Dr. Anand Parekh
speaker
112 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Jan 2025
Dr. Anand Parekh’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Making an Oreo of 90 calories instead of 100 calories. Exactly. Cut six trillion calories out of the food supply.
These are the same. Sure. Yeah.
with industry and also work against industry when we need to give them carrots give them sticks help them and sell healthier more equitable more sustainable food and i think that's happening i think that's i think i've seen these big companies like nestle and pepsi just struggling to sort of reinvent themselves but it's tough because they've got you know i mean i talked to the head of nestle and he's like yeah we have lean cuisine which is mostly carbs
because it's low fat. And because we call it lean, the FDA says we can't change the composition of it. So we can't make it healthier, even though we want to. And I'm like, it's an $800 million business. I get it. These are like big issues for them.
So let's talk about what those policies are. Cause there, there's a lot of things you've written about and I want to get into some of them.
You talk about your best by policy changes that are going to be not one thing, but a series of things that attack multiple sectors where there's issues, whether it's policy schools, whether it's quality issues, whether it's, you know, labeling, whether it's research, all these things are, are needed in concert to actually shift the whole dynamic from what we have now.
But one of the articles wrote was called the real cost of food. Can taxes and subsidies improve public health in JAMA a few years ago? And one of the challenges that, you know, we sort of don't want a nanny state, but in essence, we are creating a nanny state in reverse because we're being a nanny to the big food companies by subsidizing commodities.
that are wheat, corn, and soy, that are almost 60% of our calories, and the people who consume the most of them are the sickest. And of course, we then fund food stamps, which is predominantly, I think it's 70 plus percent of it goes to junk food, and 7 billion, almost 10% goes just to soda. So we've created this system where we're having price supports for the bad food, but not for the good food.
And you talk about flipping that upside down.
I talked to the vice chair of Pepsi. He's like, Mark, I said, why do you use high fructose corn syrup in your drinks? He says, because the government makes it too cheap for us not to.
But does it allow for the production of more and more of the food? In other words, they pay for them to produce food, even if they, for example, in bad soils or in ditches, and then they fail and they pay for this money. I mean, I've heard all these stories.
I thought that's what Nixon's policies on Earl Butts were designed to do, which is to drive the prices of milk and meat down because they were consuming these commodity crops. And he was worried about the prices going too high and not getting elected. And he got Earl Butts to change the policies. I thought that's what the whole thing was about.
All the externalities. Even how we grow the food, how it affects soils and water and climate.
Soda has gone down 40%, and the price of fruits and vegetables has gone up 40%.
So what are your best buy policies if you were willing to sort of be in charge for a little bit and could just do what you wanted? I think you're in North Korea, just make a decision on whatever you want to do.
In other words, you shouldn't give them a tax break for spending... billions of dollars advertising junk food to kids.
Well, our school lunch policy now doesn't exactly do that, right? Pizzas are vegetable and French fries are vegetable and
Although 50% of schools, you go in and get brand name food on different days. Monday, it's McDonald's. Tuesday, it's Burger King. Wednesday, it's Domino's. That's 50% of schools and 80% have contracts with soda companies.
No, but all the sports drinks, which are extremely high in sugar.
So there's no sugar-sweetened beverages in schools? Yeah, that's pretty much.
Showing 81–100 of 112 · page 5 of 6
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