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Jason H. Karp: They make a Canadian version of fruit loops that they undoubtedly produce in this country, in the US, they already make it, and they already have the formulation for it here, and they ship it up to Canada. And yet the one that they sell here has red 40, yellow 5, yellow 6, blue 1, and BHT. All of those ingredients are not included in their international version.
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Dr. Mark Hyman: Welcome to Doctor’s Farmacy. I’m Dr. Mark Hyman. It’s Farmacy with an effort place for conversations that matter and tastes. Conversation is highly consequential for you because it’s going to determine whether or not we live in a society that is causing us to be sick because of the food we’re eating, or whether we can create a food system that actually creates health. And we had this incredible conversation with Jason Karp was a dear friend who’s been an inspiration for me and his, I dunno, kind even describe him. He’s a force of nature. He’s driven by the belief that improving health is the pathway to increasing global prosperity. In 2019, he started a Human Co, which is a company that has a mission to inspire humans to demand better by showing that products can be both healthy and epic and tastes good. And his health journey started in his twenties after being diagnosed with multiple autoimmune diseases and a degenerative eye disease, which would’ve left them blind by the age of 30 and doctors told them could never be cured.
He had a commitment to making changes in his own diet, which changed his whole health, cured himself through a cleaner diet and cleaner living. And then he founded this incredible company called Hugh Products, which you probably eat their chocolate, Huge chocolate, which is amazing. And Hugh Kitchen in 2011, which I think I was the first customer in that restaurant today, Hugh is one of the fastest growing snack companies in the United States, emphasizing transparent, simple ingredients to help everyone get back to human. He was the founder and CEO of Turian Capital Partners, a 4 billion investment fund, and he’s taken all of his genius and intelligence to make better products and change the world. We’re so grateful to have him on the Farmacy. We’re so grateful to have him on the doctor’s Farmacy today. And in our conversation we crossed the spectrum from his own story of how he came to understand the role of food, his own health cured multiple autoimmune diseases that doctors said we’re incurable and took that passion and turned it into a food business that has been highly successful and is doing good and doing well.
At the same time, he also talks about something called the Meta Crisis, this incredible intersection of the planetary health destruction, human health destruction, and our mental health destruction and how all that’s linked or in large part to food and how we need to change that. We also get deep into a recent campaign that he’s initially with Kellogg to try to change the food system by holding big companies accountable. And we talk about the dyes that are in American cereals like Fruit loops that are not allowed in other countries like Europe. So we’re only asking companies to be held accountable to the best versions of the products they make. Why should we in America have the worst products they make? We need to stand up and do something about it. And this podcast gets deep into how this happened, what we can do it and how to make change.
So I know you’re going to love this podcast. Let’s dive right in. Okay, well Jason, it’s so great to have you on the Doctor’s Farmacy podcast. We’ve been friends for years, have an interesting history together, and you are a kind of remarkable man because you came from a world of high powered finance, you’ve got very sick. You had to reset yourself and learn about what food does to the body and what it doesn’t do if you don’t eat the right stuff. And you created a company called Q, which was an incredible company that everybody probably knows from the chocolate. There was a Q kitchen back in New York City that was actually an old Himalayan, the east west bookstore that I used to East West bookstore go in the eighties and do yoga on the top on where that was. It was like the only yoga class in New York.
We didn’t have Lulu Lemon or Yoga MAs. We had towels and sweatpants. And that was a very kind of symbolic thing for me to go back in there and see how you created this incredible model for eating that really represented your insights into what was wrong with our food system, how you got sick from it, and how you were able to fix yourself through that journey. And now we’re going to dive deep today into really some interesting topics that are around a new initiative that you’re creating to wake up America in the sense the evils that the food industry is perpetrating on American kids and on American adults by putting all sorts of toxins in the food that are not allowed in other countries. And you took a brave, brave step recently that was calling these companies out. You published an article in the New York Post, a letter that went to Kellogg’s as you’re shareholder calling them out for their behavior and their failure to meet their own commitment to get rid of chemicals and dyes that we know are damaging to humans in their products. And it’s kind created a bit of a buzz. It was a big article in the New York post and it’s kind of everywhere it’s been on Twitter or X or whatever call it now. And I want to give you a chance to talk about your own journey and how you got started on this and how passionate you are and how you really created a whole new effort to really rethink our food system and to reformulate our food products so we can actually eat stuff that tastes good and is also good for us.
Jason H. Karp: Yes, yes, yes. Well look, thanks for having me mark it as a little background. You were one of my early inspirations, which I’ll get to in my life story. It’s kind of a crazy story. And the whole East West books thing and the spirituality of that store is so it was
Dr. Mark Hyman: It was Swami Rama, the guy who could put needles through his arms.
Jason H. Karp: We’ll come back to how crazy that is.
Dr. Mark Hyman: By the way, I just want to interrupt you. One of the disciples of this guy, Swami Rama from the East West and the Himalayan Institute was this guy named Rudolph Valentine who wrote a book called Diet and Health or Diet Nutrition. It was in the seventies, and I got that book when I was in college and I read it and it was all about bringing nutrition into healing Chronic Disease. Yeah. So I dunno if you knew that, but
Jason H. Karp: I didn’t know that. So
Dr. Mark Hyman: Literally the book that was a disciple of the guy who actually created that Himalayan ISU where Hugh Kitchen first started. That’s crazy.
Jason H. Karp: That’s crazy.
Dr. Mark Hyman: Really wrote a book that kind launched me on this journey too. It’s kind of this karmic shared thing. It
Jason H. Karp: Really is karmic, I mean, I have the chills because I totally forgot about the east west bookstore and the spiritual connection and
Dr. Mark Hyman: About Fifth Avenue, 14th Street. Yeah.
Jason H. Karp: Yeah, we’ll come back to that. My background and my kind of personal story I think is a cautionary tale and it’s also a metaphor for what’s happened to modern society. I had a pretty meteoric ascent starting in college where I was sort of your classic overachiever. I went to Wharton undergrad business school. I was one of the top students. I was a division one academic all American athlete, and I did everything that I thought you’re supposed to do as sort of an overachieving American. And all I wanted to do was be very accomplished. And when I got out of college, I had this really coveted job. I went straight to a hedge fund in 1998, which was sort of a fledgling industry. I got so focused on just winning and accomplishing and did extremely well in my first couple of years there financially speaking. And I got every accolade and every achievement you could get. I was made the youngest partner in history of my firm. And so on the surface everything looked like life was going great. And a couple years into my working, I started getting sick. And at the time I kind of ignored it and I was so focused on achievement, achievement, achievement more, more in terms of I taught myself how to speed read. I taught myself how to micro nap. I started micro nap.
Dr. Mark Hyman: Micro nap, I love that. You got to teach me that trick.
Jason H. Karp: Yeah. I was reading obscure stuff from the military on how to be even more productive. This was really early biohacking stuff. But while I was doing it, I started viewing the things that I think make humans thrive. I started viewing those things as unnecessary. So I started giving up friends and connection and I started giving up exercise and I started optimizing my day in terms of hour blocks and I was getting more and more done and I was reading more and I was doing more of my job and everyone around me thought I was like this superhuman. And meanwhile, quietly, I was getting more and more sick and eventually I started to really notice it. My hair started falling out in clumps. I had psoriasis all over my arms and my body. I was having massive amounts of brain fog and then I was still ignoring it.
And then my vision started to go and I started seeing double and I went to multiple ophthalmologists and eventually was diagnosed with a degenerative eye disease for which there’s no cure. And it was so progressed by the time I went in, I was 23 at the time. They said I would be fully blind by the age of 30 and there was no hope or cure other than potentially a corneal transplant, which was pretty risky at the time. I fell into a deep dark depression. I was very ashamed of my health because on the surface I looked like this pinnacle of success. And on the inside I was falling apart and I decided to try to take matters in my own hands because the western medicine doctor said, here’s a pill for this. Here’s a pill for this. Here’s a pill for this. And by the way, your eye disease, there’s no cure for it and you’re just going to go blind and deal with it.
I decided, and it was kind of this almost divine inspiration to start looking in alternative channels for maybe there’s other ways I could heal myself. And I started doing a lot of research on indigenous people on ancestral diets. And I stumbled upon a couple OG functional medicine people and some of the really early books like yours and Dr. Andrew Weill. And those were kind of some of the people that I found. And I had this sort of naive hypothesis, which was based on some stuff that I found that connected atopic skin diseases like psoriasis to my eye disease.
Dr. Mark Hyman: Yeah, well, it’s autoimmune. It’s all Autoimmune.
Jason H. Karp: And of course, every doctor I saw said, oh, this disease is unrelated to this disease is unrelated to this disease.
Dr. Mark Hyman: Yeah, no, no, it’s off.
Jason H. Karp: But back in this is in the year 2001, they didn’t really talk about food as medicine. They certainly didn’t talk about functional medicine. And so I decided to go on this path of seeing if I could reverse my skin disease, which was clearly inflammation through diet and lifestyle. And I told my ophthalmologist, I said, Hey, maybe if I can make my skin disease go away, maybe my eye disease will go away. And of course, as sort of an arrogant Park Avenue ophthalmologist, he said, that’ll never work. There’s no cure. Do whatever you want. My mind’s been, yeah, don’t confuse me with the fact. So I went on an extremely restricted diet as a 23-year-old single guy in New York City. I gave up alcohol, I gave up caffeine, which ironically were the two hardest things for me to give up as someone back then when it was sort of work hard, play hard. I just tried to experiment. I gave up processed food, I gave up refined sugar, I gave up gluten, I gave up dairy, but most importantly, grains, beans too. I gave up grains. Most importantly, I gave up the hyper processed garbage and I was eating terribly at the time and I wasn’t exercising and I wasn’t socializing and I wasn’t sleeping well and I was very isolated. And I noticed after a few weeks of this, my psoriasis started going away and my hair stopped falling out. I noticed anecdotally my vision was getting better. And I went in for a checkup with my doctor maybe six weeks in, and I told him about this and he again said, that’s impossible. It’s not working. Don’t even try. But I was like, look, I feel better. I’m going to keep going. And thankfully
Dr. Mark Hyman: It’s a spontaneous remission. It has nothing to do with your diet.
Jason H. Karp: And then I did this for months and everything went away and I noticed I could see clearly again. And thankfully there was an objective test for my eye disease that didn’t require subjectivity where they actually measure the surface area of your cornea and they could see if you have the disease or not, objectively speaking. And I went in and I said, I can see clearly. And he said, well, we’ll give you the test. And he gave me the test and my disease was gone.
Dr. Mark Hyman:Unbelievable. Well, Not really very believable.
Jason H. Karp: Well, the look on his face was shock. And he actually called his colleague in, I’ll never forget this day, it’s one of the most important days of my life. He called in his colleague and they’re whispering, but I could hear them whispering. And he’s like, you got to look at this. He goes, I must’ve misdiagnosed him. This is impossible.
Dr. Mark Hyman: It must’ve been a mistake. I didn’t actually
Jason H. Karp: And he came over to me and he goes, I must’ve misdiagnosed you. There’s no cure for this disease. This is the first time we’ve ever seen this disease reversed. And I remember walking out of the doctor’s office and I remember thinking, my life is going to be forever changed and I’m no longer going to respect the western medicine dogma and I’m going to go with my gut and my heart when things feel wrong. And I kind of knew instinctively that my four or five diseases that I was diagnosed with were all related and doctors didn’t think that. And from that moment on, I decided that I was going to spend a significant portion of my time and resources and philanthropy to waking up the American public because I viewed myself as a canary in the coal mine of what was happening to me as probably happening to other people. And obviously since then it’s gotten way worse in the last 22 years.
Dr. Mark Hyman: It’s so true. I mean, I remember being doing this since the 80 nineties and it was bad then. And now it’s unbelievably worse.
Jason H. Karp: And what happened was a lot of my research and a lot of what I believe cured me was respecting human evolution and respecting kind of the way that people in the blue zones live and respecting the way that indigenous people live. Because I remember reading studies back then mean they’re
Dr. Mark Hyman: Not eating fruit loops.
Jason H. Karp: Yeah, they’re not eating fruit loops. But I remember seeing the studies how when people would go to these various indigenous communities, they had no chronic disease, they had no obesity, they had no heart disease, they had no allergies, they had no autism, they had no ADHD. And I remember because back then there was still and still now, there was still this perception of, oh, it has to be just fruits and vegetables or it has to be just this. And what was so intriguing to me was these different indigenous peoples all over the world. Some were in arctic areas and they were eating whale blubber and pure meat. Some were like the Messai where they’re drinking cow blood. Some were tribes that were eating fruits and vegetables and nuts. And the only common theme across all of these indigenous peoples was that they were eating unprocessed whole things that were as close to the earth as possible.
Dr. Mark Hyman: Not too complicated.
Jason H. Karp: Not too complicated. And that led many, many years later where I was living a much more kind of clean lifestyle where my brother-in-law, Jordan Brown, my wife’s brother, he started reading some of the same books that I was reading. He was not sick, thankfully like I was. But one of the first books, he was the UltraMind Solution, one of your early books. And he started trying these kind of methods and he noticed how much better he looked and how much better he felt and how much better he operated and how much better he slept. And he came to me one day, and at this point I was higher up in my field, but I was still in the hedge fund business. And he said, there’s no place that we can eat.
Dr. Mark Hyman: True. It’s true. It’s true. And most time when you go to a restaurant or you go shopping or somewhere to eat, you have to navigate what not to eat and try to find a few things that you can’t eat. And I remember going to Hugh Kitchen back when it started and going, man, I can eat everything in here. And it’s good. Yeah.And it tastes good.
Jason H. Karp: It started off as a preposterous idea because I was a professional investor. Restaurants typically are not good investments. Most people fail at them. They have one of the highest failure rates. And I said to Jordan, I said, Jordan, we don’t know anything about restaurants.
Dr. Mark Hyman: Remember, I remember going there before you opened. And it was just like, it was massive operation.
Jason H. Karp: Massive. It was massive. And anyway, long story short, I said to him, I said, look, we can do this. We’ll do it as initially kind of a passion project. He said he was going to quit his job in real estate. My wife was going to help. I was going to stay in the finance business to finance this whole thing
Dr. Mark Hyman: In case he’d have beans and rice, you could pay
Jason H. Karp: For it, right? For the first years, for the first many years, we didn’t have outside investors. And so it was just a family operation. And we hired consultants that showed us how to do kind of typical restaurant stuff. But what we knew was what to include and we knew what not to include. We came up with the name Hugh, because our slogan based on all of the research that I had done that cured me was get back to human because I believe that part of the reason or most of the reason we’re also sick is that we don’t live in a way that is consistent with how we evolved and how we thrived. And I believe today we are in a true slow motion apocalypse. And I’ll get to some stats in a second.
Dr. Mark Hyman: I’m with you
Jason H. Karp: And we are in what I call a meta crisis, a crisis of physical health, mental health, and planetary health. And it’s the worst it’s ever been in human history.
Dr. Mark Hyman: It almost feels though like it’s sort of invisible. It’s not necessarily in the news. People aren’t really talking about it at scale. It’s just sort of this slow motion disaster that’s coming at us. And we’re almost oblivious. We are. When you look at the scale of the illness in America, when you look at globally how it’s reaching every corner of the world, you mentioned the Messiah. Yeah. They were healthy and fit, and they had perfect teeth, and they were thin. And this tall, skinny Messiah and I went to visit them last October, and it was kind of shocked actually. They had horrible teeth and they had all misshapen mouths. They were overweight, they had all these chronic illnesses every day. The Coca-Cola truck would come in, they’d empty it out, literally a giant truck, and they would just all line up and empty out all the phanta and coke in one hour.
And they were eating all kinds of snack foods from the town that they were able to get. They still didn’t have electricity, running water, sanitation, and they were getting all these processed foods. And the chief said to me, I said, Jim, did you know that this Coke cold is probably not good for you guys to cause the diabetes? And he said, really? He said, yeah. He said, well, so many of our people are dying from diabetes. We have no idea why. And I said, it’s because of what is shocking. So I think you really are onto something, get back to human as a beautiful concept. And the metris is something that we really need to take head on and face and actually bring it into in the public conversation. And so let’s talk about, let’s get into the weeds a little bit because I think at a meta level, we understand we have to address this global crisis that’s driven by the food we create and make and eat.
And yet in America, we are probably the worst in the world at this. We allow food marketing to kids. I think the only other country that does that is Syria. We pharmaceutical advertising, other country does that. As New Zealand, we allow all these chemicals in food that are abandoned in most countries. And you recently were outraged when you found out that Kellogg’s is making tons of cereal, which is extremely harmful to people in general because of the amount of sugar itself and the refined carbohydrates and the processing. But that aside, there are known compounds like BHT or butyrate, hydroxy, toluene, red dye number 40, yellow high number five. And these are things that are known to cause human health hazards and are yet banned in other countries and are allowed in this country. And when you found out that they’re making the same products in Canada or Europe without these compounds,
Jason H. Karp: Yes. What prompted the letter originally was when Kellogg came out and recommended cereal for dinner. And I don’t know
Dr. Mark Hyman: What a great idea,
Jason H. Karp: Yeah, I dunno if you saw this, but basically I did.
Dr. Mark Hyman: I did the CEO. That guy is so tone deaf.
Jason H. Karp: So tone deaf cereal in this country is in secular decline. And Kellogg was originally a conglomerate and they split about a year and a half ago into two companies. One’s called anova, which is mostly international and snacks, and then they isolated the US North American cereal business, just cereal. And it’s just North America. And that business still does 2.7 billion a year, which is millions and millions and millions of customers and definitely over hundreds of millions of boxes of cereal.
Dr. Mark Hyman: Definitely. Hopefully not any of my patients listening are eating cereal for breakfast. Correct. It’s one of the worst things you could
Jason H. Karp: Possibly do. Yeah. Cereal period
Dr. Mark Hyman: For breakfast or dinner or lunch. It’s probably one of the worst foods you can eat. Basically pure sugar.
Jason H. Karp: And they made a television commercial, which I would urge you guys to Google and watch it. It looks like a Saturday Night Live sketch. And Tony the tiger comes into a family who are about to sit down for dinner and there’s two kids. And he comes and he starts going, cereal for dinner, cereal for dinner, and it says, let’s give chicken the night off. And this was an actual television commercial,
Dr. Mark Hyman: Not a Parody.
Jason H. Karp: Yeah, not a parody. And thankfully he got skewered in social media, and this was sort of all over the internet. And people started talking about boycotting, and he made it about food cost. He basically said, inflation has gone up a lot, so if you are cost conscious, you should eat cereal for dinner. What he didn’t say is that the big food companies have taken anywhere between 40 and 70% price increases over the last three years.
Dr. Mark Hyman: Oh, it’s Inflation. We get rid
Jason H. Karp: Their prices. They have done the most inflation of almost anybody. And so when I saw that, I thought, this is enough. This is enough. I need to take a stand as a father and as a concerned citizen, and I need to let people know that this is really happening about the Food Dies
Dr. Mark Hyman: Marie Antoinette moment. Let them eat cake, let them eat cornflakes.
Jason H. Karp: And of course, I would never advocate eating cereal. And some of the comments that we got back were, well, people shouldn’t eat cereal, period. And part of my activism and part of what we’re doing with Human Co, my business is to recognize that we’re at a certain moment in time and we have to meet people where they’re at. And so instead of coming out and saying, nobody should eat cereal, which of course they shouldn’t, I’m acknowledging that there’s 2.7 billion of Kellogg cereal sold in this country right now. That’s a big number. So acknowledging that, I said, well, let’s go after the easiest, most ridiculous part of what they do wrong, which is they make a superior safer version of the same exact cereal. So let’s just take Fruit Loops as an example. They make a Canadian version of Fruit Loops that they undoubtedly produce in this country, in the us they already make it, and they already have the formulation for it here, and they ship it up to Canada.
And yet the one that they sell here has red 40, yellow five, yellow six, blue one, and BHT. All of those ingredients are not included in their international version of Fruit Loops. And when people say like, okay, so they know how to make the better version, they’re already making it. They’re already selling the better version. Why do they sell Americans the shittier less safe version here? There’s two reasons. The first reason, which is obvious is it’s a little more expensive to use natural food colorings than it is to use artificial food dives that are derived from petroleum, like
Dr. Mark Hyman: These blueberry juice, watermelon juice. Yeah.
Jason H. Karp: They actually use fruit coloring. They actually
Dr. Mark Hyman: Put a little Stevia in it to lower the sugar content.
Jason H. Karp: And so maybe it’s a few pennies per box is what they would have to spend. The second reason, which there was a fiasco that happened with tricks cereal, where they’ve acknowledged that natural food colorings are less bright, and when they’re less bright, they’re less attractive to children. And it doesn’t affect the taste. By the way, the colorings have nothing to do with the taste. So they have come out and they have tried to say when they’ve been kind of publicly shamed for this, is that Americans want the brighter cereal. That’s what they say. And that’s
Dr. Mark Hyman: And that’sGiving our customers what they want. That’s what the food industry says. It makes me nuts. Well, if people were selling cocaine on the corner street and McDonald’s for $2, everybody be buying. We’re just giving our customers what they want.
Jason H. Karp: And here’s the worst part, Mark. The worst part is in 2015, they came out, there’ve been these moments where people start really caring about the artificial food dyes because as you’ve noted with some ingredients like BHT and others, they’re literally banned in many countries. In some of the food dies cases, they’re not fully banned, but they require a warning label similar to the warning label you would have on cigarettes. Yeah, absolutely. And the warning label says, ingredients in this food product may impair your children’s learning ability and may cause behavioral disorders in your children. And so
Dr. Mark Hyman: Yeah, they’re not making that shit up. Yeah. There’s actually data on this.
Jason H. Karp: There’s a Lot of data.
Dr. Mark Hyman: You go to the National Library of Medicine, PubMed, you can search for the scientific articles that validate this point, this real, it’s not just crazy shit.
Jason H. Karp: This is not crazy sensationalists like we want to regulate everything. And then personally, both of my children are very affected by Red 40 in particular, where my son will come back from a birthday party and he’ll be acting like a lunatic. He’ll be jumping off the walls, he won’t be able to sit still. And my wife, and I’ll literally say to him, Tyson, what did you eat? And he’ll say, oh, I had some Skittles, or, oh, I ate some charms, blow pops. Or, oh, I had some fruit loops, or whatever it is. And when we remove the food diet from their diets, it is a noticeable behavioral change. Huge. And there are countless parents that I have met that notice the same thing. And so the biggest issue that I had with Kellogg was,
Dr. Mark Hyman: There’s over 92 papers documenting the role of food colorings on autism, on behavior on a DD, on mood, on, I mean, behavior disorders across the spectrum is quite fascinating.
Jason H. Karp: But they made this pledge mark, they made a pledge that said in 2015, we will remove all artificial food dives from our foods by 2018 and quietly, and this is wherecomes in quietly, Bonnie
Dr. Mark Hyman: BonnnieHarri, who’s the friend of ours who’s basically been a crusader for waking up America
Jason H. Karp: About the, she’s been an amazing crusader roll
Dr. Mark Hyman: Of these compounds in our food.
Jason H. Karp: And when they came out with this pledge, it was national news and it was in every newspaper. And there were headlines, Kellogg’s vows to remove, and they got, it was media claim. They got credit for it, and people loved it, and they put it on their website and then quietly they removed it from their website and they didn’t tell anybody. And they keep making new cereals. And the one that Bonnie really went crazy about, they came out with a baby shark cereal targeted at toddlers that had new, it was a new product with all the food dyes. So they quietly removed from their website, they ignored the pledge that they publicly made that they got credit for. And they’re just hoping that we don’t notice because it’s more money for them.
Dr. Mark Hyman: And by the way, I’m not sure this patient, but 14% of kids are on ADD medication.
Jason H. Karp: And both of my children have a ADHD by the way. I do too. And we don’t need to exacerbate because we already know how to do it without it. And so I wrote a public legal activist letter with a very prominent lawyer named Alex Spiro, who’s Elon Musk’s lawyer who was also concerned about American society at his own children. And when I was telling him this, we were talking about it a month ago or so, he was outraged and he said, you should do something about this. And Bonnie had made attempts with petitions to get this removed. Kellogg kind of engaged with her. They wrote her a letter. Nothing happened. And I’m at this point where I said, you know what? We need more firepower at this. We need more American citizens to get behind this, and we need this to be loud and public because most people don’t know this. And so we filed the letter and simultaneously we released it on social media, we put it on all the platforms, Instagram, LinkedIn, and X. And I would encourage you guys, my handle is human carp, KARP. But had
Dr. Mark Hyman: I shared it on my Social media,
Jason H. Karp: I would encourage you to look at the posts because
Dr. Mark Hyman: We’re going to put, by the way, we’re going to put the letter in the show notes. We’re going to put the article in New York Post in the show notes. We’re going to let you actually see what’s going on and look into it a little more.
Jason H. Karp: And the comments have been extraordinary. So many people didn’t know that they were selling a superior version up in Canada or in the UK or in the eu. So many people were concerned that why don’t Americans, why don’t we get the best version of a product that they already make? This is crazy.
Dr. Mark Hyman: And by the way, we are sicker because of it. I mean, I always say this fact so stunning and shocking, but we’re 4% of the world’s population, but we were 16% of the cases and deaths from Covid, not because we didn’t have good healthcare or vaccine access, but because we were all pre inflamed because of the food we’re eating.
Jason H. Karp: That’s right. That’s, but this is just the tip of the iceberg of the kind of insanity that’s happening in this country because America allows it. And then the question is why do we allow it? The first reason is, and I know you’ve talked about this in the past, is the difference in burden of proof that we use in this country. We use the term called grass. The generally recognized recognizes is safer, which for some of your listeners is basically in this country when they introduce a new compound or a new food, it’s innocent until proven guilty, right? So let’s just unleash esra on the American public or trans fats and then we’ll figure out in 10 years if there’s a problem or a hundred, right? Right. And this is why things like asbestos happened and things like thalidomide happened and you could go on and on. There’s a lot of examples, glyphosate, there’s lots of examples where we thought, oh, what could go wrong? Just the Great Sparrow campaign. Whereas in places like Europe, they have the opposite approach with things that you put inside human bodies, which is guilty until proven innocent.
Dr. Mark Hyman: They have a whole legislation around this called the reach legislation in Europe, which prevents us them from putting all this crap in the food.
Jason H. Karp: And they want to have very long-term data before they bring it into the food. And so we have much looser regulations here. And when you talk to politicians or people at the FD A about it, the explanation they give is it encourages faster innovation. So they make it about business,
Dr. Mark Hyman: Less regulation, more innovation,
Jason H. Karp: Which factually is true. You can create more things faster if you don’t have regulation, but not when you’re poisoning people. This is what I talked to Cally Means about poisoning people is not a left or a right issue. No, it’s not. I’m against stupid frivolous regulation myself. I moved to Texas because of it from New York because I think Texas is more business friendly and more rational. But when it comes to poisoning our own people, this is idiotic. This should not be an issue about politics. This should be about if something is known to be harmful to humans and we have an alternative that works, don’t let it happen. Wake the fuck up. Because we are kind of like the frog in the boiling pot. When I talk about it at cocktail parties or whatever, people are like, oh, Jason, you’re being sensationalist and I gave us, we’re all
Dr. Mark Hyman: In the Truman Show. We don’t know it
Jason H. Karp: Right, right. And I gave a story that was, I think also kind of a cautionary tale of what I think we’ve been doing wrong and how we got here. And the story was, it was about Mao Ze Dhong in 1958, and he was trying to make China a powerhouse at the time, and it was a very farming heavy country. And he wanted to industrialize and kind of make farming less private and more kind of state owned
Dr. Mark Hyman: The Great leap
Jason H. Karp: Forward, the great leap forward. And one of the things that he observed, the green seeds, the seeds were being eaten by sparrows. And so he thought, let’s kill all the sparrows. So he created a campaign called the Smash Sparrow campaign where he told everybody, kill as many sparrows as you possibly can. And this is 1958. And typically when you hear these things, you always ask like, oh, what could go wrong?
Dr. Mark Hyman: And he wasn’t clearly an ecologist.
Jason H. Karp: Yes. And he didn’t understand complex adaptive systems or the wonder of mother nature. And so over two years, this only happened in two years. This is crazy. In over two years they killed hundreds of millions of sparrows. Well, but what they did not take into account is that sparrows also eat insects, particularly locusts. And they had the greatest locust problem in human history, which created the largest manmade famine ever recorded somewhere between 45 and 75 million people died of famine. That’s unbelievable. It got so bad.
Dr. Mark Hyman: Isn’t that more than people that died in World War 2?
Jason H. Karp: Yeah, It’s one of the greatest human tragedies of all time. In fact, it was so bad that there were books written about it that were banned in China because he didn’t want people knowing about it because it was so embarrassing. But it got so bad that people became cannibals and there were accounts of people eating their own children. There were accounts of people eating other people because the famine was so bad. Myopia of him thinking like, oh, we could tweak one variable. And it seems like it’s based on science and just hope that everything turns out. And I feel like today I just want to remind people of how bad the meta crisis is, because I think some people,
Dr. Mark Hyman: Can you define that? Because I think most people don’t know what meta means.
Jason H. Karp: So meta is just sort of a word that describes a bunch of high level things. But the metris to me is that we have four or five epidemics slash crises all happening at the exact same time. And it’s very similar to what happened with my diseases where I had five diseases manifest. They were seemingly disconnected to most people, but they were all connected.
Dr. Mark Hyman: This is so core functional medicine. It’s like look at the roots. Everything is connected at the roots are few common cause causes.
Jason H. Karp: This is functional medicine for the planet,
Dr. Mark Hyman: Basically. Yeah, exactly. There are a few common causes for all the things that are happening
Jason H. Karp: And I believe, and just to give your viewers some stats because it’s not just human health. So I wrote down some stats, and this is all in the last 50 years. And the one thing that I’ll say that’s also really remarkable is that when I did my research, homo sapiens have been around as far as know, 200,000, at least 200, 250,000 years. And all of these things that I’m about to tell you that you talk about, they’ve all happened in just the last 50 years and 50 years as a percentage of 200,000 means that we went 99.99% of humanity with no problems, none of these problems.
Dr. Mark Hyman: We had other problems, we had different
Jason H. Karp: Problems we had killing
Dr. Mark Hyman: Each other,
Jason H. Karp: But these kind of problems
Dr. Mark Hyman: Killing all the big animals
Jason H. Karp: All in the last 50 years, which on an evolutionary timescale is like a blink
Dr. Mark Hyman: Second. It’s
Jason H. Karp:: A second,
Dr. Mark Hyman: But it’s a blink that could wipe us out.
Jason H. Karp: I actually think we’re extincting ourselves. And so here’s just some stats in the last 50 years. So populations of vertebrates, of all animals that have bones have seen a 69% drop in total population in 50 years. The number of severe weather related disasters have tripled in, actually this is even shorter than that since 1980, causing two and a half trillion dollars of economic damage in just, and that number is just the last 20 years. 25% of young adults, 50% of Americans are pre-diabetic or full-fledged type two diabetes. As you know, this used to be called type two, used to be called adult onset diabetes because it was only adults that used to get it. Now
Dr. Mark Hyman: Now children, now kids get it as young as two.
Jason H. Karp: Eight of the 10 leading causes of death are related to lifestyle diseases. The cancer rates are at all time highs today, all time highs Today, this is going to be the first year that there’s over 2 million cases of cancer and the
Dr. Mark Hyman: New York Times, and the younger people are getting it too.
Jason H. Karp: And so the younger people, the under 35 has gone exponential.
Dr. Mark Hyman: So Kate Middleton just diagnosed with cancer
Jason H. Karp: And there’s all these articles where they talk about it being mysterious and it’s mostly gastrointestinal, so it’s mostly colorectal.
Dr. Mark Hyman: And the microbiome plays such a huge role in preventing that. And the way we eat and ultra processed food, which is the weight of fiber, destroys our microbiome.
Jason H. Karp: And I know, and also
Dr. Mark Hyman: And also The additives destroy microbiome causing inflammation, which also causes cancer. So the science is there about how the mechanistic systems work to drive the cancer rates and all these diseases. It’s not a mystery anymore. We know how this works, and yet we’re still doing,
Jason H. Karp: And then the part that really terrifies me, which Callie means has been talking about, has become a dear friend, is on the fertility stuff. Oh yeah, right. Sperm counts are down 50%.
Dr. Mark Hyman: Yeah, I did a podcast on that. The whole
Jason H. Karp: Thing, the whole fertility thing is terrifying.
Dr. Mark Hyman: Huge. I mean, dropping fragility rates, dropping sperm counts, difference in sex, birth rates from between men and women because of that. But animal are seeing hermaphrodites and really strange things going on because of the industrial chemicals and
Jason H. Karp: Really strange. And then the final part, which I don’t want to gloss over, suicide rates are at all time highs. And obviously we know about the mental health epidemic, but what I think a lot of people don’t know, and this has been scientifically shown, loneliness is the greatest predictor of early death. In fact, there was a study that came out out of Yale,
Dr. Mark Hyman: Like smoking two packs of cigarettes a day.
Jason H. Karp: It’s 15 cigarettes a
Dr. Mark Hyman: Day. Oh, 15, okay. I thought it was two packs now,
Jason H. Karp: But that’s still crazy. I mean, 15 cigarettes a day is the comparable mortality risk of being lonely. And this is the first time in recorded human history where lifespans are falling.
Dr. Mark Hyman: Children are going to live sicker, shorter lives than their parents.
Jason H. Karp: Fortunately, and this is the part that’s crazy, and this is why I say we have to wake up and yet we are the most wake the F up, you mean? Yes. Wake the F up. We are the most technologically advanced we’ve ever been in human history. We technically know more. And I put in quotes, no, we know more than we ever have in administered
Dr. Mark Hyman: More information, but not necessarily knowledge.
Jason H. Karp: We exercise more than we ever have, and we spend more now on healthcare per person than we do on food. And so the amount we’re spending and the amount of technological progress we’re doing is going up and up and up. And the objective metrics of all these things are getting worse. They’re not only not staying the same, they’re getting worse. And if you said to anybody, the more you spend on something, the worse it gets. They would say, stop it. What are you doing? Exactly. And Einstein has this famous quote, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a
Dr. Mark Hyman: Different result
Jason H. Karp: And here we are as supposedly the greatest scientific civilization in history, and we’re the sickest we’ve ever been.
Dr. Mark Hyman: Basically we have paleolithic brains and godlike technology. That’s right. And so we’re still trapped in these, almost in the end withal kind of behaviors and thoughts and actions, which kind of don’t comport with a level of technology we have. And so we’re really heading for this slow motion disaster, as you said, which is either the annihilation of the human species or maybe even worse.
Jason H. Karp: Yeah. Well the example I also give to some people, and then I’ll get to kind of how I think we got here, but the example I give to people is if you had an ant farm, and in my class, in one of my elementary school classes, we had one of those ant farms where you could see with the glass, you could see the ants, and they’re making all their holes and they’re making little things for the typical ant, their lifespans four weeks. And if you were watching an ant farm and 50 years is a little bit more than half of the average human lifespan, which feels like a lot to us. But if you were watching an ant farm and in two weeks time, which is half of their lifespan, you saw a bunch of them dying, you saw massive destruction of what’s happening inside there.
You would quickly look at that ant farm and go, oh my God, what the hell’s going on? We got to change this. And because it’s a little bit slower for us, and because I think this is the Al Gore talked about the inconvenient truth of global warming, this metris, which includes planetary health, is so inconvenient to deal with because it means we have to look in the mirror, we have to wake up, we have to get off of our hamster wheel. And look, everybody has regular life. You have families, you have jobs, you have distractions like TV and Netflix and social media. And to look at this in the mirror and say, wait a minute, every day that goes by, we’re getting worse. Yeah,
Dr. Mark Hyman: It’s so true. Jason, I wrote a lot about this in my book Food Fix. I dunno if you had a chance to read it, but did essentially, it maps out how food is the nexus or the root cause of most of our global problems from obviously chronic disease, which you’ve mentioned the economic impact of that, which is staggering. It’s about 30% of our entire economy is that, or maybe even more. We have the destruction of our mental health through the food. And I did a podcast recently on the role of ultra processed food and mental health. There’s obviously many other reasons like social media, but food is a big driver. The academic performance of our children and the destruction of the American mind inside from kindergarten or even before with now, they have the shark things from these kids full chemical dyes. And it’s also destroying our communities, driving increased racism through food marketing towards black and Hispanic communities.
And it’s also radically impacting the planet by the environmental destruction because of the way we overuse our water resources, the way we destroy our waterways through nitrogen runoff and nutrition, the waterways that destroy huge, vast coastal areas that 500 million people depend on for food, the incredible destruction of the ecosystem. You mentioned the sparrows, but we’ve lost 50% of all the birds in America because of the chemicals we spray on farming. And we’ve lost biodiversity on farms. We’ve lost our soil organic matter. We’ve driven huge climate change because of how we farm. And not just the cows, but everything we’re doing. And so it’s all it’s related, big problem related. And we have to sort of talk about it as one interconnected thing. And I think your story of your own healing through dealing with the root cause, which was food is kind of a metaphor for what we need to do for both our individual health, our collective societal health and planetary health.
Jason H. Karp: I think it’s not just food. I mean, I really want to make sure I also emphasize the mental health component because it goes both ways. The bad food leads to poor mental health, but then poor mental health also leads to bad physical health. And
Dr. Mark Hyman: It’s bidirectional. Yeah,
Jason H. Karp: It’s the cycle. And I do believe there’s a happy ending to this. So just in case.
Dr. Mark Hyman: Yeah, I mean it is very depressing.
Jason H. Karp: It is very depressing. So don’t worry, we’re going to get to the happy ending of how I think we can fix this. When I was immersed in public companies and I was immersed in studying these companies and I, I had the good fortune of being inside of boardrooms and the good fortune of being in some DC policy meetings with public companies and politicians, interesting to sort of see the lobby,
Dr. Mark Hyman: How these
Jason H. Karp: Decisions get made and I think
Dr. Mark Hyman: Know where it happens. I
Jason H. Karp: Think most of it came with good intentions. I don’t think everybody is malicious. I think there’s some malicious people out there, and there’s some people, and we can get to some of the big food companies that I think are still knowingly poisoning people. But I want to use McDonald’s as an interesting example of how something can start off with good intentions and then we don’t consider the downstream externalities. McDonald’s started close to 80 years ago. It was a Burger Shack, it was in the forties and back in the forties they got their beef from a farm. It was undoubtedly grass fed, grass finished beef because that’s the only way they did cows back then. The potatoes were definitely organic. They had no pesticides or chemicals or synthetic burden like we have today. They were deep frying it in tallow, be fallow. And it probably wasn’t that bad for you in the grand scheme of things.
And I often point to when people don’t believe this, watch some movies from the 1970s, and if you watch movies from the seventies, you’ll notice, and I’m not talking about the main actors, I’m talking about all the people in the background of all these movies. You’ll notice that very few people were overweight. People think like, well, the only way you can look fit and healthy right now is you have to just eat salads. But I would point out that in the seventies, and you know this, and you’re older than I am, but people ate burgers and people ate fries and people ate pizza and people ate ice cream and people drank milkshakes, and yet they were still looking like that. So it’s not just that it was junk food, right? It’s what was in the food.
Dr. Mark Hyman: Yeah. I mean, things that look like food now are really approximations of food and they’re not actually food by definition.
Jason H. Karp: And so what happened with McDonald’s is they had this mouse trap and they created a product that everyone wanted, and America in particular, but I’d say all of developing countries are based on consumption. And McDonald’s had something that people wanted more of. And so capital came into it and people are saying, Hey, let’s grow this. How do we turn McDonald’s from a hundred thousand dollars company, a hundred thousand dollars company to what today is a 200 billion company? Unbelievable. And the only way to do that, and the capital markets and particularly the public markets, have historically revolved around one variable, which is profit. Profit, which is how do we maximize profit? And so what happened with McDonald’s over time, and if you follow the trajectory, is they had to figure out how do we make our burger the same in New York City as it is in Paris, as it is in London, as it is in Tokyo, and how do we make our fries the same and how do we make everything the same?
And we took this sort of Henry Ford approach assembly line, right, of assembly line. Now with technology and things like semiconductors, it’s much easier to do that and software. But with food, which is naturally an organic, not homogenous concept, and it has natural variability, you have to do it. You have to homogenize the food and you have to widget ize the food. You literally have to say, how do we turn things like animals and plants into widgets? And the only way that we have figured out how to do it, and we did it was with pure science and how do we make more things synthetic and how do we take out the variability that naturally exists in food?
Dr. Mark Hyman: It what’s in a burger Now in a McDonald’s burger, not a lot of beef or some beef, but it’s a lot of other weird stuff.
Jason H. Karp: If you look at the ingredient label of American french fries at McDonald’s, there’s 19 ingredients in it. And we’ll come back to this with the Kellogg letter, but Europe chicken get nuggets. In Europe. In Europe, it’s four ingredients, but here it’s 19. If you sort of take that and you just see, okay, more money keeps coming in, it’s working, it’s working. More profits, more profits, more homogenization, more widget, digitizing. You can understand how we decided, okay, to make the land more predictable, to make the animals more predictable, to make the output more predictable. We have to basically make everything more and more chemical synthetic and use the science that we developed for things like technology. We have to apply it to food. And if you go industry by industry and you take the same lens, there are a lot of companies that started with a much more, I’d say, ethical and moral approach to creating that thing. Early days of Lululemon, for example. And you take clothing, you take things like Starbucks, you take things like the cocoa industry, and every single industry has the same trajectory. Trajectory, which is it started off with a natural organic approach. And then to grow and grow and grow and grow. We had to widget and synthesize and commodify everything. And you didn’t consider, or they didn’t consider because they weren’t paid to consider the externalities and they maybe
Dr. Mark Hyman: Didn’t know at that time.
Jason H. Karp: Yeah, they definitely didn’t know it at the time. And
Dr. Mark Hyman: Then we invented Crisco. We didn’t know it was bad for us. Correct. Until it was 1911, it was invented because of butter shortage. And it wasn’t until 2015 that it was declared not safe to eat 104 years later.
Jason H. Karp: That’s right. The challenge has been is that as we got later, call it nineties and the two thousands, when it started to become clear and these public companies started to say, Hey, because there’ve been a handful of CEOs that said, they raised their hand and said, this stuff is poisoning people. We have to buy healthier products. We have to create healthier products. The problem though is that when they started introducing or creating healthier products, they were inherently lower margin and they were inherently less predictable because it was, again, more natural. And this was all good when things were good, but when things started to, when companies started to have challenges or they started to miss their corporate earnings, they would always go back to the golden goose and say, oh, let’s stop this healthier stuff because that’s lower margin. We don’t make as much money on it, and let’s keep leaning into the stuff that we know works and people are buying. And it got to the point where they were certain executives that would get fired because they were trying to do the right thing.
Dr. Mark Hyman: Well, Andrew Newey Pepsi wanted to do the right thing, and she got canned. She was the CEO of Pepsi.
Jason H. Karp: Andrew Newey, greatest female, CEO of all time is on my human co-board. And she talks about how she tried to move the Titanic. And you hear the stories of, because of the way capitalism works, there’s always people along the way who may just try to make a living. They get fired if they don’t maximize profit.
Dr. Mark Hyman: Do you think there’s any world in which we’re going to move from a shareholder optimization to a stakeholder optimization economy? In other words, where it’s not just about maximizing prop for the shareholder of the stock, but all the stakeholders and who actually are involved in that product in some way as users, the society, the earth, everything. Right?
Jason H. Karp: It’s starting to happen. It’s starting to happen. And I think it has to happen from both a top down approach, which is regulatory, where the government says things like, you can’t sell trans fats, or you can’t sell artificial food diet. So you don’t even give them the option. Unfortunately, that is slow, that is corrupt. And you would think that’s happened faster. And it has happened faster in other countries. In other countries where the medical system is more socialized because the governments, the governments in those places bear the brunt of six citizens.
Dr. Mark Hyman: What most people realize is the US government actually does pay for most of the healthcare in this country. It pays for 30% of its entire federal budgets for healthcare and 44% of the entire healthcare costs in a country which are 4.3, and now 4.5 trillion are paid for by the government across all government health programs from Medicare, Medicaid, any health service, private defense, and other programs like Children’s Health Program. So we are literally doing the same thing, but we don’t realize it. So the government actually isn’t acting in their best interest by doing the kind of policies they’re doing?
Jason H. Karp: Yeah, because spending so much money on just keeping people from dying, but they’re still very sick, instead of all the preventative stuff that we’ve talked about,
Dr. Mark Hyman: Let’s back up a little bit. I think this is a really important point. We know where the situation we’re. Know we’re poisoning ourselves. We know our food system is screwed. We know food industry is not being their own police and checking themselves. I’m thinking about tobacco. Tobacco got to where it is now with dramatic changes in our laws and huge penalties to those tobacco industry because of litigation. It was a class action lawsuit and it was easy to do because it was one thing. It’s cigarettes, it’s tobacco food is so many things. Are we going to litigate against red dye number 40? Are we going to litigate against trans fats? Are we going to litigate against processed food against sugar? And I’ve talked to some people who actually were involved in the class action lawsuits, lawyers for tobacco, and they’re like, it’s really tough. It’s so amorphous and I’m wondering if you see a path for class action lawsuits and litigation.
Because basically what you did was you wrote a really nasty lawyer letter from a top lawyer who could scare the shit out of PayPal to Kellogg and say, get your act together or else, and we reserve our rights and we’re going to go after you legally if you don’t fix this now. So that was really compelling. But do you think there’s room for a massive litigation approach to this? Because that’s what’s happened across all the changes that we’ve seen in society, whether it’s civil rights, women’s rights, whether it’s gay rights, things that really worked. Were these massive attempts to change the law, not by going to lobbying congress, but by actually going to the courts. Do you think that’s the right way or is there another path that we can get out of this? Because I think about this day and night and I am struggling with figuring out how do we drive this? And I’m working on food policy in Washington. It’s incremental. Yes, right. But how do we actually make a quantum jump in this? I guess because it is existential for us. It is exist. Exist. I’ve been talking about this meta crisis
Jason H. Karp: Existential,
Dr. Mark Hyman: Whether people realize they’re not, whether they’re actually tuned in or not, whether they’re marketized by social media or streaming TV or the food that they’re eating is dumbing their brain down, which is really true. It literally inflames a brain and disconnects your adult self from your reptile self. How do we actually come to terms with this and what can we do?
Jason H. Karp: I think the bad news is there’s no silver bullet, but the good news is I think it’s a lot of lead bullets, shotgun. It’s a lot of things. And I think there’ll be some that are much more effective than others. As I said before, I think there’s the top down that you mentioned, which would be regulatory, which would be things like either taxes or banning of things like artificial food dyes
Dr. Mark Hyman: In South America. You can’t get Tony the tiger on the cereal boxing where they took it off Fruit loops.
Jason H. Karp: Correct. And I think the reason that we chose as our first shot across the bow, the reason we chose artificial food dyes is it’s so black and white. There’s nobody that’s going to say, I would proactively feed my children a bunch of petroleum derived chemicals over natural food colorings if given the choice. Whereas I think things like sugar, which have been around for hundreds if not thousands of years,
Dr. Mark Hyman: Maybe we shouldn’t be eating petroleum product Jason.
Jason H. Karp: I think things like sugar and sugar load and all of those issues are much more nuanced in terms of what’s the amount? Is it, can you do GMO non GMO? And so I wanted to pick something that was so objectively absurd that anybody who wasn’t being paid to say it would be like, yes, I would rather feed natural food colorings to my children than a synthetic petroleum derived artificial.
Dr. Mark Hyman: Not a hard
Jason H. Karp: Sell. Not a hard sell. So we’ve top down, bottom up is the part where I think it can be the most effective, the fastest and bottom up is the consumer. And that is them voting with their wallet. That is them boycotting. That is them signing our petition, which will be in your show notes. The point is the consumer can create rapid change if they vote with their wallet or their for or their for. And if consumers basically said, we are not going to buy this crap because we know there’s a better version that you’re already selling. And until you give us a better version, if Kellogg’s sales drop 5%, just five, it doesn’t need to be 20. If it just drops 5% over the course of three quarters, they will change immediately. That’s right. The problem with class action, and I think litigation is another course class actions in this country take like 5, 10, 15 years.
There’s just so much red tape and there’s so much money that’s going to be lost to lawyers on both sides that I think the class action stuff can work. But I think we don’t have time. We have time for that. The only things that we have time for are both top down and that’s why we’re in touch with several attorney generals. We’re in touch with many members of Congress about this. Anyone who is patriotic and likes living in this country should understand that we as Americans should get the best version of a product you already make. That’s right. That should be the line. We should get the best version of a product you already make in another country. Period. Full stop.
Dr. Mark Hyman: Yeah, it’s not a hard sell.
Jason H. Karp: And so I think
Dr. Mark Hyman: Not saying cereal is good or we should be promoting it, but if you’re going to eat cereal, it shouldn’t be poison.
Jason H. Karp: Right. And by the way, I think the other reason that Kellogg and the other food companies rapidly mean, rapidly changed their formulation in those other countries was because they didn’t want to have the warning labels on the box of cereal. That’s right. They didn’t want to have a cigarette warning label on their cereal. That’s what happened in South Market. We acquired a warning label in this country on the boxes of cereal. It would happen overnight. That’s
Dr. Mark Hyman: That’s what we’re doing, Jason, I dunno if you know, but my food fix campaign, we’re working with the FDA and Robert Kiff, who’s very in favor of this, to change food labeling, to create warning labels and clear labeling on the front of packages. So it’s not like you have to read the ingredient list or read the nutrition facts, which are intentionally designed to confuse and confound us unless you’re a PhD nutrition even then good luck. It’s like how do you make it simple so a little kid can understand, okay, maybe you have to make the grade A to F if you don’t make it A that’s not good. But if you’re B, probably okay, but don’t need a D or an F.
Jason H. Karp: Right. But the fastest way is through the consumer. Yeah, the fastest way. Because these companies will adapt overnight. So Kellogg agreed. They sent us a letter back. Really? Yep. They sent us a letter back. We published this yesterday. So this is new news, hot news. This is hot news. They agreed to meet with us. I don’t know what’s going to happen in the meeting. I don’t want to make any promises. I used to be a shareholder activist. I’ve done this many times. And what I’ll say, and I hope Kellogg is listening to this, I am not out for blood. I am out for change. And so I’m not looking to publicly humiliate them. What my hope is is that there’s a bunch of parents in this room who recognize that they wouldn’t voluntarily feed their kids all these artificial food dyes. And then they make the change and they come out and they say, and I’ll help them do it. I will help them change their ways and be an ally ironically. And my hope is that if they do this, that the public gives them credit. And the best thing that could happen is that sales go up. The best thing that could happen is that the stock goes up on them making this change. Because if the stock goes up, revenue meaning the sales go up, then it will give a pass to all of the other companies who are petrified of harming their margins. And they’ll say, wow, we
Dr. Mark Hyman: Can change too.
Jason H. Karp: The public actually is rewarding us for being responsible because I think the fundamental problem mark, and this is what I’m trying to do with Human Co and True Fu Kitchen and all of our related businesses under the Human co umbrella, is I think the fundamental problem is up until now, companies have been rewarded for taking shortcuts, financially speaking, they have been rewarded for making more money at the expense of people. And if we can show whether it’s through my businesses or other businesses, if we can show that’s another way that if we can show the world that you can have a successful business that heals people,
Dr. Mark Hyman: You can do good and do well
Jason H. Karp: If you can show that you can actually have a successful people that has a successful company that employs people that can pay their bills and feed their families by making the world better and healing people, we will start seeing a lot of companies that are starting to do it right’s. Right, because they’re getting rewarded for doing it.
Dr. Mark Hyman: That’s right. I think that’s the argument that the food companies make. And I’ve talked to many CEOs of big food companies and they say, look, we can’t change because our competitors aren’t changing. And if we do the right thing, our margins are going to drop and they’re going to win. And we can’t have that. So we’re stuck even though we know it’s for the wrong thing to do.
Jason H. Karp: Prisoner’s dilemma. It’s prisoner’s dilemma.
Dr. Mark Hyman: I Would also say if Kellogg is listening, that they should also take out the hydrogenated fats that are in both the European and the American version. So that shouldn’t even be there. And just to point out, we said that trans fats banned. They really weren’t in 2015. The government said they’re no longer grasp, meaning they’re not generally recognized as safe. It doesn’t mean they’re banned. It means that food companies should not put them in and they’re not recognized as safe to eat, but it’s still allowed. So we can still buy margarine, we can still buy all these hydrogenated products. A lot of companies have taken out, thank God. But Fruit Loops has hydrogenated fat. I know. So that’s really bad. I think, Jason, you’re such a great visionary and a clear seer of what’s going on in society around this meta crisis that’s affecting our physical health, our mental health, our planetary health.
You’re doing incredible work to change that. You’re a beautiful voice that’s clear and not dogmatic, and you’re trying to help companies that are doing the wrong thing, do the right thing by applying pressure in the right acupuncture point. And I’m really grateful to you. I’m grateful for everything you’ve done. I’m grateful for Hugh Kitchen. I’m grateful for Hugh Chocolate, which thank God I love and everybody should eat. It’s great. I mean, if you’re going to eat chocolate, that’s the one to eat and it’s a fantastic chocolate. You have Human Co, which is a meta brand for many, many products that you have and companies that you have that really are trying to elevate the food system and show that there is a way to do good and do well at the same time. And I’m just so thrilled that you’re meeting with Kellogg and pushing this forward. And it takes people like you to activate people who care, but maybe don’t think their voice matters because it does. So thanks so much, Jason, for being on the podcast and being on the Doctor’s Farmacy, and we’ll continue this conversation and find out what happens next. So I’m on the edge of my seat
Jason H. Karp: And thank you, Mark. And I just want to leave your listeners with one final point about, up until now, as companies have tried to scale, particularly in food. More Scale has meant more problems for the world for people and mental health in general. And I believe it’s possible to scale where things get better as you scale instead of things get worse as you scale. And that is the fundamental problem we all need to help with. And the more people support companies that are doing it right and are willing to pay a little bit more for better practices, better ingredients and better integrity, the more that those companies succeed, the more this is going to move.
Dr. Mark Hyman: That’s right. And in a sense, we think we’re paying more, but we’re actually paying less because we’re paying less in our medical bills, our healthcare bills, our disability or lack of productivity or lack of enjoyment of life. Lack of vitality. I mean the human costs, it’s not measured in actual dollars is high. And also the human cost is measured on the backend. Healthcare costs is huge. So that’s right. I think it’s important that maybe it’s interesting, I dunno if you know this fact, but I think in America, Americans spend 9% of their income on food and Europe is 20%. That’s right.
Jason H. Karp: It used to be the same, 40 years ago was the same.
Dr. Mark Hyman: So I think eating cheap food has become inconvenience. Food has become somehow a value instead of having good food. And I think we may want to shift over to thinking a little bit more about where we spend our money on and shifting over our values and priorities. But thank you Jason
Jason H. Karp: For Thank you for having me, and please support the Kellogg’s initiative.
Dr. Mark Hyman: Yeah, sign the petition.
Jason H. Karp: Show us sign the petition and boycott their food until they make their changes. Amen. Alright, thank you. Thanks, Jason.
Dr. Mark Hyman: Amen. Alright, thank you. Thanks, Jason.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
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