Ultra-Processed Food, Fiber, and the Fight Over Food Policy

Barry: What happened is I was working with the FDA on a warning label for ultra-processed foods, but the food companies got to Trump, so no policy was going to come out of the movement. Now they have to do research. What we were doing that we had proven worked and were using in other countries, they're now researching in our country, even though the research has already been done here and elsewhere.

Brent: Welcome to Death Clock. I'm your host, Brent Franson. Today we speak with Doctor Barry Popkin. We had set out to have a conversation about fiber, but it ends up being a conversation about diet and public health. We talk a lot about what the Trump administration and Robert Kennedy are doing in the Make America Healthy movement.

Brent: What's going well? What's going poorly? Doctor Popkin is the W. R. Kenan Jr. Distinguished Professor of Nutrition at the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health. He holds a doctorate in agricultural economics, has given hundreds of lectures, and has been involved in public policy since the '70s. He's a great guest to help us understand what's been happening in Big Food and Big Ag, why processed food has been such an issue for us, and how we can think about public policy to help people eat healthier and live longer.

Brent: I hope you enjoy!

Brent: Doctor Barry Popkin, welcome to the show.

Barry: My pleasure.

Brent: I'm excited to have you on. You've had an amazing career. Today I want to talk about fiber—something I've been thinking a lot about—processed food, whether we're getting enough, and how we should think about it. But before we do that, can you give us a sense of your background?

Barry: By training, I was an economist, but I've been working on food and nutrition since the 1960s. I did some work early on, incorporated nutrition into the Head Start program, and started working with the Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs on food stamps and school feeding legislation.

Barry: I've been involved in U.S. food work for a very long time. I got my PhD after taking a few years off for community organizing in the '60s, and I've been very focused on nutrition ever since. All my research has been around that. I've lived in India, the Philippines, and a number of other Asian, African, and Latin American countries, living overseas for six to ten years total over a long period.

Barry: I've been involved in U.S. food policy more recently with the FDA under MAHA, so I've had various linkages over time.

Brent: Maybe we can quickly touch on or summarize the nutrition transition. You were an early canary in the coal mine regarding the health issues caused by changing diets, more processed foods, and high-fructose corn syrup. You've been warning people about their impact on health for over 30 years.

Brent: Since the beginning of the '90s. Can you speak a bit about what we used to eat, how our food supply transitioned, and the impact that has had on health?

Barry: If we go back to any time in the post-World War II period through the '50s and '60s, Americans pretty much ate minimally processed food. White bread was refined and soft bread began then, but grain-based cereals were not heavily ultra-processed.

Barry: Rice Krispies were popped, Corn Flakes were cooked, and it was a whole different world. But beginning mainly in the 1970s, food companies found new ways through modern food science to process basic grains—corn, wheat, rice—and proteins like soybeans down to the cellular level.

Barry: They would take these foods apart to the cellular level, reconstitute the slurries with colors, flavors, and additives, and make them look and taste like the foods we used to eat, creating ultra-processed foods.

Barry: At the same time, higher- and middle-educated white Americans in the '50s and '60s ate a high-fat diet and had early heart disease. Education led them to shift toward a healthier diet and seek medical care.

Barry: Their non-communicable disease rates went down. Meanwhile, lower-educated groups shifted away from healthy traditional diets—rice, beans, grains, and vegetables—and their health outcomes worsened.

Barry: In the '70s, new media—TV, radio, billboards—pushed junk food, sugary beverages, and snacks in a massive way. A whole new sector of eating changed in America.

Barry: Snacking shifted to ready-to-eat and ready-to-heat foods. Snack bars and other items grew, and Americans started replacing meals with junk food snacks.

Barry: We went from having one or two small snacks a day in the '50s and '60s to 40% of Americans snacking 5 to 8 times a day by 2000. Snacking penetrated the U.S., then the UK and Australia, and eventually other high- and middle-income countries globally.

Barry: This change in eating frequency drove energy intake far more than portion sizes or energy density. Portion sizes played a smaller role than media like Super Size Me suggested.

Barry: Frequent eating occasions were the biggest driver. Over half of Americans eat three or more snacks a day, and 25% consume the equivalent of five meals daily. A large subpopulation eats constantly.

Barry: Much of what they eat is ultra-processed and increasingly unhealthy, leading to nearly 30% of Americans having a high BMI and severe obesity.

Barry: As we moved away from real food to ultra-processed food, we ate fewer fruits and vegetables and more refined carbohydrates. Fiber intake plummeted across America.

Brent: So you're saying that while meal sizes grew slightly, the main issue is that we're snacking more throughout the day, rather than lunch just being much larger?

Barry: For some, meals are slightly bigger and explain part of the calorie change, but eating occasions explain much more.

Brent: It's the number of eating events—going from three meals to five meals a day—combined with heavily processed content that makes it worse, rather than just plate size at meals.

Barry: Right. A large proportion of Americans hardly cook. Food preparation dropped from a couple of hours a day in the '40s and '50s to about 29 minutes today.

Barry: Most people rely on ready-to-eat prepared foods.

Brent: We all know ultra-processed foods are bad, but why specifically are they so harmful?

Barry: There are two components: processing itself and nutrient content. When you disassemble intact grains or seeds into a slurry and rebuild them with colors and flavors, you strip away the fiber and make the food hyper-digestible.

Barry: This super-digestibility leaves us hungry again right away because it bypasses normal satiety. Second, combining additives with excessive sodium, added sugar, and unhealthy saturated fats creates hyper-palatable foods.

Barry: If you go to the center aisles of a grocery store, about 98% of ready-to-eat cereals are ultra-processed. Plain oats are an exception, but granolas and most box cereals are ultra-processed.

Barry: Just a few things. The granolas, all the other stuff ultra processed. But it looks like real food.

Brent: So it's stripped of nutrition, reconstituted to look like real food, and leaves you unsatiated. What is fiber, and why is it so important?

Brent: And I just want to continue to eat more. And then the second piece is why does the fiber matter? Weight. Like what is fiber and why is why is fiber important?

Barry: Fiber slows digestion and promotes satiety. It is critical for gut motility, bowel health, and preventing gastrointestinal issues caused by low-fiber diets.

Barry: Without enough fiber, people rely more on medications for digestion and stomach motility. Humans evolved eating high-fiber diets for thousands of years.

Barry: Then, between 1960 and today, we abruptly shifted from high-fiber real food to ultra-processed diets globally. Our biology hasn't adapted to this shift.

Barry: And and it creates some of the noncommunicable related diseases related to fiber intake and related to our digestive system and so forth.

Brent: Many health issues stem from living in an environment our biology wasn't designed for. Is the debate over dietary labels (vegan vs. carnivore, Mediterranean vs. keto) missing the point compared to processed vs. unprocessed?

Barry: The Mediterranean diet is historically the healthiest—plenty of vegetables, fruit, whole grains, fish, and moderate meat. Other diets like Atkins or Carnivore cause short-term weight loss mainly by shedding water weight, but high-meat diets can cause long-term kidney and cardiovascular strain.

Barry: Diets built on real fruits, vegetables, and whole foods are fundamentally healthy. However, you can also construct an unhealthy diet out of whole foods if you rely excessively on saturated fats like beef tallow instead of healthy plant oils.

Barry: There is a lot of confusion in the MAHA movement regarding what constitutes a healthy diet and which fats are beneficial versus harmful.

Barry: And what's a real diet that creates health and what they think from their different sign. People that expose something or another are bad for you.

Brent: Are you saying the MAHA movement has it right about diet, or are they confused?

Barry: They get parts of it right. Their focus on moving away from ultra-processed foods toward real food hits the mark. However, pushing beef tallow over seed oils is misguided. Tallow is high in saturated fat, whereas oils from olive, avocado, corn, or walnut are significantly better for cardiovascular health.

Barry: We need to transition away from ultra-processed products and demand convenient, minimally processed real foods.

Barry: We already have pre-washed salads and baby carrots. We can expand that to frozen and prepped whole foods, as was common in earlier decades.

Brent: Even if we're skeptical of MAHA's specifics, isn't some skepticism justified? Public health policy previously demonized fat, leading to low-fat processed alternatives that were worse. Red meat was vilified, yet processed foods turned out to be far more damaging.

Brent: Public health has a history of demonizing certain foods, only for the replacements to end up being worse. Do you agree?

Barry: That is correct in several instances. When public health targeted fat, the food industry responded with refined, high-sugar, low-fat products that were very unhealthy. We should have encouraged healthy unsaturated oils instead.

Barry: Early margarines contained trans fats, making them worse than butter. Science evolved, and newer margarines removed trans fats. Knowledge improves over time.

Barry: Another example is high-fructose corn syrup. About 15 clinical trials in the U.S. and Europe demonstrated that high-fructose corn syrup has the same metabolic impact on the body as sucrose (table sugar).

Barry: Early on, George Bray and I published a hypothesis questioning whether high-fructose corn syrup was uniquely harmful. Subsequent research showed it wasn't worse than regular sugar, but critics like MAHA still single it out.

Barry: Science progresses, and guidelines must adapt. Mistakes happen when early hypotheses are acted upon prematurely, as when industry created hyper-processed low-fat foods.

Brent: Even if metabolic effects are similar to sugar, didn't the introduction of cheap high-fructose corn syrup drive up overall sugar consumption?

Barry: It became widespread in beverages because sugar import quotas made corn syrup cheaper in the U.S. As soda consumption surged, high-fructose corn syrup intake surged with it.

Barry: Replacing high-fructose corn syrup with sucrose doesn't make sodas healthy. Mexican Coke uses cane sugar, but its metabolic impact is identical for the same calorie content.

Barry: Mexican cola, for example, is made with regular sugar. That's for the same calorie content. It has the same no different biological effect.

Brent: We have an epidemic of obesity and type 2 diabetes. Among lifestyle factors, added sugar is a primary culprit, right?

Barry: Absolutely. Added sugar, sodium, and saturated fats are three major things we need to reduce. However, targeting only high-fructose corn syrup just leads manufacturers to substitute sucrose, which misses the point.

Barry: It's misleading.

Brent: In 1950, a family ate significantly less added sugar overall, even if they had dessert. Are we eating more sweet foods, or has cheap sweetener allowed industry to sneak sugar into unexpected products?

Brent: And so is it that we're eating more sugary things, things that we would think of as dessert or mechanisms like high fructose corn sirup have enabled them to put sugar in things that it wasn't previously, and in the past.

Barry: The biggest driver was liquid calories—people began drinking sugar in huge quantities. At its peak, 60% to 70% of added sugar intake came from beverages. Higher-educated groups largely stopped drinking sugary sodas, first shifting to diet drinks and then to sparkling water.

Barry: That drove the sparkling water boom. However, middle- and lower-educated demographics haven't reduced sugary drink consumption to the same degree, except in cities that implemented sugary drink taxes.

Barry: Where taxes were introduced, consumption dropped significantly, a trend seen internationally as well.

Barry: So you have two populations, the higher educated people who are concerned about health and have the money and the will, willpower and so forth to come eat healthier, drink healthier beverages have shifted the lower educated middle educated blacks? Not so much.

Brent: It seems less about race and more about socioeconomic status overall.

Barry: Socioeconomics play a major role, but relying on ultra-processed foods spans the income spectrum to varying degrees.

Brent: Is cost the primary barrier—that healthy food is more expensive, driving lower-income families toward cheaper, processed foods?

Barry: That is a significant factor, though options like frozen vegetables remain affordable. The food industry stopped producing minimally processed staples and heavily marketed ultra-processed products due to high profit margins.

Barry: Global conglomerates—Nestlé, Danone, Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, General Mills, Kraft Heinz—dominated distribution and marketing.

Brent: Their marketing machinery produced cheap food and made it ubiquitous.

Barry: Subsidizing healthy foods alone isn't enough because cooking skills have declined dramatically. Many people no longer know how to prepare fresh food.

Barry: In college classrooms across demographics, a large portion of students don't cook at all. In the UK under Tony Blair, we helped install teaching kitchens in middle schools so every student learned basic cooking skills.

Barry: Teaching fifth and sixth graders how to cook vegetables and basic meals was very successful. It equipped them to manage whole foods.

Barry: We don't have people that know that very much. The skills are being lost and it's, it's all part of these trends. And you can prepare food, you can either carve a tomato or you can open a can.

Brent: We choose convenience and speed, which often correlates with less healthy options. What is your broad assessment of MAHA? Is it a step forward or backward?

Barry: It's both. Bringing attention to ultra-processed foods is a step forward. Pushing tallow over plant oils and focusing heavily on artificial dyes is a distraction. Food manufacturers can easily replace banned synthetic dyes with natural colors without changing product healthfulness.

Barry: If warning labels were required on all products containing artificial additives, flavorings, and colorings, that would meaningfully discourage ultra-processed foods.

Barry: Industry can't sell the stuff looking like it is after they have to process it.

Brent: Public health debates often fall along partisan lines. Setting politics aside, our pre-MAHA trajectory was poor, with obesity rates around 40% and rising chronic disease. Doesn't public health policy need an outsider to shake things up?

Brent: Clearly, pre Maha, we weren't doing a good job. I mean we've got a we've got epidemics and obesity and type two diabetes. And I mean and also all of these preventative diseases are at these crazy high levels mean obesity is at 38, 40%. It's hard to imagine that they can get any higher. And so it doesn't feel like we brought in this disruptive figure who's disrupting this public health policy that was just perfect.

Brent: And creating these amazing outcomes. And don't we need a an outsider, a maverick to kind of shake things up because the results were so bad.

Barry: In some ways, yes. Elevating the discussion around ultra-processed foods on a national level has been constructive. Individual states banning specific food dyes won't make a major difference, but policy changes like California requiring real food in school meal programs represent real progress.

Barry: Ultra processed food like California has required real food now in the school lunch programs. That is a huge change that would really help educate kids and create much healthier meals for children at school. So there are two sides. And yes, Ma has created some good and some bad coming out that 18 or so states that are banning one die or another, mainly mainly Republican state.

Barry: It's not going to have any effect.

Brent: How do you view this through a policy lens? One perspective holds that free markets will solve it as consumer demand shifts toward healthier options like Whole Foods or sparkling waters. The counter-argument is that government intervention—taxes on sugary drinks, mandatory school cooking programs—is required. Which approach works better?

Brent: And government just needs to stay out of it and let these trends happen. They're going to trickle their way down the socioeconomic spectrum. And all that's going to happen. There would be a second argument which would say, look, we've been taxing the sugary beverages and that's worked. We need to force the kids in school to learn about cooking.

Brent: And so based on your experience in public policy, do you think a heavier hand, you know, a government top down, imposed view on on health is more important, more taxation, more government programs to help steer this year or do you think, I don't know. You know, less is better.

Barry: My group works globally on food policy. In Chile, mandatory front-of-package warning labels, removing ultra-processed foods from schools, and marketing restrictions reduced sugar intake by 33%, sodium by 25%, and overall calories by 23% in three years.

Barry: Colombia implemented similar warning labels and added a tax on ultra-processed foods. In the U.S., market-driven shifts toward whole foods only reach a small percentage of the population.

Barry: The biggest shift in U.S. grocery purchases currently comes from GLP-1 weight-loss medications reducing appetite, rather than voluntary dietary changes across the general population.

Barry: I worked with Mark Hyman and the FDA on a proposed front-of-pack warning label for ultra-processed foods.

Barry: However, lobbying from food companies stalled regulatory implementation. Instead of adopting proven label policies, the administration commissioned further domestic research.

Barry: That's all Marcus doing on any policy, including pesticides and so forth.

Brent: Warning labels on food sound similar to tobacco control policies. The drop in smoking rates was a major public health victory. Do front-of-package warning labels work similarly for food?

Brent: Isn't that insane? And, you know, now that's that's a ridiculous concept.

Barry: And the warning labels come from tobacco use, but did.

Brent: They work, do we think?

Barry: Yes.

Brent: Why people stop smoking.

Barry: Yes. Warning labels, taxation, and public education combined reduced smoking rates significantly. Based on that evidence, over a dozen countries—including Canada, Israel, and Chile—have adopted front-of-pack food warning labels, with more following.

Barry: In the U.S., corporate influence continues to stall mandatory warning labels. Clear labels allow consumers and institutions—like schools in Mexico—to easily identify and phase out ultra-processed foods.

Barry: If they were allowed, the Maha could have done some things that would have helped educate Americans on ultra processed food. It may impact only a small impact at first, but it would grow and it would have an impact on states and others. We've seen it in these other countries. We now have in Mexico, which has warning labels. Schools have taken over in banning the food with warning labels on them.

Barry: So these changes multiply. If you have an easy vehicle to help you identify unhealthy foods.

Brent: The template mirrors tobacco control: clear warnings, taxation, independent research, and public messaging showing the long-term health risks.

Brent: The research. It wasn't the crooked research Marlboro was doing. We put out real research. Hey, there's no question you're going to be much more likely to get lung cancer. This stuff kills you. And we need to do the same with with processed food.

Barry: Exactly. Multiple clinical trials demonstrate that ultra-processed foods activate neurochemical reward pathways in the brain similarly to addictive substances, prompting psychologists to classify them as addictive foods.

Barry: Addictive. Yeah. And you.

Brent: You can feel the addictive nature of hyper-palatable foods. Nobody binges on plain broccoli or un-salted nuts because natural satiety signals kick in quickly.

Brent: You're at no risk of eating too much broccoli or too many nuts or too much steak. If you don't have salt on your nuts, you know, it's like you don't even think about it. You put some in, you eat a little bit of it and then you move on. It's not a question, right?

Barry: A handful of whole nuts promotes fullness, whereas ultra-processed snacks bypass satiety signals, making overeating easy.

Brent: Yeah. And you don't. You're not going to you're not worried about you're going to sit on the couch like you might be worried about eating the whole gallon of ice cream, the whole, you know, the whole, box, you know, or the whole bag of broccoli. It's just it doesn't interact with you. It doesn't fire those reward loops in your brain in the same way.

Brent: So you can pay attention to, like, who? When am I, like, excited and want more? That's probably not very good at me. For me, when is it like, oh, okay, I've had enough and it's fine, but I want to come back to this point on on Trump. So what you're what you're saying is, hey, mom has got a lot of this, right?

Brent: Specifically as it relates to processed foods. Of course, they're talking about a lot of different things, but in the context of processed foods. But they go to Trump and they say, hey, let's put warning labels on the food. And then the food industry, big food gets to Trump. And they say, no, no, no, don't do that, I don't know.

Brent: We're going to give you some, we're going to donate some money or whatever. And then Trump doesn't do it. So they their hands are tied behind their back.

Barry: Pressure from Big Food and Big Ag limited policy action, shifting the focus primarily toward research reports and academic meetings rather than enforceable regulatory mandates.

Brent: Why didn't Biden do it?

Barry: The Biden administration focused primarily on economic recovery, leaving major food policy changes aside. FDA leadership hesitated to pursue aggressive front-of-pack labeling rules out of concern over congressional pushback.

Barry: And once it got mixed. But even before we didn't have, they were just afraid they'd been burned a number of times historically, until the policy people wanted to put something through on warning on labels. That was simple, like healthy or something and but wasn't really about all to process. The food wasn't really that much about good nutrition. It was a little bit better.

Brent: Looking ahead, is public health trajectory moving in the right or wrong direction overall?

Barry: The U.S. remains on a concerning trajectory compared to European and Latin American nations that have enacted mandatory warning labels and marketing restrictions.

Brent: Yeah. And then so has Trump. Two. Is has it been much worse from a public health policy perspective, in your opinion, than than his first term?

Barry: Absolutely. He had professionals in charge of health and human Services, FDA, CDC and so forth. His second term around he has my people, MAGA people mainly, except Omaha people in in FDA and so forth. He is worse now. Much worse.

Brent: And do you think there's no truth to the vaccine stuff? Meaning there does seem to be some increase in the number of vaccines we've been getting. Do we need this? Many? Are the side effects well studied enough? I mean, it seems like there's some obvious things like measles, etc. which seem crazy, but is there is there any truth there that like, we're over vaccinated or it's just no, all the vaccine, the.

Barry: Only country that doesn't do what we used to do, it's Denmark, but Denmark sees the children 3 or 4 times every year. With its amazing health care system. They have opted for less vaccines and then personal life. It depends on the child, but the child may get all the vaccines, but they're not required. And that's up to each doctor and pediatrician when they see the child.

Barry: But every other country in Europe does the same level vaccines that we used to do, because they're all involved in the same science and they're all want to base their vaccine policy on real science. And what the Maha movement done, particularly Kennedy, because they hate vaccines. It's working his best to make vaccines seen bad. We've now got at least 15, if not 18 or 20 countries states with that with measles epidemics right now and the number going to grow by the end of the of the 2026, I bet you every state will have had major measles outbreaks, because we have a whole hunk of people who no longer want to get their kids vaccinated.

Brent: Yeah, I mean, but where this became, I've got four kids and I've got a newborn and somebody, you know, raised the comment to me, which I think makes a lot of sense. Why are you giving your newborn a hepatitis B vaccine? That's something I'd only last ten years. B you can only get it from, you know, intravenous intravenous drug use or from if mom has hep B, why?

Brent: And that to me is a good question on my K, because I broadly would live under this mandate of like, don't put things on your body. You don't have to.

Barry: But happy vaccines last a lot longer than you're saying. And the reality is that we have subgroups of America that are quite vulnerable. And you can't we don't have a health system where everybody's in it, so we can't do something that affects that. So 10% of the population isn't impacted or 20. We need to do something that everybody getting.

Barry: It's the only way we can do policy here when we have such a varied lifestyle for so many different people.

Brent: There's a lowest common denominator problem, which is which is where I think the origin of this do your own research comes from because there is some truth to that in terms of what you're saying. If you're in a population that doesn't need to be concerned about happy, it's up for you to know that and to say no thank you to the vaccine.

Barry: Right. But when it comes to measles and I yeah, remember Syria, mumps, rubella, all these things, if, if we have 5% that don't get it, let alone 10%, everybody's going to get contact. It takes a large proportion of the population to have the vaccine to protect everyone. And you're going to see you're seeing adults as well with children getting it.

Barry: And we're we've only had a few deaths, but we're going to have more.

Brent: Yeah. Because we're at what, a few thousand cases or something so far. Yeah.

Barry: But now we're moving on 10 to 20,000 and else that happens, we're going to see more deaths. We had hundreds of hospitalizations it last year. We're going to move up to thousands.

Brent: Yeah. And so yeah because I can't I mean it's we can we can end on the on the politics of this. But it's the thing that's been hard for me to wrap my head around is who do you blame? Because in some way, RFK, Trump, they're a reaction to the opposite. You know, a lot of Trump is just a reaction to basically a Democratic party.

Brent: I think that had kind of lost its way in its own way. I think. I don't I don't think we've got a lot of great politics on either side right now. And so there's a reactive piece. Our public health policy wasn't very good. We've got this crisis in preventative health. And so the pendulum swings the other way. And unfortunately it seems across the board we've struggled for the pendulum to just settle nicely in the middle.

Brent: It's either really bad in this one way or really bad in this other way, and it seems hard to find a solution. It feels like it's just going to swing back after.

Barry: Okay, except what's happening is now the whole rubric of public health the measurement, the record keeping, the storage of data to understand when we're getting epidemics, understand what the problem has been. It's being destroyed by them at the same time, we have food based out, problems. We have other things going on with water supplies and other things.

Barry: And that's been destroyed. That infrastructure and the vaccine infrastructure, a lot of the drug companies, because they know they save money by vaccinating kids, are continuing to provide the support for but only for those who want the vaccines. So the problem is between my heart and all of that, we're now getting an increasing percentage of people, not only in the US, but we've ignited the same in camp and Canada.

Barry: Kendra has an outbreak of measles from non vax people who got the idea from the US.

Brent: Yeah. And so so you're saying there's some irreversible damage happening here. It's one thing if you've got an administration that's not as proactive as they could be let's say what was happening in the Biden administration okay fine. Public health policy would have been better then. But there's no irreversible damage. They're doing here. We're seeing some irreversible or hard to reverse damage to these institutions.

Barry: Absolutely. And that can lead to a lot of other health problems. We're already getting some outbreaks of certain other enter things that are water based and so forth in different parts of the country. But we can't we don't have measurements of it. So it's localized and that knowledge doesn't pass to other areas like it used to. Now the main people checking on sanitation and other stuff are different universities in different states that are studying it in their own population, but they don't pass it to the national registries.

Barry: So we don't know. And other states don't learn from the problem to correct their water supply. So we are going to have more problems from health in the next decade because of what's happened now before, we can never get the system working well again.

Brent: And so as as we wrap, what's your, what are you focused on next? I mean, your focus obviously, on the public policy side, I mean, is that should that be the main focus here, how we do it on the public policy side? How can we think about it on the private on the private sector side?

Barry: We're not going to get the private sector to do this without the public sector requiring it. The private sector won't do anything unless they're either food, and they're going to be legal suits against some of the food companies. Sooner or later, one of them is going to work, and we'll begin to see an onslaught of ledgers of of lawsuits.

Barry: And that will happen because for too long, we've let the private sector kill us, essentially, and we don't need that. We need to go back to them producing food the way they used to. That's healthier for America and healthier for every population.

Brent: Well, Doctor Barry Popkin, thank you so much for your time, and thank you for your outspoken advocacy here and a career, fighting the good fight on behalf of public health. I really enjoyed it.

Barry: Thank you very much. Bye bye.

Brent: Death Clock is recorded in Boulder, Colorado and San Francisco, California. Produced by Patrick Gudino, music by Patrick Lee, and hosted by Brent Franson, founder and CEO of Death Clock.