Michael: My guest today is Dr. Marion Nestle. Marion is Paulette Goddard Professor of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health, Emerita, at New York University, which she chaired for 15 years. She is also Visiting Professor of Nutritional Sciences at Cornell. Marion earned a Ph.D. in molecular biology and a Master’s in public health nutrition from the University of California at Berkeley, and she has been awarded honorary degrees from other universities as well. Last year she was awarded the Edinburgh Medal for science and society. And Marion’s research focuses on scientific and socioeconomic influences on food choice, obesity, and food safety, emphasizing the role of food marketing and food politics. So, thank you for joining me Marion. You’ve accomplished so much in your career. I read your biography — beautifully written, and a really honest telling of your life story. So, before we get into the kind-of nitty-gritty questions, I just wanted you to talk a little bit about some of the key points in your life and some things that you’ve done in your career that you’ve been most proud of.

Marion: Well, I called the Memoir my first work of fiction, because my memory isn’t any better than anybody else’s… but it’s kind-of how I remember it and how I felt about it. And the few times that I was able to do fact-checking, I was kind-of shocked by what the reality was, but I did the best I could with it. As I tell the story in the book, I grew up in a very poor family and ended up studying science, [and] was handed a nutrition course to teach. And that was life-changing because it was like falling in love. I just loved the way…. I was trained as a scientist. My degree is in molecular biology. And I just loved the way that people relate to food and nutrition. Everybody eats, and people are really excited about what they learn about it. And it was very gratifying to switch to teaching that. I guess, the other turning point was when I went to a meeting of the at the National Cancer Institute in the early 1990s. It was a meeting on smoking and cancer and diet in cancer, and I certainly knew that cigarettes caused cancer, and I knew that cigarette companies marketed to children, but I had never paid any attention to it whatsoever. Cigarette marketing was so much a part of the landscape, it was just really easy to ignore. It was just kind-of there. I paid no attention to it, and I walked out of that meeting thinking: “Hmmmm….. We should be doing this for Coca-Cola.” Because I had been going to meetings of nutritionists about childhood obesity and the rising prevalence of obesity, and at those meetings, everybody talked about: “What are we going to do to get mothers to feed their children better?” Nobody at those meetings was saying, “What are we going to do to get the food industry to stop marketing junk foods to our kids?” And so, that’s what happened. I started talking about food companies marketing junk food to our kids, writing about it, and then that led to the first of the books since then: the Food Politics and the subsequent books.

Michael: You have a real sort-of grit that’s woven through your life, and in your memoir, you talk a lot about not just growing up and what that was like, but the sexism you faced in academia and in the workplace. And yet, you found a way to persevere through all that and have an extremely accomplished life. You’ve influenced so many people and inspired so many people and made a really positive change in the food system. I know it’s a daunting task that’s… I mean, it’s a little unbearable to think about sometimes all the things that we face. And so, what advice would you give to people? Because all those problems still exist to some degree, right? They haven’t gone away. So, for people facing those kinds of challenges, how would you advise them?

Marion: Well, I never felt that I was particularly influential. I don’t think the food system has changed nearly enough… according to the way I would like it to change. And the perseverance: a lot of it was, I didn’t have any choice. I had kids to raise, and a family to deal with, and responsibilities that I took very seriously. And I did what I could, given the circumstance. I tried to… in every situation, I tried to make the best of whatever the circumstances were. And I should say that the memoir has been out for about a year, and people in my generation who’ve read it all had identical experiences. That was the way the world was, and it’s hard to explain to younger women what it was like for women in those days. When…. I went to college during the lockout periods when you had to be in at ten at night. And, certainly, in my various jobs it was assumed that women would be paid a lot less than men. And it was assumed that you just didn’t take women very seriously. So, that was normal; and as women, we grew up in that situation. It was normal, and anything else was impossible to even think about. Which is why the women’s movement — the dawn of the women’s movement — had such an enormous impact on so many of us. When Betty Friedan’s book came out in 1963, I was one of the people whose life was changed by it. It was the first time anybody had looked at… well it wasn’t the first, but it was the first American look at what life was like for postwar American women, and [it] didn’t put it in a very favorable light at all. And what she was writing about was so accurately descriptive of what my life was like and lots of other women’s lives were like, that it was life-changing, and I give her a lot of credit for that. The book came out in 1963, I had two small children…. Wow, there I was.

Michael: I remember you telling a story when you were teaching that there was someone who basically had the same position as you making $12,000, and you were making $8,000. And what you did to… which took a long time for you a lot of, again, perseverance for you to get the university to finally grant you the salary and the title that you deserved.

Marion: Yeah; that’s one of my favorite stories because of the way I found out about it. I was teaching at Brandeis University, and I was being paid $8,000 a year as a lecturer — which was not enough money to live on in my case (I had two small children), and I was living with somebody, but not married at the time. And I got a call one night from a friend — an old friend — who was in a women’s consciousness raising group in Boston, and she said, “Guess what my group talked about last night?” And she said, “We talked about this new guy who came in. We talked about his salary at Brandeis.” Because his girlfriend was in the group, and she was horrified that he was paid so much more and had been told by the department chair under no circumstances was he ever to talk about it because they didn’t want me to find out. So, the cat was out of the bag. The group had decided that this was something I should be told, and I thought it was a great gift, because we were doing exactly the same job. Exactly the same job. And his pay was considerably higher than mine, and I wanted that money. I really needed it. And I thought it was an airtight case, and it was a time when everybody was looking at inequities in women’s salaries, and I was pretty sure that if I took this to the affirmative action committee at Brandeis that I’d win. I was sure I was going to win. And, therefore, I could afford to be patient. It took a year. It took a year, and it was a difficult year. But I never lost my temper; I never raised my voice. I just kept saying over and over and over again, “I really don’t want to have to take this to the affirmative action committee. I really don’t want to have to take this to court.” Which I meant absolutely sincerely. I didn’t want to do either of those things, and I never had to. Michael: That’s a great story. So, are there other decisions that you made in your career that… you left a few opportunities, and you moved from California. You kind-of moved back and forth from the east coast to the west coast. Were there choices that you made that were really important in terms of the direction of your career?

Marion: Well; I mean, I think the big decision was to accompany my husband at the time to UC San Francisco, where he had a really important job, and I was a “trailing spouse.” I had another option that I considered, but it required commuting; and since the children were mine and were my primary responsibility, I didn’t think I could be that far away from them. And so, I took the job at the University of UC San Francisco and held it as a trailing spouse for eight years, when it all fell apart… and then for another couple of years. But it was a classic trailing spouse position; and the miracle was… or the really surprising thing about it was not that I ended up getting fired, which I did, but that I held it as long I did was kind of amazing. But it was, you know… a lot of very interesting things happened. I had a lot of really good experiences. I learned a lot about nutrition and medical practice. Wrote a book about it… that was good. I started out with the most gorgeous office I’ve ever had. It was… I had a very fancy title that meant absolutely nothing. I was Associate Dean for Human Biology Programs they didn’t exist. And that office had a view halfway up the California coast. It was the most breathtaking view you could ever imagine. And when things started to fall apart, I got moved into a basement office with no view. And no window.

Michael: You’ve written or co-written like 15 books now, is that right?

Marion: Yeah.

Michael: Ad I remember you talking in one of your books (probably your memoir) about the story when you got on Hillary Clinton’s email… the DC Leaks [web site] with Coca-Cola…. kind-of, “We’d better keep our eye on her!”

Marion: Oh, yeah. That was absolutely amazing. When Hillary Clinton’s emails were leaked during the election campaign, somebody called me… I guess a couple people called me… and said, “Marion, you’re in the emails.” I thought, “What am I doing in the emails for Hillary Clinton’s election?” I couldn’t believe it, but it turned out she had somebody working with her on her campaign who was also a consultant for Coca-Cola, and when whoever got those emails got the emails, they got all of those and it turned out that I had given a lecture in Australia at the very time I was meeting the people we were talking about earlier. And there had been somebody from Coca-Cola at my talk. And I remembered that somebody said, “Marion, there’s somebody from Coca-Cola here. Do you care?” “No. absolutely not! I’m happy to have them.” And that person had taken notes on my talk — very good ones, actually — and passed those notes up the chain of command. And they ended up with this woman who was working with Hillary Clinton and also dealing with Coca-Cola at the same time. I was astounded.

Michael: Yeah; it’s a crazy story. And you were a policy adviser in Washington for a while. What was it like working with the industry lobbyists?”

Marion: I went to Washington to be the editor of what turned out to be the Surgeon General’s report on nutrition and health, which came out in 1988. This is a very old story, and I tell the story in Food Politics about how I’m… first day on the job I was told that no matter what the research showed, the Surgeon General’s report would never suggest eating less meat or eating less of any other agricultural commodity, because that would make the Department of Agriculture — which, in a sense, is controlled by the meat industry and some of the others — it would make the Department of Agriculture upset, and they would go to Congress and the Surgeon General’s report would never come out. And this was my first day on the job, and I had just burned bridges in California. I’d given up my home, and I’d left my adult children, and I’d moved to Washington. I was kind of stuck with the job. I mean, sometimes I felt I should have walked out that day, but I stayed with it, and the report came out, but it was a real education for me. I didn’t even know what I didn’t know about how politics worked, and every day was a steep learning curve. I just never stopped being shocked by the minutia of concerns about how politics would work. I was in trouble all the time. I was just always saying things that I wasn’t supposed to say and going to meetings I wasn’t supposed to be going to, and that sort of thing. And, I just never could get over what it meant to be nonpartisan in that situation as a staff member in a federal agency. I was expected to be nonpartisan, and I should mention it was during the Reagan Administration. So — I spent two years in the Reagan Administration as a policy advisor, but it was an invaluable experience, and anybody who asks whether they should do one of these short-term things in the government, I say: “Absolutely! You don’t even know what you’re going to learn. It’ll be so absolutely amazing.” And then, I did things that I would never have had the chance to do otherwise, like write speeches for other people and maneuver what was… turned out to be just an enormously, politically sensitive report… to the extent it was maneuverable.

Michael: The food system, as you know, is very broken, and it’s so influenced by industry. And over the years… I mean, you tell stories — in the, I think, the early 90s, it was — when these companies basically got more and more control over the regulation (or non-regulation) of both the food system and the advertising for food and also for supplements, which are basically completely unregulated — even for safety, which is just crazy. So,  this is one of these areas where there’s… you seem to have a philosophy — and correct me if I’m wrong — that industry… it’s kind-of their job to make money, right? And so, where we really need to work is in policy and influencing the government. So that — their job is to look out for the welfare of people.

Marion: In an ideal system that’s how it would work. I mean, you cannot expect… I mean the thing I’m always saying is that the food industry is not a Social Service Agency. It’s not a public health agency. Food companies are businesses with stockholders. Their job is to make money for stockholders… that’s all they care about. It’s their primary goal; they’ll do anything to achieve that goal. And if doing something for public health or if doing something for the communities that they’re in doesn’t foster an increase in profits, they’re really not going to do it because their stockholders won’t let them. And I’ve heard this stated explicitly. I once… one of the things that really bothers me is that food companies market to children. They market foods to children, and they do it… they’re very, very good at it. And I once went to a meeting at the White House during the Obama era — on marketing to children — where Michelle Obama made an absolutely stunning speech, telling the food industry people who were there that we really had to stop for ethical reasons, for moral reasons, they had to stop. And afterwards, we broke up into groups, and I was in a group with food industry executives, and one of them said, “We would love to stop marketing to children. We think it’s wrong, but we can’t stop. Our stockholders won’t let us.” Just stated as boldly as that. And so, when I wrote Food Politics, which came out in 2002, I thought I was just stating the obvious. I was just describing what the food industry does: to sell products in situations in which the product may not be good for you. Or, in the case of supplements, there’s very little regulation. And how the supplement industry got rid of the regulation, I thought was a story worth telling. I talk a lot about marketing to children. And then, in subsequent books, I discuss other kinds of things. When I did a book called Unsavory Truth about how food companies skew the science of what we eat, how they fund research, and are still funding research. I write a daily blog five times a week. And every day… every week on Monday, I post another industry-funded study, each one more hilarious than the next… because you could tell from the title who paid for it. I think you should be able to tell from the title of the study who paid for it, and anybody can do it. And I know that because people send me these things all the time. I looked at the title of this study, and I knew somebody… I could tell right away who must have paid for it. I mean… so, there’s something wrong with that, but we have a government that’s captured by corporations, and the government agencies are frightened to stand up to corporations. And we see the effects of that in climate change. That’s a corporate issue. The oil industry has known forever that that burning fossil fuels was going to do exactly what it’s doing. They just didn’t realize it was going to happen so fast. And you can do that with any kind of corporation. And food corporations are no different, even though they make products that we love — that we truly love. If you…. What I’m interested in looking at now is the concept of ultra-processed foods, which is a relatively new way of describing junk foods. And the industry pushback on that concept is absolutely extraordinary. In every possible way in which food companies can undermine the concept, discredit it, say the science isn’t there, it’s not very well defined…. I mean there’s a whole long list of things that they say… “it gets rid of nutritious product products” — I mean, none of that stuff is really true. But all they have to do is cast doubt and then people don’t believe it and the government won’t act on it. And that’s what we’re seeing with the dietary guidelines. I mean, it’s going to be very interesting to see how that comes out, but it looks to me like the dietary guidelines won’t say anything about ultra-processed foods. Or at least say very little.

Michael: It seems like industry’s gotten very good… there was a book a while ago I read… The Merchants of Doubt, which talks about these people who are basically paid to cast doubt on science; and it’s a very small group of people, but it they make it seem like it’s a very large group of people.

Marion: They’re very good at it.

Michael: Right so there’s all kinds of —

Marion: And they get paid to do it! And the problem is that food advocates don’t get paid, so that’s a problem.

Michael: Yeah; and the farmers who are who are producing vegetables don’t have the budgets that Kraft does, for example, or Coke. And then you also talked about research, and so much research is funded by Industry. And I know you talk a lot also about how even a very small act like giving a doctor a prescription pad and a pen influences what they’re recommending.

Marion: The doctors not realizing it.

Michael: Right.

Marion: I mean, the thing about industry influences is that the recipients don’t realize it. They don’t recognize it. That makes it very difficult to deal with.

Michael: And I think another part of the problem is that it’s so hard to get funds for research, and so good, ethical scientists out there are kind-of stuck because they need the funds and so they get… a lot of research is funded by industry. And I think this has gotten a lot better in terms of reporting who is funding the research, but still they’re going to be influenced. And you… I don’t remember what the statistics are, but you report on this number of studies that are done and how many of them are positive for the thing that the industry is —

Marion: Oh, that was something I did on my blog. I collected industry funded studies that I ran across for a year. That’s a convenient sample. And found at the end of a year I had 158 studies and 146 of them had results that were that favored the sponsor’s interest — even though I begged readers of my blog to send me studies that were funded by industry that had negative results. That’s an exaggerated result because it wasn’t a controlled, scientific experiment. And what it really said was it’s much easier to find industry-funded studies with results that favor the sponsor than it is to find the opposite. The others are harder to find, but they do exist.

Michael: But was that research funded by industry? No, I’m just kidding.

Marion: Oh, my research? No, no, no, no… I don’t take industry money. Well, I do take industry money, but I give it away. I don’t keep it. And the… no that was University… my University salary paid for that.

Michael: Yeah; but, I mean… it was interesting nonetheless. Just… I mean, I think that whether it was scientifically done or not, I think just knowing the influence. And as you say, the scientists are like, “Oh; there’s no way I’m influenced by this.” But they are without realizing it. And so…

Marion: Yeah; I mean, what I hear all the time is, “Science is science. Why aren’t you criticizing the science? And if there’s nothing wrong with the science, what’s wrong? Who cares who funds it?” Well, there’s unfortunately a great deal of evidence on industry funding, mainly through the chemical, cigarette, oil, and pharmaceutical drug industry that shows — without question — that industry funding influences outcome. And I was able to find a few studies that did that for food: the most obvious being Coca-Cola. But there are others, and the same kind of research on the effects of Industry funding (what’s called “the funding effect”) shows the same kind of thing that it does… that happens in other industries. There’s no reason to think that the food industry is any different, which is what’s hard for a lot of people to see. Because we love the products that the food industry produces, so we’re favorably inclined to appreciate what the food industry does, and there’s a lot of talk about how you can’t regulate the food industry because we need what they produce, and what are we going to do if they stop producing it? And that kind of thing. You’ll eat something else! There’s plenty to eat.

Michael: Yeah. I mean, like half of our diet, I think, is highly processed food. And you point out, also, that the US produces like twice as much food per capita as we need. And not all that food is eaten, but it’s there. And so that’s part of the problem. And then there are a lot of people who don’t have access to good food, which is a real problem.

Marion: Well, the reason that people don’t have access to food is it’s expensive, and they don’t have enough money. The price of basic food commodities has gone up much, much less. I mean, the price of all foods has gone up, but the price of fruits and vegetables is much, much higher than the price of ultra-processed junk foods. The cost of them has gone up much, much less. And a lot of that has to do with government policies that don’t do anything for the producers of food for people. The subsidies go to food for animals, which is an indirect way of feeding people. Or now, we’re growing all this corn for ethanol. I mean, that’s the most amazing thing. I’ve remember… 40 to 45%! Half of the corn that’s grown in the United States is being used to fuel automobiles! I don’t think this is a good idea. The amount of energy that you get out of corn is… to make ethanol… is such a tiny fraction more. It’s not worth it from an energetic standpoint. It may be better to burn that than other kinds of fuel, but it’s not a good use of corn, and it has very negative effects because it encourages producers to produce corn in places where it shouldn’t be grown because there’s not enough water. I’ve enjoyed talking to you, I really have!

Michael: Well, likewise. I’m really thrilled to get a chance to chat a little bit….