Poetry from M.I.T.; Robert Penn Warren

Welcome to innovation hub I'm Carol Miller. Well today we've got a show for you about. 1968 musical Oliver fetishized food. But even Greuel is probably better than the kind of food that celebrated journalist Michael Pollan worries about industrial food he says has been sanitized and stripped of nutrients. And Michael Pollan author of The Omnivore's Dilemma and cooked joins us now along with Moises Velasquez-Manoff author of an epidemic of absence. And Mike I'm going to start by playing you an ad for our Boston Market a chain that many of us know. And this ad essentially makes you a promise we will take care of the cooking for you see the hero this holiday season with my kids. And is going great. The breeders are just 5 9 9 from your holiday season is in the bag. Your table is waiting.

So Michael Pollan you talk about the rise of the food industrial complex the sort of innovation that's come into food recently. Explain you know what that rise has been like and what it's done to food. Well the food industry figured out a long time ago that it was very hard to make money selling raw ingredients. The margins are really low but that the more you processed food which is just what we call cooking when corporations do it the more profitable it was and by adding value you could make more money. So you don't sell chicken you sell rotisserie chicken you don't sell oatmeal you sell Cheerios. And the more layers of processing which usually involve adding convenience or novelty the more money you make. You know cereal has got like two or three cents of grain in it and sells for $5. It's a fantastic business model but it's all predicated on getting us to give up the processing that we traditionally did at home which is to say cooking and you even say you know

Wonder Bread has new versions with whole grains but they also add these things. And you talk about seeing them added like dough conditioner and you're thinking what. You know I mean we know what hair conditioner is but what does dough conditioner and Doxil do assembly. Is it really. Yeah. It's basically designed to keep the dough from sticking and keeping it flowing well lustrous I don't know if that's a you know bread is a very historically is a very simple product it's flour water yeast or sourdough starter and a little salt. And now they've got it up to 30 or 40 ingredients. So you have to wonder what are all those other ingredients. And they tend to be ingredients designed to make bread rise faster. That's a big thing. You know get the amount of time to make it down. And also to make it withstand machine handling. So it doesn't stick to machines and can be done without any human hands touching it. So in general processing food has involved complicating it

in various ways. Because think about it you're taking something that is usually eaten fresh and you're figuring out a way to give it a very long shelf life and make it seem as if it wasn't cooked a year ago far away. And so that takes a lot of technology and it's really impressive technology but a lot of it's designed to keep it looking fresher than it actually is and keeping sauces for example emulsifiers are in. Normally when you have any kind of mixture of water and an oil which is what most sauces are they tend to fall apart and look really nasty. Right. So you need you need a whole class of chemicals called emulsifiers which by the way may have some health implications for us in order to keep that sauce looking you know less vomitus than it might otherwise. And you know you talk about this incredible tradeoff that we've seen in the last 30 40 years as the food industry has gotten really better and perfected all these chemicals that we've added since 1967. A hundred and sixty seven hours of labor a full month of work to our year

and food prep is down 40 percent. Yeah that's how we've been able to do it. I mean basically we've outsourced cooking and we've filled our time with some with entertainment you know more use of television and more use of the Internet. But a lot of it is we work really hard and we work longer hours than people in other industrialized nations where they still cook more. And that's been a a significant tradeoff. A lot of people are happy to make it. But I think everybody has to understand that it has a health cost because one of the things we know is that home cooked food is healthier because humans cook in a very different way than corporations do they don't need all those additives. They tend to use the highest quality wrong gradients they can find and then cook them in a fairly simple minimal way. They're also not trying to trick you into eating as much as possible much processed food is designed to stimulate your cravings. The dopamine network in your brain by using lots of salt fat and sugar layered in very clever ways. So

their goal is different than say your parents goal is in cooking you a nice meal. Your parents are trying to satisfy you. The dopamine network is about craving and cravings are never satisfied. And the reason for that is that the food industry needs us to eat more. They're faced with something that used to be called in the industry the fixed stomach and this was the phenomenon that unlike shoes there's a limited amount of food you can actually ingest. It's about 1500 pounds per person per year. So you want to push that as much as you can because the population is only growing about 1 percent in this country yet Wall Street is asking these companies to grow by about 5 percent. That's a real dilemma. And the way around it is to stimulate us to eat more than we would otherwise. And we've been doing it. Yeah they've been great at it. Turns out the stomach is not a barrier. Not so fast push through. Now we're through and we're on the other side. And they've done it with clever food science but also clever marketing. You know they've convinced us to have a fourth meal. I mean

Taco Bell has successfully sold the idea that you know three meals is not enough. And they've also done it by getting us to eat at here to for an exotic times and places. I mean in the car we're about 20 percent of American food is now eaten watching television at work. You know they didn't used to be food at work and now every workplace has a kitchen you know fully stocked with things to eat. And you can't go to a conference without a break for bagels and cream cheese. After about an hour of work so they're colonizing more and more parts of the day and getting us to eat more. That way it's called secondary eating. And this is a category devised by the Department of Agriculture as opposed to primary eating aka meals. And now we're spending more time in secondary eating which is eating while you're doing other things than we are in meals. We're spending 78 minutes a day in secondary eating and I don't have to tell you that most of that food is not you know carrots and broccoli. It's snack food choices VELASQUEZ-MANOFF author of an epidemic of

absence. I want to ask you about that kind of food science that Michael Pollan was talking about. But first here is a little bit of a conversation I had not that long ago with David Pogue from the New York Times and he's basically talking about his visit to a food design company. Let's listen. We visited a food chemical company basically a food design company in California and they are hired by Mrs. Fields or McDonald's or Stouffer's or whoever to come up with their new recipe so you get some frozen meal in a refrigerator and you think you know budget gourmet came up with that recipe. They didn't. They hired it out to one of these companies that designs foods and the day we were there they were working on several new food products for some of the big companies. And one of them was a it was a Mexican frozen dish and they had a line of small vials of scent chemicals that were supposed to connote Mexican sense.

Moises Velasquez-Manoff what you've looked at the effect of fast food on our body is this sort of fairly new industrial food. What is it what happens when we ingest this stuff. Well one of the things that is coming to light now is that it affects our micro biota which is our community of microbes that live in the gut which in fact in terms of the number of cells outnumber our cells are human cells by 10 to one. So in some respects we're actually 90 percent microbe and only only 10 percent human. So you eat this stuff and your bugs eat what you eat and they shift in response and it looks like at this point that this highly processed food that's rich in certain types of fats and simple sugars that it changes the micro biota in a way that actually inflames you and that that bits and pieces of the microbial organ begin leaking across the gut barrier into circulation where your body basically sees that as an invasion and in response with inflammation you end up slightly

inflamed. And one of the one of my favorite studies on this is a doctor past and Donna and he just fed a number of volunteers. McDonald's breakfast then measured their immune response later or immediately actually. What do you mean exactly. Do you remember what they ate Yeah they ate two hash browns and a sausage mcmuffin and then a ham egg and cheese sandwich and. And what he saw was an immediate spike in markers of inflammation you know within minutes that lasted for a number of hours now. Increasingly metabolic disorders or obesity. There is a new sort of hypothesis that's gaining credence that these disorders are being driven actually by inflammation for a long time. Scientists have noted that there is an inflammatory component when you're overweight often many overweight people have measures of elevated C R P C reactive protein and that sort of thing. But now they're thinking that actually the inflammation drives it so that if you deal with the information or if you prevent

it or if you eat something it doesn't inflame you you're less prone to sort of fat accumulation in particular fat that can weight around your liver and in your abdomen which is this sort of toxic type of fat. So it's really meaningful that the kind of junk food that we eat more and more of these days prompts this information that seems to emanate from our microbial origin. And this is all very very reason I don't think anyone ever really thought about this until the last 10 years or so. Michael Pollan author of Cooked I mean you've looked at this idea that our microbes are incredibly important to us. So does that mean that the microbes the guts really of the people in the guts of overweight people look different. Well they do. They don't know what the significance of it is and what comes first the fact that they're heavy or the fact that they were predisposed to get it because of their community but they do have what appear to be somewhat different communities. And Moises is absolutely right that this fast food

diet is you know we've looked at it and been concerned about. You know the amount of fat in and the amount of sugar in it. But this is a whole new take on why it may make people sick. And that one of the other earmarks of it though is the fact that it has very little fiber in it processed food in general has very little fiber and a lot of reasons for that it doesn't freeze well. And if you want to really maximize the calories in something you tend to eliminate the fiber. And as one doctor said to me he said you know we're only feeding the upper G-I the upper gastrointestinal tract with this food and we're not feeding the large intestine. So in other words most of this really highly refined processed food is absorbed before it gets to the gut and it doesn't leave fiber which is really the favorite food of the microbes. You know much for them to eat with the result that that community is impoverished in some ways and more prone to inflammation. So it's a problem with processed food. We didn't recognize before. And the question is can you

remedy it without processing less. And the industry's take is always sure. Tell us a health problem you're having and we'll tweak the system and we'll add lots of insulin which is a kind of fiber found in chicory roots in other places. And so now you see all sorts of processed food with extra fiber or breads with the stamp of the whole grain Council which allows you to put whole grain on bread that is 50 percent whole grain. So it's actually half whole grain but nevertheless. So you see once again where we're going to just try to tweak the processed food supply rather than rethink it which is really what needs to happen. So they take everything out and then put it back in or they take out all the vitamins and spray on some vitamins. Well that's you know the story of Wonder Bread. Wonder Bread It was a brilliant product builds strong bodies 12 ways. They fortified flour because they had ruined flour when they figured out how to make it really really white. Suddenly we had all these nutritional deficiencies because they had taken out all the vitamins and rather than go back and say you

know maybe we shouldn't be refining flour that much and maybe we should be eating more whole grain flour now. Even better we'll just add back the vitamins that we the ones we recognized we took out thereby selling the problem and the solution in one neat package. We're talking about food today on innovation with Michael Pollan and Moises Velasquez-Manoff. I'm Karen Miller and Moises Vasquez men let me come back to you. You know I'm going come back to the people who are eating the sausage mcmuffin and the ham egg and cheese sandwich and the hash brown for McDonald's and their information goes way up. But it turns out that this guy who did this study that you followed found out a way to reduce the inflammation. What was it. Yeah it's sort of unbelievable. But he brought freshly squeezed orange juice into the picture and had some of his volunteers drink that glass of freshly squeezed oranges which was flown in from Florida on a plane especially just the transport orange juice. And then he had some drink sugar water

and some drink water and sugar water soda stand in for the usual soda. My bio or what have you and the people who drank the orange juice it just prevented the whole inflammatory cascade that he saw. It just sort of dampened it somehow. And he's not really sure how that works but he suspects flavonoids which are molecules that plants make a famous flavonoid as veritable which is found in red wine anti-cancer anti cardiovascular disease or as you say has the stuff unspayed but it could also be vitamin C. It could be the small amount of soluble fiber that's in orange juice. It's not really clear. But in any case that something that basically is one step removed from the actual fruit. It's just an orange oranges they squeezed and put on a plane. I think his argument would be that ideal you'd eat the orange. As Michael was pointing out you need the actual fruit which has far more fiber but it's still meaningful that something REAL actually prevents this whole real Being natural

is related to something that came from the ground recently that it prevents the whole inflammatory cascade. And one thing I should add is that what seemed to be meaningful in that study was that the microbial byproduct a kind of toxin he was observing that leaking through the gut barrier in his just fast food studies where he just fed them the meal so he could see this stuff spike in the blood and that's the stuff that provokes the inflammation. Whether the orange juice that stuff did not leak through somehow it fortified this gut barrier which is turning out to be tremendously important for a number of diseases autoimmune diseases as well. But basically you need to be somewhat permeable so that you can absorb the nutrients but it can be so permeable that microbes start leaking through. Because then it provokes all sorts of sort of chaos. On the other side that leads to inflammatory disease. Can you imagine. All right go ahead. Just it's a really eloquent argument for something we've known for millions of years which is eat real food.

And you know our bodies evolved to deal with oranges and perhaps orange juice and you know with simple foods that have not been overly refined and that many of these problems go away simply by doing that. And one question I have for you Michael is to what degree has the fast food but more broadly the industrial food industry that the industry that you really get a sense of when you go to the frozen food aisle of your supermarket right now you can buy things that are just this close to almost being done. To what extent have they dealt with bacteria. We're talking here about how important bacteria is. Do they take bacteria out of food. What do they do in terms of microbes. Well they are understandably hostile to microbes. They want a few microbes in their food as possible processed food in general has been sanitized to the extent that they can. And there are people who argue that that's a problem too that if you're eating vegetables that have been completely sanitized and processed you're missing out on the bacteria that comes with them when they're

fresh and that there may be some value in exposing yourself having that kind of constant engagement with microbes and that one of the other problems with the processed food diet. Not only does it not feed the microbes it doesn't contain a lot of microbes. Now this is not an argument for you know bad sanitation necessarily. There are there are pathogens that you do want to worry about. But really we eat very little what's called Live culture food. These are foods usually fermented that have lots of beneficial bacteria in them. The only one Americans routinely need is yogurt. And that's you know that's an important food although we tend to trick it up with so many additives and sugar that. I wonder how well the bacteria do in that slurry. But you know we don't eat a lot of fermented vegetable products pickles and sauerkraut and kimchi and things like that. Although you're seeing more and more of it in the market and that's an encouraging thing. I think the story about the value of life culture food which which has probiotic bacteria and also has lots of fiber in it and lots of lactic acid. I think that story is starting to be told and you see a growth in those

markets which is encouraging. Well you've said that we are right sort of on the edge of a paradigm shift in the way that we look at bacteria. When you talk to scientists you get the sense that something exciting is happening. Oh yeah and I'm sure Moyses will agree that it's a very exciting time in microbiology and microbial ecology and that they sense that there is a revolution in medicine coming and that so many conditions that we never associated with the gut microbiomes and mental conditions as well. I mean various neurological issues that so much is mediated by that community and that and that we need to take care of it and that there might be ways to garden it if you will to feed it properly give it what it likes to eat and create an environment where it's you know going to be maximally diverse and also not nuke it with antibiotics at every turn. There are a lot of insults to the micro biome in our lives. Antibiotics being an important one. But some of the scientists that we both interviewed are concerned about antibiotic

residues in industrial meat that survive and may affect the gut. Microbiota antimicrobials in the in the environment in our you know cleaning products and you know we've been at war with bacteria since the time of pastur the whole society has been fighting bacteria because we recognize that many diseases were bacterial but we kind of threw the baby out with the bathwater and we didn't realize that 99 percent of bacteria are actually either harmless or actually beneficial. I'm Miller This is innovation hub on eighty nine point seven WGBH. And today we're talking about food and bacteria. With Michael Pollan the author of Cooked and Moises Velasquez-Manoff author of an epidemic of absence. And Moises Vasquez man of talk about the disorders the illnesses that you see potentially connected to the notion that we just don't have that much bacteria in our lives we spend a lot of time you know with deodorants and pure Al trying to attack that

bacteria. Right. I think it's important to recognize that that you can never be free of bacteria on this planet. So in all our efforts to sort of get rid of them which build on this on this germ theory of disease which is one bacterium causes one disease and we should we would do better just to avoid bacteria generally we've forgotten that you can't create a bacteria free space so it's actually smarter as a strategy to cultivate friendly bacteria and that the spaces around you including the spaces inside of you. So that's a that's a very new idea in medicine and in terms of the observations we're sort of beset by chronic diseases now that are non-communicable diseases. Asthma is the hay fevers for the auto immune inflammatory disorders Crohn's disease ulcerative colitis type 1 diabetes. These are diseases that have no obvious infectious cause even though you always find people who argue that they're caused by infections. But I

don't think that that's Except that what seems to be happening is a dysfunction of the immune system generally. And that seems to be overreacting or even turned upon the self. In the case of multiple sclerosis say it's turned on the violence in your brain your brain sort of you lose your body move because your brain is essentially getting eaten up from the inside. So every autoimmune disease or inflammatory disease or allergic disease or they look at they see a sort of signature in the micro biota whether that causes the disease is up for debate. Very much so but that it's different is probably meaningful. And if you look at the animal studies where essentially they take the microbes from a diseased animal and then put them in a healthy animal that doesn't have any microbes until that moment they can always almost invariably cause the disease that they were looking at and the recipient animal. So that's a strong argument in favor of causality. And you've talked about countries that are right next to each other but let's say one country is a lot cleaner and they suffer from diseases in totally different ways.

So give an example of that. Well I think the best example is Finland and a region of Russia called Karelia. And so they're actually ethnically Finns in the Russian side since World War II. It's been it's a chunk of Finland that ended up on the Soviet side after World War Two. And since they have the same genes they have the same prevalence of gene variants that are associated with autoimmune disease and yet Type 1 diabetes which is basically Finland is the number one country of all for type 1 diabetes which is an autoimmune diabetes that usually hits in childhood. It's like one fifth as common on the Russian side. Celiac disease similarly not as common allergic diseases meanwhile are like one third as prevalent. And generally speaking conditions are more crowded far poorer in that area of Russia than they are in Finland which is one of the richest countries per capita in the world. So there's human crowding. Over and over is associated with a lower prevalence of these immune diseases like asthma

like Type 1 diabetes. And no one's really sure why but it may be that just because there's a bunch of people crowded into a small place they share microbes more readily and they end up with a more diverse robust internal ecosystem. Early on in life what is really important to have that right. Also people who grow up on farms in Moyses book actually talks about these experiments done in Europe and kids who grew up around farm animals. Heavy exposure to maneuvers and other pathogens from animals tend to have lower rates of allergies and asthma. So this idea that microbial pressure when you're very young and possibly in utero that if your mother is exposed to microbial pressure while she's pregnant will will offer some sort of protection against auto immune conditions. Michael Pollan I was shocked to learn that people who have were born by C-section actually are much cleaner in some ways than people who are born with a normal delivery and they because of their

cleanliness they tend to have more allergies. There are repercussions from that throughout their life. Yeah that's right. I mean a C-section birth is a very sanitary birth it's surgery and there is not the exposure as you pass through the birth canal to the mother's microbes. And there's a seeding that apparently goes on during birth that kids with the Syrians miss out on. And one of the things that really struck me when I was writing my my I wrote a piece for The New York Times and the microbiomes was that one of the researchers I was working with was so concerned about this when his wife had to have an emergency C-section that he took matters into his own hands and inoculated the baby with vaginal secretions from from the mother. And in fact now there's a trial going on in Puerto Rico to see where there's a very high rate of Assyrians like 50 percent to see whether deliberately inoculating the babies with the mother's vaginal secretions might improve their microbiota and offer some protection against energy.

All the things that we're saying are maybe especially with diet may be especially important during pregnancy because that's when the fetal immune system is being programmed. So you might get the largest bang for your buck essentially by eating while eating all the things we're talking about real food while you're pregnant because you're cultivating the right microbes at least in theory. And those microbes are sending a signal to the unborn fetus that may produce a child that is not prone to developing these diseases at least less prone. I mean this is a very hot area of science fetal origins of disease generally. And I think that that's where you can do very not invasive stuff and possibly have a very great positive effect. Some of this research is so fascinating about you know breast milk and that there's parts of breast milk that are just feeding the gut bacteria of the child not even really the child and that it's not sterile. I mean everybody assumed breastmilk was sterile but in fact it has a pioneer population

of Byford of bacteria that are very important for the for the baby. And that's something you don't get when you you know when you use formula and that's you know that's really recent findings. But yeah that breast milk is designed to seed a certain bacterial population and then to nourish it with these oligosaccharides a certain kind of sugar that's in breast milk. Michael Pollan author of Cooked and Moises Velasquez-Manoff author of an epidemic of absence. Standby when we come back we're going to talk about how embracing germs is beginning to change our behavior from how we eat to the medications that we take. And later a doctor tells us how you test whether carbs are actually addictive. You can grab this segment or any of our past segments on iTunes or SoundCloud. And this week we've got a Web extra looking at a potential breakthrough in treating kids who just can't handle germs. So-called bubble boys. I'm Kara Miller. This is innovation