 70% of Americans are either overweight and obese, 42% of Americans are now obese. Nearly one in three Americans are suffering with diabetes or pre-diabetes, and certainly in my practice over 80% of the people I see have diabetes or pre-diabetes, and one in every four deaths in this country are caused by heart disease. It's a good parallel to what's happening in the news. We talk about global pandemics, but this, what you're talking about is actually the global pandemic that no one is talking about except a few of us. And with your new book, you're really leading the charge on this. Why is this happening on an international scale now? Well, one, our government policies support a food system that makes us sick and fat, cripples our economy, threatens our national security, threatens our kids' academic future in learning, and creates so much social injustice. And the reason the food industry is so nefarious is they not only influence policy, but they're in every aspect of influence. And they control the story and the narrative about what we should eat and what's good or bad. For example, they fund $12 billion worth of nutrition research, quote, nutrition research, things like candy helps kids with weight loss, or soda is a health food. Crazy stuff that's out there that compuses the literature. So the government spends only $1 billion. So they spend 12 times as much of the government funding nutrition, quote, nutrition research that pollutes the science and compuses other doctors and consumers. That's why the headlines are all over the place. Second, they fund professional societies. So those trusted groups that we take our advice from like the American Heart Association, I mean, you're in cardiology. I mean, you know what kind of garbage they put out. And why? Because a big portion of their revenue comes from the food industry and pharma, about $192 million a year. And then, of course, you've got the American, I mean, the Academy of Nutrition Dietetics, which receives 40% of its funding from the food industry. They control their conferences. They now don't allow pictures in the exhibit hall at their annual meetings because it's all full of junk food. And they don't want people to see who's supporting the Academy of Nutrition Dietetics, which is the major nutrition association. So we're taking their advice, but maybe it's not the best advice. And then you've got them funding front groups, things like the American Council on Science and Health and the Center for Consumer Freedom and Climate Smart Agriculture and Crop Life and all these wonderful sounding groups that are front groups for the food industry to get their agenda pushed forward. And only that they actually are driving social groups to behave in certain ways. For example, they fund the NAACP and the Hispanic Federation, which is why they oppose soda taxes, is why they get all these benefits for their communities from these companies that are poisoning them, and they're the ones who are the most affected. So on every level, whether it's social obviously groups that are co-opted, professional groups, front groups that are putting misinformation out there, corrupting science, policy change, the food industry has very deliberately driven our food system to produce the worst food on the planet. And then is exporting it to every country in the world, which is why we're seeing 80% of the people with chronic disease are not in America, they're in the developing world. 80% of the types of diabetes are in the developing world. And there's this double burden of obesity and malnutrition in often in the same families because of this sort of inundation of fast food companies into these countries where it's aspirational. So McDonald's is a upscale brand in China, right? KFC is an upscale brand in Africa, if you're affluent. And here we think it's not really exactly a great date night out with your wife, but in those countries, it's like, wow, you're in India and all these countries, it's like the best thing you could do. And I think it's just driving incredible rates of obesity and diabetes in these countries that is unprecedented and they're just not equipped to deal with it. And it's happened so fast. Our food has changed so much over the last 40 years. Our methods of production, our quality of our food, the processed food, it's staggering. And so health care systems, governments, and people are just so ill-equipped to even recognize that there's a problem. OK, 38,000 people die from the flu every year, and that's bad. And a few thousand have died from coronavirus, which is terrible and tragic. But literally a million people die every year just from heart disease in America. Why aren't we talking about that? You mentioned regenerative agriculture a couple of times now. What the heck is regenerative agriculture for our listeners? OK, well, let's just back up a little bit. So we hear about organic. We hear about whole foods, sustainable agriculture, all this stuff. But people don't understand why our agriculture is so problematic. And as a doctor, why the hell would I care about farms and agriculture, right? Well, as a functional medicine doctor, you're looking for the root cause. And it starts on the farm. It starts with the seeds we produce. It starts with the chemicals we use, the fertilizer we use, how we farm, the quality of the food that's produced. And you have to start with that. Because today, the best vegetables out there that are supposedly nutrient-dense are about 50% less nutritious than they were when I was 10 years old 50 years ago. Yeah, that's exactly right. So even if you're eating like a plant-based diet, the quality of the food is worse because of the soil it's grown in. The soil is required to have a lot of organic matter, a lot of microbes, a lot of life to extract the nutrients from the soil to give to the plant. Right now, we farm in dirt, which is lifeless, dead, can't hold carbon, water, and no organic matter. And it doesn't really produce high-quality food and creates all these other problems, like climate change. So our food system is the biggest cause of climate change. We've destroyed our soil so much that actually it's one of the biggest causes of climate change. We think we're the rainforest are terrible. We're cutting on the rainforest. Yeah, that's bad, but it turns out soil is worse. We've lost a third of all of our soil on the planet. We lose an area the size of Nicaragua to desert every year. We deforest an area the size of Costa Rica to grow crops for animals or farming. And that's seven billion trees a year. And all these farming techniques actually destroy the environment, destroy the ecosystem, and 30% to 40% of all the carbon in the atmosphere since the time of the Industrial Revolution, and that's about a trillion tons is in the atmosphere, about 300 billion or a third of it comes from the soil loss of organic matter. So regenerative agriculture is a method of farming that has a whole bunch of benefits. One, it builds organic matter in the soil, which sucks the carbon out of the atmosphere. And the UN said we could literally stop climate change for 20 years if we took two of the 5 million degraded hectares of land around the world and turned it to regenerative agriculture, which would only cost $300 billion. Now that seems like a lot. It's only three times as much money as Jeff Bezos has. And it's less than the money, it's less than the money we spend for Medicare on diabetes every year. So it's not all doom and gloom, right? The book is called Food Fix, Not Food Apocalypse. In World War II, we came together to fight a common enemy and we were willing to make sacrifices. We were willing to ration food, have victory gardens, and we were willing to do all sorts of things from the lights out at night because we didn't want the enemy to be able to see where our cities were. And so we really had a really robust coming together as a society. We need to do the same thing for what's going on today with chronic disease, with all these social problems that are all connected to food and with climate change in the environment. It's an existential threat to us. And I think most of us just go about our daily life and we worry about coronavirus because it's an acute thing. This is like slowly boiling a frog, right? If you boil a frog and you drop in boiling water, it'll jump right out. If you turn the heat up slowly, it'll just sit there and boil to death. And that's what we're doing now, it's terrible. So there are a lot of things that we can do whether we want to have choices in our own diet, for example, just say, I'm not going to buy GMO foods anymore. That alone will make a difference in your health and will stop the demand for these foods. Two, you can become a regeneratorian. How do you source your food for more regenerative farms? So you can, for example, go to mariposa ranch.com where they have all kinds of poultry and meats that are regenerally raised. So we have the technology to do that. You can start a garden, call it a victory garden, call it a community garden. Whenever you want, I had gardens, I've had gardens most of my life. Start a compost pile because food waste is the biggest source of climate change after the U.S. and China for our country. Yeah, so it's like, we throw out 40% of our food. It's an enormous place of resources, that's bad enough, but everybody throws out an America pound a day per person at an average, but that's not the worst part is when we throw it in a landfill, it actually off gases, rots and off gases and it turns into methane and it's a huge cause of climate change. So food waste is a huge problem that you can end by having a compost pile in your kitchen, a compost bucket, and then you can have a compost pile in your backyard if you're in the country or suburbs or if you live in a city, you can have an in-home anaerobic digester that digests the food. There's business innovations that are happening around this. It's really exciting. So there's so much that you can do as an individual. Then you can be active politically in your town or community to advocate for this. You can be active in your school. You can be actively federally. Like for example, you can go to foodpolicyaction.org where they have a list of your senators and congressmen. They're voting, wrecking on food issues and whether it's good or bad. And they've actually outed and gotten rid of a couple of congressmen who were super in the pocket of the food industry simply by a social media campaign. So we don't think we have impact, but we do. But you're right. More people are gonna die of heart disease today than of the coronavirus. That's for sure. And you're right. Our food system is the pandemic we should be focused on. It really is. And I think that's what people need to understand and that it's affecting everybody. It'll affect you and your lifetime. And then it's actually totally treatable and preventable by using this approach. And I just wanted people to understand that that's what's so exciting about this. It's not like we have to wait for some crazy solution or a vaccine or some magic new drug. Like we have the tools and the best drug is food and using the right food.