Part IV Mike: From the food manufacturer's point of view, yes. They color the foods with artificial colors to fool our senses, to make their foods look appealing and look fresh when they are not. They can be on the shelf for months and still have these same neon red colors, and something from nature doesn't last that long, so it's a pretty good hint that something artificial is going on there. Speaking of food colors, if you look at the foods people consume around the world -- the cultural diets -- those cultures that have the healthiest diets make great use of colors in their foods. They go to great lengths to put different colors in them. I'm thinking in particular of food from Thailand. Thai food, when it is prepared in the traditional Thai format, is an absolute work of art. It's not just a taste masterpiece, it is also visually appealing, and again, it uses colors from nature, not a bunch of artificial colors. Thai food is glorious, and if you look at some of the medicinal herbs used in Thai food, it's rather astounding how healing Thai dishes can be. Ben: I notice something really interesting right here, on both the health and disease sides of the pyramid. A lot of what we think of traditionally is just physical health when we talk about eating the right foods and eating the wrong foods. But I notice here we have some psychological and behavioral penalties and benefits from eating some of these foods. Mike: Absolutely. There is a great disconnect in this country and our modern medical system in understanding the links between consumption of foods and mental health. We have now a quarter of our nation -- depending on who you ask -- of Americans suffering from mental disorders. With all the discussion about mental health and mental disorders, there's no discussion whatsoever about the true causes of it. There's all this talk about treating everybody and how we should get everybody into "treatment," which means jobs. I say that mental disorders are not caused by a lack of drugs, so why would you think that adding drugs to someone's brain would eliminate these disorders? What are they really caused by? Well, they are caused by nutritional problems. They are caused by the consumption of hydrogenated oils, for one big thing. This is poison for your brain and nervous system. It creates birth defects. It competes with the absorption of essential fatty acids. There are other processed foods made from white flour and sugar that deplete nutrients, vitamins and minerals in your body that are crucial for brain health. Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder is largely a fictitious disease. One study I recall showed that 80 percent of children with ADHD are symptom-free within two weeks after transitioning to healthy foods and eliminating certain additives from their diets. So here we have the so-called disease that is really nothing more than the labeling diagnosis of a pattern of symptoms that are quite clearly created by food choice, and yet the USDA, once again, won't tell the truth and won't tell the parents of America that they should be feeding their children these healthy foods and avoiding these other ingredients if they want their children to be healthy mentally, physically and emotionally. If you want to take your teenage boy, for example, and turn him into a violent, angry machine or a killer, it's actually very easy to do. All you have to do is feed him lots of soft drinks, snack chips, pizza and donuts and give him all these hydrogenated oils, food additives, monosodium glutamate and chemical sweeteners. Make sure he doesn't get any good nutrition, and then have him diagnosed with depression and make sure he gets dosed on antidepressant drugs. You do that, and you have created an angry, violent adolescent killing machine. It's a very easy recipe. The tragedy here is that parents, doctors and our society are all doing this every single day, unknowingly. They are following the recipe for creating a generation of violent youth, but they don't realize they are following a recipe. Ben: No, but most of them are willing to say that it's movies or video games that are influencing this kind of behavior. Mike: Right. Blame Hollywood for the diet these kids have. Look at what school lunches feed children. ThisHonest Food Guide should be a required course in all public schools. The teachers should know this, and the administrators should know this. In fact, doctors should be required to know this. Again, it's a tragedy in this country that physicians can be given licenses to practice medicine, while not having a clue about which foods promote disease and which foods promote health. I can't tell you how many times I've been in discussions with practicing MDs, and they would say something that's so utterly ignorant about nutrition that I was just floored. Of course, I would challenge them on the spot and say, "How can you say this? How can you even think that? How can you give your patients this information?" Ben: Because that's what they learned in medical school. Mike: That's exactly what they learned in medical school. All they learned, really, is how to diagnose diseases and treat them with drugs, surgery and radiation. They did not learn nutrition. Nutrition is not taught in medical schools today. Dr. Andrew Weil will tell you this. He says that doctors are "nutritionally illiterate." This is a direct quote from Andrew Weil. Dr. Weil, of course, is a real pioneer and has done outstanding work from within the system of organized medicine. He is a product of the medical industry, yet he was able to open his eyes and see beyond his training that there's a whole universe of information that people need to know to be healthy, and that includes nutrition. He tells the story that when he was in medical school, which was four years of training, he had, I believe he said, one hour of training on nutrition. Not one credit hour, like it was a semester course, or anything ... Ben: Literally 60 minutes. Mike: Sixty minutes! 60 minutes of training on nutrition. Now, I've spent 5,000 hours studying nutrition, health and the causes of disease. I poured those 5,000 hours into the creation of this Honest Food Guide. That's my background for understanding these cause-and-effect relationships. Your average doctor has spent 60 minutes. That is unbelievable. It shouldn't be allowed in this country. They shouldn't be allowed to practice medicine. Ben: What do you think is the main reason people are more predisposed toward the diseased side of this pyramid, even those who truly know what is more healthy for them and what foods are going to benefit them? Mike: This is the big challenge. That's an excellent question. The big challenge of public health is that, on one hand, you can give people knowledge of what foods they should consume. For example, you can tell people how good these healthy oils are for them, and you can name superfoods, berries, nutritional supplements and nuts and seeds, and people can intellectually understand this information, but when it comes time to decide what to actually do -- when it comes time to translate that model into action -- there's a great disconnect. People tend to go with the action that feels most comfortable to them. In the case of foods and beverages, it comes down to their habitual foods. Let's face it, a sugar donut is pretty tasty to most people. You're making faces -- you don't like donuts. Ben: I don't like donuts, but I realize I'm one of the few. Mike: No, I'm not a big fan of anything that's too sweet either, but I grew up on that. And if you'd asked me 10 years ago, I'd say, "Heck yeah, give me the donuts, the pizza, the soft drinks." I consumed all of that, and I can certainly understand how other people do too. The companies that make these foods know how to "hack" the taste buds of the human body. They know how to excite the tongue. They know how to refine sugars to give them a real kick, so you get not only a taste kick, but you actually get a blood sugar kick and a brain chemical kick from the consumption of these sugars. They know how to manufacture foods to tune into your senses and make them not just tasteful but addictive. Did you know Kraft Foods -- which is owned by Phillip Morris, a cigarette company -- employs, I believe, nearly 10,000 food scientists? That's 10,000 people who are hard at work figuring out how to rearrange the molecules of food to make you, the consumer, want to keep buying it over and over again. There's a lot of brainpower going into this hacking of the human tongue, as I call it. You can't compete with that taste when you're taking something right out of nature that is not hyped up with chemicals and is not exaggerated with extra salt, chemical taste enhancers, refined sugars and so on. You can't compete with it taste-wise. That's why most people are purchasing and consuming all of these processed foods and fast foods -- because the taste feels good to them. Ben: I know a lot of people come up with the excuse that healthier foods and vegetables tend to be more expensive than a lot of snack foods. You can go get a soda for 25 cents in some stores and then turn around and carrots are $1.50 a pound. Why do you think this is? Is it some sort of tax the food industry is trying to levy? Mike: No. First of all, I disagree with that assessment. I understand that people say that, and they say it to me all the time, too. Here's my answer to that. If you think that health foods are more expensive than unhealthy foods, then you need to learn how to shop. Healthy foods are far less expensive. In fact, when I went out and actually bought some brand-name foods just to take some photographs for another project I'm working on, I was amazed at how much it cost me to buy this stuff. I was buying breakfast cereals, dinner mixes, instant foods, soft drinks and all these other things. I had a shopping cart full of these, and it was like $200. I was amazed because I usually spend a lot less than that -- usually $75 or $80 -- on a shopping cart full of food. The difference is, when I go shopping, I'm buying food ingredients, not packaged food, so I'm buying quinoa by the pound. A pound of quinoa is only a couple of bucks, and that's 25 meals of quinoa. You add something else in it that you buy by the pound, like onions or eggs, and that's very inexpensive. That's a meal the Incas have traditionally eaten in the Andes Mountains, by the way: Boiled quinoa with onions and eggs. It's a wonderful meal. It's a delicious dish. Vegetables are not expensive either. Fruits are not that expensive. If you get into organic fruits and vegetables, yes, they can be more expensive. I always tell a person if you are making a choice between some processed food versus fruits and vegetables, and you can't afford the organic, go with the non-organic. You are still better off than buying the processed foods. Ben: Right, so all the health detriments that a traditionally grown vegetable might have, it's still not as bad as red meat. Mike: Absolutely. I'd take non-organic produce over packaged foods any day of the week, if I didn't have the funds or the choice of organic foods. Now, of course, I support organic foods very strongly. That's your best choice. But if you're on a tight budget and you need to make a choice, go with the non-organic fruits and vegetables. Ben: Even if it were true that the healthy foods were more expensive, the amount that you save avoiding the medical bills that come from eating on the diseased side of the pyramid more than makes up for it. Mike: When people consume unhealthy foods, there is a hidden cost. It's doesn't show up on your receipt at the grocery story. It's just like you said, the hidden cost is the long-term health cost associated with the consumption of these foods. If you consume soft drinks, canned soups, sugary breakfast cereals and peanut butter with hydrogenated oils in it, and you consume these for a period of several decades, you will be diseased. That's common sense now. We know this to be true; it's cause-and-effect. There will be a cost associated with that disease, and typically that cost will be in the tens of thousands of dollars, if not much more. I mean, six figures is not at all unusual. Let's say you're diabetic. By the time you add up a couple of decades of insulin and diabetes prescription drugs that people tend to get on, and typically the heart disease associated with diabetes, the loss of quality of life, the loss of work productivity, the loss of brain function, the diagnostic tests that are required, the blood tests and the doctor visits, you're looking at several hundred thousand dollars. Ben: At least. Mike: At least. I say, for a couple of hundred thousand dollars you can buy a lot of fruits and vegetables, you know what I mean? You can load up on all the organic foods in the world with that kind of a bankroll. Then people say, "Well, my insurance is paying for my health care costs." Ben: You're still paying for the insurance. Mike: Exactly. Who's paying for the insurance? I mean, if you're going to make an argument like that, you're a fool. "I'm going to be sick because insurance covers that?" What kind of an idiot thinks that? But it's true; people do. I say that being healthy is very inexpensive. It's an inexpensive way to run your life. Do you know how much money I've spent on health care costs in the last three years? Ben: How much? O.K>>>What do you think?