Jeremy: I think that Mitch brought up in one of our previous meetings that our food and agricultural industries maybe inadvertently or purposefully are colluding with the pharmaceutical industry on the production of illnesses.  Bill G., you mentioned the great wealth that obesity had brought to the pharmaceutical company.  Mitch, do you want to comment a little more on your observation? As Bill G. said, this might not be a genetic disorder There might not be a generic factor in the US that makes us more vulnerable to obesity. There might be environmental factors that need to be addressed.\

Mitch:   Though I am not a conspiracy theorists, there are some actors that are contributing to the obesity issue—and those need to be addressed more than obesity itself as well as the underlying metabolic problem.  The whole way in which we mass produce our foods. It is not only the big agriculture, but then the big Food takes the gross aggregate of agi-business’s production and highly, highly refines it.  The fertilizer is basically oil based, and then there is a high level of processing, This highly processed food is sent out as highly palatable products. Science plays an important role here. We know how much fat to put in each food and how much salt and how much sugar.  The food we consume is scientifically tested to be irresistible and to set off dopamine.  It can’t be genetics because 70 years ago this didn’t happen. It is with the growth of agriculture, the growth of medicine and the growth of the pharmaceutical industry that obesity has occurred. I think it is probably driven by making money—but I don’t think it is driven by collusion per se, but it is an interesting set of circumstances. The way out is not going to be by addressing obesity. It is almost impossible to do much about obesity given the things that we are up against. I think there will be medicines that will take care of some of our urges to eat; however, as long as we are eating crappy food farmed in a crappy way, we still are going to have a metabolic syndrome –even if we got rid of the obesity. Right now, 80 percent of the people who are obese are physiological set, while 20 percent are not. It is kind of interesting to note that it is not just BMI. It is the underlying metabolic condition that makes for poor health outcomes.

Scott: And if I can make the point that it is not just that they are overweight. They are malnourished at the same time. We say that a big fat person must not be mal-nourished. We say that they are over-eating, and therefore they have all the nourishment. But you get these people who are morbidly obese who have not eaten anything healthy. IN round figures, the foot pyramid came out in 1990-1995. The bottom of that pyramid was filled with carbs.  They were refined carbs. The way to lose weight was to eat a load of bread each day. Then by 2000-2005, we were associating those things with insulin—sugar and all those things that are unhealthy. But there was a long time of us saying that processed sugar doesn’t make us fat—and all that related “evidence”. I don’t’ want to get conspiratorial, but I think there is this really interesting piece where Americans under 40 were trained to do things in a certain way that generated obesity as an outcome.

Mitch: Scientific research was actually influenced by big pharmacy, big ag and the food industry. So the meta analyses are diluted in a scientific way by these biased reports.  Ye, sugar isn’t the problem You are over-easting.  That’s the problem. Which is fundamentally wrong. That’s part of the problem.  It has been twisted into the politics and twisted into the diet.