And we talk about climate change. People go, I get climate change. But nobody's talking about the impact of the food system, not just on chronic disease and the economy and our kids' brains and mental health, even violence, you know, we know is linked to bad food and prisons. Violent prisoners can reduce violent crime in prisons by 56 percent just by eating healthy diet.
But we also know that it's destroying our environment and our climate. The food system is the number one cause of climate change. People don't get that. People don't understand that when you put it all together, whether it's deforestation, soil erosion, factory farming, whether it's food waste, processing, distribution, refrigeration of food, all that together makes the food system the number one cause of climate change.
Hi, my name is Ron Gunchasci, GP, television presenter and author of the best-selling books The Stress Solution and The Four-iller Plan. I believe that all of us have the ability to feel better than we currently do, but getting healthy has become far too complicated. With this podcast, I aim to simplify it. I'm going to be having conversations with some of the most interesting and exciting people both within as well as outside the health space, so hopefully inspire you, as well as empower you with simple tips that you can put into practice immediately to transform the way that you feel.
I believe that when we are healthier, we are happier, because when we feel better, we live more. Hello, and welcome back to episode 98 of my Feel Better Live More podcast. My name is Ron Gunchasci and I am your host. As a practicing doctor, one of the commonest things I see in clinic is people complaining of low energy.
Now, of course, there can be many different reasons for this, some of which may require medical help, but most of the reasons actually can be fixed with small changes to our lifestyle. Last year, I created a series of six free videos to help you with this, and thousands of you have watched them so far and found them really, really useful. If this is something that you or someone else close to you would benefit from watching, simply go to www.chatsg.com forward slash energy and follow the instructions. Now, the topic of today's conversation is food.
Is it possible to create a food system that promotes health and not disease? One that regenerates ecosystems, reverses climate change, and ensures that no one, least of all the poorest in society, is endangered? My guest on this week's podcast believes that it is. He is Dr.
Mark Hyman, medical doctor and author of an incredible 12 New York Times best-selling books. Mark and I talk about everything from how processed food is addicted by design to the powerful role of good nutrition from real food could have in hospitals, schools, and prisons. We also discuss why soil depletion from intensive farming is one of the biggest drivers of climate change and why that vegan burger may not be the most environmentally friendly option. Despite the serious subject matter of this conversation, I'm sure you'll come away feeling hopeful.
Mark doesn't simply highlight the problems that we're facing. He identifies the fix, providing practical and positive solutions. It's a call to action that we can all do our bit to answer. Mark gets pretty fired up in our conversation today, and I really think you're going to enjoy what he has to share.
Now, before we get started, as always, I do need to give a quick shout-out to some of the sponsors of today's show who are essential in order for me to continue putting out weekly episodes like this one. Vivo Barefoot, the minimalist footwear company, continued to support my podcast. I am a huge fan of Vivo Barefoot's shoes and have been wearing them for many years now as have my entire family. They make really, really comfortable minimalist shoes that you can basically live your entire life in.
So many of you have already taken advantage of the special offer that Vivo Barefoot's give to listeners of my podcast and have fed back to me that you are really pleased and actually pleasantly surprised with how comfortable these shoes actually feel. They can be really beneficial for back, hip, knee pain, as well as general mobility, and I've been recommending them for many years now to patients and have seen great benefits. They make shoes for all occasions, work play, walking, going to the gym, and so much more, and they also make shoes for children as well as adults. The listeners of my show, they continue to offer a fantastic discount if you go to vivobeth.com forward slash live more.
They are giving 20% off as a one-time code for all of my podcast listeners in the UK, USA and Australia. They offer a 100-day trial for new customers, so if you're not happy, you can simply send them back for a full refund. You can get your 20% off code by going to vivobeth.com forward slash live more now on to today's conversation. Mark, welcome to the Feel Better Live More podcast.
Well, I definitely want to feel better and I want to live more, so I'm so happy to be on this podcast. Well, it's a point of context to people. We're here in Santa Monica in California. I'm over here doing some promotion for my book This Resolution, but today we're going to talk a lot about your work and in particular an issue which you've gone into every deep way in your new book, Food Fix, and that's something I don't think you've covered before in previous books.
So can you tell me what is Food Fix about and what was your drive to write it? Well, the title of the book is Food Fix, How to Save Our Health, Our Economy, Our Communities and Our Planet, one by the time. And the reason I wrote this book, it's about the social and political and bigger context of the food system and how it's driving all the things that are wrong with society today, whether it's chronic disease or economic burden or chronic disease, whether it's social injustice or climate change or mental illness or environmental destruction, all these things are connected to food, even challenges without kids' education and national security because we can't actually recruit enough healthy people to join the military in the United States because 70% are rejected. So I'm thinking to myself, how are these things connected?
And as a functional medicine doctor, my job has always been to think about the root cause. So for the last 30 years, I've been treating thousands of patients in my office, one by one, seeing the power of food to change their health, to get rid of the bad food and put in the good food. And remarkable transformations happen. But then I began to ask myself, like, why am I just working on this end of the problem?
I'm just waiting for people to come to my office who are sick from all this bad food. The question, you know, rose in my head, which is, why? Why do we have all this bad food? And then I began to realize, well, we have a $15 trillion food system.
It's the biggest industry on the planet. It's controlled by a few dozen companies and CEOs that control the big food companies and fast food and processed food companies, the agriculture and the agricultural companies, the seed, the fertilizer companies. And I began to say, well, if these companies are controlling the food that's grown and produced, then why do we have the food system we do? Why do we have the food that we're producing?
And then it occurred to me, well, it's our policies. It's the policies that drive the food system. And what food has grown and produced and sold, distributed, all of that is determined by the government's policies around food and agriculture. So I began to think about, as a doctor, if I'm really going to help my patients, I have to go upstream to think about these problems.
I can't just wait until they show up my office with diabetes, right? How do they get diabetes? It wasn't bad luck. It was a toxic nutritional wasteland that we all live in where it's easier to find a pop tart than a peach, right?
So I began to think deeply about this and I began to research it and think about it. Well, why is this going on? And what's the problem? And then realize that the food industry is driving so many of our global crises.
Let's just sort of go through them because they're all connected. And the good news is that there are solutions. So there's a lot of bad news, but there's also a lot of good news in terms of how we can as citizens, as businesses, as philanthropists, as policymakers, change the system we have. And we think, oh, wow, we have this giant food system.
It's so difficult and so big. It's so embedded. It's the way we do things. But the truth is that American society was founded on slavery and an agricultural system that depended on slavery.
That changed. It seemed impossible to change. I mean, the abolitionist working at the turn of the 1800s probably couldn't imagine a world without it, but they still fought for what was right. And I think we are in that same situation.
We have a very destructive food system. So what does it do? One, it produces massive amounts of chronic disease. We know that 11 million people die every single year from eating bad food and not eating enough good food.
And I think that's an underestimate. And it's the number one killer on the planet, more than smoking, more than lack of exercise, more than accidents, guns, violence, more than anything else. It's the number one cause of disease. I mean, think about it.
If Ebola or Zika was killing 11 million people a year, don't you think there'd be out of a massive global collective effort to change that? Scientists, policymakers, businesses, everybody beyond board to solve these terrible epidemics, but we haven't run in front of us and nobody's dealing with it. So why is that, Mark? Because the stats you just mentioned are mind-blowing.
I hope by now most listeners, this podcast are aware that actually food is not important just for our physical health, but our minds are emotional health at so many different components of our health. But why are we not giving it the attention, societally, that we are on an individual level? Because you have spent your career writing, you know, best out of the best seller trying to empower people to make better food choices, more helpful food choices than them. You've spent your career seeing patients one-on-one and helping them on an individual level change their food choices and see a consequent improvement in their health.
So you've seen that. But are you or have you found, like I have found, but sometimes you get the best advice that you possibly can to the patient in front of you? Yeah, they then go out into a food landscape where they simply cannot or it is too challenging to make those choices that you and I would like them to make. It's true.
It's a good system where it's super easy to make the wrong choice and super hard to make the right choice. You know, we're in America, 23 million Americans live in a food desert where they can't find a vegetable. You know, I met the woman from Cleveland who lived in the project. She said her mother wanted to feed her healthy food.
She had to literally take four buses on a two-hour round trip to just buy some vegetables for her family. That's the way we live in. We live in a world where 80% of the food in grocery stores is processed and contains sugar, where the food we're eating is all commodities. You know, 60% of the food we eat is basically derived from a number of few products, wheat, corn and soy, which is basically flour, sugar, and refined oils that are turned into all varieties of processed food.
Basically, if you cover the front of the package, you couldn't tell what's in the box if it's a pizza or a corn dog because it's all the same nonsense. And so we have a very tough time where people to change and that's why I realize it's not people's fault when they're advertised food that is addictive, when the food's designed to be biologically hijacking their brain chemistry and their metabolism, when we know the science is so clear on this and yet we do nothing about it. You know, in America, we have one in two people with a chronic disease and that's increasing dramatically. We have, you know, children, 40% overweight, 70% of Americans overweight and increasingly across the globe, we're seeing the same thing as the food industry is exporting its toxic products across the globe.
We're seeing people suffering mental illness. We're seeing people driven, which is driven in part by the food we're eating. And we're still trying to solve the problem in the doctor's office and the costs are staggering. I mean, just in America alone over the next 35 years, the cost of chronic illness, both directed indirect costs is $95 trillion.
Let me just put that in perspective, that's $3.1 trillion a year. And the entire federal tax revenue, the amount that the government collects from the citizens is $3.8 million. So it's almost the entire federal budget that's needed to pay for... I'm glad you put that in context, because these figures, they're so big, they're so staggering.
For many of us, we don't even know what that means. What is one trillion, two trillion? What does that mean? Let me tell you, if you take $95 trillion and you stack them in dollar bills up into the sky, it would reach 6.4 billion miles.
Now, the new New Horizon spaceship has been traveling for 13 years to get past Pluto at 36,000 miles an hour and it's only gone 4 billion miles. So can you imagine how much money that is? It's basically the entire economy of the entire world. And I guess that is what you were saying at the start, that food is, yes, it's about health, but you're making the case that it's so much more than that.
It's about politics, it's about the economy, it's about the environment, it's about climate change. All of these things come from food, which is very powerful. If we figured out how to fix this money thing, we'd have money for free education, for everybody on the planet, for free healthcare, for social services, for the needy among us. We'd be able to create a very vibrant economy and society rather than being burdened by this food-caused epidemic of product disease.
It's kind of as if, on one level, we've got this the wrong way rounds, we're accepting the food system the way it is and saying, okay, that's the food system. We need to pour more money into the system because it's not working. In the UK, the National Health Service, we need to pour more money into the National Health Service, but actually it looks so, we're both interested in getting to the root cause of our patients' problems, but actually the root cause of many of society's problems from what you're saying. It's also food.
It's food. Yeah, let's go into it. So we've got the chronic disease epidemic, we've got the economic burden. Let's talk about some of the social justice issues around this.
Yeah. Well, I think what we'll time really nicely there is something you said, which is, I realize that for many of my patients, it's not their fault. I think that was really poignant because when people talk about healthy food choices, a lot of people on social media, a lot of people in the media still think it is the person's fault that they know what they should be doing, they're simply not following the advice. They need more willpower.
They need to get a grip of their life. It's not good enough. But I guess what you're saying is it's not their fault. Why do so many people think it is their fault and why do you think it's not their fault?
Well, that's a great question. So the reason people think it's their fault is because we've been told by doctors, nutritionists, our governments, and of course, the food industry that all calories are the same. That calories and calories out exercise more eat less, you lose weight. And if you don't do it, it's your fault that all calories are the same as just about moderation and that 20 ounce soda with 250 calories is exactly the same as enough cups of broccoli with 250 calories.
I mean, even a five-year-old can get that ridiculous, but that's exactly the message out there. And when all calories are the same, then there's a sense of, well, just control yourself, control yourself. It's your fault. But the truth is we know from the science that all calories are the same and ultra processed food calories affect the body.
The brain and metabolism very differently. So what are ultra processed foods for people who are listening to this? It's pretty much everything in the supermarket in the middle of it. It's packaged food.
It's refined foods. It's white flour. It's white sugar. It's high fructose corn.
It's trans-fast. All the food adders and chemicals are in food. When you buy a package or processed food, it's basically what's made by the food industry. It's the whole thing.
It's right. Yes. I mean, I make it really simple. When I teach in churches, I say, you know, it's really simple to know what to eat.
Leave the food that man made. Eat the food that God made. Did God make a Twinkie? No.
Did God make a avocado? Yeah. Does it have an ingredient list? It's probably not good to eat.
It's really delicious. It's sardines, olive oil and salt, tomatoes, water and salt, etc. There's stuff that you can buy that's canned or packaged that is real food. Most of them are not.
What's true, and this is validated with over 300 interviews with food industry, insiders, whistleblowers, food scientists that were done by Michael Moss. These foods are designed to be biologically addictive. They have craving and experts that work in taste institutes to create the bliss point of food, the quote, bliss point of food, designed to create what they call heavy users. These are their internal terms that they use within the food industry.
They know actually how to create that perfect mouthfeel, that perfect brain hook where your brain is literally addicted. So like if I said to a patient, listen, I want you to hold your breath underwater for 10 minutes, I'm going to give you five million dollars darn right, they're going to want to do that, but they won't be able to do that. And it's the same thing when we're eating these foods, they alter our brain chemistry and our hormones in a way that affects our ability to control our behavior. And if you shut that off, it changes everything.
So I'll tell you a quick story about this woman, Janice, who came to our Center for Functional Medicine in Cleveland, and joined one of our groups. And she was 66, she typed your diabetes, she demanded insulin for 10 years. She had a body mess index of 43, which is very overweight, 25 or less is normal, 30 is OB, she was 43. She had high blood pressure, heart failure, kidneys were starting to fail, her liver was starting to fail.
And she was on a bolo to medications, blood, blood pressure, medications, cholesterol meds, diuretics, you name it, she was on it. And her whole life, I mean, she was ready to get one minute, but her whole life, she had never learned about food, she grew up in a home that all the ate was packaged and processed food, she grew up in a home where they didn't cook. And she was just focused on her career and her life and was doing really great things, but it was really on her way out. And we just literally put her on a Whole Foods anti-inflammatory detox fine diet, basically similar to the 10-D detox diet, the book that I wrote, which is very low in starch and sugar.
Within three days, she was off her insulin. In three months, she was off all her medications. Her blood sugar was normal, or A1C went from 11 to 5 and a half, which as a doctor, you know, is extremely dramatic. And without that, to put in concert, we were listening to that, so I'm being a very, very poorly controlled, too diabetic, to not actually going into the pre-diversit range, actually into the normal range.
And then her heart failure, which by the way, heart failure never reverses in conventional medicine, you can manage with medications. Her ejection fraction was 35%. If it's under 30, you're headed towards a heart transplant. And it went up to 50 after her three months.
And her kidney failure, which was on her way to dialysis, reversed, just using the power of food and putting her in a group setting where she was given support and education and knowledge. Without that, it's so inspiring to people. She lost over the course of a year, 116 pounds, and now has her life back and is off all medication and saved about $20,000 in co-pays for her medication. And I don't know what her insurance company was paying.
Yeah. I mean, Mark, you've got countless stories about it because you had been talking about using food as medicine for years now. I remember before I even got into this way of thinking, I was reading blogs that you'd been writing and thinking, wow, this is incredible. I wonder if that will work if I try that.
You can see how impassioned you are talking about this. But you mentioned the addictive qualities of food. And I think it reminds me of a conversation I had recently on the podcast with Professor Felice Jacker. You may not know her, but you'll be familiar with her work.
She was in charge of the first randomized controlled trial, The Smiles Trial, that was done in Australia to look at where the diet can improve depression. The first, exactly 67 patients, she showed that the group who changed their diet to a modified Mediterranean diet after 12 weeks had above a 30% remission rate compared to only 8% in the control group, which was social support. And when I spoke to her on my podcast, I also mentioned to her that my cousin who's in his late 20s, he's now working, he tries to work every day in his car. And he says when he's driving home after a day after a busy day's work, there is one roundabout in particular where there is a KFC.
And he says, I can smell the food every time I go through that roundabout. And I can't always resist. I will often succumb to that smell. So put his windows up in the recirculation button on his car.
What's interesting is that you mentioned the taste of these foods is formulated in such a way that they almost have that sort of addictive quality to them. Not almost actually measurable on brain scans, looking at the part of the brain that's affected just like heroin and cocaine. It's not an emotional addiction. It's a biological addiction.
Wow. Do you know much about the smell of these foods, whether it can do similar things? I bet it can. I mean, I've been succumbing and sometimes I was at a very stressful drip and I was coming back from somewhere and it was my flame was delayed.
I was in the eight in the morning and I'd see patients the next day. And I thought sorry for myself, there was a cine button stand and they blow that like I think they have a family blow the smell towards you. And I just went and had a cine button. But yeah, I was terrible.
I felt horrible after. Yeah. But you're just showing that we're all human. We can know as much as we want about the right food choices.
You clearly know about the right food choices. But even you are susceptible. When life gets tough, when you're stressed, when you're tired, if the food environment around you is blowing out that smell is, you know, tempting you with the offerings. Ultimately, it's going to be very hard to make those good choices.
That's why I have to change the food system. That's why this book Food Fixers for me is such an important part of how I think about the world now. And I think about, yes, you know, it's about obesity and diabetes and chronicities, but also it's about mental health, as you said. And even in our kids, you know, we see our kids not functioning well.
One in 10 kids have attention deficit, 40% of our kids in America overweight in school. We have increasing amounts of performance issues. We have what we call an achievement gap, you know, we're 31st in the world and in education, math, and reading and so forth. We're worse than Vietnam.
And the reason is because it's affecting our kids' brains and their cognitive function. This is well documented. These kids are nutritionally deficient. And kids who grew up in poor environments or don't have adequate high quality nutrition, their brains are 10% smaller.
IQ points, points lower. We've literally lost millions of IQ points in our children. You mentioned kids who are growing up in poor environments, so these deprived communities. And we know full well what the research says about people living in areas of lower socioeconomic status is the way the food industry is set up.
Does it unfairly penalize those with the least in society? So when we look at the social injustice around food, it's massive. You know, when you look at how the food industry targets poor minorities, it's disproportionate. So they're targeting them with more ads and more marketing.
And they're providing their communities with more of these foods, such as soda and processed food. And it has a big impact on them. Maybe African Americans are 80% more likely to get diabetes. They're four times more likely to get kidney failure.
They're three and a half more likely to get amputations. And these communities are being targeted by the food industry in direct ways. And then there's accessibility to poor environments where there's no grocery stores, where there's convenience stores and no produce stores. Yeah.
So for seven years, Mark, I worked in a place called Oldham in North Manchester in the UK. And it was then right at the center of Oldham and the practice was in quite a deprived area. What most people consider a deprived area. Most of my patients were, you know, were certainly on very low incomes.
Many were working two jobs. But what was interesting is that these guys really cared about themselves and their families. They were trying to make the best decisions. And I think it's really important to highlight this because I think a lot of blame gets put on people who are struggling with their health and making certain food choices.
But I saw first hands how, like, for example, I would usually bring my lunch into work with me on the rare occasion where I forgot to bring it. Sometimes I think, okay, I'm just going to go and walk and buy something. It certainly is not like Santa Monica where we're calling this podcast, which is probably the wellness capital in the world where it's super easy to buy something healthy. I would walk for about a mile in diameter around that practice.
And I struggled to find anything because there was at least seven or eight fried chicken and kebab shops with big signs on their saying something like, you know, £1.99 each as much as you can. You know, that's what? Two pounds, that's what? Maybe about $3.
It's very hard to compete with that. And I thought, I can give them the best advice that I possibly can. But then moving into an environment where it's simply too difficult day in day out to make those healthy choices, in addition, they, I found were very trusting off the government and the supermarkets. So when I explained to them about certain breakfast series that they were having in the morning, they were shocked.
And they said, well, that's just you, but yeah, but why they've been sold in the supermarket, says a picture of, you know, heart, it says heart's healthy, it's because there's no fat. No, but what's interesting for me, Mark, is that these guys were trying their best. They literally were shocked when I was telling this information. So when we think that everyone knows this stuff now, they don't, and it is these different areas, which you can't get the hardest.
Absolutely. I remember when I was in helping with this movie, FedUp, which was released a few years ago. Food industry and sugar on the health of our nation. There was a family that I worked with, and they lived in one of the worst food deserts in America.
They were very overweight. The father was 42 already had kidney failure on dialysis from diabetes at 42. The mother was severely overweight. The son was severely overweight.
The 16 had almost diabetes and struggled. And they lived in a trailer on food stamps and disability. They were, you know, trying to lose weight because the father couldn't get a new kidney until he lost 40 pounds, but they didn't know what to do. And they were eating all this stuff that they thought was healthy, like cool whip, because it had zero trans fats, which was basically all trans fats and sugar.
It just basically threw a loophole in the government that allowed them to actually say zero trans fat. They had processed salad dressings. They used iceberg lettuce. They didn't never know how to cook.
They didn't have any utensils. They didn't have knives, cutting knives. They didn't have cutting boards. So I said, well, rather than me giving a lecture on how to eat healthy, let's just go into your kitchen.
Let's get some groceries, make simple food. We made turkey chili, I made salad from like real lettuce and real vegetables and olive oil and vinegar dressing. We roasted some sweet potatoes with some herbs. We stir-fried some asparagus.
They didn't know how to do any of that. They didn't know how to roast. They didn't know how to sautee. They didn't know how to nothing.
And what the vegetables they had were canned green beans and iceberg lettuce. And that was pretty much everything else was from a box or package. And they really didn't know. And I said, here's what is going on.
I took everything out of the cupboard. I showed them everything. I covered them in front of the boxes and said, what is this? And I couldn't tell.
I looked at the ingredient list. I said, it's all the same stuff, just in different size shapes and some colors. And they were so eager. And I said, let's cook and meal together.
So we sat together. We cooked. We talked. We had fun.
They loved the food. It was delicious. And I said, look, you guys can do this. Here's a cookbook.
Here's a guy. I mean, you eat well for last. You know, a good friend on a tight budget. And I didn't know what's going to happen.
In the first week, she texted me back. We lost 18 pounds as a family within a year. The mother lost about 100 pounds. The son lost 50, gained it back by working at a best food restaurant, which is only place to work down there.
But eventually got his act together. He lost 138 pounds. He asked me for a letter recommendation for medical school. And now he's in medical school, which is just staggering and amazing.
And we have the ability to actually do this if people understand what's going on. But most people don't understand that they're being taken advantage of, that they're being targeted, the system is set up for them to fail. And it's not an accident. We have sort of alluding to the reason we have these policies is because the food industry controls the government.
They spend half a billion dollars just on our farm bill in the US, which is controls our food and ag policy. There's 100% of the Senate and House Ag Committee members are on the take from big food and big ag in terms of campaign donations. Who do you think they're going to support corporate interests or citizens? And it's really unfortunate.
The policies we have are so destructive. I want to just go through them. One, you know, we, we support the growing of commodity foods, corn, soy, and wheat, which gets turned into processed food. So we make it cheap to have processed food and it's high fructose corn syrup.
I mean, the vice chairman of Pepsi said, when I asked him why to use high fructose corn syrup, he said, because the government makes it too cheap for us not to use it. And I said, you know, we have policies that allow unlimited marketing of junk food to our children. And the rest of us were it's proven to cause harm. We'll, the FDA makes food labels, the federal food drug administration, they're so confusing that the average person can understand them and doesn't prohibit the use of toxic chemicals that are used in our food supply, which are mostly banned in Europe.
Things like BHT and other things. We have policies that support food stamps. In other words, not only we grow the food, it's the bad food, but then we provide it to our poor with $75 billion a year in food stamps, $7 billion, which is soda, and Coca-Cola's major source of American revenue, 20% of it comes from food stamps. So that's my queen.
Could you, for a lot of my UK lessons, could you explain what food stamps are? Yeah, food stamps are basically food assistance. If you're poor, there are 46 million Americans who need food support, because they're basically, you know, it's like a card credit card you can go buy food with. And they can't afford to buy food.
So the government gives them money to do it. But it's all processed food. And one in four children in this country depend on food stamps. So it seems, it seems maddening this because on one hand, you've got potentially government doing a good thing, which is, okay, you can't afford food.
We're going to help you. But with the other hand, they're supporting, if I understand this right, they're supporting the wrong food choices, or the unhelpful food choices. So they could keep the food stamp system, but encourage whole food, process foods. And then suddenly you're helping these communities out and supporting their health.
Absolutely. And it's been shown, you can say billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of deaths by incentivizing good food and incentivizing bad food. But they won't happen because the government is so locked up with the food industry. Mark, I want to ask you a question.
In all years, I've known you and seen you speak, you've always been very passionate about getting to the root cause of problems. You've always been extremely passionate about how powerful food is. But I don't think I've ever seen you this impassioned about a particular topic. And it's really...
I'm just getting started. Yeah, but it's really interesting for me. It's that you've died deep into the research on this over the last few years. I know that one right in this book, you saw a lot yourself away.
You've actually really tried to understand, systemically, what is going on here? Has what you have found, is that what's driving this new sort of supercharged passion? Has that made you angry? It has made me angry because...
Well, anger has also made me optimistic because if we can identify and name the problem, we can do something about it. We talk about climate change. People go, I get climate change. But nobody's talking about the impact of the food system, not just on chronic disease and the economy and our kids brains and mental health, even violence.
We know is linked to bad food and prisons. Violent prisoners can reduce violent crime in prisons by 56% just by eating healthy diets. But we also know that it's destroying our environment, our climate. The food system is the number one cause of climate change.
People don't get that. People don't understand that when you put it all together, whether it's deforestation, soil erosion, factory farming, whether it's food waste, processing, distribution, refrigeration of food, all that together makes the food system the number one cause of climate change. It's not driving electric car. We've got to fix the food system.
Well, let's get into climate change because it's clearly a topic that is at the tip of many people's tongues these days. It's a very hot political agenda. There have been many documentaries made on what is driving climate change. But it's also a bit like the diet wars in terms of what foods we should be eating.
The climate change wars potentially can be quite polarizing in terms of what foods are driving this. I don't know how much you've got into that. What are those foods that are driving it? I wonder whether we could have broaden out that discussion in terms of soil health, regenerative agriculture, climate change.
What are the foods that are driving this and how do we change it? Great question. I think we've pretty much gotten into this conversation that meat is the cause of climate change, that we should not eat meat and I'll be vegans and that would solve climate change. It depends and it's a more nuanced answer.
So factory farming of animals absolutely is a significant contributor to climate change. Whether it's 10%, 14%, it's a significant contributor. Why? Because factory farming animal is not just about the methane burps from the cows.
It's about the way we grow the food that feeds the cows. So we grow a lot of corn through industrial processes that destroy the soil, which use up enormous water resources that depends on huge amounts of fossil fuel dependent things like fertilizer, which takes a lot of energy to make herbicides and pesticides, which are fossil fuel derived. And so we have a real problem. And then all the factory farming of animals also drives huge amounts of methane in the environment.
So you've got this whole problem of factory farming of animals. But as a friend of mine said, it's not the cow, it's the how. So when you look at one of the biggest drivers of climate change, it's the loss of soil. We think of the rainforest, but the soil on the earth is a far bigger carbon sink than all the rainforest.
Well, let's dive into that. I think a lot of people listen to this will not be familiar with this. What does the soil do? Why is soil health so important for the environment, but also the human house?
So that we have lost huge amounts of soil. So we lose about 2 billion tons of soil every year, 200,000 tons an hour. We lose farmland the size of North Korea or Nicaragua to desert every year. Soil, if it's healthy, not the soil that we now have in America, because we've lost so much soil, we've lost a third of all the soil on the planet for farming because of the way we grow food.
We basically till it and then we pour these chemicals into it that destroy the organic matter of the soil. Now organic matter is basically carbon. It's carbon in the soil. How does it get there to a very powerful, the most powerful technology in the planet to reduce carbon?
It's called photosynthesis. It's this ancient technology that sucks carbon out of the environment. What the plants and grasses breathe, they breathe carbon dioxide and they suck it in and then they build plant material, right? They build carbon, it goes into the soil.
Every 1% of carbon in the soil, organic matter in the soil will help to draw down carbon and also help to restore water in the soil. 1% organic matter in the soil leads to an extra 27,000 gallons of water that can be stored in there. Why are we having droughts and floods and wildfires? Because the soil can't hold the water anymore.
So it either runs through it or it just kind of runs off it and that leads to this huge amounts of droughts and floods. So organic matter in the soil is the thing we have to build and we've lost most of it. In fact, we had so many in America, we had places with 50 feet of topsoil that's now almost gone because it was built by the bison and the elk, 60 million bison. We had more ruminants running around America than we have cows and there was no climate change from it.
It wasn't that because it basically grazed the grass in a certain way, moving around frequently, they dug with their hosts, they pooped and peed and that's what builds soil. It uses natural fertilizer. The cows become part of the cycle. And I think regenerative agriculture is the science of how do we build new soil as a solution to creating a healthy ecosystem, to dealing with our scarce water resources, to increasing biodiversity, which we all depend on.
I mean, we've lost 75% of our pollinator species because of all the chemical agriculture and Einstein said that if we lose bees off the face of the earth humans have four years to live. Just taking a quick break in the conversation to give a shout out to some of the sponsors of today's show. As you know, I am a huge fan of meditation. There are so many incredible benefits.
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You can check it out at athleticgreens.com forward slash live more. So you should say it's not the cow, it's the how. So therefore, has your research basically shown that if we go, I guess, to more traditional ways, or I don't know if you have to find new ways. It's almost mimicking nature, right?
Mimicking how natural herds moved around. These big herds moved around in concentrated groups. They would not graze the grass to the nub. They would kind of graze it down halfway.
They'd move along, they'd poop and pee, and they kept doing this. And this is what built the soil. So when we look, for example, at life cycle analysis, that was done by Qantas of both a GMO soy burger, was actually the impossible burger, compared to a regenerative farms, grass fed, regionally raised beef burger, they found that while the impossible burger was far better than a feedlot burger, in terms of its carbon image, a carbon footprint, it added three and a half kilos of carbon to the environment. So it was a net add of carbon in greenhouse gases to the environment by eating an impossible burger, GMO soy burger, the grass fed burger pulled out three and a half kilos of carbon from the atmosphere.
So you'd basically have to eat one regionally raised grass fed burger to offset the carbon emissions of a soy burger. That is mindblowing, actually. This is my opinion. This is an independent scientific group that analyze both of those.
So just to clarify that, essentially, what this research is saying is that an impossible burger is better than a feedlot, I guess. So a convention, you know, these sort of factory farms, burgers. So on that, if you make an argument with those two, yes, an impossible burger is better. But if you compare an impossible burger to a generally raised grass fed burger, then that is better for the environment than the impossible burger.
Now that is not the narrative that has been played out in the media at the moment. And I guess then the question is, is that also on purpose? Is that also part of this big structural problem with the food industry? It's huge.
Yeah, it's huge. I mean, I think, yes, we should be finding, you know, other alternatives and protein sources. That's great. But it's also a highly processed industrial food.
And when we talk about growing the soy, what does that mean? Well, we're growing soy in jar and large monocrop fields. Often these are rainforests that have been destroyed and taken down. I don't think they may use American sources.
The amount of fertilizer destroys the soil and the organic amount of the soil, it off gases, greenhouse gases, it takes a lot of energy fossil fuels to produce. And it runs off into the rivers and lakes and oceans. In fact, in the Gulf of Mexico, there's a dead stone the size of New Jersey that kills 212,000 metric tons of fish every year. There are 400 dead zones like that across the world in areas of coastal areas that feed half a billion people on the planet.
And if you put them all together, it will be the size of Europe. That's just a nitrogen fertilizer. And then let's talk about the herbicides and the pesticides. They also kill pollinator species in the biodiversity and the soil.
And they don't promote organic matter. So they kill the organic matter in the soil. So you end up with, then the soil needs massive amounts of irrigation because it can't hold water. We have 70% of human use of freshwater is for irrigation of crops, mostly for animal production.
So we have water depletion, which we're losing our water. So we have the killing of the soil. We have the polluting of our lakes and rivers. We have the loss of biodiversity when you're eating your impossible burger.
Now, that is a shock for most people to hear because it sounds like it's a soy burger, grass fed, all that, or I mean the gym, it's a plant-based burger. But it's not as simple as that. And when you look at the ecosystem services that are provided by a regenerative farm, it's massive. So there's been huge investments now in buying up all regular farms and converting them to grass fed or regenerative farms because they provide so much benefit.
So we are the providing economic benefits. So that's important. This is going to be part of the solution. It has to also be an economic benefit.
That's the harsh reality of life. We use about, I don't know, it's $120 trillion a year of ecosystem services from the planet. We're basically extracting these and using them. Whereas regenerative, which can actually provide value, it increases the biodiversity of soil, it increases the water retention, it increases the organic matter, it sucks carbonate environment and it's been estimated that the soil can hold three times the amount of carbon is in the atmosphere today.
And if you actually were to scale this up and it needs to be scaled up, it could literally draw down all the carbon from the industrial revolution. I mean, always essentially saying, if we fix the soil, the solutions under our feet, we fix our health, we fix our food industry, we fix climate change. Yes, because not only are you growing different kinds of food, the food you're growing is so much more nutrient dense. Why do plants get nutrients?
They get it from the soil. If you don't have the right microbes in the soil, you can't extract the minerals and vitamins from the soil. We know that our plants, even if they're healthy organic plants, have 50% less nutrient levels than they did 50 years ago. And that's something really important for many of us to remember, and I've seen plenty of data supporting this, that the broccoli from 2019 is not the same broccoli as the one in 1970, in terms of the nutrients available.
So we could be trying our best and trying to eat as many vegetables as we can, trying our best if we can afford it to go for this organic vegetables, but we still are not getting the nutrients that pretty much everyone was getting 40, 50 years ago. And the problem is that there are basically a couple of dozen companies that control the food system, the big food companies, the big ag and processing companies, the ag or chemical companies, the seed companies, the fertilizer companies. There's just a few companies that have massively consolidated. There's just over 100 seed companies 30 years ago.
Now there's like four big ones that control 60% of our food. Well, you mentioned all these pesticides and herbicides that are getting used and the damage that's causing to the soil. But I was reading bits of your book where I think you were suggesting that being a farmer in the United States is quite a dangerous job. So as well as the systemic implications of this, what are the implications for that individual farmer?
Well, this is another part of the social injustice issue. There's many aspects of that, but you know, food and farm workers were excluded from their labor act that was developed in the 30s to create fair labor standards in the United States, minimum wage, working conditions and so forth. Why? Because most of the food and farm workers were former slaves, so they weren't protected.
And that is carried over even now, 80 or 90 years later, we're seeing lack of protection. So the average food worker may make $2 an hour and depend on tips. They make minimum wage or less, and they're unable to take care of their own health care. They're unable to provide their food services.
Many of these workers have to be on food stamps or food assistance. And the farming itself is highly dangerous. They are, I mean, the pesticides, the chemicals they use, the working conditions. But you see pictures, I think it's strawberry farmers with face masks on.
Gas masks, yeah, the whole whole stuff is covered whilst they're spraying pesticides. And the food workers, I mean, it's, you know, working in a big chicken factory, for example, processing chickens, it's like a one step after the other repetitive motion injuries. They even don't let them go to the bathroom and they come to work in diapers. So the next time you're having your factory farm chicken, think of that food worker who's came to go to the bathroom and has to pee in a diaper because you can't leave the food line.
Think about that. Yeah, this is, this really changes the conversational food, really, doesn't it? Because what's that so personal? It's political?
Yeah, it is. It's not just political, economical, you know, yes, health. But even I think I saw this on Twitter recently, actually, someone who was, who wasn't a huge believer in organic food, actually tweeted something. I wish I could remember who it was and said, actually, you know what?
I was wrong, because I didn't realize the implications it had on those individual farmers. Oh, yeah. And I was just thinking about my own health and that's a separate story, which we had time can go into. But he said, actually, realize how selfish I was being because actually the implications for that individual farmer is huge.
And I think and their kids, you know, the data has been looked at, but the pesticide exposure in these in these groups has led to a loss of 41 million IQ points in these kids. We're literally sacrificing the minds of our future generation. We're destroying the intellectual capital of our society. I think that this appears to be, I think it's a global problem.
But from what I see, and I'm interested as to where the book of your research has been on this, is this more for problem in the United States than anywhere else in the world? Well, like the United States, it leads in many things, but it's not just the United States. It's everywhere. It's global.
80% of the world's type two diabetics in the developing world. China and India are number one and two in diabetes. We're seeing Africa being inundated with fast food companies taking over. It's aspirational.
It's a sign of affluence to the KFC in Ghana. And they are controlling the narrative and manipulating the science all around the world of Malaysia. They're partnering with co-nutrition scientists to produce research that shows the products are healthy. It's interesting.
I thought as you were talking about these so-called developing countries, which I guess is in many ways a misnomer now, and I think China and India are probably going to be more developed than we are here. But I remember as a kid, when I used to go to Calcutta in India every other summer, we'd go for six weeks because my family, well, it's a beautiful place actually. But yes, there's a lot of poverty, a lot of problems there. But I remember as a kid going down, and in the summer, in our British summer, in July and August, the schools were still running.
So I guess in my cousin, they'd be going to school. I remember in the morning breakfast would be served, and they had proper meals. So meal will be prepared. That'd be like two or three vegetable curries, maybe a bit of fish, maybe some chipassie breads, maybe a bit of rice.
But they had a proper meal before they went to school. And I used to think this is so different because I have a quick bowl of cereal that takes two minutes to prepare. If that probably takes 30 seconds to call the milk over, I need that. And I didn't really realize the significance of it at the time.
But now is our effect. And now when I go back, I'm not mean for a few years, but culture has changed. What you said about the middle class is aspiring to this Western way of living. Now, they're too busy.
Now they don't want a proper meal. They want the quick cereal. And you see the big adverts everywhere that the food companies have come in, they're advertising how healthy these foods are. They want the quick, highly processed bread that you can put in the toaster for 20 seconds, it's toasted, and you can slap on some jam and get out to work quickly.
And it's amazing that actually, this was only like 20 years ago, 25 years ago, where they were having the middle classes in India, were having these proper meals before they went out for the day, whereas now they've aspired for this, what they consider this Western ideal. And it's quite striking how quickly that's changed. It's true. And the good news though, in researching the book is there's a lot of bad news.
But the good news is that there is a lot that can be done to fix this problem. That's why I call the book food fix, because there are solutions that citizens can do, in terms of choosing what they eat, in terms of composting. For example, food waste is a huge issue, this third largest emitter greenhouse gases of our country after US and China. We have ways we can influence our choices with our wallets and our votes.
So people often are cynical about the political process of voting, but it matters. And we do have control. We can their grassroots movements and efforts happening all around. I think there are a lot of things that people need to get involved and to actually change their personal life, their personal health, and their communities.
And that's really what food fix is about. It's about outlining what those solutions are and how to do them. So you sound, as well as sounding impassioned, and almost, you know, I wouldn't say angry as the wrong word, but I'll raise it. A little frustrate, a little like, ah, we'll wake up everybody.
This is happening. There's a real notes of optimism here. And I think let's go into the optimism, because I think if people are listening to this and they're affected by this and they think, yeah, well, actually, okay, fine, I can't maybe influence the political system, although maybe there's a way that they can. But on an individual level, let's talk about some of the things they can do.
And I tell you, on a personal level, as I've been reading more about factory farming, as I've understood it more, yeah, sure, the financial case, the political case, but just the moral and ethical case around it in terms of how animals are treated. There's a Thai restaurant near to where we live, where, you know, sometimes my wife and my kids will go out and eat there. We'd like to do that. And I, in the past, maybe if you could have had, let's say, Pad Thai chicken noodles.
Okay. But recently, the last couple of years, I will now no longer have that, because I know that the chicken being served there. I don't think it's a high quality. I don't think it's factory farms.
They're very unclear on where this chicken comes from. And so, you know, you could say we should boycott the restaurant. Okay, you can make that case. But we don't.
We go. But I will have a, you know, I'll have the vegetarian pad Thai noodles now. So I won't support and pay for something on the menu as much as I possibly can, that actually it's going to support that industry. And I feel I'm doing a little bit, you know, I had this conversation a few weeks ago, my kids, they wanted the chicken.
And I said, look, guys, you know, do you know where that chicken comes from? Do you know what is happening? Do you still want that chicken? And look, I'm not saying I'm doing this the right way with my kids.
But I think kids are the future. And I think if we can teach and have these conversations with our kids, then they're going to see this from a young age. And they would like, yeah, actually daddy will have the vegetarian one as well. How much of a difference does a simple choice for a family of four like that actually make it make a difference.
I imagine if everybody in the world decided for one day, they were going to not eat any processed food or any fast food. Don't you think that would have a big impact on the global markets? I think I think we have more influence than we believe. And I think all starts with grassroots efforts and movements.
So people start demanding things. It changes. I mean, I got a text today because I did a podcast with Tom Newmark about the carbon underground, which is essentially about carbon underground, meaning getting the soil full of carbon again. And I talked about regenerative agriculture and how important it is.
I talked about the fact that General Mills was sort of gilted and forced into committing a million acres to be converted to a regenerative ag. And the person who texted me works at Nestle. And she says, I'm going to bring this to CO of Nestle. Would you be willing to meet with the CO of Nestle to talk about these issues and get them to start changing their supply change?
Because if these companies start, it can make a big difference. And not everybody has that ability to make those levers that I maybe can, but it's possible as a guy named Jeremy Kohler, who was a business guy from the UK who who aggregated $12 trillion in assets from institutional investors and pension funds and said, look guys, we're going to try to end factory farming of animals. First, we're going to start with antibiotics. We're going to go to the top 20 fast food companies who we are all invested in.
And we're going to tell them we're going to divest if you don't stop antibiotics by this date from all your food, like McDonald's and Burger King and all that stuff. And they did and it worked. So there are levers that can be pulled in the system, whether it's through business, whether it's through the market from the bottom up, you know, the groundswells pushing companies to do the right thing into sustainability, into thinking about their communities. And they want, I mean, I think there is more consciousness now happening in those companies because they're hearing it from, you know, the consumers who want this.
And so the consumer demand is driving the marketplace. Yes. And more, the more we all can make these choices, the more people listen to this can go, like, you know what, I'm going to see what small difference I can make in my life. That's going to have a significant, not going to fetch, you know, there's a growth in electric cars.
I mean, that is going to replace the combustion engine very soon. Why? Because consumers and people are demanding it. Same thing that happened with food.
You mentioned prisons before. Yeah. And I found that really interesting. Both you and I have spoken to Dan Boettner on our podcast, the chap who has studied extensively, these so-called blue zones around the world, these areas of high longevity, these longevity hotspots.
And what's what's striking about that is that a lot of people are, you know, debating what are the various components of that. One thing that seems to be really consistent is that the environment is set up in such a way that it makes the healthy choice, the easy choice, right? And you mentioned a statistic, something like if you serve healthy food in a prison, what was 50 something percent? Well, they basically were looking at, you know, you talked about the smile study, about the effect of food on depression and we know mental illness is really driven by a lot of nutritional deficiencies.
In violence and behavior change, we don't really think about it that way. But in prisons, they've done randomized trials where they put half the group on a healthy diet, half the group on the same prison diet, who are violent criminals, violent in prison. And they reduce violent crime by 56%. And if they add a multivitamin, they reduced it by 80%.
And I remember ones coming home from, I mean, coming into my office at work and there was a letter, handwritten letter, that was from a prisoner in prison who said, Dr. Hyman, I read your book in prison. I changed my diet and I don't know how we did it in prison. And I realized my whole life as a violent criminal was because of what I was eating.
I feel like a completely different person. So that is powerful, isn't it? That is so incredibly powerful to see the power of foods. Yeah.
There is something going on in the UK, the moment, actually, which I'm just going to bring up here. And a lot of people are getting quite annoyed and very frustrated with the term food as medicine, or food as medicine. It's really interesting. Yeah.
And I know they have a quarrel with Hippocrates, huh? Yeah, I know my thoughts on it. I know probably very soon as yours, but maybe it's just been a nice little offshoot here to touch on, you know, these stories are mentioning the smiles trial, this prisoner who wrote to you, all the countless case studies you've got and I've got is food medicine. Absolutely.
I mean, there is no doubt about it. I'm William Lee just wrote a book called Eat to Beat Disease, who's a Harvard physician. I'm not really, I've seen everyone. I'm not actually really brilliant.
But he showed a slide and there's very sophisticated analyses testing food components compared to drug components. So a blood pressure drug, a cholesterol drug, heart failure drug, whatever the drug is, and looked at various food components and how it compared in terms of the effectiveness. We're using very sophisticated models for testing these in biology. And they found that almost every single time food beat out the drug in terms of effectiveness.
Wow. And what food is far more than calories, as I was talking about, not all calories are the same. That's the biggest thing that's perpetuating everything. Because in the fast food world, if all calories are the same, it doesn't matter if it's KFC or soda, or French fries, as long as you balance your calories, it doesn't matter what you eat.
That's not true, because food is information. So we know that food influences the body in multiple ways. One, it changes gene expression. You literally can turn on or off genes by which if you had broccoli, you can turn on genes that help you detoxify and produce glutathione, right?
If you eat green tea, you drink green tea, you increase the level of catechins, which have the ability to detoxify heavy metals and activate various enzymes. If you eat the right foods, you can balance your hormones. If you eat the wrong foods, too much insulin, your testosterone goes down. If you eat the right fats, it's the opposite.
If you look at what it does to your brain chemistry, you can either hijack your brain chemistry or make you calm and peaceful in your mood. It can change your microbiome. You literally have trillions of bacteria in your gut that control almost every function of your body. When you eat the wrong foods, you grow the bad ones that make you sick.
When you eat the right foods, you grow the good ones that make you healthy. So literally with every bite in real time, you're changing your bowel chemistry, your physiology, your genetics, every single minute of the day. Yeah. You're absolutely right.
I mean, it is that powerful. This is not my opinion, by the way. This is just hard science. Yeah.
I would have said that out, of course, we're talking about food. But even sleep, there's a really good study showing that a single night's sleep deprivation changes the expression. I think of over 700 genes that if you haven't slept well, the genes that actually predispose inflammation, the pro-inflammatory genes get turned on and the anti-inflammatory ones start getting switched off. So our lifestyle literally is medicine.
It's not just prevention of health problems. It can often be used as the treatment as well. And that's something that I think is still not recognized enough. It still always comes down to prevention.
And of course, prevention is better than cure. But you can use the lifestyle a lot of the time as well as like the story with Janice. I mean, we weren't preventing her heart failure, preventing her diabetes, preventing her high blood pressure. We were treating it with food and with lifestyle.
So yes, food is medicine, exercise is medicine, sleep is medicine, stress reduction is medicine. You know, connection, love is medicine. These are all medicines. I mean, work well, medicine.
Most importantly, this is the medicine we need primarily for the health problems of the 21st century. That's the key. Maybe 34 years ago, you know, maybe we didn't need these things as medicine in the same way. Maybe our conventional opinion of medicine, like a drug that we prescribe, you know, if you've got an acute problem and you come in with that, you know, I can understand where that rationale has come from.
The health landscape of the US, of the UK has changed dramatically. So we now need these lifestyle tools as our medicine. By the way, twice as many people die from chronic lifestyle diseases as infectious disease, not just here, but globally. So in Africa, they're suffering the double burden of malnutrition and obesity.
I mean, exactly. It's not ironic in many ways. And it's, I think, not calling food medicine. I think it's not patients to disservice because then it's not put on the same level or a higher level than let's say the pharmaceutical drug that we might have to offer.