for example, was seeing massive obesity rates in kids and adults,

00:29:18.880 healthcare costs staggering for that country. And again, we're inundated by all the processed food

00:29:24.800 from the food industry and soda industry. And it took a doctor who was elected to the Senate,

00:29:30.080 who was vice president of the Senate, and a doctor who was elected president, Michelle Bachelet,

00:29:34.720 who's a pediatrician, to stand up and say enough and put in a set of regulations to try to stop

00:29:40.800 the onslaught of these conditions on their population driven by the food industry. So they did

00:29:46.660 a number of things. One, they put in an 18% soda tax. Two, they put on warning labels on the front of

00:29:53.060 bad foods. So on your Frosted Flakes cereal box, there's black warning labels.

00:29:56.940 They eliminated any cartoon characters from all the kids' food. So no Tony the Tiger,

00:30:04.820 no Toucan Sam on Froot Loops. They eliminated any processed food from schools and they made the

00:30:10.280 school lunches healthy. They eliminated any advertising on junk food from six in the morning

00:30:15.620 until 10 at night. So kids wouldn't see it. And then they measured these outcomes based on that.

00:30:19.880 And they've seen tremendous improvements. And it was surprising to me. I talked to Barry Popkin,

00:30:24.380 who's from UNC, who worked with them on developing these. And Michael Bloomberg, I think, gave them

00:30:29.200 $30 million to assess the impact and so forth. So they're studying this. And even more than the 80%

00:30:35.240 soda tax, the restriction of food marketing and the warning labels and so forth had a fourfold

00:30:41.560 increased benefit compared to the soda tax, which is being heavily fought here. There's incredible

00:30:47.780 opposition to any limiting of marketing to kids. And they're saying it's the breach of the First

00:30:52.900 Amendment and free speech and so forth. The First Amendment doesn't abdicate our responsibility to

00:30:58.060 protect our children. If a foreign nation was doing to our kids what the food industry is and our

00:31:02.980 government is to its policies, you know, we'd go to war to protect our kids. And we just sort of sit

00:31:07.120 back and let this happen. It's interesting. I'm not a constitutional expert, which would be such an

00:31:11.740 overstatement. I know nothing about the Constitution. There is a Constitution. Yeah, I know.

00:31:15.240 There's a few. But my understanding of the First Amendment is provided the advertising is quote

00:31:21.300 unquote honest, it is constitutional. And that's a gray area because if you say Froot Loops are part

00:31:27.960 of a healthy breakfast, how do we know that's honest? I can't help but think about the analogous

00:31:32.900 situation, which is tobacco. And what I think most people don't know, and it's possible I'm wrong,

00:31:39.040 but I believe everything I'm about to say is correct because at one point I knew this story well.

00:31:43.400 When the Surgeon General came out with his declaration of the harm of tobacco, which was

00:31:49.860 in about the mid-60s, and that was the peak of smoking in the United States, I believe something

00:31:55.920 to the tune of 50, 55% of people over the age of 18 smoked cigarettes at the time the Surgeon General

00:32:02.280 came out and said definitively cigarettes are causing lung cancer. A number of things took place that

00:32:07.660 got us to where we are today, which is somewhere below 20% of people. Last time I looked,

00:32:12.000 it was about 18% of adults smoked. Yeah, a lawsuit is what worked.

00:32:16.720 Well, but here's a big one. A big one was the removal of advertising. But here's the part that

00:32:22.900 I was surprised to learn. It was voluntary on the part of tobacco. In other words, the tobacco industry

00:32:31.080 was not banned from advertising. What the policymakers said is the law is now that every time a tobacco

00:32:38.820 commercial airs, it must be followed by an anti-tobacco commercial. So they didn't ban

00:32:45.700 tobacco, they added anti-tobacco. So every time you have a McDonald's commercial, you say how bad

00:32:50.540 the food is, it's going to kill you, right? I think that's not a bad idea. Well, what's interesting is

00:32:53.340 the anti-tobacco ads were so devastating that the tobacco industry voluntarily withdrew its ads.

00:33:02.020 They were getting hurt so bad by the anti-tobacco ads that they said enough is enough. And that's to

00:33:07.060 this day, we don't have tobacco ads on television. So A, someone needs to fact check that to make sure

00:33:12.940 I have that story correct, but I believe it is correct. And secondly, if it is, it at least

00:33:17.480 suggests another angle to this problem, which is rather than go down the First Amendment fight,

00:33:23.260 maybe, great, okay.

00:33:24.820 I love that idea.

00:33:25.720 Keep all the commercials you want on, but we're going to come up with something different.

00:33:28.400 Now, of course, it's like a drug ad. You can eat this soda, but it's going to cause obesity,

00:33:33.860 diabetes, cancer, dementia, and kill you early. Fine. Maybe that's a good idea.

00:33:39.120 Yeah. And of course, tobacco is the easiest thing to demonize because you just show somebody

00:33:43.280 a hole in their throat after they've had throat cancer or a black lung or a corpse. I mean,

00:33:48.000 there's so many grotesque ways that you can make the point that are more difficult with food.

00:33:51.820 Limp cigarette.

00:33:52.880 Yeah, yeah, exactly. But nevertheless, I've always found that to be a very powerful

00:33:57.020 point because it's true that eventually taxes were introduced into tobacco and they turned out

00:34:04.220 to be quite powerful in additional measures. In 1989 was also a big step when secondhand smoking

00:34:10.160 became well enough understood that they banned tobacco in airplanes and things like that. But

00:34:16.240 I wonder how much of a playbook there is there on tobacco to copy.

00:34:19.760 Well, there is, but guess what? The food industry is copying tobacco's playbook to slow or stall or

00:34:27.140 stop this. And one of the most egregious things was something they've picked up recently, which is

00:34:32.580 from the tobacco playbook. There have been soda taxes that passed predominantly in the 2016 election

00:34:39.380 in California and other states. And the soda industry is vehemently opposed to this. The

00:34:44.760 past in California, they spent about $38 million avoiding these taxes, against these taxes. Bloomberg

00:34:51.520 and the Arnold Foundation spent about $20 million and it didn't pass. I mean, taxes did pass and it

00:34:58.200 freaked out the soda companies. So the American Beverage Association essentially went and tried

00:35:02.780 subversive tactics. So they went to California where most of these taxes were passed and they put in a

00:35:07.800 ballot measure, which was designed to prohibit local taxes unless there was a two-thirds majority,

00:35:14.380 meaning you couldn't fund your school, your police department, your fire department, your road

00:35:20.420 cleanup unless there was a two-thirds majority. That would hamper local governments dramatically.

00:35:27.140 And they spent millions of dollars pushing this ballot measure, even though it had nothing to do with

00:35:31.840 food. And at the last minute before the election, they went to Governor Brown, who's probably the most

00:35:36.900 liberal governor in the history of the United States, Governor Moonbeam. And they said, look,

00:35:40.800 we'll pull this measure, but you have to put in place a preemptive law that prohibits any future

00:35:46.820 taxes on soda or junk food. And it happened all behind closed doors, completely co-opted the

00:35:52.920 government. It pressured them to do something that they didn't want to do. And they're doing this in

00:35:57.200 state after state after state. And this is exactly what tobacco did. So we can say, oh, they're not bad

00:36:02.600 actors. They're trying to do things that are good. They're making water. They're making low-sugar

00:36:06.680 beverages. They know exactly what they're doing. And they have an existential threat, and they're

00:36:10.740 trying to fight it in every way possible. That's just one example.

00:36:14.320 There's another funny example, which is an initiative called the Global Energy Balance Network,

00:36:20.300 GERN, or something like this, right? Yeah, yeah.

00:36:22.880 Anahat O'Connor, I believe, played a pretty important role at the New York Times exposing this for

00:36:28.560 what the sham it was. Do you want to tell people a little bit about that? Sure, the Global Energy

00:36:32.020 Balance Network. So the whole idea of this is that energy balance is the mantra of the food industry.

00:36:37.320 And what that means is all calories are the same. Soda calories, broccoli calories, no difference. So

00:36:42.160 it's just a matter of balance. Calories in, calories out. Moderation, et cetera, et cetera.

00:36:47.160 And so they essentially, Rona Applebaum, who was one of the top VPs at Coca-Cola, put together a

00:36:52.840 strategy because she saw the vilification of soda and all these horrible outcries against sugar.

00:36:58.960 That were unmet by enough aggressive force from the sugar industry and the soda industry. And she

00:37:04.580 said, look, let's start this something called the Global Energy Balance Network. She found a bunch of

00:37:07.980 scientists who she could co-op, paid them lots of money, funded their research to actually promote

00:37:12.720 the idea that all calories are the same. Like James Hill, for example, who was part of an NIH study,

00:37:17.660 legitimate scientist, but completely co-opted. And they funded about 20 million and they built the

00:37:22.480 website. They organized the messaging and the talking points, and they did it all sort of behind the

00:37:27.540 scenes. And when there was discovery, and so the FOIA, Freedom of Information Act, which was a public

00:37:32.620 university, we got all the data. It was really clear how they were behind the scenes manipulating

00:37:36.200 all this to fund literally millions of dollars of corrupt research to prove their point and tell a

00:37:41.700 different story. And then as soon as the New York Times article came out overnight, it was disbanded

00:37:47.180 saying it's run out of resources. I mean, come on, Coca-Cola has what, billions and millions of

00:37:51.780 dollars of sales over here. They have plenty of resources. And the whole thing collapsed because

00:37:56.420 of investigative journalism. But it just goes to show how these food companies are co-opting

00:38:00.820 scientists, co-opting professional associations, co-opting social groups, co-opting the government,

00:38:07.520 putting forth front groups, and spinning all kinds of misinformation in a very coordinated strategic

00:38:12.700 strategy to disrupt public opinion, to confuse the public, and to allow their shenanigans to keep going.

00:38:19.980 Is the opposition to this industry that you can't fight this at the individual level? In other words,

00:38:28.860 it has to be solved structurally because of the economic disparity? And let me ask the question

00:38:34.280 another way. Why not focus all of the efforts on helping people understand so that they can make

00:38:40.980 the informed choice, which is if you have to have a Coke, make it a diet Coke.

00:38:45.020 That may not be as good either.

00:38:46.040 Yeah. But using that as an example, right? But in other words, do we really believe that this has

00:38:53.160 to be solved at the level that seems almost unwinnable, which is fighting an unethical

00:38:59.260 opponent with infinite resources? I mean, that's a very dangerous combination.

00:39:03.100 Yeah. Well, look what happened to tobacco. I mean, think about this country.

00:39:05.980 But you don't need tobacco to live, right? The advantage that you would have as an

00:39:11.980 anti-tobacco crusade person is the ground is not muddied by the notion that tobacco is part of a

00:39:20.160 group called food that you need to live.

00:39:22.900 Although it depends how you define food.

00:39:25.500 Are Froot Loops food? I don't think so. I mean, they're a highly industrialized processed product.

00:39:30.760 But they still fit into this bucket of food.

00:39:32.880 They do.

00:39:33.200 And therefore, they ride a little bit of the coattails of they're still riding on the,

00:39:38.540 hey, we're putting B vitamins in these things and they're fortified and all this other sort of

00:39:43.880 nonsense.

00:39:45.180 So what you're asking is, do we need just a grassroots effort to focus on individual choice

00:39:48.820 and action or do we need a public policy change?

00:39:52.040 Well, and I wouldn't even ask it as either or because the obvious answer to that would be you

00:39:55.380 could do both. I guess what I'm getting at is, would you be better off putting more effort into

00:39:59.980 sort of the grassroots campaign?

00:40:01.620 It's complicated. When you think of the big changes that happened in policy in this country,

00:40:06.900 the abolition. I mean, there were a few people running people on the Underground Railroad and

00:40:12.700 pushing for abolition back in the early 1800s. And it took decades and decades for change. But

00:40:18.240 eventually, our entire agricultural and economic system collapsed. It was founded on slavery and it

00:40:24.740 was reimagined and rebuilt. And I think look at women's rights, same thing, gay rights, civil rights.

00:40:29.780 All those things are things that were really starting on the periphery through grassroots

00:40:34.260 movements, but had to push Congress to make different laws. And I think that's what has to

00:40:37.980 happen. But I think we have to be smart about it as well. I mean, yes, consumers make a difference.

00:40:43.480 That's why we're seeing General Mills commit a million acres to regenerative ag. It's why we're

00:40:47.620 seeing big companies like Nestle reformulating their products and why there's sustainable regenerative

00:40:53.300 ag initiatives at Danone. I mean, these companies are starting to see that the consumers want different

00:40:58.000 things and they're starting to shift their product lines. They're starting to shift their focus on

00:41:01.720 how their supply chain works and where they get and source their products to regenerative

00:41:05.320 agriculture. So I do believe that the individual has a huge impact through their vote with what

00:41:10.900 they're eating, their fork, with their wallet, and of course, even with their vote and their voice.

00:41:15.360 And I think we don't use the latter enough. That has to all happen. And unfortunately,

00:41:20.100 I do believe that individual choice matters. Yes, we can all have compost piles. We can have

00:41:24.220 community gardens. We can have a garden in our backyard. We can choose to eat regenerative meat. We can

00:41:28.000 be like you, Peter, and go hunting our wild deer. I mean, I'm like, I'm jealous, but that alone is

00:41:34.200 not enough because there are structural problems that are not solvable unless we change how we grow

00:41:40.200 food, what we grow, how we process, distribute, market, sell, eat, and waste it. And if we don't

00:41:47.400 deal with every aspect along that food chain, we're really not going to solve this problem. And we haven't

00:41:52.040 really talked about it yet, but things like climate change are an increasingly important part of the

00:41:56.980 conversation about food. And that is something that's just not in the radar. Like how does

00:42:01.800 fixing food fix climate? It does. It's actually one of the only ways to really reverse climate change.

00:42:07.480 Let's talk about that. Some people don't think climate change is real. They call it weather. I

00:42:11.520 mean, whatever you want to call it, there's stuff happening. We're having a million acres flooded

00:42:15.200 in the Midwest, cropland that's destroying farmers' livelihood. We're seeing increasing weather

00:42:20.740 patterns of hurricanes and wildfires in Australia and California. We're seeing melting of 3 trillion

00:42:26.600 tons of ice from the Antarctica. These are just undeniable facts.

00:42:30.100 Can I give you my two cents on this?

00:42:31.240 Yeah.

00:42:31.720 I think the term climate change, global warming, we're sort of in retrospect, not the best ways

00:42:37.740 to describe this phenomenon. And climate volatility would have been a better way to have explained it

00:42:44.400 because one, it's actually more accurate. And two, it provides a better explanation for what

00:42:50.460 you're describing. Because when you say global warming is a problem, well, then how do you explain

00:42:55.660 a record cold year? It's the high highs, the low lows, and the frequency with which they're cycling,

00:43:03.700 both through hurricanes, fires, things like that. So I wish we could have gone back in time and said,

00:43:08.620 look, the problem is climate volatility.

00:43:10.400 Yeah, it's instability. 2019 was the hottest year on record other than 2016 in human history.

00:43:15.640 So all of us can feel it. We know it. And I think, so the question is, why is it happening?

00:43:20.800 And what's the cause of it? And clearly most people think it's fossil fuels and taking up all the carbon

00:43:26.300 that was stored in the earth's crust and burning it and releasing that carbon through fossil fuels.

00:43:31.600 And that's a big part of it, maybe a third, but half of it comes from our food system through all

00:43:36.480 sorts of different mechanisms. One, deforestation, you lose the carbon capture from the trees,

00:43:42.240 the soil destruction from destructive agriculture, which we have, which essentially is a method of

00:43:48.500 industrial growing of food that tills the soil, which disrupts the normal organic matter, causes

00:43:53.520 soil erosion, releases carbon in the environment. It also, when you look at the soil as an issue itself,

00:43:59.880 it's probably the biggest cause and the biggest solution to fixing climate change. And most people

00:44:05.460 don't think about that. They think about oil, not soil, but a third to 40% of all the carbon

00:44:11.320 in the atmosphere today that's causing climate volatility is from the loss of soil. That's a

00:44:19.220 staggering amount. So explain how that's the case. Yeah, well, the soil, when it's alive and has living

00:44:25.040 matter and carbon in the soil, organic matter, which is carbon, it can hold three times the amount

00:44:31.380 of carbon that's in the atmosphere today, which is a trillion tons of carbon. It can hold three

00:44:36.540 trillion tons. The UN estimated that if we take 2 million of the 5 million degraded hectares of land

00:44:43.300 around the world, and we intensively use regenerative agriculture, which I'll explain in a minute,

00:44:49.240 and restore the soil, we could stop climate change and delay the progression for about 20 years. And it

00:44:55.580 would cost $300 billion, which is essentially what we pay every year for diabetes in America

00:44:59.500 through Medicare. And it's basically the amount of budget for the total global military spend for

00:45:05.160 just two months or 60 days. So this is a solvable problem. And the reason that the soil is such an

00:45:10.800 issue is that it basically takes, when the grasses are on there and the plants are on there, it sucks

00:45:16.000 the carbon out of the environment. Can you explain the difference between soil and dirt?

00:45:19.700 Yeah. Soil is alive. Soil has all kinds of bugs in it, mycorrhizal fungi. It has all kinds of bacteria.

00:45:28.040 It has all kinds of carbon in it from the plants, and it holds a huge amount of water. It can hold,

00:45:33.500 for example, for every 1% organic matter, it can hold 27,000 gallons of water, which would prevent

00:45:38.020 floods and droughts, which it does and creates more resilient farms.

00:45:41.520 Explain that again.

00:45:42.660 When you have soil, it's like a sponge. So when it rains, instead of the rain running off or running

00:45:47.940 through, it gets stored like a sponge in the soil so that you don't need to irrigate, that you don't

00:45:52.980 have to worry about floods and droughts. Now, the reason we had so much of these floods and these

00:45:57.940 flooded farm fields in the Midwest was because these soils are just dead. And then you have to do more

00:46:02.420 and more fertilizer. So we're killing the soil by using fertilizer, by pesticides, herbicides, tilling,

00:46:07.080 not using cover crops, not using crop rotations, not using animals in an integrated way to actually

00:46:11.740 create more soil. And everything we're doing is just destroying the soil. When you have a live soil,

00:46:17.940 when you have the ability of these plants to suck out carbon dioxide, because they breathe carbon

00:46:22.000 dioxide. That's what plants do. They breathe out oxygen, which we breathe. And it's vicious. I mean,

00:46:25.580 a beautiful virtuous cycle. And the carbon dioxide from the atmosphere gets pulled through the plants

00:46:31.180 into the soil and stays there. And you can build soil simply by using this technology and integrating

00:46:37.940 animals that poop and pee.

00:46:39.580 So I don't think I was aware of that. I'll put my ignorance on full display. I always assumed that

00:46:44.420 the majority of the carbon that came in, that the plant brought in through the photo cell

00:46:49.960 was for carbon fixation, which was creating biomatter. So in other words, carbon and oxygen

00:46:57.340 are coming in the form of carbon dioxide. That carbon is being fixated to other carbons. That's

00:47:02.700 how we make hydrocarbons within the plants.

00:47:05.520 Yeah, carbohydrates.

00:47:06.200 That's right. And then the oxygen is being released, but I didn't realize that there was

00:47:10.400 any carbon dioxide stored in soil. Yeah. And if you look at the mechanism,

00:47:14.500 it goes into the plant, but it also goes into the roots. And so you've got this incredible

00:47:18.040 root system and then you've got mycorrhizal fungi that are fed up.

00:47:21.220 Oh, I see. So you're just saying the hydrocarbon within the roots of the plant

00:47:24.800 is the storage, not in the soil per se, not in the actual dirt and bacteria.

00:47:29.400 No, no. Then it gets eaten by the bacteria, eaten by this massive mycorrhizal fungi, and it creates

00:47:34.880 a lot of necrotic dead, but like actually organic matter. It's an incredibly rich living organism.

00:47:42.140 And dirt is just dead. Dirt doesn't hold water. It doesn't have much carbon in it. It doesn't have

00:47:47.260 much nutrients. And in order to actually to extract the nutrients from the plants, you have to have

00:47:51.600 organic matter, which allows us, and bacteria and all these mycorrhizal fungi, which make the

00:47:56.660 nutrients in the soil available to the plant. And since we are growing food in dirt, we see 50% less

00:48:03.200 nutrient density of even healthy food. Like broccoli has less minerals than it did 50 years

00:48:08.800 ago. So you have all these complicated factors that are driving the destruction of our soil.

00:48:13.760 Fertilizer is another one. I don't think people really understand the fertilizer story. There's

00:48:17.480 400 billion pounds of fertilizer used everywhere in the world. It's a sevenfold increase over the last

00:48:23.720 40 years because they're two thirds as effective. The way you make fertilizer is a chemically intensive

00:48:29.420 process that uses energy. It's one of the biggest utilizers of energy and the number one

00:48:34.460 utilizer of fracking produced natural gas, which I didn't even know. So when you look at the

00:48:41.220 fertilizers today, they use more natural gas than Exxon. And in order to make the gas-

00:48:45.600 I'm sorry, they use more fertilizer than Exxon produces?

00:48:48.940 So they use more energy than Exxon produces?

00:48:51.960 Yes. They use more natural gas than Exxon uses.

00:48:54.980 So the Yara and Mosaic, these big fertilizer companies, are making fertilizer using this

00:49:00.480 intensive energy process that needs natural gas. When you frack, you actually release methane from

00:49:07.240 these methane leaks that come out of these fracking wells. Recently, there's one in Ohio that

00:49:12.000 you could see from space. And then that actually is about a quarter of all methane-release gas in

00:49:18.640 the environment today, which is as much as factory farm cows. And that's from growing plants.

00:49:24.320 Do you know what percent of- I don't know the numbers anymore, but there was a day when the

00:49:29.300 United States was consuming 20 million barrels of oil and oil equivalent per day. It's probably a

00:49:34.360 bit less than that today. Do you know what amount of that is in the production, transport,

00:49:41.340 consumption of food?

00:49:42.420 Oh yeah, sure. One-fifth of all our oil consumption is for the food system. It's more than all cars,

00:49:47.800 planes, boats, transportation combined. So it's a staggering amount of oil. And part of it is-

00:49:53.960 It can't be combined though, because those-

00:49:55.380 Combined. No, combined. All transportation combined-

00:49:57.840 Is less than one-fifth of our total oil consumption?

00:50:00.520 Mm-hmm. Because a lot of it's industry and other things. So yeah, it's pretty staggering.

00:50:05.560 And so the fracking-

00:50:06.500 So 20% of our energy utilization is to make fertilizer, deliver seed, harvest-

00:50:13.000 Yeah. Pesticides, herbicides, all come from fossil fuels.

00:50:15.680 So the fertilizer story gets even worse, because once you- Now you have all the gas you're using,

00:50:20.080 the methane released from that. When you put on the soil, it kills the soil.

00:50:23.260 And sorry, the purpose of fertilizer is to provide generally nitrogen and phosphorus,

00:50:28.580 right?

00:50:28.680 And nitrogen, yes, nitrogen to the plant.

00:50:30.540 So again, just taking a step back for the biochemistry understanding of this. I think

00:50:34.460 plant biology, by the way, is so incredible. Because I don't think people appreciate the

00:50:38.900 significance of carbon fixation, how complicated a chemical reaction it is to take carbon and join

00:50:45.120 it to carbon like a plant can do. So, I mean, it's very energy intensive, which is why it requires

00:50:50.060 sunlight. So you've got this photosynthetic thing. But basically, plants need carbon,

00:50:56.440 which they're getting from the air. They need nitrogen and phosphorus, which they're getting

00:51:00.080 from their soil. And they need energy and water, which they're getting from the environment. And

00:51:06.280 then they make biomass.

00:51:07.840 Yeah, exactly.

00:51:08.660 So the fertilizer is where we give them the nitrogen and the phosphorus, correct?

00:51:12.440 Yes. But most of the fertilizer that was growing plants historically came from either nitrogen-fixing

00:51:18.180 plants, like the legumes, or from the animals. The reason we have 50 feet of topsoil in some areas

00:51:23.660 in this country 150 years ago was because of millions of bison running around. There were like

00:51:29.060 bison and elk and all these ruminants that were running around in big herds, chomping things down,

00:51:34.640 moving on to the next spot, peeing and pooping, digging the thing. Saliva makes the grass grow.

00:51:39.080 So it was this beautiful symbiotic system that built literally tens of feet of topsoil.

00:51:43.360 And it's not that we have too many cows. It's how we're growing.

00:51:45.860 I mean, I think it's worth pausing for a moment to explain for folks. I'll try to do it quickly.

00:51:50.060 There was a day, believe it or not, like 10 years ago when I was obsessed with understanding

00:51:53.140 agriculture. So everything I'm saying is 10 years old. So you can correct me if I'm wrong.

00:51:57.140 But basically, if you use corn as the model system, and you look at the only metric that really

00:52:04.060 matters, which is bushels per acre per year, yield, it all comes down to yield. Basically,

00:52:10.820 from the Civil War to about the end of World War II, if you look at crop yield and you see the plot,

00:52:18.900 it was about 20 bushels per acre per year. So every acre could produce 20 bushels of corn per year.

00:52:26.480 Obviously, it fluctuated quite a bit from year to year, but it was a largely horizontal,

00:52:30.580 jagged line from about the end of the Civil War to the end of World War II. And then something

00:52:36.980 really interesting happens. At the end of World War II, that line just turns up and just almost in

00:52:43.260 a linear fashion rises to 200 bushels per acre per year. And I think what a lot of people erroneously

00:52:51.320 assume is, oh, it's the goddamn GMO. Well, actually, no, not at all. GMO didn't even kick in until that

00:52:57.060 number was 160. It was nitrogen-based fertilizer, crop rotation, industrial farming, meaning the

00:53:05.680 ability to actually use machines to not just have a farmer out there doing something. It was selective

00:53:11.660 breeding, crossing. So it was a bunch of things that came in. And then basically, GMO has put like

00:53:17.580 a 10% plus up on that from a yield perspective. Maybe. That's debatable. So yeah, anyway, the point

00:53:23.380 here is this process really began in earnest about 70 years ago. And prior to 70 years ago, it's been

00:53:30.380 remarkably flat. So of course, this goes back to something you said earlier, which is post-World

00:53:36.460 War II, we had to figure out how to feed a bunch of people. And 20 bushels per acre per year was not

00:53:42.020 cutting it. We're now 10 times the yield, as you're pointing out, at quite a cost.

00:53:47.580 Quite a cost, yeah.

00:53:48.260 So the question then is, I mean, you talk about in your book how we're wasting a third of the food

00:53:53.880 produced. So we don't really need 20, 200 bushels per acre per year if we stop wasting. Have you

00:54:00.440 figured out or at least calculated what you think the sweet spot is, which is if you were to back off

00:54:05.240 the aggressive yield measures, not waste, how much of the benefit could you recapture that was there

00:54:12.500 when, for example, we used animals as our fertilizer?

00:54:16.400 That's right. There's sort of a fallacy in the idea that we can't produce the same amount of food

00:54:21.600 using regenerative methods. I think that's been disproven.

00:54:25.980 Do you believe, in other words, there is 200 bushels per acre per year using regenerative methods?

00:54:31.360 Well, let me just share a quick story. And I want to share this story and I'm going to come back to

00:54:34.840 the fertilizer and talk about the rest of the different aspects that are causing climate change

00:54:38.360 because I think people need to understand that. There's a guy named Gabe Brown who was a North

00:54:43.120 Dakota farmer, 5,000 acre farm, devastated by hail, devastated by weather, and was about to go

00:54:50.040 bankrupt and then decided he wanted to try regenerative agriculture. And many years ago,

00:54:54.080 he started it. And now he says he's built 29 inches of soil. He uses no chemical inputs,

00:55:00.000 makes his own fertilizer from the animals and the plants that he plants, the nitrogen fixing plants.

00:55:04.840 He produces more food, better quality food, and makes 20 times as much money as his neighbor.

00:55:12.380 So in terms of productivity, a regenerative farm is far more productive. And I think there's this

00:55:17.240 fallacy that we need green revolution, we need industrial agriculture to feed the world.

00:55:21.720 That's really been disproven. And I think that's the mantra of big ag. It's the mantra of Monsanto

00:55:27.020 and now, which is Bayer and a lot of these big agrochemical companies that are trying to push

00:55:32.740 their products on the marketplace. And so I think we have to sort of be smart about going,

00:55:36.840 wait a minute, it's not just about trying to sort of go back to some old form of agriculture that

00:55:41.700 isn't going to produce the yields. No, I think this is not what was done. This is a sort of a new way

00:55:46.280 of thinking. It combines organic, but it also goes beyond that. And the reason is that it sort of

00:55:50.700 interrupts all these problems that are actually driving climate change. So we talked about the

00:55:54.620 fertilizer. Once you put it on the soil, it damages the soil and it releases nitrous oxide,

00:55:59.960 which is 300 times more potent in greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. So you're getting all the

00:56:05.820 fracking, you're getting the destruction of the soil on top of that. It's like a triple threat.

00:56:10.440 As a back-end side effect, all that runs off into the rivers, streams and lakes and goes into the

00:56:15.200 oceans and has created dead zones in 400 areas around the world the size of Europe. There's one

00:56:19.720 the size of New Jersey in the Gulf of Mexico that kills 212,000 metric tons of fish every year.

00:56:25.480 It's a lot of gumbo and sushi. And there's 400 of those around the world that are feeding 500

00:56:31.420 billion people. So this is what fertilizer does alone. And then of course you have

00:56:35.340 deforestation, the soil erosion, and so forth. And why is that not a problem when the fertilizer is

00:56:42.260 coming from an organic nitrogen source versus an inorganic one?

00:56:46.340 Of course, right. So an organic nitrogen source, poop goes in there and nitrogen fixing plants,

00:56:52.740 and it stays in the soil as opposed to running off through this degraded soil into the river stream.

00:56:58.460 So is the issue the fertilizer or the nature of the soil that can't hold the fertilizer?

00:57:02.840 It's both. In order to get dirt to produce plants, you need to put on huge amounts of fertilizer. Like

00:57:09.240 I said, the increase in the use of fertilizer is sevenfold compared to 40 years ago.

00:57:14.000 So if I'm understanding what you're saying, the problem with fertilizer is it allows us to be lazy

00:57:21.480 and rely less on healthy soil. Because you can dump fertilizer on dirt and eventually grow.

00:57:27.440 Beating a dead horse.

00:57:28.580 But if you actually want the healthiest soil possible, you will get your nitrogen contribution

00:57:35.440 from an element that stays within the ecosystem of the soil because it's a part of it. And therefore

00:57:40.040 you're not going to have the runoff. Is that accurate?

00:57:41.540 Exactly. And so you've got deforestation, you've got damage to the soil and all the ways we talked

00:57:44.920 about. And you've got transportation, refrigeration, processing, distribution,

00:57:49.640 those all cost energy. And then food waste, which is a big cost. So how do you estimate that

00:57:54.500 that is a staggering number that a third of our food is wasted?

00:57:57.860 That is just what the sort of conventional assessments are around food waste in the world.

00:58:03.020 It's not my opinion. That's what the UN says.

00:58:04.620 Right. But I mean, what's the methodology by which one calculates that?

00:58:07.200 Good question. I don't know the answer to the question, but that's a good question.

00:58:10.240 But I think it's a generally accepted thing. It's between 30 to 40%. It's different for different

00:58:14.900 reasons in the developing world versus here. We throw out food in our kitchen. They have

00:58:18.880 loose food in the food chain because of lack of storage and transportation, refrigeration.

00:58:23.520 So you've got all these causes which add up to about 50% of climate change. And by shifting

00:58:28.920 how we grow food and focusing on regenerative agriculture, which specifically means regenerating

00:58:34.600 soil and ecosystems. In other words, increasing the amount of organic matter in the soil,

00:58:39.720 increasing water retention, using crop rotations, using cover crops so there's no bare soil so the

00:58:44.980 soil doesn't, or using animals in very specific grazing patterns that mimics nature to actually

00:58:50.800 intensively graze the land and move the animals around to actually stimulate the growth of the

00:58:54.440 plants, stimulate the soil, and so forth. So all those techniques could be easily applied and are

00:59:00.000 done in literally millions of acres around the world with great benefit and high productivity

00:59:04.520 and mitigating climate at the same time.

00:59:07.380 What's the obstacle to it?

00:59:08.940 The obstacle is, you know, you've got a $15 trillion food industry that's dependent on the

00:59:13.240 products of industrial farming and is actually selling the seeds. It's selling the fertilizer.

00:59:18.940 It's selling the pesticides and herbicides. It's selling all the...

00:59:21.780 Is it the convenience? Like for example, when you talk about the gentleman you alluded to earlier,

00:59:26.780 who basically switched... How many acres does he have?

00:59:30.160 5,000.

00:59:30.800 5,000 acres and he switched over to fully regenerative. Sounds like he's increased his

00:59:35.060 profitability.

00:59:36.380 Dramatically. And resilience of all.

00:59:38.820 And has that increase in profitability come through higher price, higher volume, or lower cost?

00:59:44.860 I mean, these farmers lose an average in this country of about $1,600 a year. That's their net,

00:59:50.280 is minus $1,600 a year.

00:59:52.000 Per acre?

00:59:52.880 No, per farm. Like if you're a farmer, the average farmer, according to the USDA and other statistics,

00:59:57.840 loses money every year. He's making money because...

01:00:02.100 On the subsidies.

01:00:02.920 What do you mean?

01:00:03.540 Like it's the only reason he can make a living because of the subsidy?

01:00:07.040 This guy in North Dakota?

01:00:08.140 No, no, no, no. The farmer who's losing $1,600 a year.

01:00:10.420 Yeah. I mean, they have write-offs and subsidies and so forth. I mean, Trump just bailed them out for

01:00:13.940 $20 billion, which is almost as much as all the subsidies that exist in the country annually,

01:00:18.420 which is a lot of money. And the farmers struggle and they're caught between basically the big ag

01:00:24.600 and the government. The government's saying, you need to produce these foods. Here's the money

01:00:28.480 to support you to do it. But that money then goes to buy the seed from Monsanto or the glyphosate

01:00:33.740 from Monsanto or the other agrochemicals and fertilizer from Yarra. So they're taking,

01:00:38.180 they're just sort of the pass-through of the money from the government to big ag and the industry.

01:00:42.860 And that's the problem. Whereas this guy, Gabe Brown in North Dakota, he doesn't have to buy seed.

01:00:47.980 He doesn't have to buy fertilizer. He doesn't have to buy glyphosate. He doesn't have to buy

01:00:51.020 pesticides. He doesn't need a lot of irrigation because his soil holds so much water. He has a

01:00:56.100 diverse ecosystem of animals and plants that he can grow and sell and make a profit. That's more

01:01:01.940 than the others. And how long would it take someone like him to make that transition?

01:01:05.840 So it's about three to five years, depending. So we need a massive effort for supporting and

01:01:09.880 transforming our agricultural system to regenerative ag. And there's groups that are

01:01:13.600 working on this, like Kiss the Ground and Carbon Underground that are consulting with governments

01:01:17.920 around the world to help them understand this. And the UN gets this. There's a huge report called

01:01:23.140 Climate Change and Land Use that came out in August 20, I think August 2019, which laid these problems

01:01:28.720 out and how we are degrading our land that's contributing to climate. And the solution is

01:01:33.000 multifaceted, but includes restoring these degraded lands. And people say, oh, you know,

01:01:37.700 we can't do this at scale. It's too expensive. The truth is, if you look at all the conservation

01:01:42.740 land in this country, if you look at all the conservation land in this country, if you look

01:01:47.200 at degraded lands that aren't being used properly, if you look at land that's used to grow corn and

01:01:51.680 soy for factory farm animals, that could be converted. And we can literally double the amount

01:01:56.300 of cows we produce every year on regenerative farms than we do now. Not that we should, not that we need

01:02:00.740 all that meat, but I'm just saying the argument that it's not scalable, but it's not cost effective

01:02:04.980 is just not true. And the truth is you can say you can be vegan, fine, but we should all grow more

01:02:09.640 plants. But there's a lot of land on the planet, about 40% of the arable land, you can't grow food

01:02:15.260 for humans. So these animals upcycle inedible food and put it into a form that we can eat that's

01:02:21.200 extremely nutrient dense. There's a beautiful symbiotic ecosystem here. And you don't have

01:02:25.960 to eat the animals if you don't want to, I don't care, but they're needed for the regeneration of soil.

01:02:31.220 Who has done the most comprehensive life cycle assessment on this transformation as you describe it?

01:02:36.340 So how many acres are there of agricultural land in the United States approximately?

01:02:40.240 Oh, good Lord. I should know that. I don't, it's a lot of millions. It's a lot of millions.

01:02:44.320 So if you take that number and on a per acre basis, do the calculation of over five years,

01:02:50.840 everybody transitions to a more regenerative, appropriately rotated, covered ag position.

01:02:57.640 How many tons of CO2 can be sequestered per acre under those scenarios?

01:03:03.660 A lot. So the book called Drawdown is a wonderful explanation of the top solutions that exist today

01:03:11.120 that don't need to be invented, that can draw down carbon out of the environment. And collectively,

01:03:16.560 the food solutions- Do you know the author?

01:03:18.280 Paul Hawken. Yeah, he's a good friend of mine.

01:03:20.300 Yeah, actually, I'd like to interview him. He looks like someone who'd be interesting to interview

01:03:23.460 on this topic.

01:03:24.060 Yeah, he's coming up with a new book called Regenerate, which is how do we regenerate our

01:03:27.140 health, regenerate the soil, and so forth. He unexpectedly found that the food solutions were the top

01:03:32.720 solutions to fixed climate change that aren't really being implemented. And it's been estimated

01:03:38.880 this much investment in billions results and this much value in trillions, and it reduces carbon by

01:03:44.260 this many gigatons. And it's all in the book. So the calculations have been done. The analysis

01:03:49.240 has been done. And I think it's been estimated by some that we could draw down anywhere from 30 to 100%

01:03:54.340 of all the carbon that's been released since the industrial revolution, if we can scale this up.

01:03:58.320 What's the biggest counterargument to this?

01:04:01.040 There isn't any. I mean, I think the argument is we need to have industrial agriculture to feed

01:04:05.980 the world. That's the mantra. It's like calories are all the same. It's that same mantra that isn't

01:04:10.320 science-based, but that suits the needs of agrochemical and agribusiness.

01:04:14.660 But there's no one that's got a pushback argument that says, no, these calculations are

01:04:18.780 overly optimistic and you would introduce a new problem if you did this.

01:04:23.920 Of course. There are people all the time who are trying to refute this. And whether it's

01:04:29.040 agribusiness or even the vegan community has come out and said regenerative agriculture is not going

01:04:33.260 to solve a problem. People like Pat Brown from Impossible Foods has been really clearly stating

01:04:38.280 that we need to get rid of all meat, that even regenerative meat doesn't work in terms of protecting

01:04:42.580 the environment. And he quotes various studies that were, I do analyze in my book, Food Fix,

01:04:46.940 talk about how they're flawed and actually miss a lot of the data. So I think it does take time to

01:04:52.120 create regenerative agriculture. It does take effort. But once you do it, there's an incredible

01:04:56.760 value chain that gets put in place. And there are countries that are understanding this. We take out

01:05:02.680 of the earth a lot of natural capital, about $125 trillion a year of resources and soil and everything

01:05:09.180 else that we steal from the earth. We don't put it back and it's running out. And-

01:05:13.760 Wait, how much did you say?

01:05:14.620 $125 trillion. And the global GDP is probably 80 to 90 trillion.

01:05:17.700 I was about to say that's more than the global GDP.

01:05:19.440 Yeah, which is about 80 to 90, right? It's more than that every year. And there's a lot

01:05:23.960 of people working on this. For example, there's a private equity company called Farmland LP that's

01:05:28.360 buying up conventional farms, converting them to regenerative agriculture, and moving those farms

01:05:33.120 from single digit profits to high double digit. Their first fund had a 67% return. And when they look at

01:05:39.660 the benefit they provide to the environment, we call ecosystem services, that's the $125 million

01:05:46.320 of ecosystem services, the natural capital we borrow, they add $21 million of value on their

01:05:52.060 farms versus a similar amount of conventional farms would actually steal $8 million of value

01:05:57.360 from the earth. And countries like Costa Rica are paying for ecosystem services for their farmers,

01:06:02.180 are paying them to produce more soil, to actually conserve water, to increase biodiversity,

01:06:06.420 which we haven't even talked about, which is a whole other topic.

01:06:08.560 I want to get to it. Let's see. Talk to me a little bit about, you know, it's funny,

01:06:11.960 Pat Brown was one of my professors in medical school.

01:06:14.000 Oh, geez. Okay.

01:06:14.760 So, I mean, I don't know if a lot of people realize what a prominent scientist Pat was. And

01:06:20.020 if you look at the type of work Pat did in the 90s, I mean, it's not inconceivable he could have

01:06:28.200 gone down the path of a Nobel Prize.

01:06:30.100 Yeah. I mean, he's a smart guy, but the challenge is you don't have to vilify

01:06:33.500 people wanting to do regenerative agriculture.

01:06:35.900 Yeah. And I was just going to say, I don't know anything about Pat. I know very little about

01:06:39.060 their philosophy around why they've created the, is it the Impossible Burger?

01:06:43.720 There's two of these out there. One's the-

01:06:45.160 Beyond Burger, Beyond Meat, and Impossible Burger.

01:06:47.880 Okay. And I can never get the two of them straight, but-

01:06:49.500 I mean, one is pea-based, which is the Beyond Meat, and one is GMO soy-based, which is-

01:06:53.740 Okay. And that's the GMO one must be Pat's.

01:06:55.760 If you look at the, you asked about a life cycle analysis, Qantas, which is an independent

01:06:59.700 life cycle analysis company, did an analysis of the Impossible Burger compared

01:07:03.220 to a regeneratively raised beef burger. And the Impossible Burger was far better than

01:07:09.480 a conventional factory farm burger, but it added three and a half kilos of carbon for

01:07:14.220 every burger you ate.

01:07:15.200 Which one did?

01:07:16.220 The Impossible Burger.

01:07:17.460 So say that again.

01:07:18.180 So the Impossible Burger was better than a factory farm burger by far, but it still added

01:07:22.420 three and a half kilos of carbon to the environment for every burger. A regeneratively raised burger,

01:07:27.620 including methane, everything, all the inputs took out three and a half kilos of carbon,

01:07:32.460 meaning you'd have to eat one regeneratively raised beef burger to offset the carbon emissions

01:07:37.060 of a Impossible Burger. So I'm not against plant-based meats, but I think we can't overstate

01:07:42.160 the importance of-

01:07:43.460 And what, by comparison, what was the factory farm burger? Do you remember how much carbon

01:07:47.120 was added?

01:07:47.780 Three and a half kilos of carbon were removed-

01:07:50.020 No, no, no. Sorry.

01:07:50.720 The factory-

01:07:50.840 Of factory. Oh, it was a lot. It was like 50 or-

01:07:53.180 It was a lot. It was significantly less. But still, it's not the only answer. When you think

01:07:58.320 about scaling up Impossible Burgers on a GMO monocrop soy field using tons of glyphosate,

01:08:04.660 which has all sorts of harmful consequences, causing soil erosion to the way we farm, damaging

01:08:09.840 the waterways, damaging everything else. I mean, it just, it doesn't even add up, right? So let's

01:08:14.300 do it right.

01:08:15.140 So let's talk a little bit about GMO. This is a loaded topic. Again, I think people don't

01:08:20.460 understand what it means. And that's sort of, I want to talk about it, but I also want to just

01:08:24.260 put it in context for people so that we understand what GM means and why it came about. So we go back

01:08:31.220 to the 1940s. We had growing old maize on, you know, 20 bushels per acre per year. Well, we got

01:08:38.320 to remember that used to be something called Tia Sente. That was like this little tiny, silly crop

01:08:43.160 that was the size of our finger. And it had like four little kernels on it. That's where corn came

01:08:47.840 from. So I was explaining this to my kids the other day, because we were, my kids are obsessed with

01:08:53.300 gardening and stuff. And I was saying, look, there's four things about a plant that really

01:08:57.440 matter. If you're planting crops, yield matters. How much do you have? Product profile.

01:09:04.260 Is it good to eat or not?

01:09:05.520 Yeah. Or in the case of Tia Sente, it had a lousy product profile because it just had four

01:09:09.920 kernels on it. Harvestability. The other problem with Tia Sente is the little kernels would always

01:09:14.820 fall off it. You actually wanted the kernels to stay on the thing so you could harvest the whole plant.

01:09:19.200 And crop protection. Can you keep it away? Can you keep the critters away from it?

01:09:24.160 So GMO has had by far its greatest impact in crop protection. The BT insertion is basically what

01:09:33.400 allowed Roundup-ready crops to be resistant to glyphosate. We'll use the terms glyphosate.

01:09:39.620 BT is for the cotton, right?

01:09:41.080 Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:09:41.540 Which is pesticide resistance.

01:09:42.420 Yeah, pesticide resistance. So there's a glyphosate resistance that, and we'll use, like I said,

01:09:46.640 we'll use glyphosate and Roundup interchangeably. But if you could basically genetically modify a

01:09:52.000 plant to be resistant to the thing that you use to kill the pest, you can use that thing liberally,

01:09:56.940 right?

01:09:57.380 Yeah, I mean, for all the promise of GMO, basically the only two inventions have been

01:10:01.860 the BT pesticide resistance and the glyphosate resistance. Yeah, that's it. And that's led to

01:10:07.460 massive increases in the use of pesticides.

01:10:09.640 The first point to make here is most of the yield gains came long before this. So obviously

01:10:15.780 you do get some yield gain with crop protection. So there's an overlap, but virtually all of

01:10:21.180 it came before this. All of the harvestability, to my knowledge, there's been no GM addition

01:10:26.580 to harvestability and no GM addition to product profile. Although some might argue that it's

01:10:32.820 low-hanging fruit. For example, I know Monsanto was very aggressively looking at trying to

01:10:39.640 engineer tomatoes that could grow in brackish water. And that way you would obviously open up the

01:10:45.280 ability to grow it in areas that where you don't have fresh water. Okay. So with all of that said,

01:10:50.820 the next question for the person to be thinking about that you're going to take us through is

01:10:55.360 there are at least two things about GM that could be problematic. The first is it could be problematic

01:11:03.300 that you are eating an organism that now has a gene that looks different from the gene that

01:11:10.460 we evolved to consume it. In other words, it now makes different proteins that it didn't make that

01:11:16.140 are foreign. And because food is information. So how is that different information affecting your

01:11:20.960 biology and how's it regulating the different body functions? I don't think we know much about that.

01:11:24.780 The second thing that could be harmful about GM is that by its very success, it enables the use

01:11:32.920 of chemicals in a higher concentration than you would be able to use them in the absence of GM.

01:11:38.140 And we'll use Roundup or glyphosate as the poster child for that. Can you talk through both of those

01:11:44.080 and what the state of the evidence is for the harm of GM? Because it should be noted that what you're

01:11:49.780 about to say is that the backdrop or stands at odds with what the USDA would tell us, what the

01:11:55.980 National Association of Scientists would tell us, which is GMO is safe. Feel free to consume it

01:12:01.460 liberally. And so tell us where you think that might be questionable. Well, there's a bunch of

01:12:05.620 issues there. First is it's a large uncontrolled experiment on humanity. Just like Crisco was invented

01:12:11.460 in 1911 as this great new invention. It was in our food supply for, I don't know, 80 or 90 years

01:12:17.240 more before people were like, wait a minute, this isn't good for us. It's killing hundreds of

01:12:21.500 thousands of people a year. Let's get it out. So we don't know. I think there's animal studies that

01:12:26.160 looks concerning. There's various issues. I think in terms of the use of these chemicals,

01:12:32.920 there's two issues there. One is the plants are increasingly mutating to be resistant to these

01:12:39.180 substances. So you need more pesticides and more glyphosate to do the same job. So there's all these

01:12:44.140 weeds that are becoming resistant to glyphosate that they're trying to fight. And that

01:12:47.060 that's a problem because we're using more and more of these chemicals. Europe followed a different

01:12:51.380 path. It didn't allow GMO foods, didn't allow any of that. And so what the comparative analysis of

01:12:56.480 agriculture in the U.S. versus Europe was no difference in yields and far less use of pesticides

01:13:02.840 and herbicides. So it didn't fulfill its promise of yields and decreased use of chemicals.

01:13:08.180 It was transient. I believe there was a transient reduction in pesticide use until we started to see

01:13:13.980 resistance. Is that correct? Yeah. And we're using more and more of these chemicals. And glyphosate

01:13:17.920 is 70% of the agrochemicals used on the planet. It's increasingly being linked to harmful human

01:13:23.320 effects. So forget about the insertion of the gene as an issue. We know that these chemicals are

01:13:27.840 harmful to this. Do we know this? This is an important point. Yeah. I mean, aside from, you know,

01:13:32.180 the litigation, which is not a scientific judgment, it's a traditional judgment, but there's 14,000

01:13:37.600 lawsuits around glyphosate. There's been billion dollar settlements. A friend of mine's a lawyer is

01:13:41.760 involved with those lawsuits. He told me that on discovery, they found that the Trump administration

01:13:46.020 said to Monsanto and Albert, we have your back. And the EPA recently is trying to shut down any

01:13:53.120 further lawsuits on glyphosate, which is fascinating because it's sort of disclosed emails. And I think

01:13:58.680 the effects on animal studies are really clear. I just read a study on epigenetics and glyphosate,

01:14:02.580 where they looked at interventional studies on rats, where they looked at giving the generation zero

01:14:07.180 glyphosate and infected their grand rats in multiple ways through prostate disease, cancer,

01:14:15.060 various things. But we've seen this before, Mark. I mean, we've seen lots of things where in the lab,

01:14:19.820 they're using doses that are significantly higher than the human exposure and or laboratory animals

01:14:25.340 behave differently than humans. Okay, fine. But are we willing to take that risk? I know some other

01:14:28.840 study where glyphosate disrupts the microbiome in significant ways in animals. And the dose that's in

01:14:34.020 one Impossible Burger is 110 times the dose that was used in the animal studies to totally disrupt

01:14:39.340 the microbiome of the rats. But do we know how bioavailable it is and how much it remains?

01:14:44.760 Well, it's on the food. I mean, I try to eat organic. I try to eat non-GMO. I travel. I'm not

01:14:50.240 perfect. And I did my urine test to look at my glyphosate levels. And I was shocked. I have a 50th

01:14:56.340 percentile glyphosate in my urine. How do we do this test? You can pee in a bucket and you send it into

01:15:01.180 the lab. Great Plains Lab has this test available and you can check your glyphosate levels. I was

01:15:06.000 shocked. And I think most of us are sort of walking toxic dumps. And if you looked at average fat

01:15:11.320 biopsy of a human, it's full of DDT, dioxin, pesticides. It's like, it's pretty bad. So I

01:15:18.640 think we are still in an uncontrolled experiment. So your view is basically to take the precautionary

01:15:23.500 principle, which is, look, we may never know this definitively. There's enough suggestion that this

01:15:29.360 could be harmful through animal models or other things like that. I mean, for example, I mean,

01:15:33.780 again, I'm just, I'm pushing back, not because I don't necessarily agree with you on a personal

01:15:37.600 level and make a lot of the same choices myself. You're not sprinkling glyphosate on your salads.

01:15:42.080 You know, I stopped a couple of weeks ago, actually. I used to. I just, I love the taste of glyphosate.

01:15:46.740 Yeah, you got a big lawn here. You're like putting it all over your lawn.

01:15:49.040 But again, I always think it's important to sort of at least let people understand when something is,

01:15:54.280 where our level of confidence is very high versus modest, but there's a precautionary approach to

01:16:01.020 take out of it. In other words, I feel much more comfortable saying tobacco is causally responsible

01:16:06.300 for lung cancer than I feel saying glyphosate is causally responsible for human disease. I just don't,

01:16:12.220 I just haven't been convinced by the day. If it was the only way to grow food, fine. We deal with

01:16:16.880 the risk. It's not, it's not the best way. It's not the most effective way. And there is potential risk

01:16:22.760 and there's real concern about our industrial agricultural system on the earth and so on

01:16:28.180 biodiversity. And also, I sort of interrupted you when you were about to make a point about

01:16:31.740 biodiversity. That was something I learned recently. Yeah, it's an important issue. But before I get

01:16:36.840 done, I just want to finish this thought about how this industrial system has sort of usurped

01:16:40.900 small farmholders, which are the majority of farmers that feed the majority of the world.

01:16:45.440 And these farmers are getting squeezed by these big ag companies are coming in and saying they're

01:16:52.020 going to improve their livelihood, but then force them to buy their seed, force them to buy their

01:16:56.380 chemicals. And there's increasing suicides and terrible economic consequences from these farmers

01:17:02.880 around the world because they're not able to maintain a livelihood doing what they're doing.

01:17:07.020 So it's not just that it's an issue around health. It's also an issue around squeezing a lot of the

01:17:11.960 people who do grow most of the food in the world. So it's another issue I talk about in the book.

01:17:15.440 Before we leave that then, do you know what the median farm is in the United States

01:17:19.040 in terms of acreage? I don't. I did know, but I don't, I can't keep all the facts.

01:17:24.220 That's all right. And what is approximately most farmers in the world? It's like less than five

01:17:28.520 acres is most of the farmers in the world that feed most of the world. Does that include the

01:17:32.480 United States? No. We're more industrial. Yeah. More industrial. Yeah, for sure. I mean,

01:17:37.240 there's less and less farms for you and for farmers. It's decreasing all the time, bigger and bigger

01:17:42.020 farms. I mean, Earl Butts said it under Nixon, go big or go home. In doing the research for your book,

01:17:46.140 Mark, did you spend any time with these farmers and did you sense in them a degree of dissatisfaction

01:17:52.520 or letdown with this promise of big ag that came about 20 years ago?

01:17:56.600 Oh my God. Yeah. I think the more and more farmers are thinking about this. There was an article in

01:18:00.180 Time Magazine where all the democratic candidates in Iowa were going out of the farms and the farmers

01:18:04.540 were like, look, our livelihoods are being destroyed. We're having floods. We're not able to grow food.

01:18:09.080 The system isn't working. We want to explore regenerative agriculture. So it's definitely happening,

01:18:14.020 not because they're hippies who want to go back to the land. It's happening just from an economic

01:18:18.020 imperative and the way to restore and save their farms. But do farmers feel captive now to Monsanto

01:18:24.480 and Pioneer and these other companies? They do. They have a system and they don't have a way to get

01:18:29.200 out of it. So they're in a vicious cycle. They've got all this capital in their equipment. They're stuck

01:18:34.220 in this vicious cycle of growing the same crops and they have no way out. So we do need a bridge for

01:18:39.000 these people and we do need mechanisms through government and private equity and others to

01:18:43.100 actually help fund the transition. I think, like I said, the UN has had $300 billion. Boom,

01:18:47.960 we could solve the problem of climate change and give us 20 years more runway to solve the bigger

01:18:53.040 issues. So it's a massive effort that could actually transform our quality of our food, the quality of

01:18:59.900 our soils, save our water, increase biodiversity, which we'll talk about, and so many of our global

01:19:05.180 problems just starting at the seed. So back to biodiversity. So what that means is that we

01:19:10.000 talk about extinction of species, but it's not just some frog in the Amazon. We've lost 90% of

01:19:15.840 our edible plant species. Basically 60% of our calories comes from corn and wheat and rice and soy

01:19:21.700 and mostly from 12 species. We've lost 90% of our edible plant species, half of all our livestock

01:19:27.240 species. There's a lot of weird animals all over the place and you travel to foreign countries,

01:19:31.360 you see these weird cows and weird pigs and weird goats and they all look different. And

01:19:35.180 now they're all the same that we produce in this country. And we have lost 75% of our pollinator

01:19:41.360 species, from which our agriculture depends, which Einstein said, if we lose bees from the face of

01:19:46.940 the earth, humans have four years left to live, which may be true or not, but it's an existential

01:19:51.660 threat. Butterflies, pollinators, all damaged also by these pesticides and chemicals that are

01:19:57.180 indiscriminate in what they kill. They were basically nerve gases that were produced in World War I and II

01:20:02.720 that were factories retooled to produce agrochemicals. That's what the bombs were. I mean, how Timothy

01:20:08.600 McVeigh bombed in Oklahoma, that building was through going to like a farm store and buying

01:20:14.800 nitrogen fertilizer and turning into a bomb. That's where it actually came from. So these chemicals

01:20:19.880 that we use in the soil, the methods of farming destroy the ecosystems, both from all those, but also

01:20:25.300 the biodiversity of the soil, the organism, the soil that are so critical, the mycorrhizal fungi,

01:20:29.600 the bacteria, the nematodes, the worms, all these different animals that live in the soil that are

01:20:35.540 necessary to actually create food and to create sustainable agriculture. And so I think we're

01:20:40.520 sort of asleep to the idea that we're sort of running out of soil or running out of these

01:20:45.020 biodiverse animals that are essential for our health and our survival. I mean, coral reefs, I mean,

01:20:49.200 with climate change, we're destroying all the coral reefs. And again, 500 billion people depend on

01:20:54.780 these coral reefs for food. So how would one go about moving the needle on this?

01:21:00.500 Well, I'm trying, I'm trying. So I wrote the book Food Fix, how to save our health, our economy,

01:21:04.360 our communities, and our planet one bite at a time in order to lay out the problem and lay out

01:21:08.200 the solutions. And they're multifaceted. They're what citizens can do, what can happen in business

01:21:12.760 innovation, like I mentioned, bring, come back and talking about an example around food waste.

01:21:16.660 And they're what policymakers need to do. And there needs to be the political will, but it's really tough.

01:21:20.600 So can we start at the bottom of that? And let me ask you another couple of questions.

01:21:24.600 What does organic really mean when it comes to plant or meat? If a person says, okay, Mark,

01:21:31.820 you've definitely convinced me that I want to be more mindful of what I'm buying. Let's just assume

01:21:36.460 that this is a person who has the economic flexibility to make the food choices that might

01:21:42.000 even increase their, their budget on groceries. So first of all, what does it mean when you go to

01:21:46.200 the grocery store and you see two boxes of strawberries, one's organic, one's not?

01:21:50.000 Well, organic is a certification that's delivered by the government. That means no antibiotics,

01:21:55.460 no pesticides, no herbicides, and has to be certified that it's clean of all of that. However,

01:22:02.740 it doesn't certify the method of growing the food. So Michael Pollan, his book, Omnibor's

01:22:07.740 Lema talked about industrial organic. So if you have these massive monocrop lettuce fields,

01:22:12.340 you're doing tillage, you're not doing cover crops, you're not doing crop rotations. You're also not

01:22:17.360 super helping the soil. It's better than industrial farming, but it's not fully regenerative. Regenerative

01:22:24.000 is a method of farming that actually includes organic, but goes beyond it. And there is now

01:22:28.660 a regenerative organic certification, which you can look up and I talk about in my book.

01:22:32.320 But the chemicals and the pesticides that we consume have an impact on our health. It's been

01:22:37.500 estimated that pesticide exposure just in children is responsible for an average loss of seven IQ points

01:22:44.060 or 41 million IQ points in kids. So there's a lot of brain power that's killed. And not to mention-

01:22:50.300 How many per kid?

01:22:51.420 I think it's like seven IQ points. There's literally millions of pounds of these pesticides

01:22:55.680 and herbicides that are in our food supply and our water. And some plants have more than others.

01:23:00.420 So I'm on the board of the Environmental Working Group and they produce a really great guide called

01:23:05.200 The Dirty Dozen and The Clean Fifteen. So you can look at that list and if you're having economic

01:23:10.660 issues or whatever, you can say, well, strawberries are the worst thing I could buy if they're not

01:23:15.220 organic. Whereas, you know, banana or an avocado, maybe not a big deal if it's not organic. So you

01:23:21.080 can look at that list and go, I'm going to save money by buying organic of the things that are the

01:23:25.440 worst contaminated. And I can cheat on the other ones that are not.

01:23:29.820 And as part of that, because in the case of bananas and avocado, you're eating what's inside and not

01:23:34.420 outside. Whereas in the strawberry, it's like got this surface that you collect.

01:23:38.240 It sucks at all. Celery is terrible. Never have anything about organic celery, for example.

01:23:43.400 And meat, besides not using hormones in the animals and not giving them antibiotics,

01:23:49.640 is there anything else that comes in the distinction of organic meat?

01:23:53.500 Again, it's not using the inputs that are chemical inputs that are on the corn that you have or the

01:24:00.720 soil that they have. So that's good. But again, it doesn't mean that they couldn't be fed organic

01:24:05.300 corn that's still growing in ways that are destroying the soil. So we really have to sort

01:24:09.220 of think more nuanced about what that means. That's why regenerative is sort of organic plus,

01:24:14.780 you know, it's like a whole next level.

01:24:16.600 How ubiquitous is that regenerative organic label?

01:24:19.920 It's not. It's not. It's not. It's not even a label yet. There's just a proposal for a

01:24:23.340 regenerative organic certification. And yet there are farms who are doing this and there's ways to

01:24:27.600 regulate it and measure it. And I think the government's going to be able to sort of

01:24:30.560 put out field service workers to measure soil, to measure these things, to look at, is it

01:24:34.400 regenerative? And places like Mariposa Ranch in California, you can buy half a cow with a bunch

01:24:39.960 of friends and it's eight bucks a pound, which for a four-ounce serving is less than you'd pay

01:24:43.860 for a McDonald's hamburger. So you can, with a little ingenuity and effort, you can actually start

01:24:48.320 to sort of find how to get these things. But it's the demand that's going to increase. And that's

01:24:52.840 why, for example, General Mills and Danone and Nestle and Pepsi even are looking at how do we get

01:24:57.940 our supply chain to be more regenerative? And how are we going to move that needle? It's kind of

01:25:02.220 exciting to me. Is there anything else a consumer can do absent the types of bigger changes that

01:25:08.460 you're pushing for and hoping for? I mean, I think being really focused on what you eat and where it

01:25:13.960 comes from, buying at local farmers markets, joining a community-supported agriculture, looking

01:25:18.800 for regenerative sources online, buying things together with friends. What are the resources people can

01:25:23.280 use to find those things? Are these centralized in any way? Yeah, they're in my book.

01:25:26.620 They're in my book, Food Fix. And they're on our website. What's the URL?

01:25:32.140 Foodfixbook.com. And there's a video on there, Five Steps to Heal the Planet and Yourself. And

01:25:37.600 there's an action guide that is good for citizens, businesses, governments, and so forth, so that it

01:25:43.560 says, you know, what can you do? And so, yes, you can vote with your fork in all the ways I just

01:25:48.000 mentioned. You can be active in your community. Maybe you should have a compost pile. I'm talking about

01:25:52.120 that, but you can be active to sort of have community garden. You know, my son, for his

01:25:56.660 fifth birthday, it's like, okay, what do you want, Reese? He wanted a compost box. All right,

01:26:01.400 there you go. You know how hard it was to find one? You couldn't go to Home Depot and get one.

01:26:05.420 You couldn't go to the local garden store. Like, it took- Really? They have them on Amazon. You can

01:26:09.220 buy them and have them shipped to you. I think ultimately, it sounds silly, I think ultimately we

01:26:13.240 did that. But I think with kids, sometimes it's fun to take them to the place and get the thing.

01:26:17.480 I was amazed how hard it was to get a big compost. You don't even need that. I just put a little

01:26:22.000 fence, a little kind of some two-by-fours and built a little box and you just throw it in my

01:26:26.960 backyard and just throw it in there year after year. And I've got like tons of feet of this dark,

01:26:32.080 rich soil, like a humus that goes on the garden. It's great. If you want to be politically active,

01:26:37.760 you can go in your municipality and say to your local government, say, look, let's have a composting

01:26:42.560 law. Let's make it mandatory like San Francisco did. You can't go and throw your garbage in San

01:26:47.200 Francisco anymore. And for example, in- I just don't know if I want to do anything San Francisco

01:26:51.840 is doing. I got to be honest with you. Well, whatever. But I mean, like, I mean,

01:26:55.160 France, if you have mandatory composting there and if you don't, you get a fine or you go to jail.

01:26:59.920 In Massachusetts, they passed a law that if you make a ton of organic waste every week,

01:27:04.300 you can't throw it out in the landfill. And they actually created innovation there. There's

01:27:08.480 people coming up like dairy farmers are making less money, struggling. This dairy farmer creates

01:27:12.860 these anaerobic digesters, which gets food waste. They get about a hundred tons of food waste every

01:27:18.100 week in this one farm from like Whole Foods and other grocery stores. They put in their manure from

01:27:22.440 the animals. It basically combusts. And this digester produces electricity for 1500 homes and makes the

01:27:28.760 farmer an extra hundred grand a year. And it's a win, win, win for everybody.

01:27:32.600 To me, I always feel like that's the better, whether that particular example works at scale or not,

01:27:37.440 I have no idea. But it seems to me the, we're going to put you in jail if you don't compost

01:27:42.140 approach is the wrong approach versus the let's economically incentivize you to do this thing

01:27:47.620 differently. And I worry that there's too much emphasis on the punishment side of things.

01:27:54.080 I don't think humans work that way. And it's also a slippery slope because the government doesn't

01:28:00.220 exactly have a track record of great competence. So for everything that they do right, they're probably

01:28:06.340 doing three things wrong. And therefore, I mean, again, I don't want to sound like too much of a

01:28:11.900 libertarian anti-nanny state guy, but I feel like I kind of need to sound like the libertarian anti-nanny

01:28:17.820 state guy when it comes to these things, because the government, as you point out, is a big part of

01:28:22.720 the reason we got in this mess. And to quote Einstein again, and I might be bastardizing this

01:28:28.300 quote, but the same level of consciousness that produced these problems will be incapable of solving them.

01:28:33.260 That's true. But we do have a lot of regulations that protect citizens, right?

01:28:36.140 We have seatbelt laws and emission controlled laws in cars. We have baby seats and all sorts

01:28:42.420 of things that we mandated that now people accept. And we have airbags, which the industry didn't like

01:28:47.420 and seatbelts, which they hate. And we just sort of accept that. And I think there's a role for

01:28:51.760 government in actually helping incentivize the right thing. And I think the law making it not okay

01:28:56.860 for big companies to throw out all their waste in the landfill. And the reason to sort of back up a

01:29:01.060 little on that is food waste, incredible problem. Like we said, 30 to 40% of all food producers

01:29:05.560 wasted. If it was grown on landmass, it would require the entire country of China to grow all

01:29:11.200 that food that we throw out. The average family throws out about a pound a day or about $1,800 a

01:29:16.660 year of food. And if it were a country in terms of the greenhouse gases that get produced when you

01:29:22.040 throw it in landfills and it rots and emits methane, it would be the third largest emitter of

01:29:26.600 greenhouse gases after the US and China. And it's about $2 trillion of resources that we waste in

01:29:32.360 throwing out all the food. And we produce more than enough food for 10 billion people on the

01:29:36.440 planet. It's just not equitably distributed. It's a big problem to solve and nobody's for it. Even

01:29:41.420 the Trump administration has created a food waste initiative with the EPA, the FDA, and the USDA.

01:29:47.800 And they basically like, oh, it's the FDA, the EPA, yeah, and USDA to actually deal with the food waste

01:29:53.180 issue. So I think each of us can stop that. That's an easy thing to do. And there's a lot of other

01:29:58.320 things we can do to get involved in our political process through being involved in communicating

01:30:02.760 with your congressmen and senators. There's something called the Food Policy Action Group,

01:30:06.460 which is foodpolicyaction.org that rates your senators and congressmen on their voting records

01:30:10.520 on food and ag policy. So you can see, and they've literally unseated congressmen who are doing bad

01:30:16.460 things and voting the wrong way around food and policy issues that people care about. So there's a lot

01:30:21.100 of things we can do as individuals. The USDA, what's their role in this?

01:30:27.440 Oh my God, you have another couple hours. I go through all this in the book, but just at the high

01:30:31.920 level, the USDA is responsible for a number of different food and ag policies that are the majority

01:30:38.140 of the things that are going on. Our dietary guidelines, which are messed up. Our school lunch

01:30:42.740 guidelines, which are messed up. Our SNAP program, our food stamp program, which is 75 billion a year.

01:30:48.680 It's one of our biggest government programs that feeds 46 million Americans, including one in four

01:30:52.780 kids who are food insecure. Great idea, but there's no nutrition guidelines in that. So there are $7

01:30:58.060 billion a year just in soda that we spend, about 30 billion servings a year.

01:31:02.520 You can buy soda with food stamps?

01:31:04.700 Oh yeah, of course. You can buy anything except alcohol and cooked food. So you can buy a two-liter

01:31:10.060 bottle of soda, but you can't buy rotisserie chicken in the grocery store. And 75% of the food stamps

01:31:15.180 is junk food or soda. That's about a $730 billion program, which is massive over a period of 10

01:31:23.360 years. And so there's no nutrition guidelines in there. And so you've got all these government

01:31:28.800 programs plus the crop insurance and agricultural supports that support an industrial agricultural

01:31:35.200 system. And those are harmful in the sense that if you have a big soy and corn farm and you want to

01:31:40.420 grow a whole bunch of veggies, you can't, even if you want to, because you will get penalized and not

01:31:45.300 get your crop insurance. So farmers are disincentivized from growing fruits and vegetables.

01:31:50.360 And the government tells us on the one hand to eat half of our plate as fruits and vegetables,

01:31:54.160 but less than half a percent of agricultural supports from the government are for fruits and

01:32:00.300 vegetables. So it's like, basically, if we were eating what the government actually funded in

01:32:06.220 agricultural supports, we'd be having a giant corn fritter, deep fried in soybean oil, you know?

01:32:11.320 And it's like, that's not exactly what we should be eating.

01:32:14.240 That's a very powerful image, Mark, is that not that necessarily the USDA's recommendations on

01:32:19.700 nutrition are correct, but even if you took that as an aspiration, it's interesting to note that the

01:32:26.680 funding doesn't align with that. So how does the USDA respond to that, especially because it's not a

01:32:31.900 subtle, they're not off by a little bit, they're off by an order of magnitude.

01:32:35.240 A quarter, less than a half a percent versus 50%.

01:32:38.380 So what is their response to that?

01:32:40.620 I don't know. I just, like, I think it's just, the right hand's not talking to the left hand.

01:32:45.800 And so there's all these disparate policies. I was working with Tim Ryan and my friend

01:32:49.680 Dariush Mazafarian from Harvard Tufts to get an analysis by the Government Accountability Office to look

01:32:56.300 at what our disparate policies were doing to our public health and to our economic health as a nation,

01:33:01.980 because they're all cross-purposes. We say, don't drink soda, eat healthy diet, so forth with

01:33:07.860 dietary guidelines, but then we pay for 75 billion a year in junk food for the poor. How does that make

01:33:13.400 sense? And so I think we have all these government agencies, which is the FDA that has confusing food

01:33:17.900 labels, or that allows antibiotics in our animal feed, or that allows substances that are banned in

01:33:23.100 other countries to be, that are toxic to be in our food supply, like azodicarbonamide, which is

01:33:27.920 basically a softener for flour products, for bread. I mean, if you use that in Singapore, you get a

01:33:34.500 $450,000 fine and you go to jail for 15 years. I mean, Singapore is Singapore, but still, like, it's not even

01:33:40.460 allowed. And we have the FDA, the FTC, which regulates the airwaves, allows all this unrestricted marketing

01:33:46.800 to kids. So you've got all these different agencies that are working cross-purposes that aren't coordinated and

01:33:51.700 aren't creating a coherent food policy. So we need a national food policy. We need activism to change some of

01:33:57.160 these food policies and support regenerative ag and to reform food stamps and dysfunctional policies,

01:34:02.340 to reform school lunches, and to actually help advance in healthcare food as medicine. All these

01:34:07.400 things can be done. And I'm actually working on a campaign with some extraordinary people who are

01:34:12.740 launching a nonprofit and an advocacy group, otherwise known as a lobby group for the good guys,

01:34:18.180 to start to work on these issues in Washington. Because while it may seem like nothing can be done,

01:34:23.340 I think behind the scenes a lot can be done. And I think there are a lot of these issues are

01:34:27.420 bipartisan issues. I just think people are ready for this. There's a movement and a readiness around

01:34:32.500 the country and even in Washington to address these issues. I mean, I just gave a talk at somewhere and

01:34:36.900 someone knew one of the senators from Maine and they called me the next day and was like,

01:34:41.200 what can you help with this? And I said, well, 70% of the military recruits are unfit to fight and

01:34:46.000 70% of the evacuations from Afghanistan and Iraq were not for more injuries, but were for obesity-related

01:34:51.220 injuries. And the soldiers, and they want to figure this out. So I am hopeful because I see that despite

01:34:57.240 all these issues, people are waking up to these problems. I see these big food companies like

01:35:02.120 Nestle, Danone, Unilever, and so forth, General Mills actually starting to take on these issues.

01:35:07.680 I mean, they still are part of the problem, but they are trying to move their super tanker ships and

01:35:12.200 it takes a while, but I do see room for hope. I see business innovations, food and ag tech companies are

01:35:17.940 billions and billions are flowing into these areas for innovation, which is all a good thing.

01:35:22.580 What do you think are the top three changes? If you were food czar and you had to rank order

01:35:28.580 sort of the biggest, are there three things that could make 70% of the difference?

01:35:32.680 Yes. I would immediately transform healthcare reimbursement to focus on food as medicine

01:35:38.900 through paying for food for those who are food insecure, for reimbursing fruit and vegetable

01:35:43.480 prescriptions for making food essential part of the government. And that would include having all

01:35:49.400 government is probably the biggest food purchaser in the country, have them only purchase food that

01:35:54.860 is going to promote health and not disease. I would then secondly, reform these dysfunctional food

01:36:00.520 policies. I would transform SNAP, transform school lunches, transform the dietary guidelines to be

01:36:05.440 science-based. And lastly, I would actually support regenerative ag in every way possible through

01:36:11.120 government policies and through business innovations, incentives and other things. So those three

01:36:15.400 pillars, one, fixing food as medicine into the healthcare system and reimbursement policies and

01:36:20.500 every government institution, reforming dysfunctional government food policies and

01:36:25.260 supporting regenerative ag. And that's really the whole agenda of the food fix campaign.

01:36:30.980 We've sort of glossed over it a little bit, but I guess no discussion on this would be

01:36:34.200 complete without coming back to maybe some of the confusion that exists around a plant-based diet

01:36:40.960 exclusively as a solution for, and let's put aside the health issues for a moment, because there's

01:36:47.740 obviously lots to debate around whether animal-based products have deleterious health consequences.

01:36:53.780 And let's put aside also the sort of egregious cruelty to animals that takes place under farmed

01:37:00.320 conditions. Factory farming should be banned, period, full stop.

01:37:04.520 Yeah. I don't think anybody that's spent any time actually going and watching how animals are

01:37:09.340 harvested in that way would disagree with that. So let's instead focus on specifically the

01:37:14.920 environmental concerns. You've already talked about it a little bit, but can you say a bit more

01:37:18.400 about it? Yeah. You know, this interesting report came out called the Eat Lancet report,

01:37:23.040 which was very well-intentioned and had a lot of great science in it that talked about how we link

01:37:29.200 climate and diet and food and what is a healthy diet and how do you define that? There's a lot of

01:37:34.380 great science in there. There were challenges though, because some of the language in there

01:37:39.120 was really driven through the food industry. And a lot of the sponsors for that were big food and big

01:37:45.500 ag. One of the, for example, messages is we need to grow more plants, more grains, and more beans

01:37:51.300 through something called sustainable intensification or climate smart agriculture.

01:37:57.260 These are buzzwords sort of like clean coal, which sound good. But when you look behind

01:38:05.100 the curtain, who funds those organizations, 60% of the members of climate smart agriculture are the

01:38:10.960 fertilizer companies. Sustainable intensification means using more and more chemical inputs on farms

01:38:17.100 in the developing world to grow more grains and beans. That's not the solution. And lastly,

01:38:21.660 without animals integrated into regenerative agricultural systems, you cannot restore soil

01:38:29.340 in the way we need to restore it as fast as we need to restore it. It's just a scientific fact.

01:38:34.280 So what you- Is that based on the need for the, basically the transfer of nitrogen through the

01:38:38.740 animal? Yeah. Pooping, peeing, digging, the saliva makes the plants grow. It's a whole symbiotic ecosystem.

01:38:44.920 And when used properly, not over-grazing, but proper management, which is called holistic

01:38:51.380 management or managed grazing or adaptive multi-paddock grazing, there's a science to it,

01:38:56.180 you can dramatically increase soil. So it takes like, I think, a thousand years to get three

01:39:00.320 centimeters of soil naturally. Gabe Brown in North Dakota got 29 inches of soil just through these

01:39:06.100 methods that are sort of supercharged methods. They're like sort of agriculture 2.0. It's not about

01:39:11.560 going back to old ways. It's about inventing new ways, using all the science to actually grow soil.

01:39:16.280 Because a lot of, I mean, through human history, we were destructive. I mean, we would grow food on

01:39:21.060 land and we would deplete the land and we'd move to the next plot of land. Problem is now we're running

01:39:25.100 the land. There's no more place to go. So I think we absolutely need to actually scale this

01:39:30.880 regenerative agriculture model in order to solve all these global issues.

01:39:34.680 Can regenerative ag be superimposed on fallow land?

01:39:37.160 Yeah. Then people are basically taking degraded land, which is almost desert, and turning it back

01:39:42.240 into lush fields and lush agricultural practices. So when those people say we have to be vegan to

01:39:48.220 save the planet, it's actually not accurate. Whether you eat meat or not is a personal choice,

01:39:52.840 a moral choice. If you think it's a health choice, fine. But whether or not you believe in eating meat

01:39:58.520 or not, from an environmental, from a regenerative, from an climate standpoint, we must have animals

01:40:04.480 integrated into the process in order to restore soil, which is the biggest carbon sink. So the

01:40:09.700 take-home message here for people is there are a lot of ways to fix climate change, but the quickest,

01:40:14.260 fastest, and most effective and scalable way, and using ancient carbon capture technology

01:40:20.280 that is more effective than anything that exists today, and it's free, called photosynthesis,

01:40:25.820 it's basically sun and carbon dioxide in the air, we can solve a lot of the global issues that we have.

01:40:30.640 So Mark, how are you spending your time today? You wear a ton of hats.

01:40:34.200 Talking to you.

01:40:34.440 Yeah. I mean, you know, you're involved in the education of functional medicine at the Cleveland

01:40:39.500 Clinic. You commute there and back from your home in New York. You're obviously very involved in this

01:40:43.840 initiative. What does the pie graph look like of how you allocate your time?

01:40:48.520 Well, I'm always doing the same thing in my mind. I'm trying to end the suffering through the power of

01:40:54.680 functional medicine, systems thinking, and sort of restoring communities and behavioral change through

01:41:00.560 that. And this is just part of that story. Like I said, there's so much suffering that's unnecessary,

01:41:06.460 whether it's chronic disease or poverty or mental illness, or kids struggling with learning in schools

01:41:12.360 or violence. These are all needless suffering. If we have the solutions, then we need to focus on

01:41:17.060 them. And as I again began at the beginning, talk about, as I sort of went down the rabbit hole of why

01:41:22.420 are my patients sick, I came to this bigger conclusion that unless we deal with the systems

01:41:26.580 issues, unless we go upstream, we're just going to be treading water or bailing a sinking boat.

01:41:32.000 And the acceleration of these problems is so big that I feel like I'm focusing more and more

01:41:36.140 on these bigger issues in order to solve them. So yes, I write books and I feel like this is my last

01:41:41.920 one for a while, but like to write books and teach and speak and do all these things, have clinics.

01:41:47.200 But at the end of the day, this is an existential threat. And once you've seen it,

01:41:51.620 you can't unsee it. I just were researching the book for the last two and a half years. I just

01:41:55.380 sort of was shocked by a lot of things that I learned that are not really common knowledge,

01:42:00.700 even with really educated people. If I go in a room of highly educated people and say,

01:42:05.420 what's the number one source of climate change? They're not going to say food,

01:42:08.080 but when you actually unpack it, that's the biggest threat.

01:42:11.600 Well, Mark, thank you very much for making the time today. And more importantly, of course,

01:42:15.280 for doing this work and bringing it to our attention. This is an area that I have become

01:42:19.220 increasingly interested in. And my views are kind of constantly evolving. I mean, I think there was

01:42:25.760 a day when I didn't question the health of GMO. I'll just share with you an anecdote, which is when

01:42:33.580 I went to Europe a year ago, I just made the glib observation, which was sort of the bread,

01:42:41.680 the pasta, all of the food that I ate in Europe, which I actually went out of my way to eat,

01:42:47.640 did not seem to produce the same effect as it did here. And that was actually kind of the thin end

01:42:53.100 of the wedge in my mind that said, what's going on? What is the difference between the crops that

01:42:57.920 they are using in Europe? And it's funny because it reminded me. I can give you four reasons why

01:43:02.620 that's true. Yeah. Well, it reminded me of my childhood because when I was a kid, we used to go to

01:43:06.400 Egypt every year because that's where my parents are from. And I'd go with my mom each year and

01:43:11.520 usually spend two months there. And I remember the way bread tasted there. It had a very distinct

01:43:18.260 taste that you'll never taste. Even if you buy like pita bread or other Middle Eastern bread here

01:43:23.180 in the US, it tastes very different. And I remember sort of having those neurons tickled again

01:43:28.380 when I was in Europe going out of my way. Because most of the previous times I'd gone to Europe,

01:43:32.260 I kind of don't eat that sort of stuff. But on this trip, I was like, hey, I'm going to

01:43:35.960 when in Rome, right? So yeah, tell me about what you think those four differences are.

01:43:39.700 You're talking about wheat products, right? So what's happened to wheat is that we've

01:43:43.520 hybridized the wheat to make it extremely drought resistant and hardy. And it's called dwarf wheat.

01:43:50.740 And the guy who invented it, Norman Borlaug, won the Nobel Prize and increased in yields. But what was

01:43:57.400 sort of the unintended consequences is the starch in there. It's called amylopectin A. It's a super

01:44:03.240 starch. So it raises your blood sugar more than regular sugar. So one, it's basically just like

01:44:07.080 eating sugar or worse. Two, when they breed plants, it's not like humans. You get 23 pairs

01:44:14.100 of chromosomes, one from your mom, one from your dad, 46 chromosomes. In plants, it's 46 plus 46.

01:44:19.100 So it's like 92. And so there's extra proteins that are formed. And there are many more gliding

01:44:23.520 proteins, which are inflammatory and more active in terms of causing disruptions in the gut. So they're

01:44:29.060 more likely to cause a leaky gut inflammation. The third thing is they spray wheat, even though

01:44:34.100 it's not a GMO food plant, they spray it with glyphosate at harvest. Why? Because it defoliates

01:44:40.840 the plants. It gets rid of all the sort of leaves and stuff. So it makes it easier to harvest. So

01:44:45.540 right at harvest, they spray this with glyphosate and your Cheerios have more glyphosate than vitamin A

01:44:51.300 and vitamin D that are added in there per amount of weight.

01:44:53.780 Right. So even if you buy organic wheat?

01:44:56.340 Organic wheat, no. Organic wheat could still be the dwarf wheat.

01:44:59.000 Yep, yep, yep.

01:44:59.640 And then lastly, and this is interesting, there's actually maybe five reasons. But second to last,

01:45:03.760 the calcium propionate, which is a preservative, is added to the wheat in this country. And it's

01:45:08.740 known to cause toxic neurological effects, behavioral hyperactivity, and it has been linked to autism.

01:45:14.860 In fact, when you give babies breast milk, it increases butyrate, which is a powerful short-chain

01:45:20.140 fat in the gut that makes your gut healthy. When you have formula, it causes

01:45:23.620 high propionate levels, which can cause neurotoxic effects. And in animal models,

01:45:27.580 it has caused autism if you put propionate in rats' brains. And then lastly, in Europe,

01:45:33.300 they have different methods of making them. But here, it's like quick, quick, quick, quick. They

01:45:36.380 want it to leaven and rise in a couple hours. There, it can take overnight, 12 hours, 14 hours,

01:45:41.180 and it tastes very different. It's a very different structure, and it does different

01:45:44.120 things to the gluten and so forth. So there's a lot of reasons that that happens. But I would say over

01:45:48.860 and over, I see this happen with my patients who can't eat this stuff here, and they go over there,

01:45:53.620 and there's no GMO over there. It's a complex web of things.

01:45:57.040 Can one make bread here in the US on their own using wheat, like an actual wheat that comes from

01:46:02.120 Europe?

01:46:02.420 Sure. You could, or you could get heirloom wheats, like einkorn wheat, which is very different. Or

01:46:07.620 now there's new forms of wheat, like kernza wheat by Wes Jackson was developed in the Midwest. It has

01:46:12.460 incredibly deep roots. It's a perennial wheat, super nutrient-dense, really amazing, amazing product.

01:46:18.380 So there's incredible grains out there. I was talking to my friend Jeff Bland the other day,

01:46:22.840 who's developing this company, and he's working with this guy to develop these phytochemical-rich

01:46:27.880 foods, superfoods. And he got a bunch of things from the USDA, a bunch of seeds. And one packet

01:46:34.520 came in, it was like 4, 3, 2, 1, 6, or something. He's like, what's this? I don't know what this is.

01:46:38.120 And they sent it to him by accident. And it was this Himalayan buckwheat, which apparently is one of the

01:46:43.140 most protein-rich, low-glycemic, phytochemical-dense, hearty superfood on the planet. And

01:46:51.200 they're now, they have this sort of seed, and they're not selling it, distributing it, but they

01:46:54.980 couldn't give it back. So he's like literally taking this packet of seeds and turning it into a

01:46:58.060 whole business, which is really amazing. So there's a lot of stuff out there that we could

01:47:02.280 use. It's much better for us, but we just kind of homogenized our food supply. And we've taken out

01:47:07.460 all, like I said, we ate 800 species of plants before when we were hunter-gatherers. You know, our bodies need

01:47:11.920 all those different phytochemicals and nutrients and minerals and so forth and vitamins to actually

01:47:16.340 run itself. And we're now just in this sort of nutrient-devoid diet, even if we're eating organic

01:47:22.440 stuff. If it's not grown in good soils, if it's hybridized plants, it's just not great. I always

01:47:27.400 say eat weird food. So I always try to eat weird food. I gotta tell you, I'm hungry right now.

01:47:31.780 I know, me too. All right, Mark. Well, thanks very much. Sure. Thanks a lot, Peter, for having me.

01:47:37.680 Thank you for listening to this week's episode of The Drive. If you're interested in diving deeper,

01:47:41.780 into any topics we discuss, we've created a membership program that allows us to bring you

01:47:46.200 more in-depth, exclusive content without relying on paid ads. It's our goal to ensure members get

01:47:51.700 back much more than the price of the subscription. Now, to that end, membership benefits include a

01:47:57.040 bunch of things. One, totally kick-ass, comprehensive podcast show notes that detail every topic, paper,

01:48:03.040 person, thing we discuss on each episode. The word on the street is nobody's show notes rival these.

01:48:08.320 Monthly AMA episodes, or Ask Me Anything episodes, hearing these episodes completely.

01:48:14.240 Access to our private podcast feed that allows you to hear everything without having to listen

01:48:19.200 to spiels like this. The Qualies, which are a super short podcast, typically less than five minutes,

01:48:24.920 that we release every Tuesday through Friday, highlighting the best questions, topics, and tactics

01:48:29.420 discussed on previous episodes of The Drive. This is a great way to catch up on previous episodes

01:48:34.900 without having to go back and necessarily listen to everyone. Steep discounts on products that I

01:48:40.480 believe in, but for which I'm not getting paid to endorse, and a whole bunch of other benefits that

01:48:45.060 we continue to trickle in as time goes on. If you want to learn more and access these member-only

01:48:49.680 benefits, you can head over to peteratiamd.com forward slash subscribe.

01:48:53.860 You can find me on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, all with the ID peteratiamd. You can also leave us

01:49:01.660 a review on Apple Podcasts or whatever podcast player you listen on. This podcast is for general

01:49:07.560 informational purposes only and does not constitute the practice of medicine, nursing, or other

01:49:12.080 professional healthcare services, including the giving of medical advice. No doctor-patient

01:49:17.800 relationship is formed. The use of this information and the materials linked to this podcast

01:49:22.540 is at the user's own risk. The content on this podcast is not intended to be a substitute for

01:49:28.580 professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Users should not disregard or delay in

01:49:35.240 obtaining medical advice from any medical condition they have, and they should seek the assistance of

01:49:40.620 their healthcare professionals for any such conditions. Finally, I take conflicts of interest very

01:49:46.460 seriously. For all of my disclosures and the companies I invest in or advise, please visit

01:49:52.060 peteratiamd.com forward slash about where I keep an up-to-date and active list of such companies.

01:50:22.060 Thank you.

01:50:23.060 Thank you.

The Peter Attia Drive - February 24, 2020

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

Episode Stats

Length

Words per Minute

Word Count

Sentence Count

Misogynist Sentences

Hate Speech Sentences

Summary

Transcript