The Reverse Mullet Healthcare Podcast
Ellen Brown, Justin Politi, and Dave Pavlik bring their 90 collective years of healthcare experience to BP2 Health where they're on a mission to effect real change in the industry. Connect with BP2 Health Here: https://bp2health.com/contact/
The Reverse Mullet Healthcare Podcast
Healthcare's Secret Ingredient: The Future of Food with Carter Williams
Ever wondered how your dinner plate can transform your health? Get ready to unravel the surprising connection between agriculture and healthcare with Carter Williams, a visionary at the confluence of these fields. The Reverse Mullet Healthcare Podcast Hosts, Ellen Brown, Justin Politi and Dave Pavlik, indulge in a stimulating conversation that promises to defy your expectations of the typical healthcare delivery dialogue. We're bringing food to the forefront of our value-based care discussion, inspired by Carter's rich background, from Boeing Ventures to the innovative iSelect Fund, and paralleling his sailing adventures with the challenges of nurturing health through nutrition.
Hear Carter reflect on his personal journey from problem-solving around the family dinner table to pioneering Lean Six Sigma methodologies that rejuvenated military aircraft. This episode isn't just a trip down memory lane; it's an eye-opener to the potential of agricultural technology and healthy eating as cornerstones of value-based healthcare. We're not shying away from the stark reality of ultra-processed foods' impact on our society – thank you Mark Hyman for the statistics. Instead, we're taking a hard look at the repercussions and championing the vital role food plays in mitigating chronic health issues.
Finally, we sail into the horizon of regenerative agriculture's role in value-based care and the burgeoning “Food is Medicine” movement with insights from Erin Martin's work with Midwest farmers. Imagine grocery stores doubling as health advisors, and GLP-1 medications reshaping our taste buds for the better. This episode isn't just a discussion; it's an exploration of the possibilities hidden within our meals, an invitation to view food as the first line of defense in our health arsenal. Join us for a conversation that's sure to feed your curiosity and perhaps even change the way you think about your next meal.
Welcome to the Reverse Mullet Healthcare Podcast from BP2. Today we are talking with our guest, carter Williams, about food as part of the Value Based Care solution set Along with. While food is medicine is critical. It would be even better if we used the term food as health. But first, who are we and why are we here, and why did we name our show the Reverse Mullet Healthcare Podcast?
Speaker 2:Well, we want to be relevant, informative and creative, but we also want to be entertaining and have fun. So it's like a party in the front and business in the back, like a mullet when we reversed.
Speaker 1:We are your hosts. I'm Ellen Brown, we have Justin Politi, and joining us remotely today is Dave Pavlik.
Speaker 2:So we are passionate, innovative and collaborative and are committed to solving our industry's most important issues together with our clients. We have a combined 90 years experience which makes us sound so super old.
Speaker 1:In each episode, we will dive into a hot healthcare topic and dig into each other.
Speaker 2:Be gentle on me.
Speaker 1:Never. So I okay. So I have to confess I feel like I. So Justin said that this is like a Super Bowl episode for me. He's not joking, because I literally I feel like I've been biding my time in this industry for over 30 years for a day like today.
Speaker 1:We're finally at a point where the topic of today's podcast is relevant to the healthcare industry at large. For years and Dave and Justin know this and all of our listeners that know me well know that I've had this closet passion for health that I've had to keep, that I've had to keep stashed away while wearing my fix the healthcare system cape. But today we're going to talk about the importance of food in the healthcare delivery system. There's been a lot of talk about food as medicine lately and folks are talking about it, and outside of the industry at large there's a big momentum and movement of regenerative agriculture, and our guest today, carter Williams welcome. Carter is the perfect person to not only talk about both of these topics, but he also happens to make the solid case as do many, but not many as we need right that healthcare and agriculture are actually inextricably. Inextricably, that's a big word.
Speaker 2:I know.
Speaker 1:Yes, okay, we will not be doing that, it's.
Speaker 2:Swedish discord.
Speaker 1:Inextricably linked and that it shouldn't be bifurcated. And finally, I want to give him props for pushing the term food is health Further supporting our needed transition within the industry from sick care to healthcare. So I'm going to introduce Carter and then we'll get started, but he has a very impressive background. Carter is the CEO and managing partner of ISELECT Fund and has spent his entire career working on innovation. Early in his career, he started Boeing Ventures, which led him to becoming a successful entrepreneur and venture investor.
Speaker 1:Throughout his career, he has directly managed investments of over 600 million in early stage ventures in corporate research resort, resulting yeah, I know right, it's super impressive when I read this resulting in several billion dollars of new product revenues. He also has a background in technology development and manufacturing, particularly in aerospace, including a startup that he created and successfully exited. He also has a similarly impressive background on the investment side, culminating in his current role as CEO of ISELECT Fund. I was also impressed with his credentials of a mechanical engineer and an MBA from MIT. On top of that, he writes about innovation at the sub stack creative destruction. Welcome Carter. I know that we're going to get into some banter, but we appreciate you coming on today.
Speaker 3:Yeah, thank you for having me.
Speaker 2:I will add Ellen, literally floated on air coming into the studio. She's had this smile and I haven't seen such excitement. I can't remember. I'm not making it up. This was like that Christmas morning feeling when you're open the presents. That's what Ellen's look was.
Speaker 4:Yes.
Speaker 2:So Carter, where are you joining us from today?
Speaker 3:I'm in St Louis Missouri.
Speaker 2:Great, I know we did talk just a little bit. I know your background around sailing and your love of sailing, but this whole concept around what you would do in your free time and that kind of work that you would do with the boat yard, can you explain where that passion comes from and that interest?
Speaker 3:I grew up sailing Long Island Sound. It was something we did as a family. It was also something that was challenging. Early at age 16, I was moving hey, the boat needs to go from here to there, can you help move it? There was a lot of camaraderie. I grew up in an environment around sailing, where my grandparents' friends would go sailing with us, my parents would, my parents' friend and my friends. You learned a lot in that about the way the world was in the past and how relevant it is today. And then it was also just physically challenging. You sail, sail, race to Bermuda on a hurricane or Gale, it's right.
Speaker 1:You can survive anything I share with Carter that my father-in-law was a sailor and he my husband. One of the few big adventures that my husband took with my father-in-law on the boat was that they did sail from Baltimore or from Annapolis to Bermuda. And my husband still tells the story of today, today, of the mast being hit by lightning, probably said it's one of the most scared times he was as an entire life. Was that sailing adventure? So to your point, carter it is very trouble.
Speaker 4:I don't want to disappoint Carter, but I am a powerboat guy.
Speaker 3:Oh yeah, he called those stinkpots, but don't wait.
Speaker 4:We literally know somebody in the industry who did exit the industry and works at a boat yard right.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 4:You don't yes, right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, we also have somebody that sailed around the world.
Speaker 2:Yes, yep.
Speaker 3:It's a good place to putter, but the relevance to innovation if you've ever done any long distance sailing, long distance racing is there was one race where we were in a day race long day race. We were two hours behind and ended up finishing 45 minutes ahead of everybody. Wow and this relates a little bit to creative destruction is that it really doesn't matter where you are in the course. It matters where you are when you finish and when you're put into a corner. Big things can change and that's what we're doing with food and health.
Speaker 4:That is a perfect segue. So tell I know what a sub stack is, but tell our listeners what the heck a sub stack actually is and maybe more importantly, why yours is called creative destruction.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so sub stack is a newsletter that people can subscribe to and sort of get a more direct feedback from people who are right in the middle of the industry, without the without the press being in between, and as a platform it's been very effective in terms of reaching out to people who are really curious and trying to understand the truth about what's going on. And so practitioners tend to write on some stack because a good way to directly get a voice out that and sort of linked in. But creative destruction comes from Joseph Schumpeter. Joseph Schumpeter basically said that it was one of the key economists behind entrepreneurship. He's sort of the father of entrepreneurship and economics and he really had this concept of a boom bus.
Speaker 3:A lot of the term boom bus really comes from him and that that many people think the boom bus cycles as a negative. It's really a positive. It is. It is sort of the regeneration of the economy and the shift of the economy. So we've the notion of creative destruction and he often talked about the gales of creative destruction. So you can sort of see the overlap with sailing. My boat is actually named creative destruction, so I don't have a tattoo, but really the principle of both, what Hayek later on spoke about in economics and Schoenpeter originally spoke about in economics, is that entrepreneurs are unique and their ability to sort of listen to the marketplace and hear that there's an opportunity and figure out the calculus of putting that together and so creative destruction is why it's. That's why it's named creative destruction.
Speaker 4:So people can be willing to get a tattoo live on our podcast.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I would.
Speaker 2:OK, all right, so we have a follow up. More content, more content.
Speaker 3:If you've got somebody doing the logo correctly, ok, all right, we have a challenge, and from where?
Speaker 1:So I think we have a challenge and we have a future follow up episode. So where can folks find the newsletter, the sub-stack?
Speaker 3:Creative Destruction If you go to creativedestructionsubstackcom.
Speaker 1:OK.
Speaker 3:Also, if you go to my LinkedIn profile and I'll sort of make one comment about that, this is Ellen and I really met through LinkedIn and as a VC, we don't really know what the hell we're doing. I mean, people are like, oh, you're an ag tech, you must know a lot about agriculture. I know nothing about agriculture. I know a great deal about innovation and a great deal about how innovation works, and so the fuel the most important thing for us is feedback from people close to the market, and the reason we do the sub-stack and the reason why I'm very active on LinkedIn is to suck in the information from the people who are the practitioners on the front end. So if you care about where food is health is going after this, please follow me on LinkedIn and the sub-stack is mentioned there to get a longer form content.
Speaker 1:And I will vouch that Carter puts out some really cool content. I did get completely sucked in to the content, because it's just very thought provoking and also enjoyable, quite frankly. So OK. So, first of all, your bio is massively impressive, but now there's more to it, which is so. I'm fascinated with how you manage to not only be the first Six Sigma application in aerospace but also manage to get trained by Bill Smith himself, and you also manage to figure out how to save a billion dollars on the FAA-18 Super Hornet aircraft program when you were only 25. And now you're helping drive innovation in both health tech and agriculture, which, like you just said, I mean, you kind of answered the last piece of that right, but this is such a fascinating background. You have to tell us a little bit more about all this, because it's so interesting.
Speaker 3:So I graduated from college in 1989, and anybody sort of knows Lean Six Sigma was sort of coming into view at that point. One step back, my father was a lawyer and used to always do various kinds of deals and at age seven I'd be sitting at the dining room table and he'd say, well, this is the deal I'm working on this week. How would you solve it? And he did that with us as a family and like twice a week at dinner we would have conversations about how to solve things. So when I showed up at McDonald Douglas as a 24-year-old out of school and people said, well, how do you think we should solve this problem? And I raised my voice, people were like you're 24 years old, shut up.
Speaker 3:But I never really had this concept that a 24-year-old shouldn't be able to speak up, and so we were seeing high defect rates and people said a 10% defect rate is normal in aircraft and a defect rate meaning they fix this in manufacturing before you ship it. But a quality problem Anybody who's had a pinto knows what that's like.
Speaker 2:But imagine that in a fighter aircraft. So I was like well, why can't it be zero?
Speaker 3:Why can't it be zero? And people were like, oh you fool.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you're 24.
Speaker 3:I was like I was a fool.
Speaker 3:I was 24, 25 years old and I started reading up on Lane and Six Sigma this before really it was even a term and I read a bunch of articles by Bill Smith that he had written under. He had been pushing Lane Six Sigma at Motorola and called him up and said I think we should do this in aerospace. And he said well, I'll come out there and teach you. And so he taught five of us at McDonald Douglas in probably 1990 or so maybe, and that was very fascinating to have him teach it. But he really gave you an inside edge. And then we sort of rolled it out and expanded it. And then those principles of design for manufacturing Lane Six Sigma really helped us say look, you can actually design a better product.
Speaker 3:And so we designed in manufacturing more unitized structure and we changed. We came up with new technology. We came up with new forging techniques and a bunch of things all around, the idea that we could put together the aircraft without tools, which saved about $600 million. And then we found another $400 million to save and in some of the manufacturing plant there, and so the Super Hornet would probably not be around today. It was a collective group of people. It was about 10 of us. That really sort of triggered this conversation. But I was sort of a little bit precocious and put together the whole thing in a way to get it back.
Speaker 3:And so today, when people say you can't change health care, my attitude is that I don't know why not Wow, if I'm 15.
Speaker 1:So now you guys know why this is like the Super Bowl for me because Carter most of the time I asked my question about real change, we were like, oh, I think it should be whatever. Carter and I were like, yeah, I mean we were yeah Anyways.
Speaker 4:That's amazing. We should probably dive in. But real quick, carter, if you wouldn't mind just telling us very quickly about ISElect Fund.
Speaker 3:So ISElect Fund is a venture fund. We've invested in about 75 companies. $200 million is focused on food as health. We look at the world and we say we spend $1.7 trillion on food in the United States. We spend $1.9 trillion on the health care costs of poor nutrition $6,000 per person per year in the United States to deal with the effect of poor nutrition, and so we see that as a $3.6 trillion economy. That really is sort of longevity and nutrition. And can we take on the F-18,? We spent. 10% of our cost was fixing defects in the US economy. 1.9 trillion more is spent. What is that? 110% is spent on fixing the wrong choices we make in nutrition. And so ISElect is focused on ag tech investments and health tech investments that improve nutritional density and that's all deep tech. And then, on the health side, really resolving and providing the longitudinal data sets to help clinical environments understand the right way to make people healthy not deliver health care, but make people healthy.
Speaker 1:So now we get to dive into our topic of food and now it has to be part of the value-based care and health care conversation which, just like I am, I'm jumping out of my skin to be able to do this legitimately and not just pontificating, but with an expert who's in the middle of all of this making it happen. And it's funny because on our recent change episode we did a couple months ago, one of my picks for how to affect real change was food. It was in fact food. That is what I selected and I quoted some stats from Dr Hyman, which we'll get to that at the end, because there's kind of a funny piece to that.
Speaker 3:We're going to invest from one of his companies, exactly.
Speaker 1:And right, and so I'm making a plug at the end. I'll make it now that I want you to help me get Dr Hyman on, because the fact that I used his statistics and I get to quote him and now maybe we could get him on here at some point would be outstanding. So 11 million people die every year from eating ultraprocessed food. These are some of the stats that I pulled from him, that he obviously pulled as well, but six out of 10 people have chronic disease.
Speaker 1:Ultraprocessed food has been showed to cause cognitive behavioral issues, which is a complete epidemic that we as BP2, solve regularly with clients. For every 10% of your calories that are from unprocessed food, your risk of death goes up by 14%. So After Carter and I found ourselves in what I will call a very captivating text exchange last week, the jumped in a span of 20 minutes, which found I found impressive, and and on a text exchange, no less while I was trying to cook dinner, so clearly I was not doing a very good job on the dinner front. Carter's like who is this?
Speaker 4:Pretty much. Yeah, he's like who is?
Speaker 1:this crazy lady.
Speaker 3:I was pretty obsessed with the conversation.
Speaker 1:It was yeah, so we. So here's what we did. In 20 minutes we literally jumped from grocery retail to functional medicine, to the food is medicine versus food is health debate, to sick care versus health care. We covered GLP ones all in a span of 20 minutes via a text exchange.
Speaker 2:That sounds about right with Ellen. You know, I don't know fast cycle time on innovation.
Speaker 3:It's this kind of thinking that solves big problems.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so. So how did you end up? I do we haven't talked about in all of this before or during this podcast is how did you end up so passionate and knowledgeable about this topic?
Speaker 3:I so I Do live in St Louis and those byproduct of working at McDonald's and Boeing. It is so happens that St Louis is the world's best place for agricultural research. I I many in many ways. Also the foundation of the Danforth Center and really the genome and then Also part of the human genome was done at Wash U. It's the St Louis is extraordinarily good at health care, health innovation and and ag innovation. So when we created this fund, a lot of the talent around us was in that area.
Speaker 3:I, bill Danforth, who's Jack Danforth center Jack Danforth's brother is incredible was an incredible philanthropist and I had some opportunity early on in my career at Boeing to work with Bill on some of the local community effort in terms of really building and making the area more robust and research and and really understood what his philosophy on philanthropy was. You know, as a well-off family, fourth generation well-off family, and they really dedicated a lot of effort to that. And so when we started the fund, I One, we were looking at the opportunity and talent and two, there was sort of Bill whispering in a sense that the mentorship he had given me, whispering in my ear a little bit to sort of say you know, you. You can make it a big change here. Bills made big changes in the past, and so other humans can do that.
Speaker 1:That's see that, that. That just that's like right there, right, that's at the core. I because I really we're gonna do another episode later today and I I'm gonna talk about how last year, I really started to lose a little bit of my Belief that we were capable, as an industry, to change things right at a fundamental level, like what we're talking about with food, and so when I meet people like you and we get to have these types of conversations which is why, in essence, this podcast exists is for us to have a platform to not only have the conversations but to put them into a platform. To have the conversations but to put them out there, to for people to listen to, to think about, right, to provoke that thought and continue the conversation To a level that we can't do just through LinkedIn, right, yeah, so it's just I know, it's just super and it's.
Speaker 1:I just think it's outstanding that you you used that mentorship, like you saw what that mentorship could do, and and you weren't just chasing the dollars, I guess. I mean, clearly, we all have to chase the dollars, but that means a lot to me to see is that it also meant something fundamentally that you could follow in someone's footsteps that had done that. So, dave, I know that you were gonna jump in here, so I'm I'm just Jumping you off.
Speaker 4:No, I just Carter, you have no idea. There are so many stories we could tell about Ellen's how should we say? Her protocols over the years of her nutrition, her need for nutritionally dense food, and I didn't even know what regenerative agriculture was, but I've always just written it off, as she's a little bit. You know, nuts, right, every great.
Speaker 3:It's hard to tell at the front end whether they're nuts or they're not yeah, there you go, good answer good answer.
Speaker 2:A little bit of column B.
Speaker 1:I did not pay Carter to say that.
Speaker 3:This one thing just about venture capital is an asset class is venture capital? What we go out and we say is and you know we have five run LPs. There are lots of individual investors or doctors or people who were part of the human genome project. There we have a very diverse set as fun. But one thing about VC is is that we say two out of ten things will be successful.
Speaker 3:So people like OVC's and P there did you know? All they want to do is grind out distance that we go in with the premise that eight of the businesses of ten that we invest in are not going to succeed. Wow, and so I mean that's really the heart of what we're doing. And so now, why don't they succeed? They don't succeed because they don't get good customer contact. They don't. They don't engage a customer right, or I think that's more often the case, and so I think that the the way to fix that is more feedback from early adopters. So there are people throughout the health. If we want to fix healthcare and food, we got to get closer to the people who are seeing the problem. Suck in that information, and then our job as venture capitalists and as entrepreneurs is to sort of put those puzzle pieces together in a reasonable enough way to trigger profit and then use the proceeds of this profit to feed back in, to grow, and and that is how creative destruction occurs. Like the, david Beats Goliath because he finds a better angle.
Speaker 2:So what are some of the more innovative and interesting things that you're seeing right now and what do you think needs?
Speaker 3:more attention. Well, one, we've got a GLP one asset that will be $100 a month and when these GLPs first came out is a little uncomfortable with what they meant, but maybe you call it like first generation statin. So we got a GLP one asset really on, really geeky. Really affects PYY, but it affects the appetite in a particular way. It has little SGI upset. So one thing is is that the obesity issue right now, which is a $1500 a month fix, may go down to $100 a month fix and that'll take that market from, you know, called 500,000 people to 50 million people.
Speaker 3:So that's really bending our mind in terms of what that does on the food and health side. We want to fix it on the health side, but, I'm sorry, we want to fix it on the food side. But but that's an interesting. On the other side we're working on. Coolabio is a micro biome micro, I'm sorry, a micro and what it does in the soil is it? It sucks nitrogen out of the air nitrogen fixation and then releases it back into a crop. What the hell is that all about.
Speaker 3:Well, right now we put a lot of synthetic fertilizer in crops which has some negative effect on soil health but helps boost yield. Once you use something like Kula, it will suck nitrogen out of the air, which you get from lightning. You get nitrogen out of the air and it can help improve the performance of the crops while also increasing nutritional density. Nutrition in food really comes from the soil and we've really spent the last 40, 50 years on the genetics of crops to try to boost yield, to end famine, and we did that. We have ended famine. We produce more food than people need. It doesn't always get to the right spot, so we range from healthcare therapeutics down to fixed crop inputs. We're at 75 companies all together. So the story behind everyone.
Speaker 1:So literally lightning in a bottle. I just want to say that out loud Lightning in a bottle.
Speaker 3:Yes, lightning in a bottle.
Speaker 1:Like, what's better than saying that? Right, like you, literally I don't want to say snake oil, I can say lightning in a bottle, but I just I think I don't want to lose sight. And then I want to jump over for a minute but don't lose sight of your point about, because a lot of people are going to listen to this and be like like Dave's point. I don't even know what regenerative agriculture is. I don't. That sounded really cool, the lightning in the bottle thing. But like, what does that even have to do here? And I just want to step back for a second and this was something I really appreciate about, carter is the food that you go in and buy in the grocery store today is largely void of nutrition. Right, that, there it is. And so people are not only eating unhealthy in terms of the mix of what they're eating, the types of foods they're eating, the ultra processed right, all that but they're eating what they think they're eating that's healthy is actually.
Speaker 2:Like what? Even kale is different Exactly. Yes, yes, yes, you can buy.
Speaker 1:Sorry, carter, if you want to weigh in, I mean yes, if you buy the wrong grapes or the wrong strawberries or the wrong.
Speaker 2:You know leafy greens like you could be, even if they're grown right down the road.
Speaker 1:That's the point, justin right Is that if they're being grown to Carter's point of just for supply right, just to get yield up, then you're sacrificing nutritional density largely, and a lot of times that's what we've kind of done is we've just decimated the nutritional density of that food in lieu of production. And I know I'm grossly oversimplifying this, carter, so I apologize, but it's to me the idea that you're there saying we need food as medicine, but we don't just need food as medicine, we need nutritionally dense. We need to pay attention to that. That's just that's money.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so nutrition and yield are negatively correlated. So if you boost yield and crops, you tend to reduce nutrition. Taste and nutrition are positively correlated. So as you reduce nutrition, you also tend to reduce taste, which reduces desirability. Tomatoes fresh tomatoes cooked with heritage genetics taste awesome the two or days after. They taste like crap and fall apart six weeks later. So we bred them to make them last in the supply chain. And so they last in the supply chain, but then they're not as desirable and tasty as they used to be.
Speaker 3:Taste and nutrition Evolution figured this out. It basically said let's make sure the things that are good for you taste good. But then even on other things, like meat, so we feed grain more to our meat instead of grass, and so it has more omega-6s, which increases the chance that you're gonna get cardiovascular disease and clogged arteries. So there are all these little intricacies that the science gets to, and really we've over 50 years. We sort of spent a lot of trying to boost production, to try to address famine, because post World War II, 26 million people died of famine and we thought that that was a bad thing and we didn't really want fascists using famine as a way to control people. So we started the other way thing in that direction, but we took a dent in the food system, and so now we're fixing that.
Speaker 1:So we only have another couple of minutes because I know we all have to move on with our day and clearly I will have you on as a guest anytime because I love talking about this, but I also I mean joking aside this is super important for our industry to talk about, but I do wanna spend a couple of minutes hearing from you. So we talk about food as medicine versus food as health, and then we talk about food as health and food as medicine becoming part of value-based care. So that, to me, is where our that convergence is key.
Speaker 4:And.
Speaker 1:I think so. If you can talk about your ideas around that for a couple of minutes, that would be fabulous.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean we got a little tight here on the back end.
Speaker 3:Yes, exactly, so there is a movement around food as medicine that I have a lot of respect for, and the food as medicine idea is a little bit of Medicare, medicaid kind of attitude, which is look, people not reading the eating the right stuff. If doctors can prescribe quality food and get it subsidized or underwritten by healthcare, we can reduce diabetes. And so there's that mentality that I might call a value-based mentality, which is good. It's a challenge because then now we're into CMS and we're into lobbying and then all of a sudden Coke is gonna somehow show up in the midst of this mix and say, well, our variant of this thing is healthy, and I don't know which way that will go. It starts taking the market signal away from innovation and puts it into decisions made in a very centralized way.
Speaker 3:Food as health is the notion that you walk into a grocery store. The function of the grocery store is deliver nutrition, not food, and that in through a combination of innovations, you can walk into the grocery store and you can say, look, I'm obese, help me solve this problem. And then, through that framework the fact that you go to the grocery store twice a week through that framework you can get some combination of. It might be GLP ones, it may be nutritional assistance. It may be guidance on how to wander through the store. It could be marketing and CPG positioning better in the store of oh yeah, this is not the sweets aisle, this is the keto aisle or exactly how that's gonna happen is something that we're still working out, but that the idea is that the function of walking into a Kroger is to get nutrition and that there's some healthcare components to that.
Speaker 3:There is subtle influence of behavior change. There is components of behavior change, but the other thing that this is based on is, if you go back to 1970, our brains were programmed around how to get nutrition and we got that to the store. Then we made several changes. We said that was bad and we made a few other changes, and so that led us down the sugar path, which was more addictive, and then our behavior was modified by the CPGs and the retail establishments and by our own bad science, and so to some degree, we're trying to get us to go back to the 70s in terms of delivery, but still keep the volume up so that there's affordable food, and strike that balance. And that's no different than making aircraft that don't crash, exactly.
Speaker 1:So I'm gonna just close. I know you have to go, so I'm just gonna close and say that I loved your answer to our question about what you would wanna leave as a legacy, which was to cure type 2 diabetes and eliminate 1.9 trillion in healthcare expenses related to poor nutrition. So thank you for coming on the show, carter. I really look forward to having you again. Okay, so I'm done. I know that I asked too many questions.
Speaker 4:Twinkle in her eyes. Where did you find that guy?
Speaker 1:I know Carter had to leave. He had a hard stop, but we have so many things to talk about after that or at least I do so we decided we're gonna spend a little more time together debriefing about that conversation, Cause yes, I am floating that we got to do that.
Speaker 2:To me it was really interesting. Like you know, david brought up, I always thought it was a little bit in the wacko category. Thank you, right. So Just being honest. Just being honest right Like how much can this really achieve?
Speaker 4:But then you somebody. So have you ever seen me?
Speaker 2:be honest before Right?
Speaker 4:yes, no, listen. But hey, ellen would eat all the time. We'd get in the car from the airport that she's eating. We'd show up at a meeting. We're talking, we're around a big conference room table with our clients. She brings out her Tupperware thing and starts eating Eating all day because she had to eat whatever it was. That you kind of have to eat it all day long in order for it to sustain you, so just seemed a little bit.
Speaker 2:Well we should get into all episode around Ellen's like. The behavioral aspect around the eating versus the food is nutrition. There's a whole component to that.
Speaker 4:Would you call this an eating disorder? No, no, no, no, we're learning that it's not. We're being educated.
Speaker 1:I'm being schooled.
Speaker 4:Carter schooled us.
Speaker 1:He did school, you, and he validated my passion, since I pumped.
Speaker 4:He did say there's a chance that you are crazy.
Speaker 2:Well, there's no no, I am sort of flibly crazy.
Speaker 1:Like I will go on record, I wouldn't put myself in the entrepreneurial bucket necessarily.
Speaker 2:But definitely in the crazy bucket I did take. That was a big takeaway to you, dave. I mean, we've got a validation.
Speaker 4:He left the door open.
Speaker 1:So okay, but let's be serious for a minute, which I know you're ready to just have fun after. That is because it was very. That was a really engaging, robust amount of information, even at an intellectual level. But I guess I do want to hear from you all what do you guys think I mean to me when you hear that from Carter, and the way that he breaks it down, the way he talks, the statistics, the 1.9 trillion, all that, like how can we not talk about food? Is health as part of value-based care? I mean, did it change your perspective at all, or I think it.
Speaker 2:I guess, from my perspective the takeaway was it's not kind of one versus the other when he's talking about the GLP ones and right, so it's Very good point. That there's like a multi-pronged approach, what I took away from it's part of it.
Speaker 2:It is, but what I took away from it was my lack of knowledge of like, hey, I'm going to my local grocery store and I think I'm buying something healthy, right, but in reality it might have been stripped of all the nutrients that I think I'm getting and that's disturbing to me, Like it actually makes me. I don't know if that feels worse, because now I'm going to go to the store I'm like I don't know what the hell I'm-.
Speaker 1:Well, so good news.
Speaker 1:I have another guest for us, aaron Martin, who is, like, also very much part of the Food is Medicine and Food is Health movement, but on the regenerative agriculture side, and not that Cardin couldn't completely fill this bill, but so she and I had an interesting conversation a few weeks ago about so this is fascinating to me.
Speaker 1:She's solely basically focused on regenerative agriculture, so like out with farmers all across the Midwest constantly and doing some really amazing programs. But what's crazy is that she and I came into each other's fears because she only wanted to talk about value-based care, because she's getting pulled with. So she's actually getting pulled into the Medicaid conversation in value-based care because of the need for nutritionally dense food as part of Food is Medicine, because that's what we didn't get to talk about with Carter is Food is Medicine. To me, the reason that term has to stay with healthcare for the time being is that to me, it designates funding. It's saying this is something that's being prescribed and therefore it will be paid for and it will be utilized right. Versus Food is Health. It's like, oh yeah, we want everybody to buy the world a Coke and everybody should eat healthy, like it's very aspirational.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, and he did touch upon what I brought up in a previous episode, and we didn't necessarily get into but Boston Medical Center, the exact thing that he's talking about, them having a food pantry and the physicians prescribing a healthy prescription, so to speak and having a food pantry where the food's available has been something that they've been doing for quite some time. Right, and I feel like we shouldn't go, I mean away from that. You're right, funding is tied to that. The other interesting thing, though, and I didn't think about, is where are you gonna draw the line? Like, all of a sudden, coca-cola decides like hey, I've got a healthy product in here, and next thing, you know, you've kind of watered down, but what are you really accomplishing through that?
Speaker 4:You're not getting people healthier. Yeah, and you're always still gonna have. Like Ellen you said, you can prescribe it and they'll eat it, but there's gonna be a lot of people that still wanna just eat. They want the Cheetos and they want the. I don't care what the prescription is that their doctor gave them. They like what they like and they might be addicted to it, to sugars and all that. Absolutely so. That may be part of the puzzle, but there needs to be some more work on that.
Speaker 1:And that's the piece that actually we didn't again, we only had half an hour with Carter, but and he has such an impressive background that we could have spent the whole episode just talking about what he did before this topic. But the piece that he and I were talking about offline is the food deserts, right, where people can't even get the food, and that's also to me that's interesting is it corresponds with the healthcare deserts, right. So, ok, rural America is very much devoid of healthcare. They're also very much devoid of proper food, nutritional food, but the biggest barrier in all of this, honestly I would argue, is education. I just people are overwhelmed with the idea of eating healthy. It's like I don't even know how to start right, I don't have time to prep food and I don't even know how to cook healthy. I don't even know what to do with a piece of kale. You know, like it's such this-.
Speaker 4:I'd rather get this thing out of the box.
Speaker 1:Yeah, just give me a pill, glp-1.
Speaker 2:Exactly, I know, and I firmly believe as a society that that's just gonna ramp up unless there's side effects that we don't-.
Speaker 1:So there will absolutely be. There's no way. There's not side effects. Kale and GLP-1s are not standing.
Speaker 2:We gotta stay on it for the rest of your life.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but Carter did share with me because you know, you guys know my opinion. I'm not a big drug fan, sorry to all the pharmaceuticals that make the industry run, but I'm more of a let's just be healthy, right, have a healthy lifestyle. But when he and I were talking, he did make an interesting case for the GLP-1s, which was and he didn't. Again, we don't have time to talk about this, but it actually does change your taste preferences and they have been able to show statistically that the GLP-1s reduce the consumption of ultra-processed food and all of that.
Speaker 1:So just by taking it and we talked in that one episode we kind of debated GLP-1s versus food and here we are talking about again is this idea that where I was focused at that point was more behaviorally, it helps people get over the hump of not only being overwhelmed about what to eat, but like I'm never gonna lose this weight. There's just too much weight for me to lose. I'm overwhelmed with it, the idea of going to the gym and then eating and that like I can't right. So by taking it, I've seen people where it's given them that jumpstart. But what I didn't understand is that it has a palate impact, which I thought was really fascinating that I learned from having that conversation with them.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, I, you know again the Christmas morning analogy. I couldn't imagine a better conversation. You know that happened today. What was really impressive? Like I felt like I learned a lot when I'm coming in with a different viewpoint and just hearing where you know someone's that is that smart and has solved a lot of the world's problems. Yeah, it kind of compartmentalizes things and it's interesting as to how he you know attacks.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and just so knowledgeable and well spoken about it and just clear, it's like, yeah, we need to, this needs to be part of it.
Speaker 2:But once again everything goes back to the 70s, like the 60s and 70s. Again, here we go again.
Speaker 1:Here we go again.
Speaker 4:That's why we're gonna buy the world a cup Right.
Speaker 1:Anyways, all right.
Speaker 4:This great, great conversation. Definitely food for thought. Yes, not just food. Medicine and food is all but food for thought Got it Got it.
Speaker 1:I love it. Throwing it in at the end, all right. Thanks again everyone for tuning in. Hopefully you enjoyed this conversation as much as we did. I'm Ellen Brown.
Speaker 2:I'm Dave Pavlik and I'm Justin Politi. We are the partners of VP2 Health, your best chance for real change.
Speaker 1:As you can tell, we could talk about this stuff all day, but you can drop us a line through our site, bp2healthcom.
Speaker 2:Reverse Mullet podcast is produced by MMG Studios in the Florida.