253: The Scientist Who Helped Rewrite America's Dietary Guidelines Tells All - Ty Beal

The science of what to eat has never been clearer. The problem was never the biology — it was everything else. Dr. Ty Beal, a global nutrition scientist who helped author the new U.S. Dietary Guidelines, has spent his career mapping where modern diets fail and why they keep failing. His Nutritional Value Score ranked foods with a rigor that finally puts organ meats in their proper place, calls out the grain mythology for what it is, and confirms what many already suspect: ultra-processed food is systematically, measurably eroding human health worldwide. But knowing what to eat and actually eating it are two very different problems. Dr. Beal doesn't just explain the gap — he names the machinery keeping it open. And despite decades of food industry interference in policy, he's cautiously, specifically optimistic. The question he can't fully answer yet is the hardest one: knowing what we know, why haven't things changed?

BIG IDEA

We have enough science to know what to eat — the remaining obstacle is not biology, it's the economics, politics, and behavioral engineering working against it.

Ty Beal Contact Info

Dr. Ty Beal discussed the development of the Nutritional Value Score (NVS), his role on the 2025 Dietary Guidelines Scientific Review Group, and the critical need to prioritize whole, minimally processed foods over ultra-processed options. The conversation revealed broad agreement that ultra-processed foods and refined carbohydrates are the primary dietary issue in the U.S., while nutrient deficiencies remain widespread globally and domestically. 

TyBeal.com
RealFood.gov
Nutrient-Lab.com
Social Media: @TyBealPhD

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Transcript

0:56

It's Stay Off My Operating Table with Dr. Philip Ovadia, and we are joined today by Ty Beal, who Frankly, this one's gonna be, I think, completely unlike any we've ever had before. So Phil? Yeah, I'm, You have it all pretty- ... real excited for this conversation. As we were getting ready to record I was trying to remember if I had met Ty in person. I think I am hoping that I had met Ty in person, but our paths haven't chan- haven't really crossed physically yet, but we've crossed digitally certainly, and I've been very interested in the work that he's been doing. And this will be a very good opportunity for us to dig in a little bit more on a topic that we talk about and dance around a lot but haven't really had an expert in figuring out food quality essentially, and trying to give people a framework to understand, what they really should be focusing on eating versus what they may shouldn't be, and some of the challenges around that. Dr. Ty Beal PhD, he's a senior technical specialist and a global nutrition scientist at the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition. So I'm gonna give Ty a chance to introduce himself, talk about how and why he got so interested in this nutritional space. And one of the things I'd love to hear from you, Ty, is really what do you see as the main problem that you're trying to solve and focus on? Sure. Great to be here. I got interested in nutrition from a personal story where I had a bunch of health issues I was trying to address, and when I figured them out through diet, I thought,"This is really powerful, and I wanna figure out how to research this and help other people." So I went to school for geography as kind of food systems, like global nutrition, environment, agriculture. Big, broad background. But I was really just obsessed with understanding nutritional quality, nutrient density, and I got working in this global organization, GAIN, where we do work all around the world in low-income contexts primarily. So that, by default, led me to focus a lot around this sort of nutrient adequacy, the nutrient density and bioavailability of foods, and the sources of nutrients that were lacking. And I did a lot of global work analyzing- How are diets short and lacking around the world? Now, when you ask this question of what is the biggest challenge we're trying to address, I do work in low-income context, but I also served on the Dietary Guidelines for Americans recent scientific review group, and we've done quite a bit of work in the US as well, and so I have... I would separate this into two groups. There's sort of the US-type context or UK or other wealthy context, and then the lower income context. But when we're talking about in America, the biggest issue by far is obviously chronic diseases when you look at diets. Now, what does that mean in terms of the diet quality? If you talk to people, which I have, on sort of all sides of the spectrum, from plant-based and vegan, vegetarian to keto, carnivore, low carb, most people agree the biggest issue is these highly refined processed carbs ultra-processed carbs, added sugars, refined flours, combined foods into these sort of highly palatable foods that are hard to stop eating, right? We overeat. 60% of the calories in the US are these ultra-processed foods. So that's the big issue. You can debate on the margins, but that's the big issue. In lower income contexts, these ultra-processed foods are not consumed very frequently. Now that's increasing, but the primary issue is that poverty has really caused people to not get access to a diversity of foods, so they're consuming a lot of starchy staples. It's corn, it's rice, it's wheat, maybe roots and tubers or plantains as their primary energy, and they don't have animal sourced foods or a diversity of plant sourced foods. So those are the two challenges that, that we try to really address. And of course, both populations have undernutrition and this increasing chronic disease risk as well. And do you see that there is a way to sort of bring those together? I- is there a way for us to really talk about, one gloo- global kind of food ranking system, we'll call it, or whatever it is, one global way to evaluate it when, on the surface it would seem like those are two diametrically opposite problems and yet, you're working on both. How do we start to bring those together to help people globally understand, what they should and shouldn't be eating? It's a great question, and I think conceptually when you look at the programs, policies, interventions that country governments do or other people who are working in food systems, they typically have to prioritize something. So that's why it gets put into these different camps. But I think at the diet level, you can have a diet that is very nutritionally adequate and very protective of chronic diseases. You c- you don't have to make it one or the other. Now sometimes there can be trade-offs for certain people, right? Like some people may do better with more plants, more animals, some people do may- maybe do better with higher fiber or less fiber. And so- You sometimes have trade-offs at the individual level, but overall, the big picture, I mean, if you just take away one thing, it's consume a diversity of minimally processed whole foods. That right there is gonna really address a lot of issues. The biggest challenge that we face is how do you actually make that a reality? There's a lot of things impacting what people eat. Preferences, food industry producing foods that are very engineered to be addicting and to keep people coming back for more, right? You have cost aspects. How much is it to, purchase these? Where can you find these foods? How convenient is it? How long does it take you to prepare? So those are all huge obstacles that prevent people from eating healthy diets, we know at a high level, we know what healthy diets are. They can take different forms, but the basics are there. It's just how do you get people to do that? It's what? Probably two years ago now that you were one of the lead investigators, lead authors on the nutritional value score, right? And this was another attempt, and there have been many to try and, rank foods essentially. Talk about... i'd love to just kinda hear your perspective first of all on maybe, what was the basic framework that you took to approach that? What were maybe some of the differences between the way that you and your team had approached this versus how some of the other nutritional scoring systems that came before it had some shortcomings, we'll say? Yeah. I wanna start off... I wanna start off by saying I, I historically have really hated food rating systems. I think they're reductionist. I think they're not able to fully capture the complexity of diets and food, and so I was opposed to them. So it's ironic that I did work on one, but I'll tell you kinda why I did. So for those who don't, aren't aware there's these systems out there, they're called different things, nutrient profiling systems, food rating systems, and the most popular ones are in Europe and Australia, and this is Nutri-Score and Health Star Rating, and those are used to actually put a label on a package. So when you go to the store, it gives you a rating and it tells you, should you buy this food or should you not buy this food? Should you eat more of this or less of this? And it's really basic. It's very simple. They're only using data that you have on a nutrition facts panel, which is very limited. And so they're very reductionist. It's like how much saturated fat is there? How much sodium is there? How much fiber is there? How many calories? And not a lot else. And so I've been opposed to those because I think food is so much more than the what's on the nutrition facts panel. But a few years ago, we saw a system called Food Compass come out in the US- And that system attempted to use a much more sophisticated approach, which it did. It used all sorts of dietary attributes from vitamins and minerals to nutrient ratios to additives and all sorts of things. So I was pretty excited about it because I thought,"This is gonna be this is gonna do a better job than previous ones out there." But a lot of the scores didn't really make sense to me. So when I saw, Honey Nut Cheerios with 12 grams of added sugar per serving scoring among the top scoring foods in the green zone, I thought, "There's something wrong with the system. It has flaws that-" Oh. It didn't add up to me. And so I kinda set to work building on some prior work we were doing at GAIN where it was trying to break down what are the components within foods that we most care about. What are the things that people are most lacking? So in terms of vitamins, minerals. So we broke it down into a few different categories. We looked at vitamins that are lacking worldwide. So really when you look at how-- what is a shortfall in these nutrients, we included those minerals as well. Protein, we looked at, quantity but also the quality of the protein'cause that also matters. And then Omega-3, we did not look at Omega-6 because there's tons of Omega-6 in the food supply. We don't have an issue with getting enough Omega-6. And so we really looked at Omega-3 because that's a particularly healthy essential fat. We looked at the long chain f- chain fatty acids like, EPA, DHA, as well as short chain fatty acids. And then we wanted to expand beyond the sort of nutrient density side of things. And so this is where it gets even more controversial, right? So we s- we added fiber, we added calories, and we added nutrient ratios, which is also something Food Compass did, where you look at the ratio of sodium to potassium, which kinda gives you an indication of how much of the whole food is still left in there and how much has been added to it. Because if you look at any plant sourced food, it's very high in potassium, but if it's been extracted and refined a lot, you actually lose a lot of that potassium. So this kinda helps detect that. The carb to fiber ratio is looking at what is the quality of the carbohydrate. So something like white rice has a lot of carbs and not a lot of fiber. But if you have something like nuts or seeds or legumes, beans, peas, lentils, a lot higher on the fiber. So it gives you a sense of the quality. And then we didn't include this initially, but the saturated fat to unsaturated fat ratio. And the reason we didn't include that initially is just because, when I look at the evidence, I think it, it matters for some people. Some people have, less optimal cardiometabolic health with saturated fat depending on who they are. But on average, it's not the biggest issue to me, so I didn't wanna hyper-focus on those types of foods, and we know that whole dairy and other foods are even health promoting with a lot of these chronic diseases. But we ended up adding that in from a reviewer feedback, and so there's a component of that saturated fat to unsaturated fat ratio. So we tried to do it holistically, and then see where the scores were. Now the other decision points are how much do you weight all these things and sort of how do you adjust for bioavailability? What is the reference unit? Do you do it per calorie, per gram? We did both because no other system does that. We wanted to not overly penalize low-calorie foods or high-calorie foods. We wanted to sort of get at what is the nutrient density in both of those concepts of sort of the weight of the food and the calories of the food. So that's what we set out to do. And, theoretically if someone eats the foods that are scored high on, on this system what would you expect the outcomes to be, from a health perspective? Yeah, that's a good question. We have not done that type of validation, which is sort of limited anyways'cause it's observational. But if we were to do that, my guess... we know for sure it's a lot higher of nutrient density, so nutrient adequacy would be much better. In general, the higher the score, the higher the nutrient content and the bioavailability, right? So that would be improved. I think the metabolic health would be improved. There's not a lot of the refined high-glycemic foods. There's not a lot of the ultra-processed foods up there. It's quality foods from plant and animal sources. And so I think you would see probably people maintaining their body weight better, not having excess calories. You'd probably see people have a little better body composition. You'd see potentially lower blood pressure better blood sugar regulation, insulin sensitivity. That's the things, of course, we hope to see. That's why we d- designed the system. But that's what you would expect based off of the foods. And how do you answer the criticisms, and again, this is probably more broadly of these food rating systems and yours in particular, right? But people always come at it with the thought of, okay, and, I'll be forthright, right? I have a bi- bias towards animal, proteins and animal products and, yet somehow the beef that I love and I think is the most nutrient-dense food on the planet, ends up below a lot of these plant things. But, how do you help people think about- How these scoring systems should be used because I'm sure you would be the last person to say knowing what I know about you, right? That you should only eat foods that are, this and above. And, any food that has a score that's a higher one than another food, clearly if you're choosing between those two, the answer is always the higher, higher rated food. Yeah. I think you- we need to keep these in context that this is just one tool to help guide things, and it's not always for the consumer. So part of this is really to g- to guide things that are going on behind the scenes. So policies to prioritize or invest in certain foods or promote certain foods, interventions to do that. But yeah, I mean, I also envision this could be used at a, with a mobile app, on a food label. And I'll just talk about red meat first. Actually, when you look at previous scoring systems, so Nutri-Score, Health Star Rating, and Food Compass, unprocessed red meat scores ver- very low on those systems. So the NVS, this nutritional value score, actually compared to other systems out there really shows the value of red meat. It's up there, it's up towards the top. And when you look at food groups, the top food group is dark green leafy vegetables. The second one is organ meats. The third one is fish and seafood, and the fourth one is unprocessed red meat from ruminant animals. So that is your beef, but also leaner cuts. You've got goat, 'cause this is a global study, right? So there's other there's deer, there's venison. So I would keep things in sort of per context here. But in general these, this system is distinguishing between the components that make up the score. It's basically telling you, based on all these components and the way that it's framed, which ones have the highest, best profile in that context. But I would say that in general, I think it's good at general guidance of saying, eat more often, more frequently, the ones that score well, and these are, anything plant and animal source foods. There's also legumes and eggs and poultry and vegetables and whatnot. But then at the bottom it's really helpful because it tells you, I mean, this may be obvious to some people, but there's actually a lot of stuff that's not particularly obvious. So soft drinks like sodas, very bottom. Nobody argues with that. Some people think we should still pay for that in SNAP, but that's another question. We've got grain-based sweets. We've got instant noodles. There are pa- packaged snack foods, so things like chips, things like that. Refined grains, those score very low. I mean even whole grains. So this is a controversial one, but whole grains do not score particularly high. They're in the middle range and it just at least to me, it kinda reveals, look they're not a... They're not like people should not have whole grains. Of course, some people may need to limit their carb intake, but- They're not the most nutrient dense food out there. There are other options out there, right? From plant and animal sources that are, higher in compounds that are protective and have a better food matrix overall. Yeah, I will say, I think your system probably did a better job than any other I saw of sort of, keeping those junk items from the top of the list, like you pointed out, right? The Honey Nut Cheerios or the Froot Loops, I think also on the Food Compass one was a lot higher than I think most people agree it should. And and ultimately, that's one of the things that I've talked about for years now, right? When you look at, all the different diet camps out there, right? And where do they have the most agreement, I think it really is, around this ultra-processed food is should be minimized in the diet, and I think your system did a good job at sort of keeping that stuff towards the bottom. Yeah. Maybe that then leads into you were one of the members selected as an expert to advise on the revision to the dietary guidelines, right? We had this late in the process, typically late in the cycle for new guidelines to come out there was, and admittedly because of the political change we scrapped what was done and they pulled together a group of experts and came out with these new food guidelines, which were just released a few months ago. So I'd first love to hear, what was that like? How did you... how did that selection go, right? How did you get notified that you were one of the people that they wanted to be an advisor on this? And then maybe, if you can give us a little behind the scenes of what that whole process was like. Yeah. I think that I got the call because I have been doing research on nutrient density, vegan vegetarian diets, the role... kind of the controversy of sort of animal sourced foods and nutrient adequacy. And so when they selected people were chosen for a specific area of expertise. We weren't just all just chosen and given the same sort of role in this thing. We f- we were given specific top- topics. So I was chosen probably because somebody recommended me, but I was, I was given a call and said, "Could you write the section on vegan and vegetarian diets? We want to know how can we do this in a way that is adequate for people." We weren't saying don't have- You know, if your value is vegan or vegetarian, don't do that, be an omnivore. We are trying to say, "Here are the concerns when you cut out big food groups like animal source foods, and how do you address those shortfalls? How do you really make sure they're adequate?" And so I did that, and then I was asked to write a really short section on nutrition throughout the life course as well as part of that. So for me, it was like very I was very honored, and I was anticipating there was going to be lots of controversy around these because, of course, they were not taking up the previous committee's suggestions, and they were starting over from scratch. And so I felt, if I can p- play my role I feel fine about that. Now, process, we did meet regularly to discuss things, but we kinda stayed in our lane with what we were required to do. I didn't go to the protein section and say, "Oh, that-- We should not use that value. One point two is the wrong one. Let's use a different one." So we-- But we did get peer-reviewed feedback from two independent NIH scientists, which was helpful. We had to respond point by point to their feedback, and make changes to the document. So to me, it turned out well. I think I li-- What I liked about it is there's a transparent sort of publication of the exact reviews. And if you go to realfood.gov, you can see this. You see the appendices, which is our direct reviews, with the authors listed who wrote those. You see this sort of forty to fifty-page summary. It's the background evidence document, and that's just a sort of synthesis of all those reviews in a shorter format so that it's a bit more easy to absorb. And then you got the nine-page guidelines document. I will say I was not-- I did not have power to decide what was in the final guidelines document. Now, I think that's pretty typical for how these are done. The scientists do their research and reviews, and then the HHS and USDA work on this final document. So-- But I think it reflects, to the most part, it reflects what was in the reviews. There weren't a lot of, major discrepancies. Of course, it's much shorter, so you can't include all the nuance. But that, I think from my perspective, was-- it was a big step forward. If I think of my top takeaways, I really that we called out highly processed foods. Not just the ultra-processed foods, but the refined fl-- starches as well, or refined grains. And I think that, for the first time actually calling them out was a really, a big step forward. Making the refined grains, that was one where the previous committee had sort of allowed, not that they encouraged, but they allowed up to half of grains from refined. And so I thought that was a good step forward to really restrict as much as possible. And added sugars stronger limits on added sugars, really suggesting that no added sugars is optimal. But if you do have them, keeping them less, less than ten grams per meal, which is, if you were to do the max, that would-- if, at three meals a day, that would be Less than the added sugar that was previous allowed. So I think it's a step in the right direction and hopefully the big takeaway message of just eat a variety of real food is what people take away from it. I'm of the mind that for most of my life, government recommendations about health have largely been driven by giant organizations that sell food or that sell to giant organizations that sell food of some kind. In other words, there's been a real conflict of interest in what the government recommends and what is actually good for us. If that was not true, then we wouldn't have just completely inverted the food pyramid. Have you run into pressure? And if so let's let's name names. I think that food industry is very much involved in, unfortunately, in influencing policy, government. It's a complicated mess, to be honest. I don't think you can eliminate it. I think this-- If you notice that the conflicts of interest, they were stated. Now, the previous committee, they aggregated everything, so you couldn't see which scientist was connected to which conflict. But the recent one, people had conflicts, but they were with the-- mostly with meat and dairy, right? But to me, it's these are commodity groups that produce nutritious products. They're not producing Twinkies. It's not the same... It's not-- To me, it's not the same type of conflict. But I will just acknowledge that pe- we have been criticized on that side. Now, I personally don't take any funding from industry of any kind. And in fact I have n- I can't really do that. As part of my role, I write about animal source foods. I-- we work in the food system in a space where if we were to take funding from big food, it would very much be a conflict. And so I don't have any sort of conflicts in that regard, and I think that's very helpful, and it's ideal. But I also want to just acknowledge th-these sort of conflicts. It's very hard to be a researcher. You can do it where you don't take any money, but-- from industry, but there's not a lot of money to go around and you work so hard to write grants, and you spend all this time, and then you get rejected, and it's just how-- You gotta make a living. So I sort of sympathize with people wanting to be able to find ways to get money a-a-and research done. So I think there's... the thing you should do is try to get as few conflicts of interest as possible, always be transparent, declare them, and, do the best you can. But I think- Yeah for obvious reasons, there is a lot of lobbying from the food industry. So I think that this current administration has stood up to big food in a lot of ways, but I think the criticism, which I can kinda understand, is that they're still favoring animal source foods, right? Whatever, regardless of your view on that sort of approach, there is sort of this the conflicts are on that guard- regard. Now, when you look at the actual guidelines, the, there is not a eat animal source foods over plant source foods. Even the protein section is just kinda listing them out, and it's like consume proteins from these types of foods, right? It doesn't say eat more animal source foods than plants. I think some of the messaging is what people have taken issue with, what is the marketing that's been done, the promotion. Yeah. And, do you, again, I think one of the pushbacks perhaps against this was this sort of, scrapping the whole process essentially, right? Starting over from new, this was. Whereas for the most part, since the original food guidelines came out in 1980 each subsequent revision was just sort of a iteration and built upon the previous one. And like I said, this was very much, we're starting new, starting from first principles around all of this. So I mean, is that something that you thought was necessary? I'm assuming you agree with it 'cause you participated in the process. But maybe how would you answer the critics that said why did we just scrap, 40-plus years of work and think that, we can do better just by starting over?" So first I wanna say, if you look at the scientific foundations report, which is that sort of f- 40 to 50 page report, it goes through and reviews the previous report from the DGAC the Dietary Guidelines for Americans Committee report, that it talks about every point where it's sort of what do we... did we take this recommendation? Do we adjust it? Did we do it partially? Did we not take it, right? And we-- That was sort of written out there. So I think there is a little bit of optics of this was like we threw out the old and we just did it all different, but there's actually quite a lot that's aligned and if you look at previous reports, even the word nutrient density, it's used hundreds of times. I mean, it is very much like there is an emphasis on whole foods, minimally processed foods, and nutrient dense foods. But there are-- I think there's just inherent issues with the system, so there was no calling out of highly processed or ultra processed foods. They wouldn't use that term, right? And so I think the refined, we already talked about this, but the refined grains- I think that those things are hard to get out of there if you just stuck to the same committee or you stuck to this and you tried to say, "Can we make..." I don't think that'd be easy. Now, at the same time, I sympathize with the scientists on the previous committee that worked for 18 months to 24 months working on this sort of thing. I don't think that was done for nothing, but I do think that I would be probably pretty upset if I was, did all that work and then it was like,"We're not gonna use it." So when I've talked to people on that committee, like Christopher Gardner and Deirdre Tobias and I think what's probably surprising to people is that we actually, when you get down, you sit down together and talk about it, you agree about 80, 85, 90%. And so it's presented as like it's all just totally different. I think a lot of it comes down to sort of decisions about what ev- what evidence do you consider, and do you start from a sort of foundation of what's optimal biologically versus what's potential from where we're at? And so some of the previous stuff was very soft 'cause they're saying with the whole grains, it's like we want everyone to consume whole grains if they're gonna consume grains, but we're basically at 17% of the population of the grains consumed are whole grains, the rest are refined grains. So how do you get people to come closer? So I think there's some of that. But yeah, I think starting with a new group of scientists was probably... I mean, it's a painful thing to happen for the scientists in the previous one, but it probably was necessary to really have the freedom to do a new approach and really stand up to some of the issues that were in there. So I think it's, I think it's a good move overall, but I also feel like we want to also not say the previous stuff was garbage and it was terrible and everything w- and it was wrong. I think we wanna talk about it a little bit more constructively because think about, one, how do you get more buy-in? How do you have sustainable changes? How do you bring more people into the tent? And with another administration, you don't want them to just reject and throw out this one. And so I would hope there's a little bit more of a sort of collaborative effort while standing up to some of the pressures, like big food, that get in the way of, I think, just good science. Nick the... One of the things that ended up most excited about was the website Realfood.gov, right? That says it all. And Jack, is a marketer and will probably echo, that was just genius quite frankly to do that. I... Do you know where that came from? Who came up with that idea? I'm just thinking, sitting around in the meetings, and usually, this, a- as far as I know, the old versions of the dietary guidelines would just go up on the USDA website, right? And didn't really have any marketing behind it. We got realfood.gov. We got Mike Tyson doing a Super Bowl commercial talking about eat real food. What's your perspective on that? So I have to say when I was... when the guidelines were released, I was told when they were gonna ver- be released. I hadn't actually seen the final guideline document. No one told me about realfood.gov, so I saw it in real time as anyone who was paying attention to this saw it, and I was very excited because I went to the website and I just started scrolling through. I was like, "This is powerful. This is going to capture people. It's kinda clear. It has a FAQ at the end. You have all the docs there." So I loved it too. I thought that was a really big... I think that was a big change to what we normally do. You don't see this type of marketing from the government in this way. You know who designed it was National Design Studio. So that was started with the... The head of that was the co-founder of Airbnb, Joe Gebbia, and they designed this, and they're redoing other federal websites, but they designed this with a real consumer face- facing approach, which was not the previous attempt. If you look at previous dietary guidelines, they're really geared towards how do you inform the dietician putting together the school meal and whatnot. This clearly has a consumer focus, and I've spoke with some of the officials in the administration about potentially building an app around this sort of nutritional value score reflecting some of the dietary guideline approaches, where you could actually go from for consumers with a personal mobile app. And so that, that excites me as well. You would never... I don't think that would've been a real possibility with previous administrations. And so that opportunity to actually try to reach consumers directly or the population directly, I think is a real game changer. What's the most... god, I hate the word impactful. What is the most, the highest leverage piece of information, and I'm trying to distinguish that from just raw data, for conclusion, that your work has produced to date? Highest leverage piece of information My, so my work looks at, primarily my research has looked at the nutrient density, the nu- the micronutrient deficiencies shortfalls in the diet in that regard. So I have to say the work that I've done, the biggest evidence piece that's been added, the highest impact is to show we have nutrient deficiencies everywhere. In the US, we have nutrient deficiencies. Women of reproductive age, a third of women have iron deficiency. We lack a lot of, if you look at adequacy of choline, it's far below recommendations. Potassium, magnesium, right? There's a lot of nutrient shortfalls. Globally, they're even worse, so there's more. But when you look at that data, you can't deny we're not consuming foods that nourish us. They don't even meet our basic nutrient requirements. So that's the biggest sort of impact from my work. But I think the other piece, which is I sort of have done reviews of this and incorporated this into my nutritional value score, is the chronic disease side of things. I think for the US population, the message, the findings of some of the work of the folks doing randomized controlled trials and the observational studies of ultra-processed foods just consistently showing the link with ultra-processed diets. So diets very high. It's not that you can't have some in moderation, but diets predominantly of ultra-processed foods consistently impact cardiovascular health, diabetes risk, obesity everything, right? Even mental health, cancer. So I think if you were to look at those two together, we're not getting the nutrients we need, and we're consuming foods that make us sick. I think the answer can be eat real whole food. And how you do it, whether it's lower in animal source foods or lower in plant source foods, right? If it's lower in carbs, higher in carbs, lower in fat, higher in fat. That is the big takeaway for me from the evidence of the last few decades is that we have a lot of ways to eat healthy, but we're doing all the wrong things, right? Yeah as someone who just wrote a book focused on nutrient density and bioavailability, obviously I'm going to agree there. It is one of the places where I think we've gone wrong, right? One of the big criticisms around the EAT-Lancet diet for instance that was, has been so heavily promoted was and I forget who did the analysis of it, right? But when you did an analysis that if you ate, the EAT-Lancet diet, you would end up nutrient deficient in like multiple, key areas. And yet these are kind of recommendations that are being pushed out there. And I think ultimately, the whole reason we eat the whole purpose of our food is to get the nutrients that we need, and somehow that sort of got lost in a lot of these thinkings around, dietary guidelines. Yeah. I was the one who led that analysis looking at the EAT-Lancet diet. And to me, like I think... To me it's like the effort behind that is a good intention. I know a lot of the folks in it, they're trying to go from, diets are really terrible right now, and they're recommending minimally processed whole foods. But I think the concern is the nutrient adequacy, and that's why I did that analysis, is that when you go too low in animal source foods, you start having issues with iron, with calcium, with vitamin B12, and even with zinc. We didn't look at every single nutrient available, but those ones stood out. And other studies since have looked at even a review of randomized controlled trials and observational trials. When you look at these sort of environmentally protective, sustainable type diets, they do increase risk for certain nutrient deficiencies. So to me, I agree, I think we need to pay attention to nutrient density, and it's not just an issue in lower income contexts. We see nutrient shortfalls right here in the US. What's the most common nutrient shortfall in the US? For women, I would okay. Depends. I know you're gonna give me- If I- ... a qualified answer. Oh, I'm gonna give you lots, because- I'm fully aware that if I ask you for an answer- ... it needs all kinds of qualifiers. Let me just- Nevertheless... break it down. Nevertheless. So we look at it at three levels, okay? Food supply, so the food that's available for consumption, how much does that fall short of our needs? The diet, so what people are actually consuming at an individual level, how much does that fall short of their needs? And then biomarkers, so nutrient deficiencies in the body. So we don't have data on all those really well all of those levels. But if you look at general- He talks like a scientist. Okay. My lord. When you look at what you eat, we're short on vitamin D Even with sunlight, we have a third of the population deficient in vitamin D, two-thirds depending on what cutoff you use, so a third to two-thirds. Calcium, close to half of the population. Vitamin E, close to half the population. Those are diets, and when the body... when you measure the deficiencies, we only have a handful of actual good data. So for iron, I would say for women really comes out, but other shortfalls, I mean, honestly, vitamin A is a shortfall. You have other nutrients. If you look across, we have 29 essential nutrients. If we had data for all of those, people would be short, and choline, I think 70% do not consume sort of enough choline as well, which is high in eggs. Where does choline come from? That's one I'm Eggs is a really good source. It's the best source. So what what would you hope to see next coming out of these new dietary guidelines? What do you think needs to then start to happen for this to actually have a meaningful impact on our health as a nation? That's the important question, because this is a tiny step towards that because there's so many barriers. I think the levers that we have in terms of policies are what's called procurement. So what do you do for school meals? You get the... we get to decide what gets funded for school meals, so I think that can make a big impact. Military foods, hospital foods, those are all ways that we can start having policies that change which foods are allowed in those. So that's gonna have an impact. That's gonna increase, ideally, an economy of scale, which means that when you have more scale of these foods, these nutritious, nourishing foods, it's going to lower the prices. Theoretically, it should. Now, also, there's these policies in SNAP, so the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. Right now, we ... one of the highest purchases is soda. That's being subsidized by taxpayer dollars. So if you get rid of that, so if you reduce the... you restrict soda, maybe candy, there's other things that you consider restricting as well, that's gonna, that's gonna help as well. And then I think there needs to be... There's a potential cost savings, huge cost savings, if you think about how much we spend on healthcare because we're all so sick, right? My gosh. Oosh. So that is a huge potential, but the thing is we need to invest to make it easy for people to get these foods, to make them desirable. We need to make sure the schools... Like I, I say, we need to change schools, but a lot of schools don't have kitchens that are working. They don't have staff. They don't have infrastructure. They don't have... They're underfunded. So to me, I would wanna see more investment, and then I think you're gonna see savings come from that. Sort of like when you invest in good nutrition- You actually make more money down the road, it's just that you gotta start somewhere with that. So I hope that there's more funding with that, and then we can see, investments going to the right areas as opposed to subsidizing sodas. We should be subsidizing real food. So let me ask a painful question. Given the fact that we s- we see these ultra-processed foods are available in vast quantities in all those places you just named. In other words, places that have, in all likelihood, been approved by somebody in a position of governmental authority. As a scientist, what can you do? And is there anything that, that can be done from the folks like you who are looking at the research, who've got the data, who've come to the i- inescapable scientific conclusion, this stuff doesn't need to be in our government-funded institutions. It's there because of lobbyists. It's there because Coca-Cola pays somebody's s- Senate campaign. Yeah. I'm over-generalizing, but there's no good reason why a diabetic who's in the hospital is having... is being fed a hospital meal that is known to spike their insulin levels. I mean their- their blood sugar levels. And yet that happens a billion times a day in every hospital across this country. If you would've asked me how hopeful I was that the government would stand up to Big Food and change their hospital meals and food, school meals two years ago, I would've said,"That's never gonna happen, like not in my lifetime." But I think what we've seen is really transformative. It's not gonna happen overnight. I know it's slow. But there are policies, state policies in dozens of states that are restricting unhe- sodas in SNAP, for example, that are requiring whole foods in schools. I think it's it's moving in that direction, but it's an uphill battle. And so for me, what can I do? I think a lot of scientists are separate from the policymaking process, so I think the more... I'm starting to engage a little bit more with policymakers. I think that's important. You can try to have more influence. W- what else can you do? You've gotta make things profitable. So the... You can't have any system that's sustainable long-term if people, if there's, if it's not profitable. It has to be economically viable. Yeah. So you have to generate demand for that. You have to shift what people are eating. You have to be able to sell products that people want. So it's complicated, but you can do things. You can incentivize the industry, so you can regulate. You can do that through even this, a food label, right? So if you have a food label where, let's say the NVS was adapted, which we hope to do in the US, and you've got a advisory group to put together something that people agree about, and we're gonna put this label on. So not only is the consumer sort of informed, but it actually means that food companies don't want so much of their products to be scoring poorly or to have something on them that looks like it's discouraging consumption. So that can shift what they invest in. They may choose to try to produce more healthier products. So some of it comes on individuals, some of it comes on changing the incentives. And it's a uphill battle, and there is no easy way to get there. But I would say I'm more optimistic than I was two years ago. And the fact that the Senate and Congress in general is talking about ultra-processed foods- Yeah It's something that we haven't seen before. So that gives me hope. I just wish that we could... I wish that we could just take the science that we know, implement it, and have everything be changed, but it's gonna be a process. Is there a place... I'm sorry, Phil. No. I wanna follow up on the nutritional value score. Is there, i- is there a place where the nutritional value score is accessible for h- for just normal folks to go look and see, you know- Yeah ... what's my 80/20 hamburger score? You know what? The... W- we're working on a full dashboard. We had somebody who developed something that was right after the paper was published so that people can see it. So you can go to nutrient-lab.com, so nutrient-lab.com. And that's really cool because not only can you see the scores for these foods. Now, it's not gonna have all the foods you wanna see. We're working to build that. But it has a couple hundred foods or 300 foods or so, and food groups. And you can actually change the score. So you can s- if you say,"I don't like that you guys penalize saturated fat," you can change that. If you say, "I don't like the weight of fiber," you can change that. A little slider bar, you can change it. So we're going to be expanding this, and we'll have a new website probably coming up- Oh, dear God- in a few months... I just went there. Yeah, it's it is, Okra. Dried okra. Yeah. Ugh. That's the big talking point. Yeah. That's the worst food on the planet. Ugh. My dad had a garden, and I was the the indentured labor that in- that was involved in... And he loved okra. Ugh. Have you had dried okra? Why would I want dried okra? That- 'Cause it's better than, it's better than cooked okra. Everything's better than cooked okra. Asphalt off the bottom of my shoe- ... from a hot pavement- Okra's a very- ... is better... it's a very slimy vegetable. Yeah, I agree. But the dried okra is actually kinda nice. It's kinda like a chip. But he'll tell you. Okay. I'll t- Sounds like Jack will take your word on that one. I'll take your word for it. So I wanted to go back to the kinda this interplay between science and politicians for a minute. The original Senate committee that then led to the dietary guideline committee and the first set of guidelines, right? Famously Senator McGovern leading that committee, right? There was a scientific sort of consensus that we really didn't have enough scientific evidence to make recommendations around what people should be eating. And Senator McGovern, famously said something along the lines of, "We don't have time to wait for the science, so we're just gonna put out some guidelines." Here we are 50 years later, essentially. I believe that was 1977 we're pretty darn close to 50 years later. Do you feel like we have enough scientific evidence to tell people what they should and shouldn't be eating? Yeah, absolutely. I would say that for 90% of the issue, you could say this phrase, you could say, "Eat a variety of nutrient-dense whole foods." That right there is the evidence. I think the evidence is very strong for that. Now, there, there is a lot that we still don't know about which types of ultra-processed foods are the worst. We know sugar-sweetened beverages are at the bottom but there's some things like fortified breakfast cereals, wholewheat bread that has fortification, right? There's a lot of questions about which foods and types of processing. So those types of questions can get worked out. They shouldn't prevent us from acting on what we know. And so in general, I think if you are able to sort of make policies and interventions that try to moderate or limit ultra-processed foods and produce a variety of minimally processed whole foods, you're gonna be 90% of the way there. I really think that, and I th- I would say the biggest barriers are not the science at this point in terms of the biology of what is healthy, but it's the social science and the economics of how do you get that to happen, the behavior change. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, there's no doubt about that. It'd be... Since we know for a fact that that big food has laboratories full of scientists who are working to make e- everything that comes out of their plastic bags- essentially addictive. We're fighting against that. But, Yeah ... this is good. I'll confess, this was a much better conversation than I was anticipating. And this nutrient-lab.com, folks, check it out. In spite of the fact that they think dried okra is supposed to be good for you. Okay, there's no science behind my, what I just said. But yeah- ... seriously well done website that is instantly able to communicate the nutritional value of the stuff you're putting in your mouth. I'm impressed. Really- Well- Really impressed... yeah, I've certainly been impressed by all the work that Ty has been doing. I think you are one of the more reasonable voices in this whole discussion pretty consistently. That's what's attracted me to the work that you've been doing. Why don't you tell people where they can find out more about the work you're doing, where they can follow you, and maybe even contribute to some of the work that you're doing. Like you said, funding this is a challenge. Yeah. So tybeale.com is my website. You can find links there. On socials, I'm usually TyBealePhD, is my handle. So you feel free to contact me or get in touch there. Yeah, funding is the trick, we certainly need funding to do this work. Building the database to make this scoring system available I think is really important, but again, I'm not gonna take it from Kellogg's or Unilever, it has to, it'd have to be from a bit of a more less conflicted funding source. But we are in talks with funders right now, so hoping to see more of that in the future. Really cool. I love this website. I'm gonna bookmark this one. It's good to see as I scroll down here skimmed milk. Skimmed milk scores higher than whole milk. Huh. By definition, it's more nutrient dense. Now it's, it's- Oh, okay. Yeah. All right.'Cause it's nutrient density per quantity. Okay. All right. That makes sense. Mass, volume, and calories. Yep. That makes sense. Crustaceans. What are crustaceans? Crustaceans are like shrimp- Shrimp lobster, shellfish. Gotcha. Okay. My, my beloved beef is almost as high as crustaceans, And if you look there, you got, I think there's... I don't know if it's on this one or if it's on another one. We have more data that's not on this site. We have so we have goat. Yeah, goat is a little higher, but we have venison. So it depends on the type of... You have buffalo. Buffalo scores really well. Sure. 80s, I think it said 80, 82. Now, that would be because it's lower in fat, it's just a leaner meat. Leaner, more nutrient dense, yeah. Okay. That makes- Again, it's not to say, it's not to say this scoring system is not to say you have to have lean everything. That's not- ... that's not what it's saying. But it's sort of like by design, that's what it's gonna show. Understood. But if you notice, fatty fish is interesting- because fat is higher in calories per gram- Per gram per nutrients too ... by definition, it's going to be lower in- Yeah nutritional density. But if you notice, lean fish scores lower than fatty fish. Yeah. I actually- There's a few reasons- I did notice that... a few reasons for that. So one is that lean fish is typically without the skin, it's a filet, often a white fish. So it really doesn't have as many micronutrients. The fatty fish, so you get benefited because you've got the omega-3 content, but also a lot of them are gonna have vitamin D, vitamin A, other nutrients. If you have the small fish, you're getting the calcium. If you consume them whole with the eyes, it's the vitamin A from there. So you, so there's more nutritional content within the fatty fish, and that actually shows up in the score as well. Interesting. I also noticed that most of the vegetables that my dad loved, no, it's not that bad. The okra drive me crazy. Yep. And the zucchini. God, we grew a lot of zucchini. Ugh. We're gonna make sure that Jack puts some dried okra on his burger tonight just ... he can experience it. Oh. Well- They used to have these dried okra at Trader Joe's. I haven't seen them there, but they're actually pretty tasty, but the problem is that they're, there's oil in there, so-... you have to deal with that. Oh. All right. Our guest has been Dr. Ty Biel. He's a PhD, not an MD. And I'm gonna make sure this, these various websites show up in the show notes. I've already looked at them, and I'm real impressed, both the realfood.gov and the nutrient-lab.com. I encourage our listeners, check it out. It's gonna be good. All right. For Dr. Philip Ovadia, this has been Stay Off My Operating Table. We appreciate y'all joining us, and we look forward- To talking to you next time