From LeverNews.com — Lever Time is the flagship podcast from the investigative news outlet The Lever. Hosted by award-winning journalist, Oscar-nominated writer, and Bernie Sanders' 2020 speechwriter David Sirota, Lever Time features exclusive reporting from The Lever’s newsroom, high-profile guest interviews, and expert analysis from the sharpest minds in media and politics.
Arjun Singh 0:03
Arjun from the levers, reader supported newsroom, this is lever time. I'm Arjun Singh, when Robert F Kennedy was nominated to be the Secretary of Health and Human Services, he faced stiff opposition from a major industry, big food. Kennedy is a known vaccine skeptic who frequently fights with a majority of the medical community, but when it comes to the role of ultra processed foods in the American diet, the two may have found a topic they can break bread over. But to say this is Kennedy's crusade misses the larger story. That's the story of how major food companies like Kellogg have manipulated our understanding of nutrition in the name of driving up profits in a sugar soaked arms race, the food giants turn to ultra processed foods, and in that process, have hooked millions of Americans. In fact, some would even say, made them addictive. The cost has been American health, and it's something Kennedy says he wants to fight today on lever time, we're going to look at the long history of processed foods in America. We'll hear how they became so embedded in our society, how food science was weaponized to ensure people kept coming back for more and we'll also hear from some people who were trying to fight back. You
Andrew Gallegos 1:20
yeah, there's no cooking. This hasn't been rendered in any way. It's it's straight from field to Singh, you know, washed off, to sliced flavor, to jar to freeze dry. And one of the what comes
Arjun Singh 1:35
to mind when you hear the word dehydrated food, if you're like me, it conjures up that disgusting freeze dried ice cream, the kind you can get in an air and space museum that's ostensibly for astronauts to be able to enjoy a nice chocolate sundae in space. Except it's not a Sunday it's a block of what looks like chalk and, frankly, tastes like it too, which is why I was a little skeptical when Andrew Gallegos, the founder of the nonprofit cultivating community, invited me to sample a collection of freeze dried fruits and vegetables that he had curated. What does Guy Fieri say in the end, like a failure town? Yeah. Oh, and how could I forget my friend's dog, Clouseau, is with us too.
Andrew Gallegos 2:14
These are dog treats. They're freeze dried dog treats that I actually make from reutilized, not food waste, but I get donations from local farms when they have excess and abundant crops, yeah,
Arjun Singh 2:27
oh, someone's happy. Unlike clue, I was hesitant. I've had freeze dried ice cream and dried out fruit, and let's just say it's not my thing. But with trepidation, I tried one of these freeze dried strawberries.
Andrew Gallegos 2:41
This is my favorite. Like, changed all of the flavor
Arjun Singh 2:45
of the strawberry. You don't lose a sort of, like, cardboard, crunchy I'm curious about something, and not even just chuffed, stable strawberry. Like,
Andrew Gallegos 2:53
like, you just picked it and ate it.
Arjun Singh 2:57
Yeah, it was that good. Imagine taking a bite of a fresh strawberry or an apple, maybe an orange slice, but instead of pulling it off the vine, it came in a jar, not too dissimilar to the kinds of packaged food you see filling grocery store shelves. And for Andrew, that's the point. There's
Andrew Gallegos 3:15
a quote from Wendell Berry that I've always kept in the back of my mind since starting the farm, and that quote is, eating is an Agricultural Act. For me, it's a reminder that every meal is a reflection of the agricultural system that we support, whether it is consciously or unconsciously. That's because Andrew's
Arjun Singh 3:35
more than a brilliant food scientist. He's a man on a mission, a mission to help restore the primacy of natural and fresh food in our diets, a Herculean task given the dominance of packaged and processed food here in the United States, one
Andrew Gallegos 3:49
thing that stands out to me about our food systems reliance on packaged and processed foods is the disconnect it creates between us and the reality of farming while processed foods are convenient and often cheap, they come with a very detrimental hidden cost for both our health and the environment.
Arjun Singh 4:06
The reason I call that mission Herculean is because it pits Andrew against some of the most powerful forces in the country, if not the world, and that's that gang of food companies that have an outsized role on both the food we eat and the food we grow for a lot of us, these household names are synonymous with joy. For me, that was Saturday morning cartoons with a heaping bowl of Frosted Flakes. And if I'm being honest, I love Coca Cola, and so do most Americans. By one measure, ultra processed foods, things like Cheez Its or Fruit Loops, made up about 60% of American diets, which makes sense, considering it everywhere and in a lot of cases, cheaper than fresh food. That means for someone trying to budget their money and time, easy packaged foods are all the more enticing, and let's be real, they're tasty as hell, but behind every. Toucan on a box of Fruit Loops lies a dark secret. We don't just love these foods because they taste good, the chemistry of them is artificially designed to hook us. Decades of research has been poured into discovering the perfect levels of sugar, salt and fat to trigger our brains not just to want but to crave. And this week, they came under scrutiny from an unlikely place. For
Robert F. Kennedy jr 5:26
20 years, I've gotten up every morning on my knees and prayed that God would put me in a position where I can end the childhood, chronic disease epidemic in this country on August, 23 of last year, God sent me President Trump. This
Arjun Singh 5:44
is Robert F Kennedy, Jr, yes, as in that RFK and those Kennedys. The reason his voice sounds like that is due to a medical condition called spasmodic dysphonia. And unlike his dad, who's been canonized by Democrats, Kennedy is Donald Trump's pick to be in charge of Health and Human Services. As of this week, he's been confirmed to oversee the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the financing of Medicare and Medicaid, and also the Food and Drug Administration. Did you
Michael Bennet 6:13
say Lyme disease is a highly likely militarily engineered bio weapon?
Robert F. Kennedy jr 6:19
I probably did say that? Did you say
Arjun Singh 6:21
that Kennedy is a controversial figure, someone both Republican and Democratic senators have been wary about prior to becoming a presidential candidate and then Trump's pick for HHS, Kennedy was a prominent vaccine skeptic, and he's promoted a dubious claim that the measles and mumps vaccines cause autism, a claim that's widely disputed within the medical community during the peak of the COVID 19 pandemic, Kennedy proposed COVID was a bio weapon. Then he sued the government to prevent the distribution of the COVID 19 vaccines based on false claims. At one point in his 2024 presidential campaign, Kennedy also floated the theory that the pesticide Atrazine was infecting the water supply and could potentially lead children to develop gender dysphoria and then become transgender.
Robert F. Kennedy jr 7:07
They took male frogs, gave them Atrazine. 10% of them turned into female and produced fertile eggs, and we're subjecting our children to exposure to that every day. What is Atrazine is in the water. It's a pesticide.
Arjun Singh 7:29
The author of that study Kennedy mentioned is actually named Tyrone Hayes, and he's a professor at UC Berkeley. And when Hayes was asked about Kennedy's comments, he bluntly rejected them and said there's no data on atrazines effect on human gender identity, perhaps more importantly, he also pointed out that frogs and humans have very different biologies. Kennedy's concerning record on science, however, hasn't completely led him astray. In fact, Kennedy's conspiratorial mindset and concerns about institutional capture of the government have made him a vocal opponent of the influence of processed food companies on our food system.
Robert F. Kennedy jr 8:05
Something is poisoning the American people, and we know that the primary culprits are changing food supply, the switch to highly chemical, intensive processed foods. Now
Arjun Singh 8:20
even in this crusade, Kennedy has promoted some questionable ideas, one being that people should consume raw milk, which the FDA, CDC and many scientists in the field warn has risks of containing diseases in it, perhaps most importantly right now, h5 n1 also known as bird flu, but when it comes to ultra processed foods and their influence in this area, Kennedy is actually in alignment with decades of research, much of it funded by the food companies themselves. These food companies have long been aware of the addictive nature of their food often before the general public is and that's been a selling point for them. It's why Coca Cola refers to their best customers as, quote, heavy users. This is all what led me to talking to Andrew Gallegos, who we heard from earlier I
Andrew Gallegos 9:08
was introduced to gardening as a therapeutic space, that practice would actually bring about a lot of introspection. And so it became so compelling that it actually reshaped my entire life with profound intentionality. Once I was healthy again, I knew I wanted to share this experience with others. I wanted to help them redefine the relationship with food and connect with their communities in meaningful and lasting ways. And so I started a quarter acre micro farm in Phoenix, Arizona, where for just over three years I grew vegetables, I raised seedlings, and I actually taught volunteers how to grow their own food. As
Arjun Singh 9:43
the founder of the nonprofit cultivating community, Andrew is dedicated to making healthy food more accessible, particularly for unhoused and homeless people. Although
Andrew Gallegos 9:52
there are a lot of wonderful philanthropic organizations and programs distributing food to those in need, there comes. Comes with that naturally occurring logistics that the unhoused specifically are under equipped to remediate, namely, that the transitory nature of their situation does not allow for much in the way of fresh food, and they're most often compelled to choose, you know, the highly processed and less nutritious options, because preparation and storage becomes an agonizing issue when you're considering to replace blankets or clothing.
Arjun Singh 10:24
What I found interesting about his mission is that it's not just about health, to Andrew, it's about freedom, in this case, the freedom to opt out of a food system controlled by multinational corporations. It's
Andrew Gallegos 10:36
not just about nutrition, but it's also about nurturing relationships with the land, with other people and with yourself. Ultimately, I think we have to ask ourselves, what are we sacrificing in exchange for cheap processed foods? Because when we do take a step back, the consequences, health, wise, socially and environmentally, are very steep. We invite everyone in our community to show their support and learn how to grow their own food, to see for themselves the benefits and abundance that are possible in these community based food systems, and farmland is becoming less and less available, more than any other time in history. So the model for urban farming has long been shown to be a viable solution for these and other common oversights and deficiencies of our modern food industry. I've been
Arjun Singh 11:23
thinking about this topic for a long time. Years before I became a journalist, I did all kinds of jobs in the food service industry, everything from a convenience store clerk to a bartender at a fine dining restaurant. I saw firsthand how locally sourced meat, cheese and fresh cut whole vegetables can fundamentally transform a greasy plate of nachos into a culinary masterpiece, one that's nourishing too. But don't get me wrong, I have a sweet spot for junk food. As I'm speaking, there's a shelf in my pantry stocked with a pack of Oreos and Cape Cod potato chips during a busy day, sometimes the easiest and cheapest meal is a frozen pizza chock full of salt, fat and preservatives, and every now and then, I just get a craving for a McDonald's burger, but I've also felt the strain these foods put on my body. I sometimes can't help it. I really do just crave junk food, and apparently that's by design
Michael Bennet 12:21
many of these products that are engineered by these companies can be addictive. They're engineered in ways that can destroy our ability to control our eating habits.
Arjun Singh 12:32
Michael Moss is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist who's been covering the packaged food industry for a long time in 2013 he published a seminal book called salt, sugar, fat, how the food giants hooked us, where he revealed the extent to which food companies manipulated the public's understanding of nutrition through advertising campaigns that often misled consumers about what's healthy and what isn't. But over the course of his reporting, Michael became convinced that these ultra processed foods weren't just unhealthy, they could lead people down the same path as substance abuse does.
Michael Moss 13:06
Initially, I thought that was just like crazy to compare Twinkies with heroin, but I came full circle on that, and came to say that in some ways, came to think that in some ways, many of these products were even more trouble for us than cigarettes and alcohol and even some kinds of drugs. To understand
Arjun Singh 13:25
how Michael came to that conclusion, think about your local chain grocery store. I don't know about you, but I've always liked going to the grocery store. There's something kind of surreal walking down an aisle and seeing shells packed to the brim with brightly colored boxes featuring outrageous cartoon characters with names like Tony the Tiger and buzz going down the candy aisle is like being a kid in, yeah, a candy store. It's absurd when you think about how many different ways food companies have managed to just sell you corn syrup and sugar. Yet it's totally normal to us.
Michael Moss 14:01
People are really able to adjust their diets easily. That's why they created the cereal aisle where there's 200 brands of sugary starch, giving kind of the false sense of variety, knowing that that will engage that basic instinct of ours. We love cheapness, right in food and growing up and sort of in hunter gatherer societies, cheapness meant sort of less energy expenditure. So we've learned in those days, it made more sense, instead of trying to run down and Impala for dinner, just to reach down and grab that poor arg bark sitting there. And so what do the food companies do? They have working for them? These flavor labs companies are exploiting our deepest biological instincts, which is, we, by nature, are attracted to calories
Arjun Singh 14:49
in the world of food, calories and cash are both King. Our bodies evolved in a world where it took a lot of effort to find food, more hunters chasing down a deer, and less Doom scrolling on doors. Dash. But today we have a different problem. Calories are more readily available than ever, and in the case of ultra processed foods, they're usually found in things that offer little nutritional value. Getting
Michael Moss 15:11
energy was a life or death thing. Putting on body weight, body fat was a really good thing. It enabled you to get through drought and famine. So we also being really good at putting on fat. And so what are the companies? Too? They invented snacks, especially, but foods that are loaded with calories, but nutritionally empty. And we have sensors, I should say, too, in the mouth and possibly in the gut that tell us how many calories there are in a product. But here's the catch, our bodies and our brains can't tell the difference between junk calories that don't have nutrients in them and real calories that do have nutrition in them. So we'll get super excited by something has a lot of calories, no matter what it is.
Arjun Singh 15:58
So what are ultra processed foods. Basically, it's any kind of food that's been heavily modified before being sold to you. Processing is a kind of catch all term that just means changing the food. Take the example of an apple. If you buy just an apple, you're purchasing a whole piece of produce. But if you buy a pack of apple slices already cut up, that's a form of processing. In the case of ultra processed foods, they're about as far away from the Apple as you can get. Over the years, in the name of profit, food, scientists have developed techniques to take an apple, strip it of its nutritional quality, and extract some flavor. They might then combine that with artificial preservatives and sugar so that it can sit on store shelves for a long time. Maybe they even add food dye in there to give it a little color as a result of these techniques, though, these ultra processed foods, like sodas and Jarred sauces tend to have almost no nutritional value, and they're correlated with higher rates of obesity and heart disease. But if they're so unhealthy, then why do we keep wanting to go back for more? It's because food companies are deceptive.
Mark Schatzker 17:05
Flavor is the brain's map to nutrition in the world. If an animal is craving a specific nutrient, it will crave the flavors that brings them to that nutrient. Mark
Arjun Singh 17:15
Schatzker is a writer in residence at the modern diet and physiology Research Center at McGill University in Canada, and he's the author of the book the Dorito effect. Mark works closely with some of the leading scientists studying the relationship between our brains and food. We have
Speaker 1 17:30
created a world in which the tastes and flavors we get from food no longer match the nutrients that they should be matched with. So like, a really great example would be something like artificial sweeteners in a pre processed food environment, Sugar was always an indication of energy. The sweeter Something tasted, the more sugar it would have. Now we live in a world where sweetness might mean a lot of calories. It could be no calories. It could mean some and that's just one example. Food processors have an arsenal of additives that alter the sensed properties of food. There's sweeteners, there's fat replacers, which is, you know, a huge kind of genre of additives that no one knows anything about. And then there's these artificial and so called natural flavorings. So if you think about the sort of sensory impression we get from food, like you pop food in your mouth, and that taste and flavor you get, if that is information. We now live in a world where that information is just unreliable. One
Arjun Singh 18:26
thing Mark has really tried to figure out is why we crave food. Few people would actually describe as tasty. We talk
Speaker 1 18:32
about processed foods as being hyper palatable, as though they're hitting all these bliss points. And yet, I think on some level, we know this isn't true, because we call it junk food. We know on some level, what it's telling us is false. And I think very few people would say that the, you know, their favorite meal of all time was at a fast food restaurant, or was a bag of chips or something like that. So they kind of make us push this button. I think it's this they get us into the cycle of wanting to eat, but I don't think that is the same as true pleasure. So I think when you really examine the dynamics of pleasure and food, it starts to become quite interesting, and not necessarily what people think.
Arjun Singh 19:09
This is a situation I know all too well, grabbing a bland tortilla chip in an office party, dipping it into some generic store brand salsa, terrible, of course. And then I do it five more times, obviously, but I wanted to know if that was because of some sort of chemical impulse being triggered by what was being added to the food. But Mark also emphasized that our brain chemistry is triggered by the culture around us, and American food culture promotes eating quickly and eating in big quantities.
Speaker 1 19:39
The problem with Ultra processed foods, I think they do two things, I think, on the one hand, by giving us this mismatch, by kind of creating these foods that sort of tell the brain a lie about what it's getting, but I think it partly sets us up, makes us want to eat more, but then it also delivers. If you really are looking for calories, boy, does it ever deliver. And it promises those calories with the. Words like, like a double down or a Big Mac or Big Gulp. So I think it's complex. And I think like you say, like our eating, our food environment, the foods we eat, is a reflection of our cultural beliefs about food, and that is what's really hard to change.
Arjun Singh 20:15
This was something Michael Moss told me too, that in addition to chemically altering Ultra processed foods to hit what's called a bliss point, or the optimal combination of salt, sugar and fat that makes food craveable. Companies have invested billions of dollars in advertising campaigns just to make us eat more. They
Michael Moss 20:33
created new cereal boxes that had a wider mouth to get your whole paw in there and a whole handful. And now more recently, people at companies have been talking about cereal as a snack, not a not a breakfast item, as a way of sales. So the entire sort of regiment of chemists and technologists and marketing people have seen the great growth potential in creating and marketing processed food as snacks to where now Americans are getting a fourth of their calories, something like 560 calories on average per day through snacking, sort of in between meals. And
Arjun Singh 21:10
those campaigns totally worked, at least they did on me as a latchkey kid growing up in the late 90s and the early 2000s my generation was bombarded with commercials. And now that I'm thinking about it, there's actually this one commercial from Taco Bell that had it all.
Taco Bell Commercial 21:25
It's time for fourth meal, the late night meal, between dinner and breakfast. Part of the pyramid. Check out the square. All the tastes at a delicious fourth meal, melting, crunchy, spicy and grilled, the taste are exciting. Only Taco Bell, Scott everyone's a fourth Mealer. How you doing some just don't know it yet. If it's not fourth meal, it's just food. Not
Arjun Singh 21:49
only did Taco Bell try to normalize midnight snacking by creating a brand new meal, but those words, crunchy, grilled, they're all there to stoke cravings, and these ads would run on Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon channel, specifically for children. At first, I wondered why. I mean, anyone can eat food, so why go so hard on marketing it to kids who don't even have a disposable income rather than adults? And that was another thing Michael illuminated for me, the reason they target kids isn't just so that kids ask their parents to buy them junk food. It's a means to hook them for life.
Michael Moss 22:25
One of the food industry insiders I spent time with was Jeffrey Dunn, the former president of coca cola for North America, South American. And Jeff walked me through why Coca Cola fights so hard for what they call pouring rights in ballparks, knowing that if they can get a soda in the hands of a kid when they're having the time of their lives with their parents watching a ball game, that experience will forevermore be lodged in their brain As this joyful moment, and it's the other reason why I think food is more powerful than things like cigarettes and alcohol, because we begin forming memory for foods at a really young age, possibly even when we're still in the womb, depending on what our mother is eating, then those memories stick in our heads for the rest of her life. And so you know, 40 years later, you're having a stressful day, you know your brain is going to remember that that coke you had as a kid with your parents at the ballpark as a choice sort of happy thing, and it's going to be that cue to kind of reach for that coke again. So so the companies went hog wild with this, with this marketing campaign, going after kids, knowing how powerful those marketing programs are to young kids, especially,
Coca Cola Commercial 23:49
I'd like to buy the World a home and furnish it with love turtle. Do
Speaker 3 24:04
I like to teach the world to sing, sing with me.
Arjun Singh 24:19
Today, processed foods make up 60% of our diet, and a handful of companies control 80% of the market, and their why processed food is everywhere, from gas stations to school cafeterias. So after the break, we're going to look at what happened when the government tried to regulate them, and how big tobacco taught the industry how to fight back. I real.
Arjun Singh 24:50
There's this really weird cereal commercial from the 1970s where Frankenstein and Count Dracula, excuse me, Count Chocula are just like. Hanging out.
Cereal commercial 25:04
Oh, what a beautiful day for Frank and daddy. The world's super sweet new cereal. Here's the world's super sweet new cereal called Chocolate. I've got daddy flavored sweeties for monstrous strawberry flavor. Well, I've got chocolate, as
Arjun Singh 25:19
I said earlier, as a child of the 1990s one of those dreaded millennials. I always thought my generation was the commercial generation, but food companies had been marketing processed sugary foods to kid as far back as the 70s,
Cereal commercial 25:33
sugar finger me, Mr. Winter is freezing our summer. I'll sweeten him up with super sugar. Super sugar crisp is coated with super sugar to make it taste so sweet.
Arjun Singh 25:43
In the 1970s cereal sales skyrocketed so much so that by the end of the decade, they'd passed $4 billion and that soon attracted the attention of regulators. First, the Federal Trade Commission accused the Big Three cereal makers, Kellogg's General Mills and General Foods, of anti competitive behavior, then they tried to regulate its marketing towards kids. See as cereal sales were going up, so was public scrutiny over sugar in 1977 with cereal sales growing and soft drinks gaining in popularity, 12,000 health professionals wrote a letter to the government demanding the FTC ban the advertising of sugary food and children shows, and the FTC took them up on it, but they'd go against the industry's lobbying powerhouse led by one of the most infamous lobbyists ever, Tommy Boggs. Boggs led a multi million dollar lobbying blitz that turned Washington against the FTC, so much so that in 1980 a law was passed that ended up curbing the FTCs ability to regulate food advertising, rather than the food companies. But it wasn't all for not, though the food companies managed to win over Capitol Hill. The legacy of the FTCs fight against sugar and advertising galvanized a generation of consumer advocates into action.
Mary Beth Albright 26:57
That debate over sugar that you're talking about in the 1980s is just now turning into, I mean, December 19, the FDA released its new rule about what can be called a healthy food, quote, unquote, healthy. And for the first time, added sugars are being considered in what can be considered healthy. These things take decades to turn into policy, and when the FDA rule comes into effect in 2028 you can't label that as healthy anymore. So the sugar debate of the 1980s is turning now into policy in 2024 slash 2025 and that is what's important to recognize about this is that it takes time for even when we know the mechanism, like we were talking about with Ultra processed foods, later, it's not going to turn into policy for decades.
Arjun Singh 27:50
Mary Beth Albright is a journalist who specializes in food in the American food system. She's also the author of the book Eat and flourish, how food supports emotional well being. At one point, Mary Beth worked in the US Surgeon General's office, and for 15 years, worked with former US Surgeon General C Everett coupe on issues relating to food policy. I'm
Speaker 6 28:10
just going to give some facts. Yes, the food come the food companies, absolutely, and they would say the same thing, right? There is influence over nutrition policy by food companies and by the money that they donate, there is influence. The second thing I will say is that we live in a capitalist country, the role of the food company is to make money. So, you know, one of the things that's inherent in that is that you don't want to kill off your customer base, right? But another thing that's inherent in that is that you want your customer base to want your product more than anybody else's, and that is your fiduciary duty to your shareholders to make that profit.
Arjun Singh 28:58
Speaking of capitalism, an interesting thing happened to the big food companies in the 1980s in 1985 the tobacco company, Arjun Reynolds merged with Nabisco, the people who make Oreos. The same year, another tobacco giant, Philip Morris, bought General Foods, the makers of Kool Aid. And when the industry was coming under fire over sugar, Big Tobacco pulled out their old playbook of how to manipulate public opinion rather than be passive. The Tobacco insiders encouraged the food companies to become aggressive in fighting back against public perception, emphasizing the role of exercise over diet and obesity, and they pushed them to essentially lie in their marketing
Arjun Singh 29:42
why in ad campaigns, kool aid would market itself as having a leg up on the other soft drinks that it contained fruit really, though most servings of Kool Aid had maybe 5% of actual fruit juice, but that was enough for them to market and brand their drinks as a healthy alternative. To Coca Cola, and they did more than marketing. In the case of Philip Morris, the tobacco company that bought Kool Aid, they pushed their food scientists to keep pushing the boundaries of the bliss point. At one point they even managed to make sugar taste sweeter. Of course, they were always on top of the public debate. When consumers began to shift their attention to fat rather than sugar, Philip Morris and the food giants were ahead of the game. In response to a growing public trend that was moving towards skim milk, food companies lobbied Congress to essentially subsidize and create a process by which they could turn the excess fat into cheese by the 2000s when I was in middle school and high school, it seemed like the hostile takeover of our food system was complete. School cafeterias carried Lunchables and soda in 2011 food companies even managed to successfully lobby Congress to classify frozen pizza as a vegetable on a school lunch tray. And all of this makes me think about what Andrew Gallegos was saying earlier about wanting to liberate people from the food system, this idea of having food sovereignty, and it's kicked up a lot of big, heady questions for me too. But I'm sorry this is self centered. But come on, I know you're thinking about it too. I just really want to know, what do I do when I go to the grocery store? Now
Speaker 6 31:17
that's what this all comes down to, all the policy and all the science and whatever. It comes down to a person standing at the grocery store staring at 18 different kinds of rice, and it's like, I don't even care. I'm just going to order takeout because I can't. It's too much. I was going to say, learn to cook, but that sounds too much. Learn to feed yourself, because if you don't learn to feed yourself. You are at the mercy of people who are going to decide what you should feed yourself and what you should find delicious. And don't be afraid to be like I'm at the grocery store. I'm exhausted, but you know what? I'm going to buy a can of beans, a bag of pre cooked rice, go to the salad bar and get a couple of pre chopped vegetables so I don't have to chop anything, and some cheddar cheese. And that's it. Not every meal has to stun people, not every meal has to be like the best meal of your life. And that's very true when it comes to our health, and it's the best way to keep your own health at the forefront and still get that pleasure, because the second that we stop talking about pleasure, you've lost everybody. Now
Arjun Singh 32:31
Kennedy is our new HHS secretary, and to be honest, when it comes to these matters, he's far from a qualified voice. What I find more remarkable about Kennedy's odd alliance with many in the scientific community on ultra processed foods is that it's a growing recognition of the oversized influence packaged food companies have on our diets and critically over our government. It makes one wonder if the industrial food system that is designed to enable the profits of food companies, not our health is even replaceable, given how critical it is to our day to day life. But in speaking with everyone for this episode, two things stood out to me. One is that just paying attention to what goes into your food can go a long way. The other is to remember that food is a pleasurable thing. It's fun to eat. It makes us feel good for a reason, and more importantly, was the revelation that most packaged food tricks our brains into thinking it's good just because it's been designed to taste good. So while the road to a cleaner food system may be a long and difficult road, being able to take sovereignty over your own diet is completely possible today. Thanks for listening to another episode of lever time. This episode was produced by Ariella Markowitz, with editing support from Joel Warner and Lucy Dean Stockton. Our theme music was composed by Nick Campbell. We'll be back next week with another episode of lever time.