Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian
speaker
96 appearances
3 recordings
2 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard 25 May
Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 2.
Appearances
unwelcome playbook of tobacco, where it's about deception, denial, attacking the scientists, hardball lobbying, softball buying of influence, a lot of the same tactics. But I think at the end of the day, you know, the analogy to tobacco only goes so far. And many of those examples are actually around soda and big soda. There are still present for other foods, but it's really about Big Soda.
But I think the analogy with tobacco only goes so far for a few reasons. First, the food company is incredibly diverse and heterogeneous. There's thousands of companies with thousands of products compared to tobacco. Second, I think that with tobacco, it's a fight to the death. Whereas with food, we need the food industry. We need their scale. We need their expertise. We need their technology.
We need their distribution systems. And when I say big food, I mean from agribusiness to large supermarket, international supermarkets, to restaurants, to manufacturers. People think of the manufacturers, but there's four pieces to big food. Mm-hmm.
And I think maybe most importantly, we shouldn't forget is the food industry mostly for the last 50 years did what we as public health experts and scientists told them to do. And now in the last 20 years, it hasn't been that long as we've really gotten to new science. We're saying, wait a minute, while you did what we asked you to do, slow down and change and refresh.
And this is where the problem is that some food companies are slowly trying to do the right thing and trying to pick that up, mostly because they're being pushed by their losses and sales. Yeah. Some because they believe in doing the right thing. Others are fighting and digging in every step of the way. So there's a lot of heterogeneity.
But I think what's interesting is that... It was interesting.
Yeah, yeah. All the people I speak to and I've heard from, they see that the food revolution is coming. There's absolutely, the food in 10 years is not going to look like the food it does now. And so I think what keeps me up at night is not that there's not going to be change, there's going to be change, but that the change isn't going to be informed by evidence.
And so, you know, we need innovation in the food system. We need investment in the food system, but going from Doritos to Cool Ranch Doritos is not innovation. going from gummy bears to non-GMO gummy bears is not innovation, right? We need real innovation.
There's a major food company who wanted to reduce the calories in their ice cream, so they added air, right? So that per cup, there'd be fewer calories, right? But adding air to food is not going to improve its health, right? No. So, so, so I think that, you know, that's the kind of thing that I worry about.
Yeah. So, so we need to, we need to, but, but the, but the public, I think the biggest thing the public is demanding from their food right now is trust and big food is not trusted and that's a wake up call and that's good that that's a wake up call. And so I think that we don't want to demonize the entire food industry. There's a lot of folks trying to do the right thing.
A lot of graduates from our school at Tufts in the industry trying to help them do the right thing. But we also want to work
And this is where, Mark, government has a key role, right? Because if you leave it up to every individual food company to try to fight the system, they're going to go under. If they innovate and the other companies don't, they'll go under. So this is where government has really a role to play to even out the playing field and help these food companies do the right thing.
Well, so you said a lot there. There's a lot of points there. And just what's really interesting, and again, sort of wonderful from a point of view of wanting to study this, is that just like there's no single magic bullet to eating, and nutrition science shows us that you can't just pick one piece of the diet and fix it and everything's fine, the same is true for policy.
There's going to be no magic bullet. There's a range of solutions that are needed. I think that taxes and subsidies are pretty crucial, and I'll talk about that in a minute. But I would go back to your comment about subsidies.
There's been this sort of popular myth that's kind of urban legend that's spread through the media that somehow there's subsidies to commodities that's making the prices cheaper. And I just want to really say clearly that's totally false, that all U.S. policy for commodities keeps the prices high. The reason, you know, what farmer in the US wants their prices low, right?
They all want their prices high. And so sugar is a great example. People say, well, their subsidies, you know, and first, most of the subsidies have turned to crop insurance. Crop insurance gives farmers insurance so that they have a really bad season because of drought or something. They don't go under.
And so most subsidies now are actually crop insurance for those commodities, not direct cash subsidies. That's still a form of a subsidy, but it's not direct. But corn is a great example. We actually keep the price of sugar high in this country because natural Brazilian sugar is much cheaper than corn syrup. Much, much cheaper. Sugar from Brazilian farms than U.S. corn farmers.
Well, they make it cheaper than natural sugar by putting tariffs on the Brazilian cane sugar to protect corn farmers. Right, right. So if we took away all the price supports, which actually keep the price high, corn farmers would go out of business, but the market would be flooded with cheap sugar from other countries. So that's just one example of this kind of conventional notion somehow.
I don't know, Michael Pollan, someone wrote about this and it's just entered the...
The great majority of commodity crops in our country aren't eaten by humans. So the great majority of commodity crops in our country go to livestock. or go to energy.
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