1116: Fake Foods | Skeptical Sunday

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Standard exclusions apply. Welcome to Skeptical Sunday.
I'm your host, Jordan Harbinger. Today I'm here with Skepticalical Sunday co-host, writer and researcher Jessica Nguyen.
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Today, Fritos, figs, french fries, foie gras, and fondue. The line between what's real food and what's fake food is kind of blurry.
What are we consuming at each meal? How can we unravel the tangled web of ingredients and intentions and consequences of the food we eat? From lab-grown meats to artificial flavors. How do fake foods

affect our health, environment, society? We are uninformed about the food we eat and the labels and marketing schemes make food all the more confusing. Writer Jessica Wynn joins me for a feast of knowledge and skepticism about fake foods.
All right. Bon appetit, everybody.
Yeah. Hey, Jordan.
So do you know the healthiest rule of shopping in a supermarket? No. What is that? Stick to the perimeter.
So think about it. Anything down an aisle is likely processed, but the perimeter is where we find fresh fruits, vegetables, meats and fish.
So staying out of the aisles eliminates a lot of fake food choices. Yeah, that's true.
The middle aisles, that's where all the good stuff is. That's where the Pop-Tarts are.
But let's be clear, when we say fake foods, I'm not talking about decorative fruit or plastic for a drawing, and I'm not even talking about something that might just be frozen. What are we talking about when we say fake foods? Yeah, it's a pretty wide spectrum.
So fake food refers to imitation or synthetic food, like any food that mimics the look, taste, texture, or nutritional profile of natural foods. Think foods with hydrogenated oils, additives, artificial sweeteners, and flavors.
Okay, so anything with the word artificial is probably a giveaway. Yeah,

and that word shows up a lot in our ingredient lists. There's also plant-based meat alternatives,

molecular milk, processed cheese, lab-grown meat. They're all fake foods.
Our food sounds high-tech

molecular milk. I don't even know what that is, but it sounds like something.
Milk from the future.

It is milk from the future, for sure. A really complicated process of manipulating molecules.
Like a huge percentage of what we eat is engineered, and we do it by using a combination of synthetic ingredients, additives, and different processing techniques. So fake foods are trying to replicate the sensory experience of real fresh food without using the same ingredients or production methods.
So is this just a modern phenomenon? Is it just as we get the technology, this gets worse? I think people like to think that processed foods are fairly new, but processing food, it's an ancient technique and it's shaped human physiology. So humans are the only species that process their foods.
We are like processivores. And compared to animals of our size, we have tiny jaws, tiny teeth and tiny intestinal tracts.
So humans develop techniques and tools to make food easier to chew and digest,

like mashing and cooking using grinders and knives,

salting and curing, smoking, anything that makes food edible and delicious.

Cooking, I hadn't thought about that.

We're the only species that cooks.

There's no animal kingdom cooking show.

We've always processed food, I guess, as long as we've been throwing meat on the fire.

I had not thought about it like that. So what is the difference today? Because obviously it's worse.
Yeah, of course. There's processed foods like we process them when we're cooking, but they're not the same as ultra processed foods.
So this is super, super important to understand. Processed foods are what we've always done.
And any kind of processing changes how our bodies metabolize the food. But we've known since the 70s when it was found through studies that the body reacts differently to eating a whole apple versus eating a mashed apple versus eating just the juice.
And the only time it doesn't spike our sugar is when we eat the whole apple. It's that balance of the fiber and the sugars our body needs.
So whole foods are what our bodies are designed to digest. Interesting that just chopping an apple is enough processing to change our body's digestion.
I know. And ultra processing affects our body's reaction even more.
Okay. So what is ultraprocessing compared to processing? Ultraprocessing is when we eat things that have never been in the human diet before, like modern chemicals.
There's an agreed upon, like, simple definition for ultraprocessed foods. It's wrapped in plastic with at least one ingredient that you wouldn't find in a standard home kitchen.
Thinking of what the ingredient list looked like on the foods in my kitchen, I feel like a lot of this stuff is ultra-processed, for sure. Yeah.
And our food is labeled around what we all think of as the components of nutrition, right? Salt, sugar, carbs, fat, protein, and fiber. But research shows food is more than that.
It's what we do to the food, like how processed it is that matters. In 2019, a hypothesis was tested where researchers designed two diets and they tested two groups.
One group was fed 80% of their calories from ultra-processed foods and the other 0%. It was the same sugar, the same carbs, the same fat, same everything.
The ultra processed foods group, they ate an average of 500 calories more a day. So the studies suggest that there's something else about ultra processed foods that drive people to overeat because calorie for calorie, the diets were exactly the same.
That's almost like tricking our brains from the sound of it. Yeah, it absolutely is.
Like animals are all attracted to the food they need and humans are no different. It's how we survive.
But flavor is like nature's language of nutrition. And flavor molecules are how the nutritional value of food is communicated to our brain.
So ultra-processed foods, they're introducing brand new molecules that have never been in our diet before. And then there's new formulations of ancient molecules that have never been tried.
And this is all problematic because we have an internal evolved system that isn't good at dealing with these new molecules because there's just no blueprint in our brains and bodies for what we do with them. Okay, so what do our bodies then end up doing when they get new molecules? Yeah, it gets confusing because when our taste buds send a message of, say, orange flavor to our brains, our body prepares for vitamin C.
But if it's an artificial orange flavor with no vitamin C, the body doesn't know what to do with the information. When we fool our brains like this over and over, the brain and the body's ability to metabolize food, it goes all out of whack.
I know this is connected to why we've seen a rise in obesity, because obesity isn't just from inactivity, but research indicates obesity is more from the food we are eating. Yeah, absolutely.
We all burn the same amount of calories a day, pretty much. But we absorb these ultra processed foods very quickly.
So we eat them really fast and we get the calories faster than our bodies can realize we're full. And then when you have sweetness without sugar and smoothness without fat and savory without protein, it's just messing with our taste buds.
Like we evolved to have an incredibly balanced diet. And so when you keep fooling your brain, it's just trying to balance things out.
Okay, so if that orange flavor has little to no nutrition, your brain tells you, hey, you got to eat more of this because there's barely any vitamin C in here. We're not detecting any vitamin C.
This, I assume, works out well for food companies who just want you to eat as much as possible. So it's a great business plan, but sounds like a really bad health plan.
That's 100% true. It's a lot of profit.
And if you start really reading ingredient lists, you'll notice a pattern where the first ingredient is typically a commodity crop, like the top four are rice, soy, wheat, and corn. And then there's a commodity oil like palm or sunflower.
I know a lot of those commodity crops are grown at scale for feeding farm animals. So why are they in my food too? Yeah, well, they grow so much of it for the farm animals that the leftovers are what's thrown into the human food supply.
And then they're processed down into powders of fat, protein, and carbohydrates. And these powders are low cost.
They're really easy to ship and they store for a long time. So all they need is a ton of additives to reconstitute.
And then you can turn the powders into anything. And we do.
It's funny that as a human, I think, oh, my leftover food goes in a trough and then pigs eat it. Meanwhile, we're all eating the same stuff.
It's actually the leftover pig food that's going into my stuff, right? It's like, oh, we don't need this palm oil and this other soy and corn. Make a cereal out of this.
Give it to Jordan and his kids. You make it sound like additives are a magic potion.
So what are these mysterious additives that reconstitute powders and turn them into something resembling food? Additives are definitely mysterious. There's about 5,000 to 15,000 additives in our diets, but the reason we don't know how many are actually used for sure is that for some reason, the FDA just doesn't keep a list.
Yeah, for some reason. Okay, so it sounds like it's the Wild West when you see artificial flavor as an ingredient, which is concerning.
So what do the additives do? I don't get how nobody cares if those exist and are thrown into everything. Yeah, they're just, they are kind of like a magic potion.
They emulsify and they stabilize the foods. They bind those basic ingredients together, and then they create textures that are pressed, fried, baked, or whatever.
And then that can be turned into any shape you want. We have dino nuggets or whatever.
Like everything you buy from bread to pizza to pies, all the ingredients are cheap crops and a bunch of additives to make it edible. So additives increase the shelf life of our foods and the artificial flavors and the colors.
They enhance the taste, smell and appearance of the food. So they say we taste with our eyes first.
You know anything about that? Yeah, absolutely. That's what gets us like salivating the first time we look at it.
But we don't know how healthy what we're looking at is when we're fooled behind all the packaging. So the artificial flavor and color, it can come from natural compounds, but most are entirely synthetic chemicals that we're just happily ingesting because it makes the spicy chip red.
Spicy chip red. So are these affecting our health aside from packing on the pounds? Not that being super overweight isn't the most primary health concern of our entire nation right now, but do they do anything else besides make us fat? Yeah, I mean, my guess is yes, but we can only really look at the additives that have been specifically tested, right? We don't know what they all are, but countless research shows that various additives are linked to mental health disorders, attention deficit disorder, cardiovascular disease, and cancers.
I remember when we were kids, it was like red dye number four. And then it was like, oh, my God, now you can't use that.
And people were upset to lose a red M&M. Yeah.
And it was causing I don't even know what, but it was definitely bad for you. Yeah.
I know some of this stuff is supposed to be bad for our guts as well. Something we maybe in the last 10 years people started caring about, but didn't even realize was a thing back when we were growing up.
It just slowly crept in. Instead of not making foods that were harming our guts, there's just a whole new market for products for good gut health.
And food companies put things like kombucha and probiotics on shelves. But just more for us to buy.
It's this insane loop. And many experts agree that a lot of those additives used should just be banned outright.
At the least, consumers should get health warnings about the ingredients. That's true.
So instead of saying, hey, we should make food that tells you that for your gut, it's like, no, continue buying this crap, but then also buy the one with probiotics and drink this kombucha to replenish the gut bacteria that you've murdered or starved by eating all this other stuff. So it's like everything has additives.
Does this include artificial sweeteners? Because I feel like those must be doing some good, eliminating tons of sugar from our diet. Decreasing sugar is a good idea for everyone on the planet, for sure.
And artificial sweeteners are sugar and calorie free. That's great.
But studies link them to weight gain, poor gut health and increased cravings. So we do need sugar, right? But our brains need a balance of sweet and calorie intake.
So too sweet or not sweet enough, that affects the body's ability to metabolize those calories. Within a decade of artificial sweeteners hitting the market, type 2 diabetes and obesity, which was basically unheard of in the past, became leading health problems in the United States.
Okay, but some of that is correlation versus causation, right? We can't say, hey, by the way, artificial sweeteners, and then everyone got fat. It's like, well, okay, a lot of things have changed.
I got a friend, he drinks 20 diet sodas a day so he can brag about being sugar-free. Doesn't seem that good for him.
There was a guy in my law school. This guy would show up to the library with a 12-pack of Diet Coke, those long

ones that fit in the fridge, and he would

just open the top, and then he would

slam a can, open another

one, drink that can, open another one.

By lunchtime, that thing

was empty. He would go eat,

come back with a fresh 12-pack.

So this dude was drinking two dozen

Diet Cokes per day,

every day. That you knew of.
Yeah. We saw him drink that much.
That's not counting what he drank before he got there or what he drank when he got home. That dude must have been just immune to caffeine at that point.
I didn't even think about that. Oh my God, that hurts my teeth.
Oh God, just sweating out caramel coloring. Oh, gross.
Yeah, that's just it though., diet sodas have so many people hooked. Look at the

ingredients in a Diet Coke, which everybody loves to say that it has no fat, no sugar, no salt. But what are we drinking? So the ingredients are the first one's always listed as carbonated water.
That's fine. But the second ingredient, that caramel color, and it has nothing to do with caramel.
It's just a nice name describing the color of the chemicals that make soda brown. And it contains sulfates and aspartame, which trick your brain into thinking you're getting sugar.
And as we've said, that's a problem because when the sugar never arrives, your body has a stress response. Oh, really? I didn't realize that.
I thought it was just more like, oh, I'm disappointed. But I guess that's what a stress response is for your body.
That's bad news because I freaking love Diet Coke, man. None of this sounds refreshing at all.
Your husband, he likes Diet Coke, too. Oh, my God.
He like hides them. I'm just trying to throw everybody under the bus now.
Yeah. Why are they so addicting? Why don't they tell us? It could be the natural flavors, which are all those unknown additives.
We don't really know what they're doing. There's caffeine.
And then there's phosphoric acid and citric acids, which erode our teeth, and they actually decrease bone density. So I try not to think about the bone density issues with all the Diet Coke, obviously.
I just drink it. I know.
It's all about that fizz, Jordan, because there's no flat version of Diet Coke. Like that just wouldn't sell.
That is a good point. Fizz and caffeine.
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Fake foods are more than just additives, right? There's a lot of actually just totally fake stuff or like the bulk of it's fake. Yeah, I mean, of course.
The most common fake food is hydrogenated oils. Hydrogenated oils are used to improve the texture and shelf life of many processed foods, but they're linked to health risks because they're so high in trans fat content, which contributes to heart disease, stroke, and diabetes, yet they're still sitting on all the supermarket shelves.
And the same goes for processed cheeses. They're all fake foods.
Processed cheese, that's still cheese though, right? Aside from Velveeta. Lord knows what the hell that actually is.
When I was a kid, there was cheese that came with a nozzle on the package. I'm going to guess that that was not actually cheese.
Oh, I remember that. Oh, again, so good and addicting.
Why? Yeah. What's with the nozzle? It was probably like a squirt guns method with that.
You just launch it on your hot dog.

Oh, yeah. High tech food.
There it is. Maybe some portion of the product is cheese, but often it's a very small amount of natural cheese that's added to a ton of additives that increase the shelf life of whatever cheese product.
In 2016, the CEO and some executives of Castle Cheese Inc., who make a lot of the Parmesan we shake on our pasta, like I'm sure you know the container. It's got like green sides and a red top.
They were convicted for selling fake Parmesan, Romano and other cheeses. Their cheeses were cut with wood pulp, but the containers said 100% real Parmesan.
Yeah, like 1% was 100% real Parmesan. I'm not surprised.
The tip-off is it's in a can and it doesn't need to go in the refrigerator. One might not expect 100% Parmesan.
Wood pulp, though, how was that even allowed? Or was that why they went to prison? No. The actual argument in that case was that since goats naturally eat wood pulp, it's classified as food.
Hey, some living organisms can actually eat this without dying. So technically, and the judge is like, OK, I'll see it.
Give me one more example. Termites.
Yeah, it's fine. But wood pulp is processed into cellulose, which food manufacturers use as a declumping agent in our foods.
I don't know how they figured that out. Whenever you see cellulose in your ingredient list, you're most likely having a little sawdust.
T, tasty sawdust. I know.
The FDA is, hey, only 5% can be wood pulp, though, okay? And don't add it to stuff just to increase the weight so you make more money, okay? And the food companies are like, all right, fine. But all of that can be so hard to prove.
Regardless, the Castle Cheese Company, they didn't get convicted for selling wood pulp. They got convicted for mislabeling their product.
Ah, so if they had labeled it wood pulp parmesan, then there would have been no problem selling this stuff to everybody. Oh, that's so disappointing.
People would probably be into it. Yeah.
Oh, you got the fancy wood pulp parm. If you test any of those cans labeled Parmesan in every supermarket, I'd be shocked if you found any actual Parmesan.
Like usually they're using other cheaper cheeses. I don't know how they get away with it, but they do because the FDA requirements for food are confusing.
I want to try that mahogany parm. Gross.
The fact that the government is okay with giving people fake food, to me, is crazy. What regulations are there? I feel like I'm going to regret asking because you're going to be like, none.
But surely at least some barriers exist here. Yeah, I wish there were more.
But FDA recognizes food fraud. But that doesn't have anything to do with healthy ingredients or ingredients at all.
If food doesn't make us sick almost immediately or kill us, the FDA is totally happy. Making us sick long term seems to be perfectly fine.
Right. Yeah.
If it kills you in a few decades, that's on you for eating too much of it. Yeah, try these pharmaceuticals we make.
But what they do have a problem with is the FDA has a classification of economically motivated adulteration, which is when companies profit by leaving out or substituting an expensive ingredient.

And this happens all the time.

Like, I would bet everyone listening right now has been a victim of economically motivated adulteration at some point. Oh, no.
Not economically motivated adulteration. How are you so sure that we've all eaten sawdust cheese or whatever? How do we know that? Because the food fraud is everywhere.
Ah, OK. Like 25% of commercial fish is incorrectly labeled and probably on purpose because when you drop like $35 a pound on Chilean sea bass, you're most likely buying tilapia, which is about $7 a pound.
There was recently a scandal in the UK when it was discovered that 25% of all beef in restaurants was horse. No, that's gross.
Yeah, it turns my stomach. Some people also into that.
The French don't care, but they're buying horse and know they know it's horse. I've heard it's popular in France.
I'm not just picking on the French. I've heard horse means popular there, but I still want to know what I'm buying.
Yikes. And if you think horse is bad, wait until you find out about the bogus extra virgin olive oil racket the Italian mafia has going on.
Like the actual mafia? Yeah, the agro mafia. It counts for 15% of the mafia's income.
I can't believe that's a real thing. It sounds like something that dorky executives at agricultural companies call themselves like, yeah, drinks with the agro mafia tonight.
All right, I'm in 7 p.m. That sounds fake.
I know the Scorsese farm film coming soon or something. The goat father.
But it's totally a thing, the agriculture mafia. So it's this part of the mafia that they don't deal in guns or drugs, just food.
In 2016, Italian authorities completed Operation Mamma Mia. Wow.
Where they seized over 2,000 tons of fake extra virgin olive oil from the region of Puglia. And it was worth over 13 million euro.
The mafia was taking adulterated, low-quality Spanish and Greek oils and were exporting it as primo Italian EVOO. By the way, if it was really in Italy, it was Operation Mamma Mia, right? They have to say it like Mario.
And not only did they just name it the most cliche thing you could possibly name an Italian law enforcement operation, but they still found a way to throw shade on the Spanish and Greeks. It's not that you were exporting olive oil.
It's that you were exporting the low-quality, adulterated Spanish and Greek stuff, which we all know is not as good as the stuff we make here. And you're making us look bad.
Trash olives. So my surf and turf is tilapia slash horse cooked in cheap oil supplied by the mom.
I must have missed that scene in Goodfellas. I know.
Food is scandalous. And oil's the most faked food in the world with milk and honey coming in second and third.
There are honey launderers. Wow.
Yeah. There's a lot of deliberately watered down milk.
This food fraud is so extensive that the National Institutes of Health has kept a food fraud database since 1980. Like, we're just fooled into buying all these expensive ingredients.
There's saffron, which averages like $1,500 a pound on the cheap side. You know, when it comes in such a small amount in the photo bag or those little black bags or whatever, it's all just for show because when tested, it's mostly corn silk or coconut husk dyed red.
No, that means I'll probably never even had real saffron, the humanity. I know.
I've seen fake honey. Jen and I, when we went to Australia a zillion years ago, she picked this scammer out at a market down there because Jen used to be a beekeeper.
And this guy was like, I have pineapple flavored honey. I have strawberry flavored honey.
And my bees, they only feed on this one monocrop. And Jen was like, yeah, that's just not even possible.
You mean to tell me you have a giant greenhouse full of one crop and then you could taste it? And it was like really strawberry, like candy, really pineapple, like candy. And the consistency and the thing that it was almost totally clear.
And Jen's like, you know, the honey we pull out of the hives at our house is like dark

brown and has stuff in it like little particles.

Real honey almost looks a bit dirty.

And it tastes like honey.

That's a mix of all kinds of different plants and things like that.

This is definitely just corn syrup with flavoring in it.

And yeah, if that guy was doing it at a farmer's market in Australia, then it's likely not just in that one isolated incident being sold to the public. Absolutely.
It's, like, large scale. I love that Jen was a beekeeper.
Did she confront the guy? No, she was just like, don't buy any. Because my parents were like, oh, it's so good.
And she's like, don't buy any of this. It's fake.
And they were like, oh, okay. And later I was like, what are you talking about? She's like, he's a con artist.
So once she explained it, it made sense. And she said that, you know, the little bear honey that you buy at the grocery store that you put on your cereal or in your tea? Oh, sure.
That's basically just corn syrup. I think they actually list the first ingredient as corn syrup.
Like, at least they're letting you know. That's labeled as it says honey, but it's not.
It's a 2% or 0% honey. Yeah, I'm sure that was corn syrup.
And people who don't have the information Jen has, they're buying it and just getting sweet and thinking it's delicious. Like the corn syrup's often the first ingredient in honey, which it surprises us of how delicious honey is.
People just don't know. Yeah.
The biggest bummer for me, though, is coffee. When you buy it just ground, it's often mixed with barley, legumes, and twigs.
Literal twigs? Yeah, I guess the goat law stands. Gross.
But as climate change reduces, like the coffee acreage, it's going to make it all worse because we drink a lot of coffee and buying whole beans is going to definitely be the best option because the ground stuff will end up being more lentil than coffee bean. That's interesting.
I grind my own beans because I do be fancy like that, but this is alarming. And you know what? It makes sense because I've noticed that ground coffee is really cheap.
And I thought, but I'm grinding it myself. Why is it more expensive if I have an extra step? And the reason is because I'm getting coffee beans, and that is 5% coffee beans and then frickin' twigs.
Yeah, yeah. You're getting real coffee, you snob.
Yeah, no kidding. Wow.
So it makes me wonder, am I eating anything real? Come on, everything's fake.

I mean, those are just a few examples of fake foods that we can get. And there are some fake food companies that have good intentions and they're trying to address issues of sustainability and health and animal welfare, like plant based meats.
Ah, meat alternatives.

Yeah, in the Bay Area, it's super popular.

I had a plant-based chicken sandwich that tasted exactly like chicken the other day.

I think one of Jen's cousins works at one of these plant-based meat companies. But they don't strike me as healthy because isn't this all processed soybean stuff with, again, additives or oils packed in there to make it all stick together? Oh, you nailed it.
These products are just a joke on the health conscious.

Food companies realized, like, hey, a lot of people aren't eating meat or cheese. So what if we process the shit out of plant derived ingredients like soy and pea protein, emulated the taste and texture of animals and sold it at a ridiculously high price? And just sort of LARP slash pretended that fake food was also healthy because it wasn't meat while tripling the price.
Yeah. People who didn't eat meat were eating so much fresh food like they didn't need the food company's help of buying all this processed stuff.
And the health benefits of the meat alternatives are definitely not worth it. According to the National Institutes of Health, all meat imitations they tested, they are high in protein and fiber.
Gimitation sausages and milks, they have lower total and saturated fat compared to animal-based products, which that's all good. But all imitation dairy has lower protein than animal-based dairy.
And we don't really know as much in the States, but the NutriScore system, which is, it's like a color labeling system on foods in the EU and UK, all their foods have, they're like little traffic lights on the labels for calorie, fat, sugar, and salt. So it'll be green for A, which is the healthiest, and then goes down like light green, yellow, orange.
And then the worst for you is when it's red and all imitation cheeses, whether it's the really fancy voile for whatever you think you're buying. They're all labeled a bright red E.
So it's just the additives and processing used to make these imitations are being found to have negative effects on our health. But we need to do a lot more testing.
I feel like the cheese sticks we buy our kids are probably legit because I found one behind the bed the other day and it was hard as a rock. And I was like, oh, that that seems to me like what real cheese might do when left out, just dehydrate and be really hard.
OK, my friend, I don't want to out the guy. He bought a McDonald's hamburger and let's just say it ended up in his car for a long period of time.
And we were going on a road trip and we were cleaning out his car and we found it. And it looked basically like the day he bought it and it was months old.
Yeah. There's so many documented cases of exactly that.
People buy a McDonald's Happy Meal and then they check in on it a year later and there's no chain. Right.
No mold, nothing. And that's because all processed foods are dry as a bone and natural foods have moisture, so they mold.
And when you eat a McDonald's hamburger, they're fooling you that you think it's moist. There's sauces and oil that's put on at the last minute.
Like there's tricks. All those things are just dry.
And so it's just like having a piece of cardboard sitting in the corner. It's not going to change.
And it's just crazy how much we fool our eating habits. Yeah.
It seems like with the plant-based meats, animal welfare slash ethics are the reasons to add that fake meat to your diet, not for your health. Yeah, totally.
But it's confusing since the health food market is now overrun by big food companies passing off ultra-processed foods as healthy choices. Impossible meat is impressive.
It's really popular right now, but it's more modern chemicals than food. And the creator, he's really clear that it was never meant as a health food, that it's meant to reduce industrial farming, period.
They did a study on the safety of impossible meat, and they found the burger's key ingredient, the thing that gives it its meatiness, which is called soy leg hemoglobin, is safe for human consumption. But what the consumption is doing to our health is really debated.
Leg hemoglobin really sounds like hemoglobin, which I know is in the blood.

And I don't want to be like, it sounds the same, so it must be the same thing.

It's plant blood.

Oh my gosh, that's so bizarre.

Wood pulp is safe for human consumption too.

So I'm not sure I'm all in with impossible because it's not impossible that this stuff is slowly killing you if you eat a lot of it.

And there's a lot of additives in leg hemoglobin, plant blood.

I don't know, maybe not as natural.

Yeah, for us, it's not that great. But if it could completely replace animals or even if it just replaced cows, it would slow greenhouse gases and habitat destruction by incredible rates.
There's no slaughter, there's no hormones, there's no antibiotics, but it is built on commodity agriculture and ultra-processed foods, so there's a huge health trade-off. These products are just questionable.
They solve one problem, like regarding animal welfare, but they create a ton of health issues. The phrase plant-based food, it fools the consumer into thinking it's healthy.
Okay, so fake meat's not the best choice. Are we going down the wrong path in terms of finding a solution for this stuff? Because it seems confusing.
Yeah, it's a really bumpy road. The one good thing is that it does lead to innovation and food technology.
So food companies are continuously improving taste and texture, which is great.

But it's the nutritional profile of fake foods that needs to be advanced in the processing.

What about lab-grown meat as opposed to fake meat?

This is meat that's grown.

That's actually real meat, right?

It's just not from slaughtered animals.

Do you know anything about this?

Lab-grown meat is cultivated from animal cells. So it does start with an animal, and they take the animal cell in a lab setting, they cultivate it, and it's a sustainable alternative to conventional meat production.
but there's a lot of testing that needs to be done on lab-grown meats. Most are in the developmental stage.

There's two, like, main companies working furiously to get them on the market.

They do eliminate animal slaughter. But again, the health pros and cons are really questionable.
Yeah. TBD on lab grown meats.
I'm curious about it because something is weird slash gross about eating vat grown meat. But admittedly, slaughtering a cow in a really inhumane way and then cutting into the little pieces, that's also weird and gross.
We're just used to it. The one thing I'd be really worried about that I guess I should be worried about with actual animals is if animals can get sick, like you get mad cow disease or something, can't vat-grown meat, I mean, it's still cells.
Those could get diseases

too, right? Oh my gosh. That's my biggest concern because yeah, like, of course, disease can spread through an industrial farm, but the way these vats work, it looks like a brewery almost.
And you put a few cells in one of the tanks and then it just keeps multiplying and multiplying. And the empty vat is completely full with chicken in five days or something.
Yeah. Air quotes chicken.
Yeah. And it's just so vulnerable to disease.
And I would think in those kind of facilities, it would spread even faster. Because everything's just in a bucket.
Yeah. They use a lot of antibiotics in lab-grown meat.
There's a lot of pharmaceutical techniques being used. And so that's a big reason not to eat industrial farmed meat, right, is all the antibiotics that they give the animals.
But they're putting even more in the lab-grown stuff. So from a cruelty standpoint, it's better because you're not killing the animal.
But I didn't realize they were still using the same drugs and everything in that kind of stuff. That sort of defeats the purpose for a lot of us.
You're not killing an animal, but it's weird Frankenstein. Yeah.
It's really bizarre. Like depends on who you ask, though, because governments see it, only the positives in it.
But eventually, when the technology improves, be a cheaper way to feed the masses. The U.N.
wants the U.S. government to promote lab-grown and plant-based meats, but they are getting a ton of pushback from farm-raised meat producers.
Of course. It's an interesting battle politically, and I'm not sure that either option is right.
What we should all agree on is that whether it's lab-grown or farm-raised, meat producers need to focus on raising the nutritional content of these products. You know what's not grown in a vat with a boatload of antibiotics? The fine products and services that support this show.
We'll be right back. Thank you for listening to and supporting this show.
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Now for the rest of Skeptical Sunday. So do we need alternatives to the alternatives? Because I don't know, it seems like the alternatives have just as many problems so far.
Yeah, it's called just eat an apple. Go old school.
But those apples might even grow in a wasteful way. It's like almonds.
Oh, they're so good for you. They're sucking all the water out of California.
It seems like we want our foods to have a positive environmental impact as well, or at least a not super negative environmental impact? Of course. And I get really frustrated with the almond controversy because that whole campaign was started by dairy farmers in California.
And their big argument was it takes so much water to grow an almond tree, which if you think about it rationally, like it's bullshit. It doesn't take any more water to grow an almond tree than any other tree.
That's not the problem. And it's just a baseless argument.
But anyway, I feel like we did a skeptical Sunday on almonds and they take a ton of water to grow. But maybe that's just what trees need to grow.
I've heard it was kind of this manipulation by big dairy. They're wasting water.
Give your water to us so we can waste it on cows. I'm not saying almond farming doesn't use a ton of water, but it's not any higher than any other farm as far as I've read.
And I think it was like a smear campaign because a lot of people are buying almond milk. That's right.
Dairy companies have a lot of lobbying power. I can't remember if that was a skeptical Sunday or something a guest said on the show.
Oh, interesting. Yeah, plant-based foods typically have a lower environmental footprint compared to animal-based foods, but they still make an impact.
Almond trees still need water, but plant-based requires less land, typically, less water, less energy, and it definitely generates fewer greenhouse gases. They reduce the demand for factory farm meat, dairy, and eggs, which some big food companies are upset about.
But we're just duped into thinking that these plant-based products are automatically a healthy choice. There's just a false equivalency.
I know people with allergies turn to these products as well. So there's some health benefit there.
If you swell up when you drink milk, maybe you drink almond milk instead. Yeah.
And fake foods, they absolutely provide options for people with allergies. Anybody that's lactose intolerant, it's a great product to have.
They could probably not drink milk. I don't know.
But not just for allergies, though, like fake food that expands options for vegetarians, vegan or gluten free diets. But all the additives used to simulate the real thing, they all seem to have negative effects on our weight and health.
That's the bottom line. But the environmental impact concerns, that has to be weighed with the fact that we got to eat, right?

Look, I'm all for the environment, but I'm not going to like

only eat sprouts that I grow in my house because I don't want to have an impact on the environment.

We just need to mitigate these concerns. Like the industrialized production of fake foods,

for example, relies a lot on palm oil, which contributes to environmental degradation big time. I have heard a lot about palm oil.
I think that was also one of those cause du jour when I was in college. Like, palm oil is terrible.
Stop using it. And it was just in every snack food.
There's a lot of negativity around the environmental impact of that stuff. It's like it's ruining the developing world because that's all they're growing or whatever.
Oh, totally. The processing of the plant, it destroys ecosystems.
It's really bad. But the oil palm, like naturally, where they're indigenous to like around the equator in Africa, when it's locally grown, it produces this red gooey, like really delicious liquid that's high in antioxidants.
And because it's such an efficient crop, though, we've been mass producing oil palms all throughout Asia. And then we send them to an oil refinery and we just strip all its nutrition out through ultra processing and turn it into the palm oil as we know it.
And this modern process of refining, it allows for basically anything to be turned into oil quickly and cheaply. It seems like the big problem is that fake food is cheaper than non-fake fresh foods.
Yeah. Produce is enormously expensive.
We're mistaken when we think people are making bad choices by not buying fresh fruits and veggies. It's not like the whole world just stopped having willpower of how to eat and got fat.
There's something going on with the food we're eating. And for many people of low income, ultra processed food is all that's available.
Like a lot of people live in food deserts. For those who don't know, food deserts are communities with no convenient options for fresh foods, right? So if you only have a liquor store nearby, you're probably not going to have a produce section with a bunch of different choices and a fresh meat section or whatever it is.
It's just going to be like, all right, here's some packaged stuff that you can heat in your microwave. And food deserts, they're disproportionately found in high poverty areas.
There's about 40 million Americans that are living in places considered food deserts. So stores like 7-Eleven or the Dollar Store are supplying those communities with their food and there's zero fresh options.
There's just no access. And it shows in the weight and health of these communities.
It makes no sense that food options aren't equally available. Yeah, it really doesn't.
I know people that live out of the Dollar General, basically, near their house. And it's just tragic.
You can imagine what's available there. We just adapt to it.
But there is a movement to eliminate food deserts, but it takes people investing in these poor communities. Tiffany Haddish grew up in the food desert of South L.A., and she's made it her mission to change food options and food quality in that neighborhood.
So more than five years ago, she launched Diaspora Groceries and she opened a market in the neighborhood that has fresh, healthy choices where she grew up. So her philanthropy is terrific, but more than one store needs to be accessible to get 40 million people out of food deserts.
If food equity is all about access, it seems like the solution would be in community gardens and local farming and not a supermarket. But I know I'm asking for farms to crop up in the middle of downtown Detroit, which makes absolutely no sense.
I know, but why aren't there more community gardens? Like in Philadelphia, they have a neighborhood farmer's market and it's all raised beds. So you don't have to use the soil in the city.
And that feeds a neighborhood in Philly. But it's like, why aren't things like that everywhere? Convenience, though, right? It's not convenient to grow your own food.

It's easier just to be like, screw it.

Any place you see a garden, like a community garden,

it's just long waiting lists.

So one market's not going to change it,

but at least Tiffany Haddish is setting a good example.

Like we had more people giving back to their communities.

So it'll be interesting to see how it affects the neighborhood.

But even if you do have access and can afford fresh produce,

This is a production you might not have. So there's a lot to food inequality, and it just makes healthier, fresh options more expensive.
So if you can't afford fresh food, you better be able to afford health care, which is a really crappy trade-off. The problem with fake foods, it's not just the cost.
It's both the cost and the availability. So instead of investing just in synthetic substitutes, we should be focusing on improving access to fresh, nutritious ingredients for everyone.
Like, we have to be careful that as the innovation and competition increase affordable food options, that those options aren't 100% fake. Yeah.
Fake food's going to be so cheap in the near future, but is it all just going to be totally bereft of nutrition? It might be if we're not careful, but processing isn't going anywhere. And the reason you process food is not because there's anything wrong with it in its natural state, but because there's more money to be made when you process.
There's a lot of money being made in the food industry, but it's not going to the farm end of things. The farmer gets less than 15% of your food dollars.
The money goes to food processors who are benefiting from the fact that we're overproducing. The philosophy is that if you complicate food to give it flavor and novelty, that's where the money is.
And food companies know this. So the food industry, it's crazy.
They spend more on lobbying than the defense industry. Wow.
I had no idea. That's huge money.
I know. It's crazy.
What? Yeah. But I think it's like 15 companies make all of our calories,

and about 75% of those calories come from the top six companies that produce grain and oil. Holy cow, man.
There's just such a big bag of money in making us sick from eating cheap crap. I mean, making us sick isn't their goal.
It's the result. But wow, it's really easy to underestimate how much we eat of that stuff at Commod commodity food.
Yeah, it's wild. I mean, poor diet has overtaken tobacco as the leading cause of early death globally.
The primary cause of diet-related disease, including obesity, is the rise of a diet of industrially produced ultra-processed foods. This is all driven by profit incentives.
So agriculturalists need to work with economists. We need to treat food companies like we've been treating the tobacco companies.
Sounds like we're all part of a really gross experiment, whether we like it or not. Maybe it's always been like that.
We are part of a weird experiment. Cigarettes, they were chemicals we chose to smoke.
But now these chemicals are silently in our food, and they have the same addictive properties and the same chemical makeup. Yeah, we're a few centimeters on the timeline away from, like, nicotine flakes for breakfast.
Oh, God, yeah, with some fake watered-down sawdust milk. Yeah, for me, man, regular trips to the farmer's market.
That's so gross. I know.
I wish we could all have that luxury. But when is your farmer's market open? Yeah.
The weekend. Four hours a week.
Yep. Trust me.
We go every weekend. It's not the majority of the stuff that I eat.
Just some random things that we like from there. So we come home with like mushrooms and some eggs or whatever and some fruit.
That's it. It's not like we buy everything from that place.
Yeah, I have one stand I go to like specifically for bok choy. I don't know what it is, but it's like a treat.
It would be awesome if our food system aligned with our values and farmers markets were more available. But the food industry is just dominated by a very few big and powerful companies.
And those companies are not in control of their business model. Their investors are.
Like CEOs at Dannon and Pepsi that proposed making foods better for people, they were voted out and replaced. The food companies have just made it clear what their motives are, and it is not public health.
It seems hopeless, but what could we do to fight corporate influence on our diet? I don't have Nestle lobbying cash. Yeah, I mean, we just need a cultural change.
We have to come to regard food companies like tobacco companies because their money is dirty and ultra processed foods need to be in national dietary guidelines. Policymakers and industry leaders must start prioritizing public health and sustainability and social equity all across food production.
We need marketing restrictions. Like Mexico has ruled that no tiger on the cover of Frosted Flakes.
I think it's funny that's where they draw the line. You can't put that tiger on the front.
The sugar coated flakes, no problem. The tiger on the front, no, sir.
Let me be clearer. Mexico passed a law insisting on the removal of all cartoon characters from labels.
And that law also said that your warning label has to be bigger than your logo. That's kind of genius.
Yeah, it is. So now there's just really small logos on things.
Yeah, and it's effective in guiding the consumer to healthier choices. Mexico has seen a lot of sales of these popular garbage foods go down.
As consumers, we should demand clear information so we can consider impacts on our health and the environment. Whether you're pro-fake or anti-fake, the future of food, it sounds like it's a topic we must all digest.
Thank you, Jessica. This has been a barfer of a skeptical Sunday, especially the vat meat was really yucky.

Oh, gross, gross.

Thank you all for listening.

Topic suggestions for future episodes of Skeptical Sunday to Jordan at Jordan Harbinger dot com.

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So do your own research before implementing anything you hear on the show. Also, we may get a few things wrong here and there, especially on Skeptical Sunday.
If you think we really dropped the ball, let us know. We're usually pretty receptive to that.
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You're about to hear a preview of the Jordan Harbinger Show with a pain psychologist that helps people manage chronic pain when all else has failed. None of us are going to escape pain.
Pain is part of being human. All of us at some point, if we haven't already, are going to experience pain.
Seems about time we understood it, knew how it worked, and knew what to do about it. So I am what's called a pain psychologist, which no one has ever heard of.
People say, oh, well, you must treat emotional pain. The answer to that is no.
Pain is always both physical and emotional. That's what neuroscience says.
And in fact, what we know is that negative emotions like stress and anxiety or depression or anger or frustration turn up pain volume in the brain. We think and are trained that pain lives in the body, like in your back or in your knee.
It is, of course, true that things may be going wrong in your back or in your knee, but that isn't where pain lives. Pain lives in the brain.
Pain does not always indicate danger. When you have chronic pain and your brain has become sensitive, small bits of non-dangerous input from the body are being interpreted incorrectly as dangerous.
You've seen that car alarm. You're looking out your window and that car, the lights are flashing and the horn is beeping and you're like, bruh, no one's breaking in.
You're safe. The glass isn't even broken.
That's a brain on chronic pain. So it's just so important for people with pain to know that part of what's happening for them is that their brain has become extra sensitive and it is alarming when it doesn't need to.
And it can be hacked. Guess what you and I are doing today?

To hear more from Dr. Rachel Zofniss about how pain works in the body and brain,

check out episode 661 of The Jordan Harbinger Show.