Michael: My guest today is Dr Marion Nestle. Marian joined us a few weeks ago, and we had a really interesting conversation, so I appreciate you coming back and joining me again.

Marion: I thought it was an interesting conversation too, so I’m happy to be back.

Michael: Last time we talked a little bit about how the food industry was able to change how the government makes recommendations and regulations and also influences research outcomes, and I wanted to talk a little bit more about some of the strategies that the food industry has taken over the years and how they make it more about the ingredients that are in food. We don’t eat individual ingredients, right? We’re eating the food as a whole.

Marion: Well, the food industry follows what’s referred to as the Playbook, which is the set of strategies that the tobacco industry used to divert people from thinking about cigarette smoking as a cause of lung cancer and the strategy’s main goal was to cast doubt on the research, which they were able to do very successfully. So, it took 50 years before real regulation came in to help people stop smoking cigarettes. They were really successful at it, and that Playbook has been picked up by every other industry that sells products that might not be ideal for people’s health. The main research has been done by the pharmaceutical drug industry as a sales technique. And research — there’s 50 years of research on the drug industry’s ability to influence sales of prescription drugs.

Michael: So, you know, part of the strategy also is about shifting the responsibility from the food industry — and from the government as well — to making it a personal choice, right?

Marion: Oh, always! “We’re not holding a gun up to your head forcing you to buy our products. It’s entirely up to you! We’re just offering you a choice!” And that’s part of the Playbook strategy. The cigarette industry wasn’t forcing people to smoke, it was just putting billions of dollars into advertising and marketing, and the food industry does much of the same. And again, it’s not that food industry executives are sitting around a table saying, “How do we make Americans fat?” That’s not what they’re talking about. They’re just trying to sell products in an extremely competitive food environment, and their job is to sell more products and to produce returns for stockholders. And that’s what they’re about. Once you understand that, everything that happens makes perfect sense.

Michael: There’s obviously a lot of good people who work in the food industry, and I think it’s frustrating for them — especially, there are a lot of young people who really want to go in and try to make a difference and are very set on doing so. And then they get into the system that, I think, is really difficult to manage, and to actually have an influence on what… once you get into the inside of it.

Marion: Yeah; I think, you know, people who work with sustainability officers at food corporations say they they’re the unhappiest people they’ve ever met, because anything that will reduce… that threatens to reduce sales or profits is something that the companies just simply cannot tolerate. They can’t allow it because their stockholders will be upset. And we have many examples of this. PepsiCo, for example, had an enormous initiative: it was going to be a wellness company. Well, the wellness products didn’t sell as well as the full-sugar sodas, and the stockholders got very cross. And before long, Pepsi was just back to what doing what it had always been doing. And efforts to try to get corporations to produce healthier products, to reformulate, to make them healthier, and to take actions that will reduce their impact on the environment are fine as long as they increase sales. If they just… if they decrease sales, they can’t do them. So, this makes people who have jobs with these companies have to make compromises, and to the extent that the compromises make them miserable, they have to leave and take other jobs. And my experience with students in department who have gone to work with food companies with the idea that they would change the companies from within had to abandon that idea: A very painful learning experience for them.

Michael: Yeah; the sustainability is…. You know, when I teach sustainability modules in my classes, it’s really hard to not just depress everyone in the class, including myself. I mean, sustainability is very apparently left out of recommendations and regulations by the government. And I don’t know if you saw this: just recently there was… I think it was a New York Times article about Bonsucro, and I think that that’s just one example of the problems with… even when we’re trying to do the right thing and get this information (and people really want it), so much of it is really hard to trust.

Marion: Well, the Bonsucro article was fascinating to me. It’s the third or fourth one that the New York Times has written about: this particular issue. Bonsucro is an organization that was certifying the quality of production of sugar by various corporations, and they were interested in sustainability labor rights, how workers were being treated, and all kinds of things. And the companies were inspected to make sure that they were following the practices that they had agreed to. And what the articles have been showing is that the inspections are rigged in a sense. So, the inspectors don’t see what’s actually going on because the companies don’t permit them to talk to the actual workers. They only permit them to look at what they’re shown. And so, that’s kind of depressing; because if you don’t have third-party certification of these kinds of things, it’s hard to know what to believe. But the sustainability issue is an astounding one. The meat industry is extremely concerned that dietary recommendations will suggest eating [less] meat as a way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. And in… two dietary recommendations ago… in the 2015 dietary recommendations, the dietary guidelines advisory committee advised reducing meat intake for reasons of health and sustainability. The meat industry went ballistic and came to Congress. And Congress actually put language in an Appropriations Bill telling the Department of Agriculture that: under no circumstances was it to allow the dietary guidelines to say one word about sustainability. And, in fact, those dietary guidelines came out without saying anything about sustainability. And no dietary guidelines since then have said anything about stainability, and the current ones announced, at the beginning, that they weren’t going to say anything about sustainability. So, this is really because of food industry opposition. Otherwise, sustainability would be very high on the agenda for making dietary recommendations. It’s a hugely important issue.

Michael: Yeah; and a lot of people care about sustainability, and the more they learn about it, the more they’re looking for that. And when there are so many marketing terms that are used that don’t really mean anything, or mean very little, or are not regulated… and then when you get into things like this that are supposed to be regulated, and it turns out that that there are all kinds of ways that that the industry circumvents that, it’s really troubling for people. How do they trust anything? And how do they make sense out of what they should be buying?

Marion: Well; that’s the big problem with the food supply these days is: who do you trust? You know, my answer to that is very simple. Me, of course…!

Michael: Good answer!

Marion: … somewhat ironically. But no, it’s very, very difficult. And I have a lot of sympathy for that. You know, I tell people to read ingredient lists and to think critically about what they’re doing. But if you have a situation in which certification agencies can’t be trusted… not because the certification agencies are corrupt but because they’re not being allowed to see what they need to see the… you know, one hopes that the certification agencies will get much tougher as a result. But getting tough as a certification agency is pretty risky. For example, the observers who go on fishing vessels put their lives at risk. If they’re seeing things that the companies don’t want them to see and they’re way out at sea and don’t have any cell phone service, they’re at risk of losing their lives. And this has happened. There are documented examples of this happening. So, this makes the whole certification system extremely difficult to deal with… very hard to know who to trust. And this is why everybody advises eating real foods, not processed foods. And, you know, buying from companies that are trying really hard to do the right things… some better than others. But very, very difficult for individuals to know without government intervention or some agency that’s taking the responsibility for doing what you can’t do because you don’t have the… you can’t go and look at fishing vessels and see how the fish are caught and how the workers are treated. You know, worker treatment is becoming an increasingly important issue in looking at the food supply. You know, there are now reports about how prisoners are being used throughout the food supply to do work. That’s slavery! That’s a form of slavery, and I think this is something that people don’t know about. We’re very divorced from the source of our foods. If you go to a supermarket, you have no idea how those foods got there unless you do investigation and make a special effort to try to track the supply chain. Most people can’t do that. That’s hard to do. So, you depend on the press. You depend on investigative reporters. Thank heavens for those… they still exist.

Michael: Yeah; and people like you. And, you know, I, for myself personally, and a lot of people also really appreciate that you are — even though you’ve retired from your full-time teaching position — that you’re still writing your blog and helping illuminate the issues and giving a source that people can go to… to trust. And are there other organizations or people like you or websites that you recommend?

Marion: Yeah; it’s difficult. I mean, there are a lot of advocacy organizations that do very very good work, and it depends on what the issue is. For most consumer issues Center for Science and the Public Interest is an obvious place to start. They publish a monthly newsletter that only cost $15 a year. Everybody should subscribe to it. And there are organizations like the Environmental Working Group or the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition and other groups that deal with specific issues and that are putting out information all the time. But, you know, I subscribe to probably 20 daily newsletters that cover the territory, and that’s a lot to read… a habit I got into, and I do it pretty quickly now. But the… you know, I read a lot, and it’s a habit I’m not willing… I’m not yet ready to give up. And I’m writing the blog foodpolitics.com five times a week. I will probably post the Bonsucro story… not this coming week, but the week after. I don’t try to stay on top of these things on a timely basis, but I write about what interests me… what I think the most important stories are. And I’m particularly interested in how food companies influence people’s food choices. I mean, that’s my focal area of interest. So, whenever I see a story on something like that, that I think affects food choices, I want to talk about it and sort of get readers used to the idea that they need to think about what’s going on behind the scenes and that this information is available if you read enough. So, I always post links to my sources. I can look at a study by now, and my readers can too… because readers are constantly sending me examples. I don’t have to look for them anymore, because readers send me examples. And every Monday I post one that I think is the funny. They’re usually pretty funny. And so, I post one and readers send them, and then other readers complain that I’m not talking about the science, I’m just talking about the funding. But the connection… the association of funding source to research outcome is so strong that you can’t ignore it. You really can’t. And there’s research that has looked at this, and that research says that it’s not the science that is at fault here. These studies are done under excellent scientific principles. It’s the way the study is designed or the way the results are interpreted… the influence is shown. And the other thing studies show is that scientists who do industry-funded research tend not to recognize that the funding had any influence on them… they don’t see it. They don’t believe it; they don’t see it; they didn’t intend to be influenced; they don’t believe they were influenced. And when I did talks on Unsavory Truth, somebody would always stand up and say, “I don’t understand why you’re talking about the funding. Why does the funding matter? It’s the science that matters! What’s wrong with you?” And, you know, I can tell them until I’m blue in the face that there’s research on this topic that demonstrates, without question, that funding influences outcome. But it’s rarely recognized. It makes it very hard to talk about.

Michael: I can see the way that the study is designed being influenced, and I’m wondering: on the other side, you mentioned the interpretation of the study. Is that like unintentional “P-hacking,” or in what ways are the studies… the data interpreted that influences the reported results?

Marion: Easy. You get a result that’s not statistically significant and you say, “This means that this product may prevent heart disease.” That’s how it’s done; it’s just that simple. So, you know, you get an equivocal result: you interpret it positively. You don’t say, “We didn’t get a statistically significant result on this. Obviously, this has nothing to do with health… this product has nothing to health.” you say this product might you know the data show that this product might have an important effect on the big one is cognition these days everybody’s worried about mental health. So, cognition, heart disease, whatever the big ones are… neurological issues. I mean, there are so many studies coming out that you know… and I could examine, I mean, I could do a detailed examination of the way the study was designed and conducted. And I have favorite examples. POM Wonderful, for example (pomegranate juice). They’ve spent millions and millions of dollars on research demonstrating that POM Wonderful has antioxidants. I could have told them that without doing the research. And I remember one study that was done in Japan… and a meticulous study, done under the most careful scientific principles to demonstrate that if you fed pomegranate juice to people, their levels of antioxidants went up in their blood. Well, duh. If you feed people antioxidants, their antioxidants will go up, obviously. But there’s no comparison here to any other source of antioxidants. There was no discussion of whether antioxidants make any difference to health: a highly debatable subject. But the study was beautifully designed and must have cost a fortune.

Michael: Yeah; and I think there’s… you had something on your website recently about a grape study; the same kind of thing. And you know fruits and vegetables are healthful, we know that. So, you can do the same, studying every single one, and the grape industry can fund this one and the blueberry industry can fund this one. And, yeah, without a comparison….

Marion: The nut industry: they fund lots of research. Right.

Michael: Right. So, without knowing, “Well, should I be eating this fruit or this fruit?” Or this nut or that nut, you know? And I think one thing that you say often — and I believe as well — is you really need to have a variety in your diet. And also, food is deeply personal, right? So, it’s about eating healthfully, but it’s also about eating stuff that makes you happy. And sometimes, some of those choices may not be the best thing for us, but if they make us happy and increase our mental health, then there’s some benefit there as well.

Marion: Absolutely! Yeah; I mean, mental health is a big issue right now. And if taking a supplement or eating a food you like is going to relieve it, I say go for it, you know? Just don’t eat too much of any one thing.

Michael: Right; yeah. And supplements is another huge issue. You know, as I think we talked about last time, they’re unregulated in terms of both safety and efficacy, so…. And I think the people who take the most supplements are the people who probably need them the least because they can afford them and they probably have better diets in general because they can also afford good foods, right? But all the marketing that goes into to all of these things with supplements it’s just, I don’t know… it’s kind of crazy.

Marion: Well, it’s so interesting to me, because something like 70% of American adults take supplements of one kind or another with almost no evidence that the supplements make healthy people healthier. And since the healthiest people are the ones who are taking supplements, the chances of them doing much good are pretty small. People feel better if they take supplements. I have a hard time arguing with that. I think anything that makes you feel better is a good thing if it’s not overtly harmful. And, fortunately, most supplements are not harmful.

Michael: Yeah; and it’s interesting. There was a study on… I think it’s called, “Radical Honesty” some years ago where…. You know, they’ve done all these studies with placebos and how many placebos do change people’s symptoms and health and so forth, but even in cases where people knew they were taking the placebo, it still helped them, right? That was fascinating.

Marion: They still worked! They’re great! They’re just great! And so, I think, you know, if supplements are nothing else but placebos, they have a real benefit. They’re expensive, but people feel better spend more money on it, I guess. I don’t know. Anyway, life is so tough these days, I’m greatly in favor of anything that helps. I don’t take supplements, but whatever.

Michael: Do you take vitamin C or just eat good foods?

Marion: No; I follow my own dietary advice. I don’t find that hard to do, and I would never advise anybody to do anything that I don’t do as a matter of very strong principle. I mean, I would never, never tell people to do something that isn’t something that I can do pretty easily. I’m pretty resistant to food product marketing. I don’t hear… a new term in my vocabulary: “food noise.” One of the things that the new GLP-1 drugs do is they reduce “food noise.” I had never heard the term before, but I love it. I really, really think it’s great, and I don’t hear a lot of food noise. I can have food in the house and not eat it… most foods. There are a few things. There are a few things.

Michael: The whole [area of] GLP-1 drugs is really interesting, and I don’t know if we have time to get into… really dive into that. I’ve been doing a little research on how the drugs actually work: the glucagon-like peptides and how they’re different from the way our body produces glucagon and how that whole system works but….

Marion: It’s complicated, but fascinating.

Michael: Yeah; it is fascinating! And I think that there it’s scaring some companies as well.

Marion: Oh, yes! Oh, the food industry is terrified between GLP-1 drugs and inflation, the food industry is terrified that people are going to stop buying junk foods. And since junk foods or “Ultra-processed foods” are the ones that are most profitable, it’s going to cut into their profits. And they’re all really, really, really worried about it. Nestle has announced that it’s creating a new line of products for people taking GLP-1 drugs. These are going to be higher in protein and higher in vitamins and minerals. You know, I think, really?? Why not just eat food? yeah you I don’t get it why not just eat food? Eat a carrot!

Michael: You know… I eat lots of carrots. I love carrots!

Marion: You know; but people on these GLP-1 drugs say they’re not as hungry, they don’t hear food noise, they don’t want to eat junk food. Isn’t that interesting? They’re kind of off junk food. That’s fascinating! And, you know, we’ll see what happens with the drugs. We don’t know what the long-term side effects are. We don’t know how long people are staying on them. There’s a lot that’s still unknown about it, and lots of people are doing the experiment, and lots of people are studying them. So, we’ll find out.

Michael: Yeah; that’s a fascinating area. You know there are a lot of foods that are what I refer to as skeuomorphic.”

Marion: Explain.

Michael: So, skeuomorphism is when there’s something… like if you have a faux wood table, for example… something that’s made to look like something else. Something natural. So, like… a hamburger. Rather than a beef hamburger it’s pea protein, or whatever they’re made out of. And there’s all of these ingredients. It’s basically a highly processed food meant to replace something that is bad for us. Which, you know… we know there are a lot of things that are bad about beef, both for us and for the environment, but it’s hard to know if all of that stuff that’s in that processed food… how much better for us [it is], or if it causes other issues. And the other thing is, well, why not just… some of these things… they go through so much work to make something that’s like something else. There are so many great foods out there that you can eat, right?

Marion: Yeah. I mean, you don’t want to eat a lot of meat? Eat less meat, but make it really good. You know, eat good stuff, but less… especially if you can afford it. If you can’t afford it that gets into all kinds of other issues. But for people who can afford it, eat meat. Just don’t eat so much, right?

Michael: Yeah. I think there’s true a lot of things. I mean, my dietary supplement, that I eat from time to time, is ice cream. So, you know… I try not to have too much, but….

Marion: It’s my favorite food! I’m with you. Yeah. So… all right. Well, I know you’re a little short on time. Two other things I wanted to talk about: one is the latest Farm Bill, which…. And not just the Farm Bill, specifically, but just how complicated it’s gotten to try to make sense of things like these. You know this document… I don’t know… it’s a thousand pages or something, the latest one. But how do people even begin to make sense out of this stuff, and are there people who are, like you, taking the time to interpret it and kind-of explain the important points of it?

Marion: Yeah; I once taught a course on the Farm Bill. I can only laugh about it. It was not one of my better teaching experiences. My class got very, very tired of hearing me say, “Nobody can understand this.” Nobody can understand it in its entirety. The Farm Bill encompasses literally hundreds of programs, and each of those programs has its own devoted set of lobbyists who… and lawyers who understand it. Nobody else does. I mean, some of the things are easy to understand. Some of them are really impossible. And, you know, it’s a bill that grew… that acquired program-by-program, and usually when people talk about it, they only talk about the “big picture” items, which are the parts of the Farm Bill that pay for agricultural supports: farm Insurance, and the like. And the much greater part of the Farm Bill that pays for the supplemental nutrition assistance program SNAP, which is, you know, food stamps for the poor. The Farm Bill does two quite different things. It’s welfare for enormous corporate agricultural producers. That’s the farm support part. And that’s who gets the farm support. And it’s welfare for the people in America who don’t have enough money to survive. That comes from… these things were coupled together by President Johnson in the 1960s, because he recognized that neither one of them could pass Congress on its own. That hasn’t changed. That situation has not changed. Neither one of those could pass Congress on its own, so for the Republicans to say that they’re not going to vote for the Farm Bill unless SNAP gets cut… and for the Democrats to say that that they’re not going to vote for the Farm Bill unless SNAP stays the same… means that the Farm Bill will never pass. So, I don’t know what’s going to happen with it. These fights come up every single time that a Farm Bill comes up for renewal. It’s often delayed. Nothing unusual is happening now. This just happens to be an election year, and nobody wants to try to get this thing passed until there’s an election and we know who the next president is. So, I don’t know. I don’t think the average person or even people who are trying to become expert on it can possibly understand more than a tiny fraction. So, you look at the pieces of it that interest you. The Farm Bill is on the Web. You can read it. It has a table of contents that goes on for 10 pages. I mean, it’s an amazing document. And you can pick out of it what’s interesting. There’s a nutrition title, that’s SNAP. There’s also a horticulture title that… which is where all the organic food as medicine programs come in. And lots and lots of little token programs that are there because some legislator is thinking of food for people, not for animals. I mean, the other thing about our food supply is that our food supply and the supports for it are for a system in which nearly half the corn goes to feed animals. So much for climate change. And the other half and other half goes to fuel automobiles… ethanol for automobiles. I mean, it’s an absolutely crazy system. Makes no sense whatsoever.

Michael: Yeah; and both of those are terrible uses of resources.

Marion: Yeah. Terrible uses of agricultural land, except for corn producers and alcohol producers (ethanol producers). You know, we need an agricultural system that is focused on producing healthful food for people and food that will reduce the effect on climate change. That’s what we need. But the possibility of getting that, politically, is extremely small right now.

Michael: Yeah. When I tell students about the mass of cows… which I think is greater than all other (wild) animals and humans combined… it’s crazy.

Marion: We do like our meat, yes.

Michael: Well, meat’s delicious. But you know… like you say, we just enjoy it but maybe just a little.

Marion: A little less.

Michael: Yeah; a little less. So, I understand that you’re working on another book…?

Marion: I am. I’m actually working on two books simultaneously. I’m finishing up the editing of the second edition of What to Eat — a book that came out in 2006. And is scheduled for publication in 2025. And I took it on as a pandemic project, thinking that it would be pretty easy to just…. I thought the book read pretty well, and I could just update it a little bit. It’s turned out that a great deal has changed in the supermarket food supply since 2006, and I’ve been working on this book for three years.

Michael: I read the original. It was a long time ago; I don’t remember all the details, but I thought it was a great book at the time.

Marion: Oh, thank you! And the publisher is doing a new addition, so I’m trying… it has a lot of new…. I mean, I had no…. This is a book in which I use supermarkets as an organizing device for talking about food issues that come up in each section of the supermarket, aisle-by-aisle. And I hadn’t been paying very close attention and didn’t realize how much it had changed. I mean, kind-of amazing actually. So, I’m dealing with those changes in the new addition. I’m almost through with the editing of the manuscript, and it should go into production in the fall. But then, I have a book proposal out. This is a fun project where… I’ve collected cereal boxes for years, and I don’t collect the cereal, I just collect the boxes. And I’ve mainly collected boxes with ridiculous nutritional things on them. You know, ridiculous health claims: “This cereal will fix your immune system.” “This cereal will take care of your obesity.” That kind of thing. And so, I’m doing a book with a… I have a co-author who’s a former vice president of Kellogg. And we’re going to do a book on basically the history of food nutrition policy and food and culture in America using cereal boxes as the starting point for discussing a lot of health and cultural issues. So, we not only have my collection to use, but I also have three sets of Kellogg facsimiles of cereal boxes: a complete set of three different cereals from the first year they were introduced until 2010, which is when I was given these. And the cereal boxes change their designs… sometimes several times a year, so that they keep up with fads, trends, cultural Issues, new regulations…. And you can pick a cereal box and use it to illustrate something that we want to talk about. And I have lots to work with because it turns out the NYU library has a collection of 300 cereal boxes that were donated to the library. And, yeah… mostly sports figures, but some but some other cultural things as well. So, we have lots and lots to work with, and I’m trying to keep up with it. So, I buy the cereal boxes with amazing… you know, that have amazing things on them. They’re coming out all the time.

Michael: That is a super interesting idea for a platform for this new book. Kelloggs, as you know, has an interesting history starting with some very troubling views on race and also on mental health. But…. Yeah; there are so many books on nutrition and health out there, and attacking from this standpoint sounds super interesting and fun. I really look for of seeing it!

Marion: Well, every single element on a cereal box has a story behind it, and some of the stories are absolutely amazing. So, I think we’ll have a really good time doing it. And I keep hearing about more. You know, people are constantly telling me stories about boxes I didn’t know about. Whether we’ll be able to get copies of those boxes or get illustrations, I don’t know. But we’re trying.

Michael: Well, Marion. Thank you again. I really appreciate the time, and I’m really looking forward to your new books. There’s so much really complicated information out there, and just having people like you who take the time and to help us all sort-of make sense of it is really great. So, thank you.

Marion: Thank you!