the more ultra-processed foods you eat, the worse your physical and mental health, both. It's cardiovascular disease, it's obesity, it's diabetes, it's mortality, it's cancer. It's also a broad range of mental disorders. And so we know that. We've got more granular data that hyper-focuses on the mental health story. You know, one study, over 300,000 people, the more ultra-processed foods you eat, a direct linear relationship.

It was shocking how linear it was. The more ultra-processed foods you eat, the worse your mental health. And it was so striking. It was not a subtle difference. It wasn't like, you know, oh, it was a 3% difference between the lowest. It was a three-fold difference. The people who consumed ultra-processed foods every day, multiple times a day, 58% of them had poor mental health, compared to only 18% of the people who rarely or never consumed ultra-processed foods.

Wow. So this would be even just, like, somebody has, like, a bag of chips and some, you know, just pour-in-water type pre-made soup or something like that. Those are ultra-processed. This would be somebody orders a sandwich at the deli for lunch, which can be done in a relatively healthy way, depending on what's in that sandwich, and then does soda and bag of chips on the side.

Like, I mean, you're, that's a lot of, in my opinion, highly processed food. But people, I think sometimes people don't think of it that way. One of the, I was surprised and somewhat delighted to learn that one of the ways that the, you know, the public health folks got kids to smoke fewer cigarettes, because when I was growing up, like, smoking was cool.

Like, if you smoke cigarettes, it was cool. People thought it was cool. It definitely is reinforcing because of the nicotine, the dopamine increases. And it was considered cool. You had your, like, Marble Man image from the preceding decades. But then it was really the, the, the 90s kind of, it was the actors and models and stuff that made it cool.

Like, people smoked and it was supposed to be cool. And one of the ways that we ended up with people smoking far less was not just to ban it on campuses, because that just makes teens want to do it more, right? In college, you want to do it more, was to have these commercials of these, it was all to be direct.

It was just like these rich white guys in a room that was portraying, like, the boardroom of a tobacco company. And they were, like, cackling and talking about, like, ha, ha, ha. They think we're going to, they don't think it causes cancer and this kind of thing. Basically, pitting youth against adults so that the youth felt like their money was being taken by the, by the establishment.

So is there a world where, you know, kids are going to be like, you know, forgive me, but, you know, like, F that. I'm not eating Doritos. You know, like, I'm not going to be manipulated by highly processed foods, or I'm going to hold on to my mental health by making healthy choices in terms of food.

It's tricky. But it has a lot of the same parallels to cigarette use or alcohol use. But I feel like the only way to really get Americans to change their behavior, besides scaring them fundamentally, but even if you do that, is to incentivize it. And one of the best incentives historically for public health change has been to pit the, make the public feel like they're pitted against the people that are trying to take their money unfairly and make them unhealthy at the same time.

You got to activate that kind of rebellious spirit. No, uh-uh, not going to do it. Just telling people it's bad for you doesn't work, right? We know that. How do we incentivize people? Yeah, I'm not going to give a cliche answer because this is the trillion dollar question that everybody's asking, and it really, you know, the health of our country really kind of depends on it.

With billions of dollars that this industry has in revenue annually, they can spend a lot of that money on really impactful marketing campaigns, getting people to believe that it's not as unhealthy as Chris Palmer and Andrew Huberman are saying. It's fine. Everybody deserves a treat. Within the last couple of weeks, the American Heart Association was actively lobbying against a Texas bill that was trying to restrict spending food stamp money on junk food.

I saw that clip. It's so disturbing to see someone from the American Heart Association actively lobbying to keep tax dollars directed towards including sugary soda, not even diet soda, but sugary soda in lunches and food for people who are low income. And he went on record as saying this junk food, this ultra-processed food is not the root cause of obesity or diabetes or any of these health conditions, which is an absolute abject lie.

And when you have supposedly respected organizations being bought by industry, promoting misinformation, it's really hard. You know, everybody's all upset that like, oh, people don't trust the science. They're not respecting the respected organizations. Well, the respected organizations need to step up and start behaving in a respectable manner. They need to stop.

The American Heart Association should not be taking a dime from any industry that plays a role in heart disease. Like they, it would be like, it would be like the American Heart Association taking money from tobacco companies and tobacco companies and then coming out and say, smoking doesn't really cause heart disease, people.

Everybody calm down. There's still a lot that we don't know. We need more research. We need more research. Smoking doesn't cause heart disease, people. This is just scaremongering. This is just paranoid conspiracy theories. That is exactly what's happening now. They're taking money from food companies that have no vested interest in the human, in the health of the population that they are feeding.

They know perfectly well that these foods are highly palatable. And what does that mean? It means addictive. And again, if I was selling food, I would want people to be addicted to the food I was selling. Why? Because you sell more. Higher margins. If you sell food that people aren't addicted to, they'll just move on to the other food that is addictive and then you'll be out of business.

So it's not an easy problem to solve. I don't mean to imply it's easy because if, if one or two companies steps up and does the right thing, they'll just go out of business. Well, I feel like the, the smoking parallel is, is critical and maybe the trans fat, um, the history of, of entire cities banning the use of trans fats, for instance, or the use of a styrofoam containers, right?

I mean, it's very different, uh, very different issue. This doesn't directly get to human health of the styrofoam is not good, but it's about, it's about waste and, and, um, environment. But I feel like there has to be a top down ban and Americans also don't like bans, right?

We don't, we don't like things we like choice, but we don't like the consequences of those of choice. And then we want people to fix the consequences of those choices, um, with treatments that don't have side effects. And then this is like kind of the cycle that, that I've observed in my lifetime over and over again.

You know, I think it's the rebellion piece. It's when people realize they're being manipulated. Once people realize they're being manipulated, I feel like that's when they're, willing to intervene, uh, and stop a, uh, otherwise reinforcing activity, uh, reinforced addictive activity, save money and like take a different direction. Like that's, that's inherent to the American spirit.

As much as we love freedom, we also, we have this like, no, you're not going to, you're not going to do this to me kind of spirit. We see it everywhere. This is my belief. But then again, I was kind of a rebellious teen, but, but if it's in service to health, I'm, I'm hopeful.

I mean, my, my understanding, by no means am I an expert, but my understanding of what really drove the reduction in tobacco use was the taxes and the ban on advertising, the ban on television advertisements. Interesting. That, that when you get rid of the advertisements, you're no longer tempting people with it.

Um, you're no longer able to spread misinformation. Um, and when you make the product so expensive, people just, even if they want to try it, even if they're already addicted to try it, already addicted to it, now they are highly motivated to get off of it. Why? Because it's costing them an arm and a leg.

Yeah. Money hurts. And, and they, and they realize that I, I just don't want this. We could do similar things with ultra processed foods. If rebellion, education, whatever, I, I don't care what works, but we're all of the above. We're, we're, we're really fighting an uphill battle. We're, we're, we're, we're, we're, we're, we're, we're, we're, we're.