‘Big Food’ Poisoned America — Here’s How We’re Taking It Back | Patrick & Ashely Sullivan | Ep 1369

Did you know that big tobacco owns big food? And that is one of the big reasons why our food market is filled with these ultra-processed foods that are poisoning us. Today, we have Patrick and Ashley Sullivan. They created the documentary Breaking Big Food, talking about the corruption within the food industry, also within the federal government, but also how we are breaking it apart with our choices and by lobbying the government to make the right choices. This is a fascinating, super educational conversation about health and all of the systems that are working against us. You're going to love this episode. Today's episode of Relatable is brought to you by our friends at Olive. See what is really in your food. Before you buy it at the grocery store, just download the Olive app today. That's the Olive app at the App Store. Patrick and Ashley, thank you so much for taking the time to join me. Can you all just tell me who you are and what you do? Ashley? I am Ashley LaRue Sullivan. I'm married to Patrick, and we are a husband and wife team. We are super passionate about health. We recently created a documentary called Breaking Big Food, how the American food system went rotten and how it's being revived. And we also own a coffee shop called Firefly Organic Coffee and Market and Jigsaw Health, a nutritional supplement company that we've been running for essentially 20 years. Okay. What is Breaking Big Food? Well, Breaking Big Food, the full title is how the American food system went rotten and how it's being revived. It loosely follows the creation of our coffee shop, Firefly, but also really looks at, through the lens of Cali Means, how the food system went rotten over the past 40 years. Okay. And tell us more about that. How did it go rotten? What is the culprit? Well, in 1985, R.J. Reynolds, the maker of camel cigarettes, purchased Nabisco for about $5 billion. In 1988, Philip Morris, the maker of Marlboro cigarettes, they purchased Kraft Foods for about $13 billion. And these are just two of the examples of big tobacco buying up the food companies that you know the names of. By the 1990s, big tobacco actually controlled about 40% of the food supply in America. What could go wrong, right? Yeah. Well, I was going to say, why? Why did these tobacco companies buy the food companies? Well, it was about that time that cigarettes were getting a bad rap, and there was literally campaign after campaign telling people, cigarettes are going to kill you. So they saw, number one, the industry that they were in was going down in flames, and maybe saw an opportunity in the food industry to go in and say, well, maybe we are the addiction people. Let's figure out how to apply what we know to process foods. Going down in flames. Was that a pun intended, or? It was. Okay. That's what I thought. Okay. So basically, it was just, they looked at the market and they said, look, it's going to get harder and harder to make money off of this. We've got the governments breathing down our necks, putting these warning labels on the cigarettes. How are we going to continue to make money? And so they went into these food companies and they said, let's apply, as you said, what we know about addiction and consumerism to food. How did that actually affect the ingredients in the products at these companies? Well, the first thing that they started to look at, like any business does, is how do we get our customers to buy more of our products? Oh, we make it taste better. We make it, you know, everyone remembers the Lays ad, no one can eat just one. That wasn't a marketing campaign. That was like a promise. They basically worked with the tobacco scientists, became food scientists, and they began studying how do we tickle the pleasure centers of the brain with potato chips and candy and sodas? And they found this sort of perfect mixture of fat, salt, and sweet that makes it so no one can eat just one. Right. And did they sweeten what was already sweet and they made saltier what was already salty, right? Yes and no. I think they did a little bit of that, but more so it was like ingredients that were used as preservatives and looking at like, you know, switching from cane sugar to high fructose corn syrup, which gives you the sweet, but for a lot less cost. So like any business, you know, the food companies were looking at how do we make our products last longer? How do we make them less expensive and still deliver the consumer promise that people expect when they open a bag of chips or pop open a soda? Yeah. And the general public didn't really know that this was something that was happening. Maybe they noticed there's more options on their grocery shelves. I don't know if y'all have insight into how marketing and PR advertising was used to get people basically not to notice or not to care about the changing ingredients on the back of the food that they were eating. I think that, you know, they used other marketing tactics like let's color this with red dye 40 and make it look really pretty. Let's talk about, you know, let's do these fun ads. Let's target children, make it fun for them to want to purchase these foods. Let's put a toy inside of the cereal. Let's give a free gift with a happy meal. I mean, they pulled out all the stops. And I also think about just like the health movements of the 1980s that weren't really about ingredients, but just about like, you know, no trans fat or low carb or things like that. And so something that was essentially really unhealthy was marketed as healthier, just, you know, based on arbitrary diet standards. Yes. And speaking of diet standards, Patrick, do you want to talk a little bit about the food pyramid and how different it was and has been until RFK Jr. has flipped it on its head? Yeah. Tell me about that. Well, I think it's one of the best visual tactics that HHS has employed recently, this campaign to eat real food by flipping the food pyramid that came about in the 80s, 90s, which had at the very top of it, animal protein and saturated fat and olive oil and butter and dairy and at the bottom, grains and rice and pastas and was built, we now know, thanks to lobbying efforts on the behalf of grain producers and not really based on full scientific basis of what we as humans have been eating for centuries. Yeah. So, flipping the food pyramid upside down, putting the emphasis on animal fats, on dairy, on vegetables and really de-emphasizing grains in particular, I think, seems to make a lot of sense given what we know about metabolic health. It's actually insane to think about how that, you know, no pun intended, is ingrained in our minds that you should have the most amount of carbs that you can have and like a little bit of meat. Like, I'll be honest, even as someone who knows the importance of protein, that I can just feel that underlying assumption in my mind that you should, you know, fill your plate with rice or potatoes and like small vegetables, small piece of chicken when the opposite is true. It just goes to show that what is taught in schools, marketing, advertising by lobbyist groups has a really big effect on your thoughts and how you lead your life. And it all for big food started with people who just wanted to make more money and didn't actually care about our health. Are there any other examples that you found in the making of this documentary where Americans were convinced that something is healthy and good and it had nothing to do with health? Well, one of the most eye-opening things for me was essentially realizing that there are seed oils in almost everything. Even things that are marketed to be healthy. And to be clear, seed oils are, you know, sunflower oil, canola oil. These are highly processed oils that become inflammatory during that process. Basically, they become oxidized and they're cheap to use. So if you're listening and you're like not quite sure what to stay away from in terms of seed oils, coconut oil, avocado oil, olive oil, those are very good oils. Those are kind of the ones I stick to. Those are not seed oils. Yes. But the safflower, sunflower, canola, all of those oils that have been very heavily processed, those are the oxidized… They're like made rancid, right? Yes. And then they deodorize them. It's a very industrial process to create seed oil. It was originally machine lubricant. It was oil that went into machines in the World War II, during World War II, because it was a cheap way to produce a lubricant. Yeah. It is crazy the health foods that, like Annie's mac and cheese, Annie's bunnies, they're better than Cheez-Its for some reasons. But, you know, there's seed oil in those baby formula. I know. A lot of times has sunflower oil or canola oil. And so people can really feel like they don't have any true options without seed oils. I mean, even like hummus and what you think of as maybe a more healthy salad dressing, Italian salad dressing, or anything that's like pre-prepared, start looking at the labels because they sneak that in everything. All right, quick pause to tell you about our first sponsor for the day. And that is Fellowship Home Loans. Home improvement season is here. 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I mean, it's hard to guess what the motives necessarily are. Profit motive, the phrase follow the money, is pretty good at predicting what you will see happen. For them to say, we could use extra virgin olive oil, but we can get this stuff from Canada called canola oil that's made from rapeseed, terrible branding name, but canola comes from Canada, oil, and it's made from rapeseed, and it's one-tenth of the price. Is it safe? Everyone else is using it, and that's really, I think, the main issue is, then with the consumers not being educated and not even understanding that the seed oils are harming their health, they're looking at price tags. So they're going to go down that grocery aisle, they're seeing all these different salad dressings, and they're looking at the prices, and if there's one Italian salad dressing that is using extra virgin olive oil, and it's $2 more than the one next to it that isn't, and they don't know to look or know the difference, I mean, as a business owner, they're going, we're not going to be able to keep up. Unless more companies start doing this too, I don't think we can make it. There's not enough demand for what we're doing, and that's why we're so passionate about let's help educate people on what they need to be looking for so that they can be educated to vote with their wallet to demand better. And protect their own health. Yeah. What is, when you say big food, because we say that about a lot of things, big tobacco, big everything, what is big food? I think it's loosely defined as the large health company, I'm sorry, health companies, what a funny kind of thing to say there, the large food companies that are making highly processed foods. And allegedly, Robert F. Kennedy has stated that we will be getting a definition of what highly processed foods actually stands for, or ultra processed foods. So it'll be very interesting if by defining what an ultra processed food is, that creates the impetus to create essentially the same kind of black box warnings that ended up on cigarettes. That seems like the direction that HHS is headed. And obviously that worked when it came to decreasing the demand of tobacco. And so it's a possibility that that could decrease the demand of highly processed foods, or at least warn people what they're doing with their bodies when they're consuming them. Y'all released kind of like a cheat sheet to help people understand what they're eating, what ingredients to look for, right? Can you talk more about that? Yes. We started getting so many questions from people like, okay, this just feels totally overwhelming. I don't know how to read a label. I don't even know what these words mean. So we created the Dirty Dozen Ingredients to Avoid. And it's just a PDF you can download on breakingbigfood.com. You don't have to register for anything. You literally just click it, and it's made for you to keep on your fridge or save it on your phone so that as you are starting to shop down the grocery aisles, you at least have something to reference. And they're kind of the most common offenders on there, like the seed oils, the artificial flavors, MSG, like the gums and the emulsifiers that are just in so many things that can be really disruptive to the gut and the microbiome. What would you say is maybe one ingredient that people don't know to look for? I've heard a lot of people talk about seed oils and different things, but what would you say is maybe one that doesn't get enough attention that people need to look out for? I think natural flavors can be tricky. Sometimes they can be from naturally derived sources, but specifically if they are used in savory foods, a lot of times it can be code for MSG. And what is MSG? How do you say it? Monosodium glutamate. The concern is that it's an excitotoxin, a neurotoxin to the brain at specific dosages, and it does have a natural sort of savory flavor to it. So think of like your stovetop stuffing kind of thing that has natural flavors, that natural flavors is likely a monosodium glutamate. I had no idea that natural flavors could be a code word for MSG. When I think MSG, I think Chinese food. I don't know why. I just always associate it with orange chicken. And that's it. But you're saying it could be in something that's marketed as healthy, that doesn't have any other bad ingredients, but it does have natural flavors, which honestly, a lot of times I've kind of just resigned myself to being like, well, that's the only thing in it, then whatever. But you're saying it could be MSG. It could be. Yeah. And that would be something that you kind of look at the FDA and say, I think they're asleep at the wheel here on yet another issue regarding food labeling. I think most Americans want to know, they want to educate themselves. They want to feed their families healthy food, and they're sort of expecting FDA, whoever is in charge of what is on the grocery store shelves, they kind of expect that the FDA has kind of done their homework. They're sadly mistaken that there are loopholes like natural flavors. There's also the loopholes of grass generally recognized as safe, where in America, you have to prove harm rather than proving safety. So, for the past 30 years, the FDA was overwhelmed and they allowed Big Food to begin introducing new chemicals into the food supply that they allow the food companies to self-regulate as well. We think that's generally recognized as safe. And as a result, you hear claims, I'm not sure if the number is correct, but there's about 10,000 chemicals in the United States that are allowed to be used under generally recognized as safe principles. And those same chemicals are not allowed to be used in Europe. So, you end up with the example of people, I went to Italy and ate pizza for two weeks, and I came back, and I felt fine while I was there, but my doctor told me I was celiac and I can't eat pizza and gluten here, but I ate it while I was over there and I felt fine. Maybe it's not the gluten. It might be all the other junk that is generally recognized as safe and might not actually be. I think all of us want to be able to trust the FDA or just trust the experts in general in anything. I think COVID taught us that we can't necessarily do that, that we do have to take charge of our own health, but not everyone feels like they have the capacity or the knowledge to do that. It's so overwhelming. Yeah. And they just want to be able to trust the FDA. And a lot of people just assume that the FDA is doing their job and rigorously testing every single ingredient, but you're saying that that kind of testing isn't really happening. Do you have any insight into what is the process of actually testing ingredients that are on the market? Well, first of all, the FDA does not actually do any testing themselves. They read the reports that are done by other third-party laboratories. And so, some of the most common testing done on food would be heavy metals like lead and mercury and arsenic. That they know are poisonous. Yeah, that we know clearly are poisonous at a certain threshold. Now, the irony is that the threshold is somewhat debated sometimes where they're like, well, a little pinch of lead might be okay, but a whole spoonful is probably bad for you. And there probably, I believe, is truth to that. The dose makes the poison. But then the other things that they will commonly test for would be things like microbiology and bacteria. E. coli would be a specific one. We've probably all heard of when spinach gets recalled because E. coli was spotted. But it's not the FDA that does that testing. And it really is batch-specific. It's not every piece of food that gets tested before you eat it. So, testing can miss some stuff. And there isn't like one machine that just tests everything. When you go to test, and this is something that we did with our Firefly Coffee, we were specifically looking for very clean coffee. So, we sent it to labs that tested like four different pages worth of stuff. Heavy metals, microbiology that we talked about. But we were also looking for glyphosate and other pesticides and microplastics and mycotoxins and mold. And those kinds of tests are not at all regularly done on most food. Yeah. So, who is testing the ingredients and considering them generally, what does grass Well, that process involves sort of a lot of science and sort of a lot of guesswork of, okay, well, this derivative of this chemical, we're not aware of any danger that has happened. So, we're probably okay to use it. So, really what the American scientists and the American food system and really FDA relies on is like warnings and, okay, it seems like there's been an outbreak of something. But then you're literally having to try and prove harm, and it often turns into court cases and trial lawyers. And I would guess I would call it innovator-friendly, where here in America, I think that we have a very entrepreneurial spirit, and we are entrepreneurs. I'm very much in favor of that. But also, sometimes you can get a little out over your skis, and if there's not enough regulatory sort of holdback of like, wait, are we sure that that's safe? You end up with basically too much leeway. I mean, I think that the tension between innovation and regulation should be there. It should exist for the safety of all Americans and people. Next sponsor is We Heart Nutrition. I use We Heart Nutrition, their products every single night, their iron and their prenatals especially, those are non-negotiables. Also take their probiotics, which really helps the gut. And the gut is the source for all different kinds of ailments and can also be a source of health and healing for you. So, you want to make sure that's strong, that's what I do by taking their probiotics, magnesium, their omega-3s, their wholesome balance, their immunity blend. They have so many great new products, and they all are so good. Every ingredient comes in the most bioavailable form. 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It uses this specific pathway that is, quote-unquote, safe for humans, so it's not dangerous for humans. Well, what they didn't kind of take into account is that our microbiome, those bugs have, I believe it's called the Shimake pathway. We would have to fact-check me on that, but it's like the Shimake pathway that our gut bacteria does have. So, humans don't have it, but our gut bacteria does. So, glyphosate can wreak havoc on the gut microbiome, and once you wreak havoc on that, well, that's your ability for your immune system, your digestion, and really you are what you eat, so food as fuel. We need that to function, and if we're not breaking down the fuel properly, we're in trouble. How many people do you know with gut issues? I feel like everyone I know, almost. I do. I didn't used to, but for some reason over the past couple of years, I've just become totally intolerant to gluten, and it was really just making me sick and making me feel bad. I was down for the count. I never thought I could give up bread, but it made me feel so bad that I stopped, and I'm very aware that, like you said earlier, it could be that I would go to Europe and I would be totally fine, but you know, it's tough in America to be able to navigate all of that, so it's just kind of easier to restrict. But for people who really have gut issues with everything, it's like you can only restrict so much. So, yeah, so many people in our lives struggle with that. Yeah, it's sad. The real problem with glyphosate, as it's gotten even worse, particularly with bread, is that it's used as a desiccant. Essentially, it dries out wheat right before they're about to plow the field to harvest wheat. And the reason they use glyphosate is it just works really well at drying out the wheat, so you can schedule the plow within a couple of days. Makes it predictable. So, it makes it predictable, which means it makes it scalable and more efficient, and therefore obviously more profitable. But yeah, I think glyphosate being in the news recently has been an important addition to the conversation, and I think Americans are waking up to the challenges that they may be having with relation to glyphosate. And it's also the kind of thing that because we've been using this way of farming for so long and using glyphosate on the crops, it's not something you just outlaw it, stop using it completely, and we'll have enough food for everybody. It definitely takes a transition to figure out a way to grow enough crops without using the glyphosate, right? Yeah, the biggest part, how this kind of came up in the news is that President Trump signed an executive order that basically shielded Bayer, the owner, the maker of glyphosate Roundup, from liability because there have been, I believe, hundreds, possibly thousands of cases working their way through the court system in America of harm caused by glyphosate. Interestingly enough, about 10 years ago or so, RFK Jr. was a part of the legal council that helped a man in California, I believe it was, get $200-ish million in damages from Monsanto at the time for developing non-Hodgkin's lymphoma because of- Chronic Roundup. Chronic Roundup exposure in his job. So, there is precedent, and there are many cases coming through, I believe, so RFK was on Joe Rogan a few weeks ago talking about how he really, I mean, he kind of threaded the needle in terms of saying, well, I don't agree with the President's executive order because I think we need to transition out glyphosate from the use on American crops, but that's a decades-long transition, and in the meantime, if we stopped, we probably would have problems in the food supply overnight. So, I think he understands that the world is not always black and white, and there are sometimes transitionary periods that have to happen. So, do we know the reasoning behind why President Trump, though, would shield them from liability? Maybe it's one thing to say, we're not going to ban it, but if it's causing cancer, then yeah, you have to be liable for it, and maybe we don't know. I'm just kind of speculating and wondering. I'm sure there are just, as in all politics, there are interests, there is money, there is lobbying. There are a lot of farmers that are pro-glyphosate because, as you said, it's more predictable, which is more profitable. They might not be thinking nefariously. They may be thinking, I've got to keep my company alive and feed my family, and right now, there's not another alternative. It's just unfortunate that Maha put Trump in office, and this is not part of their agenda that's being pushed forward. No, it feels kind of like a slap in the face. It does, and at the same time, it's really impossible to know what happens really behind the closed doors and what they're truly dealing with. You made such a great point. A lot of different money, a lot of different motives, who knows what President Trump has been up against as he was maybe strong-armed into doing it. It's really impossible to know, but I know that so many people are super frustrated with this and they want answers to it, and I wish we had more information to share. That's why a big part of our film is trying to help educate Americans so that they can vote differently with their wallet. We definitely need changes to happen from the top down. We need regulatory changes, and some of those are happening. But we have a responsibility for our own health, and as Maya Angelou said, when you know better, do better. And the fact is, every American votes with their wallet every single day based on what they're purchasing. You might be able to eat bread if you bought it from a local baker that was using organic flour making sourdough the way that it's been made for millennia. You might find that you're able to eat eggs if you're buying eggs from a chicken farmer that's local that doesn't feed soy and corn to their chickens. So, there are really ways to not only improve your own health, to improve the local food system around you in your own community, and that's a big part of, you know, the second half of the title is how the American food system is being revived. Maya Angelou So, it's possible to avoid glyphosate, because obviously it's not an ingredient on the back of something. Do people just, should they just assume that almost everything that they buy in the grocery store does have a form of Roundup on it, and do they only go to, you know, local bakeries? How do you navigate that as a regular consumer? Dr. Maya Angelou Well, that's what I do. I basically just assume that if it's not organic, it was likely sprayed with glyphosate at some point. Maya Angelou So, organic, the organic label means that there is no glyphosate, because I know that sometimes organic is misleading. Dr. Maya Angelou Organic is supposed to mean not treated with glyphosate. Yeah, and the problem is you end up with like, well, we tested this California organic wine, and it has glyphosate in it. The challenge with that, of course, is not that they're spraying with, they're probably not spraying glyphosate on their winery, it's just it's cross-pollinating from the winery next door. Glyphosate being used so heavily over the last three, four decades means that it's like everywhere. So, even if it's not being sprayed, and that's why when we got our coffee beans, that they said, oh, this is from a registered organic farm. We said, okay, we'll see. Dr. Maya Angelou Yeah. Yeah, but I would say, and that feels daunting too, because then you're like, but okay, so then how do I protect myself and my family, right? I think if you're not buying organic, the grains are one of the worst offenders. So, maybe just do your best to just steer clear of the grains. And when you're buying produce, look for things that have a peel, like a banana or avocado that has a skin on it, or a potato that you're going to peel. And you can wash your berries and your fruit really well to get it clean, get the glyphosate. There's a baking soda water combination that you can do. There's lots of videos online about it, but there are ways you can work around it, especially if you're on a budget and you're like, oh my gosh, all this organic stuff is killing me. I can't afford to shop this way. So yeah, just do the best you can. It's about direction, not perfection. Let me tell you about Christian Women for America. 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I've noticed there are so many options now, more than there were five years ago, certainly more than there were 10 years ago before I even knew what a seed oil was. There are whole brands now dedicated to no seed oils and hopefully no preservatives or no bad ingredients. Do you see that as a part of breaking up big food? I mean, I think that the demand is growing because the awareness is growing. And these big companies, I mean, they're in business too. They're seeing where the trend is heading. They're smart. So they're saying, okay, I guess people are caring now. It's time to start making these shifts, which I think is amazing. I'm super grateful as a consumer. But like we say in breaking big food, it's like the best way to break big food is to start taking ownership of our own health and start making better choices every day. And if you've ever had French fries fried in tallow, it's so much better than French fries fried in canola. And how else is big food being broken up? Well, from the top down, early on, one of the first things that RFK Jr. started to focus on was petroleum-based food dyes. I give credit to The Food Babe for doing a lot of posting on social media showing like, here's what Froot Loops in America look like, and here's what Froot Loops in Canada and the rest of the world look like. And they're way brighter in America and way duller in the rest of the world. Why is that? Well, it's because in the rest of the world, they're not allowed to use these petroleum-based food dyes. So they use beet juice and other basically food-based colors to color the food. And the reports that we heard is RFK brought all the big food companies together for a big meeting and said, okay, we're going to first tackle food dyes because there's absolutely no reason for them. And what you kind of heard was the food companies were like, thank you. Because they were in this kind of position where, well, if Kellogg's can keep using Red 40, Nabisco doesn't really have an incentive to remove Red 40 because it means their food would not only be duller in color, but it would cost more. So they were like, look, if you regulate the entire industry and remove petroleum-based food dyes, we're fine with that. That, to me, sounds like hallelujah kind of moment. Just change the playing field. The FDA has been sitting on Red Dye 3 or 40, I can't remember. They've been sitting on that for a long time. It has been outlawed in cosmetics for over 20 years. Maika Leibbrandt Because it causes cancer, but go ahead and put it in the kid's cereal, no problem. Pete Taylor Because it causes cancer when you put it on your lips, but once you put it behind your lips, down into your belly, oh, don't worry about it. No big deal. Another shout out would go to a wonderful documentary called To Die For, D-Y-E, To Die For. Maika Leibbrandt Yeah, I've seen that. Pete Taylor Oh, it came out about a year ago. Pete Taylor Talks about how they took their son off of all food dyes. And wouldn't you know it, the hyperactivity, the ADHD- Maika Leibbrandt It changed his whole life. Pete Taylor Disappeared. Maika Leibbrandt Yeah. And it's crazy how that kind of thing is seen as some kind of kooky conspiracy theory that there couldn't possibly be anything to the idea that what you put in your body has an effect on your brain or has an effect on how you live your life at all, when it really is just like the most common sense thing. And it shouldn't be political either. Pete Taylor Right. Maika Leibbrandt Right. Maika Leibbrandt It shouldn't be partisan. Pete Taylor Amen to that. Pete Taylor I said to Callie in the film, I'm glad that the documentarian captured it, kind of popped out of my mouth and said, we've been divided in this country for so long politically, maybe food is the thing that begins to unite us. I said that almost about a year and a half ago. Unfortunately, what we've seen is food has become even more political now with RFK, a former Democrat, being someone that now all Democrats are angry at because he's trying to take away the Froot Loops from the children or something like that, or they're taking Coca-Cola away from SNAP. Maika Leibbrandt Yeah. Pete Taylor No, they're basically just saying that food stamps, you can't use for sugary soda. That's not what it was intended for. Maika Leibbrandt Yeah. Pete Taylor Meanwhile, SNAP has been responsible, like 10% or more, I believe, of SNAP dollars have gone to Coca-Cola and Pepsi. Maika Leibbrandt Yeah. Pete Taylor That doesn't seem like what we want to do. That doesn't make sense. Maika Leibbrandt And you shouldn't force me to cover the cost of poisoning poor people. I'm sorry. That's evil. That's wrong. Why should I be forced to give over my hard-earned dollars to make a poor person more likely to get cancer? That's not compassionate. That's really cruel. But they frame it in such a way where you're literally taking candy from a baby. And that is why it's really hard also to get policy changed and to get regulations changed because of the propaganda, the marketing, and PR surrounding it. It sounds like y'all are saying, obviously, a lot of the responsibility is up to the individual because we can't just wait for Big Food and for the government to do their jobs, but also that there is responsibility when it comes to the federal government to change regulations to make it easier for Americans to have more choices, right? Pete Taylor Absolutely. I think it's estimated that at least half of Americans' daily calories come from ultra-processed foods, whether it's fast food or packaged food, lunchables, those kinds of things, convenience foods. Half of our calories are coming from ultra-processed foods. And I'm putting food in air quotes here. Just because it's marketed as a food does not mean it's real food. And that's the big push from HHS right now. There's just recently announced Dr. Oz talking about hospitals. He wants to see hospitals take away sodas and the ultra-processed foods that are being served in hospitals. Exactly. Beth Dombkowski I mean, I've given birth three times, and thankfully that's the only time I've had to stay in the hospital. But anyone who has stayed in a hospital know that they give you the Kool-Aid, gross stuff, it doesn't taste good, and it's horrible for you. No vegetables, no real protein, just slop, like cafeteria slop. And a lot of times these are people who are dying, recovering from surgery. They need their immune systems to be strong. Like, let me just pump you with a bunch of dyes and seed oils to make you inflamed. It doesn't make any sense. And you're right, there's no reason for it. Just no reason for it. Pete Taylor Yeah, Dr. Oz told a story about when he was first starting at, I think it was Columbia University, as a new doctor. The chief residents would say, well, they were the doctors, they would bring him food. It was from the hospital. And the chief residents would say, don't eat the food. The food will make you sick. But that's the food they were feeding to all the patients in ICU. It doesn't make any sense. Beth Dombkowski It's the upside down world. Yeah, totally. That's one of the things that we were inspired by when we created Firefly Coffee and Market. We source local grass fed meat, raw milk, farm fresh eggs, things that you can't get in your normal grocery store. And I would love to see more communities doing something like this, these little micro markets. Yeah, it's in Scottsdale. And we were amazing couple in Fountain Hills, Arizona. They started to have their own issues with some health challenges. And so they cleaned up their food. They were going to one farm to get their produce, another to get their eggs and their milk. And they would do their weekly trips. And then they started to have friends say, hey, can you grab me some while you're there? Because I don't have time to hit the farmer's market this week. And then they decided, you know what? What if we were to create a little market where we have the local farmers bring us deliveries of what they're harvesting? And we source all these things in one place for our community to just come and shop here. And it's so brilliant. And so I think if more communities had a little setup like that, where there are more micro markets to help bring the local farmers to the people as a resource, it would be an amazing step in the right direction. where we as the aggregators can get a weekly milk delivery and a weekly honey delivery, a weekly organic sourdough bread delivery, all these things coming to one place. It helps the producers and it helps the people that are within five, 10 minutes of Firefly to stop in, do almost 90% of their grocery shopping for the week and pick up a delicious organic latte with collagen boost while they're there. So it's this sort of beautiful vision of make food local again. Next sponsor is Good Ranchers. Good Ranchers has a great deal going on right now. You can get $50 off any box. They're celebrating all 50 states in this 250th birthday month for the United States of America. And when you use my code alley, good ranchers.com code out, you get that $50 off. If you just want to celebrate America, if you want to make sure that you are supporting American farmers and ranchers who have fed our beautiful nation for generations. Now, if you want to support a family owned Christian America loving company, then you need to buy all of your meat, your chicken, your beef, your seafood from good ranchers. Go to good ranchers.com, use code Allie, check out that's good ranchers.com code Allie. I want to talk about childhood obesity for a little bit. Most people in this audience have kids and it's a struggle for a lot of parents to feed their kids the right things. Or maybe they just feel like, I don't know, their kid is addicted to the screen, which is a whole other conversation. But the fact is in America that 17%, or no, in the last 17 years, obesity has increased to 21%. Chronic conditions because of that obesity have been rising sharply. And I'm just curious if y'all think childhood obesity is because of these ingredients that we're talking about? Are there other factors? What do you think is going on here? Well, if I'm not mistaken, 62% of calories that kids age one through 18 consume, 62% of those calories are ultra processed foods. Do you think that that's having an impact on the weight of children? Right. Yep. Absolutely. And that's what they're getting in cafeterias too. Right. And these companies are directly marketing to children. I mean, they're playing the commercials on the whatever shows these kids are watching, and then they beg their parents for it. Or the kid next to them at the lunch table has all these fun fruit snacks and whatever else in their lunch, and that's what they want. And they don't want to be the weird kid with the healthy things in their lunch box. I mean, there's just so many things. But sadly, kids are the target, right, for this food. Yeah. It is really such a blessing when you have moms in your kids' class who are on the same page as you. And I love the text like, yeah, we're bringing a diet-free snack today. And it can be really hard to navigate because it's hard to be that one parent that's like, actually, we don't want those cupcakes because we don't do diets. And I'm sure there's a balance there. But this is another one of those things where it just takes some deliberate discipline on the part of parents to make that one replacement. And it really is like it's an investment in your child's future, even if it's a hard thing in the moment. A huge investment. And we're hoping our film Breaking Big Food will be an inspirational thing that families can watch together to get a sense for where food comes from, why most of the ultra-processed packaged foods is not going to be healthy for your family, and to get a sense of like, you know, cooking together as a family is an important, if not sacred ritual that has been done for millennia and it actually leads to healthier outcomes for families anyways. So, you know, movies like ours, documentaries like To Die For, which we talked about, DYE, and even a great film, The Biggest Little Farm, that shows a couple transitioning a monocropped field into a organic regenerative farm over the course of seven years, that was a big inspiration for us. And I think it is the answer for how to make food small and local again. Yeah, my oldest daughter and I were reading The Little House on the Prairie series, which of course is set in the late 1800s, and it's very descriptive about how the moms and the kids are making the food, even the dad's contributions to that process, usually hunting, and then how the kids spend their days. And it's just, I mean, it really harkens you back to a time that you really want to go back to, but everything, the pace was slow and deliberate and the preparations and the thought for the next season were just so intentional. And the kids spent their days working, playing, a mixture of both, but it was never, ever, except for Sunday afternoons, just sitting down and doing nothing. So it's such a combination, I think, of all of these things of idleness. I don't think that we are productive enough as people. We don't make our kids be productive enough. And then also, yeah, like where we're getting our food and the detachment that we have from our food that contributes to this whole vicious cycle. Yeah. I think helping the kids fall in love with food, real food, and the process of making it, like Patrick said, like do a family day to the farmer's market once a week so that the kids can meet the farmers and see all the, what does produce look like when it's just straight from the dirt? It's just, I think, getting back to that. Buy a planter and plant some tomatoes or some strawberries. I feel like I saw a clip online of like a kid like picking a strawberry and was like, wait, so we can just actually eat it? Yeah. Like we don't have to go to the grocery store to get it? Like we have become so detached from where food comes from and that's such a beautiful description, the little house on the prairie, sort of like, I mean, food, shelter, water, that's kind of the things that we actually need. We don't need internet. We don't need Facebook. We don't need Instagram. Like we enjoy them, sort of, but we don't need them. Yeah. They actually make you feel bad after you use them. Unlike when you make something really good that sustains your family, it makes you feel good. So we should be doing more of the things that make us feel actually good in a lasting way with our families. I think that could, it could change a lot. Yeah. Tomato book. Yeah, it didn't land. Sorry. I was thinking that could be the new social media. Tomato book. Oh, okay. Instead of Facebook? Strawberry gram. Okay. You know what? We got it. But the only reason we're going to cut it out, we don't want anyone to steal your business, I guess. That's right. I'm pretty sure the crew is laughing at me, not with me. They laugh at me every single day. Okay. Y'all used to be in a band. So you haven't always been in the health space. What inspired y'all to go this direction? Well, in 2014, Patrick was diagnosed with thyroid cancer. And that was, I mean, we were pretty in the middle of, you know, in being, you know, rock stars, right? We would just, we would play weddings and corporate events and it was a very fun time, but we were living on a lot of instant noodles food, I would say, doing our best to be healthy, make good choices. But again, I didn't know there were seed oils in the hummus. You know, I wasn't really educated on how to read a nutrition label at that time. And I'm not blaming all of it on that. But all I know is the doctors couldn't tell us how he got the cancer or how maybe he can avoid getting in the future. They were like, we can cut it out and you're going to be fine. You'll take a pill the rest of your life. It was very traumatic, but it was very frustrating at the same time to just not have any answers. And so it was always just kind of sitting in the back of our minds. And as owners of a nutritional supplement company also, it's like, okay, well, we know how important it is to supplement ourselves with basic things, you know, vitamin C, magnesium, things like that. But they're just, that's what it is. It's a supplement. It's meant to replace your food. So then we started to dig even further. And the more we learned about the food supply and just how broken and upside down everything is, the more passionate we got. Can you talk a little bit more about that, just from your perspective, being diagnosed with cancer and realizing there's something that's got to change? Yeah, it was weird. It was just one day driving home from work, kind of felt a lump on my throat and I was like, hmm, that seems a little weird. About three weeks later, first heard those three little words, not the I love you that I love it when you say, but the three words, you have cancer. And it was the scariest words I've ever heard. Anybody that has ever heard that knows that sinking feeling that you have and you have it together, right? And it was almost like three months of almost throwing up every morning, not because I felt any different, like I didn't feel like I had cancer, but it was the stress of this, you have cancer playing on a loop. And we went and got three, maybe four second opinions. But yeah, like Ashley said, there was nobody that could explain, well, here's how it got there. And here's, yeah, and because thyroid cancer is a slow-growing cancer, it's also very slow to die with sort of the natural path, the natural treatments that may work. I would say we kind of started to go down that path, but because of the stress of this loop playing in the back of my head, we decided to get a surgical removal. Thankfully, knock on wood, I was able to dial in my thyroid medication just fine, been well-supported and quite frankly for, I don't know, seven, eight years after that, we kind of just closed the chapter on that stressful year, 2014. Hearing Callie Means speak in the summer of 2024 was the thing that I felt like had a spark for both of us to hear how the American food system went rotten and to feel like, could that be a part of what contributed? Yeah, it was like this light bulb going on in our minds going, oh my gosh, it's the food. And it made so much sense. And so, yeah, that just sent us down the rabbit hole and we're like, we have to figure out how to help amplify this message. This is what Americans need to hear. Do you think there is a risk with Maha that people get too overwhelmed with all of the information that they hear? And some people feel like, I can't, I can't keep up. One day I hear this is bad. The next day I hear from someone else that it might be okay. I don't know who to listen to. I don't know what to do. And some people might just go the other direction and say, you know what? It doesn't matter. Something's always going to give me cancer. Whatever. Obviously that's not the mentality we want. So how do we help someone like that who is feeling really overwhelmed take a systematic and balanced methodological approach to getting her family healthier one step at a time? I think the one step at a time is crucial because I think you're describing the majority of people, especially busy moms who are maybe all working and raising a family and trying to do it all. But I always encourage people like just start with seed oils. That's just the one thing that you can start with. It's not overwhelming. Start to look at the labels and just slowly get those out of there. You don't have to do like a one day purge the entire house. But once you start, I love Patrick has this great analogy of like, it's almost like playing a video game. You're on like the first level. And as you conquer each level, you gain a new superpower, but you don't get to go fight the dragon the first day. You know what I mean? You take it one level at a time. And if you do that, it really helps. Yeah. Yeah. Doing it all at once. That's when you really start to get overwhelmed. And like, I'm just throwing my hands up and I'm going to go have a cheeseburger because like, screw it, you know? Yeah. Or it's like trying to run a marathon in one day. You just won't do it because you'll give up and be like, well, I'm just not a runner. I can't do it. Well, you might be a runner, but maybe right now you can only run half a mile. But then after you run half a mile, for the first time, you feel really accomplished. And I know for me, when it comes to this, you cut out that one thing or you replace that one thing that you thought, I could never replace that. I could never replace Cheez-Its or whatever it is in my family. And then you do. And you're like, oh, that was a little hard, but I did it. And then you just kind of continue to add on to that. You're capable of a lot more than you think you are. You just have to pace yourself a little bit. That's my opinion anyway. And as you start to make these changes, you will notice that your body doesn't crave the same things that it used to. It changes a lot. And it's awesome because then all of a sudden you're not tempted for it. You're like, I really would never buy a Cheez-Its ever again. And I used to seriously love them. It was like a guilty pleasure. But my body just has zero desire for it. It's not worth it. No. Yeah. The late, great podcaster, Dilbert creator, Scott Adams. Yeah. He had this thing about when you decide something, like when you really decide something, that's when the change occurs. So building on the idea of levels and starting somewhere, make it seed oil, be the first place you start. That's something you can tackle. But when you really decide, and I think the best part about deciding is you're deciding to no longer just be a victim of the system. You're deciding to change it for you and your family starting now, and you will get effects. Yeah. Okay. Where can people watch your documentary, support you guys, find more information, all that good stuff? Well, Breaking Big Food is available right now on Apple TV and Amazon Prime Video. And there's some other resources on BreakingBigFood.com, such as the Dirty Dozen Ingredients to Avoid, as well as links to all of our social media sites. Okay. Awesome. And if people are in the Scottsdale area, they can come visit you, right? Yes. Visit us at Firefly Organic Coffee and Market. We promise to make it a fun time, and the coffee is delicious. And we're usually there every day about 2 p.m. for our own afternoon latte. Okay. Next time I'm in the area, I really am going to stop by. Thank you all so much. Thank you all for just what you do, for the time and dedication you've put into helping people get healthier and make their families healthier, and for being here today. I just really appreciate it. Thank you so much for having us. It's been a pleasure. Thank you, Allie. It's been great.