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- I'm a writer.

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I don't have a scientific background.

And I thought, "Am I qualified to take people

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on this journey and offer any kind of advice?"

But as I delved into it,

I began to realize it was actually a strength.

I brought a very open mind,

and I think I could see it freshly.

I had spent a lot of time writing articles and books

tracing the food chain and showing people

where their food came from, how it was produced --

following meals all the way back to the farm.

But I found that what I kept hearing from readers was,

"Yeah, yeah, yeah, you've told me where the food comes from

and how the animals live and everything.

But what I really want to know is what should I eat?"

And it's no wonder people are confused.

Every day, there's a new headline --

eat more fiber,

drink less milk,

eggs are bad,

eggs are good.

As eaters we feel whipsawed by the changes

in the nutritional advice we're getting.

And I became absorbed in this question --

"Yeah, what do we know?"

What do we know about the links between diet and health?

That was something I hadn't really focused on very much.

So, I decided to see I could come up

with some guidance for myself, for my readers,

for my family on how to eat

if you're concerned about your health.

I really thought the answer to this question

would be so much more complex than it has turned out to be.

Thank you.

I'm Michael Pollan.

Join me as I make the case in defense of food.

-Food.

Why does it need defending?

It's everywhere around us.

And who doesn't love it?

- Oh my goodness, I love pizza.

- My favorite dinner is chicken pot pie.

- A nice piece of char-grilled steak.

- I love arugula -- can't get enough of it.

- And, of course, I love ice cream, too.

- I think food is one of life's greatest pleasures.

I don't have one favorite food. I just like food.

- But the food we're eating today

is very different from what it used to be.

And that change has been taking a heavy toll on our health.

The Scavotto family lives outside Boston.

- Would you call this shredded carrots?

- Anthony is 11.

- Yes, I would.

- Last year, when I went to the doctor's,

he said that I gained 30 pounds in a year.

I didn't like that at all.

- See if that says whole wheat on it.

- Most of my friends,

they can run and they can not get tired.

They can, like, be athletic and I can't do that.

I couldn't do that.

- When I found out he gained 30 pounds

under my watch, that's crazy to me.

I definitely felt I failed in the food department.

- My mother and my father were buying foods

that said they were healthy, but they weren't.

- You know, granola bars --

they're not so healthy if you look at the sugar.

Yogurt.

We were doing all that.

All right, then it's not healthy.

- I was mad at myself.

I was trying to eat healthy, but apparently it didn't work.

I didn't like it.

I wanted to change my body.

- Anthony's doctor referred him to a program

for overweight kids at Boston Children's Hospital.

It's a busy place.

- Anthony.

- Over the last 30 years, the rate of childhood obesity

has more than doubled.

More and more young people are now getting a disease

that used to be very rare in children --

type-2 diabetes.

- Being overweight increases your chances of getting the disease.

- Hold your hand out like that.

- So Anthony may be at risk.

- Obesity can affect virtually

every organ system of a child's body.

And in some cases, uh, resulting in type-2 diabetes --

the ultimate metabolic meltdown.

Swallow.

It's one thing for an overweight adult

To develop type-2 diabetes at age 50

and then have a heart attack at age 60.

Take a deep breath.

It's a very different thing

if the clock starts ticking at age 10.

Since 1975, the percentage of Americans

who have type-2 diabetes has more than tripled

and is expected to keep on growing.

- Four of the top ten things that will kill you

are chronic diseases linked to diet.

So somethings wrong.

The diet most of us eat these days

as the Western diet.

It includes lots of meat,

white flour,

vegetable oils and sugar,

and very little fruit, vegetables, and whole grains.

It's cheap.

It's convenient.

And most of it has been processed to taste really good.

- The food industry has gotten incredibly good

at manipulating the properties of food so it has

just the right texture, just the right color,

just the right smell to make you consume

as much of it as possible, miss it when you don't have it,

crave it to the point

where you want to keep coming back for more.

- And the key to getting us hooked

is our inborn craving for salt, sugar, and fat.

- We're biologically designed to like foods

that are very high in calories, very high in sugar,

fat, and salt because that was adaptive

during almost all of human history

when food was scarce and there were things like famines.

But now food is abundant and our biology is mismatched

with what's occurring out there in the environment.

Take Buffalo wings.

What are they?

You start off with the fatty part of the chicken.

Usually fried in the manufacturing plant first.

That pushes a lot of fat into that chicken wing.

Fried usually again in the restaurant.

That pushes more fat into that wing.

That red sauce -- what is it?

Sugar and salt.

That white creamy sauce on the side?

Fat, sugar, and salt.

What are we eating?

We're eating fat on fat, on fat on sugar,

on fat, sugar, and salt.

- From fast food meals

to all the packaged products in the supermarket,

we're eating more processed foods than ever before.

They now make up some 60% of our diet.

- The food industry makes its greatest profits

through the most extensively processed foods.

- The key ingredients for those foods --

corn, soybeans, wheat, and rice --

don't cost the food companies much because

government subsidies keep supplies high and prices low.

The food companies turn those crops

into things like hydrolyzed soy protein,

mono and diglycerides,

and high fructose corn syrup --

ingredients that end up in so many processed foods.

- The American farm system

has turned into a calorie conveyor belt

that produces massive amounts of commodities

to make sugary beverages, fast food,

junk food very, very cheap.

- You've added all this packaging,

and this marketing, and these characters,

you know, that appeal to kids, and you're selling it

for an order of magnitude more money.

- And, of course, this is a good business model for the companies

'cause they want to maximize their sales.

But it's not very good for human health.

- People who eat a lot of processed foods

struggle more with health problems.

And so we've been really curious

to understand what happened to the food.

So we look at what's present and absent from processed foods

to understand where they went wrong,

why they make people sick.

Take bread -- one of my own favorite foods.

It's made from a few basic ingredients --

flour, water, yeast and salt,

which you mix together, let rise,

and then eventually bake.

We've been eating it for thousands of years.

But the bread our ancestors ate was very different

from what you find in most supermarkets today.

Flour used to be made

by grinding grains like wheat between two big stones.

This kind of flour, called whole wheat,

contains all of the wheat seed, including the bran and the germ.

But whole wheat bread was usually dense and hard to chew.

Removing the bran and germ

made the flour white and the bread softer.

But white flour was a luxury few people could afford

until the late 19th century,

when a new technology came along.

- Roller milling was this great idea.

You could shake the bran and the germ of that grain off.

And it would fall down into the bottom underneath the roller.

You could feed that stuff to the cattle.

Whoops, it turns out that stuff is the good stuff.

- The bran and the germ are rich

in many nutrients, including vitamins.

The part that's left is mostly carbohydrates,

which break down when we eat them

into the sugar molecule glucose --

one of the body's main sources of energy.

And we love that.

We love that sensation of sugar coming into our body.

Our brains crave sugar.

They live on glucose.

That's the brain's high-octane fuel.

And white flour is very stable.

It will last on the shelf indefinitely.

Unlike whole wheat flour, it doesn't turn rancid

because the germ, which can easily spoil, has been removed.

And when you moved to white flour,

it was a great boon for the food industry

because, you know, one giant mill could feed

millions of people and send out flour that would last forever.

The one little problem is, as you made the flour last,

you basically ruined it as a food source

because you were taking out all the nutrients, or most of them.

You still had some starch and you still had some protein,

but you lost the vitamins.

The shift to white flour, and to processed corn and rice,

took a toll on people's health.

They were getting diseases, like Beriberi and Pellagra,

which are often fatal.

But the link between those diseases

and people's diets remained unclear

until the 20th century, when we discovered

they were caused by a lack of vitamins.

- You had these deficiency diseases.

Nobody knew where they came from.

And then you fed these people a food that had

the right vitamin in it, and they'd become healthy.

This was a true miracle.

Scientists, nutritionists, chemists

were delving into the miracle of vitamins.

And this information was delivered to an excited public,

through newspapers, through magazines.

- Before long, everyone was talking about vitamins.

And food companies jumped on the opportunity.

- For food marketers, it was kind of like

being given this beautiful gift of this word

that the public's obsessed with that no one really understood,

the chemical details of.

My favorite example was Schlitz beer came up

with Schlitz Vitamin-D beer,

with the tag line that beer is good for you.

But Schlitz Vitamin-D beer is extra good for you.

Manufacturers were quick to pick up on the fact

that vitamins were a very good selling point

and if they weren't naturally in the food,

then why don't you add it?

- You want to grow bigger and stronger, don't you?

- Golly, sure! - Okay!

- A sandwich daily and two slices of Wonder Bread

every meal give you eight elements you need --

as much muscle building protein as roast beef,

as much calcium for bones and teeth as cottage cheese,

As much vitamin B1...

- The story of Wonder Bread, in a way,

is the story of the food system writ small.

Why do you need to add all these special vitamins to bread?

Well, because you've taken them out of flour.

And had we left good enough alone,

and we'd continued to either eat whole grains

or even partially whole grains,

you wouldn't have created this problem.

So Wonder Bread was an amazing technology

solving a problem that technology created.

I mean, you're essentially selling

the problem and the solution in one neat package.

Some of our dietary problems began

long before the rise of modern technology.

When we invented agriculture, which gave us bread,

we set in motion other changes

that are still affecting our health today.

We used to eat a lot of green plants.

They're one of nature's best sources

Of a class of fatty acids called omega-3s

that are vital to our health.

But once we started farming seed crops like wheat, rice,

and corn, they began to dominate our diet.

The bulk of what agriculture does is grow seeds.

Seeds are full of energy.

They have lots of carbohydrate in them and protein.

I mean, they're wonderful things.

They have everything a new life needs.

But green, leafy plants are usually much better

than seeds as sources oi omega-3s.

- Omega-3 fats are essential for optimal brain growth,

for optimal heart health, and for optimal immune function.

And omega-3 fats can't be made by the human body.

They have to be eaten.

- Traditional diets gave us many ways to get omega-3s.

In addition to Green plants,

omega-3s are also plentiful in fish,

which eat lots of plants in the ocean.

Meat used to be a good source of omega-Be

because farmers fed livestock their natural diet --

green, leafy grass.

But now, most of the animals we raise for food

are mainly eating corn and soy.

So they get fewer omega-3s

and their meat and milk have less of them, too.

But many of the foods we eat are quite rich

in a rival group of fatty acids called omega-6s.

There are lots of them in oils pressed from seeds,

like soy and corn oil.

- Omega-6s are the darlings of the food industry

because they have a much longer shelf life than omega-3s do.

- Though we need both omega-6s and omega-BS to survive,

there's evidence that eating too many sixes

blocks out the threes.

- It's like a game of musical chairs.

There are only so many seats.

And if they're occupied by the omega-6s

you're gonna have many fewer omega-3s.

- And some scientists believe

the loss of omega-3s is hurting our health.

- A deficiency in omega-3 fatty acids

of heart disease death.

It will impair the development of kid's brains

so that they don't have optimal IQ.

They will have greater risk of major depression.

- So we've gone from a diet

that gave us all the omega-3s we needed

to one where they're much harder to get.

- But perhaps the biggest threat to our health

comes not from losing a nutrient,

but from flooding our bodies

with one we seem powerless to resist.

- We now consume about 1,000% more sugar

per day than we did 200 years ago.

- Sugar's appearing in foods that were never sweetened before.

There's sugars now in bread.

There's sugars in ketchup

of all different kinds.

We have figured out a way in this country

to make sugar, sweeteners very, very cheap.

- When soda costs less than milk,

or even bottled water,

and is marketed as a normal thing to have with a meal

or give to toddlers and young children,

we have a problem.

- When we look at factors

that are related to obesity and diabetes,

the single most important factor we have seen

is sugar-sweetened beverages.

- Increasingly, you're seeing sugary drinks

that have labels on them that'll say

that they have vitamin C or they're good in antioxidants

or otherwise somehow imply that they're healthy for you.

They're still basically sugary drinks.

In a 20-ounce bottle of lemonade

than there is in a Coca-Cola.

We know that sugar has a lot of calories.

But sugar causes other metabolic changes, as well.

- Roughly half of the sugar in sweetened drinks and foods

is a kind of sugar called fructose.

- Fructose is the sweet molecule in sugar.

We love it.

It's the reason we go after sugar.

- But there's evidence that too much fructose

can damage the liver.

- And when your liver gets sick, type-2 diabetes, hypertension,

heart disease, liver disease, all start accumulating.

- Eating foods like potatoes, white rice,

or anything made from white flour,

also floods our bodies with sugar.

Because, even though they may not have added sugar,

they're made up of carbohydrates

that break down into glucose when we digest them.

And flooding our bodies with glucose

triggers the release into our bloodstream

Of a very important hormone called insulin.

-Insulin is necessary for life.

So what does insulin do?

Well, it lowers blood sugar.

Your blood sugar rises because you've eaten.

When you're healthy,

your pancreas senses the blood sugar rise.

The insulin goes up, and the various cells of the body

will take up the glucose so that the glucose

will come back down in the blood to normal.

- But there is evidence that eventually too much sugar

can push insulin to the breaking point

and lead to type-2 diabetes.

It's a disease that's hitting

low-income communities the hardest.

- Yesterday, I decided to write down some ingredients

in my day-to-day diet,

First, there was a million things I could not pronounce

and then there was sugar, flour, sugar...

- This video was made by the Bigger Picture campaign,

which brings together young poets

and health care workers in the San Francisco Bay area

to highlight the problem of diabetes.

It's like let me hit that cookie one time.

It's like knowing most of your family has diabetes

but your still smacking on your Sour Patches

as you're walking your aunt into her dialysis appointment.

It's like aunty Marlo being blind at 32.

It's like grandma Suzie dying from a heart attack at 51.

- The people who are suffering the most

in the obesity epidemic today are the poor and the minorities.

Twice the rate of diabetes

in African Americans, Latinos as whites.

That's not because of their genes.

That's because of the marketing

in those low-income neighborhoods

of food that's bad for people.

- We're dealing with a crisis that's at an emergency level.

Their lives are at stake.

I think all of our lives are at stake.

- It's like damn.

It's like suicide.

It's very painful for me

to watch my family literally pass away.

We will go to funerals that were caused because of food,

and then turn around and eat the same food

that put the person in the grave in the first place.

So what if I told you that a hundred years ago,

one in a hundred people contracted a disease

called type-2 diabetes.

Only one in a hundred people.

What if I told you that 50 years from now,

one in three people --

one in three people are gonna have type-2 diabetes.

How would that make you all feel?

Type-2 diabetes, obesity, heart disease, heartbreak --

you know, a lot of misery has been created

by this modern diet.

It seemed clear that the Western diet

is making lots of people sick.

So I started looking at the kind of diet

that we evolved to eat --

food that comes not from factories, but from nature.

My search took me back to the beginning of life.

- It turns out that one thing did literally evolve

to nourish healthy individuals --

lactation and milk.

Everything that the infant requires has to be in milk.

So milk is literally

a comprehensive diet in one product --

all the essential nutrients.

Every vitamin, every mineral, every amino acid,

every fatty acid that the infant needs has to be in milk.

- At the University of California at Davis,

Bruce German and his colleague Daniela Barile

are trying to understand

how mother's milk keeps babies healthy

and what the rest of us can learn from that.

- Milk is really the perfect food because it's always changing.

If you have milk from day one and milk from day ten,

the vitamin content, the lipid content, the protein,

the carbohydrate is evolving to match the needs of the baby.

- But not all mothers can breastfeed.

- If there's any kind of challenge

that you'd like to share with us,

that gives us an opportunity to discuss it mother to mother.

- I've had struggles

with breastfeeding from the very beginning.

I had low supply, so I've been supplementing with formula.

- Mothers have been unable

to feed their babies throughout history.

If you couldn't breastfeed a baby,

that baby was really in trouble.

- In the 19th century,

infant mortality rates were extremely high.

People were very fearful

for the lives of their children, particularly infants.

- Then, in the 1860s, parents were offered

a potentially life-saving alternative

when a German scientist named Justus Von Liebig

introduced the first commercial baby formula.

He believed his product contained

all the essential nutrients in breast milk.

- Liebig's food opened up an entire market.

It quickly was followed by many copiers.

- But our attempts to make a substitute for breast milk

have taught us just how hard it is

for science to mimic nature.

Those early formulas were missing valuable nutrients.

Vitamins hadn't been discovered yet.

And the importance of omega-3s

wasn't understood until the 1970s.

We learned that as close as we get,

the ultimate goal is constantly retreating

because mother's milk is a very complex food.

In 2006, Bruce German and his colleagues

discovered one of its secrets

when they solved a longstanding mystery.

- One of the things that was absolutely astonishing

is that human milk contains undigestible material.

The babies literally can't digest it.

It goes right through them.

- When we looked at how much there was,

it was staggering.

It was the third-most abundant component in milk.

- It was a kind of complex sugar called an oligosaccharide.

- Mothers literally are feeding undigestible matter to the baby.

Why?

- German had a hunch.

- The first thought was, "Well, babies can't digest them.

Maybe bacteria can."

Because we know bacteria inhabit

the intestine of all of us, including babies.

- Bruce came over to my lab and we tested

to see if the oligosaccharides that he found in milk

could grow any bacteria

that I happened to have in my lab.

- And he tested them and he came back and he said,

"No, they don't."

And he was looking at bacterium after bacterium after bacterium.

Nothing -- no growth at all.

But then he found one.

And at that point, we began to realize the genius of milk.

- What Mills found was a little-understood bacterium

Called bifidobacterium infantis.

- And when you look at breastfed babies,

their lower intestine is full of just that bacterium.

The great question is why would this bacteria be valuable?

What could the bacteria do for the baby?

- It occupies all of the surfaces of the baby's large intestine

and prevents germs that could cause disease

from attacking the baby.

So it starts to grow and multiply

and grows and multiplies until the baby is literally full

of just this one group of bacteria.

And no other bacteria can compete.

That's an ingenious process.

- The story of mother's milk

shows how well nature provides for us.

And that's something

that remains true throughout our lives.

No matter where we live,

nature offers us an astonishing variety of healthy foods.

We are omnivores.

We live on six of the seven continents.

We have managed to construct from what nature has to offer

in all those different places --

deserts...

jungles...

grasslands...

forests -- a healthy diet.

In the Andes mountains in Peru,

the Quechua people eat mostly potatoes and grains

with a small amount of meat.

In East Africa, the Masai thrive

on a diet consisting mostly of cattle blood, milk, and meat.

In the Arctic, the Inuit people's traditional diet

includes tremendous amounts of fat

from whales, seals, and fish.

And here in Tanzania, members of the Hadza tribe

eat hundreds of different wild plants and animals.

Although one in five Hadza babies still die

before their first birthday, those who survive childhood

tend to live long and healthy lives.

- We don't see these so-called Western diseases

among the Hadza.

Things like cancer, things like obesity,

type-2 diabetes, heart disease -- very low rates.

For the most part, they are a very healthy population.

- So what can we learn from the way they eat?

The Hadza are some of the last people on Earth

who still get their food the way our ancestors did --

by hunting and gathering.

- For the bulk of our history,

we were living like the Hadza.

We were foragers.

What we are doing now in the industrialized West

is what's different or odd.

- They're doing what people

used to do everywhere on the planet,

which is figure out a way to use what nature has to offer.

- The women dig for roots called tubers.

They're very hard to chew.

But when other foods are scarce, they're almost always available.

They also collect a fruit

that falls to the ground from tall trees.

It's called Baobab.

The inside is kind of chalky and dry.

To make it easier to eat, the Hadza pound it into a powder

and sometimes add water to make a sort of smoothie.

This is a kind of food processing, but very minimal.

While the women and children gather plant foods,

the men go out hunting for meat and searching for honey.

- Honey is the number-one ranked Hadza food.

Foragers will go to incredible lengths

in order to access honey.

If we had to climb a tree

every time we wanted a sugar fix from a Coke.

We'd probably think twice.

The Hadza get their meat straight from nature, too.

On days when the Hadza kill a big animal,

they eat lots of protein and fat.

On other days they might have mostly sugar or starch,

it's not what We might think of as a balanced diet,

but it works very well for them.

The Hadza eat what their parents ate

and their grandparents ate and they don't stress about it.

Here is a people that don't know what a nutrient is,

and have very good dietary health at the same time.

I think that has something to teach us.

- What you're gonna do is you're gonna go down the center.

- So, whenever I give a talk,

I explain the choice we're facing.

We are at a fork in the road when it comes to food.

We have two options --

one, surrender to the Western diet,

stay on processed food, and junk food, and fast food,

and wait for evolution to adapt us to it.

It will happen eventually.

It should happen eventually,

but there will be so much suffering.

There will be so much expense before that happens

that I would argue it's really not sustainable.

Well, there's another option.

We can take the more practical, the more economical,

and the more beautiful path,

which is simply to change the way we're eating.

And everything I've learned about healthy eating

can be summed up in just seven words.

Eat food, not too much, mostly plants.

And those seven words tell you all you need to know

about how to eat in a healthy way.

When I say, "eat food,"

I'm basically saying eat the kinds of things

that people have been eating for a long time --

meat...

fish...

vegetables...

and fruits...

grains.

Eat food, which is to say, "Eat real food."

And that other stuff, we shouldn't even dignity

with that beautiful word -- "food."

And so I call it something else.

I call it edible food-like substances.

And that's all that processed stuff

in the middle of the supermarket.

The Western diet is in the center aisles.

Go to the produce section.

The healthiest food in the store is in the produce section,

and there are no health claims.

You go to the middle of the store

where the food is just screaming about its whole grain goodness,

and there's cereals that are gonna, like,

save you from heart attacks.

They don't talk that way over in the apples and the broccoli.

Why is that?

Well, they don't have packages,

They don't have big budgets.

The quieter the food, likely the healthier the food.

- You don't have to be a scientist to know how to eat.

To me, that's one of the interesting things

about nutrition -- is everybody can eat a healthy diet,

and they can put together their own healthy diet

without knowing thing one about the biology of nutrients.

Just go around the outside of the supermarket

and pick up fruits, vegetables, meat,

and stay out of the processed foods

because they're fun to eat once in a while,

but they shouldn't be daily fare.

- Saying that we should eat food may sound obvious.

But these days, much of the food industry

is built on a different idea --

that what really matters is eating the right nutrients.

Manufacturers bombard us with claims

About the good nutrients they've put into their products

and the bad ones they've taken out.

This way of thinking has a name -- nutritionism.

And the more I learned about it, the more convinced I became

that it's the reason something as simple as eating

has become so complicated.

Nutrition is one thing.

Nutrition science is a science, but nutritionism is an ideology.

It's the ideology of believing

that the nutrient is the key to understanding food.

The big premise of nutritionism is that the most important thing

about any food are the nutrients it contains, right?

A food is the sum of its nutrient parts,

which is basically how science studies food.

So, take an apple, or take carrots.

And what's important about carrots

is a certain amount of beta-Carotene

and a certain amount of vitamins

and a certain amount of fiber and a certain amount of sugar.

That's what a carrot is.

So that seems kind of, "Okay, no big deal.

That's -- nutrients are the basis of food."

But if you accept that idea that the important thing

about a food are the nutrients it contains,

you suddenly find yourself dragged along

to tenet number two of nutritionism.

And that is the idea that since nutrients are invisible,

then it falls to experts to tell us how to eat.

It's sort of like a religion, 'cause, now,

if what matters about a food is something you can't see,

then you need a priesthood

to mediate your relationship to that mystery.

And so we have a priesthood that consists of doctors,

who we consult about food, and various experts

and writers of books on nutrition

and nutrition scientists of all kinds.

And -- and we defer to them.

Like most ideologies, nutritionism divides the world

into good and evil so that, in the nutrition area,

there is always a group of blessed nutrients

and a group of evil nutrients.

So let's get a few examples.

Give me some examples of a blessed nutrient.

- Kale!

- Kale is not a nutrient. It's a food.

But thank you.

- Vitamin C! - Vitamin C.

- Fiber! - Fiber.

- Antioxidants! - Antioxidants.

- Omega-3s! - Omega-3s, yes.

The blessed nutrients.

And, on the other side,

there is always the evil nutrients

we are trying to drive from the food supply --

Saturated fat, high-fructose corn syrup,

sugar, in general.

Evil nutrients.

But it's important to know that the identity

of the good and evil nutrients is constantly changing.

You go back to the turn of the last century,

around 1900, there was an ideology then

that the great evil nutrient, was protein.

Now we think protein's great,

but then some people thought protein was really bad.

The best-known critic of protein was

Doctor John Harvey Kellogg --

a member of a Christian denomination called

the Seventh-day Adventists that promoted vegetarianism.

People flocked to his sanitarium

in Battle Creek, Michigan, to be cured

of the gastrointestinal curse of the day.

- America's diet in the 1800s and early 1900s,

it was a lot of meat and potatoes.

And constipation was, like, an obsession.

Everyone was obsessed with constipation.

- Which Kellogg claimed was caused by bacteria in our colon

that thrive on the protein in a meat-heavy diet.

They thought that it released toxins in your gut

as it fermented and -- and that would lead

to cancer and all sorts of things.

Celebrities including Henry Ford, Amelia Earhart,

and future president Warren Harding

Eagerly submitted to Kellogg's vegetarian diet

and anti-bacterial treatments.

And people did the most insane things

under the direction of this pseudo-science.

I mean, go on all-grape diets for a day

and eat 14 pounds of grapes and nothing else,

take yogurt enemas.

And you were supposed to chew every bite a hundred times.

That can interfere with the pleasure of a meal.

Kellogg asked his brother Will

to perform experiments to design healthier foods.

They really wanted to dethrone protein,

which was the morning meal -- eggs and bacon and sausage.

And they thought that carbohydrates

were the clean, blessed nutrient.

One day in 1894,

the brothers stumbled on a discovery

they hoped would transform the American breakfast --

the flaked cereal, made mostly of carbohydrates.

First came wheat flakes.

And then Will invented the corn flake --

so wildly successful it would make him wealthy.

But John Kellogg's theories about the perils of protein,

not to mention his ideas about yogurt enemas,

Were eventually disproven by science.

You know, we look back on that

and we think this is complete quackery.

Well, I hate to say it, but someone will look back

on us in a hundred years, and say much the same thing

for a lot of our own nutritional practices.

We look at gluten the way they looked at protein.

You know, we have millions of Americans

now working to remove gluten from their diet.

We're looking for answers.

We're looking for dietary salvation.

And when someone comes forward with a theory,

we fall into line.

- Because so many women are concerned about too much

saturated fat, a great change in eating habits

is taking place in homes all over America.

- The campaign to reduce fat in our diets

is the best example yet of what can go wrong

when the science of nutrition gets hijacked

by the ideology of nutritionism.

- Reducing fat in your overall diet

can help make you healthier.

- We spent 30 years in this country obsessing about fat.

- Health specialists recommend

that children more than two years old

begin eating a diet that is lower in fat.

- Eat foods that are low in fat.

- Fat got a reputation

as an evil nutrient back in the 1950s

when scientists began searching for the cause

of what seemed to be a big increase in heart disease.

Finding the reason why became an obsession

For a Minnesota physiologist named Ancel Keys.

He and his wife Margaret, a biochemist,

traveled the world studying heart disease.

- Ancel Keys' hypothesis

at the beginning of his research was

that something in people's diets was responsible

for the generation of heart disease.

His studies in Naples made him think that

that something was fat.

- Ancel and Margaret first visited Naples in 1952.

They had heard that working-class Neapolitans

had less heart disease

than their more comfortable neighbors.

So they decided to compare their diets.

- Those who were more affluent loved their steaks.

They loved their veal.

They loved their rich, creamy sauces.

Now amongst the working classes, they were eating lots of pasta,

lots of vegetables, lots of fresh fruits.

But they were missing the fat

that was so common on the dinner plates

of the upper crust of Neapolitan society.

The connection that Ancel Keys saw between

fat and cardiovascular disease was cholesterol.

- This sticky substance

is something our bodies make and need.

But scientists were finding that too much of it

in the bloodstream clogged arteries.

- Scientists could see cholesterol

on the interior linings of arteries,

especially the arteries of those people

who suffered heart attacks.

- Keys and others found that your blood-cholesterol level

went up the more you ate a particular kind of fat.

- Saturated fat, like palmitic acid, stearic acid --

they are saturated with hydrogens.

- Saturated fats are usually solid at room temperature.

We get them most often from meat, milk, butter, and cheese.

- As he looked around the globe,

Keys found that the more animal fat,

red meat, and dairy products,

the more heart disease within the population.

- Keys was practicing a statistical

kind of science called epidemiology.

He was looking through data about large numbers of people,

trying to find patterns.

Epidemiology is very powerful in its way

because it identifies trends and potential relationships.

But you always have to be skeptical

of any of those kinds of associations,

unless you've got other kinds of data that show causality.

And it should be written

on every single epidemiological study --

"Red flag, association does not necessarily mean causation."

- But based on the strong association

Keys saw in his data

between heart disease and saturated fat,

he advised people to eat less of it.

By the 1970s,

Keys' theory was being discussed in the Senate.

- There were some one million people

who died in 1967 from heart disease.

- In 1976, George McGovern was chairman

of the Senate's Select Committee on Nutrition.

- We're eating much more animal fat.

- They hear over and over again that animal fat is the problem.

And they issue a set of guidelines

called the dietary goals of the United States.

The goals urged Americans to reduce fat

to 30% of the calories in their diets.

How?

By eating less meat and less dairy.

"Decrease consumption of meat," they said.

- And never has a nutrition report been more controversial.

- The meat industry would have none of that.

- They went right to their friends in Congress.

Congress held hearings.

And McGovern had to rewrite those guidelines.

- So, "Eat less red meat," is rewritten as,

"Choose meats that will reduce your saturated fat intake."

And in the move from that first sentence

to that second sentence, that translation process,

to my mind, is the beginning of full-blown nutritionism.

Because think about it.

First of all, we're no longer talking about a food

that everybody recognizes -- meat, red meat.

We're talking about a nutrient that no one has ever seen,

really understands, and is an abstraction --

saturated fat.

For the food industry, the mandate to reduce fat

was an opportunity to sell new products --

low in fat, perhaps, but often high in sugar.

- The food industry could all of a sudden

use low-fat or no-fat as a marketing strategy.

Don't you want something that's healthy for you?

Why not buy a highly processed,

sugar-laden cookie that is fat-free?

- People thought, "God, there's no fat in this.

I'm not just gonna have one of those cookies,

I'm gonna have a whole box.

- I think they're zesty.

I could eat a million.

I think I Will.

- The message to eat less fat was translated into,

"It's okay to eat more sugar."

- So the food industry re-engineers the food,

and if you look at it, fat as a proportion

of calories in the diet goes down,

which sounds really good.

But, in fact, what happened is

fat stayed level and we ate a lot more carbohydrate.

And that meant more calories.

So we were kidding ourselves,

and the industry was helping to let us kid ourselves.

- Prodded by health experts, the industry also encouraged us

to switch from butter to margarine.

- America's favorite margarine.

- Blue Bonnet.

- Margarine is made from vegetable oils.

They contain polyunsaturated fats,

which were touted as blessed nutrients

because some of them can lower cholesterol.

But to make vegetable oil hard enough to spread,

you have to hydrogenate it.

That means injecting hydrogen gas into the oil

under controlled temperature and pressure --

a process that changes some of the polyunsaturates

into a kind of fat called trans fat.

Margarine and other vegetable oil products

with trans fat were cheaper than butter

and stayed fresh longer.

They became popular in baked goods,

deep frying, and all kinds of processed foods.

For decades, we were told they were healthy alternatives

to foods with saturated fats.

But in the 1990s, scientists discovered

that trans fats were in fact not very healthy at all.

- Many people associated with the American Heart Association

had been advising people to consume margarine

that was loaded with trans fat, although lower in saturated fat.

As it turns out, people who had more trans fat in their diet

had higher rates of heart disease and diabetes.

Those margarines were about

the worst things that people could be eating.

- So, think of it --

what we told people is to get off

a possibly unhealthy fat called saturated fat

And replace it with a fat that we subsequently learned

actually does give you heart attacks.

As time went on, many people

began thinking that all fats were bad.

- Fat was oversold as public enemy number one.

Now, fat is an essential ingredient.

You will die without certain fatty acids

so you -- you need some fat.

There are many people in the United States

who think you should eat a no-fat diet.

You'd be dead.

- In 2001,

scientists at the Harvard School of Public Health

issued a scathing report.

"The low-fat campaign," they wrote,

"has been based on little scientific evidence

and may have caused unintended health consequences."

Essentially, to read this article

the entire scientific edifice

around the low-fat campaign crumble before your eyes.

The scientists said the low-fat campaign

had oversimplified the science.

They reported that replacing saturated fat

with unsaturated fat did lower the risk of heart disease.

But they noted that while a significant association

between saturated fat and heart disease

was found in two studies,

it was not found in seven others.

And they pointed out that as people

replaced fat with carbohydrates and sugar,

the prevalence of obesity and diabetes grew dramatically.

It's tragic because, in the process of doing this,

all supposedly with the idea of improving the public health,

we may have made the public health worse.

This was a tremendous public health mistake.

And that mistake was getting so obsessed with a single nutrient.

The glamor is in the nutrients, and there's no question

that when you do that, you stumble down the path

and you hit something and you say, "Oh, that's it.

That's it -- it's fat.

It's fat. Cut out the fat.

And then about ten years later, you say,

"Well, now, wait a minute.

It really isn't all fat."

And they're always coming out with something new

telling you what's the ideal diet.

So, of course, people are confused.

- Scientists now understand that a healthy diet

has to do with a lot more than one kind of food or nutrient.

- A single nutrient or a single food

are not the magic bullet.

That is the combination of foods

that is the most important determinant of health.

- We should not be talking about nutritionism,

we should talk about nutrition.

We shouldn't talk about components of food.

We should talk about food.

- But eating food isn't always easy,

especially for the millions of people

who live in low-income neighborhoods

where so much of what's available is processed food.

- If you go shopping across the street,

you'll be able to purchase a wide variety of cigarettes,

chocolates, soda, malt liquor, and potato chips.

Probably some canned vegetables,

rice, sugar, bread, cheese, and processed meat.

People make decisions based on what they can afford.

And sadly,

what they can afford often is cheap food --

things that will enable you

to stretch your dollar as far as possible.

- Growing up, what I typically ate was fast food,

whether it's Mickey-D's or a Burger King,

going to the corner store buying a bag of chips

and a soda for less than $3.

That's what you're used to.

- We're gonna move all these towers

into this beautiful formation

and then we're going to go farming.

- But all over the country,

including here in the South Bronx,

people are finding ingenious ways to get real food.

- Malik found a home.

One for you, But don't cut yet.

Let's walk our way through this.

Do we want to take all the leaves off the plants?

- No.

So what we're gonna do -- we're gonna come over here.

We're gonna go right down to the bottom.

Take the top shoots off -- boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.

Boom.

- Teacher Steve Ritz runs a network of food projects,

which includes this hydroponic vegetable garden.

- There's a myth that people are happy

with cheeseburgers and French fries.

They're not.

- You got a whole lot of crop going on here, sweetie.

- I know.

- But many people don't know there are other options.

And that's what we're doing here --

teaching people about options.

- Tastes good and fresh. - I know, right?

- What we found is that when you give people

in low-income areas the opportunity to grow food,

they respond resiliently.

You'll be picking the produce at the peak

of freshness and nutritional value.

So you'll not only be getting fresh food,

you'll be getting healthier food.

- Ritz got his start growing food back in 2005.

He had become tired of seeing

his students grow fat and become diabetic.

With fresh vegetables hard to find in the Bronx,

he and his kids got access to a vacant lot

and started growing their own.

- We were able to transform this space

from something that was a blighted area

into something that was a productive area.

And that made the kids feel good.

It made me feel great. I couldn't believe it.

- Ritz now has kids growing vegetables all over the Bronx,

and they're feeding hundreds of people a week.

- One group he works with are teenagers who've dropped out,

or been kicked out, of the public schools.

- All right, listen up, advanced culinary guys.

That's you, you, and you.

If these kids don't know what they're doing, give them a hand.

This is only their fourth day in the kitchen.

All right?

- Ritz learned that JVL Wildcat Academy,

a school that gives kids second chances,

had a restaurant kitchen

and was training kids to become professional cooks.

- I'm gonna demonstrate how to make pesto --

classic pesto, okay?

It's a basil-based sauce, uh, with nuts and cheese, all right?

Why don't you guys go get washed up,

claim your stations, and let's go.

Bring that over here. Put that over here with this.

I saw a great commercial kitchen

that has kids from troubled backgrounds

learning how to cook and be engaged

in the food service industry.

And next to that kitchen, I saw a huge, open space.

And I said to myself, "Hmm, wouldn't it be great

to grow the food that they need for that kitchen

right next door to it --

zero miles to plate, if you will?

- So the basil they grow in the garden

goes right into the pesto they make in the kitchen.

- Let's grab some chives.

- The head of the kitchen is Bill Peacock.

- Let's head on down here. Let's go over to here.

Five arugula.

- After years cooking in restaurants,

he came here to teach in 2003.

- And two Butterheads? - Yep.

- All right.

- These students, they're going out to fast food

and they're eating convenience foods.

They're not gonna be eating fresh fruit

or fresh vegetables because it's not there.

But now we've got the hydroponic garden.

They're seeing the life cycle,

and seeing these things actually growing.

They're moving them from stage to stage.

Makes a big difference.

- Being able to grow our own product right next

to where we cook just seemed mind blowing --

the fact that we can do that

and show, you know, where we live

that we can do this is something I can't describe.

It's an amazing thing.

- Okay, why are we making it -- making sure it's so dry?

- So the salad won't fall off.

- Not the salad, the salad what? - The salad dressing.

- There you go -- the salad dressing.

All right, listen up.

We are coming towards time to eat.

Now everybody is gonna cook their own plate of pasta.

Have fun.

All right, there you go.

Where's your plate?

The salad was a big winner today,

which was surprising because these kids

have never eaten anything like this --

never knew that a green can have a peppery flavor,

never knew that a green could have a soft, subtle flavor.

All right, let's see what we got here, Gustavo.

Very nice.

All right, grab your salad,

get yourself an iced tea, and enjoy your meal.

The fact that all those kids

shoved that lettuce in their mouth today

was only because they grew that lettuce.

So it's an ownership.

You look like you're eating it.

- If you expose people to locally grown, healthy food,

they tend to like it.

They really do.

It's not something that's exclusive.

It's not something for the highfalutin

or for the fringe, you know -- fringe outliers.

And when you can grow your own food,

people are really inspired by that.

- But the big food companies, of course,

still provide most of the food people eat.

And they say they're making processed food healthier.

How?

By doing what they've always done --

tweaking the nutrients.

This is really seeing can dietary protein alone

impact lean mass cause it's always been...

- More than 20,000 people are gathering in Chicago

for America's biggest food expo -- the annual meeting

of the Institute of Food Technologists,

the IFT.

- The IFT brings together all manner of companies

from the small to the medium

to the huge, multi-billion dollar corporations.

It's a supermarket of ingredients

for the food producers.

- And those producers are making foods that last.

- If you want something fresh,

you could go to the bottom of the garden.

If you want something that is going to live

in your pantry for three months, nine months,

or more than that, then you'll have to have something

that's well-preserved and built in such a way that it is stable.

- People from companies like Kraft and General Mills

what food scientists

are developing for tomorrow...

like hot dogs made with rice bran --

the vitamin-rich part of the rice seed

that's usually thrown away.

Or gluten-free pizza whose crust has no wheat,

and is made instead from a byproduct of cheesemaking

called whey.

- The gluten-free industry has gone crazy.

And it's amazing how many are interested in the gluten-free.

And they can't believe that it doesn't taste funny.

It tastes like the real pizza crust

that would have wheat in it.

- And one of the world's biggest food companies, Cargill,

is here showing prototypes

for healthier, processed food products for kids.

- The theme of our exhibit this year

is around childhood nutrition.

We understand, or, recognize that obesity

in the United States

and that more and more people are looking

for more healthful alternatives to the food choices.

- Cargill buys a huge share of the world's farm products,

from which it makes hundreds of food ingredients.

The company is showing how some of these ingredients

could be used to take advantage

of the growing interest in healthier eating.

- The first exhibit we're gonna look at

is a peanut butter spread

that has added chicory root fiber.

You get three grams of fiber per serving.

Next, we have a chewy chocolate chip granola bar.

This contains whole grain corn

so you can get some added fiber there, as well.

This is our reduced-sugar chocolate milk,

and it's had 25% of the sugar replaced

With Cargill Stevia leaf extract,

which is a natural sweetener

that reduces the overall sugar content.

One thing we've learned over and over again

is if food does not taste good, consumers simply won't buy it.

And that's the challenge that the food scientists take on

is to find that perfect sweet spot

of health, convenience, and taste.

- There's no question that processed food

is convenient and often tasty.

But when it comes to health, the claims manufacturers use

to sell their products are frequently confusing,

if not deceptive.

A trip to the supermarket has become kind of a journey

through a treacherous landscape.

I mean, what are we to make of a product

like Splenda with fiber?

They're selling the lack of one nutrient, sugar,

and the gratuitous presence of another, fiber.

So it allows you to have this amazing thing

never before tasted in the history of mankind,

which is high-fiber coffee.

These guys are really the champs

of aggressive health claims -- Pom Wonderful.

They were advertising these products

as helping everything from, uh, your heart

to your prostate, to -- and I kid you not --

erectile dysfunction.

This drink right here.

And they got in a little hot water for that

because they tested it.

They performed these experiments on, uh, rabbits.

And some animal rights people got very upset.

Okay, but the thing that struck me is,

do rabbits have this problem?

Anyway, they went too far, though,

when they put a health claim on, or a slogan that was --

I'm not kidding -- "Cheat death with this product."

And the FTC said, "You can't do that."

You can't promise, uh, immortality with your products.

You think about people trying

to make good choices in the supermarket

and finding themselves not losing weight,

not improving their health, and you wonder why?

Well, look at yogurt.

Yogurt is a healthy choice, we're told.

We give it to our kids in huge amounts.

This is Yoplait.

This is one of the first of the very successful yogurt brands.

And this is, uh, YoCrunch, and this one comes with M&Ms.

Talk about a confused message, but here's the thing.

Yoplait, Coca-cola--

obviously, this is the better choice, right?

But if you look at how much sugar is in this,

there is exactly the same amount of sugar in these two things.

This is the latest sugar delivery system.

And so we feel good about not giving our kids soda,

but we give them this instead.

So that's what I mean when I say

it's really gotten treacherous out there.

So how do you know what's really healthy and what's not?

How can you tell the difference between food

and edible food-like substances?

I've come up with some common-sense guidelines

I call food rules.

Like...

And...

So, if we're going to eat real food,

the next obvious question is, "What kind of real food?"

And that part of my overall food guidance is,

in some ways, the most controversial --

mostly plants.

Why do I say mostly plants?

It didn't please vegetarians,

who thought I should go all the way.

- I know. I'm tempted.

- And it certainly didn't please meat-eaters,

who thought I was dissing meat.

That were carved this week.

- But I used that word after a lot of consideration,

because it's a somewhat equivocal message.

There are people who demonize meat,

but there's no reason to do that.

Meat is healthy food.

Humans have eaten meat

for a very long time with great pleasure.

I think our problem is we eat too much of it.

So, and that's why I say mostly plants.

Every additional daily serving of vegetables and fruit

Reduces your risk of stroke by 5%

and your risk of heart disease by 4%

We only eat about between two and three portions

of vegetables and fruit in this country.

If we up that by just one more, that would save 30,000 lives

and $5 billion in healthcare costs.

- Great, how's it look?

- Remember our rules for letting them out?

- Don't bother them.

- Don't bother them. That's right.

But we are gonna police them away from our vegetables, right?

- At a day camp in Sunnyvale, California,

Stanford scientist Christopher Gardner

is exploring what it takes

to get children to eat more vegetables.

- One of my research interests

is just how many vegetables could I get a kid to eat.

What are the barriers?

What are the things that get in the way?

Is it a peer pressure thing?

Is it really a taste thing?

Is it familiarity?

- So, today, we have garlic-basil hummus

and we also have lemon cucumbers,

green beans, and corn.

You can try the raw veggies by themselves.

You can dip them into the hummus.

- Here's another really big one over here.

What they learn is that it's really delicious food.

But it's just taking that first jump

into feeling comfortable enough to try it.

So, in terms of teamwork...

- To make that jump easier, in the cooking assignment

that culminates the week, the kids have been told

to use three different vegetables to make...pizza.

- Uh, does pickles count as a vegetable?

- Yeah.

- One of the main points of the camp

is to get the kids connected with food,

because you see this light bulb go off over their heads

and this sparkle in their eye when they see,

"Oh, that food -- it grows just like this!"

- So, yesterday, we came up with a list.

So we have squash, peppers, kale, green beans, cucumber.

Eggs is not considered a vegetable

but it can be an additional topping to your pizza.

- It's pretty much dough,

and then I have pesto, tomato paste, or sauce.

I have cheese, a mixture -- we cooked onions, peppers,

and garlic together so I have that on my pizza.

Tomatoes, and then I have an inner ring of pickles,

which I'm really excited about

because I've never had pickles on a pizza.

- What do you think? Does that look done?

- I'm kind of stunned actually how many different vegetables

they're willing to try by the end of the week,

and how many they're willing to say they like

just within a few days.

- You want your peppers, right?

- Yes, I want peppers.

- When people eat a plant-based diet,

their whole lives, the benefits are impressive.

Here in Lorna Linda, California, many people belong

to the same religious denomination

that the Kellogg brothers did -- the Seventh-Day Adventists.

- Green onions? - Sure.

- Founded back in the 19th century,

the church has always emphasized healthy living.

- Green shards -- lots of green shards.

- Today, Adventists have the longest life expectancy

of any group in the United States.

- I can't believe you're gonna be a 101 in August.

- The residents at this retirement home

are almost all Adventists.

- We feel that our bodies are the temple of God.

And we owe it to ourselves and to our community

to keep up our health.

We have at least two or three people

who are a 100 years old here.

And they seem to get along very well.

I'm 92 years old.

The average age is 93.

I walk four miles a day.

I used to walk outside,

but now I walk in the villa here.

I realized that if I go from end to the other

and back six times, it's a mile.

So I go back and forth 24 times in the morning.

- Almost all Adventists abstain from smoking and alcohol.

And about 50% of them are vegetarians.

- I have been a vegetarian all my life.

- And you, Richard?

- I could say the same thing, and I haven't missed anything.

It's pretty well-established that especially the red meats

are not really that good for you.

- And that's true if you eat too much of them.

Studies show that the more red meat you eat,

the greater your risk of getting heart disease,

diabetes, and certain cancers.

Some of the meat studies were done

at the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston.

- From what we've seen in our research,

eating mostly plants is a good idea.

We've done a series of analyses over the last few years

comparing red meat with poultry with fish, with nuts,

with legumes in relation to risk

of cardiovascular disease and diabetes.

And very consistently replacing red meat

with other protein sources turns out to be related

to lower risk of mortality from these diseases.

- In Cleveland, researchers have made a new finding

that they think might explain some of the risks of red meat.

- Stanley Hazen is a cardiologist.

- We were looking for characteristic markers

or features in the blood that predicted near-term risk

for heart attack, stroke, and death.

- Hazen and his colleagues found something

that seemed to do just that -- a compound called TMAO.

- When we first found that this compound

was associated with heart disease risk,

we didn't know very much about it.

So we tried to essentially reverse engineer --

where did it come from?

- The answer pointed to red meat,

which contains a substance called carnitine.

Bacteria in our intestines feed on carnitine,

and help turn it into TMAO

Hazen found that the more TMAO there is in our bloodstream,

the more likely we are to develop heart disease.

- What we have found is that TMAO is enhancing heart disease risk

by changing cholesterol metabolism.

- In mice, higher levels of TMAO

made the sticky deposits of cholesterol called plaque

more likely to form in their arteries.

- I like to think of TMAO as a rheostat on a light switch.

If you have a high TMAO, you're gonna have more plaque.

If you have a low TMAO level, you end up having less plaque.

Based on our findings,

I have not stopped eating red meat,

but I have decreased the amount and also the frequency.

So, now, instead of having it multiple times a week,

I try to have it, at most, one time a week.

- We still don't understand

precisely why meat causes problems.

It could be the carnitine or the kind of iron in it

or the saturated fat.

Or the problem may simply be

that meat crowds plants out of our diet.

But we do know this --

eating less meat and mostly plants is good for you.

- Good. - Okay.

- Nutrition scientist Joan Sabaté

teaches at Lorna Linda university.

He and his wife Carmen,

who both grew up in Adventist homes in Barcelona,

follow a vegetarian diet.

- For supper, I eat a good salad, or a good soup,

and vegetables with carbohydrate foods

such as pasta, or potatoes, or bread.

And then fruit for dessert.

That seems like a good meal.

But don't stick with just cauliflower and potatoes.

The plant kingdom is very rich

in textures, in flavors, in colors.

So a rich variety of plant foods is the best.

- Sabaté has done studies comparing the longevity

of both kinds of Adventists -- meat-eaters and vegetarians.

He's found that vegetarian Adventists

live three to four years longer than non-vegetarian ones

and six to nine years longer than the rest of us.

- You're awfully easy to please, honey, I must say.

- Ellsworth Wareham is one of those vegetarian Adventists.

He's 99

He was a heart surgeon for more than five decades,

and retired at the age of 95.

- During the last 20 years, I assisted in cardiac surgery.

I wasn't the principal surgeon, but I worked full-time.

I try to live a healthy lifestyle.

And that involves, of course, trying to have proper nutrition.

Do I keep a list of things that I'm going to eat?

No.

- This has little hot peppers in it.

You eat a plant-based diet.

I want to just say how simple it is.

It is simple to have good eating habits.

- At the University of Pittsburgh,

researchers are exploring

just how eating mostly plants may promote health.

- We're particularly interested...

- Colon cancer specialist Stephen O'Keefe

spent many years working in Africa,

where he saw very little colon cancer among his patients.

But when he moved to the United States,

he was struck by the fact that African-Americans

have one of the highest colon cancer rates in the world,

even though many are genetically similar to Africans.

- Studies have demonstrated that the factor most associated

with differences in colon cancer between Africans

and African-Americans is diet.

- Most Africans tend to eat more vegetables, fruits,

beans, and whole grains

and less processed food than we do in the West.

And those plant-based foods contain substances

our bodies can't digest, which we call fiber.

We understood for a long time that fiber was important,

and we thought it was important to help people

overcome constipation and improve what's called

transit time of food through your body.

But O'Keefe's studies reveal that fiber does something else.

It feeds bacteria in the colon that to help keep it healthy

By producing a compound called butyrate.

- Our cells don't produce it, but bacterial cells do.

If you eat enough fiber,

you maintain a bacterial population

that convert the fiber into butyrate,

the health of the colon

and prevents cancer.

- Fiber is food for these microbes,

and if you don't feed it to them,

they're not gonna be well and you're not gonna be well.

And the less fiber you eat, O'Keefe has found,

the more bacteria you have that make harmful compounds

that can lead to cancer.

Since the Western diet

that many African-Americans eat is low in fiber,

and most Africans get plenty of fiber,

O'Keefe wondered what would happen if Africans

and African-Americans switched diets?

O'Keefe's team fed fiber-rich diets to African-Americans

and fiber-poor diets to people in South Africa.

- And then we basically measured substances

that are good or bad for the colon

before and then two weeks after their dietary switch.

- After just two weeks,

the amount of harmful compounds increased

in the colons of the Africans,

while the amount of beneficial compounds

like butyrate increased in the African-Americans.

- This is the butyrate.

- It's very dramatic. It's very easy to see.

- Yeah.

- The exciting thing is that by changing your diet,

you or I can influence our risk of colon cancer

in just two weeks.

- So the larger lesson is

that we're not just eating for ourselves.

We're eating for the trillions of microbes that inhabit us,

like the ones that help protect breastfed babies.

The community of microbes inside us

has become known as the microbiome.

But scientists are just beginning to understand

how big a role those microbes play in our dietary health.

- Our ability to transform the complex chemicals

in the foods that we eat

into products that we can grab a hold of and use,

very much depends upon our microbial partners.

And, in a sense, we never dine alone.

And that's why we proceeded to try to understand

this intersection between the foods that we eat,

the microbes that we harbor, and our health.

- Jeffrey Gordon and his colleagues

have found that these microbes can actually influence

both obesity and malnutrition.

In Malawi, his team studied unusual pairs of twins.

Even though they'd been fed similar diets,

in dozens of cases, one twin was malnourished

and the other one wasn't.

It turned out that their intestinal bacteria,

for reasons still unknown, were starkly different.

- This suggested that there may be a causal relationship

between the microbes and malnutrition,

but it didn't prove it.

- To test this hypothesis, the scientists transplanted

the children's intestinal bacteria into mice

that had been bred to have none of their own.

The mice that got the sick twin's bacteria

developed symptoms of malnutrition.

Those that got the healthy twin's bacteria did not.

Gordon did a similar study of twins in the United States,

this time looking at obesity.

In cases where one twin was obese and the other wasn't,

it again turned out that they had

different kinds of gut bacteria, which suggests

that certain microbes may contribute to obesity.

- If we think about our microbes as a garden,

how can we grow this garden?

How can we cultivate it to ensure our health?

- In places like Bangladesh, Gordon is investigating whether

traditional diets may do that by encouraging the growth

of a wide variety of intestinal microbes.

- One fascinating finding that we have made

is Westernization is associated with a reduction

in the diversity or richness of microbial life in the gut.

And diets that increase richness

are probably going to be beneficial.

- Researcher Jeff Leach

thinks the Hadza in Tanzania can also tell us

a lot about how to cultivate our microbiome.

- One of the holy grails in microbiome research

is trying to figure out what is

an optimal or balanced microbiome.

- The Hadza's gut microbes feed mainly on wild foods,

like the kind our ancestors ate for tens of thousands of years.

- We think that the Hadza contain, in their stomach,

a microbial Noah's Ark to what ails the world.

- To learn more about these microbes,

Leach is collecting stool samples from some

500 Hadza -- men, women and children.

- We provide the individuals in the village

little tubes and a swab.

Samples for Bahti? - Bahti.

- The samples are shipped to the labs of Leach's U.S. colleagues,

who can precisely identify the microbes they contain.

- At the end of the day, what we hope to find

is are there certain diets

that drive certain groups of bacteria?

And what does that tell us about the health of the person?

- Studies suggest that the Hadza have different kinds

of microbes than people in Western countries.

And this may partly stem from the high levels of fiber

they get from all the plants they eat.

- I think the Hadza

are gonna teach us that plants should be

the primary source of calories in the diet

and that those plants should also contain

lots of dietary fiber.

- I think one of the most interesting things

that Jeff Leach is up to is looking for

that baseline of what the human microbiome looked like

before the rise of agriculture

and then before the rise of processed food.

We don't know how these changes in our diet

may have affected the microbes inside us.

- The microbes may provide a very important

between food and health.

We need to take them into consideration

when we're deciding what to eat.

- So there are many good reasons to eat mostly plants.

There's plenty of evidence to suggest

that eating a variety of vegetables and fruits

can probably reduce rates of stroke,

heart disease, and some cancers.

They're nutritious and have lots of fiber.

They're good for the microbes in your gut.

And if you're eating mostly plants,

you can be sure you're not eating too much meat.

So...

That is, eat as many different kinds of plants as possible.

And now the last and most challenging

of my seven words...

not too much.

In a country where 2/3 of us are overweight,

this may seem obvious.

But it can be tough not to eat too much.

One big reason is that

we're constantly being tempted by food.

- People are eating more food more often

and in greater portions.

Food is everywhere.

You used to be asked to leave food outside

if you came into a clothing store.

Now they give you snacks.

- The wonderful human institution of the meal,

this time where people stop what they're doing,

sit down at a table, eat socially, is in trouble.

We eat at our desks.

We eat while we're driving.

We eat while we're walking down the street.

There were social taboos on all these activities

once upon a time and they're all gone.

- We can see, if we look at data on the number of calories

that people are eating, people are eating much more now

than they did 25 or 30 years ago.

- And those kinds of trends are going to take a lot more

than removing a gram or two of sugar or salt

from a food product to make any difference.

- And that's why we need to talk,

not just about nutrients or even just about food,

but about how much we eat.

- Thanks for coming for lunch today.

Like I promised, there's a free lunch.

Okay, so let's go on, and let's get started.

One thing that I've learned,

having done hundreds and hundreds of studies

related to eating behavior, is that, to a person,

we believe we are master and commander

of all of our food decisions.

But we're not.

We make over 200 decisions about food a day.

And the majority of these decisions

are basically unconscious to us.

So, um, grab a plate up there.

The pasta is right on the stove.

Serve yourself up.

- Brian Wansink is an expert on eating behavior.

He's discovered we're often

not aware of why we eat as much as we do.

Sometimes, it's because of something

we don't give the slightest thought to,

like the size of our plate.

- We'll bring people in, and we'll give them

a large plate to serve themselves,

but what they don't realize is that the pasta is cold.

- Wansink concocts an excuse so that everyone

has to get a different plate, which is slightly smaller.

- These things weren't the right temperature.

So I'd like you to come back and just grab another plate

out of the cupboard, there.

One of the things we find is

that they'll serve themselves a second time --

they won't believe they served

an amount any different than they did the first time.

Did you guys notice anything any different

between the first time you served yourself

and the second time you served yourself?

- The plate feels a lot smaller. It looks smaller.

- So here's one thing we found -- the size of a plate

tremendously biases us, in terms of how much we serve.

- The smaller the plate, the less food people take.

- You serve four ounces on a nine-inch plate, you go,

"Holy cow, I'll never be able to eat that."

So let's take a look at what happened to you guys.

So the big plate -- 207 calories.

The smaller plate, it dropped down to a 162 calories.

That's about 40 calories.

If this happened three times a day

over the course of a year, by using a smaller plate,

you'd end up weighing nine pounds less

than you would if you had a bigger plate.

Just really, really small things

make this really huge difference.

When it comes down to it, the changes we can make

most immediately are the changes we can make

when we go home tonight.

They're the changes we can make

in our kitchen or in our own house,

like simply using smaller plates.

- Wansink has also found that the order

in which we encounter foods influences not just

but what we eat.

He's now working with schools around the country,

to re-design lunch lines

so that kids will choose healthier food.

- This is about the most difficult place in the world to get people to eat better.

It's a middle school and a high school cafeteria.

Here's how we do it.

We re-organize the line -- put the healthiest food first.

We find people are 11% more likely

to take the first thing they see than the third thing.

So let's load it up with the healthy vegetables.

After that, we've got the low fat hamburgers,

Whole grain buns here, bean quesadillas.

It's only then do they hit the really indulgent stuff.

But, you know, hey, it's too late.

Their plates are already full with the good stuff.

- You know that it's working by the fact that,

we used to only do 25 pounds of carrots a week

for all three buildings, and now we go anywhere

from 70 to 75 pounds of carrots a week.

And they don't even realize it, a lot of them, that,

"Wow, we're eating better."

It's just happening.

- The other thing we do, we take the fruit

and we put it right next to the cash register.

What we find is that fruit sales go up 103%.

Simply by putting the fruit in a nice basket

and putting it next to the cash register.

And the exact same thing that works

for selling Twinkies in a convenience store

works for getting people to eat healthier

in high schools and junior highs.

- And it's not just kids who are influenced

by where and when they see food.

The order of items at a breakfast buffet

had a similar effect on adults.

- We found that the first three things they saw

comprised 66% of everything they took.

So, in one case, they saw cheesy eggs first,

they saw bacon, they saw fried potatoes.

2/3 of their plate --

cheesy eggs, bacon, fried potatoes.

If instead they saw fruit first,

and low-fat granola, low-fat yogurt,

They'd end up taking 2/3 of their plate from those items.

It's incredible the impact the order of food has

on whether we take it or not.

- All these little environmental cues

are very important in our appetite.

We think of appetite as this biological absolute --

"This is how hungry I am."

But, in fact, it, like so many other things, is constructed.

It's socially constructed, environmentally constructed

and influenced by all these little, little things.

So I see great potential to harness that kind of thinking

and those kind of insights to redesign the buffet line,

to redesign the plate,

to redesign the food environment in which we live.

- Thank you. Have a good day.

- It's very interesting how we'll put up

with social engineering from corporations endlessly.

When they come up with the Big Gulp

they are social engineering, right?

They're getting us to drink more than we would otherwise.

When they manipulate the salt, fat, and sugar.

All that is social engineering, too, and we don't resent it.

Yet, as soon as it's being done on our behalf --

an elected official doing it on our behalf --

this is too much.

This is social engineering.

This is socialist. We can't. We can't go there.

We have a double standard.

- The government is already involved

in food choice up to its ears.

Government policy has determined

the kind of food system that we have.

It determines what food products get supported

and which ones don't.

So what those of us who are advocating

for a healthier food system are after

is not getting the government involved in food policy.

It already is.

We just want it tweaked so that the government role

in food policy is to produce

a food system that promotes health --

healthier people and a healthier environment.

- This is the amount of sugar that you or your child eat

when you drink one can of soda a day for a year.

I'm gonna put this down in front.

- In 2012, Richmond, California councilman Jeffrey Ritterman

proposed that the city collect a penny-per-ounce tax

on sugary beverages.

He hoped the tax would discourage people

from consuming so much sugar.

- Please be respectful while we're discussing this.

Thank you.

- Ritterman is also a cardiologist.

- Unequivocally, medically, right now

it is proven that one can of soda a day

increases your risk of type-2 diabetes.

It causes heart attacks,

and it causes obesity and it makes some cancers grow.

- The tax proponents raised close to $70,000.

But in this city of about 100,000 people,

the soda industry spent nearly $2.5 million to defeat the tax.

- I was calling on behalf

of the community coalition against beverage taxes.

- They established an ostensible grass roots organization

to fight the soda tax.

They went into minority neighborhoods

and put up big posters saying

your rights are being taken away from you.

- When we get to the point of being a dictator to people,

I think it's wrong.

- Measure N is losing.

We can now confirm that it has gone down to defeat.

- In the end, Richmond voters rejected the tax

by a margin of nearly two to one.

Across the country,

New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg

came up with a different strategy

to cut down on people's intake of sugar.

He proposed a regulation to limit the serving size

of sugar-sweetened beverages to 16 ounces.

- There's an epidemic in this country

of people being overweight, bordering on obesity.

The percentage of the population

that's obese is skyrocketing.

We've got to do something about it.

- So this is the proposal.

The maximum size that a food service establishment

could sell of a sugary drink is 16 ounces.

If you go into a fast-food restaurant in New York City,

you can find an awful lot of things like this.

This is a 64-ounce container.

That's a half a gallon, by the way.

It contains about 800 calories

Or more than 50 packets of sugar.

To give you an idea of what we're talking about,

this is how much sugar is in there.

- We know from research

that people eat what's in front of them.

If you give somebody a 16-ounce soda,

that person will drink 16 ounces.

If you give that same person 32 ounces,

that same person will drink 32 ounces

and have twice as many calories.

- The beverage industry filed suit to stop Bloomberg's rule

and launched a slick campaign to turn the public against it.

- New Yorkers don't want the mayor

to tell them what size beverage to buy.

- I'm an adult and I can make

my own decisions about what I drink.

- Hey, New York, it's time to take a stand.

Join us.

- In March 2013, a judge ruled in favor

Of the industry and threw out Bloomberg's rule

calling the limit "arbitrary and capricious."

- Being the first to do something is never easy.

When we began this process, we knew we would face lawsuits.

Anytime you adopt a groundbreaking policy,

special interests will sue.

That's America.

- Come to Marlboro country.

- Personal freedom also used to be one of the tobacco industry's

favorite arguments against government regulation.

But the evidence of harm became so overwhelming

that the government finally had to act.

- For many years, there was very firmly established science

that smoking cigarettes was killing people.

But it took a long time for government to react.

Once it did, though, it did things

that were considered inconceivable at one time.

Standing up to the tobacco companies?

- In 1970,

37% of American adults smoked cigarettes.

The U.S. Government banned cigarette advertising

on television that year,

and cigarette taxes began to rise.

Since then, the percentage of adults who smoke

has been cut in half.

- So I don't think it can be very far off

where we ask government to do with food

what it's done with tobacco.

- And in 2014, people in Berkeley, California

did just that -- passing the first soda tax

in the nation's history.

- We got the measure passed. Whoo!

- This time, tax proponents successfully

countered industry spending,

thanks partly to former mayor Bloomberg.

- If We're going to start reversing the epidemic

of childhood obesity, it starts November 4th.

- He spent a reported $650,000 in support of the measure.

- I think it's a big deal because we are gonna test

this idea that by adjusting the price of soda,

you can reduce the consumption of it.

- It's already working in Mexico,

where a national soda tax took effect in 2014.

Since then, Mexicans have been drinking

significantly less soda,

suggesting that the amount we eat or drink

is more than just a matter of willpower.

Now we'll see whether a tax can have a similar impact

when we try it in just in one city.

And if we discover that that works,

and, in turn, we find rates of obesity

and type-2 diabetes moderating or declining,

we will have discovered a very powerful tool.

It may or may not work, but I'm delighted

that finally we're gonna get to try this.

Eat more like the French do?

Aren't they known for their love of rich food?

Well, one of the remarkable things about the French

is that they actually enjoy better health

than people in many other Western countries.

It's a mystery known as the French paradox.

They eat very fatty foods very often.

They have lavish, lush desserts.

They drink lots of wine.

And it drives us crazy,

but they're not as fat as we are,

and they have less heart disease and slightly better longevity.

How could this possibly be?

They're breaking all our rules of eating.

- Claude Fischler is a French sociologist

who studies how people eat.

- The French are very rigid

when it comes to issues associated with eating.

They eat at exactly the same time in all regions.

Any given weekday at 12:30, you can be sure

that 50% of the French, they are busy eating.

Across the English Channel or in the U.S.

It's, more like 15%, 16%, 17% of people

that are eating at the same time.

- Fischler thinks this rigidity,

or reliance on tradition,

actually makes life easier for the French.

- It's not such a maddening individual obsession

about controlling yourself.

Because there's a lot that is controlled by the culture.

- The big difference between the French and the Americans

is that they serve less food.

That's the big one.

They serve smaller portions.

That's part of their tradition.

Another thing is they think of food

more as something you enjoy.

- The French view of health issues is...

Si c'est Bon, c'est Bon.

If it tastes good, it's good for you.

- The French, when they say they eat,

mean they have a meal together.

They wouldn't call eating a snack, eating.

The way they use their word eating is in an event.

They have a world in which food is a celebration with others.

- Tonight's dinner is at the home

Of Fischler's friend, Hervé de Lannurien.

In keeping with tradition, the meal follows a script --

appetizers...

...a first course...

...a main course...

...a cheese course...

and salad.

Later, they had dessert.

In France, they eat slowly,

which is very interesting and significant.

One of the most striking things about the American way of eating

is we are some of the fastest eaters on the planet.

- It's about 135 minutes a day in France spent eating,

compared to something like 74, I think, uh, for the U.S.

- So they're used to eating smaller portions,

but they're used to taking longer to eat them.

So the pleasure of eating comes

from the good food in your mouth.

- So the French paradox may have nothing to do

with the miracle of nutrient in the red wine,

which some people thought,

but it may have everything to do with habit.

As powerful and wonderful as science is,

culture also can teach us how to eat.

And, so far, until science

makes the breakthroughs it needs to make,

culture is the best guide we have.

Last rule...

Cultivating a relaxed, non-punitive attitude

toward food is essential.

Being anxious about your eating cannot be good for your health.

What matters is not the special occasion

but the everyday, default practice.

So I stand with Oscar Wilde, actually, who said it best.

He said, "All things in moderation,

including moderation."

Thank you very much.

Tomatoes, assorted.

- Do you want a strawberry to go? - Thank you.

There are many aspects of our lives

where we feel like we have very little power.

But when it comes to food, we do have power.

The rise of farmer's markets,

the rise of organic agriculture,

the rise of the food movement --

none of this was the result of government action.

All of this was the result of consumers

voting with their forks,

signaling to farmers and the food industry

they wanted something different.

And this has created a multi-billion dollar

alternative food economy.

So we may be at a turning point.

- We are feeding people today in so many different ways.

- More and more people are making

between food and health.

- We have some young people who have been working

to combat type-2 diabetes directly --

To actually end type-2 diabetes

in young people in the state of California.

And we need your help.

We need you actually eating good food.

We need you actually sharing that message.

- When we talk about wanting to eat healthy,

we also have to think about the system

that is making us eat the wrong things.

- I believe we can change the whole community.

Growing and knowing where your food comes from

makes a difference.

I would love to see in the next five, ten years,

the South Bronx having more healthy alternatives --

actually where the healthy isn't an alternative.

The fast food is the alternative and this is the standard.

- Back in Massachusetts, the last year

has also marked a turning point for Anthony Scavotto.

He's cut way down on junk food -- especially sugar.

- I think more about it

because I kind of know what it does to my body now.

I feel pretty good about the changes I've made.

I like fruits and vegetables.

I love cauliflower.

I love, like, apples.

I like lemons.

Is that weird?

I love lemons.

- Though Anthony has gained a few pounds,

he's also grown two inches taller,

so he's carrying less excess weight.

- Go!

- Anthony is doing great.

His energy level is up.

- I love sports.

My goal's to stay the same weight...

- There you go.

-...to be healthy.

- Blue goal.

- I couldn't be prouder of him.

- Nice job.

- You know, after talking to scores

of nutrition scientist, nutrition educators,

when I finally realized what they're really telling me

is, "Eat food,"

it was just like a light had gone off.

It's like, "Could it really be that simple?"

And the more I thought about it, it was like,

"It is that simple."

Eat food, not too much,

mostly plants is what our species

has done for hundreds of thousands of years.

So, that advice, I think,

is about as universal as any advice you could offer.

It's very rare in our lives where the answer

to a complicated question is so simple,

but when it comes to eating, it is.