How Big Food Is Keeping Us And Our Children Sick - Transcript
Introduction:
Coming up on this episode of the Doctor's Farmacy.
Calley Means:
We are unequivocally becoming sicker, fatter, more depressed, more infertile based on our food. And we would expect the healthcare and our medical systems to be ringing the alarm bell on that. But they're silent because they're profiting.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Welcome to the Doctor's Farmacy. I'm Dr. Mark Hyman. That's Farmacy with an F, a place for conversations that matter. And this conversation today matters a lot because it's about your health. It's about how we know what we know about nutrition, about the way in which we're influenced by big food, big pharma, big Ag, and how they're corrupted in ways that are manipulating our population and causing us all to be sick and fat and miserable and depressed. And we have somebody on the podcast today who is an interesting man who has been on the inside of how we manipulate people to eat the wrong stuff that makes us sick. He's Calley Means he's the co-founder of TrueMed, a company that enables Americans to buy, exercise and healthy food with your health savings accounts, which are really cool idea. Actually, I believe in this company, I'm an advisor and investor.
He's also the co-author with his sister of Casey Means. Dr. Casey Means who's been on the podcast many times of an upcoming book on food as medicine. Early in his career, he was a consultant for food and pharma companies helping do the wrong thing. And now he's doing the right thing and he is exposing these practices they use to weaponize our institutions of trust. He's a graduate of Stanford and Harvard Business School and he just tells it like it is. So welcome, Calley to the Doctor's Farmacy podcast.
Calley Means:
I'm thrilled to be here Mark.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Martin Luther King said, "Our lives begin to end the minute we become silent about things that matter." And that's why I started this podcast to talk about things that matter and effect all of us. And you, aside from starting a company that's going to empower people to live healthier lives using their health savings accounts that are billions of dollars of unused money that people can apply to actually improving the quality of your lives, you recently spoken out and had a treat that went viral about your role in helping shape the policies for Soda industries to manipulate minorities in poor against their own interest by having them oppose soda taxes. And in my book Food Fix, which I wrote in 2020, came out in March, 2020, great time to publish a book. I called out a lot of the things that you are now talking about. And I think it's important to have people understand that we live in a world that seems to be based on science and evidence and goodwill and policies that are intended to help people.
But in the end, they're often manipulated and governed by industry, particularly big food, big pharma and big Ag that have really corrupted almost every institution, politicians, social groups, professional associations, under research institutions, medical schools. And has really unfortunately led to huge amounts of confusion in the public. And it's a shell game in a way where people are just totally bamboozled by conflicting data, information, public messaging. And what's happening in the middle of that is that we've seen an explosion of chronic disease and obesity in this country. When I was born 1959, 5% of Americans are obese, now it's over 42%. Chronic disease was not as prevalent. And now we're seeing over 50% of people having diabetes or pre-diabetes. We're seeing 40% of kids being overweight. We're seeing the rise in healthcare costs and exponential rate. We're seeing all these things that seem to be exponentially moving forward while we're spending more and more money on drugs and surgery and things that really don't seem to be working.
So we have to fix it. And I want to just start with a quote from an article in Critical Public Health that's entitled How Food Companies Influence Evidence and Opinion Straight From the Horse's Mouth. And this was based on FOIA investigations, Freedom Of Information Act investigations that got emails from major companies, including Coca-Cola and how they work and how they manipulate people. And the quote from the paper is this, "They said the results from this investigation provide direct evidence that senior leaders in the food industry advocate for a deliberate and coordinated approach to influencing scientific evidence and expert opinion." And I would add also public opinion through social groups. And we'll talk about what those are. The paper reveals industry strategies to use external organizations including scientific bodies, medical associations, things like American Diabetes Association, Academy nutrition dietetics, and tools to overcome the global scientific and regulatory challenges they face, meaning they are influencing policy.
This evidence highlights the deliberate approach used by the food industry to influence public policy and public opinion in their favor. Calley, you were in the middle of all this. You were in the room where it happens, as I said, play Hamilton in the room where it happens. So tell us about your early career where you found yourself working at the Heritage Foundation.
Calley Means:
I interned there and then worked with them to produce some studies.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
And you helped do the quote research to help shape policies that would actually lead to the increased consumption of foods and drinks that are killing us. So talk about what that was like, what you thought at the time, how you worked, what the industry asked of you, and how these groups that are independent think tanks are controlling and influenced by the food industry.
Calley Means:
Well, food and healthcare are the two largest industries in the United States. So at the time, this is all normalized. With the benefit of hindsight, having read many of your books and having Dr. Casey, as you mentioned, who's been a warrior on this issue, it's very clear in retrospect what I witnessed and what I witnessed is a devil's bargain that I think is the most important issue in America right now. Which is that we are unequivocally becoming sicker, fatter, more depressed, more infertile based on our food. And we would expect the healthcare and our medical systems to be ringing the alarm bell on that, but they're silent because they're profiting. So diving into what I saw, because I think what's resonating is I did see actually how this was systematically weaponized. I think we all know maybe it's rigged, but I think it's empowering to understand these stories.
And these stories are a little bit depressing, I think we're going to go over. But I think let's look at this from a empowered standpoint. Because I think understanding how this system works is the first step to actually taking control of your own health. So I can go a little bit into the food and then we can get to pharma.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Yeah, I mean, let's talk about it because I think there's been such a coordinated strategic effort by the food industry. And I wrote about this in Food Fix to control the research. I mean, the food industry funding of nutrition research is 12.4 billion and from independent research it's 1.5 billion, so almost 11 times more funding from the food industry. When a food industry company funds research, it's eight times more likely to show a positive outcome from their research. In review, over 206 studies it was published in the PLOS medicine, which was published in 2007. So we have such evidence that this system is rigged and corrupt and is pushing the wrong strategy.
And it's not an accident. It's not like, oh, they're just doing marketing of their products and trying to move their companies forward and advancing their profit margins, which everybody has a right to do. But it's a deliberate attempt to create subterfuge that confuses the public and influences their behavior. And confuses scientists, confuses policymakers, confuses social rights groups, and everybody who is trying to make a better life for themselves and find out what to eat and what's right or wrong.
Calley Means:
Well, Food Fix changed my life, brought into stark relief my previous experience and really did convince me in many ways to devote my life to both trying to solve this with TrueMed, but also speak out about these issues. So I think you bring up a really interesting point, and I think what we're being asked to believe was debating a leading obesity doctor recently who's pushing pharmaceutical treatments for obesity. And she said, "Kids are being lazy." She said, "We're becoming lazy. And the medical system just has to treat that." So what we're being told is that Americans are systematically, essentially trying to kill themselves. That 80% of Americans are basically out of their free choice or obese or overweight, that 25% of children, teenagers now have pre-diabetes, that 50% of American adults have pre-diabetes or diabetes, that 93% of Americans are metabolic dysfunctional.
Now we're all... And we're buying into that. The medical system buys into that. It's present throughout how we hear about the American patient. And I can tell you, I don't believe that's true. I don't think parents are systematically trying to miss their children's wedding and playing with their grandkids. I don't think parents are systematically trying to see their kids be obese, which 20 plus percent are and 45% are overweight or obese. So I think, but as you allude to it is systematic. So what happens, let's get down into brass tack. So early in my career I saw a playbook. And the playbook is around rigging systems of trust. So-
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Rigging systems of trust. What do you mean by that?
Calley Means:
Rigging of trust. That means who are the stakeholders? The stakeholders are individual Americans, they're policy makers, they're the medical community. And what is the goal? The goal of food companies, somewhat understandably, is to make food cheaper and more addictive. So who do they need to rig? Who do they need to pay in order for that to happen? And let me just go down the list. Because this was the playbook I saw, and I've talked about this before, but the specific issue I was working on was in 2011, 2012, Coke was trying to maintain sugary drink spending with food stamps. A nutritional program that is $115 billion that 15% of the American people depend on for nutrition. It's the pre-eminent nutrition program for lower income Americans. The number one item bought on that is sugary drinks, 10% of all food stamps spending and 70% goes to processed food. This is not the case in other country-
Dr. Mark Hyman:
It's almost 40 billion servings of soda for the Poor.
Calley Means:
It's a material portion of Coke and Pepsi's revenue.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
I think it's the largest profit center for Coca-Cola in the United States, which is [inaudible 00:11:58].
Calley Means:
A government nutrition program for lower income kids. And by the way, a lower income man in the United States dies 15 years younger than a man at the upper income bracket and that's because of nutrition. So this program, this subsidy, we say it's personal choice. This is one example of a government program that's shifting billions of dollars to highly addictive weaponized drinks and food that have limited, if not negative nutritional value, I would argue negative. I'm sure you would. These are diabetes bombs. These are weapons of mass soda, and it feels a surreal reach into the godfather of who I've learned from on these messages. But soda's a nuclear weapon for diabetes. So Coke was trying to keep this on. And again, in the room, it's not we're all evil. It's well, these kids, it's very patronizing actually. "These kids need their soda, they love their soda. These lower income kids, it's one treat they have, we can't restrict choice." Of course, this isn't about restricting choice, this is about keeping government money funding coke.
So what is their playbook? Rigging institutions of trust. So I've talked about the civil rights groups. I think this was one that was shocking to people, but it's very true and happening today. If you call someone racist and racialize the debate, quite frankly, it does shut down the debate. And the Heritage Foundation, the NAACP was on the list and millions of dollars exchanged hands and there's reporting the New York Times at the time where the debate was really racialized. It was actually racist to take away that soda from lower income folks. Think tanks I've talked about, think tanks are very important in DC. And really purchasing studies on the left and the right was very transactional. As you mentioned, I worked earlier in my career at the Heritage Foundation, them and other think tanks, pay-to-play. The media-
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Tell me more about the pay-to-play. What does that exactly mean?
Calley Means:
Yeah, so I think is we all maybe high level when we see a study, oh, who funded it? Let me just tell you, let me just tell you and I'll loop in think tanks and research institutions. When you see a study from your favorite think tank or you see a study on the news from a leading university, I am telling you, most likely, that study was funded by unimpressive people sitting in an office in Washington DC. These PR offices, there were lists and there were strategies to deploy billions of dollars of research funding to achieve goals. With the case of food, that goes to foundational research studies like a study from Harvard that you've mentioned numerous times. That what's the foundation of the food pyramid? That study said, that sugar does not cause obesity and we should shift to a higher carb diet that led to the food pyramid.
That's still happening today. There are still studies coming out of universities, elite universities today saying sugar, it's unclear whether it causes obesity. So it's for specific outcomes like that. Also a strategy, I just have to say of the food companies is just to deploy money to nutrition studies. The fact that there are so many studies actually is the point. We are all confused about nutrition right now. We have a new news article and new on the nightly news every night about a new nutrition study saying a different thing. My recommendation is that we cut all funding for nutrition studies and give everyone some of your books with simple principles, the blood sugar solution, which is simple-
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Or [inaudible 00:15:26] fund, the National Institute of Nutrition that actually is properly funded and spends billions of dollars on doing good nutrition research that's independent.
Calley Means:
That and I also think there's just simple principles. It's just limit sugar for kids, but this obfuscates that debate. So it's a really conscious strategy. You talked about the kind of conscious weaponization of this, this is not complicated. If there's a bunch of studies from Harvard and other top universities that say or even differing things, that confuses the debates. Another thing we did-
Dr. Mark Hyman:
I wanted you to go on in a minute, but I want to pause to highlight an example of what you're talking about. Because this is... From the Annals of Internal Medicine, one of the premier medical journals out there. The title of the article was called The Scientific Basis of Guideline Recommendations on Sugar Intake, A Systematic Review. So it seems like an objective review of the science on sugar. And this is what the conclusion of this paper was from experts. Guidelines on dietary sugar do not meet the criteria for trustworthy recommendations and are based on low quality evidence. Public health officials while when promulgating these recommendations and their public audience when considering dietary behavior should be aware of these limitations. In other words, there's no evidence that sugar is harmful and we should be not promoting this through policy and consumers should not change their behavior because of any public perception that sugar is bad for you. Because according to the data, not.
This study was funded by the International Life Sciences Institute, which is funded by Coca-Cola, General Mills, Hershey's, Kellogg, Craft, McDonald's, Monsanto, Nestle, Pepsi Co, Proctor and Gamble. And the lead author of the study is on the board of one of the largest makers of high fructose corn syrup. So what do we do? This is like a New England Journal equivalent of a paper that the kind of reveal the conflicts of interest in the conflict of interest section. But nobody reads that and they hear the headlines that sugar isn't a problem.
Calley Means:
I can tell you that, that might not be on the radar of most people. That document is I think one of the most violent documents in America. What we do is we fund those studies and that's immediately taken to politicians. Now, let's not forget, in 78% of US states, the largest employer is either a healthcare outfit or a food seller, Walmart, which is the largest... So there's huge pressure on these lawmakers. And when they have a study like that from the New England Journal of Medicine, that gives them plausible deniability. There is blood on that study. What do we do? Well, thinking about this, humans are the only animal that get chronically obessed, that have chronic diabetes like that. We have an innate ability to know ourselves what we should be eating. A baby born today isn't lunging for processed food. They're lunging for natural food.
We have been addicted and corrupted by these studies. So what we need to do is step one, and we can talk about solutions in a bit, but step one is really embrace, really embrace this, really embrace that the elite levers of American medicine are being weaponized. Additionally, in the medical groups. You talked about this in Food Fix, but I saw this in 2011, 2012. Again, in public relations offices, there's lists of professors, and I think this is very important. The way you can get into policy and the way you can get into federal guidelines and the way you can get into drug approval and the way you get into policy, is you can pay directly the medical organizations and professors. Let me take that one by one, let me start with professors. So the IH research and academic professors are able to take both personal payments and of course their currency is research funding.
As you mentioned, 11 times our research funding comes from food companies then the NIH. So you're literally able to donate personal payments and fund the research for these academics. And then when we form policy, for instance, the nutritional guidelines, those aren't government bureaucrats. They appoint outside experts. So recently in 2020, the nutritional guide, this is-
Dr. Mark Hyman:
The dietary guidelines for Americans.
Calley Means:
The dietary guidelines for Americans. This is the foundational document that's guiding nutrition for our kids. 95% had a conflict of interest. So you're able, and this is very known, this is very strategic. You are able to pay these folks. And I just ask, and this is just common sense for everyone, and it's very simple. Be empowered to just use common sense here. If somebody's being paid millions of dollars for their research, personal payments, is that impacting their psychology? Even if the study says, this doesn't impact the research. The studies all say that, but these companies, I can tell you from experience, the PR consultants in Washington DC funneling billions of dollars are not assuming there's arm's length. Companies don't pay billions of dollars, which is what these processed food companies are paying for research out of a philanthropic goodwill to advance unbiased research.
They want something. It'd be against their fiduciary duty to spend that money. If-
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Well, it's true. I mean, there was a follow-up paper in public health nutrition in 2018 where they looked at 133 studies from 2001 to 2013, and they found that 82% of independently funded study showed harm from sugar sweetened beverages. But 93% of industry funded studies showed no harm.
Calley Means:
Yeah. And I think it's tough taking it to a listener to where I used to be. I went to Harvard and tried to rise up the elite ranks like Casey and felt very proud of that and felt very trusting of these elite institutions telling us what to think. I think it's very understandable for Americans to defer to the New England Journal of Medicine and Harvard Studies and Government studies. I just think and I think people are waking up post COVID. But these are nothing better than PR documents. And relatedly-
Dr. Mark Hyman:
So you're saying it's not science, it's public relations.
Calley Means:
These studies, it was dispiriting. Looking back on this, and as you outline in Food Fix, these studies are being directed by unimpressive PR consultants in Washington DC. Now, I think there are a lot of very dedicated researches and part, you alluded to this at the beginning. Part of the, I think beauty in a way of the system is that most people, at most levels are good people doing good work. They're conducting nutrition research. Even the Coke executives, they're not trying to get cheap calories into folks' hands. Everyone can go to sleep at night, but the end result is evil. The end result is that we're getting sicker, fatter, more depressed, more infertile because of food and it's very, very simple. Another thing just related to the buying off the professors who then go on the FDA panels, who go on the nutrition guidelines, is the medical groups.
Now, I saw this firsthand, and this isn't complicated, but these medical groups, the American Diabetes Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, there's obesity groups on down for every specialty, they are able to accept and are actually chiefly funded through outside funding. And you have, back when I was working for Coke, a direct donation strategy from Coke and other processed food companies to institutions like the American Diabetes Association. Imagine that, the American Diabetes Association has accepted millions of dollars from Coca-Cola, which is diabetes water. The American Diabetes Association had a Coke logo on their website. They said small cans of Coke might be a good option. To this day, they say Diet Coke, which is microbiome disrupting might be okay. Or is really recommended. What do they get? Well, as Dr. Lasick pointed out, and this is just absolutely shocking to me, until 2018, the American Diabetes Association said that as long as you're taking your drugs as a type two diabetic, as long as you're taking your insulin and other drugs, you can eat the diet you want.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Which is insane. Just to use more insulin but eat more cake. I mean, it's true, these professional societies are definitely co-opted. There was a paper published by [inaudible 00:24:02] from Stanford that was in circulation, basically saying, "The professional societies should abstain from authorship of guidelines and disease definition statements." And why? Because the American Heart Association received 182 million in industry funding, and the European Society of Cardiology got 77% of its funding from Industry. Academy of Nutrition Dietetics gets 40% of its funding from the food industry, which is insane. So this is why, you think you're looking up to trusted organizations like the American Heart Association, American Diabetes Association, American Academy Pediatrics, which is recently recommended surgery and drugs to treat obesity in kids, which we're going to get to.
It really, it's driving so much confusion because you think, oh, well these are independent groups, these are looking out for our welfare, these are not government groups, these are not industry groups. But essentially they are, and you mentioned the dietary guidelines. It's not just that the members have conflicts of interest. Under President George W. Bush, the guidelines were changed from the recommendations from the scientists being used as policy to shifting the final choice of what goes in the guidelines to government bureaucrats. And not only bureaucrats, but government industry appointed people who are basically in the revolving door from working with government and industry. So that's really pretty frightening. And I think that we're unfortunately seeing amazing amounts of influence on our dietary guidelines. In fact, under President Trump, there was a woman who was a policy advisor for the dietary guidelines who previously worked for the Corn Refiners Association and the Snack Food Association of America, who it was in charge of the dietary guidelines, which doesn't make any sense.
Calley Means:
Well, the Ag secretary after Ag secretaries is generally a food industry lobbyist. I'm on my personal campaign on Twitter that you should be Ag secretary one day and be pulling this... We need people like you in there. But it's totally co-opted and what's happening, I see it as a real assault on our brains and our innate ability to understand what's best for us at common sense. And really an assault. I'll just be direct on our children's bodies, I mean this is just to ram home the point. It is an orchestrated effort to basically confuse us from something that's manifestly obvious, which is we are getting sick because of food. Leading doctors, leading journalists are literally saying, we don't know the causes of childhood diabetes and childhood obesity. It is because of food. I will-
Dr. Mark Hyman:
To quote President Clinton, "It's the food, stupid."
Calley Means:
I will take it a little bit more direct too. Again, reading your books and just using common sense, it's actually, and there's a lot long tail you could go down. But the foundational things that have happened are actually, I believe, relatively simple. Our food has gone from a natural to a predominantly highly processed diet, and we have added three ingredients that did not exist 120 years ago in our diet. We have added sugar, it's gone up by some estimates, 100 x and 100 years, particularly for kids. Added sugar wasn't really a thing 120 years ago. That's gone up exponentially, it's a foundation of our food as we all knew. Highly processed grains, highly processed grains were invented in the early 1900s, these are new inventions. The processing, as we all know, takes out the fiber, takes out the nutrition, the fiber blunts the glucose impact.
These are weaponized, these basically turn in and our glucose bombs. And then of course seed oils. Seed oils were admitted in 1909 as an industrial byproduct from Rockefeller and the oil and all of the industrial work they were doing. This is car grease basically. And this is much cheaper than good fats, but we used to be almost predominantly anti-inflammatory fats as you talk about a lot. Now, we are eating inflammatory cheap processed fats. It's not complicated. We're being obfuscated. And let me tell you, this is by design. This is by design to take away our own sense of commons, just ability to know what's best for ourselves. And it's working. And I don't fault that, I want to say this, I don't fault. You can fault them, the end result is evil. We're all, I mean, trillions of dollars of budget and crazy rates of chronic diseases we talked about. But you can understand why the food companies in and of themselves want food cheaper and more addictive. Where the Devil's Bargain comes in and what I also saw is the healthcare industry stands silent in profits.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Yeah, I mean, it is a beautiful system of free enterprise, which is a very free, because the cost is so huge. But basically, Wendell Berry said this, we have a food system that pays no attention to health and a healthcare system that pays no attention to food. And I think they're mutually reinforcing each other. The worse our diet is, the more our healthcare system is utilized, the more profits there are and the financial incentives are all perverse. I think that there are movements within healthcare to create value-based healthcare, which means you pay for outcomes instead of just doing stuff. The more hospitalizations, I mean if a patient's in the hospital, they get an amputation, they get a bypass, whatever, that's how the system makes money. But if you got paid for keeping people well, that changes. And that's starting to happen but it's too slow. And I think, there's a lot of pushback on making this actually the way we run things, which is based on value creation, which is better outcomes and lower costs.
Calley Means:
And I really support the efforts at value-based current and agree those have been too slow. But the reality and was very clear to me, working for healthcare interests, and you still see this very much today, and we can go into specific examples. But is that very simply put, every lever, and I would say every lever of healthcare today predominantly makes money when they're intervening on sick people. The incentives of healthcare is for more people to be sicker for longer periods of time. And I don't think a person at a pharma company or medical school dean is strategizing and trying to have more people sick, but that is what it's paying their paycheck and it is happening. And speaking on this mission, I've been on speaking to senior people in academia, in medicine, in insurance, they say they're very disheartened because this is absolutely unmistakably where the incentives are.
And I think you see doctors talking to Casey, doctors have among if not the highest rates of burnout, suicide and oppression among any population, any profession. I believe Casey believes that's largely because these are some of the smartest people in the world, most mission driven people in the world who are realizing that the patients aren't getting better, that they're actually incentivized to put band-aids on and not actually cure the root cause. But this is unmistakably the situation. When I was working on the food stamp issue and Coke was working unforgivably to have government subsidies continue to go to diabetes water, the American Academy [inaudible 00:31:24].
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Diabetes water.
Calley Means:
The American Diabetes Association-
Dr. Mark Hyman:
That's something we should put on the label. Diabetes water.
Calley Means:
I mean it's a weapon of mass destruction for diabetes. And you would expect the American Diabetes Association to be in that debate. The American of Academy of Pediatrics has 25% of kids are getting pre-diabetes. Nowhere to be found. But right now, right now when there's, as you mentioned, a drug that's about to get approval for teens and adults for obesity, now that so many people are obese, oh, they're speaking up. And what's happening? And just taking the case of pharma, let's look at chronic conditions. Let's look at kids and I have a son going into this, he's one year old, and it's really inspiring me, but looking what the buzz saw that kids are going into, I think it's like over 20% of college students are on Adderall, a methamphetamine created by Nazi Germany to make soldiers more effective and actually discontinued because everyone had psychosis. It's the same drug. It's actually more powerful.
Adderall, 20% plus of college students are on that. We spend 250 billion on cancer treatments, cancer rates are going up. We spend a ton on metformin, diabetes going up. We spend a ton, the most prescribed drug in the country, SSRIs, depression, suicide, you can go down the list. Statins, heart disease going up. Now-
Dr. Mark Hyman:
I mean one in $3 in Medicare is spent on diabetes of the trillion plus dollar budget. So it's real.
Calley Means:
And what's happening is, it's waiting. This is just how the incentives work. The medical system waits for someone to get diabetes. They do not speak out about food stamp funding, they don't speak out about grain subsidies on corn subsidies. They go to Fruit Coast. They don't speak out that there's not a sugar limit in school lunch programs that are funded by federal and state dollars [inaudible 00:33:12]. They're not speaking out on that. They wait for someone to get diabetes. And then as you've pointed out, over a trillion dollars is going to somehow to diabetes management. So this playbook is playing out very well with this new Ozempic drug, which I think is something we can maybe tangibly dive into and explore the playbook on how that's used.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
So it's really the case with pretty much all of it. And I think whether it's the media with commercials and advertising or whether it's a celebrity that uses something and then it catches fire, Ozempic for those who are listening, don't know what that is, it's a peptide. It's something called the GLP one agonist. And essentially what it does is, impact your hunger and make you feel full and eat less. It also improves insulin regulation so you can actually regulate your blood sugar a little better so it helps with diabetes. And this is a diabetes drug, which can be helpful in some diabetic patients. But the cure for diabetes is not a drug, it's food. And this drug is now being promoted as the next best thing for weight loss. And Wegovy, which is a same drug with a different name that's FDA approved for weight loss.
These drugs are enormously expensive. I mean, they're about $1,700 a month. And if you look at the 15 million kids that are overweight in this country, if American Academy of Pediatrics is recommending this drug as a treatment, you're talking and do the math, it's 15 million kids times $21,000 a year, that's $3.1 trillion a year for a drug that you have to stay on for life. And what if we just gave people food? I mean, think of that $70 a month. And yet studies have shown that giving families $2,400 a year for food saves 100 plus thousand dollars in healthcare costs per diabetic patient and has dramatic improvements in their biomarkers of diabetes. Why aren't we doing that?
Calley Means:
So some people listening might logically think that, oh, well, if we prescribe more and we produce more Ozempic, maybe prices will go down. That's not how it works in healthcare. So actually, because pharma spends three times more on lobbying than any other industry, five times more than the oil industry, there's a revolving door, as we know between the FDA and pharma, the former FDA shares now on the board of Pfizer. Actually legally Medicare and Medicaid are not able to negotiate drug prices. So there's not price controls for a drug like this. So you assume, that multi-trillion dollar estimate sounds ridiculous. No, no, no. Healthcare's the largest and the fastest growing industry in the United States right now. I come from tech where usually innovation means lower prices, better outcomes. It's the opposite with healthcare. Again, I'm going to repeat that the largest and the fastest growing industry. I think we hear about the growth of healthcare and the GDP percentage 20% now it's going to be 40% in 15 years. Our eyes gloss over, we hear that so much. It is growing at an increasing rate.
And there is an absolute full court press using the playbook. And I'm frankly impressed if it wasn't so tragic how well they're executing this playbook. Their goal is to get government funding for this drug, trillions of dollars, as you said, if you really do the math. And they're winning. And I actually think this is, we hear about the corruption, I think driving into this, it's something every parent, every American should actually be very concerned about. I think we're actually at a monumental moment right now. Where are we going to see obesity again, which is a root of metabolic dysfunction, which it's a symptom of medical dysfunction. Are we going to continue to see that as a whack-a-mole thing like diabetes, like heart disease, like all these things. Again, the more drugs for every chronic condition we prescribe, the worse things get. Because the problem is food making us metabolically dysfunctional showing itself. 15% of kids have fatty liver disease right now. Obesity is just one branch.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
I mean, there are kids now who are getting liver transplants as teenagers because of fatty liver from drinking soda. I mean-
Calley Means:
15% of kids have fatty liver.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
I mean, I remember being in at an obesity, pediatric obesity conference in Atlanta, and I was there with Bernie King, Martin Luther King's daughter, who is really deeply cares about this issue. And I met this guy there who was a pediatric gastroenterologist, and I'm like, "What are you doing here?" And he is like, "Well, fatty liver in kids is real. And we're seeing kids as young as five years old, 15 years old, who have severe fatty liver disease." Fatty liver disease, sounds like whatever, who cares? Fatty liver. But it is a huge risk factor for cancer, for heart disease, for early death or diabetes, and it affects over 90 million Americans. So this is a big deal. And yet we're just not addressing this as a society because we're bamboozled by this sort of blitz creek of industry efforts, both pharma and nutrition industry. And food industry, co-opting our politicians, our academic institutions, our professional societies, our social groups like the NAACP, creating front groups like Genetic Literacy Project and the International Life Science Institute and Crop Life and all these wonderful sounding groups in American Council on Science and Health.
I mean, if you Google Mark Hyman and the American Council on Science and Health, you will think I am the craziest, quickiest, wackiest, manipulative, lying doctor on the planet. I should be in jail according to what these guys say about me.
Calley Means:
Mark, you're espousing to your audience a very subversive message, which is that we have cells and that we should think about how the one ton of food we put in our bodies each year impact those cells, the fuel for our bodies, how we should look at sunlight, how we should move. How maybe those simple metabolic cab should be the foundation of health. From you to Joe Rogan who talks about those concepts every day, the FDA and the NIH and medical schools are trying to shut that down. I mean, they're going after war. There's a war on podcasters who are talking about looking at the sun, exercising and eating healthy. This is a disruptive message.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
What heresy?
Calley Means:
This is a disruptive message. And going to my previous days in consulting, now, there's millions of dollars funded to TikTok and other influencers and a massive [inaudible 00:40:03], you probably see it, some of the nutrition conferences, a massive campaign both funding researchers and TikTok influencers body positive to say that talking about any type of food being bad is stigmatizing food in a bad thing to do. And apparently what I'm hearing is in a lot of the nutrition circles that's flooding in too based on donations that we shouldn't stigmatize food. That's a coordinated effort as well. And talking truth-
Dr. Mark Hyman:
[inaudible 00:40:25] calories, we shouldn't demonize it for anything kinds of food and yeah.
Calley Means:
But I think, again, this can get very high level. I think potentially, if I could go through the playbook that [inaudible 00:40:36] up, [inaudible 00:40:36] real quick.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
For Ozempic, you're talking.
Calley Means:
Yeah, for Ozempic, Wegovy, the semaglutide.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
And by the way, it occurs, whether it's the food industry, the pharma industry, the Ag industry, manipulating our public opinion, our policy makers, our social groups, pretty much everybody, and this is exactly how it works. So tell us [inaudible 00:40:57].
Calley Means:
Yeah, no, this ties it together, I think with the food and the pharma of the Devil's bargain. So let me go into Ozempic, so you kind of set the stage well, so Ozempic, Wegovy in semaglutide, these makers, I'm going to single out Ozempic, which is a lead on this. They want this drug to get to as many folks as possible and ideally have the Medicare, Medicaid taxpayer funding for it. The TAM is very large, the total addressable market. 80% of Americans are adults, are obese or overweight. And at the JPMorgan conference in San Francisco recently, they're saying this is on track to be the highest selling drug in American history because of that large market size. So what do they do? Nova Nordics, the parent company, has paid $30 million a year direct payments to doctors. Now I saw this too. You can have direct consulting fees, 420,000 individual payments to doctors.
The whole field of obesity medicine is new. And there is not an obesity doctor I think you could identify in this country that isn't on the direct payroll of this drug. Let's look at a more important financial incentive. This new field of obesity medicine, what happens if a patient learns how to eat, learns how to manage the metabolic health and gets healthy? There's no intervention to do. The entire foundation of obesity medicine is having a patient for as long a period of time to do interventions on. So Ozempic is an absolute dream for this field because the actual label says it. You have to be on it for life.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Take it forever.
Calley Means:
I was talking to a leading doctor at Harvard the other day and she said, "No, no, no, no, you don't understand, Calley, you're not in medicine. Obesity is a lifetime condition. It needs lifetime care." She said that to me.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Well, it's true If you live in a certain paradigm of the beliefs we have about obesity, is that it's not our fault that it's genetic, that it's some disease. It happens to us like we get cancer. It actually, it's not induced by the food industry.
Calley Means:
So it's very much within obesity, medicine's incentives. Just looking it seems, not getting personal here. It's a dream drug in that respect because even if the person gets thinner, it's a lifetime injection and actually there's unknown and very serious metabolic effects if you go off this drug. So what happens? So there's paid 30 million doctors, huge funding to the medical associations, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, huge funding to the med schools themselves and the obesity clinics themselves. Huge funding to the front groups obesity medicine that makes the standards for obesity medicine. And then pharma is the number one funder of most news programs in this country.
So what happens, this culminates a couple weeks ago in a 60 minutes piece. Amazingly, pharma Ads ran before and after this piece, and they had a doctor from Harvard, Dr. Fatima Stanford. She went on undisclosed that she's been paid a lot by this company and that her clinic is really counting on this approval to have lifetime patients and a huge financial problem there. They said it was an unbiased doctor. She literally said that, "Eating and movement and personal choice did not have much to do with obesity, that it is a genetic condition." She was not pressed on that program about how this genetic conditions only popped up in the past 50 years.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Oh yeah. I mean-
Calley Means:
You literally can't make this up.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Well, I think what's interesting is just to, from my perspective is that our genes don't change. So the idea that this is a genetic mutation and somehow all of a sudden we become prone to obesity because of some genetic reason is a little bit ludicrous because genes don't change in 40 years. Maybe they change in 40,000 years. But what does change is our epigenome and our epigenome are the tags on our genes that determine which genes are expressed. So we might have obesity propensity genes, and because we're adaptive to starvation, but we don't actually have to turn those on if we avoid the kinds of insults that are ramped in our society, the processed food and junk food that I've talked about for years. So when you look at the epigenome, our in uterine environments, our early life influences of eating junk food our environmental toxins, all these influence our epigenome and they do predispose this more to obesity for sure, but that's irreversible problem. Our epigenetics is not fixed, and that can be changed.
Calley Means:
I mean, I talk about this, but I was born 12 pounds, which is a sign that my mom and potentially me had metabolic dysfunction growing. And I talk about this. My mom had that, had high cholesterol, statin had high fasting glucose, Metformin had high blood pressure pill. I wish these were seen as warning signs. This is the, and I think key point is that, yes, that might be happening. Kids actually are being in new drug. The answer is not to drug that to everyone. The answer is that's actually reversible and obesity in and of itself actually isn't the problem. Obesity's actually a warning sign. I wish that my mom having trouble losing weight and having me after giving birth to me and having me as a high baby, which is a sign of metabolic dysfunction. I-
Dr. Mark Hyman:
A big baby. A big baby.
Calley Means:
A big baby.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
How much did you weigh when you were born?
Calley Means:
Like 12 pounds.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
You weighed 12 pounds?
Calley Means:
Yeah, I was a... And everyone was celebrating, everyone's high fiving.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
12 pounds. So that's called, that's a condition that's very serious. It's really related to the mother having high levels of blood sugar that causes these big babies that have to be worn by C-section.
Calley Means:
So my mom was congratulated by her doctor. She had trouble losing weight after the pregnancy, which was assigned a metabolic dysfunction. And these rights of passages, the stand, metformin, the blood pressure medication. These are all just, "Oh, it's fine, here's the prescription. I think it's something getting to 40% of men over 40 on a statin, this is not a big deal." These are connected warning signs. So the, what's happening very strategically right now, is there's money going to the American Academy pediatrics. There's just obviously, just a strangle hold from the drug companies on these obesity medicine things. And there's this all out war, to define obesity as this isolated condition. As this isolated condition that you really don't have much control over. Just as most diabetes doctors say, "Oh, bad luck, diabetes, oh, bad luck, heart disease, this is normal. Or take a statin.
The they're defining, there's a war right now to define obesity as this thing. We don't really have control over this thing that we're just given the thing that's just kind of bad luck. And what does that do? Then on the Harvard website, on these obesity clinics website, there is a all out push this 60 minutes stuff, all of this news, all these doctors, they have one mission. Which is government funding. If obesity is defined as a disease, then it's like, oh, a government can't tell a doctor patient can't... You can't legislate what medications a doctor can prescribe. Once it counts and the sounds ridiculous. You saying multiple trillions of dollars. That is very much in the cards. The government cannot restrict the price. They set the price. That price will stay. You don't have market forces in healthcare. So it's going to be astronomically expensive.
And then this is the key, this is the cute part. You'd think it's just for obese people. The 95th plus percentile, no. It says on the label and what the American Academy Pediatrics and other health groups that are totally bought off are pushing for is that it's obese and overweight, wink, wink, if you're overweight and other interventions have failed, all the patient has to do is check a box and say, dietary interventions failed. Of course they're going to check that box. There's trillions of dollars of incentives against them being healthy. So you have a situation.
Now then let's step back. Let's imagine we were an alien coming down to Earth, didn't understand our healthcare system and saw the problem. We see 80% of people obese are overweight. We see basically our country being crippled by essentially food-based illnesses. Eight out of the 10 colors of Americans, 85% plus of healthcare spending goes true to preventable food base. You would never in a million years that smart alien, they would never in a million years say, "Okay, as a public policy, let's wait for everyone to get sick and then give them marginal drugs." They'd say, "Let's fix the food system." And the calculations you did, this is an insane amount of money going to Ozempic, if you took one fifth of that amount, you could go across the street to Whole Foods and buy organic food for every obese child in the country.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
It's true. If we literally paid for food as medicine, with healthcare insurance dollars, the whole system would shift and we'd save literally trillions of dollars in healthcare expenditures. Just one study that was done by Geisinger in Pennsylvania. They looked at food insecure diabetics and they, instead of giving them better drugs or better care management, which they were getting. They were poorly controlled diabetics, they were food insecure and they were struggling. And so instead of just telling them what to do or what to eat, they gave them food. They gave them $2,400 of food a year, which sounds not like a lot, but they were able to get the meals for like 65 cents, and they were much healthier and much better for them. They gave them some education. They were able to drop the healthcare costs in that group from about $240,000 per year per patient to 48,000, $192,000 savings per patient while reducing hospitalizations and adverse outcomes like heart attacks by 40% and reducing the hemoglobin A1C more than any drug can do, which is the average blood sugar.
And yet you think this would be headline news. You think this would be, this is the biggest drain on our economy right now is obesity and diabetes is the biggest line item in our Medicare payments. And you think this would be like, "Hey, we found this solution, the cure, and it works better than anything else. And yet for literally about one month's cost of Wegovy or Ozempic, you could give people free food for the year, for them and their families for five days a week. It's really amazing, and yet we don't do that. And right now we're working in Washington and I'm working on a bill, it's called Medically Tailored Meals, it could be a 500 million study in 10 states, 20 medical centers using food is medicine, giving medically killed meals to chronically ill to see the impact on healthcare outcomes and costs. And I hope we can get that bill passed. It sounds like a lot of money, but it's a drop in the bucket when it comes to what we spend on healthcare and diabetes right now.
Calley Means:
Well, I'm a foot soldier in the fight here, Mark and I know, I'm so excited about Young Forever coming out, but everyone listening, if they haven't read Food Fix needs to read it. And I'm on the war path with you. I'm so excited about this bill, and luckily through this crusade I've been on engaged with a number of lawmakers from both sides, and we've got to do this. I am optimistic, I actually do think it's so untenable what's happening when you look in a classroom. I really like it as a new parent. I want to be there for my son as he grows older and not get a chronic condition. And then I think it is absolutely shocking what's happening to kids, what's happening to kids.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
So Calley, tell me from your perspective, being in the inside and working in this space and having sort of, going to Harvard Business School, understanding the way the economy capitalism works and government works being on the inside of think tanks like the Heritage Foundation. This isn't a bipartisan, I mean, this isn't a partisan issue. This is a bipartisan issue. We all are humans, we all have bodies. We all are sick. And then obesity doesn't discriminate whether you're a right wing or left wing. And the real question is not about whether this problem exists, not about the manipulation of science, public opinion, policy, professional association, social groups by the food industry and pharma. It's how do we solve this? What's really needed from a legal and policy perspective to fix this rig system? And what do we do about it? Because people listening are probably outraged. I certainly am. That's why I wrote Food Fix.
I mean, thinking about it. I wrote Food Fix in 2020, was published in 2020. In 2005, I wrote a book called Ultra Metabolism, my second book, and I'm on my 18th book, which basically talked about the toxic triad of big food, big pharma, and big Ag. And that was even before a lot of this crazy data came out. So how do we navigate a future that looks different, that helps solve our obesity crisis, it helps solve our corrupt food system that helps solve our corrupt pharma and medical healthcare system? What do we do?
Calley Means:
Let me start high level and take it down. So I think the foundation of public policy, in my head, it should be around, think about a child's cells. Right now that child has subsidized poisonous food. We have no healthcare until they get sick. And then when they get sick, we have all these incentives for as they grow older to continue in not learning about metabolic habits, about food. We literally give them statins, metformin, now Ozempic. And literally the message of those is you can still eat what you want. And we're not learning foundational habits. So I think that's the high level framework. So then you get down, it's like on food, it's like how do we incentivize healthy food? I refuse to believe this idea that people just want to eat the crappy food. Like crappy food is heavily subsidized. Whole food is more expensive. So you start in some simple things, everyone should be arguing for, but it's like where are we subsidizing bad food? We spend tens of billions of dollars right now on subsidies. For-
Dr. Mark Hyman:
You mean for agriculture or you mean for SNAP or food stamps?
Calley Means:
Well, let's go. We spend tens of billions of dollars on agriculture subsidies, which subsidize the grains and the corn that turned into fructose and highly processed grains. So that's one area.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
I give you a little anecdote on that. I had a dinner with the vice chairman of Pepsi years ago. He's no longer there, but he was an endocrinologist, a diabetes specialist from Mayo Clinic, who by the way, had diabetes himself. And I said to him, "Why do you use high fructose corn syrup in Pepsi?" He says, "Mark, the government makes it too cheap for us not to use it. And we know that people say, "Oh, it's no different than sugar." It actually is because free fructose is extremely dangerous for your metabolism and drives fatty liver, insulin resistance, diabetes, and even though it doesn't raise blood sugar, it has all these other harmful effects.
Calley Means:
Well, my understanding too, Mark, is that it shuts off your hunger. It makes you want to eat more.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
It shuts off your appetite suppressing hormones.
Calley Means:
Because I think David Perlmutter book you have here Drop Acid talks about, and Nature Wants Us to Be Fat, another great book. But it literally is weaponization. It makes you want to eat more. So we're subsidizing, we're subsidizing that corn that turns in the high fructose corn syrup, which is weaponized sugar. So that's just issue number one. If I'm a parent, if you're listed as an outrage and want to get into this policy fight, this thing we should do, number one is stop the agriculture subsidies as you point out in a Food Fix, just 0.4% at last count of agriculture subsidies, go to fruits or vegetables, they're considered specialty crops. So just as the fundamental policy instrument, we should be fixing the externalities. Right now it's totally back, which we're literally subsidizing with direct agriculture subsidies. The foods that you can directly tie to trillions of dollars of downstream health impacts.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
I mean, I think in my mind it's a little bit of a complicated issue, whether or not getting rid of the supports for agricultural crops that are producing these raw materials of high fructose corn syrup and soybean oil and junk food, flour and wheat. The truth is, the cost of these foods is far more than we're paying at the checkout counter. The true cost of food according to the Rockefeller Foundation is three times what we pay. So you pay a dollar for a can of Coke, let's say. The real cost is probably $3, or maybe for Coke, maybe 10 or 20 or a hundred dollars when you take in all the effects. So we're not actually having a true free market system. If we were having a true free market system, we would pay for all the embedded costs in whatever product we're producing, whether it's oil or whether it's sugar. And we don't do that and so these products are artificially priced very low, and that's driving increased consumption.
So you can buy in most places a two liter bottle of soda cheaper than you can buy a two liter bottle of water. How does that make any sense?
Calley Means:
Because there's so many subsidized ingredients. So I think what the grain, that's just an easy place to start, before we talk about anything even potentially polarizing like bans or taxes, let's not even go there. Let's stop subsidizing, we should, as you said, just economics dictates that if these foods are producing trillions of dollars of downstream negative health impacts, costs and just decimation of human capital in form of diabetes, then you should price those externalities in, that their soda should be more expensive. Not only do we not price those negative externalities in, we actually subsidize the products themselves. So we'll just tick off a couple more.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Right. Where we pay for it all. Multiple times in corn, we pay for the corn to be grown. We pay for the downstream economic consequences of the... And the environmental consequences of climate change. As a result of our farming practices. We are not paying for the damage to all the waterways from all the nitrogen fertilizer that's used that destroys our waterways and kills all the fish. We're not paying for the economic cost of the pesticides and the harm on human health. We're then paying again for using these products in the poor through the subsidization of food, through food stamps and snaps. So we're basically spending huge amounts of money buying those foods and paying for them in essent for the poor. And then on the back end, we're paying for Medicare Medicaid to take care of people who are sick from eating those foods. So if you actually got the true cost of what it would be to actually embed the cost of the corn production and the downstream products from that, it would be staggering. We'd be maybe paying $100 for a can of soda.
Calley Means:
Yeah. So that brings me to a second thing, which is a little bit outside the political sphere, but I think very important is, so this viral tweet about Coke's practice at the food stamps.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Of Coke what?
Calley Means:
Of my viral tweet about the Coke food stamp rigging of the system. My initial tweet that went viral about exposing that. Bill Ackman, who's a very wealthy famous hedge fund manager, retweeted that and said, "It is due time that basically billionaires step up and other folks to fund and help catalyze class action lawsuits against Coke and Pepsi." Such as we have with tobacco. And with all the tobacco lawsuits were about, is that they were consciously basically rigging the system knowingly and producing really disastrous economic externalities. I think the same thing is happening with sugar, big sugar right now, big soda. Except the only difference is that the impact on Americans is an order of magnitude worse. And I do think, as I'm talking about, and I think it's manifestly clear, there is a conscious rigging of academic institutions of civil rights institutions of... Coke also pays a ton of money and a huge amount of effort to have soda machines in schools. 80% of high schools still have soda machines.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
I mean they have reduced the sugar sweetened beverages them, but they replace it with artificially sweetened grains or juice or chocolate milk.
Calley Means:
Well, I'll tell you, I was recently giving birth to our son in a pediatric ward. It was full strength Coke in the vending machines in the pediatric ward. And my understanding is that the majority of pediatric ward still have full sugar Coke. And that's a very calculated effort to normalize these things in institutions of trust. So I do think there's a playbook and there's actually very interestingly, I've been lucky to see this effort and appetite from leading lawyers to follow the tobacco playbook. And I do think that's a good free market and I do think that is a way a system that we have to price in those externalities. I mean, in the year 2000, not that long ago, Philip Morris, if you look at the most valuable companies in the world, I think it was top 10. I mean, it was one of the most valuable companies in the world. They've really fallen from grace, I think appropriately as the extra knowledge were priced in.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
It was interesting, a lot of the food companies and tobacco companies were the same companies RJ, Bisco, are Philip Morris Craft. They recently something sort of separated, but they were really in the same business and used the same tactics.
Calley Means:
Well now the processed food companies are merging with pharma companies such just a full, they're getting sick and then Monsanto Bayer on down. So-
Dr. Mark Hyman:
What people don't know is that health insurance companies, big health insurers are by fast food companies, stock top to actually hedge against their losses.
Calley Means:
I mean it's a vertically integrated system. So I think-
Dr. Mark Hyman:
As they maybe lose money with people being sicker, they make money by people eating more junk. So it's a whole screwed up model.
Calley Means:
Yeah, yeah. No, it's insane. But yeah, so I'm hopeful on that. The third one I'll say, and this is also I think where public pressure matters, and just one sidebar here, Mark, on public pressure. And I've been meeting with a lot of lawmakers and a lot of policymakers who are somewhat pessimistic about this movement being changed. I think we're all kind of concerned about money in politics and the money these industries have. There's one thing that counteracts money for a politician. Yes, being paid by these industries helps, its grassroots effort. If they get a lot of calls, lot of interest from voters, that is the only thing more important than money. So a third thing that I think is very important, that we can-
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Grassroots efforts.
Calley Means:
Grassroots efforts. But a third thing I think that's very important potentially steer a grassroots effort is a very simple point about government guidelines. A very interesting stat and a very interesting principle I've found doing this work is that people actually do listen to medical elites. When the Surgeon General in the 1980s said, "Hey, let's cut down on smoking." And made a clear voice on that, which by the way was 20 years too late, just like we're saying now. It was way late. But you need to understand the 1960 6% of all government revenue came from tobacco taxes. There was huge financial incentives there. These were some of the most largest companies. So you had a late assertion from the Surgeon General smoking plummeted, smoking plummeted from there. In the 1990s with the food pyramid, it was disastrous. That was a violent document to our metabolic health. But that changed behavior. We followed it. We followed orders with-
Dr. Mark Hyman:
I certainly did. I was like, oh, pasta. It's a healthy, let's have pasta every night.
Calley Means:
And followed it, I think we saw a lot of her mentality around COVID. So we do, for better or worse, listen to medical authorities. And I will just say this, and I do think this is a big part of the solution, and I want everyone to understand this. Why the hell do we have the FDA and CDC saying 10% added sugar consumption is okay for two-year olds? That is what we're saying right now.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
It's insane.
Calley Means:
We literally have-
Dr. Mark Hyman:
I mean the world... It was interesting, I don't know if you know this, but this is to kind of loop back on this, under George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, who was the defense secretary of his time, went to Geneva to meet with the World Health Organization to tell them that the US would withhold $400 million in their annual funding for the dub World Health Organization if they went ahead with their guidelines for sugar intake for rattle and children, which was to take it from 10% to 5%. So they basically blackmailed the World Health Organization, the US government, because of the industry push, to prevent the World Health Organization from lowering its recommendations to 5%, which really should be zero. There should be no recommendations for sugar. It should be a treat. It should be known as a potential toxin poison. And I think if you want to have it occasionally, fine. If you want to drink a glass of wine, have a glass tequila once in a while, fine. But understand that this is a poison, that it's a drug, that it's dangerous and that you should be careful with It.
Calley Means:
Well, I'm a libertarian. I think most drugs should be legal. I enjoy a nice glass of wine. I don't think we should be totally puritanical on this stuff. What I think we need to do is understand that sugar is a highly addictive and very dangerous drug. And it's not a drug that should be subsidized. When you add up all the programs, 100 billion dollar plus. And it's 10%, this 10% thing. What a joke. What a joke. Let's give 10% wink, wink, recommended or approved for two-year-olds. So you a two-year-old, a highly addictive drug, you expect that to stay at 10%. Have you seen any kid, even the most, well-meaning parents? It is literally like a day with a three-year-old these days, it's like a meth addict looking for sugar. It really is. It's very dispiriting and a lot of my friends, and I'm really trying to prevent that. But when you addict a kid true to a highly addictive drug, which is literally what sugar is. What a joke. So I do think, and we look for-
Dr. Mark Hyman:
And the biology of this is clear, it's not hyperbolic to say that these are addictive compounds. We know from Dr. David [inaudible 01:07:18] research at Harvard and others that the sugar compounds in food affect the nucleus accumbens in the brain, which is the same center that gets triggered by heroin or cocaine or nicotine or Alcohol.
Calley Means:
Well, so physiologically, the dopamine receptors and I'm glad to hear that you affirm that. It seems very clear that it's very similar to drug. I recently posted something on Twitter where you can actually tie the amount of deaths for each drug. And sugar is by far just factually the highest killing drug in the country. Much more than opioids, far more than zero of LSD and psilocybin, which we stigmatize. So it's just like, it's just like, and actually the ones at the top, the ones at the top, sugar is by far and away the most. It's the legal ones, it's alcohol, it's methamphetamines, which we provide to kids in the form of Adderall. So it's these things we actually subsidize. And then drugs that are more stigmatized go down. But then opioids, of course, which 90% of opioids come from a prescription pad. And then people seek it illegally.
So we have it totally backwards. And I just want to say this, and I actually am chatting with some folks that I used to work with in DC and who I think are on the right side now and some various interests. You know what, True Medicine, we're trying to solve the issue, but we really want to just be at the forefront. I want to spend the next 20 years, 30 years of my life talking about this issue. And I do think this is one area where we can have grassroots support. The guidelines for children for sugar should be zero period. We have the guideline committee coming up. Fatima Stanford at Harvard, who I mentioned, who's on the payroll of Ozempic, is on that committee. We literally have doctors right now who are saying that obesity isn't the result of eating or exercise on this committee.
That is a big fight. If the government says we shouldn't be having sugar for kids, you'd have monumental impacts because that affects school, lunches, school. This is not nanny state stuff. We should not be subsidizing and encouraging drugs for children as young as two. So that is a big one we should do. I think just from a public policy perspective, we should be asking and attacking this incentive. The core incentive as we talked about, is that 95% of healthcare spending go to interventions once people are sick. We fundamentally have to work and support and ask our members of Congress and research and advocate for that prompt. Do not be fooled. Do not be fooled by politicians and folks saying about improving access. That is a ruse. The problem with healthcare right now is not that not enough people don't have access to drugs and our broken system. If there's acute issues, if somebody has an acute issue, of course we need to have healthcare for them.
But I really do think this whole debate about access, it's not access. It's the fact that the system is broken. That is the core problem with healthcare. The problem with healthcare is that so many people are getting sick. How do we stop that? And the way to stop that is just, again, pretend you're an alien coming down to earth, and when you're thinking about healthcare policies and thinking about dollars being spent, we're now waiting for everyone to get sick. We need to, and I'm having some interesting conversations, I think more people are realizing this. But we need to look at the $4 trillion for spending on healthcare, realizing that 95% is behind the curtain once you get sick. And we need to slant that to more food as medicine programs to keep people healthy. I don't like this box of preventative health people talk about with food.
Whenever probably you talk to people about, "Oh yeah, there's some community preventative programs." No, no. Food is the best reversal as well. You put food up against [inaudible 01:10:56], you put food up against metformin. It's not put it in this niche preventative box. Casey talks about when she used to do dietary interventions for patients when she was a surgeon who had a migraine, which is clearly metabolically tied or a lot of these inflammation issues. Her boss said to her, looked in the eyes and said, "Don't be a-"
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Yeah.
Calley Means:
And that is how the medical system sees nutritional interventions.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
I mean, it's true. The order of magnitude of impact from food interventions for people who have advanced disease is so much greater than pharma interventions. I'm agnostic when it comes to treatment. I will use drugs or surgery or whatever the right treatment is. And if I can maybe get someone's blood sugar A1C down by one or two points with a drug, I can get it down by six or seven or eight points with food. And there's no contest. It's not like it's maybe 10% better or 20% better. It's probably tenfold more effective.
Calley Means:
We've got to make that point and have policy for that. Food is not in a preventative lifestyle bucket. It is a serious medical intervention. And again, it's not anti-drug, it's not prof food. Let's take every condition we are facing and ask how can we spend money to both prevent and reverse, and reverse. The data coming out, the studies on Alzheimer's reversal, the studies on obviously diabetes reversal, which many quarters say can't even be reversed anymore. The obesity, obviously heart disease, kidney disease, COVID deaths. I mean, you have to follow those trillions of dollars that we spend in policy and move more towards that.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Yeah. I really applaud what you've done, Calley, to educate people to be out there in the media, to be running around when you have a kid and a business to run and actually talking about these issues when you have other things to focus on that are your primary concern. But you are a new and very loud and very powerful voice in this conversation that's raising awareness where it has been raised before, despite many other people talking about it. So I really applaud what you've done. I think you're bringing these issues to light. And I also think that highlighting things that actually need to be done, we need to get the conflicts out of the funding for medicine and food research. We need to get the conflicts out of the professional societies. We need to create some transparency and regulatory awareness around how these food companies manipulate social groups and public opinion.
And we need to develop real strategies around changing food policy, which is what the Food Fix campaign and nonprofit that I created to actually educate lawmakers, who, by the way, are often very well-meaning, but don't know much about these issue. Not because of any fault of their own, but because they're only hearing from the food industry. And so as they begin to become aware of these issues, we've met with over 75 lawmakers in Congress, both sides of the aisle. We have incredible awareness and supporter on this now. And I think there's the potential to really change this conversation. It's not going to be an easy fight. I think the food industry and the agriculture industry and the farm industry are funding huge amounts of lobby efforts and are influencing lawmakers in ways that I think are really unfortunate. But I do think there's an opening, and there are people like Cory Booker now the chair of the Health Subcommittee and the Ways and Means Committee.
People like Jim McGovern, Senator Marshall from Kansas, Senators that I met with from Arkansas, Boozman and others are very clear that we have a problem. And then we have to deal with this both from a economic perspective, a social perspective. So whether you're a Democrat, Republican left or right this is affecting every single one of us, every one of our families, all of our children. And it's a national crisis. And I think that it needs to be like that. Just like we had a massive effort to address COVID. Imagine if we spent a fraction of that. It's crippling a fraction of that. And we spent what, three or 4 trillion dealing with COVID.
If we spent a fraction of that on just dealing with these issues around changing our food system, around fixing some of these policies, we could really make a huge effort and create a society that's healthier, that's happier, that's more globally competitive, or we're not crippling our future generations of kids, both mentally and physically shortening their life expectancy. And where we're also as a side effect, improving the environment and climate and doing so many things as a result of fixing the embedded problems on our food and healthcare systems.
Calley Means:
It's so obvious to me. It's the first order issue.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
And it really is. I thank you for saying that. As a doctor, obviously I'm very focused on this, but as a businessman, as a graduate of Harvard Business School, I mean as a former consultant for the Heritage Foundation, that you're getting these ideas out there and talking about this to me is one of the greatest things I've seen in a long time.
Calley Means:
Cool. Thank you, Mark. And if I could just give you one quick story, is that Okay?
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Yeah, let's do it.
Calley Means:
When I really decided to make this my life's calling, I bonded a year and a half ago with a guy named Justin Mayers who was working in tech and had his own health issues and solved them through food. He started a company called Kettle & Fire's, leading Bone Broth company, perfect Keto. And we literally said, we literally, in these early conversations, we didn't have a company, we were just brainstorming how we could both have impact. And we said, we want to bring your Mark Hyman's vision to life. We want to be foot soldiers in the mission that you have been tirelessly fighting for. And I really mean that. We both, food Fix was one of the most influential books we've ever read. How can we be foot soldiers in this effort? So I appreciate what you said, but I see everything we're doing as connected.
This company, the mission of this company is we want to, at the high end, call this out. Justin seen within the food systems, my political background, I think a lot of people don't talk about these dynamics because of the financial considerations and their paycheck is paid by this. We wanted to be in a place where we could call this out and be foot soldiers into movement. And then getting the solutions. I really do think this FSA HSA, these accounts that give a consumer's choice, 140 billion is in them. Most people don't optimize them, I never use them. But that's where we need to move to. Having your own account, these tax advantage money. And we simply ask, it's simple, it's a question you phrased, but it's how do we incentivize better behaviors? And are actually, you can use these accounts, we expect to use them on drugs it's for when you get sick.
No, if you have a doctor's note, if you have a recommendation from a doctor, I think your clinics do this sometimes, you can actually purchase food and exercise if it's substantiated with studies, that can be a good reversal or prevention. And of course it is. So that's what we're doing, truemed.com to try to solve this. But what we are in this fight for, what we got amped up to voting our lives to do is continue communicating and exposing as best we can, the issues that you've been at the forefront on. And it's really an honor to be able to communicate these. And it really, it's looking backwards at my mom. I want, I want other people to prevent their parents from dying early as of a metabolic condition that's preventable and looking forward. It sounds trite, but I am concerned about this world my son is going into. And I think a lot of people feel that way. And it's just a real gratitude to be able to communicate this mission
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Well, thank you, Calley, for what you're doing. Keep going. Keep fighting the fight. Keep having the conversations that matter. I think many people are silent and unwilling or afraid to speak out and have, and you've been speaking clearly and loudly for awareness around how to fix this, what the issues are, and I'm just grateful for that. So thank you. And if you all listening to this podcast, were inspired by it or outraged by it, spread it around. Share with your friends and family on social media. Leave a comment, how have you been impacted by food? What have you learned about how you can make a difference in your life and subscribe ever you get your podcast and we'll see you next week on The Doctor's Farmacy.
Closing:
Hi everyone. I hope you enjoyed this week's episode. Just a reminder that this podcast is for educational purposes only. This podcast is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical professional. This podcast is provided on the understanding that it does not constitute medical or other professional advice or services. If you're looking for help in your journey, seek out a qualified medical practitioner. If you're looking for a functional medicine practitioner, you can visit ifm.org and search their find a practitioner database. It's important that you have someone in your corner who's trained, who's a licensed healthcare practitioner, and can help you make changes, especially when it comes to your.
