Shireen Abdullah (0:00)

Podcasting from Dallas, Texas, I am Shireen, and this is the Yumlish Podcast. Yumlish is working to empower you to take charge of your health through diet and exercise and reduce the risk of chronic conditions like type 2 diabetes and heart disease. We hope to share a unique perspective and a culturally relevant approach to managing these chronic conditions with you each week.

Shireen Abdullah (0:30)

Gerald Mand is CEO of Neuroscience, Adjunct Professor of Nutrition at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and a non-resident Senior Fellow at the Tisch College of Civic Life at Tufts University. For most of his career, he has served in senior federal food, nutrition, and health policy positions, including the FDA and USDA.

Shireen Abdullah (0:52)

Welcome, Jerry.

Jerold Mande (0:53)

Thank you, Shireen. Thank you for having me.

Shireen Abdullah (0:55)

Pleasure having you on. So, Jerry, my first question to you. One, where did you start out going into this career? Like, walk us through your journey into nutrition policy and in public health. What led you to it?

Jerold Mande (1:10)

Well, I really should start, you know, with my family. My mom was a great cook, really into food, and so that probably had something to do with it. But I found myself, like many people in college, without sure which direction to go. And then Something curious happened. FDA banned red M&Ms by banning Red Dye No. 2. The reason was that it was worrying that it was causing cancer. And somehow I knew enough then.

Jerold Mande (1:34)

I’m not sure how, but I thought food was important with cancer. But I didn’t think it was really the red diet too. I thought it had to do with other parts of our food system, the macronutrients, the fat, the sugar, the salt. And so I was kind of curious about why they would start of all places with red M&Ms. If you wanted to make Americans healthier. And so I decided to take a class, and that became a major and became a profession.

Shireen Abdullah (1:59)

I love that story, and I love it originated from M&Ms. That’s exciting. What were some of the key moments in your work, whether in government or research, that has really shaped your commitment to improving the food system?

Jerold Mande (2:14)

Well, with that training, as both an undergraduate and graduate training in nutrition, I then went and worked in the Congress on food, nutrition, and health policies. One of the things we worked on is we passed a law to create a more uniform food label.

Jerold Mande (2:31)

And then I went to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and got to work on that label. In fact, I was asked to lead the graphic design of the label. So, the nutrition facts label that you see on virtually all of our food packages today, I led the graphic design of that while I was majoring in nutrition in college, I minored in art and design, and so I put the two together on that project, and we got to do that label.

Jerold Mande (2:55)

And that has to be maybe the coolest thing I got to work on because, you know, even today I have to confess, I’ll go into the grocery store, and I’ll turn around the labels. Even in my own pantry, often I just turn around the packages to see the labels. It’s just, it’s just really something that’s fun to have worked on and it’s cool.

Jerold Mande (3:13)

It’s in so many other areas today when people are looking to provide that kind of information, they put it in a something fax label, like lighting fax, or financial fax, or mom or dad fax. I’ve had, I have sort of a whole collection of those things. So that was a really cool thing. It’s won all sorts of graphic design awards, so that’s cool.

Jerold Mande (3:30)

But you know, my main interest in trading is in public health. And I have to say the label hasn’t accomplished as much as we hoped it would. So I have to turn to something else I did at FDA, which is after we did the label, we began an investigation and regulation of smoking and tobacco, and ended up writing a rule that’s now the law that has FDA regulating tobacco.

Jerold Mande (3:54)

Now, I’ll point out, when we began that investigation in the early 1990s, about a third of young people in America smoked. It was the leading cause of preventable disease. Really, a terrible toll was taking on the nation’s health. Today, less than 2% of young people smoke in America.

Jerold Mande (4:12)

It’s the one area of public health where we lead the world, which is terrific. We often don’t in America. And so that was a pivotal moment as well. Later, when at the USDA, I got to work with Michell Obama on improving a school meals, tackling childhood obesity. And for those listeners who’ve heard of MyPlate, I played a pivotal role in getting rid of the pyramid.

Jerold Mande (4:34)

We’re the ones who actually did. For some who claim now, but we got rid of the pyramid over 15 years ago and replaced it with MyPlate. That was something else that was a great deal of fun to work on. But today we’ve not made the kind of success I mentioned in tobacco. We haven’t had that in food and nutrition yet.

Jerold Mande (4:53)

I’m hoping we will. Today, a third of young people in America have a food-caused chronic disease. And I’m hoping that there’s time in my work and in my career, and after leaving the federal government, started nourish science so that we can ensure every child reaches age 18 at a healthy weight and good metabolic health, which isn’t the case today.

Shireen Abdullah (5:13)

You know, you just mentioned the food causes chronic disease. I do want to double-click into that in the context there. Being at Yumlish today, we often explore how access to healthy foods can really impact long-term health. Now, you’ve played an important role, clearly, in advancing this idea of nutrition security. How does that differ from food security, and why does it matter so much for print, for preventing conditions like diabetes? Because I know that these both of these terms are used interchangeably, and they’re very distinct and different in what they accomplish.

Jerold Mande (5:44)

Well, they’ve turned out to be. At one time, when we all ate food, there was a relationship between having enough food, enough calories, and also food caused chronic disease. But we were all eating food. But that’s changed today. Some of us get to eat real food. Most of us eat man-made foods that are turning out to not be well for us. But to back up a bit and give you some history in respect to your question in terms of that, in the United States, we’ve had different crises around food.

Jerold Mande (6:16)

The first actually is way back in the beginning of the 1900s, where we created the laws that created FDA and USDA. We may touch on that more later. But back then, it was that food was one of the 10 leading causes of death because of a chemical and microbial contamination that made people acutely ill. And so we passed laws to make that illegal to do. And that was the first big shift and really policy in food in the United States.

Jerold Mande (6:42)

But then in the 1960s, we were shocked as a nation to discover that some of our citizens were sick and dying because they didn’t have enough food. There was a hunger epidemic in parts of the country. There was a news program CBS did back when everyone would watch one station, there were just a few, and everyone would watch a show showing that Americans were sick and dying because of not enough food.

Jerold Mande (7:07)

The kind of pictures we thought we’d only see in third-world countries were here in places like West Virginia. It really shocked the nation. Indeed, the president at the time, Richard Nixon, called for a white house conference. There was also a new Senate Select Committee on Food Nutrition created. And what they found out was that yes, this crisis is real, but there’s plenty of food in America.

Jerold Mande (7:30)

There’s just a poverty problem in America, and we should need to solve that so everyone has at least enough food to not get sick. Well, you know, at the time, they realized the problem was poverty. And we needed to solve that. But there was no real political consensus to do that. So we ended up not making progress there.

Jerold Mande (7:51)

In fact, today, poverty continues to be a very, very serious problem in this country. But the problem we did set out to solve was that there was political agreement to one kind of unrest you don’t want in your country is people’s hunger. And so we needed to do something about that. And that’s a great success story that we often don’t hear about, which is again, then, in the 1960s, people were sick and dying because there wasn’t enough food.

Jerold Mande (8:14)

That doesn’t happen in America anymore. And that’s because we have a Department of Agriculture, 80% of its budget, over 100 billion, with a B, a year, is providing food. In fact, one in four Americans each year get food from one of the USDA programs. But USDA then retired the phrase hunger. Lots of people still use it, but they replaced it with something called food security, which is just making sure that people will have a secure source of food, so they don’t have to worry about that.

Jerold Mande (8:43)

And if you are here in America, the programs were limited to people who were citizens. And up until this administration, it worked much smoother than it’s working right now. But you’d find plenty of food in America if you look, not poverty. And so I think, you know, I want to make that point because people often talk about. When they talk about hunger in America and hunger today, I think what they’re really talking about is poverty. The kind of real suffering, the real harms, real health harms that occur when people live in poverty.

Jerold Mande (9:14)

And food is just one of many concerns. And they worry about many things. But actually, the reality is many of the programs do exist to ensure that people can get at least enough calories, protein, vitamins and minerals that they won’t get sick from not having enough food now as we go forward, in fact, Even at that 1960s, 1969 conference, in fact, four years after that, five years after that, 1974, the Senate held a hearing. An expert panel had been put together to look at, well, what progress have we made in the five years? And these are their words.

Jerold Mande (9:44)

I might use slightly different, but I think they captured the right point on the problem of hunger, which was what the country really faced at that point. They said that the problem had been alleviated. The problem that they felt we faced was going forward was that nutrition still wasn’t.

Jerold Mande (10:00)

We hadn’t made any headway at all, they said, and we needed to do something because the warning that ended up coming up was that there was a hunger problem then, and we were going to solve it. But on this, they also saw ahead. They saw that the real threat that our food presented going in the years forward to now was not enough food, but that indeed food caused chronic disease. The heart disease, the cancer, the diabetes, the obesity that food would cause unless we put in place policies.

Jerold Mande (10:28)

And that’s come to me in some circles. Nutrition security versus food security. So food security is making sure that people have the calories, the protein, the micronutrients they need to avoid the sicknesses that come from malnutrition. It’s a Nobel Prize-worthy discovery. With nutrition, we used to think about food. The move to nutrients was that Nobel Prize-worthy discovery.

Jerold Mande (10:52)

But the link between food and chronic disease has been more challenging for us to understand. We really don’t. The nutrients alone really don’t explain the obesity epidemic today. So the concept evolved where we started talking about both food security and nutrition. Food security just means people have access to food, but it doesn’t mean they have access to food that they’ll thrive on that will prevent them from getting these food-caused chronic disease.

Jerold Mande (11:18)

Indeed, most of the food sold in American shopping centers today, if you eat them as the companies intend, will make you sick. And the problem is so bad that Americans have the shortest lifespan, not by just a little.

Jerold Mande (11:31)

When you see the grass, we’re like an order of magnitude below other countries. It’s been a problem that’s evolving for years. It got worse during COVID, but we have the shortest lifespans by several years of any wealthy country. But then, even more alarming is just how sick our children are that a third of children in America have a food-caused chronic disease.

Jerold Mande (11:51)

Indeed, it’s become hard to raise your child. That’s not a food security problem, that’s a nutrition security problem. And that’s the problem the nation faces today.

Shireen Abdullah (12:00)

Where do you see the biggest gaps today in our food system when it comes to supporting better health outcomes?

Jerold Mande (12:09)

Well, one big problem is the majority of food that Americans have access to in their shopping, supermarkets, in many of the restaurants we eat at is food that’s designed to be overeaten. And as a result, it causes diseases. Obesity and diabetes, in particular is result of being overeaten. And so in America, if you’re just trying to lead your life and it’s busy and you’re doing things I mentioned earlier, you know, the original laws back in 1906, they require that the food in our stores needs to be safe, that they wouldn’t make you sick.

Jerold Mande (12:43)

That law is not being enforced. And we can go more into that if you want. But the problem is that for so many Americans, they go into the store, they pick food off the shelf, assuming that, you know, they need to pick food that tastes great to them, that’s convenient, that they can afford, but they don’t have to worry about health, right?

Jerold Mande (12:59)

The foods, they certainly are going to thrive on the food they eat. And that’s just not the case. I think that that is the number one problem is that the food that our companies, that the food industry, is producing, the food industry is not assuring that they will, people will thrive when they do. In fact, they’re not even ensuring it won’t make you sick. The law says they should do that. They’re just not following it. They’re substituting their profits for our health. That’s the number one problem.

Jerold Mande (13:23)

Number two is we just don’t invest in the science to help the companies or ourselves to really know what would be, you know, if you’re, it’s, it’s one thing when we’re growing food and we, you know, because you know, there are millions of years really of nature to sort of sort out what’s what we need to, you know, in those foods.

Jerold Mande (13:39)

But when we switch to sort of man-made foods, which is what the ultra-processed foods are that are sold today, we need to know with, you know, what, what is it that needs to be in them so that we will thrive and what needs to not be in them, them so we’ll thrive. And we haven’t done that science. And so as a result, neither the government or the companies have done that science. And so many of the foods, the man-made foods, the ultra-processed foods being produced today will make you sick if you eat them as the manufacturer intends.

Shireen Abdullah (14:05)

That’s interesting because I think part of that is, and I think you hit it right on, which is like not enough work is being done about what should be included. And I would almost argue is that the latter part of it is what should not be included. I feel we just, we just don’t know or we just don’t have enough evidence on quite yet. It’s not being studied intentionally in that way. How do government policies and programs really shape the foods people are then able to access and consume on a daily basis?

Jerold Mande (14:33)

So in a number of ways, as I mentioned, back in 1906, there were two laws passed, the Pure Food Act, the Meat Act, that together ensured that all the food in our stores met certain safety standards.

Jerold Mande (14:46)

Back then, food caused illnesses, usually acute illnesses, either by chemicals or microbes, were one of the 10 leading causes of death. Today, it’s number one. So things have only gotten worse. But back then, it was one of the ten. It’s because there was no regulation at all. And this scientist at the USDA, Harvey Wiley, had this hypothesis that it was because there was a new industry America hadn’t seen before. For a processed food industry up to that point, people got their food from the farms and their families.

Jerold Mande (15:16)

But now there was processed food, and it had sort of merged with another new industry or got the help of another industry, a chemical industry. Well, chemicals that existed a long time, but they weren’t being used in commerce till then. Again, this is back around 1906. And so the chemical industry and the food processing industry got together to make their products.

Jerold Mande (15:34)

And to give you an example, green beans, you got them off the farm. They were delicious. They’re green, bright, nice color. But when the processed food company started putting them in a packaging that allowed you to be shelf-stable, they were in a can. And when you open them up, they weren’t that appealing anymore. The color was off.

Jerold Mande (15:52)

Well, they were looking for a solution. The chemical said, well, you know, we can put copper sulfate in there, and it’ll stay bright green and crunchy and say, “Oh, good, well let’s do it.” And they did. Well, it turns out, yeah, it does do that. And it’ll make you sick. It might kill you, too, putting copper sulfate in our food. So they passed a law to make sure these chemicals don’t do that.

Jerold Mande (16:08)

So that’s one way the government is supposed to regulate to make sure the food is safe. Unfortunately, Big Food, the food companies, use their political power to keep the agencies from enforcing the law. The other big way is through USDA and the programs it has. It helps feed, in fact, touches the lives of one in four Americans each year eat food from a USDA program.

Jerold Mande (16:29)

The biggest by far is the SNAP, or what was once the food stamp program. Today close to $100 billion program that feeds 40 million Americans. That’s by far the greatest reach, largest program. But then also you think about it, in fact, the chain of USDA, I’ll start on the other end. Over half of infants in America are fed through the WIC, the Women Infant Children program. Over half that means they’re born close to poverty, below the 200% of the poverty line. And that’s where how most American children are, unfortunately.

 

 

Jerold Mande (17:04)

And so that’s half are on the WIC program, then a third are on USDA’s Child Care Feeding program. And then virtually all are in the school meals program. And then after that, there’s SNAP. So USDA has an extraordinary reach on what people eat as well. But for most people, it’s in the grocery stores. And the biggest effect the government has is its role in making sure the foods they buy are safe.

Jerold Mande (17:25)

And it really shouldn’t be that they’re safe ones out there or they’re healthy ones out there. You need to find them, and you need it should be that when you pick something off the shelf, and you eat it as intended, and I use as intended because. Yeah, no, if you decide you’re going to go on the ice cream diet and that’s all you’re eating, or you’re on the cookie diet.

Jerold Mande (17:43)

Yeah. No one intends you to eat it that way. And sure, that could make you ill. But if you’re going to eat the foods, if you buy a ready-to-eat neat meal, you should be able to eat those every day and not get sick. That’s not the case today in our food system, if you eat many of the ready-to-eat meals, you will get diabetes, you’ll probably become obese, and you will have these chronic food-caused diseases.

Shireen Abdullah (18:06)

You know, which, this takes me to my next question. If we were to look at a perfect world scenario, in this case, Jerry, what food policy changes do you think could have the greatest impact on improving diet quality and reducing significantly chronic disease risk?

Jerold Mande (18:21)

Yeah, it’s hard. You know, first we do need to invest in the science because we really don’t, you know, we spend less than 4% of our NIH budget. You know, it’s, I mean, think about this. We have the National Institutes of Health. It’s really a extraordinary world-leading program, sort of the crown jewel of American biological sciences at 50 billion with a B budget. But we have institutes of cancer, heart disease, diabetes, and they’re working hard to come up with treatments which we need to do.

Jerold Mande (18:52)

We need treatments for these diseases because they’ve become so common. But what’s missing, there isn’t a National Institute of Nutrition. And so, of that 50 billion, we’re spending only 2 billion trying to understand what’s causing all these diseases and all the rest trying to treat them.

Jerold Mande (19:07)

We need a better balance of that. We need to understand the science of food, nutrition, and health so that we can, you know, as we’re designing more foods ourselves, we can make sure that they’re safe. So that’s number one. Then we need to regulate this class of foods called ultra-processed foods, which have now dominated our shelves.

Jerold Mande (19:25)

You know, companies develop this. If I could, I’ll back up just a bit. You know, each of us, when we shop, I feel like there’s a North Star around the design of food, and it has four points on the star: taste, cost, convenience, and health.

Jerold Mande (19:37)

That’s what we expect from our food. Now, the taste, cost, and convenience, you can figure that out an hour after you get home. If that met your expectations on those, it’s not hard to do. But health, you know, is this food causing diabetes, heart disease? Is it going to make me obese? You won’t know that for years. You may not know that for five or 10 years. The companies are taking advantage of that. There’s no margin on taste, cost, and convenience. They have to invest all the money they need to make sure it meets that.

Jerold Mande (20:03)

But here’s a trick they’re playing on us. Rather than invest and make sure that the foods that they’re making also promote health, which is the law can’t make you sick. It’s the law. They know that we can’t tell. With yes, on the acute illnesses, they make sure that doesn’t happen. But on these chronic diseases, they know we can’t tell. So they’re not going to.

Jerold Mande (20:23)

They’re actually going to provide food because, in order to meet our standards for taste, cost, and convenience, they’re going to trade off by making design changes that are actually going to make us sick. But we won’t know for five or 10 years. And so they do that because that’s how they’re going to make their profits.

Jerold Mande (20:36)

They’re going to swap our health for their profit. And they’re doing that, and the government needs to regulate that. And so we need to make sure that the FDA and USDA have the resources to properly regulate ultra-processed food. And they need to start by enforcing a really key law, the one I mentioned at the beginning that resulted in the FDA Banning red dye, too, is a 1958 law, a food additives law that required that. You know, it turned out that back when they passed the 1903, USDA was given pre-market authority.

Jerold Mande (21:06)

Any meat product that came to product-to-sale, you had to get permission from the USDA. It’s sort of assumption it wasn’t safe. It had to do. can read The Jungle by Upton Sinclair. But there was just a lot of concern that about meat. And so the government and the companies agreed that they’d get pre-market approval. They didn’t do that for the rest of the food supply at that time; that was a mistake. They fixed it. In 1958, they passed the Food Additive Amendments. And that required that any new chemical additive you want to put in food, you need to present the evidence that it’s safe and get FDA approval.

Jerold Mande (21:39)

Well, the companies didn’t follow that law. They, in fact, used their resources to hire lawyers to figure out a way around it. And they took. There’s a provisional law called Generally Recognized as Safe, or GRAS. It was meant that things that have a long historical use, back when they passed the law in 58 or the laws have been in place for 50 years, they felt some things, you know, the table sugar we use, for example, or the oil, the cooking oils we use, those things have a long history of safe use.

Jerold Mande (22:07)

You don’t have to present new evidence on it. But the companies have twisted that. So every new chemical to this day, while we’re speaking, that they think of to put in food, they can just say, “We think it’s GRAS.” It’s generally recognized as safe. And they don’t have to do any testing, actually. And they don’t even have to let the government know they’re putting it in our food. And as a result, there are thousands of chemicals in American food that you won’t find in food in other countries, particularly Europe.

Jerold Mande (22:32)

And that needs to change. We need to enforce the law. We need to get rid of this grass exemption altogether, in my view. And we need to make sure that the companies prove that the food and the ingredients are safe. That’s two.

Jerold Mande (22:44)

And then third, we’ve touched on, but you know, USDA, we need to use all of their programs, particularly SNAP. SNAP is just such leverage. You know, food companies will do whatever SNAP tells them to do to continue to be able to buy it with SNAP dollars. So if we use SNAP as more of a lever to force, to encourage, to incentivize food companies to produce healthier food, they’ll do it.

Jerold Mande (23:02)

People worry that it might affect some of the recipients in the SNAP program. I don’t think, you know, we do need to pay attention to that. We need to play that. But, but here’s a quick anecdote. Walmart, not a small store, in the 1980s, they realized their customers were walking in and out with billions of dollars. Billions of food stamps couldn’t spend it in their store because they didn’t sell food. And so Walmart literally changed its business model to start selling food because of SNAP.

Jerold Mande (23:28)

Back then, that was SNAP was one-tenth the size it is today. So the leverage that SNAP would have and why we need to use it, that leverage, because retailers, food manufacturers will follow whatever rules for SNAP, you know, they’re not required, but if you want to participate in the program, they’re required, and that we need to use that lever. So invest in the science. Regulate ultra-processed food and its design. Use the levers that USDA has, particularly with SNAP, and together use them to ensure every child reaches age 18 at a healthy weight and good metabolic health.

Shireen Abdullah (24:01)

Man that is powerful in many communities today still face significant barriers to accessing nutritious foods. How can these policies be designed to be better, address these disparities in nutrition and health outcomes? And then what approaches have you seen that effectively reach and support underserved populations?

Jerold Mande (24:24)

Well, if we enforce the law, you know, pretty much most food in grocery stores would be if you ate them as intended, would be, you know, healthy, and you would be healthy. So you don’t have to worry, you know, you’d go in the store, you just buy things. And again, the person who, if you’re going to buy just cookies or ice cream, we can’t protect against that. But if you buy the food that’s meant for meals, for sandwiches, even if they’re prepackaged meals ready to go, you should be able to eat those and not have to worry that they’re going to promote your health.

 

 

Jerold Mande (24:54)

And so we just need to have laws. We have the laws; we need to enforce the laws to make sure that the food companies are selling that meet that standard. So that would help a lot. Because then the food, because today what happens is the foods that are cheapest and most convenient are often the ones most likely to make us sick. That’s because they’ve been designed.

Jerold Mande (25:16)

Again, the companies, when they’re designing, I mean, think about this, right? They’re trying to make a profit. So that’s a big thing for them, but not for us. So they, you know, they know that, but then they’re saying, okay, well, our customers really care a lot about taste. We need to make sure it’s delicious. And I absolutely agree that’s true.

Jerold Mande (25:30)

Job one of food, it has to be delicious. Okay. Second, they have to, you know, be affordable. And a big part of affordable is convenient indeed, a lot of times, especially for people who have less money to spend, the affordability is tightly connected to convenience, because the way it’s not affordable is they just don’t have the time to prepare it from scratch. And for the skills or the resources in terms of facilities to prepare it from us scratch.

Jerold Mande (25:56)

So convenient becomes, really, an important part of affordability. And so the companies are focused on those three: taste, cost, and convenience, and are investing in the research and stuff to make those foods. But they’re just trading off. Then they have to still make a profit. So how can we do all those things and still make a profit? Well, we’ll use cheaper ingredients, we’ll use chemicals instead of food to do all these other things. And you know, the fact that it makes people chronically ill, well, you know, they won’t know for five or ten years, and then it’ll be hard to prove it was us.

 

Jerold Mande (26:25)

It could have been something else they did. And so that’s the system we have. We need to change that. And if we do, you know, we do need ultra-processed foods that are designed for us to thrive. And I know our companies can do it. We just need to enforce the law to make them do it.

Shireen Abdullah (26:40)

And some of the levers you talked about earlier are clearly a step in that direction as well. I know we’re at time, Jerry, so I’m going to run through these questions real quickly with you. You know, today there’s this growing momentum around food as medicine. We hear it a lot; there are conferences around it. How can healthcare systems and public programs better incorporate nutrition into both prevention and treatment of chronic diseases?

Jerold Mande (27:05)

Yeah, I love that phrase, food is medicine. I mean, I think it relates to a lot of people. Yeah, I prefer a little bit food is health. But food superpower is preventing disease, and it can treat disease. That’s something we should know but that’s, that requires a lot of work. But we do need to make sure that the food we have will prevent disease, that the foods that are most available that are bad, and the things we’ve talked about all the way are ways that the government could incentivize and sort of sticks and carrots to get food companies to produce food that way.

Jerold Mande (27:35)

Some good news is just a couple weeks ago, the head of the Centers for Medicare Medicaid, Dr. Oz, a cardiologist, put out his sort of his take on the new dietary guidelines that have come out. He listed eight elements that all hospitals need to start following. They’re outstanding.

 

 

Jerold Mande (27:51)

I hope our Department of Agriculture uses similar ones for school meals in their interpretation. So I think that’s a big thing as well, is making sure that we follow the basic elements of food, that real food when we can. But the processed foods that we use are, are designed to make sure we would thrive on them and certainly not make us sick.

Shireen Abdullah (28:13)

Thank you for that perspective. And now, Jerry, I’m going to give you a crystal ball. Looking ahead, where do you see the greatest opportunities for progress in nutrition policy and public health?

Jerold Mande (28:25)

Well, you know, it’s been a head-spinning last year because of the ” Make America Healthy Again” and RFK Jr.’s role in that. You know, they deserve an enormous credit for making it a political priority where it really just hasn’t been in the past. I mean, it’s just shocking that we’re last in life expectancies. You can’t raise a child to 18 without a large chance of getting a chronic disease, and yet we’re not doing much about it. And he’s right to be critical that we’ve been ignoring it and letting it go because of the political power largely of big food companies.

Jerold Mande (28:58)

And so we have this moment, and they’ve demonstrated the first so-called MAHA report, really just historic, not only identified that food causes chronic disease in our kids is the number one problem, and the same one that my organization is trying to address. But they called out that the root cause of the problem is our food companies, that can’t be taken back. You now have the White House on record saying that. And that’s going to play out in court, so law and lawsuits with food companies going forward.

 

 

Jerold Mande (29:28)

And then they pointed out, particularly in fact, 40 times in the report, they mention ultra-processed food and how it’s making us sick. So they’ve identified the right problem. They recently put out dietary guidelines that have many of the, I think, right elements in it, especially limiting the highly processed, ultra-processed foods. And now it’s a matter of implementing it.

Jerold Mande (29:49)

What are they going to do? You know, they’ve identified the problem correctly. They’ve identified some of the things we need to do. Are they going to invest in the resources, putting in the funding, the rules, the regulation to get there? And that’s the big question, that’s what we’re going to have to see and hopefully get an answer this year before the election so people have a chance to vote on what they’re doing. 

Shireen Abdullah (30:10)

Lots to look forward too indeed. With that Jerry, we are towards the end of the episode. How can our listeners connect with you and learn more about your work?

Jerold Mande (30:17)

Yea so, it’s Nourish Science, two words. We have a website, nourishscience.org. Go to that. It has my email, my phone number if you want to get in touch with me. You can see on there our priorities, things that we’re working on, and many of them I talked about today, and very much all of them. And so, if those sounded interesting to you, please join us! It’s a pivotal moment; I think we’re different than a lot of the groups in this space. Particularly in this moment, a lot of people, are rightly so, concerned about other things: RFK’s suggestion around vaccines, other policies that they just can’t work with them. We are working with this administration. We feel like we have to take every opportunity, and particularly where one is saying the right things about the problem and need to do something about it, we need to work with them, and we’re trying to do that.

Shireen Abdullah (31:10)

Love it. Thank you so much Jerry for your time here today. It has been such a pleasure talking to you about some of these things. You know, it’s both eye opening and, at the same time, just the work ahead, and giving us a scope of the work ahead its self is also so important. So, thank you for that perspective and joining us this episode.

Shireen Abdullah (31:29)

To our listeners of the episode, thank you so much for joining another episode of the Yumlish Podcast. Head over to our social media and answer this quick question, which is “What changes, wether in policy or in your local community, would make it easier for people to access nutritious food where you live?” Again, head over to @Yumlish on Facebook or on Instagram, find this podcast post and comment below to tell us what changes, wether in food policy or local community, would make it easier for people to access nutritious food where you live? We’ll continue the conversation over there!

 

Shireen Abdullah (32:02)

With that, Jerry, thank you so much again.

Jerold Mande (32:04)

Well thank you Shireen, thank you for doing an outstanding job. Great question! I look forward to the answers as well

Shireen Abdullah: (32:10)

Thank you for listening to the Yumlish podcast. Make sure to follow us on social media @Yumlish_ on Instagram and Twitter and @Yumlish on Facebook and LinkedIn for tips about managing your diabetes and other chronic conditions and to chat and connect with us about your journey and perspective. 

Shireen Abdullah: (32:32)

You can also visit our website, yumlish.com, for more recipes, advice, and to get involved with all of the exciting opportunities Yumlish has to offer. If you like this week’s show, make sure to subscribe so you can hear more from us every time we post. Thank you again, and we’ll see you next time. Remember, your health always comes first. Stay well.

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Connect with Jerold Mande!
Website URL: https://nourishscience.org/ https://hsph.harvard.edu/profile/jerold-r-mande/

Twitter(X) URL: @JerryMande

LinkedIn URL: www.linkedin.com/in/jerold-mande