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,

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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. 0.99

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 1.00

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, 1.00

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. 0.93

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 0.63

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 1.00

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 0.98

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, 1.00

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. 1.00

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 0.98

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 0.99

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. 0.94

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 0.64

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 0.99

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 0.69

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 0.52

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 0.97

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 0.99

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, 0.99

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 1.00

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 1.00

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 0.92

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 0.97

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 0.90

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 0.98

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. 0.77

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.

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The Peter Attia Drive - February 24, 2020

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

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