Marion Nestle | Food Politics, Industry-Funded Research, & The Unsavory Truth

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00:51 Which means you'll unfortunately never hear my voice again. 1930s President Franklin Delano Roosevelt addressed the nation through a series of radio broadcast known as the fireside chats His aim was to reassure the common man that our society would recover from its troubled times From 1930 and I deal with a different kind of fire For a new era of worldly frustration we offer a fresh conversation, I'm Greg Carlwood These are the higher side chats.

01:29 Alright people, here we go. Raise a glass as we dedicate another day to diving deep into the nuances of a corrupt and backwards system because it seems that in many sectors of modern life decisions are not being made for the people or even by the people but rather under the watchful eye and steady hand of the corporate behemoths that dominate their respective industries and craft policy public perception and even the science we would use to properly assess how bad the damage really is Pharmaceuticals, guns, energy schooling, healthcare transportation finance and even something as simple as internet service are all examples of the inmates running the asylum. As this system serves their desire to devour more money and harvest whatever happens across their paths

02:15 Well, another sector we see this madness spinning out of control in is the food industry where organizations and associations representing everything from sugar and sodas to meat and milk and even pomegranates and grapes are getting way too involved in bias science that allows them run with deceptive headlines and marketing campaigns that obscure how bad the bad stuff really is but also inflate how good even the good stuff is supposed to be. It's a backward system that has eroded the public confidence nearly to the point of no return. But lucky for us, we have people fighting back like today's powerhouse guest The Great Marion Nessel

02:52 Marian has had an impressive career that is hard to do justice entirely, but she is Paulette Goddard Professor of Nutrition Food Studies and Public Health Emerita at New York University which she chaired from 1988 to 2003. And from which she officially retired in September 2017 She is also a visiting professor of nutritional sciences at Cornell. She earned a Ph.D in molecular biology and an MPH in public health nutrition from University of California, Berkeley, and has been awarded honorary degrees from Transylvania University in Kentucky and from the City University of New York's McCulley Honors College

03:31 She's amassed too many impressive awards and accolades to even name, and she is also the author of a Pandora's box of powerful food industry books like Food Politics How The Food Industry Influences Nutrition & Health What To Eat Soda Politics Taking On Big Soda And Winning and her latest Unsavory Truth How Food Companies Skew The Science Of What We Eat She's even written two called Pet Food Politics, The Chihuahua and the Coal Mine and Feed Your Pet Right, The Authoritative Guide to Feeding Your Dog & Cat which tackle many of these same problems plaguing the pet food industry. She is a food warrior forced to be reckoned with and proof in the pudding that a passionate person can make a powerful impact

04:13 I know, I'm psyched to get into it. The corporate conflict of interest call her outer the fearless fairy godmother of fair food science and a true master of her domain. Marion welcome to the higher side Oh, thank you for the introduction. I'm glad to be here Yes Thanks so much for taking the time You talk about these topics with such a mastery that i'm really lucky to have you here I read food politics some years ago and of course unsavory truth just recently But even before that first book you've been pretty dedicated To pushing back in the food space for a long time having you probably longer than i've been alive

04:49 Oh, I hope not that long. Well, Iím only 34! Well, theÖIíve been teaching nutrition for longer than that but these issues didnít really come up until the early 1990s was when I first started getting interested in this and really I thought I was just describing the obvious I didn't really think I was starting anything new or breaking new ground. My book, Food Politics came out in 2002 and I wrote it because I was going to a lot of meetings about childhood obesity and everybody was talking about what are we going to do to get mothers to feed their babies better?

05:31 And I thought, mothers? Why is everything always blamed on mothers. Why isn't anybody talking about the way that the food industry is marketing to mothers? Why isn't anybody talking about the food industry at all? It's as if it's invisible and so I described what I saw and that was food politics And something that is probably a bit comical to this audience, that I read in Unsavory Truth is that you actually found yourself in some of those Hillary Clinton email hacks didn't you? Oh well that was the most amazing thing in the world. When when I was doing the research for my book Unsavory Truth which is about how food companies sponsor nutrition research which by spectacular coincidence

06:18 just happens to come out with results that favor whoever paid for the research. I was working in Australia, I was on leave from NYU and had a fellowship to work at the University of Sydney with a woman who works on conflicts of interest there and while i was there I heard from several people who said Marian did you know that And those emails had just come out, they were all over the newspapers. Those were the ones that were hacked by the Russians and I couldn't imagine what I was doing there! It turned out that somebody who was on Hillary Clinton's staff was also working for Coca-Cola at the same time and her emails got picked up in a hack

07:09 and i was in the because coca-cola had sent one of its people in australia to go to a talk i gave at the university of sydney and uh... at the end of my target i have been told that there was somebody from cocoa with air are do you mind if there's somebody from coco no i didn't mind i assumed that they were coming from cocoa let every talk i gave because i had just published a book called so the politics about the soda industry. And so I gave my talk, didn't think anything of it and then these emails turned up and whoever the person was who was at my talk had taken detailed notes on what i had said very

07:51 good ones actually, and then passed them up the chain of command with instructions that my activities in Australia ought to be monitored. And also those of the activities of Lisa Bureau who I was working with." I was kind of amazed! Yeah, yeah. I'm sure those Coca-Cola representatives are out there now as well but these people that they pay they're very well paid! I believe this person is making $7000 a month paid by Coke and that's just one of their many jobs but these companies got a lot of money to throw around

08:27 Well, the woman who was working with Hillary Clinton was on a $7000-a-month retainer from Coca Cola. And I was impressed. Academics don't make that kind of money Right sadly they don't and in unsavory truth you write about the position that your end and the career that you've had, and you refer to it as privileged in terms of why you can speak so boldly about these things can you tell people little bit about your career how it unfolded in this way in which you are really held back like many others better looking at food science and nutrition.

09:04 Well, I'm extraordinarily fortunate in having an academic position with tenure. And not only that but I'm at a university that pays the full salary so I don't have to earn my own salary the way that lots of academics do. Many academic researchers have to raise their own money to pay for their research but I'm in NYU it's a teaching institution we get a full salary. And I came into this job with tenure and with the full professorship, I'm basically untouchable unless I do something really stupid or dishonest or illegal it's very difficult to fire tenured professors so from the free speech

09:49 standpoint, I get to talk about anything I want and nobody at NYU ever not once in the 30 years I've been here has ever said Marianne we wish you weren't saying that you weren't doing these kinds of investigations about the food industry because they're not giving us the kind of money that we want from them and you're making it really difficult for us. Nobody ever said anything like that In fact, they like the kinds of things I do that I'm rewarded for talking to reporters for writing the books that I do. For doing a kind of research that I do and for being a public figure in that I talk to reporters all the time and give lots of lectures. I think that the privilege comes from having a job that I love doing exactly the kind of work that I love

10:39 and being rewarded for it, that's really rare in our society now. Mm-hmm mm-hmm And we are really lucky to have you and we're thankful that you use your position Be one of the good ones and even with that said it's not without some headaches i do believe your publisher for the latest book is actually dealing with a lawsuit already is that the case. Yes i was threatened to the law suit but didn't go anywhere it seems like this stuff never ends me you're going up against the big guys you gotta expect some pushback and,

11:16 So let's tell the people about this kind of casual year-long project you undertook of collecting food studies on your website and comparing the results to the interest of the sponsors. What did you find there? Well, first of all I have to explain where that project came from. When I was doing the research for my book Soda Politics Taking on Big Soda and Winning, it came out in 2015 and when I was doing the research for that book, I kept coming across studies that were funded by Coca-Cola that came out with results

11:52 were very much what Coca-Cola was paying for. Coca-Cola was interested in demonstrating that any research that linked sugary beverages to poor health, was so poorly done that you didn't need to pay any attention to it, that physical activity is more important than what you eat and gaining weight and that sugars have no effect on obesity or type 2 diabetes So they were funding lots and lots of research that was coming out with those kinds of results. But while I was kind of looking around for that research, I began noticing that other food companies were doing the same kinds of things

12:34 And I came across, and it got so I could recognize a food industry sponsored study by the title. If the title talked about a specific food or food product in a particularly positive way that didn't make any sense at all And your first question would be, why? Would anybody do a study like that and how could that result possibly be right. I could predict right off the bat who had paid for the study. So I started collecting them. I got so annoyed by it that I just started collecting them and every time I had five such studies, I would post some summaries on my website. And I did that for a whole year

13:15 from March 2015 to March 2016 and during that year I collected 168 studies and 156 of them had results that were favorable to the sponsors' interest, only 12 didn't. Even though I begged readers on my blog, I posted these on my blog foodpolitics.com and I begged readers to send me examples of industry funded studies that came out with results that the industry would be really sorry about. People just couldn't find them, they don't exist or they existed at a very low rate. So this wasn't a scientific study because I didn't do it systematically it was just what I ran across and the only

14:01 scientific conclusion that I can draw from it is that it's a lot easier to find industry-funded studies with results favorable to the sponsor than ones without, the ones that don't come out that way. But I still thought it was kind of interesting and now there are systematic studies that have very similar results so it was in the right direction even if it wasn't very rigorously done Yes, and money does make the world go round. It's not surprising but definitely good to know someone is looking at the trend and the examples of it are endless but in one of your talks you gave the example of new research shows mangoes are better than fiber supplements for solving problems with constipation And then you would look to see who funded that? Well Big Mango! Of course Not surprising

14:49 If there is such a thing as big mango. But yeah, trade associations and the mango industry. Now I'm greatly in favor of mangos. I love mangos. I think they're absolutely delicious. I am slightly allergic to the skin and the rinds that have to be little careful with them But I think they're great, but that was one of the studies that I recognized from the title. I thought who on earth would want to do a study comparing mangoes to fiber supplements? Why would you even do a study like that? Everybody knows that mangoes are healthy and delicious. Why would you have to do a study like that?"

15:25 And so I was pretty sure that the trade association had sponsored it and bingo, I was right on that one. Why are they doing this? Because now they can advertise mangoes as not only delicious but also having this great effect on constipation if that's your problem Mm-hmm. And I definitely would expect these kind of shady actions from Coca Cola, Kraft, Nestle or Kellogg's but what i did find more surprising in your book is that these problems persist even with the healthy foods kind of like you're talking about Oh yeah, I mean every single healthy food that you can think of has a trade association as part in that it belongs to the companies that produce these things belong to and they're all looking for market

16:14 So if you can, I think the pomegranate people set the standard for this. They put $35 million into research to demonstrate that pomegranates have antioxidants and that antioxidants are sometimes associated with good health." I could've told them that! All fruits have antioxidants, but they have a lot of pomegranates to sell. They want more people eating pomegrans and drinking pomegranate juice. This is the POM Wonderful company and so they sunk a fortune into being able to advertise it as something that would cure everything that ails you. Their claims were so egregious

16:58 And so beyond any kind of scientific substantiation that the FDA actually got after them and told them they couldn't make the kinds of claims that they were making. One of them was to cheat death, drink pomegranate juice and cheat death. I mean if you give this even a moment's thought, you know this can't possibly be right. And yet it works from a marketing standpoint. Their advertisements increased the sales of palm juice Yes, it's somewhat predictable pattern and very new craze is the CBD stuff. And I'm sure that something you've been looking at. I saw you post on the blog about it How are you assessing? The claims coming out here with the expertise you have you got to be a little skeptical right

17:44 Well, I'm only interested in the edibles. My blog is about food politics and so I am very interested in the politics of CBD edibles because they're marketed to have all these amazing health effects and I can't believe that this one substance is going to do all of that but a lot people do believe it and we have big problem with pain in this country lots of people have aches and pains, and if something that's relatively benign will solve that problem. That would be terrific! Whether it is a placebo effect or something is really happening I don't know. I'm waiting for the research. And one of the really interesting things about the whole cannabidiol business how little research there has been on this. Right right...that Schedule 1 classification has held us back a lot

18:36 Yeah, it's held us back a lot and I we're gonna pay for that. And in terms of those CBD edibles? I mean even if the stuff is really good for you they're often putting it in foods like brownies and candy and I gotta assume that's kind of a catch 22 Well, yeah. I mean you don't want to encourage people to eat candy on the other hand this stuff is so expensive people aren't going to be eating that much of it So no, I don't know how that works what? I worry about a lot Is that a lot of the products look very very much like the kind of products that are fed to kids Kids candy and kids cookies and kids whatever and there have been

19:16 now several reports in the medical literature about children being brought to emergency rooms because they've gotten into their parents' edibles. It's better if they don't look like something that kids would want to eat." I agree, it seems like a no-brainer and to bring it back to your book and these big food companies and their front groups Who are some of the people you see as the biggest offenders? You mentioned Coca-Cola, they front that global energy balance network but there's many others right. well i think they're all doing the same thing all of these companies are businesses food companies and not social service agencies and they're not public health agency for businesses uh... if they're publicly traded they've got stockholders and their primary fiduciary responsibility is to produce returns on this stockholders investment

20:09 So that's what all this is about. And the way the American investment system works is it's not enough just to make a profit and give profits to investors, you have to grow the profits! They have to get bigger and bigger all of time. In order to do that you have to expand sales all the time That's pretty hard to do. We have way too much food in this country from the standpoint of what is needed, probably twice as much food as the population needs as a whole and even if a lot of that is wasted which it is there's still a huge surplus and this makes the food industry hugely competitive

20:51 They have to kill each other to get market share. So this kind of research that demonstrates that this particular kind of nut has more of this good thing than that particular kind of nut is a way of increasing market share and because of the way that humans think where we just happened, we believe a lot in magical thinking. Humans do a lot of magical thinking and nutrition is a great way to do magical thinking so you think gee if this has vitamins in it I don't have to worry about the calories

21:29 If it's got antioxidants, it's obviously good for me even if there isn't any research to back that up. Magical thinking, yes it is a powerful thing. And just to get into the history of this cozy relationship between food companies and food scientists you say in Unsavory Truth that the foundations of this sort-of formed in the early 1900's when vitamins were first being discovered and categorized obviously which vitamin are in which foods would be of interest to food producers and was sort off to races ever since right? Oh yeah. I mean vitamins are just a great sales device and companies began putting vitamins into food products the minute they could. You already see, and I have this collection of cereal boxes that goes way back or facsimiles of cereal boxes and even in 1920's and 30's

22:26 The first processed cereals that were put on the market had vitamins added to them, not the way they do now. There are many more added now but it was a sales technique right from the beginning of vitamins are good more or better is the magical thinking that goes with that. It turns out that's not true but it feels like it's true and There's not a whole lot of critical thinking about food marketing so that you go through grocery store, you see the messages on the packages. You think oh goody that's good for me and you don't stop and read the labels and go through all the critical stuff you'd have to do to try to make sense of it. I think we're hardwired to just love stuff like that.

23:12 Yeah, I would agree. And you write that things were fairly innocuous in those early days but everything changed after World War II what happened in that post-World War II era that sort of tip the scales towards the mess we have today? Well, the main thing was that during the Second World War we learned how to do... We learned how to manufacture food products and distribute them. So the distribution system got built during the Second World War and the manufacturing systems got built. And after the war it then... The food companies proliferated and started doing more manufactured food products

23:54 convenience became a big sales point. It was advertised very, very widely people like convenience people liked the taste of the manufactured foods and they were often running and we now have a situation where we have 50 thousand products in a supermarket I mean if you read the research on food choice or choice of anything people are much happier with fewer choices But this is the system that we're involved in and it's a system designed to get people to eat more food, not less. And it has been really effective in doing that. It's one of the reasons why Americans gained so much weight over the last 30 years

24:38 Indeed and i think a lot of people do see this problem even if they can't identify the nuances like you can but to play devil's advocate for, the people who maybe are more naive that are listening what would you say it to those who have the opinion that all the sciences the science is objective you can make the results which you want even if you are funding research. Oh, the science of these studies is fine. That's not the issue. The issue is how the studies are designed and the research question that's asked. I'll give one example of how easy...I mean it is so easy to design a study to give you the answer that you want that anybody could do it.

25:23 Let me give you a pomegranate example if that would be okay. So the pomegranate people went to a lot of trouble to recruit a group of investigators, to do a study in rats in which they gave rats pomegranate juice and measured the increase in level of antioxidants in their blood as a result So the question was, if you feed rat pomegranate juice would their levels of antioxidants rise? That was the research question. And of course it did! Why wouldn't it? If they eat pomegranate juice and aren't eating any other source of antioxidants... They didn't compare

26:09 The question was not, are pomegranate antioxidants any different from anybody else's antioxidants? Or do the antioxidants in pomegranates juice have any special health benefits as compared to the antioxidants in any other fruit. Those are different questions. So the research question they asked was one that was designed to come out with the answer they wanted it was a sure thing They didn't compare it to orange juice or grapefruit juice or peach juice, so any other kind of juice. It's really easy to do that and you know my doctorate was in molecular biology and we had beaten into us

26:55 that your research question had to be open-ended. You're not supposed to know the answer of your research question in advance, you're supposed to do the research to find out the answer but if you're setting up your experiment to give you the answer that you're looking for it's not the same And it's really easy to do that and whether that is done consciously or unconsciously, is not clear because a lot of the research on industry funding of research. A lot of it done for the tobacco and chemical industries and the pharmaceutical drug industries shows us that researchers who are doing work don't realize they're being influenced

27:42 they're not really conscious of what it is they're doing. It occurs at some kind of unconscious level that makes it really hard to prevent and it makes it really hard to talk about. Mm-hmm, well said! And we just can't take anything for granted these days and To dig into the nitty gritty let me ask you about some of the most common tactics these big companies use that people should be looking out for in terms of them trying to control this public perception around their products. What are some of the big ones? The big tactics? Yes. They're just like the tobacco industry, it's called the Tobacco Industry Playbook and the tobacco industry perfected this when the tobacco industry realized that cigarettes were causing lung cancer they had several options they could stop making cigarettes

28:33 They could immediately try to do everything they could to prevent cigarettes from causing lung cancer or they can hire a public relations firm, to try to cast doubt on that research and that's exactly be what they did. So the first thing you want to do is cast doubt on any research that indicates harm from your products and that's really easy to do, you can do your own research, you can criticize other people's research and say well they didn't control for this and they didn't control for that so that's one way

29:11 Another is you get scientists to do that criticism for you because your obviously being self-serving if your criticizing research that is critical of your products. So, you get other people to do it for you. You hire scientists who are willing to go public and say well they didn't control this and they didn't control that. You recruit front groups. You get groups that are set up to do health promotion or some kind of social program and you get them. You give them a big donation, and you see if you can get them to say critical things about the research in your product or to say good things about your products or you give funding to various kinds of groups that might criticize your product and get them not to say anything

30:06 They just don't say anything at all and let it go. And the cigarette industry was a master at that, and then behind the scenes you do the usual. You lobby to make sure that there are no regulations. You argue that self-regulation is fine. You can take care of your own regulation. You want to see a company doing that? Look at Juul, you know, the inhaled tobacco substitute vaporizers, yes. The vaporizer thank you I couldn't remember the word but Juul has been having a series of full-page advertisements in the New York Times and other national newspapers in which it argues that its taking care of its own regulation we're not marketing to children were not marketing to teenagers We support efforts keep our product away from teenagers

31:00 Just don't tell us not to put flavors in them that teenagers like. I mean, it's a fabulous technique. It really works and so other groups have picked this up and the food industry has picked it up too and does the same kinds of things. And mostly you see this from Coca-Cola not because Coca-Cola is a particularly terrible company. Because Coca-Cola got involved in some things that led to Freedom of Information Act requests to get emails. And those emails revealed how Coca-Cola was operating, it got caught.

31:44 And I've learned interesting things about Coca-Cola from you. One was that they had to, I guess teach Myanmar how to drink cold beverages because they only drank hot beverages until the marketing machine came in and told them how to use Coca-Cola properly. Yes wasn't that generous of them? Thoughtful of them! They had labels on when they went to Burma which had never seen these kinds of things before. They had to teach people how to use refrigerated drinks And how to drink the night you don't taste very good warm they take much better if their cold right so that people had to do that. They have succeeded in doing it they have they don't tend to fail too much i mean when you got billions of dollars its kinda hard to but,

32:26 I also think it was a Coca-Cola funded front group who convinced the government of China, much like their efforts here to focus its health services on exercise and activity and sort of brush diet aside. Is that right? Yeah, I mean that's what you've... they had a whole organization set up of investigators who were doing research on physical activity think that physical activity is very important. I do too by the way! I think physical activity is extremely important but when it comes to body weight you can't work off the calories that you eat from food very easily. And so Coca-Cola funded the development of this organization called The Global Energy Balance Network, that was devoted to producing research and public information that would indicate that you didnít have to worry about what you ate or drank

33:21 And there was a video that said that. Everybody is always telling you that you need to worry about what you eat and drink, You don't need to! All you need to do is be a little bit more active." Oh if only that were true... Yes and as you note we see these tactics in a lot of industries like tobacco but the drug industry is probably one of the biggest offenders today and you have a chapter about how Drug company influence really should be a cautionary tale for what is going on in the food industry and there are a lot of similarities for sure but there are also some major differences and regulations, and a bit of transparency that activists have fought for in the medical space that still really haven't spilled over into the food space right?

34:04 Well, what impressed me so much about looking at the literature on drug industry funding of pharmaceutical research and drug industry funding of physicians giving them trips and giving them gifts and doing all that kind of thing was that there have been complaints and concerns about this for 50 years. There's a 50-year history of ethical concerns about the way the pharmaceutical industry sells drugs to physicians. And that research, there are libraries full of books about it and thousands and thousands and thousands of articles that show that even a tiny gift—a pen and prescription pad given to a physician is enough to change that physicians

34:58 prescription practices to give more prescriptions for that particular drug, even if that drug is more expensive and less effective than a drug that's already on the market. I mean this has been documented so extensively for so many years it kind of takes your breath away And that's kind of a model for the situation with food. But I could only find at the time that I wrote on savory truth, 11 studies looking at what's called the funding effect, the effect of industry funding on the outcome of research there were only 11 studies

35:35 and half of them were on sugar-sweetened beverages. Now there have been a couple more, but they pretty much show the same kind of thing that the studies tend to come out with results that are favorable to the sponsor's interest and at the place where their bias is most clearly expressed in the way the research question is asked." Yes I think that's just great The drug industry is a great one to look at as a template and it's just so confusing you are right it is everywhere and i think the first time i ever got a little suspicious was that got milk campaign you know that has been a very pervasive one in people are saying there is good days bad, and now we're just kinda throwing up our hands like i don't know i guess if you like dairy have some because we just don't know the facts.

36:26 Well, actually if you like dairy have some is kind of my attitude about it. So I'm kind of there but the dairy industry's in big trouble now. People are not drinking milk the way they used to and you're just not seeing the dairy industry doing very well. dairy farmers are going out of business like mad, they're really worried about it. It's actually a very complicated and difficult situation and I feel sorry for the dairy industry in that way but i don't feel sorry about them in the way that they have marketed

37:04 because the dairy industry for a long time has had a checkoff program and that Got Milk campaign comes from a Department of Agriculture sponsored program in which all dairy producers put a certain amount of money into a kitty depending on how much milk they produce. and the money that goes into that is used for generic marketing of dairy foods half of it spent nationally in a half of its spend by states and they got milk campaign which is the most successful of their campaigns came out of that That's the one, the milk mustache one where they got all these celebrities to drink milk and get milk on their upper lip. And celebrities were fighting over being asked to participate in that. Mm-hmm mm-hmm and that makes me wonder how much blame should be shared by the government? Of course these companies want to market their own products but just like in the example you gave I mean

38:05 The government is helping them to do this and their interest is supposed to be the protect us so they gotta share some of this plan, no we're talking about the department of agriculture here the department of agriculture role with two promote the interests of big agriculture. Industrial agriculture, that's their primary mission. Everything else they do is at the periphery and not their primary mission so that they're certainly very conflicted about having organic agriculture housed within the Department of Agriculture. That makes them squirm.

38:43 dietary guidelines are in the department of agriculture that makes them squirm i mean that's a very difficult situation so they have strongly promoted these generic marketing programs because it helps big agriculture Yes and regulatory capture of course is a huge thing in pretty much all industries that were dealing with right now is that, who's watching the watchman because a lot of these people are either self regulating or regulating through the agency that people assume is the watchdog and as you just laid out clearly. A lot of times has not the case we have a misunderstanding of their true goals

39:25 Well, as I said businesses are not social service agencies. They are businesses and to expect them to be anything else just doesn't make any sense. And when it comes to the food industry this is a difficult concept for people to understand because the food industry makes products that we love Some of us feel like we're addicted to some of their products. We love to eat them and the idea that these products aren't good for us is a very difficult one conceptually, and the idea that these companies are not doing this for our well-being in health is also difficult conceptually as is the idea that government isn't watching our backs on this

40:19 Well said and I wanted to cut over to the pet food industry for a bit because many of us love our pets you've written two books on it and this seems to be even more unique than talking about human food, and it's easy to imagine that as bad as things are for human food we can only imagine the steep drop-off in integrity when it comes to animals. What did you find when you dug into the pet food industry? First of all, I just loved writing about pet food. I have to say it was really fun and the reason why did it was that I didn't understand anything about it. I go through the pet food aisles in stores and I couldn't read the labels they're not the same as the labels on human food products

41:02 They're animal feed labels and I didn't know how to read them, but my partner did. We ended up writing a book about pet food together that was really an analysis of the pet food industry with a terrible title it's called Feed Your Pet Right. It is just a horrible title and the book is really a deep dive into how the pet food industry works and the role of pet food in American society because plays an enormously important role in using up the waste of human food products. Really important, if we didn't use this level of waste to feed pets...

41:44 If we had to feed pets, the amount of food that goes into pet food would be like feeding another 40 million people because there's so many pets. So I'm greatly in favor of pet food. I think it plays a really important role and pet food then at the time he wrote the book and even more now is a complete reflection of what the human food supply is like. particularly hot get translated into pet food. Gluten-free pet food is a really big deal these days, for example." Yes I really love that book 300 plus pages of really great information and even as a kid i thought it was weird to see us feed our pets the same dry dog and cat food every day while our diets were so diverse It just seemed obvious that maybe something was up there Maybe there was a better way And there seems to be right?

42:41 Well, I think then there may be better ways but I don't want to discount the utility of pet food. You don't have to worry about the nutrient requirements of a dog or cat if you're feeding them a complete and balanced pet food because the nutrient issues have all been worked out for them. If you're cooking for your pets than you are using foods that could be feeding a person but for many people they feel like the dogs and cats in their house are people, they're family. And they want them to eat the same way that they do and of course the pets thrive on it. But the pets thrive on commercial pet food too! One of the things that really bothered me about the whole pet food issue was that nobody is doing research

43:32 to compare home-cooked diets with cheap commercial foods, for example. Nobody has ever done that. No pet food company... Pet food companies sponsor most of the research that's done on pet food figures and they have no interest whatsoever in showing that what they're producing is worse than any other means of feeding pets, so they're not interested in doing the research and there's nobody else who is doing it. I think that's a huge loss." Right! It is such a huge loss and that's definitely something I noted from that book just so many areas you ask the question then you say here's some information we can look at but its just incomplete and thats really sad of course intuitively you would think yeah we should probably

44:20 probably feed these animals the things they evolved to eat rather than kibbles and bits, but I guess we can't say for sure until someone does that work. Well, as far as I can tell dogs evolved to eat anything. You know? The historical story about it was that they ate the garbage of human food production and that's how the whole thing started with dogs but what's best for them do they live longer if their fed better? I have no idea I mean, you can predict. When we wrote that book there's a community of very thoughtful people who are very concerned about the way pets are fed and they were kind of upset

45:05 with us because we didn't automatically say everybody should be cooking for their own pet. We didn't say that, and because we don't have the research to show that it's better." I do not know whether its better or not as far as I could tell most pets in America are fed on commercial pet food they do fine I mean, to a degree. But I thought the parts on lifespans in that book were really fascinating because it seems like a lot of our pets do have the same problems with obesity and diet based disease that we have as you note the data is seriously lacking when it comes to this but some interesting facts are that vets routinely report shorter life spans than breeders sometimes by as much as 40%. We don't know why but that's there You also note the CEO

45:55 Enfield Pet Hospital says pets on a wellness plan can live an average of 25% longer, but they sell wellness plans so who knows if that's trustworthy. And then finally you have a somewhat unsubstantiated graphic from a pet advocacy website showing cats should be living closer to 32 years and dogs closer to 26 and it is just hard to know But what are your thoughts on pet lifespans and how our pets today are really doing compared to where they maybe should be? Well, the biggest problem with pets these days is surprise obesity because owners

46:33 Relationships with their pets are often, people aren't home all day. Their relationship with their pet is about feeding and they overfeed. They give pets treats. They give them too much to eat. They're not giving them enough physical activity. I mean it's just like people So, the biggest problem is obesity and obesity in pets is a risk factor for all the same things that obesity is a risk factor for in people. Type 2 diabetes, heart disease and so forth, joint problems or if the pet is carrying too much weight. All of that is very similar I think that's what makes it so fascinating

47:15 Mm-hmm. Yeah, I've definitely lost a few pets to those conditions in my lifetime and our current pet has definitely been helped out quite a bit by a home cooked diet thanks to my wife but this is a sample size of one who really knows Well, that's unfortunately not science. It's great for your bed Right and to bring it back to people another somewhat Compartmentalized industry is baby food and baby formula I think you wrote about this in food politics But are there challenges and problems that you found that are somewhat unique to that market? Oh

47:54 Oh yeah, the biggest problem is a business problem. The market is very limited you can practically count to the person how many babies there are going to be in United States and it's been 4 million or so for years That means the market for infant formula is extremely limited and the market for baby food is very limited. Babies only eat these things for very limited periods of time, so the object of the game for infant formula manufacturers and for baby food manufacturers is to extend the amount of time that infants and babies

48:33 these foods and to do that the formula people have made a big deal out of Omega-3 so that people will be willing to pay more for the products. And for the baby foods, they've got these toddler foods and other kinds... I mean, these are completely unnecessary products for the most part You know, babies are fed on breast milk. Okay not everybody can breastfeed but the toddler formulas and the baby foods for children who are eight or nine months old and a year old and two-year-old they should be eating adult food!

49:13 If families are eating decent food at home, cut it into small pieces. Don't put so much salt on it and feed to the baby. Babies can eat that stuff." That's an interesting business problem I think more than anything else. Infant formula is probably the most regulated product in the world. All infant formulas are alike because they have to be. They're just like pet foods. Just like all complete and balanced pet foods have to have the same or have to have a certain minimal nutritional level, infant formulas are the same thing. And from what I understand, the science seems to show that no formula has really come close to matching natural breast milk. Of course, I could be wrong and of course some people need the formula it's better than nothing but does that seem to be your contention as well? Is that what you found?

50:07 Oh yeah, there's still evidence that breast milk is better than infant formula. How much better we can argue about? And certainly lots and lots of people have been raised successfully on the infant formula. One wishes that the companies didn't push it so hard or weren't competing and weren't pushing in on people who didn't need it and one wishes that there were greater support for women who want to breastfeed It's really tough in this society. Those are social issues." And so to touch on the adolescent stage of life, one thing that was just huge when I was growing up that seems to have taken a hit in the last 10 or 15 years is the sugary breakfast food industry it seemed like its calmed down a little bit from the out-of-control situation it was in the 90s maybe?

51:00 yeah the boxes have gotten boring you know i think i mentioned that i collect cereal boxes and off there was a period when every week they would be some other ridiculous health claim on them i'd particularly like the ones about solving the problem of children getting colds or flu or something like that, thatís all stopped. But the breakfast cereal industry is in trouble too. Itís another industry where people just arenít buying it the way they used to and remember itís not enough to keep selling the same amount of product year after year you always have to increase your sales and if youíre not increasing your sales youíre in trouble

51:44 So the cereal industry is in trouble too and they have tried, they're under a lot of pressure to make their products healthier. And so they're tweaking the amount of sugar and they're tweaking this and that most cereals aimed at kids are still quite low in fiber and too high in sugar, and full of candy. I mean that's not what I think is the best thing for kids to be eating for breakfasts you're feeding them kind of cookies anyway. Marshmallows, chocolate whatever they're putting into them these days but I see them as greatly toned down. They are not nearly as much fun for me as they used to be

52:28 No not at all i mean those commercials they definitely captured my youthful attention oh yeah it seems like big sugar in general has just the toughest time i mean obviously the eighties and nineties there were quite successful now their kinda under the gun but you do have a great chapter on candy, Of course, candy is a multi-billion dollar industry. Two thirds of that is chocolate and we hear all these studies about dark chocolate and how good it is similar to like red wine got have a glass of red wine? Of course pushing products with the science they funded but Mars as a company is a pretty good example there almost like the Coca Cola of candy It seems like but how has your experience been with studying Mars as a corporation

53:14 Well, Mars is interesting because it's family owned. And that means that it's not under the same kind of pressure that publicly traded corporations are under. It's not that the family members don't want to make money they just don't have to be quite as greedy and they don't have to push growth quite as much but Mars for a very long time got the idea that if it could market chocolate as a health food we would sell a lot more chocolate And it did that and it did sell a lot more chocolate. And it marketed, invested any fortune in funding research to demonstrate the chocolate has antioxidants. Antioxidants again regardless of whether antioxidants are shown to have any particular benefits for health the word is out that antioxidants are good for you

54:06 So they could find antioxidants in dark chocolate, never mind that those particular antioxidants were destroyed by the heating process that was involved in turning chocolate into something that's actually edible. And never mind that it is only in the dark chocolate and even so you would have to eat pounds of it in order to get anything close to any amount that's useful, they were able to market chocolate as a health food and the word got out. Everybody I know thinks that dark chocolate is a health food well they've cut back on that because they're no longer pushing their chocolate now they're doing supplements

54:46 of the particular antioxidants, the flavanols that they think are useful. They're doing studies with the flavanols and they're trying to back off from some of them more egregious claims but their job is to sell chocolate and if they can convince the public that chocolate is healthy, they'll sell more M&Ms even if M&M's aren't the ones that have components in them that are supposed to be good for you Yes yes that's not magical thinking again and i just found the mars to be such a great case study because even though these corporations are funding research that is favorable to their products there's also another giant leap when it comes to the claims, that the companies themselves make based off the study they take that in a run with it i mean but then i read down about mars and this cocoa via supplement as it says

55:40 It can help firefighters or anyone maintain who they are for years to come and of course you invoke firefighters cuz there the most fit people around, and it's just like sometimes in these cases you leave and have the people who did the study come back and say wait a second guys i mean you can't you can say this. Well, no. That's not up to them it's really up to the company to negotiate with the FDA about what they can say and if they go too far then the FDA writes some little notes and says back off but by that time the word is out and believe me the word is out about chocolate everybody I know thinks that chocolates health food its candy everybody

56:23 Sorry about that. I think candy has a place in American diets, I love candy myself although i'm not a chocolate lover but it's candy and to think of it as a health food just doesn't make any sense but as I said we do magical thinking we don't do critical thinking around these kinds of issues Right, and that's what I was going to get into. Of course these kinds of interviews eventually get to that What can we do about it question which has got to be a little frustrating for you given that you've been doing something about it for most of your career But what do you consider some actionable steps? You encourage people listening to take the first thing I say is run for office please Run for office get yourself in a position of power

57:08 I mean, you can see what the group that's in the group of new representatives who are causing all that fuss in Congress now good for them. Good for them. May they be electable forever. Run for office, run for local office make things good at the local level I think the national level is really difficult right now and i don't advise trying to fight anything in Washington why bother you? It's not going to get you anywhere but certainly it's a local level its possible to do really good things

57:44 A starter advocacy is to make sure that your local schools have good food. Schools are very person-dependent, it depends on who's in them, it depends on the school board, the kinds of decisions that are being made... That's a really great place to start because you can totally transform kids' lives by having them fed better in school Teaching them about what healthy food is about and why it's so good, and how to prepare it in ways that make it taste really good. Those are lifetime skills really great to have. So I think that's just an excellent starting place. Gardens, make sure they're gardened. Teach people how to grow foods. Growing foods really fun!

58:29 Most people like it a lot. The green thumb thing doesn't really matter, it's just a question of paying attention and making sure that the plants are watered. They kind of take care of themselves. So I think those are really great things to do and those are simple and don't cost very much money. Beyond that, you join organizations that are already working on these issues. Very easy to find them. Anytime I'm giving a talk in place that I'm not familiar with, usually I like to have the slide of local food organizations and I just Google.

59:06 food advocacy in the name of that town. And I've never yet come across a town that didn't have food advocacy organizations working in it, no matter how small there's always going to be an anti-hunger group there's always going to be a Food Bank there is Often a school food association or people who are working on those kinds of issues, there may be the magazine Edible. There are edible magazines in 60 cities in the United States or 60 locations. Those sort of tell you about the organizations and the kinds of activities that are going on. I think it's really easy to find them

59:47 Find out what they're doing. Pick one that's working on an issue that you like and join it, advocate along with them. There are national organizations that are working on these issues. Join them. Send them a little money once in awhile. I always recommend Center for Science in the Public Interest is the oldest one. It has been around for 45 years And they lobby on food issues. School food marketing to kids, they're really terrific on that. They have a little newsletter that goes out once a month it's only $15 a year everybody can afford that it's really worth getting I don't think it's hard just get out there and do something

1:00:30 Yeah i'm with you and it is important to be savvy and strategic because we're up against a pretty intelligent and well refined machine. Yeah yeah I don't think you can underestimate how much better they are and focus they are then everybody else and even so, Public advocates and consumer advocates have been able to make strides, have been able to pressure food companies to try and change what they're producing. To make it healthier and better for the planet. Well, right on. Marian this has been a real blast I think we taught a lot of people a lot of things and the work you've done over the years is just a real inspiration Of course your website is foodpolitics.com and the latest book is Unsavory Truth Anything else we should leave them with in terms of following your work or whatever it is you got going on next?

1:01:24 No, during the school year I'm blogging five times a week at foodpolitics.com and people you can sign up and get it on your email and then people write me emails when i write them back Yes, people are juggling a lot of important issues in their head and its good to keep your blog Open and bookmarked because you're always reminding people about the food politics, and there's always another little story to add to the blog I love it. Well Thank You! You got it And thank you again keep fighting the good fight. I appreciate your time and take care out there Okay great bye-bye

1:02:02 Oh, oh! It's magic people. You know! Yes I hope you liked this one. I thought it filled a small gap in the broad subject matter that we get into It's not so much a health and diet show which i know we've done a lot lately but this is more of an episode to put food companies on notice. It's a corporate conspiracy show that just focuses on the food sector If that distinction makes sense, I'm sure it does. I honestly think Coca-Cola and probably Nestle too could use full episodes of their own where we could really go through all their shady tactics and international operations and probably find plenty to keep us busy over two hours but this really has been the space that Marion has been highlighting her whole career

1:02:54 And I really have to thank Marion because she does not do lengthy interviews like this very often, or really ever she said. And I tried to assure her that I had enough content prepared to get us to the finish line and that we have a large and passionate audience that would really appreciate it if she was willing to accommodate the demanding two hour time span...I mean i damn near begged! And I'm always willing to swallow my pride for the higher side A decade in retail can really make you quite good at accommodations and not being afraid to grovel a little bit. But I call this a food corporation conspiracy episode, and I think conspiracy applies. Corporations trying to game the system and lie to the public as much as they need to maximize sales but there's almost no distinction between what i consider conspiracy and what others might just call smart business that's fine

1:03:54 And I really do like that about Marion's attitude. Corporations are gonna corporate! Nobody should be surprised by this stuff, and some of it is even impressive just from a strategical standpoint. I mean the boldness of it all... But that doesn't make it right or fair. And we know that life isn't always right or fair so we need people like Marion to remind us that we can't just accept the things we hear or read And it is about personal responsibility, but THC tries to give you the tools to navigate an unfair system a little bit better. We can't change the world but maybe we can change your world! It's crazy because food companies already know that we don't trust them so they go out of their way to hide behind front groups or consumer advocacy organizations and they definitely play dirty So we gotta pay attention

1:04:52 I also really enjoyed the detailed breakdown of the tobacco industry playbook. That's what it is, tactic by tactic! That was a section that I enjoyed for sure and it's good to have all laid out like that But what really set this episode in motion was a listener who sent me a link to a new documentary about the pet food industry And how low the food quality standards are there i think you can call them to one of the joint sessions and i mentioned how. The documentary makers did not respond my request but then i looked for more material on a subject you know we want what we can't have, i found marianne's books and i made sure that we got the pet food section into the first hour because i do think it's a creative area to look into with some really valid concerns

1:05:42 But it did seem like Marion was a little more forgiving of the pet food industry than I might be. She makes a couple of good points about the practicality of it all, that without the pet food industry we'd be using a lot more resources and we might not have the infrastructure to get all these animals fed...I guess? I could see how there could be some truth to that but if the quality is so bad that were hurting or even killing our pets doesn't sound like a very good trade-off to me And as she said, there really just isn't enough studying being done to see how our pets are being affected by the same old dry dog food every day forever. Chances are it's not good and that's why there aren't the studies to show that it's not good again. That's one of those tactics in the playbook

1:06:33 And I obviously don't have any data to cite, but my suspicion is that given how bad the processed food industry is for humans pet food has got to be in pretty bad shape. Think about all the recalls we've had just in the last couple years there have been some pretty big ones in the pet food space and our pets can't tell us when there's a problem so... That's just what they caught you know? I can imagine what they wouldn't catch But personally, our aging dog definitely started to have bad reactions to processed food and we couldn't figure out what was wrong with her for a long time. We even had a vet convince us to go to a dog chiropractor thinking that it was a hip or joint issue

1:07:16 It got quite insane and let me just say quite southern california but now my wife buys these logs of raw meat and mixes in some key vegetables that are good for dogs. And most of our dog skin allergy issues have gone away, am i cats like to jump up on the counter when she's preparing the food and eat off those rod dog logs too and i'm sure that's good for them but the chart that Marion reproduces in her book. Granted, who knows where it really came from? But it has dog and cat lives at nearly double what we consider normal! And how could processed foods not have a negative effect just as they do on people

1:07:59 I know when it comes to the overall scope of what to eat, Marion always emphasizes calorie intake as the big key. You can lose weight on McDonald's if you watch the calories i understand that also so many of our health issues arise out of obesity So i understand why she is emphasizing that so much But even if I cut my calories down, if my food is soaked in glyphosate or devoid of any nutrients. I might be thinner but what does that say about the quality of my health? You know...I want to be thin but I don't want to look like Smeagol! Of course my hair kind of already does but you'll never see that. Regardless I am just glad we got such a knowledgeable and professional guest to really knock out a great food marketing episode. I hope you agree

1:08:50 i didn't make a couple of mistakes though i think it was in the plus show that i mentioned that kfc has managed to establish a tradition and china where the chinese get a bucket of chicken as their christmas meal, well that is not china thats actually japan but it's real thing. i don't feel like any corporation has really captured our holidays in that way sure there's a lot of plastic junk that we buy for easter halloween and christmas, but in terms of food the traditions are all still pretty home cooked you know.

1:09:26 That is just a weird one. It always stuck out to me how they managed to weasel their way into the Christmas meal category in Japan, but hey that's what they do of course you can never really look at an entire country as one thing but it's definitely a tradition I'm sure not everyone has been caught by that hook Of course not We also had that section about CBD and THC And look i am fan of both No question I'm a fan of blueberries too, but i think the same principle applies that it's a conflict of interest to fund the science that supports a product you want to sell. And I am willing to admit even for things I like! What is wrong with seeking complete objectivity? Even if we never really get there... I'm glad we talked about how even healthy foods are overstating health claims. That's important too. But these sorts of trendy fads like CBD

1:10:26 This is what Marion is best at analyzing, and I'm sure as good as CBD might be there are probably a lot of over-exaggerated claims driving this new market. We got to admit that both can be true! I also agree with her that weed edibles are a little shaky they shouldn't be isolated to desserts and candy not only because you can't claim the benefits of THC when you're putting it in a Rice Krispie treat But it is sketchy that these are kind of kids foods. I love whiskey, but i don't think it should be sold in a capri sun pack or a sippy cup with toucan sam on it you know? But overall i'm just so glad we could do it! I really enjoy her books and her blog definitely check out food politics or unsavory truth

1:11:17 Please let her know that you liked the show. As I mentioned, I really laid it on thick that this would be worth her time Don't make me look like some kind of slick salesman who can't back up their claims on an episode that's literally about exactly that it would be awkward. But as good as the free show is, The Plus Show adds just as many layers to the cake! We got into deceptive marketing aimed at older generations, ultra-processed foods calories and proper nutrition, egg marketing, the animal welfare aspect of the corporate food industry, shady actions of food companies outside of the US, ethics when dealing with the industry and industry funding

1:12:02 the tragic loss of the Economic Research Service, and how the current administration is affecting things in Marion's wheelhouse. I've been incorporating that into a lot of shows lately at least giving one question to our guests to say well how have things changed in your industry since Trump? Because I am determined to beat back the QAnon perspective that this administration is somehow different And in Hireside News, I really hope that all of our Plus members are converting over to the new RSS feed URL. You just have to take the plus out of the hiresidechatsplus.com That's all you gotta do keep the rest the same The last two episodes have had this notice front and center in the show notes so even on your apps you should see it please change that over

1:12:49 thehiresideschats.com slash feed slash THC dash plus or get it from the frequently asked questions help page at thehiresideschats.com but we are getting an early start to September and that's great I'm so ready to just hit the ground running now that we have the site issues worked out for the most part it's a great time to become a Plus member, I'm just saying! And if you use Patreon, you still get the plus shows and all that. But your login is not going to work on the regular site that I run. Patreon is its own closed system and only offer it because some people do prefer it. And I know there was some confusion there too so let that be known

1:13:31 But good show today and some great ones planned. I'm really proud of what we got coming up, so be ready! Also i will be in Portland next week for Gordon White and Austin Koppik's As Above event. I'm not really involved except to hang out with some colleagues and listeners but I will be going all the side events and drinking gatherings so I hope to see you if that's your thing And with that, I'll let you guys go. Thanks for listening! I've done my part Your move Bait-and-Switch scientists shady corporate food companies and masters of marketing manipulation magic your fucking move I won't take it No i refuse If its alright Ill keep my refuge I been scheming Of bigger things and Have to leave My old life behind Gotta transfer To the inner earth I built a box Built a hole

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