Ultra-Processed Food Is the New Tobacco—How Big Food Manipulates Science, Policy, & Your Cravings | Michael Pollan

The modern food industry is built for profit, not health. Ultra-processed foods dominate grocery shelves, fueling the epidemic of obesity, diabetes, and chronic disease. But how did we get here? And what can we do to fix it? In this episode of The Dr. Hyman Show, I sit down with Michael Pollan, award-winning journalist and food activist, to break down the hidden forces shaping our food system and the urgent need for change. In this powerful conversation, you’ll discover: How a handful of corporations control our entire food supply—and why that’s a problem. The shocking truth about ultra-processed foods and how they’re engineered to keep you hooked. Why our food system collapsed during the pandemic and what it revealed about its fragility. How food companies quietly buy up health brands and use misleading labels to keep consumers in the dark. The role of policy and lobbying in keeping unhealthy food cheap and widely available. Make sure to tune in—this is a conversation every American needs to hear. View Show Notes From This Episode Get Free Weekly Health Tips from Dr. Hyman Sign Up for Dr. Hyman’s Weekly Longevity Journal This episode is brought to you by Seed, Sunlighten, Big Bold Health, PerfectAmino, and AirDoctor. Seed is offering my community 25% off to try DS-01® for themselves. Visit seed.com/hyman and use code 25HYMAN for 25% off your first month of Seed's DS-01® Daily Synbiotic. Visit sunlighten.com and save up to $1400 on your purchase with code HYMAN. Try Big Bold Health's HTB Rejuvenate and get 25% off by going to bigboldhealth.com and use code DRMARK25 at checkout. Get pure essential amino acids today. Go to bodyhealth.com and use HYMAN20 to get 20% off your first order. Get cleaner air. Right now, you can get up to $300 off at airdoctorpro.com/drhyman.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Coming up on this episode of the Dr. Hyman Show.

• 0:02Speaker 01

  Ultra-processed food, I think, is, yeah, it's a scourge. If you go to Latin America or South America, where these food companies don't exert as much domestic power, you will find some powerful labels. I mean, skulls and crossbones and stop signs.

• 0:18Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Right.

• 0:18Speaker 01

  Other countries are starting to deal with it. Unfortunately, we haven't yet.

• 0:24Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Now, before we jump into today's episode, I'd like to note that while I wish I could help everyone by my personal practice, there's simply not enough time for me to do this at scale. And that's why I've been busy building several passion projects to help you better understand, well, you. If you're looking for data about your biology, check out Function Health for real-time lab insights. And if you're in need of deepening your knowledge around your health journey, well, check out my membership community, Dr. Hyman Plus. And if you're looking for curated trusted supplements and health products for your health journey, visit my website, drhyman.com for my website store and a summary of my favorite and thoroughly tested products.

• 1:04Dr. Mark Hyman?

  So, Michael, it's great to have you back. Last time was before COVID and the world changed a lot.

• 1:08Speaker 01

  2019, I believe. Yeah.

• 1:10Dr. Mark Hyman?

  That's right.

• 1:10Speaker 01

  I know. Lots happened since then to both of us and to the world.

• 1:14Dr. Mark Hyman?

  It's true. You were just, it was just pre-COVID and you launched your book, How to Change Your Mind, which changed the world, I think, in a big way, which is good. And then your documentary series on Netflix was just remarkable. And, and I think it really helped people understand that there's another way to think about addressing mental health and working with some of the struggles we have as human beings, which are, you know, often challenging. And it's been great to see how that book has just exploded and how it's become this catalyst for change. Just like the Amno Wars Dilemma did the same thing for the food, food system. So you kind of have this really unique kind of role in our culture of being kind of the truth-sayer and, and the truth-teller in a way that, that

• 1:56Dr. Mark Hyman?

  people really have, have a way of warming up to and challenging subjects. Cause you're talking about like psychedelics and food. And these are, these are controversial topics, but it's great to see how you sort of threaded that needle and is beautiful. So I've loved that book and I loved what you've done. So, congrats on that, Michael.

• 2:13Speaker 01

  Oh, thank you, Mark. I really appreciate you saying that.

• 2:16Dr. Mark Hyman?

  So, you know, today we're going to talk about something that you wouldn't talk about with me last time, which was food, because you're like, I want to talk about consciousness and psychedelic. Like, okay, okay. So we're going to get back to food because you just were part of a movie. You helped produce it called Food, Inc. Two. Most people heard about Food, Inc. Came out in 2008. And between 2008 and 2014, things have gotten a lot worse, not better. And there's, there is a food movement and you were a catalyst in helping establish that. But unfortunately, there's so many forces working against it. And there's been consolidation of companies in the food industry. There's been the explosion of ultra-processed food even more than it was. And it's led to a real crisis.

• 2:58Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And what's really exciting to me, though, is it seems like the world is sort of waking up to this. Like, the movie exposes. So maybe you can share a little bit about your inspiration for doing a Food, Inc. Two and why that was important and what the main lessons that you learned doing it and that you hope that the audience would take from, from watching. By the way, everybody's got to watch the movie. It's great. It's up on streaming services now.

• 3:21Speaker 01

  Well, you know, when we did Food, Inc. in 2008, it really did help launch a conversation. And there hadn't been a film that looked at the whole system quite the way that one did. And it had a big impact. It also led to a backlash. It was, I, I just remember how much pushback there was from the industry, from the Farm Bureau, which is a, not really a farmer's organization. They hide behind farmers, but they're really an agribusiness organization. And they came after me and they came after Eric Schlosser. And it was a real reminder how much power there is

• 3:57Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Wow.

• 3:57Speaker 01

  in the status quo in food. I had a series, I used to get invited to speak at agricultural schools, land-grant colleges. And I love going to talk to young farmers. And all of a sudden, those invitations would get canceled. Or I would go and there would be some counter-programming.

• 4:17Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Beyonce doing a concert at the same time.

• 4:20Speaker 01

  That kind of stuff. And, and then I had, I had, oh, I had a gig at Cal Poly where they announced that.

• 4:29Speaker 01

  It couldn't be a speech without challenge. I had to do a debate instead.

• 4:33Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Hmm.

• 4:34Speaker 01

  Subsequently, uh, came out in the Los Angeles Times that the owner of the biggest feedlot in California, Harris Ranch, had threatened the president of Cal Poly if I was allowed to speak unchallenged.

• 4:46Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Wow.

• 4:47Speaker 01

  And threatened to withdraw a gift.

• 4:49Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 4:49Speaker 01

  Um, and in the same letter, which they got ahold of at the LA Times, he, uh, insisted they cancel a course on the, on the grass feeding of livestock of ruminants.

• 5:00Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Wow.

• 5:00Speaker 01

  Um, and then I had a, a gig canceled at Washington, East, uh, Western Washington University. So, and, and it all turned out to be Farm Bureau organized. And, uh, so it was, it was an interesting reminder to me.

• 5:13Dr. Mark Hyman?

  It's like the McCarthy area, you're blacklisted, like being communist.

• 5:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, you know, and the idea they don't want, they don't want young farmers to hear from somebody like me is, uh, is a sign of, I think, insecurity. Anyway, um, but I thought I was done after I did that. You know, I wrote several books on food in addition to Omnivore's Dilemma. There was Indefensive Food and Food Rules. Pottery of Desire had a lot of material on food. So I thought I had said what I had to say. And there was a whole generation of young food journalists who were, you know, had taken the baton. And that was, you know, wonderful to see, and I moved on to other topics. But then when the pandemic hit, um, something really interesting and revealing happened with the food system.

• 6:01Speaker 01

  Uh, and you'll remember, you have to go back to those early days in March and April and May of, uh, of 2020, when suddenly, uh, you couldn't find food in the supermarket. There was, the shelves were bare.

• 6:17Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 6:17Speaker 01

  And at the same time, you saw on your television, this incredible split screen, the bare shelves on one side, on the other, farmers euthanizing chickens and pigs and spilling milk out on the ground. Um, and the reason was that our food system, it turns out we have two food systems. One supplies, uh, supermarkets and consumers. And the other supplies institutions, whether it's restaurants or schools or factories. And, um, that one completely shut down, uh, because nobody was going to work or school.

• 6:55Speaker 01

  And so everyone got all their food at the supermarket or tried to. And the system crashed for a period of time. And the two systems don't relate to one another because we've had such concentration. So the kinds of companies that are selling, say, liquefied eggs in the institutional food chain, didn't have the containers to sell their eggs in a supermarket. Right. Ditto toilet paper. Remember the famous toilet paper shortage? There were giant rolls. Well, you know, the way the toilet paper is sold to institutions is on these giant rolls and they couldn't sell those in the supermarket chain.

• 7:34Speaker 01

  So, um, so we really learned something about the system, that it was highly centralized and specialized and really brittle. Uh, and that of course is the cost of efficiency.

• 7:49Speaker 01

  You can get a very efficient system and we have that in some ways, but it's only efficient if there are no shocks. And as soon as you get a shock, the brittleness of the system reveals itself. The other thing that revealed itself was the political power behind the food system. And the most telling instance here, and this really got our attention that spring when we were deciding whether to make a sequel or not, um, was, uh, the day that John Tyson, uh, took out ads in the Washington Post, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, an open letter to the president. And the reason they were doing that is because the public health authorities were trying

• 8:30Speaker 01

  to shut down their, some of their processing plants in the high plains. I remember that. And in Iowa, because they had become vectors, um, that very, they were bringing COVID into these communities. These people were working really close to one another in the cold with, um, no PPE. And, um, people were like turning off the production lines and vomiting and going right back to work. They were sick. And the public health authorities in these towns and Waterloo, Iowa is the one we focused on, were trying to like, close them down for a while to clean them up and, and put some protocols in place. And rather than do that, the president of Tyson writes this

• 9:14Speaker 01

  letter asking the president of the United States, who was Donald Trump at the time, to invoke the Defense Production Act to force open their production lines. And low and behold, two or three days later, the president does it. The president writes an executive, signs an executive order, written or drafted by Tyson, opening up their production lines. And if you, you know, the reason we have antitrust laws in this country is to avoid concentrations of power. It's not just to protect consumers from price gouging. It's to protect the republic from overly powerful interests. And if you ever needed an example

• 9:57Speaker 01

  that we had gone too far in that direction, when you can have a company force the president's hand, and, and the Defense Production Act, you should understand, was something passed in the 50s, giving the president the power to force a company to do things in the public interest that they don't want to do. Like, say, a car company should start making tanks because we're in wartime, or planes.

• 10:22Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Right.

• 10:23Speaker 01

  And, and basically, this was a perversion of the, of the act because it, it was allowing the company to do exactly what it wanted to do, but using the federal power to do it. So all of this told us that the food system had reached a point of crisis in terms of concentration. And that was a, a reason to, to reopen the story and take another look at the food system.

• 10:52Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah. And most people don't realize that the, you know, that the food industry is the biggest industry on the planet. I think it's 16 or 17 trillion dollars a year because everybody eats. And that it's controlled by just a few dozen CEOs. When you look at the seed companies, you To be dozens and dozens of them. Now there's like five or so the fertilizer.

• 11:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, or meat. There are four, four companies slaughter all the beef. Look at infant formula. Remember that crisis? You know, there are only two companies that sell all the infant formula. And when one of them had a contamination problem on their production lines, mothers couldn't get formula.

• 11:33Speaker 01

  So had if you had 20 companies or 10 companies, the a screw up at one of them would not have affected everybody. But so, you know, it's the old adage, we're putting all our eggs in in one basket and that's never a good idea.

• 11:47Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And and also, you know, they're insidious in how they work because they're they work a, you know, to kind of gobble up other companies that seem to have a halo of health. So a lot of the health brands that you're having are actually bought by these big food companies. And and that.

• 12:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's it's one of the saddest things. You see these these creative startups doing healthy food or doing innovation, and they get gobbled up right away. And invariably, when they get gobbled up, you know, they add the they add to the amount of sugar in the products, which always increases sales and add salt and, you know, kind of destroy the golden egg that they've just bought.

• 12:28Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, you know, in Michael Moss's book, it was it was fascinating to read about how the food industry got together. I think it was in the late 50s in Minnesota because there was a pushback on processed food. And there was this woman named Betty, who was a home ec teacher, who basically was trying to get families to cook and and garden and basically be self sufficient around food. And and they wanted to get their processed foods into the American kitchen. And they got together and kind of colluded to to kind of make convenience king and they succeeded. And and it's just gotten worse and worse and worse. And I, you know, I grew up on TV dinners. I'm sure you say you're about my age.

• 13:03Speaker 01

  I do too.

• 13:03Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, it's like.

• 13:04Speaker 01

  I love TV dinner.

• 13:05Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, and pop tarts and all that crap. This industry has become so so controlled by so few people, by so few companies that are all working towards making a profit, which is what they're supposed to do. But at the same time, they're killing us. And what what I think that. The movie really did also was was sort of exposed this one this consolidation and concentration around the food companies that control our entire food supply and how fragile it is, but also how they've just kind of aggressively pushed more and more processed food and fought at every turn to stop any attempt to try to limit access to or label or restrict or change policies around ultra-processed food.

• 13:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, that's the other big story that we focus on in Fooding 2 because that's the other big change since 2008. The term ultra-processed food was not in use then. We talked about junk food a lot or processed food, but a lot of research has been done since then to really pinpoint the fact that the degree of processing of food matters greatly to our health. And ultra-processed food, the term was coined by Carlos Montero, who was an epidemiologist in Brazil, in Sao Paulo. And he's a very interesting character who's in the movie. And he was trying to understand, you know, 10 or 15 years ago,

• 14:33Speaker 01

  why was it that Brazilians were putting on so much weight and having rising rates of diabetes when the the amounts of, say, meat or sugar or salt hadn't actually changed? And and this was kind of a paradox. And what he found was that, yes, even though the amounts of sugar and salt and fat hadn't changed, people were getting them in a new form. Instead of in home-cooked food, they were getting them in in highly-processed food. Sweetened yogurt came into the market, sodas came into the market, prepared meals came into the market. And he hypothesized that there was something about ultra-processed

• 15:18Speaker 01

  food that caused people to eat more of it. Um, this idea was controversial until a man named Kevin Hall at the NEH decided to do a very controlled test where he, he had people live in a hotel for 30 days and gave them one of two meals. One was ultra-processed and the other was, you know, cooked, normal food, matched for percentages of, of fat and salt and all the, all the macronutrients. And, um, and lo and behold, he found that on the, the people, and people could eat as much as they wanted of either. Um, the people on the ultra-processed diet ate 500

• 15:59Speaker 01

  more calories per person per day. And, um, and that is because the, the study didn't determine exactly why that was true. Um, that work is going on now, but it clearly has to do with the way this food has been engineered. Um, that it is engineered to be irresistible, addictive in various ways, but also that it's also engineered to be very quickly absorbed in the body. It has very little fiber, ultra-processed food. And, um, and that leads, I mean, you know, this as a doctor, that leads to, um, you know, quick insulin spikes, um, uh, you know, and, um, and that, that terrible cycle, um,

• 16:41Speaker 01

  that gets started. So, um, ultra-processed food, I think is, yeah, it's, it's a scourge. And, um, other countries are, are starting to deal with it. Um, unfortunately, we haven't yet. Um, you know, if you go to Latin America or South America, um, where these food companies don't exert as much domestic power, um, you will find some powerful labels. I mean, skulls and crossbones and stop signs. And, uh, you know, it's, it's pretty intense. If you go to Mexico or Chile or, um, or Brazil. Um, but so far, you know, there's,

• 17:20Speaker 01

  I mean, Biden was supposed to announce front of package labeling of some kind. Hasn't happened yet, I don't think. Um, but, uh, let's hope and let's hope it doesn't get diluted by the industry.

• 17:34Dr. Mark Hyman?

  No, no, I've, I've been in the conversations around this front of package labeling with the FDA. It's part of my nonprofit, Food Fix, and You know, they're going to do something, but you know, I kind of talked to someone who talked to the FDA commissioner and kind of was pushing him. He said, look, you know, you're going to get something, but it's probably not what you want. And

• 17:53Speaker 01

  I've heard the same thing.

• 17:53Dr. Mark Hyman?

  The subtext there is it's like, you know, the food industry still got its hands on the reins. And, and that, that just really concerns me because what we're talking about is just putting front of package labeling to protect our children. Like if, if we can't protect our children from the harms of these foods, you know, as a nation, then who are we? And, and the, the fact that the food industry is so powerful and so consolidated and it drives so much of the policy in Washington, um, i- it's something that most people don't realize. And like, like this effort you mentioned in, in, uh, with Tyson Foods and President Trump. I mean, that stuff goes on all the time and the, the voices that actually need to get heard aren't getting heard. And so I'm just a little guy. I'm, I have a little nonprofit

• 18:37Dr. Mark Hyman?

  and, and I've got a team that are very sophisticated and smart, but when we go and talk to the senators and congressmen, they don't know much about this at all. And it's not their fault. It's just, there's just zero education and all they're hearing from is the other side. I mean, Sam Cass said this to me. He said, Mark, you know, when I was in the White House, we would have a parade of food industries coming and telling, you know, what the sci- quote, "science" says, which is funded by them, what, you know, what the legislation should be. They write the legislation. They give it to us. They create all the rationale. We don't hear from anybody else. We don't hear from the other side. And so I, I wonder, Michael, you know, you've been this a long time and you've been thinking about this a long time. You know, where do you see the biggest levers to pull? Or is it, is it, is it grassroots?

• 19:19Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Is it, you know, huge, um, efforts with our, our policymakers? Is it trying to sort of, you know, learn from other countries and put pressure on America to kind of follow, follow the suit? I mean, I, I wrote an article in Time Magazine about it, sort of as, as sort of about ultra-processed food and front of package labeling and sort of this being the new cigarettes. And I, I think, you know, what, what do you see as the, the lever that's going to really make a difference?

• 19:44Speaker 01

  I think it's going to take power in Washington and specifically in Congress. I mean, that's where the problem lies. We've had a couple of White Houses that wanted to do the right thing and got stymied. The Obama administration didn't achieve all they hoped to around food, although Michelle Obama did some positive things. But, you know, I think they sort of chickened out on some issues, especially around antitrust during the Obama years. I have more hope for Biden's antitrust policies, which have some real teeth, much to the upset of the industry.

• 20:29Speaker 01

  One positive change since 2008 is like allies in Washington, and I'm sure you've had this experience too. There's a group of people in the House and now a couple in the Senate who are committed to food issues. We spent a lot of time with Cory Booker making the film. And, you know, here is a person who was an urban legislator and a mayor who gets to Congress and decides to use his political capital to get on the Ag Committee, the Agriculture Committee. That is not a place that ambitious urban legislators go. But he understands that the health of his constituents in New Jersey depends on what's going on on the farm.

• 21:11Speaker 01

  And if we're growing monocultures of corn and soy, his constituents are going to be eating ultra-processed food. And that until you change agricultural policies, you're not going to have an impact on nutrition and the issues we care about. And yeah, I mean, labels are really important and better information is really important. But in the end, food choice is driven in large part by price. And the unhealthiest calories are the cheapest calories in our food system. And that is what has to change, and that won't change until you have policy. So I think building, you know, a caucus of people who care.

• 21:51Speaker 01

  John Tester is another one who has, he's really, he's a farmer himself, an organic farmer in Montana, very popular despite the fact he's in a-

• 22:02Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, Matt Whitman, he's a great guy.

• 22:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, he is a great guy. And he gets it. He gets, he understands this industry. He sees what they're doing to farmers. And you know, the, um, uh, I also think the Democrats have to do a better job talking to farmers. I mean, we, they've completely lost that, uh, that register, that vocabulary. And, um, rural America has turned against Democrats.

• 22:25Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, it's true.

• 22:26Speaker 01

  And we, we forget that Obama won Iowa twice. That is unimaginable today.

• 22:31Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 22:32Speaker 01

  Um, although I think one of the reasons that the Democrats lost it is because he disappointed expectations that he had created, that he was going to be more helpful to farmers. So anyway, I, it's, it's political organizing. It's, it's hard work. Um, and there is not a natural business constituency in favor of reform. You do have all these, you know, great small farmers and small food companies, but the food companies, the only exit for them is to sell to a big company.

• 23:06Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, right.

• 23:07Speaker 01

  And, um, that, you know, that's how you do it. You, the returns on food are not very high compared to other parts of the economy.

• 23:14Dr. Mark Hyman?

  I wonder who the natural allies are, like insurance companies? I mean, in terms of them being aligned?

• 23:18Speaker 01

  Well, you know, it's interesting you bring that up, Mark. I, I remember a few, I always thought that the natural ally of the food industry were health insurers. Because if you can prevent, you know, for every case of type two diabetes you prevent, I remember seeing a number, and this is 10 or 15 years old, um, they saved half a million dollars over the life of that person. And I was invited to give a speech in Scottsdale, Arizona, to a group of presidents of, of health insurance companies. And I got up there and I gave a stemwinder about how they should be allies of the food movement and how preventing, you know, chronic disease could make them money. Um, and that, you

• 24:00Speaker 01

  know, they should really be in there fighting for a farm bill that privileged health over productivity. And this president of a, of a health insurance company comes up to me after and he says, You know, with all due respect, you don't understand our business.

• 24:16Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Really?

• 24:17Speaker 01

  We, we have so much churn. We, we anticipate holding on to a customer for one year. So prevent, we don't make any money with prevention. And if we, if we, if the contracts were five years, that would change everything. So there is a lever you could pull, right? Longer contracts for health insurance.

• 24:39Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Or some kind of portability. There's different ideas I've heard tossed around about how to get insurers to sort of be working together to sort of have a line incentive so they're not, you know, just passing the buck to the next one. So that's what happens. You're right. The churn is a big issue. And I think you're right. In Washington, there is a growing array of allies, both on the right and the left. I mean, I met with Senator Cassidy, Senator Marshall, who were very active in trying to move food as medicine policy forward, nutrition education in medical schools to, you know, creating reimbursement for nutrition through Medicare and nutrition services and food as medicine. So there, there's a lot of, a lot of people in Congress now, I think, and, and Senate, very interested in this.

• 25:19Dr. Mark Hyman?

  But, um, you know, it's like really slow going and I, and I worry for us as a nation. And I think about the cost, you know, of our, of our national debt and I, I just consolidated end to end. Our healthcare bill in America is about, you know, 4.5 billion, trillion, sorry, trillion with a D. And when you add up all the government

• 25:41Dr. Mark Hyman?

  payers that are paying for Medicare, Medicaid, Indian Health Service, Department of Defense, VA, you know, all federal health workers. It's 40% of the entire healthcare bill. So it's like about $2 trillion. We're racking up that debt every year and most of that's preventable. But, but somehow the government hasn't figured this all out and looked at it. I was just met with Sammy Inakin, who started Berta Health. You may know him. He basically created an online company to cure diabetes using a ketogenic diet. And he's got over a hundred thousand people. They've run through it. They save an average of $6,000 per. Patient, which is, you know, the average cost for diabetic is about ninety six hundred. So for the sixteen and a half million people on Medicare, if everybody did this and they pay,

• 26:24Dr. Mark Hyman?

  the government paid for it, they'd save literally a hundred billion dollars just with one simple, you know, reimbursement change in, in Washington. So I'm actually going to testify on September eighteenth in Washington in front of the Subcommittee of Health Ways and Means for the Health Subcommittee and try to, you know, move forward the needle on this. But I think you're right, Michael, that the, the, the sort of this, there's an incrementalism that drives me, and I'm sure you're crazy, but there's an opportunity for, for I think a tipping point to happen in this. And I think the movie, The Food, Inc. was part of that, number one, and two, also contributed. The book is great. It's a number of essays that go along with Food, Inc. too. I encourage people to read it. You have an essay in there and so does that guy from Brazil you mentioned who's, who's developed the ultra-processed food.

• 27:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, Carlos Montero. And Eric Schlosser has a very good piece in there, too.

• 27:09Dr. Mark Hyman?

  I've kind of was talking to a guy from Europe who's working on the UK and similar issues and other doctor about how do we kind of start to really deal with the ultra-processed food issue? Because in, in some ways, this, this controversy about the definition, about, you know, what it means, about, you know, which foods are bad or good, or is all processed food bad? And so the food industry tries to obfuscate all the time. But I, I think it's pretty clear what, what it is. People know what ultra-processed food is when, when, when they see it. And, and I think, you know, he, he, he's talking about the, the best lever really is around kind of awareness and labeling. And, and you mentioned Chile. I was just in South America for a few months and, yeah, you know, the warning labels are clear.

• 27:52Dr. Mark Hyman?

  You get, you get a little snack on the airplane and it's got like three giant black, you know, stop signs on it. I'm like, I'm not eating that, you know? And it, and it, and it works. But getting that through America's heart.

• 28:08Dr. Mark Hyman?

  In terms of ultra-processed food being kind of the smoking gun, do you think it's the smoking gun that should be the thing we go after?

• 28:15Speaker 01

  I think it's a great place to start. I mean, I think that there are other issues too. You know, to the extent that our interest is about the health of the individual, but also the health of the planet, we have to look at meat eating and the amount of meat we're eating. I think that's an issue too, even if it's unprocessed. We're eating altogether too much meat or more than the planet can afford to make, particularly a beef. But I think ultra-processed food, look, the message that works for people is their health. And I think that's a good place to start. You know, in terms of the definition, I think Carlos's definition is kind of brilliant. I mean, he basically says, this is food made with ingredients you don't have at home.

• 29:00Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Right.

• 29:00Speaker 01

  Just look at the label and you, you know, you do not have, you know, all that stuff, all those weird long chemicals.

• 29:09Dr. Mark Hyman?

  A jar of butylated hydroxytoluene in your cupboard? No.

• 29:13Speaker 01

  I don't know about your pantry, but I can't find it. And, and then the other thing is, and you can't make it without a factory.

• 29:21Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Right, right.

• 29:22Speaker 01

  And I think we know what that is. And so it's, it's, it's hard to put in a law, I suppose, but, but there you have it. I think most people recognize it. I think we do have to educate people about it. You know, cured meats, people don't think of as ultra-processed, but of course they, you know, it's not a complicated process, but it renders them much less healthy as we're learning.

• 29:45Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, I wonder how. I mean, I wonder if like I was in Ikaria when I was researching my book and, and Sardina, they have like, you know, legs of, of ham they make and they cure it in like a grape leaves and seaweed and all this stuff. I mean, I wonder if that's as bad as what you would get made in sort of a like, you know, processed meat that you get.

• 30:05Speaker 01

  Hormel or somebody. Yeah, I don't know the answer. I don't know how the processes differ. I mean, certainly we've been smoking meat for a long time. But, you know, the thing we have to remember is The quantities are so different today. You know, Americans eat nine ounces of meat per person per day. And that's unprecedented in the history of humankind. There just wasn't that much meat around.

• 30:31Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Unless you're, unless you've got all the bison in the, in your plains.

• 30:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, there were moments of, you know, where people splurged on meat. But meat in, in most cultures is a flavoring and not a main course. You know, I mean, think of the way the Asians use it or the Indians use it. And there, you know, there's another way to eat meat and, and have the advantage of eating meat. Cause it is, it is nutritious food. And, um, but our idea that you have this big slab of, of animal on your plate. And, you know, with some vegetables cowering in the corners. That's a kind of very novel Anglo-American idea.

• 31:10Dr. Mark Hyman?

  I guess that sort of speaks to Dan Barber's third plate concept.

• 31:14Speaker 01

  Third plate, yeah.

• 31:16Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Which is basically meat is a side dish and having veggies is the main dish. And as opposed to two asparagus on a plate next to a steak.

• 31:24Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 31:25Dr. Mark Hyman?

  I, I, I think that, that, I do want to go deeper into the meat thing because, you know, the, there's a number of like arguments around meat. There's moral, ethical, there's environmental climate and there's health and they all get conflated. And I think, you know, then there's also the scale of like, you know, can we actually scale up our gender of agriculture to have enough animal food for a growing planet? And, you know, there's a lot of controversy and a lot of different opinions about that. A farmer, rancher Williams is, who's done work on this and said, you know, we looked at all the like BLM land and all the unused land and all the land. We used to grow soy corn to feed the animals.

• 32:05Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Like we could actually have far more meat produced in America in a regenerative way than we do now even in feed loss. You know, and I love to hear your opinion about this because I, I think that, you know, like you said, meat is a nutritious food. We need protein. There's, there's significant protein deficiency around the world and. And yet, the way we do it now, as you sort of exposed in On the Worst Dilemma, and Fooding 1, and also Fooding 2, it's horrible for the animals, it's horrible for the planet, it's horrible for the humans who eat it. It should be outlawed, period. Everybody, I think, can agree on that, except maybe your friend out in California who blacklisted you from Cal Poly Tech.

• 32:45Speaker 01

  John Harris.

• 32:46Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah. But basically, I think there's general consensus about that. But if we could change the agricultural policies to incentivize regenerative agriculture, which is one of the things I'm working on in my nonprofit, do you think we could kind of move away from these feed laws? Or are they just so entrenched, and so consolidated, and so stuck, we're just never going to be able to do that?

• 33:06Speaker 01

  Well, I don't think we're going to eliminate them. I don't picture them going away entirely, but I could imagine them getting a lot smaller, and a regenerative agriculture getting a lot bigger, acre by acre. The fact is that most of our best land in the Midwest is being used to grow feed for animals, not food for people. And that is not just the result of, this is how capitalism works. It's the way we've organized the incentives. And we make it very easy for farmers to grow lots of corn and soy, neither of which are

• 33:46Speaker 01

  foods directly. They have to be processed. This is not corn on the cob we're growing, or edamame.

• 33:53Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Right.

• 33:54Speaker 01

  These are industrial commodities, raw ingredients, and they get broken down and teased into all those ingredients that become ultra-processed food. So we're subsidizing the unhealthy calories directly, and we don't have to. And we could, in turn, instead, subsidize people who are pastoring their animals, letting them live outdoors, which produces meat that is more flavorful and more nutritious. Can you do it at the same scale? Well, I think we have to look at that scale. I don't think we want to do it at that scale. It's just way too much. I mean, meat is... You know, is a in for most of history has been a luxury food.

• 34:39Speaker 01

  And we're treating it as a three meals a day food. And that's just not sustainable. I remember reading years ago, a study, and I think it was World Watch or somebody. Was looking at trends in meat consumption in China, where of course they're eager to eat meat at our rates. And and their rate of meat eating is is going up very quickly. In fact, we're growing a lot of their meat now. They're too smart to want to grow the feed for it. So they let companies like Tyson take on all the environmental and labor problems. And then they just ship over the the sides of pork.

• 35:16Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Right, Smith Fields, but like really China owns.

• 35:18Speaker 01

  Smithfield is now owned by the Chinese, yeah. And but, you know, it's it's very much of a colonial situation where we keep the pollution and and they get the meat. But anyway.

• 35:32Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, our our our evil ways are coming back to bite us.

• 35:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, in in a lot of ways, there they are. And so, oh, yeah, and the study found that if if the Chinese were eating meat at the rates we do, we would need 2.3 more worlds to grow all the grain necessary. And that's just not going to happen. So we we need to, you know, if the Chinese are going to eat more, we need to eat less and and a lot less. So I I just think the goal should not be one to one convert from feedlot agriculture to, you know, pasture agriculture. But but I think we have to just reexamine the whole system. And, you know, this move toward synthetic meat is.

• 36:20Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Lab meat, you talked a lot about that in the movie, yeah.

• 36:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, is, you know, is an effort to confront this. The the premise of the industry, and this goes for both the people making plant based meat and the people making what's called cultured meat, which is actually meat. Meat cells that are, you know, fermented in a laboratory, basically. And this is starting to hit the market. And they're, you know, all these companies are founded on the premise that the way we're eating meat now is unsustainable and it should change. And a lot of the big companies are behind these cultured meat companies, including Tyson.

• 37:00Speaker 01

  The problem, but there's a few problems with that. So their premise is, of course, you're never going to get people to change their habits. So let's just change what a hamburger is or a chicken breast. And I don't buy that premise. I think changing people's behavior based on education and knowledge and experience is well worth trying. It certainly worked with cigarettes and it worked with littering and, you know, we can change deeply ingrained habits. But we have to work at it and we have to tax them probably.

• 37:35Speaker 01

  But their premise is no, that's never going to happen. So let's change what the meat is made out of. The problem with the synthetic meat is that it's ultra-processed food. I mean, it's, you know, got, I mean, look at the ingredient list on Impossible or Beyond. It's got 20, 21 ingredients.

• 37:56Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 37:56Speaker 01

  And we did this, you know, we went to their factory and I interviewed Pat Brown. And, you know, it's an impressive piece of food science, I have to say.

• 38:06Speaker 01

  He's got it, he's got this plant-based thing to behave like a burger on the grill.

• 38:13Speaker 01

  But it has a, has an ingredient that hasn't been part of the human diet before, this heme iron from soybeans. And it's got all these ingredients and lots of, you know, methyl cellulose and stuff like that, which is essentially wood pulp.

• 38:30Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And it's GMO soy, so they're spraying glyphosate on it and.

• 38:34Speaker 01

  That's right. And that's, and that's a real concern. And so, you know, you're.

• 38:41Speaker 01

  You're trading in, yes, you may be not killing a cow to make this burger, but you're eating an ultra-processed food that has its own issues. So, and then on the ca- in the case of the culture.

• 38:52Dr. Mark Hyman?

  He didn't, he didn't, he didn't probably like that when you, when you challenged him on that, I imagine.

• 38:57Speaker 01

  No, he didn't. You know, he has his eye on one thing. I mean, Pat Brown is an environmentalist first, and his, his goal as a vegan himself is to destroy the meat industry. And he's not selling health, or he wasn't. I mean, now they, now they figured out you have to make a health claim to sell anything processed.

• 39:22Speaker 01

  The more bogus, the better. But his interest was just take, you know, whatever we have to do to take down the meat industry.

• 39:30Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Wasn't that one of your health rules? Wasn't that one of your food rules, don't eat anything with a health claim on it?

• 39:35Speaker 01

  Yes, yes. It was counterintuitive, but the basic idea was only packaged foods, only packaged foods make health claims. And that the, you know, the fresh produce is sitting there quietly in the produce aisle. You know, the broccoli's not saying anything.

• 39:52Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, I'm filled with all these phytonutrients and.

• 39:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's one of the ironies. I mean, you know, because if you have to have, I mean, look, I mean, under, underlying this whole conversation, of course, as you know, is you can't sell real food very, for a lot of money. You know, I'm talking about produce and, you know,

• 40:15Speaker 01

  flours and grains and things like that. You, you can't make money without processing it. And the more you process it, the more money you make. And that is the problem, the value added in terms of convenience and novelty and, you know, snackability and craveability. And that, that is our problem. I mean, and look at the percentage of the food dollar farmers get, you know, it's 10 or 12%. And the reason is that the processors, that's where you want to be. I mean, you, you can talk to executives in the food industry and they'll say, yeah, the, you know, farmers are not the way to make money.

• 40:53Speaker 01

  Making food and you know, as long as we are not cooking as a culture, that that's going to be an issue because um who's going to buy the the raw, unprocessed, whole foods? It's going to be the people who are setting out to process it.

• 41:10Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, I mean, that was one of the most beautiful things I'd ever seen you write was really the book Cooked. And and also the sort of I I'm going to botch the sense I I quoted it in one of my books, which is basically, you know, cooking is one of the essential acts of being human. It's it's it's sort of this essential part of who we are and what makes us different and unique. And it it brings together us to nature, to each other, to community. And and that we've lost that. And the industry has like hijacked American kitchens.

• 41:39Speaker 01

  I I think it is so important on so many levels. It takes care of this health conversation automatically. Whatever you cook at home is going to be healthier than what you're buying. You're not going to make fried chicken every day. You're not going to make french fries every day. It's too messy and it's too big a pain. In the end, you're going to cook simply. And you're gonna, your family is going to benefit. But then there are all the spiritual benefits of it. And even the political benefits. I really believe that what happens at the family dinner is a nursery of democracy. It's it's, I mean, think about it now. We're we have such centrifugal lives. Everybody goes off to their room and they have their screens.

• 42:22Speaker 01

  And when do they come together, you know, in the car and at the at the dinner table? And that's where we kind of learn how to how to talk in a civilized way, how to argue without fighting. It it really is training for really important social and civic skills that we lack. So, yeah, there's the food piece and the health piece, uh, which is profound. But there's this other piece that we're losing to. And the problem is it's very hard for a man to make an argument for cooking.

• 42:57Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Well, I'm the one who cooks in my house.

• 43:00Speaker 01

  Well, I share it with my wife. We're really 50 50 about it. We divvy up each meal. Who's going to do the protein? Who's going to do the vegetable or the salad? But in general, when a lot of women hear a man saying cooking is really important, often they hear, go back to the kitchen. And that's certainly not what I meant in that book. It was really about sharing this work. It's the responsibility of both parents and the kids. I mean, I think we need to get our kids to cook too. That was a big deal in our family when Isaac was growing up, that he had to do something to contribute to each meal. And I know he had sports and he had,

• 43:41Speaker 01

  you know, and he had his homework to do, and they always pulled the homework excuse. But, but even if he had a lot of homework, he at least had to cut up an onion or mince some garlic or do something to contribute to what we were doing. And now he's a wonderful cook and he cooks for pleasure.

• 43:58Dr. Mark Hyman?

  That's right. Same thing with my family. I always started cooking with my kids, brought them in the kitchen, even they were making a mess. I didn't care. And there was that Molly Katz had that great kids cookbook, Ten Soup. And it was like all these really healthy recipes, but they're kind of kid friendly and they're delicious and they're fun. And so, you know, I think, you know, it's an incredible way to bring families together and to create health. I was in this movie Fed Up where we went to South Carolina, in easily South Carolina. And I was with this family of five, lived in a trailer. They were on food stamps, disability. The father was on dialysis at 42 from kidney failure from diabetes. The mother was 100 plus pounds overweight. The 16 year old son was almost diabetic and 50% body fat. He should be 10% at that age. And they didn't have a single fresh food in their house.

• 44:41Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And they had only packaged, boxed, packaged frozen foods. And I didn't even know what they were eating. And I showed them what they're eating. I didn't give them a lecture on how to, you know, eat healthy. But I said, like, do you know how to cook? Let's make a meal together. And I basically got the guide from the environmental working group, EWG, called Good Food on a Tight Budget. It's good for you, good for your wallet, good for the planet. And I showed them how to peel garlic, how to stir fry, how to make turkey chili, how to, you know, make simple salad dressing, how to make a salad. And they were shocked and they, and they loved the food. And then they were like, you, one kid goes, Dr. Hyman, do you do this with your family every night? I'm like, yeah, that's what we do. And then they ended up doing it. They didn't have a cutting board or knife. I mean, I was trying to cut like sweet potatoes into pieces with a butter knife.

• 45:25Dr. Mark Hyman?

  It was not that easy. So I bought him a cutting board. I bought him knives my way home on the plane from Amazon, sent to their house. And I gave him a cookbook and I said, you can try it. Here you go. And they did it. And the father lost 50 pounds, got a new kidney. The mother lost 100 pounds. The son lost 50, regained it and ended up going to work in Bojangles, which is like a fast food chain down in the South. Cause there's no other place to work for these kids. It was the worst, one of the worst food deserts in America. And, and I was like, wow, we're basically just one meal away from solving our health crisis. Like one, and I, and, and the son then, you know, gained the weight back. But then he called me and I helped him. He lost 132 pounds and ended up asking me for a letter

• 46:07Dr. Mark Hyman?

  of recommendation for medical school. So it gave me, it gave me such hope that like, if, if, you know, we can get out there in the community with each other, helping and supporting each other. It works. You know, I did this with the church and Saddleback Church with Rick Warren. We did it with 15,000 people and they lost a quarter million pounds a year by doing it together. I, I did this in Cleveland Clinic, you know, where I, at South Point Hospital, which is mostly African American community. We got 300 African American women coming to a cooking class that I led. You know, I was just like, what do you, I was like, what's going on here? And, and I think there's a real hunger for people to know. They just don't know. And I, and I actually say I had implicit bias, which was, people kind of know, but they're lazy. They don't want to do it. But I don't think people really know.

• 46:47Speaker 01

  They don't. They don't have the skills. I mean, you know, we, that, that chain of transmission from parents to kids, to their kids and their kids of how you cook has been lost. And, um, you know, home ec doesn't happen, uh, the way it did, cause that was too gendered. And, um, uh, but I do think that, I mean, what you're talking is really important. The question is how do you plant these values in the society? And I really think you do it in the public schools. Uh, I, I think as time goes on, you were asking for where the important leverage points are. It seems to me, uh, it's very exciting that,

• 47:27Speaker 01

  That the new vice presidential candidate is associated with a program to give two meals a day to children in Minneapolis. Walls pass this, you know, and it's for everybody. It's not means tested or anything. It's a universal program. Now, you know, this could all be Cisco processed food.

• 47:47Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Right.

• 47:47Speaker 01

  You know, I hesitate to dig in too far. But the basic idea that we have this opportunity to educate children about food by feeding them. But we have to pay attention to what we're feeding them, certainly. And we have to, we have to give them two more things. One is classes where they can learn how to cook, which they love. I mean, I've, you know, the edible schoolyard is around the corner from me, corner from me. This is Alice Waters' project. And there they have a beautiful school garden where the kids grow food. And then they have a cooking class where they learn how to cook it. And then they eat it at lunch. And it's their favorite time of the day.

• 48:32Speaker 01

  And what happens is they start bringing these skills home and they start introducing foods to their family that their family didn't ordinarily eat. And so, you know, human habits are hard to change and you've got to start young. And so I think as a, as a focus of our energy, Alice Waters talks about school-supported agriculture. And she's trying very hard to get the schools in California to commit to buying locally to support the farmers. There's so much buying power in schools. But anyway, and you know, to the extent that this next administration is talking about

• 49:15Speaker 01

  a set of policies around children, child tax credits and things like that, I think it's a really good opportunity to, to inject these ideas of, of educating kids about how to eat, how to prepare food and, and how to grow it.

• 49:31Dr. Mark Hyman?

  I think it's so essential, Michael, because, you know, as a doctor, you know, I've been giving lectures on, you know, the state of our health and for 30 years. And I keep having to change my slides because. The percent of kids overweight and obese keeps going up and up and up. And now 40% of plus kids are overweight, 20% are obese. You know, one in 10 kids are on psych meds and, you know, a lot of other meds. They're talking about giving little kids Ozempic now for obesity. And it's terrifying because we're, we're literally have a state of the world now with kids where their futures are really in jeopardy in terms of their health and wellbeing, their future happiness,

• 50:14Dr. Mark Hyman?

  earning capacity, life expectancy are all being threatened by what's happening in, in, in the food system and their food supply and in the schools. And so I a hundred percent agree with you. It's, it's like, that's why the front of package labeling effort is really focused on kids. You know, like, how can we not protect our kids? Save the children should be our, our basically calling cry for, for actually dealing with this. Cause who, who can argue that? Like, who could argue that we should be poisoning our kids? But it happens. It's like, like the dietary guidelines committee is supposed to be an independent group of scientists, but often they're highly conflicted. The last group is a little bit better than the previous one, but they still came out with a, a ruling that ultra-processed food did not have enough data to connect it to, to obesity.

• 50:59Dr. Mark Hyman?

  So they weren't going to, going to make any, any guidelines around it. And I was like, gee, this is terrible. There's like mountains of evidence that this is killing 11 million people a year. Right?

• 51:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:10Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And, and you're like, well, what is going on here? And, and, and I think the, the kids thing is key. And, and I think parents have to get, get, uh, involved. I think this, they can make a difference in schools. You know, I'm not sure you probably know Eat Real, which is a Jordan Chlain.

• 51:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:26Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Initiative in California. They're doing great work in child schools. Kimball Musk, Big Green, getting edible school, school yard, similar thing with gardens and schools around the country. And, and it's happening. Um, but it just, it seems like too slow. And I don't know if we're just going to poison ourselves to death. I think, you know, lead was the death of Rome because the lead pipes. Well, I think the ultra-processed food is going to be the death of America, you know?

• 51:48Speaker 01

  And, you know, look, I mean, we're talking about political money, right? And the influence of, of money in politics has a tremendous influence on this, like so many other issues. And, um, uh, but I also think that, you know,

• 52:04Speaker 01

  Taboos arise in society. I mean, the, you know, the associate, it's entirely possible that ultra-processed food can acquire the image of something, you know, that it's like candy. It's like, it's like something, it's an indulgence you have every now and then, but as a regular way to eat is just really dangerous. And the problem, though, too, is that the budgets, I remember Marion Nessel did this calculation, that the entire government budget for educating people about food and, you know, showing them the nutritional recommendations when they come out.

• 52:42Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Is zero.

• 52:44Speaker 01

  Equals a single SKU, a single product from PepsiCo.

• 52:49Dr. Mark Hyman?

  I went to Washington, I met with the folks who were involved in the dietary guidelines, who are not, not the, not the political, but the sort of people who've been working there in the trenches. And they're like, you know, Mark, we, we don't have any money. The Congress mandates that we create these dietary guidelines, but we don't actually have a budget to do it. So we have to go around to all the other, no, not to promote them, just to develop them. We have to go around with a tin cup to the other departments in our agency and ask for money. And if, and there's no money to promote them, to educate people about them, to kind of create awareness. It's, it's incredible. Like, you know, what we would be the one, one bomb, you know, fighter jet, we could literally change everything, right?

• 53:29Speaker 01

  Well, you know, the defense and actually the food industry spends more on lobbying than the defense industry. So that gives you some idea of the scale of it. It's, it's vast.

• 53:38Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, it is. And just to kind of loop back a little bit about the lab-grown meat, because it seems like that could be a good idea, but there are issues with it. And I'd love to hear your kind of thoughts about the challenges around that.

• 53:52Speaker 01

  Well, we went to a company called Upside, which is near me here in Emeryville.

• 53:59Speaker 01

  And they are a very well financed company with all the big players in agribusiness owning a piece of it. And I don't know why exactly whether they believe in it, or they wanna control it, or have a window on it, I don't know. But they're all there. It started by a doctor, actually, a cardiologist, who adopted some of the techniques he was using to repair the heart with stem cells.

• 54:27Dr. Mark Hyman?

  This is Uma Valetti, right?

• 54:28Speaker 01

  Uma Valetti, yeah. And he's very dedicated, very idealistic. And we were given a tour and we saw these great stainless steel vats. It looks like a brewery. And it's very similar kind of equipment. And in those vats are cells that are removed, almost, you know, it's a biopsy essentially. You don't have to kill the animal. You just need cells and you start duplicating them. And you have to feed them. And one of the challenges, there are two big challenges to scaling this, is that the feedstock, which is, has to be pharmaceutical grade, this is the kind of feedstock you would

• 55:10Speaker 01

  use if you were growing cell lines in a laboratory. It has to be perfectly clean. And it, you know, it's a mix of amino acids and fats and sugars and micronutrients, I assume. But you get a single bacteria in there and the bacteria will multiply much faster than your meat cells and you've got to throw out the whole tank. So, the issue is, and pharmaceutical grade feedstock for cells is not cheap. The issue is, can a company like Cargill make trainloads of this stuff that will be so clean that you can use it? And that's a really open question. There's nothing that clean in our food system. If you've been in a slaughterhouse, if you've been, you know, in a, in a grain elevator,

• 55:55Speaker 01

  it's, doing things at that level of cleanliness is gonna be very difficult. The other, though, is that in these tanks, you can multiply cells, but the final product doesn't look like a chicken breast and doesn't look like a steak. It looks like a slurry. And you can form that into chicken nuggets and form it into hamburgers, but to make cuts of meat takes another very expensive process that hasn't been perfected.

• 56:22Speaker 01

  And so when we went there, we I got the full tour with Uma and he explained what he was up to. And then he sat me down and they cooked me a chicken breast.

• 56:33Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Where'd you get that? A Costco?

• 56:36Speaker 01

  Not quite, but they were, you know, we were fooled into thinking that the process we had just seen had produced this chicken breast. And this chicken breast, it was an impressive piece of technology in that it was a chicken breast. It wasn't, it wasn't like a Beyond Meat chicken breast. It was a chicken breast. It was kind of tough and, you know, and it cost, he said, like $500 to produce. It was this big. But subsequently, we learned through the work of another journalist, not me, that the process I was shown cannot produce cuts of meat and that that's produced in a very bespoke system that's basically designed for journalists and chefs.

• 57:20Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Right, right, right.

• 57:21Speaker 01

  So I think that upside is a long way from having a marketable product that's inexpensive. Their plan is to mix this slurry with plant-based materials to create things that feel like chicken breasts and feel like steaks. But there we're back to processed food again.

• 57:41Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, I mean, part of, part of the problem, and I know Uma and I spent a weekend with him and he beautiful man.

• 57:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, he's a very good guy.

• 57:48Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Brilliant guy, cardiologist, trying to really do the right thing. And I said to him two things, which he really never considered. I said, well, if you're going to scale this, where is the feed going to come from? And you mentioned Cargill, which is one of the biggest food manufacturers and processed food companies in the world. And, you know, it has to come from somewhere. So is, are we growing fields of corn and soy and industrial agriculture to feed lab-grown meat? And at scale, it's going to get worse. And then what energy inputs are you using? You know, using fossil fuels to fuel these bioreactors that take huge amounts of energy or using renewables? So we're kind of, you know, solving one problem, but maybe creating another problem. And so I said, unless you can figure out how to, you know,

• 58:30Dr. Mark Hyman?

  source your, your food sources for the cultures from regenerative sources and you can get renewable energy, you're kind of in a, in a, in a downward spiral, I think. It's just going to have

• 58:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, I think you're right. And I think that the feedstock is gonna be the same old, same old. It's gonna be the corn and soy, the monocultures of the Midwest. Because that's the cheapest source of those, of those ingredients. Because that's what we, you know, that was an issue too with Impossible, that they were gonna, initially, I think they wanted to use pea protein or something like that, or, you know, something that would diversify if they got big, that would diversify agriculture. But in the end, they used GMO soy. And that, and economically, it's hard to argue with that. So, you know, it's very interesting that these monocultures at the, at the very base

• 59:24Speaker 01

  of our food system, the corn and soy grown in the Midwest. Even when we change our food system, we're still on that same foundation. And that foundation has lots of problems. I mean, as you, you pointed to glyphosate, you know, there's so much glyphosate in the food supply now. A lot of it comes from soy. Some of it comes from wheat, though. One of the most absurd practices in recent years was that farmers found that if they sprayed their wheat fields with glyphosate immediately before harvest, they could harvest earlier because they didn't have to wait for the plants to die and dry out. You know, they have to, they have to get to a certain level of hydration in the, in

• 1:00:09Speaker 01

  the wheat berry before they can harvest. So they spray our, our, our food with this weed killer immediately before we eat it. I mean, this shouldn't be allowed. And, and so that, that's one of the reasons I will only buy organic flour, because the rest of the flour now is contaminated.

• 1:00:28Dr. Mark Hyman?

  But it's on everything. It's on 70% of our food crops. And if you get out of a restaurant, you know what you're getting. And I, I'm like really careful, but I checked my urinary levels of glyphosate and they were relatively high. I mean, if you look at the average American, their bodies are full of it and it destroys the microbiome, it has epigenetic effects that's two or three generations down the line and it's, it's quite, it's quite harmful. And yet, you know, we don't regulate it and we, we don't. Do anything about it. And I mean, I think Monsanto, who makes it was sold to Bayer.

• 1:00:57Speaker 01

  Bayer.

• 1:00:58Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Which, yeah, it's just gonna, I think, probably shelve it and create, creating another product that's probably even worse or just as bad. And, and kind of distract us for a minute. But it, you know, we're, we're in it. We're, we're, to me, we're in an existential crisis. It's a national emergency that no one's talking about. And it's even in the presidential campaign. And I remember you wrote that letter to, I think, the potential. Obama, yeah. It was in the New York Times Magazine where you kind of laid out, hey, hey, like, pay attention to this. But, uh, you know, I don't know, does it take, uh, does it take a litigation like we did for tobacco? Is it antitrust laws that we need to go after? Is it like, these, these are the levers that I'm thinking about.

• 1:01:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it's all of the above. I mean, I think, you know, antitrust is focused now on, um, on tech. But Lina Khan knows a lot about the food industry. That was her first, she first wrote about it. She's the, a person who runs antitrust at the Federal Trade Commission. And she's, she's kind of amazing. She's fearless. And, uh, and that's why you hear all these wealthy Democratic donors. Telling Kamala to fire.

• 1:02:04Speaker 01

  No, they've been doing it openly. Barry Diller and somebody else came out and said, she's got to go. And, uh, it'll be a real test of Kamala Harris, whether she succumbs to that or not.

• 1:02:14Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Well, she gets to be president, right?

• 1:02:16Speaker 01

  Yes. Well, that has to happen first. You're right.

• 1:02:20Dr. Mark Hyman?

  She haven't, by the way, I imagine you know her because you're from California, but she has not been talking about these issues. And, you know, President Trump has talked about them. Uh, he was on a teleprompter, so I don't know, but at least he was talking about these issues. Bobby Kennedy is talking about chronic disease, whether he agree with his other policies or not, as this existential crisis for America. But it's just sort of absent from the political discourse. And I, it doesn't make sense to me because I think people really care about these issues and they, they want.

• 1:02:46Speaker 01

  So, you know, I think they do, and Obama understood that. Um, and, you know, I had a little window into what was going on in his, his process. And it was. It was not a, it was, it was calculated that, that Michelle got involved in food issues. That was not her plan. She was going to do veterans' families, I think. And it, it, it grew out of conversations that the, that they were having with people in the food movement, not me. And, uh, but I think Obama's analysis was that there wasn't enough pressure.

• 1:03:25Speaker 01

  You know, is what you were talking about earlier, that he didn't feel the heat from the food movement enough to, to, to spend the political capital. And that, you know, leaders don't really lead. I mean, they, they need to be pushed.

• 1:03:41Dr. Mark Hyman?

  I think you're right.

• 1:03:42Speaker 01

  And he said to people I know, he said, show me the movement and I'll move. And, uh, and I think we failed to do that. I don't think we're well enough organized and I don't think we've got the numbers. And, um, uh, so, you know, some of it's on us. But yes, we're up against a, a really formidable set of enemies.

• 1:04:03Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Well, I think this is a sort of part of our strategy, you know, is, is with Food Fix. And we're partnering with Food Fight USA, which is Mark Cuban and Todd Wagner's nonprofit, to try to create a documentary series, really, that, that takes us even deeper. It's more than just one, one, but multiple, multiple docu-series episodes that sort of catalog the, the harm that our current food and food systems doing, from everything from mental health to physical health to economic health to national security, to academic performance and global competitiveness, to the environment, climate, social justice. I mean, the list goes on and on because food is the nexus for all these things coming together. And they're all siloed and they're, they're talked about as separate issues, the economic impact. These are all things that are connected to food.

• 1:04:48Speaker 01

  Well, and the climate impact, which only recently have people begun to hear about. You know, the fact that the food system is a huge contributor to, to greenhouse gas production. And that in ways people don't fully understand. And, you know, you go back to the first Inconvenient Truth, um, you know, landmark film that Al Gore did about, and, and really helped put, uh, climate change on the national agenda. There was not a word about agriculture or food in that film.

• 1:05:18Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Well, he, he's getting there.

• 1:05:19Speaker 01

  It just wasn't on anyone's radar.

• 1:05:20Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:21Speaker 01

  And now he's, he definitely understands it. And I think everybody in the climate activism world understands it, but the public still needs to be educated about that, that the way you eat is, is much in part of your, your footprint, your environmental footprint as the kind of car you drive, or how you heat your house. And we have to think about it that way.

• 1:05:44Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah. So, Michael, this is such a great conversation. You're, you've been such an inspiration to me and so many. And you've been the catalyst for really important change in our food system and our mental health system now.

• 1:05:55Speaker 01

  Well, the same goes for you, Mark.

• 1:05:57Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And, and you know what? What is exciting now is that like people are, are able to tap into resources and tools and things that, that are available. Like your book, Omnivore's Dilemma, should be mandatory reading for everybody in America. All, all the other books too, obviously, in defense of food. Food Rules is really fun. But Food, Inc. Two now is a great book that came out. And also, you know, you're, this is your mind on plants, which is another book you wrote. It's more around the mental health and the psychedelic space. And you're a journalist, you're a professor, you're, you're an outspoken advocate for telling the truth when no one else wants to tell the truth, and it's not that popular. But somehow you, you do it in such a way, in such a nice way, that people aren't too mad at you. But I think, I think we, we have a lot of work to do, and we have a lot of

• 1:06:42Dr. Mark Hyman?

  education to do. But I think we just got to keep at it. And I think we just got to keep educating people. And I'm going to keep pushing in Washington, keep telling stories, and, and hopefully we'll get there. As a final question, I'm curious, you know, where do you see us in five, 10 years with all this?

• 1:06:58Speaker 01

  Well, you know, there, there's a history in America of pushing on issues like this. And things proceed with incredible slowness and frustration for years and years and years. And then something happens. And suddenly, history speeds up. And, and that's why you got to stay at it. It's really important to stay at it. And it's hard to tell when you're going to have that confluence of factors, you know, come together and give an issue the kind of prominence in the political debate. You know, sometimes it's a disaster. Sometimes it's, but it can be, it's very serendipitous. I mean, I've watched this with the psychedelic,

• 1:07:43Speaker 01

  you know, movement, you know, another movement I'm very involved in, you know, to bring psychedelics back into medicine and. And it's been very different than the food movement and and kind of thrilling because it's been so fast. Why has it been so fast? Well, there's no opposition to speak of.

• 1:08:01Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Well, that's the the site pharma industry probably won't like it. Nobody's gonna be taking SSRIs anymore.

• 1:08:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, pharma has been notably quiet. And I think they're starting to wake up and notice what's happening. They're often kind of late. But in general, it it's been a good education to me on how politics works and and the strength of your opposition is a big part of it. But things can change really fast in this country. You know, we just the last month has shown us that. How much how much can happen in a month?

• 1:08:37Dr. Mark Hyman?

  It's true.

• 1:08:37Speaker 01

  So I don't think we should assume because it's an uphill slog now that it will always be that. I think that the conditions will be right. I think that the issue is is ripe for the kind of attention that it needs to to really move it forward. You know, when an issue is not front and center in our politics is when the lobbyists have the most power.

• 1:08:59Dr. Mark Hyman?

  That's right. That's right.

• 1:09:00Speaker 01

  Because they go unnoticed. But if we can raise the profile in the public conversation, you know, that can do it. And, you know, we do have a ticket now on the Democratic side with two people who really understand the importance of food and children. And and so we should be lobbying them, too.

• 1:09:19Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, I agree. I'm a pathological optimist, Michael. So I think.

• 1:09:23Speaker 01

  Me, too. Me, too.

• 1:09:24Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And I think you're right about this. You know, I always say change doesn't start in Congress, it ends in Congress. You know, abolition didn't start and civil rights and women's rights and gay marriage, all the things that have happened over the last.

• 1:09:35Speaker 01

  It was pressure from outside.

• 1:09:37Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Some of it, some of it took 100 years. You know, women's vote, getting women to vote, you know, it was more than a.

• 1:09:42Speaker 01

  But then gay marriage, you know, happened really quickly. I mean, amazingly fast.

• 1:09:47Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:49Speaker 01

  You know, Obama got flat footed. It was flat footed. You know, Biden came, Biden came out and like, what are you talking about? And then months later. So yeah, history speeds up sometimes.

• 1:10:02Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Okay, let's hang on that, Michael. And Michael, keep the good work up and excited for your next book on consciousness. We'll have you back talking about that when it comes out. And everybody go watch the film Food, Inc. 2 and read the book Food, Inc. 2 and check out Michael's other work. And keep, keep, keep on fighting the good fight, Michael.

• 1:10:20Speaker 01

  Thank you. You too, Mark. Take care.

• 1:10:23Dr. Mark Hyman?

  If you love this podcast, please share it with someone else you think would also enjoy it. You can find me on all social media channels at Dr. Mark Hyman. Please reach out. I'd love to hear your comments and questions. Don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe to the Dr. Hyman Show wherever you get your podcasts. And don't forget to check out my YouTube channel at Dr. Mark Hyman for video versions of this podcast and more. Thank you so much again for tuning in. We'll see you next time on the Dr. Hyman Show. This podcast is separate from my clinical practice at the Ultra Wellness Center, my work at Cleveland Clinic, and Function Health, where I am Chief Medical Officer. This podcast represents my opinions and my guests' opinions. Neither myself nor the podcast endorses the views or statements of my guests. This podcast is for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical

• 1:11:07Dr. Mark Hyman?

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