Coming up on this episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy.

They make a Canadian version of Fruit 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 5, Yellow 6, Blue 1, and BHT. All of those ingredients are not included in their international version.

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Welcome to the Doctors Pharmacy. I'm Dr. Marc Hyman. That's pharmacy with an F, a place for conversations that matter. Today's conversation is highly consequential for you because it's going to determine whether or not we live in a society that is causing us to be sick because of the food we're eating or whether we can create a food system that actually creates health. We have this incredible conversation with Jason Karp, was a dear friend who's been an inspiration for me. I don't even describe him. He's a force of nature. He's driven by the belief that improving health is the pathway to increasing global in the prosperity. In 2019, he started Human Co, which is a company that has a mission to inspire humans to demand better by showing that products can be both healthy and epic and taste good. His health journey started in his 20s after being diagnosed with a multiple autoimmune diseases and a degenerative eye disease, which would have left him blind by the age of 30. Doctors told him could never be cured. He had a commitment to making changes in his own diet, which changed his whole health, cured himself through a cleaner diet and cleaner living.

Then he founded this incredible company called Hugh products, which you probably eat their Hugh chocolate, which is amazing, at Hugh Kitchen in 2011, which I think I was the first customer in that restaurant. Today, Hugh is one of the fastest-growing snack companies in the United States, emphasizing transparent, simple ingredients to help everyone get back to human. He was the founder and CEO of Turbion Capital Partners, a $4 billion investment fund. He's taken all of his genius and intelligence to make better products and change the world. We're so grateful to have him on the pharmacy. Sorry. We're so grateful to have him on the doctor's pharmacy today. In our conversation, we cross the spectrum from his own story of how he came to understand the role of food, his own health, cured multiple autoimmune diseases that doctors said weren't curable, and took that passion and turned into a food business that has been highly successful and is doing good and doing well at the same time. He also talks about something called the MetaCrisis, this incredible intersection of the planetary health destruction, human health destruction, and our mental health destruction, and how all that's linked in part or in large part to food and how we need to change that.

We also get deep into a recent campaign that he's initiated with Kellogg to try to change the food system by holding big companies accountable. We talk about the dyes that are in American cereals like fruit loops that are not allowed in other countries like Europe. We're only asking companies to be held accountable to the best versions of the products they make. Why should we in America have the worst products they make? We need to stand up and do something about it. This podcast gets deep into how this happened, what we can do about it, and how to make change. I know you're going to love this podcast. Let's dive right in. Okay, well, Jason, it's so great to have you on the Dr. Strongercy podcast. We've been friends for years, have an interesting history together. You are a remarkable man because you came from a world of high-powered finance. You got very sick. You had to reset yourself and learn about what food does to the body and what it does into if you don't eat the right stuff. You created a company called Q, which was an incredible company that everybody probably knows from the chocolate.

There was a cute kitchen back in New York City that was actually an old Himalayan East West Bookstore that I used to go in the '80s and do yoga on the top of where that was. It was like the only yoga class in New York. We didn't have Lill Lemon or yoga mats. We had like towels and sweat pants. That was a very symbolic thing for me to go back in there and see how you created this incredible model for eating that really represented your insights into what was wrong with our food system? How you got sick from it, and how you were able to fix yourself through that journey. We're going to dive deep today into really some interesting topics that are around a new initiative that you're creating to wake up America to the... In a sense, the evils that the food industry is perpetrating on American kids and on American adults by putting all sorts of toxins in the food that are not allowed in other countries. You took a brave, brave step recently that was calling these companies out. You published an article in the New York Post, a letter that went to Kellogg's as your shareholder, calling them out for their behavior and their failure to meet their own commitment to get rid of chemicals and dyes that we know are damaging to humans in their products.

It's created a bit of a buzz. It was a big article in your post, and it's everywhere. It's been on Twitter or X or whatever we're calling out. I wanted to give you a chance to talk about your own journey and how you got started on this and how passionate you and how you really created a whole new effort to really rethink our food system and to reformulate our food products so we can actually eat stuff that tastes good and is also good for us.

Yes. Well, look, thanks for having me, Mark. It was a little background. You were one of my early inspirations, which I'll get to in my life story. It's a crazy story. The whole East-West books thing and the spirituality of that store is so- It was Swami Ramma, the guy who could put needles through his arms. I mean, it's crazy. We'll come back to how crazy that is.

By the way, I just want to interrupt you. One of the disciples of this guy, Swami Ramma, from the East West and the Himalayan Institute, was this guy named Rudolf Ballantyne, who wrote a book called Diet and Health or Diet Nutrition. It was in the '70s. I got that book when I was in college and I read it. It was all about bringing nutrition into healing chronic disease. I don't know if you knew that.

I didn't know that.

So literally, the book that was a disciple of the guy who actually created that, Himalayan Insu, where Hugh Kitchen first started. That's crazy. Really wrote a book that got a launched me on this journey, too. It's this karmic, but shared.

It really is karmic. I have the chills because I totally forgot about the East West Bookstore and the spiritual connection.

Fifth Avenue, 14th Street.

Yeah, we'll come back to that. My background and my personal story, I think, is a cautionary tale, and it's also a metaphor for what's to modern society. I had a pretty meteoric ascent starting in college, where I was your classic overachiever. I went to Wharton undergrad business school. I was one of the top students. I was a division one academic, all-American athlete, and I did everything that I thought you're supposed to do as a overachieving American. All I wanted to do was be very accomplished. When I got out of college, I had this really coveted job. I went straight a hedge fund in 1998, which was a fledgling industry, I got so focused on just winning and accomplishing and did extremely well in my first couple of years there, financially speaking. I got every accolade and every achievement you could get. I was made the youngest partner in history of my firm. On the surface, everything looked like life was going great. A couple of years into my working, I started getting sick. At the time, I ignored it, and I was so focused on 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... Micro nap, I love that. Really, I was reading... You got to teach me that, true. I was reading obscure stuff from the military on how to be even more productive. 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. I started giving up friends and connection, and I started giving up exercise, and I started optimizing my day in terms of hour blocks. I was getting more and more done, and I was reading more, and I was doing more on my job. Everyone around me thought I was the superhuman. Meanwhile, quietly, I was getting more and more sick. Eventually, I started to really notice it. My hair started falling out in clumps. I had psoriasis all over my arms and my body. I was having massive amounts of brain fog. Then I was still ignoring it. Then my vision started to go, and I started seeing double. I went to multiple ophthalmologists, and eventually was diagnosed with a degenerative eye disease for which there's no cure. 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. 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 looked like this pinnacle of success, and on the inside, I was falling apart. 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. I decided, and it was this almost divine inspiration, to start looking in alternative channels for maybe there's other ways I could heal myself. I started doing a lot of research on Indigenous people, on ancestral diets, and I stumbled upon a couple like Ogie functional medicine people in some of their really early books like yours and Dr. Andrew Weil. Those were some of the people that I found. I had this naive hypothesis, which was based on some stuff that I found that connected atopic skin diseases like psoriasis to my eye disease.

Yeah, well, it's autoimmune.

It's all autoimmune. Yeah. Of course, every doctor I saw said, Oh, this disease is unrelated to this disease, is unrelated to this disease. Yeah, no, it's all. But back in, this is in the year 2001, they didn't really talk about food as medicine. They certainly didn't talk about functional medicine. I decided to go on this path of seeing if I could reverse my skin disease, which was clearly inflammation through diet and lifestyle. I told my ophthalmologist, I said, Hey, maybe if I can make my skin disease go away, maybe my eye disease will go away. Of course, as an arrogant Park Avenue ophthalmologist, he said, That'll never work. There's no cure. Do whatever you In a month, I decided to- Don't confuse me with the fact.

My mind's been- Don't confuse me with the fact.

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 as someone back then when it was work hard, play hard. 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. I wasn't exercising, and I wasn't socializing, and I wasn't sleeping well, and I was very isolated. I noticed after a few weeks of this, my psoriasis started going away, and my hair stopped falling out. I noticed anecdotally, my vision was getting better. I went in for a checkup with my doctor maybe six weeks in, and I told him about this, and he again said, That's impossible. It's not working. Don't even try. But I was like, Look, I feel better. I'm going to keep going. Thank Thankfully-It's a spontaneous remission.

It has nothing to do with your diet. Yeah.

Then I did this for months, and everything went away, and I noticed I could see clearly again. 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. I went in and I said, I can see clearly. He said, Well, we'll give you the test. He gave me the test, and my disease was gone.Un Unbelievable.Not.

Really, very believable.

The look on his face was shock. He actually called his colleague in. I'll never forget this day. It's one of the most important days of my life. He called in his colleague, and they're whispering, but I could hear them whispering. He said, You got to look at this. He goes, I must have misdiagnosed him. This is impossible.

It must have been a mistake. I didn't actually- 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. I remember walking out of the doctor's office I remember thinking, my life is going to be forever changed, and I'm no longer going to respect the Western medicine dogma, and I'm going to go with my gut and my heart when things feel wrong. I knew instinctively that my four or five diseases that I was diagnosed with were all related, and doctors didn't think that. 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 because I viewed myself as a canary in the coal mine of what was happening to me is probably happening to other people. Obviously, since then, it's gotten way worse in the last 22 years.

It's so true. I remember been doing this since the '90s, and it was bad then, and now it's unbelievably worse. Yeah.

What happened was, a lot of my research and a lot of what I believe cured me was respecting human evolution. And respecting the way that people in the blue zones live and respecting the way that Indigenous people live, because I remember reading studies back then. 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. I remember because back then, 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. 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. Some were tribes that were eating fruits and vegetables and nuts. 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. That led many, many years later, where I was living a much more 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. He started trying these methods, and he noticed how much better he looked and how much better he and how much better he operated and how much better he slept. He came to me one day, and at this point, I was higher up in my field, but I was still in the hedge fund business. He said, There's no place that we can eat that has these guardrails that you have done and that I'm now doing. 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. It's true.

Most time when you go to a restaurant or you go shopping or somewhere to eat, you have to navigate what not to eat and try to find the few things that you can't eat. I remember going to Hugh Kitchen back when it started and going, Man, I can eat everything in here. It's good.

It tastes good. It started off as a preposterous idea because I was a professional investor. Restaurants typically are not good investments. Most people fail with them. They have one of the highest failure rates. I said to Jordan, I said, Jordan, we I don't know anything about restaurants.

I remember going there before you opened and it was just like it was a massive operation.

It was massive. Anyway, long story short, I said to him, I said, Look, we can do this. We'll do it as initially 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.

It's okay, son. Because for-Eat beans and rice, you could pay for it.

Right. For the first few years, for the first many years, we didn't have outside investors. It was just a family operation. We hired consultants that showed us how to do typical restaurant stuff. But what we knew was what to include, and we knew what not to include. We came up with the name Hugh because our slogan, based on all 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 thrive arrived. I believe today we are in a true slow-motion Apocalypse. I'll get to some stats in a second. I'm with you. We are in what I call a Meta-Crisis, a crisis of physical health, mental health, and planetary health. It's the worst it's ever been in human history.

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It almost feels, though, like it's invisible. It's not necessarily in the news. People We're not really talking about it at scale. It's just this slow motion disaster that's coming at us, and we're almost oblivious. When you look at the scale of the illness in America, when you look at globally, how it's reaching every corner of the world, you mentioned the Messiah, and they were healthy and fit, and they had perfect teeth, and they were thin, and they were tall, skinny Messiah. I went to visit them last October, and it was shocked, actually. They had horrible teeth, and they had all misshapen mouths. They were overweight. They had all these chronic illnesses. Every day, the Coca-Cola truck would come in, they'd empty it out, literally a giant truck, and they would just all light up and empty out all the Fanta and Coke in one hour. They were eating all kinds of snack foods from the town that they were able to get. They still didn't have electricity, running water, sanitation. They were getting all these processed foods. The chief said to me, I said, Jim, do you know that this Coca-Cola is probably not good for you guys because of diabetes?

He said, Really? I said, Yeah. He said, Well, so many of our people are dying from diabetes. We have no idea why. I said, It's because of it. It's shocking. I think you really are on to something. Get back to human is a beautiful concept. The metacrisis is something that we really need to take head-on and face and actually bring it in the public conversation. Let's talk about, let's get into the weeds a little bit because I think at a meta level, we understand we have to address this global crisis that's driven by the food we create and make and eat. And yet in America, we are Probably the worst of the world at this. We allow food marketing to kids. I think the only other country that does that is Syria. We have pharmaceutical advertising. The other country does that is New Zealand. We allow all these chemicals in food that are banned in most countries. You recently were outraged when you found out that Kellogg's is making tons of cereal, which is extremely harmful to people in general because the amount of sugar itself and the refined carbohydrates and the processing. But that aside, there are known compounds like BHT or butylate hydroxy toluine, red dye, number 40, yellow dye, number 5.

These are things that are known to cause human health hazards and are yet banned in other countries and are allowed in this country. When you found out that they're making same products in Canada or Europe without these compounds.

Yes. What prompted the letter originally was when Kellogg came out and recommended cereal for dinner. I don't know. What a great idea. Yeah, I don't know if you saw this, but basically- I did.

The CEO, that guy is so tone-deaf.

Yeah, so tone-deaf. Cereal in this country is in secular decline. 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. Then they isolated the US North American cereal business, just cereal, and it's just North America. That business still does $2.7 billion a year, which is millions and millions and millions of customers and definitely over hundreds of millions of boxes of cereal.

Definitely, hopefully not any of my patients listening are eating cereal for breakfast. Correct. It's one of the worst things you could possibly do.

Cereal period.

For breakfast or dinner or lunch, it's probably one of the worst foods you can eat because it's basically pure sugar. Yes.

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. Tony the Tiger comes into a family who are about to sit down for dinner. There's two kids, and he comes and he starts going cereal for dinner, cereal for dinner. It says, Let's give chicken the night off. This was an actual television commercial.Not a parody.Yeah, not a parody. It got, thankfully, he got skewered in social media, and this was all over the internet, and people started talking about boycotting. He made it about food cost. He basically said, Inflation has gone up a lot. If you are cost-conscious, you should eat cereal for dinner. 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.

It's inflation.

We get in our prices. They have done the most inflation of almost anybody. When I saw that, I thought, This is enough. This is enough. 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 dies.

Maria Antoinette moment, let them eat cake, let them eat cornflakes.

Of course, I would never advocate eating cereal. Some of the comments that we got back were, Well, people shouldn't eat cereal, period. 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. Instead of coming out and saying, Nobody should eat cereal, which, of course, they shouldn't, I'm acknowledging that there's $2.7 billion of Kellogg cereal sold in this country right now. That's a big number. 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. Let's just take Fruit Loops as an example. They make a Canadian version of Fruit 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 5, yellow 6, blue 1, and BHT. All of those ingredients are not included in their international version of Fruit Loops.

When people say, Okay, so they know how to make the better version, they're already making it. They're already selling the better version. Why do they sell Americans the shittier, less safe version here? There's two reasons. 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 dives that are derived from petroleum.

They use blueberry juice, watermelon juice. Yeah, they actually use fruit coloring. They actually put a little stevie in it to lower the sugar content.

Yeah. Maybe it's a few pennies per box is what they would have to spend. The second reason, which there was a fiasco that happened with Trix cereal, where they've acknowledged that natural food colorings are less bright. When they're less bright, they're less attractive to children. It doesn't affect the taste, by the way. The colorings have nothing to do with the taste. They have come out and they have tried to say when they've been publicly shamed for this, is that Americans want the brighter cereal. That's what they say.

They're giving our customers what they want. That's what the food industry says. It makes me nuts. Well, if people were selling cocaine on the corner street at McDonald's for $2, everybody'd be buying. We're just giving our customers what they want.

Right. 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 dives because as you've noted, with some ingredients like BHT and others, they're literally banned in many countries. 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. 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.

I'm making that shit up. There's actually data on this.

Yeah, there's a lot of data.

If you go to the National Library of Medicine Pubmed, you can search for the scientific articles that validate this point.

This is not just crazy shit. This is not crazy sensationalist like We want to regulate everything. 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. My wife and I will literally say to him, Tyson, what did you eat? 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. When we remove the food diet from their diets, it is a noticeable behavioral change. It's huge. There are countless parents that I have met that notice the same thing. The biggest issue that I had with Kellogg was- There's over 92 papers documenting the role of food colorings on autism, on behavior, on ADD, on mood.

I mean, behavior disorders across the spectrum is quite fascinating.

But they made this pledge, Mark. They made a pledge that said, In 2015, we will remove all artificial food dives from our foods by 2018. Quietly, and this is where Vani comes in, quietly-Vani Harri, who's the food babe, a friend of ours who's basically been a crusader for waking up America about the role of these compounds in our food.

She's been an amazing crusader. She's been an amazing crusader.

When they came out with this pledge, It was national news. It was in every newspaper, and there were headlines, Kellogg's Vows to Remove. It was media acclaim. They got credit for it, and people loved it. Then they put it on their website. Then quietly, they removed it from their website, and they didn't tell anybody. They keep making new cereals. The one that Vani 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. They ignored the pledge that they publicly made that they got credit for. They're just hoping that we don't notice because it's more money for them.

By the way, I'm not sure you know this, Jason, but 14% of kids on ADD medication.

Yeah. It's really... Both of my children have ADHD, by the way, and I do, too. We don't need to exacerbate because we already know how to do it without it. 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. When I was telling him this, we were talking about it a month ago or he was outraged. He said, You should do something about this. Vani had made attempts with petitions to get this removed. Kellogg engaged with her. They wrote her a letter. Nothing happened. I'm at this point where I said, You know what? We need more firepower at this. We need more American citizens to get behind this. We need this to be loud and public because most people don't know this. We filed the letter, and simultaneously, we released it on social media. We put it on all the platforms Instagram, LinkedIn, and X. I would encourage you guys, my handle is humankarp, K-A-R-P. How did I share it on my social media screen? I would encourage you to look at the post because- We're going to put, by the way, we're going to put the letter in the show notes.

We're going to put the article in your post in the show notes, we're going to let you actually see what's going on and you look into it a little more.

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 concerned that why don't Americans, why don't we get the best version of a product that they already make? This is crazy.

And by the way, we are sicker because of it. I always say this fact because it's so stunning and shocking, but we're 4% of the world's population, but we were 16% of the cases in deaths from COVID. Not because we didn't have good health care or vaccine access, but because we were all pre-inflammed because of the food we were eating.

That's right. But this is just the tip of the iceberg of the insanity that What's happening in this country because America allows it. 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 burden of proof that we use in this country. We use the term called grass. The generally recognizes the safe, 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. 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. This is why things like asbestos happened and things like thalidomide happened, and you could go on and on. 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. Whereas in places like Europe, they have the opposite approach with things that you put inside human bodies, which is guilty until proven innocent.

They have a whole legislation around this called the REACH legislation in Europe, which prevents them from putting all this crap in the food.

Yeah. They want to have very long term data before they bring it into the food. We have much looser regulations here. 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. You can create more things faster if you don't have regulation, but not when you're poisoning people. This is what I talk to Callie means about, poisoning people is not a left or a right issue. No. It's not. I'm against 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. But when it comes to poisoning our own people, this is idiotic. 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. Because we are like the frog in the boiling pot. When I talk about it at cocktail parties or whatever, People are like, Oh, Jason, you're being sensationalist. I wanted to-We're all in the Truman show. We don't know it. Right. I gave a story that was, I think, also a cautionary tale of what I think we've been doing wrong and how we got here. The story was about Mao Zedong in 1958. He was trying to make China a powerhouse at the time, and it was a very farming-heavy country.

He wanted to industrialize and make farming less private and more state-owned. The great leap forward. The great leap forward, right. One of the things that he observed, the seeds were being eaten by sparrows. 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. This is 1958. Typically, when you hear these things, you always ask like, Oh, what could go wrong?

He wasn't clearly an ecologist. Yes.

He didn't understand complex adaptive systems or the wonder of Mother Nature. Over two years, it's only happened in two years. This is crazy. 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. They had the greatest locust problem in human history, which created the largest manmade 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. 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. 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. I feel like today, I just want to remind people of how bad the meta crisis is because I think some people- Can you define that?

Because I think most people don't know what meta crisis means.

Meta is just a word that describes a bunch of high-level things. But the meta crisis, to me, is that we have four or five epidemics/crisis all happening at the exact same time. It's very similar to what happened with my diseases, where I had five diseases manifest. They were seemingly disconnected to most people, but they were all connected.

This is so core functional medicine. It's like, look at the roots. Everything is connected at the roots. There are a few common causes.

This is functional medicine for the It's all in the planet, basically.

Yeah, exactly. There are a few common causes for all the things that are happening.

Yeah. I believe, and just to give your viewers some stats, because it's not just human health, so I wrote down some stats. This is all in the last 50 years. The one thing I'll say that's also really remarkable 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. 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. Yeah. 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 a lot of We had different problems.

We had- Killing each other. Yeah, but these problems.

Killing all the big animals.

It was 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. Here's just some stats in the last 50 years. Populations of vertebrates 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 two and a half trillion dollars of economic damage. That number is just the last 20 years. 25% of young adults, 50% of Americans are prediabetic or a full-fledged type 2 diabetes. 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, not children. Not all the kids get it.

It's two, yeah.

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.

The New York Times- The younger people are getting it, too.

The younger people, the under-35, has gone exponential.

It's like Kate Middleton just diagnosis cancer.

There's all these articles where they talk about it being mysterious. It's mostly gastrointestinal, so it's mostly colorectal.

The microbiome plays such a huge role in preventing that. The way we eat in our ultra-processed food, which is the way the fiber, destroys our microbiome. Also the additives destroy microbiome, causing inflammation, which also causes cancer. The science is there about how the mechanistic systems work to drive the cancer rates and all these diseases. It's not a mystery anymore. We know how this works, and we're still doing it.

Then the part that really terrifies me, which Calleigh means has been talking about, has become a dear friend, is on the fertility stuff. Sperm counts are down 50%, Polycysts.

Yeah, you just had a podcast on that.

The whole thing. The whole fertility thing is terrifying.

It's huge. Dropping fertility rates, dropping sperm counts, difference in sex birth rates from between men and women because of that. An animal, we're seeing hermaphrodites and really strange things going on because of the industrial chemicals.

Really strange. Then the final part, which I don't want to gloss over, suicide rates are at all time highs. 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 is the greatest predictor of early death. In fact, there was a study that came out out of Yale.

Smoking two packs of cigarettes a day.

It's 15 cigarettes a day. Well, 15.

I thought it was two packs.

Yeah, but that's still crazy. I mean, 15 cigarettes a day is the comparable mortality risk of being lonely. This is the first time in recorded human history where lifespands are falling.

Children are going to live sicker, shorter lives than their parents, for sure.

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. 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.

We exercise more than we ever have. We spend more now on health care per person than we do on food. The amount we're spending and the amount of technological progress we're doing is going up and up and up. The objective metrics of all these things are getting worse. They're not only not staying the same, they're getting worse. If you said to anybody, The more you spend on something, the worse it gets, they would say, Stop it. What are you doing? Exactly. Einstein has this famous quote, The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. Here we are as supposedly the greatest scientific civilization in history, and we're the sickest we've ever been.

We have Paleolithic brains and Godlike technology. That's right. We're still trapped in these almost Neanderthal behaviors and thoughts and actions, which don't compore with a level of technology we have. We're really heading for this slow-motion disaster, you said, which is either the anihilation of the human species or maybe even worse.

Yeah. Well, the example I also give to some people, and then I'll get to how I think we got here. But the example I give to people is if you had an ant farm, 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. For the typical ant, their lifespan is four weeks. If you were watching an ant farm, and 50 years is a little bit more than half of the average human lifespan, 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 a bunch of them dying. You saw massive destruction of what's happening inside there, you would quickly look at that ant farm and go, Oh, my God, what the hell is going on? We got to change this. 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 meta-crisis, 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. Look, everybody has regular life. You have families, you have jobs, you have distractions like TV and Netflix and social media. To look at this in the mirror and say, Wait a minute, every day that goes by, we're getting worse.

It's so true, Jason. I wrote a lot about this in my book, Food Fix. I don't know if you had it. Yeah, I did. Essentially, it maps out how food is the nexus or the root cause of most of our global problems from, obviously, chronic disease, which you mentioned, the economic impact of that, which is staggering. It's about 30% of our entire economy is that or maybe even more. We have the destruction of our mental health through the food. I did a podcast recently on the role of ultra-process food and mental health. There's obviously many other reasons, like social media, but food is a big driver. The academic performance of our children and the destruction of the American mind, starting from kindergarten or even before, up with like, now they have these shark things from the kid, these kids full of chemical dyes. It's also destroying our communities, driving increased racism through food marketing towards Black and Hispanic communities. It's also radically impacting the planet by the environmental destruction because of the way we overuse our water resources, the way we destroy our water waste through nitrogen runoff and eutrification, the water waste that destroy huge vast coastal areas that 500 million people depend on for food, the incredible destruction of the ecosystem.

You mentioned the sparrows, but we've lost 50% of all the birds in America because of the chemicals we spray on farming. We've lost biodiversity on farms. We've lost our soil organic matter. We've driven huge climate change because of how we farm, and not just the cows, but everything we're doing. It's That's all you're related. It's all one big problem, and we have to talk about it as one interconnected thing. I think your story of your own healing through dealing with the root cause, which was food, is a metaphor for what we need to do for both our individual health, our collective societal health, and planetary health.

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. The bad food leads to poor mental health, but then poor mental health also leads to bad physical health It's bi-directional. Yeah, it's the cycle. I do believe there's a happy ending to this.

Yeah, this is very depressing.

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 had the good fortune of being inside of boardrooms and the good fortune of being in some DC policy meetings with public companies and politicians to see how these decisions get made. 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 still knowingly poisoning people. But I want to use McDonald's as an interesting example of how something can start off with good intentions, and then we don't consider the downstream externalities. Mcdonald's started close to 80 years ago. It was a burger shack. It was in the '40s. Back in the '40s, they got their beef from a farm. 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. It probably wasn't that bad for you in the grand scheme of things. I often point to, when people don't believe this, watch some movies from the 1970s. 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. 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 eat burgers and people eat fries and people eat pizza and people eat ice cream and people drink milkshakes, and yet they were still looking like that. It's not just that it was junk food. It's what was in the food.

Things that would look like food now are not They're approximations of food, and they're not actually food by definition.

What happened with McDonald's is they had this mousetrap and they created a product that everyone wanted. America in particular, but I'd say all of developing countries, are based on consumption. Mcdonald's had something that people wanted more of, and so capital came into it. People were 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? 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? 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? We took this Henry Ford approach of assembly line. Now, with technology and things like semiconductors, it's much easier to do that in software. But with food, which is naturally an organic, not homogenous concept, and it has natural variability, 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? 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?

What's been a burger now in the McDonald's burger, not a lot of beef or some beef, but it's a lot of other weird stuff.

If you look at the ingredient label of American French fries at McDonald's, there's 19 ingredients in it. We'll come back to this with the Kellogg letter. But in Europe, it's four ingredients. But here it's 19. If you 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, we have to basically make more and more chemical synthetic and use the science that we developed for things like technology, we have to apply it to food. 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. Early days of Lululemon, for example. You take clothing, you take things like Starbucks, you take things like the Cocoa industry, Every single industry has the same-Trajectory.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.

You didn't consider or they didn't consider because they weren't paid to consider the externalities.

They maybe didn't even know at that time.

Yeah, they definitely didn't know it at the time.

We invented Crisco. We didn't know it was bad for us. Correct. Until it was 1911. It was invented because of butter shortage, and it It wasn't until 2015 that it was declared not safe to eat, and then four years later.

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 have been a handful of CEOs that said, they raised their hand and said, This stuff is poisoning people. We have to buy healthier products. We have to create healthier products. The problem, though, is that when they started introducing or creating healthier products, they were inherently lower margin They were inherently less predictable because it was, again, more natural. This was all good when things were good, but 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. Let's keep leaning into the stuff that we know works and people are buying. 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 Nuyi, Pepsi wanted to do the right thing, and she got canned.

She was the CEO of Pepsi. Indra Nuyi, greatest female CEO of all time, is on my human co-board. She talks about how she tried to move the Titanic. 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 profit.

Do you think there's any world in which we're going to move from a shareholder optimization to a stakeholder optimization economy? In other words, where it's not just about maximizing profit for the shareholder of the stock, but all the stakeholders and who actually are involved in that product in some way as users, as a society, be it or with everything, right?

It's starting to happen. It's starting to happen. 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 diet. You don't even give them the option. Unfortunately, that is slow, that is corrupt, and you would think that's happened faster. 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.

What most people realize is the US government actually does pay for most of the health care in this country. It pays for 30% of its entire federal budget is for health care and 44% of the entire health care costs in a country, which are 4.3 and now $4.5 trillion are paid for by the government across all government health programs from Medicare, Medicaid, Health Service, Prardence, and other programs like Children's Health program. We are literally doing the same thing, but we don't realize it. The government actually isn't acting in their best interest by doing the policies they're doing.

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 That's the stuff that we've talked about.

Let's just back up a little bit, Hitch, because I think this is a really important point. We know we're in this situation. We know we're poisoning ourselves. We know our food system is screwed. We know food industry is not being their own police and checking themselves. I'm thinking about tobacco. Tobacco got to where it is now with dramatic changes in our laws and huge penalties to the tobacco industry because of litigation. It was a class action lawsuit. It was easy to do because it was one thing. It's cigarettes, it's tobacco. Food is so many things. Are we going to litigate against red dye number 40? Are we going to litigate against trans fats? Are we going to litigate against polytral processed food, against sugar? And I've talked to some people who actually were involved in the class action lawsuits, lawyers for tobacco. They're like, It's really tough because it's so amorphous. And I'm wondering if you see a path for class action lawsuits and litigation, because basically what you did was you wrote a really nasty lawyer letter from a top lawyer who could scare the shit out of paintball to Kellogg and say, Get your act together or else.

We reserve our rights and we're going to go after you legally if you don't fix this now. That was really compelling. But do you think there's room for a massive litigation approach to this? Because that's what's happened across all the changes we've seen in society, whether it's civil rights, women's rights, whether it's gay rights, things that really worked were these massive attempts to change the law, not by going to lobbying Congress, but by actually going to the courts. Do you think that's the right way, or is there another path that we can get out of this? Because I think about this day and night, and I'm struggling with figuring out how do we drive this. I'm working on food policy in Washington. It's incremental. Yes. But how do we actually make a quantum jump in this? Because it is existential for us.

It is existential.

As you've been talking about this meta-crisis, it is existential. Whether people realize they're not, whether they're actually tuned in or not, whether they're narcotized by social media or streaming TV, or the food that they're eating is dumbing their brain down, which is really true. It literally inflames your brain and disconnects your adult self from your reptile self. How do we actually come to terms with this and what can we do?

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. 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.

In South America, you can get Tony the Tiger on the cereal box, where they took it off, Fruit Loops. Correct.

I think the reason that we chose as our first shot across the bow, the reason we chose Artificial Food Dives is it's so black and white. 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.

We shouldn't be eating petroleum products, Jason.

I think things like sugar and sugar load and all of those issues are much more nuanced in terms of what's the amount? Can you do GMO, non-GMO? 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 a synthetic petroleum-derived artificial.Not.

A hard sell.We start there.Not a hard sell.

We have top down. Bottom up is the part where I think it can be the most effective, the fastest. 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 four. Or their four. 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. Until you give us a better version, if Kellogg's sales drop 5%, just 5. 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. The problem with class action, and I think litigation is another course, class actions in this country take 5, 10, 15 years. There's just so much red tape, and there's so much money that's going to 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. 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 We, as Americans, should get the best version of a product you already make. That's right. That should be the line. 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.

I think- Not saying cereal is good or we should be promoting it, but if you're going to eat cereal, it shouldn't be poison. 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 They're going to have a cigarette warning label on their cereal. That's what happens in South America too. If we required a warning label in this country on the boxes of cereal, it would happen overnight.

That's what we're doing, Jason. I don't know if you know, but my Food Fix campaign, we're working with the FDA and Robert Califf, who's very in favor of this, to change food labeling to create warning labels and clear labeling on the front of packages. It's not like you have to read the ingredient list or read the nutrition facts, which are intentionally designed to confuse and confound us. Unless you're a PhD in nutrition, then even then, good luck. It's like, how do you make it simple so a little kid can understand. Maybe you have to make the grade A to F. If you don't make an A, that's not good. But if you're B, probably okay, but don't need a D or an F, right?

But the fastest way is through the consumer. The fastest way because these companies will adapt overnight. Kellogg agreed. They sent us a letter back. Really? Yeah. They sent us a letter back. We published this yesterday. This is new 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. I used to be a shareholder activist. I've done this many times. What I will say, and I hope Kellogg is listening to this, I am not out for blood. I am out for change. 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 dies. 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. My hope is that if they do this, that the public gives them credit. The best thing that could happen is that sales go up. 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. 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 Human Co and True Food Kitchen and all of our related businesses under the Human Co umbrella, I think the fundamental problem is up until now, companies have been rewarded for taking shortcuts, financially speaking. 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- That's another way. If we can show the world that you can have a successful business that heals people.

You can do good in and- If you can show that you can actually have a successful people that has a 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.

I think that's the argument that the food companies make, and I've I've talked to many CEOs of big food companies, and they say, Look, we can't change because our competitors aren't changing. If we do the right thing, our margins are going to drop and they're going to win, and we can't have that. We're stuck, even though we know it's the wrong thing to do.

Prisoner's dilemma. It's prisoner's dilemma.

I would also say, if Kellogg is listening, that they should also take out the hydrogenated fats that are in both the European and the American version. So that shouldn't even be there. And just to point out, we said that trans fats were banned. They really weren't. In 2015, the government said they're no longer grass, meaning they're not generally recognized as safe. It doesn't mean they're banned. It means that food companies should not put them in and they're not recognized as safe to eat, but it's still allowed. So we can still buy margarine, we can still buy all these hydrogenated products. A lot of companies have taken it out, thank God. But fruit loopsost has hydrogenated fat. I know. That's really bad. I think, Jason, you're such a great visionary and a clearer seer of what's going on in society around this meta crisis that's affecting our physical health, our mental health, our planetary health. You're doing incredible work to change that. You have a beautiful voice that's clear and not dogmatic. You're trying to help companies that are doing the wrong thing do the right thing by applying pressure in the right acupuncture point. I'm really grateful to you.

I'm grateful I'm grateful for everything you've done. I'm grateful for you, Kitchen. I'm grateful for you, Chocolate, which, thank God, I love, and everybody should eat. It's great. If you're going to eat chocolate, that's the one to eat. It's a fantastic chocolate. You have Human Co, which is a meta brand for many, many products that you have and companies that you have that really are trying to elevate the food system and show that there is a way to do good and do well at the same time. I'm just so thrilled that you're meeting with Kellogg and pushing this forward, and it takes people like you to activate people care, but maybe don't think their voice matters because it does. Thanks so much, Jason, for being on the podcast and being on the Doctors Pharmacy. We'll be on the Doctors Pharmacy, and we'll continue this conversation and find out what happens next. I'm on the edge of my seat.

Thank you, Mark. 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. I believe it's possible to scale where things get better as you scale instead of things get worse as you scale. That is the fundamental problem we all need to help with. 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.

That's right. In a sense, we think we're paying more, but we're actually paying less because we're paying less in our medical bills, our health care bills, our disability, or lack of productivity, or lack of enjoyment of life, or lack of vitality. The human cost, it's not measured in actual dollars as high Also the human cost is measured on the back end, and health care cost is huge. That's right. I think it's important that maybe we... It's interesting. I don't know if you know this fact, but I think in America, the Americans spend 9% of their income on food, and Europe is 20%.

That's right. It used to be the same. Forty years ago, it was the same.

I think eating cheap food has become and convenience food has become somehow a value instead of having good food. I think we may want to shift over to thinking a little bit more about where we spend our money on and shifting over our values and priorities. But thank you, Jason, for everything you did.

Thank you for having me. 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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