The Leading Voices in Food

Do you ever wonder whether your grocery store cares about whether you have a healthy diet? Every time we shop or read advertisement flyers, food retailers influence our diets through product offerings, pricings, promotions, and of course store design. Think of the candy at the checkout counters. When I walk into my Costco, over on the right there's this wall of all these things they would like me to buy and I'm sure it's all done very intentionally. And so, if we're so influenced by these things, is it in our interest? Today we're going to discuss a report card of sorts for food retailers and the big ones - Walmart, Kroger, Ahold Delhaize USA, which is a very large holding company that has a variety of supermarket chains. And this is all about an index produced by the Access to Nutrition Initiative (ATNi), a global foundation challenging the food industry investors and policy makers to shape a healthier food system. The US Retail Assessment 2025 Report evaluates how these three businesses influence your access to nutritious and affordable foods through their policies, commitments, and actual performance. The Access to Nutrition Initiatives' director of Policy and Communications, Katherine Pittore is here with us to discuss the report's findings. We'll also speak with Eva Greenthal, who oversees the Center for Science in the Public Interest's Federal Food Labeling work.   Interview Transcript Access ATNi's 2025 Assessment Report for the US and other countries here: Retail https://accesstonutrition.org/index/retail-assessment-2025/ Let's start with an introduction to your organizations. This will help ground our listeners in the work that you've done, some of which we've spoken about on our podcast. Kat, let's begin with you and the Access to Nutrition Initiative. Can you tell us a bit about the organization and what work it does? Kat Pittore - Thank you. So, the Access to Nutrition Initiative is a global foundation actively challenging the food industry, investors, and policymakers to shape healthier food systems. We try to collect data and then use it to rank companies. For the most part, we've done companies, the largest food and beverage companies, think about PepsiCo, Coca-Cola, and looking are they committed to proving the healthiness of their product portfolios. Do the companies themselves have policies? For example, maternity leave. And these are the policies that are relevant for their entire workforce. So, from people working in their factories all the way up through their corporate areas. And looking at the largest companies, can these companies increase access to healthier, more nutritious foods. One of the critical questions that we get asked, and I think Kelly, you've had some really interesting guests also talking about can corporations actually do something. Are corporations really the problem? At ATNi, we try to take a nuanced stance on this saying that these corporations produce a huge amount of the food we eat, so they can also be part of the solution. Yes, they are currently part of the problem. And we also really believe that we need more policies. And that's what brings us too into contact with organizations such as Eva's, looking at how can we also improve policies to support these companies to produce healthier foods. The thought was coming to my mind as you were speaking, I was involved in one of the initial meetings as the Access to Nutrition Initiative was being planned. And at that point, I and other people involved in this were thinking, how in the world are these people going to pull this off? Because the idea of monitoring these global behemoth companies where in some cases you need information from the companies that may not reflect favorably on their practices. And not to mention that, but constructing these indices and things like that required a great deal of thought. That initial skepticism about whether this could be done gave way, at least in me, to this admiration for what's been accomplished. So boy, hats off to you and your colleagues for what you've been able to do. And it'll be fun to dive in a little bit deeper as we go further into this podcast. Eva, tell us about your work at CSPI, Center for Science in the Public Interest. Well known organization around the world, especially here in the US and I've long admired its work as well. Tell us about what you're up to. Eva Greenthal - Thank you so much, Kelly, and again, thank you for having me here on the pod. CSPI is a US nonprofit that advocates for evidence-based and community informed policies on nutrition, food safety and health. And we're well known for holding government agencies and corporations to account and empowering consumers with independent, unbiased information to live healthier lives. And our core strategies to achieve this mission include, of course, advocacy where we do things like legislative and regulatory lobbying, litigation and corporate accountability initiatives. We also do policy and research analysis. We have strategic communications such as engagement with the public and news media, and we publish a magazine called Nutrition Action. And we also work in deep partnership with other organizations and in coalitions with other national organizations as well as smaller grassroots organizations across the country. Across all of this, we have a deep commitment to health equity and environmental sustainability that informs all we do. And our ultimate goal is improved health and wellbeing for people in all communities regardless of race, income, education, or social factors. Thanks Eva. I have great admiration for CSPI too. Its work goes back many decades. It's the leading organization advocating on behalf of consumers for a better nutrition system and better health overall. And I greatly admire its work. So, it's really a pleasure to have you here. Kat, let's talk about the US retail assessment. What is it and how did you select Walmart, Kroger, and Ahold Dehaize for the evaluation, and why are retailers so important? Kat - Great, thanks. We have, like I said before, been evaluating the largest food and beverage manufacturers for many years. So, for 13 years we have our global index, that's our bread and butter. And about two years ago we started thinking actually retailers also play a critical role. And that's where everyone interfaces with the food environment. As a consumer, when you go out to actually purchase your food, you end up most of the time in a supermarket, also online presence, et cetera. In the US 70% or more of people buy their food through some type of formal food retail environment. So, we thought we need to look at the retailers. And in this assessment we look at the owned label products, so the store brand, so anything that's branded from the store as its own. We think that's also becoming a much more important role in people's diets. In Europe it's a really critical role. A huge majority of products are owned brand and I think in the US that's increasing. Obviously, they tend to be more affordable, so people are drawn to them. So, we were interested how healthy are these products? And the US retail assessment is part of a larger retail assessment where we look at six different countries trying to look across different income levels. In high income countries, we looked at the US and France, then we looked at South Africa and Indonesia for higher middle income. And then finally we looked at Kenya and the Philippines. So, we tried to get a perspective across the world. And in the US, we picked the three companies aiming to get the largest market share. Walmart itself is 25 to 27% of the market share. I've read an amazing statistic that something like 90% of the US population lives within 25 kilometers of a Walmart. Really, I did not realize it was that large. I grew up in the US but never shopped at Walmart. So, it really does influence the diet of a huge number of Americans. And I think with the Ahold Delhaize, that's also a global conglomerate. They have a lot of supermarkets in the Netherlands where we're based, I think also in Belgium and across many countries. Although one interesting thing we did find with this retail assessment is that a big international chain, they have very different operations and basically are different companies. Because we had thought let's start with the Carrefours like those huge international companies that you find everywhere. But Carrefour France and Carrefour Kenya are basically very different. It was very hard to look at it at that level. And so that's sort of what brought us to retailers. And we're hoping through this assessment that we can reach a very large number of consumers. We estimate between 340 to 370 million consumers who shop at these different modern retail outlets. It's so ambitious what you've accomplished here. What questions did you try to answer and what were the key findings? Kat - We were interested to know how healthy are the products that are being sold at these different retailers. That was one of our critical questions. We look at the number of different products, so the owned brand products, and looked at the healthiness. And actually, this is one of the challenges we faced in the US. One is that there isn't one unified use of one type of nutrient profile model. In other countries in the Netherlands, although it's not mandatory, we have the Nutri Score and most retailers use Nutri Score. And then at least there's one thing that we can use. The US does not have one unified agreement on what type of nutrient profile model to use. So, then we're looking at different ones. Each company has their own proprietary model. That was one challenge we faced. And the other one is that in other countries you have the mandatory that you report everything per hundred grams. So, product X, Y, and Z can all be compared by some comparable thing. Okay? A hundred grams of product X and a hundred grams of product Y. In the US you have serving s

In this episode of the Leading Voices in Food podcast, Norbert Wilson of Duke University's Sanford School of Public Policy speaks with researchers Jean Adams from the University of Cambridge and Mike Essman from Duke's World Food Policy Center. They discuss the mandatory calorie labeling policy introduced in England in April 2022 for large food-away-from-home outlets. The conversation covers the study recently published in the British Medical Journal, exploring its results, strengths, limitations, and implications within the broader context of food labeling and public health policies. Key findings include a slight overall reduction in calorie content offered by food outlets, driven by the removal of higher-calorie items rather than reformulation. The discussion also touches on the potential impacts on different consumer groups, the challenges of policy enforcement, and how such policies could be improved to more effectively support public health goals. Interview Summary Now everyone knows eating out is just part of life. For many, it's a place to make connections, can be a guilty pleasure, and sometimes it's just an outright necessity for busy folks. But it is also linked to poor dietary quality, weight gain, and even obesity. For policymakers, the challenge is identifying what policy changes can help improve population health. Jean, let's begin with you. Can you tell our listeners about the UK's menu labeling intervention and what change did you hope to see? Jean - Yes, so this was a policy that was actually a really long time in coming and came in and out of favor with a number of different governments. So maybe over the last 10 years we've had various different suggestions to have voluntary and/or mandatory calorie labeling in the out-of-home sector. Eventually in April, 2022, we did have new mandatory regulations that came into a force that required large businesses just in England - so not across the whole of the UK, just in England - if they sold food and non-alcoholic drinks and they had to display the calories per portion of every item that they were selling. And then have alongside that somewhere on their menu, a statement that said that adults need around 2000 calories per day. The policy applied just to large businesses, and the definition of that was that those businesses have 250 or more employees, but the employees didn't all have to be involved in serving food and drinks. This might apply also to a large hotel chain who just have some bars or something in their hotels. And the food and drinks covered were things that were available for immediate consumption. Not prepackaged. And then there was also this proviso to allow high-end restaurants to be changing their menus regularly. So, it was only for things that were on the menu for at least 30 days. You mentioned that this policy or a menu labeling might have at least two potential modes of impacts. There's first this idea that providing calories or any sort of labeling on food can somehow provide information for consumers to make what we might hope would be better choices. Might help them choose lower calorie options or healthier options. And then the second potential impact is that businesses might also use the information to change what sort of foods they're serving. It might be that they didn't realize how many calories were in the foods and they're suddenly embarrassed about it. Or as soon as their customers realize, they start to put a little bit of pressure on, you know, we want something a little bit lower calorie. So, there's this potential mechanism that operates at the demand side of how consumers might make choices. And another one at the supply side of what might be available to consumers. And we knew from previous evaluations of these sorts of interventions that there was some evidence that both could occur. Generally, it seems to be that findings from other places and countries are maybe null to small. So, we were thinking that maybe we might see something similar in England. Thank you for sharing that background. I do have a question about the length of time it took to get this menu labeling law in place. Before we get into the results, do you have a sense of why did it take so long? Was it industry pushback? Was it just change of governments? Do you have a sense of that? Jean - Yes, so I think it's probably a bit of both. To begin with, it was first proposed as a voluntary measure actually by industry. So, we had this kind of big public-private partnership. What can industry do to support health? And that was one of the things they proposed. And then they didn't really do it very well. So, there was this idea that everybody would do it. And in fact, we found maybe only about 20% of outlets did it. And then definitely we have had government churn in the UK over the last five years or so. So, every new prime minister really came in and wanted to have their own obesity policy threw out the last one started over. And every policy needs consulted on with the public and then with industry. And that whole process just kind of got derailed over and over again. Thank you. That is really helpful to understand that development of the policy and why it took time. Industry regulated policy can be a tricky one to actually see the results that we would hope. You've already given us a sort of insight into what you thought the results may be from previous studies - null to relatively small. So, Mike, I want to turn to you. Can you tell us what came out of the data? Mike - Thank you, yes. So, we found a small overall drop in average calories offered per item. That amounts to a total of nine calories per item reduction in our post policy period relative to pre policy. And this is about a 2% reduction. It was statistically significant and we do in public health talk about how small effects can still have big impacts. So, I do want to sort of put that out there, but also recognize that it was a small overall drop in calories. And then what we did is we looked at how different food groups changed, and also how calories changed at different types of restaurants, whether it was fast food, restaurants, sit downs that we call pubs, bars, and inns. And then also other different types of takeaways like cafes and things like that where you might get a coffee or a cappuccino or something like that. What we found was driving the overall reduction in calories was a reduction in higher calorie items. So, as Jean mentioned at the outset, one of the things we were trying to identify in this analysis was whether we saw any evidence of reformulation. And we defined reformulation as whether specific products were reduced in their calories so that the same products were lower calories in the post period. We define that as reformulation. And that would be different from, say, a change in menu offering where you might identify a high calorie item and take it off the menu so that then the overall calories offered goes down on average. We found more evidence for the latter. Higher calorie items were removed. We separated into categories of removed items, items that were present in both periods, and new items added in the post period. There were higher calorie items in the removed group. The items that were present in both periods did not change. The new items were lower calorie items. What this says overall is this average reduction is driven by taking off high calorie items, adding some slightly lower calorie items. But we did not find evidence for reformulation, which is a crucial finding as well. We saw that the largest reductions occurred in burgers, beverages and a rather large mixed group called Mains. So, burgers reduced by 103 calories per item. That's pretty substantial. One of the reasons that's so large is that burgers, particularly if they're offered at a pub and might even come with fries or chips, as they say in the UK. And because they have such a high baseline calorie level, there's more opportunity to reduce. So, whether it's making it slightly smaller patty or reducing the cheese or something like that, that's where we saw larger reductions among the burgers. With beverages, typically, this involved the addition of lower calorie options, which is important if it gives an opportunity for lower calorie selections. And that was the main driver of reduction there. And then also we saw in Mains a reduction of 30 calories per item. A couple of the other things we wanted to identify is whether there was a change in the number of items that were considered over England's recommended calories per meal. The recommended calories per meal is 600 calories or less for lunch and dinner. And we saw no statistical change in that group. So overall, we do see a slight reduction in average calories. But this study did not examine changes in consumer behavior. I do want to just briefly touch on that because this was part of a larger evaluation. Another study that was published using customer surveys that was published in Nature Human Behavior found no change in the average calories purchased or consumed after the policy. This evaluation was looking at both the supply and the demand side changes as a result of this policy. Thanks, Mike and I've got lots of questions to follow up, but I'll try to control myself. The first one I'm interested to understand is you talk about the importance of the really calorie-heavy items being removed and the introduction of newer, lower calorie items. And you said that this is not a study of the demand, but I'm interested to know, do you have a sense that the higher calorie items may not have been high or top sellers. It could be easy for a restaurant to get rid of those. Do you have any sense of, you know, the types of items that were removed and of the consumer demand for those items? Mike - Yes. So, as I mentioned, given that the largest changes were occurring among burgers, we're sort of doing this triangulation attempt to examine all of

In this episode, Kelly Brownell speaks with Jerold Mande, CEO of Nourish Science, adjunct professor at the Harvard School of Public Health, and former Deputy Undersecretary for Food Safety at the USDA. They discuss the alarming state of children's health in America, the challenges of combating poor nutrition, and the influence of the food industry on public policy. The conversation explores the parallels between the tobacco and food industries and proposes new strategies for ensuring children reach adulthood in good health. Mande emphasizes the need for radical changes in food policy and the role of public health in making these changes. Transcript So, you co-founded this organization along with Jerome Adams, Bill Frist and Thomas Grumbly, as we said, to ensure every child breaches age 18 at a healthy weight and in good metabolic health. That's a pretty tall order given the state of the health of youth today in America. But let's start by you telling us what inspired this mission and what does it look like to achieve this in today's food environment? I was trained in public health and also in nutrition and in my career, which has been largely in service of the public and government, I've been trying to advance those issues. And unfortunately over the arc of my career from when I started to now, particularly in nutrition and public health, it's just gotten so much worse. Indeed today Americans have the shortest lifespans by far. We're not just last among the wealthy countries, but we're a standard deviation last. But probably most alarming of all is how sick our children are. Children should not have a chronic disease. Yet in America maybe a third do. I did some work on tobacco at one point, at FDA. That was an enormous success. It was the leading cause of death. Children smoked at a higher rate, much like child chronic disease today. About a third of kids smoked. And we took that issue on, and today it's less than 2%. And so that shows that government can solve these problems. And since we did our tobacco work in the early '90s, I've changed my focus to nutrition and public health and trying to fix that. But we've still made so little progress. Give us a sense of how far from that goal we are. So, if the goal is to make every child reaching 18 at a healthy weight and in good metabolic health, what percentage of children reaching age 18 today might look like that? It's probably around a half or more, but we're not quite sure. We don't have good statistics. One of the challenges we face in nutrition is, unfortunately, the food industry or other industries lobby against funding research and data collection. And so, we're handicapped in that way. But we do know from the studies that CDC and others have done that about 20% of our children have obesity about a similar number have Type 2 diabetes or the precursors, pre-diabetes. You and I started off calling it adult-onset diabetes and they had to change that name to a Type 2 because it's becoming so common in kids. And then another disease, fatty liver disease, really unthinkable in kids. Something that the typical pediatrician would just never see. And yet in the last decade, children are the fastest growing group. I think we don't know an exact number, but today, at least a third, maybe as many as half of our children have a chronic disease. Particularly a food cause chronic disease, or the precursors that show they're on the way. I remember probably going back about 20 years, people started saying that we were seeing the first generation of American children that would lead shorter lives than our parents did. And what a terrible legacy to leave our children. Absolutely. And that's why we set that overarching goal of ensuring every child reaches age 18 in good metabolic health. And the reason we set that is in my experience in government, there's a phrase we all use - what gets measured gets done. And when I worked at FDA, when I worked at USDA, what caught my attention is that there is a mission statement. There's a goal of what we're trying to achieve. And it's ensuring access to healthy options and information, like a food label. Now the problem with that, first of all, it's failed. But the problem with that is the bureaucrats that I oversaw would go into a supermarket, see a produce section, a protein section, the food labels, which I worked on, and say we've done our job. They would check those boxes and say, we've done it. And yet we haven't. And if we ensured that every child reaches age 18 at a healthy weight and good metabolic health, if the bureaucrats say how are we doing on that? They would have to conclude we're failing, and they'd have to try something else. And that's what we need to do. We need to try radically different, new strategies because what we've been doing for decades has failed. You mentioned the food industry a moment ago. Let's talk about that in a little more detail. You made the argument that food companies have substituted profits for health in how they design their products. Explain that a little bit more, if you will. And tell us how the shift has occurred and what do you think the public health cost has been? Yes, so the way I like to think of it, and your listeners should think of it, is there's a North star for food design. And from a consumer standpoint, I think there are four points on the star: taste, cost, convenience, and health. That's what they expect and want from their food. Now the challenge is the marketplace. Because that consumer, you and I, when we go to the grocery store and get home on taste, cost, and convenience, if we want within an hour, we can know whether the food we purchased met our standard there. Or what our expectations were. Not always for health. There's just no way to know in a day, a week, a month, even in a year or more. We don't know if the food we're eating is improving and maintaining our health, right? There should be a definition of food. Food should be what we eat to thrive. That really should be the goal. I borrowed that from NASA, the space agency. When I would meet with them, they said, ' Jerry, it's important. Right? It's not enough that people just survive on the food they eat in space. They really need to thrive.' And that's what WE need to do. And that's really what food does, right? And yet we have food, not only don't we thrive, but we get sick. And the reason for that is, as I was saying, the marketplace works on taste, cost and convenience. So, companies make sure their products meet consumer expectation for those three. But the problem is on the fourth point on the star: on health. Because we can't tell in even years whether it's meeting our expectation. That sort of cries out. You're at a policy school. Those are the places where government needs to step in and act and make sure that the marketplace is providing. That feedback through government. But the industry is politically strong and has prevented that. And so that has left the fourth point of the star open for their interpretation. And my belief is that they've put in place a prop. So, they're making decisions in the design of the product. They're taste, they gotta get taste right. They gotta get cost and convenience right. But rather than worrying what does it do to your health? They just, say let's do a profit. And that's resulted in this whole category of food called ultra-processed food (UPF). I actually believe in the future, whether it's a hundred years or a thousand years. If humanity's gonna thrive we need manmade food we can thrive on. But we don't have that. And we don't invest in the science. We need to. But today, ultra-processed food is manmade food designed on taste, cost, convenience, and then how do we make the most money possible. Now, let me give you one other analogy, if I could. If we were CEOs of an automobile company, the mission is to provide vehicles where people can get safely from A to point B. It's the same as food we can thrive on. That is the mission. The problem is that when the food companies design food today, they've presented to the CEO, and everyone gets excited. They're seeing the numbers, the charts, the data that shows that this food is going to meet, taste, cost, convenience. It's going to make us all this money. But the CEO should be asking this following question: if people eat this as we intend, will they thrive? At the very least they won't get sick, right? Because the law requires they can't get sick. And if the Midmanagers were honest, they'd say here's the good news boss. We have such political power we've been able to influence the Congress and the regulatory agencies. That they're not going to do anything about it. Taste, cost, convenience, and profits will work just fine. Couldn't you make the argument that for a CEO to embrace that kind of attitude you talked about would be corporate malpractice almost? That, if they want to maximize profits then they want people to like the food as much as possible. That means engineering it in ways that make people overeat it, hijacking the reward pathways in the brain, and all that kind of thing. Why in the world would a CEO care about whether people thrive? Because it's the law. The law requires we have these safety features in cars and the companies have to design it that way. And there's more immediate feedback with the car too, in terms of if you crashed right away. Because it didn't work, you'd see that. But here's the thing. Harvey Wiley.He's the founder of the food safety programs that I led at FDA and USDA. He was a chemist from academia. Came to USDA in the late 1800s. It was a time of great change in food in America. At that point, almost all of families grew their own food on a farm. And someone had to decide who's going to grow our food. It's a family conversation that needed to take place. Increasingly, Americans were moving into the cities at that time, and a brand-new industry had sprung up to feed people in cities. It

In this episode of the Leading Voices in Food podcast, host Norbert Wilson is joined by food and nutrition policy economists Will Masters and Parke Wilde from Tufts University's Friedman School of Nutrition, Science and Policy. The discussion centers around the concept of the least cost diet, a tool used to determine the minimum cost required to maintain a nutritionally adequate diet. The conversation delves into the global computational methods and policies related to least cost diets, the challenges of making these diets culturally relevant, and the implications for food policy in both the US and internationally. You will also hear about the lived experiences of people affected by these diets and the need for more comprehensive research to better reflect reality. Interview Summary I know you both have been working in this space around least cost diets for a while. So, let's really start off by just asking a question about what brought you into this work as researchers. Why study least cost diets? Will, let's start with you. I'm a very curious person and this was a puzzle. So, you know, people want health. They want healthy food. Of course, we spend a lot on healthcare and health services, but do seek health in our food. As a child growing up, you know, companies were marketing food as a source of health. And people who had more money would spend more for premium items that were seen as healthy. And in the 2010s for the first time, we had these quantified definitions of what a healthy diet was as we went from 'nutrients' to 'food groups,' from the original dietary guidelines pyramid to the MyPlate. And then internationally, the very first quantified definitions of healthful diets that would work anywhere in the world. And I was like, oh, wow. Is it actually expensive to eat a healthy diet? And how much does it cost? How does it differ by place location? How does it differ over time, seasons, and years? And I just thought it was a fascinating question. Great, thank you for that. Parke? There's a lot of policy importance on this, but part of the fun also of this particular topic is more than almost any that we work on, it's connected to things that we have to think about in our daily lives. So, as you're preparing and purchasing food for your family and you want it to be a healthy. And you want it to still be, you know, tasty enough to satisfy the kids. And it can't take too long because it has to fit into a busy life. So, this one does feel like it's got a personal connection. Thank you both for that. One of the things I heard is there was an availability of data. There was an opportunity that seems like it didn't exist before. Can you speak a little bit about that? Especially Will because you mentioned that point. Will: Yes. So, we have had food composition data identifying for typical items. A can of beans, or even a pizza. You know, what is the expected, on average quantity of each nutrient. But only recently have we had those on a very large scale for global items. Hundreds and hundreds of thousands of distinct items. And we had nutrient requirements, but only nutrient by nutrient, and the definition of a food group where you would want not only the nutrients, but also the phytochemicals, the attributes of food from its food matrix that make a vegetable different from just in a vitamin pill. And those came about in, as I mentioned, in the 2010s. And then there's the computational tools and the price observations that get captured. They've been written down on pads of paper, literally, and brought to a headquarters to compute inflation since the 1930s. But access to those in digitized form, only really in the 2000s and only really in the 2010s were we able to have program routines that would download millions and millions of price observations, match them to food composition data, match that food composition information to a healthy diet criterion, and then compute these least cost diets. Now we've computed millions and millions of these thanks to modern computing and all of that data. Great, Will. And you've already started on this, so let's continue on this point. You were talking about some of the computational methods and data that were available globally. Can you give us a good sense of what does a lease cost diet look like from this global perspective because we're going to talk to Parke about whether it is in the US. But let's talk about it in the broad sense globally. In my case the funding opportunity to pay for the graduate students and collaborators internationally came from the Gates Foundation and the UK International Development Agency, initially for a pilot study in Ghana and Tanzania. And then we were able to get more money to scale that up to Africa and South Asia, and then globally through a project called Food Prices for Nutrition. And what we found, first of all, is that to get agreement on what a healthy diet means, we needed to go to something like the least common denominator. The most basic, basic definition from the commonalities among national governments' dietary guidelines. So, in the US, that's MyPlate, or in the UK it's the Eat Well Guide. And each country's dietary guidelines look a little different, but they have these commonalities. So, we distilled that down to six food groups. There's fruits and vegetables, separately. And then there's animal source foods altogether. And in some countries they would separate out milk, like the United States does. And then all starchy staples together. And in some countries, you would separate out whole grains like the US does. And then all edible oils. And those six food groups, in the quantities needed to provide all the nutrients you would need, plus these attributes of food groups beyond just what's in a vitamin pill, turns out to cost about $4 a day. And if you adjust for inflation and differences in the cost of living, the price of housing and so forth around the world, it's very similar. And if you think about seasonal variation in a very remote area, it might rise by 50% in a really bad situation. And if you think about a very remote location where it's difficult to get food to, it might go up to $5.50, but it stays in that range between roughly speaking $2.50 and $5.00. Meanwhile, incomes are varying from around $1.00 a day, and people who cannot possibly afford those more expensive food groups, to $200 a day in which these least expensive items are trivially small in cost compared to the issues that Parke mentioned. We can also talk about what we actually find as the items, and those vary a lot from place to place for some food groups and are very similar to each other in other food groups. So, for example, the least expensive item in an animal source food category is very often dairy in a rich country. But in a really dry, poor country it's dried fish because refrigeration and transport are very expensive. And then to see where there's commonalities in the vegetable category, boy. Onions, tomatoes, carrots are so inexpensive around the world. We've just gotten those supply chains to make the basic ingredients for a vegetable stew really low cost. But then there's all these other different vegetables that are usually more expensive. So, it's very interesting to look at which are the items that would deliver the healthfulness you need and how much they cost. It's surprisingly little from a rich country perspective, and yet still out of reach for so many in low-income countries. Will, thank you for that. And I want to turn now to looking in the US case because I think there's some important commonalities. Parke, can you describe the least cost diet, how it's used here in the US, and its implications for policy? Absolutely. And full disclosure to your audience, this is work on which we've benefited from Norbert's input and wisdom in a way that's been very valuable as a co-author and as an advisor for the quantitative part of what we were doing. For an article in the journal Food Policy, we use the same type of mathematical model that USDA uses when it sets the Thrifty Food Plan, the TFP. A hypothetical diet that's used as the benchmark for the maximum benefit in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which is the nation's most important anti-hunger program. And what USDA does with this model diet is it tries to find a hypothetical bundle of foods and beverages that's not too different from what people ordinarily consume. The idea is it should be a familiar diet, it should be one that's reasonably tasty, that people clearly already accept enough. But it can't be exactly that diet. It has to be different enough at least to meet a cost target and to meet a whole long list of nutrition criteria. Including getting enough of the particular nutrients, things like enough calcium or enough protein, and also, matching food group goals reasonably well. Things like having enough fruits, enough vegetables, enough dairy. When, USDA does that, it finds that it's fairly difficult. It's fairly difficult to meet all those goals at once, at a cost and a cost goal all at the same time. And so, it ends up choosing this hypothetical diet that's almost maybe more different than would feel most comfortable from people's typical average consumption. Thank you, Parke. I'm interested to understand the policy implications of this least cost diet. You suggested something about the Thrifty Food Plan and the maximum benefit levels. Can you tell us a little bit more about the policies that are relevant? Yes, so the Thrifty Food Plan update that USDA does every five years has a much bigger policy importance now than it did a few years ago. I used to tell my students that you shouldn't overstate how much policy importance this update has. It might matter a little bit less than you would think. And the reason was because every time they update the Thrifty Food Plan, they use the cost target that is the inflation adjusted or the real cost of the previous edit

The gut is in the news. It's really in the news. Catapulted there from exciting developments coming from laboratories all around the world. Links of gut health with overall health are now quite clear and surprising connections are being discovered between gut health and things like dementia and Alzheimer's. But how does the gut communicate with other parts of the body in ways that make it this important, and where does the brain figure into all this? Well, there's some interesting science going on in this topic, and a leading person in this area is Dr. Diego Bohorquez. Dr. Bohorquez is the associate professor of medicine, of molecular genetics and microbiology and of cell biology at the Duke University School of Medicine. Interview Transcript Diego, your bio shows that you blend work in nutritional biochemistry, gastrointestinal physiology, and sensory neurobiology. It took me a little time to figure out just what these things are, but what this represents, to be a little more serious, is a unique ability to understand that the different parts of the body, the gut and the brain in particular, interact a lot. And you're in a very good position to understand how that happens. Let's dive in with the kind of a basic question. What got you interested in this interaction of the gut with the brain and why care about it? Yes. Kelly, I think that that's all technicalese for saying that we are at the interface of food, the gut, and the brain. Apart from the fact that we are what we eat and if we truly believe that then food will be shaping us. Not only our body, but also like our belief systems, our societal systems, and so on and so forth. I don't think that that is anything new. However, what is new is the ability of the gut to guide our decision making. And it was interesting to hear in your introduction that now the gut is all in the news. In 2005 when I came to the United States, and I was at North Carolina State University, and I joined a graduate school. I remember taking a graduate course in physiology in 2007. And when the professor opened the session on gastrointestinal physiology, he said the gut is one of the most misunderstood and mysterious organs. It has almost as many neurons as the spinal cord, or more. But honestly, we don't give a lot of respect to the gut. We only think that it does some digestion and absorption, and we judge it more for the value of its products of digestion than what it does for the entire body. And fast forward almost 20 years later now, partly my laboratory and other laboratories that have entered this field since some of our discoveries started to emerge, it's very clearly showing that the gut not only has its own sensory system that is behind what we call gut feelings. The gut feelings are actually real. But it actually can influence our decision making. Like specifically, we have shown that our ability to choose sugars and consume sugars and feel sugars and choose them over sweeteners, it can be pinpointed to a specific set of cells in the intestine called neuropod cells and specific receptors in those cells. And the intestine is right after the stomach. And this is where these cells are exposed to the surface of the gut and detect the chemical composition of food to guide our decision making. Let's talk about that a little bit more. So, you've got this axis, or this means of communication between the gut and the brain going on. And let's talk about how it affects what we eat. You just alluded to the fact that it's pretty important. What does it tell us? What to eat, how much to eat? What we like to eat? When we're hungry, when we've had enough? How does this affect our eating? We are beginning to understand how much it affects this eating. And obviously we are departing from understanding, right? And an understanding is cognitive. In the 1500s is when the idea of 'we think therefore we are,' came online. And we needed to think things before we actually will understand them. But well before thinking them, we actually feel them. And you probably have noticed that. If anybody offers you maybe a cup of water at 5:00 AM, 6:00 AM, it will be very welcome. Especially with it's a little bit warm. If they offer you a steak at 5:00 AM you will run away from that. But in fact, you'll create distress I think unless you are like severely jet lagged. And a lot of those feelings not only come from the experience, but even if you blind are blindfolded, your gut will be able to evaluate what you just ingested. And it is because the intestine, it is the point where those molecules in the meal or in the drink, will be either absorbed to become part of who we are, or will be excreting and expelled. And that absorption of who we are is dependent on the context. Like for instance, the part of the month, morning versus afternoon, health status, age, will influence specifically like at the molecular level, what it is that we need to continue to thrive. It sounds like there's lots of potential for the gut and its interaction with the brain working in concert with the rest of the body. Things are in balance and working like they should be. But there are lots of things going on out there that disrupt that. Tell us more about that and how it affects eating. For example, the levels of obesity have risen so much in the past decades. How does the gut figure into that, for example. Could there be environmental things like the microplastics or exposure to toxins like pesticides and things that might be affecting the gut that throws the system off? I think that that is a very timely question for the days. Over the last 10 years, we have documented that the gut has its own sensory system. And in fact, it's one of the most ancient sensory systems. At the very beginning, 600 million years ago, when cells started to coalesce into animals, multicellular organisms, they needed to eat. And they needed to not only find the food but create a sensory representation of the food. What do I mean by that? Eating algae is very different than eating bacteria, for instance. And the gut needed to have these sensors to be able to rapidly create first a representation, this is bacteria. And then put out the molecules to digest that bacterium or those bacteria. And then ultimately absorb them, turn them into metabolites and continue to thrive, right? Perhaps reproduce, coalesce and so on and so forth. This is a very important concept because our reality, the reality that you and I are having right now, it is guided by our senses. And we have multiple senses. Like for instance, we are able to communicate partly because of the sound that is going through our ears. And then there are inner hair cells that are picking up those waves. Passing that information to the brain, decoding it, and then the brain coalesces with everything else and saying like, 'okay, Diego, you're in a podcast. Make sure that you say something hopefully reasonable, right?' What the gut is doing, as a true sensory system, is also detecting the food that we have ingested, creating a rapid representation. It's not the reality itself. It is a representation of the reality. Because when we eat an apple, ultimately the gut, what it's doing is creating a representation that was an apple and not an orange. And then telling the brain, look, you're going to get some glucose, some fiber, a little bit of a skin. And you may need to adjust it with water, right? And then that will trigger the desire to, 'oh, maybe I should have also a cup of water.' Why does that have to do with, the societal issues that we are facing? Since the 1970s, we learned to disentangle the sensory experience of food, not only as humans or scientists, but also that was extrapolated to the society. So, if you go and look, and it is not a secret, it has been very well documented. For instance, the ability to put artificial sweeteners out there. It has really changed the health landscape. And it was just a normal progression of how it is that we humans think. We thought well, people consume sugars because they're sweet. If we take out the calorie and we just leave the sweetness, it will be totally fine because it's benign. You're not consuming anything else. However, the gut, you have promised the gut something sweet. That it has always, or almost always, invariably, been associated with a nutritional value. Then the gut is fed this information that is skewed. Then it has to go and adjust. And we actually have demonstrated that in the laboratory that when the neuro pods detect a non-caloric sweetener, they actually release a different neurotransmitter that communicates to the brain that artificial sweeteners have arrived at the gut, as opposed to glucose, which triggers the release of glutamate. And that glutamate is essential for the organism to know that we have consumed sugar. Is it safe to say then that the body has evolved to be able to have effective signaling and feedback systems with things that are found out there in nature, like sugar or an apple or an orange. But when you start introducing things that don't exist in nature, like the artificial sweeteners, then bad things can happen. Yes. Because imagine right now your brain will swap the reality and you will transport yourself or the beach. You may not even have the clothing ready to confront the breeze of the beach, right? Or the salt. You would have not been prepared, right? We evolved around nature because nature was there before us. Therefore, we had gradually adjusted to what nature had to offer. Eventually we introduced fire, and we were able to transform simple or complex carbohydrates into something digestible. And then the body had the ability to adjust to it. And not only the body, but also the microbiota in the gut. Now we are talking about like the transformation of foods. And especially I think in the last 30 years we have been able to transform those foods. Beverages have sweeteners now. We have energy drinks that have a compo

An avalanche of information besets us on what to eat. It comes from the news, from influencers of every ilk, from scientists, from government, and of course from the food companies. Super foods? Ultra-processed foods? How does one find a source of trust and make intelligent choices for both us as individuals and for the society as a whole. A new book helps in this quest, a book entitled Food Intelligence: the Science of How Food Both Nourishes and Harms Us. It is written by two highly credible and thoughtful people who join us today.Julia Belluz is a journalist and a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times. She reports on medicine, nutrition, and public health. She's been a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT and holds a master's in science degree from the London School of Economics and Political Science. Dr. Kevin Hall trained as a physicist as best known for pioneering work on nutrition, including research he did as senior investigator and section chief at the National Institutes of Health. His work is highly regarded. He's won awards from the NIH, from the American Society of Nutrition, the Obesity Society and the American Physiological Society. Interview Transcript Thank you both very much for being with us. And not only for being with us, but writing such an interesting book. I was really eager to read it and there's a lot in there that people don't usually come across in their normal journeys through the nutrition world. So, Julia, start off if you wouldn't mind telling us what the impetus was for you and Kevin to do this book with everything else that's out there. Yes, so there's just, I think, an absolute avalanche of information as you say about nutrition and people making claims about how to optimize diet and how best to lose or manage weight. And I think what we both felt was missing from that conversation was a real examination of how do we know what we know and kind of foundational ideas in this space. You hear a lot about how to boost or speed up your metabolism, but people don't know what metabolism is anyway. You hear a lot about how you need to maximize your protein, but what is protein doing in the body and where did that idea come from? And so, we were trying to really pair back. And I think this is where Kevin's physics training was so wonderful. We were trying to look at like what are these fundamental laws and truths. Things that we know about food and nutrition and how it works in us, and what can we tell people about them. And as we kind of went through that journey it very quickly ended up in an argument about the food environment, which I know we're going to get to. We will. It's really interesting. This idea of how do we know what we know is really fascinating because when you go out there, people kind of tell us what we know. Or at least what they think what we know. But very few people go through that journey of how did we get there. And so people can decide on their own is this a credible form of knowledge that I'm being told to pursue. So Kevin, what do you mean by food intelligence? Coming from a completely different background in physics where even as we learn about the fundamental laws of physics, it's always in this historical context about how we know what we know and what were the kind of key experiments along the way. And even with that sort of background, I had almost no idea about what happened to food once we ate it inside our bodies. I only got into this field by a happenstance series of events, which is probably too long to talk about this podcast. But to get people to have an appreciation from the basic science about what is going on inside our bodies when we eat. What is food made out of? As best as we can understand at this current time, how does our body deal with. Our food and with that sort of basic knowledge about how we know what we know. How to not be fooled by these various sound bites that we'll hear from social media influencers telling you that everything that you knew about nutrition is wrong. And they've been hiding this one secret from you that's been keeping you sick for so long to basically be able to see through those kinds of claims and have a bedrock of knowledge upon which to kind of evaluate those things. That's what we mean by food intelligence. It makes sense. Now, I'm assuming that food intelligence is sort of psychological and biological at the same time, isn't it? Because that there's what you're being told and how do you process that information and make wise choices. But there's also an intelligence the body has and how to deal with the food that it's receiving. And that can get fooled too by different things that are coming at it from different types of foods and stuff. We'll get to that in a minute, but it's a very interesting concept you have, and wouldn't it be great if we could all make intelligent choices? Julia, you mentioned the food environment. How would you describe the modern food environment and how does it shape the choices we make? It's almost embarrassing to have this question coming from you because so much of our understanding and thinking about this idea came from you. So, thank you for your work. I feel like you should be answering this question. But I think one of the big aha moments I had in the book research was talking to a neuroscientist, who said the problem in and of itself isn't like the brownies and the pizza and the chips. It's the ubiquity of them. It's that they're most of what's available, along with other less nutritious ultra-processed foods. They're the most accessible. They're the cheapest. They're kind of heavily marketed. They're in our face and the stuff that we really ought to be eating more of, we all know we ought to be eating more of, the fruits and vegetables, fresh or frozen. The legumes, whole grains. They're the least available. They're the hardest to come by. They're the least accessible. They're the most expensive. And so that I think kind of sums up what it means to live in the modern food environment. The deck is stacked against most of us. The least healthy options are the ones that we're inundated by. And to kind of navigate that, you need a lot of resources, wherewithal, a lot of thought, a lot of time. And I think that's kind of where we came out thinking about it. But if anyone is interested in knowing more, they need to read your book Food Fight, because I think that's a great encapsulation of where we still are basically. Well, Julie, it's nice of you to say that. You know what you reminded me one time I was on a panel and a speaker asks the audience, how many minutes do you live from a Dunkin Donuts? And people sort of thought about it and nobody was more than about five minutes from a Dunkin Donuts. And if I think about where I live in North Carolina, a typical place to live, I'm assuming in America. And boy, within about five minutes, 10 minutes from my house, there's so many fast-food places. And then if you add to that the gas stations that have foods and the drug store that has foods. Not to mention the supermarkets. It's just a remarkable environment out there. And boy, you have to have kind of iron willpower to not stop and want that food. And then once it hits your body, then all heck breaks loose. It's a crazy, crazy environment, isn't it? Kevin, talk to us, if you will, about when this food environment collides with human biology. And what happens to normal biological processes that tell us how much we should eat, when we should stop, what we should eat, and things like that. I think that that is one of the newer pieces that we're really just getting a handle on some of the science. It's been observed for long periods of time that if you change a rat's food environment like Tony Sclafani did many, many years ago. That rats aren't trying to maintain their weight. They're not trying to do anything other than eat whatever they feel like. And, he was having a hard time getting rats to fatten up on a high fat diet. And he gave them this so-called supermarket diet or cafeteria diet composed of mainly human foods. And they gained a ton of weight. And I think that pointed to the fact that it's not that these rats lacked willpower or something like that. That they weren't making these conscious choices in the same way that we often think humans are entirely under their conscious control about what we're doing when we make our food choices. And therefore, we criticize people as having weak willpower when they're not able to choose a healthier diet in the face of the food environment. I think the newer piece that we're sort of only beginning to understand is how is it that that food environment and the foods that we eat might be changing this internal symphony of signals that's coming from our guts, from the hormones in our blood, to our brains and the understanding that of food intake. While you might have control over an individual meal and how much you eat in that individual meal is under biological control. And what are the neural systems and how do they work inside our brains in communicating with our bodies and our environment as a whole to shift the sort of balance point where body weight is being regulated. To try to better understand this really intricate interconnection or interaction between our genes, which are very different between people. And thousands of different genes contributing to determining heritability of body size in a given environment and how those genes are making us more or less susceptible to these differences in the food environment. And what's the underlying biology? I'd be lying to say if that we have that worked out. I think we're really beginning to understand that, but I hope what the book can give people is an appreciation for the complexity of those internal signals and that they exist. And that food intake isn't entirely under our control. And that we're beginning to unpack the science of how those interactions work. It's incr

In today's episode, we're discussing the complex and urgent topic of global food demand. The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, or SDGs, ask countries to make measurable progress in reducing poverty, achieving zero hunger, and supporting every individual in realizing good health. While also mitigating climate change, sustaining the environment and responsible consumption and production habits. Researchers have recommended sustainable diets - planetary health diets. For example, the Eat Lancet Planetary Health Diet. However, others have criticized some of these diets for not addressing the economic and social impacts of transitioning to such diets. Is it possible to balance changing diets, rising incomes, and economic growth with economic feasibility, environmental impact, and long-term sustainability? Well, that's what our goals are today. Our guests today are Andrew Muhammad of the University of Tennessee Institute of Agriculture, and Emiliano Lopez Barrera from Texas A&M. They are my co-authors on a new paper in the Annual Review of Resource Economics entitled Global Food Demand: overcoming Challenges to Healthy and Sustainable Diets. Interview Summary Andrew let's begin with you. Why is it important to study the economics of dietary habits and food choices in a global context? Well, it's important for several reasons, right? When we think both about food security as well as environmental outcomes and maintaining biodiversity, in keeping both human beings and the planet healthy, we really do need to think about this in a global context. One could see agriculture as a global ecosystem where decisions in one country clearly have impacts on outcomes in others. While at the same time, we need to see food as a means by which we satisfy the demands of a global community. Whether it be through our own domestic production or international trade. And then the last thing I'll say, which is really most important are all the actual things we want to tackle and mitigate and correct, fix or improve. Whether it be the environmental issues, global food security outcomes, individual diets, mitigating obesity issues globally, right? It's pretty clear that most of the things affecting human beings in the environment as it relates to agriculture are global in nature, and there's an economic component that we need to consider when addressing these issues in a global context. Thank you for sharing that. And I am interested to understand what the role of economics in dietary habits is as we explored it in this review paper. In economics, this is a pretty long history, one could say going back centuries, right? This idea of how income growth impacts food spending on a household or individuals, as well as what economic affluence in development does to sort of how diets transition. And so, for example, it's been long established, right, as individuals get richer, a smaller and smaller share of their income is spent on food. So therefore, food dynamics become less important in [a developed, rich country versus a developing country where a large percentage of income is still spent on food. And what does that mean? That means that while I may find price shocks annoying, and while I may find higher grocery prices annoying, in a developing world that clearly has some implications on the nutritional needs and food decisions far more than it would have on me, for example. But the other thing which is something that has been highlighted for quite some time, and that is this transition from basic staples - from rice, grain, corn, cassava, potatoes, etc. - to more complex food products like high protein dense meat products, fish, milk, dairy, and even highly processed products that are deemed unhealthy. But the point is, as we look at the full spectrum of countries from least developed to most developed, you see this transition from basic staples to these protein dense products as well as complex processed products. This is a really important point about what are the trends across countries and over time as incomes change and as global prices affect choices. And I do appreciate what you're saying about those of us in, say a country like the United States, where we may be able to absorb some of the shocks that may happen with food prices, we also recognize that there are folks from lower income households where those kinds of price shocks can be really challenging. That's true. But this is a different story when we're then talking about developing countries and some of the challenges that they face. Thank you for sharing that. I'm also interested in understanding what do economists mean by a nutritious and sustainable food demand, especially in the context of global or cross-country comparisons. What are some of the things that you uncovered in this review? Yes, and I think the main thing, which is particularly interesting, is how early diets transition. How quick countries go from being staple dependent to sort of relying more on protein in consumption and demand. And that happens pretty early and so long before you get to say, countries like the United States with a per capita income of around $50,000 per person, you start seeing transitions quite early, right? Whereas income goes from say less than a $1,000 per person to maybe $5,000 and $10,000, you see these transitions right away. And in fact, you begin to see things level off. And what that means is when we think about, for example, animal protein production, which is in the context of dairy and beef, which is considered relatively more harmful to the environment than say poultry production. What you do find is that in these developing countries, they really do transition right away to meat with just minimal income growth. Whereas at the same time, when you start seeing income growth at the higher end of the spectrum, you don't see that much of a change. Now, something that's also unfortunate, what you find is that with income growth, you do see decrease in consumption of vegetables. A part of that is that some staples are counted as vegetables, but another part of that is that wealth and influence doesn't necessarily lead to improved diets. And that's something that's unfortunate. And what it says is that interventions are possibly needed for these improved diets. But to really get back to your question, this idea when we say sort of a nutritious diet, obviously we're thinking about diets that satisfy the nutritional needs of individuals. While at the same time mitigating unhealthy outcomes. Mitigating obesity, cardiovascular disease, etc. But then coupled with that is this whole notion of sustainable agricultural production. And I think one of the difficult things about both nutritious and abundant food as well as environmental outcomes, is we really are thinking about sort of trade-offs and complementarities. Then I think economics gives us a real keen insight into how these things play out. Andrew, you make me worry that we're locked in. That is as soon as income start to rise, people move to more animal protein-based products. They move away from some fruits and vegetables. And knowing that the environmental consequences of those choices and even the health consequences, my question to you is what kinds of interventions or how do you think about interventions as a way to shape that demand? Is that an appropriate way to think about this? Alright, so there's a few things. One is just sort of provide nutrition education globally. Having countries and their governments sort of understand these outcomes and then making a concerted effort to educate the public. The other thing is what you often do see is incentivized, for example, fish consumption. Incentivizing poultry production. And you do actually see a lot of incentives for poultry and egg consumption. And I think of like the Gates Foundation in that One Egg a Day initiative to help with child stunting and child growth in the developing world. And so, they're clearly protein alternatives to bovine type products. And I have to be clear here. Like I'm only speaking about this in the context of what's being said, in terms of the environment and animal production. But the other thing I think, it's probably even more important, right? Is this idea that we really do need to rethink how we, both in the developing world as well as in the developed world, rethink how we think about nutrition and eating. And that's just not for developing countries. That's for all countries. And obviously there's one last thing I'll highlight. You do have to be sort of concerned about, say something like taxes. Which would be clearly regressive in the developing world, and probably much more harmful to overall consumer welfare. The point is that taxes and subsidies seem to be the policy instruments of choice. Great. Thank you for that. Andrew has just shared with us some of the issues of what happens as incomes rise and the changing patterns of behavior. And that there are some implications for sustainable diets. Emiliano, how can we use the type of data that, Andrew talked about to model food systems in terms of health and nutrition. What can we learn from these models and, what should we do with them? Emiliano – Yes, thank you. Andrew really pointed to like many very important issues, aspects. We see some worrisome trends in the sense that current diets are going in the direction of showing less nutritious. Also, we are looking at a lot of issues in the environmental externalities, embedded resources. A lot of that within the current diet trajectory. Economic models, they have this advantage that they can connect these things together, right? Each time that we decide what we are purchasing for eating each day we are deciding in a combination of these resources embedded in the food that also some potential nutritional outcomes or health outcomes related to that diet. And the models help to connect these things very well. We can trace this back fro

Lots of talk these days about ultra-processed foods (UPFs). Along with confusion about what in the heck they are or what they're not, how bad they are for us, and what ought to be done about them. A landmark in the discussion of ultra-processed foods has been the publication of a book entitled Ultra-processed People, Why We Can't Stop Eating Food That Isn't Food. The author of that book, Dr. Chris van Tulleken, joins us today. Dr. van Tulleken is a physician and is professor of Infection and Global Health at University College London. He also has a PhD in molecular virology and is an award-winning broadcaster on the BBC. His book on Ultra-processed People is a bestseller. Interview Summary Chris, sometimes somebody comes along that takes a complicated topic and makes it accessible and understandable and brings it to lots of people. You're a very fine scientist and scholar and academic, but you also have that ability to communicate effectively with lots of people, which I very much admire. So, thanks for doing that, and thank you for joining us. Oh, Kelly, it's such a pleasure. You know, I begin some of my talks now with a clipping from the New York Times. And it's a picture of you and an interview you gave in 1995. So exactly three decades ago. And in this article, you just beautifully communicate everything that 30 years later I'm still saying. So, yeah. I wonder if communication, it's necessary, but insufficient. I think we are needing to think of other means to bring about change. I totally agree. Well, thank you by the way. And I hope I've learned something over those 30 years. Tell us, please, what are ultra-processed foods? People hear the term a lot, but I don't think a lot of people know exactly what it means. The most important thing to know, I think, is that it's not a casual term. It's not like 'junk food' or 'fast food.' It is a formal scientific definition. It's been used in hundreds of research studies. The definition is very long. It's 11 paragraphs long. And I would urge anyone who's really interested in this topic, go to the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization website. You can type in NFAO Ultra and you'll get the full 11 paragraph definition. It's an incredibly sophisticated piece of science. But it boils down to if you as a consumer, someone listening to this podcast, want to know if the thing you are eating right now is ultra-processed, look at the ingredients list. If there are ingredients on that list that you do not normally find in a domestic kitchen like an emulsifier, a coloring, a flavoring, a non-nutritive sweetener, then that product will be ultra-processed. And it's a way of describing this huge range of foods that kind of has taken over the American and the British and in fact diets all over the world. How come the food companies put this stuff in the foods? And the reason I ask is in talks I give I'll show an ingredient list from a food that most people would recognize. And ask people if they can guess what the food is from the ingredient list. And almost nobody can. There are 35 things on the ingredient list. Sugar is in there, four different forms. And then there are all kinds of things that are hard to pronounce. There are lots of strange things in there. They get in there through loopholes and government regulation. Why are they there in the first place? So, when I started looking at this I also noticed this long list of fancy sounding ingredients. And even things like peanut butter will have palm oil and emulsifiers. Cream cheese will have xanthum gum and emulsifiers. And you think, well, wouldn't it just be cheaper to make your peanut butter out of peanuts. In fact, every ingredient is in there to make money in one of two ways. Either it drives down the cost of production or storage. If you imagine using a real strawberry in your strawberry ice cream. Strawberries are expensive. They're not always in season. They rot. You've got to have a whole supply chain. Why would you use a strawberry if you could use ethyl methylphenylglycidate and pink dye and it'll taste the same. It'll look great. You could then put in a little chunky bit of modified corn starch that'll be chewy if you get it in the right gel mix. And there you go. You've got strawberries and you haven't had to deal with strawberry farmers or any supply chain. It's just you just buy bags and bottles of white powder and liquids. The other way is to extend the shelf life. Strawberries as I say, or fresh food, real food - food we might call it rots on shelves. It decays very quickly. If you can store something at room temperature in a warehouse for months and months, that saves enormous amounts of money. So, one thing is production, but the other thing is the additives allow us to consume to excess or encourage us to consume ultra-processed food to excess. So, I interviewed a scientist who was a food industry development scientist. And they said, you know, most ultra-processed food would be gray if it wasn't dyed, for example. So, if you want to make cheap food using these pastes and powders, unless you dye it and you flavor it, it will be inedible. But if you dye it and flavor it and add just the right amount of salt, sugar, flavor enhancers, then you can make these very addictive products. So that's the logic of UPF. Its purpose is to make money. And that's part of the definition. Right. So, a consumer might decide that there's, you know, beneficial trade-off for them at the end of the day. That they get things that have long shelf life. The price goes down because of the companies don't have to deal with the strawberry farmers and things like that. But if there's harm coming in waves from these things, then it changes the equation. And you found out some of that on your own. So as an experiment you did with a single person - you, you ate ultra-processed foods for a month. What did you eat and how did it affect your body, your mood, your sleep? What happened when you did this? So, what's really exciting, actually Kelly, is while it was an n=1, you know, one participant experiment, I was actually the pilot participant in a much larger study that we have published in Nature Medicine. One of the most reputable and high impact scientific journals there is. So, I was the first participant in a randomized control trial. I allowed us to gather the data about what we would then measure in a much larger number. Now we'll come back and talk about that study, which I think was really important. It was great to see it published. So, I was a bit skeptical. Partly it was with my research team at UCL, but we were also filming it for a BBC documentary. And I went into this going I'm going to eat a diet of 80% of my calories will come from ultra-processed food for four weeks. And this is a normal diet. A lifelong diet for a British teenager. We know around 20% of people in the UK and the US eat this as their normal food. They get 80% of their calories from ultra-processed products. I thought, well, nothing is going to happen to me, a middle-aged man, doing this for four weeks. But anyway, we did it kind of as a bit of fun. And we thought, well, if nothing happens, we don't have to do a bigger study. We can just publish this as a case report, and we'll leave it out of the documentary. Three big things happened. I gained a massive amount of weight, so six kilos. And I wasn't force feeding myself. I was just eating when I wanted. In American terms, that's about 15 pounds in four weeks. And that's very consistent with the other published trials that have been done on ultra-processed food. There have been two other RCTs (randomized control trials); ours is the third. There is one in Japan, one done at the NIH. So, people gain a lot of weight. I ate massively more calories. So much so that if I'd continued on the diet, I would've almost doubled my body weight in a year. And that may sound absurd, but I have an identical twin brother who did this natural experiment. He went to Harvard for a year. He did his masters there. During his year at Harvard he gained, let's see, 26 kilos, so almost 60 pounds just living in Cambridge, Massachusetts. But how did you decide how much of it to eat? Did you eat until you just kind of felt naturally full? I did what most people do most of the time, which is I just ate what I wanted when I felt like it. Which actually for me as a physician, I probably took the breaks off a bit because I don't normally have cocoa pops for breakfast. But I ate cocoa pops and if I felt like two bowls, I'd have two bowls. It turned out what I felt like a lot of mornings was four bowls and that was fine. I was barely full. So, I wasn't force feeding myself. It wasn't 'supersize' me. I was eating to appetite, which is how these experiments run. And then what we've done in the trials. So, I gained weight, then we measured my hormone response to a meal. When you eat, I mean, it's absurd to explain this to YOU. But when you eat, you have fullness hormones that go up and hunger hormones that go down, so you feel full and less hungry. And we measured my response to a standard meal at the beginning and at the end of this four-week diet. What we found is that I had a normal response to eating a big meal at the beginning of the diet. At the end of eating ultra-processed foods, the same meal caused a very blunted rise in the satiety hormones. In the 'fullness' hormones. So, I didn't feel as full. And my hunger hormones remained high. And so, the food is altering our response to all meals, not merely within the meal that we're eating. Then we did some MRI scans and again, I thought this would be a huge waste of time. But we saw at four weeks, and then again eight weeks later, very robust changes in the communication between the habit-forming bits at the back of the brain. So, the automatic behavior bits, the cerebellum. Very conscious I'm talking to YOU about this, Kelly. And the kind of addiction reward bits in the middle.

The Food and Drug Administration or FDA regulates roughly 78% of the US food supply. This includes packaged products, food additives, infant formula, ultra-processed foods, and lots more. However, an analysis by the Environmental Working Group found that 99% of new food ingredients enter our food supply through a legal loophole that skirts FDA oversight and seems, to me at least, to be incredibly risky. Today we're speaking with two authors of a recent legal and policy analysis published in the Journal Health Affairs. They explain what this loophole is and its risks and suggest a new user fee program to both strengthen the FDA's ability to regulate food ingredients and address growing concerns about food safety. Our guests are Jennifer Pomeranz Associate Professor of Public Health Policy and Management at New York University School of Global Public Health and Emily Broad, director of Harvard Law School Center for Health Law and Policy Innovation. Interview Summary So Jennifer, let's start with you, help our listeners understand the current situation with food ingredient oversight. And what is this legal loophole that allows food companies to add new ingredients without safety reviews. Sure. So, Congress passed the Food Additives Amendment in 1958, and the idea was to divide food additives and generally recognized as safe ingredients into two different categories. That's where the GRAS term comes from generally recognized as safe? 'Generally Recognized As Safe' is GRAS. But it circularly defines food additives as something that's not GRAS. So, there's not actually a definition of these two different types of substances. But the idea was that the food industry would be required to submit a pre-market, that means before it puts the ingredient into the marketplace, a pre-market petition to the FDA to review the safety. And then the FDA promulgates a regulation for safe use of a food additive. GRAS ingredients on the other hand, initially thought of as salt, pepper, vinegar, are things like that would just be allowed to enter the food supply without that pre-market petition. The problem is the food industry is the entity that decides which category to place each ingredient. There's no FDA guidance on which category they're supposed to ascribe to these ingredients. What has happened is that the food industry has now entered into the food supply an enormous amount of ingredients under what we call the GRAS loophole, which is allowing it to just bring it to the market without any FDA oversight or even knowledge of the ingredient. So, in essence, what we're having now is that the food industry polices itself on whether to submit this pre-market petition for a food additive or just include it in its products without any FDA knowledge. When you said 'enormous number of such things,' are we talking dozens, hundreds, thousands? Nobody knows, but the environmental working group did find that 99% of new ingredients are added through this loophole. And that's the concerning part. Well, you can look at some ultra-processed foods and they can have 30 or 40 ingredients on them. That's just one food. You can imagine that at across the food supply, how many things there are. And there are these chemicals that nobody can pronounce. You don't know what's going on, what they are, what they're all about. So, what you're saying is that the food industry decides to put these things in foods. There's some processing reason for putting them in. It's important that the public be protected against harmful ingredients. But the food industry decides what's okay to put in and what's not. Are they required to do any testing? Are there criteria for that kind of testing? Is there any sense that letting the industry police itself amounts to anything that protects the public good? Well, the criteria are supposed to be the same for GRAS or food additives. They're supposed to be meeting certain scientific criteria. But the problem with this is that for GRAS ingredients, they don't have to use published data and they can hold that scientific data to themselves. And you mentioned food labels, the ingredient list, right? That doesn't necessarily capture these ingredients. They use generic terms, corn oil, color additive, food additive whatever. And so, the actual ingredient itself is not necessarily listed on the ingredient list. There is no way to identify them and it's unknown whether they're actually doing the studies. They can engage in these, what are called GRAS panels, which are supposed to be experts that evaluate the science. But the problem is other studies have found that 100% of the people on these GRAS panels have financial conflicts of interest. Okay, so let me see if I have this right. I'm a food company. I develop a new additive to provide color or flavor or fragrance, or it's an emulsifier or something like that. I develop a chemical concoction that hasn't really been tested for human safety. I declare it safe. And the criteria I use for declaring it set safe is putting together a panel of people that I pay, who then in a hundred percent of cases say things are. That's how it works? I can't say that in a hundred percent of cases they say it's safe, but a hundred percent of the people have financial conflicts of interest. That's one of the major concerns there. Well, one can't imagine they would continue to be paid... Exactly. This sounds like a pretty shaky system to be sure. Emily: I wanted to add a couple other really quick things on the last discussion. You were saying, Kelly, like they're using a panel of experts, which indeed are paid by them. That would be best case in some cases. They're just having their own staff say, we think this is generally recognized as safe. And I think there's some examples we can give where there isn't even evidence that they went to even any outside people, even within industry. I think that the takeaway from all of that is that there's really the ability for companies to call all the shots. Make all the rules. Not tell FDA what they're doing. And then as we talked about, not even have anything on the label because it's not a required ingredient if it's, used as part of a processing agent that's not a substance on there. So I was feeling pretty bad when Jennifer is talking about these panels and the heavy conflict... Even worse. Of interest, now I feel worse because that's the best case. Totally. And one other thing too is just you kind of warmed this up by talking about this loophole. When we put an earlier article out that we wrote that was about just this generally recognized as safe, the feedback we got from FDA was this isn't a loophole. Why are you calling this a loophole? And it's pretty clear that it's a loophole, you know? It's big enough to drive thousands of ingredients through. Yes, totally. Emily, you've written about things like partially hydrogenated vegetable oils, trans fats, and red dye number three in particular. Both of which FDA has now prohibited in food. Can you walk us through those cases? You asked about partially hydrogenated oils or trans-fat, and then red dye three, which are two examples that we talk about a little bit in our piece. Actually, one of those, the partially hydrogenated oils was allowed in food through the generally recognized as safe definition. And the other was not. But they are both really good examples of another real issue that FDA has, which is that not only are they not doing a good job of policing substances going into food on the front end, but they do an even worse job of getting things out of food on the backend, post-market once they know that those substances are really raising red flags. And you raised two of the prime examples we've been talking about. With partially hydrogenated oils these are now banned in foods, but it took an extremely long time. Like the first evidence of harm was in the mid-nineties. By 2005, the Institute of Medicine, which is now the National Academies, said that intake of trans fat, of partially hydrogenated oils, should be as low as possible. And there was data from right around that time that found that 72,000 to 228,000 heart attacks in the US each year were caused by these partially hydrogenated oils. And on FDA's end, they started in early 2000s to require labeling. But it wasn't until 2015 that they passed a final rule saying that these substances were not generally recognized as safe. And then they kept delaying implementation until 2023. It was basically more than 20 years from when there was really clear evidence of harm including from respected national agencies to when FDA actually fully removed them from food. And red dye number three is another good example where there were studies from the 1980s that raised concerns about this red dye. And it was banned from cosmetics in 1990. But they still allowed it to be added to food. And didn't ban it from food until early this year. So early 2025. In large part because one of the other things happening is states are now taking action on some of these substances where they feel like we really need to protect consumers in our states. And FDA has been doing a really poor job. California banned red dye about 18 months before that and really spurred FDA to action. So that 20-year delay with between 72,000 and 228,000 heart attack deaths attributable to the trans fats is the cost of delay and inaction and I don't know, conflicts of interest, and all kinds of other stuff that happened in FDA. So we're not talking about something trivial by any means. These are life and death things are occurring. Yes. Give us another example, if you would, about something that entered the food supply and caused harm but made it through that GRAS loophole. The example that I've talked about both in some of the work we've done together and also in a perspective piece in the New England Journal of Medicine that really focused on why this is an issue. There was this substance added to food ca

Interview Summary You know I really like the innovative nature of Food On The Move, and I'm eager for you to tell us more about what it involves. But before we do that, how does a young, highly successful musician turn to battling food insecurity? What led you to create Food On The Move? It took me years to say I even created it. I didn't even use the term founder because I really had this sense of partnership that was a part of how it came to be. But I did found or 'start' Food On The Move because I have just a deep sense of gratitude in my life experience and also maybe a calling? I call it the tap on the shoulder that said there's more for you to do. There's more for me to do. And I didn't really know what that meant. I wanted to invest in Oklahoma and where we're from because as a musician, first you travel, you leave, you go out, you connect with people all over the world. But there's something about building and doing well for your community from the town you're from. And I was inspired by a former US ambassador. A man named Edward Perkins, who was an incredible representative of our country. He worked in some of the most difficult parts of the world representing the US and working with other nations. And his story struck me so deeply because he found ways to partner and transform communities as an ambassador. And I got to know him after his time as an ambassador because he was teaching as a professor at OU (Oklahoma University), in Oklahoma. And I asked him, I said - I want to honor your life. I want to learn from you. If I was to begin to really impact my community, Oklahoma where I'm from and maybe beyond, where would you begin? And he said, I would start with food. That's so interesting. You know, your concept of partnership is so interesting. I'd like to dive into that a little bit deeper in a little bit. But first, tell us about your organization and what it does, how it works, what it tries to accomplish. Yes. So, inspired by Ambassador Perkins' example, we set out to ask the right questions more than have the answers. And in 2014, I just basically cold called everyone in the community that worked in food - from the food bank to the food pantries and said 'help me understand the gaps.' Help me understand where it's hard to accomplish change. And the term food desert began coming up more and more. And food deserts are communities without grocery stores. So, think of it as the canary in the mine. Sort of when a grocery store goes, the neighborhood is declining. Because they're small margin organizations they have a hard time staying afloat and when they go it's hard to bring them back because you need either a company like a big chain or a small business that doesn't have a lot of resources. And oftentimes that decline continues, and it impacts the community. So, with Food On The Move I basically brought together partners to create an access point in food deserts where it's was all in kind. From food trucks that could bring great, tasty food and give people dignity and excitement and energy, to partners that are doing food safety training and teaching people to cook. And places like Oklahoma State University extension where they train people about how to prepare food because they may not know. And so, all these partners came together, and we basically spent five years just learning and serving people in those communities. And focusing on an environment that was not about raising a bunch of money; it was really about who is already in this space that we can garner relationships with and get to know the communities. And now those events continue to be flagships. We call them food and resource festivals. They are a pay-as-you-can. You show up, you get access to fresh produce, you have food trucks, you have wraparound services. You have people that are in the community, in different nonprofits, for-profits, and government organizations that we all collaborate with. And we reach people where they are while serving and getting to know them and learning from them. And through those relationships, through those events - which we still do - what it's brought us to is the innovation and education side, and ultimately transformation. We realized in order to change food deserts, end food deserts, bring grocery stores back, that we had to get to the heart of the food system. Which is we had to be teaching people to grow things again, rebuild the local foundation of farmers being trained, use new, innovative systems like indoor growing and aquaponics, hydroponics. And basically, we had to kind of build the foundation back that's been lost since post World War II in our community, like many places. And that means a food hub to bridge farmers to distributors. That means training those farmers for the future. And it ultimately means building a new model for a grocery store. So, we are at the heart of that now with a project we call Food Home, where we are building a campus that is like a microcosm of the food system. Hopefully could be the end of this year, we'll see. Construction is always tricky. But, for sure by the start of first quarter next year, we'll be opening a 10,000 square foot urban farm, which is a training facility, and producing hundreds of thousands of pounds of food every year, and this is really the launchpad for future farmers. My God, I mean, and one of those things you mentioned would be wonderful to dive into and talk about a lot. Because I mean, each is impressive in its own right. But you bring them together, you're probably doing some of the most extensive, impressive things I know of around the country. Let me ask how you address the fundamental issue that we've actually faced ourselves. So communities often feel set upon by outsiders coming in to help. You know, it could be a philanthropy, it could be universities, it could be somebody, you know, who's just coming in well-meaning, wanting to help. But nonetheless may not know the communities or understand the realities of day-to-day life and things like that. And people from communities have often told us that 'we're in the best position to come up with solutions that will work for the members of our own community.' How did you work through those things? Well, this is always why my story elevator pitch tends to be too long. Because I want to actually talk about that element. It's not super elevator pitchy because what it involves is building relationships and trust and what I first learned from Ambassador Perkins. I'll tell you a small story of his example and it really rocked me. I asked him where would you start if you wanted to change community? Because I'd learned from his story that he had actually done it. He was sent to South Africa at the heart of the Apartheid Movement to with a mission from at the time President Ronald Reagan, to free Nelson Mandela from prison and help dismantle the Apartheid system. This is about as high a mark as anybody could have. And he had no policy. They said you're going to make policy. And what he did was so extraordinary, and I think is the mark of his success. And that's, to answer your question, he said, I recognized that every ambassador had held court. You are one step away from the president of the United States, which means you're always the most powerful person in the room. And other ambassadors, he'd ask them to come to him. But you had this deep divide between Black and white, deep divide between economics. And so, what he did was he told his team when he went to South Africa, he said, put the American flags on the front of the car, roll the windows down and take me to the townships. Take me to the neighborhoods. They need to know I'm here. And he took the time to build real relationships and build trust with communities. Black, white, rich, and poor, you know, old and young. He really did the time. And so that model, though obviously South Africa is a deeply entrenched community that, you know, especially that time. And this is kind of world politics, but I listened to that. And I thought, wow, we have a divide in our own community. And it's true of so many American cities. And where people, they see an area and they say that's not my community. They're going to come to me. And so, Food On The Move is built on we will build a partnership-based foundation which is like a block party where you walk up, and I'm a musician, I'm a DJ. So, we have a DJ playing music, we have food trucks. It smells great. You have smiling faces. You have a feeling that when you go there, you're not there, like, I need help and I'm in a soup kitchen. It's like there's a community party and you get invited and everyone's available to go there because if you want to give, you can go. If you don't have a dollar in your pocket, you go. And everybody leaves with the same treatment. And that foundation, the way we go about building those relationships, that is the heart and soul of how we are getting to the question and then trying to answer: we need more grocery stores, and we need more farmers. Because we heard it from the neighborhood. And I'll wrap up the answer a little bit which is to say we have multiple community farms as well as our own training farms. And we've worked in middle schools to teach young people to grow things with high-end aquaponics. You know, statistically the worse school in the city. But we've seen it just rocket people to engagement and better education and being fired up to come to school. But the community grow beds are the real test because you can't just drop a community grow bed and say, 'Hey, isn't this awesome? Here's your grow bed.' You have to stay engaged with community, but you also have to invite them to be participants. And so, we work with our neighbors. We treat one another as neighbors, and you are right, it is wrought with pick your cliche. You know, the complex of the outsider coming in with money. The contrast between racial issues and economic issues. It's so wrought with p

Every day, with few exceptions, I eat a handful of nuts. Usually a combination of almonds, walnuts, pecans, cashews, and pistachios. And they taste good for sure. But I'm responding mainly to research showing that consumption of nuts is related to less chronic disease. In particular, eating nuts lowers levels of inflammation related to heart disease and diabetes, and may improve cholesterol levels among other benefits. So, I saw it as welcome news that someone has just published a book about nuts, all aspects of nuts, actually. Today we're joined by NPR, food Writer Elspeth Hay author of a new book called Feed Us with Trees- nuts, and The Future of Food. And I had no idea. Nuts were so interesting until I dove in a little bit. Elspeth has gathered stories from dozens of nut growers, scientists, indigenous knowledge keepers, researchers and food professionals. She writes that humans once grew their staple crops in forest gardens of perennial nuts, such as oaks, chestnuts, and hazelnuts in these species. Particularly important to the environment as well as to human wellbeing. Interview Summary Elspeth, thanks so much for joining us and for writing such an amazing book. Thank you so much for having me. And it sounds like you have the same habit as my dad. He makes sure to eat a little bit of mixed nuts every night, ever since I can remember for his health. Let's start by having you describe your book. Tell us about Feed us with Trees. Why did you write it and what's it about? I wrote it because I've been reporting on food in the environment for a long time, a little more than 15 years. And I had never heard anyone mention anything about eating acorns until a few years ago. And someone sent me a TEDx talk by a woman in Greece named Marcie Mayer, and she said, you can eat acorns. And not only that, but they're a super food nutritionally, and one of humanity's oldest foods. And I live in this giant oak forest that's protected on Cape Cod as part of the Cape Cod National Seashore. And I had always seen this forest as a sort of impediment to local food production, right? There's all this land that can't be farmed. And all that time, it turns out there was food literally raining down on my roof, underfoot in my driveway, and I just wasn't equipped to see it. The stories that I had grown up with hadn't mentioned that. And so that was a real eyeopener for me and I just couldn't stop thinking about it and I kept researching. So, have you started consuming acorns? I have, yes. I've collected them the past probably five falls and, you know, oaks do something called masting. Some years they have a really big production and some years smaller production. Some years I've gotten more than others. But I have started processing them at home and experimenting with different ways of using the flour. And I've also ordered online acorn oil. There are actually three food products that you can make from acorns. You can make starch, which works just like corn starch or potato starch. Thickens things. You can make flour and with some species you can make oil. It's actually a pretty diverse crop. That's so interesting. You know, I have a series of oak trees right outside my window and I never thought that they might be producing food I could consume. It's so interesting to hear your history with that. Yes, I mean I had no idea. And it turns out that actually acorns are very similar to olives in the way that they need to be processed. They're very high in these compounds that are very bitter, called tannins, just like an olive. I had the experience once of going to Italy with my husband, and we saw this olive grove and we thought, oh cool. Olives growing right here. And we picked one off the tree and he put his in his mouth and immediately spat it out and said, oh, that's awful. Tannins are not something that we want to eat. They don't taste good, but obviously they haven't hampered the olives rise to glory in terms of a human food source. And Acorns need the same kind of processing. So, tannins are water soluble. You pull them out with water. You know, you always get olives in brine, right? And so Yes, just started learning more about how to work with them and then also more about our relationship with oak trees. And I started seeing them differently in that light too. Going from sort of the species that I'd always seen as natural and wild and better off without humans, to actually understanding that we have a really long history with oak trees and in some places, they actually really depend on us. So that was total game changer for me. There's more to the story than oaks and acorns. Tell us what you learned about the history of humans eating nuts like acorns, but also things like chestnuts and hazelnut. Yes, I was really surprised. At first, I thought, okay, this is going to be an isolated thing where some people in really hilly areas or areas that aren't good for row crops are eating these nuts as staple foods. But when I looked back, actually all over the Northern Hemisphere in a huge variety of cultures, people have been in relationship with these nut trees as a staple food for a lot of the past 12,000 years. So, there's records in Japan of this ancient society that was sort of the first known chestnut cultivators in Japan. The burr size increased a lot. The nut size increased a lot during that early era of cultivation. There's a really interesting history of chestnut cultivation throughout Europe during what we call the quote unquote dark ages, although I'm starting to think maybe it was lighter than we thought during that time. There was a lot of cool stuff happening with Agroforestry. And in some areas of Europe, people ate an average of 330 pounds of chestnuts per person, per year. To put that in perspective, today, the average American eats about 150 pounds of grains per person per year. So that is a pretty serious level of chestnut consumption. You know, it's called in some places the bread tree. And I just started finding all these examples. There was a time in the British Isles known as the Nut Age, between about 7,000 and 5,000 years ago. There were just all these examples of different people at different times tending to these trees and harvesting a huge amount of food from them. You've written that trees like oaks and chestnut and hazels and also humans are what ecologists call keystone species. Yes. Tell us what you mean by that and how such species play an outsized role in local ecosystems. So, a keystone species, the first time I ever heard of them I think I was in Jamaica, and someone was talking about the sea urchins on the reef and the beach there. And it turned out that when they disappeared, for a variety of reasons, this whole ecosystem fell apart. And there's different types of keystone species, but a keystone species is as important to its ecosystem as the keystone in a Roman arch, right? So, if you pull that keystone out, you have this cascade of effects where everything kind of falls apart. And oaks are a huge life support tree. I don't know if listeners have heard of the work of entomologist, Doug Tallamy. He's done some really interesting studies on different families of plants and how much life they support by looking at insects. And in most counties where they occur, oaks are the top life support plant in North America. They're this incredibly important basis of the food chain. They provide food for a ton of insects. Those insects in turn feed birds and mammals and other creatures. And you know, at first as I am learning all this, I thought, okay, great oaks are important. Well, you know, I kind of already knew that, but that's exciting that we can eat from them. But then I started getting to know some fire practitioners. Especially an indigenous man in present day Northern California named Ron Reed. And he's a member of the Karuk Tribe there. And he started telling me about the relationship between cultural fire, prescribed fire, and oak trees. And what I learned is that oaks and human fire have actually been in relationship for millennia. And there's this whole, on the east coast, this hypothesis called the Oak Fire Hypothesis. And most ecologists that I've spoken with ascribe to it and believe that the reason that white oak and hickory have been this sort of dominant forest type through a lot of Eastern North America for the past 9,000 years, despite some really dramatic climate changes, is because humans have burned to keep them dominant on the landscape. And that in doing that we actually play a role as a keystone species too, right? So, if our fire is supporting this incredibly important keystone species, oaks, and other nut trees, we're in the category that they call ecosystem engineers. Mm-hmm. So, a beaver is an example of an ecosystem engineer, right? You take the beaver out of the wetland and the whole thing falls apart. And a lot of fire historians and ecologists see us as the fire animal. And historically, in a lot of different ecosystems, that has been our largest and most important role is creating ecosystems for other wildlife habitat, for other wildlife, with fire. So, it sounds like there was a time in human history when humans would selectively burn other things in order to protect these trees. Yes, and truly not just these trees. If you look at other places, other continents, there's human burning in Australia, there's human burning in the Amazon, there's tons of examples. But around here where I live, at least in New England and in the East, fire has been used intentionally to keep these nut trees dominant. Because what happens is. oaks are a mid-succession species. If folks don't know a lot about succession, early is like bare dirt, right? When we have an open field that's been plowed up, that's the beginning of succession. And then it proceeds all the way to an old growth forest. And oaks, if they get shaded out, they're not a particularly shade tolerant species. So, a lot of these n

Interview Summary So, you two, along with a number of other people in the field, wrote a chapter for a recently published book called The Handbook of Children and Screens. We discussed that book in an earlier podcast with its editors, Dmitri Christakis and Kris Perry, the executive director of the Children and Screens organization. And I'd like to emphasize to our listeners that the book can be downloaded at no cost. I'd like to read a quote if I may, from the chapter that the two of you wrote. 'Screen time continues to evolve with the advent of continuous and immersive video reels, voice activated assistance, social media influencers, augmented and virtual reality targeted advertising. Immersive worlds where children can virtually shop for food and beverages, cook or work in a fast-food outlet from a smartphone, a tablet, a computer, or an internet connected tv and more.' So as much as I follow the field, I still read that and I say, holy you know what. I mean that's just an absolutely alarming set of things that are coming at our children. And it really sounds like a tidal wave of digital sophistication that one could have never imagined even a short time ago. Amanda, let's start with you. Can you tell us a little bit more about these methods and how quickly they evolve and how much exposure children have? I think you're right, Kelly, that the world is changing fast. I've been looking at screen media for about 20 years now as a researcher. And in the earlier years, and Tom can attest to this as well, it was all about TV viewing. And you could ask parents how much time does your child spend watching TV? And they could say, well, they watch a couple shows every night and maybe a movie or two on the weekend, and they could come up with a pretty good estimate, 1, 2, 3 hours a day. Now, when we ask parents how much time their children spend with media, they have to stop and think, 'well, they're watching YouTube clips throughout the day. They're on their smartphone, their tablet, they're on social media, texting and playing all these different games.' It really becomes challenging to even get a grasp of the quantity of screen time let alone what kids are doing when they're using those screens. I will say for this book chapter, we found a really great review that summarized over 130 studies and found that kids are spending about three and a half or four hours a day using screens. Yet some of these studies are showing as high as seven or eight hours. I think it's probably under-reported because parents have a hard time really grasping how much time kids spend on screens. I've got a one-year-old and a five-year-old, and I've got some nieces and nephews and I'm constantly looking over their shoulder trying to figure out what games are they playing and where are they going online and what are they doing. Because this is changing really rapidly and we're trying to keep up with it and trying to make sure that screen time is a safe and perhaps healthy place to be. And that's really where a lot of our research is focused. I can only imagine how challenging it must be to work through that landscape. And because the technology advances way more quickly than the policies and legal landscape to control it, it really is pretty much whatever anybody wants to do, they do it and very little can be done about it. It's a really interesting picture, I know. We'll come back later and talk about what might be done about it. Tom, if you will help us understand the impact of all this. What are the effects on the diets of children and adolescents? I'm thinking particularly when Amanda was mentioning how many hours a day children are on it that three to four hours could be an underestimate of how much time they're spending. What did kids used to do with that time? I mean, if I think about when you and I were growing up, we did a lot of different things with that time. But what's it look like now? Well, that's one of the important questions that we don't really know a lot about because even experimental studies that I can talk about that look at reducing screen time have not been very good at being able to measure what else is going on or what substitutes for it. And so, a lot of the day we don't really know exactly what it's displacing and what happens when you reduce screen time. What replaces it? The assumption is that it's something that's more active than screen time. But, you know, it could be reading or homework or other sedentary behaviors that are more productive. But we really don't know. However, we do know that really the general consensus across all these studies that look at the relationship between screen time and nutrition is that the more time children spend using screens in general, the more calories they consume, the lower the nutritional quality of their diets and the greater their risk for obesity. A lot of these studies, as Amanda mentioned, were dominated by studies of television viewing, or looking at television viewing as a form of screen use. And there's much less and much more mixed results linking nutrition and obesity with other screens such as video games, computers, tablets, and smartphones. That doesn't mean those relationships don't exist. Only that the data are too limited at this point. And there's several reasons for that. One is that there just haven't been enough studies that single out one type of screen time versus another. Another is what Amanda brought up around the self-report issue, is that most of these studies depend on asking children or the parents how much time they spend using screens. And we know that children and adults have a very hard time accurately reporting how much time they're using screens. And, in fact when we measure this objectively, we find that they both underestimate and overestimate at times. It's not all in one direction, although our assumption is that they underestimate most of the time, we find it goes in both directions. That means that in addition to sort of not having that answer about exactly what the amount of screen time is, really makes it much tougher to be able to detect relationships because it adds a lot of error into our studies. Now there have been studies, as I mentioned, that have tried to avoid these limitations by doing randomized controlled trials. Including some that we conducted, in which we randomized children, families or schools in some cases to programs that help them reduce their screen time and then measure changes that occur in nutrition, physical activity, and measures of obesity compared to kids who are randomized to not receive those programs. And the randomized trials are really useful because they allow us to make a conclusion about cause-and-effect relationships. Some of these programs also targeted video games and computers as well as television. In fact, many of them do, although almost all of them were done before tablets and smartphones became very common in children. We still don't have a lot of information on those, although things are starting to come out. Most of these studies demonstrated that these interventions to reduce screen use can result in improved nutrition and less weight gain. And the differences seen between the treatment and control groups were sometimes even larger than those commonly observed from programs to improve nutrition and increased physical activity directly. Really, it's the strongest evidence we have of cause-and-effect relationships between screen use and poor nutrition and risk for obesity. Of course, we need a lot more of these studies, particularly more randomized controlled studies. And especially those including smartphones because that's where a lot of kids, especially starting in the preteen age and above, are starting to spend their time. But from what we know about the amount of apparent addictiveness that we see in the sophisticated marketing methods that are being used in today's media, I would predict that the relationships are even larger today than what we're seeing in all these other studies that we reviewed. It's really pretty stunning when one adds up all that science and it looks pretty conclusive that there's some bad things happening, and if you reduce screen time, some good things happen. So, Amanda, if you know the numbers off the top of your head, how many exposures are kids getting to advertisements for unhealthy foods? If I think about my own childhood, you know, we saw ads for sugar cereals during Saturday morning cartoon televisions. And there might have been a smattering if kids watch things that weren't necessarily just directed at kids like baseball games and stuff like that. But, and I'm just making this number up, my exposure to those ads for unhealthy foods might have been 20 a week, 30 a week, something like that. What does it look like now? That is a good question. Kelly. I'm not sure if anyone can give you a totally accurate answer, but I'll try. If you look at YouTube ads that are targeting children, a study found that over half of those ads were promoting foods and beverages, and the majority of those were considered unhealthy, low nutritional value, high calorie. It's hard to answer that question. What we used to do is we'd take, look at all the Saturday morning cartoons, and we'd actually record them and document them and count the number of food ads versus non-food ads. And it was just a much simpler time in a way, in terms of screen exposure. And we found in that case, throughout the '90s and early 2000s, a lot of food ads, a lot of instances of these food ads. And then you can look at food placement too, right? It's not an actual commercial, but these companies are paying to get their food products in the TV show or in the program. And it's just become much more complicated. I think it's hard to capture unless you have a study where you're putting a camera on a child, which some people are doing, to try to really capture everything they see throughout their d

Today we're talking with health and nutrition expert Dr. Stuart Gillespie, author of a new book entitled Food Fight: from Plunder and Profit to People and Planet. Using decades of research and insight gathered from around the world, Dr. Gillespie wants to reimagine our global food system and plot a way forward to a sustainable, equitable, and healthy food future - one where our food system isn't making us sick. Certainly not the case now. Over the course of his career, Dr. Gillespie has worked with the UN Standing Committee on Nutrition in Geneva with UNICEF in India and with the International Food Policy Research Institute, known as IFPRI, where he's led initiatives tackling the double burden of malnutrition and agriculture and health research. He holds a PhD in human nutrition from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Interview Summary So, you've really had a global view of the agriculture system, and this is captured in your book. And to give some context to our listeners, in your book, you describe the history of the global food system, how it's evolved into this system, sort of warped, if you will, into a mechanism that creates harm and it destroys more than it produces. That's a pretty bold statement. That it destroys more than it produces, given how much the agriculture around the world does produce. Tell us a bit more if you would. Yes, that statement actually emerged from recent work by the Food Systems Economic Commission. And they costed out the damage or the downstream harms generated by the global food system at around $15 trillion per year, which is 12% of GDP. And that manifests in various ways. Health harms or chronic disease. It also manifests in terms of climate crisis and risks and environmental harms, but also. Poverty of food system workers at the front line, if you like. And it's largely because we have a system that's anachronistic. It's a system that was built in a different time, in a different century for a different purpose. It was really started to come together after the second World War. To mass produce cheap calories to prevent famine, but also through the Green Revolution, as that was picking up with the overproduction of staples to use that strategically through food aid to buffer the West to certain extent from the spread of communism. And over time and over the last 50 years of neoliberal policies we've got a situation where food is less and less viewed as a human right, or a basic need. It's seen as a commodity and the system has become increasingly financialized. And there's a lot of evidence captured by a handful of transnationals, different ones at different points in the system from production to consumption. But in each case, they wield huge amounts of power. And that manifests in various ways. We have, I think a system that's anachronistic The point about it, and the problem we have, is that it's a system revolves around maximizing profit and the most profitable foods and products of those, which are actually the least healthy for us as individuals. And it's not a system that's designed to nourish us. It's a system designed to maximize profit. And we don't have a system that really aims to produce whole foods for people. We have a system that produces raw ingredients for industrial formulations to end up as ultra processed foods. We have a system that produces cattle feed and, and biofuels, and some whole foods. But it, you know, that it's so skewed now, and we see the evidence all around us that it manifests in all sorts of different ways. One in three people on the planet in some way malnourished. We have around 12 million adult deaths a year due to diet related chronic disease. And I followed that from colonial times that, that evolution and the way it operates and the way it moves across the world. And what is especially frightening, I think, is the speed at which this so-called nutrition transition or dietary transition is happening in lower income or middle income countries. We saw this happening over in the US and we saw it happening in the UK where I am. And then in Latin America, and then more Southeast Asia, then South Asia. Now, very much so in Sub-Saharan Africa where there is no regulation really, apart from perhaps South Africa. So that's long answer to your intro question. Let's dive into a couple of things that you brought up. First, the Green Revolution. So that's a term that many of our listeners will know and they'll understand what the Green Revolution is, but not everybody. Would you explain what that was and how it's had these effects throughout the food systems around the world? Yes, I mean around the, let's see, about 1950s, Norman Borlag, who was a crop breeder and his colleagues in Mexico discovered through crop breeding trials, a high yielding dwarf variety. But over time and working with different partners, including well in India as well, with the Swaminathan Foundation. And Swaminathan, for example, managed to perfect these new strains. High yielding varieties that doubled yields for a given acreage of land in terms of staples. And over time, this started to work with rice, with wheat, maize and corn. Very dependent on fertilizers, very dependent on pesticides, herbicides, which we now realize had significant downstream effects in terms of environmental harms. But also, diminishing returns in as much as, you know, that went through its trajectory in terms of maximizing productivity. So, all the Malthusian predictions of population growth out running our ability to feed the planet were shown to not to be true. But it also generated inequity that the richest farmers got very rich, very quickly, the poorer farmers got slightly richer, but that there was this large gap. So, inequity was never really properly dealt with through the Green Revolution in its early days. And that overproduction and the various institutions that were set in place, the manner in which governments backed off any form of regulation for overproduction. They continued to subsidize over production with these very large subsidies upstream, meant that we are in the situation we are now with regard to different products are being used to deal with that excess over production. So, that idea of using petroleum-based inputs to create the foods in the first place. And the large production of single crops has a lot to do with that Green Revolution that goes way back to the 1950s. It's interesting to see what it's become today. It's sort of that original vision multiplied by a billion. And boy, it really does continue to have impacts. You know, it probably was the forerunner to genetically modified foods as well, which I'd like to ask you about in a little bit. But before I do that, you said that much of the world's food supply is governed by a pretty small number of players. So who are these players? If you look at the downstream retail side, you have Nestle, PepsiCo, Coca-Cola, General Mills, Unilever. Collectively around 70% of retail is governed by those companies. If you look upstream in terms of agricultural and agribusiness, you have Cargill, ADM, Louis Dreyfus, and Bunge. These change to a certain extent. What doesn't change very much are the numbers involved that are very, very small and that the size of these corporations is so large that they have immense power. And, so those are the companies that we could talk about what that power looks like and why it's problematic. But the other side of it's here where I am in the UK, we have a similar thing playing out with regard to store bought. Food or products, supermarkets that control 80% as Tesco in the UK, Asta, Sainsbury's, and Morrisons just control. You have Walmart, you have others, and that gives them immense power to drive down the costs that they will pay to producers and also potentially increase the cost that they charge as prices of the products that are sold in these supermarkets. So that profit markup, profit margins are in increased in their favor. They can also move around their tax liabilities around the world because they're transnational. And that's just the economic market and financial side on top of that. And as you know, there's a whole raft of political ways in which they use this power to infiltrate policy, influence policy through what I've called in Chapter 13, the Dark Arts of Policy Interference. Your previous speaker, Murray Carpenter, talked about that with regard to Coca-Cola and that was a very, yeah, great example. But there are many others. In many ways these companies have been brilliant at adapting to the regulatory landscape, to the financial incentives, to the way the agriculture system has become warped. I mean, in some ways they've done the warping, but in a lot of ways, they're adapting to the conditions that allow warping to occur. And because they've invested so heavily, like in manufacturing plants to make high fructose corn syrup or to make biofuels or things like that. It'd be pretty hard for them to undo things, and that's why they lobby so strongly in favor of keeping the status quo. Let me ask you about the issue of power because you write about this in a very compelling way. And you talk about power imbalances in the food system. What does that look like in your mind, and why is it such a big part of the problem? Well, yes. And power manifests in different ways. It operates sometimes covertly, sometimes overtly. It manifests at different levels from, you know, grassroots level, right up to national and international in terms of international trade. But what I've described is the way markets are captured or hyper concentrated. That power that comes with these companies operating almost like a cartel, can be used to affect political or to dampen down, block governments from regulating them through what I call a five deadly Ds: dispute or dispute or doubt, distort, distract, disguise, and dodge. And you've written very well Kelly, with I think Kenneth Warner abo

Interest and grave concern have been mounting over the impact of agriculture and the food choices we all make on the environment, particularly on climate change. With natural weather disasters occurring much more frequently and serious threats from warming of the atmosphere in general, it's natural to look for places to make change. One person who has thought a lot about this is our guest today, Dr. William Dietz of George Washington University. He's been a prominent voice in this space. Bill, you're one of the people in the field I respect most because our relationship goes back many years. Bill is professor and director of research and policy at the Global Food Institute at George Washington University. But especially pertinent to our discussion today is that Dr. Dietz was co-chair of the Lancet Commission on the global syndemic of obesity, under nutrition and climate change. Today, we'll focus on part of that discussion on beef in particular. Interview Summary Bill, let's start out with a basic question. What in the heck is a syndemic? A syndemic is a word that reflects the interaction of these three pandemics that we're facing. And those are obesity, under nutrition, and we've also called climate change a syndemic insofar as it affects human health. These three pandemics interact at both the biologic and social levels and have a synergistic adverse impact on each other. And they're driven by large scale social forces, which foster clustering and have a disparate impact on marginalized populations. Both in the developed and equally important, in the developing world. Here are a couple of examples of syndemics. So, increased greenhouse gases from high income countries reduce crop yields in the micronutrient content of crops, which in turn contribute to food insecurity and undernutrition in low and middle income countries. And eventually the reduction in crop yields and the micronutrient content of crops is going to affect high income countries. Beef production is a really important driver of the climate change, and we're a major contributor in terms of the US' contribution. And beef production drives both methane and nitrous oxide emissions, and in turn, the consumption of red and processed meat causes obesity, diabetes, colon cancer, and cardiovascular disease. And finally, obesity, stunting and nutrition insecurity occur in the same children and in the same population in low- and middle-income countries. Okay, so we'll come back to beef in a moment, but first, help us understand the importance of agriculture overall and our food choices in changing climate. Well, so I think we have to go back to where this, the increase in mean global surface temperatures began, in about 1950. Those temperatures have climbed in a linear fashion since then. And we're now approaching a key level of increase of 1.5 degrees centigrade. The increase in mean surface temperature is driven by increased greenhouse gases, and the US is particularly culpable in this respect. We're it's second only to China in terms of our greenhouse gas emissions. And on a per capita basis, we're in the top four with China, India, and Brazil and now the US. And in the US, agriculture contributes about 10% of greenhouse gas emissions, and about 30% of fossil fuels are responsible for greenhouse gas emissions. But when you look at the actual contribution of car use among the fossil fuel use, it's pretty close to the contribution of greenhouse gases from agriculture. The important point here is each one degree increase centigrade in air temperatures associated with a 7% increase in water vapor. And this is responsible for the major adverse weather events that we're seeing today in terms of increased frequency and severity of hurricanes, the droughts. And I learned a new term from the New York Times a couple of days ago from the science section, which is atmospheric thirst. I had trouble understanding how climate change would contribute to drought, but that same effect in terms of absorbing moisture that occurs and drives the adverse weather events also dries out the land. So increasingly there's increased need for water use, which is driven by atmospheric thirst. But that increase in air temperature and the increase in water vapor, is what really drives these storms. Because in the Pacific and in the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico, this increase in air temperature is associated with an increase in water temperature, which further drives the increase in the severity of these storms. Thanks for that background. Now let's get to beef. You and I were not long ago at the Healthy Eating Research conference. And you gave what I thought was a very compelling talk on beef. We'll talk in a minute about how much beef figures into this overall picture, but first, tell us how beef production affects both climate and health. And you mentioned nitrous oxide and methane, but how does this all work? Cattle production is a big driver of the release of methane. And methane comes from cow burps. The important thing to understand about methane is that it's 80 times more powerful than CO2 in terms of its greenhouse gas emission. And that's because it has a very long half-life when it gets up into the atmosphere? Well, actually it's interesting because the half-life of methane is shorter than the half-life of nitrous oxide. So, it's an appropriate target for reduction. And the reduction has to occur by virtue of reduced beef consumption, which would reduce beef production. The other piece of this is that nitrous oxide is derived from fertilizer that's not absorbed by plants. And the application of fertilizer is a very wasteful process and a huge percent of fertilizer that's applied to crops is not absorbed by those plants. And it washes into the Mississippi River and down to the Gulf of Mexico. But also, increases the genesis of nitrous oxide. And nitrous oxide is an even more powerful greenhouse gas than methane. About 260 times more powerful than CO2 with a very, very long half-life. So, as a target, we really ought to be focused on methane, and if we're going to focus on methane, we need to focus on beef. You could imagine people who are opposed to these views on climate change making fun of cows burping. I mean, are there enough cows, burping enough where the methane that's coming out is a problem? Yes. Maybe a better term that we can use is enteric fermentation, which is in effect cow burps. But enteric fermentation is the major source of methane. And nitrous oxide, the same thing. The agricultural system which supports cattle production, like the feedlot fattening from corn and wheat. The genesis of nitrous oxide is a product of fertilizer use and fertilizer use is a real important source of nitrous oxide because of the amount of fertilizer which is not absorbed by plants. But which washes into the Mississippi River and causes the dead zone in the Gulf, but also generates an enormous amount of nitrous oxide. So, between those two, the enteric fermentation and the origin of nitrous oxide from fertilizer use, are a lethal combination in terms of increasing greenhouse gas emissions. And it's important to know that those greenhouse gas emissions are associated with important declines in crop yields. Crop yields have declined by about 5% for maize for wheat, for soybeans, and somewhat less for rice. These crop yields have yet to affect the US but are clearly a problem in the Global South. In your talk, you cited a paper by Scarborough and colleagues that was published in the Journal Nature Food that modeled the environmental impact of various diets. Could you please explain what they found? This was a really nice study of four diets in the United Kingdom. Actually it was five diets. They looked at vegans, vegetarians, low meat eaters, medium meat eaters and high meat eaters. And looked at the contribution of these diets to the genesis of methane, nitrous oxide, and also importantly, land use and water use. And the most expensive, and the most detrimental environmental impact of these diets, were the among the high meat eaters. These were substantially greater than than the genesis of for example, methane by vegans. For example, high meat eaters generated about 65 kilograms per day of methane compared to vegans, which generated only four kilograms per day of methane. And when you reduce beef, and there were two lower categories, these measures come much more into line with what we'd like to have. The low meat eaters generate about half of methane that the high meat eaters generate. This is also true for their genesis of nitrous oxide. And importantly, the land use among vegans and vegetarians is about a third of the land use required for the production of beef. And water use by meat production is about twice that generated by the water use by the production of plant-based diets. I think these are important data because they, they really reflect the importance of a lower meat consumption and higher plant-based diet. Not just in terms of greenhouse gases, but also in terms of land use and water use. Not to mention health. Not to mention health. Yes. I think it's important to continue to remind ourselves that beef consumption is associated with a variety of chronic diseases like obesity, like diabetes, like colon cancer and like cardiovascular disease. So, there's this double whammy from beef consumption, not only on the climate but also on human health. In your talk that I heard it was interesting to see how you interpreted this information because you weren't arguing for no beef consumption. Because you were saying there could be tremendous benefit from people going from the high beef consumption category to a lower category. If you could take all the people who are consuming beef and drop them down a category, it sounds like there would be tremendous benefits. People could still have their beef but just not have it as often. Right. I think that's an important observation th

I was at a professional meeting recently and I heard an inspiring and insightful and forward-looking talk by journalist and author Roger Thurow. Roger was a reporter for the Wall Street Journal for 30 years, 20 of them as a foreign correspondent based in Europe and Africa. Roger has written a number of books including one on world hunger and another what I thought was a particularly important book entitled The First 1000 Days, A Crucial Time for Mothers and Children and the World. Now comes a new book on farmers around the world and how they are coping with the unprecedented changes they face. It was hearing about his book that inspired me to invite Mr. Thurow to this podcast and thankfully he accepted. His new book is entitled Against the Grain: How Farmers Around the Globe are transforming Agriculture to Nourish the World and Heal the Planet. Interview Summary I really admire your work and have loved the new book and what I've read before. So, let's talk about something that you speak about: the wisdom of farmers. And you talk about their wisdom in the context of modern agriculture. What do you mean by that? Farmers of the world, particularly the small holder farmers, indigenous farmers, family farmers as we know them in this country, they're really bold and pioneering in what they're doing. And these farmers, kind of around the world as we go on this journey around the world in the book, they've seen their efforts to earn a living and feed nourish their families and communities turn against. So, while conforming to the orthodoxies of modern industrial agriculture practices: the monocropping, the increased use of fertilizers and pesticides and insecticide chemicals, the land expansion, at the expense of savannas, forest wetlands, biodiverse environments. In the face of this, they've really witnessed their lands degrading. Their soils depleting. Their waters dwindling. Their pollinators fleeing. Their biodiversity shrinking and becoming less diverse. Their rains becoming ever more mercurial., Their temperatures ever hotter. And their children and families and their communities becoming ever more hungry and malnourished. So, they've really seen the future of their own impacts on the environment, and then the impacts of changing climates, of more extreme weather conditions. They've really seen this future. They've experienced, lived it, and it's ugly what they see and what they've experienced on their farms. So, that's their wisdom, and they'll really tell us that it doesn't have to be that way if we listen. That such a future isn't inevitable. Because out of their desperation, you know, these farmers have begun farming against the grain. So, there's the title of the book Against the Grain of this modern agriculture orthodoxy to reconcile their roles as both food producers and nourishers of us all, and stewards in the land. They're pushing forward with practices like agroforestry, agroecology, regenerative agriculture, kind of whatever one calls it. Farming with nature instead of bending nature to their will, which is what we too often done and with kind of the larger modern industrial agriculture techniques. So, farming with nature as opposed to against it as they strive to both nourish us all and heal our planet. Give us a sense, if you will, about how important these small farmers are to the world's food supply? So how important are these? They're really important. Extremely vital for the global food chain, certainly for their own families and communities, and their countries. In a lot of places, say in Africa, in many of the countries, on the continent, it's the small holder farmers that are producing the majority of the food. In their communities and in their countries and across the continent. Still not enough. Africa then must become a substantial importer of food. But these small holder farmers are so key and the more success that they have in feeding their communities and families, the more success we all have then in this great goal of ending hunger and malnutrition. Equally important, these farmers are the stewards of the land. And they're on the front lines of these environmental challenges. The threats from the changing climate and more extreme weather conditions. They're the first impacted by it, but they also increasingly see, and that's what stories in the book are about, how they see that their own actions are then impacting their environment and their climates. And this is why they're so important for all of us is that they find themselves at the center of what I think is this great collision of humanities two supreme imperatives. One, nourish the world, so nourish us all. That's the one imperative. And then the other imperative, kind of colliding with that, is to preserve, protect, and heal our planet from the very actions of nourishing us. So, these are these two colliding forces. You know as I think we already know agriculture and land use activities are responsible for about a third of the greenhouse gases impacting our climate and weather patterns. And the greatest impact of this then is felt by the farmers themselves. And they see what's happening to their soils and the depletion of their soils. Their lands being so terribly degraded by their very actions of nourishing their families and then contributing to nourishing us all. I think that's why they're so important for us. I mean, there's certainly kind of the canaries in the coal mine of climate change. Of these environmental challenges that we're all facing. And how they're then able to adjust their farming, as we kind of see in the book and that's this wisdom again. How can we learn from them and what are they seeing in their own situations. They're then having to adjust because they have no other options. They either have to adjust or their farms will continue to degrade and their children and their families increasingly malnourished and hungry. Roger let's talk through this issue of colliding imperatives just a bit. The fact that protecting the planet and nourishing people are colliding in your view, suggests that these two priorities are competing with one another. How is that the case? Some of the techniques of the monocropping, which is basically planting one crop on the same plot of land year after year, after year, season after season, right? And by doing that, these crops that are pulling nutrients out of the soil, many of the crops don't put nutrients back in. Some of them do. They'll restore nitrogen they'll put other nutrients in. But with the mono cropping, it's kind of the same depletion that goes on. And, has been particularly practiced in this country, and the bigger farmers and more commercial farmers, because it's more efficient. You are planting one crop, you have the same technique of kind of the planting and tending for that. And the harvesting, kind of the same equipment for that. You don't need to adjust practices, your equipment for various other crops that you're growing on that land. And so, there's an efficiency for that. You have then the price stability if there is any price stability in farming from that crop. That can be a weakness if the price collapses and you're so dependent on that. And so, the farmers are seeing, yeah, that's where the degrading and the weakening their of their soils comes from. So, what's their response to that when their land's degrading? When their soils become weak, it's like, oh, we need additional land then to farm. So they'll go into the forest, they'll cut down trees. And now there's virgin soil. They do the same practices there. And then after a number of years, well that land starts depleting. They keep looking for more. As you do these things, then with the soils depleting, the land degrading, becoming really hard, well, when the rain comes, it's not soaking in. And it just kind of runs away as the soil becomes almost like concrete. Farmers aren't able to plant much there anymore or get much out of the ground. And then so what happens then if the water isn't soaking into the soil, the underground aquifers and the underground springs they become depleted. All of a sudden, the lakes and the ponds that were fed by those, they disappear. The wildlife, the pollinators that come because of that, they go. The bushes, the plants, the weeds that are also so important for the environment, they start disappearing. And so you see that in their efforts to nourish their families and to nourish all of us, it's having this impact on the environment. And then that drives more impacts, right? As they cut down trees, trees drive the precipitation cycle. Tthen the rains become ever more mercurial and unpredictable. Without the trees and the shade and the cooling and the breezes, temperatures get hotter. And also, as the rains disappear and become more unpredictable. It has all this effect. And so, the farmers in the book, they're seeing all this and they recognize it. That by their very actions of cutting down trees to expand their land or to go to a different crop. Because again, that's what the commercial agriculture is demanding, so maybe its sugar cane is coming to the area. Well, sugar cane doesn't get along with trees. And so, the farmers in this one part of Uganda that I write about, they're cutting down all their trees to plant sugarcane. And then it's like, wow, now that the trees are gone, now we see all these environmental and ecosystem results because of that. And so that's where this collision comes from then of being much more aware, and sensitive in their practices and responding to it. That they are both nourishing their families and then also being even better stewards of their land. And they're not doing any of this intentionally, right? It's not like they're going 'we have to do all this to the land, and you know, what do we care? We're just here for a certain amount of time.' But no, they know that this is their land, it's their wealth, it's their family property. It's f

Recently I was asked to review a forthcoming book for American Scientist magazine. The book was entitled, Sweet and Deadly: How Coca-Cola Spreads Disinformation and Makes us Sick. I did the review, and now that the book has been published, I'm delighted that its author, Murray Carpenter, has agreed to join us. Mr. Carpenter is a journalist and author whose work has appeared in publications such as the New York Times, and the Washington Post, and has been featured in places like NPR's All Things Considered and Morning Edition. Interview Summary So, let's start with your career overall. Your journalism has covered a wide range of topics. But a major focus has been on what people consume. First, with your book Caffeinated and now with Sweet and Deadly. What brought you to this interest? My interest in caffeine is longstanding. Like many of us, I consume caffeine daily in the form of coffee. And I just felt like with caffeine, many of us don't really discuss the fact that it is a drug, and it is at least a mildly addictive drug. And so, I became fascinated with that enough to write a book. And that really led me directly in an organic fashion to this project. Because when I would discuss caffeine with people, mostly they just kind of wanted the cliff notes. Is my habit healthy? You know, how much caffeine should I take? And, and in short, I would tell them, you know, if you don't suffer from anxiety or insomnia and you're consuming your caffeine in a healthy beverage, well, that's fine. But, what I realized, of course, is that by volume, the caffeinated beverage people consume most of is sodas. And so that led me to thinking more about sodas because I got a lot of questions about the caffeine in sodas. And that led me to realize just the degree to which they are unhealthful. We've all known sodas not to be a health food, but I think that the degree to which they are not healthy surprised me. And that's what led me to this book. Yes, there's some very interesting themes aren't there with addiction and manipulation of ingredients in order to get people hooked on things. So let's talk about Coca-Cola a bit. Your book focuses on Coca-Cola. It's right there in the title. And certainly, they're giants in the beverage field. But are there other reasons that led you to focus on them? Other than that, the fact that they're the biggest? They're the biggest and really almost synonymous with sodas worldwide. I mean, many people don't say 'I want a pop, I want a soda.' They say, 'I want a Coke.' I quote a source as saying that. You know, what that means is you want a sugar sweetened beverage. And it's not just that they're the most successful at this game, and the biggest. But as I started doing this research, I realized that they have also been the most aggressive and the most successful at this sort of disinformation that's the focus of the book. At generating these health campaigns, these science disinformation campaigns, we should say. This is not to say Pepsi and Dr. Pepper have not been at this game as well, and often through the American Beverage Association. But it is to say that I think Coca-Cola has been the most sophisticated. The most invested in these campaigns. And I would argue the most successful. And so, I really think it's a league apart and that's why I wanted to focus on Coca-Cola. That makes good sense. So, in reading your book, I was struck by the sheer number of ways Coca-Cola protected their business interest at the expense of public health and also the degree to which it was coordinated and calculated. Let's take several examples of such activities and discuss exactly what the company has done. And I'd love your opinion on this. One thing you noted that Coke acted partly through other organizations, one of which you just mentioned, the American Beverage Association. There were others where there was sort of a false sense of scientific credibility. Can you explain more about what Coke did in this area? Yes, and one of the organizations that I think is perhaps the exemplar of this behavior is the International Life Sciences Institute. It's a very successful, very well-funded group that purports to you know, improve the health of people, worldwide. It was founded by a Coca-Cola staffer and has, you know, essentially carried water for Coke for years through a variety of direct and indirect ways. But so front groups, the successful use of front groups: and this is to say groups that don't immediately appear to be associated, say with Coca-Cola. If you hear the International Life Sciences Institute, no one immediately thinks Coca-Cola, except for people who study this a lot. The International Food Information Council, another very closely related front group. This is one of the ways that Coke has done its work is through the use of front groups. And some of them are sort of these more temporary front groups that they'll establish for specific campaigns. For example, to fight soda taxes in specific areas. And they often have very anodyne names, and names again that don't directly link them to Coca-Cola or a beverage, the beverage industry. And the reason that this is so important and the reason this is so effective is journalists know if they were saying, Coca-Cola says soda isn't bad for you, of course that raises red flags. If they say, the International Life Sciences Institute says it's not bad for you, if they say the International Food Information Council says it's not bad for you. The use of front groups has been one of the very effective and persistent, strategies. It almost sounds like the word deception could be written the charter of these organizations, couldn't it? Because it was really meant to disguise Coca-Cola's role in these things from the very get go. That's right. Yes. And the deception runs very deep. One of the things that I happened onto in the course of reporting this book, Sweet and Deadly, is Coca-Cola two different times, organized three-day seminars on obesity in Colorado. These two attendees appeared to be sponsored by a press organization and the University of Colorado. They were funded and structured entirely at the behest of Coca-Cola. And it wasn't until after people had attended these seminars and reported stories based on the findings that they'd learned there. Much, much later did people find out that yes, actually these were Coca-Cola initiatives. So yes, deception, runs deep and it's a huge part of their public relations strategy. It's like reputation laundering, almost. Well, it is, and, you know, I make frequent analogies to the tobacco industry in the book. And I think one of the things that's important to remember when we're looking at tobacco and when we're looking at Coca-Cola, at the soda industry writ large, is that these are industries that are producing products that science now shows unequivocally are unhelpful. Even at moderate levels of consumption. So, in order for the industry to continue selling this product, to continue leading, they really have to fight back. It's imperative. It's a risk to their business model if they don't do something to fight the emerging health science. And so, yes, it's very important to them. You know, it's easy, I guess, to ascribe this kind of behavior to ill meaning people within these organizations. But it's almost written into the DNA of these organizations. I mean, you said they have to do this. So, it's pretty much be expected, isn't. It is. I think young people when they hear something like this, they often shrug and say capitalism. And, yes, there's something to that. But capitalism thrives also in a regulated environment. I think that's maybe a little bit too simplistic. But the aspect of it that does apply here is that Coca-Cola is in the business of selling sugar water. That's what they're there to do. Granted, they've diversified into other products, but they are in the business of selling sugar water. Anything that threatens that business model is a threat to their bottom line. And so, they are going to fight it tooth and nail. So how did Coca-Cola influence big health organizations like the World Health Organization and any equivalent bodies in the US? Well, so a few different ways. One of the ways that Coca-Cola has really extended its influence is again, through the use of the front groups to carry messages such as, you know, a calorie is a calorie. Calories and calories out. That's, that's one of the strategies. Another is by having allies in high places politically. And sometimes these are political appointees that happen to be associated with Coca-Cola. Other times these are politicians who are getting funding from Coca-Cola. But, yes, they have worked hard. I mean, the WHO is an interesting one because the WHO really has been out a little bit ahead of the more national bodies in terms of wanting soda taxes, et cetera. But there's a subtler way too, I think, that it influences any of these political entities and these science groups, is that Coca-Cola it's such an all-American beverage. I don't think we can overstate this. It's almost more American than apple pie. And I think we still have not sort of made that shift to then seeing it as something that's unhealthful. And I do think that that has, sort of, put the brakes slightly on regulatory actions here in the US. Let's talk about the Global Energy Balance Network, because this was an especially pernicious part of the overall Coca-Cola strategy. Would you tell us about that and how particular scientists, people of note in our field, by the way, were being paid large sums of money and then delivering things that supported industries positions. Yes. This was a Coca-Cola initiative. And we have to be clear on this. This was designed and created at the behest of Coca-Cola staffers. This was an initiative that was really an effort to shift the balance to the calories outside of the equation. So energy balance is one of these, sort of, themes that Coca-Cola and o

As someone who's been mostly vegetarian for a number of years, I have tried a lot of plant-based foods and there's a variety of them. And so how do they really taste, not just from my perspective? Well, it's really important to do really careful analysis, and this is going to be the subject of our conversation today. Plant-based foods are becoming increasingly healthier and cheaper. But one large question really remains for consumers. How do they taste. NECTAR, a nonprofit initiative on a mission to accelerate the alternative protein transition sets out to answer this question. Through large scale blind taste tests with thousands of consumers. NECTAR is amassing the largest publicly available sensory database on alternative protein products. In its latest report, Taste of the Industry 2025, NECTAR conducted blind sensory panels of 122 products across 14 categories and uncovered which products have achieved the taste that's on par with their animal-based counterparts. Today we talk with NECTAR's Director, Caroline Cotto, about which products are meeting and exceeding consumer taste expectations and what the alternative protein industry needs to do to get more products to this level. And how NECTAR's novel dataset can be used to get there faster. Interview Summary I understand you've conducted the world's largest clinical sensory test for plant-based and alternative meats compared to real animal meat. Tell me about how you conducted this study and why NECTAR is focused on this research. Absolutely. So, for us, we're really focused on this research because we know that taste is a major purchase driver for consumers and it's often the key reason people cite for not repurchasing plant-based meats once they've purchased them. We really want people to come back to the category and so in order for that to happen, we need taste to be where consumers expect it to be. As you mentioned, we set out to conduct a large study and sort of understand where the products on the market taste today. So, we tested 122 products across 14 categories. And we chose those categories by looking at the highest volume selling categories of animal meat, and then mapping the plant-based products to those categories. And then 43 of those products were from Europe as well. So, we were trying to get a real landscape analysis. Different than traditional sensory testing, we conducted all of our studies in restaurant settings to give a more natural experience for the participants. And all of our testing is done with omnivore consumers. So, we love vegans and vegetarians, but we're really trying to go after that hardcore meat eater and see if we can get them to switch because they love the taste of these products. And then the other difference is that we serve everything in what we call a full build. We serve burger patties and buns, hot dogs and buns. We really allow consumers to apply condiments as long as they do it equally across all of the products that they're testing, um, to give that authentic experience as they would experience the product in their own kitchen. And we ended up having 2,684 participants in this city. Each product was tried by a minimum of 100 consumers. Wow, that's pretty extensive. What were some of the surprising results of this? Yeah, I think we found that the average plant-based product was not quite ready for mainstream adoption. The average plant-based product was generally disliked more frequently than the animal product was, with 35% of tasters rating the product. Some form of dislike. And only 9% of tasters rating animal products as some form of dislike. That said, we did find 20 products out of the 122 that were worth celebrating. We created the Tasty Awards based on this data. And we set a threshold for top performance. And that threshold was that of the people that tried the product, if at least 50% of them said that it, that plant-based meat was the same or better than the animal meat that it was considered a winner product in this study. I'm super exciting to see that we saw 20 products meet that threshold. However, these products were not distributed equally across categories. Some categories had up to five products that met the winner threshold and other categories had none. And we also found that no products in this year's study actually achieved parody with animal meat. So, four products came very close, and we're expecting that in next year's study, that there will be some products that achieve that milestone. But we're not there quite yet. And then lastly, we found that there really is a correlation between great taste and financial return. So, we found that the plant-based products that perform best in our sensory tests are actually capturing 50% more market share than the average products in that category. And the categories that taste better are capturing more market share than the lower performing categories. Wow. That's really fascinating and there are lots of ways of sort of thinking through the data. I'd like to hear a little bit more about how those consumer preferences vary across different categories of plant-based products such as burgers, nuggets, and hot dogs. Are there specific sensory attributes that consistently influence consumer satisfaction? Yes, so overall we found that flavor is the top opportunity for plant-based meats at large. Currently these products are described as savory 35% less often than the animal products. And they're described as having a weird aftertaste or off flavor five to six times more often than their animal counterparts. As we look at plant-based meat as a whole, flavor is definitely still needing some improvement. And then we also saw that texture is really the secondary opportunity. So, plant-based meats were described as juicy 62% less often than the animal products. And there's a big need to increase tenderness and reduce mushiness. So that's why I was mentioning there are some categories like burgers and nuggets where we had multiple winner products and those products have had a lot of R&D done on them. Their texture is a little bit easier to replicate than something like whole cut steak or bacon or pulled pork. You talked about some of the difficulties when you look at different sensory aspects. And I'm interested to understand what some of the key challenges are facing the alternative protein industry in terms of improving taste of the plant-based meats. And how can NECTAR's database help address these challenges? Yes, I think the key opportunity here is that NECTAR's data provides a roadmap for each product to improve. So, it might be the case that a certain product actually performed well on flavor but needs to improve its texture. Our research can really help you pinpoint exactly what it is about your texture that needs to change. So maybe it's, you know, reducing that mushiness or increasing firmness. And I think overall for the entire category of plant-based meat, it's what we were just talking about, flavor is sort of the biggest opportunity. And then closely followed by texture. But it does seem to vary quite a bit within each category for each product. And we saw on the whole, there was a wide range of ingredients and production methods used. So, we tested the category of unbreaded chicken filet. Within that category, we had extruded products, soy-based products, pea based products, mycelium products. And there were multiple products in that category that were all winners using each of those different techniques and ingredients. But they all have their own slight differences and tweaks that need to be made to meet mainstream consumer expectations. Oh, this is fascinating. And I have to say, we haven't had many opportunities to talk about how alternative proteins or products are actually produced. Thank you for sharing that. You know what's really interesting, you've touched on this a little bit, but I think there's a little more that we can learn from you on this. So, your research highlights that some plant-based products like nuggets are approaching taste parody with their animal counterparts. Are there specific factors that contribute to the success and how can these insights be applied to other product categories? So, the Taste of the Industry 2025 is a second annual report that NECTAR has released. In our 2024 research, we found that breaded products tended to outperform unbreaded ones. So, we actually saw similar success from the nugget category in this year's research. But on the whole, I think we see that texture is much easier to replicate for some categories and nuggets is one of those. The other would be burgers where all of the products are ground and so it's much easier to replicate that with existing technologies than to replicate things like muscle fibers for whole cut steak. We did find four products that are within striking distance of achieving parody. And two of those products were nuggets. One of them was a burger, and the last was an unbreaded chicken filet. And as I mentioned, I think we'll see next year one of these products achieve parody or surpass the animal product in overall liking. But on the whole, we see that chicken is an easier flavor to replicate than beef and pork. And so, we saw more products from the chicken categories that were winners this year than from the other types of animal based meat. Looking forward, how do you envision NECTAR's work impacting the broader food industry? Particularly in terms of driving innovation and adoption of plant-based products among consumers who are honestly hesitant due to taste concerns. We really believe that tasting is believing. So, we are using this data to drive stakeholders across the supply chain towards the best tasting products so that they taste it and they immediately are sold on the product. So that means we're working with retailers and food service buyers to help direct them towards the best tasting products. And even consumers we have an Instagram page and a con

Do you pay attention to information printed on food labels? From eye-catching designs companies use to entice you to buy a product to nutrition facts panels to the tiny dates printed on packages. There's a lot going on to be sure. For policymakers, they hope that refining date labels on food packaging will help reduce the amount of uneaten food ending up in landfills. Food Waste is a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions. The Food and Drug Administration and the Food Safety and Inspection Service recently asked for public input on food date labels. So, we decided to gather some experts together to talk about this important policy tool. Roni Neff is a professor in the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Senior Advisor at the School's Center for a Livable Future. Her research looks at the intersection of food waste policy, climate change, and food system resilience. Brian Roe is a professor at the Ohio State University Department of Agricultural, Environmental and Developmental Economics. His work focuses on issues including agricultural marketing, information policy, behavioral economics, and product quality. Ruiqing Miao is an associate professor of agricultural economics and rural sociology at Auburn University's College of Agriculture. His research emphasizes sustainability, innovation, and decision making. Interview Summary Brian, let's begin with you and let's make sure everyone's on the same page. Can you talk to us a little bit about what date labels are and where they are on packaging. And what is industry required to include in terms of these date labels? Yes, so date labels, we see them anytime we pick up a food package. Most packages are going to have some type of date label on them. Oddly, federal law doesn't regulate these or really require these other than the exception of infant formula, which is the only federal requirement domain out there. But in the absence of federal regulation, states have kind of done their own thing. About 40 different states require date labels on at least some food products. And about 20 states prohibit or restrict the sale or donation of food past the label date. And even though states that require date labels, manufacturers can still choose the dates. There are no real regulations on them. So, recognizing that confusion over date labels can lead to unnecessary food waste, Government and industry actors have made, you know, some efforts to try to standardize date labeling language. But nothing terribly authoritative. Now, some states have introduced bills that seek to standardize date labels, with the motivation to try to get rid of and reduce food waste. California being perhaps the most recent of these. In 2024, they passed a bill that prohibits the use of any date label other than 'Best if Used By,' the phrase that goes along with foods where the date represents kind of a quality indicator. And then the phrase 'Use By,", if that date has some implications for product safety. The bill doesn't go into effect until July of '26, so we're going to see if this is going to create a domino effect across other states, across the food manufacturing center or even bubble up and be dealt with at the federal legislation level. Now, industries tried to do things before. Back in 2017, the Food Marketing Institute and the Grocers Manufacturers Association had a standardized date labeling suggestion that some firms bought into. FDA has given out some guidance about preferring 'Best if Used By' on certain food products to indicate quality. But again, we're all kind of waiting to see if there might be a federal legislation that kind of brings these state labels into check. Thanks, Brian. And it's really important to know about the policy landscape and the fact that there hasn't been a federal policy across all foods. And it's interesting to see the efforts of, say, in California. I think this begs the question; how do consumers actually process the information of date labels? This fascinated us too. A very clever person at Ohio State that I work with, Dr. Aishwarya Badiger, led a study I was part of. We enlisted consumers to come into the Consumer Evaluation Lab that we have here on campus and evaluate samples of milk. They were presented with the label of each milk. We gave them a little glass with a nose full of the milk that they could sniff. So, they're looking at the date label, they're given the sample they could smell, and then we kind of asked them, Hey, if this were in your fridge, would you keep it or toss it? But the entire time we actually had them fitted with special glasses that precisely track their eye movements so we could understand kind of which information they were looking at while they went through the whole process of evaluating and then making their decision. Consumers overwhelmingly looked at the date itself on the package and largely ignored the phrase or the words that go along with the date. In fact, for more than half of the evaluations, the consumer's eyes never went anywhere near the phrase. This is important. And actually, we'll talk about that a little bit more with some of our other guests. So, what are the implications of date label policies? So the eye tracking research really drove home to me that dates are much more salient than phrases. Although all the policies largely deal with the phrases. Dates give you actionable information. People can look at the date on the label, look at the calendar, and man, that's something they can do something about. They can act based upon that. The phrases are a little bit more ambiguous as Roni will talk about later. I think that people have a hard time interpreting what those phrases really mean. That doesn't mean we should not try to unify those phrases, but rather this is going to be a longer-term investment in educational infrastructure that until those phrases really become salient and actionable to consumers. And then become more of a critical component of the policies. But right now, policies are generally silent on dates. And dates seem to be the real action mover. Yeah. So why don't we just get rid of all of this? What would be the implications? Yes. We did this experiment too. Same kind of setup. Had people come in, they had the jug of the milk in front of them. They had a glass of milk that they could sniff. Same thing. And we had a bunch of different milks. We had some that were only like 15 days post pasteurization. Some that went out to like 40 days past pasteurization. So, the youngest or the freshest had about three days, quote unquote, left on its date label. The 40-day old milk was like two or three weeks past the date. And we did two things. We had them evaluate the milk with the dates on the jugs, and then we had ones where we took the dates and the labels off the milk. Not surprisingly, when they did not have the dates on the milk, they were much more likely to say that they would keep the milk. Even that 40-day old milk, about half of them said, yeah, I'd drink this. I'd keep this if it were in my fridge. But it wasn't a slam dunk. So, our youngest and freshest milk had an odd flavor note. You know, sometimes as the seasons change, feed sources change for cattle, you get an odd flavor note. It's not spoilage, it's just a slightly different note. And when people have the date label, they were much more willing to give that milk a second chance and say that they would keep it. But if the date label wasn't on there, they took that odd flavor note and said, I'm going to toss this milk. So, it's really kind of a nuanced thing. And if you would take those off, I think you're going to get some consumers who are going to kind of freak out without any guidance. And they might have kind of an itchy trigger finger when it comes to throwing away that milk or other products. So, it's compelling. We've seen England, the UK, do this; take dates off of certain products. But I would probably want to see a little more example of how consumers are responding to that before I fully endorse that as kind of a policy movement forward. Brian, thank you for that. And I have got to say, I was not expecting to have a conversation about the bouquet of a glass of milk. But this is really an interesting finding, and it does help us understand some other things that we're going to talk about. Roni, I want to turn our attention to you. And I know you are someone who's been involved in understanding date labels for a while. And I really appreciate it and I've said it before, but you're the reason I got into this work. I want to understand a little bit more about what are important things to understand about the misconceptions that consumers may have about food date labels? And why does it matter for policymakers? Well, I'll start with just saying that conceptions are what we know rationally. And it's not the whole picture because as Brian was alluding to a lot of our decision making is going on in our emotions. And like I can tell my son all day long the fact that that milk is okay, he's going to toss it because he doesn't trust it. There's a lot more going on than conceptions. But I want to talk about two misconceptions. The first one is that despite what Brian just said about the fact that these date labels other than infant formula aren't federally regulated, about two in five people think that they are. We just did a national consumer survey in January 2025, and this is one of the findings. And I did that along with Emily Broad Lieb from the Harvard Food Law and Policy Project and Akif Khan also from there, and then Dana Gunders from ReFED. And in addition to this idea that they're federally regulated, I'll say that these kinds of beliefs were most common among those who were 18 to 34, parents with children under age 18, and black and Hispanic consumers. Our earlier work also found that those who think that food date labels are federally regulated are more likely to discard food based on them. A

So even the people that follow the topic closely are stunned by the digital landscape that engulfs our children, how quickly it evolves, and the potential social cost. Two people in a unique position to explain all this are our guest today, Jeffrey Chester and Kathryn Montgomery, both from the Center for Digital Democracy. Jeff is executive director of the Center, and Kathryn is its research director and senior strategist, as well as professor emerita of communication at American University. Jeff and Kathryn have been pioneers in this work and have been uniquely strong voices for protecting children. Interview Summary Let me congratulate the two of you for being way ahead of your time. I mean the two of you through your research and your advocacy and your organizational work, you were onto these things way before most people were. I'm really happy that you're joining us today, and welcome to our podcast. Kathryn, let me begin with you. So why be concerned about this digital landscape? Kathryn - Well, certainly if we're talking about children and youth, we have to pay attention to the world they live in. And it's a digital world as I think any parent knows, and everybody knows. In fact, for all of us, we're living in a digital world. So young people are living their lives online. They're using mobile phones and mobile devices all the time. They're doing online video streaming. They form their communications with their peers online. Their entire lives are completely integrated into this digital media landscape, and we must understand it. Certainly, the food and beverage industry understand it very well. And they have figured out enormously powerful ways to reach and engage young people through these digital media. You know, the extent of the kids' connection to this is really remarkable. I just finished a few minutes ago recording a podcast with two people involved with the Children and Screens organization. And, Chris Perry, who's the executive director of that organization and Dmitri Christakis who was with us as well, were saying that kids sometimes check their digital media 300 times a day. I mean, just unbelievable how much of this there is. There's a lot of reasons to be concerned. Let's turn our attention to how bad it is, what companies are doing, and what might be done about it. So, Jeff, tell us if you would, about the work of the Center for Digital Democracy. Jeff - Well, for more than a quarter of a century, we have tracked the digital marketplace. As you said at the top, we understood in the early 1990s that the internet, broadband what's become today's digital environment, was going to be the dominant communications system. And it required public interest rules and policies and safeguards. So as a result, one of the things that our Center does is we look at the entire digital landscape as best as we can, especially what the ultra-processed food companies are doing, but including Google and Meta and Amazon and GenAI companies. We are tracking what they're doing, how they're creating the advertising, what their data strategies are, what their political activities are in the United States and in many other places in the world. Because the only way we're going to hold them accountable is if we know what they're doing and what they intend to do. And just to quickly follow up, Kelly, the marketers call today's global generation of young people Generation Alpha. Meaning that they are the first generation to be born into this complete digital landscape environment that we have created. And they have developed a host of strategies to target children at the earliest ages to take advantage of the fact that they're growing up digitally. Boy, pretty amazing - Generation Alpha. Kathryn, I have kind of a niche question I'd like to ask you because it pertains to my own career as well. So, you spent many years as an academic studying and writing about these issues, but also you were a strong advocacy voice. How did you go about balancing the research and the objectivity of an academic with advocacy you were doing? Kathryn - I think it really is rooted in my fundamental set of values about what it means to be an academic. And I feel very strongly and believe very strongly that all of us have a moral and ethical responsibility to the public. That the work we do should really, as I always have told my students, try to make the world a better place. It may seem idealistic, but I think it is what our responsibility is. And I've certainly been influenced in my own education by public scholars over the years who have played that very, very important role. It couldn't be more important today than it has been over the years. And I think particularly if you're talking about public health, I don't think you can be neutral. You can have systematic ways of assessing the impact of food marketing, in this case on young people. But I don't think you can be totally objective and neutral about the need to improve the public health of our citizens. And particularly the public health of our young people. I agree totally with that. Jeff let's talk about the concept of targeted marketing. We hear that term a lot. And in the context of food, people talk about marketing aimed at children as one form of targeting. Or, toward children of color or people of color in general. But that's in a way technological child's play. I understand from you that there's much more precise targeting than a big demographic group like that. Tell us more. Jeff - Well, I mean certainly the ultra-processed food companies are on the cutting edge of using all the latest tools to target individuals in highly personalized way. And I think if I have one message to share with your listeners and viewers is that if we don't act soon, we're going to make an already vulnerable group even more exposed to this kind of direct targeted and personalized marketing. Because what artificial intelligence allows the food and beverage companies and their advertising agencies and platform partners to do is to really understand who we are, what we do, where we are, how we react, behave, think, and then target us accordingly using all those elements in a system that can create this kind of advertising and marketing in minutes, if not eventually milliseconds. So, all of marketing, in essence, will be targeted because they know so much about us. You have an endless chain of relationships between companies like Meta, companies like Kellogg's, the advertising agencies, the data brokers, the marketing clouds, et cetera. Young people especially, and communities of color and other vulnerable groups, have never been more exposed to this kind of invasive, pervasive advertising. Tell us how targeted it can be. I mean, let's take a 11-year-old girl who lives in Wichita and a 13-year-old boy who lives in Denver. How much do the companies know about those two people as individuals? And how does a targeting get market to them? Not because they belong to a big demographic group, but because of them as individuals. Jeff - Well, they certainly are identified in various ways. The marketers know that there are young people in the household. They know that there are young people, parts of families who have various media behaviors. They're watching these kinds of television shows, especially through streaming or listening to music or on social media. Those profiles are put together. And even when the companies say they don't exactly know who the child is or not collecting information from someone under 13 because of the privacy law that we helped get enacted, they know where they are and how to reach them. So, what you've had is an unlimited amassing of data power developed by the food and beverage companies in the United States over the last 25 years. Because really very little has been put in their way to stop them from what they do and plan to do. So presumably you could get some act of Congress put in to forbid the companies from targeting African American children or something like that. But it doesn't sound like that would matter because they're so much more precise in the market. Yes. I mean, in the first place you couldn't get congress to pass that. And I think this is the other thing to think about when you think about the food and beverage companies deploying Generative AI and the latest tools. They've already established vast, what they call insights divisions, market research divisions, to understand our behavior. But now they're able to put all that on a fast, fast, forward basis because of data processing, because of data clouds, let's say, provided by Amazon, and other kinds of tools. They're able to really generate how to sell to us individually, what new products will appeal to us individually and even create the packaging and the promotion to be personalized. So, what you're talking about is the need for a whole set of policy safeguards. But I certainly think that people concerned about public health need to think about regulating the role of Generative AI, especially when it comes to young people to ensure that they're not marketed to in the ways that it fact is and will continue to do. Kathryn, what about the argument that it's a parent's responsibility to protect their children and that government doesn't need to be involved in this space? Kathryn - Well, as a parent, I have to say is extremely challenging. We all do our best to try to protect our children from unhealthy influences, whether it's food or something that affects their mental health. That's a parent's obligation. That's what a parent spends a lot of time thinking about and trying to do. But this is an environment that is overwhelming. It is intrusive. It reaches into young people's lives in ways that make it virtually impossible for parents to intervene. These are powerful companies, and I'm including the tech companies. I'm including the retailers. I'm including the ad agencies as well as these global food and beverage c

As any parent knows, it is really important to help our children to make healthy food choices. I know as a father who cooks for my child, it is really critical that I introduce her to fruits and vegetables and encourage whole grains and try to manage the amount of additional sugars, but it's hard. We do this with the goal of trying to make sure that our child is able to eat healthy once she leaves the home. That she's able to make healthy choices there. But it's not just about the future. My child is making choices even today at school and outside of school, and the question is, can we help her make those choices that are going to lead to healthy food outcomes? Do food labels on products encourage children to make healthy food choices if it indicates good ingredients? Or would labels that warn against nutrients of concern actually discourage kids from using those or consuming those products? Today we're going to actually explore those questions in a particular context- in Chile. In 2016, the Chilean government implemented a comprehensive set of obesity prevention policies aimed at improving the food environment for children. Last year on this podcast, we actually explored how the Chilean food laws affected school food purchases. But now today, we're going to explore how food labels are influencing youth outside of school. It is my pleasure to welcome back my colleagues, Gabriela Fretes, who is an associate research fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute, or IFPRI; and Sean Cash, who is an economist and chair of the Division of Agriculture, food and Environment at Tufts University at the Friedman School of Nutrition, Science and Policy. Interview Summary Gabi and Sean, I'm excited to discuss our new paper, Front of Pack Labels and Young Consumers an Experimental Investigation of Nutrition and Sustainability Claims in Chile that was recently published in a Journal of Food Quality and Preference. Gabi, let's begin with you. So why look at Chile? Can you explain the focus of the Chilean labeling and food environment policies there? So, the setting of our study, as in the previous study, was Chile because recently the country implemented the law of food labeling and advertising, which includes three main components. The first one being mandatory front of package warning labels on packaged goods and beverages. The second one being restrictions on all forms of food marketing directed to children younger than 14 years. So, including printed media, broadcast, and also all digital media. And the third component being at school regulations at different levels including preschool, elementary, and high school levels. Briefly, food manufacturers in Chile must place front of package labels on packaged foods or beverages that are high in specific nutrients of concern, including added sugars, saturated fats, sodium, and or energy. This law was implemented in three stages, starting in June 2016. The last stage was implemented in June 2019. So, it has been already six or seven years since the full implementation of the regulation. Specifically talking about the school component because this, yeah, it relates to children and adolescents. The law mandates that foods and beverages with at least one front of pack warning label cannot be sold, promoted, or marketed inside schools. And this includes the cafeteria, the school kiosks, and even events that are happening inside the schools. And additionally, food and beverages that have at least one front pack warning label cannot be offered as part of school meal programs. In addition to this front of pack warning label regulation, Chile also implemented voluntary eco labels starting in 2022 that provide information about the recyclability of food packages specifically. There is a certification process behind this labeling regulation and the eco label can be displayed if the food or beverage package is at least 80% recyclable. Wow. This is a really comprehensive set of policies to encourage healthier food choices, both at the school and then also outside of the school. I'm excited to discuss further what this may do to food choices among children. Sean, that really brings up the question, why is it important to look at young consumers and their food choices and what makes them unique compared to adults? Thanks for asking Norbert. This is an area where I've been interested in for a while. You know, young consumers play a crucial role in shaping the demand for food and long-term dietary habits. And young consumers might be more open to incorporating dietary advice into those long-term habits than adults might be. Just perhaps kids are less set in their ways. Children and adolescents are both current, but also future consumers with growing autonomy in what they choose around food as they get older. To marketers, we sometimes would say they might represent a three-in-one market. First, they spend their own money on snacks. What you could think of as the primary market. And how children spend money autonomously is really something that hasn't been studied enough by researchers. Although it's an area where I have tried to make a contribution. Second, kids influence household purchases. This is sometimes called pester power. You can think of a kid in the supermarket begging a parent to buy a favorite snack or a certain brand of cereal. But this can also be more socially positive in that kids might be agents of change within their households. Encouraging perhaps other family members to buy healthier food items if they get more interested in that. And third, this three-in-one market is rounded out by the fact that children represent future purchasing power as future adults. So, the habits that they're forming now might influence what they do when they're older. Despite this importance for marketers, but also for pro-social behavior change, there really hasn't been a lot of research on youth food purchasing behaviors. And this question that we are looking at here of how kids might respond to front to package labels has been particularly limited. In this project, we wanted to understand how Chilean adolescents might respond both to nutrition warning labels, but also eco labels, and how they consider price when choosing snacks. We were lucky to be able to recruit a sample of over 300 kids, aged 10 to 14, to participate in these experiments. I know we're going to chat a bit more about what we found, but in general, our results suggest that while price is perhaps the biggest factor in explaining what the kids chose in our experiment, that some of these youth showed preferences for the eco labels, which could be indicative of an emerging interest in sustainability issues. But overall, understanding these behaviors is really important because the food choices made during childhood and adolescence can persist in adulthood. And this can be really something that helps change long-term health outcomes.   Gabi, let's talk a little bit more about eco labels for a moment. What are they, and how do these echo labels influence children's snack choices? What did they tell us about their awareness of sustainability? That's a great question, Norbert. Thanks. In our study specifically, we found that eco labels, had a greater influence on adolescents' snack choices than nutrition warning labels these black and white octagons that are displayed on the front of the package of products in Chile. And this suggests that some young consumers are becoming more aware of environmental issues, or at least in our sample. One possible explanation for this could be that eco labels suggest positive emotions rather than warnings, as with the nutrition labels. Which might feel more restrictive. Unlike the nutrition labels that tell consumers what not to eat, eco labels, on the other hand, highlight a product's benefits, making it more appealing. This could be one of the reasons. Related to that, adolescents may also associate eco-friendly products with social responsibility aligning with increasing youth-driven environmental movements that are very prevalent around the world. However, not all adolescents in our sample responded equally to the eco labels that were presented to them in the snacks. Our study specifically found that those who receive pocket money were more likely to choose eco label snacks. And this could be possibly because they have more autonomy over their purchases and their personal values could be playing a bigger role in their choices. If eco labels are really influencing children and adolescents with choices, one intervention that could be potentially beneficial could be to incorporate sustainability messaging in school food and nutrition education in order to reinforce those positive behaviors. And make them part of the daily food choices that they make. In making sustainable food more affordable, government incentives or retailer promotions could encourage youth to choose more eco-friendly snacks. Given that price, as we saw in our study, remains a key factor for choice. Lastly, not all eco labels are created equal. And this suggests that clear standardization and regulation are needed to prevent misleading claims. And ensure that adolescents receive accurate information about the sustainability of their food choices. Ultimately, the eco labeling, of course, is not a silver bullet. It's not going to solve all the environmental issues, but it represents a promising tool to nudge consumers. So our better dietary and environmental behaviors. Gabi, you talked about how the eco labels have a bigger effect than nutrition warning. And overall, the nutrition warning labels didn't really have that big of an effect on snack food choices. Why do you think that's the case? Yes, this was really one surprising finding in our study. That front of pack nutrition warning labels did not significantly impact children's and adolescents' snack choices. And this kind of contradicts some previous research sugges