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Speaker 1: Welcome to Wellness sun Mass. I'm doctor Nicole Safire, and today we're pulling back the curtain on something that affects every American family. Mine, yours, all of us, the food on our plates. For decades, we were told Big Tobacco was the villain, and it took us decades to kind of get rid of them. Well, we didn't really get rid of them. They're still around. What if I told you the same corporate playbook, the same executives, the same manipulation tactics, the same addiction science quietly migrated from big tobacco into big food. My guest today Patrick and Ashley Sullivan expose exactly how big Tobacco helped engineer modern big food, designing ultra process products to hijack our brain chemistry, distort public policy, and keep consumers pooked. Now, this isn't about personal willpower. It's about corporate strategy, regulatory capture, and the health crisis unfolding in plain sight. Let's talk about it. We have a beautiful couple, Patrick and as Actually Sullivan. They are the MAHA inspired filmmakers behind a brand new documentary called Breaking Big Food, now streaming on Apple TV and Amazon Prime and I am so excited for this conversation because you guys uncovered a lot in this documentary, right.
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Speaker 2: We sure did. It was a very eye opening experience for us, right Patrick.
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Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean the full title Breaking Big Food, how the American food system went rotten, and how it's being revived.
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Speaker 1: So tell me a little bit about it. First of all, your background, what even made you want to do this?
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Speaker 3: Well, in twenty fourteen, I got a thyroid cancer diagnosis and decided to go at that time the traditional route of getting a thyroid ectomy, having the cancer removed, and quite frankl Nicole, it was so stressful hearing the words you have cancer that after the surgery, Ashley and I really kind of buried that for a while. And you know, Frankly, I think we just didn't know enough about food labels and ingredients and about the environmental toxins that were out there that when we began to research this film, and really the inspiration came from hearing Calli Means speak at a conference in the summer of twenty twenty four He and his sister, doctor Casey Means, had just published the book Good Energy, and Ashley and I felt like that's it like barely hit for us. Yeah, the pieces of how we got here in the first place. And as a result, we felt like we wanted to help amplify that message, and that turned into pitching them the idea of this documentary, and Calli was like, let's do it. I'm all in.
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Speaker 1: That's great. So when you started the documentary, tell me some about the big things that you uncovered.
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Speaker 2: I think the biggest shocking thing that we uncovered was really the fact that the cigarette companies purchased the food companies. Patrick, what are the stats on that?
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Speaker 3: Well, Calli, as a former lobbyist, goes through a number of different examples, starting in nineteen eighty five when R. J. Reynolds, the makers of Camel cigarettes, purchased Nabisco for five billion dollars. In nineteen eighty eight, Philip Morris, the maker of Marlborough cigarettes, they purchased Kraft for thirteen billion dollars. And these were just some of the transactions of big tobacco buying up big food. And by the mid nineteen nineties, the cigarette industry controlled about forty percent of the American food supply.
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Speaker 1: We could go wrong, right, right, So while all of the anti cigarette campaigns were going big tobacco is like, oh no, we're starting to lose money because cigarettes caused cancer and a lot of other things. This is what they did. Now they have taken over the food supply, and were there demonstratable changes that they made to the food supply at this time once they took.
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Speaker 3: Over, Well, the amount of grass chemicals and I'm not talking about like grass that you have in your front lawn. I'm talking about FDAs generally recognized as safe. That is a term that has been going around in the media and it's effectively the food company their own ability to self approve ingredients that they feel are quote generally recognized as safe. And currently in America there's almost ten thousand chemicals I believe that are allowed in our food supply, but are not allowed in European countries. They're banned in Canada. And that's why you've maybe seen online examples. Food Babe has posted a lot of these, like here's what fruit loops look like in America and they're bright and colorful, and here's what they look like in the rest of the world. And the ingredients are about half of the amount of ingredients.
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Speaker 2: Yeah, and people will say like, oh, but I grew up eating this and I'm fine. Well, actually, if you look at the food label the exact same product from back in the early eighties, seventies and early to what they are today, they're completely different ingredient labels well.
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Speaker 1: And also one important thing to remember is here in the United States we kind of have generally approved as safe or recognized as safe, so you have to prove that it is unsafe to remove it, whereas Europe and other countries they say, we have to prove it is safe before you can put it in there. Why we have such lack standards, I think one can only guess, and it is the lobby powerhouse, which is the big food industry.
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Speaker 3: Yes. Unfortunately that seems to be the case throughout the film. Cali really does a great job of explaining things, like, you know, processed food was not even a thing until after World War Two when Europe was decimated and American farmers went to work to basically feed the world that had been decimated by war. So innovation and need to preserve the food as it was traveling by large ships kind of created a okay, well we have to make this persons, and so they began to experiment with seed oils and stuff like that. Well, the road to hell is oftentimes paved with good intentions.
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Speaker 1: Yeah, and I think confounding that is women also going more into the work environment, not home as much, and really requiring a well stocked pantry to feed their family instead of you know, daily trips to the grocery store. Listen, I'm culpable of this myself, full time working female with three kids, and it's really hard to make sure that you're constantly having all the freshest ingredients. So, you know, it's a price to pay for convenience. It just happens to be cheaper food. But that price of what it's actually causing to our bodies from a metabolic standpoint and potentially cancer and others. I mean, it's quite the detriment.
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Speaker 3: Well, one of the things we hoped to show in the documentary was the second part of the subtitle, how It's being revived is from the ground up. In areas like the Phoenix community where we live, there's a number of local farmers markets working together to make more convenient options for busy moms like yourself, and that's part of what led us to creating Firefly Organic Coffee and Market. We wanted something in our community that one scratched our own afternoon latte habit, but also provided us and our community with a way to get raw milk, farm fresh eggs, seed oil free chips, seed oil free ingredients, or as sourdough. Yeah right, And we're very hopeful that from the top down, RFK is I think making some massive changes that are much needed. But really from the ground up, it starts with consumers voting with their wallets. And what we're finding here in the Scottsdale area is that consumers when they find Firefly are so ecstatic that it's like, oh my gosh, this is on my way home, this is on my way to work. I can pick up these staples that are cleaner, fresher, better, organic, not that much more expensive, and it is better than the choices that I have at a typical grocery store.
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Speaker 1: So I'm actually born and raised in Scottsdale. I just am one of the few people who leave Scottsdail to come to me. I don't quite understand that, but so I love this. But one of the things about Scottsdale is a higher a socioeconomic community, which is one of the things that we talk about a lot that have access to healthier foods. You know, it tends to be more expensive. So what do you see is some of the ways that we can make sure that this healthier options are actually making their way into lower socioeconomic neighborhoods.
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Speaker 3: Yeah, that's a question that we get asked a lot, and I think that the answer is the supply and demand. You know, the example of essentially innovation starting on the high end. You think about a big screen TV twenty years ago was fifteen thousand dollars and now it's like I have one hundred dollars. So innovation creates sort of supply, or rather innovation creates demand and then supply rushes to fill the vacuum. One of the things, like a great example would be from the documentary Inspire Farms Tiffany Lily aka the Chicken Lady, that a lot of people talk to us about after watching the film. She started with her teenage daughter her home as a homeschooling project, raising a chicken in their backyard, and now she has about forty chickens, and she started a little market and she supplies eggs quite a few dozens of eggs to her local community. As a business, she makes a profit on it. But the good news is is she used to be allergic to eggs. She was actually allergic to the soy and the corn that those chickens were eating. And so once she had her own chickens and could control their diet and give them a more natural backyard pasture to grow up in, she wasn't allergic to eggs anymore. That kind of innovation, whether you're a concer or potentially a producer, you know, people raising chickens in their backyard is not that far fetched, and I think it's how we solve the problem at a local level, and by increasing supply we hopefully lower cost as well.
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Speaker 1: I also, I actually have backyard chickens. I am a huge fan of them. I love my chickens. I think it would be a tremendous idea if there's a way to, you know, subsidize some of these neighborhoods to have backyard chickens and actually have some gardens to feed their community. I think that's a great idea.
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Speaker 2: One of the things that Tiffany actually does is she helps people get started if they want to raise around chickens.
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Speaker 1: She calls it. We inspire.
00:10:41
Speaker 2: Uh we want bart at a time.
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Speaker 3: Yeah, we Inspire farms, one backyard at a time.
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Speaker 1: That's great, that's wonderful.
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Speaker 2: You know.
00:10:48
Speaker 1: I wanted to touch on one thing that you talk about because I am an avid coffee drinker. I drink coffee all day long. I have a cup of coffee sitting next to me right now. There are health benefits, but I also just really like coffee the taste of it. But you talk a lot about how not all coffee is created equal. That's right.
00:11:05
Speaker 2: Actually it was pretty eye opening. Around the time that we started to film this documentary, I had been doing a series of health tests for myself and I did a microtoxin test to see what kind of toxins were in my environment. And actually four different types of mold showed up on that test, which I was totally shocked by. It said they were likely from food sources, and I mean I don't need to even eat like blue cheese, So I was like, where could this be coming from? So of course I dived down the rabbit hole and figure out, Wow, coffee's actually one of the biggest defenders of this, and I am an added coffee drinker. I mean probably four cups a day, including an afternoon latte habit that we had both developed because we'd like to get out of the house and go and like take a break from our workday. But then realizing there aren't any like organic or anyone talking about mold free coffee anywhere in this town. As a matter of fact, this seems like a pretty big hole in the in the market for like some one to be talking about. There are a couple of clean brands out there, but not that many. So that was the inspiration for Firefly.
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Speaker 1: So how does mold like get on coffee? So if you're going to Starbucks, for instance, would you expect to find mold on their coffee? Are you talking about people's old coffee just sitting in the van train?
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Speaker 3: Well, it's more during the production and storage of the green beans, the raw beans before they're roasted. Most coffee, in fact, pretty much all of it is grown around the equator. Equator of course, is very humid often and so the storage that the coffee sits in when it's waiting to get to roasters is often when the mold is grown. During roasting, they're often able to burn off the mold, but not necessarily the micotoxin and the mycotoxin is really where the problems can be for humans. The EU recently did a test and almost half of the coffee that they tested had detectable levels of micotoxins. So if you're drinking for to six cups of coffee at it's the cumulative build up that you really kind of worry about. One of the things that we were able to do, and in fact, it's kind of part of the journey of the documentary was our search for a mold free coffee that we really liked the taste of, and spoiler alert, we found one working with a local roaster. They've been working with this small family farm in Honduras for thirty years and it's a registered organic bean. When we tasted it, we loved the taste, and then we did the step that most companies, I don't think do, which is to send in the finished product to a third party lab for testing, and we had four pages of test results looking at of course micatoxin's molds, but also heavy metals and PIFAs and glyphysates and other pesticides, and thankfully the coffee came back squeaky clean.
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Speaker 1: You know interesting you mentioned gleigaface. There is the Trump administration of the White House just put out something that kind of was not in line with some of the MAHA talking points on glecapace and trying to get some of that out of our produce, being a besticide that as being loosely linked to medical illness, specifically cancers. What do you make of that?
00:14:17
Speaker 3: I think it's a bad move. Recently Dark Horse podcast Brett and Heather went through a whole hour and a half episode talking about a paper on glyphisate, the supposed safety of glyphisate that was published in the early thousands, and that paper was recently retracted. That paper was really the foundation of the glyphasate is safe and just to boil down their whole episode, it was pulled. The paper was pulled for a couple of different reasons, the biggest of which was Monsanto helped to write the paper, but they were not declared as authors number two. The paper was not a new study or like new scientific research. It was a review paper of all the other research that had been done, but it failed to review several articles, several papers that actually showed danger for glypha sates, so they kind of cherry picked the studies that they looked at. So the retraction of that paper quite frankly is I think monumental. Glyphosate aka roundup has been used so much in our food and you think, okay, well, you know it's like bad for the bug, you know, keeps the bugs away. Yeah, if the bugs don't want to eat it, maybe we shouldn't be eating it either.
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Speaker 1: Yeah. They try to say that some of the ingredients in there, it's only targeted to disrupt the membranes in insects. Okay, I understand that maybe we don't have those same membranes, but they love to say, you know, correlation doesn't equal causation. Well, we do a lot less in human medicine for a lot of correlates. So there does seem to be some strong corporate support to keeping this alive.
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Speaker 3: Well in our glycis sate. Yeah, Glyphisate is a multi multi billion dollar product. RFK was a part of the legal team that awarded I think about ten years ago, maybe least maybe five years ago, one of the largest judgments in a glyphasate injury case in California, something like two hundred and fifty million dollars awarded to a essentially a landscaper for I think the University of California. If I recall, he developed non Hodgkins lymphoma directly connected to at least agreed upon by a jury and in a court of law, directly connected to glyphasate exposure. So I just feel like it's a big mistake to not be basically focusing on getting glyphasate out of the food supply. And in fact, it's one of the ingredients that we talk about and the Dirty Dozen Ingredients to avoid a little cheat sheet that we made to help people get started when they're feeling kind of overwhelmed, like there's so many ingredients, there's so many things I have to avoid. Well, if you go to ingredientsnobs dot com, there's a free download, it's a one page pdf and it lists sort of here's the ingredients to avoid and when you start on this path, each ingredient that you started avoiding is like a new superpower that you picked up.
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Speaker 1: What are I mean that's excellent resources to have that downloadable sheet. More coming up on Wellness Unmasked with doctor Nicole Sapphire. For people who listen, what's probably like the three tips the easiest things for them to do to try and remove some of these toxins. Maybe what are a couple of things they'd be surprised about, Like you already mentioned coffee in the mold. But when they're going to the grocery store, what should they be on the lookout for?
00:17:50
Speaker 2: I would say just healthy foods, well, supposedly healthy foods, right, foods that are kind of imposters, where you know, you're going to look at the back of the if you look at the hummus, you're going to look at the ingredients, and you're going to see ninety five percent or more of hummus that you buy in the store has a seed oil in it. Same thing with salad dressings, ready to drink protein shakes, things like that that are marketed as being healthy but truly are not pro health at all. And unless you understand how to read a label or some things to look out for, you can easily be duped into thinking that you're supporting your body in the best way, but not realizing that actually it's causing inflammation and some gut disruption and microbion disruption.
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Speaker 3: So yeah, salad dressing is another great terrible example of Oh, you know, I'm going to eat a salad, so let me put all this ranch dressing on it. We made a video What's really inside of Ranch Dressing that got like five million views on TikTok. It's kind of recreating it and showing all the junk, especially huge amount of seed oil, huge amount of artificial coloring and flavoring. It's not the hidden valley that we think of on that beautiful label that you know, kind of animated graphic that created it is industrial garbage.
00:19:11
Speaker 1: Hearbridge. So I was just going to say that Patrick and Ashley, this has been wonderful. I have not watched the documentary, but I'm going to tell you I am going to I didn't realize Callie Means was in it or even involved in it, Callie being one of the White House advisors and one of the big, big reasons that the MAHA movement is what it is today. So really interested in watching this? Tell us again the name of the documentary, how people can watch it?
00:19:37
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think you're going to really enjoy it. Nicole Breaking Big Food can be found now on Apple TV or Amazon Prime Video. It's available for rent if you want to find out more. About it. You can go to Breaking Bigfood dot com to see the list of the cast, to watch a trailer, and really it's a seventy five minute film that we really aimed to be inspirational, to not necessarily create an ex fact blueprint of how we're going to fix everything, but really to show how we got here in the first place and how it can be revived, because I really believe we can make America healthy again. The name of your book was absolutely perfect and obviously has become a big rallying cry for many of us. Let's make America healthy again.
00:20:20
Speaker 1: Yeah, I appreciate it. Well, it took us decades to tackle big tobacco, and now it's again. We're tackling them again, just under the guys of big food. So hopefully with us another several decades, but people like you CALLI means Rka Junior, who are really speaking out, hopefully we'll get there. Thanks so much for joining.
00:20:38
Speaker 2: Us, Thank you for having us.
00:20:40
Speaker 3: Thanks Nicle.
00:20:41
Speaker 1: This conversation is not about fear. It's all about awareness. You don't have to be afraid to drink coffee because you're worried about the toxins and the mold. Well maybe you should be a little bit afraid, but just be selective in the coffee. Look into it, do your due diligence. I'm certainly not going to stop drinking coffee because I'm afraid of it, but i am going to start looking for cleaner coffees. We also have to make sure cleaner is also affordable, because it's not right if only the wealthy can afford to eat clean. When you understand how the industries engineer products to override our biology, you stop blaming ourselves and start demanding accountability. Patrick and Ashley's documentary is going to be a reminder that real health reform doesn't just happen in hospitals and Congress. It happens all around boardrooms, policy rooms, and yes, at your dinner table. You have some control over this. Thank you so much for listening to Wellness on MASS. I'm doctor Nicole Saffire. Be sure to listen to Wellness on Mass on iHeartRadio, Apple Podcasts, or anywhere you get your podcasts. We'll see you next time.
Speaker 1: Welcome to Wellness sun Mass. I'm doctor Nicole Safire, and today we're pulling back the curtain on something that affects every American family. Mine, yours, all of us, the food on our plates. For decades, we were told Big Tobacco was the villain, and it took us decades to kind of get rid of them. Well, we didn't really get rid of them. They're still around. What if I told you the same corporate playbook, the same executives, the same manipulation tactics, the same addiction science quietly migrated from big tobacco into big food. My guest today Patrick and Ashley Sullivan expose exactly how big Tobacco helped engineer modern big food, designing ultra process products to hijack our brain chemistry, distort public policy, and keep consumers pooked. Now, this isn't about personal willpower. It's about corporate strategy, regulatory capture, and the health crisis unfolding in plain sight. Let's talk about it. We have a beautiful couple, Patrick and as Actually Sullivan. They are the MAHA inspired filmmakers behind a brand new documentary called Breaking Big Food, now streaming on Apple TV and Amazon Prime and I am so excited for this conversation because you guys uncovered a lot in this documentary, right.
00:01:16
Speaker 2: We sure did. It was a very eye opening experience for us, right Patrick.
00:01:21
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean the full title Breaking Big Food, how the American food system went rotten, and how it's being revived.
00:01:29
Speaker 1: So tell me a little bit about it. First of all, your background, what even made you want to do this?
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Speaker 3: Well, in twenty fourteen, I got a thyroid cancer diagnosis and decided to go at that time the traditional route of getting a thyroid ectomy, having the cancer removed, and quite frankl Nicole, it was so stressful hearing the words you have cancer that after the surgery, Ashley and I really kind of buried that for a while. And you know, Frankly, I think we just didn't know enough about food labels and ingredients and about the environmental toxins that were out there that when we began to research this film, and really the inspiration came from hearing Calli Means speak at a conference in the summer of twenty twenty four He and his sister, doctor Casey Means, had just published the book Good Energy, and Ashley and I felt like that's it like barely hit for us. Yeah, the pieces of how we got here in the first place. And as a result, we felt like we wanted to help amplify that message, and that turned into pitching them the idea of this documentary, and Calli was like, let's do it. I'm all in.
00:02:43
Speaker 1: That's great. So when you started the documentary, tell me some about the big things that you uncovered.
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Speaker 2: I think the biggest shocking thing that we uncovered was really the fact that the cigarette companies purchased the food companies. Patrick, what are the stats on that?
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Speaker 3: Well, Calli, as a former lobbyist, goes through a number of different examples, starting in nineteen eighty five when R. J. Reynolds, the makers of Camel cigarettes, purchased Nabisco for five billion dollars. In nineteen eighty eight, Philip Morris, the maker of Marlborough cigarettes, they purchased Kraft for thirteen billion dollars. And these were just some of the transactions of big tobacco buying up big food. And by the mid nineteen nineties, the cigarette industry controlled about forty percent of the American food supply.
00:03:33
Speaker 1: We could go wrong, right, right, So while all of the anti cigarette campaigns were going big tobacco is like, oh no, we're starting to lose money because cigarettes caused cancer and a lot of other things. This is what they did. Now they have taken over the food supply, and were there demonstratable changes that they made to the food supply at this time once they took.
00:03:53
Speaker 3: Over, Well, the amount of grass chemicals and I'm not talking about like grass that you have in your front lawn. I'm talking about FDAs generally recognized as safe. That is a term that has been going around in the media and it's effectively the food company their own ability to self approve ingredients that they feel are quote generally recognized as safe. And currently in America there's almost ten thousand chemicals I believe that are allowed in our food supply, but are not allowed in European countries. They're banned in Canada. And that's why you've maybe seen online examples. Food Babe has posted a lot of these, like here's what fruit loops look like in America and they're bright and colorful, and here's what they look like in the rest of the world. And the ingredients are about half of the amount of ingredients.
00:04:48
Speaker 2: Yeah, and people will say like, oh, but I grew up eating this and I'm fine. Well, actually, if you look at the food label the exact same product from back in the early eighties, seventies and early to what they are today, they're completely different ingredient labels well.
00:05:04
Speaker 1: And also one important thing to remember is here in the United States we kind of have generally approved as safe or recognized as safe, so you have to prove that it is unsafe to remove it, whereas Europe and other countries they say, we have to prove it is safe before you can put it in there. Why we have such lack standards, I think one can only guess, and it is the lobby powerhouse, which is the big food industry.
00:05:29
Speaker 3: Yes. Unfortunately that seems to be the case throughout the film. Cali really does a great job of explaining things, like, you know, processed food was not even a thing until after World War Two when Europe was decimated and American farmers went to work to basically feed the world that had been decimated by war. So innovation and need to preserve the food as it was traveling by large ships kind of created a okay, well we have to make this persons, and so they began to experiment with seed oils and stuff like that. Well, the road to hell is oftentimes paved with good intentions.
00:06:08
Speaker 1: Yeah, and I think confounding that is women also going more into the work environment, not home as much, and really requiring a well stocked pantry to feed their family instead of you know, daily trips to the grocery store. Listen, I'm culpable of this myself, full time working female with three kids, and it's really hard to make sure that you're constantly having all the freshest ingredients. So, you know, it's a price to pay for convenience. It just happens to be cheaper food. But that price of what it's actually causing to our bodies from a metabolic standpoint and potentially cancer and others. I mean, it's quite the detriment.
00:06:45
Speaker 3: Well, one of the things we hoped to show in the documentary was the second part of the subtitle, how It's being revived is from the ground up. In areas like the Phoenix community where we live, there's a number of local farmers markets working together to make more convenient options for busy moms like yourself, and that's part of what led us to creating Firefly Organic Coffee and Market. We wanted something in our community that one scratched our own afternoon latte habit, but also provided us and our community with a way to get raw milk, farm fresh eggs, seed oil free chips, seed oil free ingredients, or as sourdough. Yeah right, And we're very hopeful that from the top down, RFK is I think making some massive changes that are much needed. But really from the ground up, it starts with consumers voting with their wallets. And what we're finding here in the Scottsdale area is that consumers when they find Firefly are so ecstatic that it's like, oh my gosh, this is on my way home, this is on my way to work. I can pick up these staples that are cleaner, fresher, better, organic, not that much more expensive, and it is better than the choices that I have at a typical grocery store.
00:08:06
Speaker 1: So I'm actually born and raised in Scottsdale. I just am one of the few people who leave Scottsdail to come to me. I don't quite understand that, but so I love this. But one of the things about Scottsdale is a higher a socioeconomic community, which is one of the things that we talk about a lot that have access to healthier foods. You know, it tends to be more expensive. So what do you see is some of the ways that we can make sure that this healthier options are actually making their way into lower socioeconomic neighborhoods.
00:08:39
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's a question that we get asked a lot, and I think that the answer is the supply and demand. You know, the example of essentially innovation starting on the high end. You think about a big screen TV twenty years ago was fifteen thousand dollars and now it's like I have one hundred dollars. So innovation creates sort of supply, or rather innovation creates demand and then supply rushes to fill the vacuum. One of the things, like a great example would be from the documentary Inspire Farms Tiffany Lily aka the Chicken Lady, that a lot of people talk to us about after watching the film. She started with her teenage daughter her home as a homeschooling project, raising a chicken in their backyard, and now she has about forty chickens, and she started a little market and she supplies eggs quite a few dozens of eggs to her local community. As a business, she makes a profit on it. But the good news is is she used to be allergic to eggs. She was actually allergic to the soy and the corn that those chickens were eating. And so once she had her own chickens and could control their diet and give them a more natural backyard pasture to grow up in, she wasn't allergic to eggs anymore. That kind of innovation, whether you're a concer or potentially a producer, you know, people raising chickens in their backyard is not that far fetched, and I think it's how we solve the problem at a local level, and by increasing supply we hopefully lower cost as well.
00:10:16
Speaker 1: I also, I actually have backyard chickens. I am a huge fan of them. I love my chickens. I think it would be a tremendous idea if there's a way to, you know, subsidize some of these neighborhoods to have backyard chickens and actually have some gardens to feed their community. I think that's a great idea.
00:10:34
Speaker 2: One of the things that Tiffany actually does is she helps people get started if they want to raise around chickens.
00:10:39
Speaker 1: She calls it. We inspire.
00:10:41
Speaker 2: Uh we want bart at a time.
00:10:43
Speaker 3: Yeah, we Inspire farms, one backyard at a time.
00:10:46
Speaker 1: That's great, that's wonderful.
00:10:47
Speaker 2: You know.
00:10:48
Speaker 1: I wanted to touch on one thing that you talk about because I am an avid coffee drinker. I drink coffee all day long. I have a cup of coffee sitting next to me right now. There are health benefits, but I also just really like coffee the taste of it. But you talk a lot about how not all coffee is created equal. That's right.
00:11:05
Speaker 2: Actually it was pretty eye opening. Around the time that we started to film this documentary, I had been doing a series of health tests for myself and I did a microtoxin test to see what kind of toxins were in my environment. And actually four different types of mold showed up on that test, which I was totally shocked by. It said they were likely from food sources, and I mean I don't need to even eat like blue cheese, So I was like, where could this be coming from? So of course I dived down the rabbit hole and figure out, Wow, coffee's actually one of the biggest defenders of this, and I am an added coffee drinker. I mean probably four cups a day, including an afternoon latte habit that we had both developed because we'd like to get out of the house and go and like take a break from our workday. But then realizing there aren't any like organic or anyone talking about mold free coffee anywhere in this town. As a matter of fact, this seems like a pretty big hole in the in the market for like some one to be talking about. There are a couple of clean brands out there, but not that many. So that was the inspiration for Firefly.
00:12:06
Speaker 1: So how does mold like get on coffee? So if you're going to Starbucks, for instance, would you expect to find mold on their coffee? Are you talking about people's old coffee just sitting in the van train?
00:12:15
Speaker 3: Well, it's more during the production and storage of the green beans, the raw beans before they're roasted. Most coffee, in fact, pretty much all of it is grown around the equator. Equator of course, is very humid often and so the storage that the coffee sits in when it's waiting to get to roasters is often when the mold is grown. During roasting, they're often able to burn off the mold, but not necessarily the micotoxin and the mycotoxin is really where the problems can be for humans. The EU recently did a test and almost half of the coffee that they tested had detectable levels of micotoxins. So if you're drinking for to six cups of coffee at it's the cumulative build up that you really kind of worry about. One of the things that we were able to do, and in fact, it's kind of part of the journey of the documentary was our search for a mold free coffee that we really liked the taste of, and spoiler alert, we found one working with a local roaster. They've been working with this small family farm in Honduras for thirty years and it's a registered organic bean. When we tasted it, we loved the taste, and then we did the step that most companies, I don't think do, which is to send in the finished product to a third party lab for testing, and we had four pages of test results looking at of course micatoxin's molds, but also heavy metals and PIFAs and glyphysates and other pesticides, and thankfully the coffee came back squeaky clean.
00:13:52
Speaker 1: You know interesting you mentioned gleigaface. There is the Trump administration of the White House just put out something that kind of was not in line with some of the MAHA talking points on glecapace and trying to get some of that out of our produce, being a besticide that as being loosely linked to medical illness, specifically cancers. What do you make of that?
00:14:17
Speaker 3: I think it's a bad move. Recently Dark Horse podcast Brett and Heather went through a whole hour and a half episode talking about a paper on glyphisate, the supposed safety of glyphisate that was published in the early thousands, and that paper was recently retracted. That paper was really the foundation of the glyphasate is safe and just to boil down their whole episode, it was pulled. The paper was pulled for a couple of different reasons, the biggest of which was Monsanto helped to write the paper, but they were not declared as authors number two. The paper was not a new study or like new scientific research. It was a review paper of all the other research that had been done, but it failed to review several articles, several papers that actually showed danger for glypha sates, so they kind of cherry picked the studies that they looked at. So the retraction of that paper quite frankly is I think monumental. Glyphosate aka roundup has been used so much in our food and you think, okay, well, you know it's like bad for the bug, you know, keeps the bugs away. Yeah, if the bugs don't want to eat it, maybe we shouldn't be eating it either.
00:15:35
Speaker 1: Yeah. They try to say that some of the ingredients in there, it's only targeted to disrupt the membranes in insects. Okay, I understand that maybe we don't have those same membranes, but they love to say, you know, correlation doesn't equal causation. Well, we do a lot less in human medicine for a lot of correlates. So there does seem to be some strong corporate support to keeping this alive.
00:16:04
Speaker 3: Well in our glycis sate. Yeah, Glyphisate is a multi multi billion dollar product. RFK was a part of the legal team that awarded I think about ten years ago, maybe least maybe five years ago, one of the largest judgments in a glyphasate injury case in California, something like two hundred and fifty million dollars awarded to a essentially a landscaper for I think the University of California. If I recall, he developed non Hodgkins lymphoma directly connected to at least agreed upon by a jury and in a court of law, directly connected to glyphasate exposure. So I just feel like it's a big mistake to not be basically focusing on getting glyphasate out of the food supply. And in fact, it's one of the ingredients that we talk about and the Dirty Dozen Ingredients to avoid a little cheat sheet that we made to help people get started when they're feeling kind of overwhelmed, like there's so many ingredients, there's so many things I have to avoid. Well, if you go to ingredientsnobs dot com, there's a free download, it's a one page pdf and it lists sort of here's the ingredients to avoid and when you start on this path, each ingredient that you started avoiding is like a new superpower that you picked up.
00:17:21
Speaker 1: What are I mean that's excellent resources to have that downloadable sheet. More coming up on Wellness Unmasked with doctor Nicole Sapphire. For people who listen, what's probably like the three tips the easiest things for them to do to try and remove some of these toxins. Maybe what are a couple of things they'd be surprised about, Like you already mentioned coffee in the mold. But when they're going to the grocery store, what should they be on the lookout for?
00:17:50
Speaker 2: I would say just healthy foods, well, supposedly healthy foods, right, foods that are kind of imposters, where you know, you're going to look at the back of the if you look at the hummus, you're going to look at the ingredients, and you're going to see ninety five percent or more of hummus that you buy in the store has a seed oil in it. Same thing with salad dressings, ready to drink protein shakes, things like that that are marketed as being healthy but truly are not pro health at all. And unless you understand how to read a label or some things to look out for, you can easily be duped into thinking that you're supporting your body in the best way, but not realizing that actually it's causing inflammation and some gut disruption and microbion disruption.
00:18:35
Speaker 3: So yeah, salad dressing is another great terrible example of Oh, you know, I'm going to eat a salad, so let me put all this ranch dressing on it. We made a video What's really inside of Ranch Dressing that got like five million views on TikTok. It's kind of recreating it and showing all the junk, especially huge amount of seed oil, huge amount of artificial coloring and flavoring. It's not the hidden valley that we think of on that beautiful label that you know, kind of animated graphic that created it is industrial garbage.
00:19:11
Speaker 1: Hearbridge. So I was just going to say that Patrick and Ashley, this has been wonderful. I have not watched the documentary, but I'm going to tell you I am going to I didn't realize Callie Means was in it or even involved in it, Callie being one of the White House advisors and one of the big, big reasons that the MAHA movement is what it is today. So really interested in watching this? Tell us again the name of the documentary, how people can watch it?
00:19:37
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think you're going to really enjoy it. Nicole Breaking Big Food can be found now on Apple TV or Amazon Prime Video. It's available for rent if you want to find out more. About it. You can go to Breaking Bigfood dot com to see the list of the cast, to watch a trailer, and really it's a seventy five minute film that we really aimed to be inspirational, to not necessarily create an ex fact blueprint of how we're going to fix everything, but really to show how we got here in the first place and how it can be revived, because I really believe we can make America healthy again. The name of your book was absolutely perfect and obviously has become a big rallying cry for many of us. Let's make America healthy again.
00:20:20
Speaker 1: Yeah, I appreciate it. Well, it took us decades to tackle big tobacco, and now it's again. We're tackling them again, just under the guys of big food. So hopefully with us another several decades, but people like you CALLI means Rka Junior, who are really speaking out, hopefully we'll get there. Thanks so much for joining.
00:20:38
Speaker 2: Us, Thank you for having us.
00:20:40
Speaker 3: Thanks Nicle.
00:20:41
Speaker 1: This conversation is not about fear. It's all about awareness. You don't have to be afraid to drink coffee because you're worried about the toxins and the mold. Well maybe you should be a little bit afraid, but just be selective in the coffee. Look into it, do your due diligence. I'm certainly not going to stop drinking coffee because I'm afraid of it, but i am going to start looking for cleaner coffees. We also have to make sure cleaner is also affordable, because it's not right if only the wealthy can afford to eat clean. When you understand how the industries engineer products to override our biology, you stop blaming ourselves and start demanding accountability. Patrick and Ashley's documentary is going to be a reminder that real health reform doesn't just happen in hospitals and Congress. It happens all around boardrooms, policy rooms, and yes, at your dinner table. You have some control over this. Thank you so much for listening to Wellness on MASS. I'm doctor Nicole Saffire. Be sure to listen to Wellness on Mass on iHeartRadio, Apple Podcasts, or anywhere you get your podcasts. We'll see you next time.
