Big Food vs. Your Health: The Power Struggle
Today, we talk to esteemed food and public health advocate Marion Nestle about the politics of food. No, this has nothing to do with political parties and ballots; it’s about who has the power to decide what goes on your plate. While you may think you’re the one making the decisions, there’s a whole host of hidden influences shaping the food we eat. From government dietary guidelines to nutrition labels and even how supermarkets are set up, we are often the last to be involved in our food choices. Why is nutrition research often driven more by money than health? Who truly controls the U.S. dietary guidelines? How did we contribute to creating the obesity epidemic? And what do Big Food and Big Tobacco have in common? Tune in to find out.
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Eddie You know, with the election coming up, I feel like politics is everywhere on TV, social media, even at the dinner table.
Juna Oh, tell me about it. I just want to take a nap and wake up next year. I'm so exhausted.
Eddie Well, don't take a nap just yet, because there's a whole other type of politics that we haven't covered yet. No.
Juna No more politics.
Eddie Just wait. This one is actually really interesting, and I think it could really help us understand what's going on with our food.
Juna What? I don't know about that, Eddie, what kind of politics are we talking about today?
Eddie We're talking about food politics.
Juna Food politics. You mean like one side of the plate is blueberries and the other side is strawberries, and they're fighting over the battleground plates.
Eddie Oh, God. That was like a straight up dad joke. You do not have to be a dad to have a dad joke. I believe in you. Even though you stole my idea.
Juna Because Eddie is rubbing off on me. And it is not the way I want you to rebel for me. Take it back.
Eddie But no, that's not the politics of food that we're talking about. The politics of food is about who is really influencing what ends up on our plates.
Juna Eddie, I'm pretty sure that is a me. Okay. I'm the one that goes to the grocery store. I choose what I buy, I put it on my plate. It's me.
Eddie Oh, Yuna, wouldn't it be nice if we were actually in control of what food ends up on our plate? Unfortunately, it's not that simple. From nutrition guidelines to food marketing, the decisions behind what we eat are more political than we realize.
Juna Eddie, are you saying that free will is an illusion from home?
Eddie Oh, you know, that's a topic for another episode.
Juna On today's episode, we're covering the politics of food. How does the food industry pull the strings? What are the sneaky marketing tactics that shape our eating habits? What role does the food industry play in the obesity epidemic, and what can we do to make smarter choices? I'm Juna Gjata.
Eddie And I'm Doctor Eddie Phillips, associate professor at Harvard Medical.
Juna School, and you're listening to food. We need to talk. The only health podcast that's got your vote for uncovering the truth behind what's on your plate. And we approve this message. Before we jump into this episode, first, we're going to take a moment to shout out one of our fave reviews of the week. This review comes from someone called Charity DC.
Eddie Yes, and it's titled I love, love, love this. Absolutely. Another cut, cut off. Okay. So I'll just repeat I love love love love this.
Juna Absolutely love the Blake.
Eddie Thank you so much for making this podcast. You make all the topics you cover so relatable and easy to digest. Oh my God, it's spreading like wildfire. Listening to you two both is like chit chatting with my two healthy, like minded BFFs. Oh, that's a.
Juna Positive, right? Yes. That's.
Eddie Best friends forever. Best friends forever. Oh, good. Good. All right, I'm back.
Juna You're doing.
Eddie Good. I absolutely love my time tuning into the show and look forward to every new episode. Exclamation point. Keep up the amazing work. Exclamation point. And I literally have told all my gym friends about you guys.
Juna Oh my god, a smiley.
Eddie Much love charity see?
Juna Oh my God, thank you charity. That's so nice.
Eddie Actually first I first rated as charity DC. That's I would probably be this individual's middle initial. Yeah. Maybe a DC is also a chiropractor. And then I thought oh a charity DC might be someone who like does adjustments for free, but maybe not. I don't know, right back into watching. He's on a rampage. He's on a rampage. Thank you to charity.
Juna Thank you Charity, and thank you for telling all your gym friends about us. That is so cool. You know, I have a lot of people that tell me that they listen to us at the gym and God bless them, because I if I were listening to us at the gym, I would be I don't know I don't know what I'd be doing. I feel like my workouts are too. I don't know, I need like crazy music at the gym. As always, leave us a review. Not only makes us feel really good and has us have a little laugh reading all your beautiful words, but it also helps other people find the show. And speaking of supporting the show, we also want to give a very special thank you to some people from the foodie fam who are our biggest supporters. Right?
Eddie And can you explain with a foodie fam is Jenna?
Juna Yes guys. Okay, so there was a time last year when we literally didn't know if this podcast would be able to keep going, okay? And we started a Patreon to be able to support the production of the podcast because as you guys know, we don't like to accept just any sponsor on the Potter, okay? We don't accept the B supplements. We don't accept the weight loss pills, we don't accept the green powders because they don't work. And we would never want to sell you guys stuff that doesn't work.
Eddie So we've also passed on blood alcohol. Like everything.
Juna Yeah, all the alcohol. Oh my gosh. Like so many. Just like processed foods sponsors just all the stuff. And we try the foodie and it has three tiers. And our highest tier is called Edy's coffee ice cream.
Eddie Oh, right. Sounds good. Alrighty.
Juna And and every month these people pay the most out of our members to support the podcast. And everybody is so kind. And it just, like, warms my little heart. Eddie, do you want to shout them out? Yes.
Eddie Thank you so much to Allison. Keely. Christy, Jana. Elizabeth. Jessica. Kirk, Chris, Carissa a lot of KS, Suzanne and Melissa.
Juna Thank you guys. Also, I'm just noticing it's like almost all women. Well because the ladies are showing up. Men men listening.
Eddie Yes it's come on down hahaha R Kelly is a male Archie today.
Juna That's my dad. Shout out to my dad for being a highest tier member. He's the best. And there's one more thing we want to talk about for the episode starts guys. And that is supporting another man, another wonderful man. One might say my American dad, as I often call him, and that is Mister Edward M Phillips as he once again tries to run a marathon.
Eddie I am I am going to, run my last marathon. Woohoo!
Juna Is your last one?
Eddie Yeah, it's the last time I'm going to be asking for any support from anyone. Okay, so, my wife, myself and some other friends are going to be running the Chicago Marathon tober 13th week. And to get into the race, I chose to support and get a number from Achilles International, which is a remarkable organization that over the years has gotten over 140,000 disabled athletes to participate in things like marathons and shorter distances and all sorts of sports, with remarkable support from folks that will run along with the disabled runner. So I'm looking for, some support. And if you go to food, we need to talk.com. There's a little tab called run Eddie run and appreciate all support. So thank you enough for remembering that I'm running this, to all of the folks that, would care to support. The effort and contribute to Achilles International.
Juna And now onto the episode. Today we are joined by Marion Nestle, who is the Paulette Goddard Professor of Nutrition, Food Studies and Public Health emerita at New York University. She is best known for her influential books food, Politics and What to Eat, and she is a super cool lady who I have been reading about for like over a decade now, so I am so excited to have her on the show.
Eddie Professor Nestle, I just wanted to give a little fan shout out that I've been reading your works for probably decades, and understanding that you really have shaped the discussion about food and politics, and we're thrilled to have you here with us today.
Juna Yes. Thank you so much.
Speaker 3 Oh, thanks for having me.
Juna So the first question we wanted to start off with was, how has the food industry influenced dietary guidelines over the years? I think a lot of us think of dietary guidelines as the government does a lot of research and decides what's good for our health with no input from the food industry. And obviously that's not really the case. So where are we wrong in that assumption?
Speaker 3 Well, the food industry is a stakeholder group in government policy, and the dietary guidelines are open for comment in every one of their iterations. And food companies can comment as well as anybody else can comment. But food companies tend to have a fair amount of clout on this. And the best example really, right from the beginning, the Dietary Guidelines, which started in 1980, came right after a big report from a Senate committee in 1977. There were called dietary goals for the United States, and that the first edition of the Dietary Goals recommended eating less meat because meat was a source of saturated fat. They were worried about saturated fat. And the guidelines said, eat less meat. The meat industry went berserk, and then within a year, the dietary goals had been changed.
Juna So could I ask you a question about nutrition research? What are the other influences that make nutrition research biased? I think a lot of us assume that nutrition research is conducted in an objective way because, you know, these people are professors there at universities, like they are supposed to be having the public interest at heart. But I found out very early on, when looking at papers that you always have to look if there's any funding or I, you what they call it on papers. But like basically any other ties that the researchers have to other industries, because most of the time there's some sort of tie to something that's funding their research.
Speaker 3 Well, I'm going to say that and make a sort of general statement that everybody who does research is biased. Everybody may come into research wanting to demonstrate something in design studies to try to, see whether their hypothesis is true or false. When it comes to nutrition, there's an additional problem, what I would call ideological biases. And lots and lots of nutrition researchers have them. They believe in meat. They believe in vegan diets. They believe in supplements. They think all of these things work. They design studies to test that hypothesis. And to the extent that they've done a really good job of designing that research, they'll get an a reasonable test of it. I don't know anybody who criticizes the quality of the science. Where the difficulty comes in is in the way a study is designed and the way it's interpreted. And when you have industry funded research, which is something I'm very interested in, it adds an additional kind of bias that is discretionary. If everybody is biased because they have ideological beliefs, that's part of doing science. You do an experiment. Somebody else has different believe. They try to disprove your science. That's how science works. But when funding is involved, it introduces an external factor that complicates things enormously. And there is a whole body of research that looks at the effect of industry funding on research. And that research demonstrates, without question, that industry funding biases research results in the direction that the funder would like. This has been shown for the tobacco industry, for the chemical industry, I think most obviously for the pharmaceutical drug industry, where drug companies are trying to demonstrate that their branded drug is better than anything else. And it's also true for food research and nutrition research. Where it's gotten to the point where I can look at the title of the study, and if it says that a particular food has a particular benefit on some particular disease. The big ones are cognitive function, the heart disease, cancer, whatever. My last question is who paid for this? Yeah. And sure enough, a surprisingly large percentage of cases. I can guess who the funder is by what the title of the study is. While it's not always true, but it's true often enough to be eyebrow raising.
Juna And is that legally required to be disclosed in the paper?
Speaker 3 Oh, yeah. It's supposed to be disclosed, and the disclosure requirement is relatively recent. It's really only within the last 20 years or so that investigators were asked by journals to disclose their conflicts of interest, and let's assume they do. And there they are. And then that gives you the opportunity to say, oh, this study of walnuts in health was paid for by the National Walnut Board, or this study was paid for by the meat industry, or this study was paid for by the dairy industry or the sugar industry or whatever. And if you know who the funder is, you could pretty well predict what the outcome of this study is. And the researchers who have looked at that say that that doesn't have to do with the quality of the science. It has to do with the way the study question was designed.
Juna Right.
Speaker 3 It has to do with the way the question was framed. And then secondarily, it has to do with the interpretation of the results. So and that shows up where you have a study looking at the effect of a food or nutrient, usually a food on health. And it really won't show much or it'll show some benefits and some risks. I don't know, it's it'll be messy, but it will be interpreted favorably.
Eddie We're not to get too, too wonky here, but where are we with the effort to catalog all of the studies done so we can overcome the bias where the negative studies that show that, God forbid, walnuts are not healthy, which I which I eat every day with three different meals that that those studies get squashed.
Speaker 3 I think they.
Eddie Are.
Speaker 3 But I'm I don't even know why we're doing research on that. There's only one reason to do that kind of research. And that's really my point is, the only reason to do that kind of research is to market walnuts, as opposed to cashews or macadamia nuts or almonds or something else. Everybody's competing for market share. And you know I did this thing I have a blog food politics.com that I've been doing for years. And in 2015 I was so tired of seeing these industry funded studies that every time I collected five of them, I would post them on my website. And I did that compulsively for a year. It was a convenience sample. It was just whatever I ran across. I was doing it very systematically, but at the end of the year, I had collected 168 studies. Oh my gosh. And 156 of them had results that were favorable. This one is just okay. This was not real science. This was casual. But I had asked my readers to send me examples of studies that had negative results that the funder would be really unhappy about. I could only find 12 wow in that year and what that told me, even though this was not real science, what this told me was that it was easier to find these studies that were funded by industry that came out with results that favored industry than the opposite. And the other interesting fact was that of those 168 studies, 156 studies, they represented about 50 different kinds of foods. Any food that you could think of was doing this, I'm sure. Yeah, lots and lots and lots of healthy foods. Mangoes. Peaches. Cherries. Strawberries. Blueberries. Raspberries.
Eddie So you mentioned politics, which is what we're focused on. And there was a couple of dates that you mentioned, and one sticks in my head, which was 1980. And I remember one of the traditions in the show is to, show how old I am and how young Yuna is. But I remember where I was in college when Ronald Reagan was elected. That's also kind of the date often associated with the beginning of the obesity epidemic. And you've spoken and written about this extensively. Can you take us through what changed in policy and with corn, etc.?
Juna And are they related? Is policy and the obesity crisis related?
Speaker 3 Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. You can date the current food system and everything that's wrong with it. To 1980, when President Reagan was elected. And there were three things that happened in 1980 and actually 1981. One was a change in agricultural policy that actually it started a little bit earlier, and it started in the 1970s when Earl Butz became Secretary of Agriculture and changed agricultural policy for one that paid farmers not to grow food in order to maintain price levels high enough so that farmers would make a living. That changed to grow as much food as you possibly can. Fence rode a fence row because we're going to support the growing of as much food as possible. And what that did was it enormously increased the calories in the food supply, which went from 3200 calories per capita. Again, availability, not what people were eating. Availability in 1980 to 4000 calories per capita 20 years later. So there was an enormous increase in the availability of food in the food supply. Food companies had to sell that 4000 calories is roughly twice what the country needs enormous surplus food. If you're trying to sell food in that kind of environment, you have to get people to eat your product instead of somebody else's, right, or you have to get people to eat more in general. And that's what happened. The food environment changed in the 1980s. Portion sizes got bigger, you know, and if I had one thing, one concept to get across in nutrition, it would be that larger portions have more calories. I can't even say it with a straight face, but it's not intuitively obvious, as it turns out. So larger portions. Enormous effort by the food industry to push snacking. Snacks are good for you. If you eat snacks, you won't take in as many calories. A falsehood if I've ever heard what? Because the more times a day you eat, the.
Juna More.
Speaker 3 You take in food, because it went everywhere. When I came to NYU in 1988, there were signs. There were the cleverest signs all over the library warning students not to bring food into the library. Now there are two cafes and live bookstores. Wouldn't let you in if you were carrying a cup of coffee. Food absolutely everywhere. And it became socially acceptable to eat all day long, anywhere in enormous portions, any time of day. So that was a social change that took place. But that wasn't the only big change. The other thing happened in 1981 with the speech by Jack Welch, who was then head of General Electric, and he made an enormously influential speech in which he picked up Milton Friedman's neoliberal ideas and said, never mind blue chip corporations slow returns on investment. No more of that. We want immediate higher returns on investment. So this was part of what was called the shareholder value movement. And you can date it quite precisely to that particular speech. And everybody bought it. There was an immediate change in the way that corporations operated. They got rid of all of their social interactions, their care of their employees. They reduced wages, they outsourced. And that combination created a food environment that just really encouraged everybody to eat more. And for food companies, it was death because they not only had to make a profit in a situation in which there was twice as much food available as anybody needed, but they had to demonstrate growth in profits. Oh, and so they had to find ways to sell more food. And you know what? They were really good at it.
Eddie And we ate it up.
Speaker 3 And we ate it up. Hence obesity. I actually think that large proportion suspicion, the explanation you writ large abortions, you're taking in more calories. Really that takes care of it.
Juna Did the not only the quantity of the food we were eating changed, but did the quality of the food also change? Because I know ultra processed food is also kind of dated, or the explosion of, I should say is dated back to around that time as well.
Speaker 3 Well, it was the same thing. It was the same thing it had to do with the snacking. So what you wanted to do was you wanted people eating food all the time. And one way to do that. Is to promote sex. So there was an enormous investment in sex production and in general, an enormous effort into designing processed foods that people just couldn't stop eating.
Juna Can you talk about some of the efforts that go into designing foods like that? I think a lot of us like, don't even understand how much research and money goes into making foods addictive.
Marion Oh, yeah. I mean, if you're going to design a food product, you want people to eat it. You know, this is this isn't rocket science. This is the order. And it's not even us. It's just business. I mean, part of the point of all of this is that there was nothing devious about this. This was business as usual. Of course, if you're going to design a product, you're going to design one that people like. You're going to have focus groups with people sampling different kinds of products and telling you what they think of them. You're going to do this with babies. You're going to do this with children. You're going to do this with adults. You're going to do this with everybody. You're going to put cameras on kids and have them go through supermarkets picking out things that they like, wow, you're going to go to the centers that work on flavors and you're going to have them try many, many, many different kinds of flavors until you find one that people can't resist. You're going to add sugar to products and salt products until you reach what the industry calls the bliss point, which is this is exactly the level of sugar I like. This is the level of salt I like. If you reduce it below this, I'm not going to like it nearly as much. And the combination? Of having to sell more food, demonstrating growth to Wall Street, which I think is just absolutely deadly. Main food companies forget any kind of ethical or moral or I mean, their health was not their issue. Health is your issue. We're not forcing you to eat our product. We're not holding a gun to your head. You know, then just blame personal responsibility. If you're fat, it's your fault.
Eddie So many of our listeners are trying to improve their health. Excuse me. Duh. One mantra is it's just takes a little bit more discipline. I'm going to learn how to shop in the supermarket. I'm going to shop. The what? The periphery, where the vegetables are and not the interior. You know, all sorts of things versus this is a calculated change for the reasons that you've clearly described to us. But, you know, take us to our listeners choices as they enter the supermarket or decide not to go in there at all. And maybe they're better off going to a farmer's market or meal, ordering their foods, and you never get tempted, but just take us through the responsibilities.
Marion I mean, the way I put it is, if you're trying to eat healthfully in this environment, you're fighting a $1.5 trillion industry on your own. Okay. You know, I consider that a rigged system.
Eddie Yeah.
Marion I mean, maybe you're strong enough to fight a $1.5 trillion industry on your own. I certainly know that. I'm always impressed by how there is not one single detail of the way that a supermarket is organized that has not been researched to the degree that there are no accidents in supermarkets. There's a reason why, when I walk into a Wegmans, for example, there's a wall of Wegmans fruit flavored drinks at the entrance. There's a reason why the produce is where it is. There's a reason why the milk is way in the back of the store. There's I mean, there's a reason why what's on the shelves is in front of you, and there's a reason why every single one of those products is right next to the cash register where you were checking out on your own, so that you could just pass that into the bag right there. And the system is set up heavily researched, the lighting, the music, the distance, the size of the aisles, all of that stuff is researched. And then on top of it, supermarkets charge slotting fees to companies. Companies pay supermarkets to place their products in certain positions. Because the rule of supermarkets is the more you see, the more you buy. So once you understand that rule, that you understand that the purpose of the supermarket is to get you to spend as much time there as possible and to walk through as much of it as you possibly can. Excellent for your exercise regime. Not so good for your dietary intake. So the most profitable products are where you can most easily see them there at the ends of the aisles and cash registers. So if you have trouble going through a supermarket without doing a lot of impulse buying, again, it's because you're fighting a whole system of your own. And, most people are strong enough to fight them, and I don't know who those people are. I certainly can't do it.
Eddie Is there any evidence that that you're somehow more protected if you order online?
Marion No. No, because what happens online is that companies pay the, oh, you know, pay the supermarkets to have their products put up front. And again, the objective is to get you to stay on as long as possible, look at as many things as possible and pay as many fees as possible. The sort of guideline is if you go to a supermarket, bring a shopping list and don't deviate from it. But again, if you're human, you're either going to ignore the shopping list or deviate from it. And I have to say, I love going to supermarkets. I think they're enormous fun. And when I see something that I think is interesting, I think, oh, I'm going to get that. Let me try it just this once.
Eddie And for you. It's all just research.
Marion Absolutely. I get to do research on very fun things.
Eddie You know, I am absolutely loving this conversation, but we're about to go to a quick break. Before we do, I just want to say to our listeners, why not share this episode? Send. To someone who you think will love it. I can't wait for some friends of mine to listen to it, because I know they were really into politics and they have never thought about food politics. Don't go anywhere. We'll be right back. And we're back with Professor Marion Nestle from New York University.
Juna I had another question for you about the marketing aspect of food. So I don't know if this is true, but it seems like in my lifetime at least, there's been this massive increase in health and nutrition, and you would think that this would make it a better food environment or make people more informed, but it kind of just seems like food companies have caught on. So now it's just more profitable to market foods as health foods. So I'm thinking of all the things that are like, you know, protein donuts, protein pancakes, protein whatever.
Eddie Gluten free soda.
Juna Yeah.
Marion No GMO. Right?
Juna Yeah. No GMO. Have you seen that food companies are capitalizing on the health fad of the post companies?
Marion They are. Yeah. The purpose of a food company is to sell products. Really, that's all there is to it. So they have marketers who try to figure out what sells. And there are research enterprises that do that research for the food companies. There are lots and lots and lots of research firms that will come out with, usually reports that you have to pay a lot of money for, but they'll tell you things like, it seems sort of obvious to me, but okay, nobody's paying me to do this. You know, people are interested in their health. Well, yes. So if you can advertise your product as having some health effect, that's going to sell it. And there are what I would call positive claims. You know, the Cheerios will help you reduce heart disease. Sort of an obvious one. That's an FDA approved health claim. And then there are the notes. And I just love the notes. I find them so entertaining. No gluten, no GMOs, no sugar, no artificial sweeteners, no glyphosate. So no, I mean, you name it and there's a no for it. And so people are looking for products that don't have things they don't want to eat. And so this kind of advertising is very useful for health conscious consumers. Health conscious consumers are by no means the majority and they're a minority, but they're a very noisy and influential minority. And I would guess your listeners fall into that category. Yes. The FDA says that when people look at food labels, all they care about is sugar. These days, or all they care about is calories, or all they care about is something else. And to understand food labels, you have to be really, really sophisticated in your understanding in order to understand food labels. They're very hard to understand. And, you know, unless you do that work. You're raising your hand. Do you have a question?
Eddie I just I do, professor, whenever I can. Oh, I don't know, a little bit blue about. My God, it's just ever going to change. The place I look historically for some salvation is, the tobacco wars and the ability of this country since the 1960s to transform ourselves from, what, like 40% of adults smoking to now. It's like a weird thing to do. One of the big steps in that history was the restriction of advertising. Is that a place that we could go or we could actually get these food companies that are dutifully working to increase shareholder value and to compete with each other. But if they're just making if they're pushing something that we know is unhealthy, is there a chance should we be putting our energy into restricting that? So, you know, kids are not overwhelmed.
Marion You certainly want to restrict marketing of junk foods to kids. Okay. There are plenty of places in their countries in Latin America that have set up some guidelines for what's marketable and what's not. There are warning labels on products that are too high in sugar, saturated fat, salt in calories, artificial sweeteners, caffeine. In the United States, we have the First Amendment, which the Supreme Court and the courts in general have interpreted as allowing commercial speech. Now, it's very hard for me to believe that the Founding Fathers of the United States intended the First Amendment to protect food companies who were marketing junk foods to kids. Right. But that's how the courts interpret it. And so unless there's a change there, I don't see our being able to do that very easily in this country. The one time that it was tried, it was right around the time that Reagan was elected, the Federal Trade Commission had the bright idea of saying that foods that were high in sugar, salt, saturated fat, or whatever could not be advertised on television programs aimed at children. What happened in response to that was amazing. First of all, the head of the Federal Trade Commission was fired right off the bat. He was he was fired. And Congress passed a law that said, you can't put any restrictions on marketing to children.
Juna Wow, wow, wow.
Eddie So as we start to wrap up, just take us through the recommendations. I'm going to make a list before I go to the supermarket. I'm going to be aware that.
Juna Yeah, what do we do.
Eddie Simply put. Well, you know.
Marion It's so easy that the journalist Michael Pollan can coverage in seven words, eat food. Not too much, mostly plants. And all you have to add to that is that by food, he means foods that are lightly, minimally processed or unprocessed. Real food, in other words. So if you add to that, avoid what are now called ultra processed foods, a fancy name for junk foods. You've taken care of it. And I think it's perfectly possible to eat healthily and deliciously. I don't have any trouble with it, but I don't buy a lot of junk food, and I never have. You know, my first advice to anybody who's trying to maintain weight is no sugar sweetened beverages.
Juna Stop him.
Marion Stop. And if you must have a sugar sweetened beverage, make sure it's eight ounces and no more, no more than eight ounces. And, please, not very often do not drink sugar sweetened beverages by the court. Do not. Oh, I've learned a new you know, the new weight loss drugs, the GLP one drugs. I've learned a new term connected with them that I just love. It's called food noise. The drugs stop, the food noise. If you can't have these kinds of foods in your house without eating them because you feel like they're done for you, they're screaming, eat me all the time. Don't buy them. Yeah. You know, and I have my own. I have, you know, my own favorite noisy foods that, I have a lot of trouble with. So I find sparingly.
Juna Before we end, I tried a fun question. What are the biggest industries that spend the most money lobbying the government? Is it sugar? Is it meat? Is it dairy? Like, what is the biggest offender?
Marion Oh, actually it's agriculture.
Juna Really?
Marion It's production. Agriculture. By far.
Juna Why is that?
Marion They make a lot of money from government subsidies. They don't want those to change. Wow. Okay. I mean, a lot of the lobbying is done in a complicated way. With the blessing of the Department of Agriculture through checkoff programs, which are these generic marketing programs paid for by industries that are managed by the Department of Agriculture?
Juna Why? If the most money is being spent by agriculture, why is it not that like fruits and vegetables are being pushed more than junk food? I feel like junk food is always pushing your face, but fruits and vegetables are kind of, you know, always in the back or on the sides.
Marion You know, because there are hundreds of different fruits and vegetables and they view each other as competitors. They don't view each other. I mean, there are organizations of fruit and vegetable growers, but the, really, there's first of all, there's small vegetables are small in comparison to some of these other products. And unifying them has proven to be very difficult. There are some organizations that lobby for them, but they're tiny in comparison to junk food.
Eddie The profit margin on the processed food is much greater, right?
Marion Yeah, because they're shelf stable. Fruits and vegetables are hard to deal with because they spoil.
Juna Right.
Marion And so there are costs associated with the left, the refrigerated and other annoying things like that. It's not that anybody's losing money on them. Yeah they're not, but they don't have anywhere near the profitability of potato chips or, things that can sit on a shelf for a long time.
Juna Right. And in our bonus episode, we're going to dive into all of the secretive and often shocking ways that Big Food is using to market these foods to you. But for now, I just wanna say thank you so much for coming on. This was so informative, sir.
Marion My pleasure.
Juna Thank you so much to Professor Marion Nestle. We will link to her work on our website and you can also visit her website. Food politics dotcom. If you want to hear our bonus episode with Marion Nestle, where we dive into what food companies do to market to you, and also how the new weight loss drugs are scaring all the food companies.
Eddie Ooh.
Juna You can go to food. We need to talk.com/membership or click the link in our show notes. You can find us on Instagram at food. We need to talk. You can find me on Instagram at the official Yuna and Know Jada on YouTube and TikTok. You can find Eddie.
Eddie Didn't I mentioned that I'm training for a marathon?
Juna Yes you can.
Eddie You can find me running. Yes.
Juna Training for his marathon. Food We Need to Talk is produced by me and is distributed by PR.
Eddie Our mix engineer is Rebecca Seidel.
Juna We were co-created by Kerry Goldberg, a George Hicks Eddie Phelps and meet.
Eddie For any personal health questions, please consult your health provider to find out more. Go to food. We need to talk.com. Thanks for listening. We're will. Make that funny mark on my phone, right? Knock knock knock.
