Kevin Hall

This goes back to Thomas Malthus's thesis many, many decades and centuries ago now.

We actually have, for the first time in human history, kind of a mark on what is the plateau of the human population, somewhere around 10 billion people within the next 100 years.

And therefore, we have a target of what our agricultural system has to actually produce.

and produce in a sustainable way for the planet and produce in an equitable way for people to actually have healthy diets.

And we believe ultra-processed foods are gonna be a part of that.

And we need to start thinking about that long-term transition now

and how we're going to coordinate that does that happen from the top down not likely but what sorts of policies can we put in place with the idea of diet related chronic disease which is in some sense it's merely an epiphenomenon of the fact that we front-loaded all of the tech to agricultural tech and food technology to produce and get rid of this calorie glut as we talk about in in our book

And so we have to start thinking past the diet-related chronic diseases as much as we now have wonderful therapies for those who are most susceptible to the changes in our food environment, the GLP-1 drugs and many, many others coming down the pipeline, and think about what is it that we have to do to our food system and what kinds of policies do we need to put in place

in order to feed the planet healthy diets in the future.

That's gonna be partly ultra-processed foods, it's gonna be partly the kinds of technologies that we talk about in the book called Food 2.0.

I think we need to start seriously thinking about that while we're also thinking about the diet-related chronic diseases we're currently experiencing.

No, I mean, I think it's a wonderful thing to be able to have not just this

category of drugs that are now currently on the market and are going to get cheaper and cheaper and more generic and pills that will allow people to kind of have access that currently don't have access and the pipeline of new drugs that are coming down the market.

I think that what we may be underestimating, although the food industry is starting to look at this,

is that there are upstream consequences on the foods that these folks want to eat.

It's not just that they're eating less, you know, Twinkies and Doritos, right?

They're actually changing their fundamental food preferences in ways that are more aligned to healthy diets.

Maybe it's because these drugs finally allow people to kind of make those changes.

Maybe there's some more fundamental biology going on that we still don't understand.

But I don't want to underestimate the fact that that is also having upstream consequences or has the potential to have upstream consequences on the foods that we all have access to, which ironically might allow us to get through this transition of diet-related chronic diseases in ways that allow us to look at that population of 10 billion people in the future that we have to feed healthy diets that are sustainable for the planet.