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- [00:02]
Dan Buettner
Lemonade.
- [00:06]
Marion Nestle
If you go into a grocery store and are trying to select healthy foods, you are fighting an entire food system on your own. I've had people in food companies tell me this over and over again. Regulate us. Give us a level playing field.
- [00:22]
Dan Buettner
Oh, interesting.
- [00:23]
Marion Nestle
We don't want to go first. Meat and dairy products are the largest source of saturated fatty acids in American diets. You're not allowed to say eat less meat because.
- [00:35]
Dan Buettner
Marianne Nestle, first of all, it's a huge honor sitting there, and the listeners are in. They're in for a huge treat because everybody's talking about our food environment and processed food. And you've been quietly, and sometimes not so quietly, studying this as an academic, as a PhD for 40 years, and, okay, about a half a century, and which is giving you. You're a real scientist, you're rigorous, you're very smart, and you also don't back down. And I think of this adage of gentle pressure, relentlessly applied. And you've done that with the food industry. And you kind of, I would say, burst on the scene In, I think, 2002 with food politics, which is a book that pulled away the veil, that helped us understand why we're living in a food environment where today over 50% of all of our food is processed or ultra processed, where over 70% of Americans are overweight or obese. And, you know, I like to say it's not their fault, but we'll unpack that with you. But why don't we start with where we are and when it comes to food and the. And the ensuing health and how did we get here?
- [02:07]
Marion Nestle
The way I would describe it is what you just said. 75% of American adults are overweight or obese. And the food environment in which we live can be described by one's graph from the Department of Agriculture, which shows what happens to all of the corn that's produced in the United States. Roughly half of it goes to feed animals to produce meat. The other half almost goes to produce ethanol for automobiles.
- [02:39]
Dan Buettner
So we don't even eat it.
- [02:40]
Marion Nestle
We don't eat hardly any of the corn that's produced. And the remaining under 10% is used for all of the ingredients that corn goes to make the kind of industrial uses. And a completely tiny, practically unmeasurable fraction is sweet corn. That's our food system. That's what we start with. So it's not a food system in which agriculture is aimed at producing food for people. It's set up for producing feed for animals or fuel for automobiles or Airplanes. Because the same thing is true for soybeans, except they go to make diesel fuel.
- [03:26]
Dan Buettner
But at the end of the day, our grocery stores are something like 60% ultra processed foods. I mean, this all ties in too, doesn't it?
- [03:34]
Marion Nestle
Oh, absolutely, because the ultra processed foods are based on industrial food ingredients. That's whatever corn and soybeans go to human food. That's where they go, is to the ingredients in processed foods. Processed foods are convenient. They can sit on the shelf for a really, really, really long time. They're among the most profitable foods that are available in supermarkets. So the food companies love them. They're enormously advertised and marketed. So everybody has gotten used to it. And people think that's what they're supposed to be eating.
- [04:10]
Dan Buettner
My dad grew up on a farm, and they had an enormous garden. They had one pig and they had one cow, and the cow regularly gave milk and the pig once a year. It had a couple good years and then one bad day and it turned into pork chops. But mostly what they were eating was the food that they grew in their garden. How did we get from there to a world where the vast majority of the food choices were present? It would be unrecognizable as food. Back in the days when my dad was on the farm.
- [04:47]
Marion Nestle
Chalk it up to the Second World War, when food companies started producing meals for soldiers who were overseas and developed all this technology for producing processed foods that would last and taste reasonably well when, you know, if consumed by people
- [05:08]
Dan Buettner
in the field who were really hungry
- [05:10]
Marion Nestle
and who were really hungry and needed the food. And after the war, they needed to find something to do with that technology. And the transportation system had enormously improved during the war. That was when all the highways were built. You could get food from California to the East Coast. So that changed the fruit and vegetable mix. But the packaged food stuff came about because there was an enormous. There was the technology is waiting to be used, and there was an enormous effort from the fruit industry to sell that. The products that they were making. So they did that by pushing homemakers to think that cooking was a huge chore. You don't want to have to do all that chore. We can produce TV dinners. That was one of the first that got introduced.
- [06:03]
Dan Buettner
Bam.
- [06:04]
Marion Nestle
I remember Bam. Well, that was. Yeah, that was during the war. That was a wartime product. And the TV dinners and the packaged foods, we can do this. It'll be cheap. You won't have to do the work. And an enormous effort. I mean, there are terrific books that have been written about this. Laura Shapiro's Perfection Salad is a historical account of exactly how this happened. And so people got used to eating processed food and they're the most marketed. And unfortunately, as people started eating more and more of them and they got defined as ultra processed, the really bad ones, then people could do research. And that research shows that diets that are high in ultra processed foods increase the risk for obesity, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, I mean, everything that ails you. And those are observational studies and they're correlation, not causation. But by now they're very, very well controlled clinical trials that show that these foods induce people to eat more of them than they otherwise would, they eat more calories.
- [07:17]
Dan Buettner
Was there an inflection point? You're saying that a lot of the seeds of our processed food culture began in World War II, but was there a point where the graph started to hockey stick?
- [07:28]
Marion Nestle
And why 1980, 1980, 1980, very sharp demarcation. The election of Ronald Reagan, who came in with a deregulatory agenda and did several things, deregulated food marketing so that companies could do a lot of marketing to kids.
- [07:48]
Dan Buettner
Oh, so before that you couldn't.
- [07:49]
Marion Nestle
Before that there were some restrictions those were removed. It really promoted a much looser business environment. And then in 1981, Jack Welch, who was then head of General Electric, gave a speech in which he said, Milton Friedman's theory of shareholder value is really what we should all be doing. Never mind IBM's blue chip stock. Long term return on investment. Forget about that. We want higher returns on investment now. And everybody bought it. So that was again, right at the.
- [08:31]
Dan Buettner
So connect the dots between the Doritos that is for sale in the grocery store right now and Jack Welsh saying, we gotta maximize shareholder value.
- [08:41]
Marion Nestle
Well, I need one more. One more piece in that. And that started in the 1970s. We had Earl Butts, who was Secretary of Agriculture, who said, Andrew Nixon who said, grow as much food as you possibly can. The Department of Agriculture was rewarding farmers and paying farmers not to grow food in order to keep prices up so farmers would make a living.
- [09:05]
Dan Buettner
So if they're not growing food, what are they growing?
- [09:07]
Marion Nestle
They would just let the fields fall.
- [09:09]
Dan Buettner
Wow.
- [09:09]
Marion Nestle
They just didn't harvest them. And he said, I want you to grow food. Fence row to fence row. We're going to feed the world. And farmers were very good at increasing production. And so the number of calories in the food supply in 1980 were 30.
- [09:29]
Dan Buettner
We should say, what food there? What were they planting? What were these farmers planting?
- [09:33]
Marion Nestle
Oh, corn and soybeans. Corn and soybeans. Commodity crops.
- [09:36]
Dan Buettner
And wheat, I assume. Or not.
- [09:38]
Marion Nestle
Yeah, that too. We're not talking about lettuce and tomatoes. Okay. Commodity crops. Those are specialty crops. Food for people is specialty crops.
- [09:48]
Dan Buettner
The specialty food is what we should be eating.
- [09:50]
Marion Nestle
Specialty food. So that's food for people. And what the Department of Agriculture does very, very little to support. The Department of Agriculture supports commodity crops. So the number of calories in the food Supply increased from 3,200 calories a day per capita, meaning men, women, little tiny babies. By the year 2000, it had gone up to 4,000 calories a day, where it remains. So this enormous influx of calories into the food supply, food companies had to figure out a way to sell those calories. And they were already having to do the shareholder value thing, which meant that they not only had to make a profit, but they had to show growth in profits every 90 days. And they were trying to do that in a situation in which there was twice as many calories in the food supply as anybody needed. You know, the average. If you go across the population, the population needs about 2,000 calories a day. On average, we've got 4,000. So how do you sell food in that environment? Well, you figure out ways to do it. You make bigger portions. Reason enough why people are gaining weight, because if I had one nutrition concept to get across, it would be that larger portions have more calories.
- [11:15]
Dan Buettner
Oh, boy.
- [11:16]
Marion Nestle
Really?
- [11:17]
Dan Buettner
News flash.
- [11:18]
Marion Nestle
Really. I mean, it's. You know, it's not intuitively obvious. It really isn't. So they made bigger portions. They put food in places where it had never been before. Bookstores.
- [11:30]
Julia Louis-Dreyfus
Wow.
- [11:31]
Marion Nestle
Libraries. You know, when I went to NYU in the late 1980s, there were signs all over the library. You can't bring food in here now. There's cafes, there's. There's. The entire first floor of the library is people drinking coffee and looking at their computer.
- [11:47]
Dan Buettner
You know, the most egregious example, you go to a Walgreens or a pharmacy and to go get your diabetes medicine, you have to route through a gauntlet of chips and sodas and candies before you even get your diabetes. And then you got to do it in reverse.
- [12:03]
Marion Nestle
And now they have. Now they have special sections for people taking GLP1 drugs.
- [12:09]
Dan Buettner
So there's. Oh, okay, a. Products for GLP1 people. Yeah. So what? Just to go back, because it's very, very interesting, this Nixon administration, the 1970s, what was the impetus for Nixon to turn to Earl Butts and say, I want this. I Want you to change the agricultural system away from real food to these commodity crops. Why is it, why does, why does our government want that?
- [12:34]
Marion Nestle
Well, because they could sell them. I mean, the idea was that you could sell all that corn and soybeans to Russia or sell it to the Soviet Union or sell it elsewhere and it would much more money.
- [12:46]
Dan Buettner
For in all fairness, in 1970, do you think people knew that corn, soybeans and wheat, the products were unhealthy?
- [13:01]
Marion Nestle
Well, they're not unhealthy if consumed in reasonable amounts. They're not. I mean, the processed foods came in slowly in those years and it wasn't really until the 1980s when they proliferated because there was so much money to be made and the ingredients were cheap.
- [13:23]
Dan Buettner
When did it become common or when did you know? And then when did it become common knowledge that too much processed food was bad for us? And the reason I ask, I like to think of myself as a bit of a, you know, informed health, you know, individual. And until, until 2000, I would drink half a dozen Coca Colas a day. I had no idea. Or I eat Doritos and I had Cheerios Honey nut Cheerios with milk on it. I had no idea this was bad for me. Now of course I do, but I wonder when scientists knew and when did the public.
- [14:01]
Marion Nestle
Well, I would say it was called junk food in those days. And that was a term that was coined by Michael Jacobson, who was the director of center for Science in the Public Interest.
- [14:10]
Dan Buettner
The public interest, yes. Created a new museum.
- [14:13]
Marion Nestle
Right. And he was doing all that stuff starting in the early 1970s. So it goes way back.
- [14:20]
Dan Buettner
I remember very well. I ran marathons and I was a long distance cyclist in the 80s and early 90s. And the state of the art wisdom was carbo load. If you want to perform, you load up on pancakes with syrup and spaghetti and wash it down with the beer. So in the defense of public, we get all these confusing messages on what we should be eating and over time and the state of the science changes.
- [14:49]
Marion Nestle
It doesn't change very much. If you dig, if you dig into the science, it really doesn't change very much. Carbohydrate loading is still a very good idea. If you're a marathon runner. You want to have as much glycogen as you possibly can before you start running. And there was plenty of research at the time to back that up. You know, where the big switches came were the what seemed like switches. And I bear some responsibility for that because I was the editor of the 1988 Surgeon General's Report on Nutrition and Health, which was the. Were you really the one and only Surgeon General's Report on Nutrition and Health, which came out in 1988. And that report for which I was lucky enough to get the credit for everything that was good about it. And don't get blamed for everything that was bad about it. And one of the things that was really bad about which I had absolutely nothing to do with it was the major take home message, which was that the single most important thing you can do for your dietary health is to reduce your fat intake.
- [16:00]
Dan Buettner
What were the revelations for those of us who haven't read that? 1988?
- [16:05]
Marion Nestle
Well, that was the big take home lesson. And the reason for that take home lesson was that fat is high in calories. Saturated fat is a risk factor for coronary heart disease. That's where Ancel Keys comes in. And that's still true. That hasn't gone away. If you substitute saturated fat for polyunsaturated and monounsaturated fat, your risk for heart disease goes up. So that hasn't changed. But the idea was that the American public doesn't know the difference between saturated unsaturated and polyunsaturated fatty acids. And you can't say people eat less meat. Meat is the largest source. Meat and dairy products are the largest source of saturated fatty acids in American diets. You're not allowed to say eat less meat because of the politics. The meat industry doesn't like that. Cattle are grown in every state. Every state has two senators. The meat industry has enormous political power. So you couldn't say, eat less meat. You could say, eat less saturated fat, but nobody would understand it. So you said, eat less fat. And then of course, what happened as a result of that was that food companies started producing no fat products with tons of carbohydrate and sugars. Nobody was talking about calories. And I like to talk about calories.
- [17:33]
Dan Buettner
Why? Why? Why do you like calories?
- [17:35]
Marion Nestle
Because they. If you're. That's what determines body weight.
- [17:39]
Dan Buettner
But aren't there good calories and bad calories?
- [17:42]
Marion Nestle
No, there are good foods and bad foods.
- [17:44]
Dan Buettner
Oh, there we go.
- [17:45]
Marion Nestle
No, it depends on where you get your calories from. But body weight. Body weight doesn't care where you get your calories from. Body weight is about calories. Health is about where those calories come from.
- [18:00]
Dan Buettner
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- [21:24]
Marion Nestle
Yeah, I mean, I don't think of the food companies as being evil. They're just doing business the way business is required to be done in the United States. And shareholder value is the single most important function of a business. If a business isn't maximizing shareholder value, the CEO gets fired, the shareholders get annoyed and the CEO gets fired. And there are many, many examples of CEOs attempting to turn their corporation into a health food company. PepsiCo gave that a try that didn't last long. That particular attempt. The shareholders were very, very cross.
- [22:12]
Dan Buettner
I have a good friend who is the executive vice president for marketing for General Mills, had a billion dollar a year budget. And he very moral guy. We tend to think of these big evil corporations, but he was a pillar of the community. He had a moral compass and he saw that, that General Mills Foods was making people sick. And he proactively created these lines of healthier alternatives and they didn't sell as well. And the CEO basically said to him, discontinue those lines. And you want to say, well, that's a bad CEO, but if the CEO didn't discontinue those lines, his job, he loses his job. And then Campbell's, you know, they, I remember I was talking to the food scientists of Progreso, which is a general mill soup. And I said, you know, why don't you lower the sodium? Soup has lots of sodium in it as a rule, salt. And they said to me, well, we tried that, but many times Campbell's, Campbell's doesn't do it. And the consumer figures out that the sodium laden Campbell soup tastes better and our sales take a hit.
- [23:19]
Marion Nestle
That's why we need regulation though, because then you, I mean I've had people in food companies tell me this over and over again, regulate us, give us a level playing field. We don't want to go first. If we go first, we're going to lose sales. And you know, it's. And the way I describe this is food companies are not social service agencies, they're not public health agencies, they're businesses. And once you understand that they're businesses, then everything that they do makes sense.
- [23:53]
Dan Buettner
Yeah, it's like, why should a Tire company be able to maximize shareholder value, or a couch company be able, but the food company can't.
- [24:05]
Marion Nestle
It's not fair. So, yes, of course they can. And I've had people in food companies say, we would love to reduce this or take this away, but we don't want to go first. And we know that if we take this out of our products, we'll lose sales. We're going through this right now with Colorado.
- [24:26]
Dan Buettner
So we have a government right now who seems at least lets us to believe they're aware of the perils of processed foods. Why isn't government regulating these foods that we know are making people sick? It doesn't take a huge connection for one side of the government who realizes we're paying $5 trillion a year on healthcare to the other side of the government that says, wait, our food system is making us sick. Why isn't that connection being made? And why aren't we getting the regulations to protect us?
- [25:03]
Marion Nestle
Well, it's explicitly not being made. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Who's the secretary of Health and Human Services, has stated explicitly that we're not going to regulate. We're going to ask for voluntary and because we're not a nanny state, and nobody's going first, and nobody wants to go first. And so he's gotten some concessions from food companies about things like color additives, you know, which I'm all for getting color additives out of the food supply, but I don't think it's nearly as important as reducing sodium. They're not saying anything about sodium. The new dietary guidelines, you know, do. On the one hand, they say reduce sodium, and they give a number that they want you to reduce the sodium, too. But then on the other hand, they say add salt to season your food.
- [25:58]
Dan Buettner
That makes sense.
- [25:58]
Marion Nestle
Which doesn't compute.
- [26:01]
Dan Buettner
So why doesn't RFK want to regulate? Why doesn't he? I mean, I actually, you know, I met him several times, and he's a smart individual. Say what you want about him, but he's intelligent. Why. Why wouldn't he regulate? Why wouldn't he just.
- [26:19]
Marion Nestle
Well, his particular view is that personal responsibility is what counts, and it's up to you to make healthier choices. And therefore, the role of government is to educate. The role of government is not to regulate. The role of government is to educate. And so that's what they're trying to do, is to educate.
- [26:41]
Dan Buettner
So how well does education work?
- [26:43]
Marion Nestle
It doesn't. I mean, it works for some people, but it doesn't work in general. I mean, and There's a major tenet of public health that education is not enough to change behavior. You need policy to back it up.
- [26:57]
Dan Buettner
If you were put in charge of the food system and we made you the emperor, which I'd vote for, what kind of regulations would make the biggest difference in America to help us eat healthier?
- [27:10]
Marion Nestle
I get money out of politics. Number one, overturn Citizens United. Stop corporations from being able to give unlimited amounts of money to election campaigns so that we could actually elect people who are interested in public health, not personal gain or corporate health. I'd like to completely redo the agriculture system so that we focus on producing food for people, not fuel for automobiles or even feed for animals, because we need to eat less meat because of the effect of cattle on climate change. That's a big problem. I mean, I'm not for eating no meat. I'm for eating less meat. Let's reduce that. I'd like to see universal basic income so people have enough money to buy food and buy healthy food. I want universal school meals so the kids get fed in school with enough money to those schools so that they can make healthy meals for the kids. I can think of others to sum
- [28:21]
Dan Buettner
up, we had this in the 70s, this shift to creating mostly grains. And then the food companies realized that they could take this new glut of grain and create feedlot meat. And it's the input for most of the junk food. We eat the chips and the cookies and the candies and fast food and fast food. And these are high profit margin. They make a lot of money. A lot of money is spent marketing them to us, and we're susceptible to that marketing. Government doesn't want to regulate it because they're influenced by these big food companies who are making all this money. So the problem is really systematic. I mean, how do you react to this idea that it's your responsibility to eat healthy?
- [29:14]
Marion Nestle
Well, the way I put it is that if you go into a grocery store and are trying to select healthy foods, you are fighting an entire food system on your own. That's a lot to ask of an individual. The food system is huge. It's a trillion dollars or more in the United States.
- [29:31]
Dan Buettner
Or how are you fighting it as a grocery store shopper?
- [29:33]
Marion Nestle
Well, the grocery stores are set up to get you to buy some foods rather than others. I mean, they're totally. Even if you're doing. Even if you're doing online shopping. If you're doing online shopping, what's on the homepage? That's not an accident. Every single Inch of the grocery store real estate is being paid for by somebody or other. And the rules of grocery stores, the more products you see, the more you buy. The more often you see a product, the more likely you are to buy it. The more time you spend in the grocery store, the more products you are likely to buy. The further away the thing that you want is from the entrance, the more likely you are to pick up other things on the way.
- [30:25]
Dan Buettner
But why does that make us easier, make unhealthy selections?
- [30:30]
Marion Nestle
Because those are the ones that are paid for. Food companies pay to have their products in the places where they are most likely to be seen at eye level, on the shelves, at the end of the aisles that has a special name, ncaps and at the checkout counters.
- [30:49]
Dan Buettner
And that's where we see the junk food.
- [30:50]
Marion Nestle
And that's where you always see junk food. And they pay a lot of money to place products. There's. And so if you go into a grocery store and you see sugar sweetened beverages absolutely everywhere, and it used to be that full sugar sodas were in 20 places in the store. They were here, they were there, they were in the other place, they were cold, they were in room temperature, they were all over. Now it's bottled waters of one kind or another. Sugar sweetened flavored, cannabis flavored, alcohol flavored, whatever, whatever.
- [31:27]
Dan Buettner
And how about going out to eat?
- [31:29]
Marion Nestle
Well, there. That also happened during that 1980 inflection point when there was because food was cheap, because so much of it was produced, supply and demand, 4,000 calories in the food supply, the price of food went down. It was cheap for restaurants to give people very large portions. And I'll say it again, larger portions have more calories. And the.
- [32:01]
Dan Buettner
I like to joke we're on a seafood diet. We eat the food we see and it's a large.
- [32:06]
Marion Nestle
Right? And the more food that's put in front of you, and that's another rule, the more food that's put in front of you, the more calories you'll eat from it. We're human and we don't like to waste food. So I mean, we've all grown up. Finish what's on your plate. So restaurants started making foods in bigger and bigger portions. And because restaurant chefs are used to cooking in a certain way, they're going to up the sugar, up the sodium, up the fat, because it tastes better to them that way. And so you have no idea what you're eating. And the calories in restaurant portions are enormous. So between restaurant portions and larger portions in General, that is sufficient to account for the increase in caloric consumption that occurred between 1980 and 2000. And that's been quite well documented.
- [33:05]
Dan Buettner
And that's from what to what?
- [33:06]
Marion Nestle
Well, it was the average. It's hard to say, was an increase of about 3 to 500 calories a day. And today a lot of people ate more.
- [33:18]
Dan Buettner
And today is it even higher?
- [33:21]
Marion Nestle
Hard to say because the Department of Agriculture isn't doing that kind of research anymore.
- [33:25]
Dan Buettner
So does an extra 300 calories, 3 to 500 calories a day explain this jump? It does.
- [33:32]
Marion Nestle
Easily, just easily a little three.
- [33:35]
Dan Buettner
That's like a cookie.
- [33:36]
Marion Nestle
Yeah, right. Well, it's a good size.
- [33:39]
Dan Buettner
Yeah, it's a Starbucks cookie.
- [33:41]
Marion Nestle
It's a good size cookie. And, you know, I mean, that's a work eating. I just want to understand. I keep saying larger portions have more calories. I remember when larger portions came in in the mid-80s. I remember muffins, when muffins went from little teeny things that were 200 calories and are now called mini muffins to what they are now, which is 6 or 800 calories. And when bagels went from 200 calories to 6 or 800 calories. I mean, I remember when that happened. The attack of the giant muffins.
- [34:16]
Dan Buettner
Yeah. Or Super Size meeting.
- [34:18]
Marion Nestle
Or Super Size, that documentary where Morgan
- [34:21]
Dan Buettner
Spurlock ate at McDonald's for a month and got very sick.
- [34:26]
Marion Nestle
My first movie.
- [34:27]
Dan Buettner
Oh, you're a bit of a celebrity.
- [34:30]
Marion Nestle
I had my 30 seconds of fame in that movie. But yeah.
- [34:35]
Dan Buettner
And so for the record, I gave you about three minutes of fame in Live to 100, our Netflix documentary where
- [34:42]
Marion Nestle
you were kind of right. That was very nice of you.
- [34:46]
Dan Buettner
That was nice of you.
- [34:47]
Marion Nestle
So the. Yeah, so that's what happened. And people just got used to eating more. They got used to eating more in restaurants. They got used to eating more in packaged foods. And larger portions have more calories. People put on weight.
- [35:02]
Dan Buettner
I think it will surprise a lot of people to learn that the current farm bill is somewhat at fault here, that the farm bill we have could be changed to impact how we eat.
- [35:18]
Marion Nestle
Oh, it could change enormously because the. Well, first of all, the farm Bill.
- [35:24]
Dan Buettner
Yeah. Explain what it is and how it fuels us eating wrong.
- [35:29]
Marion Nestle
Yeah, it's the omnibus Farm Bill, and it's an enormous bill, usually seven or 800 pages of very tiny type. And it governs farm programs, but it also governs the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, SNAP, which used to be food stamps. And 80% of the farm bill funding is Food stamps, which is a whole issue in itself. But the 20% that's left, which is about $20 billion a year, goes to farm subsidies. And those subsidies are insurance payments, various other payments to commodity producers. There's very, very little money in food for people or special, what they call specialty crops. Actually, it's in the horticulture title. It's called horticulture.
- [36:24]
Dan Buettner
So the root of the problem, one might argue, is that American farmers find it very difficult to make money growing food. They make money growing commodity, and they almost don't have a choice, do they?
- [36:39]
Marion Nestle
Not if they want to make a living. So, you know, I mean, the system is skewed so that the large, only the largest of the industrial farming. I mean, the word farmer doesn't really apply here. It's the industrial producers are the only ones who really make any money. And they get the subsidies. The more food they grow, the more subsidies they get. The system is rigged against small farmers
- [37:10]
Dan Buettner
growing, like organic vegetables. Yeah.
- [37:13]
Marion Nestle
Or medium sized farmers. And it's rigged against them in two ways. They're not subsidized and they don't have a really good competitive system for who to sell their products to or a distribution system that works. And this has been going on for a very long time. You would think it would be a fixable problem. But the agriculture industry is extremely powerful because it's situated in that central Midwest from top to bottom, and that's where the political power is.
- [37:49]
Dan Buettner
Iowa, et cetera.
- [37:50]
Marion Nestle
That's Iowa, Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, all of those states. And Iowa is interesting because Iowa used to be the vegetable capital of the United States.
- [38:01]
Dan Buettner
Now it's the pork.
- [38:02]
Marion Nestle
And now it's. No, it's corn and soybeans and pork.
- [38:06]
Dan Buettner
I have a good friend who has an enormous farm in some of the most fertile soil in American Illinois, and he grows these commodity crops. And I said, why? Why don't you grow kale and organic carrots and beets and these things that are good for us? And he says, dan, I could grow that, but I can't get it to market.
- [38:27]
Marion Nestle
Right.
- [38:29]
Dan Buettner
And if you're growing corn and soybeans very easy. There's a grain elevator in every small town and there's a regular sort of shipping supply chain to get it to buy and there's somebody to buy it.
- [38:39]
Marion Nestle
Right. So it's a structural and systematic problem easily solved by putting some money into it.
- [38:45]
Dan Buettner
What's the easy solve? Where would you put that money?
- [38:48]
Marion Nestle
You set up a distribution system. Why not? We know how to do things like that. We can get vegetables. We can get vegetables from California.
- [38:57]
Dan Buettner
True, but what. Is there any low hanging fruit in the farm bill? I like to think about not only what's effective, but what's feasible. People out listening, they feel helpless. But is there anything they could sort of advocate for in the farm bill that might actually be passable in the next round?
- [39:21]
Marion Nestle
Yeah, they could get subsidies for specialty crops. There are some, you know, we're talking about millions, not billions. And so it's very small scale.
- [39:33]
Dan Buettner
That, that seems like an easy fix.
- [39:35]
Marion Nestle
Yeah, it's not an easy fix because the large industrial agricultural producers are very politically powerful.
- [39:44]
Dan Buettner
So they, they would want to squash a subsidy for.
- [39:47]
Marion Nestle
They want their own subsidies.
- [39:49]
Dan Buettner
Okay. And they're stronger at getting those subsidies.
- [39:51]
Marion Nestle
Sure. I mean, they know how to work the political system. They hire lobbyists. They have. The Department of Agriculture supports groups within these commodities that do education and marketing. And some of them lobby. And they're really good at what they do. They want to keep the system exactly as it is, and they're very good at that.
- [40:20]
Julia Louis-Dreyfus
Hey, it's Julia, Louis Dreyfus from Wiser Than Me, et cetera. Just popping in with a little reality check. Food waste shouldn't exist. There is no reason that our leftovers should end up in a landfill. But that's the final destination for about a third of the food we grow. Our ancestors would be confused. They used their food scraps as compost or as animal feed or in weird soups, all the stuff we did before garbage was invented. But composting is hard work. Living with a bucket of rotten food on your counter is gross. Most food goes in the trash because it's easy. And these days, we'll take any easy we can get. But now there's something easier. Drop your scraps in a mill food recycler. It looks like a kitchen bin and an iPhone had a baby. It takes nearly anything, even meat and bones. It works automatically. You can keep filling it for weeks and it never smells. When you finally empty it, you've got these nutrient rich grounds. Use them in your garden, pour them in your green bin, or have mill get them to a small farm so the food you don't eat can help grow the food you do, just like it should be. It's why I own a mill, why I invest in mill, and why I'm still obsessed with my mill. If you want to get obsessed too, go to mill.com wiser to get $75 off. That's mill.com, for $75 off.
- [41:55]
Dan Buettner
Move over to corporations and it's under. They get a pass because they need. They're in the gladiator ring of the free market system. They. They have to maximize shareholder value. But let's talk about playing fair. And you read these studies that often conveniently find that this product is good for me, and who knew? And how is the system rigged when it comes to scientific studies and the food industry?
- [42:27]
Marion Nestle
Well, here we have the Department of Agriculture, again, which works with food producers to do research to demonstrate the benefits of their products. And I would say every fruit and vegetable, every product, everybody is doing research. And the way they do it is they send out a request for proposals, and they say, we're looking for research proposals that will demonstrate the benefits of our product for preventing this disease, this problem, or whatever. They're not going to fund proposals that aren't likely to show those benefits. For example, the pomegranate people were just. They put, I think, more than $30 million in research on the benefits of pomegrana. And I remember one incredibly complicated rat study in which they gave rats concentrated pomegranate juice. And the study demonstrated that the antioxidants that are found in pomegranates showed up in the rats afterwards. Well, I could have told them that if you feed a rat antioxidants, they're gonna have antioxidants. But they were arguing, c, if you eat these things, you're gonna have all these antioxidants and you're gonna be healthier. Which is not what the study showed, but some.
- [43:59]
Dan Buettner
What are some of the studies that come out that people have read and believe where you just roll your eyes and say, this is not anything that
- [44:06]
Marion Nestle
demonstrates some phenomenal health benefit of any one food. It doesn't matter what the one food is. One food is not going to make any difference in your diet to your overall health. You know, what matters with overall health is diets.
- [44:23]
Dan Buettner
So what are some of the more egregious examples that have popped up?
- [44:27]
Marion Nestle
Well, the most egregious, certainly Coca Cola. Where Coca Cola funded. This was a huge scandal 15 years ago where Coca Cola was shown to have been funding, secretly funding studies that demonstrated that physical activity was more important than what you eat in obesity. And it's not, unfortunately, no, I'm sorry. Physical activity is very important for overall health. But if you want to lose weight, you got to work awfully hard.
- [45:01]
Dan Buettner
You can't work off a bad diet.
- [45:03]
Marion Nestle
It's really hard to work off a bad diet because if you walk a mile, it's only 100 calories. That's two Oreo cookies. Cookies.
- [45:14]
Dan Buettner
So our current food pyramid puts in the upper left where you would actually start reading. If you start reading a book, you would start in the upper left hand side of the page, in the upper left steak. And you look at the scientific advisors to the food pyramid and the majority of them were, have been or were funded by the meat industry.
- [45:37]
Marion Nestle
What a coincidence.
- [45:40]
Dan Buettner
I guess we could say no more on that and let the listener or viewer draw a conclusion.
- [45:44]
Marion Nestle
Yeah, what a coincidence. I mean, what was so. I mean, that process of the new dietary guidelines was so disappointing because the promise was that this would be gold standard science and that it would be free of conflicts of interest. And it was neither. Because the way they did it was they just had one person write a personal review of the literature. And there were people who were asked to do those literature reviews who say that they were told that there were studies they were not allowed to look at and said, okay, I'm not doing this. But there were other people who did do them. I don't know what those arrangements were, but they were very personal reviews of reviews. They were certainly not systematic literature reviews in the usual way these things are done. And they wrote their personal view of what they thought this research showed. And then somebody else took those reviews and turned them into dietary guidelines. But we don't really know how that process occurred because it was not transparent.
- [46:56]
Dan Buettner
You've been studying food and nutrition for 50 years. When you look at the dietary Guidelines, what America is supposed to queue off of to decide what to eat, what are the issues you take with the current ones? Besides meat being on the.
- [47:12]
Marion Nestle
Well, the dietary guidelines have always said, balance calories, don't eat too much salt, sugar, saturated fat, alcohol, eat more fruits, vegetables and whole grains. They've always said that. Oh, and the way you could summarize that is Michael Pollan's eat food not too much, mostly plants. These guidelines are eat food as much as you want. Mostly meat is the way they come out.
- [47:44]
Dan Buettner
And what does that mean to health wise?
- [47:46]
Marion Nestle
Well, you worry that meat is high. Meat diets are associated with cancer risk. High sodium diets are associated with hypertension and heart disease. High sugar diets are associated with all kinds of problems, metabolic problems. Too many calories leads to obesity. Too much alcohol leads to all kinds of bad things. And I don't think they say that very clearly. The eat real food message is fine. And the restrict your intake of highly processed foods. They don't use the word ultra processed, but they Use highly processed. First time the dietary guidelines have ever done that. Those were good. But then this double the amount of protein you eat? I don't think so. There's no evidence that that's necessary. And protein for many people is a euphemism for meat. You know, they're really telling people to eat more red meat. They don't say to restrict red meat and processed meat where there's evidence that those diets high and those are linked to cancer. And they are urging full fat and saturated fat when the evidence on saturated fat has not changed. So the system is rigged against healthful choices.
- [49:06]
Dan Buettner
You know, I push back a little bit against that only because. And I'm not funded by the big bean industrial complex, but I go to blue zones, and those people in Icaria and highlands of Sardinia and Nicoya Peninsula, they're well below the US Poverty line. And they're eating peasant foods. They're eating largely beans, whole grains, corn and rice.
- [49:36]
Marion Nestle
Dan, they're cooking.
- [49:38]
Dan Buettner
They are cooking.
- [49:38]
Marion Nestle
They're cooking. Americans don't cook.
- [49:42]
Dan Buettner
Yeah. I did an experiment. I live in Miami and I did an experiment with 20 inner city moms, and we made an agreement. If you come 10 times to this cooking class, I will give you a free instant pot. I have nothing to do with instant pot, but I like it. Instant pot is an electric sort of pressure cooker. 50 bucks, you push one button. We, for 10 weeks in a row, we voted on what recipe was all very simple peasant ingredients. Whole plant based, no processed. We chopped it together. We put the beans and the grains in there, put the lid, hit on the button. We had a little conversation between us, and then we ate it together. And then leftovers they got to bring home. And because they had the pressure cooker at home now, they had the hardware, they had the software, the recipe, they could afford the ingredients. We made sure that it was all less.
- [50:40]
Marion Nestle
And they had the skill.
- [50:42]
Dan Buettner
The skill. And you know what I think the most important thing is? The most important longevity ingredient is taste. I could tell you all day long that fermented tofu is good for you or broccoli. But if you don't like fermented tofu, broccoli, you ain't gonna eat it. But if they like it and they've had that experience of tasting a Sardinia minestrone or a hoppin john as beans and rice. And my theory is we're gonna taste it. That was six months ago. About two thirds of them are still cooking with that crock pot, with that. I'm sorry, instant Pot. So I often think we look at this gargantuan problem and we say, I can't change the form, Bill. But I think we can shift our focus to doing something that well.
- [51:36]
Marion Nestle
Yeah, that's why I think school gardens are so important, because the kids learn how to plant food. They learn what food is, they harvest it, they make it into whatever they're doing. Their relationship with food is totally transformed. Those are the kinds of things where you can have an enormous effect on people's relationship with food, with teaching people how to cook, teaching people how to garden, making sure they have the equipment at what is really not very high cost. But how do you do that? I mean, how do you mandate that in order to bring it up to scale?
- [52:20]
Dan Buettner
I think you don't start by mandating, but you have influence. You're in the New York Times all the time. You have a very powerful microphone.
- [52:32]
Marion Nestle
And not only I push for school food all the time. Yes, I think it's really important.
- [52:38]
Dan Buettner
You know, I think it's having that the half a dozen things that you can do, and I would argue having an instant pot or a one pot solution and knowing the ingredients that an inner city mom can afford and how to assemble them to taste delicious. That is a solution that I think we could be putting more sort of attention to.
- [53:00]
Marion Nestle
Yeah, I like it a lot.
- [53:01]
Dan Buettner
And more investment where we can. But you've been at this for half a century. Are you optimistic or pessimistic?
- [53:08]
Marion Nestle
I see. You know, I mean, what I've seen over that period is many, many, many more people being interested in these kinds of issues, particularly among young people who really care about food and health and are very concerned. I mean, to give just one example, I would say five or six years ago, if I was talking about the role of the food industry and shareholder value, I would never mention the word capitalism in a classroom because it was too intimidating and it would turn people off. Now, I can't talk about these issues without somebody in the audience saying, aren't you talking about capitalism? Yes, I am. Late stage at that. And so the question is how within the system that we've inherited or that we've created. I hate to take responsibility for creation of this system when I've been fighting it for so long. Obviously not effectively enough, you know, so that you have to work within whatever system you have. And, you know, I urge anybody who's interested in this to become an activist or an advocate, a food advocate, and try to use the political system to make. To change the food system for the better.
- [54:32]
Dan Buettner
How do we do that? I'm a housewife in Iowa. What can I do?
- [54:36]
Marion Nestle
Well, I'd start with the local school. I just think school food is so important for the kids who are in it. You have a school that's producing decent food, and you've got kids who are eating healthfully who have a completely different relationship with food than kids who haven't had that experience. And it's possible to change the food in one school. It really is if you've got the right people there.
- [55:03]
Dan Buettner
But isn't it? Aren't schools. Don't they have to. They take the USDA funding and then they have to buy these USDA sanctioned foods.
- [55:11]
Julia Louis-Dreyfus
Oh.
- [55:12]
Marion Nestle
But it's what they do with those foods that makes the difference. Some schools cook from scratch, Most of them warm. Yeah, some warm, some. But some cook from scratch. And those schools are doing fabulous work.
- [55:26]
Dan Buettner
Wow. How can we find out about a school who's doing it right? Did any come off the top of it?
- [55:33]
Marion Nestle
There are groups that are working with you. Find whatever group there is that's working with your local school district. I'm actually going to visit a school tomorrow with wellness in the schools.
- [55:46]
Dan Buettner
That's a big idea.
- [55:47]
Marion Nestle
And I'm going to go to a school that wellness in the schools is associated with.
- [55:52]
Dan Buettner
Tell us what wellness in the schools is.
- [55:53]
Marion Nestle
It's a group that puts chefs into schools. There are two issues in school food. One is how the food tastes, and the other is whether the kids are eating it or not. And they're taking me to a school where they're paying attention to both of those issues.
- [56:11]
Dan Buettner
Well, would you share that with me and I'll share it with the audience here?
- [56:14]
Marion Nestle
Yeah, I'd be happy to.
- [56:15]
Dan Buettner
Yeah. Because I think we need models to emulate.
- [56:19]
Marion Nestle
Well, also Chef Ann, the Chef Ann foundation works with schools to train the school food service people. And I met recently with a group of them in Tompkins county, upstate New York.
- [56:32]
Dan Buettner
Chef Ann.
- [56:34]
Marion Nestle
Chef Ann Cooper. And so she has this program where they train the people in the school to produce food from scratch, to worry about making sure that the foods are whole and healthy and to make sure that the kids are eating it so
- [56:52]
Dan Buettner
it can be done. And I'm all for the optimism. It can be done. And I think we need to shine a very bright light on those schools that have figured it out, because I have a new book coming out called Blue Zone Evolution, where I found the areas in the world where people live the longest lives in full health, which is to say without chronic disease. And without diabetes. And the Delta is about 12 years over Americans. Our healthy life expectancy about 64. I found places where they were living to 76 or 77. And it was never a coincidence. And the most convincing takeaway I got, I met with sort of the RFK of Japan. We have obesity rate of over 40% Japan. This I can't tell you what it is, where it is exactly, but it's in Japan. Their obesity rate is 4%, 1/10 the rate we. And I said how do you do that? And she was kind of very diplomatic and I'm sure she didn't want to bad mouth the US government. And she thought a minute and she said, well, you know, at a very early age we teach our children about nutrition and we feed them that nutritious food. So I said, oh, let's go into Japanese school kitchen. I actually went to one it got invited in and washed them. Here were these five year old kids who were helping prepare the food. Their meal was a protein, but it was often tofu, plant based protein. But there was a little bit of meat or fish or tofu. There was always a vegetable, there was a pickle and there was what, rice. And then they had this sort of barley tea. But there were no fried chicken nuggets, there was no brownie, there was no chocolate milk. So their palates were being trained at age 5 to be. To favor these more subtle flavors and more.
- [58:50]
Marion Nestle
And textures.
- [58:52]
Dan Buettner
Textures, yes.
- [58:53]
Marion Nestle
And lots of different kinds of foods.
- [58:55]
Dan Buettner
And they had to pick up the. Yeah. And I look at our school lunches and they're an aberration. The foods that we call healthy are anything but.
- [59:07]
Marion Nestle
And well, some schools do it much better than others.
- [59:10]
Dan Buettner
Yes. So let's focus on those. All right, so this has been fantastic. I feel like we've gotten the. A better understanding of where we are now and what. The origins of it. I think most people don't understand why we are where we are today with
- [59:30]
Marion Nestle
Follow the Money, Follow the
- [59:34]
Dan Buettner
if. If we're a Marian Nestle reader. I'm just getting familiar with you. What's the first of the many books that you've written we should read?
- [59:42]
Marion Nestle
Well, it depends, I think what to Eat now is the book that I wrote for the general public. If you're nerdy and want to get into the weeds, start with food politics, but get it from the library because I'm about to start working on a 25th anniversary edition. It'll come out in 2027.
- [60:02]
Dan Buettner
And you're writing now a book about cereal.
- [60:05]
Marion Nestle
Yes, that One's coming out in September and it's a book about food and nutrition policy and food marketing told through cereal boxes.
- [60:15]
Dan Buettner
And you have a rather odd fetish with cereal boxes, don't you?
- [60:20]
Marion Nestle
Well, I've been collecting them for a long time, but I've collected cereal boxes with ridiculous health CL claims. That's my favorite.
- [60:28]
Dan Buettner
What is the most egregious health claim you've seen on a cereal box?
- [60:31]
Marion Nestle
Oh, the one about if you eat this sugar sweetened cereal, your kid will be smarter.
- [60:36]
Dan Buettner
Which, which one is that?
- [60:38]
Marion Nestle
Oh, which one was it? It was a General Mills cereal. I can't remember which one it was. Some sugar sweetened cereal. Your kid will be smarter. I love it.
- [60:46]
Dan Buettner
And how about your. Your newsletter?
- [60:50]
Marion Nestle
How.
- [60:50]
Dan Buettner
How can we.
- [60:50]
Marion Nestle
Oh, that's foodpolitics.com where I post something about food politics once a day, five days a week, not on weekends. I've been doing it for a very long time.
- [61:04]
Dan Buettner
You're very humble. You're a bit of a hard ass, I will tell you that, but in a lovable way.
- [61:11]
Marion Nestle
I'm sure. I'm flattered by that.
- [61:13]
Dan Buettner
But you are a consummate academic who has this rare ability to connect with the everyday person. You're a great writer and you can take this science and you boil it down to be not only simple but compelling. And that is not only a great gift that you possess, but it's a great gift for us living in this toxic environment that's killing so many Americans. So on behalf of all the listeners, thank you. And thank you on behalf of our children as well. So keep up. Keep it up for another.
- [61:50]
Marion Nestle
Thank you, Dan. That's really nice of you. Glad to be here.
- [61:54]
Dan Buettner
Thank you. Marian Nestle.