Join Kathleen Zelman and Dr. Barry Popkin, Distinguished Professor of Nutrition at UNC Chapel Hill as they dive into the changes in food and habits that have had the greatest impact on our nation’s children and adults.
You are what you eat and our food is killing too many of us. We need to turn back the clocks and eat like grandma. Our diets lack enough healthy food and improving nutrition would make the biggest impact on our health. Join Kathleen and Dr. Barry Popkin, Distinguished Professor of Nutrition at UNC Chapel Hill as they dive into the changes in food and habits that have had the greatest impact on our nation’s children and adults.
The number of eating occasions has been the major change over the last 20 years contributing to overweight, obesity and chronic diseases. It has gone from snacking once daily with healthy foods to snacking three-four times a day with nutrient poor ultra-processed foods.
Kids need snacks. Learn about the best snacks to enjoy, impact of sugar and how food labeling can improve what we choose.
THR Podcast_R22_031622_Dr Barry
[00:00:00] Lifestyle is medicine when done, right? Especially food choices as the potential to eliminate 80% of chronic disease. Our mission is to be the trusted signal of truth, based on the weight of the evidence that rises above the definitely noise of misinformation,
Kathleen: we offer you a no nonsense and enjoyable approach to the fundamentals of nutrition and wellness.
Our goal is to give you simple and actionable strategies, so you can make. Health promoting decisions every day. Welcome to the true health revealed podcast. I am your host registered nutritionist, Kathleen Zalman. And today we have a fascinating conversation. I think most of us would agree that our food is killing too many of us improving America's nutrition would make the biggest impact on our health.
On saving lives. Here's just a few facts to ponder [00:01:00] more than a hundred million adults. That's almost half the entire adult population have pre-diabetes or diabetes. Cardiovascular disease affects roughly 122 million people causing about 2300 deaths each day three and four adults are overweight or obese.
So in other words, more Americans are sick than our health. And we need to look to our diets to see how we can improve them. And today my guest, Dr. Barry, Popkin a distinguished professor of nutrition at the university of North Carolina chapel hill. He is the director of the interdisciplinary center for obesity.
He is the recipient of dozens of awards, including the 2016 world obesity society. He has published over 600 peer reviewed journal articles. He is a scholar among scholars, and recently he wrote a [00:02:00] really interesting article on junk food looking at and examining how much, how many calories sodium, fat sugar we are getting.
So thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Dr. Popkin for being our guest today, I can't wait to talk to you about.
Hi. Uh, thank you. I'm pleased to do it. I'd like to start with a bigger picture. Okay, I've done about 20 papers on different aspects of a portion size eating occasions, snacking and junk food in the last decade.
Uh, and I want to begin with a couple of study. We did both on children and adults. The adult study was published in a very eminent journal plus medicine. And. And another eminent journal on children and we, what we did in these, and I'll focus on children because the adults are almost [00:03:00] identical in trends.
We decomposed the diet between changes in portion, sizes, energy density. And eating occasions. The number of times we eat over the last four decades and over the last two decades. Uh, and what we essentially found for both adults and children is the non. Eating occasions has been the major cause of our calorie change in calorie increases in our country.
Unlike all of us, including myself who did an important article in JAMA on portion size trends, uh, the portion sizes. Haven't been the big change factor in the last 20, 25 years. So what we've really seen. Is really starting in the seventies. And onward is a huge increase in the number of eating occasions.
We've gone from [00:04:00] snacking one today with healthy fruit, maybe fruit, maybe a glass of milk. If your child may be a cookie and milk, but very small snack
Dr Barry Popkin: to the point
where the average American is snacking three times a day. Before, depending on the age group, uh, and the snacking occasions, uh, several of them at least match their meals in sizes.
And so with this huge change we've seen. This trend toward increasing snacking at the same time, concurrent with that, we've shown in a number of papers that what we purchase
Dr Barry Popkin: has shifted
completely, really from two over the last 30 years, especially the last 22. What we call ultra processed food, the proportion of food that a child eats that what we call [00:05:00] really high in.
Added sugar added sodium, unhealthy added saturated fats. Refined carbohydrate has really kind of moved to be about 60% of what the average child eats. Most of that is what we think of as snacking junk food. It's ready to eat or ready to heat. And. Truly over 70% of what the average American eats is ready to heat or ready to eat.
And it's ultra processed food if a child to about 60%, slightly less for adult, but those foods have been shown to have. The largest impact of any set of foods on our health, um, studies across the globe random control trial done by NIH showed that people who ate real food
Dr Barry Popkin: lost over two [00:06:00] weeks, young, normal way to
adults, uh, close to
Dr Barry Popkin: over two pounds.
People who then shifted to ultra processed foods
or vice versa gain. 2.2 pounds. And during the same period, and they're, cardio-metabolic markers, the things you talked about, the diabetes and others really increased, and that's just in two weeks eating a diet of either real food or this ultra processed junk food.
So now you think of. The 40
Dr Barry Popkin: plus studies now done on
children and adult will following them across the globe in Europe, in the U S and Brazil and China,
Dr Barry Popkin: many different
cohorts
Dr Barry Popkin: across the globe, particularly from Europe
in the U S that we have are out to process. Food has increased, and it's the largest kind of predictor of [00:07:00]
Dr Barry Popkin: Avara.
Mortality, our cardiovascular disease risk our risk of diabetes, our risk of so many different 13 to 15 major cancers, cancer, mortality, heart disease, mortality,
uh, and
Dr Barry Popkin: these studies along with this huge NIH controlled trial done brilliantly,
um, lead us to understand.
Dr Barry Popkin: What our children are eating is going to kill them and it's going to kill them earlier.
And that's where we come to. What we talk about with junk food.
Uh, these ultra processed
Dr Barry Popkin: foods are full of additives and smells and tastes different kind of items in there. Uh, on the
average really
Dr Barry Popkin: impact the kind of palatability they become, what we call ultra palatable. [00:08:00] They, we want to eat them right.
We want to continue to meet them. There's several major psychologists, a woman, particularly a university of
Michigan prominent psychology
Dr Barry Popkin: department who have shown that they're probably addictive. And moreover, we need to see that the way they prepared these foods is unnatural. It's not the way we ate from thousands of years when we were pretty normal weight.
It's and this changes that have really occurred in the last
20 years leads
Dr Barry Popkin: our children to. Consuming such a large proportion. Now, some of that we understand our salty snack, some of that, our desserts and alpha to sweet items with tons of added sugar or, or with the Felty snacks, just sodium. They also have so many other properties
with [00:09:00] them.
We want eat a lot of them. And that's the same for our fast foods.
Dr Barry Popkin: You go to McDonald's hamburger and there are a lot of additives added that you don't know about. It's not just red meat. There are lots of things in the sauces and in the meat itself that are trying to make us want more of it. And we do the French fries as an example, the.
Proportion of meals with French fries is crazy in our country and fried, and they're fried with all the extra saturated and unhealthy fats. But on top
of that,
Dr Barry Popkin: they're, they're just full of, of the calories from the fat and calories from all the sodium that goes with it. Um, And that's what we know, but the additives that go into it as well, make them want to keep eating.
Kathleen: Let me jump in and ask you some questions. I know I'm I'm my mind is just spinning, but it's fascinating. It sounds to [00:10:00] me as though we have multiple problems, we snack too often and we snack on the wrong kinds of foods and turning back the clock. I mean, I love that idea of trying to think about what your grandparents ate or eating closer to the ground.
And the problem with all of these foods is they're not satiating. You're not, you don't get full from them. So you and they have that addictive quality because of all those ingredients. And when you're eating the wrong kinds of foods, you're instead of the right kinds of foods, because we know it. We're woefully shy on meeting fruits and vegetables and healthy foods.
So let's start with, how do you define junk food and ultra processed food?
Dr Barry Popkin: Well, the,
the junk food. Doesn't have as a definition that everybody in the world
Dr Barry Popkin: agrees
to. We, we know it's a lot of categories. What we call ready to eat foods. Be there. Kind of all of these different pops that people can put in the toaster and eat from [00:11:00] breakfast, all the ready to eat cereals that have tons of added sugar in them or, and the added sugar could come.
If you buying organic ready-to-eat cereals from fruit juice concentrate, but it's still just sugar. Know, all
Dr Barry Popkin: these sugars, whether they, we want them, the
industry wants, thinks they're natural or not are in all of those breakfast products. And then you think of the salty snacks, the chips, the, all these corn things, all the different things that we eat, be it at a sporting event or going to a.
Oh, any rest, any, any grocery store you will see on the aisles, around the edge or the healthy food, the dairy and the fruits
Dr Barry Popkin: and vegetables and the poultry and meat and so
on. But then you go
Dr Barry Popkin: through most of the store and the middle is all,
all the middle aisles are junk food of [00:12:00] various sorts with
Dr Barry Popkin: tons of different products.
So. Is the predominant number of products in our
Dr Barry Popkin: grocery store. And. It is very difficult to ignore those. Now, the junk foods that are the easiest for people to identify are
the salty snack, all the ready
Dr Barry Popkin: to eat, sweet product, all the dessert products with ice cream and other things that are frozen desserts and fell on the frozen juices.
All the juice. That children eat the juice drinks that they're fed. And before they become going, get ready for school during the preschool period, those are essentially junk food, tons of added sugar. How
Kathleen: best a hundred percent for.
Dr Barry Popkin: The a hundred percent fruit juice is controversial.
The American academy of
Dr Barry Popkin: pediatrics recommends against it because it's really sugar water, a hundred percent fruit juice does [00:13:00] more harm in terms of increasing the risk of diabetes.
Then it gives us any benefit. We've been led to think that there's all this vitamin C and a and other
things in it,
Dr Barry Popkin: but every long-term study on a hundred percent fruit juice shows us. That it's really just. The junk food that it's full of sugar, but
Kathleen: doesn't the American academy of pediatrics allow a small portion.
I mean,
Dr Barry Popkin: they're, I actually say for preschoolers, they don't recommend it might know that anything a little bit. But there really
don't recommend it. And
Dr Barry Popkin: they've published so many studies on child obesity and links to these fruit, a hundred percent fruit juice. It's kind of, if you eat the orange, if you eat the apple, you.
Much more nutrient, you get all the fiber, you get all of that and it will fill you up. [00:14:00] Now, if you take six oranges, squeeze them and put them in a glass. It won't fill you at all. In fact, there's many, many studies now to show that what you drink. Of up in the way of fruit juice, a hundred percent fruit juice does not affect what we eat.
Whereas if you eat the orange, it affects what we eat and you reduce your other food intake. Right? So. Filling ness of Jew of all beverages, which added sugar is zero at almost. We, we, we essentially think we're full from a smoothie or a hundred percent fruit juice if you're a kid. But the reality is we.
Kathleen: Yeah, liquid calories just don't don't fill you up as much, but I want to take you back to the center of the grocery store because I, you know, as a nutritionist feel like there are so many good things within the center I get around the perimeter is where, you know, the, the, the gold standard lies, but yet.
Cans of beans, [00:15:00] nuts, whole grains. And even though the foods in the center have to be processed because you can't take wheat from the field and eat it, it has to be processed, but that is minimally processed and as are a can of beans or healthy cereal. So I'd love for your perspective on, you know, that spectrum of processes.
And, and how to guide people to find the foods that are best for health and best to feed their families.
Dr Barry Popkin: Let's
start with beans, which is probably the healthiest protein anybody could eat. Uh, the. If you get the bags of beans that are completely unprocessed at best. If you go and get a can and you look and you see that it doesn't have a lot of added sodium minute, it's very good.
But when you also can go and see the rephrase. Beans in there, the black beans and brown different beans that
Dr Barry Popkin: would be [00:16:00] think of as, as part of Mexican
food that has a lot of unhealthy nutrients added of, of saturated fats and sodium.
Dr Barry Popkin: So
beans are. Truly healthy, but they're just a few categories that are more processed that we have to stay away from.
Dr Barry Popkin: Similarly, whole
grain bread. First, we have to understand that whole grain is really critical because all the brand, the Korean stains, all the new Tintin bread are in that. Part that's ground away when we have refined white Brene being a bread so that the refined bread really is nutrient less. It's missing all the critical nutrients.
A few are four to five back, but it's not natural. And it's, it's truly less. So
Kathleen: the labeling is important to understand how to read labels so that you can see how much fiber is in that loaf of bread, so that you can see the sodium [00:17:00] in the cannabinoids, which just PS by thoroughly rinsing the beans in a colander.
You can reduce the sodium by 40%. So
exactly that's true for all the beans that are just in liquids and so on. The beans that are processed, like the refined beans.
Kathleen: So let's talk about the labels because nutritional labeling can be so confusing. And there are lots of terms that are not regulated, like natural and healthy that on the front of the label, some parents and consumers say, oh, this must be a good product where they really override.
The food's healthfulness. So any ideas you have about, you know, how we can improve our food labeling or tips for people when they're in the grocery store,
Dr Barry Popkin: let me start by
giving you an example of a country that did that. Uh, Mexico has a front of the package labeling scheme that wants you to identify foods that are higher in sodium saturated, fat added sugar or calories.[00:18:00]
And by. In that process, they band putting any of these high-end food, putting a label on a claim on the natural or other things, you will find natural foods. Are often some of the least healthy that have lots of added sugar and other things, but they put them in as natural, natural sugars, not healthy, natural,
Dr Barry Popkin: uh, fruit juice concentrate in, in the whole foods
and all the organic ready-to-eat cereals is just sugar.
So.
Dr Barry Popkin: The natural claim is one of the worst claims out there. And it's almost to be ignored to be, to be honest,
it really means
Dr Barry Popkin: very little except industry using
it to kind of get us to one eat more. Similarly,
Dr Barry Popkin: it
goes for some of the claims like high in vitamin a or C or something.
Dr Barry Popkin: Those foods are to be cooked.
The fight,
the [00:19:00] nutrients are going to be gone before you eat them. And if they're not, you don't really, we don't have a deficiency of these. Uh, and so it really doesn't, we can't show any real health benefit from these extra nutrients that are added. And so industry
Dr Barry Popkin: just uses these because.
It's marketing and it's a different kind of market.
Similarly, the characters on packages, Mexico got rid
Dr Barry Popkin: of all of them. You can't see a package on a, on a
food or beverage to tie and added sugar or sodium or unhealthy saturated fats and so forth that those
Dr Barry Popkin: characters are really very seductive. And you'll notice those foods with the characters typically on aisles where children can see them and even reach.
Kathleen: So, I mean, it seems as though the, the proliferation of convenience foods, those ready to eat, those ready to hate are a reflection of our lifestyle. I've seen [00:20:00] lots of, um, social media posts from the expo west where there's the it's out in Anaheim. I think it just wrapped, but all these new products and they all seem to be wanting to promote plant-based because that's the dietary guidelines recommendation to eat.
Plant forward diet. And yet they're, they're overly processed to, you know, they might start with a P protein, but then the end result is that they're really glorified, junk food to me. So I'd love to, I'd love your opinion on, you know, these, the convenience foods and, you know, parents are looking for, I know my daughter-in-law has to send a snack every day to preschool with her child.
So she's always trying to figure out what what's easy. What's convenient that doesn't require me to be in the kitchen, chopping up apples, you know, when the chaos of getting them out the door. So I'd love to hear your perspective on all these over-processed foods that are new to the market. [00:21:00] That sound healthy, but there really are not
right.
It begins. Let's start with all the granola bars and let's start with all the bars and. They're proliferating. And if you look at them, very few of them are not high. Or reasonably high in sugar and sodium. And if there, and many of them are higher in saturated fat, and it's hard to find one of these bars with a lot of fiber, a lot of health.
Items in it and less than a hundred calories, they range from two to 500 calories in these bars, which, because of all the added crap that's being put in and they're not healthy. In fact, they're no different than a chocolate bar. Most of them in terms of helpfulness, uh, And yet, because we've been sold that granola is [00:22:00] healthy for us.
We, we buy it. But again, just like granola cereal, which has some of the highest added sugar cereals out there. Um, and with the granola bars are just one example. Creating more and more of these bars because they're ready too convenient, just in the same way they create all these trail mixes. They put a lot of dried fruit in them to make it seem healthy, but the dry fruit is really just concentrated sugar and with no other real value.
And so we have to be careful on each of these now. What we ideally need in the U S is kind of labeling that lets us understand what's healthy and what's not healthy. And it's something being done increasingly in other countries, uh, there's eight or 10 countries from Israel
Dr Barry Popkin: to Mexico, to [00:23:00] Chile,
Brazil, and many others across the globe that are putting warning
Dr Barry Popkin: labels on food or have put them on.
So let's
Kathleen: let me ask you about snacking. Okay. So we're, we're doing too much of it. So we're almost snacking three times as many times as we are eating meals. And it's not, we're not talking about snacking on broccoli. So what ha what is the frequency that has been proven to be. Beneficial cause we know kids need extra nutrients between meals and what do you suggest that's convenient and easy?
Um, because that's, you know, I mean, it's got to taste good, but also, you know, uh, parents and, um, and consumers don't have a lot of time for preparation. So I'd love your thoughts on the frequency and what should we.
Dr Barry Popkin: Well,
let's go back again
Dr Barry Popkin: to your grandmother or who's kind of older and grew up in the
forties and fifties, fifties.
Uh, then we were [00:24:00] given a. Milk in the morning
Dr Barry Popkin: at school, if you were at preschool or even at, at young
ages in elementary school and in the afternoon, you'd go home and you'd have some fruit. Now that's the ideal
Dr Barry Popkin: back then it was only plain milk. It wasn't even chocolate milk, except it was an exotic
thing you might get at a birthday party.
Dr Barry Popkin: Today, of course, the milks have changed. They're full of added sugar and the whole, the flavored milks, and most of the containers of milk
that mothers get that are, um, radiated and they can carry
Dr Barry Popkin: them around and feed
their children are flavored. Um,
Dr Barry Popkin: So we we've shifted. Children do need one or two snacks a day.
Uh, but they don't have to be huge and they can be healthy in school. They could be fruit. Uh, they could be plain milk. Of course the [00:25:00] industry sold us chocolate milk is needed to make our kids want to drink it.
Um,
Dr Barry Popkin: And number of countries actually getting rid of flavored milk because of they find the kids will drink real milk if that's what their.
Kathleen: Could you make your own trail mix? I mean, what's wrong with some raisins in with some nuts and maybe some like simple cereal, something that got us cereal, right.
Dr Barry Popkin: Nothing's wrong with that? I wouldn't put that many raisins in because they're really concentrated sugar, but the more you can put
nuts in and, and grains, uh,
Dr Barry Popkin: the better you.
So
Kathleen: try to make them at home, right?
Dr Barry Popkin: Yes. Try to make them at home. But one of the things people need to understand is not, if they're not full of sodium and just minimal sodium
are one of the
Dr Barry Popkin: healthiest foods that we can eat at they're filling. They may not seem filming, but they truly have been shown in all [00:26:00] scientific studies to be filling with healthy, not healthy fats.
And they're there a lot of protein and
Kathleen: fiber too. So they, they feel
Dr Barry Popkin: just like
nuts and beans, fruits, and vegetables with some of
Dr Barry Popkin: the healthiest things. So that's what
Kathleen: we need to focus on. So, um, I mean, there's the liquid calories. We talked about how dangerous they are, but also the fact that, um, you know, there's sugar has been an and sugary beverages have been, you know, uh, thought to be like addictive cocaine quality and that when you pair them with fat, um, and you have sugar and fat it's even worse.
So. When, when you want your sweet treats and we have to, we have to allow for some sweet traits, right? You, you agree that we were allowed, you know, a treat?
Absolutely. I love sweets. I just moderation. I love
Dr Barry Popkin: dark chocolate. I love good [00:27:00] desserts,
but all in moderation, not dangerous. We won't kill us in moderation.
It will kill us in excess. So
Kathleen: define moderation. So what, what for us at home who loves sweets or our children, what would you say is a safe amount to, to have dates?
Well, that's very complex. The less, the better, of
Dr Barry Popkin: course, because
we don't know a lot about sweet preference, but everything we know seem to
Dr Barry Popkin: suggest that
preschoolers eat a lot of sweets second or wants weeks later.
And they're going to grow to want more and more sweets as they get older. Uh, so we we'd like to keep
Dr Barry Popkin: it minimal.
Uh, and this week can come from fruit. Uh, or
Dr Barry Popkin: minimally a sugar, but still healthy fruit pies or breads or
other things you can make them, you, I mean, I make [00:28:00] now that with COVID and having to work at home for a long period of time, I've been making a lot of banana bread and other things.
But if you have a little piece of it, it's great. If you have a lot of it.
Kathleen: So try to have fruit within your sweet trade. I agree with that. That's my, my philosophy. So I'll go for a fruit tart. If they want a dessert versus a cake with lots of gooey icing, my little grandchildren, we freeze grapes. They think that, you know, we call it nature's candy.
So, I mean, I think it's trying to get your kids to. You know, not be so addicted to sugar because it, it does have that addictive quality, but I also worry about classifying foods as good or bad, or, or creating that, you know, the craving, the forbidden fruit, so to speak that when you, when something is totally off the table, then you want it even more.
So finding that balance is really what we're advocating.
I concur with that. And I [00:29:00] concur that this it's very hard to feed your children in modern America. They're inundated with they're inundated with marketing everywhere they turn. And once they get old enough that you allow them to have a smartphone it's even worse.
If they look at one sugar product, pretty soon, they'll be in debt with marketing for sugary products. And. And that they play a game on a computer or on a smartphone. That game is going to be full of, of advertising by the food industry, to that child. That's showing all sorts of junk food. Uh, it, it, that's how the games make them money and that's how the industry can food industry can create so many of these child games because they're brilliant marketing tools for them.
So, um, the marketing to children in America as gone crazy and. If you [00:30:00] just watched a day, how much a school age child gets the C in the way of marketing, you'd be shocked. You take an adolescent who has their smartphone and does games and
Dr Barry Popkin: Twitters or
whatever they want to do. They will be inundated with ads for all sorts
Dr Barry Popkin: of unhealthy products.
Kathleen: Well, there are studies recent study that showed that one in five deaths globally are due to a sub optimal diet. That more than any other risk factor, including tobacco is what's killing us. It's cardiovascular disease and cancers and type two diabetes. I mean it, this is serious business. Parents really need to take it seriously and understand that they're developing pallets for their children, but I'd love for you to talk about how junk food affects chronic diseases.
I mean, what's the relationship,
Dr Barry Popkin: [00:31:00] right? Uh, and I think your statistic is on a global level. If you move to the U S diet really. Diseases, either from the diet
affecting our weight or from the diet directly affecting like the sugar affecting diabetes, have a sodium hypertension, heart disease, or others. 13 to 15 biggest cancers.
Most important cancers in America are linked to diet and to obesity. And you
Dr Barry Popkin: take, if you, we, you
take away those two risk factors, the cancer incidents would go down and prevalent by
Dr Barry Popkin: two-thirds. So. What we need to understand is let's start talking with the worst, start with diabetes, because it's so debilitating.
You can lose toes, you can lose your blind sight. You can become disabled from it. Right. And it [00:32:00] just it's
really bad. That
Dr Barry Popkin: diabetes is so related to sugar and obesity,
that if those two risk factors were
Dr Barry Popkin: minimized, it would cut our diabetes by two thirds, at least in this country, a small portion of diabetics
be the type one or type type one is really a genetic.
And that's like 5% of our
Dr Barry Popkin: diabetes, the type two, which is really caused by our diet. And our weight, but also to some extent, sugar smoking has a role, but much less than the diet
obesity, uh, as we've been seeing, um,
Dr Barry Popkin: is, could be stopped. We could, if everybody in America
cut their sugar in half.
Dr Barry Popkin: Or cut their sugar by 20% of the weight by just five
pounds.
The risk of diabetes for America would go down by 10 to 20%.
Dr Barry Popkin: Just [00:33:00] small weight changes are amazing for that.
Uh, and you go to hypertension,
Dr Barry Popkin: you reduce your sodium, intake
it,
Dr Barry Popkin: and you cut your weight. Uh, and again, cuts over half of the. Half of the hypertension. So we're talking about with those diseases, the cancers take longer, but very much relate to weight and diet, particularly weight, which is obviously cause mainly in our country by unhealthy.
Kathleen: But it's more than junk food. Well, I guess if you classify fast food as junk food, then
yeah. I think you have to classify if you really could decompose the fast food and we've had industrial databases where we could look at what's in each food, you see the trends, a lot of attitudes and other things in that food, which makes it hyper palatable, just like really Tate snacks.
So it's really no different. And that's why [00:34:00] McDonald's. All the others are so popular in our country. And why 20 to 30% of what Americans age is from away from home. And the bulk of that is fast food. It's only a subset of America, a very small proportion, the healthy away from home.
Kathleen: Well, so do you think that, I mean, what's, what is the government's role here?
And should there be some kind of food policy? I think I've read that you've, you're a proponent of junk food tax. Um, will taxing make a difference? Is there food policy? What, what do we need to do on a larger scale to help people?
The first thing is. We need to identify what's unhealthy and we could easily do that.
We could label our food with a little boxing it's ultra processed, for example, or we could label it saying a tie-in sodium added sodium, or added sugar added attached, rated fats, not natural in the food. Uh, those are [00:35:00] what we're really concerned with. Um, Or even if it's got those added tie and energy density, the amount of calories, per hundred grams
Dr Barry Popkin: of what we eat or drink.
So
we could do that. Uh, we won't necessarily because our industry is so powerful, but we could label the truly healthy food and make it the truly healthy and go the other way. I'm in favor of labeling the unhealthy food, because we've shown it in study, after study in around the world, that it impacts food purchasing the most.
Uh, and that's why so many countries have started to make it mandatory. It's the only front of the package labeling, which is mandatory in countries around the world, except Thailand, which has a different kind of. Label focusing on healthy food. Uh, so we could do [00:36:00] that. Uh, we won't, but we could start the process.
We could define what's net. So when they put it on the product to truly make it be natural and healthy, natural, not natural. And we could legislate some of the claims because the claims have gone crazy, uh, in our country. And they're very misleading for most people. So the lots of things we can do, one of the things that's very important to understand is.
The food component, FTA get one 30th, the amount of money as the smoking component of FTA food has been marginalized, even though the food and drug administration initially started over all. The unhealthy food sanitation across the country that was killing us in the night early 1900. That was the beginning putting sanitary monitors over [00:37:00] the slaughter houses in all across the country, making the food supply healthier.
But today food is just neglected inside that agency. And so. Again, there's historic problems like, like that, but it's all part of trying to understand that food is what's affecting our health the most today. Yeah,
Kathleen: what you eat. And I think that the real take home message here is try to keep it clean. Uh, and I don't mean clean eating because that's a term that is not regulated, but keep it simple, keep it closer to the ground.
Like you pick an apple off of a tree or, or what you can grow in your backyard and try to go back to what grandma did. I mean, uh, and I also think things like yogurt are, um, Simple cookies. Like you mentioned, we used to have, when we were [00:38:00] kids, Graham crackers and milk, that was our snack. You know, you'd have one long Graham cracker and a cup of milk.
And so you have a little bit of a sweet, but it's not ooey gooey.
Right. Right. And even peanut butter, it's some of it has a lot of sugar added and you could actually buy peanut butter. That's less sugar added or natural peanut butter, which is tell very tasty. But the reality is we don't use it instead.
We give our kids some sugar pop-up or something, and we could change that
Kathleen: is sugar, sugar. I mean, what if it says a Gavi or what if it's maple syrup or
right. Or honey or triggers? All one of the things that we've shown is all sugars are equal. I don't care whether it's sugar less. Corn high fructose corn syrup or sugar from honey sugar, from any [00:39:00] other fruit, a fruit juice concentrate that you see all the time as an organic food or from
Dr Barry Popkin: beach sugar, which is our major source of sugar in our country.
Along with
corn sugar. They're all the same. They have the same effect on our health and it's all adverse, whether you're eating honey, which is natural, it's still affecting you the same way and creating your diabetes, et cetera. Every sugar's equal and people have to understand that I was one of the ones that wondered and speculated in an important article that
Dr Barry Popkin: high-fructose corn syrup may be worse because it was exploding in use because it was used in all
the soft drinks and from the nineties to, in the last couple of decades.
And it.
Dr Barry Popkin: We found in clinical studies that was equal to other sugar. And we turned that we found
out that every sugar [00:40:00] was equal and that's a lot of research has done
Dr Barry Popkin: in the last 20 or 30 years that showed
Kathleen: that. And there's no nutritional goodness from sugar. So sugar just is an additive to your diet. You could live without it.
If you never had another ounce of sugar, um, you wouldn't be any less healthy. You'd probably be healthier. That's
Dr Barry Popkin: all correct. Hard for most of us to give up sugar because we love it. And we've been grown to
use it and con, but just in moderation, we'd have to
Dr Barry Popkin: do everything in moderation. And if we can cut a lot of
the sweet out of kids' diet and a lot of the salty snack will go a long way.
Starting to create healthier child diets. Absolutely.
Kathleen: And I keep asking the question instead of what, so when you give your children or you eat yourself junk food, you're not eating something else you probably should. So those nuts or fruit or yogurt or things that [00:41:00] are better for you and Marika's diet stinks.
I mean, we, we do not eat enough of the foods that are recommended. So focus back on fruits and vegetables, low fat dairy plant, plant, whole grains, instead of refined grains. And you know, just a little bit of.
And, and look, if you're going to eat meat,
Dr Barry Popkin: poultry
and fish are much better than our red meat.
Certainly the worst meat are the highly processed meat to go into lots of different sandwiches, the
Dr Barry Popkin: sausages, the bolognas, all of those process
products and the process cheeses. So if we can find ways to.
Dr Barry Popkin: Real protein from
poultry or fish or minimal numbers of times red meat. We're helping.
Kathleen: Well, this has been a fascinating conversation.
Thank [00:42:00] you so much for your Sage wisdom. Any last thoughts that you'd like to live with our listeners
at all, but I do want to echo what we use killing America. It, and there's two other things to understand. We're getting.
Dr Barry Popkin: Americans are shorter by almost an inch in the last couple decades we're shrinking and we're, our wastes are
expanding.
Our waste have gone up by over an inch on the average for the average weight. So
Dr Barry Popkin: we have to think that what's eating is not only hurting us, but it's shortening.
Kathleen: That's crazy. And I had no idea about that. I guess it's bone health that, you know, the diets are not, not supporting the kind of bone growth that we used to have.
So back to the way we used to eat closer to the ground, Dr. Popkin, it was a pleasure. Thank you so much for
Dr Barry Popkin: joining us. My pleasure. [00:43:00] Take care. Bye-bye bye.
Thank you for listening to the true health revealed podcast. We appreciate your time and hope you'll join. For more information on today's episode and to subscribe to future podcasts, please visit true health initiative.org.
And to help us continue the fight against fake facts, please consider donating to our nonprofit true health initiative. .