Susan:
Hey there, it's Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson, and welcome to the weekly vlog. This week I am joined by Dr. Marion Nestle, someone I have admired for a long, long time. Welcome, Dr. Marion Nestle.
Dr. Marion Nestle :
Glad to be here.
Susan:
Yeah. So you have a book out that you have in your screen, and I'm putting in my screen. "What to Eat Now?" And it's a sequel of sorts or a second edition. Is that right?
Dr. Marion Nestle:
Yeah. It's a updated edition of a book I wrote 20 years ago and it was a pandemic project. I'm laughing because at the time I told the publisher that I thought the book read pretty well and it just needed a little bit of updating. And I bet I could do it in about six months. And here we are four years later.
Susan:
Oh, wow. Why did it end up being such a much bigger project than you expected?
Dr. Marion Nestle:
Because so much had changed and I had no idea. I hadn't been paying close enough attention. I mean, I'd noticed some things, but I hadn't realized the extent of the changes in rules, regulations, the way supermarkets operate, new food concepts, and an enormous amount of research that had come out subsequently. So all of that had to be done over and it was, I got to do the book again. It was really fun.
Susan
All right. And who is this book for?
Dr. Marion Nestle:
Well, this is my book for a general audience. This is my book for anybody who eats and who's interested in food issues. It's not really a book about what you should eat. It's a book about how to think about food issues.
Susan:
What do you mean by what to think about food issues? Give me an example.
Dr. Marion Nestle:
Well, if you go to a grocery store and you go to the produce section, for example, which is usually the first place everybody goes to if they go in the right direction.
Susan:
You're talking my language, by the way. Okay. Keep going.
Dr. Marion Nestle:
Where did the fruit come from? How long did it take to get there? Was it genetically modified? Who picked it? Who prepared it? Were there pesticides on it? Is there organic? Why does it have a non-GMO label on it? I mean, those kinds of questions that just come up in routine shopping. I did that in every section of the supermarket, as I had in the previous edition.
Susan:
So, it's about food policy, food systems.
Dr. Marion Nestle:
It's really about food policy, food systems, food choices, what goes into those choices. The major point, which hasn't changed, is that supermarkets are not social service agencies. Their businesses and their job is to sell you food and not only sell you food, but to sell you as much food as possible in the largest amounts as possible at as high a price as they can get away with. That's what it's about. So you as a customer going into a supermarket and trying to eat healthfully are up against an entire food system on your own. It's a lot to ask of one person to fight an entire food system. But if you have trouble picking healthy foods, if you end up with far more impulse buys than you intended to, if your bill is twice as high as you wanted it to be, you're doing exactly what the supermarkets want you to do.
Susan:
Interesting. And when you go to the supermarket, what kinds of thoughts or values drive what you buy?
Dr. Marion Nestle:
Well, I'm old and I don't eat that much anymore. And I happen to like fresh foods, fresh ingredients. I don't eat a lot of junk food. I never have. And so I want fresh, tasty, good foods. And I don't eat very much, so it doesn't cost that much, although I'm quite shocked by how much prices have gone up in the last year.
Susan:
And you're a nutritionist, right?
Dr. Marion Nestle:
Yes.
Susan:
Okay. And you're at NYU, so you've published a bunch. And there's a lot of politics in nutrition, education, science in the United States. Is that right? There's a-
Dr. Marion Nestle:
Well, I wrote a book called "Food Politics" in 2002. It's come out in several subsequent editions and there'll be a 25th anniversary edition in 2027. When I published that book, the first question everybody asked me was, "What does food have to do with politics?" Nobody asks me that anymore. Now that we have RFK, Jr. As Secretary of Health and Human Services, everybody understands what food has to do with politics.
Susan:
Okay. You brought it up, so let's go there. What do you think of the job he's doing?
Dr. Marion Nestle:
I wish he were doing a better job. He had some very good ideas about food and those were ... Any idea that he had about food that countered the ability of the food industry to make money has been defeated by lobbying. I mean, the thing that I was most interested in seeing him do was to get the harmful chemicals out of the food supply. He's been unable to do that. He couldn't even get glyphosate out because the lobbying and pushback on it was so bad and nobody wants to do anything to the maker of glyphosate because that company also makes a phosphorus compound that's extremely important in weapons. So they don't want to do anything to that company. That's politics.
Susan:
Heartbreaking. What ideas did he have that you loved most?
Dr. Marion Nestle:
Well, I love eat real food in the new dietary guidelines. Been saying that for years. Eat real food and go easy on ultra-processed foods. Although they didn't use the word ultra-processed, they used highly processed, but ultra-processed is what they mean. I thought those were very, very good things in the dietary guideline, unfortunately undermined by some of the other things in the dietary guidelines that are hard to interpret or make no sense at all. And the big one, of course, is double the amount of protein that you eat, but Americans already eat twice the protein that they need. Nobody needs more protein, really. So, what's that about? That's about a pro-meat agenda because most people think that protein is a euphemism for meat. And when I said, "Well, the meat industry is really happy about all this. " They say it has nothing to do with the meat industry. It's Robert F. Kennedy, Jr's ideology that's doing this. He eats a carnivore diet and believes that a lot of meat is really good for you. The guidelines also say in contradiction to 40 years of other advice to eat full fat dairy products and to eat a lot of healthy fats. And healthy fats are defined as olive oil, butter and beef tallow. Beef tallow? You've got to be kidding me. So, I mean, all of that is very peculiar and it's very hard to know where it all came from, but it's clearly ideology.
Susan:
Yeah, ideology, not science. So, you mentioned ultra-processed foods. The current most commonly cited definition of ultra-processed foods comes from the NOVA Scale, right? What do you think of the Nova scale?
Dr. Marion Nestle:
I like it. I think it works pretty well. What the NOVA Scale does is to divide foods into four categories by their degree of processing. NOVA-1 is unprocessed or minimally processed foods. NOVA-2 is processed culinary ingredients. NOVA-2 three is processed foods, minimally processed like frozen or baked bread or canned or something. Canned beans, that kind of thing. And then the only classification you care about is NOVA-4, which is ultra-processed. And these are industrialized foods that don't look anything like the foods they came from. You can't make them in your home kitchen because you don't have the equipment or you don't have the additives because they contain industrial additives and often a lot of added sugar and salt and sometimes fat. And those foods, the NOVA-4 category foods are designed specifically to be irresistible, if not addictive, and to be extremely profitable because they're made with inexpensive ingredients that can be purchased when they don't cost much and they have very long shelf life. So, the difference there is pretty easy to understand. Corn on the cob is unprocessed, NOVA-1. Canned corn is NOVE-3 three processed, and Dorito chips are NOVA-4 ultra-processed. Pretty easy to understand. And the importance of it is that there has now been a phenomenal amount of research that links Nova-4 ultra-processed foods to poor health outcome, obesity, type-2 diabetes, heart disease, cognitive difficulties, overall mortality, you name it. Anything bad that happens to you has been linked to ultra-processed foods. Those are observational studies. They can't prove causation, but there are now several clinical trials in which people have been fed ultra-processed diets as opposed to minimally processed diets comparable in nutrition value. And those studies invariably show that when people are eating the ultra-processed foods, they take in many, many, many more calories, 500 a day, 800 a day, a thousand a day more than when they're eating minimally processed foods and don't realize it. So, for that reason alone, since everybody eats too much, or most people do, your 75% of American adults are overweight or obese. You want to avoid foods that induce you to eat more calories without realizing it. So that's where that comes from. And it seems to me that's a very useful classification system.
Susan:
Now, some studies have come out saying that it's confusing, saying that even experts can't figure out which category things go into. And then I heard that those studies were funded by the food industry.
Dr. Marion Nestle:
Oh, not necessarily. I mean, some of them were. The food industry is very concerned about the NOVA-4 classification because those are among the most profitable foods of the supermarket and eating less is very bad for business. If you're in the food business, it's really bad. You don't want people eating less. You want people eating more. That's why we have the food environment that we have now, because it's set up to get people to eat more. But there's some nutrition people who are very concerned about the NOVA classification system also, because they say it excludes a collection of foods that are high in nutrients like commercial whole wheat breads or commercial yogurts or plant-based meats or those kinds of things. Actually, there are only a very, very few examples, really very few, but they don't like the idea that the nutrition quality of the food is not considered in the NOVA classification system, and it's not. The idea is, of course, if you're eating NOVA-1, 2, or 3, you are going to be getting a healthy diet, and you don't need to worry about nutrients. It's only if you're eating a lot of NOVA-4 foods that you need to worry about the nutritional value.
Susan:
I mean, so my take as a recovering food addict is I'm really concerned about the white sugar on white flour in NOVA-2. And I look at those things and I say, "Those things were born in factories and poured into a bag too." And I think that white sugar should be in category 4 because I can sit at home and pour white sugar and white flour and butter into a bowl and mash it up with a fork and eat and be eating entirely out of NOVA-2.
Dr. Marion Nestle:
Except that if you look at traditional cuisines throughout the world, they contain those ingredients and people were not obese and didn't have all of the chronic diseases that we have. The difficulty that we have in the United States is we eat too much. I studied this on my doctoral student, Lisa Young, did her dissertation on the increase in size of portions in the food supply. I think in this increased portion size is a sufficient explanation of why people gained so much weight between 1980 and 2000. I mean, if I had one nutritional concept I could get across to everybody, it's that larger portions have more calories. I know I can hardly say it with a straight face because it seems so obvious. It is not intuitively obvious. I can prove that it's not intuitively obvious.
Susan:
How's that?
Dr. Marion Nestle:
Because when Lisa was teaching undergraduate nutrition and I was working on my book about calories, I asked her to ask her class as a class assignment, how many calories are in an eight ounce soft drink and how many calories are in a 64 ounce double gulp. And we did not expect people to know how many calories were in an eight ounce soft drink unless they read a lot of labels, but we certainly expected them to know the difference between eight and 64 and to multiply by eight, right?
Susan:
Yeah.
Dr. Marion Nestle:
The average multiplier was three.
Susan:
Oh, interesting.
Dr. Marion Nestle:
I said, "Lisa, you have to go back and ask your class."
Susan:
Interesting.
Dr. Marion Nestle:
I don't care how mathematically challenged they are.
Susan:
Oh my gosh.
Dr. Marion Nestle:
They can go eight times eight and you have 800 calories. And they told her that 800 calories in a soft drink was impossible.
Susan:
Wow. Interesting.
Dr. Marion Nestle:
That's what they told her.
Susan:
Interesting.
Dr. Marion Nestle:
Impossible. Yes, of course we can multiply by eight, but that seemed ridiculous. It was just totally impossible.
Susan:
Oh, interesting. But it's not. It's not. Yeah. I feel that way sometimes when I'm in restaurants that often now have calories on the menu and I feel that I'll look at a dish and it's like 2,300 calories or something. And I'm like, that's like, what? I mean, I don't order it, but it does seem kind of crazy pants, right? They've got this thing on the menu that's an appetizer and it's got 2,300 calories.
Dr. Marion Nestle:
It's an appetizer or it's lunch. And you think, holy smoke. 2,300 is about the average caloric need of most women.
Susan:
Of a person in a whole day. I actually did have an experience once ordering something like that. I was at a Red Robin, which is a burger and fries joint that I used to go sometimes with my husband and my kids. And we went again a couple years ago, and they had a Brussels sprouts appetizer on the menu that was 900 calories. It was deep fried with Parmesan cheese on it. And there's not that much healthy that I can eat in a Red Robin restaurant. Anyway, I ordered the Brussels sprouts without the cheese. And in my head I'm justifying, I'm like, I guess the cheese was a lot of those calories. So, the Brussels sprouts come, they're deep fried and crispy. Crispy as all get out. And I eat them and they melt in my mouth. There's practically oil dripping down my chin. And I eat them all and I go home feeling so wretched and guilty and wrecked. And I got to call my friend in food recovery and go, "I ordered the Brussels sprouts and said 900 calories, but I said without the cheese." And I just, she's like, "You're okay." I'm like, "I'm okay. I'm okay. Okay. I ate the Brussels sprouts." But it's true. There was something in my head that sort of said, "Well, that can't be right, there's not 900 calories in Brussels sprouts."
Dr. Marion Nestle:
Oh yeah, if they're deep fried, there sure is because even olive oil has 120 calories per tablespoon. It adds up quickly.
Susan:
Oh my gosh. So I have a question. I've been wondering about this for a long time, and maybe you're someone who knows enough to educate me. I used to teach a course called the Psychology of Eating in college, and I used to talk about The Farm Bill and how it came about in 1973 and the desire to produce more food, not less food, stop subsidizing farmers for not growing tomatoes. Let's start paying them to grow the tomatoes. And how it turned out that we ended up paying all these farmers to produce all these commodity crops, wheat and corn and soy, the corn mainly going to high fructose corn syrup or no, going into corn onto cow feed. Is that where it mainly goes?
Dr. Marion Nestle:
Yeah. The Department of Agriculture publishes a gorgeous graph of what happens to corn in the food supply. Roughly half of it goes to feed animals. Roughly half of it goes to make ethanol for automobiles.
Susan:
Oh, really?
Dr. Marion Nestle:
Leaving a tiny fraction under 10% for all other uses of corn, industrial as well as food. Hardly any corn is grown in this country for food.
Susan:
Interesting. Interesting.
Dr. Marion Nestle:
Indirectly through animals, but corn itself, hardly any ... And a tiny, tiny amount goes for high fructose corn syrup.
Susan:
Interesting.
Dr. Marion Nestle:
Mostly because we have so much corn.
Susan:
There's a lot of it. Yeah. And where does the soy go? All this soy? It's not going into tofu, right?
Dr. Marion Nestle:
Half of it goes to diesel.
Susan:
Diesel fuel. Okay.
Dr. Marion Nestle:
And the other half to animals.
Susan:
Okay. So, animals are eating soy as part of their feed as well?
Dr. Marion Nestle:
A tiny fraction for soy oil that people actually eat. And soybeans, edamame and things that people eat. Our food system is not about food. It's about feed and fuel.
Susan:
Interesting. Interesting. Okay. And a lot of those crops, am I right, couldn't really be grown profitably without the government subsidies?
Dr. Marion Nestle:
Right. And the government, the way the subsidy system works is that the more crop you grow, the more subsidy you get. So, this has been an enormous incentive to plant corn in places where it should never be grown because it's not enough water, but people plant it and if the crop isn't any good, it doesn't matter. They still get the subsidy.
Susan:
Huh. Interesting.
Dr. Marion Nestle:
It's a system that requires revision, but the growers of these crops, and they're called farmers, but it's not exactly my idea of a farmer. These are industrial produced crops and they're very politically powerful. The growers of industrially produced crops.
Susan:
How would you like to see the system change? What would you do?
Dr. Marion Nestle:
I want to see a complete revolution in the agriculture system. So we have an agricultural system that is focused on producing food for people.
Susan:
And what do you want to do with all that fuel and that cow feed and stuff? How would you change it? What would you do?
Dr. Marion Nestle:
I would say I would minimize it. Absolutely. The purpose of the food supply is to feed people. I would take that land and grow fruits and vegetables on it. We need a lot more of them and we need them to be cheaper. I think the government should subsidize fruit and vegetable production. When people say that they're too expensive, they are too expensive. So, I think there are lots of ways in which we could revamp the agricultural system to make it one that promotes health and the health of people, not the health of commodity growers or alcohol producers. But the system is so politically entrenched in the Midwest that changing it would be very, very difficult.
Susan:
And say more about why.
Dr. Marion Nestle:
Because they elect the President. Very simple. They elect the Republican Congress, and they elect the Republican Senate, and they elect the Republican President. That's where the political power is in this country.
Susan:
But Obama was president and Michelle Obama came in with the like, let's get rid of childhood obesity movement.
Dr. Marion Nestle:
Yeah, and they practically killed her over it.
Susan:
Yeah. All of a sudden it was the Let's Move campaign, like just neutered. So, with a Democrat in office, it wasn't any better. I mean, I think he talked about trying to change The Farm Bill before getting into Office and then?
Dr. Marion Nestle:
They got so much pushback on everything that they were doing that they couldn't do anything. One of the ironies of Robert F. Kennedy's efforts is until he took on Dunkin' Donuts. He was not subject to the same kind of criticism that he was nanny state. And, in fact, the Make America Healthy Again Movement, which is very powerful and very focused on child health and being able to bring up children in a healthier way was supporting him. And it wasn't until he took on Dunkin' Donuts that he got any pushback at all.
Susan:
Why was that? Why did all of a sudden, the pushback come from Dunkin' Donuts?
Dr. Marion Nestle:
Well, I guess Dunkin' Donuts has a lot of passionate followers who wanted to continue drinking drinks that have 115 grams of sugar in them. I mean, Kennedy's point was you shouldn't be drinking 115 grams of sugar. It's a quarter of a pound, more than a quarter of a pound at one time. And that's what was in some of these Dunkin' Donuts, Starbucks drinks.
Susan:
Yeah. He said, don't eat any. Basically, don't eat any processed foods. Don't eat any sugar. I was stunned. I've never seen anyone politically have the guts to say, "Don't eat any sugar." I was like, whoa.
Dr. Marion Nestle:
Right. Well, I mean, I'm not in favor of not eating any sugar. I like sugar. But in moderation, of course.
Susan:
Yeah. If you can.
Dr. Marion Nestle:
Well, I can. So, this is the first time that the nanny state accusations have come up against him and there was quite a pushback about it. And he's trying to explain, I don't think it's good for people to eat that much sugar at any one time. Well, yeah, he's right.
Susan:
Yeah, totally. Totally. So, I've got your book. I love your book. I think it's super helpful. And it's like an encyclopedia. I mean, really, and it's organized like the grocery store, like you said, it's sections of the grocery store where you can really look at what you're buying. How much power do you think the consumer has to change food policy by buying different foods?
Dr. Marion Nestle:
Well, quite a lot actually. And one of the big changes in the last 20 years has been the introduction of the no GMO project verified fruits. And it didn't exist 20 years ago, and now it's on 60,000 food products.
Susan:
Yeah. I know the couple that created that label.
Dr. Marion Nestle:
Oh, really?
Susan:
Yeah. She just had the idea. It's just a business. She goes to businesses and she sells them the label.
Dr. Marion Nestle:
Well, it's been very successful and it's probably the most successful front of packaged label that's in supermarkets. And that's new since in the last 20 years. And I think that it was a direct response to the government's failure to label genetically modified foods. People really wanted to know whether their foods were genetically modified or not. I spend a lot of time in this book trying to find out if there's anything in my grocery store that is. It's hard to find, and not very well labeled, and really pretty tricky to find. Papaya's from Hawaii for sure, but that's about it. And not papayas from anywhere else. So, I mean, I think a lot of what goes on in grocery stores is very consumer driven, but you have to have a lot of people who are doing the same thing in order to have an impact. I mean, it can't be just you, although every time you make a choice of a food at a supermarket, you are voting with your fork for the kind of food system you want. If you buy organic, you're supporting organics. If you buy non-GMO verified, you're supporting that view. And you can do that throughout the store if you know what the issues are and what the food products are. I mean, it's interesting that the no labels have become so popular and there are products that have just great big long lists of things that they don't have in them. Not no high fructose corn syrup, no sugar, no color additives. I mean, the list goes on and on and on. And that's what people are looking for. Those labels are there because people are looking for those labels.
Susan:
Yeah, totally. Excellent. How do I want to wrap up with you? I'm grateful for your work. I have a random, weird little question. You were in the movie Supersize Me, weren't you?
Dr. Marion Nestle:
Supersize Me. Yes. Two. Oh, one and two.
Susan:
The first one, I think, right? The very first. What was it like to be in that movie? It was such a delightful movie when it came out. It was kind of the trendsetter of all these movies, right?
Dr. Marion Nestle:
Well, I don't know what to say about it. I didn't remember being interviewed. You get interviewed for movies several years before they come out. And the way that I found out that I was in it was somebody had seen a preview and said, "Marion, you're in this movie." And then there was a preview in New York and I went to it, but I had no idea what to expect. When I saw the interview, I had absolutely no recollection of it whatsoever. It was clearly me talking to somebody. I didn't remember the guy I was talking to. I was actually talking to Morgan Spurlock.
Susan:
Morgan Spurlock, you didn't remember him. That's hilarious.
Dr. Marion Nestle:
Not at all. The second one I remember much more about, but that was when Morgan Spurlock ended his career, and then he died very soon afterwards, very sad.
Susan:
Yeah. Well, you've been in a lot of movies ,and you've been a voice for sane eating for a long time.
Dr. Marion Nestle:
I don't always remember them.
Susan:
Fair enough. Well, we'll finish our interview and you can forget it right afterwards. We can just put it out there and you can go on your merry way. I'm going to ask one last question. Is there anything you have left to do in your career or in your life that if you don't do it, you'll feel like your life was incomplete?
Dr. Marion Nestle:
Well, I have a book coming out in September. I want to be here for that book.
Susan:
All right.
Dr. Marion Nestle:
This is a book based on my cereal box collection, written with Lisa Sutherland, who was a former vice president of Kellogg, who left without signing a non-disclosure agreement. And she and I wrote a book about food policy, culture, and marketing in America based on cereal boxes, and it's lavishly illustrated with cereal boxes, and it's coming out in September.
Susan:
Can you share a takeaway from that book. What's something really cool that someone will learn about marketing from cereal boxes?
Dr. Marion Nestle:
That the cereal companies are relentless in marketing sugary cereals to kids. And they'll do anything, anything, to keep anybody from stopping them because the cereals are so profitable or were. Now, cereal sales are going down, so they're working even harder on it. But the history of this is absolutely overwhelming. We talk about marketing by ingredients, by health claims, and then to target audiences. And what I didn't know, and Lisa knew a lot more about, was the endless litigation over every single thing that's on those packages. It's a long history of consumer advocates trying to get the cereal companies not to exaggerate the benefits of products that have a lot of sugar in them.
Susan:
Right. Right. Dr. Mary Nestle, thank you so much for your time. It's been wonderful chatting with you today.
Dr. Marion Nestle:
My pleasure.
Susan:
All right. Take care.
