All right. The world's a mess.
(Laughter)
Climate change.
Farmlands turning to desert.
Depletion of our water resources.
Chronic disease and obesity everywhere.
Social injustice, violence, poverty.
Learning gaps in kids.
Threats to national security.
Oy.
(Laughter)
It's enough to make you just give up and feel hopeless.
But there is something that you do every single day
that can radically change all of that.
You eat.
You see, I've been connecting the dots as a doctor for 30 years,
treating thousands of patients.
And I've been able to use a powerful tool
to prevent, treat and reverse most chronic disease,
and it's nothing I learned about in medical school,
and you can't find it in a pharmacy.
[A new drug]
It's food.
Now, food has the power to cure or to kill.
And it's the nexus where everything that matters comes together.
Most of us believe that what we eat is just about personal choice,
that if you're sick and fat,
it's because of bad habits or lack of willpower,
that it's sort of your fault you're fat and sick.
It's what the government and the food industry tells us.
It's all about moderation,
about more exercise, about personal responsibility.
There are no good and bad calories.
But what if I gave you a Big Gulp, which has 46 teaspoons of sugar,
or 21 cups of broccoli, which has 35 grams of fiber -
same calories -
are they going to effect you the same?
No, they change your hormones, your brain chemistry, your metabolism.
They're very, very different,
and yet the party line
from doctors, scientists, nutritionists, the government, the food industry
is that they're exactly the same; there's no difference.
Eat less, exercise more.
How's that working out for all of you?
Right? Not so good.
And so in a world of misinformation,
in a world of marketing,
the whole concept of personal choice is a little more complicated,
and I began to really understand this when I met this young man, Brady,
as part of the movie "Fed Up,"
about the food industry's role in the obesity epidemic.
I went down to Easley, South Carolina - small town.
One of the worst food deserts in America.
Visited his family of five,
who lived in a trailer on food stamps and disability.
All sick, morbidly obese.
The father had type 2 diabetes, on dialysis at 42,
couldn't get a new kidney because he couldn't lose the weight.
They were desperate to lose weight,
doing all the right things, they thought:
eating a low-fat diet, having diet this, diet that.
So I went to their trailer,
and I took out all the food from their cupboards.
We looked at the packages.
I covered over the front of the box.
I said, "Can you tell me what this is?"
And they couldn't tell if it was a Pop-Tart or a corn dog.
You know what this is?
Anybody?
It's a Twinkie.
(Laughter)
It's not food. It's a food-like substance.
(Laughter)
So we know what this is. It's just food.
It doesn't have a label, ingredient list or a Nutrition Facts on it, right?
And so I so simply cooked a meal with them, of real food,
and they loved it, surprisingly.
I said, "You can do this."
I gave them a guide on how to eat well for less, a cookbook.
They lost 200 pounds in the first year, together.
The father got a new kidney.
Brady lost 50 pounds, and then he went to work at Bojangles'
because it's the only place to work down there.
And he said, "It's like sending an alcoholic to work in a bar."
(Laughter)
And he gained the weight back.
And then some.
And finally, he got his act together, and he lost 140 pounds,
and last week I got an email from him, saying, "Hey."
(Applause)
I got an email from him, saying,
"Hey, can you write me a letter of recommendation for medical school?"
So what I learned from Brady,
what I learned from Brady
was that in a world where supermarkets are food carnivals
filled with biologically addictive foods,
it's not about personal choice.
It's about fixing the food environment.
So I began to wonder,
like, what is the impact of our food on our world, right?
I began to think about it and wondered, "What's going on?"
So let me take on a journey
from the field to the fork to the hospital to Congress and beyond.
We know chronic disease is epidemic.
One in two of us have a chronic disease.
One in two Americans has prediabetes or type 2 diabetes.
70% of us are overweight.
And it's crippling our economy.
Medicare and Medicaid are buckling under the weight of chronic disease.
In 20 years,
it's estimated that it will comprise our entire federal budget.
And it's global: $47 trillion will be spent globally, across the world,
fighting chronic disease that's mostly diet driven.
And we have tremendous loss of productivity:
2 trillion a year from what I call "FLC syndrome."
You know what that is?
That's when you feel like crap.
(Laughter)
And we have achievement gaps in kids
who go to school on Doritos and Flamin' Hot Chips and soda.
Of course they can't focus or learn or succeed or go to college.
We have analysis
that food has enormous impact on the brain and mood and behavior.
And the studies in prisons - violent crime in prisons and prisoners
goes down by 56% if you feed them a healthy diet
and 80% if you give them a multivitamin.
What are the implications of that?
And we've usurped the food systems of many poor communities,
the Native Americans especially.
We took away their food system, gave them commodities:
sugar, flour, shortening.
And there's a word for people
who on the reservations eat those commodity foods.
It's called "commod bod."
I remember going on a rafting trip last summer with a Hopi elder, Hopi chief.
And he had terrible diabetes, massively overweight.
He was so sick.
I said, "You can fix this."
He said, "What do I have to do?"
I said, "You have to give up sugar and flour and starch."
He says, "Well, what are we going to do
with our traditional Hopi ceremonial foods?"
I'm like, "What foods?"
He says, "Cookies, cakes and pies."
(Laughter)
And I thought to myself, those are not his traditional ceremonial foods.
(Laughter)
So not only are those problems real,
but we have, now, in analysis,
that our food system as a whole, collectively all the aspects of it,
is the number one driver of climate change,
more than the energy sector,
and that the way we farm depletes our soils.
We mine the soils; we deplete our aquifers and water resources.
It's estimated that maybe in 50 years
we're going to have no water or soil left to feed us.
So I began to question: what is going on here?
If this is the food system, and it creates the food we have,
then how did we get here?
The heart of the matter is this:
our food system is not designed
to create healthy people or a healthy world.
It's designed to maximize profits.
So what are the policies that drive our food system?
How do we rethink what we're doing?
Well, our subsidies, for example, are for commodities -
wheat, corn and soy -
that get turned into processed food.
It's 60% of our calories in America,
and those who consume the most of those calories
are the sickest and the fattest.
And those foods are then turned into processed food,
which then we pay for with our Food Stamp Program.
$85 billion a year, and most of that is for junk food -
$7 billion alone is for soda.
That's 20 billion servings a year we give to the poor with food stamps.
Our food labels are so confusing
you need a PhD in nutrition to figure it out,
and even then, good luck.
You know, we have food marketing to kids,
where they see 6,000 ads for junk food every year on television.
It's unrestricted and probably much more on social media.
We know the average two-year-old can go in a grocery store
and name brand-name products before they can barely walk or talk.
And we have dietary guidelines that are so confusing
because they're corrupted by food-industry influence
and by ignoring huge amounts of relevant science.
And this was from a report from the National Academy of Sciences.
So clearly, these policies are not working to serve us, right?
The reason is money, money in politics.
We have half a billion dollars spent by 600 lobbyists on the farm bill,
which is essentially our food bill.
We have nutrition science being corrupted by the food industry,
which funds much of our nutrition science.
If a nutrition science study is funded by a food corporation,
it's 8 to 50 times more likely to show benefit for that food.
For example, if a food company studies artificial sweeteners,
99% of the time, it's fine.
If independent scientists study it, 99% of the time, it's not fine.
And then our public health organizations -
the American Heart Association, Diabetic Association, Cancer Association,
even the Academy of Nutrition Dietetics -
40% of their revenue comes from the food industry.
How can we trust what they say?
Of course, there's this wonderful effort of corporate social responsibility,
where Coca-Cola funds NAACP,
of course, and the Hispanic Federation.
Of course they're going to oppose the soda tax.
They have the consumer front groups, like the Center for Consumer Freedom,
which says obesity is a hoax.
Well, go to WalMart or Costco, look around.
Amazing.
And the American Council on Science and Health,
(Laughs)
which is basically telling us that pesticides and smoking is okay.
I went to show the movie "Fed Up" at the King Center,
and it was all set up.
Bernice King was all into it.
Got a call the day before - we can't show the movie.
Why? King Center's funded by Coke.
Martin Luther King says,
"Our lives begin to end
the day we become silent about things that matter."
And of course, since their products are getting less and less popular here,
they're going around the world,
and now China and India are one and two in diabetes:
80% of the world's diabetics in the developing world.
So if businesses are beholden to their shareholders only,
then they don't prioritize the suffering of millions of people.
We allow them to privatize profits and socialize the costs
and put profits ahead of public good and public health.
What if all the externalities in our food system
were embedded in the price of food?
How much would a can of soda cost?
$100?
What if the impact on health, the environment, the economy
were all included?
What would a cost of factory farm meat be for a pound?
$1,000?
We can no longer ignore
the impact and the consequences of our food system
on everything that matters.
We cannot do that any longer.
And we have to rethink this.
And the good news is there are efforts happening around the world to change this.
Paul Hawken has estimated
that if we change all the aspects of our food system in the right way,
that we could draw down carbon to pre-industrial times,
like regenerative agriculture.
We have health systems, like Geisinger, paying for food pharmacies,
giving diabetics $2,400 a year in food
and reducing healthcare costs by 80%.
We have countries, like Chile, being brave and going up against the food industry
with 18% soda tax.
They've eliminated food marketing on TV, radio, in print, in movie theaters.
They put warning labels, like on cigarette boxes,
on the front of cereals,
and they've gotten rid of cartoon characters.
They've killed Tony the Tiger.
(Laughter)
So there are some things we cannot change,
but this we change.
We vote three times a day with our fork.
What we do to our bodies, we do to the planet.
What we do to the planet, we do to our bodies.
It's time that we step up and speak and act about things that matter,
and food matters most.
Thank you.
(Applause)