Salt Wars with Michael Jacobson

In this episode of Repast, Michael T. Roberts interviews Michael Jacobson on his new book,  Salt Wars: The Battle Over the Biggest Killer in the American Diet.  Salt Wars describes the long struggle to reduce the dangerous levels of sodium in the American diet, and explains how industry has fought efforts to regulate salt.  Here, Roberts and Jacobson discuss the harms of salt, government inaction, and the exceptional nature of food regulation in the United States.

Michael T. Roberts is the Executive Director of the Resnick Center for Food Law & Policy at UCLA Law.

Michael Jacobson is the co-founder and long-time Executive Director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI).

You can buy Salt Wars here.

Music by Ike Winters

Transcript

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Michael Roberts 0:07

Hello, welcome to Repast, a food law and policy podcast from the Resinic Center for Food Law and Policy at UCLA Law. I'm Michael Roberts, the Executive Director of the Resting Center.

Diana Winters 0:19

And I'm Diana Winters, the Assistant Director of the Center. The Resnik Center performs cutting-edge legal research and scholarship in food law and policy to improve health and quality of life for humans and the planet.

Michael Roberts 0:33

Each month we'll bring you an interview with thought leaders transforming food law and policy. It's an honor today to have with us Mike Jacobson, a good friend and an illustrious leader in nutrition, and I'm sure well known to the audience, but nevertheless, I'm going to go ahead and give an introduction to Mike. Mike is the co-founder and longtime executive director of the Center for Science and Public Interest and now serving as a senior scientist. Under Mike's leadership, CSPI was a leader in getting the FDA to put nutrition fact labels on packaged foods and passing the Nutrition Labeling Education Act. CSPI has also a long list of achievements that we don't have time to account for today, but everything from pushing the modernization of food safety laws to eliminating junk food from schools and so on and so on. Mike has been honored with numerous awards for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Hero Award in 2010, the American Public Health Association David P. Rawl Award for Advocacy and Public Health in 2011, and the Food Marketing Institute Esther Peterson Consumer Service Award in 1992. Mike has a PhD in microbiology from MIT. And Mike has also spoken at previous Restic events and has always been willing to take time to visit with us and to counsel us. And so we really appreciate having you here, Mike, with us today.

Mike Jacobson 2:14

Thank you very much, Mike.

Michael Roberts 2:16

The reason we brought you on today is you have a new book, which is of really interesting read. And I have to compliment you on this book called Fault Wars, The Battle Over the Biggest Killer in the American Diet. And what impressed me about this book are two things. One is that it's it's remarkably dense. You have incredible amounts of information in here, including tables and charts and boxes. And yet the narrative is really quite easy to read. It's a really nice narrative. So I compliment you on putting together this fine book. And from what I understand, it's gotten really good reviews so far, including in the Washington Post.

Mike Jacobson 2:54

That's right. Yes. Thank you for publicizing the book.

Michael Roberts 2:58

It's our pleasure. So I'd like to ask you a few questions up front. And that is the first question is why did you write the book?

Mike Jacobson 3:07

Well, I I've been working on the salt issue since 1977. And we'll talk about some of those activities over the years, but there's been so little progress. So that's that's 40-some years, so little progress on this issue that I thought I would uh take some time out and tell the story of salt. And I really covered two what I call salt wars. One is a scientific battle, and the other is the political battle. And both are long-standing and protracted.

Michael Roberts 3:41

What did you hope to accomplish in writing the book?

Mike Jacobson 3:43

You know, well, I have the desire to educate the general public about salt, but more specifically, I'm hoping that it'll have some influence on public policies at local, state, and national levels, particularly at the Food and Drug Administration, which has, I call the FDA the foot-dragging agency, because uh it really should have been a lot more aggressive on salt over the years.

Michael Roberts 4:13

Well, before we talk about the FDA, let's address salt for just a minute. Tell us about salt. How much should we eat and how much do we eat?

Mike Jacobson 4:23

Well, you know, just the big picture is that salt is the most used food additive. It's used in more than half of all foods. And it uh we're consuming about 50% more salt or sodium. Remember, salt is sodium chloride. We're consuming about 50% more sodium than is officially recommended, and we could we probably ought to be eating a lot less than that. But that 50% excess is causing roughly 50 to 100,000 premature deaths every year, costing tens of billions of dollars in excess health care costs. So, you know, it's and I say it's the biggest killer in the American diet. It's a huge, it's a huge problem. And so the challenge to health advocates is to get government and industry to reduce the amount of salt in packaged in restaurant foods because that's where we get 75 percent of our sodium. 75 percent. It's not the salt shaker, that's only five or 10 percent. So we should be eating about um a third less than we're consuming 3,400 milligrams a day. We should cut back to at least 2,300 milligrams a day. And uh it shouldn't be that hard if we had help from the food industry and the government.

Michael Roberts 5:58

How do you respond to some experts who have argued that it's dangerous to reduce salt in our diets too much? You addressed that in your book, but please go ahead and re and refresh us.

Mike Jacobson 6:09

That's the the um center of the scientific battle. That for many years, health experts said salt boosts blood pressure, and higher blood pressure means more cardiovascular disease. So the argument is A equals B and B equals C, therefore A equals C. Some scientists did research that suggested that if you what they did is they they looked at sodium intake and then compared that to cardiovascular disease. And their studies found that if you raise sodium, you'll have more cardiovascular disease, heart attacks and strokes in particular. But if you lower sodium to around that level of the recommended level of 2300 milligrams a day or less, you also have an increased risk of cardiovascular disease. You know, so that really upset the dogma of lowering sodium will lower the risk of cardiovascular disease. But those studies really muddied the waters. And journalists at the New York Times, the Washington Post, and elsewhere publicized that research. And people in Congress took it up and used it as a reason to delay any action on salt. So it really delayed things. But those studies were criticized from the day they were published because, in particular, there are a number of flaws, but in particular, they did not measure sodium intake accurately. And remember, they're correlating sodium intake with cardiovascular disease. But if you don't measure sodium intake, you know, your study is almost worthless. And those scientists did essentially the same poorly designed study time after time. And, you know, they built up a body of literature that looks impressive on its surface, but it is lousy science. And um, that science has been pretty much debunked in the last few years. Initially, it was the debunking was rhetorical. You didn't measure sodium accurately, but then there were some uh research studies where scientists uh the the accurate way to measure sodium intake is to collect somebody's urine for 24 hours. And that 24-hour urine collection, the sodium in that reflects how much sodium you consumed in the previous 24 hours. That's the most accurate way. And so those uh contrarian researchers at the beginning of a multi-year study asked people to pee in a can once in the morning, not even all day, once in the morning, and then they used a formula that itself was flawed to convert that one spot urine collection into 24-hour urine collection and sodium intake. The way to measure sodium accurately is to collect samples for 24 hours, and you do it multiple times, because what you ate yesterday doesn't necessarily represent what you are eating over the next five years. These are multi-year studies. So good studies measure sodium intake accurately for multiple times, and then they average it and so on. So, what some clever researchers did is they had done good studies. They measured sodium intake accurately with multiple 24-hour urine collections, and then they said, okay, and what they found is a um a linear relationship between sodium intake and cardiovascular disease risk. They did not find a higher risk of cardiovascular disease at very low intakes of sodium. And they said, okay, what if we looked just at that first 24-hour urine collection? And what they found was they had that uh curve showing increased risk at high sodium intake, and they also found it increased risk at low sodium intake. But once they used multiple collections, then they found a straight line. And that's that was a second debunking. And then in 2019, the National Academies of Sciences made it official, essentially, and said that that research was biased and we're not even going to look at it. And so I think the scientific war should have ended. It probably hasn't, because those contrarian scientists may continue to do studies in stir up and make a little noise. But um, I think the issue has been settled. And that controversy has been primarily in the United States, not elsewhere in the world.

Michael Roberts 11:12

That's very interesting. And certainly underscores the importance of understanding science and the way it works in nutrition. Here at the Resnik Center, of course, we focus on regulation. And you mentioned that your book is both scientific and political. I like that because the law really straddles those two, or at least attempts to. So we're going to focus the rest of our questions uh on the regulatory side. But I want to ask you first, when did government health experts start expressing concern about salt? And why has so little been accomplished?

Mike Jacobson 11:51

Sounds like a little question, but it's big, especially the second part. First part's easy. The first reference to uh systemic sodium reduction came at at the 1969 White House Conference on Diet, Nutrition, and Health. And they recommended the food industry cut sodium and the government should get involved. So that's 50 years ago. And then there have been many reports since then. Why has so little been accomplished? Well, it's basically the basic thing is industry pressure. Companies don't like to be told by government what to do. They fear that if they cut down on sodium, their foods wouldn't taste as good, and maybe their competitors wouldn't cut down on sodium. You know, so that's kind of the corporate milieu in which this issue has been growing. And probably one key report was in 1979 when uh an advisory committee of the Food and Drug Administration concluded that salt was not generally recognized as safe, at the grass, G R A S. And the grass uh concept is that government should look at not just kind of an inherent toxicity of a substance, but how much is used. So they said salt is not grass at the levels used in the food supply. And there was a big review of grass substances, something like five or six hundred substances. And salt was one of the only ones where the FDA was advised that it wasn't grass. And around the same time, actually a year earlier, we had petitioned the Food and Drug Administration to set limits on salt because of its contribution to cardiovascular disease and to have warning labels on high sodium foods. So the FDA had our petitions, the 1979 report, and it said, well, let's try to do things on a voluntary basis. And the FDA, we went to court. The FDA didn't do anything for a couple of years, and so we went, we sued the agency for not doing anything. And the agency said, Hey judge, we're gonna we're gonna try to work this out on a voluntary basis. And the FDA required sodium to be listed in tiny print on about half the foods in the marketplace, and so then we were kind of frozen and we had to wait and see how that came out. There was no effect on sodium consumption, and so then we worked to get the nutrition facts labels that you referred to, and that that the law was passed in 1990, the regs were adopted in 1993, uh that's when companies had to start putting nutrition facts labels on foods. Then we had to say, okay, is that going to have an effect? Because those labels are much clearer than the predecessor, and they're on all foods. So we had to wait. And we look 10 or 15 years later, sodium consumption didn't change at all. Then in 1980, the National Academy of Sciences issued reports saying, hey, there's been no effect of anything that's been done. The FDA should set mandatory limits on sodium in food. A 2010 very key report. Uh and those limits should be mandatory. You know, the voluntary approach over the previous, what, 30 years hasn't worked at all. And so the FDA's immediate reaction in 2010 was okay, let's go for a voluntary approach. So we thought, okay, well, let's see what the agency is going to do. And they were working behind the scenes, and they we didn't, for five years, we didn't see anything coming out of the agency. So we sued the agency for uh not doing what it said it would do, uh, and that SALT should not be considered generally recognized as safe. And we negotiated um a deadline for the FDA's uh release of a proposal which came about in June 2016. So it was proposed voluntary guidelines on what should be in 158 different categories of food. Big job. I really give FDA credit for undertaking that a huge review, but came out in June of 2016, and everybody thought Hillary Clinton would finalize some some guide these guidelines in 2017 or maybe 2018. Unfortunately, uh Donald Trump became president, not Hillary. And the FDA did almost nothing on sodium for four years, and so we're left with those proposed guidelines still sitting in a dusty old federal register, and we're hoping that the Biden administration uh finalizes those guidelines quickly. And I should say there are two other things during the Trump didn't do anything on those guidelines, but the administration did uh two things. One of the early things was that the Department of Agriculture, which regulates school meals, which are federally subsidized, it said, let's make school meals great again. That was the motto of Secretary of Agriculture, Purdue. And so their way of making them great again was to water down the nutrition standards on whole grains and on salt. So that the Obama administration had promulgated regulations that would gradually reduce sodium levels in three stages. And the first reduction came about, and all schools are complying. But the Trump administration delayed the next step down in sodium for six years, 2024, and they got rid of the biggest reduction completely. So that was the bad thing the Trump administration did. We sued the agency and we actually prevailed, and the court killed that rescision that uh Trump put in place, and now the Biden administration has to um reinstate the Obama rule or come up with some uh variation of it. Uh the thing they did uh that was good that they did in December, I think, of 2020, was to uh there's a there's a magic bullet that consumers could use and industry can use to reduce sodium intake by 25 percent or 35 percent. And that's to replace it's to use what's marketed as light salt, where a third to a half of the salt, the sodium chloride, has been replaced with potassium chloride. The F and but the food industry didn't want to use potassium chloride because they feared that people would see potassium chloride on labels and would think, oh my god, it's a chemical, and we don't want chemicals in our food. A maker of potassium chloride petitioned the FDA to allow a synonym, potassium salt, on food labels, which is a lot more palatable to companies and maybe the public. So the Trump administration approved that petition. And I hope that potassium uh chloride is now added to a lot more foods than it's currently added. And people can buy this stuff at a supermarket.

Michael Roberts 20:01

Seems like a no-brainer petition.

Mike Jacobson 20:04

Yeah. Absolutely. It shouldn't have taken four years, but at least it was it was done, and it should facilitate the lowering of sodium in our foods.

Michael Roberts 20:14

I'm going to ask you to uh indulge with me in a little bit of a creative exercise to draw attention to some of the other agencies as well or organizations that are involved in regulation. So put it put for just a minute, put your professor's hat on. And I'm going to ask you to give a grade to the following agencies. The FDA, which we've already spent considerable time talking about, maybe even the USDA, Congress, states, and municipalities, all which have had a role in the reduction of sodium or the attempts to reduce sodium.

Mike Jacobson 20:49

Yeah, they could have a role. Well, the FDA we've talked about, and they they've done next to nothing. I'd give them an F plus.

Michael Roberts 20:58

Okay.

Mike Jacobson 20:59

And the Department of Agriculture uh gets an F well, maybe I should raise it to an F plus also, because of the school meals in particular, but they also co-authored dietary guidelines for Americans. And that had almost the same uh text on salt as it did five years ago. New additions come out every five years. So they didn't screw that up. And so maybe we'll give them a F uh also on that. Congress really didn't do much except uh delay FDA action on the the guidelines, those voluntary guidelines. And they were uh that was kind of the main thing that that Congress did. And so Congress, I would give an F to states. Yeah, it depends how far back you want to go. If you want to you know think five years, I don't I'm not aware of states doing uh much of anything and what's one thing states could do or I'll mention two things one is procurement policies state governments buy a lot of food for prisons and parks and government office buildings and so on and they can have procurement standards that set limits on on sodium and sugar and saturated fat and uh maybe some other uh things in the food and some states may be doing things but I'm I'm not aware of them lately. The the second thing they could do is require warnings on restaurant menus. The just the way they require disclosure of calories at chain restaurants they could put warning notices on uh for salt no state has done that but when you get to um municipalities uh they can do the same two things procurement they buy a lot of food and warning notices and New York City and Philadelphia are two cities that have adopted warning notices for chain restaurants and it's a very generous um requirement a meal has to have or a food whatever's on the menu has to have more than a whole day's worth of sodium before it earns a warning notice which is a salt shaker in the image of a salt shaker so it's very generous but uh very generous to the restaurant industry but in New York City and Philadelphia you go to a chain restaurant and in many of them you'll see these warning notices.

Michael Roberts 23:45

So it sounds like states maybe get an incomplete grade municipalities perhaps no no I'd I I'd give them enough I mean because they can't run out the clock forever you know what did you do states?

Mike Jacobson 23:59

What did you do cities?

Michael Roberts 24:01

All right well it sounds like we have an abysmal failure of governance uh when it comes to sodium uh uh right the the reduction of sodium intake yeah look at it Michael that there's a pandemic of salt related deaths as many as a hundred thousand excess deaths a year from high sodium diets and what are health officials doing next to nothing I mean now in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic uh salt isn't that big of a problem or compared to tobacco but salt is probably the biggest killer in the food supply and health officials should be doing a hell of a lot more than they have been let's talk about international actions you in your book you in table 7.1 actually uh you have an amazing table that outlines a lot of countries and the efforts that they're taking is there something going on internationally that you think would be of a big help to the U.S. in terms of modeling ways of how to take regulatory action to reduce sodium?

Mike Jacobson 25:11

Yeah uh well there's there's several approaches that the countries have used and it's spotty around the world a number of countries looked at where is salt coming from in their food supply and they targeted the the biggest contributors to high sodium diet and they've actually set mandatory limits. So Turkey has a mandatory limit on sodium in bread which I think contributes about one third of Turk's sodium intake in a number of other countries South Africa is another one that has set limits on certain categories of food. So that can be very effective if the limit is is decent and if the limit is gradually reduced to kind of have the stepwise decrease Britain was the creator of the system that the Food and Drug Administration is proposing in roughly 2005 the British government divided the food supply into something like 85 different categories and set voluntary targets for each category and then didn't just publish them but beat up on the food industry the government publicized some of the really high sodium foods it met with trade associations, major supermarkets, major manufacturers and said you got to lower sodium and then at the same time the government mounted a public relations campaign to get the public to read the sodium numbers on food labels. And uh they actually had Sid the slug remember you can kill slugs by sprinkling salt on them. So Sid the slug was a very well known ally of sodium reduction and that had a big effect in something like six years sodium intake as measured by 24 hour urine collections sodium intake decreased 10 to 15 percent the goal was a 33% reduction. So they've got quite a ways there in six years and and that's worth keeping in mind that context you don't have to get rid of all salt a one third reduction as an initial target is a huge huge benefit. So and then there was a change in government and the British government now has pretty much sidelined that program and can I mention one other one which is very effective and that's a program Chile led and they they said okay here's a reasonable limit on sodium content in foods and any foods that have more than that much sodium has to have a warning notice a stop sign shaped label on the front of the package and the same for sugar and saturated fat and calories and that threshold for warning notices declined every two or three years over a five year period.

Michael Roberts 28:14

And in some food categories that had a huge impact on the the uh number of the percentage of foods that um had warning notices so in sausages I think initially 73 percent had warning notices at the end of uh um couple of years when the government looked again only 27 percent had warning notices so that and that program now has been copied by Mexico uh Uruguay Peru and uh Israel has um a closely related program uh Canada was considering it then changed in government they dropped it so that has uh it's a very interesting approach let's shift now to the Biden administration uh you what you referenced earlier that you thought some things might change uh in your book you outline a number of steps the governing agencies can take to reduce the the amount of sodium or salt consumed what steps do you envision that could or will happen in the Biden administration or are at least plausible over the next four years say?

Mike Jacobson 29:25

Well the the first thing is the Department of Agriculture has to get back to Obama's sodium reduction plan for school meals. It's a no-brainer over at the Food and Drug Administration the no-brainer is to immediately finalize those voluntary guidelines and then monitor the progress so the FDA set targets for two years out and 10 years out. So the two years out let's see what happens and so it'll take a year or so to analyze the progress maybe even two years if there's been limited progress then the FDA should convert some of the voluntary guidelines into mandatory requirements and it may vary it may be the breakfast cereals all met the uh all are below the the targets and so leave them alone but maybe uh deli meats are are way above the targets so that's ripe for making those mandatory second thing is remember the FDA has is proposing two year and 10 year targets that eight year gap is crazy nobody's going to pay any attention to sodium over those eight years you know maybe six years out industry will say hey didn't the FDA back in 2021 issue some voluntary targets why don't we take a look at them the FDA staff will be on to other things. So I think what the FDA needs to do is have some intermediate targets say it's six years that are set halfway between the two year and the 10 year targets. And I should mention the two year targets were intended to get about a 10% reduction in sodium not much the 10 year targets were intended to get down to a uh the 2300 milligram recommendation as average intake for the public. So those are much much stricter guidelines. So um and the FDA has other tools it it could say okay we don't want to make them mandatory okay industry will give you that but industry if if you don't meet those voluntary targets then your products have to have warning notices in the front of the package so make better use of warning notices and the FDA could follow or Congress either could follow Chile's example and have a kind of a national nutrition requirements that would put warning notices on foods that have too much salt or sugar or saturated fat or calories and that's controversial industry hates those just hates them with a passion because people they'll be very obvious people will pay attention to them and there could even be extensions of those of the labeling so in Chile they the government ruled that no food with a warning notice can be used in public schools and no food with a warning notice can be advertised uh in children's media on the web or or on television so it could be a very powerful tool but industry will say oh first amendment you know that's compelled speech you can't make us do that and uh they'll go to court and and uh possibly uh kill that kind of requirement and some lawyers that I've talked to say compelled speech is is a powerful argument others say no you got a public health crisis government has is justified in using this tool of informing the public well that issue could fill up about 10 more podcasts uh so let me let me pivot here just a little bit um and in in the spirit of talking about conflicts in law uh because we are a law center I need to ask you uh is do you envision a role for moving forward uh with for in litigation to reduce sodium intake? Well you know I mentioned at the Department of Agriculture a lawsuit killed the Trump effort to make school lunches great again. At the Food and Drug Administration I don't see um you know so I'm not a lawyer member I'm a microbiologist and so I might know not know every nuance of administrative law but I think FDA has it's making uh an effort if it doesn't come out if it doesn't finalize the voluntary guidelines then I think there may be an opportunity to sue. If it does finalize them then I think we have to wait a couple of years maybe four years if sodium consumption did not decline if FDA's action was not sufficient then I think one could go to court and sue the agency using um SALT's grass status again as a tool member SALT at current levels of consumption is not safe and the FDA needs to protect the public.

Michael Roberts 34:39

What else can lawyers do to move the issue along and more specifically what can law students do in their communities?

Mike Jacobson 34:45

Well if I were a law student who cared about this issue I think it would be fun to look at at the city policies does it have any policies like on procurement and if not try to uh petition them or otherwise persuade them go to the city council or county board and same thing at the state level procurement is such an easy thing because industry can't really object and if you get cities and states or the federal government buying healthier foods that creates a market for healthier foods. The other thing is uh a great project would be to try to get warning notices at restaurants. New York and Philly have shown that it can be done New York's was challenged in court and the city prevailed so there's it's local law but still it's valuable to have that. And so you can try to get your city or your state government to either through the health department or through through the legislature to adopt these warning notices and hopefully and the good the cool thing about this would be to have New York City and Philly have a 2300 milligram threshold before warning notices are required. A different city could say we want that's too generous let's have a 2000 milligram limit. Another city could say no let's do an 1800 milligram limit chain restaurants would go crazy and then seek maybe national legislation that would preempt those local laws but would get a warning notice everywhere. And that's what happened with calorie labeling that initially New York City required calorie labeling Seattle required calories trans fat and sodium and California had something different and the restaurant industry which had previously opposed this nutrition labeling on menus then all of a sudden changed its tune and said okay we'll accept calorie labeling on a national basis and that became part of the Affordable Care Act.

Michael Roberts 37:01

That does seem to be the pattern action on a local level and then it parleyes into a national rule at some point I'm sure there may be a student or two out there that would take your advice we'll see. I have uh just a last question for you or two questions bundled into one. And you've been very generous with your time but I'd like to turn this more you know in a little bit more of a personal uh way for us. You've given advice in your book on how to reduce salt consumption. So what is your favorite piece of advice and are you have you been successful in reducing your sodium intake?

Mike Jacobson 37:38

You know first for the uh for the general public there are three things I think people ought to do one is cook more from scratch where you you have control over the salt and when you do use salt use light salt in Morton there's a Morton's light salt package in every supermarket. Second thing is when you're shopping read food labels carefully when you in practically every aisle in the supermarket if you look at salad dressings or soups or pasta sauce you'll see that sodium levels vary tremendously from brand to brand which demonstrates that many companies could greatly reduce the sodium content of their products. The third thing is we get more than one third of our sodium at restaurants and cafeterias it's almost impossible to avoid salt and huge amounts of salt. So I think this does not make me make me popular but eating out less at restaurants and if you do eat out maybe split an entree with a friend or bring half home. So those are three general things very few people will adhere to all that I try to and I've actually eaten out less often I almost never get a soup when I eat out because that's a real hot spot of sodium and I often bring half of the food home or I split split a meal with my wife and I I read labels carefully but I don't read every label and I've been tricked sometimes by some food that I was assumed like frozen shrimp. I always assumed that frozen shrimp were just shrimp. And I finally read the label and they're very high in sodium like a fourth of a day's sodium limit in a single serving. So you know you got to pay constant attention to this and that's why we need the government and industry to help so that you don't go bonkers trying to keep sodium at low levels. People have enough other things on their mind and I'm sure law students are very busy with exams and other things that they shouldn't have to worry that much.

Michael Roberts 39:53

That's my big takeaway from this podcast Mike is that even Mike Jacobson has been tricked. Thank you so much. You've been very generous to so glad to talk to have this discussion with you and I again I I recommend your book highly and best of luck on the next book whenever that comes thank you. Thank you I've enjoyed being on the podcast thank you so listeners I highly recommend Michael Jacobson's book Salt Wars the Battle over the biggest killer in the American diet. It's a great read it's an informative read and it will not only change the way you eat hopefully but also the way we look at government and the regulation of food