Jason Karp
Appearances
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: The Dark Side of The Food Industry: How The Standard Diet Is Making Us Sick & Fat
Yeah. And it tastes good. You know, it started off as a preposterous idea because I was a professional investor. Restaurants typically are not good investments. Most people fail at them. They have one of the highest failure rates. And I said to Jordan, I said, Jordan, we don't know anything about restaurants.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: The Dark Side of The Food Industry: How The Standard Diet Is Making Us Sick & Fat
It was massive. It was massive. And anyway, long story short, I said to him, I said, look, we can do this. We'll do it as initially kind of a passion project. He said he was going to quit his job in real estate. My wife was going to help. I was going to stay in the finance business to finance this whole thing. In case you need to eat beans and rice, you could pay for it. Right.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: The Dark Side of The Food Industry: How The Standard Diet Is Making Us Sick & Fat
For the first few years, for the first many years, we didn't have outside investors. And so it was just a family operation. And we hired consultants that showed us how to do kind of typical restaurant stuff. But what we knew was what to include and we knew what not to include. And we came up with the name Hugh.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: The Dark Side of The Food Industry: How The Standard Diet Is Making Us Sick & Fat
Because our slogan, based on all of the research that I had done that cured me, was get back to human. Because I believe that part of the reason or most of the reason we're all so sick is that we don't live in a way that is consistent with how we evolved and how we thrived. And I believe today we are in a true slow motion apocalypse. And I'll get to some stats in a second. I'm with you.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: The Dark Side of The Food Industry: How The Standard Diet Is Making Us Sick & Fat
And we are in what I call a metacrisis, a crisis of physical health, mental health, and planetary health. And it's the worst it's ever been in human history.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: The Dark Side of The Food Industry: How The Standard Diet Is Making Us Sick & Fat
Yeah. Yes, what prompted the letter originally was when Kellogg came out and recommended cereal for dinner. And I don't know.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: The Dark Side of The Food Industry: How The Standard Diet Is Making Us Sick & Fat
Yeah, I don't know if you saw this, but basically.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: The Dark Side of The Food Industry: How The Standard Diet Is Making Us Sick & Fat
Yeah, so tone deaf. Cereal in this country is in secular decline. And Kellogg was originally a conglomerate and they split about a year and a half ago into two companies. One's called Kelanova, which is mostly international and snacks. And then they isolated the US North American cereal business, just cereal. And it's just North America.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: The Dark Side of The Food Industry: How The Standard Diet Is Making Us Sick & Fat
And that business still does $2.7 billion a year, which is millions and millions and millions of customers. And, you know, definitely over, you know, hundreds of millions of boxes of cereal. Definitely, hopefully not any of my patients listening are eating cereal for breakfast. Correct.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: The Dark Side of The Food Industry: How The Standard Diet Is Making Us Sick & Fat
Cereal period.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: The Dark Side of The Food Industry: How The Standard Diet Is Making Us Sick & Fat
Yes. And they made a television commercial, which I would urge you guys to Google and watch it because it looks like a Saturday Night Live sketch. And Tony the Tiger comes into a family who are about to sit down for dinner. And there's two kids. And he comes and he starts going, cereal for dinner, cereal for dinner. And it says like, let's give chicken the night off.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: The Dark Side of The Food Industry: How The Standard Diet Is Making Us Sick & Fat
And this was an actual television commercial. Not a parody. Yeah, not a parody. And it got, thankfully, it got, he got skewered in social media and this was sort of, you know, all over the internet and people started talking about boycotting. And he made it about food cost. He basically said, inflation has gone up a lot. So if you are cost conscious, you should eat cereal for dinner.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: The Dark Side of The Food Industry: How The Standard Diet Is Making Us Sick & Fat
What he didn't say is that the big food companies have taken anywhere between 40% and 70% price increases over the last three years. Oh, it's inflation. We get another price. They have done the most inflation of almost anybody. And so when I saw that, I thought, this is enough. Like, this is enough.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: The Dark Side of The Food Industry: How The Standard Diet Is Making Us Sick & Fat
I need to take a stand as a father and as a concerned citizen, and I need to let people know that this is really happening about the food dyes. Marie Antoinette moment. Let them eat cake. Let them eat cornflakes. Yeah. And of course, like I would never advocate eating cereal. And some of the comments that we got back were, well, people shouldn't eat cereal, period. Right.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: The Dark Side of The Food Industry: How The Standard Diet Is Making Us Sick & Fat
And part of my activism and part of what we're doing with Human Co., my business, is to recognize that we're at a certain moment in time and we have to meet people where they're at. And so instead of coming out and saying nobody should eat cereal, which of course they shouldn't. No. I'm acknowledging that there's $2.7 billion of Kellogg cereal sold in this country right now. That's a big number.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: The Dark Side of The Food Industry: How The Standard Diet Is Making Us Sick & Fat
So acknowledging that, I said, well, let's go after the easiest, most ridiculous part of what they do wrong, which is they make a superior, safer version of the same exact cereal. So let's just take Froot Loops as an example. They make a Canadian version of Froot Loops. that they undoubtedly produce in this country, in the US.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: The Dark Side of The Food Industry: How The Standard Diet Is Making Us Sick & Fat
They already make it and they already have the formulation for it here and they ship it up to Canada. And yet the one that they sell here has red 40, yellow five, yellow six, blue one, and BHT. All of those ingredients are not included in their international version of Froot Loops.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: The Dark Side of The Food Industry: How The Standard Diet Is Making Us Sick & Fat
When people say like, okay, so they know how to make the better version. They're already making it. They're already selling the better version. Right. Why do they sell Americans the shittier, less safe version here? There's two reasons.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: The Dark Side of The Food Industry: How The Standard Diet Is Making Us Sick & Fat
The first reason, which is obvious, is it's a little more expensive to use natural food colorings than it is to use artificial food dyes that are derived from petroleum.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: The Dark Side of The Food Industry: How The Standard Diet Is Making Us Sick & Fat
Yeah.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: The Dark Side of The Food Industry: How The Standard Diet Is Making Us Sick & Fat
Yeah, and so maybe it's... Maybe it's a few pennies per box is what they would have to spend. The second reason, which there was like a fiasco that happened with Trix cereal, where they've acknowledged that natural food colorings are less bright. And when they're less bright, they're less attractive to children. And it doesn't affect the taste, by the way.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: The Dark Side of The Food Industry: How The Standard Diet Is Making Us Sick & Fat
The colorings have nothing to do with the taste. So they have come out and they have tried to say, when they've been kind of publicly shamed for this, is that Americans want the brighter cereal. That's what they say.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: The Dark Side of The Food Industry: How The Standard Diet Is Making Us Sick & Fat
Right. And here's the worst part, Mark. The worst part is in 2015- They came out. There have been these moments where people start really caring about the artificial food dyes because, as you noted, with some ingredients like BHT and others, they're literally banned in many countries.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: The Dark Side of The Food Industry: How The Standard Diet Is Making Us Sick & Fat
In some of the food dyes cases, they're not fully banned, but they require a warning label similar to the warning label you would have on cigarettes. Yeah, absolutely. And the warning label says, ingredients in this food product may impair your children's learning ability and may cause behavioral disorders in your children. Right. And so, yeah. I'm making that shit up.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: The Dark Side of The Food Industry: How The Standard Diet Is Making Us Sick & Fat
This is real.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: The Dark Side of The Food Industry: How The Standard Diet Is Making Us Sick & Fat
This is not crazy sensationalist like we want to regulate everything. And then personally, both of my children are very affected by Red 40 in particular, where my son will come back from a birthday party and he'll be acting like a lunatic. He'll be jumping off the walls. He won't be able to sit still. And my wife and I will literally say to him, Tyson, what did you eat?
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: The Dark Side of The Food Industry: How The Standard Diet Is Making Us Sick & Fat
And he'll say, oh, I had some Skittles or, oh, I ate some Charms Blow Pops or, oh, I had some Fruit Loops or whatever it is. And when we remove the food diet from their diets, it is a noticeable behavioral change. And there are countless parents that I have met that notice the same thing.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: The Dark Side of The Food Industry: How The Standard Diet Is Making Us Sick & Fat
And so the biggest issue that I had with Kellogg was- Yeah, there's over 90, I was thinking there's over 92 papers documenting the role of
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: The Dark Side of The Food Industry: How The Standard Diet Is Making Us Sick & Fat
But they made this pledge, Mark. They made a pledge that said, in 2015, we will remove all artificial food dyes from our foods by 2018. And quietly, and this is where Vani comes in,
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: The Dark Side of The Food Industry: How The Standard Diet Is Making Us Sick & Fat
And when they came out with this pledge, it was national news and it was in every newspaper and there were headlines, Kellogg's vows to remove and they got, it was media acclaim. They got credit for it and people loved it. Right. And then they put it on their website.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: The Dark Side of The Food Industry: How The Standard Diet Is Making Us Sick & Fat
And then quietly they removed it from their website and they didn't tell anybody. And they keep making new cereals. And the one that Vonnie really went crazy about, they came out with a baby shark cereal targeted at toddlers that had new, it was a new product with all the food dyes. So they quietly removed from their website.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: The Dark Side of The Food Industry: How The Standard Diet Is Making Us Sick & Fat
They ignored the pledge that they publicly made that they got credit for. And they're just hoping that we don't notice. Because it's more money for them. Yeah.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: The Dark Side of The Food Industry: How The Standard Diet Is Making Us Sick & Fat
Yeah. So, yeah. It's really, it's, and both of my children have ADHD, by the way, and I do too. And we don't need to exacerbate because we already know how to do it without it. And so I wrote a public legal activist letter with a very prominent lawyer named Alex Spiro, who's Elon Musk's lawyer, who is also concerned about American society and his own children. And when I was telling him this,
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: The Dark Side of The Food Industry: How The Standard Diet Is Making Us Sick & Fat
We were talking about it a month ago or so. He was outraged. And he said, you should do something about this. And Vonnie had made attempts with petitions to get this removed. Yeah. Kellogg kind of engaged with her. They wrote her a letter. Nothing happened. Right. And I'm at this point where I say, you know what? We need more firepower at this. We need more American citizens to get behind this.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: The Dark Side of The Food Industry: How The Standard Diet Is Making Us Sick & Fat
And we need this to be loud and public because most people don't know this. And so we filed the letter and simultaneously we released it on social media. We put it on all the platforms, Instagram, LinkedIn, and X. And I would encourage you guys, my handle is humancarp, K-A-R-P.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: The Dark Side of The Food Industry: How The Standard Diet Is Making Us Sick & Fat
I would encourage you to look at the post.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: The Dark Side of The Food Industry: How The Standard Diet Is Making Us Sick & Fat
And the comments have been extraordinary. So many people didn't know that they were selling a superior version up in Canada or in the UK or in the EU. So many people were concerned that why don't Americans, why don't we get the best version of a product that they already make? Like this is crazy.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: The Dark Side of The Food Industry: How The Standard Diet Is Making Us Sick & Fat
That's right. But this is just the tip of the iceberg of the kind of insanity that's happening in this country because America allows it. Yeah. And then the question is, why do we allow it? The first reason is, and I know you've talked about this in the past, is the difference in kind of burden of proof that we use in this country. Yeah. We use the term called GRAS, the Generally Recognized Safe.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: The Dark Side of The Food Industry: How The Standard Diet Is Making Us Sick & Fat
which for some of your listeners is basically like in this country, when they introduce a new compound or a new food, it's innocent until proven guilty. That's right. So let's just unleash Olestra on the American public or trans fats, and then we'll figure out in 10 years if there's a problem. Or 100. Right, right, right.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: The Dark Side of The Food Industry: How The Standard Diet Is Making Us Sick & Fat
And this is why things like asbestos happened and things like thalidomide happened, and you could go on and on. Yeah, yeah. There's a lot of examples, glyphosate. There's lots of examples where we thought like, oh, what could go wrong? Just like the Great Sparrow Campaign.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: The Dark Side of The Food Industry: How The Standard Diet Is Making Us Sick & Fat
Whereas in places like Europe, they have the opposite approach with things that you put inside human bodies, which is guilty until proven innocent.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: The Dark Side of The Food Industry: How The Standard Diet Is Making Us Sick & Fat
Yeah. And they want to have very long-term data before they bring it into the food. And so we have much looser regulations here. And when you talk to politicians or people at the FDA about it, the explanation they give is it encourages faster innovation. So they make it about business. Less regulation, more innovation. Which factually is true. Right.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: The Dark Side of The Food Industry: How The Standard Diet Is Making Us Sick & Fat
Like you can create more things faster if you don't have regulation, but not when you're poisoning people. And this is what I talked to Callie Means about poisoning people is not a left or a right issue. No, it's not. I'm against like stupid, frivolous regulation myself. I moved to Texas because of it from New York, because I think Texas is more business friendly and more rational.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: The Dark Side of The Food Industry: How The Standard Diet Is Making Us Sick & Fat
But when it comes to poisoning our own people, this is idiotic. Like this should not be an issue about politics. This should be about if something is known to be harmful to humans and we have an alternative that works, don't let it happen. Wake the fuck up. And because we are kind of like the frog in the boiling pot. And when I talk about it,
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: The Dark Side of The Food Industry: How The Standard Diet Is Making Us Sick & Fat
you know, at cocktail parties or whatever, people are like, oh, Jason, you're being sensationalist. And I wanted to, I gave- We're all in the Truman Show. We don't know it. Right, right, right. And I, you know, I gave a story that was, I think, also kind of a cautionary tale of what I think we've been doing wrong and how we got here. And the story was, it was about Mao Zedong in 1958.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: The Dark Side of The Food Industry: How The Standard Diet Is Making Us Sick & Fat
And he was trying to make China a powerhouse at the time. And it was a very farming- heavy country.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: The Dark Side of The Food Industry: How The Standard Diet Is Making Us Sick & Fat
And he wanted to industrialize and kind of make farming less private and more kind of state-owned. Yeah, the Great Leap Forward. The Great Leap Forward, right. And one of the things that he observed, the green seeds, the seeds were being eaten by sparrows.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: The Dark Side of The Food Industry: How The Standard Diet Is Making Us Sick & Fat
And so he thought, let's kill all the sparrows. So he created a campaign called the Smash Sparrow Campaign, where he told everybody, kill as many sparrows as you possibly can. And this is 1958. And, you know, typically when you hear these things, you always ask like, oh, what could go wrong? He wasn't clearly an ecologist. Yes, yes.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: The Dark Side of The Food Industry: How The Standard Diet Is Making Us Sick & Fat
And he didn't understand complex adaptive systems or the wonder of Mother Nature. And so over two years, this only happened in two years. This is crazy. Yeah. In over two years, they killed hundreds of millions of sparrows. But what they did not take into account is that sparrows also eat insects, particularly locusts.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: The Dark Side of The Food Industry: How The Standard Diet Is Making Us Sick & Fat
And they had the greatest locust problem in human history, which created the largest man-made famine ever recorded. Somewhere between 45 and 75 million people died of famine. That's unbelievable. It got so bad. Isn't that more than people that died in World War II? Yeah, it's one of the greatest human tragedies of all time.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: The Dark Side of The Food Industry: How The Standard Diet Is Making Us Sick & Fat
In fact, it was so bad that there were books written about it that were banned in China because he didn't want people knowing about it because it was so embarrassing. But it got so bad that people became cannibals and there were accounts of people eating their own children. There were accounts of people eating other people because the famine was so bad.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: The Dark Side of The Food Industry: How The Standard Diet Is Making Us Sick & Fat
Myopia of him thinking like, oh, we could tweak one variable and it seems like it's based on science and just hope that everything turns out okay. And it didn't. And I feel like today, I just want to remind people of how bad the metacrisis is because I think some people... Can you define that? Because I think most people don't know what metacrisis means. Yeah.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: The Dark Side of The Food Industry: How The Standard Diet Is Making Us Sick & Fat
So, you know, meta is just sort of a word that describes, you know, a bunch of high-level things. But the metacrisis to me is that we have four or five epidemics slash crises all happening at the exact same time. And it's very similar to what happened with my diseases, where I had five diseases manifest. Right. They were seemingly disconnected to most people, but they were all connected.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: The Dark Side of The Food Industry: How The Standard Diet Is Making Us Sick & Fat
There are a few common causes. This is functional medicine for the planet, basically. Yeah, exactly. There are a few common causes for all the things that are happening. Yeah, and I believe, and just to give your viewers some stats, because it's not just human health, so I wrote down some stats. And this is all in the last 50 years. And the one thing that I'll say that's also really remarkable
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: The Dark Side of The Food Industry: How The Standard Diet Is Making Us Sick & Fat
is that when I did my research, Homo sapiens have been around as far as I know- 200,000. At least 200, 250,000 years. And all of these things that I'm about to tell you that you talk about, they've all happened in just the last 50 years. And 50 years as a percentage of 200,000 means that we went 99.99% of humanity with no problems, none of these problems. We had other problems.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: The Dark Side of The Food Industry: How The Standard Diet Is Making Us Sick & Fat
We had different problems. Killing each other. Yeah, but like these kind of problems. Filling all the big animals. All in the last 50 years, which on an evolutionary time scale is like a blink. It's a second. But it's a blink that could wipe us out. I actually think we're extincting ourselves. And so here's just some stats in the last 50 years. So populations of vertebrates
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: The Dark Side of The Food Industry: How The Standard Diet Is Making Us Sick & Fat
of all animals that have bones, have seen a 69% drop in total population in 50 years. The number of severe weather-related disasters have tripled in, actually, this is even shorter than that, since 1980, causing $2.5 trillion of economic damage And that number is just the last 20 years. Yeah. 25% of young adults, 50% of Americans are pre-diabetic or have full-fledged type 2 diabetes.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: The Dark Side of The Food Industry: How The Standard Diet Is Making Us Sick & Fat
As you know, this used to be called, type 2 used to be called adult onset diabetes because it was only adults that used to get it.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: The Dark Side of The Food Industry: How The Standard Diet Is Making Us Sick & Fat
Eight of the 10 leading causes of death are related to lifestyle diseases. The cancer rates are at all-time highs today. All-time highs today. This is going to be the first year that there's over 2 million cases of cancer. And the New York Times- And the younger people are getting it too. Yeah. And so the younger people, the under 35 has gone exponential.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: The Dark Side of The Food Industry: How The Standard Diet Is Making Us Sick & Fat
And there's all these articles where they talk about it being mysterious and it's mostly gastrointestinal. So it's mostly colorectal.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: The Dark Side of The Food Industry: How The Standard Diet Is Making Us Sick & Fat
We know how this works. And yet we're still doing it. And then the part that really terrifies me, which Callie Means has been talking about and has become a dear friend, is on the fertility stuff. Oh, yeah. Right? Sperm counts are down 50%. Yeah, you said a podcast on that. Yeah. So the whole fertility thing is terrifying.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: The Dark Side of The Food Industry: How The Standard Diet Is Making Us Sick & Fat
Really strange. And then the final part, which I don't want to gloss over, suicide rates. are at all-time highs. And obviously we know about the mental health epidemic, but what I think a lot of people don't know, and this has been scientifically shown, loneliness is the greatest predictor of early death. In fact, there was a study that came out out of Yale.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: The Dark Side of The Food Industry: How The Standard Diet Is Making Us Sick & Fat
15 cigarettes a day. Oh, 15.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: The Dark Side of The Food Industry: How The Standard Diet Is Making Us Sick & Fat
Yeah. Yeah, but that's still crazy. I mean, 15 cigarettes a day is the comparable mortality risk of being lonely. And this is the first time in recorded human history where lifespans are falling.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: The Dark Side of The Food Industry: How The Standard Diet Is Making Us Sick & Fat
And yet, and this is the part that's crazy, and this is why I say we have to wake up. And yet, we are the most- Wake the F up, you mean. Yes, wake the F up. We are the most technologically advanced we've ever been in human history, right? We technically know more, and I put in quotes, know. We know more than we ever have in human history. More information, but not necessarily knowledge.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: The Dark Side of The Food Industry: How The Standard Diet Is Making Us Sick & Fat
We exercise more than we ever have. And we spend more now on healthcare per person than we do on food. And so the amount we're spending and the amount of quote technological progress we're doing is going up and up and up. And the objective metrics of all these things are getting worse. They're not only not staying the same, they're getting worse.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: The Dark Side of The Food Industry: How The Standard Diet Is Making Us Sick & Fat
And if you said to anybody, the more you spend on something, the worse it gets, they would say, Stop it. Like, what are you doing? Exactly. And, you know, Einstein has this famous quote, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: The Dark Side of The Food Industry: How The Standard Diet Is Making Us Sick & Fat
And here we are as supposedly the greatest scientific civilization in history, and we're the sickest we've ever been.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: The Dark Side of The Food Industry: How The Standard Diet Is Making Us Sick & Fat
Yeah. Well, the example I also give to some people And then I'll get to kind of how I think we got here. But the example I give to people is if you had an ant farm, right? And, you know, in my class, in one of my elementary school classes, we had one of those ant farms where you could see with the glass, you could see the ants and they're making all their holes and they're making little things.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: The Dark Side of The Food Industry: How The Standard Diet Is Making Us Sick & Fat
You know, for the typical ant, their lifespan's four weeks, right? Yeah. And if you were watching an ant farm and 50 years is, you know, a little bit more than half of the average human lifespan. Yeah. Which feels like a lot to us. But if you were watching an ant farm and in two weeks time, which is half of their lifespan, you saw like a bunch of them dying.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: The Dark Side of The Food Industry: How The Standard Diet Is Making Us Sick & Fat
You saw massive destruction of what's happening inside there.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: The Dark Side of The Food Industry: How The Standard Diet Is Making Us Sick & Fat
You would quickly look at that ant farm and go, oh my God, what the hell's going on? We got to change this.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: The Dark Side of The Food Industry: How The Standard Diet Is Making Us Sick & Fat
And because it's a little bit slower for us, and because it's... I think this is the... Al Gore talked about the inconvenient truth of global warming. This metacrisis, which includes planetary health, is so inconvenient to deal with because it means we have to look in the mirror, we have to wake up, we have to get off of our hamster wheel. And look, everybody has... regular life.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: The Dark Side of The Food Industry: How The Standard Diet Is Making Us Sick & Fat
You have families, you have jobs, you have distractions like TV and Netflix and social media. And to look at this in the mirror and say, wait a minute, every day that goes by, we're getting worse.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: The Dark Side of The Food Industry: How The Standard Diet Is Making Us Sick & Fat
Yeah, I think it's not just food. I really want to make sure I also emphasize the mental health component because it goes both ways, right? Bad food leads to poor mental health, but then poor mental health also leads to bad physical health. Yeah, it's bi-directional. Yeah, it's the cycle. And I do believe there's a happy ending to this.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: The Dark Side of The Food Industry: How The Standard Diet Is Making Us Sick & Fat
This is very depressing, so don't worry. We're going to get to the happy ending of how I think we can fix this. When I was immersed in public companies and I was immersed in studying these companies and I was in, you know, I had the good fortune of being inside of boardrooms and the good fortune of being in some D.C.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: The Dark Side of The Food Industry: How The Standard Diet Is Making Us Sick & Fat
policy meetings with public companies and politicians to sort of see how these decisions get made. And I think most of it. came with good intentions. I don't think everybody is malicious. I think there's some malicious people out there and there's some people and we can get to some of the big food companies that I think are still knowingly poisoning people.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: The Dark Side of The Food Industry: How The Standard Diet Is Making Us Sick & Fat
Yeah.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: The Dark Side of The Food Industry: How The Standard Diet Is Making Us Sick & Fat
But I want to use like McDonald's as an interesting kind of example of how something can start off with good intentions and then we don't consider the downstream externalities. Yeah. McDonald's started close to 80 years ago. It was a burger shack. It was in the 40s. And back in the 40s, they got their beef from a farm.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: The Dark Side of The Food Industry: How The Standard Diet Is Making Us Sick & Fat
It was undoubtedly grass-fed, grass-finished beef because that's the only way they did cows back then. The potatoes were definitely organic. They had no pesticides or chemicals or synthetic burden like we have today. They were deep frying it in tallow, in beef tallow. And it probably wasn't that bad for you.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: The Dark Side of The Food Industry: How The Standard Diet Is Making Us Sick & Fat
in the grand scheme of things, and I often point to when people don't believe this, watch some movies from the 1970s. And if you watch movies from the 70s, you'll notice, and I'm not talking about the main actors, I'm talking about all the people in the background of all these movies, you'll notice that very few people were overweight.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: The Dark Side of The Food Industry: How The Standard Diet Is Making Us Sick & Fat
People think like, well, the only way you can look fit and healthy right now is you have to just eat salads. But I would point out that in the 70s, and you know this, and you're older than I am, But people ate burgers and people ate fries and people ate pizza and people ate ice cream and people drank milkshakes. And yet they were still looking like that.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: The Dark Side of The Food Industry: How The Standard Diet Is Making Us Sick & Fat
So it's not just that it was junk food, right? It's what was in the food.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: The Dark Side of The Food Industry: How The Standard Diet Is Making Us Sick & Fat
And so what happened with McDonald's is they had this mousetrap and they created a product that everyone wanted. And America in particular, but I'd say all of developing countries are based on consumption.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: The Dark Side of The Food Industry: How The Standard Diet Is Making Us Sick & Fat
And McDonald's had something that people wanted more of. And so capital came into it. Yeah. And people are saying, hey, let's grow this. How do we turn McDonald's from a $100,000 company, $100,000 company to what today is a $200 billion company? Unbelievable.
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And the only way to do that, and the capital markets and particularly the public markets have historically revolved around one variable, which is profit, which is how do we maximize profit?
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And so what happened with McDonald's over time, and if you follow the trajectory, is they had to figure out how do we make our burger the same in New York City as it is in Paris, as it is in London, as it is in Tokyo? And how do we make our fries the same? And how do we make everything the same? And we took this sort of Henry Ford approach of assembly line.
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Now with technology and things like semiconductors, it's much easier to do that in software. But with food, which is naturally an organic product, not homogenous concept and it has natural variability, you have to, to do it, you have to homogenize the food and you have to widgetize the food. You literally have to say, how do we turn things like animals and plants into widgets?
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And the only way that we have figured out how to do it, and we did it, was with pure science and how do we make more things synthetic and how do we take out the variability that naturally exists in food?
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If you look at the ingredient label of American french fries at McDonald's, there's 19 ingredients in it. And we'll come back to this with the Kellogg letter, but in Europe, it's four ingredients. Yeah. but here it's 19.
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If you sort of take that and you just see like, okay, more money keeps coming in, it's working, it's working, more profits, more profits, more homogenization, more widgetizing, you can understand how we decided like, okay, to make the land more predictable, to make the animals more predictable, to make the output more predictable,
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we have to basically make everything more and more chemical, synthetic, and use the science that we developed for things like technology, we have to apply it to food. And if you go industry by industry and you take the same lens, there are a lot of companies that started with a much more, I'd say, ethical and moral approach to creating that thing. You know, early days of Lululemon, for example.
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And you take clothing, you take things like Starbucks, you take things like the cocoa industry. And every single industry has the same trajectory, which is it started off with a natural organic approach. And then to grow and grow and grow and grow, we had to widgetize and synthesize and commodify everything.
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And you didn't consider, or they didn't consider because they weren't paid to consider the externalities. And they maybe didn't even know at that time. Yeah, they definitely didn't know it at the time.
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That's right. The challenge has been, is that as we got later, call it 90s and the 2000s, when it started to become clear and these public companies started to say, hey, because there've been a handful of CEOs that said, they raised their hand and said, this stuff is poisoning people. Like we have to buy healthier products. We have to create healthier products.
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The problem though, is that when they started introducing or creating healthier products, they were inherently lower margin. And they were inherently less predictable because it was again, more natural. And this was all good when things were good,
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But when things started to, when companies started to have challenges or they started to miss their corporate earnings, they would always go back to the golden goose and say, oh, let's stop this healthier stuff because that's lower margin. We don't make as much money on it. And let's keep leaning into the stuff that we know works and people are buying.
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And it got to the point where there were certain executives that would get fired because they were trying to do the right thing. Well, Indra Nooyi, Pepsi wanted to do the right thing, and she got canned. She was the CEO of Pepsi. Indra Nooyi, greatest female CEO of all time, is on my human co-board. Yeah. And she talks about how she tried to move the Titanic. Yeah.
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You know, and you hear the stories of because of the way capitalism works, there's always people along the way who may just try to make a living. They get fired if they don't maximize profits.
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It's starting to happen. It's starting to happen. And I think it has to happen from both a top-down approach, which is regulatory, where the government says things like, you can't sell trans fats or you can't sell artificial food diets. So you don't even give them the option. Unfortunately, that is slow. That is corrupt. And you would think that's happened faster.
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And it has happened faster in other countries. where the medical system is more socialized because the governments in those places bear the brunt of sick citizens.
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Yeah, because we're spending so much money on just keeping people from dying, but they're still very sick instead of all the preventative stuff that we've talked about.
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It is existential. As you've been talking about this, metacrisis is existential. It is existential.
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I think the bad news is there's no silver bullet. But the good news is I think it's a lot of lead bullets. Shotgun. It's a lot of things. And I think there'll be some that are much more effective than others. As I said before, I think there's the top down that you mentioned, which would be regulatory, which would be things like either taxes or banning of things like artificial food dyes.
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In South America, you can't get Tony the Tiger on the cereal box anymore. They took it off, Fruit Loops. Correct. And I think the reason that we chose as our first shot across the bow, the reason we chose artificial food dyes is it's so black and white.
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There's nobody that's going to say, I would proactively feed my children a bunch of petroleum-derived chemicals over natural food colorings if given the choice. Whereas I think things like sugar, which have been around for hundreds, if not thousands of years. You shouldn't be eating petroleum products, Jason.
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I think things like sugar and sugar load and all of those issues are much more nuanced in terms of like, what's the amount? Can you do GMO, non-GMO? And so I wanted to pick something that was so objectively absurd that anybody who wasn't being paid to say it would be like, yes, I would rather feed natural food colorings to my children than synthetic petroleum-derived artificial food.
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Not a hard sell. Not a hard sell. So we have top-down. Bottom-up is the part where I think it can be the most effective the fastest. And bottom-up is the consumer. And that is them voting with their wallet. That is them boycotting. That is them signing our petition, which will be in your show notes. The point is the consumer can create rapid change if they vote with their wallet. Or their fork.
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Or their fork. And if consumers basically said, we are not going to buy this crap because we know there's a better version that you're already selling. And until you give us a better version, if Kellogg sales drop 5%, just five, it doesn't need to be 20. If it just drops 5% over the course of three quarters, they will change immediately. That's right.
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The problem with class action, and I think litigation is another course Class actions in this country take like five, 10, 15 years. There's just so much red tape and there's so much money that's gonna be lost to lawyers on both sides that I think the class action stuff can work, but I think we don't have time. We have time for that.
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The only things that we have time for are both top down, and that's why we're in touch with several attorney generals. We're in touch with many members of Congress about this. Anyone who is patriotic and likes living in this country should understand that we as Americans should get the best version of a product you already make. That's right. That should be the line.
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We should get the best version of a product you already make in another country. Period. Full stop. Yeah. It's not a hard sell. Not saying cereal is good or we should be promoting it, but if you're going to eat cereal, it shouldn't be poison. Right.
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And by the way, I think the other reason that Kellogg and the other food companies rapidly, and I mean rapidly, changed their formulation in those other countries was because they didn't want to have the warning labels on the box of cereal. That's right. They didn't want to have a cigarette warning label on their cereal. So if we required a warning label in this country,
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on the boxes of cereal, it would happen overnight.
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But the fastest way is through the consumer. The fastest way, because these companies will adapt overnight. So Kellogg agreed. They sent us a letter back. Really? Yeah. They sent us a letter back. We published this yesterday. So this is new news. Hot news. This is hot news. They agreed to meet with us. I don't know what's going to happen in the meeting. I don't want to make any promises.
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I used to be a shareholder activist. I've done this many times. And what I will say, and I hope Kellogg is listening to this, I am not out for blood. I am out for change. And so I'm not looking to publicly humiliate them. What my hope is, is that there's a bunch of parents in this room who recognize that they wouldn't voluntarily feed their kids all these artificial food dyes.
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And then they make the change and they come out and they say, and I'll help them do it. I will help them change their ways and be an ally, ironically. And my hope is that if they do this, that the public gives them credit. And the best thing that could happen is that sales go up.
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The best thing that could happen is that the stock goes up on them making this change, because if the stock goes up, revenue, meaning the sales go up, then it will give a pass to all of the other companies who are petrified of harming their margins. And they'll say, wow. We can change too.
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The public actually is rewarding us for being responsible because I think the fundamental problem, Mark, and this is what I'm trying to do with Humanco and True Food Kitchen and all of our related businesses under the Humanco umbrella, is I think the fundamental problem is up until now, companies have been rewarded for taking shortcuts, financially speaking.
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They have been rewarded for making more money at the expense of people. And if we can show, whether it's through my businesses or other businesses, if we can show- There's another way. If we can show the world that you can have a successful business that heals people. You can do good and do well.
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If you can show that you can actually have a successful company that employs people, that can pay their bills and feed their families by making the world better and healing people, we will start seeing a lot of companies that are starting to do it right because they're getting rewarded for doing it. That's right.
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So I'm on the edge of my seat. Thank you, Mark. And I just want to leave your listeners with one final point about up until now, as companies have tried to scale, particularly in food, more scale has meant more problems for the world, for people and mental health in general. And I believe it's possible to scale where things get better as you scale instead of things get worse as you scale.
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And that is the fundamental problem we all need to help with. And the more people support companies that are doing it right and are willing to pay a little bit more for better practices, better ingredients and better integrity, The more that those companies succeed, the more this is going to move.
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That's right. Yeah, it used to be the same.
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Thank you for having me. And please support the Kellogg's Initiative. Sign the petition. It's in the show notes. Sign the petition and boycott their food until they make their changes. Amen. All right. Thank you. Thanks, Jason.
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Yes. Yes. Yes. Well, I look, thanks for having me, Mark. And, um, you know, as a little background, you know, you were one of my early inspirations, um, which I'll get to in my, in my life story. It's, um, it's kind of a crazy story. Uh, and the, the whole East West books thing and the spirituality of that store, uh, is Swami Rama, the guy who could put like needles through his arm.
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I mean, it's, it's, we'll come back to how, how crazy that is.
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I didn't know that.
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It really is karmic. I mean, I have the chills because I totally forgot about the East West bookstore and the spiritual connection.
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Yeah. Yeah, we'll come back to that. My background and my kind of personal story, I think, is a cautionary tale and it's also a metaphor for what's happened to modern society. You know, I had a pretty meteoric ascent starting in college. where I was sort of your classic overachiever. I went to Wharton undergrad business school. I was one of the top students.
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I was a division one academic All-American athlete. And I did everything that I thought you're supposed to do as sort of a overachieving American. And all I wanted to do was be very accomplished. And When I got out of college, I had this really coveted job. I went straight to a hedge fund in 1998, which was sort of a fledgling industry.
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I got so focused on just winning and accomplishing and did extremely well in my first couple of years there, financially speaking. And I got every accolade and every achievement you could get. I was made the youngest partner in history of my firm. And so on the surface, everything looked like life was going great.
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And a couple years into my working, I started getting sick. And at the time, I kind of ignored it. And I was so focused on achievement, achievement, achievement, more, more, more, more in terms of I taught myself how to speed read. I taught myself how to micro-nap. I started, yeah, really, I was reading.
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Yeah, I was reading obscure stuff from the military on how to be even more productive. Like this was really early biohacking stuff. But while I was doing it, I started viewing the things that I think make humans thrive, I started viewing those things as unnecessary. So I started giving up friends and connection. And I started giving up exercise.
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And I started optimizing my day in terms of hour blocks. And I was getting more and more done, and I was reading more, and I was doing more of my job. And everyone around me thought I was like this superhuman. And meanwhile, quietly, I was getting more and more sick. And eventually, I started to really notice it. My hair started falling out in clumps. I had psoriasis all over my arms and my body.
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I was having massive amounts of brain fog and then I was still ignoring it. And then my vision started to go and I started seeing double. And I went to multiple ophthalmologists and eventually was diagnosed with a degenerative eye disease for which there's no cure. And it was so progressed by the time I went in. I was 23 at the time. They said I would be fully blind by the age of 30. Wow.
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And there was no hope or cure other than potentially a corneal transplant, which was pretty risky at the time. I fell into a deep, dark depression. I was very ashamed of my health because on the surface, I look like this pinnacle of success. Right. And on the inside, I was falling apart. Yeah.
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And I decided to try to take matters in my own hands because the Western medicine doctor said, here's a pill for this, here's a pill for this, here's a pill for this. Oh, and by the way, your eye disease, there's no cure for it, and you're just going to go blind and deal with it.
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I decided... And it was kind of this almost divine inspiration to start looking in alternative channels for maybe there's other ways I could heal myself. And I started doing a lot of research on indigenous people, on ancestral diets. And I stumbled upon a couple like OG functional medicine people in some of the really early books like yours and Dr. Andrew Weil.
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And those were kind of some of the people that I found. And I had this sort of naive hypothesis, which was based on some stuff that I found that connected atopic skin diseases like psoriasis to my eye disease.
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It's all autoimmune. Yeah, and of course, every doctor I saw said, oh, this disease is unrelated to this disease, is unrelated to this disease.
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But back in, you know, this is in the year 2001, they didn't really talk about food as medicine. They certainly didn't talk about functional medicine. And so I decided to go on this path of seeing if I could reverse my skin disease, which was clearly inflammation through diet and lifestyle.
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And I told my ophthalmologist, I said, hey, you know, maybe if I can make my skin disease go away, maybe my eye disease will go away. Yeah, and of course is sort of an arrogant Park Avenue ophthalmologist.
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Yeah said that'll never work Yeah, there's no cure, you know do whatever you want, you know, I decided don't confuse me with the fact my man So I I went on an extremely restricted diet as a 23 year old single guy in New York City I gave up alcohol I gave up caffeine which ironically were the two hardest things for me to give up yes as as someone back then when it was sort of work hard play hard and
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I just tried to experiment. I gave up processed food. I gave up refined sugar. I gave up gluten. I gave up dairy. But most importantly, I gave up grains. Most importantly, I gave up the hyper-processed garbage. And I was eating terribly at the time. And I wasn't exercising. And I wasn't socializing. And I wasn't sleeping well. And I was very isolated.
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And I noticed after a few weeks of this, my psoriasis started going away. And my hair stopped falling out. Yeah. I noticed anecdotally my vision was getting better and I went in for a checkup with my doctor, you know, maybe six weeks in and I told him about this and he again said, that's impossible. It's not working. Don't, you know, don't even try. But I was like, look, I feel better.
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I'm going to keep going.
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And thankfully,
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Yeah. And then I did this for months and everything went away and I noticed I could see clearly again. And thankfully, there was an objective test for my eye disease that didn't require subjectivity where they actually measure the surface area of your cornea and they could see if you have the disease or not, objectively speaking. And I went in and I said, I can see clearly.
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They make a Canadian version of Froot Loops that they undoubtedly produce in this country, in the US. They already make it and they already have the formulation for it here and they ship it up to Canada. And yet the one that they sell here has red 40, yellow five, yellow six, blue one, and BHT. All of those ingredients are not included in their international version of Froot Loops.
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And he said, well, we'll give you the test. And he gave me the test and my disease was gone. Unbelievable. Well, not really. Very believable. Well, the look on his face was shock, and he actually called his colleague in. I'll never forget this day. It's one of the most important days of my life. Wow. He called in his colleague, and they're whispering, but I could hear them whispering. Yeah.
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And he's like, you got to look at this. He goes, I must have misdiagnosed him. This is impossible.
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And then he came over to me and he goes, I must have misdiagnosed you. There's no cure for this disease. This is the first time we've ever seen this disease reversed. And I remember walking out of the doctor's office and I remember thinking, my life is going to be forever changed. And I'm no longer going to respect the Western medicine dogma.
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And I'm going to go with my gut and my heart when things feel wrong. And I kind of knew instinctively that my four or five diseases that I was diagnosed with were all related. And doctors didn't think that. And from that moment on, I decided that I was going to spend a significant portion of my time and resources and philanthropy to waking up the American public
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because I viewed myself as a canary in the coal mine of what was happening to me is probably happening to other people. And obviously since then, it's gotten way worse in the last 22 years.
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I mean, I remember being doing this since the 90s and it was bad then and now it's like unbelievably worse. Yeah. And what happened was like a lot of my research and a lot of what I believe cured me was respecting human evolution and respecting kind of the way that people in the blue zones live and respecting the way that indigenous people live because I remember reading studies back then.
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You mean they're not eating Fruit Loops? Yeah, they're not eating Fruit Loops. But I remember seeing the studies how when people would go to these various indigenous communities, they had no chronic disease, they had no obesity, they had no heart disease. They had no allergies. They had no autism. They had no ADHD.
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And I remember because back then there was still, and still now, there was still this perception of, oh, it has to be just fruits and vegetables or it has to be just this. And what was so intriguing to me was these different indigenous peoples all over the world. Some were in Arctic areas and they were eating whale blubber and pure meat. Some were like the Maasai where they're drinking cow blood.
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Some were tribes that were eating fruits and vegetables and nuts. And the only common theme across all of these indigenous peoples was that they were eating unprocessed, whole things that were as close to the earth as possible. Not too complicated. Not too complicated.
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And that led many, many years later where I was living a much more kind of clean lifestyle where my brother-in-law, Jordan Brown, my wife's brother, he started reading some of the same books that I was reading. He was not sick, thankfully, like I was. but one of the first books he read was the ultra mind solution. One of your early books. Yeah.
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Uh, and he started trying these kinds of methods and he noticed how much better he looked and how much better he felt and how much better he operated and how much better he slept. Yeah. And he came to me one day and at this point I was, you know, higher up in my, in my field, but I was still in the hedge fund business. And he said, there's no place that we can eat
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that has these kind of guardrails that you have done and that I'm now doing. And wouldn't it be great if there was this oasis, this place in New York City where people could come in and everything in here was the manifestation of these principles.