Coming up on this episode of the doctor's pharmacy.

You shouldn't have to have a PhD in nutrition and biochemistry to understand a food label.

Welcome to the doctor's pharmacy. I'm Dr. Mark Heimann and that's pharmacy within F-A-R-M-A-C-Y,

a place for conversations that matter. And if you care about what's in your food,

you should listen closely to this conversation because it's about the food and drug administration

and how they're asleep at the wheel in protecting us from harmful chemicals and antibiotics

and even bad nutrition information. Now the FDA regulates food labels, which is a prime example

of how the agency fails the public. They're deliberately misleading and confusing,

which serves the interest of the food, but not the rest of us.

A Jerry Mande who is now a professor of Tufts and nutrition expert who

was, keep part of the administration in the Obama administration, worked on food labels at the FDA

in the USDA and he said, most food companies don't want you to know what's in their products.

So they deliberately make their ingredients hard to read. A lot of companies use all

capital letters, they squish them together, use very small font size, maybe you know,

one-sixteenth of an inch letter. The results are you look at most food packages and it's hard

to read the ingredient list. They're also required these companies to list the ingredients in order

of their predominance, but that doesn't tell you how much is in the package. For example,

if sugar is the second ingredient list on the package, it doesn't tell you if it's 30% or 5%.

Have you ever picked up a jar of strawberry jam with a supermarket and looked at what's in it?

A jar of smuckers, strawberry jam lists, strawberries at the first ingredient. Okay, sounds good.

And the second, third and fourth ingredients are high fructose corn syrup, corn syrup, and sugar.

Now this is a very common tactic, which is they create different kinds of sugars, which means they

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