Why Big Food Spends Millions Every Year in Washington

The Dr. Hyman Show

Dr. Mark Hyman

Health & Fitness, Nutrition, Medicine

4.6 • 8.7K Ratings

🗓️ 16 March 2020

⏱️ 15 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

We need to transform our food system and address one of the biggest threats to our well-being: our lack of a coordinated and comprehensive food policy. The outside influence that industrial food and agriculture lobbyists have on our policies encourages a food system that engenders disease. Lobbying power in Washington is rarely in the best interest of the public, supporting food and agriculture policies that undermine public health, harm the environment and increase private profits for Big Food. Big Food and Big Ag spend millions of dollars in Washington every year for the power to block policies that hurt their bottom lines and promote policies that make them money, whether or not it’s harmful to our society or the environment.

On this week’s mini-episode, Dr. Mark Hyman talks about the dirty politics of Big Food, how that influences our government food policies, and why we need to change it. Learn more about these topics and the undeniable harm our food system is doing to human health and to the environment or climate in Dr. Hyman’s new book, Food Fix. foodfixbook.com

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Coming up on this episode of the doctor's pharmacy.
0:02.9	The combined lobbying effort between 2013 and 2015 was $143 million that was spent by the
0:13.6	food industry to prevent chemo labeling.
0:16.0	Welcome to the doctor's pharmacy. I'm Dr. Mark Heimner and that's Pharmacy
0:19.1	of the F-A-R-M-A-C-Y-A place for conversations that matter.
0:22.7	And if you care about our food system, today's conversation is going to matter because it's
0:25.8	another one of my mini-soes on my new book Food Fix.
0:29.2	How to save our health, our economy, our communities, and our planet one by day time.
0:33.3	And today's subject is the dirty politics of big food and how that influences our government
0:39.4	food policies and why we need to change it.
0:42.6	You know, if you look at our government's food policies, it's just a mess.
0:46.8	Eight agencies oversee the government's food-related policies and they all work in silos.
0:51.1	They don't coordinate with each other very often.
0:53.6	And their policies are confused, contradictory, and conflicted.
0:56.5	In many cases, they're completely in opposition to each other.
0:59.6	For example, we tell people to avoid sugar and to eat whole foods and to avoid junk food
1:08.0	and processed foods on the one hand with our dietary guidelines.
1:11.7	And on the other hand, with our Food Stampers Snap program,
1:16.2	we spend $75 billion a year, three-quarters of which is for junk food,
1:21.3	and 10% of that is for soda.
1:24.4	So how does that make any sense?
1:28.2	The problem is that most of our food and agriculture policies undermine public health,
	...

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