827: Marion Nestle on Fibermaxxing, RFK Jr, and Collecting Cereal Boxes

0:00Plan B is a backup birth control option that's there for you when things don't go according to plan. It specifically works after unprotected sex and before pregnancy occurs by temporarily delaying ovulation. Plan B is available nationwide at all major retailers and through delivery apps like DoorDash. No ID, prescription or age requirement. It's the number one OBGYN recommended brand of emergency contraception and it won't impact your future fertility. That's freedom to be. Use as directed.

0:37Oh, I think my favorite by far these days is cookies and cream Cheerios protein. I saw protein Doritos in the bodega last week. Right, exactly. Exactly. As if anybody needed more protein, really, and as if Doritos were the best source of protein you could have. This is Taste. I'm your host, Eliza Barbanel. Dr. Marion Nessel is a renowned nutritionist who has been shaping food policy for over half a century. She co-founded NYU's groundbreaking food studies program in the 90s and has published over 16 books, including her newest, Sugar Coated, unboxing the hidden forces shaping America's favorite breakfast food.

1:24Today on the show, she weighs in on the many buzzy topics in the food world today. Think highly processed foods, fiber and protein maxing, dramatic evolution of food culture, and how her cereal box collection inspired this new book. Marian Nestle, this is Tace. Thank you for coming on the podcast. Glad to be here. I'm really happy to get to speak with you. I've been an admirer of your work for a long time. And before we kind of get into your career and your upcoming new book, I'm wondering if you can tell me an early food memory from growing up that you think somehow shaped your point of view.

2:01Well, you know, I did a memoir that came out in 2002, and I tell the story in the memoir because it was really quite formative. When I was a kid, I went to summer camp in Vermont, and the place where I went had a kitchen garden. And if you were a good camper, they did this Tom Sawyer routine and sent the best campers, best behaved campers out to the garden to pick vegetables for dinner. And I was sent out to pick string beans for that night's dinner. And I had never seen a real string bean before. I grew up in New York City. We had canned string beans. and I bit into one and it was this revelatory experience.

2:51It was July, it was warm from the sun, it was crisp and it was sweet and it was just an astonishing experience and I've never looked back. I love that the reward for being a good camper is doing more work but As I said, Tom Sawyer. Yeah, exactly. They have a whitewash fence for you next. But I loved picking vegetables. It was so much fun. And that farm had raspberries. That farm had blueberries. That farm produced maple syrup in the winter. I mean, it was pretty great. It sounds like the ideal Vermont summer camp. And I'm curious, you know, maybe that was a revelatory moment with you with food.

3:39but professionally, when did you develop an interest in working in food and doing research and writing in that space? Well, I tell those stories too, because they were really formative. I've always been interested in food because I like it and I love to eat. And I went to college thinking that I would study about food, but the options were agriculture, which I totally didn't get. I was a city girl. It took me a long time to understand about agriculture. And the other alternative was dietetics. And I went to Berkeley as a dietetics major. I lasted one day. That was the end of that. It was too easy and it was too home economics-y.

4:23I just, it wasn't what I was, I wanted to be challenged. So I ended up as a science major. Believe me, I was challenged. In my first teaching job, I was teaching, I got my doctorate in molecular biology, and my first teaching job was to teach undergraduate molecular biology to undergraduate biology students. And I was teaching cell and molecular biology, and my department had a rule that you could only teach the same class three times, and then you had to change to something else. And you had to change second rule. You had to change to something else that the department needed, whether it was anything you knew anything about or not.

5:11And I was, the students were clamoring for human biology courses, and I was offered human physiology or human nutrition. I picked nutrition, you know, and the reason I picked it was I was kind of intrigued by it. It was, this was the early, it was a really long time ago, it was the early 1970s. And Linus Pauling had just published Vitamin C and the Common Cold. I wondered if there was anything to that. Francis Moore Lappe had just written Diet for a Small Planet. I had the same question about that. And Center for Science and the Public Interest had just started and published a book called Food for People, Not for Profit, which was a collection of short articles about food issues of one kind or another, ranging all the way from agriculture to food consumption and nutrient intake and that kind of thing.

6:14So food politics was in the air, and I was kind of intrigued by it. I thought that the opportunity to read about it and learn it would be interesting. And then, And of course, I had this fabulous class and it was so much fun to teach. And in comparison to teaching cell and molecular biology in which students struggled so hard to understand the abstract concepts, they really related to food and nutrition. And it's just a wonderful way to teach undergraduate biology. Actually, it's a wonderful way to teach anything. food to everything and everybody relates to food so i was hooked and i never looked back well i think we all as a collective are grateful that you went down that path and didn't look back because your contributions in the field have been so incredible you've written over 16 books i'm curious as a writer as an academic how do you find a topic that you think is worthy of a book and are there any specific themes that you kind of see in your career?

7:21Well, the topics find me. You know, they're just, the next topic is so obvious that, you know, that it just finds me. But I guess my first book was, I was teaching nutrition to medical students at UC San Francisco. And I wrote a book about nutrition for medical students in 1985. But then food politics didn't come out until 2002. And the genesis of food politics explains, you know, really addresses your question because I had been writing articles about food politics during the 1990s. And because I come from a molecular biology background, molecular biology departments don't care about books. Books are secondary and tertiary literature.

8:16They're not primary. They really don't count. But I was in a department of nutrition and food studies at NYU. And at NYU, books count a lot. And so in the 1990s, I figured out that it was probably time for me to write a book. And I had all these articles about the politics of food. What if I took those articles and put them together and made them into a book? How would that work? And as it turned out, that turned out to be two books. But that was really how it happened. So that was the genesis of food politics, was to pull together a lot of what I had been working on. And I was pretty aware at the time that very, very few people were talking about the kinds of things that I was talking about.

9:13Center for Science and the Public Interest was, you know, kind of the only other place. And I was going to a lot of meetings about childhood obesity. Everybody was noticing in the 1990s that kids were getting fatter and gaining weight, and childhood obesity was becoming a noticeable problem. And the meetings that I was going to about it, every single speaker talked about the same thing. How are we going to get moms to feed their kids better? Nobody was saying. How are we going to get the food industry to stop marketing junk food to our kids? Nobody was saying that. And so I thought, okay, there's a niche for kinds of things that I'm writing about.

10:03I want people thinking about that question and thinking about that question very seriously. And I wanted everybody to stop blaming moms who it seems to me have enough problems without being yelled at for that. So I put those I took those articles and put them together and wrote a few other chapters. I don't know. And it was my that was my first food politics book. And it was interesting that the first question everybody asked me is what does food have to do with politics? I don't get asked that question anymore since RFK Jr. took over as head of health and human services. Yeah, it's so interesting to think about the different topics that I think have probably collected the or captivated the mainstream consciousness over your career, obesity, obviously, in the 90s.

10:58I think today we see people talking about all kinds of things, highly processed foods, probiotics, gluten, certainly RFK Jr. What do you think about the topics that capture mainstream attention? Do you think people are focused on the right food issues? Well, I wrote a book called Why Calories Count. I don't think anybody should be counting calories, but calories matter a lot and nobody wants to talk about them. You can't see them. You can't feel them. You can't smell them. The only way you know about them is by weighing yourself on a scale. I think, you know, restricted calorie intake would solve a lot of problems.

11:39And I don't mean starving yourself. I mean, just not overeating. The main, you know, 75 % of American adults are overweight or obese. That's calories, you know. Wow, 75 %? That's of adults are overweight or obese, overweight and obese. Yeah. I mean, that's an enormous, enormous change in 20 to 30 % of children. That's just an enormous change. And, you know, now we have GLP-1 drugs and the problem is solved. But this is a calorie issue and nobody wants to talk about it. Do you see GLP-1 drugs as the solution to that? Or maybe do they bring up other problems? Well, of course they bring up other problems.

12:25Of course they do. They have costs and side effects. But for people who have struggled with weight all their lives, they're a miracle. An absolute miracle. I mean, I know a lot of people who are taking them. And for a year, I asked audiences that I was speaking to, you know, if you're taking these drugs and are willing to share your experience with me, come up afterwards privately and tell me about it. Oh, I just can't even count the number of people that came. I was just floored by how many people are taking them. And people have very different experiences. The people who stay on them are having a very positive experience usually, and people go off and didn't or thought they were too expensive or couldn't stand the side effects.

13:14But they're really helpful to a lot of people, and I think denying that is really, you can't deny that. The evidence is too strong. And the evidence is too strong. One of the things that was really interesting to me is that what people were telling me was very, very consistent with the published research. Remarkably consistent. So I was getting from individuals confirmation of what I was seeing in the research literature. Very helpful to lots of people. I imagine GLP-1s are a recent example of a big shift or development in terms of food science and how it impacts people's lives. I'm curious if there are other moments like that that you've seen over your career that you would look back on as significant.

14:03I can't think of anything as dramatic as this one. I mean, this one is really, you know, when you look at one out of every eight Americans is taking these drugs, you know, this is huge. And I can't think of anything in that. I mean, I think the big new concept in nutrition is ultra processed foods. I think it's enormously important.

14:32I'm just so impressed that the idea that you categorize junk foods in a very specific way means that you can do research on them and divide people's food intake into foods that are processed or unprocessed versus ultra-processed and then we'll look at what happens to the health of people who are eating a lot of ultra-processed foods. And the number of studies now is extraordinary. There are more than 100 clinical trials, more than 100 retrospective trials. There are thousands of studies that have been published about ultra-processed foods, but the actual science is overwhelming because the studies all point in the same direction.

15:21People who eat ultra processed foods have poor health outcome. A lot of them, a lot of ultra processed foods. And then there are the controlled clinical trials, short term, but indicate that people who are on diets of mainly ultra processed foods take in more calories than they would if they remember I'm a calorie person. They take in more calories than they would if they were eating less processed foods and don't realize it. They're completely unaware that they're taking in more calories. And it's not a few more calories. It's a lot more calories. And so I think ultra processed foods are a sufficient explanation for why people gain weight.

16:11What's the definition for an ultra processed food as opposed to just a processed food? There's a lot of debate about the definition, but the one that was devised by the people in Brazil who came up with the concept is the food is industrially produced, designed to be irresistibly delicious, if not addictive. It has a design purpose. It has industrially produced ingredients that you can't get in your home kitchen. If you're cooking, you can't get at those ingredients. You don't have the equipment. You can't make them in your home kitchen. So that would distinguish ultra-processed ice cream from homemade ice cream, for example, or ultra-processed fried potatoes from potato chips that you can't do.

17:06And they have ingredients that are industrially produced. So we're not talking about salt, sugar, and fat here. We're talking about the chemical ingredients that food producers use. And they're designed to be profitable. So this is a different way of thinking about food than thinking about its nutritional content. And that's the major argument about ultra-processed foods, is that the definition doesn't include nutritional value. Then the question is, well, are there ultra-processed foods that are nutritionally valuable? Very few, as it turns out. There are some, but very, very few. You know, whole wheat breads and commercially produced yogurts, power bars.

17:59I mean, very, very few. so as a general rule given the amount of data on it the advice to reduce intake of ultra processed food seems like really good advice what I used to say was don't eat too much junk food everything in moderation right if you can do that but the problem is most people can't do that right and what you're saying is that these foods have been designed and formulated so that it's very difficult to have just a small amount of them. Yeah, I mean, there's the famous Frito-Lay ad that Burt Lahr did holding up a Lay's potato chip and say you can't eat just one. That's the whole point.

18:44And it's true, because those are really good potato chips, but they're hard to eat just one of them. Right, yum, let's have another one, yum. Oh, I have a bag. Everybody's had that experience.

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22:36Marion Nestle:Wedding season, bachelorettes, rooftop birthdays, August doesn't slow down and neither do you. Pre-alcohol keeps it that way. Visit zbiotics.com slash taste or use code TASTE for 15 % off. That's zbiotics.com slash taste for 15 % off. This concept that we're talking about of ultra-processed foods is kind of tying in nicely, I think, to your upcoming book that you have coming out, which is called Sugar Coated. Can you maybe speak to the idea behind the book and what drew you to the topic? Yeah, well, I mean, as I said, the books come to me. And I've been collecting cereal boxes for years. I started probably 20, 25 years ago, picking up cereal boxes that had ridiculous health claims on them.

23:26I mean, just ones that I would walk down the cereal aisle, look at it and laugh. I know I better buy that one quickly because they change the cereal companies just change the designs all the time. And so they're they're constantly manufacturing new boxes and it's hard to keep up with them. I mean, I had a very small and specialized collection. And in doing this book, I was just astounded to find out how many people collect cereal boxes and had many, many more than I did. Even our library had a collection of 300 cereal boxes. That was kind of astounding when I found that out. But I had this collection, and I had a period of four months.

24:13My last book, What to Eat Now, came out last year. And the year before, when the editor had the manuscript, it's a very big book. It's 700 pages. It was a very large manuscript, and it took the editor a long time to plot his way through it. So I had a chunk of several months when I didn't have a writing project. I liked to have a writing project. And my literary agent said, why don't you work on your next book? I said, I want to work on the cereal. I want to do something with my cereal collection. And he said, oh, nobody's going to want to read a book about cereals. And I said, let me write a proposal.

24:59So I started working on the proposal for the book. And I remembered that about 15 years earlier, I had gone to Battle Creek to the Kellogg offices, where I knew their head nutritionist at the time, their vice president for nutrition. and I had asked her if she could get me into the Kellogg files because I couldn't remember what the nutrition facts labels looked like before 1990 when that law was passed to start the nutrition facts. What was on boxes before? I couldn't remember. And because it was pre-online, I couldn't find any online. I mean, I could find, I was looking at cereal boxes because they're easy and I could find cereal boxes, but I couldn't find pictures of boxes that also had the side panels or the place where they had the nutrition information.

26:02And I really want, I was writing something where I really needed to see that. And they had said that I could come out and look at the files. When I got there, they said, do you want the good news or the bad news? I said, I'll take the bad news first. And they said, the lawyers aren't going to let you near the files. Oh, great. I had just flown out to Battle Creek. I said, okay, so what's the good news? And they handed me three boxes of color Xeroxes of the three serials I had asked to look at from the year they were produced until 2010, which is when this was. And I thought, this is a treasure, an absolute treasure.

26:47And we sat there in the Kellogg's Library and started leafing through these things. And the nutritionists were saying, oh, this is when the FDA passed this rule. Oh, this is when we got sued by General Mills. Oh, this is when Center for the Science and Public Interest sued us. Oh, this is when this study came out about, you know, about Oatbrand. This is when this study came out about antioxidants and immunity. And we said right there, there's a book in this, a really interesting book that sort of tells the history of regulatory policy, the regulatory policy on packages, but also of culture in America.

27:45And because the cereal boxes have so much space on them, they're essentially advertising billboards, and every single element on the box is either required to be there, or it's there for marketing purposes. um and so i started writing a proposal and i got about an inch into it and thought oh maybe i better clear this with the kellogg nutritionist because we had talked about a book and here i was going ahead and doing it i thought maybe i better clear it with her and oh and i hadn't heard from her in years and years and years. I mean, we had completely lost touch. And I, the internet is a wonderful thing.

28:36I tracked her down. I was able to track her down and I wrote her and told she, and she was at the University of Jacksonville in Florida. And I tracked her down. I wrote her a note and said, well, I got, and I'm thinking about pulling together a book on cereals based on my cereal box collection. And she wrote back and said, I'm doing this with you. And we were off and running. So that was, okay, let's see how this works. So she brought to the party her intimate knowledge of how cereal companies work, because she had been a vice president at Kellogg for a couple of years. and she knew all the stuff about the lawsuits that I knew nothing about.

29:27Anyway, we had a great, great, great collaboration and had really a lot of time, a lot of fun writing the book. And it's coming out in September. Yeah, it is such a fascinating, like your expertise and then her expertise coming together. And you spoke a little bit about the way that the nutritional panel changed, but obviously it's like the contents of the cereal also that was shifting in response to these regulations. Was there an example of a specific cereal in the book that you think had a particularly dramatic or notable change? Well, everybody tried to reduce their sugar when everybody started worrying about kids eating sugar.

30:09And, you know, the example that we use in the book was sugar-free alphabets. I mean, I always thought alphabets were adorable, and they were fun for kids, and you could teach kids reading, and they could play with them and play with their food. And when the company announced that it was going to take the sugar out of alphabets, and this was General Mills, oh, I went to a store instantly. I knew they were going to last five minutes on a shelf, and they would be gone. Nobody was going to buy them. And they were going to get rid of them as quickly as possible. So I have that box. And they did, in fact, take the sugar out.

30:54And they did, in fact, go out of the market pretty quickly. But the interesting thing about that was that the reasons for it wasn't only taste. Everybody complained that they tasted like straw. But besides that, the sugar turns out to have a very important structural effect. And I think the operative term was they lost letter integrity. The letters didn't hold their shape without sugar. So that sort of interests. One of the reasons why the companies can't get rid of sugar is because the way these things are constructed is the sugar has a structural component, a taste component. But the companies have tried to get the sugar down as low as they possibly can.