YouSaid · the spoken record

Henry Dimbleby

lines on the record: 63
first: 2023-04-10
most recent: 2023-04-10
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Government documents had an editor who was just saying, what do you actually mean by someone who knew nothing about the topic, the world would be immeasurably improved. It's the best question you can ask is what do you actually mean? And we wrote it to try and wrote it to be exciting and kind of gripping and to appeal to an intelligent 12-year-old. And I think that is certainly appealing to an intelligent 12-year-old is what all government work should set out to do.”
2023-04-10 · Intelligence Squared · Henry Dimbleby and Alice Thomson On How The Global Food System Is Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So Maima, Jemima Lewis, who writes a column in the telegraph, she edited for me With me, the school food plan, the national food strategy, and then this book is finally, she's managed to get her name having done all this complete unpaid, thankless task. And what I would say is the most, I mean, it's a joy to be able to talk to your wife about something. We've got three kids who are of that age what you're talking about all the time. So it's a joy. But what's interesting is that she used to edit a magazine called The Week. So she's a very precise, which summarized things, very precise writer. And sometimes having someone who says, what do you really mean and forces you to actually set out quite carefully what you actually mean by something will make you realize you don't understand something? And I think that's been the most interesting thing about the process. And I think that if...”
2023-04-10 · Intelligence Squared · Henry Dimbleby and Alice Thomson On How The Global Food System Is Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To change the incentives in those marketees, in those sectors so that they don't produce dirt. And the food industry is about to produce so much dirt it brings down the NHS. And government must intervene. That won't be enough. So at the same time, when we talk about the power of love in the book, you need government interventions on the big levers, but you also need citizens who care and decide to improve the food at their local school in their local, in their office and so on and so forth. So you need a bit of government intervention and a lot of bottom-up care and love.”
2023-04-10 · Intelligence Squared · Henry Dimbleby and Alice Thomson On How The Global Food System Is Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, you know, we talk, I give the quote, I talk about Andrew Maher, the politician, the TV presenter who was known as Red Andy when he was at university because he was a Marxist. And then he was talking a book festival the other day about how he had come to see how actually we all swim in the free market. It gives us amazing things that we love. You know, this chart behind me, which is a food map of France, all of those things are different food specialities in France. There's no way that a planned economy could give me that. That's the free market at work, something I love given to me by someone who loves it. But he says the problem with free markets is that they produce dirt and increase inequality. They produce externalities. And we fundamentally need to recognize that it takes government intervention.”
2023-04-10 · Intelligence Squared · Henry Dimbleby and Alice Thomson On How The Global Food System Is Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't so Eating disorders are largely mental disorders to do with control. And I think it, some people say, oh, you can't talk about overweight because you might give someone an eating disorder. I just don't think that's true. I think you have to, how you talk about being overweight to something, but fundamentally you can't say we can't try and fix this problem because we've got this problem. What is interesting, and I'm not an eating disorder expert, but there is a large amount of disquiet in the eating disorder world about appetite suppressing drugs. That those will exacerbate people with control issues and enable people who really want to get their weight down to know really unhealthy levels of underweight that these drugs will enable that but it's not that's not an area where i am uh an expert”
2023-04-10 · Intelligence Squared · Henry Dimbleby and Alice Thomson On How The Global Food System Is Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But interestingly, there's no data that I've seen on this, but the three people that I have spoken to all say that the things that they really don't like the idea of are cakes, donuts, etc. And one of them who I was talking to today said that she now finds that she doesn't take the Wagovi every week now. She'll take it once every three weeks. But she finds that even when she's not taking it, she has fundamentally, she thinks, rewired her brain away from the bad stuff. So I don't know. We don't know yet if that is a common. Common result of taking the drug, but it might be the case that not only does it make you feel less hungry, it directs you towards not towards the unhealthy stuff, but towards the healthier stuff. But we don't know.”
2023-04-10 · Intelligence Squared · Henry Dimbleby and Alice Thomson On How The Global Food System Is Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People do not have this problem and actually say, I've been like the people on Mogovia, I've been freed from this appetite. Shouldn't blame people. We should recognize that it is difficult for people, but that doesn't mean that we need to give up and we should still be helping people try and live within their genetic. Restrictions as decent as they can.”
2023-04-10 · Intelligence Squared · Henry Dimbleby and Alice Thomson On How The Global Food System Is Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We give an example of a bariatric surgeon, which is stomach surgery, who the previous bariatric surgeries, the gastric band, which restricted the top of your stomach left you feeling still hungry and people got hungrier and hungry, hungrier and they'd melt Mars bars and drink melted ice cream because they felt ravenous. And they would come back to him. And not only would they not have lost weight, they would feel unbelievably guilty that they had had on the NHS this surgery and they had been too weak to deal with it. If you look at the modern bariatric surgeries, the gastric sleeve and the gastric bypass, they both significantly reduce the production of hunger hormones and one increases the amount of satiety hormones. And so those”
2023-04-10 · Intelligence Squared · Henry Dimbleby and Alice Thomson On How The Global Food System Is Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Don't mean that we should give up on all agency. It just means that we should not blame ourselves what's going on. But that doesn't mean you try and make it better. One of the most powerful examples of that self-blame, I thought, was.”
2023-04-10 · Intelligence Squared · Henry Dimbleby and Alice Thomson On How The Global Food System Is Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so the way I like to kind of think about this is that the food environment is very bad. We are in, you know, imagine we're living in a desert. Life is hard. It's hard to live in that desert. But that doesn't mean that you shouldn't teach people desert craft. So there are all sorts of ways that people can change their food environment, that they can shop. There are trials in Washington that we equate in the book of where you get people who have got very little money and are struggling from diet related disease and you supplement their kind of the amount of vegetables they're able to buy and you teach them to cook etc etc so we shouldn't the genetic thing”
2023-04-10 · Intelligence Squared · Henry Dimbleby and Alice Thomson On How The Global Food System Is Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's much easier to understand what's going on, but also that actually that was quite, that would be quite a small effect. And there, I was going to get the data from the government department to raise coffee personally blocked it. So I don't know. It's a very weird thing about these are just bleeding heart liberals who aren't looking at the data, but then they don't seem to want to actually get into the data. It's peculiar.”
2023-04-10 · Intelligence Squared · Henry Dimbleby and Alice Thomson On How The Global Food System Is Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is these people don't really need it. It's not, we should be doing, we should just getting more money into their pockets. I don't know. I do know that when for the part two, one of the arguments against giving free school meals to everyone on universal credit was, well, you know, there are some people on universal credit who are on 40,000 pounds, which is true because the whole point of universal credit is to make sure that if someone has a disaster in their life, loses a job, they can get back on their own feet without being cast permanently into the welfare system. But I asked EWP where Therese coffee was Secretary State at the time if I could have the data so that we could describe, we could segment and describe what people on universal credit look like because my instinct was going to be, well, my instinct is that if you put a face to something.”
2023-04-10 · Intelligence Squared · Henry Dimbleby and Alice Thomson On How The Global Food System Is Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So it's really, I mean, that is a kind of deep ideological question. So, there are things, I mean, this wasn't even universal free school meals giving free school meals to everyone, and there are very good reasons to do that for culturally. It's fantastic for schools. The Rashford campaign where he campaigned for some of our recommendations was simply about extending support during the holidays, holiday activity and food programs, which the government did after quite a lot of campaigning, put into place. And I genuinely think there is still. A kind of ideological feeling that”
2023-04-10 · Intelligence Squared · Henry Dimbleby and Alice Thomson On How The Global Food System Is Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We have this completely outside my scope. We have one of the most unequal societies in the Western world. And food banks and food poverty is simply a reflection of that inequality. And there are all sorts of things you can do in the food system in a small way assuage that inequality but fundamentally we have to change that economic model. And I've read a lot about that. I'm not an expert on it and I wouldn't, it's tricky. Fundamentally we have an economic model where too much is our wealth is distributed too unevenly and therefore people too often are falling through the net.”
2023-04-10 · Intelligence Squared · Henry Dimbleby and Alice Thomson On How The Global Food System Is Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, Germany has food banks. They're government run. And the argument against food banks is, of course, if you have food, then people will take them. So the growth of food banks or the argument against has been about supply. I've been to quite a few food banks and I spent one really interesting afternoon signing people in. why they're there, what they're doing. And all of the stories that you hear are not about food. They're about people who have a benefit cat but don't want to leave the area they're living. They're about Mental ill health, thereabout, domestic abuse. And the most effective food banks actually use the food as As a way of trying to refer these people to different services to sort out their lives. So that's the one part of them is that they should be more than just giving food. But the second thing I think is that”
2023-04-10 · Intelligence Squared · Henry Dimbleby and Alice Thomson On How The Global Food System Is Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Do the things that we need them to do. So, for example, in the uplands, if you don't make it profitable enough for them to farm in a different way, they will just put the economic incentive will be to put more sheep up into the uplands because that will be the way they'll try and improve their profits. So it's kind of on the headliny thing, but it needs very careful monitoring, changing. I think the government will make mistakes. They have to recognize they'll make mistakes, but be prepared to change and tweak and change and tweak those incentives. But, you know, I think it is possible to do.”
2023-04-10 · Intelligence Squared · Henry Dimbleby and Alice Thomson On How The Global Food System Is Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think you need to do, first of all, you need to protect your borders, so you need to do trade deals that don't sell your farmers. Down the river. And then secondly, the transition is right. So it is right to begin to pay farmers for Environmental benefits, biodiversity restoration, soil improvement, et cetera. I am at the moment, and this is quite wonky, but at the moment the default measure has been revenue foregone. And I worry that sometimes that is not going to be enough to make farmers.”
2023-04-10 · Intelligence Squared · Henry Dimbleby and Alice Thomson On How The Global Food System Is Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think I've done all I can on the inside. I would offer advice. If anyone wants to talk to me, I've met with, you know, obviously extensively with... Tories beginning to speak to Labour and give advice. But you need it. It's not, you don't need a czar, you need a strong center.”
2023-04-10 · Intelligence Squared · Henry Dimbleby and Alice Thomson On How The Global Food System Is Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Both parties are kind of long term sense that this is a proper structural problem, get things into their manifestos. And then I hope whoever wins wins by enough that actually they can be a bit longer term and aren't just constantly fighting the last fight on Twitter or the news kind of cycle of that day.”
2023-04-10 · Intelligence Squared · Henry Dimbleby and Alice Thomson On How The Global Food System Is Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Will you need the tragedy of Boris Johnson is that you need stability and a good majority to be able to do long-term difficult things. If you look at some of the structural reforms that Blair made in the NHS, they were made on the back of ministers who didn't change much and a big majority. And Johnson had that big majority, but he was completely chaotic and nothing long-term happened. And I think, you know, what I hope is that at the next election, whoever wins, and I keep telling people that it is a mistake of all the kind of NGOs say to me, what should we try to get into the Labor Manifesto? I'm like, well, who knows? It may be Labor. It may be Tory. But what you want to try and do is create for.”
2023-04-10 · Intelligence Squared · Henry Dimbleby and Alice Thomson On How The Global Food System Is Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Term systemic problems where there are multiple departments involved, you need to have a center that can think about them and can take a longer term view and can corral the various departments and secret state into action. And certainly we now have a center that is much more functional than it was during the truss and Johnson eras. you know, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know if we've got the political skill.”
2023-04-10 · Intelligence Squared · Henry Dimbleby and Alice Thomson On How The Global Food System Is Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't think we're living in the kind of golden era of great politicians. No, I mean, to be fair to Boris, he was hijacked the morning the report was published, so he couldn't have read it. But he did, he is the populist politician, and he actually went backwards. So when he almost died, he was going to restrict advertising and do all that stuff. And then he pulled back from it. You know, Therese coffee is actually everyone in Deafer expected her to be Liz, a trussite vision of this is all about growth and to hell with the environment. She's very focused on the environment and on climate change and things that she obsesses about, but she's not particularly good at telling the story. And, you know, I don't know. I mean, government has definitely got much more serious. If you think about long...”
2023-04-10 · Intelligence Squared · Henry Dimbleby and Alice Thomson On How The Global Food System Is Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Then you can make that come about. You can make that transition by changing the incentives. But as you're seeing in the press moment, that takes enormous political skill because there is so much fear out there. And there's so much every little thing is seen as the Open farmers think, oh, they're trying to destroy our livelihoods. And the vegans think we need to remove all meat altogether and et cetera. the paleo people weigh in because they think that by saying we need a bit more diversity in the uplands you're not going to allow them to eat their their steak you know so it becomes trying to there's a very narrow landing strip politically and so i think that transition is going to take uh both detailed implementation and a visionary politicians who can constantly reassure and set a vision i'm not sure we're there at the moment”
2023-04-10 · Intelligence Squared · Henry Dimbleby and Alice Thomson On How The Global Food System Is Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That equation, you can solve the equation using that if you waste less, if you waste less food, if you farm more productively, and if we eat less meat. Because 85% of the land that we use to feed ourselves is used to rear crops, to feed to animals or to graze animals. It is an incredibly wasteful way of producing food. And we say you should reduce about 30% of the meat we eat by 2030 to meet our biodiversity and climate goals. And you can do that because we're currently subsidizing effectively upland farmers to produce meat if you change the subsidies and make it more attractive to them to reduce the size of their herds, to farm beef, which are less destructive or rugged outdoor sheep.”
2023-04-10 · Intelligence Squared · Henry Dimbleby and Alice Thomson On How The Global Food System Is Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“With places which are suitable for the restoration of biodiversity and sequestering of carbon through restoring peat bogs, through tree planting or growing, where those two things overlap. So the vision that we paint for the future of the British countryside is one where you basically have, we call it the three compartment model. You have some wild land, you have some farmland that is that is intentionally farmed to lower yields but with more nature on the farm because there are whole ecosystems that are good at living on farms that are not so good at living in the wild. And then you have higher yielding, low impact, sorry, lower input farms. So you have a kind of range of different kinds of agricultural approach to the land. And that can feed us.”
2023-04-10 · Intelligence Squared · Henry Dimbleby and Alice Thomson On How The Global Food System Is Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It relies on the subsidies paying different subsidies. So what we argue in the book is that effectively you're trying to solve an equation. So we... Because of the Green Revolution, we produced a lot more food from less land without the kind of the modern way of farming with the high-yielding crops, nitrogen fertilizer, and new forms of irrigation. About 40% of people on this planet wouldn't if you change it overnight be fed. And so you're trying to say, okay, well, how do we produce enough food while restoring nature and sequestering carbon? And you can solve that equation and you can solve that equation for a couple of reasons. First of all, there are large parts of our land that don't produce many calories. So about 20% of our lamb produces about 3% of our calories. And secondly, there is quite a large overlap, particularly on the uplands.”
2023-04-10 · Intelligence Squared · Henry Dimbleby and Alice Thomson On How The Global Food System Is Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A group of people who thought that Brexit was all about more globalization. So it was about, you know, it was about free trade deals becoming Singapore on the channel. And those two views were fundamentally opposed. And I'm not sure within the Conservative Party. It's not clear that they have yet to decide which one of those two positions they're going to take, which means that the farming transition is at risk.”
2023-04-10 · Intelligence Squared · Henry Dimbleby and Alice Thomson On How The Global Food System Is Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think you had, I mean, interestingly, what happened was you had two completely different views in the Conservative Party about Brexit. I'm not a conservative. I'm not a member of any party. I've always been rather against joining things. But you basically had a group of people who saw it as regaining sovereignty and being able to choose our standards, which was one view of Brexit, which was probably shared by a section of the Tory party and the left-wing Brexiteers who'd always been slightly suspicious of the European Union and thought it was kind of big business's way of trying to take over Britain. And then you had a”
2023-04-10 · Intelligence Squared · Henry Dimbleby and Alice Thomson On How The Global Food System Is Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To incentivize our farmers to farm differently. And then allow imports of food that is grown to lower standards for abroad, effectively you're just moving the problems to a country where you can't see them. And in the Australian trade deal, Probably the worst trade deal any country has ever done, according to the Australian press, who were amazed by how bad it was. In that trader, that did not protect our farmers. Now, it might not matter with the Australian trade deal because most of their food anyway for economic reasons goes to China and is not sold into this market. But if we do similar trade deals with America and Brazil and so forth, we could hobble our own attempt to show the world how it's possible to farm in a more nature-friendly fashion.”
2023-04-10 · Intelligence Squared · Henry Dimbleby and Alice Thomson On How The Global Food System Is Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We have an opportunity, the one the kind of one thing about Brexit that almost everyone agrees on is that we have, who knows about it, is that we have an opportunity to change that in the UK because we're coming out of the common agricultural policy. So we have an opportunity to pay people not to destroy nature, but to restore it, to give payments for public goods. And I think, and currently the framework the government has is the right one. There are all sorts of ways that it could go wrong. And if you want, we can talk about how it needs to go right. But fundamentally, we have an opportunity to show the world that this is possible. The only thing that is, or there are lots of things that are difficult about it, but the one thing already that has gone slightly wrong is trade deals, because it makes no sense.”
2023-04-10 · Intelligence Squared · Henry Dimbleby and Alice Thomson On How The Global Food System Is Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think the farming side is really exciting. So, you know, basically in the book, we say the health problem is caused by this junk food cycle, this feedback loop that's going wrong between appetite and commercial incentives of companies. I think that is tricky to break. The reason that our farming is so destructive is that what the economist path is. And in fact, Dask got to points out that it's not just not there. We actually subsidize globally activities that destroy nature governments do to the tune of about 500 billion dollars a year through subsidies to agriculture, to fishing and to fossil fuels.”
2023-04-10 · Intelligence Squared · Henry Dimbleby and Alice Thomson On How The Global Food System Is Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Less bad, and then the other is we need to focus on from the bottom up creating a better culture of cooking and cooking from scratch and feeding our families and eating together, etc. And I don't think that that is nuts. I think cultures change all the time.”
2023-04-10 · Intelligence Squared · Henry Dimbleby and Alice Thomson On How The Global Food System Is Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“London, all the food was better, and France. I repeated that journey the other day, and we are now, and we were categorically defend this to anyone who wants to have an argument on it. We have a better, we have better restaurants than the French. The French have not improved since the 90s. They've sat on their laurels. And I really do think that that culture can permeate down, that we can find a food culture in the UK and that we can learn to cook from scratch. But in the meantime, you've still got this 57% of food that's processed. So I think there's kind of two transitions that need to happen. One is we need to make the processed stuff less.”
2023-04-10 · Intelligence Squared · Henry Dimbleby and Alice Thomson On How The Global Food System Is Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We just had the first time out food awards and we'd had the Eagle Gastro pub had opened and Quaglinos had opened. And I was sent by the Telegraph to go and compare British food to French food. And I traveled on the ferry then across to Paris. And actually, except for about four restaurants in”
2023-04-10 · Intelligence Squared · Henry Dimbleby and Alice Thomson On How The Global Food System Is Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They had quite restrictive agricultural rules to try and maintain this new Japanese cultural diet. They have planning rules that meant that it was quite hard for fast food chains to set up there. But then they also had the Mitabo law, which meant that still you get measured by your company once a year. And if you are overweight, you get a bit of health from a dietitian and a bit of advice. You can, I think, change food cultures. And I think will in this country, in the end, I think we will realize that we need to. We've done it quite recently. When I was a journalist in the 90s,”
2023-04-10 · Intelligence Squared · Henry Dimbleby and Alice Thomson On How The Global Food System Is Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“British naval ships. And then they got those cooks in the army and the navy to broadcast on radio cookery lessons for Japanese houses. And then after the war, they had a similar thing again. So they actually went from, again, being very starved. MacArthur came in. They, as you said, the diet began to become quite American. But then they really turned up the dial on creating a Japanese food culture. So both subtly. So for example.”
2023-04-10 · Intelligence Squared · Henry Dimbleby and Alice Thomson On How The Global Food System Is Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Have changed their food culture twice, first of all, in the Meiji period, the Meiji Restoration, when they opened up to foreigners, and they saw all these hulking Dutch traders who were the first people to trade with them because they were the only ones being pragmatic Dutch people. They were the only ones who would stand on the Bible to sign deals. And the Chinese came in and they thought, my God, these people are so strong. We need to do something about it. The emperor first of all decided that he would eat red meat and be public about it, which was taboo at the time. They got the army to, they created a whole new menu for the army, which included dishes that they stole from all around the world, katsu curry, for example, was taken from a fried chicken dish with an Indian curry sauce that was served on...”
2023-04-10 · Intelligence Squared · Henry Dimbleby and Alice Thomson On How The Global Food System Is Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, although I wouldn't put it quite like that, but I think we can change our food culture. So people say, well, why can't we get people eating, cooking from scratch? Can we get people eating better food? Can we change our culture and go, people go, no, no, no, is it possible? The genie's out of the bottle, that's never going to happen. But actually, it's happened here. We have created and changed our food culture. And as you say, it's happened in Japan. Japan's been through, you know, we all think of the Japanese. Food culture as being kind of God given amazing food, and they have 4% of their population is obese.”
2023-04-10 · Intelligence Squared · Henry Dimbleby and Alice Thomson On How The Global Food System Is Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Released from that struggle. I should then rather rudely say, You should try it. But I do think there are people, if you look at the bell curve of Satya, our appetites are very different. And so if you are a naturally thin person, you have to imagine how you feel at the end of a day if by mistake you didn't eat for the day and realize that other people feel that. They've eaten relatively recently. So we all have different appetites. And I do think if someone has a particularly strong appetite, if they have a genetic propensity to obesity, somewhere between 40 and 70%, for those people, I can see what would be a bleak existence for me might seem like a blessed relief.”
2023-04-10 · Intelligence Squared · Henry Dimbleby and Alice Thomson On How The Global Food System Is Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'd be quite careful not to impose my values, but definitely instinctively, I think, God, that's not a world that I would like to live in. And in fact, you mentioned up front that I'd done work for the government before on school food. And one of the things I did was help write the curriculum. And I was really pleased that we managed to sneak in there that the lessons should try and instill a love of cooking, which is one of the great outlets of human creativity into the curriculum. But trying to kind of fight against those values of mine, I spoke to a few people who were on semaglutide, and one of whom we quote in the book, who said she doesn't enjoy food as much, but her whole life had been a struggle with food. And she just feels...”
2023-04-10 · Intelligence Squared · Henry Dimbleby and Alice Thomson On How The Global Food System Is Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Are the hormones of appetite do because they evolved have all sorts of other roles in our body. They are used to balance all sorts of different biological processes in our body. And I think there is a fundamental concern about using a drug that focuses on a certain hormone, GLP1 in this case. basically makes you artificially release more of it, dealing with a complex system in that way. I think you inevitably will cause unintended side effects down the line. I think it's a really, really dangerous way to solve the problem of a bad food system.”
2023-04-10 · Intelligence Squared · Henry Dimbleby and Alice Thomson On How The Global Food System Is Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think that you should go to your GP, you should look at that option. But what I think is going to happen is that the government will, whichever government will think actually fixing the underlying problems too hard and 20 million people will end up permanently on these drugs. There's been reports in the paper recently that Steve Barkley, our current health secretary, has already asked for a paper about how much it would cost to give this drug to 12 million people. And there are problems with that. There are two problems I have with that. One is when you give drugs to that many people, the side effects can scare people. You have very slow level of side effects as we have with the vaccine, which make the drug scary to people, which means that people who might actually benefit from it don't want to take it. But the other one is more fundamental, which is...”
2023-04-10 · Intelligence Squared · Henry Dimbleby and Alice Thomson On How The Global Food System Is Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You can restrict what can be marketed to children just to improve the environment a bit better. And we argue in the book that that is what you should do. But we also recognize that what I think is actually more likely to happen is that government will think that stuff's a bit tricky, that's politically difficult. I don't want to nanny state, et cetera, et cetera. And they will focus on the appetite. And there are very good drugs now or very effective drugs at restricting our appetite, semaglutide is the name of the drug. Its brand name is Wagovi and Azempic. It's suddenly been in the press a lot over the last few weeks. Basically, you inject yourself once a week and you feel less hungry. And if you are someone who has struggled with weight all of your life, you have a BMI of over 30, you are very unwell”
2023-04-10 · Intelligence Squared · Henry Dimbleby and Alice Thomson On How The Global Food System Is Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's very difficult. And, you know, if you look, for example, the new wave of attack on this appetite is the delivery companies. And it is very hard for them to portions that would be reasonable. And there's good evidence that we could, we overeat massively when we eat delivered food. It's very hard for them to give us portions that would be reasonable because we would complain that they weren't big enough. But basically there are two ways that you can tackle the health problem. If the feedback loop that's going wrong is the feedback between our appetite and the commercial incentives of companies, you can tackle, you can change either of those. So to change the commercial incentives for companies, there are all sorts of things you can do. You can restrict advertising. You can put into place reformulation taxes.”
2023-04-10 · Intelligence Squared · Henry Dimbleby and Alice Thomson On How The Global Food System Is Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of our kind of drive to live that is causing a lot of trouble and causing us harm. And it's not, but it's not just, you know, we talk in the book. It's not just us who are stuck in the junk food cycle. Those food companies, if they decided not to do that individually, the CEOs, they would just lose share to another food company or be fired. So it's a systemic problem, this commercialist reaction between the commercial incentive of companies and this ancient evolved appetite.”
2023-04-10 · Intelligence Squared · Henry Dimbleby and Alice Thomson On How The Global Food System Is Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's a two to one. There's a ratio of sugar to fat to salt, and there are various different ones. In breast milk, the ratio is two sugar, one fat. And that is particularly, it's a bliss point in ice cream. Funny enough, it's also in crisps if you take the carbs to be the sugar. And it's in all sorts of foods. And actually, the work of Kevin Hall, who was the first person to prove in the States that this ult processed food was really bad for us. He has now identified specific ratios that of carbs to fat, to salt that don't exist in unprocessed food. So there is something about this food that literally interacts with this marine worm brain, this most fundamental part of our”
2023-04-10 · Intelligence Squared · Henry Dimbleby and Alice Thomson On How The Global Food System Is Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And the weight that that puts, the pressure that puts on your body and that can create cancers and diabetes, heart disease, but actually the quality of the food and the way in which it messes around, for example, with our insulin production means that in the states now where 40% of people are pre-diabetic, there are a significant number of what they call the skinny ill. So people who have diabetes without being overweight because of the way this very sugary fatty food interacts with our bodies. And funny enough, those are the people, if you're diabetic and you're skinny, you're more likely to die of it than if you're overweight because you don't spot that you're sick.”
2023-04-10 · Intelligence Squared · Henry Dimbleby and Alice Thomson On How The Global Food System Is Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Friends, first their flesh, which they cut from the bodies with the glass from the windows of the plane, and then their organs, and then their lungs, and then their brains. So our appetites will make us do extraordinary things. And this processed food that we currently eat, that 57%, most of that is designed in such a way that it is irresistible to that appetite. That appetite evolved to make us go to quite great lengths to seek out highly calorie dense food. And when we eat that food, it fills up less often and it's less quickly and we eat more of it. And companies spend more and more money marketing that food and developing it, weaving more and we've got sick. And that's sickness, to answer your question. There is part of it is just overweight.”
2023-04-10 · Intelligence Squared · Henry Dimbleby and Alice Thomson On How The Global Food System Is Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There is one of the oldest or most ancient pieces of evolution in our body is the amygdala in the brain, which actually evolved in prehistoric marine worms. And this drives our most fundamental desires and appetite. And it is where appetite, where the hormones of appetite meet the brain and affect our behavior. We talk in the book about how powerful this is, this urge, and we give the example of the Chilean rugby players who are documented very well by Piers Paul Reed in his book Alive, who crashed in the Andes and ran out of they survived amazingly, ran out of food. And the urge to eat was so strong that they ended up eating their family.”
2023-04-10 · Intelligence Squared · Henry Dimbleby and Alice Thomson On How The Global Food System Is Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it's not entirely overlapped. So I'm sure we might come on to this. So I do make the argument the fact that so much meat is eaten in processed form that you could substitute meat and processed products for other kinds of protein and you wouldn't improve our health, but you would massively improve the impact on the environment. But in terms of our health.”
2023-04-10 · Intelligence Squared · Henry Dimbleby and Alice Thomson On How The Global Food System Is Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT