- One, they fund
12 times as much,
$12 billion a year
compared to the government
of nutrition science
that shows candy is great
for weight loss for
kids and that soda
is not linked to obesity
which is just nonsense.
- Right.
- They co-opt
professional societies like
the American Heart Association,
the Academy of
Nutrition and Dietetics
and fund their organizations,
the nutrition organization
gets 40% of their funding
from the food industry
and in their annual conference,
you're not allowed to take
pictures in the exhibit hall
because they don't
want people to see all
the junk food that
they're promoting.
(calm music)
- I'm Dave Rubin and this
is "The Rubin Report"
and joining me today is a doctor
who is a leader in the
field of functional medicine
as well as a 13-time New York
Times bestselling author,
and his newest book is
"Food Fix: How to Save
Our Health, Our Economy,
"Our Communities, and Our
Planet One Bite at a Time".
Dr. Mark Hyman, welcome
to "The Rubin Report".
- Thanks go having me Dave.
- I think that was my
longest intro ever because,
I mean this is a serious.
- You got it updated
because this book just
hit the list yesterday.
- That was, I'm
doing on the fly,
and you could see as I
edited it right there,
if it said 12 on
the prompter there.
I'm super psyched to talk to you
because as I, as I just said
to you before we started,
getting away a little
bit from politics
is always a nice break for me.
- Yes.
- But this is not purely away
from politics.
- No.
- So we're gonna do
a little of that.
- Food is probably the most
political issue of our time
even though we don't
talk about it that way.
- Yeah and quite literally,
you bit off a lot in this title
because you talked about
economics and communities
and the planet and
all of those things.
- Yeah.
- And how it's related.
So before we get into
any of that stuff,
how did you get into this field?
What made you care
about all of this stuff?
Where did it all come from?
- That's great, well I've
always been interested
in health and nutrition.
I grew up in Spain,
my parents lived there
for 11 years after the war.
They missed the whole
junk food, fast food,
processed food
revolution in America
and I always grew up
eating real, whole food
and in college I
lived with a guy
who was a nutrition PhD student
and he introduced me
to this whole idea
about nutrition against disease.
And I became a yoga teacher,
before I was a doctor.
Then I became a doctor and
kind of got indoctrinated,
literally.
And became very
focused on you know,
traditional, good medicine but
I realized the limits of it
and I then got sick myself
and ended up having to fix
myself using functional medicine
which was looking at systems,
looking at root causes
and after 30 years
of sitting in my office,
seeing chronically ill
patients which by the way
is six out of 10 Americans
have a chronic disease,
it kills 11 million
people a year from food.
I realized that food was
causing my patients to be sick
and that I had to look at why
they were eating the
food they were eating
and then I thought well
it's the food system.
And I'm like well why do
we have the food system?
It's our food policies.
And why do we have our policies?
It's because of the
food industry influence
driving our policies
and some of it's legacy,
from good intentions and we
still have from policies,
50 to 70 years ago.
So it occurred to me,
that if I really wanna
cure my patients,
I have to step back and
look at the big picture of
what's wrong with
our food system,
the impact it's
causing on disease,
on our economy, on
social justice issues,
poverty, mental health,
kids' academic performance,
national security,
environment, climate.
It's all one problem that
is predominately driven
by our food and our food
system and it's fixable.
If food is a cause,
it's also the cure.
- And that's exactly
what this book
is about.
- Yes.
Yes it's called,
it's called Food Fix
not Food Apocalypse, so.
- We'll see about that, give
me another 50 minutes here.
So you know I had your buddy
Max Lugavere on recently.
- I do.
- And he was also talking about
how regular Western medicine
when his mom got sick, they
did not have enough answers
or it was as he calls
it, diagnose and adios.
You just referenced something
there about indoctrination
and relative to
Western medicine.
- Yeah.
- And how they don't
really talk about food, can
you explore that a little bit?
- Yeah Wendell
Berry says you know,
food system produces
food with no,
paying no attention to health
and the healthcare
system treats disease
with no attention to
food and I think food
is the biggest driver
of chronic disease.
It's something that
I've learned as
a functional medicine
doctor that food is medicine
and can heal but
it also can harm.
And so that's really
why I wrote this book
was to sort of help our country
and hopefully our global
population understand
that if we wanna deal with
some of the biggest crises
we're facing today in
America and globally,
we have to focus
on the food system.
It's the most invisible cause,
there's no real
conversation about it.
In the political
discourse and yet,
it's probably the biggest
political issue of our time.
- So since we're having
the conversation right now,
what are some of just
like the basic things
we should know about
the foods we're eating
and what we're being forcefed
that we shouldn't eat.
And maybe some things that.
- Right.
- We should be incorporating,
we're all that.
- Exactly.
So how we grow
food from the seed
to how we produce
food and process food
to how we eat it
and how we waste it
is driving so much
of our issues.
So the food we're producing
predominately today
is what we call
ultra-processed calories
or ultra-processed
food, what is that?
It's food made from a
few simple ingredients.
Refined white flour,
high fructose corn syrup
and other corn additives
and ingredients,
and refined soy bean
oil that are turned into
literally hundreds of thousands
of processed foods
that are all made
from the same ingredients
that are different colors,
size and shapes of food-like
extruded substances.
And the frightening
thing is the data's.
- They're not fresh, that's what
you're telling me?
- Well they're not fresh.
There are ingredients that
you might even recognize.
If you cover the front of
a Pop-Tart or a corn dog
of the box you probably
could barely tell
the difference in the
ingredients right?
- Right, right.
- And these are foods
that are made because
the government helps
support these commodity crops
which are 60% of our calories.
The people that consume them
the most are the sickest.
Globally it kills 11
million people a year,
that's like a Holocaust
every single year
of people dying from
eating the wrong foods
and not eating the right foods.
And it's because our
whole agricultural system
has been moved to
make those foods
which are causing heart disease,
diabetes, cancer, dementia,
obviously obesity and
it's frightening to me
and when I was born,
there were 5% of Americans
who were obese.
When I graduated medical
school, it was less than 20%.
There was not a single state
that had an obesity
rate over 20%.
Now it's 42% and most states
have obesity rates over 40%.
That's 42% of Americans are
obese, 75% are overweight.
It's going to be one in
two people in 10 years
that will be obese,
not just overweight.
And this is crippling
our economy.
We now have one in three
dollars in Medicare
is spent for diabetes alone.
Our entire chronic
disease epidemic,
80% of Medicare costs
are from chronic disease.
We have one in three
federal dollars
that are spent on Medicare,
soon it will be one in two.
I mean Medicare if
it were a company
would be the biggest
company in the world
with a $1.3 trillion
a year budget.
- Wow.
- And a lot of that
is unnecessary.
80% of that is unnecessary,
it's caused by the food
and the food system.
So you mention the
way our polices,
going back decades sort
of led to some of this.
Is there like a moment?
- Yeah.
- Is there a moment there?
- So here's what happened.
You know nobody was
like a big cabal
of evil food companies
that got together and said.
- Well 'cause I think that,
I'm glad you started with
that 'cause I think that's
what people think that it's,
it's like these evil companies
or the evil government that.
- No, no.
No no no.
- Sit down
and how do we screw over
the most amount of people?
- No, no.
It's the unintended
consequences of good intentions.
Right, so after
the World War Two,
there was a lot of
hunger in the world.
There was a need to produce
a lot of starchy calories
which we thought were good
sources of carbohydrates
and energy to fuel a
growing population.
And so industrial agriculture
came onto the scene
with you know,
mass mechanization,
with intense use of
fertilizers, pesticides,
herbicides which no one
knew were bad at the time.
I mean Silent Spring was written
in the 60s by Rachel Carson
which exposed the harm
of DDT and pesticides.
That wasn't eliminated
until the 70s
and we didn't know
that fertilizer
was destroying oceans
and lakes and rivers
and killing you know,
hundreds of thousands of
tons of fish every year
and the mechanism.
- Did really nobody know?
I mean it's.
- Nobody knew.
I don't believe that
people really said
oh these pesticides
are gonna kill people,
we're gonna use them anyway.
Or that glyphosate
is gonna cause cancer
or destroy our
microobiome or you know.
- You think these
companies, they really?
- Yeah.
- Just they thought
they had answers.
- Yeah of course.
- We need science.
- We need to create
a food for a growing population
but then people started
to understand these things
and then the cat
was out of the bag
and they didn't wanna
lose the business
and the profitability of
growing food in this way.
So, and there's been
over the last 40 years
incredible consolidation
of the food industry
from hundreds of seed companies
to like four major companies
that control 60% of our seeds.
We've had many
fertilizer companies
that have consolidated into
a few fertilizer companies.
We have about nine or
10 big food companies
that own all of
the other companies
like you know,
Haagen-Dazs is owned by
you know, Danone right?
Or Nestle you know?
- Right, right.
- Or Danone owns, or
Unilever owns Ben & Jerry's.
So we don't really
understand how much even
in the healthy food brands
that these big companies own.
And so we have this sort of,
this juggernaut that
has hit our population,
our economy and our
politics in ways that
I don't think anybody
really still understands.
'Cause it's so fast.
Like even when I graduated,
like I said graduated
from medical school
this wasn't a problem and
within the last 30 years
it's just exploded.
And now we're seeing
six out of 10 Americans
like I said who have
a chronic disease
that's caused by food.
So we didn't have a bunch of
bad people doing bad things.
But now we have people
trying to protect their turf.
But I see change, I'm hopeful
because companies like
Nestle, Danone, Unilever,
General Mills they're saying,
Kellogg's they're saying no,
we're gonna change
what we're doing right?
General Mills said
we're gonna commit
a million acres to
regenerative ag.
Danone says we're
gonna pay farmers
to convert from
traditional farming
to what's called regenerative ag
which actually fixes a
lot of these problems.
Unilever said we're
not gonna advertise
to kids anymore ice cream.
Right and they're one of the
biggest ice cream producers.
- [Dave] Right.
- Even Burger King.
- Oh no,
they're not turning
against ice cream are they?
That's my only weakness.
- No they're not
but they're saying
we're not gonna,
we're not gonna sell
crap to kids right?
Because that's one
of the biggest things
that the food industry does
is they spend billions
marketing junk food to kids
which hooks them young.
It causes them to have
learning disabilities,
cognitive impairment,
poor academic performance,
be able to, less likely
to go to college,
earn poorer incomes,
have more chronic disease
and they're really,
really in a way
kind of predatory on children
and it's terrifying to me
because we're threatening
our future generation
and we're threatening our
global economic competitiveness.
We're threatening our
ability to actually have
good national security
'cause 70% of the
recruits for the military
are rejected because
they're unfit to fight.
It's a national security threat
that the generals and
admirals have written a report
saying unhealthy and unprepared.
I mean just from, just from the
war in Iraq and Afghanistan.
There were 70 plus
percent more evacuations
for obesity-related injuries
than for war injuries.
Think about that.
- That's incredible.
That actually almost
doesn't sound possible.
- It doesn't sound possible.
And then I just talked
to a woman who works
at the top level in the
Department of Defense
a couple of days ago, she said,
on the military bases
that are just loaded
with fast food restaurants,
the combat troops
are not combat ready
because they become so unfit.
- So that's a, well
how do you get from
knowing that this
stuff ain't right
to having all these fast
food joints on combat bases?
- Well look, just like they
have fast food in schools.
They have McDonald's Monday
and Taco Bell Tuesday
and Wendy's Wednesday.
80% of contracts of the schools
have contracts with
soda companies.
You know these companies are
very smart in delivering.
So while there may not have
been bad intentions to start,
there is a lot of
bad behavior now.
They have a massive way of
controlling the narrative
about food and
confusing consumers,
confusing the scientists
and confusing politicians.
One, they fund 12 times as much,
$12 billon a year
compared to the government
of nutrition science
that shows candy
is great for weight
loss for kids
and that soda is not
linked to obesity
which is just nonsense.
- Right.
- They co-opt
professional societies
like the American
Heart Association,
the Academy of
Nutrition and Dietetics
and fund their organizations,
the nutrition organization
gets 40% of their funding
from the food industry and
in their annual conference,
you're not allowed
to take pictures
in the exhibit hall because
they don't want people
to see all the junk food
that they are promoting.
- Right.
- They fund
the American Heart
Association which allows
them to say Trix are
a heart-healthy food
'cause it's low in fat.
I mean it's frightening, and
they create front groups.
Four companies spent
half a billion dollars
on front groups to
confuse consumers
saying that for example,
that pesticides and
high fructose corn syrup
and trans fats and smoking
are not bad for you.
Like the American Council
on Science and Health.
They spent $30 million fighting
GMO labeling in California
and they won that battle.
They fund social groups
like the NAACP and
Hispanic Federation.
So they co-opt the very groups
that are the most effected
by these conditions
like diabetes and obesity.
So they will oppose
things like soda taxes.
They were one of the
biggest opposition groups
to the Big Gulp recommendations
from Michael Bloomberg
which I think was an
ill-advised idea but still,
they were opposing it.
- Right.
- Because they were
funded by these groups.
They fund nutritionists
and dieticians
to go on social media saying
we shouldn't have soda taxes
or that soda's okay.
I mean it's just insidious
and then they fund
the political process.
So just on one bill, the
GMO labeling bill which was,
was euphemistically
called the DARK Act.
Denying Americans
the Right to Know,
they spent $192 million
in one year on one bill.
They spent half a billion
dollars on the Farm Bill
which is governing most
of our food programs
like food stamps.
They fund Feeding America
which is a hunger group
which is great.
A hunger advocacy
group to make sure
we deal with hunger in America.
On the board of that group
are high level executives
from the food industry
which is why they oppose
restricting food stamps for soda
or other junk food right?
- Right.
- So now, government is paying
seven billion dollars a year,
the single biggest line
item for food stamps
for soda for the poor.
That's 30 billion sodas a year.
- Then they get sicker,
then back to the Medicare.
- Yeah, yeah.
- Problem that you mentioned.
- And the true cost of food
is not in the price we pay
at the checkout counter.
So you buy a can of soda.
Well let's look at what
happens to the corn right?
- For the record
I'm off the soda.
- Good, good.
- I just feel
that I should tell you that.
I haven't had a regular
soda in God knows how long.
- Good so here's just the.
- Club soda, club soda.
- Club soda's good.
Here's how the sort of
connectivity works in corn.
- Yeah.
- So government funds
the subsidies that
support corn production.
These monocrops that are
heavy use of fertilizers,
pesticides, herbicides.
That corn production
itself destroys the soil,
causes release of carbon
into the atmosphere.
Soil, carbon is a
third of all the carbon
in the atmosphere
from the way we farm.
And contributing
to climate change.
It actually destroys
the ecosystem.
Pollinators and bees are killed,
who's paying for that right?
It destroys the rivers, lakes
and oceans as I mentioned
and it creates dead
zones because of the
fertilizer runoff.
Then the food that's produced
is the raw materials for
junk food and for soda.
Then we pay for that to be given
at the tune of about $75
billion a year to the poor
in food stamp products.
75% of that is junk
food, 10% is soda.
So they eat that.
And then we pay for
Medicare and Medicaid
on the backend when
they have diabetes
and obesity-related illnesses.
And so we're not paying
for the economic,
of the impact on our
environment and climate.
We're paying for it,
literally four times
and that price is not
in the can of Coke.
It should be maybe
$100 for a can of Coke.
When you include
all those costs.
- Right, okay.
You gave me a lot there.
And a lot of numbers.
- Yeah sorry.
- First I have to jump
back for a second.
You're calling it Danone, I
always thought it was Dannon,
am I wrong?
- In America it's Dannon.
- Oh, oh okay.
- In Europe
it's called Danone.
- Oh okay, now all right.
All right that was sticking
with me this whole time.
- Yeah, yeah.
- So I'm glad we could.
- I mean it you know.
- Got the important thing
out of the way.
- You say tomato
I say tomato.
- Okay, so you did
grow up in Spain.
Now I accept it.
- It's a European company
so that's how they say it.
- Okay fair enough.
That actually is a perfect segue
to my next question which is,
how much of this is
uniquely an America problem?
- Oh my God.
- Yes, we have basically created
the worst diet in the
world and are exporting it
to every country on the planet.
And what's frightening
to me is you know,
I was in China in 1984,
there was no obesity,
there was no diabetes.
Now they have 100 plus
million diabetics in China.
It's the number one country one
in the world with diabetics.
They're increasing.
- That's probably just
a numbers game though right?
Just because of the
amount of people?
- No it's one.
- Is it per capita or?
- It used to be one in 50.
- Oh okay.
- Now it's one in 10.
- Okay so per yeah.
- It's one in 10.
India is number two
and the Middle East
it's one in four have diabetes.
In the developing world,
80% of the diabetics
and obesity-related
issues and chronic disease
are in the developing
world, 80%.
So in countries like
Africa, in India, in China.
Junk food, fast food
is aspirational.
If you wanna take your
date out in America
for a good time you don't
take her to McDonald's
but that's what they do
in the developing world.
KFC is a premium brand.
- I know it Mike.
- McDonald's is a premium brand.
Domino's is a premium brand.
- My brother in law was
living in El Salvador
doing some work, some
research work down there
and we went down
there and basically,
you know I saw a Wendy's and
there was a lot of Wendy's.
I think it was Wendy's, Wendy's.
- Yeah.
- And a couple other
chain things and those were the,
that's where
everyone wanted to go
'cause that was sort of
thought of as the nice stuff.
- Yeah.
- Which is a very backwards
way of looking at it.
- No and thank God for you
and these kinds of shows because
this kind of conversation
wouldn't happen
on traditional TV.
I was watching Good Morning
America the other day,
I was in a green room
about to go on a show
and I don't usually
watch TV and there was,
the whole segment where
they gave free Wendy's
breakfast burgers or
whatever junk they give them
to the entire audience.
- Yeah.
- And then they
were talking about
these great Wendy's breakfast
things and they were eating,
the hosts were eating them.
And a big ad after
and it's like.
- You know the host would
never eat that stuff normally.
- No, they wouldn't.
- Yeah.
- But the media is co-opted,
who funds the media
and advertising today?
Big pharma and food, big food.
- Yeah.
- Right?
And that's where you
see most of the ads.
- Well right, every ad now
is for a prescription drug.
- Right.
- And half the ad
is about telling you
the bad stuff that it's gonna do
to you.
- Right and they should have
that when they advertise food.
You know, you can eat this
and here's all the
side effects right?
- Right, right.
- And they do that
in cigarettes.
You go to you know, I
love when you go to Europe
or other countries.
Half the packet is.
- Yeah.
- This will kill you if
you use it as directed.
Right?
- Yeah I mean with pictures
of you know,
some awful thing.
- It's like, it's gruesome.
Like I'm and it's like wow.
It's not like some little thing
on the side of a
cigarette packet.
It's like the front
of the packet is like,
smoke this and you will die.
- Yeah.
- Up to you.
- Yeah, so when you
talk about obesity rates
and the unique American
problem that we have here
that now is being exported,
when someone talks to you
about the American diet,
like what would you say
the average American diet?
Can you give me the
three meals a day?
- Yes, yeah yeah.
- And then whatever
else you're filling in
between the three meals.
- Oh my god
it's called the SAD diet.
The Standard American Diet.
- Yeah.
- It's so sad.
- All right,
give me that SAD diet.
- First of all, Americans
have dessert for breakfast
and that means bagels,
muffins, croissants, cereal.
Cereal is a toxic food.
It's 75% sugar mostly.
- Yeah.
- Right, we eat.
- So I shouldn't have downed
a bowl of Fruity
Pebbles this morning
is that what you're?
- Definitely not.
- No I'm kidding, I had,
I had, you'll be
very happy to know.
I had, I had two organic eggs
with grassfed butter.
A cup of coffee, that's it.
- There you go, protein.
You got protein and fat
which is what we should
be eating for breakfast.
- Yeah.
- Not sugary, starchy carbs.
So flour which is most
of our breakfast products
are actually the worst
for your blood sugar
than table sugar.
So whether you're
eating you know,
a bagel or a bowl of sugar,
below the neck your body doesn't
know the difference right?
So that's the first
thing that Americans do
is eat huge amounts
of starch and sugar.
For lunch you know,
they'll have sandwiches,
they'll have
burgers, fries, soda.
Dinner you know, again.
Most people in this country,
60% of their calories
comes from processed food
and even if they're
eating at home
which is only 50% of the time,
it's usually from
a box or package,
or some industrial product.
- Is that right?
Only 50% of Americans are
eating dinner at home.
Meaning eating out?
- Eating a meal.
- Or they're just not?
- 50% of Americans eat out.
- Wow.
- You know half the time.
So it's half the time, half
our meals are eaten out.
- Wow.
- In 1900
it was 2% of our meals.
People don't know how to cook.
You remember you know, the
whole you deserve a break today.
It was not an accident.
The food industry deliberately
in the 50s and 60s, when
there was this advent
of a backlash against
processed food,
it was a woman named Betty
who was a home ec teacher
who decided she
wanted to go around
and advocate for families
to learn how to cook
and grow gardens
and eat whole food
and the big cabal
of food companies
got together in Minnesota.
General Mills and others,
and basically
concocted this idea
that we should create
convenience as a value in food.
And they invented somebody
called Betty Crocker
who I thought was a real person.
My mother had the
Betty Crocker cookbook.
- I swear to you that until
you just said that, I've always
thought she was real.
- Yeah and they
had her picture.
- Yeah.
- There was like
a cartoon picture
of Betty Crocker
on the front of the cookbook.
- Betty Crocker's on the.
- And if you remember.
- Aunt Jemima's
real though right?
- I don't know.
But, but if you.
- Oh man.
Colonel Sanders, that was a guy.
I know he was a guy.
- But I remember
those recipes and I,
I think I, my mother
still has that cookbook.
She died but I think
I still have it.
Look at the recipes,
it says crumble,
a row of Ritz Crackers on top
of your broccoli casserole.
- Right.
- Add one can
of Campbell's cream
of chicken soup
to the sauce or whatever.
And so it was insinuating
processed foods.
And then it became
you know, TV dinners
and then it became more
and more processed foods
and literally, we've hijacked,
the food industry has
hijacked the American kitchen
and has created two
generations of Americans
who don't know how to cook.
Who watch more cooking on TV
than they actually
spend time cooking.
- Yeah, yeah.
- And have created
a generation of people
who are dependent
on industrial processed foods
that's made in factories.
- So when you then add in
sort of a generation now of,
I want everything
fast no matter what
and I can have
everything delivered,
Uber Eats and everything else.
People just, it's a secondary
problem to have to fight.
It's not that it's also,
just that it's so accessible.
It's just that we
now no longer expect
to have to put any
work into anything.
I've come to love cooking now.
- Yeah I mean it's, it's
something that if you have
a human body, it's
a basic life skill.
Like brushing your teeth
or taking care of the basic
functions of your life.
If you don't know how to cook,
you're at a disadvantage.
Unless you're rich
enough to have a chef.
Great you know, but
that's not most of us.
- Right, right.
- And there's a myth
out there that cooking is hard,
that it's complicated, that
it takes too much time,
that eating whole
foods is too expensive.
And these are the mantras
of the food industry
that we have bought and we
have consumed and believed.
And it's just not true.
And I've demonstrated
this over and over
in various communities
where people can do it
even in the worst environments.
So just a quick story.
I was part of this
movie "Fed Up"
about how the food industry
was driving sugar consumption
and led to this
whole obesity problem
and they were profiling a
family in South Carolina
that I went to their house.
It was a trailer where they
lived with a family of five.
The father was 42, had
diabetes, on dialysis.
Couldn't lose the weight
to be able to get a kidney,
a new kidney because
he was very overweight.
The mother was this
big, the son was 16
and almost diabetic.
And they never cooked
a meal in their life
and I went into their trailer,
when I pulled everything out
and I showed them
what they were eating
and they thought
it was all healthy.
They thought it was
you know, Cool Whip
which is a healthy topping.
It says zero trans
fat on the label
because the government
gave the food industry
a loophole which says
if it has less than
half a gram per serving
it could say zero trans fat.
But if you look at
the ingredient list,
it's like high fructose
corn syrup, trans fat.
- Right.
- And so I showed them
all this stuff and
they were shocked.
And I said okay let's cook a
meal from simple ingredients
and I'm on the Board of the
Environmental Working Group
and there's a guide called
Good Food on a Tight Budget.
How to eat well for you,
eat well for your wallet
and for the planet.
And it's ingredients
that are real food
but that are less expensive.
So what are the less
expensive cuts of meat?
And less expensive vegetables?
And the less expensive
things you can buy
in beans and grains
and so forth.
And we cooked a simple
meal, they loved it.
They, I said here's a
guide, here's my cookbook.
You guys can do this.
And they lived in one of the
worst food deserts in America
on food stamps and disability
for 1000 bucks a month
for a family of
five to eat right?
So they did it and they
lost 200 pounds as a family.
- Wow.
- The son ended up losing 50
but he gained it back
because he went to work
at Bojangles and
said it was like,
putting an alcoholic
to work in a bar.
- Right, right.
- And then he finally
got his act together
and he lost 138 pounds.
His family had never gone
to college or anything,
he asked me for a
letter of recommendation
for medical school and now
he's in medical school.
So it's possible and they did it
in one of the worst
food deserts in America
but it was just education.
People just don't
understand how to do it,
they don't know how to choose
and to eat healthy food,
it doesn't have to
be more expensive.
It's shown that
you can actually,
for 50 cents more a day
or $15 a month per person,
you can eat whole
real food diet.
- Can we, let's,
let's unpack that a little bit.
Because you hear
people say how well,
you know, the reason poor
people have to eat fast food
is because you know
it's eight bucks
and you're getting the burger,
you're getting the fries,
you're getting the
cookie blah blah blah.
But I do find now,
since I've become much
more aware of all this.
If you have eight bucks,
you could eat a
pretty damn good meal
that you could get
at Trader Joe's
or a local thing.
- Yeah.
- That you might have to
heat it up for a second
or do something.
So can you lay out a couple ways
that you could change your diet?
- Well you know first of all.
- On a really economic level.
- First of all you know,
chicken is not that expensive.
There are certain cuts of meat
that are not that expensive.
I mean you can even get
regeneratively raised
grass-feed beef if you buy
directly from the rancher,
for an average of
eight dollars a pound
or two dollars a
serving which is less
than a McDonald's hamburger.
- Oh I bet you could,
even at Whole Foods here
I think it's only you
know, 5.99 a pound.
- Yeah for.
- Wait, what did you say?
Regenerative?
- Regeneratively raised beef
which is grass-fed but
it's a whole next level
of how do you restore soil and
talk about climate reversal
and all of that.
So it's like a next level up.
- Oh so that's next level,
past just grass-fed.
- Yeah it's even like the
next level up.
- This is, gotcha.
- Which doesn't really
exist that widely but.
- Okay.
- But you can,
you can buy vegetables
that aren't heirloom,
you know radishes from
Japan or something.
But you can buy
carrots and onions
and cabbage and you
know, small potatoes.
You can buy real, whole food
and you can make
grains and beans
which are extremely
cheap, whole grains.
If you know how to make it.
And you can make delicious
food and people just
have no clue how to shop and
buy and find the right foods.
And there is great
resources out there
where you can bypass the
middle man like Thrive Market
or you can buy really
good ingredients
for 50 to 25% or 50%
off of the retail price
and you could go to Whole Foods.
- Right.
- So there's lots of ways
for people.
- Is that because they're
either close to expiration.
- No it's a membership program.
So they make money on the
memberships like Costco.
It's sort of like Costco meets
Whole Foods meets Amazon.
- Interesting, a lot of
big business in on this.
- Yeah.
- Okay so,
people start cleaning
up their diets.
They start losing weight
but what do they have to do
after that to kind
of keep thing going?
- Well I think what we
have to realize is that,
we need change right?
Food Fix the book I
wrote is about what,
what the problems are
and how they're connected
and what the solutions are.
And there's citizen
solutions, there's things
that businesses can do.
There's things that
governments need to do.
So nothing is gonna work
unless it's all happening.
- Yeah, all right so
let's do one at a time.
That we already have.
- Yeah so.
- The citizen one?
- So citizens.
So citizens can
choose what they eat.
- Yeah.
- So imagine
if everybody in
America just ate food
from real ingredients,
from whole food.
Doesn't have to be Whole
Foods the whole paycheck.
- Right, right.
- But it should be
just real food.
- Yeah just have some.
- We got rid of
industrial ingredients.
So I'm gonna not eat
refined white flour.
I'm not gonna eat high
fructose corn syrup.
I'm not gonna eat
refined soybean oil
and I'm not gonna eat any
foods with weird ingredients
that are coming
from these plants.
Look at the label and if
you don't recognize it,
you can't pronounce
it or it's in Latin
or it has 45 ingredients,
don't eat it.
- So let's just give some
people some real things
to eat in the morning.
Have some eggs,
have some oatmeal.
- Yeah eggs, have some eggs.
You know have some
steel-cut oats.
Yeah, you know.
Have yogurt if you want.
- Yeah.
- Berries, nuts, seeds,
all that's great.
- Okay.
- A shake.
Second is, is don't eat
GMO if you can avoid it.
Why, not necessarily
because we know
GMO foods are bad
for your health.
But we do that the stuff
they put on them is bad.
Like the pesticides
and the glyphosate
which causes cancer.
It's weedkiller and Cheerios,
there's more weedkiller
in your Cheerios
than there is vitamin D and B12
which they add to the cereal.
- Wow.
- And that's why Kellogg's has
said we're gonna get it out.
- Can you explain the GMO
thing a little bit more?
We've talked a bit
about this on the show.
But GMO, genetically
modified organisms
in and of themselves
aren't bad right?
- We don't know.
- That process.
- We don't know, I think it's
a big uncontrolled experiment
on humanity, so.
- But haven't we
modified like bananas for years
to get them to be
a certain shape
and size and things like that.
- Yes, we definitely have
bred plants for years.
- Yeah.
- Mendel and his
peas, that's different
than inserting genes into plants
that are novel to that plant.
So we don't, we don't know.
But we do know that the stuff
they put on them is bad.
So glyphosate is a great
example, weedkiller okay?
It's put on 70% of our crops.
It's 3.5 billion pounds that
we've sprayed on America
since it's been introduced.
It's 70% of all the
chemicals in agriculture used
across the world.
It has been by the
committee that was gathered
from international scientists
as a part of the UN's,
I'm sorry, the WHO's
research on what cancer is
and what's carcinogenic,
they said that it's
a problem carcinogen.
There have been billions
of dollars of lawsuits
that have been won against
glyphosate in court recently
because of its link to
non-Hodgkin's lymphoma
and that has led to a $35
billion loss in stock price
and also the firing
of the CEO of Bayer
which bought Monsanto
which makes a weedkiller.
That also is clear
link to destruction
of the microbiome which is
the most important thing
in your body that
controls everything.
It's the gut bacteria, it
controls heart disease,
cancer, diabetes, obesity,
autoimmune disease, allergies.
It literally destroys
your microbiome.
And you're getting that
all the time in your food.
It's sprayed on
70 crops of wheat.
On all wheat products.
It's sprayed right at
the end of harvest,
so they dry it out so
they can harvest it easier
and it's in your food.
So it's not good for you.
So whether or not
GMO is bad or not.
If you don't eat GMO foods
you're telling a message
to the marketplace to
stop what they're doing
and Campbell's
recently announced
they're getting all the GMO out
of their food chain right so?
And so Kellogg's announced
they're getting glyphosate
out of their cereal which is,
which is happening because
the consumers want change.
- Can you explain a bit more
on, so we use these chemicals.
It's not just that it's
getting into the food.
But then the runoff
into the water
and the rest of it.
- Yeah I mean, so 70.
Look, agriculture depends
on the pollinators right?
Butterflies, bees.
We've lost 75% of our
pollinators because the things
that they use for
pesticides are neurotoxic
and they kill pests and
they don't discriminate
between bees or
potato beetles right?
And so, so they're
really destroying
our pollinators which
has enormous impact.
And the fertilizer, and
that's not even to mention
the human impact.
So there's a study
for example of kids
who were exposed to pesticides.
It's led to a loss of
41 million IQ points.
It increases the risk
of cancer dramatically.
It causes 10 to
20,000 deaths a year
in farm workers from
pesticide poisoning.
So it's a real, human cost.
But then there's the fertilizer
story which is you know,
a whole different game
and I was sort of shocked
as a doctor to start
to dig into this
and can I just kind of
expand on it for a minute?
- That's what we're doing here.
- I actually didn't think
fertilizers were so bad.
I'm like so you put a
little nitrogen on the soil,
what's the big deal, it
helps the plants grow.
Turns out that about 2% of
all energy use in the world
is for making fertilizer.
It's made using natural gas
that comes from fracking.
They're the biggest
purchaser of natural gas.
- Wow.
- The fertilizer industry.
'Cause there's a
very energy-intensive
process to make it.
It then, the methane released
from the fracking wells
is about 40 to 50% more methane
than that released from
traditional oil wells.
Then you put it on the soil
and it causes nitrous
oxide to be produced
which is 300 times more
potent a greenhouse gas
than carbon dioxide.
And it destroys also the
microbiome of the soil,
the microbiology which is how
our plants get nutritious.
So what we're eating today
is far less nutritious
than before.
You eat broccoli today,
it's got 50% less nutrition
than it did 50 years ago
because of the soil
requiring the microbiology
to extract the nutrients
that the plants eat.
- Is that why my mom always says
you can't get a
good tomato anymore?
- That's right, that's right.
- Is there something to it?
- 100%, 100%.
So it's all dependent
on the soil.
And then once it's runs
off into the water,
into the rivers, lakes and
oceans, it fertilizes the algae.
'Cause it's indiscriminate
and it's why you see
this algal blooms in
Lake Erie and why Toledo
had no fresh water
and cost the city
a billion dollars to provide
water to its citizens
and then it runs off
into the Gulf of Mexico
through the Mississippi
and creates a dead zone
the size of New Jersey
that kills 212,000
metric tons of fish
and there's 400 of
these around the world
that are the size of Europe
that 500 million people
depend on for food every year.
And it's, it's 400 billion
pounds of this shit
that's poured on the earth.
- Jeez.
- And these companies
are super powerful
and they're nefarious.
They started something called
climate-smart agriculture.
Now who is not for
climate-smart agriculture.
- That sounds good.
I know if it sounds good it's
automatically good right?
- Right crop life you know.
Like all these front groups
and so they create these,
like the Global Alliance
on Sustainable Agriculture.
It's all big food and big ag
and the major contributors
and partners in
the climate-smart
agriculture movement
are fertilizer companies.
- So it's interesting though,
because on one
hand you're saying
some of these
companies have started
to do some good things.
- Yes they have,
yes they have.
- And then on the other hand
clearly it ain't,
it ain't yeah?
- It's a mixed bag right?
- Yeah.
- Some people are fighting
for you know, survival and
clawing tooth and nail.
The Grocery
Manufacturers of America
which represented a lot
of the big food companies
was pretty nefarious
in its tactics
to obstruct any progress
on changing our food system
for the better.
So they for example
in Washington State
spent a huge amount of money
on fighting GMO labeling
and they did it in a
way by creating funding
from the food companies
through a mechanism
that was illegal.
And it was the biggest
illegal campaign
finance violation ever.
The state Of Washington sued
them for $18 million and won
which is nothing compared to
the billions they're making
and the law didn't pass
because their campaign
was effective right?
And after that, a bunch
of these companies
like Nestle, Danone,
Unilever, Mars,
they bailed on the Grocery
Manufacturers of America.
They started the Sustainable
Food Policy Alliance,
remains to be seen
what they're gonna do
but the Grocery Manufacturers
of America now is defunct.
Everybody started pulling out
'cause they're just
not acting great
and then they formed
this new version of it
that's sort of a smaller version
that not a lot of
members join now.
So that's a good sign
that the food industry's
starting to kind of wake up
and you've got big companies
talking about sustainability,
about regenerative ag, about,
and then I'm talking about,
they're actually doing
something about it.
Why, why would they care?
It's not responding
to the consumer
because only 10% of consumers
know about regenerative ag.
- Right.
- I mean Amazon
and Whole Foods announced
that regenerative ag
was one of the biggest, most
important business innovations
and trends and that that
is really important.
- Are they labeling meat
now with regenerative?
- Yeah.
- Why can't I
say regenerative?
- You can't, yes you can.
So these companies.
- Yeah I don't know that I've
seen that in this area.
- Aren't doing it
because their
consumers are asking.
They're doing it because
they realize the way
we're growing our food today
is threatening our future
ability to grow food.
So they're like, wait a minute,
we need to buy these raw
materials from the farmers
and if they keep
farming this way,
there ain't gonna be
any food for us to buy
and our companies
are gonna go bad
so they're paying farmers,
which the government
should be doing
to actually convert
to regenerative ag.
So citizens can do a lot
with changing their diet.
They can also actually
do small things
and actually make
a big difference.
They can start for
example joining
community supported agriculture.
They can have a
community garden,
they can have their own garden.
They can start composting,
food waste is third biggest
emitter of greenhouse gases
after the US and China
because when you throw
all your vegetables
and food scraps
and wasted stuff into
the landfill, it rot
'causing methane right?
- Yep, yep.
- So you're a vegetarian, you
think you're not eating meat
and doing a good job but you
throw out your vegetable shit
and it goes in the landfill,
and you're actually you know,
it's more methane
than cows produce.
- Geez.
- Right,
so it's all complicated
but the key is,
you could start doing a
compost in San Francisco.
They have mandatory compost
in France, it's mandatory.
In Massachusetts
they've created a law
that if you're a
company that produces
a ton of food waste a week
you can't throw it out.
So they have to figure
out what to do with it.
Give it to farmers
or whatever and it's,
it's spurred
business innovation.
So those kinds of laws
spurred Vanguard Renewables
to partner with dairy
farmers who are losing money
in Massachusetts 'cause
nobody's drinking milk anymore
and they built
anerobic digesters
which basically they take
three tractor trailers
from Whole Foods
and grocery stores
every day on this one farm
and they put it in this,
in this digestor with cow poop.
It basically creates
electricity for 1500 homes.
- Wow.
- The farmer
gets free electricity,
the farmer makes $100,000 a year
instead of losing 1600 a year.
Vanguard then sends, sells
it back up to the grid
and everybody's happy
and you've solved manure,
food waste and you
make electricity
and it's just like, and
there's a few of these
in this country but
there's 17,000 in Europe
'cause they're way ahead of us.
- Yeah, so are we
just behind on it
because of the power that
the big companies have
over legislators?
Or the fact that they can.
- Yeah, yeah I mean.
- Pump into the system?
- Yes I mean you know,
when you look at the lobby
effort and you look at
the different industries
and lobbying it's like a,
if you look at a graph
it's like agriculture
and food is here
and everything
else is down here.
It's just a massive amount
of money that's pouring in
that is quote,
educating the lawmakers
about what to do and they're
not hearing the other side.
It's not that
they're bad people,
it's not that they're
not well-intentioned,
it's that they just don't know
and I've been meeting with
senators and congressmen
and I'm just sort of shocked
at the level of awareness
of these issues.
And when you start
to talk about it,
they get very engaged
and interested.
- So how do you decide
how much government
should be involved?
- This is where my, the
libertarian side of me
always, the alarms
are going off.
Like oh yeah we can tell
the government to start
giving these regulations.
- Yes.
- And stop doing
this, stop doing that
and A, we know that someone
will always get around it.
The law of
unintended consequences.
- Consequences.
- Et cetera, et cetera.
So how do you decide that
somebody's trying to do
from a approach.
- Well I think,
it's really about you
know, sort of being honest
about what we're doing and
how the government is funding
the growing of food
that's making us sick.
It's funding the
provision of that food
to a large portion
of the population
and it's paying for the
Medicare and the Medicaid.
So we need to actually
incentivize the right things
and deincentivize
the wrong things.
So give people on SNAP
more benefits for eating
fruits and vegetables
and basically have
to pay a little more
for buying junk food.
- Yeah.
- Or have them.
- But oddly there's
a lot of lefties
that are often
against that right?
- Yep.
- Because they say
oh we shouldn't tell these
people what to do with this.
- Well this is, but this
is not necessarily lefties.
This is the hunger
groups that are funded
by the food industry
who are on their boards
who are opposing the
changes in SNAP regulation.
Why can't we put nutrition
guidelines in food stamps?
It's a great program
developed by Johnson in 64
to deal with food insecurity
and hunger in America,
great idea.
But there are no
nutrition guidelines.
So for school lunch, there
are nutrition guidelines.
- Right, so at Burger King
you literally say outside,
something like you
know say we accept SNAP
or we accept this or that.
So this is a tough one for
me on the Libertarian side
where it's like,
I wouldn't want,
I don't love those
programs generally
but I wouldn't want the
government then telling people
what they have to eat and
yet I completely understand.
- But we do, we do it
with school lunches.
- Yeah, right.
- You know they
should be able to serve you
know, soda and McDonald's
for every kid's school lunch?
- Well I would say for
kids school lunches
that are given by the government
it's probably a little different
rather than you giving,
if you're giving
people money for food
you wanna have them have as
much choice but I get it.
I do get it.
I'm not saying
there should be no.
- I agree.
- Regulations yeah.
- Yeah and then you know,
and then for incentives
for farming for example
they could incentives
for generative,
so now there's
regulations in the USDA
that if you're a, if you have
a 10,000 acre soybean farm
and you wanna grow a
five acre piece of plot
for a regenerative vegetables
or whatever, you can't do that.
Because the government will
take away all your crop supports
if you grow vegetables.
- Yeah.
- Which are seen
as specialty crops.
So it's just weird.
Like the government tells
us in our dietary guidelines
that 50% of your
vegetables should be,
I'm sorry, 50% of our plate
should be fruits and vegetables.
Through subsidies we
support .45% for vegetables.
So less than half a percent
of our agricultural supports
are for vegetables,
mostly apples.
And these are called
specialty crops
and yet we're
telling people to eat
lots of fruit and vegetables.
And so far, if our plate
actually looked like
the government subsidies were,
we wouldn't be
eating half our plate
in fruits and vegetables.
We'd be having a
giant corn fritter,
deep fried in soybean oil.
- Right.
- With a giant cotton napkin.
- Right, well corn
is a vegetable.
- And maybe one green bean.
- Right, wait let's talk
about corn a little bit
because I always, the high
fructose corn syrup one
always strikes me as
the craziest thing
that if you buy a Coca-Cola
in the United States.
- Yes.
- I believe
it's the second ingredient,
you know it's water
and then it's high
fructose corn syrup.
- Yes.
- If you buy a Mexican Coke.
- It's got sugar.
- Coke in Mexico
or that one that's
been brought here,
the second ingredient is sugar.
- Yeah.
- How did we in America,
we're so advanced
and yet we can't even
do the sugar thing right?
- Well you know I met with.
- Even though sugar
ain't that great for you.
- Well I met the Vice
President of Pepsi once,
Vice Chairman of Pepsi
and we became friends,
he's a doctor and you know,
he had some interesting
conversations.
And I said why,
why do you guys use high
fructose corn syrup?
He says the government
makes it too cheap
for us not to use it.
There's all kinds
of tariffs on sugar
to prevent importing
sugar to keep the prices,
you know, higher and to
actually help corn farmers
use their products for the sugar
which helps Americans but
it also kills Americans.
- Yeah, geez.
- Yeah.
- What a screwy one.
I mean it's, it's just nuts.
- It is screwy yeah.
- You go to a store
and you gotta pay more
for the sugar one
than the corn.
- Because the prices
are artificially low right?
- Yeah.
- So it's challenging
and I think we,
we kind of have to look at,
how do we create things
that aren't you know,
really onerous for people
but that incentivize them
to do them the right thing
and disincentivize them
to wrong thing right?
I think that's what we
do through our tax code.
We could incentivize
through our tax code.
Why do we, for example,
pay, allow the food
industry to take
a $15 billion tax
cut or not pay taxes
on marketing junk food?
Why do we do that?
- Right.
- I mean cigarettes,
there's enormous taxes,
there's enormous disincentives.
You can't advertise, why
don't we look into that?
I mean we could say
free speech fine
but why should we let them
have the benefit of that.
- Right, so what model
is better for us?
I see what you're
saying, so okay
we're exporting a lot of this
but where are the
places that are,
that have a model that
maybe makes a little sense.
Just.
- Well I mean listen.
Europe is so far ahead of us.
There's no GMO,
half the ingredients
in our food that we
allow, they don't allow.
Food additives, colors, dyes.
Something like azodicarbonamide
which is a yoga mat material
that is used in.
- Oh isn't that
in the McRib?
Is that the one
that's in the McRib?
- It was in Subway.
- Yeah.
- It was in Subway buns.
It was in a lot of, it's in
a lot of the fast food buns
and it's still allowed
in this country.
It's a deemed.
- As a yoga teacher,
I know food guys are
supposed to kill you.
- That's right.
And in Singapore for example
which is a very you know,
restrictive country,
if you use that as a food
manufacturer in your product,
you get a $450,000 fine
and 15 years in jail
and we allow it here.
- Right.
- Products like BHT
and our preservatives
that are not allowed in Europe.
There's a whole list
of these in my book
of why do we have them
here and not there.
And so we have to look at
how different countries
are addressing this and Europe,
collectively is focusing
on regenerative agriculture
and changing their system.
Chile is a great example
of a country that
has implemented
a whole series of food policies
that have had great
impact in reducing obesity
and ill health
which are completely
unpalatable in this country.
So the only way it got done
was the Vice President
of the Senate
and the President of the country
at the same time were doctors.
And they got this
and they're like,
we're gonna fight
the food industry.
So they put in a ban on junk
food advertising to kids
from six in the morning
till 11 at night.
They banned all cartoon
characters on kids food.
So no more Tony the Tiger.
They killed Toucan Sam
and Tony the Tiger.
- Slaughter.
- Yeah they put warning labels
on the front of packaging
like cigarettes for bad food.
They limited advertising
of formula to kids.
They eliminated any
junk food in schools
and they put in an 18% soda tax.
And they've funded,
there's been funding
to assess the impact of this.
$30 million from
Bloomberg actually
to fund what this
actually is doing
and they found
dramatic improvements
and the most dramatic
benefit wasn't even
from the soda tax.
It was from the ban on marketing
and the warning labels,
reduced consumption four
times more than soda taxes.
- Is the increasing of
taxes on these things,
is that just really a
short term stop though?
Because eventually if
you get enough people
to stop then you don't
have the tax money anymore
and then you might be funding
other things with tax money.
- I don't know, I
mean it's been a model
that you know, is
very controversial
but the Larry Summers
and Michael Bloomberg
created a fiscal
taskforce around the world
of financial, finance
ministers to look at
how do we use financial policies
to change behavior right?
So you tax the things you
don't want people to do
and you incentivize the things
you want people to do right?
So, so savings you
don't tax you know
and maybe soda you
should tax right?
And I think that it's been
effective across the world.
It's just a challenging
thing to do.
The data is really
clear that it works.
- Yeah.
- Cigarettes,
we do it on cigarettes.
And we've done in Berkeley,
we've done it in Philadelphia,
we've done it in
many, many cities.
But the problem is the
food industry fights back.
So in the last
election, in 2016,
four cities in California
passed a soda tax.
There are six cities
totally in the country
and the food
industry freaked out.
So the big soda companies
then created a strategy
to prohibit future taxes.
So what they did is for example,
they went in California and
they created a ballot measure
that would prohibit local taxes
unless there was a
two thirds majority
which would mean it would
cripple local governments
to fund schools, to
fund police departments,
fire departments.
And they didn't care about that
but they spent $7 million
funding this campaign.
It would've passed 'cause
people don't like taxes right?
Five days before the election,
they went to Governor Brown
who was also called
Governor Moonbeam,
probably the most liberal
Governor in history.
- Yep.
- They said if you
don't pass this preemptive
law that prohibits
future taxes on
soda and junk food,
we're gonna leave
this ballot measure in
and you're gonna be screwed.
So he basically was bullied,
they made him quote an
offer he couldn't refuse
like the mafia and he
had to pass this tax
which now prohibits
future taxes.
And they're doing this in
state after state after state.
So all this happens
behind the scenes.
It's all it.
- Politics is messy.
- Yeah, and so, so as consumers
we're sort of like
stuck with you know,
this system that is perpetuating
a disease-creating system
and a disease-creating economy
and it's, and it's threatening
our entire way of life
and people just don't get it.
It's like if we don't
fix this, you know,
we're all gonna be
really sick and fat
and get all these chronic
illnesses which we already are.
Our economy is gonna
be crippled by this.
I mean think about it.
If one in two dollars of
our entire federal budget
is for Medicare, I mean
like there's no money
for anything else right?
- Yeah, all right so
we have sick people
suddenly from all of this
or I guess not so suddenly.
It's happened over generations.
We've gotten an economy
that the incentives
are completely out of whack.
Let's talk about that
planet thing too.
How is this
effecting the planet?
We've talked a
little bit about it.
- Yeah, so, so.
- The environment
and the water.
- We talked about
some of the
environmental impacts
but what people
don't realize is that
the very way we grow food
is threatening our ability
to grow food because
of its impact
on our climate
and weather right?
So, so if you look at end to
end, our entire food system,
it's 50% of climate change.
Where fossil fuels
is about a third.
So it's worse than
fossil fuels, why?
Deforestation.
You know we kill seven
billion trees a year,
the size of Costa Rica.
Soil erosion from our way
of farming and the killing.
Factory farming of animals.
Food waste, transport,
refrigeration,
all these things end to end,
you add them up and it's 50%.
The good news is that if
that's true we can fix it.
And the UN said that if we took
two million of the
five million degraded
hectares of land
around the world
from overgrazing and
from poor farm techniques
and we convert it to
regenerative agriculture
which is a way of farming
that restores and builds soil,
that conserves water,
that increases diversity,
pollinators, et
cetera, et cetera.
It produces better
food, more food
that's more profitable
for the farmers.
If we did that, we could stop
climate change for 20 years
and it would cost $300
billion which is less
than Medicare spends on
diabetes every year in America.
- What does that
actually look like?
So we go to this land
that's been barren.
- Yeah Farmland LP is I think
the private equity company
that is buying up
conventional farms.
They're converting them to
regenerative agriculture
which includes creating diverse
plantings, crop rotations,
cover crops, no
tilling of the soil
and integrating animals who
poo and pee and build soil.
They have actually
taken their profits
on those farms from single
digits, to 60 to 70% profits
and they add all these
benefits to the environment.
We call it ecosystem services.
So as humans we extract
about $125 trillion
a year from nature
and use it for our purposes,
without putting it back.
The global economy is
about 80 to 90 trillion,
so it's a lot.
There's a whole concept
called ecosystem services
where farmers can actually add
benefit to the environment.
Build soil, conserved water,
increased pollinators,
all that stuff.
And then finally they add
$21 million on the farms
that they bought a benefit
versus the conventional farms
which remove eight million.
And there are companies like
Indigo that are paying farmers
through very high
tech measurements
of those benefits
to the environment
for the benefit they create.
In Costa Rica,
they're paying farmers
to build soil and conserve
water and increase biodiversity.
So Danone and General Mills
are now paying
farmers to do this.
So there's incentives that
government could create to say,
like we're talking about carbon
capture technology right?
So the most powerful
carbon capture technology
in the world is available
everywhere, it's free.
It works better
than anything else.
It can completely reverse
carbon in the environment
and draw down all the carbon.
And it's called photosynthesis
and it's been around
for billions of years.
- Yeah, you mean that
green stuff and the sun
and the whole thing.
- Yellow sun and carbon,
I mean that's how it happens.
Carbon dioxide,
if plants eat that
sunlight turns it into energy.
It goes into the roots
and into the soil.
30 to 40% of all the
carbon in our atmosphere
which is a trillion tons,
about three to four billion
comes from the destruction
of carbon in the soil.
From soil erosion,
from the tilling,
from the way we farm and
it can all be put back.
The soil can literally
hold three times the amount
of carbon in our entire
atmosphere right now
if we were to do it right.
- I wish we had more time here
but I got a hard out today.
Give me, give me the one minute,
like if you want people
to understand all of this.
- Yes.
- Or the call to action.
- Call to action, yes.
- Can you give me
the call to action,
one minute.
- Call to action, first of all
first of all, first of all.
- Finish strong here.
- They can go to
foodfixbook.com.
- [Dave] I was
gonna do that part.
- And there's a Food
Fix Action Guides
which lists all the
citizen actions,
business innovations
and government actions
that can be done to
actually start to solve this
and you can also
go to foodfix.org.
We've started a
campaign, a non-profit
and a lobby group 'cause I,
I've decried lobbyists
my whole life.
Now I'm gonna become
one because I wanna be
one for the good guys.
- Yep.
- And we're raising money,
we're mobilizing
grassroots efforts.
We're educating people,
we're educating law makers
and if you wanna be
part of that movement,
go to foodfix.org and
learn more about it
and let's do this together.
- All right, Dr. Mark Hyman
we're gonna do this again.
Guys, go to drhyman.com
or foodfix.org.
If you're looking
for more honest
and thoughtful conversations
about lifestyles
instead of non-stop
yelling check out
our lifestyle playlist.
And if you wanna
watch full interviews
on a variety of topics,
check out our full
episode playlist,
they're both right over here.
And to get notified
of all future videos,
be sure to subscribe and
click the notification bell.
