#239 – Big Ag feeds into Big Pharma: Metabolic health benefits from regenerative farming | Dr. Robert Lustig & Ben Grynol – (Replay)

Since metabolic health is downstream of food production, we need regenerative farming, balanced ecosystems, and to lift the veil of Big Food’s marketing schemes in order to optimize the entire system. Our Head of Growth Ben Grynol interviewed Levels’ Advisor Dr. Rob Lustig to talk about how insecticides changed American farmland, how agriculture and healthcare are intertwined and actionable tips consumers can follow to eat better food.

06:08 – The growers and the helpers

The growers are the farmers, who remain faceless to most consumers, but the helpers are the chemical companies that we know by name, providing pesticides and insecticides to the farmers.

Ultimately, there are the growers and then there are the helpers, as it were, the helpers to grow. And the growers, we actually don’t know their names. They’re very much small groups for the most part. It’s the helpers of the growers that are sort of the interesting ones because they’ve got specific products that end up being incorporated into our food that we don’t necessarily know because after all, there’s no logo on the front. The reason there’s no logo on the front is because all of the things have been “generally recognized as safe by the government.” So we “don’t need to know,” as it were. That’s where the rubber hits the road in terms of this. We’re not talking about mom and pop farms. We’re not even talking about International Harvester or John Deere that help produce the food through cultivation. We’re talking about the groups of companies that add something or subtract something. Those companies are known to us as “chemical companies.” For the most part, we’re talking about Monsanto, we’re talking about BASF as you said, we’re talking about Bayer who bought Monsanto, we’re talking about Syngenta in Europe. These are companies that make products that then either are used to change the food in some fashion or to prevent its degradation. And when we say prevent degradation, we’re usually talking about either herbicides or pesticides.

07:05 – How DDT changed America

During WWII, DDT helped protect American soldiers from diseases they would catch in the fields, but then it was used as an insecticide across the entire country.

It starts actually in World War II. It starts with the fact that we had a problem with typhus, and we had a problem with malaria, and we were losing troops to these terrible infectious diseases in the field, and so we had to basically clear large swaths of land from vegetation. And back in the 1920s, I believe it was, actually, I think it was actually produced first in 1879, but in the 1920s, this new product called DDT came along, and in 1939, it started being applied to World War II vegetation to try to help the American soldier. And it was very effective in keeping the typhus problem down significantly during World War II. World War I, we didn’t have it, and it was a huge issue in World War II. We had other issues but that wasn’t one of them. The fact of the matter is that led, after the war, to DDT starting to be used for getting rid of vegetation as an insecticide virtually everywhere.

12:19 – The next big thing

One of the biggest names in big ag, Monsanto, created another problematic insecticide after DDT was banned in the US.

Monsanto came up with, shall we say, the next big thing, and that was glyphosate. And glyphosate has a really, really sordid history associated with it, and we are really just uncovering, we’re just pulling back the bandaid on the wound of glyphosate even just now, and so this continues to be an enormous problem. And it’s not just glyphosate. If it were just glyphosate, that would be bad enough, but we’ve got another one called atrazine, Buctril, and that one was created by Syngenta. Both Monsanto and Syngenta claimed on a stack of Bibles that this stuff was safe. Yeah, but they’ve been paying out court cases for cancer, both here and in Europe, not admitting wrongdoing by the way. They were all settled, except for the case in 2018 where a gardener at a school ended up suing for his lymphoma, non-Hodgkin lymphoma and won $280 million. So that sort of got Monsanto’s attention.

16:04 – Soil vs. dirt

Plants can thrive naturally in rich top soil, but need help from external sources when grown in dirt.

People think topsoil is just dirt and it is not. There’s a difference between soil and dirt. Yes, they’re both ground, but they are not the same. You cannot grow a plant in dirt. You can grow a plant in soil, but you can grow a plant in dirt if you spray nitrogen on it, fixed nitrogen in the form of ammonium nitrate fertilizer, and add a few extra things like Miracle-Gro. So you can take dirt and make it productive by throwing Miracle-Gro on it. That’s true. You can do that. The question is, is the plant that grows in soil the same as the plant that grows in dirt with Miracle-Gro? That’s the question. And the answer is no, it’s not. We think it is. The food industry acts like it is, but it’s not. And the reason is because soil is alive.

28:29 – Farming in the 1960s

American farming in the mid 20th century included regenerative agriculture, where farmers were compensated for improving their top soil.

Once upon a time, we paid farmers not to grow certain crops, and we did it for two reasons. One reason was because we didn’t want a glut because that maintained higher prices when there was lower availability. And the second reason was because that allowed farmers to take some of their land to lie fallow so that the soil could be regenerated, so that you could end up with an improved top soil layer. That’s how we managed farming back in the 1960s, and it worked, except food prices were high, and they were artificially high to some extent. And they were also high because we were starting to subsidize corn, wheat, soy, sugar, which meant that all the other items basically were taxed because if you’re subsidizing something, that means you got to tax everything else in order to make book. So we already had a problem in terms of where the money was being allocated.

30:17 – Turning America’s Heartland into big ag

Nixon introduced a cheaper way to produce more food by pushing out small farmers and streamlining agricultural production.

It was during the Nixon years that we developed WIC. It was during the Nixon years that the national school lunch program expanded, didn’t start but it expanded. The goal was: put something in people’s bellies because that was better than starvation, and anything counted. And the question is, was that a good idea? Well, the whole country thought it was a good idea until it wasn’t. And now, we’re basically paying for the downside of that alteration and policy. The farmers today, the ones that are still around, will say this was a great policy because they’re still around. You know how many small farmers got knocked out of the box because of it, because it was all about monoculture and only the big guys could play? And that’s what Earl Butz said, was, “Row to row, furrow to furrow, get big or get out.” So this worked for a select few farmers, and that’s why there are very few private farms now in America’s Heartland. They’ve all gone away. And in the process, we’ve turned soil into dirt, and the only way to make it productive is to spray nitrogen fertilizer on it, and now you’ve got the whole vicious cycle going. So how do you fix that? How do you fix that? And the answer is you have to make food better, and you can’t make food better in dirt.

34:06 – Agriculture and healthcare are inseparable

Though many people view ag and healthcare separately, they are inextricably linked as one heavily influences the outcomes of the other.

Ultimately, people see these as two separate silos. They see agriculture as one silo. They see health as a completely separate silo. They are not. They are two subsets of one silo. And if you combine those two silos together on a spreadsheet, you would recognize that the current attempts to try to rob Peter at the agricultural level were paying Paul at the healthcare level. The farmers are not interested in the healthcare side. The healthcare side is not interested in the agricultural side. They don’t even understand how food ultimately impacts health. They only know that lack of food impacts health. They don’t see that the food has become toxic.

38:16 – An immoral hazard

When food companies and chemical or pharmaceutical companies combine, they position themselves to profit both from food production and adverse health conditions caused by that food production, leading to an immoral hazard.

If they had thought that those billions of dollars were going to actually cut into their profits, they wouldn’t have taken on the purchase of Monsanto, would they have? So obviously, they analyzed this and decided there was still more money to be made. And you’re absolutely right. Bayer was a chemical company. Bayer was a medicine company. It wasn’t a food company, but now it’s a food company. So you’re right. Now they’ve got food and medicine. Well, guess what? There’s another company that’s food and medicine now too. Nestle was always a food company. Well, now, they’re going into diabetes drugs. So what’s the conflict of interest there? What’s the conflict of interest for both of those? That’s not moral hazard. That’s immoral hazard because you’re creating the market to basically benefit off other people’s misfortune.

43:13 – The consumer is in the dark

The only information available to consumers regarding their food is on the nutrition label, which doesn’t include what happened to it during food processing.

The consumer is in the dark, and they’re in the dark for many reasons because the food industry wants them to be in the dark. They don’t want them to know what’s going on. They don’t want to actually have to list what’s going on with the food. And unfortunately, the US government makes that easy for them because the food label, the nutrition facts label is useless. And the reason is because the nutrition facts label tells you what’s in the food. It doesn’t tell you what’s been done to the food. Does it say anywhere on a nutrition facts label the level of pesticides that are in that box or in that package or in that jar? No. Would you like to know? I think so. I think people would like to know, but it’s not listed. Why is it not listed? Because then nobody would buy it. So the government said we’re not going to list those because that’s not what’s in the food. Actually, it is what’s in the food, but really what’s been done to the food? And that’s key.

50:32 – Shop around the edge of the supermarket

The best way to eat less processed foods is to avoid the center aisles where foods have logos and shop around the refrigerated sections of the supermarket.

So when you start mixing ingredients, you get into ultra processing, and there are ways to figure out what’s what. And what he’s shown with a set of very elegant epidemiologic studies in Europe and now in South America, and now even in the United States, he has shown that the disease is in that class four. The amount of food you eat in that class four is what contributes to cardiac disease, diabetes, cancer, all-cause mortality. The other classes, classes one, two and three, actually seem relatively devoid. Foods from those, basically the same level as the general population. It’s that class four, that ultra processed food category. But those are the foods that are marketed heavily. Those are the foods that have a logo. Those are the foods that have to be avoided. Those are the foods on the shelves rather than in the crisper or refrigerator section of the supermarket.

Dr. Robert Lustig: (00:06) People think top soil is just dirt, and it is not. Okay. There’s a difference between soil and dirt. Yes, they’re both ground, but they are not the same. You cannot grow a plant in dirt. You can grow a plant in soil, but you can grow a plant in dirt if you spray nitrogen on it, fixed nitrogen and add a few extra things like Miracle-Gro. That’s true. You can do that. The question is, is the plant that grows in soil the same as the plant that grows in dirt with Miracle-Gro? And the answer is no, it’s not. We think it is. The food industry acts like it is, but it’s not.

Ben Grynol: (01:04)

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.

Ben Grynol: (01:30)

When it comes to food production, we often think about the processing of the food, what happens to it before it goes on the shelf? Well, when you go upstream as far as you can, you get into this idea of big agriculture. You get into the idea of processing food at its earliest stage. When you think about the implications of it, you get into this idea of the principal agent problem. You get into the idea of moral hazard. You get into the idea of the people that are incentivized to make the food don’t necessarily have the lens on the downstream implications of what it will do for consumers, what it does from a health perspective, what it does from a food systems perspective, an ecological perspective, climate change, the list goes on.

Ben Grynol: (02:20)

So Dr. Rob Lustig, one of the advisors to Levels and author of Metabolical, Fat Chance, Hacking of the American Mind, he and I sat down and we discussed this idea of big agriculture. We discussed the idea of food processing and some of the downstream implications that come with it. We talked about things like monoculture. We talked about regenerative farming and what consumers can do about it when things are a little bit out of their control. People sometimes might feel in the dark about these things that happen within the food system. The important thing is to understand that these things can happen and what people can do and how they can think about the choices they make as it relates to the food they consume. It’s always fun talking with Rob. Very much appreciated his time. It was a great conversation. Here’s where we kick things off.

Ben Grynol: (03:14)

We talked last time about big everything. We went deeper into big sugar, but there’s also, when we talk about metabolic health, metabolic health is very much this upstream concept in health and wellness where you think of all the downstream implications that happen. Well, what’s further upstream in the food system or the furthest upstream is this idea of getting into production. And when we think about companies that are involved at the production, not food processing but more in agriculture, you look at them and you go, “Hmm, BASF, Bayer, DuPont.” And you’re like, “I’m pretty sure those are chemical companies or they’re companies that are non-traditional when you think of agriculture and you have a heuristic of John Deere.”

Ben Grynol: (03:59)

So I thought it would be good to go into this idea of how some products get into the food production system to begin with or some things like insecticides and then take it from there.

Dr. Robert Lustig: (04:11)

Understood. Ultimately, there are the growers and then there are the helpers, as it were, the helpers to grow. And the growers, we actually don’t know their names. They’re very much small groups for the most part. It’s the helpers of the growers that are sort of the interesting ones because they’ve got specific products that end up being incorporated into our food that we don’t necessarily know because after all, there’s no logo on the front. The reason there’s no logo on the front is because all of the things have been “generally recognized as safe by the government.” So we “don’t need to know,” as it were.

Dr. Robert Lustig: (05:01)

That’s where the rubber hits the road in terms of this. We’re not talking about mom and pop farms. We’re not even talking about international harvester or John Deere that help produce the food through cultivation. We’re talking about the groups of companies that add something or subtract something. Those companies are known to us as “chemical companies.” For the most part, we’re talking about Monsanto, we’re talking about BASF as you said, we’re talking about Bayer who bought Monsanto, we’re talking about Syngenta in Europe. These are companies that make products that then either are used to change the food in some fashion or to prevent its degradation. And when we say prevent degradation, we’re usually talking about either herbicides or pesticides.

Dr. Robert Lustig: (06:09)

Now, to some extent, we’ve been able to increase productivity in the food system because we’ve had decreased loss. The locusts don’t kill off the wheat fields anymore, and that I guess in one way is good because you can feed a lot more people and you can feed a lot more people cheaply when you don’t have a problem with either wastage or spoilage or destruction of crops. So that has contributed to the US being the behemoth in food production that we’ve become. You could make an argument that that’s a good thing. And from an economic standpoint, I would guess that’s true.

Dr. Robert Lustig: (07:00)

The question, what’s the downside of that? Well, let’s talk about the downside of that. It starts actually in World War II. It starts with the fact that we had a problem with typhus, and we had a problem with malaria, and we were losing troops to these terrible infectious diseases in the field, and so we had to basically clear large swaths of land from vegetation. And back in the 1920s, I believe it was, actually, I think it was actually produced first in 1879, but in the 1920s, this new product called DDT came along, and in 1939, it started being applied to World War II vegetation to try to help the American soldier. And it was very effective in keeping the typhus problem down significantly during World War II. World War I, we didn’t have it, and it was a huge issue in World War II. We had other issues but that wasn’t one of them.

Dr. Robert Lustig: (08:15)

The fact of the matter is that led, after the war, to DDT starting to be used for getting rid of vegetation as an insecticide virtually everywhere. And in fact, the guy who brought DDT to the war, Paul Hermann Muller, won the Nobel Prize in 1948 for the application of DDT to this. So obviously, somebody thought this was something good if you win a Nobel Prize for it.

Dr. Robert Lustig: (08:48)

Well, it had its downside, and it wasn’t until 1962 that we even realized there was a downside. And so this stuff was basically sprayed willy-nilly over the entire crop land of the United States in an attempt to try to reduce spoilage. Well, then Rachel Carson came along and said this is causing a problem. And it was causing a problem in terms of cancer. It’s caused a problem in terms of fertility because DDT is an estrogen, and it doesn’t take much to be an estrogen. All it takes is two hydroxyl groups, 22 angstroms apart. There are a lot of compounds in our environment that are estrogens. There are a lot of compounds that are made by chemical companies that are estrogens, BPA, Bisphenol A, which is used on the inside of packaging to keep cans from spoiling. It’s in the thermal paper at Target that we print our receipts on. So these compounds are almost everywhere.

Dr. Robert Lustig: (10:01)

And so she was the first one to associate DDT with increased cancer risk and also changes in fertility. We know that fertility is going down in humans. It’s also going down in animals all over the planet. We’ve got an alligator problem. Not too many alligators. We’ve got too few alligators. The entire Everglades actually may lose its entire alligator population, and it’s because of DDT, because you can actually measure the DDE levels in the alligators.

Dr. Robert Lustig: (10:36)

And the fact is that DDT went away from the United States and we banned it finally in 1972, but you can measure its metabolite today in the alligators, and you can also measure it in pregnant women’s urine in the Salinas Valley, which we did, a member of an academic group out of UC Berkeley that studies a cohort in the Salinas Valley, Steinbeck Country, called CHAMACOS and it’s the Children and Mothers of Salinas, assessing the health of these offspring of women who were exposed to all of these insecticides, pesticides early on in their pregnancy and what effects this might have long term. And we can see the effects on cognition. We can see the effects on reproduction. We can see the effects on obesity. We can see the effects on puberty because these compounds are estrogens. Estrogens make really good insecticides because they interfere with the life cycle of the insect. Yeah, but they are poisoning us too.

Dr. Robert Lustig: (11:51)

So we learned that. We learned it the hard way. The question is, did we learn it? Well, we learned about DDT. We didn’t learn about anything else because right on the heels of DDT being banned, then everyone said, “Well, what are we going to do next? How are we going to fix the spoilage problem on the next round?”

Dr. Robert Lustig: (12:15)

Well, and then Monsanto came up with, shall we say, the next big thing, and that was glyphosate. And glyphosate has a really, really sorted history associated with it, and we are really just uncovering, we’re just pulling back the bandaid on the wound of glyphosate even just now, and so this continues to be an enormous problem.

Dr. Robert Lustig: (12:46)

And it’s not just glyphosate. If it were just glyphosate, that would be bad enough, but we’ve got another one called atrazine, Buctril, and that one was created by Syngenta. Both Monsanto and Syngenta claimed on a stack of Bibles that this stuff was safe. Yeah, but they’ve been paying out court cases for cancer, both here and in Europe, not admitting wrongdoing by the way. They were all settled, except for the case in 2018 where a gardener at a school ended up suing for his lymphoma, non-Hodgkin lymphoma and won $280 million. So that sort of got Monsanto’s attention.

Dr. Robert Lustig: (13:34)

Actually, Bayer ended up buying Monsanto, and we can talk about the whys and wherefores of why they would’ve done that. But they’ve now created a fund where they put $10 billion into glyphosate class action lawsuits. So if that’s the case, how did these compounds get on the market in the first place? And the answer goes nobody did the studies. That’s how.

Ben Grynol: (14:02)

And that’s something you alluded to in Metabolical and in this conversation, the GRAS list where some of these chemicals or compounds, these obesogens that make it into food production in some way, shape or form just make it on to the GRAS list and there isn’t really any diligence and then they’re there and they’re just accepted as safe. So ’72 is when DDT was banned, and around the corner from that, 1974, our good friends, Monsanto, and by good friends, I mean that colloquially, Monsanto comes out with Roundup in 1974. And that ended up being this pesticide or herbicide, I should say, that ended up leading to super weeds, leading to all of these problems. And we’ll see from what you’re seeing right now with your research in obesogens how long it takes for something like DDT to actually get out of the system. It’s there. And we don’t know with Roundup how long this will last.

Ben Grynol: (15:09)

But fast forward to ’96 when we started to have Roundup Ready and they had soybeans, and that’s a whole different issue as far as seed saving and pushing monoculture on farmers. We can touch on that, but it’s more in the importance of things take a really long time to get out of the system, and we know that there was collusion and corruption with some of the awareness that Monsanto had internally towards the health implications of this product, but they kept pushing it out to market. And so that has led to some very serious considerations for even now what we’re seeing with topsoil where people go, “Our top soil is dying and we should think about regenerative farming.” There are so many issues aside from health.

Dr. Robert Lustig: (16:00)

So you’re absolutely right. People think topsoil is just dirt and it is not. There’s a difference between soil and dirt. Yes, they’re both ground, but they are not the same. You cannot grow a plant in dirt. You can grow a plant in soil, but you can grow a plant in dirt if you spray nitrogen on it, fixed nitrogen in the form of ammonium nitrate fertilizer, and add a few extra things like Miracle-Gro. So you can take dirt and make it productive by throwing Miracle-Gro on it. That’s true. You can do that.

Dr. Robert Lustig: (16:51)

The question is, is the plant that grows in soil the same as the plant that grows in dirt with Miracle-Gro? That’s the question. And the answer is no, it’s not. We think it is. The food industry acts like it is, but it’s not. And the reason is because soil is alive. Soil has bacteria, viruses, fungi, mushrooms, fungi, that make stuff and actually contribute to the vitality of that soil that allow for the plants that grow to be able to create the various chemicals that they need for their survival, that they need for their defense against locusts and ticks and boll weevils and what have you also in order to fend off foreign invaders, and also to create the various nutritive compounds that basically help us, which we call vitamins or flavonoids or various things.

Dr. Robert Lustig: (18:11)

So bottom line is we get all of these essential nutrients from primarily plants. That’s why plants are important. And we need those chemicals. They are essential. We can’t make them. We have to consume them. And they’re basically made by what’s in the soil. Well, yeah, but the dirt doesn’t have that. The dirt doesn’t have all of those things. What it does is it sprays the various chemicals that the plant ultimately needs, but it doesn’t actually then produce the things that we want that plant to produce. So that plant is essentially nutritionally deficient because it didn’t have what it needed to create the chemicals it required for its survival.

Dr. Robert Lustig: (19:05)

So bottom line is processed plant production is not the same as regenerative farming where you’re basically growing in soil that works. So this is part of the problem. It means that our current processed plant production in the United States is deficient. It’s deficient nutritionally, and it’s unbelievably problematic in terms of climate change.

Dr. Robert Lustig: (19:43)

So let’s talk about climate change real quick because we have many other things to talk about, but climate change is due to greenhouse gases entering the atmosphere. No argument. The question is where are those greenhouse gases coming from? The overwhelming majority is coming from industrial petroleum use rather than from agriculture, but agriculture definitely provides a proportion, and it depends on who you read as to what that proportion is. So I’ve seen levels as low as 14%. I’ve seen levels as high as 33%, depending on who you read and depending on exactly what they are calling the use because some of them just talk about the agriculture itself. Some of them are talking about the animals only. Some of them are talking about the plants only. Some of them add the transporting into the equation as well. So there are different numbers as to what percent of climate change is due to agriculture. I don’t want to go there. That’s for the statisticians and for people who do spreadsheets better than I do.

Dr. Robert Lustig: (21:02)

Here’s what I want to say. Everyone blames the cows. Everyone is saying cows make methane, and methane contributes to climate change. Well, methane does contribute to climate change. I’m not arguing that. That is true. The question is where is the methane coming from? And it turns out that most of the methane is actually still coming from petroleum, not from cows. Yes, cows do make methane. It’s true. Cows have always made methane. All you have to do is go to a cow farm and you’ll know pretty quick that cows make methane. It’s true. They do. The question is how much?

Dr. Robert Lustig: (21:46)

In 1968, there were more cows in the United States than there are today because of changes in meat consumption and changes in current food processing. There are actually more head of cattle than there are now by 20%, yet the entire cow mass, if you will, the entire herd of cows in the United States produced a total of 14 teragrams of methane per year. Now that’s a lot of methane. I’m not arguing. A teragram is a Golden Gate Bridge. All right. So 14 Golden Gate Bridges. But today, there are fewer heads of cattle, but those cattle are producing 74 teragrams of methane, 74 Golden Gate Bridges, so they are actually producing six times the amount of methane per cow than they were back in 1968. So it is true that the cows are making the methane. The question is how come they’re making so much more methane today than they were back then? And if we got rid of that six times amount, could we actually make a difference? The answer is yes, we could. So then why are they making six times the amount?

Dr. Robert Lustig: (23:18)

And the answer to that is antibiotics. We are injecting all of those cattle with antibiotics, and the reason we’re doing that is because these cows back in 1968, they were basically grown, they were being raised on farms. And the farms had alfalfa and the farms had clover and the farms had grass, and that’s what these cows ate, and they got the essential nutrients that they needed in order to stave off infection from the various and sundry plant products that was available to them on the farm. Well, today, those cows are not on the farm. They’ve been moved. They’ve been moved to something called a CAFO, C-A-F-O, concentrated animal feeding operation. They’re all throughout Nebraska and Kansas and Oklahoma. That’s where these CAFOs are.

Dr. Robert Lustig: (24:18)

And these CAFOs basically, and you’ve seen pictures of them, there’s no place for the cow to roam. There’s no place for the cow to obtain food other than what is provided to them by the ranchers, and that happens to be corn that’s shipped in from Iowa. And the reason that this happened was because back in 1971, Earl Butz basically said, “We have to make food cheap. And in order to do that, we have to create monoculture because economies of scale.” And that ultimately what changed the farm culture in America.

Dr. Robert Lustig: (25:00)

And so we moved the cows to Kansas. We moved all the corn to Iowa. So now there’s no manure to carbon fix the soil in Iowa. So you have to spray the ammonium nitrate, which creates nitrous oxide, which is way more heat trapping than methane ever was. And you’ve got all the cows on the CAFOs who have to receive the antibiotics because they’re not getting the essential nutrients they need in order to maintain their ability to stave off infection.

Dr. Robert Lustig: (25:41)

And so what that’s done, those antibiotics have basically killed the cow’s intestine. And so what moves in instead, nature abhors a vacuum, so the methanogens, which are resistant to those antibiotics, they’ve moved in and that’s why the cows are making six times the amount of methane, because the methanogens have taken over. Could we fix that? Could we undo that?

Dr. Robert Lustig: (26:06)

And the answer is if the cows ate what was on the farm, yeah. Well, how are you going to do that? Put them back on the farm. Well, that’s regenerative farming. That’s what we’re talking about where we carbon fix the old way, the right way, the way that made sense for thousands of years since the advent of the concept of agriculture and undo food processing that’s gone on. So yes, it is the insecticides, but it’s also the method of food production that we have undertaken in the United States.

Ben Grynol: (26:43)

Yeah. So you talk about that lots where it’s the, let’s play both sides of it, there’s the principal agent problem because in one sense, so Earl Butz is involved in instilling these incentives for monoculture and we focus on quantity, quantity, quantity. And there’s food. We’re just going to call this categorically food. Whether or not it is nutritious, we will leave that out. But categorically, there’s this thing called food and there’s a whole bunch of it and so everyone can check a box and be like, “We’ve done well.” But then the long-term implications are, well, you’re taking away all the symbiosis you get in this ecosystem of having multiple types of plants all living together, animals grazing on that land, cattle, putting carbon back into the soil to get all of the organisms and to get all the bacteria growing where you have a healthy ecosystem.

Ben Grynol: (27:42)

And so monoculture produced a ton of quantity. Amazing. Cool. We fed a bunch of people, but the downside is the quality went down so much that the health implications from this food, this category, we’re now seeing the effects of it years and years later. And it’s not something that is as easy to fix because people say, “Well, we would love to get back into regenerative farming but it’s too hard.” Everything becomes excuses, and so then we just keep focusing on going down the path of monoculture, and we’re really seeing it’s got detrimental effects to the food production system.

Dr. Robert Lustig: (28:22)

Look, you’re not old enough to remember this, Ben, but I am, unfortunately, but I remember this. Once upon a time, we paid farmers not to grow certain crops, and we did it for two reasons. One reason was because we didn’t want a glut because that maintained higher prices when there was lower availability. And the second reason was because that allowed farmers to take some of their land to lie fallow so that the soil could be regenerated, so that you could end up with an improved top soil layer. That’s how we managed farming back in the 1960s, and it worked, except food prices were high, and they were artificially high to some extent. And they were also high because we were starting to subsidize corn, wheat, soy, sugar, which meant that all the other items basically were taxed because if you’re subsidizing something, that means you got to tax everything else in order to make book. So we already had a problem in terms of where the money was being allocated.

Dr. Robert Lustig: (29:42)

But in 1971, Richard Nixon, “in his infinite wisdom,” and I put that in quotes, colloquially as you put it, he realized that fluctuating food prices caused political unrest. And he had a whole lot of political unrest to deal with as you might remember. And so make food cheap became his watchword and his contribution to Johnson’s war on poverty, and it was during the Nixon years that we developed WIC. It was during the Nixon years that the national school lunch program expanded, didn’t start but it’s expanded. The goal was put something in people’s bellies because that was better than starvation and anything counted. And the question is, was that a good idea? Well, the whole country thought it was a good idea until it wasn’t.

Dr. Robert Lustig: (30:50)

And now, we’re basically paying for the downside of that alteration and policy. The farmers today, the ones that are still around, will say this was a great policy because they’re still around. You know how many small farmers got knocked out of the box because of it, because it was all about monoculture and only the big guys could play? And that’s what Earl Butz said, was, “Row to row, furrow to furrow, get big or get out.” So this worked for a select few farmers, and that’s why there are very few private farms now in America’s Heartland. They’ve all gone away. And in the process, we’ve turned soil into dirt, and the only way to make it productive is to spray nitrogen fertilizer on it, and now you’ve got the whole vicious cycle going. So how do you fix that? How do you fix that? And the answer is you have to make food better, and you can’t make food better in dirt.

Ben Grynol: (32:06)

Yeah. The principal agent problem and all the moral hazard that comes with this is multi-tiered. So in one sense, there are the, we’ll say, the producers. A lot of the producers don’t own their land, so their incentive is to just produce. They’re not incentivized to actually take care of the land because hypothetically, let’s just use an example, someone … Assume that switching costs are easy. You can just get up and transplant your food production to another piece of land. Assume it was easy. They are not incentivized because they’re not vertically integrated. They’re not incentivized to actually do anything to take care of the land. So that’s one consideration for principal agent.

Ben Grynol: (32:53)

And then the other is when we start to think about the incentives from subsidies’ perspective, from a monoculture perspective, principal agent having to do with the downstream consumer. The producer is incentivized to focus on profits over environment, profits over doing right for long-term health, like profits over, and it just keeps going. And so then you get back into these things. And we’ve talked about some of the internal collusion that happens either between these companies or between independent agents that are acting between different parts of the process, and that leads to a lot of complications.

Ben Grynol: (33:43)

We’re realizing now, but you put it so well in Metabolical where if we went upstream in food production, it’s a fraction to, I don’t want to say fix because you can’t just snap your fingers and fix, but to address, it’s a fraction of the cost of everything that we pay in the healthcare system right now.

Dr. Robert Lustig: (34:04)

That’s right. Ultimately, people see these as two separate silos. They see agriculture as one silo. They see health as a completely separate silo. They are not. They are two subsets of one silo. And if you combine those two silos together on a spreadsheet, you would recognize that the current attempts to try to rob Peter at the agricultural level were paying Paul at the healthcare level. The farmers are not interested in the healthcare side. The healthcare side is not interested in the agricultural side. They don’t even understand how food ultimately impacts health. They only know that lack of food impacts health. They don’t see that the food has become toxic.

Dr. Robert Lustig: (34:58)

So that’s the question I actually posed to the director general of the Food and Agriculture Organization, which is part of the WHO, part of the UN, José Graziano da Silva, back in 2017 at a meeting. I said, “Which is worse? Neither is better, but which is worse, no food or bad food?” And he didn’t have an answer. And that’s right. He didn’t have an answer. The obvious answer would be no food because no food starts wars. Well, wars have an end, and then the no food stops being a problem. And I’m not saying that we should all go to war. What I’m saying is bad food, the problem is insidious. It’s like frog boil, although it’s happening, and so terrible things start happening, and you don’t even realize that that’s the reason for it.

Dr. Robert Lustig: (36:04)

And ultimately, it ends up costing way more in terms of lives and in terms of economy and in terms of healthcare expenditures, and it’s breaking the bank on virtually every developed and developing country now taking care of chronic metabolic disease that came because of our lousy food. And then of course, we have the social determinant of health. The fact of the matter is that rich people can afford the better food and the poor people can’t, so that’s creating the social inequities that are actually tearing the country apart at the seams. So bad food might actually be worse.

Ben Grynol: (36:53)

It’s interesting too if we think about the macroeconomic considerations around a company being incentivized to make money on both sides. So let’s use one example and we’ll try, I don’t want to say try, we will remain as neutral as possible. But let’s play out the scenario.

Ben Grynol: (37:13)

So we’re Bayer. We own Monsanto, and we’re incentivized to grow a ton of food, but we’re incentivized to make a ton of money in pharmaceuticals because we do both. We’re incentivized to, I don’t want to say that anyone is consciously trying to make people sick, but you know that the thing that you do that helps to get more people sick, you’re making money on both ends. And so you’re caught in this dilemma where the worse you can do in the food production system, and I’m speaking very hyperbolically about this, the better off you do in the pharmaceutical, so you just want it all to happen because when you talk about profits. And let’s take it one step further, you inherited, you acquired a company, you inherited lawsuits in perpetuity in the billions of dollars. What do you do?

Dr. Robert Lustig: (38:11)

They must have thought that it was a good trade. If they had thought that those billions of dollars were going to actually cut into their profits, they wouldn’t have taken on the purchase of Monsanto, would they have? So obviously, they analyzed this and decided there was still more money to be made. And you’re absolutely right. Bayer was a chemical company. Bayer was a medicine company. It wasn’t a food company, but now it’s a food company. So you’re right. Now they’ve got food and medicine.

Dr. Robert Lustig: (38:46)

Well, guess what? There’s another company that’s food and medicine now too. Nestle was always a food company. Well, now, they’re going into diabetes drugs. So what’s the conflict of interest there? What’s the conflict of interest for both of those? That’s not moral hazard. That’s immoral hazard because you’re creating the market to basically benefit off other people’s misfortune.

Ben Grynol: (39:16)

And we’ve got DuPont as well. So DuPont again, traditionally a chemical company playing in different parts of the food system, all of the issues with PFOA and Teflon, but in 2019 spun off a company called Corteva that is in the egg game, very much a seed company, seed and chemical, seed and fertilizer. But again, it’s like having all of these subsidiary arms where you are traditionally a chemical company or you’re traditionally like you’re not playing in the space but you’re getting involved in the space. This is where it gets to be very, very challenging.

Ben Grynol: (39:56)

And as a consumer, as you said before, it’s one of those things where we don’t know. We can say eat real food all you want, but when you think you’re doing well and you’re eating real food and you don’t realize that your food has things like pesticides in it. It’s not all food, but it’s very hard to get away from some of these considerations in the food system because it’s so deeply ingrained.

Dr. Robert Lustig: (40:23)

Well, this isn’t a new concept. The fact of the matter is the tobacco industry did this back in the 1980s and ’90s. Altria is what Philip Morris morphed into, and they own Kraft and General Foods and RJR, Reynolds, own Nabisco. They got into the food business. They were selling tobacco, but they were also selling food. Now, why was that? And the answer was because people started to stop smoking. And the thing is when you stop smoking, what do you do? You start eating, because that addiction pathway is still lit up. And people will tell you that’s one of the reasons people continue to smoke, was to keep their weight down. And as soon as they stopped smoking, they started eating. So why wouldn’t they want to be in on that?

Dr. Robert Lustig: (41:12)

This concept, the industry calls it diversification, but you have to really look askance when a company is actually basically playing both ends. There’s definitely immoral hazard to be seen there.

Ben Grynol: (41:30)

Yeah. It gets very challenging. So let’s into the idea of what can people do? We’ve highlighted that there are challenges. There are things that we do not see and will not know are happening within the food production system. There are some things that we can avoid, and there are some things that are a lot harder to avoid. So when thinking about giving people guidance or some goalposts for how they can think about accessing and eating real food, we’ll agree all day, just don’t eat Twinkies, don’t eat things that are just inherently bad. But when you think you’re eating certain foods that, let’s say, things like spinach that grow on the ground and would be the closest possible food to getting things like pesticides. It’s a lot different than corn, for what it is, but it comes in a wrapper. It’s wrapped up in leaves so there will be some mitigation against pesticides being directly hitting. Whether or not they’re grown in fertilizers that are in the actual vegetable is different, but what can people do?

Ben Grynol: (42:41)

What are some takeaways they can have or maybe some frameworks, some heuristics they can have about thinking about real food and what they consume? And maybe questioning some of the things that, I know you talk a lot about beef where it’s just like the thing that looks great on the shelf that tastes really good is actually full of omega-6 and probably not what we should be eating because of being corn fed.

Dr. Robert Lustig: (43:10)

All right. So the short answer, Ben, is the consumer is in the dark, and they’re in the dark for many reasons because the food industry wants them to be in the dark. They don’t want them to know what’s going on. They don’t want to actually have to list what’s going on with the food. And unfortunately, the US government makes that easy for them because the food label, the nutrition facts label is useless. And the reason is because the nutrition facts label tells you what’s in the food. It doesn’t tell you what’s been done to the food.

Dr. Robert Lustig: (43:45)

Does it say anywhere on a nutrition facts label the level of pesticides that are in that box or in that package or in that jar? No. Would you like to know? I think so. I think people would like to know, but it’s not listed. Why is it not listed? Because then nobody would buy it. So the government said we’re not going to list those because that’s not what’s in the food. Actually, it is what’s in the food, but really what’s been done to the food? And that’s key.

Dr. Robert Lustig: (44:22)

So this is part of the problem, is that the government has made it very easy for the food industry to, shall we say, play Three-card Monte with us, hide the ball. And are there ways to fix that? Well, fixing the nutrition facts label would be a very good start, but then you basically have to tell people what’s been done to the food, and that’s not even on the table right now, even though that’s what I say needs to happen. That’s what I said in Metabolical, is the call to actually fix the food label so that consumers can be apprised properly.

Dr. Robert Lustig: (45:04)

An example of this was what happened with Prop 65 here in California which was basically all about GMOs, and it ultimately got voted down, and that’s because the food industry made this huge push that basically this was unnecessary. Well, it actually is necessary. The food industry doesn’t want to go there for obvious reasons.

Dr. Robert Lustig: (45:26)

All right. What else can we do? Well, there are now organizations like, for instance, the Environmental Working Group that are quantitating this for you, but it’s hard to carry an Environmental Working Group thing practically in your back pocket. Yes, it’s online, but you have to subscribe to it. A company that I am chief medical officer of, called Perfact, is trying to basically help people in the grocery store by letting you basically get the barcode off the thing and it will actually tell you not just what’s in the food, because that you can read on the side, but what’s been done to the food, so that there ultimately will be ways to do this.

Dr. Robert Lustig: (46:13)

And ultimately, I’m working with a food procurement service called Foogal that will actually let you put in what you want and with filters that basically will filter out all the stuff in the store that you don’t want, and only purchase the stuff you do. And actually, we’re trying to get insurers to pay for that because that will convey health rather than convey disease. And so food has medicine, but unfortunately food can also be poison. Well, the insurer doesn’t want to pay for the poison. They only want to pay for the medicine. So that has to then be determined by an independent third party, which is what Foogal would be.

Dr. Robert Lustig: (46:58)

So there are potential ways of doing it, but ultimately, the consumer is in the dark, and until consumers demand better, they will continue to be in the dark. And that’s why education is so important, is ultimately not because you can affect one person at a time. That ain’t going to work. What you have to do is affect one congressman at a time. When we get enough congressman on board, the problem of course is that 338 out of 535 congressmen today take money from the food industry to keep things exactly the way they are. This is an organization called ALEC, A-L-E-C, the American Legislative Exchange Council. It’s a bill mill that basically is paid for by big oil, big pharma and big ag, big pharma. They want sameness to stay the same.

Dr. Robert Lustig: (48:02)

All four of those, by the way, are guilty of immoral hazard. That’s why they want things to stay the same. This is the problem in our society today, is the corporate environment that wants to basically make money off the backs of the electorate and keep them in the dark and keep them basically placated and narcotized with lack of knowledge. And of course, that’s what we’re trying to fix right now.

Ben Grynol: (48:38)

There are certain principles. People are grocery shopping. We talk about real food. Stay away from the aisles where something is highly, highly processed. Everything that comes in a package is pro …

Dr. Robert Lustig: (48:53)

It is processed.

Ben Grynol: (48:54)

Almost all food is processed in some way because if the definition of processing is taking it from the tree, taking an apple from the tree.

Dr. Robert Lustig: (49:04)

Yeah. Basically, unless you picked it yourself, it’s processed. It goes that far. There’s different levels of processing to be sure. My colleague and good friend, Carlos Montero, who is a professor of public health at the University of Sao Paulo, Brazil, has introduced and also now verified and validated an instrument that he calls the NOVA system. And what it does is instead of telling you what’s in the food, it basically tells you the degree of processing of the food, and there are four classes of processing. The best way to explain this would be with an apple. So class one, according to Carlos, would be an apple. Class two would be apple slices in a package. Class three would be apple sauce, sweetened apple sauce. Class four would be an apple pie. They’re all apples but they’re not, and they all contribute different levels of health versus disease, even though the prevailing ingredient is apples. In fact, by the time you get to apple pie, the prevailing ingredient is not apples. And that’s the point.

Dr. Robert Lustig: (50:32)

So when you start mixing ingredients, you get into ultra processing, and there are ways to figure out what’s what. And what he’s shown with a set of very elegant epidemiologic studies in Europe and now in South America, and now even in the United States, he has shown that the disease is in that class four. The amount of food you eat in that class four is what contributes to cardiac disease, diabetes, cancer, all-cause mortality. The other classes, classes one, two and three, actually seem relatively devoid. Foods from those, basically the same level as the general population. It’s that class four, that ultra processed food category. But those are the foods that are marketed heavily. Those are the foods that have a logo. Those are the foods that have to be avoided. Those are the foods on the shelves rather than in the crisper or refrigerator section of the supermarket.

Dr. Robert Lustig: (51:41)

So people, say, walk around the edge of the supermarket. Yeah, that’s right because the class four foods are shelf stable because they have been stripped of their fiber and they’ve had preservatives added. The primary one of the consequence is sugar, but all the other preservatives as well, including emulsifiers and potassium bromate and BHA, BHT, etc. These are all on the shelves. They’re not in the refrigerator sections of the supermarket.

Ben Grynol: (52:16)

Yeah. The class four, that’s where branding comes in. You’re being marketed or sold to. We know that it’s very difficult, from summarizing what we’ve talked about, it’s very difficult to escape a lot of these obesogens. They’re around us everywhere. And you and Casey had a great conversation about that. But when it comes to obesogens related to agriculture and upstream food production, it’s very hard to avoid them. But if people can have a mental model that is eat more in this idea of class one, it’s completely different than going class four. And so if you can start to make some of these choices, and then maybe the other thing is if you see an apple the size of a basketball, maybe question whether or not that is an apple you should consider eating, if you start to think about things like that.

Dr. Robert Lustig: (53:12)

Another thing you can do is look at color. Like for tomatoes, tomatoes, for instance, have a chemical in them called lycopene, which has gotten some notoriety because it’s supposed to help vision, especially as you get older. Well, only the red, red tomatoes have lycopene. The, shall we say, orangy tomatoes tend to be much larger so people tend to like to buy those because they look bigger, juicier, healthier. They’re actually relatively devoid of lycopene, and they’ve been bred out to be that way. In fact, a lot of the nutrients that we want out of our produce don’t taste very good. The polyphenols, the flavonoids, the nucleic acids, etc., the choline, etc., they don’t taste very good. They actually can provide some off notes.

Dr. Robert Lustig: (54:16)

So a lot of the growers have actually bred various strains of different produce to be devoid of those, to have more sugar in them, to be sweeter, to actually hide those notes. And in the process, these become less nutritionally valuable. So there is that process going on as well, and that requires, unfortunately, a reeducated palate. And that’s something that really does have to be done at an individual basis. There’s no sort of government program to reeducate the palate, as it were. People just need to understand that certain foods are supposed to taste a certain way, and if you’ve never tasted a real tomato, you might not know what a real tomato tastes like and you might opt for the crap your entire life.

Ben Grynol: (55:16)

Brussels sprouts are meant to be bitter, not sweet. So if you’re eating Brussels sprouts that taste like raisins, you’re probably on the wrong track.

Dr. Robert Lustig: (55:27)

Exactly. So that’s yet another layer of this, and that really does require some, shall we say, some intensive training on the part of each individual person on the planet. Good luck to us.