#233 – Big Food, Big Sugar & how they affect our metabolic health today | Dr. Robert Lustig & Ben Grynol – (Replay)

Big Sugar has a long history of shaping the scientific consensus around its dangers and swaying government guidelines. Understanding the full story is the first step in understanding our current metabolic health crisis. In this episode, Levels Head of Growth Ben Grynol talks to Dr. Rob Lustig about the dark tactics that were used to get us to this point and what we need to do now.

09:24 – Create the consensus

The Sugar Research Foundation funded many studies starting in 1943 that shaped the health consensus around sugar.

And the more studies that they can say that says that their product is not dangerous, then when you do a meta-analysis, which is a conglomeration of multiple analyses in an attempt to try to answer questions, then those studies play an outsized role in basically bringing everything to the mean, regressing it to the mean, and basically therefore proving the null hypothesis that’s basically, there’s no harm. So this is a statistical effort on their part to exonerate their product when they think that there is a problem with their product. And chemical industry, petroleum industry, et cetera, have all engaged in this. And we now have the data, like for instance, for oil, if you read Naomi Oreskes, she has gone back as early as 1968, ExxonMobil knew about this problem back in the late 1960s, even before the first Earth Day.

17:17 – Exonerate sugar as the cause of heart disease

When rates of heart disease and heart attacks started increasing, people wanted to find the culprit. The SRF made sure sugar was ruled out.

So Keys was out there yelling about saturated fat, Yudkin was out there yelling about sugar and the Sugar Research Foundation had to put their thumb on the scale. And so what they did was they went to the Harvard School of Public Health, department of nutrition, which had been started in 1942 by a gentleman by the name of Fred Stare, S-T-A-R-E, very famous in this field. And they said, “You know that it’s saturated fat, don’t you?” And Stare’s said, “Oh, absolutely, I know that.” And they said, “Well, we would like the rest of the world to know this too. And so we would like for you and your two assistants, Mark Hegsted and McGandy, I can’t remember his first name, to write two review articles. So there were review articles, not scientific studies, review articles in the New England Journal of Medicine that exonerate sugar and finger saturated fat as the bad guy. And Stare said, “How much.” And they ended up saying 6,500 American dollars, which today’s money would be worth 50,000. And so that’s exactly what Stare, Hegsted and McGandy did. And they wrote these two articles, basically exonerating sugar, and fingering saturated fat.

22:31 – Use shoddy science

The food industry used a variety of dark tactics to increase the amount of sugar in food. The first was bad science.

So first of all, shoddy science, okay. Like for instance, SnackWell’s, okay. And they’re still with us. All right. They say they replace the fat to make them low fat. Well, what do they replace them with? They replace them with sugar. It actually turns out that there is more calories in each cookie than there was before. There’s just less fat. So they took two grams of fat down, 13 grams of carbohydrate up, and four of which are added sugar. So like not a good idea. Same with chocolate milk. So they take the fat out of the milk, allow them milk tastes like dishwater. So what do they do? They put chocolate or strawberry in it so that the kids will drink. It turns out dairy fat is actually protective against heart disease and diabetes because it’s different. It’s odd chain, fatty acids with a different phospholipid signature than standard red meat saturated fat. So it’s actually protective. It’s actually good. Well, we take it out and then we put something that’s harmful in.

23:35 – Buy off scientists and critics

The food industry also gave money to nutrition associations to sway their opinions and input on food guidance.

Buying off scientists. Well, I just described what happened with Fred Stare, Mark Hegsted and McGandy. Co-opting critics. So like who would be the biggest critic that would have some stature? Well, the dieticians. So it turns out that the American Dietetic Association, which morphed into the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics back in 2012 or so, they get 90% of their operating budget from Big Food, so then they’re not going to bite the hand that feeds them, all right. And we actually have the data to show how the AND has basically been co-opted over these years because of their relationship with Big Food. The worst offender by far and away is the School Nutrition Association. Okay. These guys are actually downright evil and they run all the school cafeterias in America and school cafeterias are the largest fast food franchise in the entire world.

24:50 – Weakening government oversight

The food industry put pressure on the government to include more ingredients and products on its safe list.

Weakening government oversight, and that’s been done in whole bunches of ways, including the GRAS list. So the Generally Recognized As Safe list, used to only have 170 items on it when it started in 1958. Do you know how many things are on the GRAS list today? 10,000. Do you really think there are 10,000 things you can put in your body that won’t kill you? I can’t. All right. Well, why did this happen? Well, food industry. Okay. The Food Safety Modernization Act of 1997, basically put food safety in the hands of the industry rather than in the hands of the government, okay. Disaster, disaster. Market saturation, okay. When all of the items in the supermarket aisles have added sugar in them, okay, You actually don’t have a choice because everything has it. And that’s the level we’re at now.

26:53 – Fight back against regulated advertising

When the government tried to restrict junk food advertising to children, the food industry fought to take away the FTC’s authority.

Now we know from numerous studies that children cannot tell the difference between the commercial and the TV show until eight years of age. So they don’t know when they’re being marketed to, is that fair? One of the reasons that the industry says that it’s free speech is because you assume that people are allowed to speak freely and then other people are allowed to either filter it out or accept it, that the onus is on the listener. But if the listeners under age eight, then that doesn’t work. So in 1979, I think it was 79, the Federal Trade Commission tried to restrict marketing of junk food to children. It’s a famous scandal called the KidVid debacle, KidVid. And the FTC had launched a whole bunch of hearings in Congress. Well the food industry went so frigging ballistic. They pulled out all their big guns and they lobbied every single member of Congress. And not only did they get the FTC to stop the effort, but they actually got Congress to pass the FTC Modernization Act, which took the enforcement arm of the FTC away and they became only an advisory organization.

35:20 – Go all in on corn

To prevent rising food prices in the 70s, Nixon’s administration started subsidizing crops. Soon, high fructose corn syrup became a new byproduct of all that corn.

That was also around the time that we started learning about this thing coming out of Japan called high fructose corn syrup. And the process for being able to turn glucose in corn into a higher concentration of fructose, an enzymatic process using an enzyme called glucose oxidase. So more corn equals more better. And the goal now was to increase yield and the government stopped paying the farmers to not grow specific items. It stopped paying them for the lying fallow. So there was a completely new price model. There was a completely new business model that was put in place that went on quantity not on quality. It was all about yield. And basically to be honest with you, that is still in place today. And so we continue to cover the entire Missouri River Valley in petroleum fertilizer, which then the nitrogen runoff kills the Gulf of Mexico. That’s why there’s dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico is because we have to basically support the corn and soy that’s in Iowa with petroleum fertilizer. So basically these are the unintended consequences of these irrational policies that were poorly thought out.

40:40 – Sugar should be a condiment

Our bodies have a limited capacity to metabolize sugar. We’re consuming four times as much as we should.

Or even like spice, it’s a condiment. You don’t live on turmeric. Okay. It’s added to certain foods for one reason or another or cumin or whatever. But it’s not a dietary staple, okay. Sugar has become a dietary staple, all right. Up to 20% of calories are sugar. It should be more like about 5% of calories. I mean, we’re eating quadruple what we should be eating. But when we went from condiment to diet staple, that’s when things went disastrous. And the reason is because we have a limited capacity to metabolize it, okay. It is not just calories. It overwhelms our mitochondria. It inhibits mitochondrial function. Mitochondria is the little energy burning factories inside all your cells that make chemical energy for your cells to power themselves, that chemical energy is called ATP. Well, sugar inhibits ATP generation. Therefore, it’s making your cells sick because your cells need that ATP in order to do their functions. So we’re not supposed to eat this much.

43:04 – Increase food industry profits

Sugar is addictive and putting it into foods increases the amount we buy.

Prior to 1975, the annual profit margin of the food industry was 1% per year. Now population was going up by 1% per year. That means that the food industry made more money because they sold the same amount of food to more people, same amount of food per person to more people. So they grew by volume, but volume of people. Since 1975, the annual profit margin of the food industry is 5% per year. But in fact, birth rates have actually gone down. It’s not 1% per year anymore, it’s about 0.7% per year. So birth rates have gone down by about 30% yet the annual profit margin of the food industry’s gone up fivefold. How do you explain that? Well, they have to be selling more food to fewer people. So the question is how do you get more food into somebody? And the answer is sugar. And the reason is because it’s addictive. So they’ve learned when they add it, you buy more.

48:27 – The public needs to demand better

If the public becomes more educated about the dangers of sugar, we’ll stop buying sugary foods as much and the industry will have to offer something else.

The food industry told me a long time ago, we don’t care what we sell. We just have to sell. It’s about the money. It’s only about the money. They sell, what they sell because we buy it, okay. So there are two philosophies of business. One is we give the public what they want and the other is, if you build it, they will come. Which of those two does the food industry use? Both, they use both. Point is if we didn’t buy it, they wouldn’t sell it. The goal is to educate the public as to the evils of ultra-processed food of which sugar is the primary driver of chronic disease. If we did that, then the food industry would change, if the public demanded different. The problem is the public’s not demanding different. And the reason is because prices on ultra-processed food are kept low because of food subsidies.

Dr. Rob Lustig (00:00):

The food industry makes 700 billion, but we lose 1.9 trillion cleaning up their mess. That is unsustainable. And that’s why healthcare has gone the hell in a hand basket is because the food industry makes the disease and then big pharma is only happy to treat it, because that’s how they make their profit. But the gross profit margin of the food industry is 45%. Pharma is only at 21%. So food is actually twice as lucrative pharma. Well, the fact the matter is they’re not going to give this up without a fight. And so people have to understand what’s going on and why everyone’s getting sick.

Ben Grynol (00:58):

I’m Ben Grynol part of the early startup team here at Levels. We’re building tech that helps people to understand their metabolic health and this is your front row seat to everything we do. This is a whole new Level. Probably heard the word, big, big pharma, Big Food, big tobacco, big industry. Well, there’s also big sugar. And so Dr. Lustig Rob, as we refer to him now, Rob and I sat down and we talked about this idea of big industry, big sugar, Big Food, and all of the implications from a deep-rooted history in some of the things that have been at play that have influenced health and wellness. All of the things that have come into account when thinking about the food system, there’s more at play than we would think. We don’t want this to sound like a conspiracy theory. We’re looking at objective information, things that have happened and some of the ways that people have been influenced to make choices over time.

Ben Grynol (02:06):

There’s a lot of factors to dig in to. And it was a really interesting conversation. A lot of it tied into the books that Rob has written, Hacking of the American Mind and Metabolical. They’re all of these factors at play and it’s really important to have these conversations. It’s really fun to do with Rob. Here’s where we kick things off. This is a topic that is near and dear to your heart for sure and something that I am fascinated in. And it’s the idea of when we think about metabolic health and health and wellness, a lot of times we focus, the conversations focused on micro factors. Like what’s in front of us, a piece of cake, a bag of potato chips and all these things. But when you really pull out, there’s the idea of the macroeconomics that have contributed for so many years to lead us into this poor metabolic health crisis that we face as a world.

Ben Grynol (03:02):

And so when we really dig in this can turn into a bit of a rant, but it’s this idea of big everything. So I thought it would be interesting to dig into Big Food, a little bit of big pharma but really focus on big sugar and some of the things that have happened over the course of a number of years, to get us to this point where people can start to understand like, hey, how do we get into this pickle in the first place? So that might be a way of setting everything up. But the question for you is how far back should we take this rant?

Dr. Rob Lustig (03:32):

Well, we can take it back pretty far, Ben, this is problem that is not exclusive to the food story. This is a problem in the petroleum story, this is a problem in the tobacco story, this is a problem in the opioids story. There are dark forces at work and they are making money. And so they want things to stay status quo. And so they have very specific playbooks and we’ve seen the data, we’ve seen their playbooks. So we know they exist. This isn’t a figment of our imagination and we’ve caught them in their own lives as well. So understanding the organization and how this gets played out and who’s participating and who’s paid off is extraordinarily important to understanding how we got into the mess that we’re in. And I’m very happy to talk about it. And I’ve actually written articles and books, in fact, like Metabolical about this exact question.

Ben Grynol (04:42):

Yeah. And a lot of it’s touched on in Hacking of the American Mind too. So why don’t we start out with defining big, right? It might be a term that people have heard big tobacco, big oil, but the idea of like what exactly is big. So framing it as conglomerates or these large corporations that often collude to influence policy, focus on profits over people and big spans, as you mentioned, it can big span food, pharma, oil, sugar, tobacco, list goes on

Dr. Rob Lustig (05:10):

That’s right. So let’s first of all talk about what we mean by collusion, all right. So there’s a difference between a plot and a conspiracy. They’re not the same. A conspiracy is an organized consortium of either individuals or companies with a common goal working together to defraud the public or some other entity with a mission of malice. We have no data to say that there is a conspiracy for any of these things, okay. Not for oil, not for tobacco, not for opioids, not for alcohol, not for sugar, not for food and not for pharma. We do not have data for conspiracy. We have plenty of data for plot. The fact is that each company looks what every other company does and says, “That’s what we have to do.” And so they are not organized in the sense of running a cartel to defraud the public, but they are all defrauding the public individually. So the ultimate answer is the same, but looking for signs of collusion will end up being fruitless.

Ben Grynol (06:35):

So why don’t we take it to place that you’ve probably spent a lot of time thinking about 1943.

Dr. Rob Lustig (06:43):

Yes.

Ben Grynol (06:43):

1943, the SRF, the Sugar Research Foundation is founded. And we know that the SRF can see the smile gleaming on your face because you’ve probably thought so much this and have lots to say. They funded more than 300 industry research studies between 43 and 72, which was a critical, critical period in the way that we thought about sugar as a society and the downstream implications of it. So why don’t we start there? And there’s lots to go into fifties all the way to the sixties, seventies and talk about that.

Dr. Rob Lustig (07:19):

Right. So I’m going to start by saying, I don’t know why the Sugar Research Foundation engaged in all of this [inaudible 00:07:28] funding of industry sponsored studies back in 1943. Did they know that their product was dangerous back in 1943? I don’t know. I actually don’t know. I do know that’s when the Sugar Research Foundation started and it became an International Sugar Research Foundation at about shortly thereafter. So clearly there was reason for the various sugar companies to ban together in this consortium arrangement to try to promote their product. And they started funding studies. Now up to that point, industry had not funded scientific studies. So they were really the first to do that. There were plenty of pharmaceutical studies. That’s true, but they were funding their own studies.

Dr. Rob Lustig (08:22):

They weren’t funding other people’s studies. So like for instance, IG Farben, the famous maker of Zyklon B from World War II. The nerve gas that they used in the concentration camps, they funded a lot of research, but it was all pharmaceutical research within their own company. And of course, lots of other pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer and what have you. But this was the first time when an industry sponsored science outside of themselves. And I don’t know why, but I do know that they did it and I do know that they continue to do it even today. And we have the data as to how that happens and they’re supposed to disclose, and they don’t always disclose. So this is a well won tactic on their part. And the reason they’re doing it is to pollute the literature. They are basically paying for studies that say that their product is not dangerous.

Dr. Rob Lustig (09:24):

And the more studies that they can say that says that their product is not dangerous, then when you do a meta-analysis, which is a conglomeration of multiple analyses in an attempt to try to answer questions, then those studies play an outsized role in basically bringing everything to the mean, regressing it to the mean, and basically therefore proving the null hypothesis that’s basically, there’s no harm. So this is a statistical effort on their part to exonerate their product when they think that there is a problem with their product. And chemical industry, petroleum industry, et cetera, have all engaged in this. And we now have the data, like for instance, for oil, if you read Naomi [inaudible 00:10:13], she has gone back as early as 1968, ExxonMobil knew about this problem back in the late 1960s, even before the first Earth Day.

Dr. Rob Lustig (10:26):

They knew about this and they started publishing the issue and then someone, I don’t know who, in the oil business said, “This isn’t very good for us.” And they put the big clamp on it. And they actually then started with their own disinformation campaign telling people that this was not an issue and that we should ignore it. And of course, we continued to burn fossil fuels at enormous rates. And now we have the climate change disaster that we have. And I have actually been approached by some of these people. One guy I remember took me to dinner to basically convince me that fossil fuels were not the problem. And there was an interesting argument to say the least.

Dr. Rob Lustig (11:13):

And now I know why, because that was his job. I get it, I get it. I know what’s happening. All right. So 1943 is when this all started. Then in 1954, the Tobacco Research Foundation realized they had a problem because of the Richard Doll paper and the also with Austin Bradford Hill back the UK realizing that was the first indication in 1950, that tobacco might be associated with lung cancer. And they needed to do something about it because this is clearly not good for their publicity or for their product. At that same moment, a member of the Sugar Research Foundation, who was actually a professor at MIT. And I take Umbridge with this, because I’m an MIT grad and I love MIT, but this one guy he needs to pay for his crimes. And his name was Robert Hackett. And he approached the Tobacco Research Foundation and showed them the playbook that the Sugar Research Foundation had been using for the previous 10 years.

Dr. Rob Lustig (12:24):

And he then went to work for the Tobacco Research Foundation to do the same thing in terms of covering up and engaging in this disinformation campaign. And so the Tobacco Research Foundation used the same playbook as sugar, as opposed to sugar using the same playbook as tobacco. And they were both doing it at the same time with the same people. And my colleagues at UCSF; Kristin Carnes, Laura Schmidt, Stan Glantz, and all the people in the Tobacco Research documents library, which is now also the food industry documents library at UCSF are actually conducting a digital etymological analysis of all of the documents from big tobacco and from big sugar to determine using the phraseology of these documents, like what they wrote and how they wrote it as to whether or not there was collusion between these two industries and who was involved and who was in charge of it.

Ben Grynol (13:32):

Interesting.

Dr. Rob Lustig (13:33):

So that’s going on right now as we speak and I can’t wait for the results of this analysis.

Ben Grynol (13:40):

So let’s go into the fifties. So early fifties, the SRF started to find a link between CHD, so Coronary Heart Disease and sugar, they’re finding a link and they seemed to bury that information pretty deeply to the point where they funded an animal experiment project 259 to evaluate sucrose’s effects on cardiovascular health, ended up blocking the results from getting published because they weren’t in the best interest of industry, air quotes industry, like the entire industry. So instead they sponsored a study on CHD in 60, I think it was 65 that linked cholesterol, cholesterol is a problem. And that’s when fat turned into the demon and sugar was the hero of the story and published those results in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Dr. Rob Lustig (14:34):

Right? So that’s almost correct. So first of all, 1955, Eisenhower had a heart attack and everybody in the country started paying attention to the fact that cardiovascular disease was going up like wildfire, okay. From the 1900s to the 1950s, there had been an enormous increase in cardiovascular disease. Now, remember there was an also an enormous increase in smoking. There was also an enormous increase in the use of trans fats, okay. 1911, Crisco, 1920, started appearing in baked goods, the Twinkies, 1950s. There were several issues tied up in heart disease. But as you probably know, there was this guy back in the 1950s who started this work in 1952 by the name of Ancel Keys. And he was convinced that it was saturated fat that was the bad guy. And the reason he said that was because he was a Minnesota epidemiologist and he had done sabbaticals in two places. In 1952, he did a sabbatical in England and he saw all of these Brits getting heart disease.

Dr. Rob Lustig (15:56):

And he was convinced it was the fishing chips. And he then went to Pioppi, Italy and he saw very little heart disease. And he also saw that they did olive oil. They didn’t have that much meat in their diet and they also didn’t have any pasta by the way. And they also didn’t have any sugar by the way, while we’re at it. And so he was convinced that the reason the Brits were getting sick and the people in Pioppi weren’t was because of saturated fat. And he went out to proof this. So this was well known in the echelons. And the sugar industry was worried that their product was going to end up being implicated because of a British physiologist nutritionist physician by the name of John Yudkin, who had in 1957, started publishing papers, fingering sugar as the primary driver.

Dr. Rob Lustig (16:57):

Now Yudkin did not have causational data. He only had correlational data. But the correlational data was pretty good. And we’ve learned that causation and correlation are not the same thing. But back then, we sort of didn’t understand from a statistical standpoint the difference between the two. So they were worried. And so they had to do something. So Keys was out there yelling about saturated fat, Yudkin was out there yelling about sugar and the Sugar Research Foundation had to put their thumb on the scale. And so what they did was they went to the Harvard School of Public Health, department of nutrition, which had been started in 1942 by a gentleman by the name of Fred Stare, S-T-A-R-E, very famous in this field. And they said, “You know that it’s saturated fat, don’t you?” And Stare’s said, “Oh, absolutely, I know that.”

Dr. Rob Lustig (17:55):

And they said, “Well, we would like the rest of the world to know this too. And so we would like for you and your two assistants, Mark Hegsted and McGandy, I can’t remember his first name, to write two review articles. So there were review articles, not scientific studies, review articles in the New England Journal of Medicine that exonerate sugar and finger saturated fat as the bad guy. And Stare said, “How much.” And they ended up saying 6,500 American dollars, which today’s money would be worth 50,000. And so that’s exactly what Stare, Hegsted and McGandy did. And they wrote these two articles, basically exonerating sugar, and fingering saturated fat. They ignored all of the data that Yudkin had and instead basic focused on saturated fat.

Dr. Rob Lustig (18:51):

And of course, the Sugar Research Foundation did not disclose the fact that they were the funders of this and that they were also receiving drafts and editing and adding references very specifically to form a bull work against Yudkin and the sugar hypothesis of heart disease. And in fact, they funded many studies by many different people. And when they didn’t like the results that they were seeing, they made sure that those studies never saw the light of day. And my colleague, Kristin Carnes at UCSF is now actually researching that and finding out all of the studies that the Sugar Research Foundation funded, but never came to publication to figure out exactly why, whether or not it was inconclusive versus whether it actually showed problems in the data. And I’ve been working with her on a couple of these papers to figure this out.

Dr. Rob Lustig (19:54):

There was one guy who was in the pocket of big sugar, named St. Clair back in 1971, there was one study done, which showed that sugar was associated with bladder cancer in rats never got published. There’s a whole bunch. So we know that this was a major portion of what the Sugar Research Foundation was involved in was basically obfuscating the truth and promoting their own narrative throughout and by buying off scientists.

Ben Grynol (20:26):

Yeah. And some of the studies that are being done. So there’s the ones where they’re finding data that does not support a strong position for the sugar industry. And then they’re doing these other ones, like one that I found recently was from 2018. And it’s just absurd to think about it, but it’s basically marketing propaganda. I think the title is Mary Poppins was right: Adding small amounts of sugar or salt reduces the bitterness of vegetables. So it’s targeted at parents and like, hey, this is supporting why we should have a little bit of sugar in those fruit pouches and feed them to your kids at a certain age. So they’re doing these things that are basically trying to dupe people or influence their thought process to rationalize like, yeah, maybe it actually is okay, or it’s not that bad.

Ben Grynol (21:12):

Like, so they find there’s almost two sides. There’s like we find terrible data and we don’t want to publish it and we’ll do anything not to. And then we’re going to do these things that are just sort of these marketing pushes to make people think it’s not as harmful as it is. And it really feels like everyone’s having the wall pulled over their eyes and you need people like Kristin or Stanton Glantz. Like these people that are basically investigating what’s going on to say, “We’re all being duped. Like this is how we’re being duped.” And uncovering some of the links between big everything.

Dr. Rob Lustig (21:43):

Absolutely. So the dark forces of industry to use many, many different tactics and different techniques to sort of get their way. And we now have exposed each of them and we know what’s going on, but they still do it. And there’s no enforcement. There’s nothing on the prosecution side for being able to do this because it’s considered free speech. They’re allowed to say these things and what are you going to do if a scientist decides not to publish a study, who’s going to get thrown in jail for that? So they play on this. Let me give you a list that I made years ago of all the methods that the dark force uses. And I’ll give of a little description of each one and how it works. So first of all, shoddy science, okay. Like for instance, SnackWell’s, okay.

Dr. Rob Lustig (22:38):

And they’re still with us. All right. They say they replace the fat to make them low fat. Well, what do they replace them with? They replace them with sugar. It actually turns out that there is more calories in each cookie than there was before. There’s just less fat. So they took two grams of fat down, 13 grams of carbohydrate up, and four of which are added sugar. So like not a good idea. Same with chocolate milk. So they take the fat out of the milk, allow them milk tastes like dishwater. So what do they do? They put chocolate or strawberry in it so that the kids will drink. It turns out dairy fat is actually protective against heart disease and diabetes because it’s different. It’s odd chain, fatty acids with a different phospholipid signature than standard red meat saturated fat. So it’s actually protective.

Dr. Rob Lustig (23:29):

It’s actually good. Well, we take it out and then we put something that’s harmful in. So shoddy science to start with. Buying off scientists. Well, I just described what happened with Fred Stare, Mark Hegsted and McGandy. Co-opting critics. So like who would be the biggest critic that would have some stature? Well, the dieticians. So it turns out that the American Dietetic Association, which morphed into the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics back in 2012 or so, they get 90% of their operating budget from Big Food, so then they’re not going to bite the hand that feeds them, all right. And we actually have the data to show how the AND has basically been co-opted over these years because of their relationship with Big Food. The worst offender by far and away is the School Nutrition Association. Okay. These guys are actually downright evil and they run all the school cafeterias in America and school cafeterias are the largest fast food franchise in the entire world.

Dr. Rob Lustig (24:41):

And these people are in charge of your kids’ nutrition. They have to go, okay. If anybody has to go it’s them, all right. Weakening government oversight, and that’s been done in whole bunches of ways, including the GRAS list, so the Generally Recognized As Safe list, used to only have 170 items on it when it started in 1958. Do you know how many things are on the GRAS list today? 10,000. Do you really think there are 10,000 things you can put in your body that won’t kill you? I can’t. All right. Well, why did this happen? Well, food industry. Okay. The Food Safety Modernization Act of 1997, basically put food safety in the hands of the industry rather than in the hands of the government, okay. Disaster, disaster. Market saturation, okay. When all of the items in the supermarket aisles have added sugar in them, okay, You actually don’t have a choice because everything has it.

Dr. Rob Lustig (25:48):

And that’s the level we’re at now. And it’s done on purpose and it’s not because there’s one entity doing that, it’s that every entity’s looking at every other entity. So General Mills is looking at what Kellogg’s is doing. And they’re basically matching because it’s share of stomach. They want their piece as it were. So that’s a big problem. Astroturf Groups, so there are groups called Citizens for Health, the American Legislative Exchange Council. These are all food industry sponsored groups that are influencing Congress, calling themselves grassroots organizations, but they are nothing of the sort. And their job is basically to lobby Congress to keep things the way they are. Marketing to children, so is marketing to children, legal? It is absolutely legal. Is marketing to children ethical? It is highly unethical.

Dr. Rob Lustig (26:53):

Now we know from numerous studies that children cannot tell the difference between the commercial and the TV show until eight years of age. So they don’t know when they’re being marketed to, is that fair? One of the reasons that the industry says that it’s free speech is because you assume that people are allowed to speak freely and then other people are allowed to either filter it out or accept it, that the onus is on the listener. But if the listeners under age eight, then that doesn’t work. So in 1979, I think it was 79, 78, 79, the Federal Trade Commission tried to restrict marketing of junk food to children. It’s a famous scandal called the KidVid debacle, KidVid. And the FTC had launched a whole bunch of hearings in Congress. Well the food industry went so frigging ballistic. They pulled out all their big guns and they lobbied every single member of Congress.

Dr. Rob Lustig (27:59):

And not only did they get the FTC to stop the effort, but they actually got Congress to pass the FTC Modernization Act, which took the enforcement arm of the FTC away and they became only an advisory organization. They declawed the FTC. Have you ever heard the FTC doing anything since? And the reason is because they can’t, because Congress basically took that away from them because Big Food did that, all right. And so basically there is no enforcement, there’s nobody to tell Big Food what’s going on. And then finally the most egregious of all, spyware. In Mexico when the soda tax was being put into place, have you heard about this Israeli spyware that they can put on cell phones and they can track everything?

Ben Grynol (28:55):

Right.

Dr. Rob Lustig (28:56):

Well, they actually did that to all the members of the Instituto Nacional de Salud Pública, the Institute of Public Health in Cuernavaca, Mexico that were actually working on trying to get a Mexico soda tax and El Poder del Consumador, which is the public relations, nonprofit that sprung up to basically educate the public about the evils of sugar and the relation between sugar and diabetes, this is really, really bad, okay. So the bottom line is the food industry and now of course we have the tobacco industry and the opioids industry and the oil industry, they don’t want to play. They do not want to change. They want their money and we’ve seen it. We’ve seen it. And we’ve seen them get in trouble and they don’t care because they’ve basically declawed the agencies that would effectively regulate them.

Ben Grynol (29:54):

So why don’t we go into this idea of the processed food industry and where some of the foundational [inaudible 00:30:01] started. So early seventies, Nixon is up for reelection and decides that there’s going to be a policy implemented around incentivizing farmers on quantity, not quality of crops, really digging into this idea of corn. And so I think he had worked with it was Earl Butz, I believe,

Dr. Rob Lustig (30:23):

Earl Butz. Earl Butz was the secretary of agriculture under Nixon. That’s right.

Ben Grynol (30:27):

And the idea was to push forward corn like to really promote corn and all of these downstream implications about corn being this commodity crop and this filler, while that led to corn syrup and the list goes on. So why don’t we leave it there, you take it away from early seventies and how the processed food industry evolved and some of the thoughts that happened around it.

Dr. Rob Lustig (30:48):

Right. So I remember, and you’re way too young, I remember TV show every Saturday morning on New York TV. I mean it was national, but lived in New York, whole college bowl and different colleges basically Trivia like Jeopardy for college students. And I was a kid and I used to watch that religiously. And college bowl was always sponsored by General Mills and Kellogg’s and this company that I didn’t understand what they did named ADM, Archer Daniels Midland. And boy, oh boy, did they have a lot of commercials for ADM? And they showed all these tractors rolling through the rock through Iowa, collecting all the corn and all this. This was the late sixties. The bottom line was that in the late sixties, farmers in Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, et cetera, they farmed different products. They farmed corn. Of course, they farmed soy, of course, but they also farmed vegetables.

Dr. Rob Lustig (31:59):

They farmed tomatoes. They farmed the whole host of different things for the country. And in order to do that, they had to rotate crops. They had to basically let some land lie fallow in order to sort of regenerate the soil so that the microbiome in the soil could support the difference between dirt and soil, dirt is just carbon and silicon whereas soil has living organisms and minerals and amino acids and other stuff. And so that’s what [inaudible 00:32:34] grow. It is basically all that stuff put in a bottle. All right, well, the point is you had to regenerate the soil. So you had to basically rotate the crops and you had to let some fields lie fallow. And that’s what happened through the late sixties. And they were all family farms and there was a science or an art to how to improve your yield.

Dr. Rob Lustig (33:00):

And then Richard Nixon, he had a problem, okay. It was called political unrest and he had a lot of it because of Vietnam and everything else. And he also had fluctuating food prices and fluctuating food prices cause political unrest. And if we didn’t learn that before, we certainly learned that when the price of rice went up in Thailand, when we converted corn to ethanol in the 2008, it caused rice riots in Thailand and caused the ouster of their prime minister. So we had this globalization and fluctuating food prices, nothing makes people more unhappy than fluctuating food prices. And so Nixon in an attempt to try to stabilize food prices, he told his agriculture secretary Earl Butz, whose nickname was Rusty, Rusty Butz I love that, to make food cheap and do whatever you have to, to make food cheap so that this issue of political unrest would get better because after all he was running for reelection in 72.

Dr. Rob Lustig (34:13):

And so Butz devised a plan that basically we were going to do mono-culture. We were going to basically increase the yield on every farm and we were not going to let anything lie fallow. And what we’re going to do is we’re going to pump all those farms full of ammonium nitrate, full of petroleum fertilizer to get the nitrogen into the soil so that we could grow crappy food but nonetheless more food. And so he went to the Heartland, Nebraska, Kansas, Iowa, et cetera. And he said three things, row to row, furrow to furrow, get bigger get out. And that was the end of crop rotation, that was the end of lying fallow. It was also the end of ADM’s sponsorship of college bowl. That was when they stopped sponsoring it, all right. Because now they had a different set of directives as it were. And of course that was also around the time that we started learning about this thing coming out of Japan called high fructose corn syrup.

Dr. Rob Lustig (35:27):

And the process for being able to turn glucose in corn into a higher concentration of fructose, an enzymatic process using an enzyme called glucose oxidase. So more corn equals more better. And the goal now was to increase yield and the government stopped paying the farmers to not grow specific items. It stopped paying them for the lying fallow. So there was a completely new price model. There was a completely new business model that was put in place that went on quantity not on quality. It was all about yield. And basically to be honest with you, that is still in place today. And so we continue to cover the entire Missouri River Valley in petroleum fertilizer, which then the nitrogen runoff kills the Gulf of Mexico. That’s why there’s dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico is because we have to basically support the corn and soy that’s in Iowa with petroleum fertilizer. So basically these are the unintended consequences of these irrational policies that were poorly thought out.

Ben Grynol (36:43):

Is that when in the early seventies, when all this was happening, is that when there was collusion with companies like Monsanto and encouraging people to go to monoculture, like farmers to go to monoculture and really prohibiting them from doing any seed saving, like all the things that you should do if you’re growing multiple crops and trying to encourage, or trying to focus on the quality of food, seed saving like tilling soil properly.

Dr. Rob Lustig (37:10):

Well, that’s certainly happened in the 1970s. Monsanto was a slightly different story. I mean, obviously they’ve always been so pouring American agriculture in some fashion rather, but really Monsanto ended up becoming the bad guy in the story when we started with GMOs, okay. And that was not in the seventies that molecular biology was just basically coming of age in the eighties. And Monsanto basically developed various seed products that were for instance, Roundup Ready and so you could spray pesticides, but still grow your corn. And that’s when we got into even bigger trouble. Now, as it turns out, those pesticides have effects on us. Like for instance, glyphosate or Roundup. Glyphosate is an amino acid analog. It is an analog of glycine and it gets into our proteins and it affects our DNA. And now we’ve shown that glyphosate actually is a predictor of cancer.

Dr. Rob Lustig (38:17):

And that’s why Monsanto was sued for $280 million for this guy who got lymphoma from glyphosate. And then Bayer bought Monsanto, which I think was the stupidest move ever made on record. Why would you do that? But they did. I guess they thought they could weather the storm. And now Bayer owes about $109 billion in lawsuits. That was really dumb, but they did it. Greed is pretty amazing. The point is that every single thing we do has downstream effects and unintended consequences. And the problem is that no one’s looking at those, especially in industry. So is it the government’s job to do that? Well we have all sorts of environmental impact things that we have to do before a construction project can be done or a building project can be done, that have to be, but the industry doesn’t have to do any of those things. The question is, why not? Shouldn’t they have to do that? Shouldn’t they have to submit their plan before they do that? Well, they don’t, because it’s food, but it isn’t.

Ben Grynol (39:27):

And with sugar, the wild thing is, I think you had written in Hacking of the American Mind that the margins are just ridiculous. It’s like 45% margins. So they’re up there with like pharma margins.

Dr. Rob Lustig (39:39):

Oh, [inaudible 00:39:39].

Ben Grynol (39:39):

And so the incentives to grow and grow and grow and irrationally to promote, “Hey, this is fine for you. And it’s not a big deal.” And it’s a filler in everything. It causes all of the worst downstream health implications that we know of. It is the, as you always say, it’s like the other white powder, it’s addictive, it’s the number one cause of metabolic syndrome and, and, and, and. It’s just, I mean, it’s dangerous, but we, your famous line sugar equals love, we just, we glorify that it’s this like beautiful thing and we celebrate sugar, but we have to love look at everything with a bit of a discretionary lens saying there are things that aren’t good for you. We’re not saying eliminate, like never have a single grain of sugar in your life. It’s more a matter of like, you probably should avoid it all together, but it’s just the idea of it’s in everything. And now it’s causing huge implications for the world.

Dr. Rob Lustig (40:35):

Look, sugar should be a condiment. Okay.

Ben Grynol (40:38):

Like alcohol, right?

Dr. Rob Lustig (40:40):

Or even like spice, it’s a condiment. You don’t live on turmeric. Okay. It’s added to certain foods for one reason or another or cumin or whatever. But it’s not a dietary staple, okay. Sugar has become a dietary staple, all right. Up to 20% of calories are sugar. It should be more like about 5% of calories. I mean, we’re eating quadruple what we should be eating. But when we went from condiment to diet staple, that’s when things went disastrous. And the reason is because we have a limited capacity to metabolize it, okay. It is not just calories. It overwhelms our mitochondria. It inhibits mitochondrial function. Mitochondria is the little energy burning factories inside all your cells that make chemical energy for your cells to power themselves, that chemical energy is called ATP. Well, sugar inhibits ATP generation.

Dr. Rob Lustig (41:41):

Therefore, it’s making your cells sick because your cells need that ATP in order to do their functions. So we’re not supposed to eat this much. Our livers only have a limited capacity to metabolize the stuff like alcohol. And you see what happens when you overdo alcohol? Well, same thing happens with sugar and the reason is because alcohol and sugar metabolize the same way. And it makes sense that would be the case because after all, where do you get alcohol from? Fermentation to sugar, it’s cold wine, right. We do it in Napa and Sonoma every day. The big difference between the two is that for alcohol, the yeast does the first step in metabolism called glycolysis. For sugar, we do our own first step in metabolism. But after that the mitochondria see the same thing. And so it makes sense that sugar and alcohol would have the same downstream diseases and they do.

Dr. Rob Lustig (42:32):

And that’s why children now get the diseases of alcohol, Type 2 diabetes and fatty liver disease without the alcohol. Point is we’re not supposed to eat this much, but the food industry has realized that number one sugar cells and they make a whole lot of money on it. If you look at the gross margin of the food industry prior to 1975, which was when the sugar glut started and high fructose corn syrup entered our world. Prior to 1975, the annual profit margin of the food industry was 1% per year. Now population was going up by 1% per year. That means that the food industry made more money because they sold the same amount of food to more people, same amount of food per person to more people. So they grew by volume, but volume of people.

Dr. Rob Lustig (43:26):

Since 1975, the annual profit margin of the food industry is 5% per year. But in fact, birth rates have actually gone down. It’s not 1% per year anymore, it’s about 0.7% per year. So birth rates have gone down by about 30% yet the annual profit margin of the food industry’s gone up fivefold. How do you explain that? Well, they have to be selling more food to fewer people. So the question is how do you get more food into somebody? And the answer is sugar. And the reason is because it’s addictive. So they’ve learned when they add it, you buy more.

Ben Grynol (44:00):

And it’s such a filler. I think that’s one thing that you always talk about as well is it’s like it is literally a filler. It adds calories, it adds all these things, it is energy, right? [inaudible 00:44:10].

Dr. Rob Lustig (44:10):

No, it’s not energy. Yeah, that’s what they say.

Ben Grynol (44:14):

Yeah, exactly. And it’s just garbage.

Dr. Rob Lustig (44:16):

Right, exactly. If you blow it up in a bomb calorimeter, it’s energy.

Ben Grynol (44:20):

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Dr. Rob Lustig (44:21):

But if you try to burn it in a mitochondria, it actually is poison. It actually inhibits energy formation. And that’s the reason why the whole concept of calories is useless. My job is to kill the calorie as a unit of measure, okay. It never made sense. It is what’s wrong, okay. And sugar is the perfect example of how it’s wrong and why it’s wrong and how to basically take something that’s ensconced. For a hundred years, we’ve been counting calories, ever since 1916 when Wilbur Atwater came up with his equations that said fat had nine calories per gram and carbohydrate had four calories per gram and basically made these calories fungible that it didn’t matter where they came from. It was just the total that mattered, garbage, okay. That is just garbage.

Dr. Rob Lustig (45:16):

And we have proof every which way from Sunday as to how garbage that is. But the fact is food industry continues to use it because this is their juggernaut. This is their hook. And it’s also the thing that shields them from culpability because they say, “Well, not our problem. We’re just supplying the calories, you get to eat them.” But the fact is we’re eating so much more and that’s their fault. So this is a problem. Now the food industry grosses each year, $1.9 trillion a year. Now of that, 700 million is gross profit. So they’re at about 40% gross profit margin. Okay. So that’s gross profit, not net profit, but gross profit.

Ben Grynol (46:08):

700 billion?

Dr. Rob Lustig (46:10):

700 billion out of 1.9 trillion. However, medicine, the healthcare industry grosses not grosses, but loses $3.8 trillion a year of which 75% is chronic disease driven by diet of which 75% of that could be recoupable if we could bring levels of disease back to where they were in 1970, before the [inaudible 00:46:38]. In other words, 75% of 75% of 3.8 trillion is $1.9 trillion down a rat hole. The food industry makes 700 billion, but we lose 1.9 trillion cleaning up their mess. That is unsustainable. And that’s why healthcare has gone the hell in a handbasket is because the food industry makes the disease and then big pharma is only happy to treat it because that’s how they make their profit. But the gross profit margin of the food industry is 45%, 40%, 45%. Pharma is only at 21%. So food is actually twice as lucrative as pharma. And pharma, we call them drug horrors.

Dr. Rob Lustig (47:28):

What do we call the food industry? Well, the fact the matter is they’re not going to give this up without a fight. And so people have to understand what’s going on and why everyone’s getting sick. And until we stand up and basically say no more, they’ll keep doing it because there’s no enforcement on.

Ben Grynol (47:48):

So given sugar is addictive, given all of the factors at play, the massive, massive behavior change, massive policy change, all these things are required and it doesn’t happen overnight, takes time. It takes decades and decades. But if you were to give one piece of advice, what is something that people can do? Is it read labels better? Is it lobby? Is it vote with their wallets? What’s sort of the thing, knowing that if we all agree, everyone sort of nods their head. They’re like, “I didn’t realize sugar was that bad. I now have been given some foundation of education to know I should probably stay away.” What would you give as one piece of advice that people could have as a takeaway?

Dr. Rob Lustig (48:27):

The food industry told me a long time ago, we don’t care what we sell. We just have to sell. It’s about the money. It’s only about the money. They sell, what they sell because we buy it, okay. So there are two philosophies of business. One is we give the public what they want and the other is, if you build it, they will come. Which of those two does the food industry use? Both, they use both. Point is if we didn’t buy it, they wouldn’t sell it. The goal is to educate the public as to the evils of ultra-processed food of which sugar is the primary driver of chronic disease. If we did that, then the food industry would change, if the public demanded different. The problem is the public’s not demanding different. And the reason is because prices on ultra-processed food are kept low because of food subsidies.

Dr. Rob Lustig (49:28):

To me, food subsidies are the big evil in the room. That’s what has to change. There’s no economist on the planet that believes in food subsidies because they distort the market, let the market work. Even libertarians can get on board with that. So if food subsidies disappeared and food could actually be sold for what it actually cost the in the industry to make, it would change our entire diet. It changed our entire diet back in the 1970s. We’d change it back. So to me, that’s the thing that has to change. And until that changes, none of the other dominoes can fold. So how do you get food subsidies to change? Well, only Congress can do that. And so that’s where the pressure has to be put. And that’s what people have to know. Ultimately Congress has to respond to the people sort of, as we’ve learned, not so much. And that’s the real issue here.