>> sub concussive hits and accumulation of neurological harm is clearly higher in football. if you just look at diagnose concussions the rate is about the same in football and soccer. but that is why soccer is starting to look at helmets because you get your head hit more than you would guess playing soccer. >> i should add that people often ask what if your son wanted to play football and the response would be if he wants to play pickup football even if you want to play tackle football at a younger age, i did that. i got a concussion i have my shoulder dislocated a couple of times a day would stop them from doing that. i don't think you can put kids in giant michelin man outfits. they have to incur some risk and that's part of growing up is managing risk and kids can't be protected from that. but it's a huge industry, this huge for patient industry that has grown up around this

beautiful game that is so concerning to me and ultimatel ultimately -- i still play catch with my neighbor. i can throw the ball about 50 yards because i love it. kids were playing pickup ball outside my daughters swim practice and i was watching them and being like i totally want to go and play with them. i'm not the creepy guy wanting to play with a bunch of teens but the game is wonderful. everything around it has for me gotten too dark. >> thank you. [applause]

>> one of the things that fascinates me is when you talk about how warfare and violence was really necessary for civilization and without that they would not have been civilization. can you talk about that a little bit? >> absolutely.

this is what made me want to write this book actually. i came across this extraordinary fact that every single civilization before the modern period before we invented industrialized society every single civilization depended on agriculture and that meant that a small every single civilization whether in china india europe the middle east develops a system whereby a small aristocracy comprising of at most 5% of the population took away the surplus of produce grown by the presence and kept them at subsistence level in poverty and degradation and use this wealth that they had taken to fund their civilization

projects. this could only have been done by force. the peasants somehow had to be subdued. 90% of the population throughout the 5000 years were capped in distress and anger. as historians tell us without this terrible system we would probably not have developed beyond a primitive level as a species because this system supported a privileged class the people that have no leisure to explore the items -- arts and sciences in which civilization depended plus when your economy is based on agriculture, the only way you can if you like increase your gross national product is by acquiring more arable land and more peasants to farm it.

consequently warfare became essential to the economy. he was the only way for the economy to grow and plunder was also essential to supporting aristocratic lifestyle. the economic aspect was always there but of course because we are meaning seeking creatures, this effort, the struggle to achieve civilization was mythologized in various religious systems to give it meaning, to give it significant but at the same time there were always profits and stages and i'm thinking of the prophets of israel for example jesus mohammed confucius who spoke out against the system of castigated people, rulers were oppressing the poor in this way and had harsh words for those people who said their prayers punctiliously

are worshiped in the temple that neglected the plight of the poor and the oppressed. >> are you saying that violence was a good thing or is a good thing and can be a good thing because without it we wouldn't have civilization and that's kind of a conundrum. >> absolutely the civilization is a dilemma for us all. of course i don't think violence and warfare is a good thing. the system of agrarian oppression was utterly appalling but it's a dilemma. and the american trappist monks said all those of us who benefit from a system of oppression are in some way implicated in the suffering that has been caused. ..

>> the book is called "food politics," how the food introduces food and health.

the author, marion nestle at new york university. professor nestle, how big is the u.s. food industry by >> guest: acr miss. a vast defendant of the nation speed all. everybody he is. couldn't be more important. >> in your book you compare it to the tobacco. >> guest: only in certain ways. food is very different from tobacco. one product clearly with possible others one message. else well. food is much more complicated than that. you can't tell people not to eat. and it's not just one product. thousands and thousands and thousands of products. the question for dealing with

nutrition issues is if you need this instead of that answered that question. >> host: how has the food industry changed over the last 50 years? >> guest: i think within the last 50 years what we've seen is an increase in consolidation. the big problem the food industry faces in the united states at least is too much food. we produce in this country plus imports, less exports. roughly twice the number of calories the population needs on a daily basis. about 4000 calories available in the food supply every day and people eat about 2000. these are ballpark figures. so the food industry is competitive and it has to find lots and lots of ways to sell food and in doing that, as the number of calories in the food supply increase, the food industry became more competitive and have to find more and more and more ways to push food on

people and it did that very effect delay. hence, obesity. >> host: how did he do that? >> guest: we have to get back in history to the 1970s. starting in the late 1970s, early 80s, three things happen. the first of agricultural policy change so that instead of not growing food, we pay farmers as much as they can. we did and that's why there's my why there's my calories in the food supply. the second has to do with wall street. wall street in the early 1980s changed. there is a shareholder talking movement that insisted that instead of both lovely blue spots that you never hear about anymore, but those lovely blue chips that gave that long flow between an investment forget about them, we shareholders want high returns on investments and we want them right now.

so for food company is that we're trying to sell food in an environment, now they have an additional pressure. they had to produce growth, evidence of growth to wall street every 90 days. this took enormous pressure. they began to look for ways that they could sell more food and make out one break also in the early 1980s after president reagan was elected under the regulatory agenda, deregulating of marketing to children occurred. so it was then possible for food companies to market directly to children in a way that had never been done before. and that combination of things plus a deregulation of the food and drug administration, removal of resources from the food and drug administration gave food companies the opportunity, the market in ways they never had before.

and they did that by making larger portions of food if there is one life than i would love to get across, it is that larger portions have more calories. larger portions started coming in the early 1980s. they also put food everywhere. if you live in new york and go to a drugstore, it looks like a grocery store now. there is food at bed bath and beyond. there's food at staples. there is food everywhere. it used to be that libraries wouldn't allow any kind of food anywhere near the library. now every library has a café and it a café in it. these are ways of selling food and we are humans. humans eat when food is in front of us. and the more times we see food a day, the more food we eat. >> host: you write in your book, "food politics," food

companies will make any product that sells regardless of its nutritional value or effects on them. >> guest: i did say that. take coca-cola for an example. the soda industry is under enormous pressure from health authorities right now because it is sugar water. it is not only sugar and no new trance, the sugars in liquid form, which may have their own metabolic difficulties. so yes, billions of dollars go into marketing coca-cola every year and people would be much healthier if major soft drinks are sugary drinks in general. >> host: at all? >> guest: in small quantities. for when coca-cola started out as a company. now you can buy 64-ounce bottles or cans or whatever. small amounts of time. we are americans.

we don't do moderation. it's against our genetic code. >> host: professor nestle, a lot are fortified. it's not a good thing. >> guest: if you ask people about the difference between fortified and unfortified ahmed may think that the fortified one has fewer calories. and if you thought of fortified products versus the foods so those vitamins came from, people think anything that has vitamins added is healthier than original food. it's using nature as a code for food. >> host: have farmers gotten a lot more efficient? >> guest: farmers are

fabulous. the level of efficiency and product dvd has increased or manically over the last 50 years it has gone way, way down to small farms have gone under because they can't compete. what pat has done is to plate of the population of rural america. if you don't have small farms come you don't have people around. you just have a great big operation farmworkers going through and you go through moral america now and it's just devastated. it's really heartbreaking when their new secretary of agriculture in the obama administration came in with an agenda of revitalizing rural america and not meant promoting small farms again. he hasn't been able to do very much with that and i think that's a real tragedy. >> host: why not?

>> guest: the forces of agribusiness in this country are huge and may understand that the organic seasonal, local food movement that is so popular among the educated population of the united states is a direct critique of industrial agribusiness. they don't like it and they have the power in congress. >> host: genetically modified foods. natural on not or is it a bad thing? >> guest: it is just as polarizing in the united states as the middle east is. you can't get people in the same room, just like you can't get pro-israel and pro-palestinian people in the favor and just like pro-gm of people and anti-gm of people in the same room. they have no common base is speaking. that's really too bad. i think the industry brought this on itself.

by insisting away from the beginning that there was no reason to label genetically modified food. just think about what would've happened if they had been labeled right from the beginning. i was on the fda for the advisory committee at the time and i said you got it labeler. if you don't label them, the public will wonder what you are trying to hide and people won't have a choice. this is a big consumer choice country in the food industry is always arguing about choice except for genetically modified food. if they put a label on it from the beginning, people would have a choice and by this time 20 years later, people would realize nobody dropped dead at 80 genetically modified foods and they were good when the bad ones and make a talk about what good products were it not harmful products were and not have it be so polarized. >> host: what are the rules regarding labeling?

>> guest: the organic rules are very clear. the department of agriculture has codification as i think hundreds of pages. some of the united states, as the project is labeled organic, it has to follow the department of agriculture rules and it's expected to make sure it does follow those rules. those rules say that for plant crops, no genetic engineering, no fertilization sewage sludge, no chemical fertilizers or herbicides. i think those are the main ones. for animals, there are rules for what they must be sad. they must be fed organic feed here that is a difficult one because there's not a lot of organic feet around and it's expensive. they also have certain things that have to be done in order to

make their conditions of raising a little bit better. so those are very clear. anybody that has usda organic label on the food product is following those rules and is expected to make sure they do. >> host: marion nestle as public health at new york university, do you eat organic foods? to look for organic foods? >> guest: i do look for organic foods because what organic foods do as they are produced without using the worst of the chemical herbicides and pesticides. they also have to maintain the quality of soil and we've been industrial farming doesn't have to do. industrial farming is this fertilizers rather than building at ohio. as anybody who knows anything about farming knows what really counts in farming is the quality of the soil. so every time you pick an organic product or i pick an

organic out of it, i am voting for and i'm willing to pay a little bit more in order to make sure that the soil is maintained more sustainably. >> host: bias at the foods that seem to have a lot of sugar, a lot of salt, a lot of that seem cheaper to buy a? >> guest: the salt sugar factories are cheaper to buy for two reasons. first about their process, which means they have a long shelf life, which means that the companies can buy the ingredients when the ingredients are at their cheapest, make the product, but the product on the shelf then it can sit there forever and nothing bad will happen to it. and also, we like those foods and the government subsidizes corn and soybeans, which are the basis of a lot of the ingredients in processed foods. so does the ideas are cheaper than they would be if they were

on the open market. the other ingredient of course is high fructose quiet syrup, which comes from subsidizes corn and is much cheaper than sugar even now. >> host: when it comes to the federal government, do you have faith that our food supply is being protected in a sense or do you think the bad actors in your view are being promoted? >> guest: i have a lot more faith in the safest and then i did five years ago. so when the obama administration came in, it came in with a clear agenda to clean up the food safety problems to the extent that occurred and what that meant was getting congress to pass the food safety modernization act, which congress did in early 2011 finally. that law gave the fda powers they been seeking in decades to issue recalls, for example, to

require food producers to follow a standard whose safety procedures and so forth. so the fda is finally getting started on that process. the rules i wrote an purpose. it's going to be a few years before they are completely implemented. but everybody knows this is coming and a lot of just gone on board and started following these procedures. the other thing that has happened is a courts have started taking food safety more seriously. so the officials of the peanut corporation of america are working recently at doing very bad games. this is the company that knew a peanut butter was contaminated with salmonella and shipped it out anyways and lots and lots of people got sick and there were some deaths and not fun. so between the fda's rules and an increase inspection ability

and increase recall ability and let the courts were doing, i think we are going to see the safety system improve. >> host: one thing a lot of people know from the u.s. department of agriculture is the food. med. is that a successful model? >> guest: well, the food. it went through 1992 through 2011 when the obama administration came in and got rid of it and replaced it. i happen to be very fond of the 1992. med. i think it is something that none of the other food guides had done, witches to make it very clear that it is better to be some foods than others and the others are less hierarchical than that. med. but the obama administration wanted a clean sweep of everything done before so they got rid of it. >> host: your students coming to class. do they bring snacks have been? what is your reaction to the products they have.

>> guest: i never comment on what anybody else see tiered >> host: why? >> guest: must they ask me. i think it's rude. >> host: what is your opinion of some of the snacks they go to the snack shelf? >> guest: well, they are designed to sell food products. it's about marketing, not health. if you want to eat healthily, it is really easy to do it. it sure you have plenty of fruits and vegetables in your diet. don't eat too much junk food and balance your calorie intake against the calories of intake. there's really nothing to it and there's lots of ways of eating healthily that liking the foods you like. lots and lots and lots. but those kinds of diets don't include a lot of heavily advertise food products. he used to be at the periphery of the grocery store had the real food and i can say is stay

out of the center aisles. i can't do that anymore because grocery stores caught on to the fact that nutrition expert making that kind of recommendation. so now they have junk food everywhere. absolutely everywhere. >> host: what is the obesity rate? >> guest: it is now up to 33%, 34% of the population is considered to be obese, which means body mass index of 30 or at the and roughly almost 70% of the population is considered overweight. and therefore at risk of an increase for type-2 diabetes, heart disease and other chronic diseases. >> host: when we have bad eating habits, can we really blame we really blame that on general mills for catalogs? >> guest: i think that is a simplistic way of putting it. leaving it on one company. i think we can say that the

default eating pattern in the united states is not a particularly healthy eating pattern. the less healthful foods are cheaper. they are more widely available. more heavily advertised generally the amount of money that goes into marketing is extraordinary. it's about $17 billion a year for food, beverages, restaurants and alcohol. and people are very responsive to marketing. otherwise marketers would arce. what is so interesting about that is almost nobody i know recognizes that marketing influences what kde. it is not supposed to. it is supposed to slip a live the radar of critical thinking and marketers are very good at that. so yes, i think the food industry has a great deal to do with creating a food environment that encourages people to keep

more and eat more of the wrong kinds of foods. you don't see those kinds of advertising budgets for fruits and vegetables because fruit and vegetable growers don't have the kind of money that the marketers of food.x do. if you are selling half a billion units of the particular breakfast cereal, a sugary breakfast cereal a year, you've got enough money to really promote the serial, especially to children and you are going to be advertising on tv. you want to be doing acts, contacts, all kinds of things. or if you're really clever, you're going to be supporting community organizations. you're going to be funding research and doing all kinds of things just like the cigarette companies did to make sure that people -- so help her fashion millstone of guys eating less of those products.

>> host: marion nestle come he talked about marketing and one of the effective marketing campaigns as milk does the body good. in your book, "food politics," you have don shalala, former hhs secretary with a milk mustache. >> guest: yes, i was horrified when i saw that because that ad came out at exactly the time the dietary guidelines advisory committee, which is the committee of health and human services and the department of agriculture was dealing with how many servings of dairy products they were going to recommend and the dietary guidelines of the error. i was told that doctors saw leila didn't see anything wrong with it. everybody wants to be in a milk/ad. it means you're famous. they never identified the people in it so you are supposed to know who they are. i thought it was a conflict of interest and i worry a lot about

the food industries intends unrelenting after to try to get academics of one kind or another to sign on in something that i would csa concept of every situation. they find an enormous amount of time the effects of soda on health. and guess what? those studies never show the sodas have any effect whatsoever >> host: if you could make the decision, would you say no more subsidies of any food types and the u.s. government? >> guest: i think the u.s. government has better ways of supporting healthful diet and if they are going to subsidize, i don't want to see them subsidize local farmers and growers of fruits and vegetables. we don't have an agriculture

policy that believes in any way whatsoever to health policy. they are completely separate. so as the affordable care act kicks in and becomes clearer that prevention of disease is going to be a much better way to go than to try to treat the disease because the treatment is always hugely older, the government will look for ways in which it can prevent some of these long-term chronic diseases, particularly type-2 diabetes. it's just awful. they should look for ways to prevent obesity type-2 diabetes and early-onset heart disease through diet and other means than they are going to fund programs and policies that promoting whole grains and so forth. >> host: year book kidnapping 2002. it's been updated every couple of years sense. what is your reaction of the

food industry to your book? >> guest: day i don't think like me very much. in the beginning, there is a threatened lawsuit for the sugar association, which was extremely upset that i had something about sodas or sugar and water and nothing else in the sugar association which represents to growers of sugarcane and sugar be was very offended because they said i should know that soft drinks containing high fructose corn syrup, which they don't represent. that is another lobbying group represents -- the corn refineries represent high for those corn syrup, that they threatened a lawsuit and never followed up on it. post or general mills, nestlé, are they bad actors? >> guest: i don't think they need to be. a lot of very well-meaning people work for these companies. but they are in a situation where they are publicly traded

and publicly traded companies under the wall street rule have to report growth in their ability to meet growth markets every 90 days to wall street. this puts them under absolutely unbelievable pressure to demonstrate growth and they will do anything to sell food products. they will cut corners on food safety is. they will market to vulnerable children. they will move all of their marketing overseas and market to poor people in india and china and indonesia and africa. said the companies are seeking billions of dollars in marketing, in places where people don't need these products at all in order to meet growth in all you have to do is read the business pages of "the wall street journal," "new york times" during a newspaper and look at how closely their growth is scrutinized. i would hate to be in one of

those companies. when students ask me, i want to work for a food company and transfer of the food industry so it's working towards health, i tell them they better go to a company that's not publicly traded. if they do go to a publicly traded company, they better make sure it's a benefit corporation in a state that allows corporations to make decisions based on other issues, social issues besides just holding stocks. >> host: marion nestle, what about food labels? they were changed in the last seven or eight years. are they affect of? >> guest: the food label is in play right now. even at this moment, the fda has put out proposals to revise the food label in order to make some significant changes, emphasize calories, put an added sugar, mix some other changes that everybody is arguing about.

those changes that this particular moment are out for public comment on the comments have come in and i don't know how long that will take and i don't know what the decision will be. but there's been a great deal of lobbying about it. these things are very political. again, the label is only for food products. you don't see any nutrition facts labels on apples or oranges. so one way to deal with the whole what should you keep the issue was never eat anything with a food label on it. >> host: how would you design a food label? >> guest: with great difficulty. i think i reduce the front pack weibel, very much like the traffic label system that was used in great britain for a while. the fda actually proposed a front of package labeling system and before it could do that, it

got the institute of medicine in washington to do two major reports on front of package labeling and the fact that report proposed a system of front of package labeling and it's sort of like traffic lights for it overlooks the sugar, salt and and has little check marks for them. but that report came out during an election year. it went into a drawer and the fda is going to leave those reports in the drawer until they get the nutrition facts label straight now. they may never go back to it. but i would pull that report out of the tour and mediate lien put an end. >> host: because of the availability of our calories per person, has that led to a decrease in world hunger? >> guest: would not be nice? world hunger is actually decreasing according to the food and agriculture organization,

which just came out with its annual report and it's down again by about 50 or 100 million people, so that's only about 800 million in the people in the world are considered to be hungry on a daily basis. most of them in asia, africa and india. hunger isn't about the amount of food that is available. it is about whether people can afford to buy it or not. this gets us into the whole question of income equity and issues related to how do you develop a system of payment of individuals in support of individual jobs and so forth that enable people to buy what they need on a daily basis and have enough. in the united states, we have a food insecurity rate the call

about 15%. that's 50% of however many million people it is. that is quite a lot of people. and these are people, largely the working poor, who just either have jobs that don't pay enough for them to live in a reasonable where they can't get jobs. so the real issue is employment and wages. one other thing i talk about is touching on so many report issues in our society. and our food study programs at and why you would talk about food as they land in order to deal with the most important problems in the world and i would say that health care, agricultural production, income equity, climate change are some of those problems. immigration.

>> wic, food stamps, successful? >> guest: certainly would imprint children food program and snap, programs are the only programs that stand between a lot of poor people in absolute destitution. i mean, there's plenty of evidence that their efforts that people wouldn't have any money to deal with anything. but snape now costs taxpayers about $80 billion the year and it costs 80% of the farm bill, the entire farm bill. what it is doing in the farm bill is a long political story, but very days. so if you are a republican legislator for a legislator that the government is too big and needs to be cut, here is $80 billion sitting there. it is just a target for people who want a budget cut