Plain English BEST OF: What’s the Matter With America’s Food?

My name is Matt Bellenium, founding partner at Puck, and the writer of the "What I'm Hearing" Newsletter, and with my show "The Town" I bring you the inside conversation about money and power in Hollywood. Every week we've got three short episodes featuring real Hollywood Insiders, tell you what people in town are actually talking about. We'll cover everything from why your favorite show was canceled overnight,

which streamers on the brink of collapse, and which executives on the hot seat.

Disney, Netflix, who's up, down, and who'll never eat lunch in this town again.

Follow the town on Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, everybody, Derek here. In December, my wife and I welcomed our second baby girl into the world. I'm going to be taking some time off, but we wanted to keep the pod going through the holidays. So we're going to be rearing some of our favorite episodes from the last 12 months,

a kind of best of compendium, and this list includes interviews that really stuck with me, and others that really stuck with you, and you had lots of feedback and thoughts on, including this one. I'll be back in the new year with fresh content, but until then, happy new year.

In the last few weeks, we've done several episodes on this show about obesity,

GOP-1 drugs, and nutrition science. What we haven't talked about as much is the politics of food. And today's guests say, if you really want to understand why Americans are so unhealthy,

“you have to see that the problem is not just our willpower.”

It's not just our food itself. It's our food policies. Why, for example, is it so easy for food companies to introduce additives to our food with so little scrutiny? Because our laws make it easy. Why is it so easy to sell supplements and vitamins with vague, but big-sounding promises in the label, despite no evidence that they actually do anything?

Well, again, because our laws make it easy. Why can food companies confuse consumers with ingredients,

or sell junk food to kids, or even get tax deductions for advertising in a way that subsidizes junk food marketing towards children? Again, because of our laws. Now, some of this might sound like it's been ripped from the pages of "Maha," the "Make America Healthy Again" movement that's associated with RFK Jr and the Trump administration.

“As I've always said, I think there's a lot that "Maha" gets right,”

particularly when it comes to emphasizing the importance of diet, exercise, and a greater awareness of our food systems, what we put into our bodies. But today's guests are not "Maha." Kevin Hall was a former top nutrition researcher at the NIH before he resigned after accusing RFK and the Department of Health and Human Services of censoring a report that questioned their description of ultra-process foods. You'll hear a bit more about why he left RFK's NIH in a few minutes.

Julia Belus is a longtime nutrition and health journalist, and together, they've written a new book called "Food Intelligence," the science of how food both nourishes and harms us. Today, we talk about the policy history of American food, going all the way back to the early 1900s, what it would take to actually fix our food supply. What "Maha" gets right and wrong about the science of food and why more than anything, what American food could use more of today,

is precisely "more" science. I'm Derek Thompson. This is "Planning Fish." Kevin Hall, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. Julia Belus, welcome to the show. Thanks so much for inviting us. I've been reporting on food and diet for a few years, and one thing that I keep hearing is, we have to fix the food supply. We have to fix the food supply, but I feel like very few people who actually say and repeat this over and over again,

articulate what they actually mean by this. What is the food supply? Who controls it? Who regulates it? What are the relevant laws and rules that we would have to change to fix it?

“And so that's what I want to dig into with both of you today. You've written this wonderful book”

that outlines the path forward, and I think we can make some real progress on this really important question. Julia, let's start with you. Your thesis is that America struggles with weight and chronic disease, not because of personal failures, but because of our food environment. In other words, it's not us, it's the food. What does that mean? So I went into this area of reporting and researching this book with a personal question. I was one of the people, like I've probably many

diets or exercise programs or whatever the thing was, even supplements when I was a teenager.

“And I carried around this feeling when I couldn't lose the weight that somehow I had failed.”

And when I started to talk to researchers like Kevin and others who work on sort of understanding this symphony of internal signals that we have, that guides our eating behavior. I realized how much of the decisions we make about what we eat are happening beyond our conscious control. And what I came to appreciate through writing this book and working with Kevin was the extent to which the environment kind of interplays with these internal signals that we have that are guiding

our eating behavior. So whether you're going to eat an avocado an eggs in the morning or just turn to a donut or whatever these hundreds of decisions we make about what we're going to put in our mouths every day, there's a lot of evidence that this isn't something we have the control over that we thought we did and therefore, yeah, it's not us. It's the food environment over the years

“where we saw this explosion of diet related chronic diseases including obesity,”

our genes didn't change what changed was the food environment. So yeah, that's sort of what we mean by that. Kevin, I want to dive into specifics and evidence here. There's a ton of observational research on nutrition. Hey, we followed these 1,000 people and we kind of got some surveys about what they ate and we sort of made a connection to what kind of food is better for them and what kind of food is worse. You are one of the only researchers in the world to have

conducted several randomized clinical trials, gold standard trials on the impact of ultra-processed foods in our diet. What did these trials do? What did you find and how were those findings consistent with this idea that as Julia put it so beautifully, our food environment disrupts the symphony of metabolism inside of us. Right. So we were actually trying to isolate the effects

“of the foods per se, right? So there's all these other aspects of the food environment that Julia”

alluded to, the kind of the social environment that we find ourselves in, the advertising, the cues in our environment, the expense, the time commitments that it takes to require to prepare healthy foods or unhealthy foods, as the case may be. We decided to try to remove all of that from these experiments and we brought people in to the NIH Clinical Center where I used to work

and we basically remove people from their normal food environments, grid this very artificial food

environment for them just to kind of isolate that food environment and basically expose them to diets that had plenty of calories, more than double the number of calories that they would require to maintain their weight, try to match them for as many of these different sort of nutrients of concern that we often hear about the salt, sugar, fat, carbs, glycemic load of the diets matched again for the total calories that we presented to people with. And in one instance, we presented

them with a diet that contained none of these so-called ultra-process foods. And in another occasion, we presented them with a diet that contained 80% of calories from ultra-process foods and just gave people very simple instructions in this new food environment. You know, we're interested in seeing how it affects your biology. We're going to be poking and prodding you, putting you in respiratory chambers, measuring your body composition, all sorts of things. What they didn't know was that we were

going to be measuring all their leftovers. And we would basically be trying to figure out how much

of the food presented to them did they actually eat in which foods did they which ones did they leave on their plate. And really simple instructions. It is much as little as you like. Don't be trying to change your weight at all. And what we ended up finding was that despite matching for the presented calories and all these different nutrients, when people were exposed to this ultra-process food environment, they tend to overeat calories. Again, they're not being advertised to them. They're not

having to buy or purchase the food or make the food or anything like that. Just something about the meals that we gave to them, led them to consume more than 500 calories a day on average. Then when the same people were exposed to the food environment that didn't contain these foods, when they were in the ultra-process food environments, they were gaining weight and gaining body fat. They didn't know about these measurements. They were wearing loose-fitting scrubs. They

couldn't tell if their clothes were getting tighter or elusive. And when they went to the ultra-process food environment, they spontaneously lost weight and lost body fat. And so it did seem to be even over and above these broader environmental consequences of our food environment and how it's changed. There seemed to be something about the foods themselves that we were presenting to these folks that led them to over-consume calories and gain weight. Just one level deeper, right? Because

objects of their environment. How are these foods specifically acting on individuals at the biological level that is making us, not just in the lab, but clearly outside of the lab where 40-50% of Americans have obesity over eat? Yeah, great question. So you're pointing out something that's really

“fundamental that I think a lot of folks still have this mythology about that they control everything”

that they eat and that this is just a matter of willpower. The fact of the matter isn't something that we've learned through almost a century of work now is that food intake is a biologically controlled phenomenon and that we actually try to regulate our body weight through the symphony of internal

signals that somehow integrate with environmental cues in ways to basically generate a weight at which

we're regulating. I know you had Randy Celie as a guest on your podcast before he's been working on what is it that determines where that body weight is defended and what are those internal signals and how do they act in the brain in order to give rise to this? I think one of the fundamental questions that we still don't quite have answers to is what is it about ultra-processed foods? What is it about the calorie density of the foods? What is it about how the nutrients and

flavor pairings that might be disrupted in ultra-processed foods with certain additives? How that might affect the gut brain signaling that is one of the pathways of this biological symphony of

“signals that are integrated in our brains to control our food intake over long time periods?”

How does that interact with hormones like leptin which are being secreted by fat cells over long periods of time to give our brains the index of how much stored energy do we have on board? To be able to do things like have babies or go for long long sort of adventures out into the wilderness to explore new areas of the world. These biological questions are still being worked out and we're still at the stage right now even in our research of trying to figure out

what is it specifically about the foods themselves that cause these disruptions and then more broadly what is it about the food environment with all of these other social and environmental consequences of these foods being marketed to us on a regular basis and the defaults being the calorie dense hyperpalpable foods? Julia, the thesis that Kevin seems to be advancing here is that our food environment is making us sicker. It's making us sicker over time a chronic way and therefore

we need better science and ultimately better policy in order to fix that food environment.

Who is Wiley and what did he do? So Wiley was the chief chemist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture in the late 18 early 1900s and he was interested in this question so this is a time when America's urbanizing people are moving off of the farms and into cities further away from the food supply and basically food manufacturers are trying to figure out how do we keep food safe and feed people when they're yeah and basically not living on the farm anymore and

one of the ways they did that was they started to add preservatives and other additives to food.

“I think we all have this idea that our great great grandparents were sort of eating this”

cure like lovely meals that we don't have access to anymore but in this time it was not uncommon to leave lunch or dinner with like a raging stomach ache and to even yet be be acutely poisoned

from your food because there was basically no regulation of the food supply in this moment so

there's a wonderful book by the science journalist Deborah Blum and she details it's a Wiley biography and she details all the gruesome things food manufacturers were doing in this time so it was like to milk to kind of give it this illusion of cream at the top of yellow cream at the top of the milk they were add ground calf brains there there was just horrendous what was happening so Wiley becomes interested in can we isolate what the poisons are and so he designs these

famous poisons squad trials that were actually very similar to what Kevin was doing he randomizes it was young men at the time clerks in the Department of Agriculture to two groups one group just gets you know they eat all their meals in this in this room in the Department of Agriculture and the other group is getting the meals plus little tablets containing the commonly used preservatives and so he's trying to isolate with graduated doses when one might these preservatives start to

cause or added if start to cause problems for people then it was his research along with the jungle by updancing clear that ends up resulting in the establishment of basically the food it what we know as the food and drug administration today Kevin it's a really important point

die of obesity well maybe they didn't have time to get fat because they were dying young of ground

“calf brains and led in their milk and in their food but thanks to Wiley and thanks to his work”

we have regulatory guardrails in place to prevent acute food poisons but today our food environment is fatening and sickening us on timescales of years and decades they're chronically sickening us and here you look at you know all of the money that we spend on American science just over one percent of all NIH funded research projects today address the role of diet and nutrition shortly after your ultra-processed food study was published your boss is tried to close the

research facilities that you and your colleagues used to study nutrition and metabolism how dire

is our lack of science and research and funding in the space of nutrition

yeah no it's it has been a problem for quite some time you know the NIH has traditionally been very focused on finding cures and treatments which is a great thing to do and very little focused on prevention at least when it comes to supporting the research from a monetary basis and you know it's it's a huge problem because if we don't have the science to understand explicitly what is it about you know for example ultra-process foods that are driving some of the problems that we've seen

then the sort of blunt instruments that we might have from a policy perspective become you know somewhat misguided or if we are targeting certain aspects of foods that are not based on really solid science then they might have expanding all this political capital on something that's not going to make much difference and I would argue many of the things that the current administration does in the name of maha winds are currently in that category you know things like targeting high

fructose corn syrup for replacements with you know cane sugar as a you know a new a new brand of Coca-Cola products is not going to move the needle on public health because it's not relying on good science about what it is about Coca-Cola products that are probably contributing to

“the poor public health and so I think that the the point here is that we knew need this a dramatic”

improvement in nutrition science to better understand what are the specific roles of our foods and our food environment and even do the kinds of research like what policy changes do we need to make what changes in the food environment are going to be the most effective you know even if our studies said there was nothing about the foods themselves that were driving this problem it was just the fact that they're being marketed and and and promoted in such a way to make

excess calorie consumption occur because we have so many calories available to us we need some science to better understand well what are the policies that are going to be most successful we had a look at few things about menu labeling at one point and and we have some some policy research on on soda taxes and things like that but no we're near the amount that would be required to really inform some of these things to really know if your the policies that you're going to put

forward are going to make a dent in in the the public health of the nation. The ad no calls back to where we started this conversation like that there's this great book the tyranny of the gene where we're on the author talks about basically the obsession with genes and individuals and treatments and biology when so much of what is shaping health is environmental and we just don't look there and we don't fund that research one one thing we

mentioned in the book Kevin you know the specifics it's how much should we spend on the precision nutrition so there's this yeah I think that the biggest single investment that the NIH has ever made in nutrition research is this nutrition for precision health program which is kind of interesting

from a scientific perspective but they're spending like 170 million dollars or more just trying to figure

out you know what is the best diet for every individual based on you know maybe they're got microbiome or some genetic factor when everybody knows that the food environment is not allowing Americans to you know take up the dietary guidelines for Americans at a reasonable rate we don't produce enough fruits and vegetables in the country to feed everybody even if they were to magically start adhering to the guidelines so I think that again we're sort of focused on these whizbang

sort of a really interesting ideas at the individual level about how to optimize your health and

“in you know what supplements we should prescribe to you and what wearable devices you should wear”

whereas the broader questions about what is it about our food environment how is it driving poor health what is it about how is it affecting our biology what are the specific attributes of ultra-process foods and only a subset of that very broad category that are causing the problems

framing that we used to die in America of acute food poisoning and we developed a policy regime to

fix that problem but now millions of Americans are dying of chronic overeating or chronic eating of the wrong foods and we don't have a policy regime to fix that problem what is the original sin here that you see why are we so unprepared in our laws and our regulations to fix the food supply

“so I think this original sin probably goes back to whiley's time what actually gets”

Congress to act on the findings of his poison squad trials is a book called The Jungle by Upton sin Claire that you might have read in high school so sin Claire is interested in exposing how horribly workers are being treated in meat packing plants in Chicago and kind of telling the story of the play of the American labor but because of the work and all that because the whiley had been doing the public was primed to read it another way as more evidence of just

this tainted food supply and and how terrible and unsanitary the conditions for food processing are at that time in the U.S. and so there's this public upper that ensues and other countries start to boycott imports of U.S. meat and in 1906 two laws get passed so one is the pure food

“and drug act that leads to the creation of FDA and and this regulation of food and drugs and then”

the other one is the meat inspection act and this is giving authority to the USDA to do pre-market health and safety checks for meat including having USDA inspectors president slaughterhouses and the meat industry to be able to actually do that lobbies heavily to get USDA a big budget for food safety and the result is that it's bigger than FDA's entire food safety budget even though FDA is responsible for regulating something like 80% of the American

food supply so you have this well resource USDA program for meat and this historically under resource FDA food safety program for the rest of what we eat and then lots of what happens with

the rest of food is that we basically rely on companies to do the right thing and there's no

pre-market vetting of much of what we eat so in the 20th century in the early 20th century widely and updense and clear bring attention to acute food poisoning and the conditions of these meat plants and we get the FDA and lots of funding for USDA meat inspections but over time there's less attention paid to the rest of the food supply Julia why don't you keep the story going what happens in the 1950s? In the 1950s there's this increasing concern about rising cancer rates

and how they might be linked to preservatives and additives in foods and so this food additive demandment gets passed and it's saying that companies that are using additives need to make sure that they're not causing cancer and they need to seek out FDA pre-market approval when they want to use a new additive in food but they also include this loophole for substances that are generally recognized as safe or grass and by the late 1990s FDA also says the companies can self-determine

whether additives that they're using are grass or not and if you flash forward to today something like 99% of the new additives that entered the food supply since 2000 entered through this self-determined grass loophole so that means much of them were just vetted by companies not by regulators or other independent experts. In fact that's one of the reasons why you have petitions like David Kessler's recent petition to the FDA saying that there's a whole bunch of highly processed

carbohydrates that are part of ultra-process foods that should no longer be generally recognized as

safe which is a category of ingredients or additives in into food that are basically

pretty underregulated in some sense is many of these things are self-affirmed and when they were affirmed for these kinds of ingredients folks weren't thinking about diet-related chronic diseases they were thinking about this acute food safety aspect and not necessarily cumulative exposures given the conditions of of use that are now present in our food environment.

“Kevin I want to follow up with that because while I think I agree with you there's also a way in”

which I want to be careful about adding regulations before we have information so in New York times excerpt from your book you wrote quote ultra-process foods that don't meet FDA definition

apply aggressive tax policies front of pack warning labels marketing restrictions and more

especially for foods marketed to children and quote this is in a way treating ultra-process foods as a category a little bit akin to something like say cigarettes cigarettes we have decades worth of incredibly specific studies that show it clearly causally leads to lung disease and other maladies but you just told me a few minutes ago that we don't have enough government funded science in the realm of nutrition to know basic facts about how or what ultra-process foods

at the individual food level are doing to us at a previous conversation on the show where I hopefully learned that within the category of UFP you have things like twinkies which I can

“definitely believe are bad for me and almond milk which I think is probably not that bad for me”

so to what extent are we stuck a little bit at the policy level because if we're honest with ourselves we actually don't know what exactly it is we want to regulate and how yeah so I think an important clarification about what we talked about in the book and in that piece is that what we were trying to do is say what subcategories of ultra-process foods are probably perfectly fine and should be actually recommended and those would be the category of ultra-process foods

that already meet the FDA's definition of a healthy product and so if it doesn't meet the definition of a healthy product it could be perfectly neutral for health in which case you don't also want to aggressively attack those products and what we said was what subcategory of ultra-process foods that is not already in the FDA definition of healthy which is based on a long long history

“of dietary guidelines from not just America but around the globe of you know a promoting”

its amount of vegetable intake and fruits and nuts and legumes and low in saturated fat, low in added sugar, low in sodium all the things that we have a wealth of data behind what looks like a healthy diet and if they don't meet that definition and they also don't if they do promote over consumption calories because they're calorie dense for example or because they contain hyper palatable combinations of nutrients that's the subcategory they're very small subcategory

of this wide variety of ultra-process foods that we say yeah we don't want to remove those from the market but we want to minimize their their use as much as possible and we want to promote the kinds of ultra-process products that actually do meet the FDA healthy definition so instead

of demonizing this entire class of foods like you mentioned we want to basically be much more

targeted in our policies and focus on what do we know about what makes up a healthy diet which is quite a lot and there's quite a bit of consensus around the world about what that looks like and promote ultra-process products that actually promote that kind of diet for people to make it convenient inexpensive affordable from a time perspective as well and so that's the the kind of the way that we're approaching this problem so Julia can you help me understand how in this

regulatory regime that Kevin's describing I as a shopper for my family with my two-year-old daughter would confront products in a grocery store like I'm walking down the aisle and I see almond milk, I see cheetos, I see twinkies right I can't possibly believe that almond milk in twinkies deserve the exact same label so what am I seeing is I'm walking through the grocery store and looking at what are both ultra-process foods but almost certainly have a very different

“effect on me at the metabolic biological level yeah I think what Kevin was just trying to get out”

that's a really important distinction is that the science that what we're advocating for is based on this is decades of research there's quite strong evidence that over consumption is linked to these two factors the Kevin mentioned the energy density and hyper-politability and right now

as a consumer there's basically no way to to differentiate products that are more or less hyper-politable

and more or less energy dense unless you're maybe a little bit more knowledgeable about nutrition and even then it can be difficult so it's these types of things and you know I'm talking to here from Paris where there is a system of warning labels on food and it's not perfect but you can at least as a consumer navigate with a little bit more ease than you can in America right now so we're thinking of things like that but I think the ultimate goal is how do you invert this

extremely toxic food environment where the darkest stacked against everyone to make the best choices for themselves and their families but what I want to do is not to get a lot of the students

so you can say you can say that you can go back to your story but you can't go back to your story

“but you can just go back to your story and when you then go back you can go back to your story”

you can go back to your story and when you go back you can go back to your story it seems like these ideas ideas like front-of-pack warning labels or marketing restrictions to children they might be good ideas they might be bad ideas they might be good ideas they just don't do very much like for example it's not entirely clear to me that calorie labels on large restaurant menus have like significantly and immediately changed the overall trajectory

of obesity in America it seems like we did something that is useful to people who look to calorie

numbers and not as useful to people who might not look to calorie numbers none of this seems to

directly fix the food supply right deregulating the downstream marketing and selling of food to individuals which might have not be good but it doesn't fix the food supply at the source

“what are the better ideas for fixing the food supply upstream there's perhaps a misconception”

that many of these things that seem to be targeted towards the consumer don't have upstream consequences when they actually do and one of the things we have historical precedents for this once the nutrition facts panel mandated that trans fats be labeled the amount of trans fats on products be labeled the food industry rapidly reformulated their products to remove trans fats and it was only

many years later that they were actually banned from the food supply and otherwise removed from

these the list of things that you could put in food and so these things do have dramatic upstream consequences in terms of what food the food industry and what foods are grown I mean if there was a demand in the FDA made it a mandatory that all products that met the FDA definition of healthy had to have those on the front of the package as opposed to right now it's really a voluntary program and the food industry doesn't even like the voluntary program if they mandated that all

foods that met the FDA definition of healthy were on the front of the package then the food manufacturers are going to start looking for ingredients that are going to allow for them to advertise to have that that that formulation so that they will do that and that will create upstream pressure on the kinds of inputs that are going to be required in order to meet the FDA definition of healthy and so in similar ways you can use these sort of economic incentives and

policies to kind of create pressure both downstream on the consumers by changing prices and changing labels but those labels and prices and incentives that you can put in place by clever taxation and subsidies will influence upstream what foods are grown how they're grown and what are the inputs to the foods that end up on our dinner plates the solutions also need to be real

“about how people eat now like like one one big thing that I think a lot of people don't talk about”

is that the reason we have this proliferation of ultra-process food this because we have two people working in most households so women went to work and stopped cooking as much and the food industry heavily targeted working moms with these convenience products and so we've talked a lot about taking things away and labeling bad things but we need to also offer these healthy convenient alternatives to people we we commission this morning consult survey for the book and we asked

people what's the biggest barrier standing between you and a better diet and the top fences were affordability time like I don't have the resources and the time to be cooking the way I want to so we also I think need to meet that reality with with with options for people and different solutions and right now those products are actually available to folks they end up in a specific aisle of the grocery store that has a premium price associated with it right so

they are you know the healthier for you versions of many of these products that you can get like I can you can get a really crummy micro-avable frozen meal for lunch or you can pay you know 40% more for a relatively healthy version I tend to choose the healthier version because I have the privilege of doing so but most folks don't have that privilege and so how do you flip that how do you what kinds of policies do you put in place to make it the incentive for the food industry to

make more of these healthier for you they might be ultra-process because they have some additives and technology in them that allow you to kind of make these things heat up properly in a microwave but they from the FDA definition of healthy might meet all of those requirements Kevin I have to ask a question that must be bouncing around in a lot of listeners heads which is a lot of the recommendations that I'm hearing here sound exactly like what I would hear if I had

censorship under RFK junior clearly listening to you you think that maha's right about emphasizing

the quality of our food supply but also given your recent history you clearly depart meaning

“leave from this movement so how do you cash out what maha's getting right and wrong?”

Yeah I mean I think that part of the potential problem here is that in my experience the folks in the political leadership of the maha movement not the grassroots folks but the political leadership were not interested in hearing what the science had to say in other words they thought that they already knew the answers to what they wanted to do they thought they had the policies that they wanted to implement and they had certainly the rhetoric around for example ultra-process foods

or as addictive as crack cocaine for example is one of the quotes that I remember hearing about

but when we were doing science to actually see well does ultra-process foods high in fat and sugar actually generate the same neurobiological processes as consuming cocaine the answer is no there is active suppression of that bit of data from the science to to regular everyday folks and my concern was that you know they're really not interested in finding the science to actually support the best policies and what I've observed is that you know there's well there's a lot of

rhetoric and the rhetoric I agree with and as you pointed out sounds a lot like what I'm saying there's not a lot of action that's going along with that rhetoric that's supportive right you can't have this rhetoric and at the same time say oh we're gonna eliminate you know the USDA programs that provide you know farm fresh fruits and vegetables to school programs and food banks you can't kind of eliminate snap dollars and snap ed when you're saying that you've got to actually

improve the quality of the diet of the nation these things don't actually track you can't say that you're concerned about the way our foods are produced and the kinds of inputs that are used in our agricultural system and eliminate you know the parts of the EPA that are involved in monitoring the

“pesticide use and the runoff into into our our waterways and whatnot so I think the rhetoric”

sounds right I have not been convinced that any of the actions that have been taken are promoted by good science or are really interested in hearing about the good science and investing in the science that there are actually going to make meaningful policy changes in the future that are have the potential to benefit public health I'm very interested in my husband's relationship to pharmaceutical therapies versus supplements so you hear from RFK junior often a deep skepticism

toward big pharma skepticism toward vaccines skepticism essentially toward technologies that have phase three clinical trial evidence that they make us healthy at the same time out of this general Mahaspace especially in the podcast world you've got a huge fondness for supplements and in many cases supplements are directly funding a lot of these podcasts and shows well as I learned from your book thanks the dietary supplement health and education act of 1994

there is no need for any supplement sold in America to demonstrate any proof of effectiveness that is to say when you buy a supplement you are buying something that exists in the supplement

aisle precisely because it's never even been tested to do anything that it says on the label

how do you make sense of this weird relationship that Mahas seems to have with let's call it more broadly medicine where there's skeptical about the therapies that have been shown to be effective but trusting of the pills that have no proof of effectiveness. I wish I could explain it I don't have a good there's I don't see a rational explanation for this because you're right in pointing out that if a pharmaceutical or other sort of device that is

generating some sort of claim of effectiveness for treating a disease or a condition it has to undergo trials and demonstrate both safety and effectiveness whereas dietary supplements have to undergo neither they don't have to demonstrate safety nor effectiveness I guess the only way I can kind of wrap my brain around this is the idea that some folks will say well I'm taking supplements to prevent illness I'm not actually trying to treat anything but there's no evidence

“that they prevent illness either it's in and it just it boggles the mind I think that the the”

cynic in me would say well it's exactly what you say it's an easy way for folks to fund the kind of rhetoric that has promoted them to levels of political power that are enabling them to

up on them entirely but yeah that is a source of revenue for many of these social influencers who have now influenced at the highest levels of political power at the Department of Health and Human Services I was going to say they also offer the offer solutions for many of the things that medicine is in great ad like you're fatigued you have brain fog you're dealing with symptoms of menopause whatever the thing is you know that these wellness influencers have these kind of

very elegant quick fixes that seem like they might work but ultimately there's no evidence

“for them so I think they pray on these like not in securities but these these areas of vulnerability”

that people have and offer solutions where maybe a traditional medicine is failed or may a mainstream medicine is failed I feel like a larger team of this show this interview is that American food and drug policy is very scatter shot in terms of where we regulate and where we under regulate so since the days of widely we regulate acute food poisoning but we don't devote similar resources to regulating the origins of chronic food sickness we regulate therapies

we don't regulate supplements or vitamins we devote lots of resources to investigating meat facilities

but very few resources to investigating other parts of the food supply and am I wrong to pick this up

as a theme of your work that America's food policy is simultaneously both maybe overregulating

“in some spaces and underregulating in others yeah I think I think you you touch on something”

that's really interesting I think regulating to prevent chronic illness is something that's just really difficult relative to you know what what while he was doing singling out you know to promote you don't want formaldehyde in your food or later whatever the thing is to tease out which components of food are are sickening us over these timescales of decades when chronic diseases develop is a lot I think it's a bigger challenge but it's not impossible and what one thing I

think you would want it to touch on that we didn't get to was this that where grass evolved from it was it concerned about food outatives causing cancer in the 1950s and cancers obviously a chronic illness so there was this effort to to start to regulate for that but then they added this amendment with the grass added is it allowed what became this flood of outatives onto the food supply

“that ultimately are basically unregulated I don't know if you want to want to get into that in”

more detail at this stage but I think there have been efforts made to recognize these chronic health issues and to prevent them but I think it's a little bit more difficult and we've also allowed these like gaping loopholes to emerge that they don't solve the problems we're setting out to solve you know it's a very human phenomenon to focus on acute things and in the lay discount the future consequences of our current actions and I think that it's so it's a very human thing to

have a food regulatory system that's focused on things that can happen immediately to folks as opposed to you know acute food poisoning and death that happens you know within days or potentially a week after kind of consuming you know that batch of spinach or something like that it's also easier to track down in some sense well as opposed to things that are affecting us over decades which is what worked now currently experiencing with the rise in obesity and whatnot it's also

kind of driven in part behind the fact that in the history of human kind we've have been devoted

to avoiding the problem of starvation and we've always faced this problem of producing enough protein

and calories to feed populations and this spectre of mass starvation because the population is growing too fast compared to our ability to increase agricultural production this is goes back to Thomas mouthuses thesis many many decades and centuries ago now we actually have for the first time in human history kind of a mark on what is the plateau of the human population somewhere around 10 billion people within the next 100 years and therefore we have a target of what our agricultural

system has to actually produce and produce in a sustainable way for the planet and produce an equitable way for people to actually have healthy diets and we believe ultra-processed foods are going to be a part of that and we need to start thinking about that long-term transition now and how we're going to coordinate that does that happen from the top down not likely but what sorts of policies can we put in place with the idea of diet-related chronic disease which is

to agricultural tech and food technology to produce and get rid of this calorie glut as we talk

“about in our book and so you have to start thinking past the you know diet related chronic diseases”

as much as we now have wonderful therapies for those who are most susceptible to the changes in our food environment the GOP one drugs and many many others coming down the pipeline and think about you know what is it that we have to do to our food system and what kinds of policies do we need to put in place in order to feed the planet a healthy diets in the future that's going to be partly ultra-processed foods it's going to be partly the kinds of technologies that we talk about in the book

called Food 2.0 I think we need to start seriously thinking about that while we're also thinking about the diet related chronic diseases we're currently experiencing last question how do you feel about the claim that obesity and ultra-processed foods are fundamentally a technological problem and they require a technological solution we can fuss at the corner with marketing bands for children and black labels for saturated fats and foods that are two energy dense but at the end of the

day 20 30 years from now if we see the obesity curve finally bending nutritionists and sociologists

will say this is because not of food regulation but GOP one drugs that this ultimately has to be a policy of allowing people to effectively redesign their bodies to be in line with their food environment to the extent that GOP ones work for many people they seem to work by increasing satiety slowing gastric emptying in a way that allows them to live in the modern food environment in chronic caloric deficit which leads to weight loss why isn't the problem here just tech tech

“no I mean I think it is it's it's a wonderful thing to be able to have not just this”

category of drugs that are now currently on the market and are going to get cheaper and cheaper and more generic and pills that will allow people to kind of have access that currently don't have access and the pipeline of new drugs that are coming down the market I think that what we may be underestimating although the food industry is starting to look at this is that there are upstream consequences on the foods that these folks want to eat it's not just that they're eating less

you know twinkies and Doritos right they're actually changing their fundamental food preferences in ways that are more aligned to healthy diets maybe it's because these drugs finally allow people to kind of make those changes maybe there's some more fundamental biology going on that we still don't understand but I don't want to underestimate the fact that that is also having upstream consequences or it has the potential to have upstream consequences on the foods that we all have

access to which ironically might allow us to get through this transition of diet related chronic

diseases in ways that allow us to look at that you know population of 10 billion people in the

future that we have to feed healthy diets that are sustainable for the planet that's the hope I would I truly hope that that's part of the solution I'm not some sort of lead I who wants us all to go back to kind of cooking fresh fruits and vegetables and local have local farms in these types of things these are kind of quaint ideas for the privileged few who can do those sorts of things they are not the solution to a 10 billion people population sustainably living as part of

sustainable planet Julia do you want to have the last word no Kevin put it so nicely but I think

“what we're trying to get in the book is that you have to pull like that this problem is complex”

and you have to pull many many levers to address it so the reformulation and the drugs the reformulation of ultra-process foods and GLP one drugs are certainly part of the solution but there are many other levers that that we have to pull including this this idea of how do you make healthy meals accessible and available to more people so so I think that the tech is certainly part of the solution but not the entire solution Julia we lose Kevin Hall thank you very much thank you

thank you so much for such smart questions in this year there are over 10,000 electro-fahrzeuges for amazon lievering in ganz european

this would be more based on the plan to take our liever partner in the EU and great Britain in the end of 2016.