This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the Thing from iHeart Radio, a chocolate chip cookie, a bite of Devil's Food cake, or a gigantic cup filled with your favorite soda. Sugar is a simple chemical compound, yet so powerful and so hard to refuse. The traditional advice about avoiding sugar seems simple put down the doughnut, but few people know how much the deck is being stacked
against them. Food and beverage corporations spend billions of dollars to ensure their customers remain addicted to their products, which has contributed to an epic surge in type two diabetes. In order to reverse these rising rates, my guest today believes we need to embrace deep legislative and societal change. Physician and public health expert, doctor Dean Schillen is a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. He is the co founder of the UCSF Center for
Vulnerable Populations. I was featured in the PBS documentary on Type two diabetes Blood Sugar Rising. As someone with type two diabetes, this issue hits close to home for me. I wanted to begin my conversation with doctor Schillinger, learning how he went from simply treating individual patients to calling for a public health war on diabetes.
I work at San Francisco General Hospital, which is the city and County of San Francisco's public hospital, which is for the New Yorkers on the call, sort of like a small.
Version of Bellevue.
And if you had told me thirty years ago that I was going to become a specialist and expert in diabetes when I was coming out of medical school, I would have laughed at you. It was not something that I was interested in when I was training. And when I started out as a primary care physician general internest this Stan Africa General Hospital, I'd say about one out
of fifteen of my patients had type two diabetes. And now I just think about the clinic that I had on Monday, one out of two of my patients has type two diabetes. So in one generation, we have seen an absolute explosion in type two diabetes in America, and that can't possibly be managed by endocrinologists. There just aren't enough of them on the planet. And truth be told, most of diabetes can be handled by family doctors.
In general interness but it.
Has become the proverbial bread and butter of my practice, and it has also led me to try to combat the illness not only in the clinic, but also outside in society, this diobetogenic society, to move the fight sort of beyond one patient at a time to sort of the general population.
Where'd you grow up, where you from originally?
I'm originally from Buffalo, New York.
And where did you go unto grad?
I went to Brown University.
And where'd you go to medical school?
University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, Which is interesting because the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia was home to the country's largest public hospital, Philadelphia General. But you know, it lost a lot of money, as you can imagine, and so they shut it down just a few years before I entered the medical school, And so I had never had exposure to working in a public hospital as a medical student.
And you talk about the high level hospitals that New York and San Francisco have, and that indeed is true. But until you've worked in a public hospital, you don't realize the fact that we really operate in a two tier medical system, and that a lot of the consequences of our social ills end up at the door of public hospitals. So if you're only working in private hospitals or nonprofit hospitals, you don't see what's really going on in society until you set foot in a public hospital.
And it's really it's transformative as a clinician. And what I try I have been trying to do in the last few decades, has been to share the stories that I've been witnessed to in the public hospitals to the general public so we can begin to understand how public health happens or doesn't happen in this country. And that's sort of what you saw in Blood Sugar Rising.
And the fundamental difference between the two is what.
Well, the fundamental difference between the two is the burden of disease that we see in low income communities and people of color far outstrips that which we see in the private hospital. So the reason that the waiting rooms are so packed in public hospitals is not just because we don't have enough doctors and nurses, but because the demand for healthcare is so logarithmically exponentially higher because of
the burden of disease that comes with poverty. Think about what it's like to be a poor person working two jobs, the stress that they have in their daily lives, and all that is around them in the every corner store, every advertisement, every billboard is pushing the food that you appropriately described is causing your diabetes. And it's the same for people who are poor but really on steroids, no pun intended.
Well, what's interesting to me? You know, I'm some and this is just my belief that when you abuse alcohol, when you wake up in the morning and you look at yourself, you don't like what you see. Maybe if you smoke too much, you know it's wrong. Sugar is something that is indoctrinated into our lives from day one. We have appended the consumption of some sugary product with nearly everything we do. Birthday caicks. You don't have a
birthday salad, you have a birthday cake. Everything has their designated sweets.
I mean, the holiday is just that it's a holy day and we are meant to celebrate it as a very special and unique day in the year for whatever ritual, whatever reason, And so the introduction of sweets into that holiday was a signal, a symbol of the sweetness of life that we celebrate or whatever the memory is that
we're trying to celebrate. And you're absolutely right that what the food industry and the hallmark industry has done is take this natural joy we feel when we consume added sugar and essentially make it such that every meal now has to have that endorphin and dopamine rush experience that we used to only experience two or three times a year.
And what we've learned increasingly from both basic science and behavioral science, is that added sugar, particularly liquid added sugar in the form of sugar sweetened beverages.
Are addictive.
They have all the characteristics in terms of brain response that we see with alcohol, cocaine, etc. And I am not exaggerating when I say this. The cravings, the joy, the withdrawal, all of these things the food chemists have learned and have then implemented into marketing strategies and distribution strategies. And for those who are under stress or depressed or down and need to pick me up, this is the
perfect drug. And the modern food system has trained, has formed itself, to deliver high doses of added sugar, particular liquid sugar on an ongoing basis and we create the false belief that this is part of our culture, and I think that it indeed is, but it's based on a model of addiction and the corporate takeover of the food system by harnessing the addictive properties of their foods.
It's not a level playing field. Your body has natural hormones and chemical messages that say my appetite is satisfied, I'm going to stop eating. But the food chemists have created foods that do not stimulate the appetite suppressant hormone. I mean specifically that so that we're being played, so that you feel that you and your willpower are inadequate in terms of your question as to when we should
be screened. This is highly controversial, and I can tell you what I do in my practice and my practices, I take care of low income people who have a very high point revalence of type two diabetes. If you take the average adult who is a person of color in the United States, there's about a twenty twenty five percent chance that that person off the street's going.
To have diabetes at one age.
That's the average age, so we're talking about in their fifties. But we see the incidence of diabetes occurring younger and younger, and particularly in people of color. In fact, we're seeing it now in children. We're seeing type two diabetes emerge. If I had said twenty five years ago, I've got a child with type two by diabetes as supposed to type one, people would you know, laugh me off the stage.
But now this is this is just an everyday phenomenon, and the rates of type two diabetes and children of color has gone up three four fold over the last decade.
The young man you see in the film who you're taking care of, the black guy who's going to be lose his foot, Yeah, Montille, Montille. Now he looks pretty whippity and pretty lean. So I'm assuming you don't have to be morbidly obese to qualify for this.
Correct, That's absolutely true. I think there is a there. Of course, obesity and high BMI is a risk factor for the development of type two diabetes. But I have plenty of patients, particularly young patients, who have type two diabetes who are not overweight. So yes, he developed diabetes in his late twenties. He was born in poverty and raised in poverty, severe food and security. He grew up eating what he told me were syrup sandwiches, which is
syrup put in between two pieces of wonderbread. For much of his childhood, his father was incarcerated. He raised himself and his younger brother, and they would drink you know, high Sea and the fruit, you know, the powder mixes of sugar, sweet and beverages, three meals a day. So he was really addicted, if you will, but also overly exposed to added sugar, particular liquid sugar. And in his
twenties he came in at a diabetic coma. And you know, in the old days, we would have thought that was type one diabetes, the so called autoimmune disease where you you know, children, juvenile onset diabetes, where the body attacks itself, you know, the pancreas stops producing insulin. But what we're seeing now in these younger people is type two diabetes, which I like to think of as the body politic
attacking the child or the young person. It's not the body attacking itself, it's our society attacking the body of that young person. And that's what happened with Montille, and he has suffered all of the consequences of uncontrolled type two diabetes. He's now forty, and he just sustained another amputation.
The sugar consumption in my family as a child was habitual. My mother was diabetically. Yeah, it was diabetic, and she did had no amputations. But she was really very sick from diabetes for many, many years.
But how old was she when she developed diabetes? I'm interested to her.
I would say that she was identified and treated when she was She died at ninety two last year.
Do you remember how old she was when she was sixty?
I'd say, okay, probably sixty.
Yeah, it's interesting because you would say to your doctor, I have a family history of diabetes. It's interesting. Many of my patients say, oh, this is happening because of my genetics. I have a family history of diabetes. And I say, well, that's interesting. How old was your grandmother when she got diabetes? Oh she was eighty okay.
And how old was your mother when she got diabetes?
She was seventy. And how old are you now? Oh, I'm forty five. And how about your son who has diabetes? Oh he's twenty one. I have patients who tell me the story and so say, yeah, you have a family history. We are all vulnerable to getting diabetes. But your history went from ninety to seventy to fifty to thirty. And it's very different to have diabetes at a young age than it is to have an old age. And so something has gone on in our environment, something pathologic has
gone on our environment. To unmask this nearly human, universal human tendency, we have to acquire diabetes such that it's happening at younger and younger ages, with tremendous implications for work productivity, raising a family, sexual activity, you know, and all of those things. And so it's really you know, in the context of the COVID pandemic, of course that's gotten all the intention. But what's happening at a much more chronic, slow growing, and insidious pace is the diabetes epidemic.
And the two of them together, of course, were a disaster, you know, the so called syndemic of having diabetes making you much more likely to die of COVID than you see how these two things interact with each other. So
it's a very important national urgent problem. And you know, we've recently had some federal policy work around this that I hope will change the conversation such as well, the conversation is focused very much on you know what you and I have been talking about, which is people's individual choices that they make in their day to day lives, right the intimates and donuts that your mother served you
and that you enjoyed. Really much of this exposure is occurring in the context of federal policy that in many ways promotes the diabetes epidemic.
Let's take, for.
Example, the most important nutrition assistance program, the SNAP Program Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program formerly known as food stamps. Something like forty forty five million individuals receive SNAP benefits every year, and because of the efforts of the junk food industry in particular, we have never been able to actually make that a nutrition assistance program. Rather, what it is is it gives people a little bit of money to buy food,
including junk food. So last year we spent maybe eighty billion dollars on providing SNAP benefits to low income America. It's very important program to reduce poverty and food and security. Four billion dollars four billion of the eighty billion was spent only on sugar, sweet and beverages.
And any attempts we've made to attach restrictions to that money have been rebuffed by even civil rights activists who are saying, don't tell us what.
To eat, right.
We have the misconception that this freedom to eat in some way restricts our freedom of life. And you know, we're not saying you can't drink a sugar sweet and beverage. What we're saying is that the government funding should not be used in a nutrition assistance program. And just by way of comparison, with the four billion dollars in that same year, the CDC would have spent six hundred million dollars on all chronic diseases in America.
So what is that like?
A sevenfold greater expenditure on sugar sweet and beverages than the prevention of all chronic diseases.
Doctor Dean Schillinger. If you enjoy conversations on public health, check out my episode with doctor Robert Lustig, a pediatric endocrinologist who studied the link between sugar and childhood obesity.
Sixteen percent of all of the corn grown in America today ends up as high fructose corn syrup. We have boatloads of it, and it's cheap, and because it's cheap, it started finding its way into things that never had sugar before. Like hamburger buns, hamburger meat, barbecue, sauce, ketchup, salad, dressing.
I mean pretty much everything you can imagine in the store. Indeed, Barry Popkin at the University of North Carolina has just done a study that shows that eighty percent of the food items there are six hundred thousand food items in America, eighty percent of them relays with sugar added sugar.
To hear more of my conversation with doctor Lustig, go to Here's Thething dot org. After the break, Doctor Dean Schillinger shares how conflicts of interest in scientific studies and lobbying prevent change from within the sugar industry. I'm Alec Baldwin,
and you're listening to Here's the Thing. Doctor Dean Schillinger served as a co chair of a federal Advisory Commission on Diabetes policy and Chief Medical Officer for Diabetes Prevention for the State of care California, among many other high profile appointments. I wanted to learn about his approach to advising elected officials and trying to bring about real legislative change.
You know, we've gotten to the point now where one in seven adults on average has diabetes in America one in seven, and in communities of color, it's, like I said, one in four, sometimes one in three. We can't avoid hearing stories of the consequences of diabetes. And what I've realized, I've stopped giving talks on the statistics and the p values and the you know, and graphs, and I've just started telling real stories from my own practice that sort of give people a wake up call around like this
is like really important shit here. These aren't just numbers. And this sort of happened to me when I was working as chief of the diabetes Prevention Control Program in the state of California. So when I started the job in two thousand and eight, two and a half million Californians had diabetes, and when I left twenty thirteen to four million Californians had diabetes.
So I'm like, gee, I did a great job, right, what a fantastic job I did.
And the reason I wasn't able to do my job is I couldn't get into the heads of legislators how important this was. And then I quickly learned, probably too late, that I needed to tell them real stories. And the story that I told them then and I've told another regulatory in policy settings was a story of Melanie, a lovely forty year old African American woman who had developed diabetes just like Montelle in her late twenties and had been addicted to a number of things, smoking cocaine, sugar
sweeten beverages, but the addiction she could not kick. With sugar sweeten beverages, she loved seven ups. She just could not give up the seven up and she was desperate. And I remember on her fortieth birthday, I came into clinic and I saw her hospital card, like, it's your fortieth birthday, Why are you here? You should be celebrating, And she said, oh, don't worry. You know, my girlfriend going to take me tomorrow to the water park, my favorite thing to do. I'm going to go to the
water park and do the water slides. I haven't done it in fifteen years. I was like, oh, that sounds like a great birthday. And then a couple months later, at her follow up appointment, she didn't show, but her girlfriend showed and I said, where's Melanie And she said I it was horrible. We went to the water park and you know Melanie who can't feel her feet because
of her. The nerve damage from the diabetes burnt the bottom of her feet while she was standing on the hot staircase, and she developed gangreen in both feet, hospitalized and had amputations, and then the gangreen spread to her body and she died. And this is what I learned, you know, at her follow up visit.
And for those people that don't know, for those people who don't have a real sense of the diabetic neuropathy where and for some of my friends, that neuropathy came on in somewhat rapid surges.
Yeah.
I had friends of mine who had along that outer pad of your foot, the balls of the feed and then the heel. They had a neuropathy like sensation for an extended period of time, like let's say a year, and they felt the tingling right, and then all of a sudden, it seemed like they told me, like overnight he went to burning and numbness.
And then numbness. Yeah.
You know, the statistic that I think is most compelling is, you know, we think of amputees, We think of soldiers, right, we think of the Iraq War and IEDs and people getting their leg blown off, and that indeed happened in the fifteen years of that conflict, twenty five hundred soldiers lost a limb and it's a catastrophe. It's devastating. In that same period of time, one million people with diabetes
in the United States lost a limb. And we think of amputation as like this most catastrophic thing, but it is happening. If you go into low income neighborhoods, you see people in wheelchairs. Why are they in wheelchairs? They've
lost a limb. So I mean, at some point, and I think we've hit this point, the discourse begins to change around, just like we saw with tobacco use, that maybe this is something we need to do in moderation, and we have to recognize it's not only we who have to change, it's the businesses that are pushing this at us that need to change.
I was told by people years ago when I was more active on an ongoing basis in advocacy work in the nineties and so forth, the sugar lobby is like borderline, like the Mediine cartel. You know, the biggest sugar producer I was in Brazil. The great families that are some of them Cuban expatriates in the Miami area Great Miami Fortunes logged countless millions of dollars in federal subsidies for
these products. You know, it's almost like they look at sugar like oil, Like if we don't have a steady supply of this stuff, the country is going to grind to a halt. You know, sugar is a heavily What do you think about that? In terms of this idea, people was talking about putting warnings on candy labels.
Yeah, I think this is a critical, critical issue. The outsized influence in this case of the American Beverage Association, which is, you know, in cahoots with the sugar industry. It's part of it, and I mean I've had firsthand experiences with them.
I'll give you example.
So in twenty fifteen, the City and County of San Francisco passed an ordinance because we've had this explosion of diabetes, that would place warning labels on billboards that advertise sugar, sweet and beverages, you know, warning consuming one or more of these. The City County of San Francisco that consuming one or more of these may contribute to OBEs, diabetes, tooth decay, and heart disease.
Pretty reasonable and this went to court.
The American Beverage Association sued the city and county for breach of their First Amendment rights, so called compelling their free speech making them say something that they claimed was misleading, scientifically false, and controversial.
And so this went to of all places.
Of federal court, the Ninth Circuit Court because it's a constitutional case.
And who were the litigants again, the the.
American Beverage Association, the City and County of San Francisco to plaintiff with you. And so I was asked to be the expert scientist to develop a report around, Okay, is this warning actually scientifically factual? And I provided that
report and that case was one but was interesting. In the research that I was doing to try to determine whether sugar, sweet and beverages were causally associated with these outcomes, something sort of interesting happened, which is about half of the studies showed that, yes, there is a causal relationship between these products and these outcomes, but half of them found no effect. I would say fifty to fifty was
kind of, you know, coincidental. And so after that court case happened, I went back and I very carefully went through the funding sources of each of these studies there were something like sixty studies in a fifteen year period, and looked at the funding sources of the scientists who had written those coursers. And as it turned out, not surprisingly those studies that were funded in some way by the American Beverage Association or the scientists had been sent
on trips to Hawaii or whatever. It was almost universally, with only one exception, thirty three out of thirty four found no association between their product. No diabetes is zero, right, And every study that was independently funded founded, and so the likelihood of having an association found if you were funded by the industry was basically zero.
And so I wrote up these findings because that, I mean, everybody.
Knows there's conflicts of interest, right the chemical industry and the tobacco industry. But this strength of the conflict of interest essentially entirely determining the result of the study, showed how the industry controlling the scientists, controlling and hijacking science itself. Being on the editorial boards of nutrition journals, for example.
Really was unprecedented.
And so I wrote this up in the Anamals of Internal medicine, and needless to say, the American Beverage Association responded immediately and quote a scathing letter to the editor saying that Okay, yeah, he claims doctor Schellinger claims that there are conflicts of interest at play here. He needs to understand that they are intellectual conflicts of interest that
he is subject to. In other words, saying, I somehow religiously believe that sugar sweeten beverages are cause of diabetes, and therefore that belief is a conflict of interest that undermines the scientific study that I did, and intellectual conflicts of interest.
The last time I saw.
That raised was when the tobacco industry, you know, went against the scientists who found the relationship between tobacco and lung cancer. So then about a year later, two years later, a study came out in that same journal, the Annals of Internal Medicine, that claimed that all of the national guidelines internationally that said that we should have less than ten percent of our caloric consumption from added sugars are fraudulent, They're bad science.
You know.
It was a very well done systematic review funded by the International Life Science Institute, which is the Americ Beverage Association, Snickers, Mars Bar, all of these people. And I was asked to write an editorial about this study, and I basically called them out in the editorial, and then The Atlantic Monthly said, well, wow, what's going on with this sugar controversy.
We're going to have a story about the sugar controversy, and they interviewed me, and they interviewed the editor of the Anamals of Internal Medicine, an esteemed physician colleague of mine, and they said, you know what, why did you publish this study funded by the Beverage Association? And she said, well, I felt like it was really important to have two sides of the story. And I learned that yes, there are financial conflicts of interests, but they're also intellectual conflicts
of interest. So this idea of intellectual conflicts of interest is being pushed by the industry and is finding its way into scientific discourse and really creating another mechanism for disinformation.
Now, in the time we have left, I wanted to highlight the fact that your wife is a public interest attorney who serves a director of the Program and Advocacy at Bay Area Legal Aid. So both of you did your wife's and your own public service mindedness, your civic mindedness, your commitment to helping the less fortunate. Is that a glue that drew you to your wife, something you admired about her?
Yeah, absolutely, it's something that I think she's been an inspiration for me. She I mean, we often joke that we serve the same clients, you know, and I'm trying to promote their health and she's trying to promote their rights, and in some cases we have shared clients coincidentally.
That's funny.
But I grew up in a public housing project actually in Buffalo in my early years, and I saw what poverty was like, and then we came out of that, and I saw how different life was for me, you know, once we had some money, and how that impacted my health. On the other side of my family, my uncle was running science education for UNESCO in Paris, and my aunt
was a radio broadcaster in Israel for Colistrael. And so this idea of communication and science and health all sort of I think I grew up with somehow, and so I'm able now to try to harness science and communication to make the world a better place. And it's extremely gratifying. To be able to work in a public hospital where you're working side by side with others who.
Who they're not in for the money. I mean we get paid, we get.
Well paid, but really get to see their efforts returned.
You know, so many times.
Over, Doctor Dean Schillinger. If you're enjoying this conversation, tell a friend and be sure to follow Here's the Thing on the iHeartRadio app, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. When we come back, doctor Dean Schillinger shares the most important change you can make to help fight diabetes. I'm
Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the Thing. Doctor Dean Schillinger co founded a nonprofit campaign, The Bigger Picture, to help young people of color tell their stories about diabetes. They share how the issue affects their families, their communities, and themselves through poetry, song and film. I wanted to know what was behind the campaign and how it might change the public perception surrounding sugar. Well.
I mean, I think there are two parts of the conversation about diabetes. The first part is the individual patient right, get your A one C, get tested, treat your diabetes, eat right, exercise, I think we do a really good job of that in the United States. The American Diabetes Association is front and center where we don't have the megaphone. However, is ref framing the conversation about diabetes to be not just a biomedical problem at the individual level, but that it is a societal problem.
That needs societal fixes.
And that's where this Bigger Picture campaign, with these young poets of color basically speaking truth to power about what's going on, has really changed the conversation away from this individual blame and shame kind of narrative to actually, we're kind of being victimized here, and it's not just people of color being victim but we're all being victimized by
these insidious practices around the food industry. And this requires a movement alec if we are going to change the course of the epidemic, and we've begun to see that. As I mentioned earlier, it's going to require a social movement. And you know that the impact of these young people in the Bigger Picture campaign, when they get in front of policymakers and bang out a poem in front of them, far outstrips the impact that I've been able to make as and so.
I wouldn't have thought that.
I think bringing together the arts and public health in terms of a megaphone around changing the conversation around diabetes to be reframed as a social problem that we can get our arms around. Is where the money should be. It's where the money is. So it's where the money should be. And I mean, you have a tremendous megaphone at your disposal, and I hope you use it in
that regard. But there are many gifted members, particularly of disproportionately affected communities, who can do a much better job representing the experiences of individuals and communities more than the public health expert can. So bringing together the public health experts with vocal community members, who's.
Doing the talking and who's delivering the message exactly?
And what is that message? Yeah, I mean my message.
If I had said, oh, go do a diabetes campaign, it probably would have been far less effective than what you heard Obassi Davis and Joker Rosco's say.
In their poems.
Joker Orosco's poem, you know he's a kid who grew up in Central Valley of California, which is, you know, the fruit basket of the world, world growing fruits and vegetables, and all the kids exposed to his junk food. He can't you know, his family's farming the Bounty of America and everywhere in Stockton is just junk food, and everybody's got diabetes.
But you always see, I mean I did for a period of time. You always see where they're going into the school lunch program and they're taking the administrators of the school district, and they're taking the administrators of the individual school, and they're saying, you got to get the soda machines out of the school. You got to get the high fructose vending out of the school.
How do we not have federal legislation around that?
I wonder who can defend that? Who wasn't just completely in the pocket of the beverage lobby or the sugar lobby. You're sitting there saying you want your children, don't condemn your children to what you have.
Right, Well, that's why we need a social movement. I mean, we don't have cigarette vending machines in high schools right anymore?
We don't. That's true that we used to.
Now one last question, which is that so you're not an endoquinologist and I'm assuming you're not a nutritionist either. So when people come to you, whether it's the young man who lost who was the subject of the film who had the amputation, very sad case. And when people are coming to you, I'm assuming within your body or your network of your organizations you work with in hospitals, there's a nutritionists you pass them on to who can give them some guidance about what to eat, not eat. Eat.
Yeah, I provide basic nutritional counseling. Often it's not rocket science. When you hear what people are you just have to take a good history. You have to hear the story. Tell me what you ate yesterday, Tell me what It doesn't take long to figure out that they're having four bowls of rice with every meal, or you know, having three sugar sweetened beverages a day. And you know, a lot of this is pretty out there and obvious. But yes, we do have nutritionists who work in the outpatient's setting,
and they're very effective. I think the most effective thing that they do is they have the person keep a food diary and then they review the food diary.
Because I'm always saying to people it's an incremental change. I said, just give up one thing. I had a doctor sit me down when I was fifty years old, so it's fifteen years ago, and he said, here's my philosophy. He said that is, once you turn fifty, start to minimize or completely give up one of each category gradually every five years.
I mean, I do think certainly individual decision making is really important, which is what we do with an attritionness. At the same time, we have to ensure that when the person walks out of their home that within a mile or two miles there's some place.
That's option go, there's oppositation that you can get.
And the price of healthy food over the last thirty years has exorbitantly increased relative to the price of junk food, which has declined adjusted for inflation. So the stress on the pocket is real. And you know, a lot of that is subsidized by the farm bill. Paradoxically, so if we could have a farm bill that subsidizes the growth of healthy food, which we do not have a program to do, we could turn that around to.
Well, let's just say this, which is when you're ready to go to Washington and fight the fight about school lunches and vending and lunches, when you're ready to do the next charge up that hill. Count me and I'll go with you.
Thanks, So I appreciate it.
Your kids are how old?
I have twins who are twenty four.
They're jazz musicians in New York actually, and then I have a sixteen year old daughter.
So your daughter, And what's the shill in your house on a dietary basis cooking at home?
Yeah, we mostly cook at home.
Occasionally we order in, you know, when I'm lazy, and we have desserts. I mean a lot of fruit, a lot of fruit. But well, we'll have desserts every now. And that we do not have sugar, sweet and beverages. That's something that's very different from my chi. And we didn't have the fruit loops that I grew up with, you know, the pop tarts that I grew up And my kids, my boys are like five or six inches taller than me and look a lot better than I did.
Well, listen, I enjoyed so much seeing you in the film, and I was so captivated by the work you're doing and your articulation and your just your whole energy in terms of you're caring for your your constituents there that I was dying to talk with you, and thank you so much for doing with us. Okay, thank you, my thanks to doctor Dean Schillinger. This episode was recorded at CDM Studios in New York City. Were produced by Kathleen Russo,
Zach MacNeice, and Maureen Hobin. Our engineer is Frank Imperial. Our social media manager is Danielle Gingrich. I'm Alec Baldwin. Here's the thing is brought to you by iHeart Radio